MASQUERADE

A professor of mine, the influential scholar of African art Sylvia Ardyn Boone, traveled to Sierra Leone in the 1970′s to study the aesthetics of Mende culture. She understood that the stunning, elaborately braided and sculpted hairstyles women wore were a measure of social prosperity. There were no beauty parlors, and the most fashionable styles demanded considerable skill and time. So only women well-positioned socially – with loving and supportive aunts, sisters, cousins and friends – had good hairstyles.

Maybe this is also true of homemade masks. During video chats several friends mentioned they were wearing scarves bankrobber-style to the grocery store because they didn’t know where to get cloth masks. So I decided to make some to share. I spent hours online, researching what would offer the best protection. A non-medical grade cloth mask offers only partial protection, but fabrics that are natural, soft, dense and breathable are most effective. I chose a fitted design that cups the nose and the chin, used cotton poplin lined with cotton jersey, attached extra-long ties, and left the sides unfinished for additional layers to be slipped inside. The sewing had lots of starts and stops, weighed down by sadness.

Friends have received the masks, shared selfies, and been wearing them for walks to the drugstore and through the park, which pleases me. They offer some protection. They signal social distancing. And they show that the wearer is cherished.

Fu Face Mask Pattern from Free Sewing, to be distributed freely.

April 10, 2020 by Nalina Moses

TALKING OF MICHELANGELO

The first half of The Two Popes, a movie about the friendship and rivalry between Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis, is screamingly beautiful, offering astounding views of Rome, Vatican City and Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s summer residence. Watching, one feels goddess-like, peering into a resplendent private world.

But then the overall formal beauty of the movie starts to oppress. In flashbacks we see Frances as a young priest in Buenos Aires forging a prudent and costly alliance with the fascist government, and then exiled in rural southern Spain. These scenes are shot in recognizable movie styles: the city in a romantic black-and-white, like Casblanca, and the country in flat acrid tones, like The French Connection. These palettes aren’t linked to any spirit, but serve as tinny pop cultural references.

When Benedict, the reigning Pope, calls Francis to the Sistine Chapel one morning, before public hours, to broach his voluntary retirement, the opulence of the surroundings feels slightly obscene. The room is empty and floodlit, the frescoes rendered in crisp candy colors like wallpaper. One marvels at the architectural spectacle rather than the anguish in the human figures stretched across the ceiling or sitting quietly below.

This scene made me remember my own experience at The Vatican. While waiting in line to enter an older man, dressed in a fine pinstriped grey wool suit that hung off his ravaged frame, threw himself from his wheelchair and crawled on elbows to the altar. There’s no expression of faith like that in this movie. Even Francis, a complex, articulate, and self-questioning priest, doesn’t emerge as a full-blooded person. He gets lost in the surroundings.

April 08, 2020 by Nalina Moses

A BRAND NEW UGLY

There’s lots of talk about beauty, but what about ugly? That which doesn’t possess beauty can be simply insipid, unimpressive, unimportant, while something truly ugly possesses its own power. It agitates, upsets expectations.

OMA’s new building for luxury retailer Galleria in Seoul is ugly. Popping up in my twitter stream among prettily groomed interiors and houses, the masonry behemoth had a beastly presence. The structure’s dark outer skin is split by a run of faceted glass windows that swells like a cancerous growth at an outer corner. Its facade has no grid, no consistent measure except for its small stone triangular tiles, which blend like pixels into mud-colored strata. Its palette of dark stone and garish sea-green glass is unharmonic. The volume is rich in associations, none particularly flattering, and none architectural. This building reminds one of a geographical specimen, a molten chocolate desert, a subterranean mammal.

But one can’t mistake this for bad architecture. It’s complex, vivid and deliberate. It makes no attempt to look like a building, veering courageously from convention, particularly in the service of a luxury retailer peddling established European brands. This building is admirably ugly; it might even be deeply ugly. Is it arriving ahead of a larger wave, forecasting a new normal? And is it quietly dismantling some flaw in our thinking, pushing us towards a new beauty?

Photograph courtesy of OMA.

April 07, 2020 by Nalina Moses

JOURNALISM

There was a time, abruptly undone, when an Instagram feed – that stream of exquisitely-curated single images – was the consummate expression of social identity. Then it all shifted and the Zoom video chat – an array of live, grainy, eerily shifting, beloved human faces – became the standard.

I’d like here to plead for physical expression, and more specifically the journal – a catchment for all manner of writing, drawing, recording, collecting, sorting, and salvaging. A friend in Europe, whose sensibilities are fundamentally literary, observed that the one-of-a-kind crisis we’re living through now resembles a war, and that we should all be looking around closely, taking notes, keeping track. A recent piece by Sloane Crossley in the Times, thoughtful and fantastically premature, wonders what kind of novels this period will produce, concerned that a universal experience like this “is poison to actual book writing.” But there are surely millions of perspectives and many millions of stories to tell.

Short of a novel, a journal might be the richest, most supple form. One’s journal can be a book or box in which one leaves things: lists, poems, Post-it notes, receipts, rants, sketches, snack wrappers, lists. It’s a loose, low-tech, capacious form that requires no deep artistic or literary skill. As one’s ideas, feelings and observations build, the journal can take on an infinite number of shapes.

At a moment when looking outward is painful and necessary, looking inward might offer some comfort, distance and, for those privileged to remain in quarantine, a way to mark the strange, stubborn stream of days. One’s journal is private and typically remains unseen, which might trouble some, especially youngsters. But it captures, if only for our future selves, what is happening now, and who we are becoming.

Notebook by Kengo Kuma, 2009. Photograph courtesy the Moleskine Collection.

April 04, 2020 by Nalina Moses