Delicacy

I’m so fascinated by the actress, Alice de Lencquesaing, at the moment. I saw a movie with her called, Le père de mes enfants on television, and spent most of the film admiring her subtle performance. She embodies the spirit of ‘fineness’. She has this quiet inner strength to her acting style that is expressed so beautifully on her face and body. And rather than seeming weak, her vulnerable performance in the film highlights the strength and backbone of her character, Clémence Canvel. It’s such a beautiful film.

I was reading this short, four-line poem by Jane Hirshfield (found in The Best American Poetry 2011 anthology) last night in bed, and suddenly it hit me why I loved her performance in the film so much:

The Cloudy Vase


Past time, I threw the flowers out,
Washed out the cloudy vase.
How easily the old clearness
leapt, like a practiced tiger, back inside it.

I immediately reacted to the metaphor of a tiger leaping into a fragile vase. That’s how I reacted to the character of Clémence: she was like a silent tiger encased by delicacy.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had a handful of people mistake me for a teenager. This is not the first time it’s happened, I do admit I look young for my age. Still, every time it happens, I get defensive. Usually, it occurs within a context of someone not taking me seriously, or wanting me to ‘prove’ my professional credentials. Other times, I can already feel myself being talked down to, like a child. All this based not on what I say or do, or how I present myself, but on my small frame. There’s one word often used to describe me by strangers that I think is meant as a compliment, but which tends to irritate me: delicate.

I like the word ‘delicate’ itself, I also love its variant, ‘delicacy’. There’s something pleasing about the way it sounds when said out loud. But when this word is applied to me, it loses its charm. So you know what I’ve started doing? I’ve begun to reconceptualise it. Delicacy often implies fragility, weakness, and a whole list of similar words listed in the dictionary:

Delicacy * noun 1 FINENESS, exquisiteness, delicateness, daintiness, airiness; flimsiness, gauziness, floatiness, silkiness.

Lots of pretty ‘ness’ words. And its opposite? Strength, of course. So says the dictionary. But language isn’t a static thing, we often make our own meanings. I’ve only begun to notice quite recently how I’m drawn to some images that may outwardly seem to be the epitome of delicacy, but which also carry an underlying strength, confusing this logic of supposed fragility. I like things to be contradictory, maybe that’s why. Delicacy can be a strong thing, and strength can be a fragile thing. I want to remember this every time I feel myself starting to get defensive. This post will be my own personal reminder, I suppose. By the way, do you recognise Alice from the movie L'heure d'été? Another subtle and beautifully acted film, which if you haven’t seen, I highly recommend.

Image sources: pictures of Alice de Lencquesaing found here.

The Piano

Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993), is one of my favourite films ever, if not the favourite. Which is why I find it so hard to write about it – it’s like trying to write about somebody you love. But I find myself wanting to say something about it now, however imperfect and incomplete. This is a ‘non-review’ I suppose: a description of my adoration rather than a distanced and rounded analysis of the film. If you want to read something objective on The Piano, I suggest you stop reading my own words now.

There’s a scene in The Piano that makes the sensitive hairs at the back of my neck stand on end. In truth, there are many other scenes in the film that do that, but this one does so in particular. It’s when Baines watches Ada’s nape as she plays piano. He then begins to very slowly touch her fingers, her wrists, her elbows, her arms, and then her neck and back. Desire has become such a cliché on screen: heaving chests, rough breathing, glamorous shots of a woman’s thighs, heads thrown back in ecstasy. You get the picture. It’s rarely a delicate thing, rarely something that speaks beyond the sexual act itself, the way that making yourself physically vulnerable to another human being is something that also speaks beyond what actually goes on in the bedroom. This scene could have so easily collapsed into something boring and standard, but instead it becomes lovingly entwined with the rest of the film’s themes.

For me, so much of this film is about generosity, and the physical body as a marker of that. Ada speaks through her fingers, and it’s through them that she tries to connect with other people. When she transfers this communication to the rest of her body through desire, she also learns the difference between being owned and possessing your own body. The piano, a mirror of herself, is something that moves between being a possession and a gift. I once saw an interview with the actress Juliette Binoche in which she spoke about what it actually means to her to be nude in a film. She described how she views her willingness to share her body with an audience for a narrative as an act of generosity, determined by its context. And also, how she finds it sad that such generosity is often received as something lewd, used to objectify her body. I think I understood what she was saying in this interview when I saw The Piano. Ada’s body, like the colonised native people of New Zealand, is legally and physically possessed by men who pass her around like property. Baines may initially approach her body in the same manner, but her romance with him is something that quickly moves in an opposite direction to suggest the gift of the body, rather than its ownership.

I don’t pretend that this is what the film is about in its entirety. It’s probably only one aspect out of many. But whenever I watch this scene I’m so moved by Campion’s ability to evoke desire and represent the body without making me feel like the actors and the characters are being diminished. There are very few films I can actually say that about. It would take me a dozen more posts to say all I want to say about this film though, and I won’t subject you to that!

On Feminism: Brave New World?

Amen Caitlin Moran, I’d like to know if they were drunk too. When did something that essentially stands for equality become a dirty word with women? And just as disturbing for me, when did we buy into the myth that feminism has been ‘surpassed’, when we need it more than ever? I’ve written an article on this subject, along with the modern ‘body image’ debates, for Settle Petal. But since this is an important topic for me, I’ve decided to also post it here in full:

When Germaine Greer recently attacked Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s ‘big arse’, I was ironically reminded of her previous assertion that women are often perceived ‘as bodies rather than people’ (The Whole Woman, Anchor Books, 2000, p. 68). I was thoroughly bored by the debate surrounding Greer’s comment about our female Prime Minister’s dress sense and body. Yes, it was hypocritical and contradictory of her, but so what? Feminism doesn’t need a spokesperson or a leader to proclaim unitary and simplistic ideas. Rather, what it needs is constant relevant, and dare I say it, politicised, debate. And I fear that’s what we’re losing in the haze of contemporary ‘body image’ debates that do little to actually change gender inequalities.

I’m twenty eight years old, and for as long as I could remember, I smelt a rat whenever I was told what my behaviour, appearance and character should be as woman when compared to men. When I went to university, I was given the language to express this instinctive awareness of inequality. But when I was learning this language, feminism was already declared ‘dead’. Its death knell in the media and culture is something that I continue to observe, perplexed by the fact that we still live in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society with all the gender inequalities this entails, yet are also incessantly reminded that women have ‘arrived’ and have nothing left to fight for. The truth is, the language of feminism has been derailed, and nowhere is this more evident than in the current strand of ‘body image’ debates.

One of the most problematic aspects for me in the current media is the way the female body is used as a marker of feminism’s dubious ‘success’ within the limited frame of the commercial marketplace. Women are encouraged to buy, consume and view other women’s bodies as commodities and ‘things’ under the appropriated language of feminism. So buying this shade of lipstick is exercising your ‘power’ as a woman to be ‘independent’ (because ‘you’re worth it’, as L'Oréal reminds us). Or perhaps posing nude in a men’s magazine is asserting your ‘empowered’ sexuality, as if we suddenly live in a magical fairy-tale world where women’s bodies are not perceived as sexualised objects.

The fact is, women are not ‘free’ to objectify themselves without harmful consequences, because they are still considered to be objects; or, in Greer’s words, as ‘bodies rather than people’. Yet, when a feminist tries to critique the use of women’s bodies in commercial culture, she is often lampooned as a bitter old hag who doesn’t realise that it’s no longer the 1960s and that modern women are now ‘free’ from the shackles of the past. To me, this is laughable. If anything, objectifying women has increased, rather than decreased, and disturbingly, it’s becoming harder to critique this objectification because it speaks through the appropriated language of ‘equality’ and ‘empowerment’.

That’s the bind many feminist critics are in at the moment, including myself. There’s nothing more frustrating than sitting in a class full of young women fresh out of high school, trying to explain to them why the popular mode of ‘girl power’ and ‘you’re worth it’ spewed out by the media, advertising and magazines, is not a discourse that speaks in their interests as modern women. Often, these young women compare their own financial and physical freedoms to their mothers’ or grandmothers’ generations and rightly see positive changes in women’s lives. But what they do not see are the intangible ideological boundaries that affect their lives, and which were tackled by previous generations of feminists in a political and collective manner. The world in which young women grow up today may offer them vast financial freedoms and an ability to manipulate their bodies for their own gain, but such ‘freedoms’ come at a price.

I think what has occurred in our modern culture is a movement away from the political to the personal. Feminist issues such as equal pay, the running of the domestic household, raising children, women’s healthcare, abortion rights and the perception of the female body, have moved from collective action to individual ‘lifestyle’ concerns. For example, determining equality in the workplace is suddenly the domain of lifestyle quizzes and glib articles in magazines, rather than something which is seriously tackled in political debate or legal change. We may have countless discussions about ‘women’s issues’, but the underlying patriarchal structure of the home and workplace is left untouched and unthreatened. Because if you make a wide societal issue a personal and individual responsibility, you depoliticise it. Or, in Michèle Roberts’ words, you make feminism ‘unthreatening, nice. Less a politics than a behaviour’. The thing is, unless women are prepared to engage with feminism as a ‘politics’ rather than as a personal ‘behaviour’, any attempt at ‘empowerment’, ‘equality’ and ‘freedom’ will be hampered by past ideals of gender that still determine our lives and our choices.

What does all this have to do with ‘body image’ debates? Well, the way that I see women around me engage with such debates highlights to me how far away we’ve moved from a political and collective interpretation of ‘women’s issues’ and feminism, to a more depoliticised and personal interpretation. A prime example is the ever-popular debate surrounding thin women’s bodies in fashion magazines and advertising. While our current fetish with skinniness and the idealisation of thinness in the beauty and fashion industries are certainly valid concerns, the way they are discussed is often indicative of the way we tackle many other concerns regarding gender and women. Often, such discussions about overly thin models degenerate into simplistic clichés about femininity where women are pitted against each other according to body types. Rather than actually addressing the way fashion and beauty industries function through the objectification of women, such debates just focus on who’s more ‘real’ and ‘womanly’: curvy women, or skinny women?

My reaction to such debates is always, who cares? I have zero interest in pointless arguments about ‘what men really like in a woman’, or who is more of a ‘real woman’ based on her bodily curves. Such arguments are debasing to both men and women. Rather, what interests me is deconstructing how the fashion and beauty industries create unrealistic images of women based on the idea of a ‘lack’ that can be fixed through consumption. Too skinny? How about plastic surgery to enhance your breasts? Too fat? Liposuction is the answer. Got a wrinkle and no longer look like a 15 year old girl? Here’s a face cream you can buy. And don’t you feel ‘empowered’ now? All these images of femininity are based on the basic ideology that women’s bodies are a ‘problem’ that can be ‘fixed’ by buying something. That’s ostensibly where our ‘power’ as modern women lies in commercial culture. It’s a dubious and insulting power, at best. And it’s also an unquestioned ‘power’. Too often, popular media discussions about this topic just focus on an individual model’s body, rather than politically addressing the ideologies of consumption and gender that underpin the industries within which such a model works. It’s not an individual model’s body that should concern us, but the collective system which she represents.

So is it a brave new world for women? Not just yet. Until it is though, I’ll be digging around for the politics, rather than the behaviour. Because whether a woman chooses to undergo plastic surgery or buy an anti-wrinkle face cream is her own personal choice. But the ideologies of beauty which may contribute to such decisions are not up to personal responsibility, they are a collective social responsibility. And that’s why feminism is still as relevant today as it ever was.

Sweedeedee & Winter Syntax

I try not to re-blog too many things from Behind Ballet, since I write for them, and also, since I would probably end up re-blogging everything on that blog, as I love it. But I couldn’t help myself when I saw this post. These images are from Tim Harbour’s new work, Sweedeedee. As described on The Australian Ballet blog:

Long-time fans of The Australian Ballet will be thrilled to welcome Steven Heathcote and Justine Summers back to the stage, and to meet Mia Heathcote, Steven’s daughter, and Lennox Niven, who play their children in this family piece. Set to intimate folk music, performed live by musicians led by Dancing with the Stars’ Chong Lim, Sweedeedee is both playful and poignant, and will provide a powerful ending to our Let’s Dance program.

I couldn’t stop looking at these images when I first saw them, because they immediately brought to my mind this poem by Billy Collins:

Winter Syntax

A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.

There are easier ways of making sense,
the connoisseurship of gesture, for example.
You hold a girl's face in your hands like a vase.
You lift a gun from the glove compartment
and toss it out the window into the desert heat.
These cool moments are blazing with silence.

The full moon makes sense. When a cloud crosses it
it becomes as eloquent as a bicycle leaning
outside a drugstore or a dog who sleeps all afternoon
in a corner of the couch.

Bare branches in winter are a form of writing.
The unclothed body is autobiography.
Every lake is a vowel, every island a noun.

But the traveler persists in his misery,
struggling all night through the deepening snow,
leaving a faint alphabet of bootprints
on the white hills and the white floors of valleys,
a message for field mice and passing crows.

At dawn he will spot the vine of smoke
rising from your chimney, and when he stands
before you shivering, draped in sparkling frost,
a smile will appear in the beard of icicles,
and the man will express a complete thought.

I thought of the “blazing” silence, simplicity and wordless eloquence of the bodily gestures and movements caught in these images: a hand cupping a face, an elbow rising sharply in the air, two arms wrapping shoulders, hands pressed against the heart. As someone who works with words, I’m envious of these “easier ways of making sense”; they express things in a way that I cannot in my own battle of trying to “express a complete thought”. Or, then again, maybe I’m just romanticising another art form in my own struggle with another.

If you’d like to learn more about this ballet or the Let’s Dance program, head over to Behind Ballet.

All photography is by Lynette Wills and is used here with permission. Please do not re-blog without giving proper credit.

Things Change

I was looking for some old notes this weekend, and this inevitably led to some cleaning up of boxes of stuff under my bed. Instead of the notes, I found old scrapbooks filled with magazine images and editorials. I used to love going through my favourite fashion magazines, cutting out the most striking images and editorials, and filling up my scrapbooks with them. I used to consume fashion magazines voraciously, totally seduced by the array of models seemingly doing nothing but looking good all the time. I basically think a lot of the fashion and style blogs these days are simply a digital version of such scrapbooks; all those models and ‘it’ girls being coveted for their endless parade of perfectly constructed outfits. That’s what I collected too, in hard copy. And as much as things have changed since my own collecting days with everything migrating to blogs, they’ve also remained the same in a lot of ways.

But now, instead of being fascinated by all these great outfits, I’m just totally bored with it all. I've stopped subscribing to fashion magazines. I’ve stopped buying them in newsagents. I’ve stopped reading style blogs or ‘street style’ blogs. I say this all without any judgement, as I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with any of these things. I myself used to love them to bits. And I’m definitely not trying to be some sort of snob here as I still love pretty things, and have my own coveting days when I look at a superbly dressed woman and then cast a glance at my own ‘uniform’ of jeans and a black jumper. I guess I’m saying all this because I’m interested in how much I’ve changed, how things that used to consume all my attention now no longer seem alluring at all. I know there’s nothing particularly special about this as most of us come to a point when our interests, our lives and what occupies our thoughts and creativity inevitably changes direction. But I rarely stop to think about that – how much I’ve actually changed in the past few years, and how my perspective of the world and myself has altered.

This is not some earth-shattering revelation, just a small personal one. I’m totally happy to throw away those scrapbooks, I even feel a sense of relief doing so. I find that now, what I collect are passages, words, poems, articles, opinions. This is what dominates my online behaviour too. Rather than perusing an endless array of perfect style blogs which tend to make me feel anxious, I’m hunting for imperfect words and debate. I want to leave you with one piece of writing I collected, which immediately made an impact on me when I read it. I don’t quite know how to express why it did, so I hope it speaks for itself:

Postcard 2
By Franz Wright

Incomprehensible fate that sentenced my father to my mother. I can’t blame him, I would have left the raving bitch myself, and would do so many many times in years to come. Then, of course, I came along. There is a limit to what one man can endure. So I suppose I am the reason he left, actually. I am the one to blame. And yet he did his best; he did all that he was capable of doing, and wrote me every year, like clockwork. He rarely remembered to mail what he wrote me, poor man (when I think of what I must have put him through), barely legible one-sentence postcards he sometimes worked at half the night; but as they all said the same thing, word for word, it wasn’t that bad. He could be forgiven. The blizzard I visit your city disguised as will never be over and never arrive. I think what he was trying to say was that at some point I’d begin to notice I was freezing, wasn’t dressed right, had nowhere to go, and was staggering into a blinding snow that no one else could see. I think he meant, the cold will make you what I am today.

Source: Poetry (May 2012).

Image sources: I’ve included some of the magazines and journals that I do buy and read these days in the above image, including (from top to bottom, left to right): The Paris Review, Poetry, New England Review, Southerly, Brick Magazine and Meanjin.

Picturing Rebecca

I was planning on re-reading Daphne du Maurier's classic Gothic novel, Rebecca, this weekend, but it looks like I'll be working instead. Never mind, it's good work. But since I can't enjoy the book this weekend, I felt like indulging with it in other ways today. One of the most remarkable things about Rebecca is that it's a book about a character we never actually get to 'meet', as she's dead right from the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, Rebecca the character fascinates the reader, the narrator and all the other characters in the book, despite hovering on the margins of the text like a ghost. She is one of the most alluring non-characters to appear in print, and by the end of the book, you feel as if you both know her well and that she's a complete mystery.

Rebecca is one of those fictional beings whom I always want to 'picture': whenever I re-read the novel, I imagine her scent, her clothes, her face, her hair, her mannerisms. And yet, I care nothing about the real 'heroine' of the story: the second, unnamed Mrs de Winter who marries Rebecca's husband, Maxim. Even though the second wife is the supposedly 'good' character, while the first wife is cast as the 'villain', Rebecca remains the most vital and interesting character who captures your attention and sympathy the most. I keep thinking her real story lies buried somewhere in the novel, waiting for the reader to tease it out through the imagination. I usually try to tease it out with words, but today, I imagined Rebecca through images. If you want to know why there is so much sea and water imagery here, especially the first image, Ghostly Galleon, which perfectly summarises Rebecca for me, you'll have to read the book - I promise, it's great. I hope you like the way I 'saw' Rebecca (image sources are below each set) ...



: : Vivien Leigh : : English Channel : :



: : Screen-grab from the film Cracks : : Amelia Rope Pale Lime and Sea Salt Milk Chocolate Bar : : White azaleas : : Screen-grab from the film Atonement : : Ael Mat Eau de Toilette by Lostmarc'h : :



: : Screen-grab from the film Cracks : : 'The Sea' (1963) by L.S. Lowry : : Screen-grab from the film Angel : :



: : English Breakfast Tea : : Royal Albert Blue Polka Vintage Tea for Two Set : : Blodwen Teal Cwlwm Throw : :



: : “Bound Hand with Lover’s Eye” by Fatima Ronquillo : : Screen-grab from the film Angel : : Take me back : :

P. S. I also wrote an article on Pushkin's Eugene Onegin for the Australian Ballet, which was a lot of fun. Have a great weekend everyone!

Picasso to Warhol: MoMA in Perth

If you happen to live in Perth like me, you’ve probably heard about the exhibition, ‘Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters’, which is coming in June from The Museum of Modern Art. There have been quite a few excellent collections and exhibitions to visit The Art Gallery of Western Australia over the years, but I think this one tops them all. I have butterflies in my stomach just thinking about going to this exhibition. I can’t imagine anyone here in Perth not wanting to make the most of this rare opportunity to see some of the best art in the world.

Since I’m keen to encourage everyone to go see it, The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) has kindly provided some information about this exhibition to share on my blog. Note, I was not paid for this (I never accept payment for posts), I don’t need money to shamelessly fawn over art! ‘Picasso to Warhol’ will be the beginning of six exhibitions to be housed by The Art Gallery of Western Australia over the next three years, in a partnership series with New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Perth will be the only place in Australia to showcase these exhibitions and collections from MoMA. I think this is a very sound reason for those of you interstate to come visit us here in Perth (I can also tempt you with wine and great beaches). I’ve been invited to the media launch for the ‘Picasso to Warhol’ exhibition, so hopefully I can snap some pictures at the launch to share with you all here.

What I personally like about the way The Art Gallery of Western Australia has organised this series of exhibitions is its incorporation of other cultural events. Rather than presenting art as a rarefied and distanced experience, AGWA is incorporating it as part of a wider and interconnected cultural experience, alongside live music, food, shopping and a Manhattan-inspired bar here in Perth. I also plan to take their ‘Literary Links Tour’, which explores the relationship between literature and visual art.



I’ll probably be blogging about this series of exhibitions as I attend them (and basically be swooning with pleasure in each post), but I’ll introduce you to the first two in the series now:

:: 16 June – 3 December 2012 ::

Picasso to Warhol: Fourteen Modern Masters
The first exhibition in the series to go on display, it features over 100 masterpieces rarely seen outside the United States, including the works of modern artists such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock, Louise Bourgeois, Romare Bearden, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. I’ve seen some of their works when I visited New York a few years ago, but I can’t wait to get reacquainted with them.

:: 28 January – 12 May 2013 ::
Picturing New York: Photographs from the Museum of Modern Art
I’m brimming with excitement about this exhibition, perhaps even more than the ‘Picasso to Warhol’ one as I have a more intimate relationship with photographs. This exhibition is described as ‘Depicting the iconic New York and the idiosyncratic details that define New Yorkers’ sense of home’. This sounds so fascinating to me, this idea of ‘home’ in the vast city – especially a city that is so well-known and considered to be a type of ‘prototype’ for the city-landscape. This exhibition includes works by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Lewis Hine, Helen Levitt, Cindy Sherman, Alfred Stieglitz and Weegee. Basically, it’s a collection of some of the best twentieth-century urban photography.

All the ticketing, exhibitions and events details are available here, and The Art Gallery of Western Australia has also created a blog which I hope will be updated with some interesting information about all the exhibitions as they come to Perth. I’m so excited about this, and as silly as it sounds, I’m also proud that these collections are coming here.

Image sources: All the images from the above collage are courtesy of The Art Gallery of Western Australia. The second image is, Picasso draws a vase of flowers with light, 1949, Gjon Mili—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.