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Review Essay by Published in Visual Resources, Vol. XVII, pp. 323-340. 2001.
Were a browsing bibliophile to encounter the three titles of this review on the remaindered table of a local bookstore, no doubt they would appear not to have any discernable relationship to each other. Indeed, how might a children's fantasy about a little girl who climbs within the Mona Lisa's frame and takes her for a tour within the great paintings hanging in the gallery be related to a collection of celebrity portraits built mosaic-like out of a matrix of small images 末 an effect achieved by a process by which image-laden picture-elements serve as erstwhile pixels of a much larger image. What do either of these two titles have to do with a survey of the history and significance of the Chinese fireworks industry written to contextualize a collection of labels removed from unexploded fireworks packs. None of the normal tools we use to compare such works for review prove helpful to elucidate this choice. They are not about the same subject and one finds no stylistic threads connecting these titles. Thus, in James Mayhew's, Katie and the Mona Lisa, to speak of them stylistically, the illustrations are rooted in the simplified naturalistic mode familiar to children and parents the world over. One thinks immediately of images by Robert McCloskey or even Arnold Lobel. Mayhew's visual wit at times even owes a bit to the wonderfully inventive crayon images by Disney animator Bill Peet, but comes out somewhat more sober and less whimsical. Nor does Mayhew's style in this series broadcast itself in the mode of modern departures from the customary ways of illustrating contemporary children's narrative. The style is not self-referential like Maurice Sendak's and owes nothing to the fashion for decorative narrative abstraction found in some contemporary illustrations for children, such as those by Leo Leoni. And yet, despite its debt to the school of children's naturalism, the style is sufficiently evocative of the manners of the paintings that form the subject of this book as to condone transgressions from its naturalistic norm. Its playful adaptations of historical styles tend to contrast its ordinary narrative subjects to the stylistic ambiance of those paintings from which the book's narrative is constructed. In the second book, highlighting a selection Robert Silver's digitized celebrity portraits, of course, there is no narrative at all. Rather, the viewer is asked to enjoy the "magic" of the author's digital mosaic technique, and, at the same time is invited to play the iconographical game of figuring out how the images of the figurative mosaic tesserae (the component images) link to the subject of the portrait (the big picture). Yet, here, too, the style is adaptive; it begins with the styles inherited from underlying imagery, and ends in the pixelized (painterly) effect imposed by the technique. In the third title, on fireworks, it is clear that the ostensible purpose of the book is to present these interesting under-appreciated labels as art and to erect a scaffold better to appreciate the historical and technical context of their invention, use and manufacture. This mission is made all the more interesting because these designs were invented naively to promote commercial success and to delight an audience with colorful catchy ephemeral images. The adaptation and use of Chinese traditional styles throws the western viewer slightly off balance, unused as he or she might be to looking at commercial art of the Orient. Our fascination increases when we realize that we are looking at a product that consumes its art at the very moment it is used. Here is a label art that from its beginning looks forward to the recent fashion for "self-destructive" works. In this way, these slips of paper epitomize, as perhaps has never been done before, the ultimate meaning of ephemera. Were the reader to surmise that there might be a connection binding their respective audiences, here, too, he would be wrong. It is clear that Katie's escapade with the Mona Lisa is written for pre-school children (or for parents who wish to acquaint their children with works of traditional renown), while the intended audience of Robert Silvers' book of so-called "photomosaics" appeals to those who enjoy being astounded by the bravura of the surprisingly revealed image, who relish optical illusions, or to those for whom the presentation of celebrity images need no further rationale. These portraits rely on a clever gimmick, one that closely recalls a wall-mural (not by Silvers) situated in Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not museum in Orlando, Florida. The Ripley's work replicates a famous Van Gogh self-portrait by building it out of hundreds of postcards of the artist's paintings. [n01] These studies appeal to those who enjoy being transported by virtuoso technique and by the magic of illusion. They join those who marvel at the magical images of artists like Giuseppe Arcimboldo or M. C. Escher and who are astonished when they see the image of the Virgin Mary in rust stains. Firecrackers: The Art & History, by Warren Dotz, Jack Mingo, and George Moyer, on the other hand, is a study. Of the three volumes cited here, it alone is an attempt to present materials never properly collected and presented, and to offer them to a broad and popular audience as well as to specialists in ephemera. This volume has been crafted by a team composed of a writer, a researcher, a collector and a publisher. Its admitted purpose is to display the extensive collection of labels assembled by George Moyer, with the hope that the "synergy of talents" of this select group would produce a valuable addition to our knowledge of popular culture and its artifacts. It does. Interestingly, the choice of a publisher was considered just as significant as the choice of any other team member. All things considered, it would seem that there is no ostensible reason for combining these three works into a single review. And yet, from the perspective of reviewing these volumes for this journal -- for Visual Resources -- which specializes in discussing the way images are collected and used to document our heritage and our culture, this writer, at least, finds a tie that binds these volumes into a cohesive unit, unlikely as that might at first appear. In their own way, each of these three volumes casts its own light on the way icons of our visual culture and visual heritage are transformed by the process of presenting them in social, commercial and adaptive contexts. Further, each volume uses the cultural and iconic tradition to which it is specifically addressed to show that its images are transformative, that they reveal something new, something that has not yet been revealed. It is most curious, perhaps, that Firecrackers exists at all. If these labels were just ordinary unaesthetic ephemera 末 old cash register receipts, for instance 末 they would never have been published. This book exists because someone took aesthetic pleasure in these works, and made an effort to collect, preserve and comprehend the worth of these cheap, crudely produced images. At once emblems of manufacture (trademarks) and symbolic presences 末 these labels, of course, serve to identify products, but these are products, that, as the authors note, would be entirely indistinguishable from similar items created by other factories were it not for the singularity of the label. The labels, therefore, had to be sufficiently identifiable, attractive and meaningful to induce previous customers to repurchase the same brand 末 quite a task when the time-span between purchases could easily be an entire year. In short, one might say that the label makes the product. In a very contemporary way, these simple images look forward to the current trend of making brand identification the surrogate for item identification. If fireworks yield the most ephemeral of pleasures, the history of the West's fascination with Chinese fireworks is enduring, as the book makes quite clear by quoting Marco Polo's description of them on its cover. [n02]
While Firecrackers is, on its face, a survey of the phenomenon of ornamental and ritual explosives in society 末 covering their use worldwide 末 its primary function is to present and explain the varied arts and iconographies of the fireworks label of Chinese manufacture. This is a book of interest to both the historian of the art of popular culture and to the collector of ephemera, since it contains sections on collecting labels and a guide to their rarity. It does not tell the whole story, however; it contains no information on fireworks as theater. and nothing on their use in choreographed displays, now-a-days mounted by expert firms such as the Grucci on Long Island in New York. The use of fireworks as theater and national display and prowess has a formidable history that must date back (if not earlier) to eighteenth-century European celebrations, such as the one memorialized in Handel's 1749 "Music for the Royal Fireworks." But, while the theme of this book covers fireworks world-wide, it is actually limited to those products of Chinese manufacture and their associated ritual uses by common people. Seen as a group, the garish brightly colored labels of fireworks manufactured in China, Hong Kong and Macao are oddly attractive in their drawings and in the application of primitive lithographic techniques. As export items, their style and iconography came to be influenced by Western ideals and by imagery that soon was to manifest as unavoidable but unlikely fusions of Oriental and Western styles, epitomized perhaps by the terse safety warning commonly found on firecracker packages: lay on ground light fuse retire quickly Ritually used in China to ward off evil spirits, fireworks labels originally imbedded images of friendly and protective creatures culled from the Chinese symbolic menagerie, but as the Western market grew, themes taken from the popular imagery of Western culture soon came to be used in marketing. Accordingly, the iconography changed from that of protection to themes of power and dominance 末 Tarzan, Pirates, Rockets, Satellites, Nuclear explosions, Race cars, Boxing, Baseball, Bullfighting, and War 末 to name just a few of the subjects that were intended to arouse thinly romanticized visions of supremacy. Part of the uncanny fascination with the images that adorn these packages comes from watching the way the logic of artistic influence infiltrates diverse cultures 末 where partial familiarity with the visual culture of one way of life, for commercial purpose, immiscably fuses with that of another. Thus, on one label, Tarzan wields a knife of certain oriental manufacture, or, to cite another example, the traditionally protective Chinese dragon somehow transmigrates itself into a Raphaelesque scene of St. George slaying the dragon. Similarly, fireworks labels may project racial insensitivities that are not comprehended or communicated across cultures. Thus as late as the 1960s, labels manufactured and designed in China, Hong Kong and Macao for distribution in the United States unabashedly caricatured Afro-American Blacks, perpetuating familiar forms of long-standing American derogatory stereotypes. In this way the theme of superiority is carried forth. The importance of these labels lies not merely in their attractive coloration and unsophisticated imagery, but in the way they replicate and perpetuate rudimentary cultural values. By virtue of their guaranteed short life, artists and designers felt no obligation to create labels of profound, lasting or cultural importance. As a result, rather unconsciously they unearthed deeply-held core convictions. On occasion they created images that tended to promulgate the ugly side of nationalism and without shame exposed blatant racism. By inventing labels for American consumption, unwittingly these artists projected their own views of the America in which they sought markets. In this way, in this simple art, select images of iconic significance perpetuate stereotypes that are carried forward on the back of commercial necessity. The use of fireworks to accompany the celebration of national ritual helps pass on images and the ideas they signify to the children who delight in their destructive and deafening power. Katie and the Mona Lisa is the latest in a series of pre-school books by author-artist James Mayhew. The series also includes Katie's Picture Show, and Katie Meets the Impressionists. The purpose of our story, of course, is to provide children with a way to enjoy Renaissance painting by building a fictional narrative in which these works play a vital role. Katie's fantastic excursion therefore is the author's way of animating several key Renaissance paintings by linking them to a child's interests. Not a naive writer, Mayhew weaves his story from threads taken out of the venerable canvas of Western literature, but sews some surprising twists into his fabric to keep the parents alert. As in the earlier volumes, Katie visits the Placing the entire story in the space of Grandmother's nap invokes the use of a traditional literary device, indeed, one found so frequently, that it has become a fixture of world fiction, both ancient and modern. The Romance of the Rose, Dante's Divine Comedy and the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, are just several examples of quests and adventures that commence with sleep and take place as if within a dream. Peter Pan ("close your eyes, snap your fingers and fly") and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are examples for children. [n03] In the preceding story, when Katie visited the Impressionists, she closes her eyes, and opens them to find herself within canvasses that have suddenly come alive and vibrate with activity. Katie is transported into a Renoir just as the Renoir becomes life-like. Mayhew uses the same device in this Mona Lisa story. Sleep, of course, is just one of several literary portals writers use to allow their actors to pass from reality into the world of imagination and dream. It is not uncommon for these stories to ask their protagonists to pass through one contrivance or another (such as the wardrobe in C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe), through tree trunks, rabbit holes, or even through the base of grandfather clocks, as in the secret passage that Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson take to enter the Bat Cave from their sedate mansion 末 the entry to their comic-book world of unreal imagined adventure. These literary devices serve as the frame or the parenthesis that envelope the fantastic and keeps it separate from the real. What makes James Mayhew's use of the device so clever in this Katie story is that it is not Katie who falls asleep, but the grandmother. In this way Grandma's nap frees Katie from parental propriety, and gives her literary leave to enter her invented world of childhood make-believe. Once sleep commences, the several worlds within the real frames of the gallery pictures become products of imagination and make-believe 末 metaphors for what might be or might have been. In most literature of this sort, dreaming frees the adult; but, here it is the child who is released to be her childlike self. For Katie this happens in, of all places, a museum 末 the last real-world place that would allow anyone to exercise such a freedom. [n04] Sleep and dream prepare us for the device of passing into the fictive space of pictures. They allow the world behind the frame to become alive and animated. As already mentioned, this boundary between worlds permits protagonists to exit their commonplace world of rational existence and enter the fictive worlds of fear and desire. There are so many examples in this genre that I am tempted to mention only some of the more peculiar variants. Thus, in the Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde gives the device an ironic reversal. It is the portrait that contains the real Dorian Gray while the flesh and blood version is the fiction. Lewis Carroll, in Through the Looking Glass, uses the metaphor of a mirror (reality behind a frame) to invert the real world and turn it into the path leading into the topsy-turvy world of Alice's adventure. In a well-known story called "The Mezzotint," by medievalist and ghost-story writer M. R. James, curious events of past history are magically reenacted by figures moving within a framed graphic. In his plans for the Eucharist Tapestries commissioned for the Descalzas Reales near Madrid, Peter Paul Rubens plays on the intersecting realities of real and fictive spaces, the spaces and planes bearing images of Old and New Testament events. Rubens' illusionistic enframements create a Counter-Reformation pictorial metaphor that is perceived as real, better to represent the truth of the miracle of the Eucharist. Rubens slyly makes the observer intermix reality and representation. Recently, Robin Williams starred in a film that serves as a good example of how the metaphors of sleep and pictorial art can meld to foster the creation of a fictive world. In the beautifully produced, but mercilessly syrupy and formulaic What Dreams May Come (1998), Williams (as Chris Nelson) dies in a car-crash and wakes to find himself stuck inside a half-way world between earth and heaven. Under the tutelage of a guide he learns that to pass out of this realm, he must purposefully decide to leave, which he does when he realizes that his half-sensed presence only torments his still-loving and beloved wife. That is when he falls asleep, and awakes to find himself within a heavenly romantic landscape of glorious proportions and dramatic vistas, which he immediately discovers is a confection of thick paint. Indeed, he is within a painting, and it turns out that he is within one of his favorite paintings 末 his own vision of heaven 末 in a painting created by his painter, museum-worker wife. The movie has been criticized for its thick and soupy sentimentality and for its routine adaptation of one mythic story after another, so we won't dwell on it for long, except to say that in its predictability it serves well to epitomize the genre. It can be no accident of narrative writing, therefore, that the car-crash that killed Chris Nelson takes place in a tunnel 末 the first of several portals through which he must pass to achieve his imagined heaven. [n05]
Mayhew's book is fascinating from a pictorial point of view. Its illustrations are created with a combination of watercolor and colored pencil. The opening scene inside the museum gallery employs a da Vinci-like brownish cross-hatching that creates shadow and depth. But, the narrative in each scene mimics (without being slavish) the style of the current painting 末 and yet fits comfortably within the stylistic conventions of children's book art. As a result, the adventure unfolds on a mutable stage that evokes the style of whatever image is current 末 in much the same way as the scenography of What Dreams May Come flows from Chris Nelson's wife's painting, as manifest in his own mind. In this book, several key monuments of the history of Renaissance art become the basis for the creation of Katie's imaginary world. This imaginary world demonstrates to children, but with equal importance, also to adults, that the life of the four-sided images of the history of art extends beyond their mitered dominions and flows through our subconscious imaginations. In so doing it provides a manufactured but convincing context for the humanization of the spirit of this erstwhile Mona Lisa 末 in the process revitalizing an icon that lives frozen in so many minds. While Robert Silvers' images individually might be the most intriguing of those reviewed here, when viewed as the collection published under the title, Photomosaic Portraits, unfortunately, they are the least satisfying. The "photomosaic" technique that the author invented while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology consists of analyzing hundreds or thousands of pre-selected images and arranging them like tesserae stones or pixels to form a recognizable portrait subject. The public's fascination with the results is easy enough to comprehend and is well certified by the numerous commercial contracts the author has received for creating "photomosaic" portraits of celebrities and other well known people. The author's introduction happily recounts these commissions. [n07] One cannot deny that there is a fascination that springs from the pictorial interplay of these images. At one moment they depict one object, and, then, in the blink of the eye another image is revealed. Suddenly what one perceives as a wall of little images is transformed into abstract picture elements that fuse to form a cohesive coherent whole. The effect is not unlike what happens in "trick" drawings that at one moment appear to represent one object and at another represent something entirely different. The paintings of Arcimboldo, figural optical illusions, such as the famous image of a woman seated at her vanity that magically metamorphoses into a human skull, the age-old symbol of vanity, are familiar examples of this genre.
In Art and Illusion, Ernst Gombrich discusses this phenomenon as applied to a simple drawing of a rabbit that seems to turn into an image of a duck. The image is easily understood as either a duck or a rabbit. [n09] Harder to understand is what happens to human perception in the process of this transformation. At no time is the figure neither rabbit nor duck, and at no time is it both at once. The same may be said for Robert Silvers' figures. We may choose to see a matrix of component pictures, but by so doing we cannot take in the portrait, and vice versa. It is the breakdown of our natural desire to see representation that makes the image portraits so intriguing, but once accustomed to the trick and used to the scintillating discomfort of transformation, the only thing left in these portraits is the voyeuristic delight in watching celebrity or brand images materialize before our eyes. Even though the individual pixel images may have some interest in themselves, watching them in enlargement (as shown in this book) appeals more to our frenetic desire for instant change, our love of multiplicity and to our fear of emptiness, our horror vacui. Indeed, the dynamic flow in which the observer moves from a busy planar design to images filled with space and light creates an entertaining dialogue between distinct contrasting modes of representation. The above notwithstanding, there is an unfortunate predictability in the selection of images used to build these portraits. For instance, the image of distiller Jack Daniel is composed of photographs culled from the archives of Brown and Foreman, the company that owns the brand name of this popular bourbon. Similarly, the portrait of George Eastman is fabricated from uncropped historical images selected from the collection of the George Eastman house. Most of the images in the volume have been commissioned to serve commercial missions 末 advertising and publicity. It is understandable, therefore, that the selection of subjects has been (must be) limited to those that support these purposes. In this book there is little or no effort to use images ironically; yet, there are a few that seem to stand out by virtue of the force of their presence. One of these is the portrait of Babe Ruth constructed from baseball cards. In the Babe Ruth the typical relation between the overall image and the component images is reversed. Ruth is not the dominant image, but recedes behind a screen of the colorful vibrant patterns of baseball cards. It seems as if a heavy texture has been imposed over the familiar face, turning that face into an icon that vaporizes into a ghostly watermark. The portrait of model Claudia Schiffer is made up of thousands of images of cosmetic preparations and body lotions, producing an unexpectedly creamy softness that belies the rectangularity of the grid that serves as the pictorial foundation. On occasion we meet well known images of great social significance 末 images that society has invested with profound meanings 末 such as Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother." In this case, the matrix that replicates this icon of American history is built out of depression-era photographs commissioned for the Farm Security Administration in California. But, here, the result falls flat. At once it makes Lange's photo seem inconsequential and vapid, while it turns the FSA photos into unimportant genre pieces. The portrait of Marilyn Monroe is composed of (what else) Playboy magazine covers, taking advantage of the peek-a-boo titillations that flow from the possibilities of surprise inherent in Silvers' process. Celebrities march across these pages one after another. Jerry Seinfeld, Nolan Ryan, Tim Berners-Lee, Jim Carrey, and so on, and in nearly each case we are told who commissioned the work and from whence the images derive. But, in the end, the viewer is left cold and unenlightened, since nowhere is there an attempt to comprehend the nature of the phenomenon or to discuss the genesis of the technique in anything but technical and commercial terms. Thus, in no place is there a discussion of pointillism and the influence of Seurat, of the potential influence of the portraits of Chuck Close, or of the physiology and psychology of vision and cognition that makes these efforts compelling. It would have been interesting to read an analysis of why this technique is admired by corporations and personalities, but no analysis is offered, even though, in interviews and in other sources the artist shows that he is aware of some of these precedents and issues. One imagines that commissioning Mr. Silvers to create these composites might have become a fad in celebrity circles, for they certainly draw one's eyes to the image 末 a wish fulfillment for anyone who has achieved or wishes to achieve celebrity status and to attract notice. One suspects that for some reason those who need these portraits have come to mistake the minions of images for conveyers of meaning, and that meaning somehow automatically flows in the wake of the selection of associated pictures. Subscribing to the doctrine that "too much is not enough," leaves one hungry for portraits of truly profound import where frequently the truth of "less is more," rings out. In these works under review the participation of the viewer is both prescribed and limited. It is doubtful that Robert Silvers' portraits would exist were it not for the precedent of Andy Warhol, who showed that the replication of images and the process of image building has aesthetic significance, and who knew instinctively that it is the media that creates celebrity. But, rendered in digital precision, for the most part, the parade of personalities in this volume seems humorless, trite, and predictable. Instead of revealing personality and humanity, this technique tends to obfuscate it. Indeed, that may be its purpose. Icons of celebrity must control and freeze human nature into repeatable recognizable formats. These works qualify as "appropriation" art, where the artist is not, himself, necessarily responsible for the creation of any single component of the image. Neither the overall photo nor any of the individual images from which the whole is built is necessarily the copyrightable work of the artist. Silvers' contribution 末 as with so many appropriation artists 末 consists of the selection and arrangement of components. His is a copyright of compilation. For this reason rights management in the production of his works assumes a degree of importance not found in works by other artists. The search for cleared images certainly must have drawn the artist toward commercial projects where the rights to the component images were freely available. In spite of the effect of the regimen of commerce, there are hints that the author has greater imagination than he dares show us in this volume. For himself, as he notes in the foreword, he created an image of the Mona Lisa from photographs of plumbing fixtures. I haven't seen this work, but immediately it conjures up Dada visions of a Marcel Duchamp run amuck, or, perhaps, even an arcane reference to the notion that in the Mona Lisa Leonardo demonstrated his theories of liquids flowing through nature.[n10] At its best, the plumbing-fixture Mona, may serve as an ironic commentary on the very process of image-making that Silvers seems to mine so well for commercial gain. Probably not considered appropriate for Photomosaic Portraits is the Mona Lisa that Silvers has turned into a jig-saw puzzle. It is germane to the current topic because this subject, too, no doubt was chosen for its celebrity status. Because Mona is instantly recognizable, she is not only immune to the synthetic effect of the mosaic process, but also to the deconstructive force of puzzle-making. As a puzzle, the significance of the image takes on a new hew, for it asks the observer to become a builder, and thus intimately engages the puzzle builder in the creative process, which, ultimately, is the key to understanding the meaning and attraction of Silvers' technology. Cultural icons share one significant trait: They are immediately identifiable symbolic signs 末 emblems that connote their own meaning with a rudimentary visual language. This does not mean that all such emblems are simplistic or simplified like traffic signs, but that they share an ability to be understood and recognized quickly. The printed fireworks labels, the Mona Lisa in any permutation of form, and the repeating image of celebrity, all qualify. However, the volumes reviewed here each do more. As a group, they approach the question of what to do with cultural icons and the stereotypes from which they are born, but, individually, their methods and subjects differ. Silvers has taken on the task of depicting celebrity, of perpetuating and defining its iconic status. Mayhew starts with an image that has already achieved its celebrity, and that achieved it so long ago that it is difficult for many people to understand why the Mona Lisa is famous. Mayhew must break through the conventions of fame. His task is to reinvest the Mona Lisa with meaning and to provide a pulse to an image that is quickly becoming culturally and visually paralyzed. It is testimony to the power of the folk tradition built around the Mona Lisa that Mayhew feels free to bathe Leonardo's masterwork in fantasy rather than to heel to the historical and art-historical persona. The book on fireworks offers yet another twist. In their effort to make a market for Chinese fireworks, the labels (as we have seen) adopt Western cultural icons and adapt them to the business of commercial distribution. It is curiously entertaining to see the images we have created to define ourselves be returned to us distorted as seen through the looking-glass of another culture 末 to see them offered back as images of ourselves. Do we recognize them? Captions for illustrations: [go to top]
Notes: [go to top] [1] The Ripley's "Van Gogh" may be seen in a poor illustration at this URL: http://www.studiolo.org/Mona/MONA20.htm It is a 26 x 20 foot mural illustrating Van Gogh's 1888 "Self Portrait in Front of an Easel." The entire mural is made from 3,000 postcards, intermixing images of 115 works by the artist. Communication with Runaway Technology, Robert Silvers' graphic arts firm, verifies that the Ripley's Van Gogh is not his work. [text] [2] The labels from firecrackers and fireworks have been the objects of ephemera collectors for some time. It is not clear when their aesthetic significance was discovered. See, further: Maurice Rickards. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera. Routledge, New York, 2000. (Copyright by The Centre for Ephemera Studies, The University of Reading, Great Britain.), p. 143. 末 Marco Polo: "They burn with such a dreadful noise they can be heard for ten miles at night. Anyone who is not used to it could die, hence the ears are stuffed with cotton and clothes drawn over the head ... for it is the most terrible thing in the world to hear for the first time." [text] [3] As soon as Alice falls asleep, the story begins with a trip down the rabbit-hole: "...the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid. ... when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her..." [text] [4] The ideal locale for stories of freedom is in a place of strict rules. There is a genre of children's literature in which adventures take place in museums. Typically, museum rules are breached in these works. For example, in E. L. Konigsberg 1967 classic, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, to teach their parents a lesson, two children, brother and sister, run away to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, successfully hiding at night and blending in during the day. In the process they become involved in a mystery concerning a newly acquired sculpture of an angel attributed to Michelangelo. [text] [5] See Stephen Holden's review in the New York Times. October 2, 1998. (http://www.nytimes.com/library/film/archivemain.html) Other works that use the device of passing into the illusionistic space of images include Marguerite Yourcenar's story "How Wang-Fo was Saved," the film version of Mary Poppins, and the Coen Brothers' film Barton Fink. [text] [6] Unfortunately, the story ends with a double negative editing error that only serves to confuse the reader. To Grandma, Katie says: "I found out all about Mona Lisa's smile! But I can't say you wouldn't believe me." The meaning suggests that the correct rendition should read as follows: "But I can't say you would believe me." (Bold added.) [Addendum 6/10/03: A letter of 6/9/03 from reader Joy Ralph (cithra@zipcon.net) occasioned a reexamination of the text. Ms. Ralph suggested that there may have been another kind of editing error that caused the confusion, and proposed that the crucial sentence be rendered as follows: "But I can't say -- you wouldn't believe me." In fact some blame in this must be placed on the current author, who omitted a comma where Ms. Ralph would place a double-m dash. Even so, the sentence, to this writer's ears, appears opaque and awkward. The foregoing review relied upon the second paperback edition of 1999, which presumably replicates the 1998 hardback edition. Turning to the first American edition (1999) we discover that the meaning of the sentence was clarified. As before, Katie says to grandma: "I found out all about Mona Lisa's smile!" But the next sentence was rewritten: "But I can't tell you, because you wouldn't believe me." The sense is now correct. Is it possible that the original version used a British idiomatic locution, somewhat unintelligible to American ears? In any case, young readers are left to decide if the truth they know they know can be shared with incredulous adults. [text] [7] Robert Silvers' graphics firm, Runaway Technologies, Inc. has posted a number of his images on its web-site, which sells posters and puzzles based on his designs: http://www.photomosaic.com. [text] [8] http://www.omnimag.com/archives/chats/em122997.html [text] [9] E.H. Gombrich. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (The A.W.Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1956, Bollingen Series XXXV-5), Princeton University Press, 1961, p. 5. [text] [10] The work displayed at the following URL might be the Mona Lisa composed of plumbing fixtures, but it cannot be enlarged enough to verify: http://www.fabienfryns.com/ml.html On the Mona Lisa and Leonardo's theory of the flow of liquids in the earth, see Stephen Jay Gould, "The Upwardly Mobile Fossils of Leonardo's Living Earth," in Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms Essays on Natural History, Harmony Books, New York. 1998. [text] |
