Response to Thea Burns Review of The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas

Abstract

It was an honor to have my book, The Art of Paper: From the Holy Land to the Americas, reviewed in the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation (JAIC) as this book clearly stated that it was a cultural and not a technical history of paper, and so an unexpected review in this specialist publication offers an important opportunity for conversation between two disciplines. I appreciate Burns’s review offering this chance, particularly given her expertise as a paper conservator. I am grateful for her clarification around certain technical definitions, and I have no doubt that some of the language in my book would sound different to a conservator than an art historian. I am certain that from her perspective as a conservator, my terminology fell short of her expertise, and I appreciate her dedicated attention to language. She also wonderfully nuanced some of my readings with her vast knowledge, and it is unfortunate that she felt a need to characterize this as my failings as a scholar rather than a productive dialogue. I am primarily concerned, however, as Burns not only omitted large parts of my argument but also misrepresented the thesis and scope of the book. It was easy to do this, as she did not summarize the arguments of each chapter, as is standard in a book review. Instead, she drew upon certain threads while omitting others; most importantly, she ignored that this is a book about the mythologies surrounding European art history. I focused on the ways in which white paper, as a ground for drawing, thinking, writing, mapmaking, and bureaucracy, has played a role in creating certain mythologies around European exceptionalism from the fifteenth century to today. In many instances, Burns and I disagree on the evidence and arguments, such as the role of erasure in late-medieval drawing. It is productive to have both viewpoints circulating, and I appreciate her engaged consideration. Many of her arguments, however, are willful mis-readings. There are many points of clarification that Burns makes, such as rag paper was not always filthy when delivered to the watermill. Obviously, this is true, but the cultural, poetic, and verse landscape around paper in early-modern Europe built up a mythology about the transfiguration of filthy rags transformed into a white surface, a mythology that was part of a Christo-centric culture, which is elucidated in the book. She also quotes out of context; for example, suggesting that I argued that blue paper was a new technology when Dürer adopted it. As my examples of earlier blue paper suggest, I do not think it was a new technology, but it clearly held a specific novel appeal for Dürer who exclusively used it for a set of drawings made while he was in Venice. In some instances, the vocabulary of a non-conservator prevents Burns from engaging with my argument, such as when I refer to a piece of paper as pigmented, meaning that it was exactly as she described, dyed fibers intimately interwoven into the structure. I simply used pigmented as another term by which to describe with color. But perhaps the strong delineation between dyes and pigments in conservation terminology made Burns misread my argument? Most problematically, however, Burns states that my overarching thesis is: “Paper is not the object of representation,” and that its success demands “it remain transparent, denied its own capability to convey a message.” Perhaps, had she been forced to individually elucidate the arguments of each chapter, she would have contended with the actual thesis of the book, which is an examination of how the transmission of rag-paper technology from the Middle East to Europe transformed artistic production and ideas of authorship. The Art of Paper examines how earlymodern Europeans “forgot” rag paper’s Middle Eastern origins and assumed it was invented in Europe. This cultural amnesia became central to seventeenth-century philosophers, such as John Locke, likening the mind to a clean white sheet of paper, a new language that I argue was engaged with current debates around imagining the Americas as an empty ground for colonization, and carrying out a set of bureaucracies on the “invention” of European white paper. Fascinatingly, it was through the technical studies of Joseph von Karabacek (1845–1918) and Julius Wiesner (1838–1916) on Arabic manuscripts from the eighth century CE that Europeans were forced to acknowledge that they had not actually invented rag paper, a history outlined in my book. To ignore these larger arguments in this book review was irresponsible of the reviewer. If our two disciplines focus solely on the linguistic differences between our understandings of objects, perhaps we will miss the larger picture. To dismiss these larger arguments prevents both art history and conservation from the necessary conversation with one another about the Euro-centric narratives that have structured our disciplines.