TIME
The Grammar of Ornament (1886) by Owen Jones, British architect and design theorist, is a seminal decorative arts text that remains immensely popular to the present day. The first chapter of the book is titled “Savage Tribes” and the illustrations in this chapter show pattern designs on bark cloth, matting, wooden spears and clubs from several Polynesian islands. The next few chapters of the book cover sequentially: ancient Egypt, the Assyrian empire, ancient Greece, Pompeii, and ancient Rome (incidentally depicting designs on durable materials such as stone and ceramic).
The Polynesian cultures represented in Chapter One were first encountered by Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries and the patterns in question decorate objects made from organic materials unlikely to survive long periods, certainly not centuries or millennia, in tropical climates (especially the one diagram of facial tattoos since people are highly perishable). Jones and his contemporaries could only have reasonably established these particular designs existed in the 1600’s at the earliest, which is hundreds or even thousands of years after designs featured in the chapters which follow.
Plate I: Savage Tribes No. 1, The Grammar of Ornament
Plate VI: Egyptian No. 3, The Grammar of Ornament
Plate XXV: Pompeian No. 3, The Grammar of Ornament
This anachronistic organization of history is prevalent across the arts. Harvard professor Suzanne Preston Blier is a historian of African art and architecture who presented a paper at a Smithsonian symposium in 1987, a full century since the publication of The Grammar of Ornament, assessing the current state of academic scholarship on African art from the dual perspective of how far the field has come and how far it still had to go compared with the scholarship of Western art history. Blier describes her frustration with one the of the most influential books on art history The History of Art by H W Janson (first published in 1962 with many revised editions published in numerous languages since then) which placed traditional African and other so-called ‘primitive art’, “near the beginning of his chronologically organized text, immediately after prehistoric art and before (ancient) Egyptian art. This he does despite the fact that most of the African works that he illustrates date from the 19th and 20th centuries. In this chronology, Janson implies a cultural time frame for the African art traditions between 15,000 BC and 3,000 BC… Janson’s chronology is both ahistorical and faulty art history”.[1] Janson appears to have been following precedents set by the likes of Owen Jones during the Victorian era of peak colonialism. The vast majority of books presenting an encyclopedic history of clothing also suffer from Janson’s chronological confusion/delusion as they inevitably employ the same counterfactual sequencing.
Encyclopedic histories of art and design tend to use the following broad organizational strategy:
Fashion: The Whole Story (2016) is a characteristic example. The first chapter of the book traverses a span of 2100 years from 500 BC to 1600 AD marking the end of the Dark Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance which was a pivotal moment in European history as it signified a re-birth of intellectual, scientific and artistic enlightenment. As we progress through the book the quantity of time covered by each chapter quickly shrinks from two millennia to two centuries, then one century, and finally a period of only twenty-six years in the final chapter. Time, it seems, has both an order and a structure in history books as it is squeezed and stretched in harmony with European social movements. This morphology of time creates a predicament for non-Western arts whose pace and progression may not fit neatly within the anatomy of European Art Time™.
A cult publication on the original punk scene, In the Gutter (1978), juxtaposes photographs of British punks with people wearing traditional dress and body adornment in other parts of the world. The author’s motivation for doing so isn’t completely clear (the introduction loosely alludes to “a visual celebration of the most bizarre phenomenon of this decade”) and may indeed be suspect. Yet what strikes me as remarkable about the book is that instead of projecting African arts into the distant past In the Gutter positions African arts alongside their European contemporaries, bringing them back to the future. In the true spirit of punk, this anti-establishment gesture grants a long overdue opportunity to appreciate parallel aesthetics of two concurrent forms of dress (cultural and counter-cultural) at the same time.
In the Gutter, pp 56-57
Caption: Fulani woman, Upper Volta (Burkina Faso). In the Gutter, pp 14-15
Caption: Maasai elder, Kenya. In the Gutter, pp 34-35
Caption: Baluchi (Pakistan/Afghanistan) school child. In the Gutter, pp 52-53
[1] S Preston Blier, “African Art Studies at the Crossroads: An American Perspective” p 97
A Racinet, The Costume History, Taschen 2015 (originally published in Paris under the title Le Costume Historique by Libraire de Firmin-Didot et Cie in 1888)
F Boucher, 20,000 Years of Fashion: The History of Costume and Personal Adornment, Harry N Abrams Inc. 1987 (first published in 1965, republished in an expanded edition in 1987)
O Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, Bernard Quaritch 1868
S Preston Blier, “African Art Studies at the Crossroads: An American Perspective” in African Art Studies: The State of the Discipline - Papers Presented at a Symposium Organized by the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution September 16, 1987, National Museum of African Art 1990
M Fogg (ed.), Fashion: The Whole Story, Thames & Hudson 2016
V Hennessey, In the Gutter, Quartet Books 1978