The Brooklyn Rail

Sarah Minor is a master weaver, every bit as virtuoso as the artisans who stitched the eleventh-century epic clothwork that features in Carousel, her astute study of the panorama. The Bayeux Tapestry (which is not a tapestry per se, as she points out, but rather embroidery on linen) opens and winds through this compressed and elegant book as a paradigmatic example of the human urge to capture imagery “in the round”—never as straightforward, ahem, as it seems.

On the narrative hanger of delivering slide lectures for a class called History of the Panorama, Minor layers multiple ideas about observation in general and the inherent possessiveness of the wide gaze, starting with the medium closest to hand: the Zoom talk itself. The computer’s camera eye watches her watching her students watch her back, forming an episodic narrative out of its grid of individual frames. (“The fine-art school they attend believes that students should also be images,” Minor observes with customary shrewdness.) She introduces the subject of the famous tapestry relating the Battle of Hastings—“the world’s softest war monument,” she jokes—which is normally displayed in Normandy on a circular drum that reminds her of a baggage carousel. The tapestry then recurs through the rest of the book, a temporal unfurling of its meanings akin to the way the cloth is read by the viewer.

In the short vignettes, each no more than a page, that comprise the book she goes on to discuss the variety of ways the panorama has permuted throughout history, up to its current transformation, which she posits as the drone. But hold up. Lest I convey Carousel as some sort of dreary academic recitation, a grave misapprehension of Minor’s project as a writer, deeply intellectual though it is, I need to correct the record.

Minor excels at using form to create meaning, and vice versa; in her work, the medium is the message so completely that the literal shape of the work is its subject. This is most the case in her dizzying collection Bright Archive, a handful of intricately wrought “visual essays” in which, say, a river of white space cuts through a meditation on personal and domestic midwestern history, and the river that runs through it all; or text spirals like rope across the pages of an inquiry into eroticism and female trauma. The standard physical bounds of the book are not sufficient to contain her inventiveness: a pullout unfolds into an elaborate essay-poem pieced together in the shape of a log-cabin quilt. This is “experimental” writing at the level of NIH advanced study.

Carousel is far less multitudinous, perhaps because its scope is narrower. (Odd thing to say about panorama, but at least it is a unified subject rather than the almost-everything that overspills the pages of Bright Archive.) It is not wholly without visual sport, however: there is a flipbook element that animates a blank panorama condensing to a thin line before widening back out. Try it! It’s fun! Yet Carousel’s considerations are both tighter and lighter than her earlier books’: its bursts of insight about its subject are sharp and brief, its forays into memoir (the peculiar hallucinations her grandfather experiences as a result of Lewy body dementia; the landscape making of itself a moving panorama as she looked out the car window as a child) suggestive rather than analytic. Her idiom may be said to be scholarly x poetic x playful.

The book represents an act of literary generosity. She trusts the reader to climb the stairs to her point without insisting they ride the elevator with its dinging announcement of every floor.

This is not to say that Minor is not building a case. She is, if craftily. “Sight is a weapon of capture,” she asserts about the use of military observation balloons beginning during the French Revolutionary wars. These were in effect a sort of proto-drone, now perfected in the so-called knife bomb, “a carousel of blades that converge as the missile approaches.” The ultimate aim of the panorama’s possessive gaze is full ownership over life.

Carousel is itself a panorama composed of perfectly formed individual micro-essays that function as either metaphors or cautionary tales. In one adamantine passage, Minor (in the third person, as throughout, which I merely choose to take as her) describes looking out the window of the campus gym at the progress of a new art center. The building will in effect contain and represent the weather outside, from its temperature-controlled storage rooms housing documentation of the body/performance art of Ana Mendieta (itself focused on the representation of temporal events) to its central glass cylinder that will allow precipitation and nature to be viewed from inside the structure as if it, too, were performance art. And then she tumbles off the treadmill she’s running because its simulacrum of time and reality—the scenes on its screen that aim to seduce and dissemble—suddenly “updated. The footage changed and she fell.”

Not all that we see is real. Taking it so can be unsafe.

Again and again, Minor shows how we are all implicated in the allures of the embracive view by virtue of reveling in its elisions, impossibilities, fictions, godlike vantage. Finally she reminds us that panorama has always been “a technology of conquest.” It must be said that she has taken a panoramic look at its history to develop the idea.

Carousel is the series of slides we watch. Carousel is time and repetition. Carousel is sameness that repeats as difference. Carousel carries our baggage, around and around until it is claimed. Carousel is the digital eye viewing you. Carousel is the treadmills, both literal and metaphoric, we run.

Carousel is the book that embodies the notion that when vision is circular, what we look at always looks back at us. It is a small, and watchful, masterpiece.