Journal articles on the topic 'Mid 20th century portrait artist'

The article is devoted to the study of three ceremonial portraits of Prince Peter Lvovich Wittgenstein, a general of the Russian army and the richest landowner in Belarus in the 19th century. Most of ceremonial portraits of 19th century military men were perished in the whirlwind of wars and revolutions of the 20th century. Finding each such work, even outside our country, is of great interest.The prince’s maternal ancestors were representatives of the most famous aristocratic family in the history of Belarus. His father was the son of a Russian field marshal, hero of the war with Napoleon. Prince Peter did not leave children, all of his portraits are now outside Belarus about the descendants of his sister and brother.The paintings were revealed by the author himself, have not been studied before.The earliest portrait dates from the 1850s. and represents the prince in the uniform of a junior officer of the Horse Guards Regiment. The author’s name is not known, there is a copy of J. N. Bernhardt. The next portrait was painted by an unknown artist around 1864. The latest portrait represents a prince in a general’s uniform, completed by the Austrian artist Z. L’Alleman in 1888 after the death of his hero. Two copies of this portrait are also kept in private collections of his descendants.The article presents descriptions of portraits and their copies, analysis of the history of creation and existence in the context of the prince’s biography and his iconography, through the prism of the Russian and European tradition of writing ceremonial portraits of government officials.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Paris was home to scores of bronze foundries making it the primary European center for the production of artistic bronzes, or bronzes d’art. These foundries were competitive, employing different casting methods—either lost-wax or sand casting—as well as closely guarded alloy and patina recipes. Recent studies have demonstrated that accurate measurements of the metal composition of these casts can provide art historians of early 20th-century bronze sculpture with a richer understanding of an object’s biography, and help answer questions about provenance and authenticity. In this paper, data from 171 20th-century bronzes from Parisian foundries are presented revealing diachronic aspects of foundry production, such as varying compositional ranges for sand casting and lost-wax casting. This new detailed knowledge of alloy composition is most illuminating when the interpretation of the data focuses on casts by a single artist and is embedded within a specific historical context. As a case study, compositional analyses were undertaken on a group of 20th-century posthumous bronze casts of painted, unbaked clay caricature portrait busts by Honoré-Victorin Daumier (1808–1879).

AbstractThe Ashmolcan Museum in Oxford owns a portrait of Jan van Huysum, thc famous painter of still lifes and landscapes, which has always been considered a self-portrait (fig. 1). Stylistic comparison, however, justifies the attribution of this portrait to Arnold Boonen. As early as the mid-eighteenth century the artist and writer Jan van Gool mentioned and illustrated a portrait of Van Huysum by Boonen (fig. 3). That picture can very probably be identified with a painting which was on the London art market in 1981, allegedly as a self-portrait of Jan's father, Justus van Huysum (fig.4). In an Amsterdam auction of 1773 a third, smaller, portrait of Van Huysum by Boonen came up for sale, and in recent decadcs a (studio) version of the Oxford painting has been on the market (fig. 5). From old catalogues it would appear that still more portraits of the painter by Boonen have existed. Printed portraits of Jan van Huysum, among them illustrations in biographical works, were apparently all derived, one way or another, from portraits by Boonen (figs, 3 , 6 and 8-10); even Kremer's romantic representation of the artist known only from a print- appears to be distantly related (fig. 12). The source for a nineteenth-century lithograph remains somewhat uncertain, although it, too, was probably inspired by Boonen (fig. 11). Clearly not a portrait of Jan van Huysum is Heroman van der Mijn's painting at Amsterdam (fig. 13), but a work at Quimper, now considered by the museum to be an anonymous French portrait of an unknown man, might be a fairly early effigy of Jan van Huysum after all (fig. 14).

In various Protestant denominations (particularly in the Evangelical Church in Germany) the demand for the formation of artistic competence has been growing since the mid 20th century. The celebration of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation in Germany in 2017 contributed to a new round of discussion of this issue. Luther's attitude to artistic images has been reevaluated. Interconnectedness of the word and image in the process of religious communication has been emphasized. The autonomy of art and freedom of creative expression of an artist in the dialogue with religion (in the form of exhibitions, installations in churches, etc.) has been recognized.

This paper compares Jack Burnham's “systems esthetics” and Stanley Cavell's “automatisms,” linking them by way of organizational and systems theories of the mid-20th century and the rise of the post-medium condition in art. Although rarely paired, curator and critic Burnham and philosopher Cavell offer similar ontologies of art in the post--World War II period. Their ideas freed artists from old constraints of formalism and medium specificity while foreshadowing the rise of an artistic atomization driven by technology and economics. If Burnham's concept of systems aesthetics is concerned with a sense of cybernetic connectivity based on a feedback loop between the artist, artwork, art community and monetizing power of the market, then Cavell's automatisms describe a condition of laissez-faire independence in which each artist must work entrepreneurially, wholly for and unto herself.

This essay traces the resurrection of the fotoescultura, a three-dimensional photographic portrait popular in rural Mexico in the early 20th century, as interpreted in recent works by Performing Pictures, a contemporary Swedish artist duo. The early fotoesculturas were an augmented form of portraiture, commissioned by family members who supplied photographs that artisans in Mexico City converted into framed sculptural portraits for display on family altars. We compare these »traditional« photographic objects with “new” digital forms of video animation on screen and in the public space that characterize Performing Pictures work, and explore how the fotoescultura inspired new incarnations of their series Men that Fall. At the intersection between the material aspects of a “traditional” vernacular art form and “new” media art, we identify a photographic aesthetic that shifts from seeing and perceiving to physical engagement, and discuss how the frame and its parergon augment the photographic gaze. The essay is accompanied by photos and video stills from Performing Pictures’ film poem Dreaming the Memories of Now (2018), depicting their work with the fotoesculturas. Keywords: fotoesculturas, frame, parergon, vernacular photography, videoart

Kass Banning and Warren Crichlow provide a historical and theoretical assessment of renowned British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien's ten-screen installation Lessons of the Hour: Frederick Douglass (2019). Lessons of the Hour is inspired by a combination of Douglass's own genre-breaking autobiographical writing, personal letters, and published lectures that mobilized tropes of visuality for his own unique rhetorical ends. With its sculptural multiscreen architecture, lush color palette, and immersive affordances and soundscape, Julien's Lessons is less concerned with rendering a hagiographic portrait of Douglass than in reactivating his visionary thought as a continued force for human rights in the twenty-first century. Lessons underscores that the nascent technology of photography and the renewed struggle for liberation from chattel slavery emerged simultaneously in the mid-nineteenth century; this confluence fosters Douglass's lifelong personal and theoretical inquiry into what both truth and sovereignty—and visuality—might entail.

For the first time in the Russian-speaking academic environment the authors of the paper analyze the creative legacy of the scientist, aeronautical engineer and artist Frank Joseph Malina (1912–1981). His working practices reflected the most important ethic and aesthetic aspirations of the mid-twentieth century, what became an important contribution to the development of modern visual culture. The pioneer of Lumino Kinetic art F.Malina created several unique electromechanical systems for the production of an image, the media infrastructure and technological nature of which would later become the visual standard of the digital age. The discovery of electric light as a new artistic medium allowed him to focus on the production methods, control and processing algorithms for light that produces images. The Lumino Kinetic experiments of F. Malina are based on understanding the new nature of the image, born during the era of scientific discoveries. Several decades before the iconic turn was proclaimed by academic science, they presented the image as a system of relations that is formed in acts of perception and that is not based on visible, but felt, ideated, imagined reality. While creating his works F. Malina dreamed of modeling qualitatively new perceptual conditions for the existence of mankind aimed at further progress and traveling to the stars.

The author attempts to attribute the lesser-known artistic works by Oleksandr Murashko (1875–1919). Some of them were considered lost, e.g. the images of Tetiana Jashvil or Lidia Murashko. Others, including a portrait of the German consul Erich Hering’s wife, as well as a portrait of the artist A. Babenko (Murashko’s pupil) and the painting "Evening", can still appear in the field of view of researchers. The author describes primary sources that allowed her to carry out the attribution, and details that suggested the correct way for the scientific search. A number of iconic paintings by Oleksandr Murashko are known only from some black-and-white or colour reproductions. First and foremost, we are talking about such works of the artist as "Merry-go-round", "Sunday" (1909), "On terrace", "Over the old pond", which trails were lost in the early 20th century. The author already touched upon the question of these paintings’ fate (except for "Merry-go-round"). Nevertheless for a deeper understanding of the artist's work, it is necessary to explore the lesser-known, even lost pieces. The primary source for studying the heritage of the artist are listings of his works, that were compiled around 1919 by Marharyta Murashko. Despite the fact that they contain many inaccuracies and errors, the value of these listings cannot be overemphasized. Inter alia, there are works, which locations are unknown by far. But the idea of some of them can be formed from photos from the documentary and archival trust of the National Art Museum of Ukraine. Some researchers have managed to establish the names of many persons portrayed by Murashko, but there is a need to make further researches in this field. The attribution of each painting proves that even a limited amount of sources can give us an idea of the appearance of lost works, regardless the fact that not all of them were reproduced on the pages of printed publications or as photographs. At the same time, the assessment of various sources allows us to attribute the little-known portraits, because the names of many depicted persons remain unknown. But with each passing year it becomes more complex to set them.

The concept of collective memory raises fundamental questions regarding the assessment of heritage, especially of built heritage in contested spaces. The simultaneous presence of different groups in conflict introduces into the space parallel memory discourses that can be recognised both in the built environment as well as in public sculpture, and both can be read as a symbolic marking of space (Veschambre, 2008). The urban space of northern Istria, where the Italian and Slovene communities have become intertwined throughout history, were drastically marked by the political and historic events of the mid-20th century. Post-war conflict-solving processes lead and an ongoing process of “ethnic metamorphosis” (Purini, 2010) in the region came to a peak when the majoritarian Italian-speaking population of the urban area emigrated, while the space was settled by newcomers from inner Slovenian regions and other Yugoslav republics. Tensions between Slovenes and Italians arose in the early 20th century, especially from the period of Fascist oppression and violence against the Slovene population. Nevertheless, the antifascist struggle united the two ethnic groups, specifically within the Communist ideology, so after WWII the area of the so-called Zona B of the Free Territory of Trieste was marked by the ideal of fratellanza, the brotherhood between Italians and Slovenes in Istria. A monument to this ideal was created by a sculptor from Capodistria, Oreste Dequel, who is unknown in the Slovene context. The sculpture represented the Protestant Bishop of Capodistria, Pier Paolo Vergerio il Giovane, a friend of the key Slovene Protestant Primož Trubar. Despite the then leading Socialist Realist aesthetics, the artist managed to intertwine in the artwork, using a subversive approach, several collective memories.

The concept of collective memory raises fundamental questions regarding the assessment of heritage, especially of built heritage in contested spaces. The simultaneous presence of different groups in conflict introduces into the space parallel memory discourses that can be recognised both in the built environment as well as in public sculpture, and both can be read as a symbolic marking of space (Veschambre, 2008). The urban space of northern Istria, where the Italian and Slovene communities have become intertwined throughout history, were drastically marked by the political and historic events of the mid-20th century. Post-war conflict-solving processes lead and an ongoing process of “ethnic metamorphosis” (Purini, 2010) in the region came to a peak when the majoritarian Italian-speaking population of the urban area emigrated, while the space was settled by newcomers from inner Slovenian regions and other Yugoslav republics. Tensions between Slovenes and Italians arose in the early 20th century, especially from the period of Fascist oppression and violence against the Slovene population. Nevertheless, the antifascist struggle united the two ethnic groups, specifically within the Communist ideology, so after WWII the area of the so-called Zona B of the Free Territory of Trieste was marked by the ideal of fratellanza, the brotherhood between Italians and Slovenes in Istria. A monument to this ideal was created by a sculptor from Capodistria, Oreste Dequel, who is unknown in the Slovene context. The sculpture represented the Protestant Bishop of Capodistria, Pier Paolo Vergerio il Giovane, a friend of the key Slovene Protestant Primož Trubar. Despite the then leading Socialist Realist aesthetics, the artist managed to intertwine in the artwork, using a subversive approach, several collective memories.

The article deals with a number of issues highlighted in the research of monumental painting during the 1960–2000s, and follows the development of art studies literature during the specified period. Ukrainian monumental painting during the second half of the 20th century evolved rather unequally, which affecte the art criticism reflections. In the 1960's and 80's the active and dynamic development of monumental art took place. Research in this area also reached the peak of its popularity. For example, the article of I. Pronina contains a review of publications from 1973–1974, and the author brought the statistics indicating more than 200 works. (180) Since the mid-1960's, academics have been increasingly focusing on monumental art. The attitude to monumental painting in the art history literature of the 1960's is ambiguous. However, most researchers are still critical of post-war practice and consider monumental works of the late 1950`s and 1960`s as a step forward. The distinctive differences between the 1960's and 1970's – 1980's lie in various attitudes towards themes and scenes of the monumental painting. In the 1960's the monumentality was associated with the laconic content, using a set of all understandable associative attributes. The expansion of the range of themes in monumental painting in the professional literature occured in the 1970's. Since the research problem stands at the crossroads of various branches of art, important scientific advancements were reflected in such prominent professional publications as: "Architecture of the USSR", "Decorative art of the USSR" and "Fine Arts". In the 1970's the publishing house "Soviet artist" released a series of articles compilations called "Soviet monumental art." The state of monumentalism significantly changes in 1990's as there was a significant decline in the activity of this artistic direction. At this time the monumental painting fell into the field of wide-scale artistic studies. In the professional literature of the last decade the scope of art study themes has changed to a certain extent as the art historians more often address the issues previously tabooed in Soviet times, and some of them partially or fully relate to the monumental painting. To such themes belong the Sixties and Boichukizm. Today the problem of the preservation of Soviet monumental works sharply appears. Many authors turn to the theme of monumental art in order to attract the attention of society to the rapid destruction of mosaics and wall murals, and to prove their value for Ukrainian fine arts.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the nature and forms of investigative discourse that appears in James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. On one hand, we shall explore the manner in which elements of investigative discourse such as supervision, interrogation, system of punishment, and confession are used in order to maintain the discipline society in Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century. On the other hand, we will analyse the possibility of using investigative discourse with the purpose of annulling repression and achieving individual liberty. The character of Stephen Dedalus will serve as an example so as to show how an individual can apply the process of self-interrogation as investigative technique in order to attempt to liberate themselves from the influence of religion and nationalism and become independent. Both Joyce and his protagonist Stephen believe that art enables us to achieve freedom through the process of artistic creation. In this paper, we shall attempt to demonstrate that art is only an illusion of freedom: instead of liberating us, it only captures us even stronger into a trap of supervision, control and discipline. Believing that art leads us to final liberation, we accept its postulates and consequently become limited by them. Therefore, the consequence of our acceptance is not freedom but voluntary submission.

The Milk River Transboundary Aquifer (Canada–USA) has been so intensively used over the 20th century that concerns have risen about the durability of this resource since the mid-1950s. This aquifer actually corresponds to the middle Virgelle Member of the Upper Cretaceous Milk River Formation (called Eagle Formation in Montana). To assess the conditions needed for a sustainable use of the aquifer, a comprehensive and unified portrait of the aquifer is needed across its international boundary. The stratigraphic framework and geometry of geological units on both sides of the international border were thus unified in a 50 000 km2 three-dimensional (3D) geological model. The Virgelle Member is 0–60 m thick and it subcrops near the border and along both sides of the Sweetgrass Arch. It dips away from the subcrop areas in a semi-radial pattern. The Medicine Hat gas field hosted by the Alderson Member (Alberta), which is separated from the other members by a regional unconformity, and the Tiger Ridge gas field near the Bears Paw Mountains (Montana) limit the extent of the aquifer. The unified 3D geological model forms the necessary basis for conceptual and numerical hydrogeological models of the Milk River Aquifer.

This article provides an overview of recent scholarship dedicated to the legacy of the Russian scientist and traveler Nicolai Miklouho-Maclay. The fi rst part deals with the so-called “classic” approach of the second half of the 20th century, which tended towards a mythologized and idealized portrait of Miklouho-Maclay, as evidenced by the publications of D. Tumarkin and by the second edition of the Complete Works of N.N. Miklouho-Maclay, published in the 1990s. The second part addresses articles published during the 1990s and 2000s that have sought to “demythologize” and reevaluate standard perspectives on Miklouho-Maclay. Some authors, rather than overestimating his achievements, tend to understate the impact of his work. The third part deals with Englishlanguage articles about Miklouho-Maclay’s legacy. These are mostly translations of Miklouho-Maclay’s archival texts from Russian, with scholarly commentary. However, an ongoing Australian research project conducted by Chris Ballard and Elena Govor has begun a sustained program of fi eldwork with descendants of the Melanesian source communities with which Miklouho-Maclay worked, seeking new insights into his texts and especially his drawings as a form of dialogic approach to culture. We propose to study Miklouho-Maclay’s legacy using modern approaches to anthropological theory. This will hopefully result in a unifi ed image rather than separate images of an anthropologist, an artist, a humanist, etc. Also, the use of Miklouho-Maclay’s drawings in addition to his texts will be an important step toward a dialogic study of Oceanic cultures.

This paper is focused on the joust between English squire John Chalons and French écuyer Louis de Bueil, that was held in 1446 in Tours, France, in the King Charles VII of France and his courtiers presence. The mounted combatants fought with full armour on using couched lances. The article also covers the connection issue of this chivalric encounters type with warfare and military practices of that time, their effectiveness in then military training and interpretations of 15th century tournaments and pas d’armes in the 20th -early 21 century historiography. Available existing sources for this event suggest that the fighters with premeditation used lethal combat techniques during the collision, that resulted in Louis de Bueil death. However, Jean de Bueil, the older brother of the deceased, soldier, courtier and writer, expresses his highly hostile attitude towards chivalric practices of this kind in his autobiographical work "Le Jouvencel", which in the long run led to a false interpretation of the Late Middle Ages pas d’armes as an escapist and anachronic manifestation of the Late Middle Ages elites culture, spread by renowned Dutch scholar Johann Huizinga and his epigones. The article has its emphasis on participants’ arms and armour, as well as their impact on the course and result of a joust. The paper presents the analysis of the narrative program of eight mid. 15th century colored handwritten miniatures, conveing the stages and course of the duel. Visual narration is created with profound knowledge of the knight weapon and equipment features, as well as an accurate understanding of the equestrian encounters course and logic. Depicted by unknown artist plate armor on the combating fighters has direct historical analogies among the preserved survived artifacts of knights weapons. This miniatures series may be considered as a ‘documentary military art’ prominent example for its time.

W zbiorach Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen w Monachium jest przechowywany portret króla Zygmunta Augusta, który po ponad pół wieku poszukiwań przez polskich historyków sztuki został niedawno odnaleziony i zidentyfikowany. Ma on ogromne znaczenie dla ikonografii ostatniego Jagiellona bowiem, jak dotąd, jest jego jedynym znanym malarskim przedstawieniem w całej postaci, powstałym za życia modela. Wizerunek pozostaje w związku z miniaturowym portretem monarchy w popiersiu, dawniej w kolekcji arcyksięcia Ferdynanda II Tyrolskiego w Ambras, obecnie w Münzenkabinett w wiedeńskim Kunsthistorisches Museum. Oba obrazy, tego samego autora, powstały na polskim dworze tuż przed połową XVI stulecia. Ich twórca był dobrze obeznany ze stosowanymi wówczas we Włoszech i cieszącymi się uznaniem kompozycjami portretowymi. Monachijski obraz trafił do bawarskich zbiorów Wittelsbachów, jak wszystko na to wskazuje, wraz z wyprawą ślubną królewny Anny Katarzyny Konstancji Wazówny, w roku 1642 wydanej za mąż za księcia neuburskiego Filipa Wilhelma. Należał do zespołu wizerunków członków rodziny Jagiellonów, zabranych do Bawarii przez Wazównę, lecz powstał w okolicznościach innych niż pozostałe portrety i jest dziełem o odmiennej genezie artystycznej.
 Ujawniony w zbiorach monachijskich portret nie tylko w istotny sposób wzbogaca ikonografię ostatniego Jagiellona, lecz ma również znaczenie dla wiedzy o królewskim mecenacie.
 Summary:
 The Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen collection in Munich houses a portrait of King Sigismund Augustus, which was recently discovered and identified by Polish art historians following a quest lasting more than half a century. It sheds important light on the iconography of the last Jagiellonian, as it remains to date the only known representation in pictorial form of the model during his lifetime. It is related to a bust portrait miniature of the monarch, formerly found in the collection of Archduke Ferdinand II of Tirol in Ambras, and nowadays on show in the Münzenkabinett in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Both paintings by the same artist were produced at the Polish court just before the mid-16th century. Their creator was well acquainted with the highly regarded compositional techniques used at the time in portraiture in Italy. All the evidence suggests that the Munich painting found its way into the Bavarian Wittelsbach collections as part of the trousseau of Princess Anna Catherine Konstancja Wazówna, who in 1642 married the Neuburian prince Philip Wilhelm. It was included in the collection of portraits of members of the Jagiellonian family, that Wazówna took with her to Bavaria. However, it was painted in circumstances different from other portraits and is a work with a different artistic genesis.
 This portrait unearthed in the Munich collection not only greatly enriches the existing iconography of the last Jagiellonian, but it also makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of royal patronage.

The famous Soviet and Russian sculptor V. M. Klykov (1939-2006), winner of state prizes of the RSFSR and the USSR, People's Artist of Russia, Honored Artist of the Russian Federation, was an ambiguous figure in the eyes of his contemporaries. His caught the attention not only of professional critics, but also of ordinary people. Many publications and memoirs dedicated to the sculptor had been published during his lifetime. However, V. M. Klykov himself gave contradictory information on the history of his family in his interviews. At the same time, a complete and objective assessment of his life and work and his role in art is impossible without studying his social origin and family history, which determined the relevance of this work. Until now, the history of the Klykov family has been reconstructed from stories and memoirs of those who knew him personally. The study has also been hampered by the fact that there are misconceptions about V. M. Klykov’s ancestors that often spring from desire to create a certain image that fits the worldview of the famous sculptor. The purpose of the study has been to identify and analyze the documentary sources on the subject: archival materials, documents from the museum collection and periodicals. The fonds of the State Archive of the Kursk Region (GAKO) have provided most sources. However, destruction of the archives during the Civil War and the Nazi occupation resulted in a lack of documents and photographs from the early 20th century. Some information has been found in databases available on the Internet. A number of documents are being introduced into scientific use for the first time. The study is based on the key principles of historicism, consistency, and objectivity, which allows the author to avoid mythologization of the sculptor. Comparative analysis of the identified sources has allowed the author to trace V. M. Klykov’s genealogy up to the mid-19th century, to identify the names of his ancestors, to note the family’s difficult fate through the pivots of Russian history, to determine V. M. Klykov’s ancestors and to explore their biographies, achievements, and social status. Several representatives of the Klykov family have been identified, who showed themselves worthily in the military service of the Fatherland. In addition, the author has refuted the tale of the sculptor's grandfather ‘s de-kulakization and persecution by the Soviet power. The author concludes that peasant origin and environment in which the sculptor grew up left an imprint on his worldview, and therefore, on the theme of his monumental creativity and ideas that he defended in public life.

AbstractThe portrait of Symon Marten Dircksz. (1504-1574) preserved in Athens (fig. I, notes 1, 2), was identified on the strength of his coat of arms. The sitter was a staunch Catholic and held high offices in the Amsterdam city government. His portrait, dated 1565, is the earliest specimen of a type that was produced during the last decades of the sixteenth century by the sons of Pieter Aertsen (1507/ 08-1574), Pieter (1540/41-1603) and Aert Pietersz. (1550-1612) (figs. 2, 3, 4, 8, 9). In view of the documented relations between Pieter Aertsen and various prominent Amsterdam citizens and also because of clearly Mannerist features, the portrait may be attributed to the father. It holds a place of its own among Amsterdam portraits of the period and does not relate to any traditional portrait type either in Amsterdam or in Antwerp, where Aertsen had worked until C. 1555. In spite of similarities in the sitters' postures and the ornate background, the portraits attributable to Pieter Pietersz. and Aert Pictersz. (figs. 2, 3, 4, 8, 9) show the style of a younger generation; pictorial space is rendered in a credible way and the figures also appear more three-dimensonal. A late example is the portrait of Hendrick Buyck, signed by Aert Pietersz. and dated 1605 (fig. 8, note 28). The sitter was a successful merchant and joined the Reformed Church, as did most of his brothers and sisters. His portrait contains a wealth of details which may in part point to the traditional idea of transience but also convey information of a more personal nature, as do the texts on the pages of a open cash-book. At his death in 1613 Hendrick Buyck's estate included a small number of paintings, mostly portraits, and one of The Four Evangelists by Pieter Aertsen ('Lange Pier'). This picture may be tentatively identified with one now at Aachen (fig. 10, note 46). A copy of it bears the date 1613 and was in all likelihood made for some member of the Buyck family when the original was inheritcd by the Protestant Hendrick's illegitimate son. The original bears the date 1559 and may well have already been in the possession of Hendrick's grandfather, Cornelis Buyck, who was Pieter Aertsen's neighbour until his death in 1562. POSTSCRIPT HUYBRECHT BEUCKELAER : AN ANTWERP SOLUTION FOR AN AMSTERDAM AND AN ENGLISH PROBLEM The long-standing debate as to whether or not the Monogrammist HB or Hb (figs. 11 and 12) could be identical with Joachim Bcuckclacr, was convincingly settled by Detlev Kreidl (note 27). This author not only analyzed the artist's distinct style but also showed that it was connected with that of Agnolo Bronzino, in whose studio the Monogrammist probably worked. Infrared reflectography subsequently revealed that the Kitchen-maid with a boy and a girl in Brussels (fig. 12), usually thought to be by Pieter Aertsen but attributed by Kreidl to the Monogrammist, bears the signature in full of one H[uybrecht] Beuckelaer, probably a brother of Joachim (note 27). Documents provide scant information on the artist's life. There is evidence of extensive travelling in 1567/68; a letter of 1574 was sent from Bordeaux. His earliest works date from 1563 but only in 1579 did he become a master in the Antwerp guild. This surprisingly late date may be accounted for by the assumption that until then the artist merely (or mainly) assisted other painters. Van Mander relates that Joachim Beuckelaer assisted Antonis Mor for davwages by painting the sitters' attire in their portraits. This piece of information would however seem rather to apply to Huybrecht, who (contrary to Joachim) paid much attention to the rendering of his figures' clothes. An example of his collaboration with Mor may well be the portrait of a nobleman, signed bv Mor and dated 1561, in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (fig. 15, note 64). A number of features in this picture recur in the Brussels Prodigal Son, which bears Huybrecht Beuckelaer's monogram (fig. 11). Huybrecht appears also to have been a portrait painter in his own right. The Style of his Prodigal Son may be recognized in a portrait of Thecla Occo, a member of the powerful Catholic family of that name in Amsterdam (fig. 13, notes 11 and 52). This picture suggests that Huybrecht was familiar with Mor's 1559 portrait of the wife of Jean le Cocq, now in Kassel, where a similar dog (a symbol of conjugal fidelity) lies in its mistress's arm. However, the main inspiration for the style of the Occo portrait comes from portraits Bronzino painted in the mid-1550s. This is borne out by the build of the tall figure with a slender hand dangling from an arm-rest as well as by the narrow shape of the head, enhanced by the strong shadow zone along the right side of the face (cf. fig. 14). From this (and from a similar case to be discussed below) it may be inferred that Huvbrecht visited Bronzino's workshop carly in his career, before working in Mor's studio around 1560. After 1584 there is no further mention of Huybrecht Beuckelaer in Antwerp documents. There is however evidence that he settled in England, probably after the taking of Antwerp by the Spaniards in 1585. A first clue to this effect is supplied by a portrait of Francis Cottington (1578/79-1652), later first Lord Cottington, that was sold at auction in 1922 (fig. 16, note 65). The picture is in many respects very similar to the Prodigal Son though it must, judging by the sitter's age and costume, be dated to the years around 1600, possibly to 1605 when Cottington was appointed secretary to the English ambassador in Spain. The artist's style had remained remarkably constant over the years, and so had his use of Bronzino prototypes. The latter's portrait of the youthful Lodovico Capponi (New York, Frick Collection) must have been in Huybrccht's mind when he designed young Cottington's portrait (fig. 17). There must have been quite a few portraits of distinguished English patrons by Huybrecht Beuckelaer besides the one of Cottington (which is not documented). This is supported by inventories from the years 1583-1590 which mention works by one Hubbert or Hubbard, long considered to have been a Netherlandish artist named Hubert (or Huybrecht - the artist actually used both forms of his name). The works described (notes 72, 73, 75 -77) were mostly portraits. But the earliest mention of his name occurs in connection with A Butcher and a Maid Buying Meat in the Earl of Leicester's collection in 1583. This was obviously a work in the Aertsen-Beuckelaer tradition, such as one might expect from Huybrecht Beuckelaer.

Background. During the last century composers show an increasing activity in the fi eld of a literature while writing texts that explain specifi c features of their musical works, their aesthetic, philosophy or attitude to certain cultural phenomena. Sometimes even an analytical essay produced by the composer may characterize the composer’s personality and his/her position in the art. In this aspect, the composer’s texts deliver a vast number of facts directly connected to the heart of aesthetic, social, psychological phenomena of a composer’s activity. In the article an ill-defi ned phenomenon of texts and speeches of a composer on his/her works and on music and art in general is analyzed. The objectives of the study are fi nding the connection between literal and musical works of the composer. The main source of the analysis of a composer’s personality should be musical works, because they contain the complete information about the author, and they may lead to construction of the author’s “portrait” in various aspects – psychological, historical, ideological, etc. Understanding the artistic personality through analysis of his/ her works, although being the most trustworthy method, sometimes is also the hardest, since the author not always manifests himself/herself directly while using various kinds of play-acting. That’s why the analysis of a composer’s speech as an additional fi eld, that refl ects the composer’s personality, may be effective. This method is applied to the published speeches and the interview of Valentyn Sylvestrov. Being applied to his “case”, this analytical instrument explains the reason of his critical speeches against avant-garde aesthetic and its typical adepts (Helmuth Lachenmann, Karlheinz Stockhausen and others). This critic does not mean the change of Sylvestrov’s position since his youth. Although he became known as an avant-gardist in the 1960s, even then – and his early interview (published in 1967) demonstrates this quite clearly – he declared his position which strongly differed from typical avant-garde ideas. His speeches of later time shows similar attitude of the composer to many musical problems, despite these speeches were made almost half a century after his early interview. They describe quite strange situation when the composer’s text, while saying almost nothing about the objects of its criticism, shows fi rst of all Sylvestrov’s own evolution from “soft” avant-garde of the early 1960s to the specifi c and extremely individual stylistics that combines radical and quasiconservative features. This combination in itself is quite unusual both in avant-garde and conventional styles, and proves lyrical nature of his artistic personality, as well as some favorite subjects typical of him both now and half century ago. Composer’s letters show the mental condition of the author in a certain period of his/her life and creative evolution. They give exact information on facts, events, dates, etc., so in this aspect they are irreplaceable. Certain words and a way of description used by an author – and also what he/she omits – directly shape the artist’s nature. It is important to take into account that we do not have to deal with absolute truth but subjective interpretation which may contain (apart the trustworthy details) exaggeration, misunderstanding and wrong conclusions. These very deviations add new features to the artistic “portrait” and may explain the reason this or that feature appears in a musical work. Analysis and even reading composer’s (and any other) letters raise some moral problems. Usually letters are addressed to a certain person or an institution and not intended to be seen by anybody else. We cannot know whether the author would be happy if he/she would know his/her letters are published. Only in the case of a publication during the author’s life this problem may be totally fi xed, as the author’s agreement to such publication seems to be mandatory. While artist’s letters are usually not intended for publication, an interview or dialogues of the artist with “authorized person”, as well as autobiography, an article or memoirs are always created for the public, so the “master” depicts himself in accordance with the way he/she wants the others see and treated him/her. While the literature knows classical example of this genre back from the early 19th century (we mean the wellknown Peter Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe), the composers start to regularly produce similar texts much later in the 20th century. Despite the technical and aesthetical progress of the 20th century culture stimulated the musicians to create texts, they did not became the obligatory (sometimes because of personal reason). While almost all more or less known musicians gave an interview and created brief speeches on various occasion, just a part of them left the dialogues with extended explanation of the composer’s views on various problems and facts of the art and life. The model example of such texts are the Dialogues if Igor Stravinsky with Robert Craft. Later other outstanding musicians followed them, exactly Jannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen, Witold Lutoslawski, Alfred Schnittke and Edison Denisov among the mostly known. Another kind of the author’s word to be widely circulated is an author’s annotation or commentary to the piece. Such a commentary written for a concert leafl et or a festival (LP, CD) booklet is always expected by the recipients, so it plays an exceptional role in understanding the new work and may help to promote it or, in unlucky case, prevent its success. The results of the research prove the importance of the composer’s text for understanding his/her music. Although being a sort of paradox, such texts may show the shortest way to fi nd secret senses and codes of music. so we conclude the literal texts gradually become an integral part of the composer’s work and composer’s life.

Background, the objective of the research. From the perspective of interpretative discourse, C. Saint-Saëns’s heritage widens the contemporary views of his performance career and explains the nature of his pianoforte mentality. Moreover, an interpretative approach is becoming an important part of its investigation methodology, which makes it possible to state the aim of the paper, which is to determine the priorities of C. Saint-Saëns as being an outstanding virtuoso performer of his historical era (what is necessary to understand his artistic mentality). According to the aim of the paper, the following practical tasks have been solved: 1) lay down the requirements for a pianist when performing C. Saint-Saëns’s pianoforte cycles; 2) determine the artist’s most performed solo pianoforte works nowadays (namely the cycles). The methodological basis of the research is a comprehensive approach based on the unity of historical biographical, genre-style and performance research methods that emphasize the importance of the piano work of a unique French artist for modern generations of performers. The results of the research. The analysis of the performances of young C. Saint-Saëns has become obvious that at the beginning of his performance career, he was far from the traditional image of a pianist-virtuoso typical for the first half of the 19th century and has represented the model of a pianist-interpreter of classical music pieces, according to new cultural tendencies. In the middle of the 1860s C. Saint-Saëns shifted his genre-style priorities in his concert performance and widened the geography of his audience outside France to Germany, England and Russia. The French virtuoso improved his repertoire by performing the works of contemporary composers. However, the tendency towards romantic repertoire did not prevent him from including of J.-Ph. Rameau’s and J. S. Bach’s works into his concert program. Beginning from the 1890s to the end of C. Saint-Saëns’s performance career (1921), his own works made the basis of his concert programs also. Having systematized of C. Saint-Saëns’s repertoire, four performance preferences have been distinguished: 1) interest in the works of Baroque composers and French national culture of pre-classical period; 2) returning to Viennese classicists as the basis of a pianist’s concert repertoire in the new historical era; 3) having romanticists’ works serving as the example of modern performer’s repertoire in the second half of the 19th century; 4) producing his own music pieces and transcriptions. Based on summarizing the repertoire preferences, in terms of their stylistics and the increase in the significance of the historical interpretation of other composers’ works, which can be traced in C. Saint-Saëns’s statements and recommendations, it has been concluded that at the beginning of the 20th century his performance style corresponded to the one typical for new post-romantic performers – “interpreters-generalists” (according to O. Kandynskyi-Rybnikov, 1991). The comparison of C. Saint-Saëns’s solo concert programs of different years and the genre and style orientation of the piano compositions created by him in the corresponding periods shows a noticeable interconnection of two major areas of his creative activity – concert and composing. In his early period, he interpreted, as a pianist, mainly the classical music pieces (especially Beethoven’s). And his own Op. 3, Bagatelli, was created under the influence of the Viennese classicism music. In his mature period (starting from the middle of the 1860s), which was connected with C. Saint-Saëns’s concert tours outside France and the enrichment of his repertoire with the works by F. List, F. Chopin, F. Mendelssohn, R. Schumann, there was a shift of the composer’s genre and style priorities: he composed the concert etudes of the Op. 52, program pieces of the Album Op. 72. Finally, in his late period (from the 1890s), except for his own music pieces, the basis of C. Saint-Saëns’s concert programs consists of the works of classicists. At those times, his Suite Oр. 90, Six Etudes op. 135 for left hand and Six Fugues Op. 61 were created, which shows the author’s interest in the genre models of European Baroque. The fundamental principles of C. Saint-Saëns’s pianoforte mentality has been distinguished: virtuosity and simultaneous accuracy of applying expressive means; clarity and accuracy of instrument sound together with the delicacy and flexible manner of intoning; in terms of the interpretation of historically remote composers’ pieces (pre-classical, classical and early-romantic periods), the attempts to approximate the tone to the authentic sound pattern. Taking into account the composer’s performance style and the tasks set in the score of his works, the requirements for a pianists needed for the interpretation of C. Saint-Saëns’s pianoforte cycles have been laid down: high level of performance technical preparation; analytical skills, wide kit of mental sound patterns that integrates the features of various historical and style eras, from Baroque to PostRomanticizm. As for the panorama of the interpretative versions of C. Saint-Saëns’s piano works, every cycle has quite rich performance history, which is proved by numerous professional recordings. Over the last decade, more and more recordings of C. Saint-Saëns’s pianoforte cycles have been appearing, which contributes to the popularization of the pianoforte heritage of the French artist. Most of them have been created by French pianists. However, the geography of the recordings is quite wide: Italy, the USA, Switzerland, Hungary, Austria, Russia, Germany. Unfortunately, in Ukraine the piano cycles are almost unknown and are rarely performed; there are no known audio recordings of their performance by outstanding Ukrainian pianists. Conclusion. In search of a starting point in mastering the principles of interpretation of French piano culture, the study of the creative activity by C. Saint-Saëns today has advantages over the study of other French composers of the mid XIX – early XX century, because there is a large amount of material available that reveals its artistic, in particular performing, priorities. All the above indicates the need to popularize the piano heritage of C. Saint-Saens in the modern globalized world and proves the importance of an interpretological approach to its understanding. The latter reveals the essence of the piano style of a unique artist who, in his creative evolution, has gone from classicromantic attitudes to examples of his own nео-stylistic thinking, which dominates the art of the twentieth century.

The purpose of the article is to introduce into scientific turnover the little-known drawings of the outstanding Ukrainian realist painter of the mid-20th century, professor of the Kyiv State Art Institute, Karpo Demianovych Trokhymenko, made during the evacuation to Ufa in the period of the Great Patriotic War. The methodology of the work is based on the principles of art history, figurative and stylistic, systematic and comparative analysis, as well as historical and contextual methods. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the definition of the role of drawing in the creative heritage of Karpo Trokhymenko of the period 1941-1944. In the portrait sketches made by Karpo Trokhymenko for the picture “Meeting of the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Ufa”, the difference in relation to the expressive means of art destroyed at the time of the avant-garde and finally formed social realism are clearly traced. The point, line, and plane as the leading artistic elements of the avant-garde are losing their significance, remaining to a certain extent only in the arsenal of graphic artists. Tone, light and shade gradations and energy of light acquire a special significance in the drawing of the easel painters. Conclusions. By analyzing the figurative and stylistic structure and technique of the portrait works, the peculiarities of drawing in the artist’s asset, in particular, the attention to creating an air environment, are revealed. In the drawings of Karpo Trokhymenko, the line has no intrinsic value and is perceived only as of the part of light and shadow, dissolving in the overall tone spot. The color plays an important role in the drawings of Karpo Trokhymenko. The works made within the complex warmth and coolness of colored paper, silver graphite pencil, colored pencils and chalk and acquire the significance of independent works. A set of portraits of outstanding Ukrainian scientists - academicians, artists, writers created by Karpo Trokhymenko, has not only documentary, historical and cultural value, but is a significant monument of Ukrainian easel drawing of the Great Patriotic War period.

Статья посвящена анализу творчества и уникальности пути художественных исканий в начале ХХ века талантливого русского живописца А.О. Никулина (1878-1945), внесшего значительный вклад в развитие русской изобразительной культуры, но в силу сложившихся исторических условий и жизненных обстоятельств, разрозненности собрания, выпавшего из поля зрения ведущих отечественных искусствоведов. Яркая и самобытная личность, художник с европейским образованием, всю свою жизнь отстаивавший право на индивидуальность, искавший свой путь и свои темы в искусстве, он формировался как творческая личность не в столичной среде, а в российской провинции. В творчестве мастера, как в зеркале, нашли отражение искания художников эпохи модерна. Так сложилось, что имя А.О. Никулина не стало хрестоматийным в истории русского искусства, более того, на долгие годы было забыто. Коллекция работ А.О. Никулина, собранная стараниями нескольких поколений музейных сотрудников Алтайского государственного художественного музея, не только является гордостью собрания, но и создает сегодня все предпосылки для полного и масштабного представления деятельности художника. Пейзаж, портрет, театральная декорация, журнальная и оригинальная графика, литературное творчество полно представляют наследие живописца. Настало время вернуть в художественное историческое пространство имя А.О. Никулина, расширив и обогатив наши представления о многообразии и специфике художественного процесса в России рубежа ХIХ – ХХ веков. The article is devoted to the analysis of the creative work and to the unique way of artistic searches of the talented Russian painter Andrei Nikulin (1878-1945) in the early 20th century who made a significant contribution to the development of Russian visual culture, but due to the prevailing historical conditions and life circumstances, and fragmentation of the collection he was neglected by leading national art historians. Being a bright and original personality, a European educated artist who was asserting his right for individuality, all his life looking for his way and his own themes in art, Nikulin was formed as an artist not in the environment of the capital, but in provincial Russia. Searches of Art Nouveau style artists are reflected in the creative work of the artist. It happened so that the name of Andrei Nikulin didn’t become a textbook one, furthermore it was neglected for many years. The collection of Nikulin’s works, assembled by the efforts of several generations of museum’s employees of the Altay State Art Museum, is not only a pride of the museum but also creates the prerequisites for a full and large-scale presentation of the artist’s activities. The heritage of the painter comprises landscape, portrait, theatrical decoration, journal and original graphic art, and literary work. It is time to return the name of Andrei Nikulin into the art and historical environment having enlarged and enriched our concept about the variety and specific features of art process in Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.

В статье проводится ретроспективный анализ жизни и творчества кубанского художника-графика Александра Романовича Мазина, работы которого отличаются высоким уровнем мастерства и отражают основные этапы хозяйственного и экономического развития Юга России. Основой исследования послужили материалы его личного фонда, хранящегося в Славянском историко-краеведческом музее, опубликованные источники, исследования российских ученых. Применены историко-системный, историко-биографический и диахронный методы. Автором прослежена судьба художника и установлена его связь с такими признанными мастерами графики ХХ в., как А. П. Остроумова-Лебедева и А. П. Эйснер. Отражены факты личной жизни и подробности творческой биографии А. Р. Мазина, относящиеся к 1950–1960-м гг., описаны судьбы его приемных детей, приведены события, связанные с уходом художника из жизни. Значительная часть выявленных и использованных материалов вводится в научный оборот впервые. The aim of the study is to reconstruct the biography of the Kuban graphic artist Alexander Romanovich Mazin (1909–1973), who created most of his works in the middle of the 20th century, through a retrospective analysis of his life and work. Based on the artist’s personal fund in the Slavyansk Museum of Local History, consisting of materials (linocuts, photographs, samples of printed materials, and personal belongings) donated by private individuals from 1985 to 2011, as well as relying on materials from private collections, published sources, and studies of Russian researchers, the author reconstructs the main stages of Mazin’s creative biography. Historical-systematic, historical-biographical and diachronic methods were used in the study. Brochures with the inscription of Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, a Soviet graphic artist of the twentieth century, and photos of the Russian scientist Aleksey Eisner found in the artist’s personal fund allowed reconstructing the facts related to the period of Mazin’s study at the Institute of Proletarian Fine Arts (Leningrad) in the early 1930s. Particular attention is paid to Eisner, who renderedpersonal assistance to the young artist. The author discovered and first introduced into scientific discourse Eisner’s portrait photograph—the only known image of him in adulthood today. The author presents the previously unknown events of Mazin’s life after training in Leningrad in the pre-war period, those during the years of war and Nazi occupation and during the restoration of the country’s economy after the victory. He also describes facts from Mazin’s private life, his personal qualities, the fates of his adopted children, the details of his creative biography in the 1950s–1960s, and events related to his death. The author concludes that Mazin’s fate is similar to fates of many provincial artists of the Soviet Union, who, for various reasons, were unable to fully use their potential and earn the lifetime recognition of their talent. Mazin’s works demonstrate his high skill; they areal so significant as they reflect the main stages of the economic development of the South of Russia. Alexander Mazin can stand on a par with the brightest representatives of the artistic environment of Kuban in the middle of the twentieth century. His works are of undoubted importance for the local community, serving as an inspiring example to new generations of artists.

The Digital TurnMuch of the 19th century disappeared from public view during the 20th century. Historians recovered what they could from archives and libraries, with the easy pickings-the famous and the fortunate-coming first. Latterly, social and political historians of different hues determinedly sought out the more hidden, forgotten, and marginalised. However, there were always limitations to resources-time, money, location, as well as purpose, opportunity, and permission. 'History' was principally a professionalised and privileged activity dominated by academics who had preferential access to, and significant control over, the resources, technologies and skills required, as well as the social, economic and cultural framework within which history was recovered, interpreted, approved and disseminated.Digitisation and the broader development of new communication technologies has, however, transformed historical research processes and practice dramatically, removing many constraints, opening up many opportunities, and allowing many others than the professional historian to trace and track what would have remained hidden, forgotten, or difficult to find, as well as verify (or otherwise), what has already been claimed and concluded. In the 21st century, the SEARCH button has become a dominant tool of research. This, along with other technological and media developments, has altered the practice of historians-professional or 'public'-who can now range deep and wide in the collection, portrayal and dissemination of historical information, in and out of the confines of the traditional institutional walls of retained information, academia, location, and national boundaries.This incorporation of digital technologies into academic historical practice generally, has raised, as Cohen and Rosenzweig, in their book Digital History, identified a decade ago, not just promises, but perils. For the historian, there has been the move, through digitisation, from the relative scarcity and inaccessibility of historical material to its (over) abundance, but also the emerging acceptance that, out of both necessity and preference, a hybridity of sources will be the foreseeable way forward. There has also been a significant shift, as De Groot notes in his book Consuming History, in the often conflicted relationship between popular/public history and academic history, and the professional and the 'amateur' historian. This has brought a potentially beneficial democratization of historical practice but also an associated set of concerns around the loss of control of both practice and product of the professional historian. Additionally, the development of digital tools for the collection and dissemination of 'history' has raised fears around the commercialised development of the subject's brand, products and commodities. This article considers the significance and implications of some of these changes through one protracted act of recovery and reclamation in which the digital made the difference: the life of a notorious 19th century professional agitator on both sides of the Atlantic, John De Morgan. A man thought lost, but now found."Who Is John De Morgan?" The search began in 1981, linked to the study of contemporary "race riots" in South East London. The initial purpose was to determine whether there was a history of rioting in the area. In the Local History Library, a calm and dusty backwater, an early find was a fading, but evocative and puzzling, photograph of "The Plumstead Common Riots" of 1876. It showed a group of men and women, posing for the photographer on a hillside-the technology required stillness, even in the middle of a riot-spades in hand, filling in a Mr. Jacob's sandpits, illegally dug from what was supposed to be common land. The leader of this, and other similar riots around England, was John De Morgan. A local journalist who covered the riots commented: "Of Mr. De Morgan little is known before or since the period in which he flashed meteorlike through our section of the atmosphere, but he was indisputably a remarkable man" (Vincent 588). Thus began a trek, much interrupted, sometimes unmapped and haphazard, to discover more about this 'remarkable man'. "Who is John De Morgan" was a question frequently asked by his many contemporary antagonists, and by subsequent historians, and one to which De Morgan deliberately gave few answers. The obvious place to start the search was the British Museum Reading Room, resplendent in its Victorian grandeur, the huge card catalogue still in the 1980s the dominating technology. Together with the Library's newspaper branch at Colindale, this was likely to be the repository of all that might then easily be known about De Morgan.From 1869, at the age of 21, it appeared that De Morgan had embarked on a life of radical politics that took him through the UK, made him notorious, lead to accusations of treasonable activities, sent him to jail twice, before he departed unexpectedly to the USA in 1880. During that period, he was involved with virtually every imaginable radical cause, at various times a temperance advocate, a spiritualist, a First Internationalist, a Republican, a Tichbornite, a Commoner, an anti-vaccinator, an advanced Liberal, a parliamentary candidate, a Home Ruler. As a radical, he, like many radicals of the period, "zigzagged nomadically through the mayhem of nineteenth century politics fighting various foes in the press, the clubs, the halls, the pulpit and on the street" (Kazin 202). He promoted himself as the "People's Advocate, Champion and Friend" (Allen). Never a joiner or follower, he established a variety of organizations, became a professional agitator and orator, and supported himself and his politics through lecturing and journalism. Able to attract huge crowds to "monster meetings", he achieved fame, or more correctly notoriety. And then, in 1880, broke and in despair, he disappeared from public view by emigrating to the USA.LostThe view of De Morgan as a "flashing meteor" was held by many in the 1870s. Historians of the 20th century took a similar position and, while considering him intriguing and culturally interesting, normally dispatched him to the footnotes. By the latter part of the 20th century, he was described as "one of the most notorious radicals of the 1870s yet remains a shadowy figure" and was generally dismissed as "a swashbuckling demagogue," a "democratic messiah," and" if not a bandit … at least an adventurer" (Allen 684). His politics were deemed to be reactionary, peripheral, and, worst of all, populist. He was certainly not of sufficient interest to pursue across the Atlantic. In this dismissal, he fell foul of the highly politicised professional culture of mid-to-late 20th-century academic historians. In particular, the lack of any significant direct linkage to the story of the rise of a working class, and specifically the British Labour party, left individuals like De Morgan in the margins and footnotes. However, in terms of historical practice, it was also the case that his mysterious entry into public life, his rapid rise to brief notability and notoriety, and his sudden disappearance, made the investigation of his career too technically difficult to be worthwhile.The footprints of the forgotten may occasionally turn up in the archived papers of the important, or in distant public archives and records, but the primary sources are the newspapers of the time. De Morgan was a regular, almost daily, visitor to the pages of the multitude of newspapers, local and national, that were published in Victorian Britain and Gilded Age USA. He also published his own, usually short-lived and sometimes eponymous, newspapers: De Morgan's Monthly and De Morgan's Weekly as well as the splendidly titled People's Advocate and National Vindicator of Right versus Wrong and the deceptively titled, highly radical, House and Home. He was highly mobile: he noted, without too much hyperbole, that in the 404 days between his English prison sentences in the mid-1870s, he had 465 meetings, travelled 32,000 miles, and addressed 500,000 people. Thus the newspapers of the time are littered with often detailed and vibrant accounts of his speeches, demonstrations, and riots.Nonetheless, the 20th-century technologies of access and retrieval continued to limit discovery. The white gloves, cradles, pencils and paper of the library or archive, sometimes supplemented by the century-old 'new' technology of the microfilm, all enveloped in a culture of hallowed (and pleasurable) silence, restricted the researcher looking to move into the lesser known and certainly the unknown. The fact that most of De Morgan's life was spent, it was thought, outside of England, and outside the purview of the British Library, only exacerbated the problem. At a time when a historian had to travel to the sources and then work directly on them, pencil in hand, it needed more than curiosity to keep searching. Even as many historians in the late part of the century shifted their centre of gravity from the known to the unknown and from the great to the ordinary, in any form of intellectual or resource cost-benefit analysis, De Morgan was a non-starter.UnknownOn the subject of his early life, De Morgan was tantalisingly and deliberately vague. In his speeches and newspapers, he often leaked his personal and emotional struggles as well as his political battles. However, when it came to his biographical story, he veered between the untruthful, the denial, and the obscure. To the twentieth century observer, his life began in 1869 at the age of 21 and ended at the age of 32. His various political campaign "biographies" gave some hints, but what little he did give away was often vague, coy and/or unlikely. His name was actually John Francis Morgan, but he never formally acknowledged it. He claimed, and was very proud, to be Irish and to have been educated in London and at Cambridge University (possible but untrue), and also to have been "for the first twenty years of his life directly or indirectly a railway servant," and to have been a "boy orator" from the age of ten (unlikely but true). He promised that "Some day-nay any day-that the public desire it, I am ready to tell the story of my strange life from earliest recollection to the present time" (St. Clair 4). He never did and the 20th century could unearth little evidence in relation to any of his claims.The blend of the vague, the unlikely and the unverifiable-combined with an inclination to self-glorification and hyperbole-surrounded De Morgan with an aura, for historians as well as contemporaries, of the self-seeking, untrustworthy charlatan with something to hide and little to say. Therefore, as the 20th century moved to closure, the search for John De Morgan did so as well. Though interesting, he gave most value in contextualising the lives of Victorian radicals more generally. He headed back to the footnotes.Now FoundMeanwhile, the technologies underpinning academic practice generally, and history specifically, had changed. The photocopier, personal computer, Internet, and mobile device, had arrived. They formed the basis for both resistance and revolution in academic practices. For a while, the analytical skills of the academic community were concentrated on the perils as much as the promises of a "digital history" (Cohen and Rosenzweig Digital).But as the Millennium turned, and the academic community itself spawned, inter alia, Google, the practical advantages of digitisation for history forced themselves on people. Google enabled the confident searching from a neutral place for things known and unknown; information moved to the user more easily in both time and space. The culture and technologies of gathering, retrieval, analysis, presentation and preservation altered dramatically and, as a result, the traditional powers of gatekeepers, institutions and professional historians was redistributed (De Groot). Access and abundance, arguably over-abundance, became the platform for the management of historical information. For the search for De Morgan, the door reopened. The increased global electronic access to extensive databases, catalogues, archives, and public records, as well as people who knew, or wanted to know, something, opened up opportunities that have been rapidly utilised and expanded over the last decade. Both professional and "amateur" historians moved into a space that made the previously difficult to know or unknowable now accessible.Inevitably, the development of digital newspaper archives was particularly crucial to seeking and finding John De Morgan. After some faulty starts in the early 2000s, characterised as a "wild west" and a "gold rush" (Fyfe 566), comprehensive digitised newspaper archives became available. While still not perfect, in terms of coverage and quality, it is a transforming technology. In the UK, the British Newspaper Archive (BNA)-in pursuit of the goal of the digitising of all UK newspapers-now has over 20 million pages. Each month presents some more of De Morgan. Similarly, in the US, Fulton History, a free newspaper archive run by retired computer engineer Tom Tryniski, now has nearly 40 million pages of New York newspapers. The almost daily footprints of De Morgan's radical life can now be seen, and the lives of the social networks within which he worked on both sides of the Atlantic, come easily into view even from a desk in New Zealand.The Internet also allows connections between researchers, both academic and 'public', bringing into reach resources not otherwise knowable: a Scottish genealogist with a mass of data on De Morgan's family; a Californian with the historian's pot of gold, a collection of over 200 letters received by De Morgan over a 50 year period; a Leeds Public Library blogger uncovering spectacular, but rarely seen, Victorian electoral cartoons which explain De Morgan's precipitate departure to the USA. These discoveries would not have happened without the infrastructure of the Internet, web site, blog, and e-mail. Just how different searching is can be seen in the following recent scenario, one of many now occurring. An addition in 2017 to the BNA shows a Master J.F. Morgan, aged 13, giving lectures on temperance in Ledbury in 1861, luckily a census year. A check of the census through Ancestry shows that Master Morgan was born in Lincolnshire in England, and a quick look at the 1851 census shows him living on an isolated blustery hill in Yorkshire in a railway encampment, along with 250 navvies, as his father, James, works on the construction of a tunnel. Suddenly, literally within the hour, the 20-year search for the childhood of John De Morgan, the supposedly Irish-born "gentleman who repudiated his class," has taken a significant turn.At the end of the 20th century, despite many efforts, John De Morgan was therefore a partial character bounded by what he said and didn't say, what others believed, and the intellectual and historiographical priorities, technologies, tools and processes of that century. In effect, he "lived" historically for a less than a quarter of his life. Without digitisation, much would have remained hidden; with it there has been, and will still be, much to find. De Morgan hid himself and the 20th century forgot him. But as the technologies have changed, and with it the structures of historical practice, the question that even De Morgan himself posed – "Who is John De Morgan?" – can now be addressed.SearchingDigitisation brings undoubted benefits, but its impact goes a long way beyond the improved search and detection capabilities, into a range of technological developments of communication and media that impact on practice, practitioners, institutions, and 'history' itself. A dominant issue for the academic community is the control of "history." De Groot, in his book Consuming History, considers how history now works in contemporary popular culture and, in particular, examines the development of the sometimes conflicted relationship between popular/public history and academic history, and the professional and the 'amateur' historian.The traditional legitimacy of professional historians has, many argue, been eroded by shifts in technology and access with the power of traditional cultural gatekeepers being undermined, bypassing the established control of institutions and professional historian. While most academics now embrace the primary tools of so-called "digital history," they remain, De Groot argues, worried that "history" is in danger of becoming part of a discourse of leisure, not a professionalized arena (18). An additional concern is the role of the global capitalist market, which is developing, or even taking over, 'history' as a brand, product and commodity with overt fiscal value. Here the huge impact of newspaper archives and genealogical software (sometimes owned in tandem) is of particular concern.There is also the new challenge of "navigating the chaos of abundance in online resources" (De Groot 68). By 2005, it had become clear that:the digital era seems likely to confront historians-who were more likely in the past to worry about the scarcity of surviving evidence from the past-with a new 'problem' of abundance. A much deeper and denser historical record, especially one in digital form seems like an incredible opportunity and a gift. But its overwhelming size means that we will have to spend a lot of time looking at this particular gift horse in mouth. (Cohen and Rosenzweig, Web).This easily accessible abundance imposes much higher standards of evidence on the historian. The acceptance within the traditional model that much could simply not be done or known with the resources available meant that there was a greater allowance for not knowing. But with a search button and public access, democratizing the process, the consumer as well as the producer can see, and find, for themselves.Taking on some of these challenges, Zaagsma, having reminded us that the history of digital humanities goes back at least 60 years, notes the need to get rid of the "myth that historical practice can be uncoupled from technological, and thus methodological developments, and that going digital is a choice, which, I cannot emphasis strongly enough, it is not" (14). There is no longer a digital history which is separate from history, and with digital technologies that are now ubiquitous and pervasive, historians have accepted or must quickly face a fundamental break with past practices. However, also noting that the great majority of archival material is not digitised and is unlikely to be so, Zaagsma concludes that hybridity will be the "new normal," combining "traditional/analogue and new/digital practices at least in information gathering" (17).ConclusionA decade on from Cohen and Rozenzweig's "Perils and Promises," the digital is a given. Both historical practice and historians have changed, though it is a work in progress. An early pioneer of the use of computers in the humanities, Robert Busa wrote in 1980 that "the principal aim is the enhancement of the quality, depth and extension of research and not merely the lessening of human effort and time" (89). Twenty years later, as Google was launched, Jordanov, taking on those who would dismiss public history as "mere" popularization, entertainment or propaganda, argued for the "need to develop coherent positions on the relationships between academic history, the media, institutions…and popular culture" (149). As the digital turn continues, and the SEARCH button is just one part of that, all historians-professional or "amateur"-will take advantage of opportunities that technologies have opened up. Looking across the whole range of transformations in recent decades, De Groot concludes: "Increasingly users of history are accessing the past through complex and innovative media and this is reconfiguring their sense of themselves, the world they live in and what history itself might be about" (310). ReferencesAllen, Rob. "'The People's Advocate, Champion and Friend': The Transatlantic Career of Citizen John De Morgan (1848-1926)." Historical Research 86.234 (2013): 684-711.Busa, Roberto. "The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus." Computers and the Humanities 14.2 (1980): 83-90.Cohen, Daniel J., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia, PA: U Pennsylvania P, 2005.———. "Web of Lies? Historical Knowledge on the Internet." First Monday 10.12 (2005).De Groot, Jerome. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.De Morgan, John. Who Is John De Morgan? A Few Words of Explanation, with Portrait. By a Free and Independent Elector of Leicester. London, 1877.Fyfe, Paul. "An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers." Victorian Periodicals Review 49.4 (2016): 546-77."Interchange: The Promise of Digital History." Journal of American History 95.2 (2008): 452-91.Johnston, Leslie. "Before You Were Born, We Were Digitizing Texts." The Signal 9 Dec. 2012, Library of Congress. <https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/292/12/before-you-were-born-we-were-digitizing-texts>.Jordanova, Ludmilla. History in Practice. 2nd ed. London: Arnold, 2000.Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Anchor Books, 2006.Saint-Clair, Sylvester. Sketch of the Life and Labours of J. De Morgan, Elocutionist, and Tribune of the People. Leeds: De Morgan & Co., 1880.Vincent, William T. The Records of the Woolwich District, Vol. II. Woolwich: J.P. Jackson, 1890.Zaagsma, Gerban. "On Digital History." BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 128.4 (2013): 3-29.

Одна из значимых проблем мировой художественной культуры – проблема взаимосвязи и взаимовлияния литератур. Она еще более актуальна в России, которая позиционируется как многонациональное государство. Потому роль межкультурного диалога русской и осетинской литературы, возникшего в конце 19 века, лишь увеличивалась в последующие десятилетия. Ощутимым в развитии этого диалога представляется творчество выдающегося российского поэта, прозаика, переводчика, журналиста, педагога и художника Сергея Митрофановича Городецкого, вошедшего в русскую литературу на рубеже XIX и XX веков в рамках культуры «Серебряного века». Эта эпоха составила гордость отечественной литературы, дав миру А. Блока, А. Ахматову, С. Есенина, И. Бунина, В. Брюсова, Н. Гумилева, К. Бальмонта, О.Мандельштама, В.Маяковского, М.Волошина и многих других. Наследие С. Городецкого поражает жанровым многообразием – поэзия, проза, драматургия, оперные либретто, публицистика, критика, литературоведческие статьи, переводы. Его долгое творчество развивалось под влиянием русского фольклора, символизма, неоромантизма, неомифологизма, он сформулировал задачи акмеизма. Предлагаемая работа посвящена осетинским литературным связям Городецкого, практически не отраженным ни в его биографиях, ни в исследованиях творчества. В 1919 г. журналистская судьба привела поэта на Кавказ, полюбившийся ему на всю жизнь. Его знакомство с Осетией началось с Нартовского эпоса, с перевода в 1920 г. нартовской легенды об Ацамазе и Агунде. В 1928 г. он обратился к осетинскому Даредзановскому эпосу и творчеству осетинского драматурга Е.Бритаева, создав либретто оперы «Амран», поставленной на сцене Большого театра. В 30-е годы со знакомства с поэтом Харитоном Плиевым начинается новый этап осетинских литературных связей Городецкого. Началом их многолетней творческой дружбы стал перевод стихотворения Х. Плиева «Æнæхуыссæг æхсæв», написанного на смерть Кирова. Городецкий, опытный переводчик, приложил немалые старания в поисках адекватности образности, художественных особенностей, выразительности осетинской поэтической речи. Помощь в этом ему оказали знания, приобретенные в середине 20-х гг., когда в качестве корреспондента газеты «Известия» он побывал в Осетии, познакомился с ее этнографией, культурой, эпосом, обрядами и обычаями, встречался с народом Осетии. Затем Городецкий обращается к образу выдающегося осетинского поэта Коста Хетагурова, любовь к которому, обусловленная общностью идейной направленности их творчества, отношения к народу, к фольклору, оставалась неизменной до конца жизни. В статье рассмотрены переводы Городецкого стихотворений Харитона (Хадо) Плиева, посвященных Коста. Их отличает высокое качество перевода, глубокое проникновение в специфику осетинской поэтической речи, художественного мышления национальных поэтов, их духовно-нравственных ценностей. Также проанализировано стихотворение Городецкого «Коста Хетагурову», написанное в 1939 г. к юбилею поэта и прочитанное им на торжествах во Владикавказе (тогда Орджоникидзе). Через несколько десятилетий это стихотворение перевел на осетинский язык поэт Хаджи-Мурат Дзуццати. One of the significant problems of world art culture is the problem of the interconnection and mutual influence of literature. It is even more relevant in Russia, which is positioned as a multinational state. Therefore, the role of intercultural dialogue between Russian and Ossetian literature, which arose at the end of the 19th century, only increased in the following decades. The work of the outstanding Russian poet, prose writer, translator, journalist, teacher and artist Sergei Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky, who entered the Russian literature at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries as part of the Silver Age culture, seems to be tangible in the development of this dialogue. This era was the pride of Russian literature, giving the world A. Blok, A. Akhmatov, S. Yesenin, I. Bunin, V. Bryusov, N. Gumilyov, K. Balmont, O. Mandelstam, V. Mayakovsky, M. Voloshin and many others. S. Gorodetsky’s heritage is striking in its genre diversity – poetry, prose, dramaturgy, opera libretto, journalism, criticism, literary articles, and translations. His long work developed under the influence of Russian folklore, symbolism, neo-romanticism, neo-mythology, he formulated the tasks of acmeism. The proposed work is dedicated to the Ossetian literary connections of Gorodetsky, which are practically not reflected either in his biographies or in his studies of his creations. In 1919, the journalistic fate brought the poet to the Caucasus. His acquaintance with Ossetia began with the Nart epic, with the translation in 1920 of the Nart legend of Atsamaz and Agunda. In 1928, he turned to the Ossetian Daredzan epic and the work of the Ossetian playwright E. Britaev, creating the libretto of the opera Amran, staged in the Bolshoi Theater. In the 30s, a new period in the Ossetian literary relations of Gorodetsky began with his acquaintance with the poet Khariton Pliev. The beginning of their creative friendship was the translation of the poem by Kh. Pliev “Ænækhuyssæg ækhsæv”, written on the death of Kirov. Gorodetsky, an experienced translator, made considerable efforts in the search for the adequacy of imagery, artistic features, and expressiveness of Ossetian poetic speech. The knowledge acquired in the mid-1920s, when he visited Ossetia as a correspondent for the Izvestia newspaper, got acquainted with its ethnography, culture, epos, rites and customs, and met with the people of Ossetia, helped him a lot. Then Gorodetsky turned to the image of the outstanding Ossetian poet Kosta Khetagurov, whose love, due to the common ideological orientation of their work, attitude to the people, to folklore, remained unchanged until the end of his life. The article considers the translations of Gorodetsky poems by Khariton (Hado) Pliev dedicated to Kosta. They are distinguished by the high quality of translation, deep penetration into the specifics of Ossetian poetic speech, the artistic thinking of national poets, their spiritual and moral values. Gorodetsky’s poem “Kosta Khetagurov”, written in 1939 for the poet’s anniversary and read by him at the celebrations in Vladikavkaz (then Ordzhonikidze), is also analyzed. A few decades later, this poem was translated into Ossetian by the poet Haji-Murat Dzutstsati.

As the distinction between disclosure-fuelled celebrity and lasting fame becomes difficult to discern, the “based on a true story” label has gained a particular traction among readers and viewers. This is despite much public approbation and private angst sometimes resulting from such disclosure as “little in the law or in society protects people from the consequences of others’ revelations about them” (Smith 537). Even fiction writers can stray into difficult ethical and artistic territory when they disclose the private facts of real lives—that is, recognisably biographical information—in their work, with autoethnographic fiction where authors base their fiction on their own lives (Davis and Ellis) not immune as this often discloses others’ stories (Ellis) as well. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously counselled writers to take their subjects from life and, moreover, to look to the singular, specific life, although this then had to be abstracted: “Begin with an individual, and before you know it, you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (139). One of the problems when assessing fiction through this lens, however, is that, although many writers are inspired in their work by an actual life, event or historical period, the resulting work is usually ultimately guided by literary concerns—what writers often term the quest for aesthetic truth—rather than historical accuracy (Owen et al. 2008). In contrast, a biography is, and continues to be, by definition, an accurate account of a real persons’ life. Despite postmodern assertions regarding the relativity of truth and decades of investigation into the incorporation of fiction into biography, other non-fiction texts and research narratives (see, for instance: Wyatt), many biographers attest to still feeling irrevocably tied to the factual evidence in a way that novelists and the scriptors of biographically-based fictional television drama, movies and theatrical pieces do not (Wolpert; Murphy; Inglis). To cite a recent example, Louis Nowra’s Ice takes the life of nineteenth-century self-made entrepreneur and politician Malcolm McEacharn as its base, but never aspires to be classified as creative nonfiction, history or biography. The history in a historical novel is thus often, and legitimately, skewed or sidelined in order to achieve the most satisfying work of art, although some have argued that fiction may uniquely represent the real, as it is able to “play […] in the gap between the narratives of history and the actualities of the past” (Nelson n.p.). Fiction and non-fictional forms are, moreover, increasingly intermingling and intertwining in content and intent. The ugly word “faction” was an attempt to suggest that the two could simply be elided but, acknowledging wide-ranging debates about whether literature can represent the complexities of life with any accuracy and post-structuralist assertions that the idea of any absolute truth is outmoded, contemporary authors play with, and across, these boundaries, creating hybrid texts that consciously slide between invention and disclosure, but which publishers, critics and readers continue to define firmly as either fiction or biography. This dancing between forms is not particularly new. A striking example was Marion Halligan’s 2001 novel The Fog Garden which opens with a personal essay about the then recent death of her own much-loved husband. This had been previously published as an autobiographical memoir, “Cathedral of Love,” and again in an essay collection as “Lapping.” The protagonist of the novel is a recently widowed writer named Clare, but the inclusion of Halligan’s essay, together with the book’s marketing campaign which made much of the author’s own sadness, encourages readers to read the novel as a disclosure of the author’s own personal experience. This is despite Halligan’s attempt to keep the two separate: “Clare isn’t me. She’s like me. Some of her experience, terrors, have been mine. Some haven’t” (Fog Garden 9). In such acts of disclosure and denial, fiction and non-fiction can interrogate, test and even create each other, however quite vicious criticism can result when readers feel the boundaries demarking the two are breached. This is most common when authors admit to some dishonesty in terms of self-disclosure as can be seen, for instance, in the furore surrounding highly inflated and even wholly fabricated memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Margaret B. Jones’s Love and Consequences and Misha Defonseca’s A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Related problems and anxieties arise when authors move beyond incorporating and disclosing the facts of their own lives in memoir or (autobiographical) fiction, to using the lives of others in this way. Daphne Patai sums up the difference: “A person telling her life story is, in a sense, offering up her self for her own and her listener’s scrutiny […] Whether we should appropriate another’s life in this way becomes a legitimate question” (24–5). While this is difficult but seemingly manageable for non-fiction writers because of their foundational reliance on evidence, this anxiety escalates for fiction writers. This seems particularly extreme in relation to how audience expectations and prior knowledge of actual events can shape perceptions and interpretations of the resulting work, even when those events are changed and the work is declared to be one of fiction. I have discussed elsewhere, for instance, the difficult terrain of crafting fiction from well-known criminal cases (Brien, “Based on a True Story”). The reception of such work shows how difficult it is to dissociate creative product from its source material once the public and media has made this connection, no matter how distant that finished product may be from the original facts.As the field of biography continues to evolve for writers, critics and theorists, a study of one key text at a moment in that evolution—Jill Shearer’s play Georgia and its reliance on disclosing the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe for its content and dramatic power—reveals not only some of the challenges and opportunities this close relationship offers to the writers and readers of life stories, but also the pitfalls of attempting to dissemble regarding artistic intention. This award-winning play has been staged a number of times in the past decade but has attracted little critical attention. Yet, when I attended a performance of Georgia at La Boite Theatre in Brisbane in 1999, I was moved by the production and admiring of Shearer’s writing which was, I told anyone who would listen, a powerfully dramatic interpretation of O’Keeffe’s life, one of my favourite artists. A full decade on, aspects of the work and its performance still resonate through my thinking. Author of more than twenty plays performed throughout Australia and New Zealand as well as on Broadway, Shearer was then (and is) one of Australia’s leading playwrights, and I judged Georgia to be a major, mature work: clear, challenging and confident. Reading the Currency Press script a year or so after seeing the play reinforced for me how distinctive and successful a piece of theatre Shearer had created utilising a literary technique which has been described elsewhere as fictionalised biography—biography which utilises fictional forms in its presentation but stays as close to the historical record as conventional biography (Brien, The Case of Mary Dean).The published version of the script indeed acknowledges on its title page that Georgia is “inspired by the later life of the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe” (Shearer). The back cover blurb begins with a quote attributed to O’Keeffe and then describes the content of the play entirely in terms of biographical detail: The great American artist Georgia O’Keeffe is physically, emotionally and artistically debilitated by her failing eyesight. Living amidst the Navajo spiritual landscape in her desert home in New Mexico, she becomes prey to the ghosts of her past. Her solitude is broken by Juan, a young potter, whose curious influence on her life remains until her death at 98 (Georgia back cover). This short text ends by unequivocally reinforcing the relation between the play and the artist’s life: “Georgia is a passionate play that explores with sensitivity and wry humour the contradictions and the paradoxes of the life of Georgia O’Keeffe” (Georgia back cover). These few lines of plot synopsis actually contain a surprisingly large number of facts regarding O’Keeffe’s later life. After the death of her husband (the photographer and modern art impresario Alfred Steiglitz whose ghost is a central character in the play), O’Keeffe did indeed relocate permanently to Abiquiú in New Mexico. In 1971, aged 84, she was suffering from an irreversible degenerative disease, had lost her central vision and stopped painting. One autumn day in 1973, Juan Hamilton, a young potter, appeared at her adobe house looking for work. She hired him and he became her lover, closest confidante and business manager until her death at 98. These facts form not only the background story but also much of the riveting content for Georgia which, as the published script’s introduction states, takes as its central themes: “the dilemma of the artist as a an older woman; her yearning to create against the fear of failing artistic powers; her mental strength and vulnerability; her sexuality in the face of physical deterioration; her need for companionship and the paradoxical love of solitude” (Rider vii). These issues are not only those which art historians identify as animating the O’Keeffe’s later life and painting, but ones which are discussed at length in many of the biographies of the artist published from 1980 to 2007 (see, for instance: Arrowsmith and West; Berry; Calloway and Bry; Castro; Drohojowska-Philp; Eisler; Eldredge; Harris; Hogrefe; Lisle; Peters; Reily; Robinson).Despite this clear focus on disclosing aspects of O’Keeffe’s life, both the director’s and playwright’s notes prefacing the published script declare firmly that Georgia is fiction, not biography. While accepting that these statements may be related to copyright and privacy concerns, the stridency of the denials of the biography label with its implied intention of disclosing the facts of a life, are worthy of analysis. Although noting that Georgia is “about the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe”, director of the La Boite production Sue Rider asserts that not only that the play moves “beyond the biographical” (vii) but, a few pages later, that it is “thankfully not biography” (xii). This is despite Rider’s own underscoring of the connection to O’Keeffe by setting up an exhibition of the artist’s work adjacent to the theatre. Shearer, whose research acknowledgments include a number of works about O’Keeffe, is even more overtly strident in her denial of any biographical links stating that her characters, “this Juan, Anna Marie and Dorothy Norman are a work of dramatic fiction, as is the play, and should be taken as such” (xiii).Yet, set against a reading of the biographies of the artist, including those written in the intervening decade, Georgia clearly and remarkably accurately discloses the tensions and contradictions of O’Keeffe’s life. It also draws on a significant amount of documented biographical data to enhance the dramatic power of what is disclosed by the play for audiences with this knowledge. The play does work as a coherent narrative for a viewer without any prior knowledge of O’Keeffe’s life, but the meaning of the dramatic action is enhanced by any biographical knowledge the audience possesses. In this way, the play’s act of disclosure is reinforced by this externally held knowledge. Although O’Keeffe’s oeuvre is less well known and much anecdotal detail about her life is not as familiar for Australian viewers as for those in the artist’s homeland, Shearer writes for an international as well as an Australian audience, and the program and adjacent exhibition for the Brisbane performance included biographical information. It is also worth noting that large slabs of biographical detail are also omitted from the play. These omissions to disclosure include O’Keeffe’s early life from her birth in 1887 in Wisconsin to her studies in Chicago and New York from 1904 to 1908, as well as her work as a commercial artist and art teacher in Texas and other Southern American states from 1912 to 1916. It is from this moment in 1916, however, that the play (although opening in 1946) constructs O’Keeffe’s life right through to her death in 1986 by utilising such literary devices as flashbacks, dream sequences and verbal and visual references.An indication of the level of accuracy of the play as biographical disclosure can be ascertained by unpacking the few lines of opening stage directions, “The Steiglitz’s suite in the old mid-range Shelton Hotel, New York, 1946 ... Georgia, 59, in black, enters, dragging a coffin” (1). In 1946, when O’Keeffe was indeed aged 59, Steiglitz died. The couple had lived part of every year at the Shelton Towers Hotel at 525 Lexington Avenue (now the New York Marriott East Side), a moderately priced hotel made famous by its depiction in O’Keeffe’s paintings and Steiglitz’s photographs. When Stieglitz suffered a cerebral thrombosis, O’Keeffe was spending the summer in New Mexico, but she returned to New York where her husband died on 13 July. This level of biographical accuracy continues throughout Georgia. Halfway through the first page “Anita, 52” enters. This character represents Anita Pollitzer, artist, critic and O’Keeffe’s lifelong friend. The publication of her biography of O’Keeffe, A Woman on Paper, and Georgia’s disapproval of this, is discussed in the play, as are their letters, which were collected and published in 1990 as Lovingly, Georgia (Gibiore). Anita’s first lines in the play after greeting her friend refer to this substantial correspondence: “You write beautifully. I always tell people: “I have a friend who writes the most beautiful letters” (1). In the play, as in life, it is Anita who introduces O’Keeffe’s work to Stieglitz who is, in turn, accurately described as: “Gallery owner. Two Nine One, Fifth Avenue. Leader of the New York avant-garde, the first to bring in the European moderns” (6). The play also chronicles how (unknown to O’Keeffe) Steiglitz exhibited the drawings Pollitzer gave him under the incorrect name, a scene which continues with Steiglitz persuading Georgia to allow her drawings to remain in his gallery (as he did in life) and ends with a reference to his famous photographs of her hands and nude form. Although the action of a substantial amount of real time is collapsed into a few dramatic minutes and, without doubt, the dialogue is invented, this invention achieves the level of aesthetic truth aimed for by many contemporary biographers (Jones)—as can be assessed when referring back to the accepted biographical account. What actually appears to have happened was that, in the autumn 1915, while teaching art in South Carolina, O’Keeffe was working on a series of abstract charcoal drawings that are now recognised as among the most innovative in American art of that time. She mailed some of these drawings to Pollitzer, who showed them Steiglitz, who exhibited ten of them in April 1916, O’Keeffe only learning of this through an acquaintance. O’Keeffe, who had first visited 291 in 1908 but never spoken to Stieglitz, held his critical opinion in high regard, and although confronting him over not seeking her permission and citing her name incorrectly, eventually agreed to let her drawings hang (Harris). Despite Shearer’s denial, the other characters in Georgia are also largely biographical sketches. Her “Anna Marie”, who never appears in the play but is spoken of, is Juan’s wife (in real life Anna Marie Hamilton), and “Dorothy Norman” is the character who has an affair with Steiglitz—the discovery of which leads to Georgia’s nervous breakdown in the play. In life, while O’Keeffe was in New Mexico, Stieglitz became involved with the much younger Norman who was, he claimed, only his gallery assistant. When O’Keeffe discovered Norman posing nude for her husband (this is vividly imagined in Georgia), O’Keeffe moved out of the Shelton and suffered from the depression that led to her nervous breakdown. “ Juan,” who ages from 26 to 39 in the play, represents the potter Juan Hamilton who encouraged the nearly blind O’Keeffe to paint again. In the biographical record there is much conjecture about Hamilton’s motives, and Shearer sensitively portrays her interpretation of this liaison and the difficult territory of sexual desire between a man and a much older woman, as she also too discloses the complex relationship between O’Keeffe and the much older Steiglitz.This complexity is described through the action of the play, but its disclosure is best appreciated if the biographical data is known. There are also a number of moments of biographical disclosure in the play that can only be fully understood with biographical knowledge in hand. For instance, Juan refers to Georgia’s paintings as “Beautiful, sexy flowers [... especially] the calla lilies” (24). All attending the play are aware (from the exhibition, program and technical aspects of the production) that, in life, O’Keeffe was famous for her flower paintings. However, knowing that these had brought her fame and fortune early in her career with, in 1928, a work titled Calla Lily selling for U.S. $25,000, then an enormous sum for any living American artist, adds to the meaning of this line in the play. Conversely, the significant level of biographical disclosure throughout Georgia does not diminish, in any way, the power or integrity of Shearer’s play as a literary work. Universal literary (and biographical) themes—love, desire and betrayal—animate Georgia; Steiglitz’s spirit haunts Georgia years after his death and much of the play’s dramatic energy is generated by her passion for both her dead husband and her younger lover, with some of her hopeless desire sublimated through her relationship with Juan. Nadia Wheatley reads such a relationship between invention and disclosure in terms of myth—relating how, in the process of writing her biography of Charmain Clift, she came to see Clift and her husband George Johnson take on a larger significance than their individual lives: “They were archetypes; ourselves writ large; experimenters who could test and try things for us; legendary figures through whom we could live vicariously” (5). In this, Wheatley finds that “while myth has no real beginning or end, it also does not bother itself with cause and effect. Nor does it worry about contradictions. Parallel tellings are vital to the fabric” (5). In contrast with both Rider and Shearer’s insistence that Georgia was “not biography”, it could be posited that (at least part of) Georgia’s power arises from the creation of such mythic value, and expressly through its nuanced disclosure of the relevant factual (biographical) elements in parallel to the development of its dramatic (invented) elements. Alongside this, accepting Georgia as such a form of biographical disclosure would mean that as well as a superbly inventive creative work, the highly original insights Shearer offers to the mass of O’Keeffe biography—something of an American industry—could be celebrated, rather than excused or denied. ReferencesArrowsmith, Alexandra, and Thomas West, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe & Alfred Stieglitz: Two Lives—A Conversation in Paintings and Photographs. Washington DC: HarperCollins and Calloway Editions, and The Phillips Collection, 1992.Berry, Michael. Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Chelsea House, 1988.Brien, Donna Lee. The Case of Mary Dean: Sex, Poisoning and Gender Relations in Australia. Unpublished PhD Thesis. Queensland University of Technology, 2004. –––. “‘Based on a True Story’: The Problem of the Perception of Biographical Truth in Narratives Based on Real Lives”. TEXT: Journal of Writers and Writing Programs 13.2 (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au >.Calloway, Nicholas, and Doris Bry, eds. Georgia O’Keeffe in the West. New York: Knopf, 1989.Castro, Jan G. The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Crown Publishing, Random House, 1985.Davis, Christine S., and Carolyn Ellis. “Autoethnographic Introspection in Ethnographic Fiction: A Method of Inquiry.” In Pranee Liamputtong and Jean Rumbold, eds. Knowing Differently: Arts-Based and Collaborative Research. New York: Nova Science, 2008. 99–117.Defonseca, Misha. Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Bluebell, PA: Mt. Ivy Press, 1997.Drohojowska-Philp, Hunter. Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: WW Norton, 2004.Ellis, Carolyn. “Telling Secrets, Revealing Lives: Relational Ethics in Research with Intimate Others.” Qualitative Inquiry 13.1 (2007): 3–29. Eisler, Benita. O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance. New York: Doubleday, 1991.Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe: American and Modern. New Haven: Yale UP, 1993.Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories. Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962.Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: N.A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.Gibiore, Clive, ed. Lovingly, Georgia. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990.Halligan, Marion. “Lapping.” In Peter Craven, ed. Best Australian Essays. Melbourne: Bookman P, 1999. 208–13.Halligan, Marion. The Fog Garden. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2001.Halligan, Marion. “The Cathedral of Love.” The Age 27 Nov. 1999: Saturday Extra 1.Harris, J. C. “Georgia O’Keeffe at 291”. Archives of General Psychiatry 64.2 (Feb. 2007): 135–37.Hogrefe, Jeffrey. O’Keeffe: The Life of an American Legend. New York: Bantam, 1994.Inglis, Ian. “Popular Music History on Screen: The Pop/Rock Biopic.” Popular Music History 2.1 (2007): 77–93.Jones, Kip. “A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The Use of Arts-Based (Re)presentations in “Performative” Dissemination of Life Stories”. Qualitative Sociology Review 2.1 (Apr. 2006): 66–85. Jones, Margaret B. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.Lisle, Laurie. Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. New York: Seaview Books, 1980.Murphy, Mary. “Limited Lives: The Problem of the Literary Biopic”. Kinema 17 (Spr. 2002): 67–74. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (Oct. 2007). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct07/nelson.htm >.Nowra, Louis. Ice. Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2008.Owen, Jillian A. Tullis, Chris McRae, Tony E. Adams, and Alisha Vitale. “Truth Troubles.” Qualitative Inquiry 15.1 (2008): 178–200.Patai, Daphne. “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake.” International Journal of Oral History 8 (1987): 5–27.Peters, Sarah W. Becoming O’Keeffe. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991.Pollitzer, Anita. A Woman on Paper. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.Reily, Nancy Hopkins. Georgia O’Keeffe. A Private Friendship, Part II. Santa Fe, NM: Sunstone Press, 2009.Rider, Sue. “Director’s Note.” Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000. vii–xii.Robinson, Roxana. Georgia O’Keeffe: A Life. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1990. Shearer, Jill. Georgia [playscript]. Sydney: Currency Press, 2000.Smith, Thomas R. “How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves [review]”. Biography 23.3 (2000): 534–38.Wheatley, Nadia. The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift. Sydney: Flamingo, 2001.Wolpert, Stanley. “Biography as History: A Personal Reflection”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 40.3 (2010): 399–412. Pub. online (Oct. 2009). 19 Oct. 2009 < http://www.mitpressjournals.org/toc/jinh/40/3 >.Wyatt, Jonathan. “Research, Narrative and Fiction: Conference Story”. The Qualitative Report 12.2 (Jun. 2007): 318–31.

augmentvb [ɔːgˈmɛnt]1. to make or become greater in number, amount, strength, etc.; increase2. Music: to increase (a major or perfect interval) by a semitone (Collins English Dictionary 107) Almost everything associated with Robert Johnson has been subject to some form of augmentation. His talent as a musician and songwriter has been embroidered by myth-making. Johnson’s few remaining artefacts—his photographic images, his grave site, other physical records of his existence—have attained the status of reliquary. Even the integrity of his forty-two surviving recordings is now challenged by audiophiles who posit they were musically and sonically augmented by speeding up—increasing the tempo and pitch. This article documents the promulgation of myth in the life and music of Robert Johnson. His disputed photographic images are cited as archetypal contested artefacts, augmented both by false claims and genuine new discoveries—some of which suggest Johnson’s cultural magnetism is so compelling that even items only tenuously connected to his work draw significant attention. Current challenges to the musical integrity of Johnson’s original recordings, that they were “augmented” in order to raise the tempo, are presented as exemplars of our on-going fascination with his life and work. Part literature review, part investigative history, it uses the phenomenon of augmentation as a prism to shed new light on this enigmatic figure. Johnson’s obscurity during his lifetime, and for twenty-three years after his demise in 1938, offered little indication of his future status as a musical legend: “As far as the evolution of black music goes, Robert Johnson was an extremely minor figure, and very little that happened in the decades following his death would have been affected if he had never played a note” (Wald, Escaping xv). Such anonymity allowed those who first wrote about his music to embrace and propagate the myths that grew around this troubled character and his apparently “supernatural” genius. Johnson’s first press notice, from a pseudonymous John Hammond writing in The New Masses in 1937, spoke of a mysterious character from “deepest Mississippi” who “makes Leadbelly sound like an accomplished poseur” (Prial 111). The following year Hammond eulogised the singer in profoundly romantic terms: “It still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way to phonograph records […] Johnson died last week at precisely the moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall” (19). The visceral awe experienced by subsequent generations of Johnson aficionados seems inspired by the remarkable capacity of his recordings to transcend space and time, reaching far beyond their immediate intended audience. “Johnson’s music changed the way the world looked to me,” wrote Greil Marcus, “I could listen to nothing else for months.” The music’s impact originates, at least in part, from the ambiguity of its origins: “I have the feeling, at times, that the reason Johnson has remained so elusive is that no one has been willing to take him at his word” (27-8). Three decades later Bob Dylan expressed similar sentiments over seven detailed pages of Chronicles: From the first note the vibrations from the loudspeaker made my hair stand up … it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition …When he sings about icicles hanging on a tree it gives me the chills, or about milk turning blue … it made me nauseous and I wondered how he did that … It’s hard to imagine sharecroppers or plantation field hands at hop joints, relating to songs like these. You have to wonder if Johnson was playing for an audience that only he could see, one off in the future. (282-4) Such ready invocation of the supernatural bears witness to the profundity and resilience of the “lost bluesman” as a romantic trope. Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch have produced a painstaking genealogy of such a-historical misrepresentation. Early contributors include Rudi Blesch, Samuel B Charters, Frank Driggs’ liner notes for Johnson’s King of the Delta Blues Singers collection, and critic Pete Welding’s prolific 1960s output. Even comparatively recent researchers who ostensibly sought to demystify the legend couldn’t help but embellish the narrative. “It is undeniable that Johnson was fascinated with and probably obsessed by supernatural imagery,” asserted Robert Palmer (127). For Peter Guralnick his best songs articulate “the debt that must be paid for art and the Faustian bargain that Johnson sees at its core” (43). Contemporary scholarship from Pearson and McCulloch, James Banninghof, Charles Ford, and Elijah Wald has scrutinised Johnson’s life and work on a more evidential basis. This process has been likened to assembling a complicated jigsaw where half the pieces are missing: The Mississippi Delta has been practically turned upside down in the search for records of Robert Johnson. So far only marriage application signatures, two photos, a death certificate, a disputed death note, a few scattered school documents and conflicting oral histories of the man exist. Nothing more. (Graves 47) Such material is scrappy and unreliable. Johnson’s marriage licenses and his school records suggest contradictory dates of birth (Freeland 49). His death certificate mistakes his age—we now know that Johnson inadvertently founded another rock myth, the “27 Club” which includes fellow guitarists Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain (Wolkewitz et al., Segalstad and Hunter)—and incorrectly states he was single when he was twice widowed. A second contemporary research strand focuses on the mythmaking process itself. For Eric Rothenbuhler the appeal of Johnson’s recordings lies in his unique “for-the-record” aesthetic, that foreshadowed playing and song writing standards not widely realised until the 1960s. For Patricia Schroeder Johnson’s legend reveals far more about the story-tellers than it does the source—which over time has become “an empty center around which multiple interpretations, assorted viewpoints, and a variety of discourses swirl” (3). Some accounts of Johnson’s life seem entirely coloured by their authors’ cultural preconceptions. The most enduring myth, Johnson’s “crossroads” encounter with the Devil, is commonly redrawn according to the predilections of those telling the tale. That this story really belongs to bluesman Tommy Johnson has been known for over four decades (Evans 22), yet it was mistakenly attributed to Robert as recently as 1999 in French blues magazine Soul Bag (Pearson and McCulloch 92-3). Such errors are, thankfully, becoming less common. While the movie Crossroads (1986) brazenly appropriated Tommy’s story, the young walking bluesman in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000) faithfully proclaims his authentic identity: “Thanks for the lift, sir. My name's Tommy. Tommy Johnson […] I had to be at that crossroads last midnight. Sell my soul to the devil.” Nevertheless the “supernatural” constituent of Johnson’s legend remains an irresistible framing device. It inspired evocative footage in Peter Meyer’s Can’t You Hear the Wind Howl? The Life and Music of Robert Johnson (1998). Even the liner notes to the definitive Sony Music Robert Johnson: The Centennial Edition celebrate and reclaim his myth: nothing about this musician is more famous than the word-of-mouth accounts of him selling his soul to the devil at a midnight crossroads in exchange for his singular mastery of blues guitar. It has become fashionable to downplay or dismiss this account nowadays, but the most likely source of the tale is Johnson himself, and the best efforts of scholars to present this artist in ordinary, human terms have done little to cut through the mystique and mystery that surround him. Repackaged versions of Johnson’s recordings became available via Amazon.co.uk and Spotify when they fell out of copyright in the United Kingdom. Predictable titles such as Contracted to the Devil, Hellbound, Me and the Devil Blues, and Up Jumped the Devil along with their distinctive “crossroads” artwork continue to demonstrate the durability of this myth [1]. Ironically, Johnson’s recordings were made during an era when one-off exhibited artworks (such as his individual performances of music) first became reproducible products. Walter Benjamin famously described the impact of this development: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art […] the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. (7) Marybeth Hamilton drew on Benjamin in her exploration of white folklorists’ efforts to document authentic pre-modern blues culture. Such individuals sought to preserve the intensity of the uncorrupted and untutored black voice before its authenticity and uniqueness could be tarnished by widespread mechanical reproduction. Two artefacts central to Johnson’s myth, his photographs and his recorded output, will now be considered in that context. In 1973 researcher Stephen LaVere located two pictures in the possession of his half–sister Carrie Thompson. The first, a cheap “dime store” self portrait taken in the equivalent of a modern photo booth, shows Johnson around a year into his life as a walking bluesman. The second, taken in the Hooks Bros. studio in Beale Street, Memphis, portrays a dapper and smiling musician on the eve of his short career as a Vocalion recording artist [2]. Neither was published for over a decade after their “discovery” due to fears of litigation from a competing researcher. A third photograph remains unpublished, still owned by Johnson’s family: The man has short nappy hair; he is slight, one foot is raised, and he is up on his toes as though stretching for height. There is a sharp crease in his pants, and a handkerchief protrudes from his breast pocket […] His eyes are deep-set, reserved, and his expression forms a half-smile, there seems to be a gentleness about him, his fingers are extraordinarily long and delicate, his head is tilted to one side. (Guralnick 67) Recently a fourth portrait appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in Vanity Fair. Vintage guitar seller Steven Schein discovered a sepia photograph labelled “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B. B. King???” [sic] while browsing Ebay and purchased it for $2,200. Johnson’s son positively identified the image, and a Houston Police Department forensic artist employed face recognition technology to confirm that “all the features are consistent if not identical” (DiGiacomo 2008). The provenance of this photograph remains disputed, however. Johnson’s guitar appears overly distressed for what would at the time be a new model, while his clothes reflect an inappropriate style for the period (Graves). Another contested “Johnson” image found on four seconds of silent film showed a walking bluesman playing outside a small town cinema in Ruleville, Mississippi. It inspired Bob Dylan to wax lyrical in Chronicles: “You can see that really is Robert Johnson, has to be – couldn’t be anyone else. He’s playing with huge, spiderlike hands and they magically move over the strings of his guitar” (287). However it had already been proved that this figure couldn’t be Johnson, because the background movie poster shows a film released three years after the musician’s death. The temptation to wish such items genuine is clearly a difficult one to overcome: “even things that might have been Robert Johnson now leave an afterglow” (Schroeder 154, my italics). Johnson’s recordings, so carefully preserved by Hammond and other researchers, might offer tangible and inviolate primary source material. Yet these also now face a serious challenge: they run too rapidly by a factor of up to 15 per cent (Gibbens; Wilde). Speeding up music allowed early producers to increase a song’s vibrancy and fit longer takes on to their restricted media. By slowing the recording tempo, master discs provided a “mother” print that would cause all subsequent pressings to play unnaturally quickly when reproduced. Robert Johnson worked for half a decade as a walking blues musician without restrictions on the length of his songs before recording with producer Don Law and engineer Vincent Liebler in San Antonio (1936) and Dallas (1937). Longer compositions were reworked for these sessions, re-arranging and edited out verses (Wald, Escaping). It is also conceivable that they were purposefully, or even accidentally, sped up. (The tempo consistency of machines used in early field recordings across the South has often been questioned, as many played too fast or slow (Morris).) Slowed-down versions of Johnson’s songs from contributors such as Angus Blackthorne and Ron Talley now proliferate on YouTube. The debate has fuelled detailed discussion in online blogs, where some contributors to specialist audio technology forums have attempted to decode a faintly detectable background hum using spectrum analysers. If the frequency of the alternating current that powered Law and Liebler’s machine could be established at 50 or 60 Hz it might provide evidence of possible tempo variation. A peak at 51.4 Hz, one contributor argues, suggests “the recordings are 2.8 per cent fast, about half a semitone” (Blischke). Such “augmentation” has yet to be fully explored in academic literature. Graves describes the discussion as “compelling and intriguing” in his endnotes, concluding “there are many pros and cons to the argument and, indeed, many recordings over the years have been speeded up to make them seem livelier” (124). Wald ("Robert Johnson") provides a compelling and detailed counter-thesis on his website, although he does acknowledge inconsistencies in pitch among alternate master takes of some recordings. No-one who actually saw Robert Johnson perform ever called attention to potential discrepancies between the pitch of his natural and recorded voice. David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Robert Lockwood Jr. and Johnny Shines were all interviewed repeatedly by documentarians and researchers, but none ever raised the issue. Conversely Johnson’s former girlfriend Willie Mae Powell was visibly affected by the familiarity in his voice on hearing his recording of the tune Johnson wrote for her, “Love in Vain”, in Chris Hunt’s The Search for Robert Johnson (1991). Clues might also lie in the natural tonality of Johnson’s instrument. Delta bluesmen who shared Johnson’s repertoire and played slide guitar in his style commonly used a tuning of open G (D-G-D-G-B-G). Colloquially known as “Spanish” (Gordon 2002, 38-42) it offers a natural home key of G major for slide guitar. We might therefore expect Johnson’s recordings to revolve around the tonic (G) or its dominant (D) -however almost all of his songs are a full tone higher, in the key of A or its dominant E. (The only exceptions are “They’re Red Hot” and “From Four Till Late” in C, and “Love in Vain” in G.) A pitch increase such as this might be consistent with an increase in the speed of these recordings. Although an alternative explanation might be that Johnson tuned his strings particularly tightly, which would benefit his slide playing but also make fingering notes and chords less comfortable. Yet another is that he used a capo to raise the key of his instrument and was capable of performing difficult lead parts in relatively high fret positions on the neck of an acoustic guitar. This is accepted by Scott Ainslie and Dave Whitehill in their authoritative volume of transcriptions At the Crossroads (11). The photo booth self portrait of Johnson also clearly shows a capo at the second fret—which would indeed raise open G to open A (in concert pitch). The most persuasive reasoning against speed tampering runs parallel to the argument laid out earlier in this piece, previous iterations of the Johnson myth have superimposed their own circumstances and ignored the context and reality of the protagonist’s lived experience. As Wald argues, our assumptions of what we think Johnson ought to sound like have little bearing on what he actually sounded like. It is a compelling point. When Son House, Skip James, Bukka White, and other surviving bluesmen were “rediscovered” during the 1960s urban folk revival of North America and Europe they were old men with deep and resonant voices. Johnson’s falsetto vocalisations do not, therefore, accord with the commonly accepted sound of an authentic blues artist. Yet Johnson was in his mid-twenties in 1936 and 1937; a young man heavily influenced by the success of other high pitched male blues singers of his era. people argue that what is better about the sound is that the slower, lower Johnson sounds more like Son House. Now, House was a major influence on Johnson, but by the time Johnson recorded he was not trying to sound like House—an older player who had been unsuccessful on records—but rather like Leroy Carr, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, Lonnie Johnson, and Peetie Wheatstraw, who were the big blues recording stars in the mid–1930s, and whose vocal styles he imitated on most of his records. (For example, the ooh-well-well falsetto yodel he often used was imitated from Wheatstraw and Weldon.) These singers tended to have higher, smoother voices than House—exactly the sound that Johnson seems to have been going for, and that the House fans dislike. So their whole argument is based on the fact that they prefer the older Delta sound to the mainstream popular blues sound of the 1930s—or, to put it differently, that their tastes are different from Johnson’s own tastes at the moment he was recording. (Wald, "Robert Johnson") Few media can capture an audible moment entirely accurately, and the idea of engineering a faithful reproduction of an original performance is also only one element of the rationale for any recording. Commercial engineers often aim to represent the emotion of a musical moment, rather than its totality. John and Alan Lomax may have worked as documentarians, preserving sound as faithfully as possible for the benefit of future generations on behalf of the Library of Congress. Law and Liebler, however, were producing exciting and profitable commercial products for a financial gain. Paradoxically, then, whatever the “real” Robert Johnson sounded like (deeper voice, no mesmeric falsetto, not such an extraordinarily adept guitar player, never met the Devil … and so on) the mythical figure who “sold his soul at the crossroads” and shipped millions of albums after his death may, on that basis, be equally as authentic as the original. Schroeder draws on Mikhail Bakhtin to comment on such vacant yet hotly contested spaces around the Johnson myth. For Bakhtin, literary texts are ascribed new meanings by consecutive generations as they absorb and respond to them. Every age re–accentuates in its own way the works of its most immediate past. The historical life of classic works is in fact the uninterrupted process of their social and ideological re–accentuation [of] ever newer aspects of meaning; their semantic content literally continues to grow, to further create out of itself. (421) In this respect Johnson’s legend is a “classic work”, entirely removed from its historical life, a free floating form re-contextualised and reinterpreted by successive generations in order to make sense of their own cultural predilections (Schroeder 57). As Graves observes, “since Robert Johnson’s death there has seemed to be a mathematical equation of sorts at play: the less truth we have, the more myth we get” (113). The threads connecting his real and mythical identity seem so comprehensively intertwined that only the most assiduous scholars are capable of disentanglement. Johnson’s life and work seem destined to remain augmented and contested for as long as people want to play guitar, and others want to listen to them. Notes[1] Actually the dominant theme of Johnson’s songs is not “the supernatural” it is his inveterate womanising. Almost all Johnson’s lyrics employ creative metaphors to depict troubled relationships. Some even include vivid images of domestic abuse. In “Stop Breakin’ Down Blues” a woman threatens him with a gun. In “32–20 Blues” he discusses the most effective calibre of weapon to shoot his partner and “cut her half in two.” In “Me and the Devil Blues” Johnson promises “to beat my woman until I get satisfied”. However in The Lady and Mrs Johnson five-time W. C. Handy award winner Rory Block re-wrote these words to befit her own cultural agenda, inverting the original sentiment as: “I got to love my baby ‘til I get satisfied”.[2] The Gibson L-1 guitar featured in Johnson’s Hooks Bros. portrait briefly became another contested artefact when it appeared in the catalogue of a New York State memorabilia dealership in 2006 with an asking price of $6,000,000. The Australian owner had apparently purchased the instrument forty years earlier under the impression it was bona fide, although photographic comparison technology showed that it couldn’t be genuine and the item was withdrawn. “Had it been real, I would have been able to sell it several times over,” Gary Zimet from MIT Memorabilia told me in an interview for Guitarist Magazine at the time, “a unique item like that will only ever increase in value” (Stewart 2010). References Ainslie, Scott, and Dave Whitehall. Robert Johnson: At the Crossroads – The Authoritative Guitar Transcriptions. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Publishing, 1992. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Banks, Russell. “The Devil and Robert Johnson – Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings.” The New Republic 204.17 (1991): 27-30. Banninghof, James. “Some Ramblings on Robert Johnson’s Mind: Critical Analysis and Aesthetic in Delta Blues.” American Music 15/2 (1997): 137-158. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London: Penguin, 2008. Blackthorne, Angus. “Robert Johnson Slowed Down.” YouTube.com 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/user/ANGUSBLACKTHORN?feature=watch›. Blesh, Rudi. Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1946. Blischke, Michael. “Slowing Down Robert Johnson.” The Straight Dope 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=461601›. Block, Rory. The Lady and Mrs Johnson. Rykodisc 10872, 2006. Charters, Samuel. The Country Blues. New York: De Capo Press, 1959. Collins UK. Collins English Dictionary. Glasgow: Harper Collins Publishers, 2010. DiGiacomo, Frank. “A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/10/a-disputed-robert-johnson-photo-gets-the-csi-treatment›. DiGiacomo, Frank. “Portrait of a Phantom: Searching for Robert Johnson.” Vanity Fair 2008. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/11/johnson200811›. Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol 1. London: Simon & Schuster, 2005. Evans, David. Tommy Johnson. London: November Books, 1971. Ford, Charles. “Robert Johnson’s Rhythms.” Popular Music 17.1 (1998): 71-93. Freeland, Tom. “Robert Johnson: Some Witnesses to a Short Life.” Living Blues 150 (2000): 43-49. Gibbens, John. “Steady Rollin’ Man: A Revolutionary Critique of Robert Johnson.” Touched 2004. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.touched.co.uk/press/rjnote.html›. Gioia, Ted. Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionised American Music. London: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008. Gioia, Ted. "Robert Johnson: A Century, and Beyond." Robert Johnson: The Centennial Collection. Sony Music 88697859072, 2011. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. London: Pimlico Books, 2002. Graves, Tom. Crossroads: The Life and Afterlife of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. Spokane: Demers Books, 2008. Guralnick, Peter. Searching for Robert Johnson: The Life and Legend of the "King of the Delta Blues Singers". London: Plume, 1998. Hamilton, Marybeth. In Search of the Blues: Black Voices, White Visions. London: Jonathan Cape, 2007. Hammond, John. From Spirituals to Swing (Dedicated to Bessie Smith). New York: The New Masses, 1938. Johnson, Robert. “Hellbound.” Amazon.co.uk 2011. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hellbound/dp/B0063S8Y4C/ref=sr_1_cc_2?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376605065&sr=1-2-catcorr&keywords=robert+johnson+hellbound›. ———. “Contracted to the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2002. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Contracted-The-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00006F1L4/ref=sr_1_cc_1?s=aps&ie=UTF8&qid=1376830351&sr=1-1-catcorr&keywords=Contracted+to+The+Devil›. ———. King of the Delta Blues Singers. Columbia Records CL1654, 1961. ———. “Me and the Devil Blues.” Amazon.co.uk 2003. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Me-Devil-Blues-Robert-Johnson/dp/B00008SH7O/ref=sr_1_16?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604807&sr=1-16&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “The High Price of Soul.” Amazon.co.uk 2007. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/High-Price-Soul-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000LC582C/ref=sr_1_39?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376604863&sr=1-39&keywords=robert+johnson›. ———. “Up Jumped the Devil.” Amazon.co.uk 2005. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.amazon.co.uk/Up-Jumped-Devil-Robert-Johnson/dp/B000B57SL8/ref=sr_1_2?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1376829917&sr=1-2&keywords=Up+Jumped+The+Devil›. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music. London: Plume, 1997. Morris, Christopher. “Phonograph Blues: Robert Johnson Mastered at Wrong Speed?” Variety 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.varietysoundcheck.com/2010/05/phonograph-blues-robert-johnson-mastered-at-wrong-speed.html›. Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou? DVD. Universal Pictures, 2000. Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues: A Musical and Cultural History from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago’s South Side to the World. London: Penguin Books, 1981. Pearson, Barry Lee, and Bill McCulloch. Robert Johnson: Lost and Found. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. Prial, Dunstan. The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “For–the–Record Aesthetics and Robert Johnson’s Blues Style as a Product of Recorded Culture.” Popular Music 26.1 (2007): 65-81. Rothenbuhler, Eric W. “Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 24.3 (2007): 189-205. Schroeder, Patricia. Robert Johnson, Mythmaking and Contemporary American Culture (Music in American Life). Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Segalstad, Eric, and Josh Hunter. The 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009. Stewart, Jon. “Rock Climbing: Jon Stewart Concludes His Investigation of the Myths behind Robert Johnson.” Guitarist Magazine 327 (2010): 34. The Search for Robert Johnson. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1991. Talley, Ron. “Robert Johnson, 'Sweet Home Chicago', as It REALLY Sounded...” YouTube.com 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCHod3_yEWQ›. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. London: HarperCollins, 2005. ———. The Robert Johnson Speed Recording Controversy. Elijah Wald — Writer, Musician 2012. 1 Aug. 2013. ‹http://www.elijahwald.com/johnsonspeed.html›. Wilde, John . “Robert Johnson Revelation Tells Us to Put the Brakes on the Blues: We've Been Listening to the Immortal 'King of the Delta Blues' at the Wrong Speed, But Now We Can Hear Him as He Intended.” The Guardian 2010. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/may/27/robert-johnson-blues›. Wolkewitz, M., A. Allignol, N. Graves, and A.G. Barnett. “Is 27 Really a Dangerous Age for Famous Musicians? Retrospective Cohort Study.” British Medical Journal 343 (2011): d7799. 1 Aug. 2013 ‹http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d7799›.

Figure 1: Peng Liu, Body Techniques. Photograph. (2014).As an academic researcher as well as practicing artist, I am interested in my bodily movement/techniques in the actions of painting which inevitably reflects the institutions enacted upon my body as representation of Chinese culture/society, and also highlight my individual practice as an artist in response to the world. According to Shilling (10-12), Turner (197), Douglas (68-78) and Mauss (75), the body is historically inherited and culturally embodied. My bodily experience of wandering in the space of the Forbidden City is mediated by its historical and cultural formations, as Turner notes that human beings “are simultaneously part of nature and part of culture […] and culture shapes and mediates nature…nature constitutes a limit in human agency” (197). Specifically, my body is affected by the concept of grand unification which is reflected in its actions and reactions. It is interested in the Confucian conditions of the limits to what is possible in the techniques of painting and how the techniques of painting rely upon and resist the grand unification promised by Confucian thought. Every action, as Douglas notes, “always sustaining a particular set of cultural meanings, a particular social order” (68).The concept of grand unification is apparent in the space of the Forbidden City in that the design of every courtyard is in hierarchical relation to each other, not only physically connected and distinguished through hidden doorways, corridors, and verandas, but also the styles and plants suggesting their coherency within/to the city as the head of the hierarchical society. My body responds to the architectural space in certain ways whereby visual perception and tactile experience of touching surfaces of wooden columns, cornerstones, and fallen roof tiles consolidate the interactions of my body with the space under the concept, as my body is forming its techniques to approach corners and details.The Forbidden City represents a dynamic fusion or hybrid setting. It is an eastern historical and cultural precinct as much as a symbol of western economic and technological exchange. Because of its particularity as the continued power centre of the nation, the Forbidden City becomes a material form of memory, like a portal to access the past. As much as immaterial form, the Forbidden City generates viewers’ affective and intuitive responses allowing the viewers to imagine ancient time and space even though they are physically in present time and space.My everyday bodily actions, embodied with historical thought and culture means as being a “cultural men” (Merleau-Ponty 7), or a cultural meme, may obtain rich sensations and experience through multiple senses in the space of the Forbidden City; however the everyday body and its actions may inadequate in expressing the bodily experience in studio. While Merleau-Ponty describes the relationship between lived object and post-impressionist painter: “The lived object (in nature) is not rediscovered or constructed on the basis of the contributions of the (human) senses; rather, it presents itself to us from the start” (5), his words imply the actions of expression in painting may require different techniques from everyday life. And Frenhofer notes the role of hand as bodily technique in studio: “A hand is not simply part of the body (in everyday perspective), but the expression and continuation of a thought which must be captured and conveyed” (Frenhofer cited in Merleau-Ponty 7), and result in brushstrokes.Apart from being social and cultural, therefore, my everyday habitual actions are re-thought and expanded to form a new series of bodily techniques in studio in order to express my bodily experience in the space. Body techniques in studio are not only cultural embodied as representation of social contexts, but also artistic – being individual in response to the world.And paint (painting) is the documentation of my body movement/techniques in studio space, as James Elkins notes: “Paint is a cast made of the painter’s movements, a portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts […] (it) records the most delicate gesture and the most tense (tensest) […] (and) tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas” (5). Each brushstroke reflects particular bodily techniques formed in studio which is the combination of both cultural embodiment and artistic expression that would barely appeared in everyday life.As a practicing artist who was trained under the influence of the concept of the grand unification, I was taught to paint relationships on canvas as one of many ways to handle the medium. Every colours and brushstrokes, painted in terms of tones, perspectives, and size of brushstrokes build the relationships in between in order to construct a coherent system which balances positive and negative shapes. There is no such “right or wrong” colour/brushstrokes. There are only appropriate or inappropriate colour/brushstrokes. The dynamics of the painting is reshuffled with every colour/brushstrokes painted on canvas at a time. Painting is a process of constant balancing. As Bernard said, “each stroke must ‘contain the air, the light, the object, the composition, the character, the outline, and the style.’ Expressing what exists is an endless task” (Bernard cited in Maurice Merleau-Ponty 5). And the task of expressing on canvas is not the showcase of our visual ability in capture shapes and colours from nature or memories, but is to see how my next brushstroke interacts with the existing marks on canvas. The photos taken in the space, may help to recall memories at first place, would have little to do with the actions to painting in studio as soon as the first brushstroke is laid.The Concept of Grand Unification in Everyday Embodied Body Movement and My Body Techniques in Studio SpaceThe concept of grand unification is understood as Dao, which originated from Laozi founder of Daoism and has variable interpretations one of which appeared as communality in some English translations. The grand unification was advocated by major ancient philosophies such as: Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and in processes like Legalism, in China to reflect the philosophers’ understanding about the world. For example, Confucius points out: “天下有道，则礼乐征伐自天子出” (“if the nation is unified under one centre, the nation is in good shape”). This implication of the concept of grand unification in politics encouraged centralization, which is fulfilling god’s will according to Daoism.Liu Che, the Wu emperor in Han dynasty, adopted Dong Zhongshu’s suggestion in Interactions between Heaven and Mankind, to “罢黜百家，独尊儒术” (“venerate Confucianism, meanwhile, ban the rest of philosophies and ideologies inherited from the Warring state period”). This political move established Confucianism as the only official ideology in China, which applied the grand unification in cultural/ideological perspective.The idea of the grand unification is interpreted and embedded in daily life, forming a set of body techniques in relation to the hierarchical society, for example, the mid-autumn festival which is one of the two most important festivals in China. By using the astronomical phenomena of the full moon as both a symbol and a metaphor, moon in full, represent the nation in unification as well as a family reunion.In terms of Confucian values, every common person should reunite with their family to celebrate the festival by having a family feast. The feast not only gathers the family, but also suggests the nation which is seen as a big family that shall be unified too, for example many poems from the Tang and Song Dynasty are themed on the full moon to express their nostalgia as well as the wish of a unified nation. Such as poet Li Bai wrote in Tang dynasty: “举头望明月，低头思故乡” (“I raised my head and looked out on the mountain moon; I bowed my head and thought of my far-off home”). Moon cake is one of the festival foods made in the shape of full moon as a symbol of perfection in family reunion.Even for those people who do trading far away from home all year round, they must make their way back home in time for the family feast to celebrate and express their filial piety, which is one of essentials in Confucianism. The very first evidence of body technique occurs when the family members literally step across the doorsill back from business trip when they greet parents straight way in the principal room. A well educated person under the value of Confucianism would salute his parents with formal/full ketou in expressing filial piety. This form of address was considered “rituals of abject servitude” (181) by James L. Hevia. There were nine types of ketou which, as body techniques, were applied in everyday life and highlighted the hierarchical society orientated by the centralization.The actions of ketou involve everyone’s physical participation and cultural engagement with the idea of centralization so that the philosophical content of the idea behind the phenomenon is inscribed into common bodies. The everyday accumulated bodily memories and experience of participating in the idea drives the bodies to behave accordingly and technically and impacts upon the bodies to reinforce the ideology over and over again. The concept of grand unification is widely accepted and implemented in the nation as cultural reference, which discipline every body into a fixed role in the hierarchical society, as Michel Foucault describes culture “a hierarchical organization of values, accessible to everybody, (and) at the same time the occasion of a mechanism of selection and exclusion” (173). The senses of grand unification in the hierarchical society became a part of the national identity in centuries, not only as abstract concept but also as concrete culture embodiment in every action of everybody on daily base.With such cultural means inherited, my bodily movement in action to painting dedicatedly place and adjust every brushstroke in relation to the existing marks in order to construct a collective and systematic world. My brushstrokes, as James Elkins notes, are “the evidence of the artist’s manual devotion to his image” (3) which provide the balance between the sense of stability created by the composition and the sense of infinite possibilities created by the subtlety of the colour. (Figure 2) There is neither strong contrast in using colours, nor sharp edges painted, as the air I painted not only has softened every object, but also has integrated every object into the holistic atmosphere. The world is “a mass without gaps” (Merleau-Ponty 5) and the ultimate purpose of grand unification underneath its hierarchical structure is in ever pursuit of a virtuous circle – a mystical interpretation and expectation about the world in order in terms of Chinese ancient philosophy. The scene of painting “is not just one of my visual perceptions recalled from memory but a bodily experience as participant in the scene” (Liu 25) and my cultural embodiment which are expressed and translated through body techniques into the language of painting in studio. The constantly moving body perceives the colour of the space as infinite, and it seems as though the space itself vibrates. Figure 2: Peng Liu, The Forbidden City Study Series Two. Oil on canvas, 100cm x 170cm. Photo: Peng Liu (2010).While I physically explores and forms my very own techniques (as the language of painting), the intention on applying certain body techniques to ensure the painters’ understanding and to create an appropriate artwork is historical inherited. For example, in early tenth century, Jing Hao firstly theorized types of brushstrokes, called 笔法记 (The Theory of Brushstrokes in Chinese Landscape Painting), for depicting different objects accordingly. The theorized brushstrokes specify particular bodily movements for depicting certain objects, such as the fingers in variable ways of holding Chinese brushes and the pressure of hand’s strength put into each brushstroke. The theorized bodily movements/techniques would create sufficient communication and establish a hierarchical relation in between depicted objects, which translate the painter’s cultural understanding of the grand unification into the expression of Chinese landscape painting.Certainly, the sense of grand unification in Chinese landscape painting can be achieved in many methods and different techniques according to each individual artist. For instance, Guo Xi’s painting techniques, called “the angle of totality” or “floating perspective” which displaces the static eye of viewers by producing multiple perspectives in two-dimensional scroll painting, as his artistic interpretation of the sense of grand unification. (Figure 3) Guo, cited in R. M. Barnhart (372), describes the objects relation realized in his techniques: “山以水为血脉，以草木为毛发，以烟云为神采，故山得水而活 […] 水得山而媚” (“Mountain and water come alive through the mutual endorsement on each other. Water makes mountain vibrant; and mountain makes water vigorous”).Figure 3: Guo Xi. Early Spring. Hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk. 158.3 x 108.1. National Palace Museum, Taipei. (1072). And Guo's paper “Mountains and Waters”, cited in Grousset, notes: “The clouds and the vapours of real landscapes are not the same at the four seasons. In spring they are light and diffused, in summer rich and dense, in autumn scattered and thin, and in winter dark and solitary. When such effects can be seen in pictures, the clouds and vapours have an air of life” (195). Every lived object become full of vigour by the interaction with other lived object depicted together to create a sense of coherence as whole. The vibrant communications between depicted objects reinforce the aliveness of individuals within the atmosphere of the painting. The virtuous circle appears. Moreover, his painting express double meanings that not only eulogize the dynamic scene created by the relationship between every depicted object, but also imply the concept of grand unification that every object is supposed to play their own part, to be appropriate in the centralized atmosphere.Under the influence of the concept and with the awareness of body techniques in terms of Chinese painting, my body has brought its cultural habits into the studio while interrogate its own process of translation of the bodily experience into the language of painting through bodily movement. In particular, by depicting in paint the colour of the light, temperature, and atmosphere of spaces that are shaped by buildings, and how bodies interact with these affects, it is like unfolding communications on the canvas about what happens between my body and the space of the Forbidden City. My body, when making paintings, then, becomes a vehicle for expressing my remembered bodily responses to the resonances of the space. And through the compositional construction of the image, I am, or my body is able to find the best combination between colours, lines and forms to interpret those experiences/stories all under the unified voice. In the process of translating, from idea to object, the movement/techniques of my body help me to revive those bodily experiences from the space of the Forbidden City. During the constant movement of my arm and my hand, holding the brushes, I look for the best moment to leave a brushstroke on the canvas in the most appropriate angle. Every move of my body along with every colour left on the canvas is the representation of the ideology that my cultural embodied body from history creates the painting.The movement of my physical body in studio enacts my cultural body in the sense of provoking memories of the inscribed experience and embodied knowledge from the space of the Forbidden City to colonize the studio. The dynamics of the studio assimilate into the space of the Forbidden City, not through some display objects such as printed photos taken in the space, but through my body’s physical and cultural presence in actions to painting. Apart from interacting with brushstrokes, the bodily movement also involve the rest of the studio into actions, such as wall, lights, tables, palette, little things placed behind easels, and the air around my bodies which are inevitably caught in my sight as background while travelling between canvas and palette. The bodily actions in studio, as Merleau-Ponty notes, “is a process of expression […] to grasp the nature of what appears to us in a confused way and to place it (on canvas) before us as a recognizable object” (6). Such bodily movement and techniques housed within, which may be differentiated from everyday actions, are culturally embodied and individual artistic. Therefore, as result of it, the painting, as a technique, becomes a post-colonial, which indicates the embodied knowledge and experience colonized in, as a material form of memory at the same time as an immaterial form to generate viewers’ affective and intuitive responses by allowing the viewers to imagine.To continually consider the painting as the techniques of my bodily movement in studio, the rhythm of my painting (constructed by composition, colour, and brush marks) is connected with my variable perceptions sensed in the space, reflecting my bodily experience, and affecting my viewers through its pictorial depiction. My use of colour is subtle, vivid and individualized, as the original colours of the buildings merely serves as a reference point. (Figure 4) Specifically, the colours shown in my paintings display a collection of colours that my body perceives while moving in the space at a particular time; rather than the actual colour of the paint on the building itself perceived through a fixed geometric or photographic perspective. This is called “the lived perspective” (Cezanne cited in Merleau-Ponty 4), emphasising on expressing the colours perceived by my body constantly changing in subtle ways with every step my body taken in the space over a period of time. And “this visual rhythm is the translation of my bodily experience in the space, not only representing a still scene at a specific moment, but also visualizing a set of body movements/techniques accumulated in the space over a period of time” (Liu 25-26); as well as in studio.Figure 4: Peng Liu. The Forbidden City Study Series Three. Oil on canvas. 170cm x 300cm. Photo: Peng Liu (2013).ConclusionAcknowledging my body is historically inherited and culturally embodied as the result of participating in different societies and my bodily experience is perceived “through the mediation of cultural categories” (Douglas 68); “it is certain that a person’s life does not explain his (art) work” (Merleau-Ponty 8). My body techniques in dealing with everyday society are re-thought and expanded in studio space, which highlight my bodily movement not only representing my body as cultural embodied being, but also exposing my individual as an artist in response to the world.ReferencesBarnhart, R.M., et al. Three Thousand Years of Chinese Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.Confucius. The Analects of Confucius. Trans. P, Liu. No. 16. Written 770-476BC.Dong, Zhongshu. 天人策 [Interactions between Heaven and Mankind]. Written 179-104BC.Douglas, Mary. “The Two Bodies.” The Body: A Reader. Edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, New York: Routledge, 2005. 68-78.Elkins, James. What Painting Is. New York: Routledge, 1998. 3-5.Foucault, Michel. L'hermeneutique du sujet: Cours au Collège de France, 1981-1982. Paris: Gallimard Seuil, 2001.Grousset, Rene. The Rise and Splendour of the Chinese Empire. Barnes & Noble Inc, 1995.Guo, Xi. 林泉高致集 – 山水训 [Chinese Landscape]. 1020-1090AD.Hevia, James L. “Sovereignty and Subject: Constituting Relations of Power in Qing Guest Ritual.” Body, Subject & Power in China. Eds. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.Jing, Hao. 笔法记 [The Theory of Brushstrokes in Chinese Landscape Painting]. Written 923-936AD.Li, Bai. 静夜思 [On a Quiet Night]. Trans. S. Obata.Liu, Peng. “The Impact of Space upon the Body in the Forbidden City: From the Perspective of Art.” Body Tensions: Beyond Corporeality in Time and Space. UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014. 22-34.Mauss, Marcel. “Techniques of the Body.” The Body: A Reader. Edited by Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, New York: Routledge, 2005.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cezanne’s Doubt.” Sense and Non-Sense. Trans. Hubert and Patricia Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 9-25.Shilling, Chris. The Body and Social Theory. London: SAGE Publication, 1993. 10-12.Turner, Bryan S. The Body & Society Second Edition. London: SAGE Publication, 1996.


 
 
 At least as far back as classical Greek times, humankind has speculated over the complexities of creativity as a concept and the modes of its transmission (Madden 133-134). This paper considers what happens when our inherited conceptions of creativity collide with the World Wide Web. It concludes with a brief survey of the Creativity Resource Portal, a current on-line project managed by the authors and related to the conceptual issues raised in the body of the text. 
 
 Today, creativity has moved beyond its traditional home in the rhetoric of the philosopher and the exploits of the artist to form an integral part of both the theory and practice of a myriad of disciplines. Health professionals (Dossey; Kirklin & Meakin; Meites, Bein & Shafer; Rees; Satalof), scientists (Bohn 1-3, 13-15; Culross), educators (Guilford; Sawyer; Sternberg & Williams; Wilks) and those involved in the corporate world (Forbes & Domm; Mauzy & Harriman; Robinson & Stern) all consider creativity to be a fundamental criterion by which they measure and achieve their successes. 
 
 In this way, however, creativity has become something of an over-burdened signifier. Now the market is flooded with highly idealised and ever expanding models for understanding and transmitting creativity, in which the medium (transmission) strives to outdo the message (creativity itself). We are not attempting here to arbitrate between these various models with a view to providing a rank order of creativity. Instead, we want to focus on and explore the ways in which recent technological developments, primarily the internet, have been, and might be, used to transmit and facilitate new directions and expressions of creativity and the creative process itself. 
 
 Although the internet has no single inventor or birth date, its origins lie in the communication system devised by the RAND corporation in the 1960s: a system designed to survive a nuclear war because it had no central point of control. To this extent, one could say that its initial egalitarianism tips towards the expression of creativity. From here, the internet evolved through various mutations, such as APRANET and Bulletin Boards, to become the World Wide Web that emerged in the 1990s. Since then, the internet has encroached further and further into our everyday lives: we buy and sell goods at sites like Amazon or E-bay, we communicate to the world via email accounts at Hotmail or Yahoo, we court potential partners at Lavalife or Okcupid, and we engage in scholarly debates on sites such as M/C – Media and Culture. The point here is that the sheer ubiquity of the internet has brought about a quiet revolution in our everyday modes of creativity. Web navigation, for example, is heavily dependent on the creativity of the user to move through virtual space, even or perhaps especially when he/she must counter the ‘point and click’ inducements of advertising and marketing strategies. 
 
 Little wonder then that the emergence of creativity as a fundamental tenet for success across a wide array of disciplines, coupled with the pervasiveness of cyberspace, has led to an explosion of both the production and transmission of creativity on-line. One such development is the transmission and dissemination of already created products via the web: that is, products hijacked from the ‘real’. In its most controversial and publicized form, the creative output of musicians has become tender for trade between individuals who subscribe to programs such as Napster and Limewire. Beyond this, the internet extends ever outwards in a panoply of both solicited and pirated images and video clips of people’s creative output. Here the internet seems to move beyond the liberating potential that Benjamin saw in technology’s ability to reproduce the image (Benjamin) towards the simulacra (or hyper-real copies of the ‘real’) proposed by Baudrillard (Baudrillard). 
 
 On-line creativity has not, however, been limited to the reproduction of artistic output that exists in the ‘real’. As with any practice fundamental to the expression of the human condition, creativity has found new and exciting ways to express itself on-line. For example, digital art has emerged as a serious artistic pursuit since the late 20th century. Here, a number of artists have fused their creative ability and their technological skills to generate new ways in which their creativity can be transmitted. A cyber-poet may meld both the classical poetic forms of stanza and rhyme with the language of HTML or Java to create a cyber-poem (see the work of Komninos Zervos). Visual artists such as Han Hoogerbrugge have also been able to successfully adapt their works to the digital world: Hooderbrugge converted a comic strip he wrote in the mid-1990s to a series of digital animations. As well as this, new on-line formats such as blogs have been used by a number of artists to express their creativity in new and interesting ways (see the work of Olia Lialina). Other artists have dived even further into the simulacra, preferring the aesthetic value of the code itself over the presence of images or words that might signify something in the ‘real’ (see this work by Jason Nelson). Unlike traditional art forms, these emerging digital art forms are intensively interactive and thereby encourage the creativity of their audience. By allowing the artistic product itself to be manipulated, digital artists facilitate new ways of ‘reading’ art.
 
 It is tempting then to offer the internet up as something of a creative utopia – an Aladdin’s Cave – a place where creativity, in all its manifestations, can be transmitted to the masses. However, in the final chapter of her book The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Margaret Wertheim discusses the notion of a ‘cyber-utopia’ and asks “Who is this cyber-utopia really going to be for?” (Wertheim 295). She goes on to point out that not only do the majority of the world’s inhabitants not have access to the internet, but that out of those who do, many are discriminated against in the virtual world because of their gender, their sexuality, their skin colour or their ethnicity. (Of course, this does not necessarily make online space any less democratic than traditional technologies such as print forms). 
 
 More recently, Lawrence Lessig has taken Wertheim’s questioning of cyber-utopia to its logical dystopian antithesis in his book Free Culture. Here, Lessig agues that the internet has had a direct impact on the way that culture is made. Specifically, the control that major media conglomerates and governments have over the internet has meant that “the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before” (Lessig 8). Have we therefore clicked open a Pandora’s Box through our incessant attempts to get wired? 
 
 All technologies are open to abuse. Cyberspace is neither Aladdin’s Cave nor Pandora’s Box but simply a work in progress. And it is on this basis that we are currently creating an online Creativity Resource Portal. This portal does not attempt to resolve immediately the many debates over the nature and transmission of creativity, nor does it set out to completely resolve the quandaries raised by creativity’s cyber manifestations. Instead, it aims, at least initially, to disseminate a broad range of knowledge about creativity – thus encouraging inter-fertilization across disciplines and practices – and also to act as a catalyst for currently unrecognized ways of creating and expressing creativity in the online world. 
 
 That being said, we hope that future refined manifestations of the site will possess the characteristics of a ‘laboratory’, in which the serious issues of creative freedom and control outlined in this paper – issues of transmission in the broadest sense – might be more directly engaged with. It is through this direct virtual engagement that we hope to reach conclusions capable of extending outwards to the wider, global online environment. This might happen via experiments with new types of non-hierarchical site structures, or with the level of control given to visitors over what happens in the site. But can any structures resist the exercise of power? Can egalitarianism (cyber or otherwise) ever fully eschew borders and margins? These are the questions that challenge and excite us as managers of the CRP. 
 
 References
 
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In Ireland today, we eat more pigmeat per capita, approximately 32.4 kilograms, than any other meat, yet you very seldom if ever see a pig (C.S.O.). Fat and flavour are two words that are synonymous with pig meat, yet scientists have spent the last thirty years cross breeding to produce leaner, low-fat pigs. Today’s pig professionals prefer to use the term “pig finishing” as opposed to the more traditional “pig fattening” (Tuite). The pig evokes many themes in relation to cuisine. Charles Lamb (1775-1834), in his essay Dissertation upon Roast Pig, cites Confucius in attributing the accidental discovery of the art of roasting to the humble pig. The pig has been singled out by many cultures as a food to be avoided or even abhorred, and Harris (1997) illustrates the environmental effect this avoidance can have by contrasting the landscape of Christian Albania with that of Muslim Albania.This paper will focus on the pig in Irish cuisine and culture from ancient times to the present day. The inspiration for this paper comes from a folklore tale about how Saint Martin created the pig from a piece of fat. The story is one of a number recorded by Seán Ó Conaill, the famous Kerry storyteller and goes as follows:From St Martin’s fat they were made. He was travelling around, and one night he came to a house and yard. At that time there were only cattle; there were no pigs or piglets. He asked the man of the house if there was anything to eat the chaff and the grain. The man replied there were only the cattle. St Martin said it was a great pity to have that much chaff going to waste. At night when they were going to bed, he handed a piece of fat to the servant-girl and told her to put it under a tub, and not to look at it at all until he would give her the word next day. The girl did so, but she kept a bit of the fat and put it under a keeler to find out what it would be.When St Martin rose next day he asked her to go and lift up the tub. She lifted it up, and there under it were a sow and twelve piglets. It was a great wonder to them, as they had never before seen pig or piglet.The girl then went to the keeler and lifted it, and it was full of mice and rats! As soon as the keeler was lifted, they went running about the house searching for any hole that they could go into. When St Martin saw them, he pulled off one of his mittens and threw it at them and made a cat with that throw. And that is why the cat ever since goes after mice and rats (Ó Conaill).The place of the pig has long been established in Irish literature, and longer still in Irish topography. The word torc, a boar, like the word muc, a pig, is a common element of placenames, from Kanturk (boar’s head) in West Cork to Ros Muc (headland of pigs) in West Galway. The Irish pig had its place in literature well established long before George Orwell’s English pig, Major, headed the dictatorship in Animal Farm. It was a wild boar that killed the hero Diarmaid in the Fenian tale The Pursuit of Diarmaid and Gráinne, on top of Ben Bulben in County Sligo (Mac Con Iomaire). In Ancient and Medieval Ireland, wild boars were hunted with great fervour, and the prime cuts were reserved for the warrior classes, and certain other individuals. At a feast, a leg of pork was traditionally reserved for a king, a haunch for a queen, and a boar’s head for a charioteer. The champion warrior was given the best portion of meat (Curath Mhir or Champions’ Share), and fights often took place to decide who should receive it. Gantz (1981) describes how in the ninth century tale The story of Mac Dathó’s Pig, Cet mac Matach, got supremacy over the men of Ireland: “Moreover he flaunted his valour on high above the valour of the host, and took a knife in his hand and sat down beside the pig. “Let someone be found now among the men of Ireland”, said he, “to endure battle with me, or leave the pig for me to divide!”It did not take long before the wild pigs were domesticated. Whereas cattle might be kept for milk and sheep for wool, the only reason for pig rearing was as a source of food. Until the late medieval period, the “domesticated” pigs were fattened on woodland mast, the fruit of the beech, oak, chestnut and whitethorn, giving their flesh a delicious flavour. So important was this resource that it is acknowledged by an entry in the Annals of Clonmacnoise for the year 1038: “There was such an abundance of ackornes this yeare that it fattened the pigges [runts] of pigges” (Sexton 45). In another mythological tale, two pig keepers, one called ‘friuch’ after the boars bristle (pig keeper to the king of Munster) and the other called ‘rucht’ after its grunt (pig keeper to the king of Connacht), were such good friends that the one from the north would bring his pigs south when there was a mast of oak and beech nuts in Munster. If the mast fell in Connacht, the pig-keeper from the south would travel northward. Competitive jealousy sparked by troublemakers led to the pig keepers casting spells on each other’s herds to the effect that no matter what mast they ate they would not grow fat. Both pig keepers were practised in the pagan arts and could form themselves into any shape, and having been dismissed by their kings for the leanness of their pig herds due to the spells, they eventually formed themselves into the two famous bulls that feature in the Irish Epic The Táin (Kinsella).In the witty and satirical twelfth century text, The Vision of Mac Conglinne (Aisling Mhic Conglinne), many references are made to the various types of pig meat. Bacon, hams, sausages and puddings are often mentioned, and the gate to the fortress in the visionary land of plenty is described thus: “there was a gate of tallow to it, whereon was a bolt of sausage” (Jackson).Although pigs were always popular in Ireland, the emergence of the potato resulted in an increase in both human and pig populations. The Irish were the first Europeans to seriously consider the potato as a staple food. By 1663 it was widely accepted in Ireland as an important food plant and by 1770 it was known as the Irish Potato (Mac Con Iomaire and Gallagher). The potato transformed Ireland from an under populated island of one million in the 1590s to 8.2 million in 1840, making it the most densely populated country in Europe. Two centuries of genetic evolution resulted in potato yields growing from two tons per acre in 1670 to ten tons per acre in 1800. A constant supply of potato, which was not seen as a commercial crop, ensured that even the smallest holding could keep a few pigs on a potato-rich diet. Pat Tuite, an expert on pigs with Teagasc, the Irish Agricultural and Food Development Authority, reminded me that the potatoes were cooked for the pigs and that they also enjoyed whey, the by product of both butter and cheese making (Tuite). The agronomist, Arthur Young, while travelling through Ireland, commented in 1770 that in the town of Mitchelstown in County Cork “there seemed to be more pigs than human beings”. So plentiful were pigs at this time that on the eve of the Great Famine in 1841 the pig population was calculated to be 1,412,813 (Sexton 46). Some of the pigs were kept for home consumption but the rest were a valuable source of income and were shown great respect as the gentleman who paid the rent. Until the early twentieth century most Irish rural households kept some pigs.Pork was popular and was the main meat eaten at all feasts in the main houses; indeed a feast was considered incomplete without a whole roasted pig. In the poorer holdings, fresh pork was highly prized, as it was only available when a pig of their own was killed. Most of the pig was salted, placed in the brine barrel for a period or placed up the chimney for smoking.Certain superstitions were observed concerning the time of killing. Pigs were traditionally killed only in months that contained the letter “r”, since the heat of the summer months caused the meat to turn foul. In some counties it was believed that pigs should be killed under the full moon (Mahon 58). The main breed of pig from the medieval period was the Razor Back or Greyhound Pig, which was very efficient in converting organic waste into meat (Fitzgerald). The killing of the pig was an important ritual and a social occasion in rural Ireland, for it meant full and plenty for all. Neighbours, who came to help, brought a handful of salt for the curing, and when the work was done each would get a share of the puddings and the fresh pork. There were a number of days where it was traditional to kill a pig, the Michaelmas feast (29 September), Saint Martins Day (11 November) and St Patrick’s Day (17 March). Olive Sharkey gives a vivid description of the killing of the barrow pig in rural Ireland during the 1930s. A barrow pig is a male pig castrated before puberty:The local slaughterer (búistéir) a man experienced in the rustic art of pig killing, was approached to do the job, though some farmers killed their own pigs. When the búistéirarrived the whole family gathered round to watch the killing. His first job was to plunge the knife in the pig’s heart via the throat, using a special knife. The screeching during this performance was something awful, but the animal died instantly once the heart had been reached, usually to a round of applause from the onlookers. The animal was then draped across a pig-gib, a sort of bench, and had the fine hairs on its body scraped off. To make this a simple job the animal was immersed in hot water a number of times until the bristles were softened and easy to remove. If a few bristles were accidentally missed the bacon was known as ‘hairy bacon’!During the killing of the pig it was imperative to draw a good flow of blood to ensure good quality meat. This blood was collected in a bucket for the making of puddings. The carcass would then be hung from a hook in the shed with a basin under its head to catch the drip, and a potato was often placed in the pig’s mouth to aid the dripping process. After a few days the carcass would be dissected. Sharkey recalls that her father maintained that each pound weight in the pig’s head corresponded to a stone weight in the body. The body was washed and then each piece that was to be preserved was carefully salted and placed neatly in a barrel and hermetically sealed. It was customary in parts of the midlands to add brown sugar to the barrel at this stage, while in other areas juniper berries were placed in the fire when hanging the hams and flitches (sides of bacon), wrapped in brown paper, in the chimney for smoking (Sharkey 166). While the killing was predominantly men’s work, it was the women who took most responsibility for the curing and smoking. Puddings have always been popular in Irish cuisine. The pig’s intestines were washed well and soaked in a stream, and a mixture of onions, lard, spices, oatmeal and flour were mixed with the blood and the mixture was stuffed into the casing and boiled for about an hour, cooled and the puddings were divided amongst the neighbours.The pig was so palatable that the famous gastronomic writer Grimod de la Reyniere once claimed that the only piece you couldn’t eat was the “oink”. Sharkey remembers her father remarking that had they been able to catch the squeak they would have made tin whistles out of it! No part went to waste; the blood and offal were used, the trotters were known as crubeens (from crúb, hoof), and were boiled and eaten with cabbage. In Galway the knee joint was popular and known as the glúiníns (from glún, knee). The head was roasted whole or often boiled and pressed and prepared as Brawn. The chitterlings (small intestines) were meticulously prepared by continuous washing in cool water and the picking out of undigested food and faeces. Chitterlings were once a popular bar food in Dublin. Pig hair was used for paintbrushes and the bladder was occasionally inflated, using a goose quill, to be used as a football by the children. Meindertsma (2007) provides a pictorial review of the vast array of products derived from a single pig. These range from ammunition and porcelain to chewing gum.From around the mid-eighteenth century, commercial salting of pork and bacon grew rapidly in Ireland. 1820 saw Henry Denny begin operation in Waterford where he both developed and patented several production techniques for bacon. Bacon curing became a very important industry in Munster culminating in the setting up of four large factories. Irish bacon was the brand leader and the Irish companies exported their expertise. Denny set up a plant in Denmark in 1894 and introduced the Irish techniques to the Danish industry, while O’Mara’s set up bacon curing facilities in Russia in 1891 (Cowan and Sexton). Ireland developed an extensive export trade in bacon to England, and hams were delivered to markets in Paris, India, North and South America. The “sandwich method” of curing, or “dry cure”, was used up until 1862 when the method of injecting strong brine into the meat by means of a pickling pump was adopted by Irish bacon-curers. 1887 saw the formation of the Bacon Curers’ Pig Improvement Association and they managed to introduce a new breed, the Large White Ulster into most regions by the turn of the century. This breed was suitable for the production of “Wiltshire” bacon. Cork, Waterford Dublin and Belfast were important centres for bacon but it was Limerick that dominated the industry and a Department of Agriculture document from 1902 suggests that the famous “Limerick cure” may have originated by chance:1880 […] Limerick producers were short of money […] they produced what was considered meat in a half-cured condition. The unintentional cure proved extremely popular and others followed suit. By the turn of the century the mild cure procedure was brought to such perfection that meat could [… be] sent to tropical climates for consumption within a reasonable time (Cowan and Sexton).Failure to modernise led to the decline of bacon production in Limerick in the 1960s and all four factories closed down. The Irish pig market was protected prior to joining the European Union. There were no imports, and exports were subsidised by the Pigs and Bacon Commission. The Department of Agriculture started pig testing in the early 1960s and imported breeds from the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. The two main breeds were Large White and Landrace. Most farms kept pigs before joining the EU but after 1972, farmers were encouraged to rationalise and specialise. Grants were made available for facilities that would keep 3,000 pigs and these grants kick started the development of large units.Pig keeping and production were not only rural occupations; Irish towns and cities also had their fair share. Pigs could easily be kept on swill from hotels, restaurants, not to mention the by-product and leftovers of the brewing and baking industries. Ed Hick, a fourth generation pork butcher from south County Dublin, recalls buying pigs from a local coal man and bus driver and other locals for whom it was a tradition to keep pigs on the side. They would keep some six or eight pigs at a time and feed them on swill collected locally. Legislation concerning the feeding of swill introduced in 1985 (S.I.153) and an amendment in 1987 (S.I.133) required all swill to be heat-treated and resulted in most small operators going out of business. Other EU directives led to the shutting down of thousands of slaughterhouses across Europe. Small producers like Hick who slaughtered at most 25 pigs a week in their family slaughterhouse, states that it was not any one rule but a series of them that forced them to close. It was not uncommon for three inspectors, a veterinarian, a meat inspector and a hygiene inspector, to supervise himself and his brother at work. Ed Hick describes the situation thus; “if we had taken them on in a game of football, we would have lost! We were seen as a huge waste of veterinary time and manpower”.Sausages and rashers have long been popular in Dublin and are the main ingredients in the city’s most famous dish “Dublin Coddle.” Coddle is similar to an Irish stew except that it uses pork rashers and sausage instead of lamb. It was, traditionally, a Saturday night dish when the men came home from the public houses. Terry Fagan has a book on Dublin Folklore called Monto: Murder, Madams and Black Coddle. The black coddle resulted from soot falling down the chimney into the cauldron. James Joyce describes Denny’s sausages with relish in Ulysses, and like many other Irish emigrants, he would welcome visitors from home only if they brought Irish sausages and Irish whiskey with them. Even today, every family has its favourite brand of sausages: Byrne’s, Olhausens, Granby’s, Hafner’s, Denny’s Gold Medal, Kearns and Superquinn are among the most popular. Ironically the same James Joyce, who put Dublin pork kidneys on the world table in Ulysses, was later to call his native Ireland “the old sow that eats her own farrow” (184-5).The last thirty years have seen a concerted effort to breed pigs that have less fat content and leaner meat. There are no pure breeds of Landrace or Large White in production today for they have been crossbred for litter size, fat content and leanness (Tuite). Many experts feel that they have become too lean, to the detriment of flavour and that the meat can tend to split when cooked. Pig production is now a complicated science and tighter margins have led to only large-scale operations being financially viable (Whittemore). The average size of herd has grown from 29 animals in 1973, to 846 animals in 1997, and the highest numbers are found in counties Cork and Cavan (Lafferty et al.). The main players in today’s pig production/processing are the large Irish Agribusiness Multinationals Glanbia, Kerry Foods and Dairygold. Tuite (2002) expressed worries among the industry that there may be no pig production in Ireland in twenty years time, with production moving to Eastern Europe where feed and labour are cheaper. When it comes to traceability, in the light of the Foot and Mouth, BSE and Dioxin scares, many feel that things were much better in the old days, when butchers like Ed Hick slaughtered animals that were reared locally and then sold them back to local consumers. Hick has recently killed pigs for friends who have begun keeping them for home consumption. This slaughtering remains legal as long as the meat is not offered for sale.Although bacon and cabbage, and the full Irish breakfast with rashers, sausages and puddings, are considered to be some of Ireland’s most well known traditional dishes, there has been a growth in modern interpretations of traditional pork and bacon dishes in the repertoires of the seemingly ever growing number of talented Irish chefs. Michael Clifford popularised Clonakilty Black Pudding as a starter in his Cork restaurant Clifford’s in the late 1980s, and its use has become widespread since, as a starter or main course often partnered with either caramelised apples or red onion marmalade. Crubeens (pigs trotters) have been modernised “a la Pierre Kaufman” by a number of Irish chefs, who bone them out and stuff them with sweetbreads. Kevin Thornton, the first Irish chef to be awarded two Michelin stars, has roasted suckling pig as one of his signature dishes. Richard Corrigan is keeping the Irish flag flying in London in his Michelin starred Soho restaurant, Lindsay House, where traditional pork and bacon dishes from his childhood are creatively re-interpreted with simplicity and taste.Pork, ham and bacon are, without doubt, the most traditional of all Irish foods, featuring in the diet since prehistoric times. Although these meats remain the most consumed per capita in post “Celtic Tiger” Ireland, there are a number of threats facing the country’s pig industry. Large-scale indoor production necessitates the use of antibiotics. European legislation and economic factors have contributed in the demise of the traditional art of pork butchery. Scientific advancements have resulted in leaner low-fat pigs, many argue, to the detriment of flavour. Alas, all is not lost. There is a growth in consumer demand for quality local food, and some producers like J. Hick & Sons, and Prue & David Rudd and Family are leading the way. The Rudds process and distribute branded antibiotic-free pig related products with the mission of “re-inventing the tastes of bygone days with the quality of modern day standards”. Few could argue with the late Irish writer John B. Keane (72): “When this kind of bacon is boiling with its old colleague, white cabbage, there is a gurgle from the pot that would tear the heart out of any hungry man”.ReferencesCowan, Cathal and Regina Sexton. Ireland's Traditional Foods: An Exploration of Irish Local & Typical Foods & Drinks. Dublin: Teagasc, 1997.C.S.O. Central Statistics Office. Figures on per capita meat consumption for 2009, 2010. Ireland. http://www.cso.ie.Fitzgerald, Oisin. "The Irish 'Greyhound' Pig: an extinct indigenous breed of Pig." History Ireland13.4 (2005): 20-23.Gantz, Jeffrey Early Irish Myths and Sagas. New York: Penguin, 1981.Harris, Marvin. "The Abominable Pig." Food and Culture: A Reader. Eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York: Routledge, 1997. 67-79.Hick, Edward. Personal Communication with master butcher Ed Hick. 15 Apr. 2002.Hick, Edward. Personal Communication concerning pig killing. 5 Sep. 2010.Jackson, K. H. Ed. Aislinge Meic Con Glinne, Dublin: Institute of Advanced Studies, 1990.Joyce, James. The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, London: Granada, 1977.Keane, John B. Strong Tea. Cork: Mercier Press, 1963.Kinsella, Thomas. The Táin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.Lafferty, S., Commins, P. and Walsh, J. A. Irish Agriculture in Transition: A Census Atlas of Agriculture in the Republic of Ireland. Dublin: Teagasc, 1999.Mac Con Iomaire, Liam. Ireland of the Proverb. Dublin: Town House, 1988.Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín and Pádraic Óg Gallagher. "The Potato in Irish Cuisine and Culture."Journal of Culinary Science and Technology 7.2-3 (2009): 1-16.Mahon, Bríd. Land of Milk and Honey: The Story of Traditional Irish Food and Drink. Cork:Mercier, 1998.Meindertsma, Christien. PIG 05049 2007. 10 Aug. 2010 http://www.christienmeindertsma.com.Ó Conaill, Seán. Seán Ó Conaill's Book. Bailie Átha Cliath: Bhéaloideas Éireann, 1981.Sexton, Regina. A Little History of Irish Food. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1998.Sharkey, Olive. Old Days Old Ways: An Illustrated Folk History of Ireland. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1985.S.I. 153, 1985 (Irish Legislation) http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1985/en/si/0153.htmlS.I. 133, 1987 (Irish Legislation) http://www.irishstatuebook.ie/1987/en/si/0133.htmlTuite, Pat. Personal Communication with Pat Tuite, Chief Pig Advisor, Teagasc. 3 May 2002.Whittemore, Colin T. and Ilias Kyriazakis. Whitmore's Science and Practice of Pig Production 3rdEdition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006.

I first came across etoy in Linz, Austria in 1995. They turned up at Ars Electronica with their shaved heads, in their matching orange bomber jackets. They were not invited. The next year they would not have to crash the party. In 1996 they were awarded Arts Electronica’s prestigious Golden Nica for web art, and were on their way to fame and bitterness – the just rewards for their art of self-regard. As founding member Agent.ZAI says: “All of us were extremely greedy – for excitement, for drugs, for success.” (Wishart & Boschler: 16) The etoy story starts on the fringes of the squatters’ movement in Zurich. Disenchanted with the hard left rhetorics that permeate the movement in the 1980s, a small group look for another way of existing within a commodified world, without the fantasy of an ‘outside’ from which to critique it. What Antonio Negri and friends call the ‘real subsumption’ of life under the rule of commodification is something etoy grasps intuitively. The group would draw on a number of sources: David Bowie, the Sex Pistols, the Manchester rave scene, European Amiga art, rumors of the historic avant gardes from Dada to Fluxus. They came together in 1994, at a meeting in the Swiss resort town of Weggis on Lake Lucerne. While the staging of the founding meeting looks like a rerun of the origins of the Situationist International, the wording of the invitation might suggest the founding of a pop music boy band: “fun, money and the new world?” One of the – many – stories about the origins of the name Dada has it being chosen at random from a bilingual dictionary. The name etoy, in an update on that procedure, was spat out by a computer program designed to make four letter words at random. Ironically, both Dada and etoy, so casually chosen, would inspire furious struggles over the ownership of these chancey 4-bit words. The group decided to make money by servicing the growing rave scene. Being based in Vienna and Zurich, the group needed a way to communicate, and chose to use the internet. This was a far from obvious thing to do in 1994. Connections were slow and unreliable. Sometimes it was easier to tape a hard drive full of clubland graphics to the underside of a seat on the express train from Zurich to Vienna and simply email instructions to meet the train and retrieve it. The web was a primitive instrument in 1995 when etoy built its first website. They launched it with a party called etoy.FASTLANE, an optimistic title when the web was anything but. Coco, a transsexual model and tabloid sensation, sang a Japanese song while suspended in the air. She brought media interest, and was anointed etoy’s lifestyle angel. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “it was as if the Seven Dwarfs had discovered their Snow White.” (Wishart & Boschler: 33) The launch didn’t lead to much in the way of a music deal or television exposure. The old media were not so keen to validate the etoy dream of lifting themselves into fame and fortune by their bootstraps. And so etoy decided to be stars of the new media. The slogan was suitably revised: “etoy: the pop star is the pilot is the coder is the designer is the architect is the manager is the system is etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 34) The etoy boys were more than net.artists, they were artists of the brand. The brand was achieving a new prominence in the mid-90s. (Klein: 35) This was a time when capitalism was hollowing itself out in the overdeveloped world, shedding parts of its manufacturing base. Control of the circuits of commodification would rest less on the ownership of the means of production and more on maintaining a monopoly on the flows of information. The leading edge of the ruling class was becoming self-consciously vectoral. It controlled the flow of information about what to produce – the details of design, the underlying patents. It controlled the flows of information about what is produced – the brands and logos, the slogans and images. The capitalist class is supplanted by a vectoral class, controlling the commodity circuit through the vectors of information. (Wark) The genius of etoy was to grasp the aesthetic dimension of this new stage of commodification. The etoy boys styled themselves not so much as a parody of corporate branding and management groupthink, but as logical extension of it. They adopted matching uniforms and called themselves agents. In the dada-punk-hiphop tradition, they launched themselves on the world as brand new, self-created, self-named subjects: Agents Zai, Brainhard, Gramazio, Kubli, Esposto, Udatny and Goldstein. The etoy.com website was registered in 1995 with Network Solutions for a $100 fee. The homepage for this etoy.TANKSYSTEM was designed like a flow chart. As Gramazio says: “We wanted to create an environment with surreal content, to build a parallel world and put the content of this world into tanks.” (Wishart & Boschler: 51) One tank was a cybermotel, with Coco the first guest. Another tank showed you your IP number, with a big-brother eye looking on. A supermarket tank offered sunglasses and laughing gas for sale, but which may or may not be delivered. The underground tank included hardcore photos of a sensationalist kind. A picture of the Federal Building in Oklamoma City after the bombing was captioned in deadpan post-situ style “such work needs a lot of training.” (Wishart & Boschler: 52) The etoy agents were by now thoroughly invested in the etoy brand and the constellation of images they had built around it, on their website. Their slogan became “etoy: leaving reality behind.” (Wishart & Boschler: 53) They were not the first artists fascinated by commodification. It was Warhol who said “good art is good business.”(Warhol ) But etoy reversed the equation: good business is good art. And good business, in this vectoral age, is in its most desirable form an essentially conceptual matter of creating a brand at the center of a constellation of signifiers. Late in 1995, etoy held another group meeting, at the Zurich youth center Dynamo. The problem was that while they had build a hardcore website, nobody was visiting it. Agents Gooldstein and Udatny thought that there might be a way of using the new search engines to steer visitors to the site. Zai and Brainhard helped secure a place at the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts where Udatny could use the computer lab to implement this idea. Udatny’s first step was to create a program that would go out and gather email addresses from the web. These addresses would form the lists for the early examples of art-spam that etoy would perpetrate. Udatny’s second idea was a bit more interesting. He worked out how to get the etoy.TANKSYSTEM page listed in search engines. Most search engines ranked pages by the frequency of the search term in the pages it had indexed, so etoy.TANKSYSTEM would contain pages of selected keywords. Porn sites were also discovering this method of creating free publicity. The difference was that etoy chose a very carefully curated list of 350 search terms, including: art, bondage, cyberspace, Doom, Elvis, Fidel, genx, heroin, internet, jungle and Kant. Users of search engines who searched for these terms would find dummy pages listed prominently in their search results that directed them, unsuspectingly, to etoy.com. They called this project Digital Hijack. To give the project a slightly political aura, the pages the user was directed to contained an appeal for the release of convicted hacker Kevin Mitnick. This was the project that won them a Golden Nica statuette at Ars Electronica in 1996, which Gramazio allegedly lost the same night playing roulette. It would also, briefly, require that they explain themselves to the police. Digital Hijack also led to the first splits in the group, under the intense pressure of organizing it on a notionally collective basis, but with the zealous Agent Zai acting as de facto leader. When Udatny was expelled, Zai and Brainhard even repossessed his Toshiba laptop, bought with etoy funds. As Udatny recalls, “It was the lowest point in my life ever. There was nothing left; I could not rely on etoy any more. I did not even have clothes, apart from the etoy uniform.” (Wishart & Boschler: 104) Here the etoy story repeats a common theme from the history of the avant gardes as forms of collective subjectivity. After Digital Hijack, etoy went into a bit of a slump. It’s something of a problem for a group so dependent on recognition from the other of the media, that without a buzz around them, etoy would tend to collapse in on itself like a fading supernova. Zai spend the early part of 1997 working up a series of management documents, in which he appeared as the group’s managing director. Zai employed the current management theory rhetoric of employee ‘empowerment’ while centralizing control. Like any other corporate-Trotskyite, his line was that “We have to get used to reworking the company structure constantly.” (Wishart & Boschler: 132) The plan was for each member of etoy to register the etoy trademark in a different territory, linking identity to information via ownership. As Zai wrote “If another company uses our name in a grand way, I’ll probably shoot myself. And that would not be cool.” (Wishart & Boschler:: 132) As it turned out, another company was interested – the company that would become eToys.com. Zai received an email offering “a reasonable sum” for the etoy.com domain name. Zai was not amused. “Damned Americans, they think they can take our hunting grounds for a handful of glass pearls….”. (Wishart & Boschler: 133) On an invitation from Suzy Meszoly of C3, the etoy boys traveled to Budapest to work on “protected by etoy”, a work exploring internet security. They spent most of their time – and C3’s grant money – producing a glossy corporate brochure. The folder sported a blurb from Bjork: “etoy: immature priests from another world” – which was of course completely fabricated. When Artothek, the official art collection of the Austrian Chancellor, approached etoy wanting to buy work, the group had to confront the problem of how to actually turn their brand into a product. The idea was always that the brand was the product, but this doesn’t quite resolve the question of how to produce the kind of unique artifacts that the art world requires. Certainly the old Conceptual Art strategy of selling ‘documentation’ would not do. The solution was as brilliant as it was simple – to sell etoy shares. The ‘works’ would be ‘share certificates’ – unique objects, whose only value, on the face of it, would be that they referred back to the value of the brand. The inspiration, according to Wishart & Boschsler, was David Bowie, ‘the man who sold the world’, who had announced the first rock and roll bond on the London financial markets, backed by future earnings of his back catalogue and publishing rights. Gramazio would end up presenting Chancellor Viktor Klima with the first ‘shares’ at a press conference. “It was a great start for the project”, he said, “A real hack.” (Wishart & Boschler: 142) For this vectoral age, etoy would create the perfect vectoral art. Zai and Brainhard took off next for Pasadena, where they got the idea of reverse-engineering the online etoy.TANKSYSTEM by building an actual tank in an orange shipping container, which would become etoy.TANK 17. This premiered at the San Francisco gallery Blasthaus in June 1998. Instant stars in the small world of San Francisco art, the group began once again to disintegrate. Brainhard and Esposito resigned. Back in Europe in late 1998, Zai was preparing to graduate from the Vienna Academy of Applied Arts. His final project would recapitulate the life and death of etoy. It would exist from here on only as an online archive, a digital mausoleum. As Kubli says “there was no possibility to earn our living with etoy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 192) Zai emailed eToys.com and asked them if them if they would like to place a banner ad on etoy.com, to redirect any errant web traffic. Lawyers for eToys.com offered etoy $30,000 for the etoy.com domain name, which the remaining members of etoy – Zai, Gramazio, Kubli – refused. The offer went up to $100,000, which they also refused. Through their lawyer Peter Wild they demanded $750,000. In September 1999, while etoy were making a business presentation as their contribution to Ars Electronica, eToys.com lodged a complaint against etoy in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The company hired Bruce Wessel, of the heavyweight LA law firm Irell & Manella, who specialized in trademark, copyright and other intellectual property litigation. The complaint Wessel drafted alleged that etoy had infringed and diluted the eToys trademark, were practicing unfair competition and had committed “intentional interference with prospective economic damage.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) Wessel demanded an injunction that would oblige etoy to cease using its trademark and take down its etoy.com website. The complaint also sought to prevent etoy from selling shares, and demanded punitive damages. Displaying the aggressive lawyering for which he was so handsomely paid, Wessel invoked the California Unfair Competition Act, which was meant to protect citizens from fraudulent business scams. Meant as a piece of consumer protection legislation, its sweeping scope made it available for inventive suits such as Wessel’s against etoy. Wessel was able to use pretty much everything from the archive etoy built against it. As Wishart and Bochsler write, “The court papers were like a delicately curated catalogue of its practices.” (Wishart & Boschler: 199) And indeed, legal documents in copyright and trademark cases may be the most perfect literature of the vectoral age. The Unfair Competition claim was probably aimed at getting the suit heard in a Californian rather than a Federal court in which intellectual property issues were less frequently litigated. The central aim of the eToys suit was the trademark infringement, but on that head their claims were not all that strong. According to the 1946 Lanham Act, similar trademarks do not infringe upon each other if there they are for different kinds of business or in different geographical areas. The Act also says that the right to own a trademark depends on its use. So while etoy had not registered their trademark and eToys had, etoy were actually up and running before eToys, and could base their trademark claim on this fact. The eToys case rested on a somewhat selective reading of the facts. Wessel claimed that etoy was not using its trademark in the US when eToys was registered in 1997. Wessel did not dispute the fact that etoy existed in Europe prior to that time. He asserted that owning the etoy.com domain name was not sufficient to establish a right to the trademark. If the intention of the suit was to bully etoy into giving in, it had quite the opposite effect. It pissed them off. “They felt again like the teenage punks they had once been”, as Wishart & Bochsler put it. Their art imploded in on itself for lack of attention, but called upon by another, it flourished. Wessel and eToys.com unintentionally triggered a dialectic that worked in quite the opposite way to what they intended. The more pressure they put on etoy, the more valued – and valuable – they felt etoy to be. Conceptual business, like conceptual art, is about nothing but the management of signs within the constraints of given institutional forms of market. That this conflict was about nothing made it a conflict about everything. It was a perfectly vectoral struggle. Zai and Gramazio flew to the US to fire up enthusiasm for their cause. They asked Wolfgang Staehle of The Thing to register the domain toywar.com, as a space for anti-eToys activities at some remove from etoy.com, and as a safe haven should eToys prevail with their injunction in having etoy.com taken down. The etoy defense was handled by Marcia Ballard in New York and Robert Freimuth in Los Angeles. In their defense, they argued that etoy had existed since 1994, had registered its globally accessible domain in 1995, and won an international art prize in 1996. To counter a claim by eToys that they had a prior trademark claim because they had bought a trademark from another company that went back to 1990, Ballard and Freimuth argued that this particular trademark only applied to the importation of toys from the previous owner’s New York base and thus had no relevance. They capped their argument by charging that eToys had not shown that its customers were really confused by the existence of etoy. With Christmas looming, eToys wanted a quick settlement, so they offered Zurich-based etoy lawyer Peter Wild $160,000 in shares and cash for the etoy domain. Kubli was prepared to negotiate, but Zai and Gramazio wanted to gamble – and raise the stakes. As Zai recalls: “We did not want to be just the victims; that would have been cheap. We wanted to be giants too.” (Wishart & Boschler: 207) They refused the offer. The case was heard in November 1999 before Judge Rafeedie in the Federal Court. Freimuth, for etoy, argued that federal Court was the right place for what was essentially a trademark matter. Robert Kleiger, for eToys, countered that it should stay where it was because of the claims under the California Unfair Competition act. Judge Rafeedie took little time in agreeing with the eToys lawyer. Wessel’s strategy paid off and eToys won the first skirmish. The first round of a quite different kind of conflict opened when etoy sent out their first ‘toywar’ mass mailing, drawing the attention of the net.art, activism and theory crowd to these events. This drew a report from Felix Stalder in Telepolis: “Fences are going up everywhere, molding what once seemed infinite space into an overcrowded and tightly controlled strip mall.” (Stalder ) The positive feedback from the net only emboldened etoy. For the Los Angeles court, lawyers for etoy filed papers arguing that the sale of ‘shares’ in etoy was not really a stock offering. “The etoy.com website is not about commerce per se, it is about artist and social protest”, they argued. (Wishart & Boschler: 209) They were obliged, in other words, to assert a difference that the art itself had intended to blur in order to escape eToy’s claims under the Unfair Competition Act. Moreover, etoy argued that there was no evidence of a victim. Nobody was claiming to have been fooled by etoy into buying something under false pretences. Ironically enough, art would turn out in hindsight to be a more straightforward transaction here, involving less simulation or dissimulation, than investing in a dot.com. Perhaps we have reached the age when art makes more, not less, claim than business to the rhetorical figure of ‘reality’. Having defended what appeared to be the vulnerable point under the Unfair Competition law, etoy went on the attack. It was the failure of eToys to do a proper search for other trademarks that created the problem in the first place. Meanwhile, in Federal Court, lawyers for etoy launched a counter-suit that reversed the claims against them made by eToys on the trademark question. While the suits and counter suits flew, eToys.com upped their offer to settle to a package of cash and shares worth $400,000. This rather puzzled the etoy lawyers. Those choosing to sue don’t usually try at the same time to settle. Lawyer Peter Wild advised his clients to take the money, but the parallel tactics of eToys.com only encouraged them to dig in their heels. “We felt that this was a tremendous final project for etoy”, says Gramazio. As Zai says, “eToys was our ideal enemy – we were its worst enemy.” (Wishart & Boschler: 210) Zai reported the offer to the net in another mass mail. Most people advised them to take the money, including Doug Rushkoff and Heath Bunting. Paul Garrin counseled fighting on. The etoy agents offered to settle for $750,000. The case came to court in late November 1999 before Judge Shook. The Judge accepted the plausibility of the eToys version of the facts on the trademark issue, which included the purchase of a registered trademark from another company that went back to 1990. He issued an injunction on their behalf, and added in his statement that he was worried about “the great danger of children being exposed to profane and hardcore pornographic issues on the computer.” (Wishart & Boschler: 222) The injunction was all eToys needed to get Network Solutions to shut down the etoy.com domain. Zai sent out a press release in early December, which percolated through Slashdot, rhizome, nettime (Staehle) and many other networks, and catalyzed the net community into action. A debate of sorts started on investor websites such as fool.com. The eToys stock price started to slide, and etoy ‘warriors’ felt free to take the credit for it. The story made the New York Times on 9th December, Washington Post on the 10th, Wired News on the 11th. Network Solutions finally removed the etoy.com domain on the 10th December. Zai responded with a press release: “this is robbery of digital territory, American imperialism, corporate destruction and bulldozing in the way of the 19th century.” (Wishart & Boschler: 237) RTMark set up a campaign fund for toywar, managed by Survival Research Laboratories’ Mark Pauline. The RTMark press release promised a “new internet ‘game’ designed to destroy eToys.com.” (Wishart & Boschler: 239) The RTMark press release grabbed the attention of the Associated Press newswire. The eToys.com share price actually rose on December 13th. Goldman Sachs’ e-commerce analyst Anthony Noto argued that the previous declines in the Etoys share price made it a good buy. Goldman Sachs was the lead underwriter of the eToys IPO. Noto’s writings may have been nothing more than the usual ‘IPOetry’ of the time, but the crash of the internet bubble was some months away yet. The RTMark campaign was called ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’. It used the Floodnet technique that Ricardo Dominguez used in support of the Zapatistas. As Dominguez said, “this hysterical power-play perfectly demonstrates the intensions of the new net elite; to turn the World Wide Web into their own private home-shopping network.” (Wishart & Boschler: 242) The Floodnet attack may have slowed the eToys.com server down a bit, but it was robust and didn’t crash. Ironically, it ran on open source software. Dominguez claims that the ‘Twelve Days’ campaign, which relied on individuals manually launching Floodnet from their own computers, was not designed to destroy the eToys site, but to make a protest felt. “We had a single-bullet script that could have taken down eToys – a tactical nuke, if you will. But we felt this script did not represent the presence of a global group of people gathered to bear witness to a wrong.” (Wishart & Boschler: 245) While the eToys engineers did what they could to keep the site going, eToys also approached universities and businesses whose systems were being used to host Floodnet attacks. The Thing, which hosted Dominguez’s eToys Floodnet site was taken offline by The Thing’s ISP, Verio. After taking down the Floodnet scripts, The Thing was back up, restoring service to the 200 odd websites that The Thing hosted besides the offending Floodnet site. About 200 people gathered on December 20th at a demonstration against eToys outside the Museum of Modern Art. Among the crowd were Santas bearing signs that said ‘Coal for eToys’. The rally, inside the Museum, was led by the Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping: “We are drowning in a sea of identical details”, he said. (Wishart & Boschler: 249-250) Meanwhile etoy worked on the Toywar Platform, an online agitpop theater spectacle, in which participants could act as soldiers in the toywar. This would take some time to complete – ironically the dispute threatened to end before this last etoy artwork was ready, giving etoy further incentives to keep the dispute alive. The etoy agents had a new lawyer, Chris Truax, who was attracted to the case by the publicity it was generating. Through Truax, etoy offered to sell the etoy domain and trademark for $3.7 million. This may sound like an insane sum, but to put it in perspective, the business.com site changed hands for $7.5 million around this time. On December 29th, Wessel signaled that eToys was prepared to compromise. The problem was, the Toywar Platform was not quite ready, so etoy did what it could to drag out the negotiations. The site went live just before the scheduled court hearings, January 10th 2000. “TOYWAR.com is a place where all servers and all involved people melt and build a living system. In our eyes it is the best way to express and document what’s going on at the moment: people start to about new ways to fight for their ideas, their lifestyle, contemporary culture and power relations.” (Wishart & Boschler: 263) Meanwhile, in a California courtroom, Truax demanded that Network Solutions restore the etoy domain, that eToys pay the etoy legal expenses, and that the case be dropped without prejudice. No settlement was reached. Negotiations dragged on for another two weeks, with the etoy agents’ attention somewhat divided between two horizons – art and law. The dispute was settled on 25th January. Both parties dismissed their complaints without prejudice. The eToys company would pay the etoy artists $40,000 for legal costs, and contact Network Solutions to reinstate the etoy domain. “It was a pleasure doing business with one of the biggest e-commerce giants in the world” ran the etoy press release. (Wishart & Boschler: 265) That would make a charming end to the story. But what goes around comes around. Brainhard, still pissed off with Zai after leaving the group in San Francisco, filed for the etoy trademark in Austria. After that the internal etoy wranglings just gets boring. But it was fun while it lasted. What etoy grasped intuitively was the nexus between the internet as a cultural space and the transformation of the commodity economy in a yet-more abstract direction – its becoming-vectoral. They zeroed in on the heart of the new era of conceptual business – the brand. As Wittgenstein says of language, what gives words meaning is other words, so too for brands. What gives brands meaning is other brands. There is a syntax for brands as there is for words. What etoy discovered is how to insert a new brand into that syntax. The place of eToys as a brand depended on their business competition with other brands – with Toys ‘R’ Us, for example. For etoy, the syntax they discovered for relating their brand to another one was a legal opposition. What made etoy interesting was their lack of moral posturing. Their abandonment of leftist rhetorics opened them up to exploring the territory where media and business meet, but it also made them vulnerable to being consumed by the very dialectic that created the possibility of staging etoy in the first place. By abandoning obsolete political strategies, they discovered a media tactic, which collapsed for want of a new strategy, for the new vectoral terrain on which we find ourselves. Works Cited Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Continuum, London, 2003. Warhol, Andy. From A to B and Back Again. Picador, New York, 1984. Stalder, Felix. ‘Fences in Cyberspace: Recent events in the battle over domain names’. 19 Jun 2003. <http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.php>. Wark, McKenzie. ‘A Hacker Manifesto [version 4.0]’ 19 Jun 2003. http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. Harper Collins, London, 2000. Wishart, Adam & Regula Bochsler. Leaving Reality Behind: etoy vs eToys.com & Other Battles to Control Cyberspace Ecco Books, 2003. Staehle, Wolfgang. ‘<nettime> etoy.com shut down by US court.’ 19 Jun 2003. http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.html Links http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00005.htm http://felix.openflows.org/html/fences.html http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/warktext.html Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Wark, McKenzie. "Toywars" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>. APA Style Wark, M. (2003, Jun 19). Toywars. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/02-toywars.php>