INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE
WRITING about her experience of attending a Marc Jacobs collection launch in New York, Jutta Koether chose not to describe the show itself (i.e. the clothes on the models), but what preceded it. In Text Zur Knust (#56, 2005) she described those ‘20 minutes before the Marc Jacobs Show’ as ‘a good noise concert, or an interesting exhibition, a system that produces a cathartic moment, and a social experiment’. But she was only focusing on the audience, as if nothing was going to happen on stage. Or as if she knew in advance what was going to happen, assuming that a fashion show is mostly an empty spectacle, one more commercial display whose formal perfection is intended both to seduce and to sell.
It is obvious that fashion has become mainstream. Both Lagerfeld and Viktor & Rolf collaborate nowadays with H&M, Alexander McQueen with Puma. The collection show provides one of the most sophisticated marketing opportunities. It is an autonomous, perfect and über-produced spectacle, requiring its own trade skills, employing professionals such as show designer Alexandre de Bétak, or make-up superwoman Pat McGrath. The Victoria’s Secret Christmas Parade, for example, in preparation for months, drew the attention of millions of spectators. And its success has nothing to do with the suspense of discovering the newest products: the
underwear collection displayed during the show was already available in shops.
But is there less and less room given to ‘live playing’ in fashion shows, as Jutta Koether tends to think? Isn’t the catwalk both a commercial and a creative space? In the nineties, fashion designers driven by ideas expanded the concept of fashion into art, so that fashion shows mutated into performances. It all started with Martin Margiela’s coup de force in 1989: walking on a carpet of white cotton, their high-heeled shoes sprayed with red paint, the models maculated the catwalk, subsequently used as the material for the next collection. Referring to Yves Klein’s Anthropométries, Margiela gained a genuine artistic credibility. But he also emphasised the autonomy of fashion, inventing metafashion. He was then followed by a new breed of conceptual-oriented designers such as Hussein Chalayan, Viktor & Rolf, and Alexander McQueen, who all started producing experimental clothing as well as transforming the catwalk into a public arena, in which the issues of identity, the body, death and violence were being hotly debated.
In 1997, Rei Kawakubo (Comme des Garçons) presented her collection ‘Body becomes dress’. The clothes filled with deforming cushions alluded to Leigh Bowery’s mutant, queer body. In 1998 Alexander McQueen, whose aesthetic of cruelty is to be linked with Artaud’s theatre and to the Vienna Actionists, presented the double amputee model Aimee Mullens walking down the catwalk. In his 1999 summer collection Walter van Beirendonck worked in collaboration with special effects specialist Geoff Portass to present a collection inspired by Orlan’s body art, with models whose faces were deformed. These shows were clearly bringing body art to the fashion world.
Some designers used the show to produce critical forums about fashion. In 2001, Imitation of Christ replayed the Brechtian principle of Dan Graham’s performances: models were seated in the front row, while fashion editors were forced to walk the runway. The whole event was meant to be an ironical and disturbing comment on the tyrannical power of the fashion press. Likewise Viktor & Rolf’s ‘Silver Collection’, presented in February 2006 in Paris, was deeply rooted in conceptual and experimental culture. Models were walking down the runway, their faces covered with a grid, silver colour appearing gradually on the details of their clothes. The two designers also included a sound piece by Bruce Nauman, in which a woman’s voice expresses her state of emotional sterility. In referring to haute couture as armour, Viktor & Rolf both emphasise and mock the power of fashion.
By proposing clothes about clothes in radical performances, these designers are highlighting their critical approach to that system called fashion. As does the artist Swetlana Heger. She usually produces glamorous and brilliant objects such as her steel-framed photos of the ‘Playtime’ series, in which she collaborates with fashion brands, posing as a model. But she also realises performances like Live, presenting photo shoots in an art context, to play fashion ‘live‘. The first event took place for her exhibition in Vienna in 2003. In the show were several photos of her collaboration with Wolford and photographer Bettina Komenda. On the day of the opening Heger organised a final shoot, faking the hotel room in Sorrent, ‘designed by Gio Ponti’ she insists, where all the other images had been shot one month before. She then added the new motif to the show. ‘I very much like the idea of art production as a place of construction. The “making of” a work of art, with all its simultaneous richness and imperfections,’ explains Heger.
The second performance was a collaboration with Hugo Boss, that took place in the awesome private Cohen Residence in Paradise Valley, Phoenix. Heger played three different characters throughout the day, transforming herself in front of the audience, in this enchanting environment. ‘The house was built by Frank Lloyd Wright, and is in the middle of a desert, with beautiful flora-like cactus, strange trees,’ explains Heger. The film of the event is included in ‘Constructing New Berlin’ at the Bass Museum of Art, Miami (3 November 2006 – 21 January 2007). Heger’s purpose was not only to seduce: she wanted to take the audience backstage. So her performances are clearly collaboration works, which show the other side of fashion, and are meant ‘to make art production accessible to the viewers and to create a discussion between the artist/audience/institution’.
Sylvie Fleury also played fashion ‘live’ in 1995, when she took high-heeled shoes (with a Mondrian design on them) and walked on a Carl Andre floor piece in the Villa Merkel, in Esslingen. After two days, Andre had his piece removed from the space and from the catalogue too (claiming it had not been installed properly, but Fleury says it is because he didn’t like what she had done). The video, Walking on Carl Andre, was shot afterwards in a private collector’s house, producing a funny commentary on the relationship between the artist and the institution. As Peter Halley acknowledged, ‘the irony is that his pieces are supposed to be walked on’. Let’s also remember Haim Steinbach’s 1996 catwalk for the Strenesse Group in Milan. Producing an elegant architectural and sound design for the show, Steinbach also included a working shower system to be used by the male models, echoing the status of the woman’s body in the fashion world.
‘When I started my career as a solo artist,’ says Heger, ‘I wanted to work with the clichés and expectations people have of female artists. That´s also why I entitled this series of works ‘Playtime’. I am playing around. Fashion turned out to be the perfect partner for such a project.’ Providing both the opportunity to play around and to produce a critical work, fashion seems today to be the perfect vehicle for an updated version of the performance.
JILL GASPARINA IS AN INDEPENDENT ART CRITIC, BASED IN PARIS