Behind the Lens
Rrose Sélavy - Duchamp’s Female Alter Ego
Rose is a common name for women... but Marcel Duchamp took it one step further. In 1921, a coy figure appeared on the stage to shock the international art world. Duchamp, dressed as a woman wearing make up and pearls, posed as the infamous Rrose Sélavy at Andre Breton’s Surrealist Group in Paris – to roaring success! Photographed by the preeminent Dada and Surrealist artist, Man Ray, Rrose challenged gender conventions and soon started to “create” her own artworks, appearing in exhibitions in New York and Paris. Her name alone, evoking “Eros, cést la vie” or “arroser la vie” (eros, that is life, or a toast to life) gave a further double entendre to her existence.
Kado -The Way of the Flower
Photo: Ben Huybrechts, Ikebana: Ilse Beunen
A rose can put you in a place of heightened awareness. Look into a flower and see it as though you have never seen a flower before. Only the present, abandoning all sense of self - no birth no death, no future, no past, no time, no fear. Just the present connection with the flower. See what IS, not what WAS or what you hope WILL BE.
This state is called KADO in Japanese, and means “the way of the flower.” In her book, The Japanese Way of the Flower, Ikebana as Moving Meditation, Ann Kameoka joins H.E. Davy in describing how “ikebana” - Japanese flower arranging, originating from Buddhist altar flower offerings, can bring you into harmony with nature. In Kado, one observes a flower in a state of such heightened awareness that no distinction exists between the observer and the observed. And in that instant, one realizes the essence of existence in a single petal poised between life and death.
Ikebana - @ilsebeunen_ikebana
Kado/Ikebana - @annkameoka
Rilke’s Roses
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) was one the early German modernist poets - and obsessed with roses. He wrote about roses all of his life, but intensively in the last four years of his life - in French.
“Sub Rosa”
The term, sub rosa, means “under the rose,” and refers to the ancient use of the rose to mark places where secret meetings were to be held. The association of roses with secrecy began with Greek mythology.
