oneweekoneband:

Björk - “I’ve Seen It All (Live at the Oscars 2001)”

In 2001, Björk appeared at the Oscars in a Swan Dress and laid an egg on the red carpet.*

She was there to sing “I’ve Seen It All” from the musical she did with Lars Von Trier, Dancer in the Dark. It was nominated for an Oscar (it lost to a Bob Dylan song). Predictably, Björk was criticized by the “media.” Noted intellectual luminary Cojo said it was “probably one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen.” It was called the “fashion faux pas” of the year. The general consensus was that she was crazy. Joan Rivers said Björk needed to be put into “an asylum.”

The criticisms are not a one-off thing. Björk has been repeatedly characterized as crazy and kooky, and as elfish and deranged – even by her supporters. Von Trier said she was so crazy on set that she ate her costume. Aside from the fact that these descriptions are a standard way to diminish the power of female artists, what they do show is a basic distaste for art, except in its most sterilized forms.

There was an element of theatre to the dress. Björk said later it was a joke. It is a bizarre dress. But it came from an interior and weird place in herself:

I don’t really know why I’m obsessed with swans but as I said, everything about my new album is about winter and they’re a white, sort of winter bird. Obviously very romantic, being monogamous. It’s one of those things that maybe I’m too much in the middle of to describe. When you’re obsessed with something, you can explain it five years later, but in the moment, you don’t know exactly why. Right now, swans seem to sort of stand for a lot of things.

The Swan Dress is a sign of her unfiltered obsessions. The Ancient Mariner had to wear an albatross around his neck; Björk wears a symbol of delicacy and passion, and all of the tiny emotions that fill up Vespertine. She’s not alone. It’s something that all artists do - in a less visual manner - as they work on their obsessions through their art. All artists are essentially wearing a giant Swan Dress if their art is in any way personal. Look, they say, at all of my dead and strange feeeeelings, awkwardly displayed.

The deep irony about this moment at the Oscars is that the film is exactly about people’s reactions to Swan Dresses. In the film, Selma sings “I’ve Seen It All” to console herself on her blindness. She luxuriates in all of the idiosyncratic personal memories she can, and argues against the conventional ones everyone says she must see. And in the last scene of Dancer (spoiler alert!) we are meant to be horrified by the callousness of a system that could allow Selma’s artistic beauty to be destroyed. In the movie, it seems a bit far-fetched. No one, we think, would ignore such a passionate voice. But while all of the beautiful people at the Oscars sat staring at the tiny woman nervously belting out a song about blindness, they high-schoolishly ignored any chance that the dress could be art because they thought it wasn’t conventional. They were, in a small, everyday way, recreating that last scene. They were blind to personal beauty in the way that Selma most certainly was not.

Art is messy. I still don’t know if I agree with the Swan Dress. But it’s why art remains with us while convention fades. Almost no one can remember any of the “tasteful” dresses from the Oscars in 2001. But we all remember the Swan Dress.   

*Remind you of someone?