Maison Martin Margiela A/W 03-04
The Inkblot and Popular Culture
Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922), who is still famous today for his psychoanalytic work using inkblots, was very familiar with a popular 19th century parlor game called Blotto. So much, in fact, that as a schoolboy, young Rorschach was nicknamed “Klecks,” (or, “inkblot”) by his friends — because of his fascination with the game. Players of the game would make up poems or stories based on what they saw from the folded paper inkblots they would create.
Few know that the game evolved from a German doctor and poet by the name of Justinus Kerner (1786-1862), who, in 1857, created a book of poems inspired by the symmetrical shapes he created with inkblots. Kerner called his abstractions Klecksographen, (translated “Blotto-graphs”), and were enhanced by hand to create surreal, anthropomorphic creatures. Though his book was not published until after his death in 1890, it became the spark that influenced not just parlor games but the future career of young Hermann Rorschach.
For the last 60 years or so, the Rorschach test has been used as a psychoanalytical testing tool by many psychologists, and at the same time, discounted by scores of medical professionals who call the test worthless and tantamount to a scam. But one thing is sure — the inkblot has come to personify mystery, interpretive analysis and the science of psychology as a whole.
By the 1960s and 70s, the Rorschach test was commonly known, at least enough to where the idea of it made its way outside the lexicon of psychiatrists and into the mainstream vocabulary. That’s where the symmetrical inkblot became known in popular culture, and in 1984, was “pop” enough to be used by Andy Warhol (1928-1987) in several dozen large paintings.
(Source: observatory.designobserver.com)
As Black as Midnight on a Moonless Night, for A magazine issue 6, curated by Veronique Branquinho
Confidentially Yours (1983), François Truffaut
2 hours later and I’m finished making my fish spice mix. My place smells wonderful; a blend of hazelnuts, sesame seeds, coriander seeds, poppy seeds, ginger, and chamomile. Looking forward to doing some sous vide soon.
Comme des Garcons Homme Plus from Dazed & Confused
The longer you live, the more life laughs in your face. Life: that old friend and enemy who knows all your secrets and tells them to you in the most unexpected or inconvenient places: in bed, as you drift off to sleep; in the cinema, as you drift into a performer’s dream of a face; while swimming in waters thick with salt, shafts of sunlight, murkiness. Sometimes, in one’s living, fragments of a former self reappear, dressed to the nines, but always in the wrong clothes. When, in memory, do we ever look “correct”? Always, in my memories these days, I look “less” standing next to my now dead father, not that he was especially well-dressed. What my father was: beautiful to many women, in part because he was far away from the concerns of “fashion”; in addition to having his own style - soft V-neck cardigans, sensible shoes for the long walks he loved taking - he was immune to social life; he lived more or less by himself, even as he lived with other people. Before he died I wasn’t close to my father for many years, but I’ve generally been interested in men who represent him sartorially; that is, I’ve always been interested in men who are immune to trend, and who have the ability to treat clothes not as fashion but as an element of self-expression, their own private language made visible.
He was the first one I know who wore - among other things - Comme des Garçons. He was an art director at the “alternative” weekly I worked at back then; this must have been 1988 or so. Back then, I didn’t speak to my father, but I spoke to him: he of the linen Comme des Garçons jacket, and collector of Rei Kawakubo’s Six Magazine, that sharer of this hitherto unknown designer who was categorized as a “deconstructionist”. What did that mean? My now fast friend, the art director showed me what that meant when he took me, one afternoon, to Comme des Garçons SHIRT. There was a shirt with half a collar, or a dress shirt with no collar at all. He showed me this: a shirt could mean something other than “shirt,” just as Gertrude Stein had proved that a sentence could look and feel and sound like something other than an ordinary sentence. My friend was a rose was a rose was a rose. He not only collected Gertrude Stein’s books, but the occasional Comme des Garçons “piece,” as he called Rei Kawakubo’s clothes. (Before my friend, I did not know that clothing could be art, or that an underthing could be as beautiful and necessary as a Brancusi, say.) My friend lived, at times, in Kawakubo’s black rayon knickers. Or a striped jacket with the armpits removed. In all his Comme des Garçons clothes, though (how we loved the name of Rei Kawakubo’s enterprise, especially since we didn’t want to be boys at all!) there nested, always, my friend’s smell, his unique mixture of baby oil and coffee and perspiration. His odor made his clothes his own. How we found one another, I’ll never know.
Not content with my ability to love him, and my great joy in learning from him, I shared him with a woman friend who had great interest in Japan and design, too. One afternoon, we took her to Comme des Garçons SHIRT, where my friend photographed her wearing various Comme des Garçons shirts. In some of the pictures you can see her face - a face that had the shape and contours, some of her friends said, of the faces seen in ancient Japanese woodcuts. She died five years ago, and because my friend loved her, I haven’t seen him since she died, and that is part of his genius: to identify deepy with all manner of the living and the dead, down to their clothes.
by Hilton Als
032c
