2006

what a year. In
february 2006 I was diagnosed with four simultaneous stress fractures in my
left toes. Immediately afterwards, the diagonsis became reactive arthritis.
quite painful yes, and lots of drugs. Goodbye skateboarding, running, etc. This
period directly relates to the 'arthritis', 'broken toes' , and ' fragmented'
for obvious reasons. The churches were my first venture in pure architecture.
Picked solely based on location, they were structures I frequently was confronted
with, so I decided to draw them. The watercolors of Julia were overnight. Next
time look up is a reminder not to overlook the wonders we are surrounded by
in Manhattan and all we take for granted. as well as the bullshit in the sky.
From August till December I exclusively dedicated myself to daily architectural
studies. There are several theories, proposals on this which I will discuss
when the project is done. It is to consist of 365 in total, and at 112 currently,
I am almost a third there. I will come full circle in August 2007.

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'365' ink, graphite,
charcoal on paper. 2006-2007 (in progress)

December 2006

..

November 2006

October 2006

..quot;http://www.victortimofeev.com/minimalism/images/september11th2006_th.jpg" width="300" height="406" border="0">

August 2006

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'friends' march-june
2006. ink on paper.

'next time look
up...' etching, drypoint, spitbite, watercolors. march 2006.

'fragmented' ink,
graphite, watercolor, gouache on board. june 2006.

'series' ink, watercolor,
graphite on Arches paper. november 2006.

'psyche maps' ink,
graphite on paper. november 2006.

december 2006

'random' ink, goache
on paper. october 2006.

left - 'arthritis'
ink, watercolors. march 2006. right - 'broken toes 2am' ink on paper. february
2006.

all is copyright,
© Victor Timofeev 2006.

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Sketchbook August 1, 2006
当前表情： 冷嘲热讽

This is my breaking.

Model1.

Bar Matchless in Greenpoint.

I was psyched on Modigliani at the time I guess.

Self Portrait 4AM with wine, bandaged knee.

Fire and Wine.

A fucking goat! from the statue @ the Met.

Unnamed female 1.

Unnamed female 2.

Handlines.. (like headlines, except with hand, get it>?? ) haha.

FAces have been bothering me lately.

Except ones with mustaches like this.

In the waiting room for the second mri in 2 days on my knee. Waiting rooms suck.

On the train from Rome to Florence.

Looking out of Cafe Pick Me Up, mixed with view inside Tompkins Park.

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"Go skateboarding today" a film by VictorTimofeev

I made this film after getting seriously injured last year. I had a lot of great footage that I didn't get to use, and realized this was probably the end of the line for me. So I bottled everything I had absorbed from skateboarding over eight years or so, the camaraderie, the pain, the joy, the grief, and made this clip.

videography by Victor Timofeev, editing by Victor Timofeev, music by Modest Mouse
contributing videography - Sho Ma, Jeremy Cohan, Skaterdays. above photo by Denny Mui.(dennydoes.com)
..>

目前 收听 : Heat 歌手： Colder 发布日期： 25 October, 2005

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I disegni da Firenze (Drawings from Florence)

The Famous Santa Croce Church, where Galileo, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli are buried, and fragments of the piazza surrounding it.


nature vs. architecture. when relics that are hundreds of years old begin to feel like the earth made them.


impression of via Giraldi, the Bargello musuem on the right.




impression of the Arno river from the Lungarno Della Zecca Vecchia street.

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A Poem for A Drawing by Adam Israel
当前表情： 清醒

My friend and good neighbor Adam Israel (myspace.cn/adamisrael) wrote a poem for the last piece I completed. Here it is, followed by the piece.





City Elegy
for Victor Timofeev’s “Distance vs. Direction”
-Adam Israel-

we bury our dead above ground,
and our strong tombs are rising.

funeral glyphs no longer rest
beneath the earth. our myths scratch

their backs on the walls. crucifixes grow
striker roots into red sediment.

the city is steaming away the world.
and staircases twist up from roofs

worms out of burning timber. we are
the letters soaking like fractures

in glass eyes. spider black pupils
bricked through us. our iron buildings

on their pilgrimage off the earth, bearing
engraved pleas. parasite words harden

lifeless amid giant candles and bleeding
concrete shoulders. illuminated of color.

o lord of the burning of our world,
may the earth rewrite us.

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The Rise Of Criminology

Victor Timofeev
Media 399.41.

Towards the latter part of the nineteenth century, lots of social, political and technological developments gave rise to criminology, the science of fusing old anthropological tools with criminal identification. The invention of photography, the publishing of the Communist Manifesto, the exponential growth of immigration into the U.S., the expanding fields of phrenology, physiognomy, and craniometry and the birth of eugenics all played enormous roles in the advancement of criminology. Alphonse Bertillone, the founder of this new field of ‘science’, developed criminology to sift through the growing populations of strangers, be able to identify the “habitual criminal”, and measure and record their anatomical features in order to create a database of distinct and differentiable identities.
The invention of photography was most influential towards the ideas that started criminology. In its early days, it was used to document the degeneration of the mainstream population, including groups such as slaves, inmates and the mentally ill. Endowed aristocrats used this photography as visible evidence of proof between themselves, the superior beings, and the others, the inferiors because photographs were believed to be objective; undeniable visual truth that can be used as scientific evidence – “the closest scrutiny of the photogentic drawing only discloses more of the absolute truth”(Edgar Allen Poe). Matthew Brady, a prominent phrenologist, was one of the first few photographers employed to document prison inmates. Sir Francis Galton developed composite portraiture, a technique which combined photographs of criminals together to generate a single identifiable face. While he believed that “a person’s identity is defined in relation to [this] pictoral average”, he wasn’t very successful in identifying particular criminals. Instead, the technique created the ideal image of the degenerate criminal, an ideal that didn’t exist. He admits that his images “represent not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime”. Much like physiognomy and craniometry, Galton’s photography reinforced European notions of beauty and superiority, and the inferiority of the lower classes.
In 1848, Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, an open call for the rise of the oppressed working classes and take over of the bourgeoisie. This started political activism amongst the masses, which the “Victorian aristocrats” viewed as social radicalism and anarchism, and linked to the degenerate populations of “the poor, the laboring, the immigrants, and the criminals”(Phillips, Identifying The Criminal). Madison Grant expresses his fears for the safety of the ideal Nordic race in his book, The Passing Of The Great Race – he calls the masses “weak, broken and mentally crippled”. Around the same time, Charles Darwin released his book entitled The Origin Of Species, in which he attempted to give scientific proof of the evolution of human beings. Herbert Spencer took Darwin’s theories and created a belief he called Social Darwinism, which gave ‘scientific’ evidence to support the social hierarchy of the races, again supporting the already present established fields such as phrenology and physiognomy. The constant grouping of the poor, radical, ill and immigrant masses into one big ‘other’, created an ‘us versus them’ mentality among the upper classes. Fear for the takeover of the degenerate population led many philosophers to believe that it was their duty as members of the superior Nordic race to save it from extinction. Sir Francis Galton stepped up and founded eugenics, the social movement which indirectly called for the genocide of the inferior and unfit humans.
Eugenics was based on idea that hereditary engineering, or controlled breeding, would save the nation from “racial suicide”. Indiana State Senator Albert Beveridge claimed it was “the mission of our race, trustee of civilization” to impose civilization onto an increasingly barbarous world. Organizations such as the American Breeders Association and the Race Betterment Foundation, founded by cereal tycoon Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, popped up around the country with the goal of educating the diminishing white, Nordic stock of humans. Such ideas helped paved the way for the expansion of criminology around the world and resulted in one of the most terrible atrocities in the history of the humankind - the extermination of Jews in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, which aimed to propagate the Nordic race all over the world while wiping out the others.
Bertillone’s criminological classification system heavily resembles Samuel G. Morton’s studies in craniometry. In Crania Americana, Morton published his findings after measuring the volumes of the skulls of various races, and concluded that since a Caucasian person’s skull contained the most amount of mustard seeds, it is the superior intellectual race. However, his findings were later proven to be biased and false by Stephen Jay Gould, author of Mismeasure Of Man – “ [there is evidence of] fudging…of calculations in order to uphold already existing concepts about race”(Gould). Much like Morton, Bertillone believed in measuring the skull size of every inmate. He took this idea even further and measured anatomical details such ears, noses, eye colors and iris types. He created a vast classification system with multiple levels of subcategories, that broke through deceptive physiognomic structures – differentiating people that look the same and catching multiple identities of one criminal bearing disguises. An Italian physician named Cesare Lombroso supplemented Bertillone’s ideas of criminology, and broken down criminals into further subcategories.
Lombroso writes about and documents dullards, perverts, habitual thieves and criminals of passion in his book, Criminal Man. He calls criminals “savages living in the middle of a flourishing European civilization” and believes that their tendencies to commit crimes are hereditary. Lombroso founded the Positive School of Criminology and just like his father, performed many autopsies on criminals in order to be able to study their anatomy closely. He writes that when his father was examining the body of Vitella, an Italian Jack The Ripper who by atrocious crimes had spread terror in the Province of Lombardy, he found an abnormality in the cerebellum, the spinal cord which separates the cerebellar lobes lying underneath the cerebral hemispheres. This anomaly was typically found in the lower types of apes and rodents, “seldom met with in the insane or other degenerates, but later investigations has shown to be prevalent in criminals”(Lombroso). He attempts to provide such ‘scientific facts’ in order to separate criminals from the rest of society, he writes “the criminal by nature has a feeble cranial capacity, heavy developed jaw, and a large orbital capacity”. This justification of the criminals’ nature by means of anatomical structures is very similar to Morton’s use of craniometry to justify the inferiority of the black race and their natural position as slaves. We can also see Lombroso’s findings influenced by Lavater’s studies in physiognomy, in which Lavater attempted to prove that an individual’s intellectual capacity can be measured simply by looking at the shape of the head.
Just like its predecessors, criminology is based on nothing more than biased and embellished ‘facts’. However, as the ideas of phrenology, craniometry and physiognamy were proven scientifically false, criminology still holds large today. Mug shots of criminals are widely distributed, and composite photography is used to create a virtual criminal face from a database containing many ‘criminal-like’ eyes, noses and mouths. This system all stems back to Bertillone’s classification process, almost a century old. How can we expect to live in a stereotype-free world, when we are still using archaic systems of classification that only sixty years ago justified the genocide of an entire race?

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How Phrenology Still Exists Today

Victor Timofeev
Typecasting MEDIA 399.41

Phrenology, the science of mapping the human brain into many organs and the theory that the surface of the skull can be read as an accurate indicator of psychological aptitudes and tendencies, played an enormous role in the development and formation of the United States of America. Developed by Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim in the late eighteenth century, phrenology presented a materialist view of the human mind, dividing the brain into 27 different organs, each with its own unique role. After a student of Spurzheim’s named George Combe integrated phrenology into racial science in the United States, it was used by America’s greatest leaders to justify the genocide and enslavement of two entire populations, allowed Americans to conquer the western frontier and fulfill its manifest destiny, and eventually sank into the mainstream of the urban population and helped inhabitants living in growing cities to deal with the clustered new world full of strangers by applying stereotypes and social barriers against the unknown.
Andrew Jackson held office as the seventh President of United States of America when Combe introduced phrenology to the United States. Jackson developed a reputation for being an “Indian fighter,” having led his troops into the slaughter of thousands of Native Americans from many various tribes across the nation. He opened up the South for the expansion of slavery and thus paved the way for American industrialism, built largely on plantation slavery and the implementation of the cotton gin, and passed the Indian Removal Act, which used force to push the Native Americans to the western coast of the country and opened up land for white settlement. Combe stated that only the large sized Anglo-Saxon brain is capable of political freedom, labeled the Natives ‘killable’ by claiming that “they prefer extermination to submission” and that their intellectual organs are in atrophy and make them prone to violence, and wrote about the African as “property because he is…submissive, affectionate, intelligent and docile.” Dr. Samuel G. Morton studied hundreds of skulls of various races, using methods that Stephen Jay Gould proved to be inaccurate in The Mismeasure Of Man a century and a half later. Morton concluded that whites are the most intellectually superior race, blacks the most inferior, and the Natives in the middle. His findings were published in several volumes of his books entitled Crania Americana, where he writes that Indians are a “lower being, prone to violence”(Morton). Slaveowners praised Morton for “giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race”(Gould, 101). Combe and Morton thus provided a ‘scientific’ explanation for the racial of policies of Jacksonian America, which allowed immense bloodshed, slave labor and genocide be viewed as common sense.
A student of Spurzheim’s named O.W.Fowler teamed up with brother Lorenzo, and decided to turn phrenology into a traveling tent show, giving lectures and measuring heads across the nation. This would proved to be an extremely successful business, later named Fowler and Wells, and brought phrenology to the mainstream. Easy to read diagrams and pictures didn’t even require literacy to be understood. A picture of a Caucasian male next to a Native American woman explained the ability to reason and reflect versus the inability to reason, respectively. The brothers claimed that once a customer receives an examination, it is possible to cultivate oneself and change for the better. By the 1850’s, the brothers gained fame and money and settled in New York, opening a phrenological museum complete with a collection of skulls in the Phrenological cabinet and an examination room for personal examinations. Everyone examined received an illustrated self-instructor booklet, which explained the essence of phrenology and the possibilities of teaching the masses “how to perfect their characters and improve [their] children”(Fowler, 4). The booklet contained instructions on how to perform self examinations, listing every organ of the human brain and the meaning of its size. As phrenology became popular culture, it not only started a rush towards self-improvement and self-help in the large scale community, but also laid the foundation for stereotyping.
As American Industrialism grew, urban cities started developing across the nation. Factories attracted workers from the entire country, as well as brought in a huge influx of overseas immigrants. Racial and ethnic tensions mounted as communities were forced into a melting pot of cultures from the entire world, many of which had previously never been forced to interact with one another. This resulted in the grouping together of people with common interests, backgrounds and jobs, and the separation of neighborhoods based on ethnicity and race. Each group would consider itself the norm and be most comfortable interacting within this norm. Lies and embellishments were created in order to discourage the interaction with deviants from the group. This notion that ‘we’ are unique, and they, the ‘others’, are all the same, mirrors Dr. Samuel G. Morton’s studies. Morton assumed that every Indian skull he acquired was representative of that particular tribe, which is exactly why his Crania Americana is nothing more than “fudging…of calculations in order to uphold already existing concepts about race”(Gould). Morton stereotyped every individual from another race as uniform and inferior. Great American poet and essayist Walt Whitman writes about stereotyping – “It allowed some people to feel that they ‘fit in’, that they were members…It marked out people as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference”. Stereotypes helped the growing masses fit into their own secluded norm, surround themselves with familiars, and deal with the new world of strangers and unfamiliars by casting them outside of their circle of interaction based on observable truths, a concept from Spurzheim’s early phrenological diagrams. Visible differences such as skin color were integral in stereotyping, and sadly, the world of today has still not learned to overcome these social barriers.
Phrenology was built on ideas of racial inferiority of anything outside of the white norm. After many years of social movements attempting to reverse the damages done onto countless societies and ethnicities, today it appears as if the masses have learned to accept the ‘politically correct’ view of the world - that people of all races are equal human beings who deserve equal rights and equal treatment. However, a nation who’s foundation solely rests on racial differences cannot forget its roots this easily. Unfortunately, inferential, or accepted, racism is still highly prevalent in our society, particularly in our media. Television shows about crime portray blacks as the most “vicious, frightening, cunning and glamorous crooks”(Stuart Hall, 16), and Hollywood movies still show blacks as “crazy-talking under-men who connect Starsky and Hutch to the drug saturated ghetto”(Hall, 16). It is hard to tell if these stereotypical ideas will ever fade, but one thing is certain – if the national media still clings onto the world of yesterday, racial stereotypes will plague the future for many years to come.

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