In anticipation of the upcoming Little White Dress Show on June 8 at Disjecta, we consider that color that is all colors and no color. Guest contributor Tim DuRoche on white.
“. . .oh Lana Turner we love you get up” � Frank O’Hara
White is about elegance, cooling, and a hopeful balm and simultaneously about blurring, burning intensity�like the polarity between Grace Kelly’s wedding dress and the sweat-and sin-inducing tear of Jimmie Lunceford’s big band playing White Heat (delivered at a blistering 364 beats-per-minute).
White can be about hygiene, modesty, innocence, or for the Japanese�death and “deuil blanc” mourning. It can suggest an aching, minimalist ars poetica where white space is synonymous with silence and small gesture�think of Rauschenberg’s “landing strips” of white or for that matter John Cage’s 4′33″ (1952), the little white dress of the minimalist avant-garde. Better yet look at the austere poetry of painter Robert Ryman’s Surface Veil series. Executed on cotton, linen, and canvas, the series offers a slow-motion riot between translucence and opacity, exposed surfaces and sensual membranes of viscosity that are as seductive as any peek-a-boo wedding dress. Just as the white dress mirrors a flower’s folds, layering over skin and curve and a promise of bloom, Ryman’s white-on-white offers infinite variations, permutations, and transfigurations of white that are far from blank or meaning-free.
Or maybe it’s like the proverbial gentle calm of early summer nights. White makes us want to momentarily set aside our gun-slinging blacks and believe in it because illumination trumps darkness.
Then again there’s the moral ambiguity of Lana Turner in the Postman Always Rings Twice. Tay Garnett, the director said, “We figured that dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did less sensuous.” But instead of purity or hope, Turnerian White took on a corrosiveness that was anything but neutral.
White clothing (or white-on-white painting) does not have a flat frequency spectrum in linear space like white noise and like Lana Turner is anything but muted. Rather, it is charged with an array of exquisite, minute gestural improvisations that tenderly, “Shoot first, ask questions later.”
Noting a devotional trend toward white this season (and who really wants to commit the sin of a Beckett-like stain on textile silence?), Suzy Menkes writes, “If the fashion crowd once resembled sinister black crows circling a funeral, this summer it looks like wedding belles. Every kind of garment is subjected to the white-out. . .Tao Kurihara has [even] used white handkerchiefs (a symbol of innocent femininity and grace before Kleenex took over).”
“It’s all about innocence and hope–starting in a new way and designing on a new page,” says Rolf Snoeren, one half of Viktor & Rolf, radical modernist fashion’s answer to Gilbert and George.
What’s it all about, Alfie? I’m not sure, but when it’s your turn to approach the altar, any of these sophisticated theories of white better take into account the unambiguous splendor of the Bianca Jagger white suit.
The Little White Dress Show goes down June 8 at Disjecta (230 E Burnside). Doors at 7:30 PM.
–Tim DuRoche
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