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Events/Exhibits

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The Transdiciplinary Wunderkamer

Review article by Michael Punt

Books: Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting
Barbara Maria Stafford. The MIT Press, 219 pp., $29.50, Cloth, ISBN:0-262-19421X.

Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen
Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak. Getty Trust Publications, Los Angeles, CA, U.S.A., 2001. 416 pp., illus. Paper. ISBN: 0-89236-590-0.

Exhibition: Devices of Wonder; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles November 13, 2001- February 3, 2002

Lecture: Intensified Reality: Visual Devices and the Remaking of Worlds.
Barbara Maria Stafford, 15 November 2001

Web site: www.Getty.edu/exhibitions/devices

Perhaps the most liberating intellectual movement of the last few decades has been 'New Historicism'. Paradoxically not a movement at all (according to Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt authors of 'Practicing New Historicism', Chicago, 2000), the informal transdisciplinary coalition of 'New' historians have (re)organised empirical evidence, fretted over their own histories, and doubted their own conclusions to show us that, the very substance of historical study is as unstable as a wave (or a particle) of light. They have inspired a generation and as a consequence, if nothing else, we are no longer constrained in our understanding of the past by the totalising monorealisms of technological progress, modernisation, or mimesis (to name but three). Revisionism in the examination of science, technology and the arts has offered convincing ways to account for the present as it has also revealed the skewed evidence and occult agendas of Whig histories. While many emerging fields of study have benefited greatly from this approach, the more established disciplines appear to have been thrown off course. Art history, perhaps more than biography, archaeology or political history has suffered the most, moving from the centre stage of culture to become an option in Cultural Studies and, as a final indignity, subsumed into the catch-all of (an unreconstructed) Visual Culture.

To be sure Art History (with capitals) asserted its authority in education and academia with restraint and dignity, but sadly, as it left the academy often purveyed bad history when in the public eye. History was a relay race from the caves of Lascaux in which the current holder of the baton was the historian's favourite. The very heterogeneity of art practice since the thirteenth century, the compelling ruptures and discontinuities, were often sewn together with dubious thread that linked the past to the present with a single imperative. As a consequence of substantial criticism of its methods and assumptions, art history as a popular publishing and television topic appears to have lost its way in indirect proportion to the assurance of, for example, film history that daily extends its intellectual constituency as it excites curiosity. The losers in this decline are not just the ranks of superannuated academics (for whom few may be willing to shed tears) but, in the atrophying process, art itself has been sidelined as a significant and meaningful determinant of the present and has been replaced by the vacuous and the technophiliac Emperor's shell-suit of postmodernism.

It is in this breach that Barbara Maria Stafford's interventions over the past decade can be best understood. Unable to subscribe to unsustainable explanations of continuity in art practice over the past seven centuries, and unwilling to resort wholesale to French theory of the eighties, Stafford has reconciled the heterogeneity of the history of western art through the concept of visual analogy. As one would expect Stafford's intellectual method reflects new historicism's preferred understanding of history as the proliferation and nature of connections as opposed to the chaining of causality from an initial imperative. Rejecting the seductive homologies of structuralism and the reification of productive rupture in Foucault, 'Visual Analogy: Consciousness and the Art of Connecting' examines "areas of contemporary life that cry out for fine-grained formulations of resemblance and distinction." (p.30) The spaces between differences are the focus, and these are subjected to a teasing analysis not practiced since the rise of the Jena Romantics and the insistence on difference. "Areas of life" to be sure, since Stafford's ambition is not simply to put the study of the history of art back on the rails Ü that is in the forefront of culture Ü but to connect it (reconnect it) with the spectrum of preoccupations that any contemporary observer might share with an art work: hence the subtitle 'Consciousness and the Art of Connecting'.

Barbara Maria Stafford's residency at the Getty Research Institute laid the foundations for 'Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting' as well as a collaboration with Frances Terpak to mount the exhibition 'Devices of Wonder' in Los Angeles, (also represented on the website). It is a small collection of the very best examples of the epistemic instruments and technologies that have been used to mediate the world around us. They will be familiar to anyone with an interest in what might be called media archaeology; there are no surprises just the pleasure of the finest examples. What will be unfamiliar, however, is the cogency of the argument expressed in the precise selection and organisation of the collection in nearly perfect conditions, the transparency of the thesis, relative to the density of the writing in Visual Analogy, and the enthusiasm of the Los Angeles audience. In short, the big surprise is that artefacts have been returned to the domain of the public eye (and brain) from which they were appropriated for study, not as an expression of the refined and educated taste of the scholars, but as an important burning intuition that has to be shared.

This reciprocity was also the tenor of the lecture Stafford gave at the Getty Research Institute on November 15, 2001. Alert to the proximity of 9/11 and dedicated to the late Ernst Gombrich she articulated the thesis in a sparkling revision of the history of mirrors, lenses, magic lanterns and optical toys in which she was determined to uncouple them from the dominant realist teleology. She argued that these and other devices of wonder did not so much enhance reality as interrupt the relationship with the real to produce a knowledge that was better than the normal world. In this model, human perception was not extended by technology but, on the contrary, was the agent through which technology was amplified to expose the enduring reality as a limited construction. Her journey was familiar to readers of her most recent books: a fastidious archaeology of the cultural imaginary revealed the persistence of a desire for bringing the remote down to earth. In particular she dwelt on the fascinations of what might be called natural magic that were combined with the romance of the magic lantern to produce not cinema, as most histories assert, but the confirmation that reality had long had a competitor. They were what might be called polyopticals that were both extensions of and stand-ins for technology. The magic lanterns (and the host of affiliated apparatus) was not to be consigned to the pre-history of cinema as failed attempts to make moving pictures, but to be regarded as machines in their own right that spoke of the uncanny, the remote and the other worldly.

For Stafford the significance of uncoupling cinema from these devices is that it opens the way to an analogous understanding how biology has seeped into cybernetics - how to explain for example that the impact of computer science on philosophy has not been towards the machinic but quite the reverse. By returning to wunderkamer, the diminutive 'cabinet of curiosities', that greets the visitor to the exhibition Stafford suggested that the object shared with some instruments the particular intensity of reading as the rush of space and time was temporarily halted in the bonding of human consciousness with the apparatus. The objects in the cabinet and the images produced by the 'devices of wonder' existed as specific unconnected moments that ruptured the flow of everyday reality. As such shadows and shadow plays were not mere yearnings for the true representation of movement, but also functioned as portals to other realities; trapping figures in a dark and distorted world with sufficient resemblance only to insist upon its otherness. Similarly projecting mirrors, often used by artists after the sixteenth century, (not as early as Hockney argues), were also to regarded as 'phantom ware' more accurately understood as a critique of the rationalism of the Enlightenment. By detaching the image from the concrete reality these lenses could contradict the real by restoring the dead. In contradiction to some accounts she held that the camera obscura also contested rationalist science in its projection of a condensed and intensified image of the world in colour. It created a moment of perfection that stood in opposition to the regulation of vision. Such distortions of conventional representation were also to be found in what she called the re-purposing of media by, for example carefully and painstakingly shaving the back from etchings and pricking them so that when they were held up against the light they could be reversed and animated. Magicians conspired with this effect as they used anamorphic devices in a reversal of the process collapsing the biological with the geological recovering from the stratified images the representation of the human. What these distinct forms shared was a particular resistance to the idea of linear development and the effect of focusing on analogy was to see these devices as blurring the boundary between the natural and the spiritual. In this context she argued that the images of September 11 (not the events) were a moment of perfection in that they were in a similar sense of another reality Ü beyond our current domain Ü analogous to the warping mirrors that reflected the world back not so much as a bizarre and comic version of what was before it but the realities lost to normal vision.

Drawing this thesis into the present she revisited William Gibson's bleak assertion that "The non mediated world is one that we cannot get back to." But, she questioned, was there ever a time when reality was not mediated? Perhaps the reverse may be the case that the lust for immediacy insists on mediation since it must confirm the existence of another reality - in this sense nanospace and the newest mediations of human consciousness were merely confirmations of the continuing fascinations for another reality. What they offered was not mere escape however but the opportunity to enhance the total person - these technologies were amplified by human consciousness Ü they provided the means by which consciousness was able to change and continue to be changed through the construction of competitors to existing realties.

Stafford and Terpak's book that accompanies the exhibition 'Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen' is an extension of the material and its support and not as teleological as the title suggests. It is a mixed reality with Stafford's introductory essays occupying the first third but dependent upon Terpak's following fastidious and engaging description of the objects (and images) that makes explicit the connections between apparently mutually exclusive technologies of the eye. Carefully illustrated and bound together in an intelligent design concept by Bruce Mau, Chris Rowat and Daiva Villa the book itself becomes a device of wonder, a wunderkamer that temporarily halts rush of space and time in a flurry of fascinating and perplexing images and compelling argument.

The exhibition 'Devices of Wonder' is an unrecoverable experience since it finishes on February 3, 2002. The website will no doubt be active after that but is of necessity temporary. What remains, however, are the two books, 'Visual Analogy' and 'Devices of Wonder'. They are important books. Together they not only pitch a brilliant and refreshing thesis, but they also throw a lifeline to anyone interested in a beleaguered discipline that is in serious danger of being selectively plundered by whatever totalising vision of reality becomes the next academic vogue. At stake in this rescue is not the nostalgic recovery of discrete intellectual territories but, more importantly, the future of trandiciplinary research based on resemblance and the discovery of sameness in otherness.

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