"Ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst!"
Museum Ludwig Köln

To Excite the Eyes
Catalogue review
By David Robinson
In: Print Quaterly, Volume XX, Number 2, June 2003

Ich Sehe Was, Was Du nicht Siehst! Sehmaschinen und Bilderwelten. Die Sammlung Werner Nekes, edited by Bodo von Dewitz and Werner Nekes, exhibition catalogue, Cologne, Museum Ludwig, 27 September 2002-5 January 2003, Göttingen and Cologne, Steidl Verlag and Museum Ludwig, 456pp., numerous colour and b. & w. ills., € 39.

This collection of essays by eighteen authors (if we include Werner Nekes himself proves the exception to the rule that the seminar style of book is rarely satisfactory, because of the difficulty of subjugating disparate texts and authors into consistency. If “Ich Sehe Was, Was Du Nicht Siehst!” - designed to accompany rather than specifically to catalogue an exhibition - succeeds and coheres, it is because the texts are dominated and unified by the rationale of the collection that inspires them and provides the rich illustrations.
Werner Nekes is the exemplar of the artist-collector, for whom a collection is not just a checklist accumulation of objects, but a creative work and philosophical exploration. As a prolific avant-garde film-maker since 1965, he has consistently sought to startle and stimulate the spectator's vision. Appropriately then, the principle of his collection, dating from the 1970s, is to demonstrate how media of very varied sorts have been employed to delight, assist, deceive, shock, or in any other way excite the eyes. He is quite catholic in the quest: incunabula and the classic texts of Scientific Revolution optics (Dürer, Kircher, Zahn, Scheiner, Schott, s' Gravesande) sit easily side by side with baroque automata or a Leporello postcard mailed from Gillingham in 1900; the Lumière Cinématographe alongside a 1950s juke-box.
Klaus Barthelmess's essay, 'Kosmologie und Sammlung', discusses the cabinets of curiosities (Kunstkammern, Wunderkammern) of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - microcosmic collections of the wonders of science and nature through which their gentleman-amateur owners sought clues to cosmic order. The Nekes collection is the twenty-first century equivalent: the cluttered shelves in a photograph of his own Wunderkammer at Mülheim an der Ruhr (p. 414) are not much different from those in the 1617 Breughel-Rubens painting Allegorie des Gesichtssinns (p. 2o2).
A central theme of the collection and the resultant book is the relation of optical science to art. Artists from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century perceived as their ideal the most precise observation of nature; and devices to assist and enhance this observation proliferated. Primary was the camera obscura, whose principles were observed from ancient times, and which from the time of Leonardo served many functions - as astronomical instrument, pre-cinematic spectacle-show and, most important, as a drawing instrument which passed directly into photography when chemistry took the place of the artist's pencil to record the image captured by the camera. Other devices - perspective machines and the pantograph - were directly devised for artists' use.
Nekes shows us too the manipulation of shadows both as theatrical shows and as artists' aids: a recurrent theme in eighteenth-century art is 'The Origin of Painting', as the portrait artist traces the shadow profile of his subject. Nekes particularly loves 'coptography', or 'white shadows', the art of cutting silhouettes as a kind of negative, which can cast a peculiarly realistic image on a white screen. Mirrors, in their turn, serve variously for projection, distortion or multiplication of images; for looking round corners and over high barricades; for constructing the kaleidoscope.
The optical discoveries of the scientific revolution quickly passed from scientific cabinets to exploitation as public spectacle. The magic lantern, with its pictures in light, amused, thrilled, delighted and often educated spectators, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth, when its techniques were appropriated and enlarged by the motion picture. The peep-show, exhibited throughout Europe by itinerant showmen, offered a voyeur's view of wider worlds. The nineteenth century was the golden age of more grandiose optical spectacles. The panorama, whether in the form of vast cylindrical trompe-l’oeil paintings or continuous canvases (often mendaciously advertised as being three or four miles long) that were progressively unrolled within a proscenium, satisfied the Victorian hunger for instruction combined with amusement. Daguerre's Diorama offered translucent trompe-l’oeil paintings, as big as an Imax screen, that came alive with ingenious plays of light.
Finally, though, the Nekes collection demonstrates that print and paper remain the most potent medium for fascinating and deceiving the eye: the German words Vexierbild, Vexierspiegel and Vexierspiel are admirably evocative. The range and ingenuity of artists and their publishers was limitless: the cut-out paper peep-shows of the prolific eighteenth century Augsburg publisher, Martin Engelbrecht, and his many nineteenth-century successors; 'beehive pictures' that are revealed when a cut-paper spider-web is raised; metamorphoses, in the form of harlequinade 'turn-ups, or books with split pages that permit endless changes of costume for the figures thereon printed (or even Humphrey Repton's layered vistas in his 18o6 Designs for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton; 'myrioramas', ever-changing landscapes, printed on cards that can be arranged in any order; fore-edge paintings; jigsaw puzzles and their antecedents; magicians' 'blow-books', the ingeniously mechanized toy-books of Lothar Meggendorffer; the limitless series of vues d’optique, which provided images for peep-shows and other optical viewing devices; anthropomorphic landscapes; reversing pictures, which transform into a different head when turned upside down; pictures made up of vertical ribbons, which present a different image according to whether they are viewed from left, right or head-on; 'morphing' images, which demonstrate the transformation of a face through strip cartoon techniques; prints arranged with discs that revolve behind an opening to effect facial changes in a portrait; erotic images that allow the viewer to blow aside the tissue skirts of female beauties. The gigantic public spectacles inspired imitation in miniature. Clark's Portable Diorama (1823) ingeniously simulates the lighting effects of the Diorama show in a 10" x 8" (254 x 203 mm) format. Folding panoramic prints were popular, but none excelled Samuel Leigh's 1824 Description of the Most Remarkable Places between London and Richmond, some 6o feet long although only nine inches high. The Ludwig Museum built a special case to show this masterpiece of print at full length and in all its glory.
The Nekes collection particularly reveals the variety of anamorphoses - mysterious images, popular from at least the sixteenth century, that only assume recognizable form when viewed at extreme angles or through distorting mirrors. Ultimately, print is allied to technology in the nineteenth century's motion picture toys - the Thaumotrope, Anorthoscope, Phenakistiscope, Zoetrope and Praxinoscope. Werner Nekes invariably has the best available examples of all these publishing oddities, in all their guises, comic, inspirational, educational or pornographic. Along the way there are extraordinary individual printed images: the masks to cure squinting from Georg Bartisch's “Augendienst” of 1583, the spiral drawing of two embryonic children from Frederick Ruysch's 1739 “Thesaurus Anatomicus”, a 1900 illustration of customs officers inspecting baggage by X-ray. A bonus is Nekes's own 'Glossar der Optischen Medien', hidden as an appendix, and identifying more than 2oo devices and techniques, from ‘Alabastra-Theater' and Alethoskop' to 'Zoopraxiskop' and 'Zylinderanamorphosen'.
The book (like the exhibition itself rushes to a close with a catch-all section on the post-photographic techniques of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 'Photographie ,Stereo - Chronophotographie', but also taking in cinematography and television. The extraordinary scope of Nekes's own vision is most apparent here. Alongside treasures of photographic history, the final and most evocative item is the cover of the fourpenny British magazine John Bull, from 1 May 1954, showing an English family enraptured by a football match on the little black-and-white television screen as the young son scornfully carries off the wireless set to the dustbin. An earlier harbinger of the television age is the 1929 Baird Television Senior Kit, a construct-it-yourself outfit, still in its original box with the wiring plan on the inside of the lid. The screen was only 1.000 x 800 mm, but they already called it 'The Eye of the World'.
Yet how remote the pre-digital era now appears. From 1957 comes the French 'Radiocinéphone', a bakelite radio set incorporating a gramophone turntable and a 16 mm film projection system, viewed on a little glass screen - an impertinent riposte to the imperfections and brief transmission hours of television of that time. And from 1958 the 'Scopitone-Filmbox', absurd yet marvellous. An oversize red juke-box, when you drop a coin in the slot you not only hear but see, on a TV-sized screen, prancing girls and preening men chirruping the worst French pop songs of the age. The marvel is inside - an intricate arrangement of thirty-six 16 mm films, each individually looped, and with a complex mechanism to move the film on demand to the projector and sound head, to screen it, and afterwards to rewind it ready for the next request. This triumph of mechanics seems far closer in time to the automata of Hero of Alexandria or Pierre Jaquet-Droz than to the invisible digital magic of the here and now.

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