Carlo Ginzburg is a great showman. The renowned UCLA history
professor knows how to keep the audience guessing by limiting the
details of his upcoming speech on replication. Revealing too much
would simply be, according to Ginzburg, “a bad example of
replication.”
Carlo Ginzburg is also a great historian. In reaction to the
looming possibility of cloning, Ginzburg, who specializes in early
modern European history and the Italian Renaissance, steps away
from the present in order to compare today’s conceptions of
replication to those of yesteryear. The Los Angeles County Museum
of Art is presenting Ginzburg’s lecture, “Aping Nature:
Reflections on a Medieval Metaphor,” at the Leo S. Bing
Theater at 7:30 p.m. tonight.
“I’m interested in the present,” Ginzburg
said. “It’s part of what historians do or should do:
look at the present from a critical distance.”
Thus, this historian will discuss the present conception of
replication by examining famous medieval works from the past.
According to Ginzburg, part of a historian’s objective is to
avoid taking common occurrences for granted.
“Estrangement is part of this technique,” Ginzburg
said. “We are used to taking things for granted because
it’s part of our everyday environment. We were not used to
the idea of cloning, but soon the idea became familiar. I think the
process of becoming familiar is the opposite of what I would like
to achieve.”
Even though the lecture was inspired by Dolly, the cloned sheep,
Ginzburg will focus on the relationship between texts and images.
Among the medieval works he will discuss is “The Romance of
the Rose,” a French poem by Jean de Meun and Guillaume de
Lorris, and Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy.”
Ginzburg also noted that the recognizable Uncle Sam recruitment
poster is another example of image replication.
“The Uncle Sam poster is a replication of a British poster
asking men to join the army,” Ginzburg said. “It
features Lord Kitchener with his big mustache, pointing his finger
and saying “˜Our country needs you.’ Here, the image is
more important than the text. The text is rather self-evident, kind
of a caption.”
Ginzburg’s personal history begins in 1937. Born in
Torino, Italy, Ginzburg studied at the University of Pisa, earning
a dottore in Lettere in 1961. After a teaching stint at the
University of Bologna, he relocated to UCLA in 1988.
As a teacher, Ginzburg is committed to instilling into his
students’ learning process a technique he calls “slow
reading.”
“Reading is an experience,” Ginzburg said. “In
this environment, everyone can read. But there are so many
different ways of reading. So I often say that my classes are
examples of slow reading. In Italy, there’s a movement called
“˜slow food’ against fast food. Rather than fast
reading, I would like to teach slow reading.”
Some of the groundwork for Ginzburg’s lecture was laid in
his famous essay, “Clues.” The essay portrays
Ginzburg’s interest in connoisseurship (the expertise of
identifying original paintings as opposed to copies), a topic that
led to his recent research on replication.
The historian remains hush-hush about his talk at LACMA, but he
does want students to understand his main thesis on stepping back
from a parochial mind-set and taking a panoramic shot of
history.
For more information, visit www.lacma.org.