Adelle Lutz
View:Re:View
Judith Clark Costume Gallery
23 February - 6 April 2002

Introduction by Harold Koda

Like the optical illusion of a vase that shifts into two confronting profiles and then back again, Adelle Lutz's art and interventions are based on simple perceptual manipulations that yield unexpected, often unstable readings. Almost all her works, from her performance-generated costume to her sculptural and environmental projects, are based on concepts and materials directly related to the body or dress. In "The Wedding Party," Lutz dresses furniture and household items with ruffled skirts, chinos, y-fronts, and a lace-hemmed half-slip imbuing anonymous and mundane objects with idiosyncratic character and unexpected humanity. This use of clothing as the expressive form for her ideas necessarily engages her in the discourses of identity, gender, and culture, all issues inextricable to dress; and her designs, no matter their primary genesis, inevitably retain clothing's allusive narratives of social address.

When Richard Martin included Lutz's work in his landmark exhibition, "Fashion and Surrealism," he situated her costumes in a netherworld of fashion and art. Her "Ionic Dress" which was a literal interpretation of a columnar gown conformed to surrealism's ironic take on classicism, and her brick-patterned "Urban Camouflage" tailleurs suggested an affinity for the surrealist notion of the body as a site of architectural effects and strategies. Like Meret Oppenheim's "Fur-Lined Teacup," Lutz's recent suite of surrealistic chairs sprouting hair is astonishing, even disquieting, but curiously not off-putting. Her silken-tressed chaises are so well groomed that they project luxury, charm, and propriety even as they allude to a fetishized feminine sexuality. In contrast to most surrealist enterprises, her art is notable for its absence of misogyny and dark pathologies. Her affinities have always cleaved to Duchamp rather than Dali, with her sur-reality much more simply and directly achieved than the tortured imagery and tricky libidinous juxtapositions to which many surrealists fell prey.

Because many of her sources and references are extracted from the obsessively consumerist and cheerfully conformist culture of low- and lower-middle-brow America— wood-grained paneling, plastic flowers, velvet paintings, and aluminum garden furniture have all at some point figured in her designs—there is a danger of assuming an implicit critique in the kitschiness of her imagery. In fact, her work is invariably an affectionate celebration of the oddities she discovers in the everyday. Still, despite her apparent whimsy and good humor, like the Dadaists, Lutz is consistently, if subtly, subversive.

Over the years, she has explored the idea of clothing as a simultaneous mechanism of concealment and revelation. Beginning with the notion of dress as the most superficial construction and representation of identity, Lutz cites the architectural and horticultural iconography of suburbia in designs for an archetypal American family.

Another series penetrates beyond the image projected by our clothes by suggesting the naked body beneath. Basic apparel components of impeccable modesty are embroidered with a naturalistic pattern of body hair. This unnerving disclosure underscores the extent to which clothing succeeds in obscuring any explicit manifestation of our physical and animal nature.

Next, Lutz reveals the miraculous structure of the human body by describing its musculature. Her rendering is illustrational, clinical and observant, but deliberately deprived of the uncannily forensic.

Finally, Far from the localized geography of the American suburbs she extends her references to a global range of Eastern and Western costume traditions. Paradoxically, as her exploration expands, her focus becomes more introspective. Glowing elements of skeletal structure and internal organs are isolated and appear ghostlike, emerging and receding on garments of culturally diverse provenance. As she divulges the anonymous components of our bodies and thus our commonality, the obfuscating and prejudicial consequences of dress are exposed. In her adept manipulation of clothing as a medium, Adelle Lutz reveals its awesome communicative power.

Preview by Judith Clark

When Adelle Lutz says that her 'costumes (are) generic, they are not terribly subtle' she reminds us how terrible subtlety can be. Neither pretentious nor daunting, her outfits bounce us back into the world. We can look at them because there is nothing for us to work out. What is remarkable about Adelle Lutz's work is that she wants you to be able to have a good look at it without being disturbed.

As there are in Lutz's words 'no hidden meanings' - if everything has already been uncovered - it is as though the work has already been done for us. We can enjoy the strangeness of these objects without being suspicious of them and without being intimidated. And yet of course we cannot help but wonder, for example, if these objects are called Urban Camouflage, what do we need to protect ourselves from in the suburbs. What both art and Lutz's suburban inhabitants need to be protected from is a too serious suspicion. Her outfits seem like dead-pan jokes: 'I want people to get it immediately' she says, 'recognise the outfit.'

Uniforms are usually the clothes we get immediately; the clothes that let us jump to conclusions about the people who wear them, though even Lutz's methods are informal, consistently unimpressed by professional life. Talking about the Urban Camouflage project she described herself as 'very short-handed, the local high school drama club came after school to glue on leaves and sew. My mother sewed the column dress, a neighbour painted the trompe l'oeil bricks and the column...the clothing had to last through the day of rehearsal and a day of shooting.' The costumes, like the bodies they dress are not made for posterity.