Thoughts Abhor Tights

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #14, 1978

Umberto Eco wrote about the sensation of tight jeans in 1976. As he tends to do, he takes it to a different place that you might expect, exploring how our clothing directs our consciousness and behavior. For women, this might ring especially true.

"The jeans didn’t pinch, but they made their presence felt…. As a result, I lived in the knowledge that I had jeans on, whereas normally we live forgetting that we’re wearing undershorts or trousers. I lived for my jeans, and as a result I assumed the exterior behavior of one who wears jeans. In any case, I assumed a demeanor… I discussed it at length, especially with consultants of the opposite sex, from whom I learned what, for that matter, I had already suspected: that for women experiences of this kind are familiar because all their garments are conceived to impose a demeanor—high heels, girdles, brassieres, pantyhose, tight sweaters....

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still # 15

But the problem of my jeans led me to other observations. Not only did the garment impose a demeanor on me; by focusing my attention on demeanor, it obliged me to live towards the exterior world…I thought about the relationship between me and my pants, and the relationship between my pants and me and the society we lived in. I had achieved heteroconsciousness, that is to say, an epidermic self-awareness.


I realized then that thinkers, over the centuries, have fought to free themselves of armor. Warriors lived an exterior life, all enclosed in cuirasses and tunics; but monks had invented a habit that, while fulfilling, on its own, the requirements of demeanor (majestic, flowing, all of a piece, so that it fell in statuesque folds), it left the body (inside, underneath) completely free and unaware of itself. Monks were rich in interior life and very dirty, because the body, protected by a habit that, ennobling it, released it, was free to think, and to forget about itself… And when even the intellectual must dress in lay armor (wigs, waistcoats, knee breeches) we see that when he retires to think, he swaggers in rich dressing-gowns, or in Balzac’s loose, drolatique blouses.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still

But if armor obliges its wearer to live the exterior life, then the age-old female spell is due also to the fact that society has imposed armors on women, forcing them to neglect the exercise of thought. Woman has been enslaved by fashion not only because, in obliging her to be attractive, to maintain an ethereal demeanor, to be pretty and stimulating, it made her a sex object; she has been enslaved chiefly because the clothing counseled for her forced her psychologically to live for the exterior. And this makes us realize how intellectually gifted and heroic a girl had to be before she could become, in those clothes, Madame de Sevigne, Victoria Colonna, Madame Curie, or Rosa Luxemburg."


— Umberto Eco, "Lumbar Thought," Travels in Hyperreality, 1976

Art as Posession: From the Hearst Castle to Cleansed Bills

Hearst Castle

"The prime aim of these wild Xanadus (as of every Xanadu) is not so much to live there, but to make posterity think how exceptional the people who did live there must have been." (Eco, p. 27).

Umberto Eco, in Travels in Hypperreality, asserts that America's wax museums/Hearst Castle/Marilyn Motel etc. arise out of a "horror vacui" since we exist outside of a European, historical past and therefore we need to take fake possession of the real. This is similar to previous function of oil paintings in society. Berger in Ways of Seeing (see previous post) asserts that oil painting was a way of owning property in lieu of the real thing or as a demonstration of what one owned for society and posterity. Basically, its all about possession and value. How capitalist.

So I guess we Americans are left with a simulacrum of the real as a roads to possession. Eco continues that people seem to think if its a good enough simulacrum, such as the Hearst Castle, its almost better than the 'real' thing.

"Cleansed" bill in Draw your Money project.

Roland Farkas, a Slovakian artist in Hungary, gets at this notion with his 2011 project, Draw your Money, where he takes something literally capitalist, a banknote, and turns it into art. Draw Your Money involves cleansing banknotes of the ink markings that give them value. The artist removes the ink from paper money to create blank slates for drawings: "In this way the ink and paper of bills are recycled as materials for an original artwork, the value of which is greater than that of the denominated note from which it was created."

Via Rising Tensions

In trying to thing of something intelligent to say, I poked around the internet and found this. Which kind of sums it all up if you were to throw in some dollar bills.

Eco, lists, and the Louvre

Doesn't he look like Hercule Poiret?

I confess, despite having left University, I still manage to have professor-like crushes on men I've never met, and Umberto Eco comes first and foremost on my list. He wrote the bestselling The Name of the Rose novel, is the preeminent semiotician, and more recently has written treatises On Beauty and On Ugliness. So how chuffed am I that he's curating an exhibition at the Louvre as part of its recent shake up? Very.

In exploring the infinity of lists, his chosen subject, Eco studied the Louvre's collection for two years to create Mille e Tre. He likens our tendency to make lists as one that attempts to order and quantify chaos. This leads us to accumulate lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art, and encyclopedias. One painting that represents this might be a Dutch still life, with its profusion of naturalistic and bountiful fruit. Eco chose works related to the subject of lists and enumeration but also voluptuousness and the effects of abundance, or "vertigo."

Eco, from Art Newspaper, says:

“The search for The List in the corridors of the Louvre was as exciting as hunting the unicorn. Painting has a beauty that is born of accumulation; art embodies the plurality and variety of reality in the limits of the form. From Antiquity down to the 19th century we have been prisoners of the picture frame; in painting, the frame tells us that ‘everything’ we should be interested in is inside it. I want to invite people to go beyond the form of the physical limits of the picture, to imagine the etcetera, a very important concept that suggests that it may continue. I want to invite people when they look, for example, at the Mona Lisa to go beyond what is most obvious and to observe the background landscape and wonder whether it extends into infinity—something that Da Vinci perhaps intended. To look at a picture as if we had a movie camera that would do a travelling shot to show us the rest.”

If you want get more of a taste of my crush, check out this great Spiegel interview. Lucky for me, who won't be visiting the Louvre before the exhibition ends this February, is that Eco has written a book entitled The Vertigo of the Lists to complement the exhibition. On one hand, a list seems like a simple enough thing; we all make grocery lists or task lists. But if you think of an encyclopedic museum like the Louvre, what is it but a large list of universal culture, trying to encapsulate in one building objects the signify all of human achievement?

The Golem in the Attic, and Other Tales

Buried deep in the New York Times this weekend, you might have noticed the article entitled, Hard Times Give New Life to Prague's Golem. This would be scary were it true; a golem is, after all, a monster. Yet the golem is a unique and relatively recent monster, one of debatable bloodlust.

The inhabitants of Prague might now consider it a deformed patron saint of sorts, akin to Quasimodo in Paris, when they see vendors hawking little statues and images of it. The Golem is a historically Jewish monster with a long history. Mentioned once in the Bible, the instructions for fashioning one are in the Book of Creation, part of the Kabala, and involve forming it in clay and bringing it to life with words. What results is a strong creature with blazing eyes and an inability to speak. It will keep going on whatever task it's creator assigns it until it is destroyed.

The most well-known story of the golem is connected to a Rabbi Loew, called the Maharal of Prague, in the 1500s. It was said that he created a golem out of clay to protect the Jewish community from blood libel and to help out doing physical labor. (Medieval inhabitants sometimes even planted children in Jewish houses to spur riots against the Jews who were ritually killing and drinking the blood of Prague's children.) The golem acted as a protector of the Jewish community for a time.

Then the golem ran amok, threatening innocent lives. Rabbi Loew removed the Divine Name he had written on the golem's forehead, rendering it lifeless. He saved the clay body in case it was ever needed again. It is widely suspected the golem is still lying in the attic of Rabbi Loew's temple in Prague.

Whenever times are tough, and people need protection, the golem becomes more popular. Unfortuantely, as the legend shows, golems literal and dogged following of instructions often has bad results. So this odd hero/protector/monster is returning to populairty in Prague, according to the New York Times. If he mad more artistic debuts, we'd be lucky.

The golem has sprung up all over the arts for the past few centuries. He had appeared in early silent films (since lost) and even a ballet. (This conjures up images of the elephant ballet dancers from the movie Fantasia, so I can't even imagine what it a golem would dance like.) The golem of Prague has appeared in more recent novels, such as Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, in which Josef Kavalier helps save the Golem of Prague from Nazi invasion, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and Dara Horn's The World To Come, about the life of artist Marc Chagall. All three of these books are fascinating reads of historical interest with great storylines.

Statue of the Golem of Prague

That Intellectual Kind of Beauty

Beauty is instantly recognizable. What is a little more difficult is to pin down exactly what beauty is. Even is you missed the debate regarding Theodore Dalrymple's Beauty and the Best, you still have a chance to get into the latest aesthetic theories by checking out the prolific writer and philosopher Roger Scruton in a book entitled, properly, Beauty.

Beauty as Scruton means it is of a specifically mental rather than visceral nature. Along with Sebastian Smee of The Guardian, I rather think Scruton does an injustice when he relegates beauty to an act of rational contemplation. Like every other book on beauty, it deals with whether we can make value judgements about art, i.e. can something be better or more beautiful, than another. He also considers whether art can be moral, rather an old-fashioned question but then so is the question of beauty.

sd

What kills me about books like this is they tackle a huge and general subject, and then meander bombastically about for 100 pages. Dalrymple's article made his argument precisely, even without him repositing Kant.

sd

The best primer for any discussion of beauty, as far as I'm concerned, remains Umberto Eco's On Beauty, which, with it's thickly illustrated pages, is a thing of beauty itself. Scruton either ripped off Eco's jacket cover, or Renaissance woman remain the ideal of beauty...

http://aphainventions.com www.condron.us

Ugliness, More than Skin Deep

"It is a fact universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife." So begins Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and this tongue-in-cheek maxim could perhaps be qualified by more recent research to state: "a single man in posession of a fortune must be in want of a beautiful wife." As a New York Times article points out today, the more beautiful a woman is, the wealthier her husband tends to be.

Indeed, who wouldn't want a beautiful wife? Beauty is more than just beauty. Because beauty, historically and today, is associated with virtue and intelligence. Thus, beautiful people are even payed more. The NYT article discusses 'ugliness' as a quality coming up more in public discussion, everywhere from the popular TV show "Ugly Betty" to Umberto Eco's art history tome On Ugliness, which I've recommended in another post on ugliness. It ends by discussing a new awareness of ugliness as a quality discriminated against, similar to race or gender. Certainly a fair point.

More interesting though, is how ugliness has been systematically ignored throughout history and why, if at all, we should remove the stigma. Beauty has been discussed ad nauseum, while ugliness, as Eco points out, has simply been considered the opposite. Ugliness, in its grotesque mutations and fascinating sinfulness has all the appeal of Milton's Satan, who remains far more compelling than his God. Beauty, like perfection, is boring. Absolute symmetry only means you need to see half the face before you know everything that you need to know. If one considers ugliness or beauty something more than superficial, then I think one has to acknowledge that it as a very powerful force. Look at the variations of ugliness below:

In defense of this misunderstood phenomena, I've pointed out the ugliness is more interesting and more complex than beauty. In addition, aside from the fact it is uneradicable and necessary to a conception of beauty, ugliness should have a stigma. Beauty and ugliness go behyond the skin deep. They express qualities beyond symmetry and proportion, and to limit them to simplistic ideas of Barbie dolls and Ugly Betty's is to limit our cutural heritage. Why is uglyness such a loaded term? What is it we fear? Death. Sickness. Deviation from the norm. Evil.

Tomorrow expectations of beauty will be reversed. It's Halloween, when people embrace the ugly and scary and creepy. However, it's more fair to say that the scary, creepy, and horrible are in themselves ugly. With costumes of monsters and witches, people embrace their deepest culture fears. (Obviously, this article is not going out to all those skanky barmaids and Playboy bunnies. Yawn.)

Halloween is a celebration of all that ugliness signifies, and even if we as a culture only give it one night before shedding our talismanic ugly skins and returning to our beautified selves, it is an important expression of all the variety and power of ugliness.

Grotesque Old Woman: Why did Leonardo and Matsys depict you?

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) sketched the head of the woman to the left. Flemish painter Quentin Matsys (1466 - 1530) painted the oil portrait below. People have generally assumed that Matsys was copying Leonardo. Obviously, there is a remarkable similarity between the two heads produced in roughly the same time. Both artists had an interest in the ugly as much as the beautiful, and these images have popped up multiple times in my reading on ugliness and on portraiture. I think these two works say a lot about the nature of beauty and function of portraits.



I've read that Leonardo despaired of finding true beauty after struggling with the Vitruvian man, and turned more to grotesques and caricatures. I don't find this very convincing. Ugliness, just like evil to good, is so much more interesting than beauty. Also, throughout his life, Leonardo displayed an acute attention to all aspects of life.

So there are many questions about who this woman is, who drew her first (assuming she is the same woman), and why she was drawn. This oil is one of Matsys's best known pieces today, and, once considered simply a copy of Leonardo, is now thought to depict a real person with Paget's disease, though it is sometimes said to be a portrait of Margaret Countess of Tyrol, also known as "the Ugly" or "Satchel-mouth." Was it a commissioned portrait of an individual, or a grotesque head done for fun? Without answering any of these questions, I think one can delve into the ideas of beauty and portraiture that informs these works.

Beauty in the Renaissance era functioned as an outward sign of one's inner self. Beauty was associated with goodness, and ugliness with vice. Paradoxically then, females--as the original temptresses-- were either beautiful and pure, or ugly and lecherous. What a man is to do in those circumstances, I don't know. More and more in this time, we see men paying homage to ugliness as the safeguard to chastity, or ridiculing old women for their fading charms, or chastising women for using make up to alter their appearance and trick people. In this portrait, the woman is clearly ugly. She does not seem lewd, nor does she seem made up. In Matsys portrait, her old-fashioned bonnet would have made her seem additionally ridiculous. However, Matsys portrait--perhaps just because of the oils--makes her look like a real individual, especially in the eyes, whereas Leonardo's sketch seems like another of his grotesque heads even as the bulbousness of the figure is less pronounced.

Are the images of the grotesque women meant to depict a real person (or people)? I would argue that both fall into the tradition of the caricature, placing them squarely at odds with beauty. Notice, though, how despite her ugliness she is not revolting. Caricatures, by creating a harmony out of the disproportions of ugliness, neutralize the bad associations that ugly females had. Albeit at the same time as it mocks and dehumanizes its subject, caricature elevates ugliness to a kind of beauty. It is a really interesting phenomenon, documented in Umberto Eco's On Ugliness, which I highly recommend.

There are very few women who have spanned the centuries by being Quasimodos. Women are traditionally celebrated for their beauty or virtue. These two, or one, women interest me. If anyone know more about them, please let me know.