The Art of Fashion - Installing Allusions
Boijmans van Beuningen Museum
19 September - 10 January 2010

Building Genealogies
Judith Clark

'Why adopt a circuitous form of speech. It is polite and it is obliging but why do it? [ ]... we understand the allusion. Why disguise the phrase?'
- Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, Chapman & Hall 1865

To install an allusion is to calculate an effect. But there is a distinction between the intended allusion and the unwitting allusion. We don't always know what we are alluding to. In one sense an allusion conceals one intention whilst it reveals another; it relies on the reader to understand the message, to get it, in order for it not to remain a merely decorative device. It is not about being vague, it is about being conspiratorial. Allusion, as Dickens suggests, is a form of disguise, but it can circulate like gossip. One of the questions raised by this exhibition is what do we use allusion to do and where does allusion end?

If curating is a form of narrative, then how might allusions work within it? This exhibition is called The Art of Fashion and it is also called Installing Allusions, and it is about creating a different kind of eloquence around fashion's archives whilst questioning that eloquence at the same time. It is about the big populist glamour-show and at the same time about the difference between looking carefully, and being in the know.

The exhibition is created and organised around the five new commissions by avant-garde designers Walter Van Beirendonck, Hussein Chalayan, Naomi Filmer, Viktor & Rolf and Anna-Nicole Ziesche. It therefore creates a context for work that did not yet exist at the time of curating nor in fact during the exhibition design process, other than as a few sketches; so that a museological landscape made up of many other objects had to be staged with an unknown future written into it. A context needed to be created into which the new work might fit, be intelligible and inspiring.

In literature, allusions often make seemingly casual but deliberate reference to a famous event or figure or text. It is an economical way of exploiting and challenging the reader's prior knowledge. For curators, it is about referencing another object - a mental picture is created which suggests a route, an imaginary trajectory (or trajectories). As devices, allusions illustrate curatorial intentions. For exhibition-makers it is about referencing other exhibitions.

The objects in this exhibition serve to dramatise the conversations between the curators - with Han Nefkens - and the commissioned designers during the curatorial process; they also set up continuities between the themes revealed by the commissions, and other works already in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection and seminal pieces from other international museums and archives. Earlier pieces here work as flashbacks reconfiguring rather than explaining the current pieces.

The exhibition also participates in a now established tradition of external curators re-interpreting the museum's permanent collection for a temporary exhibition. The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions extends this brief: it looks at a famous collection of conceptual fashion, and whilst extending it into the future, questions its roots and allegiances and confronts it with its artistic claims.

The Exhibition

The exhibition is a circular genealogy: each object is an island, installed on its own individual plinth, but it is always a link between other objects. Dai Rees's Carapace series is hung at the natural point of entry into the exhibition. Its fine leather inlay immediately reminds the visitor of a broader context, of the museum itself - and its famous chair collection - destabilising the boundaries of the gallery. The Carapace series is made up of leather pattern pieces sewn together so as to be un-wearable. The resulting sculptural form resembles that of hanging meat. So within a moment of entering the exhibition one is confronted with history - the history of the collections, re-fashioned dress patterns, associations to meat - and one's curiosity is aroused as to what might come next in this sequence. The exhibition privileges fashion as its subject, and within one piece the visitor is alerted to the complexity and variety of fashion's voice.

The first item of fashion ever collected at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Martin Margiela's waistcoat of shredded plates Gilet en porceleine (collection autumn/winter 1989-1990) which is now 20 years old, is not therefore the first piece exhibited but instead is woven into a web of 'conversations' beyond Dai Rees's work. Next to Dai Rees's reconfigured patterns Margiela's piece speaks about collage, but as the visitor turns and views it next to Viktor & Rolf's bed (Bedtime Story: Hana, 2005), the ceramic plates become a darker tale about domesticity, referring back to Rees and on to the pattern series by Dirk Van Saene (Eight paper dresses: Sissi, Elisabeth, Ruffle Dress, Guirlande, Victoria, Folie, Mme Crêpe, Rococo, 1998): the history of dress as a series of manipulations of one pattern, and so on. Whilst revealing designers preoccupations, the exhibition resists the traditional fixed themes arranged over a few choral plinths and privileges the sequencing of ideas.

Each designer distracts us from their purely sartorial narrative, providing clues to their conceptual preoccupations. This exhibition is at once about the passage of time, the fixing of bodily perimeters, ritualised or sacralised performance, memory's distorting view, monumentalisation, fragmentation, deformity, micro-geographies, looking and being looked at, the cult of celebrity that creeps into every contemporary story - each extended and elaborated upon within the exhibition to form the basis of infinitely interlocking themes. The beginning of the game lurks within the definition or root of the word allusion.

Italo Calvino shows us that history is a matter of plotting and re-plotting the same material and of authors taking liberties. This could be at once a description of and a criticism levelled against curators since the 1980s.

'In the universe now there was no longer a container and a thing contained, but only a general thickness of signs superimposed and coagulated, occupying the whole volume of space, it was constantly being dotted, minutely, a network of lines and scratches and reliefs and engravings; the universe was scrawled over on all sides, along all its dimensions. There was no longer any way to establish a point of reference'
- Italo Calvino,'A Sign in Space', The Complete Cosmicomics, Penguin 2009, pp. 41-42

'Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established serving as an immediate aid to memory.'
- Italo Calvino, 'Invisible Cities', Cities and Memory, Vintage Books 1997, vol. 4, p. 13

'High walls, light coming in from the ceiling, a neutral floor are still the best bet ... Artists usually prefer simplicity too.'
- Hans Ulrich Obrist, 'Mind over Matter: Interview with Harald Szeemann', Artforum International, November 1996

The exhibition is situated in the large Bodon Gallery and has within it associations to do with exhibition-making and to do with the history of the extraordinary space itself.

The five commissions are more or less evenly-spaced focal points within the exhibition and related fashion and art works are placed in formal and thematic relation to them, creating what appears to be a continuous genealogy across the three sections of the gallery.

The descriptions received from the designers of each of the commissions evoked a very precise spatial association and dictated the spatial articulation of the gallery: a square jewel-like box to contain Viktor & Rolf's new fragrance Alternative No. 1, an ever widening processional avenue leading up to Walter Van Beirendonck's sarcophagus and 'temple', '2357' - THE SEQUEL, the need for extra space surrounding Naomi Filmer's to be sucked in and out of her series Breathing Volume, the inevitable darkness around Anna-Nicole Ziesche's film Childhood Storage and the horizontal archaeology of Hussein Chalayan's Microgrography: A Cross Section as well as the natural elements pulling it towards the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen gallery space's dramatic window.

In 1988 Harald Szeemann curated A-historical Sounds in the Bodon gallery reinterpreting the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection with the search for a-historical resonances between objects. The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions refers to Szeeman's seminal exhibition in a number of ways.

He had placed a sculpture central to each of the three sections of the gallery, from the right: Imi Knoebel's Buffet (1984/85), Joseph Beuys's Grond (1980/81) and Bruce Nauman's Studio Piece (1982). He then allowed them to 'resonate' (to continue his analogy of sound) through the adjacent objects. It is essential to his curatorial practice that it be difficult to track the resonances.

For The Art of Fashion: Installing Allusions, the triptych space could be seen as divided into five themes that are subdivided and subdivided until they meet and marry into other family trees and cross over the outer limits of the adjacent sections, giving apparent continuity (or circularity if it were not for the occasional way out) through the leaves in Hussein Chalayan's box and out through the window. The resonance is built around the objects' support, sometimes literally linking objects, sometimes merely pointing towards them.

All objects are linked by the contemporary landscape of an open diffusely daylit gallery, which, when articulated with Naomi Filmer's gentle viewing ramp, both freezes and invites movement more reminiscent of a skatepark perhaps: monotone grey, lunar and yet playful.

The floor contains within it a thin criss-cross pattern of lines, like tiny scratches in its surface, the remains of other abandoned routes between objects. They rehearse connective possibilities and keep us mindful that there is no inevitable logic between any two objects, only temporary groupings: groupings, that can be called so many things - 'movements', 'collections', or even, but less fashionably, 'coincidences'. They can be called 'trends' or 'patterns'. For experimental exhibition designer and architect Frederick Kiesler they were 'Galaxies'. For Picasso they became 'constellations'. The Constructivist lines multiply the depth of plane and extend the gallery space. Whilst the chosen configurations hover above the floor on a steel grid or hang high as webs made of chains and meat hooks, taking us back to Dai Rees and the beginning.