The year is 1878. Twenty commissioners from the United States visit the Exposition Universelle in Paris, tasked with recording the wares, whatnots, and wonders of modern industries on display. Their report is lengthy, detailed, and disarmingly enthusiastic. In Volume III, William P. Blake, assigned to ceramics, glass, and glassware, notes the following: “Paper weights of hollow balls filled with water, containing a man with an umbrella. These balls also contain a white powder which, when the paper weight is turned upside down, falls in imitation of a snow storm.”[1]
This is the first known record of a snow globe, a small but significant entry on the French exhibitors, captured between candle lusters and vases. The report provides an opening to our snow globe history while immersing – rather, submerging – us in an imaginative world. We are at a world’s fair, celebrating the technological innovation of the modern age and reveling in the new, the grand, and the exotic. We can imagine the pomp of pavilions, the scale of machinery, and the masses of merchandise. It is a historical moment of unquestioning optimism, hubris, empire, and cold, snowy winters. The ‘global’ surrounds us, and we hold a globe in our hands.
The year is 2014. A group of academics and artists meet in Madison, Wisconsin, to stage an “Anthropocene Slam.”[2] They bring origami paper and concrete and sand. They fold, pour, perform, play, and end by writing an eclectic collection of essays which they call “Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene.”[3] What wealth of objects could be placed inside this epochal cabinet? The collection includes a monkey wrench, a freezer box, and a pesticide spray pump (wares and whatnots and the worrying). Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett’s curiosity cabinet seems to me a wonderful way of “staying with the trouble,” by staying with the stuff.[4] The following is my imaginary addition – my unofficial nomination of an object articulating our era. Tourist kitsch, children’s toy, mnemonic and metaphor, snow globes are potent ornaments to ponder with. We gaze inward at small figures and frozen landscapes, and so are drawn outwards, to thoughts of elements, distant places, and former days. What might we glean about global snow from its miniature inversion, the snow globe? What can we learn from dusty souvenirs, cabinet shelves, and troubling times?
The year is 2025. Parties meet in Belém, Brazil, to negotiate and discuss climate change for the UN’s thirtieth Conference of the Parties. There are controversies and conflicts. There is consumer culture and changing weather. (Think tourist tat and warming winters.) Timothy Morton’s term “hyperobjects” has gained traction in capturing the scale of environmental crises, planetary systems, or anthropogenic pollution. Hyperobjects are ungraspable in scale and scope, nonlocal, and “viscous, which means that they ‘stick’ to beings that are involved with them.“[5] Global snow is perhaps one of them – complex, colossal, and hard to get your head around. And yet it settles and sticks. It demands something of us. And we cannot brush it off.
I wonder if, in our attempt to grasp the ungraspable, we have begun to imagine global snow like Mark Carey imagines glaciers: as “an endangered species.”[6] Carey’s work is an important reminder of the way that our understandings of the world, climate, environment, and ice crystals are shaped by myriad cultural imaginaries as well as natural processes. As Alexis Rider has pithily put it, “It’s hard, when among ice, not to hunt for melt.”[7] Snow is rendered as something in danger, or even in absentia. We hunt for it too: clone it, create a doppelgänger, encase it in glass. We have manufactured something which, placed in our hands, reminds us of winters past.
Lindsey A. Freeman asserts, “When the gigantic is ignored, fails to mesmerize, or threatens to overwhelm us completely, we turn to miniature.”[8] She is writing of snow globes and, instead of classic memorabilia showing idyllic landscapes and tourist attractions, Freeman draws on the unsettling pieces of artistic duo Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz. Their ongoing collection shows ominous white worlds with dystopian possibilities. Snowscapes contain a lonely figure pulling his house on a sledge, or dancers in a graveyard, or people teetering on stilts with baying wolves beneath. Through impermeable glass we are shown the catastrophic, uncanny, and darkly funny. We gaze, expect to be comforted, and are disconcerted.
In Freeman’s quirky sociological exploration, snow globes become mnemonic and oneiric devices, where dreams, nightmares, and memories mingle and are manifest. But what of the elemental? What is the significance of the snow in snow globes? Perhaps, as Jennifer Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff have asserted, the snow globe “presents a compelling space in which to explore weather imaginaries.”[9] While shying away from allusions to crystal balls, Gabrys and Yusoff see potential in the way that snow globes blur the distinction between prediction and control: they are material articulations of our wish for mastery. We shake them up, to watch them settle, to shake them up again.
I see potential in snow globes, too – in thinking with the miniature, the material, the mundane, and the always somehow magical. Because objects tell us stories and bear witness to their times. Ceramics, glass, glassware. What would our snow globe of the Anthropocene be made of? Do fragments of plastic represent falling snow? Maybe there would be no snow at all. It would be ash or microplastics themselves, drifting in our sealed oceans of solution. Writing of the fifteen objects which compose their cabinet of curiosities, Mitman, Armiero, and Emmett claim theirs “resemble more the tarots of a fortuneteller than the archaeological finds of an expedition: they speak of the future.”[10] (Perhaps we should think of crystal balls after all.)
Snow globes seem to me the perfect curio for the Anthropocene. A memento for the messy magical time we call modernity. In memoriam. A memento for global snow. Present and absent, real and imagined, something to consume and control. And remember our man with the umbrella? Esther Leslie writes, “Crystallized here is an absurd contradiction: what good is the umbrella when surrounded by water?”[11] Such tensions, the absurd and the ambiguous, are, I believe, essential when understanding snow globes. They are whimsical memorabilia but worrying metaphors. They evoke nostalgic reverie and expose visions of the future. They are objects combining movement and fixity, the weighty and the wafting, translating the ephemeral into the enduring.
Perhaps I would choose one of Martin and Muñoz’s dystopian visions, unsettling and surreal, for our curiosity cabinet. Or maybe something catastrophic. Or perhaps something sentimental and sincere, small and strangely familiar, capturing the uncanny and contradictory. Where we put up our umbrellas to find we are already submerged in water. Shaking our toys in troubling times. Caught in the (snow)storms of our own making.
[1] William P. Blake, “Glass and Glass Ware,” in Reports of the United States Commissioners to the Paris Universal Exposition 1878 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1880), 266.
[2] Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett, “A History of the Anthropocene in Objects,” Edge Effects, May 22, 2018.
[3] Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett, eds., Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene (University of Chicago Press, 2018).
[4] Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).
[5] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.
[6] Mark Carey, “The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species,” Environmental History 12, no. 3 (2007): 497.
[7] Alexis Rider, “Ice. From the series: An Anthropogenic Table of Elements,” Society for Cultural Anthropology, June 27, 2019.
[8] Lindsey A. Freeman, “Catastrophic Snow Globes as Oneiric and Mnemonic Gadgets,” Space and Culture 19, no. 2 (2016): 116.
[9] Jennifer Gabrys and Kathryn Yusoff, “Forecast factory: snow globes and weather makers,” in Bipolar, ed. Kathryn Yusoff (Arts Catalyst, 2008), 62.
[10] Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert S. Emmett, “Preface,” in Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, 12.
[11] Esther Leslie, “Snow Shaker,” in The Object Reader, eds. Fiona Candlin and Raiford Guins (Routledge, 2009), 516.
*Cover Image: Traveler CCCXXIV, 2017 by Walter Martin & Paloma Muñoz. Courtesy of the artists.
[Cover Image description: In a snow globe, a lonely figure pulling his house on a sledge.]
Edited by Nina Foster; reviewed by Deniz Karakas.