Chipstone House

Taking a class in another department is always valuable, not only because you get to work on something totally different, but also because it inevitably makes you appreciate your own department all the more. This is being brought home to me again this semester, now that I'm taking a class taught by a folklorist in the Landscape Architecture department on "Cultural Landscape History, Theory, and Preservation." I was sort of hoping for a class about the history of landscape design, featuring the likes of Capability Brown and Frederick Law Olmstead, but mostly what we talk about is the preservation of historic buildings, because for better or worse that's what our preservation programs privilege.


But at least that means I can do a project on architecture, which I get to talk about but rarely. The working title of my final paper is Curating the Cultural Landscape: Chipstone House as Historical Property and it will examine Chipstone House, a 1949 neo-colonial mansion and its surrounding grounds, located in the Milwaukee suburb of Fox Point. The first question I want to raise relates to the discipline of landscape studies, and asks how J.B. Jackson’s definition of landscape as a collection of defined spaces relates landscape to other types of collecting and curatorial practices. J.B. Jackson is a seminal figure for the study of vernacular landscapes, but it feels like his groundbreaking ideas haven't sufficiently carried over to curatorial practice. This is particularly pertinent to Chipstone House since it is now the headquarters of the Chipstone Foundation, which curates the collection of early-American decorative arts begun by the house’s original owners, Stanley and Polly Stone. If we take Jackson's point that the interior and exterior landscapes of Chipstone House are collections, then how have they been curated? And how do these landscape curatorial practices relate to those used to curate what is better known as the “Chipstone Collection” of decorative arts?


My secondary point is about the role historicism played in the cultural landscape of Chipstone House. It was designed by Andrew Hepburn, an architect whose firm had been charged with restoring Colonial Williamsburg, and it's more or less a domestic version of Williamsburg's Governors Palace (above). Chipstone House clearly relates to a wider American interest in an idealized colonial past, but what I want to suggest is that Chipstone’s emulation of the historical properties in Williamsburg constructs history itself as property, as cultural capital or a commodity that can be bought and displayed.

Keramic Art of Japan

Last year I came across this book Keramic Art of Japan in our art library, and I've been more or less obsessed with it ever since. It was published in England in 1875, and it's basically an illustrated catalog of Japanese ceramics in various public and private collections. But the illustrations! In addition to photographs and photolithographs, it has the most extraordinary chromolithographs I've ever seen in person. They were done by a French firm and each image required a whole series of hand-drawn lithographic stones, one for each color and shade. They are so detailed, so colorful, so three-dimensional and yet so flat: their quality is almost magical.


This semester I'm finally getting to indulge my interest in Keramic Art of Japn by using it as the object of my final project for my class on "Dimensions of Material Culture." This will force me to look at the book as a material object: its size, bindings, printing, typography, etc., everything that isn't its text or its images. As an added bonus, I'm also giving a preliminary presentation on Keramic Art at a research colloquium on "Photography and the Technologies of Empire and Race" that's part of a Visual Culture Center conference here at UW-Madison. So I'll get to talk both about how all the images (even the chromolithographs) make use of photography, and how the book relates to England's imperialist attitudes towards Japan in the late-nineteenth century.


It's these later aspects--how the book uses mimetic technologies like photography and chromolithography, and how the book relates to Japonisme as a colonial discourse--that make me interested in using Keramic Art of Japan as a focus for my MA paper next semester. Specifically I want to compare what's going on in Keramic Art with the ways in which Japanese people were mimetically copied and mimicked by the English in popular illustrations and plays like Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado (as I discussed in my presentation for UCLA's Graduate Symposium on the Remnant). I have a hunch that one of the reasons Japonisme is under theorized in the scholarly literature is that Japonisme is thought to have been about decorative arts rather than figural representations. Even in my own department, with its emphases on material and visual culture, vases and parasols just don't register as having the same political consequences as images of people. Leaving aside that this plays right into nineteenth-century ideas of Japanese art as "merely" decorative, I hope that by looking at representations of Japanese people and objects in tandem I can demonstrate how they were unforunately equated.

Remnant Redux

Following the basic rule of academia that no conference paper should actually correspond to the abstract you originally submitted for it, I've written my UCLA paper along slightly new lines. I was originally planning on tying in the whole "remnant" idea by talking about how the images medievalize Japanese people, that is, represent them as living in a colorful but outdated feudal society. But the problem with art history is that, contrary to popular belief, you can't just claim that the image looks like whatever you want. You need actual visual evidence, enough to convince a room full of people that they can see in the image what you can see. And the more I looked at these images, the less evidence I saw of medievalizing tendencies.


But what I did see more and more in the images was a certain theatricality. Platforms and stages, curtains, audiences, subjects directly addressing viewers: everything suggesting that Japanese people were seen not just as remnants of an "old" Japan, but also as performing remnants of their ancient civilization for western audiences. What's interesting about this emphasis is that these exhibitions were still seen as authentic, as providing a picture of "real" Japan, even when the exhibitions were frankly discussed as performances. Much like how a "staged" photograph was considered much more realistic in the 19th century than it would be today.


If westerners saw Japanese culture as more or less a performance, than the inevitable outcome is performances like Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado, in which "Japanese" culture can be performed not just for westerners but also by westerners. And in the inevitably unequal power relations of the time, Japanese people were not given the same privilege of being able to perform western culture. In fact, Japan was aggressively westernizing at the time, reforming their government, education system, and military along western lines, wearing western clothes, etc. Some of these policies were praised in the West, but others, particularly wearing western clothing, were openly ridiculed. So we get things like this image, which was an apparently hysterical picture of Japanese men in western dress, when it first appeared in an English periodical in 1877. It's humor lies mostly in how the man on the right is trying to get on his horse on the "wrong" side, and how the men on the left have top hats and clothes that don't fit properly by English standards. Images like this one confirmed the idea that Japanese people belonged in their "ancient" costumes and would never be able to out-westernize the West.