The Music of Change

Easily, it is argued, dress is an artform reflecting its time as much as do painting, sculpture, and craft. With what are we left when the final romances of Japonisme go to smoke and the circumstances of the world take all the rest with it?

As we have seen, the blocks of color and the asymmetry have been retained, but the outlines are gone, though still perhaps implied. simplicity remains, and one can often still intuit nature's influence, but without question, there has been a change.

What we do know is that cubism is not only a natural when it comes to artistic evolution, but also inevitable in the face of the disintegration of the world as many had known it. We were no longer naive. We were motorized, our visions changed.

WHO AM I?

Who am I?
Where am I from?
I’m Antonin Artaud
And since I speak
As I know
In a moment
You’ll see my present body
Shatter to pieces
And gather itself
In a thousand notorious
Aspects
A fresh body
In which you’ll never
Be able
To forget me.

Antonin Artaud

Things were taken apart and reassembled in ways that were unimaginally new. Along with the other artists, poets followed suit and shattered meaning, then reflected it in a mirror put it back anew. Inspired both by wars and by technological advances, they forced their readers to find the meaningful bits amidst the chaos.

PERMISSION TO LEAVE

I put my cap in the cage
And went out with the bird on my head
So
One no longer salutes
The officer said
No
One no longer salutes
Replied the bird
Oh good
Pardon me I thought that one saluted
The officer said
You are fully excused we all make mistakes
Said the bird

Jacques Prévert

"Things fall apart," said Yeats, revealling the mind-set ofthe pre-post-war generations; "The ceremony of innocence is drowned." Music fractured into jazz. Costume fractured into patched work and spiralled. Componant parts redefined the whole.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries
of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

William Butler Yeats

Do I, as a number of us have discussed recently, embrace the paintings of this era as I do those of just earlier times? Nope. But fashion, rugs, and other material forms of creativity, recalling Kabuki geometrics, I must admit that I'm crazy for.

The simplicity and the lines learned from the Japanese are still here, only syncopated, a little be-bop in the mix. I can do nothing but shake my head and tap my toes.

translations from here

russe

DUST LIGHT, LEAVES

Above autumn's burgundy
and rust,
beyond the orange groves
chafing and ruddy in the frost,
a cloud lifts into blue . . .

the west goes up all haydust, flame,
and the flat land glimmers
out to it on the day-stream--
it is Millet's sky of "The Angelus,"

that nine- teenth century sky
we have only in paintings
and in these few still moments
in their rose and amber rags.

As a child, I remember this . . .
standing on the creek stones,
dusk moving over the fields
like a ship's hull pulling away

with that first sense of loss
and release; I saw it was
all about the beginning of dust
rising into the long sky's seam.
into my own two eyes and hands.

A chalk-white moon overhead
and to the right, umber waves
of sparrows back and through
the empty trees . . .

Soon, stars will draw analogies
in the dark, but now the world
is simple as the dead leaves
glowing in this late hour,

simple as our desire
to rise lucent as clouds
in their camisoles of dust,
the cool air burning though us

over leaves drifting on a pond,
over the last memory
of ourselves looking up,
stunned as a carp blinking at the light.

Christopher Buckley

(this whole exploration in hue began when i noticed, in the metropolitan museum's collection, the oddly matching color schemes of the (at top) dagobert peche textile and the callot soeurs gown. i am not sophisticated in color theory, but i poked around until sense seemed to begun being made. the ballet russe had a tremendous influence on design in the first quarter of the twentieth century. how those became the colors of the ballet russe, and how these same colors came to become circulated around the western world, i do not know. but know that matisse as well as bakst designed their costumes, then carried the language of their colors into the world.)

高澤圭一, 中西利雄 & Matisse

in 1947, just after the war and the year i was born, two artists in japan were finding work, beyond their own "western-style" painting, as the painters of covers of women's magazines. since i first saw them in 2007 here, they have struck as very matisse-like. so i went out exploring.

closer examination proved me more accurate than i'd imagined. the two japanese artists whose work i most admired were toshio nakanishi and keiichi takasawa, i could find next to nothing about them in english, and the japanese translator (google) is pretty poor. but one thing i think i was able to ascertain was that the two that were my favorite were by keiichi takasawa, though they look nothing like his painting style (mostly of his wife, it is believed) which are not illustrated here. but there is similarity in style to his pamphlet on the kimono.

others were by toshio nakanishi whose painting style does look a lot his magazine colors. could i have misunderstood the japanese and these are really by nakanishi too?

but the similarities to matisse, not only in facial style and use of pattern, but in body language too. the outline is evident as are similar uses of flat color. though matisse, like frank lloyd wright, denied he was influenced by japanese art, the truth, also as with wright, was inescapable. as nakanishi began to fill in the flesh, matisse began to simplify it.

and the connections prove it not far-fetched. keiichi takasawa studied with foujita tsugeharu and both soon became integral parts of the paris art scene.

toshio naka- nishi was part of a group of rebellious artists, reaching to the west to grow parts of themselves. one like-minded artist, bijutsu shinron, said, "Of course one has to imitate. Even if we want to create works that are uniquely Japanese, we still need to look at Western paintings in order to supplement our own deficiencies. And I don't believe we have to set out to be 'Oriental.' If we simply express ourselves, the results will be sufficiently 'Oriental,' I'm sure."

i find it quite interesting, the similarities each culture went through adjusting to the new influences, the new style. another young japanese artist, koide narashige, was moved to comment, "I often hear that Japanese women are rather shapeless and that nudes other than those of Western women are worthless. Those who say so want to make fun of shapes of women depicted in Japanese oil paintings.

I do not know whether theirs is indeed the right form of the human body, but if a French beauty with thin hair about her lips comes at a distance of one foot from me, then, before being struck with her grace, I will be overwhelmed by her strange exaggerated nose, her deep-set piercing eyes and each pore of her rough skin, and I will possibly begin weeping. Some people despise short legs in view of a certain sort of individualism. In a streetcar I see fat young women sitting, their stocky legs not reaching the floor, but I can regard them as quite charming."

MATISSE, TOO

Matisse, too, when the fingers
ceased to work,
Worked larger and bolder,
his primary colors celebrating
The weddings of innocence and glory, innocence and glory

Monet
when the cataracts blanketed his eyes

Painted swirls of rage,

and when his sight recovered
Painted water lilies, Picasso claimed

I do not seek, I find,
and stuck to that story
About himself,
and made that story stick.
Damn the fathers.
We are talking about defiance.

Alicia Ostriker

Ostriker"Matisse, Too" from Poetry Magazine 12/06.

dammed self!

what of identity, then?
is it a fixed thing, or fluid?
self, no self, shifting self?

i dilute, like water-color
drop of paint assuaged by water.
but how do i know, then, it's me?

one simple thing: my mouse
goes out, and i am suddenly
without connection, without hands.

my every thought is dammed,
my constant curiosity is still
plugged in yet impotent.

will i disappear? or
spend some time remembering
i will come back, i'm already there.

when connections are severed,
if you feel selfless you are
looking in the wrong direction.

1810

.生て居るばかりぞ我とけしの花
ikite iru bakari zo ware to heshi [no] hana

just being alive
I
and the poppy

Issa

tr. David G. Lanoue

do you see yourself here?

SLOWLY: a plainsong from an older woman to a younger woman

am I not....olden olden olden
it is unwanted.

wanting,..wanting
am I not....broken
stolen....common

am I not crinkled cranky poison
am I not glinty-eyed and frozen

am I not....aged
shaky....glazing
am I not....hazy
guarded....craven

am I not....only
stingy....little
am I not....simple
brittle....spitting

was I not....over
over....ridden?

it is a long story
will you be proud to be my version?

it is unwritten.

writing,..writing
am I not....ancient
raging....patient

am I not....able
charming....stable
was I not....building
forming....braving

was I not....ruling
guiding....naming
was I not....brazen
crazy....chosen

even the stones would do my bidding?

it is a long story
am I not proud to be your version?

it is unspoken.

speaking, speaking
am I not....elder
berry
brandy

are you not wine before you find me
in your own beaker?

Judy Grahn

“Slowly: a plainsong from an older woman to a younger woman” from love belongs to those who do the feeling: New & Selected Poems (1966-2006). Copyright © 2008 by Judy Grahn.

when i was a young feminist judy grahn was at every poetry reading reading her common woman poems (see some here). i once painted the text of one onto my kitchen wall.