Incarnation (Billie’s neck)
All those who heard Billie Holiday recognize the unique voice, the particular inflections, this almost lazy way of relating one note to another, the apparent distance she puts between herself and the world through her music.
On that photo, we see the eyes shut, the lips, the hairdo, the make-up.
Her neck is swollen while she utters her blues.
We suddenly realize the presence of the thin necklace, imprisonning the tensed up throat.
How can she not be disturbed by the metallic thread compressing her skin so obviously ?
How can she even get enough air to just keep breathing ?
In one second the jewel there and the expression on her face collide in a totally new vision : could she not be screaming out in pain, strangled ?
The necklace is so thin, so deep into her skin, we feel it can disappear into her flesh.
Yet she keeps singing.
I can hardly think of any stronger representation of jewellery when we put it on : it is in fact not very different from putting it « in ».
« A piece of jewellery is a rim », says the french philosopher of science Baudouin Jurdant, a border between an outside and an inside.
That is why it is not a simple object, but actually something (some thing, whatever) « that stands on the wearer’s body, so that this very body can pour itself, flowing over like a kind of sensual and precious river into the eyes of the admirer » *
Can we relate Billie’s talent and her necklace ?
It may simply reveal, visually, what our ears so much relish hearing : on that photo, it truely incarnates (« in carnis», in the flesh) what she is.
*Baudouin Jurdant, in « Corpus 4 : appropriating jewellery, learning and understanding », 3rd Ars Ornata Europeana International Conference, Strasbourg (1997), p. 47.
Check out Christophe's earlier writing here. | 
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