Playlist : Mahalia, The Blow, The War on Drugs, Kali Uchis, Night Beds

This week’s best songs.

Mahalia - No Reply

                                                       

                                                                       YouTube

The Blow  - Get up

                                                              YouTube

The War on Drugs – Knocked Down

                                                                   

                                                                        YouTube

Kali Uchis – In my dreams

                                                         

YouTube

Night Beds  -  Me, Liquor and God                                                                                                                                       

YouTube

Vitamin D

The sun is out. I always envy people who delight in the sun. Relaxing on  the beach, sitting at a cafe terrace, drinking and watching people go by. My vitamin D deficiency compels me to go out. Give me a solitary ride on my bike, anytime,  dreaming another life. Yesterday I went to the roof of my office building and took in a shot of sunshine. And I took these two photos.



                                                                           

How Constance and Oscar Wilde Helped Get Women Into Trousers

                                                           

The year was 1884, and Oscar Wilde was already something of a London celebrity. Though he had not yet published the plays that would earn him his spot among the Victorian literati, he had made a name for himself as aesthete, man-about-town, and lecturer—with public views on everything aesthetic, including clothes. At the beginning of the year, he announced his engagement to Constance Lloyd, who he had met in Ireland some years earlier. Newspapers frothed about the news, and appeared relieved that Wilde, and his new wife, would not be moving to Dublin: “there was some fear lest London should lose its lion and society its favorite source of admiration and ridicule. … Happily this danger is averted. We keep Oscar.”

But Wilde also appeared in the papers that year for another reason. In a series of letters published in the Pall Mall Gazette, he wrote about how women ought to dress. The following year, in the New York Tribune, he published his essay “The Philosophy of Dress,” in which he stressed the important relationship between clothing and one’s soul.

At that time, women commonly wore heavy, restrictive underwear, and long, cumbersome skirts with crinolines or bustles. Corsets were certainly uncomfortable, but they could also be lethal, deforming skeletons, compromising fertility and even driving internal organs into places they oughtn’t have been. Despite that, people continued to wear them, and to “tight-lace,” ignoring doctors’ concerns and claiming these devices improved posture.

It was in this climate that people began to call for dress reform, with some asserting that these corsets were immodest and promoted an objectifying take on women’s bodies. In time, “dress reform” would come to be seen as a crucial part of the fight for women’s equality. It’s ironic, then, that many of the “reformed” clothes suggested as an alternative were themselves deemed shocking and morally questionable.

Wilde’s letters were strongly in favor of simple, comfortable outfits for women, with minimal “fringes, flounces and kilting.” More radically, he expressed his fondness for the “divided skirt.” This controversial article of clothing was essentially an extremely wide-legged pair of trousers. It had caused some anxiety in the British press, amid concerns that two-legged clothing for women would promote immoral ideals. The divided skirt—a trouser posing as a skirt—was a compromise of sorts. In a public letter, Constance, Wilde’s wife, described it as trying to “look as though it were not divided, on account of the intolerance of the British public.” Those who did wear it loved the liberty it afforded them. One wearer described “the delightful sense of freedom that results from the removal of petticoats.”

Constance was propelled to stardom through her celebrity marriage. Even the New York Times reported on her wedding dress, which Wilde is alleged to have designed. (In his biography of Wilde, Richard Ellmann describes “rich creamy satin,” “a delicate cowslip tint … a high Medici collar; ample, puffed sleeves [and a] veil of saffron-colored Indian gauze.”)

On her honeymoon, the now-Constance Wilde ruminated on what to do, beyond being mother and wife, writing to a friend that she wanted a career: “I am thinking of becoming a correspondent to some paper, or else going on the stage.” Though she didn’t go on the stage, nor became a reporter, she was instead a star campaigner for multiple causes. Women’s dress reform, and the divided skirt, would be one of her most public targets.

                                                                   

A few years earlier, in 1881, Lady Frances Harberton had launched the British arm of the Rational Dress Society, an organization that later promised to “promote the adoption, according to individual taste and convenience, of a style of dress based on considerations of health, comfort and beauty.” Staggeringly, it advocated for underwear that weighed under seven pounds. The Society came four decades after the bloomers craze of the 1850s, but similarly promoted towards the liberation of bifurcated leg cladding: the “divided skirt.”

The satirical magazine Punch had plenty to say about the “divided skirt”: in June 1881, it published a not-inaccurate poem about what, exactly, the divided skirt was:

“Skirts be divided—oh, what an atrocity!

To ‘dual garmenture’ folks must attain.

True that another skirt hides this insanity

Miss Mary Walker in old days began;

Yet it should flatter our masculine vanity,

For this means simply the trousers of Man!”

The following month, they decried it simply as “revived Bloomerism,” and proposed that its proponents be nicknamed “Pantaloon-atics.” Bloomers were Turkish-style trousers popular in the early 1850s, for similar reasons to the “divided skirt”. It was short-lived, but the media furore it provoked continued, and it loomed large in the popular imagination.

Constance seems to have agreed with, and sought to propagate, Wilde’s strong views on women’s clothing. She dressed as much for him as herself: The actress Elizabeth Robins remembered meeting her at home, where she wore a white muslin dress, despite the relatively cold August day. Seeing Robins staring at her “midsummer frock”, Constance is said to have remarked: “My husband likes me to wear white.” On other occasions, onlookers remembered Constance’s “very peculiar and eccentric clothes,” which she wore apparently “to please Oscar, not herself.” At a private viewing, “instead of looking at the pictures on the walls, a great many people were asking each other if they had seen Mrs. Oscar Wilde.”

All of these things collided—Constance’s sudden shunt into the limelight; her readiness to wear unusual clothes; Wilde’s strong and supportive views on dress reform; her desire to do something beyond being Wilde’s wife and mother to their two sons. She quickly became one of the Rational Dress Society’s most vocal and visible advocates.

Atlas Obscura

Degas and His Model by Alice Michel

Just finished reading Degas and his model, a touching memoir by Alice Michel.

‘’Pauline thought about how odd it was, this aversion on Degas’s part to any easy grace and his constant search for poses that captured some vigorous action at his tensest moment. At the same time he wasn’t blind to the harmony of line or the beauty of forms, she knew, since he’d often praised his model’s body: her beautiful legs, her charmingly plump arms, her delicate joints. But he couldn’t stand it when Pauline put rouge on her lips or did her hair up in the latest fashion.  Even with his faded eyesight, he’d never fail to notice and, digging his fingers into her hair, he’d tug on it with all his strengths. ‘When someone is as young and fresh as you are, there’s no need to go playing the whore. Just stay as you were born! Natural, without  al this frippery!’ It made her wonder why he so loved to paint the theatre, where everything is a façade . But the question seemed too difficult for her to puzzle out, so she quickly gave up on it.  No longer thinking of anything, Pauline mechanically held the pose.  A furious grunt made her spin around and she was taken by surprise to see Degas threatening her with a hammer. “I’d like to break your head to pay you back for how slack you are!’ he shouted. With a disdainful pout, Pauline looked at the little hammer, barely big enough to pound in a tack. ‘That’s no tool for a sculptor! You need at least a stonemason’s hammer’. ‘It’s true’,  he said, beginning to laugh. ‘I’ll never be any kind of sculptor’

‘’His coloured pencil in hand, Degas hesitated. Finally he applied a tentative stroke to the background of the pastel, then stopped to examine  the drawing, his face rigid in intense concentration. Pauline almost broke out in tears when she remembered the rapid movements he would’ve drawn with in the old days, compared to this trial and error. She left her bench and approached the stove, turning her back on the old artist to shut out the pathetic spectacle.  She had heard barely a handful of scratches of pencil on paper when all of a sudden the dull thud of a heavy body hitting the floor echoed though the atelier.  Degas had fallen completely over, dragging the easel down with him. When Pauline ran to help him up, he cried: ‘Leave me! Pick up the drawings first’. She obeyed and gathered up a number of drawings, that had fluttered off in every direction. The, helping him to his feet, which was no easy task, she asked: ‘What happened? Are you hurt?’ He gingerly felt his arms and legs and said, reassured : ‘No, I haven’t broking anything…As I was getting up, I hadn’t seen that my heel was caught on the easel and it tripped me over. Look, my girl, my nice clothes are covered in dust’

David Zwirner  Books


                                                                         

In contrast, Michel’s Degas is an almost systematic inversion of the reverent testimonials current in the French press in the years after the artist’s death in 1917. Degas, as seen by the model Pauline, is no stoic devotee of the Muses but a curmudgeon subject to sudden bouts of theatrical self-pity, always on the verge of collapsing into melancholy ruminations over his failing sight, his oncoming death. The artist famous for his deft public quips becomes, in private, a mealymouthed, repetitious prattler, retailing twenty-year-old anecdotes for the two-hundredth time. Instead of zingers (e.g., Gustave Moreau is “a hermit who knows what time the trains leave”), the model is obliged to de-escalate incoherent rants about Jewish conspiracies and feign interest in foggy reminiscences of trips to Italy and bouts of pubic lice. This Degas is not only tedious company but a volatile and occasionally violent taskmaster, liable to punch Pauline in the back or threaten her with a hammer when the session isn’t going as well as the artist would like, and perfectly capable of firing her for reading a book or—virulently anti-Semitic as he was—posing for a Jew. But perhaps the most cutting feature of Michel’s portrait is that “old Father Degas” is artistically impotent. He can finish nothing, and statuettes that represent years of work over hundreds of sessions crumble to dust before his eyes, to be begun again, and again, in a cycle broken only by his death. Instead of a prolific visionary, Michel’s Degas more resembles a Beckett character retrofitted for Third Republic melodrama.

The handful of art historians and curators who have drawn on Michel’s text to establish chronologies for specific sculptures, or for information about Degas’s late studio practice, otherwise sparsely documented, have typically assumed that the text is authentic. The editors of the 2012 French edition issued by L’Échoppe come to similar conclusions, asserting that Michel and Pauline are pseudonyms for the same individual, a model relating her firsthand experience. But there are certainly reasons to suspect that the real nature of the text is not so straightforward. In its original publication in the Mercure de France, it was presented without commentary, and no explicit claims were made for its authenticity. Nowhere does Michel state that she is Pauline or that the events she uses Pauline to narrate constitute a “firsthand view.” The model herself remains a cipher: we learn nearly nothing of her family life, of how she came to modeling, of what she does when she’s not posing. She serves instead to establish a perspectival framework that allows Michel to string together anecdotes about Degas, a format typical of accounts of artists’ lives in the period. And those anecdotes often seem carefully considered to hit on aspects of his personality that were, to some degree, commonly known—his political conservatism, his gruff manner—as if Michel were making an effort to hew just closely enough to testimonials by individuals known to have been intimate with the artist. Finally, the decision to begin Pauline’s account in medias res, with Degas’s light curse almost a distant echo of Alfred Jarry’s famous “Pschitt,” is certainly a literary touch. If Pauline is not necessarily Michel and vice versa, who could have been behind all this? An unknown individual capitalizing on the spate of interest in Degas? An associate of the recently deceased artist, male or female, writing under the cover of a pseudonym to slightly deflate his skyrocketing posthumous reputation? A journalist working from interviews with a model or models to produce a synoptic account?

Are the intricate descriptions of the artist’s studio and apartment sufficient evidence to demonstrate a kernel of authenticity somewhere in the text’s nested pseudonyms? Despite the artist’s notorious reclusiveness, previously published memoirs revealed at least some of this supposedly intimate information. But Michel provides one detail that might inspire confidence, precisely because of its seeming inconsequence: Pauline reports two sessions in the course of which Degas drinks an infusion of cherry-bark tea prepared for him by his maid, to ease a bladder disorder that forces him to get out of bed a half dozen times a night to urinate. It’s a microscopic detail that Vollard, in his own subsequently published book on the artist, also mentions: “He was walking about with a bowl of cherry bark tea in his hand and suddenly he looked up absently and said: ‘Do you have trouble urinating? I do, and so does my friend Z.’ ” Homeopathic infusions and troublesome nocturia were not, as might be expected, common features of testimonials about Degas.

From the introduction by Jeff Nagy, who translated  the book.

Paris Review
       

                                                                 

                

As we belatedly come to recognize that social progress is halting at best, and it becomes harder to flatter ourselves on our own enlightenment, it also becomes harder to relegate Degas’ inhumanity to an artifact of a time when racism and bigotry were more acceptable. His cruelty becomes, instead, an indelible component of his artistry. This is admittedly precarious territory, but I believe it can be argued that the obdurate politics of the two most prominent anti-Dreyfusards in the history of modern art, Degas and Paul Cézanne, played a role in the coldness infusing their relationship to the human form.

Cézanne famously rendered his sitters, most notably his wife, Marie-Hortense Fiquet, with the same dispassion he would apply to a bowl of fruit, setting off generations of painters and sculptors in search of pure form. But his gaze also turned people into objects of research, whose interest lay primarily in the formal possibilities they presented to the artist’s imagination.

Degas’ portraits can be breathtakingly beautiful, but they are also reserved and distant. The sitters avoid eye contact with the viewer (as a stand-in for the artist), and when they do, as in his self-portrait from 1857-58 in the collection of the Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, they look wary and world-weary. In the majority of his signature depictions of dancers and bathers, the model’s face is turned away or obscured. This was very likely done for formal reasons — to direct the viewer’s gaze toward the entire composition, rather than zero in on the face — but it also reduces the subject’s personality to her pose — which was frequently torturous, as Pauline attests — and body type. The artist’s insistence on strenuous positions resulted in muscularly expressive imagery, but it also displayed a not-so-mild sadistic streak.  In contrast to their academic contemporaries, whose cloying and superficial paintings quickly achieved institutional recognition and market success, Degas and Cézanne were unable to cloak their ugliness in glazes and varnish: their conflict is our conflict; their inhumanity is our inhumanity. It was their inadvertent honesty that made them modern.

And the modernism they ignited quickly raced away from them. The dramatic spine running through Degas and His Model is the artist’s inability to complete Pauline’s sculpture — a second version of “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot” (1910-11) — after endless hours of posing. The practice of calibrated accuracy between model and image, which Degas dragged like an albatross from the glory days of the French Academy into the chaos of World War I, had been ambushed decades earlier by the Impressionists, with Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (1907) delivering the coup de grâce. As Nagy writes in his introduction, “perhaps the most cutting feature of Michel’s portrait is that ‘old Father Degas’ is artistically impotent. He can finish nothing, and statuettes that represent years of work over hundreds of sessions crumble to dust before his eyes, to be begun again, and again, in a cycle broken only by his death. Instead of a prolific visionary, Michel’s Degas more resembles a Beckett character retrofitted for Third Republic melodrama.”

The Beckett reference is particularly apt: every afternoon, dressed in rags because he refused to spend money on clothes, Degas would shamble alone around the streets of Paris until twilight forced him back inside. But every morning he would get up, eat breakfast, brusquely greet his model, and engage once again, nearly blind and stewing with resentment, in a solitary, pointless, and fruitless pursuit of beauty — a 20th-century figure despite himself.

Thomas Micchelli   on Hyperallergic



                                                                   

Here more information on Degas and his loss of eyesight. 

Art, Vision and the Disordered Eye

Savages : Two songs

Shut up           YouTube

The world used to be silent

Now it has too many voices

And the noises are constant distraction

They multiply, intensify

They will divert your attention to what's convenient

And forget to tell you about yourself

We live in an age of many stimulations

If you are focused, you are harder to reach

If you are distracted, you are available

You are distracted, you are available

You want flattery

Always looking to where it's at

You want to take part in everything

And everything to be a part of you

Your head is spinning faster at the end of your spine

Until you have no face at all

And yet if the world would shut up, even for a while

Perhaps we will start hearing the distant rhythm of an angry young tune

And recompose ourselves

Perhaps having deconstructed everything

We should be thinking about putting everything back together

Silence yourself!

Too many to convince

too many to hire

and nothing you ever own

the world's a dead sorry hole

and i'm cold, and i'm cold

and im cold, and i'm stubborn

i'm sick to keep it open wide

and speaking words to the blind

speaking words, to the blind

speaking words, to the blind

and the soul of the pure

and the eyes of the lover

and the one who truly saw your soul

and the one who truly saw your soul

i'm the one, who truly saw your soul

i'm the one, who truly saw your soul

and if you tell me to shut up

and if you tell me to shut it

did you tell me to shut up

oh if you tell me to shut it

i'll shut it now

young, just born

fragile and trembling soul

you hold it to the light

that pours down the moon at night

you kept on holding it

you kept on holding it

it was a dangerous thing to do

but you did it when no one knew

when the eyes were closed

and the people asleep

not an animal

not a human

not a soul

not a soul

and if you tell me to shut up

and if you tell me to shut it

did you tell me to shut up

oh if you tell me to shut it

i shut it now

i am a breaker of ocean

leaden like a bullet to the sun

i am a breaker of ocean

leaden like a bullet to the sun, to the sun, to the sun...

From their album :  “Silence Yourself”, 2013.

Adore                                      YouTube

If only I didn't want the world

 I wouldn't make you feel so sad

 I'm sure my shame would be gone

 Is it human to adore life?

 If only I'd hidden my lust

 And starved a little bit more

 If only I didn't ask for more

 Is it human to adore life?

 I adore life

 If only I'd lived beyond regret

 I wouldn't feel guilt for what I take

 Is it human to ask for more?

 Is it human to adore life?

 I know evil when I see it

 I know good and I just do it

 If I hadn't been so starved

 Is it human to adore life?

 I understand the urgency of life

 In the distance there is truth which cuts like a knife

 Maybe I will die maybe tomorrow so I need to say

 I adore life

 If only I had been more shy

 And hid every tear I cried

 If only I didn't wish to die

 Is it human to adore life?

 If only I didn't care so much

 For the feel of your cold, cold touch

 In every bed I leave behind

 Is it human to adore life?

 I understand the urgency of life

 In the distance there is truth which cuts like a knife

 Maybe I will die maybe tomorrow so I need to say

 I adore life

 I adore life

 Do you adore life?

From their album : "Adore Life", 2016

Website  :  Savages

'Painting is a high-wire act': Olivia Laing on sitting for the artist Chantal Joffe

Before we started, I prowled around sockless, getting pastel dust on my soles, itemising the detritus. An orchid, a pair of rubber gloves, a kitchen roll smirched with pink. There were scribbled notes all over the white walls, graffiti I’ve watched spread month by month: F. Bacon; Prussian blue; Rimbaud; I am always; My stringbean. Chantal’s palette was covered in fat worms of yellow, ochre, scarlet, black. A painting of a baby was propped against a table leg. It lay on its back, a gender-indeterminate frog. The greenish, aquatic colour of the blanket made it look as if it were floating in amniotic fluid, a snapshot from the womb.

It was snowing. The light kept shifting, one minute a blizzard, the next full sun. There were several huge canvases, primed with pink or green ground. They cast their own light too, glowing weakly like drugstore neon. It was snowing so hard the sky went green. The air was completely full of snow.

Painting is a high-wire act, especially if you’re making portraits from a model. They can’t see what you’re doing, but they can see you doing it, six brushes in one hand, leaning in and out, stealing long looks, maybe stalling, maybe running catastrophically aground. It’s a negotiation, an exercise in consent. They give themselves up, hoping you’ll see them at their best, revealing the beauty they’re sure they contain. It’s sort of like being a hairdresser, Chantal said. That’s what it means to be a painter, you watch the person depart. And then: Stop looking! You can’t! No!

                                                                     

Later she told me that when she first paints someone she can barely pluck up the courage to look at them, that sometimes she is painting the familiar contours of her own face, or projecting moods into other women’s bodies. This conversation fascinated me. It opened up a new door into Chantal’s work. It was the sense of slippage between artist and subject I liked, the admission that perfect objective looking is an impossible act. You can’t paint reality: you can only paint your own place in it, the view from your eyes, as manifested by your own hands.

A painting betrays fantasies and feelings, it bestows beauty or takes it away; eventually, it supplants the body in history. A painting is full of desire and love, or greed or hate. It radiates moods, just like people. That afternoon Chantal told me about painting a friend whose immense beauty was located in her vivacity, her force of presence. The painting she made was accurate, it rendered the features, but the person she’d been looking at had evaded her completely. When she told me that story she was excited. Something had been there, in the room. It hadn’t been caught.

 



The Guardian