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Unfolding the Baroque: Cultures and Concepts

Constantine the Philosopher University Faculty of Arts Vol.2, No.1 / 2010

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Nzov/Title ARS AETERNA - Unfolding the Baroque: Cultures and Concepts Vydavate/Publisher Univerzita Kontantna Filozofa v Nitre Filozofick fakulta tefnikova 67, 949 74 Nitra tel. + 421 37 77 54 209 fax. + 421 37 77 54 261 email kangl@ukf.sk Adresa redakcie/Office Address Filozofick fakulta Univerzity Kontantna Filozofa v Nitre Dekant FF UKF tefnikova 67, 949 74 Nitra Tel.: +421 37 7754 201 Fax: +421 37 6512 570 E-mail: dekanatff@ukf.sk fredaktor/Editor in Chief Mgr. Alena Smiekov, PhD. Redakn rada/Board of Reviewers Prof. Bernd Herzogenrath (Germany) Doc. PhDr. Michal Peprnk, PhD. (Czech Republic) Doc. PhDr. Anton Pokrivk, PhD. (Slovak Republic) Mgr. Petr Kopal, PhD. (Czech Republic) Redakn prava/sub-editor Ing. Mat ika, Mgr. Simona Heveiov, PhD. Jazykov korektra/Copy Editor Jeanne Lance Editorial assistant Trevor Joy Sangrey Nzov a sdlo tlaiarne/Printing House EVT, a.s. Bratislava Nklad/Copies 100 Poet strn/Pages 169 ISSN: 1337-9291 Evidenn slo: EV 2821/08 (c) 2010 Univerzita Kontantna Filozofa v Nitre This publication is the result of the project KEGA 3/6468/08 Teaching intercultural awareness through literature and cultural studies.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction for the Extension of the Baroque Catherine M. Soussloff

Vol.2, No.1 / 2010

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In Lieu of an Introduction: The Baroque Space in Paul Austers City of Glass Alena Smiekov DEFIGURATIONS The Culture of Defiguration: Anamorphosis, Then and Now Jon R. Snyder Bastarda Musicians and the Practice of Musical Anamorphosis Nina Treadwell The-Approach-of-the-End-of-the-World-Feeling: Allegory and Eschatology in the Operas of Robert Ashley Tyrus Miller EXCESSES If the Term Baroque Did Not Exist Would It Be Necessary to Invent It? (with Apologies to Voltaire) Dana Arnold An Aura of Excess: Zaha Hadid and the Baroque Genetics of Contemporary Architecture Meredith Hoy Echoes from the Future: douard Glissant and the Infinite Work of the Baroque Gerwin Gallob EMBODIMENTS Body-Language and Language-Body in William Forsythes Choreography: Michel Foucault and Louis Marin on the Baroque Body Mark Franko The Embodiment of History at the Great Altar of Pergamon: The Power of Helenistic Baroque Maria Evangelatou Spatial Effects and Meaning in the Galerie des glaces at Versailles Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlf Bios and Baroque: Life in the Folds of 17th-Century Artifice and Contemporary Bioart Anna Munster CODA A Rent in the Clouds Robert Harbison REVIEW

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Introduction for the Extension of the Baroque

Catherine M. Soussloff
Catherine Soussloff served as Director of Visual and Performance Studies at UC Santa Cruz for ten years. She is the author of books and articles on the history and theory of European art and visual culture from the early modern period to the present. She is currently Professor and Head of the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia.

This special issue of the journal Ars Aeterna provides an extensive meditation in the form of eleven scholarly essays on the significance for the arts and the humanities of the conceptual and historical aspects of the baroque. Sponsored by the Visual and Performance Studies research group at University of California, Santa Cruz, the conference Unfolding the Baroque: Extensions of a Concept took place in April 2009.1 The conference explored the Baroque, baroqueness, neo-baroque, baroquisms, and other extensions of the baroque from a variety of disciplinary, temporal, and methodological directions. Like all of the research endeavors of Visual and Performance Studies, Unfolding the Baroque: Extensions of a Concept insisted on a geographically de-centralized and culturally diverse series of explorations of the idea of the baroque, which has had a significant place in transmedia and meta-historical studies of visualities and performativities for at least the last four centuries.2 Working within the framework of a collaborative research model for over twelve years, Visual and Performance Studies allowed a particularly rich context for 4

this exploration of the inflections of the baroque on human creations and actions, performances and artifacts, texts and images. Once thought of only as a seventeenthcentury art historical and musicological phenomenon of style, the baroque is back.3 Given the intense attraction to the Baroque in a number of arts practices and scholarly disciplines over the course of the last three decades, the essays found here seek to understand its location in the context of contemporary culture and historical critique.4 In 1977 the American artist and selfstyled anarchitect Gordon MattaClark (1943-1978) made the work he called Office Baroque in Antwerp.5 The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City displayed a fragment of this example of Matta-Clarks deconstructive architecture in the 2007 retrospective exhibition. Consisting of nothing more than a slab of parquet wood flooring, drywall and wood floor joists Office Baroque, the now-destroyed monument of Postmodernity, stands for the fascination that the Baroque holds for our times. The connections and disconnections, the contrasts and similarities, the fragmentary and

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deconstructed aspects found in the visual artifacts and performance events discussed in this issue of Ars Aeterna attest to the power of what can only be described today as the baroque aesthetic. This contemporary baroque aesthetic goes well beyond the dictionary definition of the root of the term baroque as meaning a misshapen pearl, although the anarchitecture of Matta-Clark, to take again my primary example, offers misshapen artifacts as a result of the performativity of this aesthetic. Office Baroque related canonical art media, e.g., architecture and sculpture, to the then more radical art practices of installation, performance, and deconstruction. The result, as in the case of Matta-Clarks fragment in the Whitney exhibition, puts the contemporary baroque aesthetic in relief both to its own genealogy in the history of Post-1968 art and performance, and to todays art world. The crossing of media and the engagement between materialistic and conceptual practices perpetuated in the late 1970s the anarchistic heritage of the Situationist derive and the theatre of the absurd, both of which may be considered foundational to Matta-Clarks work to the baroque aesthetic as I am defining it here. As a fragment or a mere remnant of its earlier form and exhibited today at the Whitney or elsewhere, Office Baroque extends the concept of the baroque into the institutions of art with which it will always already have an anarchistic, if not absurd, relationship. The extension of the baroque aesthetic causes interpreters to note common characteristics not so much embodied in as elicited from the artifacts and performances addressed in this journal issue. Works of art and performance are understood according to their affective qualities: elaboration, excess, juxtaposition, surplus, dissimulation, ecstasy, virtuosity, efflorescence, and absurdity. Antinomies not encountered in other performative and representational regimes press forward in the baroque aesthetic also and the artifacts and practices that extend it: prosthesis/antithesis; assemblage/ diffraction; impoverishment/excess; plentitude/vacancy. As that which always and explicitly exceeds itself the baroque aesthetic articulates an extension of that which was prior to it in both historical and conceptual terms. For these historical reasons, in the baroque aesthetic interventionist strategies into canonical art practices and predominant political regimes prevail and cause the remainder to become centralized, as in Matta-Clarks work, and expressed, as in the performances of William Forsythe (addressed in this volume in the essay by Mark Franko). It therefore seems useful to consider here the meaning of the term extension as it relates specifically to what I have been calling the baroque aesthetic. The most familiar use of extension refers to prolongationas in the prolongation over time or through historical representations of the baroque style and its subject matter. In art history the Baroque may be called a period style, occurring between 1600 and 1750, although that chronology is imprecise and determined by 5

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disciplinary convention as much as by anything else. In art history the baroque period style is understood to have occurred between the Renaissance and the Neo-Classical period styles. We might call this temporally defined meaning of extension: the historiographical baroque. However, certain caveats or conditionals to the historiographical extension of the Baroque arise. While both the Renaissance and the NeoClassical period styles have contained within them the concept of the revival of antiquity (the Renaissance being the rebirth of Roman culture; the Neo-Classical being the new Classical or Greek style), the Baroque does not contain within it either a concept of an idealized past or the idealized memory of artifacts and conventions of representation from an earlier era. Even as a period style, the Baroque produces something other than the ideal or the idealized. It has been said that the Baroque period style relies overtly on illusionism and the supernatural, and on strong subjective appeal and opulent dcorall tastes that have not yet returned to fashion. While this view of the Baroque period in art history may explain its lack of relationship to a revival of an earlier historical moment, the statement itself, particularly when put in relationship to the art of the late 20th century, seems incredibly anachronistic. Yet, the negativity of the concept of the period style of the Baroque cannot be ignored in its disciplinary context of art history. Turning from the historiographical idea of a period style, a second, philosophical meaning of the term extension pertains here. Extension may be understood in 6 this context as a term generated by the Baroque philosopher, Ren Descartes (1596-1650). In Descartes, extension is the essential characteristic of all matterlet us say for the purposes of our interests here, of all material objects, monuments, performances, etc. Importantly, the number and nature of the matter discussed dictated the meaning of extension in the Cartesian sense. In the nominative, or singular, or individualistic sense, extension referred to the object named, e.g., the extension of Descartes is Descartes. Conversely, the extension of a predicative noun or adjective or a plural non-nominative are those things to which the predicate applies. The extension of artist is all artists. The extension of the Baroque is all baroques. To speak of the extension of the baroque using the allegorical register theorized for it by the Postmodern philosopher Gilles Deleuze is to use it in this Cartesian way; e.g., the way in which the relationality among the particulars are common to all baroques. Although Deleuze names Leibniz as the thinker through which the Baroque will be theorized as fold, Descartes must be understood as the locus of the possibility of the concept of extension itself. For Deleuze this meant to see the thing as or the characteristic particularity of the Baroque, i.e., the fold, as the traits [, which] taken in their rigor that have to account for the extreme specificity of the Baroque.6 At this point a summary of Deleuzes extension of the Baroque will prove illustrative for the essays in this issue of the journal.

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1. The fold: as in the infinite work or process, not how to finish a fold but how to continue it, to have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity. 2. The inside and the outside: that which moves between matter and soul, the faade and the closed room, the outside and the inside. 3. The high and the low: resolution of tension achieved in the division into two levels, as I n the coupling of material-force replacing matter and form.

4. The unfold: not contrary to the fold or its effacement, but the continuation or the extension of its act, the condition of its manifestation as a method or process.

Questions which arise for the reader of this volume in taking Deleuzes fold as the paradigmatic extension of the Baroque pertain both to materiality and medium-- what is the best material for the fold or for the texture of the fold?and to political action and powerwhat gives the fold its particular political force in the object or the performance that has been achieved? The essays here will provide not one but many answers to or suggestions of where these questions might take us in the quest for a philosophical meaning of the

5. Texture: how it becomes visible at the limits of the fold, where there might be scarring or tearing or rupture, including different textures that appear in the fold. extensions of the baroque. For, the extensions of the baroque take us far from the nomination of a particular style, artist, movement or historical period and beyond the proliferation and iteration of the terms of the baroque, such as, neo-Baroque, baroqueness, the theatrical baroque, Baroque music, and Office Baroque. The baroque aesthetic that we have identified plays out in a myriad of ways between the Baroque, as a period style or content, and baroque as a predicate noun with infinite extensions into space and time.

This author and the editors of this volume would like to thank Trevor Sangrey for her programmatic and editorial work on behalf of this issue of the journal and the conference at UC Santa Cruz that preceded it.

Notes i A number of groups and individuals supported this conference: The University of California Humanities Research Institute, Major Conference Grant Program; the UC Santa Cruz Vice Chancellor for Research; the UC Santa Cruz Division of the Arts; the Department of History

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of Art and Visual Culture; the UC Presidential Chair in the History of Art and Visual Culture; Cowell College and the Provosts of Cowell College, Professors Tyrus Miller and Deanna Shemek. Without the brilliant organizational mind of Trevor Sangrey, graduate student in History of Consciousness, this event would not have been possible. ii At least two books and numerous articles have directly resulted from the research activities of the members of Visual and Performance Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz, see all of the essays in Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Edited by Mark Franko (London: Routledge Press, 2006) and Acting on the Past: Historical Performance Across the Disciplines, Edited by Mark Franko and Annette Richards (Middletown, Ct., Wesleyan University Press, 2000). See also, Catherine M. Soussloff, Jackson Pollock and Post-Ritual Performance: Memories Arrested in Space, TDR 48 (Spring 2004): 60-78 and Catherine M. Soussloff and Mark Franko, Visual and Performance Studies: A New History of Interdisciplinarity, Social Text 73 (Winter 2002): 29-46. iii In this sense of the terminology of style in regard to the Baroque, it seems the ideal concept for the critique of style made by Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1979). iv In addition to the sources cited here some recent literature dealing with aspects of the baroque may be useful for thinking through the issue of the extensions of the baroque, see Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media and Cinematic Folds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Samuel Weber, Theatricality as Medium (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Lisa G. Corrin and Joaneath Spicer, Eds., Going for Baroque :18 Contemporary Artists Fascinated with the Baroque and Rococo (Baltimore :The Walters Art Gallery,1995). v On Office Baroque specifically and Gordon-Matta Clarks work overall, see Pamela Lee, Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000) and Gordon Matta-Clark, Edited by Corinne Diserens (London and New York: Phaidon, 2003). vi Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Catherine M. Soussloff, Ph.D. Professor and Head, Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory University of British Columbia 403 - 6333 Memorial Road Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z2 csoussloff@aol.com 8

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In Lieu of an Introduction The Baroque Space in Paul Austers City of Glass Alena Smiekov
An infinite space has an infinite potentiality and this infinite potentiality may be praised an infinite act of existence. Giordano Bruno

What allows us to speak of the two concepts that might appear seemingly very distant from contemporary American fiction, such as the Baroque and the space, is the confusing chronology, which the contemporary rereading of the Baroque initiated. The Baroque has been most widely perceived through its manifestations in the visual arts. The collection of essays presented in this issue of Ars Aeterna, however, confirms that looking for the affinities does not imply to search for the identity between the artwork in inspection and the concept of the Baroque because in the words of one of the contributors, Robert Harbison even writers like Milton are not exactly Baroque but like Baroque in akind of metaphorical extension. (2000, p. 227). Therefore, my introduction as well as all the collected essays, proposes the possibilities for a metaphorical extension of the change in consciousness, which we read in the Baroque and in its meaning for the present. The presented essays discuss not the Baroque as a specific set of rules and aesthetically appropriate

stylistic or thematic devices but a kind of meta-baroque, the term I borrowed from Tyrus Miller; they are a reflection on historical, ideological, theological and semiotic nature of the baroque (2010, p.43). As it follows, we praise the Baroque for the construction of a new space. Not only that the new places were discovered - it was the time of exploratory travels - but visual arts, such as architecture and painting, focused on the creation of the space, which in various forms generated the illusion of a cross over, the movement from the real physical plane of perception to the simulation of yet another space. Harbison in his coda A Rent in the Clouds writes an ode on the vertiginous ecstasy, in which many examples of Baroque architecture conjure up the way to heaven ad infinitum. The two examples of the newly conceived space mentioned above propelled Baroque men to expansion whether physical or spiritual. The radical reconfiguration of the consciousness came however, with the idea that space does not surround architecture but is created by it (Norberg-Schultz, 2003,

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p. 14). A single building loses its focal centrality, it is integrated into the larger system, which means the space between the buildings acquires a new importance as the real constitutive element of the urban totality. (ibid., p. 12) The buildings and squares in a Baroque city are linked by straight and regular streets. In the Baroque city par excellence such as Rome, the space in between them creates a hierarchical structure reflecting the structures of power, dominance and control and organizes the social life. With the new considerations on space not only the grandiose scales, churches and palaces to support the hierarchy of power came to existence, but the fascination with the possible reconfiguration of the space in a smaller, more intimate size found its form in the decorative element of mirror. Mirrors visual worlds expose the ontology of the viewer in the act of looking. Similarly to the subject enmeshed in the public space positing herself in contrast to the allegorical representations of social structures and proportions, the viewer, when confronted with the mirror, has to reconsider her position and perceptive limitations. Being both meta-reflective and reductive they open the questions of similarity, identity, and deformation. (Rossholm Lagerlf, 2010, p. 138) Since they are predominantly visual worlds which represent and reflect, their decorative
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employment in the baroque interior provides the allegory of multiplicity corresponding with the new consciousness (ibid.). The social world of the Baroque is paradoxical. On one hand, the physical expansion, colonization and new scientific discoveries characterize that system as open and dynamic, endowed with multiplicity of opportunities; yet everybody has a certain specific assigned place in terms of social relations. Moreover, as Anna Munster in her essay on bioart points out, the crisis also takes place invisibly, in the domain of life conception. (2010, p. 153) She refers to Leibniz in Deleuzes reading: our body is a type of world full of an infinity of creatures that are also worthy of life, which corresponds with the state of sciences at the time namely Giordano Brunos vision of the space: there are innumerable suns, with countless planets likewise circling about these suns (Leibniz, quoted in Deleuze, 1993, p. 109). As number of the essays in this volume refer to Gilles Deleuzes The Fold (1993), the authors support the idea that the book provides an eccentric and inspiring understanding of the baroque mind. The figure and the form of the fold that is central to the book was not an arbitrary force for Deleuze, as Tom Conley, the translator of the book explains. It originated in his earlier writings on subjectivity, for example, in the last chapter of his book on Foucault. As Deleuze

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examines Foucaults principal works he describes the idea of doubling, a productive force reflected in the metaphor of the fold. In this way, the Iis always defined as the double in the formative process of creating the Self and relating the Self to the past. Delueze claims that the knowledge is known only where it is folded (1993, p. 56). Because in folds, the two sides, the inside or the past as memory and the outside as the present and the subjectivity are inseparable and constitute one. Even though Deleuzian fold is a palpable concept, and uses a lot of examples that are primarily visual he claims that the dialectics of seeing and gazing might be restrictive and can turn it into a definition of an optical fold only. (ibid. p.37) He rather suggests that the form as folded exists as a mental landscape. (ibid., p. 40) Then what is the form, what is the style and manner in which a work of art inhabits a folded space? The examples in this volume range from visuals arts, such as architecture and photography through various forms of music and literature to bioart. Our example points to a possibility of reading contemporary American fiction through Deleuzian folds and self-similarity. As the visual images dominate the contemporary world one of the popular forms of the interaction between different media is the examination of their representational qualities. The individual established forms such as fiction or film, for example, to take over stories or characters and search for the ways to present them within their own territories. Speaking about the interaction, we suggest that these processes are qualified at present as legitimate ways of art production. Traditional classification of genres and forms as high or low, central or peripheral loses justification since it is exactly the constant flux between the peripheral and the centre that describes the contemporary art. Our example shows how the interaction allows for the productive exchange between a piece of fiction and a graphic novel. There are many examples when graphic novels inspired artists to other graphic representations, usually films. The most famous, probably, are Batman series, or Spiderman films. The films deploy the popular iconography of graphic novels and enhance their potential through a specific film technology. The graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli City of Glass (2005) is a rare example when the inspiration comes from other media. Paul Austers novel City of Glass (1987) inspired Karasik and Mazzucchelli to turn the dematerialized space of the novel into a palpable visual scene. In fact, their graphic representation materializes the mental landscape the novel generates. In one of the first images of Karasik and Mazzucchellis novel we look at the folding of two essential

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elements which can be discerned in Austers novel. One is material, in the picture embodied in the physical diagram of a city, the other is sublime presented in the graphic form realistically as a figure of aman, walking over a cartographic maze. The city is New York where the sublime in the Austers novel is presented as a set of characters, with specifically assigned roles such as writer, private eye, or narrator, which in different points of the story overlap, cumulate or exchange their hierarchical positions. In the Karasik and Mazzucchellis image, it is precisely the impossible juxtaposition of a scale, one of a map and one of a figure that reveals the pleads of matter and the folds of soul. (Deleuze, 1993, p. 40) The iconography of the picture subverts the simple one to one correspondence between metaphysical and the physical. The realistic oversized figure of a man walks on the diagram of the city. In the image the body is immersed in the cartographic representation of the city the same way as the protagonist of Austers novel dissolves in the novels story. In the graphic novels presentation the city and the man become the one, the two sides of the same thing like in Moebius strip, similarly to Austers novel: New York was an inexhaustible space, a labyrinth of endless steps, a no matter where he walked, no matter how well he came to know his neighborhood and the streets,
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it always left him with the feeling of being lost. Lost, not only in the city, but within himself as well. Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind , and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to aseeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think, and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace, asalutary emptiness within. (Auster, 1987, p. 4) In Austers novel, New York becomes a baroque city. Glass buildings create the living space and constitute the urban totality where the invisible force, the sensation of being lost within oneself or the possibility that the body contains another body, emerges. In the character of Daniel Quinn, who is a writer of detective novels under the pseudonym of William Wilson, Auster created a contemporary urban man, confused with his own ontology. For Auster it is no longer important to follow the traditional fictional lines and generate the characters story. On the contrary, the trajectory of characters is reduced to reveal the materiality of the novel, fold after fold in a series of mirror like embeddings. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of the night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not, the novel starts (Auster, 1987, p. 3). The mistaken identity, a traditional, if not a clich literary compositional

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technique within the novel, reveals alternative structural order because the identity of who he was not, is the identity of the writer Paul Auster (Hoy, 2010, p. 69). As Delueze says: As a general rule the way a material is folded is what constitutes its texture (Deleuze, 1993, p. 41). The more you fold, the better you insight its texture. So if a texture is revealed in folds, it is the materiality of fiction that surfaces in the above mentioned ontological fold. While in a mannerist Baroque painting chiaroscuro reveals the way the fold catches the illumination, the moment of revelation for the reader of fiction comes from seeing, reading and the ability to present legible allegories of fiction in her mind. In fiction, the fold catches the light of creation and acknowledges the process of world making. While in Baroque architecture the play of light and shadow depends on such categories as the hour of a day, the intensity of light, and the perspective from which the particular allegorical object is perceived, in fiction the process of folding and unfolding may be connected to a reading experience, to the intensity with which the event, that is the process of creating the fold, comes to existence. The event happens when different spaces are linked together as Meredith Hoy suggests in relation to Zaha Hahids architecture elsewhere in this volume. (Hoy, 2010, p. 68) Where is the lineage between the Baroque as a period style and the baroqueness as aquality attributed to the contemporary art? Deleuze characterizes the Baroque as an abstract art par excellence (1993, p. 40). The novel City of Glass is abstract in so far as Klee or Dubuffet is abstract in contrast to Winslow Homer. It employs metafictional elements and discloses its own texture. It exists as a mental landscape in the soul and in the mind of the reader (ibid.). Moreover, it includes immaterial folds that integrate also the characters in the novel, in the following example, the protagonist: It was all a question of method. If the object was to understand Stillman, to get to know him well enough to be able to anticipate what he would do next, Quinn had failed.... But ... Quinn felt no closer to Stillman than when he first started following him. He had lived Stillmans life, walked at his pace, seen what he had seen, and the only thing he felt now was the mans impenetrability. Instead of narrowing the distance that lay between him and Stillmanm he had seen the old man slip away from him, even as he remained before his eyes (Auster, 1987, p. 80). The above quotation constitutes one of the immaterial folds of selfsimilarity, when ontological levels of two characters, in this case the protagonist Quinn, now in the role of the private eye, supposedly following the man named Stillman, reverse. Even though Quinn follows Stillman, the clues he receives do

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not move his investigation further on. He meticulously records Stillmans movement every day in his red notebook, however, he is not able to homogenize the knowledge he receives. To see and to speak is to know but we dont see what we are speaking of and we dont speak of what we are seeing (1987, p. 83). Quinn is the seer but he cannot speak of what he sees, he only records in his red notebook the visible traces of the object he follows. Inevitably he, as a subject, the seeing and speaking self, starts to evaporate. Stillman, as the object of following disappears, but Quinn in order to perpetuate his role of a detective, continues in the process for the sake of the process and becomes immersed in the territory of maps he drew into the red notebook. He becomes the space and disappears. The last sentence in the red notebook reads: What will happen when there are no more pages in the red notebook? (Auster, 1987, p. 157) The abstraction is, however, not the negation of the form states Deleuze (Deleuze, 1993, p. 40). We claim it is rather the accentuation of the form. For the Baroque and contemporary art it is, however, not the good form of mimesis. Instead, the lineage between the past of the Baroque and the now in the arts can be traced in forms that reveal what remains in excess.
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Self-similarity as a paradigm for structures in the natural world has been popular as an artistic form of presenting the infinite. Whether employed as a structural element in architecture or as metafiction and intertextuality in literature, it serves to emanate what lies outside of the representation: the intensities, affects and sensations, and the materiality of the fold, the form itself (Slaughter, 2004, p. 237). Catherine Soussloff, in the introduction, summed up the affective qualities of interpreted works of art, which the essays in this volume discuss such as elaboration, excess, juxtaposition, surplus, dissimulation, ecstasy, virtuosity, efflorescence, and absurdity. (2010, p. 5) Most of them are elicited from works of art, which in various forms employ self-similarity. Although its aims and social background were different, we may learn much from the Baroque. The simulation of infinity through self-similarity has a liberating and assertive effect no wonder that a keen interest in the Baroque is again being felt. Its openness and dynamics bears a basic affinity to contemporary art and its emphasis on expression and happening rather than ideal order, is certainly related to many aspects of contemporary life.

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Works cited: Auster, P. 1985. City of Glass. The New York Trilogy. New York: Penguin Books. Auster, P., Karasik, P. and Mazzucchelli, D. 2004. City of Glass, the Graphic Novel. New York: Picador. Delleuze, G. 1993. The Fold. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harbison, R. 2010. ARent in the Clouds. In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. Harbison, R. 2000. Reflections on Baroque. London: Reaktion Books. Hoy, M. 2010. An Aura of Excess: Zaha Hadid and the Baroque Genetics of Contemporary Architecture. In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. Miller, T. 2010. The Approach of the End of the World Feeling: Allegory and Eschatology in the Operas of Robert Ashley. In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. Munster, A. 2010. Bios and Baroque: Life in the Folds of 17th-Century Artifice and Contemporary Bioart.In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. Norberg-Schultz, C. 2003. Baroque architecture. History of World Architecture. Milano: Electa Architecture. Rossholm Lagerlf, M. 2010. Spatial Effects and Meaning in the Galerie des glaces at Versailles.In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. Soussloff, C. M. 2010. Introduction for the Extension of the Baroque In Ars Aeterna. Vol 2./No 1., 2010. Nitra: CPU. Slaughter, M. 2004. The Arc and the Zip: Deleuze and Lyotard on Art. In Law and the Critique 15: pp. 231257 copyright Springer 2005 Endnotes
i ii

Foldings, or the Inside of Thought (Subjectivisation) (1986) History of Sexuality (1976 1984), Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) iii with the introduction by Art Spiegelman. Art Spiegelman is a recognized cartoonist, the author of Maus: A Survivors Tale (1986, 1991), a cartoon narrative on the biography of the authors father, a Holocaust survivor. iv knowledge is known only where it is folded(Deleuze, 1993, p. 56)

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The Culture of Defiguration: Anamorphosis, Then and Now Jon R. Snyder

Jon Snyder, professor of Italian and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has published widely on European literature, art, and culture, with particular emphasis on early modern Italy. His most recent book is Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe (2009). The subjects of his essays, reviews, and translations specifically concerning modern Europe range from Wilde to Nietzsche, from fin-de-sicle architecture and painting to postmodern philosophy.

This article examines, in the wake of many recent studies, a key practice of visual representation that was first perfected and widely deployed in 17th-century Europe, namely anamorphosis. The Baroque, as the first tentative media world in the West, stands in a peculiar relation of proximity to modernity and its aftermath, whose revival of anamorphosis privileges its power to distort and re-form the visual field, in a process of defiguration and refiguration that calls the very act of seeing into question. The article concludes with an analysis of the neo-baroque photographs of Loretta Lux, which, it is argued, work to this same end. In his classic critique of ocularcentricity in modern Westernespecially Frenchculture, the intellectual historian Martin Jay contends that in our time the Baroque has perhaps finally come into its own (Jay 1994 [1993]). Jays acknowledgement of the particular affinities between the privileged visual field of the Baroque, on the one hand, and media-saturated modernity/postmodernity, on the other, resonates with the work of 20thcentury thinkers as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, to name only two of the many who have explored this same connection (Benjamin 1928; Deleuze 1988). The long era, driven by the respective agendas of the Enlightenment and Romanticism, of disinterest inif not disdain for 16 the artistic and cultural achievements of the late 16th and 17th centuries came to a close by the turn of the 20th century (see, for instance, Wlfflin 1888). In underscoring the intrinsic relationship between the Baroque and the emergence of the modern ocularcentric regime, however, Jay adds an important dimension to the philosophical discourse that seeks not only to articulate a critical geneaology of contemporary thinking, but to define the contemporary artistic movements often loosely labeled neobaroque. In the following pages, I will examine an advanced technology for visual representation that was first perfected and deployed in 17th-century Europe, namely anamorphosis, before concluding with a brief look at the work

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of one of the many contemporary artists around the world who have adopted or thematized anamorphosis, thus reintroducing the Baroque into the art of the present day. Although its definition is elusive, the neo-baroque is widely supposed to extend, develop, reflect, recycle, or revise the most salient traits and themes of Baroque art. Libraries and bookstores contain recent titles such as The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture, Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art, Digital Baroque, La modernidad de lo barroco, The Universal Baroque and many others promising to elucidate the neo-baroque and its links to the art and culture of the past and the present (Lambert 2004, Wacker 2007, Murray 2008, Echeverra 1998, Davidson 2007). By the same token, there is no question today of a revival of neo-Renaissance art: that was something for the 19th century, with its seemingly unshakable belief in progress and in overcoming, inspired by the path-breaking political and intellectual freedoms of the Italian city-states. The Baroque seems instead, from the vantage point of today, to stand in a peculiar relation of proximity to many projects of modernity and its aftermath. In his extraordinary study of the origins of German tragic drama, for instance, Walter Benjamin detects a striking parallel between the 17thcentury Trauerspiel (tragedy) and 20th-century German Expressionism, one of the most avant-garde modes of modernism around the time of the First World War (Benjamin, 2003 [1977], pp. 54-55). Benjamin does not imply that all of 20th-century art can be said

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to reflect the Baroque, but rather that certain modern and contemporary artistic movements or practicessuch as German Expressionism but not, say, Abstract Expressionismreveal a deep affinity with the styles and themes of that prior period. For Benjamin, this constitutes the return of the repressed in modernist Western art and culture, i.e., Baroque allegory, which works to undermine dominant representational practices such as realism and symbolism, as well as the twin pillars of historicism and progress. It would be impossible for me, in the space provided here, to offer a pocket guide to the various itineraries of the Baroque across the art of the 20th century: Francis Bacons powerful reworkings of 17th-century Old Master paintings, to give only one example, indicate the importance of this tradition for the new Western art. With the decline of High Modernism in the post1968 period, more than a few critics have even gone so far as to conflate the neo-baroque with Postmodernism tout court, subsuming the former entirely within the labile confines of the latter. Although it is not difficult to point to Baroque influences in a wide range of postmodern artists (think of Damien Hirsts diamond-encrusted skull, Frank Gehrys convoluted metallic faades or Orlans free-standing bodiless figures made of swirling drapery), there are far more who cannot be made to fit into such a rigid scheme. I will in this essay instead consider the neo-baroque solely in terms of its contemporary response to the radical technological interrogation of the visual field put forward with such emphasis centuries ago in the Baroque. 17

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I have argued elsewhere that, despite its obvious technical limitations in comparison to subsequent eras, the Baroque may be termed the first tentative version of a media world in the West (Snyder, 2005, pp. 99-139). We can see this clearly in opera, which constitutes a multimedia genre unlike anything known before it, and whose very high degree of artifice appealed powerfully to early modern spectators at court or in public theaters. That opera has survived the many successive transformations of Western theatrical and musical culture, and has in essence descended to us relatively intact from the Baroque, while so many other artforms have either gone extinct or have fallen moribund in the meantime, cannot be merely a matter of chance (and the same could be said for the revival of baroque opera from the late 20th century onward). We can detect traces of this same nascent media world in experimental baroque works for the stage, such as those of the playwright and capocomico G. B. Andreini, which seem to have incorporated and thematized the latest technological innovations in opticsmirrors, lights, projections, and other visual effects in public performances (Snyder, 2009, pp. 1-32). Moreover, we can discover a theoretical basis for this same media world in the writings of those late 16thand 17th-century critics and thinkers concerned with concettismo or wit. In these years, Francesco Patrizi, Matteo Peregrini, Maciej Sarbiewski, Baltasar Gracin, Emanuele Tesauro and a number of others set out to redefine the autonomy of art, the faculty of 18 imagination, and the aesthetic purpose of novelty and surprise, while openly rejecting the long-acknowledged classical rules of decorum, proportion, harmony, unity and so on (Snyder, 2005, p. 21). As the last in the long chain of concettisti, Tesauroby the time that he completed his work on the massive final version of Il cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Spyglass) in 1670 does not hesitate to contend, without the faintest trace of anxiety, not only that tutto lecito (there are no rules) in the new arts of the Baroque, but that everything encountered in human experience is indeed always already a representation or a figure, devoid of any authentic foundation in the real, and generated solely by human wit or, as he terms it, ingegno (Tesauro, 2000 [1670], p. 735). What frees his version of the Baroque aesthetic, allowing it to float clear of the ground of reality, is its willful and highly self-conscious break with the Aristotelian definition of mimesis, or the so-called mirror of nature. The dynamics of Baroque art are based on the principle of difference rather than repetition, Tesauro argues: so that it may propagate itself ad infinitum, figure upon figure upon figure, the Baroque does not attempt to repeat the real but to remake it entirely. It is, simply put, the triumph of the new, invoking a wholesale transformation through the endlessly creative work of wit (the most highly evolved mode of human consciousness)of what already exists, in which the original model loses whatever weight it once had and is reduced to a mere trace of what it

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once was. For Tesauro, the experience of the Baroque figural universe is not only one of extreme freedom from the limits of the real or the necessary, but must be understood as an essentially aesthetic experience: it is constantly metamorphosing into something unexpectedand at once beautiful and pleasurablethat has never before seen, whether figure, metaphor or image. The aestheticization of the universe, after the breaking of the mirror of nature, is the universalization of the aesthetic. There was one contemporary thinker in Italy who was every inch Tesauros equal: Marco Boschini, art critic and author of the bizarre and extravagant treatise entitled La Carta Del Navegar Pittoresco (Boschini 1966 [1660]). In this seemingly interminable verse work, composed of over five thousand stanzas in Venetian dialect, Boschini memorably, if crudely, defines the new Baroque artworks as being dove fa larte alla natura i fighi, or where art gives nature the finger (see Snyder, 2005, p. 146). It goes almost without saying that the representation of space, especially of figures in space, was a key experimental area for the visual arts in early modern Europe. From the early Renaissance onward, at least two basic perspectival techniques are employed in twodimensional pictorial representation to re-create the illusion of viewing objects that exist in three dimensions. The first of these, accelerated or relief perspective, consists in showing objects in a compressed or foreshortened form, as if they were farther away than they really are, as was commonly done in the Renaissance with, say, theatrical backdrops and stage sets (Elkins, 1994, p. 72, n. 67). The second perspectival practice instead makes represented objects seem nearer to the viewer by enlarging their component parts rather than shrinking them, as, for example, in Antonio Pollaiuolos late 15thcentury Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (1473-75). Both of these respective perspectival techniques are, however, widely understood. In the Renaissance to produce not an optical illusion per se, but rather a window on what (and through which) the eye actually sees, constructed according to the way that it sees (Clark, 2007, p. 84). In other words, Renaissance perspective is an art of illusion at the service of the painter who is, as Leon Battista Alberti argued, solely concerned with representing what can be seen, like a mirror or other reflecting surface guaranteeing privileged access to the real and the true (as cited in Clark, 2007, pp. 8485). The concettista culture of the Baroque, as we have seen above, tends programmatically to call into question any such inherited assumptions about the mimetic stability of representation or its performance as a mirror of nature. Indeed, one Baroque artistic practice in particular critiques the artifices of traditional perspective by pushing them to such extremes that their rules are not merely bent but in fact reversed, in what amounts to a spectacular laying-bare of the device (to borrow a central notion of Russian Formalism). As a result, a glaringif intentionally transientdisconnect between artistic representation, on the one hand, and the 19

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reality that it purports to represent, on the other hand, arises in the eye of the beholder: this is called anamorphosis. Anamorphosis was known to artists in Europe since at least the 15th century, and was widely explored in the first part of the 16th century, as we can see from such now-iconic works as Parmigianinos Self-Portrait and Holbeins The Ambassadors, to mention only two examples. However, anamorphosis became a subject of intensifying interestan outburst in both theoretical and practical terms over the course of the 17th century: Stuart Clark notes that the term first appears in 1646 (Clark, 2007, pp. 90, 95). Anamorphosis combines two visual orders in one image, one depicted naturalistically and the other distorted according to the rules of the technique. By definition, this ma[kes] it impossible to see one of them correctly without simultaneously failing with the other when the viewer seeks to make visual sense of the image (Clark, 2007, p. 92). In this system of deliberate double-imaging, whenever the onceskewed realistic order is restored through the discovery of the hidden correct viewpoint, the unnatural or distorted original order is lost to sight, and vice versa (Clark, 2007, p, 93). This discovery can occur when the viewer finds the proper oblique angle in relation to the surface of the picture to be able to recover a legible, naturalistic image otherwise deliberately disguised by anamorphosis (a process taken to an extreme in viewing a painting such as The Ambassadors, which now requires the viewer to step almost into the plane 20 of the painting itself in order to grasp the image of a skull). Alternately, in another version of the same practice that thanks to dramatic advances in optical technologybecame widespread in the Baroque, the anamorphic logic of double-imaging is affirmed when a catoptric mirror of the correct shape is placed in the proper relation of proximity to intentionally distorted images (see Fig. 1, lower right). A cluster of sometimes random-looking blotches or stains on a two-dimensional surface is transformed, when reflected in the appropriate kind of cylindrical or conical mirror, into a naturalistic representation (and the obverse holds equally true upon removal of the mirror). One of the most famous 17th-century examples of an enigmatic anamorphic image being resolved by a catoptric mirror is to be found in the engraved frontispiece of Tesauros Il cannocchiale aristotelico (Tesauro, 2000 [1670], p. 3). What is thematized in such anamorphic artworks is not only the arbitrariness of the conventions of perspective, but an accelerating sense of the elusiveness of the objects to be represented, which seem almost centripetally thrust out of their former familiar states. If media are spaces of action for constructed attempts to connect what is separated, as Siegfried Zielinski contends, then in the Baroque anamorphic media world, especially when catoptric devices are employed, we witness an intentional and technically complex attempt to connect what is separated, that is to say, the viewer and the increasingly remote objects of the representation, while at the same time problematizing

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that attempt and acknowledging the difficulty of overcoming the dispersion of the latter in infinite space (Zielinski, 2006, p. 7). There is no doubt that many Baroque artists and theorists valued the catoptric mirror for its power to distort and re-form the visual field, in an act of defiguration and refiguration that ultimately threatens to disturb, or even to undermine, the presumed certainty of the act of seeing itself, which stands at the very center of the ocularcentrism of the West (Jay, 1994, p. 49). Anamorphosis charges the relation between vision and the visible field with a sense of fundamental, even radical uncertainty: not only is that which appears in the catoptric mirror an unnatural product of skillful human artifice, but the viewers eye is wholly reliant on a sophisticated technological intermediarythe medium of the mirrorin order to be able to detect any figure at all. The seeming immanence of vision is undone, making the ordinary gaze into little more than a kind of blindness that, in the case of mirror-anamorphosis, may be helpless to decipher the image without the assistance of an optical instrument or visual aid (Massey, 2007, p. 68). In this version of the Baroque there is in fact nothing natural about vision, and the new optics, as Tesauro notes, makes you see what you do not see (le Optiche . . . ti fan vedere ci che non vedi [as cited by Clark, 2007, p. 87]). Anamorphosis effectively de-faces or de-figures the signs in the visual field, alienating them from themselves and from the viewer, although this is not meant to be a permanent state of affairs. There is of course a way and a moment for restoring the logic of vision to its rightful place by suitable manipulation of the visual field that has been destabilized by anamorphosis (through the placement of a suitable mirror or the proper positioning of the viewers eye). Resemblance that seems lost may therefore be recovered; in a curious procedure, as Jurgis Baltruaitis notes, the destruction of the figure precedes its representation (as cited in Paz, 1990, p. 141). Yet there can be no denying that in this process the picture, in a sense, looks back at the viewer. In other words, the anamorphic image is not solely a passive recipient of the gaze, but ambiguously makes the viewer at once subject and object of a reconfigured viewing space, as Lyle Massey has brilliantly argued (Massey, 2007, pp. 68-69). As she points out, one is forced to move, or to move something, in order to see properly the anamorphic picture: in some cases the viewer may feel compelled to push the subject-object distinction to the very limit, by bringing herself or himself hard up against the plane of the picture in an effort to resolve the visual enigma (Massey, 2007, pp. 68-69). Thus, Massey concludes, in anamorphosis the subject is but another object in and of the view itself (Massey, 2007, p. 109). Or, to put it another way, the anamorphic image is first of all there in the mirror, as it were, and not in the eye of the subject. No wonder that the eye itself appeared to be of special interest in early modern studies of anamorphosis (Leonardo da Vincis anamorphic drawing of an 21

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eye is emblematic of this interest, but other examples can readily be found). In the most notable Baroque treatise on anamorphosis and other optical tricks, the French Minorite monk Jean-Franois Nicerons La Perspective curieuse ou magie artificielle des effets merveilleux (1638), the emphasis in both image and text is on the eye as the organ and organizer of vision (Niceron 1638, Fig. 2). Anamorphosis invariably realigns the very act of seeing for the subject, as I have argued above, and thus posits the crisis of the eye in early modernity: the latter is no longer an organ that rationally and objectively apprehends and organizes the visual field, but rather is forced to accept the relativity of that field (which is not constituted in its entireness and fixity in advance of our gaze and our gestural and mental performance [Margolin, as cited in Clark, 2007, p. 95]). In turning back vision onto itself and in insisting on the eyes essentially self-reflexive nature, the anamorphic image problematizes any attempt to interpret fully, in an artificial and nonmimetic universe, the field of the visual (Clark, 2007, pp. 91, 95). For Baroque culture every act of perception, as Deleuze argues, tends to be hallucinatory, because perception [no longer has] an object or, I would add, any object other than itself (Deleuze, 1988, p. 125). One of the plates in Nicerons 1638 treatise displays the portraits of a dozen Turkish sultans which, if viewed through a specially faceted prism of Nicerons own design, recombine to create a portrait of King Louis XIII, the defender of Christianity against the Ottoman Empire. What the 22 eye is to see is not what is there on the page, but only what is in the glass [Fig. 3]. Roughly four centuries later, we now generally take anamorphosis for granted, although not in the early modern sense of the term. Anamorphic lenses, including the fish-eye lens, have long been a part of photography and cinema, and in the computer age the production of anamorphic images has become childs-play for anyone, not just gifted artists or specialeffects technicians. There are software programs that will instantly transform any .JPEG file into anamorphic images of every conceivable kind: and who among us is not weary of seeing these on blogs, Facebooks, and the like? At the very moment, then, in which anamorphosis is no longer a technically challenging practice, either in terms of draftsmanship, lenses, mirrors, or media, it seems to have lost whatever allure it may have once had for artists. We might say that it is a Baroque visual practice that seems by now to have become routinized, commonplace, and conventional to such a degree as to be almost wholly naturalized and, in short, forgotten. To put it another way, anamorphosis today appears to be no longer possessed of a distinctive aesthetic or critical function. I must insist on almost, however, because I believe that in fact in our time the neo-baroque hastrue to its namemade room for anamorphosis, or at least anamorphic effects, in new and unexpected ways. This is not the place for a survey of anamorphosis in modern and contemporary art (see

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Mannoni et al. 2004). Suffice it to say that there is no single representative figure or oeuvre that can capture the full complexity of the modes of its deployment, from the avant-garde photographs of Hungarian-born Andr Kertsz to the experimental political films and drawings of South African born William Kentridge in What will come (has already come) [2007] (Kentridge, 2009, pp. 58-59, 114-115). I will instead limit myself here to a brief examination of the corpus of one contemporary painter-photographer, German-born Loretta Lux (1969- ), whose subtle recourse to the techniques and themes of anamorphic art touches on some of the same questions that the Baroque first raised systematically some four centuries ago. Lux originally trained as a painter in Mnich and started to use the medium of photography only when she was already 30 years of age. Unlike most contemporary portrait photography, her carefully composed and heavily manipulated photographic portraits of children appear to be subtly but deliberately painterly, referring especially to the tradition of the Old Masters (who instead lived, it goes without saying, in an era before photography). Luxs portraits of children may bear a marked resemblance to those of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries in particular, but they are principally dependent on digital technology rather than the medium of oil paint. Her young subjects are first photographed in meticulously chosen modern vintage clothing and hairstyles in front of a white background in the studio, often in poses suggestive of the work of Bronzino or Velzquez, among others. Subsequently the artist inserts the portraitafter extensive digital enhancementinto a digital photograph of either one of her own paintings of imaginary scenery, or of a landscape or scene that she encountered somewhere on her travels (which are anonymous, or cannot in any case be readily identified by the viewer). Each portrait is an artful montage, in other words, of modern and contemporary elements that are intentionally reassembled to recall or refer to the European artistic heritage, especially that of the Baroque. In Luxs portraits the colors of a childs clothes characteristically match (or nearly so) those of the photographed backgrounds, in which pale, washed-out pastel tones tend to predominate. This produces a marked Verfremdungseffekt, inasmuch as the subject of the portrait and the rest of the image often seem to be isolated from one another: faces, heads, and unclothed body parts seem to float like fragments against the same background into which the childrens clothing blends seamlessly, like some Lacanian fantasy of le corps morcel. The children who pose for the photographer are usually alone; not only do they never smile at the camera or at one another (if accompanied by other children), but they generally refrain from any expression of passion or emotion. Although the children may look back directly (albeit impassively) at the camera, they seem incapable of, or indifferent to, communication; Luxs images appear intent on conveying a zero degree of interiority 23

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that establishes an insuperable distance between the viewer and the photographic subject. Anyone familiar with early modern portraiture of noble or royal children will recognize that Luxs work shares some or many of these same traits with the works of the Old Masters. These same unsettling pictures may also bring to mind Victorian photographic portraits of children, the paintings of Balthus, or even the style of some contemporary Japanese manga (and on the Internet one can find for sale numerous disturbing-looking dolls that are look-alikes modeled on Luxs portraits). Luxs art consists in the subtle transformation and recombination of the elements of the image to create an effect of estrangement both from the spectator and from the inner lives of the children that she portrays: the latter keep their distance from the photographer, from the viewer, from each other, and from themselves. One of the principal means through which the artist achieves her purpose in these highly self-referential pictures, which depend far more on artifice rather than on any indexical relationship to the real, is digitally generated anamorphosis. Often one or more parts of the childs body are very slightly yet perceptiblydistorted, enlarged or stretched out of normal proportion in Luxs photographs. The viewers eye encounters heads that seem to be too big, relative to the rest of the body of the child, or arms that appear to be too long, creating an uncanny sense that the familiar is in fact alien to us. The bodies shown in these portraits are a subtle 24 assemblage of component parts that do and do not fit together, almost like Nicerons bizarre composite portrait of Louis XIII. Luxs greatly understated use of anamorphosis is the only one possible for this somber approach to neo-baroque image-making. The medium itself, in the 21st century, no longer needs to call the act of seeing into question in order to interrogate the relationship between subject and object that arises in it. At the same timeand here we may detect the difference between neo-baroque anamorphosis and its predecessorthere is no way to recompose these unsettling figures or to restore them to normal dimensions through the exercise of reason and the discovery of the correct vantage point for the viewer, as the artists of the Baroque fully intended to do. Such images thus work to destabilize the power of the ocularcentric regime which Martin Jay so eloquently describes and critiques, and for which Baroque art helped to lay the original groundwork (Jay, 1994 [1993], pp. 49-52). In Deleuzes philosophical terminology, Luxs anamorphic images instead cannot be unfolded once the process of (neo) baroque folding has begun. There is no privileged viewpoint, and no magical mirror, that could be employed to turn these children back into what they once may have been. The children in Luxs portraits bear a striking resemblance to Deleuzes description of the philosophy of Leibniz in Le pli (The Fold). They are like monads, windowless, sealed off in themselves, and absent from usor rather, we may say that they are sealed

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off from the viewer by an invisible barrier that absolutely cannot be broached or penetrated (Deleuze, 1988, pp. 20-37). These are images of so-called Photoshop Children in which past and present, painting and photography, high art and mass culture, Baroque aesthetic technique and contemporary digital imagery are combined to create portraits of the surfaces of childhood, or, as I have already suggested, of the distance between the viewer and what is viewed. Perhaps in the last analysis what these pictures are about, as emphasized by Luxs recourse to the subtlest touches of anamorphosis, is not so much the distortions inherent in vision and representation as the fact that in our era what can be seen and what can be representedas the Baroque knew, but still thought to overcomeis none other than distance itself.

Works cited: Andreini, G. B. 2009 [1622]. Love in the Mirror. Snyder, J. R. (ed. and trans.). The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe: The Toronto Series, 2. Toronto: Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies. Benjamin, W. 1928. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Berlin: E. Rowohlt. Rev. ed. 1963. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Osborne, J. (trans.). London: Verso, 2003 [1977]. Boschini, M. 1966 [1660]. La carta del navegar pitoresco. Pallucchini, A. (ed.). Venice and Rome: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale. Clark, S. 2007. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Davidson, P. 2007. The Universal Baroque. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Deleuze, G. 1988. Le pli: Leibniz et le Baroque. Paris: Les ditions de Minuit. Echeverra, B. 1998. La modernidad de lo barroco. Mexico City: Ed. Era. Elkins, J. 1994. The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Jay, M. 1994 [1993]. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Kentridge, W. 2009. William Kentridge: Five Themes. Rosenthal, M. (ed.). San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; West Palm Beach: Norton Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press. Lambert, G. 2004. The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. New York: Continuum. Mannoni, L., W. Nekes, and M. Warner. 2004. Eyes, Lies and Illusions: the Art of Deception. London: Hayward Gallery. Massey, L. 2007. Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Murray, T. 2008. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Niceron, J.-F. 1638. La Perspective curieuse ou magie artificielle des effets merveilleux, par la vision directe, la catoptrique, par la rflexion des miroirs plats, cylindriques et coniques, la

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dioptrique, par la rfraction des crystaux.... Paris: P. Billaine. Paz, O. 1990 [1978]. Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare. New York: Arcade Publishing. Rosenthal, M. (ed.). 2009. William Kentridge: Five Themes. New Haven and London; Yale University Press. Snyder, J. R. 2005. Lestetica del Barocco. Bologna: Il Mulino. Tesauro, E. 2000 [1670]. Il cannocchiale aristotelico. Savigliano: Editrice Artistica Piemontese. Wacker, K. A. 2007. Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Wlfflin, H. 1888. Renaissance und Barock: eine Untersuchung ber Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien. Munich: Ackermann. Zielinski, S. 2006. Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Custance, G. (trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press.

Jon R. Snyder Department of French and Italian University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, CA 93106-4140 snyder@frit.ucsb.edu 26

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Fig. 2: J.-F. Niceron, Anamorphic projection, La Perspective curieuse (1638)

Fig. 1: J.-F. Niceron, Title page with catoptric mirror, La Perspective curieuse (1638)

Fig. 3: J.-F. Niceron, Composite portrait of King Louis XIII, La Perspective curieuse (1638)

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EFIGURATIONS

Bastarda Musicians and the Practice of Musical Anamorphosis Nina Treadwell

Nina Treadwell is associate professor of music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, specializing in 16th- and 17th-century Italian music. Her publications appear in journals such as Cambridge Opera Journal, Women and Music, Lute Society Journal, and Musicology Australia, and the edited collection Gender, Sexuality, and Early Music. Her monograph Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina was published by Indiana University Press in 2008.

This article describes the little-known practice of bastarda musicians, particularly that of bass singers and viola da gamba players. Though criticized by connoisseurs for subverting the musical architecture of a preexisting composition, bastarda musicians were renowned for their meraviglia-inspiring performances. This study explores the anti-mimetic, anamorphic dimensions of bastarda performance, as an important strand of early baroque musical culture. The bodily dimension of bastarda practice brought to the fore broader tensions between the natural and the artificial, challenged the boundaries between an original (musical) text and its performative realization, and ultimately questioned the constitution of musical (and social) order. And I remember, when I was in Rome in the year 1567, hearing of the reputation of a famous bass [singer] who was praised beyond measure. I went to hear him one day in the company of certain accomplished foreigners. He filled us with wonder [meraviglia] with meraviglia, I saybecause there was never a man who had greater natural gifts than this one, for he could reach a large number of notesall resonant and sweetup high as much as in the deepest and middle ranges. But to return to our subject, he so spoiled nature with art that he broke the [poetic] lines, indeed shattered them to pieces, making long syllables short and short ones long, putting runs on the short and stopping on the long, that listening to him was to witness a massacre of the unfortunate poetry. The wretched fellow, entreated by adulation, the more he saw eyebrows arching, the greater was his foolishness to satisfy the ignorant public.1
- Giovanni de Bardi, Discorso . . . sopra la musica antica, el cantar bene (c. 1578)

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[Those singers] who perform the low part and the bass, do not remembernot to say are ignorant of the factthat it is the base and foundation upon which the song was built. And not standing firm beneath it, as the fabric requires, they go on up, they add nonsensical passages and allow themselves, because they enjoy it, to go so far as not only to pass into the tenor part but even into that of the contralto. Even this is not enough, they go almost to that of sopranos, climbing in such a way to the top of the tree that they cant come down, without breaking their necks.2
- Ercole Bottrigari, Il desiderio overo de concerti di varij strumenti musicali (1594)

These two accounts document a specialized, highly virtuosic performance style especially practiced by bass singers and players of the viola da gamba.3 In the case of bass singers, particularly those working in Rome and Florence, an extended vocal range was cultivated. The term bastarda was first used in 1584 to describe the style, though the practice likely dates from the mid-16th century and flourished through the early-17th century.4 While some musical commentators derided singers who cultivated vocal basso alla bastarda, the capacity to inspire meraviglia (often at the expense of text clarity) was guaranteed by the singers ability to transcend his natural voice range, thus traversing the vertical terrain of a musical composition from the very lowest to the very highest parts. In the context of essays largely devoted to visual culture, the architectural and spatial metaphors in Bottrigaris description above are useful for explaining the bastarda style as an important strand of baroque musical practice that relied on aural perception, but resonated with broader artistic

cultures privileging anti-mimetic, anamorphic structures of meaning. In the narrower construct of the discipline of musicology, the bastarda style is representative of tensions regarding conceptions of baroqueness: lack of attention to text settingor failing to observe the integrity of the poetic line, to paraphrase Bardi aboveis frequently posited as antithetical to mimetic modes of musical composition and practice that led to the birth of opera, signaling the arrival of the musical baroque in 1600.5 Yet as Tom Conley asks, Can styles be periodized and, if so, what are the ideological motivations betraying the historical schemes that also tend to produce them? (Deleuze, 1993, p. ix). The bastarda style, like other styles and musical practices I have examined elsewhere, do not fit the traditional definition of the musical baroque as heralded by the birth-ofopera narrative (Treadwell, 2008); they have thus been largely ignored, or in some cases examined and dismissed.6 In part, this dismissal implicitly relies on descriptions such as those of Bardi and Bottrigaridocumentary 29

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sourcesthat appear to provide evidence for disregarding particular strands of baroque musical culture. Bardi, of course, is a key figure in this regard, because of the prominence granted his writings, and those of his circle, including members of his camerata that met at his Florentine palazzo during the 1570s and 1580s. As the standard narrative goes, Bardis camerata was instrumental in the development of monody (solo song, in the words strictest sense), which provided the practical means for the development of opera.7 The emphasis was not only on solo song (as opposed to multi-voice compositions), but a style of composition in which clarity of text expression was the primary goal. Notwithstanding Bardis contributions in this regard, one must also look carefully at both his writings and other practical activities and intellectual affiliations;8 moreover, in terms of the influence of Bardis camerata, Richard Wistreich (2007, p. 161) aptly describes their activities in terms of a research groupand a highly specialized one at thatwhose ideas were far from representative of performance practice in general during the late 16th century. Indeed, the various tirades against bassi alla bastarda (and other types of singers who performed highly florid embellishments) represented a somewhat limited attempt to reign in performers with respect to the license they took with music as presented on the printed page. Moreover, these tirades indicate that the practice of adding lavish embellishment was indeed widespread. 30 Returning specifically to Bardis account of the bastarda bass he witnessed in Rome, a certain ambivalence is also in evidence. The passage occurs as a digression in the context of instructions on the art of good singing, where the primary goal is to communicate how best to sing poetry so that the words can be most clearly understood. Though his assessment of the bass singer seems ultimately damning, he cannot help but admire the singers natural gifts and the astonishing, meraviglia-inspiring nature of the performance. He later reintroduces the topic of embellishment and bass singers in general: To make divisions [embellishments] on a bass is contrary to nature, because this part contains (as we said) the slow and severe and drowsy too. But since it is customary to do it, I do not know what to say of itI dare not praise or blame it (Bardi, c. 1578, pp. 124125). Acknowledging the practices widespread cultivation, Bardi goes on to explain how to temper the practice, suggesting to the singer to do this as little as you can, and when you must, show that you do it to indulge someone else (c. 1578, pp. 124-125).10 Bardi suggests a complex performative feat: while foregrounding musical prowess, the singer must simultaneously distance himself from his own virtuosity, thereby demonstrating a self-conscious awareness of his practice to the audience (communicating that the singer does not personally endorse his own performance). Yet Bardis account of the bastarda performance he witnessed in Rome

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describes a very different kind of engagement between the performer and his audience.11 Audience and performer engage in an ongoing dialogue whereby the performer, encouraged by audience response to his singing, strives for yet greater heights (both literally and figuratively). Likewise, rather than exhibiting discretion, Bottrigaris singer foregrounds his virtuosity by moving as far away as possible from the compositional model on which his embellishments are based. In this regard, the bastarda practice threatens the assumed authoritative voice of the composer. Though Bardi and some other contemporaneous writers suggest that performers follow a composers musical work note-for-note in performance, such opinions were commonly voiced in the context of discussions of unruly singers.12 In general, it was assumed that the musician would embellish a given composition during this period; the extent and manner of embellishment was dependent on aspects such as style, genre, and performance context. The bastarda musician incorporates embellishments that go well beyond those a singer might choose to articulate within his or her natural voice range. Music on the printed pageas a tangible element of material cultureprovided a mere basis for the bastarda musician to create a composition anew, through anamorphic performative process. The original (notated) musical model was already completely internalized by the best of singers, allowing maximum flexibility, moment-by-moment, during the course of a performance. While there are surviving examples of bastarda music in notated form, providing insight into the practice,13 the practice was primarily one in which the most renowned musicians improvised on the spot, with the interactive component between musician and audience contributing to the aural outcome. Contemporaneous criticism of bastarda performances, especially by music theorists and connoisseurs, was also based on the fact that the bass singer virtually abandoned his traditional role, which was to provide the foundation for a musical composition. Writing of 16thcentury four-part counterpoint, theorist Gioseffo Zarlino states: As the earth is the foundation of the other elements, the bass has the function of sustaining and stabilizing, fortifying and giving growth to the other [musical] parts. . . . If we could imagine the element of earth to be lacking, what ruin and waste would result in universal and human harmony! (1558, p. 179). Zarlino then proceeds to describe the distinct function of each of the parts above the bass, proceeding in order of vocal range: from the next part above the bassthe tenorthrough the alto and soprano ranges. A tacit understanding of the correct performance and spatial distribution of musical partsfrom lowest to highestlies at the heart of Bottrigaris account of bastarda singing. What he describes is not the performance of a four-part composition by four singers of appropriate range, but a single singer traversing the entire musical texture (in a seemingly indiscriminate and reckless fashion). When a bass singer or instrumentalist cultivated 31

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the bastarda style, the (usually four) discrete musical lines of a preexisting composition become a mere framework for the musician to transform the said music anew, by leaping between the various musical parts at will, as well as embellishing each part with florid passagework. (Accomplished bass singers were known to sing bastarda style with a range of approximately three octaves, using the falsetto voice for the soprano range.) Often, too, an additional fifth part was generated that was freewheeling, so to speak, independent of the traditional four-part texture. During the late 16th century and beyond, bastarda musicians (particularly viola bastarda players) frequently relied on well-known, fourpart compositions from mid-century madrigals and chansonsas the basis for their practice. There was good reason for choosing this repertory. Madrigals and chansons from earlier in the century continued to be reissued in print throughout the 16th century; they were popular with amateur musicians who could perform them with relative ease in the traditional fashion (with four singers, one per part) during an evenings entertainment. These madrigals were also relatively straightforward from a structural point of view, and were mainly diatonic with little chromaticism. From the standpoint of the bastarda musician, the four vocal parts were easy to memorize. In performance, then, the bastarda musician engaged with audience members who were familiar with the model that provided the 32 framework for his improvisations. The meraviglia that the musician induced in his audience was thus partly dependent on the auditor knowing the original musical model. In this context, the extent of a singers virtuosity could be measured in relation to the model, as well as elements of novelty and risk. As Bottrigaris account attests, risks could involve leaping to the very highest of ranges, with the singer dancing on the edge of the architectural precipice, as it were. With the connection to visuality implicit in accounts of performances by bass singers, one wonders if the generation of meraviglia also involved the combined visual-aural impression of, at times, comparatively high pitches emanating from the body of a bass singer, whose traditional function was tied to that which was understood as earth-bound or grounded, to paraphrase Zarlino. In addition, the musical lines produced by bassi alla bastarda were quite different from those produced by regular basses or those who sang in the typical range of a soprano or tenor, for example. As Wistreich has stressed, singing alla bastarda was not simply a natural technical development but, rather, something [that was] remarkable even well into the seventeenth century (2007, p. 181). First, during the 16th century, singing in more than one vocal register or modal ambitus was out of the ordinary (Wistreich, 2007, p. 176). When singing four-part counterpoint, it was unusual for any one singer to go much beyond the designated voice range. Second, singing alla bastarda produced a very

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different effect than ornamenting the discrete, more melodically oriented, tenor or soprano lines. Deriving from the bass parts traditional function, bass lines were usually slower moving and typified by leaps of fourths, fifths, and octaves, providing a harmonic support to the more conjunct movement of the soprano and tenor lines (Zarlino, 1558, p. 179). Therefore, the embellishment or passaggi (passagework) employed by bass singers produced different styles of passaggi designed to fill in leaps in the musical line. In addition, it seems fair to say that the disjunct motion that characterized bass parts must have contributed to the singers facility and propensity for leaping between various voice parts, while internally maintaining a secure sense of placement within the compositions harmonic structure (pace Bottrigari). For audience members, however, the feat clearly appeared miraculous. Interestingly, viola bastarda players do not appear to have received the same kind of criticism as their vocal counterparts. Though the basic characteristics of the style were more or less the same, and it is even possible that viola bastarda style was initially derived from vocal practice (Wistreich, 2007, p. 186)considering the longstanding tradition that instrumentalists should imitate vocal stylethere is one fundamental distinction: the use of the body. The basso alla bastarda actually produced sound through his own body: given the preeminent position of vocal music during the 16th century, and the common analogy between the physical body and musical composition,14 a singer who disrupted the functioning parts of a musical composition, invading other parts at will, was in a sense also threatening the bodily fabric that constituted social and musical order. This brings us to the bodily implications of the term bastarda itself. The term bastarda was obviously in common usage to denote musical style long before Girolamo Dalla Casa first used the term in 1584. In a few method bookshow to books that describe and give examples of making passaggi and also include music in bastarda stylethe term is briefly defined. Viola da gamba player Francesco Rognoni explains that it is named bastarda because one moment it moves to the alto range, the next moment to the bass, the next to the soprano; sometimes it plays one part, then another; sometimes with new counterpoint, the next with passaggi in imitation (1620, part 2, p. 2).15 Michael Praetoriuss definition of 1619 is perhaps a little more suggestive: It is possible that the viola bastarda received its name from the fact that it affords a mixture of all the parts, for it is not restricted to any one part (italics mine) (cited in Paras, 1985, pp. 11-12).16 Praetorius hints at the connotation of bastarda as mongrel; indeed, in many cases not only does the bastarda musician appropriate various parts of the musical texturegrafting itself onto and embellishing those parts temporarily before moving onbut in many cases boundaries begin to blur between an embellished original part and new material (the so-called fifth part that the performer creates from scratch). For example, Dalla Casas 33

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bastarda version of Cipriano de Rores famous madrigal Ancor che col partire relies heavily on a fifth part that is characterized by rapid passagework. The musical invention is not only confined to these rapid passages, however; Dalla Casa plays a continual game with the original by adding new counterpoints and highlighting small groups of notes (from the original) which spur new invention, such as sequential treatment (i.e., imitation of a motive at different pitch levels). By nature of the practice, then, the distinction between the original and a parasitic other becomes increasing oblique. In terms of extant viola bastarda repertory, the works of Oratio Bassani (died 1615) depart most radically from their models. In his setting of Orlando di Lassos chanson Susanne ung jour, only a very small portion of the work draws on the original model. The work is almost entirely based on freewheeling ornamentation over the original bass line (which incorporates minor modifications), creating dissonances and adjustments to the original harmonic structure (Paras, 1985, p. 42). In other words, aside from the original bass line, the remaining three voices (that also constitute the chansons harmonic dimension) are all but eviscerated in the viola bastarda version. In instances such as these, the performer moves so far away from the music in its notated form that, according to Bardi, even the composer does not recognize it as his offspring (c. 1578, pp. 126-127).17 The bodily connotations of the term creatura (best translated 34 in this context as offspring) help to call into question the authoritative position of the composer as progenitor; in such cases the bastarda musician becomes the generator, in the sense of the one who creates or reproduces. The question of illegitimacy is key here: the bastarda is literally one who is born outside of the legitimate social contract of marriage. Socially and musically the bastarda is one who moves both inside and outside of traditional structures. The creative insights gleaned from such a position, and the practical results of such insightsmost significantly the potential to reproducewere clearly threatening to musical (and social) order as traditionally understood, hence the derogatory implications of the term bastarda, adopted to describe a musical practice that nevertheless produced awe and astonishment in those who witnessed performances. During the course of a performance a bastarda musician could potentially transform a given musical composition to the extent that it became unrecognizable, even when the original counterpoint apparently served as a kind of veiled sonic backdrop (i.e. an accompaniment of sorts). The inherently diffuse nature of sound and its ephemeral constitution guaranteed that, in the performative mode, neither the original nor its offspring could be recaptured. In this sense, what the bastarda musician chose to create was, like all performances, ultimately irretrievable. Alternatively, in the realm of visual culture, Jon Snyder describes anamorphosis as a kind of doubleimaging: both the naturalistic and

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the distorted could be seen at once. In this way, the naturalistic image was always recoverable, albeit through an unconventional viewing angle or the use of a mirror (see Snyder, 2010, in this issue). In this regard, one must distinguish anamorphosis in the visual sphere from its musical counterpart. Perhaps the immutable nature of notated music, as material culture, made possible the anamorphically irretrievable feats enacted through performance by bastardi. One thing is clear: the practice of the bastarda musician was not merely to bastardize from one (preexisting) musical part, then another, and so on. Though highly virtuosic, and perceived as such by audience members, the cultivation of bastarda style not only required extraordinary vocal technique and thorough understanding of the art of counterpoint, but the ingegno necessary to invent or fashion the new. The bastarda repertory flourished in Italy through the early 17th century. Though the practice began during the period that musicologists define as the late Renaissance, the lions share of notated examples fall squarely into the early Baroque (although the bastarda tradition began and remained an essentially improvised art). Thus, during the early Baroque periodas demarcated by the musicological traditioncompeting, and at times complementary strands, of musical culture co-existed and continued to rub shoulders. Even Giulio Caccini, Bardis protg (also In its baroque manifestation, the viola bastarda style moved even further away from adherence to a four-part contrapuntal model that provided the basis for improvisation. Instead, a socalled basso continuo line was included, along with bastarda embellishments, reflecting the new notational practice of emphasizing the bass line as support for a soloist (the works of Oratio Bassani reflect this practice). These stylistic changes paralleled the socalled monodic revolution; while the practice of solo singing was common throughout the 16th century, it was not until 1602 that print technology was utilized to provide an independent basso continuo part (with implied harmonies) that underpinned the solo voice part (usually tenor or soprano). Yet as Wistreich (2007, p. 207) points out, a small but distinctive group of songs influenced by the basso alla bastarda tradition are dispersed among these early printed monody collections. Thus, Bardis interest in foregrounding the solo voice was finally reflected in the medium of print, yet the concomitant demand for text clarity above all else was not entirely satisfied, most especially in bass solos where the characteristics of the bastarda style continued to prevail. well-known for his rants regarding unruly singers) chose to include two songs in this 1614 publication replete with passaggi covering both tenor and bass voice ranges in rapid succession. Clearly, composers and performers, like their counterparts in the other arts, 35

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continued to negotiate the boundaries between the natural and the artificial. If the birth of opera was characterized by the naturalistic (i.e. speech-like) qualities of recitative, then apparently the birth was not a particularly spectacular one. Indeed, as Tim Carter pointed out in passing more than 25 years ago, the new style of recitative was not particularly well received: Euridice was, according to one source, like the chanting of the passion, while . . . [in Il rapimento di Cefalo] the style of singing easily led to boredom (1983, pp. 93-94). In fact, non-operatic musico-theatrical entertainments, such
Endnotes: I wish to thank Christen Herman (voice) and David Morris (viola da gamba) for working with me to explore the bastarda repertory and for their participation in the concert Vocalizing the Baroque: Qualities of Motion and Instrumental Extensions. 1 . . . et mi ricordo essendo in Roma lanno 1567 udendo la fama dun Basso che oltra misura era lodato un giorno andai udirlo essendo in compagnia con certi uirtuosi forestieri, il quale ci emp di marauiglia, di marauiglia dico, perche non f mai huomo che hauesse in questo fatto pi dote di costui dalla natura: auuenga che ricercaua assai voci tutte sonore, e dolci cos nellalto, come nel basso, e per lo mezo, ma hau poi, tornando al nostro proposito, tanto guasta la natura con larte, che rompeua i uersi, anzi gli fracassaua, facendo della lunga breue, e della breue lunga, correndo in su quella, e fermandosi in su questa, che altro non era ludir costui, che uno scempio della misera poesia, e linfelice sollecitato dalladulatione quanto pi uedeua inarcar le ciglia, tanto pi andaua crescendo le sue scempiezze per sodisfare al poco intendente uolgo (Bardi, c. 1578, pp. 122-123). The identity of the bass singer that Bardi heard in Rome is unknown. It was not the famous basso alla bastarda Giulio Cesare Brancaccio because he was in France at the time, although it may have been Alessandro Merlo or Gio. Andrea napoletano. Both were mentioned by Vincenzo Giustiniani as active in Rome during this period. For this information I am indebted to Richard Wistreich. 2 [Those singers] che essercitano la parte grave, e bassa, non si ricordando, per lasciar di dir non sappendo, che ella la base, & il fondamento, sopra il quale stata fabricata, conviene, che vada sossopra, che si pongono s grilli de passaggi, & si lasciano da questo particolare diletto loro tirar tanto oltre, che non solamente passano nella parte de Tenori: ma giungono a quella de Contralti: & non li bastando, quasi a quella, de soprani:
*

as intermedi (interludes), continued to be favored genres in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Indeed, Carters aside deserves a full study in and of itself. Such a study would surely complicate the history of musico-theatrical entertainment during the early baroque period. Yet it seems that incentive is lacking. Could it be that charges of artificiality and lack of expressivity in repertories and genres such as that of the bastarda and intermedi continue to pervade our historical imagination, thus precluding their serious consideration today?

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inarborandosi di maniera alla cima, che non ne possono scendere, se non a rompi collo (Bottrigari, 1594, MacClintock, trans., p. 6). 3 The viola da gamba is a bowed, stringed instrument that was particularly popular in Italy during the 16th and early 17th centuries. Although lutes, organs, and harps were sometimes played in bastarda style, the practice was far less common among players of these instruments. 4 Because of the improvised nature of the practice, it is difficult to pin down exactly when bass singers began to sing solos using extended ranges. Though the practice of adding extensive embellishment using the natural voice range dates from the late 15th century, Wistreich (2007, p. 162) surmises that using the actual bass line as source material for improvisation by bass singers dates from 1540s Naples. With bass singers creating improvisations from an actual bass line (rather than a tune that a singer transposed as a bass solo), it was but a small step for bass singers of exceptional merit to cultivate an extended virtuoso range. In terms of viola bastarda repertory, the earliest notated music dates from 1553 with the arrangements of Diego Ortiz. His ornamented versions of Arcadelts madrigal O felici occhi miei and Pierre Sandrins well-known chanson Doulce memoire involve the voice-crossings that are characteristic of bastarda style (Ortiz, 1553). 5 The musical baroque is typically periodized from 1600 to 1750, the latter date corresponding with the death of J. S. Bach. 6 The basso all bastarda style has only recently been given serious attention by Richard Wistreich (2007). A classic dismissal of late 16th-century florid singing style in general using charges of artificiality and inexpressivityis articulated by Warren Kirkendale (2001, p. 166). Bernard Thomas recognized this bias in 1980, when he produced the first series of modern musical editions of bastarda repertory: Modern performers and scholars have tended to dismiss the viola bastarda repertoire as something rather contrived and artificial (Thomas, 1980, p. 2). 7 This characterization is of course oversimplified, as a number of factors influenced the development of opera. Nevertheless, the Bardi-opera connection is one that remains central to the birth-of-opera narrative, as any textbook on the history of opera or baroque music attests. 8 Bardis practical involvement in the Florentine interludes for La pellegrina in 1589 indicates his awareness of a variety of musico-aesthetic trends. His friendship and familiarity with the work of Francesco Patrizi, who advocated poetic forms incorporating fragmentary, meraviglia-inspiring scattered bursts, may have influenced his conception for the Pellegrina interludes. Patrizis aesthetic also resonates closely with the scattered bursts (with the musician leaping between various parts at will) that characterized the bastarda style. Regarding Bardis involvement in the Pellegrina interludes and his relationship with Patrizi, see Treadwell (2008). 9 Il diminuire i bassi cosa contra natura, perche in essi, come habbiam detto, il tardo, il graue, el sonnolente pure poiche cosi luso non s che dirmene, ne ardisco lodarlo, ne biasimarlo. 10 . . . ben darei per consiglio far ci il men che si possa, et quando ci si debba pur fare, almeno mostrar di farli per altrui compiaciemento. 11 See the final sentence of Bardis account, as cited at the opening of this article. 12 I would add that the best thing a singer can do is to perform a song well and precisely,

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as it was composed by its creator. (Soggiungendoui oltre di ci che la miglior, parte che possa hauer un cantante di bene, e puntualmente sprimer la canzone secondo che dal maestro stata composta.) (Bardi, c. 1578, pp. 126-127.) 13 For basso alla bastarda sources, see Wistreich (2007); for the viola bastarda repertory, see Paras (1985). 14 Examples are ubiquitous. Regarding Zarlino, near the opening of book 3 of Le istitutioni harmoniche he states: Since counterpoint is the principal subject of this part, we shall first see what it is and why it is so named. I consider counterpoint to be that concordance or agreement which is born of a body with diverse parts, its various melodic lines accommodated to the total composition, arranged so that voices are separated by commensurable, harmonious intervals (1558, p. 1). See also p. 178: As every physical body is composed of the elements [i.e., the four elements], so every perfect composition is composed of the elemental parts. 15 . . . si chiama Bastarda, perche hora v nellacuto, hora nel grave, hora nel sopra acuto, hora fa vna parte, hora vnaltra, hora con nuoui contraponti, hora con passaggi dimitationi. 16 The citation is drawn from Praetoriuss Syntagma Musicum 2: De Organographia (Wolfenbttel, 1619). 17 . . . che quegli stesso che lha composto, per sua creatura nol rinonosce. 18 As Carter states, Indeed, one could argue that opera did not establish itself as a selfsufficient dramatic genre until it escaped the artistic confines of the courts, as occurred in Rome and, especially, Venice in the second quarter of the [17th] century (1983, p. 93).

Works Cited: Bardi, G. de. c. 1578. Discorso mandata a Giulio Caccini detto romano sopra la musica antica, el cantar bene. In: Palisca, C. (ed.). 1989. The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, pp. 90-131. Bottrigari, E. 1594. Il desiderio overo de concerti di varij strumenti musicali: Dialogo di Allemano Benelli. 1962. MacClintock, C. (trans.). Musicological Studies and Documents, vol. 9. Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1962. Caccini. G. 1614. Le nuove musiche e nuova maniera di scriverle. Florence: Z. Pignoni. Carter, T. 1983. A Florentine Wedding of 1608. In Acta Musicologica, vol. 55, no. 1, pp. 89-107. Dalla Casa, G. 1584. Il vero modo di diminuir con tutte le sorti di stromenti. Venice: A. Gardano. 1980. Repr. Bologna: Forni. Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kirkendale, W. 2001. Emilio de Cavalieri Gentiluomo romano: His Life and Letters, His Role as Superintendent of all the Arts at the Medici Court, and His Musical Compositions. Florence: Olschki. Ortiz, D. 1553. Trattado de glosas sobre clausulas y otros generos de puntos en la musica de violones. Rome. Paras, J. 1985. The Music for Viola Bastarda. Houle, G. and G. Houle (eds). Bloomington:

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Indiana University Press. Rognoni, F. 1620. Selva de varii passaggi: secondo luso moderno per cantare, & suonare con ogni sorte de stromenti: divisa in due parti. Milan: F. Lomazzo. Snyder, J. R. 2010. The Culture of Defiguration: Anamorphosis, Then and Now. In: Ars Aeterna, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 9-20 Thomas, B. (ed.). 1980. Girolamo Dalla Casa: Madrigali da sonar con la viola bastarda I. London: London Pro Musica Edition. Treadwell, N. 2008. Music and Wonder at the Medici Court: The 1589 Interludes for La pellegrina. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Wistreich, R. 2007. Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate. Zarlino, G. 1558. Le istitutioni harmoniche. 1968. Marco, G. A. and C. V. Palisca (trans.). In: The Art of Counterpoint: Part Three of Le istitutioni harmoniche, 1558. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Nina Treadwell Music Center University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064 treadwel@ucsc.edu

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The-Approach-of-the-End-of-the-World-Feeling: Allegory and Eschatology in the Operas of Robert Ashley Tyrus Miller
Tyrus Miller is professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars, Singular Examples: Artistic Politics and the Neo-Avant-Garde, and Time-Images: Alternative Temporalities in Twentieth-Century Theory, Literature, and Art and editor of Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context.

In his series of television operas following his 1978 work Perfect Lives, Robert Ashley explored the cultural and geographical landscapes of North America through an individualized appropriation and reinscription of the world-view and accompanying aesthetic of the baroque. This essay consider Ashleys work in light of recent media theory utilizing the notion of the Neo-baroque and goes on to discuss Ashleys particular use of allegory and eschatology in his operas, concerns that reveal his creative connections with the conceptual cosmos of the Baroque.

I. Neo-Baroque and Meta-Baroque

In her recent book Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Angela Ndalianis considers the current corporate entertainment media landscape in relation to the aesthetics of the classical Baroque. In the serial spin-offs of characters and narratives in multiple media, the polycentric proliferation of branches of single works, the use of advanced special effect techniques and technologies to dazzle viewers, and the movement of narratives along overlapping planes of reference and allusion, Ndalianis discovers a distinct new phase of the baroque characteristic of the contemporary age. The neobaroque aesthetics she describes are closely related to the economic and 40 institutional organization of presentday media production, in particular, the dense horizontal connectedness of media industries and other commodified domains of popular leisure experience (Ndalianis 2004). Ndalianiss notion of the neo-baroque implies that industrially produced works of popular culture may exhibit some of the same structural and semiotic logic typical of avant-garde works of art. Popular culture, she suggests, has already incorporated and outstripped the innovations of the avant-garde, manifesting in even more developed and effective forms supposedly avant-garde dynamics of formal inventiveness and productivity. The so-called television operas of

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Robert Ashleyso-called, because he managed to produce only a small fraction of the material in television versions would seem to constitute a ripe example for such a dialectical undercutting of the avant-gardes cultural capital. Between 1978 and 1994, composer, performer, and video artist Robert Ashley composed a series of operasincluding Perfect Lives (1978-80), Atalanta (Acts of God) (1982-87), Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) (1985), el/Aficionado (1987), Now Eleanors Idea (1993), and Foreign Experiences (1994), which are linked in a proliferating, labyrinthine set of narrative interconnections that, together, unfold an evermore complex set of allegorical references. These fit the formal criteria of Ndalianiss neobaroque, not only because they make explicit use of baroque musical, literary, and imagistic elementsfrom allusions to Giordano Bruno and Handels pastoral opera Atalanta, to Calderns la vida es sueo themeremediating them in a contemporary electronic music and video idiom; but also because they exhibit within a postmodernist avantgarde performance work many of the neo-baroque polycentric, serial, and allegorical elements that Ndalianis and other commentators like Mario Perniola, who speaks of the neobaroque as the Egyptian moment in postmodern society and art (1995), also discern within popular media culture. Moreover, Ashley exhibits his interest in establishing correspondences between the classical baroque and the contemporary neo-baroque popular cultural landscape particularly in his choice of visual imagery. Thus, for

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example, just as Stephen Calloway documented in his Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess a propensity towards baroque stylization in a wide range of 20th-century fashion and design (1994), so too Ashley has underscored this connection. Thus, on the cover of the recording of his opera Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), his protagonist Linda appears in a Spanishstyle Roberto Cavalli outfit, set against a fake Southwestern landscape, which recalls the baroque ornamentation and foregrounded artifice used by other haute couture designers such as Karl Lagerfeld, Vivienne Westwood, and Christian Lacroix. So too, in Now Eleanors Idea, Ashley utilizes the popular baroque aesthetic of low rider car panel and glass paintings as a source of both thematic and narrative material for the opera. And in his video version of an excerpt of Atalanta (Acts of God), which is allegorically a meditation on architecture, one sequence especially emphasizes, through a graphic language of baroque geometry, the visual analogies between historical architecture and industrial designs. Yet in some crucial respects, Ashleys reinscription of the Baroque is richer and more complex than that which Ndalianis develops on the basis of current culture industry products. For like Latin American and Caribbean writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Severo Sarduy, and Jos Lezama Lima who developed the neo-baroque concept in the 1950s and 60s (see e.g. Carpentier 2001, Sarduy 1995, Lezama Lima 2000), Ashleys remediation of the Baroque is explicitly intended to characterize a 41

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New World experience and aesthetic. Ashleys operas conjure up allegorical underpinnings of otherwise banal, contemporary American incidents, characters, and settings, such as the Midwest (Perfect Lives), the South (Atalanta, in which there is a whole reflection on the Tennessee Valley Authority dam projects of the New Deal era), the Southwest (Now Eleanors Idea, which involves a television report on the low rider community in Chimay, New Mexico), and California (Foreign Experiences, in which the character Don moves to California to teach at a small college and sinks into isolation, madness, and dental disease). Each of these stories explores, at a variety of levels of meaning, typical destinies associated with the larger New World history of conquest, territorial expansion, and ethnic encounters, the same history that established the American regime of hybrid, deterritorialized signs from which Ashleys invention draws its materials. Moreover, unlike Ndalianiss neo-baroque, which describes an existing mode of the American-centered global culture industry, Ashleys use of baroque aesthetics is a more localizing, critical counterpoint to the culture industry. This can be seen especially in his bitter remarks about his failure to produce the opera Now Eleanors Idea for television as he had intended and as he had promised members of the Chimay low rider community who assisted him in developing his material:

I want to apologize to my many friends in the Low Rider community. I came to you with the idea that this opera was to be made for television. I told you that because I believed I could make it happen. In this I failed. There is only the sound of the opera. And the damage of my failure (and the failure of American television) is more than just the loss of your trust. The opera is designed for television. It is intended to be seen as well as heard. The libretto describes specific images made to be seen. . . . Maybe this will happen someday; the score is not to be changed. Or maybe it will never happen, and the Low Rider will disappear into the mythology of the Hispanic heritage (Ashley n.d., last accessed April 13, 2009). Hence, in both respects, Ashley retains a connection to the critical edge of the Latin American and Caribbean articulations of the neo-baroque, which were strongly indebted to the modernist 42 and avant-garde legacy, hybridized with and refreshed by indigenous cultural modes, which thus also continue to stand in a critical New World relation to the Western culture industry.

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II. Allegory
From the work of Walter Benjamin in the 1920s on German baroque drama through later theories of such diverse thinkers as Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Frank Kermode, Angus Fletcher, and Paul de Man, the mid-20th century saw a devaluation of the critical fiction of the romantic symbol and a corollary elevation of allegory to a sort of master trope for meaning-eliciting or meaningpositing processes in general, both in language and in nonlinguistic media as well (see e.g. Benjamin 1998, Adorno 1997, Lacan 2006, Gadamer 2004, Kermode 1957, Fletcher 1964, De Man 1983). In his notes and statements about the operas and in structural features of the works, such as titling, Ashley has signaled a parallel, metabaroque artistic concern with the conditions of possibility and validity of allegory, which brings his protagonists to the edge of visionary insight or paranoic delirium. (By the term metabaroque, as applied to Ashleys work, I mean an artistic orientation that
THE ALLEGORY

does not merely appropriate stylistic or thematic devices from baroque art, literature, or music, but a reflects on the historical, ideological, theological, and semiotic nature of the baroque, and on its relation to our contemporary cultural horizon.) A quick perusal of Ashleys titling of his works and his accompanying texts reveals the degree to which the television operas are explicitly allegorical, with their manifest contents correlated to hidden levels of meaning. To take one of the most striking examples, in Ashleys opera Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), a husband (Don) abandons his wife (Linda) in a Southwestern vista point bathroom and flies off without her; both Don and Linda begin a wandering itinerary with various new partners that leaves them spiritually transformed. We discover in the notes to the recording that Ashley has provided an elaborate key that establishes its thematic parameters and the allegorical references of its various elements:

Linda Don Now Eleanor Junior, Jr. Mr. George Payne Mr. Paynes mother Tap dancing

The Jews Spanishness America The descendants of Jews and non-Jews (i.e. us) Giordano Bruno The Roman Catholic Church The Art of Memory

(Ashley 1992)

and so on through a list of 28 characters, objects, or other details of the opera. 43

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A further dimension of allegory that Ashley mobilizes is in the music, with his use of what he calls vocal characterization, the keying of certain ranges of pitch and timbre to the characters of the opera, within which, in another redux of baroque musical practice, the performers have substantial leeway to improvisationally realize their parts. Ashley explains:

Most important to explain, for me, is the technique of the vocal characterization. In almost every solo or ensemble part, the singer is given a character defining pitch (that is, a pitch somewhere in the singers range that, understandably, forces a certain character to emerge.) Around this pitch the singer can (is asked to) invent vocal inflections (pitch changes, vocal techniques, etc.) that express the intent or meaning of the text. . . . . [T]he singer is entirely free to invent the vocal character. This invention can be spontaneous or prepared in advance and in any degree of detail. So, with rare exceptions, there are no written melodies in the operas, and there is a preponderance of empirical decisions found in practice and in rehearsal, collaboration (with and without tears) and spontaneous invention. In short, everybody has invented his or her part (Ashley n.d., last accessed April 13, 2009).

Ashley says that he thinks about his music in a dramatic sense. He does not, however, mean this just in the limited sense that he writes works for performance, and there are many ways that his performances are spare and undramatic in a traditional sense. Rather, just as allegorized mythologies could allow theological and philosophical concepts to be played out in terms of actions and relations of beingsin Gnostic or kabbalistic cosmologies, for exampleso too Ashley treats philosophical and spiritual contents through a dramatization of music, word, and image complexes as mythomusicological characters and stories. 44

Besides these allegorical structural features, Ashleys operas also foreground the mechanism of allegoresis working within the operas, with plots that reflect upon the allegorizing mental operations of his characters as well as general features of image and language that lead to the implication of hidden dimensions of meaning. Thus, a typical remark of Ashley on his compositional thinking is the following remark on his opera Perfect Lives, from a lecture at Mills College in 1989: I started out writing without naming anybody. I was just describing imagery. I realized very soon that if you describe a whole bunch of different images like snapshots, it

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becomes sort of arbitrary. If you attach those things to a name, even though the name is doing many different things, people connect it in some way (Ashley, 1991, p. 186). As a corollary to his reflections on how allegories get generated, Ashley also considers how such allegoresis comes to an end, what decisions or mere contingencies halt the potentially infinite generation of new allegorical connections, and what are the existential implications when allegoresis is terminated or fails to find any end. Both the ultimate disappointment of failing to go all the way through a crisis of meaning towards a mystical breakthrough, and the ultimate breakdown of the self into mad fragments and schizoid shards of self-interpreting language to infinity, hover indefinitely around this borderline of terminable and interminable allegoresis. Throughout these operas, Ashleys characters cross this line or stop short of it or lose track of it altogether, thus drawing our attention to the existence of a border that is invisible but complementary with whatever identity we, as Americans, might be said to construct both individually and collectively. Ashleys quadrilogy of operas, Now Eleanors Idea, exemplifies the allegorical logic and structural principles of much of his work following Perfect Lives at the end of the 1970s. The interpretative frameworks of the Now Eleanor cycle are, according to Ashley, provided by the four major religions of America: Judaism, corporate mysticism, Spanish Catholicism, and Pentacostal Evangelism, respectively (Ashley n.d., last accessed April 13, 2009). The Now Eleanors Idea sequence thus explores the meaning- and life-organizing systems of religious practice and how they interacted with the American geographical and cultural space. If, however, the operas individual narratives each allegorically refer to one of the major monotheistic religions, the names themselves of the allegorically referenced religions taken together become textual signifiers for their own hidden, composite allegorical meaning, which according to Ashley is the abstract concept of genealogy or How to find out who you are. Ashley has also noted that he drew the operas conceptual and verbal materials from four basic sources: Francis Yatess writings on Kabbalah and 16thcentury hermeticism, writings by and about Carlos Castaneda, Low Rider magazine, and business papers such as The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine (Ashley n.d., last accessed April 13, 2009). Within each of the interpretative frameworks established by the four religions of America and in the idioms provided by these vocabulary sources, each of the four operas presents a character who sets out on a quest, passing through a spiritual crisis, to achieve deeper insight into and transformation of his or her identity. Yet just the use of the same title Now Eleanors Idea for the whole cycle and for one opera within the cycle, so too the four individual allegories are subordinated to a synthetic idea. As Ashley goes 45

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on to explain in the notes for the individual opera entitled Now Eleanors Idea Now Eleanors idea is that in the modern form of Judaism, Protestantism, Business and Catholicismthe religions of Americaall the important things have become as one and the differences have disappeared. This seems wrong. So, when the opportunity presents itself she will be responsible to see if there is a purer form (Ashley 2007).

Moreover, Now Eleanors own name is, in fact, no more a metonymic sign of her capacity to allegorically represent her own identity as a self-reflexive thought process, as an ongoing process of dissolving personality into ideation and judgment. As Ashley explains: She noticed, finally, that whenever she thought of herself it was with a tone of caution, if not scolding, as in Now, Eleanor. . . So, as a matter of self-

III. Eschatology

respect she dropped the comma and the three dots (Ashley 2007). Now Eleanors Idea is, in a sense, the idea of Idea: a sign of the always available, but always problematic capacity of the human mind to proffer names for hidden meanings and experiences and, in turn, to interpretatively correlate meanings and feelings with names whose significance are uncertain or underdetermined. lifestyle and psychology, which is, as it were, the spiritual correlative of the transplantation of Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism, the Three Great Families as the (individual) opera Now Eleanors Idea puts it, to the American soil. Thus, in Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), in which the allegory is concerned with the expulsion of the Jews from Spain andfollowing Francis Yatesthe influence of kabbalah on the rise of secular and scientific thought in 17th-century Europe, there is only a precipitate of eschatological foreboding expressed in one of the four songs, North, East, South, West, that end the opera. In the song entitled South (Campo dei Fiori), which the key tells

Along with its engagement with allegorical narratives and interpretation, Ashleys meta-baroque aesthetic also remediates baroque concerns with secular and sacred history and with what Walter Benjamin, in relation to the German baroque drama of the 17th century, called the total disappearance of eschatology (Benjamin 1998; 81) All four of the operas in the Now Eleanors Idea sequence are pervaded by what is characterized in the opera entitled Now Eleanors Idea with the-approach-ofthe-end-of-the-world-feeling. However, three of the four would appear to emphasize the retreat or dissolution of a religiously motivated eschatology into features of the modern American 46

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us allegorically signifies History, Ashley draws the line of modern history as a register of persecution, intolerance, and mass violence, spanning from the burning of Giordano Bruno by the Inquisition in the Campo dei Fiori to National Socialism and the atom bombs of Nagasaki and Hiroshima:

Almost unimaginable. Twenty-eight million, two hundred seventy-eight thousand, four hundred sixty-six (calculated simply!) all facing the same way, arms raised, allow their image to be snapped. To represent an idea? You cant believe they could hold still. BUT THEY DO. I try to tell them. I hear others try to tell the that its a big mistake. Its unspeakable. A flash of light. Twenty-eight million, two hundred seventy-eight thousand, four hundred sixty-six (because it happened once?) could perish in a flash of light. They deny that they admit the possibility. BUT THEY DO. WHAT COMES NEXT IS WHAT WAS FIRST, OR SO THEY SAY. AS FAR BACK AS WE CAN GO. (AT LEAST ON THIS SYSTEM.) NOTICE THAT WE SPEAK OF IT WITH AWE. AS IF THERE WERE PERFECTION ONCE. THATS NICE. AND AS IF THERE IS RENEWAL. THATS NICE, TOO (Ashley 1992).

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The speaker is the classic baroque melancholic, who examines the shards of the past while helpless to change them; under his hapless gaze, they turn to allegories. Here, the scenes of mass politics and mass death prompt the speakers anguished question to human beings, alienated from themselves and functioning as signifying elements supposedly embodying in their collectivity a global meaning of history: To represent an idea? The eschatological horizon to which the realized allegories of 20thcentury mass ideological politics point are, however, as the last lines of the song suggest, perhaps only a regression and termination, expressing a Freudian death-drive to return to a lower state of organization, rather than redeeming the sacrifices and sufferings of history. This tendency of eschatology to turn to entropy when the European religious world-views flow into the American geography also characterizes the conclusions of el/Aficionado and Foreign Experiences. el/Aficionado concludes with a cessation of happening, but in an end time that is more the interminable waiting of Samuel Beckett than the time of expectation of Saint Paul or his most fanatical 17th-century successors:

The outcome was not clear. The line went dead, as I have told you. The waiter appeared almost immediately. He brought the bill for the food that I had ordered, which was untouched, except for what appearances required. I dont know how long the scene had lasted. It was dark outside now. The lights in the caf had come on. And the light was on in the apartment, as it must have been on from the beginning, in readiness, but unnoticeable in the twilight. Finally, my attention softened. I paid the waiter and forgot why I had come. His indifference canceled the urgency of the past. I have nothing more to report to you. I learned long ago that there is never any news (Ashley 1994).

Foreign Experiences, too, is a narrative dead-end, the nihilistic end-time of a place called California. As Ashley explains in the program for the opera: 48 There is a peculiar, eerie, indescribable loneliness in all of California. It permeates everything. Maybe its just the water. Maybe there are

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other places of the same sort in other places on Earth. But California could be special, the place where the early European-American settlers, upon arrivingif they got there, realized they would never get back. California is the end of the earth. That feeling is passed on from generation to generation without anyone recognizing that it is part of them. And it is passed on to the most recent arrivals. Even today in the precious palaces of Malibu, in the vast developments between Los Angeles and San Diego, in the spreading domestic comfort of the San Francisco Bay area its there. It poisons our movies and TV shows. It generates the most violent and interesting mystery novels. Even now jet travel doesnt cure it. It comes down on you hard when you get off the plane and step outside the terminal. It drives some people mad.

It is in the opera Now Eleanors Idea, however, that Ashley gives the most positive treatment of the eschatological theme. The whole introductory section of the opera, which adumbrates the overall arch of the work from the premonition of the end to a redemptive vision-song of the Seventh Age that reunites the various religious answers to the eschatological question, also sets up the character Now Eleanor who will embody this redemptive trajectory from sense to song and vision. I will conclude by quoting the opening paragraph of the opera that sets her up for this allegorical task, which she will realize

Don Jr. has come to California with his familyLinda and Jr. Jr.and his friend N, to take a job at a small college. They have movedfrom the Midwest of fractured identities to the world of no identities (Ashley 2006).

Now Eleanor rarely allows herself to talk. She is at the nadir of the cycle That all humans share. The nadir, Unlike its opposite, has been described. We can name it, speaking clumsily, The Approach of the End of the World Feeling.

by becoming a television reporter, going to New Mexico to realize an assignment about the Low Rider community, learning Spanish with miraculous speed and ease, becoming a source of popular wisdom as a callin host of the show Now Eleanors Idea, and in the end realizing that she has been chosen to sing a special song to the Low Rider community the song of the Three Great Tribes describing their wanderings through the Seven Ages (Ashley 2007). This spiritual calling, however, begins in the presentiment of the eschatological horizon, the Approach of the End of the World Feeling:

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It happens in men every fourteen years. It happens in women every ten years. Who knows why this difference should be so great? On a larger scale it happens to whole Peoples. We dont know the time of that scale. When as individuals or as a culture We see it and know its happening in others, Most often we ascribe the cause to A religion different from our own. So, we can dismiss the anguish that comes With the feeling. We can laugh it off. When the feeling comes in our own language, Our religion, thats a different fish. For instance, now, here, where we are, We are obsessed with the question of The Approach of the End of the World Feeling. The question is expressed in language, And the language is appropriated Into other modes of thinking, e.g. Politics, philosophy, et cetera. All other manifestations of the feeling

Are thought of as pure superstition. This introduction, brief, will help explain Now Eleanor to us. She is not. . . Nuts, or a scientist, but she has The Approach of the End of the World Feeling (Ashley 2007).

Works Cited: Adorno, Theodor. 1997 [1970]. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ashley, Robert.. n.d. Note for Now Eleanors Idea. http:// www.lovely.com/albumnotes/notes1009.html 1991. Perfect Lives. New York: Burning Books. 1992. Libretto for Improvement (Don Leaves Linda). Electra Nonesuch 79289-2. 1994. Libretto for el/Aficionado. Lovely Music LCD 1004. 2006. CD note for Foreign Experiences. Lovely Music LCD 1008.

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2007. CD note for Now Eleanors Idea. Lovely Music LCD 1009. Benjamin, Walter. 1998 [1963]. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso Press. Calloway, S. 1994. Baroque Baroque: The Culture of Excess. London: Phaidon. Carpentier, Alejo. 2001 [1953]. The Lost Steps. Trans. Harriet de Onis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. De Man, Paul. 1983. The Rhetoric of Temporality. In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 187-228. Fletcher, Angus. 1964. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2004 [1960]. Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinshemer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Continuum. Kermode, Frank. 1957. Romantic Image. London: Routledge. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Lezama Lima, Jos. 2000 [1968]. Paradise. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press. Ndalianis, A. 2004. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: MIT Press. Perniola, M. 1995. Enigmas: The Egyptian Moment in Society and Art. Woodall, C. (trans.). London and New York: Verso. Sarduy, Severo. 1995 [1972, 1978]. Cobra and Maitreya: Two Novels. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press.

Tyrus Miller Cowell Faculty Services University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz CA 95064, USA. tyrus@ucsc.edu 51

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XCESSES
Dana Arnold

If the Term Baroque Did Not Exist Would It Be Necessary to Invent It? (with Apologies to Voltaire)

Dana Arnold, F.S.A., F.R.Hist.S., is professor of architectural history. She is author of Art History: A Very Short Introduction; Rural Urbanism: London Landscapes in the Early Nineteenth Century; Reading Architectural History; and Re-presenting the Metropolis. Recent edited volumes include Art History: Contemporary Perspectives on Method; Biographies and Space; Rethinking Architectural Historiography; Architecture as Experience; Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness; Tracing Architecture; and Art and Thought. She edits the book series New Interventions in Art History. Her monograph The Spaces of the Hospital will be published by Routledge.

Baroque has been the focus of writers spanning the chronological and conceptual breadth of architectural history. Heinrich Wlfflin (1888) saw it as a reaction against the style of the Renaissance, John Summerson (1953) argued for a specifically English version of baroque, while Gilles Deleuze (1988) wanted us to see it as a multiplicity of possibilities and repetitions. This article explores the uses and usefulness of the term baroque to see what it tells us about the historiography of architectural history. This can help us open up the conceptual framings of architectural history in order to contribute to the ongoing transformation of it and our understanding of notions baroque. In architectural history, the term baroque has been used to define the formal qualities of a buildingits space as well as its cultural context and meaning. The notion of baroque has been the focus of a range of writers spanning the chronological and conceptual breadth (and depth) of architectural history. For instance, Heinrich Wlfflin (1888) encouraged us to see the Baroque as something that is not classicala reaction against the style of the Renaissance; John Summerson (1953) argued for a specifically English version of baroque; while Gilles Deleuze (1988) wanted us to see it as a multiplicity of possibilities and repetitions. In this article, I aim to explore the uses and usefulness of the term baroque in its various complexities to see what it tells us about the historiography of architectural history. This can help us further open up the spatial boundaries and conceptualframings of architecture, in order to contribute to the ongoing transformation of architectural history and to our understanding of notions baroque. I want to focus on the mid 20th-century writings about architectural history that attempted to tell macro histories. These are mostly,

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but not exclusively, histories of British architecture, and the moment when they appeared is a very particular one in the historiography of the discipline. What follows is a series of provocations that fold together or unfold to reveal at once the complexities and the elusiveness of the term baroque. First I want to think about baroque as a stylistic category. We often see architecture and style as being so interlinked that style can be believed to contain the essence of architecture. But if this were the case, style would constitute the subject of architectural history. Style is one of the many orders of narrative open to the architectural historian. What then is style? We might say that style is the specific organization of form. But the characteristics of a style consist of a repertory of ornamental components that cannot be confined to a single periodmany appear again and again in different configurations. This is especially the case with the baroque in architecture, as it is normally understood as being the use of classical architectural motifs (in the broadest sense), which may be combined with a range of spatial possibilities. I suggest then that baroque is characterized by the manner in which form is interpreted, as the reading of these ornamental components changes according to their context. The privileging of the aesthetic gives a work In the mid 20th century, the cultural value of Britains historic architecture was acutely felt. Both during and of art an autonomous status and this can be employed in the historical analysis of buildings. But architecture is more than faades; it is a lived experiencea set of spaces that stage social and cultural relationships. Style is a means of identifying, codifying, and interrogating the aesthetic, and I want to use it as a way of exploring the taxonomies of architecture and the impact this has on our understanding of the Baroque. It is the space-time location of the notion of baroque that is of interest here.1 My argument focuses on two discrete areas of architectural history which demonstrate how the baroque has been adopted for use by architectural historians in the telling of different kinds of narratives. The first case study focuses on how histories of British architecture have been formulated, and here we see how baroque is used as a stylistic category. It is presented as a variant or subcategory of classical architecture, its qualities being principally decorative. The second example is a specific history of modern architecture where the spatial possibilities of baroque are explored and exploited in a mutually enlightening dialogue with modernity. In both cases, the Baroque can be used as a tool to understand more fully the methodologies and approaches of the historians under review in terms of their stylistic and spatial analysis.2 immediately after the Second World War, photographic and documentary records were carefully archived and 53

British Architecture and the Baroque

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historicized. As part of this process, the map of the history of British architecture was drawn up by Sir John Summerson in his seminal work Architecture in Britain 1530-1830, and this remains in use today. The choice of examples made by Summerson as a set of stepping stones through the architectural history of the period has become the bench mark of greatness. But the development of architecture in the period is presented as some kind of autogenesis where a repertory of ornamental components reappears. This is seen, for instance, in the diagrammatic grouping of buildings, such as 18th-century villas that share common stylistic elements, to present some kind of formal coherence or development. Summerson devotes two chapters to the discussion of baroque in England: one is a consideration of Sir Christopher Wrens designs for the City churches; the other is a discussion of the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanbrugh.3 Although reference is made to the influence of both contemporary southern and northern European architecture, Summerson is more interested in establishing a genealogy of English Baroque flowing from Wren. That said, his survey is concerned principally with classicism, and it is the classical country house, and its villa variant, which dominatesthe purer the style, the better. This constructs categories of quality determined only by 20th-century criteria based on what we know to have happened and our fuller understanding of classical systems of design. This system must embody political, economic, cultural, and philosophical beliefs of the dominant ruling class. The variations in this style, whether Palladian, neoclassical, or baroque, matter less than the persistent use of the repertory of classical elements.4 And on closer inspection, the distinctiveness of these seemingly discrete categories of classical architecture is further eroded. For Summerson, baroque becomes just one manifestation of the adoption and adaptation of classical architecture in Britain.

Baroque as Kulturgeschichte

Summerson established an insular, inward-looking view of classical British architecture that encompassed the category of baroque. But if the architectural history of the British Isles was to have the same academic weight as its continental counterparts, it required recognizable formal qualities which gave it distinction and allowed it to be read as signifying sets of social 54

and cultural ideals of its builders, users, historians, and its many publics past and present. There is no doubt that Summerson achieved this. But it would also be preferable for these formal qualities to relate to the European canon of architecturenamely the classical style. (Here again I use classical to mean any style that draws on the architecture of Greco-roman antiquity.)

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The influx of European scholars into Britain in the mid 20th century opened up the possibilities for placing British architecture in its cultural and aesthetic context and seeing it as part of a broader intellectual history of culture. Not least here are Fritz Saxl and Rudolph Wittkower, who jointly wrote British Art and the Mediterranean, first published in 1948, which in the Warburgian tradition presented a cultural and iconographic survey of the use of classical motifs across a broad chronological span. The typological approach adopted by Wittkower here and elsewhere in his discussion of the use of classical architecture in Britain comprised the study of specific stylistic details or elements and provided an illuminating set of connections. An example of this can be found in Wittkowers article Pseudo-Palladian Elements in English Neoclassicism. His discussion of a type of window and door frame, with blocked quoins at regular intervals and a compact mass of three or five voussoirs in its lintel, demonstrates his innovative method of analysis of a motif that was extensively used in 17th- and 18thcentury British architecture. This architectural form can be found across the whole range of classical design in Britain from the Palladianism of Lord Burlingtons House for Lord Montrath to the baroque of Sir John Vanbrughs Grimsthorpe. The intrinsic nature of the Englishness of English classicism, and within this its baroque variant, was not however lost as Wittkower offers this examination of a specific classical ornamental form:

How does this motif fit into the pattern of Palladian and Neoclassical architecture? Does it correspond to our conception of classical poise and is itan a priori demand of classical architectureeasily readable? but also that in its English interpretation the conflict, which it originally held is blotted out.... Was the important motif really taken from Palladio? The answer is no. A shrewd observer like Sir William Chambers in his Treatise on Civil Architecture, published such a window with the comment: It is, I believe, an original invention of Inigo Jones, which has been executed in many buildings in England. The question arises whether, as Sir William Chambers believed, this treatment of doors and windows originated in the circle of Inigo Jones or whether it has an older pedigree. Although very rare, a few buildings with the same peculiarity exist in Italy. Jones, who was in Rome in 1614, may have seen Ottavio Mascheronis entrance door to the Palazzo Ginnasi in Piazza Mattei. The door is dated 1585, i.e. it was modern in Joness days and may have attracted his attention as the last word in architecture....

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The form of the motif used in England was, of course, far removed from the highly personal interpretations of Guilio Romano, Serlio and Giacomo del Duca [the architects of other examples cited by Wittkower]. It was legalized and academically petrified. France was the junction whence the standardized type went on to its further travels.... ...[it] reached England in the beginning of the seventeenth century, [the motif was also found in the Low Countries, Belgium, and Austria].... What is the conclusion to be drawn from these observations? Although originating in Italian mannerism and cherished in France for a short period, the motif was never absorbed into the countries of functional architecture. The pedigree of the motif has revealed its unorthodox [my emphasis] origin, and now it should be mentioned that there were men in England [Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor] who understood its original meaning.... ...it remains to inquire what it was about it that fascinated English academic architects. The answer is that they had no eye for the intricacy of the motif and saw in it a decorative pattern which could be advantageously employed to enliven a bare wall... In English academic architecture flat surface patterns replace Italian functional elements (Wittkower, 1974, pp. 171-174). My aim in citing such a lengthy passage is to illustrate the way in which British classicism is discussed. It is at once related to Europe (through the perceived influence of Inigo Jones), albeit with idiosyncrasies, and a selfreferential entity. Interestingly, the English baroque architects Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor are the only ones credited with fully understanding this form of architectural motif. How then do we or can we move away from the kind of insular British architecture identified by Wittkower and Saxl? 56 Wittkower goes some way to providing the answer to this in his seminal work Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, first published in 1949. For the first time British architecture was linked with the architecture of Europe in formal and intellectual terms. This made a significant break with the inwardlooking, insular empirical surveys of previous decades. But, importantly, while placing British architecture in its European context in formal terms, Wittkower did recognize that it is a

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repertoire of classical ornament that he identifies rather than a coherent selfconsciously constructed style. Moreover, although he picks Palladianism as the progressive thread, as we have already seen the architectural elements used are common to all forms of English classicism, including baroque.

Classicism, Taste, and the Formation of Class Ideologies

Although, from the 18th century onwards, there have been studies written of the history of British architecture, as we have seen the convergence of continental academics and new archives and interest led to a much wider field of investigation. This offered greater possibilities with thorough attention paid both to the form of the buildings and their social and cultural contexts. Now the form or style of British architecture was being scrutinized in the same way as its European counterparts and the taxonomic system of stylistic classification was grafted onto its discourses. In this way, sensitivity to and articulation of the aesthetics of architecture became more refined. Previously, British architecture from Inigo Jones to Sir John Soane was simply referred to as renaissance by writers such as Reginald Blomfield (1897), who wished to keep a substantial distance between Britain and Europe by celebrating the divergent traits in design on either side of the Channel. Now style became subject to closer scrutiny, allowing micro histories based on classifications such as mannerism, baroque and neoclassical. The balance of analysis also shifted from the originality of a vernacular tradition based loosely on classical design as stressed by Blomfield and others to

the manifestation of different styles all within the classical canon and all borrowing heavily from European traditions. This raises the question of a national style or school of architecture, or at least the formulation of such an idea by historians. British architecture could be seen as derivative and lacking in originality and certainly without influence in the European arena, the emphasis being on the import rather than the export of ideas. And it is difficult to find examples of the export of either British architectural styles or the employment of British architects on the continent.5 The identification of classicism as a primary expression of English culture helped to underpin the imperialist nature of British society while allowing historians to credit its architecture with appropriate gravitas to hold its own in the arena of European architectural design.6 The diversity of classical formulae was rationalized by the selection of one strand as the progressive element. Indeed stylistic histories that offer an evolutionary view of architecture impose a notion of continuity and progress which might not necessarily be there. The architectural stepping stones chosen may well pick a route through moving from baroque to Palladian and then to neoclassical by fiat of the historians backward glance. 57

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But discontinuity is not a problem if the historian recognizes the limitations of teleological methodologies. Palladianism might appear to be the inevitable style for the Augustan era but is this really the case? Does something become Palladian in this era because it is no longer baroque? And can the baroque of architects like Vanbrugh be seen as part of the repertory of classical elements rather than a break with the Palladian tradition? Indeed, the testimony of Wittkower would appear to endorse this view. Ultimately the repertoire of motifs, as Wittkower has suggested, is the same but he attributes Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor with an understanding of these in contrast to those architects who used them subsequently, albeit in a more academic style.7 If baroque is then anything more than formal analysis or a description of the ornamentation of a building, it must surely offer or represent a specific set of ideals from the moment of its production. We, the viewers, will see this within the context of our own culture. In this way, the understanding of the formal qualities of a building are the product of the convergence of past and present. In this way, a building plays an important ontological role in representing, and it is up to us as the viewers to be sensitive to the particular statement it is making. firm grounding in architecture of the past, Geidions ideas and writing had a significant conceptual influence on the members of the Independent Group at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the 1950s. His first book: Space Time and Architecture (1941) is an important standard history of modern architecture while in Mechanization Takes Command (1948) Geidion worked to establish a new kind of historiography.. Space, Time and Architecture is a metahistory of European architecture which begins with the innovations in design and planning of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque. Although Giedion organises his material in a chronological narrative, he side steps the teleological and determinist pitfalls of the implicit notion of progression. Instead, he moves across time periods using art

Sigfried Giedion and the Baroque

This brings me to my second example, where I consider the use of baroque as a category in broader histories of architecture. Sigfried Giedion, a Bohemia-born Swiss historian and critic of architecture, might at first glance appear to be an unlikely candidate for my survey of the uses of baroque by architectural historians.8 But following E. H. Carrs maxim . . .our first concern should be. . . with the historian (1964, p. 22), a brief biographical sketch quickly reveals why Giedion is of interest here. His training as a historian was very much in the field of architecture as kulturegeschichte, as he was a student of Heinrich Wlfflin and wrote a Ph.D. dissertation under Wlfflins direction on Sptbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus (Late Baroque and Romantic Classicism). Despite his 58

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historical methodology, especially the comparative method of formal analysis developed by Giovanni Morelli and used by Wlfflin in his seminal work Renaissance and Baroque, to explain how things are baroque and the kinds of specific qualities they share. Alongside a lucid and insightful narrative, Giedion, taking his lead from Wlfflin, presents some provocative visual comparisons where formal and spatial analysis combine. And the abstract notions of baroque space are explored through juxtapositions of architecture and sculpture that are as challenging as they are atemporal. As a consequence, Giedions innovative methodology brings one of the recognized major players in Italian baroque architectureFrancesco Borrominiinto juxtaposition with those of the modern movement. In his discussion of the dome of the hexagonal, star-shaped structure of Borrominis SantIvo della Sapienza in Roma (1634-41 and 1642-62), Giedion (1941 p.115) compares the treatment of space and the plasticity of form to the sculpture of a human head made by Picasso:

To cut out sections along the perfect circle of the dome, to continue the movement of a design by treating it as though it were flexible, must have had the same stunning effect upon Borrominis contemporaries that Picassos disintegration of the human face produced around 1910 (p. 115).

The relationship between the sculpted spaces of the baroque and modernity is explored further as Giedion (1941, p. 117) argues that like the Russian constructivist Vladimir Tatlin, Borromini explored the transition between inner and outer space by exploiting the potential of the spiral form. Giedion evokes the movement inherent in this sculptural and architectural form through the powerful visual comparison of Tatlins design for a monument in Moscow c. 1920 (sometimes referred to as the Pravda Tower) and the lantern of SantIvo with its coupled columns supporting a spiral top. In some ways Giedions approach stands in contradistinction to the typological, almost archaeological (in

both senses) approach of Summerson, Wittkower, and Saxl. There is no doubt he is using and extending the concept of baroque in an intuitive rather than an archivally based scholarly way. But how else can space be discussed, especially in such pan-historical, cross-cultural contexts? Giedions innovative juxtapositions bring us back to English architecture, where once again we find comparisons made between baroque and modern. Attention is focused on the design and planning of Bath in the 18th century as it was transformed from a provincial town to an elegant city. The Royal Crescent (1769), designed by John Wood the Elder, is a key feature of the urban topography of Bath resting on 59

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top of one of the citys gentle hills. It comprises a terrace of 30 identical houses in the form of an ellipse, each enjoying open views to the landscape beyond. Its baroque form is compared to the near contemporary example of Jacques-Ange Gabriels Place Louis XV, 1763 (now Place de la Concorde) in Paris. But perhaps more importantly for Giedion (1941, p. 149), the production of a single unit that is impressive without any separations is not seen again until Walter Gropiuss scheme of an eight-storey apartment house at St. Leonards Hill near Windsor (1935). The mixture of residence and natural surroundings found in Bath through its series of garden squares and hilltop crescents is also likened to the Place Vendme in Paris, as well as the baroque urban forms found in Nantes and Rome (Giedion, 1941, pp. 147-149). Moreover, the serpentine form of Landsdowne Crescent (1794), emphasized through the use of an aerial view of it in the text (p. 157), is compared to the movement implicit in Borrominis design of an undulating wall for the faade of San Carlino (166267). Here Giedions understanding of the dialogue between English and continental baroque recalls the formal comparisons made by Summerson,
1

Wittkower and Saxl, although for these writers the architecture and planning of Bath has no place in their lexicon of baroqueness. My aim in this essay has been to explore the use and usefulness of the term baroque, albeit within the confines of a specific set of texts, and to explore the question if the term did not exist would we have to invent it? The resonance between baroque and modern, English and continental examples, reveals something of the historiography of the term. It is clear that baroque as an architectural concept has a fluidity that allows it to fold and unfold across a range of complex spacetime coordinates. Could, then, these concepts be articulated and discussed without the term baroque? Certainly in architectural history baroque helps us pinpoint specific stylistic characteristics within the canon of classical architecture. More generally we can also extend the concept to help us understand the spatial complexities of individual buildings. Perhaps, most importantly, it can enable us to think about architecturehere I am thinking of that of Britainacross traditional space-time barriers in order that we can rethink its history and historiography.

Endnotes For a fuller discussion of the relationship between style and architectural history, see Arnold (2002), ch. 3, On Classical Ground: Histories of Style, pp. 83-108 esp. 2 Arnold (2002) discusses this at length; see pp. 8-11 esp. 3 Summerson (1953), ch. 13, Wren and the Baroque, pp. 203-220, and ch. 17, English Baroque: Hawksmoor, Vanbrugh, Archer, pp. 269-291. 4Summerson (1953) admits that the name Palladianism is inaccurate but nevertheless a useful taxonomic tool ....the whole output of English building [from the period 1710-50],

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has long ago become labelled Palladian, a description not wholly accurate (as no such labels can be), but accurate enough and secure in acceptance, p. 317. 5In the latter half of the 18th century, there are isolated examples of the influence of English academic architecture (i.e., that which followed the strict rules of classicism) on European architects. For instance, Jacques-Ange Gabriel drew on this tradition in his designs for the Ministre de la Marine and the Petit Trianon. See Kimball (1943), p. 216. 6The historical background of British Imperialism and mercantilism, which underpinned the choice of Augustan Rome as an imperialistic and cultural model, is discussed in Hill (1966) and in Speck (1977). 7Wittkower (1953, 1974) makes an important distinction between the use of classical elements that shows an understanding of their function and purpose in Italian architecture and their reiteration as part of a tradition of design taught by rules in academies, where these elements were divorced from their original context and subsumed into a classical repertoire. See Pseudo-Palladian Elements in English Neo-Classicism. 8 Giedion was the first secretary-general of the Congrs International dArchitecture Moderne. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, where he became chairman of the Graduate School of Design. He was also a friend of Walter Gropius. Works Cited Arnold, D. 2002. Reading Architectural History. London: Routledge. Blomfield, R. 1897. History of Renaissance Architecture in England, 1500-1800. London: G. Bell Carr, E. H. 1964. What Is History? Harmondsworth: Penguin. Deleuze, G. 1988. Le pliLeibniz et le baroque. Paris: Minuit. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Giedion, S. 1948. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . 1941. Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Hill, C. 1966. The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714. London: Oxford University Press. Kimball, F. 1943. The Creation of the Rococo. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art.Saxl, F. and R. Wittkower. 1948. British Art and the Mediterranean. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Speck, W. A. 1977. Stability and Strife in England, 1714-1760. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Summerson, J. 1953. Architecture in Britain, 1530-1830. Harmondsworth: Pelican. Wittkower, R. 1949. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. London: Warburg Institute, University of London.. 1953. Pseudo-Palladian Elements in English Neoclassicism. In Journal of Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, VI, pp. 154-164. Republished in the edition cited in this article: 1974. Palladio and English Palladianism. London: Thames and Hudson. Wittkower, R. (ed.). 1945. England and the Mediterranean Tradition. London: Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. Wlfflin, H. 1888. Renaissance und Barock. Munich: T. Ackermann.

Dana Arnold School of Humanities, University of Southampton, U.K. d.r.arnold@soton.ac.uk

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XCESSES
Genetics of Meredith Hoy

An Aura of Excess: Zaha Hadid and the Baroque Contemporary Architecture

Meredith Hoy is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2010. Her dissertation, entitled From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics, traces links between contemporary digital art and modern painting. Drawing on theories of visuality, space and spatial practice, cybernetics and systems theory, phenomenology, and post-structuralism and semiotics, her research focuses on the impact of technology on art and visual culture. She has written on modern and contemporary art and architecture, generative art, information visualization, and the phenomenology of networked space. This article examines the genetic tracelines extending back from Aura, Zaha Hadids 2008 installation for the Venice Architecture Biennale. Against the backdrop of its site, the Palladian villa LaMalcontenta, Aura appears at first to forcefully assert its status as a contemporary art object. However, further inspection reveals the deep structural connection between Hadids swooping forms and renaissance and baroque theories of harmonic proportion. At a phenotypic level, Aura resists categorization as an architectural object, but its genotypic composition performs a nuanced meditation on the persistence of historicity in even the most radically contemporary architecture.

In Zaha Hadids Aura, installed at the Villa Foscari La Malcontenta (155860, Mira, Italy) for the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, two striated curvilinear forms confront the simple harmonic proportions of Andrea Palladios renaissance architecture. Built to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Palladios birth, Hadids two structures, located in facing rooms of the villa, are a concrete translation of Palladios linear proportions into dynamic, undulating sculptural forms. By generating frequency curves distilled from Palladios proportional rules and manipulating them using mathematical algorithms, Hadid produces a series of structures that, according to the press

release for this installation define a genotypic elementary space whose form contains in its DNA the whole Palladian set of rules. For Aura, the linear proportions undergirding the plan of the Villa correspond to a musical harmonic. These harmonics are computationally transformed into frequency curves, which in turn are gradually twisted, manipulated, and then physically actualized in polyurethane foam and fiberglass. In other words, Palladios harmonic proportions provide the genetic blueprint for the seemingly alien curvatures that set Aura apart from its architectural container. As they pierce the space of the villa these two glossy structures appear, at first glance, to be

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emphatically contemporary. However, the complex historicity enfolded into the sculptures puts them into conversation with the conceptual and aesthetic parameters of the Neo-Baroque; when considering Auras reflexive historicity, apparent in its recursive iteration of Palladios proportionally calculated architectonics, it is almost impossible not to see the installation as a gesture not just to renaissance proportionality but to the folie du voir, the ecstatic madness of vision, that signifies the Baroque.1 Zaha Hadid, born in Baghdad in 1950, studied at the Architecture Association School in London and worked under Rem Koolhaas at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. She became the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004. Due to her highly experimental approach to architectural design, she has rather notoriously encountered obstacles in the translation from planning to building, a difficulty which has solidified her position as a radical, if sometimes impractical, figure in contemporary architectural practice. Hadids projects are complex, stylistically and conceptually dense, but frequently unfeasible to engineer.2 However, the buildings that have been completed, including the Taiwan Guggenheim (2003), the Vitra Fire Station (1990-94), the Landscape Formation ONE/Landesgartenschau (1999), the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center (1997-2003), and the BMW Plant Central Building in Leipzig (20012005), all bear the mark of their initial conceptualization as densely layered networks of lines, axial geometries, and multi-nodal perspective projections. Both Hadids plans and built structures reveal the highly contemporary and technologiclal nature of her architectural style. Much of her work looks not only like it was made by a computer but perhaps expressly to showcase the complexity of form enabled by computational technology. At the same time, however, she not only situates herself explicitly within the grand tradition of modernist abstraction, but also frequently references Palladian and Georgian, Mannerist and Baroque, Cubist and Constructivist spatial geometries. Although her work has been most prominently linked to the Soviet tradition (Suprematism and Constructivism), the morphological and theoretical connections in her design to the Baroque have also been remarked but not pursued systematically (Mertins 2006). Hadids particular brand of modernism, in its radical reshaping, dissolution and morphing of three dimensional surfaces, finds its origins in the porous folds of baroque space, described by Leibniz as a pond of matter in which there exists different flows and waves (Deleuze, 1993, p. 5, n. 8). And while it might seem contradictory to emphasize the copresence of Soviet modernist, Palladian, and baroque resonances in Hadids oeuvre, scholarship on the history of proportional systems in architecture has invested itself with some persistence in the question of the historical function and legacy of proportion. After Le Corbusiers publication of Le Modulor in 1950, for example, Wittkower renewed his 63

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argument for the enduring significance of proportional experimentations in architecture by drawing connections between renaissance proportional theory--specifically the latticed floorplans of Palladian villas--and the asymmetrical modulor lattices found in Le Corbusiers architecture (Millon 1972). Given that Wittkower was a renaissance scholar, it is not surprising that he draws a line between renaissance and modernist architecture,3 skipping over the use of proportional systems in the Baroque. But it is also important to note that the numerical/proportional underpinnings of baroque architecture have been largely ignored or simply viewed in terms of distortion or degradation of the regularity of renaissance proportionality (Hershey, 2000, pp. 4-5). In their incorporation of modernist tropes of geometric abstraction developed by the Soviets in the first half of the 20th century, Zaha Hadids sketches and drawings look like a cross between pared down Suprematist motifs and 21st-century blob architecture.4 Internally, they use classical proportions and harmonic form as their generative principle. But their final form recalls with a subtle insistence the anamorphic stretching and folding of matter and surface performed in baroque imaginations of infinite heavenly space. Aura presses us to consider how and why contemporary architectures are comparatively categorized, in this instance vis--vis the Renaissance and the Baroque. Where does Hadids work stand in relation to the theoretical vocabulary given by these categories, 64 and what do such comparisons offer us? To what extent is Hadid performing a contemporary rendering, and thus an extension, of a baroque aesthetic or a baroque ethos? Hadids use of projective geometry to build multiply-layered perspective constructions both activates her spaces and underscores the link between her contemporary approach to architectural design and the geometries employed in classical and baroque architecture. Her superimposition of spatial slices, each with their own notional vanishing point and system of projection lines creates a vertiginous, articulated, poly-central and multi-directional experience of partial, interpenetrating spaces whose multiplicity confounds any attempt to stabilize the space into a coherently unified format (Schumacher, 2004, p. 9). Viewed from the perspective of the 21st-century eye, the incorporation of projective geometry, in its capacity to squeeze, stretch, and morph regular and irregular figures, most immediately emphasizes the computational genesis of Hadids designs, in which we suppose morphing and layering to be an easily recognizable property of computation. However, while some of Hadids plans do not insistently analogize baroque aesthetics, Aura adamantly performs its link to the baroque fascination with projection and distortion.5 Auras physical structure bears palpable marks of manipulation; the skeins of composite material seem to stretch past their capacity for elongation, and begin to separate into striated threads. The distended materiality of the sculptures effectively ups the ante of baroque

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architectural distortion, straining ovoid and ellipsoid forms past the breaking point of structural integrity. Materialists might connect this fascination in contemporary art and architecture with the exaggeration of baroque principles and properties to the availability to contemporary architects of manipulable, stretchablecompressible media, like polyurethane, whose capacity to convey a sense of viscosity would be immensely difficult to match with stone (though baroque sculptors managed to approximate this to the greatest extent possible with spongy travertine). But Hadids baroqueness is as conceptual as it is material; her radical swoops and folds actualize Deleuzes intensification of Wlfflins more sober reading of baroque spatiality,6 and thus insert her in a performative way into a theoretical conversation about the nature of the Baroque.7 By adapting and permuting Palladios plan--converting the lines of his proportioned grid into a waveform spiral--Hadid activates a metaphorical bridge between renaissance, baroque, and contemporary architectural styles. Aura performs an answer to the question of how the elegant simplicity of the Renaissance can transmute into elaborate curvatures but still maintain traces of its genetic predecessor. Her solution is to reference baroque concepts of anamorphosis and multiple, shifting movements between real and virtual space, so that Auras structural integrity could be said to depend upon the hidden support of the Baroque.8 If renaissance geometry is a closed system, baroque visuality is defined by its openness, its manifestation of transformative potentialities: of bodies, of spaces, of the very notion of structure itself. Let us move away now from architecture into a consideration of renaissance and baroque pictorial strategies. These are in some senses distinct from architectural concerns given that pictures represent rather than design inhabitable spaces; however, the two modes, pictorial and architectural, are also strongly related in their mutual engagement with viewers phenomenological responses to spatial effects.9 From the moment of its invention by Filippo Brunelleschi, the particular model of visuality constructed using perspective created an interplay between the coordinate grid and the eyepoint of an ideal viewer, the point of origin that structures and limits the scope of a given pictorialization. This dependence on point of view actually makes it difficult to argue that renaissance perspective presents a fully universalized, disembodied model of visuality (Summers, 2003, p. 558). Nevertheless, it has been thoroughly critiqued for divorcing spatiality from the empirical/experiential plane and positing instead an abstract geometrical spatial model that submits to the rigors of Cartesian rationalism (Damisch 1994, Jay 1993, Davis 2005). Baroque space builds itself on the foundation of geometrical perspective but turns the rectilinear schema of Cartesianism against itself, performing instead a series of involutions and juxtapositions--of opacity and transparency, of visibility and 65

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invisibility, of regular structure and radical metamorphosis. The Baroque is characterized by excess, fluidity, and ecstatic transformation. The idea of madness of vision--folding, irregularity--is morphologically and sensorily apparent in Auras curvatures. The massiveness attributed by Wfflin to baroque architectural sensibility is nowhere present in this installation;10 Auras shapes are open, airy, shimmering in and out of substantiality. Indeed, we must see its baroqueness precisely in its anamorphic adaptation of renaissance metrics, in its pointed reference to a parabolic bending of a straight line and the eventual meeting of the lines two endpoints in an ovoid loop. Redacted in 2008 by Hadid, baroque geometry based on conic sections and changing curves does away with the square-based visual culture of the Renaissance (Hershey, 2000, p. 159). Imported to baroque pictorial schemas from the renaissance skenographic coordinate plane, the concurrence of mathematical/metric space with the phenomenological/cardinal particularity of subjective vision persists as an operative mechanism in Hadids conceptualization of Aura. A universally metric space would be notionally prior to the phenomenological space of the viewer. Its capacity to map space and predict positions within that space would be independent of the particular standpoint of any given viewer. But, although both renaissance and baroque pictorial systems contain metric characteristics, they both depend for their effectiveness on cardinal viewer space, which seems structured on 66 entirely different and even contradictory principles, namely a subject-centered model of vision which presupposes seeing from a particular standpoint, being directionally oriented, etc.11 Although, in the end, the particularity of viewing position becomes subsumed into the coordinate matrix, a tension persists between subjective vision and the objective world of measure and ratio (Summers, 2003, p. 559). For example, the famous baroque ceiling frescoes rely for their spectacular spatial effects simultaneously and paradoxically on the independence of universal coordinate space and on the situatedness of a viewer in a physical location. The complex relationships between real space and pictorial space established by this system are evident in Giovanni Battista Gaullis Triumph of the Name of Jesus (1676-79, Church of Jesus, Rome); looking at the painting as a series of layers of spatialization, we can observe a clear attempt to establish continuity between real and pictorial space. A series of plaster figures--putti and apostles--mediate between twodimensional pictorial illusionism and the three-dimensional viewer-space (Summers, 2003, p. 543). We see the precedent for this in Andrea Mantegnas earlier dome in the Camera degli Sposi at Mantua (1465-74), in which we are not supplied with transitional plaster figures. However, the putti standing around the edge of the parapet and the precariously supported basket help our eyes make the transition between real and virtual space--from three-dimensional extension to twodimensional illusionism. The objects

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occupy a layer below the indeterminate space of the heavens and are distinctly oriented in relation to the viewer, leaning towards them or threatening to fall. But, again, the conditions under which this continuity becomes possible result from the notional construction of an infinitely extensible, modular system that effectively metricizes space, making any point in space hypothetically calculable in relation to any other point.12 What I want to show with these examples of the Italian tradition of illusionistic painting known as quadratura is that the complex relationship between metric and cardinal space is the generative principle that gives rise to Aura. The illusionistic operation of quadratura, its potential to produce simultaneously the sensation of virtualized extension to infinity and vertiginous disorientation is a product of dissonance between metrically regulated and phenomenologically experienced pictorialization. Aura playfully enacts this tension by enfolding both the metric regularity of harmonic proportion and heavily distorted frequency curves into its structures. In architecture, a conflict often exists between ideational plan and material structure: between the space of drawing and the space of construction, and between what might be called virtual space, and real space.13 This shifting between material and notional registers finds an analogy in the representation of the heavens in quadratura, in which a series of gradations between pictorialization and sculptural form concretely instantiate the transition between real and virtual space. The pictorial field, in this instance, is the blurred, light-saturated suggestion of heavenly space at the oculus of the fresco. The sculptural forms mediating between the viewers space and the pictorial space are identifiable in the plaster figures mimicking their painted counterparts, and issuing the viewer into the virtually represented heavens. Aura obliquely references this transitional layering of two- and three-dimensional representation by translating Palladios harmonic proportions into swirling lines of glossy polyurethane. These shapes operate like the putti and the plaster figures in Mantegnas and Gaullis frescoes insofar as they function as a connective tissue between the metric coordinate relations comprising illusionistic, pictorial space, and the thickness of the real space occupied by the viewer. However, in our baroque example, the placement of three-dimensionally-sculpted figures intermediately between virtual pictorial space and real viewer space activates an immediately perceptible relationality between these two domains. The trick and the fascination of the laughing putti, which operate as extensions of the pictorial schema in baroque ceiling frescoes, lies precisely in their legibility as mediating figures. Even while quadratura depends for its illusionistic success on the notionally prior existence of metric, coordinate space, it is also reliant on the bodily correspondence, or lack or correspondence, experienced as distortion, between the viewers space and the space of pictorialization. Aura, on the other hand, obstructs and 67

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confounds the viewers apprehension of its internal relations by designing objects whose status as mediating objects between real and metric space remain illegible on their surface. We cannot readily see that Hadid is using Palladian harmonic equations to generate the shapes we come to recognize as Aura-S and Aura-L. These shapes ultimately result from a complex oscillation between metric space and cardinal viewer space. This oscillation would, in a baroque fresco, supply a sense of continuity between these spaces that would be intellectually and sensorially accessible to any viewer. Hadid, however, takes the baroque ideal of representing the unrepresentable a step further, by creating a series of relationships between architectural, sculptural, and cardinal space that may be based on mathematical rules but that can only be intuitively or sensorially apprehended. In the design of La Malcontenta and other villas, all of which relied on the same underlying geometrical skeleton, Palladios use of proportion functioned explicitly, according to Richard Wittkower, as a systematic linking of one room to another and was the fundamental novelty of his architecture (1998, p. 122). Through repetition and proportional expansion and diminution, Palladio sought to unify the diverse features of a building into a coherent structure in which each part could be both experientially and mathematically ascertained to be a subset of an overarching system. The linking of rooms, hallways, and structural details through repetition of self-similar or progressively multiplied 68 ratios establishes the organic unity of the building--a unity that unfurls from the seed of the module, or the regola homogenea (Wittkower, 1998, p. 122). The incursion of a different kind of module--that belonging to the coordinate plane--into the pictorial schemas of the Renaissance and into the baroque invention of quadratura both function as ways of linking different spaces. Likewise, Aura acts as a linking device--between architectural styles, historical modes of spatiality and spatial representation, and between the mathematical modeling and the phenomenological experience of space. The visual field of baroque ceiling frescos is largely determined by the vertical axis--the stretching of strings from the standpoint of the observer on the floor, through a gridded picture plane, to the ceiling (creating an inverted visual pyramid opening out onto infinity instead of closing off at a vanishing point opposite the viewers monocular eyepoint). Aura, by contrast, stretched horizontally across the rooms of La Malcontenta, creates an irregular web that obliquely analogizes the visual rays linking viewer and world in the theorization of renaissance perspective. A great deal of the attraction of Aura lies in the juxtaposition of computationally designed structures whose morphogenesis seems most closely related to pods, blobs, or primordial ooze with the simple harmonic proportions and geometric elegance of renaissance architectural styling. Auras dynamic curvatures not only reference but are genetically structured by Palladios proportional

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and harmonic equations. Thus, the mirroring of renaissance proportions and contemporary digital computation actively produces a visible structure from a set of abstract relations. We can view the juxtaposed visual models in Aura as architectural mirrors--but the relations mirroring each other here are multiple, and some exist outside the visual register. In other words, the mirroring results in a visible structure (the building, the sculpture), but what is being mirrored is a set of mathematical/ numerical relations rather than morphological features. The figure of the mirror here is not accidental; unlike the astonishingly accurate reflection given by a leadbacked flat mirror as exemplified by Brunelleschis infamous demonstration, the mirror employed in baroque visual practices was anamorphic (Edgerton 1975). Not only does the anamorphic mirror bend what is visible, and not only does it call into question the notion that vision supplies a perfect carbon copy of the physical structure of the world, but this anamorphic mirror also refers, if somewhat obliquely, to the invisible, or in the words of Martin Jay (1993, p. 48), signifies an alternative visual order that the solidity of presence cannot efface. Just as the anamorphic skull hovering at the base of Hans Holbeins Ambassadors (1533, National Gallery, London) serves as a memento mori, reminding its viewers of the eventual insignificance of the earthly treasures surrounding its titular figures, gazing at, or moving alongside, the cadenced lines of Hadids sculptures must also remind us of an alternative structural order, of musical or numerical principles of structuration whose visual instantiation appears to curve and distort its referent. Despite Donald Preziosis reminder that the bizarre distentions and compressions occurring in anamorphic art reinscribe the conventions of linear perspective in the very act of challenging them, the sense of disorientation and instability activated by anamorphic figuration presents the possibility of a decentered mode of apprehension that crossreferences between different sensual, conceptual, or even temporal registers.14 The instance of mirroring found in the streaming curves of Aura crosses not only between historical periods but also between the human sensory register and an inhuman computational domain which cannot be sensed directly, but whose epiphenomenal effects can be intuited. Approaching Aura as an example of refiguration of a harmonically proportioned architectural plan expands the field of anamorphosis, so that it becomes something more than a mere outlier within the relatively narrow boundaries of perspectival systems. Although Palladios plan has a visual component--it exists as a drawing separate from the built form of La Malcontenta--it would not be the kind of object traditionally available for anamorphic manipulation. It is a plan, not a skull, nor a depiction of a skull, and as such it is an object whose chain of reference, its raison dtre exists outside of itself; the capacity of the plan to signify, or the particular way in which it will signify, depends on 69

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whether the Villa is actually constructed. Additionally, the plan is perpetually incomplete--it reaches toward a projected spatiotemporal existence, and towards the kind of specificity that can only be achieved and experienced in lived space-time. Thus, Hadids anamorphic visualization of the plan, and more specifically the equations that give rise to the plan, carries out a further decentralization of the subject and a destabilization of the objects at hand. If the Baroque plays with the desire to represent the unrepresentable, Hadid does this by representing the invisible--the numerical universe that invisibly structures and provides the possibility conditions for proportional architectures to be physically constructed. What is being represented in Aura is not a distortion of an originary visual or physical referent; there exists no correct view of the structure that would conform to unaltered perspectival conventions. The referent, in this case, is something mathematical, physical only in the sense that mathematics can be said to (in some cases) supply a representation of forces. The interest in forces and dynamic change, embodied graphically in anamorphosis, cannot but place Hadids design alongside the baroque preoccupation with temporal processes, particularly transformation and distortion. Of course, we must continually remind ourselves that the Baroque depends for its particular brand of ecstatic excess on the same view of universally metricized space for which its more staid older cousin, the renaissance, is so frequently criticized. Ultimately, baroque topology expands Renaissance 70 metrics by adding a ludic, reflexive dimension to spatial illusionism, calling attention to the possible deviations from and perceptual/sensory instabilities within the metric space that in the Renaissance was held forth as a paragon of geometrical perfection. I will conclude now with a brief comment on possible nodes of connection between the Neo-baroque, exemplified here by Aura, and the specter of postmodernism. As Angela Ndalianis has pointed out, the term transformation, applied with such great gusto to the stylistic excesses of the Baroque, demands the coexistence of the-thing-that-has-beentransformed and that-which-it-has-beentransformed-into (2004, p. 22). Just as the Postmodern has been characterized as an explosive intensification or tectonic rupture of modernity that creates a new periodization through amplification rather than radical novelty, the Baroque, itself, is suffused with self-reflexive historicity. Its focus is on the exploitation of irregularities embedded in the rationalized system of Cartesian perspectivalism. But the Neo-Baroque performs an amplified doubling of baroque historicity; in adopting the stylistic markers most closely associated with the Baroque--irregularity, transformation, excess, madness, ecstasis--the NeoBaroque performs and intensifies its own historicized relationship to its progenitor. But it also retools the critique of renaissance systems enacted by the Baroque for a response/critique/ rejection of contemporary systems, in this case most pointedly the particular limitations imposed and possibilities

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afforded by computational technology. If the baroqueness of Hadids architecture is hidden in Auras folds of polyurethane, we also cannot forget that this structure suspends and extends the Baroque like a bridge between Renaissance and contemporary architecture.

Endnotes: 1 This aspect of the Baroque has been explored extensively by several contemporary scholars of visual culture, including Buci-Glucksmann (1986). Martin Jay provides a brief but cogent analysis of the Baroque ethos in his essay Scopic Regimes of Modernity (1988). 2 As collaborator Patrik Schumacher has written, The idiosyncracies of [Hadids] drawings made it difficult to read them as straightforward architectural descriptions. This initial openness of interpretation might have led some commentators to suspect mere graphics here (2004, p. 9). 3 It should be noted that Wittkower posited the use of proportional systems in architecture as evidence of biological determinism, arguing that architectural exercises in symmetry, balance, and proportion are not only integral to human nature, but that the achievement of proportion in architecture indexes cultural advancement and aesthetic universalism (Millon 1972). Nevertheless, it is instructive to examine the persistence of proportional systems in architectural practice in order to highlight the deviations in these systems that appear within periodic or stylistic categories. 4 Hadids thesis project at the Architectural Association in London, entitled Malevichs Tektonik (1976- 77), was a conceptual painting of a series of structures on Hungerford Bridge that transformed Suprematist compositions into a series of plans for functional geometric structures, including a hotel and a nightclub. It remained, like many of Hadids designs, unbuilt (Giovanni, 2006, p. 24). 5 George Hershey uses a comparison between the hemispherical dome of the paragon of Roman architecture, the Pantheon, and Blondels proposal for a redesign of the structure with a hyperboloid dome. While Wlfflin would probably have attributed this to the baroque obsession with massiveness, manifested in constructions that seem to crush under their own weight, Hershey views this as a moment of play with the properties of squeeze and stretch that made mapmakers aware of the cartographic possibilities for completeness and legibility opened up by using projective geometry to transform the globe from an ellipsoid sphere to a two-dimensional ellipsoid or ovoid shape (Hershey, 2000, pp. 150-151). Hershey points out the baroque aptitude for figuring continuous change, a shift from the renaissance tradition of working with regular figures and proportions. He attributes this shift in the baroque imagination to experiments with conic sections, which are themselves continuously changing curves (2000, p. 154). 6 According to Deleuzes more radical reading of the Baroque, the new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold--in other words, to a relation of form-matter-but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form (1993, p. 19). 7 For Wlfflin, baroque aesthetics are characterized by massiveness, amplification, and distortion, but do not result in a full-scale implosion of the descriptors of spatial experience. In other words, while Wlfflin argues for a quality of strangeness and tension in baroque architecture, this tension relies on deviations from, and therefore reliance on, recognizable

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forms as opposed to the invention of an entirely new model of space and spatial experience. This is similar to anamorphosis, which depends on the underlying support of the laws of linear perspective for its parodic destabilization of perspectival geometry. 8 Hadids encounters with virtuality are more than just metaphorical; the fact that in her early career her designs were not built, remaining instead in the form of drawings and paintings, seems to have oriented her to a mode of architecture sensitive to the possibilities inherent in virtual planning. Between the years of 1750 and 1761, Giovanni Battista Piranesi printed 16 drawings of the Carceri dinvenzione or Imaginary Prisons, a series of drawings of imaginary architectural constructions whose labyrinthine complexity are later evoked by M.C. Escher and the Surrealists. Like Piranesis impossible designs, Hadids own drawing practices enabled a greater degree of experimentation with the limits of form, plasticity, and structural coherence. For more on Hadids unbuildable drawings, see Giovanni (2006). 9 Irrespective of the use of frescoes to augment viewers experience of architectural space, Wlfflin differentiates baroque from renaissance architecture on the basis of its painterly quality. Thus, if the beauty of a building is judged by the enticing effects of moving masses, the restless, jumping forms or violently swaying ones which seem constantly on the point of change, and not by balance and solidity of structure, then the strictly architectonic conception of architecture is depreciated. In short, the severe style of architecture makes its effect by what it is, that is, by its corporeal substance, while painterly architecture acts through what it appears to be, that is, an illusion of movement (1966, p. 30). 10 As matter becomes soft and masses fluid, structural cohesion is dissolved; the massiveness of the style, already expressed in the broad and heavy forms, is now also manifested in inadequate articulation and lack of precise forms. To begin with, a wall was now regarded as a single uniform mass, not as something made up of individual stones (Wlfflin, 1966, p. 46). 11 I owe this particular reading of metric vs. cardinal space to David Summerss encyclopedic study of the developments in Western art, such as the coordinate plane and ultimately the metaoptical cube, which, according to Summers, create the conditions of Western modernism, in which modernism in European painting emerged as a more or less continual transformation of virtuality from the late Middle Ages onward (2003, p. 550). 12 For example, it would be possible in a consistently metricized universe to compute the position of a floor tile in a palace 10 miles from where I stand. 13 Patrik Schumacher introduces the problem of graphic space--the question of the ontological, material, and formal importance of architectural drawing in relation to building--with the contention that Architecture as a design discipline that is distinguished from the physical act of building constitutes itself on the basis of drawing. The discipline of architecture emerges and separates from the craft of construction through the differentiation of the drawing as a tool and domain of expertise outside (and in advance) of the material process of construction (2004, p. 15). In other words, architecture always exists in reference to space and the built environment, but in the extreme cases of architectural experimentation, drawing is seen not just as a tool whose success will be measured in the actualization of a habitable structure, but becomes an object of consideration in and of itself. The drawing is thus not merely a means to an end, but an entity that exists and signifies independently of material construction. 14 The wit of anamorphism is a constant reference to a rational and stable system that it assumes in the very moment that it is parodied or questioned (Preziosi, 1989, p. 57).

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Works Cited: Buci-Glucksmann, C. 1986. La folie du Voir: de lesthetique baroque. Paris: Galile. Damisch, Hubert. 1994. The Origin of Perspective. Goodman, J. (trans.). Cambridge: MIT Press. Davis, Whitney. 2005. Real Spaces. Graduate Seminar University of California at Berkeley. Department of the History of Art. Berkeley, CA. Spring. Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Edgerton, S. Y. 1975. The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York: Harper & Row. Giovanni, J. 2006. In the Nature of Design Materials: The Instruments of Zaha Hadids Vision. In: Zaha Hadid. New York: Guggenheim Museum, pp. 23-32. Hershey, G. 2000. Architecture and Geometry in the Age of the Baroque. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jay, M. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. ---. 1988. Scopic Regimes of Modernity. In: Foster, H, (ed.). Vision and Visuality. New York: New Press, pp. 3-23. Le Corbusier. 1950. Le modulor: essai sur une mesure harmonique a lechelle humaine applicable universellement a larchitecture et a la mcanique. Boulogne: Editions de larchitecture Daujourdhui. Leibniz, G. 1696. Letter to Des Billettes, December 1696. Cited in Deleuze, G.1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mertins, D. 2006. The Modernity of Zaha Hadid. In: Zaha Hadid. New York: Guggenheim Museum, pp. 33-38. Millon, H. A 1972. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism: Its Influence on the Development and Interpretation of Modern Architecture. In Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, May, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 83-91 Ndalianis, A. 2004. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: MIT Press. Preziosi, D. 1989. Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven: Yale University Press. Schumacher, P. 2004. Digital Hadid: Landscapes in Motion. Basel: Birkhuser. Summers, D. 2003. Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. New York: Phaidon. Wittkower, R. 1998. Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. West Sussex: Academy Editions. Wlfflin, H. 1966. Renaissance and Baroque. Simon, K. (trans.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Meredith Hoy Department of Art and Art History University of Massachusetts, Boston McCormack Building, Rm 458 100 Morrissey Blvd Boston, Massachusetts 02125 meredith.hoy@umb.edu meredith.hoy@gmail.com 73

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XCESSES
Gerwin Gallob

Echoes from the Future: douard Glissant and the Infinite Work of the Baroque

Gerwin Gallob is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His dissertation-in-progress, entitled Sonic Lines of Flight: Black Techno-Aesthetics, Black Politics of Sound, addresses questions of black particularity and aesthetic militancy in the kinds of 20th-century Afrodiasporic music and sonic cultures that depend on, and celebrate, not liveness and presence but the mediations and materialities associated with the phonographic apparatus.

This article discusses some aspects of Martinican writer douard Glissants theoretical work on the significance of baroque forms and concepts for a New World Poetics of Relation. Glissant contends that the diversions of orality and musicality may bring about a future language that enables a collective articulation adequate to the realities not only of the Caribbean archipelago, but a creolized and creolizing world. The idea of echo emerges as both central rhetorical trope and sonic manifestation of the baroque fold taken to infinity. Cross-cultural links to black American culture are explored, and an expanded notion of a baroque without territory is proposed. Words are but the surface appearance of the deeper echoes of song, dance, and eternal rhythms. Words are necessary. You must hear them. But there are times when it is not important to listen closely. Only their resonance is needed, their concrete existence and deeper urges are awakened. Then they can reach a conclusion. -douard Glissant, The Ripening1

Make him speak the unknown tongue, the language of the future. -Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man2 Ever since the mid 17th century, the baroque as concept, as trait, as set of techniques, has been planting its extensions all across the multiple geopolitical locations that constitute the world we have come to understand as modern. Imported by the Spanish colonizers, the Euro-baroque impulse premodern by most accountshas profoundly affected the eccentric New World modernities that have emerged in the wake of European conquest

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and colonialism. The processes of cultural and racial mixing, mestizaje, that blended Old World baroque and indigenous forms that were also baroque, soon led to complex aesthetic rearticulations, adequate to Latin American and Caribbean realities. Recognizing the political potential of such a baroque to the second power, 20th-century artists and intellectuals inhabiting these realities have deployed it as an instrument of contraconquista, of counterconquest. In their artistic and political efforts that often accompanied local struggles for cultural autonomy and decolonization, trans-American writers like Alejo Carpentier, Jos Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Carlos Fuentes, Haroldo de Campos, and others have recurred heavily on the guiding principle of the Baroque. In recent years, formations of this Neo-Baroque in the New World have received increased attention in the interdisciplinary humanities and the arts.3 The subject of this essay is douard Glissant, Martinican novelist, poet, essayist, and activist. Born in 1928, educated in Martinique and Paris, influenced early on by his friend and compatriot Frantz Fanon as well as by ngritude poet and teacher Aim Csaire, Glissant is today regarded as the preeminent thinker of creolization and antillanit, or Caribbeanness. Antillanit refers to a utopian, crosscultural, post-nationalist and postidentitarian conception of being-inthe-world as becoming-Caribbean. Animated by the political urgency of decolonization, and informed by the rhizomatic thought of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, his Poetics of Relation points to a new set of possibilities that favors processes of becoming over states of being, interdependence over autonomy, expansion over depth, and ceaseless cultural mixing over the old violence of filiation and purity. In his most recent work, Glissant has tweaked and expanded his conceptual apparatus to fall even more in line with Deleuzian philosophy, in terms of articulating a coherent theory of becoming that is both immanent and specific (see Burns, 2009, pp. 104-115). Glissants theory of the baroque rarely finds its way into contemporary debates. In part, this may be due to his marginal status, as a French Caribbean writer, within a field that has been dominated by artists and writers from the hispanophone and lusophone parts of the New World. At the same time, Glissants theoretical explorations of the baroque seem somewhat marginal to his own body of work as well. Dispersed across his essays, novels, and poems, they are not easy to locate or summarize: apart from a brief 1985 text entitled Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World, no other distinct elaborations of the topic exist. Instead, Glissant offers something like a distributed, discontinuous theory of the baroque that both infuses and emerges from his work across the genres of fiction, poetry, and cultural criticism.4 75

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Echoes, Folds, Diversions
Glissants domain is language. In what follows, I will read a series of moments in his work that revolve around questions of speech, sound, and writing in the French Caribbean context. As I do this, I will pay special attention to the ways in which the baroque is being deployed, following Deleuzes formula, as an operative function that endlessly creates folds (Deleuze, 1993, p. 3). However, I will not be able to adequately discuss in Glissants work several issues crucial to neo-baroque discourse, including temporality, narrative, and the function and figuration of physical space. Shaped by a centuries-long history of slavery and colonialism, and lacking what Glissant calls the collective density of an ancestral cultural hinterland (Glissant, 1989, p. 64), Martinique has never had at its disposal a language that, by its nature, enables collective articulation. Caught up between two problematic, alienating alternativesthe official French and the peoples stagnant Creoleit remains a country without a language. Here is Glissant outlining this basic predicament, as well as hinting at a possible way out:

Glissant here emphasizes the materiality of language, which manifests itself most forcefully in the primordial scream that marks the arrival of his African ancestors on the archipelago, what he calls their irruption into modernity (1989, pp. 100 and 146). The texture of that scream (its passive force) is the resistance of(fered by) the material, i.e., the body, i.e., the object. As 76

Our aim is to forge for ourselves based on the defective grasp of two languages whose control was never collectively mastered, a form of expression through which we could consciously face our ambiguities and fix ourselves firmly in the uncertain possibilities of the word made ours (1989, p. 168). We have so many words tucked away in our throats, and so little raw material with which to execute our potential (1989, p. 140). [F]or us it will be a question of transforming a scream (which we once uttered) into a speech that grows from it, thus discovering the expression of a finally liberated poetics (1989, p. 133).

Glissant indicates, this initial moment of excess, of speech at its limit, will not and cannot be forgotten in the quest for true collective articulation. But alongside the various types of verbal expression that formed among slaves and eventually found their way into the Creole language, another kind of outburst took place in the enclosure of the Plantation, namely, a music of

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reserved spirituality through which the body suddenly expresses itself (1997, p. 73). The embodied presentness, the dynamism, and the rhythmic exuberance he hears in New World forms of orality and musicality have strongly shaped Glissants conception of his own experimental language, which he sees to take shape at the edge of writing and speech (1989, p. 147). Now, where is the baroque in all this? It first appears, argues Glissant, in the evolution of Martinican rhetoric as the symptom of a deeper inadequacy, being the elaborate ornamentation imposed on the French language by our desperate men of letters (1989, p. 250). In other words, the excessive, convoluted yet grammatically impeccable French of the cultural elite suggests to him a compensatory strategy, covering up a profound insecurity, a vulnerability. Excess signifies lack. But baroque derangements, foldings, unfoldings, and refoldings have also affected Creole, the language of the people. Glissant reminds us of the centrality of sound in the formation of a language originally designed to enable communication between slave and master:

For Caribbean man, the word is first and foremost sound. Noise is essential to speech. Din is discourse It was the intensity of the sound that dictated meaning [T]he dispossessed man organized his speech by weaving it into the apparently meaningless texture of extreme noise Creole organizes speech as a blast of sound (1989, pp. 123124).

In addition to the manipulation of sound intensity and raw sonic matter, i.e. noise, the excess of spoken Creole also involves verbal acceleration, which adds to the texture of speech while inflicting further damage on the transparency of enunciation. Sped-up, rushed, frenzied, Creole orality produces a continuous stream of language that makes speech into one impenetrable block of sound (1989, p. 124). Creole has at its origin a conspiracy to conceal meaning, which makes it proliferate sonic foldings in order to mislead, to disguise its message in the textural density of speech. Its rhetorical strategies favor concrete

imagery over abstractions, and they operate through the chain reactions of echo, repetition, tautology, and word association. Decentered, deformed language, Creole is the art of diversion. To this end, it can also employ the ultimate technique of verbal expansion, namely delirious speech. However, such a counterpoetics can present a danger for a language that has been stagnant for too long, lacking a historical dimension due to never having passed naturally from secret code to conventional syntax, from the diversion of imagery to conceptual fluency (1989, p. 128). Of contemporary Creole, Glissant writes: 77

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Verbal delirium as the outer edge of speech is one of the most frequent products of [its] counterpoetics. Improvisations, drumbeats, acceleration, dense repetition, slurred syllables, meaning the opposite of what is said, allegory and hidden meaningsthere are in the forms of this customary verbal delirium an intense concentration of all the phases of the history of this dramatic language (1989, p. 128).

Such foldings and contractions of speech-matter mark a series of diversions, a fugitive impulse. In true baroque fashion, they counterpose an irreducible densitywhat Glissant calls an opacityto the oppressively transparent, rational discourse of the colonizers. Delirious speech is eccentric and impenetrable; it compromises language in unpredictable ways. Importantly, like all tactics of diversion, it must not be seen as an end in itself, but rather as a tool to enable a future articulation.5 At one point in Glissants 1975 novel Malemort, the narratora collective we that belongs to a group of Martinican studentsis confronted

An impossible dream like Glissants notion of antillanit, this utopic, collective speech is nevertheless present to Malemorts narrator as a faint sound, a future echo of itself. And what is echo, other than an infinite series of foldings in the material that is sound? While 78

[When the masters stop talking] we can hear around them the future echo of the way of speaking that they would perhaps have wanted so much to know and against which they defended themselves so fiercely: our way of speaking, impossible and sought after! (Glissant, 1975, pp. 153-154; translation quoted in Britton 1999, p. 102).

with the baroque ostentation of their three schoolmasters French. It is alienating, convoluted speech, filled with redundancies and artful diversions. As mentioned above, Glissant claims that the diversions and decenterings that the official language is made to undergo by the French Caribbean elite merely mask an underlying deficiency, a lack. This fact would seem to rule out any liberatory possibilities. But, attentive to the gaps and silences in the discourse of those learned men, Malemorts narrator comes to the realization that, precisely in and through its breaks, this alienating discourse may actually reveal to them the contours of a truly collective language that is to come:

it lacks the power to initiate speech, echo makes the word shudder, sets it in motion, reveals its texture. Traveling at the speed of sound, echo unfolds in time (it takes sound to infinity) but also always evokes a particular space whose acoustic signature it carries.

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It adds reverberation, rhythm, and thickness to the sound that serves as its occasion, gives it a material presence and spatiality in the listeners here and now.6 Across his novels, poems, and essays, Glissant makes frequent use of echo as both concept and rhetorical device, just as he regularly employs other sonic and musical tropes as well. For instance, along with fellow Martinican author Patrick Chamoiseau, he understands the task of the Caribbean writer to be hypersensitive to creolized and creolizing sound, and in particular to listen closely to that distant voice whose echo hovers over the scenes of our collective memory and guides our future (1999a, p. ix). Again, the possibility of a collective future is here linked to a barely audible sound, a persistent vocal echo that ought to befall the written word so that something new can emerge in the process. Through echo, repetition, and assonance, a characteristic rhythm enters into speech, producing infinitely multiplying expressions of the real (1999b, p. 201), as well as variances, or versions thereof. In other words: endless reverberations, foldings upon foldings of sound. It thus opens itself up to the new and the unpredictable, making audible future possibilities. The poet takes note: When the written text adopts the economies of orality, it frequently tries to suggest or imitate this music (1999b, p. 200). In the following passage, Glissant again exalts the rhetorical power of African-American speech. Two personal experiences in the United States, he writes, have particularly moved him:

Cross-Cultural Poetics

The line between vocality and music disappears when speech is enriched and texturized by repetition and echoic resonance. Glissant, who often finds inspiration in African-American culture, here cites the homiletic style of Black American preachers, men who imperceptibly enter into the chanted word as well as choral music (1999b, p. 200). This type of excessive speech oscillates between two registers, puts them into relation.

I remember having heard, at Tufts University, an expos on Afro-American literature and having discovered with great surprise and feeling the spectacle of this audience that, rhythmically swaying, turned the lecturers text into melody. I also saw the television film on Martin Luther King and discovered the doubling of the voice, the echo placed behind the speaker to repeat and amplify his speech. As in the tragic text, here repetition is not gratuitous. Therein lies a new management of language (1989, p. 149).

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Echo, stretching of the voice, musicality, call-and-response: these are only some of the diversions and decenterings that characterize black English. Here, multiplication and resonance serve to fortify the voice of the speaker, to expand its range, and to increase its impact. Affected by musicality and generating echoic responses, it enters into relation with other voices, other bodies. Speech thus becomes creolized, sonic matter folded to infinity. What Glissant calls a new management of language concerns the essentially collective or communal articulation (or at least its future echo) that these material practices enable. By its nature, such an articulation will involve a baroque decentering, recognizing, and conforming to no preestablished norm. According to Deleuze and Guattari, black English would lend itself particularly well to this project: commenting on the versatility and inventiveness of its speakers, they have rightly called it a deterritorialized language, appropriate for strange and minor uses (1986, p. 17). As mentioned above, Glissant considers African-American culture to be exemplary with regard to creolization. To him, jazz in particular serves as both model and inspiration. Bemoaning the absence of a truly collective and popular form of musical expression in Martinique, he cites jazz as a counterexample, emphasizing its ethics, its discipline, and its ability to creolize. Jazz, Glissant argues,

In this formulation, Glissant calls jazz universal while also insisting on its concreteness and specificity, its link to the community that is its condition of possibility.7Ever since its inception, jazz has been subject to the process of creolization, here understood as the unstoppable conjunction despite misery, oppression, and lynching that opens up torrents of unpredictable results (1999b, p. 30). Along these lines, jazz can be seen as a set of concepts, attitudes, aesthetic strategies, and musical techniques that have 80

progressively records the history of the community, its confrontation with reality, the gaps into which it inserts itself, the walls which it too often comes up against. The universalization of jazz arises from the fact that at no point is it an abstract music, but the expression of a specific situation (1989, p. 110).

entered into relation with musical and nonmusical cultures worldwide: Glissant calls it a recomposed trace which has roamed all over the world (quoted in Martin, 2008, p. 107). At the same time, jazz as/in performance asserts black subjectivity as/in the resistance of the object, thus giving aural and gestural testimony from the margins of a world without center.8 The singular eloquence of this kind of testimony, multi-voiced and ongoing, is rooted not in words but in rhythms, tones, textures, and cadences. Whats

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more, in its emphasis on improvisation and collective poesis, and often without recourse to preexisting written scores, jazz ceaselessly produces unforeseeable, provisional, and everchanging outcomes (echoes, folds, diversions) that are all its own. On the subject of these baroque hallmarkssonic decenterings, proliferations, multiplied voicesone is reminded of that famous jazz moment in 20th-century black literature, in which Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man, sitting in his windowless basement, dreams of the baroque opulence of having five radio-phonographs playing the same Louis Armstrong record, all at one time (1965, pp. 10-11). A glorious noise must be the result from such a hypothetical, yet-to-be actualized setup: I imagine that echo, resonance, and static would accrue around, enfold, and distort Louiss multiple/multiplied voices (both vocal and instrumental), thus constituting a soundscape of fantastic density. By turns falling into and out of phase, reverberating and bouncing off the walls of the narrators hyper-illuminated hole in the ground, the sound simultaneously produced by the five phonographs would carry the acoustic signature of this subterranean space, making it vibrate along with the body of the listener whose resistance (existence) it would serve to confirm and validate: No, I am not a spook I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquidsand I might even be said to possess a mind (1965, p. 7). At the very least, the quintupled Armstrong sound, played back in sync from inanimate black vinyl objects over a jury-rigged home audio system, would combat the holes acoustical deadness that the narrator so abhors. Of course, the name of the record, whose future echo Ellisons narrator conjures up so vividly, is (What Did I Do to Be so) Black and Blue. On it, Louis sings the blues, his voice doubled and assisted by his trumpet, whose hidden possibilities he unlocks as he bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound (1965, p. 11). This is a diversion, and testament to the workings of a limitless creativity, as well as evidence of a fugitive spirit in search of ever-new lines of flight. There is also a second diversion,9 concerning time as embodied experience. As the narrator informs us, Louis (his sound) calls attention to the nodes and breaks that mark the passing of nonlinear time, thus making audible the peculiar sense of temporality that is a known side effect of invisibility, of being excluded from the project of modernity and the flow of History (1965, p. 11). This idea, then, brings us back to Glissant, who has also grappled at length with contrasting, disjunctive conceptions of temporality. Antillean history, he claims, does not unfold in a linear, continuous fashion but comes to life with a stunning unexpectedness (1989, p. 63); the task of the writer is thus to give a prophetic vision of the past (1989, p. 64). This can only be accomplished through constant experimentation, through listening for echoes from the future. It requires attentiveness to opacities, a taste for unpredictable outcomes, and a heightened sensitivity with regard to the 81

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diversions introduced into languages and practices of any kind. Revisiting his earlier discussion of the French language in the Caribbeanthe language in which he himself writes and of which he makes minor10 usesGlissant insists that in and through such diversions, we have a chance to compromise this language in relationships we might not suspect. It is the unknown area of these relationships that weaves, while dismantling the conception of the standard language, the natural texture of our new baroque, our own (1989, p. 250).

Un Baroque Mondialis

A slight shift in parameters and a new set of key formulations appear in Glissants more recent work, particularly with regard to the baroque. With the introduction of new concepts like tout-monde, errance, and pense archiplique, his theoretical apparatus thickens and becomes more powerful, but his thought does not change in nature.11 Throughout the 1990s, Glissant develops a poetics and philosophy of Relation that relies heavily on Spinozist/Deleuzian conceptions of totality and immanence, while also drawing on insights gained from chaos theory (see Burns 2009). Glissants notion of a naturalized baroque abroad in the world (un baroque mondialis) exemplifies this shift in theoretical emphasis, toward the post-territorial thought of worldtotality. In the course of modernitys historical development, Glissant argues, the baroque impulse became generalized, eventually extending into the mode of Relation and thus engendering a whole new way of being-in-the-world.12 This baroque is self-constituent and self-regulating; it no longer constitutes a derangement [of classicisms], since it has turned 82

into a natural expression of whatever scatters and comes together (1997, p. 91). By proposing this notion, Glissant suggests that the kind of thought that requires the division of the world into center and margin, metropole and periphery, has long been rendered obsolete by the global processes of creolization. Renouncing the search for origins, universal truths, and fixed identities, Glissants baroque prizes becoming, horizontal relations, the proliferation of centers, and destabilized/deferred meanings.13 Via the concept of errance (errantry, drifting, wandering), Glissant introduces a practice of nonlinear movement and mobility that invites the unpredictable outcomes of unforeseen detours and encounters, while no longer recognizing the primacy of home tw ideal of voyage, a journeying beyond foundational certitudes, over exploded ground (Dash, 2004, pp. 99-100). Glissants New World baroque poetics require a conception of space that can account for the nature of island ground, the connecting function of the ocean, and the role of the littoral.14 As Michael

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Dash writes, Glissant thus attempts to conceptualize space in terms of frontier zones that become patterns of archipelagos (2004, p. 108). Pense archiplique (archipelagic thought) is what Glissant calls this particular mode of engaging the world by way of rethinking Caribbean island space within a New World archipelago. The next logical step in Glissants line of thought, suggests Dash, is to propose that all places must be opened out to their archipelagic dimensions (2004, p. 95). As it happens, one of these places may turn out to be the island of Paris, France. To wit, in some of his earliest writings Glissant has used the island metaphor to defamiliarize and deterritorialize the City of Light, thus provocatively reducing the mtropole to a kind of open insularity (Dash, 2003, p. 102). This notion first appears in the surrealist fragments and meditations that comprise Glissants 1955 essay collection, Soleil de la Conscience, in which he chronicles his first journey to Europe. Of Paris, he writes:

Following Glissant across the Atlantic Ocean, I would like to conclude this essay by revisiting, in brief, one of its core themes. In section 2 of his 1993 lyrical work The Great Chaoses (2005), Glissant focuses on (the discourse of) a group of homeless wanderers and trampsmagi of distresswho congregate in certain Parisian public places, turning them into theatrical, noisy, baroque zones. Insisting on their right to opacity, and speaking their creolized, unheard-of tongues, these figures are exiles, alien invaders. They introduce a set of disturbances into the smoothly operating modern city; they personify noise, friction, criminality, excess. By organizing section 2 of The Great Chaoses around the speech

So Paris, in the heart of our time, receives, uproots, blurs, then clarifies and reassures. I suddenly learn its secret: and it is that Paris is an island which draws light from all around and diffracts it immediately (Glissant, 1957, p. 68; translation quoted in Dash, 2003, p. 102).

of subjects who seem so radically out of place, so unassimilable, Glissant offers another variation on the New World baroque theme of counterconquest (an earlier example would be his account in Soleil de la Conscienceof traveling to Paris, and experiencing its essential insularity). In this case, the idea of counterconquest must be understood not only in the general sense of a reconquest of European civilization by American colonial subjects in the realm of the arts, but more literally, as a reverse invasion of the metropolis by the periphery (Kaup, 2007, p. 235).15 Bernadette Cailler, whose work on Glissants poetry is invaluable, writes that in section 2, Glissant 83

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is describing the old European city that has been invaded, willy-nilly, by the descendants of all these Conquis or conquered peoples and by their myths, dreams and truths. These erstwhile victims are the new conquerors of this new Old World (2003, p. 110).

Marked by a condition of rootlessness and existential alienation whose side effects include an increased inventiveness, a talent for improvisation, and an uncontainable, polyglot verbosity, these errant subjects emerge

Endnotes: 1 Glissant (1985, p. 169). The Ripening is Glissants first novel, originally published in French as La Lzarde in 1958. As of today, many works by Glissant remain untranslated. With the exception of two instances, in this essay I restrict myself to using only those of his texts that are available in English translations. 2 Ellison (1965, p. 382). 3 For instance, the 2000 exhibition Ultrabaroque: Aspects of Post-Latin American Art, organized by Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego and on display in North America until 2003, convincingly reasserted the relevance of New World baroque forms for the contemporary moment, while also extending their aesthetic range, their theoretical contours, and their political claims. The following texts provide a good overview of recent scholarship on the aesthetics and politics of the New World neo-baroque: Kaup 2005; Kaup 2007; Kaup 2006; Egginton 2007; Moraa 2005. Most recently, the January 2009 issue of PMLA included a special section on The Neobaroque and the Americas (Monsivis 2009; Oropesa 2009; Zamora 2009; Egginton 2009; Greene 2009; Kaup 2009). A comprehensive anthology of key theoretical and critical texts, entitled Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, is scheduled for publication in 2010 (Zamora and Kaup). 4 Aside from its rather opaque, discontinuous nature, Glissants theoretical work on/with the baroque poses another problem, namely its seeming lack of direct applicability in the fields of art history and visual culture studies. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it has

History has debated them and dumped them here. But along with the unfurled language of their vagrancy. They deflect the sufficient reason of the languages they use (). They understand the chaos-world instinctively. Even when they affect, to the point of parody, the words of the Other. Their dialogues are all allegorical. Mad preciosities, unknown science, baroque idioms of these Great Chaoses. Come from everywhere, they decenter the known. Vagrant and offended, they teach. What voices are debating there, announcing every possible language? (2005, p. 231, emphasis in original).

as visionaries that can teach the poet and the worldwhat a truly collective articulation may look, feel, and sound like.16 In the brief prosaic passage that acts as a preface to section 2, Glissant writes of them the following:

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rarely been commented on, at least in anglophone academic writings. Indeed, Glissants name is entirely absent from the essays that comprise the PMLA special section mentioned in the previous note. However, his text Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World (Dun Baroque Mondialis), a version of which appears in his 1990 essay collection Poetics of Relation (Glissant 1997), will be included in the forthcoming Baroque New Worlds anthology (2010, Zamora and Kaup). 5 Setting into relation the work of the trans-American poets Pablo Neruda (Chile) and Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), Nathaniel Mackey encounters similar types of broken, impeded speech, and suggests that instances of linguistic perturbation such as Nerudas semantic phanopoetic and phonological folds and flutter or Brathwaites use of calibanisms may actually function as catalysts for the radically new (Mackey, 2005, p. 6). What these writers seem to propose, writes Mackey, is that postcolonial speech begins in a stammer (2005, p. 44). 6 In an essay that connects the black diaspora process and Jamaican dub reggae (another specifically Caribbean cultural practice that is built around a poetics of echo and echoicity), Louis Chude-Sokei offers a cosmological reading of sound, silence, and the infinite foldings of echo: [The Big Bang] is a sound which makes possible the universe and then the world. The creation of the universe and the world are merely echoes of this primal sound, products of its sonic waves. This myth establishes one of the most crucial dialectics in human knowledge: sound and silence. What bridges the two elements is echo, the races of creation. If sound is birth and silence death, the echo trailing into infinity can only be the experience of life, the source of narrative and a pattern for history (1999, p. 47). For displaced and dispersed subjects who find themselves outside of History, echoicity manifests the metaphorical and material dimensionsthe disorientationsof an ongoing experience of temporality as nonlinear and disjunctive. At the same time, as Chude-Sokei suggests, by its very nature echo also evokes histories of (uprooted, stolen) bodies moving through spaces that lack both center and bounds: [D]iaspora means distance and the echo is also the product and signifier of space (1999, p. 47). 7 Elsewhere, tracing the evolution of speech and music in the enclosure of the Plantation, Glissant further elaborates on this notion of universality. The cry of the Plantation, he argues, was transfigured into the speech of the world. For three centuries of constraint had borne down so hard that, when this speech took root, it sprouted in the very midst of the field of modernity; that is, it grew for everyone. This is the only sort of universality there is: when, from a specific enclosure, the deepest voice cries out (1997, pp. 73-74). 8 The work of Fred Moten is indispensible with regard to this notion (e.g., Moten 2003a; 2003b). 9 On the subject of the multiple strategies of diversion deployed in black music and black sonic cultures, Albert Murrays comment on the blues aesthetic seems pertinent: With all its so-called blue notes and overtones of sadness, blues music of its very nature and function is nothing if not a form of diversion (1989, p. 45, my emphasis). 10 This is a reference to Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris concept of minor literatures, which they develop in their 1975 book on Franz Kafka, and of which Glissant has surely been aware. A minor literature, they write, doesnt come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language (1986, p. 16). When

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they go on to identify its three characteristics as the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation (1986, p. 18), they may as well be talking about Glissants poetics and its orientation toward diversion, politics, and collectivity. 11 Some critics would disagree with this statement. See, for example, chapter 2 of Peter Hallwards Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific (2001). Glissant himself has emphasized the continuity in his thought across the decades, e.g., by describing a more recent book as a reconstituted echo or a spiral retelling (1997, p. 16) of previous works. 12 The relevant passage reads as follows: As conceptions of nature evolved and, at the same time, the world opened up for Western man [t]he baroque, the art of expansion, expanded in concrete terms. The first account of this was Latin American religious art Baroque art ceased its adversarial role; it established an innovative vision (soon a different conception) of Nature and acted in keeping with it. This evolution reached its high point in mtissage. () The generalization of mtissage was all that the baroque needed to become naturalized. () No longer a reaction, it was the outcome of every aesthetic, or every philosophy. Consequently, it asserted not just an art or a style but went beyond this to produce a being-in-the-world (1997, pp. 78-79). Note that in Glissants poetics, the term mtissageintermixing, braiding, mongrelization is used to complicate unproblematic notions of unified new (racial, cultural) identities emerging out of the encounter between two previously distinct subjects. In fact, Glissant understands mtissage as a relational practice, the meeting and synthesis of two differences. Once it becomes generalized, i.e., limitless, its elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable (1997, p. 34), it mutates into creolization, a concept closely related to Glissants expanded notion of the baroque. 13 Baroque naturality, if it exists, has a structure or at least an order, and we have to invent a knowledge that would not serve to guarantee its norm in advance but would follow excessively along to keep up with the measurable quantity of its vertiginous variances (1997, pp. 101-102). In its rejection of a priori knowledge and first principles, Glissants formulation resonates with Gilles Deleuzes account of the way in which 17th-century European baroque theologians deflected attacks against their ideal: The Baroque solution is the following: we shall multiply principleswe can always slip a new one out from under our cuffsand in this way we will change their use. We will not have to ask what available object corresponds to a given luminous principle, but what hidden principle responds to whatever object is given, that is to say, to this or that perplexing case. [] A case being given, we shall invent its principle (1993, p. 67). 14 The zone where water withdraws in successive waves, each following its own current, leaving behind muddy streaks and silt and spores of life from the deep (Glissant, 1999b, p. 228). In his monograph on Glissant, Michael Dash writes that [i]t is the threshold of the sand facing the open sea that is the poets exemplary space (1995, p. 163). 15 For another literary example of this type of reverse invasion, see Alejo Carpentiers novel Baroque Concerto (1991). Carpentiers magical realist narrative chronicles the fantastic journey to Europe of a wealthy Mexican merchant and his Afro-Cuban servant, Filomeno. The nameless merchant is a criollo, a locally born direct descendant of European colonists.

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Arriving in Madrid and visiting Venice in 1709, the two journeymen part ways over 200 years later, in what must be the 1930s: the criollo, grandson of Spaniards, feels alienated in the world of his ancestral allegiances, and returns to Mexico City. Filomeno, however, trumpet in hand, decides to stay, and, in the absence of any redemptive notion of home, to keep moving. The novel, in which music and aurality play a key role, ends at the scene of the last in a series of marvelous baroque concertosa Louis Armstrong (!) show in Venice that Filomeno attends. In appropriately ecstatic terms, Louis is described as he who made the trumpet ring like the voice of the God of Zachariah, the Lord of Isaiah, or as called for in the chorus of the most joyous psalms of the Scriptures (1991, p. 116). On the morning after the concert, we learn, Filomeno plans to board a train to Paris, that archipelago of black diasporic modernism, where he expects to be known as Monsieur Philomne. Like that, with a Ph and a beautiful grave accent over the e (1991, p. 114, emphasis in original). 15 Elsewhere, Glissant presents us with this concise formula: Baroque speech, inspired by all possible speech (1997, p. 75, emphasis in original). Works Cited Britton, C. 1999. douard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Burns, L. 2009. Becoming-Postcolonial, Becoming-Caribbean: douard Glissant and the Poetics of Creolization. In Textual Practice, vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 99-117. Cailler, B. 2003. From Gabelles to Grands Chaos: A Study of the Disode to the Homeless. In: Gallagher, M. (ed.). Ici-L: Place and Displacement in Caribbean Writing in French. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 101-124. Carpentier, A. 1991. Baroque Concerto. Zatz, A. (trans.). London: Deutsch. Chude-Sokei, L. 1999. Dr. Satans Echo Chamber: Reggae, Technology, and the Diaspora Process. In Emergences, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 47-59. Dash, J. M. 1995. douard Glissant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Carabe Fantme: The Play of Difference in the Francophone Caribbean. In Yale French Studies, no. 103, pp. 93-105. 2004. Martinique/Mississippi: douard Glissant and Relational Insularity. In: Smith, J. and D. N. Cohn (eds.). Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 94-109. Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Polan, D. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Egginton, W. 2007. The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque. In South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 106, no. 1, pp. 107-127. 2009. The Baroque as a Problem of Thought. In PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 143-149. Ellison, R. 1965. Invisible Man. London: Penguin. Glissant, . 1957. Soleil de la Conscience. Paris: Seuil. 1975. Malemort. Paris: Seuil. 1985. The Ripening. Dash, J. M. (trans). London: Heinemann. 1989. Caribbean Discourse. Dash, J. M. (trans). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Wing, B. (trans.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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1999a. A Word Scratcher. Foreword to Chamoiseau, P. Chronicle of the Seven Sorrows. Coverdale, L. (trans). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. vii-ix. 1999b. Faulkner, Mississippi. Lewis, B. and T. C. Spear (trans.). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2005. The Great Chaoses. In: The Collected Poems of douard Glissant. Humphries, J. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 223-257. Greene, R. 2009. Baroque and Neobaroque: Making Thistory. In PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 150155. Hallward, P. 2001. Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specific. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kaup, M. 2005. Becoming-Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New World Baroque with Alejo Carpentier. In CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 107-149. 2006. Neobaroque: Latin Americas Alternative Modernity. In Comparative Literature, vol. 58, no. 2, pp. 128-152. 2007. The Future Is Entirely Fabulous: The Baroque Genealogy of Latin Americas Modernity. In Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 68, no. 2, pp. 221-241. 2009. Vaya Papaya!: Cuban Baroque and Visual Culture in Alejo Carpentier, Ricardo Porro, and Ramn Alejandro. In PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 156-171. Mackey, N. 2005. Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Martin, D.-C. 2008. Can Jazz Be Rid of the Racial Imagination? Creolization, Racial Discourses, and Semiology of Music. In Black Music Research Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 105-123. Monsivis, C. 2009. The Neobaroque and Popular Culture. In PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 180-188. Moraa, M. 2005. Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque: Disruptive Readings of Modernity. In: Spadaccini, N. and L. Martn-Estudillo (eds.). Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, pp. 241-282. Moten, F. 2003a. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2003b. Magic of Objects. In Callaloo, vol. 26, no. 1, pp. 109-111. Murray, A. 1989. Stomping the Blues. New York: Da Capo Press. Oropesa, S. A. 2009. Obscuritas and the Closet: Queer Neobaroque in Mexico. In PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 172-179. Zamora, L. P. 2009. New World Baroque, Neobaroque, Brut Barroco: Latin American Postcolonialisms. In PMLA, vol. 124, no. 1, pp. 127-142. Zamora, L. P. and M. Kaup (eds.). Forthcoming 2010. Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest. Durham: Duke University Press.

Gerwin Gallob History of Consciousness University of California, Santa Cruz Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA ggallob@ucsc.edu 88

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MBODIMENTS
Vol.2, No.1 / 2010

Body-Language and Language-Body in William Forsythes Choreography: Michel Foucault and Louis Marin on the Baroque Body1 Mark Franko

Mark Franko is professor of dance. His publications include Ritual and Event: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (editor, Routledge); Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions Kargo; Palermo: LEpos), and Dancing Modernism/Performing Politics (Indiana University Press); Modernizem v plesu/Politike uprizarjanja (Lublujana: Zavod EN-KNAP). Franko is editor of Dance Research Journal and a choreographer and director, whose most recent work (in collaboration with Alessandro Rumie) on Pasolini as poet and theorist was produced at the Akademie der Knste (Berlin).

This essay explores the relations between the return to 17th-century language theory in the early work of Michel Foucault and Louis Marin (1966-1975) and the poststructuralist choreography of William Forsythe in Artifact (Ballet Frankfurt, 1984), the first work in which Forsythe addresses the ballets past in the 17th century. Foucault and Marin both analyzed La logique de Port-Royal and arrived at concepts of a body-language and a language-body that have resonance for Forsythes choreography. The author reviews their critique of classical representation theory and then uses it as a grid through which to interpret Artifact, a ballet that gives a significant space of play to language.

From the 1920s to the 1990s philosophical, literary, and choreographic modernity in Western Europe, the United States, and Latin America drew critically and artistically on 17th-century ideas and forms. Frequently, the aim was to seek an alternative to classical (often understood as official) representation in literary, visual, and performance culture, but also to grasp the modernity of the critique as always already internal to classical theories of language, representation, and movement.2 At the same time, this intellectual and artistic tendency rediscovered neglected

aspects of 17th-century performance that shed light on 20th-century avantgarde aesthetics.3 In both cases, the 17th century was conceived of as a if not the origin of modern power and representation, but also as a historically grounded alternative critique of contemporary manifestations of this power. Anti-bourgeois resistance to normative classicism and to doctrinaire modernism alike could be called baroque modernity. In The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (1980), Craig Owens argued that postmodern art was allegorical. His references

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to Walter Benjamins Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1928), which had appeared in English translation three years earlier in 1977 as The Origin of German Tragic Drama, made allegory a code word for the baroque as a contemporary issue of art practice. Owens found allegory in a variety of contemporary art strategies, including appropriation, site specificity, impermanence, accumulation, discursivity, [and] hybridization (p. 75). One dance example he gave was Trisha Browns Primary Accumulation (1972). From a prone position, Brown moved isolated parts of her body in repetitive sequence, always mindful to recap the sequence before each added variation. If accumulation was allegorical for Owens it was figural too, because he understood allegory as the rewriting [of] a primary text in terms of its figural meaning (p. 69). Each added movement variation, coming as it did at the end of the already established sequence, rewrote the primary movement. Browns sequence was an evolving primary text. Furthermore, adding another meaning to the image, was the model of all commentary, all critique in Owenss terms (p. 69). In addition to accumulation as both figural and critical allegory, a conviction of the remoteness of the past, and a desire to redeem it for the present . . . (p. 68) was an accompaniment. The accumulation of signs of the baroque that Owens amassed in this essay at the dawn of the 1980s did not coalesce critically. But, the essay announced the role artistic production of the 1980s would take in the ongoing project of baroque modernity. 90 Rather than cite baroque theory with Benjamins theory of allegory in the 1920s and in postmodern dance of the 1960s, I shall turn to early poststructuralist theory in France between the mid 1960s and mid 1970s and choreographic practice of the 1980s.4 I understand the 1980s as the baroque decade of contemporary choreography par excellence in Western Europe and the United States. Some examples (in chronological order) of baroque-influenced choreography include David Gordons Trying Times (1982), William Forsythes Artifact (1984), Dominque Bagouets Dserts damour (1984), Mark Frankos Le Marbre Tremble (1986), John Kellys Find My Way Home (1988), Jarva Yuotonins Pathtique (1989), Mark Morriss Dido and Aeneas (1989), to which list I could add the much later Trisha Browns Orfeo (1998). Although choreographic baroquism as well as baroque dance reconstruction flourished in North American and continental dance in the 1980s, it has existed in different guises throughout the 20th century (Franko 2007a).5 I shall limit myself here to the postmodern baroque. Rather than the lateral slide between signs that characterizes Benjamins treatment of allegory, and which was influential for Jacques Derridas notion of the trace, I address the movement within the sign itself or the movement produced by the sign, as analyzed by Michel Foucault and Louis Marin on the basis of 17thcentury language theory. I then turn to the connections between the theory of movement within the sign--the signs

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expressivity and corporeality--and William Forsythes evening-length ballet Artifact created for Ballet Frankfurt in 1984. Taking its inspiration from 17thcentury ballet spectacle, Artifact stages language and the body on a continuum that also raises questions of movement, the sign, and representation.6 Further, Artifact engages in a critique of ballet as a classical system of representation while also envisioning it as generative of resistant spaces of representation.7 I realize that I am linking the choreography of an American artist working in Germany with French theory. William Forsythe, however, was and is a reader of Michel Foucault and was hence influenced by these ideas (Franko 2010). II The visual and performative concept of the baroque had to be wrested in France during the 1950s and 1960s from the dominant and monolithic view of the French 17th-century culture as exclusively neoclassical. The baroque, initially identified with the reign of Louis XIII in the first half of the 17th century (Rousset 1954; Tapi 1967, 1980) as a forgotten alternative to neoclassicism that had chronologically preceded neoclassicism but was then entirely eclipsed by it, became transformed under poststructuralism into a parasitic force below the surface of neoclassicism that furnished a model for modernity.8 By 1967 Guy Debord could claim: The sometimes excessive importance taken on in modern discussions of aesthetics by the concept of the baroque reflects a growing awareness of the impossibility of classicism in art . . . (1995, p. 134). Between 1966 and 1975, Michel Foucault (1966) and Louis Marin (1975) addressed the body and language-movement as sign--in their respective analyses of general grammar in La logique de Port-Royal.9 Foucaults Les mots et les choses (1966) and Marins La Critique du Discours (1975) present a striking intersection between their early work.10 Taken together, these works delineate a position on representation that could be characterized as poststructuralist, and in so doing they also delineate a generative connection between critical examination of 17thcentury theories of representation and poststructuralist aesthetics. They are poststructuralist at the very least in that they are implicitly critical of structural linguistics that had grown from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. In examining the differences between the analyses of Foucault and Marin, I intend to discern where the problematic of movement/gesture invests the critical philosophy of language such that the subject of art displaces the focus on linguistic communication per se. Although neither author isolated the baroque as an issue in the context of 17th-century general grammar, Marin was to do so elsewhere; Foucaults friend and colleague Gilles Deleuze did so in Le pli, originally published in French in 1988 (1993). Nevertheless, their seminal critiques of classical representation underline that the baroque phenomenon in the French context operates as an internal critique of neoclassicism, and hence of classical 91

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representation or mimesis as such. I shall be particularly vigilant to the way a language-body and a bodylanguage emerge to overcome the impasse of general grammar (Marin) and to theorize a postclassical theory of representation. III As a critical concept in the French intellectual context, the baroque implies that normative classicism was and is a fiction. In terms of the philosophy of language, that fiction is what Foucault calls the reciprocal kinship between knowledge and language (1970, p. 89).11 In the Classical age, wrote Foucault, knowing and speaking are interwoven in the same fabric (p. 88).12 It is this fiction about language-that the representation it affords Between the mind and the sign is an idea. This idea is a representation of the thing: a mental image. Hence, every sign being a representation of an idea, which is itself the representation of a thing, is the representation of a representation. In this sense, the sign always introduces duplication. It is also true, continues Marin, that the representation [is a] sign (et la reprsentation, signe) (p. 9). The sign is representation, and the representation, sign.15 If the sign, and in particular the word, he specifies, is customarily linked to the idea, a second connection slips in: that of the thing and the idea (p. 47).16 Marin cites Arnauld and Nicole: It is necessary to consider in the Logic ideas joined to words, and 92 guarantees the truth of the content it conveys--that undergirds the reflexivity of the classical episteme. For Marin, Language and thought will be linked like the two faces of one reality, which is man in his expressivity.13 This simultaneity or duplication (ddoublement) of truth and representation is, for Marin, expressive. Poststructural aesthetic thought is resolutely anti-expressive for this reason (Murray 1997). Representation originates in the subject for Marin, and more precisely in the mental image the subjects thought produces. Here, Marin introduces the image into the relationship between knowing and speaking. Another way of saying this is, the sign is (a) representation (le signe est la representation) (1975, p. 9).Marins model of the classical sign is as follows: words joined to ideas (p. 47).17 Hence, concludes Marin, the sign is in actuality an idea-thing. It is in this way that the classical episteme can be founded on a belief in the equivalence of knowledge expressed and truth in the mind: the sign is the glue that aligns the mental image with objective reality. The sign is an idea-thing because it encompasses both the subjects way of being (esprit in the diagram) and the formal reality of the idea, which is the representation of an objective reality. Precisely for this reason, the sign appears to act twice: it stands both for the thing it represents and the idea of the thing in the mind of the subject who mobilizes the sign (the sign opre un

Esprit ______ ide ________ signe ________ chose14

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ddoublement): The sign is a thing that represents an idea, which idea is itself the representation of a thing (1979).18 Between the subject, language, and reality emerges the (mental) image as an integral part of representation, and the role of the subject in representation. The sign is a thing--a piece of linguistic materiality--that can represent another thing (a piece of objective reality) through its association with a mental image. Marin implicitly critiques Saussurian linguistics, which deals exclusively in acoustic images, not in mental images. The sign shares the stage with the mental image. Marin, in other terms, offers us the linguistic sign as an effect of anamorphosis between thing and image. Foucault also speaks of duplication (ddoublement), but places duplication structurally within the representation itself: Since it [general grammar] makes language visible as a representation that is the articulation of another representation . . . its subject is the interior duplication existing within representation (p. 91).19 The sign exists in its own right as a thing because, as Marin points out, it is without visible relationship to what it represents (sans rapport visible avec ce quil reprsente) (1975, p. 60). The sign itself is visible, but not transparently so: we do not see through it to the object it represents. On the other hand, the idea in the mind has a visible relation to what it represents (a un rapport visible avec ce quelle reprsente). Yet, the image in the mind is invisible. Representation presupposes the absence of the thing represented (be it the referent of objective reality or the mental image) and the visibility of that which takes its place: the linguistic sign. Hence, for Foucault, substitution is the second principle of representation. The sign is a thing that takes the place of another thing, but that works like an idea (p. 60).20 To say that the sign is a representation is to say that despite being twice removed from the object, it still maintains the illusion or the effect of transparency. This apparent transparency links the subject both to the sign and to the thing represented, and creates the properly ideological sense of the seamless closure of knowledge and representation. To reverse the formula, as Marin does, and say that the representation is a sign, is to say that all representations work against their own supposed transparency-against their own merging of image and truth--because they substitute image and truth with a certain ordering in a space proper to itself, a space foreign to the subject and, hence, an unexpressive space. Marin points to Arnauld and Nicoles discussion of the Eucharist as a solution to the problem of representation. The bread and the wine--these things--are proposed by the Eucharist as symbols of the body and blood of Christ, but also as his corporeal presence through the words: This is my body. The thing as sign here is at once effect and symptom, symbol and image (1975, p. 54). Transubstantiation, a phenomenon in which language produces a real body as an effect of representation, produces the image of a body-language as the guarantee 93

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of the seamless joining of truth and representation. The signs transparency is redeemed as a body that emerges from the verb. While this solution is magical, it is also performative. Bodylanguage facilitates the incarnation of the image. In incarnation language as materiality gives way to that which it represents. Incarnation is ultimately the redemption of language as image that weds truth to representation. To recognize its religious and/or ideological character does not obscure its mechanism. Although Marin refers to it as a body and a real body, I shall refer to it as imaginary. The specificity of language for Foucault, on the other hand, is the result of its successive (and hence temporally linear character), which works against the image: It is here that the peculiar property of language resides . . . . It replaces the simultaneous comparison of parts (or magnitudes) with an order whose degrees must be traversed one after the other. It is in this strict sense that language is an analysis of thought: not a simple patterning, but a profound establishment of order in space (pp. 82-83).21 It is precisely the reality of this ordering in/of space that undercuts the classical epistemes view of language that weds truth to representation. Foucault removes representation from the mental imaging framework of the subject that had constituted one pole of Marins model, and places it in space as a grammatical and tropological phenomenon. There is, in other terms, a profound discrepancy in language embodied in substitution, which attempts to replace the simultaneity 94 of the mental image with a succession of signs: General grammar is the study of verbal order in its relation to the simultaneity that it is its task to represent (p. 83).22 The unspoken truth of general grammar is that language is corporeal because it exists in both space and time. Time is the order of the subject but space is the order of the body. The sense here of corporeal is neither energetic nor organic. Language, like the body, can be moved from place to place and made to assume a variety of shapes and figures.23 The body, like words, is an instrument of meaning, and the linguistic chain is corporeal once we acknowledge its alphabetical nature. Once language is acknowledged to exist in space rather than in the ideal representational space of the mind, the word diminishes in expressive value in favor of its tropological value: the word becomes tantamount to a letter. Language (more particularly discourse) as a spatializing analytics, for Foucault, calls of necessity for alphabetic writing: [A]lphabetic writing, by abandoning the attempt to draw the representation, transposes into its analysis of sounds the rules that are valid for reason itself. So that it does not matter that letters do not represent ideas, since they can be combined together in the same way as ideas, and ideas can be linked together and disjoined just like the letters of the alphabet (p. 112).24 Foucault continues, that . . .exactly in that fold of words where analysis and space meet we come upon the fundamental relation between space and language (pp. 112-

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113).25 This is not an expressive but a discursive relation. Discourse, in other terms, is not embodied in the sonorous voice but in writing, which for this very reason is likened to a body. Discursivity renders languages body visible as a materiality rather than as transparent intent. The effect of this emphasis on succession in the alphabetical view of representation is to remove the body from vocal conceptions of movement and hence from expressive principles based on the idea-thing deriving from the subject. The bodys space becomes more properly the space of the written character, the gramma, which places it in the symbolic order: the body becomes the subject of space rather than of breath.26 The body is drawn into this scheme metaphorically as a language-body. Foucault erases the expressive dimension of the classical sign. For classical thought, language begins not with expression but with discourse (p. 92).27 It is this view of the body that stands at the opposite pole of transubstantiation as a body-of-meaning dressed as the real. With substitution is thus introduced the importance of spacing and spatialization. The function of analysis (commentary and critique) enters into tension with representation understood as the simultaneity of the idea as mental image with the thing existing in the world. Returning to Owenss baroque model, we might say that expressive simultaneity is part of the past to be restored--the premise without which there can be no coherent critique--whereas analysis and/or commentary furnishes the figural dimension, which brings new meaning to the primary text. The point, however, is not that one conception of language precedes or follows the other historically, but that both exist simultaneously as ideological and operational factors. This simultaneity is itself a doubling, which contains contradictory pulls within it. Marin speaks of a compensatory movement between presence and invisibility on the one hand, absence and visibility on the other (p. 60).28 In other terms, every representation entails a compensatory movement between doubling and substitution, simultaneity and succession, a movement internal to the sign itself. Movement compensates for the discrepancy between bodylanguage and language-body. The cohabitation of simultaneity and substitution, expressivity and analysis, constitutes the sign as a contrapuntal structure: it is traversed with contrary vectors of energy. Every sign is an ideathing in which we find duplication and substitution, expression and analysis, simultaneity and succession. The endpoint of doubling is incarnation whereas the endpoint of substitution is alphabetization. The respective emphases placed by Foucault and Marin on body-language and language-body--the alphabetical body as fragment of ambiguous space (fragment despace ambigu) (p. 314; p. 325) and the expressive body in which the verbal and the figural encounter the sacred as the time of their performance (p. 77)--stage the theatrical body in an epistemic shift in the 17th century. 95

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IV The poststructuralist analysis of 17thcentury language theory has applications to ballet, which itself replicates the coordinates of the classical sign and its critique: ballet is both expressive and alphabetical. The balletic sign is forged from this very tension. In ballet, we observe the body image as a mode of being of the subject and, at one and the same time, as an analysis of corporeality in the axiomatized order of space. These two tendencies are in historical and conceptual counterpoint to one another. No other contemporary ballet choreographer makes us more aware of this counterpoint as a productive performative principle and a product of choreographic analysis than William Forsythe. No other work of Forsythes more directly addresses this historicaltheoretical complex of ideas with direct reference to language than Artifact (1984).29 Artifact is the first of Forsythes ballets to constitute, in Gerald Siegmunds phase, an Auseindersetzung mit der Tanzgeschichte (a productive argument with dance history) (2004, p. 33). Indeed, Artifact provides a critically conscious and historically informed vision of ballet spectacle, e.g., as a form of theatricality that, until the late 18th century, actually included the spoken word (Franko 2009). Artifact is itself the closest thing imaginable to a poststructuralist ballet in that it returns to the 17th-century to both articulate and critique the theory of meaning in the linguistic and corporeal representation, which is classical ballet. Artifact is distinguished not only for its extensive use of language, but because the work itself was generated from a Language Model.30 My approach to this highly complex evening-length work will be to describe its concurrent deployment of movement and language along the axis of the historical theory of language and its critique.31 The language model takes the form of a diagram with two columns listing the key words of the ballets text.

ARTIFACT Language Model

SEE SAW HEAR HEARD THINK THOUGHT SAY SAID DO DID ALWAYS FORGET ROCKS DIRT DUST SAND SOOT NEVER REMEMBER INSIDE

OUTSIDE

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On the left side we read: SEE, HEAR, THINK, SAY, DO; on the right side: SAW, HEARD, THOUGHT, SAID, DID. These are the modalities of present and past that structure the verbs used in the ballet. Despite the lack of any coherent narrative, there is an anxiety conveyed throughout Artifact about the relation of thought and image to representation in a sender-receiver model (to use linguistic terms) that is adapted to spectacle and acted out in a spectacular framework. Below this first box in the language model, we find three other governing polarities: ALWAYS-NEVER and OUTSIDE-INSIDE are recurrent adverbial modifiers; FORGET-REMEMBER are commands that make the use of present and past with respect to the five verbs obsessive. ALWAYS and NEVER tend to introduce doubts as to the nature of the action we perceive and the story sought by the protagonists, while OUTSIDE and INSIDE refer to the audience and/or the space off-stage with respect to the perspective-oriented proscenium stage. The architectural space of the theater and the orthogonal choreographic use of space it imposes become the uneasy scene for the transmission of ideas in time. At the bottom of the diagram are the five nouns: ROCKS, DIRT, DUST, SAND, and SOOT. These words formulaically intoned appear to contradict the energy of combinatory inventiveness to which the other alternatives are DEVOTED. Indeed, the language model indicates structured improvisation rather than set text. These improvisations--for example: you think you thought you saw--tend to undermine or at least cast doubt on the dictum: Language and thought will be linked like the two faces of one reality, which is man in his expressivity.32 The permutations of the language model are almost impossible to follow for the spectator. The word games wash over the audience with the vertiginous rapidity of movement leading the eye constantly in new directions. Words, like movement, are material in a textual and choreographic labyrinth for endlessly renewed combinations.33 Despite the fact that Artifact appears bathed in words there are only two speaking characters: Person with Historical Costume and Person with Megaphone. Person with Historical Costume is a woman dressed in a pseudo-baroque gown and suggesting a 19th-century Fairy God Mother from Charles Perraults Tales (Fig. 1). With this allusion, Forsythe connects the historical meditations of Artifact to the 19th-century story ballet. Person with Megaphone has no rhetorical presence; he seems an untrained and aging body on the ballet stage without a voice or a body to project to the audience. His gravelly voice is captured in and conveyed through a megaphone, which creates a kind of muttering echo in the background of the historical figure (Fig. 2). The vocal delivery of Person in Historical Costume as mistress of ceremonies--she initially addresses the audience: Good evening! Remember me?--is presentational and cloyingly patronizing. Her gestures scan the rhythm of her words and her vocal inflections in a way that suggest baroque declamation as rhetorical scansion of 97

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thought. That is, her gestures are not mimetic but serve to aid in the delivery of the idea. Person with Megaphone is the polar opposite: an older man, a nondancer, in contemporary street clothes with a megaphone in hand. She is not only meant to be seen, but is the center of attention; he is a back-stage figure whose lack of aesthetic appeal and period style clashes with her. The nonspeaking roles include OTHER PERSON, a Kunstfigur (fictional character) of uncertain gender with metallized skin and short-cropped hair frised like Lee Millers as the classical statue in Jean Cocteaus film Blood of a Poet (Fig. 3). Other Person appears to be the ballet dancer as abstraction.34 Christel Rmer (1993) calls Other Person a Kunstfigur, but does not elaborate on her use of this term. I understand Kunstfigur in reference to Oskar Schlemmers designs for modernist allegorical dance figures inspired by the 17th-century court ballet: these figures embody certain qualities of, or tensions within, theatrical movement (Franko 1993). S/he is a reminder that ballet historically belongs to an allegorical rather than a symbolic order. The allegorical order is a visual order in which language itself can easily become a form of visual communication through the motif of writing. Person with Historical Costume functions on the opposite premise: language structures dance, and language is, in Lacanian terms, part of the symbolic order. Her language, however, is always in jeopardy of opacity as vocal gesture. Following the conceit of the allegorical structure of court ballet, we could add 98 that these three characters themselves form a Lacanian allegory: the Symbolic (Person with Historical Costume), the Imaginary (Other Person), and the Real (Person with Megaphone). The Person with Historical Costume fights for the symbolic consistency of theatrical experience through her expressive intent; the Other Person is mute and exists on the margins of this meaning to lead the Corps de Ballet; the Person with Megaphone does not at first belong to the visual universe of the ballet and embodies the unattainable real. He is linked to the Corps de Ballet in that they too are in contemporary dance garb. In their green costumes they barely stand out from the dark background. From the rows of the orchestra, radial spotlights shine and put a veil of light on the dancers. They are not recognizable as persons, but are dancing figures, depersonalized.35 In order to flesh out the symbolic import of Person with Historical Costume, consider that the relation of linguistic representation to truth in 17th-century general grammar is replicated in the proscenium box of the classical stage, which is a mimetic space cut off from the external world where reality is mirrored as a compelling experience of the present. In order to maintain the illusion of reality, the theater must operate according to the architectural boundaries of the outside and the inside. The spatial coordinates of classical theatrical mimesis--what Luce Irigaray calls the symmetrical closure of this theater or the stage setup-is Artifacts starting point (Murray, p. 70). As Andr Green notes: . . . [T]here

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occurs a projection of the relationship between theatrical space and the space of the world on to the theatrical space, itself split into a visible theatrical space (the space of the stage) and an invisible theatrical space (the space offstage) (Murray, p. 139). The present of the performance that takes place on the inside is nonetheless elusive. Person in Historical Costume taunts the audience with phrases like You think you thought you saw, which suggest not only the difficulty of perception, but also the uncertain role of memory in the retention of the present: her words make the space of representation an unstable one. The invitation of Person with Historical Costume to the audience to step inside nevertheless establishes the stage space within the three walls of the theater as theoretically inside. Only the performers step in this space: the stepping of the audience is purely visual and imaginary. This is the space of representation (in French, both representation and performance) in which, as with language theory in general grammar, what is represented will by definition be what is true. Hence, the role of Person with Historical Costume as subject--originator of the sign as idea-thing, with her anxiety about past and present--is foregrounded against the depersonalized dancers. Three items of the Language Model for Artifact--SEE, THINK, and SAY-correspond to Marins diagram of the sign in which the thing SEEn becomes an idea in the mind (THINK), which itself is a representation: a sign to be used in speech (SAY). Transposed to the theatrical setup, the role of Person with Historical Costume is to speak and to be heard by the audience, which occupies the outside of the theatrical box. The stage in darkness, with the exception of a light box in the floor, underscores this sense of the inside and the outside as unstable boundaries bequeathed us by history. Constantly in a process of reversal, they have the structure of the fold, described by Deleuze (1993), as axiomatic for the baroque. The dialectic between inside and outside is the very condition of the baroque, which itself is a variant of the critique of classical representation. Yet, at least in principle, these two realms must remain differentiated; their continued differentiation constitutes their artifactual nature. As Person with Megaphone says at the start: She stepped outside and she always saw it. She stepped inside and she always said it. The inside is the space of representation that can only be seen from without; the outside is the space of reception that must be projected from within on the model of the voice. The regime of seeing and hearing is outside as opposed to saying and doing, which are inside. Inside is the space of the stage as a representational container; outside is the space of representation for the audience. But, outside is also the space of the world outside of representation, the space of history strewn with rocks, dirt, dust, sand, and soot. The lines I never think rocks . . . I never hear sand . . . I never say dust indicate that history and spectacle are incommensurable. Spectacle is sundered from history as 99

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decay (Vergnglichkeit in Benjamins terms), ruins, and fragments. Yet, the role of light as a blinding force in competition with darkness, of choreography breaching the orthogonal use of space with diagonals reaching beyond the confines of the proscenium, the reminder of the existence of dust, and the periodic dropping of the firewall during the double duet of Part II all conspire to transgress this distinction between inside and outside. The geometrical formations of the Corps de Ballet during the double duet to Bachs Chaconne in D minor will always remind us that the disciplinary order of ballet aligned itself historically with the symbolic order. Male and female dancers in skin-colored suits form a square, cued by a woman in white. Rigid rows, virtuosity in ballet dance, pas de deux, artistically arranged: ballet as a piece of art in a warm, yellow light.36 The two duets, which deserve an analysis of their own, are indeed virtuosic, and also patently expressive. Without any romantic tinge, the heterosexually paired couples appear to be in a contest, and their treatment of each other borders on violence while remaining perfectly cooperative in the execution of off-center balances, promenades, and lifts. Here, Forsythe displays his ability to innovate with traditional ballet vocabulary (the women on pointe) in partnering while injecting a very contemporary sense of relationships as disphoric rather than euphoric. This quality of relationship prefigures the end of the work when Person in Historical Costume and Person with Megaphone fight, destroy the set, and 100 breach the distinction between inside and outside with their language. Here, there is the hint of a relation between classical theories of representation and heterosexual normativity. In the Language Model, the remaining two terms--HEAR and DO-- correspond to the disciplinary order of movement: Other Person claps and the Corps de Ballet responds by replicating his/her gestures. Once the Corps de Ballet enters the stage to form a series of extended geometrical lines, a mirroring occurs between it and the Other Person. The dancers of the Corps see Other Person, and then do what they see Other Person doing. The port de bras of the Corps led by Other Persons clapping introduces a grammatical and disciplinary quality to movement. This is the choreographic apparatus that corresponds to the stage setup. (Later in Artifact the clapping will have an interruptive force.) This disciplined adherence to geometry and the alphabetical figure cannot, however, be absolute, since the lines of bodies are too long to be contained with the inside of the space and yet extend off into the wings. The initial crossing of the stage by Other Person at the start also orients us to a transgressive diagonal trajectory intersecting the space off-stage, and leaving us alone for what seems like an undetermined length of time.37 The space of the stage is a space of representation in that it is a space both of visibility and invisibility. That Other Person also descends into a trap door in the stage floor from which s/he gestures, indicating that the Kunstfigur does not occupy space unequivocally

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as a symbolic order. Moreover, some of Other Persons choreography in the trap (especially the movement of the hands and arms that emerge from below) is far more expressivist than classically formal and thus contrasts with Other Person as the symbolic representative of the Corps de Ballet, the singular embodiment of that collective entity that founds choreography as spectacle in the symbolic order. The Corps gestures are frequently designed to suggest the simulation of a sign language, the alphabet and grammar as an alternative to expressive movement. In this way, as well, the distinction between inside and outside is breached. More importantly, I should emphasize the distinction is not breached as an impossibility, but is breached to reveal the space of representation itself and the conditions through which it constructs meaning and posits truth. The initial invitation of Person with Historical Costume to step inside-the Person with Megaphone says: Forget the sand, forget the dirt, forget the rocks, forget.--is an invitation to enter the symbolic order-the space of representation as the stage setup--within which history as an accumulation of deathly ruins is suspended in favor of power (Franko, 2007b). Rocks, etc., are the dust of history that we are constantly entreated to forget. (In this sense, the right side of the language model allies REMEMBER and INSIDE with NEVER (at least spatially), indicating that the symbolic order of the stage is a fiction and an impossibility. Hence, stepping inside always corresponds to remembering rather than forgetting, to the present rather than the past. At the same time, Person with Historical Costume also enjoins us to try not to forget. The periodic injunctions about forgetting and remembering refer also to the unfolding of the performance itself in its receding present. Performance, like language, proceeds linearly and hence poses challenges to the expressive certainty it presumably embodies. But, to remember is also to forget: the first line of Person with Historical Costume is a question to the audience: Remember me? When we remember her, we forget the dustbin of history and bask in the compelling power of the stage setup. Always and never underline the incompatibility between the expressive and the alphabetical (visually figural) signifying theatrical and choreographic orders that nonetheless coexist, and whose tension generates the spectacle of movement. Despite the architectural stability of the theater itself, we are constantly being invited to step inside and outside, to enter and leave the fold of representation rendered not only by architectural space as such, but by the use of light and darkness as well as the choreographic patterns of the work, which are often obscured or only partially visible.38 I shall conclude with a few remarks on the third part of Artifact. The stage is filled with flats, free standing screens inscribed with calligraphic scribbles in black ink. The scene is chaotic with dancers improvising both before and behind the screens. Person with Historical Costume is screaming Step inside! after which she goes behind one 101

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of the flats and pushes it over. Behind it we find a dancer. The flats are arranged in a diagonal line across the stage, and Person with Historical Costume moves along this diagonal pushing the screens down until the unity of the stage appears definitively breached. We have a sense of the orthogonal theater in chaos with glimpses of backstage, and of un-choreographed action. The overturning of these flats reminds us of the fragility of the inside, as they so thinly mask what stands behind them. More importantly, this is the scene of a violent quarrel between Person with Historical Costume and Person with Megaphone. Siegmund (2004, p. 33) views it as the inverse of a marriage of state, which many court ballets were designed to celebrate. We could also view the scene allegorically as the destruction of the alliance between the symbolic order of language and the real, an alliance assumed to be inevitable in classical language theory. The break up occurs when the two proponents of the spoken word in the ballet confront and oppose one another. Caspersens notes refer to this as the betrayal, and the only point at which you no longer interpellates the audience, but another actor on stage.39 The fight reaches fever pitch with Person in Historical Costume struggling to get out of her dress and the two screaming at each other hysterically. The language-body is an artifact, expressively fragmented and syntactically deprived of the impulse to move through the contrivances of its own grammar. (fig. 4). Body-language subsists as the transubstantiation of word into body, but at the level not of the sacrament but of rage. Just as Foucault and Marin unveiled the way linguistic representation undoes the classical ideal of language as the marriage of representation and truth, so Forsythe demonstrates how this classical episteme is undermined in and by theatrical representation. This is both because a concept of the body is necessary to an understanding of language theory and because dance is invested with the syntactical and alphabetical qualities of language. Furthermore, the very visual processes of classical representation were worked out in terms of the linear perspective of the procenium stage. The languagebody and body-language intersect precisely where choreographic classicism becomes impossible, and this could only be thought through and realized in choreographic practice in the 1980s when a deconstructive approach to classical ballet within the grid of the classical stage became possible.

Endnotes: 1 An earlier version of this paper was read at the Collge International de la Philosophie (Paris) in the framework of the seminar La Mtaphysique du mouvement, organized by Franz-Anton Cramer (and held in Berlin and Paris between 2008 and 2009). 2 Noam Chomsky found the basis for generative grammar in the 17th century when he acknowledged that the distinction between deep and surface structure, in the sense in which these terms are used here, is drawn quite clearly in the Port-Royal Grammar (1965, p. 199).

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Peter Brger has argued (1984, p. 68) that Walter Benjamins understanding of 17th-century allegory in his study of German tragic drama was only possible from the 20th-century avantgarde perspective. 4 My intent is not to diminish the importance of Benjamin to 20th-century baroquism, but to locate distinct moments of baroque theory across the 20th century. Benjamin cannot be evacuated from these contexts. In the discussion of Forsythes Artifact with which I conclude this analysis, the Benjaminian motifs of the ruin, the fragment, and allegory in tension with the symbolic (rather than as accumulation) cannot be avoided. Issues of the relation of the Frankfurt School to French poststructuralism are beyond the scope of this paper. 5 This essay is part of a larger study in progress to examine the baroque as a literary and philosophical concept in relation to choreography of the 17th and 20h century. 6 Forsythe consulted with the Frankfurt Schoolinfluenced German theorist of historical dance Rudolf zur Lippe before he created Artifact. Personal communication with William Forsythe, 2000. 7 My analysis of Artifact is indebted throughout to the work of Gerald Siegmund (2004, 2006), although I give greater importance to the interpretation of the text in the ballet. 8 Victor L. Tapis Baroque et classicisme was first published in 1957. The history of the emergence of the baroque in 20th-century consciousness deserves a much more detailed analysis for which there is not space here. 9 Particularly relevant in Foucaults Les mots et les choses is the section Parler, pp. 92-136. Foucault also edited a critical edition of La logique de Port-Royal in 1967. Marins book, originally his doctoral thesis, has not been translated into English. All translations of it here are mine, and for the purposes of clarity I shall provide the French and English of both authors throughout this article. 10 Marin and Foucault subsequently also had a common interest in utopias. Xavier Vert (2008) reveals connections between Marins Utopics: Spatial Games and Foucaults discussion of heterotopia in the essay Different Spaces (1998). 11 Lappartenance rciproque du savoir et du langage (1966, p. 103). 12 A lge classique, connatre et parler senchevtrent dans la mme trame (p. 103). 13 Le langage et la pense seront . . . lis comme les deux faces de la mme ralit. This reality for Marin is lhomme dans son expressivit (Marin, 1975, p. 40). 14 This diagram is reproduced from class notes I took in Louis Marins seminar on historical discourse at Columbia University in 1975. 15 Le signe est la reprsentation, et la reprsentation, signe. 16 En effet, si le signe, et en particulier le mot se lie par accoutumance lide, une deuxime quivalence sintroduit subrepticement, celle de la chose et de lide. 17 Il est ncessaire dans la Logique de considrer les ides jointes aux mots et les mots joints aux ides. 18 Le signe est une chose qui reprsente une ide qui est elle-mme la representation dune chose. 19 Puisquelle fait apparatre le langage comme une reprsentation qui en articule une autre . . . ce dont elle traite, cest du ddoublement intrieur de la reprsentation (p. 106). 20 Le signe est une chose qui prend la place dune autre mais qui fonctionne comme une ide. 21 L reside le propre du langage, ce qui le distingue la fois de la reprsentation (dont il nest son tour que la reprsentation) et des signes (auxquels il appartient sans autre privilge singulier) (1966, p. 97).
3

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La Grammaire generale, cest ltude de lordre verbal dans son rapport la simultanit quelle a pour charge de reprsenter (1966, p. 97). 23 It is not far from the definition we find of body in the Encyclopdie: Corps, Cest une substance tendue et impenetrable, qui est purement passive delle-mme, et indifferente au mouvement ou au repos, mais capable de toute sorte de mouvement, de figure, et de forme (1988, vol. 4, p. 260). (Body is an extended and impenetrable substance, which is purely passive in itself and indifferent both in movement and in repose, but capable of all sorts of movements, figures and forms.) 24 Lalphabet reprsente mieux que tout autre exemple la spatialisation qui caractrise lcriture. . . . Les lettres ont beau ne pas reprsenter les ides, elles se combinent entre elles comme les ides, et les ides se nouent et se dnouent comme les lettres de lalphabet (1966, p. 128). 25 [T]rs exactement en cette pliure des mots o lanalyse et lespace se rejoignent . . . un rapport fondamental de lespace et du langage (p. 129). 26 There are, of course, many resonances that cannot be explored here with Jacques Derridas Of Grammatology: Visibility--a moment ago the theorem, here the theatre--is always that which, separating it from itself, breaches [entame] the living voice (p. 306). 27 Foucault defines discourse in these terms: language in so far as it represents--language that names, patterns, combines and connects and disconnects things as it makes them visible in the transparency of words. In this role, language transforms the sequence of perceptions into a table, and cuts up the continuum of beings into a pattern of characters (p. 311). Le langage qui nomme, qui dcoupe, qui combine, qui noue et dnoue les choses, en les faisant voir dans la transparence des mots. En ce rle, le langage transforme la suite des perceptions en tableau, et en retour dcope le continu des tres, en caractres (pp. 321-322). 28 [U]n mouvement de compensation entre prsence et invisibilit dune part, absence et visibilit dautre part. 29 Artifact received its premiere by the Ballet Frankurt, December 5, 1984, in Frankfurt. 30 I thank William Forsythe and Ballet Frankfurt for allowing me to see Dana Caspersons original notes for Artifact. Christel Rmer (1993, p. 28) asserts: . . .[T]he structural principle of this work is clearly derived from the zone of speech. 31 My description and analysis is based on a live performance of Artifact I saw at Sadlers Wells in London (2000) and on subsequent viewings of the work on video. The performance on the video housed at the Dance Collection is not identified, but may likely be the February 28, 1992, performance at the Thtre du Chtelet (Paris). 32 Le langage et la pense seront . . . lis comme les deux faces de la mme ralit. Cette ralit pour Marin est lhomme dans son expressivit (Marin, 1975, p. 40). 33 This explains the position of Gerald Siegmund (2004, p. 32) on the illogicality of language in Artifact: . . . schaffen die Sprecher durch die Komination der Wrte immer aberwitzigere Stze, die zwar grammatikalisch korrekt, semantisch aber vollkommen unlogisch sind. (The speakers use word combinations to create absurd sentences that, although grammatically correct, are completely unlogical.) 34 Gerald Siegmund (2006, p. 244) has suggested that the Corps de Ballet constitutes in and of itself a fourth character in Artifact. 35 Program notes for Artifact, Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (*MGZB. Forsythe, William. Programs). 36 Ibidem.
22

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Valerie Briginshaw (2001, p. 190) cites architect Daniel Liebeskind on Forsythes use of space: There are . . . particular diagonals which differentiate his view of space from the orthogonal spaces . . . so often the scenography of contemporary dance. Briginshaw adds: Orthogonal spaces, made up of straight lines and right angles, are examples of the cues for reading and ordering space in a perspectival sense. 38 It is important to note here that Forsythe creates his own lighting design.
37

Works Cited: Benjamin, W. 1977. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. J. Osborne (trans.). London: Verso. Briginshaw, V. A. 2001. Dance, Space and Subjectivity. London: Palgrave. Brger, P. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Chomsky, N. 1965. Aspects of The Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press. Debord, G. 1995. The Society of the Spectacle. D. Nicholson-Smith (trans.). New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold. Leibniz and the Baroque. T. Conley (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, J. 1974. Of Grammatology. G. C. Spivak (trans.). Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Diderot, D. and J. DAlembert (eds.). 1988. Encyclopdie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonn des Sciences des Arts et des Metiers, Nouvelle Impression en Facsimile de la premiere edition de 1751-1780. Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt: Frommann. Forsythe, W. 1984. Artifact. Video, Dance Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: MGZIC 9-3524. Foucault, M. 1966. Les mots et les choses: une archologie des sciences humaines. Paris: Editions Gallimard. ---. La Logique ou LArt de Penser. Paris: Paulet. ---. 1970. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. ---. 1998. Different Spaces. In: Faubion, J. D. (ed.). Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York: New Press, pp. 175-185. Franko, M. 1993. Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ---. 2007a. The Baroque Body. In: Kant, M. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to the Ballet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 42-50 and 296-297. ---. 2007b. Fragment of the Sovereign as Hermaphrodite: Time, History and the Exception in Le Ballet de Madame. In Dance Research, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 119-133. ---. 2009. Relaying the Arts in Seventeenth-Century Italian Performance and EighteenthCentury French Theory. In Hushka, S. (ed.). Wissenskultur Tanz. Historische und zeitgenssische Vermittlungsakte: Praktiken und Diskurse. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, pp. 55-69. ---. 2010. Archaeological Choreographic Practices: Foucault and Forsythe. forthcoming in History of Human Sciences. Marin, L. 1975. La Critique du discours: sur la logique de port-royal et les penses de Pascal. Paris: Editions de Minuit. ---. 1979. Historical Discourse. M. Franko seminar notes (Columbia University, New York).

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---. 1984. Utopics. Spacial Play. Tran. Robert A. Vollrath. New Jersey: Humanities Press. Murray, T. (ed.). 1997. Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime. The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Owens, C. 1980. The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism. October, no. 12, pp. 67-86. Rmer, C. 1993. William Forsythes Artifact. Versuch einer Annherung durch Spache. In: Gaby von Rauner, G. (ed.). Tanz und Sprache. Frankfurt-am-Main: Brandes and Apsel, pp. 27-46. Rousset, J. 1954. La littrature de lge baroque en France. Circ et le paon. Paris: Librairie Jos Corti. Siegmund, G. 2004. William Forsythe: Rume erffnen, in denen das Denken sich ereignen kann. In: G. Siegmund (ed.). William Forsythe: Denken in Bewegung. Berlin: Henschel. ---. 2006. Abwesenheit. Eine performative esthetik des Tanzes. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Tapi, V. L. 1967. La France de Louis XIII et de Richelieu. Paris: Flammarion. ---. 1980. Baroque et classicisme. Paris: Collection Pluriel. Vert, X. 2008. Louis Marin en Utopie: fiction, idologie et reprsentation. In: Careri, G. (ed.). Louis Marin. Le pouvoir et ses reprsentations. Paris: INHA, pp. 53-75.

Mark Franko 35 West 92nd Street 7D New York, NY 10025 USA markfranko@earthlink.net

Fig. 1. Person with Historical Costume in Artifact (photo: Dominik Mentzos)

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Fig. 2 Person with Megaphone in Artifact (photo: Dominik Mentzos)

Fig. 3 Other Person in Artifact (photo: Dominik Mentzos)

Fig. 4: The final variations of Artifact (photo: Dominik Mentzos)

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MBODIMENTS
Maria Evangelatou

The Embodiment of History at the Great Altar of Pergamon: The Power of Hellenistic Baroque

The paper examines the most famous case of Hellenistic Baroque, the Great Altar of Pergamon, in order to suggest a new approach to its multivalent significance. Emphasis is placed on the synergy of sculpture and architecture for the creation of a sacred space that acquired its full potential through its interaction with the Hellenistic visitors. Their spatiotemporal experience of the monument defined their understanding of its political and cultural statements. It is suggested that this embodiment of meaning led the visitors to perceive the altar as a solidification of time and history and a visualization of past, present, and future.

Evangelatou was awarded her B.A. in archaeology at the University of Ioannina, Greece, and studied museology and art conservation at the Universit Internazionale dellArte, Florence. She received her diploma in art history from the University of East Anglia and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Byzantine art from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Institutes that have supported her research include Dumbarton Oaks, the Princeton Program in Hellenic Studies and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She teaches Ancient Greek, Byzantine, and Islamic visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The Great Altar of Pergamon, created in the first half of the second century B.C. in the homonymous city of Asia Minor, can by justifiably considered the most representative and elaborate case of what scholars call the Hellenistic Baroque.1 However, my main purpose in this paper is not to present those elements that justify the identification of baroque before the Baroque in the Pergamene monument. Rather, my intention is to emphasize previously unnoticed features of the altar that highlight its admirable complexity, its

It is not the body that realizes, but it is in the body that something is realized, through which the body itself becomes real or substantial - Deleuze, 2006, p. 120. interaction with the Hellenistic visitor, and its function as a powerful political, religious, and cultural statement. In other words, I will discuss features of visual conception and perception that are also central in the creation and function of European Baroque monuments, but I will not attempt to draw extensive parallels that only specialists of the latter period could identify in a well-informed and systematic way.2 After a brief historical introduction on Hellenistic Pergamon, I will make selective reference

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to iconographic, compositional, and stylistic aspects of the altars sculptures that contribute decisively to the construction of the monuments meaning. Finally, I will examine the collaboration of architecture, sculpture, spatial design, and ritual for the creation of a sensorial experience that led to the embodiment of meaning by the Hellenistic participants while they were themselves absorbed in the body of the monument. I hope that this approach will be interesting to those specialists of European Baroque art who have been influenced or intrigued by Deleuzes Fold.3 The Great Altar of Pergamon is one of the most famous and studied, yet still puzzling monuments of the Hellenistic period.4 It was constructed in the first half of the second century B.C. on the acropolis of Pergamon, the Greek city of Asia Minor, in present-day Turkey, which was the capital of the Hellenistic kingdom of the Attalids.5 The dynasty was founded by Philetairos (c. 343263), son of Attalos and commander of the city of Pergamon during the power struggle between the successors of Alexander the Great, who divided among them the empire created by the Greek king of ancient Macedonia in the fourth century. During the early third century, as the royal families of the successors were embroiled in bitter wars, Philetairos took the opportunity to promote himself as independent ruler of Pergamon and used the immense funds of the citys treasury entrusted to him by Alexanders generals in order to advance his own goals.6 Since Philetairos and his family were newcomers in the political arena of the Hellenistic world, of obscure descent and with no connections to the royal houses of Alexanders successors, and since the city of Pergamon was a relatively new foundation with no historical ties to the major cities of the Greek world, the Attalids had to promote their status and legitimize their claims as rulers through an intensive political campaign of cultural sponsorship and military victories.7 Both Philetairos and the family members who succeeded him spent great sums of money to ensure alliances with other Greek cities and to fund defensive and offensive wars that expanded their territory, but above all to elevate Pergamon as a preeminent cultural center of the Greek world.8 Myths were employed to further promote the Attalid political and cultural agenda. The claim that the progenitor of the dynasty and founder of Pergamon was Telephos, son of Herakles and the Arcadian princess Auge, provided a prestigious Greek lineage for the Attalids and their capital city.9 In addition, the Pergamene rulers won a number of decisive victories against the Gauls, warrior tribes of Celtic origin that had invaded Asia Minor in the third century and posed a great threat to the Greek cities of the region. In Greek eyes, the Gauls were the new insolent barbarians who defied Greek supremacy and cultural superiority and should be defeated like the Persians before them.10 It is already established in the literature that the Great Altar of Pergamon is a monumental expression of and tool for the promotion of the above Attalid concerns of political, 109

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cultural and military supremacy in the Greek world.11 The following analysis will be set against this background. What is known today as the Great Altar of Pergamon is in fact the monumental precinct of an altar whose exact dedication remains unknown.12 Most surviving fragments of the monument are kept today in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, where the complex is partially reconstructed (Fig. 1). Its original location was on a terrace inside the royal citadel of Pergamon, at the upper part of the acropolis (Fig. 2).13 The -shaped monumental altar precinct consisted of a high podium with the Gigantomachy frieze, which supported an Ionic colonnaded courtyard with the Telephos frieze around the actual altar, accessible through a large stairway from the west. Free-standing statues of numerous figures stood between the columns at the exterior side of the colonnade and on the roof above.14 Although the most famous part of the monument today is the Gigantomachy frieze (Figs 1, 3), it is clear that the religious, political, and cultural function of this structure depended on the masterfully orchestrated interaction of all its parts. The monument should not be seen simply as a combination of architectural, sculptural, and painted parts,15 but rather as a sacred space of multifaceted significance, its elements organically integrated to create a complete body which reaches its full potential in interaction with the bodies of the visitors. Before I can turn to this interaction, I will discuss some significant aspects of the monuments parts, starting with the Gigantomachy. 110 This major event of ancient Greek mythology was considered the final battle of the Olympians against the forces of chaos and disorder, the unruly children of the primordial goddess Gaia. The extermination of the giants sealed the beginning of a new age of justice and order in the world, under the guidance of the Olympians led by Zeus. In ancient Greek literature and visual culture, it was customary to use the Gigantomachy as a metaphor for important contemporary conflicts that were cast into the antithesis of order versus disorder, justice versus injustice, entitlement versus usurpation, or simply superiority versus inferiority (Castriota, 1992, pp. 139-141).16 A case well known in antiquity appeared in the sculptures of the Parthenon, constructed in 447-432 B.C. on the acropolis of Athens with money of the citys allies in order to celebrate primarily the victory of the Athenians over Persia and therefore their supremacy in the Greek world.17 On the Periclean monument, the insolent giants who were depicted like savages, dressed in animal skins and fighting with rocks and tree trunks, were probably an allusion to the Persians, constructed as the barbarian, uncivilized, arrogant invaders whom the Greeks defeated with divine help.18 Giants represented with the round shield of Greek hoplites could be a cautious reference to other Greeks whom Athenians increasingly treated as inferior subordinates, punishing them severely whenever they dared defy Athenian supremacy.19 The same double reference can be seen in the altar of Pergamon, where

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it has been observed that some giants are dressed in animal skins and fight with rocks and tree trunks or carry non-Greek armor, while others have helmets or shields that are recognizable as Greek, or even specifically carried by the armies of Alexanders successors that were enemies of the Attalids (Fig. 3, left). In addition, several giants are now clearly characterized as alien and inferior through their hybrid, half-humanhalf-animal forms (Fig. 3, center). It is well know that ancient Greeks placed barbarians in the same category with animals, so it can be assumed that here the giants, many of whom crawl on snaky lower parts, are a reference to the non-Greek enemies of the Attalids, especially the Gauls.20 There is at least one such giant who bears a mustache, an ethnic feature of the Gauls known from contemporary Greek written sources and visual representations.21 It is worthy of notice that many giants bite their opponents in the same way that the sacred animals of the gods, but never the gods themselves, bite the giants (Fig. 3).22 Scholars have drawn comparisons with Greek monuments of the fifth century where centaurs, another category of uncivilized creatures that Greeks used as metonyms for their barbarian enemies, also bite their Greek opponents who fight honorably according to the rules.23 The exact nature of these rules deserves attention: I believe a reference is made to athletic competitions, which were a quintessential component of ancient Greek culture and civic identity.24 In the fighting competition known as pankration, or all-powerful, the only two moves that the opponents were forbidden to use under penalty of disqualification were biting and eye-gouging (Miller, 2004, p. 57). And indeed, next to biting the giants attempt eye-gouging on the Pergamon altar, which as far as I know is not attested in older surviving monuments (Fig. 3).25 Pergamon had prominent training facilities and its own athletic competitions, established by the rulers in order to promote their cultural and political goals and reinforce communal identity and pride among the citizens.26 The improper ways in which the giants fight would not have been missed by ancient Greek viewers, reinforcing the identification of these figures with the uncivilized other. Another significant feature that scholars have observed in the Gigantomachy frieze is the fact that the passionate emotional expressions of baroque character are mostly confined to the giants and the animals, while the facial features of the gods are calm and composed, and only their clothes and their gestures reveal agitation. This obviously highlights emotional control as a supreme value of ancient Greek culture, but it also reinforces the victory of the confident powerful gods over their desperate opponents (Pollitt, 1986, p. 105).27 At the same time, the treatment of the composition, with dense overpopulated scenes, intense movements and deep relief, confers an air of urgency and utmost importance to this conflict, which becomes emblematic of all other conflicts but is also vividly present in front of the viewers. This 111

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brings me to the second part of my paper, relating the Gigantomachy to the Telephos frieze and the experience of embodiment that the ancient viewer would have undergone when visiting the monument. There are several aspects that differentiate the Telephos frieze from the Gigantomachy, for example its smaller size and chronological narrative. While the Gigantomachy is a continuous frieze of an active conflict with no beginning and end, the Telepheia narrates a story of separate episodes, unfolding in different times and places and with very different subjects.28 A constant element in scholarly discussions of the Telephos frieze is the novel depiction of landscape and architectural elements and the illusion of spatial recession (Fig. 4).29 Stewart has perceptively observed that the special features of the Telephos frieze serve a number of specifically narrative functions: to anchor the story in a definite spatiotemporal context (in our case, one the Pergamene spectator would often know intimately); to increase its power and credibility; and to promote the illusion that the spectator is an eyewitness to it. Yet in the final analysis both landscape and personifications are two-edged swords. While they certainly contextualize the story and make it and its hero more relevant to the viewer, they also compromise the universality of heroic myth and to some extent relativize it. As always no advance is ever cost-free (1996, p. 42). In my opinion, it was exactly this specificity that was intended in the Telephos frieze, and was created 112 through the above visual components: the goal was to relate the newly founded city of Pergamon and its alleged ancient founder with specific locations of mainland Greece and Asia Minor that would support the claim of prestigious ancestry and historical significance.30 Here the myth was not used primarily as a universal paradigm but on the contrary as historical and biographical account. I believe that the intention was not to create the illusion of events that were eyewitnessed by the ancient viewers in their own space, but of events that belonged to a specific spatiotemporal historical context and were therefore recorded as such through the medium of sculpture. Indeed, the frieze was viewed behind the colonnade that supported the protective roof above and created a certain distance from the viewers and interruptions in their continuous reading of the narrative.31 The comparison with the Gigantomachy is most revealing in this respect. Although this primordial conflict was further removed from the viewers in terms of chronology and the nature of the protagonists (gods and giants rather than humans, fighting at the beginning of time rather than the time of the Trojan War), its treatment on the altar turned it into a real event unfolding before viewers who became eyewitnesses: in the Gigantomachy the total absence of landscape elements and the occupation of the entire frieze by a multitude of figures in high relief turns the monument itself into the background of the conflict and makes the sculpted figures present in the space of the viewer (Figs. 1, 3).32 This

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impression is further supported by the unobstructed way the Gigantomachy can be read by the viewers walking in front of it and makes perfect sense considering the contemporary allusions of the composition. The Gigantomachy takes place everywhere but also here and now, because it is not just a cosmic event but a paradigm for contemporary conflicts, in this case the ongoing confrontation of the Attalids with the Gauls and other opponents. The atemporality of the Gigantomachy stemming from its cosmic significance makes it appropriate as a metaphor for any temporal conflict, while the historicity of the Telepheia keeps it anchored in the heroic past of Pergamon and links it to the present exactly as a historical model.33 It is not a coincidence that the Gigantomachy is depicted as still evolving while the life of Telephos has a beginning and an end. If we now turn to the way ancient visitors would have experienced the monument while moving around and inside it, we can begin to unravel additional layers of meaning that depend on interaction and further reveal the multivalence and sophistication of the Great Altar and its parts. In fact, the process of embodied experience that was created when ancient viewers visited the monument or even more importantly participated in the rituals of sacrifice inside it makes the terms visitor and viewer or even worshiper totally inadequate.34 The levels of interaction anticipated in the design and fulfilled in the life of the monument were intended to create a sacred space in which both the people present and the monument itself were transformed by complementing each others significance. This will become more apparent in the following analysis, but in order to emphasize the point, instead of words like viewer or visitor I will use the Greek term symmetexon which can be loosely translated as participant.35 In the following analysis, the symmetexontes who were equipped with the cultural and political awareness necessary for the fullest experience possible were the people of Pergamon themselves, but the message would not be lost on other visitors.36 The ancient symmetexontes would approach the monument from the east (Fig. 2, from right), first viewing its back side, which very much looked like an inverted Greek temple, with the colonnade on top and the Gigantomachy frieze below, and a multitude of statues looking out from the intercolumniations.37 These elements alone would already demand the attention of the symmetexontes, emphasizing the importance of viewing. By its size and stylistic features as well as its location, closer to the symmetexontes than distant temple friezes, the Gigantomachy would immediately become a feature of importance to be carefully examined as the symmetexontes walked around the monument. At this point the frieze was at a higher level in relation to the symmetexontes, which emphasized that they operated on different dimensions, the historical human present and the mythistorical divine past.38 However, as soon as the symmetexontes turned 113

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around the southwest or northwest corner of the monument and started ascending the stairway, their level would be gradually equated with that of the Gigantomachy, and they could see the sculpted figures actually climbing the stairs with them (Fig. 1). This would create a common level of existence emphasizing the contemporary allusions of the mythical conflict.39 When reaching the top of the staircase, the symmetexontes would be once more on a different level, this time above the Gigantomachy, which could be now perceived as the base of the altar with the story of Telephos around it. This phase of the experience could be read in various complementary ways. The mythistorical conflict of the Gigantomachy was the first step in the establishment of universal order, instituted by the Olympians and safeguarded by the Greek kings, first Telephos and the generation of the Trojan War and later their Attalid successors. A similar idea was in fact reflected by the rhythmical alternation of statues and columns above the Gigantomachy frieze on the outside of the monument. The identification of these female statues is disputed, but according to one reading they might have been an extended group of muses and ancestors of the royal family of Pergamon, both of which could be seen as forces of culture and order standing above the defeat of disorder.40 Turning again to the inside of the monument as perceived by the symmetexontes at the top of the stairway, the contemporary references of the Gigantomachy just seen would also emphasize the idea 114 that constant vigilance and struggle were needed in order to safeguard the ancestral values represented by Telephos and to perpetuate the current prosperity of Pergamon for which the gods were thanked by sacrifices on the altar.41 In a sense the sacrifices would reinforce the domination of humans over animals and nature, in the same way the Gigantomachy had reinforced the similar status of the gods over the half-animal children of nature.42 This analogy would highlight the significance of the rituals taking place in the altar, binding together the various elements of the monument in interaction with the symmetexontes.43 In addition, modern viewers tend to ignore that the ancient symmetexontes were dressed in the same clothes as the figures in the sculptures.44 This feature, which further bonded the monument with the symmetexontes, was especially reinforced when each symmetexon experienced the space with others in it: the monument was complete and significant to its fullest potential especially when it was populated by symmetexontes, even though as a dedication to the gods and a testament to Pergamene wealth and power, it was also significant on its own. In a sense there is an analogy here with the function of a theater, which is fulfilled through the interaction of actors and audience. In fact the Pergamene monument has some elements that are reminiscent of ancient theaters in reverse, with the great stairway leading up to an altar and a proscenium-like arrangement, while in actual theaters the seats looked down to an altar,

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beyond which stood the proscenium. This reversal could be perceived as a sign of the heightened role of the symmetexontes in the Pergamon altar and their interaction with the sculptures. A modern viewer might tend to identify the sculptures with the actors, reenacting a story, and the symmetexontes with the viewers or the audience, passively watching the action. This reading ignores the role of the symmetexontes as actors in the rituals performed at the altar and the role of gods and heroes as viewers, receiving the honors offered by the symmetexontes. In other words, we need a more flexible reading, in which the sculptures and the symmetexontes interacted in ways that collapsed the distinction between actor and viewer. They both acted stories that ran parallel to each other and at the same time intersected; their interdependence was what brought the experience of the monument to its fullest and completed its meaning.45 It is appropriate to remember here that during ritual sacrifices the experience of the symmetexontes was further enhanced by the participation of other senses besides vision, through music, smell, and taste, components that were also addressed to the gods and rather than separating the two levels of existence they further intensified their interrelation. In this sense, the sacred space and experience constructed through the monument and the symmetexontes prefigures the function of another sacrificial space, the Byzantine church in which the faithful are in communion with the figures surrounding them on the walls and participate together in the celebration of the Eucharist that reinforces the links between past, present, and future.46 If space is the solidification of time (Queyrel, 2005, p. 174 quoting Novalis), then certainly the sacred space that was created at the Great Altar was a solidification of Attalid Pergamene identity in time and history. According to the above analysis, the ancient symmetexontes would better understand the ideological references of the monument to time and space through their own spatiotemporal interaction with this complex construction. Alert from such an experience of embodiment, they could look at the monuments body with renewed insight and identify structural elements that further enriched its temporal significance: in the context of a spatiotemporal reading, the monumental west stairway could be perceived as a visualization of the progression of time (Figs. 1, 5). Interestingly, the base of the entire monument, below the Gigantomachy frieze, was formed by a few steps (krepis),47 which could be a reference to undifferentiated time at the beginning of the cosmos. Above them the monument consisted of three parts of progressively diminished solidity that could refer to the succession of past, present, and future and their interdependence (Figs. 1, 548): 1. The level of the Gigantomachy, the solid past that was also a metaphor of the present. The conflict that brought order to the universe and therefore structure to time. It initiated the past of a specifically Greek world under the protection of the Olympians and their values, still 115

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operating in the kingdom of Pergamon and its victorious campaigns.49 2. The colonnade and altar courtyard, a more structured and yet more permeable present (the space of Pergamene rituals) that looked back to the roots of history (Telepheia). It presented the origins of the city and its rulers and linked past and present in a more historical and less metaphorical way. 3. The level of free-standing statues on the roof (akroteria), the less solid and more fluid part of the monument, the future. It included figures of the Olympians and mythical creatures that supervised the offerings on the altar and ensured a prosperous future for the pious city.50 In smaller size and higher level than the other sculptures, these figures looked more distant, like future itself.51 At the same time, only the second and third levels of the monument (present and future) included free-standing sculptures, while the past of the Gigantomachy and the historical references of the Telepheia were represented in relief, embedded in the marble of the monument, literally set in stone and in the structure of time.52 It is certainly a pity that time didnt pass gently over a monument dedicated to its solidification. When the rituals performed on the altar were no longer relevant after the advent of Christianity, when no symmetexontes were left to embody the monument and its significance, it was deliberately ruined, abandoned, or reused and finally amputated from the body of the Pergamene acropolis to be partly reassembled in the inhibitive environment of a museum.53 Yet thanks to the dedication of those who studied it and preserved it in modern times and despite its uprooting, this extraordinary monument continues to stir its viewers and therefore still offers to its ancient patrons perhaps the only kind of temporal solidification available to mortals: posterity.54 Through its design and sophisticated features, the Great Altar of Pergamon was intended to be the site of a multilayered experience by symmetexontes who interacted with the monument and with each other in a holistic way that reached the full potential of embodiment: an experience that was not only sensorial and kinetic, but also intellectual, emotional, and ultimately cultural. It was formulated not only through individual bodies but through the collective body of participants in relation to the body of the monument, conceived and perceived through the cultural and political conditions of the time. The ambitious goals of the Attalids could not find a more powerful tool and a more successful expression than this Hellenistic Baroque.

Endnotes: 1 Although the application of this term is anachronistic strictly speaking, it is still meaningful for reasons that go beyond stylistic analogies between the Hellenistic monument and visual expressions of 17th-century Europe. In my mind, one of the most significant such

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analogies is the recent historiographic reappraisal of both Hellenistic and Early Modern Baroque, after their earlier condemnation by those who had idealized classical Greece or Renaissance Italy and considered decadent whatever did not conform to their standards. This could be the theme of a separate article, and it will not be discussed in the present paper (see Ridgway, 2000, p. 4, for a reference to the reappraisal of Hellenistic sculpture). Usually scholars employ the term baroque in Hellenistic art when they discuss the style of its sculptural production. The Gigantomachy frieze of the Pergamon Great Altar is perhaps the most representative case of Hellenistic Baroque as defined for example by Pollitt, who mentions first, a theatrical manner of representation which emphasizes emotional intensity and a dramatic crisis, and, second, the formal devices by which this theatrical excitement is achieved--restless, undulating surfaces; agonizing facial expressions, extreme contrasts of texture created by deep carving of the sculptural surface with resultant areas of highlight and dark shadow; and the use of open forms which deny boundaries and tectonic balance (1986, p. 111). In addition, Pollitt introduces his chapter on Hellenistic baroque (1986, pp. 111-126) with a number of significant clarifications: First: The term Hellenistic Baroque is convenient not only because there are certain analogies between Hellenistic sculptures and later baroque sculptures but also because it can substitute for prejudicial phrases like high Pergamene or middle Hellenistic. Second: The use of the term should not mislead us to believe that Hellenistic sculpture betrays all the stylistic features of 17th-century European sculptures. Third: The use of the term does not imply an inevitable cycle in which a baroque style will always follow a classic style. See also Ridgway (2000, pp. 39-42) for a stylistic analysis of the Gigantomachy frieze that touches upon its baroque character. 2 Occasional brief references to analogies between European Baroque art and the Great Altar of Pergamon will be included in these endnotes and will not be confined to issues of sculptural style. 3 My limited familiarity with this demanding work is based on the English edition translated by T. Conley (Deleuze G. 2006. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. New York: Continuum). I have found Deleuzes emphasis on the primacy of the body in human perception and expression to be stimulating and refreshing, and although his writing (at least in the available translation) was often obscure to me, I especially enjoyed philosophical passages that verged on poetry or revealed an affinity with Eastern religious (or for others philosophical) systems like Buddhism, which Deleuze sees through the looking glass of the body. The following is a statement that I consider particularly relevant to my approach: It is not the body that realizes, but it is in the body that something is realized, through which the body itself becomes real or substantial (Deleuze, 2006, p. 120). 4 Two of the most extensive recent publications with systematic discussion of previous literature are Massa-Pairault (2007, focusing on the Gigantomachy frieze) and Queyrel (2005, on the whole monument). See also the Pergamon-related articles in Grummond and Ridgway (2001). Important articles on the Great Altar with special attention to the Telephos frieze are also included in Dreyfus and Schraudolph (1996, vols. I-II). Useful introduction and overview of basic scholarly interpretations is found in Pollitt (1986, pp. 95-110, 198205). See also Ridgway (2000, pp. 19-102). The fragmentary survival of the Great Altar, including its architecture, sculptures, dedicatory inscription, and identification inscriptions for the gods and giants of the Gigantomachy, cloud with uncertainty the identification of many figures and architectural components, as well as the purpose, date, and dedication of

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the monument (for which see below), and render hypothetical any modern interpretation of the monument, including my own. 5 Scholars still debate the date of the monument, which is generally placed in the years 180-160 B.C., during the reign of Eumenes II (r. 197-159), the greatest builder of the Attalid dynasty. Within this time span, some researchers prefer an earlier date for the completion of construction, closer to 180 B.C. (after the Attalid victories against the Gauls in 189 and 183), while others promote a later date in the second half of the 160s (after the new triumph against the Gauls in 166). Either way, arguments are still inconclusive, especially when they are based on the interpretation of the monument in relation to political circumstances (resulting in a kind of circular reasoning). For example, Massa-Pairault (2007, pp. 24-28, 123-157) prefers the early dating, and Andreae (1996, pp. 121-126) the late one. Queyrel (2005, pp. 123-126) even suggests that the altar was consecrated after the death of Eumenes II, around 150, by his brother Attalos II (r. 159-138) who supposedly dedicated it to his deified predecessor. Stewart (2001, pp. 39-41) seems to favor a late date in the reign of Eumenes II, but his references indicate how on political grounds an earlier date is equally appropriate. See also Ridgway (2000, pp. 21-25) for another review of dating hypotheses. Based on general values of Attalid culture and politics that remained stable throughout this period, the interpretation of the monument proposed in the present paper is practically unaffected by an early or late date (although I also agree with a dating during the rule of Eumenes II rather than Attalos II). 6 For a brief and useful historical introduction on the Attalids, see Pollitt (1986, pp. 79-83), Shipley (2000, pp. 312-319), and Kosmetatou (2005). For an extensive monograph on the Attalid Kingdom, see Hansen (1971, out of date on certain issues, especially since it does not examine all the available epigraphic evidence) and Allen (1983). 7 Although Attalos, the father of Philetairos, was probably Greek (Macedonian general), his mother Boa was non-Greek (Paphlagonian, and perhaps a courtesan). A Greek settlement is first attested in Pergamon in the fifth century B.C., but the city became important only under the Attalids. The first of them to assume the title of king was Attalos I Soter (r. 241197), probably in the 220s, after important victories against the Gauls. Most of Alexanders successors had proclaimed themselves kings decades earlier, by the end of the fourth century. For an insightful discussion of Attalid cultural policy see Gruen (2001). For a more extensive treatment of their military, diplomatic, and cultural achievements and their selfpromotion as patrons of Greek culture and protectors of Greek freedom, see McShane (1964). For the importance of military victories in the ideology of Hellenistic monarchy and specific references to the Attalids, see Chaniotis (2005, pp. 57-77). 8 The city with its famous library and scholars and its impressive monuments was modeled as the successor of Athens and the rival of Alexandria. Sculptural commissions of the Attalids dedicated to the sanctuaries of Delphi, Delos, and Athens further advertised their cultural and political claims in the Greek world. See Gruen (2001), and for a more detailed discussion of their sculptural dedications and artistic patronage, see Pollitt (1986, pp. 79-110). See also Dreyfus (1996) for a well-written overview of Pergamene history and culture, Nagy (1998) for the Library of Pergamon and its rivalry with Alexandria, and Hansen (1971, pp. 390-433) for an overview of the Attalid patronage of learning. 9 Through Telephos, the Attalids traced the roots of their city to the time of the Trojan War and placed their founder on the same level with major Greek heroes like Achilles and Agamemnon. In addition, through him they claimed descent from mainland Greece and

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especially from the bloodline of the most venerable Greek hero, Herakles, son of Zeus. This lineage indirectly related them to the royal house of Macedonia and Alexander the Great, whose origins were also traced back to Herakles and Zeus. In addition, the Attalids promoted the otherwise obscure hero Pergamos as another founding figure of their capital city, for he was grandson of Achilles and therefore another link to the heroic past of Greece and to Alexander, whose mother Olympias traced her descent from the same Achillean bloodline. These issues are discussed by Gruen (2001) and more extensively by Scheer (2005, esp. pp. 220-226). 10 See Allen (1983, pp. 136-144), Mitchell (2005), and Shipley (2000, pp. 52-54), for a historical discussion of these Gauls, and Marszal (2001) for an art-historical approach. Ancient Greek writers used the name Galatai in the same way modern English writers use the term Gauls, to refer to both the Celts of Gaul and to those who invaded Greece and Asia Minor. On the contrary, the term Galatians is used today to denote exclusively the Celtic peoples of the eastern Balkans and especially of Asia Minor (Mitchell, 2005, p. 281). Hellenistic rulers, including the Attalids, at times fought against Galatian tribes and at times employed them as mercenaries in their own armies. Consequently, the Attalids fought against Gauls both when the latter attacked them individually and when they served under the commands of other Hellenistic rulers who waged war against Pergamon (Mitchell, 2005; Hansen, 1971, pp. 224, 227). 11 For example, both Massa-Pairault (2007) and Queyrel (2005) examine the Great Altar in this context. 12 Scholars suggestions for the patron deities offer a wide range of possibilities. For example, Queyrel has suggested Eumenes II was honored together with the 12 Olympians (2005, pp. 112-122, esp. pp. 114-115). Massa-Pairault (2007, pp. 7-23) suggests that next to Zeus, Herakles was also honored. Stewart (2001, pp. 34-41) agrees with the hypotheses that the altar was dedicated to Zeus, Athena, and possibly also Queen Apollonis (mother of Eumenes II and Attalos II). They all offer reviews of previous literature on the subject (also in Ridgway, 2000, pp. 21-25). 13 For a discussion of the original location, modern discovery, excavation, transportation, and exhibition of the Great Altar, see, for example, Queyrel (2005, pp. 21-48), Kstner (1996a), and Heilmeyer (1996). 14 The visitor entered the terrace of the Great Altar from the east, facing its back side, decorated with that part of the Gigantomachy frieze on which most Olympians were represented, including Zeus and Athena (the most important Olympians in Pergamon) and their indispensable helper and Pergamene progenitor Herakles. The Gigantomachy frieze covered the entire length of the east north and south sides of the podium and the projecting west wings that flanked the stairway. The smaller frieze with the life of Telephos was on the north east and south wall of the Ionic colonnade above, facing towards the altar courtyard. See Pollitt (1986, pp. 96-97) and Ridgway (2000, p. 25). For more information on the freestanding sculptures, see below. 15 Originally, the sculptures of at least the Gigantomachy frieze were painted, as was common practice for sculptures at the time (Queyrel, 2005, pp. 48, 79). This interaction of architecture, sculpture, and painting can be considered analogous to similar tendencies in European Baroque (although in ancient Greece it also characterized archaic and classical monuments such as temples). 16 For example, scholars have debated the political message of the Gigantomachy on the

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north frieze of the Siphnian Treasury in Delphi (525 B.C.) where the victorious gods are represented as individual unarmored warriors, fighting heroically against giants in the armor and the phalanx formation of contemporary Greek armies. The interpretations by Watrous (1982) and Neer (2001) vary greatly, but they both refer to political tensions within the Greek world (or specifically the Siphnian society). Only after the Persian Wars was the Gigantomachy systematically used as a metaphor for the conflict between Greeks and non-Greeks. 17 The Gigantomachy was represented on the east metopes (barely legible today) above the entrance to the temple, and on the interior of the shield of the chryselephantine statue of Athena Parthenos inside the temple (now lost). For an extensive discussion of the political message of the Parthenon and especially its sculptures in relation to the victory of Athens in the Persian Wars and her imperialist policy, see Castriota (1992, pp. 184-232; pp. 138143 for the Gigantomachy). 18 Vian (1952) has argued that the Parthenonian sculptures had a particularly emphatic representation of giants as savages that was previously uncommon in Greek art. This innovation (reflected in Gigantomachy depictions on Attic pottery of that time) could highlight the allusion to the just defeat of the uncivilized barbarian Persians according to the Athenian point of view. 19 Despite the bad preservation of the metopes, it is evident that at least in one if not more of them the round shield was held by the giant rather than his divine opponent (Castriota, 1992, p. 140, fig. 13.4; Praschniker, 1928, fig. 121; basic bibliography on the north metopes of the Parthenon in Schwab, 1996). Although in his analysis of the Parthenon metopes Castriota focuses primarily on anti-Persian allusions (1992, pp. 134-175), I believe references to Athenian supremacy in relation to other Greeks was also a prominent part of the agenda, especially since the Athenians had grown increasingly despotic towards their allies (even more so after the inauguration of the Peloponnesian War in 431). The fact that in 454 the Athenians moved the treasury of the Delian League from Delos to Athens and used it to construct the Parthenon in which they stored the new revenues is rather telling of the way they treated their allies as subordinates and is also indicative of the political significance of the Parthenon. Whether or not the atrocious behavior of the Greeks during the sack of Troy was depicted on the north metopes, the representation of Akamas and Demophon (sons of the Athenian hero and king Theseus) saving their grandmother Aithra rather than participating in the looting of the city and the massacre of its royal family was probably included as an emphatic reference to Athenian piety and moral superiority. The Amazonomachy chosen for the west metopes was the battle fought on the Athenian acropolis, where Athenian men (and not just Greek heroes in general, as in the Amazonomachy led by Herakles) defeated the insolent oriental invaders. I believe a most significant allusion to Athenian moral superiority in relation to other Greeks was included in the depiction of the Centauromachy on the south metopes: the probable representation of the myth of Ixion reminded the viewer how the hybristic and unethical behavior of that Thessalian Greek (who killed his father-in-law, disrespected the gods, and attempted to rape Hera) led to the creation of the half-animal violent race of the centaurs, against whom the Athenian Theseus fought valiantly. 20 Stewart (2001, p. 40) discusses the possible references of some fully anthropomorphic giants to Greek opponents of the Attalids. Although Ridgway (2000, pp. 36-37) doubts their armor can securely identify them with specific Greek armies, at least a general Greek rather

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than barbarian identity can be assumed. Massa-Pairault (2007, pp. 126-128), describes all the categories of giants and their possible allusions. I disagree only with her assumption that snake-legged giants refer to rivers with a geopolitical significance: giants were considered sons of Gaia and snakes clearly reflected their chthonic character, while rivers were thought to be sons of Pontos and snakes did not share their fluvial character. Besides, as providers of valuable water, rivers were usually considered benevolent entities. The case of the mustached snake-legged giant discussed below demonstrates the anti-Galatian reference of anguiped giants on the Great Altar. 21 For the mustache as a characteristic trait of Gaulic chiefs, see Marszal (2001, p. 192, and figs. 70, 73). It is significant that this giant is in a very prominent position: among the few figures represented at the left side of the stairway (northwest projecting flank of the podium, the giant defeated by Nereus [Queyrel, 2005, p. 67, figs. 58-59 ]). As the Gigantomachy frieze is only partly preserved today, it is possible that originally more giants were represented with this trait. It has been also noted that three giants appear in a reversed hybrid form, with human body and animal head (lion, bird, and animalistic head with bull horns, Ridgway, 2000, p. 36). A tentative interpretation could be to see them as allusions to the Greek opponents of the Attalids, through a reference to the culture of the non-Greek people they ruled. For example, the Egyptians under the Ptolemies worshiped animal-headed gods, which for at least political reasons were also respected by the Greek rulers (for the acceptance of local religion by the Ptolemies, see Thompson, 2005, pp. 105, 107, 111-112. On p. 107, he mentions the preference of Greek settlers in Egypt for anthropomorphic versions of local gods. Also, when Hellenistic Greek cities adopted Egyptian deities, they preferred the anthropomorphic Isis and Sarapis, but they rarely accepted the dog-headed Anubis, who was the customary companion of these gods in Egypt [Koester, 1998].) Through the defeated animal-headed giants of the Great Altar, the Attalids might have intended to make a statement of cultural superiority and purity, presenting themselves as patrons of exclusively ancestral anthropomorphic Greek gods who fight against inferior beings, reminiscent of the deities of the syncretic culture of Ptolemaic Egypt. The cultural rivalry between Pergamon and Alexandria could be significant here. Massa-Pairault (2007, pp. 83-90, 94-98, 144-145) mentions the possible Egyptian sources for both the lion-headed and bull-horned giants (she does not discuss the bird-headed one), but she also refers to possible oriental connections (Syrobabylonian, Phoenician, Persian, Chaldean) and suggests a complex astrological and religious interpretation. In addition, she hypothesizes that these two giants are a reference to the political confrontation of the Attalids with the Ptolemies (lion-headed) and Macedonians (bull-horned). I do not consider probable the interpretation of the latter giant as a reference to a river (Massa-Pairault, 2007, p. 85), for the river-god Achelloos used as comparative material is represented with a bulls body and horns while this giant has a human body. 22 Indeed, it is significant that the gods not only defeat the animal-like giants but they also control their own animals, whose bestial nature contrasts with the serenity of their masters. The only element that might relate the gods with their sacred animal besides their spatial proximity are rare external features such as the mane-like long hair of a goddess who fights next to her lion (Massa-Pairault, 2007, pp. 50-54), variously identified, for example, as Keto or Adrasteia. 23 Ridgway (2000, p. 59, n. 58) mentions the centaur who bites a young Lapith on the west pediment of the temple of Zeus in Olympia and a similar representation from the frieze

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of the temple of Apollo at Bassae. The giants of the Pergamon Gigantomachy bite their opponents or their armor with their snake legs (e.g., Pollitt, 1986, fig. 103, upper image), but in one famous case of the north frieze, a giant sinks the teeth of his human yet animalwild head on the arm of his opponent (Pollitt, 1986, fig. 109). 24 Local athletic competitions were indispensable components of religious festivals that were prominent expressions of civic identity in ancient Greek cities. In the Hellenstic period a number of cities established or upgraded athletic competitions that they advertised throughout the Greek world in order to attract participants and visitors and earn panhellenic recognition for their festivals, consequently elevating the status and economic prosperity of their city. Athletic facilities were indispensable in Greek or Hellenized cities that were founded or redeveloped in the Hellenistic world, and participation in athletic training and competitions indicated the Hellenization of non-Greek inhabitants of the Hellenistic kingdoms. See Miller (2004, pp. 196-197, 199-201). 25 In a very dramatic and prominent gesture, the fallen giant in front of Artemis attempts to gouge the eye of her dog which is biting his neck (Fig. 3). Massa-Pairault makes reference to pankration when discussing fighting groups of the Pergamon Gigantomachy, including the case of the giant who bites his opponent on the north frieze (note 23, above), but does not mention the violation of regulations (2007, pp. 46, 69, 95). 26 For example, the Nikephoria in honor of Athena Nikephoros (bringer of victory) was a triennial athletic festival (probably a reorganization of an earlier celebration), instituted after an important military victory by Eumenes II against the Gauls in 183 B.C. Obviously, it commemorated the military triumphs of the ruler and his divine protector and celebrated the prosperity and collective efforts of the city. The festival acquired even greater importance when Eumenes invited various other Greek cities to recognize it as equal to the panhellenic Pythian and Olympic games (Hansen, 1971, pp. 448-450). The elevated status of the Nikephoria reflected the prominence of Pergamon. The gymnasium of this city (both an athletic and educational institution as were all gymnasia at the time, Miller, 2004, 186-189) is the largest and most complete to survive from antiquity (Green, 1990, pp. 168-169). 27 To refine this point further, notice how the fully anthropomorphic opponent of Artemis (Fig. 3), a very beautiful giant with helmet and shield possibly alluding to the Greek rather than non-Greek enemies of the Attalids (Massa-Pairault, 2007, p. 139), has the same calm expression shared by the gods, as the worthiest of their opponents. This polarized use of emotional expression differentiates the Hellenistic Baroque of the Pergamon altar from European Baroque, where passion, pathos, and empathy are spread across the spectrum of both positive and negative figures. This is not to say that baroque features have a negative value in the Hellenistic monument, but that they are used according to ancient Greek values, in order to highlight antitheses and conflicts. Scholars debate whether the Pergamon giants and the defeated Gauls of other Attalid monuments are absolutely negative figures or were also intended to invoke the pity of the viewers towards the defeated opponent (Marszal, 2001, p. 195, with further literature). I tend to agree with those who condemn the emphasis on pity as a reading that stems from our own modern perception--although I would not exclude it from the spectrum of psychological reactions possible among ancient viewers. 28 The most important episodes of the story, ranging from peaceful and romantic to agitated or violent events, narrate the reception of Herakles to the court of the Arcadian king Aleos; the heros encounter with the kings daughter Auge; the exposure and childhood of baby

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Telephos in the wild and the punishment of the mother cast in the sea in a chest; her salvation in Mysia by King Teuthras; her sons later efforts to find her; his favor with the Mysian king when Telephos helps him against his local enemies; the recognition between mother and son; the invasion of the Greeks who mistake Mysia for Troy; the fight and wounding of Telephos by Achilles; Telephos trip to Argos in order to force the Greeks to assist in the healing of his incurable wound; his return and founding of Pergamon and his honorable treatment of the gods. The last episode might be a scene of Telephos heroization. For a discussion of the surviving episodes and the significance of the frieze, see Heres (1996, pp. 83-94) and Queyrel (2005, pp. 95-100). 29 The protagonists usually occupy only two-thirds of the friezes height, while smaller figures on lower relief are depicted on higher ground receding in the background, giving the impression of actions within a real space (Fig. 4). Further emphasis on specific locations is created through the representation of personifications of rivers, mountains, and other places. For a discussion of these features, see Pollitt (1986, p. 205) and Stewart (1996). Usually scholars focus their attention on the hypothetical sources of inspiration for the treatment of space and narrative in the Telephos frieze, by reference to monumental paintings (for the spatial recession) or book illustrations (for the continuous narrative). The latter especially seems improbable. See Pollitt (1986, pp. 200-208) and the critique of the model theories (especially the use of book illustrations) by Stewart (1996, pp. 45-48). 30 This function is also recognized by Stewart (1996, pp. 43, 45) and other scholars like Heres (1996, p. 82), Sturgeon (2001, p. 73), and Green (2001, p. 175). 31 Visitors could also step behind the colonnade and view the frieze up close, but this proximity wouldnt favor an all-encompassing and continuous reading of the story either; rather, it would allow for only a piecemeal reception, episode by episode, which would reinforce the impression of viewing a historical record rather than witnessing an event in real time. The historical presentation of Telephos biography in an important public building of Pergamon and its function as a political tool in the shaping of civic identity make it analogous to other historical representations of famous public monuments of Greek cities (despite their differences in medium, narrative technique, style, and architectural setting). For example, in the fifth century, the Stoa Poikile of Athens (the city which in many ways was the model for Attalid Pergamon) was adorned with painted representations of the Attic Amazonomachy, the Trojan War, and the Battle of Marathon--the historic victory of the Athenians against the Persian invaders in 490. The two mythical stories were considered historical precedents from the heroic past of Greece and models of the recent victory against Persia. For an examination of this and other similar cases, see Castriota (1992, pp. 33-133). For a detailed examination of the architecture of the Great Altars court with the Telepheia, see Kstner (1996, pp. 73-77). 32 Many of the Gigantomachy figures seem about to detach themselves from the monument and are sculpted with great attention to detail, seen for example in the meticulous rendering of different textures. On the contrary, the Telepheia figures are firmly anchored in their sculpted environment, and this impression is reinforced especially by those who retreat in the background, sculpted on lower relief, as if they recede not only in space but also in time (compare Figs. 3-4). Scholars have also noted that the Telephos frieze does not have the detailed finish nor the traces of color found in the Gigantomachy, so they have suggested that the Telepheia remained unfinished (Queyrel, 2005, pp. 48, 79). Although this could have been the result of accidental circumstances, its visual effect would have

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been very appropriate for the ideological function of the monument: it reinforced the contrast between the highly finished and colorful Gigantomachy, vividly present before the viewers eyes, and the hazy and pale Telepheia recording events of the past. 33 Compare Massa-Pairault (2007, p. 33), who states that the Gigantomachy appears inscribed in the time of the universe while the Telepheia in the time of history. My reading does not imply that the ancient viewers would have considered the Gigantomachy nonhistorical in the same sense that we treat today myths as fiction. Even though some ancient scholars perceived it only as an allegory of ethical or physical significance (Queyrel, 2005, p. 168), the majority of people would have considered the Gigantomachy an important event of divine rather than human history (the only human protagonist being Herakles), which was also a model for later human conflicts of the heroic age thought to belong to the distant historical past of Greece (like the Trojan War or the Amazonomachy), in their turn models of more contemporary battles between Greeks and barbarians (like the Persian and Galatian Wars). The historical significance and political relevance that mythical battles had for ancient Greeks is for example evident in the Attalid dedication of a sculptural group on the Athenian acropolis, which represented the Gigantomachy, the Amazonomachy, the Marathonomachy (Athenians against Persians), and a Galatomachy (Pergamenes against Galatians) (Pollitt, 1986, pp. 90-97). As a historical record referring to the life of the Attalid progenitor, the Telepheia of the Great Altar provided very appropriate historical and moral parallels that could enhance the status and reflect the values, achievements, and self-presentation of Pergamene royalty. Like them (or for them), Telephos was of humble beginnings yet glorious lineage and destiny, he successfully fought both Greek and non-Greek enemies, he represented Greek supremacy in a land of non-Greek indigenous people, he was a great builder and a pious and favored devotee of the gods. Indeed, scholars have noted that the myth of Telephos was manipulated in the Pergamon frieze in order to better serve the political and cultural goals of the Attalids (Queyrel, 2005, p. 108). Certainly, the function of the Telephos frieze as a reference to second-century Pergamon was based primarily on its historicity. In other words, on the Pergamon altar both the Gigantomachy and the Telepheia made references to past and present, but while the Telepheia was constructed firstly as a historical event and therefore secondly as a contemporary metaphor, the Gigantomachys emphasis was visually reversed, showcasing an ever-present conflict and moral model which echoed from the past or rather transcended time. 34 The kind of rituals performed at the Great Altar remains practically unknown to us, and some scholars even dispute whether sacrifices were performed there at all (e.g., Ridgway, 2000, pp. 27-31, questions the function of the monument as an altar). Because of the lack of fire traces, Hoepfner (1996, pp. 55-57) assumes only unburned sacrifices were possible on the altar and even suggests that no religious ceremonies were performed there because the construction was a victory monument. However, the one function does not exclude the other. Various scholars have emphasized the multivalent and multifunctional character of the Great Altar (e.g., Stewart, 2001, esp. p. 49; Sturgeon, 2001, pp. 71-75; Green, 2001, pp. 174-180). Stewart (2001, pp. 46-47) suggests that sacrificial meat was indeed roasted on the altar and explains the lack of fire traces by the revetment of the marble altar with clay or other protective material, as was customary. However, he hypothesizes that animals were not actually killed on the altar but in front of the monumental precinct, because it would have been difficult to force them to ascend the stairway and pass through the narrow intercolumniations (1.2 m.) of the west colonnade without incurring damage to the

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structure. Grummond and Ridgway (2001a, p. 8) express doubts about such a process of sacrifice away from the altar, which would have been contrary to normal practice. It would be interesting to know how big ancient Greek bovines actually were (through a study of bone remains), since the large size of various modern domestic animals in many cases is the result of centuries of breeding. Queyrel (2005, p. 25) has suggested the use of a wooden ramp for the ascent of sacrificial animals on the altar courtyard and has mentioned the possible use of the west stairway as a seating area for viewers of ceremonies taking place on the terrace below. In past reconstructions (including the one in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin), the west colonnade was assumed to have intercolumniations that gradually increased in the center of the structure to avoid a monotonous visual effect, and such planning would also allow more space for large animals to pass through. The recent arguments in favor of equal intercolumniations through the whole length of the west colonnade do not seem conclusive to me, since ceiling slabs of different dimensions have been found on the site (compare Hoepfner 1996a, p. 59-60, with Kstner, 1996, p. 72). Indeed Kstner, who agrees with the use of the monument as a sacrificial altar, also opts for intercolumniations of varied length, adding that this baroque variability was quite common in Asia Minor and was found on temples from the Archaic to the Roman period (1998, pp. 152-153). 35 Symmetexon, plur. symmetexontes: transliteration of the Greek , plur. , participle of the verb which is composed from the preposition and the verb . The latter is a composite of the verb (to have) and the versatile preposition (together, with, between, among, inside, beyond, after; can be also used in the sense of in union with, in agreement with, in the manner of). The verb denotes ownership, sharing, inclusion, participation, or communion and can refer to an intimate experience with notions of embodiment, sensorial perception, the sharing of values or thoughts (e.g., participation in a religious mystery/ritual). In the composite verb the addition of the preposition (together, with, plus) further emphasizes the notion of communal/collective experience, which to a certain extent is already included in the verb because of the preposition (Liddell-Scott, 1996, pp. 1108-9, 1120, 1679.). 36 I do not intend to propose a unified vision, as if all symmetexontes would have experienced the monument in the same way. This is obviously impossible, given differences in gender, social status, personal interests, and specific role in the rituals performed there, to mention just a few variables. (For example, if any symmetexontes were prohibited access to the sacrificial courtyard, their exclusion would make them see in a different light both the monument and the symmetexontes who enjoyed full access.) Nor do I suggest that the following reading is the only way the producers of the monument intended it to be experienced. After all, multiplicity is a major characteristic of this complex creation. Besides, our cultural and spatiotemporal distance from a monument that survives in such a fragmentary state makes all our modern readings hypothetical. As Queyrel notes (2005, p. 18) notre vision est fugitive et partielle et, en cela, nous rertouvons la vision dun spectateur antique qui na jamais exist sous une forme unique; il y avait pluralit de visions, dans lAntiquit aussi bien que de nos jours. However, I do believe that the following considerations were central in the conception and perception of the monument in its ancient context and can help us realize its communicative power, because they suggest a basic framework within which other paths of perception and understanding can be developed. In my opinion, modern attempts to relate all the parts of the Pergamon

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Gigantomachy and Telepheia with specific historical events and personages and timespecific political statements of the first half of the second century (as in the analysis of Massa-Pairault, 2007, pp. 123-157), besides being conjectural and impossible to prove (or disprove), also reduce the potential of the Great Altar to be continuously relevant in its Hellenistic context as a powerful statement of Attalid cultural, political, and military superiority regardless of specific historical developments that occurred shortly before its construction. Indeed, very precise references to recent historical events could have been included in the planning of the monument and especially in the design of the Gigantomachy by its erudite planners, and be addressed to an equally sophisticated audience. However, this was also an extremely expensive public monument that took years to complete and was addressed to all the citizens and other visitors to the city. Therefore, the planners would have wanted it to be meaningful in a basic yet significant and time-proof manner, referring to fundamental values, achievements and aspirations of the Attalid kingdom. Queyrel (2005, pp. 136, 148) emphasized that even if very erudite, this monument was also very simple and destined for a collective experience. Grummond and Ridgway (2001a, p. 6) also admitted layers of meaning in the perception of the monument by sophisticated ancient viewers but they wondered whether modern scholars have exaggerated the impact of history and propaganda on the planning of the monument. Therefore Greens statement that we cannot define the type of propaganda constructed by the Great Altar without a precise dating (2001, p. 170) would be true only if we were after a very narrow and temporally specific propaganda--which is not my goal. Green himself eventually identifies a more general scope for the intended message of the monument that would not be affected by a year-specific dating (2001, pp. 176-180). 37 It should be noted that the placement of statues in the intercolumniations is in fact uncertain (Queyrel, 2005, p. 43). For a discussion of possible architectural models that might have informed the design of the Great Altar (which remains an exceptional creation), see Sturgeon (2001). 38 I use the adjective mythistorical and the noun mythistory (composites from the words myth and history) to refer to events or stories like the Gigantomachy, the Trojan War, and the Telepheia as the ancient Greeks perceived them or at lest presented them and used them: something that had happened in the remote past and was believed to be true (and therefore historical in the modern sense of the word history) even though it was beyond scientific verification and its transmission through oral tradition might have embellished it with imaginary details. Today, we know that this is indeed the nature of the Trojan cycle, a legend woven in the first millennium B.C. around a core of historical memories from the Mycenaean past of Greece in the second millennium. Ancient Greeks would describe such stories as myths (mythos, ), oral narrations about the remote past, unverifiable but believable and to a large extent true), in contrast to history (historia, ), which was knowledge/information or narrative resulting from research and/or eyewitnessed experience/accounts. These differences between mythos and historia can be also seen in the use of the word mythos to denote an imaginary (fabricated) story already from the fifth century B.C. onwards. In ancient Greek, the word mythistory (mythistoria, ) also denoted an imaginary story, mythical in todays sense of myth as fable (Liddell-Scott, 1996, pp. 842, 1151.). 39 Green (1990, p. 352) cites Robertson (1975, p. 538) in the following way: The friezes figures, carved in high relief, actually intruded, with foot or knee or hand, onto the steps by

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which the worshipper ascended to the altar. The two worlds intersect and at this point are one. It should be noted, however, that at the same time the symmetexontes would continue to perceive the larger-than-life size of the Gigantomachy figures, thus being reminded that they operated in parallel but different dimensions. 40 See Stewart (2001, pp. 41-43), for this identification of the figures and an interpretation that emphasizes culture and virtue in juxtaposition to the Gigantomachy. He offers arguments against the identification of these female statues with personifications of cities under Attalid control. On the contrary, Sturgeon thinks personifications of these and other Mediterranean cities (perhaps bringing gifts to the Pergamene kings) could have been included in the group, together with representations of priestesses (2001, p. 72), in addition to muses and Attalid ancestors. Hoepfner also makes some suggestions about the visual and conceptual relation between the colonnade with female statues and the Gigantomachy below: tranquility above agitation; equal height of figures; and rhythmical placement of columns and Gigantomachy combatants at roughly four-foot intervals (1996, p. 55; 1996a, p. 62). 41 Herakles was another link between the Gigantomachy and the Telepheia (Massa-Pairault, 2007, pp. 3, 19). The preeminent Greek hero was not only the only human to take place in the Gigantomachy but was also necessary for the victory of the gods. At the same time he appeared as a protagonist and father of Telephos in the Telepheia. 42 For the debate about the performance of sacrifices on the altar, see note 34, above. It is worthy of notice that on a fragmentary dinos by Lydos of the mid sixth century, one of the most detailed archaic representations of the Gigantomachy appears above a frieze depicting animals sacrificed and hunted (Moore, 1979, p. 79). Obviously there is no direct connection between this object and the Pergamene altar, separated by almost three centuries and hundreds of miles, but both of them might be considered reflections of the same idea of a certain correspondence between the defeat of the giants and the sacrifice of animals. Queyrel (2005, p. 128) compares the giant about to be killed by Athena on the Gigantomachy frieze with a victim about to be sacrificed. 43 As a basic ritual that established the relationship between gods and humans on the basis of exchange, ancient Greek sacrifices were thanksgiving offerings for divine blessings and favors bestowed in the past and invoked for the future. In this sense, what event could be more appropriate for a thanks offering than the defeat of chaos and disorder through the Gigantomachy, or the analogous victorious battles of the Attalids in which they claimed to have exterminated animal-like barbarians? Indeed thanksgivings for blessings provided by the gods are mentioned in the fragmentary dedicatory inscription of the Pergamon altar itself, probably alluding among other things to military triumphs. See Stewarts discussion of the altar as a victory monument (2001, pp. 34, 35, 42, 44-46, 48-49). 44 That is, the gods in the Gigantomachy frieze, the statues in the intercolumniations, and the participants in the Telephos frieze. In addition, some furniture and other objects represented in the Telepheia have a more archaic look while others conform to contemporary secondcentury fashion (Heres, 1996, pp. 96, 99-100), further emphasizing the reference both to the historical past and the Pergamene present. In addition, we should not forget that a number of activities central in the Gigantomachy (war) and in the Telepheia (war, rituals of worship and hospitality, construction works) were intimately familiar to the ancient symmetexontes and central to their lives in ways that we as modern viewers do not share. For example, the continuous presence of war in Hellenistic societies is vividly brought to

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life by Chaniotis (2005). Rituals, altars, and an emphasis on construction works seen in the Telephos frieze would have created a network of cross-references between the historical past of the Telepheia and the actual altar with its precinct, which was a major construction of the time and a venerable ritual space. The ritual of hospitality is presented three times in the frieze, when Aleos receives Herakles, when Teuthras welcomes Telephos, and when the Greeks receive the hero in Argos. Cult rituals appear when Herakles sees Auge serving as a priestess of Athena (her figure is now lost), when the heroine establishes the same cult in Mysia, when Telephos founds a cult in Pergamon, and when the male figure of panel 1 consults an oracle (previously identified as Aleos, now relocated in the frieze sequence and identified as Telephos; compare Pollitt, 1986, fig. 213, with Dreyfus and Schraudolph, 1996, v. I, pp. 16-17, fig. 8). If the last scene of the frieze is Telephos heroization, then it is another cultic reference. Rituals are also depicted in the marriage of Telephos and Auge (not consummated) and in the heros seeking of sanctuary at an altar in Argos. Construction works on a cult building are prominent when Telephos founds a new cult in Pergamon, but interestingly enough construction is also emphasized in an almost self-referential manner (for the artists who worked on the frieze) when carpenters are depicted at work on the chest in which Auge will be cast at sea, and they appear larger and closer to the viewer on the first plane of the scene, while she is removed in the background (Fig.4). See diagram and photos in Pollitt (1986, figs. 213, 216, 217, 220); description and photos in Heres (1996, pp. 83-108). Massa-Pairault, (2007, pp. 147-157) hypothesizes very precise and unverifiable political references in the Telephos frieze, as she also does for the Gigantomachy (pp. 123146). 45 Considering the possible theatrical references of the Great Altar, we should not forget that it was built on an acropolis famous for its theatricality (raised on terraces that offered a magnificent spectacle of the acropolis and of the valley below,Fig. 2). In addition, the altar was built above and close to the theater of the city and had the same orientation (looking west, towards the left in Fig. 2). Both spaces were used for the interaction of the citizens with each other, their rulers and their gods, through cultural, civic, and religious rituals and visual expressions that related the past with the present. See Pollitt (1986, figs. 83, 247, and pp. 230-235) for the the atricality of Hellenistic architecture, of which the acropolis of Pergamon was the supreme example. Massa-Pairault (2007, p. 4, n. 23; pp. 11, 19) mentions the use of the Pergamon theater in political and civic gatherings and celebrations. 46 For the creation and experience of sacred space and ritual in Byzantine churches, see, for example, the collected articles in Safran (1998, especially Ousterhout on architecture and liturgy and Maguire on the cycle of images in the church, pp. 81-151). 47 Kstner (1996, p. 70) mentions four or five steps, and Hoepfner (1996a, p. 560) four. 48 The model of the monument shown here in fig. 5 is better reproduced in Hoepfner (1996, fig. 1, repeated in Stewart, 2001, fig. 1), and is a useful visual aid for a better understanding of the following analysis. 49 Furthermore, the frieze was absorbed in the body of the monument, incorporated in it, as it gradually diminished in height and finally disappeared at the point the stairway reached the courtyard of the altar, or else when the flow of time reached the present (Figs. 1, 5). This merging in a sense visualized the continuity between past and present, the fact that even if the past is lost in time, it is also very much present: it actually climbs the steps of time up until the present and dissolves in it, in the same way the figures of the Gigantomachy ascended the stairway with the symmetexontes, but also disappear below the level of the

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courtyard. 50 It is worthy of notice that, according to Stewart, spoils of war were displayed around the altar table in the courtyard (secured with dowels where holes survive on the stone structure, where Hoepfner has suggested the placement of statues representing defeated Galatians, a theory that has not found wide acceptance). The spoils would have consisted of defeated-enemy weapons and would have offered an additional link between the various spatiotemporal components of the monument. Stewart sees a connection with the battles of the Telepheia and the deities of the roof who would appear to sanction the spoils of Attalid victory (2001, pp. 48-49). A connection with the victorious conflict of the Gigantomachy which also alluded to Attalid triumphs should be seen as another possibility. Therefore, from a temporal point of view the spoils referred to victories of the past (Gigantomachy, Telepheia, Attalid wars), which were the basis for the prosperity of the Pergamene present, expressed in thanksgiving sacrifices that also invoked the presiding gods for continuous blessings in the future. 51 The exact location, identity, and meaning of these figures are still debated. Chariots were part of the group, and it is uncertain who was driving them. Stewarts interpretation of these figures as references to virtue, victory, and prosperity is closer to my reading (2001, pp. 43-46). Queyrel (2005, pp. 44-45) states that centaurs did not belong to this sculptural group as was formerly believed. Since these creatures usually had negative connotations in Greek culture, it would be difficult to justify their presence among protective figures-although Hoepfner (1996a, p. 67) mentions the positive identity of the centaurs Chiron and Pholos, and Ridgway (2000, p. 46) and Stewart (2001, p. 44) relate them to Dionysos. Ridgway (2000, pp. 43-47) expresses doubts about the placement and role of this group of statues, but she does not offer any alternatives and she admits her doubts to be related with her own personal aesthetic prejudices. She mentions the smaller size of the roof sculptures in comparison to the larger than life-size sculptures of the Gigantomachy and the free-standing figures of the intercolumniations, a difference that has induced Sturgeon (2001, p. 72) to reject a divine identification for figures of the roof. However, Ridgway herself mentions the possibility (which she does not find very plausible) that smaller size could have been a conscious choice in order to create the optical illusion of great distance between the roof sculptures and the viewers and therefore make the monument look higher. The temporal reading I propose is perhaps a useful key for the interpretation of this group, whose smaller size could allude to temporal as well as spatial distance. Their placement and orientation remains conjectural; we dont know if all of them were turned inwards to look at the altar, or they were mostly facing west (as they are usually represented in modern reconstructions), so that the ones above the east colonnade presided over the altar and the ones above the west colonnade gazed at the arriving symmetexontes and also the acropolis and the city below them. 52 It should be noted here that the perception of space in interrelated hierarchical levels (a case of which is the above temporal interpretation of past, present, and future) would have been a familiar process to the Pergamenes through the structure of their own acropolis: Pollitt (1986, pp. 233-235) mentions that the planners of the acropolis seem to have thought of the monuments on its slope as ascending in a symbolic as well as a physical way, with the buildings connected with mundane affairs of life at the bottom, those connected with education and the development of the mind in the middle, and those expressing divine powers and supreme cultural achievements at the top (p. 233). The latter included the

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Great Altar, the Library of Pergamon, and the temple of Athena as well as the palace of the Attalids. Pollitt concludes that like the sculptures of the Great Altar (in my opinion, like the entire monument as sacred space) the plan of Pergamon was designed to engage the emotions as well as the mind, and in doing so it created an environment unparalleled by any other ancient city. Finally, Queyrel (2005, pp. 140-145) has noted that most Olympians were positioned in the Gigantomachy frieze so that they appeared moving or facing towards their respective sanctuaries in the city of Pergamon and its surroundings-some of which had been sites of critical battles between the Attalids and their enemies. Even though this cannot be proven for all the Olympians (Massa-Pairault, 2007, p. 30), this sophisticated interrelation can be taken as another aspect of the spatiotemporal character of the Great Altar and reminds us that the entire urban, geographic, and historical context of the monument further enhanced the embodied experience of the symmetexontes. Statues and other dedications that might have stood on the monuments terrace and the altars courtyard would have also influenced its perception, but unfortunately those components are now beyond our reach. 53 For the adventures and vicissitudes of the monuments from the advent of Christianity to the present, see Queyrel (2005, pp. 27-48), Kstner (1996a), and Heilmeyer (1996). 54 Various scholars who have perceived a multivalent function in the Great Altar have particularly emphasized its character as a victory monument (see note 43, above). Indeed, I believe the reference was to a multivalent victory (military, political, and above all cultural victory of Hellenism led by the Attalids), that was won and celebrated through and over time. Green described the altar as the dynasts make-your-own-immortality kit and emphasized the function of the monument as the commemoration of Attalid accomplishments in the name of Hellenism that would endure and be remembered by posterity. He also suggested that its founder Eumenes II was always planning for the future rather than enshrining the distant past (2001, pp. 176, 180). Here my reading varies, as in the Great Altar I clearly see Eumenes planning and addressing the future on the basis of the past. In addition, the emphatic reference to time that I detect in the monument can be also perceived as an interest in tradition. Hellenistic Baroque (and perhaps later European Baroque) was developed in dialogue with the teachings and values of what preceded it, in an intention to compete with, improve, and perhaps outdo, but not to destroy or criticize what came before it. See, for example, the various quotations of famous sculptural creations of the fifth century B.C. in a number of figures in the Gigantomachy frieze, and even stylistic connections between them, discussed by Ridgway (2000, pp. 34-35, 39-42); also Queyrel (2005, pp. 157-160, 169). Compare the interest of Hellenistic scholars in editing texts of the previous literary production of the Greek world (Nagy, 1998). It is worthy of notice that another famous altar and political monument of the ancient world, the Ara Pacis Augustae in Rome (13-9 B.C.) was also designed and experienced from a spatiotemporal perspective that emphasized the connections between past, present and future as well as between myth and history, but contrary to the Pergamon altar which visualized time as an ascent, the Ara Pacis presented it as a cyclical renewal. See for example the discussion by Holliday (1990) and Laurence (2000).

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Works cited: Allen, R. E. 1983. The Attalid Kingdom: A Constitutional History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Andreae, B. 1996. Dating and Significance of the Telephos Frieze in Relation to the Other Dedications of the Attalids of Pergamon. In: Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, vol. II. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, pp. 121-126. Castriota, M. 1992. Myth, Ethos, and Actuality:Official Art in Fifth-Century Athens. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Chaniotis, A., 2005. War in the Hellenistic World: A Social and Cultural History. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Deleuze G. 2006. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. from the French by T. Conley. New York: Continuum. Dreyfus R. 1996. Introduction. In: Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, vol. I. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, pp. 11-14. Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). 1996. Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, 2 vols. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Green, P. 1990. Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evoution of the Hellenistic Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Green, P. 2001. Pergamon and Sperlonga: A Historians Reactions. In: Grummond, N. T. and B. S. Ridgway (eds). From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 166-190. Gruen, E. S. 2001. Culture as Policy: The Attalids of Pergramon. In: Grummond, N. T. and B. S. Ridgway (eds.). From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 17-31. Grummond, N. T. and B. S. Ridgway (eds.). 2001. From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grummond, N. T. and B. S. Ridgway. 2001a. Introduction. In: Grummond, N. T. and B. S. Ridgway (eds.). From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-16. Hansen, E. V. 1971. The Attalids of Pergamon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Heilmeyer, W.-D. 1996. History of the Display of the Telephos Frieze in the Twentieth Century. In: Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, vol. I. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, pp. 29-38. Heres, H. 1996. The Myth of Telephos in Pergamon. In: Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, vol. II. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, pp. 83-108. Hoepfner, W. 1996. The Architecture of Pergamon. In: Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, vol. II. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, pp. 23-57. Hoepfner, W. 1996a. Model of the Pergamon Altar (1:20). In: Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, vol. II. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, pp. 58-67. Holliday, P. J. 1990. Time, History, and Ritual on the Ara Pacis Augustae. In The Art Bulletin, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 542-557. Kstner, U. 1996. The Architecture of the Great Altar and the Telephos Frieze. In:

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Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, vol. II. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, pp. 68-82. Kstner, U. 1996a. Excavaton and Assembly of the Telephos Frieze. In: Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, vol. I. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, pp. 19-28. Kstner, V. 1998. The Architecture of the Great Altar of Pergamon. In: Koester, H. (ed.). Pergamon, Citadel of the Gods; Archaeological Record, Literary Description, and Religious Development. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, pp. 137-161. Koester, H. 1998. The Cult of the Egyptian Deities in Asia Minor. In: Koester, H. (ed.). Pergamon, Citadel of the Gods; Archaeological Record, Literary Description, and Religious Development. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, pp. 111-135. Kosmetatou, E. 2005. The Attalids of Pergamon. In: Erskine, A. (ed.). A Companion to the Hellenistic World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 159-174. Laurence, R. 2000. Monuments and Texts: The Life Course in Roman Culture. In World Archaeology, vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 442-455. Liddell, H. G. and R. Scott. 1996. A Greek-English Lexicon, reviewed and augmented by Sir H. S. Jones, with the assistance of R. McKenzie, and with the cooperation of many scholars, with a revised supplement. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marszal, J. R. 2001. Ubiquitous Barbarians: Representations of the Gauls at Pergamon and Elsewhere. In: Grummond, N. T. and B. S. Ridgway (eds.). From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 191-234. Massa-Pairault, F.-H. 2007. La gigantomachie de Pergame ou limage du monde. Athens: Ecole franaise dAthnes (BCH, supplment 50).McShane, R. B. 1964. The Foreign Policy of the Attalids of Pergamum. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Miller, S. G. 2004. Ancient Greek Athletics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mitchell, S. 2005. The Galatians: Representation and Reality. In: Erskine, A. (ed.). A Companion to the Hellenistic World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 280-293. Moore, M. B., 1979. Lydos and the Gigantomachy. In American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 79-99. Nagy, G. 1998. The Library of Pergamon as a Classical Model. In: Koester, H. (ed.). Pergamon, Citadel of the Gods; Archaeological Record, Literary Description, and Religious Development. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, pp. 185-232. Neer, R. T. 2001. Framing the Gift: The Politics of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi. In Classical Antiquity, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 273-336. Pollitt, J. J. 1986. Art in the Hellenistic Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Praschniker C. 1928. Parthenonstudien. Vienna: B. Filser. Queyrel, F. 2005. LAutel de Pergame: Images et pouvoir en Grce dAsie. Paris: Picard. Ridgway, B. S. 2000. Hellenistic Sculpture II: The Styles of ca. 200-100 B.C. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Robertson, M. 1975. A History of Greek Art, 2 vols. London: Cambridge University Press. Safran, L. (ed.). 1998. Heaven on Earth:Art and the Church in Byzantium. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Scheer, T. S. 2005. The Past in a Hellenistic Present: Myth and Local Tradition. In: Erskine, A. (ed.). A Companion to the Hellenistic World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 216-231. Schwab, K. A. 1996. Parthenon East Metope XI: Herakles and the Gigantomachy. In

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American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 100, no. 1, pp. 81-90. Shipley, G. 2000. The Greek World After Alexander, 323-30 BC. London: Routledge. Stewart, A. 1996. A Heros Quest: Narrative and the Telephos Frieze. In: Dreyfus, R. and E. Schraudolph (eds.). Pergamon: The Telephos Frieze from the Great Altar, vol. I. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, pp. 39-52. Stewart, A. 2001. Pergamo ara marmoreal magna: On the Date, Reconstruction, and Function of the Great Altar of Pergamon. In: Grummond, N. T. and B. S. Ridgway (eds). From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 32-57. Sturgeon, M. C. 2001. Pergamon to Hierapolis: From Altar to Religious Theater. In: Grummond, N. T. and B. S. Ridgway (eds). From Pergamon to Sperlonga: Sculpture and Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 58-77. Thompson, D. J. 2005. The Ptolemies and Egypt. In: Erskine, A. (ed.). A Companion to the Hellenistic World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 105-120. Vian, F. 1952. La Guerre des Gants. Le mythe avant lpoque hellnistique. Paris: Klincksieck. Watrous, L. V. 1982. The Sculptural Program of the Siphnian Treasury at Delphi. In American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 86, no. 2, pp. 159-172.

Maria Evangelatou University of California, Santa Cruz Department of History of Art and Visual Culture D-201 Porter College 1156 High Street Santa Cruz, CA 95064 mevangelatou@hotmail.com 133

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Fig. 1. The Great Altar of Pergamon, partially reconstructed in the Pergamonmuseum in Berlin, Germany. View towards the western stairway. Image in the public domain (photo by Lestat Jan Mehlich, GFDL and Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5, Wikimedia).

Fig. 2. Model of the acropolis of Pergamon, with the Great Altar at bottom center, seen from the south. Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, Germany. By permission of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 3. Great Altar of Pergamon, Gigantomachy frieze, east side. Artemis confronts an anthropomorphic giant while her dog bites a snake-legged opponent who attempts to gouge its eye. Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, Germany. By permission of Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz / Art Resource, NY.

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Fig. 4. Great Altar of Pergamon, Telephos frieze, north wall. Carpenters build a raft or chest for Auge who mourns her fate in the background. Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, Germany. By permission of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Fig. 5. Model of the Great Altar of Pergamon after Hoepfner. Pergamonmuseum, Berlin, Germany. Image in the public domain (www.webshots.com).

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MBODIMENTS
Vol.2, No.1 / 2010

Spatial Effects and Meaning in the Galerie des glaces at Versailles Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlf

The article is an analysis of meaningful spatial effects of the decoration in the Galerie des glaces at Versailles. Visual spaces (representational space of paintings, reflected space of the mirrors, and the physical space of the room) are examined in terms of their interrelations and in terms of the address to the viewer. Visual space is considered the most important tool to arouse curiosity and admiration in the spectator, the rhetorically most efficient aspect of the decoration. Three types of effects are discerned and discussed: ambiguity; control and domination; tension (as intensification, as challenge, and as risk). Baroqueness in art has to do with arousing reactions in an audience or in individual subjects. The artwork seems to perform like a living agent, as it protrudes balancing on its representational essence, transforming not only subject matter, but also the means of art (stone, chalk, paint, ink), enlivening the audience to question and simultaneously demonstrate dimensional differences. And the viewer becomes attracted, maybe confused, and caught in an optical construction (a self-reflection and a world-reflection) with no clear issues.1 Image in a baroque artwork is body, a physical thing with changing illumination and light conditions, a spectacular and triumphal presence, and a passing having the aura of aging and imminent loss. The generality of its character as a sign (its inherent abstractness) stands in contrast to this corporeality.

Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlf has been professor of art history at Stockholm University since 1998. She is leader of an international curatorial program with a wide network in the art world in Sweden with international extensions. Lagerlf is founder and leader of an interdisciplinary research group, Barockakademien, with meetings once a year. She has published works on 17th-century ideal landscapes, the Parthenon sculptures, and theoretical issues. She edited Konsthistorisk tidskrift (Journal of Art History), 200209.

Visual Space of the Galerie des glaces

The decoration of the Galerie des glaces at Versailles (managed 167884 by the premier peintre Charles Le Brun)2 is about the kings deeds in the years immediately preceding the date of the

decoration itself; it shows the impact of controlled action and it invokes present time (or at least recent time) amplified in an aura of mythology and concepts. With its focus on precision, speed, and 137

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vehemence of action, it combines the modes of courtly dance and the display of war.3 Mirrors and visual representations (predominantly painting) compete as devices of visual space in the gallery, but they also suggest each other and depend on each other in the production of effects. The differences between the devices (the sign-function, the causes and conditions) are at stake, but also the resemblance between them in their shared power to induce impressions of visual space with the look of reality. Both mirror and painting suggest visual worlds. The paintings bring forth the rhetorical inventions of the mind. The mirror evokes recognition of identities, sources of impressions, and facts, in a mode of dream, wish, desire, or fear; it is both meta-reflective and reductive, recalling dimensions of early memories. The illusions of both kinds of imagerepresentation and reflectionstress the paradox of a visual reality-impression: the viewer is invited to enter, through vision and imagination, an unattainable dimension. the figures mythological identity and its flying position in a certain light, perspective, and scale. The decorations of the enormous galleryin attached oil painting, in painting on the wall (on a foundation of plaster), and in gilded stuccoamount to an ensemble of various visual represented spaces. A viewer confronted with this compound of pictorial spaces can observe them as co-existing, in a miraculous continuity. What does it take to identify a specific pictorial space (the boundaries of it)? The various virtual openings are shown in a construction that has no clear-cut or essential distinctions, since the sign-system is not verbal but iconic.4 There could be an incitement to imagine a simultaneous realization of many different spaces, merging in an open-ended totality embracing the site and the mirrors (extending the scene into the garden, the castle, the realm). Visual space could then be this larger,

Spatial effects in the Galerie des glaces

In the Versailles decoration, there are three kinds of visual space, interacting: the representational areas as pictorial space; the mirrors as reflected space; and the room as physical space. The meaning of pictorial space is not a question of formal aspects against literary, conceptual, or ideological concerns. Visual space in the decoration is determined by identifications of various sorts and by comparisons with the imagery of the classicist tradition. An impression of a spatial effect occurs not only in relation to manifest shapes; it can be issued from expectations that are sustained or frustrated. Basically, however, spatial analysis concerns framing, correlations, scale, perspective, lighting (including color pitch), and bodily stance, gestures, and relations of figures. But, a figure seen as flying, wearing a red dress, and identified as Mercury, produces a spatial effect that is a compound of 138

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ever-extending compound, consisting in a variety of modes and scales, more or less conceptual. Each part could, however, also be identified through its medium; its character as an object; its frames; scale of figures; and subject matter. But the impulse to experience the various spaces as co-existing (even sharing ontological essence) in an expanding visual world (different from the usual order of things) remains and creates an impression of similarity between the parts and the actually and potentially growing ensemble. This effect of co-existence is similar to mirror reflections and to the way inventive decorations of this kind appear in prints. The mirrors and the representation compete on the issue of sameness in the visual world presented; in the Versailles case, the intermediary expression of prints is missing at the earliest period of the decorations existence.5 Painting and sculpture materialize heavily in the grand vault, addressing the bodily presence of viewers. As painted or sculpted, the image penetrates the physical space; as reflections of the mirrors, the image captures and vanishes towards the distance. The mechanisms of the media themselves are stressed in the pictorial effects. But in the juxtaposition of painting and mirror, the theme of pure visuality is actualized with different kinds of visual mode.6In the Versailles decoration, three kinds of spatial effects are especially elaborate: ambiguity, control and domination, and tension. Ambiguity serves the rhetoric of the message; it stimulates the curiosity and astonishment of the viewer. Control and domination is the main message. Tension concerns the conditions of the triumph or success displayed in the decorationthe challenges and the risks. Ambiguity comes forth particularly through impressions of scale and identification of material or substance. The double view (varying understanding of material and size) activates the viewers energy of attention. The series of large historical and narrative scenes can be seen, in a glimpse, as joined in a continuous world with a shared sky-dimension that seems to spread out behind the girders and frames; yet, each scene is also self-contained; each one renders a detached visual world within the frames. Furthermore, ambiguity is not only an effect of the continuous as opposed to the solitary, but also an option between expanding space and closed surface, between the impressions of an imagined reality and those of an inserted framed canvas. The historical scenes appear as paintings inserted in framework (as quadri riportati),7 and at the same time as openings into an imagined ideal universe. This dual visual function of the narrative scenes adheres to the tradition and the ultimate paradigm of the invention: the vault of the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo. In this tradition, the framework usually recalls architecture; this is the case in the Vatican and in the Galleria Farnese that was widely known through prints and that was also the obvious source for some of the figures in the Galerie des glaces.8 139

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In the Versailles decoration, the frameworks play on two different scales of reference: they suggest architectural devices, such as atlantes, pediments, and niches; but they also appear as metalwork, as if forming a large decorated belt, with jewels and ornaments. In an effect of ambiguity, the viewer can experience how precious collectibles, such as goldsmiths craft, cameos of lapis lazuli, and medallions, turn into colossal format, becoming girders and symbols articulating the broad tunnel vault.9 Things seem to be growing and then become reduced in size, expanding and shrinking, as from a pulse, as if animated in a rhythm of a colossal creature, both distanced and intimately near (Fig. 1). There is an impression of ongoing change in this ambiguity; not only a transformation of size, but also of material and work: from built to carved; from products of mason work and smith work to figures delineated with chisel; from elements of buildings to things to wear and hold. The idea of a metamorphosis is thus performed as a topos of arts magic (hailed in various forms and formats in the steadily recurring references to Ovids cycle of poems, the Metamorphoses,10 during the whole Baroque period). The ultimate effect of this power of transformation is shown in the emotive masks of the decorative frames, where we can witness how the lowest-ranking figures of the pictorial universe suffer or rejoice, looking animated and really alive (not only as vivid representations), although tied to their bodily confinement as masks. 140 All these effects are entertaining and surprising, they quicken the reception of the viewer, and they arouse an interest to capture the messages on triumph and power. Control and domination are effects that occur in relation to the kings figure. The king is displayed in the historical scenes and the medallions as a resource of strength and action, but also as the keeper of this energy, deploying force to control and manage the outcome. The spatial effect of the kings persona is a result of perspective, angle of vision, and bodily stance. The kings figure is seen as composed and stable in contrast to chaotic bundles of figures surrounding him in the battle scenes. In the war scenes, the turmoil of the falling enemies denotes disorder and surrender; in the institutional scenes, the surrounding figures convey the idea of dependence. We witness how figures bend in submission or turn towards the king as if consulting him or waiting for his orders or answers. The king is regularly depicted in three-quarter profile, never completely parallel to the canvass surface, never completely frontal. In this pose, the figure seems to control the space widelysideways and towards the pictorial depth. And in this stance, he seems to hold and withhold a compressed compound of energies that could be spread from his body, issued outwards in the shape of a fan (the range of his potential movements, towards the sides and forwards) (Fig. 2). The large war scenes and the far

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ends of the gallery are adorned with clusters of decorative figures shown arranging trophies and drapery to amplify the scenes and the messages. Also in relation to these elaborate groups of figures, the king himself, in the enframed area above them, radiates an impression of stability in conjunction with activity. The impression is of control and readiness for more action. The stability facet is due to lighting conditions; among the decorative figures, the direction and sources of light are changeable; but the king is always illuminated from the same angle, from the left side (not far left, but slightly in front of the painting, on the left side), allowing his active profile (from right to left) to be emphasized in the scenes where he is turned with his face towards the left. On the northern side of the center, the king is turning towards the left in the narrative scenes (more hard energy is needed); on the southern side, he is usually turned towards the right, with a softer shadow on his profile, advancing on the swiftness and force of his own active speed (Figs. 3 and 4). This is more of a tendency, admitting intermediary settings, (like the narrative scene about the resolution to start war with Holland, on the window side south of the central scene), with more variety on the side of the windows, stressing the eastern part of the decoration above the mirrors as the main and representative one. In the medallions, the system of directions is more heraldic: four medallions with the king seen organizing his rule are flanking the central large scene, where the young king starts to rule on his own; in the medallions, the figure of the king is turned more towards the center (although in the scenes about institution of justice and protection of the arts, he is seen in an intermediary way again, on the throne with his legs pointing away from the center and his face turned towards it). However the directions change subtly with the message and its rhetoric, the lighting of the kings body is always slightly from the left. Tension occurs in various ways in the decoration: as enhancement or intensification; as opposition or contrast; as challenge and, ultimately, risk. The whole tendency of action and transformation in the decoration has natural passages of tension, but the effect also emerges as emphasized, carrying its own meaning. Tension as intensification is an effect of the relation between the two large parts of the vaultthe northern versus the southern. In the north the character of the figures and events is coarser, and the labor of governing and battle is heavier; deceit and conflict are themes; primitive figures like satyrs appear, in one case, as flanking devices; the colors are somewhat darker or duller.11 In the south, by contrast, the themes concern victory, concord, and future prosperity; here, the figures are more ideal, and the colors are more vivid and luminous; even the degree of lapis lazuli in the feigned cameos is higher, turning these pictures more bluish and brighter.12 The most obvious case of enhancement is the passage from 141

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the northern large victory scene to the southern counterpart. In the battle scene on the northern side (the passing of the Rhine, leading to the seizure of Maastricht) the works of war are heavy; the victorious king makes his way with his carriage among corpses and dying enemies; there is a pull downwards, as if from the depths of trenches; the king is turned towards the left, with the energies of his own muscular force accentuated; the label states a duration of 13 days. In the southern victory scene (the seizure of Ghent), on the other hand, we witness the king flying through the sky, without resistance or effort, and the situation has an aura of triumph, but also of a joyous mode; even time has become quicker and lighter (the event happened in six days, cutting the edge of the other victory with speed).13 The change from one side to the other has a tonal character, as a musical theme rendered in two different rhythms or pitches14 (Figs. 3 and 4). Seen by themselves, one by one, the scenes could not convey this message of evolution and enhanced success, but together they bring out a sense of changing qualities and a new atmosphere, the dawning and light of the day, after the grayish dusk. As contrast and opposition, the effects of tension amount to stages in the orchestration of the enhancement from one side to the other, from the threats and burdens of war to the prospects of a glorious peace. As challenge or risk, tension pertains to the decoration seen in a vaster ideological field concerning tradition. Furthermore, tension (and 142 particularly risk) occur in the meeting between mirrors and paintings, in an interrelation with aesthetical (and thus rhetorical) dangers, much more hard to control than any of the other spatial effects of the gallery. The decoration is inscribed in patterns of conflict and adherence to ideas and values, in the classicist tradition of painting and sculpture, the grand got.15 Charles Le Brun had to leave two project ideas behind before delivering the scheme chosen by the kingthe recent military victories and the establishment of rule, a modern theme embedded in mythological references instead of mythology symbolizing the kings rule.16 With present time, French language in the labels, and blossoming natural colors in oil painting, the decoration sides with the modern ideals launched in the quarrel between ancient and modern.17 Impressions of a timeless classical past are different from impressions alluding to recent French lifeeven if mythological figures can join the two dimensions. In the Versailles decoration, the case is not either-or, but both-and; the impressions are of recent military victories in an amplified setting. Jupiter does not symbolize the king; Jupiter and the king share the same identity (Fig. 5). The events appear as allembracing and expanding, as present time and ageless ideals simultaneously. According to the moderns, the French achievements had all the values of classical models and more, because they were advanced and included more and better elements.18

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The French ambitions were aiming towards three sources of cultural value: Antiquity; Christianity; and the national heritage. Like Francois 1er, Louis XIV was the trs chrtien, the protector of Catholicism. And, again in continuity with the 16th century, the rivalry with the Italians on the role as true interpreters of classical sources went on, allowing the grand got and the grande manire to be without nation but preferably rooted in French soil.19 The decoration held the utmost claim; it was the most ambitious endeavor of the most powerful ruler. The aesthetic risk was obvious and the challenge of a possible failure as enormous as the dimension of the task. Le Brun was in the lead, without competition; but the cultural environment was critically very potent; already in his lifetime, Le Brun was questioned on artistic grounds.20 It is, however, with the spatial effects, in general, that Le Brun seeks the glory of his achievement. Le Brun works like a scenographer, installing the scenes with bodily stances, lighting, color intensity, perspective, and scale. These aspects are further out on the register of verbally coded values, determining the theories of the day and also art history in many ways; the decoration has been analyzed in terms of thematic of subject matter, but not in terms of the visual scenography Le Brun worked out, as an ardent member of the modern camp, to whom literary ideas were less important than a method for constructing the images.21 An even more challenging risk, than that between the ancient and the modern, is the one between paintings and mirrors. This aesthetic tension is strikingly obvious and simultaneously subtle and dangerous. The mirrors bring brilliance and extreme luxury into the room. But they also bring another visual code. Mirrors are paradigms and sources for painted images, but also the threatening other: painting idealizes and enhances, splitting reality in dimensions of purification; mirrors stand for equality, sincerity, exposure, desire, and presence. In the gallery, the kings figure in the more triumphant scenes is protected from the mirrors; these paintings are to be seen by the visitor standing by the windows and looking towards the other side, where the main scenes with the king would appear, crowning the mirror row but not reflected in them. In baroque art there is triumph and excess. But there is also always a sense of risk of failure, and an exposure to that risk. Painting pretended to take the viewer to heaven, showing what Gods heaven could be likebut at the risk of ending up with a rough surface that would instantly break. That is where the idea of a performative quality in baroque art is especially relevantnot so much in the processual, exuberant, and spectacularbut in the exposure to risk and a vulnerability bordering on failure. It was an age of endless wars. The sufferings could be turned into glorifications; this idea was a pretense that was expected, it could be needed and asked for, as the only hope to be had. The risk was different. It was sharedlike the space. The king was very seldom in 143

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the gallery, and when he attended ceremonies with audiences he appeared against a covered background, a built stage and a throne. In the gallery, the great power of the French monarchy lets the audience into impose magnificence on people, to silence any opposition and questioningbut also to come out in the open of a shared fragility of being in an act of exposure, to a brilliance that impressed the minds but that could also catch the view of the king from his back. The edge of power is on display, the triumphs and the pretense, and the high stakes of the play that is performed.

Endnotes: 1 There is a constant play with reflections in baroque art. The increasing use of optics is significant as well as the idea that the reflection does not explain, but expands and confuses. At Versailles, the row of mirrors and the kings realm are in a relation of a mise-en-abyme, as one infinity consumed in the other. The term mise-en-abyme refers to a reflection within a reflection (often with the idea of an entailing self-reflection); or a reflection or impression ending up in a sense of infinite abyss creating vertigo or nausea. For further reading, see Dllenbach (1977). 2 For Le Bruns work on the gallery, see La Galerie des Glaces (2007), especially chapter 2, Une oeuvre dart totale, pp 120-211, and chapter 3, Les trente tableaux expliqus, pp 214-288. An early biography on Le Brun is Nivelon (published 2004; Claude Nivelon was a follower and pupil of Le Brun). 3 Van Orden (2005, pp. 3-36, 187-234, and passim). Chivalry in modes and habits such as court dance and elegant and measured gestures stands in contrast to the violence of battle, but in the French monarchy, music and dance were aspects of the military ideal, as means of control and hierarchy of style, ultimately related to the figure of the ruler. 4 In an image, the distinctions are not inherent in the language system, but adhere to the things or dimensions referred to or signified. The figure of a model depicted in an image is singled out as an element, since viewers are used to identify a body as a unit. The distinction between arbitrary and motivated signs (or natural and artificial) is used by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, see Townsend (1998); although contested by modern semiotics, the distinction is still widely in use; it also has an ancient tradition, from Stoicism and Scholastic philosophy. 5 As late as in 1753 appeared a magnificent collection of prints, by Jean-Baptiste Mass (16871767); see Castex (2007). The reason why there were no print albums to accompany the early descriptions was probably economic. The costs of the long wars exhausted the resources of the monarchy. 6 Mirror and painting have been companions in the development of theory and practice for illusionism in visual art. An important tradition was the legacy of Leonardos treatises where the use of mirrors is explicit. But the idea that artificial images could imitate the images made by nature, such as reflections in water or shadows, was part of the narrative tradition on the origin of painting, mainly with references in Pliny and in Ovid. Interests in optics during the Baroque era strengthened the interests in mirrors and other reflective devices. For a survey of this tradition, see Kemp (1989). 7 Quadri riportati is a Bolgonese invention used by Michelangelo in the ceiling decoration of the Sistine Chapel; from there the idea spread and became inherent in illusionist ceiling

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decoration. The Galleria Farnese provided the next major impetus for the idea. See Sjstrm (1978). 8 For instance the grimacing faces of the mascarones and the figure of the flying Mercury are obvious quotations. 9 The influence of interests for collections of cabinet size probably came from the Petite Acadmie, an assembly of learned men, and men of letters, not painters or philosophers. See Milovanovic (2005, pp. 60-68), on the Petite Acadmie, founded by Jean-Baptiste Colbert in 1663, to institutionalize the erudite advisory group concerned with ideological programs for the monarchy; in 1701 it was renamed as Acadmie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Although the modern side in the conflict on the arts, with leaders such as Charles Perrault and Charles Le Brun, represented a panegyric attitude to the present French rule, Louis himself carefully selected men from the side of the ancients (Nicolas Boileau and Jean Racine predominently) for important and honorable tasks. See Fumaroli (2001, pp. 178179). 10 Ovids poems in the Metamorphoses are tales on the transformations of human bodies into plants, animals, and other nonhuman forms, thematizing subjects such as the poet, the creative invention, and relations of love. The poems were immensely influential during the 16th and 17th centuries, especially for visual arts. See, for instance, Barolsky (1998). 11 For this observation, see Mrot (2007). See also note 12. 12 Martin (2007). lisabeth Martin notices how the painting techniques stress the brilliance of the south side in relation to darker and cooler colors on the north side. 13 The two double scenes are obviously pendants. But in a baroque taste for complexity, the references are tied crosswise: the main northern scene, which shows the king leading the war as a Roman warrior and as Jupiter is the passing of the Rhine, while the victory itself, on Maastricht, is shown in personifications and mythological figures; the main southern scene, corresponding to the passing of the Rhine is the seizure of Ghent, showing the king again as Jupiter, flying through the sky; and the effects of the victory, on the enemies, are shown through groups of personifications. Thus we have the scheme: North 1 (opposite the windows) = the troops cross the Rhine, the king as Jupiter + South 1 (on the same side, opposite the windows) = the victory at Ghent, the king as Jupiter; North 2 = the victory at Maastricht with personifications + South 2 = the plans of the Spaniards are disturbed. Thematically and historically, North 2 + South 1 belong together. Through visual analogy, however, between North 1 + South 1in the fact that the king as Jupiter is the protagonist in both and that the images are focused on the prominent place above the mirrors, lightened from the windows oppositethere is an impression of the initial war action (the passing of the Rhine) as already entailing the victory at Maastricht. In reality, the victory at Maastricht was extremely difficult with large numbers of dead; these events were actual and terrible in fresh memories of people. See Lynn (1999, pp. 119-120) and Treasure (2001, pp. 143). Le Brun makes a visual apology for the whole war in the juxtaposition of the scenes, showing the initial passing of the Rhine as already a measure with the promise of imminent victory, although the hard times are also shown as prerequisite. 14 See note 3. 15 The expression grand got was current on the elevated style in painting, used both by the ancients and the moderns. Both sides advocated models from Antiquity, but the moderns extended the realm of classical values into modern times, and they stressed rationality and method. In the modern camp, Roger de Piles developed theories around

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the concept got, using the term got artificial for the elevated and cultivated taste in art. The term le vrai got was also used, and it was stressed that it had no nationality. De Piles developed his thoughts about got especially in Lide du peintre parfait, the introduction of Abreg (sic) de la vie des peintres, and in the chapter Du got et de sa diversit, par rapport aux differentes Nations, in the same work (1715, pp. 538-545). I thank Linda Hinners for discussion on the notions of taste and style in de Piless works (see also note 19). 16 On the decision about a change of subject matter and idea of the decoration, see Thuillier (2007). Thuillier states (p. 24), that there is no document proving how, on whose initiative, the decision was taken, but it was certainly within the nearest council of the king, Le Conseil des Dix. Nivelon (2004), who wrote about Le Bruns life, says it was on the highest level, which means the king himself. 17 In a conference at the Acadmie Royale de peinture et de sculpture, Le Brun made a logically based apology for drawing, probably in order to claim excellence in drawing as the cause or condition for perfect painting. See Confrences indites de lAcadmie Royale (1903, pp. 35-44). 18 Fumaroli (2001, pp. 18-24). 19 The Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin the younger who was in charge of the scenography of the Swedish monarchy (its buildings and decorations as well as its entries, festivities, etc.) arranged for a group of French artists to come to the Swedish court to work on the castle decoration, and after the fire destroying the whole castle in 1697, to work on the rebuilding. In the correspondence with his agent in Paris, Daniel Cronstrm, Tessin talks about the craftsmen he needs and the requisite that they should be trained in the real taste from Italy in which one succeeds nowadays very well (fort heureusement) in France. See Tessin/Cronstrm (1964, pp. 13-14). Riksarkivet=National Archives, RA E 5716. My thanks to Linda Hinners whose forthcoming doctoral thesis treats the lives and works of the French artists working at the Swedish royal castle in Stockholm in the late 1690s and a few decades of the early 18th century. 20 Tilghman (2006, pp. 83-93). 21 Le Brun was a keen follower of Descartes, as can be seen in his studies of emotive faces, where he departs from Descartes Passions de lme; see Montagu (1994). The moderns were rational and stressed the importance of critical thinking and scientific method, instead of the realm of poetic ideas from Antiquity, stressed by the ancients. See Fumaroli, who describes the contrast in terms of vidence gometrique, oppose lvidence de lordre esthtique (2001, p. 192). Works cited: Barolsky, P. 1998. As in Ovid, So in Renaissance Art. In Renaissance Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 2, pp, 451-474.Castex, J.-G. 2007. Du tableau la gravure ou le dessin dinterprtation au XVIIIe sicle: cinquante-deux dessins pour une oeuvre? In Revue du Louvre et des Muses de France, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 96-104.Confrences indites de lAcadmie Royale de peinture et de sculpture daprs les manuscripts des Archives de lcole des beaux-art. 1903. Assembled and annotated by Fontaine, A. Paris: Albert Fontemoing, Collection Minerva.Dllenbach, L. 1977. Le rcit spculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme. Paris: Seuil.Descartes, R. 1650. Les Passions de lme. Amsterdam: Louis Elzevier.Fumaroli, M. 2001. Les abeilles et les araignes. In: Lecoq, A.-M. (ed.). La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Paris: Gallimard.

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La Galerie des Glaces: de sa cration sa Restauration. 2007. Prefaces byAlbanel, C., P. Arizzoli-Clmentel, and P. Coppey. Dijon: ditions Faton.Hinners, L. (planned for 2010, forthcoming doctoral thesis), De fransske hantwerkarnaIdeologiska, sociala och tekniska aspekter p de franska utsmyckningsarbetena p Stockholms Slott under Nicodemus Tessin d.y.:s ledning (Ideological, social and technical aspects of the decorations made by French artists/artisans in the Royal Castle of Stockholm under the direction of Nicodemus Tessin the Younger). Kemp, M. 1989. The Science of Art: Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat. New Haven: Yale University Press.Lynn, J. A. 1999. The Wars of Louis XIV, 16671714. London and New York: Longman. Martin, E. 2007. Les techniques originales des peintres. In: Galerie des Glaces, pp. 323-325. Mrot, A. 2007. Le rle de lornement: Le Brun ensemblier de genie. In: Galerie des Glaces, pp. 154-171Milovanovic, N. 2005. Du Louvre Versailles. Lecture des Grands dcors monarchiques.Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Montagu, J. 1994. The Expression of the Passions: The Origin and Influence of Charles Le Bruns Confrence sur lexpression gnrale et particuliere. New Haven: Yale University Press.Nivelon, C. 2004. Vie de Charles Le Brun et dscription dtaille de ses ouvrages. Gnve:Librairie Droz S.A.Piles, R. de. 1715. Abreg de la vie des peintres, avec des reflexions sur leurs ouvrages, et un trait du peintre parfait; de la connoissance des desseins; de lutilit des estampes, 2:e d., rev. et corr. par lauteur; avec un abreg de sa vie, et plusieurs autres additions. Paris: C. de Sercy.Sjstrm, I. 1978. Quadratura: Studies in Italian Ceiling Painting. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International.Tessin, N./Cronstrm, D. 1964. Les relations artistiques entre la France et la Sude 16931718: correspondance (extraits) / Nicodme Tessin le jeune et Daniel Cronstrm. Weigert, R.-A. and C. Hernmarck (eds.). Stockholm: Nationalmuseums skriftserie, 10. Thuillier, J. 2007. Charles Le Brun et la Galerie des glaces: un moment de lhistoire de lart francais. In: Galerie des Glaces, pp. 24-25.Tilghman, B. 2006. Reflections on Aesthetic Judgment and Other Essays.Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Townsend, D. 1998. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. In: Craig, E. (ed.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. London: Routledge. Retrieved August 01, 2009 from http://www04.sub.su.se:2061/ article/M029SECT3Treasure, G. 2001. Louis XIV. Harlow: Longman.Van Orden, K. 2005. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlf Art History, Stockholm University SE-10691, Stockholm, Sweden Margaretha.Rossholm-Lagerlof@arthistory.su.se 147

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Fig. 1. Section of the decorative system. Photo: Margaretha Rossholm Lagerlf. RMN (Chteau de Versailles)

Fig. 2. Decision to Start War with the Dutch 1671. RMN (Chteau de Versailles) / Ren-Gabriel Ojda / Franck Raux / montage Dominique Couto

Fig. 3. Passage of the Rhine in the Presence of Enemies 1672 and The King Takes Maastricht in Thirteen Days 1673 RMN (Chteau de Versailles) / Grard Blot / Herv Lewandowski

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Fig. 4. Seizure of the Town and Fortress Ghent in Six Days 1678 and Measures of the Spaniards Broken by the Seizure of Ghent 1678 RMN (Chteau de Versailles) / Ren-Gabriel Ojda / Franck Raux / montage Dominique Couto

Fig. 5. Seizure of the Town and Fortress Ghent in Six Days 1678, detail. RMN (Chteau de Versailles) / Ren-Gabriel Ojda / Franck Raux / montage Dominique Couto

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MBODIMENTS
Anna Munster

Bios and Baroque: Life in the Folds of 17th-Century Artifice and Contemporary Bioart

The Baroque is a topography in which connection and difference between lived bodies, material objects, science, and the passions formed a mesh of enfolded territories. These relations also suggest a mode for articulating the materialityinformation relationships of contemporary life. Information now materially inhabits lifein the networking of genes, in the scaffolding of tissue onto digitally designed polymer structures to cultivate semi-living entities, and so on. In a deeper way, the differential unfolding of bios is scaffolded to technologies of life. Can recourse to baroque folding assist us to think the aesthetics of contemporary life including the emergence of bioart? If the Baroque has often been associated with capitalism it is because the Baroque is linked to a crisis of property, a crisis that appears at once with the growth of new machines in the social field and the discovery of new living beings in the organism - Deleuze, 1993, p. 110. The work of rereading the baroque philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz performed by Gilles Deleuze in his book The Fold (1993) has been something of an inspiration in the field of new media practices and art theory. Deleuzes folding has inspired fields of architectural practice such as Greg Lynns (2004), Tim Murrays writing on the digital baroque (2008), and my own theorizing of digital-baroque relations (2006). But in the quote above, Deleuze draws our attention to a particular

Anna Munster is the deputy director of the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics and an associate professor in the School of Art History and Art Education, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Materializing New Media (Dartmouth College Press, 2006). Her research interests are in contemporary art, new media, networks, and embodiment, and she is currently researching a book on networks, aesthetics, and experience.

triangulation of ownership, emergent social formations, and biology to which baroque aesthetics are linked. It strikes me that although digital aesthetics may well resonate with baroque folding, it is to the life sciences and their emergent aesthetics that Deleuzes Leibniz might now take us. In this article I want to extend Deleuzes understanding of baroque aesthesia to the crisis of living and life under contemporary biocapitalism. In particular, I am interested in the emergence of a form

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of aesthetic practice that coincides with crises in biocapitalismbioart. Bioart is a reasonably young and emerging art form and movement, with many of its artists still engaged in debates over what constitutes its key techniques, media, and artifacts. However, after a number of large-scale exhibitions such as LArt Biotech, staged in Aix-enProvence in 2003, and Bio-Difference, which was part of the 2004 Biennale of Electronic Arts Perth (BEAP) in Australia, most artists and curators now vehemently defend the biotech fleshiness of their medium and form. Quoting Eduardo Kac, a prominent bioartist, Jens Hauser (curator of LArt Biotech) states that:

Bioart is not, then, comprised of images, sculptures, or even computational simulations of biological life. Artists such as Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr who belong to the Tissue Culture and Art project (TCA) have adamantly asserted an anti-representationalist stance in the bioart arena, differentiating themselves particularly from artists who work with biological metaphors, such as the genetic algorithm or simulated artificial-life environments (Catts and Zurr, 2008, p. 140). As I hope to show, this anti-representationalism connects contemporary bioart to what I will call, borrowing from Tim Murrays recent book, the digital baroque (2008). This anti-representationalist position is also linked in some bioart to a deep understanding of the baroque as an aesthetic of folding. However, this involves a move on my part, which is anathema to many bioartiststhe reconnection of bioart to a tradition of digital or new media art. Many bioartists have raged against the implicit representationalism of the

Bio Art is first and foremost an art of transformation in vivo that manipulates biological materials at discrete levels (e.g. individual cells, proteins, genes, nucleotides) (2005; the last part of the sentence comes from Kac).

computational machine, insisting on the brute fleshiness of their medium and artifacts. For example, in a workshop on The Aesthetics of Life conducted by Adam Zaretsky and Jennifer Willet in 2008 (at the University of Exeter, U.K.), both artists distanced themselves from computational biotechnologies and the genetic hype of the biotech industry (Willet and Zaretsky 2008). They insisted instead on their immersion in the wetware of the laboratory as space for artistic practice and on the importance of re-embodying biotechnologies. Yet we need to situate the debate about the relation of contemporary bioart to biotechnologies within the debate about a digital baroque and the baroqueness of digital embodiment. By doing this I think we can begin to ascertain an aesthetics for bioart that is not simply steeped in negation; that is, bioart is not genetic art, not digital art, not new media. Rather we can understand bioart as a practice propelled by a set of energies that gain their force through differentiation. We are then led to 151

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another set of considerations: if bioart is produced through the differential folding of flesh, and its artifacts embody differentially inflected and produced flesh as contemporary embodiment, then to what extent does this respond to the crisis in property Deleuze raises? We need to examine the status of bioart (and especially its parasitic relation with biotechnologies) as either an aesthetic that is generated in response to a contemporary property crisis or as part of the crisis. In working to transform and often to produce living things at the level of biotechnical manipulation, bioartists engage (to pick up on the positive aspects of crisis invoked by Deleuze) new machines in the field of the social and in fact discover, or at least call forth, new modes of living for the organism (to now paraphrase Deleuzes discovery of new living beings in the organism) (Fig.1). Of course, the very machines bioartists engage in the field of the social are precisely assemblages of technique, matter, and life science deployed by biotech corporations, which are posing enormous social, environmental, and ethical concerns for contemporary life. For Deleuze, the key problem posed by the Baroque, and what in fact links the Baroque to capitalism, is the problem of property or, as he suggests, the determination of appurtenance (1993, p. 107). For him, the Baroques association with capitalism is not its historical link to the rise and spread of mercantilism (as a straightforward, traditional Marxist theory of aestheticsfor example, Arnold Hausers Social History of Art, 1962might argue). Rather, capitalism 152 arises as result of a crisis in property, and it is the baroque machine that drives this crisis. Hence capitalism might be understood as a socialfinancial machine that tries to manage property crises, that is forever trying to stabilize a crisis in property, with disastrous consequences. To what crisis in property is Deleuze referring that the Baroque provokes? It is not, for him, foremost a crisis of property considered in its commodity form. Rather it is the epistemic and ontological preconditions for property as such: knowledge of what belongs to what in the world and how to live according to the knowledge that pertains to these relations. These relations are not initially played out in the realm of the market but rather in the domain of life, of organism and body. For what the Baroque discovers in the realms of 17th-century natural history and philosophy is that the body that belongs to me is not unified and possessed but rather aggregated, enfolded, and distributed: our body is a type of world full of an infinity of creatures that are also worthy of life (Leibniz, quoted in Deleuze, 1993, p. 109). For Deleuze, this raises the question of what belongs to what species, relations, degrees, and the extent to which what I belong to and what belongs to me determines what I am. These relations and degrees reorder the relationship between belonging and being such that what I belong to is precondition for what I am (1993, pp. 109110). In the light of this, we might reconsider the debate between preformationists and epigeneticists, which haunts the history of the life

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sciences from their nascent form in the early modern period to the present day. The early microscopists such as van Leeuwenhoek and Swammerdam have often been attributed a preformationist position, (fig. 2) perhaps due to the ambiguities within their drawings and correspondence to places such as the Royal Society in Britain. Homunculi are found in the drawings of microscopists of this periodfor example, Nicolas Hartsoekers 1694 woodcut of a homunculus inside sperm (fig. 3). Epigeneticist illustrators and scientists of later ilk, such as Ernst Haeckel, were preoccupied with the force of form and deformation in embryogenesis. It is here that we begin to see a much more definitive split between notions of epigenesis and preformation. Interestingly, Haeckels drawings have often been attributed a baroque aesthetic (fig. 4). There was a lot of fluidity between the preformationist and epigenetic positions during the early modern period. Their sharp distinction was more an effect of a couple of centuries of ensuing argument in biological theory and experiment. In fact, the idea of beings inside other beings could just as easily be understood as an effect of the modulation of serial enfoldingworlds within worlds within worldsupon conceptions of life in early natural history. In other words, a hardened preformationist position can sometimes seem almost epigeneticist. Contemporary historians of the life sciences suggest that Swammerdam and Malpighi were used later by thinkers to forge a coherent preformationist framework (Magner, 2002, p. 159; Roe, 2003, pp. 57). It was Nicolas Malebranche who developed a fully fledged theory of preformation, referencing Swammerdams and Malpighis drawings and observations. In The Search After Truth (1674), Malebranche schematized Swammerdams ideas into the concept of embotement (encasement)all living things encased other living things inside them. And making the protocreationist leap, Malebranche drew the conclusion that, the body of every man and beast born till the end of time was perhaps produced at the creation of the world (1997, p. 27). Malebranche tried to use microscopy to settle the infinite regress of relations of belonging. On the other hand, Kaspar Friedrich Wolff (173494), who is often thought of as one of the founders of modern embryology, drew upon microscopic investigation of the development of the intestines of chicken embryos to support an epigenetic position (see Roe, 1979, pp. 512).On Deleuzes reading of Leibniz, relations of belonging cannot be settled. Instead they are induced as a problem to be worked at by the baroque machine. To have relations to other beings inside one or to diverse thoughts in the field of perception is to acknowledge that belonging involves moving and perpetually reshuffled relations (Deleuze, 1993, p. 110). What a Leibnizian monad has is not a property such as plasticity but rather other monads. What a little animal hasas revealed by microscopyis not motility as a property of life but rather many other little animals moving 153

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in relation to it (van Leeuwenhoeck in 1688, republished 1932, pp. 109166). The question of having is not settled by embotement, ownership, or attribute. Rather, to have means to live in relation to a crisis of the unfixability of property. Transversally cutting into contemporary questions, we can ask: if we do reverberate with a baroque aesthetics, is this because, likewise, there is today a kind of crisis in property in the fields of life and living? We are now similarly beset by the question: what does it mean to have a body or for a body to belong to us? For, courtesy of the pervasiveness of biotechnologies, my body is filled with the organ transplants of other species, has the hands of another grafted onto it, parts of it may become an immortal cell line perpetually grown in a laboratory, and/or is subject to genetic marking by transgenic organisms. Here we see the body distributed in an endless deferral of its totality to the non-sum of the whole of its parts. This inability to find a bodily center or to find a center that is the body resonates with conceptions of the Baroque explored by authors such as Tim Murray and myself. Murray (2008) argues that digitalitys baroqueness is to be located in the ways in which digital aesthetics enfold and unfold temporality. The digital image (especially displayed by multimedia, installation, or hyperlinked work but also in cinema that deploys a digital baroque aesthetic such as Peter Greenaways 1991 film Prosperos Books) presents simultaneous, interconnected informationlayering, 154 hotspots, embedded imagery, and so on. Yet this simultaneity is never reduced to presence. Instead, what is baroque about this digital visuality is the extent to which the co-present elements of the image are engaged in deferringreferring interplays; the hotspot reveals an embedded textual fragmenta kind of past or archaeology to that image and the entire image is potentially subject to future rearrangement. Processes of differentiation energize both the conceptions of digital baroque and digital embodiment. For Murray, the digital image is not a specular projection that greets or emanates from a stabilized subject position. Instead, the arc of visual traces and serial productions unfolds the engagements of and between a viewer-participant, artist-participant, and digital information. For me, digital embodiment is a local actualization of the potentially (virtually) distributed vectors of corporealitydistributed as traces in databases and as emergent arrangements to be brought forth by interaction between user-participants and computational machines (Munster, 2006, pp. 6266). In other words, there is no the body and the computer but rather corporeal-informatic assemblages (the artistic machine deploying an aesthetic of humancomputer interaction, for example), which engender embodiments. In what way, then, might bioart be situated as a mode of digital embodiment playing out across this digitalbaroque aesthetic? We would need to understand bioartistic production as preoccupied with unmaking the solidity of the flesh, of unmaking flesh

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as property, preformed or as the tabula rasa that supports form. We need to ask to what extent bioart participates in a kind of folding such that its flesh is processually or differentially produced and inducing. Perhaps not all bioart does engage in this kind of enfolded aesthetic but I hope to suggest that such a direction is emerging within some of its practices. However, and this is to situate Deleuzes question about capitalism and crisis within a more contemporary context, to what extent is the production of flesh as ongoing foldingpermanent differentiation, permanent embryogenesisan activity of contemporary capitalism, otherwise known as biocapitalism? Biotechnical organisms embody a crisis of property because their processes and technical arrangements mitigate against the location of property and bodies within the body. As Eugene Thacker puts it, we are in the midst of the production of a new kind of biology, which he calls biomedia:

Biotechnical flesh belongs to a more generalized liquidation of property and capital as fixed assets, as it both propels us and is propelled into the bioeconomy of permanent speculative liquidity (Rajan 2006). Does this abundance of ongoing flesh production by the biotech industry signal a new formation of capitalism as infinite differentiation or does it signal a crisis in property? Might any bioarteven that which highlights processes of differentiationbe fully engaged by a regime of bio-capitalpolitics?As Melinda Cooper has recently argued, at stake in biotechnology are the kinds of techniques/biologies being deployed, including their historical antecedents, discursive formations, and actual engagement with materials (2008). Cooper explores the genealogy of tissue engineering (TE), arguing that it is historically connected with concepts

The body in biomedia is thus always understood in two waysas a biological body, a biomolecular body, a species body, a patient body, and as a body that is compiled through modes of visualisation, modelling, data extraction, and in silico simulation (2004, p.13).

of epigenesis. TEs techniques, she argues, share less epistemological space with mechanical engineering and more with the mathematics and geometry of topological space, especially when deployed in the sphere of regenerative medicine (2008, pp. 103105). This area of mathematics is concerned with the generation of form due to continuous modulations by forces, something we see manifest in Haeckels 19th-century embryo series. In the quest for what Cooper calls permanent embryogenesis in regenerative medicine, tissue is engineered from immortal cell linescells that are sustained precisely on the basis that they continually differentiate. But what this confronts us with, Cooper suggests, is the possibility of a body unbound by measurable (metric and chronological) time. Instead we must confront a new 155

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constitution of embodiment via TE biology produced (and increasingly lived because of its deployment in areas such as regenerative medicine), in nonmetric time (Cooper, 2008, p. 105). The bioartists I have mentioned so far in this articleWillet, Zaretsky, and TCAcould be said to be pursuing a trajectory within bioaesthetics that explores nonmetric embodiment in the age of biotechnologies. Willet and TCA have used tissue engineering as a technique for exploring the dispositif of biocapital (fig. 5).1 Under the auspices of a fake biotech company Bioteknica, Willet with collaborator Shawn Bailey grew tissue culture teratomas at the SymbioticA Art and Science Laboratory in Perth, Western Australia (codirected and founded by members of the TCA project). Willet and Bailey hybridized in vivo and representationalist techniques in the ongoing performance that was Bioteknica during 200307. They produced marketing brochures for their corporation as well as successfully growing semi-living teratomas. Teratomas of course represent the paradox at the heart of areas such as TE and indeed the very idea of regeneration. Literally monstrous growths, cancers and tumors are often also teratomas. The teratoma is cell growth out of control or in permanent differentiation. And here lies the very paradox explored by the Bioteknica projectso too are cell lines used to regenerate tissue in permanent embryogenesis. Bioteknica ironically market the very idea of growth, monstrous growth, as the force that subtends the contemporary biotech corporation.The focus of the TCA project lies with exploring the aesthetics and ethics of what they call semi-living organisms; organisms that have been grown in vivo using tissue engineering techniques. The TCA artists have developed a complex ethico-aesthetic framework that is embedded in their work. The semi-living entities they make, display, and perform with are not simply to be located between the living and the dead. Rather they are fundamentally fragmented, dependent, and distributed organisms, which also call upon humans to consider the ways in which we, too, have become imbricated in this networked ecology of life (fig. 6):

In the context of our work once a fragment is taken from A BODY it becomes a part of THE BODY. The living fragment becomes part of a higher order that embraces all living tissues regardless of their current site. We see it as a symbolic device that enhances the bond humans share with all living beings. The semi-living are fragments of The BODY, nurtured in surrogate bodya techno-scientific one. The laboratory is part of the extended body, but the care can only be performed by a fellow living beingus, the artists (Catts and Zurr, 2008, p. 141).

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The questions raised by these artists in their work follows a line of baroque folding that leads us all the way from the worlds-within-worlds fold of the early modern flesh of natural history to the ecologies of contemporary biotechnical life. But is this enough to continue to incite or at least draw upon the radical conclusion to which Deleuze leads usthat the baroque art-machine incites a crisis in property? As stand-alone art pieces, I doubt that bioart and its aesthetics set off a process of unraveling on such a scale. Indeed, as I have hinted, they might even constitute part of a movement that throws us into a permanent unraveling as a new mode of life lived under crisis capitalism. But the redeeming grace of the kind of bioart I have been gesturing toward, is that for all its defense of the presentational nature of its medium and techniques, the bioartists to whom I have referred are also active participants in a broader movement that has recently been referred to as tactical biopolitics in which bioart plays a more interventionist role:

Perhaps, then, bioart gains its gravitas from the extent to which it rejoins a more general relation to information and knowledgethe extent to which its ethico-aesthetic claims can or do become part of a more generalized epistemological distributive and differential impulse in culture at large. And this impulse has as much to do with sets of problems opened up within digital culture as it does with a restricted notion of the biotechnical issues such as the multiplicitous tendencies of digital code, which are then managed by patenting and proprietorial regimes such as intellectual property and digital management rights. So, too, are biotechnical artifacts and techniques subject to such forms of management techniques. Where bioart does

a thriving community of bioartists, researchers, and hobbyists have provided new analytical and activist models by which to intervene and participate in the life sciences. Through a broad set of hands-on interventions that provide a critique-in-action of both the political economy and the naturalization of the biotech industry, bioartists and researchers have fostered interspecies contacts, engineered hybrid life forms, and set up independent Biolabs (da Costa, 2009).

differentiate itself from becoming simply another aspect of the unfolding crisis of life and capital in the contemporary world is inasmuch as it participates in an onto-epistemological redistribution of this crisis beyond techniques of managing life and property. This is demonstrated explicitly in the sharing of knowledge about biotechnology in art-laboratory environments where scientists and artists are together engaged in the politics of information and the will to unfold different relations to life. Here bioart contributes to a broader process of creating ecologies of bio-lifeinformation, invoking the ceaseless work of folding these into and out of each other; ecological work in which digital artists and thinkers are likewise engaged. 157

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Endnotes: The term dispositif is drawn from the work of Michel Foucault and is badly translated by the English term apparatus (see Foucault, 1980, pp. 194-228). Foucault uses it to refer to an assemblage comprising variable elementsdiscourses, institutions, protocols, statements and propositions, architecture and so onwhich when working together generate and sustain a social order of power relations. I am suggesting that the Bioteknica work is not simply aesthetic but is designed to investigate the interrelations among biotechnologies, corporations, aesthetics, economics, marketing, and the various discourses and statements through which these circulate and are affirmed. This assemblage makes up contemporary biocapital, and the artists are interested in critically investigating this assemblage via their art practice.
1

Works cited: Catts, O and I. Zurr. 2008. The Art of the Semi-Living and Partial Life: Extra Ear14 Scale. In: Pandilovski, M. (ed.). Art in the Biotech Era. Adelaide: Experimental Art Foundation/IMA Books, 140147 Cooper, M. 2008. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press. da Costa, B. 2009. Rationale. Radars and Fences II: Tactical Bioart in the Age of Biotechnology. Symposium, New York University, March 5. http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/md1445/rf/ Deleuze, G. 1993. The Fold. Conley, T. (trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Foucault, M. 1980. The Confession of the Flesh. In: Gordon, C. (ed.). Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon, pp. 194-228. Haeckel, E. H. 1874. Anthropogenie. Entwickelungsgeschichte des menschen von Ernst Haeckel. Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann. Hartsoeker, N. 1694. Essay de dioptrique, Paris: J. Anisson. Hauser, A. 1962. The Social History of Art. vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Hauser, J. 2005. Bios, Techne, Logos: A Timely Art Career. In: SantaMoniCA Arts Bulletin (Barcelona). December. http://cultura.gencat.cat/casm/butlleti/hemeroteca/n19/en/ article_03.htm#1 Leeuwenhoek, A. van. 1688. The First Observations on Little Animals (Protozoa and Bacteria) in Waters, Antony Van Leeuwenhoek and His Little Animals. 1932. Dobell, C. (ed. and trans.). New York: John Bale, Sons & Danielsson. 1722. Opera Omnia, seu Arcana Naturae. vol. 1, Leyden: J. A. Langerak. Lynn, G. 2004. Folds, Bodies & Blobs: Collected Essays. Brussels: La Lettre Vole. Magner, L. N. 2002. A History of the Life Sciences. 3rd ed. New York: Dekker. Malebranche, N. 1997. The Search After Truth: With Elucidations. Lennon, T. M. and P. J. Olscamp (trans. and eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munster A. 2006 Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press. Murray, T. 2008. The Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis:

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University of Minnesota Press. Rajan, K. S. 2006. Biocapital: The Constitution of Post Genomic Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Roe, S. 2003. Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-Century Embryology and the HallerWolff Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1979. Rationalism and Embryology: Caspar Friedrich Wolffs Theory of Epigenesis. In Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 1-43 Thacker, E. 2004. Biomedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Willet, J. and A. Zaretsky. 2008. The Aesthetics of Life, Seminar on BioArt presented by the Information Society Network, University of Exeter, U.K., May 14. For information regarding this seminar see: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/networks/information/ Bioartdescription.shtml

Anna Munster School of Art History and Art Education, College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, P.O. Box 259, Paddington NSW 2021, Australia A.Munster@unsw.edu.au 159

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Photographic images of A Semi-Living Worry Doll H and Semi-Living Worry Doll A, (McCoy Cell line, Biodegradable/bioabsorbable Polymers and Surgical Sutures), The Tissue Culture and Art Project, 2000

Growing the semi-living steak in a bioreactor Research image from Disembodied Cuisine The Tissue Culture and Art Project, 2003

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Shawn Bailey & Jennifer Willet, BIOTEKNICA Generational Prototypes Installation Installation View at Biennial Electronic Arts Perth, 2004

Spermatozoon. Homunculus., woodcut, Essay de dioptrique, Nicolas Hartsoeker (J. Anisson: Paris 1694) p.230. Image courtesy of Wellcome Library, London.

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Figures 5 and 6, Opera omnia, seu arcana naturae..., Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, (J.A. Langerak: Leyden 1722 1730), vol. 1, p. 168, image courtesy the Wellcome Library, London

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Plate V, Comparative embryos of hog, calf, rabbit and man. Anthropogenie. Entwickelungsgeschichte des menchen von Ernst Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, (Wilhelm Englemann, Leipzig 1874) image courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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A Rent in the Clouds Robert Harbison

Robert Harbison teaches architectural history at London Metropolitan University and is the author of Travels in the History of Architecture published in 2009 and a series of books that cross the boundaries of disciplines: Eccentric Spaces (on imagination), Deliberate Regression (on primitivism), Pharaohs Dream (on subjectivity), The Built the Unbuilt, and the Unbuildable, Thirteen Ways, and Reflections on Baroque. The archetypal baroque cloudscape occurs on a certain kind of painted ceiling that pretends to redraw the boundaries of the building, sometimes increasing the apparent size of the space to twice the original. One of the most flamboyant instances was constructed by a painter, who was also a Jesuit, for the church of SantIgnazio in Rome. When you stand under this ceiling, it looks as if Fra Andrea Pozzo has taken off the roof and piled another building just as big, on top of the one were standing in, using the huge existing church as its foundation. This second, illusory building also lacks a roof and opens straight onto the sky (likewise painted) which drifts down into the building beneath, in the form of stray clouds and groups of levitating bodies. Beyond them is a further depth of cloudy sky, tubelike in form. Our giddiness looking up at all this movement is mirrored, at a different metaphysical temperature to be sure, by our sensation when gazing down at the sand underfoot in the Ryoanji garden in Kyoto, sometimes said to represent a sea of cloud, interrupted only a by few mountain peaks (15 carefully strewn

rocks) poking through. At SantIgnazio many unquiet painted figures cling to imaginary ledges and protrusions, obscuring the fictitious structure. Most of them are being sucked upward by invisible forces in the air. In our most fervent imaginings we might expect the space to end as an alarming vision of emptiness, approaching that of the final surrealist stage, up a little set of stairs all its own, of Le Corbusiers roof garden for Charles de Beistegui, the heir of Mexican silver mines, where a rococo sitting room is mocked up without windows, furnishings (except for a fireplace and one garden chair), or roof. When you stand beneath the cyclonic events depicted overhead at SantIgnazio, the idea of such a disconcerting void does not seem far away. There is a further troubling ambiguity about the world of these interiors. Are they so vast, staked out by four writhing, personified Continents on the lowest tier and incorporating the entire sky, in order to express an intelligently enlarged idea of Gods scope? Or is it self-praise, the grandiose 163

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view propounded by a powerful human institution, the Jesuit order, with a wider grasp, effectively, than the Church to which it pays lip service? So this extraordinary incorporation of clouds into architecture may represent both a serious disruption of architectural coherence and a drastic realignment of spiritual power. Taking the roof off in a controlled explosion directed by the science of perspective is only one of the ways in which spaces beyond the building and the city itself are intimated: substances like silver, jade, and lapis lazuli are visible here in great abundance, instantly recognizable as trophies from specific Jesuit triumphs overseas in the recently explored territories alluded to in the frescoes. Perhaps this is only a variation on the classical idea that the building represents the cosmos because it incorporates rare marbles from the four corners of the earth, that remind us in their veins and blotches of the rivers, clouds, and storms of the far-off places from which they have traveled to get here. Early commentators on Hagia Sophia, the great imperial church in Constantinople, make this argument almost explicit, while describing its sequence of dome and semi-domes all coated in gold mosaic as an imitation heaven, suspended from the actual one by a golden chain. The dome of the Pantheon, Berninis favorite ancient Roman building, has also been seen as a sky, in a more abstract and purely geometrical sense than Pozzos, though apparently the coffers in its ceiling were once peppered 164 with metal rosettes or stars, and though to this day you can still watchat least on sunny daysthe sun passing slowly across it as a patch of light given roundish shape by the single hole in its roof. Taking their cue from the Pantheon, most renaissance architects would have been non-plussed by the idea of cluttering their domes with deceptive representations of clouds. Clouds are quintessentially impermanent and domes have always been favored architectural forms because they echo the permanence of the heavenly spheres. So the interior of Bramantes little dome on his Tempietto is painted a uniform blue and sprinkled with a regular grid of gold stars just like the roofs of Egyptian temples from thousands of years earlier. Thus the lighter patches on this ceiling that you might mistake for clouds are probably only water stains. It is true that the little saucer domelet over the chancel of Brunelleschis Old Sacristy at San Lorenzo in Florence, the first fully fledged architectural ensemble of the Renaissance, is painted with a night sky, but this is cloudless and diagrammatic, more like a star map than the accompaniment of a particular evening walk. It shows a world far above the clouds, peopled by the mythological beasts and beings that keep the stars in order, and is said to record the positions of the heavenly bodies at the moment of the patrons birth, making it an extremely displaced form of portrait. The Baroque interest in clouds, unlike Constables or even Turners, cannot be classed as naturalism, but a series of invitations to new forms of license that

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lead one on to more preposterous levels of artifice. So unsympathetic observers nowadays find the preponderance of plaster clouds one of the most damning signs of baroque corruption and excess. When Bernini, most brazen of baroque sculptors, wants to show a saint in ecstasy, he suspends her a few feet above the floor on stone clouds. Saint Teresa forms part of a careful three-dimensional reconstruction of an incident described in her autobiography, which took place not in the sky but in her cell, an ordinary interior. Bernini has taken a liberty in the siting, placing the event on a little theatrical stage where it can be savored by eight marble spectators who twist round dramatically to see it better We have to assume that these contradictions, one could almost say these absurdities, stirred Berninis imagination rather than defeating it. Spiritual ecstasy looks like fleshly orgasm; depicting it, the sculptor excites the senses with marble sometimes soft like butter, sometimes jagged like ice, material so strange and intense it pushes us to levitate too, imagining ourselves floating above the ground, buoyed up on the cloud of our thought. Without pretending to penetrate fully the mixture of literalism and symbolism in 17th-century devotion, we can be reasonably sure that reason should here be kept at bay. However far he was from the style of the anonymous 14th-century author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Bernini would have agreed with him that some forms of knowing are enemies of spiritual truth. As in the fundamentally weighty Roman Baroque, there is something paradoxical in the hankerings of Bavarian Rococo after the immaterial. Structurally, most of the pilgrimage churches are lumbering beasts of daunting mass, until you enter them, that is, at which point you feel raised to another plane. The whiteness of most surfaces, especially lower down, seems to wish away our relation to earth and ordinary substance. You could imagine yourself in a cloud world, an ideal place of unearthly radiance and sparkling unreal substance. Ceilings are painted as skies where important meetings and raisings take place, but this seems almost a sky on top of the sky, because we already inhabit a purified empty realm, a kind of heaven on earth, like such worlds of myth as the vast sea of milk waiting for the troop of Hindu demons who will churn it and bring forth life, or Jack Londons Yukon, an ideal endless whiteness. The works of the late baroque architect Dominikus Zimmermann, large and small, are continually assuring us that we can break away from the restrictions of the material world and enter a freer sphere. His most interesting ways of enforcing this idea are various forms of piercing, breaking through to a space beyond or above the one we are temporarily in, with the effect of a rent in the clouds showing us suddenly another realm stretching ahead. Bernardo Vittone, the 18th-century Torinese architect who marries Guarinis intellectual complexity to Juvarras decorative exuberance, is another expert at slicing holes in the fabric to give views of little worlds stretching off in all directions. In 165

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Vittones buildings the effect is puzzlelike, as if we inhabit an oversized childrens toy, and the experience that results is exhilarating but a joke at the same time. Zimmermann seems far less detached; the fervency in his simulation of outdoor sensations indoors suggests that he wants to move a garden into the building bodily to preserve his dream of an ideal place. And the piercing first of all, odd shaped windows like organic apertures, reminiscent in turn of eyes or ears or mouths. And then, even more gratuitous ones, a series of irregular fringed openings running along the top of an arcade, at just the place where you expect the fullest structural sobriety. Sometimes, quite unnecessarily, he erects little membranes between the walls of a narrow ambulatory just so he can poke a cartouche-like hole in each one. Appliances like altarpieces and pulpits are ideal playgrounds for this impulse to dissolve the substance by removing selected excerpts. Sometimes the altar will jut up into a small dome straight above, so it looks as if it has broken through the ceiling and into the space beyond, suggesting that the ceiling is a kind of cloud-substance, easily penetrated. Sometimes the breaking through is contained within the altarpiece, as if a cavity had been discovered high up, which turns out to have the Christ Child within it waiting to shine out like the sun from clouds. No one is surprised to find that He is comfortably seated there on a sofa of cloud. I have sometimes felt that all these 166 disintegrating surfaces must point to an unspoken malaise, a lot of little hints that death lies just around the corner. A radical change in taste did in fact lie not too far ahead. Within the career of Balthasar Neumann, who created one of the most compelling cloudscapes, in the form of a whole interior at Vierzehnheiligen near Bamberg, his clients turned against the exuberant Rococo in favour of a colorless classicism. Vierzehnheiligen is a billowing space seemingly open on all sides, lightly stitched together like a tent or balloon that lets the surrounding air dictate its form. Of course this is a cleverly calculated illusion, not a reflection of the buildings actual relation to the weather outside. Neumann practices here a less literal naturalism than Zimmermanns, summoning up certain features of the world beyond without imitating them. It would be a wonderful irony if one could believe that the great English landscape gardens of the 18th century were inspired in part by the grandiose irregularity of baroque interiors. Do we need such a spur to explain the scale of these huge works of art, that incorporate the whole visible world as far as one can see and even rope the sky itself into playing its part by providing a changing display of baroque forms, a literal realization of our subject at last, baroque clouds indeed. Gardens like Stourhead and Stowe must rank as both apotheosis and final dissolution of the expansive aesthetic of the Baroque, straining at the limits placed by gravity and building technique on its constructive ambitions.

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Now, right on the heels of the wildest excesses, and almost contemporaneous with them, comes a backlash or scaling down of baroque overconfidence. We could follow this in the park at Versailles, of all places, where some of the purest expressions of the new taste are built. But I would prefer to look at a few paintings by Fragonard that do brilliant translations of baroque cloudscapes, bringing them down to earth. In Fragonards pictures instead of the mysteries of the heavens we are given clouds of steam in a laundry, clouds of incense in a pagan temple or an enveloping mist conjured out of an ordinary pot of milk. These depictions of weather are in some uncanny way more beautiful than anything in earlier baroque painting, as the detail in Popes Rape of the Lock is more beautiful than anything in Milton, in part just because it is smaller, allowing a more intimate, intenser inspection. Maybe, as in Pope, mockery is not absent from Fragonards subjects, of the vast Miltonic or Versaillessized distances, but also of us, for strutting so preposterously on such tiny stages. The beauty but also the sadness of Watteaus or Fragonards ladies, their dresses spread out like entire cloudscapes, their surroundings dissolved in clouds of trees overlooked by trees of cloud, is that there is no need for them to do anything at all. In the century that follows, a more scientific approach intrudes even on artists views of clouds, until even mystics like Caspar Friedrich and romantics like Ruskin find themselves studying clouds with clinical precision, which doesnt stop either of them from viewing clouds apocalyptically, signs of cosmic emptiness or evil. We might conclude that, even in an age hamstrung by a scientific view of the world, clouds continue to function as Rorschach blots in which people discover their own already-formed, deepest ideas about reality all over again.

Robert Harbison Professor of Architectural History and Theory London Metropolitan University 31 Jewry Street London EC3N 2EY r.harbison@londonmet.ac.uk 167

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eview
Reviewed by Mria Kiov

On literary roads: a guide to the (fictional) cities in literature

Petr Chalupsk: The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night (The image of the city in the Works of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan). VDM Verlag Dr. Muller: Saarbrucken. 2009. 133 pages. There is an eternal circle in which a writer a wanderer/pilgrim/ inhabitant - fascinated by the particular city makes it alive and as the fictional city approaches its reader s/he may or may not be equally enchanted by its representation though it might shape the perception of the mentioned place. As a result, the reader also quite easily turns into a wanderer, a traveler who while visiting the place - actively shapes its nature; being there as a living part of it makes fertile ground for other fiction, and if lucky enough and spotted by a writer - may be even turned into a fictional character himself and the process continues. Places we love tell much about ourselves and without any doubt cities have been acquiring the status of cultural icons and representations since time immemorial. Their identities have been based not only on those living there, on the events taking place but as it already happened a few times in literary history the identity of the city has been created via writers fictional characteristics of cities that get alive so much as to trespass the border between fiction and reality. Consequently, we presume especially in terms of cultural aspects that one cannot fully understand Petersburg without Gogol, Dublin without Joyce or London without Blake or Ackroyd. Literature loves cities and cities love being fictionalized; and to make it complete we also need to reflect upon their representation in fiction, to uncover and discover their textual layers in order to understand how urban life establishes links between the individual and the collective, everyday and unique, natural and artificial. Thus it is pleasure to read through The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night, a thought-provoking and definitely further-reading-provoking book, in which Petr Chalupsk shows and comments upon the significance of the city in the British fiction. Though his detailed analysis concentrates on Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, the book offers much more and anyone interested in modern literature would find authors comments on literary works in the first part of his publication very useful. Petr Chalupsk explores how the city appears and reappears in various literary contexts and talking specifically about London, he emphasizes how Ackroyds London: The Biography has shaped the iconography

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of the capital (and of the city narratives as such) since 2000 when the book was first published. Chalupsks book is clearly and well-structured and after already mentioned overview of the fiction in which cities and urban places gain specific significance, he moves on analytical part and in the two chapters he gives a detailed portrayal of Amiss (Other People: A Mystery Story; Money: A Suicide Note, London Fields and The Information) and McEwans (The Cement Garden, The Comfort of Strangers, The Child in Time and Amsterdam) works. Besides a close analysis of the image of the city, he identifies essential characteristics of the narratives which also offer a more general perspective upon both authors. As far as the city is concerned, Petr Chalupsk shows how it becomes a character, what different forms and aspects it acquires, what language it uses, how its fictional soul is created. For instance, in McEwans The Cement Garden, London is nightmarish and becomes an urban wasteland where consolation and comfort would hardly be found. In another McEwans work The Comfort of Strangers the city this time anonymous - appears as the actual city and the narrative directly hints on the phenomena of mass tourism which again turns into a sort of delusion: The result is then that the tourist, in search of an unknown, exotic place, enters a world that has lost its originality and does not differ much from his or her home environment. (88) On the other hand, another representation of the city is mystical, metaphorical, impossible to grasp and map. Similarly in other analysed works, the city emerges in various contexts and perspectives. It is not just a setting; the place forms, suggests, contributes and helps but also destabilizes, provokes fear and hatred. It often oversteps characters; and pulsates emotionally with love or hate. There are more things for which Chalupsks work may be praised and in conclusion The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night definitely represents an interesting contribution to the literary criticism on Martin Amis and Ian McEwan as well as on the representation of the city in the contemporary British literature. When lost in the labyrinth of the postmodern fictional landscapes, a handy guide is always worth having.

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