viz. - Affect

"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.

Affect, Bias and the Maine Labor Department Mural by Jane Taylor

ladysquires — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:24:40 +0000

The former Main Labor Department mural, Judy Taylor, via The Portland Press Herald

As of Monday, a 36-foot mural in the Maine Department of Labor was removed by order of Governor LePage because of its perceived "anti-business" bias. The mural, created by artist Judy Taylor, depicted scenes from Maine's labor history and was criticized by local business leaders for being overtly "pro-union" and therefore inappropriate for a taxpayer-funded building. Debate over the mural, of course, appears to be an extension of the intense debates about the status of the labor movement nationwide, but particularly in states like Wisconsin and Illinois, where public-sector unions have experienced considerable political setbacks following the conservative "wave" election of 2010.

So where, you might ask, is the bias in this mural. Critics of LePage's decision point to the fact that this mural is simply an objective depiction of historical facts. Indeed, it would appear that the facts aren't really in question. Rather, proponent's of removal tend to simply say that there is just something about the mural that makes them uncomfortable. As the The Portland Press Herald reports, one anonymous letter writer claims that, "In studying the mural I also observed that this mural is nothing but propaganda to further the agenda of the Union movement. I felt for a moment that I was in communist North Korea where they use these murals to brainwash the masses."

I'd like to briefly consider the mural debate and alongside other debates about the nature of liberal bias, particularly in the wake of the James O'Keefe NPR "sting" and the resignation of top NPR executives. NPR's weekly show "On the Media" has, for the past three weeks, been featuring a lively and soul-searching debate on the nature of bias in media and how one detects it. For me, one of the most enlightening revelations to come out of this series was the relationship between fact and affect in the perception of liberal bias. Sam Negus, a conservative listener who was asked to participate in the discussion, could find little fault with the factual reporting offered by NPR and agreed that, for the most part, NPR journalists attempted to mediate between both sides of contentious debates, though he noted a couple of cases in which he felt conservative positions were marginalized. One such case, he argued, was reporting on labor conflicts in Wisconsin and Indiana:

There were a couple of journalists and they started the show talking about the labor situation, obviously, Wisconsin and Indiana. So the panelists were talking, and one of the first observations that one of the guests made was that the situation in Wisconsin would probably galvanize the American labor movement. And the tone of her voice told me very clearly that, that she was thrilled by that, which she has every right to be.
What I didn't hear was another guest who shared my ideological concerns with the overarching goals of labor unionism. There was nobody there I felt speaking for the electorate of Wisconsin. The people of Wisconsin went to the polls and they returned the Wisconsin Democrats as the minority in the Senate. And what happens when you’re in the minority is bills get passed that you don't like. That’s democracy, you know.

So, in addition to the perceived one-sidedness of the discussion, Negus objects to the affect of the reporter, the "tone of her voice." This comes up a few times in the conversation between Negus, Ira Glass, and host Brooke Gladstone. At one point Negus says:

Maybe the best way to explain it would just be that there are assumptions. It, it, it’s – you can explain facts, but the way that you state facts or the way that you structure them, sometimes it’s more than others and sometimes it’s because I'm, I'm sensitive.
I'm aware of my own biases, too. I understand sometimes I'm reading into questions hostility that isn't there, but sometimes it’s definitely there. And I'll give you a, an example that, that my wife and I have kind of joked about a couple of times. We remember very clearly the morning after the 2006 midterms when the Democrats took back the House. It was just obvious that the anchors on Morning Edition and, and the other shows that followed were happy. You, you can't hide when you’re happy, right?

The ways in which people perceive bias (and I suspect that this applies to liberals perceiving conservative bias as well), seems to have as much to do with the affective or aesthetic qualities of the report or artifact in question as it does with the "facts" in question. So perhaps this does help explain why the mural, which, according to supporters, is a portrayal of objective historical events, was viewed to be offensive by some.

Seen from a certain perspective, the drab colors and the stark, two-dimensional quality of the painting could evoke a kind of Soviet austerity. I suspect that the dress of the women in the right panel above--with kerchiefs that have a "Russian" feel--could bring up the same could contribute that that vague (and vaguely sinister, for some) Communist aura. In other words, the detection of bias in this mural seems to be partially--if not primarilly--aesthetic and associative.