Beauty in the Details....

Well, I have to admit that this looks kind of awesome.....might be a bit hard to see around these parts, but it might land in Pittsburgh. (Pun certainly not intended). I'm assuming Adele is the lovely Edwardian clad woman (of, apparently, many other guises) and not the pterodactyl.


I have to say that I miss watching Jean-Pierre Jeunet movies. My favorite was A Very Long Engagement, which appeared in 2004. Sometimes I show the movie's opening scenes to my students to demonstrate how absolutely horrible trench warfare was, even when mortar fire was not falling. The scene during which soldiers are blowing off each other's thumbs (so they might be sent home) at the minute-strike of a chiming pocket watch usually gets an expression of shocked disgust from the audience. Of course, it follows that none of the soldiers who did this got sent home, but were instead court marshaled and condemned to fend for themselves in the no-man's land between enemy trenches. Ooo...ooo...even though I think Jean-Pierre Jeunet is worth his weight in large gold ingots, let us not forget that A Very Long Engagement was actually based on a novel by the so-called "Graham Green of France," namely the late author, screenwriter, translator, and director Sébastien Japrisot.

Yes! Let's not forget the writers in this world. Without them, where would so many movies come from? And I'm talking screen plays, too of course, not just novels. I've heard that writers get the shaft pretty frequently in Hollywood. A cousin, who wrote the TV series Moonlight (no, no, I am not related to Stephanie whatever-her-name is. No, this is a small-screen show about a vampire detective whose wife turned him in the 1950s and now he is in love with a blonde cop. Sort of like Angel, but slightly different. Yeah? Well okay, that show.) Anyway, Trevor once said that even though he lived in Hollywood, he tries not to be a douchebag. Very telling comment there. From all accounts, the studios gave him a pretty rough time. But I see Moonlight has gone into syndication of SyFy, so hopefully he's making a bit of money from his work.

Anyway, I like to geek out of period films. Yes, I'm one of those kinds of girls. I love the costumes, the set, the antiques, the mystery. While I have to say I enjoyed the new True Grit (Rooster is much darker here, less heroically hokey, more realistic...sorry, John. If it's any consolation, Michael still prefers your performance to Bridges') and all it's genuinely flawed characters (except for the new Lucky Ned Pepper, who was too strange to have lived so long on the lam), I really, really dug looking around at all the pretty set pieces. Maybe no one else pays attention to the color of the shades on the gas lamps or the coarseness on the ticking of the wool coats, but I do. There's beauty and believability in those details. I know the movie makers know it, but sometimes we forget.

I mean, look at these stills (from A Very Long Engagement), for example. Look at the wide mirrored walls, the pressed glass cruet set, the woman's hat piled high with fabric flowers, and tell me that this wasn't a gorgeous period to be living in (freakin' scary yes, but away from the Western fronts, the cities are literally filled with functional artwork...almost everywhere). We live in the Age of Plastic, which to me, is dull by comparison. But look, look, look at this crystal and silver magnificence here:

This is why I go to auctions. To see this stuff, which has gone the way of the Dodo, I'm very sorry to say. Still, it lives on in Europe...it lives on in the everyday life of Germans, at least. Parisians, too. I know it does only because I saw it. They use glasses, real glasses. They serve their coffee cups on silver trays with little wrapped sugar cubes that I ate like candy.

But also, there is this. As opposed to the opulence of the cafe above, of life outside war, outside prison, there is this grim scene. Grim but also magnificent. And Marion Cotillard in her quiet, anguished sensuality, wears it well. A kind of wayward Magdelene. (And if only I could find a picture of her weapon, which was somehow rigged to her corset and stockings...fantastic!).

These are the kinds of things that make me want to write stories. To recreate these strange and gorgeously detailed tableaux of historical life and emotion in the extreme, like this story...this one about the radium girls...keep reading, scroll to the end. The details, they get better for you, worse for poor Beverly, who puts her lost molars next to her confirmation pearls in her jewelry box.

Preoccupied with Decay (Part 1)

In 2000, when I lived in Washington, D.C. and worked, for a brief period, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I began an independent, quasi-philosophical consideration of Decay in our culture.

I wanted to know: what role does Decay play in aesthetics? What types of Decay are represented? And what does the inclusion of Decay in our visual lexicon reveal about our national mind-set?

I’m starting to think about this again, almost 11 years on.

First, it’s necessary to define Decay—too loose a definition allows for too wide an interpretation. Of course, there’s genuine decomposition and putrefaction. Is that what I mean? The gooey green byproduct of organic breakdown? No. That’s a step too far. But it’s close. I’m talking about mind-reeling disorganization, as well as the romanticization of physical collapse, more specifically fragmentation and disintegration in its early to mid-level stages. With fragmentation (speaking in the abstract), there's discord, disharmony--visual chaos. With disintegration, there are (speaking in concrete terms) abandoned buildings, peeling paint, wasting figures. And yet, these last few items come with very different associations. Abandoned buildings have a quiet, haunted majesty that speaks to something fundamental and superstitious within us. Thinning bodies, depending on how dramatic their appearance, incite a trainwreck-worthy fascination in viewers.

For the essay, I broke down Decay into three subsets:
(1) Beautiful Decay, or the glossy, seamless photographic capture of romanticized disintegration
(2) Fragmentation and Asymmetry, or the abstract disorganization that the mind generally flees from.
(3) Pure Decay, or decadence expressed by way of deteriorated materials, like trash.

One of the artists that I interviewed for the essay was Rina Banerjee (pictured above), who uses discarded materials in her installations. One of her works, produced at the time, employed the severely stained blue prints for a New York City hospital onto which she drew a Hindu-inspired figure more monstrous than devotional in appearance. This 1999 work, titled "An Uncertain Bondage is Deserved When Threatening Transmission," (pictured at right) appeared as part of the exhibition Bodies of Resistance, a benefit for the contemporary art organization known as Visual Aids.

When discussing her intent, Banerjee explained that her work was—at the time—concerned largely with identity, notions of foreignness, and the idea of contamination. The nation, she indicated, fears infection by foreign bodies and is afraid of surprise eruptions from within. That which is foreign may be waiting to strike a vulnerable area.

I interviewed Bannerjee months before 9/11, yet how prescient her remarks turned out to be.

Still, at the time, she wasn’t talking about those surprise attacks. She was referring to the slow, steady supplanting of a homogenous cultural identity with another cultural element. It is why one culture constructs “otherness" because this visualization, this classification creates a clear delineation between what belongs to one identity and what are characteristics of the unfamiliar, the Outsider. Here, what we are, (or perhaps what we should be). There, the genus and species of what does not belong.

Americans, whose ancestors were colonists, whose distant forefathers destroyed a series of vital native cultures, unconsciously fear a similar domination. Like a T-cell, we create a concept of the “invading” body, so we can identify (and sometimes, if necessary) eliminate it. We reject Postmodern Colonialism, if we are not the colonists. But what contemporary culture does not resist domination? What contemporary culture would willingly cede its authority to another invading body?

Banerjee's use of trash, generally regarded as unwanted and dirty, contributes a significant conceptual element here, since it plays directly into our notion of outsiders, particularly immigrants (And know this is relevant not only to America. This is true of many cultures; in Bavaria, for example, I was tested for numerous diseases--including tuberculousis--before I was granted a student visa because I might have "brought in" something unpleasant and would subsequently propagate this unpleasantness among the "healthy" German citizenry. Moreover, these were tests applied specifically to Americans, whom the Germans viewed as promiscuous. Really, this is what the blood-drawing Gesundheitsamt was all about).

Ultimately, Banerjee's work fits neatly into Category #3, “Pure Decay,” using decadent material to represent decay. And in doing so, she points to one of the facets of our culture’s obsession with decay: are we not, with Decay #3, holding up a notion of what is unacceptable so that it might be understood as that which undermines us? We fear cultural demise as we fear bacterial and viral infections, as we fear influenza and the similarly varied strains of hepatitis. What will kill us, we ask? Letting the Other in, we answer. (Never mind the fact that we seem to be killing ourselves just fine without anyone else's help.)

A similarly topical consideration of category #1, Beautiful Decay, will come next, with a an example of the work of photographer and videographer Floria Sigismondi.

In the meantime, read more about Rina Banerjee at Art India Magazine.