The subject of fashion was not one that Wim Wenders professes to have had any affinity for back in 1989. He did, however, feel a deep appreciation for a Yohji Yamamoto jacket that he owned, so his approach to the subject takes the form of a video diary of his time spent with Yohji Yamamoto in Tokyo and Paris.

Take this quote from the director’s opening statement in the film:

“Fashion. I’ll have nothing of it. At least that was my first reaction when the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris asked me to make a short film in the context of fashion.”

“The world of fashion. I’m interested in the world, not in fashion! But, maybe I was too quick to put down fashion. Why not look at it without prejudice? Why not examine it like any other industry, like the movies for example?”

The statement assumes he has the ability to look at the movie industry without prejudice.

Wenders ascribes to Yohji Yamamoto a way of dealing with the problem of style and its associated prejudices through a considered detachment that clashes with his own opening statement in which he seems to avoid, or rather, deny the possibility of prejudice in his own means of expression.

Yamamoto’s detached, though not cold, sense of reality is expressed again in this second clip.

I don’t want to sound as though I do not like Wim Wender’s film, because I do very much, this is just a minor quibble and one made as much as anything else for the sake of saying something. The film concludes with Wenders addressing the opening conceit of his film. Comparing fashion production to movie production, he describes the studio of Yohji Yamamoto like a film crew whose job is to ensure that “Yohji’s tender and delicate language could survive in each of his creations … Inside of an industrial production process they were the guardian angels of an author.”

Still from Wings of Desire (directed by Wim Wenders, 1987).

Georg Lukacs’ essay Realism in the Balance on p.39 of Aesthetics and Politics

p.29 Tintin and the Land of Black Gold

Unfortunately the embed code is not working so follow the LINK to watch the video. To really enjoy it make sure you have the sound on.

The year’s most original artists were the post-minimalists Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra—and Eva Hesse, whose work is annoyingly absent from “1969.” They founded their art in the absurdity, and the necessity, of making formal decisions. Two grainy videos show Nauman, alone in his California studio, walking with arbitrary determination and wielding a lit fluorescent tube. In a film shot with an industrial high-speed camera, he pulls his mouth agape with his fingers; in another, he yanks a streamer of gauze from his mouth. The quick gestures take something like forever in super-slow motion. “Cutting Device: Base Plate Measure,” by Serra, resulted when the artist made a long, neat, crosswise stack of slabs, planks, and rolls of raw stone, wood, and lead; sawed two parallel cuts in the array, lengthwise; and then moved the severed ends away at odd angles. The sculpture, on the floor, speaks with sullen power of order and randomness and not much else. Nauman and Serra addressed a culture in which “artist” was becoming a job description, at once secure and drained of meaning. Having nothing to do, but having to do something, they made the situation clear and just a little bit dramatic.

Who could be expected to care about such stuff? People who were vocationally obliged to care. You knew them by their tendency to speak of the art world as a “community,” adrift from society. Geared-up art schools, contemporary-art museums, and programs of public funding for the arts tugged artists away from the commercial market and popular audiences and into an archipelago of insular scenes. Other factors speeded the implosion. One jumps out from a distant wall, beyond a doorway, when you enter the first room of “1969”: “Q. And babies? A. And babies,” a photographic poster, widely distributed at the time, that pictures murdered innocents at My Lai. (It was issued by the Art Workers Coalition, an activist group whose myriad assaults on the apolitical aloofness of MOMA, including pickets and a sit-in, are documented in the show.) Disgust with America took over where traditional avant-garde contempt for the bourgeoisie had left off, a decade or so earlier, first with the triumphs of Abstract Expressionism and then with the fiesta of Pop. The embitterment of right-wing politics today isn’t a patch on that of leftist temperaments in 1969—an alienation so deep as to resemble indifference, but scintillant with rage. The art world, or community, became a destination of internal exile. Art works became tests of initiation. If you wondered what they were about, it meant that you would never know.

Read more, follow the link.

I watched Jean-Luc Godards film Weekend a couple of months ago. A very strange movie, looking back at my notebook the last thing I have written down after watching it was: A swan is killed. More interestingly I had also made a note of a piece of dialogue from the film, it read:

“They don’t want progress, they want to be first.”

This single line of dialogue expresses the disjunction between a competitive society and a progressive one. Often it is argued that a competitive society drives progress, however this is surely only ever true in a binary system where all competitions can be decided objectively. Clearly this is not the case in a general sense. In a tennis tournament for example, one player beats another and so progresses. But even in this instance the best player doesn’t always win. A number of other factors such as a players health, form on the day, and perhaps some fortunate calls by the umpire contribute to the result.  The key problem in a society that believes that victory is progressive is the attitude of selfishness that it motivates, the belief in the progress of the individual, the few, at the expense of the many. It is also a belief that encourages short term victory at the expense of longer term progress. A longer term progress that is likely to include many failures along the way. Furthermore, in a competitive society the expectation is for constant growth, it does not engender the thought that one can be rich enough or successful enough, nor does it countenance the necessity of decline.

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This image that I saw today by Alexander Carse reminded me of a passage I read once in a book about the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi. The painting, made in 1792, is titled View of the Willow Cathedral. The passage is from page 42 of a book on wabi-sabi by Leonard Koren. It goes as follows:

Things are either devolving toward, or evolving away from, nothingness. As dusk approaches in the hinterlands, a traveler ponders shelter for the night. He notices tall rushes growing everywhere, so he bundles an armful together as they stand in the field, and knots them at the top. Presto, a living grass hut. The next morning, before embarking on another day’s journey, he unknots the rushes and presto, the hut de-constructs, dissapears, and becomes a virtually indistinguishable part of the larger field of rushes once again. The original wilderness seems to be restored, but minute traces of the shelter remain. A slight twist or bend in a reed here and there. There is also the memory of the hut in the mind of the traveler – and in the mind of the reader reading this description. Wabi-sabi in its purest form, most idealized form, is precisely about these delicate traces, this faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness.

I started this blog almost five months ago without much thought as to what I wanted to do a blog about. I knew I had a website, LIEBABY.NET, for which I had ideas that I started to express in the first zine I made. I knew I wanted to start a blog to have a more consistent stream of content linked to the main site. What I struggled to identify was the thing that would give the blog focus, or more to the point, what would give me something to focus on.

A quote I read this weekend in the book History by Shahrzad led me towards what I think can help me define this blog. The quote goes as follows.

“Mr. Beckham, do you consider this a historical moment?”
“Definitely.”

As an ardent football fan, and a reasonably good player in the not too distant past, I like to imagine myself in the role of a footballer from time to time. I asked myself how I would have responded had I been in Mr. Beckhams boots. My first thought was that I would have liked to tell the interviewer that all moments are historical. That the moment we were discussing may well be historical to a great number of people but there are moments of historical importance to me that nobody else could possibly know about nor suspect.

The reason I love football, more so than nearly anything else I can think of, is for the moments of clarity that one experiences, both as a player and a spectator, every so often in the midst of what is an essentially chaotic game. Those moments, and they usually are the briefest of moments, where you feel as though you have imposed order, over yourself, the ball and those around you. Fleetingly you have control. It may be as subtle as a slight pause that opens up space for yourself, or as collectively awesome as Manchester Uniteds breakaway goal against Arsenal a week ago finished off by Wayne Rooney. There is an artfulness to these moments. They don’t even have to lead to anything constructive to be of personal significance, I’m sure that more often than not they go unnoticed. It is a joy that can be appreciated by the audience as much as the actor. The beauty of the film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, is the grace with which the player comes alive when he has the ball at his feet, the care with which he performs the simplest of actions.

I don’t know whether other football fans have the same feelings about the game, it is not a question that I have often asked, but I know from experience that I am rarely satisfied with the binary pleasure of victory or defeat. The happiness I derive from the game is something close to an appreciation of beauty.

Returning now to the question of where I want to take this blog, I hope to be able to recognise and make a record of more of these moments of clarity, not in the expectation that I can make them last forever, but simply out of a desire to remember what is possible. That momentary beauty is attainable in the stuff of life. I do not believe a lasting blissful happiness to be attainable or necessarily desirable. I do however wish to pay greater heed to the fleeting moments that reveal the artfulness of life and all that is possible. All of that without holding on to the fear that such things might not last forever.