viz. - Irony

"On A Clear Day You Can See Edith Sitwell": Materialism, Affect, and Irony in Photography

Matthew Reilly — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Source: telegraph.co.uk

In 1952, Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) announced intentions to translate her own novel Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) into a Hollywood script. British and American newspapers ran a common story detailing her extravagant costume and monstrous physiognomy at the event: “The statuesque Miss Sitwell appeared in a black gilded cowl (‘I resemble Henry VII strongly—he was an ugly old man’) and a black bombazine floor-length dress, and sported long gilt fingernails. She also wore a topaz ring some two inches square, and her wrists were two huge gold bangles” (TD 49). Click ‘Read More’ to follow the thread of my post on how irony, affect, and materialism provide possible lenses for interpreting the above photograph, which features an icon of English eccentricity and literary modernity across from Marilyn Monroe.

On November 15, 1952, the Times Daily advertised that the “Acid-tongued poet-historian-lecturer Dr. Edith Sitwell” was making a try at the movies: “She did not say she was a bit worried about Hollywood because George Bernard Shaw once warned her that film people are the greatest wolves. . . . ‘My first scene,’ she wants Hollywood and Columbia pictures to know, ‘will be most appallingly morbid” (TD 49). As much as her theatrical costumes and demeanor may suggest, Edith Sitwell was not cut out for Hollywood. Over the winter of 1952–53, she wrote letters to T.S. Eliot about her discomforts on Sunset Boulevard: “I looked forward immensely to being in Hollywood, but everyone I have met has done their best to terrify me. I was told yesterday that people of my height are frequently drowned walking along the street, by a sudden downpour of rain.” Sitwell was not only tall, but she suffered from a spinal deformation. She was famed to have spent long bouts at home in bed, writing and reading. When she went in public, she almost always wore decadent and extreme costumes. She described her initial struggles with the Hollywood media to Eliot: “My principal entrancements here are the columns of the lady gossip writers, which I read with avidity. . . . Unable to get at me—because I won’t see them—one wrote ‘A little old lady’ (my italics) ‘has come to Hollywood: Edith Sitwell.’ A man reporter asked me on the telephone: ‘Is it true you are 78?’ I replied, ‘No. Eighty-two.’ But I read last week that you are 78.’ Yes, but that was last week. This week I’m 82” (SL 183). She was 66 at the time. Her script would never be completed as a film, and she slighted industry collaborators as being too artistically naïve and (falsely) “naturalistic” for her tastes. Sitwell’s greatest fame in America (a historical irony and disappointment) likely derived from the above image from Life Magazine.

Source: telegraph.co.uk

After the appearance of the Life Magazine photograph (taken during one 30-minute meeting with Marilyn Monroe in February 1954), Sitwell lamented that the image had made her life an “absolute hell. . . . Some tiresome people will not even let me have any peace. They send letters addressed to her. Newspapers all over the world commented about our meeting. An Egyptian paper went so far as to say I was instructing her in philosophy” (VS 62). A year later, she wrote to her friend, Geoffrey Singleton, on a “Coronation Ode” falsely attributed to her: “It is probably part of my famous friendship with Marilyn Monroe—whom I met once . . . and have not seen since” (SL 200). Despite Sitwell’s disparagement of the staged photo-op and contrived connection to Marilyn Monroe, the photograph itself offers more than just a lively caricature. The flow of gazes and postures in the foreground incorporates a vibrant atmospheric background—a continuity of objects, auras, and things (from Sitwell’s open handbag to the table lamp behind Monroe’s head, from the reflection off of the portrait’s glass plate to the inverted sinking of the couch). The surreal image captures the strangeness of Edith Sitwell's arrival in Hollywood.

Source: npgprints.org

The part of the Life Magazine photograph that compels my interest is the open handbag, which is obscured by the LIFE logo in the magazine’s website archive. This handbag makes the scene more touching, human, and potentially ironic (as in the “Egyptian paper,” which suggested Edith was teaching Marilyn philosophy). I wonder, what was in that bag? Sitwell herself was fascinated by the role of the material objects and curiosity in personal biography. In her novel, English Eccentrics: A Gallery of Weird and Wonderful Men and Women, she cherishes and enshrines what she describes as an “eccentricity [that] exists particularly in the English. . . . [It] takes many forms. . . . [and may] indeed be the Ordinary carried to a high degree of pictorial perfection” (EE 16). Her scholarship shares characteristics with her self-presentation, for Sitwell raises obscure objects and traditions to aesthetic, psychological, and cultural significance. From her morbid chapter on a lock of Milton’s hair (“On the Benefits of Posthumous Fame”) to that on Beau Brummel (“Some Amateurs of Fashion”)—a dandy upon whose coat “Lord Byron is said to have remarked, ‘You might almost say the body thought” (EE 15).

Source: npg.org.uk

If we discount Marilyn Monroe, few individuals of the twentieth century have been more accomplished in the realm of “pictorial eccentricity” than Edith Sitwell. Outside of the costume, makeup, and drama so central to her photographic archive, the Tate Collections also hold two intensely private portraits, by Pavel Tchelitchew (below) and Percy Wyndham Lewis (above). Instead of the handbag, it is Sitwell’s hands that are unique in the portraits. Her hands remained unfinished at the center of Lewis’s painting, for she ceased to sit for him after he intimidated her. In the painting of her close friend, two floating right hands sign on a board behind Sitwell. This painting surprised William Carlos Williams so much that Tchelitchew had to assure him, “She is like that . . . A very beautiful woman. She is alone. She is very positive and emotional. She takes herself very seriously and seems as cold as ice. She is not so” (ES 89). Sitwell’s pictorial legacy has lived on in the sympathetic adoption and branding of artists such as Morrissey, however, she is underappreciated in our contemporary culture of images and ideas.

Source: 2.bp.blogstpot.com

Roland Barthes distinguishes the affective tug of photographs as a “punctum” (point, puncture) that disturbs the “studium” of a photographic appeal to “average effect” and the “rational intermediary of an ethical and political culture” (CL 26). In Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes outlines the “punctum”: “A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points” (CL 26–27). It is my opinion that a visual analysis of the photograph from Life Magazine ought to move beyond the aesthetic contrasts of the “studium” to consider the “punctum” of the handbag. Those readers curious of Edith Sitwell’s fascinating collection of letters, notebooks, images, drafts, and novels (I’ve been looking at some of these recently) can find them at the Harry Ransom Center, where her archive is held.

Source: 29.media.tumblr.com

Works Cited:

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Strouss, and Giroux, 1981)

Lehman, John and Derek Parker, eds., Edith Sitwell: Selected Letters, 1919–1964 (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1970).

Elizabeth Salter, Edith Sitwell (London: Oresko Books, 1979).

Edith Sitwell, English Eccentrics: A gallery of weird and wonderful men and women (New York: Penguin, 1958).

Times Daily “Watch Out Hollywood, Dr. Edith Sitwell is coming from England,” Nov.15, 1952.

The Vancouver Sun “Harried Dame Edith Insists She’s NOT Marilyn’s Friend” June 29, 1955.

Accessorizing Surveillance - Barbie Video Girl

Cate Blouke — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 13:03:14 +0000

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

H/T: Noel

From coloring books to glitter to unicorns, my viz. posts seem to be revolving around adult repurposing of the trappings of youth. Naturally, we'll have to throw Barbie into the mix. While she has certainly seen her share of fashion updates over her 50-year reign as fantasy icon extraordinaire, this creepy 21st-century update to Barbie's accessory collection reverses the gaze and turns Barbie’s body into a tool for surveillance.

The doll is marketed and designed for video sharing. The website encourages girls to take video, upload it on the computer, and share it with their friends. The chord plugs right into Barbie’s spine, and for just $49.99, you too can have a cyborg girl gadget!

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

With a video camera “hidden” in her necklace, Video Barbie ostensibly allows young girls to “record movies from Barbie’s point of view.” However, masking technology in the doll’s bosom opens the door for less appropriate kinds of video-taping and raises questions about children and technology.

Aside from my instinctual reaction – that this is the perfect new toy for pedophiles (the jacket looks like it could easily be replaced with one that would conceal the video interface) – I’m dismayed by the message this sends. For one thing, the placement of the camera reinforces fetishization of the female chest. Though the location may have been strictly due to technological constraint, to make eye-contact with the camera, little girls have to gaze directly at a biologically impossible female form.

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

The language used to sell the doll blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. Barbie explains to us, “I am a real working video camera.” In a weird way, she ends up objectifying herself – selling both herself and her camera within. For all Barbie’s associations with female objectification, this doll flips that, and you become the filmed object.

And why are we teaching little girls to tape themselves in the first place? Let alone with a hidden camera? The recent internet incidents with 11-year-old “Jessi Slaughter” should be enough to have parents kicking their kids off computers, let alone buying them toys to broadcast with.

Image Credit: screen shot from barbie.com

That'll show 'em: The Rhetoric of Didactic Kitsch?

ebfrye — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 04:36:54 +0000

Image Credit: Scouting magazine, via Gizmodo

The poster from the Boy Scouts of America’s Scouting magazine is all smiles and no foolin' about its anti-illegal downloading message, but can you take it seriously?

Megan’s post from last week has led me to ask whether posters as a visual form wield any didactic power anymore if the image is not shocking or if the lesson at hand is not presented with a palpable degree of irony. The posters she includes from Every Day Posters Every Day all move to a similar message of joy in the banal even as they take joy in mocking the mere presentation of the banal. Must we reach any pictorially depicted message through a self-aware sort of glibness?

The poster from the Boy Scouts of America’s Scouting magazine is quite serious about its message. Gizmodo quarrels with the logic of the message given to parents—rather than spend time teaching your kids the difference between legal and illegal downloads, you should only play CDs you bought at the mall. That’ll show ‘em.

Yet, especially when read in contexts outside of the magazine, the combined slogan and retro image can be taken as a bit ridiculous for other reasons. Its visual method recalls the retro irony of products we frequently encounter. See the Anne Taintor image below:

Image Credit: Anne Taintor

The ubiquity of images of this kind condition a viewer to interpret many, if not all, mid-century-themed posters with a sense of play. Consequently, the image utilized by the Boy Scouts appropriates a mode laden with millennial snark. To use such a mode without any nods to the ironic appears to ignore audience expectations outright. Or, does the image appear to transcend the ironic as it insists on poising the sentimental charm of a by-gone era against today's burgeoning music theives? Is a self-aware sense of humor a necessary characteristic of an effective retro style?

Remote Sensing, Logos Images and the Irony of Evidence

Nate Kreuter — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 14:21:53 +0000

My take on visual rhetoric is largely informed by my prior career with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. In the UT Visual Rhetoric Presentation I have a slide that depicts a photo from the Cuban Missile Crisis alongside a picture from Colin Powell's Presentation to the UN. The pictures are embedded below. I like to make the point that even though these two photos are remotely sensed, captured by a U2 spy plane and a satellite, respectively, and show raw data, presumably objective data, the pictures are hardly objective.

Because so few of us are trained military imagery analysts there is a real irony in presenting such photos to the public as evidence, for none of us can verify the contents independently. Who among us has ever seen a "Sanitized Chemical Munitions Bunker" or a "Missile-Ready Tent"? Our readings of these logos-driven, data-intensive images is entirely dependent on the government's readings of the images. They got it right in the Cuban case forty years ago, and wrong in the Iraq case four years ago.

Two very cool sites on remote sensing are hosted by the two largest US remote sensing companies, GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.