2006
MAGNUS AF PETERSENS: IF THERE CAN BE A SPACE FOR A FASHION CURATOR AS A PROFESSIONAL PROFILE IN THE FUTURE, IT IS PRECISELY IN THIS LIMINAL SPACE BETWEEN FASHION AND ART
Dobrila Denegri: What prompted the interest in staging an exhibition at Moderna Museet, “Fashination” (2004)? It explored points of contact between art and fashion, a theme many exhibitions have since pursued, following “The Time and the Fashion”, the first fashion Biennial in Florence, held in 1996. Your show also focused on the ’90s. How did it all start?
Magnus af Petersens: Lars Nittve took up his post as director of Moderna Museet, the national museum of modern art in Stockholm, in 2001, after his tenure as director of Tate Modern in London. He spoke to our curatorial team, including me, about the reflections and inspirations he had while visiting the exhibition of the fashion photographer Steven Meisel at the White Cube in London. He went to the gallery without knowing what he would see or who was in the show, and as he went through the exhibition, he began to wonder about the pictures, which, to him, evoked Cindy Sherman’s work. The photographs looked so appealing to him, and yet were also very familiar. In fact, it was the show of Meisel’s “Four Days in LA: The Versace Pictures”, an acclaimed 2000 advertising campaign published in Vogue.
Nittve became interested in how his focus shifted with the context, so that his reading of the photos became much more critical, seeking more meaning in the images shown in the art gallery, than leafing through Vogue and thinking that somebody just wants to sell clothes.
Lately, fashion magazines have become very ambitious when presenting their content and fashion as part of contemporary culture, too. But still, for Nittve, something changed when he saw these big Meisel prints on the white walls of a gallery.
That was one of the things we brought into the exhibition, an interest in the shift of context and how that affected the reading of the different exhibits.
Another important input came from the encounter between Lars Nittve and Lars Nilsson, a Swedish designer who collaborated with fashion houses such as Christian Lacroix, Christian Dior, Ralph Lauren, Bill Blass, Nina Ricci, and Balmain, but who also developed an interest in art. As he was also in London in the early 2000s, he told Nittve about his collaboration with DAKS Tailoring on Old Bond Street. The issue was how to recognise that you were seeing an art installation when it was placed in the window of a tailor's shop. Nilsson, who worked on the border between art and fashion and their respective contexts, stated that he felt “protected” when showing at an art institution, as his work was perceived as art. When placed in the shop window, he wasn’t taken as seriously, though. Yet, what is interesting is that when you see his work displayed in the shop window, you would stop in front of it anyway, recognising that it is not a “usual” commercial display. You would think, “Hmm, this is interesting, it's not an ordinary window display, it’s a commission to an artist”. Lars Nilsson joined our curatorial team because he was so attuned to these issues of context specificity.
Salka Hallström, fashion editor and writer, was the fourth person who knew the most about fashion among us. But we were not making a show about the best or most interesting fashion designers, but about the ones we thought bordered on art. The way they worked was closer to the way artists work: they made very topical collections, the presentations were very performance-like, and so on. More conceptual design in some instances, and sometimes a very extravagant visual quality. It was also a reaction to some things we sensed were getting boring in the art.
DD: While reading Salka Hallström Bornold’s essay, I noticed she wrote: “We want to show fashion, not art”. How did you deal with that, and how did the museum context, which is the container dedicated to contemporary art, semantically influence the items and works on display? Also, how were you intending to make an exhibition that would be different from all those previous tickling art and fashion crossovers?
MaP: Part of that Salka’s statement had to do with the identity of the fashion designers that we didn't want to violate in any way. But fashion doesn't need art to be important.
On the other hand, Moderna Museet's mission as an art museum differs from that of many similar museums in that we don't have a design department or anything similar. So far, we have only focused on painting, sculpture, video, and so on. But when the art definition expanded, and it engulfed other things, or when things moved into that, we looked at these crossovers and didn’t want to name them art; we wanted to look at them from another perspective. In the exhibition in Florence you mentioned, fashion designers were asked to “act” like artists, to do something using disciplinary and expressive languages akin to contemporary art. We didn't commission anything like that or ask the fashion designers to make art. We showed what we thought was their best work: their strongest piece of clothing, or a presentation from a fashion show staged as a performance. Also, at that time, we had many photographers who moved in and out of fashion and art.
The artworks we chose for this show were in some way connected to the fashion world, not only through inspiration but also in a real sense.
DD: In your essay in the catalogue, you quoted Chris Townsend, curator and author of “Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion”, and his consideration that art was predominantly a male domain, while fashion was female. This has changed now, of course. Was this dynamic reflected in your curatorial choices?
MaP: For me, it was an interesting quotation, actually. I mean, we would never ever say this kind of thing now... this kind of strong polarisation is passe. Still, I wanted to speculate on why fashion is becoming more important for men. Also, Townsend says that fashionable men were considered effeminate. Maybe not in all cultural contexts, since to me, even if it might be a prejudice, it looks like that in Italy, a well-dressed man is not perceived as effeminate, while in the US, he would be. In some contexts, a dandy, or a well-dressed man, is an image of self-respect and self-confidence.
The exhibition “New Persona / New Universe” in Florence addressed the issue of gender shifting, and it was also explored in another show set up at Leopolda, the “Fourth Sex,” curated by Raf Simons and Francesco Bonami, where adolescence, androgyny, and gender fluidity were central topics. All these gender issues emerged from the art of the ’90s, a decade dominated by questions of identity on many levels.
DD: Is there a difference when curating a “fashion” exhibition and an “art” exhibition? What was your experience with “Fashination”?
MaP: The research part is quite the same. What you try to do is attribute meaning to the things. Of course, the referential fields can be different, and therefore, you wonder more when researching a specific fashion collection or editorial.
The logistic part is very different. When you are putting on a show involving artists, you deal, in most cases, either directly with them or through their galleries. Artists, gallerists, collectors or museums are part of the same infrastructure. They are interested in being involved in the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, such as Moderna Museet. So they are interested in the concept of the show; they “speak the same language” when it comes to questions of lending, display, or installation of the artwork.
When we worked on “Fashination”, we included fashion designers who are part of the international fashion system, which is still dominated by a handful of cities – Paris, London, New York, Milan, Tokyo and Antwerp. We had to involve people who work in a different system, and not all of them were interested in being shown in a museum of contemporary art, like Moderna. In some cases, there would be a PR person working for a brand; in others, there was no one to discuss what to obtain for the show, how to handle landing, or logistics in general. It was challenging, I would say. I had to explain why it is interesting to show in the museum, and what kind of visibility it provides.
DD: Do you think the fashion curator is emerging as a new form of professional profile?
MaP: Eventually it will. Fashion is oriented towards commercial imperatives, but some people in the fashion industry are making culture through their collections, photos or editorials. Think of Viktor & Rolf, Hussein Chalayan, or some Belgian designers... they appear like artists using another visual vocabulary, the one of fashion. The same goes for many contemporary photographers who are exhibiting in both domains, art and fashion; think of Nick Knight, Wolfgang Tillmans, Corinne Day, Juergen Teller, Glen Luchford, Nigel Shafran, Mark Lebon, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin or Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Our exhibition delved deeply into fashion photography, as it is the space where art and fashion merge most.
If there can be a space for a fashion curator as a professional profile in the future, it is precisely in this liminal space between fashion and art.
DD: How did you choose artists who were featured in the show?
MaP: We looked for artists whose projects established dialogue with the fashion system. Besides the already mentioned Lars Nilsson’s “Game Over”, commissioned by the DAKS fashion house and shown for the first time at the opening of their boutique on Bond Street in London, we also involved Alicia Framis and Vanessa Beecroft. We also commissioned a new work from Yinka Shonibare.
DD: You speak about “Fashion Art”, which is in tune with Alex Coles’s book titled “Design Art” (2005). What does this byname mean for you?
MaP: At the core of the exhibition was our conviction that there was a conceptual shift in the way some designers are creating fashion that is more akin to the way artists are working with ideas and concepts.
Before, when you would talk about the relation between art and fashion, you would quote Versace putting Warhol’s “Marilyn” as the pattern on the dress.
As Nittve said, concepts have become more unruly in recent times. They are expanding and mutating, merging and receding, and the borderland between art and fashion is among the most dynamic. Some fashion designers, such as Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen, Maison Martin Margiela, Jun Takahashi, and Viktor & Rolf, produce collections and shows that, if exhibited in an art gallery or museum, are automatically considered art. Some create conceptual installations, while others lean towards performance. Others fit within the perspective of relational aesthetics, where the interaction between the viewer and the artwork is often direct and tangible.
2006
MAGNUS AF PETERSENS: IF THERE CAN BE A SPACE FOR A FASHION CURATOR AS A PROFESSIONAL PROFILE IN THE FUTURE, IT IS PRECISELY IN THIS LIMINAL SPACE BETWEEN FASHION AND ART
Dobrila Denegri: What prompted the interest in staging an exhibition at Moderna Museet, “Fashination” (2004)? It explored points of contact between art and fashion, a theme many exhibitions have since pursued, following “The Time and the Fashion”, the first fashion Biennial in Florence, held in 1996. Your show also focused on the ’90s. How did it all start?
Magnus af Petersens: Lars Nittve took up his post as director of Moderna Museet, the national museum of modern art in Stockholm, in 2001, after his tenure as director of Tate Modern in London. He spoke to our curatorial team, including me, about the reflections and inspirations he had while visiting the exhibition of the fashion photographer Steven Meisel at the White Cube in London. He went to the gallery without knowing what he would see or who was in the show, and as he went through the exhibition, he began to wonder about the pictures, which, to him, evoked Cindy Sherman’s work. The photographs looked so appealing to him, and yet were also very familiar. In fact, it was the show of Meisel’s “Four Days in LA: The Versace Pictures”, an acclaimed 2000 advertising campaign published in Vogue.
Nittve became interested in how his focus shifted with the context, so that his reading of the photos became much more critical, seeking more meaning in the images shown in the art gallery, than leafing through Vogue and thinking that somebody just wants to sell clothes.
Lately, fashion magazines have become very ambitious when presenting their content and fashion as part of contemporary culture, too. But still, for Nittve, something changed when he saw these big Meisel prints on the white walls of a gallery.
That was one of the things we brought into the exhibition, an interest in the shift of context and how that affected the reading of the different exhibits.
Another important input came from the encounter between Lars Nittve and Lars Nilsson, a Swedish designer who collaborated with fashion houses such as Christian Lacroix, Christian Dior, Ralph Lauren, Bill Blass, Nina Ricci, and Balmain, but who also developed an interest in art. As he was also in London in the early 2000s, he told Nittve about his collaboration with DAKS Tailoring on Old Bond Street. The issue was how to recognise that you were seeing an art installation when it was placed in the window of a tailor's shop. Nilsson, who worked on the border between art and fashion and their respective contexts, stated that he felt “protected” when showing at an art institution, as his work was perceived as art. When placed in the shop window, he wasn’t taken as seriously, though. Yet, what is interesting is that when you see his work displayed in the shop window, you would stop in front of it anyway, recognising that it is not a “usual” commercial display. You would think, “Hmm, this is interesting, it's not an ordinary window display, it’s a commission to an artist”. Lars Nilsson joined our curatorial team because he was so attuned to these issues of context specificity.
Salka Hallström, fashion editor and writer, was the fourth person who knew the most about fashion among us. But we were not making a show about the best or most interesting fashion designers, but about the ones we thought bordered on art. The way they worked was closer to the way artists work: they made very topical collections, the presentations were very performance-like, and so on. More conceptual design in some instances, and sometimes a very extravagant visual quality. It was also a reaction to some things we sensed were getting boring in the art.
DD: While reading Salka Hallström Bornold’s essay, I noticed she wrote: “We want to show fashion, not art”. How did you deal with that, and how did the museum context, which is the container dedicated to contemporary art, semantically influence the items and works on display? Also, how were you intending to make an exhibition that would be different from all those previous tickling art and fashion crossovers?
MaP: Part of that Salka’s statement had to do with the identity of the fashion designers that we didn't want to violate in any way. But fashion doesn't need art to be important.
On the other hand, Moderna Museet's mission as an art museum differs from that of many similar museums in that we don't have a design department or anything similar. So far, we have only focused on painting, sculpture, video, and so on. But when the art definition expanded, and it engulfed other things, or when things moved into that, we looked at these crossovers and didn’t want to name them art; we wanted to look at them from another perspective. In the exhibition in Florence you mentioned, fashion designers were asked to “act” like artists, to do something using disciplinary and expressive languages akin to contemporary art. We didn't commission anything like that or ask the fashion designers to make art. We showed what we thought was their best work: their strongest piece of clothing, or a presentation from a fashion show staged as a performance. Also, at that time, we had many photographers who moved in and out of fashion and art.
The artworks we chose for this show were in some way connected to the fashion world, not only through inspiration but also in a real sense.
DD: In your essay in the catalogue, you quoted Chris Townsend, curator and author of “Rapture: Art's Seduction by Fashion”, and his consideration that art was predominantly a male domain, while fashion was female. This has changed now, of course. Was this dynamic reflected in your curatorial choices?
MaP: For me, it was an interesting quotation, actually. I mean, we would never ever say this kind of thing now... this kind of strong polarisation is passe. Still, I wanted to speculate on why fashion is becoming more important for men. Also, Townsend says that fashionable men were considered effeminate. Maybe not in all cultural contexts, since to me, even if it might be a prejudice, it looks like that in Italy, a well-dressed man is not perceived as effeminate, while in the US, he would be. In some contexts, a dandy, or a well-dressed man, is an image of self-respect and self-confidence.
The exhibition “New Persona / New Universe” in Florence addressed the issue of gender shifting, and it was also explored in another show set up at Leopolda, the “Fourth Sex,” curated by Raf Simons and Francesco Bonami, where adolescence, androgyny, and gender fluidity were central topics. All these gender issues emerged from the art of the ’90s, a decade dominated by questions of identity on many levels.
DD: Is there a difference when curating a “fashion” exhibition and an “art” exhibition? What was your experience with “Fashination”?
MaP: The research part is quite the same. What you try to do is attribute meaning to the things. Of course, the referential fields can be different, and therefore, you wonder more when researching a specific fashion collection or editorial.
The logistic part is very different. When you are putting on a show involving artists, you deal, in most cases, either directly with them or through their galleries. Artists, gallerists, collectors or museums are part of the same infrastructure. They are interested in being involved in the exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, such as Moderna Museet. So they are interested in the concept of the show; they “speak the same language” when it comes to questions of lending, display, or installation of the artwork.
When we worked on “Fashination”, we included fashion designers who are part of the international fashion system, which is still dominated by a handful of cities – Paris, London, New York, Milan, Tokyo and Antwerp. We had to involve people who work in a different system, and not all of them were interested in being shown in a museum of contemporary art, like Moderna. In some cases, there would be a PR person working for a brand; in others, there was no one to discuss what to obtain for the show, how to handle landing, or logistics in general. It was challenging, I would say. I had to explain why it is interesting to show in the museum, and what kind of visibility it provides.
DD: Do you think the fashion curator is emerging as a new form of professional profile?
MaP: Eventually it will. Fashion is oriented towards commercial imperatives, but some people in the fashion industry are making culture through their collections, photos or editorials. Think of Viktor & Rolf, Hussein Chalayan, or some Belgian designers... they appear like artists using another visual vocabulary, the one of fashion. The same goes for many contemporary photographers who are exhibiting in both domains, art and fashion; think of Nick Knight, Wolfgang Tillmans, Corinne Day, Juergen Teller, Glen Luchford, Nigel Shafran, Mark Lebon, Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin or Philip-Lorca diCorcia. Our exhibition delved deeply into fashion photography, as it is the space where art and fashion merge most.
If there can be a space for a fashion curator as a professional profile in the future, it is precisely in this liminal space between fashion and art.
DD: How did you choose artists who were featured in the show?
MaP: We looked for artists whose projects established dialogue with the fashion system. Besides the already mentioned Lars Nilsson’s “Game Over”, commissioned by the DAKS fashion house and shown for the first time at the opening of their boutique on Bond Street in London, we also involved Alicia Framis and Vanessa Beecroft. We also commissioned a new work from Yinka Shonibare.
DD: You speak about “Fashion Art”, which is in tune with Alex Coles’s book titled “Design Art” (2005). What does this byname mean for you?
MaP: At the core of the exhibition was our conviction that there was a conceptual shift in the way some designers are creating fashion that is more akin to the way artists are working with ideas and concepts.
Before, when you would talk about the relation between art and fashion, you would quote Versace putting Warhol’s “Marilyn” as the pattern on the dress.
As Nittve said, concepts have become more unruly in recent times. They are expanding and mutating, merging and receding, and the borderland between art and fashion is among the most dynamic. Some fashion designers, such as Hussein Chalayan, Alexander McQueen, Maison Martin Margiela, Jun Takahashi, and Viktor & Rolf, produce collections and shows that, if exhibited in an art gallery or museum, are automatically considered art. Some create conceptual installations, while others lean towards performance. Others fit within the perspective of relational aesthetics, where the interaction between the viewer and the artwork is often direct and tangible.
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