Zinc Vignettes

Abstract This article explores the agency (often self-effacing) of zinc as the critical material and currency of British imperialism. For Primo Levi zinc embodies a rite of passage between metals and his own sense of autobiography. Known as the Philosopher’s Snow, zinc can be conceived as soft or, as Roland Barthes would say, the embodiment of The Neutral. My discussion is concerned with the genealogies of zinc in Zawar (Rajasthan) and Guizhou Province, China. I am concerned with the politics and aesthetics of zinc in Chinese and British painting and how it became a ground for structuring the monument and how its afterlives are very much that of the filmic and phosphorescence.


Introduction
When his eyesight began to fail, Wittgenstein grieved the loss of white.White might of course be leaden, zinging, brilliant, or it may fade to be delicate, kind to the eyes.Here, white is soft as a sort of 'ish', a swish of a colour bereft. 1 There is nothing of the harsh white of chromophobia, nor traces of racial slurs and their partial redemption as vulnerability and the blush.Rather, Wittgenstein's white is that of zinc.Zinc is soft, amenable and often of the shade.
Zinc pervades Primo Levi's Periodic Table as the unspoken condition of purity before the iron road to Auschwitz.His little essay on zinc sings with admiration for his school teacher of General and Inorganic Chemistry -Professor Pand his own gauche first love for classmate Rita.Given such intimacy, zinc is: Zinc, Zinck, zinco: they make tubs out of it for laundry, it is not an element which says much to the imagination, it is grey and its salts are colourless, it is not toxic, nor does it produce striking chromatic reactions; in short, it is a boring metal.It has been known to humanity for two or three centuries, so it is not a veteran covered with glory like copper, nor even one of those newly minted elements which are still surrounded by the glamour of their discovery. 2spite being dismissed as boring, grey, perhaps as neutral, there is a poignancy to its (auto)biographical fissure between hydrogen and iron.Zinc provides a rite of passage between the adventures with a friend in his older brother's homemade lab where they make hydrogen burn 'in the sun and the stars and from whose condensation the universe is formed in universal silence' 3 and ironthe branding of his adulthood where to be tormented by anti-Semitism would lead to eventual suicide.
Zinc is a non-ferrous base metal, dazzling, blueish and argent.Although it occurs as a metallic element in nature, it can be obtained in pure form only by smelting ores that contain it. 4However, its low boiling point of 906 degrees Celsius makes it difficult to extract from ore as it escapes as a gas during the smelting process unless equipment is used to prevent it.This could be one reason why zinc as a metal was historically less popular than copper and iron.The other could be that it becomes slightly brittle at room temperature.
Although chemically similar to magnesium, zinc is more toxic and more shimmering in its tones.Surprisingly, then, it has been kept in the shade (literally and metaphysically) in much art historical debate.But philosophically, playfully, zinc can be characterised in part by what Roland Barthes terms as 'the neutral'. 5His prescient lectures expressed the shy illegibility of Zen, the tempering grisaille of Bosch's Sublime and Spinoza's intricate discussions of ethics, political theology and watch making watches fashioned in part with zinc.Also, zinc for the alchemist was deemed to be capable of such intensity that when burned in the air it became known as 'white snow' or the 'philosopher's wool'.Its etymology can be gleaned from old Germanzinke, denoting pronged or toothedmeanings which were not lost on the philosopher-colourman George Field, whose views on white I discuss below in relation to the colonial painter George Chinnery and the artistic milieu of early nineteenthcentury Canton.Chinnery has become the subject of several recent exhibitions, but here I am more concerned with his working practice and with his relationship with a phantasmic projection and miasmic collapse of India, Canton and the zinc-mining district of Guizhou.
As Hailian Chen and George Bryan Souza have demonstrated, Guizhou had long been the mountainous epicentre of zinc production. 6inc white, it can be claimed, even determined the aesthetic and the palette of Chinnery and those artists based in Canton and Guizhou Province.Although it was not marketed as paint in Britain until the 1830s, when it was described as China White, zinc already skirted the shadows, the reflections of art and porcelain in much mid-eighteenthcentury Chinese painting, most notably the export portraits and glass art of Spoilum. 7n recent years scholars have turned to 'vibrant' or 'unstable' matter to consider the abject nature of matter.We can think for instance of Brian Massumi's discussion of the blue eyes of Sinatra, 8 or Jane Bennett's case studies of dust, debris and rubbish in which there is a fascination with materials, that all materials might be redeemed. 9Although chapter four of Vibrant Matter, 'A Life of Metal', deals with vibrancy, very few pages are devoted to metal and those there are seem more concerned with what a metal can do rather than what it does.
In one sense Bennett's viewpoint returns us to Bruno Latour's conjecture on the actant or the iconoclash. 10The vibrancy of the iconoclash thinks of action as co-produced, as seen in Latour's examples of the hotel key or the sleeping policeman.But the actant can also be sinister and sublime, as seen in Latour's discussion of Robert Boyle's air pump and the complicity of the gun.Can zinc offer us a way of thinking differently about matter in ways far more subtle?What does it mean to speak of a kind rather than vibrant matter?Can we go so far as to say that zinc itself desired to be a form of camouflage, and if so in what sense?
It is useful to turn to the work of George Bataille precisely because of his concern with mysticism, the abject, the banal, the quotidian and especially the formless.In 1929 he would come to define informe or formless as a term for thinking of the 'direct interpretation' of 'brut phenomena '. 11 In an insightful discussion of his work qua Hindu temple sculpture, Deborah Stein observes that materialists clung to dead matter, 'In Indian terms, this is akin to regarding an icon as a kosa, or shell, with no ontological essence… Materialists would obsess about the location of the stolen figural statue of Amba Mataan ontological corpseand ignore the residual divinity in the material of the stone itself.' 12 Bataille sought to question the relationship between what he perceived to be the unnecessary abstraction of historical materialism in favour of the visceral and the gnostic. 13Bataille's investigations for Documents show how stone contains within itself its own spirit.This of course has powerful precedents in the sacred construal of materials in Hinduism.But was zinc like stone or clay deemed to be an auspicious material?
At the same time zinc has so often been comprehended as an alloy, as a ground for the image.Jean Luc Nancy's claim that the image is a thing that is not the thing proposes that presence unfolds into representation.For Nancy, the sacred is 'separate… set aside, removed, cut off… what, of itself, remains set apart, at a distance, and with which one forms no bond (or only a very paradoxical one)'. 14Possibly there is no deeper ground to be sought for the image as the image is the ground itself.
As the ground of an oil painting, it can be suggested that zinc does not draw attention to itself.Possibly it can be seen as material which selfeffaces.This reflexive erasure would, for some artists and colourmen, raise certain phenomenological/material(ist) challenges.The kind of ground and sense of white associated with zinc are sometimes seen not so much as vibrant but rather as retiring.Yet zinc offers a kind perspective on what might be the visual cultures of white in a term of emergent empire.Its soft whiteness, its amenable agility, enabled zinc to become a form of mercantile-capitalist currency.But this is not all: in the later nineteenth century zinc would emerge from its retiring nature to become quite Other to itselfto enter explosive relations with bio-iridescence, phosphorescence and luminescence, even to conduce white noise.

Spectres of Zinc: Ghost of Materials in India
The engravings of Edward Moor's Hindu Pantheon (1810) makes for fascinating viewing precisely because they flesh out, partially classicise and repair Hindu, Mughal, Rajasthani painting and sculpture. 15The images might be read as the 'barbarick hints' for fantastic compositions, as suggested by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his lecture on architecture published as 'Discourse Ten'.As one of the engravers for Moor, William Blake would appear to have used his usual zinc plates in Moor's project.Zinc as printing ground granted Blake the greatest of freedom for his etching practice (as seen also in such works as Songs of Innocence and Experience) precisely because of its susceptibility to imprimatur and its obvious reusability.The cut of the metal proposes a certain malleability which enables a lyricism for the figure and the line.Leafing through Moor's Hindu Pantheon it can be conjectured that the plates on which the images had been drawn were zinc.
Zinc, I suggest, offers a continuum between ground and representation with a bent to the tragic.Such is apparent in Blake's fellow printmaker Charles Houghton Junior's rather schematic depictions of Hindu murtis fashioned from zinc, also represented in the Hindu Pantheon.Commissioned by the English East India Company's first Librarian and Museum Director Charles Wilkins in 1800, they were conveyed to the East India Company's museum, the Oriental Repository, by Jonathan Duncan, the Company's Resident at Benares (now Varanesi).The zinc statues may have appeared as something of an anomaly in the Pantheon amidst numerous brass and stone murtis.
Duncan was best known for his virulent collecting, his attempts to reshape the administrative culture of Benares and for his encouragement of the Orientalist Hindu College.He dispatched paintings to former Governor General Warren Hastings (1772-1785) who, while an avid collector of Hindu and north Indian painting and Sanskrit inscriptions, did not himself read Sanskrit.Thus, he required Duncan to commission the translation of inscriptions in Benares, 16 considered by many to be the most holy city in Hinduism.Its auspicious foundation is associated with Siva's fall from Heavena fall to be broken, to be redeemed by the mercy of Mother Ganga, who caught Siva by his tangled hair at Panchgangathe spot where the five holiest rivers of Hinduism meet.Diana Eck, Christopher Pinney and Nita Kumar all show how certain materials might evoke darsanthe ritual of seeing and being seen by the divine. 17he most common of these is clay, later to be dissolved in the water during festivals or when the object becomes obsolete or worn out (it must not go under the shoe).Such images required holy water to be sprinkled during puja.Often they were adorned with zari workglitter and mirrorsto give them an otherworldly luminescence.
Museum Director Wilkins had trained as a printer, became a founding member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal and translated the Bhagavad Gita.Possibly his own interest in the use of zinc in plates for engraving attracted him to study its use as a material in the bazaars of Benares.Zinc alloy images of gods that survive from his collection include those of Ramachandra, Vishnu, Balarama, Kurma, Varaha, Matsya, Kali, Parasurama, Krisna and Siva.Modest in scale and deemed by some to be quite crude, even dull in their materiality, they were later shunted off to the dusty archives of the South Kensington Museum where today they lie broken, carry tired labels and are consigned to the deepest spaces of the V&Aalthough unlike many artefacts they are deemed worthy of being photographed.In their former lives they were nonetheless admired, according to Moor, as 'The beautiful specimens of HINDU mythology, cast at BENARES under the superintendence of MR.WILKINS and some PANDITS, have never received the least polish or filing, but are now seen at the INDIA house museum exactly as they made their first appearance from the moulds.' 18 Given the advice of pandits, the iconography and seating of the material of Wilkins' zinc images make them analogous to the murtis of important temple deities, whilst also bearing the mark of imperialist commissioning.Following a bloody coup in 1781, Benares was annexed by the British, who sought to impose a heavy pilgrimage tax and to regulate Hinduism as far as possible.It is not, as William Blake suggests, that art follows empire, but rather that empire follows art, as seen in the ways in which Duncan and Wilkins sought to intervene in the production of, and possibly also the iconography of, local murtis. 19For the English East India Company, Benares offered a gateway to the north and its eventual designs on the mines of Zawar, Rajasthan.If it is unclear how far Wilkins's images adhere to the stricture of the Silpasastras; certainly the lure of Zawar made zinc of the highest value as a material for an industrialising colonial economy, to which I shall return.
In Moor's Hindu Pantheon the zinc murtis appear immaculately pristine, certainly with their lakshana (attributes) restored.It is clear that subsequently several were mishandled and literally hacked to pieces.Possibly this wilful destruction took place in the V&A or in Benares.What then would it mean to manifest the wounded image denuded of its sacrality?One of the most devastating cases is that of the only statue in the collection of Siva, which is seemingly beyond repair.The very geophysicalsacred structure of Benares is based on a series of sixty-four shrines located in eight concentric circles, all of which are devoted to Siva.In many ways the layout of the city is intended to evoke the body, the energy of Siva.Wilkins's Siva is bereft of the base shown in Moor's Hindu Pantheon and misses two upper arms, one of which would, according to the engraving, have held a noose and the other his trident.Siva now has soldered elbow struts and a hooked metal shaft in his back as means of bringing the fragments of the body together, if somewhat ajar.
Yet such figures may be of great value if thought of in terms of the sensationalist as slippage between sublimation and the sublime, as iconoclash.Also as broken idols, scarified, sacrificed, they put under the pressure what Christopher Pinney terms the xeno figure of empire.The xeno figure speaks to the doubled alterity of the exotic object which challenges the categories of European artas the unexpected, shining things of mercantilism inserted into the 'polite' ie brutal spaces of London, such as the shelves of the library of the Oriental Repository. 20To violate or discard with violence such sacred images in an attempt to transform them into part-objects seemingly became a colonial norm. 21In many ways the rival of the Company's Oriental Repository, the London Missionary Society's museum, displayed several Polynesian 'idols' whose mother of pearl eyes or phalluses had been removed.But, as Latour reminds us (in the spirit of Nietzsche), to deface the image is only to enhance its power; perplexed, the hammer of the destroyer always seems to hit sideways. 22f the existing literature on the Oriental Repository has tended to stress the anomaly of Tippoo's Tigerthe wooden automata-organ whose sahib soldier groans whilst being devoured, 23 Mysore's fight against the British is better told either through the murals depicting Hyder Ali's campaigns in the summer palace Seringapatam in Mysore, or through the use of zinc by Tipu and his father Hyder Ali, who adapted the technologies and materials of foreign courts and armies including the use of rockets cast in jasada (zinc).These rockets could be fired forty feet and proved to be highly effective against the British both in outright warfare and within the ceremonials of the durbar, as illustrated in a single engraving by Robert Home of a zinc rocket in the guise of an ornamental parasol.Whilst fireworks appeared to belong to the realm of the courtly carnivalesque (with a spillover into elaborate clocks and automata possibly soldered with zinc, as was the case with elaborate fabrics) here the rocket acted as the crossover part-object par excellence.As the accoutrement of the chobdar, the zinc-iron alloyed rocket could in theory be the ruler's personal weapon: zinc as camouflage smiles.
There appears to have been some ambivalence, even a sense of the abject, when considering zinc as a material of the sacred.Known as jasada, zinc had long been considered a highly valued metal, although several Sanskrit texts make it clear that it should not be classified as one of panchaloha/sarva lohathe five most sacred temple metalsiron, copper, lead, tin and silver.Like gold, zinc is slightly of the outside; it is consigned to be soldered, moulded with other metals, to be recast or cast into rubbish.Rubbish, as Bataille, Thompson and Bennett remind us, can be vitalising, 24 which is possibly why zinc zinged, sung/singed as one of the most potent currencies of empire.Rubbish morphs between purity and danger.

Zinc as the Currency of Empire
As a currency of empire, zinc inhabited the border zones of the fetish.Well into the twentieth century African artists based in Guinea were casting sacred, combative images for worship and for trade.As both the raison d'etre and the offshoot of this creole, coastal economy, such images were often made from melted-down coins hailing from the mines of Rajasthan, the trading currencies of Canton and the mines of southern Africa.Although zinc alloy coinage became prevalent in this time of what Lenin would dub High Imperialism as the highest form of capitalism, zinc barely, rarely makes an appearance in theories of economy.If Marx has been dazzled by the phenomenology, the glitter of the commodity as somehow the equivalent of gold, and Engels admired the 'empirical' sheen of Salford cotton, African, Indian and Chinese zinc is virtually ignored. 25ajri Jain notes that many of the chromolithographic printers in Sivakasi whom she interviewed in the 1990s were using zinc plates coated with egg albumen.Such plates they later ground down for re-use. 26his might also have been the practice with the early photographic plates I consider below.Zinc's amenability offers a subtle, smooth surface which is considerate to the lay(er)ing of paint.Such amenability to the smooth, to soothing the ground, meant zinc could be applied to rounded objects, as seen in murtis and in those many present-day public monuments of poured concrete.Once the concrete is sandblasted it is coated with zinc in preparation for polyurethane automotive paint.Zinc is the schein, the skin of the image.It gifts a monumentality and sense of the public to those sculptures that now occupy the public spaces of many Indian cities and satellite towns. 27rafulla C Ray and Paul T Craddock have mined ancient texts in search of zinc but their results are few and far between, although it does appear that by the end of the first millennium CE zinc metal had emerged as an important industrial product, and much later that Indian zinc came to be much desired in Iran.It also appears to have been used in liquor distillation during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. 28ncient mines at Zawar, Rajasthan date from the first millennium BCE, and were also home to a zinc smelting site. 29In order to deal with the problem of the zinc vaporising (disappearing into the air), the zinc ore, calamine, was heated in a specially designed sealed clay vessel, which enabled the vaporised metal to cool and return to a solid state.The Zawar mines also yielded silver to the value of Rs 400-500 per day, according to Munhta Nainsi writing in c 1657, 30 but, curiously, they became much neglected under British rule.
According to military adventurer James Todd, now best known for his extensive excursions in Rajasthan, 'the castes of zinc miners are now extinct' (1829). 31Craddock and Stein's copious analyses of the zinc mines of Zawar make it clear that by the nineteenth century zinc mining had fallen into disarray, which might appear surprising given the extensive use of zinc in coinage and bhidri work (betel boxes, huqqa bases). 32It would seem that by the later seventeenth century zinc was being imported from China to meet the demand for bidri work. 33This could, of course, be to do with the lack of mining resources in Rajasthan but also a strong desire for exotic materials both in the court and the bazaar.The first reference to zinc in Persian comes from Nuzhatu-I Qulub (1339-1340), where it is included in a chapter on mines.Here, zinc is already a compound as part of a 'kind of material… that arms are made of.Striking by it is harder than by iron.' 34 Georamic Zincography: Drawing the World in Zinc Zinc became very much the material of colonial governmentality, as can be seen in the practice of cartographer and photographer James Waterhouse. 35If zinc had once been associated with radical artists like Blake, by the 1850s it had been 'colonised' by the Ordnance Survey projects of England and India.Believed to be conducive to a certain degree of precision as well as being light and hence easily transportable, zinc could be easily transformed on site into charts and maps for reproduction.Before taking up his position as head of the Photographic Department of the Survey of India, Waterhouse underwent intensive training in Calcutta to master zincography.Waterhouse may well have first learnt photography during his time at Addiscombe, where the subject had formed part of the curriculum since the mid-1850s.Whilst stationed in Meerut in 1859 he acquired his first camera, 'a half-plate set made of the good old French walnut wood… [which]… stood the hot dry climate wonderfully well'. 36is first serious photographic expedition appears to have been made in 1861 in the company of a fellow officer Boyce Edward Gowan, with whom he produced the first recorded photographs of the ruined Buddhist stupa and monastery at Sanchi, near the holy Hindu city of Vidisha.In June 1861, an official circular issued under the authority of the Governor-General Lord Canning, was sent out, encouraging military officers and others to collect photographs of ethnic and tribal 'types', and in December 1861 Waterhouse was officially seconded to undertake a photographic tour of Central India (present-day Madhya Pradesh) for  (1868).As well as printing maps and plans, the Photolithographic Department of the Survey undertook a wide range of additional photographic activities under Waterhouse's direction, including the copying of the sketches made by Edward Law Durand in the course of his work with the Afghan Boundary Commission of 1884-1887, the production of presentation albums for the Viceroy relating to the Gilgit Mission of 1888, and the reproduction of photographs made by the Archaeological Survey of India.
Zincographya planographic printing process using zinc plateshad long been in use as a substitute for Bavarian limestone in printmaking, as seen in the experiments of Alois Senefelder, 1801. 37In 1837-1842, Eugène-Florent Kaeppelin standardised a process to create large polychrome geologic maps using zinc plates.These beaten sheets of zinc were coated with a solution containing gallic acid and phosphoric acid that caused hygroscopic salts to form on the plate's surface.A printer would then cover the zinc plate with a coating of asphalt varnish, expose it under a drawing and develop it.The zinc affected by the lines of the drawing proof would be coated with hygroscopic salts.The plate would be bathed in acetic acid to dissolve the salts whilst the asphalt varnish protected the remaining surfaces of the plate.Then the printer would coat the plate with fuchsinea coloured lacquer varnishbefore it was dried and dipped in benzene.The benzene would dissolve the varnishes, leaving only the fuchsine varnish in the areas associated with the drawn lines, and hygroscopic salts elsewhere.The printer wetted the plate so as to allow the water to localise on the salts.In a process analogous with lithography, ink applied to the plate was repelled by the hygroscopic areas, and attracted to the fuchsine areas.
As zincography became standardised, for each Ordnance Survey map the constituent plate was printed approximately 6 3/4 by 4 3/4 inches on a scale of 6 inches to the mile.The printer would then transfer the proof design to a zinc plate under a press, and hand-etch the drawing onto the plate with a stylus.The plate would then be rubbed with oil which did not stick to the repellent coating, but rather adhered to the etched areas ready for inking.As in chromolithography, colours were printed in successive passes of the press, with the plates kept in register.
By the 1830s zinc had entered the realm of monumental large-scale maps known as georamas.These consisted of a hollow globe with a map of the world pasted on its inner surface, conducive of a concave world's-eye view ideal for both leisure spectacle and military strategy.On 20 October 1850 The Observer indicated that James Wyld, a renowned map-maker and Geographer to the Queen, had a team of fifty-six people working on a model globe of 'huge dimensions' for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London.As the initial globe (a standard globe 100 foot in diameter) proved too big for the Crystal Palace, Wyld rethought his plans and constructed a domed neoclassical building in Leicester Square resembling a planetarium for the containment of a map with a diameter of 64 feet, a circumference of 188 feet and a surface of 10,000  38 Later known as the 'Monster Globe'the largest model of the earth ever constructedthe concave map is emblematic of an emerging architectural type, the exhibition pavilion and, by allusion, to what Peter Sloterdijk terms 'an architecture of immersion'. 39Living amidst a bristling array of other public spectaclesdioramas, and raree or peep shows, the 'Monster Globe' became famed as the largest and most detailed of its kindeven if it had been pre-empted by Charles Delanglard's Parisian equivalent. 40In a prescient essay, Matthew Teismann observes that a 'georama forces us to momentarily imagine that it is possible to excavate the earth so that only its finite surface remains… Like a mirror, Wyld's georama reflects the image of the earth' as something contrary to the truth. 41Critics, including Dickens, complained of the cacophony of staircases, which occluded the opportunity of a single view.The world could not be grasped through perspectivism (or the sense of being in the Lockean camera -the camera obscura); this world offered itself as a membrane, an imposing screen for a gaze that intimates, intuits and reflects the Sublime.Lacking the depiction of historical monuments except for the Great Wall of China, Monster Globe privileged the representation of geological forces envisaged as deserts, mountains, valleys; every volcano is erupting with cotton wool as smoke.Its riot of chromatics (painted by William Roxby Beverly) announced that all water is uniform bluebright yet stagnant, as lacking tides or currents; the Arctic is glittery and frosty, if too hot, given the hole which pierced the Pantheon-like membrane of the building, allowing the sun to pierce the cramped, dank space of the globe.Parts of the world little known to European cartographers were deemed to be chromatically neutral, whilst the British Empire's couleur de rose appeared in vague swathes.If Monster Globe's de-territorialising gesture did not adhere to nation states it did carry the spirit of Burke on the Sublime, and Marx's early work on geology.What I mean by this is that 'Monster Globe' pulsated like a body without organs.At any moment it appeared ready to implode or to explode.Nevertheless, for Charles Dickens the meagre magnitude of the Earth was disappointing.
The panorama had long been associated with the prospect and its potential democratisation and, as such, zinc globes invited fantasies of power and imperialism. 42If Oliver Grau and Jonathan Crary argue that modernity desired an aesthetic/proto spectacle of immersion which required the suspension of perception, the little studied georama shows the map in quasi-Borgesian terms as defamiliarised, fetishised, writ to eccentric scalea scale in elevation of 1 mile per inch. 43ossibly with the georama in mind, Borges imagines the tatters of empire and its absurdity.His one paragraph tale 'On Exactitude in Science' fabulously credited as a quotation from 'Suárez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap.XLV, Lérida, 1658', imagines an empire where the science of cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice: 'succeeding Generations… came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome… In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar.' 44 To be clothed in the fragments of the map manifests all its haptic theatricality.Contra the panorama, the georama forced the world to bear on the viewer, to reduce representation to abstraction, which is also eccentrically reminiscent of Ltd, Calcutta, 1903, 2nd  ed, pp 157-158  , 1899-1901,  vol 1, no 8, 1900, medieval mappa mundi in their incitement to worship and wonder.Yet georamas lack the marginal figures, the wild men of the earth or the nomads of Borges's labyrinth of imaginary beings.There is also something almost prehistoric and shamanistic to their zinc piecing together; what is it to stand in these cave-like structures gazing upon territories to be hunted, to imagine the map as bristling with geological totems?Does this incite a kind of sympathetic magic subsequently made popular by Frazer's The Golden Bough? 45 The Shudder, the Craquelure of Colonialism: From Photo Zincography to Monumental Desiccation Zincography, so often confused with modern zinc-plate lithographic printing, led to the development of photozincographyan early form of photogravure practised by photographers such as Waterhouse.The various variants of the zincographic process, as with photogravure (photo engraving), involved coating zinc with a light-sensitive albumen/ chromium salt mixture which would then be exposed in contact with a glass negative, which was inked before the albumen was removed by washing.This process created a single proof image.Photozincography, sometimes referred to as helio-zincography is essentially the same process, known commercially as zinco, and was developed by Sir Henry James FRS to enable the accurate reproduction of images, manuscript text and outline engravings for the Ordnance Survey of Great Britain during the 1850s and put into force by the government's Topographical Department. 46At this time, high-contrast negatives were made using the wet plate collodion method, using a solution of nitrocellulose in ether or acetone on a ground constituted by glass.Once the negative had been made, a sheet of thin tracing paper was coated in a mixture of saturated potassium bichromate solution and gum water.Once dried, the tracing paper was placed under the photographic negative and exposed to light for between two and three minutes.The mixture of bichromate and gum remained soluble on the areas of the tracing paper that were shielded from light by the opaque areas of the negative, which meant it could be removed so as to leave an insoluble 'positive' image.This bichromate positive was then placed on a sheet of zinc covered in lithographic ink and run through a printing press three or four times.After the paper was removed, the zinc plate was washed in a tray of hot water (containing a small amount of gum) and brushed with a delicate camel-hair brush to remove all the soluble bichromate.What remained on the zinc plate was a perfect representation in ink of the original composition produced as a result of the ink binding itself to the insoluble potassium bichromate.
The use of photozincography at the Ordnance Survey, James claimed, saved over £2000 a year, with up to 2000 or 3000 impressions being taken from a single plate.Yet it was deemed unsatisfactory as a full colour image could not be produced and it still required as much labour as the favoured technology of the pantagraph. 47Nevertheless zincography became a crucial means for photographers in India to explore questions of scale, and the relationship between landscape and the view.Zincography opened up discursive spaces which allowed for the estrangement of geography and for a new exhibitionalitythe 'transformation of landscape after 1860 into a flattened and compressed experience of space spreading laterally across the surface' which entailed sharp value contrast in the synonymy of landscape and wall.In a fascinating discussion on the powers of new photographic technologies Rosalind Krauss makes the case for an outdoor photographic aesthetic -'a perspective that tends to flatten, to fragment, to generate ambiguous overlap'. 48or contemporary artists Raqs Media Collective, zincography offers inspiration to muse upon the spectre of empire.Their installation An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale takes inspiration from the reproduction of a photograph by James Waterhouse which shows clerks in the headquarters of the Trigonometric Survey of India, Calcutta.In the slow, meditative, brief looped video the men's gestures are barely visible, shadows at best captured in the seepage of light morphing from morning to dusk. 49As with much of their work, Raqs meditate on the materials, carto-astrology and temporalities of colonialism and their rhizomatic legacies, as seen in their use of algorithms and the making of a museum of lost constellations.Zinc, as a prescient soldering material of modernity/contemporaneity, is no doubt present in the very projector used for An Afternoon Unregistered on the Richter Scale.In Raqs's hands a single image acts as a 'compressed performance', a condensation of empire as viewed through its blueing cotton, claims to carto-astrology, exploitation of indigo, and reliance on photography and zinc.If Wyld's 'planetarium' Monster Globe strove to erupt the world (volcanoes et al) Waterhouse's cartographic office looked to astronomy as the slowed precision of trigonometry.
Intermittently concerned with astrology and imperialism (for instance their Great Bare Map installation and Museum of Lost Constellations) Raqs has more recently smashed the bombastic stature of the Raj and all the materials associated with haute imperial statuary.Their installation 'Coronation Park' for the 2015 Venice Biennale, consisting of a boulevard of white beheaded governors, seeks to guillotine the remnants of the Rajthose faded, anachronistic memorials that still frequent sites such as theVictoria Memorial, Kolkata. 50While some of these bombastic dead white men and women were carved in marble in order to adorn streets, parks and churchesand become the subject of art historical Throughout the Commonwealth and the United States zinc statues now rot, split, are cracked by winds or shattered by the frost.Prevalent in the 1870s, such monuments were intended to offer a substitute, possibly a supplement to or surrogacy for stone.As with Pinchbeck gold or aluminium, zinc had to become an ersatz materiala self-effacing material of mimicry. 51Such zinc monuments were constructed first by casting the metal in moulds or by stamping zinc sheet into fragments as indexical traces of the human body.Both methods were easier and cheaper than the facture of bronze or iron statuary because small pieces could be quickly fabricated and joined to make a large statue.Zinc, then, can be seen as a form of ersatz wax or as a form of armour.
In North America numerous zinc monuments were produced by the monumental Bronze Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and its subsidiaries, using a unique methodology that included a sandblasted finish.Such finish was intended to give the effect of slightly weathered stone.Marketed as superior to stone in terms of durability, such sculptures came to be known as 'white bronze'.real custom-made effigies for the dead, as well as offering early instances of off-the-shelf statues of Faith, Hope, and Charity whilst holding the capacity to provide seemingly efficacious and quickly erected Civil War and British colonial war memorials.As zinc can be beaten thin, it enabled ambitious compositions such as relatively minor generals on horseback or bombastic statues crowned with wreaths of standing soldiers.Zinc as memorial fast became a production line which was in some degree based on photographs of the deceased.So, from a zincbased plate the sculptor/artisan would project a three-dimensional idea of the body as either portrait or generic hero.
From the 1870s, zinc increasingly determined the visual rhetoric of the militant public sphere and its mnemonics of commemoration.For instance, the New York-based firms of J L Mott Iron Works and J W Fiske sold zinc statues of soldiers and firemen painted in imitation of bronze to veteran's groups and municipal governments, whilst their cast-iron fountains with 'Classical' zinc statues intended for cemeteries claimed to be better than stone.Yet within a generation this proved to be but an aesthetic of the ephemeral, discarded to the realm of the fake, the fallen, the forgotten.By 1900 most companies ceased to use zinc.documentary so far.To glean fragments of gold washed from factories into sewers or to be pressed deep into the shafts of Zawar, to be cast into the pitch black is to dive beyond the grasp of representation.As Marx intimates, there are limits to art's integrity in relation to labour.It is labour that bears within itself beauty and integrity, which the superstructure of capitalism will always fail to grasp.Deborah Stein demonstrates how zinc mining in Zawar inspired the formation of many mediaeval and modern Jain and Saivite temples and their incumbent gods. 56The Jain community based at Jawar, Rajasthan, organised elaborate pratishta installation ceremonies involving much holy water, as Zawar lies on strong riverine and land routes reaching to Gujarat.Believed to be the most ancient site of zinc mining in India, Jawar became an important commercial centre precisely because of the prevalence of zinc smelting, which from the fourtheenth century drew monks and crafts people to the area.
At Zawar the majority of religious icons appear to have been smelted with zinc, which accounts for up to 30% of their metal content.The rest of the metals mined (tin for instance) may well have been local or melted down from spolia, as was the practice in much of South Asia at this time. 57According to the thirteenth-century text Rasaratna Samuccaya by Vagbhata Charya, zinc should be distilled with the assistance of turmeric, Chebulic myrobalan (cherry plum), resins, salts, soot, borax, nuts and acid juices, whilst the ore should be mixed with lac treacle, white mustard and boiled with milk, clarified butter and melted into balls.Deborah Stein conjectures that the Rasaratna Samuccaya, 'also provides a plan for an alchemical laboratory that demonstrates an interweaving of geomancy and the architectural placement of deities with the directionality akin to that seen in a Hindu temple'. 58In the exact centre of four directions, a Siva lingam would be located on one side with a raw materials storage area and a transmutation bay, whilst on the other side of such sacred directionality would be an area for sharp instruments and a furnace bay.At the entrance of temples, which we can say are broadly dedicated to zinc, the god fashioned of zinc would be flanked on the western wall by a washing bay and a drying bay, whilst the eastern wall contended with Bhairavaa malevolent form of Siva.Bhairava, a deity beloved of the Johr or the iron workers and the tribal workers who live in Chhapan today, is not only on the axis with the central Siva linguam but also adjacent to the transmutation bay on the north wall and the furnace bay.Perhaps like the latent malevolence of Bhairava, zinc is not easy to work with.Zinc evaporates: it slips away.Zinc requires a precise temperature (at Jawar a consistency between 1,100 and 1,250 degrees Celsius for five hours).The debris at the site suggests over a million tonnes of ore was mined between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Located forty kilometres south of Udaipur, close to Dhebar -India's second largest lake -Zawar now consists of a township stretching ten kilometres along the Gomati River, situated behind an impressive mine akin to a gigantic amphitheatre of closed and open pits.Close by is a deserted yet well-preserved medieval town of palaces and temples, now run by Hindustan Zinc Ltd.Established in 1966 as a Public Sector Undertaking, Zawar is indicative of Indira Gandhi's attempts to promote industrial collaborations with Unilever and other colonial era multinationals The nine statues by Raqs Media Collective are not zinc but fibreglass mounted on bitumen-coated wooden pedestals.The structure and the title of the work make reference to the coronation sight/site of George V and Queen Mary as emperor and empress of India and their notorious visit to India in 1911 Pinchbeck gold is associated with Charles Pinchbeck, who worked as a London clock and watchmaker.He used zinc in an alloy of brass, copper and zinc.Zinc constituted 7% of this alloy.This alloy was intended to do the such as the Tata and Birla groups.Although other sectors of Hindustan Lever have flourished (such as the infamous whitening skin cream Fair and Lovely), in 2001 the Government of India found it necessary to abort Hindustan Zinc Ltd's activities.Nevertheless, Hindustan Zinc Ltd continues to operate the world's largest open pit mine and the world's biggest zinc mine at Rampuew Agucha, also in Rajasthan.Hindustan Zinc Ltd's other mines operate in Rampura Agucha, Rajpura Dariba, Sindesar Khurd and Kajad.Hindustan Zinc Ltd is feted in business communities as one of the lowest-cost producers of zinc.
If there is a lack of museological/photographic interest in Zawar, the mines of Zawar flourish in folklore.Archaeology and fabulation speak to the existence of an elaborate underground palace associated with the resistance of sixteenth-century Mewari ruler Maharana Pratap to Mughal imperial expansionary plans.Escaping underground in the Arawalli Hills with his family and military entourage in tow, he survived many months in the tight almost airless shafts of the ancient mines, even commanding his architects to construct an underground durbar hall.Remains suggest a grandiose platform, an ancient worked-out stope and a great circular domed chamber and exhaustive carving out of the mine.As absentee sovereign forced to rule underground, Pratap was transformed into a mythical hero akin to a deity.Yet the subterranean sublime of Zawar is not publicly marked.India's mines are not the sight/sites for tourism; rather they remain within the remit of the Geology Survey of India which, in 2017, with the global market for zinc increasing, identified copious resources in Andhra Pradesh.
Today, Pratap is hailed as the great hero of Mewar.Elaborate festivals celebrate his birthday on 9 May and the Battle of Haldighati on 18 June, whilst all those seeking to be elected to local government must chant 'Pratap gaurar' shaan!'to Pratap's pride and honour!His equine statue, fashioned from local zinc is festooned with temple/bazaar garlands and showered with rice.Pratap is also celebrated as a patron of courtly painting, the rhythmic intelligence of which (admirably studied by Molly Aitken) is informed by the presence of brilliant whitesone of which is local zinc. 59If the subjects have little to do with mines, occasionally the figures of bhils (nomads) appear in such courtly artmen and women who, wandering the deserts and highlands of Rajasthan, are believed to have inhabited the caves of Zawar.
The addition of mixed lead white, which often contained zinc, to Mewar painting is also characteristic of seventeenth-century Hindi miniatures, jewellery and textiles.Through the use of incident light microscopy, scholars have employed energy-dispersive ray fluorescence (EDXR7), spectroscopy, ultraviolet and infrared colour to detect zinc.In India these whites were often employed over or with red lake, carbon black and verdigris to create rich, saturated grounds which encouraged, in fabric and glass paintings, viewing from both sides.Zinc, as I discuss below, can so often be seen as mirror, screen, gaze.
As Kajri Jain shows, in both printmaking and contemporary public monuments, zinc provides a ground, a skin for the image (Jain, personal correspondence).Conceptualised as surface, zinc may be malleable yet it also speaks to a certain ontology for artistic culture and the public sphere.Still associated with coinage, zinc is seemingly everywhere.Market investment in zinc has gone sky high, as has its association with Bitcoin.The Smithsonian studied over 700 zinc memorials to set up a database dedicated to zinc.It aims to be the first database dedicated to zinc sculpture in America with a strong intention towards the improvement of its conservation.One of the directives was to think through the descriptions of paint coatings appropriate for particular types of sculpture to help with the selection of modern coatings when no evidence of the original survives.Knowledge that white bronze monuments were not meant to be painted could end the detrimental application of paint, which detracts from the material's intended stone-like appearance.If the practice of filling large zinc monuments with concrete is halted, this alone will bring an enormous saving to the national heritage.See Carol A Grissom, 'The Conservation of Outdoor Zinc Sculptures', in Ancient and Historic Metals, David A Scott, Jerry Podany and Brian B Considine, eds, Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 1994, pp 279-304.
Grissom, 'The Conservation of Outdoor Zinc Sculptures', op cit; Barbara Rotundo, Zinc as pigment itself can be viewed as colonising and industrial.While Primo Levi dismissed it as boring, nonetheless zinc as bright yellowa sort of equivalent of cadmiumsears through nineteenthcentury canvases, sculpture and architecture.It screams with a kind of perspective of chromatic form.Its symbolism, its phenomenology also pertain to what Pinney terms 'Creole Europe' -Europe seen as an anxious reflection of a reflectiona space of violence and frisson played out in terms of historical materialism, fiction, the fetish and materiality broadly defined. 60Being both pervasive and slight, zinc has so many histories which a single article can never contain.In the spirit of the Creole and the coeval I venture now a small history to the chalkiness and the whiteness of zinc and what it means to pan for zinc in both India and China during the Opium Wars, and how white might incite a slight attention to detail, a turn to the creole vignette.

Creole Vignette I: Zinc and the Aesthetics of the Pearl River Mountains, Chromatography and the Coeval Palette
If in recent years there has in art history been a turn to analogy and anachronism as a means of comparing otherwise dissonant, disparate material, whether it be colonial-contemporary art, late medieval fresco, film and the early modern, it is still worth addressing the coeval.The coeval, as wonderfully evoked by Johannes Fabian many years back, forces us to confront the ethics of the ethnographic encounter. 61There might be a certain lack of the coterminous, even in forms of communication, but 'the encounter' remains critical for thinking about being for the world and its serious limits.If Fabian's account is concerned with human recognition, is it possible to transpose his ideas of recognition and temporality to the world of materials?For Bruno Latour we can still formulate a kind of ding democracy where things confront us but also one another, to strike up a form of recognition which happens potentially at the level of matter. 62Read together, Fabian and Latour offer a window onto the world of zinc as the sludge of the Pearl River, as the very fabric of Cantonits dazzling white architectureor the sheen of the intimate scenes of creole living.
In parallel with British colonial investigations of mining at Zawar, zinc offers a poetic gamut for delving into the export works of artists based in Canton and their resolve to forge a creole/dissonant studio practice.Underestimated in much art historical literature is the network of British and Chinese artists based in Canton, all of whom were concerned with economies of white.If the visceral and highly racialised qualities of white and the brush of the blush have been much discussed regarding England and the Caribbean, as well as in regard to the mestizjo character of Mexican and south American painting, zinc remains something of a misnomer.Whilst Dana Leibsohn charts the exchange of objects such as porcelain between China and southern America, David Roxburgh calls for the (re)mediation of Mughal painting as a screen between China and Iran. 63I would like to suggest that we can call forth additional screens with which to consider the vibrant power of Chinese paintinghow it had the ability to hold in thrall much European art.
The reactivation of Indian zinc mines by the British was in part a response to the military requirements of the Opium Wars (1839-1860).
Here we can think mine to mine, as the British envisaged the zinc mines of northern China to be an embarrassment of riches.In China, zinc can be identified closely with the mining of brass alloy during the Ming and Qing dynasties.Known as qianzheng (mintage), the zinc administration reached to what Chen has termed commodity chains.In her extensive study, Hailian Chen traces the presence of 30 to 40 per cent of zinc in coinage in the early modern era, thus deeming zinc to be essential to the growth of China's globalising economy. 64Used in this way, zinc could compete with South American silver and the growing power of European trading companies and to lesser explored connections between the Han mercantile community and the Parsis of Calcutta and Bombay.Paktong was used in overseas markets, as well as proving the life blood of local energy flows, particularly in Guizhou province.
Zinc had long been the unspoken earth, the wash, the breath of much Chinese painting, perhaps most evocatively as landscape.The empathetic notion of qinlutraversing the landscape conjured by the painted scenes -'is intimately somatic and driven by free will as an opportunity to relish natural and potential social surroundings'. 65By contrast, fengjing is closer to European notions of landskip as scenery or prospect in terms of 'perceptual-mnemonic views of a place with discernible customary activities, dwellings and lifeworlds'. 66The immersive and sensorial engagement of jing, the scene allows for the mutual evocation of place and painting which might also be theatrical.Liu deems such landscape to be symbolic.The beauty of her observations envisages the mist of isolated copses, how such copses bear forth their roots for opening up routes to travellers caught in their midst.Such mist painted with delicate washes of zinc is offset by calligraphic inscriptions whose beauty sings for the space.The later eighteenth-century revival of thirteenth-century aestheticsit's the watery washes, it's the chalk whites from the Pearl River Delta, which derive from the zinc mines, suggesting a nostalgia for a bygone aesthetic.
It would seem that those artists most fascinated by landscape painting sought out, forged those pathways featured in one form or other in Suzhou district (c 1540-1550).For Wen Boren 文伯仁 (1502-1575), 'Where there are footpaths, [the scenes] wind; where there are forks in the paths, [the scenes] become crisscrossed.'The crisscross is meant loosely as the paththe way or the jing 徑 which might be seen as a means of redeeming the presence of the body/bodies within the scene.Nature might appear to be alienating or far away as the path yields a space; it offers a clearing or the potential for the customary or for clearance.The path might also have analogies with gardens, parks and other visual depictions.Possibly representation is too strong a term with which to consider the path as a formalised motif in Suzhou landscape painting: 'In both painting and place making, the footpath functioned as what one might call a place binder, while also enabling the contingent propulsion of bodily movements.' 67reading this landscape of zinc was to experience a primal means of realising the worlda world either perceived through the quasiphenomenological ideas called forth by Tim Ingold's or De Certeau's concern with the familial practices of everyday life. 68In his beautiful excurses on Caspar David Friedrich's landscapes, Joseph Leo Koerner conveys how the clearance yields, holds forth, promises. 69Although Koerner has little interest in materials, Friedrich, like Chinese masters before and beside him, employed zinc for his epic landscapes.Zinc promised a warmth of the Italianate.In contrast with the Sublime, here Friedrich's firs, his darkening thickets or crucifixes or the Crucifixion, the light of his northern Italian landscapes are soft, almost delicate in ways possibly reminiscent of Goethe's mode of travelling.For both Friedrich and Goethe there is a vaporous softness to these fields of zinc.Zinc evokes the sap of early summer morns, the rise of light from the frosts.
I have drawn attention to Chinese landscape painting precisely because zinc became a critical medium, also possibly a metaphor, for creole chromophobia/chromophilia in a broader global context.Famed colourman George Field was part of an intellectual and scientific milieu led by Sir Humphry Davy that sought to experiment with electricity, astronomy and novel technologies as seen in Davy's pioneering of the solar camera and his use of the solar microscope to project images onto sensitised paper.Davy's extensive experiments with chemical philosophy included the choice of small shards of zinc which, when added to copper, created cathodic protection.Cathodic protection could be used as a means of protecting ships' hulls.However, this initially proved disastrous as the zinc attracted barnacles. 70For many years Davy worked closely with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose own extensive notebooks experiment with hydraulic bell jars of oxygen, steam being pressed through the tap, noting that 'the zinc burns with a very bright flame, the lower part white, the conical part purple blue'. 71Much of Coleridge's verse is tinged, tainted by bright, even harsh chemical coloursthink of the phosphorescent ice of 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and his fascination with the substrate. 72or Field, painting with rigour meant to depict flesh, skies, shadow and the 'suitableness of our climate to perfect vision' as a quest for 'a boundless diversity of hue in nature relieved by those fine effects of light and shade which are denied to more vertical suns'. 73His defence of the British School is that of the boundlessness of colour: The graphic branches of painting, owe everything to colour, which, if it does not constitute a picture, is its flesh and blood.Without it, the finest performances remain lifeless skeletons, and yield no pleasure.Painting is the art of representing visible things by light, shade, form, and colour; but of these, colourand colour aloneis the immediate object which attracts the eye.Colouring is, therefore, the first requisitethe one thing imparting warmth and life. 74ansparency and opacity, depth, breath rather than breadth or texture, are what makes a picture expressive and judicious.Transparency, Field believes, pertains to shade: The 'colour of shadow is always transparent, and only that of extreme light objects opaque.It follows, that white is to be kept as much as possible out of shadow'. 75 The painter's box is a very museum of curiosities, from every part of the universe.For it, the mines yield their treasures, as well as the depths of the sea: to it come Arab camel, and English ox, cuttle-fish and crawling coccus: in it the Indian indigo lies next the madder of France, and the gaudy vermilion of China brightens the mummy of Egypt. 76e bêtes noires are iodine and scarlet and blackblack is shunted to the back of Field's Chromatography.
For Field, white 'in a perfect state should be neutral in hue' and 'absolutely opaque'. 77It is only then that it will reflect light, if light is understood to be brilliant.Throughout his extensive treatise, Field stresses the implacability of body, space and depth: colours should be effective in landscapes and as flesh tones.White is the foremost colour with which he is concerned.White, which frames the treatise, is 'the instrument of light'; white has the power to dilute, to dilate and to cool all colours except blue 'which is specifically cold'. 78White has the potential to be overpowering in its purity and its ability to overthrow all colours to disorienting degrees of advancement or recession.
With white as an expanded field in mind, Field is at pains to stress the power of the neutral, which has the potential to overbear.The neutral, as Barthes reminds us, is a remedial space for much experimentation, as grisaille, as sigh. 79Zinc pertains to several shades of the neutral: 'Perfect white is opaque, and perfect black transparent; hence when added to black in minute proportion, white gives it solidity; and from a like small proportion of black combined with white, the latter acquires locality as a colour, and better preserves its hue in painting.' 80Both white and black communicate these properties to other colours in proportion to their lightness or depth, while they cool each other when mixed, and contrast each other when opposed.These extremes of the chromatic scale are each in its way most easily denied, as green, the mean of the scale, is the greatest defiler of all colours.If 'Rubens regarded white as the nourishment of light, and the poison of shadow', for Field the most beautiful shadows contain gold or white. 81hroughout his extensive discussion of colour in Chromatography Field stresses the need for pigments to be permanent; it is here that zinc and Chinese white garner the most favour.He perceives Chinese white to be exclusive to watercolour because of its delicacy, its inability to work with oil. 82It is to be favoured over many whites, such as 'Barytic white' which, 'unsatisfactory and unpleasant', will confound the most experienced artists precisely because it is harsh, chalky and dries poorly. 83Many whites simply cannot be mixed with gum; whites have a tendency to lack vital luminosity and clarity.They are difficult to grind.Field spends some time extolling and vilifying lead whites as inordinately heavy and vulnerable to varnish.The antithesis of the subtle, even frail, tones of zinc and Chinese white, lead white is yet essential in the ground, in dead colouring, in the formation of tints of all colours, and in scumbling, either alone or mixed with other pigments.It is also the best local white, when neutralised with ultramarine or black; and it is the true representative of light, when warmed with Naples yellow, or orange vermilion or cadmium, or with a mixture of the yellow and either of the orange pigments, according to the light.It should be mixed with large amounts of heavy spar, gypsum, or chalksuch chalk might contain zinc.
Field is emphatic that art must coalesce with science, especially in the case of white.White as blanc d'argent has the tendency to flake.Although it is exquisitely pale it lacks body in contrast with Cremnitz whitea Hungarian or Viennese pigment heavily leaden in base and smelling strongly of vinegar.English white is to be commended for its combination of protocarbonate and hydrated oxide of lead, in contrast to Flemish white, which is a poor cousin of blanc d'argent.Roman White is 'of the purest white colour' but differs from blanc d'argent 'in the warm flesh tint of the external surface of the large square masses in which it is commonly prepared'. 85This praise aside, Field condemns the majority of whites for being admixtures involving charcoal, indigo or Prussian blue, ceruse and heavy spar.
Field devotes a section to zinc white: [Zinc] is either the anhydrous oxide, the hydrate oxide, or hydrated basic carbonate of zinc.It varies in opacity and colour according to the mode of manufacture, and the purity of the compound, but may always be relied upon as permanent.The whiteness of the best samples rivals that of white lead, and it is not tarnished like the latter by sulphurous vapours.
In opacity it never equals white lead, and might perhaps serve advantageously as a glaze over that pigment, either alone or compounded with other colours; as well as act as a medium of interposition between white lead and those colours which are injured by it, such as gamboge, crimson lake, &c.When duly and skilfully prepared the colour and body of this pigment are sufficient to qualify it for a general use upon the palette in oil: in water it has been superseded by Chinese white… As a pigment, zinc white may be said to be innoxious [sic.].As oxide of zinc does not readily form a saponaceous compound with fats or oil like white lead, the paint prepared with it and ordinary linseed oil does not dry or harden so rapidly.For the purpose of causing it to be more siccative, the oil was boiled with a large quantity of litharge, but by this method the white was liable to tarnish on meeting with foul air.Instead of litharge, experiments have led to the choice of salts of zinc, such as the chloride or sulphate, a small percentage of which, on being mixed with the oil or oxide, confers upon it the property of rapidly hardening.The same result is attained by employing an oil, dried by boiling with about five per cent of peroxide of manganese.In either case, a paint retaining its white colour permanently is produced.These agents might, with advantage, be more generally used in the place of litharge for rendering oils siccative.Many pigments which are not naturally affected by sulphurous emanations are apt to suffer if mixed with an oil made drying by means of lead. 86nc is preferable to the iron-based and clumsy texture of Cadmium White which, is 'deficient in body' and tends all too readily to assume a yellow tint on meeting with an impure atmosphere', in marked contrast with the delicacy of mother of pearl. 87Mother of pearl however is too delicate for painting even flesh, except as flesh painting comprehended, apprehended as makeup.As loose powder, it may tend to the grey, injuring the skin, 'rendering it yellow and leather-like; and it has been known to cause a spasmodic trembling of the face, ending in paralysis'. 88Worse still would appear to be tin white, which, 'resembles zinc white in some White chalk (which may include zinc) should only be used as a crayon or for tracing designs if it is sawed to 'suitable lengths' and free from grit, but it can form 'the bases of many cheap pigments and colours, used in distemper, paper-staining, &c'. 90As if tired of his list, Field moves swiftly through the remaining whites, which tend to the metallic and involve mercury, arsenic, and antimonynone of which have value at all.They merely elicit foul air.Mal air is for Field a constant concern.One that plagues the equivocally named Morat or Modan white, Spanish white, Troys or Troy white, Rouen white, China white, and Satin white.White is seemingly easily foundfrom egg shells and native earths, although all are 'destitute of body in oil; and several, owing to their alkaline nature, are injurious to many colours in water, as well as to all colours which cannot be employed in fresco'.For Field, the wall, the mural are critical tests for the power of colour, especially baryta, lead and zinc: 'In fact, there is but one white pigment which approaches perfection -Chinese white'.If it is mixed with cadmium yellow it might prove gorgeous but also noxious as its toxins are those of sulphur and carbonic acid, which is blackish, brackish in intent. 91espite Field's interest in the depths of the image, whether it be the face or the distant chiaroscuro of a field, Field held little writerly interest in the ground.Yet, by the 1840s it is as the ground of the image where zinc finds new primacy, as can be seen in its prevalence in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites.But zinc tends to flake and is quite resistant to heavy industrial pigments.As an ill-fated ground, zinc became allegorical of a landscape of poetic industrialism and alienation.Whilst the clays of John Linnell's Gravel Pit suggest a continuum of materialsthe gravel, the clay, the earthsfor Millais zinc became the ground for his moving image The Blind Girl.If the scene be that of a rainbow doubled, the field is seemingly fallow, although its remnants of paths suggest a rambling from the farmsteads of Winchelsea.First exhibited in 1856, critics took the rainbow to be allegoricalas a sign of God's covenant in Genesis 9:16: 'Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.'Ragged, with worn, raw chapped hands, the blind girl and her companion might be shielded from the glare of the rainbow and the scorch of zinc yellow meadow only to be caught in our gaze. 92The glare in part is due to the dazzling presence of yellow zinc transparent ultramarine varnish and lower madder materials. 93

Creole Vignette II: A Prevalence for Opiate War White
In two relatively obscure, yet extensive, albums, modest in scale and materials (brown ink and pen on paper) George Chinnery records the topography of eastern India, the backstreets and port of Canton and the labour-rich district of Guangdong.As opposed to his rather generic or now unidentifiable 'picturesque' oil sketches of collapsed mosques, hovels and stinking tanks (an Orientalised nod to Thomas Gainsborough or George Morland but with less certain political resonance of what might be the indigenous commons) these tight drawings may or not be for a market desirous of the generic picturesque vignette.Pandering to the precarious cosmopolitanism of Canton locates Chinnery within a diasporic aesthetic that stretched to his former home, Patna in eastern India.Chinnery had spent many years working up country in Patna (Azimabad), where he became embroiled in the machinations (artistic, political and economic) of a circle of planters centred on the amateur maverick artist Charles D'Oyly.Although famed now for his comedic publication Tom Raw the Griffin (1828) and his earlier more serious topographical views of bustling 'white' Calcutta, D'Oyly is best thought of through his ruthless business in indigo and opium. 94ossibly encouraged by evangelical missionaries in Bihar then translating biblical texts into Hindustani, the D'Oyly/Chinnery circle experimented with lithography and zinc.Indian artists swiftly colonised lithography and zinc, transforming the materials into the powerful technology of magical xeno-realism. 95Their dexterity with the polished surface of the stone and zinc may owe something to their extensive use of mica in eastern India.Mica, mined close to Patna, elicits a sheen so rich, and a robust surface much favoured by Company School painters including the famed Shiva Lal.Painted double-sided, these self-mirroring, selfreflecting mica images played with the luminosity of light on their material lyricismmaterials that included indigo and imported pigments such as red madder and cochineal, which could be easily sealed within their transparent surfaces.Occasionally becoming the window panes in the palaces of absentee zemindars in north Calcutta, such mica panels did the work of glass.As individual sheets to be collated as albums they frequently depicted the labour for and cavernous factories of opium.Mica powder and shards had long been used to provide a kind of silver lustre to enhance the plaster of Mughal and nawabi palaces, creating a mirror culture which bore no reflection in either European or Qing practices.
If fellow 'up country' artist Robert Home's sketches, oil paintings and recipe book feted poppy oil, bulls' blood, Indian yellow (cow urine) and local indigo, for Chinnery by contrast 'makeshift' local materials were less totemic than taboo.It is as if he held a certain nostalgia for his former ceremonial palette.Cast in silver, Chinnery's palette is now the pristine object of consumer attention (a print of which can also be bought).In his last self-portrait, the painting of a palette performs a different form of narcissism, as can be seen in its 'reflection' of his own florid tones.The palette reflects less the landscape he depicts than his own face.The palette as mirror, as screen, allows pigment to sear through its surface as vermilion, lead white, cochineal and most probably also as zinc.If zinc offered the grounds for Blake's mystical etching and engraving, as can be seen by zinc's remains on his palette (V&A), for Chinnery the palette is stridently less experimental.Its circumscription speaks of a nostalgia for Britain.
Like several fellow colonial artists, Chinnery attempted to theorise his own practice, as can be gleaned from the many scratchy, scattered, nighon destroyed remnants of his ragged letters and jottings.An incessant sketcher, he also sought to ruminate on the category of art.It would seem that by the early nineteenth century, European artists living in Calcutta had taken upon themselves the task of extrapolating on what art and its origins might be.This may be predictably Orientalist if, veering from Winckelmann to Hegel on the Sublime or the Silpa Sastras, the Ain-I Akbari, it does underlie their attempts to intervene on the emergent category of aesthetics.At times reliant on morphology, resemblance, typology of the detail or a pandering towards the (neo)classical, such jottings offer glimpses of eccentric analogies with European art, as can be seen in Chinnery's contemporary Thomas Hickey's Ancient Art. 96Less well known than the Orientalist jottings of William Hodges and Thomas and Williams Daniells, Hickey advanced a theory of ancient art that sought to engage with and to reject both Winckelmann's and James Barry's theories of climatic determinism.If both Hickey and Chinnery had spent time in Dublin working with patrons and the school of art, Chinnery was more insistent on upholding the orthodoxy of the Royal Academy.Hickey's references to colonialism are at best oblique and mostly concerned with sculpture and Apelles.Chinnery by contrast advocates prospecting: 'my book when I write it![which he did not] Is to have every theory practically illustrated'. 97Chinnery kept many sketchbooks, including a rare scrap album of drawings and watercolours which are interspersed with works by Charles D'Oyly, the Prinseps and Chinese works on pith paper (private collection).His own planned Treatise (held in the archive of Alan Bradford and the Martyn Gregory Gallery, London) both emulates and critiques Field's emphasis on zinc.
Chinnery's negligence of zinc is possibly due to his retrospective emulation of Reynolds.In many ways Chinnery's work best attests to the shift from the deadpan colouring and recklessness of Sir Joshua 'Sloshua' Reynolds to the scientific and aesthetic intensity of Millais et al.Clues to Chinnery's means of procuring metropolitan (London) supplies are scant, with only a single reference to a London-based colourman.The reference is concerned with vermilion for the portrayal of fabrics and faces, uniforms and the broken complexions of those rendered florid by the tropics.Even then the price is the point of quandary: 'The Vermilion is the same you gave me & all of it… Vermillion is Vermillionbut Neman does contrive to make his cakes of very different colour to all others -I have now a bit and only & for a Cake would willingly give 100Rs.' 98s is well known, it would appear that Chinnery trained and relied on artists in Canton and Macau.Lam Qua, now celebrated for his harrowing medical portraits for American missionary Peter Parker, in many ways outshone Chinnery as the leading and most prolific painter in oils in Canton. 99His dual portraits, in which the men, women and children are usually seated patiently in darkened interiors in dull navy robes and simple gold jewellery, depict terrible disfigurements.It would seem that images of people with tumours were placed on display in Parker's hospital, designated 'pre-operative' and 'post-operative', as if the images acted as mirrors or memento mori of illness and perceived disfigurement.The virulent, violent nature of their growths intends a kind of guttural scream, a carnal sense of the body without organsa spasm of distention, of dignified pain. 100n spite of the fame and power of such images a French visitor to Lam Qua's studio (1849-1850) noted with some disdain: The Chinese colours are much inferior to the European.They scarcely succeed in manufacturing any besides vermilion, lazulite, carmine of the plant carthame and orpiment.The best painters, especially portrait painters, buy other paints of the English.Lam-Qua had near him a box divided into compartments, in which were arranged in order about twenty different colours, prepared beforehand in porcelain cups.A drawer contained many small phials of the same colours in a powdered state.In the bottom of the box were placed brushes of every size and degree of fineness, sticks of India-ink, a little mortar with a glass pestle, and a little gelatine to thicken and fix the paints. 101 contrast, Chinnery himself sought out materials derived from London: Canvas of all Nos.-Cordage of all sizes -fine Prussian Blue -An assortment of prepared paints in kegs and fizes, consisting of Red, White, Yellow, Blue, Green and Black -Best dry Red and White Leads -Prepared Linseed Oil -Best Stockholm Tar, Blue, Red and White Buntins -Broad and Narrow Lines and Twines, of all kinds. 102 Canton the materials then being advertised in the press for artists included amber, beeswax, 'Ebony 3 ½ a 4 pecul, Cochineal 380 a 400, lead 5 ½ pecul, smalts 12 a 28 pecul', plus Dragons Blood, gamboge, vermilion and whites of lead.Pigments were certainly deemed to be contraband.According to The Canton Register: Prussian Blue, an article which formerly was brought in considerable quantities from England, is now totally shut out of the list of Imports, in consequence of the mode of its manufacture being acquired by a Chinaman whilst in London; and from timely improvement, it has been brought to that perfection, which render the consumers independent of foreign supply. 103gments such as lead white were listed in the press and customs statutes under 'Miscellaneous Imports and Articles not in the Tariff.' 104 Ships coming from Madras carried a range of pigments including terre verte, massicot, realgar and many organics, and within such 'promissory' lists whites shine out, and are the most prevalent, whether they be lead, calcite, gypsum, kaolin, mica, tin white or zinc.
Chinnery's palette included a choice of lacs, kermes, carmine, Indian and chrome yellows, malachite and verdigris, as well as a large assortment of whites, such as lead white, calcite, gypsum, kaolin, mica, tin white and zinc, whilst his selection of supports ranged from fine laid paper, pith paper, irregular open-weave canvas, smooth, closely woven canvas, indigenous soft and hard woods, silk, copper, alloys, glass and ivory. 105It would appear that he eschewed the use of more eccentric grounds such as those favoured by fellow painter Ralph Earl, who resorted to bed ticking as canvas in New England, Augustus Earle who patchworked canvas from a variety of scraps, or Turner's turn to makeshift canvas and cupboard door panels.Nor does his choice of pigments bear any resemblance to that of Mughal/Company School painters it would seem. 106Chinnery kept any fine-quality canvas for commissioned portraits whilst working with coarse twill for graphite studies, washed outdoor scenes and general notations.For Chinnery, pigments remained a constant preoccupation: 'If I was not so bothered as I am about finance I would do more, rather than shew my talent better now I am shackled.' 107Chinnery worked with both local and imported paper: The Chinese paper is very thin, pliable, smooth and delicate, and in a hot country is preferable to European paper, which in India particularly, is very rarely fit to write upon.It seems the great evaporation of moisture from the surface of the earth in these countries, occasioned by the intense heat of the sun, impregnates the bibulous paper of Europe with water, and is the cause of the ink seeping into it.Whereas the Chinese paper having a fine glossy surface, the pores of which are consequently blocked up, the moisture is not imbedded. 108 be thrifty with materials was to construct the studio as a pseudo form of laboratory.As Simon Werritt has argued, thrift existed as the makeshift ethic of workable practice which allows for science to enter more the realm of everyday life. 109Nevertheless, Chinnery remained determinate in his choice of grounds, choosing colourpinks, olive, lemon, limes, lilacsall of demi size. 110Chinnery scraped around for imported paper of all kinds, which suggests a certain fetishisation of the long-distance surface. 111Each scrap had the potential to become a vignette.
The vignette so often dismissed as mere frivolity, as folly, could also be a mode, a method of aesthetic and economic survival.It could be the space for experimenting with a composition, with scale and the closeup.The close-up (as a signifier/symptom of the optical unconscious) is, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, a means of breaking out of faciality into dazzlement: it is to search for the physiognomic aspects of the world through the minute and the uncanny. 112For Chinnery the materials override a division of subject matter: 'chronically short of paper I use my old sketchbook again, and in the spaces between my old Indian sketches appear figures of Chinamen'. 113Chinnery painted directly onto his paper, without priming it first.He made extensive underdrawings, using bread to erase mistakes, and shorthand markings, such as 'x' to indicate that something was incomplete.He worked rapidly, with few materials.Instead of gouache he mixed hair powder with egg yolks to form a paste.
In a somewhat disparaging note, one critic of Chinnery observed that the Chinese copyists, though they sometimes painted on imported canvas, would use any bit of cloth that came to hand, some of them painting on paper that was attached to sleazy cotton fabric.These makeshift canvases have not stood up well to the passages of time and today they are often split and rotten at the edges. 114 Chinnery's forebear, the celebrity artist Spolium, overlaid card with the finest paper so as to capture the fleshliness of his sitters, or made much use of the mirror and a play on the doubling of mimesis as gaze.Perhaps Spolium's sitters, many of whom were naval seamen, associated canvas too much with the 'flap' of the ship. 115Also, there is a lumines- I let you see it in its current state to explain to some degree the white cloth business, which rely on it you will find after a little practice, of infinite use -Sir Joshua says those particularities of practice may be either follies or advantages (he speaks of Gainsborough's plan of Sticks, Coals & Looking Glass, & building Landscapes with these on a Table) but there is so much reason in this that I think it speaks for itself -Opie had a plan of having his Canvas priming with Black & it would be as wrong for him to have a Light Ground as for us to have the Contrary -We are confined to paint on a White Ground, & it surely is better to have an Effect made up in reality which answers to our practicesbesides, it prevents our having further dependence on the Back Ground than as an Ornament & help -You have found that I dare say that a Head loaded with Colour will put on a clear look with a dark Groundtake the Ground away and it looks blackbut it ought to look clear bright & well coloured before any Ground is put at all & when this is the Case any Ground you may put will make it so much better if it is well harmonized. 116 the jottings of his 'Treatise' Chinnery spoke further of portraiture: Heads which are to be relieved off a Sky Back Ground ought to be painted off a Light onesuch as a Table Cloth placed immediately behind the Sitterthis shews [sic.] the True Colour of the Head, & any ground may be addedit is better than painting them off dark Grounds, which is deceptive, because, the Ivory on which we paint is white (or nearly so & the reason why the same mode does not apply to Oil Painting is, that we have the power of putting in & taking out a dark Back Ground with such facility, that the Effect we see of a dark Back Ground behind the head may be given immediately -In Miniature it is not so, & the practice must proceed in all cases of doing the Head first, before any Back Ground is put. 117innery's whites in both India and Canton show an even layer of white ground with a slight gloss, which appears to be oil based and possibly to contain lead white, which had become the standard practice in Britain.His Treatise describes the process of leaving the paper white as a ground.Ground must be both aqueous and sculptural in order to achieve an exigency of form: [The] necessity of comprehending Form well before General Effects are produced -Whether the Form is much got rid of or a little only got rid of by Shadow, the Form must be well understood, anatomically as it were; & remark applies more (of course) to foregrounds than anything else. 118 Chinnery's fey vignettes are vague and myopic in their topography and somewhat reliant on brief notes so as to identify locales (as in his rendi-with the ground layerinvolving the coating of size and ground to the reverse of a canvas to reduce the movement of the fabric, or to paint directly onto raw canvas with only a glue application.It would seem that Chinnery's Indian and Chinese canvases used an even ground of lead white.He used a preparation of lead white and chalk layers with various glue layers which was quite standard practice in Britain.He also liked to leave the paper white to act as a ground for watercolour which might then be chalked.Cambridge, 2014, pp 33-34.Spoilum (Guan  Zuolin) was active between 1765 and 1805 in Guangzhou during the tion of eighteenth-century sculptor Chitqua's home), Tingqua's celebration of modern trade and the opium boudoir plays with the pleasures of opium as a means of forming intimacy and hospitality. 119Working for both a European and Chinese public, Tingqua created almost mirror images of his studio which are curious in that one features a back wall of European style portraits whilst the other suggests a Chinese clientele, made most obvious by the presence of his signature in each in English or Cantonese.Possibly akin to Las Meninas's looking-glass/painted image of the Spanish king and queen, Tingqua's back wall acts as a kind of mirror, the world as gaze returns to us through the screen of artworks.For Tingqua the studio is a place of meditative contemplation indicative of a precise and silent division of labour but from which the master and his clients are curiously absent.
Given its reoccurrence in numerous albums, it would seem that Tingqua's studio functioned as a kind of carte de visite.If placed alongside each other, the Chinese and the European versions possibly provide comment on the shifting clientele during the Opium Wars.One art historical analogy might be Antoine Watteau's studio, where former sovereign Louis XIV's portrait is put to rest as the fashionable newly feminised public turn to the frivolous, the rococo, to polite conversation. 120Possibly the back wall of depictions of women in the Cantonese version of Tingqua's studio speaks to a novel clientele and to another form of cut in the image.The turquoise walls and overall greenish light suggest a cast of illumination very different to the mauve seemingly required by portraits of European men.These differences could of course be entirely fictional and dependent on the artist/artists' play to manifest the experimental vibrancy and contingency of the studio.
Such opening out of the studio possibly harks back to depictions of the Mughal karkhana or those export painted fans which celebrate a surfeit of porcelain and lacquer so much desired by Europeans.In the depictions of Tingqua's studio each artist is absorbed in their own micro-studioseemingly a far cry from Chinnery's self-projection as the flamboyant lone artist seated beneath a landscape of Brighton, working on one of his many oil vignettes of now unidentifiable mosques.The floridity of his palette allows materials to act as a kind of second self-portrait; clearly they have less to do with the landscape than with the unfinished flushed ruggedness of his painted face.
Whilst Tingqua plays with the metaphor of the mirror and zinc as the means for portraying rice and silk screens, his predecessor Spolium's celebrated series of 'export' portraits of Europeansusually naval officers or traderstake the mirror to be more literal.Immediately identifiable, Spolium's softened warm expressions and kind gaze made him somewhat of a celebrity artist.Several of his surviving likenesses were painted on mirrored surfaces which allow the viewer to become part of the image.This could of course be a form of self-reflection, a doubled, ludic narcissism or an intimate overlay of two gazes.Portraits being largely market inalienable were intended to be gifts. 121Sadly, there is a dearth of technical analysis of Spolium's portraits, but the extremely mirrored surface may well be achieved through the use of zinc.If in eastern and northern India mica provided the zari (glitter work) for wall decoration, as either inlaid mirrors or ground into the white murals for sheen, in Canton zinc mined or panned from the Pearl River became the very stuff of  New Haven, 1985   For the colonial context of portraits as gifts see Natasha Eaton, Mimesis Across Empires: Artworks port architecture as well as its painterly depiction by artists such as Tingqua.

Conclusion: The Daze: Zinc's Snow between Phosphorescence and the Glow
Integral to the phantasmagoria of high modernity, zinc would morph into the glittering dazzle of spectacle.Zinc came to occupy a space between phosphorescence, dazzlement and the glow.In early cinema it enabled the shimmering effects of costumes and things so as to emerge from darkness to shimmer pearlescent, as seen in the gleaming pigments used in Irving Berlin 's Music Box Review (1921).Doused in silver-activated zinc sulphide or doped strontium aluminate, the women's costumes sizzled.Zinc's phosphorescent glow (phosphor thermometry) could achieve as many as twelve hues after exposure to light, conducive of a rainbow effect.Zinc's idiosyncracies of absorption elicit its latent theatricality.Light interference in its structure exposes optical flakes which appear like the surface of an oil slick.Zinc then becomes lazy in its phosphorescence and inviting of a kind of black light.
Phosphorescencelight emitted by a substance without combustion or perceptible heatcan be achieved by the use of zinc, which is deemed to be a luminescent material capable of producing extraordinary light effects.Phosphorescence is a type of photoluminescence related to fluorescence.Unlike fluorescence, a phosphorescent material does not immediately re-emit the radiation it absorbs.The slower timescales of the re-emission are associated with 'forbidden' energy state transitions in quantum mechanics.As these transitions occur very slowly in certain materials, absorbed radiation is re-emitted at a lower intensity for up to several hours after the original excitation.
The phosphorescence of zinc sulphide was first reported by the French chemist Théodore Sidot in 1866, whose findings were presented by A E Becquerel during his extensive experiments on whether luminescence is electricity motivated or driven by the mimetic desire to find a fluorescent equivalent to the bioluminescence of bacteria, insects and fish or fireflies.Known to scientists since the experiments in the early seventeenth century with the naturally occurring lapis solaris in fields near Bologna, phosphorescence really came into dazzling effect with Tesla's investigations and their subsequent militarisation.
Not only was zinc used as the casement for armaments and as an alloy for brass, it became the pigment of camouflage.Zinc as phosphorescence oscillated between the real and the imaginary, between offensive or defensive mimicry, between a mimicry of dissimulation, direct or indirect mimicry.In his seminal study of mimicry from this time Roger Caillois deployed the example of two butterflies from the jungles of Brazil. 122ne is able to self-protect through its environsto seemingly disappear; the other, known as Caligo, can resemble the head of a bird of prey, or the evil eye.As such it served as a much-coveted indigenous amulet.
It is on this level that it can be gratifying to give a common root to phenomena of mimicry both biological and magical and to psychasthenic experience, since the facts seem to impose one on them: this attraction by space, as elementary and mechanical as are tropisms, and by the effect of which life seems to lose ground, blurring in its retreat the frontier between the organism and the milieu and expanding to the same degree the limits within which, according to Pythagoras, we are allowed to know. 123f Caillois is ultimately concerned with mimicry as 'depersonalization by assimilation to space', zinc had to be attentive to the aerial and the oceanic.Here it could become a subtle or dazzling mirror, a screen, inciting gaze as daze. 124inc sulphide combined with barium sulfate produces lithopone.If, sulphur is introduced, the mixture gradually changes from white to yellowish to brown powderits luminescence enhanced by its capacity for light absorption.In paint and the production of zinc sulphide it is possible to produce luminescence from such waste materials as slag, smelter and pickle liqueurs.Luminescent effects are a byproduct of ammonia's interaction with methane when zinc oxide is used to scavenge hydrogen sulphide impurities gleaned from natural gas.Zinc sulphide provides a mirror-like surface which, on war planes, could reflect clouds and sky, thereby dazzling and temporarily blinding enemy pilots like the Caligo butterfly or the bioluminescence of the brightest firefly.
Such post-irony, tired remnants of kitsch qua pastiche aside, does zinc speak to an anti-ideal materialism which is devoid of any ontological ideal or figural form?Formlessness as au de la, it can be taken as both utopian and as a potential form of political engagement.Zinc does not speak clearly to strident materiality although it can be seen as the material of a globalising modernity.
As the philosopher's snow, zinc's drifts are ubiquitous and sacrificial.It is the ground of so many commodities, the objects of our everyday life.The sight of philosopher's snow makes us think how beautiful and short life is and how, in spite of all their enmities, people have so very much in common; measured against eternity and the greatness of creation, the world in which they lived was narrow.That's why snow drew people together.It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another. 125 photography is arduous: it has to embrace and yet resist industrial capitalism.55It positions the photographer as an ambiguous figure of artist/ worker qua the category of labour as well as the commodity.By the late 1860s the British began turning their attention to the industrialisation of the Indian economy.This would appear to have begun with the opening of the first steel furnace at Kulti in 1870, to be swiftly followed by the Bengal Iron Works and the creation of The Ordnance Factory Board and its Metal and Steel Factory.Yet mining at Zawar does not fit Marxian models of labour and was possibly not deemed worthy of pictorial representation.Today Zawar's mines might be the subject of folk lore, or internet spectacle: brightly lit, they appear welcoming in their wide, cavernous online glisten, inviting in their subterranean sublimity, or terrifying as evocations of the fabulation of EM Forster's Marabar Caves.There are no artistic projects akin to Steve McQueen's filmic exploration of the exploitation of miners in South Africa.In India, artist activism happens elsewhere in the urban wastelands, streets, factories of Mumbai and Delhi or the videoed shorelines of the oceanic.To be Down and Out Labouring Under Global Capitalism (Ravi Agarwal) can only push He spent much of 1862 involved in a series of trips to Central India in search of suitable subjects, many of whom were presented in Watson and Kaye's eight-volume The People of India (1868-1875), while views taken at Sanchi during the trip were used by the architectural historian James Fergusson in his Tree and Serpent Worship It may be stating the obvious that has less body and colour, and dries badly.According to its composition, it is liable to turn either black or a dull yellow in contact with sulphurous vapours.' 89 to Spolium's work which canvas could never capture.Spolium's finesse is more akin to Mughal miniature work or to the rhythmic quietude of landscapes, of wandering the highlands of the Pearl River.If Chinese artists chose to prime grounds with a coating of size, or worked directly on raw canvas with only a glue application, Chinnery stressed his stringent or stalwart fidelity to Eurocentric practice.In a letter to pupil Mrs Browne he stressed a form of retrospective materiality: cence