The Art of Psychology, Sociology and Identity
By Tisha Nemeth-Loomis

Cool Cleveland Book Review
Feeding the Eye by Anne Hollander
University of California Press

Cleveland has long neglected to take ownership of its unease pertaining to artists’ perspectivism involving mental, visceral, and creative conflicts. But there also exists in Cleveland groups on the fringe who frequently dissect these topics; artists who immerse themselves in the re-naming of cultural and personal psychological experiences into formative expression. Navigating these perceptions of self can be agonizing as well as unnerving, yet these unconventional conversations are gaining popularity in this region. What better way to smash trivial conversations of the conservateurs and the local media? Alleviating our need for hard truths is Anne Hollander’s dialectics of art and cultural perceptions in her book, Feeding the Eye.

Penetrating and divergent, Feeding the Eye gorges the mind with psychological investigations, artistic expression, and its relation to fashion, community, thought and sexuality. Drawing on controversial and irresistible topics, Hollander’s essays enlarge one's vision via identification of cultural theories supported by abundant research, taking on a personalized approach with the inclusion of quotes and letters from Simone de Beauvoir, Franz Kafka, Chanel, the artist Titian, and others whose works and lifestyles embraced unorthodox ideologies.

The book explores the artistic wrestle with identity included in Hollander’s statements on fashion, which revisits Mark Andersen’s book Kafka’s Clothes: Ornament and Aesthetic. Here, we’re reminded of Kafka’s erudite pursuit of immortality which stemmed from his personal conviction to transcend the self, past the imprisonment of clothing as it relates to identity. It’s an infectious ideology: garments’ trappings are encumbering and distracting, an idea which clashed (then and now) against popular culture’s fixation on dress. To empathize with Kafka is to acknowledge the full-on attack of trifling preoccupations with the body’s outer coverings, as it becomes a mental diversion responsible for deterring individuals from gaining spiritual aspiration. More problematic is the branch of female dress, as women’s identities becomes increasingly reliant on its guise of clothing. This focus promotes an unreflective existence, fueling a living hell of repetition marked by purposeless shopping to further one's identity. Release from the culturally approved, prosaic world of fashion is demonstrated in Kafka’s self-styled instructional manual Metamophoses, as the author’s writing becomes both literary journey and artistic outlet for psychological transmutation. Hollander delivers compelling analysis of the human preoccupation with clothing and identity, paired with Kafka’s warning of spiritual and intellectual dimness or awakening that occurs as a result.

Diving into underground culture's garment preferences related to identity, I found answers to the eccentric practice of corset wearing through Hollander's visitation to Mark Kunzle’s Fashion and Fetishism: A Social History of the Corset, Tight Lacing and Other Forms of Body-Sculpture in the West. Its interrogations into Western culture’s aversion to this seemingly repressed and depressing practice, corset wearing currently survives the scrutiny of both lower and higher social classes, as well as contemporary feminists’ castigation. The corset preference maintains its own following of women devoted to heightening of bodily sensations and mental perception via physical containment. This too, addresses identity; Kunzle confirms the corset’s movement as an established one sustaining positive sexual expression and identification for women. Why women are attracted to this practice is complex, but there exists a private understanding amongst wearers that a corset releases an inconspicuous sexuality simultaneously explicit and subtle. For some it provides psychological emancipation via physical and sexual discipline: woman as mistress of herself; woman as architect of self restraint, satisfied within the moralities of the right (physical) sensations within realms of erotic pleasure. Kunzle points out the psychological framework involving corset wearing: intellectual and “upwardly mobile” women are the main practitioners, asserting themselves through erotic expression knowing it’s deeply satisfying to own one's sexuality in a hidden and indirect manner. Under the layers of utilitarian garments, the corset’s blatantly erotic definition of the female bodice promotes physical and visual excitement, sexualizing the woman’s body while affirming to the viewer its restraint. The tight corset symbolically and physically contains and spills an erotically intense and enduring sexual readiness; the sensual tensions generated are consuming, constrictive, and sexually liberating in an unpredictable combination. While fortifying the wearer’s sexual awareness, it provides unexpected affirmation of strength to the sensual identity. The corset, in all its controversial handling, also symbolizes women’s immediate reaction against common typecasting of feminine de-sexualization.

Identity hits a crescendo in Hollander's chapter addressing Western culture’s rigid hatred of bodily non-perfection that categorizes scars, or any physical anomaly, as physical imperfection in need of correction. For those of us who can look beyond the empty pretense of perfection, there’s an overlooked sensual tactility to scars, as Hollander researches the subculture of "body branding" in Robert Brain’s book, The Decorated Body. It disseminates the genre of bodily decoration which originated in Africa, identified as “scarification:” a cultural view recognizing scars as a rite of passage and experience, providing viewable evidence of one’s existence and survival. Currently, irreversible scarring has evolved into a type of body-art that supersedes material adornment (e.g. jewelry) as an artistic expression on the body’s limitless canvas. From this perspective, scars hold their own asymmetrical physical completeness, and this ideology is a challenging, if not a disturbing outsider's view, in our culture where a high price is attached to perfection. Scarring as its own legitimate source of physical validation interrupts popular Western cultural beliefs of attaining bodily perfection.

Responding to physical perfection standards, underground culture's pursuit of bodily modification is growing in significant numbers. Without having to experience life altering situations that result in scars, they're willing to cut their flesh in an activity termed as “branding.” What would encourage this behavior in our self-obsessed culture of perfection? It's a problematic question for those who’ve obtained scars the hard way via life threatening or medical emergencies. Layering the body with permanent scar-enhanced designs signals a sea-change of personal crisis in our society; perhaps lack of physical scarring indicates a lack of life’s traumatic experiences that come along with scars. Branding provides instant permanency, by way of hospital-grade medical implements to close wounds - devices that generate enough heat to vaporize skin and produce a scar. Ironically, these implements designed to close wounds are now being used to create irreversible wounds, to re-enact physical trauma. The artificial process of obtaining scars marginalizes the experiences of those who have survived the real thing, and to them, the very nature of branding is looked upon with derision. Scars have seemingly been reduced to a souvenir status that can be purchased in a tattoo parlor to satisfy a psycholgical craving for permanence; this competes with authentic scarring's hard-won remnants of survival in the form of an excruciating, permanent emblem.

Encouraging Cleveland to address these stifling social and cultural climate may disrupt our society's mainstream and complacent identity struggles. The difficulty lies in admitting that pursuits of perfection, as its own superficial practice, only perpetuates artificial perceptions of identity - but it's an ambitious insurrection worth the effort. Readers may rightfully cringe over the contents of Feeding the Eye's unholy hybrid of cultural quirks and the intellect, but it easily fits the Kafka-reading, corset-wearing, scar-ridden individuals who understand that beauty finds its own completeness within imperfections.

After all, perfection is overrated.

 (:divend:)