Picture, Object, Puzzle, Prompter: Devilish Cleverness in Restoration London

• Published in: Art history Vol. 36; no. 3; pp. 546 - 567
• Main Author: Hunter, Matthew C.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2013
• Subjects: Art criticism; Art history; Hooke, Robert (1635-1703)
• ISSN: 0141-6790; 1467-8365
• DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12018

Hunter propose that a crucial component of the cleverness of Robert Hooke's paper micrometer derives from its likeness to a puzzle. This 'positivist' story proceeds by reconstructing the experimental, visual and ethical conflicts in which Hooke's paper model emerged so as to illuminate its elegant, puzzle-solving wit. The second component of my argument turns the situation around; I elucidate how we should understand the relations between what Hooke and his milieu called 'art' and artefacts like the cut-paper micrometer. As opposed to the astonishing creations of Hicks's Madam E.C. or to the devious artistic entrapments contemporaneously narrated by Hooke, I argue, a clever object in later seventeenth-century London is that which could both solve puzzles and also undermine its own authoritative structure, prompting and stimulating new imaginings. Like cut paper itself, the clever object bodied forth by Hooke is literally positive and negative simultaneously; it is both trap and trapdoor.