Dressing, art and style

[couch]

Tilters, beware of equivocating on senses of the word "art" . . . . There is the colloquial sense of a practice or activity with its own tekne, as in "the art of shaving." There is the collective sense of many aesthetic objects of a like kind and/or historical tradition (painting, sculpture, lyric poetry, etc.), as in Aristotle's "the art precedes the artist." There is the sense of art as a synonym for that (human-made thing) which produces the aesthetic response, which in Plato or Kant would be roughly synonymous with the beautiful, though for a long time now that identification has been problematized. As rodes notes, the aesthetic response, based on 'the judgment of taste' (Kant), is not based on any prior purpose or utility for which the 'art object' is intended, other than to be, in itself, beautiful (in the largest sense of the word, including the provocative).

So: is cathedral building an art? Certainly it had/has its own knowledge, technology, and crafts. Are Chartres or St.-Chapelle works of art? Are their windows or carvings works of art? To the extent, following rodes and Plato, that they merely shelter the viewer from the elements, or teach biblical narratives to illiterate congregants, we would say no. But do these functions or purposes exhaust their effects? Certainly not. To stand in St.-Chapelle on a bright morning and be bathed by apparently weightless walls of exquisitely colored light, and especially to imagine doing so in an era when no other technology existed to produce any remotely similar effect, is to have an aesthetic response to a work of art, not to a function:

St-Chapelle.png

Cutting and tailoring are practices that may result simultaneously both in practical garments and in objects that evoke an aesthetic response--either when worn or, in some cases, merely appreciated in isolation. Dressing is a practice which may result in keeping the dresser warm or cool, or fitting in with a social code at work, or expressing individual attitudes. To this extent it does not produce an object of art. To the extent that the result of dressing produces an aesthetic response--that we say, "I am moved by seeing this clothed person to a positive judgment of taste not based on any function"--to that extent we can say that dressing produces a work of art, and that the dresser is (at least for that time) an artist. This is not so strange if one considers so-called performance art. Dressing could perhaps be thought of as a subtype of performance art. The style prized often on the LL would, of course, embody an ethos that the performance should appear effortless or innate, that it be no performance at all. And indeed there may be dressers of innate style, as there are naïve artists, who have never given conscious thought to the canons of their dress or art. I suspect in both cases, however, they have absorbed quite a lot merely by having lived among people who wear clothes.

As I suggested in another thread, Louis Sullivan's famous dictum that "form follows function" can be interpreted to mean, not that function causes 'beauty' or aesthetically evocative form, but that in satisfying the demands of function, designs and compositions may be created that are perceived as beautiful--often in new ways if the functional constraints are novel. The constraints provided by function thus can serve to stimulate the creative imagination in the same way any other constraint can: sonata form, sonnet form, painting in a lunette in the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

When he said, "All art constantly aspires to the condition of music," Walter Pater may have had in mind that a piece of music probably serves fewer practical purposes than an example of any of the other arts, and in that sense seems 'purer' and easier to appreciate as art. But like all the arts, music has plenty of formal traditions and constraints.

As does dressing, but there is a lot of room for the imagination to work.

[NJS]

Cutting and tailoring are practices that may result simultaneously both in practical garments and in objects that evoke an aesthetic response--either when worn or, in some cases, merely appreciated in isolation. Dressing is a practice which may result in keeping the dresser warm or cool, or fitting in with a social code at work, or expressing individual attitudes. To this extent it does not produce an object of art. To the extent that the result of dressing produces an aesthetic response--that we say, "I am moved by seeing this clothed person to a positive judgment of taste not based on any function"--to that extent we can say that dressing produces a work of art, and that the dresser is (at least for that time) an artist. This is not so strange if one considers so-called performance art. Dressing could perhaps be thought of as a subtype of performance art. The style prized often on the LL would, of course, embody an ethos that the performance should appear effortless or innate, that it be no performance at all. And indeed there may be dressers of innate style, as there are naïve artists, who have never given conscious thought to the canons of their dress or art. I suspect in both cases, however, they have absorbed quite a lot merely by having lived among people who wear clothes.

Museums certainly seem to display clothes as works of art in themselves, posted-up on dummies. If a human dresser becomes an artist in wearing the clothes well (besides having influenced their form), does he then also become a part of another, animated work of art, which is the combination of the clothes and the way in which he wears them? This maybe a moot point and I am not sure whether it matters that the way in which he is able (the more naturally the better) to wear the clothes (the component that he brings to the creation of the 'performance art'), is called: 'skill'; 'style'; 'panache'; 'class'; 'art': whichever it is, it has to be present when he has no clothes at all or even when he has only rags, and must also be present in the performance of various acts of discrimination and appreciation by him and even in his own movement and activity, as well as in his own acts of understanding, consideration and compassion. I knew what meant when I wrote this but now I am not so sure; however, I'll let it stand to give Gruto a laugh.
NJS
PS I guess what I meant was that a good dresser may well be more of a great appreciator of art, rather than an actual 'artist'. If one owns a great painting (let it be a given), and one knows how and where best to hang it, one does not, necessarily, become an artist for that accomplishment alone.
NJS

[All over the world]

I am an artist - Are you saying that what I do is useless?

[Gruto]

I am an artist - Are you saying that what I do is useless?

At a practical perspective, yes, unless, of course, we look at it as decoration or an investment object. Existentially your work is very useful - if you are a great artist

[NJS]

I am an artist - Are you saying that what I do is useless?

At a practical perspective, yes, unless, of course, we look at it as decoration or an investment object. Existentially your work is very useful - if you are a great artist

There is something fundamentally unconsidered in your process of reasoning for you to come out with something like this! You are saying that great art is practically useless but 'existentially' very useful. What do you mean? It is all very well setting out to provoke all the usual suspects but it is a bit of a bore grappling with sentences like this, hoping for a meaning where there is none.
NJS

[Gruto]

I am an artist - Are you saying that what I do is useless?

At a practical perspective, yes, unless, of course, we look at it as decoration or an investment object. Existentially your work is very useful - if you are a great artist

There is something fundamentally unconsidered in your process of reasoning for you to come out with something like this! You are saying that great art is practically useless but 'existentially' very useful. What do you mean? It is all very well setting out to provoke all the usual suspects but it is a bit of a bore grappling with sentences like this, hoping for a meaning where there is none.
NJS

We are trying to sort out what are dressing, art and style. I think dressing or the art of dressing differs from art itself. Kant might be helpful. He differs between two aesthetic forces, beauty and the sublime. The former can only confirm our way of living and views. The latter is able to move us existentially. Dressing is in the reign of beauty, I think. Art is in the kingdom of the sublime. What do you think, old chap?

[NJS]

^I am spending the day in an agreeable state of vacancy.
NJS

[couch]

Gruto, if you read Kant as saying that the discourse of the sublime is appropriate to all art, then there's no point in going any farther. Quite apart from the question of the natural sublime.

[Gruto]

Gruto, if you read Kant as saying that the discourse of the sublime is appropriate to all art, then there's no point in going any farther. Quite apart from the question of the natural sublime.

I guess it will not be right to see all art as a sublime phenomenon. Maybe it is better to say, that art can be sublime like the Alps or the Himalayas, wheras dressing can never really transcend the boundaries of beauty.



The Danish poet Sophus Claussen reciting the poem ‘Imperia’ for Helge Rode and J. F. Willumsen (1915)