Pathways

From Jonathan Keats’ Centuries of Bristlecone

Tracing new genealogies is a mode of reconfiguring relationships in—and to—time, typically by emphasizing the longue durée over the immediate. Jonathan Keats is an artist who could be said to create sculptures in time. One project is a climate change clock, a simple band of stamped metal placed around bristlecone pines to trace their actual rate of growth against what is projected for the next 10,000 years. Another project is a long exposure photograph of a city for one century, creating a work of art that will show the future an image of the city in flux.

Keats’ projects are part of a broader movement that argues that we are living for the first time in the Anthropocene, a geological era that’s primary feature is its human influence. But even this movement could be said to have a long genealogy. The Public Domain Review highlighted a work by George Perkins Marsh from 1864, entitled Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action. Moreover, Marsh’s work is itself genealogical. He argued against the theory of “inexhaustible resources” by comparing the physical geography discussed in classical Greek sources to current conditions, finding that more than one half of what was described by the ancient writers was “deserted by civilized man and surrendered to hopeless desolation.”

Sofonisba Anguissola, Portrait of the Artist’s Sisters Playing Chess, 1555

A new show at Madrid’s Prado, “A Tale of Two Women Painters,” recovers two overlooked women artists of the Italian Renaissance: Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana. The recovery was necessary in part due to misattribution of their masterworks to famous male artists, including Titian and Carracci. A write-up in The Paris Review reflects upon the broader significance of this show and the work of these two artists.

Several new monographs have appeared that could be considered significant contributions to the genealogy of modernity. Jonathan Scott’s How the Old World Ended is precisely this, a tracking of the complex causes that led from the European middle ages to the possible emergence of Dutch and British East India Companies and the complex core of relations between colonial trade between these two empires and the American colonies. The struggle for reproductive rights receives a powerful new genealogy in Birth Strike by Jenny Brown. And Andrew Delbanco’s The War Before the War offers a stirring account of how the fugitive slave became a figure in the political imagination of Americans prior to the Civil War. The New York Review of Books [paywall] argues that one of the work’s strong points is its ability to show how the war was not inevitable.

The 1619 Project, discussed in a previous Links post, has generated a controversy amongst historians. The Atlantic reports on this. Yet with the party hoping to modify the purpose of the project claiming that anti-slavery politics were a “very new thing in the world in the 18th century,” this reader remains very unconvinced.

Historians often claim to give voice to the dead and, perhaps even more often, anguish over the politics of this gesture. But archaeologists have recently done this literally. With the use of 3D printing and other techniques, we can now hear what an ancient Egyptian priest named Nesyamun sounded like. The results, dear reader, are more comical than convincing. Byaw!