Ink & Image, 13th Edition

Ink & Image 13th Edition Spring 2021

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Ink & Image Spring 2021 Volume 13

Contributors Sasha Carnes Adriana Carmela Emilie Meyer Brock Riggins Zoe Shields

Cover Artist Charlotte Somerville

Editors-in-Chief Anna Sujin Leckie Niall Finn Lowrie

Co-Editors Ann Lukyanova Clara Jeanne Reed Sang “Sunnie” Zhang

Design Editors Marie Layla Normand Clara Jeanne Reed -3-

Table of Contents Letter from the Editors............................................................................................................Page 5

Baubo: Friend or Foe? Emilie Meyer...........................................................................................................................Page 7

“Let us note how great this thirst was”: Christ in the Wine Press and Viticulture in Northern Europe Adriana Carmela van Manen................................................................................................Page 21

What Stares Back: Ruin and ‘Animal’ Encounter through Derrida Brock Riggins.......................................................................................................................Page 34

Progressive Deaccessioning: A Step Towards Museum Parity Sasha Carnes.........................................................................................................................Page 44

The Artist and Art Institution in the Digital Age Zoe Shields............................................................................................................................Page 58

About Us...............................................................................................................................Page 67 -4-

Dear Reader, As the editors of Ink & Image we are delighted to present the thirteenth edition of NYU Department of Art History’s journal of original undergraduate research. This journal was founded in 2009 with the intention of granting undergraduates the opportunity to present work typically reserved for graduate students. The original founders Malcolm St. Clair (Urban Design and Architecture Studies ‘09) and Alexis Wang (Art History ‘09) intended to create a dialogue between Art History departments and researchers, both within NYU and other academic institutions. We are proud to say that vision has been maintained throughout the thirteen years we have been running.

This year we present to you a selection of papers ranging from the tiny sculptures of ancient Greece to the digitization of museums in our current and future age. Running through these papers are themes of change; whether coming to terms with it or creating it. These themes are especially pertinent now, as billions of people worldwide have had to adapt to changes and losses brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. This issue is dedicated to all the NYU Art History alumni, faculty, staff, and students who have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank our faculty advisor, Professor Carol Krinksy, and also Professor Geronimus, Peggy Coon, and the countless other NYU faculty and staff who have helped us bring this year’s edition to print. The advisors and authors of this year’s papers must also be thanked for their tireless efforts and their wonderful research.

As seen on our cover, Nike of Samothrace is the goddess of victory. Our cover artist Charlotte Somerville drew the statue in the Louvre, which was commissioned to commemorate successful naval action and conveys triumph and the conquering of adversity. These are the two very themes that appear throughout our journal and without a doubt throughout the entirety of the pandemic, especially as the distribution of vaccines ramps up.

Central to the mission of Ink & Image are the notions of inspiring new research, encouraging creativity, and furthering connections. We hope that as you read this journal you are inspired by these ideas and learn a thing or two.

Happy reading!

Anna & Niall

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This issue of Ink & Image is dedicated to all members of the NYU community who have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. We hope that the essays included in this edition will provide inspiration to be curious, open, and interested as the world continues to reckon with the effects of the pandemic.

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Baubo: Friend or Foe? Emilie Meyer

To alleviate pain or sadness through the simple act of a woman exposing her genitals is not a

practice that we often encounter in the 21st century. Yet the motion of lifting one’s skirts, known as the anasyrma in Greek, has a rich cross-cultural history imbued with apotropaic power. The anasyrma’s authority to avert evil influences lies in both the positive and pejorative cultural implications of the female sexual organ. The vulva has historically been a space demarcated by ideology, both religious and political, resulting in its associations of fertility and fecundity, as well as becoming an object of fear and threat under the transformative influence of the male gaze. A corollary of these cultural associations is the range of affective responses engendered by the sight of what was once hidden becoming revealed in the obscene and humorous act of exhibitionism. It is within this affective response of the viewer that the apotropaic power of the anasyrma resides.1 The anasyrma could therefore be said to function differently depending on the reaction of the witness, a reaction influenced by their relationship with the female sexual organ; whether that be identification or unfamiliarity. The male gaze renders the vulva capable of scaring away evil as an object of fear whereas the female gaze upon the female body must be argued to produce a different affective response.

The name ‘Baubo’ has been ascribed to one of the most famous and equally mysterious characters

to have performed an anasyrma, a story which can be traced back to the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, an anonymous collection of ancient Greek hymns thought by scholars to have been written between 650 and 550 BCE.2 Baubo escapes this original context and is found scattered throughout later texts ranging from the writings of Christian theologians to Freud, her narrative ever-evolving and changing along with these texts that were influenced by their own times, cultures, and authors. The interaction between the literature on Baubo and her representation in art is a fascinating one, leaving only a single secure thread remaining at the core of the myth: Baubo’s act of lifting her skirt was to comfort the grieving goddess Demeter. It is what lies beneath Baubo’s skirt that oscillates over time, resulting in remarkable depictions where what 1 Dutsch, Dorota, and Ann Suter. Ancient Obscenities: Their Nature and Use in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. (University of Michigan Press, 2015), 6.

2 Foley, Helene P. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary and Interpretive Essays. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 46.

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she exposes defines her as either a humorous friend, or monstrous foe. One could look at the range of potential affective responses to the female sexual organ in order to understand these variations in Baubo’s ongoing mythology, particularly the textual variations resulting from her anasyrma being perceived and re-written by men, in contrast with the original intended female audience.

In 1898 at the remains of a temple of Demeter and Kore at Priene, Turkey, six curious terracotta

statuettes were discovered by German archaeologists (Figures 1-4).3 These figurines, ranging from 8 cm to 15 cm in height all present disproportionately large heads crowned with softly waved hair and a form of headdress. The bodies appear to lack a neck, chest, or stomach, and instead their mouths sit just above lightly outlined female genitalia and elongated, fused legs. The majority of the figurines now lack arms, presumably broken, yet some still hold a lute (Figure 1), a basket of fruits above their head, a torch (Figure 2), and even a seemingly waving outstretched hand (Figure 3). The figures with intact faces show us that they were all delicately and realistically carved with slender noses, almond eyes, and a slight smile.

These statuettes were soon to be called “Baubo” by Hermann Diels, a German scholar, who dated them to c. 4th century BCE along with the temple itself.4

Hermann Diels’ identification of the Priene figurines as Baubo was primarily due to their nudity

and their discovery at the site of a temple to Demeter. These factors aligned with the narrative of Baubo’s anasyrma in her earliest literary appearance, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the epic composed to honour the Greek goddess of grain. The text concluded with a mythical explanation for the founding of the Eleusinian Mysteries, sacred rites held for the cult of Demeter and Persephone which focused on the female experience and bonds of motherhood, introducing the small but vital role of Baubo. The hymn tells of the rape and abduction of Persephone, daughter of Demeter, by Hades: “I sing of Lovely-haired Demeter, and her slim-ankled daughter whom Hades seized.”5 Consumed by her own sadness and mourning, “for nine days divine Demeter roamed over the earth, holding torches ablaze in her hands” while searching for her daughter. “In her grief she did not once taste ambrosia, or nectar sweet to drink, nor bathed her skin.”6 Upon her arrival at Eleusis, an ancient town in West Attica, Demeter is met by Baubo, an old nurse who greets her and encourages her to break the fast of mourning by drinking Kykeôn, a sweet nectar-like wine. At Demeter’s refusal, Baubo “was unhappy because her hospitality was disdained,

3 Olender, Maurice. “Aspects of Baubo.” Before Sexuality: the Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, (Princeton University Press, 1999), 83.

4 Ibid., 86.

5 Foley, 1.

6 Foley, 4.

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uncovered her genitals and displayed them to the goddess.”7 Faced with this absurd and humorous act, “Demeter was pleased by the sight and finally took the drink, in her pleasure at the display.”8 A record of Baubo’s anasyrma appears again in Hellenistic poet Philikos’ Hymn to Demeter written in the 3rd century BCE. Here he writes that Baubo tells Demeter “if you are willing to loosen the bonds of your mourning, I can set you free.”9 This process of emotional release, which Baubo achieves by making Demeter laugh, causes her anasyrma to be understood as apotropaic. The exposure of her vulva does not directly allay evil, but catalyses Demeter’s pleasure and laughter that shatters the destructive silence of her ascetic mourning.

In light of Baubo’s apotropaic role, the uses of the sculptures found at Priene have been debated

amongst scholars, although most have suggested they were employed in the sacred rituals of the Eleusinian Mysteries and at the Attic festivals of Thesmophoria. These were celebrations and feasts associated with the cult of Demeter, during which women exchanged jokes, proffered insults in honor of the divinities, used vulgar language, and carried representations of male and female genitals.10 The small scale of the Baubo statuettes suggests that they may have been held, or intended to be easily moved and passed around, potentially as props during the celebrations. Men were thought to be excluded from these festivities, and in some parts of Ancient Greece, even male dogs were excluded from the sanctuary during the mysteries, implying that the statuettes were intended for women to use and view.11 One thing is certain: Baubo was worshipped alongside the other goddesses. Two instances of her worship in cult inscriptions have been found, the first from Naxos in the 4th century BCE showing a dedication to Demeter, Kore, Zeus, and Baubo. The second comes from the island of Paros which was also called “Demetrias” as it was known as a principal cult-site of Demeter. Here, an inscription commemorating a dedication by a woman in the 1st century BCE to Hera, Demeter, Kore, and Baubo was found.12 These inscriptions show her elevated importance within the cult, not just as a character in Demeter’s story, but also as a figure celebrated in her own right, explaining her popularity and the number of figures found at Priene.

7 Arthur, Marylin, and H. D. “Politics and Pomegranates: An Interpretation of the Homeric Hymn To Demeter,” Arethusa 10, no. 1 (1977): 7-47. Accessed April 24, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26307824. 20.

8 Foley, 228.

9 Halperin, David M., et al. Before Sexuality: the Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World.

(Princeton University Press, 1999), 86.

10 Lubell, Winifred Milius. The Metamorphosis of Baubo: Myths of Woman’s Sexual Energy. (Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 15.

11 Olender, Maurice. “Aspects Of Baubo: Ancient Texts and Contexts,” In Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World, edited by Halperin David M., Winkler John J., and Zeitlin Froma I., 83-114. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990. Accessed April 24, 2021, 95.

12 Ibid., 87.

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Although Hermann Diels was able to draw clear parallels between Baubo’s anasyrma in the Ho-

meric Hymn to Demeter and the figurines found at Priene, had he been familiar with later textual representations of Baubo he would have perhaps found the task of identifying these joyous-looking figurines more challenging. Baubo undergoes a transformation when revisited within the cultural context of Christianity. Her anasyrma mutates through the lens of a patriarchal religion where women, especially those who were considered sexual, were reduced and deemed sinful. This is a crucial development to Baubo’s narrative, as it is at this point that her exposure becomes more obscene, locating the apotropaic power of her anasyrma in an altered affective response: that of a male witness to female nudity. In re-translating the narrative, the exposed female genitalia is now perceived through the pejorative cultural associations of the vulva propagated by Christianity, reflected in a marked change in language and shift in tone of the narrative. When the church fathers re-record the story of Baubo, Clement of Alexandria’s (c. 150 – c. 215 AD) translation of the original version states, “Baubo pulls back her peplos and displayed the most indecent parts of her body; young Iakkhos, who was there, was putting his hand under Baubo’s breast, laughing; then the goddess smiled.”13 It is notable that Clement’s translation focuses far more on the body of Baubo than had ever been done in the Homeric Hymns. Suddenly what Baubo is showing is “indecent,” and her breasts are exposed. Interestingly, Clement’s text was thought to suggest that Iacchus, believed by many scholars to be the son of Baubo, “was there” beneath Baubo’s skirt.14 Arnobius (c. 255 AD - c. 330 AD) expands on this theme of Iacchus (or a little child) being revealed in the anasyrma, writing, “Baubo pulls up her garments from the bottom and exposes to sight the object shaped on her natural parts. Below she agitates them with her hand - the shapes resembled a little child.”15

Miroslav Markovich proposes that these variations can simply be put down to a mistranslation

since Arnobius attempted to translate Clement’s text into Latin but used a copy of the work altered by a redactor. For the redactor, the image of Baubo was interpreted as “not a decent one” potentially because he envisaged Baubo’s vulva serving as the mouth of the face she had drawn on her lower abdomen.16 On the other hand, one could propose that the introduction of the author’s own moral value judgement of indecency is a symptom of the anasyrma being perceived by a male witness whose affective response to 13 Halperin, David M., et al. Before Sexuality: the Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World.

(Princeton University Press, 1999), 87.

14 Foley, Helene P. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter: Translation, Commentary and Interpretive Essays. (Princeton University Press, 1994), 46.

15 Halperin, David M., et al. Before Sexuality: the Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World.

(Princeton University Press, 1999), 88.

16 Marcovich, M. “Demeter, Baubo, Iacchus, and a Redactor.” Vigiliae Christianae 40, no. 3 (1986): 294-301. Accessed April 25, 2021. doi:10.2307/1583904, 295.

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the image of exposed female genitalia moves from the humorous and joyful reaction of Demeter to one of culturally conditioned disgust. The exposure enacted is no longer simply Baubo’s genitals on display, but genitals that are being sexually suggestively touched, paired with the monstrous appearance of a secondary face beneath her skirt. Although it seems likely that Clement of Alexandria’s and Arnobius’ account of what lay beneath Baubo’s skirt was rooted in a mistranslation, their variations to the narrative significantly alter the affective experience of her anasyrma, engendering repulsion or disgust which unsurprisingly align with the moral standards of Christianity regarding the female body.

This metamorphosis of Baubo’s narrative does the figurines found at Priene a great disservice by

misplacing the apotropaic power of their anasyrma within the witnesses’ reaction of fear or shock at an unnatural body, rather than joy and humor at a rebellious exposure. Depending on which version of the story is applied, the Priene Baubo can be argued to embody a combination of different versions of the myth: the original exposure of genitals from the Homeric Hymn, or Clement of Alexandria and Arnobius’ altered account of her physical monstrosity. The female genitals of the figures are clearly outlined, and wave-like lines above their heads potentially represent Baubo’s hair, parted and drawn back above the forehead and held in place by a knotted headdress. The narrative from the Homeric Hymn suggests that the face we see is that of Baubo’s, encouraging us to interpret the statuettes as representations of her torso-less body. However, from Clement of Alexandria’s and Arnobius’ accounts, we could argue that the face shown on the Priene Baubo statuettes is either of Iacchus, who is said to be hidden beneath the skirt as recorded in Clement of Alexandria’s account, or the little child’s face created by Baubo agitating her genitals which Arnobius described. Their alteration of what Baubo reveals during her exposure can instead encourage us to interpret the wave-like lines as Baubo’s raised skirt revealing the resemblance of a little child or Iacchus below, meaning Baubo’s own face is missing from the figurines entirely.

The influence of these later textual transformations of Baubo’s narrative therefore presents the

possibility of understanding the Priene Baubo figurines as grotesque or even monstrous objects, due to the potential absence of Baubo’s head and the fusing of her and her son Iacchus’ bodies. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s popular concept of the grotesque body from Rabelais and His World, we can see how the changes made to Baubo’s narrative cause the statuettes to align with aspects of the monstrous, resulting in their apotropaic power residing in their ability to cause a disgusted or even fearful reaction, rather than their original intention of joyful laughter.17 The grotesque is understood by Bakhtin to be that which degrades what was once spiritual and noble to a debased and material level, the very same movement that Baubo’s anasyrma has undergone. The grotesque concerns the lower stratum of the body, and often is created by 17 Bakhtin, Michail Michajlovič. Rabelais and His World. (Indiana University Press, 2009), 1-8.

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the use of exaggeration and excess, aspects shared with the Priene Baubo whose bodies are restricted to the lower half in their entirety, a hyperbole of her original anasyrma. Furthermore, the exposure of Baubo’s genitals automatically carries associations of bodily fluids, and reminds us of the orifices and convexities of the body, often used as the site of the grotesque. The semi-formed apparition of Iacchus on Baubo’s body similarly implies the fusion of two beings, an allusion to pregnancy which aligns with the formations Bakhtin identifies as core elements of the grotesque. As he understands it, the “grotesque body is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continuously built, created, and builds and creates another body.”18 If we are indeed seeing the face of Iacchus fused within Baubo’s belly, then the monstrous quality of the body is emphasised by the combination of male and female genders, the oscillation between the two achieving an uncanny and unsettling effect. Alternatively, if we understand the face as Baubo’s own collapsed body, it also introduces a monstrous feature shared with the glastrocephalous Blemmyes, a mythical race of headless men.19 Here, the atrophied body subverts the order of high and low, as “the limitation to the zone of the belly or womb expresses the inhuman gruesome aspect, the radical autonomy of the belly over against the higher centres of the heart, breast and head.”20

A visual analysis of the Priene Baubo statuettes in light of the later versions of the myth renders

their bodies monstrous in their ability to be the “harbinger[s] of category crisis,” combining genders and ages due to the fused bodies of mother and son, while collapsing the body into a compacted nude lower half, aligning with Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque.21 To analyse the Priene Baubo as grotesque objects consequently renders Demeter’s laughter a reaction to a grotesque body, rather than laughter and pleasure at the sight of the numinous, natural, and consequently familiar female body. Bakhtin himself wrote “the themes of cursing and of laughter are almost exclusively a subject of the grotesqueness of the body.” yet perhaps this statement stands only in relation to the reaction of the male gaze upon the unfamiliar female body. Could Demeter’s laughter be a subject of a numinous body and the rebellious nature of the woman who exposes what has traditionally been shamed and hidden? Would the aspects of Bakhtin’s grotesque body apply to the feminine gaze upon what is familiar, as in the case of Baubo and Demeter’s interaction?

If we are to consider the affective shift of Baubo’s anasyrma depending on the gender of the

viewer, Freud’s theory of castration anxiety could explain the monsterization of the female sexual organ through the phantasy of threat it poses to men. Originating during the phallic stage of psychosexual de18 Ibid., 24.

19 See British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B V/1, fol. 82r.

20 Cometa, Michele. “The Survival of Ancient Monsters: Freud and Baubo,” Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century, V & R Unipress, 2015, 310.

21 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome “Monster Culture: Seven Theses,” in Cohen, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture, (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 2.

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velopment, the unconscious fear of penile loss is instilled in the infantile male when he becomes aware of differences between male and female genitalia. He assumes that the female’s penis has been removed and becomes anxious that the same punishment could be inflicted upon himself. The mere sight of the female ‘wound’ can consequently instill a deep primal fear in men of losing their own genitals.22 Freud would argue that tales of the vagina dentata, or toothed vagina, which can inflict pain or castrate the penis during intercourse, are the result of castration and the vagina becoming unconsciously synonymous for the male subject. The depiction of Baubo’s mouth directly above the vagina on the Priene statuettes would consequently activate castration anxiety, a clue to why her anasyrma slips into the realm of fear and disgust under the rewriting of male authors who may have seen similar representations. If monsters are known to threaten us through our fear of being eaten, then the castrating vulva holds the power to inflict that very punishment, or worse, emasculation through impotence. Merely by proxy of her nudity Baubo once again unconsciously aligns with aspects of the monstrous for the male viewer under castration anxiety, a variation on the harmless apotropaic power of laughter which she originally exercised in the Homeric Hymns.

Margaret Miles’ understanding of the “feminine grotesque’’ analyses the role that the male gaze

has had in the development of these decidedly negative cultural associations of the female sex organ.23 Looking at her analysis of these associations in light of the Christian Father’s transformations of Baubo’s narrative, we can come to understand the tendency to render Baubo’s apotropaic power within the affective response of fear or disgust. Miles shows that essential components of grotesque figuration, such as birth and sexual intercourse, are fused to the female body due to the influence of the Christian understanding of sinful Eve, a woman made from man and consequently inherently inferior. As a result, the natural wonders of pregnancy and menstruation are no longer revered and sacred as they were in the cults of Demeter, but instead reveal the woman’s body as antithetical to the desirable “closed, smooth and impenetrable body.”24 The ideology that shaped women’s bodies into a symbol of sinfulness and punishment cannot be divorced from the event of Baubo’s own form being subjected to grotesque figuration over time.

Although it could seem anachronistic to superimpose Miles’ understanding of the feminine grotesque on the ancient statuettes, the views central to her argument can be traced back to the Greeks themselves.

Aristotle claimed that a woman’s body is monstrous by nature, as a deviation from that of the normative male, deformed and mutilated because they did not form properly.25 Perhaps Baubo’s myth was safe from 22 Ibid, 4-7.

23 Miles, Margaret, “Carnal Abominations: The Female Body as Grotesque,” in Adams and Yates, eds., The Grotesque Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, (United States: W.B. Eerdmans, 1997), 110.

24 Ibid, 88.

25 Ibid, 104.

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these contemporaneous negative cultural associations due to her anasyrma remaining in a restricted arena of viewership within the all-female cult of Demeter. The inevitable devolving of her myth into the domain of the grotesque was merely the result of her introduction into the domain of male viewership enacted by the Christian fathers.

The context in which the Priene Baubo were viewed consequently altered the apotropaic power of

the objects, a power that was once exercised through a female specific humour partially lost to the pejorative associations of the vulva propagated by Christianity. When the Priene Baubo were viewed within the context of sacred fertility rituals their anasyrma served a joyful apotropaic function, where the numinous cultural associations of the vulva prevailed. The influence of the male re-interpretations of Baubo’s story was to associate the nudity of the figurines with the grotesque and monstrous, misplacing the central affect of her power in the realm of fear and obscenity. The effect of rewriting what lay beneath Baubo’s skirt consequently altered not only the root of Demeter’s reaction to Baubo’s exposure, but also influenced future reception of the Priene statuettes and to Baubo’s myth itself. This can be examined through later artistic renderings of Baubo, a famous one being in Goethe’s 1828 play Faust. Here, Baubo becomes a witch riding a pig: “Our ancient Baubo rides alone with a mother sow beneath her buttocks,” showing a figure once used to celebrate fertility devolving into obscenity, the very movement of the grotesque delineated by Bakhtin.26 Goethe’s devolving of Baubo’s anasyrma aligns with Arnobius’ translation, which reduced the originally joyful moment of humor into a suggestion of masturbation, pushing the event towards a sexual act and introducing a new focus on penetration that would undeniably activate Freud’s castration complex. Was this introduction of a narrative that could be perceived as grotesque consequently the result of a fearful male witness to female nudity, influenced by the moral agenda of Christianity?

Though Baubo could be, and has been, seen as a monstrous or deformed figure by later viewers,

her worship among goddesses should exempt her from that categorisation. Though she appears to be either a hybrid or headless, she could be placed in a similar category as that of the Egyptian gods, depicted as combinations of animals and humans, or the Christian Trinity itself, thought of as three bodies in one. These figures are elevated from monstrous bodies to gods, and by proxy, they escape pejorative labels such as ‘grotesque’ or ‘deformed.’ Perhaps Baubo instead glides over into the realm of the gods and the “marvelous” if we take Joy Kenseth’s definition into consideration. Kenseth identifies marvels as those which “excite the particular emotional responses of wonder, surprise, astonishment, or admiration,” the very same response Demeter had to Baubo’s anasyrma in the original Homeric Hymn.27 Included in 26 Cometa, Michele. “The Survival of Ancient Monsters: Freud and Baubo,” Monstrous Anatomies: Literary and Scientific Imagination in Britain and Germany during the Long Nineteenth Century, (V & R Unipress, 2015), 310.

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Kenseth’s category of marvels is that which is grotesquely shaped or physically deformed, qualities which have the power to produce a positive affective response due to the ingenuity of deformity as a feat of nature. To see the curious shape of the Priene Baubo as marvelous bodies rather than monstrous deformities serves to return them to the affective realm from whence they came. The members of the cult of Demeter worshiped Baubo as a fertility symbol, a female body celebrated as a natural wonder and an example of ingenuity and complexity.28 The body of Baubo must therefore be considered marvelous in order to preserve her status within the cult of Demeter, surpassing the human or monstrous.

Their godly status is not the only aspect of the Priene Baubo which enables them to escape the

confines of the term “monstrous” despite their curious shape. Their departure from this pejorative term can be accentuated by comparing them to depictions of anasyrma explicitly intended to be fearful and monstrous rather than humorous, such as the Sheela-na-gig (Figure 5). Some scholars have suggested the Sheela-na-gig, like Baubo, have an apotropaic function, as these figures can be found carved on the exterior of churches, their legs spread as they expose their genitals which are often exaggerated in scale and deeply cut to imply an orifice.29 Increasing the size of female genitalia has often been used in art to represent women’s dangerous propensities for threatening men’s self-control, autonomy and power. This may explain their function on church exteriors to ward away evil, much like the devil who flees at the sight of female genitalia in Rabelais’ recounting of the Devil of Pope Fig Island. The grimacing faces of the Sheela-na-gig have also been thought to function in the same way as images of Medusa as a gorgon.

Both are women whose appearances should ward off evil through their ability to instill fear in the viewer, a fear which Freud would argue is rooted in the threat of castration represented by Medusa’s snake entwined decapitated head and the Sheela-na-gig’s orifice. The main distinction that can be made between Baubo and these aggressive female apotropaic figures is that the exposure of her genitals is not meant to directly dispel evil. Baubo is unlike these figures as her anasyrma functions to promote laughter, and it is this sound of laughter which has the apotropaic effect to break the fast of mourning. The Sheela-na-gig, on the other hand, could be apotropaic objects due to the mere presence of the vulva, as its associations within Christianity provide the threat and fear necessary to ward off evil. If Baubo’s power is one step removed from these figures, it enables the purpose of her nudity to be joyful instead of fearful. The Priene Baubo are not threatening objects because the female witness to Baubo’s anasyrma encounters something 27 Kenseth, Joy “The Age of the Marvelous: An Introduction,” in Kenseth, ed., The Age of the Marvelous, (University of Chicago Press, 1991), 25.

28 Ibid, 25.

29 Dutsch, Dorota, and Ann Suter. Ancient Obscenities: Their Nature and Use in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds. (University of Michigan Press, 2015), 23.

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familiar, free of the fear of castration which Freud suggests is experienced by the male witness to nudity, and unwilling to accept the grotesque associations imposed onto the female body.

To return to the Priene Baubo, we see just how unthreatening their nudity is. This is achieved

first through the position of the legs themselves, which unlike the Sheela-na-gig, are closed. They consequently remove all direct allusion to orifices, and by proxy reduce the potential of insinuating fear of castration. These fused legs are not sexual and escape the effects of the feminine grotesque Miles and Bakhtin discuss by appearing smooth and impervious. Second, we note the disparity of detail between the genitalia and the face, with the latter given far more attention. Unlike the Sheela-na-gig whose repeatedly outlined orifice would have been time consuming to carve, the lower half of the Baubo’s bodies is merely lightly outlined. The Baubo’s faces, intricate hairstyles and accoutrements such as the lute and the basket of fruits, are much more detailed and would have been the primary focus of the artist(s). The hands of the figures do not interact with their genitals, unlike the Sheela-na-gig; and are instead occupied with other activities and objects. These contrasts between a monstrous apotropaic figure of fear and a joyful character of humour, depend on the fundamental difference between male versus female representations of the female body. Unthreatened, the female concern of self-representation would be one of celebration and familiarity, illustrated in the simple delineation of Baubo’s genitals. Conversely the male concern introduces a focus on the feared orifice, and engenders ideas of the female grotesque, embodied by the Sheela-na-gig as a figure within the patriarchal realm of Christianity. Margaret Miles herself writes, “Several factors ensure the centrality of women’s bodies to the grotesque. Grotesque figures like other artistic figurations, were formulated and circulated in the public arena by a male collective. Women did not represent themselves in this arena, but they played a large role in reproducing both human beings and society. Yet women were constructed collectively as the “figure woman” and represented as objects in relation to the male subject.”30 So why should the Priene Baubo escape the female grotesque described by Miles? As previously suggested, the statuettes merely existed outside the male arena of creation and collection, and were in fact made by women for women. One has only to look at the recent scholarship of Catherine McCoid and LeRoy McDermot on the European Upper Paleolithic Venus of Willendorf sculptures in order to see the effect of interpreting a female figurine as self-representation, rather than objects made in relation to the male subject. Their article posits that the distortions of anatomical accuracy present in the curved bodies of the Venuses were due to their being carved from the perspective of a woman looking down on her own body. By approaching the female form as both subject and object, McCoid and McDermot free the 30 Miles, Margaret, “Carnal Abominations: The Female Body as Grotesque,” in Adams and Yates, eds., The Grotesque Art and Literature: Theological Reflections, (United States: W.B. Eerdmans, 1997), 91.

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paleolithic woman from her presupposed role as passive spectator to her own representation. Rather than her body being emblematic of male concerns and interests, which would imply that the figurines’ show a “stylistic deformation of the natural body,” the Venuses could have been the products of optical transformation from the creator’s own perspective by a foreshortened view.31 To theorize that women propagated images of their own bodies introduces a potential didactic function of the Venus figurines, such as gauging stages of pregnancy. This would enable representations of the female body to serve a separate function, rather than merely realizing male concerns, and perhaps even more importantly, asks the question: “Could women have made a recognizable contribution to the fluorescence [sic] of art and technology seen in the opening millennia of this era?”32 To consider the Priene Baubo were self-representations free from male concerns and interests can transform the function of the object, in the same way that McCoid and McDermot have done with the Venus sculptures. Rather than their bodies being emblematic of male concerns and interests, the lack of focus on the Priene Baubo’s genitalia, and the heightened attention on the aspects that form their personalities beyond their sex, infuse the statuettes with vitality and individuality, a realism of the female experience no longer limited to their genitalia, contrasting with many male representations of the same subject.

The implications of interpreting the Priene Baubo statuettes as objects intended for a female arena

of creation and collection would be to return them to the originally positive affective reaction to the vulva, one which would be faithful to the statuettes’ initially numinous and humorous apotropaic power. Understanding the fear-inducing quality of the castrated female sexual organ to the male witness, the threatening propensity of the vulva to corrupt the male subject, or simply the moral agenda of a patriarchal religion, would explain why Baubo’s narrative devolved into one of obscenity and disgust upon entering this extended arena of viewership. It would encourage us as art historians to approach the Priene Baubo as they would have originally been seen, avoiding the tendency to perceive their physical distortions as monstrous or grotesque by recognising the later transformative influence of the male gaze upon these objects, a gaze which was perhaps not present at the time and place of their original use. To suggest the statuettes were made by women for a female audience reflects the original Hymn to Demeter, an interaction among women that began a cult that centralised the female experience. The familiarity of that interaction removes the male gaze and introduces a specifically female one, a mode of witnessing which we must apply when analysing the Priene Baubo’s nudity and form, one which enables them as objects to exist outside of the obscene, monstrous or grotesque.

31 McDermott, LeRoy. “Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines.” Current Anthropology, vol. 37, no. 2, 1996, pp. 227–275. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2744349. Accessed 15 Mar. 2021, 320.

32 Ibid., 323.

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Figure 1: Priene Baubo, clay, Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, Turkey, 5thc BCE Photo Credit: Johannes Laurentius.

Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz. (TC8613).

Figure 2: Priene Baubo, clay, Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, Turkey, 5thc BCE Photo Credit: Johannes Laurentius.

Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz. (TC8612).

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Figure 3: Priene Baubo, clay, Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, Turkey, 5thc BCE Photo Credit: Johannes Laurentius.

Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz. (TC8614).

Figure 4: Priene Baubo, clay, Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore, Turkey, 5thc BCE Photo Credit: Fotowerkstatt Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussischer Kulturbesitz. (TC8619).

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Figure 5: Sheela-na-Gig, Church of St. Mary and St. David, Kilpeck, England, UK. 12thc Photo Credit: Toman, “Romanesque: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting,” 1997 p. 343; EEH.

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“Let us note how great this thirst was”: Christ in the Winepress and Viticulture in Northern Europe Adriana Carmela

During the Late Middle Ages, a distinctive iconography emerges in which Christ is depicted bent under the

wooden beam of a winepress, bleeding copiously. Sometimes God the Father is shown turning the winch of the press.

A chalice is held up to the press and Christ’s blood tops it off with all the efficiency of a soda dispenser. This bloody sight seems bizarre to modern eyes;1 however, there are many ways to contextualize it through a consideration of medieval religious beliefs and practices. But Christ in the Winepress isn’t just a religious allegory; it also alludes to an actual agricultural practice. Moreover, this iconography developed in the late 14th century, after the ca. 1300 transition to the Little Ice Age, and appears primarily in regions north of the Alps (such as France, Germany and the Low Countries) where a cooler climate made viticulture (growing grapevines) more difficult. I propose that the image of Christ abundantly supplying Eucharistic wine gains more resonance in the environment of Northern Europe.

Medieval art historians do not typically examine the environment’s role in the creation of artwork and

lacunae in the written record from this period make it difficult to examine the interrelationship between nature and art. Many of those who worked closely every day with plants, animals, and local landscapes were not literate.2 Those who were literate tended to read the elements of the natural world as signs of God,3 so information about the environment in the middle ages must often be gleaned from writings overlaid with spiritual allegory.4 Because medieval people focused on symbolic interpretations of nature, it is appropriate that art history does so as well. Yet the “dynamic and growing field” of medieval environmental history has recently generated increasing interest among medievalists in “applying the methods…of environmental history” to engage with “old problems in new ways.”5 Climate historians have “continued to expand…knowledge of the well-known climatic trends of the middle ages,”6 calibrat1 Medieval people may also have been occasionally puzzled by the bloodiness. Some devotional writings note that the motif of Christ’s complete exsanguination runs counter to physiology. In Mechtild of Magdeburg (c.12071294)’s The Flowing Light of the Godhead, the figure of “the soul” says, “I am confused. How can someone dead still bleed?” qtd in Bynum, Caroline Walker. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, 167. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.

2 Hoffmann, Richard. An Environmental History Medieval Europe, 86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

3 Some practical texts do exist, such as Piero de’ Crescenzi’s treatise on agriculture, the Liber ruralium commodorum (1305-09), or Gaston Phoebus’ manual on hunting, the Livre de la Chasse (1387-9). Hoffmann, op. cit., 108-9.

4 Hoffmann, op cit., 97-99.

5 Arnold, Ellen F. “Introduction Medieval Environmental History,” History Compass 6, no.3. 898. May 2008 6 Ibid., 901.

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ing written accounts of weather patterns with scientific data from “natural ‘archives’” (e.g. dendrochronology, pollen studies, radio-carbon dating).7 Traditionally, the iconography of Christ in the Winepress has been explained through a consideration of artistic and religious trends. However, historians have recognized that nature acts neither as a passive backdrop for human life, nor as a deterministic force upon it.8 The same formulation of nature’s role ought to be applied to our understanding of artwork. In this paper, I analyze Christ in the Winepress with an eye towards how its meaning might intersect with materiality, with experiences and practices in nature. To do so, I will rely on Michael Baxandall’s concept of the “Period Eye.” Baxandall shows how the beholder brings to bear on a work of art certain interpretative skills shaped by his culture. These skills are not technical or theoretical; they are not even specific to art. Rather, they are drawn from the concrete experience of daily life in a particular society and form the painter’s medium. Unlike written texts, for an artwork to work, so to speak, it must rely on concepts that are “lucid, clear, and readily accessible” to both the patron and peasant classes.9 I will focus on an example of the winepress iconography found in the Hours of Catherine of Cleves (Figures 1-2). However, Christ in the Winepress appears not only in private prayer books but also on altar frontals10 and paintings11 accessible to non-elite viewers. Growing grapevines, making wine, trading wine, and even drinking wine are the “visual vernacular skills”12 that I will use to see this iconography through late medieval Northern European eyes.

The paper’s organization is as follows: Before exploring the interrelationship between art and nature, I will

locate the example from the Cleves Hours in terms of traditional art historical concerns such as patronage and function, and will describe it formally. Then I will look more generally at the iconography as an allegory for the Passion through a layperson’s knowledge of the seasonal grape harvest. Next, I will broadly discuss the climate of Northern Europe and its effect on viticulture, explaining how the iconography is especially meaningful in this context. I will then closely examine the example from the Cleves Hours and relate the border vignette of “Christ in the Winepress” to the landscape in the miniature of “Christ as Man of Sorrows” above it.

The Hours of Catherine of Cleves is considered a superlative example of the Netherlandish tradition of

manuscript illumination. It was produced around 1440 for Catherine of Cleves (1417-1476), Duchess of Gelders.13 7 Hoffmann, op cit., 314.

8 Ibid., 6.

9 Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: a Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style.

2nd ed. 29-41. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

10 Christ in the Winepress, ca.1500, silk altar frontal, Germany (Nuremberg?), Germanisches Nationalmuseum, in Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), plate 5.

11 Christus in der Kelter, ca.1500, painted stone relief, Kreuzkapelle (chapel of the Holy Cross), Germany (Ediger-Eller), Wikimedia Commons, accessed December 18, 2020, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ediger-Eller_Christus_in_der_Kelter.jpg.

12 Baxandall, op. cit., preface.

13 Marrow, James H. “Multitudo Et Varietas: the Hours of Catherine of Cleves.” Essay. In The Hours of Catherine of Cleves: Devotions, Demons and Daily Life in the Fifteenth Century, edited by George T. Clark, Ruud Priem, and

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Gelders was a region of the eastern Low Countries, in what is now considered the Netherlands.14 The artist worked in the city of Utrecht and is known to us only as The Master of Catherine of Cleves. The way in which the Cleves Master conveys a sense of pictorial illusionism indicates the influence of early Netherlandish artists such as Robert Campin (1375-1444) and Jan van Eyck (1395-1441). His marginal imagery is especially imaginative, with borders formed by diverse and delightfully realistic objects such as peas with golden pods [ff. 11r], interlaced pretzels [pp.

228], and even the coral beads of the Duchess’ rosary [pp. 237].15 A Book of Hours is what one scholar calls “the Medieval bestseller” and the means “by which secular time was sanctified for laymen and women.”16 Horae were commissioned by wealthy patrons for use in private devotion and contained prayers for different hours of the day and seasons of the liturgical year. Manuscript production in Northern Netherlands at this time was influenced by the Devotio Moderna, a religious movement founded by Geert Groote (1340-1384), which originated in Utrecht and spread through the Netherlands and Germany. It emphasized the role of meditation and prayer in developing a deep personal connection with Christ, focusing especially on his human suffering.17 Unlike many Northern Netherlandish horae, however, Catherine’s is written in Latin rather than a Middle Dutch vernacular. It contains a somewhat unusual series of Hours and Votive Masses for the seven days of the week.18 It is within Friday’s “Mass of the Holy Cross” that the image of “Christ in the Winepress” is located.19

The miniature at the top of the page portrays “Christ as Man of Sorrows,” bleeding from the wounds of his

Passion. He casts his eyes downward and twists his back foot to rest atop the cross, indicating his triumph over 20

death. The cross itself seems to hover, dividing the composition on a diagonal. The top right beam of the cross juts over the golden border, bringing Christ’s suffering into the viewer’s meditative space. The landscape behind him is empty and uncultivated, with sandy hills and a solitary tree. Below the miniature, the border vignette portrays “Christ in the Winepress.”21In this image, too, he wears a loincloth and crown of thorns. Under his upper arms are a reed and a scourge .. He crosses one hand limply over the other, displaying his wounds. Blood drips and pools at his feet before flowing into the golden eucharistic chalice. The angle of his back beneath the burden of the press echoes the horizontal beam of the cross in the scene above, linking them compositionally.

Indeed, these images were intended to be understood together. The winepress iconography refers to Isaiah

63.3: “I have trodden the winepress alone, and from the peoples no one was with me; I trod them in my anger and tramRob Dückers. 18-28. New York, NY: Abrahams, 2009.

14 The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. “Gelderland (Guelders).”

15 Marrow, “Multitudo Et Varietas,” 18-28.

16 Wieck, Roger S. Time Sanctified: the Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life. 27. New York: G. Braziller, 1988 17 The Oxford Dictionary of the Middle Ages, 1st ed., s.v. “Devotio Moderna.”

18 Marrow, “Multitudo Et Varietas,” 18-28.

19 Plummer, John. The Hours of Catherine Cleves, 202. New York: G. Braziller, 1966.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

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pled them in my wrath; their juice splattered on my garments, and stained all my robes.”22 St. Augustine interpreted this verse as a typological prefiguration of Christ’s sacrificial death, writing, “The first cluster pressed in the winepress is Christ.”23 Initial 12th and 13th century depictions of the winepress imagery from Isaiah show Christ standing upright and treading on grapes. In the late 14th century, this image was transformed both formally and symbolically24 so that rather than actively pressing grapes, Christ himself is pressed and becomes “a suffering victim of the winepress.”25 The meaning of the image thus shifts from typological to eucharistic, referring to the sacramental meal of Christ’s body and blood in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.26 In the 14th century image of the winepress, Christ is represented as Man of Sorrows,27 wounded and wearing a crown of thorns. This development extends the image to refer not only to his Crucifixion but also to all his sufferings in the Passion.28 A 15th century Netherlandish commentary on Christ’s fifth word from the cross, ‘I thirst,’ says, “Let us note how great this thirst was, because He lamented it above all His other suffering. And this is no wonder, because He hung on the yoke of the cross pressed out like a grape in the winepress.”29 In the Cleves Hours, the relationship between the cross and the winepress is suggested across the page, while other instances of the iconography, such as a historiated initial in a Netherlandish manuscript (ca.1405-10), 30 explicitly make the cross into the beam of the winepress.31

The iconography of Christ in the Winepress can be understood not only as a reference to the Eucharist and

the Old Testament but also through the process of making wine.32 On the day of the harvest, workers use hook22 The New Revised Standard Version.

23 “The first cluster pressed in the winepress is Christ. When that cluster was pressed out by the passion, there flowed that whence the chalice inebriating, how beautiful it is [Psalm 22,5]! Therefore let His [Christ’s] body also say, contemplating its head: Have mercy upon me, O God, for man hath trodden me underfoot…” qtd in Marrow, James H. Passion Iconography Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: a Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative, 80. Kortrijk, Belgium: Van Ghemmert Pub. Co, 1979.

24 Schiller, Gertrud. Iconography of Christian Art, Translated by Janet Seligman. Vol. 2. 228. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1971.

25 Marrow, Passion Iconography Northern European, 85.

26 Schiller, op cit.,, 228.

27 “He was despised and rejected by others; a man of sorrows and acquainted with infirmity”-Isaiah 53:3 28 Marrow, Passion Iconography Northern European, 85.

29 “[Laet ons mercken hoe groet desen dorst is geweest, want hi claecht hem boven alle sijn anderlijden. Ende dat en is geen wonder, want hi hinc inder galge des cruces wtgeperst als een druyve inder wijnperssen.]” qtd in Marrow, Passion Iconography Northern European, 83.

30 Christ Treading the Winepress (historiated initial), ca.1405-10, Tafel van den Kersten Ghelove, The Netherlands (Utrecht?), The Morgan Library, MS M.691 fol. 5r., accessed December 18, 2020, http://ica.themorgan.org/manuscript/page/1/76966.

31 Marrow, Passion Iconography Northern European, 86.

32 For brevity’s sake, I’m describing the order of steps for red wine. When making white wine, the grapes are processed through the press before fermentation. Rose, Susan. The Wine Trade Medieval Europe 1000-1500, 38.

London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

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tipped knives to cut grapes from the vines and carry them in cane baskets or wooden trugs. They pour the grapes into large vats in an open-air shelter near the vine-grower’s home and tread them by foot.33 This produces the ‘must,’ “a thick liquid that is neither grape juice nor wine but the intermediate.”34 The must is left in the vats to ferment for a few days, during which yeasts convert grape sugars into alcohol. The ‘marc,’ or the solid remains of fruit processing, a mixture of grape skins, stem fragments, seeds, and pulp, gathers on top of the must. The pigments and tannins in the grape skins affect color and flavor so workers periodically push the marc back down into the vats using wooden planks. Afterward, they remove the marc from the vats and take it to the winepress, where it is pressed up to three times.35 Most of the grape juice, about 60-80%, is produced in the vats but the use of the winepress allows vine-growers to squeeze out an extra 20-40%.36 This, however, is a labor-intensive practice. The grape harvest is the activity for September or October in cycles depicting the Labors of the Months and these often show men throwing their body weight against the press as they strain to turn it (Figure 3). Late 15th century records from a vineyard belonging to the abbey of Saint-Romain indicate that it secured the labor of eleven men just to work the press on harvest day.37

In many ways, this process of winemaking evokes Christ’s Passion. Netherlandish Passion tracts from the

Late Medieval Period describe how Christ was “run over by…foul feet”38 and viewers familiar with the traditional foot treading of grapes would have been able to imagine this in an immediate and realistic way. The ‘must,’ or the juice that streams from “crushed, chopped, and smashed”39 fruit, stands in for the blood that streams from Christ’s pierced, flagellated, and scourged body. The split grape skins and mashed pulp of the ‘marc’ provide a visual for his broken flesh. The heady aroma of ripe grapes beginning to ferment in the vats creates a powerful evocation of his body as a “fragrant offering.”40As the peasants labor, their sweat mingles with the wine,41 and their long efforts to work the large wooden press recall Christ’s drawn-out death on the wooden cross. Peasants who worked in vineyards may have viewed Christ in the Winepress with particular intensity, but wealthy merchants or aristocratic patrons would also have been familiar with the celebratory day of the grape harvest. Furthermore, their own experience of drinking wine—from its smell and taste to its potential to inebriate—might have elicited a multisensory response 33 Ibid.

34 Robinson, Jancis, and Julia Harding, eds. Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. 1272. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.

35 Rose, op. cit., 38.

36 Robinson, op. cit., 1127.

37 Rose, op. cit., 34.

38 qtd in Marrow, Passion Iconography Northern European, 80.

39 Robinson, op. cit., 1615.

40 “For you were bought with a price…” NSRV 1 Corinthians 6:20.

41 In book four, on vines and winemaking, of Pietro de Crescenzi (1235-1320)’s twelve-part Liber Ruralium Commodorum he comments that those treading the grapes should take care to have clean feet and rest often so that excessive sweat does not spoil the wine. Rose, op. cit., 29.

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to this image. A modern sensibility may find this intense imagination of bodily pain to be extreme or strange, but it was common in late medieval piety. In a devotional exercise, Geert Groote wrote, “Look into the face of your Christ and see his whole body livid, covered with blood and his five open wounds. Enter them in your heart and have your sins washed in the blood flowing from them.”42 Thus, it is appropriate that looking at Christ in the Winepress through the “visual vernacular skill” of winemaking provides a visceral metaphor for the Passion.

The wine Christ produces in the press at harvest is, of course, symbolically precious as His True Blood,

but it also might have been understood by viewers as a precious commodity in its own right—especially in Northern Europe. This is due to two factors: the difficulty of growing grapevines and the difficulty of transporting wine.

During the early Medieval period, vineyards spread beyond the limits of Roman viticulture and into regions at the northernmost limits of ideal growing conditions for grapevines.43 In Germany, cool and wet weather during the growing season meant that it was often a challenge to ripen grapes sufficiently.44 Regions of France, such as Burgundy and Bordeaux, presented similar problems.45 Heavy autumn rainfall in these areas often resulted in outbreaks of the fungal mold Botrytis, which had a deleterious effect on harvest yield and quality.46 In medieval Italy, vines were grown as part of the peasant subsistence economy and wine was the drink of common people. However, in France, the inherent challenge of growing grapevines47 meant that vineyards were the purview of powerful monasteries or secular lords. Wine became the beverage of choice for the rich,48 what Dion calls “a necessary ornament for the existence of social rank.”49

Even farther north in regions like the Low Countries, where it was not possible to grow grapevines reli-

ably enough to satisfy high demand from flourishing urban centers, great costs were expended to import wine from France and Germany. French wines often came down the Seine to Rouen, where they were taken along the English 42 van Engen, John H, trans. Devotio Moderna: Basic Writings, 194. New York: Paulist Press, 1988.

43 Unwin, P.T.H. Wine and the Vine: an Historical Geography of Viticulture and the Winde Trade, 147. London:Routledge, 1991.

44 Robinson, op. cit., 1190.

45 Ibid., 1116-7.

46 Ibid., 629.

47 Anxiety about the harvest is evident in several viticulture practices specific to the north. For instance, it is estimated that in the medieval north, fields were planted with up to eight thousand vine cuttings per ace. This is 2.5 times what would be seen as a dense pattern today and reflects worries that cuttings would be washed away by a heavy rainfall before their roots were established. It was also often preferable to harvest grapes early, before they were ripe, rather than lose them later in the season to unexpected rain or hail. Lukacs, Inventing Wine, 45. Northern vine-growers practiced a more severe prune than their Italian counterparts. This is because an increased yield of grapes could actually prove “disastrous in cooler climates, where it can be a struggle to ripen grapes” before autumn.

They pruned later in the season as well, hoping to avoid frosts that could kill leaves and damage fruiting buds. Robinson, op. cit., 1866.

48 Rose, op. cit., 37.

49 Roger Dion’s Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France quotetd in P.T.H. Unwin, op. cit., 124.

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Channel to Bruges.50 From there they needed to be transported over land. Roads were often rough, and six horses were required to pull a cart containing one ton of wine. German wines were taken down the Rhine by barge and traveled along its tributaries into the Low Countries. River transport may have been slightly easier, but unavoidably passed through cities such as Cologne, which maintained 10-13% percent of its annual income from taxes on the wine trade.51 Whether by water or land, transport was difficult, as James describes: “[Wine] was both bulky and heavy, valuable and very fragile; leakage and evaporation were always likely, especially if the journey was rough or the weather too warm.”52 Furthermore, the medieval wine trade was “highly seasonal” because wine was neither aged nor stored in airtight containers. Merchant ships arrived in October or November to bring new wines home in time for Christmas and a second time in March to pick up lesser quality reek wines (made by transferring wine from one barrel to another to settle out the dead yeast cells and solids). Even if the wine made it to its destination without spoiling, it went bad in about a year’s time and, if there was any left by summer’s end, it had probably turned to vinegar. 53 Viewers would have approached Christ in the Winepress with this everyday understanding of wine as an expensive import, something they craved when it was not available. Their thirst for wine mingled with their longing to encounter God. Their awareness of the high price of wine in contemporary markets flowed into the idea that Christ’s blood was the price he paid to purchase humankind’s salvation.54

In addition to being a precious commodity in the environment of Northern Europe, wine was also a mirac-

ulous object in light of climatic shifts that affected this area during the late Medieval period. During the “Little Optimum” or medieval Warm Period (ca.1000-1300), harvest dates indicate that fruit ripened earlier, in late September rather than mid-October, and that the growing season temperature rose by three degrees.55 Most broadly, this period was characterized by stable seasonal patterns,56 ideal for the grapevine with its distinctive annual cycle and period of winter dormancy.57 In this favorable climate, there were vineyards in unlikely areas such as England, the Baltic coast, and even in the Low Countries as far north as Utrecht.58 However, during the transition to the Little Ice Age (ca.1300-1850), temperatures fell and the average growing season shrank, sometimes by as much as three weeks.

This shift rendered unviable those vineyards already at the northern limits of viticulture. The weather during the 50 Simon Bening, October (The Wine Market at Bruges), ca.1540, Book of Hours, Flemish, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS 23638, f.11v., in Unwin, op.cit.,, 227, fig. 34.

51 Rose, op cit., 76-90.

52 Kirkbride, James Margery. Studies Medieval Wine Trade, 147. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

53 Unwin, op. cit., 161-2.

54 NSRV Acts 20:28.

55 Robinson, op. cit., 851.

56 Aberth, John. An Environmental History Middle Ages: The Crucible of Nature, 322. London: Routledge, 2013.

57 In addition, during the medieval Warm Period, the maximum altitude for successful viticulture in Rhineland rose 200 meters. Hoffmann, op cit., 322.

58 Unwin, op. cit., 150.

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Little Ice Age was also less predictable and seasonally regular. For example, the cold, wet summers of 1315-1317, which caused crop failure and famine, were followed by extremely dry, warm summers. According to Aberth, it was “the unreliability of the elements…that was perhaps most unsettling” during this period.59 In a time when yields were uncertain and nature was acutely irregular, Christ’s provision of ample and eternal sustenance in the winepress can be seen as miraculous. Christ is already a figure who can perform food miracles such as the feeding of 5,000 in the Gospels,60 but here the wine itself is an object of wonder and gratitude.

To further examine how this iconography is intimately tied to climate and landscape, I will look more

closely at the example from the Cleves Hours. Here the image of “Christ in the Winepress” is located in a border vignette beneath a miniature of “Christ as Man of Sorrows.” The background in this image depicts an unusually barren landscape. The majority of landscapes in the Cleves Hours fit into Laszlovsky’s terra cultae framework, in which positive people and actions are shown amid idealized, harmonious depictions of cultivated land, displaying economic success and the rightful order of things.61 For instance, Christ’s “Agony in the Garden” [p. 120-f] portrays lush, rolling hills with a river and windmill in the distance (Figure 4). Other miniatures show patchworks of fields [p. 144f] and grazing sheep [ff. 35v–36r].62 In contrast, the landscape in the Man of Sorrows image is of the terra incultae type, in which places of execution or general sites of danger and disorder are shown on uncultivated land, sometimes furnished with a single tree. 63 Here, the sandy hills show no signs of agriculture; there is only a scraggly tree, scrubby vegetation, and a road stretching through uninhabited land. The unfruitful land represents the sinful nature of humans which necessitated Christ’s sacrifice: “He was…crushed for our iniquities”64 Its deserted state reflects how he was “despised and rejected by others…as one from whom others hide their faces.”65 Without trees to break the wind or shield anyone from the vast sky, the bleeding and half-naked figure of Christ looks all the more vulnerable.66 59 Aberth, op. cit., 49. Aberth also argues that the ecological crises of the Great Famine (1315-22) and Black Death (1348-9) lead to a “seismic shift in attitudes towards nature” and that the understanding that man and nature are engaged in a “mutual, two way dialogue” entered “the awareness of large numbers of people.” Aberth, op. cit., 2-9.

60 NSRV Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:31-44; Luke 9:12-17; John 6:1-14.

61 Laszlovszky, József. “Space and Place, Object and Text: Human-Nature Interaction and Topographical Studies.”

Essay. In People and Nature in Historical Perspective, edited by Jósef Laszlovsky and Péter Szabó, 53-55. Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Department of Medieval Studies & Archaeolingua, 2003.

62 Even the Israelites eating manna in the desert wilderness are placed on verdant grass [ff. 137.v]!

63 Laszlovsky, op. cit., 53-55.

64 NSRV Isaiah 53:5.

65 NSRV Isaiah 53:3.

66 This reading is somewhat complicated by the fact that all other images of Christ’s Passion in the Cleves Hours do take place on terra cultae. This can be explained by two things. First, the dual meanings of the Crucifixion—death and resurrection, sorrow and joy, execution and victory—necessitate different landscapes depending on what the artist wished to emphasize. Second, the images have different concerns. The other images are focused on narrating the Biblical stories, whereas “Christ as Man of Sorrows” is detached from the narrative and intended to arouse the viewer’s emotion.

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The smaller image of “Christ in the Winepress” echoes these themes of mankind’s guilt as well as Christ’s suffering and solitude. Together, they double the blood and increase the emotional register. This intensification is consistent with late medieval devotion. For example, Gerard Zerbold of Zutphen (1367-98) wrote, “Whenever the evangelist ascribes some punishment to Christ in plain language, you add in your heart the word ‘very’ or ‘severely.’”67

The barren landscape in the “Christ as Man of Sorrows” miniature is not just symbolic; it resembles an

actual region in the Low Countries called the Veluwe. The Veluwe is located within Gelders, the territory of Duchess Catherine of Cleves, and is about 37 miles west of Utrecht, where the Cleves Master worked. It contains fir and beech forests, as well as “scantily cultivated heaths” and some of Europe’s largest sand drifts, which rise in isolated dunes similar to the one Christ stands amid in the Man of Sorrows image. The Veluwe, or “Fallow Lands” (Figure 5), was likely named in contrast to the Betuwe or “Good Land,” a fertile region between the Rhine and Waal filled with cherry and apple orchards as well as various forms of farming and gardening.68 Sand drifts, like those in the Veluwe, are a “typical man-made landscape” in that they are caused by overexploitation of the area’s biomass, which leads to wind erosion and sediment transport. Their formation is closely related to processes that began around 950 and continued throughout the middle ages: the rapid expansion of agriculture and ensuing deforestation, overgrazing by cattle and sheep in communal heathlands, and the formation of roads. Scholars believe most of this drift sand accumulated in the Late Middle Ages.69 In the Low Countries, the “Fallow Lands” can be seen as a byproduct of man’s shaping of the “Good Land.”

Christ’s blood sacrifice in the Man of Sorrows image might be understood as an intervention that can

transform the barren landscape. Here, his blood drips onto the ground, trailing from the nail wounds in his feet onto the grass. Late medieval folk traditions and scientific discourses understood “blood as life bringing—fertilizing, healing, and feeding,” and liturgies from blood cults “throb with vegetal images of…flowering and sprouting.”70 Given the connotations of fertility that blood carries, experiences of climatic instability and environmental overexploitation may have led artists to emphasize Christ’s extreme exsanguination. The land’s transformation, from infertile to productive, can also be a metaphor for mankind’s transformation from sinful to virtuous.71 It was this kind of transformation that viewers hoped for as they meditated upon devotional images of Christ’s suffering.72 Like 67 van Engen, op. cit., 282-3.

68 The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th ed., s.v. “Gelderland (Guelders).”

69 Koster, Eduard A. “The European Aeolian Sand Belt: Geoconservation of Drift Sand Landscapes,” 93-110. Geoheritage (November 2009): 93-110. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s12371-009-0007-8 70 Bynum, op. cit., 156.

71 In Isaiah 1:1-2, God is compared to a vine-grower and the people of Israel to a vineyard: “My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted with choice vines; he built a watch tower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” In Isaiah 5.7, the people of Israel are “the vineyard of the Lord” and the people of Judah are His “pleasant planting.”

God expects them to grow “justice,” but they instead bring forth “bloodshed.”

72 Geert Groote wrote, “By imitating his suffering, abuse, and labors we may come to be configured to Christ.” van

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a field, human nature must be cultivated before it can bear “fruit of the spirit.”73 This transformation is linked to and reaches its culmination in the image of the winepress, where grapes are harvested and turned into wine. The process of fermentation was not well understood at this time74 and may have had a semi-mystical quality, representing the final refinement of humanity.75 In this way, the example of Christ in the Winepress from the Cleves Hours assumes its full significance through its relationship with the barren landscape depicted in “Christ as Man of Sorrows.”

I have proposed that the winepress iconography gains its resonance in the particular climate and landscape

of Northern Europe, where viticulture was negatively affected by the shift to the Little Ice Age around 1300. This iconography is also clearly linked to the contemporaneous religious climate, with phenomena such as the growing popularity of blood piety playing an integral role in its development.76 However, when we look at an iconography which shifts from depicting Christ pressing grapes to Christ himself being pressed as a grape, we would be remiss not to take into account the material reality of shortened growing seasons and lower yields. I wonder how symbolic, meaningful landscapes like terra cultae and terra incultae intersect with actual, material landscapes like the Betuwe and Veluwe. How might painted depictions of landscapes in religious artworks influence how people relate to their local landscapes? The Netherlands have been an area of focus for medieval environmental historical research, because much of the landscape is the direct result of human intervention through drainage works and land reclamation.77 Due to its rich artistic heritage, the Netherlands could also be a place for a more comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the co-evolution78 that occurs between culture and nature. Art historians are well versed in using historical and religious contexts to elucidate medieval art. Now, especially given developments in the field of environmental history, the interrelationship between art and nature ought to become another indispensable lens through which to better understand art from this time period. Medieval people knew that man and nature are intimately “entangled”79 and it is no longer sustainable to consider medieval art as somehow separate from this entanglement.

Engen, op. cit., 87.

73 NSRV Galatians 5:22.

74 Unwin, op. cit., 23.

75 The Church Fathers believed that through Christ, there could be an “ontological transformation of human nature”— or, in other words, God became human in the body of Christ so that humans could become like God. Russell, Norman. “A Common Christian Tradition: Deification in the Greek and Latin Fathers.” Essay. In Deification in the Latin Patristic Tradition, edited by Jared Ortiz, 274. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019.

76 The Relic of the Precious Blood was present in the city of Bruges from around 1250 on, when Crusaders brought it back from the Holy Land in a crystal vial. It was displayed in an annual, ceremonial procession which the entire city attended, and which drew tourists from neighboring countries. Wardwell, Anne E. “The Mystical Grapes, a Devotional Tapestry.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 62, no. 1 (January 1975): 21. https://doi.org/https:// www.jstor.org/stable/25152571.

77 Arnold, op cit., 905.

78 Culture and nature effect each other in a recursive process. Hoffmann, op cit., 10.

79 “And in the midst of these elements is a sandy globe of great magnitude which these elements have so surrounded that it cannot waver in any direction. This openly shows that, of all God’s creation, Man’s is most profound,

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Figure 1: Hours of Catherine of Cleves (M.917/945) p. 121, Christ Standing on the Lowered Cross Utrecht, Netherlands, ca. 1440.

Photo Credit: The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.917/945. Purchased on the Belle de Costa Greene Fund with the assistance of the Fellows, 1963

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Figure 2: Hours of Catherine of Cleves (M.917/945) p. 121, Christ Standing on the Lowered Cross (marginalia Utrecht, Netherlands, ca. 1440.

Photo Credit: The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.917/945. Purchased on the Belle de Costa Greene Fund with the assistance of the Fellows, 1963

Figure 3: Book of Hours (MS M.1175)., fol. 12v. Bruges, ca. 1525-1530 Photo Credit: The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M. 1175. Melvin R. Seiden Collection, 2011

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Figure 4: Hours of Catherine of Cleves (M.917/945) p. 120, Agony in the Garden, Utrecht, Netherlands, ca. 1440.

Photo Credit: The Morgan Library & Museum. MS M.917/945. Purchased on the Belle de Costa Greene Fund with the assistance of the Fellows, 1963

Figure 5: Landscape of Veluwe.

Photo Credit: Photo 2187382 © Wessel Cirkel I Dreamstime.com

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What Stares Back: Ruin and Animal Encounter Through Derrida Brock Riggins

When one experiences a ruin, be it in Peru, Iran, Mexico, Germany, China, or Britain, one is coming across those walls and pillars that, once quotidian reminders of civilization, have now been condemned to peek from their ever-more-alive surroundings. Investigating further they will be able to see hand carved indentations that have eroded into nooks for lizards, small mammals, or birds to home and hide amongst. The pleasure of wandering through the ruin, the overgrown periphery, is an engrossingly experiential one. As Svetlana Boym writes, “the fascination with ruins is not merely intellectual but also sensual”.1 One hears the crunching of leaves, the calls of owls, and the rustle of branches against stone. The scents of decay and moist rock pervade the air. One is moved to feel the age of the stones, and their weather. To be in the ruin is a highly localized adventure. It is to come into close contact with the people who, for many centuries, lived there, ate there, lounged there, and died there. It is also to become temporarily intimate with the flora and fauna that have attempted to claim their buildings. The ruin, by its very definition, is a place that has decayed by the weatherings of time and has become enmeshed into its surroundings. The two, because of the intensity of their integration, can never be separated. To encounter the ruin in all its romanticism, for it to fulfill its poetic function, one must simultaneously encounter both its architectural forms and its ecosystemic extents. When the human historical and non-human environmental are experienced as codependent occurrences, one is often opened to a questioning of oneself, and human cultures, place within the world. This questioning, and the gazes it requires, will be analyzed with the goal of determining the specific attitudes that are historically necessary to its construction, its implications, and its deployment at ruins—both within physical sites and in relation to artistic depictions. These ideas, once developed, will be utilized in an analysis of Hubert Robert’s 1771 Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes to demonstrate their relevancy and value for the study of visual culture.

The relationship of organic regrowth and architecture is the base of Georg Simmel’s metaphorical interpretation of the ruin. For him it is when “the balance between nature and spirit, which the building manifested, shifts in favor of nature” that the honest ruin is born.2 Simmel equates spirit in synonymy with the upward striving of man and nature with a downward and destructive pull. For Simmel, the ruin holds a special spiritual power because it was de1 Boym, Svetlana. “Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia.” Cabinet, Winter 2007-2008, www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/boym2. php.

2 Simmel, George. “Two Essays.” The Hudson Review, vol. 11, no. 3, (1958): p. 379. JSTOR, accessed 17 May 2020, www.jstor.org/stable/3848614.

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stroyed not by man, but by something outside of us. It is “the contrast between human work and the effect of nature on which rests the significance of the ruin as such.”3 Natural systems and human construction are the integrated elements of a ruin.

What Simmel leaves out is a focus on the specificities of the ecosystem that is doing the ‘destruction’. For him nature and man are neatly split into two distinct boxes, a dichotomy which leads to generalizations. The particular animals and plants that encapsulate the ecosystem of the ruin, however, are very specific to the poetic imagination, and thus cannot be generalized. Rose Macaulay makes this clear in her short essay “A Note on New Ruins” when she writes that new ruins are, in a certain respect, not yet ruins because they have not yet to “put on their ivy, nor equipped themselves with the appropriate bestiary of lizards, bats, screech-owls, serpents, speckled toads and little foxes.”4 These animals are not arbitrary. They are animals that fill nooks, and it is the nooks that overflow the paintings of Hubert Robert,5 the drawings of Piranesi,6 the ruined cottage of William Wordsworth,7 the stories of Edgar Allan Poe,8 and the poems of Charles Baudelaire9--the work of those who popularized ideas of ruin. These animals also enhance the defining feelings of ruin. Macaulay’s animals (and one plant) are popularly known to be either dark green or dark brown and thus blend and bury themselves within the landscape. They are animals whose noises and crawlings allude to another world, one of darkness and night. Lizards scamper under stones, owls begin to speak at dusk, and bats sleep in caves, attuned by a specific sense to hunt at night. These animals gain food from either stalking (serpent, fox, owl), or monitoring (lizard, toad, bat). This is an ecosystem of shadowy hyper-intelligence. It is an ecosystem that, because of its invisibility, constantly puts the onlooker on edge. It is a system that is always watching (the owl from above, the serpent in the grass, the fox from atop the hill) but pointedly refuses interaction. The tendency of these animals to hunt or stalk, and their associated behaviors, is exactly what places them within the ecosystem of dusk, and thus the melancholic imagination.

Yet these behaviors are evolutionary byproducts, methods by which these creatures attain food and continue their existence. They are, from an environmental perspective, emotionally neutral and facts of life. The symbolism

3 Ibid., p. 380.

4 “A Note on New Ruins.” Pleasure of Ruins, by Rose Macaulay, Walker and Company, 1953, pp. 453.

5 Robert, Hubert. 1771, Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes, Painting, Private collection. https://library.artstor. org/asset/SS33677_33677_1405841.

6 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. 18th century, Veduta degli Avanzi di Fabbrica magnifica sepolcrale co’sue Rovine, Print, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA, Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1963.30.2996, http://www.thinker.org/. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AMICO_SAN_FRANCISCO_103859902.

7 Wordsworth, William. “The Ruined Cottage.” Poetry Nook, accessed 20 February 2021, https://www.poetrynook. com/poem/ruined-cottage-2 8 Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher, Czechia: Perfection Form Company, 1973.

9 Baudelaire, Charles. “The Ruined Garden,” Poetry Foundation, accessed 20 February, 2021. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=28759

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drawn from their identification with darkness and night are poetic creations, as is their association with the melancholic imagination. Humans looked to these animals and saw them as representations of human personalities or characteristics which the animal can never exactly have. Humanity gazes upon a creature and invents a reciprocity which will color, and at times enhance, its perception of both the animal and itself. As John Berger writes in his essay Why Look at Animals, The eyes of an animal when they consider a man are attentive and wary. The same animal may well look at other species in the same way. He does not reserve a special look for men. But by no other species except man will the animal’s look be recognized as familiar. Other animals are held by the look. Man becomes aware of himself returning the look.10 It is this ‘returning’ that is so critical in the animal encounter. When the gazer becomes aware of its gaze, an opportunity arises to question the meaning and import of the gaze itself. What does it mean to stare at that which stares back with nonhuman eyes, and what comparisons might be drawn between the two creatures that can move beyond creations of stereotypes or symbols? It is this sensitivity induced by look on which Derrida focuses in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow). As his cat looked at him while he stood naked, he became aware of an overwhelming feeling of being “ashamed for being ashamed.”11 Through analyzing this encounter he states that the difference between man and animal is that animal does not have “knowledge of their nudity” and are thus without “consciousness of good and evil.”12 In asking why we are the only animals who have needed or decided to dress ourselves we are also asking, for Derrida, why we are the only animals who are endowed with “speech [and] reason, the logos, history, laughing, morning, burial, the gift, and so on.”13 Derrida asks emphatically how one relates a human’s position to that of an animal. Do we follow it? Are we near it? Are we “Being-with it in the sense of being-close-to-it? Being-alongside-it? Being-after-it? Being-after-it in the sense of the hunt, training, or taming, or being-after-it in the sense of a succession or inheritance?”14 This interrogation of the animal and one’s positioning towards it opens up a questioning of civilization itself. Derrida suggests that it is possible to imagine oneself ‘before the Fall’ when one recognizes the gaze of the animal and questions one’s own species-specific naked shame. Following this logic, the gaze of the ruin can be seen to act in a similar way. It transports the

10 Berger, John. “Why Look at Animals?” In About Looking, p.4. London, Bloomsbury, 2009.

11 Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” Critical Inquiry, vol.

28, no. 2, 2002, pp. 372., doi:10.1086/449046.

12 Ibid., p. 373 13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., p. 380

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gazer back in historic time, and thus places them, per Derrida, in a position to feel the shame of modernity, industrial history, and the mass destructions of war—in other words, to sense the temporal gap.

When one stares at a bleeding-green stone from the Incan Empire, those who built it and those who lived within it seem to stare back. Although the wall, like Berger’s animal, does not “reserve a special look” for the individual, it is none the less sensitive to it. This sensitive gaze encourages the consideration of positional relationships between an individual and the historical world. Is one near the ruin? Is one the successor or the inheritor? Are they “Being-alongside-it?” etc. It is variations on these questions that are the foundation of the romanticized ruin, where philosophers and artists attempt to place the gazer as inheritor, student, successor, or chaser after the antique. Here lies the importance of joining the animal gaze to the anthropocentric-historic gaze when analyzing the ruin. When the ruin’s relation to contemporary life is the singular focus of analysis, fallacious questions can be created, such as whether the architecture is greater or worse than contemporary trends, how its civilization is more or less moral than that of one’s contemporaries, how the ruin represents a deviation from a ‘path’ or a step along it to modernity. These are the comparisons that dominated much of the early modern discussions of ruin By joining the ruin gaze with the animal gaze one complicates and enhances both modes of inquiry. The gaze of the ruin is amplified by the biblical stare of the animal. The animal gaze expands the meditation of the ruin into a question of ownership, asking at what point do we again begin to trespass onto ‘their’ ecosystem. This occurs both in the literal sense—questioning if a ruin ‘belongs’ to its surrounding ecosystem, if its flora and fauna have a greater right to exist in the ruin than modern visitors—as well as the eternal sense, which questions the right humanity holds to trespass upon any ecosystem. Human history becomes environmental history. As Derrida writes, “[i]ndeed, one can only speak here of history, of an historic moment or phase, from one of the supposed edges of the said rupture, the edge of an anthropocentric subjectivity that is recounted or allows a history to be recounted about it, autobiographically, the history of its life, and that it therefore calls History’.’15 Human history, therefore, becomes newly complicated through routes of non-anthropocentricity.

Svetlana Boym writes something similar in her Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia: Ruins make us think of the past that could have been and the future that never took place, tantalizing us with utopian dreams of escaping the irreversibility of time…The contemporary ruin-gaze requires an acceptance of disharmony and of the contrapuntal relationship of human, historical, and natural temporality. Rather than post-modern, we can call it “off-modern”: it involves exploration of the side-alleys of twentieth-century history.16 Both through the encounter with the historical ruin and the encounter with the animal one comes face to face with notions of temporality, relation, and place. When viewing an ancient site—or its depiction—the viewer stares back 15 Derrida, Jacques, and David Wills. “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” p. 399 16 Boym, Svetlana. “Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia,” Cabinet, www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/28/boym2.php.

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across the abyss of pre-industrial time, to ancient civilizations who lived in a completely different familiarity with their immediate landscape. Amongst the temples of Old Kingdom Egypt and Ancient Athens, one is reminded of the ancient symbolism of animalia. Horus falcons and owls of Athena decorate the ruin architecture, and one is reminded of the physical creatures these religious symbols stemmed from (Figure 2).17 The specificity and symbolism of ruin animalia are just as important an influence on the experience of ruins as the gaze of the animals themselves. Yet environmental catastrophe threatens the existence of many species of bird, lizard, and snake. The modern consumption of land and animal life to the point of irreversible pollution and extinction has created this catastrophe, and represents enormous loss even from a solely ecological perspective. However, when it is those same places species that are the root of shared mythologies and metaphors, the catastrophe becomes an additional extinction of common understanding for poetics, mythologies, and sensitivities. Stewart Lee, as quoted in Mark Fisher’s Democracy is Joy, writes on what this killing of natural health does: The absence of abundance is already accepted. The metaphors of the nature poets, mapping human hearts through once commonly understood imagery, are irrelevant and impenetrable. “The sun of Winter, / The moon of Summer, and all the singing birds / Except the missel-thrush that loves juniper, / Are quite shut out.” I’m sorry. The missile-what? Can the juniper be monetized? Is this missel-thing for sale? Our children already have no stable baseline from which to calibrate the loss of all that lives. It’s game over.18 As humanity loses its self-designated symbols, it loses both recognition of the loss and the secondary loss of its poetic guides to navigating the physical world. A remedy to this loss of recognition—and perhaps a further prompting to action—can come from the complete ruin encounter, historical and environmental. The truly Derridean or Berger-ian encounter, with all of its questioning, is an encounter beyond certain hierarchies. It challenges humanity’s difference from all of that surrounds it, and thus its place within our contemporary hierarchy of ownership and exploitation that has led to the suffocation of land to the detriment of human and ecosystemic health. Reflecting upon a prior civilization, and the remnants of its own encounters with these questions, can become a prompt for continuing, or re-examining, humanity’s perennial projects of poetic symbol creation. Architectural ruin is thus enriched in the crucible of time: “The ephemeral becomes a negative image of the lasting.”19 In thinking through how the ruin poetically operates one can begin to understand how the continual and mutual encountering of the animal and the human, as well as the human and our history, are central to architectures of spiritual clarity.

17 Part of a seat with a carved owl, Probably 4th cent. BC, Marble from Penteli, 0.35 m x 0.24 m x 0.155 m. Gallery of the Acropolis Slopes, the Acropolis Museum, Athens. https://www.theacropolismuseum.gr/en/part-seat-carvedowl.

18 Fisher, Mark. “Democracy Is Joy.” K-Punk, 13 July 2015, k-punk.org/democracy-is-joy/.

19 Vydrin, Eugene. Editorial comment to the author, June 4, 2020.

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Application of the Gaze Analyzing the intricacies of ecology, ruin, and gazing upon them presents valuable new methods of interaction in and of themselves. Methods of interaction are best represented in concrete examples, however, and Hubert Robert’s Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes (Figure 1) offers a valuable case study to represent this paper’s hypothesis.20 In the painting, a coffered arch vaults across the apse of a Roman ruin, its sole intact portions hugging the remains of a wall at the rear of the painting’s plane. The structure appears to once have been a basilica, or perhaps a temple; the extant columns engaged to its walls suggest that the interior was once a sight of grandeur, as does the relief of robed figures under the arch, and the statue of a female figure still atop its pedestal in the left foreground. Yet the coffered barrel vault is nearly disappeared; along the upper section of the ruin’s walls only its lowest section remains, the rest having crumbled away, allowing vines and plants to claim their role as the ruin’s new décor. Men and woman flit amongst the structure’s shadows, delicately harbored by the ruin nooks and stones. A group of three leans over a fallen lintel, examining the statue of a female figure. A family is grouped on the opposite side of the foreground from them, with at least one of the men holding a quill and paper in his hand, possibly sketching the ruin just as Robert might have. Here is the scholar, the student; the early modern visitor to a ruin seeking inspiration or comparison with the great works of the past. In the rear of the painting are two dark niches. The leftward one is formed by a second, smaller, arch, original to the structure. Within its shade is a close grouping of three woman, perhaps examining a fragment, or sharing conversation. The niche on the right hand side has been produced by a collapsed section of wall and an original doorway, and forms the focal point of the composition, where the perspectival diagonal of the lintel above the righthand columns meets the horizontal of the lintel on the rear arched wall. The viewer’s eye is further drawn in by the tonal contrast of this section. The niche itself is painted in tones of black and burnt umber, yet all the surrounding sections of sun-lit limestone have been painted in brighter creams or yellows. As the viewer’s eye peers into this grotto, they notice an elderly man standing at its base, white haired, classically robed, and leaning upon a wooden cane. His dress makes him out of step with the other figures. The women wear bonnets and layered dresses; the men wear sixteenth century hats, cloaks, and stockings; yet the figures in the painting most similarly dressed to the elderly man are those in the relief he stands under. Compounding the man’s strange dress is his gaze. He is the sole figure looking at neither the ruin nor another figure and directs his gaze out of the picture itself. If his robes mark him as belonging to the classical era, then in this figure, the ruin stares back.

Such a reading seems compounded by the opera of gazes on exhibition in Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes. Each individual, mirroring what Robert likely saw in his own visits to ruins, is in the act of gazing upon something. The classical man, the Socrates in the shadows, forms the foil that crystalizes the possible secondary reading of the painting. Through his directly returned gaze the viewer becomes aware of being watched; then aware of their own 20 Robert, Hubert. 1771, Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes, Painting, Private collection.

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act of watching. The painting then becomes as much a depiction of humanity’s encounters with ruin, and gazes upon a ruin, as it is a recording of the Temple of Diana itself. As a depiction of encounters the painting provokes the same philosophical questioning engendered by an encounter with ruin in the physical world; what is one’s relation to this place?

Why did it come to ruin, and what might ruin one’s contemporary structures? Should those structures come to ruin?

How ought one to relate to the distant past, what ought to be learned or forgotten? Encountering the painting, and its concerted gestures, begs questions of Robert himself; did he intend to question the gaze, to meditate on how humanity interacts with its material past? Or do his figures function to populate and make the ruin ‘real’, to heighten the sense that one is viewing, and in a way visiting, a physical location. In either case, concerts of gazes have been enacted in many depictions of classical sites. A drawing by Adélaide Allou after a work by Hubert Robert records another one of these, further emphasizing how the experience of gazing is essential to the experience of a ruin (Figure 3).21 Balancing the figures in the composition are ivies and vines, as mentioned by Rose Macaulay.22 Vegetation tumbling through the ruin’s missing ceiling forms the top point of a triangle composed of the two foreground figural groups, the family at right and the figures gazing upon the statue at left. The green tumble also occupies a roughly equal area to the figures. Ivy crowning the arched recess at rear-left of the painting forms a similar triangle, though inverted, between itself, the figural group gazing upon the statue, and the ivy previously discussed. Such a balancing of masses was likely intended by Robert to induce compositional clarity and guide the viewer’s eye throughout the picture. The combination of human-carved marble and organic vegetation can also be seen as the ‘sign’ of a ruin, as a drawing, also

by Robert, suggests (Figure 4).23 Yet when one considers these ivies in light of the environmental gaze advocated for by this essay, the ivy can be seen as representing beings with as great of a claim to be among the ruins as the inquisitive humans. The ivy is Simmel’s nature reclaiming balance; it is the works of man confronting the inevitabilities of time and nature.24 The ivy is missing its accompanying animalia, however. As one gazes at the niches and growth of the painting—the dark spaces of the arch in the top left, the bushes in the bottom right, and the shade effected by the tumbled blocks—one senses the lack of animal inhabitants, the missing yellow eyes one might expect to peer from the depths.

In a literal experience of visiting a ruin, it is likely that a visitor would see birds flit above the stones or lizards scamper 21 Allou, Adélaide. After Hubert Robert. Publisher: Pierre François Basan (French, Paris 1723-1797 Paris). 18th century. Vue du Tombeau de Virgile from Differentes vues dessiné d’après nature... dans les environs de Rome et de Naples. Print. Prints. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, New York, USA. https://library.artstor.org/ asset/SS7731421_7731421_11221934.

22 Macaulay, Rose. “A Note on New Ruins,” In Pleasure of Ruins, (London, Walker and Company, 1953), pp. 453455.

23 Robert, Hubert. 2nd half 18th-early 19th Century. Fallen capitals. drawing. Place: British Museum, http://www. britishmuseum.org/. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AGERNSHEIMIG_10313162023.

24 Simmel, Georg. “Two Essays,” The Hudson Review, vol. 11, no. 3, (1958): pp. 371–385. JSTOR, accessed 17 May 2020, www.jstor.org/stable/3848614.

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beneath them; it is equally likely that Robert observed creatures at his visits to ancient sites. Yet he seldom records these creatures in his paintings. The etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi tread a similar path; visitors, crumbling stone, ivy, and no creatures.25 It is likely that artist’s reluctance to depict creatures amongst their ruins stemmed from desires to simplify a composition or separate the animal for the experiences of the human. It is this secondary desire which is worth recognizing. When a ruin is recorded in simplified or sanitized form, with its inhabitants discarded, the creatures are relegated to a position of being inessential to the experience of the site. When the site is viewed as specific to the human experience, and not the more global experience, it is seen incompletely. Furthermore, the avoidance of animals effects a dangerous distancing from nature attempted by humanity for centuries, intricately tied to extinction and environmental catastrophe.

The sum of this exercise is not to posit Hubert Robert as harboring sentiments which have led to the mass extinction of global species. Rather, it is to demonstrate that, through recognizing the centrality of a sites ecology to a ruin’s apprehension, one can uncover fresh lines of analysis for classical works. Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes can become a representation of problematic tendencies of humanity; it can become a point of meditation on the meeting of humans and the natural world, on the inevitabilities of time. In recognizing the centrality of the gaze to both this work and others, questions are also raised about the artist’s sensibilities towards the experience of ruins, questions which— hopefully—will prompt further research.

25 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. 18th century, Veduta degli Avanzi di Fabbrica magnifica sepolcrale co’sue Rovine, Print, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, California, USA, Collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1963.30.2996, http://www.thinker.org/. https://library.artstor.org/asset/AMICO_SAN_FRANCISCO_103859902.

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Figure 1: Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes, Hubert Robert, 1771.

Photo Credit: The Rococo Age: French Masterpieces of the Eighteenth Century, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, 1983 Description: Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes, 1771 Oil on canvas, 29 x 40.5 inches (73.7 x 101.9 cm) Signed and dated at left: H. Robert 1771 Original photo to be found at artstor link

Figure 2: Part of a seat with large carved owl, Acr. 3666 © Acropolis Museum, 2017 Photo Credit:Socratis Mavrommatis

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Figure 3: Vue du Tombeau de Virgile from Differentes vues dessiné d’après nature... dans les environs de Rome et de Naples, Adélaide Allou, 18th century.

Photo Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1991 1991.1010.3(2)

Figure 4: Fallen Capitals, Hubert Robert, 2nd half of 18th to early 19th century Photo Credit: © The Trustees of the British Museum

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Progressive Deaccessioning: A Step Towards Museum Parity1

By Sasha Carnes

Part 1: Deaccessioning and Diversity in the American Art Museum The art world, like the rest of American society, has been subject to dramatic innovations and societal shifts throughout the last century, adapting swiftly and progressively with an eye towards the future. Museums have largely fallen on the slower end of this spectrum working instead to preserve, synthesize, and narrate a continuing history of art. However, despite this broadly progressive inclination, art institutions have not escaped the systemic racism and sexism that pervades American culture and society, excluding women and people of color from their collections, exhibitions, and staff through much of the 20th century. The habitual practice of discrimination has resulted in museum collections that convey a white male perspective of art, championing the same heroes and reinforcing a narrow canon of art history. Of the many steps institutions have recently taken to begin remedying this legacy, deaccessioning with the explicit goal of improving collection diversity has been the most controversial. So-called “progressive deaccessioning” has been used to satisfy the increasing need for institutional equity and inclusion in unsustainably large collections, given the financial fragility of many art museums in the wake of the coronavirus.2 From the beginnings of the modern museum, deaccessioning has been an essential practice, ensuring that collections do not exceed the capacity of the institutions that house them. However, throughout the first half of the 20th century, the ways in which deaccessioning was carried out varied widely among institutions. Alfred Barr, founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, championed the collection of anything that could be of consequence so as to lead the avant garde, writing that “the Museum is aware that it may often guess wrong in its acquisitions. When it acquires a dozen recent paintings it will be lucky if in ten years one should survive.”3 This strategy depended on routine deaccessioning, allowing the MoMA to build up the expansive collection it is known for today, although curators of the present may regret the loss of some discarded works. MoMA’s collecting philosophy, how1 * This essay is the result of an independent study that grew out of Professor Edward Sullivan’s course, “Founders of Modernity in the Art of the Americas,” which explored missing narratives in the canon of art history. Many, many thanks to Professor Sullivan for his generous support and insight throughout this project.

2 As collections have continued to drastically increase in size, the proportion of works actually exhibited has shrunk, with over half of American art museums exhibiting less than 5% of their full holdings at any particular time.

See Liam Sweeney and Jennifer K. Frederick, Ithaka S+R Art Museum Director Survey 2020,” Ithaka S+R, November 12, 2020, https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/ithaka-sr-art-museum-director-survey-2020/.

3 Martin Gammon, Deaccessioning and its Discontents: A Critical History, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), p. 19.

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ever, was unusual.4 More often than not, the unfortunate casualties of deaccessioning arose when a single authority (such as a curator) advocated for the exchange of a masterpiece they were not personally fond of for works that are now considered to be of little consequence.

Though these decisions have not shaped art history in a perceptible way, they remain ethically dubious. To deaccession is to risk removing a work from public view forever, contradicting the raison d’être of the modern museum. Deaccessioning must be treated thoughtfully and systematically, taking many factors into account. The formation of organizations such as the American Association of Museum Directors (AAMD) and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) in the middle of the century established industry-wide standards, expectations, and regulations.

The AAMD mandates that the decision to deaccession “is made solely to improve the quality, scope, and appropriateness of the collection, and to support the mission and long-term goals of the museum,” encouraging the development of individual collection management plans and policies.5 The organization advises that museums weigh all the following factors when considering if an object should be deaccessioned: the object’s physical quality and condition, redundancy in the collection, authenticity and attribution, aesthetic merit, and historical importance. A museum must also consider how the object’s ownership will be transferred, complying with the wishes of the object’s donor, if the work was donated, alongside those of the object’s creator.

The rules are particularly stringent about how the proceeds of deaccessioning are to be used. Prior to the pandemic, both the AAM and the AAMD mandated that any proceeds garnered from the sale of an artwork had to be devoted to the direct care of the institution’s collection or the acquisition of additional work. Noncompliance resulted in censure that crippled the offending institution’s capacity to collaborate with other art museums.6 The rise of social media and digital publications compounded the repercussions to aberrant institutions. Information about unpopular deaccessionings became available to anyone with internet access. Protests and criticism can go viral, and have at times forced a museum to reverse its course, though with a tarnished name and reputation.

In the last decade, however, the rigid guidelines have been called into question amid increasing financial stress on smaller institutions and an industry-wide reckoning on the art world’s long legacy of discrimination against women and people of color. Several museums facing impending closure—the Delaware Art Museum and the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA—turned to deaccessioning as a last resort, auctioning some of their collections to 4 Looking to the modern day, however, many art museum collections have significant holdings that are no longer aligned with the museum’s mission and messaging. In the survey referenced above, roughly 50% of institutions reported that over 10% of their collection was not aligned with their collection goals.

5 American Association of Museum Directors, “Art Museums and the Practice of Deaccessioning,” AAMD Position Paper, November 1, 2007, p. 1.

6 AAM Board of Directors, “AAM Code of Ethics for Museums,” American Alliance of Museums, modified 2000, https://www.aam-us.org/programs/ethics-standards-and-professional-practices/code-of-ethics-for-museums/.

International Council of Museums, ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums, (ICOM:2017).

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fund operating costs, an explicit violation of AAMD policy that resulted in sanctions. The museums’ actions incited public furor, but the question of how else they could have found the funding needed to stay open remained, instigating debates about the uses of deaccessioning and the value of their expansion.

Other institutions have sought to use deaccessioning to fix the lack of minority representation in their collections, selling works of well-represented white male artists to acquire work of lesser-known artists from diverse backgrounds. These efforts are small components of the gradual movement to prioritize minority voices in art, a shift that has taken on more urgency in the last few years with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, #MeToo, and similar initiatives. However, despite industry-wide attention to this matter, several recently conducted studies and surveys have revealed the inequalities that continue to define art institutions across the country, projecting a distant path to true equity and inclusion. Most works in the collections of the eighteen most influential art museums in the United States were created by white men. A study conducted in 2019 examined each institution’s public collections data, identifying more than 9,000 artists and classifying them by gender and ethnicity. The resulting analysis determined that overall, 85% of the artists in the surveyed institutions’ collections are white and 87% are male. Even among the institutions focused on contemporary art, where artists of diverse backgrounds are more likely to be represented, the average representation of women fell below 25% and the representation of people of color fell below 20%.7 A survey of 179 American art museums in 2018 showed that while museum staff have become more racially and ethnically diverse in the last five years, people of color still make up just 28% of art museum employees, and only 12% of museum leadership.8 A report issued by the AAM in 2017 revealed that nearly half of American museum boards are exclusively white, and only 10% of the surveyed museum directors indicated they had a plan in place to increase board diversity.9 All this inequality creates a museum environment in which many potential visitors do not feel comfortable. Small-scale studies across the industry have found that as much as 40% of the American population does not feel welcome in art institutions, a sentiment overwhelmingly held by people of color and lower socioeconomic status.10 These disaffected sectors of the American population could pose a major threat to the survival of art muse7 Chad M. Topaz et al, “Diversity of artists in major U.S. museums,” PLOS ONE, March 20, 2019, https://journals. plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212852, Table 2.

8 Mariët Westermann, Roger Schonfeld, and Liam Sweeney, Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018, (Andre W. Mellon Foundation: 2018), p. 9.

9 BoardSource, Museum Board Leadership 2017: A National Report, (Washington, D.C.: BoardSource, 2017), p. 5.

10 Johanna Jones, “Quantifying Our Museum’s Social Impact: How the Oakland Museum of California is using data science to measure impact,” Medium May 14, 2020, https://medium.com/new-faces-new-spaces/quantifying-our-museums-social-impact-e99bff3ef30e; Colleen Dilenschneider, “Why Cultural Organizations Are Not Reaching Low Income Visitors,”Know Your Boner, May 8, 2016, https://www.colleendilen.com/2016/05/18/ why-cultural-organizations-are-not-reaching-low-income-visitors-data/.

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ums going forward.11 As the population of the United States continues to become more racially and ethnically diverse, art institutions must commit to equity and inclusion. Though providing equal staffing opportunities for people of color is of vital importance, exhibiting the work of traditionally excluded artists is equally necessary. Only then will museums reflect the scope of artistic brilliance and appeal more broadly to the varied communities they serve.12

Acquiring new art by women and people of color naturally displaces other elements of a museum’s col-

lection. In recent years, some institutions have made this exchange explicit, deaccessioning and selling works by well-known artists to finance the acquisition of lesser known artists from minority backgrounds in a practice some have termed ‘progressive deaccessioning.’ Though most of these actions have fallen within the standard industry guidelines governing deaccessioning, they have nonetheless attracted considerable attention and controversy, sparking reflection on the purpose of museums in American culture, the value of art, and the practice of deaccessioning.

Through the following three case studies, this essay defends progressive deaccessioning, demonstrating its merit in the movement towards art historical and institutional equity and inclusion.

Part 2: The Case of the Baltimore Museum of Art The first major institution to take up progressive deaccessioning was the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in April of 2018, auctioning seven works from the museum’s collection with the expressed goal of acquiring more art by women and people of color. The process began in 2017, when newly appointed BMA director Christopher Bedford instructed curator Kristen Hileman to examine the museum’s collection of contemporary art and identify candidates for deaccessioning. Bedford was recruited to the BMA from the Rose Art Museum in 2017 largely because of his proven commitment to social justice and his expansive vision of what the BMA could be to the communities of greater Baltimore. From the outset, he sought to bring about swift and radical changes, stating “I’d rather make a mistake going a million miles an hour than do nothing,” and working to implement “a rapid, very aggressive, maybe reparations-based change agenda,” informed by themes of social justice at every step of the way.13 11 Over the last two decades, art museum attendance has substantially declined, with a recorded 30% decrease in the number of U.S. art museum and gallery visits between the years 2002 and 2012. However, in 2017, the percentage of Americans who had visited an art museum or gallery in the last year rose to 23.7% from 21.0% in 2012, but was still below the attendance recorded in 2002 and 1992. See National Endowment for the Arts, “A Decade of Arts Engagement: Findings from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, 2002-2012,” (National Endowment for the Arts: January 2015); American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “Art Museum Attendance,”American Academy of Arts & Sciences, https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/public-life/art-museum-attendance.

12 Several museums that have very intentionally advanced initiatives to diversify their staff, collection, and programming have had marked success in increasing attendance from people of color. The Oakland Museum reported an increase of 10% from 2017 to 2019, mostly driven by the local community. Lori Fogarty, “Fogarty in Artnet News,” Artnet, June 12, 2020, https://news.artnet.com/opinion/lori-fogarty-oakland-op-ed-1885446.

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The demographics of Baltimore made his priorities particularly necessary. Over 60% of the city’s population is Black and the median household income, $50,000, falls well below the national average of over $68,000.14 These sectors of the population often feel least welcome in art institutions; the BMA has a disproportionately small percentage of Black visitors. Though there has been marked improvement in recent years, the latest publicly available figure, 13% in 2015, is strikingly low in comparison to the Black population of the city.15 If the museum did not make significant changes to its programming and community outreach, museum attendance would continue to falter, and the BMA would fall out of relevance with the currents of the city.

The changes mapped out by the BMA’s leadership could only be executed at considerable expense. Deaccessioning became a critical tool for the BMA to advance its other social justice-oriented initiatives while also continuing to build a collection that improves minority representation and better reflects the constituents of the city it serves. Without deaccessioning, Bedford “did not see a way to fulfill all of our capital aspirations, exhibition-making aspirations, and raise money to be competitive in the contemporary art market”16.

The works chosen to be deaccessioned were created by artists well represented in the BMA’s collection, and all white men. Each work sold could have been rightfully deaccessioned without broader justification, meeting the AAMD recommended guidelines chiefly because of their redundancy within the collection. Hearts (1979) and Oxidation Painting (1978), the two works by Andy Warhol chosen for deaccessioning, were among 89 by him in the BMA’s collection, and were rarely exhibited following their donation in 1994. In accordance with the AAMD’s guidelines, the BMA obtained the enthusiastic permission of the donors—the Warhol Foundation and collector Richard Pearlstone—when considering the two paintings for deaccessioning.17 Franz Kline’s Green Cross (1956) 13 Gabriella Souza, “Change Agent: BMA director Christopher Bedford bring artistic fervor to his new position,” Baltimore Magazine, April 2017, https://www.baltimoremagazine.com/section/artsentertainment/bma-director-christopher-bedford-brings-artistic-fervor-to-new-position/; Andrew Russeth, “At the Baltimore Museum of Art, Christopher Bedford Creates a New Kind of Institution,” ARTnews, January 14, 2020, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/ news/christopher-bedford-shaping-art-2020s-1202675029/.

14 United States Census Bureau, “QuickFacts Baltimore city, Maryland; United States,” United States Census Bureau, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/baltimorecitymaryland,US/INC110219; Jessica Semega, Melissa Kollar, Emily A. Shrider, and John Creamer, “Income and Poverty in the United States: 2019,”United States Census Bureau, September 15, 2020,https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p60-270.html#:~:text=Median%20household%20income%20was%20%2468%2C703,and%20Table%20A%2D1..

15 The BMA has shared that the proportion of Black visitors to the museum increased from 3% to 13% between 2002 and 2015, and that the average visitor’s age has decreased 12 years, from 56 to 44. Mary Carole McCauley, “Free admission hasn’t stopped attendance slide at Baltimore art museums,” The Baltimore Sun, January 16, 2018, https://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/arts/bs-fe-museum-attendance-solutions-20180111-story.html.

16 Julia Halperin, “‘It is an Unusual and Radical Act’: Why Baltimore Museum is Selling Blue-Chip Art to Buy Work by Underrepresented Artists,” Artnet News, April 30, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/market/baltimore-museum-deaccession-1274996.

17 Joe Wachs, president of The Warhol Foundation, confirmed in an interview with Artnet News that he was “happy to support the request because the funds will be used for a commendable purpose, and the Baltimore Museum will

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was rarely shown in favor of a similar color painting from 1961, and was one of about a dozen of his works in the collection. Among the more than twenty works by Robert Rauschenberg’s in the BMA’s collection, the one deaccessioned, Bank Job (1979), was difficult to care for and exhibit because spanned the length of an entire wall. Three lesser-known paintings, two by Kenneth Noland and one by Jules Olitski, were within the color field and abstract expressionism movements, both well-represented in the BMA’s collection. Following unanimous approval from the Board of Trustees, five of the deaccessioned paintings were auctioned at Sotheby’s in May 2018, while the two largest canvases were sold privately.

The proceeds of the sale were split into two acquisition funds, strictly adhering to AAMD policy. The resulting fund devoted to shorter-term acquisition efforts found almost immediate use in the purchase of nine works that had been selected and approved prior to the deaccessionings. The newly-acquired works are more relevant to the communities the BMA serves and represent voices traditionally absent from the museum space, continuing the long process of righting institutional wrongs. The new acquisitions included work by seven celebrated Black artists, including Jack Whitten’s 9.11.01 (2016), a monumental work made in response to the September 11th tragedy that director Christopher Bradford deemed, “the most significant acquisition I’ll ever make for a museum.”18 Many of the artists targeted by this initiative entered the BMA’s collection for the first time. Their purchase markedly expanded the museum’s ability to convey a more complete narrative of contemporary art while making strides towards the rightful recognition of minority artists.

Despite the traditionally justified basis for the deaccessionings and the inarguable positive outcome of the new acquisitions, this moves garnered considerable attention throughout the art world and beyond it, with mixed responses. Many influential artists and curators of color stepped forward to commend the decision. Dr. Leslie King Hammond, the celebrated artist and founding director of the Center for Race and Culture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, praised the move, writing, “You have to step forward and make what are sometimes misconstrued as radical decisions, when in fact it’s just addressing the overall quality, content, and intent of the institution’s role in community.” Others condemned the BMA, concerned about the displacement of prominent work and troubled by the open motivation of improving the collection’s diversity.19 They did not consider the continued strength of the BMA’s still have significant Warhol holdings which they have regularly exhibited,” a sentiment shared by the Pearlstone family. Amy Elias, Richard Pearlstone’s wife, shared, “It took us about 30 seconds to say yes.” Julia Harperin, ‘It Is an Unusual and Radical Act’: Why the Baltimore Museum Is Selling Blue-Chip Art to Buy Work by Underrepresented Artists”, Artnet, April 20, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/market/baltimore-museum-deaccession-1274996 18 Julia Harperin, “The Baltimore Museum Sold Art to Acquire Work by Underrepresented Artists. Here’s What It Bought—and Why It’s Only the Beginning,” Artnet News, June 26, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/baltimore-deaccessioning-proceeds-1309481..

19 Cara Ober, “Artists and Curators Weigh In on Baltimore Museum’s Move to Deaccession Works by White Men to Diversify Its Collection,” Hyperallergic, May 8, 2018, https://hyperallergic.com/441782/baltimore-museum-of-art-deaccession-reactions-artists-curators/.

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collection in the movements embodied by the deaccessioned works, or the institution’s strict adherence to industry policy. The cogent justifications for the decision, and the clear financial and moral impetus to improve the institution’s equity and inclusiveness, frame this deaccessioning as a critical step in the right direction.

Part 3: Deaccessioning at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Shortly after the BMA’s deaccessioning project, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) decided to sell a single work by Mark Rothko, Untitled (1960), to finance the acquisition of eleven new works, mostly created by women and people of color, with the goal to “diversify its collection, enhance its contemporary holdings and address art historical gaps.”20 As with the BMA, this move aroused controversy, though it was generally received with less fervor than the BMA’s trailblazing decision the year before. The sale of this work allowed the institution to add eleven new ones to its collection, many of them by artists entering the SFMOMA for the first time. The new works, representing Black artists Alma Thomas, Frank Bowling, and Mickalene Thomas, women surrealists Leonora Carrington and Kay Sage, and First Nations artist Rebecca Belmore, among others, provide novel perspectives and interpretations of modern and contemporary art in the museum, making strides towards the institution’s objective of greater diversity.

Like most major art institutions, the SFMOMA reflects the art world’s marginalization of women and people of color. Of the artists represented in the museum’s collection, roughly 18% are women and just 14% are people of color—percentages that fall strikingly short of America’s demographics, but are effectively average among American art museums of a similar stature.21 Despite decades-long efforts for greater parity, these inequalities persist in SFMOMA’s recent acquisitions and exhibitions. Over the last decade, just 12% of the works acquired by the museum were by women artists, and only 10% of its exhibitions were devoted to women.22 These statistics informed the SFMOMA’s new collecting plan, which prioritizes greater minority representation to fill the gaps in the museum’s narrative of art history, while reflecting the diverse communities it serves.

The acquisitions brought about by the Rothko sale have already complicated and enriched the museum’s

presentation of the Surrealist movement, among others. Chief curator Janet Bishop stated, “Up until a few years ago, our Surrealist gallery included most of the major male figures associated with the movement but no paintings by

20 Jill Lynch, ‘SFMOMA Announces Deaccession to Benefit the Acquisitions Fund and Strategically Diversify the Collection,” SFMOMA, February 15, 2019, https://www.sfmoma.org/press-release/rothko-deaccession-2019/.

21 Chad M. Topaz et al, “Diversity of artists in major U.S. museums,” March 20, 2019, https://journals.plos.org/ plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0212852.

22 Julia Halperin and Charlotte Burns, “Museums Claim They’re Paying More Attention to Female Artists. That’s an Illusion,” Artnet News, September 19, 2019, https://news.artnet.com/womens-place-in-the-art-world/womensplace-art-world-museums-1654714.

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women—we didn’t have any.”23 With the acquisition and exhibition of paintings by Leonora Carrington and Kay Sagethe work of these notable women surrealists is beginning to find representation, reframing the way in which visitors conceptualize the movement to be more holistic, inclusive, and informed.

In contrast, Rothko’s art is ubiquitous in the principal encyclopedic art museums of the United States.

Most hold multiple examples of his work, and several—including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the National Gallery of Art—have recently hosted solo exhibitions devoted to his oeuvre.

The SFMOMA itself had a strong relationship with Rothko during his lifetime, acquiring several paintings as gifts from the artist and from his Foundation. Because of the wealth of its holdings in his work, the deaccessioned work, Untitled (1960), had remained in storage for seventeen years following its latest exhibition in 2002. Altogether, the decision to deaccession was in accordance with AAMD guidelines and adhered to the museum’s collection policies, which require that a work was not created by a living artist, and is “either outside the scope of the collection or is duplicative.”24.

Though many lauded the decision, criticisms and controversy still emerged. As with the BMA, some critics questioned why the museum’s donors could not finance the new acquisitions. Others lamented the loss of a “good Rothko” to private hands, emphasizing Rothko’s close involvement with the work’s original acquisition.25 Though the sale was not an ideal solution to the SFMOMA’s lack of diversity, financing swift changes would have been implausible without it. The deaccessioning of one work allowed eleven new ones to become publicly accessible while leading the museum’s collection in new directions for audiences in the future.

Part 4: The Coronavirus and The Everson Museum of Art

When the novel coronavirus began its rapid spread around the United States, it was immediately clear that

art museums would face unprecedented financial pressures. In December 2020, the organization Americans for the Arts reported that the arts and culture sector had absorbed approximately $14.5 billion of cumulative losses and 63% of the nonprofits anticipated severe to extremely severe financial impacts.26 Even institutions with substantial endowments and a wide donor base, like SFMOMA, were compelled to lay off or furlough over half of their 23 Ibid.

24 Jill Lynch, ‘SFMOMA Announces Deaccession to Benefit the Acquisitions Fund and Strategically Diversify the Collection,” SFMOMA, February 15, 2019, https://www.sfmoma.org/press-release/rothko-deaccession-2019/.

25 For more context on the relationship between the SFMOMA and Rothko, as well as a pointedly critical perspective of the sale, see Lee Rosenbaum, “Breach of Trust? Rothko Gave SFMOMA Its Soon-to-Be-Auctioned Painting at the Museum’s Request,” CultureGrrl, March 6, 2019, https://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2019/03/breach-oftrust-rothko-gave-sfmoma-its-soon-to-be-auctioned-painting-at-the-museums-request.html.

26 See Americans for the Arts, “The Economic Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19) on the Arts and Culture Sector,” Americans for the Arts, https://www.americansforthearts.org/by-topic/disaster-preparedness/the-economic-impactof-coronavirus-on-the-arts-and-culture-sector.

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workforce, leaving an enormous number of museum staff without employment. In an attempt to support ailing art museums across the country, the AAMD passed an extraordinary resolution to update its deaccessioning guidelines.

Extending through April 2022, the resolution states that “AAMD will refrain from censuring or sanctioning any museum—or censuring, suspending or expelling any museum director—that decides to use restricted endowment funds, trusts, or donations for general operating expenses.” However, in a press release the organization emphatically asserted that “this temporary approach is not intended to incentivize deaccessioning or the sale of art,” but to provide an avenue for additional financial support.27 Since the resolution’s release in April 2020, few institutions took advantage of the new guidelines, and none escaped without some degree of public ire, demonstrating the strength of opposition to deaccessioning amid crippling financial losses in museums across the country.

June of 2020 also brought urgent attention to the continued underrepresentation of people of color in art museums. Spurred by the nation’s reckoning with the murder of George Floyd and the systemic anti-Blackness pervading American society and culture, activists worked to reveal the discrimination present within art institutions and lobbied museums to do something about it. In response, many museums publicly committed themselves to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, pledged to present more diverse programming, and vowed to increase the diversity of their staff and board. Several museums, however, again looked to deaccessioning as a way to bring about greater minority representation in their collections, emboldened by the newly suspended deaccessioning penalties from the AAMD.

First among them was the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, an institution with a collection

of approximately 11,000 works and particularly developed holdings in ceramics and video art. Following unanimous board approval, the museum announced its decision to deaccession and auction Red Composition, 1946 by Jackson Pollock in September 2020 to fund the acquisition of works by artists of underrepresented backgrounds and to support the care of its existing collection. In a statement, Everson Director Elizabeth Dunbar explained that “The murder of George Floyd and a string of senseless killings of Black lives have propelled us into urgent discussions surrounding the Museum’s role and responsibility in fighting racism inside and outside our walls. Now is the time for action. By deaccessioning a single artwork, we can make enormous strides in building a collection that reflects the amazing diversity of our community and ensure that it remains accessible to all for generations to come.”28.

The Everson has improved the diversity of its collection since 2017, when it reframed its collecting policies to be more reflective of the communities it serves. The population of Syracuse is roughly 30% Black, and though 27 Association of Art Museum Directors, “AAMD Board of Trustees Approves Resolution to Provide Additional Financial Flexibility to Art Museums During the Pandemic Crisis,” Association of Art Museum Directors, April 15, 2020, https://aamd.org/for-the-media/press-release/aamd-board-of-trustees-approves-resolution-to-provide-addition 28 Everson Museum of Art, “The Everson Votes to Deaccession Pollock Painting to Diversify Its Collection,” Everson Museum of Art, September 3, 2020, https://www.everson.org/about/news/diversify-collection.

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no official data on the diversity of the Everson’s collection exists, it is almost certain that the racial demographics of the artists represented at the Everson do not reflect this. Though most of the museum’s acquisitions in the last three years have been works by women and people of color, the $12 million in proceeds from the sale of the Pollock will allow the Everson to significantly advance this initiative, while appropriately caring for the museum’s full collection.

Despite these positive outcomes and the major strides in the national discourse about race and racism, the Everson’s decision to deaccession aroused many of the same criticisms experienced by the BMA and the SFMOMA. Foremost was the condemnation of a public work moving into private hands, disregarding the reality that sale of the Pollock would allow a multitude of new works to become accessible to the public. Given the Everson’s more recent acquisitions, the majority of the prospective works to be accessioned with the proceeds of the sale would likely be by artists less known to the public and less widely collected by other institutions. In contrast, Jackson Pollock’s work is exhibited at virtually every major art institution with a modern collection. There is no shortage of publicly available Pollocks.

Others again raised the question of why the museum’s trustees could not fund the initiative without deaccessioning. To this, Board Chair Jessica Arb Danial responded, “No one is using the sale as an excuse to forgo our obligation to continue to provide and obtain financial support for the Everson. Indeed, it remains our privilege to serve.”29 As a smaller museum situated in a traditionally underserved community, the Everson runs on a small annual operating budget of under $2 million, with a reported endowment of just over $5 million, a figure that is likely to have shrunk with the debilitating effects of the coronavirus.30 The sale of the Pollock, however, raised $12 million for the Everson, a considerable sum for the institution that will let it realize its equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives in the future.

Part 5: The BMA’s Deaccessioning Projects Continue

Perhaps the most controversial instance of progressive deaccessioning was announced by the Baltimore

Museum of Art in October 2020. Taking advantage of the new resolution, the museum’s board approved the deaccessioning of three paintings—3 (1987-88) by Brice Marden, 1957-G (1957) by Clyfford Still, and The Last Supper (1986) by Andy Warhol—expecting a return of roughly $65 million. The proceeds were to be allocated to three initiatives. The majority of the funds would provide for the direct care of the collection, including support for the salaries of museum staff, with plans to increase the pay of traditionally undercompensated front-of-house workers.

29 Jessica Arb Danial, “To mirror, and support, community: Everson Museum board chair defends deaccessioning of a Pollock,” The Art Newspaper, October 15, 2020, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/to-mirror-and-support-community-everson-museum-board-chair-defends-deaccessioning-of-a-pollock.

30 Everson Art Museum, “The Everson: First and Forever,” Everson Art Museum, https://www.everson.org/FirstandForever.

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Another $10 million would be invested into the museum’s acquisition fund, supporting the museum’s commitment to improve its holdings in art by women and people of color. A final portion was to be devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including the elimination of museum admissions fees to reduce barriers to entry for people of lesser means.31 However, despite the inarguable value of the outcomes of the deaccessioning, many prominent figures were angered by the means, inciting a media firestorm that ultimately led to the annulment of the planned sales and the re-accessioning of the works in question.

Critics most objected to the prominence of the respective works chosen. In a letter to Attorney General

Brian Frosh and Secretary of State John Wobensmith of Maryland, former BMA director Arnold Lehman wrote these “three works are central to the museum’s collection and to the cultural patrimony of the State of Maryland, as they represent the monumental achievement of three of the world’s most important 20th century artists.”32 An online petition also directed to Maryland’s state government implied that the BMA “breached the public trust in choosing works of such iconic status for deaccession.”33. In response to these concerns and accusations, the BMA’s curators asserted that this deaccessioning was “not a judgment about individual art objects, but an assessment of context, the way they function in a collection.”34 Although 3 and 1957-G were the only two paintings by Marden and Still in the collection, the BMA’s holdings are rich in other representations of the Minimalist and Abstract Expressionist movements with increasing depth in abstract art made by women and people of color, allowing curators ample choice of ways to present, juxtapose, and complicate those narratives. Similarly, Warhol’s late work is well represented in the collection, occupying wall space and utilizing resources that reduce the BMA’s ability to accommodate new works.

Deaccessioning a third Warhol would allow the institution to support new acquisitions without affecting the museum’s capacity to exhibit Warhol’s work and engage with his legacy.

Indisputably, these works were of more value—both sentimental and curatorial—than the ones the BMA

had chosen for deaccessioning two years earlier, and the case for their sale was harder to argue under the traditional deaccessioning decision-making framework. However, looking again to the disparity between the representation of white male artists and artists of all other backgrounds in museum collections, nothing short of radical action 31 Tthe Baltimore Museum of Art, “The Baltimore Museum of Art Announces Ambitious Plan to Secure and Increase Staff Salaries, Improve Community Access and Continue to Diversify Its Collection,” Baltimore Museum of Art, October 2, 2020, https://artbma.org/documents/press/newsrelease_endowment_for_the_future_final.pdf.

32 CultureGrrl, “Central to the Museum’s Collection’: Arnold Lehman Blasts the Baltimore Deaccessions,” Arts Journal, OCtober 20, 2020, https://www.artsjournal.com/culturegrrl/2020/10/central-to-the-museums-collection-arnold-lehman-blasts-the-baltimore-deaccessions.html.

33 Baltimore Community Members, “ Investigate the hasty & opaque deaccession of 3 iconic works by Baltimore Museum of Art,” Change.org, October 14, 2020, https://www.change.org/p/maryland-attorney-general-investigate-the-hasty-deaccession-of-2-iconic-works-by-the-baltimore-museum-of-art.

34 Asma Naeem and Katy Siegel, “Baltimore Museum of Art curators respond to deaccessioning criticism,” The Art Newspaper, October 13, 2020, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/bma-curators-letter-response-to-deaccessioning.

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can begin to change it. Centuries of work by women and people of color has gone unknown or undervalued by the public, projecting a clear message of exclusion to visitors and budding artists of those identities. To not include these long-ostracized voices is to risk losing the interest of an increasingly diverse American populace, and in the case of the Baltimore Art Museum, continue to fail the majority Black population the museum serves. Though the BMA was not successful in this deaccessioning, the museum’s initiative steps into the next frontier of progressive deaccessioning, moving beyond the current guidelines and towards a greater prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion within museum collections.

Conclusion Reaching a place of relative parity will require sacrifices. Whenever possible, museums must work to ensure their collections remain publicly accessible. However, continuing to propagate a narrative of art history that excludes the many women and people of color who deserve to be a part of it is deeply damaging to our collective canon of art history and to the future of museums. The industry must uncover and elevate talented artists past and present who have been unacknowledged because of their race or gender, ensuring that their art is recognized in museum collections and available to a public far more diverse than most institutions themselves. To avoid these efforts is to risk losing connection with the communities that museums serve, debasing the collective doctrine of access and education that defines the American art museum and jeopardizing the survival of museums as we know them.

Progressive deaccessioning is just one of many tools to promote institutional changes, but perhaps the most pragmatic, especially following the debilitating reverberations of the coronavirus. Despite controversy, it is a practice that will likely grow and evolve in its use, helping to define a more diverse, inclusive, and sustainable art world in the future.

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Figure 1: 9.11.01, Jack Whitten (2006), acyrilic and mixed media on canvas, 3014.8 x 609.6 cm / 120 x 240 in.

Photo Credit: © Jack Whitten Estate. Courtesy the Jack Whitten Estate and Hauser & Wirth, Photographer John Berrens

Figure 2: Alma Thomas, Cumulus, 1972, acrylic on canvas, 71x53 in, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim © Estate of Alma Thomas Photo Credit: Katherine Du Tiel

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Figure 3: Kay Sage, Midnight Street, 1944, oil on canvas; 16 x 13 in, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim © Estate of Kay Sage / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Photo Credit: Don Ross

Figure 4: Mark Rothko, Untitled (1960) Photo credit: Courtesy of Sotheby’s Inc. © 2019

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The Artist and Art Institution in the Digital Age Zoe Shields

Digital technology has prompted social, cultural, and artistic transformation globally, and art institutions are not exempt from its resulting effect. By introducing new platforms of consumption and circulation, the digital age has disrupted the traditional structure of the art world at large. The internet challenges the institutional power of long-established museums by democratizing access, allowing viewers to serve as their own tastemakers by choosing which works to engage with online, independent of physical location. In order to maintain relevance and impact as arbiters of taste, and to continue to participate as traditional gatekeepers in a media-saturated landscape, museums must: 1) leverage technology to develop sustainable, data-driven digital strategies for the purpose of extending and advancing their mission; 2) embrace and integrate new media art into their holdings; and 3) proactively invest in emerging mediums to remain at the forefront of contemporary art. Institutions such as the New Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and Metropolitan Museum of Art have successfully recognized that the digital age has, and will continue to, have an impact on every aspect of the art world. They have employed adaptive measures in response, from publicizing creators working at the intersection of technology and art, to restructuring their organization internally.

Artists themselves have responded to the evolving situation by leveraging technology as a means of enhancing their creative practice. Technology benefits and makes more efficient the lives of billions daily, and these progressive tools provide artists with greater capacity for creating work that is more widely accessible and effective.

New media art created with technology — including digital art, computer graphics and animation, virtual, internet, and interactive art — is evidence of this.

To fully grasp the rapid evolution of the digital landscape, it is helpful to begin with an understanding of the origins of electronic art. Early integrations of technology and art first emerged when the Second World War necessitated various technological advances. Electronic art responded artistically to the new cybernetics, information and general systems theories, and in the mid-1950s, enterprising artists such as Ben Laposky and John Whitney Sr. pioneered electronic artwork in the United States by employing computer graphics to create abstract works.1 Laposky utilized cathode ray oscilloscopes, sine wave generators, and electronic circuits to create still “electrical compositions,”2 such as the Oscillions series. During the war, before starting his artistic career, Whitney had been

1 Ben F. Laposky, “Ben F. Laposky: Database of Digital Art,” Database of Digital Art, http://dada.compart-bremen. de/item/agent/253.

2 Ibid. See Figure 2.

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employed by the Lockheed Aircraft Factory, and worked with high-speed missile photography.3 After ten years, he purchased analog computing mechanisms as war surplus, which he used to create Catalog (1961), a moving-image work of shape-changing colorful, abstract forms. He began to create audio-visual animated films, and developed the notion of computerized motion control.4 Both artists recognized the enormous capacity of technology to be leveraged in the creation of art. By the 1980s, the electronic age gave way to the digital age, and installation art emerged in the contemporary scene.5 Today, artists whose practice relies on emerging forms of technology are participating in a “creative revolution,” employing technology to comment on its increasing interdependence with modern culture.

While most technology-based art can be displayed in an virtual capacity, art institutions have a valuable role in curating and displaying important works of all mediums, including new media art. Positioned within a sector that is “overwhelmingly not digital,”6 however, museums are often seen as places of “contemplation outside of”7 the pervasive effect of technology. The workplace values that are associated with global media and technology companies — an environment in which to work fast, have significant impact, take risks, and be transparent — are not often those of century-old cultural institutions, which are slow to embrace risk or to change. 8This traditional function of the art institution has been to “collect, preserve, and interpret”9 works of art, specifically objects such as sculptures, paintings, or works on paper, whose very materiality would make them resistant to digital transformation. Each institution is an archive of artworks that, in their materiality, are archivable: there is no debate about their physical existence and relationship to the future.

Unlike traditional art objects, new media pieces are “living artworks—they have a pulse,”10 as Michael Mansfield asserts; he is, an associate curator of film and media arts at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. As new media art is often immaterial, fluid, variable, replicable, interactive, and intangible, fundamental concerns

3 Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Watch This! Revelations in Media Art,” Smithsonian American Art Museum, https://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/watch-this-revelations.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Loic Tallon, “Digital Is More Than a Department, It Is a Collective Responsibility,” MET Museum, October 24,

2017, https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2017/digital-future-at-the-met.

7 Charlie Gere, ‘New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age’, Tate Papers, no.2, Autumn 2004, https://www. tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/02/new-media-art-and-the-gallery-in-the-digital-age.

8 Goran, Julie, “Culture for a Digital Age,” McKinsey & Company, https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/ mckinsey-digital/our-insights/culture-for-a-digital-age. McKinsey Digital research states that “rather than a lack of understanding of digital trends, talent for digital, dedicated funding of infrastructure, it is cultural/behavioral challenges that is the most significant barrier to digital effectiveness.” See Figure 5.

9 Susan Morris, “Museums and New Media in Art,” The Rockefeller Foundation, October 2001, https://www.cs.vu. nl/~eliens/archive/refs/Museums_and_New_Media_Art.pdf.

10 Rachel Wolff, “Keeping New Media New: Conserving High-Tech Art,” ARTnews, 24 Oct. 2013, http://www. artnews.com/2013/10/23/keeping-new-media-new/.

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regarding a museum’s “role and purview, rights and responsibilities”11 are brought into question. Further, as institutions begin to integrate screen-based works into their holdings to reflect the evolving contemporary landscape, traditional concepts of collection, preservation, and ownership are dismantled due to the reproducibility and immateriality of many new media works. Museums must balance their primary mission, cultural preservation, with participation in a contemporary world that values instancy and online realities. New media art confronts and disrupts traditional concepts of time and space as a result of technologies with “the capacity to process and present data at such a speed that the user feels the machine’s responses to be more or less immediate.”12 This is evidence of society’s trend towards that which is instant, accessible by many at any given time or place. Yet, the concepts of time and space are fundamental to the physical, in-person visitor experience.

Art institutions create a critical context around the works of art presented, fostering a dialogue between the art and its audience. When introducing a screen-based work into a physical space, innovative curatorial strategy is required. Many digital media works are formless, interactive, and ever-changing; an institution is not necessarily commissioning a physical work, but rather an experience.13 In the commissioning of new media art, museums have relied on various categorizations to define their approach to interpreting and valuing the work, be it an “original, unique work, an edition, or a performance.”14 To commission or acquire a new media work allows an institution to build and expand upon its “traditional strengths of collection, preservation, research, and display”15 and to also promote the future of visual culture. When technology is regarded as an “artist-first, artist-driven space,”16 when curators allow the artists to contextually frame their own work, the transformational nature of technologically-based work is enhanced. To that end, curators must also consider what degree of “authority [the artist is] transferring to the museum”17 for the purposes of interpreting the work in a future context, and addressing its display if the original technological basis of the artwork has evolved by that time..

In order to reach the broadest possible audience, including individuals who might not be exposed to art today, institutions must leverage technology in their own outreach efforts. In acknowledgement of the changing digital landscape, and in an effort to remain at the forefront of its evolution, many institutions have reshaped their internal, organizational structure. In the early 2000s, curators were not working within a New Media department, but rath-

11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Ibid.

Charlie Gere, ‘New Media Art and the Gallery in the Digital Age.” Susan Morris, “Museums and New Media in Art.” Ibid.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Rachel Wolff, “Keeping New Media New: Conserving High-Tech Art.”

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er operated within departments of Film, Video, and Media Arts, Contemporary, or Architecture and Design.18 The interest in creating a department unique to new media works began as an initiative to carve out intentional space for a medium that was still emerging. While these sustainable structural changes are difficult, they are essential for institutions to maintain relevance in the digital landscape. With the need for adaptation in mind, one may ask : “Should institutions scale their departments to meet that ever-growing need, or should digital responsibilities be cultivated and distributed across the organization?”19 In addition to a central department, for many institutions, digital work is appropriately integrated into the overall operational strategy. While the primary department names often range from Digital Experience, Web and Digital Media, to Creative and Digital Platforms. their functions are largely similar: digitize the museum’s collection, produce multimedia content, manage editorial services for online content, photograph the collections, and oversee digital marketing or social initiatives. In many ways, these departments are agents of change, leading “the digital transformation of their non-digital institutions,”20 by connecting with the visitor outside the museum’s walls.

An art institution must develop an online presence that engages its audience by offering information and interpretation of the works on view. Technology provides the art institution with better means to connect with their visitors. To maximize its effect, the digital strategy should be open, sustainable and scalable, allowing for further technological shifts in the future. Digital communication has created opportunities for museums to cultivate community and essential relationships, and to make their collection more accessible, while gaining crucial insight into the visitor experience.21 Considerations of audience and outreach are important, as social platforms provide museums with important data, and the audience they reach is far vaster. Through digital marketing, museums are able to tell their stories more effectively, create a meaningful online experience and make the institution’s collection more accessible to a wider audience.22 While the realities of the digital divide limit universal accessibility, it is still worthwhile for museums to make every effort to broaden their reach.

In an effort to increase accessibility, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has used immersive, spherical 360° technology to create six short videos that invite the viewer to virtually visit the museum’s art and architecturally grand spaces, including The Cloisters, the former Met Breuer, and within The Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue, the Great Hall, Temple of Dendur, Charles Engelhard Court, and the Arms and Armor Galleries. In each video, the viewer is immersed in a first-person experience, encountering the museum online through angles and perspec-

18 19 20 21

Loic Tallon, “Digital Is More Than a Department, It Is a Collective Responsibility.”

Ibid.

Ibid.

Van Den Akker, Chiel, and Susan Legêne, eds. Museums in a Digital Culture: How Art and Heritage Became Meaningful (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016).

22 Loic Tallon, “Digital Is More Than a Department, It Is a Collective Responsibility.”

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tives that are unique to the capacity of virtual reality technology. The video is effective in expanding the ability of the screen to absorb the viewer. On a computer, the viewer can use a mouse to scroll in all directions; on a smartphone, the viewer can rotate a device or utilize a virtual reality headset. This generates an interaction within a virtual environment through orientation and position tracking. In”The Great Hall,” the viewer floats above the information desk and soars upwards toward the oculus, before rising past the colonnades and ascending the grand staircase — watching as the early morning light pours in the window, and the first wave of visitors spills into the lobby. In “The Cloisters,” the viewer is transported to medieval Europe, floating above the museum’s gardens, hovering over the terracotta roof, and soaring above northern Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park and the Hudson River. The viewer also sees works on display, and can look out the large windows while hearing chimes from the bell tower.

Unlike a traditional video, in which the moving image is organized sequentially so that every audience

member has precisely the same viewing experience, 360° video allows viewers to explore and control their own observation. Engaged in an interactive experience not limited by the traditional conventions of video, the viewer is unlikely to watch the same video twice, due to variations in user-controlled vantage points. In order to create the experiences, six cameras that capture video in all directions were attached to a lightweight rig approximately six inches in diameter, and in post-production, editors stitched together the footage from each camera with non-linear editing software.23 Beyond experimental technology, the museum also supplies open-access resources to its audience, including the Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, an interactive pairing of essays and works of art with chronologies that “tells the story of art and global culture”24 through the museum’s permanent collection. The Heilbrunn Timeline functions much like a digital archive, extending the museum’s impact beyond the physical institution and into the online realm. The resource features an interactive timeline and map, both of which have embedded hyperlinks that redirect the online visitor to additional information on various works in the museum’s collection. Through categorization of period, geographical region, and theme, readers are able to distill the information available according to their interests. To make the timeline a reference, research, and teaching tool, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s curators, conservators and educators add insights on the collection.. This resource promotes the self-education of the visitor and supports the research of the scholar, which helps to fulfill the museum’s mission to share its collection, and information regarding it, with a broad audience. Readers are also armed with pertinent information, such as the location of a work, should they find themselves physically within the museum.

In a similar mission-driven capacity, The Museum of Modern Art produced a YouTube channel that includes A New MoMA, At The Museum, How To See, Conservation, Artist Stories, In The Studio, Live Q&A, and

23 Ibid.

24 “Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History”, MetMuseum, https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/.

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Our Collection. In each short presentation, the viewer follows MoMA staff as exhibitions are designed and installed, listens as curators explain how they interpret contemporary art, watches as living artists discuss their work on view, and observes as artwork is preserved. The videos provide substantial value to the observer as they present a behindthe-scenes view into the offices and staging rooms of the museum — processes and places unknown to the average museum-goer. The “Live Q&A” series interacts most directly with the museum’s audience, as live viewers’ questions are answered by curators, exhibition designers, conservators, and artists. Each video within this series lasts for an average of thirty minutes. This format effectively connects the insight and experience of museum staff with a vast, curious audience. The internet allows the professionals’ message to reach and affect a large audience that could not otherwise have access to the museum.

In addition, both institutions use the image-based social application Instagram to cross-promote their YouTube series and web-based resources, in addition to driving their audience towards an in-person experience. Both institutions utilize social platforms to reflect their core mission and position themselves as leaders and resources in the museum field. Through high-quality branded digital content, they connect with a global audience. Both institutions generate original content, including: images of newly-installed pieces, promotional content detailing community programs and projects, and series that highlight artists and their artistic process through behind-the-scenes images.

They also feature user-generated content, in which community members are actively engaging in person with the museum’s collection.. The breadth of content available online caters to a vast audience.

The New Museum, located on Bowery in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is a contemporary art institution that fully embraces technology, with the mission of celebrating and showcasing “new art and new ideas.” Recognized and applauded in the converging art and technology spaces, the institution has been a champion of digital art and an advocate for artists working in emerging media.

One of the institution’s chief initiatives for furthering this mission is NEW INC, a cultural incubator dedicated to supporting “innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship across art, design, and technology.” With the deep understanding that digital work underpins all aspects of contemporary life, the curators promote technology and collaborative space, which is central to their purpose. Members of the incubator benefite from the museum’s wealth of traditional resources, as they work in tandem with two anchor tenants, Rhizome and the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. A deep sense of community is fostered in the building of technologically-driven projects. Biannual demonstration days and an end-of-year showcase allow the members to present their work to their peers and the public. Programming such as the “Versions” virtual reality conference, which presents panels, workshops, and projects on developments in digital media, prompts the community to expand traditional notions of perception and reality in the arts. The NEW INC community is encouraged to explore these transformational mediums, and embrace new technologies, the potential of which is perhaps yet to be

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fully discovered.

Continuing to embrace new technologies available for creative use, The New Museum collaborated with “Today at Apple” to create a series of experiential augmented reality works openly available for public interaction. [AR]T Walk, the resulting project, is an interactive excursion through the streets of San Francisco, New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Tokyo, all beginning at an Apple store. The viewer engages with virtual works by important artists who are using augmented reality technology. The institution’s partnership with technology companies such as Apple broadens the scope of their work while increasing the visibility of talented individuals working at the intersection of technology and art.

While each institution dedicates time and a portion of its budget to the production of digital content, this does not deter in-person visits, but rather encourages them. An early report by the National Endowment for the Arts concluded that technology does not lessen arts participation, but rather strengthens it by contributing to the cultivation of new audiences.25 The primary finding was that individuals who engage with art through media technologies attend art exhibits “at two to three times the rate of non-media arts participants.”26 For example, the Louvre attracts 8.1 million visitors, having long been the world’s most visited museum. While museums can remain relevant into the digital age, visitors and their relationship to the museum is evolving. Both traditional art institutions and digitally-focused contemporary arts organizations have a responsibility to use online audience-building tools in order to create new ways in which to enrich the visitor experience, and for to present the work of artists who are leveraging technology in their creative practice.

While museums can remain relevant into the digital age, visitors and their relationship to the museum is evolving. Both traditional art institutions and digitally-focused contemporary arts organizations have a responsibility to use online audience-building tools in order to create new ways in which to enrich the visitor experience, and for to present the work of artists who are leveraging technology in their creative practice.

25 National Endowment for the Arts, Audience 2.0: How Technology Influences Arts Participation (Washington: National Endowment for the Arts, 2010).

26 Ibid.

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Figure 1: Ben F. Laposky, “Oscillons” #4 Ben Laposky’s “Oscillations” series includes this image generated with electronic equipment.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Sanford Museum

Figure 2: Corporate Culture and Digital Effectiveness (2016).

McKinsey Digital reesearch finds that cultural challenges, rather than a lack of understanding or dedicated funding, is the most significant barrier to digital effectiveness.

Photo Credit: McKinsey Digital

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Figure 3: The Met 360° Project: The Temple of Dendur, built around 15 B.C., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sackler Wing, still shot from 360° digital capture, Spring 2016.

The Met’s 360 Degree Project invites viewers to virtually experience the Temple of Dendur.

Photo Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, U.S.A. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

Figure 4: Tourists interacting with the Mona Lisa at the Louvre Museum in Paris, France is a reminder of todays digitally mediated visual culture.

Photo Credit: Niall Finn Lowrie

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About Us Anna Leckie ‘21 is an Art History major with a penchant for art law, singing, and dachshunds. In addition to working with Ink & Image, Anna is Co-President of the Fine Arts Society, the Department of Art History’s student organization. In the future Anna plans on attending law school but in the meanwhile she hopes to work in the art world.

She would like to thank her friends for supporting her throughout her time at NYU as well as her mentor Professor Matteini for his sage wisdom.

Niall Lowrie ‘22 is an Art History major with a minor in Studio Art focused on Renaissance artworks, especially drawings. His goal is to eventually attend grad school, in pursuit of a career in the museum industry. When not studying art you can find him spending time with his girlfriend Hannah, playing with his two dogs, or hitting the gym. He would like to thank his family and friends for their support throughout his three years at NYU. He would also like to thank Professors Geronimus and Smith for their advice and support on his upcoming honors thesis.

Ann Lukyanova ‘21 is an Art History major with a minor in Business Studies interested in the Contemporary Art World and the Art market. Her experience in art consulting allows her to support emerging artists in promoting their work and collaborating with tech developers. She plans on attending law school and attaining her appraiser license.

Marie Normand ‘21 is an Art History major with a minor in Chemistry and Studio Art. Her interests lie in technical art history and conservation, and is an aspiring textile conservator. Marie aims to one day have her own gallery space in New York City and exhibit her own work. She is presently completing her senior honors thesis on the imagery of Black children in Italian Renaissance portraiture, and would like to thank Professor Geronimus for his expertise and guidance.

Clara Reed ‘21 is an Art History and Photography double major, minoring in Hellenic Studies. She is interested in conceptual and performance art that investigate dynamics of power and space. While studying the history of art, she also is a working artist, creating work that explores the female experience and notions of desire. She would like to thank Professor Shelley Rice for her wonderful storytelling and guidance these past four years.

Sang “Sunnie” Zhang ‘21 is an Art History and Psychology double major. She is interested in contemporary art, folk art and the global art market. She enjoys attending cross-disciplinary shows especially performing arts with fine

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Ink and Image Department of Art History New York University Edition 13, Spring 2021