Symposium, Talk 2 | "Ordeal by Roses"

jonathan fires is professor of fashion thinking at the university of southampton uk and he lectures internationally on the interface between popular culture textiles and dress please welcome jonathan fires hello and first of all i'd like to thank amy and colleen [Music] for inviting me to speak today the title of my presentation today is taken from the celebrated japanese photographer akos series of images he took of the renowned and controversial author yukio mishima entitled barakay ultimately translated as ordeal by roses although literally meaning killed or punishment by roses the remarkable series of images largely shot in the baroque interiors of mishama's home featured the writer in morbid autoerotic tableau often featuring roses roses for mishama represented the seductive partnership between beauty and cruelty vitality and decay a theatrical device emblematic of mishama's own life his increasingly reactionary views of society hurtling towards decadence and decay as he thought it and even perhaps a form of photographic rehearsal a prelude to his last sensational act by committing sepaku or ritual suicide by disemboweling the term ordeal commonly understood as a prolonged period of suffering has an older meaning of a test or a trial where the accused is subjected to severe pain which they must undergo in order to prove if they survive their divine innocence emerging transformed from their torment such a process initially would seem to have little to do with the rose that most beauteous delicate and desirable bloom and yet one only has to touch a rose's thorns or see it's all too transient beauty fade and decay to understand not only mishima and ako's utilization of this floral emblem of transformation but indeed much of the roses enduring fascination for artists writers and designers this image of a de playing roses petals starting to wilt and fall is by dado moriyama who as a young photographer worked as the assistant to aiko on the ordeal by rose's shoot and who in his subsequent illustrious career revisited the essential duality of the rose its inevitable passage from beauty to decay from death to life a condition that the great philosopher transgressive and surrealist george battai emphasizes in his seminal 1929 essay the language of flowers arguing that more even moreover even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty if one tears off all of the corolla's petals all that remains is a rather sordid tuft even the most perfect of blooms inevitably bears the sign of its impending fall from beauty a condition captured again by another moriyama image which at first glance would appear to depict a sumptuously perfect rose perfect that is until we begin to look more closely at the image and discern amongst its fleshy petals a slight withering and fraying at the edges the grainy reality of the photograph capturing all of the rose's imperfections soon to become more obvious as the flower starts to wilt beauty of the rose seduces his heady perfume intoxicates its cruel thorns punish and his glorious petals all too swiftly fade and fall more than any other bloom it has fired the imagination of poets painters and composers and for centuries has been utilized as a political symbol and is a sign of altered states of consciousness exemplifying warfare and romance innocence and immorality mysticism and transformation having previously mentioned bataille it is the surrealist perhaps who understood best the rose and its affinity was suffering and who characteristically saw the rose as the symbol of bourgeois respectability as amy de la haye points out in her chapter on the rose in 20th century fashion is this suffocating rose what reni magritte here is presenting in his baffling work the tomb of the wrestlers with this monstrous bloom that fills the room blocking out light and air transforming the mundane living room into a cultivated horticultural nightmare mcgregor simultaneously acknowledges and ridicules the roses remarkable ability to create sensory spaces spaces that engulf and territorialize submerge and transform the body in suffocating perfumed universes of seductive colour and beauty magritte wrote to his friend the surrealist paul elwha elucidating that for about two months i have been looking for a solution to what i call the problem of the rose and stated that after completion of the research it can be easily explained that the rose is scented air but it is also cruel um which was a reference to elwha's poem blasson de fui and de fleur coats of arms and flowers which contains these disquieting lines rose-like parasite descends from the backdrop and everything in flame evaporates for the remainder of this presentation i will attempt to lay co locate how the rose's ability to engulf stifle and silence has been realized in art and design how his overwhelming delicacy has paradoxically been translated into notions of defense resistance and secrecy and how this metaphor of suffocation an ordeal by roses perhaps is an essential symbol of our current situation where the rose takes our breath away metaphorically by its beauty physically by its asphyxiating fragrance and symbolically as a result of its association with systems of power and oppression it is to the classical world however that we are indebted for possibly the first and most notorious instance of rosy immersion that practiced by the juvenile and hedonistic roman emperor helio gabilis and unforgettably imagined by the victorian painter al matadama in his 1888 work the roses of heliogabolus the work itself is a product of unseasonal rosy extravagance given that almatadimer painted it in the winter months of 1887 and in order to recreate the scene in his studio had roses delivered from the french riviera every week until the work was completed the scene depicted a variation on what is probably an apocryphal event derived from an account featured in the collection of imperial roman biographies contained in the augustine history the account tells of the delight the debauched and licentious heliogabalas took in suddenly releasing a torrent of flower petals on his unsuspecting guests from the retractable roof of his banqueting hall many of the drunken wrestlers were unable to crawl out from beneath his southern deluge and died in floral suffocation whether to be believed or not this fragrant slaughter has fired the imagination of successive writers and artists ever since the roman revelers please of i can't breathe echo through time a perfumed reminder of the dangers of rosy excess stifling surrealist and feminist penny slinger here in her 1974 works as she pressed her body and the roses petals onto the plate of a copying machine and which to continue to perfume our current moments masked and victimized inability to draw breath almatanima's rosy extravagance finds its sartorial counterpart in the stifling atmosphere of contemporary fashion or at least before the current pandemic with its ceaseless round of collections excessive production and inequality situations simultaneously critiqued and celebrated here by raf simmons in his decor for his debut couture collection for christian dior in 19 in 2012 which took over a million blooms to construct in closing its fetid clientele in suffocating rosy unreality emil zola in his 1875 novel la fort de la abe moray uh translated as the abbe morey sin provided arguably the most intoxicating account of death by roses in the novel we read of the doomed couple a neurotic young priest sergey and his lover the wild spirit of nature albin who play out their passions amidst an impossibly rose-filled and overgrown garden of eden where rosy sexual metaphors heap upon each other until the novel's feverish climax with albins suicide by roses a final ecstatic floral extinction and this passage from the novel makes this clear from the novel makes this clear there albin lay panting exhausted by love her hands clutch closer and closer to her heart breathing her last she parted her lips seeking a kiss which should obliterate her and then the hyacinths and tube roses exhaled their incense wrapping her in a final sigh so profound that it drowned the chorus of roses and in the culminating gospel blossom albin was dead the irresistible mixture of carnal and spiritual desire that so tortures zola's priest in the novel finds a number of presidents in more recent catholic history but rose has long been associated with religious mysticism and the virgin mary in particular mary especially for those of the catholic faith is often regarded as the mystic rose or the rose without thorns an allusion to the belief that in the garden of eden roses grew without thorns and develop them only after the fall and adam and eve's expulsion therefore the immaculately conceived mary is a rose without thorns whom believes asked to intercede on their behalf whilst reciting the rosary within the context of catholic mysticism the rose or rather the scent of roses is a chief characteristic of what has become known as the odour of sanctity a floral often rose scented fragrance emanating from the body of saints and their stigmata most notably the celebrated stigmatic padre pio's wounds and the badges he used to wrap them in smelled a rose supposedly as did the body of saint terese of lisia at the time of her death nizir also known as the little flower had a passion for roses espousing the concept of a shower of roses both literal and metaphorical as evidence of god's presence the mystical shower of roses took immediate hold gripping the imagination of devout catholics augmented by therese's writing including the fervent poem to scatter flowers written in 1896 a heady mix of desire sacrifice and ecstasy gives you my only love on calvary i strew with fond delight each evening my gathering of flowers i'm petaling for thee a rose of vernal hue that i may dry thy tearful showers and even more intensely erotic the petals of my flowers caress thy sacred face they tell thee that my heart hath fled to the above thou knowest well the language my leaf strewn roses trace and thou art smiling at my love more recently the rose or at least its petals have featured in another series of memorable erotic sequences in the 1999 film american beauty directed by sam mendes lester burnham an advertising executive undergoing a mid-life crisis becomes infatuated with a friend of his daughter the newborn angela hayes as burnham's obsession grows he starts to receive visions of angela amidst a sea of rose petals and in an especially visionary sequence burnham suffering from mounted unrequited sexual desire imagines himself beneath a shower of falling rose petals a carnal cinematic reworking of saint teresa's beatific shower roses perhaps the combination pleasure and pain personified by the rose with its soft seductive petals and sharp thorns has meant that it has become the perfect symbol of vulnerability and force here magnificently portrayed by berne jones in one of his four panels illustrating the sleeping beauty story in this one the legend of the briar rose we see the spectacularly armored and androgynous prince discovering the slumbering knights beauty's unsuccessful suitors entwined in the thorny embrace of the briar rose the armor partly discarded exposing soft flesh to deadly thorns transforming these armor-plated champions into slumbering unfulfilled and rose-scarred warriors the substitution of petals for flesh and thorns for weapons strikes at the very duality of the rose but once both tender and cruel pleasurable and painful a characteristic that the rose obsessed iranian agreed explores in his blow to the heart of 1952 goes with a dagger supplanting his thorns perhaps or more surreally a rose that wields a dagger a disturbing vision of an attacking weaponized rose macgreet's painting also draws on the popular iconography of the rose especially its centrality to the art of tattooing where the rose has long been a traditional motif requested by those who partake in the surreal gesture of having their skin pricked by the tattooist needle rather than the thorns of the roses with which their bodies are so commonly marked as most rose and dagger tattoos choose to represent the flower pierced through its heart by the dagger a popular sign understood as the eternal struggle between life and death between beauty and cruelty my greeks rose itself is the aggressor no longer pierced by the dagger but brandishing its thorn made even more deadly by its transformation into steel as a slight digression tom ford in his apparently endless old factory quest has most recently attempted to bottle this rosy dichotomy in his fragrance rose prick detailing for 228 pounds roughly i think about 312 dollars for 50 mil a blend of three roses turkish bulgarian and the rare rose de mai and which beyond the somewhat crude sexual illusion of its title is described on on ford's website as sharp and pristine the piercing prickles of the stems hook onto each other bonding their blooms in pink perfection the pleasure pain beauty cruelty binary of the rose explains its centrality to narratives of sexual desire especially those of the cedar masochistic variety roses metaphorical and real abound in tales of agonizing love and the giving and receiving of pleasurable pain one of the most explicit and for its time daring cinematic examinations of this trope can be found in the 1966 film red roses of passion directed by cult erotic auteur joe sano the film presents the tale of carla bored and living a prudish existence with her maiden aunt until she becomes involved with the mysterious occult sect known as the cult of pan who according to the film's press release have learned to harness the carnal powers of roses to entrap men into sexual liaisons a plotline that is the catalyst for a series of laboriously staged black and white tableau shot using stark kiraskuro lighting the envy of the most fevered surreal imagination painter poet and champion of surrealism roland penrose hints at the beauty and cruelty of the rose in one of his most haunting works the portrait of his first wife surrealist poet valentin bouey painted after they are separated he depicts his ex-wife silenced and blinded by moths while her neck is encircled by barbarously thought rose stems a device emblematic of their thorny unconsummated relationship here metamorphosized into a necklace of vicious rose thorns in 1963 the bitter british confectionery manufacturers cadbury launched what would be one of their most enduring advertising campaigns for their most popular chocolate assortment cadburys roses starring comedian norman vaughan line roses grow on you as roses suddenly sprouted from vaughan's body became an instant hit helping boost the sales of the chocolates which still remain a favorite in the uk today this whimsical example of mid 20th century surrealist advertising illustrates another aspect of what could be considered an ordeal by roses the phenomena of roses sprouting from covering or indeed subsuming the human body the body made from flowers or the body as fla most frequently the rose is a fantasy that has exercised the imagination of artists and designers in ever more fantastic creations of floral anatomy woman as rose has inspired many of the most radical fashion designers of the 20th and 21st centuries and blossoming amongst the rose gardens of couture are some of the most memorable of sartorial blooms specimens that retain the crown of best in show a perennial favorite arguably one of the most remarkable fashions blooms is valenciaga's black silk gaza of 1967 photographed here by irving penn the model sue murray becomes an impossibly elegant rose woman and the copy that accompanied the image makes explicit this vestimentary transformation as it read one perfect rose from balenciaga the face in the flower left valenciaga's extraordinarily beautiful cape of crumpled black gazelle that wraps around the head like a huge black rose then a right falls back in a great gauzy crush around the body revealing a tiny diamante crown and beneath a narrow perfect stem of black crate dinner dress in this human horticultural hybrid body of stem capers the crawler of petals the human head and face usurps the position of the rose's reproductive organs and is dwarfed by the extravagant black flower a surrealist fantasy echoing the attack battali made on our attraction to rose petals when he suggested if the sign of love is displaced from the pistol and stamens to the surrounding petals it is because the human mind is accustomed to making such a displacement with regard to people woman as rose or rather woman becoming roses continue to be cultivated by fashion's most radical gardeners ray kawakubo for conde castle has taken a cutting from balenciaga made a hybrid rose woman for her summer 2015 collection roses and blood for this presentation most strikingly captured by paulo reversey in this image she has constructed a floral arrangement a shower of roses perhaps with the principal bloom a cultivated human head crowning the luscious bloody blooms rather than a rose body becoming kawakubo ultra bouquet at once seductive and threatening a floral tribute composed of blood red rose heads marking not only the collection's presentation in the centenary year of world war one but also perhaps the equally bloody demise of fashion as we know it especially given its current crisis both valenciaga and kawakubo retain the human head in their various rows becomings or bouquets but returning to mystic roses briefly we encounter one of the earliest recorded instances of the head itself as a rose a vision that has insistently inspired religious artistic and fashionable iconography the legend of saint rose of lima includes the source of the late 16th century religious ascetics rosy appellation before embarking on a short life of severe penitence including fasting sleep deprivation and wearing a heavy silver crown of thorns on her head a servant allegedly witnessed her face miraculously turning into a rose giuseppe alcanboldo painted to the habsburg court and famous today for his allegorical portraits of the elements in the seasons seem to preempt rose of lima's facial transformation these are enigmatic portraits while resolutely secular in their appreciation of nature rather than the result of any religious conviction often feature emblematic representations of primavera or spring and the goddess flora and feature heads and faces entirely composed of blooms are once disturbing and seductive these rosy visions culminated in a version of flora where the typical trump effect of roses morphing into lips nose and eyes decidedly more floral than corporeal give way to a threatening one might say even monstrous rose being blinded and silenced by blooms a vision that once again returns us to the surrealists and the rose haunted rene magritte who painted and performed the rosy head including his own here in the photograph of him taken by michael cooper rendered speechless and sightless by obscuring and silencing roses the deployment of the rose as a symbol for silence and secrecy can be traced back to classical mythology and the story that cupid used arose to bribe hippocrates the god of silence and secrets to remain silent about his mother venus's various amorous indiscretions venus herself of course the goddess of beauty and love often being associated with the rose in reference to this story the ceilings of roman banqueting rooms were often decorated with roses in order to remind revelers dining beneath that what was spoken of under the sign of the rose should not be mentioned outside and by the middle ages the sign of the rose was being used to encourage discretion on the part of councillors meeting to discuss affairs of state and henry vii recently adopted tudor rose combining the lancastrian red rose with the white rose of york following his triumph at the battle of bolsworth field the climax of the english wars of the roses decorated his private chamber where political decisions were made hence the term we still use used today subrosa to demand a group or an affiliations discretion when meeting the rose has continued to be cultivated in the global political landscape with the white rose especially being implemented as an emblem for those whose existence remains secret or whose voices have been silenced in the 18th century the white rose was adopted as a political symbol by allies of the jacobite cause seeking the restoration of the catholic house of stuart to the thrones of scotland england and ireland prominent jacob supporters to show their allegiance to the cause would be painted holding or wearing white roses or even worn as in the case of this rare example of jacobite fashion which bears in each of its dazzling red squares a woven silk rose and two bugs symbolizing james the third of england and ireland and eighth of scotland the old pretender and his two sons charles bonnie prince charlie and henry stewart the jacket is an exceptional example of the rose incorporated into sartorial expression of political ideology a tacit silken sign of descent that remains secret except for those who are privy to the secret of the rose so symbolically potent is the white roses sign for secrecy the oppressed and the silence that the causes it espouses are as varied as the forms the species itself takes and it continues to represent resistance and form a floral message of liberation for the disenfranchised a white rose became the symbol of the intellectual nazi resistance group called white rose formed in munich in 1942 the movement was led by hans and sophie schull german university students who along with several friends and their professor were arrested and executed for distributing fliers and pamphlets denouncing the nazi regime this impassioned extract from their third pamphlet seems chillingly reminiscent of present-day protests from groups marginalized silenced or oppressed whether due to racial political or sexual ideologies this is from their pamphlet they suggest our current state is the dictatorship of evil we know that already i hear you object and we don't need you to approach us for it yet again but i ask you if you know that then why don't you act why do you tolerate these rulers gradually robbing you in public and in private of one right after another until one day nothing absolutely nothing remains but the machinery of the state under command of criminals and drunkards remaining with world war ii it is to the surrealists once again in this case salvador dali to whom we are one of the most enduring and indeed fashionable imaginings of the silent rose head the trope amy de la haye discusses in her chapter on the rose in 20th century fashion dali celebrated cover for the june issue of american vogue published just three months before the outbreak of world war ii with its silent rose-headed witness skeletal marooned boat and oblivious wooden headed skipping figure seems to predict the unimaginable atrocities to come stupefy the silence being the only possible reaction this haunting rose-headed figure was the result of darley's growing obsession with this image which we can trace in a succession of preceding works clinging and supplicating here in his work the birth of liquid desires of 1931 fashionably erotic in woman with the head of roses of 1935 in in 1936 a year in which darley's dreams were crowded with silent roses here they become multiple seem to revisit arkan bordeaux in the work necrophiliac spring and become literally the stuff of dreams and transformed into the artist's muse and even finds herself it finds a way rather to a shop window anticipating the rose head seminal place in fashion marketing and this as you can see was a one with teller window display based on on dali's sketches in 1936. all this before finally making her way to trafalgar square in london personified by performance artist sheila leg in what is perhaps the most seminal rose-headed appearance this apocryphal event to mark the opening of the london international surrealist exhibition of the new burlington galleries in 1936 has assumed remarkable our historical status it's still eerie presence matched by the growing number of myths associated with the event was the iconic photograph taken by claude cahoon did sheila leg wear surgical rubber or merely satin elbow length gloves did she carry a pork chop as well as an artificial leg was her white dress wedding dress made by celebrated theatrical costumiers motley were there ladybirds crawling over the rose head was she the lover of the rose-obsessed reni magritte with only the photographic image remaining these stories will continue to grow and proliferate the petals of a rose but whatever the facts this image seems to have catalyzed the succession of floral headed fashionably silent figures that continue to gaze sightless from their rosy masks from the perennial favorite the flower head hat that for most of the latter half of the 20th century was beloved of royalty and mothers of the bride alike via the full-blown rose engulfed visions of yum takahashi's spring summer 2015 collection where feathers hair and petals merge in our cumboldo likes composites onto the rose-headed sentinels that start stalk no arcane in nina mia's floral universe and in that same season most disquietingly perhaps silenced richard quinn's muses their impossibly bourgeois rose prince muffling any dissenting voice and confronting the audience with their blank rose-filled oblivion these floral enigmas undergoing their ordeal by roses continue to haunt us silently reminding us of the impossibility of finding a voice perhaps or merely the persistence of a surrealist memory of course fashion's hot house flowers nursery reared commodities restrained and trained into silent beauty need artificial stimulants and indeed protection was this what stephen jones for dior was suggesting when he wrapped the rarest of galiano's bloom blooms in cellophane cellophane that as elizabeth hall's that most severe of gardner suggested was essential to maintain the illusion of fashion suggesting watching them chase their own tales done up neatly and gasping for breath in fashion cellophane because cellophane not only adds an artificial luster it also suffocates silences and makes complicit rendering us voiceless as we are submerged beauty struck dumb as we drown in the petals of our ordeal by roses thank you you

Channel: The Museum at FIT

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Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: The Museum at FIT, New York City, Fashion, Fashion Institute of Technology

Id: fXrWZTcwous

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021