Reprise

The death knell for Plain Is Good has not tolled yet. Since I am currently undertaking postgraduate studies in the History of Dress you can expect some posts to have a more sartorial flavour from now on.

This week I had to submit a written analysis of a Hardy Amies skirt suit from the Victoria & Albert Museum's collections. Nancy Troy, in her book Couture Culture: A Study of Modern Art and Fashion (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1995), takes into account Pierre Bourdieu and Yvette Delsaut's notion of the 'magical effect' produced by the artist's signature in her examination of the designer label in the early creation of fashion. She uses the example of Charles Frederick Worth -- a nineteenth-century couturier who forged an artistic persona in order to promote his brand, thereby creating an identity shift for makers of clothing who had previously been considered mere craftsmen.

This is especially pertinent when considering the label on the Amies suit which simulates a written signature, even though it is woven into fabric:

In its heyday, the Hardy Amies brand was considered to be the quintessentially English style where Amies' great wit and showmanship was as much of a draw to his consumers as the clothes themselves. That the clothes bear his 'stamp' of authenticity is really important, as a signifier of both value and artistry on the finished product.

Photographic Bugbears

Having worked with one of the biggest collections of photographic slides in the United Kingdom, I am greatly mystified to see people photographing artworks in galleries. My first and most vivid encounter of this was going to Paris a couple of years ago where, at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, visitors frequently jostle for the opportunity to be photographed in front of a Manet or a Cézanne. Strangely enough, it is not the posturing I find problematic; rather the photographing of a work of art in isolation. Since these galleries experience record visitor numbers and are sometimes dimly lit, the opportunity to get a decent shot is fleeting. If it is just the image of the artwork that you want, you are far more likely to obtain a high-quality image on the internet or from an art library.


This practice is surely tied up with the notion of the travel as conspicuous consumption; rooted in history with the Grand Tours of Europe, but expressed through the present-day medium of the point-and-shoot digital camera, rather than sketches and oil studies.

Stuff

Being a compulsive archivist (or ‘hoarder’, when I’m feeling less pretentious) is bad on your knees. Countless hours are spent sitting cross-legged, dividing things into piles of ‘file, ‘bin’ and ‘indeterminate status’ in a futile effort to quell the mess. Some objects are subjected to the process several times, forever in the limbo of my own indecisiveness.

Occasionally this laborious task yields some nuggets of joy. Such as research for my AS-level Fine Art research for a project on art and death. On one scrap of paper I have clumsily attempted to paraphrase the life of Don McCullin:


One of my main references was Phaidon’s The Photography Book from which I made rubbish photocopies. The forensic-style photograph of the murdered Judge Cesare Terranova by Letizia Battaglia apparently caught my attention:

As did the aftermath of a murder in a barbershop by George Silk:

The focus here, albeit supposed retrospectively, was on photojournalists such as Battaglia, Silk, Bill Eppridge and Enrique Metinides who transgressed the taboo of death by directly photographing corpses. In the case of Battaglia, it was to exploit corruption in crime-ridden Sicily.

Such scraps of paper are of current fascination to me is because I recently re-encountered the work of Battaglia when one of her images was selected for a photography exhibition that I have been assisting on.

Yet it made me think about hoarding more broadly. Much of what we accumulate and refuse to offload is based upon contingency; of what we might make use of in the future, rather than what we need in the present. So much of current advertising is based upon imagined situations, not least in the language of cleaning and beauty products that prey upon our fear of germs and aging. Seemingly irrelevant in light of Battaglia’s social mission, photography’s uses for such diverse ends nonetheless serves as a reminder of its political and pervasive power, seemingly regardless of context.

“I’ve come to so many front lines it’s like taking a double-decker bus”

Documentaries on television’s BBC Four are grouped under the title Storyville. Killer Image: Shooting Robert King was a recent offering that juxtaposed the exploits of one American conflict photographer from his naïve beginnings in Sarajevo with his current hobby of stalking deer.



Young Robert King in the 1990s is thoroughly annoying; a skinny slacker who, when he first arrives in Sarajevo, manages to set a bathroom sink on fire with the classic error of leaving a burning candle unattended after he falls asleep. He invites the cameraman to film the damage, all the while whining in a bleary-eyed state. He doesn’t know anything about the conflict in the Balkans which he has come to shoot, summarised by the fact that when he is tested on the names of political leaders in Serbia his default answer is always insistently Malevich. He repeatedly bleats on about his dreams of the Pulitzer Prize and yet not only appears curiously disengaged from what is happening around him, but doesn’t seem to have any particular knowledge of how to take pictures either. Agencies decline to take him on for both his distancing from the action and his apparent misunderstanding of exposure levels.

Yet for all this he is at least innocuous, and even plays the harmonica rather well. At least he isn’t as obnoxious as the other journalists, who have also descended upon the city like vultures to carrion. In one confrontation, a filmmaker called Jeff Chagrin snorts to Robert King: “I’m not sure you have the aura… the aura of luck that war journalists, I know, have” and the wonderfully offhand “I’ve come to so many front lines it’s like taking a double-decker bus.”

Finally, a front page assignment on prostitution in Sarajevo from The Guardian offers the turning point for King, but at the expense of alienating himself from the other journalists who are based there – although judging by their frosty responses to King in the first place this is not a difficult decision.

Orientalist music provides the backdrop for King’s formative years, until Robert branches out towards other global conflicts and Acid House kicks in. Mature Robert narrates his early ambitions to emulate his namesake Capa, over pictures that reflect a determination to be fully immersed in the situation. Whether it is a mire of dead bodies in Albania, a fleet of militiamen on horseback in Afghanistan or a strip club in Moscow, King is frighteningly close. This self-destruction is finally ended when King finds love.

In the present, King has filled out a bit and partakes in a little light hunting in the American countryside with his wife and young son. He still works as a journalist, but films rather than photographs in order to convey the devastation of the conflict situations he goes to. The resolution of King’s story is predictable, but then again, it could have a different documentary altogether – interviews with a narcissistic alcoholic at the side of a bar, or even a memorial to a fallen photojournalist. In this form, there is at least an offer of redemption, even if it is for King alone.

Did he remain His Big White Self?

The first bulletin on the BBC World Service News last night when I switched on my radio was that the white-supremacist leader Eugène Terre’blanche had been murdered in his home, ostensibly because of a dispute over unpaid wages. The Associated Press have reported that the tipping point was a hate speech given shortly before the fatal attack, in the midst of racial tensions in the run-up to the World Cup.

I was not really aware of Terre’blanche before seeing Nick Broomfield’s 1991 documentary The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife and the 2006 follow-up, His Big White Self. In the second, Broomfield attempted to interview Terre’blanche about how the fall of Apartheid had affected the personal politics of the far-right orator, and to seek the answer to a question – ‘with the emergence of a new South Africa, has Eugène become a new South African or has he remained His Big White Self?’

Meetings are repeatedly set up and cancelled in both documentaries. As a consequence, and in a style that has characterised his film-making, Broomfield ends up exploring the devastating influence that his subject had exercised by interviewing friends and bystanders. In what might be called in climax of the earlier film, Broomfield eventually manages to locate Terre’blanche leading a rally. Terre’blanche is on horse-back and literally refuses to come down to Broomfield’s level, making for an uneasy dialogue after which Terre’blanche rides away and then ends up falling off his horse. In His Big White Self, Broomfield interviews Terre’blanche’s former chauffeur JP who appears extraordinarily childlike as he bumbles his way through his rationale for the supremacy of the white man and recalls the promises of revolution that were left unfulfilled. Veering more towards the tragic than the comic, the films are significant not only as a record of modern-day bigotry, but also as a model for lateral thinking in investigative journalism.

Dangerous Liaisons

Today I bought my first copy of The Spectator, although it is a milestone I feel rather ambivalent about.

For the first five minutes I was absorbed in a witty critique of a society party at Claridge’s. A riposte at Samantha Cameron’s televised “estuarial” accent (which presumably is snob for ‘Essex’) kept my attention. I was further intrigued by a historical account of Jewish-American politics. But then there were complaints of pylons marring the green and pleasant land, and a feature on why gals won’t swoon at Martin Amis in the same way that guys do.

Then I got to the centrefold. Far from being photographs of scantily-clad ladies, here were articles about how to be fully-clad gentlemen. David Cameron’s penchant for having five buttons on his cuff, rather than two or three, is examined in a manner akin to investigative journalism, the writer approaching Saville Row tailors for expert accounts and referring to Cameron’s previous dress habits as if they were exhibits in a legal trial. In another piece, Celia Walden lists her style rules for sartorially-challenged men in an abrasive and imperative mode, breaking completely with the personable style that she employs in women’s magazines. According to Walden, “Mao-necked suits…[are] reserved for perverts, misfits and bisexual members of the fashion industry.” If a statement so revolting managed to bypass the editor, it would suggest that they a) had not read it, b) agreed with it heartily, or c) guilty and ashamed of that supposed error to ever bring it up lest the crime should be discovered. Had I not been distracted by an advert for a silver cigar-holder in the shape of an upturned tortoise balancing on an elephant, I might have thrown the whole magazine out of the window.

As I turned the pages, it slowly dawned on me that the eponymous Spectator was not the bewildered layperson looking up at the hullabaloo of politics and celebrity, but the ticket-holder for the upper galleries sneering down on the farce that is the shoddily-dressed British public. I asked myself whether I should be disappointed in my own lack of judgement. Surely my aptitude to tell the political agenda of a weekly magazine was better than that?

I decided eventually, after reading about designer stationary, £50,000 beds and custom-made pyjamas that I was worrying about this far more than it was necessary. After all, the writing itself was accessible and entertaining, and the reading of opinions that contrast with your own is vital for both reassessing and reaffirming your own position. The expression, ‘to take with a pinch of salt’ or, in other words, to reserve some scepticism seems especially relevant here, especially if the salt is from a silver shaker. On that note, and to dispel your disbelief of the existence of such luxury items, I will leave you with the aforementioned cigar-holder. It is a both a joy and an absurdity to behold.

Been there, bought the T-shirt

The journey of an artwork can sometimes be controversial and unpredictable, as is still the case of The Elgin Marbles, one of the many objects recently recounted by Neil McGregor in the BBC Radio Four series A History of the World in a Hundred Objects. McGregor approaches these works from an anthropological point of view as he considers how the needs and desires of civilizations brought about the realisation of things either practical or beautiful, and sometimes both. In light of this, consider the joyful union of esteemed artworks and fashion.

Firstly we have a particular favourite of mine from around three years ago:

A Discus Thrower from Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli...

...as a tourist souvenir in the gift shop.

Then George Stubbs' Whistlejacket...

...making a little detour as Mark Wallinger's appropriation in his 2001 work Ghost...

...winding up on a ladies sweatshirt in Topshop. I caught this today out of the corner of eye, and alas I could not miss Whistlejacket staring out mournfully at me with his big, iron-on-transfer eyes I'm blaming this on retro-chic, assuming that the eighteenth century is all the rage right now. Guillotine earrings and hot-air balloon up-dos, coming to a high street near you.