 Thank you for three great papers. So I have a few questions and comments for you guys, and then I want to open it right away to conversation and questions. My first question is for Kimia and Raimi together, because I think that there are really interesting overlaps between your papers. Both of them deal with the idea that art can deliver some kind of truth about the subject that it's representing. Kimia, you talk about Richards being maybe not starting out as a skeptic, but in this work really sort of becoming a skeptic about the possibility for art to actually capture nature and kind of articulating this, or at least disrupting that idea that nature is perfectly representable, disrupting that and articulating it in the surface as you demonstrated. While in your paper you are talking about a work of art that represents the absolute belief in the memetic potential of art so much so that the object actually can really stand as a substitute for the subject represented. So my question is, well, first of all, I'd be interested just to hear your thoughts on art and truth, but also more specifically about how the possibility of truth for both of these artists is connected to the materiality or the physicality of the subject being represented, if that makes sense. Sure. Thank you for a great question. I wrote down to myself, is Richards a skeptic? Because I've never thought about it quite in those terms, and I'd like to think more about that, whether that's a word that fits, or whether I need to rethink my argument in order to maybe, because I think one thing that I've been dealing with, and I'm not sure if I'm going off mic because I turned towards you, is the question of, is truth in Richards' mind or in his work a stable concept, or is it something that, as I think I'm trying to show, very much shifting in the period. And Richard's sort of evident worry about that is, I don't know if he thinks that pictures can't achieve truth, but rather he seems to be very concerned about his ability to do that. I don't know if that really is that you're that for sure comes through. And maybe skeptic is overstating his. But it does speak to a broader, I mean, this is kind of a broader imaginary that I'm thinking about, especially, water reveals this in a really particular way, as my research is kind of showing, is that there begins to coalesce this sort of concern about why represent something like the ocean, why does that become something valuable to represent at the same time that it is considered a kind of, as I said, a sort of limit case for the impossibility of something like a painting or a drawing to actually represent it. Why even do that if it's sort of destined to be futile, as Richard says? And does do you think that the difficulty in representing that has to do with the immateriality of water? I think absolutely. I drew a lot on Ruskin for this particular paper. And he really, really usefully illustrates this point in his discourse, which is all about what he called the properties of water, both the kind of affective properties, but very much the material properties. And one thread that I'm playing with, not so much in this talk, but in the broader project, has to do with not just water's kind of elusiveness or ability to frustrate vision, but also its capacity to generate new kinds of vision. That's something that Ruskin talks a lot about. Water's capacity to function as a kind of mirror in some cases, or a kind of lens in other cases, even to function as a kind of sculptor to shift the shape of something like a coastline, even to kind of inscribe a kind of pattern in the movement of waves, to refract or distort things seen through it. These are all concepts that Ruskin really emphasizes. So it's not quite as, I'm trying to kind of work with that binary, kind of get rid of that binary that water is just something that's hard to see. Because water itself becomes a kind of visual agent in a really interesting way in this period. And I think you can position Richard's work as intersecting with that too. But it certainly destabilizes an idea of water simply as impossible, but rather a kind of new set of conditions that artists might be interested in addressing. Mm-hmm, thank you. Yeah, thanks so much for that question. Authenticity, verism, that's a central concern for my broader research in this period, especially because during the Civil War, there was sort of a mounting urgency on the part of audiences in demanding an explicit reality or authenticity in images of Civil War visual cultures, of a war material. So painters really struggled at this time to condense the war's really traumatic and momentous events into a sort of allegory or a history painting. And so at this point in time, history pointing really dissolves as a predominant genre in the United States. And I think there's some pressure put on history painting by photography. And I think there's some really interesting parallels between the indexicality of photography and the indexicality of a mold, or from which you can take a cast. And so I'm interested more broadly in Civil War visual culture, how authenticity is brought as this sort of prerequisite or metric for those images, and then how we can see that in Lincoln's own person as well, this interest in sort of confirming and grounding that authenticity of his own physical characteristics through sculpture at this point in time too. So those are some of the tensions at play and questions I'm asking. And I thought that there were some interesting parallels between your talk and the talk that Megan gave last night, was this belief that the work of art actually carries something of the subject. And that's what, I mean, one of the things that perhaps leads to the scratching. So, Michael, you talk about about Irwin's kind of use of space as part of his, and I'm wondering if it's, is it a conscious kind of decision on his part to try to not be seen as retreating to this kind of traditional modernism? Like, how conscious is he of how he's being written about at the time? That's a good question. Irwin tends to be very sort of controlling about the narrative of his work. I know that he's familiar, for example, with some of the critical reception from the late 1960s with regards to his disc paintings and the column that I showed, that kind of thing. He claims, though, to sort of be not interested in what art historians have to say about his work. That's a common sort of refrain when he's asked. So, whether or not he's kind of, I doubt that he's sort of aware of this kind of post-structuralist discourse that's emerged around his work and its idea of criticality and this use of negative space. He's been pretty, he tends to sort of keep his blinders on in that sense. And I also wonder about, so you talk a lot about the space and the kind of the movement through space and the relation between the viewer and the environment as, I think, if I'm understanding you correctly, as kind of evidence that he was a minimalist in some ways. I'm wondering if you can say more about how his kind of desire to move the viewer through space in that way contributes to the emotional experience that we kind of traditionally associate with, you know, that modernist kind of just standing and being completely just optically absorbed. How does the body play into that? That's a great question. I mean, certainly there's this kind of unfolding through time and that, I think, accentuates this kind of drama of the installation as the light comes through. So again, it's this kind of balancing where you have this movement through space that on the one hand is very kind of physical and a very kind of matter of fact experience of going around through this installation and seeing all the different scrims and how they're attached to the ceiling and how they're attached to the floor and looking at the quality of the scrim fabric of the walls and the windows. There's this very kind of physical aspect to it, but at the same time it also kind of plays into this growing sense of drama and grandeur that's unfolding in this space. So in a way it's kind of working both ways. It's not the kind of traditional like the Robert Morris kind of the L-beams on the floor sort of thing in this very kind of everyday matter of fact presentation, but there's also this kind of sort of ecstatic experience of experiencing the desert and all that that I play as well in the work. So again, that interpretive line, I guess, sort of comes from Michael Freed, who felt that the movement through the space was in a way kind of destroying the sanctity of modernism in particular, but also of the art object. So kind of taking up that line of inquiry on the one hand, yes, it's not this kind of thing that you can just sort of stand in front of and have kind of a rapturous experience because you actually have to move through it and then you have to go outside and look at the sculpture. So there's a lot to see and a lot to do in it, but at the same time there is this kind of growing sort of cumulative effect of the light and sort of the beauty of the desert and all that that contributes again to this kind of, again, what I'm calling kind of a late modernist experience that in some ways is close to what Freed enjoyed about modernism and its kind of transcendent possibilities. Questions? Megan, we're gonna throw this microphone around. Hi, thank you so much for three great talks. I have a question for Ramey about the Lincolniana discussed more broadly. So like the cast, the photographs, the actual body parts, like the piece of bone and then like his clothing, et cetera, that was preserved. What were period understandings of like the hierarchy of those, like of those relics? I mean, not all of them are relics, but of those. That's an excellent question. That's kind of what this research is trying to do is to try to nuance that hierarchy or this notion of sort of relictual artifacts in the American imaginary. So I benefited a lot from the research of Theresa Barnett, who is one of the only scholars in American history who I've found has written about relics in American culture and it's her book of the sacred remains. And she talks primarily about these, again, primary relics, so combing battlefields after they've taken place, for instance, at Gettysburg, just for any women's of the events that took place there. So those are just more like sort of this base materials or raw material gathering. And so I'm just trying to suggest that there are other gradations of that categorization that we can consider. And I think that these casts, what I didn't mention in the talk, that's important to also consider is that St. Gaudens produced this controlled series of these casts from the original molds that they then sold in order to raise money to donate the original plaster molds to the Museum of American History in D.C. And these casts, whether they were bronze or plaster, they all contained actually an authentic written on sort of truncated ends of the wrists that said these casts come from the life mask, the original life mask and cast taken from Lincoln by Leonard Wells Volk. So people were aware that there was this greater value and authenticity that sort of freighted these objects if you acknowledge that they came from the ones that were sort of closer proximity to Lincoln's own person. So that was, so I think that people are aware in thinking through those levels a bit more carefully and capitalizing on them in their own collections in that way too. Thank you. Martha, you have to get rid of this thing immediately. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Mostly because it's probably the biggest germ bank in this room, you know. So now I've really, now I've contaminated it. Thank you all three. I wish I had a question for the panel, but it was such beautiful heterogeneous thinking that I don't. So my question is for Kimia. Thank you so much for this beautiful paper. And I'm completely with you in opening our eyes to this amazing water color and the analogies between technique and representation. That was beautifully done. And the carpet paper was so surprising. There was a sort of a gasp in the audience. I really loved all of that. On the other hand though, when we do this kind of looking and forensic digging into an object like you're doing, I'm sometimes worried that the flip side of all of it falls a little bit out of view. And the flip side of it is that here is carpet paper used. And by that, the sort of substance that props up the bourgeois carpet and the bourgeois home on whose walls this watercolor is ending up which with all its ideologies of shoring up the American home. And then you start looking at this watercolor in such different ways, right? Not as an image of water and rocks, but as an image of a border zone that seems quite walled, right? And hostile and comes with all these ideologies of America and has nothing to do with the kind of porous border that is the coastline with all its comers and its endless immigration and emigration that this image just refuses to see. So I'm wondering, I know why everyone wants to get away from all of that, right? Because that is sort of the traditional interpretation of American landscape picture making. But I'm wondering what happens if we don't see it at all anymore, right? And if some conversation between that form of interpretation and yours can be had, or whether there's no connection points at all. Do you shore up as a pun? Because I personally really, really love that. I didn't. I did. It was wonderful. Accidental water puns are everywhere. Yeah, so short answer, yes. But I'll elaborate. I think it's absolutely, and this is something I've really been struggling with is how to balance this kind of close looking that I'm really in this sort of interrogation of process that I'm trying to do with exactly what's not in these pictures because Richard's pictures, as you say, of the coastline and the ocean are by and large devoid of human occupation. But of course, he's absolutely embedded in the really fascinating economic history of the Gilded Asian. Furthermore, he's an artist who moves quite a lot across the Atlantic. And he's showing in the Royal Academy. He's shipping works across the ocean. He's writing letters from Newport, inland to patrons. There's this whole kind of economy that his work absolutely participates in. So how to engage those histories without just simply pointing out what's not there has been a question. There's a really wonderful book by Matthew Johnson. It came out in 2016. It's about sort of print culture in the 19th century in America and there's a chapter about pictures of the shoreline by Richards and also John Frederick Kenseth and thinking about how the kind of absence of people elides the economic present, specifically the touristic present of these places, particularly Newport, which of course by the Gilded Age was not only a popular resort, but home to some of the most wild and opulent mansions that the kind of industrial elite were building and all the inherent kind of labor and class structures along with them. And I might add that Richards himself built a quite grandiose home on Connecticut Island in Newport. Unfortunately it doesn't exist anymore, but I plan to go to the Historical Society and hopefully look at the interior for precisely kind of what you mentioned, thinking about what actually furnishes the walls and floors of this place. But one way that I'm trying to, so I'm trying to very much in the chapter not ignore this history, but one thing that's really become a particularly interesting way to engage with it is to not so much think just in terms of cataloging what's not in the pictures, but how to engage their context kind of, I suppose on a more structural level. And I've been reading a lot about discourse surrounding the experience of being in these coastal towns as places of speculation, places of incredible financial investment, and a lot of kind of anxiety surrounding the performance of class and the stability in fact of surface appearances in the social context. And so I'm trying to sort of think about Richards' worry about the status and stability of truth in his pictures, not just simply as a kind of, I really would like to not make an argument that sort of legitimizes him. He found a better way to access nature. Isn't that pure and great? Thinking about his concern with truth actually is absolutely part of what's happening all around him. So in that sense, it very much is in the picture. So thank you. I have a question for Raimi. And I really like what you... Oh, my sister. This is so weird. I really like what you did with bringing a kind of perspective in relation to relics and to the holy face. But I wonder whether the kind of fortuitousness of a life cast having been made shortly before Lincoln's death and then being used to commemorate Lincoln afterwards, whether that's doing any kind of labor for commemoration of dead people in the wake of the Civil War and the kind of problem of the body and the photography's engagement with death and dead bodies and mutilation. And so whether there's a relationship between them that you're considering. I'm considering Lincoln and his own early death as sort of a parallel between just the massive amount of loss of life at the Civil War witnessed. So a lot of people sort of channeled. It was like the whole nation could kind of engage in this mourning and grief process that was not only focused on Lincoln, but also their own losses. So there's been an absolute connection drawn there. And yeah, just the first part of your question about the mold or like the proximity of that too. I think that it's just so interesting that the cast was taken right at his ascendancy. Right before he became president, it was just so much life packed into that particular mold that I think brings, it just adds so much nuance to those later, those subsequent statuary when you think about the fact that they were referencing that life mask. It's not a death mask that they're referencing. And in fact, another life mask was taken of Lincoln very shortly before his assassination. So after the entirety of the Civil War, and it looks like a death mask. I mean, you see it and it's a profoundly different face and a profoundly different man. So at some point, bringing those into conversation would be really illustrative of that point as well. And I would like to do that too, so thank you. So I have a question that I think might be for all of you, but it was inspired by what along with Martha I saw as some of the overlap or cross-pollination between the first two talks. And I wanna ask about topography. And this is why I think it has to do with what Michael presented, because it struck me that both of you, well, well, Ramey and Camille, both of you were describing a new or reconfigured relationship between figure and ground, meaning you have this carpet paper and then you make a representation, but that representation brings with it something from the world. In the same way that the plaster brings with it something from the world, the hair from Lincoln's scout, but the ground is as with the carpet paper itself a kind of topography. It's a topography of flesh, the carpet paper is a sort of topography of materiality. And I'm wondering if you're seeing what you're doing as producing, I mean, this might be a rhetorical question because I would answer yes. I mean, I wonder if you see what you're doing as attempting to reimagine what the relationship between something like mimesis and materiality might be. Not just in the American context, but in terms of picturing projects more generally in the 19th century. And the reason I think this might be related to Michael's talk is because I was really struck by how you, I think, rightly resisted the idea or resisted collapsing this into the category of site specificity. I think that the Irwin project, I think that was really smart. And so I'm curious to hear what your sense of figure and ground is and how, if this isn't site specificity, how it might be a reconfiguration of the notion of how materials relate to the ground that they come into contact with. So maybe that at base is my question. What are you three imagining happens when materials come into contact with a kind of ground? It isn't necessarily the canvas surface because none of you were talking about that, really. So my positioning of it, not as site specific, as I said, comes from Irwin's own language that he likes to use. He uses the term site conditioned. He tends to use Richard Sarah as his example of somebody who he would consider site specific where the work is kind of created in with regards to the site, but ultimately he says it's kind of like plopped down on the site, which he distinguishes from his own site conditioned practice, which he feels really responds in every way to sort of the conditions of the site. And so it's not an object that's kind of brought in and placed, but it's an object that's more in tune, I guess, with its environment. The Marfa installation, though, is an unusual one for him, and because it's the first time that he ever actually created a structure from the ground up that was actually kind of leveled and placed on the site. So it's an interesting kind of transition for him in his own body of work because it departs, I think, a little bit from this idea that the work should only sort of be integrated into the site. Usually they're displayed either in galleries or in some kind of public space where they kind of intercede in the environment. But certainly it's a new relationship for him in terms of reconceiving that site specific thing. And I think that, again, it's this kind of balance between interjecting into the site versus kind of creating something that's meant to sort of integrate with it or somehow to become part of the landscape. So yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, I love this question or this idea of a facial topography as functioning as a kind of ground and a ground that kind of becomes a substrate or precedent for so much other statuary from its facture. And just your, the analogy between material and mymesis is also really helpful. Another chapter in this paper considered bronze, very specifically what it lends to a life likeness, quality and the sort of aqueous nature to its actual material. So I was looking at a Thai wine ribs, his notion of iconology of technique with bronze and just that bronze is such a special material for portraits and considered to lend itself particularly well to portraiture. So yes, to all of you above, I think that's a wonderful connection between the three of us. Yeah, thank you for elucidating that. And you see all of our papers in a really different light. And I think I'm also really invested in finding and engaging with these different artworks and artistic techniques and operations, how they reconstitute a relationship or perhaps propose tensions we haven't considered between ideas of mymesis and materiality as period specific and contested terms. And indeed, rhetorics. One thing, one sort of aspect of figure ground I'm thinking about in Richard's work is indeed his rhetoric to do with his own process, which I rely on really heavily in this talk, but actually he was sort of known for talking all about his kind of physical precarity and physical danger in relation to the ocean and there's all this writing about him going into the water physically, like his own body immersing in both the kind of ground but also his subject. And trying to understand that as a way of kind of unpacking productively ideas about truth and nature as rhetorical ideas may be constituted in and through these tensions as well. One more question. The American relic and histories of collective violence in the nation building project and interested in which collective deaths are made visible and whether there are collective deaths that are not made visible by the relic. And my question is partly informed by a senior thesis I co-advised with Robert Maxwell about a decade ago, Roland Bettencourt did a senior thesis at Penn on the objects coming out of the World Trade Center as relics, which made me think again about this kind of echo of a nation building project that uses individual objects to recognize certain deaths but maybe also to occlude other kinds of violences. And I guess I'm interested in knowing how a comparative thinking across the medieval and the modern informs or occludes that way of thinking. Other moments of tragedy in the United States and what kind of material reckons we sort of amassed to commemorate those events and the meaning that we have to show it upstairs for you. It's really important to have material in what is left to us, what remains obviously not, some things don't remain or some things aren't deemed or answered that importance and aren't sort of sequestered in an American history museum. So I think being sensitive to that distinction is of critical importance. And this is not necessarily my dissertation project, but I think thinking about this sort of relictual tradition writ large is a really important one and especially its potency in the 19th century and how sort of carries on, it absolutely does carry on through the 20th and the 21st. So just being really aware of that and careful with that. Yeah, thank you. Thanks everybody.