7. The Cast as Public Record
The introduction of plaster casts into America began with their use as models for art education. Using Henry Frieze’s 1855 collection at the University of Michigan as a model, American universities collected casts of canonical works of sculpture and architecture to provide studies for their students. Eventually, institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts began to collect casts for public exhibition. Furnished by the rapidly increasing wealth of the industrialist class at the end of the 19th century, these collections were often exhibited to raise the art literacy of the American public. This trend continued into the early 20th century until the buying power of the donor class was great enough to purchase the more prestigious originals.
In Pittsburgh, just as the cast was becoming obsolete, Andrew Carnegie collected what may be considered, architecturally at least, the apotheosis of plaster cast collections. From 1904 to 1907, The Carnegie Museum of Art, at Carnegie’s specific request, collected a large volume of works spanning from Scandinavian stave churches to Egyptian ruins. This collection, like the majority of American collections, was primarily made up of Greco-Roman sculptures and architectural objects, including fragments from Delphi, the Porch of the Maidens, and a full-scale cast of the facade of Temple of Athena Nike. The temple front was cast in 1906 by D.F. Donovan & Company, a plaster workshop in Boston, and installed in the Hall of Architecture in 1907, at its opening. The temple, which today sits next to a cast of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, is emblematic of the collection as a whole. By the turn of the century, these objects were bought, sold, and commissioned on an industrial scale. By the time the Carnegie Museum commissioned the cast, J.F. Donovan & Company likely used a pre-existing mold as new molds from original artworks and architecture were increasingly viewed as too damaging to the source. As the scale of plaster production increased and the buying power of museums increased, the price of the casts went down and the demand to bring originals to American institutions increased. This devaluation would eventually cause the casts to go out of style and be removed to warehouses or “sledge hammered and carried off by dump trucks.” In spite of this trend toward obsolescence, the Carnegie Museum’s collection of casts has been continuously displayed since its opening, even becoming the centerpiece for the museum through its novelty and scale.
While the cast collection in the museum has remained unchanged for over 100 years, the city outside its walls changed rapidly. By 1907, Pittsburgh was firmly within the range of what Lewis Mumford would call a “Paleotechnic Paradise,” a trend he contends started in the city well before the 1850s—in fact the first complaints about smoke in the city started in the 18th century—but the city would not reach its polluted peak, or pit, until the 1940s when the city would finally stand up and apply standards, however weak, to its air quality. Mumford notes that increased spending on laundry, curtain cleaning, and general other cleaning could cost the city up to two million dollars per year, not including “the losses due to the corrosion of buildings or the increased costs of painting woodwork.” These losses, whether paid for by the city toward the maintenance of its own buildings, or by the inhabitants toward the maintenance of theirs, stand in stark contrast to the pristine ecology maintained in the museum on the hill. In fact, Cliff I. Davidson notes that in 1914 the city estimated the total cost incurred by the smoke at over ten million dollars a year.
Davidson also notes that through the 1870s and into the 1890s, the use of natural gas increased in Pittsburgh in both private and industrial contexts, greatly reducing the smoke in the air. The effect this had on the city was extreme, prompting an uproar as smoke would eventually creep back into the city. But, if once banished, why did smoke creep back into the city? First, the natural gas found near Pittsburgh in the 1870s was only in small supply, creating an initial surge in the market that soon returned to the status quo of cheap coal and imported gas. Second, in the 1880s Andrew Carnegie’s coke supplier, Henry Clay Frick, grew to have an increasing role in the management of Carnegie’s company, now completely vertically-integrated through the inclusion of Frick’s coke plants. Frick would manage the transition between the once-separate companies controlled by Carnegie and would, in general, perform the dirty work while Carnegie performed the public-facing image making. In 1892, Carnegie would give a speech to the Chamber of Commerce where he claimed that “the man who abolishes the smoke nuisance in Pittsburgh is foremost of us all.” But, while Carnegie made public plays toward the improvement of all, his private decisions would run counter to that image. Carnegie would not be the man to end smoke in Pittsburgh; Carnegie owned the coal and Carnegie burnt the coal.
Since the turn of the century, the times that Pittsburgh has been at its cleanest—until recent, meaningful action—have been times of economic depression, such as the Great Depression or the truly devastating crises of the 70s and 80s. In fact, the low emissions of the Depression, paired with the drastically increased production of steel for World War Two, led to calls for smoke abatement in the early 1940s. Without the paired nature of this bust and subsequent boom, it is unlikely that the cries of the public would have been loud enough to enact any real change. Historically, most calls for the abatement of smoke have come after a dip in emissions due to economic or material factors. These dips, predicated on the forced closure of Pittsburgh industry, show that the city’s atmosphere, despite its natural disadvantages, is constructed by human forces. Though not all human forces are the same; the smoke that lingers in the air above Pittsburgh is neither natural nor equally distributed. The means of smoke production have historically been held by the proportionally small class of industrialists. In this light, Carnegie’s call for a man to stand up and end the smoke once and for all sounds more like a challenge than a plea.
As Mumford notes, the corrosive pollutants released from the burning of coal have greatly affected both the health of Pittsburgh’s inhabitants as well as the solidity of the built environment. Yet, inside the Carnegie Museum the cast of the Temple of Athena Nike stands in the Hall of Architecture almost as pristine and white as the day it arrived, the polluted atmosphere of the city being kept at bay by the curators and maintenance workers.
The molding of the original object in Athens and its reproduction in plaster allowed for the “Temple of Athena Nike” to be exchanged as a commodity across the globe, redefining the work of art through its material abstraction and industrial reproducibility. Whether we agree with it or not, it is a common social norm to understand a white object as a blank canvas. The whiteness of the cast in particular was used to provide artists with the work of art as pure “form”; if the cast could not carry certain sensuous qualities with it, it could at least carry the original’s shape. The reduction and reproduction also allow it to be understood as a distributed object. It is unlikely that any cast in the Carnegie Museum is the only object hewn from the original mold. Therefore, we can expand our perception of the cast to include not only this exact material instance, but also the other casts from the same mold as a series of deployments in what Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe call the “career of a work of art.” These two qualities allow for a rereading of the cast as a single blank canvas in a series of similar blank canvases.
Though it shares distributive qualities with other casts in its family, The Temple of Athena Nike in the Carnegie Museum of Art is also marked with individual qualities that stem from its history as a market commodity. The cast was given as a “gift” from Andrew Carnegie through the museum to the inhabitants of the city. This move, the philanthropic gift of arts education, doubles as both a move to garner positive publicity as well as a method of shaping the public through a paternalistic idea of the artistic canon. If we take these socially defined qualities of the cast, that is, its blankness and the moralistic value it carries as a philanthropic gift, and combine them with the aforementioned constructed atmosphere of Pittsburgh, we can see that both objects were delivered to the people of Pittsburgh rather than emergent from the people of Pittsburgh. We can then understand that the actions of the museum to preserve the plaster cast create a complex relationship between the object’s use-value and its moral value. It is true that through the cast’s removal from the market over 100 years ago that it has regained its use-value as a tool of education. Many visitors to the museum will never have the opportunity to see the original object in Athens, and, as such, it offers value to them outside of market systems. Unfortunately, the object—and the collection as a whole—does equal work to mythologize and mystify the capitalist accumulation that brought it into existence. The cast was traded on the market as a commodity, and its decommodification required both the institutional power of the museum and the economic power of one of the richest men of his era.
It is here where the museum-object and the atmosphere may meet productively. The continued preservation of the plaster cast allows for the myth of Carnegie and the philanthropic spirit of the Industrialist class to continue. This project instead proposes the marriage of Carnegie’s two “objects”: the cast and the atmosphere. By removing the cast from the Carnegie Museum of Art and placing it into the city, it retains its use-value as an educational tool and adds another. As the whiteness of the cast fades, it becomes a record of Pittsburgh’s atmosphere. By comparing the cast in Pittsburgh to similarly situated casts in other cities, the cast would have made clear the damage being done to the environment and people, as well as directly tie together Carnegie’s “gifts.” The nature of the cast as once-commodity is crucial in making legible these natural conditions. The abstraction and the distribution of these objects allow them to be the perfect canvas on which to measure the ecological record.
In Pittsburgh, just as the cast was becoming obsolete, Andrew Carnegie collected what may be considered, architecturally at least, the apotheosis of plaster cast collections. From 1904 to 1907, The Carnegie Museum of Art, at Carnegie’s specific request, collected a large volume of works spanning from Scandinavian stave churches to Egyptian ruins. This collection, like the majority of American collections, was primarily made up of Greco-Roman sculptures and architectural objects, including fragments from Delphi, the Porch of the Maidens, and a full-scale cast of the facade of Temple of Athena Nike. The temple front was cast in 1906 by D.F. Donovan & Company, a plaster workshop in Boston, and installed in the Hall of Architecture in 1907, at its opening. The temple, which today sits next to a cast of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, is emblematic of the collection as a whole. By the turn of the century, these objects were bought, sold, and commissioned on an industrial scale. By the time the Carnegie Museum commissioned the cast, J.F. Donovan & Company likely used a pre-existing mold as new molds from original artworks and architecture were increasingly viewed as too damaging to the source. As the scale of plaster production increased and the buying power of museums increased, the price of the casts went down and the demand to bring originals to American institutions increased. This devaluation would eventually cause the casts to go out of style and be removed to warehouses or “sledge hammered and carried off by dump trucks.” In spite of this trend toward obsolescence, the Carnegie Museum’s collection of casts has been continuously displayed since its opening, even becoming the centerpiece for the museum through its novelty and scale.
While the cast collection in the museum has remained unchanged for over 100 years, the city outside its walls changed rapidly. By 1907, Pittsburgh was firmly within the range of what Lewis Mumford would call a “Paleotechnic Paradise,” a trend he contends started in the city well before the 1850s—in fact the first complaints about smoke in the city started in the 18th century—but the city would not reach its polluted peak, or pit, until the 1940s when the city would finally stand up and apply standards, however weak, to its air quality. Mumford notes that increased spending on laundry, curtain cleaning, and general other cleaning could cost the city up to two million dollars per year, not including “the losses due to the corrosion of buildings or the increased costs of painting woodwork.” These losses, whether paid for by the city toward the maintenance of its own buildings, or by the inhabitants toward the maintenance of theirs, stand in stark contrast to the pristine ecology maintained in the museum on the hill. In fact, Cliff I. Davidson notes that in 1914 the city estimated the total cost incurred by the smoke at over ten million dollars a year.
Davidson also notes that through the 1870s and into the 1890s, the use of natural gas increased in Pittsburgh in both private and industrial contexts, greatly reducing the smoke in the air. The effect this had on the city was extreme, prompting an uproar as smoke would eventually creep back into the city. But, if once banished, why did smoke creep back into the city? First, the natural gas found near Pittsburgh in the 1870s was only in small supply, creating an initial surge in the market that soon returned to the status quo of cheap coal and imported gas. Second, in the 1880s Andrew Carnegie’s coke supplier, Henry Clay Frick, grew to have an increasing role in the management of Carnegie’s company, now completely vertically-integrated through the inclusion of Frick’s coke plants. Frick would manage the transition between the once-separate companies controlled by Carnegie and would, in general, perform the dirty work while Carnegie performed the public-facing image making. In 1892, Carnegie would give a speech to the Chamber of Commerce where he claimed that “the man who abolishes the smoke nuisance in Pittsburgh is foremost of us all.” But, while Carnegie made public plays toward the improvement of all, his private decisions would run counter to that image. Carnegie would not be the man to end smoke in Pittsburgh; Carnegie owned the coal and Carnegie burnt the coal.
Since the turn of the century, the times that Pittsburgh has been at its cleanest—until recent, meaningful action—have been times of economic depression, such as the Great Depression or the truly devastating crises of the 70s and 80s. In fact, the low emissions of the Depression, paired with the drastically increased production of steel for World War Two, led to calls for smoke abatement in the early 1940s. Without the paired nature of this bust and subsequent boom, it is unlikely that the cries of the public would have been loud enough to enact any real change. Historically, most calls for the abatement of smoke have come after a dip in emissions due to economic or material factors. These dips, predicated on the forced closure of Pittsburgh industry, show that the city’s atmosphere, despite its natural disadvantages, is constructed by human forces. Though not all human forces are the same; the smoke that lingers in the air above Pittsburgh is neither natural nor equally distributed. The means of smoke production have historically been held by the proportionally small class of industrialists. In this light, Carnegie’s call for a man to stand up and end the smoke once and for all sounds more like a challenge than a plea.
As Mumford notes, the corrosive pollutants released from the burning of coal have greatly affected both the health of Pittsburgh’s inhabitants as well as the solidity of the built environment. Yet, inside the Carnegie Museum the cast of the Temple of Athena Nike stands in the Hall of Architecture almost as pristine and white as the day it arrived, the polluted atmosphere of the city being kept at bay by the curators and maintenance workers.
The molding of the original object in Athens and its reproduction in plaster allowed for the “Temple of Athena Nike” to be exchanged as a commodity across the globe, redefining the work of art through its material abstraction and industrial reproducibility. Whether we agree with it or not, it is a common social norm to understand a white object as a blank canvas. The whiteness of the cast in particular was used to provide artists with the work of art as pure “form”; if the cast could not carry certain sensuous qualities with it, it could at least carry the original’s shape. The reduction and reproduction also allow it to be understood as a distributed object. It is unlikely that any cast in the Carnegie Museum is the only object hewn from the original mold. Therefore, we can expand our perception of the cast to include not only this exact material instance, but also the other casts from the same mold as a series of deployments in what Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe call the “career of a work of art.” These two qualities allow for a rereading of the cast as a single blank canvas in a series of similar blank canvases.
Though it shares distributive qualities with other casts in its family, The Temple of Athena Nike in the Carnegie Museum of Art is also marked with individual qualities that stem from its history as a market commodity. The cast was given as a “gift” from Andrew Carnegie through the museum to the inhabitants of the city. This move, the philanthropic gift of arts education, doubles as both a move to garner positive publicity as well as a method of shaping the public through a paternalistic idea of the artistic canon. If we take these socially defined qualities of the cast, that is, its blankness and the moralistic value it carries as a philanthropic gift, and combine them with the aforementioned constructed atmosphere of Pittsburgh, we can see that both objects were delivered to the people of Pittsburgh rather than emergent from the people of Pittsburgh. We can then understand that the actions of the museum to preserve the plaster cast create a complex relationship between the object’s use-value and its moral value. It is true that through the cast’s removal from the market over 100 years ago that it has regained its use-value as a tool of education. Many visitors to the museum will never have the opportunity to see the original object in Athens, and, as such, it offers value to them outside of market systems. Unfortunately, the object—and the collection as a whole—does equal work to mythologize and mystify the capitalist accumulation that brought it into existence. The cast was traded on the market as a commodity, and its decommodification required both the institutional power of the museum and the economic power of one of the richest men of his era.
It is here where the museum-object and the atmosphere may meet productively. The continued preservation of the plaster cast allows for the myth of Carnegie and the philanthropic spirit of the Industrialist class to continue. This project instead proposes the marriage of Carnegie’s two “objects”: the cast and the atmosphere. By removing the cast from the Carnegie Museum of Art and placing it into the city, it retains its use-value as an educational tool and adds another. As the whiteness of the cast fades, it becomes a record of Pittsburgh’s atmosphere. By comparing the cast in Pittsburgh to similarly situated casts in other cities, the cast would have made clear the damage being done to the environment and people, as well as directly tie together Carnegie’s “gifts.” The nature of the cast as once-commodity is crucial in making legible these natural conditions. The abstraction and the distribution of these objects allow them to be the perfect canvas on which to measure the ecological record.
