Etymology of Fashion

Yuniya Kawamura

The terms ‘fashion’ and ‘clothing’ tend to be used synonymously, but while fashion conveys a number of different social meanings, clothing is the generic raw materials of what a person wears. The term ‘fashion’ in English, or ‘la mode’ in French, stands out from the other words, such as clothes, garment, attire, garb, apparel and costume, which are often referred to in relation to fashion.

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According to The Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology (1988), it was probably about 1300 that a sense of style, fashion, manner of dress was first recorded. The Dictionnaire de la mode au XXe siècle3 (Remaury 1996) indicates more specifically that the French word for fashion, which

meant the collective manner of dressing, first appeared in 1482. The word originally comes from the word modus which means manner in English or manière in French. As for the etymology of the English word ‘fashion,’ it comes originally from the Latin facio or factio which means making or doing (Barnard 1996; Brenninkmeyer 1963: 2). In Old French it became fazon; in Middle French facon; then façon and façonner in French led to the Middle English word ‘fashion,’ meaning to make or a particular make or shape. By 1489, fashion had the meaning of a current usage, or a conventional usage in dress or lifestyle especially as observed in upper circles of society. The predominant social notion of of fashion arose early in the sixteenth century via the sense ‘a special manner of making clothes’ (Brenninkmeyer 1963: 2).

The New Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles published in 1901 defines the word ‘fashion’ primarily as the action/process of making, manner, a prevailing custom, a current usage, conventional usage in dress and mode of life. As ‘the fashion,’ it is defined as the mode of dress, etiquette, furniture and style of speech adopted in society for the time being. As synonyms of the word ‘fashion,’ words such as mode, style, vogue, trend, look, taste, fad, rage and craze are mentioned although there are slight differences in their meanings. ‘Style’ is sometimes the equivalent of fashion but also denotes conformity to a prevalent standard while ‘vogue’ suggests the temporary popularity of a certain fashion. Therefore, it seems agreed that fashion is never stationary, never fixed and everchanging. 

Barnard’s study (1996) on fashion and clothing is one of the few studies that brings the two terms side by side trying to differentiate one from the other. Barnard makes an attempt to distinguish clothing from fashion and observes respective definitions, functions and meanings, but often treats the two simultaneously. Fashion and dress are used interchangeably because fashion is associated primarily with dress. Brenninkmeyer (1963: 5) also defines the words mode, clothing, dress, costume, custom and style among others (1963): ‘Mode’ is a synonym of fashion; ‘clothing’ originates from ‘cloth’ meaning a piece of woven or felted material made of wool, hair or cotton, suitable for wrapping or wearing, and in 1823, ‘clothing’ meant the distinctive dress worn by members of any profession. ‘Dress’ comes from the Middle French ‘dresser’ to English ‘dress’ meaning to arrange, and in general, it means the principal outergarments worn by women or the visible part of clothing. ‘Costume’ means mode of personal attire or dress belonging to a nation, class or period. As fashion has many interrelated aspects with these concepts (Brenninkmeyer 1963), it becomes impossible to demystify fashion as long as the focus is on the material objects.

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Connecting Creativity

Luigi Maramotti

What is creativity? How are ideas generated? How do we define a creative person? Such questions have probably crossed our minds more than once, but rarely do we realise how much we depend on this very special output of human intelligence. If we look at the products around us, most of which today are manufactured industrially rather than handmade, we can appreciate how their design is related to creative thought and to the necessity for innovation and change. As the Chairman of the MaxMara group, with an annual turnover of £600 million, more than twenty separate collections and 600 stores situated around the globe, I have been confronted quite forcefully with this thought. I have devoted this chapter to discussing creativity, ideas of what it is, and how, in my experience it can be organized in order to originate some of the remarkable results that industry is capable of achieving, particularly in the world of fashion.

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The first personal intuition I had about the importance of creativity was through the Disney character, Archimedes; the light bulb that appeared every time he had a good idea fascinated me. It may seem an unintellectual approach, but I have always liked the idea of invention as sudden intuition, and the magic behind it. The abstract concept of creativity can be linked to the selection, from thoughts and things, of those which lead to innovation, change or improvement. Creativity can be formatively defined as behaviour which includes such activities as origination, organisation, composition and planning. Any definition we may try will not be fully satisfying because, in order to make creativity distinguishable from mere arbitrariness, there must be a sort of legislation. We are perfectly aware, in the world of fashion, for instance, odd does not mean fashionable. There are plenty of examples, from the past and in the present. George Brummel was a fashionable trendsetter, while Liberace was an eccentric oddity; Chanel was a priestess of style whilst Mae West was provocative, amusing or comic.

Creativity is often associated with irrationality or pure intuition, but this, in my view, is an erroneous belief. I believe that creativity has to be part of a system or structure, if we want it to be a useful instrument in helping us to understand or improve our social and physical environment. That creativity flourishes through being subjected to constraint may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I believe that it is not. Perhaps as a consequence of an overall attitude to the world based on daily experience, many today regard creativity as being linked to disorder; abstract expressionism is evidence of this. Yet as recently as the eighteenth century, Pascal asserted that order was sufficient (and necessary) to define creativity, though I find myself doubting this when I find myself in the chaos of our design department.

In my opinion we tend nowadays to rarely abstract the idea of creativity. We tend instead to regard it as an attribute of certain individuals. ‘That is a creative person’, we are used to saying. What do we mean? Do we judge outward appearance, the image we are offered, someone’s behaviour or maybe new ideas, something done in a certain way, a project or performance with a particular style? Any of these would show us to perceive creativity as ‘something different’. We tend to believe that normality does not favour a creative attitude, or if you like, that human beings are not ‘normally’ creative.

A great and fascinating debate on creativity and genius enlivened the psychoanalytical studies of Freud and Jung. The former thought creativity to be the artist’s tool, by means of which he could express the contents of his unconscious. In the writings on Leonardo and Michelangelo he analysed the two great masterpieces St Anne and Moses in which he could see turned into art, the nature and the inner secrets of the artists’ souls as individuals. For Jung, on the contrary, the creative person was one, who, through his or her work, is able to emancipate the self from his or her own individuality to become an interpreter of the universal themes of mankind which he, unconsciously, activates.3 Jung’s model seems to be the one which most accurately defines creativity in the context of fashion,4 where the creative challenge is to divine unconscious collective desires, as I shall discuss.

The Italian writer, Italo Calvino, in connection with some lectures he was to give at Harvard University within the prestigious Charles Elliot Norton Poetry Lecture Series, wrote some very interesting papers entitled ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’. They list the essential literary qualities for writers of the future as being lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency. Unfortunately, his sudden death prevented him from giving the lectures, but his texts help us to identify some of the peculiarities of creative thought. When he writes about imagination, for instance, Calvino defines it as a list of potentialities, of hypotheses, of what was not and may never, but might have been. What is important to him is to draw from this gulf of possibilities, to recreate all the possible combinations, and to pick the ones which best fit the purpose.

As I have suggested, many who have dealt with the concept of creativity have used it as a label or accolade for individuals whose output is different in a striking, even obvious way. In my view, it is erroneous to make such evaluations without taking the context into consideration. Take, for example, Renaissance artists and their works. We would be obliged to regard their creative value as slight, to consider them as minor artists, if we did not judge their work in the context of the strict patronage; the political, social and religious reality they were commissioned to represent. By extension, products that vary only slightly from the established norm, contrary to their immediate appearance, may in fact be the result of great creative thought. In fashion, a ‘commercial’ product can be as much the result of creative ‘genius’ as an extravagant catwalk creation.

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Fashion and Glamour

Réka C.V. Buckley and Stephen Gundle

Few words are as ubiquitous in the contemporary mass media as glamour. ‘The new glamour burns bright’ headlined Interview in March 1997, while Elle of December 1996 tempted readers with the following cover title: ‘Glamour! The people who live it – the clothes that scream it – the make-up that makes it’. Yet quite what glamour is frequently remains unclear. When fashion and women’s magazines from time to time conduct enquiries into the meaning of glamour, they invariably seek opinions from a range of experts and celebrities, whose views are strikingly contradictory. Confusion arises over the gender connotations of glamour, whether it is an intrinsic (charismatic) phenomenon or a manufactured one, and whether it is permanent or temporary. In addition there is disagreement over its application to age ranges, places and situations. Such is the lack of common ground that it is tempting to agree with lexicographer Eric Partridge who, as long ago as 1947, included glamour in his list of ‘vogue words’ which had gained a momentum of their own whatever the original impulse had been. For Partridge, glamour was a word without meaning that had been invested with high status and picturesque connotations by authors and journalists.

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One enduring feature of glamour is its identification with fashion. In a recent analysis of fashion photography, Clive Scott contrasted ‘glamour’ with ‘sophistication’. He found that in the fashion press glamour was: youthful, dynamic, pleasure-seeking, extrovert, voluble, short-term, gregarious, uncultured, volatile, public (and thus downmarket). On the other hand sophistication was seen as: mature, poised, restrained, introvert, taciturn, long-term, solitary, cultured, controlled/severe (and thus upmarket). In other accounts fashion and glamour are taken to be synonymous. Jeanine Basinger takes this view in her analysis of classical Hollywood cinema and its female audiences. However, she also states that ‘Glamour goes beyond mere fashion. Although the concept of glamour includes fashion, it ultimately involves more than what a woman puts on her body. It deals with the lady herself.’ The movie stars she refers to usually occupied a median position between the two poles identified by Scott, thus rendering his differentiation meaningless.

In the context of such confusion, an attempt to identify what glamour is, where it comes from and how it works is surely timely. In this chapter three moments of glamour will be explored. In keeping with glamour’s associations with the immediate and the commercial, the first of these will be the present. Older meanings will be considered in relation to contemporary uses in the press and advertising. Second, the root of many of the gestures and stereotypes of modern glamour – Hollywood cinema of the middle decades of the twentieth century – will be examined. In the final section, consideration will be given to the transformation of the nineteenth-century city which, it will be argued, was the original site of glamour as it is used and understood today.

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Fashioning the Street: Images of the Street in the Fashion Media

Agnès Rocamora and Alistair O’Neill

INTRODUCTION

In the media, the street has become as conspicuous a context for fashion as the space of the photographer’s studio or that of the catwalk. No longer simply occupied, in fashion images, by the glamorous figures of professional models, it is the everyday setting of ordinary people whose fashionable looks feed the content of numerous fashion reports. The status of the street as a setting for the articulation of fashion in Taking the consecration of the ‘straight-up’ fashion portrait in 1980 in i-D magazine as a starting point, we first chart the appearance of street fashion photography, from the emergence of the street as a visual background to fashion shoots, to the institutionalization of vox-pop fashion images, on which the present paper focuses.We interrogate the values conveyed by such images, looking at the idea of the street as a site for the creative performance of ‘real’ people. Commenting on the role of journalists in the selection of ordinary subjects and city streets, we then question the status of straight-up images as evidencing what is ‘real’ about ordinary people. Finally we argue that in many fashion images, detached from the representation of actual cityscapes, ‘the street’ has lost its characteristic as a situated place to become a blank canvas ready to be filled by the imagination of the reader.

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FASHION AND THE STREET

Representations of fashion within the context of the street can be charted across the twentieth-century history of the fashion media. However, the headto-toe documentary portrait of a fashionable individual captured in the street – known as the straight-up – remains the central definition of this visual reporting on fashion.

In early issues of i-D (Fig. 17) the straight-up was established as the magazine’s visual signature: a style of dress worn by ordinary people as opposed to professional models, combined in apparent disregard of dominant fashion codes and celebrated in the streets rather than in the rarefied spaces in which fashion was usually found (see also Smedley 2000: 147). The straight-up style of photography deployed by London-based Derek Ridgers and Steve Johnson in i-D typically captured fashionable subjects against a brick wall in the street rather than in front of the white backdrop of the studio, lending an immediacy and vitality to what was then becoming known as ‘street fashion’.Twenty years on, street-fashion photography has become so commonplace that representational strategies now involve bringing the subjects back into the studio. Furthering this air of unmediated integrity was the inclusion of snatches of conversation with the subject and a detailed list of each item of apparel worn, where it was purchased and how much it cost. This approach documented street style as formed from incongruous juxtapositions – the cheap and the expensive, the old and the new, the beautiful and the vulgar.

The pairing of style and the street has earlier precedents in twentiethcentury fashion magazines, where the street was used as a transgressive foil to the representation of fashionable women in cityscapes. However, many of these photographs re-created such spaces in the photographer’s studio, often so that the dirt of the street would not soil the clothes, or in order that everything could remain still enough for it to be captured. An example of this is a 1926 photograph by Edward Steichen for American Vogue, which depicts the details of a women’s outfit centring upon the base of her evening coat, her legs and shoes (see Devlin 1979: 39 for a reproduction of the photograph).

With an usher’s spotlight casting a circular frame around the shoes, and a theatre programme held by a male companion, the image suggests late arrivals being shown to their seats. What is foremost though, is the purpose of the women’s outfit in making an entrance and exit, in defining those moments being whisked between streetcar and theatre stalls, in momentarily being seen

as a feature of the street.

Although the unaccompanied figure of the woman in the street was seen increasingly frequently in fashion photographs in the first half of the twentieth century, she often remained bound by the feminine pursuits of a bourgeois existence, with the reality of the street a beautifying prop to the unreal fantasy of high-end fashion. As an object of the gaze, her position contrasted with that of the flâneur and the male privileged code of visual spectatorship.

It was not until the post-war period, with the emergence of style-conscious magazines aimed at men that the image of the flâneur, somewhat melded with the more modern notion of the ‘man about town’, began to be visualized in fashion photography. Metropolitan masculinity was shown to be influenced by the industrial atmosphere of the metropolis. This is well illustrated by Terence

Donovan’s grainy black-and-white photographs of sharply suited men in ‘Spy Drama’ for the October 1962 issue of Town, which became famous as the visual influence for the filmic interpretation of James Bond. In this same period, the representation of the woman in the street was radicalized by the emergence of youth as a social category and its claiming of street culture as its primary context.

Many of the British fashion photographers who in the 1960s would go on to offer a new and confident definition of a woman in the street, which Radner (2000) identified in the figure of ‘the single girl’ or the ‘dolly bird’ in new magazines such as Nova, are an interesting case in point. As Harrison (1998) argues, much of the fashion photography that made them famous then was predicated on the social-documentary photography of youth cultures and street life they published in the 1950s, with much of it appearing in the new men’s titles of the period. David Bailey’s photograph of Jean Shrimpton for a Vogue ‘Young Ideas’ story in 1962 is an iconic image of the 1960s single girl.

It draws upon a number of visual tropes: in its pop-art use of signs and street furniture to indicate a navigation of the city it injects movement into the image, in its inclusion of passers-by and street traffic it sets vitality into the image, and in the confident but androgynous figure of Shrimpton, who carries a teddy bear in her hand, youth is valorized.

The newly identified social category of youth, and its claim of the street as its terrain, marked a new development in fashion photography’s use of this urban space, forcing it to modify its own practices. It was no longer enough to claim the street as the site where fashionable commodities were radicalized, rather it was now the site where style was constructed prior to the processes of commodification. The straight-up allowed the fashion media to document the fashionable styles displayed on city streets in a format informed by the tradition of the vox pop – documenting the opinion of ‘the man on the street’. Such an approach informed Nova magazine’s innovative fashion stories in the late 1960s and early 1970s (see also Williams 1998) before it was more systematically capitalized on by Terry Jones in i-D in the 1980s with the magazine’s consecration of the straight-up as a legitimate form of fashion photography.

The straight-up is now a staple of fashion journalism from the British Independent on Sunday to the French Jalouse or the aptly titled Japanese Street (Plate 17). Until March 2004, for instance, the Independent on Sunday featured a section called ‘You’ve Got the Look’ – then renamed ‘On the Street’. It read, ‘Our experts take to the streets to find out what real people are wearing, and show you how to recreate their style’. Featuring a large straight-up of a ‘real’ person in a format reminiscent of i-D’s fashion portraits, on the right-hand side of the picture is a visual breakdown of items similar to those in the photograph, with their price and a stockist’s phone number. In the bottom left-hand corner a small column quotes the subject on their own style. Readers are shown ‘how to recreate their style’ in a departure from the media’s many pages devoted to emulating the style of celebrities and catwalk models. Similarly, Elle announces that for its London Street Style Look competition it will be ‘starring the hippest girls on the high street. And where better,’ the magazine asks, ‘to look for inspiration than on the streets of dear Blighty?’ (August 2003). ‘British street style,’ Elle continues, ‘is renowned for its influence on the catwalk…We’ll be looking for real girls’ (August 2003).

The unabated popularity of the straight-up is due to its supposed ability to evidence the ‘real’ and the ‘ordinary’ in the context of written and visual speculation about the nature of metropolitan fashion. As Smedley observes, images of street fashion in i-D in the 1980s ‘took as their point of reference and basis of style the notion of the “ordinary person”’ (2000: 147), an idea we now turn to.

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A Shop of Images and Signs

Caroline Evans

‘Fashion doesn’t have to be something people wear, fashion is also an image,’said the designers Viktor & Rolf in 1999 (Gan 1999). That year, their third couture collection, made entirely in black and white, was shown on the catwalk twice: first in black light that picked out the white elements of the clothes and concealed the black, so that the audience saw only a frill, a trailing ribbon, a disembodied white ruff, or a dancing skeleton with hips of white bows; and then in white light that revealed the collection to be a series of variations on the theme of the black tuxedo. At that point it became clear to the audience that the skeleton ‘bones’ it had seen earlier were stitched onto a black suit; and the plain white trouser suit turned out to be outlined by a huge black ruffle projecting from its side seams. At once macabre, whimsical and spectacular, the ghostly presentation evoked the double meaning of the term vision: it was quite literally a vision on the catwalk, and one which embodied the designers’ vision. At the same time, it suggested the other meaning of the term: a ghost, shade or apparition. Viktor & Rolf ’s presentation was also spectral in terms of manufacturing and selling: the clothes were not intended to go into production but were made as a series of ideas. This black-and-whitecollection was an inventory of the shapes that Viktor & Rolf had been working on since the start of their career, and they intended it to be their last spectral collection before they launched themselves in the real world of embodied fashion and commerce, making clothes to go into production and be sold in the shops. As such, the collection, and its presentation, typified the spectacular nature of modern fashion and marketing. The word spectacle designates a sight, or show; the spectre a ghost, or a vision. Etymologically they have the same root, both coming from specere, the Latin verb ‘to see’. The spectacle of fashion is the subject of this article, which is concerned with fashion as image rather than as photograph. It looks at the catwalk show as a key medium through which fashion images were created and then disseminated via new electronic and print media at the end of the twentieth century.

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In the 1850s Baudelaire wrote that ‘all the visible universe is nothing but a shop of images and signs’ (Buck-Morss 1991: 177). A hundred and fifty years later, in the 1990s, new communications produced mutations in consumer culture that transmogrified the fashion object into image and sign. In the altered visual economy of fast-changing information technology and global markets, media images were, for most people, their first and only point of contact with top-end fashion. Fashion shows became characterized by dramatic showpieces – implausible garments made of feathers and shells, or resin and metal, that were galvanized by electricity or consumed by fire in a spectacular finale. Showpieces never went into production, and after the show disappeared into the designers’ archives, only occasionally to reappear in the occasional museum exhibition. Their brief appearance on the catwalk would, however, be fixed in the amber of the press photograph, and would circulate in both digital and print media as an image and memory of a fleeting moment in an

evanescent spectacle. More pragmatically, the showpiece would have done its job for the designer if it had attracted the requisite press coverage and, in the early stages of a designer’s career, potential backers. As the catalogue for a British Council touring exhibition of cutting-edge design, Lost and Found, stated in 1999,

Fashion designers work in a world whose currency is the magazine front cover; the editorial spread; the styled photo shoot…Successful designers are under extraordinary pressure from hundreds of magazines all over the world, wanting photographs or clothing samples to fill their editorial pages. As a result, a network of support teams has grown up to serve thefashion industry, consisting of press and public relations people, publicity co-ordinators, editorial stylists and fashion photographers. For most people, the media provides the only contact with experimental or couture fashion. These garments are either too expensive or unsuitable for mainstream retail distribution, and we are left to consume fantasy images of magazine photo shoots. (1999: 97).

Thus the fantasy images of the elaborate and spectacular fashion shows of

the late 1990s, in which the fashion object mutated into image, increasingly echoed Baudelaire’s observation, from the heart of mid-nineteenth-century Paris with its specialist shops full of luxury goods, that the entire ‘visible universe’ consisted of no more than a vast emporium of signs and images. In 1967, in The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord (1994) anatomized that visible universe and its relation to capital; he saw it as a world colonized by false desires and illusions, epitomized by the ubiquity of the commodity form. In many respects the fashion show is the paradigm of Debord’s notion of spectacle, which he described as narcissistic, self-absorbed and self-referential. So too is the catwalk fashion show, sealed into a hermetic world of its own with its attendant protocols and hierarchies. Like the spectacle, it spatializes time and destroys memory (Debord 1994: para. 19). It is ‘the triumph of ontemplation over action’ ( Jay 1993: 428) and the quintessential form of commercial seduction through theatrical novelty and innovation. Its spectacular displays are calculated to obscure its financial heart. Only the gilt hairs in the show, each with a journalist’s name on it, and the banks of photographers, hint at the complex professional networks to which the spectacle is tied and through which its imagery is disseminated worldwide.

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Towards a Sociology of Art Collections: Irish Intellectuals, Modernity and the Making of a Modern Art Collection

Marta Herrero

abstract: This article draws on Zygmunt Bauman’s concept ‘legislator’ – the intellectual practice of modernity – to explore the relationship between Irish intellectuals and modernity. The case study selected for this purpose is the intellectual debate that took place around the making of Dublin’s first modern art collection, which led to the opening of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in 1908. Its premise is that art collections are the outcome of intellectual practices, which legitimate and define their role. Overall, this example is used to investigate the complex ways in which Irish intellectuals sought to renegotiate Ireland’s relation to modernity, a discourse that positioned it as a ‘peripheral’ country. The article concludes by saying that the making of a modern art collection was used as a means to renegotiate a more constructive view of Ireland, and suggests ‘modernities’ as a term that captures the various intellectual practices of modernity

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Introduction

The aim of this article is to examine the relationship between intellectuals, modernity and the making of art collections. The case study selected for this purpose is the intellectual debate around the making of Ireland’s first modern art collection, that led to the foundation of Dublin’s Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in 1908. My main concern here is to use this debate to assess the possibilities of the concept ‘legislator’ – the ideal type of intellectual of modernity – as presented by Zygmunt Bauman (1987, 1992, 1995). Hence, rather than taking for granted the explanatory power of the category, I want to question its usefulness for a study of intellectual practices in one of the so-called ‘peripheries’ of modernity.

Bauman uses the term ‘legislator’ to designate the intellectual practice of modernity. It was through the practices of legislators that the worldview and social order of modernity came into being. In turn, their knowledge-making activities legitimated their role ‘as spokesmen and guardians of society as a whole, as carriers/practitioners of society’s supreme values and destiny’ (Bauman, 1995: 227). Intellectuals cooperated with the modern state to create a body of knowledge that would produce and support a theory of social order: culture. This theory was based on the premise that men and women were unprepared to meet the demands of social life, and that these demands could only be met through education.

To put this theory into practice, legislators classified and divided the world into an ordered totality (Bauman, 1987: 4). One of their projects was to render practices into superior – those that could be objectively classified – and inferior – those that resisted classification. In this way they articulated a hierarchy of knowledge with its own categories that established what was the ‘norm’ and what was ‘different’ from it. Legislators applied their knowledge in areas such as ethics, history and the arts, but the field of art and the practice of artistic judgement was the area in which their authority, power and control remained most ubiquitous and unchallenged (Bauman, 1987: 140). As Bauman explains:

Being in control meant operating, without much challenge, the mechanisms transforming uncertainty into certainty; making decisions, pronouncing authoritative statements, segregating and classifying, imposing binding definitions upon reality. . . . In the case of aesthetics the power of intellectuals seemed particularly unchallenged, virtually monopolistic. In the West, at least, no other sites of power attempted to interfere with the verdicts proffered by those ‘in the know’. (Bauman, 1987: 134)

This quote gives us an idea of the close relationship between the making of aesthetic judgements and the definition and classification of ‘reality’ through the grid of modernity’s worldview. Even definitions that helped segregate ‘art’ from ‘non-deserving’, ‘non-art’ were built upon the division of social groups as superior/inferior, which corresponds to the opposition ‘noble’ (and hence with good taste) vs ‘vulgar’ (lacking in good taste). This article is based on the premise that the making of art collections was one of the ways whereby legislators carried out their tastemaking judgements, classifying some works as ‘art’ and hence acceptable as part of a public collection.

Bauman’s ideas provide a useful springboard for understanding the knowledge-constituting activities of the intellectuals of modernity and the creation of concepts through which to understand this particular worldview. However, the term ‘legislator’ applies to those intellectuals situated in ‘the West’, in the ‘ “leading” countries’ of modernity (Bauman, 1995: 229). This becomes clear if we think that one of the tasks of legislators was the creation of a theory of history, which presented as ‘natural’ an ordered hierarchy of nations ranking from those most ‘civilised’ to those ‘uncivilised’ or ‘lagging behind’ (Bauman, 1987: 11). If a theory of history classified countries as more or less modern, arguably, intellectuals operating within these countries were positioned within asymmetrical relationships of power. Following from that, if intellectuals in ‘core’ countries such as Britain and France legislated a modernity that favoured their nations as the apex of western civilization, how can we situate and explain the activities of those intellectuals who were articulating value judgementsoutside these legislating centres of modernity? Were they able to legislate their own modernity? In Life in Fragments, Bauman (1995) argues that it was in the ‘periphery’ of civilization that the conditions for the estrangement of legislators from the ruling state and the ‘self-assertion of intellectuals’ (Bauman, 1995: 228) first appeared. In this new self-asserting position intellectuals became critics of their own society – as opposed to supporting the prevalent status quo. What we have here is an argument about where and how the legislator role came to its end, which still leaves unexplained their role in the making of modernity, while the legislating practice was still being carried out.

A study of the activities of Irish intellectuals in the field of visual arts is particularly relevant for a number of reasons. At the time, Ireland was in the paradoxical circumstance of being a European country and a British colony since the 17th century. Moreover, a number of sociologists and art historians have investigated the changing power relations that legitimated and authorized new ways of consumption and production of the arts in the so-called modern era (see Bourdieu, 1993; Lorente, 1998); however, in the Irish context a sociological approach to the arts, both in its historically and contemporary context, is practically absent.2 Added to this is the scarcity of sociological investigations of Irish intellectuals (O’Dowd, 1985: 6) and a need to redress the emphasis given to the study of literary, nationalist and clerical intellectuals (O’Dowd, 1988: 8).

I want to situate this discussion in the context of a sociology of arts. Although the term does not describe a clearly defined discipline or unitary methodology (Outhwaite and Bottomore, 1993: 28), sociologists justify their contribution to this field by treating the arts as a social construction (Wolff, 1981; Zolberg, 1990; Zolberg and Cherbo, 1997). This means investigating the relationship between the meanings and motivations involved in the production of art objects, and wider social processes and structures (Eyerman, 1998: 280). My specific purpose and contribution here are to present a sociological approach to the making of art collections that places the definition and role of collections as the outcome of intellectual debate. In this case, Dublin’s collection took place in a debate in which two visions emerged – introspective and internationalist. Drawing on Bauman’s argument, the specific questions that I want to address are: how do the practices of Irish intellectuals relate to the making of modernity’s worldview? How do Irish intellectuals legislate a particular definition of Irish art? Are they legislating a distinctive Irish modernity?

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Structure of Art, Structure of Mind

Emmanuel Anati

The context

For over four million years hunting has shaped humanity and has left profound marks on the intellectual nature of the species. The fundamental process of association and ‘logic’ of the human mind came into existence and developed throughout a long series of millennia during which the species acquired its basic behavioural patterns. These millennia are characterized by hunting bands which shared activities and refined communication; team work enhanced socialization.

This way of life reached a high level of perfection and efficiency in the last 200,000 years with the appearance of our direct forefather, Homo sapiens. He acquired developed technological skills and mental abilities, he was capable of producing precise and efficient implements and was responsible for creating an ideology whose matrix is still present at the core of modern man’s conceptual thought. Our ancestor developed the capacity for synthesis and abstraction which, among other things, led him to produce art. Visual art as a common pattern is documented only in the last 50,000 years, that is the latest 1% of the age of humankind.

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So far as we know, artistic manifestations are exclusive to the human species. Graphic art has multiple functions including communication, memorization, interpretation, commemoration and self-expression. Art is the mirror of mind, and constitutes a precious record of man’s conceptual and psychological matrix. Graphic art is a cultural pattern, like writing, dancing or singing. It implies specific abilities of synthesis, abstraction, mental associations and logic.

A few cases of early graphic expressions are recorded in various parts of the world. These predecessors of figurative graphic art appear to be of two main kinds: abstract markings; and collections of natural shapes that attracted the human mind. Abstract markings are known from Africa, going back, at Blombos Cave, South Africa, some 75,000 years. In Europe, at Bacho Kiro, Bulgaria and at Tata, Hungary, they may be as old. According to a current debate, these finds may have been produced by Neanderthaloid people or by archaic Homo sapiens. The collection of natural shapes is documented from excavations and surface finds in layers of both sapiens and pre-sapiens humans. As a cultural pattern, figurative art that includes images is first documented as a production of Homo sapiens. The evidence concerns finds executed on durable materials. Art objects in wood, on animal skins or other organic supports have not survived.

Populations whose livelihood is based on hunting and gathering are today almost extinct and are confined to the most inhospitable parts of the planet, such as the deserts of Australia and of southern Africa, the Congo basin, the tropical forests of the Amazon river, southeast Asia, the Arctic tundra of Lapland, Siberia, Alaska and the great Canadian north. They have been pushed to ‘marginal’ areas, and although they occupy territories that constitute more than 20% of the Earth’s surface, account for less than 1% of the world population. Only 500 years ago, when America became known to Europeans, 70% of the Earth’s surface was populated by hunting people, who then may have accounted for more than 20% of the world population. At the end of the Pleistocene, some 12,000 years ago, the entire population of Earth pursued this means of subsistence, which was gradually replaced by economies based on food production. Since then other ways of life have developed and patterns of visual arts have become broadly differentiated.

Tribal societies around the world have the common habit of producing art and in particular rock art, i.e. paintings and engravings on rock surfaces. Rock art is recorded in thousands of zones distributed over more than 100 countries. It is a widespread means of expression and of communication, and over 45 million prehistoric images from about 70,000 sites are known today. More than 70% of all known rock art was produced by hunting and gathering societies, while less than 30% is the work of pastoralists and of agriculturalists.

Rock art is the product of pre-literate societies. Until the communities that practised it acquired a ‘written’ form of communication it includes the earliest preserved visual art. It thus constitutes by far the most relevant record we possess of human history before the invention of what is officially recognized as writing. It also provides invaluable source material for the study of human cognitive development.

Almost all prehistoric art focuses on three basic themes: sex, food and territory. These themes expressed directly or indirectly, realistically or metaphorically, display the focus of interest of the human mind. Humans’ main concerns do not seem to have changed much down the ages, as these remain the dominant themes faced by the literate societies, in their visual arts and in literature, in dance and in music. From the earliest historical documentation they appear to have been a source of inspiration for ideology and religion, and to have represented the principal causes of war.

Similarly, they are the main causes of conflict among other species. Broad comparative studies are possible when the pertinent documentation is available. Until recently, cataloguing and making inventories of rock art has been predominantly the work of students and amateurs, occasionally supported by universities and museums. It is only in the last few years that some governments have become aware of the importance of this documentation as an immense cultural and historical heritage, and are now embarking on systematic inventories.

Mobiliary art, objects, figurines, plaques and decorated objects, on the other hand, have received different treatment. Once discovered they are usually acquired by museums and collections where inventories are produced in order to evaluate the patrimony of the institution. A whole-world inventory would be of significant value in the sector of mobiliary art. However, both in terms of the volume of existing documentation and of world distribution, rock art appears to be a global phenomenon that constitutes more than 90% of known prehistoric art. It is found on all continents and has remained in situ where early man produced it. Despite this accessibility, it has received only minimal academic attention and still less public attention and recognition.

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