Monster Smackdown: The Trojan Horse Vs. Godzilla At Cornell Library

By Nancy Mattoon

A Japanese historical magazine,
which singles out the birth of Godzilla
as the signature event of the year 1954.
(All Images Courtesy of Carl A. Kroch Library.)

Man has a long history of creating "famous" animals. Some are mythical or literary, like the Minotaur or Toto. Others are real animals, elevated to celebrity status like Rin Tin Tin, or more recently, Internet sensation Maru the Cat. A fascinating new exhibit at Cornell University's Carl A. Kroch Library uses rare books, manuscripts, photographs, and artifacts to explore "how and why humans choose to elevate certain individual animals or species to the status of divinities, emblems, mascots, heroes, or celebrities."

Woodcut Illustration From:
Opera Virgiliana. Lyon: Crespin, 1529.

Animal Legends: From the Trojan Horse to Godzilla is an elephantine display of serpentine complexity. It is divided into five major sections, corralling creatures from ancient times to modern, including the menagerie rescued from the Biblical Flood by Noah, Ulysses's "noble hound" Argos from Homer's Odyssey, E.B. White's web-spinner Charlotte, and even canine cosmonauts Belka and Strelka, two of the first living creatures to orbit the earth for an entire day. It is inspired in large part by the pioneering work of French cultural historian Michel Pastoureau, who in his book Les Animaux Célèbres, maintains that our intense attraction to wonders of the animal kingdom comes from the simple fact of "how difficult it is to be human."

Barrie G. James. The Trojan Horse:
the Ultimate Japanese Challenge to Western Industry.
London: Mercury Business Books, 1990.

The first section of the display, Tales of Destruction and Rebirth, begins with an examination of the Trojan Horse. The exhibit notes that the wooden equine giant, filled with soldiers, "may have been a siege machine." But "in any case, the tale was made hugely popular by Virgil’s Aeneid, and by innumerable pictures and films." Books and ephemera dating from 1529 to 1990 reveal the staying power of this "metaphor for political tactics of infiltration," and the show reminds us that the horse's most recent incarnation is as "the name of a destructive computer application."

Poster for the American Version of
La Guerra di Troia, 1961.

The rare books and ephemera in the show providing images of the Trojan Horse are a great indication of the huge range of the exhibition. The section begins with Opera Virgiliana (1529), which features two hundred woodcut illustrations for the poems contained in the Eclogues, the Georgics and the Aeneid. After that beauty is the 1664 "pocket edition" of the works of Virgil from the Elsevier family of Dutch booksellers, publishers, and printers. Up next is a garishly kitschy poster for the big-budget 1961 "sword and sandal" motion picture epic, La Guerra di Troia. Following on the heels and hoofs of the horse opera, is a presentation copy of Archibald MacLeish's The Trojan Horse: A Play (1952), inscribed to Cornell English Professor Arthur Mizener. Finally an alarmist business book from 1990, The Trojan Horse: the Ultimate Japanese Challenge to Western Industry, by futurist Barrie James, closes out the wildly eclectic selection.

Poster for Gojira.
Japan: Toho Ltd., 1954.

One of the largest sections of the show is called From Farm To Screen. Creatures covered here include E.B. White's super-mouse on a road trip, Stuart Little, Disney stalwarts Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, and the pop culture star attraction of the exhibition, mass media "mon-star," Godzilla. The exhibit notes that unlike the "carefree escapism" offered by Disney's cartoon critters, "Godzilla, a primitive, destructive force awakened by the excesses of modern science," plays "on the darker aspects of human fears and repressed desires." But the subversive appeal of the unstoppable King of Chaos cannot be denied: "Godzilla has starred in 28 feature films produced by the [Japanese] Toho Film Company, as well as two American remakes, and has also appeared in television series, novels, comic books, video games, songs, toys and countless commercials and advertisements."

A Pictorial Box Set of
Five Godzilla Films in Translation.
Japan: Toho Ltd. and Anchor Entertainment, 1997.

Animal Legends: From the Trojan Horse to Godzilla presents a terrific introduction to a cultural phenomenon that deserves much more serious study. The animal kingdom is an important part of the collective iconography of every culture that has ever existed across the centuries, and throughout the world. And, as the exhibit points out, "All human societies have reserved a mythical or allegorical place for...extra-ordinary animals, 'fictitious' or 'real,' from the most ancient myths of origin to the most recent scientific discoveries." As mankind's environmental expansion continues to encroach upon what used to be the domain of the animal kingdom, the time to reflect upon its cultural importance is now.

Poster for Godzilla, King of the Monsters!.
Japan: Toho Ltd. and Jewell Enterprises, 1956.

Animal Legends: From the Trojan Horse to Godzilla continues through September 30, 2011 at the Hirshland Exhibition Gallery of the Carl A. Kroch Library of Cornell University. A terrific online exhibit has been created to those unable to visit the Ithaca, N.Y. campus.

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The Bombshell Book Art of Werner Pfeiffer

By Nancy Mattoon

Explosive Subject: A "Book-Object,"
Created By Artist Werner Pfeiffer.
(All Images Courtesy of Cornell University Libraries.)

"The book is one of the most powerful weapons ever invented." This is the mantra of Artist Werner Pfeiffer, who has spent over forty years creating--and ironically destroying--books to prove their strength and importance.

Fold-Out Book #1.
Artist Pfeiffer says reading this book involves
"bursts of manipulating, arranging, feeling and touching."

Pfeiffer's childhood in Nazi Germany exposed him not only to censorship and book burnings, but also to the use of the written word as a tool to build a society based on hated, violence, and genocide. At the same time, as a boy Pfeiffer cherished books as "an escape from the harsh realities of a disintegrating world."

Difficult to Fit.

He became obsessed with the complexities of the book: an everyday object that could be a magnificent work of art; a symbol of enlightenment and learning that could spread intolerance and evil; a spiritual sanctuary that could carry the recipe for a living hell; a symbol of truth and a transmitter of lies. With his art he expresses every aspect of this amazingly conflicted cultural chameleon.

Fold-Out Book #2.
"Here the interaction is based on a visual language and
on the experience of manipulating elements into different settings."

Pfeiffer was born in Stuttgart in 1937. His boyhood home was obliterated by Allied bombing raids, and he was internally, if not externally, scarred by "the trauma of World War II and its tumultuous aftermath." He remembers his first schoolbooks were "leftovers" from the Nazi regime, "with words and sentences blackened out...chapters deleted and entire pages missing." Ideas which he had been taught six months before were worth dying for, were now concealed as so evil they were "unfit to be read about." Pfeiffer never forgot how the Third Reich used and abused the book. "The power of a book to spread free and unbridled thought," he learned, "renders it equally vulnerable...when political or religious fanatics are troubled by challenges to their orthodox rhetoric."

Original Chip.

As a young man, Pfeiffer discovered that, "With the passage of time I found myself ever more seduced by books, captivated by their content. But I became equally intrigued by their structure, their making, their décor, their design, their history, their politics." He enrolled in Stuttgart's Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, to study art and design, and found himself specializing in book arts.

One Of Three Flexgons That Make Up Abracadabra.
"A book about magic. Not the illusory trickery of a conjuror,
but the magic of an artist’s work."

In 1961 he emigrated to the United States, and spent a decade as a freelance designer and art director, building a portfolio of award-winning graphic and commercial art. In 1969 his hard work, talent, and creative devotion to typography and the written word, were recognized by the prestigious Pratt Institute, which named him Director of the Adlib Press, which produces limited edition artist books and letterpress publications for students and faculty. He subsequently became the head of Pratt's Book Arts program, and held both of these position until retiring in 2003.

Literary Salvo.

But despite the demands of his academic career, Pfeiffer continued to produce his own artist's book and what he came to call "book objects." As might be expected from a man with such a conflicted history with books, the two threads of his artistic work are diametrically opposed. "In creating my Book-Objects," he explains, "I deconstruct books, dismantle them and assemble whatever fragments remain into new composites. The opposite is true when I make Artist Books. Here I carefully plot, make thorough investigations, and spend plenty of time mapping out concepts to build new volumes from scratch." The unifying theme of both types of work is, of course, the inherent power of the book.

Woodcut From: The River.
"Structured as a long accordion fold (fully extended it measures 26½ feet),
the book echoes the rhythm and flow of a river."

Pfeiffer's Book-Objects are a modern take on the idea of the book as a vulnerable and imperiled technology. These "are made with real books. They are not casts, nor are they sculpted imitations. At its core each piece has bound, printed pages. Glued together and painstakingly covered with gesso, they are silenced and sealed for good. I practice this destruction, this obvious censorship, simply as metaphor. It is to visualize, to demonstrate, to provoke. For these acts of violence are not about the damage done to stacks of paper, to books. The objects are about the harm inflicted on the human spirit. The ropes, the nails, the clamps, the hooks and knifes are real as well. They are symbols of pain, of torture, of suppression which are inevitably brought on by the censor’s act."

Difficult Chapter.

By contrast, Werner Pfeiffer's artist books incorporate printing techniques that have been used in book production for centuries, including woodcuts, linoleum block-prints, lithographs, etchings, handset typography, and letterpress printing. He uses both handmade and archival quality papers, and cuts, sews, and decorates his fine bindings. Produced in limited editions of 10 to 50 copies, these works demonstrate the artist's respect for the book in its "elemental simplicity...deliberately low-tech, cumbersome and slow. It is private. It challenges the imagination. It is a conversation between the author and reader...a dialogue of minds."

Errantry.
A 27-foot-long canvas scroll housed in a bullet-shell casing,
"the text and images are set against a chronology
of war, conflict, and genocide in the 20th century. "

Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections is the last stop for a traveling exhibition of Werner Pfeiffer's book art. Previously on display at Smith College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Toronto, Werner Pfeiffer (censor, villain, provocateur, experimenter): Book-Objects and Artist Books, will be on view at the Hirshland Gallery of the Carl A. Kroch Library through February of 2011. An online exhibit featuring highlights of the show is available on the library's website.
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