Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (review)

Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic. By Peter Mason. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xiii + 255 pp., figures, bibliography, index. $39.95 cloth.)

Combining art historical and critical literary modes of analysis, Peter Mason defines and illustrates the “exotic” in a variety of European art forms from 1500–1920 in Infelicities. Unlike the “other,” who is an actual person(s) with another voice to “talk back” to its representations, the “exotic” is purely the work of the imagination. Whereas the Other exists in an identifiable geographic place, the exotic lacks geographic specificity. The image is often created piecemeal with iconographic symbols pointing to a multitude of peoples and places. The exotic is the product of a process of exoticization that removes signs and objects from their original context and fancifully rearranges them.

Mason demonstrates a vast knowledge of European visual representations of the period. Landscape paintings, “ethnographic” portraits, “cabinets of curiosities,” allegorical frontispieces, drama, photography, and museum objects are all considered, although he gives preference to Dutch and French representations and to representations of the Americas. Perhaps most representative of the exotic genre are the “presentations of the exotic” in the “cabinets of curiosities” (Kunstkammern, Wunderkammern) as described in chapter four. These European rooms (which blossomed in the sixteenth century) contained a wild jumble of “curious” objects from around the world, including “works of art proper (classical or classicizing paintings and sculpture, ancient coins, gems, and inscriptions . . . ) . . . natural wonders such as . . . coral, fossils, petrified objects, mandrakes, barnacle geese, birds of paradise, sharks’ teeth, flying fish, mermaids, the horns of unicorns, chameleons, the bones of giants, and armadillos, as well as objects crafted by human hand, such as canoes, weapons, Egyptian mummies, feathered headdresses, musical instruments” (67–68). While some of the objects were mundane in their original context (e.g., canoes, coral), all are made more exotic by their comingling, which implies that they are equally exotic.

Mason’s most successful passages are those in which he explores in detail specific representations or presentations, such as the early sixteenth-century painting by Jan Mostaert known as “West Indian Landscape” (26–39). The painting depicts a battle, but some have doubted the American reference of the painting, since it contains many iconographic elements that cannot be traced to the indigenous of the Americas, including pitchforks, flails, elongated trumpets, armor, sheep, cows, turbans, Tartan whitetrimmed red caps, beards, light-colored hair—and on a couple of warriors—pointed ears, and horns. Mason explains the presence of these exotic elements through showing how few visual representations of the Americas were in circulation in Europe at the time (1520s), so painters would have filled in spaces with familiar (European) details (pitchforks, flails, beards); and other iconographic elements (Tartan hats, turbans) can be traced to an emerging discourse that attributed a Middle Eastern origin to the natives of the Americas.

It is precisely at these same moments, however, when Mason explores historical contexts (images as part of an emerging discourse about specific places), that the image slips out of the “exotic” category and moves into the “imaginary.” Yes, the painting of “West Indian Landscape” contains iconographic elements that more rightfully belong to other times and places (and are therefore exotic), but if they intend to represent a specific place (the “West Indies”), is not understanding that emerging historical discourse equally as important as the image’s exoticism? The historian or anthropologist reader may feel dissatisfied at several points in the text. Various trends in “understanding” of colonial subjects (“primitives,” “barbarians,” “tribals,” biblical origins, similarities to classical subjects, unilinear evolution, the “science of ethnology,” etc.) are raised as relevant for understanding specific “exotic” representations but superficially discussed. This may derive precisely from the ambitious scope of the work: in attempting to define an exotic genre in various media across four centuries in different colonial metropoles, specific intentions of artists and collectors (and their contemporaries, including the audiences) are slighted.

Other readers may be disappointed with Mason’s inattention to the effects...