EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART
EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART
EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART
EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART
EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART
EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART

2016

“WHERE TIME BECOMES SPACE”¹

 

“If the modern figure of the art critic has been well recognised since Diderot and Baudelaire, the curator’s true raison d’être remains largely undefined. No real methodology or clear legacy stands out, in spite of today’s proliferation of courses in curatorial studies. The curator’s role appears already built into pre-existing art professions, such as museum director, art critic or art dealer.”² 

If, as described here by Christophe Cherix, currently Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the contemporary art curator is still seen as a professional figure of “undefined” roots and character, how might fashion curators be seen, given that they are more recent figures operating within a smaller niche and who tend to have even more varied formative backgrounds?  

This question might be followed by one that is more important in this context: how do we outline methodological principles for teaching fashion curation? 
Next, how do we put these into practice through courses or master's degree programs in fashion curating? 

Curatorial studies and master's in curating have been proliferating since the mid-'90s in the art context, and we are now facing similar phenomena within the field of fashion education. 
So questions inevitably arise: what are the roots of fashion curating practices? 
Which exhibitions should be considered “milestones”? 
Above all, how can fashion curation go beyond its niche of costume departments or fashion museums, in order to provide wider transdisciplinary platforms for upcoming generations of creatives?
Similarly, as an art curator, the fashion curator’s role is built into pre-existing vocations or professions as well, and its roots can be traced in even wider sets of practices, the paths of which were paved by those that we now consider to be precursors and pioneers: architect and designer Bernard Rudofsky, collector and fashion historian Doris Langley Moore, photographer and costume designer Cecil Beaton, journalist and magazine editor Diana Vreeland, and art historian Richard Martin, to mention just a few. 

All of them have produced fashion exhibitions tapping into fields of knowledge that can be considered crucial for curatorial work: ethnology and anthropology, design and architecture, and, above all, art and fashion history. Their examples indicate that heterogeneous knowledge is based on curatorial work, which nonetheless cannot be fruitful if it lacks the ability to capture the current zeitgeist. 
Curatorial work is grounded in both multi-layered knowledge and historical accuracy, but it becomes pertinent only if it can catalyse new awareness and produce new meanings. 

It therefore becomes important to look back into the history of fashion exhibitions, highlighting those that went beyond mere displays of clothing, becoming more complex cognitive or sensorial experiences. 
One of the first to really make an impact was the exhibition “Are Clothes Modern?” curated by Bernard Rudofsky³ in the brief lapse of time when he was the Director of Apparel Research and Guest Director of Exhibitions at MoMA in New York in the mid-1940s. “Are Clothes Modern” conceptually addressed the very nature of fashion and its power to transform the morphology of the human body and influence human behaviour. Its display was devised as an “instrument to reflect on the theoretical status of fashion and its inner-nature, during the moment of encounter with the museum.”⁴ Austere and graphical in its display and controversial in its approach, “Are Clothes Modern?” now appears as a paradigmatically relevant precursor for that typology of exhibitions that aim to question and redefine the very notion of fashion. 
“Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back”, curated by Judith Clark and based on the theoretical writings of Caroline Evans,⁵ can be considered as one of the more recent attempts to use the medium of exhibition in order to address conceptual and ontological questions related to contemporary fashion and its transposition into a museum display. 

Theoretical and even curatorial challenges in this case express, and continue to express, a willingness to outline not only what fashion is, but also what it can become. Moreover, the challenge remains concerning ways of outlining what a fashion exhibition is and how this can generate a more profound consideration of fashion phenomena. 

Nowadays, examining an “extended field of fashion” has become pertinent: addressing body-related practices that can be called “trans-fashional” and which dwell in that liminal zone between art, architecture, design, photography, film, performing arts and fashion, has become a key for grasping conceptual and creative forerunners. 

There have been moments in fashion-exhibition history that took this approach: already in the late ‘60s, the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art produced the exhibition “The Art of Fashion”⁶ involving cutting-edge creatives operating in the field of visual arts, choreography, film costumes or fashion, such as Louise Nivelson, Alwin Nikolais, Irene Sharaff, Norman Norrel and Andre Courreges, examining artistic aspects in fashion. 
An exhibition of the same name was held many years later at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen⁷, challenging fashion designers such as Viktor&Rolf, Naomi Filmer, Hussein Chalayan, Anna-Nicole Ziesche and Walter Van Beirendonck to express themselves through works that would extend their practice towards installations and the performative realm. 
The creative excursions undertaken by these designers are not only interesting as examples of cross-pollination between different disciplinary approaches, but also as result of precise curatorial strategy. In this sense, they indicate the dominant features of the curatorial role. 
On the one hand, the curator’s role is to provide a semantic context for better understanding certain creative work, and on the other, more importantly, to act as a catalyst, capable of stimulating the emergence of forms and meanings that will shift the common notion of fashion, no longer seen only as a producer of consumer goods, but also as a generator of cultural values. The task of the contemporary fashion curator is to provide the space, context and means for presenting creatives who tend to inject more complex content into artefacts that are body- or fashion-related, and make their work understandable and raise awareness of it among a wide audience, as well as among the institutions of fashion and creative industries. 
Just as Hans Ulrich Obrist defined the art curator as a “catalyst – someone who builds bridges between art and many different audiences”⁸, the fashion curator is also someone who is supposed to not only build bridges towards different audiences (which are already there and quite numerous), but mostly to build platforms for presenting the complexity of fashion, which as we know, goes far beyond the garment itself. 

This is the challenge for future generations of fashion curators: to generate appropriate contexts for those practices that use the language of fashion as a tool to explore issues relating to corporality, identity, gender, and other questions sparked by the recent trends of technological advancement and cultural homogenisation.

With the above-listed questions and examples, I was attempting to outline not only the profile of the curator, but the structure of the formative path that this professional figure has to undertake, and which could be redefined as follows: 

  • Becoming a curator means being a historian: learning about the history of exhibitions, collections, archives, museums, pioneering curatorial methods, as well as conservation methods and standards.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a theorist: analysing fashion in terms of multi-layered cultural, social, and economic phenomena, as well as the system of signs produced at the points of intersection between a variety of languages of expression, including visual art, photography, film, performing arts, architecture, design, etc. 
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a writer, since designing an exhibition is a form of “spatial writing” that requires the same abilities of narration and syntax as an author.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a forecaster: learning to read and decipher content that is expressed through visual forms created by designers and other creatives, as well as sharpening one’s critical sense for recognising and selecting those that show a glimpse of the “new”.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a promoter: learning to create and apply the most appropriate communication and promotional strategies.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a manager: learning to raise funds, manage budgets, generate income (material and immaterial); build teamwork and foster collective intelligence. 
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a producer: learning to work in an organised manner, manage logistics, and design and architecture of display.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a creative director: the ability to make a productive synthesis of all of these skills and knowledge in order to create one’s own “curatorial signature”. 

In the field of education, teaching curating means opening up opportunities for interconnecting fields of study that were once separate. It also means overcoming the principle of highly specialised knowledge in favour of a more generalist education that trains professionals capable of working in a flexible and versatile manner. It is increasingly clear that “one-job-for-life” is becoming an obsolete notion, so the potential of courses to train multi-talented professional figures, such as fashion curators and similar roles, highlights the foresight of those educational institutions that are ambitious enough to be at the forefront of these shifts.

Fashion is commonly connected with time, but when it is exhibited, it also involves “the space”. For the father of curatorial practices, Harald Szeemann, this “translation of time into space” lies at the heart of exhibition production. Thus, “the space” has to be charged with content and meaning, as well as with visual and sensorial stimuli, and to do so, curatorial practice and its teaching must assimilate a broad range of knowledge. But to progress, it must search for tangential points among the avant-garde and cutting-edge practices of other arts, foremost among these being, in my opinion, contemporary art and its very open and experimental curatorial approaches. 

 

Published in “Fashion Curating / La Mode Expose: Understanding Fashion through the Exhibition”, edited by Luca Marchetti, HEAD Publisher, 2017.

 

¹ Paraphrase of “Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit” (“Here time becomes space”.) from Wagner’s Parsifal, quoted by Harald Szeemann in the interview with Carolee Thea. THEA, C. (2001). In: WILLIAMS, G. (ed.)  Foci: - Interviews with ten international curators. New York: Apex Art Curatorial Program, p. 27.
² CHERIX, C. (2008). In: OBRIST, H.U. (ed.) A Brief History of Curating. Zurich: JRP Ringer, p. 6.
³ Museum of Modern Art, New York, 28 November 1944 - 4 March 1945.
⁴ MONTI, G. (2015) Are Clothes Modern? - La moda secondo Bernard Rudofsky. Iin: CIAMMAICHELLA, M.
⁵ In particular, see Caroline Evans’ seminal book Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
⁶ “The Art of Fashion”, curated by Polaire Weissman, at the Costume Institute of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (23 October 1967 - 1 January 1968).
⁷ “The Art of Fashion”, curated by José Teunissen and Judith Clark, at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (19 September 2009 - 10 January 2010).
⁸ OBRIST, H.U and THEA, C. (interview) (2001). In: WILLIAMS, G. (ed.) Foci: Interviews with ten international curators. New York: Apex Art Curatorial Program, p. 89.

BACK

2016

“WHERE TIME BECOMES SPACE”¹

 

“If the modern figure of the art critic has been well recognised since Diderot and Baudelaire, the curator’s true raison d’être remains largely undefined. No real methodology or clear legacy stands out, in spite of today’s proliferation of courses in curatorial studies. The curator’s role appears already built into pre-existing art professions, such as museum director, art critic or art dealer.”² 

If, as described here by Christophe Cherix, currently Chief Curator of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the contemporary art curator is still seen as a professional figure of “undefined” roots and character, how might fashion curators be seen, given that they are more recent figures operating within a smaller niche and who tend to have even more varied formative backgrounds?  

This question might be followed by one that is more important in this context: how do we outline methodological principles for teaching fashion curation? 
Next, how do we put these into practice through courses or master's degree programs in fashion curating? 

Curatorial studies and master's in curating have been proliferating since the mid-'90s in the art context, and we are now facing similar phenomena within the field of fashion education. 
So questions inevitably arise: what are the roots of fashion curating practices? 
Which exhibitions should be considered “milestones”? 
Above all, how can fashion curation go beyond its niche of costume departments or fashion museums, in order to provide wider transdisciplinary platforms for upcoming generations of creatives?
Similarly, as an art curator, the fashion curator’s role is built into pre-existing vocations or professions as well, and its roots can be traced in even wider sets of practices, the paths of which were paved by those that we now consider to be precursors and pioneers: architect and designer Bernard Rudofsky, collector and fashion historian Doris Langley Moore, photographer and costume designer Cecil Beaton, journalist and magazine editor Diana Vreeland, and art historian Richard Martin, to mention just a few. 

All of them have produced fashion exhibitions tapping into fields of knowledge that can be considered crucial for curatorial work: ethnology and anthropology, design and architecture, and, above all, art and fashion history. Their examples indicate that heterogeneous knowledge is based on curatorial work, which nonetheless cannot be fruitful if it lacks the ability to capture the current zeitgeist. 
Curatorial work is grounded in both multi-layered knowledge and historical accuracy, but it becomes pertinent only if it can catalyse new awareness and produce new meanings. 

It therefore becomes important to look back into the history of fashion exhibitions, highlighting those that went beyond mere displays of clothing, becoming more complex cognitive or sensorial experiences. 
One of the first to really make an impact was the exhibition “Are Clothes Modern?” curated by Bernard Rudofsky³ in the brief lapse of time when he was the Director of Apparel Research and Guest Director of Exhibitions at MoMA in New York in the mid-1940s. “Are Clothes Modern” conceptually addressed the very nature of fashion and its power to transform the morphology of the human body and influence human behaviour. Its display was devised as an “instrument to reflect on the theoretical status of fashion and its inner-nature, during the moment of encounter with the museum.”⁴ Austere and graphical in its display and controversial in its approach, “Are Clothes Modern?” now appears as a paradigmatically relevant precursor for that typology of exhibitions that aim to question and redefine the very notion of fashion. 
“Malign Muses: When Fashion Turns Back”, curated by Judith Clark and based on the theoretical writings of Caroline Evans,⁵ can be considered as one of the more recent attempts to use the medium of exhibition in order to address conceptual and ontological questions related to contemporary fashion and its transposition into a museum display. 

Theoretical and even curatorial challenges in this case express, and continue to express, a willingness to outline not only what fashion is, but also what it can become. Moreover, the challenge remains concerning ways of outlining what a fashion exhibition is and how this can generate a more profound consideration of fashion phenomena. 

Nowadays, examining an “extended field of fashion” has become pertinent: addressing body-related practices that can be called “trans-fashional” and which dwell in that liminal zone between art, architecture, design, photography, film, performing arts and fashion, has become a key for grasping conceptual and creative forerunners. 

There have been moments in fashion-exhibition history that took this approach: already in the late ‘60s, the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art produced the exhibition “The Art of Fashion”⁶ involving cutting-edge creatives operating in the field of visual arts, choreography, film costumes or fashion, such as Louise Nivelson, Alwin Nikolais, Irene Sharaff, Norman Norrel and Andre Courreges, examining artistic aspects in fashion. 
An exhibition of the same name was held many years later at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen⁷, challenging fashion designers such as Viktor&Rolf, Naomi Filmer, Hussein Chalayan, Anna-Nicole Ziesche and Walter Van Beirendonck to express themselves through works that would extend their practice towards installations and the performative realm. 
The creative excursions undertaken by these designers are not only interesting as examples of cross-pollination between different disciplinary approaches, but also as result of precise curatorial strategy. In this sense, they indicate the dominant features of the curatorial role. 
On the one hand, the curator’s role is to provide a semantic context for better understanding certain creative work, and on the other, more importantly, to act as a catalyst, capable of stimulating the emergence of forms and meanings that will shift the common notion of fashion, no longer seen only as a producer of consumer goods, but also as a generator of cultural values. The task of the contemporary fashion curator is to provide the space, context and means for presenting creatives who tend to inject more complex content into artefacts that are body- or fashion-related, and make their work understandable and raise awareness of it among a wide audience, as well as among the institutions of fashion and creative industries. 
Just as Hans Ulrich Obrist defined the art curator as a “catalyst – someone who builds bridges between art and many different audiences”⁸, the fashion curator is also someone who is supposed to not only build bridges towards different audiences (which are already there and quite numerous), but mostly to build platforms for presenting the complexity of fashion, which as we know, goes far beyond the garment itself. 

This is the challenge for future generations of fashion curators: to generate appropriate contexts for those practices that use the language of fashion as a tool to explore issues relating to corporality, identity, gender, and other questions sparked by the recent trends of technological advancement and cultural homogenisation.

With the above-listed questions and examples, I was attempting to outline not only the profile of the curator, but the structure of the formative path that this professional figure has to undertake, and which could be redefined as follows: 

  • Becoming a curator means being a historian: learning about the history of exhibitions, collections, archives, museums, pioneering curatorial methods, as well as conservation methods and standards.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a theorist: analysing fashion in terms of multi-layered cultural, social, and economic phenomena, as well as the system of signs produced at the points of intersection between a variety of languages of expression, including visual art, photography, film, performing arts, architecture, design, etc. 
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a writer, since designing an exhibition is a form of “spatial writing” that requires the same abilities of narration and syntax as an author.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a forecaster: learning to read and decipher content that is expressed through visual forms created by designers and other creatives, as well as sharpening one’s critical sense for recognising and selecting those that show a glimpse of the “new”.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a promoter: learning to create and apply the most appropriate communication and promotional strategies.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a manager: learning to raise funds, manage budgets, generate income (material and immaterial); build teamwork and foster collective intelligence. 
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a producer: learning to work in an organised manner, manage logistics, and design and architecture of display.
  • Becoming a curator means becoming a creative director: the ability to make a productive synthesis of all of these skills and knowledge in order to create one’s own “curatorial signature”. 

In the field of education, teaching curating means opening up opportunities for interconnecting fields of study that were once separate. It also means overcoming the principle of highly specialised knowledge in favour of a more generalist education that trains professionals capable of working in a flexible and versatile manner. It is increasingly clear that “one-job-for-life” is becoming an obsolete notion, so the potential of courses to train multi-talented professional figures, such as fashion curators and similar roles, highlights the foresight of those educational institutions that are ambitious enough to be at the forefront of these shifts.

Fashion is commonly connected with time, but when it is exhibited, it also involves “the space”. For the father of curatorial practices, Harald Szeemann, this “translation of time into space” lies at the heart of exhibition production. Thus, “the space” has to be charged with content and meaning, as well as with visual and sensorial stimuli, and to do so, curatorial practice and its teaching must assimilate a broad range of knowledge. But to progress, it must search for tangential points among the avant-garde and cutting-edge practices of other arts, foremost among these being, in my opinion, contemporary art and its very open and experimental curatorial approaches. 

 

Published in “Fashion Curating / La Mode Expose: Understanding Fashion through the Exhibition”, edited by Luca Marchetti, HEAD Publisher, 2017.

 

¹ Paraphrase of “Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit” (“Here time becomes space”.) from Wagner’s Parsifal, quoted by Harald Szeemann in the interview with Carolee Thea. THEA, C. (2001). In: WILLIAMS, G. (ed.)  Foci: - Interviews with ten international curators. New York: Apex Art Curatorial Program, p. 27.
² CHERIX, C. (2008). In: OBRIST, H.U. (ed.) A Brief History of Curating. Zurich: JRP Ringer, p. 6.
³ Museum of Modern Art, New York, 28 November 1944 - 4 March 1945.
⁴ MONTI, G. (2015) Are Clothes Modern? - La moda secondo Bernard Rudofsky. Iin: CIAMMAICHELLA, M.
⁵ In particular, see Caroline Evans’ seminal book Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
⁶ “The Art of Fashion”, curated by Polaire Weissman, at the Costume Institute of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (23 October 1967 - 1 January 1968).
⁷ “The Art of Fashion”, curated by José Teunissen and Judith Clark, at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (19 September 2009 - 10 January 2010).
⁸ OBRIST, H.U and THEA, C. (interview) (2001). In: WILLIAMS, G. (ed.) Foci: Interviews with ten international curators. New York: Apex Art Curatorial Program, p. 89.

EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART
EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART
EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART
EXPERIMENTS IN FASHION AND ART

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