Marthe Reed
Couture
“too beautiful to represent the moment”
Sarah Takesh, founder
Tarsian & Blinkley Clothing, Kabul
Couture dissembles, too beautiful to represent. Her face obscured by a
mask. Only a skirt and jacket, only an elaborate animal fur, evening
dress
scoring her shoulders in black. Disaster binds itself in a guise of
seeming. Fashionably fantastic. Attaque au fer deflects intention,
like
any mask, disease, terror. Such manipulation invites ambiguity. She
wraps
her confusions in a hush of silk. Forgives puppetry, her limbs
inconspicuously repositioned. A precise hierarchy of power. Not
withstanding manipulation, Takahashi’s fantasmic black hoods. Scored
in
lines of black, a veil seines her face: swath of seeming through which
she
‘appears’. Invisible ideology, a subordination of texts. Too
beautiful to
represent the moment. Too beautiful a dérobement. Deflection returns
her
by means of a gaze. Forgets ornamental silk, sexual pleasure, even
ambiguity. Croisé. A hood suppresses her desire, kisses her. We
reposition greed. Kissing a mouth swathed in silk. A precise guise
affording intimacy. Too beautiful, a mask obscures our confusion. A
kiss
dissembles.
Couture remise
"You can't have me, you can't reach me.”
Bruce Nauman
The mask recomposes her, a palimpsest of hunger dissembling. Too
beautiful
to resist, her tumbling hair frames the mask. Rewrites splendor.
Uncovered
she dishonors herself, vanishes, let her be covered. Veil, mask, body
bag.
Where a black line apportions blond whorls, a face incised in blond
tattoos.
Second intention. Steel shackles her mouth, ropes her. What is cut
away
defies simple arithmetic: Picasso atomizing Maar, recomposes her also.
Cloven wife, she takes flight, a series planes veering off into
absence. “I
can suck you dry." Distortion is inevitable. Things look strange when
seen
sideways. Or through the compression of silk mesh. Too beautiful to
articulate resistance. Her embrace expects us. Any suffices, as long
as it
manifests both terror and dis-ease. Her smile, fantastic remise,
vanishes
into the pinhole camera. Her mask a composition in of shaved hair, let
her
be shorn. Invisibile allure. Our hunger, like any other, prefers its
own
definition, a lure. Her face, a canne, a façade scoring desire. When
she
vanishes, her exposure proliferates.
Couture tierce
"I like a certain sobriety,"
Olivier Theyskens, Rochas designer
Floating in meters of rippling fabric (no sobriety), she dangles
suspended
in mid-air. Fantastic illusion recoding splendor. Patchwork of nails
and
mesh, army surplus. Fashion abandons desire, proffers alarm: a gasmask
and
a pinafore complement stilettos. Any war will do. She lifts her
tierce,
gazing into the lens. Her feint, white shroud falling away like dust.
A
regime of armor. A red mouth neglects sobriety. Dans le milieu de la
lame.
Beneath the translucent window of her mask, her dress codes menace,
subverting desire. Her gaze deflecting the photographer’s eye, takes
her
out of the frame. A cell phone detonates a car bomb. Cleaves bodies
in
Picasso-esque splintering. Too beautiful to dissemble. Eviscerated
soldiers littering the street offer no complaint, too fantastic.
Disarmed
by deceit, the frame displaces longing. Interrupts ( ) desire. Fear
insinuates itself in the tissue of silk she abandons. Sobers us,
centered
in the frame.
dialogism
a closed field, a theatrical stage. empiricism forms its own
misgivings,
writes a gap into the measure. any paranoia will do. if I begin by
counting backwards, no doubt others will come.
the space between “she” and “I” expands and contracts, a trick of the
eye.
she does not suffer paranoia. such complex affiliations defy heat,
draw a
boundary around it. a garden refreshes me.
what of her? a description imposes itself between us, coiling like
regret,
and I forget the function of names. imaginative geographies whisper
along
her neck and she brushes away the small black insects.
still a dance requires a stage, but does speech afflict an audience?
we no
longer imagine grammar or any simulacrum. a museum is a confirmation.
“you” will find me waiting under the mulberry.
without boundary
“the mark dissolves…it moves between being and nonbeing”
--Shazia Sikander
Pentimenti of carved doors, tattooed hands, scarred render. A gun
presents
itself as an earring. Seeing without being seen. She is veiled in
script.
Is this the viewer or the viewed? Couture obscura, a face in black net.
Only her eyes are evident, stroking the melody. Saffarzadeh’s poetry,
a
net cast in black lines secures an architecture of bone and muscle.
Farsi
furls its deft lines and curves. What sells, calligraphy ruminating on
revolution. Tangle of thread and intention, text moves without
boundary,
effacing a firmament it composes. The mark dissolves. Only a tattooed
hand, only a hand: calligraphic intentions. Without boundary, text
represents its own illusions. At the bottom of what? Poetry,
revolution,
couture, these cast their separate nets, perform veiled pentimenti of
their
own.
