nobrow

Postmodernism.

The intellectual movement everyone seems to love to hate.

Never mind your own feelings about postmodernism, it's real, and one of the most important ideas that comes from it is the idea of "nobrow" culture. Intellectual history has long liked to separate highbrow culture from the low. We tend to think that Mozart is - and should remain - totally separate and distinct from Mos Def. The problem with this kind of cultural divisions is that (a) there are lots of works and genres that don't neatly fit into the elite/popular paradigm (jazz music? Krzysztof Kieślowski films?) and (b) the standards for what qualifies as "elite" and "popular" seem, with close examination, more than a little arbitrary.

So postmodernism steps in to declare the end of hard-and-fast highbrow and lowbrow categories. Lots of postmodern works aim to be "nobrow," meaning they purposely mingle the cultural divisions we've taken at face value for so long. Think of the first track on Alicia Keys' Songs in A Minor, "Piano & I," which adds a kick and snare to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

But what, you ask, does this have to do with Paris?

Well, friends, today was my first day of real library research at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, a major stronghold of highbrow culture. That place is chalk full of elite academics and texts written by the dead white guys who have defined Culture (not to mention Politics, Economics, History, Maths, Science...) for the last 2,000 years. From 10h30 to 18h00 I pored over texts about a woman who threw cultural categories into question. Loie Fuller, the dancer I'm writing my thesis on, began her career in burlesques and music halls in Chicago and New York - definitely lowbrow culture. However, when she moved to Paris at 30, the plump and aging Loie enchanted big names in her contemporary highbrow culture: Auguste Rodin, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Anatole France, to name just a few.
In my thesis I am trying to read Loie Fuller's this cultural ambiguity, as well as her gender and sexual ambiguity (Fuller was openly lesbian) and her national ambiguity (an American living permanently in Paris), in the style of dance she created. La Loie's innovative style made use of yards upon yards of fabric and colored lighting to create swirling "incandescent statues," as poet and critic Camille Mauclair described them. One recent critic, Rhonda Garelick, has argued that her style is a mise-en-scène of the transition from ballet to modern dance. I'm aiming to say that Fuller's style can also be read as a mise-en-scène of her resistance to easy categorization: Is she a high or low culture figure? How is she so successfully deviant from prescribed social norms for her gender? Is she American? French? neither?

Oh, and here's a visual.

Sorry to bore you with all those details.

In any case, I spent my day in the Temple of High Culture, at one of these little tables: trying to make sense of this woman's life.

But here's a secret. After a day in such a highbrow place, I came home, put on my Ugg boots, ate Tagada, and tried really hard to think lowbrow thoughts. I even contemplated watching Gossip Girl, but then I found myself making this blogpost.
Don't worry, I ate the whole bag.