Frackelton's Dessert Plates

The spring semester has come and gone, and although I mentioned them in my last entry, somehow I never got around to actually blogging about Susan Frackelton's Dessert Plates. This set of small (about 6" diameter) porcelain plates hand-painted by Susan Frackelton c. 1890 was the subject of my seminar paper for a methods & theories of material culture class. For those who don't know, "material culture" is a catch-all term for physical objects that aren't really considered art but that academics still like to study, for example, dessert plates.

My department (and art historians generally) maintains an annoying division between material culture and visual culture, as though visual culture doesn't take material form and material culture has no visual component. Everything I want to study (e.g. fashion, furniture) could be considered both material and visual culture, because they are often material objects that people use but are also culturally constructed and circulated through predominantly visual media (like magazines).


But that's a tangent for another time! Once again I seem to be trying to get out of writing about Frackelton's Dessert Plates, much as I was all last semester. For whatever reason I just couldn't get excited about these objects or the paper I wrote on them.


Sure they're prime examples of the nineteenth-century china-painting craze, which makes them exemplary of popular yet marginalized "women's" arts. Sure, they incorporate Japanese and other self-consciously artistic motifs, making them part and parcel of my developing ideas on Japonisme and the Aesthetic Movement. They are even rather pretty, and remind me of a prized set of china currently owned by my mother that at least two out of her three daughters have their eye on. But a twenty-page paper? Really?


Somehow, I managed it, and the professor duly praised it, but I can't help feeling like I was just going through the motions. I figure it was good practice for my future career as a museum curator, when presumably I will have to write many a catalog entry for objects that I find neither beautiful nor interesting. But don't let me influence your own opinion of these pieces of material/visual culture. Just ask yourselves, if you had twenty pages to fill, what would you say?

Goldsworthy Redux

Two years ago I had the amazing experience of being an intern at the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, an experience that was partially documented on my previous blog "The Starbucks Experiment" (so named because my day job, literally my 5 am to noon job, was at Starbucks). As readers of that blog know, my main project at NGA was to conduct research on Andy Goldsworthy, a contemporary British land artist who had recently completed a permanent work in the Gallery. However, Goldsworthy is better known for his "ephemeral" works, which usually involve tramping through the landscape and created a sculpture out of leaves or something that will disintegrate in a matter of time. What's interesting about these supposedly ephemeral works is that Goldsworthy always photographs them, as though to create a permanent record, gives the works a title and sells the photographs to the public in gallery-grade prints and mass-market books.

I've found myself thinking about these photo-works again in my visual culture theory class on "Word & Image," and conveniently enough, for our final project we were asked to revise our thinking on something we had worked on previously. This has given me the perfect opportunity to pour over my Goldsworthy research, which is much more voluminous than I remembered. It's basically my mini Arcades Project, about 50 pages of single-spaced typed notes, most of which are block quotes from various sources, organized under often-amusing headings like "how is Goldsworthy's work post-modern?" Even more amusing are my own comments, which reveal disturbingly simple ideas about words & images like "images are silent, words speak." How could a good art historian write such a thing!

So, for my paper I'm analyzing word-image combinations in Goldsworthy's most recent book,
Enclosure. And although they bring up lots of thorny issues that we've raised in class, I find myself coming back to the one word-image issue our class didn't address: titles. I never realized before how titles constitute Art (with a capital A). Example: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party designates an installation piece that is a work of art, as opposed to say, what you had to celebrate your birthday. But other objects that art historians study for their historical and aesthetic significance do not get italicized titles and, by implication, are not Art. Almost all decorative arts fall into this category, so that a set of works I'm writing on for another class are captioned as "Susan Frackelton, Dessert Plates, hand-painted porcelain, c. 1890" and not as "Susan Frackelton, Dessert Plates." What amazes me is the great lengths that art historians have gone to in order to preserve this "artist's name + italicized title = artwork" equation, routinely making up artist's names and titles like "The Master of the Apocalypse" (yes there really is one) or Still Life with Goblet.

Goldsworthy manipulates these conventions to distinguish between documentary and Art photography. Most of the photos that show the construction of his more permanent works are given simple captions. But when the photo is of an ephemeral work, that is, a work which no longer exists outside the photograph, then the image is designated as Art and captioned with an italicized title. I won't argue with the sheer convenience of italicizing titles of artworks, the way a simple change in typeface lets the reader know that the author means Judy Chicago's installation and not a form of hospitality involving the main meal of the day, but Goldsworthy's titles also show how they can be used to ease anxieties about what is and is not a work of art. Those conventions for separating art from non-art are worth questioning, and I'll argue with them in my own way, by boldly writing a seminar paper in which Susan Frackelton's Dessert Plates are italicized, each and every time.

Catherinettes

Taking a medieval art class on "Pilgrimage and the Cult of Saints" seemed like a good opportunity to learn about my (sort of) namesake, St Catherine. There are actually two, St Catherine of Sienna having been named after St Catherine of Alexandria. I was more interested in St Catherine of Alexandria, not only for being the "original," but because I knew there was a recent reincarnation of her "cult" in the haute-couture houses of 20th century Paris. This cult was the subject of a Hollywood film staring Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward called A New Kind of Love. Joanne Woodward plays Sam, a hard-working, short-haired career girl who gets mistaken for a man by Paul Newman's character, Steve. Sam works at a New York department store and is in Paris to attend the fashion shows, where she gets roped into the St Catherine's day festivities.
St Catherine is a patron saint of unmarried women, so that on her feast day, November 25th, couture houses gave lavish parties for all their unmarried models and salesgirls. Famous singers (in this case Maurice Chevalier in a cameo role) entertained and handed out special hats to the Catherinettes, those women who were at least 25 and still unwed. Not only is my first name Katharine, but this year (today in fact) I'm turning 25, and naturally I'm not married. So basically I've just been working on the history of myself.

After drinking and dancing at these parties, the Catherinettes marched to St Catherine’s shrine—actually just a statue on a street corner—left a bouquet of flowers, and asked for her to help them find husbands. Even though Sam claims to be uninterested in marriage, she drunkenly climbs the ladder to Catherine’s statue, which is on a building’s second-floor façade, and admits her private yearning for a husband. She then has a vision in which Catherine tells her to (what else?) go to Elizabeth Arden.

I couldn't exactly write my medieval-art seminar paper on a 1963 Hollywood film, but I was interested in how St Catherine, a virgin martyr who never married herself, came to be seen as a good person to turn to when you want to catch a husband. It turns out that unmarried women began visiting St Catherine shrines to ask for husband-hunting help since the 14th century. The explanation seems to be that around that time, Catherine became celebrated for her mystical marriage to Christ. Although this mystical marriage was usually depicted between the saint and a baby Jesus on Mary's lap, it was sometimes shown with Mary officiating at the marriage of St Catherine to a very handsome adult Christ. Historians figure that medieval women considered Christ the ultimate husband (always turns the other cheek, etc.) and since St Catherine was the paragon who got this heavenly spouse, she became the premiere saint of unmarried women.

So, I looked at a series of images of St Catherine and scenes from her life to trace how these changes affected the visual culture. This first one is called a vita icon, a portrait of the saint surrounded with narrative scenes. What interested me was the extent to which the saint was portrayed as a model of masculine behavior. Catherine was famous for being intelligent, eloquent, and highly educated in theology and the classics, and this icon emphasizes her ability to preach, convert pagans, and verbally defend her faith, just like any male apostle or bishop.

This altarpiece made a good transition. It retains this emphasis on Catherine's "masculine" behavior but includes the first known visual representation of her mystical marriage to Christ. This narrative takes place in the first four scenes on the upper-left, and depicts Catherine visiting a hermit to ask whom she should marry. He gives her an icon of the Virgin and Child and tells her to pray to them. They appear to the saint in a vision, and Mary tells Jesus to look on his new bride, but he refuses to do so. Catherine goes back to the hermit to be baptized, and in the next scene Mary weds her to the baby Jesus.

In the kind of awesome meta-move that academics just love, this next panel is a devotional image of St Catherine's mystical marriage to a handsome adult Christ that includes a donor portrait of the Franciscan nun who commissioned it. In other words, the nun (on the lower right) commissioned this panel painting so that she could use it as a devotional image that would aid her prayers for her own mystical marriage to Christ, and the nun's practice is a perfect imitation of what Catherine was depicted doing in the earlier altarpiece. Considering how sexualized the rhetoric around these "mystical" marriages got, it would be fun to see this kind of image as medieval nuns' porn, but do I really want to see my "patron" saint has a tool for sexual fantasy?