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

when i fall in love

(to set the mood,
i must first ask you to CLICK BELOW)
then close your eyes.)

why this, now? i finally found a friend,
from 40 years ago.

A LOVE SONG

What have I to say to you
When we shall meet?
Yet—
I lie here thinking of you.

The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,
It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—
Only a honey-thick stain
That drips from leaf to leaf
And limb to limb
Spoiling the colours
Of the whole world.

I am alone.
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.

See me!
My hair is dripping with nectar—
Starlings carry it
On their black wings.
See, at last
My arms and my hands
Are lying idle.

How can I tell
If I shall ever love you again
As I do now?

William Carlos Williams

first published in Poems 1916.

and all i can say is how little we've learned,and yet too much,

interlude

In this world
love has no color --
yet how deeply
my body
is stained by yours.

Izami Shikibu
tran. Jane Hirshfield

interlude

i can't remember ever --
well, not for a long time, anyway --
feeling this way:
being offered, now,
what i may have wanted then,
but recognizing how
it was never what i thought.

and it's painful very deeply inside.
that his life, i think,
has been destroyed
by his unavoidable
misunderstandings.

the pain comes, of course,
witnessing his pain,
and knowing by osmosis
it once was mine.

courtesans, prostitutes & whores: Part IIIA Courtesans

In a memorable scene from Colette's novel Gigi, the daughter of a courtesan is carefully taught to tell the difference between a canary diamond and topaz; a cocotte's cache of gems served both as an emblem of success and as a fund for her retirement.
[and table manners--click image for clip]

many many years ago, when we were young feminists, we went to an all-day workshop at a church in san francisco. the two things i remember about it were sitting in a circle with a mirror and a speculum looking at our own and each other's cervixes.

the other was a speech by margo st. james called "getting paid for it." listening to that speech then, and even remembering it now, i am reminded how difficult it is to draw a line between "respectability" and, well, "non-respectability." her point at that time exposed the possible underside of marriage: how far different was the wife whose husband sets her up with an art gallery, for example, from the woman who does the same without the marriage? the more i read the more i realize that the answer is inevitably very very little.

as with a mistress, an affair with a courtesan was rarely just a one-night stand, that is where the similarity ends. Courtesans could be both less and more than mistresses. Less because they were by no means always faithful. Usually, they had several lovers, some who contributed to the household expenses and some who did not... And unlike the mistress of a married man, who is often kept hidden, just as the courtesan was proud of her jewelry, she too was proudly displayed. She was expected to accompany her various lovers to public places and events, cafés, restaurants, balls, parties, the theatre, the opera, even hosting gatherings of her lover's friends at her own home.

During the Belle Epoque in Paris, among the wealthy playboys, aristocrats, and businessmen who belonged to the exclusive Jockey Club, it was considered de rigueur to keep a courtesan -- so much so that even homosexual men felt they had to do it for show... But perhaps the greatest distinction we must make here between kept women and courtesans is that the latter were personages. They were, indeed, what we call today celebrities. Friends of kings, regents, emperors, statesmen, financiers, famous writers and painters, they were the constant subject of columns printed in weekly journals, gossip about their romances, what they wore and what they did providing continual fodder for public curiosity.

Flaubert, Zola, Balzac, Colette, the Goncourt brothers, all based major characters on the lives of courtesans. And of course, from Praxiteles to Titian to Manet, they were favored as subjects by painters and sculptors... For this reason, a courtesan had to be highly cultivated. Often born to poverty, with no education and lacking upper-class manners, a young woman would have to be taught many skills in order to play her new role. As in Shaw's play Pygmalion (or the musical that followed, My Fair Lady), she would have to learn to speak with an upper-class accent, dress well if not lavishly, arrange her hair fashionably, walk gracefully, dance, and play the piano. She would be required to know table manners, of course, but also different protocols, including at times the protocols of the court. A woman who may not even have been able to read very well would now be expected to know the plots of operas, recognize literary references, and have some familiarity with history. Only the brave and intelligent would be able to survive the course... Many courtesans exceeded these requirements... More than can be counted were notable actresses, dancers, singers, music-hall and circus performers.

A few, such as Sarah Bernhardt and Coco Chanel, became far more famous in other professions... But if these women were remarkable in their accomplishments, they were exceptions among the already exceptional. Altogether, there can be no doubt that courtesans were extraordinary women, not only considering their talents but because, as Simone de Beauvoir writes, they created for themselves "a situation almost equivalent to that of man... free in behavior and conversation," attaining, "the rarest intellectual liberty." For centuries courtesans enjoyed more power and independence than did any other women in Europe. To understand why this was so, we must consider the history of women in Europe, a history that is by no means always the same as the history of men. 1

Copyright © 2001 by Susan Griffin

[this topic has proved richer than i'd imagined. this is just part one.]

the chinese divan japonais

Toulouse-Lautrec:
Divan Japonais

LAUTREC'S stroke of genius as a poster designer was to bring to the task the bold coloring and flat unmodelled forms of Japanese color woodcuts -- and the idea is nowhere more apposite than in this image advertising the Divan Japonais.



This was a Montmartre cabaret decorated in a fashionably Asian style [ironically, chinese!]. Lautrec shows the dancer Jane Avril and the critic Edouard Dujardin watching a performance by Yvette Guilbert, the famous singer, who is recognizable by her black gloves. All three were friends of the artist.





Avril is elegantly composed, chicly dressed, and with- drawn. Her cultivated tastes and interest in art and literature place her comfortably in the company of the intel- lectual Dujardin. Distractedly touching his cane to chin, he is interrupted in mid- thought by Jane's shapely silhouette. As usual, Lautrec focused on the dramas enacted

by the audience, and here perfectly captures the ambivalence of the pair's feigned interest in the performance and their private, con- flicting thoughts hovering just below the surface of social refinement.




Stylistically, Lautrec looked to sources in Japanese prints: the use of diagonals, compartmentalized color, curvilinear silhouettes, and the flattening of space.

[T]he presence of Dujardin makes reference to his writings on abstraction in Japanese art. Dujardin's writings summarized the principles of Lautrec's art, and Lautrec's poster gives a pictorial synopsis of both the critic's views and the

concerns of avant-garde painting. Viewed in this way, Divan Japonais poses itself as a provo- cative brain- teaser, full of cryptic "signs" and not-too-serious references to the intellectualism of modern art that percolated at the café tables and was poured out in the journals. 1

as happened with many of the cafes and cabarets of montmartre, divan japonais eventually became a strip club, and, finally, a movie theater.

sada yacco

along with sarah bernhardt, loie fuller, misia, and cleo de merode, sada yacco captured the imagination and the hearts of artists and the public alike during the time of the early century.

known as japan's first female actor, she then parlayed her fame with a world-wide tour. she danced with fuller in fuller's own theater,
and brought over her own troupe of japanese players.

(here read the inter- view with ms. sada- yakko by yone nogu- chi. and find many photos of sada (and fuller) at the 1900 world exposition in paris. by the way, the painting of sado in a lavender kimono is by Tavik Frantisek Simon, whose work we saw here.)

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.