Among the many new and unusual sights that greeted students arriving this fall at Duke University in North Carolina, James Elkins was one of the weirdest. There he was, for all to see, a 44-year-old man wandering around the lovely tree-studded campus wearing glasses to which were affixed a small pair of binoculars.
“They are called Orscoptic Research flip-up telescopes,” he says. “They were used many years ago by dentists. Yes, there is a certain embarrassment factor in wearing them around campus, but they have enabled me to see all sorts of things that I couldn’t see before. I intend to use them on insects. On butterflies and moths, the scales would be easily visible. I will be able to observe spiders from a safe distance.”
That’s what he does, this erudite professor who seems to be part art historian, part philosopher, part scientist and full-time observer of the world around him. He looks at stuff, all kinds of stuff, every kind of stuff, and he sees more than most of us ever will. Though he has written that “no matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at,” he is a person who can, literally, find wonder in a grain of sand.
Elkins is a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has taught since 1989, and a visiting professor at Duke for the fall term. He has written dozens of articles and 13 books, most of them the scholarly sort that find their way to college or museum bookshelves. But his last two books, “The Object Stares Back” (Touchstone, 1996) and “What Painting Is” (Routledge, 1998), have generated surprising interest outside the artistic and academic communities, primarily because of what one critic called Elkins’ “different and jargon-free way of looking at culture.” Those books were reviewed in many mainstream publications, setting the stage for what might be a breakthrough with his new book, “How To Use Your Eyes” (Routledge).
It is a strangely alluring volume. In 32 short chapters, lavishly illustrated, Elkins looks at, and tells us how to better see, such things as a fingerprint, a postage stamp, the periodic table, Egyptian hieroglyphs, an X-ray, oil painting, Chinese script, color, special effects, a face, the night, mirages, a crystal, a map, mandalas, engineering drawings, Egyptian scarabs, halos and sunsets.
It is a fascinating if unusual trip that might pique the interest of TV producers, reviewers and others who help market books: Hey, let’s interview this guy who teaches how to look at the inside of your own eye and how to look at nothing.
Elkins says he intended his book to “inspire every reader to stop and consider things that are absolutely ordinary, things so clearly meaningless that they never seemed worth a second thought. Once you start seeing them, the world–which can look so dull, so empty of interest–will gather before your eyes and become thick with meaning.”
The unremarkable features of our everyday landscape–culverts, twigs, shoulders, grass and pavement–may not seem the stuff of best sellers, but the book has already generated a buzz in book circles. Its large first printing of 25,000 copies and multicity publicity tour indicate that Routledge hopes it has a hit. In a gesture that an insider at the firm said “just never happens,” Routledge’s vice president and publishing director sent a letter to the nation’s bookbuyers and booksellers enthusiastically touting the book. “Nothing I’m publishing this year has given me more pleasure than Jim’s book,” said William Germano. “When I first read his manuscript I felt as if I’d been given a box of chocolates. I ate them all.”
Whether the general reading public agrees remains to be seen; “How to Use Your Eyes” will not hit the stores for another couple of weeks. Booklist has called Elkins “a true alchemist of ideas” and photographer Rosamund W. Purcell describes the book as “a magical mystery tour of the ordinary and arcane. . . . [Elkins] goes detecting, explaining, experimenting so that, our vision revitalized, we can finally see.”
Elkins is quick to point out that the book is not a reference tool. “This book won’t tell you how to repair your refrigerator or read bar codes,” he writes in its preface. “It’s not a museum guide either–you won’t learn how to understand fine art. And you won’t learn how to predict the weather by looking at clouds, or how to wire a house, or how to track animals in the snow.”
What the book does try to do is evoke a childlike wonder in the simplest things. In one particularly lyrical chapter, written in collaboration with his geologist sister, Elkins examines sand and discovers that “a grain of sand that was first sprung free of its first rock 2.4 billion years ago may have been in ten mountain ranges and ten oceans since then. Even the giddy numbers of Buddhist reincarnations (some deities live billions of years) can’t bring home eternity for me the way this simple example does. Think of it the next time you hold a grain of sand in your hand.”
Most of us have what could be called our areas of visual expertise, some of them highly specialized. A doctor, for example, can see a cell under a microscope and know if it is cancerous; a baseball player can look at a pitch and know if it’s a sinker or cut fastball. Elkins invites his readers to extend that perception beyond narrow specialties to see meaning in the mundane. In one chapter, “How to Look at Pavement,” he describes a stretch of well-worn pavement on West Monroe Street: “Cracking, distortion, disintegration, raveling, shoving, rutting–I love the terminology of distressed pavement. The utterly ordinary mangled surface of the road in Chicago, which I walk past blindly every day on my way to work, is full of metaphors for human disaster. It’s aging, it’s cracked and distorted, it’s been pockmarked and shoved and rutted until it’s nearly ready to be replaced.”
As an experiment, several people walking past Rush and Hubbard Streets were asked to read that passage and then look at at a similar piece of pavement. “What kind of drugs is this guy [Elkins] using?” an advertising executive said after doing the exercise.
But Steve Pehrson, manager of the 437 Rush restaurant on the corner, who has walked on the pavement hundreds of times “without giving it a look,” said Elkin’s description made him more appreciative of his surroundings. “The guy is really intense, but I absolutely see where he’s coming from. He’s saying, and I think he’s right, that no observation is a wasted observation.”
Elkins was told of this experiment and he was eager not only to hear what people had to say but who the people were and what they did. He is ever curious, his mind seemingly in overdrive.
This does not much bother his wife, Margaret MacNamidhe, or his friends, though he says, “Many of them think me eccentric.”
Eccentric, and overly studious.
“What bugs me the most is people telling me, ‘Oooh, your husband must read 55 books a week, he’s so smart.’ That’s nonsense,” insists MacNamidhe, who herself is wrapping up a PhD thesis on Eugene Delacroix at Johns Hopkins University. “Jim is great fun. He watches TV, he gets up late in the morning–for him there is fun in everything: cooking, writing, seeing.”
The couple met in 1991 when MacNamidhe, who is from the small town of Navan, Ireland, near Dublin, came to the School of the Art Institute on a Fulbright scholarship. For two years, Elkins was one of her professors.
“Yes, I was his student. That’s the short story. Jim always taught the funkiest of the funky classes. Initially I knew he was full of amazing ideas. He had this incredible mind but was extremely well-organized.” The couple started dating during her second year at the school and were married in the Aran Islands in 1994.
“I love to walk around with Jim. I have never seen him in a bad humor. I think he looks at the world as a playground, and when you do that, you’re likely to see wonder in everything.”
Elkins traces his fascination with commonplace objects to his childhood in Ithaca, N.Y., and the influence of his teacher mother and dentist father. “I had what you might call a very natural-history family,” he says. “We had a special bookcase in the house that was filled with nature books and field guides. We were always playing with games, puzzles, and out in back was a pond that’s still there, filled with all kinds of natural wonders.” The floor of the family’s living room was a wonder in itself, a swirl of colors and images on pages of National Geographic magazine displayed under a clear coat of shellac.
“It’s a very difficult question, trying to answer what your mother intended,” he says, pausing for a few seconds in his usual rush of conversation. “But I think she believed that the more different things in life you could see, the better life would be.”
Elkins graduated with an art degree from Cornell University in 1977. He painted life-size, realistic figures, “mostly naked, mostly just standing and staring at the beholder. They were very aggressive and also hopelessly old-fashioned,” he recalls.
He came to Chicago in 1983, receiving an MFA that year and an MA the next at the University of Chicago. He earned a PhD with honors five years later from U. of C. He started his teaching career while getting his MFA, instructing students in perspective drawing and art anatomy in non-credit U. of C. extension classes. He dealt with a wide range of students, from teenagers to senior citizens, from Sunday painters to professional artists. He calls those experiences “good preparation for the extremely wild students we have at the School of the Art Institute.”
“Teaching is the best form of learning,” he says. “I like to design courses on subjects I’m exploring, so that the classes end up being collaborative investigations. The School of the Art Institute has easily the most diverse, eccentric, unpredictable and brilliant student population of any university or college.”
But he has always found time to write. “It is a source of great pleasure for me,” he says, and he’s certainly prolific. Even before the release of “How to Use Your Eyes,” he already has finished two new books, “Can a Painting Make You Cry?” and “Why Art Cannot Be Taught: A Handbook for Art Students.” They will be published next year.
Most of Elkins’ books have come to life through things or images that have captured his imagination. “Almost everything I have written has started as a pile of photos,” he says. Just such a pile sits in his office at Duke, the beginning of what he hopes will be another book. He wants to call it “The Most Beautiful Things in the World.” He discovered one of those things during a trip to Japan in February. He was in Kyoto and went to visit the famous rock garden in the Ryoanji Buddhist temple.
“About 20 feet short of the entrance was a table and on it was a small model of the garden,” he says. “At first I thought it was perhaps something for tourists to buy. But then I felt it and realized it was a Braille version of the garden and I thought, What an amazing idea. Because the monks meditate with their eyes closed, it’s possible they thought that blind people could experience the garden more truly or fully if they had an initial mental image of it.”
Considering that Elkins can find hidden meaning in practically everything, is it possible for him to ever take anything at simple face value? “History and academic knowledge of something can often ruin strong emotions to it,” he says. “But I still have strong, visceral reactions to all sorts of things. Sunsets and faces are just as magical to me now as they have ever been.”
Lately, his fascination with vision and perception has been focused on lemurs: “I got interested in primate vision by reading about bush babies and tarsiers, which have excellent night vision and by reading about the ‘fruit stare’ of orangutans; they will sit motionless for hours making subtle distinctions between the myriad shapes of green in the jungle, in order to find edible fruit.
“The lemurs in the photos with me were mainly looking right through me, as if I were entirely transparent. They were only interested in their daily ration of leaves and in the woman who brought it to them.”
Asking Elkins the simplest questions about his work yields, not surprisingly, some complex answers. His favorite color? “My favorite color is also one that no one can see. ‘Bees’ purple’ is the name of the ‘color’ that bees can sense in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum. It helps them perceive patterns in flowers. Of course, no one knows how the bees experience their ‘color.’ Do they see it as violet? As green? As some color no one can imagine? And is there such a thing as a color that no one can imagine?”
What’s the most amazing thing he has ever seen? “The most amazing thing I’ve never seen are ‘sprites’ and ‘elves.’ They are lightning-like discharges above rain clouds. They have been reported on for over a century, but until recently scientists didn’t believe they existed. Now they are being photographed and studied. A ‘sprite’ is a red glow that looks like an enormous jellyfish hovering over a storm cloud. An ‘elf’ is a huge red ring that expands and sinks, like the ripple from a stone tossed into the water. I would love to see one of them some time.”
How about love? Does he believe in love at first sight?
“That’s how I met my wife,” he says. “Love at first sight? Is there any other kind?”
