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May. 10th, 2009 01:09 pmI have been reading Michael Taussig’s newest book What Color Is the Sacred? with considerable excitement, not least because it is refreshing to discover that, like the bourgeois gentleman who learned he had been speaking prose, I have apparently thinking and writing like Michael Taussig, or at least like the Michael Taussig of this book.
I have probably encountered Taussig’s writings about Walter Benjamin in the past, and have always meant to get round to his fabled first book on colonialism and the wild man, but James Clifford was my man all along, and I felt disappointed that after a certain point (Routes, to be exact) Clifford seemed to have said everything he had to say and stopped producing books. Imagine my surprise to find that Taussig has been not only discussing mimesis and alterity (I make it a practice to postpone reading books that use words like “alterity” even when they are making points with which I agree), but imagining what would happen if William Burroughs and Walter Benjamin went for a walk together, or reading photographs as adroitly as Clifford ever did (not to mention Benjamin, our shared noble ancestor). I had absorbed some of the re-readings of Bronislaw Malinowski in an anniversary exhibition of some sort (not sure which life event of the father of modern anthropology was being memorialized) in London years ago, but Taussig now makes it impossible to think of Malinowski without contemplating Proust, or vice versa.
Taussig begins his book on the uses of colors (and their relationship not only to society but to how we live our whole lives, in our own bodies) with a quotation from Goethe that had eluded me.
We all know Adolf Loos’ infamous claim of “ornament as crime,” the sparseness of modern middle-class dress being favorably contrasted with the decorative impulse that leads primitives and contemporary low-lifes to tattoo themselves. (Loos, you remember, asked why the good bourgeois, who wouldn’t dream of decorating himself, felt so impelled to gussy up the architecture and furniture of his house.)
But who knew that Goethe had observed that the “fondness for colours in their utmost brightness” was shared by “uncivilized nations and children,” as well as “uneducated people” and, uh, southern Europeans, especially the women. Goethe went on, says Taussig, to recall a German mercenary returned from America who had painted his face in the manner of the Indians, “the effect of which,” in Taussig’s paraphrase, “was ‘not disagreeable.’” But nevertheless, according to Taussig, “Goethe wrote that people of refinement avoid vivid colors in the objects around them and seem inclined to banish vivid colors from their presence altogether.”
When friend Kerry Yoder Wooten exclaimed some years ago at how well the white, tan and black clothing being worn by Grady Harris (LJ’s utopyr) and myself matched the restaurant patio around us, Harris quipped, “Ah, yes, the colorful dress of our people.”
I want to collide Taussig’s new book on color with a couple of books and exhibitions on contemporary design (since I had intuited that Karim Rashid’s insistence on finding pink luggage that exactly matched his pink suit bespoke something significant in a designer so often concerned with making design combine psychological and physically practical function, and who complains about Philippe Starck's pointless whimsy when Starck combines it with a fondness for dysfunctional darkness.) But for now I want to follow up on Taussig's observation regarding Malinowski’s odd position as “neither one sort of person nor the other” so far as the colonial administrators and the “natives” were concerned (and as far as Malinowski himself was concerned, given the entries in his diary versus his staged photographs and his dutifully annotated fieldwork…he comes from an interesting personal background).
I’ve observed before that those who are born between cultures, and there are more of us all the time in the second age of globalization (the first age of globalization having been the pre-World War I era of colonialism that some have seen as the ultimate outcome of Renaissance and Enlightenment assumptions playing out on a world stage)…that those of us who never quite acculturated successfully to any social milieu tend to fall into two categories: those who, by dint of this fact, can get along almost anywhere and those who can’t get along anywhere at all, but who understand why they cannot.
Tattooed folks clutching PBRs at a graffiti-art show, intellectual property lawyers sipping sauvignon blanc at a reception designed to show off the firm’s breadth of sophistication, black-clad curators at the opening of a global biennial…and one could go on to events at which one is less at home because the circumstances aren’t quite as routine, from tense business negotiations to Dragon-Con: regardless of the social surroundings, sooner or later, one feels as an outside observer that the natives are shaking their bone rattles emphatically and shouting “Ooga! Ooga!” as in the old racist cartoons, each of the hipsters or lawyers or curators inordinately proud of how their style and their way of thinking is so infinitely superior to the other guys’ style and way of thinking.
And one is inevitably pondering, “Okay, okay, so the bone rattle is really necessary here, even if the decoration on the side is superfluous…or is it the decoration that makes it all work, so that the fact that the other folks use wood and dispense with the rattling noise doesn’t matter? And will any two-syllable exclamation work, or is it necessary to use a certain set of vowels and consonants? Because something real is going on here socially and psychologically, but it isn’t what the participants think. And it isn’t what I think, because right now I don’t think anything except that I don’t quite know why this sort of works and sort of doesn’t work.”
And the participants think nothing except, “Damn, that guy is weird.” And of course they are right.
I have probably encountered Taussig’s writings about Walter Benjamin in the past, and have always meant to get round to his fabled first book on colonialism and the wild man, but James Clifford was my man all along, and I felt disappointed that after a certain point (Routes, to be exact) Clifford seemed to have said everything he had to say and stopped producing books. Imagine my surprise to find that Taussig has been not only discussing mimesis and alterity (I make it a practice to postpone reading books that use words like “alterity” even when they are making points with which I agree), but imagining what would happen if William Burroughs and Walter Benjamin went for a walk together, or reading photographs as adroitly as Clifford ever did (not to mention Benjamin, our shared noble ancestor). I had absorbed some of the re-readings of Bronislaw Malinowski in an anniversary exhibition of some sort (not sure which life event of the father of modern anthropology was being memorialized) in London years ago, but Taussig now makes it impossible to think of Malinowski without contemplating Proust, or vice versa.
Taussig begins his book on the uses of colors (and their relationship not only to society but to how we live our whole lives, in our own bodies) with a quotation from Goethe that had eluded me.
We all know Adolf Loos’ infamous claim of “ornament as crime,” the sparseness of modern middle-class dress being favorably contrasted with the decorative impulse that leads primitives and contemporary low-lifes to tattoo themselves. (Loos, you remember, asked why the good bourgeois, who wouldn’t dream of decorating himself, felt so impelled to gussy up the architecture and furniture of his house.)
But who knew that Goethe had observed that the “fondness for colours in their utmost brightness” was shared by “uncivilized nations and children,” as well as “uneducated people” and, uh, southern Europeans, especially the women. Goethe went on, says Taussig, to recall a German mercenary returned from America who had painted his face in the manner of the Indians, “the effect of which,” in Taussig’s paraphrase, “was ‘not disagreeable.’” But nevertheless, according to Taussig, “Goethe wrote that people of refinement avoid vivid colors in the objects around them and seem inclined to banish vivid colors from their presence altogether.”
When friend Kerry Yoder Wooten exclaimed some years ago at how well the white, tan and black clothing being worn by Grady Harris (LJ’s utopyr) and myself matched the restaurant patio around us, Harris quipped, “Ah, yes, the colorful dress of our people.”
I want to collide Taussig’s new book on color with a couple of books and exhibitions on contemporary design (since I had intuited that Karim Rashid’s insistence on finding pink luggage that exactly matched his pink suit bespoke something significant in a designer so often concerned with making design combine psychological and physically practical function, and who complains about Philippe Starck's pointless whimsy when Starck combines it with a fondness for dysfunctional darkness.) But for now I want to follow up on Taussig's observation regarding Malinowski’s odd position as “neither one sort of person nor the other” so far as the colonial administrators and the “natives” were concerned (and as far as Malinowski himself was concerned, given the entries in his diary versus his staged photographs and his dutifully annotated fieldwork…he comes from an interesting personal background).
I’ve observed before that those who are born between cultures, and there are more of us all the time in the second age of globalization (the first age of globalization having been the pre-World War I era of colonialism that some have seen as the ultimate outcome of Renaissance and Enlightenment assumptions playing out on a world stage)…that those of us who never quite acculturated successfully to any social milieu tend to fall into two categories: those who, by dint of this fact, can get along almost anywhere and those who can’t get along anywhere at all, but who understand why they cannot.
Tattooed folks clutching PBRs at a graffiti-art show, intellectual property lawyers sipping sauvignon blanc at a reception designed to show off the firm’s breadth of sophistication, black-clad curators at the opening of a global biennial…and one could go on to events at which one is less at home because the circumstances aren’t quite as routine, from tense business negotiations to Dragon-Con: regardless of the social surroundings, sooner or later, one feels as an outside observer that the natives are shaking their bone rattles emphatically and shouting “Ooga! Ooga!” as in the old racist cartoons, each of the hipsters or lawyers or curators inordinately proud of how their style and their way of thinking is so infinitely superior to the other guys’ style and way of thinking.
And one is inevitably pondering, “Okay, okay, so the bone rattle is really necessary here, even if the decoration on the side is superfluous…or is it the decoration that makes it all work, so that the fact that the other folks use wood and dispense with the rattling noise doesn’t matter? And will any two-syllable exclamation work, or is it necessary to use a certain set of vowels and consonants? Because something real is going on here socially and psychologically, but it isn’t what the participants think. And it isn’t what I think, because right now I don’t think anything except that I don’t quite know why this sort of works and sort of doesn’t work.”
And the participants think nothing except, “Damn, that guy is weird.” And of course they are right.
