red stripes

The title of today's post sounds as though it should be celebrating Jamaican beer - but no: it's another getting-ready-for-the-book-fair shot: some kind of poles against white tents.  It's also a homage (an homage?) to yesterday's discussion at the Objects of Knowledge seminar - led by Nancy Lutkehaus - when we were talking about the display of "primitive" objects in art museums.  I brought up the wonderful exhibition that I saw at the Seattle Museum of Art on Stripes - everything from photographs of blinds to Agnes Martin swathes of different pale greys to Aboriginal painted boards.  (Yes, I know that there's a Michel Pastoureau book called The Devil's Cloth: A History of Stripes, which I haven't read, and should ...).  I definitely think that there's a great deal to be said for shaking up our perceptions through organizing exhibitions through formal characteristics (with, indeed, more customary contextualization readily to hand) - it stimulates our own imagination to think Why Stripes?  How do they organize space?  What do they say about regularity and irregularity?  About light and shade, bright and dark?  Are they camouflage?  Do they create false ideas of symmetry?  Do they represent a desire for symmetry? - and so on.