Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris | Slavery in New York [catalogue for an exhibition at the New York Historical Society 2005-2006]

at the roots

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ira Berlin and Leslie M. Harris Slavery in New York [catalogue to the two-part art show of November 2005 and 2006], with essays by Christopher Moore, Jill Lepore, Graham Russell, Gao Hodges, Patrick Rael, Shane White, Carla L. Peterson, Craig Steven Wilder, Manisha Sinha, David Quigley, Iver Bernstein, and Marcy S. Sacks (New York: The New Press, 2005)

 

In November 2005 I attended the exhibition of Slavery in New York at the New York Historical Society. The show was certainly not dazzling in terms of its presentation; the over-crowded rooms, each containing only a few objects but numerous exhibits of tapes and films, made for a kind of cacophony in the high-ceilinged, dark quarters of the Society that made it difficult even to concentrate.

     The heart of the show, however, was its information; and in that respect it was one of those fascinating shows where the catalogue may tell you as much as the actual museum experience. The extensiveness and continuance of slavery, in a city whose citizenry today are so diverse and cosmopolitan that it is often easy to forget, is at the heart of this show. Already in 1737, one in five New Yorkers was black, nearly all of those men, women and children being enslaved, meaning that outside of Charleston, South Carolina—the center of Southern slavery—New York had the largest urban population of slaves. As a Scottish visitor is quoted: “It rather hurts a Europian eye to see so many negro slaves upon the streets.”

     Slavery was seen in New York almost as an economic necessity. As a columnist of the day wrote: “…the want of hands and the Dearness of the Wages of hired Servants makes Slaves at this Time, necessary.” Even though it was cheaper for New York slave traders to import the slaves directly from Africa, most the imported slaves of New York in the early days came from the West Indies: Barbados, Antigua, Jamaica, St. Thomas, Curaçao, Bermuda, and St. Kitts. Only a very small percentage came from South Carolina.

     Clearly, the treatment of these human beings was inhumane—if for no other reason than they were forced workers with absolutely no rights. But unlike the rural slaves, who most often lived in separate quarters from the families for whom they worked, in New York slaves slept in their owners’ attics and cellars, working during the day alongside whites as servants, artisans, and laborers. Black slaves kept different hours—they arose earlier and went to bed later—than white servants, but that also allowed them time for communication throughout the city. Accordingly, slaves were the early bearers of news and, in their extensive city travels, often had a fuller outstanding of events throughout the city than the families for whom they worked. Their activities as messengers and shoppers also meant that they could gather with one another, discussing their conditions. On March 25, 1712, such a group gathered to plan a rebellion, determining to destroy the city and “murder every white person.” On April 6, 1712 a group of 25-50 individuals set fire to an outhouse in the East Ward, and when whites came to put it out, the slaves fired upon and killed them. The night ended with nine whites being killed and six wounded. The next day the militias swept the city, capturing several rebels, while others killed themselves. The white New Yorkers were convinced that had there not been a garrison the city would have been destroyed.

     Such events resulted in a series of so-called Slave Codes, consolidated in 1730 with a provision that it was illegal for more than three slaves to meet anywhere unless it was “in some servile employment for their Master or Mistress.” Even religious services were seen as dangerous events where Blacks could foment revolution. The rising number of slave baptisms and the accompanying instructions into the faith from 1712 to 1727—resulting in a kind of rudimentary education—made slave owners nervous. In 1740 and 1741 the English evangelist George Whitefield visited New York, preaching to five or six thousands of mixed whites and blacks, which resulted in a kind of hysteria among slave owners. For soon after Whitefield’s visit fires began to break out throughout the city at the rate of three or four a day. The whites quickly blamed blacks as being the arsonists and arrested more than one hundred black men and women, convicting many of them and burning thirteen Africans at the stake, hanging nineteen others, some in chains. Seventy more individuals were sold into slavery in the Caribbean and four whites, accused of being ringleaders of the plot, were also hanged. There is little evidence, it appears, that any of those killed were actually involved in setting the fires. It is no wonder that these events, taking place over several weeks, have been compared with the Salem, Massachusetts Witchcraft trials of 1692. But as Jill Lepore observes in her catalogue essay, the New York incidents were far worse; in Salem over one hundred and fifty were accused of being witches, with only nineteen people being executed (although others died in jail), while in New York nearly two-hundred conspirators ultimately were named and tried, ending in far more deaths.

       Extremist events such as these against the slaves may also explain, in part, why it took New York longer than many other parts of the nation to fully emancipate its slaves. As author Patrick Rael points out, we usually think of emancipation as being a single event, centered upon Lincoln’s document of January 1, 1863. But, in an understatement that is almost humorous, Rael observes that New York “surrendered the institution with great reluctance.” It took nearly a half century for full emancipation to take place. Although the New York State legislature passed a sweeping emancipation measure as early 1799, slavery ac-tually increased in the city of New York. As Rael writes, “Of all the major northeastern cities, it alone remained committed to forced labor.” Baltimore, for example, listed only 1,300 slaves, Philadelphia 300, while in New York 2,300 slaves lived. The Gradual Emancipation Act legally mandated the liberation of most slaves by 1827, yet New Yorkers were much slower to give it up.

        Even with the 1817 legislation that freed any African-Americans born before July 4, 1799 by the year 1827, children born to slave mothers before July of that same year could still be apprenticed to the age of twenty-one, which meant that they would remain unfreed until 1848.

     Yet as Rael also points out, the very fact that Blacks remained in slavery brought them closer together in New York, forming a community that forged other economic possibilities and self-educational projects that doomed the institution of slavery itself—the final result of which is represented, perhaps, in the Harlem Renaissance.

    With the final death of slavery, so the catalogue claims, black and white relations in the city sharply declined by the early 20th century. One wonders, however, if this show, accordingly, reveals in some part why by mid-century race relationships in general throughout New York City had so deteriorated that the vast areas of war-zones portrayed in theater works such as West Side Story (see my essay “Three Bernstein New Yorks” in My Year 2004) had become the reality. As we observe through this show, the roots were there as early as 1712.

      This exhibition also provided those who attended an opportunity to tape their reactions. Some of those tapes on display were quite revealing: a black man speaking in great praise of the show for discovering facts which he’d never known, a white woman, dressed like a card-carrying member of the D.A.R. in hat and gloves, reporting her utter astonishment and appreciation for discovering the information the show provided. Slavery in New York was, obviously, a necessary and important event.

 

Los Angeles, January 16, 2006

 

 

*

The second installation of the New York Historical Society show on the African-American presence in the city, was titled “New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War,” focusing on the period after the abolition of slavery in New York in 1827 through the Civil War. What became even more apparent in this second show is that New York City not only was not ready to give up slavery, for social and economic reasons, but, as museum historian James Horton suggests, “The North’s denial of equal rights to black New Yorkers was a handbook or tutorial for what the South would do during the Jim Crow period.”

     When South Carolina seceded from the Union on December 20, 1860, New York Mayor Fernando Wood suggested that New York should do the same. Recognizing that conscription would draw away for military service many of the young working laborers who had put him in power, Wood argued for protests against conscription and the continuance of the war, reiterating what would later become a cry throughout the South even up until the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s:

 

“It is a strange perversion of the laws of self-preservation which would compel the white laborer to leave his family destitute and unprotected while he goes forth to free the negro, who, being free, will compete with him in labor. Let the laboring populations assemble peaceably in mass meetings, and express their views upon the subject….”

 

     Almost immediately, the New York City Draft Riots of July 1863 began, the first battle on the very day in which Wood’s article was published. That day a mob of over 10,000 protestors swept down the East Side, destroying telegraph lines and railroad tracks. By that afternoon mobs attempted to wrest weapons from police control at the State Armory at 2nd Avenue and 21st Street. Numerous Blacks throughout the city—in tenement houses, on the streets, and in restaurant—were attacked. Others hid from the mobs in police protection.

     Battles continued on the West Side during the second day as mobs constructed barricades along 9th Avenue in midtown. By nighttime the Union Steam Works was set afire, and Blacks throughout the city, even those in hospitals such as the Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, spent the night in terror. Looting, particularly at the Brooks Brothers clothing manufacturer on Cherry Street, was reported. By the third day, July 15, 1983, the riots had escalated into the lynchings of black citizens James Costello and Abraham Franklin on the West Side. Franklin’s murder was particularly gruesome: a crippled coachman, Franklin was lynched at 27th Street and 7th Avenue, after which his body was cut down and dragged through the streets. News reports of the day suggested that the riots had spread to other cities such as Boston, Hartford, Newark, Jersey City, Hastings, Tarrytown, and Rye. Throughout the War New York City itself was contested ground, its many industries supporting slavery despite the fact that the State provided the largest numbers of troops and the greatest amounts of arms and food for the Northern cause.

     This revelatory show, moreover, also represented the rising numbers of abolitionists and leaders, both black and white, who would help show the City a way out of its endgame—individuals from radical abolitionists such as Lewis and Arthur Tappan to forward-looking figures such as James McCune Smith, Abram S. Hewitt, Philip A. White, Sylvester A. Murphy, and Adolph G. Schmager who worked with Blacks and other immigrant groups to forge new cultural communities and opportunities for their constituencies that would heal the divisions of the City during the War.

     If nothing else, these two significant historical shows should force Northern whites to reevaluate their sometimes complacent and smug attitudes toward their Southern kin. Slavery, these shows make clear, was a national issue, not simply a regional one.

 

Los Angeles, December 23, 2006

Reprinted from My Year 2006: Serving (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009)

Nivaria Tejera | The Ravine / 2008

looking down

by Douglas Messerli

Nivaria Tejera The Ravine, translated from the Spanish by Carol Maier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008)

 

The ravine of the title of Cuban-born, Canary Island writer Nivaria Tejera’s 1958 book is not only a literal barranco into which the bodies of Republican supporters were tossed by Franco supporters, but the vast gap between the young narrator’s childhood comprehension of the events taking place at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and the realities faced by the adults surrounding her. It is, moreover, the gaping hole between the reality of the past and the nightmare of all Spanish citizens during Franco’s bloody struggle to dictatorship.

 

    For the seven-year-old girl in the Canary Island city of La Laguna, “the war started today,” an indeterminate now which radically changes her life and allows her no return to the normality of the past where the daily joys of childhood were determined by the comings and goings of her beloved father. In fact, the Spanish Civil War did begin at the very center of her existence, in the Canary and Balearic Islands to which General Francesco Franco and General Manuel Goded Llopis had been exiled. On July 18, 1936 both quickly took control of these islands before moving on to Spanish Morocco and back into Spain itself.

     The young narrator, a figure based, in part, upon the author, is suddenly forced to come face to face with Franco’s squads as they search her family’s home; her father, a Republican supporter, has gone into hiding and is soon after arrested and imprisoned in Faife, the local prison created from warehouses formerly owned by a British trading company. Later exonerated of criminal behavior, her father briefly returns home only to be arrested again and ultimately placed in an unnamed prison where the family has no possibility of discovering him. And so this middle class family of workers—an extended family that includes uncles, aunts and grandparents—is suddenly reduced to complete poverty, while they face the fact that they may never see their son, lover, papa, breadwinner again.

     Tejera’s tale, however, is not about the civil war nor the struggles of the surrounding adults, but is centered firmly on the young girl trying to suddenly understand not only events conspiring against her family but the larger events of world war and human morality. Embarrassed by her sudden poverty and daily assignment to beg for groceries from a nearby shopkeeper, confused by the new passivity and depression of the adults around her, and lonely, the girl is transformed from a normal child into a stumbling, bumbling beast of contrary feelings whom her former friends now taunt and openly despise. With a younger child to care for, her mother thrusts upon the girl responsibilities that only exacerbate her difficulties. As she retreats to her internal thoughts, so too does Tejera’s writing, ultimately turning what might have been a somewhat painful but perhaps maudlin story of hardship into a surreal portrayal of the effects of war not unlike Mohammed Dib’s great wartime story of Algeria, Who Remembers the Sea.

    For the most part Tejera succeeds in convincing us of the narrator’s point of view, in part because of what she describes as “a dialogue between past and present,” the voice of the little girl ambivalently fusing with the later adult voice of the author herself.

     Translator Carol Maier spends a great deal of her afterword accounting for and justifying what may seem as inconsistencies between the voice; she admits to attempting, at first, to correct in English for those moments of adult knowledge that creep into the childhood narrative. For me, this seems beside the point. There can never be a truly childhood voice in a fiction written by an adult, simply because if one were miraculously to accomplish the transformation into childhood it would cease being of interest to the adult. Children can express wondrously beautiful and fanciful images of reality which we can enjoy, but they cannot embrace the realities of that beauty and the meaning of the images they have portrayed. Frankly, I prefer the kind of childhood characters created by Ivy Compton-Burnett, children who speak more intelligent and impeccably stylized sentences than their adult counterparts. Yet Tejera succeeds in convincing us that the world she portrays is skewed toward a child-like vision. And particularly in the final last visionary dreamscape of the fiction, the reader can only be touched by that world evoked. Insistent that she will go to search for her father in the ravine, the young narrator imagines the following dialogue:

 

                      “Niñaniña, don’t you suspect? It’s still the zinc rain and the sound from the

                      canyon still whistles through the planted fields. Aren’t you going to make

                      little stripes, aren’t you coming to the planet?” I’ll go, I will definitely go,

                      Mama. It’s at the bend beside where I think, in the puppet pit, I’ll go on

                      the wounded train, in the mirror. It’s winter now, the roads are riddled with

                      puddles and it’s nice to travel through the dirty trees toward the sky. …I see

                      him already, first he’ll lift up the dry hard bones that will be hitting me. I

                      already feel them hitting me. The rain’s softened them and they don’t hurt.

                      In the fog, they seem like insects, they’re wet and they stick to your body.

                      They do. Don’t you hear? Someone’s calling me from further away. It’s

                      the custodian, his garbage, the great wind beside the ravine covering,

                      covering the putrid place of the peloton, where I liked to think Papa would 

                      never lie dead.

                           I’ll go and the great wind will come whirling from the bottom.

                           And I’ll be there looking down.

 

    For both her young narrator and the author herself, looking down with humility—like Alice, looking into the Rabbit Hole—is the only possibility, for there is no way to “look back.” The father will never again be found for that little girl. By the time Tereja’s father was released in 1944 and the family was able to return to Cuba, she was a fifteen-year-old adolescent, a young woman inevitably aged by her childhood experiences. In 1954 Tejera moved to Paris, serving the Cuban government for a period as a cultural attaché in Rome before breaking political ties with Cuba in 1965. Today she lives in Paris, writing poetry and fiction.

 

Orange, California, April 17, 2008

Rain Taxi (Spring 2008).

Hugo Claus | Het Verlangen (Desire) / 1997

rickabone’s fault

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hugo Claus Het Verlangen, translated from the Dutch by Stacey Knecht as Desire (New York: Viking Penguin, 1997)

 

The noted Flemish writer Hugo Claus’s 1978 novel, Desire, begins in a small-town Belgian gambling bar called The Unicorn. Its inhabitants, a rather seedy lot, include figures with monikers such as Felix the Cat, Verbist the Schoolmaster, Deaf Derek and Frans the Dutchman as well as more simply named (but perhaps more complexly presented) figures Jake, Markie, and Michel. The center of this down-and-out group, the traveling salesman Rickabone, is missing because of his death, and it is upon him that the group blames all the events of the story they tell.

 

    For the first part of the novel, indeed, there seemingly is little to reveal: the small-time gamblers (with often large-time losses) seem like the kind of boy-men who exist everywhere, particularly as they engage in silly maneuvers to get a view up the knickers of straddle-legged local woman, Marianne. The game, however, soon becomes a kind of outrageous challenge, as each of the men attempt to outdo one other, and we quickly recognize that behind the standard tools of their trade—cards, booze, women, and school-boy behavior—something more frightening lurks. When one of their group speaks somewhat deprecatingly of their hero Rickabone, there is a kind of verbal ruckus which ends in the sudden invitation by the “hyper-super-sensitive” Michel for Jake to join him on a trip to Las Vegas. The pairing of these two is an extremely unlikely one, as strange as the friendships between Laurel and Hardy, Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pècuchet, or Beckett’s Mercier and Camier. For like all these famous duos, the one, Michel, is lean and, in this case, darkly handsome, and the other, Jake, a fat, jovial and placid man, the peace-maker of the group.

     Soon we visit each of these figures at home, intuiting that something more is happening there than what appears. Michel is living with his mother, his only true possessions hidden under his bed: “the Hitlerjugend knife and the airgun and the weepy love letters from Markie”—one of only two times in this fiction that Claus hints that the beautiful Michel might possibly be homosexual. The author is even more subtle about the home-life of Jake, surrounded by his loving and beloved daughter, Didi, and his critical and argumentative wife, Dina. By the end of the book, however, we perceive this same scene in a completely different manner, as we discover that Didi is not at all a child, but a mentally-disturbed adult woman who behaves, after her breakdown, in a child-like manner.

     Into the new world these two proceed, seeming innocents on their way to a startling revelation. As with most socially and culturally isolated people, however, they cannot really take in the world they encounter. In London Michel is already consumed with a search for porno, while Jake suffers the after-effects of a night of Indian spices (“it’s not every day you get stuff like that in Belgium…”). By the time they reach Los Angeles, the two are slightly disgusted with each other’s company as they sit by their motel TV, guzzling Budweiser, Miller, Schlitz, Jim Beam, ginger ale, Pepsi and Windsor, “a classic Canadian whiskey with the smooth flavor you expect and price you don’t.” Michel curses the TV for having no porno and Jake lies curled up for hours in his shorts, “like a big fat baby that has been plunked down on the orange bedspread by a giantess.”

      In Las Vegas things are not much better, as Michel alternates between gambling tables and porno theaters and Jake attempts to take in the hotel pleasures, such as watching the performers at Circus Circus. Jake soon falls under the influence of a sham preacher, who alternates between preaching hell and damnation against the evil city and working as a gambling croupier. Although Claus takes a few potshots at American culture, his focus is not upon the American scene but upon the Belgian scene these two men carry within. Under the influences of his new experiences and his sense of distress, Jake writes strange letters home to his wife, letters which betray a new sense of reality—issues which she quickly discerns and confronts back in their home town.

     Didi, it appears, was in love with Markie, even preparing to marry him until he was forced by Rickabone to break off the affair and take up a homosexual relationship with the wealthy Salome—an act which led to Didi’s breakdown.

    Suddenly we begin to understand the complex relationship between the two men, the man who has had an affair with Markie and the man who has lost his daughter to insanity because of Markie. We now comprehend the love-hate bond between them, and sense the controlled violence that exists not only in these men’s psyches but in all the hearts of all the Unicorn denizens. And we also now perceive that the desire of the title is not just a search for pleasure in a world that, metaphorically speaking, is “Rickabone’s fault” (a desire holding out against by the gaping chasm of death into which one’s rickety bones inevitably will fall) but a search for redemption—that Michel’s invitation to Jake was more than a whim, was an attempt rather for the two of them reach out together for the truth.

      Arriving at the truth, however, is openly dangerous. At a late-night Vegas haunt, Jake recognizes some of the Circus Circus performers, one of them who stares intently at him in a clearly sexual gaze. The gentle giant snaps, violently attacking and killing the youth. Readers will recognize that Jake’s violence was directed not at the stranger but at the man who has brought him to this place.

      As the two men escape back to Los Angeles and, ultimately, to Belgium, they have both undergone enormous changes. Jake moves away, never returning to the Unicorn. Michel occasionally visits, but he is no longer welcome, the denizens recognizing that something terrible has happened between the two of them—and fearing perhaps that that terrible thing is something in which they have all played a part.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2006

Reprinted from The Green Integer Review, No. 2 (March-April 2006)

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (March 2008), on-line

 

Carolyn Brown | Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham / 2007

perfect balance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Carolyn Brown Chance and Circumstance: Twenty Years with Cage and Cunningham (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 2007)

In her beautifully written and revelatory autobiographical study of the American composer and poet John Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham, Carolyn Brown recounts the first time she saw Cunningham dance, in a Master’s Class in Denver in April 1951:

 

          He was slender and tall, with a long spine, long neck, and sloping shoulders; a

          bit pigeon-breasted. The body was a blue-period Picasso saltimbanque though the

          face and head were not. I remember Merce most clearly demonstrating a fall that

          began with him rising onto three-quarter point in parallel position, swiftly

          arching back like a bow as he raised his left arm overhead and sinking quietly to

          the floor on he left hand, curving his body over his knees, rolling over quickly

          arriving on his feet again in parallel position—all done with such speed and

          elegance, suppressed passion and catlike stealth that my imitative dancer’s mind

          was caught short. I could not repeat it. I could only marvel at what I hadn’t

          really seen. His dancing was airborne then; critics and audiences of that time still

          cannot forget his extraordinary gift for jumping. …Merce Cunningham had an

          appetite for dancing that seemed to me then, as it does today, to be his sole

          reason for living.

      Brown had been brought up on dancing, studying with her mother Marion Stevens Rice, a member of the Denishawn school of Ted Shawn and Ruth St. Denis. Throughout her childhood she had attended dance events in Boston. “Despite that exposure,” she nearly gushes, “I’d never seen anyone move like Merce; he was a strange, disturbing mixture of Greek god, panther, and madman.”

     Seeing Cunningham dance, however, was not enough for her and her husband, composer Earle Brown, to pack up and move to New York. Carolyn had no intention of becoming a dancer! It was Cage, with whom she and her husband intensely talked over two nights of parties in Denver, who would truly influence their decision to move to New York. Although they had intended to go to Los Angeles so that Earle could privately study with Arnold Schoenberg, the great composer’s death in July 1951, along with a remarkable concert in their own living room by the young pianist David Tudor, as well as their earlier conversations with Cage determined their move East.

     Greeted in their new environment again by Cage, with his “well-documented remarkable open-mouthed half-chuckle/half-laugh that exposed a large fleshy tongue lolling on lower teeth,” the couple was quickly swept up into a concatenation of artists, dancers, composers and writers—Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Ray Johnson, Paul Taylor, and hundreds of other luminaries as they moved from lower Manhattan, to Black Mountain College—where in 1953 Cunningham first formed his dance company—through hundreds of American small towns, and eventually to Europe, Asia, and South America.

 

     Along the way, the reader becomes privy to the hundreds of friendships, working mates, lovers, and acquaintances (Brown intimates the reasons for the breakup of the Cage-Cunningham deep friendship with Rauschenberg, and hints at the dissolution of her own marriage). By the end of this long work, one feels almost as if he has read a panoramic novel, like War and Peace, instead of straight-forward autobiographical biography! Certainly, by the work’s last words, with the former Greek God-panther-madman sitting, wracked with pain in a wheel-chair—we feel not only that we have seen every important dance that Cunningham choreographed, but that we know these two great men.

       For all of her devotion to and love of Cunningham, Brown reveals that of the famed duo, Cunningham was the difficult one, a man often lost within himself, at times almost reclusive, failing to explain his decisions—including the seemingly impulsive decision to dismiss the popular Remy Charlip from his company—or even to relate the logic behind or names of the works he created. Brown survived Cunningham’s company for so long, it appears, because of her great sense of independence, her ability to accept her mentor’s silences, and her devotion to her art and to the idea of Cunningham’s greatness.      

     Cage, on the other hand, comes across as a generous spirit throughout, a man who loved games, eating (his mushroom-hunting expeditions are renowned), and, most of all, talking. The gregarious Cage, traveling in the early days with the company, was responsible, so Brown suggests, for the feeling that they were, in fact, a company, for the sense of group spirit. Like a loving mother, Cage is always there to help Cunningham get through the ordeals of travel and the horrible pain the body of any dancer must endure.

      Cage is presented as a joyful being, seeking everyone’s happiness. Brown writes:

 

                  For many years we seemed to be operating in the world, not in a world

                  apart. There was a richness and variety of experience. …John had friends

                  from coast to coast and was always making new ones. And if there was a

                  really fine museum, or notable architecture, or maybe just a good movie

                  around, John would find time to get us there. Slow scenic routes were

                  chosen instead of mind-numbing thruways. “Have you seen Niagara Falls?”

                  John would ask…. Our existence then was governed by process, not product.

                  The means and the end justified each other. Despite the fact that getting

                  there (traveling) seemed to take precedence over being there (performing),

                  and what and where we ate appeared to be far more important than any

                  single performance…our focus nevertheless was single: art-and-life. No

                  separation. John’s credo—accepting the multiplicity of things—was ac-

                  tively lived in the VW days. Later on, Merce’s credo—weeding out every-

                  thing but absolutely essential to putting on a performance—became the

                  company doctrine….

     It was Cage who wrote to various venues throughout the world and arranged the world tours that Cunningham’s company would take. Cage, moreover, was responsible for raising money for many of Cunningham’s performances and travels. What is utterly fascinating in Brown’s remembrances is just how different this group of gay artists—Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns—were from the musical establishment as recounted in Sherry’s Gay Artists in Modern American Culture. At the same time that Copland, Menotti, and Barber—as well as the established dance company of Martha Graham—were being paid large amounts to present their works around the world, Cunningham’s company was turned down year after year for any governmental financial support. And grants came to Rauschenberg only after he received the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1964.

     Cage’s open-mindedness was reflected, as well, in his commitment to chance operations. While Cunningham, on the other hand, attempted chance operations in several of his dance works, the actual performances were mostly pre-determined and were not altered in subsequent renditions. If the dances of the Cunningham company may seem to be the perfect blending of music, dance and art, Merce’s method of rehearsing his dancers without music, set, or costumes until the very last moment, seems to be at odds with the results.

     Brown and other dancers make it clear they were not always in sync with the radical musical compositions by Cage, Wolff, Brown, and others who Cunningham employed. It is almost as if Merce and company were able to block out of their minds, at times, integral elements of the whole—although the critics commonly focused, in their attacks, on just those matters.

     In the end, however, we come to perceive that the very greatness of Cunningham—and perhaps the brilliance of Cage’s music and thinking—had a good deal to do with the differences between these two men and, at times, the oppositions of their other collaborators. It seems to me that the beautiful black-and-white photographs upon this book’s cover express the essence of the Cage-Cunningham contributions to the whole artistic expression—a kind of perfect balance, between the arts, yes, but particularly between human beings.

 

Los Angeles, May 17, 2008

Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Appaxine, Denis Ganguilhem, and Sophie Schmit | The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult / 2005

the imperfect medium

by Douglas Messerli

 

Clément Chéroux, Andreas Fischer, Pierre Appaxine, Denis Ganguilhem, and Sophie Schmit The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005

 

In November 2005 I saw “The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was a fascinating show, and one that deserved the hour or so I spent staring at the photographs of supposed spirits, fluids, mediums, and supernatural matter.

      Most of these images were obviously manipulated, beginning with the earliest works shown by the American William H. Mummler and the British photographers Frederick Hudson and John Beattie. Many of these represent subjects in reverie or half-asleep or at the medium’s table with vague figures standing beside them or—occasionally, and almost comically, on their laps, as in the Frederick Hudson photo, “Alfred Russel Wallace with the Spirit of His Mother.”

     Some of these works were simple hoaxes, but others billed themselves as “phantasmagorical” entertainments, and indeed the works of Andre-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri and Eugène Thiébult are quite frighteningly gory: the first photographer is represented with a set of photographs depicting two friends posing before the camera before one friend reappears (in a sequential image) naked with a helmet on his head, while the second photographer’s “Henri Robin and a Specter” of 1863 presents an image of a sheeted skeleton attempting to embrace a besuited gentleman in his study.    

     It took only a few years from these original images before the specters became less theatrical, allowing far more imaginative associations: the German photographer Theodor Prinz’s “A Ghost,” for example, shows three men at table with a white figure with no discernible features hovering above them. The American W. Fitz-Hugh Smith placed two blank “Seeds” plates upon a table in a semi-lighted room while two persons rested their hands upon them on five successive Friday nights. The results are two negatives representing a total of forty-two faces, Christ in the center of the first and Shakespeare at center of the second.

     Frances Griffiths Elsie Wright of the United Kingdom depicted her young girls with miniature fairies and spites. Madge Donohoe, another Britisher, practiced what she called “skotography,” photographs of spirits taken without a camera or light. Pressing a packaged photographic plate against her face at night, she “entered into communication” with “unseen operators”—most often her late husband or the detective writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (a great admirer of her work and that of other spiritualist photographers). Her prints represent rays of light surrounding circular images of individuals, masks of eyes, and other figures that appear to have natural forms. 

    The second part of the show was dedicated to manifestations of ectoplasm and fluids forming images and words, or sometimes simply swirling out the air of the mouths, noses, and other orifices of mediums and other seated figures. Perhaps the most disgusting of these are the photographs by the American R. W. Conant who pictured the medium Margery emitting masses of ectoplasm from her nose. Some mediums even produced ectoplasm in the likenesses of figures such as Arthur Conan Doyle, represented in a photograph by the Canadian Tomas Glendenning Hamilton.

     Some photographers, such as Paul Le Cour lay claim to witnessing levitating tables and chairs. In the Dane Sven Türck’s photographs of the 1940s, not only do chairs and tables go flying through space, but in at least one instance, the medium himself. The American Sorrat Group of the 1960s colored snapshots of metal coffee tables and dolls rising above the ground, suggesting a comically gravity-free world of American domesticity.

     Several of these photographers insisted upon witnesses to their activities and put heavy constraints upon their photographic processes to prove the “truthfulness” of their work. Today, of course, even the newspapers proclaim how easy it is—given the advent of the computer—to manipulate photographic images. But what we recognize in this show is that photography was always a medium that attracted manipulation of both image and audience—an important statement, I suggest, given the continued faith Americans (and, I am certain, citizens of other countries) put in photographic representation. It was almost inevitable that the two major works that attracted the ire of conservative politicians and religious leaders of the 1980s and 1990s were photographic images: the “Piss Christ” photographs of Andres Serrano and the nude images of black males by Robert Mapplethorpe—both of whom lost venues for their art and financial support. Had their works been paintings would they have caused the furor they evoked? Why should we so intertwine the photograph with a kind of realist presentation of life that it actually offends certain viewers? Of course, painting and sculpture can evoke the same reactions, but we understand, somehow, that  they are “creations,” evocations of experience and manipulations of reality, while we somehow “believe” in the photographic image. This show should certainly make us question that faith.

    Perhaps this issue lies behind the images I find the most fascinating in this show: the “Thoughtography” of Ted Serios. In his mid-thirties, working as an elevator operator, Serios discovered that he could use his mind to project images onto film in an ordinary box camera. Drawing the attention of psychiatrist and psychical researcher Jule Eisenbud, Serios, overseen by researcher, underwent thousands of trials, witnessed by hundreds of different observers. The series is rather startling. There were more than four hundred images that contain specific images, some of these based on “target” figures concealed from Serios in various manners such as sealing the image in an opaque envelope. Although the correspondences to the “psychic” photographs were often not very close, it was sometimes the very differences which made these interesting. For example, in attempting to produce a picture of the Chicago Hilton Hotel, where he had once worked, Serios, with Eisenbud holding and triggering the camera some three feet away, produced instead the Hilton Hotel in Denver, but at an angle and perspective that would have been impossible for a photographer to accomplish—from a “position not achievable with an ordinary seven-foot stepladder but only with some special contrivance for getting the cameraman well into the air.” In another so-called “distortion,” Serios produced a photograph of Eisenbud’s ranch outside of Denver without ever having visited it; even more strangely, however, was the fact that the ranch produced in Serios’ thought-image did not represent the psychiatrist’s ranch at the time of the event, but as it had been years earlier, without shutters on the windows and beside a barn in a condition in which it had never existed.

    An alcoholic, Serios was not an easy subject, and one day he simply determined to stop the experiments. He seldom was able to mentally produce an image again.

      Many of us would like to believe in psychic phenomena: it would explain so many of our fantasies, our desires and dreams. But, in the end it is the imperfection of these images—the fascinating manipulation of reality that precludes belief—that makes them of interest to us as art. 

 

Los Angeles, December 7, 2005

Reprinted from Reading with My Lips (August 2024).