viz. - HRC

Sources of Fame: Photographer or Subject?

Laura Thain — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 21:47:13 +0000

An Arnold Newman "selfie" from 1987. Image credit: The Jewish Museum

One of my favorite parts of the Harry Ransom Center’s current exhibition on Arnold Newman is the way it resists chronology. Newman’s photographs are organizes by particular attention to one of ten elements of Newman’s photography as artistic practice: “searches,” “choices,” “fronts,” “geometries,” “habitats,” “lumen,” “rhythms,” “sensibilities,” “signatures,” and “weavings.” What results is an exhibit that resists a notion of Arnold Newman’s transformation over time. Instead, the exhibit suggests, audiences might read Newman by his unique manipulation of photography’s formal elements throughout his entire career.

The resistance to chronology is apparent, too, in the weaving, wandering nature of the physical exhibit. Temporary half-walls throughout the exhibition space designate no beginning or end point for audiences. Instead, the exhibit inspires audiences to accept Newman’s particular artistic practice across ten themes as definitive criteria for photographic excellence, and therefore evidence for celebrating the photographer himself.

Such a construction has encouraged me to think about the relationship between celebrated photographer and celebrated subject. Are there ways that these two categories inform each other in the case of Arnold Newman? Can we trace, even amidst the Harry Ransom Center’s achronological curation, a chronological shift in fame from photographer to photographed? How does fame work as a mechanism for those who garner fame by representing it and perhaps cultivating it? Can those who represent fame create it as well?

To accomplish such a task, I’d like to begin by examining some of Newman’s early portrait subjects. I’ve limited myself to what the Ransom Center has included in their exhibition in the exploration below. Each portrait contains a “fame ratio” rating, which I’ve calculated by dividing the amount of google hits the portrait subject and the search term “Arnold Newman” receive by the amount of google hits the portrait subject alone receives. The closer the fame ratio gets to one, the more, we might infer, that the fame of the portrait subject from a 2013 perspective depends on their portrayal by Arnold Newman.

Image Credit: Chris Beetles

Yasuo Kuniyoshi, 1941 [Fame ratio: .46]

[Google search results in 55,300 results]

[of those results, 25,600 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

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Without doing further archival research, I can say little about Kuniyoshi other than to assert he was an arguably minor figure in the New York art scene, especially in 1941, ten years after producing his most well-known works. Newman’s portrait of Kuniyoshi was probably mutually beneficial for Newman early in his career and Kuniyoshi late in his; now, evidence from Google suggests that Kuniyoshi is more reknowned for being Newman’s photographic subject than for his own innovating work in photography and lithography.

It is no coincidence that Newman was interested in Kuniyoshi; the two shared a similar interest in employing the naturalistic tradition in urban spaces.

Other portraits included from 1941:

Image Credit: iCollector

Raphael Soyer [Fame ratio: .22]

[Google search results in 77,500 results]

[of those results, 16,800 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

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Image Credit: Phillip Koch Paintings

Edward Hopper [fame ratio: .03]

[Google search results in 1.76 million results]

[of those results, 49,200 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

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Image Credit: Artnet

John French Sloan [Fame ratio: .02]

[Google search results in 300,000 results]

[of those results, 5,000 included reference to Arnold Newman.]

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The trend of this data suggests that during 1941, Newman was able to establish a presence in the New York art community and transition from photographing minor figures to more major ones. However, the more famous the artist at the time Newman captured his photograph, the less their fame (present and future) depended upon their role as Newman’s photographic subject.

The exhibition also suggests that Newman’s 1941 photographs had a dramatic effect on the demand for his portraiture. Having achieved a reputation with his iconic 1941 photos, by 1942, Newman was no longer photographing minor figures. His subjects included arguably the most popular artists of the mid-century: Marc Chagall and Max Ernst.

Image Credit: Anthony Luke Photography

Marc Chagall, 1942 [Fame ratio: .01]

[Google search results in 4.2 million hits]

[of those hits, only 65,700 contained reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

Image Credit: Rice Cracker

Max Ernst, 1942 [Fame ratio: .004]

[Google search results in 2.34 million hits]

[of those hits, only 9,800 contained reference to Arnold Newman.]

--------------

By 1946, Newman was photographing the likes of Igor Stravinsky (perhaps Newman’s most iconic photograph) and Gore Vidal; figures of such fame seem to indicate that Newman’s portraiture had, by the mid 1940s, become an emblem or indication of celebrity, rather than a component in the creation of celebrity for the photographic subject.

This is not to say that Newman lost interest in photographing people who did not enjoy mass fame. Over the course of his career, Newman continued to photograph subjects whom he thought were influential or significant to modern life. Not all of those figures were vindicated by the test of time.

I would like to close, however, by suggesting that Newman’s own work enjoys an iconic status in its own right, even when the significance of the photographic subject has been forgotten. (We might, for instance, return to my first example of Yasuo Kuniyoshi.) Newman often insisted that his photographs must speak as both textually (that is, technically) and contextually competent objects. This is how we might define “iconic” in the case of Newman. The object must communicate meaning both in its composition and in its subtext. As Newman argues, "Successful portraiture is like a three-legged stool. Kick out one leg and the whole thing collapses. In other words, visual ideas combined with technological control combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold its own." In this way, a viewer might experience the lesser-known figures of the Newman exhibit as a sort of “death of the subject” akin to Foucault’s “death of the author.” In relieving the subject as the primary element of a photograph, we might, in the case of Newman’s archive, let the photographer speak.

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

Framing Subjects: Arnold Newman’s Editorial Practice

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:18:36 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Walking through the Harry Ransom Center’s Arnold Newman: Masterclass exhibit with a photographer friend helped me notice more than Newman’s numerous famous subjects. Creating a portrait requires more than just telling someone to smile or to stand in fair light; good photographers must understand how composition affects the final product. Framing matters, whether that’s done by putting wood around a picture or deciding where and how you crop the shot. The exhibit allows visitors to examine Newman’s artistic process, showing the evidence of how he edited his raw photographs into finished portraits. I want to look at in this post both his famous shot of Igor Stravinsky and his created “portrait” of Marilyn Monroe to think more about what we can learn about visual and non-visual editorial practice.

As the exhibit’s catalog states, Newman’s photography was often put into the category of “environmental portraiture.” As William Ewing defines the term, this meant that Newman

would usually situate the person in their library, living room, laboratory, studio or office. But he himself was never comfortable with the term (which is just as well, since today its ecological connotations ring jarringly in our ears). He thought the “environmental” label did not give enough credit to what he termed his “symbolic portraits” [...] Newman also complained that the label was simply too restrictive: “People started calling me the father of the environmental portrait,” he explained, “[but] the moment you put a label on something there is no room to move. And I never thought in such terms, and I refuse to think in terms of labels…” (17)

His famous portrait of Igor Stravinsky, which was taken in 1946 when he was commissioned by Harper’s Bazaar’s Alexey Brodovitch to photograph the composer, actually took on a significant afterlife as one of his most famous works, endlessly included in retrospectives of his career. However, it’s worth looking at the negatives to see how this portrait came to be.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The contact sheet on display in the exhibit shows four different versions of Stravinsky posed with the grand piano; each contains a different pose, whether it’s him standing with his hand on his chin, or his head tilted back as he sits before the piano. The one Newman marks to use has Stravinsky posing with his left hand against his head and his right hand holding onto the piano, his face posed straight towards the camera. The picture reaches from below the piano to the high ceilings’ crown molding above. Within the photograph’s overall composition, Stravinsky is dwarfed by his surroundings. Yet Newman’s final print makes an even more dramatic cut, choosing to locate Stravinsky in the very far left bottom corner of the picture. The framing here highlights the instrument’s centrality to understanding and representing Stravinsky, as the piano’s highly geometric lid dominates the space, but the picture’s sharp angles draw the eye back to the subject. In other words, by cropping his original picture, Newman creates a more striking portrait, one that lets the viewer feel both Stravinsky’s awe-inspiring musical talent and his gentle humanity.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

As Jim pointed out in his post, the 1962 Marilyn Monroe series is striking as well, though perhaps more so because Marilyn herself has frequently been the artist’s subject. In his series of photographs with her and Carl Sandberg, viewers can better see how Newman constructs his subject through cropping. William Ewing explains the circumstances surrounding this shoot thus:

The frame itself is one from several rolls of film exposed at a private party ... The actress is shown across the series as relaxed and playful, though a little tired, and the intimate relationship she enjoyed with Sandburg is evident and touching. However, none of this is shown in the selected fragment. One can easily imagine a magnificent Monroe portrait by Newman—one that would have become a famed icon—but the photographer never succeeded in getting the star to pose for him. (101)

The contact sheet for this series shows a variety of Monroe’s playful postures, as well as Newman’s choice of how to crop her for the finished product:

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Newman’s framing here takes even more dramatic shape than in his Stravinsky portrait, which merely chooses within a composed shot a more striking slice. Here, Newman actually cuts out another person, focusing instead just on Monroe’s face. Ewing’s following commentary on the result is entirely disapproving:

The blow-up was not a portrait in the classic sense. It was not reciprocal; it was not an exchange. Where, in Newman’s approach, the legitimacy of cropping from a 4 × 5 or 8 × 10-inch format was implicit, the same cannot be said of cropping from a casual 35mm negative. The close-up is uncharacteristically grainy and bears no resemblance to the studied compositions of all Newman’s other works. Here, we may have evidence of the corrupting influence of celebrity. Newman could not pin Monroe down, so he took his opportunity to fabricate a “portrait” from the scant materials at hand. (101)

Celebrity may have in fact influenced this creation, if only in how well the portrait’s graininess and Monroe’s pensive expression fit within her larger iconography.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Her expression, highlighted by the close crop on her face, invites viewers to see her as isolated, contemplative, or mournful. As created here, the Marilyn we see does not reflect the intimate, relaxed surroundings within the original pictures—recontextualized, it takes on a different, constructed meaning. The insistent "MUST CROP OUT" of the proof sheet emphaiszes that construction as it puts her in a new frame.

Newman’s playful self-portrait of himself posed with the Stravinsky portrait that I opened this post with I think suggests some of what framing does and allows artists, both those who work in visual and written mediums. The contexts and surroundings and cuts you make as author focus the audience’s attention for your own interpretive point—because, if portraits are meant to reveal the subject, what gets revealed is the photographer’s choice, not the subject’s.

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

New Forms for Old Needs in Norman Bel Geddes’s "House of Tomorrow"

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 08:43:11 +0000

Image Credit: Metropolis Magazine

Walking through the Harry Ransom Center’s excellent Norman Bel Geddes exhibit, one thing that struck me is that while Bel Geddes is particularly famous for his large industrial designs—radios, cars, cities, and stadiums, for example—he also directed his talents towards the intimate spaces of the American home. Before Bel Geddes designed prefabricated homes for the Housing Corporation for America in 1939, or published his 1932 book Horizons, he wrote an article called “The House of Tomorrow” for the April 1931 issue of the Ladies Home Journal. The “twentieth-century style” he describes is one that he sees uniting form and function anew for the needs of the twentieth-century individual—or rather, what he imagines the twentieth-century individual to be.

Image Credit: Screenshot from Norman Bel Geddes's Horizons

Bel Geddes’ design philosophy is evident both within the article and in his manifesto Horizons, published the following year. As Bel Geddes and others saw himself principally as a set designer, he reframes his interest in industrial design as a kind of art for the modern era, where design has greater importance than ever before:

We are entering an era which, notably, shall be characterized by design in four specific phases: Design in social structure to insure the organization of people, work, wealth, leisure. Design in machines that shall improve working conditions by eliminating drudgery. Design in all objects of daily use that shall make them economical, durable, convenient, congenial to every one. Design in the arts, painting, sculpture, music, literature, and architecture, that shall inspire the new era. (4-5)

Bel Geddes here presents himself as an artist, who, like all others, “is sensitive to his environment” (6). He carefully notes the circumstances of life in 1930s America—post-industry, mid-Depression—and argues that they require new approaches to design in all these four phrases. He also works to break down the divisions between these different areas when he argues that “in the point of view of the artist who fails to see an aesthetic appeal in such objects of contemporary life as a railway train, a suspension bridge, a grain elevator, a dynamo, there is an inconsistency” (11). Bel Geddes argues that as modern life has centered increasingly around work, there is a greater need for conveniences, objects that function to promote ease and efficiency. Thus, while late nineteenth century art defined itself through Walter Pater’s formulation of “art for art’s sake,” Bel Geddes sees art in the perfect union of form and function

Visual design is concerned with form, space, color; with the proportioning of solids and voids and the rhythmic spacings of these elements. The governing factor as to what is pleasing to the eye is the idea, which is of an emotional nature—an emotion of pleasure, satisfaction, excitement, exhilaration, stimulation. (18)

What’s interesting here is how much emphasis Bel Geddes in this quotation places on the emotions of the artist. Elsewhere in Horizons, when he predicts that twentieth-century art will detach itself from galleries and statuary, he describes what he sees as the continuity between the art of the past and tomorrow: “The work of the artist always has been, and will be, a distinctly individual product—the antithesis of ‘machine-made.’ Fundamentally, the artist is an emotional person in that he relies more upon his feelings and intuitions than upon reasoning” (11). It’s easy to think that functional design must be based upon reasoning, but Bel Geddes flips the script to emphasize emotion, feeling, and intuition—language typically associated with the feminine.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

However, does publishing “The House of Tomorrow” in Ladies Home Journal necessarily imply that the twentieth-century figure he imagines is a feminine one? There could be a reading of the article that would point out the fact that the house is pink, that would consider the intertextual relationship between the drawings and discussion of design with the inset poem, “Hunches” by Elizabeth Boyd Borie, that would connect Bel Geddes’ intuitive designs with feminine thinking and feminine spaces. Yet such a reading might be incongruous with the Ladies Home Journal’s history, a magazine which published not only the muckraking work of Jane Addams but also Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural designs. This widely-read magazine, like Bel Geddes himself, often contemplated questions of function, questions Bel Geddes emphasizes in “The House of Tomorrow.”

In fact, Bel Geddes quickly establishes the reasons he sees for a change in home planning and design: “The keynote of all the good contemporary work is that it must perfectly suit its ultimate purpose. We have returned to simplicity because we have realized in this age that the overornamentation and elaboration of the past are not in keeping with us today. We are more forthright people than were our forefathers, we bother less with forms and conventions, and so it is surely fitting that we carry our ideas into our homes.” This description of the modern American individual is one perhaps that sounds suited equally to our age as to the 1930s; he neatly transitions from thinking about the people to the houses that should shelter such folks.

Image Credit: Alcade / The Harry Ransom Center

His solutions include moving the bedrooms from the front of the house to the back, nearer to the sunshine and expansive yards that are beautiful to behold. Even as he proposes to build more with steel girders and concrete, which might sound ugly, he notes that “in pursuit of light and air, since we are not bound down by any arbitrary limits, we can make our windows stretch the whole length of our rooms,” and likewise turn our roofs into flat spaces suitable for gardens. The emphasis he places on light, convenience, and the unity between interior and exterior design all bespeak his interest in making the home a place that does not trap its inhabitants but allows them “to take full advantage of all the innumerable aids to more convenient living that have been evolved in the past few years.” This emphasis on function is much in line with the kinds of rhetoric used in 1940s and 1950s advertising that encourages women to buy appliances to help with their domestic labor, but what’s refreshing is how ungendered his language is throughout the piece. If Bel Geddes expects the modern house “to assure complete satisfaction of every material and psychic need of the owner” (138-9), it seems that ownership is shared equally between the men and women in the space. Women have since the Victorian period been seen as the domestic goddesses, but Bel Geddes contemplates a twentieth century where their needs and interests extend beyond the interiors outward. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising, considering that Bel Geddes changed his name to include the “Bel” when he published his early writings alongside his first wife and collaborator Helen Belle Sneider, but Bel Geddes’s futurism offers new forms for old needs for women as well as men.

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

Harry Ransom Center Collaboration

locnar — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 19:42:27 +0000

During the 2011-2012 academic year, the viz. group collaborated with the Harry Ransom Center on a variety of projects. We had a ton of fun writing blog posts on current and upcoming exhibitions, including The Greenwich Village Bookshop: A Portal to Bohemia; Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored; and The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. We were also extremely interested in the upcoming exhibit on Norman Bel Geddes, the Center's current web exhibitions, and the David Foster Wallace Symposium held at the Center in early April.

As part of our work with the Center, we put QR codes up in the exhibition space in order to link museum artifacts to web content. But we also thought we should interlink the content itself and make an interactive experience out of "touring" the exhibitions and our blog. In order to do so, we created image maps where users are directed to a variety of webpages (including viz. posts) if they click on images or portions of images. For instance, in the image map screencapped below, each image on the Center's etched windows links to supplementary material related to that image. The original image map also links, through the images of flags on the Center's facade, to additional content about exhibitions.

You can explore our image maps here.

An Art Deco King James in the Orientalist Vein: François-Louis Schmied’s Engravings of the Creation and Ruth Stories

Lisa Gulesserian — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 17:08:36 +0000

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Just before viz. took a break for spring, we visited the Harry Ransom Center’s newest exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. Instead of finding only illuminated manuscripts, we were surprised to find contemporary art, literary manuscripts, film posters, and even a sculpture of a golden calf. The exhibition is not just a collection of well-preserved historic Bibles—it’s a unique collection of visual artifacts tangentially related to the King James Bible. As the viz. team walked around the exhibition, one grouping of images caught my eye. Art Deco engraver François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of both Genesis and The Book of Ruth from the King James Bible is absolutely stunning. The artwork is most interesting for its fusion of the geometric lines of Art Deco with the Orientalism of its creator and the lyricism of the Biblical stories it illustrates.

Art Deco was a remarkably successful and widespread architectural and artistic movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. The movement was one focused on decoration—the geometric, symmetrical forms of the buildings and drawings of the movement were influenced by ancient Egyptian flourishes. As Edward Said reminds us, since Napoleon’s foray into Egypt in the 18^th century, “Egypt was to become a department of French learning.” Along with Napoleon’s soldiers, “chemists, historians, biologists, archaeologists, surgeons, and antiquarians” were tasked with “put[ting] Egypt into modern French.” Started around the heyday of archaeological work in Egypt (King Tut’s tomb was discovered in 1922), Art Deco internalized the general Egyptomania of the times. “Art Deco,” says British historian John M. MacKenzie in his book Orientalism: History, Theory, and the Arts, “though not oriental in any obvious overall way, owed much to oriental influences: the geometrical patterns, often brightly coloured, the strongly projecting corbels, the sunbursts, winged elements, (like clocks rendered as solar discs), and other features.” Most of us are familiar with the architectural epitomes of this style, NYC’s Chrysler Building and Empire State Building. Both of these buildings make use of Egypt-inspired tropes, such as the lotus decorations on the elevators in the lobby of the Chrysler Building.

Image Credit: Archaeology.org

François-Louis Schmied’s artwork to accompany a French translation of the books of Genesis is no different when it comes to using Egypt-inspired visual elements. His depiction of the Creation is composed of brightly colored animals bursting (like sunrays) off the page. The whales spew water in symmetrical arcs, while a tidy group of partridges march along the bottom of the engraving.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

Schmied was an Orientalist in the clearest sense. Working in the 1920s and 1930s, Schmied internalized the Egyptomania of his times. He even painted himself in “Oriental dress” at the beginning of his career in 1927. His willingness to take on the dress of the Other might be a sign of Schmied’s identification with the Orient of the past.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Shmied’s clear investment in the Orientalist project is critical to reading his illustration of the Book of Ruth. In his engraving for the marriage of Ruth and Boaz, Schmied chose to depict Boaz with darker skin than the outsider from Moab, Ruth. Moabites were excluded from the Jewish community as stipulated by God in Deuteronomy 23:3–6.

Image Credit: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia

Ruth, as a Moabite, was allowed to congregate with Israelites because she was a woman (and Moabite women were begrudgingly accepted by Israelites). The story of Ruth and Boaz’s marriage is one of acceptance and compassion—Boaz marries the widowed and impoverished Ruth and fathers a son with her in the direct line of David and Jesus. Their story is not one of passionate love—nowhere does the Bible describe Ruth’s and Boaz’s physical attributes. So, it’s especially interesting that Schmied made Ruth into an olive-skinned beauty and Boaz into a dark-skinned savior. Schmied’s artistic choices might reflect his internalization of another culture, that of “the Orient.” In any case, his engraving is a unique one of an oft-depicted Biblical scene that merits much critical analysis.

See the engravings yourself at the Ransom Center’s exhibition, The King James Bible: Its History and Influence. The exhibition is up until the 29^th of July.

In Miniature: Bel Geddes’s “Doll House for Joan”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:25:05 +0000

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.

In the Ransom Center’s finding aid for the “Norman Bel Geddes Theater and Industrial Design Papers” housed at the Center, I found an interestingly domestic reference—one for a “Doll House for Joan.” In this helpful finding aid, I learned that Bel Geddes sketched and drafted the doll house just as he would any architectural or urban plan. Even elevations—though on a miniature scale—were noted! Bel Geddes made this detailed doll house for one of his two daughters, Joan, sometime in the early 1920s. I’m fascinated to see that before Bel Geddes decided to shift gears from stage design for theater and film, he tried out some of his nascent architectural skills with a miniature structure. I’d like to think that Bel Geddes’s ambitions to become an architect and planner were encased in his building a doll house.

Image Credit: Libraryland

Gaston Bachelard might agree with me. In The Poetics of Space (his magnum opus published in France in 1958), Bachelard muses about our relationships with “intimate places,” from childhood homes to closed drawers. His chapters weave poetry and personal experiences with dreams. The chapter most applicable to today’s discussion of Bel Geddes’s doll house is the one titled, simply, “Miniature.” In this chapter, Bachelard uses Poe and Rimbaud to discuss the power of miniatures in our everyday lives. The most wonderful thing about miniatures, according to Bachelard, is that “Values become engulfed in miniature, and miniature causes men to dream.” What’s important about miniatures isn’t their intricacy nor their accurate representation of reality. For Bachelard, “the minuscule, a narrow gate, opens up an entire world. The details of a thing can be the sign of a new world which, like all worlds, contains the attributes of greatness . . . Miniature is one of the refuges of greatness.” The ‘big’ (in terms of ideas, aspirations, and dreams) is encased in the ‘small’ (in terms of size, scale, and material).

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

I see glimmers of Bel Geddes’s future in his doll house from the 1920s. The structure is taller than it is wide (a nod to the tall skyscrapers in Bel Geddes’s future cities?). Its façade is clean and sparsely adorned (a design aesthetic made popular by Bel Geddes later in his career). And on its roof is a clothesline (as everything Bel Geddes designed was simultaneously fanciful and functional—see his designs of radios and restaurants). I’m tempted to believe, like Bachelard, that “when we examine images of immenseness, tiny and immense are compatible . . . If a poet looks through a microscope or a telescope, he always sees the same thing.” I see greatness in a doll house, domesticity in massive urban plans.

See the mini/immense doll house plans and accouterments yourself in the Harry Ransom Center’s archives now, or wait until September to see them in the Ransom Center’s Bel Geddes exhibition.

Future City from the Past: Norman Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow”

Lisa Gulesserian — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 06:31:56 +0000

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: a456

There’s a common theme in yesterday’s future city and today’s—the car. When last I spoke about possible future cities, I critically assessed artist Chris Burden’s “Metropolis II”, an installation where toy cars zipped across a future Los Angeles surrounded by huge strips of freeways. Bel Geddes’s “City of Tomorrow” is eerily similar to the future city Burden envisions. Both futures see unimpeded cars as the epitome of modern efficiency. And both images of the future are utterly devoid of people. Bel Geddes explains this lack by telling the readers of Life Magazine (where the “City of Tomorrow” ad campaign ran for months) that “tomorrow’s children won’t play in the streets.”

Image Credit: a456

Despite these similarities, there is a difference between Burden’s art installation and Bel Geddes’s advertising campaign, and this crucial difference is one of context. Burden created his art installation for public viewing at the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA). Burden’s dealer Larry Gagosian footed the bill for Burden’s project, while LACMA board member Nicholas Bergguren later bought the project. The key point is that the stakeholders in the project’s success are art dealers and museum board members.

Image Credit: Best Ad

The stakeholders for Bel Geddes’s project’s success are a lot less innocuous. Shell Oil, one of the biggest petroleum distributors in the world, hired Bel Geddes for their massive, multi-segment advertising campaign. Looking at the elaborate advertisements, it’s obvious that Shell is using Bel Geddes’s designs to sell a future lifestyle that would make them millions (billions by today’s standards) if Americans decided to make it a reality. A transportation system dependent on cars would guarantee that gasoline would be a necessary commodity in the future. And it is exactly this gas-fueled future that was embraced wholeheartedly by the city planners of America in the decades following Shell’s campaign. Campaigns like Shell Oil’s “City of Tomorrow” lulled viewers into equating automobiles with ingenuity, modernity, and efficiency. Urban planners like Robert Moses and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright only realized what these viewers wanted to see: more roads, more highways, less impediments. Yet without artists and modelers like Bel Geddes to visualize a future of cars and people-less thoroughfares, what we have ended up seeing years down the line could have been a lot different.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

If the “City of Tomorrow” has piqued your interest, be sure to check out the Harry Ransom Center in the fall when their “I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America” exhibition is up and running. Until then, visit the Ransom Center’s preview page for images and background related to the upcoming exhibition.

Visualizing Censorship: Seals, Symbols, and the Visual Rhetoric of Vice

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Photo by Jake Ptacek

We here at viz are deeply excited about our new partnership with the Harry Ransom Center, one of the premier research libraries for the humanities in the United States. As part of that partnership, we’ve been given a tour of their current exhibitions and the chance to blog about some of the Center’s amazing holdings. You may have already had a chance to read Matthew Reilly’s meditation on their Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit and Jay Voss’s post on The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door exhibition. Continuing that thread, this week I want to look more closely at two artifacts on display in the BBSC exhibit: the official seals for the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the New England Watch and Ward Society.

Photo by Jake Ptacek

I won’t rehash the history of either institution too much—something the Center exhibit does more thoroughly and forcefully than I can do here—but I am fascinated by the differing visual appeals of each seal. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (or NYSSV--sorry there’s no less ungainly acronym) seal creates a tiny narrative. In the left portion of the seal, an official-looking jailer pushes a young man through what must be one of the thickest doors in New York, into the darkness beyond. On the other half, a well-dressed gentleman tosses books onto a blazing fire—and it’s hard not to see a self-satisfied smirk on his face. The seal is a brilliant bit of propaganda. By representing the two acts in the same space, it posits a connection. They become two sides of the same coin. Never mind, of course, that the images are discontinuous—there’s no explanation as to what the criminal has to do with the books being tossed into the fire. Once you’ve seen the image, it’s virtually impossible to unsee the connection, to separate out the different narratives on a gut level.

I should add here that the narrative inscribed on the NYSSV’s seal is far from theoretical. Though technically a private endeavor—it originated through founder Anthony Comstock’s contacts in the YMCA—the NYSSV was chartered by the New York state legislature. Its members had the legal power to raid bookstores, seize material, and make arrests. Under Comstock’s successor, John S. Sumner, the NYSSV raided dozens of bookstores, impounded untold numbers of books, and prosecuted (or attempted to prosecute) dozens of novels and magazines, ranging from Ulysses to Real Forbidden Sweets. The seal was no idle threat, but a history: real people went to prison, and real books were burned, in the name of public morality.

There’s one final irony to the NYSSV’s seal. Perhaps it’s unintentional, or perhaps it’s the “lefty” politics in me looking for evidence of some Orwellian dystopia, but I wonder: when it’s read in the standard left-to-right way of to Western readers, the seal begins with an imprisonment before it gets to the “suppression of vice” (i.e the book burning). In other words, you go first, and the books after you. It’s a warning to everyone that what you read might not even be marked out yet as dangerous. A vicious book might be defined, not by its effect on you, but by your effect on it. There's a looking-glass mentality at work here which upsets the traditional narrative of a book's influence ("vicious books make bad citizens"). Instead, the seal seems to suggest that "bad citizens read bad books;" sadly, this would not be the last time that 20th century politics would rewrite cultural narratives.

Photo by Jake Ptacek

The New England Watch and Ward Society’s seal is—let’s face it—cooler. A hand throttles the snake coiled around it beneath the legend, “Manu Fortis”—“With a strong hand.” The symbolism is startling and direct, with all the subtlety of a Mack truck. While the NYSSV felt the need to narrativize and to demonstrate the effects of vice, the Watch and Ward Society—even the name is less linear—creates an iconography of power. The snake, with all its biblical associations intact, has fangs extended, ready to strike. Only a powerful (and, needless to say, masculine) hand can protect all the innocents who undoubtedly crouch just outside the frame of the seal. And it’s worth mentioning again, that hand isn’t just holding the snake, it’s crushing it. The seal makes a brilliantly simple, if disturbingly violent, claim to power.

A kind of sister organization to the NYSSV, the Watch and Ward Society was based out of Boston, where membership was largely composed of the “Brahmin aristocracy” (membership was only available to men). Unlike the NYSSV, the Watch and Ward society had no actual legal authority to impound books or make arrests; they relied on legal protest and challenges to ban books. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that their seal is more cannily metaphorical (and perhaps a slight case of over-compensation for their legal impotence). The Watch and Ward Society was no less effective, though: the phrase “banned in Boston” has entered the lexicon thanks to their efforts.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

As the poster above demonstrates, the visual rhetoric of book censorship had to change dramatically after the Nazi Party began putting into action on a state-implemented level what had previously been only the wildest fantasy of book censors (though I personally deplore the actions of the NYSSV and the Watch and Ward Society, the calibrations of their acts are, of course, far different than those of the Nazi Party). No longer could smiling book burners be depicted on state-supported seals, and the inherent claims of the Watch and Ward Society’s seal needed to be re-evaluated in a society that had witnessed the liquidation of personal freedoms and identity on a previously unimaginable scale. Ironically, this visual image itself comes from Boston, where the Boston Public Library emerged as quiet defenders of freedom of publication.

Both Societies struggled to survive in a post-WWII society. The NYSSV changed its name to the Society to Maintain Public Decency in 1947, and quietly dissolved after the retirement of Sumner, whose charisma had kept the Society afloat through a series of legal defeats. In 1948 the new head of the Watch and Ward Society, Dwight Spaulding, redirected its focus towards gambling and other social issues. Today, after several mergers and filiations, the Society’s endowments are part of the much different Community Resources for Justice group, which works to promote prison reform and ex-convicts’ rights.

Censorship, of course, hasn’t gone away, and new media fields—film, various iterations of popular music, video games—continue, along with books, to be targeted as corrupting influences on America’s youth. The act of censorship itself, though, has largely become a local issue, which tends to hide its prevalence, except in certain high-profile cases. It seems unlikely (though not, of course, impossible) that any American group will so dramatically visualize censorship as iconically and dramatically as these two. Is it possible to feel nostalgia for the obvious?