Modan Garu ( modern Girl )

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Flying Girls

by Hubert Beck Hubert Beck
(Curator MuseumModerneKunst
Francfort/Main)

“Six o’clock already / I was just in the middle of a dream / I was kissin’ Valentino
By a crystal blue Italian stream …”
Manic Monday
The Bangles

“Happy and Pretty” is the title of a painting by Keira Calydon. “All is pretty” had been proclaimed by Andy Warhol, the prophet of pop, in the 1970s with the force of inescapable truth.
Calydon finds the motifs for her figure paintings in the visual world of advertising and pop, in other words in the midst of the culture industry. Like angels, albeit without wings, the artist makes them fly; they cast no shadows. The devil (even an outcast angel) is known to be in the detail—here in the gestures and attributes of the figures.

Keira Calydon seems to look for the shadows of personality—for faces—on the smooth surface of the cliché. Stars are given a face, not their face.

The first real-life “Flying Girl,” our first female pilot in Germany, was Melli Beese
(1886 in Laubegast near Dresden – 1925 Berlin).
Despite the many obstacles put in the way of the daughter of a liberal middle-class family by men, she became a pilot. With her husband Charles Boutard (Melli = French citizen), she founded a flying school in Berlin in 1912. Like many others, she was already a Modan Garu (modern girl), as the Japanese call the type of new female figure that emerged in the 1920s.

Everything in the exhibition is indescribably female. The figures are allegorical angels (each an alter ego of the artist).

A grandmother of these female angel figures is Jane Fonda as Barbarella in Roger Vadim’s film of the same name (I/F 1967). Barbarella asks Prygar the angel, “Can’t you fly anymore?” And Prygar replies, “No, I have lost the will to fly.” After his seduction by Barbarella, who is an agent carrying out a secret mission for the President of Earth, he can fly again. (That’s science fiction.)

The essence of angels is otherness; they are transmitters, mediators (messengers) between the heavenly and earthly spheres. They are immortal and the epitome of gender ambiguity. There is a Frankfurt angel, namely the Homosexual Persecution Memorial on Klaus-Mann-Platz (next to the Eldorado cinema)—a work by the Cologne artist Rosemarie Trockel. This angel casts shadows.

We know male angels from Wim Wenders’ film Der Himmel über Berlin (with Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander), for example. Bruno Ganz, just his first hours on earth as a mortal, answers the question of the man in the snack bar at the Berlin Wall how he’s doing: “doing quite well today.” Like a movie angel costume, Keira Calydon has her bow tie dress in the showcase in the exhibition room. The floating diva’s strawberry dress is also beautiful: I’m so wild about your strawberry mouth, Klaus Kinski called his book.

Keira Calydon is not afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue. Her pictures of the flying girls show not least that painting draws less from itself than from references to other media such as film, photography, and advertising. Technical (media) images have long been our reality. And media are always states into which we allow ourselves to be transported.

So sometimes we can indeed fly.

One question remains open, of course:
“Oh, what shall the poor girl wear to all tomorrow’s parties?”
Hubert Beck