This manifesto for visual culture from Rencontres d’Arles is a fine addition to these 5 manifestos for the creative life.
“What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?”
Go ask Alice…
Ava Gardner.
A friend of my father’s.
Las Vegas showgirls by Sammy Davis Jr.
“What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language. I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible. If something can’t be said, what do you do? You scream. You make some terrible noise of pain or anguish or anger or something like that. You make a sound, an animal-like sound which, with time and society trying to calm you down, begins to take shape into something.”
(Source: Los Angeles Times)
“Mogas” (Modern gals), the japanese flappers.
Modern girls (モダンガール modan gaaru) were Japanese women who followed Westernized fashions and lifestyles in the 1920s. These moga were Japan’s equivalent of America’s flappers, India’s kallege ladki, Germany’s neue Frauen, France’s garçonnes, or China’s modeng xiaojie.
By viewing her through a Japanese vs Western lens, the nationalist press could use the modern girl archetype to blame such failings as frivolity, sexual promiscuity, and selfishness on foreign influence. The period was characterized by the emergence of working class young women with access to money and consumer goods. Using aristocratic culture as their standard of Japaneseness, the critics of the modern girl condemned her working class traits as “unnatural” for Japanese. Modern girls were depicted as living in the cities, being financially and emotionally independent, choosing their own suitors, and apathetic towards politics.
The woman’s magazine was a novelty at this time and the modern girl was the model consumer, someone more often found in advertisements for cosmetics and fashion than in real life. The all-female Takarazuka Revue, established in 1914, and the novel Naomi (Tanizaki, 1924) are outstanding examples of modern girl culture.
Rosa Loy
Landung, 2011
Casein paint on canvas
70 3/4 x 86 1/2 inches
Michael Kohn Gallery
