In Praise of the Poulaine (and Other Forms of Pointed Shoe)

Medieval dandy (c. 1450) 

Although no one quite knows why, where or how the trend started, at some point in the 12th century, the long toe shoe - known as a poulaine - became all the rage amongst medieval Europeans. 

Whatever their origin, their popularity was so great that they remained in fashion (in as much as this term means anything with reference to a pre-modern world where styles changed at a snail's pace) for several centuries during the Middle Ages; achieving their most extreme form in the late-14th and early-15th century when the toe length extended by an outrageous twenty-four inches (transforming two feet into four).

In order to provide rigidity and help keep their shape, toes were often stuffed with moss, wool, hair or grass. Alternatively, they could be supported with whalebone. Young men of leisure would often combine their favoured footwear with a provocatively short tunic (as seen in the image above). Predictably, there was vociferous opposition from all the usual quarters to these beautifully bonkers, fabulously frivolous and pointlessly pointed shoes.

In a recent post on the Victoria and Albert Museum's blog, Ruth Hibbard writes:

"They were decried by the Church as sinful for their phallic shape ... [and] their impracticality was seen as leading to laziness or incapacity. ... They were also thought to be too showy to be modest or decent."

The ruling elite, also concerned by the popularity of poulaines, introduced laws regulating  toe length by social class; the longest being the preserve of the nobility (commoners were permitted no more than a mere six-inches).

Eventually, however, the fashion in footwear finally changed and, by the end of the 15th century, short, square toe shoes were the in-thing. But poulaines continue to haunt the cultural imagination and every now and then they make a reappearance; in a very modest form as winklepickers in the 1950s and - currently and far more spectacularly - as botas picudas mexicanas, which can have an extended toe length of up to sixty inches (transforming two feet into seven).  


See: Ruth Hibbard, 'Getting To The Point Of Medieval Shoes' (July 9, 2015), Victoria and Albert Museum Blog: click here.

From Codpiece to Camel Toe Pants

The codpiece was a popular male fashion statement in Renaissance Europe; attached with string ties to the front of the crotch, its purpose was to accentuate the genital area rather than conceal or afford protection.

For despite often being riddled with syphilis, the men of the 15th and 16th centuries were proud and confident in their manhood and these colourful cocksure dandies would compete to have the best shaped, most padded and most decorative codpiece.

This outlandish game of one-upmanship came to a climax in the 1540s; after this date, the codpiece increasingly became an object of derision and fell out of favour amongst the more stylish and sophisticated of men.

Indeed, the word coddy would eventually become a disparaging slang term for those who were governed by their pricks rather than their minds; characters such as the young tram inspector, John Thomas, for example, in Lawrence's short story 'Tickets, Please' (1919).

And today, who wears a codpiece other than the odd leather fetishist or heavy metal musician - and even then it's worn ironically as a theatrical item of macho-camp, rather than as a symbol of phallic pride and undaunted masculinity.

Thus, in the absence of men who might carry off wearing a codpiece with conviction whilst gaily strolling along Piccadilly, it's left to our young women to step up and make an immodest display of their genitalia - and with the creation of camel toe knickers they can do just that ...   

These padded pants, offering the illusion of a perfectly shaped pudendum, have been popular in Asia for some years. Now they've finally arrived for sale in the UK, affording British women the opportunity to turn heads by unashamedly directing attention to their labia. 

Available from Amazon in a variety of skin tones, the pants cost just £28 - which is certainly cheaper than paying a plastic surgeon to design your vagina with a knife ...

On Trolls and the Task of Philosophy

Internet Troll by Leon Strapko

deviantart.com

Originally, a troll was a type of grotesque-looking creature depicted within Norse mythology and Scandinavian folklore, often living in isolated caves or under old bridges and intent on causing harm to any human beings - or billy goats - who had the misfortune to encounter them.

But today, in online circles, a troll is a type of moron who likes to pick fights, disrupt on-topic discussion and insult people by posting often malicious, usually anonymous and nearly always extraneous comments, full of bigotry and wilful ignorance. Often claiming to represent the majority of ordinary decent folk, trolls pride themselves on their common sense and their plain-speaking.

Either way, it's advisable to avoid or ignore them and certainly not do anything to encourage their nastiness. Unfortunately, this isn't always possible. Sometimes, therefore, one is obliged to confront trolls. Indeed, if one is a philosopher, one has a certain ethical obligation to do so. For as Deleuze liked to remind his readers, the essential task of philosophy is to degrade stupidity and expose all forms of baseness of thought; to make these things shameful.

And so, if set upon by an ugly troll - perhaps disguised in the form of a squalid porcupine or an elderly badger (for trolls are excellent shape-shifters, changing form as easily and as often as they bend or break the rules governing intellectual exchange) - my advice is to stand your ground, like a philosopher.

And then shoot to kill - as much as one may dislike having to do so ...         

The Most Beautiful Streets of Paris (Notes on Surrealist Mannequin Fetish)

André Masson: Mannequin (1938)

Photo by Raoul Ubac (gelatin silver print)

The Cleveland Museum of Art

 

If you love Love, you'll love Surrealism ...

Unfortunately, however, I don't love Love - certainly not as some kind of moral absolute - and so have never really much cared for Surrealism as conceived by André Breton, whom, despite his admirable anti-theism ("Everything that is doddering, squint-eyed, vile, polluted and grotesque is summoned up for me in that one word: God!") remained an idealist and a dogmatist at heart.

However, there are some aspects - the darker, pervier aspects - of Surrealism that do excite my interest. And one of these aspects is the erotic fetishization of mannequins; agalmatophilia being a major component of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, held in Paris at the beginning of 1938.

The exhibition, organised by Breton and the poet Paul Éluard, pretty much involved everyone who was anyone in the world of Surrealism at the time, including Duchamp, Dalí, Max Ernst, and Man Ray. It was staged in two main sections and a lobby area, displaying paintings and objects as well as unusually decorated rooms which had been redesigned so as to create what would today be called an immersive environment or experience.

It was the first section - Les plus belles rues de Paris - in which a parade of surrealist mannequins was located, including, most dramatically, the one by André Masson pictured above.

The mannequin, or lay figure, has a long if relatively humble history within the world of art; as a tool it's pretty much on a par with an easel, a brush, or a palette knife, even though it served several purposes; from helping fix perspective and understand the fall of light and shadow, to acting as a support for drapery and costume.

Perhaps, in their loneliest moments, some artists looked affectionately - even longingly - at their mannequins as silent companions. But it was only from the 19th century, however, that the latter became the subject of the painting and, ultimately, an objet d'art in its own right. For the Surrealists, however, the mannequin became something else too: a sex object.

Upon entering the most beautiful streets of Paris, visitors encountered sixteen artificial female figures provocatively designed, dressed and posed by Masson and friends. These kinky mannequins were deliberately intended to disturb and to arouse strange (often illicit) desires.

Duchamp, for example, dressed the upper-half of his model in male clothing, but left the lower-half naked, thereby playing with notions of androgyny and obscene exposure. Max Ernst, meanwhile, had intended to place a glowing red light bulb in the underwear of his 'Black Widow' mannequin (revealed by looking up her conveniently raised skirt), but - ever the prude and policeman - André Breton prevented this. 

It was, as indicated, Masson's mannequin that attracted the greatest attention, however,  with its pretty head squeezed into a bird cage covered with red celluloid fish. The mannequin was gagged with a velvet ribbon and had a pansy placed in its mouth.

What this all means, I'm not entirely certain. But it surely isn't just about female objectification and misogyny masquerading as art, or the pornographic violence inherent in male sexuality. Those critics and commentators who exclusively discuss these works in such reductive terms are mistaken and being intellectually lazy, I think. 

This isn't to say that these things aren't realities or worthy of serious discussion. But simply that there are other considerations here; for example, the way in which objects became central within consumer culture - the mannequin in particular being the very embodiment of urban modernity, as Hans Richter pointed out. Or the manner in which fetishization can elevate an object from base utility, transforming it into something magical and seductive, with its own strange allure.         

For me, as a perverse materialist, mannequins, statues and sex-dolls need to be considered as things in themselves and not as mere substitutes for real women. And the men who choose to erotically privilege such over biological entities are deserving neither of ridicule nor condemnation.

The adult imperative to grow-up, stop touching yourself and get a steady girlfriend (i.e. one who is actual, rather than imaginary; human, rather than synthetic; alive, rather than dead) is one that at least some of the Surrealists dared to challenge and for that I admire and respect them.  

Besides, maybe Proust is right to argue that we are all forever isolate at some level; that reciprocity is an illusion and the objects of our affection - whatever their ontological status - simply allow for the projection of our own ideas, fantasies and feelings ... 


Note: those interested in knowing more about the role and rise of the mannequin in Western art should see Jane Munro, Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish, (Yale University Press, 2014). 

Cut it Out - Reflections on Blue Nudes and Racial Fetishism in the Work of Henri Matisse

Henri Matisse: Nu bleu IV (1952)

The Blue Nudes are a series of painted female figure cut-outs stuck to paper and then mounted on canvas, completed by Henri Matisse in 1952. They are - no matter what fanatic Lawrentians may think - very lovely works and have added poignancy when one recalls that they were produced very late in his life when Matisse was not in the best of health, having undergone surgery for abdominal cancer ten years earlier. 

Conventional painting and sculpture having become too physically demanding, Matisse turned in his final decade to a new medium and, with the help of his assistants, began creating artworks that defy genre, being neither paintings nor sculptures as such, but incorporating elements of both these disciplines. 

Initially, the cut-outs were fairly modest in size and ambition, but eventually included large pieces of great complexity and if, at first, Matisse thought of them as subsidiary to his earlier work, by 1946 he had started to appreciate the possibilities inherent to the technique and to realise the new freedom working with scissors rather than brushes allowed him: An artist, he declared, must never be a prisoner of any style, of the past, or of himself ... 

Blue Nude IV - shown above - took the elderly artist two weeks of cutting and arranging (and an entire sketchbook of preliminary studies) before it eventually satisfied him. The slightly awkward and uncomfortable looking pose of the figure was obviously one for which Matisse had a penchant, as it's similar to a number of nudes completed earlier in his career and can be traced back to Le bonheur de vivre (1905-06), one of the great masterpieces of modernism completed in his so-called Fauve period. 

Mention must also be made of Nu bleu: Souvenir de Biskra, painted shortly afterwards: 

This work scandalised the French public when first exhibited in 1907 and continued to provoke controversy six years later at the Armory Show in the United States, where it was burned in effigy - not least because of concerns about the racial origins of the female figure. 

There's an obvious and much discussed primitivism and Orientalism in Matisse's work; African sculpture fascinated and inspired him as much as it did Picasso and other European artists at the beginning of the twentieth century. Disillusioned with Western culture and searching for new values and new ways of seeing the world, Matisse and his contemporaries attempted to merge the highly stylized treatment of the human figure found in African sculptures with painting styles derived from the post-Impressionist works of Cézanne and Gauguin. The resulting pictorial flatness and vivid use of colour helped to define early modernism. 

Whilst these artists probably knew very little, if anything, of the history or meaning of the African sculptures they encountered - and probably didn't care all that much - they nevertheless recognized the magical and powerful aspects and adapted these to their own efforts to move beyond the naturalism that had defined Western art since the Renaissance.

Ultimately, one might suggest that the blueness in the works shown here signifies seductive Otherness and functions as a disguised form of blackness, revealing the fact that Matisse (like many white men) has something of a secret BGF ...    

Blue is the Colour ... Notes on Barnett Newman's Onement VI

Barnett Newman: Onement VI (1953)

Sixty years after it was painted, Barnett Newman's Onement VI sold at Sotheby's in New York for $43.8m, which, as the art critic Jonathan Jones says, is a tremendous bargain for what is an essentially priceless work of art; one that offers us a glimpse not only of the sublime understood from the perspective of traditional aesthetics, but of the blissful blue unity that belongs to what D. H. Lawrence calls the Greater Day. 

In other words, Onement VI is more than an artwork; it's a portal onto a prelapsarian world lying on the other side of angel-guarded gates; an act of defiance against God's judgement and an assertion of man's right to return to Eden home. The hope of regaining paradise - what else, asks Newman, could possibly explain the seemingly insane desire to be a painter or poet ...?

A vertical light-blue line - what Newman liked to term a zip and which is an iconic and revolutionary aspect of his mature work - divides the flat expanse of perfect deep blueness in a manner suggestive of the biblical creation myth when the waters of heaven were separated from those of the earth. Again, it's as if Newman - one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and a leading exponent of colour field painting - is directly challenging God in his capacity as the maker of worlds: 'Anything you can do ...'

But the painting also challenges the viewer who stands before it, obliging them to be aware of their own presence and locality - as well as their own contingency and isolation - before the Void, whilst, at the same time, conscious also of their belonging to and connectedness with the universe and all things in it. In other words, Onement VI - like all great artworks - helps put us back into touch and atone for the Fall (understood as a fall not into sin, so much as into self-consciousness and separateness). 

Whilst at 102" x 120" it's not monumental in size, it's a work - one is tempted to call it an event - on an inhuman scale. And Newman - shamefully underappreciated as a painter for much of his life (the media preferring to promote the work of more volatile characters such as Jackson Pollock) - is a true giant of American art who almost at times makes his far more successful friend Mark Rothko seem a little lame in comparison.       

Blue is the Colour ... Yves Klein is the Name

Yves Klein: IKB 191 (1962)

Portrait of the artist by Charles Wilp / BPK Berlin (1961)

Considered today a major figure in post-War European art, Yves Klein memorably expressed his nouveau réalisme in a series of brightly-coloured monochromes exhibited in Paris during the mid-1950s.

Unfortunately, the public response to these canvases was not what he'd hoped for - it was mistakenly believed he was offering a new form of abstract interior decoration. Annoyed and disappointed by this, Klein decided a further - more radical - step in the direction of monochromatic painting was required. Thus, dispensing with  red and yellow, he decided to work exclusively with one primary colour alone: blue.
     
It was a fateful decision - and the right decision. For his next exhibition, Proposte Monocrome: Epoca Blu (Milan, Jan. 1957), featuring eleven identical blue canvases attached to poles rather than hung on the walls in order to give a greater sense of spatial ambiguity, was a huge critical and commercial success, eventually travelling to Paris, Düsseldorf and London.

Key to its success was the fact that Klein didn't use just any old blue paint; rather, he went for ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin of his own devising that he called (rather cryptically) The Medium. The latter helped retain the full brilliance of the pigment and the resultant colour on canvas had all the magical intensity of the lapis lazuli used by medieval artists to paint the Madonna's blue robes.

Klein registered his unique paint formula in order to protect the authenticity of the pure idea and proudly gave the world a brand new blue: International Klein Blue (IKB).

From this time on, the blueness of Klein's works was no longer just a component; it was, rather, the very essence of his art and he used IKB not only in the production of conventional canvases, but in his sculptural work - see, for example, Vénus Bleue (1962) - and in his performance art (Klein had a penchant for covering the naked bodies of young models with IKB and having them squirm around or dragged across blank canvases like living brushes - a technique he termed anthropometry but which many WAM enthusiasts know and love as sploshing).

Ultimately, we might best view Klein as a kind of perverse mystic. Someone for whom art was a means of both transforming and transcending the world; of entering that fourth dimensional realm that D. H. Lawrence also describes in terms of its blissful blueness and names the Greater Day, but which Klein simply calls le Vide.

This Zen-inspired concept of the Void refers to a kind of noumenal zone in which real objects sparkle darkly as things in themselves beyond representation. Klein wants his audience to be aware of objects in their invisibility and their absence. The blue monochromes were thus a visual analogue for the Void itself, a view he found support for in the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard who famously wrote:

First there is nothing, next there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue ...
   

Note: those interested in knowing more about Yves Klein's anthropometry can click here to access a short film on the Tate website that includes footage from a performance and a recent interview with one of his models, Elena Palumbo-Mosca. 

Blue is the Colour ... Notes on Rilke's Blue Delirium

Blue is the colour found between violet and green on the visible spectrum of light as perceived by human eyes. It comes in many different hues, tints, and shades and varies dramatically in intensity and brightness, but is found at its purest at the middle of its range on the spectrum with a wavelength of 470 nanometres. 

Along with red and yellow, it is regarded as one of the three primary colours and much loved by painters. If it's extremely difficult for us to imagine the natural world in the absence of blue, it's virtually impossible to construct a history of modern art that doesn't refer repeatedly to this profoundly beautiful colour in its various guises; ultramarine, cobalt, cerulean, turquoise ... even the names make happy and contain a kind of poetry or word-magic.  

Recognizing this, Rilke famously speaks in his letters about the possibility of writing a monograph on the colour blue, beginning with the pastels of Rosalba Carriera and ending with the very unique blues of Cézanne. As the intensity of his blue-delirium increases before the canvases of the latter, Rilke speaks ecstatically of all kinds of blue, including: a waxy blue, a wet dark blue, a self-contained blue, a densely quilted blue, a thunderstorm blue, a bourgeois cotton blue, a juicy blue and an almost invisible blue that he terms barely-blue.

As one commentator notes, this blue-incantation goes beyond a mere listing of technical terms and although he makes conventional references to sea-blue and sky-blue, Rilke carefully avoids clichéd descriptions. For he's attempting to see colours differently and to stammer the first terms of a new language in which blueness is expressed directly and concretely; as it is by the truly great artists - be they poets or painters - who understand how the reality of colour arises from the work itself.


See: Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee, (North Point Press, 2002).

Serenity Now (Notes on 'The Flying Fish' by D. H. Lawrence)

Stephen Alexander 
Window onto the Greater Day (2017) 

 

"'Beauteous is the day of the yellow sun which is the common day of men; but even as the winds roll unceasing above the trees of the world, so doth that Greater Day, which is the Uncommon Day, roll over the unclipt bushes of our little daytime. Even also as the morning sun shakes his yellow wings on the horizon and rises up, so the great bird beyond him spreads out his dark blue feathers, and beats his wings in the tremor of the Greater Day.'"

- D H Lawrence, The Flying Fish (1925)

I've always rather liked this poetic passage in which Lawrence suggests that the day-to-day world of man is not the only reality; that we might, in times of great crises and crack-up, glimpse something of the deeper blue that belongs to the Greater Day, wherein shines that other (darker) sun. It's liberating to think that there is something external to our own small and tight and over-furnished universe; something unconquerable and unknowable in its sheer immensity; the world in which flowers bloom and objects sparkle.

And it's strangely comforting to imagine like Lawrence a new type of humanity living in this fourth dimensional world without walls; that those who belong to the Lesser Day and cannot or will not leave their homes behind, will "'shudder and die out, like clouds of grasshoppers'". For the Greater Day belongs to those men and women who, like flying fish, are able to move between worlds on translucent wings, invisibly rejoicing as they do so.

The poorly protagonist of this unfinished tale gains his clearest insight into how astonishing life can be in the Greater Day, when witnessing a school of porpoises swimming alongside the ship on which he's sailing. Lawrence describes the scene in very beautiful detail as a "spectacle of the purest and most perfected joy in life". Although travelling at high speed, the marine mammals do so with carefree composure and serenity.

And that's the crucial thing; for you can't access the blue splendour of the Greater Day by an act of restless, noisy self-assertion. Rather, it requires qualities that many modern people no longer value: silence, stillness, and attentiveness ... One must, as it were, learn to enjoy watching paint dry and listening to the grass grow. 


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'The Flying Fish', in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney, (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 

Baby/Doll (With Reference to the Work of W. B. Yeats)

 

Admit it, we're so much nicer than 

   the real thing mewling and puking ...

If I were asked by some kind of investigative committee into poetic activity: Are you now or have you ever been a reader of W. B. Yeats? I would have to answer no. 

However, in the interests of full disclosure, I would also have to admit that I did once (unsuccessfully) attempt to read his esoteric study A Vision (1925) and that I am of course familiar with three of his most famous verses: 'The Second Coming' (1920), 'Leda and the Swan' (1924), and 'Sailing to Byzantium' (1928).

But I'm certainly not a Yeats scholar of any kind, nor even a fan of his writing; it's too traditional, too nostalgic, too mystical and too Romantic - in short, too Irish - for my tastes. When I don't find it boring in its lyricism, I find it politically pernicious in it's völkisch nationalism and myth-making.

Having said that, there is at least one other poem by Yeats that fascinates and horrifies in equal measure ...

'The Dolls' (1916) tells the tale of a doll-maker and his wife who has recently given birth following an unplanned pregnancy, for which she is shamefully apologetic in the face of hostility to the newborn child from her husband's handcrafted creations, one of whom "Looks at the cradle and bawls: / 'That is an insult to us.'"

But it is the oldest of all the dolls who kicks up the biggest fuss and screams with indignant rage: 

"'Although
There's not a man can report 
Evil of this place,
The man and woman bring
Hither to our disgrace,
A noisy and filthy thing.'" 

This is obviously upsetting to the couple, as one might imagine; and upsetting also to readers of the verse. Creepy, malevolent dolls are bad enough - but creepy, malevolent dolls that bad-mouth innocent living babies, are even worse. WTF is Yeats playing at here?

Well, let me reiterate: I'm no Yeats scholar - but I know a woman who is ...

According to Dr Maria Thanassa, here, as elsewhere in his verse, Yeats is affirming the superiority of art over nature and the fact that he subscribes to a material form of aesthetic idealism in which artificial objects, such as handcrafted dolls, are infinitely preferable in their porcelain perfection to biological entities, such as babies, who cry, vomit, and defecate all day long without restraint and are subject to disease, cot death, and all the other forms of sordid stupidity and defect that characterise mortal existence.      

For the doll-maker, his beautiful figures are the result of hard-work and exquisite design; the child, on the other hand, is the unfortunate consequence of a quick fuck and carelessness on the part of the woman. It takes talent, discipline and dedication to be an artist, whilst anyone can be a human breeder. Thus we should value things born of the mind over things born of the body.

Obviously, in as much as this analysis of Yeats's thinking is correct, I find it problematic to say the least - even as someone fascinated by objects and sympathetic to agalmatophilia, pygmalionism, and all forms of doll fetish.

Were I the doll maker's wife, I'd get my child and get out of there ...     

See: W. B. Yeats, 'The Dolls', in Responsibilities and Other Poems (Macmillan, 1916). Click here to read online at allpoetry.com 

Thanks to Maria Thanassa for her kind assistance with this post.