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In the ungainly setting of the former Löwenbräu brewery, under the unlikely patronage of a supermarket chain, the Migros Museum presents an exhibition that explores the relationship between art and glamour. Defining the latter as a ‘radiant’, ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘strategic category of aesthetic practice’, excluded from the narrative of modernity but now functioning as the art market’s most powerful currency, curators Heike Munder and Tom Holert present an art historical pedigree of glamorous works.

Opening with the danger lurking beneath a glittering surface, the viewer is greeted by Katharina Sieverding’s large photograph The Great White Way Goes Black, a self portrait taken during New York’s blackout of 1977, when impromptu carnivals produced unscripted moments of pure glamour and a wave of racist police violence swept the city. Josephine Meckspeer’s Shelf No.11B (2003) adopts a 1980s aesthetic in her use of polished black Perspex and diamanté jewellery, visual references to club culture and the nocturnal confrontation between protestor and police, comparing the reflective stripes on riot gear with the spangles of a night on the town.

The cultural authority afforded by glamour is the subject of both Mick Rock’s photo of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust, Bowie (Earls Court, London 1973) (1973/2004), and Jonathan Horowitz’s The Governator (2003). Stills of Arnold Schwarzenegger as bodybuilder, film star and in his current (most frightening) role as Governor of California, are interspersed with quotes from the man himself, highlighting the way in which his political success is built upon his fictional super-human image.
In contrast, several works reveal the vulnerability of glamour, the thin façade glossing over individual flaws and uncertainties. Bernhard Martin’s Single Disco (Whisperclub) (1999) questions the glamorous nightlife to which we are supposed to aspire. Opening the door of the innocuous yet softly thudding cupboard, the visitor is overwhelmed by a burst of music from this mini night club, with sufficient space for one lone dancer. Franz Gertsch’s gouache Irene III (1981) initially appears to be a photographic close up of an alluring woman, but as one looks closer, the lines of paint and lines on her skin become visible, along with her chapped lipstick and wary expression.





The glamour of reminiscence and death are recurrent themes, ranging from the nostalgic use of blurred 16mm footage in T J Wilcox’s The Funeral of Marlene Dietrich (1999) – the projector itself prominently on display – to the inclusion of Jeffrey Vallance’s Elvis Sweatclothes (1993), a stained square of silk evoking the Turin shroud and its adulation. Manon’s La Stanza Delle Donne (1990) is a theatrical installation of spot-lit, satin-lined caskets, dedicated to women who have influenced the artist, and Michel Auder’s stills, Dead Souls (Mostly) (2004), from earlier home movies reveal tantalising glimpses of the impossibly sexy bohemia of 1970s New York.

Anonymous archival photographs from Hollywood studios are effectively juxtaposed with a series of self portraits by Carlos Pazos from 1975 entitled Voy a hacer de mi una estrella. Adopting the clichéd poses of 1950s film stars, Pazos emphasises the camp aesthetic of the genre, importing an overtly queer reading to the accepted gestures of glamour. Further entangling glamour and sexuality, Fergus Greer’s magnificent photographs (1989–1994) of performer Leigh Bowery present a kaleidoscopic vision of this master of self-dramatisation in a range of his fantastical androgynous costumes.

Glamour and sex – and how ‘glamour photography’ is a euphemism for pornography – are touched upon in Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Life Forms (1973–9). Documenting her work as a nude model, exotic dancer and performance artist, she presents three photographs from each incarnation, in which she carries out almost identical actions in very different settings. Three text panels describe the difference in control she exercised over the perception of her image. Sanja Ivekovic’s Make-Up/Make-Down (1976) depicts the ritual of making up without revealing the result, showing instead the artist only up to her neck as she uses a variety of phallic lipsticks, concealers and powder brushes, all of which are twisted to an erection between her carefully manicured fingers.

Also employing makeup but with a different agenda is Sylvie Fleury’s witty Blue Notes & Incognito (2004). A remake of a Carl André’s metal floor piece, upon which lie two Chanel compacts crushed by the artist’s stilettos, the work is at once an homage, a feminist attack on an icon of male-dominated Minimalism and the invasion of a consumerist brand into an institutional setting. It is also an example of the ‘glamification’ of the art space, a phenomenon explored in Brice Dellsperger’s video Body Double 15 (2001). Taking its plot from a scene in Brian de Palma’s film Dressed to Kill (1980), in which a woman is seduced by a man in a museum, Dellsperger plays both characters himself, dressed as two identical women, thereby erasing sexual difference and focusing instead on the museum as a stage for the enactment of personal dramas rather than a space for the contemplation of art. Yet, paradoxically, this cross-dressing melodrama re-enters the museum space as a work of art itself.

The glamour of art underpins the entire exhibition, and is addressed specifically by certain works, yet is somehow absent from the installation, as if the organisers were reluctant to allow glamour to triumph. Instead, they have maintained a conventional way of presenting art that takes the unconventional as its subject matter, leading to a viewing experience that certainly maintains a critical distance, but lacks the sparkle of the wow factor.

Zoë Gray

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