I’ve been surrounded by stories of shadows lately, especially stories of people separated from their shadows. It hasn’t been intentional. I’m midway through Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, I recently found the Faust-like tale of Peter Schlemihl, and shortly before that, His Dark Materials (I guess “Peter Pan” will have to be added to the list eventually). Figuring that there must be something to this, I checked out a copy of Victor Stoichita’s A Short History of the Shadow for a bit of enlightenment. The writing is at times trying, full of academic language and awkward phrasing (just like my writing!), but that can be forgiven as it’s a translation. The meat of the book is worth the effort.
A Short History presents a compelling look at the development of the Western art tradition, a series of essays framed around artists’ use of shadow and simulacra as allegorical devices. Stoichita wanders from Pliny and Quintilian’s early explications of painting’s history (departing loved ones captured by silhouette traced on the wall) to the optical and philosophical experiments of the Renaissance to the modern investigative works by Kazimir Malevich, Joseph Beuys, and Andy Warhol.
The common threads of these stories are fascinating: shadow as a powerful double of the human form; specular reflection as a evanescent ‘other’; shadows bearing the indication of a man’s true nature; the emptiness of a person bereft of their shadow. All themes I’ve been encountering in other writing lately. Shadows have always been much more than devices for the simple rendering of volumes, and this book is loaded with examples.
A fairly recent interview with Stoichita conducted by Cabinet Magazine is available on their site, summarizing many of these essays.
4 responses to “Ars longa, umbrae longiores”
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austin says:
This is kind of crazy convergences of things we’ve both been thinking about lately: this woman manages to weave Stoichita’s writing about shadows and Otto Neurath’s isotypes into a post about quilt art.
http://junomain.wordpress.com/2008/02/10/a-ramble-through-shadows-by-june-underwood/
To weird, huh?
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austin says:
wow, horrible spelling and grammar in that comment…sorry.
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Adam says:
Thanks for the link, Austin, that’s a good connection. A passage in “Short History of the Shadow” talks about a profile’s silhouette as semblance rather than resemblance, the idea that a person’s shadow is more than just a visual shorthand for what that person looks like, that it actually contains some fundamental element of that person’s nature. The parlor game of drawing friends’ silhouettes was for a while practiced as a kind of psuedo-science, sort of like phrenology. I can see how these ideas would translate into making iconography, imbuing shadows of a thing with more important yet more universal meaning.
That post also briefly mentions Kara Walker, one of my favorite contemporary artists. If you haven’t seen her work, you really should check it out.
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austin says:
ah! the cut paper artist…I’d heard of her, but never looked into her work much. thanks!