2007-10
found wood, steel
Found wooden boards are stacked and leaned in provisional order, forming a casual or unintended set of interrelations. A steel counter-structure holds the elements in their exact places, fixing their positions and relations.
2009
terra cotta, hemp, plaster
Terracotta plates, bowls and pots dropped on the floor and smashed, their fragments linked by line in their new locations and proximities.
Double Vision: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
Double Vision is a solo exhibition of work by Jeffrey Schiff which exposes how unconscious projections from America’s colonial origins shape perceptions of its current reality. In 1786, one year before the constitutional convention, members of the American Philosophical Society, which included such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestly, published personal accounts of the natural world in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Schiff’s artworks extrapolate from these historical texts to reveal the era’s unresolved struggle between rationality and superstition, democratic ideals and cultural traditions of elitism and slavery–struggles we have inherited as we negotiate conflicting views of scientific enterprise, globalism, religious and ethnic identity and the information age.
Jeffrey Schiff’s Double Vision
by Nancy Princenthal
Seeing double is one route to radical subjectivism: it demonstrates that the world is not mapped point to point in our consciousness. Each eye produces an image, the two are not precisely the same, and neither has priority. Normally they are integrated; intoxication can cause them to separate, as can injury, and various more intentional operations, including the use of optical devices. Vision itself has two meanings, at least, one being transport from the material realm. All these connections have a bearing on Jeffrey Schiff’s enormously ambitious exhibition, “Double Vision.” Inspired by three entries in a 1786 volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (which appear as photographic enlargements in the exhibition), Schiff has created a series of works that explore vision and its corruption by culturally shaped preconceptions, while also celebrating the spirit of scientific and humanistic inquiry for which the Enlightenment was distinguished, and to which this country’s founding statesmen were dedicated.
Among the most striking features of the Transactions is their seeming innocence, to a contemporary reader. Philosophy, for the Society’s purposes, was generally identified with the natural sciences, about which its members had widely varied knowledge. Formal higher education was scarce among colonial-era Americans: neither Thomas Paine, nor Benjamin Franklin, nor George Washington–all members of the Philosophical Society–attended college. To a twenty-first-century reader, the findings submitted to the Society seem as likely to have been written by Romantic fabulists (or by masters of satire) as by sober scientists; certainly they seem to reflect the idiosyncratic academic strengths of autodidacts.
The account titled “Two Hearts found in one Partridge” begins with the admission that not all of nature’s phenomena are readily understood. The author, one D’Aboville, nonetheless recommends that those which appear “futile should be grasped like the others,” as parts of a chain whose “precious links . . . will be discovered by time.” His own link concerns a partridge that apparently contained two hearts. The interesting viscera were presented to D’Aboville by a surgeon living next door, and both men were eager to show the specimen to a third witness, but the surgeon, stopping first at home, put the saucer containing the entrails on the ground while he fished for his keys, and his dog ate its contents. The subsequent observation of the innards of 48 other partridges confirmed D’Aboville in his belief that he had seen a true anomaly, though his neighbor, noting that no dissection had been made, cautioned, “one cannot be too circumspect in affirming a fact which we ought not to judge of from external circumstances.” Vision, in other words, is not entirely trustworthy.
The second account with which Schiff engages is of “A Worm in a Horse’s Eye,” as observed by F. Hopkinson, Esq. This time, the inexplicable phenomenon is a “serpent” or “worm” seen to be moving freely behind the iris of a tormented horse, which was put on display by its owner, “a free negroe.” The third narrative, by John Morgan, concerns “a motley coloured, or pye Negro Girl,” property of “Mons. Le Vallois, Dentist of the King of France at Guadeloupe.” In relentlessly dehumanizing detail, Morgan describes the mottled coloration of the two-year-old slave’s skin: “The neck, the upper and under part of the chest, the shoulders, the back, loins and buttocks to the junction with the thighs, and the pudendum,” he writes, “are of the colour of her face, but the loins and the thicker part of the buttocks are of a deeper black,” while elsewhere there are extensive white spots, several times further identified as “lively” and “beautiful.” One such white area, on her forehead, is shaped like an “aigrette” (egret), and several like “stars”; other white spots are compared to lunar eclipses. Morgan hesitates to speculate about the causes of the discolorations, but then goes on to note that the child’s mother “delighted in laying out all night in the open air, and contemplating the stars and planets.” He concludes by acknowledging that there are “many who dispute children’s being ever marked by the fears, longings, or impressions made by mothers on the bodies of their children” during pregnancy, while others “are equally confident” of such emotional causes producing physical effects. Taken together, these three Transactions are a portrait of cultural efforts to distinguish subjective impression from objective fact. They split the differences between vision as a faculty that records and one that interprets, or imagines, or perhaps just passionately hopes.
Schiff’s response to the “pye girl” account presides like a colossus over the entryway to the museum at Wesleyan. A child slave named Maria Sabina, whose skin markings were remarkably similar to those of the toddler in Morgan’s account, was the subject of a painting of the period that Schiff has reproduced in rectangular fragments, which are presented within a three-dimensional scaffold reaching eighteen feet high. (Morgan mentions Sabina in passing, referring to a report by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the famous late 18th-century French naturalist.) The topmost painting fragment features an egret on Sabina’s forehead, a bird that in isolation evokes the holy ghost of Christian iconography. (At Wesleyan, the connection is reinforced by the installation of this work in a very tall, narrow, stone-walled gallery topped by a ocular skylight that sheds a particularly ecclesiastical illumination.) Beneath the egret is a single, limpid eye, which mercilessly commands the entering viewer’s attention. Other panels frame telling details of the painting: a parrot on the girl’s finger, also distinguished by a black, piercing eye; a gold earring; a single, ebony foot; a rustic, grass-roofed colonial church, its simple cross lit by a ruddy setting sun. But most of the panels feature segments of the child’s body, and highlight the painting’s peculiar depiction of her dermatological markings, which are rendered as cloud-like, celestial, and at the same time suspiciously evocative of a domestic animal–a dog, a cow.
Superimposed on all the fragments are linear notations–portolani–excerpted from nautical maps of the Mediterranean made by the cartographer Joseph Roux at around the time the Transactions were published. Schiff thereby brings together two sets of measurements for unstable entities: the fluid categories of race, the menacingly changeable seas. The racially equivocal child, a kind of terra incognita, is presented on the movable scaffold as a provisional being, a puzzle not fully assembled.
In the main gallery, mounted on panels attached to a section of wall flanked by the accounts of the anomalous partridge heart and infested horse eye, are five old-fashioned stereoscopic viewers. Each device is trained on a pair of photographs of equally old-fashioned glass-jarred specimens–collected by the same Buffon who observed Sabina–from the Museum of Natural History in Paris. One specimen in each pair is a human heart, the others are hearts from a monkey, a crocodile, a manatee, a tortoise, and, most evocatively, a pygmy hippopotamus. What one sees when looking into the viewer is a muddled hybrid of the mismatched organs: whereas stereopticons are designed to present subjects with preternatural clarity, these deliver images of confounding complexity, which a viewer struggles in vain to bring into alignment. But the photographic pairs can be seen clearly when one steps away from the optical devices, and the hearts’ similarities calculated. A sixth stereopticon is trained on paired videos–they are screened on iPhones, the same devices used to produce the imagery–of the block of Arch Street in Philadelphia where the worm-bedeviled horse was long ago displayed (and not far from the original meeting place of the Philosophical Society). One video delivers a steady, back and forth scan of the street; the other careens wildly, sending the placid thoroughfare with its banal modern architecture into pandemonium. In other words, a normal equine view is paired with the view from the eye of a frantic worm. The stereopticon fuses the two into an impossible collage, the trees and buildings as seen by the worm streaming in swirling floods over the placid city blocks.
Occupying the floor at the center of the exhibition space is an irregular array of roughly three dozen simple terra-cotta pots, all hand thrown and no two exactly alike, although it takes awhile to see that. Full-shouldered and short necked, they have thick-lipped mouths small enough to make it impossible to see inside. Most are intact, but six are broken to reveal stupa-like clay vessels concealed within–as with the dissected partridges, revelation comes at the price of destruction. These interior forms are also each unique, some shaped like spinning tops, others onion-domed, or conical. Shards of the smashed pots litter the floor, which evokes an archeological site. Along with the pottery fragments, wheat grain spills from the broken vessels, completing an image of spiritual and material nourishment in counterpoise, and of the pattern of generation as an enduring mystery.
In the rear gallery is an assortment of sculptures called “Propositions,” all made of glassware designed by Schiff to suggest laboratory vessels, and all placed on battered laboratory tables. Hung vertically on the back wall, one table–its black enameled top suggests an old blackboard–supports two big-bellied beakers, each containing equal amounts of oil and water. One of the beakers is shaken at regular intervals by a motorized mechanism, so the two fluids alternately emulsify and separate. Mounted side by side, the round flasks inescapably evoke eyeballs. Four other tables, placed on the floor, support flasks, retorts and beakers in various confounding configurations. The simplest Propositions pair two beakers, one containing oil and the other water, each pair connected by stunningly long, graceful necks such that eventually the unlike fluids will combine. The most complicated of these sculptures joins two round glass-filled beakers with five oil-filled flasks as delicate and elegant as perfume bottles. The tubes linking them form a dizzying, sinuous maze, which a system of valves turns into a pattern of circulation that suggests both anatomy and alchemy.
All the glass sculptures encourage the admixture of inimical things–the kinds of contamination that resulted, eighteenth-century naturalists speculated, in mottled skin and worm-infested eyes. Like the stereoscopes, they induce combinations not found in nature. At the same time, their grace and clarity reminds us that any well-formed proposition–any elegant conceptual model–is liable to acquire the force of a truth to which observable reality is made to conform, often long past the point when knowledge renders it untenable.
And yet, obsolete models ultimately do give ground, often yielding unintended resources. As it ages, science becomes literature. Aristotle’s writings are taught in departments of classics, Freud’s more often in those of cultural theory than of experimental psychology. They are read as artifacts of culture, not sources of data. No branch of biology relies on unaided human eyesight. Philosophy has distanced itself from both scientific research and artistic evaluation, though whether it primarily concerns moral, spiritual or material things remains an open question. All of these shifts and realignments come into play in Schiff’s “Double Vision,” as they have in his previous works. Earlier projects have concerned Eastern philosophies (he has made extended trips to Japan and India) and Western ones (a recent installation was made in response to Diderot’s Encyclopedia). Sustained themes include the blurry distinctions separating functional and fanciful objects, and normal and anomalous things; the intersection of raw sensory perception and conscious awareness; and the tension between faith and reason. All were of interest among contributors to theTransactions of the American Philosophical Society as well, and represent connections between their era and our own.
“The troubles we continue to have with notions of the ‘natural,’ the ‘aberrant’ and what constitutes evidence and rationality seem to me to be rooted in the intellectual origins unwittingly revealed in the Transactions,” Schiff says. “And the current resurgence of political claims using our founding documents to validate cultural traditions remind of the malleability of such material.” Opening up the Philosophical Society’s record of retrograde assumptions, bold curiosity and lively speculation with the force of his own imagination, Schiff induces several varieties of deeply illuminating double vision.
Stereoscopes mounted to blend in the mind’s eye two photographs of specimens from the Museum of Natural History in Paris: a human heart and an animal heart. Also printed as a set of ten 12″x15″ photographs.
Also pictured: Homme-Cheropotame a Pinceau (Pygmy-Hippopotamus-Man);Homme-Crocodile (Crocodile-Man)
Double Vision: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
Double Vision is a solo exhibition of work by Jeffrey Schiff which exposes how unconscious projections from America’s colonial origins shape perceptions of its current reality. In 1786, one year before the constitutional convention, members of the American Philosophical Society, which included such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestly, published personal accounts of the natural world in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Schiff’s artworks extrapolate from these historical texts to reveal the era’s unresolved struggle between rationality and superstition, democratic ideals and cultural traditions of elitism and slavery–struggles we have inherited as we negotiate conflicting views of scientific enterprise, globalism, religious and ethnic identity and the information age.
Jeffrey Schiff’s Double Vision
by Nancy Princenthal
Seeing double is one route to radical subjectivism: it demonstrates that the world is not mapped point to point in our consciousness. Each eye produces an image, the two are not precisely the same, and neither has priority. Normally they are integrated; intoxication can cause them to separate, as can injury, and various more intentional operations, including the use of optical devices. Vision itself has two meanings, at least, one being transport from the material realm. All these connections have a bearing on Jeffrey Schiff’s enormously ambitious exhibition, “Double Vision.” Inspired by three entries in a 1786 volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (which appear as photographic enlargements in the exhibition), Schiff has created a series of works that explore vision and its corruption by culturally shaped preconceptions, while also celebrating the spirit of scientific and humanistic inquiry for which the Enlightenment was distinguished, and to which this country’s founding statesmen were dedicated.
Among the most striking features of the Transactions is their seeming innocence, to a contemporary reader. Philosophy, for the Society’s purposes, was generally identified with the natural sciences, about which its members had widely varied knowledge. Formal higher education was scarce among colonial-era Americans: neither Thomas Paine, nor Benjamin Franklin, nor George Washington–all members of the Philosophical Society–attended college. To a twenty-first-century reader, the findings submitted to the Society seem as likely to have been written by Romantic fabulists (or by masters of satire) as by sober scientists; certainly they seem to reflect the idiosyncratic academic strengths of autodidacts.
The account titled “Two Hearts found in one Partridge” begins with the admission that not all of nature’s phenomena are readily understood. The author, one D’Aboville, nonetheless recommends that those which appear “futile should be grasped like the others,” as parts of a chain whose “precious links . . . will be discovered by time.” His own link concerns a partridge that apparently contained two hearts. The interesting viscera were presented to D’Aboville by a surgeon living next door, and both men were eager to show the specimen to a third witness, but the surgeon, stopping first at home, put the saucer containing the entrails on the ground while he fished for his keys, and his dog ate its contents. The subsequent observation of the innards of 48 other partridges confirmed D’Aboville in his belief that he had seen a true anomaly, though his neighbor, noting that no dissection had been made, cautioned, “one cannot be too circumspect in affirming a fact which we ought not to judge of from external circumstances.” Vision, in other words, is not entirely trustworthy.
The second account with which Schiff engages is of “A Worm in a Horse’s Eye,” as observed by F. Hopkinson, Esq. This time, the inexplicable phenomenon is a “serpent” or “worm” seen to be moving freely behind the iris of a tormented horse, which was put on display by its owner, “a free negroe.” The third narrative, by John Morgan, concerns “a motley coloured, or pye Negro Girl,” property of “Mons. Le Vallois, Dentist of the King of France at Guadeloupe.” In relentlessly dehumanizing detail, Morgan describes the mottled coloration of the two-year-old slave’s skin: “The neck, the upper and under part of the chest, the shoulders, the back, loins and buttocks to the junction with the thighs, and the pudendum,” he writes, “are of the colour of her face, but the loins and the thicker part of the buttocks are of a deeper black,” while elsewhere there are extensive white spots, several times further identified as “lively” and “beautiful.” One such white area, on her forehead, is shaped like an “aigrette” (egret), and several like “stars”; other white spots are compared to lunar eclipses. Morgan hesitates to speculate about the causes of the discolorations, but then goes on to note that the child’s mother “delighted in laying out all night in the open air, and contemplating the stars and planets.” He concludes by acknowledging that there are “many who dispute children’s being ever marked by the fears, longings, or impressions made by mothers on the bodies of their children” during pregnancy, while others “are equally confident” of such emotional causes producing physical effects. Taken together, these three Transactions are a portrait of cultural efforts to distinguish subjective impression from objective fact. They split the differences between vision as a faculty that records and one that interprets, or imagines, or perhaps just passionately hopes.
Schiff’s response to the “pye girl” account presides like a colossus over the entryway to the museum at Wesleyan. A child slave named Maria Sabina, whose skin markings were remarkably similar to those of the toddler in Morgan’s account, was the subject of a painting of the period that Schiff has reproduced in rectangular fragments, which are presented within a three-dimensional scaffold reaching eighteen feet high. (Morgan mentions Sabina in passing, referring to a report by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the famous late 18th-century French naturalist.) The topmost painting fragment features an egret on Sabina’s forehead, a bird that in isolation evokes the holy ghost of Christian iconography. (At Wesleyan, the connection is reinforced by the installation of this work in a very tall, narrow, stone-walled gallery topped by a ocular skylight that sheds a particularly ecclesiastical illumination.) Beneath the egret is a single, limpid eye, which mercilessly commands the entering viewer’s attention. Other panels frame telling details of the painting: a parrot on the girl’s finger, also distinguished by a black, piercing eye; a gold earring; a single, ebony foot; a rustic, grass-roofed colonial church, its simple cross lit by a ruddy setting sun. But most of the panels feature segments of the child’s body, and highlight the painting’s peculiar depiction of her dermatological markings, which are rendered as cloud-like, celestial, and at the same time suspiciously evocative of a domestic animal–a dog, a cow.
Superimposed on all the fragments are linear notations–portolani–excerpted from nautical maps of the Mediterranean made by the cartographer Joseph Roux at around the time the Transactions were published. Schiff thereby brings together two sets of measurements for unstable entities: the fluid categories of race, the menacingly changeable seas. The racially equivocal child, a kind of terra incognita, is presented on the movable scaffold as a provisional being, a puzzle not fully assembled.
In the main gallery, mounted on panels attached to a section of wall flanked by the accounts of the anomalous partridge heart and infested horse eye, are five old-fashioned stereoscopic viewers. Each device is trained on a pair of photographs of equally old-fashioned glass-jarred specimens–collected by the same Buffon who observed Sabina–from the Museum of Natural History in Paris. One specimen in each pair is a human heart, the others are hearts from a monkey, a crocodile, a manatee, a tortoise, and, most evocatively, a pygmy hippopotamus. What one sees when looking into the viewer is a muddled hybrid of the mismatched organs: whereas stereopticons are designed to present subjects with preternatural clarity, these deliver images of confounding complexity, which a viewer struggles in vain to bring into alignment. But the photographic pairs can be seen clearly when one steps away from the optical devices, and the hearts’ similarities calculated. A sixth stereopticon is trained on paired videos–they are screened on iPhones, the same devices used to produce the imagery–of the block of Arch Street in Philadelphia where the worm-bedeviled horse was long ago displayed (and not far from the original meeting place of the Philosophical Society). One video delivers a steady, back and forth scan of the street; the other careens wildly, sending the placid thoroughfare with its banal modern architecture into pandemonium. In other words, a normal equine view is paired with the view from the eye of a frantic worm. The stereopticon fuses the two into an impossible collage, the trees and buildings as seen by the worm streaming in swirling floods over the placid city blocks.
Occupying the floor at the center of the exhibition space is an irregular array of roughly three dozen simple terra-cotta pots, all hand thrown and no two exactly alike, although it takes awhile to see that. Full-shouldered and short necked, they have thick-lipped mouths small enough to make it impossible to see inside. Most are intact, but six are broken to reveal stupa-like clay vessels concealed within–as with the dissected partridges, revelation comes at the price of destruction. These interior forms are also each unique, some shaped like spinning tops, others onion-domed, or conical. Shards of the smashed pots litter the floor, which evokes an archeological site. Along with the pottery fragments, wheat grain spills from the broken vessels, completing an image of spiritual and material nourishment in counterpoise, and of the pattern of generation as an enduring mystery.
In the rear gallery is an assortment of sculptures called “Propositions,” all made of glassware designed by Schiff to suggest laboratory vessels, and all placed on battered laboratory tables. Hung vertically on the back wall, one table–its black enameled top suggests an old blackboard–supports two big-bellied beakers, each containing equal amounts of oil and water. One of the beakers is shaken at regular intervals by a motorized mechanism, so the two fluids alternately emulsify and separate. Mounted side by side, the round flasks inescapably evoke eyeballs. Four other tables, placed on the floor, support flasks, retorts and beakers in various confounding configurations. The simplest Propositions pair two beakers, one containing oil and the other water, each pair connected by stunningly long, graceful necks such that eventually the unlike fluids will combine. The most complicated of these sculptures joins two round glass-filled beakers with five oil-filled flasks as delicate and elegant as perfume bottles. The tubes linking them form a dizzying, sinuous maze, which a system of valves turns into a pattern of circulation that suggests both anatomy and alchemy.
All the glass sculptures encourage the admixture of inimical things–the kinds of contamination that resulted, eighteenth-century naturalists speculated, in mottled skin and worm-infested eyes. Like the stereoscopes, they induce combinations not found in nature. At the same time, their grace and clarity reminds us that any well-formed proposition–any elegant conceptual model–is liable to acquire the force of a truth to which observable reality is made to conform, often long past the point when knowledge renders it untenable.
And yet, obsolete models ultimately do give ground, often yielding unintended resources. As it ages, science becomes literature. Aristotle’s writings are taught in departments of classics, Freud’s more often in those of cultural theory than of experimental psychology. They are read as artifacts of culture, not sources of data. No branch of biology relies on unaided human eyesight. Philosophy has distanced itself from both scientific research and artistic evaluation, though whether it primarily concerns moral, spiritual or material things remains an open question. All of these shifts and realignments come into play in Schiff’s “Double Vision,” as they have in his previous works. Earlier projects have concerned Eastern philosophies (he has made extended trips to Japan and India) and Western ones (a recent installation was made in response to Diderot’s Encyclopedia). Sustained themes include the blurry distinctions separating functional and fanciful objects, and normal and anomalous things; the intersection of raw sensory perception and conscious awareness; and the tension between faith and reason. All were of interest among contributors to theTransactions of the American Philosophical Society as well, and represent connections between their era and our own.
“The troubles we continue to have with notions of the ‘natural,’ the ‘aberrant’ and what constitutes evidence and rationality seem to me to be rooted in the intellectual origins unwittingly revealed in the Transactions,” Schiff says. “And the current resurgence of political claims using our founding documents to validate cultural traditions remind of the malleability of such material.” Opening up the Philosophical Society’s record of retrograde assumptions, bold curiosity and lively speculation with the force of his own imagination, Schiff induces several varieties of deeply illuminating double vision.
Double Vision: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
Double Vision is a solo exhibition of work by Jeffrey Schiff which exposes how unconscious projections from America’s colonial origins shape perceptions of its current reality. In 1786, one year before the constitutional convention, members of the American Philosophical Society, which included such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestly, published personal accounts of the natural world in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. Schiff’s artworks extrapolate from these historical texts to reveal the era’s unresolved struggle between rationality and superstition, democratic ideals and cultural traditions of elitism and slavery–struggles we have inherited as we negotiate conflicting views of scientific enterprise, globalism, religious and ethnic identity and the information age.
Jeffrey Schiff’s Double Vision
by Nancy Princenthal
Seeing double is one route to radical subjectivism: it demonstrates that the world is not mapped point to point in our consciousness. Each eye produces an image, the two are not precisely the same, and neither has priority. Normally they are integrated; intoxication can cause them to separate, as can injury, and various more intentional operations, including the use of optical devices. Vision itself has two meanings, at least, one being transport from the material realm. All these connections have a bearing on Jeffrey Schiff’s enormously ambitious exhibition, “Double Vision.” Inspired by three entries in a 1786 volume of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (which appear as photographic enlargements in the exhibition), Schiff has created a series of works that explore vision and its corruption by culturally shaped preconceptions, while also celebrating the spirit of scientific and humanistic inquiry for which the Enlightenment was distinguished, and to which this country’s founding statesmen were dedicated.
Among the most striking features of the Transactions is their seeming innocence, to a contemporary reader. Philosophy, for the Society’s purposes, was generally identified with the natural sciences, about which its members had widely varied knowledge. Formal higher education was scarce among colonial-era Americans: neither Thomas Paine, nor Benjamin Franklin, nor George Washington–all members of the Philosophical Society–attended college. To a twenty-first-century reader, the findings submitted to the Society seem as likely to have been written by Romantic fabulists (or by masters of satire) as by sober scientists; certainly they seem to reflect the idiosyncratic academic strengths of autodidacts.
The account titled “Two Hearts found in one Partridge” begins with the admission that not all of nature’s phenomena are readily understood. The author, one D’Aboville, nonetheless recommends that those which appear “futile should be grasped like the others,” as parts of a chain whose “precious links . . . will be discovered by time.” His own link concerns a partridge that apparently contained two hearts. The interesting viscera were presented to D’Aboville by a surgeon living next door, and both men were eager to show the specimen to a third witness, but the surgeon, stopping first at home, put the saucer containing the entrails on the ground while he fished for his keys, and his dog ate its contents. The subsequent observation of the innards of 48 other partridges confirmed D’Aboville in his belief that he had seen a true anomaly, though his neighbor, noting that no dissection had been made, cautioned, “one cannot be too circumspect in affirming a fact which we ought not to judge of from external circumstances.” Vision, in other words, is not entirely trustworthy.
The second account with which Schiff engages is of “A Worm in a Horse’s Eye,” as observed by F. Hopkinson, Esq. This time, the inexplicable phenomenon is a “serpent” or “worm” seen to be moving freely behind the iris of a tormented horse, which was put on display by its owner, “a free negroe.” The third narrative, by John Morgan, concerns “a motley coloured, or pye Negro Girl,” property of “Mons. Le Vallois, Dentist of the King of France at Guadeloupe.” In relentlessly dehumanizing detail, Morgan describes the mottled coloration of the two-year-old slave’s skin: “The neck, the upper and under part of the chest, the shoulders, the back, loins and buttocks to the junction with the thighs, and the pudendum,” he writes, “are of the colour of her face, but the loins and the thicker part of the buttocks are of a deeper black,” while elsewhere there are extensive white spots, several times further identified as “lively” and “beautiful.” One such white area, on her forehead, is shaped like an “aigrette” (egret), and several like “stars”; other white spots are compared to lunar eclipses. Morgan hesitates to speculate about the causes of the discolorations, but then goes on to note that the child’s mother “delighted in laying out all night in the open air, and contemplating the stars and planets.” He concludes by acknowledging that there are “many who dispute children’s being ever marked by the fears, longings, or impressions made by mothers on the bodies of their children” during pregnancy, while others “are equally confident” of such emotional causes producing physical effects. Taken together, these three Transactions are a portrait of cultural efforts to distinguish subjective impression from objective fact. They split the differences between vision as a faculty that records and one that interprets, or imagines, or perhaps just passionately hopes.
Schiff’s response to the “pye girl” account presides like a colossus over the entryway to the museum at Wesleyan. A child slave named Maria Sabina, whose skin markings were remarkably similar to those of the toddler in Morgan’s account, was the subject of a painting of the period that Schiff has reproduced in rectangular fragments, which are presented within a three-dimensional scaffold reaching eighteen feet high. (Morgan mentions Sabina in passing, referring to a report by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the famous late 18th-century French naturalist.) The topmost painting fragment features an egret on Sabina’s forehead, a bird that in isolation evokes the holy ghost of Christian iconography. (At Wesleyan, the connection is reinforced by the installation of this work in a very tall, narrow, stone-walled gallery topped by a ocular skylight that sheds a particularly ecclesiastical illumination.) Beneath the egret is a single, limpid eye, which mercilessly commands the entering viewer’s attention. Other panels frame telling details of the painting: a parrot on the girl’s finger, also distinguished by a black, piercing eye; a gold earring; a single, ebony foot; a rustic, grass-roofed colonial church, its simple cross lit by a ruddy setting sun. But most of the panels feature segments of the child’s body, and highlight the painting’s peculiar depiction of her dermatological markings, which are rendered as cloud-like, celestial, and at the same time suspiciously evocative of a domestic animal–a dog, a cow.
Superimposed on all the fragments are linear notations–portolani–excerpted from nautical maps of the Mediterranean made by the cartographer Joseph Roux at around the time the Transactions were published. Schiff thereby brings together two sets of measurements for unstable entities: the fluid categories of race, the menacingly changeable seas. The racially equivocal child, a kind of terra incognita, is presented on the movable scaffold as a provisional being, a puzzle not fully assembled.
In the main gallery, mounted on panels attached to a section of wall flanked by the accounts of the anomalous partridge heart and infested horse eye, are five old-fashioned stereoscopic viewers. Each device is trained on a pair of photographs of equally old-fashioned glass-jarred specimens–collected by the same Buffon who observed Sabina–from the Museum of Natural History in Paris. One specimen in each pair is a human heart, the others are hearts from a monkey, a crocodile, a manatee, a tortoise, and, most evocatively, a pygmy hippopotamus. What one sees when looking into the viewer is a muddled hybrid of the mismatched organs: whereas stereopticons are designed to present subjects with preternatural clarity, these deliver images of confounding complexity, which a viewer struggles in vain to bring into alignment. But the photographic pairs can be seen clearly when one steps away from the optical devices, and the hearts’ similarities calculated. A sixth stereopticon is trained on paired videos–they are screened on iPhones, the same devices used to produce the imagery–of the block of Arch Street in Philadelphia where the worm-bedeviled horse was long ago displayed (and not far from the original meeting place of the Philosophical Society). One video delivers a steady, back and forth scan of the street; the other careens wildly, sending the placid thoroughfare with its banal modern architecture into pandemonium. In other words, a normal equine view is paired with the view from the eye of a frantic worm. The stereopticon fuses the two into an impossible collage, the trees and buildings as seen by the worm streaming in swirling floods over the placid city blocks.
Occupying the floor at the center of the exhibition space is an irregular array of roughly three dozen simple terra-cotta pots, all hand thrown and no two exactly alike, although it takes awhile to see that. Full-shouldered and short necked, they have thick-lipped mouths small enough to make it impossible to see inside. Most are intact, but six are broken to reveal stupa-like clay vessels concealed within–as with the dissected partridges, revelation comes at the price of destruction. These interior forms are also each unique, some shaped like spinning tops, others onion-domed, or conical. Shards of the smashed pots litter the floor, which evokes an archeological site. Along with the pottery fragments, wheat grain spills from the broken vessels, completing an image of spiritual and material nourishment in counterpoise, and of the pattern of generation as an enduring mystery.
In the rear gallery is an assortment of sculptures called “Propositions,” all made of glassware designed by Schiff to suggest laboratory vessels, and all placed on battered laboratory tables. Hung vertically on the back wall, one table–its black enameled top suggests an old blackboard–supports two big-bellied beakers, each containing equal amounts of oil and water. One of the beakers is shaken at regular intervals by a motorized mechanism, so the two fluids alternately emulsify and separate. Mounted side by side, the round flasks inescapably evoke eyeballs. Four other tables, placed on the floor, support flasks, retorts and beakers in various confounding configurations. The simplest Propositions pair two beakers, one containing oil and the other water, each pair connected by stunningly long, graceful necks such that eventually the unlike fluids will combine. The most complicated of these sculptures joins two round glass-filled beakers with five oil-filled flasks as delicate and elegant as perfume bottles. The tubes linking them form a dizzying, sinuous maze, which a system of valves turns into a pattern of circulation that suggests both anatomy and alchemy.
All the glass sculptures encourage the admixture of inimical things–the kinds of contamination that resulted, eighteenth-century naturalists speculated, in mottled skin and worm-infested eyes. Like the stereoscopes, they induce combinations not found in nature. At the same time, their grace and clarity reminds us that any well-formed proposition–any elegant conceptual model–is liable to acquire the force of a truth to which observable reality is made to conform, often long past the point when knowledge renders it untenable.
And yet, obsolete models ultimately do give ground, often yielding unintended resources. As it ages, science becomes literature. Aristotle’s writings are taught in departments of classics, Freud’s more often in those of cultural theory than of experimental psychology. They are read as artifacts of culture, not sources of data. No branch of biology relies on unaided human eyesight. Philosophy has distanced itself from both scientific research and artistic evaluation, though whether it primarily concerns moral, spiritual or material things remains an open question. All of these shifts and realignments come into play in Schiff’s “Double Vision,” as they have in his previous works. Earlier projects have concerned Eastern philosophies (he has made extended trips to Japan and India) and Western ones (a recent installation was made in response to Diderot’s Encyclopedia). Sustained themes include the blurry distinctions separating functional and fanciful objects, and normal and anomalous things; the intersection of raw sensory perception and conscious awareness; and the tension between faith and reason. All were of interest among contributors to theTransactions of the American Philosophical Society as well, and represent connections between their era and our own.
“The troubles we continue to have with notions of the ‘natural,’ the ‘aberrant’ and what constitutes evidence and rationality seem to me to be rooted in the intellectual origins unwittingly revealed in the Transactions,” Schiff says. “And the current resurgence of political claims using our founding documents to validate cultural traditions remind of the malleability of such material.” Opening up the Philosophical Society’s record of retrograde assumptions, bold curiosity and lively speculation with the force of his own imagination, Schiff induces several varieties of deeply illuminating double vision.
2011-12
terra cotta, hydrocal
Shattered terra cotta urns from Terra Cotta Incognito mounted on hydrocal slabs.
12″x16″
Flashe paint on paper
Institute Of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA 1979
graphite powder on architectural surfaces
12′ x 28′ x 28′
This installation imposed a drawing of an imaginary space into the architectural space in which it is situated. Solely through the application of graphite powder onto the existing floors, walls, and columns of the rooms, a fictive space became palpable, oppositional to the architecture and yet entirely dependant on it. The imaginary space was generated by using the existing columns as centerpoint and radius to describe a cylindrical space within the gallery space. The purity of the fictive space was fractured into numerous fragments when applied to the existing architectural forms.
ARTFORUM – October, 1979
Boston
“Six Sculptors.” Institute of Contemporary Art:
by Ronald J. Onorato
The most visually exciting piece in the exhibition was that of JEFFREY SCHIFF. Like Rothfarb, Schiff created his own space but with more ephemeral means – he made no objects, he build no structures. In one sense, the space Schiff used was given as he chose to rework part of the remodeled interior of the institute’s 19th-century building. His chosen area, the main staircase leading to the second floor where the rest of the exhibition was held, is not a very well defined space. It is really a large, open, multisided well cutting between floors. Several turns, a landing, open and closed banisters and the fact that all second floor galleries open onto the well make the space confusing the incoherent. Schiff brings to this awkward architecture a rational clarity – in an unexpected way, by hand-rubbing graphite in a predetermined pattern around the case. Schiff demarcates a cylinder centered on an extant structural column. As a simple, strong vertical rising though the amorphous well, the column provides the pinion on which the rest of Schiff’s conception revolves. All the architecture that falls within his cylindrical boundary – walls, floors, overhead exposed steel beams, banisters, etc. – is covered with the dark powder.
At no single point do Schiff’s shadowed walls resolve completely, but they frame voids, reveal connections between spaces and even pick out various nuances of proportion and detail usually hidden by the homogeneity of white gallery walls. Schiff plays with the space. He wrests it out of its doldrums and gives it back to his audience as his own. With the most evanescent means, Schiff provides an experience spatially startling and visually sensitive.
DRAWING – November – December 1983
Excerpt from: A Dictionary of Assumptions: Drawings by Contemporary Sculptors
By Ronald J. Onorato
One young artist working out of Boston represents a younger subgeneration of those who would directly engage architecture and the environment. Jeff Schiff has often relied on drawing as the most available, most accessible means of developing his large-scale projects. In the late 1970s, he drew several proposals involving the planting of trees in specific patterns, sometimes couples with a structure of his own design. In Porch House Project for a Dense Forest, 1977-80, Schiff projected the pattern of trees and the layout of a covered, rectangular, cloisterlike structure in the relatively wide graduation of tones available to him though a detailed graphite drawing. Sometimes, his plans would include graphic overlays of orthogonal projections or splayed walls (not unlike an unfolded paper box), this to present all the pertinent information that he experience in extant architecture (as in San Bernardino, 1980) or that he wanted his audience to experience in his own creations (as in Shift, 1979).
Drawing was never as central to any sculptor’s activity, however, as it has been in a series of works produced by Schiff between a series of works produced by Schiff between 1979 and 1981. In these projects, Schiff’s sculptural act is a graphic act as he manipulates his audience’s perception of an existing space by coating certain areas of the architecture with dark, metallic grey graphite powder. He might envision an atriumlike court offset within a gallery space (as he did at the University of Rhode Island in 1980) or a complex, cylinder clarification of a complex stairwell (as at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1979). In effect, he gets us to see his spaces, re-ëditions, or even corrections of given sites though the act of rubbing graphite onto walls, ceilings, rugs, thermostats, banisters, and any other architectural elements within his chosen workspace. We experience his sculptural space by literally inhabiting one of his drawings.
Unlike others who transcribe, sometimes with great clarity, their sculptural idea onto a two-dimensional surface, Schiff has managed to incorporate an ancient activity into his manipulation of space as he hand-colors a wall, a section of floor, an edge of a door, or a load-bearing beam.
Schiff’s work underscores the role that drawing splay for all these artists. The flay page offers them a second mode of visual expression. They find in it the means to organize and image their initial ideas and record their accomplishments. It also allows them the freedom to hone and assert what might otherwise be ignored in the structures they build and the spaces they define.
1980
graphite on walls, floors, ceiling
14′ x 31′ x 39′
Graphite powder was rubbed into the walls, ceiling, and carpeted floor to define a rectangular space in contrast to the trapezoidal shape of the extant gallery.
URI Gallery
Jeffrey Schiff
Dec. 3 – 20, 1980
Jeffrey Schiff creates spaces in the most unlikely ways. Spaces within spaces, suggested by drawing – not a drawing that defines lines but planes. Even the planes here are evanescent as if Schiff delimits his special space by subtraction as much as by addition. The experience of standing within two spaces – one of which has an architectural reality and the other only a perceptual reality is singular in Schiff’s installations. The trace of gestures in the powdered graphite, the clean crispness of his edges and planes, the almost stark, meditative interior and the basic polarity of black and white all begin to clue us into an even more subtle group of dichotomies in Schiff’s work. Planes that exist or ones that are invisible, two planes co-terminous or contiguous with each other, one space, a square-ish court nestled within the boundaries (or almost nestled within the boundaries) of a more awkward, quirky space – these are some of the perceptual balances addressed by Schiff in the present installation.
Ronald J. Onorato
Assistant Professor of Art
University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 1981
cast plaster, sheetrock
12′ x 60′ x 45′
Based on architectural hybrids and overlays in Rome, Revision inserts elements of an imaginary architecture that reorient the space of the concrete University Gallery. Cast-in-place plaster floor slabs and posts, and plasterboard walls turn the space to form a new axial orientation, borrowing columns from the gallery to form a classical façade. The center of the extant gallery is marked by the removal of a square of carpet, while the new center is marked by an imposing cast plaster well. Features of the old architecture are incorporated into the new, redefined and reoriented. Part of the old gallery becomes exterior space in relation to the new.
UNIVERSITY GALLERY
Revision: An Installation
“It is difficult to characteris my work in general terms because its specific form varies with each space it inhabits. The structure of the site itself suggests particular issues and the forms in which they might develop. As such, the work is usually architectural, and is separable from its context.”
Jeffrey Schiff – 1979
Revision: An Installation is an architectural sculpture created specifically for the University Gallery. The walls, columns, posts and platforms of the installation are imposed upon the architecture of the Gallery altering and redefining our perception of the space. The viewer is simultaneously aware of the original Gallery architecture and Schiff’s imposing addition. Entering the Gallery from the main hallway one encounters a pair of white plaster columns set on an axis diagonal to the hallway and gallery space. Our attention is drawn to a second set of columns, one plaster, one concrete, emphasizing the visitor’s initial 4/3 view o the main gallery. Once in the main gallery we are confronted by a low platform that invites us into Schiff’s walled structure. On either side of the platform two of the Gallery’s concrete columns have taken on a new identity as the faade columns of Revision. Behind us, two posts direct our attention to the processional stairways leading to the lower gallery.
Entering the enclosed area of Revision: An Installation one notes the removal of a square of carpet. This marks the actual center of the main gallery. The center of Schiff’s newly created space is assertively marked by the presence of a cast plaster well placed between the second pair of concrete Gallery columns. Eight posts define the rear section of the enclosure and emphasize the interplay of square and rectangular forms, such as the doorway, vent, cut in the carpet and well. A strong horizontal axis is formed between the platform entrance and rear door. Old and new exist side by side. Schiff incorporates the floor, columns, rear wall and ceiling of the original Gallery architecture with the walls, columns, posts and well of his extensive addition.
Revision reflects the artist’s interest in the historical process of cultural overlay. In conversation he refers to “architectural hybrids” such as Sr. Peter’s in Rome. Built on the site of the old St. Peters basilica, begun in 333 A.D., the present-day church was designed in the 16th century by the Renaissance architects Bramante and Michelangelo and revised and completed by the Baroque architects Maderno and Bernini in the 17th century. Revision: An Installation parallels this process of cultural layering within the context of the Gallery.
To lead us to the west gallery, Schiff has built a columned walkway or colonnade which the artist relates to a street. A warm light at the end of the colonnade draws us into the west gallery which contains the artist’s drawings for several recent installations.
The simple, classical architectural elements and circular and axial orientations of Schiff’s Revision: An Installation suggest various associations with religious architecture. The artist refers to the sacred hill of the Acropolis at Athens, relating the Gallery’s main hallway, defined by white plaster columns, to the entry gate of the Acropolis, the Propylaea. The columned enclosure of Revision: An Installation suggests the ancient Green columned temple, the Parthenon. The well which asserts the central point of the enclosure suggests circularly oriented sacred structures such as the Pantheon in Rome and Christian baptisteries. The artist draws upon diverse cultural references in his installation but avoids specific identification with any single structure.
Schiff notes that the temple of church is erected on a sacred spot, a site that over the centuries and inhabited by varied cultures is rarely discarded. The artists relates this notion to Revision: An Installation, quoting the artist Barnett Newman who has stated, “to my mind the basic issue for a work of art, whether it is architecture, painting or sculpture, is first and foremost for it to create a sense of place so that the artist and the beholder will know where they are É it’s only after man knows where he is that he can ask himself “who am I?” and “where am I going?”
ART NEW ENGLAND June 1981
Jeff Schiff: Revision: An Installation
By Robin Karson
Jeff Schiff’s new site-specific work Revision: An Installation occupies the main and west galleries at the University of Massachusetts Gallery in Amherst. The piece, which is both ambitious and subtle, redefines an already exceptional architectural space. The white plaster elements of the revision contrast clearly with the permanent dark gray forms of the cavernous and dramatic space.
Acting on the original architecture with great strength and sensitivity, Schiff has realigned the pronounced east-west axis of the main gallery toward the north and south. Two giant columns, which once stood separately in the large space-like redwoods, join visually to become a formal entryway, described further by a shallow platform that leads into a new enclosed sanctuary. The real center of the gallery is marked by a square hole cut into the carpet: the visual center for the sanctuary is marked by an open cube of wishing-well proportions.
Once inside the chamber the viewer is aware of a new directional pull. Though an arch in the west wall an arcade of columns and walls becomes visible: it leads the eye and eventually the body as well into the west gallery. Warm light swells from even smaller rooms to the north and south (right and left), which are discovered only by following the mazelike passageway to the light source. Here the viewer finds preparatory sketches by Schiff for Revision and other installations.
Schiff’s vision, while lofty and elegant, still operates on a human scale and so manages to communicate warmth. Visually reminiscent of a Greek ruin with their stripped-to-essentials look, the elements also described a metaphorical passage, a time sequence that becomes an event.
The artist’s method and interest in structural overlay have been shared by many months abroad. A Prix de Rome gave Schiff the opportunity to experience firsthand the Pantheon, Santa Costanza, the Parthenon, monuments at Carnac, Italian villas, and hundreds of other structures he cites as important influences, all of which reflect borrowings from preexisting forms that result in new hybrid spaces. In Amherst the artist’s space within-a space works much like those meandering, additive structures that characterize ancient forms of architecture Schiff confers upon the University Gallery space a new order, complexity, and importance.
Robin Karson
