It was something of a surprise to find myself jostled about and stepped on in the mad crush of people at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's most popular show of all time - Savage Beauty -a retrospective of the British fashion designer Alexander McQueen.
As not only an innocent abroad, but also an ignoramous abroad I had no idea what the Alexander McQueen exhibition was "about." I had intended to leave Peggy and Molly at the beginning of the 2 1/2 hour line, sit for a while in the Temple of Dendur, wander through my beloved medieval and Renaissance collections for the one hundredth time and, perhaps, wind up in the restaurant. But when I found out that my museum membership card entitled all of us to go right around that 2 1/2 hour line and straight into the exhibition, I was dragged into that human maelstrom and into one of the most horrifying, exhilarating, multivalent, and transcendent experiences of my life. I expected that this was going to be more radical than an exhibition of First Ladies' inaugural gowns, but when I encountered this creation - the first thing in the show - and learned that the bodice (I think that's what it's called) was made out of laboratory slides painted red - blood - my Gothic imagination was immediately shifted into high gear. Moving on into the first exhibit room it turned out that McQueen's masters thesis show was based on Jack the Ripper (who, according to his genealogist mother was in the family line) and into a rich, dark, atavistic Victorian sensibility that equated extreme emotionalism with the experience of beauty. The Romantic movement to which McQueen was heir emphasized "awe and wonder, fear and terror," emotions closely aligned with the concept of the Sublime." The experience of the Sublime "was both destabilizing and transformative," evoking wonder and fear, attraction and revulsion, always with the possibility of exaltation and transcendence." (Andrew Bolton) The uneasy pleasures of this exhibition ,
organized somewhat like McQueen's runway "shows," are like that. While there is little directly "religious" in McQueen's intentions, this concept of beauty is not unlike the understanding of some 19th century writers on the nature and experience of God. Rudolf Otto (in The Idea of the Holy) describes the Divine as that which is "Totally Other," to which we respond with repulsion and attraction, fear and love. In that encounter Reality is reconfigured and the individual along with it. Kierkegaard (or at least his translators!) describes the approach to this transformation as a "sympathetic antipathy" or an "antipathetic sympathy." The show had an effect on me similar to that of certain organ works by Messaien, specifically "The Combat between Life and Death" from Les Corps Glorieux and "The Two Walls of Water" (the ones that crashed down upon the Egyptians) from Livre du Sainte Sacrament. I'm afraid you'll have to listen to these pieces to see the point. Like McQueen's fashions, they don't lend themselves to rational, one-dimensional comprehension. The extraordinary nature of McQueen's artistic vision and technical brilliance, and the capacity of his works to elicit revulsion and exhaltation at the same moment reminds me of some lines from Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game:
A Toccata by Bach
Frozen silence. . . Darkness prevails on darkness.
One shaft of light breaks through the jagged clouds
Coming from nothingness to penetrate the depths,
Compound the night with day, build length and breadth,
Prefigure peak and ridge, declivities, redoubts,
A loose blue atmosphere, earth's deep dense fullness.
That brilliant shaft dissevers teeming generation
Into both deed and war, and in a frenzy of creation
Ignites a gleaming terrified new world.
All changes where the seeds of light descend,
Order arises, magnificence is heard
In praise of life, of victory to light's great end.
The mighty urge glides on, to move
Its power into all creatures' being,
Recalling far divinity, the spirit of God's doing
Now joy and pain, words, art, and song,
World towering on world in arching victory throng
With impulse, mind, contention, pleasure, love.
http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen/video/
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