SKIN: The confluence of art, culture and fashion the panel I moderated, and chaired at The College Art Association's annual conference with a group of individuals I invited to converse on a number of new movements happening in fashion. They included Valerie Steele, Director and Curator for Museum at FIT, NY; Vicki Karaminas, UTS, Sydney; J. Morgan Puett, Mildred's Lane, PA; Natalie Khan, Researcher/Lecturer Central Saint Martins, London. It was also a rare occasion that presented fashion as or within the discourse of art. Historically this is one of the most important conferences in the art world. Proposals for all the panels are competitively juried, vetted and selected. One can only submit, and hope. Being selected to present this fashion conversation was quite a moment for fashion, since fashion and the decorative arts most often have the status of 'stepchild' within the arts--if they are considered at all. The panel was an invitation to rethink fashion with the newest turns in the discipline itself, in order to place it within a distinctly twenty-first century context.
The following is an excerpt from my paper on fashion/art, singling out this movement as one of several emerging fashion narratives--since this post was re-edited for this blog, the names that seem random are actually hyperlinked to countless images. 'scratch and sniff!'
Through an examination of new movements in contemporary fashion these panelists set out to explore what is happening in fashion under the influence of contemporary culture with a critical analysis of the blur within aspects of art and fashion and the impact of new media's and technology in making fashion. Technological innovations have always led fashion so this is not new. What is however is the reach this is now opening up.
Since the 1990’s fashion (like art) has been affected by a continuing wave of increasingly performance based work--this work often falls outside of traditional industry constraints, which historically have been almost if not exclusively motivated by the production of apparel (rather than the idea of media or performance-for the sake of performance). This panel will focus on some of these new positions and creative endeavors by presentations that open up this evolving visual language where nomadic flows are often expressed best through the medium of fashion. Ultimately what will become apparent is that there are shadows on the horizon indicating some fresh directions that may even be a first for fashion.
The speakers presented their view into various facets of this emerging, multidisciplinary discourse arising out of a field whose major concern until the 1990’s was the ‘industry’ --the manufacture, and production of clothing—and its consumption.
The movement of fashion towards 'street style' that began in the sixties had reached a kind of crescendo in the seventies with Punk. By late 1997 it was clear something big was happening in fashion. Punk, grunge aesthetics and the 'postmodern moment', was giving way to a larger shift--the deterritorialization of fashion was well underway.
On the streets of New York or the deserts of Tehran - there is a visual read informed by the impacts of daily living, nurtured by a society in process, with rapid shifts in all respects. Be it a proliferation of ideas and new ground brought on by a long tail of small niche markets that are multiplying at a dazzling rate as a result of social networks and technology, or the interplay between virtual, mediated, and physical worlds (sometimes colliding) and intense mobility.
Increasing the colliding of images, nostalgia and memories all mixed with the edge of contemporary lifestyles and new wealth-- blending diverse nationalities, local dialects and global cultures, which until this moment was only imaginable in films like Mad Max that envisioned the end of the world.
NEW/OLD NARRATIVES
Over the past 20 years there have been an increasing number of artists working with clothing as an art medium—and designers who reached deeply into the language of fashion for social critique--often creating clothing that was unwearable. In these cases it is not the elevation of the often remarkable craftsmanship of couture that qualifies this work as art, but the reach for more abstract ideas--Following are videos and links to works from some of these artists/designers:
Andrea Zittel, with “Smock Shop”,
Zittel enlisted underemployed artists to create smocks using a basic instruction allowing each the freedom to create variations of their own, in direct contradiction to the usual production line demand and reward for sameness.
www.zittel.org/smockshop.php
http://katsoul11.blogspot.com/2013/04/art-fashion.html
Judi Wertheim, the Argentine performance artist designed a cross trainer for
Insight 05. Named “Brinco” slang for “jumping” the border between Tijuana and San Diego, which in itself is a dangerous act often ending in death for the jumpers. The shoe is emblazoned with an eagle at the toe to remind the journeyers of the freedom they are walking towards. The inner soles show the two best routes for getting across the desert, and are supplied with painkillers, flashlight and a number to a “safe house” once across.
Judi Wertheim/BRINCO (images)
Christian Boltanski (images)
Christian Boltanski’s piece installed in the cavernous New York Armory, titled “No Man’s Land”, an almost inconceivably massive heap of clothing that hard to view without immediately recalling death camps and the Holocaust. The artist references Dante’s inferno, a haunting allegory to the shed skins, and the aura they collectively produce.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlGg7fKKwH8
And then there are Fashion designers who have freely experimented with clothing in a conceptual realm like Hussain Chaylan, the Cypriot designer whose collection “Living Room” for Spring 2001 could be worn as items of clothing, but transform into suitcases, packed up within seconds for a rapid and traceless exodus, chilling as the stinging recall and grief from recent diasporas and genocides in Sarajevo, Armenia, Tibet, among many war torn areas remain ever present.
In 1997, fashion designer Martin Margiela in collaboration with a micro biologist dipped 18 outfits in different mold, bacteria, and yeast cultures; for the installation "Exposing Meaning in Fashion Through Presentation" he displayed mannequins with clothing rotting away. As the days worn on the moulds and bacteria’s were literally decomposing the clothing… These are only a few of the recent crossovers where designers and artists have worked with clothing to reach into domains not natural to its functionality, where fashion has become an art medium-very different from an 18c ‘historic’ referencing when the decorative arts were considered within the fine arts.
Martin Margelia (images)
Another iteration is the proliferation of media in fashion, the fashion film, and streaming media from the catwalk-- which has become an event in itself, since more often then not what is featured on the runway, is rarely what is, or can be available in the showrooms or sold as clothing. In fact the runway has come to be high spectacle where performance is prized. Viktor and Rolf, the design team, exemplified this, known for their conceptual fashion shows, with fragile materials and conceptual ideas they waited years before launching any actual clothing collections.
And then there is the practice, which some designers would agree places, cutting or patternmaking as the embodiment of philosophy itself. Not a mere superficial line but rather a clear and deep cut defining thought as effectively as text.
Martin Margiela (images)
For those familiar with fashion one wonders how far the work of designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, Comme Des Garcon who launched their collections in the mid 80’s would have gone had the ground not already been vitalized by this confluence of energies. If not before them, certainly with their work, something new was clearly at hand.
VIKTOR AND ROLF (images)
VIKTOR AND ROLF
Fashion is the physical evidence of the way we live in the present now. It has until recently been mute, unmoving, captured in frozen gestures, and under house arrest in the archives of museums, except for a seasonal performance on the catwalk. Historically it’s been governed by a strict hierarchy of signs with their precise index, the symbols that stand in for wealth and capital in all its forms, Fashion is a narrative that tells a story that only fashion can tell. Out of this chameleon-like, ambiguous and visceral language comes an extremely precise articulation of our desires, how we live and the choices we make, visible in our second skin.
This is an exciting time when novel ways of telling are being called for. In contemporary fashion, formalist views of chronological and singular narratives are being outpaced by the entry of a plethora of new values, and an intense diversity of cultural understandings. The position that fashion occupies in visual culture is a positive factor in implementing this shift from representing a foretold history to presenting new open narratives.
It is just coincidence that these new happenings in fashion medium occur at the same time as the proliferation and heightened interest in performance art and the prizing of the lived moment are defining characteristics in contemporary art ?
Nicholas Bourriaud in his book “The Radicant” states:
“And yet the immigrant, the exile, the tourist and the urban wanderer are the dominant figures of contemporary culture, To remain within this vocabulary of the vegetable realm, one might say that the individual of these early years of the
21st c resembles those plants that do not depend on a single root for their growth but advance in all directions on whatever surfaces present themselves by attaching multiple hooks to them, as ivy does. Ivy belongs to the botanical family of the radicants, which develop their roots as they advance, unlike the radicals whose development is determined by their being anchored in a particular soil.
And later—
Contemporary art provides new models for this individual who is constantly putting down new roots, for it constitutes a laboratory of identities. Thus today’s artists do not so much as express the tradition from which they come as the path they take between that tradition and the various contexts they traverse, and they do this by performing acts of translation. Where modernism proceeded by subtraction in the effort to unearth the root, or principle, contemporary artists proceed by selection, additions, and then acts of multiplication. They do not seek order to multiply one identity by another.
The radicant implies a nomadic bias, whose fundamental characteristic would be the tendency to inhabit preexisting structures, a willingness to be the tenant of existing forms, even if that means modifying them more or less extensively. END QUOTE
This sounds very much the same. The areas blur into a new one.
The great proliferation of hybrid identities coming out of transplanted nationalities, grafted cultures and trends, and impossible dreams has created even in the domain of fashion itself, something novel. It is impossible to speak of purity, either in aesthetic terms or in fact with the global flow, intense mobility and speed that mark contemporary life.
The issue we hope to unpack is how these new movements with fashion and art are happening pervasively with the kind of diversity that suggests something fresh and important is at work. It is our intention that you will think along with us and consider the ideas being presented without holding too tightly to already closed meanings but will instead take a what/if or curious listen. Welcome.
