On his book Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration, and the Homuncular Subject
Cover Interview of July 05, 2017
The wide angle
Scholars have long debated modernity, its origins,
and its defining characteristics. Body Modern sidesteps those questions.
Modernity, it argues, did not descend upon the world like a deus ex machina
that re-ordered human consciousness and changed everyone and everything.
Instead, Body Modern treats modernity as a historical artifact, the core
concept of a 20th-century identity formation.
What makes that tricky is that modernity
was a capacious signifier, full of paradoxes. It could absorb anything that
seemed to oppose primitive humanity or longstanding tradition, but also anything
that opposed the recent past, especially passé versions of the modern. Even the
primitive could serve as a signifier of the modern, if it was reframed as a
critique of the no-longer-fashionable present, and served up as the latest
thing. The modern had to be new.
In the middle decades of the 20th century, a
critical mass of people took themselves to be moderns, living in modern times, and
felt impelled to live and perform the modern. They sought to cast off local
identities and revise traditional ways, to differentiate themselves from what
came before. They did that by talking on the telephone, driving cars, wearing
modern fashions, reading modern illustrated magazines, listening to new kinds
of music on the radio and phonograph, doing new kinds of dances, receiving modern
medicines and treatments, going to the movies, taking up new political
ideologies, and doing a million other things that signified modern-ness.
There was a nearly inexhaustible demand for modernizing devices, objects, methods,
presentations and experiences. The public thirsted for the modern.
In this environment, Fritz Kahn pioneered a
new kind of image: illustrations that were scientific, metaphorical, and
self-consciously modern. In a hyper-illustrated age—where the very abundance
of printed half-tone images was itself a signifier of modernity—Kahn’s books
on the science of the human featured thousands of illustrations in a variety of
modern styles and techniques: surrealism, Art Deco, photomontagery, Bauhaus functionalism,
abstraction, Neue Sachlichkeit, sequential art, everyday commercial
illustration, etc.
It was a novel and iconophilic approach to
popular science, inspired by the media, styles, and genres of the time,
especially the illustrated newspaper and magazine. Materials that could help
people acquire and perform a “modern” social identity were in demand. Kahn
presented himself as an impresario of the modern, a provisioner of images to
get modern with. His images were a visual rhetoric of modernity, full of
representations of science and technology. More than that, the images themselves
worked as a kind of a technology of the self, a modern rhetoric of visuality, which
naturalized modernity by situating it within the human body.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
The wide angle
Scholars have long debated modernity, its origins, and its defining characteristics. Body Modern sidesteps those questions. Modernity, it argues, did not descend upon the world like a deus ex machina that re-ordered human consciousness and changed everyone and everything. Instead, Body Modern treats modernity as a historical artifact, the core concept of a 20th-century identity formation.
What makes that tricky is that modernity was a capacious signifier, full of paradoxes. It could absorb anything that seemed to oppose primitive humanity or longstanding tradition, but also anything that opposed the recent past, especially passé versions of the modern. Even the primitive could serve as a signifier of the modern, if it was reframed as a critique of the no-longer-fashionable present, and served up as the latest thing. The modern had to be new.
In the middle decades of the 20th century, a critical mass of people took themselves to be moderns, living in modern times, and felt impelled to live and perform the modern. They sought to cast off local identities and revise traditional ways, to differentiate themselves from what came before. They did that by talking on the telephone, driving cars, wearing modern fashions, reading modern illustrated magazines, listening to new kinds of music on the radio and phonograph, doing new kinds of dances, receiving modern medicines and treatments, going to the movies, taking up new political ideologies, and doing a million other things that signified modern-ness. There was a nearly inexhaustible demand for modernizing devices, objects, methods, presentations and experiences. The public thirsted for the modern.
In this environment, Fritz Kahn pioneered a new kind of image: illustrations that were scientific, metaphorical, and self-consciously modern. In a hyper-illustrated age—where the very abundance of printed half-tone images was itself a signifier of modernity—Kahn’s books on the science of the human featured thousands of illustrations in a variety of modern styles and techniques: surrealism, Art Deco, photomontagery, Bauhaus functionalism, abstraction, Neue Sachlichkeit, sequential art, everyday commercial illustration, etc.
It was a novel and iconophilic approach to popular science, inspired by the media, styles, and genres of the time, especially the illustrated newspaper and magazine. Materials that could help people acquire and perform a “modern” social identity were in demand. Kahn presented himself as an impresario of the modern, a provisioner of images to get modern with. His images were a visual rhetoric of modernity, full of representations of science and technology. More than that, the images themselves worked as a kind of a technology of the self, a modern rhetoric of visuality, which naturalized modernity by situating it within the human body.