viz.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

As I was perusing the new Harry Ransom Center exhibit, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence, I couldn’t help but linger over the first edition’s title page. The image is gorgeous and what one would expect from King James I’s own printer, Robert Baker. It features Moses and Aaron flanking the title, with the four Evangelists around the corners. Above them, the remaining Apostles are depicted, each holding the various symbols that are associated with their individual iconographies. Of these figures, the one that caught my eye was St. Andrew. Prominently on top of the title page, St. Andrew’s saltire is much larger than any of the other objects that the various figures are holding. To a certain extent, its largeness is obvious and expected given that it’s a slightly rotated crucifix. But one can’t but help also thinking about why St. Andrew might have been given special primacy here. After all, this was a Bible commissioned by King James.

Image Credit: E.O. Goldbeck

Over the next couple of weeks viz. will be putting up a series of posts celebrating the etched glass façade of the Harry Ransom Center, and I thought I’d get things rolling with a discussion of a baseball picture I’ve always noticed on the southeast corner of the building. The hand-written caption on the bottom of the photograph’s etching reads “The New York Yankees as seen in San Antonio, Texas – March 31^st, 1922.” San Antonio’s never had a Major League Baseball team, so it’s always struck me as a little bit odd that the Yanks might venture that far south. That said, Babe Ruth stands in the center of the picture, and on first glance it seems entirely probable that the team is on some sort of exhibition tour. Anyways, I thought I’d take a moment and research the photograph before speculating on the reasons for its placement on the outside of the Ransom Center.

Image Credit: SliceofGreen

In anticipation of the Harry Ransom Center’s upcoming exhibition of Norman Bel Geddes’s futuristic designs, I’ve become completely fascinated with the work of a man whom the Ransom Center describes as “an innovative stage and industrial designer, futurist, and urban planner who, more than any designer of his era, created and promoted a dynamic vision of the future—streamlined, technocratic, and optimistic.” This week, instead of focusing on the futurescapes of Bel Geddes after 1927 (the year Bel Geddes launched his industrial-design career), I will discuss a lesser-known Bel Geddes—the man as a father who built fantastic doll houses for his daughters. This man was a big dreamer (per French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, whom we’ll meet later in this post), one who dealt in miniatures.

Image Credit: Jay Voss

Over the next few weeks viz. will be rolling out a series of blog posts related to the Harry Ransom Center’s upcoming King James Bible and Belle Geddes exhibitions, and in preparation I thought it’d be fun to take a moment and consider the architecture of the Ransom Center. The building stands out from its comrades on the University of Texas at Austin campus, many of which boast a discernibly Spanish feel. Gorgeous arabesques withstanding, it’s quite easy to compare most of UT-Austin’s buildings with the Alhambra in Granada, or the Monastery of Santa Cruz in Sahagún, for example. UT-Austin’s buildings tend to be clad in a white limestone (which can be blinding in the Texas sun), and feature gorgeous soffits clad in turquoise and burgundy. But the Ransom center is different. It’s a cube of gray concrete and might be the only building on campus that I can think of that doesn’t feature a single soffit. Despite the seeming simplicity, there’s much more going on here than what might seem obvious to the cynical. In my humble opinion, the architecture of the Ransom Center is emblematic of an important shift in architectural practice over the past thirty years.

Image Credit: a456

I’ve been thinking a lot about future cities these days, though I’ve mostly been focusing on real-world metropolises as futuristic settings in TV shows and movies. Today, I’m going to shift gears to describe an idea for a future city from the past, Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” advertising campaign for Shell Oil from the late 1930s. The campaign predicts (critics might say “encouraged” or “enabled”) a car-centric, highway-laden, city whose residents “loaf along at 50 [m.p.h]—right through town.” Bel Geddes’ “tomorrow” continues to resound today.

Image Credit: Brandeis.edu

"Books are Weapons in the War of Ideas" portrays the book as a concrete opposition against the Nazi campaign to suppress free expression. This poster represents the base of a literary monument hardening into brick, creating a wall against the forces of anti-intellectualism and hatred. On one level, the text and image disagree as to whether books constitute a weapon or a barrier. On another, the vulcanized page promotes the binary of "us" versus "them," which is required to motivate citizens to armed resistance. The essentialism of this binary, unfortunately, needs to be called into question. Courses in modernist poetry prove that not all fascists were anti-literary, just as twentieth-century American history (or even the recent nightly news) shows that "we" also take our turn at book-burning. Far from denying the clear differences between Axis and Allies during World War II, we might consider how the poster's instrumental definition of books gestures toward a paradoxical complicity subtending the opposed acts of creation and destruction. Such an inquiry inverts the more conventional topic of how certain forms of preservation might actually threaten the existence of art and literature. Speculation into the creative capacity of book-burning has surprisingly rich antecedents in Alexander Pope's eighteenth-century poem, The Dunciad, and in Jorge Luis Borges's reflections on that poem in his mid-twentieth century essay, entitled "The Wall and the Books."

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/2011/banned/

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

Please note, the opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Forever Amber was the best-selling book in 1940s America, selling over three million copies during the decade (Guttridge). In many ways, the scope of the work recalls Thackeray’s The Luck of Barry Lyndon. Written by Kathleen Winsor and set in seventeenth-century England, Forever Amber is the tale of Amber St. Clare, who climbs the ranks of British society by marrying (or sometimes just sleeping with) wealthier and wealthier men. The book was subject to vehement censorship, even though (or perhaps in spite of) a market demand that surely tested the durability of the Macmillan Company’s printing operation. Interestingly enough, as part of their Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit, the Harry Ransom Center is showing an Armed Services Edition of Forever Amber.

Please note, the opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

“To clarify, the door likely didn’t come into the collection randomly,” explains Molly Schwartzburg, Curator of British and American Literature at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center. The door that she is talking about, of course, is Frank Shay’s bookshop door, which is currently featured in the Ransom Center’s interesting new exhibit, The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door: A Portal to Bohemia, 1920-1925. “We don’t have many details,” continues Schwartzburg, “but it appears that the owner of the door, who had been the shop’s last manager, decided that after thirty-five years of keeping the door in her home, she was ready to sell it.” The Ransom Center subsequently acquired the door through Lew David Feldman, a dealer who suspected that the Center might be interested because of their extensive Christopher Morley collection. Molly Schwartzburg graciously agreed to chat with viz. blog about Frank Shay’s bookshop door, and its accompanying exhibition.

(Image Credit: Harry Ransom Center and J. Paul Getty Museum)

The first photograph is hard to see. Though, really, that shouldn't have come as a surprise. The Harry Ransom Center makes it exceedingly clear on their website that not only will the image be difficult to make out, but that each viewer will in some sense be reperforming its discovery. Their instructions for viewing the photo include a short epigraph by Helmut Gernsheim, a photohistorian that rediscovered the piece in 1952. Of his first viewing of the photograph he writes "No image was to be seen. Then I increased the angle—and suddenly the entire courtyard scene unfolded itself in front of my eyes. The ladies were speechless. Was I practicing black magic on them?" 

                                                                                                              Image: Partial Screen shot from Google Maps

How do you make a topic like censorship visible?  After all, the goal of censorship is to make things, in a literal sense, invisible, un-seeable.  But in a world where (sometimes wonderfully, sometimes insidiously) the visual has come to be paramount, how can you visualize censorship, see what can’t be seen?  A few weeks ago, I posted about a few of the visual images highlighted by the Harry Ransom Center’s new Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit related to this topic.  Inspired by Banned Books Week—it’s this week, in case you didn’t know—I want to examine some modern representations of censorship.