10. See Max Kozloff, "American Painting during the Cold War," Artforum 11 (May 1973): 43-54. Kozloff argues that the U.S. government used the Abstract Expressionists so as to destroy the hegemony of the School of Paris and make New York the power center of the art world. In the process, the individualistic values of the artists themselves were co-opted. Cf. Serge Guilbault, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art : Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
11. See John Ashbery, Introduction, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, ed. Donald Allen (1971; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), ix. This edition will hereafter be abbreviated CP.
12. The third of three large Map paintings , painted in heavily grayed-down hues, bore this signature: see WSI, 191.
13. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective, ed. Kirk Varnedoe, 191.
14. Calvin Tomkins, Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and the Art World of Our Time (New York: Doubleday, 1980), 197-8.
15. See my Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), Chapter 3 passim; hereafter abbreviated FOH.
16. John Cage, Interview with Lars Gunnar Bodin et al., in Conversing with Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Limelight Editions, 1988), 177. Of Pollock's painting itself, Cage remarks, "It seemed to me to be taken from the human body, and that immediately made my interest diminish. . . . It was easy to see that, from observing a large canvas of Jackson Pollock's, he had taken five cans or six cans of paint, had never troubled to vary the color of the paint dripping from the can, and had more or less mechanically--with gesture, however, which he was believing in--let this paint fall out" (ibid.).
17. Steinberg, "First Seven Years," 44.
18. Fred Orton, ring Jasper Johns (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 64.
19. Ibid., 69. Cf. Francis Naumann, who comments that a similar suspended spoon in According to What refers to Johns's own Watchman note--"'Looking' is & is not 'eating' and also 'being eaten'"--and equates the two metaphorically, which makes both watchman and spy eaters of sorts (AWW 52).
20. Marshall Brown has noted (email to author, 12 June 2000) that the surface behind the spoon and fork resembles a Cézanne table surface and that hence Johns's representation of eating utensils may be read as a kind of dislocated nature morte: here the fork and spoon, far from resting on a table as in a "normal" still life, are hanging, thus alluding obliquely to the words "DEAD MAN" below.
21. Aside from his sculptures and drawings of isolated light bulbs, Johns also made important drawings of hanging light bulbs: see The Drawings of Jasper Johns, ed. Nan Rosenthal and Ruth E. Fine with Marla Prather and Amy Mizrahi Zorn (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990), 140-1. These suspended light bulbs (the first is dated 1957), dangling from wires, look ahead to the spoon and fork in In Memory of My Feelings.
22. See In Memory of My Feelings: A Selection of Poems by Frank O'Hara, ed. Bill Berkson, with "original Decorations" by thirty artists, a Preface by René d'Harnoncourt, and an Afterword by Bill Berkson (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1967). Johns provided the illustrations--or, more properly, "decorations" for the title poem; his main drawing is a double-page spread depicting a place setting, fork on the left, knife and spoon on the right, the area between covered with charcoal calligraphy.
23. The birthday circumstance was related to me by Bill Berkson (email, 20 July 2000).
24. FOH, 141-6, offers a fuller analysis; see also James E. B. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 240-9.
25. It is interesting to note that Cage himself experienced a similar crisis in the mid-forties, when his marriage to Xenia Kashevaroff ended, paving the way for his partnership, both personal and artistic, with Merce Cunningham--the period when he wrote his emotional Perilous Night. See, on this point, David Revill, The Roaring Silence, John Cage: A Life (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1992), 84.
26. Riva Castleman, Jasper Johns: A Print Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 19-20. Cf. WSI, 227. Skin with O'Hara Poem won the Prix du Musée d'Art Contemporain à Skopje at the "VI International Exhibition of Graphic Art," held at the Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana, Yugoslavia in June 1965.
27. Note the small chart in the upper right of the lithograph, which is indeed a replica of that found in the standard x-ray.
28. The poem "Dear Jap" can be found in CP, 470-1. For an excellent discussion of Memory Box and the related drawing Edisto , see Rosenthal, The Drawings of Jasper Johns, 25, 166.
29. CP includes only thirty poems for the period between 1963 and O'Hara's death in 1966 as compared to forty-six for the year 1961 alone.
30. See O'Hara "Personism: A Manifesto" (CP 498-9). This famous manifesto is of course tongue-in-cheek, as in the assertion that Personism "puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky-Pierre style," but its critique of abstraction, which "involves personal removal by the poet," is, I think, quite serious and shows a certain divergence between O'Hara and Johns.
31. See, on this point, AWW, 19-52. The book also contains excellent reproductions of this large painting.
32. See Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), . 76-7.
33. Merce Cunningham, ed. James Klosty (1975; New York: Limelight Editions, 1986), 86.
34. The piece is 49 minutes long; it has two parts and an entr'acte based on Erik Satie's Relache. The music is by David Behrman and, as Cunningham notes, it "was made also with Carolyn Brown very clearly in mind." A film of the performance was made by James Atlas. For a discussion of the limitations of the performance, see Merce Cunningham, The Dancer and the Dance: Merce Cunningham in Conversation with Jacqueline Lesschaeve (New York: Marion Boyars, 1985), 114-5.
35. In a recent issue of the New York Times, Arts & Leisure section (25 April 1999), Roberta Smith has an article called "Conceptual Art: Over, and Yet Everywhere," that makes the case for the ongoing vitality of Conceptualism as the movement of the second half of the century.
When is power foreign? Is it only so in colonies, penal or otherwise, or is it always somehow the case? Do we accept authority more readily when its foundations evade our comprehension, when something other than reason encourages us to submit? And if, indeed, it is the Law's startling senselessness that compels us to accept official meanings, does not this dimension also open the way to unexpected appropriations? The failure of sense may well lead to the making of sense--and yet, could this failure not provide a point of convergence that would lead not to subjection but to the reproduction of alternative social worlds?
Franz Kafka's "In the Penal Colony" invites such speculation. A traveler, an explorer from a distant land, visits a penal colony where he is invited to witness an execution. The officer in charge of the maintenance and enforcement of judicial matters shows him the lethal apparatus, which inscribes the violated commandment on the condemned man's flesh. A soldier, the only other person in attendance, straps the condemned man to the apparatus. The execution is about to begin, when the condemned man vomits, sickened perhaps by the sweets fed to him by the new commander's ladies, perhaps by the repulsive felt stump placed in his mouth to prevent him from screaming. The mishap drives the officer to a tirade in which he begs the traveler to help him defend this system of justice. The traveler refuses; although he is touched by the officer's devotion, he finds the procedure inhumane; if anything, the officer's appeal persuades him that he has the influence to intervene. The traveler's unwillingness to defend the apparatus compels the officer to make a fateful decision. Having freed the prisoner and readjusted the machine to inscribe his own judgment--"Be just"--the officer removes his clothing; the condemned man and the soldier strap him down; and the machine silently starts working. But then, quite literally, things fall apart, and the exquisite torture the officer desired is reduced to "full-blown murder." 1 After burying the officer and visiting the Old Commandant's grave, the traveler leaves.
The story suggests--even insists upon--the foreign character of power. Agents of justice are recognized as possessing qualities that place them at a remove from local politics, from the realm of comprehensible meanings, from conscious thought, from life itself. Take the protagonist, "a great researcher of Western Civilization" (at least to some) whose refusal to endorse the officer's position leads directly to the latter's self-righteous self-condemnation. He is a foreigner of a classically anthropological, even imperial sort: he visits, he observes, he refrains from intervening. Assuming neutrality gives him all the more authority to transform local practices. He is not unlike the high colonial reformers of the period, who stood in judgment of the humanity of native customs that their predecessors had preserved or, more commonly, invented. 2 Even the most soft-spoken commentary will provide ammunition for those who wish to defend the traditional system or consign it to the past.
Then there is the system itself and the apparatus that instantiates it, the work of the dead commander. Where the traveler is foreign in relation to the penal colony as a whole, the judicial system is foreign in relation to the condemned. The condemned man has not had a chance to defend himself; he does not even know that he has been accused. The officer explains the procedure in French, a language the condemned man "presumably" does not understand ("IPC" 194). An encounter with a foreign tongue always foregrounds the problematically material character of social discourse--the qualities that make language something more (and less) than a vehicle for communicating ideas. The apparatus that is used to carry out the sentence also brings these material qualities to the fore. The apparatus is textual in multiple senses. It works by writing an elaborated script that can only be "read" through the body. Beginning with the skin--an intimate interface between an interior and the outside world--the condemned man's flesh is the focus of the justice served. One also gauges the effects of the procedure by reading a surface: the "glow" that radiates from the dying man's face. Through writing, the apparatus accomplishes a work of abstraction, extending a process across multiple contexts. It functions in the same fashion every time, following a schedule that runs from inscription to enlightenment at that sixth hour when "even the stupidest man" deciphers the command ("IPC" 205). But at the same time that the machine leaves traces on bodies, bodies leave traces on the machine. Numerous details evoke what is missing--from the cane chairs that surround the apparatus to the felt stump, rank with the saliva of dying men.
"Presumably neither the soldier nor the condemned man understood French," Kafka writes. "It was therefore all the more striking that the condemned man nevertheless made an effort to follow the officer's explanations" ("IPC" 194). On the levels of citizenship, language, and textuality, "In the Penal Colony" presents the alien character of power as a source of fascination and force. But the narrative simultaneously reveals how this might be translated as a source of vulnerability. It is this aspect of Kafka's story that I wish to bring to bear on a particular postcolonial setting. First, however, I want to create a context for my analysis by reflecting on one influential effort to use Kafka's corpus to shed light on ideology and the Law.
Kafka exaggerates nothing. So asserts Slavoj Zizek midway through "How did Marx Invent the Symptom," an essay that explores the implications for the analysis of ideology of a peculiar convergence of psychoanalysis and Marxist thought. Starting with the Lacanian observation that Marx invented the symptom, Zizek explores the ways in which ideology works on the level of practice as an "unconscious illusion" that structures "our real, effective relationship to reality." 3 What Kafka shows us is not a "fantasy image of social reality," but, on the contrary, the "mise en scene of the fantasy which is at work in the midst of social reality itself" ("HDM" 36). Zizek continues, "we all know very well that the bureaucracy is not all-powerful, but our 'effective' conduct in the presence of bureaucratic machinery is already regulated by a belief in its almightiness" (ibid.). However we may comment on our actions, in the rituals of everyday life we act as if certain beliefs about value and authority were true.
Zizek uses Kafka's writings to illustrate Pascal's dictum on the "automatism" of belief: "Custom is the whole of equity for the sole reason that it is accepted" ("HDM" 37). According to his account, the circular assertion reveals the "constitutively senseless character of the Law" (ibid.). We obey the Law not because it is good or beneficial, but simply because it is the Law; rather than its virtues leading to obedience, obedience brings its virtues to light. The incomprehensible, traumatic character of the Law is what sustains its authority. But Zizek does not simply make Kafka into an illustrator of Pascal's theory of belief; he also marshals him as a critic of Althusser. According to this reading, Althusser failed to integrate his portrait of the materiality of ideology with his account of the interpellation of subjects. In the "little theoretical theater" used to showcase the workings of "ideological state apparatuses," Althusser failed to pay heed, as it were, to what happens in the split second between when the policeman yells and the subject turns around. 4
Althusser speaks only of the process of ideological interpellation, through which the symbolic machine of ideology is "internalized" into the ideological experience of Meaning and Truth: but we learn from Pascal that this "internalization," by structural necessity, never fully succeeds, that there is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it. ["HDM" 43-4; emphasis in original]
Kafka develops a "kind of criticism of Althusser avant la lettre in letting us see that which is constitutive of the gap between the 'machine' and its 'internalization'" ("HDM" 44). Kafka's novels begin with a hailing of sorts, in which the protagonist is called by a "mysterious bureaucratic entity." The result of the summons is not subjectivation; try as they might, Kafka's characters can find nothing in the Other with which to identify, for the meaning of the call remains obscure. Kafka thus offers a vision of a constitutive moment in the working of ideology. In everyday life, the experience of the apparatus as alien paradoxically leads to an identification with it. A form of transference results, with the "supposition of a Truth, of a Meaning behind the stupid, traumatic, inconsistent fact of the Law" ("HOM" 38). Ideology allows us to escape the traumatic dimension of the Law by offering us social reality as an alternative. We come to see ourselves in its terms in order to domesticate the shock with which the ideological Other confronts us.
Zizek does not mention "In the Penal Colony" in his discussions of Kafka. Still, it is possible to read the story through the lens that he provides. Elsewhere he shows how two sections of The Trial can be read as transformations of one another. In the first, the priest's parable of the doorkeeper who stands "before the law," the Law is inaccessible; the subject only glimpses its radiance as he is dying. In the second, which describes the protagonist's arrival for his first interrogation by the Court, the Law is all too present "in the guise of various obscene, nauseous phenomena." 5 In fact, Zizek contends, the two perspectives implicate one another: "in so far as the law is not grounded in truth, it is impregnated with enjoyment" ("OOP" 151). "In the Penal Colony" stages two similar perspectives. The officer's explanation of the apparatus, like the priest's parable, describes a carefully calibrated passage toward the deathly moment when the Law is briefly revealed. In Zizek's model, the Law is senseless here because it remains incomplete; its truth, like the Old Commandant's, is missing. But the Law is equally senseless where it is inconsistent; it appears as a "bricolage," "smeared with an obscene vitality" ("OOP" 149). For the condemned man and soldier, the apparatus is a site of unseemly pleasure. While the officer is petitioning the traveler to advocate for his procedure, the soldier and the condemned man are devouring rice porridge. After the officer takes the formerly condemned man's place, the condemned man puts on filthy, torn clothing and entertains the soldier by cavorting around. The two men proceed to t over the ladies' handkerchiefs, chase the gears from the apparatus, and amuse themselves with the detritus from the machine.
Sympathizing with the officer--in whose place he claims he "would have acted no differently"--the traveler is "annoyed" by the sight of the recently released condemned man happily mimicking the officer's explanation of the apparatus ("IPC" 224). In his aversion, one finds not only a typical colonial disdain for native imitation, but one also sees evidence of how the traveler's intervention fails. 6 Recall the elements that the officer had unsuccessfully tried to eliminate from his predecessor's judicial system: the lies of the accused, the sweets from the ladies, fingerprints on the drawings, vomit in the works. In his intervention, the traveler himself tries to eliminate similar contingencies on behalf of "humanity" as an ideal. It is as if the plot were designed to teach the traveler Pascal's dictum. He wishes to make the legal system more rational; and yet his influences simply reproduces its pleasures and restages its mysteries, without providing the enlightenment that both he and the officer desired. The inscription on the Old Commandant's tomb seems to capture a sense of this enduring dilemma. The Old Commandant will always be resurrected: in the form of the constitutive senselessness of the Law. From this perspective, the traveler's harried departure follows the logic Zizek outlines: he flees the traumatic mise en scène, like someone waking from a dream.
This reading of "In the Penal Colony" is compelling. Yet it fails to take fully into account certain possibilities opened by Zizek's observations on the alien character of the Law. If one carefully follows Zizek's argument that the Law's efficacy does not rest on the communication of a singular truth, it becomes possible to imagine a setting in which more than one form of transference could result from the trauma of an encounter with the apparatus of the Penal Colony. To get a sense of the instability of this situation, it is worth reconsidering the traveler's reactions to those characters who "presumably do not speak French." A crucial dimension of the story consists in the traveler's effort to interpret the condemned man's own interpretation of the situation. Assumptions about what the condemned man does not know motivate his decision to intervene. Yet his interpretations are fraught with uncertainty. The narrative tells us only what the other characters appear to say or think; the prose is scattered with the expressions, "seems" and "as if." The faces of the other characters often refract a peculiar knowledge, as when the condemned man's stare seems to ask the traveler "whether he approved of the described procedure" ("IPC" 198). This uncertainty intensifies after the soldier and the traveler exchange words at the end of the narrative. After reading the inscription, the traveler rises to look at the faces of the men who frequent the teahouse. They are described as "smiling as if they had read the inscription with him, had found it ridiculous, and were asking him to concur in their opinion" ("IPC" 228). But is this the only possibility that the traveler "pretends not to notice" when he heads for the port? Among those who frequent the teahouse are said to be the Old Commandant's anonymous supporters; in the teahouse the soldier and the condemned man have both found acquaintances; could there be something more than obscenity--some inscrutable meaning--that the traveler feels compelled to flee? We can read "In the Penal Colony" as an illustration of Zizek's observations. But are we looking for the Law when we should be looking for laws? Kafka's story shows us how power's very alterity can lead to its subversion; the apparatus may not be so "singular" after all. I would now like to turn to an ethnographic situation where the possibilities hinted at in the story come more clearly into view.
The province of Irian Jaya has long occupied a problematic place in the vast island nation-state of Indonesia. Comprising the western half of the island of New Guinea, which was claimed by the Netherlands Indies in 1848, the territory lay for many years just beyond the limits of effective colonial rule. For complicated reasons, when the rest of the Indies gained independence, the Netherlands retained western New Guinea as a separate colony, ostensibly to prepare its primitive inhabitants for self-rule. Justified by the racial and cultural differences that supposedly divided New Guinea's "Papuans" from the rest of the Indies' natives, this post-war colonial adventure ended in 1963, when first the United Nations, and then Indonesia took control of the territory. In 1969, with the military suppressing all dissent, one thousand carefully selected tribal leaders unsurprisingly chose integration into Indonesia over independence. So western New Guinea became the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya, and the Papuans became the Irianese.
A Papuan nationalist movement waxed and waned under the so-called New Order regime, whose leader, President Suharto, ruled Indonesia from 1965 to 1998 through a combination of patronage, terror, and manufactured consent. To suppress the separatists, the military engaged in horrific acts of violence. But by the early 1990s, the government was shifting away from the "security" approach, with the launching of projects designed to develop the "backward" Irianese. In the off-shore regency of Biak-Numfor, where I did fieldwork, the new strategy seemed to be working. State-sponsored schools educated the islands' inhabitants in the national curriculum and language, in which rates of literacy had long been high. Village and city dwellers dealt with and worked for the military and civil service, and were fluent in official rhetorics of rule. Those with access to television consumed the same state-sponsored fare as viewers a thousand miles away. In the near future, Biak would become increasingly accessible to outsiders, with the opening of a resort that would take advantage of the islands' position on the flight path between Los Angeles and Bali. Although the regency had been the site of resistance in earlier times, the relatively well-educated, cosmopolitan population seemed ready, even eager, to enter the ranks of Indonesian citizens. One sign of the regime's confidence was the very fact of my research in a province where anthropologists unaffiliated with the government or missions had been unable to do fieldwork for nearly thirty years.
But there may have been more to the islanders' submission than met the eye. Through a dynamic I have elsewhere called the fetishization of the foreign, the very practices through which Biaks signaled their acceptance of New Order identities prove legible from a different point of view. 7 This dynamic resided on various levels, beginning with the vocabulary with which people discussed successful persons. Parents spoke of their efforts to turn their children into "foreigners"--a Biak word, amber, which covered a field of reference including non-Irianese Indonesians, Westerners, Biak civil servants and respected persons more generally. One became a foreigner by virtue of one's origins or experience in the Land of the Foreigners, an imagined space that included sites as disparate as the provincial bureaucracy, the local port and market, Jakarta, the Netherlands, and Japan. Local foreigners provided evidence of their privileged access to such spaces through practices ranging from the exchanges that accompanied marriage, to the speeches given by local historians, to the songs sung by expert composers. These genres of social action both presupposed and reproduced a representation of the Land of the Foreigners as the source of pleasurable surprises, inexpressible meanings, and inexhaustible goods. When families participated in wedding processions that treated the market as a source of foreign booty, when ministers gave sermons that treated the Bible as a source of unfathomable truths, the very effort to capture foreignness served to recreate it in the fetishistic fashion inherent in the fact that to name the alien is to domesticate it as such. Applied in settings associated with the Indonesian state, this logic enabled Biaks to participate in national rituals without accepting the identities they would seem to promote.
For an example of this deflection of national identity, consider the trip to Jakarta I took with fifteen Biak singers in 1993. 8 As part of the effort to promote tourism in Irian Jaya, the government was working to domesticate the threatening differences that once justified western New Guinea's separation from Indonesia. The goal was to incorporate Irian Jaya into the collection of equivalent cultural units to which the national slogan, "Unity in Diversity," referred. Through official programs designed to identify and salvage "appropriate" local traditions, Irian Jaya would develop its own provincial house, wedding costume, and welcome dance. It was in this spirit that the Biak singers, aging experts in a once popular song form called wor, received an invitation to participate in a national festival of oral traditions. Including visits to monuments and a theme park, "Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature," the trip took the form of a national pilgrimage. Not least of all, the festival gave the singers a chance to present Irian Jaya's share of "Unity in Diversity" in the newspapers and on television, as well as on stage.
It was ironic that wor was selected for the honor, given the form's history. Suppressed by the missionaries who settled on Biak in the early twentieth century, wor was performed during the millennial uprisings that occurred on Biak during the colonial period, and by the Papuan separatists who took shelter in Biak's forests during the 1970s. While the authorities seemed oblivious to the political associations of the genre, the singers I knew viewed it as a potent and dangerous tool. Then there was the matter of its form. Wor songs provided a paradigmatic example of how Biak performers registered the foreignness of experiences that might otherwise have seemed banal. I was told that every song originated with a surprise; something startling happened to a composer and a song simply popped into his or her head. The composer repeated the surprise in the riddling structure of the lyrics, with the first half of the song missing words that the second half filled in. The wor experts I knew were very well acquainted with airplanes, American tourists, and visiting officials. Nevertheless, their songs on these topics had the effect of presenting everyday encounters as unprecedented: as experiences that came as a shock.
Given these factors, wor's appearance at the festival seemed like a victory for the forces of national integration. It was as if the festival suddenly revealed to Biaks an element of Indonesianness within themselves. The troupe that traveled to Jakarta was selected on the basis of recordings made by an American ethnomusicologist. People on Biak made much of the fact that outsiders had suddenly recognized the virtue of this neglected aspect of their traditional ways. The call to participate provided the first step in the process of interpellation; the singers experienced the shock of finding themselves exposed to the Other. In the next step, the shock should have faded, putting the men and women in the position of some Indonesians who felt right at home in their New Order identities. 9 Yet there is evidence that the singers deployed a different mode of domestication in response to this encounter: one that engaged a symbolic order in which national spaces appeared as dangerous and seductive sources of power and value. In other words, there is evidence that Jakarta remained a place to raid.
Take, for instance, the stories the singers and their families told in the weeks leading up to our departure. From the perspective of bureaucrats in Jakarta, Irian Jaya was a frightening, Stone Age place. But as the singers and their families saw it, it was the rest of Indonesia that was filled with danger; the Javanese would "walk up and stab you without uttering a word." While this perspective might be expected from people who had suffered at the hands of Javanese soldiers, what was less predictable was the accompanying image of distant cities as a site for intimate encounters. Our voyage featured surprising moments of tenderness as the singers discovered Biaks living abroad, or as they made new acquaintances who reminded them of loved ones back home. Jakarta may have been the land of dangerous strangers, but it was also the home of long lost kin.
What the singers posited by way of narratives they performed by way of wor. As I was warned before we left, the expert singers had trouble keeping their mind on the repertoire of songs they were supposed to be singing. New songs kept coming to them. From compositions expressing amazement at the ship we had boarded to a ditty on a perfume seller's breasts, the singers' songs affirmed the strangeness of what they experienced. The theme park, "Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature," was perhaps the clearest example of the kind of "machine" through which the New Order produced docile national-cultural subjects. But as they toured the Irian Jaya pavilion, the singers signaled in conventional ways that they were not at home. It was the theme park's foreignness, not its familiarity, that their actions registered when they responded to the visit by singing wor.
On the face of it there was nothing terribly subversive in the singers' activities. On stage they played their role as tokens of Indonesian national culture quite adequately. Yet their practices also served in the production of another social reality, at odds with the order that arrayed Indonesia's citizens on a national-cultural grid. These two orders intersected in the state apparatuses that produced Indonesian national-cultural subjects. Instead of internalizing a perspective that would have defined them in official terms, the singers, like the condemned man and the soldier in Kafka's story, derived a peculiar pleasure from the encounter. Domestication in this case consists in reproducing the shock of interpellation, not in finding meaning behind the Law's meaningless force.
To grasp this dynamic one must attend to the interpenetration of ideologies. The Biaks I knew tended to emphasize characteristics of words and things that other actors downplay in order to convey the impression of commensurate values, orderly routines, and transparent, transmissible meanings. Their practices employed the potential for alienation inherent in every social gesture--every instance of exchange--whether thought or speech. This is not to say that these individuals somehow possessed a more truthful understanding of their practices; simply that they faced different contradictions than those who claimed to express their innermost cultural selves. For their performances to succeed at attracting and entertaining an audience of Biak listeners, wor singers had to present their songs as evidence of something other than their own intentions, and yet they had to be able to take credit for composing them. They had to adhere to expectations regarding authoritative action that required that the seat of agency appear as displaced. At the same time, in their quest for recognition from a local audience, they had to obscure a force that was omnipresent in the regency, in the form of institutions and apparatuses that encouraged them to see themselves through different eyes.
It is with this interpenetration in mind that we must consider the revival of Biak tradition that followed the festival in Jakarta. Less than a year after the event, wor was resurrected as an official emblem of Biak ethnicity. Although I was appalled at the time by the speed with which people adopted the standardized version of the song form, it is worth exploring whether something more complicated was going on. Biak's colonial era uprisings erupted at moments resembling that which preceded the revival of the song form. The largest outbreak occurred at the beginning of World War II, after the mission began promoting wor singing in church. In the movement that followed, participants sang and danced and waited for the utopia that would begin with the arrival of the ancestor who created foreign power. The revival of wor was not as dramatic as the World War II uprising, but it did contain utopian elements. Officials and villagers predicted an influx of foreign tourists and a flood of invitations for local troupes to perform abroad. Taking up the millennial strain always present in official rhetoric on the "development" of postcolonial nation-states like Indonesia, this response projected the islanders' "subjectivation" across an eschatological horizon. The foreign would be revealed as a local creation; the nation-state would appear as omnipresent force, but only at the millennial moment when Biaks would startle the world.
In the context of early 1990s Biak, one might wonder whether this subtle form of subversion mattered. In the year 2000 its implications became clear. With the resignation of President Suharto and the fall of the New Order, the province has seen a resurgence of Papuan nationalism. While the fetishization of the foreign cannot account for why this has occurred, it sheds light on the speed with which many Biaks have shifted their allegiances. Actions that seemed to indicate an internalization of the New Order's "truth" may well have sheltered a very different relationship to the regime.
When is power foreign? The answer may be always, but not always in precisely the same way. In New Order Biak, as in the penal colony, the alien character of authority is stressed. Yet instead of constituting the "unconscious illusion" that ensures the efficacy of ideology, foreignness was the product and precondition of practices that took it as an explicit attribute of power. This does not mean that there was no fantasy structuring social reality in Biak; only that it did not take a predictable form. To make sense of situations like the one I have described, we must attend to particular variants of broader dilemmas as they reproduce themselves across different contexts of social action. The gap between the machine and its internalization may be essential to the process of subject formation. The same apparatus can, however, act as an interface between social orders that both diverge and overlap.
By juxtaposing my anthropological analysis with my reading of "In the Penal Colony," I suggest that the alterity of power opens a space for its subversion. The inscrutable faces and illegible texts of Kafka's story do more than just register the Law's inconsistency; they also comprise an intersection between multiple points of view. Much like the Biaks, who use a local category, amber, to designate the foreign, Kafka's narrative can only evoke the alien character of the Law by using res that, of necessity, open onto wider worlds of meaning. The condemned man and the soldier cannot partake in the apparatus as a senseless site of enjoyment without gesturing towards other narratives, other ways of making sense. My ethnographic writings focus on a situation in which an encounter with state power similarly gives rise to something other than the reproduction of official identities. I approach this situation from a perspective that "In the Penal Colony" at once signals and leaves obscure; my work on Biak is an exercise in imagining a social order that undercuts the projects of officials and reformers alike. In specifying this order's logic and contradictions, my findings offer a caveat against too reductive a reading of Kafka's classic: neither fiction nor ethnography can represent foreignness as such, though both do sometimes capture its effects.
For this reason, one must analyze the res one finds in Kafka's fiction--and my fieldwork--with an eye to their historical specificity. One must not underestimate the colonial character of both settings. Like the condemned man and the soldier, Biaks were given no choice but to join the political unit to which their islands now belong at the time of western New Guinea's transfer to Indonesia. The New Order may not have offered the form of punishment described in Kafka's story, but its strategies for dealing with opponents included abduction, torture, and summary execution--procedures no more transparent to those who came up against the state's lethal force. The fact that Biaks experienced encounters with the state as a source of pleasure as well as terror poses a quandary for anyone who would assume the position of a Kafkan traveler. Does it disqualify one's critique of an oppressive regime when its victims' responses do not take the form one might expect? One of the virtues of Kafka's story is that it refuses to offer a simple response to the political questions it raises. In an age of U.N. peacekeepers and international tribunals, it is worth considering the desires and pleasures at work in the selective enforcement of universal standards of justice and truth.
Admittedly, the world of Biak is far from that of Kafka. But I hope that this effort to move between them has not been in vain. The ethnographer, like the traveler--and any reader of Kafka's works--invariably finds herself in that uncertain position that "In the Penal Colony" conjures so well. This is a position in which the interpretive project founders on moments that block understanding, on that traumatic left-over with which analysis begins and ends. But describing this predicament is not the same thing as overcoming it. At the very least, this reminds us of the importance of remaining sensitive to differences that add to each other without quite adding up.
Danilyn Rutherford is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. She just completed a book manuscript provisionally entitled, "Raiding the Land of the Foreigners: The Limits of the Nation on an Indonesian Frontier."
1. Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other Stories. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 226; hereafter abbreviated "IPC."
2. W. J. Mommsen, introduction to European Expansion and the Law: The Encounter of European and Indigenous Law in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Africa and Asia, ed. W. J. Mommsen and J. A. de Moor (Oxford: Berg., 1992), 1-14.
3. Slavoj Zizek,"How Did Marx Invent the Symptom," in The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 33; hereafter abbreviated "HDM."
4. Louis Althusser,"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 174.
5. Slavoj Zizek, "The Obscene Object of Postmodernity," in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 146; hereafter abbreviated "OOP."
6. Homi K. Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man," in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 85-92.
7. Danilyn Rutherford, "The White Edge of the Margin: Textuality and Authority in Biak, Irian Jaya, Indonesia," American Ethnologist 27 : 312-39.
8. Danilyn Rutherford, "Of Birds and Gifts: Reviving Tradition on an Indonesian Frontier," Cultural Anthropology 11 : 577-616.
9. John Pemberton, On the Subject of Java (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), 159.
When the Court Theatre in Chicago announced that during its 2000-2001 season it would be staging a new chamber opera by Philip Glass based on Franz Kafka's story, "In the Penal Colony," we decided to use the occasion to try to open a new discussion of Kafka's remarkable text, the relevance of which, given contemporary debates about the death penalty, human rights, and the legacies of colonialism, was beyond doubt. In order to stimulate new thinking we invited a group of scholars from a variety of disciplines, most of whom would never ordinarily consider themselves Kafka experts, to address the text without engaging the vast secondary literature on Kafka. (The one exception to this "rule" was the inclusion of Stanley Corngold, the noted Kafka scholar who has produced much of this literature). We were not, in other words, interested in producing new Kafka "scholarship" in any traditional sense of the term. We invited our speakers, instead, to think out loud about the issues raised in Kafka's text from the perspective of their own work and orientation. In this sense, we sought an academic correlative to the theatrical gambit: like the Court Theatre, we were interested in revisiting Kafka's text, asking how it might resonate anew some eighty years after its initial publication. The papers were given on 1 and 2 December 2000, at the Theatre on the campus of the University of Chicago.
As is well known, Kafka himself had mixed feelings about "In the Penal Colony." The story was written in the autumn of 1914 and though Kafka considered grouping it together with "The Metamorphosis" and "The Judgment" in a collection called "Punishments," it was only at the urging of his friend and publisher, Kurt Wolff, that he, in 1919, finally allowed the story to appear in print. At some level he could not fully understand Wolff's admiration for the text and Wolff himself had to admit that his own profound love for the story was mixed with a certain horror and disgust with respect to the "dreadful intensity of the frightful material" (die schreckhafte Intensität des furchtbaren Stoffes). 1 One of our goals at the symposium was to explore this amalgam of attraction and repulsion that surely characterizes every reader's relation to this strange work of fiction. At the core of this amalgam is no doubt the very thing that invites compositional, dramaturgical, and performative engagement with the work. We are thinking, of course, of the numerous references and allusions in the story to a certain theatricality informing the institutions of law and punishment, to the spectacle of human pain in its function as real and imaginary support of social and political bonds. There is something at the very heart of "In the Penal Colony" that would seem to open it to the universe of opera, a medium in which tormented bodies so often issue in songs of supplication that are met--or unmet--by responses of mercy and grace on the part of sovereigns and lovers.
One of the central issues that preoccupied our contributors is the depth and omnipresence of ambiguity in the text. Generally thought to be one of Kafka's most straightforward texts, one whose plot most people can easily follow and recall, "In the Penal Colony" proves, under closer scrutiny, to be riddled with disorienting shifts of perspective and tone. One of the crucial passages in the text, for example, the description of the apparatus by the officer, includes a remarkable claim as to the spiritual efficacy of the punishment-machine on its victim:
But how quiet he grows at just about the sixth hour! Enlightenment comes to the most dull-witted [Verstand geht dem Blödesten auf]. It begins around the eyes. From there it radiates. A moment that might tempt one to get under the Harrow oneself. Nothing more happens than that the man begins to understand the inscription (die Schrift zu entziffern), he purses his mouth as if he were listening. You have seen how difficult it is to decipher the script with one's eyes; but our man deciphers it with his wounds. 2
In his nostalgic reminiscences about the glory days of the apparatus, the officer recalls the impact of this moment on the spectators: "How we all absorbed the look of transration on the face of the sufferer, how we bathed our cheeks in the radiance (den Schein) of that justice, achieved at last and fading so quickly!" ("IPC" 154)
At the symposium, in a round-table discussion following a performance of his opera, Philip Glass himself recalled these scenes as the ones that stuck with him from his first reading of the story some forty years earlier and as the ones that, indeed, inspired his work on the opera. He went on to associate Kafka's story with Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transred night) and questions of art and transration more generally. In the opera itself, Glass and JoAnne Akalaitis, who directed the production, endow the officer (played alternately by Eugene and Herbert Perry) with a kind of sympathy and poignancy proper to one engaged in a spiritual quest. But what are we to make of the ambiguity of Kafka's choice of words with respect to this moment of "enlightenment"? The emergence of some sort of understanding specified as a corporeal decipherment of a coded script, a decipherment that produces what may only be the appearance (den Schein) of justice: is this really the stuff of spiritual transration? And what are we to make of the fact that the officer himself is denied any sort of understanding once he subjects himself to the machinery of justice? At the end of the story, the face of the officer "was as it had been in life; no sign was visible of the promised redemption; what the others had found in the machine the officer had not found. . ." ("IPC" 166). And of course the sentence that was to be inscribed on the officer's body was not this or that determinate commandment or injunction but rather the general and categorical one, the very source of any spiritual dimension of law whatsoever: "Be just!" ("IPC" 161) Furthermore, why does the machine break down at this particular moment, under the weight of this commandment?
In light of such difficulties, it makes sense that one of the motifs of the papers that follow is the status of nonsense-- or rather, the limits of sense--both in the text and in the administration of justice as represented by the text. Though these limits assume many forms, evoking, in turn, horror, disgust, and laughter, we are tempted to correlate them with a more general feature of Kafka's work. To use a formulation proposed by Gershom Scholem in his correspondence with Walter Benjamin about Kafka, the fictive world revealed in Kafka's prose is distorted by a surplus of validity over meaning. Scholem characterizes this surplus as the force of revelation at a zero-degree of content. 3 res in Kafka's work, as well as the reader of his work, are constantly addressed by messages that can never be fully grasped, enigmatic signifiers that, as it were, get under the skin without ever being metabolized into a livable meaning. Though uncoupled from signification, they remain valid, i.e., they inform intentional life. So if there is "enlightenment" of some kind in the story, it may well have to do with this dimension of enigma at the boundary between meaning and the body in pain. All of the papers in this dossier explore, in one way or another, Kafka's remarkable meditation on this boundary.
The symposium was organized under the aegis of the newly constituted Faculty Committee on Theater and Performance Studies and the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, and was made possible by generous support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in New York and, at the University of Chicago: the Master of the College, the Dean of the Division of the Humanities, and the Adelyn Russell Bogert Fund of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. In addition to thanking each of these sponsors (as well as the Court Theatre for hosting the event), we want to thank our colleagues whose work is presented here--for their willingness to venture into unfamiliar territory. Thanks to their efforts, Kafka's text emerges here as newly compelling.
Eric L. Santner is the Harriet and Ulrich Meyer Professor in Germanic Studies and Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. His new book, On the Psychotheology of Every-day Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, is just out from Princeton.
David J. Levin is Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and in the Committee on Cinema/Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He also chairs the newly formed faculty committee on theater and performance studies. Professor Levin is currently finishing a book on opera and mise-en-scène.
1. Cited in Franz Kafka. Sämtliche Erzählungen, ed. Paul Raabe (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1994), 399.
2. Franz Kafka, "In the Penal Colony," in Franz Kafka. The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1971), 150; hereafter abbreviated "IPC."
3. See letter from Scholem to Benjamin, 20 September 1934, in The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).
In January 1914 Arthur Roeßler's article "Women and Art" appeared in the Stickerei-Zeitung und Spitzen Revue, a journal devoted to textile art in Germany and Austria. While the embroidery of Emmy Zweybrück ( 1), a leading textile artist in Vienna, was ostensibly his subject, Roeßler used the opportunity to secure women's creative activities firmly within Nadelkunst and the domestic sphere. He concluded that her embroideries deserve more praise than any "square meter of painted canvas that any woman aspiring to 'high' art places on view." 1 Stating that the best women's painting could only be an inadequate reflection of a male model, he argued that female talents lay instead in decoration, creations that were part of women's being, only hinting at an unknowable mystery beneath the ornamented surface. This characterization of ornament's superficiality contrasts with those artistic values he praised in the work of young male expressionist painters who were "able to turn the interior of people inside out" during the same period. 2 Artists such as Egon Schiele defined an approach to painting that surpassed nature and became the apex of human achievement. Roeßler suggested that these artists recovered art's high calling, which had been lost through a recent preoccupation with applied art: "They want to move away from applied art, which Klimt approached happily and frequently, sometimes even at the cost of the psychological achievement of an aesthetic creation. All works for them are true works of new art, are storage batteries of psychological forces." 3
The contrast between ornament and psychological expression, between surface and depth, used by art critics of the [Begin Page 247] period to characterize the stylistic shift from Gustav Klimt's aestheticism to Schiele's expressionism, continues to be of use for thinking about Viennese modernism. 4 The discursive interplay between ornamentalism and asceticism yields insights about gender's role in the divide between these attitudes towards form. 5 Studies of the writings of Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos show how their work contributed to a critique of ornament grounded, in part, in responses to women's changing roles in the public sphere. 6 Fashion's expansion stimulated new perceptions about women's increasing participation in the modern world. These perceptions provoked male anxieties about fashion's impact on culture and the arts at the same time as female artists in Vienna began to organize and assert their presence in both the fine and applied arts. 7
Roeßler's celebrations of a new textile art and a new painting were intertwined, both being part of an effort to draw gender distinctions in a world where boundaries were becoming blurred. Too little critical attention has been afforded the emergence of an artistic style, linked to folk art and characterized by terms such as "primitive" and "expressionist," within the Wiener Werkstätte between 1905 and 1908. Women artists played a role at least equal to that of men in the development of this style, since its impetus came from textiles and it was quickly applied to Vienna's emerging fashion industry. The discourse surrounding that ornamental style infiltrated discussions about the art produced by women. Young male artists, such as Kokoschka and Schiele, had early ties to this initial "primitive" style and its application to fashion, but distanced themselves during 1909 and 1910 by developing a competing discourse about interiority that found expression primarily in their treatment of skin.
Ornament, the focus of many debates about historical styles during the nineteenth century in Vienna, continued to be an important issue during the years before World War I. Otto Wagner had questioned the suitability of using historical architectural ornament to dress contemporary buildings during the 1890s, calling for a "raiment of modernity" equally effective in expressing both the structural and symbolic character of the new architecture. 8 Similar desires for a modern style within painting and sculpture led to the formation of the Vienna Secession in 1897, whose frequent exhibitions gave the new artistic movement a significant public forum. Appointments of Secession members to teaching positions in the School of Applied Arts and the creation of the Wiener Werkstätte in 1903 signaled that the battle to replace historical ornament with a modern style in Vienna had been won and efforts to extend its influence and reap the financial rewards of international trade were well under way. Writing in Die Flache, a luxurious new journal devoted to ornament, Joseph August Lux claimed that "[t]he growing understanding of decorative form and color is the result of the Viennese School. People, who have been accustomed for decades to obtain their models from Paris, already today demand the 'Viennese Style.'" 9 This style initially mixed a study of nature and artistic materials, typical of other currents of "art nouveau," with elements selected from the ancient cultures of Greece and Byzantium. Between 1905 and 1908, however, decorative elements from the folk cultures within Austria-Hungary became decisive elements of the style. Exhibitions at the Museum of Art and Industry had drawn attention to folk art during the 1880s, leading to the founding of the Association of Austrian Folklore in 1894. The Association envisioned the study of folk art as an important contribution to the creation of an Austrian political identity based on cosmopolitan multiculturalism. 10 Built on ideas advanced by Crown Prince Rudolph in the 1880s, this political ideal hoped to demonstrate the benevolently unifying role that the state could play vis à vis the multitude of nationalities that made up the Empire.
Two events contributed significantly to folk art's impact on modern Viennese ornamental style--the Exhibition of Austrian Domestic Crafts and Folk Art of 1905 and the Imperial Jubilee Procession of 1908. The Museum of Art and Industry spent ten years organizing the exhibition, which ran from November 1905 to February 1906 and assembled over 4,000 examples of popular handicraft. An extensive catalogue contained essays describing regional traditions of costume and art. Looking at the province of Bukowina on the Empire's distant eastern border, the catalogue provided a telling description of clothing decoration:
Nature, with its infinite riches of leaves, flowers and blooms, birds, beetles, butterflies, and small animals, which we find more or less stylized in embroideries or weavings, offers the subjects, some of them copied from old embroideries that mother and grandmother completed sometime before, however, others also newly created from individual feelings. The seven or eight year old girl, who is already trusted with the care of geese and sheep in the pasture, sits there, linen and needle in hand, embroidering without model or pattern. 11
Ludwig Hevesi, a supporter of the Secession, wrote that he found "dialects of the pure language" in the exhibition catalogue and praised the colors "at the disposal of these primitives: the peasant wives of Czechoslovakia, Ruthenia, Rumania, Croatia. . . ." 12
The exhibition's examples of folk costume and ornament were useful in designing the Imperial Jubilee Procession. Held on 12 June 1908 to mark the sixtieth anniversary of Emperor Franz Joseph I's reign, the procession was witnessed by upwards of 500,000 citizens and tourists. It was divided into one section composed of a series of groups, costumed by prominent Viennese artists, representing historical periods of Hapsburg rule, and another in which the Empire's diverse cultures, resplendent in their traditional costumes, paraded before the public. 13 The latter was a great hit with Lux, who contrasted it to the historical section by describing the costume parade as being
no longer history, no longer mere masquerade, but folk art, which still in large part at least serves life. A peasant woman with her grand finery, laces, embroideries, metal jewelry, stands there like an inimitable work of art, in a colorfulness like a small peasant garden. . . . We must be thankful for this experience. It was a beauty that one can experience nowhere but in Austria. 14
Like other supporters of the modern Viennese style, however, Lux took particular pleasure in one group in the historical section. Bertold Löffler designed Group XIII to represent a harvest festival during the reign of Joseph II (1765-1790). Löffler, who had been appointed to teach a master class for decorative painting and graphic art at the School of Applied Arts in Fall 1907, involved his students in the design of the costumes and paraphernalia. Although well researched, the costumes were seen anew with modern eyes and commentaries remarked on similarities to the Secession's aesthetic. Löffler and his students, many of whom acted the parts of eighteenth-century peasants in the parade, created an idyllic vision of folk art under a benevolent and enlightened monarch. Group XIII reified the ideological construct of the Jubilee Procession--an optimistic vision of a multicultural nation under the beneficent stewardship of Emperor Franz Joseph. Costume designs done by Löffler and his students for the procession were later printed in the series of Wiener Werkstätte postcards.
Taken together, the exhibition and procession encouraged a shift of style from "tectonic simplicity" to "elaborate, dense surface decoration" within the Wiener Werkstätte. 15 Folk pottery certainly influenced Wiener Keramik, the ceramics firm that Löffler and Michael Powolny formed in 1905 that produced the colorful tiles proclaiming the new stylistic direction at the Cabaret Fledermaus. Folk textiles, however, had the greatest impact on the Werkstätte's new decorative style, a point made by Paul Westheim in response to an exhibition of Hungarian textiles:
These works of the people are the root for a good part of all the textiles and graphics of the young artists in Vienna. The surface patterns of Margold, Wimmer, Zainer, etc. can be traced back without difficulty to such stimuli from Bosnia. Only this folk art was stripped of its naïveté, of the original liveliness, the entirety pervaded by a shot of fashionable sensuality, cultivated perversity, the unbroken colors sacrificed to a feminine, elegant, perfumed sense of color and finished with that gracefulness that pleases the delicate nerves of Europa. 16
The artists Westheim mentions are men, but he describes their style in fully feminine terms. Emmanual Margold and Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill did, in fact, work closely with the large numbers of women who sought careers in the applied arts after the turn of the century. Graduates of the School of Applied Arts, the Art School for Women and Girls, and the Royal Art Embroidery Schools responded enthusiastically to folk art and helped define the new ornamental style.
Zweybrück, who had studied with Joseph Hoffmann and Franz Cizek, was only one of many who joined the Wiener Werkstätte, regularly showed embroideries at the Museum of Art and Industry's exhibitions, formed co-operatives to advance sales, and became known outside Austria-Hungary. 17 Using thread and cloth produced by modern industry, their artistic imaginations and highly-skilled hands sought to invest the objects they produced with older as well as newer values. While remaining within the modern fashion system, artists and consumers were drawn to the values of community and social reproduction that folk art embodied. The popularity of the printed silks, beaded bags, and embroidered blouses and shawls that they created contributed to the opening of the Wiener Werkstätte fashion department in March 1911, headed by Wimmer-Wisgrill. Women were the majority of designers and assistants. Through the course of the century's second decade, it became the Werkstätte's most economically successful and well-known unit; its products were celebrated at the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne and in exhibitions devoted to Viennese fashion in Berlin.
Wimmer-Wisgrill designed the interior of the Werkstätte's room in the Austrian pavilion at the exhibition in Cologne, covering an entire lower wall with a grid of fashion illustrations. Over the next year, a series of fashion illustrations was published in twelve porfolios of twelve prints each as Mode Wien 1914/15. 18 Female artists produced 111 of the 144 original prints, while the inclusion of seven prints by Dagobert Peche rendered him the best represented male artist. 19 His hand-colored linoleum cut ( 2), which appeared in the first portfolio, emphasized the block printed fabrics that had developed from folk textiles and become one of the Werkstätte's most popular products before World War I. The dress's fabric is covered with large clusters of flowers and leaves, a vegetative motif that extends to the re's frame which includes branches of laurel. Similar leaves sprout from the model's head, her fingers resemble tendrils, and branches grow from the dress's sleeves, motifs that recall the myth of Apollo and Daphne.
The mythic suggestion of Peche's image differs from representations of fashionable women in the prints by other artists, such as by Maria Likarz or Lotte Calm, which depict modern scenes of athletic competition and shopping. Since Peche became the artist most closely associated with the Werkstätte's ornamental style during the 1910s and 1920s, his repeated use of Daphne's image bears investigation. 20 His most likely source was Ovid's Metamorphoses, wherein Apollo, the heroic warrior-diety, is struck by Cupid's golden arrow and falls in love with Daphne, a beautiful daughter of the river god Peneus and Gaea, the Earth goddess. 21 His love rejected by the chaste nymph, Apollo turns into a hound inflamed by passion and chases after Daphne to rape her. She escapes by praying to her father, who causes her to metamorphose into a laurel tree: "Her hair was changed to leaves, her arms to branches. Her feet, but now so swift, grew fast into sluggish roots, and her head was now but a tree's top. Her gleaming beauty alone remained" (MAD 35). Embracing and kissing the laurel tree, Apollo then proclaims, "Since you cannot be my bride, you shall at least be my tree. . . .  With you shall Roman generals wreathe their heads, when shouts of joy shall acclaim their triumph, and long processions climb the Capitol" (MAD 41). In designs, sculpture, drawings, and five letters written in 1915-6, Peche treated this metamorphosis. 22 His repeated association of the female body with vegetative life unites women, nature, and ornament, in some cases even inscribing leaves and flowers on drawn female nudes as if they were tattooed on the skin. 23 Such images came to embody the Viennese culture of fashion and the discursive association of ornament and femininity during the 1910s.
Klimt's portraits of members of the Werkstätte's clientele, as in his painting of Eugenie Primavesi ( 3), captures well the culture inspired by the Werkstätte's fashion department. Eugenie and her husband Otto, who came from a prominent Moravian family of bankers and industrialists, were among the most active customers and even acquired a 30 percent interest in the company when it underwent economic reorganization in 1914. In 1913 Josef Hoffmann began designing their country villa near [Begin Page 252] Winkelsdorf in Czechoslovakia. Constructed of logs on a rubble stone socle and capped by a thickly thatched roof, the villa utilized materials of local vernacular architecture. Its plan and loggia with gigantic oak columns, however, were Palladian; and the inclusion of a water turbine to generate electricity, tennis courts, and swimming pool made the villa an exemplary modern building in folk style. 24 The interiors were richly painted with Moravian folk motifs, while the wallpapers, curtains, and upholstery were hand-printed designs from the Wiener Werkstätte. Visiting guests were provided with loose gowns to wear during their stay, each selecting from a stock of garments sewn from variously patterned Werkstätte silk fabrics. Eugenie is clothed in such a gown in Klimt's portrait, its colorful pattern spilling into the painting's field. The villa and painting embody what the initial enthusiasm for folk art had become in the hands of Wiener Werkstätte artists and patrons by the 1910s.
The fashion department had an audience far beyond such wealthy patrons. Over 70,000 visitors attended a fashion exhibition in Vienna that opened on 16 December 1915 and focused primarily on the Wiener Werkstätte. 25 Max Eisler believed that this exhibition confirmed fashion's special character in Vienna, its emphasis on unique artistry both in the dresses' forms and in details such as hand embroidery. These qualities linked it, he said, to the Werkstätte's previous applied art. 26 The exhibition also prompted ten female artists within the fashion department to create a portfolio of twenty colored linoleum cuts entitled Life of a Lady which emphasized fashion's role in modern life by following a fashionable woman from hat shop to bath to the sales rooms of the Austrian Werkbund. Such images strengthened the perception, already expressed by Westheim, that Viennese ornament and applied arts were intensely feminine.
This perception was so strong that when Johanna Meier-Michel designed a poster to advertise "Art of the Woman" ( 4) for the first exhibition of paintings and sculptures organized by the Association of Austrian Female Visual Artists, her image referred to the bright stylized flowers of the new graphic design and embroidery rather than the "fine arts." 27 The exhibition's 315 works constituted the first major survey of both past women artists and contemporary production in Europe. Visitors were numerous and sales strong at this and the group's second exhibition, indications of women's growing participation in the world of visual culture. Martha Hofrichter's cover for the second catalogue, an image of female wooden dolls with painted aprons simulating embroidery, added children to the exhibition's frame of reference. 28 Indeed, children's art was closely linked with folk art, a fact made clear by the following comment about the children's art room at the 1908 Kunstschau--"Primitive folk art, lamented by many as lost, blooms here ever anew." 29 Contemporary embroideries, described as "expressionist orgies of color," were seen as being equally primitive in feeling. 30 Helene Funke's painting Hungarian Girl ( 5), shown at the association's 1911 exhibition, joined youth, femaleness, and folk embroidery in a single work which one critic termed "ghastly Van Goghism" connected with the new trends of Neoprimitivism and Expressionism. 31 Roeßler declared Funke to be one of the exhibition's stronger painters, but added that such painting by a woman was always second-hand creation. Young male artists, such as Kokoschka and Schiele, were in his estimation redefining painting as a creative [Begin Page 254] activity surpassing nature. But women were excluded from this level of achievement, because, he concluded, "as long as art arises from stress and compulsion, which are specific to a male spirit and disposition," fine art would remain "'a necessary product of male particularism,' the effort for universal synthesis." 32
Roeßler's comment about Kokoschka's and Schiele's efforts to distance themselves from applied art was an observation about their origins. Kokoschka first came to public attention as a student in Löffler's class at the School of Applied Arts where he participated in graphic design projects for the Wiener Werkstätte. Dancer in a Meadow ( 6), one of his postcard designs from fall 1907 anticipated Löffler's contributions to the Jubilee Procession. 33 The girl's beflowered, wide-brimmed straw hat and her skirt trimmed with lace and embroidery are similar to the idyllic peasant world evoked by Löffler's group's designs. 34 While other of Kokoschka's postcards represent aspects of the new textile arts, three large cartoons called Bearers of Dreams (one major project shown at the 1908 Kunstschau) were designed to be executed as textiles. Several sources suggest that he considered the cartoons to be studies toward six embroidered panels or tapestries for the Palais Stoclet's ladies' sitting room. In the end, however, these designs, described as "having the character of naive folk art," were replaced by Carl Czeschka's wall decorations. 35
While Kokoschka's early work was related to the new decorative style, when his cartoons and children's book called Dreaming Boys--both published by the Wiener Werkstätte--were shown at the 1908 Kunstschau, their highly personal psychological characters were quickly remarked. 36 Unlike those whose books were based on existing fairy-tales and stories, illustrated by Secession members, and published by Martin Gerlach in a series for children, Kokoschka composed his own text and produced images better described as evocative than illustrative. Max Mell, whom Kokoschka consulted about the book, noted its chaotic quality and described it as a serious artistic probing of puberty. About the isolated adolescent girl and boy in the final plate, he wrote, "Between these poles of puberty, the holy lack of desire and the lust for life, lie anxiety, horrible secrecy, lust for adventure, the idyllic." 37 In his autobiography, Kokoschka refers to the book as his first love letter to Lilith, a young Swede who had already disappeared from his life when the book appeared. 38 But Li, the girl associated with "the bird-woods of the north" in the story, was, in fact, Lilith Lang, a sixteen-year-old Austrian student at the School of Applied Arts (DjK 260). She appears in the story after the narrator, growing aware of his sexuality and approaching adulthood, dreams of adventures in exotic worlds, of becoming a werewolf who invades the sites and bodies of conventional society. While the narrator dances "the desires of the sexes" in a garden, Li steps "from the festoons of vermilion flowers and sulfurous yellow stars." 39 Meeting her, he feels that he has already known her body's angular gesture and has expected her arrival at his silver bedspread. The pleasures of sexual desire are evoked, along with unanswered declarations of love and feelings of possessiveness-- [Begin Page 256]
no one has ever seen you like I have
I stand next to you and see your arm bend
such a story that ceases to be
if one touches it
beyond all words and signs I see.
[OKS 116-7]
After the relationship cools, the story ends with a reflection about his changed state: "I was a stumbler / when I discovered my flesh / and a lover of everything / when I spoke with a girl" (OKS 120).
Kokoschka's letters to Erwin Lang, Lilith's brother, express his bitterness over the relationship's breakup during the winter of 1907-8 (OKL 16). Speculation about this breakup and its impact is difficult, but it seems likely that a marriage proposal coupled with intense possessiveness might have been resisted by a young woman with close connections to the feminist movement in Austria. 40 Li's association with embroidery and lace in the story is related to the narrator's ability to see her as no one else could, his revelation of her form and character understood as a demonstration of love and entitlement to her. This passage recalls Kokoschka's sketches of Lang's naked body in angular poses and in motion, drawings that contributed to the book's final plate and were probably shown at the 1908 Kunstschau. These drawings are arguably his first works that focus on psychological expression, a direction that Mell encouraged, urging him to consider the "noble task" of portraiture, "to uncover the essence of a person's face" ("CK" 252).
During 1908 and 1909, after meeting Karl Kraus and Adolf Loos, Kokoschka began to distance himself from the production of applied art. Loos, impressed by his pieces in the 1908 Kunstschau, recalled that
he was employed by the Wiener Werkstätte and was occupied with the painting of fans, drawing postcards and similar things in the German fashion of art in the service of the businessman. It was immediately clear to me that one of the greatest crimes against the Holy Spirit was being committed here. 41
This clarity formed as part of a development of ideas eventually expressed in "Ornament and Crime," a lecture of 1910. 42 Ideas that originated in his writings at the turn of the century became publicity-seeking polemic as he condemned the Jubilee Procession for its display of ornament, calling its participants "tribes" of a pagan past who made manifest the Empire's backwardness. America and England, where efficient and economical functionalism dictated the abandonment of ornament, were his models of modernity, while Papuans with tattooed faces and elaborately ornamented articles of daily use represented modernism's Other. Drawing from the writings of Cesare Lombroso and various ethnographers, Loos rendered the tattoo a topos of everything uncivilized and backward, an embodiment of erotic and violent origins that modern society was compelled to suppress. In this, he revived a trope employed previously in an 1898 essay on women's fashion in which he declared, "The lower the culture, the more apparent the ornament. Ornament is something that must be overcome. The Papuan and the criminal ornament their skin. . . . But the bicycle and the steam engine are free of ornament. The march of civilization systematically liberates object after object from ornamentation." 43 The article decried fashion as outdated ornament that bore witness to women's subjugated condition. While men had largely abandoned ornamental dress in the nineteenth century, Loos asserted that women's fashion began to change rapidly as more novelty became necessary to arouse desire in men and draw them into the marriages that give women social status.
This article, as well as others by Loos, extolled the functionality and quality of English men's clothing, opposing that restrained and seemingly timeless style both to current Parisian fashion and efforts by artists to reform fashion. Rather than dress becoming expressive of individuality, he believed that modern individuals should adopt a neutral mask to protect the self. He addressed his ideas to the "aristocrats of the spirit" who would allow "the Slovak farmer's wife who embroiders her lace" to continue to derive pleasure from her work, for she knew no better culture. Yet judging from his own interiors, such an aristocrat could nevertheless enjoy a quality Persian carpet in his modern apartment. In light of this seeming contradiction Loos concludes that "he who goes to listen to the Ninth Symphony and who then sits down to draw up a wallpaper pattern, is either a rogue or a degenerate."
Kokoschka's suspicions about fashion's inauthenticity in the modern world are elaborated in a wry letter sent to Erwin Lang in the winter of 1907-8, in which he explains,
175-186 cm above the ground, hats go for walks, and clothes 15 cm lower, falling in folds as if they were alive, and everywhere all the folds are governed by the same monotonous theatrical law. . . . I shall buy myself a false red beard to put between the hat and clothes, so as to disrupt this theatrical pageant of folds. [OKL 16] 44
His use of ornament certainly changed with his increased contact with Loos, as is demonstrated by an analysis of the mother and child motif that he obsessively drew during 1908-9. While some fantastic scenes do employ heavy gestural marks across the paper's surface deriving from van Gogh's reed pen drawings, others are studies from models. The res' embroidered garments in several drawings seem worn, like the bodies of their wearers, peasants drawn away from their rural past and proletarianized by the modern city. Simultaneously, however, another type of ornament, the tattoo, began to fascinate Kokoschka. 45 Speaking of his initial preference for the Museum of Natural History over the Museum of Art History, he claimed he could grasp the import of "a Polynesian mask with its incised tattooing . . . at once, because I could feel my own facial nerves reacting to cold and hunger in the same way," but concludes that "For all my sympathy with primitive art, it would not have occurred to me to imitate it. I was not a savage. I would have had to live like them for my imitation to be genuine" (ML 19-20). Yet a connection of such material to his art was noted by several critics at the time, as when one described the sea and cliffs represented in The Bearers of Dreams as looking as if they were "tattooed with strange plants and animals" ("CK" 250). Another described Warrior (6, a painted clay self-portrait shown at the 1909 Kunstschau and purchased by Loos, as having the "grimace of a New Zealand fetish." 46 Indeed Kokoschka would have been familiar with the Museum of Natural History's rich collection of Oceanic art, including numerous Polynesian masks. 47 However, human skulls, overmodelled with clay to restore facial forms and then painted with decorative patterns, were also an important component of the collection. An extensive group of these had been collected by the Mission House St. Gabriel and Dr. Rudolf Pöch from the Sepik River area of Papua-New Guinea. 48 Dr. Pöch lectured about his expedition and the objects collected after they were given to the museum in 1907. 49 He stressed that Papuans believed that the head was rich in mana (spirit), and this was why skulls taken in warfare and those of important clan members were preserved. The taking of the first head was an important step in a boy's rise to manhood, for skulls were tokens of bravery and transmitted power to the victorious warrior.
Kokokschka's Warrior was likely inspired by such material. Its unfired clay surface is heavily worked, with raised and incised lines tinted blue and red suggesting the coursing of blood beneath the skin. The eyes, with blue irises, framed by the socket's reddish ochre surface, appear frozen in an eternal stare. The mouth gapes like a wound below. Supported on a long neck and tilted slightly upwards as if in awe or startled reaction, the head resembles a type of overmodeled skull ( 8) often mounted atop a woven basket mask, called the big-Abwan. 50 These skulls, overmodeled to make the face long and thin with a huge nose, also rise as if on a long neck above the basket's body, which conceals the wearer's torso and head. Painted patterns swirl across the face's surface and help to emphasize the eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Kokoschka appears to have imitated the abstract patterns in indices of skin wrinkles, blood vessels, and nerves. While the form was converted to a more naturalistic Western idiom, he clearly hoped to retain a sense of ritual and myth. Many years later, in the context of a story about the horrors of World War I, he reacted with anger when a lover showed him the death mask of her former husband. "It may be that this," he wrote,
was why from very ancient times people have modeled the faces of their dead--to keep death away.  Later they covered the skull with gold leaf, which was more resistant to the passage of time. There was the mask of Agamemnon from the tomb at Mycenae. 51
In the same story he also discusses his own fascination with prehistoric skulls found in natural history museums. He attributed the holes that are often bored in them to early man's practice of headhunting to gain nourishment from the brain of his victim, explaining that the practice's cessation was an important step in "man's evolution from a cannibal to a paterfamilias" (SR 35). But for modern man, Kokoschka claims, "the terror has crawled away down into our subconscious. It is in the unconscious realm that we work off our bad conscience, like our pussy-cat decently covering up her excrement in the sand-box provided" (ibid.). With the title Warrior, Kokoschka sought to associate his self-portrait with the terrors of combat and rituals that instilled and maintained gendered power differences. 52 Through his effort to turn ancient ornament into blood vessels and nerves, he simultaneously declares his modernity and critiques fine art's emphasis on an intense interior life, a quality that many critics maintained was lacking in contemporary, woman-centered ornament and applied art.
The exhibition of Warrior under a glass cover at the Kunstschau imbued it with an exotic otherness, leading critics to invoke the ethnographic museum and Paul Gauguin in their responses to it. 53 A large exhibition of Gauguin's work at the Miethke Gallery in 1907 played a role in Kokoschka's growing desire to escape to other worlds. 54 Since European longing for escape had been constructed first by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , it is perhaps not surprising that during 1908-9 Kokoschka undertook a set of illustrations for that novel. When they were exhibited at the 1909 Kunstschau, Ludwig Erik Tesar, an art critic who had previously published a German translation of the novel, responded enthusiastically,
it's real illustration, not the type that chatters tactlessly about the story, but the type that picks out and emphasizes crucial sentences and words, actions and feelings. The personal note of the illustrator lies in the selection of significant passages, his greatness in the artistic independence with which he strengthens the poetic through a corresponding artistic symbolism. 55
Comparisons with previous illustrations for Crusoe confirm the originality of Kokoschka's approach and suggest why Karl Kraus felt compelled to advertise--without success--for publication funds in the pages of Die Fackel. While a contemporary study of the novel's place in the history of children's literature recommended its aesthetic and pedagogical value as a counter to the sensationalism and sensuality of pulp adventure stories, one doubts that the author would have found the same values in Kokoschka's illustrations. 56 Gratuitous violence, a quality that educational reformers decried in colportage literature and films of the period, seems to break out, for instance, in Kokoschka's Man Running Amok ( 9). The drawing depicts an episode in Madagascar after Crusoe was rescued from the Caribbean island where he had been marooned while sailing to Africa to buy slaves for his Brazilian plantation. After a sailor raped a native girl, the natives attacked the trading party, killing some and forcing the remainder back to ship. A group of sailors, against Crusoe's advice, then armed themselves for reprisal and proceeded to torch all the huts and slaughter over 150 inhabitants. Crusoe, however, recounts that he mastered his rage and refrained from slaughter, and it is, perhaps, his silhouette at lower right, a passive spectator before the blazing spectacle of something like a cinema screen. Tattoos on his arm indicate the murderous sailor: amidst traces of veins are an anchor, pierced heart, and the initials O. K. and L. L., which effectively insert Kokoschka's failed relationship with Lilith Lang into the image. The motifs are typical of sailors' tattoos, while the use of initials points to the practice's rebirth in European culture when sailors on James Cook's voyages had their initials tattooed on their arms in Polynesia. 57
Polynesian tattoos may have played some role in Kokoschka's thinking about the costumes and drawings for his play Murderer, Hope of Women. 58 The graphic marks demand attention in his image of "Man" subduing "Woman," whose "graphic spontaneity may be read as an analog for the violence of the play itself ( 10)." 59 The marks originate in observation of anatomy and drapery, but clearly exceed that representational code to become signs in themselves. As seen in a drawing from Augustin Krämer's 1902 study of Samoan culture ( 11), tattoos often had a mimetic relationship not only to surface anatomy, but revealed the interior on the skin surface. But these relationships were exceeded by development of meanings within the cultural system of marking. While Kokoschka's marks do evoke "nerve lines, muscles and tendons," as he says, they are also loaded with meanings related to the discourses about the tattoo in 'primitive' cultures. The initials O. K. on the murderous sailor's arm--like his shaved head--also secure an identification with European sub-groups such as imprisoned criminals, an interest that is also briefly visible in his drawings for Der Sturm during 1910 of circus and variety performers, who are also tattooed.
Egon Schiele, although educated at the Academy of Fine Art rather than the School of Applied Art, began his career with a close relationship to the Wiener Werkstätte. A group of four early works, including Portrait of a Woman with Black Hat (Gertrude Schiele) ( 12), that he exhibited at the 1909 Kunstschau were strongly influenced by Klimt's decorative portraits of women. 60 Klimt personally invited his participation in the 1909 Kunstschau and, at the end of the year, secured a position for him in the Wiener Werkstätte where he briefly designed men's and women's fashions as well as postcards that treated the theme of fashion. 61 Schiele's sister Melanie, who designed many of her own clothes, supplied the hat and ermine neck wrap worn by their sister Gertrude in the 1909 portrait, along with the decorative coverlet that she holds in her hands. The portrait's background, like Schiele's other early works, was originally executed in metallic paint in an effort cheaply to emulate Klimt's application of gold and silver leaf to his paintings' surfaces. However, at some point he painted this background over with white paint, lending greater emphasis to the re's psychological presence. The image of a young woman fashionably dressed for the street, seeming to show a decoratively patterned fabric to the viewer, nevertheless remains strongly related to the Werkstätte--an observation reinforced by the fact that Schiele subsequently obtained a modeling job for Gertrude in the Werkstätte's fashion department.
It was thus predominantly issues of fashion and clothing (rather than ornamental pattern and Polynesian tattooing as with Kokoschka) that helped to frame Schiele's preoccupation with issues of interiority during 1909-11. The sole exception from that period is found in a re study of a dancer who partnered with Erwin Osen, a painter friend of Schiele's. Why she assumed the stage name "Moa"--also the name of New Zealand's large, extinct, flightless bird--is unknown, but her thick mane of black hair certainly resembled that of Polynesian women in photographs taken for anthropological and colonialist texts. A painting on paper of Moa from 1911 ( 13) demonstrates how Schiele's re studies revolve around the tension between clothing and body. If a nude is defined as an idealized set of artistic conventions--harmonious pose, adjusted proportions, excision of body hair and imperfections, lack of clothes constructed as a "natural" state--then Schiele's res are better described as naked. This was a recognition on his part akin to J. C. Flügel's observation in 1930 that "Clothes, though seemingly mere extraneous appendages, have entered into the very core of our existence as social beings," and further "of all the motives for the wearing of clothes, those connected with the sexual life have an altogether predominant position." 62
One of the most interesting aspects relating Schiele's work to fashion is its role in increasing sexual allusion in fashion illustration. In the initial Wiener Werkstätte fashion postcards of 1911 Mela Köhler stylized fashion's forms, but the illustration remained essentially functional, concerned with showing the dress well in an environment that lent appropriate prestige. 63 Otto Lendecke had learned a similar approach through his work for Paul Poiret in Paris, but a drawing done in Vienna around 1912 evidences a new quality. 64 The re strikes a pose of sexual solicitation against a void in order to highlight the slits in the blue overdress. It is difficult to explain other than as a response to Schiele's works, which were known in the fashion department since Wimmer-Wisgrill had become one of the artist's collectors. 65 In many of Schiele's works similar poses are struck which also stretch to the field's edge. Raised elbow and revealed axillar hair in Lendecke's drawing suggest the exposed pubes in Schiele's explicitly erotic drawings, the trajectory of both images pointing to the future sexual dance of fashion photography that Michelangelo Antonioni staged so memorably in the English film Blow Up . 66
Clothing's role in social construction and its motivation in sexual expression are seen not only in Schiele's studies of women and himself, but also in those of the painter Max Oppenheimer. Between 1908 and 1911 Oppenheimer moved his work in a direction similar to that of Kokoschka and Schiele; his anti-ornamental sentiment is reflected in a statement made to Roeßler that "The decorative is the most primitive form of painterly expression. It will always be the hobby horse of those who enjoy ordinary coarse sensations and are unable to have a feeling for anything but the 'applied.'" 67 Roeßler's description of Oppenheimer's appearance as making "him stand out at the first glance with his somewhat idiosyncratic but always distinguished clothing" could also be applied to other writers and artists--like Kokoschka and Schiele--who were turning from aestheticism to asceticism. 68 Recognizing that their life and art needed to be on display in the contemporary art world, but striving to deny any relationship to that world's commerce, they cultivated an overall look of aristocratic elegance touched with subtly unique detail. 69 The result is seen in a drawing by Schiele ( 14) in which Oppenheimer seems simultaneously to retreat and reveal himself through the cut of his black suit. The relationship of dress to the male subject's sexuality is suggested by the placement of his hands, an issue also raised by a drawing in Die Muskete that satirized a self-portrait shown by Oppenheimer in the 1908 Kunstschau. It represents him in a men's room and is captioned: "It is requested to arrange one's clothing before leaving." 70 The drawing in the satire magazine likely pointed to his homosexuality through his clothing, an issue also raised by Schiele's drawings of him. These show him lying, both prone and supine, on a bed with his legs extending toward the viewer. In the first case, the foreshortening leads the eye to the buttocks, in the second ( 15) to the groin which is indicated by his hand, a gesture made telling by the model's languid face which returns the gaze. 71 The hand and face attract the eye by their colors, because the chalk outlines of Oppenheimer's suit remain unfilled. The touches of watercolor run the spectrum from green to red and seem to reveal both the surface of the skin and a condition beneath it, an effect seen most vividly in the re's right hand where only the bones are picked out by the brush.
While Schiele's approach to re drawing undoubtedly derived in large part from August Rodin, he challenged one convention of the nude--inviolate skin--that Rodin had retained. Clothing would often become the immaterial, unexamined surface that skin had once been, as in a self-portrait ( 16) once owned by Wimmer-Wisgrill where the paper is untouched within the contours of the shirt's vest, while the arms are glimpsed through the transparent sleeves. Short hairs growing from the neck's nape declare the body's life and primacy over social conventions such as clothing. Oil's viscosity adds to this quality in Portrait of Dr. Erwin Graff ( 17), a gynecologist who permitted Schiele to draw his patients at the Vienna Medical School. Graff's skin's imperfect materiality, suggested particularly through the bandaged finger, stands at odds with the antiseptic white of his scrubs. This materiality in Schiele's and Kokoschka's works always gives access to an interiority ultimately alone and moving towards death, as indicated in the following lines written by Roeßler about the skin of paint in Kokoschka's portraits: "He smears it like ointment and lets it cake into a scab and heal [Begin Page 269] into scar tissue. . . . He paints their mite infested skin, their ulcerating flesh, which stews in inner heat, is worn down by debauchery, eaten away by sickness." 72
Alfred Gell, in his study of Polynesian tattooing, considers skin's cross-cultural role as symbolic form. While some societies, such as those in Polynesia, have viewed the skin as an appropriate support and vehicle for expression of social relations, others, including most in modern Europe, have developed prohibitions on the skin's marking. 73 Individuals in the New Guinean highlands may view body decoration as a means to display their true selves' links to ancestors and cultural myths, but Europeans at the turn of the century believed that the true self, the interior one, remained hidden from public view by the skin. 74 In the final lines of "Ornament and Crime" Loos expressed that "Primitive men had to differentiate themselves by various colors, modern man needs his clothes as a mask. His individuality is so strong that it can no longer be expressed in terms of items of clothing." 75 This emphasis on a rich interior existence grew from an altered concept of childhood that had developed in Europe during the eighteenth century and coalesced in Freud's theory of the unconscious. 76 Psychic identity came to be experienced as an inner space rooted in childhood's lost history. This conceptual framework helps to link the Viennese expressionists' extraordinary focus on children to their equally unusual effort to convey unseen psychic life. The depiction of skin's material condition, like the use of expressive dance movements and auratic emanations, provided a means to allude to a hidden condition that originated in the separations and conflicts of childhood.
Schiele's The Birth of Genius ( 18), a painting of 1911 since destroyed, imagined and reenacted an infant's severance from its initial fused state with the mother's body. A startled face looks out from a transparent womb, the infant's hand tests the space of culture that his skin now meets without mediation. The motif, according to Roeßler, had its origin in December 1910 when he, in response to Schiele's complaints about his own mother, suggested that the artist execute a series on the theme of motherhood. 77 Schiele was immediately drawn to the idea of a dead mother and painted an initial version that he presented as a gift to Roeßler on Christmas Eve 1910. In the first version he clearly wanted to encourage contemplation of the painting's relationship to traditional representations of mother and child in genre and religious painting, for the heads incline toward each other, suggesting that the infant is enclosed by a blanket and both are asleep. Only the mother's ashen color challenges this interpretation and, upon reflection, forces the realization that this is a view into the womb, eliciting shock in response to the macabre transformation of the theme. In the second version, however, the mother's head and hand are more clearly cadaverous and the tender touching of heads was removed, changes that brutally call attention to the severings of parturition and the later individuation of consciousness.
Roeßler located the work's impetus solely in Schiele's personal history, never mentioning a possible relationship to the paintings on view at the December 1910 The Art of the Woman exhibition. Julie Johnson has shown how the exhibition's organizers deliberately "selected works which would represent aspects of domestic femininity. 78 Images of motives and children were plentiful, perhaps to reaffirm traditional female roles to a public who could have been disturbed by the exhibition's bold assertion of women's presence in the history and current practice of visual arts. In his review of that exhibition, Roeßler stressed that woman's natural role was that of mother rather than of painter or sculptor. 79 He continued to espouse this view in his article about Zweybrück, arguing that women were more suited to those arts that allowed them to remain a riddle, singing, dancing, and decorating. This was woman's natural role, because, as he explained,
Each man was only wholly inside woman's being once, as an unborn child; but in his later life he retains only an uncertain, dream-like memory about that internalized existence. And precisely because of that, because woman by her mere existence alone already has a strong impact, man values her as an artist only if it is a matter of a particularly feminine art. 80
Roeßler valued Zweybrück principally as a craftswoman, for embroidery had been construed as a highly gendered art since the nineteenth century. This conformed to textile's gendered status in European folk cultures where cloth was an important means of social reproduction. Celebratory gifts of textiles bound groups together and the transmission of techniques connected women to both their ancestors and progeny, encouraging the analogizing of textile production with human reproduction.
It was exactly such feminized ties that Schiele denied in his painting. In a letter written to his mother two years after The Birth of Genius, he made an extraordinary claim that says much about his understanding of the artist's imagination and psychological state. "This is the great separation," he told her:
Without doubt I will be the greatest, the most beautiful, the most valuable, the purest, and the most precious fruit--through my independent will all beautiful and noble results are united in me--this also, no doubt, because of the man. I will be the fruit which after its decay will still leave behind eternal life: therefore how great must be your joy--to have borne me? 81
This imagined separation involved much more than personal psychological history. It was, in effect, one of expressionism's myths of origin, a fantasy about the relative values of fine and applied art, about painting's eternal life as opposed to textile's decay. Through such myths, male expressionist artists struggled to separate themselves from the growing presence of women in the Viennese art world as well as the discourse about ornament and fashion that accompanied women's expanding roles in the public sphere.
Sherwin Simmons teaches twentieth-century art and design history at the University of Oregon. He is currently at work on a book entitled Fashionable Textile Art: New Roles for Women in the German Art World, 1896-1932, a section of which has appeared recently in Fashion/Theory.
I am grateful to Maria Makela and Claude Cernuschi for helpful comments about earlier formulations of this material. All translations are my own except where otherwise indicated.
1. Arthur Roeßler, "Die Frauen und die Kunst," Stickerei-Zeitung und Spitzen Revue 14 (January 1914): 182.
2. Arthur Roeßler, "Hagenbund," Arbeiter Zeitung, 14 May 1912.
3. Arthur Roeßler, "Drei Jungwiener Maler," Die Aktion 5 (February 1915): 80.
4. See Werner Hoffmann, Gustav Klimt und die Wiener Jahrhundertwende (Salzburg: Galerie Welz, 1970), and Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1979).
5. The papers of one such symposium are collected in Ornament und Askese im Zeitgeist des Wien der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Alfred Pfabigan (Vienna: Brandstätter, 1985).
6. See Nike Wagner, Geist und Geschlecht: Karl Kraus und die Erotik der Wiener Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), and Beatriz Colomina, "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), 73-128. For discussion of women's growing roles in the public sphere, see the exhibition catalogue Aufbruch in das Jahrhundert der Frau? Rosa Mayreder und der Feminismus in Wien um 1900, ed. Reingard Witzmann (Vienna: Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien, 1990).
7. Fashion's growth and the concerns that it elicited are treated in Mark M. Anderson, Kafka's Clothes: Ornament and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin de Siècle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). For recent studies of women's contributions to the Viennese art world, see Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, Künstlerinnen in Österreich 1897-1938: Malerei, Plastik, Architektur (Vienna: Picus, 1994); and Julie Marie Johnson, "The Art of the Woman: Women's Art Exhibitions in Fin-de-siècle Vienna" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1997). For discussion of fashion's and textile art's roles in the Secession before 1908, see Rebecca Houze, "Fashion, Disguise, and Transformation: Origins of the Modern Art Movement in Vienna, 1897-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2000). Regarding the anxieties of male artists, see Patrick Werkner, "The Child-Woman and Hysteria: Images of the Female Body in the Art of Schiele, in Viennese Modernism, and Today," in Egon Schiele: Art, Sexuality, and Viennese Modernism, ed. Patrick Werkner (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 51-78; and Claude Cernuschi, "Pseudo-Science and Mythic Misogyny: Oskar Kokoschka's "Murderer, Hope of Women," Art Bulletin 81 (March 1998): 126-48.
8. See Otto Wagner: Reflections on the Rainment of Modernity, ed. Harry Francis Mallgrave (Santa Monica: Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities, 1993).
9. Joseph August Lux, "Vorwort," Die Flache 1 , as cited in Michael Pabst, Wiener Grafik um 1900 (Munich: Silke Schreiber, 1984), 246.
10. See Diana Graham Reynolds, "Alois Riegl and the Politics of Art History: Intellectual Traditions and Austrian Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna," (Ph.D dissertation, University of California, San Diego, 1997).
11. Erich Kolbenheyer, "Bukowina," in Ausstellung Österreichischer Hausindustrie und Volkskunst, exhibition catalogue (Vienna: K. K. Österreiches Museum für Kunst und Industrie, 1905), 106-7.
12. Ludwig Hevesi, "Volkskunst," Altkunst-Neukunst, Wien 1894-1908 (Vienna: C. Konegen, 1909), 400, 404, as cited in Wolfgang G. Fischer, Gustav Klimt & Emilie Flöge (London: Lund Humphries, 1992), 46.
13. For a thorough examination of the Jubilee, see Elisabeth Grossegger, Der Kaiser-Huldigungs-Festzug Wien 1908 (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1992).
14. Josef August Lux, "Festzugsimpression," Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 13 June 1908.
15. Kirk Varnedoe, Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture, and Design, exhibition catalogue (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), 95.
16. Paul Westheim, "Ungarische Volkskunst," Textile Kunst und Industrie 1 (December 1909): 493.
17. For more on the prominent place of women in the applied arts movement, see Plakolm-Forsthuber, Künstlerinnen, 87-109; regarding the cooperative formed by Dr. Emma Stiasny in 1908, see Karl Walde, "Erste Wiener Produktivgenossenschaft der Absolventinnen der K. K. Kunststickerschulen in Wien," Textile Kunst und Industrie 6 (February 1913): 45-52.
18. These portfolio editions were limited to either 50 or 100 in number and appeared every two weeks, beginning 7 November 1914. "Neue Kleidermode in Wien," Stickerei Zeitung und Spitzen Revue 15 (1 January 1915): 91.
19. Media included woodcut, lithography, linoleum cut, and etching, many of which were handcolored. For a recent reproduction of the prints, see Elisabeth Rücker, Wiener Charme. Mode 1914/15: Graphiken und Accessoires, exhibition catalogue (Nürnberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1984).
20. Peche's importance within the practice of the Wiener Werkstätte and the discourse about its ornamental style during the 1910s and 1920s is examined in Die Überwindung der Utilität: Dagobert Peche und die Wiener Werkstätte, ed. Peter Noever, exhibition catalogue (Vienna: Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, 1998).
21. For discussion, see Mary E. Barnard, The Myth of Apollo and Daphne from Ovid to Quevedo: Love, Agon, and the Grotesque (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1987); hereafter abbreviated MAD.
22. For further discussion of the motif, see Sabine Plakolm-Forsthuber, "Dagobert Peche und das 'Wiener Weiberkunstgewerbe,'" and August Ruhs, "Fünf Briefe an Daphne: Mutmaßungen über ein Begehren," in Die Überwindung der Utilität, 68-85 and 148-66. Reproductions of works treating the theme are found on 68, 193-4, 327, and 331.
23. Plakholm-Forsthuber, "Dagobert Peche," 77.
24. Eduard F. Sekler, Josef Hoffmann: The Architectural Work (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985), 127-34, 360-2.
25. Traude Hansen, Wiener Werkstätte Mode (Vienna: C. Brandstätter, 1984), 66-7. This compares with 12,264 visitors to the 47th Secession exhibition held in 1914.
26. Max Eisler, "Die Wiener Modeausstellung," Dekorative Kunst 19 (April 1916): 229-40.
27. This landmark exhibition was held from 5 November 1910 to 8 January 1911 in rooms rented from the Secession. Meier-Michel's design is similar, for instance, to floral graphic designs by Leopoldine Kolbe and Gustav Kolhammer for numbers 36 and 65 in the Wiener Werkstätte postcard series.
28. Hofrichter's cover for the second exhibition, which was held at the Hagenbund from 15 September to 5 November 1911, is reproduced in Plakolm-Forsthuber, Künstlerinnen, 67.
29. Joseph August Lux, "Die Wiener Kunstschau--Ausstellung," Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 23 (1908-9), 53. In addition to his children's art classes, Franz Cizek taught classes in ornamental design at the K. K. Kunststickereischule from 1903 to 1906 and then at the Kunstgewerbeschule, where he influenced artists such as Zweybrück. The Museum für Kunst und Industrie held a children's art exhibition in 1905.
30. A. Jaumann, "Widerkunft der Dekorations-Stickerei," Stickerei Zeitung und Spitzen Revue 10 (May 1910): 213-8; and Paul Klobucar, "Emmy Zweybrück, ihre Werkstätte und ihre Schule," Stickerei Zeitung und Spitzen Revue 19, no. 8 : 145-51.
31. Adalbert F. Seligmann, "Hagenbund," Neue Freie Presse, 17 September 1911. For a recent study of the Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Österreichs, critical response to its exhibitions, and the relationship of women artists to historical narratives of modern art, see Johnson's dissertation, "The Art of the Woman."
32. Arthur Roeßler, "Hagenbund: Zweite Ausstellung der Vereinigung bildender Künstlerinnen Oesterreichs," Arbeiter Zeitung, 1 October 1911.
33. Alfred Weidinger has connected this postcard design to Gertrude Barrison's performance of a "Rococo" dance at the Cabaret Fledermaus. See Oskar Kokoschka--Dreaming Boy and Enfant Terrible: Early Graphic Works, 1902-1909, exhibition catalogue (Oslo: Stenersen Museum, 1996), 27-8.
34. Alice Strobl and Alfred Weidinger, Oskar Kokoschka, Works on Paper: The Early Years, 1897-1917, exhibition catalogue (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1994), . 41 and 42. The Wiener Werkstätte published postcards based on the designs for Group XIII, four by Löffler and four by Joseph Díveky.
35. Eduard Pötzl, "Kunstschau. Eindrücke eines Laien," Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 7 June 1908. Also see Carl Otto Czeschka, letter to Hans Ankwicz-Kleehoven, 15-19 October 1954, as cited in Werner J. Schweiger, Der junge Kokoschka: Leben und Werk 1904-1914 (Vienna: C. Brandstätter, 1983), 67, 70-1; hereafter abbreviated DjK.
36. Kokoschka's design for the Jubilee's poster also shows an imaginative dimension quite different from other artists involved with the festival. The flag bearer's beard and the waving of palm fronds recall images from the ancient Near East, such as the reliefs of captured nationalities bearing tribute to Assyrian kings at Nimrud and Nippur. The trance-like poses and references to ancient despotism are at odds with Löffler's medieval pageantry in his poster and eighteenth-century idyllicism in his costume designs.
37. Max Mell, "Chaos der Kindheit," Die Zukunft 16 (August 1908): 250-2; hereafter abbreviated "CK." For a letter from Kokoshka to Mell in March 1908, see Oskar Kokoschka Letters 1905-1976, ed. Olda Kokoschka and Alfred Marnau (London: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 18; hereafter abbreviated OKL.
38. Oskar Kokoschka, My Life (London: Thames and Hudson: 1974), 20; hereafter abbreviated ML.
39. Oskar Kokoschka: Schriften, 1907-1955, ed. Hans Maria Wingler (Munich: A. Langen, 1956), 113; hereafter abbreviated OKS.
40. Marie Lang, Lilith's mother, was an editor of Dokumente der Frauen, a journal associated with the General Austrian Women's Association, and included her children in discussions with artists and intellectuals. Lilith would have met numerous Secessionists at home and certainly knew Rosa Mayreder, the painter and feminist theorist who founded the Art School for Women and Girls, where she began her own art studies. For more on this see Harriet Anderson, Utopian Feminism: Women's Movements in fin-de siécle Vienna (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 44-54, 135-7; and René Freund, Land der Träumer: Zwischen Grösse und Grössenwahn (Vienna: Picus, 1996), 51-69.
41. Adolf Loos to Gustav Hartlaub, 5 January 1931, as cited in DjK, 116.
42. The lecture was given on 21 January 1910 at the Akademischer Verband für Literatur und Musik in Vienna and was noted in "Ornament und Verbrechen," Der Sturm 1 (April 1910): 44. English translation in The Architecture of Adolf Loos, exhibition catalogue, (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1985), 100-3. For discussion and dating, see Burkhardt Rukschicio, "Ornament und Mythos," in Pfabigan, Ornament und Askese, 57-68.
43. Adolf Loos, "Damenmode," Neue Freie Presse, 21 August 1898; and Der Sturm 1 (July 1910): 171-2. English translation in Adolf Loos, Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays 1897-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 99-103. This essay was written during a period when Loos designed the interior of the Wiener Frauenklub and enjoyed a close relationship with Rosa Mayreder and Marie Lang. It was later reprinted in Dokumenten der Frauen.
44. For a similarly critical attitude on the part of Peter Altenberg, another member of the Kraus-Loos circle, see Peter Altenberg, "Mode," Märchen des Lebens (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1908), 69-72. For a different view of fashion among expressionist artists around Otto Haas-Heye in Berlin, see my article "Expressionism in the Discourse of Fashion," Fashion/Theory 4 : 1-40.
45. Kokoschka's interest in tattooed ornament was different from the previously mentioned suggestion of tattoo in some of the later drawings by Peche. Rather than an ornament based on vegetative nature, Kokoschka was drawn to motifs that evoked human anatomy and cultural signs.
46. Paul Frank, "Kokoschka," Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 1 July 1909, 3. As cited in DjK, 113.
47. For a history of the collection, see Die Ozeanischen Sammlungen (Vienna: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1967).
48. Europeans knew the Sepik River as the Kaiserin-Augusta-Fluß of Kaiser-Wilhelm-Land, since Germany had gained control of various territories in Oceania after the Franco-Prussian War. The Missionhaus St. Gabriel in Mödling on the outskirts of Vienna established several missions in the area at the turn-of-the-century. Father P. Wilhelm Schmidt made the institution a leading center of anthropological research by beginning publication of Anthropos, an important scholarly journal, in 1906. Dr. Pöch's expedition of 1904-6 was sponsored by the Akademie der Wissenschaft.
49. Pöch's lecture was given on 9 January 1907 to the Anthropologische Gesellschaft. His publications about his 1904-6 expedition include: "Bericht über seine anthropologische Studienreise nach Neu-Guinea," Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 37, no. 1 ; "Einige bemerkenswerte Ethnologica aus Neu-Guinea," Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 37, no. 2-3 : 57-71; and "Einige bemerkenswerte Ethnologica aus Neu-Guinea (Nachtrag)," Mitteilungen der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien 37, no. 4-5 : 125.
50. For some discussion of big-Abwan masks, see Oceanic Art, ed. Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Christian Kaufmann, and Douglas Newton (New York: Harry Abrams, 1997), 310, 341; and Anthony Forge, "Style and Meaning in Sepik Art," in Primitive Art and Society, ed. Anthony Forge (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 171-2. Guidebooks to Vienna and the Naturhistorisches Museum suggest that a big-Abwan mask was on view in Room 16 during this period. Confirmation of this, however, must await completion of a storage reorganization project at the Museum für Volkerkunde Wien.
51. Oskar Kokoschka, A Sea Ringed with Visions, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser (New York: Horizon Press, 1962), 27; hereafter abbreviated SR.
52. For discussion of these rituals in the Sepik region, see Gregory Bateson, Naven (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1936); and Michael Houseman and Carlo Severi, Naven or the Other Self: A Relational Approach to Ritual Action (Leiden: Brill, 1998). For discussion in Vienna during this period, see P. W. Schmidt "Die geheime Junglingsweihe der Karesau-Insulaner (Deutsch-Neuguinea)," Anthropos 2, no. 5 : 1029-56.
53. Arnold Clementschitsch, Wege und Irrwege eines Malers (Klagefurt: F. Kleinmayr, 1947), 91; and Richard Munther, "Die Kunstschau," Die Zeit, 6 June 1908.
54. He mentions this desire in letters to Erwin Lang. See especially the letters of late 1907 and February-March 1908 in OKL, 15-7.
55. Ludwig Erik Tesar, "Die Kunstschau: Einiges über die Probleme der Kunst von Heute," Kunst Revue, supplement in Österreichs Illustrierte Zeitung, no. 39 (June 1909), as quoted in DjK, 105-6.
56. H. F. Wagner, Robinson und die Robinsonaden in unserer Jugendliteratur (Vienna: privately published, 1903).
57. The use of initials was reported to have played a role in Cook's supposed "proving" of cannibalism among the Maori. Markman Ellis, "Crusoe, Cannibalism and Empire," in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), 53-4.
58. He wrote: "I decorated the actor's arms and legs with nerve lines, muscles and tendons, just as they can be seen in my old drawings" (ML 29).
59. Cernuschi, "Pseudo-Science and Mythic Misogyny," 145.
60. For an elaboration of this influence see Alessandra Comini, Egon Schiele's Portraits (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 20-32.
61. Jane Kallir, Egon Schiele: The Complete Works (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998). For postcard designs that were not executed, see numbers 366-8 and 973-7; for drawings reproduced as postcards, see numbers 468, 486, and 488; and for men's fashion sketches, see numbers 728-35.
62. J. C. Flügel, The Psychology of Clothes (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), 16, 25.
63. Angela Völker, Wiener Mode and Modefotografie: Die Modeabteilung der Wiener Werkstätte 1911-1932 (Munich: Schneider-Henn, 1984), 31-4.
64. The drawing (K.I. 8653/10) is found in the "Österreiches Museum für angewandte Kunst and is reproduced in Wiener Mode and Modefotografie, 41.
65. Wimmer-Wisgrill owned, among other Schiele works, Nude Self-Portrait with Ornamental Drapery, an important painting of 1909 (cf. Kallir, Egon Schiele, catalogue number 154), in which Schiele allows a piece of Werkstätte-like fabric to slip theatrically off his shoulder and reveal his naked body. See a hand-written list of his paintings and their owners in Nebehay, Egon Schiele, 319. Wimmer-Wisgrill also owned numerous works on paper, having met Schiele in 1910 through Josef Hoffmann.
66. Léon Bakst's costume sketches also contributed to the growing role of eroticism in fashion drawing. Their impact is seen, for instance, on Ludwig Kainer's drawings in Berlin.
67. Arthur Roeßler, "Max Oppenheimer" (Vienna n.d. [1911]), 28, as cited in G. Tobias Natter, "Max Oppenheimer--Haben wir ihn jetzt wieder?" MOPP: Max Oppenheimer 1885-1954, exhibition catalogue (Vienna: Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Wien, 1994), 26. See also Schiele's aphorism--"Art can not be applied"--in a letter of 1 September 1911 to Leopold Czihaczek in Christian M. Nebehay, Egon Schiele 1890-1918: Leben, Briefe, Gedichte (Vienna: Residenz, 1979), 182.
68. Roeßler, "Max Oppenheimer," 26, as cited and translated in John Czaplicka, "Memory, Identity, and the Conditions of Exile," in Emigrants and Exiles: A Lost Generation of Austrian Artists in America, 1920-1950, ed. John Czaplicka and David Mickenberg, exhibition catalogue (Evanston, Ill.: Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern University, 1996), 150. Clothing's relationship to writers and artists who were turning from aestheticism to asceticism is discussed in Anderson, Kafka's Clothes.
69. For a discussion of this anticommercial stance, see Robert Jensen, "Selling Martyrdom," Art in America 80 (April 1992): 1345; and Sherwin Simmons, "Kitsch oder Kunst? Kokoschka's Der Sturm and Commerce in Art," Print Collector's Newsletter 23 (November-December 1992): 161-7.
70. Czaplicka proposes the satirical drawing's possible comment on Oppenheimer's homosexuality in Emigrants and Exiles, 190.
71. Kallir, Egon Schiele, drawing and watercolor catalogue numbers 593 and 594.
72. Arthur Roeßler, "Hagenbund," Arbeiter Zeitung, 4 February 1911.
73. Alfred Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 24.
74. Marilyn Strathern, "The Self in Self-Decoration," Oceania 49 (June 1979): 241-57.
75. The Architecture of Adolf Loos, 103.
76. See, for example, Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocation: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780-1930 (London: Virago Press, 1995). Steedman traces the nineteenth century's fascination with Mignon, a character in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister . She claims that Mignon, an orphaned Italian girl whose body is made both lithe and deformed through forced acrobatic training, becomes a topos of the sense of interiority that arose from new concepts of childhood.
77. Arthur Roeßler, Erinnerungen an Egon Schiele (Vienna: C. Konegen, 1948), 28, 62-3.
78. Johnson, "The Art of the Woman," 219.
79. Arthur Roeßler, "Kunstausstellungen: Wien," Kunst und Künstler 9, no. 4 : 204-5. For discussion of the theme's relationship to Schiele's family life, see Comini, Egon Schiele's Portraits, 84-7; and Danielle Knafo, Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993), 37, 92-102.
80.
81. Letter of 31 March 1913 from Egon to Marie Schiele. Arthur Roeßler, Briefe und Prosa von Egon Schiele (Vienna: R. Lányi, 1921), 29, as cited and translated in Knafo,
At his coterie's gatherings, Kafka was well known for laughing out loud during the readings of his tales--and being the only one to do so. He reportedly laughed at the most inopportune moments, moments of the greatest torment to his hero, of the bleakest hour, moments of the most grotesque and exquisite torture to his hero's psyche and body.
A Kafka who laughs out loud at his own terrifying story, who laughs not nervously but vigorously, is hardly recognizable to us, schooled as we are on modernist readings of his voice. By this modernist cast he is inactive, sad, despondent, drifting in a universe abandoned by God, pessimistic, sullen--in short, unfunny. Yet Slavoj Zizek demonstrates that "Kafka's problem is, on the contrary, that in this universe God is too present in the guise of various obscene, nauseous phenomena. Kafka's universe is a world in which God . . . has gotten too close to us." 1 If God is not focally absent in Kafka, then His proximity and fullness as ironic interlocutor in conversation with humanity offers the possibility of the ultimate and strange solace of irony. For Milan Kundera, Kafka devoté and countryman, the craft of the novel is that of irony. He considers the novel consubstantial with irony, and the wisdom of the novel the full reverberation of God's laughter at man thinking. "There is a fine Jewish proverb," he writes:
Man thinks, God laughs. Inspired by that adage, I like to imagine that François Rabelais heard God's laughter one day, and thus was born the idea of the first great European novel. It pleases me to think that the art of the novel came into the world as the echo of God's laughter. But why does God laugh at the sight of man thinking? Because man thinks and the truth escapes him. Because the more men think, the more one man's thought diverges from another's. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is. 2
The Old Testament is replete with the proximal ironies of a God-interlocutor, the laughter of a God exceedingly close to humanity: Job thinks and the truth escapes him; Adam and Eve are beloved and are exiled; Moses leads his exodus but is not given to see the fruit of freedom; Abraham, willing to sacrifice his son, is exempted from demonstrating this willingness. None of these laugh at God's ways. But what of Sarah? Sarah does laugh at God's ironies--and is not punished.
Three men appear to Abraham (some exegetical remarks cite them as angels, some as God triumvirate); and they ask him,
"Where is your wife Sarah?" And he replied, "There, in the tent." Then one said, "I will return to you when life is due and your wife Sarah shall have a son!" Sarah was listening at the entrance of the tent, which was behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in years; Sarah had stopped having the periods of women. And Sarah laughed to herself, saying, "Now that I am withered, am I to have enjoyment--with my husband so old?" Then the LORD said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh, saying, 'Shall I in truth bear a child, old as I am?' Is anything too wondrous for the LORD? I will return to you at the time that life is due, and Sarah shall have a son." [Gen. 18:9-14; my translation]
Sarah's beauty was legendary but it was barren: she remained childless until the fulfillment of God's (laughable) promise that she would be "a mother of nations" (Gen. 17:16). Old as she and Abraham were--she in her 90s, he a centenarian--she gave birth to the promised son. Sarah's doubt of God (giving her maidservant Hagar to Abraham as a surrogate mother, she enterprisingly fulfills God's promise for Him) is often cited as the center of this tale. Yet Sarah is not punished for her lapse of faith; she is not scolded for her skeptical laughter, her gallows humor. She is instead rewarded. She laughs (va-titzchak) and it is her gift: "Sarah remarked, 'God has prepared laughter for me; everyone who hears of it will laugh with me" (Gen. 21:6). Her laughter is embodied forever in God's award of Isaac (Vitzchak).
The tale of Sarah is often eclipsed by that of Abraham. It is sometimes treated as a tale of prophetic onomastics, of the iconicity of Isaac's naming; it is more accurately treated as a tale of irony, the tale Kundera in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting tells between the lines. This novel seems, on its surface, to bypass the biblical in its comprehensive ironies. But the careful reader with an appropriately rich "meditative background" (Kundera's term) will note an Old Testament echo in the love and longing that the character Mr. Kundera has for "Sarah, the Jewish girl, Sarah my sister." Perhaps her existence somewhere will countermand the angels' "fearsome laughter." The devils, on the other hand, laugh joyously, incipiently, devilishly at the angels who are the arbiters of world order. 3 The devils' laughter exceeds order and suits, as much as Kundera might deny it, the revelry in ambiguity that Zizek proposes is Kafka's.
Still, Kundera has done much to recuperate Kafka's jocundity, his very real comedic touch. 4 Irony is often, strangely, penned away from comedy or the humorous; but in Kafka, it is uproariously funny. His comic tragic res are those of Job, Prometheus, Christ, Adam, and Satan, the exiled angel. His laugh, like Sarah's, incorporates all the semantic field of laughability: joy, absurdity, irony, mockery. In turn, God's laughter--Isaac--fixes meaning as an end of interpretation. Sarah's laugh dwells in the moment; God's incorporates a moment into the universe of meaning.
Kafka would likely have laughed robustly at the very moment in his "In the Penal Colony" that the spike is driven through the officer's head. But how is Kafka funny to himself and so unfunny to modern sensibilities? Does the spike undo the machine of interpretation? Is that a moment when the text becomes "a coagulated, stigmatized, signifying chain repelling signification with an excess of sticky enjoyment?" (LA 151) These questions require an exploration of the effect of gesture in Kafka's writing, specifically in order to expose laughter itself as a gesture--a resistance of--and to--interpretation.
On the second of December, 1914, at one of the regular salon meetings of Kafka's writers group--a group including Max Brod, Franz Werfel, and Otto Pick--Kafka read "In the Penal Colony" aloud. Famously dissatisfied with his own writings, he was noncharacteristically "easy" on his latest work: "am not entirely dissatisfied," he recorded in his diary, "except for its glaring and ineradicable faults." 5 But what follows in the diary is of even greater relevance to an inquiry into gesture: