This Mumbai Jeweler Amassed the World’s Largest Camera Collection
Artsy Editorial
By Himali Singh Soin
Oct 28th, 2016 4:50 pm
Portrait of Dilish Parekh in his Mumbai home by Dheerankur Upasak.
In
a two-bedroom apartment in Mumbai, 62-year-old Dilish Parekh lives
among some 4,600 cameras—the largest camera collection in the world,
which has made Parekh the Guinness record holder since 2003. “I probably
need 10,000 square feet to lay them out, but that is impossible in this
city,” he says of Mumbai, one of the world’s most overcrowded cities,
where the average residential space for the estimated 18.4 million
people hovers just above 86 square feet. Instead, stacks of
cameras—including some of the rarest and most expensive models in the
world—spill off shelves that line the walls of his bedroom, in a home
overrun by the spoils of over four decades spent scooping up every
camera in sight.
Parekh, a jeweler who moonlights as a
photojournalist, began collecting cameras in the early 1970s after his
grandfather gifted him a camera. From there, the teenage Parekh began
placing classified ads in newspapers, or scouring Mumbai’s sprawling
Chor Bazaar flea market, in search of more (he was known to hit the
market at 6 a.m. with two men in tow, each brandishing bags in
anticipation of a hefty prize).
Film stills from “The Light Collector” courtesy of Dheerankur Upasak.
“Remember,
these were the days before the internet,” he tells me with a
mischievous smile. “Nobody had a clue as to the value or history of
these items.” To this day, he says, he’s never spent more than $15 on a
single camera in his collection.
Despite this, Parekh has amassed a
treasure trove of rarities—from a vintage Daguerreotype plate camera
from 1890, to a camera disguised as a Zippo lighter, to the
string-operated WWII spy camera he scavenged from a junkyard in Nashik.
He’s also keeper of a Tessina L, the world’s smallest half-frame 35mm
camera, which weighs under six ounces. It helps, of course, that he
frequently receives cameras as gifts, from donors ranging from India’s
prime minister to “anonymous, unnamed folk” from across the country,
who, after reading Parekh’s story, send their otherwise dust-collecting
gems his way.
Portrait of Dilish Parekh in his Mumbai home by Dheerankur Upasak.
While
media attention has long taken note of his Guinness Book of World
Records wins, Parekh and his collection gained a greater foothold in the
public realm in 2014, when 40 of his antique cameras went on view in “A
Vintage Camera Collection,” an exhibition at the Indira Gandhi National
Centre for the Arts in Delhi. “It was an important moment for me and
the collection,” says Parekh. He even lent his favorite camera to the
show, his 1934 Leica 250 (valued at roughly $80,000, the camera is also
among the most rare; out of 950 manufactured, Parekh says only seven
remain today). Even rarer, perhaps, was the 1907 Royal Mail Postage
Stamp Camera—a mahogany box with 15 lenses that can snap 15 stamp-sized
portraits at once.
As pointed out by Mumbai-based filmmaker Dheerankur Upasak, whose stunning black-and-white short film about Parekh, “The Light Collector,”
was released in August, every time Parekh acquires a new camera, he’s
beating his own Guinness record. “Even if you buy a camera every day, it
will take you 12 years. By that time, I will [be] way ahead,” Parekh
notes playfully to any would-be challengers during the film.
But
Parekh’s admiration for cameras far surpasses this game of numbers.
When he’s not breaking records, he takes the cameras out into the world,
intent to document history.The oldest camera he’s shot with is the
medium-format Rolleiflex from 1929; the newest is a Canon Mark 5.“We
would not believe man’s visit to the moon had it not been for the
camera,” says Parekh. In 2008, he captured the aftermath of the terror
attacks in Mumbai with a Canon 7D, just a few hundred feet from his
office. (He dropped more than $15 for the digital SLR, but it’s not part
of his collection, which only comprises cameras made before 1960.)
“Remember
the riots in Gujarat in 2002?” he asks me, recalling the photograph of a
tearful 29-year-old tailor Qutubuddin Ansari, his hands in prayer, that
became the face of the riots. “That is still embedded in people’s
memory,” he says. He also points to the iconic photograph of the Indian
army holding their flag atop Tiger Hill in Kashmir in 1999, following
their victory against Pakistan. “It has come to symbolize the Kargil
War,” he says of the image. “Without a camera, these moments would be
lost and forgotten.”
Portrait of Dilish Parekh in his Mumbai home by Dheerankur Upasak.
Despite
residing in a shrine of analog cameras in an increasingly digital
landscape, Parekh is optimistic about the future of the medium,
ultimately praising digital cameras and smartphone photography for
having democratized the medium. And though his two sons, like the global
population, are devoted to their cell phone cameras, they remain deeply
respectful of their father’s wish for his collection: to house it in a
museum that preserves the cameras as art objects, setting them on a
historical timeline for coming generations who, without connoisseurs
like Parekh, might forget what came before Snapchat filters and
smartphones—and whatever comes next.
China is struggling to keep control over its version of the past
A battle is raging in the realm of historiography
THE Chinese Communist Party likes to describe threats to its grip on
power in barely comprehensible terms. Over the past three decades, it
has struggled against the menace of “bourgeois liberalisation” (leaving
many wondering whether there is an acceptable proletarian kind) and
fought against “peaceful evolution” (exceedingly dangerous, for some
reason, unlike “reform and opening up”). Now Xi Jinping, China’s
president, is waging war against “historical nihilism”, a peril as
arcane-sounding as it is, to his mind, grave. As a state news agency
recently warned, there is a “seething undercurrent” of it in China.
Failure to stamp it out, officials say, could lead to Soviet-style
collapse.
Days before the party’s 350 or so most senior officials gathered in
Beijing this week for a secretive conclave (as they normally do in the
autumn), a party website published a compendium of Mr Xi’s public
remarks on the nihilist problem (intriguingly headlined: “Xi Jinping:
There Can Be No Nothingness in History”). People’s Daily,
the party’s main mouthpiece, marked the start of the meeting with a
commentary laced with references to the lessons of history, including
the collapse of the Soviet Communist Party.
In party-speak, historical nihilism means denying the “inevitability”
of China’s march towards socialism (the country is currently deemed
only to be in the early stages of it). It is a term that came into vogue
among party officials after the crushing of the Tiananmen Square
protests in 1989. Jiang Zemin, who was then party chief, declared that
historical nihilism was one of several ideological vices that had
“seriously eroded” the party. Other, more obvious ones, included
yearnings for freedom and democracy. By reviving Mr Jiang’s rhetoric on
nihilism, Mr Xi is signalling that the party could again face
regime-threatening danger unless it tightens its grip on the way history
is told.
Against the flow
So what are the nihilists doing that so troubles China’s leaders? Mr
Jiang’s main concern was a television series broadcast in 1988 called
“River Elegy”, which had portrayed China as a country weighed down by a
long history of backwardness and inward-looking conservatism. The
documentary programmes had prompted energetic debate among intellectuals
about how to reform China that helped foment the following year’s
unrest.
No reflection on history has stirred the public in recent years as
much as “River Elegy” did in the build-up to Tiananmen. But there has
been a steady stream of articles chipping away at the party’s account of
history. Some have appeared in officially published journals; the more
revelatory ones have circulated in samizdat form
in print and online. They have included a Chinese journalist’s
investigation of the famine of 1958-1962 during which tens of millions
died, and accounts of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution in the
1960s and 1970s.
Mr Xi sees such writings as a challenge to the legitimacy of party
rule. Already in 2013 the party issued secret orders (subsequently
leaked) that its members must be on guard against historical nihilism.
The following year Mr Xi said an important reason for the Soviet party’s
collapse had been historical nihilism, including attacks on Lenin and
Stalin. Mr Xi sees Mao’s legacy as being under similar assault.
A journal specialising in historical critiques, Yanhuang Chunqiu,
recently became the most prominent victim so far of Mr Xi’s campaign.
To the horror of its liberal fans, the magazine was taken over in July
by hardliners; its feisty staff resigned. In 2014 Yanhuang Chunqiu
had published articles that daringly disputed the party line on
historical nihilism. One of them said the party should focus on fighting
those trying to reawaken the “old dreams of the Cultural Revolution”—in
other words, take on diehard Maoists instead.
Mr Xi has enlisted the judiciary to help him. On October 19th the
supreme court called a press conference to give its views on recent
legal cases that state media have linked with historical nihilism. In
one case a historian, Hong Zhenkuai, was told by a court to apologise
for challenging the party’s story of how five Communist soldiers had
jumped off a cliff during the second world war rather than surrender to
the Japanese. Mr Hong said two of them may simply have slipped. Another
case involved little more than black humour: JDB Group, a
beverage-maker, and Sun Jie, a blogger, were ordered by a court in
September to apologise for their tweets referring to a war hero who
burned to death during the Korean war. Mr Sun had called him “barbecued
meat”. JDB had jokingly offered to provide free drinks at Mr Sun’s
barbecue restaurant, should he open one. At the press conference, a
supreme-court official said those guilty had attempted to “unravel core
socialist values”.
There have been other examples, too: a blogger who was detained for
several days in 2013 for retweeting a claim that the cliff-leaping
soldiers had bullied local civilians; four others who were hauled in
that year for questioning the frugality of Lei Feng, another model
soldier (two of them were later jailed for publishing these and other
online “rumours”); and a television anchor, Bi Fujian, who was fired for
poking fun at Mao at a private party.
Mr Xi has justified his vigilance by quoting the words of a Chinese
reformist in the 19th century: “To annihilate a country, you must first
eradicate its history”. Mr Xi takes that as a warning that rewriting
history can cause catastrophe. When it comes to wiping out history,
however, the party itself has been trying dangerously hard.
This article appeared in the Print Edition with the headline: Nihil sine Xi
Esperanto’s founder hoped it would foster universal peace. Illustration by Miguel Porlan
As
the book of Genesis tells it, God had no sooner made a covenant with
the survivors of the Flood, agreeing that He would never again try to
drown humankind, than they did something new to annoy Him. Settling on a
Mesopotamian plain, they made bricks and mortar, and began building a
tower whose top, as they planned it, would reach to Heaven—that is, to
where God lived. God did not fail to notice what they were doing:
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
And the Lord said, Behold, the people is
one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now
nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.
So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
According
to Esther Schor, in her new book, “Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the
Dream of a Universal Language” (Metropolitan), this famous story, of the
Tower of Babel, represents a sort of second original sin. “If mortality
is what it is like to live after Eden, misunderstanding,” she writes,
“is what it is like to live after Babel.” This is not just a
psychological misfortune but, more pressingly, a political one. Because
we don’t speak the same language as our neighbors, we can’t see their
point of view, and therefore we are more likely to rob them and kill
them.
For thousands of years,
people have taken this matter quite seriously. Ambitious organizations
such as the Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church made sure that
their members, whatever their mother tongue, learned a second, common
language. More recently, various thinkers have considered constructing
universal languages from scratch. Schor gives a colorful summary. In the
seventeenth century, Francis Bacon proposed that our written language
switch to something like Chinese ideograms, bypassing words altogether,
and John Wilkins, the first secretary of the Royal Society, proposed a
new language with two thousand and thirty characters. Gottfried Wilhelm
Leibniz said that we should use a pictographic system, a little like
Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came
the rise of nationalism and, with it, linguistic nationalism, which held
that the particularity of language was in fact an advantage, not a
problem. Johann Gottfried Herder claimed that a people’s language
contained its spiritual essence. Wilhelm von Humboldt believed that
language, mediating between the mind and the world, actually created a
people’s identity.
The language
called Esperanto was born of such considerations, and one more—the
so-called Jewish question. Esperanto’s creator, Ludovik Lazarus Zamenhof
(1859-1917), a short, sparkly-eyed, chain-smoking ophthalmologist, was a
Jew, and, as he wrote to a friend, this made all the difference: “My
Jewishness has been the main reason why, from earliest childhood, I gave
myself completely to one crucial idea . . . the dream of the unity of
humankind.”
By this he may have
meant that Jews were broader in outlook. In any case, he felt that they
needed to be. In the town where Zamenhof grew up—Białystok, now in
Poland but at that time part of the Russian Empire—the population, he
wrote, “consisted of four diverse elements: Russians, Poles, Germans,
and Jews; each spoke a different language and was hostile to the other
elements.” He went on, “I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught
that all men were brothers, and, meanwhile, in the street, in the
square, everything at every step made me feel that men did not exist,
only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews.”
In
fact, the Russians, Poles, and Germans did see eye to eye on one thing:
they all disliked the Jews. In 1881, this sentiment set off a great
wave of pogroms in Russia, which, in turn, gave rise to Zionism, the
effort to get the Jews out of harm’s way by relocating them to what was
said to be their promised land, Palestine. Zamenhof was in his twenties
when all this happened, and for a while, before devoting himself to the
cause of Esperanto, he was an enthusiastic Zionist. He spent more than
two years modernizing Yiddish, converting it to the Latin alphabet,
revising the spelling, and constructing a grammar, the first Yiddish
grammar ever recorded. (He did this while he was in medical school.
Zamenhof was one of those nineteenth-century notables—Balzac, Dickens,
Pasteur, Freud, Marie Curie—who seem to have slept only about three
hours a night. In his adult years, when he was head of the Esperanto
movement, he balanced this with a full-time ophthalmology practice. He
also had a wife and three children.)
In
time, Zamenhof became disillusioned with Zionism. Indeed, he turned
away from all movements defined by ethnic or national identity. “Every
nationalism presents for humanity only the greatest unhappiness,” he
wrote. He deplored the Jews’ claim that God had made a covenant with
them exclusively—that they were a chosen people. He wanted Judaism
purged of all narrowness. Let the Jews keep some of their nice things,
their High Holidays and the stories and the poetry in their Bible. But,
as for theology and ethics, they should confine themselves to the
teachings of Rabbi Hillel (first century B.C.), which, according to
Zamenhof, consisted of just three principles: that God exists and rules
the world; that He resides within us as our conscience; and that the
fundamental dictate of conscience is that we should do unto others as we
would have them do unto us. “All other instructions,” Zamenhof
declared, “are only human commentaries.”
The
objective of Zionism had been to find for the Jews a safe place, where
their separate culture could survive unharmed. Zamenhof’s objective was
to open up Judaism, so that it would no longer require either
separateness or protection. “Instead of being absorbed by the Christian
world, we shall absorb them,” he said. “For that is our mission, to
spread among humanity the truth of monotheism and the principles of
justice and fraternity.” Then everybody could be Jewish!
For
this to happen, though, all human beings would need to be able to speak
to one another. There had to be a shared, universal language. Hence
Esperanto.
He
started work on it early. At his nineteenth-birthday party, in 1878, he
surprised his guests by giving each of them a small dictionary and a
grammar of a new language he had invented. He then made a speech in the
language, and taught his friends a hymn in its honor:
Malamikete de las nacjes
Kadó, kadó, jam temp’está!
La tot’ homoze in familje
Konunigare so debá.
Let the hatred of the nations
Fall, fall! The time is already here;
All humanity must unite
In one family.
To
Zamenhof’s disappointment, most of his friends forgot about his
linguistic innovation once they left the party. That was when he drifted
into Zionism. But eventually he returned to the project with renewed
purpose. In 1887, he self-published his “Unua Libro,” or “First Book,” a
primer on the proposed language, with explanatory materials in Russian.
It contained a pronunciation guide, a dictionary, and a grammar, plus
translations of the Lord’s Prayer, an excerpt from the Hebrew Bible, a
poem by Heine, and other items. He called the language the lingvo internacia,
but people soon began referring to it as Esperanto, after the nom de
plume that he had given himself as the book’s author, Doktoro Esperanto
(Doctor Hopeful).
He
said later that he wanted his language to be “unlimitedly rich,
flexible, full of every ‘bagatelle’ that gives life to language,” but,
above all, he wanted it to be easy to learn, and that is how he promoted
it. He claimed that even uneducated people could master it in a week.
Maybe he was right, if the people were Western, because Esperanto is
closely based on Indo-European languages, or the ones that Zamenhof knew
best. Though he eventually acquired almost a dozen languages, his
mother tongues were Russian and Yiddish (which is related to German),
and he learned German and French at an early age from his father, who
was a language teacher.
Esperanto
does not stray far from those sources. It has an alphabet of
twenty-eight letters, in Latin script. About three-quarters of the words
are derived from Romance languages; most of the remainder are based on
Germanic languages. The phonology, or sound system, is fundamentally
Slavic. The language is very simple. There is almost no distinction
between masculine and feminine nouns. With some exceptions, common nouns
used as subjects end in “-o” (singular) or “-oj” (plural), and
adjectives modifying them end in “-a” (singular) or “-aj” (plural). Most
adverbs end in “-e.” Verbs are not adjusted for person or number: “I
sing” is mi kantas; “you sing,” vi kantas; “they sing,” ili kantas. Verb endings change with tense, but only once. No matter who sang or will sing—I, you, we, they—the verb is always kantis (past) or kantos (future).
In
“Unua Libro,” Zamenhof offered about nine hundred roots, and although
he added some more later, Esperanto remains a language with a very small
pantry of staples. This frugality, its most basic trait, is then
tempered by its second most basic trait, its agglutinative nature—the
construction of words by the incessant addition of prefixes and suffixes
to the roots. “Jet lag” is horzonozo:hor (“time”) plus zon (“zone”) plus ozo (“illness”). A samideano
is a fellow-Esperantist, someone who has the “same idea” as you about
Zamenhof’s creation. These words can now be found in Esperanto
dictionaries, but you didn’t have to wait for permission: Esperantists
were invited to construct words, and they did. Schor, trading
improvisations with another Esperantist, comes up with elmuri—“to take something out of a wall”—for getting cash from an A.T.M.
The compounds give Esperanto a playful, almost childlike, character. (So do some of the roots. “Toast” is toasto.)
Something else they call to mind is Dr. Frankenstein’s creature,
stitched together from so many parts—an ear here, a nose there. Schor, a
professor of English at Princeton, is the editor of “The Cambridge
Companion to Mary Shelley.” She points out the connection, and she seems
to think that Zamenhof may have experienced something like Dr.
Frankenstein’s amazement when he saw what he had created. She quotes a
letter in which Zamenhof tells a friend that, in using Esperanto, he
eventually stopped translating in his head and began to think in the
language. Suddenly, he says, it “received its own spirit, its own life,
its own definite and clearly expressed physiognomy.” Oh, my God, it’s
alive!
As for how it sounded, there have been some rude remarks. William Alden, the London correspondent for the Times,
described it as “a sort of Italian gone wrong in company with some
Slavonic tongue.” But that was in 1903, when probably no one yet spoke
it confidently. If, today, you go to YouTube and listen to people who
have spoken Esperanto from early childhood, you will hear something that
sounds vaguely Eastern European and, though unmusical, perfectly O.K.
But
Zamenhof did not put together Esperanto in order to show that he could
invent a language. He was trying to achieve world peace. As usual, he
gave his project a rather naïve coloration. In “Unua Libro,” he inserted
a page printed with eight identical coupons—one for you and seven,
presumably, to distribute to friends—on which you promised that if ten
million other people agreed to learn the new language you would, too.
You were supposed to sign the coupon and send it in. Zamenhof was
disappointed to receive only a thousand responses.
Within
two years of the original, Russian publication of “Unua Libro,” it had
been republished in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Swedish, Latvian, Danish,
Bulgarian, Italian, Spanish, French, and Czech. There were two English
editions. In 1908, a Universal Esperanto Association was established,
but even before that Esperantists had begun holding international
congresses every year. By the time of the first congress, in 1905, there
were Esperantists as far afield as Argentina, Algeria, Australia, and
French Indochina. For a while, there was a campaign to make Esperanto
the official language of proceedings at the League of Nations and even
to establish an Esperanto-speaking state, to be known as Amikejo
(“friendship place”), in Neutral Moresnet, a tiny territory that at that
time was on the border of Belgium and Germany. Pioneering Esperantists
began teaching the language to their children, and a first generation of
native speakers sprang up. Among their number was George Soros, the son
of a prominent Hungarian lawyer who had helped found an Esperantist
literary journal in Budapest. Soros used the occasion of the 1947
congress, in Bern, to escape to the West.
But
the history of Esperanto has been far from smooth. The movement was
divided from the start. Esperanto attracted leftists and freethinkers of
various stripes—Goebbels called it “a language of Jews and communists,”
not entirely inaccurately—and the majority of those people, like
Zamenhof, conceived of the language as an ethical program. But many
others were interested in it primarily as a linguistic novelty. French
intellectuals, in particular, were put off by Zamenhof’s
brotherhood-of-man effusions, as became clear at the first international
congress, in 1905, which was held in Boulogne-sur-Mer.
At
that time, France was still in the grip of the Dreyfus affair. A decade
earlier, the French Army, trying to cover a security leak, had arrested
a Jewish officer named Alfred Dreyfus, tried him for treason, and
sentenced him to life imprisonment. From the beginning, it was suspected
that Dreyfus had been framed, and the resulting conflict tore French
society in two, exposing and fortifying a deep vein of anti-Semitism.
When the Esperantists gathered for their conference, Dreyfus still had
not been exonerated, and it did not help the movement’s cause that
Zamenhof was Jewish. The conference committee asked to see the text of
Zamenhof’s keynote address. “Through the air of our hall mysterious
sounds are travelling,” he had written, “very low sounds, not
perceptible by the ear, but audible to every sensitive soul: the sound
of something great that is now being born.” He ended with a prayer to
the spirit of brotherhood that, under the banner of Esperantism, would
unite humankind: “To thee, O powerful incorporeal mystery,” etc.
A
French Esperantist, a lawyer named Alfred Michaux, described the
committee’s reaction: “One can hardly grasp the wonderment and scandal
of these French intellectuals, with their Cartesian and rational spirit,
representatives of lay universities and supporters of secular
government, accustomed to and identified with freethinking and atheism,
when they heard this flaming prayer.” They told Zamenhof to revise his
speech and to drop the prayer. “Tearful, isolated, apprehensive, he
refused to change the speech,” Schor writes, but he deleted the final
stanza of the prayer, which proclaimed that Christians, Jews, and
Muslims were all children of God. Meanwhile, the conference leaders were
doing all they could to keep the bad news of Zamenhof’s ethnic origins
out of the press. One of the organizers, Louis Émile Javal, himself a
Jew, later wrote proudly that only one of the seven hundred articles
about the congress mentioned that Zamenhof was Jewish.
On
the surface, the congress was a great success. Almost seven hundred
people attended. There were concerts and banquets. Stalls sold
Esperanto-themed pencils, pens, plates, and even a liqueur—Esperantine.
Zamenhof’s speech received a loud ovation. (One wonders how many people
understood it.) But the occasion cannot have seemed a triumph to
Zamenhof. Not only did the Congress Committee pressure him to tone down
his address; it also issued a declaration that moral commitments had no
bearing on Esperanto. The movement was an “endeavor to spread throughout
the entire world the use of this neutral, human language,” the
committee said. “All other ideals or hopes tied with Esperantism by any
Esperantist is his or her purely private affair.” This was the exact
opposite of what Zamenhof intended. The whole point of his
Esperanto—what he called its interna ideo—was to teach the brotherhood of man.
Still,
he capitulated. He could never stop his ears to the argument that his
universalist values, by sounding Jewish, would put people off
Esperanto—indeed, that his mere Jewishness, never mind his values, was a
burden to the movement he had created. But his coöperation could not
last. In the same year as the Boulogne congress, there was another spate
of pogroms. Preparing his speech for the next international conference,
in Geneva, in 1906, Zamenhof described the events in his home town of
Białystok. “Savages with axes and iron stakes have flung themselves,
like the fiercest beasts, against the quiet villagers,” he said. “They
smashed the skulls and poked out the eyes of men and women, of broken
old men and helpless infants!” At the conference after that, in
Cambridge, in 1907, he said flatly that Esperanto would “become a school
for future brotherly humanity.” In the end, he had decided that if the
others wanted to regard Esperanto as a neutral business that was their
private affair. Through various disputes and difficulties, backslidings
and recoveries, he remained faithful to his interna ideo for the remaining years of his life.
They
weren’t many. As early as his forties, he began to suffer cardiac
symptoms. He died, of heart failure, in 1917, at the age of fifty-seven.
It is good that he quit the scene early. Zamenhof was exactly the kind
of person that the Third Reich would set itself to eliminate. And by
dying before they took over he also spared himself the experience of
seeing his children die. His son was shot by the Nazis in 1940. Both of
his daughters were sent to Treblinka and did not return.
The
story of Ludovik Zamenhof and the language he invented occupies the
first third of Schor’s book, and it is by far the best part. That the
rest falls flatter is not really Schor’s fault. “For sheer dirtiness of
fighting the feuds between the inventors of various of the international
languages would take some beating,” George Orwell once wrote. His Aunt
Nellie had a lover who headed the Esperanto movement for some years in
the twenties and thirties, and Orwell spent a lot of time with them in
Paris during that period. Dirty fighting, if prolonged, does not
necessarily make for good reading. Of course, there was fighting in
Esperanto’s early years, too. What could be more distasteful than the
French Esperantists’ treatment of Zamenhof’s Jewishness? But that whole
thing reads like a novel, at least in Schor’s hands—she is a lively
writer—and Zamenhof is a real hero, whom she clearly loves. By contrast,
many of the people who came after him were the sort of nasty little
demagogues whom one tends to find battling one another to the death for
control over small, marginal movements, often on the left. Esperanto saw
no end of sects, schisms, secessions, coups. Members set up rival
languages: Ido, Arulo (later renamed Gloro), Poliespo. These sound like
something out of “Gulliver’s Travels.”
When
the Esperantists weren’t attacking one another, they were being
attacked from the outside. Zamenhof had hoped that the United States
would become the headquarters of Esperanto. This made sense to him:
America was already multiethnic. There the Esperantists would not have
to fight tribalism the way they had to in Europe. But that was part of
the problem: many Americans felt that they were multiethnic enough,
thank you. Many were also perfectly happy to embrace nationalism, as
they are today. So, between the two World Wars, most Esperantists
remained in Central Europe and the U.S.S.R. (also in Japan). There,
though they were steadily persecuted, their movement managed to survive.
Indeed, this period seems to have been the high-water mark of
Esperanto, though, even then, its principles were so contested and
revised that it’s hard, at times, to figure out which version of
Esperanto Schor is talking about.
The
fall of the Soviet Union, by letting the steam out of Communism,
greatly weakened the Esperanto movement. In the twenty years following
the end of the U.S.S.R., the Universal Esperanto Association’s
membership fell by nearly sixty per cent. Equally important was the
year-by-year expansion of English-language training. If Zamenhof felt
that we needed an international language, we now more or less have one,
though it’s not the one Zamenhof wanted. More recently, the rise of the
Internet has changed the profile of Esperanto, albeit in ambiguous ways.
On the one hand, it has made the Anglicizing of international
communications ever more unstoppable. Next to English, Esperanto looks
like a very small thing. On the other hand, the Internet has made this
small thing much easier to learn. One no longer has to join
organizations or subscribe to journals or attend congresses. Since 2002,
the Web site Lernu! (“Learn!”) has taught Esperanto to people coming
from thirty different mother tongues.
Schor
isn’t certain how she feels about this. She is faithful to Zamenhof, to
the idea that Esperanto is not so much a language as the bearer of an
idea. To absorb the idea, she says, one must subscribe to the
journals and go to the conferences. One must affiliate—meet
Esperantists, talk to them. She does, and she takes us with her. In the
book are four chapters describing her visits to congresses in Hanoi,
Havana, Iznik (in Turkey), and Białystok. But, again, it’s not easy to
figure out how she feels, or to what extent she is actually affiliating.
At one conference, she lists the subgroups present: the gay
Esperantists, the Green Party, the vegetarians, the pacifists, the cat
lovers. She describes the slogan-bearing T-shirts—“Vivu! Revu! Amu! ” (“Live! Dream! Love!”)—and the “gray-braided elders dressed more or less like John the Baptist.”
The scene is a little like science fiction—a collection of radicals from the sixties who didn’t
“sell out”—and it’s quite witty, until, after a few pages, it isn’t.
Schor may have sensed this, because she starts unloading personal
matters: how her interest in Esperanto coincided with a life crisis,
during the course of which she split up with her husband of thirty
years—“kind Leo; funny, brilliant Leo”—and wept daily, “sometimes most
of the day.” Like the conference diaries, this material feels like
something she decided to give us when she suspected that we’d be missing
Zamenhof.
But she pulls herself
together and ends on a strong, high note, taking on a number of what she
calls myths about Esperanto: that its intent was to standardize us all,
that it had its heyday and is over with. Above all, she attacks the
idea that the Boulogne Congress Committee tried to force down Zamenhof’s
throat: that Esperanto is essentially nonpolitical.
I
don’t think she had to tell us that this was mistaken. To readers
today, Esperanto may look quite political, and not necessarily in an
appealing way. It may look like the family-of-man idea that had been
sold to the unfortunate over the centuries, to discourage them from
complaining that they hadn’t got a very good seat at the family table.
In particular, it may seem directly opposed to the identity politics
that many have now embraced, in order to end those injustices. They are
not part of the family of man, they say. They are part of the family of
women or African-Americans or gay people, and never mind individualism
and case-by-case judgment. But Schor believes that it is precisely this
division—the great political quarrel of our time—that Esperanto may be
able to heal, by reconnecting us, through a common language, to a shared
earth.
People are apt to make fun
of other people’s habit of talking about the weather to their neighbors
in the elevator. They shouldn’t make fun. By invoking the one thing
that we know we have in common with others, we throw a rope across the
divide, asserting that, whatever our differences, we do share something:
when it rains on one of us, it’s going to rain on the other one, too.
Schor quotes the Spanish Esperantist Jorge Camacho: “Esperanto continues
to give me something . . . which I don’t find anywhere else, an
irrational sense of directly belonging to the world.” A language in
common, a few words that we can say to one another or, even if we don’t
learn the words, an awareness of the interna ideo: it’s something, a hook. ♦
Angst 3, Anne Imhof, 18. and 19. October 2016, 19h–23h, Musée d’art contemporain Montreal. - Photo by Jonas Leihener, Courtesy La Biennale de Montréal
Bienvenue à Montreal: North America’s seat of “Francophone culture.” La Biennale de Montréal
curator Philippe Pirotte pointedly reminded journalists at the
exhibition preview last week that Montreal remains the cultural
crossroads for two major colonial forces, the French and the British.
Perhaps it’s fitting that the heart of a province which almost seceded
from the rest of Canada just a few decades ago, has managed to beat out
Toronto, Vancouver and even the capital city of Ottawa as the home of
the country’s only biennial exhibition for contemporary art. During his opening remarks, the
Belgian-born Pirotte addressed attendees only in French—a legal
obligation—that left him with the daunting (but fairly standard) task of
repeating himself again later in English, and provided a less than
clear entry point for those of us whose French is spotty into a show
laden with literary references. And while contemporary Quebec has
undoubtedly evolved into an offspring completely unique from its
European parents (poutine is just a Montreal thing it turns out),
artworks in the show make steady use of the Socratic method, such that
it’s nearly impossible to forget you’re in a place with French roots.
A singular theme, it turns out, is nowhere to be found in ‘Le Grand Balcon’ intentionally.
Just as some prefer not to read wall
text before viewing artwork, an in depth explanation of the Biennale’s
loose inspiration from Jean Genet’s famous play Le Grand Balcon (The Balcony)
is unnecessary. A singular theme, it turns out, is nowhere to be found
in the exhibition intentionally, according to director Sylvie Fortin.
Rather, Biennale organizers seek to spark conversation around a
constellation of timely topics and arresting visuals from works by 55
participating artists and collectives, letting one image lead viewers to
the next through a web of connecting threads and heady discourse.
Disassembled pages from Lima-born, Toronto-based artist Luis Jacob’s
scrapbook album of pictures cut from magazines and books, simply titled Album XII (on
view at the Galerie de l’UQUAM) captures organizers’ intentions most
literally: an image of natural rock formations might appear next to
sculptured organic forms, while a picture of gloved hands holding a
black-and-white photo of a crowd all staring up toward the sky is placed
directly above a still from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,
featuring Shelley Duvall staring down in horror at the gibberish Jack
Nicholson has been typing on his typewriter. Themes and visual tropes
flow and morph into closely related topics from one page of Jacob’s book
to the next. But while his clippings weave a seamless narrative arc,
the exhaustive image bank as a whole doesn’t provide firm answers for
any of the visual relationships he’s underscored. Initially, Pirotte said, he wanted to
create an exhibition about hedonism, but decided against it when he
concluded that the selfish urge for pleasure lacked an “ongoing
philosophy.” Nonetheless, hedonism (in many forms) has crept into the
halls of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts, the Galerie de l’UQAM, and 19 other venues where the
Biennale will take place through January 15, 2017, along with other
themes such as violence, politics, identity and sexuality.
Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Portrait of a Lady. - Montreal Biennial
If viewers begin where Pirotte did in
his research for the show, they’d do well to start with the oldest work
on view: a mysterious portrait painting by German Renaissance artist
Lucas Cranach the Elder, which dates to 1540. Just what is an Old Master
portrait doing in a gallery alongside works by Nicole Eisenman, Hassan
Khan, Luc Tuymans and Moyra Davey, you might ask? “We live in an art world that’s so
good at self-censorship,” said Pirotte, pointing out that sections of
the female figure’s hands have been visibly altered to obscure what some
believe to be the head of Holofernes or John the Baptist. Most likely,
he said, the fair woman depicted by Cranach was Sidonia of Saxony, and
even more likely is that she was meant as a stand-in for the allegorical
character Judith or Salome. But despite efforts by conservators in the
1930s to hide her identity by adding flowers in place of a head, “she
imposes herself on the overpainting,” he said—a more poetic way of
saying that conservators did a terrible job at suppressing Sidonia’s
confident femininity. This push and pull between seemingly
oppositional forces is among those few themes borrowed from Genet’s
original source material, as is the hazy veil that exists between
reality and illusion, which took literal form in German artist Anne
Imhof’s marathon four-hour-long performance, Angst 3,
at the MAC on Tuesday and Wednesday evening. The third in a series of
self-proclaimed operas—absent of any scripted singing or dialogue—Imhof
filled the MAC’s performance hall with thick smoke, droning music, cases
of Diet Pepsi, shaving cream and razors, live falcons, bongs,
e-cigarettes, sleeping bags, smartphones, drones and seven dancers (or
models, it was hard to tell) dressed in tattered athleisure brands such
as Adidas and graphic heavy metal-themed sweatshirts. Performers lazed
around and smoked while reclining on colorful rugs, surrounded by
paraphernalia and the blindfolded falcons on pedestals. At times they
stood, apathetically flipped-off the audience while rolling on the
floor, lifted and tossed each other about, kissed, scribbled on the
walls, picked up the birds, stomped back and forth, and stared at their
phone screens. Imhof creates something of a living
tableau here, ripped from one of Delacroix’s painted harem scenes,
except her IRL version exoticizes the millennial and places the
vapidness of consumerism and digital culture on a pedestal. If there’s a
higher meaning (beyond nodding to the meta-theater of Le Grand Balcon)
in inviting audiences to endure four hours choked by smoke, while
worrying about the safety of birds and getting the finger from really
emo dancers, it remains elusive, but it’s still enticing enough to
inspire continued thought well after the performers have abandoned the
stage.
Thirteen Black Cats, Corpse Cleaner. - Courtesy of the artists
That spectre effect of imagery and
idea is a powerful force successfully executed by several of the
Biennale’s artists, all of whom explored an impressive variety of
themes. At the Galerie de l’UQAM, a film by collective Thirteen Black
Cats (Vic Brooks, Lucy Raven and Evan Calder Williams) took viewers on a
slow-rolling tracking shot through a props warehouse in Queens, filled
floor-to-ceiling with Hollywood’s leftovers, while a voiceover dictates
the correspondence of WWII air force pilot Claude Eatherly (who was
involved in the bombing of Hiroshima) and German philosopher Günther
Anders (he worked as a Hollywood studio janitor during the war). In Corpse Cleaner,
the juxtaposition of fake swords and chariots with Anders’ concerns
over the destruction of real treasures in Europe is disturbing,
especially today in a new era of cultural destruction lead by ISIS in
the Middle East.
The juxtaposition of fake swords and chariots with
Günther Anders’ concerns over the destruction of real treasures in
Europe is disturbing, especially today in a new era of cultural
destruction lead by ISIS in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, in the MAC’s lobby gallery, Belgian artist David Gheron Tretiakoff’s 20-minute film A God Passing
documents the 2007 transport of a colossal statue of Ramses from the
Cairo train station to the Giza Museum. The statue slowly moves through
the city streets atop a massive truck, while swarms of people cheer and
watch in awe as the physical manifestation of Egypt’s mythic cultural
history lumbers forward above power lines and rooftops. Only a few short
years later, in 2011, protests forced Hosni Mubarak to resign and the
Egypt that exists in Tretiakoff’s film has been completely transformed.
Still from David Gheron Tretiakof’s film A God Passing. - Courtesy of the artist
“Art is never on time, art is always
too late,” Pirotte said, of the difficulty that exists within
contemporary art to tackle current events. His statement certainly rings
true in both the aforementioned films, where the haunting power of
images of the past allow the viewer to draw conclusions on the present,
only because time has elapsed and the event’s influence has run its
course. Everywhere in the works of the
Biennale, philosophical discourse is the name of the game. But what’s
the point of asking such weighted questions if not to find some answers?
A biennial is not a philosophy class after all, and talking too much
theory runs the risk of alienating audiences. Thankfully, organizers have provided
some entry points close to home: Canadian artists are well represented
(18 total), and smartly so considering a spokesperson from the MAC told
me that turnout for openings by local artists typically draw larger
crowds than those by foreigners. And while several of the more
well-known Canadian artists, such as Moyra Davey and Janice Kerbel, now
call other nations home, their participation is still a noteworthy
homecoming for the country’s small but tight-knit art scene.
Moyra Davey, Hemlock Forest. - Montreal Biennale
Davey’s newest video work, Hemlock Forest, is an intimate portrait of the artist and her family framed within scenes borrowed from Belgian artist Chantal Akerman’s film News from Home.
“We all sample, we all do covers, it’s a way of showing love,” Davey
says in the narration. The film jumps between a view from her Washington
Heights window, glimpses of her talking to the camera while pacing her
apartment, photos taken by her son hanging on the wall, and re-stagings
of Akerman scenes painstakingly shot in the New York City subway or
half-nude in her own bed. Davey discloses details about a death in the
family, grappling with chronic illness and empty-nest syndrome, which
all serve to bring the viewer in closer though she skillfully holds her
audience at an arm’s distance.
Moyra Davey’s work, as well as drawings and
watercolors by Brian Jungen and light box sculptures by American art
star Kerry James Marshall, help ground the philosophical discourse of
the Biennale in substantive, timely and personal conversations.
Davey’s work, as well as drawings and
watercolors by Brian Jungen and light box sculptures by American art
star Kerry James Marshall, help ground the philosophical discourse of
the Biennale in substantive, timely and personal conversations. While
Davey draws on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and Akerman to make sense
of her own life, Marshall seeks to redraw the figures left out of
canonical history, specifically black bodies. Jungen, who is one of
three artists of First Nations descent included in the show, directly
addresses Canada’s unresolved relationship with its indigenous
population in his imagery. In his simple watercolor depicting two
directional signs, one reading “FIRST NATION” points one way while the
other, “SECOND NATURE,” points the opposite. Pirotte addressed the
choice to include work on First Nations issues (which are more widely
discussed in Canada than in the U.S.) as a double-edged sword which felt
both exploitative and necessary.
Untitled watercolor by Brian Jungen. - Alanna Martinez
A talk between Marshall and Tuymans,
moderated by Pirotte, perhaps best sums up the myriad opposing forces at
play in Montreal’s sprawling biennial. “Reality is something that
informs you. You can’t make art from art,” Tuymans told the audience,
while discussing how his paintings are largely based on photographs and
existing imagery. In contrast, Marshall had this to say about painting:
“The reality of my work is only in the picture.” If the ambitious Montreal Biennial
suffers from anything, it’s an overabundance of content—some real, some
entirely fictional, and a good lot of it appropriated. I can’t say that I
left Montreal with any firm conclusions about the state of the world,
or contemporary art, but the show reaffirmed my belief that artists are
the shrewd pundits this world so badly needs. Pirotte phrased the burden
of the artist eloquently: “Art is a vessel to transfer knowledge.” Let
artists ask the big questions, it’s up to the rest of us to find
answers.
“It was the nightmare before Christmas / And all through the house / Not a creature was peaceful / Not even a mouse,” Tim Burton wrote in a riff on the popular holiday rhyme, “The Night Before Christmas.” His
poetic parody would go on to inspire one of his most beloved films, not
least because it can be enjoyed during two separate holidays.
In the above 10-minute video, the late
Christopher Lee reads Burton’s original poem, on which the “The
Nightmare Before Christmas” is based, detailing the frustrations of Jack
Skellington, the spookiness of Halloween Town, and the terror bestowed
upon young children after Santa Claus is kidnapped and replaced by a
bonier doppelgänger.
Notably,
Burton’s original 1982 story has no romantic component ― Sally, Jack’s
rag doll admirer in the movie, doesn’t make an appearance. Otherwise,
the movie is faithful to the original vision, a lyrically wrought first draft.
“Then out from the grave with a curl and a
twist / came a whimpering, whining, spectral mist,” Lee reads when
introducing Jack’s dog and best friend, Zero.
The poem, capable of eliciting fear and
wonder, was written years before “The Nightmare Before Christmas” was
released in 1993, when the good-intentioned Jack was finally introduced
to a wider audience. At the time, Disney didn’t market the movie for
kids, fearing that it would be too scary for young viewers.
Today, of course, Jack and his friends are celebrated by movie-lovers of all ages.
