why are there flowers?

i was in the large waiting room shared by two teams of doctors and a testing lab, reading in a ten year old issue of natural history magazine an article entitled 'why are there flowers?'; the answer, which the magazine clearly thought would shock its readers, was quite obviously sex.

as it is, perhaps, for us humans as well. is it any wonder that we all, men and women alike, admire being, and/or seeing, the flowers? and when the hormones are flooding, we women often feel it of ourselves too: the lightness of purpose and the dance of life.

but most of us women know, or learn sooner or later, that that's not it; gender falls away in the face of substance. we are all quite more, men and women again alike, than the pursuit of the sum of our parts. (i remember suddenly realizing, at the age of three, that all the songs on the radio were love songs. how absurd! i thought.)

that's why when i come across an image of a woman who is not being portrayed for her loveliness first and foremost, it catches my attention. images of women who are thinking of something, who are complex, who have more knowledge than they are expected to have, sadly, often fall into the categories of dejection or exhaustion. but wait -- is there a glimmer more?

Each cell has a life. There is enough here to please a nation. It is enough that the populace own these goods. Any person, any commonwealth would say of it, “It is good this year that we may plant again and think forward to a harvest. A blight had been forecast and has been cast out.”

Many women are singing together of this: one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine, one is at the aquarium tending a seal, one is dull at the wheel of her Ford, one is at the toll gate collecting, one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona, one is straddling a cello in Russia,

one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt, one is painting her bedroom walls moon color, one is dying but remembering a breakfast, one is stretching on her mat in Thailand, one is wiping the ass of her child, one is staring out the window of a train

in the middle of Wyoming and one is anywhere and some are everywhere and all seem to be singing, although some can not sing a note.

Anne Sexton from “In Celebration of My Uterus” from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). Copyright © 1981

poet of the belle epoque

(marcello dudovich was born with the right skills and the right interests at the right time. it was a moment when color printing was booming and when the middle class had grown large enough to support things like department stores, the mele stores in particular. he also has the opportunities to meet and study under mucha, penfield, and hohenstein.)

In 1897 with the help of Leopoldo Metlicovitz, painter, poster artist, illustrator and stage designer, Antonio Dudovich sends his son Marcello to the Officine Grafiche Ricordi (Ricordi Printing Works) in Milan, in order to learn the job of “colourist”.

Giulio Ricordi, director of the Works, doesn’t take long to notice the young Dudovich’s talent. From simple copier and colourist he is promoted to designer and regular collaborator. It is necessary to stress how important this compact and numerous group, which includes the best “signatures” of Italian poster art, is for Ricordi.

The inter- na- tion- al char- act- er of the Officine Grafiche Ricordi manifests itself also in the presence of artists coming from other countries (Adolfo Hohenstein, Leopoldo Metlicovitz, F. Laskoff, Aleardo Villa, Giovanni Mataloni): endowed with strong personalities, they create a fertile breeding ground in which the new European modernist developments can take root, and, even within the consolidated 19th century tradition of poster art, they succeed in elaborating innovative communication formulas in the field of visual advertising art.

The Officine Ricordi are in these years the best Italian lithographic printing works, with several branches both in Italy (Milan, Naples, Florence, Rome) and abroad (London, Paris, Leipzig, New York). The constant contact of the Officine Ricordi with foreign countries represents an inexhaustible source of information and visual stimulation for Dudovich, who can thus keep up-to-date with the new artistic and publishing developments, mixing the most disparate international artistic influences.

Dudovich settles down in Milan and works for the advertising campaigns of the Grandi Magazzini Mele, an important department store in Naples (1906-1914). These years are happy and characterised by an abundant and justly acclaimed output: he realizes some of the best posters of his long career. Milan will acknowledge Dudovich as “the poet of the Belle Epoque”, a refined illustrator of human life, and an acute portraitist.

The Officine Grafiche Ricordi become in Italy what the Imprimerie Chaix, created by Jules Chéret, is in France: a stimulating breeding ground for artists capable of following all the stages of their work step by step, from the sketching phase to chromolithographic reproduction on stone, zinc, or aluminium plate – collaborating with the printers, supervising directly the work in all its phases, refining and adding further touches. 1

(the mele stores, like paul poiret -- french clothing designer --, seized the opportunity this "golden age of posters" afforded them by hiring the best and the brightest of the up-and-coming new artists of this new field to promote their goods.

clearly, the influences of japonisme have become part of the language; the dark outlines and flat areas of pure color, and the often-appearing diagonal structure are hard to miss.)

sex with ghosts

UNDER THE PEONY LANTERN:
A Cautionary Tale of Sex with the Dead

Long ago, on the first night of Obon, a widowed samurai named Ogiwara Shinnojo sat on his porch, watching the day fade into night. To his surprise, a beautiful young woman and her maid, who was carrying a lantern emblazoned with a peony, walked near. The pair paused to speak with Ogiwara, and he found the young woman's name to be Otsuyu. An instant attachment was formed, and Otsuyu promised to return the following night, at the same time.

From that night onward, always at dusk, she would arrive with her maid, carrying the same Peony Lantern. Ogiwara and Otsuyu rapidly progressed in their affair, and she took him for her lover, always leaving before dawn. This relationship continued on as seasons changed, and both were very happy.




A sus- pi- cious neighbor, wondering at Ogiwara's new habit of staying awake all night and sleeping all the day, hid outside his house, peeking through a small hole in the wooden wall in order to observe the old man's nightly shenanigans. Much to his surprise, he discovered the widowed samurai passionately entwined with a skeleton, adorned with only scarce, clinging bits of rotting flesh and cobweb-infested long black hair. Half-mad, the neighbor fled screaming from the scene.

The next day he con- front- ed Ogi- wara, bringing with him a Buddhist priest who warned of the danger facing his soul. One cannot dally with the dead. Ogiwara took this to heart, and vowed to free himself from the spell of Otsuyu. With the priest's help, he surrounded his house with ofuda, strips of paper upon which are written Buddhist sutras, offering protection from the supernatural. That night, Otsuyu and her maid came as always, but they cried at the steps of his porch, unable to enter the house.

Night after night she returned, begging Ogiwara to remove the ofuda so that they may be lovers again. Slowly, the lonely old man's resistance slipped away, and one night he left his house to join his beloved.

The next morning, he was nowhere to be found. His friends looked far and wide, until the neighbor suggested they search the cemetery. At long last, they found the graves of Otsuyu and her maid, emblazoned with the same peony as on her lantern. Opening the crypts, no one was surprised to see the corpse of Ogiwara, still passionately entwined with his skeletal lover.

So they say. 1

countering the ornamentation, often juxtaposing it, was unadulterated color.

Toulouse-Lautrec was, however, the most innovative of the poster designers, with his Japonisme-inspired compositions (characterized by simplified figures and forms, planes of flat pure color and jolting diagonal lines), and his emphasis on subjects that had previously fallen outside the purview of fine art.1

show business, the ladies of the night and their fellows: ukiyo-e. this was the floating world. the use of calligraphy, hand-lettering, as a part of the design scheme, saw letter characters as art in themselves.

and the joy in color, in art and design as in clothing for the first time in centuries, is a joy in itself.

how very short a road it was then, on to modern art.

shoot

[photographers in the photo- seccession movement found] aesthetic inspir- ation for ... pictorial photo- graphy from Japanese prints, creating photo- graphs with rich, tonal qualities, asymmetrical compositions, and a lyrical poeticism.

...[M]any painters, photographers, and designers of [the] day, [were] influenced by Japanese aesthetics... [with a] style of photography [that] emulated Japanese aesthetics and compositions.

[M]any photographers in Stieglitz's circle [were] strongly influenced by ukiyo-e prints (translated as pictures of the floating world), which celebrated the delights of life during the Edo period (1600-1868) in Japan. Upon the opening of trade with Japan in the 1850s, Japanese art began circulating in the West and influencing Western art circles.1

Stieglitz argued that photo- graphers dealt with the same concerns that modern painters considered. Translating the influence of Japanese prints from painting and printmaking to photography was both a modern and an artistic thing to do.2

(clearly, none of these photographs emulate the pattern and design of the japanese prints; indeed, perhaps these are a better examination of japonairerie than japonisme. still, they're mostly shot by stieglitz's photo-seccession circle, which only goes to show that really nobody was immune to the beauty of kimono.)

read more