The choice of theme for this exhibition is a small curatorial coup. It takes into account a fact that often falls victim to a certain narrow-mindedness or professional blinkeredness in art and fashion circles: that the White Cube is simply a better space for presenting clothes than the show room. Because here, fashion, in dialogue and concord with art – away from dictates of fashion, dress codes and the loquaciousness of lifestyle magazines – can express itself fully as a pronounced statement. And because, conversely, artistic expression gains in eloquence by drawing on the formal vocabulary of fashion. And this is not a matter of style, but of multiplication of meaning, of polyphony.
Anyone who has already realised this, who brings with them a – properly understood – fashion awareness, is the kind of visitor that the exhibition »The Enforced Dress« requires. The exhibition relies on this tacit understanding as a basis for looking at forms of dissent: the conflicts, protests and contradictions that arise in the correspondencies between art and fashion. In the Kunst Raum Niederösterreich, the curator, Susanne Neuburger, has brought together seventeen artists who work at the interfaces of these two spheres.
The ambivalence of this overlapping of genres is shown complexly and effectively by Jean-Luc Moulène’s »Trente-neuf objets de grève« (1999-2000), for which Moulène has photographed, in the manner of product and advertising photography, »strike-objects« in front of a neutral background, including »La Stromboli«, a piece of the most exquisite haute couture from the fashion house Nina Ricci in perfect imitation. The effective presentation of the evening dress on a mannequin, with sophisticatedly draped folds, leaves no doubt about its sublimity; the text insert at the lower edge of the picture, which provides information about the specific (yet alienated) use of the dress, is all the more remarkable: textile workers from Nina Ricci made it for a strike rally using all kinds of unusual materials (such as LEDs) to carry it as their banner. Moulène suggests the way that haute couture fundamentally has less to do with wearability than with image production (with the instilling of a particular feeling that the consumer connects with the brand or that is meant to connect both together) by the multiple re-functioning of the piece of clothing – from a status symbol to a political issue to a commercial product. Here is where »The Enforced Dress« has its strongest moment. In general, the exhibition lacks such vehemence. If »The Enforced Dress« claims a certain affinity between fashion and (gender-)political art, it can provide coherent arguments – the way fashion traces the borders of the body and thus also the borders between bodies is evident in the uniforms, aprons and veils presented. But it also becomes clear – particularly in the slide and video presentations of performances that Maja Bajevic, Milica Tomic and Róza El-Hassan carried out at the end of the 1990s – that the physical presence of bodies and subjects cannot completely be dispensed with. The heat of the projectors is not able to simulate the energy that built up in the direct confrontation between performers and viewers.
A theory put forward in the exhibition catalogue runs that fashion, owing to its paradoxical structure, is more capable than other forms of expression of capturing the contradictions in a society, without neutralising them in the process. This is demonstrated not only in Moulène’s posters, but above all in the works by Josephine Pryde. Her large photographs show empty rooms in which different parts of the body in gymnastics clothing are presented indirectly, via a mirror. These pictures have an entrancing, frail, ruptured beauty; the reflected surfaces create a multi-perspective that exposes a discrepancy between ideals (of self-reflection, self-expression, the desire to mean something) and reality (the shapes and needs of real bodies).
This game of fragmentation and de- and re-contextualisation that is played with such precision by Moulène and Pryde loses its effect in other parts of the exhibition. For example, the placement of one work by Markus Schinwald in the exhibition makes a somewhat forced impression: »Curvings« (2006) consists of a pair of court shoes with completely worn-down heels, presented on a pedestal. Anyone who has seen films by Schinwald will be familiar with the status in his work of pieces of clothing disfigured in this way. They will have to add in their imaginations the horrific dynamics with which these clothes take possession of human bodies and transfer their dysfunctionality to them. For everyone else, »Curvings« probably remains a lifeless prop.
In a similar way, the »Coat of the Countess of Glaxo Wellcome« (2001) by Alice Creischer, which, presented in a display case on the wall, without its wearer and the other guests at the »Greatest Happiness Principle Party« – the stereotypes and cardboard cut-outs of the big globalised corporations – has lost its vital irony.
»The Enforced Dress« is full of important ideas that are however only rarely developed into points of departure or issues worthy of discussion. Possibly, if the exhibition had had the courage to be loquacious – to provide a lively exchange of ideas – it would have had a scope going beyond the artistic field as well.
Translated by Timothy Jones