While researching the history of advertising jingles, we came across this gem from the Chemstrand Corporation c. 1957, “A lady isn’t dressed unless her legs are, too.” Forget the Nylon riots of 1945-46, when DuPont returned to producing stockings in lieu of parachutes (“Peace! It’s here! Nylons on sale!”); forget the 40,000 women who lined up for 13,000 pairs of nylons in Pittsburgh, Pa (June 1946); forget, too, a story rippped from the headlines: “Women Risk Life and Limb in Bitter Battle for Nylons.”
What we really want do know is: is that Cindy Sherman?
Sigmund Freud to Oskar Pfister, 1930. This contemptuous term for the United States was evidently common among Central European intellectuals. As early as 1921, Albert Einstein, writing about an upcoming trip to America, expected a correspondent to be familiar with the reference.
“When he sees the part of the screen that has the word that he’s looking for, he punches a little mouse. Then the screen changes and we see lines of words scrolling down, and those are the words from that part of the screen. Then when he sees the word he wants, he activates his little switch again. Then you see the screen changing again and you see the words, and when he sees the next word he wants, he punches the device again. Then that word goes across the bottom of the screen. And he builds his sentence at the bottom of a screen. When he gets the sentence completed, he makes another movement, which indicates that his synthetic voice should speak that sentence. … It sounds simple, but it’s not simple. It moves at the speed of a video game, and very often he misses a word or misses the line, and then the whole thing has to start over. What that means is that working with him can be frustrating. Very often, you know what word he’s after. You know what word he wants to capture. But protocol says you do not second-guess him. You do not move ahead and say, ‘Stephen, I know what you’re trying to say.’ You let him finish. Because he’s going to finish anyway. It would be impolite, as it would be to interrupt anybody talking.”
—
science writer Kitty Ferguson (who helped Hawking edit The Universe in a Nutshell) on Stephen Hawking’s communication style
In Hawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject, Hélène Mialet (not without controversy) provides ethnographic context for the networks that allow Hawking (and the rest of us) to work as a singular, individual identity distributed into a complex nexus of a materialized human body and its variously incorporated machines.
“In San Francisco I caught a fleeting glimpse of the type of man who overthrew the cult of the serpent and overcame the fear of lightning—the descendant of the indigenous race and of the gold-diggers who expelled the Indians: Uncle Sam in his tall hat walking proudly along the street past a pseudo-classical rotunda. And always above his top hat runs the electric wire. In this copper-snake, invented by Edison, he has wrested the lightning from nature.”—Aby Warburg, “A Lecture on Serpent Ritual,” 1923
An almost unheard of first edition of Philip Johnson’s catalog (1/1000) for the “Machine Art” exhibition at MoMA from March 5 to April 29, 1934.
From Philip Johnson: Oral History (1991), with Sharon Zane:
PJ: Well, it sounds as if I conceived it. I never conceived anything, so it must have been…It was really in talks with Alfred (H. Barr, Jr.), because the whole Bauhaus approach—that the decorative arts were no longer in existence, but that art could still be made without the handcraft approach—so it was an anti-handcraft show. The worship of the machine was an important part of it, kept over from the Futurists, but it was mostly based on the Bauhaus approach. But you see, the whole impetus is gone, the whole moral socialism of that day, that Alfred really shared. He came through with his puritanism, and with me it was purely stylistic, as coming from the Bauhaus. But Hitchcock and I were more interested in the style side of things—a word that everybody hated and still do—but we felt that a machine made an ideology, a theme that would be good to substitute for the handcrafts. The word we did coin—Alan Blackburn and I did—while we were drinking.
SZ: While you were drinking, did you say?
PJ: Yes. It was about 4:00 in the morning, and the words “machine art” just came out of the air, a very, very good idea.
**
Read the whole story in Machine Art, 1934 by Jennifer Jane Marshall : :
Gellhorn on marriage (presumably to Ernest Hemingway):
“My own experience with said state was comparable to living in Sing-Sing, with a touch of the Iron Maiden on Nurnberg thrown in… . But you can’t tell, maybe I’ll get over that terror when I’m an old lady and marry some other dodderer and we will go happily together tomb-wards.”
“These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule of man over man—of one or the few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the many in aristocracy and democracy, to which today we ought to add the latest and perhaps most formidable form of such dominion, bureaucracy, or the rule by an intricate system of bureaux in which no men, neither one nor the best, neither the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and which could be properly called the rule by Nobody. Indeed, if we identify tyranny as the government that is not held to give account of itself, rule by Nobody is clearly the most tyrannical of all, since there is no one left who could even be asked to answer for what is being done.”
Robert Motherwell and Helen Frankenthaler at their Provincetown studio, c. 1960.
“For Motherwell, getting to the point where everything in a given work was “just right” involved ridding it of an array of unacceptable elements. While collage—which is usually thought of in terms of vastly expanding the range of what is possible to includein a work—may seem a strange choice of strategies, it offered him an eminently practical way to proceed. The series of mistakes and crimes that Motherwell claimed went into any given painting required an almost continuous process of decisions about what to leave and what to delete, and how to coordinate and relate all that remained. It required him to be, in other words, an editor, “revising and revising and revising.”—Catherine Craft, from An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism
“To recur to my ghostly frame of reference, we can say that Janeism in its past as well as its current forms allows us to foreclose the gap between Austen’s time and our own, between the dead and the living, the fictional and the real, and to occupy Austen’s novels as they are—not were—lived, in an eternal present, where they commune with her familiarly.”—from Claudia L. Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures
