by Jon Lackman | 19 October 2007 | Uncategorized
In the September 2007 Renaissance Studies, Lucia Dacome has contributed an article on “Women, wax and anatomy in the ‘century of things’” on the surprisingly fascinating topic of eighteenth-century anatomical waxworks created by women in Europe. (If you have access to Renaissance Studies online, be sure to view the article’s stunning illustrations.)
… As the anatomist and natural philosopher Luigi Galvani put it in a speech pronounced in honour of Anna Morandi, there was nothing ‘gloomy and putrid’ about her anatomical waxworks. Rather, being ‘beautiful and elegant’, the models would give a ‘certain and almost incredible pleasure’ to viewers, so great a pleasure that they would convince many to undertake the study of anatomy. Morandi’s own self-portrait in wax presented the anatomical modeller busy in the act of dissecting a brain while wearing genteel clothes and jewels. As an attempt to portray the anatomist, and anatomy itself, through the codes of polite fashioning, her self-portrait is more reminiscent of the courteous and courting atmosphere of Longhi’s social portraits and domestic interiors than of the ritualized gatherings that took place in the Bolognese anatomical theatre in the cold winter evenings in which anatomical lessons were carried out …
Precisely because of its malleability, its capacity to melt and take on different forms, wax had traditionally been regarded as an appropriate material for crossing borders between the physical and non-physical. However, its employment in the production of anatomical models contributed to the redefinition of the meaning of wax by turning it into a medium particularly suited for representing the natural realm. Insofar as waxworks visually and materially instantiated the order of the anatomical body, they also offered the opportunity to refashion the material features of wax, such as softness and flexibility, and their capacity to evoke and replicate the realm of generation and life. Indeed, thanks to the properties of wax, its malleability, reliable colouring, imperishable character and capacity to attain proper bulk and credible shape, anatomical waxworks were taken to be particularly accurate and truthful; in fact, as Galvani put it, even more truthful than the natural body itself. In that sense, the history of eighteenth-century anatomical waxworks is also a story about the role of the properties of specific material domains in substantiating claims about the nature of the human body.
by Jon Lackman | 18 October 2007 | Photography
Soon to appear: two new journals devoted to the study of photography: Photography and Culture and Photographies. It’s hard to learn much about Photographies from its vaguely written press release [pdf here], except that it’s edited by David Bate, Sarah Kember, Martin Lister, and Liz Wells.
Photography and Culture, according to its press release,
aims to rebalance the overemphasis on art historical approaches to include vernacular and applied photography within its scope …
will embrace the historical, technological, cultural and social aspects of photography …
seeks to open up the study of photography beyond traditional Eurocentric and Anglo-American perspectives …
(via ARHV)
by Jon Lackman | 17 October 2007 | Asia
In the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Collections (XIX, 1), J.E. Hoare reviews Jane Portal’s Art under Control in North Korea,
The only permanent display of North Korean art in the West is at the British Museum, and it is fitting that Jane Portal, the curator who started this collection, has now provided what she describes as ‘just a beginning’ in introducing this little-known field to a wider audience. She places North Korean art firmly in two contexts: the totalitarian tradition of grandiose monuments and buildings and the intensely political nature of all activities in North Korea … Visitors will be told that one building has so many blocks, representing Kim Il Sung’s life, or that another’s height tells the same story … All this is presented as though it is original and based on Korean traditions … However, even the most casual observer becomes aware that what passes for Korean tradition in North Korea is rather an eclectic collection of styles drawn from all over the world … The author handles these difficult themes with ease, indicating the strengths and weakness of North Korean art and artists … [this is] an informative and entertaining work.
by Jon Lackman | 16 October 2007 | Books
In the Spring-Summer 2007 issue of Studies in the Decorative Arts, Bernard Jacqué reviews Christine Velut’s book Décors de papier: Production, commerce et usages des papiers peints à Paris, 1750-1820:
A book about wallpaper that is not a general history retailing old clichés is always an event, given that studies on this type of decoration remain so rare. Christine Velut’s work can only be welcomed with curiosity and enthusiasm … In France … two doctoral dissertations dedicated to wallpaper were recently defended. Velut’s was one of them, and here it is published in a shortened and attractive form in order to reach a wide audience … The originality of Velut’s work … lies, on the one hand, in the range of its approaches and, on the other, in its emphasis on one — the method of her dissertation advisor, Daniel Roche, who has pursued what he calls “the history of banal things” … things that now seem ordinary to us, but that at the time were milestones in the new phenomenon of consumerism … One can only hope that someday a similar book will be written about English wallpaper of the eighteenth century, which is still a veritable black hole for historians.
by Jon Lackman | 15 October 2007 | Books
Reviewing Michael Levey’s book Sir Thomas Lawrence in the latest British Art Journal (VII, 3), David Platzer writes that Levey is
undoubtedly our most distinguished and accessible living writer on art … A man of generous and wide sympathies, he is fiercely opinionated and rarely if ever lukewarm in his likes and dislikes … Moreover, he is a master of narrative: in addition to his many books about painting, he is also an all-round writer, the author of novels, a memoir and biographies of Mozart and Walter Pater … [this] throroughly informed book, packed with lightly-worn erudition, should do much to restore Lawrence to the prominent rank he deserves among British painters.
by Jon Lackman | 12 October 2007 | Photography, Theory
In the Autumn 2007 issue of History of Photography, editor Peggy Ann Kusnerz writes:
This issue of History of Photography brings together an assortment of essays about individual photographers and their work. These essays are not ‘histories’ in the tradition of Scottish political philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). His type of writing, called ‘Great Man History’, features lengthy, detailed biographies of kings, political leaders and prominent cultural figures. Nor is the writing in this issue subsumed by a grande idée, a uniform conceptual framework, applied (often reflexively) to an object of study. The contributors to this issue utilize a variety of approaches in developing their subject. Notably, each author constructs a compelling argument by working back and forth between biographical details, specific photographs and broader cultural, economic and political contexts. If there is an umbrella term to describe the methodology used by the authors in this issue, it would be ‘thick-description.’ As explained by American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006), in thick-description ethnography, ‘The aim is to draw large conclusions from small, but very densely textured facts; to support broad assertions … by engaging them exactly with complex specifics’.
Articles include ‘Reflection: Nat Finkelstein, Warhol Filming Duchamp (1966)’ and ‘Raja Deen Dayal and Sons: Photographing Hyderabad’s Famine Relief Efforts.’
by Jon Lackman | 11 October 2007 | Asia, Books
Also reviewed in the April 2007 Art History is The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture by Annemarie Schimmel. Gregory Minnisale writes:
Professor Annemarie Schimmel passed away in Bonn, Germany, on 26 January 2003 at the age of eighty. One of the world’s foremost experts on Islamic culture, history and thought, her publications included hundreds of articles and books on Sufism, poetry, calligraphy and art … [this] is a broad study of all aspects of Mughal life, from biographic details of the emperors and their families … [to the] status of the elephant in Mughal society … The Mughals lived in a society of the spectacle, organized by strict principles of visual order. Historical, literary, biographical sources point to an almost limitless ordering of visual experiences. An overwhelming range of refined, luxury objects was produced for the Mughal elite, and they avidly collected and catalogued a wide variety of naturally occurring substances, flora and fauna, all to excite, enrich and refine visual sensations … Schimmel’s introduction to the history and culture of the Mughals stands out from so many other bland examples of the genre … It might seem churlish in view of the high priase of much of this review suddenly to introduce a note of doubt about some of Schimmel’s work, but in the field of art history, Schimmel does not achieve the kind of originality or incisiveness that she does elsewhere. Art has a purpose for Schimmel, and that is to substantiate aspects of material culture … Over-emphasizing illusionism and confounding it with scientific naturalism misinterprets Mughal art and represses its formal aesthetic properties, which are very much part of its nature. In Mughal culture, the act of painting brought nature into existence in the form of an aesthetic perception.
by Jon Lackman | 10 October 2007 | Asia, Modern
Also reviewed in the April 2007 Art History is Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India by Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin. Prasannajit de Silva writes:
The idea of a second intellectual Renaissance in Europe, taking place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and driven by the arrival of new knowledge from Asia (principally India), is not an original one … [however, the authors] argue that the impact was greater than has generally been acknowledge, and that a vital catalyst in this was the large quantity of visual representations of India arriving in Britain from the 1770s onwards … The authors argue compellingly, and surely correctly, that the visual played an important role in conveying the idea of India to Europe, at the very least complementing the effect of the newly translated classic texts. They show the influence of Indian motifs (and possibly more) on figures such as Blake and Turner. However, whether such material was instrumental in the development of Romantic sensibilities, or merely in tune with them, remains ultimately — and perhaps inevitably — unproven … In spite of such concerns, Indian Renaissance is an important and substantial intervention in the literature …
by Jon Lackman | 9 October 2007 | Books, Theory
Opening the latest Art History (April 2007), we see that their book reviews are no longer edited by the inimitable Liz James, yet they seem to be every bit as excellent this issue under new editor Cordelia Warr. (If only the section were larger, and the books reviewed closer to their publication date.) In this issue, Amelia Yeates considers Martin A. Danahay’s Gender at Work in Victorian Culture: Literature, Art and Masculinity as well as Martin Myrone’s Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750-1810:
The field of masculinity studies has for some time now seen interventions as exciting as those in women’s studies and feminism … One of the most pleasing aspects of Gender at Work is Danahay’s clear theoretical positioning … Danahay sees his own book as part of a ‘second wave’ of masculinity studies, the ‘first wave’ represented by James Eli Adams and Joseph Kestner. Danahay shares with Adams an interest in the ways in which intellectual labor becomes feminized by the valorization of the domestic sphere, but whereas Adams examines the figures of the dandy, priest, prophet, gentleman and soldier as ‘affirmative’ models, Danahay examines the contradiction caused by conflicting and competing ideological values, particularly when it comes to the issue of labor. This leads him to consider anxieties and instances of failure, rather than positive affirmations of masculine identity … Another rewarding aspect of Danahay’s study is the close visual and textual discussion he undertakes … Accessible but rigorously written, Danahay’s book is a welcome addition …
by Jon Lackman | 8 October 2007 | Africa, Contemporary, Museums
An extended review by Elizabeth Harney in the Summer 2007 Art Journal offers an opportunity to help fill in the gap left by CAA’s recent abortive attempt at a discussion of the ethical issues involved in the collecting and exhibition of contemporary African art. We apologize for quoting at this length from Harney’s review, but it seemed necessary:
In the fall of 2005 … the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian readied itself for a major, yet controversial touring collection of contemporary African arts … [titled] African Art Now: Masterpieces of the Jean Pigozzi Collection … As a visual event, African Art Now advanced a particular narrative about contemporary Africa, which was reinforced through a highly polemical, tightly constructed catalogue essay by Thomas McEvilley and a telling interview of the curator, André Magnin … what makes this event unique, I believe, is that its timing, its presence within a major (admittedly conservative) venue, and its intellectual framework suggest a rearguardism that signals a maturation and growth in the field …
McEvilley’s essay ultimately serves to support collecting and exhibition practices deemed fundamentally neoprimitivist in the eyes of many within the field of African arts. The language used by Pigozzi to frame the curatorial choices … seems, as [Holland] Cotter suggests in his [New York Times] review, “silly at best, racist at worst,” as it perpetuates the longstanding artifices of a traditional African arts market with its restrictive parameters of authenticity …
Lest one doubt the prescience of Cotter’s comments or the stakes of McEvilley’s revisions, one need only look as far as a contemptuous review by Brian Sewell, resident art critic and curmudgeon at the Evening Standard in London, of the [2005] Africa Remix exhibition. Sewell described the exhibition as a “wretched assembly of post tribal artefacts, exhausted materials, re-used, and what would easily pass for the apprentice rubbish of the European art school.” He continued, “We are presented here with a bunch of no-hopers whose work is on view because, and only because, they are African. ‘Look, look,’ they say, ‘we can do it too.’ And so they can, but it is not worth the doing, for in following the West they mimic it in witless parody, or ape in modern materials and terms what little they know of a genuine African past, or embark on tasks that can only be completed with the obsessive industry of the deranged.” So we see here, yet again, the link between the insane, the animal kingdom, and the African artist. In this model, modernism only comes to Africa as an import that is a shadow of its former self, and it is blindly and poorly mimicked by those who are cultureless, divorced from their “true” native past. In the same piece, Sewell unabashedly uses the terms “tyranny.” “mutual slavery.” and “cannibalism” to describe a now-lost, precolonial Africa … It is both frightening and sobering to see a critic advance these racist views within a widely read newspaper in the twenty-first century.
It was in an impassioned response to this review that the art historian Sylvester Ogbechie called upon his colleagues to act … In Ogbechie’s view, in the last few years a proliferation of exhibitions have focused on Western-based African artists to the detriment of those living and working on the continent, thus promoting work that is more palatable to the “lazy Western curators who are thereby saved the rigors of traveling to Darkest Africa, where, who knows, they run the risk of being eaten by cannibals in Lagos” …
Those writing about the canon for so-called traditional African arts note that works are generally valued as authentic if they are precolonial (hence “traditional” implies past practices, not innovation and continuance), if they are made within and for a recognizable culture, and if they suggest physical signs of age and local use … What do these revelations about authenticity say about Africa as a constructed field of knowledge within the contemporary art world? … McEvilley quotes Magnin’s stated aims … which are to support “an art that prefers to ignore its possible claim as contemporary, an art often practiced by artists without any formal schooling, many of whom have no ambition beyond satisfying a local community” … [Are] artists to be dismissed because their art has become contaminated by Western influences (presented here as an unmediated whole) that they don’t have the ability to digest properly? Do they uncritically employ fetishistic symbols of Africa because they have become alienated from their own pasts? …
While McEvilley admits that some will find Pigozzi’s approach neoimperialist, he still seems to believe that Pigozzi’s attraction to the uneducated artists is a well-founded pursuit of the “totally innovative and non-derivative.” Furthermore, he argues that “the Magnin-Pigozzi position holds that African artists have lost more than they have gained by allowing Western influences to form their work … if they are educated — meaning in the Western tradition — their work becomes simply more examples, with a tinge of African subject matter, of the type of things Western artists made twenty to fifty years ago.” In one fell swoop African artists with art-school educations or broader cosmopolitan experiences are relegated to the dustbins of modernist history. The stages of modernity are set by a European clock, and Africa is late to the table — its artists destined to create works that are old-fashioned and clearly beyond the pale of contemporary practice …
This line of argument is striking for the extent to which it broadens measurements of authenticity to encompass not simply visual art and its producers but also its critics and interlocutors. Despite his expertise, dele jegede, another critic of Pigozzi and Magnin, is attacked and maligned primarily for speaking from a position within the diaspora. McEvilley discredits him as a “Nigerian scholar … who has taught for many years at the University of Indiana, living in Bloomington, yet still feels that he speaks for Africa.” McEvilley’s mention of jegede’s Nigerian heritage is an essentialist assumption that his African heritage should determine his ability to speak but that it has been compromised by too much time in the West …
In his reflections on this new politics of exhibiting, McEvilley again uses both spatial and racial markers to determine the authentic voice. He is annoyed that Pigozzi and Magnin, as white Europeans, are deemed unfit to determine the canon (or at least saddled with charges of neocolonialism), while a group of largely Nigerian cosmopolites seeks to set the agenda, erroneously promoting Westernized African art …
[T]he fundamental functioning of the field today [is] one in which each exhibition project and text provides canon fodder.
by Jon Lackman | 5 October 2007 | Modern
The July-August issue (no. 20) of FMR (available online) includes stunning photographs of Géricault’s 1819 Raft of the Medusa. The subject of a new book by Jonathan Miles, the painting has also appeared recently (in one form or another) on the covers of The New Yorker and Harper’s, freshly relevant in the wake of the American government’s handling of Hurricane Katrina. FMR has also published essays by art historian Bruno Chenique and novelist Toni Morrison, who writes that
… The painting provokes many other understandings, such as the consequence of the Enlightenment project of reason entrusted only to the priviliged; how the final composition of the painting encourages a democratic impulse and invites us to join the survivors and insist the ship on the horizon be not mockery but portent.
by Jon Lackman | 4 October 2007 | Books, Modern
In September 2007 Burlington Magazine, James Beechey reviews Elizabeth Cowling’s Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose:
… this is a wholly engrossing book … Penrose’s private notes … reveal him at his sharpest and most sensitive: his insights into individual works are generally acute … As a tale of courtly love, as Cowling nimbly characterises it, Visiting Picasso is delightful. As a psychological case study, it is mesmerising. And the rich vein of data it contains makes it a goldmine for future historians … Cowling has weighted her material impeccably and paced her narrative with great skill … The story it tells is testament to Penrose’s shrewdness and his tenacity; that it is so compulsively readable is Cowling’s triumph.
by Jon Lackman | 3 October 2007 | Theory
In the summer 2007 issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Larry Shiner and Yulia Kriskovets have contributed an article “The Aesthetics of Smelly Art”:
The remarkable increase in the number of artworks that foreground scents and odors during recent years suggests the need for an assessment of the aesthetic and artistic possibilities of smell … From the ancient world into the twentieth century, majority opinion among philosophers has been that [smell, taste, and touch] are far beneath vision and hearing in dignity, intellectual power, and refinement … Although morally condemned for its sensuality by Plato and the Church Fathers and often derided in the modern period for its erotic and commercial associations, perfume is one of the oldest arts and was held in high esteem in ancient cultures, especially in Rome, where men were as likely to wear fragrances as women … although olfactory art is still in its infancy, it has already produced works of moderate complexity and expressiveness.
by Jon Lackman | 2 October 2007 | Americas
In the summer 2007 issue of American Art (published by the Smithsonian), editor Cynthia Mills writes:
… we can sense a shift in the questions scholars are bringing to the nation’s visual history … from inquiries into science and sensation to a “serious” attention to humor … studies of American art and artists, once considered “inferior” to research on Greek and Roman sculpture and works by Rembrandt, Monet, and Picasso, are flourishing … [This] journal heads into its third decade amid a wealth of programs and resources related to American art history … we find people from a greater range of backgrounds, ethnicities, and income levels entering the field — with women far outnumbering men … they are not in general utopians, methodological ideologues, or provocateurs but more often pragmatic investigators and thinkers who are open to a wide range of approaches to study, irreverent about a “canon” of “masterworks” and often interested in “democratic” forms of visual communication … They seem impatient with debates about which single approach to interpretation is best — Marxist, feminist, lit-crit, or psychosexual — and especially eager to investigate how art functions as a system of representation.
Among the “hot” subfields within American art history, Mills identifies and discusses “boundaries, both chronological and national,” “science, mathematics, and philosophy,” “body, mind, and sensation,” “nature and ecology,” “photography and new media,” “material culture,” “race, class, and gender,” “faith and ethics,” and “humor.”
by Jon Lackman | 1 October 2007 | Uncategorized
From the Village Voice:
This month, in an article about the Venice Biennale in Artforum, the art historian and critic Katy Siegel christened [Peter] Schjeldahl and his old friend, the writer Dave Hickey, as “the feelers”—this in opposition to another critical gang she sturdily termed “the thinkers” (namely, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Benjamin Buchloh). A jab with unintended blandishments, it accidentally fingers the scab Schjeldahl scratches raw whenever he is pricked by visual pleasure. A “feeler” above all things, Schjeldahl is a self-confessed addict to the intoxicant of pleasure (and also coffee and cigarettes). Consequently, it doesn’t take much to draw him out on the subject of art with an agenda. “I think art is about 100 percent pleasure,” Schjeldahl answers when asked about political programmatic art. “Criticality is a pleasure for people who like it.”
(via Modern Art Notes)
by Jon Lackman | 28 September 2007 | Books, Modern
Here we are, half a century or so after contemporary artists began appropriating, tearing and re-assembling street posters, still without solid answers to the questions of who did what when, of who affected whom how. Who tore first? Was it décollage if you didn’t call it décollage? Does it matter? Are these artists incommensurable?
Skira and the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella have just published Rotella, a 575-page tome that includes a 49-page essay by Germano Celant as well as a lavishly illustrated chronology incorporating biography, exhibition history, documentation, and statements by the artist. Celant writes:
Mimmo Rotella was invited to join the Nouveau Realisme group when the first manifesto was written in 1960 … when Restany wrote the various manifestos, he adopted the strategic ploy of placing Rotella’s contribution after that of the French members, so that it might appear “subsquent” to them. But a different story emerges if we analyze the relative documents and events … Restany was not an art historian who was interested in documents and datings, nor even, perhaps in priority and paternity; but he was a poet and a French critic whose ambition was to “mark” the cultural history of his country, and particularly of his own city, Paris, which was competing tooth and nail with New York for world leadership in art … [In his 1968 book, Restany] uses the term décollage — which was coined by Emilio Villa in 1955 and certainly adopted, between 1955 and 1958, in various texts and catalogues on Rotella in Milan and Rome — and “attributes” it to Hains. The period between 1949 and 1952, during which Hains and Mahé de la Villeglé “appropriated” their affiches, has yet to be verified through documents and facts … Apart from the dates, which establish the absolute linguistic priority of Rotella’s décollage over the works of the affichistes Hains, Mahé de la Villeglé, and Dufrêne, there is also a differentiation in the linguistic discourse conducted through the use of the poster … If the affichistes aimed to displace the poster from its original context onto another territory, Mahé de la Villeglé onto that of poetry and Hains onto that of photography and the object, Rotella’s goal was to make it emerge in the sphere of painting.
In an interview in the recently published 208-page Flammarion book Jacques Villeglé, which includes essays by Kaira Cabañas and François Bon, Villeglé also asserts that he and Raymond Hains differed from Rotella:
… Rotella, meanwhile, understood [our] shredded posters because Restany explained them to him; Rotella had shown his own early posters upside down, in order to make them more abstract. But Rotella was eight years older than us, he was an Italian maestro; we didn’t have the same understanding of things …
Final question: did Rotella need Restany to explain to him the concept of a shredded poster?
by Jon Lackman | 27 September 2007 | Uncategorized
Jonathan Jones writes:
Why do journalists write the same six generic stories about art over and over again? … Imagine how little news about visual art would appear in the papers if the following generic stories were banned:
1. The most expensive work of art ever …
2. Anything about graffiti …
3. Lost masterpiece rediscovered …
4. Contemporary artists as plagiarists
5. Art historian/archaeologist makes earth-shattering discovery
6. Restoration stories …Bad reporting along these generic lines distorts understanding and can destroy our pleasure in great art. The worst recent example of this is the global media attention paid to a study of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Adoration of the Magi by the “diagnostician” Maurizio Seracini, who was invited to apply a range of technologies to look beneath the visible surface of this great work in the Uffizi Gallery. Seracini was able to photograph underdrawings that add to the number of figures and images in what is already a picture that teems with possibility. This is interesting and valuable. But Seracini went on to make totally unfounded, badly argued claims that in effect this is not a Leonardo at all – it is a botched job finished by a lesser artist.
by Jon Lackman | 26 September 2007 | Books, Modern
The top Independent Publisher Book Award in the fine arts category went to the first two volumes of the four-tome Eva Hesse, Catalog Raisonne. They were edited by Renate Petzinger and Barry Rosen, with Annette Spohn and Jörg Daur.
by Jon Lackman | 25 September 2007 | Modern, Museums
From the L.A. Times:
[The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art keeps] the outlaw paintings in the basement, locked in the museum’s vault. Not just the Picassos — the Kandinskys, the Miros, the Warhols. The Monet, the Pissarro, the Toulouse-Lautrec, the Van Gogh. Possibly the best Jackson Pollock outside the U.S. Ruled by one of the most vehemently anti-Western governments in the world, Iran is, by many assessments, home to the most extensive collection of late 19th and 20th century Western art outside the West. It is a treasure trove of masters that is all but forgotten outside knowledgeable art circles because, for all but a few of the last 30 years, it has been virtually unseen.
(via 3 Quarks Daily)
by Jon Lackman | 24 September 2007 | Uncategorized
From the (Memphis, TN) Commercial Appeal:
Leave it to the art history majors to change the world. That’s what Lynda Ireland did. She graduated from college with an art history degree in the 1960s, taught art for 20 years, then shifted her career to work for a business. In the process, she became a fascinating example of how one person’s work can help shape an entire company. Ireland retired this month after 22 years working for the Memphis-based Fortune 500 company AutoZone. She wasn’t the CEO. She didn’t have hundreds of people working for her. Yet Ireland’s impact on AutoZone culture — and success — would be hard to overestimate. ”I wrote the pledge,” Ireland acknowledged a few days just before 2,000 clapping, screaming, cheering AutoZone managers from around the country rose to their feet at the Cook Convention Center to shout it out. The AutoZone Pledge is recited before the start of every meeting, in every state, at more than 4,000 stores in the United States and Mexico … The four lines read: “AutoZoners always put customers first! We know our parts and products. Our stores look great! We’ve got the best merchandise at the right price.”
