Stripes
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, 30" x 40",
oil on linen. 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.
The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes and Striped Fabric
by Michel Pastoureau, Translated by Jody Gladding, Columbia
University Press, New York 2001
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