"... But With The Mind."

By Rory A.A. Hinton

Lee Alexander McQueen

Queen Elizabeth II: "How long have you been a fashion designer?"
Lee Alexander McQueen: "Quite a few years, m'lady."

There are four designers in the history of 20th century fashion that changed the way women look: Coco Chanel, Yves St. Laurent, Christian Dior, and Lee Alexander McQueen. While all acknowledge the sartorial change Lee made, some are still divided over its social significance. Did he support or subjugate post-Millett sexual politics? 

For some the subjugation started early. The six-piece graduate collection for his MA degree from Central Saint Martins entitled "Jack The Ripper Stalks His Victims" (July 1992) is seen by some as the misogynistic basis for every piece of clothing he ever designed. That his next show two years later entitled "Nihilism" (S/S 1994) provoked the critics to quickly condemn it (fashion journalist Marion Hume of the Independent described the show as "McQueen's Theatre Of Cruelty"), only added critical fuel to the subjugating fire. What else could this show be but a violent homage to John Galliano's "Forgotten Innocents" collection of 1986?

Hume wrote that the collection was "a horror show ... of battered women, of violent lives, of grinding daily existences offset by wild, drug-enhanced nocturnal dives into clubs where the dress code is semi-naked." Despite the hyperbole, Hume was at least observant enough to see that Lee, despite his supposed misogyny, was a young talent with something new to show in a business where designers devour each other's ideas as if they were their own. In order to stand out in this business you must be new on demand. And "the shock of the new," said Hume (echoing a modern theme out of the pages of Robert Hughes), "has to be just that: shocking." In this case, the value of the shock was too costly for critical consumption. Hume and her subjugating subjects condemned Lee's modern designs as nothing but a shockingly new variation on an old misogynistic theme.

"Nihilism"  (S/S 1994)

   










For others it is telling that Lee's "Ripper" show caused the "dames de Vogue" throwback Isabella Blow to sit up, take notice, and conclude something completely different. She too knew the shock value of Lee's new work. Fortunately, she was wealthy enough not to cheapen it by projecting a narrative of cruelty onto it (an ad hominem thing to do in the face of an inconvenient truth: when you cannot fully understand, you get fallaciously personal). Only someone as astutely connected as Blow (the one time assistant to both Wintour and Talley of Vogue fame) could put this subjugation theme into ironically feminine relief by focusing her attention on the clothes. She knew that the clothes were merely an interpretive vehicle for Lee's artistic vision. But she also understood that you need to have the vehicle to get the message across.

Isabella was struck by Lee's tailored blow, and the blow-back proved beneficial for him: she became his sine qua non fashion Establishment entrée among the styled elite. By this time he was established enough to know and show that the humane establishment was in the designing details. "The tailoring was excellent," Blow says. "No one spotted it. They kept thinking it was just blood and paint. They weren't looking at the cut! It was obvious from the first outfit that here was someone of enormous potential and great gifts."

Blow And Her Protégé

   















   
Lee knew from his apprenticing days with Savile Row tailors Anderson & Sheppard that cut, proportion, and colour are the three essential ingredients to a great outfit, but the greatest of these is cut. His beautifully tailored jackets in the "Nihilism" show were cut in such an exacting way that "the lapels were as sharp as shark fins," as Judith Watt describes them. Lee was a cutter, not a ripper ("McQueen's Theatre Of Sevility" is more like it). However, whether this tailored talent made him able to "marry Savile Row with ready to wear" (a stated aim of his as a designer) is questionable and worth considering, especially as a contributing means to his tragically early end. For some artists creativity and commerce remain divorced, despite the will toward rapprochement. For them it does not cut both ways.

But there is no denying that the cut came naturally to him. At one point in the documentary McQueen & I, Lee is seen gathering up a white sheet that is hanging in a doorway to a very frugal studio. He walks into the doorway, elegantly gathers up the sheet with both hands, holds it in his left hand, takes a corded phone off the receiver that is hanging on the wall next to the doorway with his right hand, wraps the cord around the sheet, then hangs the phone up again. Seamlessly. Only Lee could get away with turning a functioning door into a fashionable drape by using a phone cord as a holdback. He did this without the slightest bit of effort, without the slightest hint of forethought, and without making you think that fashion and function are mutually exclusive. Style just flowed out of him.

In light of Lee's natural style, only a myopic misogynist without Blow's eye, let alone an ear for what she and Lee had to say, would interpret Lee's "Highland Rape" show (A/W 1995-1996) as a slam against women, rather than what he said it was: a stylish commentary on England's rape of Scotland. "It wasn't anti-women," Lee says. "It was actually anti- the fake history of Vivienne Westwood." Lee's point was that Westwood's attempt to make tartan "romantic" takes away from the fact that eighteenth-century Scotland was not about "beautiful women drifting across the moors in swathes of unmanageable chiffon." "Highland Rape" was about the historic violation of women's rights because it was about the colonial rape of human culture. No amount of Westwood's revisionist herstory can take away from that fact, not if this Scottish l'enfant terrible had anything to show about it.

"Highland Rape" (A/W 1995-1996)

   
















Blow told Harper's Bazaar that what attracted her to Lee was "the way he takes ideas from the past and sabotages them with his cut to make them new and in the context of today. It is the complexity and severity of his approach to cut that makes him so modern." By the time of his "Dante" show (A/W 1996-1997) the accusations of misogyny had slowly died the death of a thousand fittings. Lee was not interested in feminine subjugation but fashionable strength, wherever it may be found. Carmen Artigas, design assistant at Romero Gigli where Lee worked as a pattern cutter in the early 1990s, realized early on that Lee was all about "disturbing the senses and yet finding beauty in decay." Celebrating empowered beauty in human savagery was the "McQueen thing to do."

"I want to empower women," Lee said. "I want people to be afraid of the women I dress." This is a key to his designing divide and conquer strategy. What Lee did was to cut through the idea that his social impact was only about supporting or subjugating women, while still acknowledging that disjunction's traditional influence on how we conceive of the relation between fashion and sexual politics. "You've got to know the rules to break them," Lee says. "That's what I'm here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition." Part of this tradition consists in how post-World War I women were able to discard the corset in favour of more functional clothing. Ever since, the implicit mandate for designers has been to prevent the subjugation of women that the corset represented.

Lee understood this history, but as an artist with a social vision he used it to create a new standard by which his work should be judged. He was not just about supporting women through fashion. That was merely a means to a transcending end for him. The end was to approach the question of what it means to live a beautiful life. Lee called changing the way women look an "art thing." Rightly so. Art demands a change in us. And Lee's art changed the way we think about the social importance of haute couture (high sewing indeed). He changed the look of Betty Friedan's "feminine mystique" by empowering the human physique, where the dividing line between fashionable tradition and gendered rules was put into ironically masculine relief. Lee used his knowledge of the history of costume to promote the necessity of an androgynous aesthetics. He neither supported nor subjugated sexual politics. Instead, he changed the political game by demolishing the psychological rules (gender), but keeping the designing tradition (fashion). Empowering women changes everyone. This is his artistic legacy.

"The Birds" (S/S 1995)

   










"He really loved women," fashion queen Daphne Guinness writes in her forward to Alexander McQueen: The Life And The Legacy, "really adored them - and not just for our statuesque beauty but for our fragility as well as our strength, our ghosts and demons alongside our accomplishments." This love began with his mother. Joyce McQueen's role in shaping her son's talent cannot be overestimated. Her love of social history and the powerful sense of identity that came from her research into their rich family heritage ("Highland Rape" would not have been possible without her), provided him with a sense that anything was possible for him as an artist. This possibility became actual in his "Banshee" show (A/W 1994-1995), where the women are celebrated as heavily pregnant, sport short Sinéad O'Connor style hair, and pose like the bride in Jan van Eyck's The Arnolfini Marriage of 1434 (his favourite painting). Beauty, fragility, strength, ghosts, demons, and accomplishments. In a word: love.

McQueen Adoring Queen

    

Helena's line about love in her soliloquy in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is the humanistic (not misogynistic) basis for every piece of clothing he ever designed: "Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind" (A Midsummer Night's Dream - I, i, 234). The relation between love, physical eyesight, and conceptual vision is the central theme in this play about the confusion that love sometimes brings. Lee's work attempts to clear up this confusion by focusing our fashionable attention away from the eyes (important as they are), and onto the mind. He was, therefore, a conceptual artist. "With me, metamorphosis is a bit like plastic surgery but less drastic," Lee said. "I try to have the same effect with my clothes. But ultimately I do this to transform mentalities more than the body. I try and modify fashion like a scientist by offering what is relevant today and what will continue to be so tomorrow." No wonder Lee had Helena's line tattooed on his right arm.

McQueen Adorning Queen

   










   
Lee's love for his mother received a shocking blow when she was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. She and Lee lived with it for two years until her death on February 2, 2010. Her death proved fatal for him. The day before his mother's funeral (nine days after she died) Lee hung himself in his Green Street, Mayfair apartment on February 11, 2010. He left a suicide note. The contents remain private to this day. It was inscribed in the catalogue of Wolfe von Lenkiewicz's The Descent Of Man. Even though Lee had the designer's eyes, more than any other designer of his generation, he still was not able to mindfully accommodate love's loss in his life. What caused this man's descent? Did the love of the mind fail him?

A coroner's inquest into Lee's death recorded the verdict that his suicide was carried out "while the balance of his mind was disturbed." Lee's psychiatrist blamed his client's depression and anxiety, in part, on "the demands of his work." It has been said of Isabella Blow that the reason why she committed suicide was that she could not endure being stuck between kitch and oblivion. Something similar can be said of Lee: he could not endure being stuck between the love of the eyes and the love of the mind. While a psychological story can and should be told here about Lee's lack of endurance, a philosophical one needs to be told as well. Lee's philosophy of art was not strong enough to deal with the confused descent that love brought into his life. This is particularly the case when it comes to the marriage between creativity and commerce.
     

Mother And Son

 









The demands of his work include the necessity of coming to terms with art and money. "Designers have to make a choice - art or money. I don't create art," Lee said. "I create clothes people wear." This was sensible PR at the time (2004), given Gucci's 51 percent stake in his business. Just after partnering with Gucci Group in 2001, sales jumped 400 percent as a result of Lee's "What A Merry-Go-Round" show (A/W 2001-2002). The CEO of Gucci Group Domenico de Sole praised the marriage between "creativity and commerce this represented." He told British Vogue that McQueen's great talent and intensity as a designer included his "comprehensive understanding of his business."

And yet, Lee's own economic commentary runs counter to his social commitment to artistic change. Guinness knew him well enough to know who he was and what he did. "He has been referred to as the fashion world's darling, its rebel and pioneer," Guinness writes. "He was both all of these things and none of them at all, because actually, what he was, was an artist. Had he chosen paint or wood for his canvas instead of material, I genuinely believe he would have been determined to master and challenge their disciplines in that same defiant, obsessive way he worked with clothes ... Painting's loss was fashion's gain, however, and how very glad I am of it."

Queen Mourning McQueen

Art or money? Artist or businessman? His claim that designers must choose between the two is a consequence of his inability to see that in the post-Warhol era art and money are not mutually exclusive. While he was able to demolish the dividing psychological line between male and female by promoting androgyny as an aesthetic ideal, he was unable to demolish the dividing economical line between creativity and commerce. He did not have a balance of mind when it came to the economics of art. This is a philosophical failure. This failure shows itself in his work just prior to the time of his death, from his inconsistent questioning of human greed in "Natural Dis-Inction, Un-Natural Selection" (S/S 2009), to his inconclusive response to fashion's built-in obsolescence in "The Horn Of Plenty" (A/W 2009-2010), to his ultimate escapism in "Plato's Atlantis" (S/S 2010) - "Aristotle's Earth" was nowhere to be found.

"The Horn Of Plenty" show is a noteworthy indicator of his struggle over the consumption of fashion in a capitalist society. The name of the show just happened to be the name of the pub in which Jack the Ripper's last victim was seen before her murder. Whether this was "a metaphor for impending doom" is up to the fashion critics to decide. What we do know is that Lee used the name of the show and his fame as a designer to respond to the inherent obsolescence and excessive production within the fashion industry. While stagehands were scattering broken mirrors on the runway (representing the narcissism of fashion), and stacking props from his past collections in mini landfills (representing the waste fashion produces), preparations were being made to launch his accessibly priced McQ line in 250 Target stores in the American Mideast once his "horn of plenty" show was over. "This whole situation is such a cliché. The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway," Lee stated, "and I think that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity." The irony of his contribution toward the problem of mass-market saturation from "Jack The Ripper Stalks His Victims" to "The Horn Of Plenty" ("McQueen's Pub Of Plenty" perhaps?) was not lost on him. He knew he was part of the problem. He never solved it.

"The Horn Of Plenty" (A/W 2009-2010)

   










"I want to marry Savile Row with ready to wear," Lee once said. If "Savile Row" was haute couture for him. then "ready to wear" was about having money to spare at the end of the runway. To embrace both couture and commerce requires a philosophy of art that is insightful enough to see a capitalist life in aesthetic terms. "The Horn Of Plenty" show is an enigma because Lee was not romantically realistic enough to see the irony of mocking the excess of fashion by fashionable means as itself an artistic statement (precisely because it is an economic one). He failed in his own mind to look hard enough at art and money, unlike other British artists of his generation. The demand that this work required was too much for his love to bear. This is his artistic tragedy.

Watt chose her words carefully when she described Lee as "the so-called Damien Hirst of fashion." Many are chosen, but few are called. Sadly, Lee was not one of them. That said, the Alexander McQueen brand under the corporate direction of Jonathan Akeroyd has less of a problem with capital than its founder. Hirst and McQ are now joining forces to celebrate the 10th anniversary of McQueen's iconic skull scarf by creating a new limited edition line based on Hirst's Entomology paintings. The collection launches November 15, 2013 and is available in chiffon, pongé, twill, and cashmere. Prices start at £135.

Lee Alexander McQueen: March 17, 1969 - February 11, 2010.

Sources

Alex Fury. "In Fashion: Daphne Guinness - Interviewed By Alex Fury." October 10, 2012.
Alexander Lee McQueen. Isabella Blow. McQueen & I. Profile of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. July 27, 2012.
Andrew Bolton. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.
Anne Deniau. Love Looks Not With The Eyes: Thirteen Years With Lee Alexander McQueen. New York: Abrams, 2012.
Daphne Guinness. Brennen Stasiewicz. Daphne's Window. Daphne Guinness homage to Alexander McQueen. May 02, 2012.
Ella Alexander. "Alexander McQueen And Damien Hirst Join Forces." Vogue News, August 13, 2013.
Janet Maslin. "Looking Back At A Domestic Cri De Coeur." The New York Times Books. February 18, 2013.

Judith Watt. Alexander McQueen: The Life And The Legacy. New York: Harper Design, 2012.
Kate Millett. Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday, 1970.
Katherine Gleason. Alexander McQueen: Evolution. New York: Race Point Publishing, 2012.
Reiko Koga. "The Influence Of Haute Couture - Fashion In The First Half Of The 20th Century." Fashion: A Fashion History Of The 20th Century. Berlin: Taschen, 2012.
Robert Hughes. The Shock Of The New. New York: Knopf, 1980.

Odd Man Out

By Rory A.A. Hinton

Scientific Canadian
Kazuo Nakamura (1926 - 2002)

"People send me so many presents in the mail, but I wish instead of all the presents and art mailers I would get science mailers in language I could understand. That would make me want to open my mail again." (Andy Warhol)

When Andy Warhol started painting money (like 200 One Dollar Bills) he finished a revolution that demolished the dividing line between creativity and commerce. Curating capital through this multiply-and-concur strategy made it possible to recognize human survival as a natural pattern of aesthetic consumption. Taking Warhol's lead, some recognize this by producing consumable art (like Banksy), while others do it by artistically consuming $43.8 million for Warhol's money (like Sotheby's). They both supply and demand within the same marketplace of ideals, they just do it in different ways. Prior to the idea that "art is what you can get away with" (which goes proxy for the post-Pop principle that good art is good business), there was no gift shop to exit through, let alone survive within. Guggenheim as Bloomingdale's.

Combining art and economics in this way set a precedent, and increased the possibility for artists after Warhol to live conceptually ahead of life itself according to their own artistic ideas. Jeff Koons is the perfect protégé. Andy's work is "about that spark of trying, in the most economical means," Koons says, "to just get a little bit ahead of life itself ... it's that increase of possibilities, and for that moment (you know as a great alchemist), we are greater than we have ever been." Koons' use of 'economical' means more here than just the necessity of romantic capitalism. It means trying to use whatever means necessary to increase the possibility of uniting art with culture writ large.

200 One Dollar Bills - 1962 by Andy Warhol on display in
New York at Sotheby's pre-auction preview, 2009.

     

When Kazuo Nakamura finished painting strings (like Infinite Waves), he started a revolution that demolished the dividing line between painting and physics. Curating science through his own multiply-and-concur strategy made it possible for him to recognize that the artist and the scientist do the same thing but in different ways: they both recognize patterns in nature. There is a sort of "fundamental universal pattern in all art and nature," Nakamura says. In a sense, "scientists and artists are doing the same thing ... This world of pattern is a world we are discovering together." In this way Nakamura lived and worked ahead of his own life and times by increasing the conceptual possibilities of what art is, and what artists do. Prior to the idea that "art is what you can scientifically recognize with" (which goes proxy for the post-Abstract principle that good science is good art), there were no science mailers written in a language artists could understand, let alone read through. Scientific Canadian as Scientific American.

Unlike Koons, Nakamura was less Warhol's perfect protégé and more his conceptual contemporary (he was two years Warhol's senior). At a time when the physical sciences are still ruled by reason, while the humanities "have been virtually abandoned to the primitive epistemology of mysticism," Nakamura's work functions as a scientific apology within Abstract Expressionism, in much the same way that Warhol's work functions as an economic alchemy without Pop Art. Both of them conceptually united art with culture writ large, they just did it in different ways.

Infinite Waves - 1957
Oil over string on canvas 

   

Science for Nakamura (like economics for Warhol) was an artistic venture. His work shows that the difference between the art of humane measure and the science of human measuring is only in the patterned product of a physically vibrating degree. Knowing what this means, and how it fits into Nakamura's aesthetics, helps clarify what Roald Nasgaard might have been getting at (albeit cryptically) by describing Nakamura as the "odd man out" among the Toronto-based abstract Painters Eleven.

Nasgaard's initial attempt to explain Nakamura's oddness focuses on his painterly technique (a predictable place to start). "From the start," Nasgaard writes, "his painting was precisely ordered and executed with restraint. There are no painterly flourishes, no expressionist gestures." What makes this explanation conspicuous is that words like 'precision,' 'order,' and 'restraint' usually don't belong within the expressionist lexicon. Is it any wonder, then, that Clement Greenberg (the abstract doyen of expressionist critics) dismissed Nakamura's work as "just a bit too captured by oriental 'taste'" to be of any good abstract use? We now have the benefit of hindsight to know that this "critical" remark is less about Nakamura, and more about Greenburg's lexical lack to describe him otherwise.

In fact, it is precisely the precision of Nakamura's fragile line that gives sense to his abstract oddness, and why (contra Greenberg) he is of such abstract use. "Nakamura adopted a way of drawing," Nassgaard continues, "using first razor blades and then the edges of a piece of cardboard dipped into paint ... [this] gave to his line a fragility and precision that some viewers have attributed to his Japanese ethnicity.”

Nakamura's ethnicity is not "germane to his primary practice" as a painter (as Ihor Holubizky correctly points out). However, it does help him express the “parallels between nature, science and art, [and] the mesmerizing complexity of both mathematical organization and mathematical chaos” in his paintings. This fact does not make his art any less abstract, nor any more concrete.

Speaking of the organization of mathematical chaos, Nakamura's pictures are best read as representing the kind of abstractly concrete world you get within chaos theory: a world of order without predictability (a theory Nakamura probably knew about given his regular reading of Scientific American, a practice and a publication that was "emblematic of his entire attitude to art," as Nasgaard says). Nakamura's work shows that there is Occidental chaos within Oriental concision. And in tapping into that chaotic concision (where West meets East on a two dimensional plane), he questions the notion found within critical scholarship (the "Oriental/Occidental dilemma") that there is a real artistic tension between two cultural tendencies that cannot be united, let alone uniformly classified.

To think there is a tension over the Oriental and the Occidental is to miss the unifying significance of "natural patterns" in Nakamura's philosophy of art. The patterns are simultaneously orderly (Oriental) and chaotic (Occidental) enough to be given both experimental and expressive recognition. The implications of this union are as surprising as they are revolutionary. In Nakamura's world an artist can literally make a scientific difference to culture. The artist just does it in a different, but no less significant, way than the scientist. How? The scientific artist and the artistic scientist share the same recognitional brain because they literally inhabit the same physical brane (but more on string theory later). Katsushika Hokusai's The Great Wave Off Kanagawa is a fractaled example of how the kind of chaos represented in the pictures Greenberg was most "captured by" can be expressed through the means of tasteful oriental precision. The Great Wave drips its own Lavender Mist.

The Great Wave Off Kanagawa - 1830-1832
Katsushika Hokusai

Austerity is at the heart of Japanese aesthetics. Art must be austere enough to detach the viewer from an attachment to the world of surface appearance. To get beyond appearance to reality consists in remaining attentive without becoming attached to what merely meets the eyes. The kind of technique that you get in Nakamura's painting is generous enough to catch your attention, but serious enough to prevent you from being distracted by being caught. It forces you to question just what is being represented through his lined fragility, and why. There is an attentive method to this austere madness. Less shows more in Nakamura's taste. Hence his abstract use.

Hillside - 1954 is an early example of this austerity in action (an instance of what he called "linear abstractions"). This painting demonstrates that too much psychological abstraction can get in the way of experiencing the abstract nature of physical reality. Psychologism is conspicuous by its absence here. Oddly enough, this early painting proves why Nakamura is both the most and the least abstract of the Painters Eleven. He is the least abstract since his work is not about his inner psychological landscape as a painter (unlike his abstract contemporaries). And yet precisely because of this, his work is the most abstract since it seeks to accurately represent the outer physical landscape of abstract reality. To copy nature is to create abstraction. “Do not copy nature too much," Gauguin once said. "Art is an abstraction.” Fortunately, Nakamura did not heed Gauguin's prohibition.

Hillside - 1954
Kazuo Nakamura

Canadian painting is steeped in its landscapes, and Nakamura's contribution to it qualifies him as a quintessential Canadian painter. However, his work in this area is abstract in a way that might seem counter-intuitive at first, at least historically. "Cezanne broke nature down into cones, spheres," Nakamura says. "But we are living in an age where we can see a structure, a structure based on atomic structure and motion."

Consider Plowed Field - 1953 as an early example of Nakamura's structured abstractions, a painting that Richard William Hill describes as "fresh, confident and clearly engaged with Japanese aesthetics." The landscape is recognizable. And yet, closer inspection displays smaller fractal-like images within the landscape. These images go proxy for the great waves of patterned energy derived from even smaller more chaotic structures existing explicitly beneath the surface, but implicitly making that surface landscape possible. Energy in motion.

Plowed Field - 1953
Kazuo Nakamura

   
"It takes energy to do abstract work," Nakamura states. "Every once in a while I do landscapes, to do what's on top." This comment is less of a commentary on what Nakamura does in response to the spent human energy of abstract painting, and more of a scientific description of the necessary condition for producing it. It literally takes physical energy, the energy that gets produced on the quantum landscape, to make it possible. The energy is virtually on top, because it is vibrationally on the bottom. Nakamura was scientific enough to recognize this patterned fact.

It is interesting to note here the similarity between Nakamura's 1953 painting Plowed Field, with the artistic rendering of a quantum field from Brian Greene's 2003 PBS documentary The Elegant Universe on string theory. The fifty years that separates the artistic rendering of these two fields only confirms the intuitive anticipation of Nakamura's artistically rendered scientific recognition of patterned spacetime. Odd, indeed.

Quantum Jitters - 2003

   







 

Cutting-edge physics is concerned with unification. The goal is to fulfil Einstein's unified dream by creating a theory of quantum gravity that will unite two mutually incompatible areas of scientific study: general relativity (the very large) and quantum mechanics (the very small). Given its universal eloquence and unifying elegance (at least as Greene describes it), string theory is not only the best unifying theory within the marketplace of ideas, but is also as revolutionary as the individual theories it attempts to unify.

String theory states that everything in the universe is made up of ultra-microscopic vibrating filaments (strings) of energy that vibrate and move within space-time. Strings (closed and open-ended loops) are the things that unite the four fundamental interactions of the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, the weak radioactive force, and the strong nuclear force. To work out how this works is the most pressing concern among string theorists. Strings be the ties that bind.

Untitled - 1965
Kazuo Nakamura

   














   
When Edward Witten (one of the leading experts in the field) said that "string theory is a part of twenty-first century physics that fell by chance into the twentieth century" he was giving expression to its revolutionary status as a theory of comprehensive breadth and predictive depth. As a result "it could be decades or even centuries before string theory is fully developed and understood" (as Greene puts it). With this comprehensiveness in mind, our understanding of it just might (in part) come from an initially unlikely domain of inquiry and analysis (one that has generally been at odds with science): art. And why not? Excluding something explanatory from a theory that claims to explain everything would be prejudicial and inconsistent. The church once claimed that Copernicus' heliocentric science was not only wrong but had nothing to contribute toward our understanding of the cosmos. How quaint the ways of scientific progress.

In his book-length commentary on why Warhol went from a commercial artist to a cultural icon, Arthur C. Danto states that “when there is a period of deep cultural change, it shows up first in art." In his analysis of the parallels between art and physics, Leonard Shalain says something similar: "Art generally anticipates scientific revisions of reality.” With Michio Kaku's commentary on Einstein as a guide, it is only right to conclude that art's anticipatory contribution toward scientific revolutions is found primarily in pictures. "Einstein would often comment," Kaku writes, "that if a new theory was not based on a physical image simple enough for a child to understand, it was probably worthless.” Nakamura’s string paintings are physical images that are simple enough for a child to understand their artistic value, but complex enough for an adult to grasp their scientific worth. This is chiefly the case when it comes to Nakamura's Infinite Waves - 1957, his "most extreme painting" as he put it.

The Infinite Wave
Kazuo Nakamura (1957)

   













Commentators have struggled to make sense of the extremity. "The waves, dense and maze-like, go nowhere," Iris Nowell writes. "Or perhaps it is better to believe that the tantalizing lines emerged from a place deep in Nakamura's cosmic world and it matters not where they go." Nasgaard's commentary is less metaphoric, and therefore more insightful: "The rows of string lines cover the whole surface of the support uniformly ... suggest[ing] landscape horizons or even objects on a plane, literalness and illusion always coexisting." Take away 'illusion' and this comment comes closer to the literal significance of Infinite Waves, especially concerning Nasgaard's notion of "objects on a plane."

Research into string theory has produced theoretical objects that are larger than strings. Witten's work theoretically created an extra dimension that allows a string to stretch into something like a very large surface or membrane ("brane" for short). With enough energy a brane could grow into an enormous size, perhaps even as large as an entire universe (like the one we live in now). Early string theory focused attention on strings that were closed loops (like rubber bands). But after Witten, physicists turned their attention to open-ended strings. It is now held that everything we see around us is made of open-ended strings, each one tied down to a three dimensional brane that is our universe. What Infinite Waves represents, then, is the waves of vibrational energy produced by open-ended strings tied down to an infinitely large brane (canvas as brane). Nakamura's "cosmic world" is our own, and it does matter where the strings go and what the strings do.

Like the string theory he anticipates, Nakamura's string paintings are part of twenty-first century art that fell by chance into the twentieth century. Fifty years prior to the public disclosure of string theory, Nakamura's strings scientifically intuit and artistically represent the most important and revolutionary theory in fundamental physics (years before it was formulated within the scientific community). And fifty years after the private production of Nakamura's strings, string theory itself helps us comprehend his work. The string paintings and string theory mutually endorse each other and help to unify art with the most successful public institution for the past three hundred years: science.

Nakamura's revolutionary worth consists in his scientific work. His artistic genius showed itself in conceptually intuiting and artistically representing string theory as a form of pattern recognition. In this way Nakamura made a scientific contribution to culture by preparing our collective imagination for scientific work in this field. Einstein was right: good physics requires good pictures. You cannot have thought experiments without them.

In the Preface to the 2004 catalogue for the Art Gallery Of Ontario exhibition Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure, Dennis Reid states that Hill's introductory essay "establishes the platform for all future consideration" of Nakamura's work. Reid is right. The reason why is because Hill describes Nakamura's work as a "funny sort of realism." Hill's use of 'funny' here means "odd." And the oddness is based on the source for Nakamura's artistic inspiration (at least for an artist of his descriptive ilk). "[I was inspired by] photographs ... of the real world at the microscopic level," Nakamura says. "And this is real form. And its basis is pattern and structure ... [so] you might say I am actually a realist."

To say that Nakamura is the "odd man out" is to recognize that his work is an extreme form of representational realism, unlike the work of his abstract contemporaries and his abstract critics. "Looking back, however, it is now clear that his radically simple yet infinitely expansive minimalist string paintings ... were more significant than any objects produced in the 1950s by his Painters Eleven colleagues," Reid writes, "and were among the most important works produced by any Canadian artist during that decade." Their significance consists in the contribution they make to our scientific understand of the world. The string paintings are patterned artistic products of physically vibrating strings.

To unite art and science artistically, is to do the same thing that quantum gravity is doing scientifically. Nakamura’s work is an artistic component of unified field theory at work. Einstein's unified dream was not unknown to him. Nakamura knew what he was doing: "I hope that some day all these explorations will be united - though maybe not by me - into a universal theory of number structure." 

Combining art and science in this way set a precedent, and increased the possibility for artists after Nakamura to live conceptually ahead of life itself according to their own artistic ideas. Jeff Koons is the perfect protégé. The scientific sina qua non of Koons' artistic One Ball Equilibrium Tank is none other than Nobel Prize Laureate in physics Richard Feynman, with whom Koons collaborated in order to defy the art of gravity through the science of salting distilled water. In trying to use whatever means necessary to increase the possibility of uniting art with culture writ large, Koons shows that the art of science is indeed a spectacular sport.
   

One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank - 1985
Jeff Koons

Warhol and Nakamura did the same thing but in different ways. They both united art with areas of culture that were their artistic concern: good art is good business if and only if good science is good art. They were contemporary revolutionaries. However, as an artistic American it is unfortunate that Warhol did not have a subscription to this Scientific Canadian. Nakamura painted in a language Warhol would have understood, and read. It would have made him open his mail again.

Sources

"Andy Warhol's 200 One Dollar Bills Silkscreen Sold For $43.8m." The Telegraph. November 12, 2009.

Andy Warhol. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001.
Ayn Rand. The Romantic Manifesto. Signet (Penguin Group), 1975.

Banksy. Exit Through The Gift Shop. Paranoid Pictures, 2010.
Brian Greene. The Elegant Universe. Vintage Books, 2000.
Ihor Holubizky. Kazuo Nakamura: The Method Of Nature. The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, 2001.
Iris Nowell. Painters Eleven: The Wild Ones Of Canadian Art. Douglas & McIntyre, 2011.
Joseph McMaster, Julia Cort. The Elegant Universe. NOVA, 2004.
Leonard Shlain. Art & Physics: Parallel Visions In Space, Time, And Light. Harper Perennial, 2007.
Michio Kaku. Einstein's Cosmos. W.W. Norton & Company, 2005.
Ric Burns. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film. PBS, 2006.
Richard William Hill. Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure. Art Gallery Of Ontario, 2004.
Roald Nasgaard. Abstract Painting In Canada. Douglas & McIntyre, 2007.
Steven S. Gubser. The Little Book Of String Theory. Princeton University Press, 2010.
Thomas Kuhn. The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Kant Cubed

A Cubism Reader
Documents And Criticism, 1906-1914
Mark Antliff, Patricia Leighten (ed)
University of Chicago Press
2008

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

A Cubism Reader

A Cubism Reader is a new collection of primary-source material on the conceptual foundations of the cubist movement between 1906 and 1914. It is a sympathetically critical response to the only other book in English that contained similar material: Edward F. Fry's Cubism (published in 1966). It is sympathetic in that it recognizes Fry's interpretive importance in the history of cubist scholarship. Fry is honoured here for originally "initiating the important project of understanding the cubist movement through its primary sources." However, it is also critical because Fry's book is unapologetically modern. His editorial selections and introductory explanation of the texts are based upon his reading of the philosopher of modernity: Immanuel Kant. Why be critical about a product of Kant's critical philosophy?
     Fry is taken to task for promoting the idea that the cast of Kant's critical shadow makes cubism conceptually possible and artistically necessary. In their introduction Antliff and Leighten argue that this reliance on Kant is dated, limited, and overdetermined, especially in light of a new critical discourse that has emerged over the past thirty years within cubist studies. To understand why taking issue with Fry matters, it helps to understand his own brand of Kantian aesthetics and how it contributed toward a philosophy of art that has outlived its usefulness.
     Fry trained in art history at Harvard in the 1960s during the heyday of formalist approaches to the early history of modern art. Formalism, as an aesthetic doctrine, is based on the idea that to interpret a painting is to indicate and explain its form: the perceptual elements of an artwork and the relationship holding between them. These related (formal) elements are the primary concern of aesthetic value. These elements, in turn, are said to be independent of the objective meaning, reference, or utility of a work of art. The turn to the subject in modern aesthetics delimits these concerns by default.
     While the philosophical roots of formalism are Kantian in both conceptual origin and perceptual substance, its influence as an aesthetic doctrine owes much to the critical scholarship of Clement Greenberg. In the heavily anthologized essay "Modernist Painting" Greenberg argues that Kant is “the first real modern” because he was the first to critique the means of criticism itself (most critically in his Critique Of Pure Reason). “Western civilization is not the first to turn around and question its own foundations,” Greenberg writes, “but it is the civilization that has gone furthest in doing so. I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant.”
     What makes Kant’s critique unique in the history of philosophy is that it did not follow the standard rule of criticizing a subject from the outside, as was the de facto method during the Enlightenment. By “outside” I mean not adopting the premises of the subject of critique, but rather assuming other premises as a basis for critiquing it. (The Enlightenment critique of religion was an outside job.) Rather, Kant criticizes from the inside by using the critical procedures themselves upon the subject of criticism.
     In his case, Kant used logic in order to place limits upon logic (subjecting his subject), thereby reducing it down to its critical essence and essential function. Kant’s logical “antinomies” (contradictions which necessarily follow from our attempt to conceive the nature of transcendent reality) within his Critique are an example of what you get when “logic goes subjective” (as it were). The point here is not to subvert the subject of concern, but to more consistently entrench it within its own methods and motives. This turn to the subject as the object of subjective concern is the essence of Kantian modernism.

Cubism
Edward F. Fry

   
















     Under the sway of Greenberg, Fry had his own Kantian historical narrative to tell between the analytic and synthetic stages of early cubism. Antliff and Leighten attempt to go beyond Fry by placing these primary-source materials within a larger more up-to-date context. In this sense, the significance of A Cubism Reader consists in reintroducing these important documents within an unapologically postmodern context (and by 'postmodern' I mean post-Kantian).
     Fry's Kantian reading of the influence of cubism in modern art gets reduced to a brilliantly absurd end in the abstract painting of Jackson Pollock (Greenberg's example of a great painter). It is Pollock's work that indicates the necessity of going beyond Kant in our critical approach to art. On this reading the turn to the subject in Kant's critical philosophy is reduced to absurdity in abstract painting. Where can you go after Pollock's Lavender Mist (let alone Full Fathom Five)? You can't go anywhere. Pollock knew this most of all.
     This is not to downplay abstract expressionism. The distinction must be made between how abstract painting broke away from late cubism in painterly talent, and yet still remained cubist in subjective intent. Cubism and abstract expressionism are both movements in painting that are characterized by the subjective will to abstraction. Abstract expressionism in the life and work of Jackson Pollock is the reductio ad absurdum of Kantian modernism. It represents a dead end (and in the case of Pollock, this is literally true).
     This is one important reason why Antliff and Leighten take issue with Fry's Kantian reading of the conceptual foundations of cubism. It is not only dated, limited, and overdetermined, but it can also lead to disastrous consequences in the lives of artists who espouse this subjectivist philosophy of art (whether consciously or not). Post-Kantian art, therefore, is a renewed turn to the object-matter of painting. The positive results show for themselves.
     For example, in questioning Fry's formalist and hierarchical narrative of cubism (where Braque and Picasso are seen as the major innovators of the movement, while artists like Jean Metzinger, Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, and Fernand Léger who came after Braque and Picasso are seen as minor imitators), this new approach to cubism makes it possible to interpret all of the cubist artists on a level aesthetic field. This also helps introduce new questions about objective meaning, reference, and utility in the work of cubist art, questions which in the modern period lacked a vocabulary for their expression.
     The most promising consequence of this turn to the object-matter in painting is how these source materials can be used as a way to add historic weight to the profound claim made by the Canadian abstract painter Kazuo Nakamura that the artist and the scientist do the same thing but in different ways: they both recognize patterns in nature (physical, geometric, and mathematical). With these primary-source materials available in A Cubism Reader, it is now possible to talk about the objective significance of the geometry of cubes (for example), and how that stress reminds us of just how realistic these cubist paintings can be seen, at least when it comes to the artistic geometry of physics at the turn of the 21st century.

Sources
Edward F. Fry. Cubism. London: Thames & Hudson. 1966.
Francis Frascina, Charles Harrison (ed). Modern Art And Modernism: A Critical Anthology. New York: Harper & Row. 1987.
Mark Antliff, Patricia Leighten (ed). A Cubism Reader: Documents And Criticism, 1906-1914. Chicago: The University Of Chicago Press. 2008.

Fashionable Entertainment

Fran Lebowitz In Conversation
Friday February 08, 2013
Massey Hall
Toronto, Ontario

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

Front Row With Fran

When Fran Lebowitz goes on tour the drill is always the same: she gets interviewed by a local celebrity, then she fields questions from the audience in an "entertaining fashion." However, the question and answer segment is neither balanced nor fair. She is adamant that the questions should not be fashionable in the way her answers are designed to be. Sadly, if the Q&A at Massey Hall was any indication, Fran gets "entertained" alot on tour.

The interview segment functions as a platform for the brand of wit for which Fran is famous. Take the following example from an interview between her and Toni Morrison, nicely captured in Martin Scorsese's 2010 Lebowitz documentary Public Speaking:

Toni Morrison: "You seem to me almost always right."

Fran Lebowitz: "What do you mean 'seem'?"

Toni Morrison: "But also never fair."

Fran Lebowitz: "I am always right because I am never fair."

Fran's prerequisite for correctness is based on the fact that one can at times get a bit too carried away with democracy, at least concerning art and its relation to culture. On this Fran is a fashionable fascist: democracy for society, but not for culture. So much the worse for democracy. Her message here is not about fairness, but about the cultural necessity of a natural aristocracy of artistic talent. Fran has it. Others do not. That is life. Who said it is fair? Not everyone can write Metropolitan Life.

Knowing this, I asked her the following question near the end of the Q&A session (doing my best to be as fashionless as possible): "Is art what you can get away with?" She answered: "I don't believe that it is." This answer gave me serious pause. She had just finished explaining to a previous questioner why she did not believe in magic by stating: "I don't believe in anything that I have to believe in. Think about it." After she talked about the art market, the importance of aristocratic taste, and how Oprah has dumbed down our standards of excellence, she looked at me with a sly smile and said: "So, to sum up ... yes." 

I had to think about that, too. Fran does not waste words. She does not believe that art is what you can get away with because she knows it is. That is why she continues to get away with creating it. She obviously learned her Factory lessons when she wrote reviews for Interview Magazine back in the 1970s. 

Sources

Fran Lebowitz. Metropolitan Life. E P Dutton, March 1978.
Martin Scorsese. Public Speaking. HBO Documentary Films, 2010.

Roitfeld's Revenge

CR Fashion Book
Issue 1: Rebirth
Fall/Winter 2012

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

CR Fashion Book
Issue 1: Rebirth

Carine Roitfeld is a "chiffrephile" (a lover of figures), and her love is elitist. Unlike her fashionably American counterparts, her figures lack pedestrian accessibility. The "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" story always gets good press within the pages of Roitfeld's world, where you can never be too thin-skinned, nor too over-dressed (or under-, depending upon Terry Richardson's lens envy). This is celebrated without apology. If her ten year tenure at French Vogue is any indication, she does not fancy the pear as a figure, nor does she offer advice on how to dress if you are about to turn 50. What she does offer with her new publishing venture is something much better: add her brand of vice to your mix and match and act your adage. Roitfeld is a 58 year old icon, and her vice is her virtue. Her ad for M.A.C Cosmetics in the inaugural biannual magazine CR Fashion Book shows that Prada is not the only thing the devil wears.

Donald Davidson waxed metaphoric when he described metaphor as "the dreamwork of language." It is easy to wax this way when it comes to Roitfeld's erotic-chic aesthetic. Like any great artist, Roitfeld is not concerned with fashion as an end. After her less than voluntary death at the hands of French Vogue in January 2011, Roitfeld's rebirth in CR uses fashion as a means to make an affirming gesture toward George Herbert's claim that living well is the best revenge: "This issue takes rebirth as its theme and is filled with both images and ideas about birth, pregnancy, and family. The promise of youth, the force of age, and the rush of all things new. It's an escape, a fashion fairy tale. It's a dream of a better life - because fashion is meant to make us dream."

Some believe in forgiveness. Others believe in revenge. Roitfeld has much to be revengeful about, especially when it comes to her critics. Like Miles Davis in Birth Of The Cool, Roitfeld in CR has turned her fashionable technique into an art form. CR is a rebirth of the cool for her. Her detractors will consider it an afterbirth. This is especially true of the fashionless feminists (Camille Paglia is a notable exception), with whom she has waged war for years over what they have dubbed as her "porn-chic" editorial policy: nudity, bondage, and blood (with a healthy dose of "fashionable anorexia" thrown in for misogynistic measure).

In this vein French Vogue under Roitfeld's direction could be likened to the kind of dinner that Halston and Elsa Peretti often ate together - caviar, baked potato, and cocaine - a meal that inevitably dissolved into what the two of them ended up eating for their just dessert: a screaming cat fight. No wonder Carine Roitfeld and Condé Nast parted company (so conclude the critics). Despite such negative publicity she continues to purposely turn technique into art, with aplomb to spare (sans the starch, of course). Welcome to Roitfeld's revenge.

Carine Roitfeld

   












We are informed in Roitfeld's editorial that CR was created with "humor, joy, grace, and always a dash of irreverence." While Wintour is rightly credited with globalizing Vogue as a brand name, Coddington nevertheless thinks that "a little nostalgia for the days when fashion came first doesn't do any harm." This is a graceful way of saying that Vogue should be more than just Prada-homogenized. Roitfeld could not agree more. No wonder she has been labeled the "Anti-Anna" of the fashion world.

Roitfeld made French Vogue in her own elitist image. It was "svelte, tough, luxurious, and wholeheartedly in love with dangling-cigarette, bare-chested fashion" (as Cartner-Morley nicely puts it). In other words: it was très cool. And her brand of cool came first. It might be the case that branded fashion got the worst of her while she was at the helm of French Vogue. If so, then CR indicates that her departure from what she describes as that "golden cage" was a victory for style (she certainly left in it - with Tom Ford in tow).

La Femme Ford

   










   




   
Fashion is still first with her. The difference now is her maternal dash of irreverence. "When I learned that my daugher, Julia, was expecting," writes Roitfeld, "I immediately began seeing babies and new mothers on planes, at fashion shows, in New York and in Paris. Birth and rebirth all around. I became obsessed. At the same time, I was thinking and dreaming about the first issue of this magazine ... I wanted to do something different ... I have always had a different side to me, a very family side." This "something different" in CR gets stylized with a model covered in black-lace Gucci carrying a baby doll. It is shown in a model dressed in Givenchy haute couture with a baby in a carriage. It is nothing less than erotic provocation pushing a pram. Roitfeld is the grand-mother of fashion.

How grand is this mother? Unlike her own (at least when it comes to personal style). Roitfeld describes her mother as a classic bon chic, bon genre Parisian - clean-cut suits accented with a constrained fetish for Hermès (the messenger of the gods, not the devil). She is more Helmut than Hermès, especially given her desire to be the subject of a Newton photograph. That desire has become reality. She has gone from a static subject to the living embodiment: heavy on the black and white, yet light on the fashionable bondage. She is what Karl Lagerfeld describes in his piece for CR as "not girly." A French woman of Carine's ilk is "something very different and specific. It is not possible "for observers of women's style and standards of beauty and fashion not to notice her. Maybe she [is] nothing but an idea, but as the philosopher Berkeley said, "All sensible qualities are ideas.""

Defying Newton's Gravity

 













   
Ideas are not absent here. When was the last time you read an article in a high fashion magazine written by Mata Amritanandamayi, known as "Amma" (or "Mother" in her native language Malayalam), extolling the virtues of a new path to inner beauty? Her devotees consider her "as a living incarnation of the divine-mother." Whether divine or humane, this grand-mother is a messenger: "We are honored to begin this issue of CR with a message from Amma - a woman whose magnetic grace and clarity of purpose inspire us all. These are her words."

Here are a few of them: "The foundation of selfless service is unadulterated love. Amma knows that it is not easy to have such a pure, loving mind, because when two people come together, it is two separate worlds that become linked. Love and service are not two - they are inextricably tied to one another, like a flower and its fragrance. True service happens when we understand the hearts of the suffering and serve them. For this, we ought to learn to see ourselves in others, and others in ourselves."

Apart from the notion of "selfless service," this is sage advice. While Carine is honored to begin her rebirth with this clarifying message, this message (in turn) gets honored through inclusion in a magazine that is all about the stylish virtue of selfish vice. Fashion under Roitfeld's watch has always been about that. The grand-mother of fashion has some sage advice of her own for the divine-mother (inclusion for the sake of instruction): altruism is not fashionable.

Eyeliner and seeing in a generous light, lipstick and speaking kind words, earrings and patient listening, rings and right actions are selfish notions that provide the foundation for artistic revenge: living well. And living well in this way can achieve the kind of unadulterated love Amma speaks about in her inspiring words. This Anti-Anna is the fashion world's Amma. She reminds us that fashion is a way to love yourself first. Her one great philosophical idea is that sensibile qualities can teach us about the point of endorsing an androgynous aesthetics: to dream of a much better (because more fashionably inclusive) life. Her resemblance to Iggy Pop should give us serious pause.

Pop Art In Drag

   















   
During an interview in the fall of 2012 Roitfeld informed The Guardian that present necessity required the tailored insertion of extra strips of fabric into her signature pencil skirts. This had nothing to do with abandoning her narrative tastes, however. She had taken up ballet and the results proved outstanding: "I am skinny," Roitfeld says, "but now my bottom is more round. It's good, no? I don't want to do Botox, that kind of thing. But I think how you hold yourself is very important. Ballet is good, because it makes you stand up tall."

Standing tall consists in knowing where you stand, and why. For example, Roitfeld would be the first to tell you that artists were not the only casualties of AIDS. A large discernible audience was also lost, an audience that knew the difference between a dancer like Suzanne Farrell and the pirouetting equivalent of a prima donna wanna-be. In the light of fashionless criticism Roitfeld's revenge aims at raising the barre of artistic connoisseurship with every page she publishes. In an age full of magazines published for pears (as if the point of fashion is to cater to the lowest common denominator), promoting a chiffrephile aristocracy of artistic taste is a cultural necessity. Issue 2 of CR Fashion Book is available at selected newsstands starting February 21, 2013. Its theme? Dance.

CR Fashion Book
Issue 2: Dance

     

Sources
Amy Larocca. "The Anti-Anna." New York Magazine. February 18, 2008.
Ani Tzenkova. "Insider News: The Real Carine Departure Story." Fashion. December 18, 2010.
Camille Paglia. Vamps & Tramps: New Essays. Vintage. October 11, 1994.
Carine Roitfeld. CR Fashion Book: Issue 1 Rebirth. Fall/Winter 2012.
Catherine Rampell. "Angus Maddison, Economic Historian, Dies At 83." The New York Times. May 01, 2010.
Donald Davidson. Inquiries Into Truth And Interpretation: Philosophical Essays Volume 2. Clarendon Press, second edition. September 01, 2001.
Grace Coddington. Grace: A Memoir. Random House Canada. November 20, 2012.
Janet Maslin. "The Very Model Of A Fashion Insider." The New York Times. November 25, 2012.
Jess Cartner-Morley. "Carine Roitfeld: Vogue Was Like A Golden Cage." The Guardian. September 14, 2012.
Miles Davis. Birth Of The Cool. Capitol Records. 1957.
Steven Gaines. Simply Halston: The Untold Story. Putnam. September 11, 1991.

The Invention Of Manolo Blahnik

Manolo Blahnik Drawings
Manolo Blahnik
Thames and Hudson
2003

Review by Rory A.A. Hinton

Manolo Blahnik Drawings

"Architectural shoes are not new to me." (Manolo Blahnik)

Manolo Blahnik is in a position to promote "the camber of making aspiration a reality" of those who wear his heels (and they are many). Anna Wintour speaks for them all when she writes: "The truth is, I wear no other shoes except his; and I see from my daughter's incursions into my cupboard that the former crawler has found her feet, which is to say her Manolos." Manolo is not the only man who promotes it. I have come by my understanding of this kind of architectural camber quite honestly, if not innocently. My de facto love of art cannot be understood without it, let alone the de jure basis for it. Like all things worth considering, it begins at the very beginning with my earliest conscious memory.

This memory consists in sound, not sight. I have no image that I can associate with this first memory. I have tried in vain over the years to access an earlier one. This aural memory is the limit of my analysis. This sound marks the beginning of my conscious life. And not without note, it is also the first time I encountered art. Art and life are therefore one with me. This deep‐seated aural‐fixation of mine is the elixir of Blessed Saint Teresa, the Whore of Babylon, my Lover, and my Mother (all combined into one). It is, in short, an aural manifestation of my inner anima, creating a sound that is refined, brutal, sensuous, archful, deviant, and ultimately joyful. Indeed, it is the kind of sound that is as graceful as it is irresistible. No wonder Nietzsche said what he did about the sounds of music.

Manolo dedicates this 2003 portfolio of drawings to his mother. I understand the maternal influence. I remember sitting at the end of a long hallway in my home when I was just two-years old. This is my second earliest childhood memory. I was busy playing with a toy. I looked up and saw my mother walking toward me. At that precise moment both sight and sound became one in me. I encountered a far reaching realization. She was wearing a pair of black heels. She walked up to me, stopped, and knelt down to pick me up. At that moment I realized that her heels made that primitive sound (when she stopped walking on the waxed hardwood floor, the sound stopped). I discovered the source of my earliest conscious memory (albeit after the fact).

Ever since that discovery I have been trying to understand its artistic import. The maternal in Manolo is a force of nurture, hence the dedication. With this in mind, I can actively imagine young Manolo innocently walking into his mother's walk‐in closet. He sees rows upon rows of his mother's shoes, all neatly placed and displayed on mounted racks. He is memorized by them, so much so that he is afraid to even touch them ("Let's get to the love scene my friend," Donald Fagen writes, "which means look, maybe touch, but beyond that not too much."). Like the genius mathematician Ramanujan (who maintained that each prime number had a unique personality all its own), so the young genius artist Manolo too imagines each pair has a personality all their own. He closes the closet door, sits himself down in the middle of the room, and begins to become the myth that is Manolo.



Young Manolo Holding His Own

   











   

   
Speaking of active imagination, we should never cut ourselves off from the irrational fullness of life. I mention this because the people, the places, and the various things that have come into my orbit have only served to irrationally confirm my love for the visual and aural artistry of shoe design. Those of us who have read through treatises like Krafft‐Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, and laughed through novels like Nicholson's Footsucker, know just how much of one's sexual identity and sensibility can be tied into the sight and the sound of this aesthetic heeling power. But there is more to this story than meets the eye and ear.

I once knew a woman who worked her way through university by owning and operating a private club. She was a student of mine when I was a professor at the University of Toronto. She came to see me often during my office hours because of a remark I made in a lecture about the relation between high fashion and sexual power (I made it in passing when discussing the function of sexuality as an "analytics of power" in relation to what Michel Foucault calls "Scientia Sexualis" in his multi‐volume work The History Of Sexuality).

This remark was the cataylist for a story she wanted to tell me about her line of work. Her job required her to dress the part, which included her shoes. For her the allure of the work had less to do with the sexual context she created for her clients (many of whom were powerful enough to require and desire feminine domination), and more to do with the sense of empowerment she experienced while doing so. Working her heels was part of the power trip.

When she mentioned this I was immediately reminded of something Manolo once accurately said (and artistically shows, through his beautiful designs): "When a woman puts on a pair of high heels, she changes." I did not say much in response to my student's disclosures (she only wanted my ear, not my advice - she was the mistress of her own domain), but I certainly understood them. My former student knew that the change is an important one, artistically and existentially. As Anna Piaggi puts it: "Manolo speaks through his shoes. For him, the foot, the shoe, implies the whole nature of a person, and expresses a story." This change is double-sided. To the extent that a woman changes when she puts on high heels, to that extent others change when they witness her wearing them, and working them, to perfection.

Ruth La Ferla wrote a review in The New York Times Magazine back in 1991 in which she describes to perfection just what it means (and what is required) for a woman to wear a pair of heels. She wrote about the "coffee‐skinned Yasmeen Ghauri" whose "hard‐to‐get gaze was belied by the ball‐bearing swivel of her hips." There is an art to swivelling a ball. Some are artists and swivel accordingly. Others are not and squander the chance to ball it, despite how hard they try. In the spirit of Fran Lebowitz (who once remarked: "When Toni Morrison said that you should write the book you want to read, she did not mean everyone"), I think it only right to assert that only artists of Yasmeen's model can powerfully move through space with Wintour's confidence and Coddington's grace (creating their own artistic orbit in the process). Those who can't should not even try.

Yasmeen Ghauri

   
















   
"In the fiction of Martin Amis," La Ferla goes on to write, "there are two kinds of model: the glamour girl propped invitingly against the bright sedan, whose demeanour, Amis writes, "proclaimed you could do what you liked with her"; and the fashion model, a more rarefied breed, whose demeanour "proclaimed she could do what she liked with you." Art does what it likes with those serious enough to let it change them. I am sure Queen Esther of old swivelled her ball precisely because she personified this seriousness generously, if not politically. Such a woman knows how to use her money maker in order to get things done (the Book of Esther in a nutshell). Personal power is a private prerequisite for a woman to make the sound (in whatever fashion they choose).

Speaking of Esther (and Queens), Daphne Guinness is correct to point out that what made Alexander McQueen's haute couture shows unique was that they were aesthetic theatre, not just an avenue to sell a garment (despite the politics of fashion). They were "modern couture" as Manolo once said. Artists understand why it matters that Michelle Obama wore Jimmy Choo to her husband's 2013 Inauguration Ball. Artists know why Warhol likened his post-Solanas shooting scars to sewed seams in a Dior dress. Is it any wonder, then, that someone as fashionable as The Material Girl chose 'Esther' as her Hebrew name when she went Kabbalistic? I think not: "Manolo Blahnik's shoes are as good as sex ... and they last longer." (Madonna)

Manolo Pumps On Marble Pedestal

   











   
Helmut Newton once said that in his world the women always win. The same is true in Manolo's world, precisely because everyone wins. In his world women and men alike acknowledge, appreciate, and aspire a reality where the architectural arch of artistic camber gets manifested with every step a woman makes. "My shoes are not fashion," Blahnik states, "they are gestures." His world is about the personal power that only an artistic gesture of the highest order can create. To be a "Manolo Girl" (as Veronica Webb puts it) is to understand that Manolo's heels are a metaphor for the existential heights we can achieve if we properly appropriate the idealistic power of art in our daily life (sidewalk as catwalk):

     She shows what she likes,

     She likes what she shows.

     In deed, she knows

     She is shocking

     Exposing her stocking

     While moving through space

     Like a limber femme feline.

     (How does she cat-walk that line?)

"Like a limber femme feline..."

The gestures in Manolo Blahnik Drawings are a selective recreation of the value of aesthetic empowerment. They are a sculptural symbol of the unifying reality that art is synonymous with a life stylishly lived (rightly displayed on a black marble pedestal). Part of Blahnik's power consists in breaking through barriers and knocking down columns that once covered and upheld the mistaken idea that fashion is as contingent as taste (which continues to change, as Sontag famously reminded us), whereas art is not. Instead, he reminds us that living is about contingently surviving in style. Like Darwin before him, Blahnik is a man who knows how to dress ... and evolve. Alexandra Shulman is right: "If God had wanted us to wear flat shoes, he wouldn't have invented Manolo Blahnik."

   

Manolo Blahnik

Sources
Alexander McQueen. Savage Beauty. Yale University Press, 2011.

Claire Anthony. Shoegasm: An Explosion Of Cutting Edge Shoe Design. Race Point Publishing, 2012.
Daphne Guinness. In Fashion, Daphne Guinness: Interviewed By Alex Fury. October 10, 2012.
Donald Fagan. "Century's End." Steely Dan Gold: Expanded Edition. Geffen, 1991.
Geoff Nicholson. Footsucker. The Overlook Press, 1995.
Manolo Blahnik. Manolo Blahnik Drawings. Thames & Hudson, 2003.
Michael Foucault. The History Of Sexuality, Volume 1. Vintage, 1990.
Richard Krafft-Ebing. Psychopathia Sexualis. Nabu Press, 2010.
Robert Kanigel. The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life Of The Genius Ramanujan. Washington Square Press, 1992.
Ruth Le Ferla. "Fashion; Striking Poses." The New York Times Magazine. June 02, 1991.
Susan Sontag. "Fascinating Fascism." New York Review Of Books. February 06, 1975.

Coda

Front of  Manolo Blahnik Christmas Card 2013

Back of Manolo Blahnik Christmas Card 2013