Dan Hicks
University of Oxford
“Realistic Degeneration”. Or, how illustration can change the world.
This talk considers a theory of illustration developed in the writing of the anthropologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers and extended by Henry Balfour, the first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, in the late 19th century. This theory concerned the transmission of images and ideas over time, and between generations, and was based on the idea of successive copying in ornamentation, decoration and drawing. Using examples that ranged from human figures depicted on wooden paddles and clubs from Papua New Guinea to Roman coins and the famous images of Virginia made by John White in the 1580s, Pitt-Rivers and Balfour examined how what is depicted can change over time, and can come to be characterised by what Pitt-Rivers called ‘realistic degeneration’. More than just the kind of lossiness that would come with a repeatedly photocopied image, or a pixilated jpeg, this process appeared to introduce change, transformation, and even, they argued, ‘growth’. By treating drawings as manifestations of thought, and thus comparable to the transmission of language, they presented a distinctive account of what they saw as the intertwined evolution of images and knowledge, in which reality itself seemed to be change. The talk places revisits these late Victorian theories in the contemporary context of legacy colonial museums and White supremacist statues, and their visual regimes. The potential for art and culture to transform the world was used by these men in one way. Today, there are new possibilities for ways in which illustration can transform the past, shape memory, represent a form of counter-monumentality, and even, perhaps, change the world.
This talk considers a theory of illustration developed in the writing of the anthropologist Augustus Pitt-Rivers and extended by Henry Balfour, the first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, in the late nineteenth century. This theory concerned the transmission of images and ideas over time, and between generations, and was based on the idea of successive copying in ornamentation, decoration and drawing. Using examples that ranged from human figures depicted on wooden paddles and clubs from Papua New Guinea to Roman coins, Pitt-Rivers and Balfour examined how what is depicted can change over time, and can come to be characterised by what Pitt-Rivers called ‘realistic degeneration’. By treating drawings as manifestations of thought, and thus comparable to the transmission of language, they presented a distinctive account of what they saw as the intertwined evolution of images and knowledge, in which reality itself seemed to be change. Today, there are new possibilities for ways in which illustration can transform the past, shape memory, represent a form of counter-monumentality, and even, perhaps, change the world.
Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator of World Archaeology at Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He has published widely on material and visual culture from the recent past and the near present. His most recent books are The Brutish Museums (Pluto 2020), Lande: the Calais 'Jungle' and Beyond (with Sarah Mallet, Bristol University Press 2019), Archaeology and Photography (edited with Lesley McFadyen, Bloomsbury 2019) and Isle of Rust (with Alex Boyd and Jonathan Meades, Luath Press 2019). His next book, Every Monument Will Fall, will be published in 2025.