Tag Archives: Umberto Eco

Thoughts Abhor Tights

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Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still #14, 1978

Umberto Eco wrote about the sensation of tight jeans in 1976. As he tends to do, he takes it to a different place that you might expect, exploring how our clothing directs our consciousness and behavior. For women, this might ring especially true.

“The jeans didn’t pinch, but they made their presence felt…. As a result, I lived in the knowledge that I had jeans on, whereas normally we live forgetting that we’re wearing undershorts or trousers. I lived for my jeans, and as a result I assumed the exterior behavior of one who wears jeans. In any case, I assumed a demeanor… I discussed it at length, especially with consultants of the opposite sex, from whom I learned what, for that matter, I had already suspected: that for women experiences of this kind are familiar because all their garments are conceived to impose a demeanor—high heels, girdles, brassieres, pantyhose, tight sweaters….

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still # 15

But the problem of my jeans led me to other observations. Not only did the garment impose a demeanor on me; by focusing my attention on demeanor, it obliged me to live towards the exterior world…I thought about the relationship between me and my pants, and the relationship between my pants and me and the society we lived in. I had achieved heteroconsciousness, that is to say, an epidermic self-awareness.


I realized then that thinkers, over the centuries, have fought to free themselves of armor. Warriors lived an exterior life, all enclosed in cuirasses and tunics; but monks had invented a habit that, while fulfilling, on its own, the requirements of demeanor (majestic, flowing, all of a piece, so that it fell in statuesque folds), it left the body (inside, underneath) completely free and unaware of itself. Monks were rich in interior life and very dirty, because the body, protected by a habit that, ennobling it, released it, was free to think, and to forget about itself… And when even the intellectual must dress in lay armor (wigs, waistcoats, knee breeches) we see that when he retires to think, he swaggers in rich dressing-gowns, or in Balzac’s loose, drolatique blouses.

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still

But if armor obliges its wearer to live the exterior life, then the age-old female spell is due also to the fact that society has imposed armors on women, forcing them to neglect the exercise of thought. Woman has been enslaved by fashion not only because, in obliging her to be attractive, to maintain an ethereal demeanor, to be pretty and stimulating, it made her a sex object; she has been enslaved chiefly because the clothing counseled for her forced her psychologically to live for the exterior. And this makes us realize how intellectually gifted and heroic a girl had to be before she could become, in those clothes, Madame de Sevigne, Victoria Colonna, Madame Curie, or Rosa Luxemburg.”


— Umberto Eco, “Lumbar Thought,” Travels in Hyperreality, 1976

Art as Posession: From the Hearst Castle to Cleansed Bills

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Hearst Castle

“The prime aim of these wild Xanadus (as of every Xanadu) is not so much to live there, but to make posterity think how exceptional the people who did live there must have been.” (Eco, p. 27).

Umberto Eco, in Travels in Hypperreality, asserts that America’s wax museums/Hearst Castle/Marilyn Motel etc. arise out of a “horror vacui” since we exist outside of a European, historical past and therefore we need to take fake possession of the real. This is similar to previous function of oil paintings in society. Berger in Ways of Seeing (see previous post) asserts that oil painting was a way of owning property in lieu of the real thing or as a demonstration of what one owned for society and posterity. Basically, its all about possession and value. How capitalist.

So I guess we Americans are left with a simulacrum of the real as a roads to possession. Eco continues that people seem to think if its a good enough simulacrum, such as the Hearst Castle, its almost better than the ‘real’ thing.

“Cleansed” bill in Draw your Money project.

Roland Farkas, a Slovakian artist in Hungary, gets at this notion with his 2011 project, Draw your Money, where he takes something literally capitalist, a banknote, and turns it into art. Draw Your Money involves cleansing banknotes of the ink markings that give them value. The artist removes the ink from paper money to create blank slates for drawings: “In this way the ink and paper of bills are recycled as materials for an original artwork, the value of which is greater than that of the denominated note from which it was created.”

Via Rising Tensions

In trying to thing of something intelligent to say, I poked around the internet and found this. Which kind of sums it all up if you were to throw in some dollar bills.

Eco, lists, and the Louvre

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Doesn’t he look like Hercule Poiret?

I confess, despite having left University, I still manage to have professor-like crushes on men I’ve never met, and Umberto Eco comes first and foremost on my list. He wrote the bestselling The Name of the Rose novel, is the preeminent semiotician, and more recently has written treatises On Beauty and On Ugliness. So how chuffed am I that he’s curating an exhibition at the Louvre as part of its recent shake up? Very.

In exploring the infinity of lists, his chosen subject, Eco studied the Louvre’s collection for two years to create Mille e Tre. He likens our tendency to make lists as one that attempts to order and quantify chaos. This leads us to accumulate lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art, and encyclopedias. One painting that represents this might be a Dutch still life, with its profusion of naturalistic and bountiful fruit. Eco chose works related to the subject of lists and enumeration but also voluptuousness and the effects of abundance, or “vertigo.”

Eco, from Art Newspaper, says:

“The search for The List in the corridors of the Louvre was as exciting as hunting the unicorn. Painting has a beauty that is born of accumulation; art embodies the plurality and variety of reality in the limits of the form. From Antiquity down to the 19th century we have been prisoners of the picture frame; in painting, the frame tells us that ‘everything’ we should be interested in is inside it. I want to invite people to go beyond the form of the physical limits of the picture, to imagine the etcetera, a very important concept that suggests that it may continue. I want to invite people when they look, for example, at the Mona Lisa to go beyond what is most obvious and to observe the background landscape and wonder whether it extends into infinity—something that Da Vinci perhaps intended. To look at a picture as if we had a movie camera that would do a travelling shot to show us the rest.”

If you want get more of a taste of my crush, check out this great Spiegel interview. Lucky for me, who won’t be visiting the Louvre before the exhibition ends this February, is that Eco has written a book entitled The Vertigo of the Lists to complement the exhibition. On one hand, a list seems like a simple enough thing; we all make grocery lists or task lists. But if you think of an encyclopedic museum like the Louvre, what is it but a large list of universal culture, trying to encapsulate in one building objects the signify all of human achievement?