Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo by Margot Mifflin (review)

144 Reviews turies, Oettermann persistently ignores the comments of his predecessors on this point or dismisses them with an air of superiority. The panorama grows out of this tradition and is simultaneously her most elaborate representative. In order to support his contention of the singularity of the panorama, Oettermann especially argues the position that the panorama represents an aesthetic reaction to the supposed discovery of “horizon” in the eighteenth century (p. 13). This presumption is quite incomprehensible because city vedutas, coastal panoramas and bird’seye view maps date all the way back to the fourteenth century—a time in which Francesco Petrarca ascended Mont Ventoux and “like one who is paralyzed” relished the Mediterranean panorama between the Alps, the Rhone and the Gulf of Marseilles. The panorama as medium unifies two diametrically opposed aesthetic experiences . Oettermann justifiably throws out the aesthetic-sublime effect of the horizontal perspective, which conjures up a feeling of an obscure power of the gaze. On the other hand, he fails to grasp the central function of immersion , which rises out of the suggestive power of the absolute image. This point is all the more pertinent when regarding spaces in which the illusion was expanded through the use of figures and natural accoutrements in the interior of the room leading directly up to the observation platform. This faux terrain functioned as a three-dimensional element in the illusion. Battle cries and other, predominantly orchestra-effected sounds increased the poly-sensual suggestion . In the Panorama of the German Colonies, opened in 1885, the proprietors intended to recreate the lighting, atmosphere and haziness of tropical regions with artificial fog and wind effects, thereby appealing to the skin and noses of the visitors. This kind of “transposing into the image,” this immersion , encapsulates the incipient essence of the idea of the panorama. The panorama attempts to break the inner distance separating observer and image; it attempts to intensify the influence exerted by the image upon viewer reaction , thereby incapacitating the observer . Oettermann fails to reflect upon this strategy of immersion, especially as employed in the suggestive politics of the battle panoramas, which make up a third of all known panoramas. In the 1880s, the “dark side” of the panorama had reached its peak. As in the case of the Panorama of the Battle of Sedan, opened in the center of Berlin in 1883 by Moltke, Bismarck and the Kaiser himself, the suggestive potential of the panorama was exploited in order to purposefully manipulate the emotions of hundreds of thousands of people, making them more susceptible to state propaganda. Today, our eyes are used to following a steady acceleration; thus, we can hardly appreciate the effect that a still panorama picture had on observers at this time. Many witnesses attested that for the first few moments the deception was so strong that the luminous scenery was experienced as a real battle. The Berliner Tageblatt reported, “It is as if one were standing amidst the awful battle.” With the calculated precision of illusion, the picture and the three-dimensional interior concentrate and fix upon the onlooker, who is devoured by the image. The mechanism of shattering the inner distance of the image, which demanded emotional participation , always claimed the central role in the history of these image-machines. Oettermann interprets the panorama as a “pictorial expression or symbolic form of a specifically modern bourgeois view of nature and the world,” of a society going through the process of democratization (p. 7). With the return of the panorama in the 1980s as a medium for the glorification of politically important battles and for the fostering of national unity in notoriously authoritarian societies—among them, North Korea, China and Iraq—one must recognize Oettermann’s glorifying analysis of the panorama as untenable. In the context of current developments in the fields of new media, the panorama becomes worthy of attention precisely because of its problematic aspects . On this point, one finds a decisive parallel with virtual reality: virtual reality employs currently available means and technologies but is, at its core, characterized by the search for interface . It is an attempt to affect directly and physically as many senses as possible. As the extent...