Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Solid Objects - 19th century

after Antonio Canova
Venus Italica
19th century
marble
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"There are, at bottom, two sorts of philosophy and two ways of noting down thoughts.  One is to sow them in the snow  or, if you prefer, in the fire clay  of pages; Saturn is the reader to contemplate their increase, and indeed to harvest their flower (the meaning) or their fruit (the verbal expression).  The other way is to bury them with dignity and erect as sepulcher above their grave the image, the metaphor  cold and barren marble."

Berthel Thorvaldsen
Ganymede
after 1816
marble
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Imperial Porcelain Factory, Russia
Inkstand - Cupid bearing Celestial Sphere
ca. 1825-30
porcelain
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

"Important in regard to collecting: the fact that the object is detached from all original functions of its utility makes it the more decided in its meaning.  It functions now as a true encyclopedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the owner from which it comes."  

Joseph Gott
Little Red Riding Hood
1827
terracotta
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Joseph Gott
Little Red Riding Hood
1827
terracotta
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"Interiors of our childhood days as laboratories for the demonstration of ghostly phenomena.  Experimental relations.  The forbidden book.  Tempo of reading: two anxieties, on different levels, vie with one another.  The bookcase with the oval panes from which it was taken.  Vaccination with apparitions.  The other prophylaxis: optical illusions."

Anonymous French Manufactory
Putto on Dolphin
ca. 1800-1850
 glazed ceramic
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Anonymous French sculptor
Hercules
19th century
terracotta
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"The deepest enchantment of the collector: to put things under a spell, as though at a touch of the magic wand, so that all at once, while a last shudder runs over them, they are transfixed.  All architecture becomes pedestal, socle, frame, antique memory room."

Albert Ernest Carrier-Belleuse
The Messiah
1867
terracotta
Clark Art Institute

Jonathan Church Harmer
Urn with Rams' Heads
before 1849
molded terracotta relief
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"Fashion inheres in the darkness of the lived moment, but in the collective darkness.  Fashion and architecture (in the nineteenth century) belong to the dream consciousness of the collective.  We must look into how it awakes.  For example, in advertising.  Would awakening be the synthesis derived from the thesis of dream consciousness and the antithesis of waking consciousness?"

Swansea Pottery Manufactory
Bracket with Nereid supporting Net
ca. 1850
molded terracotta
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Swansea Pottery Manufactory
Bracket with Triton supporting Net
ca. 1850
molded terracotta
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

Anonymous Dutch sculptor
 Rose-branch fashioned from scrap of gunboat
after 1832
iron
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"Happiness of the collector, happiness of the solitary: tête-à-tête with things.  Is not this the felicity that suffuses our memories  that in them we are alone with particular things, which range about us in their silence, and that even the people who haunt our thoughts then partake in this steadfast, confederate silence of things?" 

Erik August Kollin
Bowl
1880s
agate, silver-gilt, almandines
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Venetian Glass
Pair of buckets
19th century
British Museum
bequeathed by Sir William Temple

"Method of this project: literary montage.  I needn't say anything.  Merely show.  I shall appropriate no ingenious formulations, purloin no valuables.  But the rags, the refuse  these I will not describe but put on display."  

 quotations are by Walter Benjamin, from the "First Sketches" section appended to The Arcades Project, originally compiled between 1927 and 1939, translated into English by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin for Harvard University Press, 1999