AND VENUS WAS HER NAME

In a 2012 Times Magazine profile of Venus and Serena Williams, acclaimed essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote this about meeting Venus for the first time: “it’s easy to find yourself unprepared for her sheer prettiness." Reading that made me want to scream. Grown men have never been shy about admiring the looks of female tennis professionals. Virtually all of the women on the WTA tour acquire sex symbol status, and for some it even eclipses their game. So why the surprise that Venus is pretty? Is it her ferocious, unfeminine sportsmanship? Our narrow ideals of beauty? Or that she’s rarely photographed with the intention of making her pretty?

Right now Venus is on the cover of ESPN Magazine’s Body Issue, naked, perched tastefully and somewhat ridiculously against chalky white hills and a cloudy blue sky. The photos show off her enviable, classical proportions; she’s long and lean, almost like a Botticelli figure. Her body is lithe, curvy and muscular all at once. She’s smiling easily, entirely comfortable in herself. Typically when we see her she’s sporting a warrior-like grimace, on court, or extravagant hair and makeup, at public appearances. Here she’s flat-out pretty.

Photograph by Williams+Hirakawa, courtesy of ESPN.

July 11, 2014 by Nalina Moses

LOOKING AT LUPITA

There’s something a bit disingenuous about America’s love fest for starlet Lupita Nyong'o. Yes, she is gorgeous and talented and intelligent and accomplished. This Mexican-born, Kenyan-raised, Yale-educated actress, barely thirty, has won an Academy Award, was named People Magazine’s Most Beautiful Person 2014, and now graces her first American Vogue cover. The press she receives is unanimously glowing, so much so that I sense, lurking underneath, undertones that are self-congratulatory (in acknowledging the physical beauty of a black woman), exoticizing (in adopting her as a symbol for all our notions about “Africa”), and aspirational (in assuming that she’ll receive the same opportunities as a white actress of her caliber).

The Vogue spread is tasteful and predictable. The text, by Hamish Bowles, says she’s “as beautiful and hieratic as an ancient Egyptian statue of a cat goddess." The locations are, of course, in Africa, though nowhere near Kenya. Most of the shots were taken inside the Ksar Char-Bagh resort in Marrakech, and two were taken outside at the local market. Lupita is styled in two distinct ways: in clothes that are minimalist and earth-toned – non-fashion – and in clothes that are hyper-embellished – ethnic. In the first photograph she’s standing in a stiff Martha Graham-like position, with both arms and one leg raised. In other shots she’s reclining, on a lounge and then on a big blue exercise ball. Except for a single picture of her in the market, wearing a cartoonishly oversized hat and grinning straight at the camera, she seems passive, a lovely ornament. And, aside from a pair of fringed, baubled, thin-strapped Casadei stilettos she’s wearing throughout, there’s nothing bold, nothing high fashion, about the images.

Now take a look at Lupita’s spread from February’s Vogue Italia. Here she’s wearing separates from St. Laurent by Heidi Slimane, and photographed by Tom Munro against an inky blue backdrop. The shots have a metallic finish that gives her skin a cool glimmer, and highlights the silky, sequined, form-fitting clothes. In these shots she’s energetic: striding, shrieking, vamping, smoldering, leaping in the air. She’s styled simply, without jewelry, and with a blood-red enamel on her lips. The images are strongly graphic, and in them her presence is assertive, sexual, and emotional. The difference in tone says something about the editorial policies of these two editions of Vogue. Does it also say something about the way Americans see Lupita?

Photo by Tom Munro. Lupita Nyong'o from Vogue Italia, February 2014.

July 10, 2014 by Nalina Moses

NOT SO SWEET

When I went to see Kara Walker’s A Subtletly, or Marvelous Sugar Baby at the Domino sugar factory in Williamsburg, I spotted two young black women in the crowd wearing knotted turbans and impassive pouts. They were paying tribute to Walker’s monumental statue of a black woman, coated with 30 tons of white sugar, and they were taking back the image of the mammy.

I don’t think these two women really looking at the sculpture. Sitting Sphinx-like, naked except for the turban, with exaggerated breasts, buttocks and vulva, it’s a caricature of a black woman’s body, one that evokes racially and sexually charged popular and pornographic images. The statue is, intentionally, obscene. Sitting inside the abandoned factory, the work recalls historic roles of black women in the production and distribution of sugar, as slaves on plantations and servants in houses, which subjected them to physical and sexual abuse. The artwork seems more concerned with a black woman’s body than any image of her body.

I don’t think anyone was really looking at the sculpture. Because of strong press and word of mouth, the installation landed on everyone’s (including my own) list of Fun Summer Things To Do. Visitors brought along elderly parents who were visiting from out of town, and babies in strollers. There were ladies in cocktail dresses and heels, lads in soccer jerseys, and French tourists with backpacks and guidebooks. Middle-aged dads allowed their kids to run around, playing on the sticky, sugar-stained floors, as they took selfies in front of the statue’s saucer-sized nipples. Amateur photographs with long-lensed cameras incorporated the work into artful compositions, seeking its reflection in the pools of water scattered around the factory floor. And many visitors, like myself, simply stood back and took in the happy commotion.

Walker’s best-known work, her cut-outs, require a viewer to step up and look closely inside in order to grasp the narrative, to see beyond the supremely elegant, abstracted graphics to the historical scenes they depict, and to let their facts (rape, pillaging, abduction, torture) rush in. In contrast A Subtletly demands no inspection or introspection, and carries no complicated political charge. One sees it from the front and then the back, one gets it, and one doesn’t think too hard about it. The work’s gigantic size and scale overwhelm its content. As installed at the Domino sugar factory, A Subtlety is less a sculpture than an artsy urban spectacle, like The Gates in Central Park. And the spectacle is so successful, so big and so loud, that it suspends thought.

Photograph by Jason Wyche, courtesy of Creative Time.

July 08, 2014 by Nalina Moses

LAST YEAR’S MODEL

It’s sad that Hindustan Motors is no longer producing Amassadors, the hefty, bubble-topped sedans that were, in the 60’s and the 70’s, basically, the only car on the road in India. The car is iconic, and stood for middle class India the same way the Beetle stood for 60’s America, and the Trabant for postwar East Berlin. Virtually all Ambassadors were painted the same color, a chalky grey-white, and personalized with garlands and trinkets, often religious, dangling in the front and back window. Back then not every family of means had a car. Those who did had an Ambassador and, along with it, a dedicated driver who tended to it as if it were a living thing: washing it down each morning before it hit the road, keeping it perpetually fueled and oiled, and, often, sleeping in the back seat at night.

My father’s family in Trivandrum had an Ambassador, and each time we visited as children we met our grandfather waiting outside the airport standing beside the car with the driver. Three generations piled into it, like a clown car, and our enormous pigeon blue hardside suitcases were stacked in the boot and on the roof. The car didn’t have air conditioning so the windows were perpetually rolled-down, though the ones in back could only go half-way. The driver was cautious but, to accommodate two others in the passenger seat, drove with his head, right arm, and shoulders out the window. The seats, upholstered in a thin vinyl, were springy, so we bounced around with every dip and turn in the road.

The Ambassador dominated the market because it was a strong, flexible car, and because it was one of the few cars available. Importing a foreign car at that time required considerable wealth and influence; it was an opulence. Today, with more liberalized trade policies, the market is flooded with foreign cars. More and more Indians have more and more money, and want a different kind of ride. The best-selling cars in the country last year have the same big, glossy, Transformer-type stylings as the minivans and suburbans that can be spotted on the road in any American suburb. And in the past five years Bentley, Lamborghini and Ferrari have all opened showrooms in India.

It’s telling that Indians, who have a passion for over-embellishment, were happy for so long with the dowdy white Ambassador. Why didn’t Hindustan Motors introduce the car in fuchsia, saffron, and electric green, or plaids and paisleys? Decades ago India wasn’t a materialistic culture, and it wasn’t an individualistic culture either. Just having a car and driver – which freed one from walking long distances, riding teeming buses, and hauling packages – was a luxury. Car owners were less interested in exhibiting their wealth or asserting their individuality than in convenience. Maybe I’m less unsettled about the loss of this car than the loss of that India.

Photograph courtesy of Scoop Whoop.

July 04, 2014 by Nalina Moses