MANNEQUINS

Walking by the glass wall of display windows of this huge San Antonio department store was almost hypnotic. It took up the central part of the block on a street full of pedestrians. I took up a watching position where I could see people coming out of the store in their newly bought finery or carrying packages. Perpendicular to these people approaching me was the street crowd of all manner of people walking past on the sidewalk. Behind me was the muffled sound of traffic broken intermittently by solo car honks. I stationed myself before two glass walls of mannequins and in line with the store’s entrance far back behind these glass covered stage sets. Now there was a precise moment when the forward rushing customers and the people walking by came together with the mannequins in the window in the same plane of light that was on the sidewalk beyond the canopy of the storefront. This was what I can only describe as “the painter’s moment.” 

We painters are trained by the very nature of our practice if not consciously in art school to see as mirrors see: to break our corporeal world of form and space into colors and shapes or colored shapes as dispassionately as a kaleidoscope, and to see, if we are to interpret anything, as mirrors with a heart.  Within this beam of illuminated shapes, an exchange took place. The mannequins became animated and the customers took on the stiff pose of mannequins. Mannequins was painted in the late fifties. We were a segregated country. People were more or less equal outdoors. It was only when they were in places, under a roof, that the invisible laws of separation took full effect. But there were moments of proximity, whereby the nearness of bodies to each other would set off the soundless alarm to separate. Class, race, fashion, they work this way, like panes of glass we bump up against This little play enters the painting almost unconsciously, as the Civil Rights Movement was strong in the air, like the endless muffled sound of thoroughfare traffic that we pretend not to hear. So the only face in the whole painting that wants to engage beyond itself, to feel through the glass is that of the little black girl pressing close to her mother.

My dad of blessed memory took great pains in the arrangement of our store windows. Changing the windows was a time consuming event. Often I watched him as he instructed the people he brought in from San Antonio to arrange them. A good store window is like a stage set, a mini drama. It is a complex three-dimensional composition.  Done right, the mannequins will engage not just the passersby but each other. Garment interacts with garment. Material, color, and light play over each other speaking in frozen motion very like a painting. We buy our nicest clothes to fulfill a desire to project a certain image and, in so doing, we also enclose ourselves in panes of glass.