Pablo Picasso is Back in Fashion

Moschino S/S 2020 Ready-to-Wear Collection

The American fashion designer Jeremy Scott has done many things in his time that have made me cringe and want to look away; and many that have made me sit up and take notice.

In the latter category, for example, one might place his debut show in 1997 based on Ballard's novel and Cronenberg's film Crash, as well as his sci-fi inspired A/W 2018 collection, featuring Gigi Hadid and friends looking fantastic in their neon wigs and fur-lined moon boots.

But I think his S/S 2020 ready-to-wear collection for Moschino - for whom Scott is creative director - is my favourite to date. Inspired by Picasso, it brilliantly reminds us of the permanent relationship between art and fashion and the crucial role played by the model acting as an intermediary between these two worlds.  

Of course, Scott's not the first fashionista to have been influenced by the great Spanish artist and to have incorporated his ideas into their work; Oscar de la Renta and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac are just two other designers we might name. And it's important to recall that Picasso himself was happy to get directly involved in the worlds of fashion and costume design; famously collaborating with the Ballets Russes on several productions (much to the horror of fellow Cubists) and, many years later, accepting a commision from Fuller Fabrics to produce patterns and designs for use as high quality prints on dresses.*

I've little doubt, therefore, that Picasso would have been delighted by Scott's sexy, stylish and often witty attempt to subvert the shapes of garments in the much the same way that he subverted reality (playing with notions of symmetry, experimenting with volume and proportion). 

Notes 

* The following year Fuller's Decorama Division introduced the Modern Masters print series for home furnishings. Aimed at a more exclusive market than the dress textiles - they were only available through approved decorators - Picasso again provided several designs, though was unhappy with the thought that these might be used on chairs, saying: 'People can lean on Picasso; but they can't sit on Picasso.' 

Readers interested in watching the Moschino Spring/Summer 2020 show can do so by clicking here.

We Are All Fashion Clowns

Joaquin Phoenix in Joker (dir. Todd Phillips)

Warner Bros. Pictures, 2019

I don't know if it's a post-Joker phenomenon, but the fashion world is still loving a full-on clown look at the moment, with zany outfits, exaggerated makeup, and ludicrous footwear; exactly the sort of thing I was wearing 35 years ago in my Jimmy Jazz period (and I'm still of the view that you can't beat clashing prints and colours, kipper ties, baggy trousers, and clumpy shoes).        

Clownishness would, on the (painted) face of it, seem to be the very opposite of elegant and sophisticated cool; a kind of anti-style that transgresses all notions of restraint and good taste. As Batsheva Hay rightly says, it's the epitome of what most people in their muted blues and browns regard as loud and would normally reject in terms of appearance. 

And yet, it has a queer kind of sexiness and, of course, a slightly sinister edge; the evil clown being a well-established figure within the popular imagination, combining horror elements with the more traditional comic traits. Mark Dery, who theorised this figure with reference to Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque, regards the psycho-killer clown as a veritable postmodern icon. 

Which returns us to Joaquin Phoenix and his astonishing performance as Arthur Fleck (Joker) dressed in his burgandy red two-piece suit, gold waistcoat, and green collared shirt ...

It's a very carefully thought-through look created by two-time Academy Award winning costume designer Mark Bridges (in close collaboration with director Todd Phillips); one that is suggestive both of the period in which the movie is set (late-70s/early-80s) and true to the character and his means. Thus, Arthur looks good, but not catwalk fabulous; as if he found his clothes in a thrift store, rather than an expensive designer outlet.     

Again, I can certainly relate to that and maintain that a punk DIY ethos provides the crucial (shabby-subversive) element if you are going to assemble your own clown-inspired outfit ...

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Punk Clown 

by Gaelle Sherwood (c. 1984)

See: Mark Dery, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, (Grove Press, 1999), chapter 2: 'Cotton Candy Autopsy: Deconstructing Psycho-Killer Clowns'.

Play: Joker - final trailer - uploaded to Youtube by Warner Bros. Pictures (28 Aug 2019): click here. 

Note: some readers might be interested in an earlier post to this one called Send in the Clowns: click here.

Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 3: Chapters 4-6

Patricia MacCormack: Professor of Continental Philosophy
Anglia Ruskin University: click here for profile

It's always a bit worrying when an author says that the work that follows is experimental, because - sometimes, not always - that means badly thought through and lazy writing. Still, I doubt that's the case here, so let's investigate MacCormack's occultural and thanatological escape routes from anthropocentrism ...

VI.

Occulture, for those who don't know, is "the contemporary world of occult practice which embraces a bricolage of historical, fictional, religious and spiritual trajectories [...] an unlimited world of imagination and creative disrespect for [...] hierarchies of truth based on myth or materiality, law or science" [95-6] and a ritualistic method of catalysing ahuman becomings.

In other words, its a demonic mix of chaos magick, witchcraft, Lovecraft, and Continental philosophy that aligns itself with feminists, minorities, and nonhuman animals and which leads onto a paradoxically vital form of death activism, which we shall discuss below.

Occulture is also, according to MacCormack, a material and secular practice; a kind of atheism that opposes religious fundamentalism (or moral power and authority) in all forms that perpetuate anthropocentrism. It's compassionate too - for even the demons and monsters invoked by MacCormack conveniently share her ethical concerns.*

All that one needs to do to become a practitioner is read and think a little differently from the mainstream. No other experience is necessary and no teachers are required. It's self-inspirational. However, it's not about self-help, so much as loss of identity and refining the ego towards nothingness (what Deleuze and Guattari term becoming-imperceptible).     

That said, the key idea seems to be "remake the self and remake the world" [106] - though I hope that MacCormack is not suggesting that these projects are linked or one and the same, for that would be to fall into the purest idealism, or what Meillassoux terms correlationism. (To be fair, I'm pretty sure MacCormack is not suggesting that - even if she often writes of neural networks, modes of perception, and environmental systems in the same sentence.)  

Despite once spending a good deal of time at Treadwell's, the truth of the matter is I don't really know enough about chaos magick, or Elder Gods, etc. in order to comment on MacCormack's work in this area. Having said that, I have written fairly extensively on the cunt as a site of loss (where flies and philosophers lose their way), so was very interested to see what she had to say on why the cunt has been deemed "antithetical toward anthropocentrism, particularly phallocentrism" [116]. 

First thing's first, it's important to note that the cunt is not merely a biological organ; the cunt, in other words, is so much more than an obedient vagina. MacCormack likes to think of it as a kind of demon that incarnates as a viscous, fleshly, mucosal entity; "all the features of femininity despised by patriarchy [...] as abject and horrific" [119]. 

Alternatively, we might think of the cunt as a monstrous nonhuman animal; a "threshold of internal and external" [122] that is crucially composed of folds; a conceptual gate that grants access to unnatural worlds even while belonging itself to the natural order.

Ultimately, however, the cunt can never be fully known or described; can never have its form and function fixed like the rigid phallus. And it "will not come unless it is desired" [125], says MacCormack - and I don't quite know if she's only making a point about demonic evocation or if this is what passes for a saucy double entendre in the world of occulture.    


VII.

And so we come to death. But this is not just death; this is a life-affirming, ecosophical model of death that is about "the death of the human body in its actual existence more than just a pattern of subjective agency" [141]. This is the death of man (as species) understood as "a necessity for all life to flourish and relations to become ethical" [140].

Which, as I indicated in the first part of this post, is certainly not an idea I'm unfamiliar with or unsympathetic towards. As a thanatologist, I'm perfectly happy to curdle the distinction between life and death, or collapse the binary as MacCormack would say, and I'm pleased to see her discuss her project in relation to the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement and the Church of Euthanasia - something I did in my own work several years ago.

And if I'm not fully persuaded by the arguments in favour of cannibalism, necrophilia and utilising human corpses as a source of fuel, I'm kind of on board with sodomy, antinatalism, and suicide (as a practice of joy before death). Where Patricia and I part company is on the topic of abolitionism, which seeks to "abolish all interactions with animals based on human superiority presumption" [145], thereby ending vivisection and closing circuses, sea parks and zoos.

For although I don't subscribe to human exceptionalism, as a Nietzschean I do accept that life is founded upon a general economy of the whole in which the terrible aspects of reality - cruelty, violence, suffering, hatred, and exploitation, for example - are indispensable. MacCormack may address this elsewhere in her work, but, as far as I can see, she entirely fails to do so in The Ahuman Manifesto.

Instead, she adopts a fixed, unexamined and, ironically, all too human moral standpoint throughout the book from which to pass judgement (on men, on meat-eaters, on breeders et al). She may push her work in a queer ahuman direction beyond the "constraining systems of capital, signification and normativity" [155], but it's certainly not, alas, beyond good and evil.

Even when she does get a bit Nietzschean, celebrating death as an absolute Dionysian frenzy, for example, she quickly adds a proviso: "the celebration of the corpse and of death here is entirely mutual and consensual" [158]. Ultimately, as she later admits: "I want to create an ahuman thanaterotics based on love, not aggression" [158].

And by that she means free of misogyny, racism, and the angst-ridden pessimism of the typical white male who can only imagine necrophilia and cannibalism in savage, sensational, and pornographic terms - and we don't want that, for this form of "serial-killer necro-cannibalism is a microcosm of normative anthropocentric practice" [160] of the kind that objectifies the world.

In the thanaterotics of love, the corpse can be fucked or served with fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti, but only if the corpse has not been produced against its own agency via anthropocentric violence. Necro-cannibalism can thus be made perfectly natural and politically correct - and if it is still against the law, that doesn't matter because the law is a white, male Western phallocentric ass that seeks to deny the liberating potential and beauty of death for a variety of reasons (none of them good).

So Patricia says it loud and says it proud: "Go forth and love the dead!" [164]

And if you must eat meat - eat human corpses: "Our world is groaning under the weight of the parasitic pestilence of human life and yet our excessive resource is the human dead [...] a phenomenally cheap, if not free, resource." [162] 

Is this nihilism? No - this is the "only available creative outlet in an impossible situation" [165] and a form of ethical affirmation; it's fun too - and a form of freedom (the freedom to be eaten or become a necrophile's object of desire). After all, even Jesus - whom MacCormack regards as an activist - offered up his flesh for human consumption.   


VIII.

The closing chapter of The Ahuman Manifesto is a kind of apocalyptic conclusion that reminds readers that whilst they are right to have fears about the future, they can still act in the present with "tears of love and joy" [191] streaming down their faces - which is a bit too ecstatic for my tastes; I would rather people showed a little self-discipline and curbed their enthusiasm.    

For MacCormack, there are multiple apocalypses, large and small; the sexist apocalypse that women are born into and where "assault from a young age is expected" [172]; the speciesist apocalypse in which nonhuman animals - especially those that are farmed or enslaved for entertainment - are condemned to lives of abject misery; and even the Brexit apocalypse that shows "fascism can and does win" [174]. (I wish I were making that last example up, but unfortunately I'm not.)

None of these minor apocalypses really interest MacCormack though; she longs for something a bit bigger and regrets that plagues and wars in the past didn't do a better job of finishing off humanity: "For me personally, I am deeply saddened that there has never managed to be an annihilation of the human species ..." [176]. A sentence that seems a long way removed from her preface promise that this is not a misanthropic manifesto. 

Ultimately, there's not much left for us to do now, she says, but manage our extinction and act as kindly caretakers for the planet. Which is all a bit Letzter Mensch sounding, is it not? The last man being the one who is tired of life and seeks only a slow and gentle way out ...

Oddly enough, MacCormack quotes from Zarathustra towards the end of the chapter and suggests that her compassionate model of apocalypse is in tune with his message of creating beyond the self. But, for me, it's hard to see anything very Nietzschean about her ahumanism. Indeed, it's arguably no more than another unfolding of the slave revolt in morals; one that speaks of love and joy, but is shot through with ressentiment and a refusal to accept that nothing is tastier than a tender lamb.


* Note: Zarathustra says that if you take the hump from the hunchback, you take away his soul. I do feel MacCormack does something similar to the demons and monsters she invokes; robbing the former of their horns and the latter of their very monstrousness. I simply can't see why she is so sure that creatures of the underworld and hidden realms also read The Guardian - especially as she is keen to point out that "this cosmos is not [a] happy hippy cosmos but a terrifying one" [122].

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work.

To read part 1 of this post - notes on the preface and introduction - click here.

To read part 2 of this post - notes on chapters 1 and 2 - click here.

Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 2: Chapters 1-2

Cover design by Charlotte Daniels
(Bloomsbury, 2020)

IV.

As Poly Styrene once said: Identity / Is the crisis, can't you see?

And it remains so, even in a world that likes to pretend to be posthuman and fantasises about becoming transhuman. So MacCormack is probably right to start with this question as it whirlpools within contemporary politics and to argue: "It is time for humans to stop being human. All of them." [65]

But that's easier said than done; you can't tell someone who has the flu to just get over it and neither can we just shake off our humanity. What's more, the demand is controversial because there are many who are still waiting for their humanity to be fully recognised and are keen to assert themselves as subjects. As MacCormack notes:

"Identity politics has long been critical of posthuman philosophy's forsaking of identity for metamorphic becomings and transformative post-subjectivity, while posthuman philosophy's many critiques of identity [...] still struggles with how to acknowledge dark histories of oppression without perpetuating the identities to which they were victims." [36]

This conflict, between those who champion identity politics and those who subscribe to poststructuralist philosophy, is a dilemma alright. Though MacCormack claims it's actually a false conflict and to see "no impasse at all" [36]. For we can all move forward (into darkness) and ahumanity as long as we all agree to abandon our anthropocentric conceit and exit the phallo-carnivorous realm of the malzoan. And look! Here's Sistah Vegan to show us the way ...

Ultimately, MacCormack doesn't care about "arguments humans have between themselves" [51] over identity, social justice, or even animal rights; she cares about the "reduction in individual consumption of the nonhuman dead" [51]. If she retains a notion of equality, for example, she acknowledges that it is "as much of a myth as the humanist transcendental subject" [51].   

But better even this myth of equality than structured inequality; hierarchy is always a life-denying form of categorisation that restricts freedom and the potential of the individual to develop. Having said that, MacCormack is contemptuous of the idea that inanimate and inorganic objects might also be accorded a degree of agency; "a tedious inclination in certain areas of posthuman philosophy, where a chair is no different to a cow or a human" [56].

Now, I'm no objected-oriented ontologist, but I'm pretty sure that's an unfair characterisation of their work. Contrary to what MacCormack says, I think those working in this area argue not that all objects are equal, but that they are all equally objects upon a flat ontological field, or what Levi Bryant terms a democracy of objects.

And, as a Nietzschean, I'm very tempted to remind Patricia that being alive is only a very rare and unusual way of being dead and that to discriminate between living beings (cows) and inanimate objects (chairs) is, therefore, a form of prejudice. She'll betray her species (particularly the white male members of such) for the sake of all other organisms, but she'll not go to the wall for objects.

And I can't help seeing that as the point at which her moral vitalism triumphs over her own model of queerness; triumphs over and, indeed, infiltrates: "Queer in my use is [...] about the death of the human in order for the liberation of all life ..." [60] That's one definition, I suppose. And, in as much as queer means rare and unusual, then yes, life is queer - but that surely then includes human life; hasn't she heard that there's nowt so queer as folk?

MacCormack closes her opening chapter with a rather lovely paean to the philosopher and their vulnerability, which, she says, is as crucial as care of the world in its fragility is central to philosophical activism and creativity. The philosopher is also defined by their ever-changing and becoming-other:

"Enhancing or preserving our identities, no matter how minoritarian, may be useful and tactical, but if they are our goal then we are not philosophers. We are anthropocentric humanists ..." [62]

You've got to love sentences like that ...

V.

"This chapter explores ways in which art can be redefined to enhance the ethical nature of all action as expressive, affective, from personal actions to larger-scale activisms." [67]

I have to admit, whenever I hear the word art whilst I don't quickly reach for a gun, I do roll my eyes. Baudrillard was right; at best, all we can do in this era of transaesthetics is act out the comedy of art, just as we keep acting out the comedy of sex after the orgy.

I fear that poor Patricia is going to be disappointed if she pins her hopes on art as something that occupies a "privileged space of knowing/unknowing that separates it from science and philosophy" [69], no matter how she redefines it. I also think she'll ultimately be disappointed by activism - which she believes to be "the most urgently needed action in the world" [69].  

Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe the ahuman will encourage new forms of art and activism, with the latter becoming increasingly creative and thus an art in its own right; maybe the two will collapse into a vital symbiosis and engage with power, without object or aim, "ephemerally remaking [and unmaking] the world to cause beneficial territorial shifts" [75].

Maybe. But probably not. And - for the record - I'm appalled to see this described in the religious terms of hope, faith, and belief - what MacCormack calls non-secular intensities. I mean, c'mon ... I can accept an ethics of care, compassion and even grace (defined by Serres as a letting be and a stepping aside), but I'm not about to embrace the virtue of hope - and it's ironic to see MacCormack affirming something that only serves to prolong human existence.

As for faith, MacCormack writes:

"Like hope, which is never explicitly a set hope 'for' something, faith is not a faith 'in' something but rather a faith that there can be a world that does not behave this way forever [... that] there is more than the anthropocene and anthropocentrism." [77-78]

In other words, MacCormack's ahumanism demands trust in the possibility of an alternative future of which we have no knowledge and for which she cannot provide any persuasive arguments or evidence. That's fine for some, but I'm afraid I'd need a bit more than this sketchy promise before pledging myself to her cause and becoming a believer (or even giving up my sausage and egg McMuffin for breakfast).

But perhaps I just lack imagination (a key term for MacCormack), or the necessary courage to dream and "rise up against the anthropocene and its malignant destructive expressions of political violence and apathetic semiocapitalism which deny the materiality of the organisms who suffer" [86] ...

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

To read part 1 of this post (notes on the preface and introduction), click here.

To read part 3 of this post (notes on chapters 4-6), click here. 

Notes on Patricia MacCormack's Ahuman Manifesto Pt. 1: Preface / Introduction

Patricia MacCormack at the launch of  

The Ahuman Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2020) 

Photo by Keith Keppell

I.

In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Patricia MacCormack - a Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University and the author of several books, including Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012) - was formerly an acquaintance of mine and that she remains someone I hold in high esteem (even if, as someone who repudiates hierarchy and refuses to accept that some humans are superior to others, she'd probably find such value-laden language objectionable).     

In a sense, then, I regard The Ahuman Manifesto as a friend's book; even if - as I indicate below - there are things in it I find problematic and even if MacCormack probably regards me as just another posturing white male philosopher of whom nothing much can be expected.

II.

According to the Preface, The Ahuman Manifesto is a book that calls for direct and immediate action, rather than thinking, although, surely the latter is a form of such action, is it not? Indeed, MacCormack will later write of her inherent disdain for "any kind of bifurcating system where action is separated from criticism, word is separated from material reality" [5].
 
Still, this call for action does enable readers who have grown impatient with career academics posing as revolutionaries to throw the text across the room in good conscience.

However, if one resists the urge to do so, one discovers that the book is intended to be an optimistic work of joy and radical compassion, with the latter being interpreted as a form of grace to be extended to all life on earth; a counternihilism that affirms (amongst other things) queer feminism, atheist occultism, deep ecology, and human extinction.

In other words, it's ethics, Jim, but not as we know it ...  

III.

"The end of the anthropocene is the opening of the world." [1]

I don't know if that's true, but it's a nice opening sentence and slogan; though obviously not as catchy as Go vegan! Don't breed! which really should've been the subtitle of The Ahuman Manifesto (I can't help feeling the marketing department at Bloomsbury missed a trick there). 

MacCormack is right to suspect that, for many readers, the idea of the death of humanity will be an absurd and troubling proposition. Personally, however, I don't have any problem with it. What nicer thought is there than the Birkinesque vision of a world without people; just uninterrupted grass and a few rabbits sitting around? Having said that, I'm just as happy to imagine a world entirely devoid of all life and don't share MacCormack's insistent vitalism.

She wants an ahuman future, but she also wants to (a) avoid posthuman despair and (b) retain her political commitment to something that seems rather like old fashioned humanism and its values. Thus, cannibalism might be okay, if some people insist on the right to eat meat, but any form of discrimination, such as racism, for example, remains abhorrent (presumably on the grounds that it lacks compassion).             

At the same time, MacCormack rejects any form of identity politics; a peculiarly anthropocentric obsession as she describes it and it's brave of her to differentiate her thinking from some of her most influential contemporaries:

"Yes, I am an anti-racist, pro-queer, anti-ableist feminist while also wanting to rid the world of human subjective schemas altogether in favour of the individuation of life based not on groups, tribes, nations, genders, races and species, while actively critiquing any fetishization of alterity so beloved of much posthuman theory." [21]

I kind of admire this perversity of wanting to challenge everyone and everything even at the risk of being marginalised or branded a traitor to the human race. Not that such a charge would much bother MacCormack, who sees the concept of treachery as an active negation of the negative (our species having allegedly "betrayed the very concept and value of life at its most basic definition" [4]).

Ironically, however, for a woman who makes a virtue out of disloyalty, she stays philosophically faithful to certain privileged thinkers, including Spinoza, Deleuze, and Guattari, drawing upon familiar terms and concepts from these authors; potentia, desire, ecosophy, etc. This is the same kind of language that I formerly subscribed to and there are themes and sentences in The Ahuman Manifesto that made me nostalgic for my own past, rather than excited about the present or particularly hopeful for the future.

Indeed, MacCormack's ahumanism and my own philosophical musings share a good bit in common; cunt-awareness, gothic queerness, thanaterotics ... etc. However, whilst our obsessions and references may be similar, we view things from very different perspectives and come to very different conclusions; I'm not a vegan abolitionist and I don't, for example, share MacCormack's rejection of reason or regard all truth-claims as a form of (male) violence.

I hope, however, to provide the compassionate reading of her text that she asks for and in the same (inconsistent) tone.  

See: Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the end of the anthropocene (Bloomsbury, 2020). All page numbers given in the text refer to this work. 

To read part 2 of this post (notes on chapters 1-2), click here.

To read part 3 of this post (notes on chapters 4-6), click here. 

Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes

Melanie Pullen: Untitled (ELLE), 2014 

From the series High Fashion Crime Scenes (2003-17)

melaniepullen.com

If, like me, you love Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse for their drop dead gorgeousness and thanatological interest, then you're also gonna love the work of Melanie Pullen in her photographic series High Fashion Crime Scenes ...


Born in 1975, in New York, but currently living and working in Los Angeles, Pullen grew up in the West Village in a family home regularly visited by poets and painters, including Allen Ginsberg and Andy Warhol. She acquired her first camera as a teen and began shooting images of rock bands for various publications and record labels.     

Pullen is most noted, however, for her extensive series of  pictures based on vintage crime scene images taken from the files of the NY and LAPD. Inspired by cinematic images and photojournalism, she employed not only well-known actresses and models, but the services of a huge technical crew so that her photo shoots often resembled elaborate movie sets. Each of her pictures could take up to a month to create and the High Fashion Crime Scenes series used millions of dollars worth of designer clothing and accessories. 

Surprisingly - or perhaps not - Pullen claims to dislike violence. She is curious, however, about the role that violence plays within the arts and wider culture, as well as the response that people have to violent images. Her work might therefore be described not as an attempt to make violent crime seem glamorous or stylish by dressing up bodies in haute couture, but a critical examination of the way in which the horror and traumatic effect of murder, rape and suicide can be diminished via its aesthetic interpretation and/or portrayal in the media.  
 

Pullen herself has expressed concern with the way that images and descriptions of female corpses - often naked or semi-naked - are used to titilate or add sleazy sensational interest to a narrative; be it a film, a play, a news story, a coroners report ... or even a blog post.

See: Melanie Pullen, High Fashion Crime Scenes, with an introduction by Luke Crissell and essays by Robert Enright and Colin Westerbech, (Nazraelie Press, 2005), 128 pages.  

To read a sister post to this one - Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse - please click here.

Forever Dead and Lovely: Notes on Izima Kaoru's Landscapes with a Corpse

Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #484 (2007)

Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series

Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)

artnet.com

 

No matter how we die, we will travel up to the world 

beyond the sky without regretting how we lived

The phrase drop dead gorgeous, popular with necrophiles and thanatologists alike, also inspired the Japanese fashion photographer Izima Kaoru to stage elaborate death scenes featuring attractive models and well-known actresses dressed in expensive designer outfits that oblige viewers to consider the cultural fascination with the beautiful female corpse.

The sequence of images begin with wide-angle shots and gradually narrow to close-ups of the model. The resulting pictures look rather like film stills and remind us that there's nothing more cinematic than the death of a beautiful woman (to paraphrase Poe), although Kaoru's work demands to be contextualised within a wider art history; one that includes traditional Japanese woodcuts [Ukiyo-e].

It's also important to understand the influence of the Buddhist practice of maranasati - a musing on one's own mortality using various visualisation techniques - upon Kaoru's photography. Thus it is that, prior to taking any pictures, Kaoru asks his models to imagine the circumstances surrounding their deaths (where, when, how, etc.) and to consider also what would constitute the most sightly way of exiting this world (leaving behind a beautiful corpse is never an easy task). 

In sum, Kaoru's pictures are a highly stylised and aesthetically pleasing form of what we in the West term memento mori and not merely images to do with fashion, sex, and cinema born of the floating world (though even if they were that alone, they'd still appeal to me). 

Izima Kaoru: Kimura Yoshino wears Alexander McQueen #483 (2007)

Part of the Landscapes with a Corpse series

Galerie Andreas Binder (Munich)

artnet.com

See: Izima Kaoru, Landscapes with a Corpse, German and English text by Roy Exley, Yuko Hasegawa and Peter Weiermair, (Hatje Kantz, 2008), 192 pages, 171 colour illustrations.

See also the documentary film by Chad Fahs, Landscapes with a Corpse (2014), which follows Izima Kaoru on a journey to create new work and perhaps find the answer to the question of what best constitutes a beautiful death. 

Readers interested in a sister post to this one - on Melanie Pullen's High Fashion Crime Scenes - should click here.

Cover Girl Killer (1959)

Sex and horror are the new gods 

in this polluted world of so-called entertainment

I.

There are many reasons to love the black and white British film Cover Girl Killer (dir. Terry Bishop, 1959).

For one thing, it stars Harry H. Corbett in a pre-Steptoe role that demonstrates what a fine dramatic actor he was; one trained in Stanislavski's system (famously developed as method acting in the US). He may never have become England's Marlon Brando, as some critics predicted, but he coulda been a contender, could've been somebody, instead of a rag-and-bone man ...

      

II.

The film is set in the seedy but seductive world of post-War Soho; a world of strip-clubs, brothels, and dirty bookshops, where it was de rigeur to wear a raincoat whatever the weather.

Corbett plays a psychopath who hopes that, by killing the young models who appear on the cover of a notorious glamour magazine, he may free himself from his unsavoury obsessions and the lustful images that corrupt his thought.  

(It's always shocking to be reminded that murder and misogyny are often regarded as less shameful than masturbation by puritans who, as a matter of fact, have been driven insane by their own moralism, rather than corrupted by pornography.)

Having killed several young women - including Gloria, the showgirl with the most on show - Corbett's creepy character is lured into a trap set by the police and the publisher of Wow magazine, with the very lovely Felicity Young (as June) providing the bait. This results in a pervylicious climax to the movie, as the latter is chased around backstage at the Kasbar theatre in her underwear ...  

Cover Girl Killer may not be a great film - it's no Peeping Tom, Michael Powell's masterpiece that was released a year later - but it is, arguably, a seminal one that anticipates the direction that cinema (and popular entertainment in general) was moving: sexually explicit and ultra-violent; two decades later and the slasher movie was a staple of the horror genre and Mary Millington was starring in The Playbirds (1978).  

Well done to Talking Pictures TV (Sky 343, Freeview 81, Freesat 306) for deciding to broadcast it as part of their superb archive of films.

Harry H. Corbett and Felicity Young in Cover Girl Killer (1959)

To watch the trailer to Cover Girl Killer (1959): click here.

Reflections on Madam Butterfly 2: Puccini's Influence on Pop and Fashion

Galliano for Dior: Japanese New Look (S/S 2007)

Model: Ai Tominaga

I. Hip-Hopera

Taken from the album Fans (1984), the single 'Madam Butterfly' is a perfect fusion of opera and electronic beats, performed by Betty Anne White and Debbie Cole, with the added bonus of having Malcolm McLaren in the role of Lt. Pinkerton.

It's a kind of punk version of Hooked on Classics, which sounds as if it really shouldn't work, yet somehow does work - and works in a way that even Puccini would have approved of, belonging as it does to the post-Romantic tradition of verismo that he favoured (a form of realism that often deals with violent and sexual themes, but in a seductively beautiful manner).   

I once conducted an informal interview with Malcolm in which I asked him about his fascination with opera and particularly the work of Puccini. He explained that, for him, what appealed most was the intensity of feeling and the authenticity of emotion expressed. Opera was the very opposite of what he later termed karaoke culture. It was this sincerity of expression that opera and punk rock shared that made them so powerful.   

II. Cio-Cio San on the Catwalk

John Galliano may say terrible things when drunk, but he remains one of the undisputed geniuses of British fashion who, during a fourteen year period as artistic director at Dior, ruled Paris and the world. In 2007, celebrating his tenth year at the company, he presented a spring/summer couture collection called Japanese New Look, inspired by Puccini's legendary opera, Madama Butterfly.

The collection featured an elegant, yet bold use of colour that mixed and matched gentle cream tones with bright yellows, lime greens, and hot pinks. The tailoring, of course, was impeccable (as was the geometric detailing). Stephen Jones designed the extraordinary headpieces (think bonsai trees and cherry blossom), whilst Pat McGrath produced showstopping makeup that suggested a contemporary geisha look (or a rather punkish Cio-Cio San).   

I mentioned in a sister post to this one discussing Puccini's musical masterpiece, that there are some people now who find the opera problematic on woke political grounds ...

Doubtless, these same people would also object to Galliano's 2007 collection due to its cultural appropriation and his use of mostly white models, although it should be noted that the Japanese model Ai Tominaga, pictured above, happily participated in the Paris show, as did the Chinese model Emma Pei (below), who took to the catwalk to the sound of Malcolm McLaren's unique take on Madam Butterfly ...   

Notes

My taped interview with McLaren has been transcribed, edited, and posted on Torpedo the Ark: click here.

To read the sister post to this one on Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly (1904): click here.

Play: Malcolm Mclaren, 'Madam Butterfly', single from the album Fans (Charisma Records, 1984): click here.

Or click here for the promotional video to the above, directed by Terence Donovan. Set in a Turkish bath and featuring a languid parade of beautiful young women, the video was banned by Top of the Pops on the grounds that the artist - McLaren - fails to appear in it.  

Watch: Galliano's Japanese New Look couture show for Dior (S/S 2007): click here.

Reflections on Madam Butterfly 1: The Opera

Poster for Madama Butterfly (1904) 

by Adolfo Hohenstein

Puccini's Madama Butterfly premiered at La Scala 116 years ago today ...

Based on a short story by the American author John Luther Long, the work has become a firm favourite with opera goers the world over, although, in its original two act version, it was poorly received, obliging Puccini to significantly revise it; dividing the second act in two, for example, and inserting the Humming Chorus as a bridge to what became Act III.

These and other changes did the trick, although Puccini continued to revise the work, producing a fifth and final version in 1907 - the composer's cut - which has become the one most often performed today.

And, rather surprisingly perhaps, Madama Butterfly is still frequently staged, despite our living in a politically woke era obsessively concerned with racism and sexual abuse, things that are central to this tragic tale of an American naval officer's exploitation and betrayal of a 15-year-old Japanese girl and her subsequent suicide.   

I suppose this shows that whilst some contemporary audience members - as well as some members of the cast and production team - may struggle to reconcile their enjoyment of this musical masterpiece with the fact that it was written by a dead white European male indulging in Orientalism of the first degree, most members of the paying public don't give a shit as long as they get to hear one of the most famous (and beautiful) of arias, Un bel dì vedremo.

The fact is, when most people pop along to the theatre, they do so hoping to be entertained; they don't buy tickets for Madama Butterfly because they are concerned about white male privilege or the sexual exploitation of vulnerable young women in the developing world, any more than when buying tickets to The Phantom of the Opera it's because they care about facial disfigurement or the condition of the sewers in 19th century Paris ...

Play: Maria Callas, 'Un bel dì vedremo', from The Very Best of Maria Callas, (EMI, 2002): click here. 

To read a sister post to this one, on Puccini's influence on pop and fashion - with reference to the work of Malcolm McLaren and John Galliano - please click here.