Carl Werner, Beauty with a Tambourine, 1867 Dahesh Museum of Art
#NationalDogDay
An Orientalist who was granted the rare of honor of being given permission to paint inside Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, Werner is mostly known for his detailed architectural and landscape views.* In the Beauty with a Tambourine close attention has been paid to all the decorative details including the beauty and her little dog, a common characteristic of this type of painting. The Western male artist’s Orientalist fantasy of the languid female shut-away in a harem, awaiting one man’s pleasure, has blurred the lines a bit between the East and the West to include a lap dog that would be more likely to be found with an elegant European young lady.
Advertisement for Pagan Love, starring Togo Yamamoto and Mabel Ballin, with art by Gablik Gise. A copy of the film, a melodrama of the ill-fated romance between a man from Chinatown and a blind woman, exists today.
The above painting shows a Jewish priestess commanding attention from a group of women for the prophecy from a sculptured head, which is difficult to see near the left edge of the painting. The women react astonished and are totally absorbed into the scene. As a witness the observer may feel ashamed to experience their emotion without being noticed. In other words, the scene is very theatrical and this characterizes many of the future works of Waterhouse. It was sold for UK£ 900 to an industrial magnate.
The year before, Waterhouse had married Esther Kenworthy, the daughter of a professor in perspective and landscape drawing. Although very little is known about their marriage, it is known that they did not have any children and stayed together until his death.
I think the “slutty men” thing is mostly fun but I also think it’s gonna start setting us back the more I see people act like racial fetishization is fine as long as you’re “objectifying men” while doing it
Love how when I went to look for the Tweet I was thinking of as an example I found it with another Tweet that perfectly sums up the issue:
I cannot believe there are people who genuinely believe that swana ethnic groups living in deserts walk around half naked to “deal with the heat” and that we actually wear typical bellydancing garb casually…orientalism truly has rotted your brain
This weeks attacks at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris have justly sparked a lot of public discussion about terrorism. Unfortunately, most of it has been trite, relying on the old narrative of barbarians at the gates of civilization.
The proverbial “they” are the terrorists, constructed in the collective imagination out of fear, ignorance, and gullibility. “They” hate our perceived freedoms. Our movies have been saturated with images of them: brown-skinned men and women attacking our way of life. Tabloids prominently display their faces alongside images of carnage. Such an understanding lacks nuance and ignores historical, social, and cultural context – it creates a caricature of culture that constructs a monolith of Otherness that must be destroyed at all costs in order to preserve Western liberalism.
So pervasive is this myth that it infects all facets of our culture. Westerners trace their political fantasies to Athens and Rome, fetishizing democracy and republics that were inherently flawed, corrupt, and unequal. More important than who the West identifies as its cultural ancestors, is who or what the West denies. The West is not, in its eyes, barbarous, savage, and cruel. The West is not corrupt, dictatorial, and problematic. The West is justice and all those who oppose it are the purveyors of evil and injustice. Instances that say otherwise, are mere aberrations in our history, not symptoms of our inherent cultural defects. It was Western culture that birthed the Nazi party, it was Western culture that birthed the Spanish inquisition, it was Western culture that both developed and used nuclear warfare. At a point, the weight of all these aberrations becomes too great; there are simply too many Wounded Knees, too many internment camps, too many My Lai massacres, too much slavery, too many secret medical tests on Black people, too many Hiroshimas (it takes a kind of savagery of the soul to eradicate a people without even looking at them), too many drones in the sky, too many Fergusons, too many Eric Garners, too much torture.
The West is more than the United States. Our notions of France are archetypal of our ideas of Westernism. Paris is the “City of Light” and we claim the French Enlightenment ushered in a new era in human history that emphasized reason over traditional, light over dark. The slogan of the French Revolution translates to liberty, equality, and fraternity - a three word summary of what we imagine the West to stand for.
Yet, it was the French who colonized much of North Africa, namely Algeria and Tunisia. The colonized were oppressed both in their native lands and as immigrants in France. France’s history in Africa, rife with racism, is especially problematic. The French referred to the colonized who took on French customs as “evolved,” implying an empirical superiority over native culture. During the Algerian War of Independence, an uncounted number of Algerian Muslim protesters were massacred by the police in the streets of Paris.
When the scales of justice are weighed down with these so-called aberrations, justice, like a house of cards, falls over, an aberration unto itself.
America and the West is not devoid of problems, we are hardly exceptional in that way.
When a terrorist attacks a civilian or government target in a Western country, the discourse varies based on the attacker. If the attacker is obviously Muslim, the agent is labeled an Islamic terrorist. If the attacker is a white Westerner, he is deranged and irrational. One is a product of his society, the other is not. This essentialist dichotomy is precisely the reason the media was slow to label the Tsarnaev brothers attack in Boston, so much so that they threw one of the brothers on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine.
But when either terrorism is discussed, societal, economic and political context is dismissed. The personal context of the white American terrorist is magnified - he is a deranged man, a disturbed lone wolf acting outside the bounds of his society. The Muslim is essentialized as culturally-predisposed to terror by a violent faith, acting in accordance with the nature of his society.
Think on Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted and executed for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995: he was portrayed as alienated, insane, and fundamentally evil. The social and material conditions that produce McVeighs are rarely explored; rather, psychological defects are cited as the root cause of their malice. We have had similar homegrown American terrorists. We have had Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber, a Harvard-educated mathematician who wrote scathing critiques of modern industrial society. We have had the shooters: James Holmes in Aurora; Michael Page, the Army Veteran responsible for the Sikh temple shooting; Jared Loughner the Tucson, Arizona shooter; and Steven Kazmierczak, who killed 27 people in a Northern Illinois University lecture hall. These are just a few of the many. Between 1982 and 2012, there have been at least 62 mass shootings in the United States. Most of these acts were meant to send a political or social message.
Is it something about our society or culture that produced these killers? Are they anomalies or are they representative of something ubiquitous?
Simultaneously, there are no close studies of the Muslim individuals who perpetrate acts of terror. Their upbringings are not dissected nor are their conditions examined; instead they are painted with a broad brush. Their childhood friends are not interviewed, elaborate psychological profiles are not publicly discussed. The motives are reduced to one word: Islam.
If the target of both kinds of terrorists is the Western power structure, in the eyes of the media, the West is a priori exonerated without scrutiny. No reasonable person would blame the terror on people shopping in a Parisian kosher market or those working in the Twin Towers. Clearly, the victims of terror are innocent.
Our current discussions on terrorism are inadequate. They are largely racist, serving to further the political and economic interests of the Western power structures while doing nothing to create a world in which we can live alongside one another.
Responsible discourse lies not in dismissing these actions as the products of either psychosis or an evil, inferior culture. It begins with self reflection– in unraveling our myths about others and ourselves.
you know, every time James Wilby is interviewed they ask him about Maurice but what they SHOULD be asking him is what the fuck was up with “C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle”
Yes, and indeed. It’s loosely based on a novel by Wilhelm Jensen, but (I only learned this recently) the novel is famous mainly because first Freud, and then a load of male Surrealists, latched onto it (and onto the Gradiva as a Surrealist muse): https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/gradiva/
As for writer/director Robbe-Grillet’s film, the best I can do is that it’s meant to be highly allusive/intertextual (hence James’ character being named John Locke plus all the art-historical stuff), and also reflexively ‘about’ Orientalism (hence James’ relationship *cough* with Belkis and his *cough* kink fantasies). Robbe-Grillet’s films are known for their cinematic references, too, which led me to wonder whether certain shots knowingly reference Maurice, but really IDEK. James looks and sounds very good indeed, though. And Essaouira (the location) is one of my favourite places.
Poiret was an Orientalist, drawing much influence from the art and design of the East, and favoring rich embellishment and embroideries. Further inspired by Leon Bakst’s extraordinary stage costumes for the Ballet Russes in 1910, he became enchanted with Russian, Near Eastern and Far Eastern costume ideas from which he borrowed, thereby introducing such exotic references to the haute couture. In 1910, he extensively studied the collections of Indian turbans at the Victoria & Albert museum. He soon made his own versions for his couture collection, and the turban quickly became an eveningwear staple and the ultimate luxe society accessory. From then on, it was (and remains) something of a signature for Poiret.
Early in the twentieth century Diaghilev’s Russian dance company, Ballets Russes, performed in Paris—reigniting the taste for orientalism in Europe with its exotic sets and costumes. As this ensemble illustrates, Poiret excelled in recontextualizing western dress with fantastical eastern influence. He was also a maverick modernist in creating a stir, taking promotion of his inventive ensembles to new levels with his infamous spectaculars. This fancy-dress ensemble was made for and worn to Poiret’s 1002nd Night party in 1911, which was designed and organized to promote his new creations in the full splendor and glamour of the orientalist trend.
so funny when americans make photosets with pictures of normal eastern european buildings and describe them as “melancholy” or “desolate.” like my brother that is an apartment complex. my friend Милош lives there.
oh my god???
Imagine scrolling through tumblr and seeing your own window. Slammed my laptop down and went to bed.
Charles Adrien :: [Femme en costume oriental, visage voilé (Madame Routtand en Almée ?)], entre 1907 et 1930. Plaque de verre Autochrome. | src Société française de photographie
