Art News and Articles: FAR® Columnist
The Beauty Police
by Cork Marcheschi
My daughter’s school had a fundraiser of sorts at a North Beach clothiers. It was Friday night and early winter darkness was sharp and clear. I love seeing the darkness on the eastern edge of city and then float my eyes across the arc of the sky and find indigo on the west (eat your heart out Ed Ruscha). We had a family dinner at our favorite place then stopped by to say hi to Luciano at Café Sport and then on to the trunk show. The place was on Upper Grant Ave. possibly the most historic street in San Francisco. I know the history of the street and spent my childhood and young adult days here. The smell, sound and deterioration are familiar and comfortable.
The crowd was fashion trendy and self-conscious. Color must not be in this year as the first thing I noticed was NO COLOR?
I was standing next to the mirror when two of the school moms Stephanie and Andrea (40 and 46) traded turns on the block to check out a pair of pants they had just put on. One of the sales women came over to Steph and told her the pants looked great. The sales woman had on pants that were too tight and broadcast that fact. She also had on a top that said LOOK AT ME – but not too close. Her face was applied and she eked out every bit of glamour she could manufacture. Stephanie and Andrea are slim and beautiful with no effort at all. Steph looked at me and asked my opinion. Everything slowed way down.
I leaned in close to her ear and told her she possessed what every woman in that room wanted. She didn’t need tight jeans to make her look thin, she is thin! The tight jeans attempt to create an illusion and present an image that is similar to the picture on the cover of a frozen dinner. It’s a colorful well structured image that bears no resemblance to what’s inside.
Stephanie and Andrea tried on another pair of pants, a relaxed fit and the statement they made put a very interesting spin on the moment for me. The two women floated in the jeans, they didn’t constrict or create sausage syndrome–they presented them in the pants as if they were a vessel that they had been placed in. Think of a clear glass vase with one lily exiting the rim. The lily rests on the edge of the vase, its stem supported with ample space around it.
I can’t imagine a vase that is made of spandex and is applied directly to the stem of the flower–there is no grace and there is no beauty. There is only tightness!
If the room hadn’t been so crowded and loud, panic would have broken out to see these women look great and be sexy inside of pants that only gently caressed their butts. Andrea and Stephanie were the real deal and didn’t need help. This was the equivalent of screaming GOD at an Atheist convention.
I stepped back into a corner and watched the crowd try on clothes, some of it was pretty funny and a lot of it was very sad. I thought about Andrea and Stephanie not knowing they were the winners in a contest they didn’t enter.
As humans, we know soooooooo many things that we choose to let go of.
This moment where a fashion is presented to a person that owns the attributes that the fashion attempts to bestow to the wearer that actually doesn’t need the help is a heady cultural moment. ( I apologize for that sentence but I can’t figure out how else to say IT!)It felt as silly as selling swimming lessons to dolphins and having the dolphins not realize they could swim! BUT what if we as a culture have deceived ourselves for so long that we don’t recognize dolphins or beauty any more? I know we would sell ice to Eskimos if there was any way to do it. Maybe we don’t want to see the beautiful moms who need no help. I get the feeling that the fashion and entertainment industry have a war on real beauty. Andrea and Stephanie were taken down several notches when they had on the toooo tight pants.
These pants administer a LOW COMMON DENOMINATOR spray-on finish that removed all natural form and make everybody look like shit.
I guess if everybody looks like shit it kinda levels the playing field.
I see this incident as a festering carbuncle on the nose of society. It reveals the systemic illness that is being nurtured internally in our culture. America feasts on a diet of television, movies, sound bites and other people’s ideas.
It amounts to an all-out war on beauty and intelligence. America needs to take back its eyes and learn to find beauty on its own terms.
As children, our wrinkled grandparents are love incarnate. Kids don’t see wrinkles as anything but a curiosity. It takes time and coercion to implant a one-dimensional view of beauty in us but it does happen and there are several industries built on keeping us focused on physical beauty without spirituality or content. The only thing we get from trophy beauty is a promise that can’t be kept.
My first experience with the beauty police was 40 years ago. I was at my friend Bruce’s house. We were playing some music in his room when the door bell rang. He went to get the door and I could hear his voice and a girl’s voice. The tones were unbalanced and confused and then ugly. Bruce was saying, “Go away – get out of here – I don’t want to see you.” Her voice was small delicate and broken. He returned to the room carrying a birthday gift.
He picked up his guitar and tried to play. It was obvious he was fighting back tears. Bruce didn’t want me to see this girl – maybe she was overweight or had bad skin. But he obviously cared for her but felt I might not have approved of his girlfriend. Or spread the word that Bruce is seeing a dog. What a sad moment.
Gentrified beauty is the sickness and here are the five warning signs:
Rolex watches; The BMW; monster homes; vacations in Cabo; and the interior of your house looks like a high end furniture show room. If all these five signs are present in one individual they are near the point of no return. Very much like with AA, the first step in receiving help is admitting you have a problem.
“Hi, my name’s Bruce and I have a trophy wife problem.”
“HI BRUCE!!!!”
The antidote:
Go to your local museum and find something you don’t like and spend some time with it. Remember art is made by people like you; it does not come from outer space. Art is one of humanity’s most useful gifts to itself. Art is the reflection of each culture that it springs from. If you don’t like it you may be saying that you don’t like yourself or maybe you refuse to look at yourself.
Art does not allow us to avoid the truth, it confronts us with the truth. It is our job is to LOOK and ALLOW the experience in. If we do not let experiences in, we dwell on the surface. If we dwell on the surface, we can never experience beauty of any significance. If we can’t experience a broad spectrum of beauty, we end up being 50 years old and looking at 22-year old members of the opposite sex, dumping our old partners and saying things like, “I HAVE NEVER BEEN HAPPIER?”
We are all going to be old and wrinkled with many years left to plod the Earth. If we cannot see beauty in art, age and change, if we cannot shift our muse, we are doomed to a life that will have the feel of a stone in your shoe that you can not remove. Late at night when you can’t sleep, the vague disappointments that are the byproducts of compliance visit you. They are small sadnesses, little sighs that speak only to you. They are very much like the effect of rain on granite. Each little sadness removes the magic that you will need to maintain the beauty that will shine through as you grow old. There is a luminosity that is palpable from people who have surrendered to their desire.
In the late 1960s my graduate sculpture professor introduced me to Beatrice Wood. She was just over 80 at the time. Wrapped in purple and pink saris with all kinds of jewelry hanging off her, she was radiant.
I was her assistant for the day and guided her through classes, took her to lunch and eventually back to the home she was visiting. She invited me to visit her in Ojai whenever I might be passing through.
About six months latter I told Hugh ( my teacher) that I was going to visit Beatrice on my way to LA. He said “Bring See’s chocolates and you will be a welcomed visitor.” I dug deep and bought a 2 pound box and was on the road to Ojai. She lived high up in a little house/studio. Her name was on a board planted in the dirt with her flowers. She greeted me warmly and accepted the chocolates with sly grace. We sat on her deck that overlooked the mountains and I asked her questions about Marcel Duchamp, Edgar Varese and the most magic of all moments in modern art history that she figured in. She ate some chocolates, called me her young man and told me stories of being with the great artists of our time. I loved the stories but I loved her more, she was alive and not afraid. Beatrice was Maude to many a Harold. Beatrice didn’t hide or question what if ?–she got on the life bus and let it take her somewhere.
The result was a beauty that spilled onto you.
It seems to me there are two things that must happen. One is live your life so it is available through your being. Your presence is felt as you enter a room..
The other is a coming to terms with the changing nature of beauty and the effort that it takes to find it. It is there but you can’t buy a pair of tight pants and scream – IM BEAUTIFUL! Beauty is not for the lazy. It does not rest on the surface of anything. You must work to gather the tools to possess it
and appreciate it–there is no free lunch!
Let me end with a quote from big Joe Turner: “You so beautiful but you gonna die someday!”
— Cork Marcheschi | March 27, 2007
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