THE TOUCHING TEXTILE

FIBER AND EEELING IN THE RELATIONS OE ART AND BODY By Richard Martin

ore than ever, we know that fiber and fashion are not solely medium or mode. Fiber today is preemi nently a sensibility and approach to aesthetic issues. Apparel is not merely adornment, but mediation and metaphor, the opportunity to engage and interpret the body. The body has emerged in the 199O's as subject, metaphor, ideal, disease-prone imperfection, vehicle and victim of ideas of age and gender. Social constructions allow us to consider bodies that are our own or very like bur own, and also bring us not only to passive and self-gratifying spectatorship but also to active cultural engagement with bodies unlike our own in gender, race, social difference, and marginalization. The women's movement, AIDS awareness and activism, the demographics and demands of aging populations and our elongated lives, and the visual arts in particular have brought us to a new culture of the body. As the 1993-94 exhibition. The Empty Dress, demonstrates, a particular political and social consciousness andurgencydisplayedbygaymale artists speaks to issues of HIV and AIDS in our society. Poignant tiiemes ofloss and ofsurvival associated with AIDS and HIV have been addressed by gay men and women in a range of work that often touches on texti les, as does the famous collaborative AIDS quilt.

If the 1993 Whitney Biennial was, as every cynic from Hilton Kramer on down or up observed, a theme park of the politicized body, it was no anomaly, but an index to artists' convictions and imaging. One significant concept of the contemporary body In our time, women artists Maura Sheehan Watusi (edition of 75), Mixed media, as construct and subjective tohaveusedtheir intimate knowl15" X 12", 1993 be-interpreted presence is its proedge of their bodies as posjection of the other. Ever since sessors to create an imagery the eating of the fruitof the tree in pertinent to women's bodies the Garden of Eden, we have been concerned with an other. and an alternative to the patrilineal proclivity of Western one that might even bear shame. Lorna Simpson's Untitled(2 Necklines) (1989), for example, draws us to the AfricanAmerican experience not through the more decorous aestheties of narrative or social compassion, but through the abject fear ofthe body and apprehension ofthe white majority about the body of the person of color. What seems to be an inoffensive neckline, a standard of quotidian behavior, becomes instead the "noose" and vulnerability ofthe AfricanSDJ/SU"'

American in the history of slavery and even modern-day lynching. An innocuous edge suddenlybecomes serrated and lethal. If the Caucasian has never seen his or her neckline in this way, it is because of society's myopia and pro-tection of the smug and privileged. Personal intimacy is found in a clothing metaphor in Stephen Schofield's Hung Pocket (1990). An inside-out sensibility is operativeforSchofield who avers in the fmpfy Dress catalogue: "I've often asked myself where the outside ends and the inside begins". Hung Pocket raises such an issuethe characterizing binary of fiberartswith vehemence. Rubberglovessuggestboth protection and violation, the ostensible prophylaxis of the person who wears the glove and the clinical uncertainty of intimacy and invasion on the part of him or her who is touched. Philosopher Susan Bordo In her 1993 book. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, begins with a consideration of a Delmore Schwartz poem that contains an epigram from Alfred North Whitehead, "the withness of the body", reminding us that we are always with a body, never without it, and yet the body is not the same as living, mind, or other integers of the human experience. Even more substantively, Schofieid'reminds us of clothing "withness", a metaphorgenerating agency in intimate proximity with body, but a creation of hand and conceptualization. Apparel is "withness" and it is witness, mediator and that which is mediated.

culture. As women have been leaders in arts of performance. media involved in nature, some narrative forms, and subjective forms of the body, it is only reasonable to find women as leading artists among those interested in the phenomenon of the body in art. Many women have chosen clothing as an approximationandadornmentofthebodyforexpositionand expression. Kay Larson in her catalogue essay for American Art Today: Clothing as A^efaphor(Elorida Internationa! Uni-

versity, Miami, 1993), notes: "Eor women clothing is a game, often deadly serious, having to do with sexuality and attractiveness, even (in the days when women were scolded out of the work force) the desperate survival game of winning a man's support through marriage." Clothing, as fashion historian Elizabeth Wilson argued in Chic Thrills (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), "hastheuniquecharacteristicofbeingableto express ideas about sex and the body while simultaneously it actually adorns the body". Cultural inquiry has perhaps come to fashion reluctantly, but with the inevitableawareness that we perceive our bodies through the intermediary of fashion, even beyond oppressive forms of dress. If clothing is seen as an approach to issues ofthe body, its enhanced presence in art at this time seems just But clothing, of course, is not the body. Clothing is the body's intensification orenhancement, a hyperbolic, exaggerated form of imposition and of inherent exposition ofthe body. Clothing seizes a special role vis-avis thebody, layering, molding, coding, interpreting, amending the body. As much as clothing can be said to have traditionally played a role in fixingwomen into social roles, so it is the medium that will fix and correct social oppression and the politically volatilesubject of art in our time. That attire might insinuate a larger world is evident in Maura Sheehan's The Watusi (or The Influence of Josephine Baker on French Architecture) (1993). The globe is the recontextualization ofthe field. Sheehan-who earlier put the

dium. Jean Paul Gaultier's provocations of fashion function, gender, corsetry, infra-structure, and social roles may be as advanced as any in our culture. In spring-summer 1985, Gaultierwas projectingacombination of skirt and pantsonto the man's tailored outfit in an assembly that spoke in its transgressive disarray ofthe deconstruction of male dress and thereby of masculinity incarnate. In fall-winter 1987-88, Gaultier transformed the leather jacket in like manner, insisting that this sartorial barbarian be subject to X-ray-like analysis, revealing the sequences of raised "bones" that might describe the ribs of the interior body and, on the sleeves, a dogbone-like skeleton to indicate the internal structure of the arm. A bra-vura contemporary cod-piece likewise emphasizes the aspect ofmasculinity. Gaultier returns to the same theme in 1992 in T-shirts that photographically reproduce the idealized man. Do we honestly believe that this is the Bill Bixby-to-Hulktransformation or instead find that this is the carapace that protects more rhetorically than realistically? Further, as a strategy of posing ideas, Gaultier's body language is not very different from the cliches of Jenny Holzer or the advertising doggerel of Barbara Kruger in that surprisingly similar realm of art. What Holzer, Kruger, and Gaultier demand of the spectator is the critical distancing and hyperbolic re-reading that gives dimension to the ordinary. For Gaultier, the Jean Paul Gaultier Leather jacket and cod piece, 1987-88. reality is the body within; the interpreted body is not really inferred, but understood to be contradictory to that which is seen superficially, Gauitier has made a wearable not in the jejune sense of wearable art, but as a comprehending and critical metaphor for the body, played out on the body. When the designer can so readily analyze and interpret through the layer of apparel applied to the body, the practice may approximate art's proclivity to interpretthebody. Theinfra-viewingthatGaultier seeks in clothing that is implied framing to an interior view of the body, however fictive and imaginative, is also present in his women's wear as well. To use the now classic example ofthe deviant man's suit accompanied by externalized corset worn by Madonna in

frieze-like procession of Attic black-figured vase painting, chasing Keatsian truth and beauty, onto the comparable curvature of windshieldstakes the fringe of 1920s and 1930s style and attributes global importance. Thus, Baker is proof of African and African-American culture; dance and Africankinesisaresymbolsofaglobetransformedinourtime, even for the most myopic Eurocentric Americans. Could fashion designers or phenomena of fashion as fully dress and address these issues of body, memory, and gender politics? Our cultural intuition has been to deny fashion purpose, politics, and polemic, but fashion Is, after all, the body-defining, body-communicating, body-signifying me-

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Express Yourself {} 989), Gaultier's interplay between norm shoe takes on the identity of personal property; as enshrined in aWrtransgression is as apparent as in any art form. What we Cinderella, the shoe can be a powerful cultural interlocutor, would expect ofthe man'ssuit is its masculineclosure and its Janet Biggs' One in Every Fourteen (1992-93) makes us sobriety. Instead, in the Express Yourself er\semb\e, the power aware of the power ofthe shoe. In this assembly of shoes, one ofthe man's suit is appropriated by the woman who brings to in fourteen stands out for its whiteness. Biggs calls our itthe further power ofdisclosure, the woman's corset becomattention to the fact that one in every fourteen Americans is ingexternalandevident, its form becoming hard and intense, handicapped or physically challenged and we who assume and its conical breasts inevitably poking through the vertical selection of shoes and ambulatory delight can only do so with slits in the jacket. All that is the knowledge that there are man's power becomes woothers less fortunate. Biggs men's expression. All that is asks for no alms here, but she suppressed in the contempodoes demand a moral lesson. rary businessdressof the male As art. One in Every Fourteen becomes instead something also demands that we see the celebratory and defiantly metaphorical shoes: as the powerful for Gaultier and, of saying goes, we would havecourse, for Madonna herself. to walk in someone else's Can one compare this kind of shoes to understand. enfranchisement through apAlternatively, we can letart parel with the gestures of art project its inherently powerin assessment of clothing as a ful message. Christian Francis model for the body and the Roth's fall-winter 1992 coldiscourse on thebody? One lection featured shoe migrathinks, for instance, of Christions from the foot to the body tine LoFaso's Gestation Corin suits and dresses that took set {^992) as an artistic anaon the formal vocabulary of logue to Gaultier's corsetry. shoes. Roth'sprecedentcould In that LoFaso's work is more well be Schiaparelli's insoustable and can literally be ciant gesture in the 193O's of read, we are not surprised to placing a shoe on top of the find that its multi-media head as a hat, thus turning components ofcatnip, fur, and fashion and the wearer upcorset-makingdevices are acside down. His referencing, companied by Freud's text on however, is also so knowing Dora. But both LoFaso and that it seems as embedded in Gaultier have made us re-exthe 199O's studies ofthe body amine Freud in their vigorous and its covering as in any of new arguments for women's the metaphors offered by art. roles realized through clothing. I pose a clothing idea If we look at Frida Kahlo's achieved, capped, as it were, vehement My Dress Hangs by Fred Miller Robinson's Here (ca. 1933-39), we see 1993 book. The Man in the lanet Biggs One in Every Fourteen, Shoes, pigment, 1992 the intensity and poignancy Bowler Hat. In a text that Photo courtesy of the Aldrich Museum ofdothing, the external, taken grazes Kundera, Weimar asthehyperbolicinterior. The style, Oddjob's lethal hat, Mexican dress, standing for Kahloand her native instincts, is Nadelman, and Charlie Chaplin with a consummately delicrucifiedinthecontextofmodernCapitalism,modernplumbing, Diego Rivera's abandonment of Kahio for the big-money, big-city interests of New York. We know Kahlo's embodied pain well in other images, but this painting is the equal of physical suffering and perhaps even more suggests the emotional suffering because it is displaced to apparel. We have never seen KahIo suffer moreand rage more and express more than in this painting when she hangs her dress before us. Canclothingbesuch a powerful metaphor? Letusconsiderone wardrobe item, the shoe. As prized by Imelda Marcos, the shoe can be a ludicrous object; as rendered iconic by Van Gogh, the cate touch and provides critical understanding to Beckett, Seurat, and Magritte, Robinson defines and describes the modern asthatwhich is both substantive and light. Robinson's subject and metaphor is the bowler hat, apparent object of urban middle-classstolidityand potential subject of modernist irony and delight. Robinson argues thatthe convention ofthe bowler hat is one that accrues more and more value as it goes along in history and interpretation. We have long known that Seurat's world view of bourgeois relief, industrialization, and craving for leisure were nonetheless temperecj by the rectitude (Continued on page 36)

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R.MARTIN (Continued from page 7) of corsets for women and the deportment of bowler hats for men. Our abiding affection and identity in Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of Grand Jatte is about the world of leisure and spectatorship, but also of the ineffable sense that our holiday spirit, our well-being, still abides in the bourgeois pleasures of Impressionist gardens and Post-Impressionist escape. How can one not know that the nineteenth century flaneur (La Parade, 1887),ofwhomweare happily lineage, isthe bowlerhatted witness to a continuing side-show, the free spectacle of modern life. "We don't know", extrapolates Robinson, "what is under his hat except that he is rapt in his watching, and that what he watches in some way mirrors him". Robinson juxtaposes the hafs invention (more precisely, codification) by the venerable

tion, backward rejection and rap heroics, a suite of our contemporary ideologies and para-ideas added to the traditions of Cehrig and Mays. But the ballpark is no longer the necessary destination for the visored cap: it has goneelsewhere like the lightly meandering bowler hat that went everywhere in Magritte's fertile imagination until it finally rained down bourgeois clones on the bourgeois parade. Earlier this year. Sunrise Mall in Corpus Christ, Texas banned the wearing of caps backwards as it was deemed to be a sign of gang identity. Associated Press interviewed 19-year old Ernest Guerra, who said, "When they first told me I had to turn my cap around, I tripped out. I've worn my cap backward to long I don't feel comfortable wearing it any other way." Today's cap culture, I would argue, invites us to observe and to remember. We may advocate a Kango, like a baseball team, empathize with Malcolm X, or otherwise express ourselves in a baseball cap. Clothing is too real, too quotidian, too trivial to haunt us like Banquo's ghost and yet it is too trivial, too evanescent to proceed without our notice. Our time has a new and compelling enterprise. The bodyguards of religion, moral stricture, male prerogatives of power, and taboo have left their posts unattended. We must protect and project our bodies and ourselves. This is the unprecedented opportunity to see, show, and find symbolic identity in the body for the first time in two millennia. The visual arts will discern and discover the body only when we realize and meld the agency of apparel, the metaphor implicit in art, and the touching capacity of textile. Richard Martin is curator ofthe Costume Institute, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City.

Beverly Semmes Walercoats Fabric, wood, metal hangers, dimensions variable, 1991.

hatters James and George Lock of St. James Street, London, in 1850 with mid-century ideal ism, the Machine Age, the Crystal Palace, and the other fit descriptions of a soundly reasoned protective structure of the period. That the Locks worked with Thomas and William Bowler to supply the new hats led to their Machine-Age eponymy. Perhaps Robinson's study will not inhibit any of us from buying today's visored baseball caps as recreational clothing. We all know their conspicuous semantics of team and commonality (both vestigial and renewed), street, ducky exaggera36

L. MARTIN (Continued from page 14} and women in the Renaissance, and survives todaystrangely enough!in both the badge-sash ofthe Girl Scout uniform, and the sashes which identify contestants in the Miss America pageant. Men's neck scarves are also tied in with military uses. The Roman Legionnaires apparently used some type of neck wrap as part of military dress. It may have been emulation of the Roman soldiers which caused the Croatian regiments of French King Louis XIV to wear knotted neckcloths. According to some authors, these were also considered to be amulets which would help ward off sword-cuts. The fierce Croatian soldiers werecal led "Cravates". Much admired, their neckware was copied by the French, becamefashionable, and known by the same name. Scarves have always been used to conceal and disguise. One thinks of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis with her scarf and dark glasses, and the hold-up man with a bandanna over his face. The OED records an instance of disguise from 1523: "oure faces wrapped in kerchers (kerchiefs), so that we coude nat be known". Scarves have always been part of the stereotypical get-up of tricksters like the gypsy and the magician. Renaissance portraits show dandies being duped by fortune tellers draped in scarves, and Shakespeare names "the
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