Visceral Impressions: The Fashion-Music Discussion + Angela Davis

First, I apologize for the extreme lateness of this post. Blogger has just allowed me to sign in after a couple hours of 'server not found' madness.

I have been ruminating recently on the relationship between music and fashion that appeared here on the blog a few weeks ago. I think that music and fashion share some interesting commonalities in the ways that they are recognized and consumed. Each of them is made up of a host of minute details—notes, sounds, instruments, fibers, fabrics and textures—but each is also very frequently processed at a macro level of mood or tone without the consumer’s (in this case meaning anyone encountering and visually or aurally consuming the music or fashion in question… “perceiver” might be a more suitable word) attention being paid to the often significant details of the article's construction.

While it might easily be argued that any media or art may be approached with varying levels of attention to detail, I would contend that fashion and music (among other possible social or artistic projects I’m not thinking of right now) are uniquely consumable and recognizable from a distance without enjoyment being predicated on notice and processing of said detail (unlike, for example, a story or film). The style of a given ensemble is most frequently perceived as a hazy combination of colors and shapes, just as a piece of music is initially a collection of sounds. Each has a specific emotional character. Without further attention paid, they remain just those hazy constructions in a person’s consciousness, but this lack of attention to detail does not mean that the article has not been enjoyed. I think consumers frequently have a very strong visceral sense of a particular fashion (be it an entire style or a specific outfit) or song, without being able to recall or describe many of the components of its construction. When people do attempt to describe the qualities of something with which they have come in contact, they often do so in terms of comparisons with other styles, outfits, pieces or songs that have a similar qualities or evoke a like feeling. It is often only at the level of emulation or connoisseurship that a consumer actually invests their attention in the individual components that actually make up the feeling of a particular presentation. I think this experience is one in which the consumer processes the form of an artifact and then may or may not ever proceed to engage with the details that create the individual artifact’s content.

In some ways I think that this relates to Angela Davis’s discussion of her experience as a photographic subject. Above, I am suggesting that the impression of a style is essentially that style for viewers that do not undergo further investigation. The photograph compounds this issue, as it further distances the article from its detail and context. This impression of an impression becomes permanently encapsulated in the two-dimensional image. Davis’s photographs divorce her from the content of both her physical style and her larger persona in general, reducing her to a synecdoche of her form—the Afro. Like many cultural or historical figures, she remains a vague impression to the uniformed or uninitiated. The strikingness of her image may actually impede consumer’s inquiry and understanding of her cultural meaning, as her form, via the photographs, is so richly endowed with impressions and associations, that they are assumed to be that image's content.