Spectacle Culture and American Identity 1815–1940

1815-1940

S. Tenneriello

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137360625
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre History & Criticism

Scenic spectacles collapse the borders of graphic and visual arts, multimedia technology, spectatorship and architecture. Drawing upon various systems of commercial, institutional and public spectacle that intersect with scenic stages of the national landscape, Tenneriello examines how spectacle is entrenched in the formation of national identity.

1

Immersive Scenes: Visual Media, Painted Panoramas, and Landscape Narratives

Among the history paintings and statuary displayed in the Rotunda of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, resides a panorama of 19 panels dramatizing episodes in American history. Painted in fresco with a neutral palate of white and brown to emulate the effect of classical sculptural relief, The Frieze of American History wraps around the belt of the Rotunda’s walls 58 ft from the floor. Each panel (8 × 4 ft) depicts a different scene in the contentious terrain of nation building. The popular narrative begins with Columbus stepping onto “American” soil and leads clockwise to the Wright brothers’ 1903 Flyer lifting off into the sky. The storied movement preserves a “natural” expansion across the continent through the Spanish conquests of North America to the growth of American industry.¹ Constantino Brumidi, who also painted The Apotheosis of Washington on the canopy of Thomas Walter’s iconic dome, made the first sketch for the panorama in 1859.² Yet, it took nearly a century to complete it. Over time, commissioned artists made incremental amendments to the painted panels while consolidating any stylistic variations to maintain a unified design.³ Frame by frame the scenic text, like the creation of the panorama itself, convey a never-ending campaign to fashion the diverse character of the people and the prosperity of the land into the perpetual motion of nationhood.

The Frieze of American History raises a panoramic motif in early nineteenth-century scenic spectacles, that of landscape and history. Two distinct vistas: one manifesting values of nature, shaping imaginative sensations, the other linked to politics, shaping narrative meanings, embroider scenic modes of exchange in the antebellum period. In various ways, American landscape panoramas harbor historic scenic content, paralleling geographical movement through landlocked battles: civil rights, sectional politics, Indian authority, territorial boundaries, and material progress. The entrance of visual media in the form of installation panoramas wrap landscape narratives around the internal struggle over the direction of the country’s destiny after the War of 1812. Balancing federal policies of Western expansion and states’ interests persisted as a competing logic in national survival in the postwar climate.⁴ The 1820 Missouri Comprise, allowing Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, temporarily held together a delicate balance of free and slave states in Congress. American scenic landscapes reflect a branch of “panoramania” sweeping Western European cities that coincide with the splintering attributes of domestic politics.⁵ In tandem with economic energies jolting political schisms, cultural communities brewed the styles, subjects, and vocabularies of domestic traditions. Rosemarie K. Bank conceives a spatial history in antebellum theatre culture constitutive of “multiple, simultaneous relationships.”⁶ Scene spaces conjoin Bank’s spatial realm through mediums of spectacle immersion. Featured here, the popular visual media of installation panoramas. Scenic panoramas emit differing landscape narratives as the infrastructure of a culture industry takes economic shape. I weave the wayward story of the Capitol panorama with early appearances of the Niagara landscape to air the ebb and flow among the actual environment, illusion, and public ideals that cycle throughout this study. These political and cultural scenes instill sensory vernaculars of the “American” landscape that complicate memes of progress, opportunity, and independence in regional topography, wilderness, Indian cultures, and race inequalities. The variant and overarching vantage points appearing in panoramic scenes of wonder and enterprise provide a glimpse into synchronic disparities of historical discourse.

Contrary Landscape Narratives

The story of the Capitol panorama begins in concert with a rapidly accelerating political economy. Static principles of “progress” that underpin nation building respond to active conditions of violence and uncertainty undermining national survival. The Frieze of American History negotiates this interior spectrum of volatility by amending territorial acquisition into a binding stasis. At the start point of the panorama’s creation federal consolidation shattered single party politics wide apart. Thomas O’Brien explains that polarizing fissures in the antebellum political climate splintered the Republican Party over how government conceptualizes “a shared social basis.”⁷ Older traditions, advocated by slave-holding states of a newly formed Whig Party, took measure to conserve a social contract of mutual interests free from government interference. The nativist agenda sought internal expansion of agricultural wealth creation by sustaining the economic institution of slavery. Modern tradition, championed by the National Republican Party, required a step forward to unify the people as the state: “insisting that, unless one could define the people by a catalog of social habits, economic institutions, racial characteristics, and religious customs, there was no legitimate sanction for a state.”⁸ The so-called progressives promoted market economics.

In his second inaugural address (1833), President Andrew Jackson called for a “sprit of liberal concession and compromise” of states under a “Federal Union” to preserve order and liberty.⁹ His leadership of the Democratic Party endorsed a centrist line of “popular sovereignty.”¹⁰ Jackson’s expansion of executive powers agitated the protracted debate over the country’s direction. Institutional processes, in one analysis, recover the stagecraft of state power. The Capitol panorama sanctions an artifice of continental “emancipation” in this administrative design. In practice, partisan systems of political economy: nuanced among conservative, liberal, and centrist positions, modulated indeterminate shares in social liberty. These fractures work with and against the autonomous energies of business and cultural practices disbanding the limitations imposed by the privileged freedoms of legal and economic systems. In communication with political culture’s contentious sensibilities, landscape themes were among the first genres of installation panoramas to broach commercial and independent interaction with economic narratives.

Niagara landscapes raise alternative vocabularies of historical ideography that communicate the instabilities of political economy. In different ways, the fearsome “power” of the Niagara landscape underscores the transgressive spaces of “natural” order reflected in the Capitol panorama. Romantic filtrations of the sublime entering treatments of landscape subjects portend supersensual tensions of awe and terror, where destruction, repression, disorder, and exclusion are constituent to progress, prosperity, and consensus. The currency of America landscape imparts immersive presence in the “natural” equivocation of freedom. Actual landscape sites, such as Niagara Falls, negotiate “monumental” narratives of the country’s historical destiny. Geographical spaces communicate dynamic circumstances where landscape and spectacle forge a dialogic medium of visual narrative.

Questions of mediation posed by landscape theorists enumerate various approaches to “ways of seeing.”¹¹ This functioning premise was set forth by Denis E. Cosgrove in his influential Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Cosgrove emphasized perceptional strategies in landscape art as a methodology to decode societal discourse.¹² One particular line of inquiry hinges the economies of land and culture to the commercial production of early nineteenth-century installation panoramas. W. J. Thomas Mitchell voices a Marxist orientation to the ideological functions of landscape in terms of valuations. He defines landscape not as a genre of art but as a “medium of cultural expression” that is a “representation of something that is already a representation in its own right.”¹³ This concept is especially significant given the desecration of Indian cultures by legalized force. Panoramic vision layers additional mediation on landscape narratives. Discrepancies in particular strategies of manufacture, market forces, and ideological functions pressure visibility in a new media autonomy. Three oscillating perspectives among commercial, political, and independent viewpoints serve to ply land values and land myths as an immersive medium, one that I attempt to demonstrate transfers the actions of history to a visionary space.

The Industry of Visual Media: Methods of Production

Inaugurating a scenic sensorium in the early decades of the nineteenth century, circular painted panoramas play a role in enlarging permanent circuitry of a permeable immersive medium. An industry of technical media proliferated with rapid diversification. Stephan Oettermann claims an unintentional side effect in the manufacture of stationary panoramas created a new and more “democratic perspective.”¹⁴ He grounds this theory in the technical possibilities of unifying many viewing points into one all-encompassing painted perspective, which in turn enables observers to indiscriminately engage different viewpoints in the painting without distortion. His formal appraisal strains to defend a fuzzy pluralism. The “effect”—by which I mean the virtuosity of the technical medium—of this democratizing apparatus is worth fleshing out. Sensory technologies couple a distinct system of interactive production values. The all-encompassing views of panoramic installations posit scenic immersion partner to inhabiting spatial illusion and dramatic storytelling.

Landscape genres catapulted from a picturesque form of painting to specially designed display spaces. The concept of creating a circular painted panorama is credited to Irish artist Robert Barker in 1785. While living in Scotland, Barker had the notion of drawing everything he could see from the top of a high hill in Edinburgh on four sheets of paper. He then transferred the sections of drawings to a large canvas that he suspended in a wooden shed. The resulting scene space surrounded the spectator, who had a vantage point on top of a hill looking down into a city and out over a rustic countryside. Rather than view the painterly affects of a scene from outside its frame, as a separate static object, suddenly the viewer moved around the scene. Barker first called his exhibition “nature at a glance” (la nature à coup d’œil).¹⁵ In order to distinguish his display from traditional forms of painting, by 1791, he coined the term panorama (“all sight” or “all seeing”) in the advertising for a London exhibit of his Panorama of Edinburgh.¹⁶ The branding of panorama technology resides in the manufacturing science behind the novelty of displaying a circular painted 360-degree topographical “view.” The painted scene was a magnification of a landscape, recomposed from on-site renderings. A mathematical grid overlaid on the canvas enabled the separate sections to be blended into a composite wrap-around view.

Oettermann considers panoramic space a departure from the idealized perspective of classical art.¹⁷ However, the scene painting was stabilized with a curving horizon line to establish a diminishing perspective in relation to the spectator’s centralized (ideal) position. Furthermore, painting techniques were quite conventional and aligned the spectator within a stable—though hidden—framing mechanism. Panoramic space depended on aesthetic consistency to attract belief in the illusion. Barker detailed his method. The painter must “fix his station and delineate connectedly every object that presents itself to his view as he turns around, concluding his drawing by a connection with where he began.”¹⁸ The resulting “bird’s eye of view” enlivened the physical mobility of spectatorship within a system of standardized production values. The enveloping scene conveyed a resonating scroll admired for its literacy. One “struck” visitor to a Panorama of Jerusalem remarked “though I have never seen that ancient city, I have read so much about, and studied its geography so much, that I am quite confident of its correctness.”¹⁹

Panoramic typology inexhaustibly transmitted world affairs, current events, and historiography to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Setting the Scene
• 1 Immersive Scenes: Visual Media, Painted Panoramas, and Landscape Narratives
• 2 Moving Scenes: Multimedia Performance along the Mississippi River
• 3 Entertainment Scenes: Industrial Strength Brands of Site-Specific Spectacle
• 4 Theme Scenes: Producing Global Strategies on US Exhibition Stages
• 5 Instructional Scenes: Heritage Preservation, Commerce, and Museum Dioramas
• Epilogue: Visionary Spaces
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index