Pop Quiz: One woman or two?

Or was it a trick question? There obviously are two women there, even if one is a copy of the other. And if you look closely, you can see small differences in hair or the accessories in the background or whatever else you want to pore over. But, of course, there also is only one woman there: a blond archetype of American femininity that is the model for each of these two Miami Dolphins cheerleaders.

The two bodies could almost be clones. And, of course, they are: not because they share a fair amount of genetic material, but because each is an near perfect copy of a social form. Each is identically styled to that conventional model, from physical training to gestural habits to costumes and make-up. Each will stand out because she so completely conforms to one set of social norms. Together they mirror not only each other but their society’s demand for conformity.

But don’t think that style is to blame. Or at least consider the other end of the spectrum:

There is only one of this guy, right? He is a model at the annual Face and Body Art International Convention. Who else could possibly look like this? (The style is the man.) But, of course, he is not so unique. He fits right into the body art subculture, and the artist is drawing on familiar conventions of mythic iconography and popular design. Just in case that context isn’t clear, notice the Mona Lisa figure in the left background. And, like the cheerleaders, his well-toned body is a standard typification of gender.

The cheerleaders train for hours to have a few minutes of spectacular performance, all at considerable cost to themselves and other women. Mr. Body Art is a model of self-fashioning, but only for a few hours in a convention center that tomorrow will be hosting Rotarians while he becomes just another guy on the street. Fashion alternates between conformity and unique self-assertion, and each depends on the other. Most of us spend our time between these two extremes, but we shouldn’t feel too smug about that. Among human beings, there are only differences of degree, never of kind.

Photographs by Abbey Drucker/VMAN Magazine (October 2008) and the Orlando Sentinel, and Vince Hobbs/Orlando Sentinel (2009).

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If it seems too soon to really be in the 21st century, just take a look backwards.

This photograph of North Korean troops on parade appeared on the front page of the New York Times earlier this week, but it’s really an example of time travel. North Korea is one of the last countries in the world that is trapped in the past century. A rigidly totalitarian state, command economy, and extreme isolation combine to keep the people miserable. For once, a stock photograph seems the appropriate documentary report.

The photo is nothing if not conventional. You can look through it to generations of Soviet May Day parades and before that the German Wehrmacht goose-stepping through Europe. Indeed, this is the most typical image of the totalitarian state: militaristic, uniformed, regimented, everyone marching in lock-step formation. Machine-like regimentation concentrates power in the state while making individuals interchangeable and expendable.

Curiously, on the same day (Wednesday, September 10) the Times featured a very different story on the same front page. I don’t have the exact photo that was used in the paper edition, but this is a variant from the online slide show:

It’s Fashion Week in New York, and the show by Marc Jacobs was featured in part because he “used the early 20th century as the inspiration for his latest collection.” Compared to the photo of the North Korean soldiers, this scene would seem to be from another planet. But look again: Although each model is arrayed differently, they are marching in formation, the actual individuals are interchangeable parts in a production controlled completely by others, and the entire display has little bearing on what ordinary people actually do. The riot of color serves the same purpose as the drab uniforms of the soldiers: individuals are woven into a culture defined by a single orientation.  In one we see the massed power and collective discipline of the state, in the other the richness of the market; both are ideological displays.

The two images have something else in common: complete gender segregation. This bifurcation carries another: politics in one place, society in another. The first image reduces modern politics to the nation-state’s monopoly on violence. The second image reduces modern society to conspicuous consumption in a private sphere having no visible politics at all. Thus, both photos reproduce one of the stock assumptions of modern political thought: that politics and society are essentially separate spheres, each having its own autonomy and each disrupted by any intrusion from the other realm.

In the 21st century this fiction is becoming increasingly dated. From suicide bombers to Blackwater mercenaries, creationists to environmentalists, free trade to slow food, third world modernization to global warming, it is clear that society and politics are complexly interwoven. Of course, there still is need for distinctions that protect both individual and common interests. (I want to maintain the relative autonomy of church and state, for example.) That said, this is a time for moving beyond the old binaries. They are so twentieth century. More to the point, such stock images and conventional assumptions get in the way of creating a better world.

Photographs by Kyodo News via Associated Press and Richard Temine/New York Times.

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Tilda Swinton does not wear makeup, off the set anyway. Needless to say, this makes her the perfect prop for selling makeup to the ultra trendy. The image below is from a session for the Extreme Makeover column in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

The column by Alex Kuczynski gushes about Ms. Swinton while taking this ugly shot at the rest of her gender: “Any woman who has used makeup can look at this photo and imagine the actual shades in the service of beauty, and realize, with a shudder, that there is nothing more yearning and sinister than a woman’s face covered in carefully applied paint, mascara and shadow.” Help is on the way, however, as the small print tells us that Tilda “is so on trend” and offers nine products from eyeshadow to lipstick. No one said being a woman was easy.

To camouflage the sales pitch, Alex compares Swinton’s makeup to the character of Pierrot in commedia dell’arte. Well, yes, and no. That comparison is the real makeup in the story because it covers up the face we might actually see. That face–particularly when seen in the full page reproduction in the Magazine–looks more like a battered woman than a clown. And those lips could also be stained from engorging on some ripe fruit or raw meat; now the allusion is to The Island of Dr. Moreau. We’re back to that earlier description of women being simultaneously yearning and sinister. A creature of both fantasy and reality who signifies both victimage and vindictive consumption, this extreme makeover has taken us right back to where we started.

The artistry is remarkable, of course, as it works at many levels–I didn’t even mention the hint of ghoulishness, or of a vampire having just slaked her thirst, or the almost medical garb and the dream of making a woman, bride of Frankenstein, and Perrot really is there as well. But under all that lies not the “virginity of her unpainted face” (the Times really said that), but the same old myth that women are both flesh and false, danger and desire. Extreme Makeover? No, one that is all too conventional.

Photograph by Jean-Baptiste Mondino for the New York Times.

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The connection between edgy, avant-garde, fashion photography and a soft porn aesthetic is nothing new, especially in high end fashion magazines like Vogue. When it shows up in the NYT it can create a flap, as it did when the 2007 Holiday issue of T featured a photo shoot of 17 year old model Ali Michael in a series of seductive images, including one photograph that revealed the barest glimpse at an out of focus breast. Sex sells, of course, and as one NYT Magazine editor justified the decision to publish the photographs, “We’re well past the point in our culture when there is a bright line that separates sexually charged images of men and women just short of 18 from art.” Of course, the line would seem to be a bit brighter between a woman just short of 18,” such as Ms. Michael and, say, 15 year old teen idol Miley Cyrus (aka, Disney’s “Hannah Montana”) whose topless and semi-clad portrait by Annie Leibovitz is featured in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

Leibovitz’s portrait has created a controversy of its own, with advocates on one side worrying about the effect of the image on the preteens who look up to Cyrus as a role model and those on the other side concerned with the effect it will have on the “wholesome image” that underwrites the projected billion dollar industry that has grown up around the Hannah Montana brand. No one so far seems to be concerned with the degree to which Cyrus herself is being exploited in all of this, but that is a topic for another day.

What the controversy calls attention to for us, however, is that while we seem to live in a public culture that worries about the way in which adolescent sexuality is portrayed with real adolescents, we don’t seem to be worried when otherwise, presumably mature women are portrayed as if they embody a seductive, adolescent sexuality. At some point we have to ask, what difference does it make?

Consider, for example, this fashion photograph that appeared in this week’s Sundays NYT Magazine.

We are never told the name of the model and there is no way to know her age. Nor does it matter. For whether she is fourteen or twenty-one, the point is that she is portrayed as a young Lolita, her supple body barely covered by a dress that seems to be in tatters. The expression on her face simultaneously performs a cultivated innocence and a primitive sexuality, the two reinforced by her bare feet and skinny, pale legs spread seductively around the back of a folding chair. Her long hair is both combed and yet unkempt, simultaneously complementing and accenting the tensions between nature and culture that pervade her pose and animate the adolescent sexual energy of the image. Shot in the grey scales of black and white photography and with the slightest hint of a soft focus, it has a subtle dream-like quality to it which invokes a surrealism that adds to its erotic appeal. (In this regard it contrasts with the muted, desaturated colors in Leibovitz’s portrait of Cyrus, which produce a harsher, somewhat gothic effect that seems hardly erotic at all.) And the question is, if we are troubled by Leibovitz’s photograph (or others like it, such as those of Ali Michael), why is there no hue and cry about images such as this which pretend to represent a seductive adolescent sexuality for mass consumption?

Part of the answer, no doubt, has to do with the vexed relationship between art and pornography. And so, of course, we have to take context into account. This photograph is one of six images that appeared as part of a story titled “Green With Envy.” The story focuses on eco-conscious fashion being marketed to a “well-heeled audience” by Earth Pledge and Barneys New York. It thus operates within the soft porn aesthetic of high fashion photography. The woman above is wearing a Maison Martin Margiela dress made from “silk head scarves that were bleached, cut into strips and asymmetrically woven by hand.” The price is available on request, though the eco-conscious fashion wear on display in the other five images ranges in price from $910 for a smock dress made of “undyed cotton” to $10,000 for a ruffled dress made from “biopolymer—a corn-based alternative to polyester.” What we have, then, is the greenwashing of a soft porn aesthetic, where one progressive cause (save the environment) seems to trump another (protect our youth from sexual exploitation).

Apparently there is no end to what sex can sell, including a sustainable earth. Surely this is no way to save the planet.

Photo Credits: Annie Leibovitz/Vogue; Earth Pledge and Barneys New York

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When looking through the slide shows at the online newspapers there are times when I wonder how some of the photographs could be coming from the same planet. Let’s start with this one:

A Komi deer hunter is setting meat out to dry near his lodge on the Yamal Peninsula north of the Arctic Circle. You probably have a similar rack of meat in your backyard, right?

To someone who grew up reading popular histories of the Plains Indians, the picture appears to record a lost world. The lone hunter stands near a nomadic tipi with his dogs and fresh kill in a harsh natural environment. The shockingly raw slabs of the deer carcass suggest that he lives on the edge of survival himself. If you look around, however, you might notice that family members are tending to strong sleds while a good fire is going in the lodge. And look at the dog: he is disciplined, not lunging for the meat just above his head. Nor is everything austere, for the hunter has decorative wear on his leggings and boots. Instead of raw meat against a cold, barren landscape, we are looking at a sustainable culture.

But a very different culture from the one that produced this hothouse plant:

You are looking at one of the offerings from a fashion show in Paris. This show featured ready-to-wear outfits–you know, something you might need when visiting the Yamal Peninsula. Her features might fit in there, and the color scheme features red, white, and black somewhat like the first image, but that’s the extent of the visual similarity between the two worlds.

She stands alone only because she already is supported by a vast social and technological network that includes everything from the media to the microwave oven in which she’ll cook her dinner. And rather than living in visceral closeness to nature, she is immersed in culture. Indeed, her livelihood depends entirely on dressing for display, while the outfit of the moment features a world of signs: fabric appliques mime a face while the smiley icon suggests that everything about her is but distinctive variation within a process of constant circulation. As the circles on her top are echoed by the circular motif on runway and wall, she exists in perfect harmony with a wholly artificial environment.

Can these two worlds converge? Should they? How might each attempt to do so? These questions can be answered from either standpoint–and usually in the negative, I would think–but I don’t have good access to either. There is one example of something like a synthesis, however, also from a fashion show. What might the fashion designer do if confronted with life above the Artic Circle? This is one answer:

That, anyway, is how someone in Madrid imaged winter wear. He got the color scheme right, I guess, but it doesn’t look sustainable.

Photographs by Vassily Fedosenko/Reuters; Pascal Rossigno/Reuters; Daniel Ochoa de Olza/Associated Press.

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February has been the month for Fashion Week in New York, London, Paris, Milan and maybe even Peoria. I don’t get out much, so I have to get by with the slide shows. Where else would I see something like this?

This design is much more refined than most of the dresses, which often seem intended to insult every known aesthetic principle on behalf of sheer indulgence. By contrast, this retro accessory is a model of simplicity, at once elegant and bold. (Not too bad, eh? I also can write restaurant menus and label house paint colors.) And it is retro:

Some things never change, however: note how both models are looking in the same direction. In fact, the world of fashion is a continual swirl of variations on a theme. One wonders why. Human invention probably has its limits: if we are ceaselessly inventive, it is largely by variation rather than genuine innovation. And how many ways are there to make an impractical hat? There will be other answers as well. One of them is suggested by this recent photograph from National Geographic:

This is an act of competitive display to maintain breeding rights. Here as in many species the males carry the burden of ornamentation, but the results are the same: variation on a theme, often to excess. Nice tail feathers, don’t you think?

What distinguishes the human display is that we imitate other species. In 2008 as in 1942 and long, long before that, we have imitated birds, fur-bearing animals, fish, insects, you name it. Design, in other words, is one way that we are part of nature. The connection may seem tenuous during Fashion Week in February; hothouse fashions certainly seem far removed from the icy winter I see every day. But sometimes it is when it is most extravagant, impractical, and obviously decorative that fashion can suggest a wonderful unity to the world, a panoply of aesthetic forms that have to be both beautiful and functional. So take a look, and enjoy the show:

Photographs by Nicholas Roberts/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images; Life Magazine; Mauritz Preller/National Geographic.

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The English word “cosmos” is defined by Websters/Random House as “the world or universe regarded as an orderly, harmonious system.” The word derives directly from the Greek kosmos, which could mean the world or universe, and also an ornament and the mode or fashion of a thing. The connection between the, well, macrocosmic dimensions of the universe and correspondingly microcosmic scale of an ornament–think of an minutely detailed earring–came in the Greek mind from a shared sense of order. That connection is lost in English usage, where “cosmic” and “universal” go in one direction and “ornamental” and “fashionable” in quite another. At times, however, it is still there to be seen. Let’s start with this image:

This is a photograph of a carefully prepared martini. The image first appeared in a Chicago Tribune Magazine photo-essay on “cool cocktails” and ended up as one of many images in an end-of-the-year review. This is a better fate than what awaits most photographs of food or drink, and for good reason. This image is a stunning example of modernist design at its best. It also is optically interesting, not least because of how the light in the glass, whether of the cocktail or camera or both, makes an X pattern in the conic section, and of how the colors in the drink are repeated as a spectrum on the perimeter. These designs suggest another structure underlying the aesthetic design of the cocktail, the natural ordering of the physical universe. Against such cosmic extension, the drink is but an ornament yet something differing from the universe only in scale, not in aesthetic significance.

Whatever their worth, I was brought to these thoughts not by the photograph itself but because it inadvertently made me think of another:

This is the now famous Photo 51 taken by Rosalind Franklin in Kings College London in 1952. You are looking at an X-ray diffraction image of DNA. And not just any image X-ray diffraction image of DNA, but the one that provided the key missing piece of information for Watson and Crick’s discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule. (Two of the three named above received the Nobel Prize for this discovery; want to guess which one was left out?) It’s a stretch to see the structure of life in a photograph of a martini; indeed, a physicist might point out that a more parsimonious explanation is available. But I love the aesthetic correspondence. Each can be ornament and each cosmos to the other. One can see structure within design, or design within structure. (And this without any religious implications, by the way.)

Universe or ornament, fashion or nature. You don’t have to be Greek to see that they can be the same. It does help to be open to allegory, however, and to chiasmus and, perhaps, to quote Wallace Stevens, to the Motive for Metaphor and “the vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.”

Photographs by Bill Hogan/Chicago Tribune (February 2, 2007); Rosalind Franklin, Kings College London (1952).

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The photograph below doesn’t capture the full effect the image had when smeared across one page and part of another in a print edition of Sunday New York Times Magazine (12/23/07).

I’ll bet you get the idea even without the grainy feel of the overblown printed image. The photograph is by Delphine Kreuter, entitled “Le rouge a levres,” and part of the exhibition “J’embrasse pas” at collection Lambert in Avignon, France. The image was used to decorate a puff piece on the current fashion for red lipstick.

I’ve posted before about how fashion carries the enormous energies released by our being social animals. This image is a show stopper on its own, however. The human face is reduced to flesh and teeth. Those teeth are fashion model perfect but also vulnerable, isolated in the center foreground as if being targeted. The flesh is distended, distorted, manipulated; but for the social context of applying make-up, the angle of the head and its pallor would suggest something closer to a body undergoing surgery or being laid out for an autopsy. It’s easy to think that the hands don’t belong to the face which is being abused somehow, held down, twisted, smeared, exposed, marked.

And marked with red. The Magazine article mentions the usual sexual symbolism, but the image goes beyond that. Like fashion itself, the color exposes what it covers. In this image, we see the thick yet pliable tissues of the mouth, its minute seams and folds, its physical weakness. This mouth is not the typically invisible organ of human communication, but instead an orifice–like the others, a place where the body is folding in on itself but not quite sealed. It does not speak, but rather is a place for decoration, a thing that can bear a sign. The smear of red doesn’t quite cover the form of the lip, and so artistry itself is exposed, and with that the truth that style is imperfect, temporary, and completely artificial.

Artificial, but to die for. The image catches its subject and its audience so powerfully because we also know that what appears to be violent is also voluntary. The person photographed might have been male, but the image captures how women often are subjected to physical distortion and discomfort in the name of fashion. More to the point, fashion and violence spring from a common source.

This tension between the brutal animality underlying social life and its superficial articulation as mere fashion permeates the Magazine’s presentation of the story. It is there in the contrast between the text and image, and between title (“The Human Stain”) and subtitle (“Red lipstick continues to leave its indelible mark”) and within the story itself, which blends fashion twaddle (“red lipstick is having a moment”) with reports of vandalism and of artists who use it as “a tool of symbolic defacement.” One is quoted: “‘Red is primal and violent . . . It’s the universal gash.'”Against such celebrations of violence, the mere fashion statement might be a social achievement.

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