Category: Art Rant

The Myth of Perfection

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, Clothing, History, Living History, Philosophy, Reenacting, Research4 Comments

Ain’t nothin’ perfect.

Jackie’s got good points, and although I think they are slightly tangential to where I thought I was going on Monday, let’s pick them up.

Completely 1819 to represent 1819? My standard reply to pretty much every question is: It depends. Who are you, where are you, what are you doing? Middle class or higher bride? You are so 1819 it’s scary, from your skin out, head to toe. Lower class? You’ve altered your best dress, if not made a new one, and refreshed your accessories.

The Kaunitz Sisters (Leopoldine, Caroline, and Ferdinandine), graphite on laid paper by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1818. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998.21
Costume Parisien, 1818.

Look, folks: part of our problem is that we forget that the people in the past had the same covetous, jealous hearts that we have. They had wants and yearnings, for each other, for new bonnets, for velocipedes and overcoats. They were just as interested in impressing each other as we are, even if they sublimated desire into poetic images of greater obscurity than James Brown ever used.

I thought about this notion of mixed up times for clothing as I stood on a landing at work yesterday. Skin out, here’s what I wore on 1 September 2015:

  • Black Natori sports bra, purchased in Boston on January 10, 2014 (I saw my surgeon so I remember.)
  • White cotton tank top, label gone, acquired ca. 2013, possibly from Target
  • Blue and white striped cotton 3/4 sleeve J. Crew blouse, 2006
  • Black Nike undershorts, 2010
  • Lucky brand jeans, August, 2015
  • Red suede belt with brass buckle, ca. 2004
  • Red suede Naya oxfords, late winter, 2014

The oldest thing was the belt, followed by the blouse. The most stylistically determinate item is probably the jeans, since waistline height and cut of the legs fix trouser/jeans style. So, what could this mean for us, when we dress for the past?

Let’s start with dressing for the American Revolutionary War period, 1775-1783. What you wear depends of course on who and where you are; here I am in New England, wishing I was middling sorts.

Detail, Mrs Richard Skinner, oil on canvas by John Singleton Copley, 1772. MFA Boston, 06.2428
Detail, Mrs Richard Skinner, oil on canvas by John Singleton Copley, 1772. MFA Boston, 06.242

If I wear an open-front stomacher gown in 1775, will I still feel comfortable in that in 1783, when the ladies of means around me have switched to closed-front gowns? Or will I feel like I’m wearing bell bottoms and a macrame vest to high school, while the cool girls are wearing pegged Guess jeans and Fair Isle sweaters? (Not what happened to me, but you follow my point). Think how much American fashion changed between 1975 and 1983, and while you will surely see pieces carried over– watches, headbands, socks, Tretorn sneakers– they will be primarily small pieces, accessories, and not main garments.

Lady Williams and Child, oil on canvas by Ralph Earl, 1783. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 06.179
Lady Williams and Child, oil on canvas by Ralph Earl, 1783. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 06.17

That’s really want I think we want to get at: Yes, people mixed up clothes, wore favorite things, wore things out. But then as now, they wanted to be stylish. The more care you put into imagining yourself in the past, really being that person, the more convincing you’ll be. You won’t be perfect, and authenticity is as unachievable as objective truth, but you will be closer to real, and yes, even the public will know.

The Real Thing

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, personal, Philosophy9 Comments

Talking with a friend about authenticity and realness, I remembered the moment when I really understood the power of the real thing.¹

Meret Oppenheim Object Paris, 1936 Museum of Modern Art, NY. 130.1946.a-c
Meret Oppenheim
Object
Paris, 1936
Museum of Modern Art, NY. 130.1946.a-c

Longer ago than I care to admit, I went to MoMA with my dad, and saw, up as close as you could get to a glass case, Meret Oppenheim’s fur lined tea cup, Object, or Luncheon in Fur. 

I’d seen slides, and illustrations in books, but only when I saw the object did I really understand what it was about. Unfortunately, even having seen Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare” in person, I still don’t get that piece. Such is life.

So what is it about the fur-lined tea cup in person that makes it so different? What is it about Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series that makes it different? Or Pollock, for that matter? Why is the real thing so ineluctable?

JACOB LAWRENCE (1917–2000) The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 1, 1940-1941. The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1942 © The Estate of Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

JACOB LAWRENCE (1917–2000)
The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 1, 1940-1941. The Phillips Collection, Acquired 1942 © The Estate of Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

I don’t know, really; what I do know is that it matters. I’ve held a transparency of The Migration of the Negro, Panel no. 1, in my hand before, and it’s not as good as seeing the marks Lawrence put down in gouache. I’ve held a Robert Capa print in my hand, marked on the back with publication notes from the 1940s and it still gives me goosebumps to think of it, to think of him in the water off Normandy on D-Day. Existential ambiguity of the wrecked emulsion be damned: those images, held in your hand, are more moving than you can imagine from seeing them published in Life or any monograph.

FRANCE. Normandy. June 6th, 1944. US troops assault Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings.
FRANCE. Normandy. June 6th, 1944. US troops assault Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings.BOB194404CW00003/ICP586(PAR121451)© Robert Capa © International Center of Photography/Magnum Photos

I’ve had people say to me recently that “it doesn’t matter,” that no body will know if they’re wearing 1774-1783 clothes at a 1790 event, and I disagree strongly and thoroughly. It does matter. The mattering is the whole reason museums exist. It’s why we go to see our favorite music performed instead of sitting home with Victrola or iPod listening to the crackle of Bessie Smith² or album-produced Billy Bragg. Listening at home puts us at a remove, polishes the roughness and steps back from immediacy.

To say that the image in the book or the not-really-right clothes are the same at the real thing does a disservice to ourselves and to the public. Are we really suggesting that audiences for art or history are that stupid? Or that we are so unmoved ourselves that it just doesn’t matter?

I’m too old for nihilism. Bring on the real. Let’s get it right, because it does matter. I know when it’s real, and so do you.

 

______________

¹Sadly, this goes through my head with the phrase “the real thing.” Curse you, Douglas Coupland, for capturing my generation’s fixation on pop references.
²Yes, I know she’s dead, go with me here.

Getting Cultured

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, Museums1 Comment
Mark di Suvero at Storm King
Mark di Suvero at Storm King

Cats don’t like travel. You might, therefore, expect that Kitty Calash would prefer to stay home, but I’ve had a few travel adventures, and the hardest part is usually finding decent and strong coffee early in the morning, though sometimes dinner is a challenge: like my cats, I like my own bowl.

Happily, we’ll be cooking our meals for real tomorrow, boiling roots and meat and slabbing cheese on bread. Thank goodness for the 10th Massachusetts’s own John Buss and his love of cheese, but why did I forget the Massachusetts man who carried a pound of chocolate in his militia knapsack? We could have had drinking chocolate!

We’ll be at the New Windsor Cantonment tomorrow, but today, the last blustery snow-squally day of April School Vacation, we spent at Storm King.* The Young Mr enjoyed our visit last year, so we went back again.

 

Fun with framing
Fun with framing

This year, we did another quarter or so of the park, mostly di Suveros but also Magdalena Abakanowicz and Andy Goldsworthy. It was an interesting exercise in scale, and specificity. I used to joke that the worst part about making sculpture was that once it was done, you’d have to dust it forever, but Storm King presents another issue: the sculpture that must be weeded.

In St. Louis, we experienced Mark di Suvero pieces at Laumeier Sculpture Park , but not on this scale. They’re more interesting together; as with so many things, mass makes a difference—though with di Suvero, acres of ‘gallery’ are required for mass.

Goldsworthy at Storm King
Goldsworthy at Storm King

Goldsworthy has long been a favorite, the site-specific and temporal nature of the work appealing and similar to the kind of immersive, living history performance I prefer. Here, the wall wraps the trees and runs through the lake like a low, grey and solid version of Running Fence .

It’s a funny thing, walking the acres of art, and thinking about the kind of parkland gentlemen used to maintain—Pemberley and Stately Homes—and how yesterday’s folly is today’s site-specific sculpture.

Mozart's Birthday: another di Suvero, with snow. Snow!
Mozart’s Birthday: another di Suvero, with snow. Snow!

*Not for nothin’ is it called Storm King, as they would say in No’t Providence.

Smells Like Money: Must be Auction Season

On By kittycalashIn Art Rant, Collecting, Snark3 Comments

There’s nothing like a little frivolity to lighten your day when you’ve been pondering some really serious and stomach-churning topics. Hail, then, the arrival of the Sotheby’s catalog and the momentary dropping of all material culture pretenses.

This time, it’s Private Collections.  You say Private Collections, I say Disturbing and Hyper-Overpriced Gift Shop. But what does Snarky Duck say?

A Continental creamware duck tureen and cover. Duck ways, no more hot soup, please.
A Continental creamware duck tureen and cover. Duck says, No soup for you.

Poor Strangled Parrot: I don’t think he can say much.

A Holitsch parrot-form jug and cover ca. 1760.
A Holitsch parrot-form jug and cover ca. 1760.

And these guys, described as playful dogs, look more like dyspeptic pugs to me.

A pair of Hochst fayence figures of seated pugs ca 1770.
A pair of Hochst fayence figures of seated pugs ca 1770.

It is amazing what people will make and buy (which delights me), and I’m certain that things I own would astonish and appall someone with different taste. But animal effigies always intrigue me, and (aside from Snarky Duck, our 19th century friend) figures like these could have graced the mantels and tables of the finest homes of the 19th century. It would have been a crowded and raucous world.

Here’s the whole catalog, should you care for some ormolu chairs or Aubusson drapes (which I did not know existed until today).