'I'll tell you something which is extreme, it is about 'squatting'. It is about inhabiting space. That's what it is for me - don't you think? I have always said that my role in magazines is to squat, which is - where there is free space then that's where I place myself. And then you expand, you adapt, you synthesize and most of all you defend your position, you push against the other material'
Anna Piaggi talking to Judith Clark, Milan, September 2005
15. Last year I sent Naomi Filmer a photo of Simonetta Colonna di Cesaro' and the most important part of the photo was her beautiful right forearm. In exhibitions things stand in for other things, objects are suggestive (the exhibition space marks them as evocative, provocative objects). In fact, everything in exhibitions is standing in for something else - to effect, so to speak.
16. Exhibitions are made up of equations : mannequins + dresses = ?. If we could forget about photos and videos standing in for exhibitions of dress - exhibitions could be free to stand in for other ideas - a broader range of realities. These notes are jump cuts. I think of curating dress as to do with clashes and combinations, hauntings and improvisations; and I want these notes - a work in progress - to reflect this process.
17. Mannequins went out of fashion. They became more and more and more minimal - they lost their hair, then their skin tone, then their heads and then they 'peaked' as officially invisible with the 'Giorgio Armani' exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York in 2000. Not a millimetre showed beyond the dress however thin the shoulder straps. In 2006 the 'Anglo-mania' show at the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute treated styling instead as a tannoi for the extravagance of the gowns rather than as a distraction from their crafted forms.
18. But what of conceptual dress - when the mannequins are married to an idea, an extension of the dress but also of the space, and a carrier of adjacent meaning? Mannequins have an acknowledged history of their own - they are no longer bound just to the projects of verisimilitude or invisibility.
19. In 2004, for the exhibition 'Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back', Linda Loppa, the then Director of ModeMuseum, Antwerp, allowed me to commission Naomi Filmer to create a kind of mannequin prosthetic. Each themed section of the exhibition would have its mannequin 'equivalent'. These prosthetics as we have called them, would explicitly add to the ways the research could be translated into exhibition values.
20. So for the section dedicated to Harlequins - or rather the persistence of the harlequin theme within fashion - she carved a pair of ballet shoes on their points in wood. The ballet shoes were painted on feet in a balletic pose. They simultaneously underlined the importance of harlequins' ballet shoes and also gestured to the presence of Elsa Schiaparelli's Harlequin Jacket from the V&A collection in the section, an allusion to Surrealism - and to fashions (sometimes too easy) relationship to surrealist games.
The mannequins could have been archive mannequins; but the presence of the wooden feet bolted to the ground adjacent to the mounted garment meant we were simultaneously reminded of the harlequin's pose and the surrealist project. It was a project that used objects instead of words. Both could have been represented photographically and through a caption but they would not have engaged in the same way with issues of exhibition-making and its repertoire.
It was a series of speculative conjectures to do with exhibition-making. The prosthetics created an expensive and sporadic reference to the research that overlapped with ideas about mannequins, (or bodies): 19th Century wax figures, Hans Bellmer's perverse and traumatised bodies or the harlequins appeared throughout the trajectory of the exhibition. These were all included within Caroline Evan's look at the dark themes that dominated the late 20th century in fashion that formed the starting point for the exhibition.
21. So when I sent Naomi Filmer the photo of Simonetta, it was to conjure a new body, a new subject, to conjure hauteur with elongated chins, arms, or headdresses, all the areas that are visible beyond the garment and belong intrinsically to the silhouette.
What could stand in for the cult of her elegance and aristocratic beauty? Her eye-liner, pearls, bangles - where does a curator place elements that are extrinsic to the acual dress. My question was at the time, how does one curate eyeliner? It performs a different kind of eloquence.
It is required for the performance, to narrate it more precisely.
An archive mannequin can appear 'natural' until you do something to it.
22. With so much reality and record we fear the reconstruction. Diana Vreeland was fearless. In her autobiography, 'D.V.' she recalls a story that went around about her.: "Apparently I'd wanted a billiard-table green background for a picture. So the photographer went out and took the picture. I didn't like it. He went out and took it again. I didn't like it. Then...he went out and took it again and I still didn't like it. " I asked for billiard -table green" I'm supposed to have said; 'But this is a billiard table, Mrs Vreeland" the photographer replied. 'My dear' I apparently said, I meant the idea of billiard- table green, not a billiard table'.
Exhibitions could for example be based on idea of free association. The curators repertoire of associations meets the spectators associations. The spectator is free to make personal sense of the exhibition. They are free to notice what occurs to them, what crosses their minds as they look. Clearly some exhibitions are more coercive, more dictatorial than others. One question that the curator might ask herself is how free is the spectator to surprise herself?
When objects are placed in the same room, in the same cabinet on the same plinth, the curator is choosing to give objects something in common and something antagonistic -shape vs. colour, period vs. style, reference over chronology; the brief is visually translated and the narrative clarified in a very particular way.
23. Exhibitions can style getting stuck in time, they can stage ideas about 'micro-geography', they can perform 'claustrophobia' or 'aristocracy'. What if the pose says more than the dress?. What if the particular way that Simonetta smoked her cigarette was the memorable thing about her clothes?
24. Maybe themes should be replaced by sequences, sequences of rooms and ideas and the distributions of one within the other? Leaving the gallery I used to run I gained (museum) space, and extra rooms, but maybe lost the clarity of single statements. In museum exhibitions as opposed to those in a gallery where the statement is usually contained in one room, one space, one view, we look at exhibitions of dress through the lens of a predetermined sequence of rooms: the architecture is then invested with the rhythm reflecting the curatorial brief, the exhibition is cut up to fit within a predetermined space.
Architecture dramatises the tyrrany of the space that encloses clothes - or the system that defines them. It can stand in for other metaphorical barriers/institutions as well as its own.
25. I designed an exhibition about fashion and time, and about patterns that emerge when the words historical reference, or re-interpretation are made central to fashion. Each existed as a kind of island within the larger space of the museum - as my first museum exhibition I think I had to divide the exhibition space into smaller statements (each similar in scale to the gallery I had until then run).
I wanted the difference between the sections - each representing a different curatorial narrative strategy - to be its subject - not dress. It was intended to refer to a history of exhibitions that included those of Frederick Kiesler or Ilya and Emilia Kabakov or the utopian repositories of Yuri Avvakumov . Where are the histories of exhibitions about looking at looking?. This question has preoccupied me and made me a misfit.
26. Exhibitions and protagonists from one narrative are quickly and easily absorbed into others sometimes linked only by the re-presentation of one object. The inaugural exhibition at Judith Clark Costume Gallery (Dai Rees, Pampilion) has this year been absorbed into FIT's Gothic Dark Gamour through the swarovski crystal encrusted sheep's pelvis; Hussein Chalayan's remote control dress has toured constantly, last year included in the Skin and Bones: Parallel practices in Fashion and Architecture. They were complete exhibitions that will never be perceived now without the others. The gallery exhibitions have been given multiple futures in an imaginary ever-expanding exhibition genealogy.
27. Fashion: An anthology by Cecil Beaton staged at the V&A in 1971, has in 2009 become Hats: An Anthology by Stephen Jones, one title alludes to another, and is immediately underwritten by it.
28. Museum exhibitions carry with them the anxiety of the idea of completion, of telling the whole, the most accurate story (and if accuracy is the question what is it assumed that the exhibition should correspond to?). When objects are used in such different contexts it becomes immediately clear that their allegiances vary.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum I tried to stick to Anna Piaggi's loyalty to the non-academic (squatting, lists, anecdotal provenance, vivid approximations that become truer than the truth) I became committed to her initials and to those of the hosting institution, and walls that seen drawn in plan created A's and V's or V's and A's determined the route of the exhibition, and so determined its reading.
29. I believe that everything follows from the site of an exhibition - the architecture, or venue. For me there is no such thing as designing hypothetically; even if I am designing a hypothetical exhibition it needs to have a hypothetical venue first. Anna Piaggi: Fashionology squatted in the V&A: its angular walls at odds (from all perspectives) to the institution.
Equivalents are different to similarities - there has been a lot of parallelism coupling fashion and architecture - the curating of fashion should be as much about un-linking, as much about attacking conventional links.
30. Curating is a way of thinking about spatial analogies.
31. Bob Verhelst who designed the inaugural Backstage exhibition at ModeMuseum has recently designed the Maison Martin Margiela 20th Anniversary exhibition. - drawing our attention not to the museum's hand (collecting, conserving and theming) but the anonymous, disorienting, and distorting hand of Martin Margiela himself. The architecture was 'rearranged' to reinforce the design house's subtle games with classic sartorial vocabulary.
Photographs of the side windows were placed at 1:1 scale within the exhibition - replacing the east with southerly views . The building work across the street that was captured by the photos was completed during the exhibition adding further disorientation or rather keeping a record of passing time within the exhibition or game itself. As it was reconstruction - the opposite of decay, just a turning back of the clock - a n unanticipated impossible game that Martin Margiela would undoubtedly enjoy and could easily map onto current ideals of beauty. The allusions go on and on.
32. An exact original experience can never be created. An original experience can never be created exactly.
33. Another example is Viktor and Rolf's Milanese boutique in via sant'andrea designed by Siebe Tettero which is a neoclassical boutique turned upside down. (witty details include herring-bone parquet ceilings, and moulded floors, upturned arches and perfume bottles glued to the shelves - upside-down).
We know - as though we have always known - what neo-classical architecture looks like, though we might not know how to name it or its historical dates. We know about columns, about arches, and we know absolutely when they are upside down. This elementary game is at the heart of Viktor and Rolf's project of disrupting the recognisable codes within the fashion industry, its calendars, and branding rules. The repetition of historical designs, familiar and transformed, means we get it, we get the project; we can be perturbed, or disturbed, or simply intrigued.
I love a quote that I found when reviewing In the House of Viktor and Rolf for the Symposium at the Barbican: Siebe Tettero said something like: If I were to turn minimalist architecture on its head it wouldn't work - i.e. if you turn a simple rectangle on its head it stays the same. If you go for the familiar orders of architecture we understand the game, it is immediate.
34. Captions - Instead of fixing the discipline, they can open it up
For Barthes, words and objects have in common the organised capacity to say something; at the same time, since they are signs, words and objects have the bad faith always to appear natural to their consumer, as if what they say is eternal, true, necessary, instead of arbitrary, made, contingent.
—Edward Said
The captions for the Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back exhibition when it came to the V&A Contemporary Space were removed from the space immediately adjacent to the object s and instead placed on a leaflet/map of the space. The open design of the set made it difficult to find adjacent walls for individual objects. It was only when this 'decision of mine' was criticised did I realize that it was interesting, and how constraining captions are. I am now much more wary of them, suspicious about what they demand from, ask of, the spectator.
35. The installations were already illustrations of Caroline Evans words in her book Fashion at the Edge. So the objects were already at the service of the words - what would more words do ? -creating a sort of never ending explanation.
Captions focus our attention, tell us what to look at and make sure we do not stray too far. Roland Barthes suggested in a 1967 interview published in Le Monde why 'photos in newspapers are always captioned: to reduce the risk engendered by a multiplicity of meanings'.
36. Richard Gray re-described in his Morpho-illogical Friday Late at the V&A, what we can, in a sense, already see - he translated decoration into more decoration. He created captions made up of images, of collage, of visual references. He,( like Anna Piaggi explaining current couture through her collaged Doppie Pagine) , explained objects from the parmanent collection of the V&A. Here superficiality in a very contemporary way is the point, not the problem; it is where the sophistication of fashion is revealed.
37. Viktor & Rolf brought fragments of gallery exhibitions into the museum, the history of their clothes is also a history of their installation - a huge plane of glass as important as the white dresses resting against it.
We experience, so to speak, the experience of the mannequin. We experience the vertigo of the plinth, the claustrophobia of the crowded cabinet.
"[In the exhibition 'In the House of Viktor and Rolf'] we were given the same information three times. The exhibition used the importance of repetition to narrative, organised curatorially, but also alluded to its Freudian association to trauma. Nightmare and trauma - the trauma of nightmare - never seem very far away from the project. In Viktor and Rolf's vision fashion is itself a both a trauma and an attempted self-cure for a trauma. It opens up alternative readings of the same outfit, which is not described through object and text alone and which often closes down the readings of the garments....
The repositioning of the same object adds to its eloquence and like a chorus, by the end, they are all familiar objects - we learn the tune and get the jokes.
Exhibition design incorporates its own repetitions and histories, as well as those of the garments themselves by association. We think of what circumstances have generated miniature couture and miniature display in the past....
In Viktor & Rolf's exhibition there is a sense of claustrophobia in their demonic sartorial repetition. It is the self referential nature of their design - details over and over again are conceptual in a way that say other designers such as Hussein Chalayan might refer to an abstract concept, the silk route, technology etc. With Viktor and Rolf it is as though you can't escape the dress itself, trapped in a predetermined language, leaving them free only to manipulate size, repetition, colour etc. It draws attention to fashions repertoire with nightmarish insistence....
And through the virtuoso repetitions and manipulation of motifs we learn the rules, we recognise the rituals and regulations as part of the design. We know what oversize bows look like because we have a vocabulary in our minds which incorporates bows - maybe 1950s nostalgic cocktail dresses, for example. They trap you in a dark mis-en-abime of circular arguments, about the inside and outside of the system, about their love and hatred for clothing, about wealth and virtual wealth that is itself expensive (the collectors of expensive doll's houses themselves simulated and stimulated wealth). The allusions cannot rest, and that restlessness is the point....
Along with this there is an acknowledgment of the naivety of 'minimal design'. A route is a chronology, returns are repetitions: spatial metaphors track and trace our understanding of exhibitions and our descriptions of them." (note 1.)
38. There is a move (with the rise of more and more written fashion theory) to make exhibition design more articulate - to incorporate some of the abstract ideas within the experience of the exhibition. What are the drawbacks of this? Does theory inhibit or censure our associations.
Labyrinths have been recently used to symbolise a corrupted or complex curatorial route -intentionally devoid of its progressive inevitability -they are also potent graphic symbols of time folding back on itself. It is not only about the extended route but the proximities that are created in doing so.
39. 'But if, either on the basis of what poets try to tell you, or by biological research, with or without the tools of the psychologist, you attempt to explain a poem, you will probably be getting further and further away from the poem without arriving at any other destination. The attempt to explain the poem by tracing it back to its origins will distract attention from the poem, to direct it on to something else which in the form in which it can be apprehended by the critic and his readers, has no relation to the poem and throws no light upon it.'
T.S.Eliot
END
Note: Judith Clark: Lecture presented 13th September 2008 on the occasion of the Symposium In the House of Viktor and Rolf, Barbican Gallery, London.
'I dream of immense cosmologies reduced to the dimensions of an epigram...I would ike to edit a collection of tales consisting of one sentence only, or even a single line. But so far I havn't found any to match the one by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso: 'When I looked up, the dinosaur was still there.'
'I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like a pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the framework of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit but it is always there. We might say that in a narrative any object is always magic'
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the next Millennium, from 'Quickness'.
1. Galleries are associated with immediate experience - with impact; like quick-acting barometers, as opposed to the reflective retrospective museum exhibition. When curating for a small place, for one room, it is about ruthless selection and the clarity of connections, or it is conceived as a fragment, a key to a larger story or a clue to a different project.
2. What then is the difference between the small, the complete and the fragment?
3. I have always loved short literary forms: notes, short stories, Borges's potential literature, manifestos and their visual counterparts, sketches, scaled-down models, trailers, the avant-gardes of architecture never built but promised and documented (as alternative urban histories or utopias). These find their most powerful equivalents in fashion in Anna Piaggi's Fashion Algebra, her monthly 'Doppie Pagine' (double pages) for Italian Vogue, which consist of catwalk images juxtaposed with images torn from books and turned into 'superficial' (to use her phrase) themed collages, leaps into the past to illuminate contemporary fashionableness.
4. I feel as though I have been working on potential exhibitions of dress. Historical reference in dress has never been about evolution, continuity. There are other ways of plotting this. In dress, surfaces float free of their histories.
5. Curating is like creating a new grammar, new patterns of time and reference. The readability of objects shifts. I am constantly amazed at the simplicity of the routes taken in exhibitions, their inevitable logic. Unlike language but more like the multiple meanings of a pack of tarots cards, objects can be read back to front and side to side.
6. Anthropomorphic imagination makes clothes magical.
7. Curating is about creating sympathetic allegiances between objects, investing them through association with a lop-sided eloquence.
8. Each piece is then invested with the spatial equivalent of exclamation marks.
9. The first exhibition of dress I curated Satin Cages, 1997, was a hypothetical exhibition of crinolines. The exhibition of scaled-down crinolines (1:50) was housed in a balsa wood model, itself based on a hypothetical project by visionary architects Brodsky and Utkin. The outcome was a three minute film exhibited at the Architecture Foundation in London - supposedly of the exhibition, though of course filmed in miniature, with a leaflet commentary carefully mimicking those from the V&A Museum stating dates, venue, policy and selection. The idea was of designing for a recession. In a way my work is still an extension of that idea.
10. I have spent the last five years within the confines of the small space (four metres by nine metres) of the gallery I set up in London, Judith Clark Costume Gallery: twenty exhibition fragments, displaying as many as fifteen garments and as few as one. Cultural range was privileges over consistency, so equal space was devoted to Hussein Chalayan's Remote control Dress, when the gallery was a children's playground, Naomi Filmer's ice jewellery, when it had to be an ice box, Adelle Lutz's Urban Camouflage, when a building site, or Madeleine Vionnet's precious gowns, when a room in a museum.
11. The idea was to draw attention to the curatorial project itself, to Calvino's invisible network of relationships. Small exhibitions were also then fragments of larger exhibitions.
12. I created a rather ostentatious hardback inaugural catalogue - way beyond the resources of the gallery. The photographs by Mat Collishaw were used decadently in the catalogue and not shown in the exhibition. It was therefore more like a hypothetical catalogue to a museum show. The intention - like recruiting Pentagram later to design the journal, or inviting Harold Koda to introduce Adelle Lutz's exhibition - was a magnifying device, a way of playing with scale.
13. I am interested in the relationship between curating and digression, in the connections made by visitors who stray.
14. What would it be to be the Lawrence Sterne of fashion curators, to be free to lose the thread?
*The statement was commissioned by Linda Loppa and Kaat Debo in 2001 to coincide with their inaugural exhibition at ModeMuseum in Antwerp (opened 21 September 2002). The catalogue 'Backstage', like the installation of the exhibition, aimed to both mark a point in time - mindful of creating a 'first' a new beginning, an opportunity that is rare in museum culture, and to look around them to a moment created by disparate voices - in this case my own, and statements 2,3,4 and 5, by Valerie Steele, Claire Wilcox, Thimo te Duits and Sylvie Richoux respectively. We were asked to present a short statement - printed in a sequence that felt like it might have been a conversation.