Articles by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
Art History, 2019
In July 1923, towards the end of the fourth issue of his journal Merz, Kurt Schwitters features a... more In July 1923, towards the end of the fourth issue of his journal Merz, Kurt Schwitters features a puzzling juxtaposition under the heading 'Topography of Typography'. The title refers directly to eight theses on typography by El Lissitzky, reproduced in the upper register of the pink page (plate 1). Below a dividing line, Schwitters supplies a curious illustration for the constructivist's manifesto: a photograph of a work by Hans Arp-the quadruple-tiered wood relief of 1916 now known as Oiseau hippique [Horse Bird]-captioned 'H. Arp, Plastik' [H. Arp, Sculpture]. In a brief note lodged just below the horizontal line, Schwitters offers a caveat that functions like a hinge between Lissitzky's theses and Arp's sculpture: 'The editors are not in agreement with all of these theses, as it only provisorily recognizes a connection between the text and letter design.' 1 Lissitzky's constructivist theses celebrate the rise of 'the laws of typographical mechanics' in place of the tools of handwriting, and celebrates the transcendence of 'the printed sheet' by way of electrified text. In contrast to Lissitzky's technophilia, Arp's 'Plastik', as photographed in three-quarter profile, displays the actual topographic relief of its cut third dimension and its construction from four wooden strata to the readers of Merz. 2 If Lissitzky's 'Topography' maps the terrain of avant-garde typographical practice in 1923, Oiseau hippique offers topology itself: three-dimensional relief; contour; and shape. 3 The presentation of Oiseau hippique calls up not only an older print medium-the relief method of woodcut-but also an earlier step in the printmaking process than that which concerns Lissitzky-namely, the cutting and casting of the three-dimensional relief matrices that precede the experience of seeing or reading type on the page. Whereas Lissitzky looks forward to the electronic transcendence of the page-in the arrival of a futuristic 'ELEKTROBILIOTHEK' [an electro-or electrified library]-Arp's 'Plastik' beckons the reader back to the material processes of letter design, formation, or shaping, what Schwitters calls Buchstabengestaltung. 4 This privileging of materiality is of a piece with Arp's broader concern, particularly in the 1920s, with the morphology of writing-that is, not only with writing's plasticity, as in an untitled cardboard relief of 1926, but also with the ability of 'plastic objects' to function 'as writing' (as in the title of his 1928 relief Plastische Gegenstände als Schrift (Objets plastiques comme écriture) [Plastic objects as writing] (plate 2). 5 A number of works from this period insist upon the medium of print's reliance upon glyptic procedures. Indeed, a commitment to the reciprocity between the plastic and the graphic subtends even those print projects from the 1920s onwards that Arp did
Essays by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
"Understanding Reinhardt's 'Newsprint Collage'", The Brooklyn Rail, Special Issue: Ad Reinhardt Centennial (December 2013-January 2014)
Book Reviews by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
In her monograph on the outsider Surrealist Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob), Jennifer L. Shaw ins... more In her monograph on the outsider Surrealist Claude Cahun (born Lucy Schwob), Jennifer L. Shaw insists that Cahun was an artist engaged with her time and who, in spite of the evasiveness and opacity of her work, desired to communicate. This marks a significant new direction in the interpretation of the work of an artist known for making frequent use of her own image in works she produced from a multiply marginal position: Cahun was Jewish, gender non-conforming, a lesbian, and spent 1937-45 in exile on the British isle of Jersey. As the result of her tendency to serve as her own model together with her works' refusal to yield easy readings, the artist has come to be associated with solipsism and narcissism and her work to be interpreted-like the work of so many woman artists-as mere personal confession. Shaw's study seeks not to rescue Cahun from the pejorative descriptor of " narcissism, " but to use historical method to remove the pejorative's teeth. Shaw shows how Cahun consciously took up narcissism and self-regard as a practice, even refashioning it into her own philosophy of " neo-narcissism " (p. 71), in which self-regard and relation to the Other are not opposed. Shaw trains her focus on the enigmatic photomontages and the " collage of texts " (p. 3) that make up the book Aveux non Avenus (literally, " Avowals Null and Void, " but typically rendered in English as Disavowals), a collaborative project by Cahun and her stepsister, lover, and ultimately life partner Marcel Moore (born Suzanne Malherbe) produced over the course of the 1920s and published in 1930. Through a series of close readings and analyses, Shaw reveals the manifold links of Cahun's project to her contemporary world, its discourses, norms, and values. As she reconstructs contexts for the fragments of Cahun's book, Shaw restores their resonance beyond the " personal " or the " confessional, " forging a new set of historically grounded terms with which to understand and situate Cahun's work in its historical present. Most importantly, her study reveals that, in spite of its repetitions of her own image, Cahun's book (like her work more generally) insistently addresses an Other. This insistence on Cahun's connectedness and sociability makes Shaw's study an important corrective for art history and literary studies, which have largely staged the rescue and rediscovery of this outsider woman Surrealist in terms of the theoretical priorities of the 1980s and 1990s. As Shaw points out, queer theory and postmodernist studies found in Cahun's work the perfect object, claiming her as a foremother for feminist performance artists' tendency to turn the camera on themselves as well as contemporary theoretical ideas about gender performativity and malleability. Shaw works against the grain of a literature that has explained the ill fit of Cahun's work within its own time by seeing it as ahead of its historical moment and, thus, better equipped to communicate with the late twentieth-century viewer.
Exhibition Reviews by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
"Sartor Resartus: Diane Simpson at the ICA, Boston," Big, Red, & Shiny (February 3, 2016)
Big Red & Shiny, Feb 2016
Talks by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
“Art is a Black Hole: Duchamp, Arp, and ‘The Transported Man.’” September 2018, The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University.
La Désolation: The Violence of Pruning and Matisse's Cut-Outs, CAA February 2017
"Definite Means: Modernism's Cut-Outs," May 12, 2016. Department of Art History, Dartmouth College
"Scissor-Running Topsy": Kara Walker's Cut From Below. April 21, 2016. Leslie Center for the Humanities, Dartmouth College.
Impressing the Public: The “Negative Intelligences” of Peale’s Museum, February 2015, College Art Association annual conference, "Techniques of Reversal" panel (Chairs: Jennifer L. Roberts and David Pullins)
Enclosure/Disclosure: Hans Arp’s Cardboard Reliefs, March 2012, Princeton University Art Museum
Hans Arp's "Typographical Microbes," April 2011, at "Reconsidering the Historiography of the Historical Avant-Gardes" conference, CUNY Graduate Center
Courses by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
HA450: Cutting & Collage, from Early Photography to Hip-Hop
Uploads
Articles by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
Essays by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
Book Reviews by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
Exhibition Reviews by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
Talks by Tessa Paneth-Pollak
Courses by Tessa Paneth-Pollak