01/04/2012Heavy Breeding - Michael Wang

In 1920, the brothers Lutz and Heinz Heck, directors of the Berlin and Munich zoos, respectively, began a two-decade breeding experiment. Working with domestic cattle sought out for their “primitive” characteristics, they attempted to recreate “in appearance and behavior” the living likeness of the animals’ extinct wild ancestor: the aurochs. “Once found everywhere in Germany,” according to Lutz Heck, by the end of the Middle Ages the aurochs had largely succumbed to climate change, overhunting, and competition from domestic breeds.¹

The last aurochs herds died out in the Polish-Lithuanian Union, where a documented population persisted under royal protection in Mazovia until the middle of the seventeenth century. Historical descriptions of these animals identified the aurochs as similar to domestic oxen, but entirely black, with a whitish stripe running down the back.² More distant accounts emphasized their ferocity and imposing size. Julius Caesar described the aurochs of Germania as an elephantine creature prone to unprovoked attack.³

For the scholarly world, the memory of the aurochs was preserved in a 1550s appendix to Conrad Gesner’s Historiae animalium. Intended to distinguish this nearly vanished animal from Europe’s other species of wild cattle, the European bison, the mention formally reinscribed the aurochs into the annals of zoological science. Over 350 years after its publication, this encyclopedia of animals both real and imagined (satyrs and sea monsters appear alongside hedgehogs and hippopotamuses) served, for the Heck brothers, as a key source on the extinct aurochs. This, along with a handful of artistic representations, formed the basis of the Heck brothers’ wild ideal. Their research cited copies of the lost “Augsburg Picture” (which is thought, today, to have represented a domestic bull), a 1730 Meissen porcelain group by Kändler depicting a pack of hounds encircling a wounded bull (whose piebald coloration should have similarly suggested a domesticated subject), and the prehistoric cave paintings at the Abrigo de los Toros in Spain. The Hecks’ aurochs would be the culmination of an erratic trip through Western art history, from its primeval origins up to Baroque naturalism. Through a mimetic reversal, the breeding process sought to restore attributes known only through human cultural products. While the project took up widely held scientific theories of inheritance and conformed to the natural historical conception of the aurochs as the sole progenitor of domestic cattle (a view familiar at least since Georges Cuvier’s 1812 Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes), the Heck brothers’ biological means served primarily aesthetic ends.

01/01/2012Adventure on the Vertical - Mark Dorrian

Micromegas Introducing W. Watson-Baker’s 1935 book, World Beneath the Microscope, the English artist and critic William Gaunt wrote:

We are no longer so excited as formerly by the account of trips on the surface … The mind is stretched, uncomfortably sometimes, but with a new fascination, to speed and profundity, to the thought of worlds that lie a million light-years away from us, to the worlds that recede in evolutionary time beneath the lens, to the thought even that they merge or that by some extraordinary trick of relativity the smaller may contain the large. There is an affinity between the telescope and the microscope, between the discovery of stellar space and the discovery of the atom.¹

Watson-Baker’s book on microphotography appeared as the second of two volumes inaugurating a new series launched by The Studio publishing house under the rubric of “The New Vision.” Like its companion volume, Le Corbusier’s Aircraft, it was very much a meditation on seeing from above, a reflection on the affective and epistemic dimensions of looking downward. Gaunt’s announcement of cultural boredom with the horizontal, and the corresponding re-orientation of attention onto the vertical, invoked the notion that the view from above—together with its associated technologies—formed a peculiarly modern visual form. His richly articulated introduction certainly looked back to earlier arguments regarding elevated vision, but at the same time it presciently anticipated future expressions of the new adventure on the vertical, perhaps the most striking of which would be Charles and Ray Eames’s short film Powers of Ten.

01/10/2011Our Aesthetic Categories: An Interview with Sianne Ngai - Adam Jasper and Sianne Ngai

01/07/2011Historical Amnesias: An Interview with Paul Connerton - Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi and Paul Connerton

01/04/2012Reimagining Recreation - James Trainor

01/01/2012On Why Soup Is So Bad for Diurnal Rhythms - Sally O'Reilly

01/10/2011Mengele’s Skull - Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman

01/07/2011The Behavioral Sink - Will Wiles