{"id":708,"date":"2022-03-05T17:09:31","date_gmt":"2022-03-05T17:09:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/?p=708"},"modified":"2023-08-07T15:12:00","modified_gmt":"2023-08-07T15:12:00","slug":"gum-arabic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/gum-arabic\/","title":{"rendered":"Gum Arabic"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_709\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-709\" style=\"width: 239px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/IMG_4875-scaled.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-709\" src=\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/IMG_4875-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"239\" height=\"319\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/IMG_4875-scaled.jpg 1920w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/IMG_4875-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/IMG_4875-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/IMG_4875-1152x1536.jpg 1152w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/IMG_4875-1536x2048.jpg 1536w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 239px) 100vw, 239px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-709\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">These pinks pinks and no-pinks are.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I&#8217;ve taken a break from making more pigments to transform some of those pigments into watercolors\u2014tiny, almost gemlike nuggets ready to be mixed with water and applied to paper.\u00a0 I like to keep noodling around with things until I understand them\u2014what Michael Ondaatje calls thinkering\u2014and I&#8217;ve been thinkering pretty hard about pigments lately. \u00a0But as a teacher, I also know it&#8217;s important to have milestones, or &#8220;summative assessments,&#8221; or maybe just exams, since having a test makes the whole process fall into place.\u00a0 So I set this week as a chance to follow some recipes for watercolor binder\u2014the stuff, in Robert Dossie&#8217;s words, that makes water &#8220;fit&#8221; for carrying insoluble colors.\u00a0 I have painted a little still life, what in the age was called a &#8220;miniature.&#8221;\u00a0 It is called &#8220;These Pinks Pinks and No-Pinks Are,&#8221; and the artist&#8217;s note would explain that this little potted <a href=\"http:\/\/plants.rutgersln.com\/12150011\/Plant\/18306\/Fire_And_Ice_Pinks\">dianthus<\/a> is painted entirely from eighteenth-century <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/dutch-pink\/\">pinks<\/a> derived from woad, buckthorn, brazilwood, coffee, and madder.\u00a0 So: one botanical, made from five others, Frankenstein-like.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_710\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-710\" style=\"width: 207px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.npg.org.uk\/collections\/search\/portrait\/mw61443\/Barbarities-in-the-West-Indias-Indies\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-710\" src=\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Barbarities-in-the-West-Indias-Indies.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"207\" height=\"149\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Barbarities-in-the-West-Indias-Indies.jpg 800w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Barbarities-in-the-West-Indias-Indies-300x216.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Barbarities-in-the-West-Indias-Indies-768x554.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 207px) 100vw, 207px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-710\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">James Gillray&#8217;s compact reduction of sugar to human bondage: &#8220;Barbarities in the West Indias,&#8221; 1797. Used under license from the National Portrait Gallery (click to link).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Thinkering forces encounters with the kinds of things that don&#8217;t turn up in our normal histories. Those things aren&#8217;t casual in a real sense; they are made that way by how we do history, or, by how history is done.\u00a0 You can know a casual commodity because it can be mentioned, unironically, in a list of commodities preceded by the word &#8220;also.&#8221;\u00a0 (This point is raised in <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1017\/S0959774319000519\">an essay<\/a> by Jutta Wimmler.)\u00a0 So, in 1688, the year Aphra Behn published <em>Oroonoko<\/em>, Surinam was exporting 7 million pounds of sugar annually, &#8220;and also&#8221; tobacco, exotic lumber, indigo, various gums and resins, Amerindian objects, and so on (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.worldcat.org\/oclc\/948354800\">i.e. Goslinga<\/a>, 268).\u00a0 Sugar earns its place before the &#8220;also&#8221; by being the most visible commodity in the &#8220;triangular&#8221; trading regime which plundered Africa for slave labor to produce a commodity in the West Indies that was consumed in England.\u00a0 It&#8217;s hard to imagine any development in the eighteenth century more important to understand than chattel slavery, since the differences it installs have hardened up into our modern categories of black and white, global north and global south, and so on.\u00a0 And sugar: the taste for sweetness was both cause and effect of that plundering, a new aesthetics sense which empire was constructed to satisfy (i.e. Mintz&#8217;s magisterial <a href=\"https:\/\/www.penguinrandomhouse.com\/books\/322123\/sweetness-and-power-by-sidney-w-mintz\/\"><em>Sweetness and Power<\/em><\/a>).\u00a0 Faced, therefore, by the systematized violation of nature and human rights that was slavery, or, looked at differently the asymmetrical systems of labor and resource extraction that was sugar, everything else takes up its place after the &#8220;also.&#8221; \u00a0Those things are made casual.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_713\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-713\" style=\"width: 222px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=48712562\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-713\" src=\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Gum-Arabic-Hashab-and-Talha-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"222\" height=\"146\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Gum-Arabic-Hashab-and-Talha-scaled.jpg 2560w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Gum-Arabic-Hashab-and-Talha-300x197.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Gum-Arabic-Hashab-and-Talha-1024x672.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Gum-Arabic-Hashab-and-Talha-768x504.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Gum-Arabic-Hashab-and-Talha-1536x1007.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Gum-Arabic-Hashab-and-Talha-2048x1343.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 222px) 100vw, 222px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-713\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gum Arabic, a modern name for various exudates of west African flora. (Detail of image by Simon A. Eugster, CC BY-SA 3.0. click to link)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>One such casualty of history is the general category of polysaccharide glycoprotein &#8220;gums&#8221; exuded from some trees and shrubs native to western Africa.\u00a0 I say this carefully, because this chemical stuff has gone by many names\u2014indeed has been chopped and changed in many categories, has even been changed through selective cultivation\u2014 in the almost 300 years since the motley emblem was made.\u00a0 These gums are non-toxic and tasteless; they dissolve in water; and they change the viscosity of whatever they are a part of.\u00a0 Ground up, they become impalpable.\u00a0 Tasteless, odorless, invisible in water and impalpable to the touch: this is exactly the kind of thing that could be overlooked.\u00a0 But exactly because of these nearly magical qualities, because it can thicken a solution without changing any of its other properties, gums have wound up in everyday materials as diverse as adhesives and cosmetics, foods and drinks, candies and pills.\u00a0 They also turn up in more recherche things, like &#8220;pan&#8221; watercolors, where it is important to be able manage the phase transition between solid and liquid, and back again, as part of what it means to paint.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_722\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-722\" style=\"width: 185px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/sustainable-business\/gum-arabic-soft-drink-supply-chain\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-722\" src=\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Coca-Cola-Ingredients.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"185\" height=\"139\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-722\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Made casual in a different way: one of the &#8220;natural flavors&#8221; in Coca-Cola is gum Arabic. (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/sustainable-business\/gum-arabic-soft-drink-supply-chain\">click for more<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>But, though the stuff is sticky, the categories are slippery.\u00a0 They are what we might call a product of historical ontology.\u00a0 The very category &#8220;gum Arabic,&#8221; which is one way of naming some of this stuff, is a claim about what is real in the world, and that claim depends on a certain historical set of conditions, which, today, include a whole apparatus of harvesting and marketing, food regulations and laboratory regulation\u2014even climate change in northern Africa and the political-economic conditions on the ground.\u00a0 For instance, in trade publications, distinctions are made between grades of gum, based on their visual appearance and their capacity to refract light; in ecological literature, distinctions are made based on the genus, species, and even subspecies of tree from which the gum is extracted.\u00a0 And that is not even to broach things like the recent rebranding of &#8220;gum arabic&#8221; as &#8220;acacia gum,&#8221; owing to a fear that Western consumers would somehow associate these gums with Islamic terrorism\u2014as if Western consumers shop by acquainting themselves with chemical processes and deliberately occulted reagents, anyways.\u00a0 &#8220;Gum Arabic&#8221; is not one thing, gathered from one tree; it is a surprisingly wide range of things, different to different people, gathered not only from one species, but from many different species in a whole family of trees and shrubs.\u00a0 This helps account, as well, for the bewildering range of names that stick to the institution of west-African gums: gum Senegal, Acacia gum, Indian gum, Hashab, Talha, food additive E414, and so on.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_715\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-715\" style=\"width: 258px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wellcomecollection.org\/works\/a27suwqc\/items\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-715\" src=\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/William-Lewiss-Laboratory.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"258\" height=\"162\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/William-Lewiss-Laboratory.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/William-Lewiss-Laboratory-300x188.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 258px) 100vw, 258px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-715\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">The chemist and apothecary William Lewis knew the difference between gums Arabic and Senegal. Engraving by Pierre-Charles Canot, in &#8220;Commercium Philosophico-Technicum,&#8221; 1763. Image from <a href=\"https:\/\/wellcomecollection.org\/works\/a27suwqc\/items\">Wellcome Collection<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>None of this would be a problem, except when it meets the test of manual practice.\u00a0 Finding our way to the right results means meddling with the right materials, and those materials can be difficult to recover.\u00a0 Eighteenth-century watercolor binders made use of two things in precise ratios, and those things don&#8217;t exist anymore\u2014not because the things couldn&#8217;t be had as things, more or less, but because our sense of the world has changed, and the names we have do different work, or, slice up the world differently.\u00a0 These two things were called gum Arabic and gum Senegal.\u00a0 The materials, like the differences the names encode, were historically real.\u00a0 They had different prices and different qualities.\u00a0 Studies were done to determine their different affordances.\u00a0 But what they were is not known.\u00a0 It is tempting to think that their gum Arabic is our gum Arabic, and gum Senegal something else that needs to be found out.\u00a0 It is also tempting to think that they were making a distinction without a difference, and were simply naming the same thing, shipped through different routes or packaged differently.\u00a0 But the problem appears instead to be that chemists felt and manipulated a distinction between materials that has simply been lost, to be replaced by a different category with different boundaries and outlines.<\/p>\n<p>My solution (a chemical joke?) is to respect the craft knowledge that goes with harvesting and initial sorting, as a thing with its own repertoire and acquired discipline, outside of the regime of print.\u00a0 Meeting the difference halfway means substituting the two extant trade categories of gum Arabic\u2014Hashab and Talha\u2014for the eighteenth-century distinction Arabic and Senegal.\u00a0 Respecting the acquired knowledge of generations of harvesters and wagonners and merchants feels like it is in the spirit of the motley emblem, I mean to make the invisible manifest.\u00a0 And it seems likely to me that the earliest distinctions between gums, the distinctions made by hands in the field and at the tale were probably reflected somehow when the things made it to the apothecary&#8217;s counter or the colourman&#8217;s workshop, so there&#8217;s something to be said for respecting that continuity, too.\u00a0 So: for &#8220;gum Arabic,&#8221; I use hashab; for &#8220;gum Senegal,&#8221; Talha.\u00a0 For what it&#8217;s worth, I can&#8217;t tell the difference, once they&#8217;re ground to powder.\u00a0 But people have been sorting gums for generations upon generations, and they can.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_716\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-716\" style=\"width: 205px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-716\" src=\"http:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Lakes-Pinks-and-Mineral-Pigments-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"205\" height=\"205\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Lakes-Pinks-and-Mineral-Pigments-scaled.jpg 2560w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Lakes-Pinks-and-Mineral-Pigments-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Lakes-Pinks-and-Mineral-Pigments-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Lakes-Pinks-and-Mineral-Pigments-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Lakes-Pinks-and-Mineral-Pigments-768x768.jpg 768w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Lakes-Pinks-and-Mineral-Pigments-1536x1536.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/786\/2022\/03\/Lakes-Pinks-and-Mineral-Pigments-2048x2048.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 205px) 100vw, 205px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-716\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Some of the lakes, pinks and mineral pigments prepared as pan watercolors at the motley lab.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Below, I include a recipe for an eighteenth-century watercolor binder.\u00a0 Modern binders generally contain three ingredients: gum Arabic, glycerol, and honey.\u00a0 Glycerol is a historically recent innovation; it helps manage the transition between solid and liquid, making it easier to work up a useable paint from the solid stored in a pan.\u00a0 But I can say from experience that it is not strictly necessary, and my paints are perfectly useable without it.\u00a0 Honey is also a recent addition; it is a humectant, which means that it helps retain moisture, and is also not strictly necessary for binding pigments to paper.\u00a0 But no-one in the eighteenth-century thought to use honey as a humectant additive.\u00a0 Since honey is basically sugar-water with a few impurities, I suspect our preference is partly the result of historical associations, of the associations of organic honey with some sort of artisanal virtue.\u00a0 So, too, in the moment of the motley emblem.\u00a0 There, in some gum waters, but not all, artists added refined sugar, half as much as the combined weights of gums.\u00a0 It was double-refined sugar, in the eighteenth century, which was the desirable commodity&#8211; and not homely honey.\u00a0 And so, we might say, in the history of miniature painting, it is sugar which is casual; a watercolor binder is gum Arabic, gum Senegal, &#8220;and also&#8221; sugar.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s the method from Robert Dossie&#8217;s 1758 <em>Handmaid to the Arts<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\">Take three quarters of an ounce of gum Arabic and a quarter of an ounce of gum Senegal; powder them, and then tie them up in a linen rag; leaving so much unfilled room in the bag as to admit its being flattened by the pressure of the hand.\u00a0 Having squeezed the bag till it be flat, put it into a quart of hot water; and there let it continue, moving it sometimes about, and stirring the water for about twenty-four hours; the gums will then be dissolved, and the bag must be taken out.\u00a0 The fluid being divided into two parts, to one half of it add a quarter of an ounce of white sugar-candy powdered, and keep the other in its pure state.\u00a0 By this means, a strong and weak gum water, each proper for their particular purposes, will be obtained.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve taken a break from making more pigments to transform some of those pigments into watercolors\u2014tiny, almost gemlike nuggets ready to be mixed with water and applied to paper.\u00a0 I &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/gum-arabic\/\" class=\"\">Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.5 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Gum Arabic - The Motley Emblem<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/motley-emblem\/gum-arabic\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Gum Arabic - The Motley Emblem\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I&#8217;ve taken a break from making more pigments to transform some of those pigments into watercolors\u2014tiny, almost gemlike nuggets ready to be mixed with water and applied to paper.\u00a0 I &hellip; 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My last project was a born-digital museum of eighteenth-century cognitive models; visit at www.mindisacollection.org. I am currently engaged in recreating a marbled page from Laurence Sterne's novel _Tristram Shandy_. 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