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Otherworldly Goods

ArtForum, Sept, 2000 by Robert Simon

ROBERT SIMON ON J.J. GRANDVILLE

ACROSS THE NOTES, fragments, essays, and outlines of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's panoramic rendering of Paris and modernity, the nineteenth-century French illustrator and caricaturist J.J. Grandville plays a signal role. For Benjamin, Grandville's images, "a veritable cosmogony of fashion," reveal the interplay between the organized phantasmagoria of the nascent culture industry--epitomized by Paris itself--and the fetishization of mass-produced goods: "The enthronement of the commodity, with its glitter of distractions, is the secret theme of Grandville's art." In this art, Benjamin saw both index and image of a perceptual world shattered by modernization's asymmetrical logic of innovation, speed, transience, and desire.

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This is our world as well, and Grandville's prescient work is the subject of an upcoming exhibition and accompanying catalogue put together by Hannover's Wilhelm Busch Museum. Many of the 130-odd lithographs, wood engravings, and source drawings on offer come from the pages of La Caricature, the weekly journal of lithography and political satire for which Grandville worked from 1830 until 1835, when the July Monarchy shut it down; images from Un Autre Monde, a volume published by the artist in 1844, will also be included.

Un Autre Monde represents Grandville's strangest and most accomplished achievement. Comprising more than 180 wood engravings and their textual descriptions, the book charts an excursion to a parallel universe populated by mutant animals, vegetal/human hybrids, and inanimate objects come to life. The dreamscape they inhabit is equally fantastic: a mythical realm of shadow plays, museum rituals, Fourierist utopias, and space travel. As the artist put it, his creation serves up "transformations, visions, incarnations, ascensions, locomotions, ... metamorphoses, zoomorphoses, lithomorphoses, metempsychoses, apotheoses, and other things."

Throughout, farce unveils and multiplies the features of a new age. Hades's boatman sees his business ruined by a bridge built over the river Styx. Parasols, boots, top hats, and bonnets mounted on stands exchange greetings, the accoutrements of fashion assuming their wearers' civilized airs. Overhead, "a causeway of wonderfully smooth asphalt," illuminated by gas lamps, connects the planets, whose outmoded lineaments have in turn been replaced. "World exhibitions," Benjamin writes, "propagate the universe of commodities. Grandville's fantasies confer a commodity character on the universe. They modernize it. Saturn's ring becomes a cast-iron balcony on which the inhabitants of Saturn take the evening air."

The exhibition intends to pursue multiple lines of inquiry, addressing the representation of motion in Grandville's work and the inspiration he found in toys and optical devices. Also up for consideration will be two dream images, accompanied by detailed letters, that Grandville published in Le Magasin Pittoresque in 1847 just before his death (and which Georges Bataille commented on in his 1929 Documents article "Eye"). All in all, the show and catalogue promise to be both historically and theoretically ambitious, and as might be expected, Benjamin's writings will provide some fundamental points of reference. For one, the show's organizers will explore links between what one of them terms the "structural critique" of Grandville's later works, in particular Un Autre Monde, and the powerful satire he produced for La Caricature, which, despite its vivid grotesqueries, remains painterly, plastic, and realist next to the idiosyncratic graphic concoctions of Un Autre Monde.

By the mid-1830s, Grandville had largely turned away from overtly political subjects and lithography, apparently frustrated by the demands of quotidian visual journalism. Instead, he began to explore the new potential of wood engraving. This was an old medium that, refitted, enabled the efficient printing of image and text together on the page--the origins of a large-scale illustrated press. Grandville went to work for mass-circulation magazines and took up book illustration: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, editions of fables and proverbs.

In the final decade of his life, Grandville gave considerable attention to what Marx would soon call "the enigmatical character of the product of labor." Grandville's 1843 illustrations for Petites miseres de la vie humaine are described by Giorgio Agamben in Stanzas: Word and Image in Western Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 1993): "In a leaky faucet that cannot be turned off, in an umbrella that reverses itself, in a boot that can be neither completely put on nor taken off and remains tenaciously stuck on the foot...the prophetic glance of Grandville discovers... the cipher of a new relation between humans and things.... The degeneration implicit in the transformation of the artisanal object into the mass-produced article is constantly manifest to modern man in the loss of his own self-possession with respect to things."

Otherworldly Goods

ArtForum, Sept, 2000 by Robert Simon

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