On a Very Strange Book

　

　

　

At the Chicago Institute of Art, the gift shop at the main entry is crammed with scarves, framed reproductions, coffee cups imprinted with iconic images by Van Gogh or Rembrandt, knick-knacks of various kinds, bookmarks, shawls, racks of post-cards, and stacks of exhibition catalogues for whatever show is featured in the museum. Books are not much in evidence and, indeed, the bibliophile must walk to the rear of the store and, then, take a hard left to reach an alcove companionably lined with volumes for sale. Gift shops are a major source of revenue for museums of all stripe and, now, they mostly offer pretty objects for sale – books are compact and easily displayed but, apparently, not very popular. In Chicago, at least, you have to hike to find the books and, then, the selection is a little less impressive than the scope and majesty of the museum warrants.

One author whose books are always on offer at the Chicago museum is James Elkins, a professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago. I have purchased several of Elkins’ book when visiting the museum and enjoy his writing. Elkins is a garrulous and unpretentious writer – in keeping with Art Institute that he serves, his work is egalitarian and, often, invokes common sense. His orientation toward art is directed toward a sensitive reading of how the work of art affects viewers. In this regard, he is apt to take his own responses as a metric of the work’s importance or meaning. I gather from his writing that he teaches studio courses – the Art Institute has always been very "hands-on" – and his educated response to his student’s work, I suppose, informs their development as artists.

One of his books, Pictures and Tears is about paintings that have literally moved people to tears. It’s a fascinating book. In one passage, a Western art critic goes to a show in Tokyo featuring a single ancient picture, a panel of wood on which there is painted a silvery thread of a waterfall plunging from cliffs in a pine forest. The art critic observes everyone in the gallery is silently weeping. When the critic asks about this reaction, he is told that the painting is a Shinto object of veneration – the painting is not about a divinity in nature, that is, not about a waterfall, although the image does represent a real cascade; rather, the bemused art critic is assured that the painting itself is the God. There are many other interesting anecdotes about people weeping in the presence of art and, characteristically for Elkins, the book ends with the rather dispiriting notion that the audience least likely to shed tears in the presence of a great art work is one comprised of professional art historians and critics.

Elkins’ advice is generally that one should approach art from a warmly generous phenomonological perspective – that is, we should first ask ourselves when looking at a painting how the picture acts upon us. What emotions does the painting elicit? What feelings do we have in the presence of the work of art? Then, we may, perhaps, seek to ascertain the technical basis for those emotions. Only after we have honestly assessed our reaction to the painting and, then, assessed how the picture’s technical execution has created these reactions, do we consider the subject matter of the image Elkins interest in iconography and the history (and transmission) of images is minimal.

This approach to art has much to recommend it – it makes us all critics of a kind. But we can also be mislead profoundly about a picture’s meaning if we defer too long an assessment of its iconography. Generally, knowing what a picture is about, and the occasion or economic setting in which it was created, are also important to understanding art. Thus, there are weaknesses in Elkins’ chatty and pragmatic approach to art criticism. These weaknesses, as well as some of the strengths in Elkins’ methodology are evident in his new book What Heaven Looks Like: Comments on a Strange Worless Book (2017).

In What Heaven Looks Like, Elkins provides commentary on 52 images painted in water-color in a slender mildew-colored book identified as MS Ferguson 115 at the University of Glasgow. The images in the book are circular and they vary from 11 to 13 centimeters in diameter. (Elkins’ volume reproduced all pictures at a uniform size of 12 centimenters.) The volume is wordless except for a flourish of Latin calligraphy on the title page. Elkins translates those words as Opera (work) of Natural Magic in which the Miracles of Pneumo-cosmic Nature are Painted with a Brush. Fully engraved by an Ape of Nature, following Nature’s universal Catholic Prototype, and dedicated to the eternal memory of the King.

The pictures in the book are peculiar. In the majority of the images, the edges of the circular pictorial field are dark and annular. In many instances, the annular rings around the edge of the picture are painted as worm-like snakes – the snake-worms are abstract and, often, just daubs of dark paint. Generally, the center of the picture represents a kind of clearing where there appears to be enough light to dimly display either figures or landscapes or peculiar creatures inhabiting hazy landscapes. The images are not exactly impressionistic – rather, they are stylized and seem to be viewed through a lense of murky fluid of some kind or possibly through a fog of fumes. Elkins’ believes that he can descry sequences among the paintings. I am agnostic on that point. Some of the circular pictures are almost entirely abstract – the brownish green annular rings enclose glowing voids where perhaps a bevy of clouds shines radiantly. Some of the pictures are so dark that it is hard to detect their subject matter although close study shows that the gloom is swarming with tiny figures, little creatures falling or rising on columns of dark vapor. The anthropomorphic figures are mostly faceless – we see a turban and, maybe, an eye like a egg staring out at us, but he rest of the face is buried in shadow. Images of dragons or lambs are sometimes pulled like taffy to comprise annular rings themselves.

My description of three of the pictures, taken more or less at random, will have to suffice to provide the reader with a sense of the book’s elegant strangeness. In the first picture, the color scheme is either dark-reddish brown along the edges of the round frame with similarly dark strokes radiating away from a bubble-shaped yellow-brown center. In the lighter center of the picture, we can see sepia images of two men dressed in elaborate, somewhat theatrical oriental costumes – the men look a bit like some of the Asian magi that we see in Tiepolo’s engravings: the men stand side-by-side wearing turbans and elaborate sashes and one of them leans operatically on a staff. The features comprising the two Magi’s faces can not be discerned. In the second painting, we are looking into a circular shaft full of fluid from which limpid-looking bubbles are rising. The annular rings around the edge of the painting are clotted with swarms of dark, fat worms or daubs of paint that the artist (who likes to limn snakes and worms) would have us construe as worms. The dark, turd-colored vortex has an unpleasant blue center were little larva-like tadpoles seem to swim. The center of the image looks like an eye damaged by cataracts. In the third painting, the color scheme is again uremic and brown: a graceful faceless figure, shown as a pale cloud against a dark cloak of brown pigment seems to point her feature head down toward a blob lying on the curved bottom of the round disk. The blob is hard to see, but could be a giant toad, about the size of a good-sized lamb, turned over on its back – the creature shows an eye and a pale belly, but doesn’t seem to have any limbs. To the right of the supine toad, a column of fumes seems to coalesce as it rises and curves to ring the right side of the picture. Where the brown smoke column seems most congested with can see a face like a teddy bear and single arm raised in a sort of Fascist salute. (Elkins calls this figure "a Panda person.")

The most notable aspect of these pictures is that the images are almost never clearly delineated. Rather, they are pareidolic –that is, many of the forms are abstract: the eye and mind, working to make meaning from them, shapes these cloudy blurs into figures. The effect is like looking at clouds drifting across a blue sky – our imaginations find profiles, mythical beasts, and palaces in the white smudges moving from horizon to horizon; the images, themselves, are comprised of shifting, uncertain smudgles and daubs – it’s our imagination that crafts them into pictures. Think of the way that a scramble of shadow and light glimpsed in a dark corridor might suddenly seem to be a menacing figure or a beast crouched to spring upon us. At least half of the images suggested by the round paintings in the Glasgow book have this character – they are smudges that we can interpret as faces and forms.

This recognition leads us to the strangest aspect of the book. Quite clearly, the unknown artist examined cross-sections of logs, seeking inspiration in the patterns of annular rings, knots, and cracks in the wood. The pareidolic imagery seems to be derived from naturally existing marks on the cross-sections of these logs, all of them apparently cut to a uniform size most likely to supply fuel for a fire of some kind. In several of the pictures, divinities seem to wield white lightning bolts. These bolts are self-evidently suggested by cracks in the section of wood. In other instances, knots or irregularities in the log cross-section seem to have inspired the artist to imagine those anomalies of the eyes of creatures looking in the wood’s grain. This feature intrinsic to the artwork is peculiar – I’ve never heard of another series of images so resolutely devoted to wresting pictures from vague naturally occurring Rorschach blots embedded in some substance. There are, of course, equivalents in some contemporary artist’s practice – for instance, Anselm Kiefer pours molten lead onto his canvases and uses blow-torches to harry the surface of his huge constructions; his processes, which he describes as "alchemical" in nature, lead to strange islets of char and clotted matter that can be imagined to represent human or bestial profiles or strange deities. But, so far as I know, the specific praxis used by the unknown Glasgow artist to create this manuscript is unique.

Elkins goes wrong, I think, by exercising his not inconsiderable imagination to surmise an artist and, then, draws conclusions from this imaginary artist that he sometimes seems to forget that he has created. For reasons not explained, Elkins posits that the book was created by an "irredeemably lonely" woman, a widow whose children live apart from her. This widow, Elkins thinks, is literate and has read Milton’s Paradise Lost: she was formerly pious but now no longer knows "what the stories in the Bible mean." Her work arises from close contemplation of sawn logs and she made the watercolors in the book when the renaissance had lost it’s authority, but before the Enlightenment – that is, during the Baroque period, probably around 1680. Elkins intuits these things from the book but never explains the basis for his speculation and, so, this biography of the unknown artist must be regarded as sheer fantasy. The question, of course, is whether this fantasy adds anything to our appreciation of the art or simply confounds understanding the images.

On this point, Elkins’ fantasy biography seems curiously irrelevant because wholly arbitrary. Elkins’ imagines the artist to be some sort of proto-log-lady. (The "log lady," readers will recall, is continuing character in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks – the woman appears always cradling a log which she imagines as uttering vatic prophecies to her. At first, a figure of mild comedy, a harmless eccentric, the log-lady morphs into a more pathetic figure, even tragic in dimension. And, in the second series, the log lady’s tragedy is accentuated by being conflated with the actress’ mortality: the woman playing the log lady was dying when Lynch filmed the second series and, in fact, perished before the show was aired – several episodes are dedicated to her and her obvious frailty (she’s bald and uses oxygen) contribute to the uncanny aspect of her appearances.) Elkins doesn’t give us any basis for his weird speculation – perhaps, he was watching the return to Twin Peaks like everyone else. But his speculations, which seem to have a trendy element of imputing "gender" to the images, are beside the point – he might as well ascribe the paintings to an escaped Haitian slave working in Boston or an Italian mortician dying from tertiary syphilis or an infinite variety of other characters. The fact of the matter is that we don’t know who made the images.

Further, Elkins’ analysis is complicated by errors in his brief text, mistakes relating to some oddly obvious factual matters. First, his translation of the Latin title to the book contains two "howlers" – he translates "catholical" for the world "chaotic" and "king" for "thing". (David Duncan, a hostile critic writing in the London Times Literary Supplement, points out these errors – they are embarrassing to Elkins but don’t really made much difference and don’t necessarily undercut most of his interpretations.) More problematically, he ignores watermark evidence on the paper comprising the book establishing that the volume was made sometime after 1750. On this point, Elkins’ error in dating the work also doesn’t seem to me to necessarily impeach his other conclusions about the work.

Duncan in his review next condemns Elkins for failing to tell his readers that the images in the book, representing "natural magic" (Opus Magiae Naturalis) are alchemical emblems. Duncan goes so far as to argue that the bizarre figures depicted in the circular panels are "conventional images", alchemical emblems that would have been immediately meaningful to "the self-elected elite" of natural magicians (proto-chemists). Duncan says that "the same images can be found in vast number of alchemical works produced "from the Middle Ages to the 18^th Century." The pictures don’t show us "patterns in a log but reactions in a flask."

Obviously, there is something about Glasgow manuscript MS Ferguson 115 that seduces commentators in grievous error. Duncan’s points are well made and helpful, but they are also quite obviously, more or less, wrong. I am convinced that Duncan is right that the book has something to do with alchemy. But there is equally no doubt that the book has a lot to do with pareidolia – that is, seeing things in the sawn cross-grains of firewood. Duncan is blind if he can’t see this aspect of the work just as Elkins blinds himself with his self-indulgent fantasy of an "irredeemably lonely" widow peering morosely into her augeries of cut firewood. Clearly, the book is related in some way to alchemy and, also, has as its program some sort of divination involving examining the annular grain and wood knots in sawn logs. There’s no reason why the book can’t have both aspects and Duncan, in his way, is just as wrong-headed as Elkins.

Duncan contends that the bizarre figures in the manuscript pictures are conventional "alchemical emblems" – the emblems look odd to us simply because we have forgotten this branch of pseudo-science and the peculiar notation that early "natural magicians" used to memorialize their work. This is partly true, but a review of published images from alchemical treatises demonstrates that Duncan is completely wrong when he claims that the images in the round pictures "can be found in a vast number of alchemical works". Here Duncan is running a bluff. He is assuming that his readers don’t have access to the extremely recondite tomes to which he makes reference and, so, can’t check his confident (over-confident, in fact) assertion.

But there is an excellent volume exactly on this subject, another extremely strange book, The Golden Game – Alchemical Engravings of the Seventeenth Century by Stanilas Klossowski de Rola (Thames and Hudson. 1988). Klossowski’s book contains 533 engravings illustrating leading alchemical treatises published between 1600 and 1682 (Jacob Boehme’s Theosophical Wercke). The sheer number of images in The Golden Game provide us with a basis to test Duncan’s assertion that "a vast number of alchemical works" contain pictures similar to those in Glasgow MS 115. The truth of the matter is that the majority of the images in MS 115 bear almost no resemblance to classical alchemical emblems. Although I am convinced that MS 115 is some kind of alchemical diary, the author certainly employs a very idiosyncratic vocabulary of pictures and the pareidolic aspects of the manuscript are wholly foreign to the rather crisp and heavily allegorical syntax of imagery used by the famous alchemists.

An aside about Stansilas Klossowski de Rola is in order. Klossowski, who was a fixture of the "swinging sixties" scene in London, famously associated with Mick Jagger and the Beatles, is the son of Pierre Klossowski. Pierre Klossowski is a Polish nobleman who wrote a number of highly influential books – he was based in Paris and an associate of Georges Bataille and Deleuze. (Klossowski is famous in French literature for his monograph on Nietzsche, another study, affectionately titled, Sade, my Neighbor, a bizarre text about the Knights Templar (The Baphomet) and three erotic novels generally called Roberte ce soir.) Recently, the elder Klossowski, now long dead, has had a number of gallery shows of his pornographic paintings, mostly illustrations for Roberte ce soir. Pierre Klossowski is the younger brother of the artist known as Balthus. Balthus is notorious, of course, for his paintings of pre-pubescent girls – his work, some of it hanging now in the Louvre, would likely be considered an upscale version of child pornography today. Several of Balthus’ great paintings can be seen in this country including a very creepy and large image at the Museum of Modern Art called "The Street" and another huge canvas showing hikers near a ragged defile in the Alps -- I think it’s called "The Mountain" (Metropolitan Museum of Art). I mention these paintings because the work of the two Klossowski brothers seems, sometimes, to be allegorical – that is, the paintings are comprised of mysterious emblems. The Golden Game’s author, Stanislas Klossowski or "Stash" Klossowski, Pierre’s son, is still alive – you can see YouTube videos in which he holds forth. Elkins told me that he spoke with Stash Klossowski about alchemy – Klossowski was friendly and ended the conversation with a remark that he was going to study Ovid’s Metamophosis "in his octagonal room at his palace in Sri Lanka."

In any event, a quick survey of Klossowski’s compilation shows some features similar to MS Ferguson 115. The forty of so volumes that Klossowski surveys all have baroque and portentous titles that similar to the calligraphic inscription on 115. Generally, title pages, however, bear an engraving of the author or an elaborate allegorical emblem – 115 has an ornamental flourish inscribed on it’s first page but that is all. (The rather elaborate title to MS 115 suggests that, perhaps, the unknown author was using watercolors and pareidolic imagery to elaborate on an already existing volume and may have copied that text’s name – pure speculation, of course.) A number of the books in The Golden Game are wordless – indeed, one of them is called Mutus Liber (The Mute or Dumb Book). This feature is not surprising – alchemical manuals were intended for adepts; the power that they contained was hermetic and not to be disseminated beyond an elite group of researchers. Some alchemists may have thought it vulgar and, even, dangerous to publish manuals of chemical reactions as if they were recipes for cakes and sauces. (There is a good reason for such reticence – some of the reactions produce noxious or toxic fumes or may be explosive. Only adepts had the discipline to study natural magic without risk of harm to themselves and others.) Some of the books format their emblems in circular medallions. Indeed, at least one book shows the allegorical emblems – little sun and moon-headed Kings and Queens, crowned lions and snakes – within round alembic vessels. This would be consistent with Duncan’s assertion that the book shows "reactions in a flask" – although the volume that uses this convention, Mylius’ Anatomia Auri (1628) is very explicit in providing the reader with not only textual material but clearly delineated alchemical apparatus. Some figures shown in MS 115 appear in engravings in Klossowski’s book. From The Golden Game, I speculate that when MS 115 shows snakes or worms, the artist is portraying a process involving dissolution of a chemical in a fluid – "dissolved" substances are, often, represented by the worm Ouroboros or snakes. Dragons may represent noxious fumes – that is, potentially asphyxiating smoke and fumes. Some of the more abstract plates in MS 115, discs glowing with orange and yellowish light, probably represent the application of Calor, or the ardent energy of heat, to a substance. Several of MS 115's watercolors show oddly elongated lambs – these pictures seem to derive from representations of the "golden fleece" an emblem for the Philosopher’s Stone.

Klossowski’s arcana were all published in the 17^th century – that is between 1600 and 1700. One curious aspect of MS 115 is that the watermarked pages show that the manuscript was compiled after 1750. This factor itself suggests that we should be skeptical of Duncan’s easy explanation that the book is a conventional alchemical manual. By 1750, the Enlightenment was underway and the murky world of the alchemists, who were partly religious visionaries, partly chemists, and, often, confidence men, had faded into the past. Why would someone seek to reinvigorate alchemy when, in fact, natural scientists or philosophers had assumed authority over the field? This factor alone suggests that the meaning and intent of MS 115 is more complex than Duncan asserts – the book was made too late. It’s an account of a philosophical practice superseded by more modern science. On that basis, MS 115 seems even more hermetic, more idiosyncratic, than the volumes on which it seems to have been modeled – in a sense, the book seems to appropriate the imagery of alchemy for some other wholly different purpose.

The private, secretive aspect of the watercolor sequence is also manifest when Duncan’s claim that the imagery in MS 115 is comprised of standard alchemical emblems is considered. Alchemical handbooks in the 17^th century contain schematic human figures, often nude, and crowned. The figures carry swords or scales. Naked figures copulate – this is coagula: coming together to form a new substance. There are corpses, skeletons, spiders. Dolphins and lions crowned with diadems or laurel garlands disport themselves in the pages of these books. There are strange cocks and hens, men with their hair aflame, salamanders basking in fire and pilgrims forlornly standing outside of closed gardens. A two headed man is roasted on a sort of grill while a crowned king drowns in a wide expanse of water. These images are lucidly engraved – there is little chiaroscuro and, certainly, none of the pervasive fog and gloom embodied in the watercolors in MS 115. There is nothing approaching the sheer strangeness of many of the images in the Glasgow book: in one picture, seven men work together to strenuously drive a pole up the rectum of a donkey; in another image, three naked women seen from behind (one of them has the head of a dog) sit in the mouth of a cave, apparently, attempting to seduce three vaguely Hellenic gods. Very few of the pictures in MS 115 have any clear correlate to any of the imagery gathered Klossowski in his book. Therefore, if Duncan claims these pictures are generic alchemical emblems, he is apparently looking at books very different from the 40 volumes that The Golden Game samples.

In fact, the chief difference between the alchemical emblems and the pictures in MS 115 can be characterized in these terms: the watercolors are finished works and ends in themselves; in other words, they are art works. The various emblems Klossowski shows in The Golden Game don’t have this characteristic – they are not self-sufficient art works. Rather, these emblems are bluntly utilitarian, the means to an ulterior end.

My theory is that the person who made the Glasgow book is adapting hermetic alchemical imagery from some other text for private purposes. I think the book is an alchemical diary, an account of a 52 week research in which uniform-sized logs were cut and used to heat the substances studied. I believe that the author of the illustrations used pareidolic imagery found within the grain of the fire wood gathered to heat his or her alembics and other alchemical vessels. The purpose of the inquiry, probably, had something to so with the "Golden Fleece" – that is the meaning of the lambs pulled like saltwater taffy on some of the book’s pages. In my estimation, the book is the idiosyncratic fusion between pareidolia using chunks of fire wood, some other treatise, and the author’s diary representations of what he or she saw or felt as this year-long study progressed.

This is rank speculation to be sure. But it’s all that we have.