Trivial Things: Dogs, Porcelain and Chinese Export Art
Chi-ming Yang, University of Pennsylvania
This paper examines the shared classification of miniature dogs and porcelain as imported “toys” and “curios” in eighteenth-century commodity culture and amidst the global trafficking of cultural and racialized identities in non-human forms. The King Charles Spaniel, along with the Pekingese, the Japanese spaniel, and the Papillon, belong to a canine subset of “Oriental toy dogs.” Considered a “diminutive breed,” toys were bred for smallness of size. (The King Charles spaniel in 1750 for example averaged only six inches high.) It ranked among the three most popular toy dogs of the 18th century, the other two being the “shock” dog and the pug; the lap dog is a noted ornament of female domesticity in particular, and becomes the fictional narrator of a number of eighteenth-century texts.
Furthermore, the King Charles spaniel and the Pug, were both East Asian breeds of dog brought to England and domesticated—indeed, bred as symbols of national culture—and then rendered into porcelain miniatures through being commissioned and reproduced in China and sent back to England. Miniature animals, as both live creatures and in the form of popular cabinet curios, embody “curiosity” in both of its primary definitions--on the one hand as “an object of art or piece of bric-a-brac…applied to articles of this kind from China, Japan, and the far East” (OED). On the other hand, the curio signifies painstaking, elaborate workmanship, or perfection of construction.
The interrelated status of these “Oriental” animals and objects enables a consideration of the “miniature” as a cultural phenomenon, one that offers a unique perspective on trade and labor relations between Europe and the East Indies and the growing market for racialized breeding practices that uphold the ideal of the pure type. To study the shared importation of the China jar and the Shock dog, is to take seriously the triviality of chinoiserie and the transformation of novel exports into generic entities. Chinoiserie is, after all, a story of origins and their obfuscation: the distance between the preservation of objects in a world of consumption, and the global outside which supplies it and feeds its imaginative life. It is a story of the construction of cultural authenticities, pure-bred and hybrid, the manipulation of origins and their myths, and the cross-cultural production of value.
“Animal Bodies in Eighteenth Century Art and Science”
Joan Landes, Pennsylvania State University
Much like their 17th century precursors, Enlightenment thinkers looked to nature as a trustworthy guide in physical, moral, social and political matters. In the study of natural philosophy and natural history, they sought answers to the fundamental structure of matter, the ends and limits of knowledge, and the structure of existence. In their most robust presentations, some even accorded nature a nearly divine status. These insights guide my investigation into abstract and concrete models of artificial life during this age. In either version, imitation is not limited to direct resemblance or copying, but always involves an act of representation. Moreover, as students of Enlightenment aesthetics are especially well apprised, imitation was never without pitfalls: while gesturing toward what is true, reliable, and perfect in nature, imitation also carries with it the risk of dissimulation, of representing what is artificial and false not natural and true. In what follows, I will present several exceptionally audacious acts of imitation: acts of modeling life in the realms of the imagination, the visual and mechanical arts. Each crosses a border: for the statue, that between the inorganic and the organic; the monkey stands on the border between human and animal life; and the automata, that between brute matter and impassioned life.
Japan’s “Panda Boom”: Post-Imperial Conservationism and the Commercialization of Nature
Ian Jared Miller, Harvard University
Two giant pandas arrived at Tokyo’s Ueno Zoological Gardens in October 1972 in celebration of diplomatic normalization between Japan and the People’s Republic of China. Former foes in a brutal fifteen year colonial war that cost tens of millions of lives, the two nations were estranged for twenty seven years following the collapse of the Japanese Empire in 1945, and the arrival of Ran Ran and Kan Kan (as the pair were called) marked both a geopolitical watershed and an explosion in post-imperial fascination with all things Chinese. The resulting “panda boom” was the apex of animal commodification in postwar Japan. Fueled by a culture industry eager to extract maximum profit from the alluring Ailuropoda melanoleuca, Tokyo Zoo attendance hit world historical highs for over a decade. This hyper-consumerism coincided with a shift in environmental consciousness in the 1970s.
In wider society the contradictions between consumerism and conservationism often remain hidden, but the complicated histories of Tokyo’s pandas—the first in the world to bear artificially-conceived cubs and perhaps the most-viewed non-human animals on the planet—throw modernity’s troubled relationship with nature (particularly endangered and exotic megafauna) into sharp relief. At once post-imperial mascots and post-commodity treasures of inestimable value—from 1984 pandas were leased by the Chinese government in complex financial transactions rather than gifted or sold—Ran Ran, Kan Kan, and their offspring are ciphers for the contradictions that lie at the heart of the modern zoo, and indeed for modern Japanese dealings with the natural world writ large.
‘Floating Fast like a Hummingbird’
Alissa Walls Mazow, Penn State University
This paper examines Hummingbird, a 2004 painting by the Brooklyn-based artist Fred Tomaselli. With references to the music of Chicago-based rock band Wilco, the art historian Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, and Wunderkammern, Hummingbird displays a range of nature-culture and art-science-technology informatics. The rich display of Tomaselli’s painting situates it within the strategies of Wunderkammern, which present menageries as rooms of object relations productive of movement and wonder. His painting intimates the art historian Horst Bredekamp’s view of a Wunderkammer as being “like on the stage of a theater;” Tomaselli’s black ground suggests the choreographed space of a black box, albeit a flattened one, filled with language, images, and movement. Tomaselli leaves viewers “floating fast” within a confluence of visual and sonic associations, and a swirling pharmacopoeia of naturalist and technological phenomena. In this way, Hummingbird demonstrates Bredekamp’s “radical view that the baroque Kunstkammer is also the nucleus of modern cyberspace.”
the pennsylvania state university