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Reviews
| Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. Ed. by Lorraine Daston. New York: Zone Books, 2004. 447 pp., illus., notes, index. $34.50 hb (ISBN 1-890951-43-9).
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Combining the history of art with the history of science may appear in opposition at first glance. However, Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science does just that. This edited volume brings together essays from both fields. All of the essays deal with the overarching thesis of the book: considering what objects say to an observer about society and culture at the time the object came into being.
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The book is the culmination of three meetings by the authors of the compilation during the 2001–2002 academic year at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany. Each essay is an original work; however, they were all shaped by discussion with the group. Although the book was collaborative, each essay speaks in the unique voice of its author. The editor did not group the essays, allowing each to stand alone in no particular topical, chronological, or geographical order.
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Lorraine Daston, editor of the book and director at the Max Planck Institute, provides the preface, outlining the meetings that created the book as well as explaining the overriding thesis in "Introduction: Speechless." Daston also provides the sixth essay, "The Glass Flowers," in which she discusses the botanical models created for the Harvard Ware Collection by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka.
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The volume's remaining contents are diverse. Several essays, for instance, focus on paintings, while others look at things like columns, landscapes, and soap bubbles. The two essays that look specifically at painters or paintings deal with two widely different chronological epochs. "Bosch's Equipment" by Joseph Leo Koerner, a history of art professor at University College London and the Courtauld Institute of Art, examines Hieronymus Bosch's late-16th-century drawing "Treeman" in an attempt to understand it as an object, as equipment, and as work. The last essay in the book is by Caroline A. Jones: "Talking Pictures: Clement Greenberg's Pollock." Jones, who teaches contemporary art and theory in the History, Theory, and Criticism Program of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, looks at how the paintings of Jackson Pollock were given voice through the critiques of Clement Greenberg and how these impacted future works by Pollock.
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Somewhat related are two other essays: one on photography and one on inkblot testing. In "Res Ipsa Loquitur," Joel Snyder, professor of history at the University of Chicago, examines the history of photography, focusing on how its product, the picture, changed in status over time from precious object to commodity product to acceptance as evidence within a court of law. The Rorschach test is the object of interest to Peter Galison, Mallinckrodt Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. In "Image of Self," he looks at the technology behind the creation of the test, as well as how its interpretation is a direct result of interaction with the test taker.
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The remaining essays cover a variety of issues. Antoine Picon, professor of the history of architecture and technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, wrote "The Freestanding Column in Eighteenth-Century Religious Architecture," an essay that looks at 18th-century French freestanding columns and the role they played in the emergence of modernist thought. In "Staging and Empire," M. Norton Wise, professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Elaine M. Wise, a research associate there, study the landscape of Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island), which sits in the Havel River near Potsdam. They look at the how the landscape evolved and discuss how that evolution reflects the cultural climate of the German Empire. Simon Schaffer, reader in history and philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge, explores the soap bubble and soap itself as objects telling a story of cultural ideals, consumerism, and scientific technology in "A Science Whose Business is Bursting: Soap Bubbles as Commodities in Classical Physics." Finally, in "News, Papers, Scissors: Clippings in the Sciences and Arts around 1920," Anke te Heesen, research scholar at the Max Planck Institute, looks at the act of cutting and pasting from a historical viewpoint. She discusses this act in terms of a notation system for science as well as montage and collage in art and how it creates a new discourse through alteration.
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Each essay in the volume reflects the aesthetic and academic focus of the author's discipline, be it science or history of art, or a combination of the two. The authors use a variety of evidence to strengthen their arguments, combining current sources with historical sources to give the reader a more comprehensive view of the object and its historical context. The essays consistently fit within the framework of the book—discussing an object, how it "talks," and what it has to say about the individual, society, and culture that made it.
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The volume's numerous illustrations should be useful to scholars and casual readers. Unfortunately, the illustrations in the body of the essays are black and white and are at times hard to decipher due to size, perspective, or contrast, and their captions do not lend themselves to easy interpretation for the reader. Eight color plates in the middle of the book bring to life the works of Bosch, Blechen, the Blaschkas, the Mintorns, Pollock, and Grosz. These color plates offer finer detail than the black and white illustrations. A few of the authors use foreign quotes without providing an English translation, which could interrupt the flow of narration for some readers.
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| Things That Talk offers enough variety of subject matter to make reading enjoyable for a wide-ranging audience. The essays provide multiple views of the objects studied, making the stories more rounded and enjoyable. The volume's emphasis on how material culture provides evidence for cultural understanding should make it of interest to industrial archaeologists, even if most of the essays do not deal with industry per se. As Daston says, "The essays are as much about how things are made as about what they are," (p. 20) and this book is as much about the objects as it is about their contexts. |
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