Dressed in Life

Originally published in exhibition catalogue Dress: Clothing as Art. Richmond: The Richmond Art Center, 2005. 

        Clothing becomes part of our bodies. People wear clothes every day, with few exceptions. Garments vary widely around the globe, yet in nearly every culture, they are essential to making the transition between a private and a public world. We use clothes to communicate wordlessly with others about our priorities and our affiliations. The word “dress” can mean the act of dressing, a formal garment, an adornment or garnish, arranging a display, covering a wound, or generally putting things in order. What we wear telegraphs an image of self-perception within the social and political landscape, whether we dress according to fashion, religion, tradition or utility.

        On one hand, the artists in Dress: Clothing as Art are working in a vein of contemporary art practice staked out by key figures of late Modernism, as this essay will describe. On the other, they are embracing a do-it-yourself aesthetic that derives from handmade Artwear garments and homemade punk rock t-shirts. Among the Artwear practitioners recently awarded a retrospective at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor, prominent figures including Janet Lipkin and Charlotte Kruk n’Kempken have graced the Richmond Art Center in years past. These days their art is embraced by the establishment, while a new generation of artists schooled equally in punk DIY attitude and found-object assemblage comes up through the ranks. Clothing in this work is a focal point where explorations of performance, soft sculpture, appropriation, body and identity politics, gift exchange, and fashion connect.

        These artists have also been considering the legacies of art world luminaries such as Louise Bourgeois, in whose sculptures clothing is cadaverous and suffused with memories of physical and emotional trauma. Claes Oldenburg’s Store (1961) rendered clothes monstrous, smeared by the dual brutalities of advertising and sexuality that drive commercial exchange. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964-65), a stark reflection on the violence of desire, treated dress as a performative medium through which to negotiate identity. The parangolés made by Hélio Oiticica from 1964-1979 set another important precedent.  Designed to emphasize movement, these colorful capes meant for dancing were modeled on the utilitarian garments of the street. Cindy Sherman took an obverse approach, channeling Hollywood’s image machine in her Untitled Film Stills (1977-80). She changed personalities from each photograph to the next largely by changing dresses, describing archetypes through familiar sartorial cues.

        As very young children, we learn that how we dress influences how others perceive us. Once we settle onan image that we feel successfully communicates what we wish to project about ourselves, we may never change it. On special occasions such as Halloween or Mardi Gras, we might allow ourselves to briefly escape that fixed identity. Yet even then, we usually restrict our choices to a few funny or sexy stereotypes and relinquish the opportunity to investigate a genuine alter ego. To put on Jenny Zhang’s delicate hand-sewn octopus cape is to adopt a persona of a different sort than the ones offered by store-bought costumes. Amorphous, the octopus suggests a formless yet sensual nature. It offers self-determination, transcending categorization by others. Costumes made commercially and by other artists are provided here for comparison, along with the opportunity to try on a range of personalities.

        Regrettably, when art made for display on the body is exhibited in a gallery setting, the clothes are usually worn only by mannequins. These inanimate displays force clothing artworks to become reified objects, and are echoed in the design of high-end boutiques. Some of the artists in Dress: Clothing as Art position their work outside of this visual frame of reference, while others engage the trappings of retail toward a critical end. Some works are made to be worn, others objectified deliberately. In an installation that resembles both a shop window and an abandoned alley, the Center for Tactical Magic promotes its Ultimate Jacket as a consummate product and a catalyst for myriad possible identities to manifest. The jacket itself is beyond our reach, relegated to the shoulders of a genderless chrome figure. The display advertises the jacket’s more than fifty secret pockets, which could be used to hide disguises or for sleight of hand. A leaflet demonstrates numerous uses for the pocket pattern that comes attached. The offer of a clandestine pocket leads us to wonder to what heretofore unconsidered, covert uses it might be put.

        Our expectations of behavior are informed by our understanding of clothing as a language. Consider the woman portrayed by Linda M. Ford, walking through the bustling weekday streets of San Francisco’s Financial District in a Chanel suit and heels. What might we know about her, watching from across the street? Her outfit is the official uniform of high fashion, characterizing her socially and economically. When she repeatedly executes recognizable pole-dancing moves using a lamppost, most passersby cannot reconcile her appearance with her actions and uncomfortably look away. Their inability to categorize her causes them to look past her completely.
 

        Our ideas of appropriate clothing are informed by codes of appropriate behavior as regards sight and touch. The naked body is not supposed to be seen in public, and even when covered, certain parts of the body are not to be touched. When these codes are challenged, the experience can be unnerving, even traumatic. In order to decipher one of Anna Maltz’s Braille sweaters, one person must wear the sweater while another fondles the letters across his or her chest. The softness of the wool invites that caress, even as social anxiety discourages it. Only by touching a vulnerable area can the message be decoded.
 

        For some, the function of clothing as a uniform of gender allows for a fluid sexuality to emerge. The perception created through the external signification of dress can be a stronger indicator of gender than the physical attributes concealed beneath it. In her video and installation, Meredith Talusan dismantles her knitted frock in a solitary dance and chronicles its unraveling in a series of drawings. The dress gradually dissolves along with Talusan’s ladylike appearance. In the gallery, the drawings function as conceptual equivalents to the performative action onscreen. The unraveled yarn serves to literally dress the gallery in the remnants of this action, recasting the performance as an exercise in imagination.
 

        Clothing may be universal, but it is also at the center of an exclusive luxury goods industry, not unlike the one that trades in contemporary art. Artists working with clothing have frequently presented their practices as alternatives to the commercial market for apparel, but recently this has merged with a concept of social practice that resists a market role for art as well. Two artists in Dress: Clothing as Art circumvent and critique the art and fashion markets simultaneously through acts of generosity. Darshan Amrit deconstructs secondhand and found clothes and assembles them into personalized fashions, each made in collaboration with the person who will take it home. This participatory dialogue blurs the boundaries between maker/receiver, buyer/seller and artist/audience. Lori Gordon invokes the handmade family gift, offering to knit something warm and cozy in exchange for a few hours of shared time. By the end of the session, a relationship has formed and the gift has become rich with sentimental value.
 

        Other artists push the restrictive, fetishistic and cruel aspects of fashion toward new conclusions. The arms of Elizabeth Jameson’s snug red woolen sheath dress unravel in a nightmarish tumble onto the floor, threatening to entangle our legs as we navigate the gallery. Robin Lasser and Adrienne Pao present a 1950’s style gingham dress with an apron and a tent attached to the skirt. The wearer is unable to partake of the shelter her dress provides to others, and is reduced to a servile role. Meanwhile, those inside the tent can sneak a peek at her lacy pantaloons. Elyse Hochstadt offers new options for fashionably elegant constriction in the form of thumb corsets. Referencing the traditions of waist and foot binding to which women in numerous cultures have been subjected, her installation extols the glamour of unnatural posture and severely limited movement.

        Among dog and cat owners with some disposable income, a popular trend is to buy petwear. Dressing up the family pet confers an added measure of humanity that befits the intense emotional value of animals for their owners. In Lisa Kokin’s video collaboration with Lia Roozendaal, she takes the roles of fashion designer, obsessive collector and dog mommy to extreme and comical conclusions. Kokin has meticulously assembled found objects into a series of elaborate costumes for her Chihuahuas, casting them in the roles of exalted humans such as the Pope to emphasize the paramount importance of these dogs in her life.

        Clothing can also have a dehumanizing effect on the body. In the neighborhood surrounding the Richmond Art Center, the least fortunate residents wear dense layers of oversized pants and sweaters as their only shelter from the elements. Other people’s old clothes become a portable home, like a turtle’s shell. These people, cast off by society, take on an alien affect when seen from a distance. jD. (John Daniel) addresses the strangeness of the body in clothes. Inspired by the early evolutionary theorist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s discredited belief that acquired behavior could be inherited, he has created a costume that attempts to change the body through adaptation. When worn, the costume causes the wearer to feel foreign within his or her own physicality.

        Secondhand stores, where shoppers can siphon from a stream of unwanted clothes and outdated fashions, are common. Lucrecia Troncoso’s performance is an effort to make manifest the potential for life inherent in these old clothes, resulting in an uncanny arrangement of seemingly animate stuffed forms. These cast-offs evoke the comfort of security blankets and stuffed animals while at the same time remaining profoundly weird.

        The Richmond Art Center is committed to supporting and strengthening its community through the arts. This idea of community extends to artists who exhibit, teach and study at the Art Center, area residents, and visitors from around the Bay Area. Helena Keeffe and Claudia Tennyson have identified the group exhibition itself as a venue for forging personal connections. They have taken it upon themselves to make gifts for their community of fellow artists, customized to function according to each’s individual needs. By directing their gift toward their colleagues, they deviate from the established tendency to situate the art viewer as the exclusive recipient in such an exchange, and allow artists a respite from their traditional roles as makers and givers.
 

        Embodying the very notion of humanness as social, civilized and separate from the animals, clothing occupies a crucial position at the intersection of nature and culture. As a medium for art, it can be painted, sculpted, assembled and performed, and it is an ideal subject for investigations of art’s relationship to real life.  The remnants of performative interactions often appear as ghosts in the gallery, devoid of their animating power. In Dress: Clothing as Art, a concerted effort has been made to retain that life force in the presentation and perception of artworks. In that spirit, we have tried to create an exhibition that encourages active participation. We hope to empower people to be art-makers and encourage them to consider this a productive use of their time. Visitors are encouraged to question their assumptions about proper art-viewing behavior and the inappropriateness of touch in the context of the gallery. Above all, this exhibition seeks to advance a notion of art as a living thing, one that evolves through an ongoing negotiation between form and function.