Michael G. KammenBesprekingen

Being a critical survey of works, primarily literature and art, which treat of the four seasons. The author is erudite and insightful at times, but his poor choice of emphases limits the book's pleasures. After a perfunctory first chapter describing such works in the Old World which consists mostly of lists of dates of creation, he presents his best chapters, which deal with American nature writing of the nineteenth century. Later chapters, which obsess in excruciating detail on a group of nature writers from the mid-twentieth century who are mostly not well-remembered, and graphic artists from the turn of the century, again mostly pretty obscure, slow the book to a crawl. Music, realia, television, and movies are very briefly summarized. A coda on the science of seasonal change is unnecessary and the space would have been better spent on an examination of the changes in perception wrought by global heating, an odd omission.½

Those of us who revere the Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights realize how subversive a document it can be. We all pay it lip service but many really don't understand what it means, or perhaps understand only too well. Michael Kammen in A Machine That Would Go Of Itself describes how Louis D. Oaks, the Los Angeles Chief of Police, had Upton Sinclair arrested in 1923 for reading the first three amendments to the Constitution in public. He was "kidnapped" by the police, moved to different station houses to confuse his lawyers, and held incommunicado. Re was charged with "discussing, arguing, orating, and debating certain thoughts and theories, which thoughts and theories were contemptuous of the constitution of the state of California, calculated to cause hatred and contempt of the government of the United States of America." ! One suspects Chief Oakes was not fluent in the meaning of the Constitution when he took his oath.
Sinclair was released only because a subordinate of the Chief secretly phoned an associate of Sinclair's so his lawyers could prepare a writ to get him out. Sinclair continued his meetings and helped found the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union. Chief Oakes was fired about a month later after being discovered in his car at night with a woman and a jug of whiskey.

“Visual Shock” purports to be nothing less than a history of art controversies in American culture. Its scope is extensive, dating all the way back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and the construction of the Washington Monument, coming up through the more recent contretemps over work of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. The chapters are organized topically, and cover much of the ground that you would expect such a comprehensive history to deal with: the introduction of modern art into the United States, public sculpture, murals, the politicization of art and art funding, and even changing aspects of American museology.

One of the problems with the book is that whole libraries have been written on any one of these subjects. Reading Kammen’s book, I was reminded of a distinction all too familiar to computer scientists: that of data and information. Data is raw, unprocessed, unfiltered, and if some serious work isn’t done on it, pretty useless. Information on the other hand, has had some sort of heuristic applied to it in such a way that it now can communicate something important. Unfortunately, Kammen’s book is all data and almost no information.

The sheer number of names, projects, commissions, provincial politicians, and kvetching letters to the editor that the reader encounters is impressive enough. You get quick, superficial accounts of Karen Finley, Judy Chicago’s famous “Dinner Party,” Chris Ofili, the huge metal pieces of Richard Serra, the bombastic denunciations against modern art by McCarthyist Michigan Congressman George Dondero, the protest art of the sixties and seventies, and the palpable drive for museums to put on more and more extreme exhibits, often sacrificing the quality of art shown, for the sole purpose of pulling in more money. Most of these take up perhaps a few pages – barely enough to introduce the reader to the piece being considered - before Kammen moves on to something else that catches his attention.

Even given Kammen’s distracting lack of narrative drive and insistence on including everything under the sun, there are some recurring themes and questions. When should taxpayer dollars be expended on art, and when shouldn’t they be? Should nudity or the “ability to offend” a section of the viewing public have any relevance to this question? (Kammen, to his credit, does include some interesting polling of the general public on these questions, but as with most everything else, he covers it breathlessly in a few sentences and quickly moves on.) He also discusses several commissions during the Great Depression, and some of the factors that determined how the public reacted to them – this was one of the most successful parts of the book.

One is left with the underwhelming and unsurprising conclusion that most of the public is at best befuddled and at worst disgusted by modern art. However, instead of building critically on that observation or going one step beyond what any relatively informed reader could have already told you, he leaves it there. The level of analysis or integrative thought behind the whole project is sorely lacking, which goes back to what I said about data and information earlier. Writing a book like this consists just as much in knowing what you’re not going to include as what you are, and that filter just doesn’t seem to be there.

On a more prosaic note, in the early chapters, pictures are included when necessary – for those of you who can’t visually conjure Hiram Powers’ “The Greek Slave” from memory (I know some of you are out there). However, Kammen also refers to the work of several names I mentioned above, and no pictures are included. Perhaps he couldn’t get the relevant artist’s or museum’s permission, but this is too sizable an oversight in a book that deals with art, much of which the reader may never have seen. For both this reason and others discussed above, it may be best to completely overlook this unless you’re looking for the most general, cursory discussions of the topic. And even then, I’m sure you can find something better than this.

Philip Greven, "'Some Roots of Bitterness': Corporal Punishment, Child Abuse, and the Apocalyptic Impulse in Michael Wigglesworth," in James A. Heretta, Michael Kammen, and Stanley N. Katz, eds., The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology (New York, 1991), 93-122, 280-286.

Pointing to the origins of the apocalyptic impulse in colonial New England long before Jonathan Edwards, Greven note that

Historians, however, have not yet explored the psychological and experiential roots of this apocalyptic impulse, nor have they sought out the hidden and usually forgotten memories of pain and hurt, of physical violence and abuse in the name of discipline and parental authority that underpinned the anxieties, fears and sufferings of the adults whose consciousness was marked by a keen sense of the approaching Apocalypse. (p. 93)

By studying the writings of Michael Wigglesworth, Greven hopes to rectify this gap in our knowledge. His attempt to overcome his own physical affliction is written into his writing, which are clearly marked with suppressed rage. This rage was directed at himself, as is often the case with victims of child abuse. Obsessed with "affliction, pain, suffering and punishment, "[c]orproral punishment is the experiential core of his entire theology, fundamental to an understanding of his career and thought." (p. 94)

Fantasies of Punishment

Poems about punishment for sins written by Wigglesworth were full of imagery of physical punishment. Describing the punishments of hellfire, MW has little sympathy for the damned. This lack of sympathy is also typical for victims of child abuse. Filled with sadomasochistic fantasy, MW's poetry focus on the need for punishment to impose God's discipline. His descriptions of God the Father inflicting punishment are clearly written form the perspective of one who has endured abuse. Confused and enraged by the punishment inflicted upon him as a child, the adult MW was a victim of what pediatricians in the 1960s began to call called "Battered Child Syndrome."

The Experience of Affliction

A neurotic young man, MW's pain separated him from his earthly and his heavenly father. Greven reads his afflictions as hypochondriac and links them to those of his father. After being rejected by his father, MW emulates his father's experience. Ill health is a key to understanding his life, as he saw this affliction as coming from God. Seeing sexuality as inherently depraved, MW could not deal with his own natural sexual maturation. Wet dreams sent him into fits of self doubt and fears of having somehow contracted an STD. Though he married and even had a child, there is no indication that he ever had a "normal" sex life with his first wife.

The Meaning of Affliction

From the late 20th C perspective it was MW's pent up rage that made him sick. He likely suffered from clinical depression for much of his first 50 years of life. He was "in denial" about the abuse he had suffered as a child and his ailment resulted from the strain of justifying the abuse through sublimation into theology. In Greven's words "The adult obsession with punishment mirrors the realities of childhood, but the denial of these realities is the root cause of his subsequent illness." (p. 120) Something changed when he turned 50, almost like the effect of a mid life crisis, MW seemed to come to terms with his demons and cease the self loathing, reaching out instead to the community, becoming sexually active and living his life as "an active, assertive, adult man." He married two more times and had a second child which he named after his father. Once he dealt with his hang-ups, he was able to get on with life.

Michael Kammen's latest book is Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (University of Chicago Press, 2010). Sort of a macabre subject, but Kammen offers up a wide selection of reburial case studies loosely organized around several major themes, all centering around some form or another of pride: national, sectional, regional, ethnic/racial, reputational, &c. As Kammen writes in the introduction, "Although I will touch upon different cultures, different eras, even different countries, most of the episodes that I explore clearly involve the desire to enhance respect for someone deceased, the variability of reputations, and the complexity of restitution or repatriation. Intensely felt sentiments of pride emerge on multiple levels. And they reveal that the symbolic significance of possessing 'sacred relics,' even in secular settings, has incalculable potency - yet often provides pleasure as well" (p. 10).

Kammen's first chapter touches on the history of reburial through history (but particularly in America), and lays out some points of comparison between American and European trends (which he revisits in the final chapter, noting that American moments of reburial tend to be less ideological than many in Europe have been).

The second chapter highlights reburials of important Revolutionary figures, which (I was somewhat surprised to learn) continued well into the 20th century. Kammen profiles the various scenarios that resulted in reinterments of such folks as Joseph Warren (moved three times by 1856), Charles Thomson (plucked secretly from his grave in 1838 and moved to Philadelphia's Laurel Hill), Richard Montgomery (returned from Canada in 1818), John Trumbull, Nathaniel Greene, Button Gwinnett, &c.

Kammen's third chapter focuses on sectional and national pride, with its case studies beginning with James Monroe's removal from New York to Virginia in 1858 but mostly centered around Civil War reburials (including the mass repatriation of Confederate dead from northern cemeteries, the many efforts to get and keep Lincoln in the ground, and Jefferson Davis' post-mortem journey from New Orleans to Richmond). Next he tackles non-political/military leaders in a chapter called "Problematic Graves, Tourism, and the Wishes of Survivors," recounting the posthumous peregrinations of Daniel Boone, Edgar Allan Poe, Jesse James, D.H. Lawrence, Frank Lloyd Wright and F. Scott Fitzgerald (these last were just plain strange, I found).

Before his final, comparative chapter, Kammen also touches on religious reburials, including the long trend of burials of American Indians remains from the collections of museums. Case studies here include George Whitefield, Roger Williams, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, Matthew Henson, and Sitting Bull.

Exploring the various reasons for these historical reburials made for very interesting reading, and Kammen's comparison of American trends with those in Europe (which he notes have been colored by an "ongoing ideological edge and intensity") was well drawn. I enjoyed the book, and recommend it to anyone with an interest in death customs (and/or the slightly bizarre).

http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2010/08/book-review-digging-up-dead.html

American culture is founded on fiercely cherished principles of individual freedom coupled with a democratic process that values the vox populi. It should come as no surprise that these principles have frequently found themselves at odds in the course of our nation's lifetime. Where individual expression meets the public sphere controversy is bound to erupt.

Michael Kammen's Visual Shock is an ambitious attempt to weave a coherent history of art controversies from several divergent threads that center around the interaction of art with the public sphere. Beginning in the 19th century, he traces social changes in the way Americans view art, in the way artists view art, in the functions of art museums, in the democratization of art, in the role of public art, etc., and shows how these changes have played a role in significant art controversies in the United States. Omnipresent in this history are the political battles fought over particular works and the resultant fallout. Readers will recognize many such battles (i.e. Jesse Helms vs. the National Endowment for the Arts) and be introduced to many others.

How well is Kammen's history woven? The book is certainly well-researched and provides ample citations. His writing style is pleasant and easily understood(despite too frequent use of the word 'contretemps'). The narrative structure of the book is less successful, I think. While chronological organization is not always the best device for a history, a heavy dose of it would have been useful here. Kammen chose to organize the work thematically, and this leads to frequent repetition of events (and personalities involved) that would be better understood if addressed in a single, comprehensive manner. In other words, he should have woven the themes through the chronology rather than tracing the chronology in each theme.

Criticism aside, this is a book worth reading. It's a broad look at issues in our culture that are too quickly forgotten, if they were ever noticed at all.½

Wonderful book on how the collective American memory developed.

2/20/23

2/18/23

1986