Quite a few artists included in the 57th International Art Exhibition in Venice integrate in their work fabrics, textiles or garments.
We have recently explored the work of Heidi Bucher who created paintings with discarded underwear, but Senga Nengudi also employs in her installations a very basic and cheap everyday material – nylon stockings. The abstract artworks on display in the Central Pavilion of the Giardini are indeed almost entirely made with stockings.
Nengudi, who originally studied visual arts and dance at California State University and then sculpture at the Watts Towers Art Center in Los Angeles, began working on a series of abstract sculptures made with nylon stockings in 1974. At times the installations in the "RSVP" series featured stretched and knotted stockings; in other cases the garments were filled with sand that seemed to weight them down and anchor them to the floor.
The shapes and silhouettes created by the stockings call to mind the elasticity of the female body and the transformations it may go through. Nengudi was indeed pregnant with her son when she started producing the sculptures and this explains her interest in exploring these issues.
Stockings were mainly employed because they are economical, practical and flexible and the artist herself wore them before reusing them for her pieces. Swollen or sagging, the stockings remind of buttocks, breasts or even testicles and they call to mind the 1966 exhibition "Eccentric Abstraction" organised by Lucy Lippard at the Fischbach Gallery in New York, and in particular the works of Eva Hesse.
In 1977 the "RSVP" series was displayed at the Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery in New York, a space that regularly exhibited the works of African-American artists. In that case the artist also performed among her pieces.
From then on, Nengudi invited visitors or other collaborators such as the Z Collective to activate her stocking sculptures, interacting with them as if they were bodies.
Visitors passing through the Central Pavilion at the Giardini (Nengudi's work is filed under the "Pavilion of Joys and Fears" at this year's biennale, a section exploring the relationships between individuals and their emotions and feelings) will not see the sculptures activated by other people, but by a fan, a rather impersonal and certainly not ideal solution, but the artworks remain intriguing and will surely provide fashion designers with some interesting ideas about the elasticity of the female body.
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