sehepunkte 24 (2024), Nr. 11

Anna Grasskamp: Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia

In a recent article in "Grey Room", art historian and anthropologist Byron Ellsworth Hamann writes that disciplines like history and art history have transformed seas and oceans into "voids." [1] He argues that much scholarship on the Mediterranean fails to engage with the actual sea or to connect it with other ocean worlds, such as the Atlantic. One exception to his argument is the major scholarly study of the Mediterranean from 2000 by the historians Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, who describe the Mediterranean as "an inside-out geography in which the world of the sea is 'normal' (the interior), and the land is the fringe." [2] Recent decades have seen a sharp uptick in art historical work that attends to the interconnectedness of cultures, objects, and people within the systematic sea travel of the early modern world. [3] However, much of this work, as Hamann points out, follows a very terrestrial methodology of examining two or more distant places and not so much the vast maritime space that crucially connected them.

In "Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia", Anna Grasskamp beautifully shows that the world of the sea was thematically and materially ever-present in the daily lives of early modern people around the globe. Grasskamp reads deftly across European and Chinese sources to elucidate the many complex ambivalences that animated early modern perspectives on the ocean and ocean objects: alluring and threatening, commodified and sacred, and foreign and familiar, to name a few. She excavates an 'inside-out geography' in which the depths of the oceans that connected far-away lands were abundantly rich with materials and meanings that shaped people's views of other places, and of themselves. In doing so, Grasskamp models an art historical methodology for ascribing degrees of agency to a variety of organic matter that indelibly marked modes of (meaning-)making in early modernity.

This interest in the agency of objects receives particular attention in the first two chapters of the book. In the first chapter, Grasskamp analyzes Chinese nautilus shells mounted as cups as well as 'parrot cups' (conches carved in the shape of a parrot) in order to demonstrate how European artisans learned from the craftsmanship of Chinese artisans and from the natural forms of the materials themselves. This notion of learning from nature is expanded in chapter two, where Grasskamp skillfully draws together from multiple cultural traditions various conceptions of mollusks and their shells as inspiring or surpassing the artistry of humans. Following this line of thinking, people do not just act in one direction on the natural world, but the natural world acts on them, too, by teaching them the patterns and possibilities of making. Grasskamp is careful not to project contemporary discourses on agency onto the past so much as rather embed her discussion in period perspectives, such as the attribution of special powers to pearls, which were thought to be capable of counteracting the decomposition of a corpse (88).

Despite her emphasis on European and Chinese sources, Grasskamp's transcultural perspective, as exemplified by the term "Eurasia" in her title, is geographically expansive. [4] Chapter three reveals the extent to which numerous regions and religions saw shells as gateways to underwater worlds. Here and elsewhere Grasskamp considers objects and trade routes pertaining to northern and southern Europe and to various parts of Asia. Indeed, she "[defines] China and Europe as spaces entangled with South and Southeast Asian sites of knowledge production and trade". (12) For instance, studying the marine matter depicted in a handscroll formerly attributed to Qiu Ying, she details how materials like pearls, coral, gemstones, and tusks made their way to China by way of Buddhist monks in India (131-133). Such moments instructively expand beyond center and periphery models that traditionally have favored European perspectives. Instead, Grasskamp's framework paints a fuller picture of the multiple nodes or centers through which objects moved.

Describing the materials traded by Buddhist monks, Grasskamp writes that the tusks "are not maritime matter by definition, [but] they are related to the world of the oceans having entered China [...] alongside maritime matter such as coral and pearls". (133) In fact, tusks are maritime matter. In addition to elephants, ivory comes from narwhals, which were thought to be sea unicorns, and from walruses, the tusks of which were traded throughout Eurasia. [5] An ivory object illustrated in chapter four is carved into the shape of a scallop shell with the lamentation of Christ inside (171). Grasskamp does not discuss the material's specific animal origins. Although very possibly carved from elephant ivory, the object, which dates from sixteenth-century France or Rhineland, exists within the history of a region known to have carved many small devotional objects from walrus ivory, especially in the medieval period.

Such resonances with a variety of maritime matter also exist at the edges of Grasskamp's examination of shells. For instance, her discussion of shells as dwellings for humans in the work of John Mandeville and Desiderius Erasmus in chapter three reminded me of Olaus Magnus' description of houses supposedly constructed from whale bones in his "Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus" from 1555. Attention to a greater multitude of animals whose tusks and bones animated early modern art making would help underscore Grasskamp's concern with non-human forms of agency. While her primary focus on shells allows Grasskamp to delve deeply into the many complexities that orbited around that material, it also points toward the many other forms of marine matter that pervaded the early modern world and that still await full art historical consideration.

One of Grasskamp's overriding interests in shells is the early modern conflation of shells with a variety of human and animal bodies, a topic that culminates in the fourth and final chapter, where she turns her attention fully to gender. Across this fascinating chapter, she meticulously traces artistic representations of women on, in, and with shells. This body of evidence convincingly shows that the foreignness of shells and their decorations carried both exotic dimensions and erotic ones. For many of Grasskamp's case studies, across geographies, these erotic dimensions led to a double-objectification of the ocean by way of shells: as objects for collection and display and as female-gendered objects onto which men projected their desires for erotic fulfillment. At the same time, Grasskamp's attention to shells as bodies interacting with human bodies grants the former some agency within such negotiations, particularly in the power that the shells' mystery and allure held over collectors.

A short conclusion addresses contemporary photographs of seashells, such as by Francesca Woodman, and our enduring fascination today with ocean objects. Given this contemporary coda, it feels like somewhat of a missed opportunity that Grasskamp does not more directly engage with the ramifications of her ecological concerns within current debates around climate change, along the lines of other recent work on ecologies of early modern art. [6] Overall, though, "Art and Ocean Objects of Early Modern Eurasia" persuasively proposes multiple tectonic shifts for the field of art history. By way of her thorough and impressive research across European and Chinese archives, Grasskamp indubitably proves that seas and oceans can no longer be 'voids' within global art histories. She unearths the ways in which the ocean has shaped our conceptions of the world, of gender, and of art. Indeed, amidst the various painters, metalworkers, and craftspeople who appear in its pages, the artists that emerge most evocatively from the book are those countless industrious creatures that people the depths of the sea, who have been creating since long before humans and likely will continue to do so after us.

Notes:

[1] Byron Ellsworth Hamann: Fieldnotes from Solaris: Ship's Logs, Shipwrecks, and Salt Water as Medium, in: Grey Room 85 (2021), 103.

[2] Peregrine Horden / Nicholas Purcell: The Corrupting Sea. A Study of Mediterranean History, Oxford 2000, 133.

[3] See, for example, Daniela Bleichmar / Peter C. Mancall: Collecting across Cultures. Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, Philadelphia 2011 and Anne Gerritsen / Giorgio Riello (eds.): The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World, London 2016.

[4] Grasskamp has been defining the concept of "Eurasia" since before the present text. See Anna Grasskamp / Monica Juneja (eds.): EurAsian Matters. China, Europe, and the Transcultural Object, 1600-1800, Cham 2018.

[5] Matthew Elliott Gillman: A Tale of Two Ivories: Elephant and Walrus, in: Espacio, Tiempo y Forma VII: Historia del Arte 5 (2017), 81-105.

[6] See, for example, Sugata Ray: Climate Change and the Art of Devotion. Geoaesthetics in the Land of Krishna, 1550-1850, Seattle 2019.