Inside the Capsule of Artistic Practices: Wearing and Performing the Moving Image (original) (raw)
Related papers
Towards a practice of unmaking The essay film as critical discourse for fashion in the expanded field, 2018
Abstract Going against the traditional productivist nature of fashion design, this practice-based Ph.D. proposes a strategy for critical fashion practices in a research context at the intersection of fashion, fine arts and film methodologies. This interdisciplinary strategy investigates fashion in the expanded field, exploring fashion practice as a form of critical thinking, questioning the fashion system itself: a practice of unmaking, the purpose of this research is to develop a practice-based method of producing an essay film as an artistic reflection critically discussing the problems of the fashion system, providing new insights into the way a fashion designer develops new approaches that can expand the action spaces available for fashion. Since the etymology of the word ‘fashion’ relates it to the Latin factio, meaning ‘making’ or ‘doing,’ to ‘unmake’ fashion carries in itself a paradox; it is both a metaphorical undoing and a methodological one, a practice of fashion resistance by not producing clothing, a deconstruction of fashion in order to understand what it’s made of – like unpicking the seams of a jacket in order to analyse its construction. It de-constructs underlying assumptions regarding a transition to post-productivism, exposing the limitations of current market-driven fashion design processes. Drawing on Rosalind Krauss’s notion of sculpture in the expanded field (1979), as used in the discourse on cinema (Bardon et al., 2015), this research documents the development of experimental fashion films since the 1980s and the interdisciplinary fashion practices that stand at the edge of the fashion discipline. It investigates how thought experiments can steer the creative process towards a critique of fashion, drawing from modernist conceptual and de-materialised art practices towards the development of a conceptual fashion. The research methodology developed within the practice extends the potential of communicating through the essay-film format in order to critique fashion within the contemporary context of heightened concerns about climate change and environmental issues induced by mass-production, fast-fashion, and global fashion distribution and consumption. This is developed through a juxtaposition of allegorical images resembling a thought process: the fashion image is used as a thinking-form for constructing a critique of its own systems. The thesis emphasises the importance of taking a critical stance to fashion due to the lack of self-reflection within current fashion practices, synthesising a body of knowledge to inform practitioners of experimental, critical fashion while revealing complexities within the communication of these concerns, proposing fashion as the representation of a deconstructive thought where dress itself becomes ‘immaterial’.
Walter Benjamin’s argument on the separation of the aura from artwork, due to technological reproducibility, continues to resonate in contemporary visual culture where the ‘image-copy’ has become an accepted means of representation, over the ‘object-real’. In this respect, the aura,which corresponded to material quality of the artwork as an ‘object-thing’, has become less accessibledue to the accelerated growth of reproduction through new modalities in the postmodern era. This affected Wim Wenders during the filming of Notebook on Cities and Clothes, a documentary on the conceptual fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto that reveals his craft-oriented, inimitable deconstructive design process, in particular signifying the meaning of identity and the reconsideration of the concept of aura. Reading the film in light of Yamamoto’s open process and his iconoclastic personification – as opposed to the myth of the designer that is prioritized in the hermetic world of fashion – along with Wenders’s challenge to authorship allows us to map out the possible relationships between the aura and identity. Correspondingly, Yamamoto’s auratic resistance to obsessions with image and novelty in the spatio-temporal frame of contemporary fashion are revealed through the film. Enabling a cross-disciplinary reading, the film illustrates interactions between the disciplines of filmmaking and fashion design, i.e. the connections between image production, cutting and processes of assembly. Finally, contrasting the multiplicity of images and products in the age of reproduction, the film specifically focuses on the notion of tactility and materiality in both creative fields. Keywords Dialectical image; auratic resistance; materiality; tactility; Yohji Yamamoto; Wim Wenders.
I Live in This Dress: Materiality and Identity in Visual Art Performance
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, 2019
Following the thread of the Feminist New Materialists, in “I Live in this Dress” the author, a visual art performer, examines the workings of materiality and identity within her own practice. The process of three recent works, Point Out, Touch On and Red We (all 2017) includes the design and construction of a sculptural wearable and techniques of traditional garment making—fabric draping, sewing and embroidery—to reveal a co-embodiment and shared authorship between artist and garment, woman and dress. This deep commitment to the material underpins a shift in selfness toward a collective identity, or alterself. Insomuch as the making makes the performance, the author suggests, the making makes the performer.
Mediated materiality and meaning: curating experience through the body and dress
Fashion & Performance; Materiality, Meaning, Media is an evolving exhibition collaboratively curated by Anna Nicole Ziesche and myself. Most recently developed for the Design Hub, Melbourne in February 2015, it is the outcome of the curators’ individual and collaborative research and the performative development of a smaller pilot exhibition of the same name for the Arnhem Mode Biennale in 2013. The research and resulting exhibition demonstrates a commitment to investigate and communicate contemporary ideas around dress, the body, and performance in ways which connect but go beyond traditional parameters of fashion or performance. Through contemporary moving image based works, material artefacts, garments and performance the exhibition exposes artistic approaches driven by the moving and dressed body that embrace aesthetics, form, spatial concerns, bodily narratives and process as performance. In the work of all the selected artists and designers the performance relies upon clothing and the wearer’s active engagement as integral to the development of the performance and all are communicated through time based media. Performance is usually experienced in and through the live moment and could be understood as becoming something other than performance through mediated forms such as film and exhibition that are separated from the live experience. The problems associated with exhibiting film, dress and lived experience are confronted here in the curatorial process for Fashion & Performance. Through discussion of the research lead, curatorial approach an analysis of curating ‘dress film’ through performance based strategies and bodily knowledge’s of dress is uncovered. Understood through writings on performance and technology, interactive art, and embodiment this chapter explores how the ‘mediated experience’ of clothing and the body, curated through this specific exhibition has extended the experience for the viewer/ participant. Ultimately the curatorial approach sought to engage audiences on an experiential level through their own bodily knowledge, kinaesthetic, sensorial engagement and knowledge of wearing.
Fashionating Images. Audiovisual Media Studies Meet Fashion
Over the past decades, fashion has acquired centrality in social and economic processes in Western culture for its capacity to penetrate and influence both cultural production and identitarian practices. In the last few years, the proliferation of media objects, such as fashion films, makeover TV shows, fashion blogs and vlogs has shown how prolific the encounter between fashion and audiovisual media can be. The aim of this special issue is to explore this intersection and, consequently, the cross fertilization between fashion studies and media studies, with particular regard to audiovisual media, such as cinema, television, advertising and digital video. The fundamental idea behind all the contributions to the issue is that a strong mutual relationship binds the moving-image and fashion together, where by ‘fashion’ is not meant merely clothing, but rather a wide set of social performative practices characterized by a tension towards – or even an obsession with – the ‘new’. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, the elective affinities between the moving-image and fashion can be explored using a number of approaches, and in regard to a variety of formats and media environments, according to the extension of the moving-image/fashion relationship from cinema screens to TV screens, computer monitors and mobile devices displays. This Introduction traces a genealogy of the intersection between these two media, from cinema to YouTube, and highlights some of the main theoretical issues dealt with by the contributions.
Fashion & Performance: Materiality, Meaning, Media
Bugg J. ‘Fashion & Performance; Materiality, Meaning, Media’, Lidewjij Edelkoort and Philip Fimmano (eds.), Fetishism in Fashion, Arnhem Mode Biennale book, Frame publishers, Amsterdam, 2013, pp. 220-22 Fashion and Performance The worlds of fashion and performance have tended to be analysed and understood in the context of their own disciplines as separate and distinctly different in terms of their design process and intention. However as performance and fashion practice both increasingly move into new and site-specific contexts and as focus is extended around conceptual and experimental approaches, the divisions between clothing designed as conceptual fashion and clothing designed as costume for performance have arguably become less clear.
CS 1/2017 - Fashionating Images. Audiovisual Media Studies Meet Fashion
2017
Over the past decades, fashion has acquired centrality in social and economic processes for its capacity to penetrate and influence both cultural production and identitarian practices. The proliferation of media objects such as fashion films, makeover TV shows, fashion blogs and vlogs has shown how prolific the encounter between fashion and audiovisual media can be. The aim of this special issue is to explore this intersection and, consequently, the cross fertilization between fashion studies and media studies, with particular regard to audiovisual media, such as cinema, television, advertising and digital video. The essays interrogate how the combination of fashion and the moving-image enables us to reflect upon the ubiquitous presence of fashion in our media-saturated landscape, and at the same time upon the ubiquitous presence of media in socio-cultural practices and industrial processes such as fashion. Questioning the encounter between audiovisual media and fashion brings an elective affinity to light. If fashion is central to cinema and television and gives rise to a wide range of new genres and formats, it also impacts on the forms of representation and expression of identity and the body via personal and social media, according to the prevailing customs and tastes of our place and time. This encounter is a terrain of experimentation with new trends in the media experience – ones that rely on performativity and the enhancement of the viewer/user’s agency. After all, audiovisual media are similarly about constructing a fictional (and entertaining) world and actively and creatively inhabiting it as an essential part of the actual world.
entaglements journal_Volume 4, Issue 2, 2021
This paper concerns the research of the Centre of New Media and Public Feminist Practices (CNMFPP), based in Greece. The CNMFPP was established at the University of Thessaly, at the Department of Architecture, in 2018, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI) and the General Secretariat for Research and Innovation (GSRI) (grant agreement 2284). In particular, it analyses the project of the artist Vasiliea Stylianidou aka Franck-Lee Alli-Tis: 'WordMord'. Her* work addresses urgent feminist issues within the globalised technological condition by activating different aesthetic techniques, such as performative reading, re-enactment, video, and, in its second and third phase, coding and archiving, thus turning our attention to specific situated cases of targeted female* bodies, technology, and the dynamics of articulations and desire as potentia. 'WordMord', via different modalities, aims at the circulation of a differentiated meaning, affect, and wording, connecting female, exploited bodies-as diverse as they might be-and encompassing the possibilities of social change and drastic political pathways today.