Everyday we learn new words or maybe we learn to give a name to something we already know. How many times, for example, we stepped in an art gallery or museum and we admired a piece by an artist without any direct connection with the fashion world, but that it can be related to fashion since it represents an idea or a concept through a costume or transmits a message using a garment made with very special fabrics?
Probably that happened hundreds of times as it is not rare nowadays to stumble upon artists who use mediums that can be considered as fashion-related in their works. Well, this practice has a name - garmenting - as the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in Manhattan explains us through an exhibition scheduled to open in a couple of months' time (March 12th to August 14th 2022, hopefully there will be no changes due to Covid-19, but always keep an eye on program variations).
"Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art" is an event completely dedicated to clothes as a medium of visual art. The exhibition features the work of thirty-five international contemporary artists, from established names to emerging voices, many of them exhibited for the first time in the United States.
What we define "garmenting", a term curator Alexandra Schwartz first heard from artist Saya Woolfalk (also featured in this event), isn't actually a new practice. It emerged indeed between the 1960s and the '70s and it was first linked with performance art. Specific garments were often used by artists in live or video-based performances, think, for example, about Yayoi Kusama in her bodysuits, immersed in spaces covered in polka-dots.
The practice increased prominence in the '90s, thanks to an emphasis on crafts and as an effect of the hybridization of cultures with the blurring of socioeconomic boundaries, cultures, and identities. Around this decade we saw very clever experiments with objects being turned into garments or sculptures to create very unique installations or performances. In the early '90s, for example, Studio Orta created the "Refuge Wear" series, portable and wearable shelters or "habitats" destined to the refugees fleeing war zones, using objects and dress as critical tools to explore contemporary issues.
Garmenting has become a favourite exercise of many artists in the last ten to fifteen years or so, as proved for example by Nick Cave's soundsuits, but, while some artists and collective of artists used the principles of garmenting to comment on contemporary environmental, political and social issues, thanks to the connections between fashion designers who often team up with artists for collaborations in their collections, runway shows or window shops, garmenting also turned into a more commercial exchange.
Guest curated by Alexandra Schwartz, a New York-based art historian, curator, and adjunct professor in the School of Graduate Studies at SUNY | Fashion Institute of Technology, the exhibition at MAD will feature garments, sculptures, installations, videos, and live performances.
Schwartz carefully selected pieces that use the language of fashion to address fundamental aspects of subjectivity, including gender, class, race, and ethnicity and organised them into five interrelated themes – functionality, gender, activism, cultural difference and performance.
The first section, dedicated to functionality, explores the traditional divide between fine and applied arts. This part focuses on one key issue posed by garmenting, questioning visitors on what makes a garment "functional", that is wearable in everyday life, and what makes it a work of art and therefore worthy of being featured in an exhibition or used in a performance.
In this section visitors will be able to see Franz Erhard Walther's interactive pioneering work of participatory art "Werksatz" (First Work Set) (1963-69; "Werksatz" has not been activated in New York City in over a decade) and Louise Bourgeois' "Blue Days" (1996), plus works by Annette Messager, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Beverly Semmes, Vivan Sundaram and Nazareth Pacheco.
The next section explores the way clothing is linked with the construction of gender with a focus on femininity and female desirability, associated with clothing and adornment. Artists in this section include Zoë Buckman and Esmaa Mohamoud, the latter pondering through her images inspired by basketball and football issues such as hyper-masculinity and the underrepresentation of women in sports (Mohamoud is known for her fascinating images of players in bsketball tops and crinolined skirts).
This section will also allow visitors to consider LGBTQ+ identities and the importance of dress in group formation, protest, and disguise, through the work of Kent Monkman and Raúl de Nieves among the others. In this part of the event, garmenting is considered as a way to look critically at the construction and disruption of gender identities.
Visitors who like politically engaged artists will find the next section particularly inspiring: garmenting can turn into an activist's gesture as proved by Sheelasha Rajbhandari, Jakkai Siributr or Jeffrey Gibson's works.
Gibson has a multi-layered identity as he has Choctaw and Cherokee heritage (and moved a lot, living in Germany, South Korea and Britain), that comes out in some of his pieces combining indigenous handicraft techniques and aesthetics, such as his sculptures inspired by ghost shirts and liturgical garments.
Textile, costume and fashion designers will find more inspirations in the section about cultural differences exploring identifiers such as ethnicity, region, religion, and class. Globalisation posed a threat to certain traditions, especially to indigenous cultures, and garmenting allowed some artists to save them or to turn them into an armor to protect individuals and groups from discrimination or violence. Works in this section can be studied also from the point of view of materials employed, shapes and silhouette, tailoring details, embellishments, decorative motifs and textiles. Among the other pieces featured here there will be also Nick Cave's multisensorial soundsuits, Yinka Shonibare CBE's sculptures wearing his trademark Dutch wax fabrics costumes, Mary Sibande's tableau "Domba Dance" with her 'Sophie' alter-ego in her "red phase", and Tanis S'eiltin's "Luk nax adi Kwáan" coat, a tribute to the Tlingit, indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America.
As stated above, garmenting is linked with the rise of performance art in the 1960s, so the exhibition includes a live performance series at MAD, and artists, including Enoch Cheng, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and A young Yu, performing at the Museum each month of the exhibition's run, with works focused on how the language of dress affects bodies in motion. Besides, artists Lexy-Ho Tai and Enoch Cheng will be leading in-gallery, drop-in workshops for intergenerational audiences, with Lexy Ho-Tai's wearable art "monsters" moving around the gallery and interacting with the audience.
Featuring all these different artists and themes, "Garmenting" seems the perfect event not just for art and fashion fans but for other professionals as well, including costume designers. That said, it remains a very accessible way to discover art, as proved also by some of the pieces that will be on display like the hoodie covered in silk flowers, rhinestones, sequins and jewelry by multiracial artist Devan Shimoyama.
A tribute to Trayvon Martin, the 17-year-old Black teenager who was wearing a hoodie when he was fatally shot in Florida by George Zimmerman in 2012, the hoodie in this case becomes a symbol, a sort of wearable memorial and an art piece that we can all easily understand, proving that fashion can be used in very clever ways, to share our experiences and tackle very important social justice issues.
Image credits for this post
1.
Mary Sibande
The Domba Dance, 2019. Life-size fiberglass, bronze, cotton, and silicone, 157 1/2 × 98 × 118 1/8 in. (400.1 × 248.9 × 300 cm). Courtesy the artist and Kavi Gupta, Chicago. Photo: John Lusis
2.
Zoe Buckman
Installation view of Every Curve, 2016. Papillion Art, Los Angeles, CA. Courtesy the artist.
3.
Yinka Shonibare, CBE
The Ghost of Eliza Jumel, 2015. Fiberglass mannequin, Dutch wax–printed cotton textile, and steel plate, 57 7/16 × 71 5/8 × 40 15/16 in. (146 × 182 × 104 cm). Courtesy James Cohan, New York. © Yinka Shonibare CBE. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2021. Photo: Stephen White
4.
Nick Cave
Soundsuit, 2018. Mixed media including vintage textile and sequined appliqués, metal and mannequin, 98 1/4 x 27 1/2 x 15 inches (250.2 × 69.9 × 38.1 cm). © Nick Cave. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.
5.
Saya Woolfalk
ChimaCloud (Access Point) (installation view), 2019. Digital video installation, textiles, painted metal, and 3D prints, 300 × 36 × 267 in. (762 × 91.4 × 678.1 cm). As installed March 1 - September 1, 2019, in the Project Space at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO. Courtesy Nelson-Atkins Media Services. Photo: Dana Anderson
6.
Jeffrey Gibson
The Anthropophagic Effect, Garment no. 4, 2019. Canvas, satin, cotton, brass grommets, nylon thread, artificial sinew, split reed, glass and plastic beads, nylon ribbon, 58 × 72 in. (147.3 × 182.9 cm). Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins Co., New York.
7.
Jacolby Satterwhite
Orifice I, 2010. Hand-sewn body suit, hand-beaded helmet, iPad, two iPods, speaker, and mannequin. Courtesy Collection Mike De Paola, MAD Trustee. Photo: Morán Morán, Los Angeles
8.
A young Yu
DMZ Performance (performance still), 2020. Courtesy the artist. Photo: Matthew Yu
9.
Devan Shimoyama
February II, 2019. Silk flowers, rhinestones, jewelry, sequins, and embroidered patch on cotton hoodie with steel armature, coated wire and fishing line, 45 × 72 × 12 in. (114.3 × 182.9 × 30.5 cm). Courtesy Private Collection and De Buck Gallery, New York. Photo: Phoebe d'Heurle
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