Humor in Cold Dead Type:
Performing Artemus Ward’s London Panorama Lecture in Print
a lecture by
Jennifer A. Greenhill, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, November 8, 2012 at 6 p.m. in Elvehjem Building, Room L140
Save the date as well for an afternoon graduate student workshop with Professor Greenhill on race, abstraction, and illustration.
Greenhill’s recently completed book Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012) investigates the strategies artists devised to simultaneously conform to and humorously undermine "serious" artistic culture during the late nineteenth century, when calls for a new cultural sophistication ran headlong into a growing public appetite for humor.
This talk explores the materiality of print and awkwardness of typographic humor through a study of Artemus Ward’s Lecture (As Delivered at the Egyptian Hall, London), an experimental volume published in 1869. The book attempts to preserve the hilarity of a recently deceased American humorist, Charles Farrar Browne, known as “Artemus Ward,” the character who made President Lincoln laugh during the Civil War and inspired Mark Twain as he developed his own comic techniques. It does so with explanatory glosses on the lecture’s content, thirty-six woodcut illustrations depicting the various scenes of Ward’s visual aid, an execrably painted panorama, and experimental typography meant to evoke the humorist’s delivery of his material.
Excessive in its contrivances, Ward’s book demonstrates the inevitable awkwardness of intermedial translation projects, perhaps especially those focused on preserving the subtleties of comic performance and the interactivity of the theatrical encounter. But the book’s awkwardness is symptomatic of its overriding logic and therefore signifies more than simply a failed effort to translate the stage to the page. It signifies, Greenhill argues, the degree to which Ward’s editors had internalized his entertainment and his reputation more generally, as a humorist given to excess and lecturing on a subject—Mormonism—that had its own reputation for immoderation. The book offers a powerful example of mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of “muchness,” as Ward would say, but it does more than this: it suggests the ways that typographic expression might not only index surface features of a performance, but also reveal the deep structure of the event and the social framework in which it found form.
Sponsored by the UW-Madison Material Culture Program, University Lectures Committee, Department of Art History, and the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture
a lecture by
Jennifer A. Greenhill, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, November 8, 2012 at 6 p.m. in Elvehjem Building, Room L140
Save the date as well for an afternoon graduate student workshop with Professor Greenhill on race, abstraction, and illustration.
Greenhill’s recently completed book Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (University of California Press, 2012) investigates the strategies artists devised to simultaneously conform to and humorously undermine "serious" artistic culture during the late nineteenth century, when calls for a new cultural sophistication ran headlong into a growing public appetite for humor.
This talk explores the materiality of print and awkwardness of typographic humor through a study of Artemus Ward’s Lecture (As Delivered at the Egyptian Hall, London), an experimental volume published in 1869. The book attempts to preserve the hilarity of a recently deceased American humorist, Charles Farrar Browne, known as “Artemus Ward,” the character who made President Lincoln laugh during the Civil War and inspired Mark Twain as he developed his own comic techniques. It does so with explanatory glosses on the lecture’s content, thirty-six woodcut illustrations depicting the various scenes of Ward’s visual aid, an execrably painted panorama, and experimental typography meant to evoke the humorist’s delivery of his material.
Excessive in its contrivances, Ward’s book demonstrates the inevitable awkwardness of intermedial translation projects, perhaps especially those focused on preserving the subtleties of comic performance and the interactivity of the theatrical encounter. But the book’s awkwardness is symptomatic of its overriding logic and therefore signifies more than simply a failed effort to translate the stage to the page. It signifies, Greenhill argues, the degree to which Ward’s editors had internalized his entertainment and his reputation more generally, as a humorist given to excess and lecturing on a subject—Mormonism—that had its own reputation for immoderation. The book offers a powerful example of mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of “muchness,” as Ward would say, but it does more than this: it suggests the ways that typographic expression might not only index surface features of a performance, but also reveal the deep structure of the event and the social framework in which it found form.
Sponsored by the UW-Madison Material Culture Program, University Lectures Committee, Department of Art History, and the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture
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