This paper analyses the use of clothing in contemporary art from twentieth century textile art to the so-called contemporary clothes art. While textile art was still focused on functional and distinctive values of dress (i.e. Sonja Delaunay’s simultaneous dresses or Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealistic clothes), contemporary clothes art erases any use values, to explore and produce instead a range of meanings related to identities, cultures and memory. This polysemic space seems to unfold between two synthetic paradigms: one of destroying or emptying dress and experience, and the other of repairing experience. The emptying dress paradigm is exemplified by French artist Christian Boltanski with his gigantic installation entitled Personnes (2010), where the empty dress evokes the body’s absence, Shoa’s memory and the destroyed experience of modernity. The paradigm of the subject’s production and the experience’s repair, on the other hand, is exemplified by Franco-American artist Louise Bourgeois with her art works realised in the nineties, which used clothes and tissue sculptures to reconstruct a new corporeal self and to repair her own wounded autobiography. With this theoretical background, clothes art today, exemplified by the works of numerous contemporary artists (i.e. Jana Sterbak, Maureen Connor, Robert Gober, Maja Bajevic, Annette Messager, Kim Sooja), seems to be a significant contemporary practice of meaning production, questioning the deep relationship between art, gender identity, experience, cultures and individual and collective memories.
Unordinary Art/Unordinary Clothes. Culture, Experience and Identity in Contemporary Clothes Art
TRASFORINI, Maria Antonietta
2012
Abstract
This paper analyses the use of clothing in contemporary art from twentieth century textile art to the so-called contemporary clothes art. While textile art was still focused on functional and distinctive values of dress (i.e. Sonja Delaunay’s simultaneous dresses or Elsa Schiaparelli’s surrealistic clothes), contemporary clothes art erases any use values, to explore and produce instead a range of meanings related to identities, cultures and memory. This polysemic space seems to unfold between two synthetic paradigms: one of destroying or emptying dress and experience, and the other of repairing experience. The emptying dress paradigm is exemplified by French artist Christian Boltanski with his gigantic installation entitled Personnes (2010), where the empty dress evokes the body’s absence, Shoa’s memory and the destroyed experience of modernity. The paradigm of the subject’s production and the experience’s repair, on the other hand, is exemplified by Franco-American artist Louise Bourgeois with her art works realised in the nineties, which used clothes and tissue sculptures to reconstruct a new corporeal self and to repair her own wounded autobiography. With this theoretical background, clothes art today, exemplified by the works of numerous contemporary artists (i.e. Jana Sterbak, Maureen Connor, Robert Gober, Maja Bajevic, Annette Messager, Kim Sooja), seems to be a significant contemporary practice of meaning production, questioning the deep relationship between art, gender identity, experience, cultures and individual and collective memories.I documenti in SFERA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
