CRARY - Géricault, The Panorama, and Sites of Reality

Grey Room, Inc.
Gricault, 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 Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262599 . Accessed: 06/05/2013 22:18
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Gericault,
and
the
Sites
of
Panorama, Reality in the
Early
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
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pp. 5-25.
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Institute
of Technology
William Hogarth. Southwark Fair,
1730s. Engraving.
Fair. Southwark Detailof Hogarth,
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. 1880s. Bottom:Kaiserpanorama, 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
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
Hall,c. 1900. Top:Egyptian Bottom:Egyptian Hall,1820s. Interior view. 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, VY ven y Aue iu po IW~ uva Bl m *ua GENERAL whereby the signified is expelled from the sign."8 '* But he also showed that the reality effect was not MR only textual, and he linked it to the emergence in M.LW WJJFJIATCwAX, AND AFTERNOON EVERtY MORNING EXITING the nineteenth century of modern assumptions EGYPTINp ti H&L, * PICCADILLY, about history that were manifested in "the devel*A nw Gallery , Wor ek-lke Adelaide Av4 " Ea. opment of the realistic novel, the private diary, documentary literature, the news item, the historical museum, the exhibition of ancient objects and the massive development of photography whose .5 sole pertinent feature is precisely to signify that 0 the event represented has really taken place." Important here is that although photography is emphasized as a reality effect it is not in any sense a foundational model or prerequisite for it.
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Crry
I Gericault, the Panorama, and Sites of Reality in the Early Nneteenth
Century
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 GcauItt,*-he
Paorama
and Sies
of ReaIity in the Ea rIy Nineteeth
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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
TheodoreGericault. Right: Study of severed limbs,c. 1819. Opposite,left:Raftof the Medusa. Detail. Theodore Opposite,right: c. 1821. GUricault. Madwoman, 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 Here G6ricault separation from the outer world."15 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
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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
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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
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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:
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LeicesterSquare Right: Panorama. c. 1802. London, viewing Opposite:Panorama platform, Copenhagen,c. 1880. 18 GreyRoom 09
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
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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 Barthes has derived this characterization from a texwith the word "panorama."21 tual 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
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Gricaulw, the Panorama, and Sites of Realty n the EarlyNineteerth Century
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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
CasparDavidFriedrich. Right: 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.
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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 His Life and in England,"Burlington Magazine 62 (December 1965): 616-627; Lorenz E. Eitner, GCricault: 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
of panoramapainting. Fragment
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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.
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Grey Room, Inc.

Panorama, Reality in the

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