Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early

Transcription

Grey Room, Inc.
Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century
Author(s): Jonathan Crary
Source: Grey Room, No. 9 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 5-25
Published by: The MIT Press
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Gericault,
the
and
of
Sites
Early
Panorama,
Reality
in the
Nineteenth Century
JONATHANCRARY
Even as our present lurches further into the twenty-first century, there is still a
pervasive sense that an archaeology of our own rapidly changing perceptual world
begins in the nineteenth century amid what Jean-Louis Comolli has now memorably described as "the frenzy of the visible."' The grounds for claiming this would
certainly have less to do with the fact that film and photography were nineteenthcentury inventions (for the relative transience of these forms is now self-evident).
Rather, if it is valuable to insist on continuities between the present and 150 years
ago, those links would involve the status of the spectator and the persistence of
certain imperatives for consumption, attention, and perceptual competence. Rather
than focusing on the development of specific apparatuses or technologies, such as
film or photography, I believe it is more important to see how a related group of
strategies through which a subject is modernized as a spectator traverses a range
of seemingly different objects and locations.
To move quickly from the general to something concrete, consider William Hogarth's
South wark Fair from the 1730s, a work in many ways remote from the more modern
problems I have just outlined. It is, however, an image in which we can see forms
of premodern and modern culture coexisting side by side. Clearly we are looking at
the remains of a traditional social phenomenon in an exhausted condition, at the
tail end of its presence within European collective experience. Rather than a literal
depiction of a specific fairground, we see here the marginal survival of what had
been the carnival energies of festival within premodern Europe. Even through
Hogarth's own class prejudices, which privileged thrift, conjugality, moderation,
and industriousness, we still get a tenuous sense of how the disorder of carnival
overturns a distinction between spectator and performer, how it destabilizes any
Grey Room
09, Fall 2002,
pp. 5-25.
? 2002 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts
Institute
of Technology
7
William Hogarth. Southwark Fair,
1730s. Engraving.
5
Detailof Hogarth,SouthwarkFair.
6
fixed position or identity, how with inversions of high and low it parodies and profanes official forms, how it suggests a teeming mix of sensory modalities, the tactility of bodies mingling, sounds and smell, all at least coequal with vision. But at
the same time it is clear that the leftover fragments of carnival, the vertigo of the
topsy-turvy world, had by this time been relegated to the terrain of the fairground,
segregated from the more rationalized economic life of the city.
This brings me to one particular component of Hogarth's turbulent scene: the two
seated individuals at the corner looking into a double-sided peep show.2 Here we
have two spectators who are constituted and positioned very differently than anyone
else depicted in the print. These immobile and absorbed figures, interfacing with
the window of the peep show, anticipate one of the primary pathways that popular
culture will trace out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth and eventually
even into our own time. And it is a process that obliterates or at least sublimates the
possibility of carnival. The continuities I am thinking of can be suggested, for example,
by considering the peep-show-type setup of the Kaiserpanorama in the early 1880s
or the related miniature arrangement of the stereoscope, which was pervasive
throughout the second half of the nineteenth century (or many other similar forms).
I'm not pointing to any kind of technological lineage or some sequence dependent
on the improvement or development of devices, as if the important questions concerned the literal viewing apparatus. Even though the form of the peep show can be
followed in reverse from the 1730s-back to the perspective boxes of the seventeenth
century and probably further into the sixteenth century-what interests me is the
move that begins in the later
eighteenth century when the
spectator of the peep-show form
coincides in a general way with
WalterBenjamin'saccount of the
reader of the novel as a new isolated consumer of a mass-produced commodity. The model of
optical apparatus in the corner
of Hogarth's fairground shifts
from a relatively minor element
of early modern popular culture
to become a powerful model of
what would come to characterize dominant forms of visual
Topleft:Kinetoscope,1890s.
Topright:Stereoscopes in use,
1860s.
Bottom:Kaiserpanorama,1880s.
8
Gryor0
culture in Europe and North America-that is, the relative separation of a viewer
from a milieu of distraction and the detachment of an image from a larger background. The physical device is simply a figure for a broader psychic, perceptual,
and social insularity of the viewer, as well as a pervasive privileging of vision over
the senses of touch and smell. Mikhail Bakhtin indicates that, after the disappearance of carnival, experience in the nineteenth century acquires a "private chamber"
character for an enclosed and privatized subject.3
As much recent work has shown, a major component of the making of nineteenth
century visual culture was the education and training of both the individuals and
collectivities for whom new forms of visual consumption were being produced.
The many ways in which this occurred included the self-disciplining of the spectator as an occupant of or visitor to interior spaces and institutions: in a sense, the
formation of modern audiences. The prioritization of visuality was accompanied
by imperatives for various kinds of self-control and social restraint, particularly
for forms of attentiveness that require both relative silence and immobility. As
Tony Bennett and others have shown, the public museum (whether of art or natural
history) emerged as one of the sites in the nineteenth century where new kinds of
social intercourse seemed to pose possible problems.4 Amid the democratizing
tendencies in postrevolutionary Europe there was concern that an unregulated
mixing of social classes could import a fairground disorder to interior public spaces,
thereby harming the pedagogical and ideological agendas of those institutions. For
example, when the Crystal Palace was under construction there was considerable
official anxiety that this largest-ever indoor space would be threatened by unruly
behavior and public drunkenness. A large security force was recruited and set in
place on opening day and on days of reduced ticket prices, but it turned out to be
completely unnecessary.5 In this turning point in the exhibition of manufactured
consumer goods, there were virtually no incidents of trouble. The luster of the
commodity radiated its own exhortations for self-control.
One particular site in Europe has been especially fascinating to those studying
nineteenth century visual culture: the Egyptian Hall which operated in London,
in the area of Piccadilly, more or less continuously from around 1812 until 1904
Crary
Gericau t, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the EarlyNineteenth Century
9
when the building, then a hall for early cinematic exhibitions, was demolished.
Originally called the London Museum by its founder William Bullock, it quickly
came to be called the Egyptian Hall because of its exterior of simulated Egyptian
relief sculpture and hieroglyphs.6 Though now physically lost, it is important as a
stratified site through which the historically mutating shape of an exhibition/entertainment milieu can be examined over this long span of time. In the nearly 100
years of its existence one could have seen displays of natural history, art exhibits,
freak shows, and a vast range of curiosities, versions of panoramas and magic-lantern
shows, phantasmagorias, ventriloquists, magic shows, movies, vaudeville, and
other music hall-type acts.
At its opening in 1812, advertisements promised "Natural and foreign curiosities,
Antiquities and Productions of the Fine Arts," since the Hall's semipermanent display included various spoils taken from Egypt (alongside, no doubt, a far greater
number of fakes): mummies, papyrus texts, statues, gems. There were also exhibits
of hundreds of stuffed birds and animals, organized into a rough categorization of
types and groups. At this point in the late teens the Egyptian Hall was a hybrid
of the various possibilities of organized display in the nineteenth century, a mix of
the obsolete traditions of the cabinet of curiosity with a burgeoning but inchoate
inclination to quasi-scientific organization. But it never was to merge into the
growth of the modern bourgeois museum; instead it remained part of the modern
permutation of the older model of curiosities into a nineteenth-century preoccupation with "attractions," to use
Tom Gunning's term.7 Gunning
sees early cinema as an attraction
that, like many other phenomena
in the nineteenth century, relied
on the direct stimulation and
shock of display, the inciting of
visual curiosity and pleasure,
and the solicitation of attention
through surprise and astonishment, as in magic acts or shows
of giants or Siamese twins in
which the mere exhibition of
something is self-justifying. The
word "attractions," as Gunning
explains, operated in the writings
Top:EgyptianHall,c. 1900.
Bottom:EgyptianHall,1820s.
Interiorview.
Opposite:Posterfor Egyptian
Hallattractions,1844.
10
Grey Room 09
of Sergei Eisenstein to evoke its fairground origins. In this larger sense it is a
question of how the carnival disorder of the premodern fairground, its profuse
grotesquerie and strangeness, is deposed onto the peep-show model of visual
attraction and how the multifaceted festival participant is turned into an individualized and self-regulated spectator.
Perhaps the single most important category of exhibitionary attraction in the nineteenth century encompasses those various techniques of display whose allure was
simply their relative efficacy at providing an illusory reproduction or simulation of
the real, regardless of what was being shown. There will never be a clear separation
in this historical period between the appeal of a technique of verisimilitude solely
as demonstration of its own operation and an attention to the referent conjured up
by that apparatus. Thus a site like the Egyptian Hall is important for the diversity
of "reality effects" that occurred within it. This now familiar phrase is of course
from the work, in the late 1960s, of the French critic Roland Barthes, who insisted
that a new discursive model of reality takes shape in the nineteenth century, that
"the real" as modernity came to conceive it was invented then. It should be remembered that he used this term in several different ways. On the one hand, the reality
effect for Barthes was a specific device in nineteenth-century literature that had to
do with the function of the so-called concrete detail in a fictional text-he called
it the "direct collusion of a referent and a signifier,
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I Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nneteenth
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11
In the early years of the Egyptian Hall, for example, one of the most successful
exhibits was the display of Napoleon's battle carriage captured after the Battle
of Waterloo and shipped back to England. What went on view was not simply a
carriage but a model of the "real"in newly distilled form. Obviously it was of interest because it was luxurious, bulletproof, painted dark blue with gold trim and
wheels of vermilion, and Napoleon's wounded, one-armed Dutch coach driver had
been brought back to be part of the exhibition. But apparently a feature that was of
overwhelming interest to the thousands of spectators was the chance to look inside
at the plush drawers and built-in cabinets that contained his personal wardrobe,
bars of soap, a pocket watch, flasks of liqueurs, and numerous other minor articles.
In line with Barthes argument about the concrete detail, these mundane items
became a supplementary but vital confirmation of the authenticity of the object
itself. It is particularly noteworthy that after years of exhibition on tour throughout Britain and other parts of Europe the carriage was sold to the then thriving
establishment of Madame Tussaud's in London, to become part of her permanent
display of waxwork figures of Napoleon (for whom she had previously worked).9
This was a familiar strategy in wax museums, where the simulation was augmented by the adjacency of objects having a literal presence-that is, a wax figure
seated at the desk or table actually taken from their prison cell, or, even more
simply, the proximity of illusory wax skin with the real clothing that often had
actually belonged to the subject. But despite the unquestioned popularity of wax
museums, it was such "mixed" reality effects that finally were the most problematic in the nineteenth century, usually occupying an outer limit of popular taste
or fascination.
At this point I want to examine another piece of the heterogeneous visual
culture of the Egyptian Hall, an object placed on display there in June of 1820,
Theodore G6ricault's Raft of the Medusa.10 There are many reasons why the exhibition of this work in this particular venue is of historical importance, and there
will only be space here to indicate a few of them. First, it should be noted that
the Egyptian Hall was, for awhile, one of the most important sites in London for
the temporary exhibition of paintings, usually paintings that either in terms of
sheer scale or subject matter had a viability as a popular commercial attraction.11
My larger point, however, is an obvious one, though it certainly bears stating: the
observer of painting in the nineteenth century was always also an observer who
simultaneously encountered a proliferating diversity of optical and sensory expe-
Theodore Gericault.
Raft of the Medusa, 1819.
12
Grey Room 09
riences. In other words, paintings were produced and assumed meaning not in
terms of some cloistered aesthetic and institutional domain, but as one of the many
consumable and fleeting elements within an expanding field of images, commodities, and attractions.
Thus, with Raft of Medusa there are two distinct but not unrelated problems: the
circumstances of its production and of its reception. The fact that G6ricault chose
for the subject of his painting a contemporary news item made it already compatible with a larger social arena in which information was transformed into commodities and attractions.12But this is almost incidental to the particular approach
G6ricault staked out for his representation of this subject, which is why this painting
occupies its unstable position between two distinct historical worlds-between
the enclosed order of reference organized around the rhetoric of the human body in
the art of antiquity and the Renaissance and an unbounded heterogeneous informational field of journalistic, medical, legal, and political sources of evidence, testimony, fact, and other guarantees of the real.
G6ricault made extraordinary efforts to master, to assimilate the facts, the truth,
the evidence, the very immediacy of the horrible event, an event which already by
the time he began working on it had assumed a multilayered informational existence. G6ricault engaged the project as if all of this new data could be distilled and
forged into a visual experience that would synthesize and transcend its fragmented
character. According to Charles Cl6ment, one of his earliest biographers, G6ricault
assembled an immense "dossier crammed with authentic proofs and documents of
all sorts," indicating that G6ricault attempted to collect every news story and public
C-ry
r
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Paorama
and Sies
of ReaIity in the Ea rIy Nineteeth
Century
13
document about the expedition and shipwreck, every bit of eyewitness testimony,
including the best-selling firsthand account by two survivors, J.B. Savigny and
Alexandre Corr6ard. Not only did he assemble all the journalistic images he could
find, but he commissioned the surviving carpenter of the Medusa to build him a
small-scale model of the raft, which he tested out in water to see how it floated and
maneuvered. He made the acquaintance of Savigny and Corr6ard (the former was
the ship's surgeon) and interviewed them at length even though their published
account was already exhaustive. In fact, G6ricault used Savigny and Corr6ard as
models for two of the figures standing near the mast, fastening them onto the painting for their stature as eyewitnesses but also as a way of making actual the representation. We should note the utter discontinuity between the semantic status of
their images in the painting and the various references to old master art, whether
Michelangelo or Rubens; this is part of the discursive fissure that I suggest runs
through the painting. However, the most extreme and notorious measure undertaken by G6ricault to ensure the authenticity of his work was his insistence on
becoming familiar with the immediacy of death-not death in a narrative, psychological, religious, or symbolic sense-but death as the literal degradation of the
physical body, the body drained of any living coherence. What Cl6ment referred
to as the immense documentary dossier of G6ricault would finally have to include
also the corpses and body parts he had delivered to his studio (or studied in hospitals)
in order to live with the sights and smells of decaying human bodies, just as the survivors of the raft who kept parts of the dead on board for their own sustenance. As
far as we know, the only thing G6ricault didn't do while immersing himself in the
event was experiment with cannibalism. It is this whole dossier of fact, of evidence,
of direct experience that produces, to use Barthes's phrase, "the referential plenitude" of the work. Of course it is not a work that looks real by virtue of its literal
correspondence to a specific viewpoint of a specific moment. As critics have noted
for a century and a half, we see no starving, emaciated bodies; we don't see the raft as
it really was, submerged a few feet below water level. Its verisimilitude is based on
its more profound embeddedness in new networks of the real, in which older models
of visibility are exceeded.
Working amid this field of effects, G6ricault's first inclinations are highly telling.
Initially he was convinced that the project could be achieved only through a sequence
of several paintings, that the event could be narrated only in terms of its temporal
Right:TheodoreGericault.
Study of severed limbs,c. 1819.
Opposite,left:Raftof the Medusa.
Detail.
Opposite,right:Theodore
GUricault.
Madwoman,c. 1821.
14
Grey Poom 09
dispersal, its inherent dislocations. But much of the historical significance of the Raft
is how G6ricault forced this content and its discursive substructure back within
the rhetorical terms of a classical model of representation. That he could not do
this seamlessly, that these incompatible projects collide and fracture is part of what
made this such a charged object at this threshold of modernity. Even so, as Michael
Fried and others have indicated, it is no accident that in his efforts to reduce the
event of the disaster to a single image he chose this moment-a moment in which
vision takes on such an exclusive priority, in which the focus of attention is funneled and narrowed to a single barely perceptible point.13 To redirect the terms of
Fried's argument, the painting incarnates a vision all but cut off from the possibility
of a reciprocal exchange of gazes. For reprieve and deliverance in this image would
consist in a mutual exchange of gazes, in being acknowledged by the ship, which
is here tragically denied or at least deferred.14But this is part of what Bakhtin saw
as the "private chamber" character of experience in the nineteenth century, where
the peep-show model of looking describes both an intensification of visuality and
also an isolation of the subject from a lived embeddedness in a given social milieu.
We get an even more piercing sense of this new understanding of the privatization
of vision in G6ricault'slate portraits of the insane. We are here a long way from Goya's
nearly contemporary renderings of the madhouse. The line between the normal
and the pathological is made disturbingly indistinct. Seen from across a room,
these pictures appear more or less congruent with the conventions of middle-class
portraiture, and it is only on closer examination that one realizes something about
them is different. A key feature of these images is the breakdown of a reciprocal
gaze, not only the impossibility of a mutuality but a sense of the complete nonidentity of worlds, the loss of a shared objective reality. Music historian Lawrence
Kramer, in an essay on Chopin, thematizes the first half of the nineteenth century
as a time when "human subjectivity ceases to be a
common field and becomes instead a secret recess.
No longer a shared sameness, the self becomes an
essential difference, constantly threatened with
separation from the outer world."15Here G6ricault
discloses that separation,that difference in extreme
form. And it is alongside this shift that the need
arises for at least a simulation of a real world
experienced in
common, that a
preoccupation
Crary
•icau.t,
the Panora~r and Sites of Reality in the Eary Nineteenth Century
15
with the real emerges, eventually leading to whole industries of reality production
taking shape in a rapidly modernizing West. Yet it is not just that the possibility of our
eyes meeting the eyes of the insane is unthinkable here, because any reciprocity
would include an unbearable moment of self-recognition and self-differentiation.
Rather, it is that Gericault has recorded, with apparent clinical objectivity and
detachment, individuals who were perceiving a hyperdelusional world. It is as if
they were optical instruments whose lens we will never look through, but which,
if we could, would reveal a radically different vision of the real. In a related way,
G6ricault was repeatedly drawn during his stay in England to architectural motifs
that functioned as perceptual "black holes." He showed figures on the verge of
entrances into dark unfathomable spaces that communicated nothing back to the
observer except the shiver of an annihilating loss of redemptive possibilities.
But back to the spring of 1820, when a somewhat melancholy G6ricaultmade arrangements for the huge painting to be rolled up, crated, and shipped to London where
it opened for public exhibition in June at the Egyptian Hall. Newspaper ads emphasized the grim but sensational subject of the painting and equally stressed its size
as an attraction in its own right. That the public in England was already well
acquainted with the horrific details of the story is in part attested to by the fact that
when the painting arrived a stage play about the wreck of the Medusa, titled The
Fatal Raft, was already showing to sold-out houses a few streets away. Thus the work,
now extracted from the universe of the Louvre, was made continuous with another
network of "actualities,"a field of reified current events, which supported its value as
an attraction. In the six months Raft of the Medusa was on display at the Egyptian
Hall, it drew over 50,000 visitors. Admission was a shilling, which included an
abridged edition of the English translation of the book by Savigny and Corr6ard.
The availability of this text at the exhibition, of its authority as objective historical
discourse, functioned alongside the painting as a reality effect, complicit in establishing what Barthes calls the authenticity and "omnipotence of the referent."
Following its run in London, which did much to ease, at least temporarily,
G6ricault's financial problems and depression, a deal was struck to have the painting do a run in Dublin. Here, we learn from standard accounts, the painting did
Ali
.....
:::
:•
Right:FrenchPanorama.
..
Opposite:EgyptianHall
exhibitionof modernand
ancientMexico,1820s.
16
:
.!
Grey Room 09
less well, and after two months in the spring of 1821 the decision was made to have
the work shipped back to France. Why did it not do as well in Dublin as it had in
London? In a remarkable historical intersection, G6ricault's painting competed for
attention in the Irish capital with another artifactof nineteenth-century visual culture,
a moving panorama titled "The Wreck of the Medusa," which represented precisely
the same recent news item.16 Sometimes called a Peristrephic panorama, a moving
panorama involved a long band of canvas on which a continuous sequence of scenes
had been painted and which was unrolled before a seated audience. Colored lighting enhanced the effect of individual scenes, and often a small orchestra added
drama to the whole. Thus, for roughly the same price, a consumer had the choice of
seeing over 10,000 square feet of moving painted surface or about 450 square feet of
motionless canvas. Moreover, one of the scenes in the moving panorama was effectively a copy of G6ricault's painting, so one really didn't need to pay to see the original as well. If G6ricault's painting and the Dublin panorama were rivals for
patronage within an economic space around 1820, it certainly should not be seen
as some opposition between elite culture and a crude popular form. Rather it was
competition between two types of reality effect that each represented the same
event, and the marketplace decided which was the more compelling attraction.
The word panorama was used in a variety of ways in the early nineteenth century,
and the Egyptian Hall was a place where large mural paintings, billed as panoramas,
were created as components of exhibitions. One such exhibit displayed a large
quantity of objects and specimens brought back by Bullock from a six-month expedition to Mexico. These included a mix of real and simulated artifacts: casts of
Aztec sculpture such as Montezuma's calendar stone, as well as hundred of birds
and fish, fake plants and fruits, all placed in the context of a large, three-sided
painting of a Mexican landscape (like a twentieth-century museum diorama) with
a three-dimensional dwelling abutting the two-dimensional painted mural surface.
The word panorama would, of course, soon be used overwhelmingly to signify a
360-degree circular painting exhibited on the interior of a cylindrically shaped
structure. A patent was issued for such a form of exhibition in 1787, but the word
panorama was not used until 1791, and by 1800 numerous panoramas were operating in large European cities.17 The panorama is a compelling object for historians in that it flourished in a relatively consistent manner for a period of time
coinciding very closely with the nineteenth century itself. A key problem is to
Crary
Gricaui
, the Panorama, and Sites of Reaity in the Eary Nneteenth
Century
u
17
explain its historical durability in a time when constant innovation and rapid
obsolescence were already integral parts of cultural production and consumption.
At the same time, within any discussion of reality effects, it should be noted that
the panorama is a distinctly nonphotographic form.
This is hardly to imply that the meaning or effects of the panorama remained static
for over a century. For in fact its status continually mutated in relation to social,
technological, and cultural developments. And about the early 1820s one point
needs to be stressed: the panorama had an uneasy but relatively uncontested proximity to traditional modes of painting. The situation was very different from that
of a few decades later, when the panorama was clearly situated within the terrain
of popular entertainment and the term panorama painter was an expression of disdain. At least into the mid-1820s there was still a pervasive though often uncertain
sense that panoramas were part of the same representational codes as older existing forms of painting. It was a startlingly unfamiliar format, but there was the tacit
assumption among many writers that over time panoramic painting would become
a conventional way of representing certain kinds of subjects and that gradually
major artists would gravitate toward it. Initially many artists and critics immersed
in traditional practices were favorably disposed to the panorama. In one of the last
major academic treatises on perspective, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, in 1800,
saw the panorama as fully within the terms of classical representation, as just a
new twist on familiar problems.18In the popular press of both London and Paris the
same reviewers who wrote about conventional art exhibitions would often review
the opening of a panorama painting, generally applying the same aesthetic criteria
in evaluating the latter's success or failure. We know that many artists (including
David, Ingres, Friedrich, Constable, Turner, and others) were familiar with and
favorably disposed to the panorama. Although this familiarity means really no
more than saying that an artist living in 1920 went to the movies, it also suggests
the degree to which panoramas were pervasive urban phenomena.
I think it is reasonable to see the panorama as one of the places in the nineteenth
century where a modernization of perceptual experience occurs. The panorama
falls into the general category of the phantasmagoric as defined by Theodor Adorno:
::
.77:
7"m
Right:LeicesterSquare
Panorama.London,c. 1802.
Opposite:Panoramaviewing
platform,Copenhagen,c. 1880.
18
GreyRoom 09
i::
Nw-:_
borrowing from Marx, Adorno used this adjective to describe any form or process
under capitalism that concealed or mystified its actual production or operation.19
How, specifically, was the panorama phantasmagoric? After purchasing entry, a
spectator usually entered into the rotunda by means of a staircase that led one out
onto the central viewing platform. The interior was darkened in such a way that
only subdued light entering indirectly from the top of the building illuminated the
painting on the walls of the structure, leaving the rest of the interior in relative
obscurity. Such lighting conditions made the painting seem to radiate its own light;
and it was sometimes found that on bright summer days the light would be too
strong-enough so that the seams of the separate canvas became visible, revealing
the painting's constructed character and thus disrupting the illusion. Part of the
reason for the elevation was purely functional-no doorways could interrupt the
continuous surface of the painting. This also meant that spectators could never cast
shadows on the image, the effect of which would obviously be antiphantasmagoric,
disclosing it to be merely a two-dimensional surface.
Almost all panoramas sought to create a spatial remove from the image, with a
moatlike area surrounding the viewing platform. The spectator therefore had
nothing like the floor in a museum- or gallery-type interior to assist in a subjective
rationalization of the intervening distance between eye and image. We have
accounts indicating that audience members occasionally tossed coins at the image
as a way of determining how far away it was. Forms as seemingly different as
Daguerre's Diorama, Wagner's theater at Bayreuth, the Kaiserpanorama, the
Kinetoscope and, of course, cinema as it took shape in the late 1890s are other key
nineteenth-century examples of the image as an autonomous luminous screen of
attraction, whose apparitional appeal is an effect of both its uncertain spatial location and its detachment from a broader visual field. This is how the panorama can
at least be partially associated with the peep-show model discussed earlier: it
involves a detachment of the image from a wider field of possible sensory stimulation and creates a calculated confusion about the literal location of the painted
surface as a way of enhancing its illusions of presence and distance. At the same
ricaut, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Ear y Nineteenth Century
Crary
19
time the panorama is another instance of how spectatorship accompanied by a narrowed focus of attention produces social docility, even in group circumstances,
even for an ambulatory spectator.
But the panorama is unique: unlike these other forms, it presents an unbounded
image, an image that is to the viewer endless. It has no frame (and in this certainly
departs from the peep-show model).20Strictly speaking, it does have upper and lower
boundaries. But as one moves one's eyes, head, or body laterally, the image appears
as a continuous boundaryless field. This is its self-defining feature. In one sense
this horizontal orientation is a decisive culmination of a secularization of sight
long underway, not only for its refusal of the obvious symbolic resonances of the
ceiling and the vertical, but also for its more important evaporation of the vanishing point and its residual theological implications. And it was within this format
that a popular taste for concrete actuality asserted itself. Developing out of late
eighteenth-century enthusiasms for view painting and picturesque landscape (as
opposed to images with mythological, allegorical, or erudite historical themes),
panorama audiences were attracted by cityscapes, landscapes, or recent events that
one would have read about-battles, sieges, or views of remote regions of the world.
What was it about the panorama that seemed to guarantee a heightened verisimilitude? Clearly it had to do with the novelty of its new encircling format, but what
are some of the ways to understand this? Going back to Barthes's essay, we find that
his most extensive example of the reality effect is one that he himself describes
with the word "panorama."21Barthes has derived this characterization from a textual object, Flaubert's Madame Bovary. It is from a point in the novel when Emma
has been making regular trips to Rouen to see her lover. She has made the coach
ride to Rouen often enough so that she knows every turn in the road, every landmark along the way, including the crest of a hill from which the entire city of
Rouen spreads in full view below.22 Here are Flaubert's words: "Then, all at once,
the city came into view. Sloping downward like an amphitheater, drowned in mist,
Thus seen from above, the
it sprawled out shapelessly beyond its bridges....
whole landscape had the static quality of a painting."23The rest of the paragraph
is an accumulation of details-about the boats anchored in the Seine, the distant
gray hills, the factory chimneys, streets lined with bare trees, roofs wet with rain,
and so on. Thus Flaubert himself introduces in his text, if not specifically the
panorama, the idea of a visual image that is circular or round (an amphitheater)
Panoramaof Prague,1840s.
Fragment.
20
GreyRoom 09
and which is like a painting. Important here are the affinities between the strategies
of the real at work in panorama painting and in literary realism; it is a pretending
or seeming to transcribe the world in a scrupulous fashion while avoiding the trap
of what Barthes calls "the vertigo of notation," whereby an authentic realism would
seem to demand the deliriously impossible inclusion in representation of everything present to sight. This is where the "insignificant detail" in the text intervenes
as if to proclaim that if this level of minutiae, of narrative irrelevance, is given, then
the world is being seen in its completeness, its reality.
If we can speak of the panorama as a reality effect, it is an effect produced through
a confluence of more elements than I could begin to discuss here. But perhaps the
overriding way in which a related impression of completeness, of an inexhaustible
inclusion of the real, is achieved is through the novel 360-degree format of the
image. Like the name itself, the setup of the panorama presumes to present a total
view, characterized by a seemingly self-evident wholeness. And one important definition of the adjective panoramic as it was used in the nineteenth century is the
notion of a full 360-degree view that has no obstructions, nothing blocking an optical appropriation of it. In this sense the panorama provided an imaginary unity and
coherence to an external world that, in the context of urbanization, was increasingly incoherent. The viewing platform in the center of the panorama rotunda
seemed to provide a point from which an individual spectator could overcome the
partiality and fragmentation that constituted quotidian perceptual experience. But
while seeming to provide such a simulation of perceptual mastery and identifying
the real with that sense of coherence, the panorama was in another sense a derealization and devaluation of the individual's viewpoint.
The authority of the panorama was founded on the limitations of subjective vision,
on the inadequacy of a human observer. It posed a view of a motif, whether a landscape or city, that seemed immediately accessible but that always exceeded the
capacity of a spectator to grasp it. Unlike eighteenth-century topographical painting, the panorama image is consumable only as fragments, as parts that must be
cognitively reassembled into an imagined whole. A structure that seems magically
to overcome the fragmentation of experience in fact introduces partiality and
Crary
Gricaulw, the Panorama, and Sites of Realty n the EarlyNineteerth Century
21
incompleteness as constitutive elements of visual experience. Very generally, perspective had for several centuries established the pervasive fiction of an adequacy,
a congruence between the subjective point of view of an observer and the world.
That a perspectival representation allowed only a partial and delimited opening
onto that world was offset by the universality and rationality of the laws by which
it was composed. Panorama painting, to the contrary, with both its cancellation of
the vanishing point in the work and the reciprocal loss of a localizable point of
view, heightened the disparity between a subjective visual field and the possibility
of a conceptual and perceptual grasp of an external reality. It simulated a totality
that was necessarily beyond the reach of a human subject. In one sense it became a
degraded simulation of the sublime, available to anyone for the price of a ticket;
but, at the same time, perception was transformed into the accumulation of information, of details, of visual facts that finally resisted synthesis into perceptual
knowledge. The proliferation of reality effects in the nineteenth century coincided
with the collapse of the scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic systems that had in
a variety of ways posed an imaginary reconciliation of the limitations of a human
observer with a full possession of a perceivable world.
Two almost contemporary images disclose very different intuitions about the
panoramic viewpoint. Caspar David Friedrich's Traveler above the Sea of Clouds
(1818) has long been associated, perhaps excessively so, with the effects of the
panorama, and it has been suggested that Friedrich not only was extremely familiar with early panorama painting in Germany but that he briefly had plans around
1810 to undertake one himself.24 In the painting the position of this depicted
observer and his relation to the surrounding landscape certainly correspond to the
central viewing platform in a panorama and the illusory sense of a distant image. It
seems to incarnate the ascendancy of
newly released bourgeois aspirations
and fantasies of autonomy; it implies
the mastery of a position that transcended local provincial viewpoints
and permitted at least an optical
appropriation of a natural world that
was increasingly being parceled and
abstracted into smaller units of property.Of course, within Friedrich'swork
any sense of exhilaration is inseparable from a metaphysical melancholy
Right:CasparDavidFriedrich.
Traveler
above the Sea of Clouds,
1818.
Opposite:Planof the raftof
Medusa.Publishedin Narrative
of a Voyageto Senegal, 1818.
22
Grey Room 09
at the tragic insufficiency of the relation between subject and world. And in a larger
European context this image gives a piercing sense of how the panorama coincided
with new forms of subjective isolation, of a sensory impoverishment and emotional
privatization.
The other image, again almost historically simultaneous with the Friedrich, has,
as far as I know, never been associated with a panoramic viewpoint and certainly
does not have the same defining high vantage point of The Traveler. But if we consider the perceptual conditions that are diagrammedwithin G6ricault'sRaft, we have
a group of observers no less situated on what we could call a viewing platform, surrounded by an unobstructed 360-degree view.25 The sail itself, a curved piece of
canvas, hovers on the horizon line like a section of the assembled painted canvas
that lined the interiors of the panorama rotundas. And the group of spectators on
this platform have a far more pressing motivation to scan the perimeter of the circular field than Friedrich's mountain climber. Unlike The Traveler, which suggests
the security of a stable point of view, G6ricault's work discloses a very different
sense of the conditions of panoramic experience-it is to be uprooted from any
point of anchorage and to be drifting on an amorphous surface like the sea, without
markers, without a center, and on which homogeneity and repetition overwhelm
singularity. At stake in this work is an apprehension of the numbing disproportion
between the limits of human perception and the implacable otherness of the exterior world. This is the field on which G6ricault'sdossier of documents, facts, evidence,
images of reality effects drifts, tied together precariously like the raft itself, never
congealing into a reassuring armature of meanings. And also unlike Friedrich,
G6ricault is incapable of imagining a crisis of perception in terms of a solitary individual. The sensory and cognitive dislocations of modernity can be mapped only
through the tangled and hazardous destiny of a collective subject.
Crary I Gricault,
the Panorama. and Sites of Reality in the Early Nineteenth Century
23
Notes
This essay is the text of a lecture delivered recently at various locations, and I'm grateful to my hosts and
audiences at Brown, Cornell, Princeton, Emory, Yale, University of Washington, and the Whitney ISP.
My thanks also go to the Grey Room editors for their help and advice.
1. Jean-Louis Comolli, "Machines of the Visible," in The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Laueretis
and Stephen Heath (London: Macmillan, 1980), 122.
2. On the history of the peep show, see Der Guckkasten: Einblick, Durchblick, Ausblick, ed. David
Robinson, Wolfgang Seitz et al. (Stuttgart: Fiisslin Verlag, 1995); and Richard Balzer, Peepshows:
A Visual History (New York: Abrams, 1998).
3. See, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1968), 276-277; and Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 130-132.
4. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: Theory, History, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).
5. See the account of these concerns in Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on
Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 136-148.
6. See the extensive factual account of the Egyptian Hall in Richard D. Altick's indispensable The
Shows of London (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 235-252. See also Celina Fox, ed.,
London: World City 1800-1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 418-421.
7. Tom Gunning, "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde," in
Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: BFI, 1990): 56-62.
8. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang,
1986), 147.
9. Ben Weinreb and Christopher Hibbert, eds., The London Encyclopedia (London: Macmillan,
1983), 255.
1.0.On the exhibition of G6ricault's work in England and Ireland, see Lee Johnson, "The Raft of the
Medusa in Great Britain," Burlington Magazine 46 (August 1954): 249-253; Suzanne Lodge, "Gericault
in England,"Burlington Magazine 62 (December 1965): 616-627; Lorenz E. Eitner, GCricault:His Life and
Work(Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1983), 209-212; and Rupert Christiansen, The Victorian Visitors:
Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000), 6-41.
11. See, for example, the account of the exhibition at the Egyptian Hall of Benjamin Robert Haydon's
enormous Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, which coincided with the display of Gericault's painting in
1820, in David Blayney Brown et al., Benjamin Robert Haydon 1786-1846 (Kendal: The Wordsworth
Trust, 1996), 12-13.
12. The Medusa was part of a convoy of French ships en route to Senegal in July 1816. Due to the
inexperience of the captain, the ship ran aground on ocean shoals many miles off the African coast.
After two days a decision was made to abandon the ship; however, because of negligence, there were
only a few serviceable lifeboats. To accommodate everyone, a raft was hastily assembled out of the ship's
timbers and 150 passengers rode on it, towed by one of the lifeboats. When the crew in the lifeboat
realized the raft was impeding their own progress to safety they cynically cut the cable, leaving the raft
and its company to drift on the open sea. Thirteen days later, after storms, drunken and murderous
Fragmentof panoramapainting.
24 GreyRoom09
fighting, cannibalism, starvation, and delirium, fifteen survivors were rescued by another ship. Of
these, five died soon after reaching shore. An event devoid of anything heroic or ennobling, it became
a political scandal, focusing public attention on the corruption of the Restoration regime, which had
awarded command of a ship to an incompetent Royalist officer, thus causing 140 unnecessary deaths.
13. Michael Fried, Courbet's Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 29-31.
14. In creating that "reversed telescope" effect of vast separation between raft and distant ship,
G6ricault was obviously aware from Corr6ard and Savigny's book that the eventual rescue occurred
because the raft was spotted through a telescope, that is, through the use of a visual technology that
exceeded the mere human vision deployed on the raft, surmounting the obstacle of distance and
space. J.B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Corr6ard, Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 (1818;
reprint, London: Dawsons, 1968), 142-143.
15. Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 1800-1900 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1990), 88.
16. Valuable studies of the panorama include Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a
Mass Medium (New York: Zone Books, 1997); Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York:
Abrams, 1999); Sehsucht: Das Panorama als Massenunterhaltung des 19., exh. cat., Jahrhunderts,
(Basel: Stroemfeld/Roter Stern, 1993); Ralph Hyde, Panoramania (London: Barbican Art Gallery,
1988); and Albrecht Koschorke, "Das Panorama: Die Anfringe des modernen Sensomotorik um 1800,"
in Die Mobilisierung des Sehens, ed. Harro Segeberg (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1996), 147-168.
de perspective pratique, a l'usage des artistes ... (1800;
17. Pierre Henri de Valenciennes,
Elements
reprint, Geneva: Minkoff, 1973), 339-343.
18. See Theodor Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB, 1981), 85.
19. See my comparison of the nineteenth-century optical models deployed by the panorama and
the stereoscope in Suspensions of Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 295-296.
20. Barthes, "The Reality Effect," 145.
21. Perhaps the most stunning visual treatment of this particular hilltop view of Rouen is the
watercolor by J.M.W. Turner and subsequent engraving by William Miller for the 1834 volume
Wanderings by the Seine. In the summer of 1829, in order to promote sales of Turner's engravings,
an exhibition of his watercolors was held at the Egyptian Hall.
22. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller (New York: Modern Library,
1957), 299.
23. See Stephan Oettermann, The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah
Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 47.
24. That the rescuing ship, the Argus, was actually named after a mythological creature with a
hundred eyes has struck many as an extraordinary coincidence. Less often remembered is that the full:
mythological name was Argus Panoptes, accidentally evoking a range of forms through which the
capacities of an individual (merely mortal) human observer were exceeded, including the panorama
and Panopticon. Savigny and Corr6ard report that "One, among others said, joking, 'If the brig is sent
to look for us, let us pray to God that she may have the eyes of Argus,' alluding to the name of the vessel,
which we presumed would be sent after us. This consolatory idea did not quit us, and we spoke of it
frequently." Savigny and Corr6ard, Narrative of a Voyage, 132-133.
Cary
IGcaut,•
the Paioraman ad Sites of •Realityin the EarlyNineteenth Centufiy
25

Géricault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early

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