A quArterly mAgAzine of Art And culture issue 7 summer 2002 us $8 cAnAdA $13 uK 6 CABINET

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Contents 2002 Immaterial Incorporated & the authors, artists, translators. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction of any material here is a no-no. The views published in this magazine are not necessarily those of the writers, let alone the spineless editors of Cabinet.

cover: envelope recovered from the crash of the Pan American World Airways plane Yankee Clipper in Lisbon on February 22, 1943. Courtesy Kendall Sanford

Contributors

Magnus Brts is an artist and writer based in Stockholm. In 2000, he published a collection of essays Orienterarsjukan och andra berttelser (together with Fredrik Ekman). His recent exhibitions Satellites and The Museum of Homeless Ideas were shown at Roger Bjrkholmen Gallery in Stockholm and OK Gallery in Rijeka, Croatia (together with Zdenko Buzek).

Mike Ballou is an artist based in Brooklyn, New York.

M. Behrens (born 1970 in Germany) has lived and worked internationally as an artist and designer in Frankfurt since 1991. Since 1996 he has worked mainly with sound and video installations.

David Brody is an artist who lives and works near the Kool Man depot in Brooklyn.

Matthew Buckingham is an artist based in New York. He is represented by Murray Guy Gallery, New York, and Galleri Tommy Lund, Copenhagen.

Brian Burke-Gaffney was born in Canada in 1950 and came to Japan in 1972. He has been professor at the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science since 1996.

Paul Collins edits the Collins Library for McSweeneys Books, and is the author of Banvards Folly (Picador: 2001) and the forthcoming travelogue-mem-oir Sixpence House (Bloomsbury USA). He lives in Portland, Oregon.

Nancy Davenport is a New York-based artist represented by Nicole Klagsburn Gallery. Her work has been exhibited recently at the Rockford Museum in Illinois and at the 25th So Paulo Biennial.

Andrew Deutsch is a sound/video artist who lives in Hornell, NY, and teaches sound art at Alfred University. He is a member of the Institute for Electronic Art at Alfred University and of the Pauline Oliveros Foundations board of directors.

Jon Dryden is a musician and writer living in Brooklyn, New York.

Elizabeth Esch is completing a dissertation in the Department of History at New York University.

Matt Freedman is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn.

Dr. Merrill Garnett is a cancer researcher and the founder and CEO of Garnett McKeen Laboratory, Inc. Dr. Garnett has had research laboratories at the Central Islip State Hospital, Waldemar Medical Research Foundation, Northport Veterans Administration Medical Center, and the High Technology Incubator of The State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Tim Griffin is a writer, curator, and art editor of Time Out New York. His book of essays titled Contamination, a collaborative project with artist Peter Halley, is forthcoming from Gabrius (Milan) in September. His book of poetry, July in Stereo, is forthcoming from Shark Press (New York).

Daniel Harris is the author of A Memoir of No One In Particular (Basic Books, 2002). He has also written The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture and Cute, Quaint, Hungry, and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism.

David Hawkes teaches at a university in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Ideology (Routledge, 1996) and Idols of the Marketplace (Palgrave, 2001), and his work has recently appeared in The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement and The Journal of the History of Ideas.

Sharon Hayes is an artist. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Interdisci-plinary Studio at UCLAs Department of Art.

Brooklyn-based soundmaker Douglas Henderson has been working with electro-acoustic composition, music for dance, and installation pieces for 20 years. He has run the Sound Arts program at the Museum School, Boston and holds a doctorate in composition from Princeton University. He can be reached through www.heartpunch.com.

Bill Jones is an artist and writer. He is represented by the Sandra Gering Gallery in NY and is currently the Director of Operations of Garnett McKeen Laboratory, Inc.

Jeffrey Kastner is a New York-based writer and an editor of Cabinet.

Kris Lee and Matt Freedman met at the 1985 NCAA diving championships. They later discovered that they were distantly related.

Nina Katchadourian is an artist who lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Brown University. She exhibits with Debs & Co in New York and with Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco.

Emma Kay lives and works in London. She has exhibited widely in Europe and the US. She recently participated in the 2002 Sydney Biennial and has forthcoming exhibitions at The Approach, London, the Muscarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest, and Tate Modern, London. She has published an artists book, Worldview (Bookworks).

Peter Lew is a New York-based artist whose work includes painting, installation and sound art. He has participated in the radio project WAR!, the sound show constriction at Pierogi gallery, and his paintings were included in Working in Brooklyn at the Brooklyn Museum. His work has been exhibited in Austria, Switzerland, and Japan.

Dirk Libeer remembers Danny from when he was a boy.

Paul Lukas, author of Inconspicuous Consumption: An Obsessive Look at the Stuff We Take for Granted and editor of Beer Frame: The Journal of Inconspicuous Consumption, is a Brooklyn-based writer who specializes in minutiae fetishism. His favorite color is green and his favorite state is Wisconsin.

Christof Migone is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. He lives and works in Montreal and New York.

Susette Min is currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Pomona College. She is also an indepedent curator and most recently curated Rina Banerjee in a show entitled Phantasmal Pharmacopia. She lives in Los Angeles.

Sina Najafi is editor-in-chief of Cabinet magazine.

Pauline Oliveros (born 1932) is a composer living in Kingston, NY, and teach-ing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Mills College, and Bard College. She is president of Pauline Oliveros Foundation, a creative cultural center in Kingston (http://www.deeplistening.org/pauline)

Amy Jean Porter is an artist who recently moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Scott A. Sandage is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Carn-egie Mellon University. His book Forgotten Men: Failure in American Culture, 1819-1893 is forthcoming from Harvard University Press.

Kendall C. Sanford is retired after working forty years in the airline industry and lives in Geneva. He has collected airmail historical material and air crash covers for nearly as long. He is a past president of the American Air Mail Society, the worlds largest aerophilatelic society.

Peter Santino was born in Kansas in 1948.

Paul Schmelzer lives in Minneapolis and writes on art and activism for publications including Adbusters, The Progressive, and Raw Vision.

Tobias Schmitt. 1975: born in Frankfurt; 1989: first experiments with electronic music; 1994: started working as sbc; 1996: started doing artworks as Mischstab; 1999: founded Acrylnimbus.

David Serlin is an editor and columnist for Cabinet. He is the co-editor of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (NYU Press, 2002).

Lytle Shaws most recent poetry book is The Lobe (Roof, 2002). He co-edits Shark magazine and curates the Line Reading Series at The Drawing Center.

Michael Smith is an artist based in New York.

Nedko Solakov is a Bulgarian artist living and working in Sofia. His work has been exhibited in many venues, including the 48th and 49th Venice Biennials, the 3rd and 4th Istanbul Biennials, the 1994 So Paulo Biennial, and Manifesta 1. The series from which his Cabinet contribution is drawn was first presented at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin, in May 2002 and will then travel to the Ulmer Museum, Ulm, and Reina Sofia, Madrid.

Yasunao Tone is a co-founder of Group Ongaku and an original member of Fluxus. Born in Tokyo in 1935, he has resided in New York since 1972. He has exhibited in numerous shows, including the 1990 Venice Biennial and the 2001 Yokohama Triennial.

Tom Vanderbilt lives in Brooklyn and is the author of Survival City: Adventures Among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural Press).

Claude Wampler is an artist based in New York City.

Allen S. Weiss has been working hard on ingestion: He recently co-edited French Food (Routledge), and his Feast and Folly is forthcoming (SUNY).

Gregory Whitehead is the author of numerous broadcast essays and earplays, and is presently at work on a new play, Resurrection Ranch.

Gregory Williams is a critic and art historian living in New York City. He is also an editor of Cabinet.

David Womack was a Darmasiswa scholar in Indonesian literature and Java-nese language at the Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta, Java. He is currently the Director of New Media at the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

the Clean room DaviD serlin

leftovers Paul lukas

Colors Tim Griffin

ingestion allen s. Weiss

ernst haeCkel and the miCrobial baroque DaviD BroDy

field traCes Bill Jones

mm, mm, good: marketing and regression in

aesthetiC taste DaviD HaWkes

beautiful indonesia (in miniature) DaviD Womack

Paint and Paint names Daniel Harris

things fall aPart: an interview with

george sCherer Jeffrey kasTnerthe six grandfathers, Paha saPa,

in the Year 502,002 C.e. maTTHeW BuckinGHam

interPretations of the national Park serviCe sHaron Hayes

soothe oPerator: muzak and modern sound art

suseTTe min

birds of north ameriCa sing hiP-hoP and

sometimes Pause for refleCtion amy Jean PorTer

hungrY for god GreGory WHiTeHeaD

not Your name, mine Paul scHmelzer

the bible from memorY emma kay

blaCk box Tom vanDerBilT

Crash Covers Jeffrey kasTner

shades of tarzan!: ford on the amazon

elizaBeTH escH

hashima: the ghost island Brian Burke-Gaffney

the floating island Paul collins

old rags, some grand scoTT a. sanDaGe

the war of the flea marvin Doyle

the short, sad life of dannY the dragon Dirk liBeer

better luCk next time GreGory Williams

the disaPPointed and the offended maGnus BrTs

the invention of failure: an interview with

sCott a. sandage sina naJafi & DaviD serlin

travelfest is Closed micHael smiTH & naTHan HeiGes

sYntax error: sPeCial Cd insert

in Case of moon disaster William safire

romantiC landsCaPes with missing Parts

neDko solakov

the life of ernst moir lyTle sHaW

ConCert nancy DavenPorT

a/C cHeaTer.com

orPhan nina kaTcHaDourian

unlimited edition kris lee

stoCk in failure institute PeTer sanTino

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Columns

main

failure

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columns

The Clean Room, David Serlins column on science and technology, appears in each issue of Cabinet / Leftovers is a column in which Cabinet invites a guest to discuss leftovers or detritus from a cultural perspective / Colors is a column in which a guest writer is asked to respond to a specific color assigned by the editors of Cabinet / Ingestion is a column by Allen S. Weiss on cuisine, aesthetics, and philosophy

the clean room / the new Face oF terrorismDaviD Serlin

In the winter of 2002, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the use of Clostridium botulinum, a highly toxic microorganism, for medical use. In large, unsupervised doses, the bacterium taints organic products like meat, resulting in often-fatal cases of botulism or food poisoning. In small, controlled doses, the bacterium produces a paralyzing effect on nerve endings. Like anti-depressant medications such as Prozac, C. botulinum blocks the release of neural signals that transmit information to various parts of the body. For some physicians, the federal stamp of approval on Type A C. botulinum otherwise known as Botoxmeans that patients suffering from cerebral palsy, blepharoplasm (eyelid muscle spasms), and other neuro-muscular disorders will have much easier access to this medication.

For many more physicians, however, the government-approved mass production and widespread availability of Botox means a surplus of cold, hard cash. In elite consumer circles, the tiny bacterium has beckoned hither with one seductive promise: a single Botox injection paralyzes the nerve endings in an individuals forehead muscles for up to three months. A middle-aged matron seeking to restore the smooth, wrinkle-free countenance of youth can undergo as many injections as her forehead (and bank account) can endure. Among the latest cosmetic possibilities for Botox are direct injections into the armpit to paralyze the sweat glands and render them moisture-free, a procedure whose effects can last for as long as half a year. Recent figures reveal that in 2001, physicians delivered over one million Botox injec-tions, and the popularity of the procedure is expected to increase tenfold over the next few years. In response to consumer demand, Allergen, the main bio-medical supplier of Botox, is working with recombinant DNA technology to produce strains of C. botulinum that will double or triple the bacteriums potency, thereby increasing its appeal for both new and longtime users.

Not since the successful Dannon campaigns of the 1970s, featuring hardy Eastern European octogenarians wrapped in furs and babushkas extolling the virtues of eating yogurt for breakfast, have Americans so enthusiastically embraced the idea of putting active bacterial cultures into their bod-ies. Historically, individuals exposed to bacterial agents have been members of populations vulnerable to the authority of medical science. In the 18th century, British scientist Edward Jenner infected himself with tiny traces of smallpox-rich pus to prove that the immune system could build up tolerance to illness, thereby establishing a precedent for the evolution of vaccines. But as Susan Lederer has described in her book Subjected to Science, in the 19th and 20th centuries, a large number of scientists eager to test new vaccines gravitated toward soldiers, prisoners, children, prostitutes, the elderly, and the mentally retarded, often with unimaginably brutal consequences. In 1908, for example, when pediatricians at the University of Pennsylvania wanted to perform diagnostic tests for tuberculosis, they intentionally infected more than 140 children from a nearby Catholic orphanage, most of whom were under eight years old. In 1911, Hideyo Noguchi, a microbiologist sponsored by the Rockefeller University, subjected over 400 patients to luetin, the causative agent of syphilis.1

In the case of Botox injections, however, we see a trans-formation in the target audience of experimental infection from the most vulnerable to the most elite, while the param-eters of what delineates infection have become utterly negotiable. At $300-500 a pop, vanity-obsessed dowagers and their cohorts are willing to pay exorbitant fees for the privilege of becoming vehicles for transporting dangerous

strains of bacteria in their foreheadsbacteria for which sci-entists have still not found a vaccine. Only under the genius of capitalism can a toxic killer grow up to become a cosmetic amenity.

Initially, Botox injections seem to be the latest tool in an enormous arsenal of medical implants, injections, and other cosmetic technologies that include collagen, silicone, and even Gore-Tex. Virtually all of the organic or synthetic materials injected or implanted into human bodies produce physical side effects, many far worse than the petulant ennui that often leads one to pursue cosmetic procedures in the first place. As Elizabeth Haiken has described, in the first decades of the 20th century, doctors injected paraffin wax mixed with olive oil, goose grease, and vegetable soap into their patients faces, breasts, and legs in order to banish wrinkles and sculpt body parts to meet the cultural expec-tations of the era.2 The practice ended by the 1930s with the high incidence of paraffin-related cancers, but the desire for a sculpted, malleable body among patients persisted.

In the mid-1960s, famed San Francisco stripper Carol Doda injected a pint of silicone directly into each of her breasts. This was much more silicone than the standard amount used in breast implants produced by Dow Corning, which were taken off the market three decades later amid a firestorm of controversy and litigation. And while the use of autologous human fat, which is cleaned of biological impurities before it is injected, seemed promising in the early 1990s, recent case studies have revealed its unsavory side effects. At best, the fat migrates from the injection site to ones least-favored body part to join its kin; at worst, the fat forms an unsightly bas-relief comparable to the shape and volume of a small dwarf. The migration of autologous fat in penile enlargement procedures shocked many men who found themselves looking at penises with truly mushroom-shaped heads.

The use of Botox marks a departure from the history of earlier cosmetic implants and injections in two distinct ways. First, it does not simply introduce an organic product (such as paraffin or collagen) into the body; it introduces a living microorganism, and a highly toxic one at that. Second, Botox injections do not seek merely to produce youthful-looking skin, or to aesthetically reshape a facial feature that will continue to function normally. The goal of the Botox injec-tion is to paralyze and otherwise obliterate the function of the collateral muscles in the forehead, just above the bridge of the nose. In practical terms, this means that one needs to be willing to sacrifice subjective expression for wrinkle-free features. On some level, the allure of Botox injections may be similar to that of exotic delicacies whose charm resides in their power to put consumers in danger: one thinks of the pleasure/pain dialectic derived from the poisonous sub-stances found in absinthe, psychedelic mushrooms, and the Japanese fish called fugu. Botox, however, is distinguished from these organic materials as an impure toxin to the body that produceshowever temporarilya youthful appear-ance and not an aesthetic experience or altered state of consciousness.

The widespread use of Botox ushers the first period in the modern eracertainly since the rise of visual tech-nologies in the mid-19th centurywhere facial expressions will be disaggregated from the signified meanings to which they are typically moored. Over time, physicians expect that Botox customers will have to forfeit use of their forehead or eyebrows, two key vectors through which humans typi-cally engage in nonverbal communication. As Norbert Elias described in his classic study The Civilizing Process, facial gestures are a central part of the modern lexicon of perfor-mative visual cues that, along with etiquette and refined behavior, are public markers of social class.3 In the 1860s,

Nadar captured the prototype of the exaggerated fur-rowed brow in his photographs of Parisian asylum

patients; in the 1970s, John Belushi elevated the mischie-vous single-raised eyebrow to an art form on Saturday Night Live. Indeed, what the frozen foreheads of Botox consumers call to mind, more than anything else, is the passivity and imperturbability of European aristocracy. One imagines an unflappable, furrow-less Queen Victoria waving from her horse-drawn carriage, or perhaps the sunken, emotion-less visage of Catherine de Medici in languid repose, with a pomegranate in one hand and an open book in another. These were faces indifferent to the whims of fashion or popular opinion, born not only to rule but to resist physical weaknesses that might link them with their social inferiors.

The iconic value of unruffled monarchs and aristocrats may have represented the solidity of power in pre-modern times, but in our current media-saturated culture, the desire to humanize celebrities and political figures demands an increased capacity to physically express a wider spectrum of emotions than ever before. The fertile territory between these two competing ideals of public expression is precisely what Andy Warhol mined in his multiple silk-screened portraits of Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe in the early 1960s. During the national mourning over Princess Dianas death in 1997, the British public, seeking psychological satisfaction, called in desperation for the royal family to exhibit its collective grief through open displays of emotion. Instead, the House of Windsors decision to affect a tradi-tional and icy aristocratic stance seemed to many to expose the artifice of hereditary power, rather than its permanence.

In this sense, it is hard to conceive of a more O. Henry-esque historical moment than our own: an era in which a volatile microorganism invisible to the naked eye has achieved popularity among a social niche that is completely indifferent to the political economy of global terrorism.Herein lies the paradox of Botox: how else to understand the staving-off of aging, and ultimately the fear of death, by pursuing a medical treatment that promises to bring one in closer proximity to death than ever before?

According to Science, US officials recently ranked C. botulinum second only to anthrax as the microorganism most likely to be used in bioterrorist activitiesan unnerv-ing statistic, considering that unlike anthrax, there is no known antidote even for common strains of the bacterium.4 Indeed, any country that can manufacture mass quantities of C. Botulinumlet alone synthesize new mutant strains of itwill have a weapon of incalculable power. After all, even the cosmetic use of Botox does not work to protect the immune system, but instead works to erode the bodys natu-ral defenses. In our enthusiasm to promote the ephemera of youth over the grace of maturity, could we be producing, however inadvertently, a passive army of terrorists clad not in combat boots but in Prada heels?

1 Susan Lederer, Subjected to Science: Human Experimentation in America Before

the Second World War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 60.

2 Elizabeth Haiken, Modern Miracles: The Development of Cosmetic Prosthetics, in Kath-

erine Ott et al, Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics

(New York: NYU Press, 2002), pp. 171-198.

3 See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, [1937], trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:

Urizen Books, 1978).

4 Donald Kennedy, Beauty and the Beast, Science vol. 295 (March 1, 2002), p. 1601.

15opposite: Franz Xaver Messerschmidts 18th-century character heads from an age before Botox. Clockwise: the contrarian; the smiling old man; the mischievous man; the beaked man.

leFtovers / how to use scotch tapePaul lukaS

Weve all heard the clich about the gift that keeps on giving. Those words never rang truer for me than they did last Christmas, when a friend of mine gave me a small, stocking-stuffer-ish gift: an old metal Scotch tape dispenser from 1942, scavenged at a secondhand store, its tape roll still intact but now hopelessly gummed up. At first glance it appeared to be just another eye-pleasing tchotchke given from one design geek to another. Upon closer inspection, however, it has turned out to be a veritable treasure trove of corporate and design history.

All artifacts are historical documents, of course, but the Scotch tape dispenser offers an unusually broad window on several historical fronts, in part because both the product and its manufacturer, 3M, remain staples of the consumer landscape today, making time-wrought changes easy to gauge. Lets start with the product name itself, which is printed on the dispensers side: Scotch Cellulose Tape. This sounds vaguely off, because most of us would think of it as cellophane tape, not cellulose. But cellophane is a cel-lulose derivative, and in 1942 it was a trademarked product of DuPont, which would not allow 3M to use it as part of the products name. That is also why the dispensers front panel features a little logo seal that reads: Made of Cellophane [Trademark], The DuPont Cellulose Film.

Although Scotch is a ubiquitous brand today, its familiar plaid design motif is absent on the dispenser. In order to understand why, we need to go back to the origin of the brand name itself. Scotch was born in 1925, when a 3M engineer named Richard Drew created a form of masking tape that he envisioned being used by auto painters. But his two-inch-wide tape had adhesive only at the outer edges, not in the middle, much to the frustration of a local painter who tried one of Drews prototype rolls. As the tape kept falling off the surfaces to which it had been applied, the exasperated painter told Drew, Take this tape back to those Scotch bosses of yours and tell them to put more adhesive on it! In this context, Scotch was an ethnic slur connot-ing stinginessan unlikely source for a brand name, but one that served 3M well during the Depression, when Scotch tape became a symbol of thrift and do-it-yourself mending. This helps explain the brands rather austere blue-and-white design visage during its first two decades of existence. The more playful plaid motif appeared in 1945, as national opti-mism surged in the wake of WWII.

On the other side of the dispenser, in block letters, is the manufacturers name: Minnesota Mining & Mfg. Co. Many of us have forgottenindeed, if we ever knewthat these words are the source of 3Ms three ems. Indeed, 3M has become so synonymous with high-tech polymer innovation that a hardscrabble activity like mining seems hopelessly old-economy by comparison. But in fact the firm was found-ed in 1902 by a group of Minnesota investors who planned to mine a mineral deposit for grinding wheel abrasives. The abbreviation 3Mnot quite an acronym, more like a ligatureentered the corporate lexicon soon enough, but old-timers in the Twin Cities region still refer to the company as Mining (as in Oh sure, I used to work for Mining). Those looking for present-day manifestations of the compa-nys old name will be pleased to learn that 3Ms stock-ticker symbol is MMM, and that its Internet domain name is mmm.com.

3Ms nomenclatorial transition from unwieldy 15- syllable name to two-character symbol was already under way in the early 1940s, as is evident in the companys old logo, which is printed on both sides of the tape dispenser.

The spelled-out name and 3M Co. both appear on

the logo, a busy jumble of typography and geometry. That logo design is a variation on one that first appeared in 1906; its basic diamond-within-a-circle template remained 3Ms visual signature until 1950, when the first of several revi-sions took place. Each subsequent logo facelift has moved toward simplicity, culminatingfor now, at leastin the current 3M logotype, whose simple sans serif typography was designed by the New York firm Siegel & Gale in 1977.

Tucked into the dispenser is a small instruction sheet. Imaginatively entitled How and Where to Use Scotch Cellulose Tape, it uses a series of captioned illustrations to explain the products function. Repeated mention is made of the dispensers sawtooth edge: One caption instructs the consumer to pick up tape between roll and sawtooth edge; another helpfully tells the user to pull desired length [of tape] and tear down against sawtooth edge. While all this may seem superfluous today, its worth remembering that the first tape dispenser with a built-in cutter blade didnt appear until 1932, and the design patent for this one (one of many patents listed by number on the dispensers bottom panel and, like all American patents, accessible at the United States Patent and Trademark Offices website, www.uspto.gov) wasnt filed until 1939. So 3Ms decision to leave noth-ing to chance may well have been warranted.

As it happens, the whole thing will soon come full circle, because the instruction sheet is all tattered and crinkled and looks like its about to fall apart. At which point I will reach across my desk, deploy a certain sawtooth edge, and patch the sheet back together with some fresh Scotch tape.

colors / saFety orangeTim Griffin

These are the days of disappearing winters, and of anthrax spores whose origin remains unknown, or unrevealed. Concrete phenomena float on abstract winds, seeming like mere signatures of dynamics that supercede immedi-ate perception. The world is a living place of literature, interstitial, eclipsing objects with the sensibility of informa-tion, and experience floating on the surface of lexicons. Everything is so characterless and abstract as the weather: Wars are engaged without front lines, and weapons oper-ate according to postindustrial logic, intended to destabilize economies or render large areas uninhabitable by the detonation of homemade dirty bombs that annihilate culture but do little damage to hard, architectural space. Radical thought is also displaced, as the military, not the academy, offers the greatest collective of theorists today; all possibilities are considered by its think tanks, without skep-ticism or humanist pretensions, and all nations are potential targets. Ordinary health risks described in the popular press are totally relational, regularly enmeshing microwaves and genetic codes; the fate of ice caps belongs to carbon. Every-thing is a synthetic realism. Everything belongs to safety orange.

It is a gaseous color: fluid, invisible, capable of mov-ing out of those legislated topographies that have been traditionally fenced off from nature to provide significant nuances for daily living. Perhaps it is a perfume: an optical Chanel No. 5 for the turn of the millennium, imbuing our bodies with its diffuse form. (Chanel was the first abstract perfume, as it was completely chemical and not based on any flower; appropriately, it arrived on the scene at roughly the same time as Cubism.) The blind aura of safety orange has entered everyday living space. One pure distillation appears in the logo for Home Depot, which posits ones

17 photos: Ricardo de Oliveira

most intimate sphere, the household, as a site that is under perpetual construction, re-organization, and improvement. The home becomes unnatural, industrial, singed with toxic energy. Microsoft also uses the color for its lettering, conjuring its associative power to suggest that a scientific future is always here around us, but may be fruitfully harnessed (Your home computer is a nuclear reactor).

Such associative leaps are not unique. In postindustrial capitalism, experience is often codified in color. During the economic surge of the past decade, corporations recog-nized and implemented on a grand scale what newspapers documented only after the onset of the recession: that colors function like drugs. Tunneled through the optic nerve, they generate specific biochemical reactions and so determine moods in psychotropic fashion; they create emotional experiences that lend themselves to projections upon the world, transforming the act of living into lifestyle. Something so intangible as emotion, in turn, assumes a kind of property value as it becomes intimately maneuvered by, and then associated with, products. (One business manual recently went so far as to suggest that consumers are our products.)

The iMac, to take one artifact of the 1990s, was introduced to the general public in a blue that was more than blue: Bondi Blue, which obtained the emotional heat accorded to the aquatic tones of a cosmopolitan beach in Australia, for which the color is named. Similarly, the iMacs clear sheath is neither clear nor whiteit is Ice. (Synesthesia reigns in capitalism; postindustrial exchange value depends on the creation of ephemeral worlds and auras within which to house products. And so, as colors perform psychotropic functions, total, if virtual, realities are located within single, monochromatic optical fields. Control of bodies, the original role designated for safety orange, is set aside for access to minds, which adopt the logic of addiction.) In fact, the 1990s boom might be use-fully read through two specific television commercials that were geared to hues: It began with the iMacs introduc-tion in blue, orange, green and gray models, in a spot that was accompanied by the Rolling Stones lyric She comes in colors. Later, against the backdrop of 2001s dot-com wasteland, Target released an advertisement featuring shoppers moving through a hyper-saturated, blood-red, vacuum-sealed field of repeating corporate logoscolors and brands were by then entirely deterritorialized, lifted from objects and displaced onto architectureto the sound of Devos post-punk, tongue-in-cheek number Its a Beautiful World.

Devo often wore jumpsuits of safety orange, which was, at the time, the color of nuclear power plants and biohazardsa color created to oppose nature, something never to be confused with it. It is the color of information, bureaucracy, and toxicity. Variations of orange have often played this role. Ancient Chinese bookmakers, for example, printed the edges of paper with an orange mineral to save their books from silverfish.

Times change. In 1981, the Day-Glo connoisseur Peter Halley suggested that New Wave bands like Devo were rejecting the cloddish substance of traditional humanistic values, comparing their work to that of the Minimalists. (All colors are minimal.) Yet the course of Devo has been the course of culture: the bands rejection of humanistic values has become more abstract and expansive, and enmeshed in cultural tissue. Their music moved away from the specialized artistic realm of electro-synth composers like Robert Fripp and Brian Eno (who produced the bands first music in a German studio at the behest of David Bowie) and into the world. First, it appeared for the mass audiences of the television show Pee-wees Playhouse, for whom the band wrote music. More recently, its band

members have written music to accompany Univer-sal Studios Jurassic Park ride and, most recently,

Purina Cat Chow commercials. Their anti-humanism no longer approaches culture from any critical remove; there is no synthetic outside from which to unveil the bureaucratic, unnatural structures of a social faade that presents itself as entirely natural. We have entered an era of synthetic realism.

Devo is hardly alone in this kind of abstract migration. Vito Acconci has recounted a similar shift in his subjectivi-ty, which may be traced in his shifting modes of production from poetry and sculpture to architecture and, finally, designwhere his work is intended to disappear into the world. His changing taste in music is more to the point. He started in the 1960s by listening to the long, introspec-tive passages of Van Morrison, then moved to the public speakers of punk in the 1970s. Today, he prefers Tricky, in whose music it is impossible to tell where the human being ends and where the machine begins. Individuals, in other words, have given way to engineers. Music by a composer like Moby has no signature sound or style; art by a painter like Gerhard Richter similarly leaps from genre to genre. Subjectivity itself is encoded for Napster. And safety orange, the color of this synthetic reality, becomes cultures new heart of darkness.

ingestion / how to cook a phoenixallen S. WeiSS

Angels must be very good to eat. I would imagine they are very tender, between chicken and fish. Peter Kubelka

Every art form is a matrix of synaesthesia. Each art informs all others. Every sentence, every allusion, every word acti-vates a different complex of sensations. These evidences should not be lost on our daily pleasures. As a translator, one is perpetually caught in the dilemmas that stem from these complexities. For example, one quandary I encoun-tered was in Valre Novarinas Le discours aux animaux, which ends with the sentence, One day I played the horn like this all alone in a splendid woods, and the birds were becalmed at my feet when I named them one by one with their names two by two, followed by a list of 1,111 imagi-nary birds, beginning with:

la limnote, la fuge, lhypille, le ventisque, le lure, le fig-ile, le lpandre, la galoupe, lancret, le furiste, le narcile, laulique, la gymnestre, la louse, le drangle, le ginel, le smelique, le lipode, lhippiandre, le plaisant, la cadme, la fuyau, la gruge, ltran, le plaquin, le dramet, le vocifre, le lpse, luseau, la grenette, le galate1

Needless to say, it would be impossible to translate such names, and transliteration would hardly be satisfying, as it would be but sheer linguistic play. Rather, the challenge is to recreate the very conditions of such idiosyncratic naming, to imitate not Novarinas words, but his poetic methods; to designate as language itself designates; to be a demiurge unto ones own speech. In the ornithological context, most names are in some part descriptive, referring either to a birds relation to its habitat, to its physical aspect, behavioral conditions, or decidedly unverifiable mythical analogies. I would, in all modesty, propose the following English parallels (if not, strictly speaking, translations):

pimwhite, sandkill, partch, barnscrub, stiltback, goskit, persill, peeve, phyllist, corntail, perforant, titibit, queedle, jewet, phew, marshquiver, graywhip, corvee, rillard, preem, peterwil, cassenut, flusher, willowgyre, trillet, silverwisp, eidereye, wheeltail, ptyt, jeebill, wheatspit... 19

In an early volume, Flamme et festin, I had begun to muse upon the possibility of creating recipes for just such creatures, but I now must admit that this was a rather disingenuous proposition. Not because these birds are imaginary, but simply because each such name is a hapax (a word that occurs only once in a language), appearing without predication or description, in a context that offers no denotations, but only the undemonstrable connotations implied by the name itself. (For how can we ever really deter-mine if the cassenut actually breaks open nut shells in its quest for nourishment, or if the barnscrub lives in barns like certain swallows and owls, or if the sandkill is a shore bird?) Any such hapax is a pure signifier without signified, a word without objectwe can never know whether or not it is a figment of the imagination. While they might enter a diction-ary of imaginary creatures, they cannot be catalogued in a universal encyclopedia, for sheer lack of information.

Years ago, I had hoped for some practical help from the International Society of Cryptozoology, located in Tucson, Arizona. But none was forthcoming. Cryptozool-ogy is the science of nonexistent animals, such as the banshee, centaur, chimera, griffon, kraken, minotaur, rukh, unicornnot to mention all those nameless species that haunt our fantasies and nightmares. I sought more precise qualifications in order to fortify my belief that this obscure field of wisdom could be made more joyous through its intersection with cryptogastronomy. However, it was rather in the abstract realm of theory that I found my inspiration, specifically in Umberto Ecos article Small Worlds,2 where he proposes a theory of fictional discourse whereby one may judge truth value and descriptive validity within imaginary or possible worlds. Such domains span the spectrum from those most resembling our quotidian environment to the farthest reaches of the speculative utopian imagination; their epistemological status may be verisimilar, non-verisimilar, inconceivable, or even impossible. In all cases, such worlds can be either relatively empty or furnished, depending upon the amount of information given about a particular fictional milieu. Following this lead, it is obvious that the general world of Novarinas animals is relatively unfurnished, and the specific context in which the birds appear is absolutely impoverished: we are offered no ornithological information whatsoever, and thus cannot begin to conceive of appropri-ate recipes for them.

But, luckily, this is not always the case for fanciful animals. Consider the phoenix, that mythical bird which is consumed in spontaneously generated flames, to be reborn from its own ashes, a symbol particularly appreciated by the early Christian church for its blatantly resurrectional qualities. Indeed, we know much more about the phoenix than we do of many real animals. The history of this bird is ancient, and it appears in Hesiod, Herodotus, Plutarch, Tertulius, Tacitus, Pliny, Martial, Ovid, Dante, Cyrillus, Saint Ambrose, and Milton, among many others. It is estimated that half of the pre-modernist European poets have written about it, with, for example, seven mentions in Shakespeare. There thus exists a wealth of detail, albeit somewhat contra-dictory at times, about this creature. The 1967 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica informs us that the phoenix, whose ecosphere is the Arabian peninsula, is as large as an eagle, with scarlet and gold plumage, and a melodious cry. It is most often said to resemble the purple heron (Ardea pur-purea), and less often the stork, egret, flamingo, or even the Bird of Paradise. Part of the confusion seems to stem from the fact that in ancient Egyptian mythology, the hieroglyph of the benua solar symbol, as is the pheonix resembles a heron or some other large water-fowl, and a purple heron was sacrificed by the priests of Heliopolis (City of the Sun) in a grand ceremony every 500 years. It would seem that the sacred powers invested in this hieroglyph greatly influenced

the perception of the natural world, as well as conse-quent ornithological classification. The life-cycle of

the phoenix is unique in the animal world, here described in the classic account by Ovid in the Metamorphoses:

There is one living thing, a bird, which reproduces and regenerates itself, without any outside aid. The Assyrians call it the phoenix. It lives, not on corn or grasses, but on the gum of incense, and the sap of balsam. When it has complet-ed five centuries of life, it straightway builds a nest for itself, working with unsullied beak and claw, in the topmost branch-es of some swaying palm. Then, when it has laid a foundation of cassia, and smooth spikes of nard, chips of cinnamon bark and yellow myrrh, it places itself on top, and ends its life amid the perfumes. Then, they say, a little phoenix is born anew from the fathers body, fated to live a like number of years.3

The decadent Roman Emperor Heliogabaluswho shared with the phoenix a part of solar divinitywas a great gourmet and glutton, especially fond of such delicacies as flamingo heads, peacock tongues, and cockscombs cut from the live animal. He once sent hunters to the land of Lydia, offering two hundred pieces of gold to the man who would bring back a phoenix. None did. An explanation for this pro-digious culinary desire can be extrapolated from Jean-Pierre Vernants analysis:

The incandescent life of the phoenix follows a circular course, increasing and decreasing, with birth, death and rebirth following a cycle that passes from an aromatic bird closer to the sun than the eagle flying at great heights, to the state of a worm in rotting matter, more chthonian than the snake or the bat. From the birds ashes, consumed at the end of its long existence in a blazing aromatic nest, is born a small earth-worm, nourished by humidity, which shall in turn become a phoenix.4

What more appropriate dish for a solar emperor? Perhaps tired of the repeated human sacrifices to his own divine nature, he sought a rarer offering. For Heliogabalus, true to his own solar name, wished to bring heaven down to earth in a cruel and erotic scenario of death, so that the blood of the human sacrifices organized by the Priest of the Cult of the Sun, flowing from the sacrificial altars of the Temple of Emesa, might have well been augmented by some more decidedly supernatural offerings. The lifecycle of the phoenix is the very allegory of cuisine, taken in its structural instance, as it spans the antithetical conditions of raw/cooked, cold/hot, fresh/rotten, dry/moist, aromatized/gamy. The phoenix would thus be the perfect dish and the ideal offering, paradoxically encompassing the contradictory pos-sibilities of diverse cooking techniques, inherent alimentary differences, and sacred symbolism. Like the transubstantia-tion of the host, or cannibalistic communion, the eating of the phoenix would constitute a truly transcendental gastro-nomic act.

Setting aside whatever extravagance Heliogabalus might have had in mind, let us consider appropriate recipes for a phoenix. The end of the phoenixs lifecycle, when it is consumed in its own flames, quite obviously suggests the proper manner of cooking: the phoenix is to be roasted outdoors over a fire of sweet-smelling resinous woods and aromatic herbs. This suggestion corresponds to the sym-bolic exigencies of this sacred bird, a symbolism elucidated in Claude Lvi-Strausss analysis of culinary practice in The Origin of Table Manners. The difference between the roast and the boiled entails respectively the following opposi-tions, all pointing to the fact that one can place the roast on the side of nature and the boiled on the side of culture: non-mediated (cooked directly on an open flame) versus mediated (cooked in water in a closed utensil); masculine (open fire) versus feminine (protected hearth); exo-cuisine (cooked outside and destined for foreigners) versus endo-cuisine (cooked in a recipient and destined for the family 20

or a closed group).5 Thus while the roast is the sort of dish offered to strangers, the boiled is destined for a small, inti-mate, closed group. Furthermore, the sociological markers are even more precise, insofar as boiling fully conserves the meat and its juices, while roasting entails destruction or loss. The former is popular and economical, the latter aristo-cratic and prodigious, with the smoke rising as an offering to the gods. The boiled is an empirical culinary mode, while the roast is a transcendental one. The phoenix is, therefore, the most festive of dishes, truly appropriate for a once-in-a-lifetime occasion.

The preparation of the phoenix is relatively simple, and similar to the preparation of much large game. First of all, as is suggested by its habits, the phoenix should be hung, so that the flavor of the flesh becomes gamy, according to taste, somewhere between the bird state and the worm state. Afterwards, it should be marinated in a mixture of red wine, herbs and spices (see infra). The reason for the marinade is, however, the opposite of what is usually the case. Many types of large game need be hung and marinated in order to soften their flesh, as their free-ranging lives produces a far greater proportion of muscle to fat than is found in domestic fowl and livestock. For the phoenix, however, tenderizing is unnecessary, since it is a very long-lived and sedentary creature, and thus has an extremely high and volatile fat content. (This complicates both hanging and roasting, as its flesh easily falls to pieces if tenderized too long.) As it has a distinct tendency to burst into flame, a marinade is neces-sary for moistening and flame-retarding purposes, and it is precisely for that reason that the bird should be continually basted with the marinade mixed with a bit of clarified but-ter or neutral vegetable oil. As for the recipes themselves, we should beware of misleading analogies. Certain of them believe that the phoenix should be treated like the heron. The Oxford Companion to Food reveals that the gray heron (Ardea cinerea) was treated throughout the European Middle Ages like other great birds such as the stork, crane, and peacock: stuffed with garlic and onions and then roasted whole, with an often lavish presentation, including gild-ing and the decorative replacement of its feathers.6 But it is obvious that, though roasting is indeed the proper tech-nique, the mere accompaniment of onions and garlic is an impoverishment of the phoenixs culinary possibilities. Like all game, the flesh is already strongly flavored by what it feeds on: in this case, gum of incense, sap of balsam, and diverse savory herbs and berries (the phoenix is a vegetar-ian bird, which adds to its symbolic allure of purity); and the composition of its nest suggests that certain combinations of aromatic herbs and spices found in the Middle East should be used in the stuffing, such as the already mentioned cin-namon, cassia, frankincense, myrrh, and nard, to which we can add cardamom, ginger, turmeric, cumin, nutmeg, mace, sumac, allspice, etc. In short, many of the riches of the spice trade are appropriate; they judiciously harmonize with the phoenixs flesh. The particular mixtures of spices, like Indian curries, differ from country to country and family to family. There is no classic recipe.

There is little information about appropriate side dishes, though here too a false analogy reigns. In Greek, phoenix also means palm tree, and in Egyptian, the hiero-glyph of the benu symbolizes the phoenix and, alternately, the palm tree; since both the tree and the bird are attributes of the sun god, they are often confused. This has led some to believe that the fruit of the date palm is either an appropri-ate stuffing or accompaniment. While such a rich fruit might well serve the purpose, I would much prefer a truffe sous cendres [truffle cooked in ashes] and some pomegranate jelly.

It should be noted that the phoenix is so rare that its snob appeal by far supercedes that of all other luxury foods. Even the gold shavings and small gems

that Heliogabalus consumed mixed into his vegetables, or the huge pearls that Cleopatra dissolved in her beverages, are banal in comparison. The reason for this rarity is both because only one phoenix is said to exist at any given time, and because it is so very difficult to capture, as indicated by its life span: in the lowest estimate, Ovid places it at 500 years; Tacitus claims that it corresponds to the Egyptian Sothic Cycle of 1,461 years; Pliny puts it at the length of the Platonic Year, the 12,994-year period needed for the sun, moon, and five planets to all return to their original heavenly positions; one extreme estimate suggests that its life span is 97,000 years, but this seems ridiculous. Taking into account the ancient Egyptian ritual cycle would most probably lead one to accept the lowest estimate of 500 years. Despite its rarity, the phoenix is a foodstuff eminently worthy of consid-eration, and its absence from the culinary literature is most curious. It is hoped that this brief essay will to some extent aid in filling this noteworthy gastronomic gap.

The International Society of Cryptozoology can be reached at P. O. Box 43070, Tucson,

Arizona (AZ) 85733, USA. Telephone & fax: +1 520 884 8369.

1 Valre Novarina, Le discours aux animaux (Paris, P.O.L., 1987), p. 321.

2 Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994),

pp. 64-82.

3 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (New York, Penguin, 1984), p. 345.

4 Jean-Pierre Vernant, Introduction to Marcel Detienne, Les jardins dAdonis (Paris,

Gallimard, 1972), p. xxxiii.

5 Claude Lvi-Strauss, LOrigine de manires de table (Paris, Plon, 1968), pp. 397-403.

6 Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford, Oxford University Press), p. 379.

21

maIN

ErNst HaEckEl aNd tHE mIcrobIal baroquE DaviD BroDy

In 1895, a group of mountains along the spine of the Sierras in California was named to immortalize the apostles of evolu-tion, pioneers of a new enlightenment. Mts. Darwin, Agassiz, and Mendel topped the elevational pecking order. Next in alti-tude, at 13,418 feet higher than Mts. Wallace, Lamarck, and Huxley came a peak named for the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel, who at the time of christening was in the full vigor of his remarkable career.

You may not have heard of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), but for 50 years or so, until his death, he was the most influential evolutionary theorist on the map. He did more to spread the gos-pel of evolution than all his fellow snow-capped honorees com-bined, lecturing, demonstrating, thundering, and publishing dozens of books, some technical, some popular. In the decades before World War I, prominent display of Haeckels books was de rigeur in European or American households seeking to seem educated, up-to-date, and non-dogmatic; his opinions spiri-tual, aesthetic, philosophical, political carried the imprimatur of unquestioned scientific objectivity. But Haeckel was more than a progenitor of the Carl Sagan-like scientist-celebrity. His immense ambition was founded upon a visionarys graphic tal-ent, manifested in biological illustrations so hallucinatory that his lithographs of microorganisms still threaten to overwhelm all sorts of categorical distinctions between art, nature, and science. These images, however, cannot be examined without acknowledging the omnivorous, Faustian hunger for consolida-tion of knowledge that produced them.

Haeckel had made his name, in the 1860s, by describing hundreds of new species of radiolarians, publishing volume after volume of taxonomic description of this order of marine protozoan. What really set his work apart, though, was not the science but the plates. Whether this emphasis was entirely legitimate was debated at the time had Haeckel over-embellished and idealized his observations or, as he claimed, had he discerned for the first time their underlying crystalline structure? Certainly no biologist before him had applied the study of solid geometry to precise descriptions of organic phenomena, and the penetrating insights resulting from this dtente of disciplines seemed to justify the boldness of Haeckels drawings. If the images were not optically true, then perhaps they were truer than true. Wasnt a search for the pattern beneath the noise the higher purpose of science?

If certain of Haeckels colleagues were dubious, the pub-lic was not. Weltratsel (The Riddle of the Universe), first issued in 1895, sold more than half a million copies in Germany alone, an unheard-of number for the time, and was translated into thirty languages. Kunstformen der Natur, or Art Forms in Nature published in installments between 1899 and 1904, has arguably enjoyed an even broader audience. Its lavish images of self-enlacing, baroque jellyfish, with their translucent balda-chins of tendrils, and his constellations of plankton magnified to Romanesque filigrees,1 directly influenced the more self-con-sciously decorative, asymmetrical vocabulary of Art Nouveau

and Jugendstil Ren Binets cast iron entrance gate to the 1900 Paris Exposition, for example, was modeled on

Haeckels beloved radiolarians.2 Art Forms was eagerly perused by the Surrealists, notably Max Ernst, and almost certainly by the Bauhaus painters Klee and Kandinsky. Thus, even con-temporary artists who have never seen the book can hardly have avoided the pulsations of its influence.3 But, about this, more later.

From his professorship in Jena, the university town that was associated with the immortal polymaths Goethe, Schiller, and Hegel, Haeckel advocated Darwinism to a hostile world, declar-ing war on the medieval mystifications of religion and unleash-ing a barrage of invective at the Catholic Church. In contrast to Darwin and most of his fellow evolutionists, though, he did not confine himself to the role of sober secular materialist. His almost mystical obsession with a rational and progressive march toward biological perfection was far removed from the random impersonality of natural selection, and his contempt for religion did not stop him from establishing one of his own. As his theories developed, he began to attack not only anti- scientific ritualism, but dualism in general. Evolution proved that man and nature were not separable, and thus neither were mat-ter and mind. Crystal souls4 inhered in the very minerals we were made of, human intellect being simply their higher expres-sion achieved by means of the evolutionary drama. Accordingly, there was no need to project the existence of a creator outside the physical world: spirit lay within. In 1906, Haeckel founded a progressive church based on this quasi-scientific pantheism, calling it the Monist League in opposition to the dualistic reli-gions. The Judeo-Christian ancestry was no more than a living fossil that could now be left behind.

Haeckels immodest claim to have reconciled age-old antagonisms between science and spirit slipped, incrementally, toward the far side of social Darwinism. His philosophical sup-port for racist eugenics, coupled with his widespread popular appeal, was arguably crucial to the legitimization of such ideas in Germany, and historian Daniel Gasman has gone so far as to lay blame for the Holocaust virtually at Ernst Haeckels feet. Gas-man demonstrates, convincingly, that Haeckel was an anti-Sem-ite, and that his ponderous authority did much to bring the Jew-ish question into the realm of biology.5 Social Darwinism would better be named Social Haeckelism, it seems. Of course, racism and eugenics were in the very air of fin-de-sicle, scientific cul-ture, and Gasmans view of Monism as a wellspring underlying everything from French Symbolism to Futurism, Surrealism, and the Bauhaus is thinly documented and a bit monomaniacal in its own right. Still, consider this passage from Haeckels worldwide bestseller The Riddle of the Universe:

The statement of the apocryphal gospels, that the Roman officer, Pandera, was the true father of Christ, seems all the more credible when we make a careful anthropological study of the personality of Christ. He is generally regarded as purely Jewish. Yet the characteristics which distinguish his high and noble per-sonality, and which give a distinct impress to his religion, are cer-tainly not Semitical; they are rather features of the higher Arian [sic] race.6

The Monist Leagues promise of a scientifically sanctioned and racially purged spirituality appealed to the German elite, and after Haeckels death, the Leagues longstanding argument 23

that state policies must not interfere with evolutionary neces-sity began to gather influence. The postwar economic crisis was theorized as a result of immigration and cultural decadence; the lower races, it was reasoned, must no longer be coddled into artificial survival if the German people were to thrive. Nature itself decreed it.

Posthumous association with the methodical madness of the Nazis has cast a retrospective pall over Haeckels undeniable achievements in microbiological taxonomy; his grander evolu-tionary theories have been debunked. Nevertheless, Art Forms in Nature continues to inspire and provoke the artists who, like Ernst or Kandinsky before them, stumble upon its gorgeously elaborated plates. Admittedly, the boundaries between art and science have never been, and never can be, absolute. But their progressive and mutual violation may well turn out to be a defining obsession of 21st-century art, and there is certainly a renewed concern, on the part of contemporary artists, with the empirical mystique of the bio-lab with its statistical proce-dures and DNA/digital frontier on one hand, its viscosities and oozings, its creepy-beautiful microcosmic landscapes on the other. Given his pervasive influence and subsequent, near-com-plete eclipse, I wondered how many artists today were actu-ally familiar with Haeckels work. And, I wondered if those who have looked deeply into Haeckel and considered his example in the development of their own art might discern, in his trium-phally willed organic patterns, a graphic signature of the scary ideology that selective cultural memory has lopped away. I con-ducted an informal poll, and sure enough: from Alexis Rockman and Philip Taaffe, who have borrowed from Haeckels prints directly; to Alex Ross, Karen Arm, and Tricia Keightley, whose working premises have been informed and inflamed by his aes-theticization of microscopic rendering; to Fred Tomaselli, Susan Jennings, and Tom Nozkowski, whose engagements are mixed with severe critique, Haeckels influence remains palpable in the studios of New York artists.

For these visual thinkers, the discovery of Haeckels port-folios, whether received as art or science, or both, or neither, has been revelatory. Once entranced, however, many also register an ambivalent attraction/repulsion to Art Formss romantically totalizing worldview, to the heavy, structural-izing hand that renders medusae as swimming chandeliers, and echinidea as hovering spacecraft. Most of the artists with whom I spoke had no idea of Haeckels proto-Fascist past. Nevertheless, many seem to have intuited something of that spirit from the material before them on the page.

In their overall patterning, these pages studded with elaborately symmetrical groupings, usually floating over a black void are as striking as are the specimens themselves. A plate from Art Forms can minimize empty space to an almost neurotic degree, laying out finicky, jewel-box arrangements of like-to-like in vertical columns. This bilateral approach to display threatens to overpower the subtleties of individual organisms, whose symmetries tend to be radially complex, their multiple digits or leaves twisting with restless animation so as to bring maximal morphology into view. Sometimes the heavy-handed whole exceeds the sum of its delicate parts, sometimes not. Indeed, if one sees Haeckels lust for unification as sus-

pect leading to overdetermined (though fascinating) art, and bad (though compelling) science then the very

characteristics which attract an artist to his images their inte-grated, harmonious, monistic design would be their most dangerous and dishonest features.

Yet this sort of judgment may itself be overdetermined. Haeckels florid conflation of aestheticism with empiricism made him a lesser scientist in some ways leading him, on occasion, to fudge his illustrations for the sake of a beautiful argument. But it may also have made him a greater one, his formal acuity and imagination leading to genuine morphologi-cal discoveries. And, if the miscegenation of disciplines made him less of an artist operating covertly, as it were, never quite seizing an artists prerogative or admitting to an artists seduc-tionsin other ways, the rigors of the scientific idiom seem to have freed him, allowing him to channel his enduring talent for formal articulation into an almost superhuman penetration, focus, and deftness of hand.

Fred Tomaselli, who discovered Art Forms relatively recently, notes that Haeckels mirror-image arrangements propose, in effect, their own meta-organism, a more-than-perfect symme-try which plays upon the idea of the beautiful as it is coded deep within us. He also acknowledges a comparison between Haeckels black backgrounds and his rationalized, proliferating layouts, and some of his own methods for animating a pictorial field. But at the same time, Tomaselli finds parts of Art Forms, particularly those plates featuring creatures farther up the evolutionary ladder, to be limited by a precisionist rigidity. In the (relatively infrequent) groupings of frogs, lizards, bats, and birds, Tomaselli diagnoses a telltale scientific override a certain stiffness that can make cartoons of nature, especially when compared to the more sensual and vivid work of John James Audubon or Martin Johnson Heade. In Haeckels depic-tions of microbiota, on the other hand, you see the scientist at work. Tomaselli discerns that within the realm of the exotically small, where Haeckel could use a compass, French curve, and ruler with impunity, he gets to sing.

As a connoisseur of 18th- and 19th-century scientific illus-tration, Philip Taaffe also admires Haeckels contribution as a draughtsman, acknowledging that his drawings brought the field to a new level of authority or life or animation The bril-liance of the graphic execution is undeniable; you have to be aware of these. You have to look and look. Taaffe stops short, however, of touching; though his process often involves the silkscreening of biological illustrations in gestural conjunc-tions, and despite the fact that a couple of Haeckels more sinu-ous images have found their way into his work, on the whole he finds Art Forms too willful, too aestheticized to use. Susan Jennings agrees. Like Haeckel, Jennings actually spends time at the microscope, observing life forms that she cultures and photographs. She is interested in Haeckels passion and regards his drawings as beautiful, fascinating, but also uses words such as uptight, oppressive, and claustrophobic. Its something hes imposed because he has looked for it until hes found it. Its not how nature is, necessarily.

Take, as an example, Plate 61 of Art Forms. It features a radiolarian with the exoskeleton of a super-stellated Buckyball, a geomancers polyhedral dream, awesomely complex yet serenely Platonic. Though not a strictly scientific image, appear-

24 opposite: Plate 85 of Art Forms in Nature

ing as it does in a book aimed at general consumption, neither is it meant as fantasy or invention, raising possible suspicions about the draughtsmans habits of fidelity to the organism. In Art Forms, the unmatched zeal for extracting architecture from the infinitesimal wigglings of life might be indulged as a kind of more-than-empirical insight; in one infamous case, however, Haeckel stands accused of out-and-out fraud.

To bolster his theory of developmental recapitulation the cornerstone of his lifes work, his all-explanatory dogma defended to the day he died Haeckel often illustrated com-parative stages of the human embryo alongside those of lower vertebrates. The point was to demonstrate how humans pass through the stages of phylogenetic ancestry, how we climb in the womb, as it were, up the evolutionary tree hence those fish gills and lizard tails observed in the fetus. (For that matter, the Tree of Life image, still beloved of evolution text-books, is completely Haeckelian; he was the first to draw the differentiation of species, with all its apparent ramifying logic, as a brooding, twisted oak.7) Haeckels illustrations testified powerfully in favor of his argument that in his famous motto ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: fish, frogs, chicken, cows, and humans all look the same at comparable stages of develop-ment, the higher animals passing through and beyond the ter-minal expressions of their evolutionary ancestors.

Recapitulation promised to reveal not only the animal ancestry of man and the line of his descent but also the method of origin of his mental, social, and ethical faculties.8 A simi-lar epistemological template stamped itself on a number of emerging disciplines, for example, on Freudian and to some extent Jungian psychology, where neurosis, paranoia, and mania were schematized as primitive vestiges, the childs mind recapitulating the mental states of early tribesmen, etc. Even at the time, however, it was claimed by some of Haeck-els peers that his telltale embryos were not to be found in nature. According to the late Stephen Jay Gould, a dogged foe of Haeckels distortions, Haeckel had simply copied the same figure over and over again.9 Humans, in fact, have notable similarities with lower vertebrates only at the very beginning of development.

Haeckel dismissed the embryo controversy by claiming that all diagrammatic figures are inaccurate10 and of course, however disingenuous as a defense, in a way this was perfectly correct there is no such thing as an objective transcript of sci-entific observation. For the artists I interviewed, it is precisely this shifty topography that compels exploration; in one way or another, navigation of the art/science divide defines these bod-ies of work, and each of my respondents recognizes Art Formss problematic siting in this terrain. For Alex Ross, art and science overlap most poignantly in the areas of research and discovery Artists have no limits at all but the beauty of science is that it is guided by the ultimatum of its own strictures: follow the rules or dont call it science. Ross, whose tightly rendered but imaginary biomorphs were fattened on the myriad delights of Art Forms, calls it a revelation, to be sure, a prime mover in the germination of my thinking. The careful taxonomic display pre-sented such a potent dream-world. The crux of my work is that

what for, say, Kandinsky, were shapes and relationships, are for me organisms and communities. This concep-

tion of pictorial autonomy was directly inspired by Haeckels aestheticization of life forms. As Ross puts it, The work seemed to scream, If nature can play reality designer, you can too.

Hubristic reality-design, conversely, is Alexis Rockmans target. His work specifically addresses evolution and ecol-ogy, but from a pointedly sardonic angle; his current paintings present a wry natural history that he calls psychedelic ecotour-ism. Rockman discovered Haeckel in high school. His mother, an archeologist, was Margaret Meades assistant at the Ameri-can Museum of Natural History, and as a child he had unusual access to its dioramas and displays. In these, as in the wilder-ness-born American tradition generally, plant and animal speci-mens were shown interacting within a total ecosystem, whereas Haeckel catalogued only closely related species deployed in frankly abstract, etheric space. Even the few attempts at popu-lated landscape in Art Forms the same that Tomaselli deems cartoonish manifest a charting or listing tendency that Rock-man calls vertical compared to the horizontal polymorphism of Hudson River School naturalists like Audubon and Heade. European organization, Rockman asserts, is about putting the organism in a vitrine or box.

Karen Arm, however, defends this isolating tendency, argu-ing for realms of organic truth in which aesthetic and scientific inquiry are allied. Art forms in nature describes my work. Every time I pick up the book, its an affirmation of what Im doing. Arms paintings and drawings begin with observations of natural forms branches, waves, spider webs, smoke which she win-nows from their chaotic matrix and reorders in dense, intuitive patterns. She describes her creative process much as Haeckel described his own, as heightened views that nevertheless ring true to the anarchic specificity of observation. As Arm points out, Haeckels depictions were empirically based, but he still has his hand in it. Thats what makes him interesting to us now. His images are not dry; they have a life to them. Or, as painter Tricia Keightley says, a blob is not thought out; Haeckels drawings demarcate a zone between the gooey undefined and the schematic. Still, like Philip Taaffe, Keightley finds that the eccentricity of Art Forms works against its direct utility. Haeck-els work, she says, can be intimidating, precisely because it is so tempting as source material. If one succumbed, then 400 people would come up to you and say, You know, thats form number 10 on page 36, plate 17.

Whether admiring or skeptical, the artists I spoke to under-stand the siren song of Haeckels lapidary profusions to be their selling point. The totalizing confidence of his project its implication that nature is art is design is science is what compels, in spite of the implied denial of humanistic values like idiosyncrasy or accident or freedom. As Taaffe (who knew of Haeckels dark side) says, there is an intellectual attraction to

26

clockwise from top left: Philip Taaffe, Metacrinus Angulatus, 1997; Fred Toma-

selli, Monsters of Paradise, 2001 (courtesy James Cohan Gallery); Thomas Noz-

kowski, Untitled, 1999 (courtesy Max Protetch Gallery); Susan Jennings, Art

Culture, 1996-97 (detail); Alexander Ross, Untitled, 1998 (courtesy Feature, Inc.);

Alexis Rockman, Amphibian Revolution, 1986 (courtesy Gorney Bravin + Lee); Tri-

cia Keightley, 72.56.01A, 2001; Karen Arm, Untitled (Incense #3), 2001 (courtesy

PPOW Gallery).

overleaf: Plate 61 of Art Forms in Nature

come to grips with that schizophrenia, that dichotomy, that strange will to systematize everything, to organize everything. But at the end of the day, it leads you to mass murder or some-thing. Tom Nozkowski, meanwhile, describes himself as an anti-Haeckelian: I began with great enthusiasm. But the more I looked, the more pissed off I got about him. His order-ing processes are very 19th-century, very Germanic, and I think they lie. Haeckels project seems to be skewed in the first place and maybe not for good purpose. Nozkowski echoes Jenningss feeling that Haeckels sin is that he finds what he expects to find. For all the works ostensible beauty, it does seem a period piece, inherently nostalgic. I dont question the seriousness of how he plays the game, I just think that intellec-tually he fails. Nozkowski is not afraid to diagram an equiva-lence between the pictorial and the political: It plays back into the work, a kind of self-assuredness or self-certainty, a predisposition to knowing the answer the minute you ask the question. I think that can always lead to evil aesthetic evil first, then maybe evil in the real world.

Perhaps. Leonardo designed ingeniously vicious war machines for the Sforzas and the Borgias, but we have no trouble calling him a humanist, and like the notebooks of the ur-Renaissance Man, Ernst Haeckels lithographs encompass an otherworldly formal clarity, teased out from messy reality by the delicate emphases of the trained hand; they evince a kin-dred delight in draftsmanship in service to science, a devotion to a truth higher than mere optical objectivity. Both Haeckel and da Vinci maintained a boyish fascination for spiky armored crea-tures, for the gracefully fantastic and grotesque. Of course, one is the greater scientist and the other the greater artist. But the megalomaniacal determinism that tints the edges of Haeckels vision signals, perhaps, the last shudder of a dying da Vincian ideal, a union of curiosity and craftsmanship, poetry and indus-try, science and art. Perhaps Haeckels preternatural exactitude is truly pathological. But if so, the force of his obsession, while edifying in its failures, only adds conviction to the appeal of the ancient argument he urges that beauty is the proof of natural intelligence.

1 Haeckels delicate pencil and ink drawings were brilliantly interpreted by the

lithographer Adolph Giltsch. A thorough assessment of Art Forms in Nature would

require that their separate contributions be disentangled.

2 Ernst Haeckel, Art Forms in Nature (Munich & New York: Prestel Verlag, 1998),

p. 27.

3 Art Forms in Nature was kept in print for years by Dover Publications in their

catalogue of uncopyrighted clip-art oddities, alongside compendia of Victorian

stencils and 19th-century political cartoons. In 1998, Prestel issued a superb

color version of the book.

4 Krystallsee is the title of a book published by Haeckel in 1917.

5 Daniel Gasman, Haeckels Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (New York:

Peter Lang Publishing, 1998), p. 157. See also Gasmans The Scientific Origins of

National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist

League (London & New York: MacDonald, 1971).

6 Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (New York: Harper & Bros., 1900), p.328

7 Here is another example of Haeckels insightful but dangerous mixing of science

and art. For a detailed discussion of the misleading teleological subtleties of Haeck-

els trees of life, see Stephen Jay Goulds Wonderful Life (New York: Penguin, 1991),

especially pp. 263-267.

8 Ibid, p. 116.

9 Gould, This View of Life, Natural History, March 2000. Those phony embryos

were recently discovered persisting in textbooks, and creationists have blustered

about finding Haeckels skeleton in the closet of evolution ever since. See, for exam-

ple, M. K. Richardson et al., Haeckel, Embryos, and Evolution, Science 280:983-

985 (1998). Haeckels dogma of recapitulation had lost its luster on

any terms by 1910 or so, when it became unfashionable in practice, following

the rise of experimental embryology, and untenable in theory, following scientific

change in a related field (Mendelian genetics). Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and

Phylogeny (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1977), p. 77.

10 Ernst Haeckel, The Evolution of Man: A Popular Exposition of the Principle

Points of Human Phylogeny and Ontogeny (New York: Appleton, 1897. English

edition vol. 1), p. xxxv.

FIEld tracEsBill Jones

For the past five years, Ive been working with Dr. Merrill Gar-nett, a biochemist who has spent three decades researching electrogenetics, the behavior of biological systems altered by substances that increase the flow of electrical charge to DNA.

The basis of Dr. Garnetts approach involves the postula-tion that there is a corollary genetic code of pulsed electromag-netic current that enables communication at the cellular level within a given organism. The coaxial liquid-crystal structure of DNA transmits and receives energy and information by a pro-cess known as flexo-electricity, the equivalent of the piezoelec-tricity produced by crystal oscillators in computers. Dr. Garnett theorizes that molecular nano-circuits, through which the corol-lary genetic mechanism transfers charge over great distances, induces the multi-cellular state, as well as being key to orga-nized growth and development. Every cell has both an inward and outward current. The inward current builds up, and forms a metastable equilibrium involving multiple reactions. When the inward current reaches a certain level, outward current is forced to occur. We see the visual evidence of this flux of energies in experiments and resulting photographs that show changes in form. In such images, DNA liquid crystals that normally look like small flowers explode outward into starburst-like structures when charged at the correct frequency, expressing the energy field needed for cell maturation. During the life of an organism, this energy flux continually streams through its DNA in a num-ber of axes of vibration when the fluxes end, life ends.

Microscopy and microphotography of electro-active bio-logical polymers charged with pulsed electro-magnetic fields trace those fields as the liquid crystalline polymers dry on the surface of a glass microscope slide. The microphotographs presented here show field traces mapping the change in struc-ture and symmetry of DNA and prothrombin the bio-polymer responsible for blood clotting that one preliminary model sug-gests might function as a kind of vascular internet, facilitat-ing communication with DNA under the influence of a pulsed electro-magnetic field.

30

opposite: Microphotograph of prothrombin dried on a glass slide. The fern-like

fractal structure of this bio-polymer responsible for blood clotting demonstrates

its liquid crystalinity.

overleaf: Prothrombin is once again dried on a glass slide, but in this experiment

the linear structure of transmission cables is formed by coating the prothrombin

with the biological dialectric hyaluronic acid. The discovery of the electro-active

nature of prothrombin and other bio-polymers such as DNA suggests the possibil-

ity of a corallary genetic code and a vascular internet.

mm, mm, Good: markEtING aNd rEGrEssIoN IN aEstHEtIc tastEDaviD Hawkes

In the week following September 11, a portentous apparition appeared on the campus of the liberal arts college where I teach. A hugely fat man dressed as a tin of Campbells soup greeted shell-shocked students and faculty on their way to the cafete-ria. The red-and-white blimp was imprisoned in a tight costume splattered with his employers logo. He sweated under a carni-valesque mask that twisted his once-human features into a hid-eous, mocking grimace. His polyester uniform must have been a torment in the late-summer sun, but at first he bore the curses, taunts, and gibes of passers-by with something approaching good humor. As the afternoon wore on, though, his demeanor began to turn ugly. The winsome advertising slogans he sung degenerated into sullen mutterings, eventually shading into outright threats. The cheery smile with which he greeted the co-eds mutated into an aggressively salacious leer. Perhaps his gloved hands slipped; in any case one girl responded to his attentions with a sharp kick to the shin. Finally, as a group of simian fratboys began to circle him with violent intent, he slunk grumpily off into the sunset.

This monsters visitation caused considerable conster-nation around the university, some of whose denizens were recently bereaved. I was one of those who complained about him to the manager of the food court. The response I received was quizzical, uncomprehending. Was the Campbells freak in questionable taste, a stunt better inflicted on a less distraught community? On the contrary, he had been summoned pre-cisely because of the disaster, for the purpose of cheering people up. The representatives of the corporation that now controls our dining services simply could not understand why anyone should find this clownish spectacle unamusing. Com-mercial aesthetics, I came to realize, were regarded by these folk as unequivocally uplifting, and the thought that people numb with the shock of recent disaster should be anything but delighted by this ghoul had simply not crossed their minds.

In retrospect, it was probably naive to cause a fuss. The hapless soup-man was merely a local eruption of the general plague of marketing, packaging, and mind-control currently raging through the college campuses of the Western world. Naomi Klein describes this phenomenon in devastating detail in her book No Logo, but her protests are already buried beneath the billboards. The university cafeteria is now a shopping mall, where Starbucks and Burger King lord it over consumers. Where, the campus shop once provided good, cheap, home-made sandwiches, the students must now purchase an Asian atom-bomb of MSG from an outlet labeled, with presumably unconscious Hitlerian overtones, Mein Bowl. An enormous wall is being constructed at the edge of campus, with the dual purpose of housing The Gap and sealing off the university from the impoverished Puerto Rican neighborhood in which it is marooned. Needless to say, the bookstore has been taken over by Barnes & Noble.

We may ask ourselves: Well, how did we get here? The answer we will be given is that we wanted it this way. For a while, it was my habit to question the authorities whenever a new piece of capitalist propaganda defaced my working

environment. Why, I used to say, are you doing this to us? The response never varied. A survey had been done, a poll taken, a study commissioned. The results had proved proved beyond all reasonable doubt that students desired, demanded, could not possibly live without, the comforting presence of multinational corporations. To object that Burger King is a purveyor of poison, or that Nike trainers are manu-factured by six year-old slaves, would have been viewed as not merely unscientific, but actually undemocratic. In one of many forlorn and futile discussions with the campus deci-sion-makers, I tried to explain that part of my job as an edu-cator was to teach my students to think critically about the ideological structures upon which commercial advertising is built, and that having human tins of soup rampaging across campus tended to undermine my work. I was politely informed that while there was no desire to denigrate your philosophy, it was an incontrovertible and empirically tested fact that stu-dents took pleasure and succor from living in a brashly commercial, logo-soaked environment. This ambience, outside of which students would, I was assured, flounder like dying fish, was frequently said to generate a branded feel.

Obviously, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy, but the more I considered this ostensibly unlikely proposition, the more I found it to be true. Adolescents away from home for the first time probably do find it reassuring to be surrounded by the familiar signs and symbols, logos and brands, which gratified their desires as children. Why wouldnt they? The branded feel, after all, is hardly con-fined to university campuses. I sup-pose that the