desire, the body, and the gaze

"In the years immediately after World War I, several impulses within the German modern dance movement attempted to present the nude body
as a sign of a modern, liberated identity “in the age of mechanical reproduction." Congruent with the appearance of the Nackttanz, or nude dancing, was the discovery, one might say, of modern relations between desire, the body, and the gaze."

Some felt "that to overcome a pervasive fear of the female body one had to gaze at it with the same seriousness that one applied to the contemplation of artworks. [Paul Leppin] argued that eroticism manifests itself most powerfully in conjunction with the expression of intense religious feelings, for ecstasy is always a response to an immanence of the divine. Dance offered the strongest potential for signifying and experiencing ecstasy, but Judeo-Christian dogma had smothered dance in its determination to separate eroticism from great religious feeling. As a result, European dance culture could present nothing more than the feeble, "sweet and decayed" eroticism of the waltz."

Individuality means losing oneself in the formless and the immense without even remembering one's limits.... The time must come which shakes us, which revi- talizes the dormant evil and splendor within us, tremendous powers, doubts, which rumble in our hearts like the thunderstorms of romanticism, oaths, hate, anticipations." [He] implied that serious erotic dance entailed both nudity and rhythmic motions simulating orgasm and sexual intercourse. It was these movements more than any other... that undermined the mechanization of identity imposed on the body by Judeo-Christian dogma and its ambassador, the French-Italian ballet tradition."

Gertrud Leistikow (1885–1948) [was considered] the most tragic and "Dionysian" of all German modern dancers, the figure closest to the primeval concept of dance as an expression of an ecstatic body. [Her] nudity served to expose movements concealed by costume and mask; more important, it revealed the "thousand-fold play of muscles" in the body. Unlike the many prewar female dancers who linked the performance of graceful movements to the signification of an elevating spirituality, Leistikow favored a hard, convulsive, ecstatic, even violent type of movement. The "thousand-fold play of muscles" disclosed by her nudity made her body a radical sign of power and freedom, contradicting traditional inclinations to inscribe female bodily strength in theosophic, exotic, and spiritual terms. Moreover, Leistikow was in her mid-thirties when she had artists document her nudity; it seems quite possible that, because she did not depend on photography to transmit her image, she succeeded in making nudity a sign of modernity without imprisoning that sign within the image of virginal youthfulness pervading female nude dancing in the 1920s."

Gertrud Leistikow had a slender, supple body, but her face lacked charm, elegance, or mystery. She therefore constantly sought to hide her face, partly through suave manipulation of shawls, veils, or masks but also through movements that called attention to the beauty of her body. Her earlier dances tended to project a tragic, melancholy aura, but after she moved to Amsterdam her distinction seemed to lie in her peculiar cultivation of the grotesque. What made Leistikow's dances grotesque was her determination to invest the simplest movements with startling dramatic power, an unsuspected intensity of conflict.

Leistikow's concept of the grotesque was cosmopolitan, so perhaps her grotesque dances constituted a curious evolution of a controlling tragic aesthetic rather than a break with it. Junk suggested that the grotesque dance displayed "more strength than grace" or, "more recently," substi- tuted "the bizarre for the graceful," as manifested through "unusual positions, deformed body structures, and adventurous leaps and gestures" (98). In other words, grotesque dancing did not necessarily imply a comic mood but perhaps made a calculated challenge to aesthetic conventions of "gracefulness" and bodily composure. Brandenburg thought such a challenge led Leistikow into the realms of the demonic and heroic rather than toward any spirit of parody, frivolity, or malicious travesty.

This determination was perhaps most mysteriously evident in Gnossienne (1924), which used as accompaniment Erik Satie's equally simple and haunting piano melody "Gnossienne No. 1" (1889). Here Leistikow stood in a tight-fitting, shimmering gown and faced the audience in a veiled light. She concentrated the dance almost entirely in the hands and arms, which undulated slowly, like waves, horizontally, then vertically, while her face constantly stared straight ahead with Sphinxlike inscrutability (one had to see the dance more than once to make this observation, so strongly did the arms and hands attract focus). After performing a pattern of arm undulations, the dancer took a step forward and turned into profile to repeat the pattern but raised her right leg slightly and held it suspended for the duration of the repetition. Then she turned and faced the audience again and repeated the pattern. The dancer repeated the initial pattern five times, thrice forward and twice in profile. With each repetition, the dancer merely moved forward a step or, while in profile, suggested a step in another direction without actually taking it. The dance conveyed a sense of a body very slowly and hesitantly moving closer to the audience without, in its trancelike state, even seeming aware of the spectators."

[For example, in one dance] A violet spotlight becomes coldly reflected in the pearl ornamentation of the hair. It makes the head of the dancer, with Medusa-like, wide open eyes, perch over the purple shawl which entwines and strangles her throat. The crass red cloth separates head from body, so that the head seems to float in the air, but through constant transformation the little cloth serves the movement of the dance: now it dips and flows like blood, then it throbs and flutters like lightning flashes, then it spreads like an imperial mantel around the shoulders, then it tightened again like a noose around the neck. And the language of the body discloses just as much fear of death as desire for death."

all excerpts from the online book, Empire of Ecstasy, by Karl Toepfer
drawings from here

the bath, part 4

TEODORO LUNA CONFESSES AFTER YEARS TO HIS BROTHER, ANSELMO THE PRIEST, WHO IS REQUIRED TO UNDERSTAND, BUT WHO UNDERSTANDS ANYWAY, MORE THAN PEOPLE THINK

I am a slave to the nudity of women.
I do not know with what resolve

I could stand against it,
a naked woman
Asking of me anything.

An unclothed woman is
sometimes other things.
I see her in a dish of green pears.

Anselmo, do you know what I mean if I say

Without clothes

Her breasts are the two lions
In front of the New York Public Library,

Do you know that postcard of mine?
In those lions there is something

For which I have in exchange
Only sounds. Only my fingers.

I see her everywhere. She is the lions
And the pears,
those letters of the alphabet

As children we called dirty, the W,
The Y, the small o.

She is absolutely
the wet clothing on the line.
Or, you know, to be more intimate,

May I? The nub, the nose of the pear,
Do you know what I mean?
Those parts of the woman

I will call two Spanish dancer hats,
Or rounder sometimes,
doughboy helmets from the War.

Sometimes they are flat
in the late afternoon
Asleep. Like drawings,

Like a single rock thrown into the lake,
These parts of a woman
an imperfect circling

Gyre of lines moving out,
beyond the water.
They reach me at the shore, Anselmo.

Without fail, they are stronger,
And they have always been
faster than I am.

It’s like watching the lassoing man,
The man with the perfectly circling rope,

Pedro Armendariz in the Mexican movies,
Or Will Rogers. Wherever one is from,

Whoever this man is.
And he is always there.
Everybody knows one.

He always makes his big lasso,
twirling his rope
Around himself and
a woman from the audience

Only I am the woman,
do you understand, Anselmo?
Caught in the circling rope. I am the woman

And me thinking of a woman
Without clothes

Is that man and that rope
And we are riding on separate horses.

Alberto Ríos

from Teodora Luna's Two Kisses. Copyright © 2000 by Alberto Ríos.

are the men who are the capturers, the 'nurturers,' the captured, in fact? in the whole bath series, we have naked women being seen by (presumably) clothed men. i have tried to choose images in which the women are not apparently posing, apparently unaware of being observed. but in fact they are.

i have to admit that i don't exactly know what to make of all of this. when i used to do my magazine i realized that both male and female artists were most likely to feature their nudes female.
i like looking. feel comforted by looking.

so is it sexist? fashionable, yes (at that time, 'bathers' was a de rigour subject), but oppressive too? i just don't know. what do you think? if you are a woman, do you feel you are capturer or captured?
and men -- same question.

the bath, part 3

PLACES TO SWIM

Summer's ambitious project — the beach and its
dark striped rocks,
stone-lined pool at the swim club,

passage where the tide flowed out behind dunes,
left fingers and lips blue,
tea-colored pond of black sticks where kids

jumped off branches of an over-hanging tree,
aqua
 of indoor pool lanes,

the white lines' circling, breaking pattern
interrupted by arms, churns and kicks.

*****

Yellow leaves drift down —
 fish-shaped ovals, flecking slick streets,
light October rain,

almost like swimming, the walk
through wet, late afternoon air.
In town this week, two people found goldfish

balanced in paper cups
in their mailboxes.
Teal blue wool, ten rows

to no- tice the wave reappear

in the cable I'm knitting,
dusk pattern,

 



you bent
over the piano in the kitchen
picking out the lost bars of Satie
(what could sound better?).

Music book left
somewhere — an attic
or with cousins by the lake.

Talvikki Ansel

(how strongly a part of all this was erik satie. how similarly our artists paint the bathers.)

colette's breast

The 'modern' corset is attributed to Catherine de Médicis, wife of King Henri II of France. She enforced a ban on thick waists at court attendance during the 1550s and had a questionable effect on women for the next 350 years. 1

''Ten years ago, so many department stores wouldn't even consider carrying larger sizes because they didn't want larger-size

women in their stores,'' said Kurt Barnard, the president of Barnard Retail Trend Report. 2

In order to survive, female movie stars had to be constantly wary of excess fat. "Eternal vigilance in the diet is the price of liberty from the ogre, obesity," declared Corliss Palmer, the winner of Motion Picture Magazine's Fame and Fortune Contest for 1920.

Throughout the 1920s, fan magazines were liberally sprinkled with dramatic tales of stars' battles with weight as well as their "helpful advice" for readers who might wish to reduce.

When "Bar- bara" made her first hit, she was a slim young gift.... When the money came rolling in, "Barbara" became a victim of luxury. She grew plump and prosperous; naturally, because she was carefree and happy. But the public didn't like it. Her "fans" complained; the exhibitors
kicked; the critics laughed at her. "Barbara's" admirers wanted to see her slim and big-eyed. "Barbara," alas, looked too healthy for a "vamp."

Yet all reducing articles, even those that highlighted particularly painful or foolhardy methods of weight loss, operated under the tacit assumption that no one, regular folks included, would wish to "let herself/himself go." 3

so despite the fact that madeleine vionnet, when a fat woman walked into her shop, would ask her to turn around and go, many a woman, obese by today's standards, was considered a paragon of beauty, a muse and inspiration.

lillian russell, misia sert, loie fuller and others had more paintings done of them than any other women of the time. they were on more maga- zine covers, and they were names in dedications in every- thing from music to novels.

colette satirized the whole "flapper situation" in a number of her non-fiction essays:

Colette makes us laugh at the fact that fashion affects not only clothes, but bodies; style fashions the body and hence the self. Breasts were to be dieted into oblivion for last season, Now we witness the return of the repressed in, what is more, a fashion industry bonanza: if you do not have any breasts left, we can do something about it.

Designed in rubber and painted a delightful skin colour, you may find them lifeless: why not try this little tulle number, with an accommodating hole for the nipple? Moreover, for women who failed to fashion their bodies for last year, there is also a solution: any breast can be changed, filled out if it is too flat, rounded and lifted if it is pendulous, the whole body encased in a rubber tube to give you no more hip than a 'bouteille à vin du Rhin.'

There are fashions in bodies: a woman's body is infinitely 'malleable' — if you are required to be a sausage, then a sausage you will be. We are taught by Colette to see that dress reaches very deep into the flesh, that style fashions the body and hence the self.

Rubber tubing and the extraordinary inventiveness of corsetry ensured that where diet and patent medicines failed, the female form could still be disciplined into the tubular shape required by the waistless tunic. But where 'too fat' required constraint and compression, 'too thin' was simply reinterpreted.

No longer referring to a woman ageing before her time, the 'thin' body becomes 'slim', acquiring an erect posture and youthful vitality; it is captured as it were eternally at the threshold of sexual maturity before the deposit of womanly fats on the hips and the breasts. 4

(i hope this makes some sense to you. it's a long essay, with all of colette's words in untranslated french -- too complex for the online translators or for my old rusty skills. but to tell the truth, i didn't perfectly understand the english, either. in any case, it becomes clear that colette was hip to the game: when imitation -- even of the bodies of the women of japan -- goes below the surface to effect self-esteem, it becomes just another power game. women, yet again, are pawns in that game of fame. no wonder clara bow looks so sad.)

'colette's breast' is from sisters of salome.

The Hymn of a Fat Woman

All of the saints starved themselves.
Not a single fat one.
The words “deity” and “diet” must have come from the same
Latin root.

Those saints must have been thin as knucklebones
or shards of stained
glass or Christ carved
on his cross.

Hard
as pew seats. Brittle
as hair shirts. Women
made from bone, like the ribs that protrude from his wasted
wooden chest. Women consumed
by fervor.

They must have been able to walk three or four abreast
down that straight and oh-so-narrow path.
They must have slipped with ease through the eye
of the needle, leaving the weighty
camels stranded at the city gate.

Within that spare city’s walls,
I do not think I would find anyone like me.

I imagine I will find my kind outside
lolling in the garden
munching on the apples.

© 2008 Joyce Huff

bosoms lost

don't tell any- one, but women used to have bottoms, breasts, and bellies. in fact, when they chose clothes to wear, or dictated what was fashionable, the styles might even exaggerate them. but then things changed.

It was a difficult time for the former matrons of Edwardian society, the previous leaders of fashion whose style of dressing became as passé as their rounded figures and older faces. More youthful women who could party all night and carry the boyish fashions well were all the rage.

The slender flat- chested tanned body and face of a 15 year old became the desired silhouette of the bright young things of the 1920s. 1

Women’s fashion in the early 1900s highlighted the silhouette of the mature, full-figured body. Low busts and curvy hips were flaunted by the dress styles of the era... From 1910 until the start of the First World War in 1914, fashion continued to move toward slimmer, narrower silhouettes that emphasized flat busts and slim hips . Bustles and trains were removed from dresses, as fashion designers played with the length of skirts to reveal enticing new areas of skin. 2

and of course, as we've seen, this is also the period during which the influence of japonisme on fashion became the most evident. women and fashion designers were suddenly looking at young idealized japanese courtesans with a new eye. but this new audience for the ukiyo-e may not have understood that they were seeing through the artists' eyes as well.

Suzuki Harunobu (1725-1770) was the first artist to use the technique of full color printing. He popularized a new aesthetic in female beauty—that of a delicate, ethereal, childlike woman... Torii Kiyonaga (1752-1815) focused on bijin-ga (pretty women). His women are stately and statuesque. They are more realistic than Harunobu's, but are still impossibly tall and elegant. His faces exhibit a high degree of idealism and are often indistinguishable from each other.

Kitagawa Utamaro (1750-1806): Utamaro worked mainly with bijin-ga, his prints dominating the Ukiyo-e scene in the 1790s. He took Kiyonaga's female type to its elegant extreme. His were tall, full-bodied women with large oval heads. Utamaro depicted these women on a monumental scale, often delighting in bringing the figure forward and focusing on enlarged heads and torsos. 3

so i begin to wonder, putting this all together in my head...: were we seeing, in the 20s, evidence of women's "new freedom," as the new look is often attributed to, or yet another sample of japonisme?

are we still punishing ourselves for having edwardian bodies in a "modern" world due to the fancies of japanese printmakers from over 200 years ago?

as we've seen, we were quick and happy to emulate the japanese clothing, and perhaps we were also inviting in their bodies as well. many of us in the west are from, or have ancestors from, european peasant stock, inheriting bodies as far from the stereotyped (let alone the idealized) japanese body as a body could be. in inviting in these body images, we were also welcoming decades of frustration and self-hatred.