Art Flirts
When thinking about the relationship between art and mass culture, I most often use Fashion (a subspace within the broader space of mass culture) as an evocative term. I will look at Fashion as the ultimate example of the relationship between form and meaning in mass culture. Within mass culture, Fashion is meaning through its form and representation. The notion of Fashion can only exist in representative forms like fashion photography, advertisements, Instagram posts, etc. Fashion cannot be created solely by theory and concept. Mass culture is a meaningful entity that is absolutely incomplete without representation, as it lives through its own imagery.
fashion (with lowercase F) and Fashion (with uppercase F) have long had a relationship with art. It is hard to identify clearly when this affair started. Bodies were the first surface on which humans created art.[1] That is the starting point that I will consider complete enough.
I want to focus on the relationship between art and fashion in the past century and how it has evolved until today, particularly in some of the most peculiar combinations: fashion photography, photography, Fashion and art. In the 1950s and 1960s, an affair began to form in which art functioned as the slightly blurry background behind the model. In many cases, paintings were placed within shoots to create a more enriched editorial spread, to hint at culture and elegance (image 35).
As fine art belonged (and still belongs) to the most prestigious parts of culture, fashion has often tried to reference it visually in order to appear more intellectual and less futile. fashion does not want to be only about itself. It needs to be about everything. In editorials and magazine spreads, models engage with art as visitors do in museums with alarm sensors. There is a respectful distance that maintains the separation between the world of fashion and mass culture and the world of fine art.
In fashion photography of the 1950s and early 1960s, there are two distinct planes: the background (the colour field that any painting turns into when blurred), and the foreground (the model). In most cases, as written by Camiel van Winkel in his book with Joke Robaard, Archive Species: Bodies, Habits, Practices, the distance between the model (fashion) and the painting (art) is rather respectful.[2] It accentuates art as the ultimate form of higher culture, especially in comparison to clothing. Since this period, “the distance has gradually become smaller”. [3] Entering the late 1960s, art started to occupy many different roles, as the interest in different tropes grew in the fashion industry. Art and fashion alike began to show interest in this appropriation, and in each other.
In some cases, there is a more extreme artistic approach to fashion photography. Models start to be photographed with painterly sensibility. For instance, in works by Sarah Moon (image 16), skin functions as colour, clothes as texture, and hair as brush strokes. There is an investigation of something other than photographic qualities. These images exist in true movement, in a dream-like state, in gelatine. Just like paintings, they are full of uncertainty, and models start to become form and space.
Sometimes they act as sculptures. Models position their limbs in relation to the frame of the photograph. There is a consideration of the vertical and horizontal axes of the image. In the experimental film Veruschka – Poetry of a Woman, Franco Rubartelli highly stylizes the portrait of the 60s supermodel Veruschka (images 62, 63, 64), as myth and shape-shifting form. Veruschka is less a model and more a co-creator and performance artist. She camouflages herself with body paint, creating forms and shapes with and within her body. By turning herself into a sculpture, she becomes a clear example of Fashion (with uppercase F) flirting with art.
Besides being used as an image and backdrop, art also functioned as clothing that models could put on and take off. From the late 60s onwards, models began wearing the denim overalls of the painter, the dress of the gallerist, the muse, the rich wife, the lover, the squatter, the teenager, the addict. By the 90s, we arrive at a very interesting point of art’s relationship with fashion, where fashion is able to subvert its own subversion.
Nothing is off-limits for fashion’s impulse to appropriate, neither art nor rebellion. This contributes to the end of signification itself, because if anyone can use fashion to signify anything, nothing true can be signified anymore. There is no longer truth or meaning. Contemporary fashion (with lowercase f) has become a pastiche of looks drawn from different subcultures, periods and classes. It exists in excess of itself.
The fashion tropes relating to art, which evolved into tropes of anti-glamour, decay, androgyny, the ugly, the unhealthy, the sick, the deadly, became very played out. Fashion had become so self-aware that what had been, for a very short time, rebellion, was stylized and sold. Subversion was assimilated. What was once challenging was now trendy. fashion (with lowercase f) absorbs critique and neutralizes it by making it fashionable.
A classic example is Marc Jacobs’ collection for Perry Ellis in 1992 (image 15), in which he recreated the look of grunge culture into a fashion collection. A culture that was motivated by the rejection of fashion (with lowercase f) and consumerism became exactly that. It was priced and sold. The collection was featured in the December issue of American Vogue. Naomi Campbell and Kristen McMenamy are dressed in a Nirvana T-shirt, leather combat boots, knit sweaters, flannels, a lot of tartan, oversized beanies, hair ties replace bracelets, and an unbothered look covers their faces.
The last example that illustrates the powerful love/hate affair that is the relationship between art and fashion is Cindy Sherman. When Sherman was commissioned by Vogue France in 1984 (images 19 and 30), she explored more extreme visual qualities than those of her previous work, like Untitled Film Stills from 1977-1980 (image 65), such as fake noses, scar tissue, blackened teeth, blood, spikey black hair, etc.
In October 1983, Sherman writes a series of propositions in her notebook, like “throwing up”, “drooling, “snot running down nose” and “shooting up”.[4] Prompts that are meant to suggest a somewhat unglamorous visual situation, although it is debatable if they are fashionable or not. She carried out these prompts for the editorial in question. Sherman’s interest in the grotesque marks a new phase in her work, one that continues until today.
The exaggeration of grotesque bodily qualities entered Sherman’s work when she began making photographic series for fashion magazines. In the context of a fashion magazine, the critical content of her visual art had to be exaggerated so that it would not be confused with the fashionable material in the rest of the magazine. If the work functioned within the critical lens of the art world, it would be received through this same critical lens. The same lens cannot be used within the fashion (with lowercase f) industry. There is no guarantee that art will be read as subversive or radical in this context.
The challenge for Sherman comes when her photographs are transferred to the fashion industry, even though she uses the same appropriation tactics of fashion, those of visual clichés and tropes. Her images are completely assimilated by fashion, which can turn anything into a reproduction. This is the power of the fashion context, that everything can be transformed and neutralized. It becomes fashionable.
“If we assume Sherman’s production is conditioned by the forms of mass culture, the possibility remains that she is conscious of this conditioning, and that she allows this consciousness to somehow resonate in her work or even become its subtext.”[5] In this way, Sherman does not unknowingly fall victim to the neutralizing nature of mass culture. She anticipates fashion’s absorptive properties through an intense staging of entrapment within it, showing her awareness of mass culture’s systems.
The “conscious conditioning” Van Winkel refers to is reflected in Sherman’s choice not to resist these fashionable associations, but to allow them to structure the work, embedding them as subtext, rather than pursuing an overt opposition. The grotesque could be more malformed, more distorted, more hideous, less fashionable. So, we can assume there is a reason why it is not.
[1] Are Clothes Modern?, Bernard Rudofsky, Publisher. P. Theobold, 1947, 52
[2] Archive Species: Bodies, Habits, Practices, Joke Robaard & Camiel van Winkel, Valiz, 2018, 33
[3] Ibid., 33
[4] Cindy Sherman Retrospective, work notes 18 October 1983, 124
[5] The Regime of Visibility, Camiel van Winkel, NAi Publishers, 2005, 72