Stripes
The
Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric
by Michel Pastoureau, Translated by Jody Gladding, Columbia
University Press, New York 2001
By
JOE FYFE
Soon after reading
Michel Pastoureau's fascinating book, The Devil's Cloth: A History of
Stripes and Striped Fabric, I noticed that the inside of the cardboard
container that holds Macdonald's french fries is lined with a pattern
of delicate yellow stripes. Utilizing the information in the book, I
was able to trace the historical roots of the Macdonalds' stripes. They
arrive from two distinct sources. On the one hand, the Macdonalds' stripes
continue the clown theme of fun, personified by Ronald Macdonald, who
is rooted in the jester, a marginal figure in western medieval society
that saw stripes as diabolic.
Cary
Smith Winner 2000,
oil on linen, 30 x 40 inches
Courtesy of the artist
When stripes had
first arrived in Europe, on the garments of a Carmelite order from the
Holy Land, a great disturbance ensued because, according to Pastoreau,
the medieval eye was accustomed to seeing strictly by a succession of
figure-ground relationships, the ground had to be clearly established
by the eye before what was in front of it was comprehended. The striped
pattern disturbed this order, slicing up the conventional figure-ground
relationship that the medieval eye adhered to as perceptual habit. Stripes,
in this context, were the visual equivalent of "speaking in tongues."
As The Devil's Cloth recounts, it appears that in the 13th and 14th
centuries the wearing of stripes was a frightening transgression: the
19th chapter of Leviticus states that "one shall not wear a garment
made of two" and in old French, "barre" did not simply
mean stripe but illegitimacy. The stripe was full of perjorative associations,
and signified a doubler, an insincere person. In feudal times, anyone
not to be trusted - village idiots, prostitutes, disloyal knights, tricksters,
jugglers and clowns - might be dressed or depicted in stripes.
The second signification
of the Macdonald's stripe comes later, when stripes became associated
with hygiene. Pastoreau states unequivocally that from "feudal
times to the second industrial revolution" the only next-to-the-skin
cloth that was acceptable to western sensibility was white or undyed.
Thus sheets, chemises, underwear etc. only became patterned or striped
in the last hundred years and then very gradually, mostly with a pastel
color, a kind of purified hue, with the association of animal dye drained
from it. The lining of the Macdonalds fries cardboard container therefore
quite unsurprisingly connotes good, clean fun, or, on a Freudian level,
eating those crisp fries will involve an odd approximation of rooting
around in Ronald Macdonald's boxer shorts.
In "The Devil's
Cloth", Pastoureau does wonder why Freud and his followers never
noticed that "Our striped pajamas, our striped sheets, our striped
matresses, aren't they grills, cages?" But as a medievalist with
a specialization in heraldry, it is full of more grounded observations,
such as the metynomic quality of stripes: how a chevron on a railroad
crossing, for instance, can stand for a whole barred gate or how a pedestrian
crossing in Germany is called a "Zebrastreifen". (Africans,
incidentally, see the zebra as having white stripes on a black body
and Europeans see it as having black stripes on a white body.)
The stripe seems
an underused motif in contemporary art. Pastoureau, who is French, rightly
references Daniel Buren, who has made a career of using the stripe in
its socio-historic manner as a kind of public visual disruptor. In picture-making
proper the pre-eminent figure is Sean Scully, who, in an old interview
in Arts magazine, exclaimed, (echoing the Macdonalds' slogan "Billions
and Billions Served"): "I must have painted a million stripes".
He then goes on to compare his striped paintings with Cézanne.
In fact, the paintings that Scully is most known for resemble large-scale
fragments of the the striped awnings and fabrics in Matisse's paintings
from his Nice series. Scully, though he has written about Matisse, points
to sources outside of a fine art context, as when he recently exhibited
his photographs of the painted striped facades of dwellings in marginalized,
pre-industrial countries, which ties the stripe into Pasterou's idea
of it as a barrier, a gate that protects and filters out evil spirits.
David
Diao Little Suprematist Prisons 1986
group of 30 paintings installed at Postmasters Gallery
The painter David
Diao executed a series of paintings in 1986 called Little Suprematist
Prisons which began,he says, because he felt "imprisoned by geometry".
Diao executed 25 versions of Robert Motherwell's painting, "Little
Spanish Prison". These works, which appeared a few years after
Scully's, might also be interpreted as a rebuke to Scully's work, it's
debt to Motherwells painting and Scully's overall romance with abstract
expressionism. In this sense, Diao's hard-edged versions counter the
heroic, rough-hewn stripe of Scully's paintings with the positivism
of Stella and his roots in Russian Suprematism.
Cary Smith, another
artist with a long history as a painter of stripes, sees the painted
stripe as possessing the same "matter-of-fact, powerfully beautiful
magic" that is present in Cezanne's work. "It's the most rigorous
thing I can do", Smith continues "but that only pertains to
vertical stripes of the same thickness, stripes which vary in size in
a painting are mannered and not interesting. Also, horizontal stripes
are at rest, which differs from the tension of the verticle. The world
today is a tense place for very good reasons, and the only way I have
found to replicate the obsessive energy of the modern world is in painting
and repainting vertical stripes of the same thickness." In the
last line of The Devil's Cloth Pastoureau states that "Too many
stripes can drive you mad". Cary Smith's work suggests that painting
them, perhaps, can keep you sane.
