Forever Cute

[Image: Zooey Deschanel dressed in pale pink in the sunshine holding up a heart necklace]

Sorry this is so long, but I have a lot to say:

I enjoyed this thoughtful post from What Tami Said: Who is the black Zooey Deschanel? No one really tries to identify a black Zooey, though, because what she is really asking is, can a black woman pull off a cutesy, innocent/sexy, intellectual yet vapid little-girl aesthetic? Does society give black women room to define themselves in this way? As Tami pointed out in another post, a white woman streaking her hair pink is seen as whimsical while a black woman doing that is seen as "ghetto." Both posts and comment threads I highly recommend reading.

[Image: Nicki Minaj, also in a pink dress, making cute face, and with pink hair, literally impersonating a child's toy.]

While there understandably wasn't much love given to this trendy eternal-little-girl persona on a post about how this mode of self-expression is unfairly racially exclusive, or examination of why white women might choose this on a blog that isn't about white people, I think digging deeper in this issue is actually very pertinent to Tami's question. I realize many women use cutesy-ness to be transgressive, that there is deeper meaning at work for many lesbians, sex workers, forty-year-old women who've defined themselves differently in the past, and many many more situations. But this is a mega-trend and since 80% of people don't seem to think deeply about anything at all, I'm going to assume 80% of the trend followers haven't thought deeply about this either. And to be as clear as possible, the "cutesy" I'm talking about is what I think of as Etsy, alternative precious weddings, Real Simple Magazine, cupcakes obsessives, DIY tissue paper pom-poms, and yes, Zooey Deschanel's persona. And no, I don't have a problem with people who are into this stuff (or Deschanel). It doesn't make you stupid or shallow. I myself enjoy a stiff drink even more if it's pink and coordinated with a pastel retro tablescape.

Let's say a white girl doesn't like being sexed up like a reality star. She doesn't enjoy the Barbie persona, doesn't enjoy the snap judgements or the way people treat sexed-up women, doesn't enjoy the harassment, doesn't enjoy the objectification. Let's say she doesn't want to focus her life on male attention, either. But she also wants to stay within the acceptable limits of what girls do. She's not about to grow out her pit-hair and spend tedious hours reading up on The Male Gaze. She doesn't want to be one of those Icky Girls. She wants to be a girly-girl, but on her own terms.

Louise Brooks, in a boyish bob, cupid's-bow lipstick and sailor costume. She was extremely young in these photos and a poster-girl for "boyish" figures, i.e. small-breasted and straight-hipped.

Probably the only time a woman in her 20s or 30s remembers feeling free of The Sexiness is early childhood. It's just about the only time in a woman's life where she is deemed "ok" by society. Hopefully it's pre-dieting, pre-making sure you keep your legs together when sitting in a skirt, pre-skeevy-uncles, pre-slut-shaming, pre-prude-shaming. This would not be the first time women rebelled by channeling childhood. Remember the flappers in the '20s who flaunted "boyish" (aka pre-pubescent) figures and loose clothing like a little girl might wear? Louise Brooks? Or the Sixties, when mod and Jackie-O prep styles both made women literally look like dolls (oversized hair, big eyes, clothes that were cut to make limbs look tiny and disjointed, that hide the waist and breasts)? It's a subtle way of saying, "I'm not a sex object. I'm a 'person,' not a 'woman.'"

Jackie O in doll-like dresses. Notice the proportions of head to body because of her bouffant, and the way the clothes slice her into movable parts. Compared with cinched-waisted, pointy bazooka dresses from the '50s these also downplay her breasts and waist.

And then there's the way the current trend (at least as opposed to other trends) centers itself around "female" experience, not performative femininity. For example, tweeting about adorable kittens, as Deschanel did, is basically for a female audience. Sharing childhood experiences is another big element ("Omg remember Thundercats/MyLittlePony/Full House???") and that is also about female community. People like Deschanel seem to be developing a sense of humor that is based around appealing to other women both on the cute level, the "our experiences are worth sharing," level and the girl-friendly gross-out level (I'm using "female" and "girl" as abstract ideas here). The guys in their universe can either get with the program or be relegated to the sidelines.

And it's not just "girly" ideas you can share, but intellectual stuff too. There's a strong current of liberal arts education, contemporary art/film/music awareness, and political awareness that comes rolled into this mega-trend, probably because of the affluence of the mainly white, slightly older participants.

And best of all you're still a good girl. You're still a desirable employee, a good daughter, a cute girlfriend, a good student, a good consumer.

So why is this a new (ish) trend? Why now? I know people in every decade believe women are being hyper-sexualized more than ever before but... I think women today are being hyper-sexualized more than ever before. Women in the workplace has been well-established since the '80s, and since the liberal '90s there has been a growing conservative backlash fetishizing domestic labor at the same time that working is just what women do. That requires delicate balance.

Also women--particularly middle-class women--are experiencing a decade-or-so-long no man's land between adolescence and doing traditional "grown woman" things: getting married, having kids, owning a house, having a Career-with-a-capital-C. Today there's often college, a few shit jobs you have to take where you're not treated like a real person followed by some fluff occupations while you're trying to figure stuff out, some hit-and-miss career moves, dating around and having a few long-term relationships, crazy room-mate situations, basically a time when you want to play around for a while and for the first time in history you can. Or for many, a time when you want to be treated like a grown effing adult but aren't. You graduated and haven't been able to get a job (any job!), or you have a humiliating job, or you have to move back in with your parents. Again, this requires a delicate balance and I think the eternal little-girl trend addresses this for lots of women.

Manet, "Bar at the Folies-Bergere." I think we all know how she feels.

But of course there are major, major problems with this, and I haven't even gotten to the issue Tami brought up yet. First, due to porn and legions of pervs, little-girl-hood isn't as desexualized as most would like it to be. In fact grown women infantilizing themselves is a huge turn-on to a lot of men. Because of the focus on female, not male appreciation I mentioned earlier I think many women can knowingly overlook this. Furthermore since there is a huge hipster-cute-little-schoolboy-aesthetic trend among guys, these women can often find plenty of men who share the childhood mentality instead of being pervy consumers of female sexualized infantalization. But I wouldn't put these guys in the majority. And while little girls may be mostly free of sexual stigma they aren't particularly powerful in society. Giggles and fantasy don't get you very far in a board meeting or an argument. The main problem with this persona: there is NO room for anger, power or raw sexual energy-- I'm talking about MAJOR HUMAN EMOTIONS here.

Deep breath. And here's my other point:

I think the media (mostly owned and/or run by white affluent men) uses black people and black stereotypes to be a fantasy outlet for white people who play by the rules. Black "bad-asses"--characters like Samuel L. Jackson's in Pulp Fiction and Shaft, and heavily produced personas like Snoop Dogg and 50 Cent--function as fantasy outlets for white men and, somewhat, to white women, to the extent that many white men will, instead of expressing anger or misogyny in their own words, simply imitate black stereotypes. It's a way of saying the ugly shit you want to say but still having it be a joke (and a way to quickly earn my disgust).

Thus black women's stereotypes that get hyped in mainstream media are a directly related to white female fantasy (in addition to the old Women-of-Color-as-Exotic-Sexual-Deviants male fantasy). There's anger, power, raw sexual energy. I've seen many white women who, instead of simply standing up for themselves, imitate the neck-roll, finger-waving image as a way to say "Seriously, get out of my face" but in a cute, joking way. Even many positive-sounding phrases of empowerment used by white women are derived from black women because of the "power" fantasy: "You go, girl!" "Preach it sister!" "Right on!" "Tell it like it is!" etc. Plenty of white women directly imitate black women shown on MTV to express sexuality, too. I once saw an all-white, all-female Southern church group out at a bar being very prim and tittering until some music came on and a few of them ran to the dance floor and started booty-dancing and rolling their hips. They quit after a few minutes, all of them collapsing in laughter. They got to express their sexuality but not get in trouble for it because it's just a joke! A fantasy. Part of why reality shows seek out the same black female knock-down drag-out dramatic situations over and over is that there isn't any other viable female anger/power fantasy on TV. As the white girl cutesy trend has grown the angry black woman stereotype seems to get played in heavier rotation. White people can identify with certain black characters as fantasy, then imitate them to express emotions and attitudes that are forbidden.

I think Tami does a great job explaining why this is extraordinarily unfair to black women, both in this post and her entire blog, so I don't have much to add to that. But I'll point to the positive aspects of cutesy-ness I listed earlier that I didn't think were touched on in the post as a viable tool (however problematic) women use to circumvent societal pressure that is being denied Black women and other women of color. I also hope women who subscribe to the cutesy trend will give it some thought and perhaps develop some way to make it work for a full range of human emotion, including anger. Finally I hope that if any readers have ever thought of stereotypes assigned to Black women as Not Their Problem, that this post has illuminated just one way in which stereotyping Black women is gross and demeaning for all women, part of a system that sucks for everyone.

Noses

Opening credits on Ugly Betty.

In the past week, a woman between the ages of 40-ish and 60-ish whom I talked to while doing portraits, confided that she'd had a nose job when she was very young and that she didn't like the result. So I shouldn't draw her face. Then another woman between the ages of 40-ish and 60-ish told me, while I was doing portraits another day, that she'd had a nose job when she was very young and didn't like the results because she felt like the nose was someone else's, and was concerned about how some young women she knew felt about their own noses. Another woman asked me not to do her profile--she hated her nose. These were all within a week.

I can certainly identify to an extent: my nose is large, bent at the top, trapezoidal at the bottom, very shiny, and bumps up and down when I talk. I really, really wanted a different nose when I was younger because I thought it would make me prettier. I'm white, though, so I guess I got off easy with no pointed racial messages about my nose. People just said, "it gives you character," which doesn't mean much when you're a teenager and you're fed a bunch of hype about female beauty but none about female character. Strangers also frequently ask (!!) if I'm of Middle-Eastern/Greek descent. "No, why?" I ask. "Uhhh.... your eyelashes." Right.

Now I still think a straighter nose would make me prettier, but that would be a problem because my nose goes with my personality really well. Looking like a round-faced cute-nosed brown-haired girl would be misleading (see Sarah Vowell's story about wanting to appear more menacing and getting a goth makeover). All the same, I have no problem with cosmetic surgery in general. But it's such a shame people do it so young. I've heard lots of people in their forties say they're just starting to be comfortable with the way they look and are starting to understand the role (if any) that beauty plays in their lives. I guess it's not the nose you grow into, it's the idea that you're really, seriously not an object (and that can take a while).

So, since this week is apparently about nose-shame, instead of contributing something constructive about Patriarchy, I'll just post a "top ten" of my favorite noses, noses I simply appreciate. I have no idea if any of these people has had cosmetic surgery; either way, I like what they've got.

Comedian/actor Lily Tomlin

Actor Sandra Oh.

Snoop Dogg. And here's his nose in action:



Actor Sally Field, whose adorable looks never stopped her from throwing some of film's most memorable meltdowns.

Spanish actor Rossy de Palma.

Actor Julia Roberts, whose entire face fascinates me endlessly.

Actor/musician/comedian Jemaine Clement.


Actor/comedian Bill Murray.

Musician Nina Simone.


Actor Marc Indelicato, who played the adorable Justin on Ugly Betty. America Ferrera gets honorable mention with really expressive nostrils that she had the good sense to utilize throughout the series.

And an extra. Number 11, Actor, activist Audrey Hepburn.


Okay, just one more extra. Number 12, Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean, Black Adder).

Sir Isaiah Berlin by Sir Lawrence Gowing at National Portrait Gallery, Britain

Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller by Stephen Conroy at the National Portrait Gallery, Britain

Sir Michael Caine by James Hague at the National Portrait Gallery, UK

"Summer" at Rebekah Jacob Gallery

I stopped by Rebekah Jacob Gallery on my way home from some errand and unexpectedly viewed their new show pre-opening night. They've got the usuals: Tim Hussey, Timothy Pakron, Kevin Taylor. Their pieces are definitely worth another look as they're best viewed in person. Hussey's scraped and lightly sculpted surfaces, Taylor's smoothly glazed paintings and Pakron's large hand-processed photographs are more rewarding to see up close than photographed. There was also photography by Richard Sexton of the demolished crumbling building variety. I spent a long time looking at his photos, fantasizing about history in general, and feeling very Charlestonian.

My favorite, though --and SEE IT if you didn't see it at the Gibbes last year!!-- was Brian Rutenberg, who had two pieces up. I took myself out for my birthday to the Gibbes last year (or '09 maybe?) in time to see his show in that second-floor ballroom type gallery. The room has some sort of cupola-skylight thing, if I remember correctly, and a worn light wood floor, historical moulding, and double doors leading to a schmancy second gallery with ornate old globe chandeliers and large windows. The work itself was a series of medium-to-very-large canvases loosely--LOOSELY--depicting scenes from the woods in a very abstract, thickly painted, richly colored style. The sense of light filtering through branches and perspective was conveyed through saturated color and Diebenkorn/early Mondrian-style blocks of paint, with plenty of fractured, faceted shapes and a rich variety of brushstrokes and paint application. The paintings fit perfectly in the space: old/modern contrast, and both sharing a filtering of natural light in an almost sanctified space.

So, when I saw the to pieces at Rebekah Jacob Gallery I was disappointed at first, as that space is your typical white box, small and narrow with recessed lighting and a window at the front. But it turned out to be a more intimate place to view them. What was a medium size in the Gibbes seemed large in this gallery, and since there were only two I stopped for longer, looked closer, and appreciated the inner dynamics of the composition, which is rich, lively, and well-resolved. I could compare them to each other. Oddly, the space made them seem more "modern art"-y: paint for paint's sake, formal, angular and blunt,while at the Gibbes they seemed more narrative and lyrical. I have a serious art crush on this painter, so go see this stuff!!

Oorutaichi

The blog Contemporary Japanese Art has a post about Japanese musician & performer Oorutaichi that's worth a look. They describe him as performing, "his own progressive form of ‘drifting folklore music’ combining elements of dance, folk and pop. Singing with a palpable joy in his own invented language, while at the same time mashing and mixing driving base-lines with disco-kicks and synthesized freestyle beats." The second video is probably a good description of an annoying circular dream experience I have a lot, where you're trying to do something and all these obstacles come up that you have to deal with but you're never really done, just on a loop. Anyway, I think it's funny that "folk" can be this digitally sophisticated but I guess that's an honest description for someone that age in Japan in 2011, with "folk" being the flip-side of terms like, "crowd-sourcing," "networking," "DIY/guerrilla," etc.





Here's what this looks like live:

First painting I rememeber

This is definitely not the first painting I ever saw (my mom had actually made flashcards with famous paintings on them that she taught me along with the alphabet. She was very "classical music in the womb" at that point). But it is the first one I remember. I must have been 3 or 4 and was visiting my grandparents' Baptist church in rural Tennessee. We were walking down a basement corridor decked out in '60s office drab when I looked into a classroom decorated with smiling cartoon biblical men in beards, the "footprints in the sand" poster, and this poster in a frame:


I walked into the classroom, which wasn't lit and had some cloudy window light so I could see the poster. I sort of remember hearing the grown-ups exclaiming "damnit, where'd the kid go?" and just not caring. Someone eventually had to come find me. I told my mom I was looking at that painting and she said, "well, it's ok but not really my thing." It was SO my thing. She looked like a princess and I wanted to be a princess because, duh. But it was inexplicably so much cooler than "pretty." I thought it was cool how none of the whites were white and the composition (I didn't know that word) was weird. It seemed utterly mysterious.

Harold Pinter, by Justin Mortimer at the National Portrait Gallery, Britain

Bag, by Hendrik Kerstens

This is a photo. Kerstens has a series of awesome photos of this model, who is his daughter (and judging from his portfolio, a remarkably patient woman). The modern iterations of old Dutch costume are continuously witty and evoke '60s fashion and photography at the same time.

Sketch by Elizabeth Peyton

Thelma Mary Bernadette Holt, by Jennifer McRae at the Nat'l Portrait Gallery, Britain

"Hannah" by George Fuller

"We create because we gather together."

Speaking frankly, I create because I'm sort of a chauvinist loner. Sure, I have created in teams, when I'm forced to, like group projects or orchestra or something. But participating in a group for its own sake never felt exciting. Some people get into a group and share ideas and they're like "OMFG WE'RE IN A GROUP SHARING IDEAS WE ARE AWESOME." And then they call a school assembly or a company-wide meeting to form an even bigger group and tell everyone how awesome their group experience was and SHARE SHARE SHARE. And I was always the loner in the back row clapping politely and thinking in my head "wtf is your deal?" I had an asshole-ish running commentary in my mind about the speakers that was difficult to shut off even as my better self tried to pay attention to the speaker. I'm sure if I had shared my asshole-ish thoughts more often I would have found a like-minded group of other assholes and we would have shared and stuff too, but I didn't and I ended up in a circle of friends who were more absurdist than snarky. This is why, even though I don't fear public speaking, it is still annoying when people try to reassure me that the audience is rooting for me, the speaker, to succeed, because I know that that simply isn't true. Transitioning into a reasonable adult who actually does root for the person on stage and empathize with their efforts has taken time but has mostly been a success, and I found myself able to test this progress at last night's Pecha Kucha. As I was very much PMS-ing last night (sorry, TMI) this progress was REALLY put to the test.

They started doing these Pecha Kucha nights in Tokyo. The name is Japanese for something like, "come together and share," or something. Then someone brought it to Charleston. There's a gathering, you pay to get in, and there are about 10 speakers who give 6.5-minute presentations about a topic very loosely related to creativity. I'm unclear on if they're asked to speak or if they volunteer. They project a slide show while they speak and during intermission you can buy doughnuts and beer. (I went over for an ice-cream-doughnut sandwich and they were all out, which is probably for the best). Unfortunately I didn't stay for the last several speakers because, while I was enjoying the presentations, I began to feel extremely sorry for myself as always happens on that particular day of the month.

After we spent about 2 hours of milling around a field, boozing and people-watching, listening to DJ's Cassidy & the Kid (fun), the sun finally set and the slides began.

The first speaker was Karalee Nielsen, a resturanteur who started a group that operates Poe’s Tavern, two Taco Boy locations, Monza, and Closed for Business. She focused on the creative, constructive part of running and opening a restaurant and explained how her team worked. It was cool to see some of the faces and processes behind the restaurants, since I go out to eat as much for food as for entertainment. Now I've got more to visualize. Nielsen spent lots of time graciously thanking her crew, which made me feel good, though I'd have been interested to hear more about some of the problems they solved and what it's like to run a restaurant.

Next up was Ethan Jackson. Let me explain: back in high school when I took the Spanish AP test there were numbered categories of how good your written essay section was: excellent (5), good (4) and so on. But there was one category beneath "poor (2)" which was, inexplicably, "nonsense poetry (1)." I have always remembered that phrase and wondered, first, why it was beyond bad and second, what the examples of this could possibly look like. I must have missed some critical information (I couldn't hear everything) because as Ethan Jackson got going and the words he was saying failed to mesh into coherence I thought, "this is it. This is nonsense poetry." But I enjoyed what I saw. The introductory blurb he gave the MC was basically about what a terrible person he was-- I enjoyed that and very much identified with it-- then he lanked onto the stage (if that isn't a verb it should be) and proceeded to have fun in front of a slide show of surfers, motorcycles, hip hop stars, RunDMC Adidas, Kathryn Hepburn on a skateboard, and finally his coworkers in a time-lapse stop-motion video, also having fun. Going back and reading his bio today on the Parliament site it's starting to make more sense. He has worked in advertising for a bunch of companies in NY and Spain, then moved back to Colombia, SC and works at a firm called Lunch + Recess, while serving on the boards of several organizations including the Indie Grits Film Festival (see my post on Toro y Moi). I think his presentation was all stuff that inspires him. Again, it was difficult to hear everything he was saying.

Then Kate and Lindsay Nevin talked about opening a creative "commons" building at 1600 Meeting Street. I've driven past it dozens of times and wondered about it sitting empty. I always assumed it was condemned or something but they showed photos of the inside and it is quite lovely. They want to put architects and designers and people in offices in there, so it's probably something I could never afford or use but it sounds neat. They talked about how there is a "creative corridor" running up Meeting/East Bay area and showed a map highlighting places like Santi's, Taco Boy, Tatooed Moose and some galleries and design places on mid-lower Meeting. I understand gentrification and what it takes to make an area a good investment. Yes, it made sense. But in the back of my mind the map read like outposts of where white kids like to hang out in the middle of a predominantly black area of town, being shown to a predominantly white audience in a predominantly white part of town. Like we were plotting a takeover or something. I hope that as the "creative corridor" idea takes off investors and enthusiasts are able to appreciate what is already there in the neighborhood and that it is revitalized for everyone in it. Of course the 1600 Meeting project sounds exciting and I'm certain that's not at all what they intended the map to be. They also mentioned that the idea was formed several Pecha Kucha's ago, which was cool.

Hailey Wist, whose documentary film The Garden Summer is soon to be released, talked about how she and a group of five other young people started a farm in Arkansas (I think) as a response to the food-crisis feeling after watching such films as Food, Inc. They grew crops sustainably, sold them at a farmer's market, and used the money to buy and eat locally. She showed slides of them on the farm and a teaser for the film. It looked, honestly, like heaven.

Mary Mac McFadden identified herself as a designer, even though she has a degree in architecture. My dad is an architect and has a real problem with interior designers and people who aren't architects referring to themselves as architects and doing an architect's work, mainly because of the qualification issues. So I'm familiar with architectural anti-designer rants. That's why it was novel and enlightening to see McFadden identify herself as a designer and discuss design as a creative process that spans many professions.

Then Yve Assad and Will Fulford, who founded TheFastandDirty.com, an online flat-track motorcycle racing magazine, explained the history of flat-track racing while three riders drove around the perimeter of the park and entered the stage area with a puff of dry ice. They showed film of people racing in the '20s on hand-laid wooden tracks with no brakes, no throttle (just "off" and "full speed go") and no protective gear save leather "helmets." When they crashed, if the collision didn't kill them, they'd get so many deep splinters from the track that they'd die of infection, because it was the freaking 1920s. So they moved racing to flat dirt tracks instead. Plus, the wooden tracks were a pain in the ass to build.

I left while Carolyn Evans, author of Forty Beads; The Simple Sexy Secret for Transforming Your Marriage, was speaking. She probably has awesome advice, though once I heard the name of the book I couldn't stop thinking about anal beads. "Dang, that's a lot of anal beads," I thought. She was in fact referring to her birthday gift to her husband of 40 beautiful antique glass Venician beads, along with the promise of daily sex for 40 days (which she promised drunkenly and then thought "oh crap I cannot do this" the next morning). In the anecdote her husband asks, "What am I supposed to do with these beads?" Evans left this teaser as a mystery so we'd read the book, but in my mind I immediately answered, "Put them in your butt." Since this book and method is so popular, though, I am guessing that is not the correct answer. Plus you don't really use loose artisanal glass beads for that. And is it just me, or would 40 straight days of sex not really be that scary? The only problem I see, assuming you could just do oral some days and give your genitals a rest, would be getting extremely pissed/annoyed at your SO one (or more) of those days and still somehow delivering on the sex. In movies when couples start fighting it's sexy-fighting where all of a sudden they stop yelling and slam themselves, smooshed together kissing, into a wall. Whereas when I fight it's because I'm irritated, petty or angry, and it doesn't lead anywhere except maybe a crying fit or food binge.

And that, for me, concludes Pecha Kucha. I liked it, and even though I was PMS-ing I found that watching presentations as an adult is very different from in high school in terms of mental snark. I felt sort of community-y, a little excited, and more informed about what people in Charleston do, enjoy, hope for, and create. I think I will do it again next time if I can get my ticket before they sell out.

Authenticity, hipsters, copycats

There's a post about authenticity at Thread for Thought that links lots of topics-- hipsters, Native Americans who reclaim imagery, drag queens, Marie Antoinette, the ongoing hip-hop baggy-pants legislative battles, French ladies' hats during German occupation.

Much has been written about dominant cultures appropriating oppressed cultures. Fashion trends like the current "tribal" and "ikat" trends take various cultural elements and re-sell them to Westerners with no context of meaning or history, flippantly turning those idioms into Western ones. Some Native Americans, for instance, reclaim images of old Hollywood cowboys & Indians like feathered headdresses because those images have been appropriated and twisted by an oppressive dominant culture. To put it another way, hip hop culture has also been appropriated to some extent by powerful corporations and white pop culture. Dance moves, phrases, beats and clothes "borrowed from," (but never returned to) hip hop street style have left a sour taste for many people of color who consider themselves a part of that culture.



I think this is a small part of why so many people are angry with hipsters. Hipsters appropriate from everywhere. They're in hot water with cultural studies departments right now for wearing feathered headdresses, championing "ironic racism," and for fetishizing oppressive masculinity. I think part of the reason they do it stems from simple retro styles being back in. The '70s are in, and in the '70s the dominant culture appropriated massively from Native Americans and other cultures.

But hipsters also appropriate from dominant cultures. Anchorman mustaches; unwieldy glasses which, still today, can be seen on white-collar workers and nerds alike; a nostalgia for the '80s that was popularized by Gen-X-ers who glorified their own childhood, but is now seen from people born in the '90s. Lodge/sportsclub decorations and aesthetics, European bicycle culture, white "trailor trash"-y styles. The implication is, all those cultures exist for hipsters to play around with. It implies that those dominant cultures don't know any better because they're older and stodgier, but hipsters are young and playful so they're doing it ironically. For many people from dominant cultures in the U.S., this is the first time they've experienced having their culture appropriated and twisted.


I definitely don't want to compare appropriation of cultures by their oppressors to dominant cultural appropriation by hipsters. First off, hipsters aren't dominant. It's not like aging geeks and good-ole-boy hunting clubs don't have a mouthpiece with which to object. Second, I don't think it's really hurting anyone, just sort of mystifying them and pissing them off. I bring it up because I want to note that the attitude has changed and expanded about what's up for grabs, and that's a new feeling for a lot of people.

What does this have to do with portraiture? Mmmm-- something, I'm sure.

Osama Bin Ladin's Dead... hmm.

This has nothing to do with art, but...
So they finally got Osama bin Laden last night. Not just "got," but killed, shot in the face, and buried unceremoniously at sea with no Muslim rites of burial. I sure don't feel sorry for him, but my first instantaneous thought was, "they didn't have to do it that way. How many people will die, be injured and be raped because we had to show off?" I mean, bin Laden was just a man. Radical Islamist militancy, though, is a movement that will keep growing and I shudder to think of how he was so thoroughly made a martyr and how this is a beginning rather than an end. Ugh.
It is true that in some cases one person's 'terrorist' is another person's 'freedom fighter,' but Bin Laden was just a monster: cult leader, bloodthirsty militant, and power-hungry opportunist. But I learned something incredibly important from him. Watching the videos he released I was floored by how gentle he seemed, so charismatic and thoughtful and spiritual. He had a very empathetic face and it was simply unearthly to look into his face and realize he wanted me dead, that he delighted in death and suffering. It was an important lesson in what evil looks like.

For instance people are always so surprised when a child molester or domestic abuser is proven guilty because, "he's such a nice guy/girl!" My mother and I both experienced blatant sexism from bosses who were well-loved and very friendly. Over the years I have unfortunately become acquainted with more than one sociopath, and while I cannot call those people themselves evil, the effect on those around them is a bitter pill to swallow if you want to believe in humanity. Bad guys don't look like they do in movies: most racists don't look like Colonel Sanders in a white hood; most sexists don't look like the rich guy from Titanic, most killers don't look like Hannibal Lector and that's the problem. They can be likeable people.

I truly hope the world will be a more peaceful place after Osama bin Laden is gone but the skeptic in me is... well, skeptical.

Adele: Rolling in the Deep

I am in love with this singer. Seriously:



I wouldn't call this video "entertaining," so much as "enthralling." And even though I'm sure it wasn't cheap, it is simple. The director, Sam Brown, made a great choice to keep the focus on Adele's actual performance, the voice leaving her body and her facial expression (and she's very good at acting while singing). It's an old-fashioned magical aspect of watching live music and has been largely missing from pop music. I'm tired of female musicians being forced into a convenient box and having their creative talent limited by marketing, so it's nice to see it done right.

My husband remarked the other night, "It's shit that the edgy art you see in Charleston was cutting edge in NY about fifteen years ago." I opened my mouth to join in the complaint-- I was ready!-- but then realized where really contemporary art can be seen in Charleston: interior design. Design has consistently echoed contemporary art about ten years later: in the early sixties, the simple unadorned shapes mimicked the abstract expressionism of Lee Krasner and Alexander Calder from the early fifties. Layouts and wall treatments felt like an upscale gallery: a big white box. In the eighties, everything was supposed to be "sculptural," echoing the pure colors, geometric shapes and industrial feel of seventies minimalists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Frank Stella. Trendy layouts were more like artists' lofts and guerrilla art spaces in "up and coming" New York. Now upscale hipster nests and trendy King Street furniture stores resemble '90s gallery installations. Loose hanging light bulbs; stark, careless-looking furniture layouts that seem to have been culled from here and there (a la struggling artist finding supplies), vignettes culled from "found objects;" artwork casually leaning against a wall, everything "reclaimed." There aren't too many visual arts exhibits that look like this in Charleston (even though it's hard to find one that doesn't in big cities) but the look is very prevalent in interiors.

So, to get back to the video, I noticed that the scenery looked like guerrilla art "happenings" and generally like a series of art exhibits in a trendy gallery. The director knows Adele's audience well: young, interested in the art scene, probably female (as are about 70% of art school applicants) interested in something with depth but probably not willing to sit through a Bruce Nauman-style ordeal.

Of course the whole reason this slung-together installation look was developed in the seventies and eighties was to avoid being an aesthetic. Conceptual artists were rebelling against the art market's iron-fisted control over artists, so they made art that wasn't exactly an object (installation) or wasn't made to be sold (not traditionally beautiful or cool). Those artists are probably super-pissed about how trendy and commodified the look is now, but I think it's kind of funny. Maybe that makes me a capitalist tool? To continue in that vein I'm glad the 50s/60s acoustic "wall of sound" is trendy again. Sure it was co-opted by major labels from musicians seeking to rebel against pop trends but it's still nice to hear it on the radio once in a while.

Interview with David Bowen

A little late with this link, but here is an interview with David Bowen, an artist who uses natural systems like wind and flies to manipulate mechanical systems like lights and moving parts. He participated in ReceiverFest at Redux, which I so regretfully missed (they'd better do it again in 2012 if the world has not ended!).

I know the author, Rebekah Drysdale, from Tivoli Studios in Charleston but perusing her writing on Daily Serving was the first time I ever heard her critical analysis or thoughts on conceptual and non-object-based art. Charleston needs more of this and I'm glad she's posting.

Re-Nude: Part 3 (collages n stuff)

These may look like drippy paintings but they are collages by Conrad Guevara. The top one is called, "Rear Action," and the one on bottom is "Make It Rain." The fact that I don't get excited about exploring the History and Meaning of Painting through art that fetishizes painting makes me a really bad postmodernist (or a great post-post-modernist?) But where I fail Guevara steps up, and he seems to pose an intriguing question:

Lichtenstein famously made a gigantic steel sculpture that represented an Abstract Expressionist brushstroke, presented in Lichtenstein's famous cartoon-dot-and-outline style. It was a sculpture of a cartoon of the ideal painterly expression, oh-so-ironic. What if he had conceived of that piece today, informed by punk graphic art, Tokyo pop art, the Etsy marketplace, and feminist art?

While Lichtenstein was making art for galleries, public squares and modern mansions, many artists today are designing artwork for ease of shipping, for digital sharing, and for a young, middle-class, apartment-dwelling crowd. The contrast is similar to the difference between Northern (German/Dutch) and Southern (Italian) Renaissance painting. While Michelangelo and da Vinci were making theatrical, larger-than-life murals and sculpture for the tombs of royalty and to decorate the Church and the villas of great families, in the North painters like Durer, Vermeer and van Eyck were supplying the newly-created middle class with art. Their paintings were much smaller, often of domestic themes that ordinary people could relate to, and more affordable. They were more contemplative as well. Durer even had great success as a print-maker because because he could make simple artwork that was even more affordable to the middle-class.

To answer the question, Lichtenstein's commentary on the state of painting today may have looked more like these collages. The materials are (I think) colored paper and magazine pages on an acrylic background, affixed to a canvas (as in "Make It Rain") or framed ("Rear Action"). The size is appropriate for a small house or apartment, and the materials (photographic magazine pages) are familiar to an audience of ordinary people, as are the pretty candy colors and references (banal pornography and now-familiar drippy Abstract Expressionist art like that of Jackson Pollock).

The use of materials is very witty, too: printed magazines and photography have largely replaced painting and hand-made or -printed illustrations as a mode of mass artistic expression. Using a magazine to mimic paint is balls-to-the-wall ironic. But my favorite critique of "The Brushstroke" is the comparison to a spray of semen. My mind immediately went there with the "drips" covering the face of the model in "Rear Action." It is SUCH an accurate way to describe the macho post-war culture of Abstract Expressionism. I always wondered why critics like Lichtenstein stopped so short of the obvious: the Big Ideal Painterly Expression championed by Clement Greenburg and New York AbEx collectors was a sublimation of male orgasm, full stop.

And that's as far as I'm willing to go down the "Is Painting Dead?" rabbit hole.

Here's another collage. It's called, " I Love You, I Know," by Angela Chvarak. The title immediately reminded me of the scene in The Empire Strikes Back with Han Solo and Leia right before he gets frozen. Then the hands in the collage reminded me of Luke's hand that gets severed, since my mind had already gone down that road. But I re-grouped and took another look.

It bears an uncanny resemblance to a piece I did in art school:

We were supposed to work along the theme, "God or Goddess," if I recall. That may be Mila Kunis' head, but I didn't know that at the time so ignore that and don't think of Meg Griffin or Black Swan.

Anyhow, Chvarak's piece looks like a flower in full bloom with arms for stamens, with a background of collage and graffiti-like paint radiating outward from the flower. In this context, "I Love You, I Know," makes sense because flowers can pollinate themselves. The piece could be a metaphor, then, for loving one's self (or, more literally, masturbation, since we cannot impregnate ourselves). It seems like more of a female construction of masturbation or sexytimes not only because flowers are symbolic of women but because women's "alone time" is often portrayed as special, sensual, an indulgent retreat from the world complete with lit candles and a bubble-bath; whereas men's "alone time" is usually portrayed as a gross, thoughtless indulgence, the way you might eat your way through an entire bag of chips out of boredom.

I don't have much to say about Chvarak's piece but it is one of my favorites. It's very fun to look at.

*If you enjoyed this work you might also like Wangechi Mutu, Robert Rauschenberg

The Inevitable Preggobelly!

Check out ClinicEscort's tumblr, The Inevitable Preggobelly, showing the images that publications choose to accompany articles about abortion. ClinicEscort suggests several appropriate illustrations: doctor's offices, serious conversations between a man and woman, a woman, or the typical lab-coat medical imagery. Yet the illustrations are of mostly white women's pregnant bellies "minutes away" from birthing a baby, while nearly all abortion happens in the first trimester (when pregnancy isn't really showing). She also points out, though, that the headless, legless womb photos are dehumanizing for the women portrayed. They erase the woman involved in the pregnancy by showing only her pregnant belly, thereby framing abortion in terms of the fetus and not the woman. As a visual suggestion, it seems to work.


I think this is really important to keep in mind in terms of portraiture: revealing people in a certain way can sometimes make that person invisible. I think that is what many women grapple with when they do self-portraiture and depict their own bodies in artwork: how to reveal, versus objectify. Personally, I still aim for that romantic notion of depicting a personality, a history and an energy instead of merely a face when I do a portrait. It can be impossible to know, though, if I'm hung up on something I see in them that erases what is really there.

Sara Schneckloth & Patrick Nugent at Toro y Moi

My husband and I drove up to Columbia to see Toro y Moi play. Since it was part of the Indie Grits Film Festival there was an accompanying video piece by Sara Schneckloth and Patrick Nugent projected on the wall while Toro y Moi performed. Schneckloth, who teaches drawing, had created a huge line drawing that was stapled to the wall, while Nugent had created a video that, when projected onto the drawing (and was painstakingly calibrated), appeared to make the drawing come to life in an animation that interacted with the music. Nugent said they were only about 20% done with the project and were showing "all they had ready." He already had something crazy like 19 layers of film (sort of like digital film overlays that you put together like a puzzle in an editing program). If this is only 20% I'd love to see the finished product, because what they had was gorgeous. I stupidly took no photos of it, but Schneckloth has some frames from the video/drawing up on her website, from what I take to be an earlier showing of the piece. Schneckloth described the process and it sounded like Nugent asked her to create the drawing, then she handed it off to him and he used it as a literal framework for the video. The finished piece had a trippy, organic feeling reminiscent of cellular biology, intestines and 90s grunge music videos.

The only other time I've seen a video projected onto a concrete surface that was a part of the video, was a short film by David Lynch. He projected what must have been an actual celluloid film onto a white sculpted surface with three tortured looking faces affixed to it. The content of the film was animations that involved the faces. The animated film was always changing while the faces, of course, were static.

Still, this piece was very different from Lynch's film. I associate Schneckloth's drawing style with an overarching movement in contemporary art of fetishizing the act of drawing. I see it in every indie film that has hand-drawn block letters in the credits, and in artwork that pushes doodling and amateur drawing beyond the limits of notebook pages and into galleries. I see Schneckloth's particular style as an homage to mark-making, a glorification of drawing for drawing's sake. Within the context of an increasingly digital world and an artworld that has come to accept simpler visual expression, a labor-intensive abstract drawing like Schneckloth's seems to flout modern design conventions in favor of engaging manually in the act of creating.

So I was surprised that this hand-done piece was used to create a digital video installation. As far as digital video editing goes, this seems as hands-on as possible, though the two media still seem at odds even as they flawlessly coordinate. It is certainly a technical stunt that introduces and suggests new uses of technology and I was duly impressed. But it is also an example of the digital side of this duo bending over backward to conform to the old-fashioned analog drawing.

The band, Toro y Moi, is also a digital/old-fashioned mix. They use Ableton Live software, which is a computer program for mixing sound and creating digital music that can be manipulated live or saved and replayed. My husband, who uses the software, thought they'd be using laptops and digitally manipulating the music more during the performance. Though they did use it some the performance was mostly live players on guitars and keyboards. The singers sometimes mimicked echo effects in real-time by repeating the end of words, and lots of other elements of the music were informed by digital alteration.

I had a great time and when we got back home the next day I promptly got sick. I guess sleep deprivation + beer +hipster club germs + devouring pizza with my hipstery germy hands = disease.

Re-Nude: Part 2

*My apologies for the shitty photography.

Continuing what I loved about Re-Nude, here is part of Jenna Lyles' series, "Fempire / Night Vision."



I didn't immediately love this. Actually, when I first saw this hasty-looking display, I exclaimed, "What the crap?" But then I was drawn in by this glittery weirdness:


You're looking at strips of holographic stretch fabric that you might have seen on an ice-dancing or stripper costume from 1994, sewn down only on the top edge and hanging in loose strips. Above that is black fabric with a chain-mail-type texture exposing a grid of sheer black mesh beneath vinyl-type overlay. Mounted over that is a developed Polaroid with a blank image. To the left, between the fabric sections, are three repeated copies of a photo of a woman in a red wig and cosplay-esque purple lingerie, in a cartoonish "sneaking" pose. The photos are sewn on with orderly zig-zag machine stitching. The whole piece is sewn down to a raw-edged irregular scrap of canvas about the size of a notebook page and stapled to the wall on the top edge only.

The piece is obviously very playful and flashy, like a toy. But it isn't candy-colored and well-packaged like a lot of neo-Pop art and Tokyo Pop. It looks like a kid made it (sort of), but it doesn't fall into the category of cutesy childhood fetish hipster art, like the endearingly awkward, big-eyed, wolf-hide-wearing, lost-little-girl illustrations on Etsy. It incorporates crafty elements, like exaggerated stitching and use of cloth but seems divorced from homemaking, stuffed sculpture or clothing design.

What we have, then, feels very uneasy. My first instinct was to suggest that the artist either make the pieces smaller and more precious/sculptural, or large and numerous enough that they feel like a visual assault. But I keep coming back to the size and presentation because they don't resolve themselves and that experience feels challenging and fresh. And although the fabrics are wonky and unfinished, and the photos look homemade, the regular stripes and grids anchor the piece while the repetition of the colorful photos create an exciting rhythm. The small size also makes the piece seem half-hidden and private, like a radical fantasy told in a quiet voice. Functionally, the canvas is a tiny playground for the tiny redheaded heroine.

She shows up in all the pieces in the series, usually duplicated:


"Fempire:" I take it to mean, "female empire." So the canvases, as her playground, could be that empire. She could be suggesting that a woman's empire is an imaginary realm that she crafts for herself and rules like a superhero. Totally empowerful, right? But why the stripper clothes and fabrics, and why the implied male gaze? Why does she repeat the images of the woman, which usually serves to cheapen the image and efface the original, a la Andy Warhol's Marilyn? Could she be taking the opposite approach, that repetition glorifies the individual through syndicating and branding oneself? From a marketing perspective, the model has put her best foot forward by decorating herself, then has reproduced that image and displayed it in a dazzling peacock-like array.

What's more, the woman doesn't seem to rule the space, exactly. She seems to be involved in some sort of covert guerrilla tactics, which would imply oppression and fighting back. Is she trying to take back her own psychic space? Is she experiencing conflict about her own sexual fantasy? The fabrics-- purple lame, sparkly black fishnet and black lace-- suggest sexuality that caters to a male gaze. Is this the "fempire," the power of pleasing others? And is this the conflict she is engaged in? The other fabric, canvas, at first suggests a traditional artist's canvas. But in the context of covert guerrilla tactics it suggests military warfare as well. The juxtaposition of the sparkly fabric and the canvas, then, brings to mind the quote, "love is a battlefield," but also suggests common realities in which female sexuality and sex work incur violence, and where warfare breeds prostitution and sexual violence toward women.


"Night Vision." She actually wears what could be night vision goggles here. I also think the title, "night vision," refers to the nighttime fabrics that would be seen in a club or bedroom. The split title seems to reinforce the notion of conflict between female sexual domain and violence. It could simply be a reference to the conflicting urges to be vulnerable and open, versus guarded and strong when it comes to sex.

I just looked up Jenna Lyles after writing this post and it turns out she co-organized Tick Tock Blume, a small Kulture Klash type festival with the theme, "time," and her co-organizer was... Liz Vaughan, the subject of my last post and my other favorite artist from Re-Nude. Wow.

More on what I loved from Re-Nude coming up in another post!

*If you like the artwork above you might also enjoy work by Hannah Hoch, Wangechi Mutu

Edited to add: My husband has this to say about these pieces: "...I like it. It looks like a Trapper-Keeper."

Words vs. Images

I'm linking to a post from Echidne's blog about how images are used in news and media to sway public opinion much more effectively than words and verbal analysis. She is frustrated and concerned that images create a knee-jerk gut reaction regardless of whether it is accurate or not, and that thoughtful follow-up analyses cannot compete. That must be very frustrating for a writer like her. Echidne adds in the comments,

My own skills are not so strong in the image-creation part, especially if I can't use my voice for it. I'm also not at all certain how one fights images which mislead. Is it only possible to do it with other images which mislead in the other direction? Or what?

I agree that such imagery is used in misleading ways (ahem, the campaign to show only weird-looking photos of Hillary Clinton in '08). It's such a big problem that I'm not going to open that can of worms.

I will add, though, that there is such a thing as thoughtful analysis in the form of an image. It's called "art." And it's pretty cool. It's a shame that as the world turns more and more toward imagery, visual art is the least publicized of any art form I can think of-- literature, dance, music, film. There is no Oprah contemporary visual arts club, for instance. Or People Magazine coverage of who wore what to the Turner Prize festivities.

To address the question of whether imagery can "mislead in the other direction," i.e. why don't the good guys make this knee-jerk imagery: they often do. And it is immediately dismissed by both lefty artists and fundy conservatives as "shock art." I think no one even takes note when the Fox Newses of the world make shock art because of this "boys will be boys" permissive attitude toward the political right and the tabloid media. You know, we expect them to suck and they do.

I will also add that the number one complaint I get from the black-and-white thinkers of the world who want to know, "why can't I understaaaaaaand modern art???" is that the message in visual art isn't clear, like it is with writing. They seem to strongly prefer a written analysis to an analytical piece of visual art. Socially conservative mindsets push the idea that imagery should be a gut reaction, whether of comfort or shock, by publicly mocking modern analytical artwork any way they can, by pushing an attitude of staunch refusal to think, at all, about what any piece or modern art might mean, no matter how simple or well-explained. People are rarely deliberately obtuse without reason, and I believe the same conservatives who use imagery to great effect are also intimidated on a deep level by its power.

Portraiture right now.

It's difficult to get a grip on what an artistic era is really about, to sum it up and notice big trends until some time has passed. When I look around at this decade's paintings and sculpture, there's such a variety of art in top galleries and museums, but I'm just starting to notice what isn't there: portraiture. I'm excluding, for the moment, self-portraiture because the exploration of self is huge right now: heritage, the self in society, one's self as a marginalized person, one's own subconscious, etc. And there are some celebrity portraits too, but those are often by artists who have never met that celebrity, and I think their intent is usually to reference what that celebrity stands for, not to provide any insight into that person. What I'm not seeing is artwork that focuses on a separate, individual person for the sake of exploring that personality.

After Modigliani, Andrew Wyeth, David Hockney, Lucian Freud, Alice Neel... I come up a bit short. And when artists such as Elizabeth Peyton do focus on portraying others exclusively the thinking art world takes note of this idiosyncrasy and declares it ironic on some level.

After the seventies or so I have to look to photography to find many searching, insightful or dedicated portraitists. William Eggleston, Cindy Sherman (self-portraits, I know), Emmet Gowin, Arnold Newman, Nan Goldin, Annie Leibovitz. Most of the big headlines and controversies of photography have involved portraits: Sally Mann's kids, Diane Arbus inspiring ever photography student who ever set foot in an art school for at least the last fifteen years.

I would have guessed that because portraiture isn't shown often in top venues right now, it means issues of portraiture are simply no longer considered relevant in fine art-- but those same issues figure prominently in contemporary photography. I wonder if the difference lies in the way the two art forms are sponsored and by whom they are created and displayed. Paintings got bigger and more dramatic during the AbEx years, and then came PoMo installations and shows that take up entire galleries. I think painting and sculpture are seen as public events nowadays, whereas photography is still associated with ordinary people and family photos, as well as magazines that cater to ordinary people and with Myspace and Facebook usage. That makes photography seem smaller-scale in terms of production cost, therefore less is at stake. Perhaps that makes it more acceptable for photographers to simply portray a specific person, rather than make grand observations of society at large or explore one's own psyche in such a specific way as to be nearly universal and thus accessible to the public.

Then again maybe portraiture is no longer as esteemed in the eyes of the art world. There is, of course, the unsavory association with making a living. And perhaps as an interest in others, a form of art that is literally like a communication between two specific people (portraitist and subject), portraiture is seen as feminine, in contrast with grander, less personally specific themes of society, abstracted human experience, and massive abstract forms, which could be construed as masculine. And, being feminized, portraiture is not as valued today. Or portraiture could have fallen by the wayside during the Abstract Expressionist Movement, when a completely abstract portrait would, I'd argue, be possible but would certainly present problems for both artist and viewer. Portraiture would have continued to be sidelined by Conceptualism-- conceptual portraits are possible but also problematic-- and again by Pop Art because the movement's focus on pop culture would preclude a focus on individual non-celebrities.

I don't for a moment think portraiture is over. The genre is too basic, too essential to art history and human expression, to be abandoned. It's still alive and kicking outside of the elitest of white boxes but I expect the comeback to be from outsider art that makes its way into the art world.

Tamara de Lempicka

Auto-Portrait. I'm pretty sure this is a photo of the original, but this is a really popular painting to copy. I can see why; she's clearly a bad-ass.


Tunic.


Mrs. Bush. 1929. I think the knees in this are incredible. I also thought the skyscrapers in the background were kind of funny; she's like Ms. Modern Phallus.


Portrait of a Man. Notice the Michael Jackson glove.


Madame Boucard. She looks a little jowl-y, and de Lempicka has clearly idealized her a bit, to great effect. I can't help but wish I could see de Lempicka's take on this aging face without idealizing it, though; there would be fantastic planes and shapes for her to work with. I've seen a few portraits of older people, but they are in a less geometric style.


Kizette on the Balcony, 1927. Oil on canvas.


Femme dans Dentelle ("Lady in Lace).


Duchess of La Salle, 1925. This must have sent the oldsters with their Victorian morals screaming for the hills. I admire how she changed the placement of the buildings, which are usually rising like triumphant phallic symbols behind the subject. In this case they are at the Duchess's feet and a Baroque-style drapery surrounds the top of the figure. The Duchess appears in command of the past, and present, and her sexuality.





St. Moritz. It reminds me of Ingmar Bergman. Her understanding and exaggeration of eye sockets is amazing.


Grand Duke Gabriel.


Compte Vettor Marcello, 1933. (proto-"blue steel")


Irene et Sa Seur. 1925.


Telephone II. I think this is incredible. She looks so ridiculously girlish, like a grown-up Shirley Temple, and I think she might be wearing a sailor-suit of some sort to top it off. But she must be the most sinister, sexual Shirley Temple ever. The telephone, though, is what I can't get over. It reminds me of depictions of teenage girls from the fifties to the eighties or so sitting on their beds yakking into an oversized receiver and being OMG GIRLS. But the phone in this is menacing and black like a gun or masculine machine of some sort. It's more like a scene from a spy movie.

***

Tamara de Lempicka was born to an upper-class Polish family. She saw a man while out at the opera when she was just 15 and staked a claim to him as her future husband; three years later, they married. (I shudder to think who I might have ended up with if I chose my husband at 15.) They moved to Russia but then got stuck in the Russian Revolution and, being well-to-do, her husband was imprisoned. She apparently bribed and flirted his way out of jail, then they went to Paris.

Bohemian Paris in the 1920s sounds AWESOME. She slept with everyone: famous men, famous ladies, artists, actors, royalty. Her husband got fed up and left, but she rebounded with several very avant-garde lesbians. She painted the portrait of a Baron's mistress, then replaced her as the Baron's mistress, and eventually when the Baroness died de Lempicka and the Baron married and went to New York. There she met famous artists like De Kooning, Stieglitz, and Georgia O'Keefe, and probably had awesome sex with them all, and was a wildly successful portrait artist, till the late 1930s when her style changed and she abandoned commercial portraiture.

Her studio and professional conduct were apparently notable as well. People ask me about my studio, and I have to explain that it's more like a work-space, a stall in a warehouse and not a show-room of any sort. De Lempicka, on the other hand, was a glamorous celebrity who kept a large studio in the city that was part stylish lounge, part work-space. She painted in gorgeous clothes with a smock over them and most of her subjects were socialites and royalty.

I really admire her attitude as a portrait artist. Her subjects are in charge of the canvas, completely inhabiting every inch of space, even when they assume a traditional romanticized female "fainting limp-necked waif" posture. Someday I hope to keep a studio like that and command the type of presence she commanded in it. I'm also happy to see her work is getting more and more exposure. I think she's on her way to being an Andy Wyeth or M. C. Escher type of figure: enjoying wide popularity outside of the art world, and respect from within it. She wasn't very innovative, after all; this has watered-down elements of Fernand Leger's cubist style ("tube-ism;" I always hated his work) as well as watered-down elements of the hardcore cubists. She takes some color and atmosphere from deChirico, as well as his references to Classical Greek imagery, but doesn't push the envelope of subject-matter like the Surrealists. And then she borrows from the German New Objectivists, but her work isn't a deeply unsettling comment on post-war society. I think the attitude toward society generated by her paintings is most like an energetic, optimistic WPA mural. But every artist borrows; what she ends up with seems to work.



 

Edited to add: Wow, this appears to be a continuously popular post! so, all of you de Lempicka fans will probably enjoy this as much as I did.