On his book Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration, and the Homuncular Subject
Cover Interview of July 05, 2017
Lastly
Body Modern
is a labor of love, a long-time obsession. Fritz Kahn’s prime directives are
now our everyday common sense, the prime directives of our civilization: You
can’t just say it, you have to show it… And when you show it, you have to put
on a show… Body Modern is my show.
I began research on it, under the working
title “how to get modern with scientific illustration,” way back in 2005. Over
the years, the writing was much delayed due to professional and family
obligations, a crazy international romance, and then a long period of liver
disease and declining health. In 2011, when I was diagnosed with liver cancer,
it looked like that would be the end of me and the end of my project. But in
2012, I received a liver transplant. And in 2013, I was able to resume work.
As the book neared completion, my editor
worried the book would be mistakenly shelved in the “how to” section. That
pushed me to switch the title to Body Modern, which better conveys the
spell that Kahn’s charming new images cast over readers who thought of
themselves as moderns, and who aspired to get even more modern. (I could have
just as aptly titled it Picture Modern, because those same readers were
drunk on the proliferating images that called out to them from illustrated
books, newspapers, magazines, posters, and movies. But that wouldn’t have been
nearly as sexy.)
“Man as Industrial Palace” uses a doll-house
cross-section profile, with a sequence of multiple images within the image, to
model the self in industrial modernity. It was a commercial and critical
success, and became Kahn’s signature work. But Kahn well knew that the public
appetite for images, and for novelty, was voracious, insatiable. He and his
artists (“studio of Kahn”) went far beyond, were inspired to develop many other
genres and tropes of visual explanation: the body flow-chart, the fantastic
voyage inside the body, the dramatized body statistic, the architectural body, the
modular body, the global body, the mixed media body, the radiant body, the
visual synopsis, and so on—all richly and often humorously imagined in a
variety of modern styles.
Those images today come to us as an obscure
and complex corpus of modernist image production, a relic of a larger
vernacular modernism that scholars of modernism have mostly overlooked. But in
their day, the images spoke to a mass audience. Readers got to see modern
machines and cities and buildings and science and aesthetics—and themselves—all
in the frame of a single image, and in many images, and in many sets of images.
An impossible variety of figures, all under the sign of the modern.
Body Modern makes
a variety show out of that only partly coherent corpus, and provides
21st-century readers with close readings of selected images and their genres
and contexts. And then uses those images to think aloud about the cultural work
that prolific representations in bulk did to 20th-century readers and, in a
different way, do to us. Because, if we are inhabited and explained by figures
and forces and devices, and if we inhabit them back, then the territorial singularity
of the individual self—a hallmark of modernity in its “classic” high industrial
phase—falls to pieces, becomes utterly undone. The sharp boundary between embodied
life and technology and industry and representation and collective groupings of
humanity is impossible to maintain.
And so, “Man as Industrial Palace,” an icon
of Weimar technological optimism, now graces the cover of the most recent
English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, an iconic
ur-text of postmodern critical discourse. And, along with many other pictures
from the studio of Kahn, serves as an object lesson in a brand new essayistic
work of history, Body Modern.
[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
Lastly
Body Modern is a labor of love, a long-time obsession. Fritz Kahn’s prime directives are now our everyday common sense, the prime directives of our civilization: You can’t just say it, you have to show it… And when you show it, you have to put on a show… Body Modern is my show.
I began research on it, under the working title “how to get modern with scientific illustration,” way back in 2005. Over the years, the writing was much delayed due to professional and family obligations, a crazy international romance, and then a long period of liver disease and declining health. In 2011, when I was diagnosed with liver cancer, it looked like that would be the end of me and the end of my project. But in 2012, I received a liver transplant. And in 2013, I was able to resume work.
As the book neared completion, my editor worried the book would be mistakenly shelved in the “how to” section. That pushed me to switch the title to Body Modern, which better conveys the spell that Kahn’s charming new images cast over readers who thought of themselves as moderns, and who aspired to get even more modern. (I could have just as aptly titled it Picture Modern, because those same readers were drunk on the proliferating images that called out to them from illustrated books, newspapers, magazines, posters, and movies. But that wouldn’t have been nearly as sexy.)
“Man as Industrial Palace” uses a doll-house cross-section profile, with a sequence of multiple images within the image, to model the self in industrial modernity. It was a commercial and critical success, and became Kahn’s signature work. But Kahn well knew that the public appetite for images, and for novelty, was voracious, insatiable. He and his artists (“studio of Kahn”) went far beyond, were inspired to develop many other genres and tropes of visual explanation: the body flow-chart, the fantastic voyage inside the body, the dramatized body statistic, the architectural body, the modular body, the global body, the mixed media body, the radiant body, the visual synopsis, and so on—all richly and often humorously imagined in a variety of modern styles.
Those images today come to us as an obscure and complex corpus of modernist image production, a relic of a larger vernacular modernism that scholars of modernism have mostly overlooked. But in their day, the images spoke to a mass audience. Readers got to see modern machines and cities and buildings and science and aesthetics—and themselves—all in the frame of a single image, and in many images, and in many sets of images. An impossible variety of figures, all under the sign of the modern.
Body Modern makes a variety show out of that only partly coherent corpus, and provides 21st-century readers with close readings of selected images and their genres and contexts. And then uses those images to think aloud about the cultural work that prolific representations in bulk did to 20th-century readers and, in a different way, do to us. Because, if we are inhabited and explained by figures and forces and devices, and if we inhabit them back, then the territorial singularity of the individual self—a hallmark of modernity in its “classic” high industrial phase—falls to pieces, becomes utterly undone. The sharp boundary between embodied life and technology and industry and representation and collective groupings of humanity is impossible to maintain.
And so, “Man as Industrial Palace,” an icon of Weimar technological optimism, now graces the cover of the most recent English translation of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, an iconic ur-text of postmodern critical discourse. And, along with many other pictures from the studio of Kahn, serves as an object lesson in a brand new essayistic work of history, Body Modern.