Review of Monochrome: Painting in Black and White: National Gallery, London, October 30, 2017–February 18, 2018 (original) (raw)

Decolonizing Fashion: Defying the 'White Man's Gaze'

Vestoj, 2019

Evaluating the work of designers outside the established fashion capitals according to (references made to) their cultural identity not only continues to fulfil ‘the centre’s’ need to distil a diffuse and disordered peripheral Other into more rational categories based on collective identities, but also to differentiate and therefore discriminate and exclude, while simultaneously protecting its own boundaries. By setting this fashion apart as ethnic it not only diminishes it and discards it as ‘not real’ fashion, but also confirms French, Italian, American or British fashion as the norm.

Multicultural Fashion… Stirrings of Another Sense of Aesthetics and Memory

Feminist Review, 2002

This paper looks at the place of items long associated with the bodies of South Asian women in mainstream fashion. First, there will be a profiling of some of the scenes where bindhies, mendhies and related scents and sounds are donned and adored by white bodies. By participating in conversations with South Asian women in Britain in the second part of the article, the author is able to discuss some of the stirrings raised by the recent legitimization of these items by multicultural capitalism, leading towards an exploration of a different sense of aesthetics, memory and desire. The ambivalent attraction of limited recognition offered by the anthropological urge to ‘know’ the ethnic ‘other’ is noted. A consideration of the rage induced by the power of whiteness to play with ‘ethnic’ items which had not so long ago been reviled when they were worn by South Asian women points to the historical amnesia that underlies much multicultural celebration. The allure of images packaged as orien...

The displays, silences, and aesthetic possibilities of museum fashion's gendered geopolitics

2014

of the Master's Degree program. Dr. Busia's mentoring in creative articulations of art and politics invigorated the arguments that originally moved me to investigate fashion at museums. Dr. Rajan offered constant support especially in the organizational process of my project. Finally, I deeply thank my family and friends for their unconditional love and patience as they helped me navigate and complete this significant stage of my life. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………………… ii Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. iv Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………………... v Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………………………….. vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1: Museum Fashions and Politics of the Gaze……………………………………… 9 v History of Fashion in Art Museums…………………………………………………….. 14 v The Museum Gaze……………………………………………………………………………... 20 ♦ Appropriating the Gaze…………………………………………………………… 23 v The Art of the Museum………………………………………………………………………. 25 Chapter 2: Impress: Fashionably Painting Modern Identities………………………….. 28 v Fashion as Art…………………………………………………………………………………… 28 v Representations of Fashionable "Identities"……………………………………….. 34 v Fashion Language……………………………………………………………………………… 40

Nailing One’s Colours: Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire

Identities, 2016

Taking the view that national art museums should represent the multifarious populations they serve, this article explores racial material in Tate Britain's high-profile exhibition Artist and Empire: Facing Britain's Imperial Past (2015). The exhibition gave extensive coverage to two aspects of empire: hybrid fusions and the myth of white heroism, but gave limited attention to colonization as a maximally coercive system built on racist imaginings and abuse. Through cross-examination of the exhibition's content and absences, I explore whether Tate Britain is setting out the 'building blocks' for more diverse practice.

Colors & cultures : interdisciplinary explorations

Colors & cultures : interdisciplinary explorations, 2022

This is a bilingual collection of articles in English and in French by a group of international scholars who discuss the phenomenon of color in many different disciplines—which makes it possible to reflect on what the color experience means in various domains of human (and animal) life. Our contributions offer intercultural explorations from many corners of the color community. They deal with color as symbolism, in comparative linguistics, as a matter of feeling, cognition and epistemology, in Native American painting, about meanings of color in exemplary literary texts, in pop culture and fashion, in feminist argumentations, as an issue of the visual regimes of race in different art forms, of spirituality in Judeo-Christian culture and Islam as well as Modernist aesthetics, as a matter of color taxonomy at the Vatican and among traditional Zuni artists, in the business of dyeing textiles and its history, and in terms of technical issues such as the use of color to signal authenticity (stamps, paper money!), “unnatural” colors (fluorescence), or the role of color in new urban architecture.

The predicament of dress: polyvalency and the ironies of cultural identity

American Ethnologist, 1999

Briar College Tswana with whom I spoke in Botswana often "exposed" the sweeping and cumbrous Herero long dresses as a fraud. These dresses are of Western origin, they would tell me; they were copied from the white missionaries. Like anthropologists, these interpreters of cultural practice also tried to pinpoint a "true meaning" for the dress. In doing so, they effectively strip Herero women of colorful but superficial investitures to disclose the real people-universal humanity-underneath. In Botswana, only Herero women routinely wear "traditional ethnic" clothing. Divesting them of any implied ethnic purity, these Tswana comments assimilated Herero into the broader population of citizens of Botswana, who wear more contemporary Western-style dress. When I asked government officials about the ethnic composition of the broader population, they would always answer, "We are all Batswana here." By this, they meant that ethnic identity does not differentiate citizenship, that they are all citizens of the Botswana state. But they used the Tswana language term Batswana (Tswana people) instead of the more neutral batho ba Botswana (people of Botswana). Herero, too, recognized Tswana hegemony over the terms of everyday life and citizenship in their own term for unmarked, Western-style dress (ozombanda otjitjawana, Tswana-style clothing). 1 Following the lead of my Tswana interlocutors, in this article I, too, look critically at the Herero dress-not to uncover the universal and naked humanity underneath, but to examine the multiple layers of underskirts that support the outfit. Instead of reducing its meaning, I hope to retain the color of the dress, the sense of wearing it, the uncertainty and the ironic sensibility it provoked in Herero women in Mahalapye, Botswana, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the period of my fieldwork. Herero often use the dress as an unambiguous, straightforward icon of Herero identity-for example, a woman in the dress figured centrally in all logos debated over the years for the Herero Youth Association (see Durham 1995a). Similarly, the ethnic label "Herero" was rarely, if ever, questioned for its validity. But the full meaning of both the dress and the label was much less assured. The very women who proposed the logo-women who wore the dress frequently to public and ceremonial events (although not in their daily lives)-tittered and murmured cynically, and the Association men exchanged glances, when a To appreciate better the uncertain and unstable way that Herero women of Botswana understand their distinctive dress, I extend Bakhtin's notion of "sparkle" to include the disparate modalities through which meaning is constituted. An embodied subjectivity, or experiential sensibility, intrudes upon structured contrasts that also give the dress meaning in such registers as gender, ethnic relations, and the political economy of the liberal democratic state. I use Herero women's sense of the dress to question recent approaches to "culture" among scholars who look only at its differentiating function, since Herero women also see the dress as a means of building mutuality. Idress, identity, embodiment, agency, gender, southern Africa, culture]

The Emergence of Black Art in Britain

2017

This paper will map the emergence of black art in Britain through two exhibitions curated by Pakistan-born artist/writer/curator and activist Rasheed Araeen: Creation for Liberation (1984), a small open show at the Brixton Art Gallery, London; and The Other Story (1989), a groundbreaking exhibition of black British art at the Hayward Gallery. While the Brixton exhibition was part of the minority push to highlight local and community perspectives, the purpose of the latter exhibition was to install black British art, hitherto neglected by the ethnocentric art establishment, as a part of the story of British modernism. Thus the exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London sought to address the lack of ―visibility‖ concerning black art.<br>

Alien nation: contemporary art and black Britain

2011

About the book: This fascinating text introduces readers to postcolonial theory using the context of British media culture in ethnic minority communities to explain key ideas and debates. Each chapter considers a specific media output and uses a wealth of examples to offer an absorbing insight into postcolonial media for all students of cultural and media studies.

Phantom Colours – Colour, Fashion and Cinema in the 1920s

"This paper will consider the interrelationship of colour, fashion and Technicolor in the 1920s through an examination of the intermedial context of colour standardisation and categorisation. The 1920s was a period in which colour was highly 'in vogue'. In the art, advertising, architecture, design and cinema of the jazz age, cultural fascination with colour was lively. Colour was also a subject of intense international debates concerning its artistic, scientific, philosophical and educational significance. Moreover, with the development of new and more accessible dyes, colour was more freely available to be exploited and experimented with. As in the case of cinema where colour was used in a variety of ways. Stencil, tinting and toning, which had been developed for film colouring in the early 1900s, were still frequently used technologies, as were new systems such as Prizma, Technicolor and others. It was also a decade that saw increased activity around colour standardization and categorisation and moreover efforts to produce a universal colour nomenclature. Colour systems such as the Munsell system were promoted as meanings of measuring and standardising colour. In addition agencies such as America’s National Bureau of Standards were experimenting with the measurement of colour for a range of potential uses (Johnston, 2001). The language used to describe colour was also the focus of research by contemporaries culminating in 1930 in the publication of a Dictionary of Colour. Its purpose was to record all colour names in use up to that time and to provide ‘a record of color words and the particular sensations they identify’ (Maerz and Paul 1930). This desire to control the language of colour provides an interesting antithesis to the main function of colour in fashion. ‘Fashion thrives on novelty and change’ (Arnold, 2009) and colours are one means by which fashion can reinvent itself with each new season. This tension of colour in fashion is present in the world of textile and retail industry. For example, the Textile Color Card Association in America promoted the standardization of colours across the fashion industries as well as predicting and naming colours for the following season for the textile and retail industry (Blaszczyk, 2012). Thus proving there was a desire for both standardisation and variety in the growing consumer culture, resulting in colours becoming commodities. These intermedial conditions provide an important context to the development and use of colour in film during the decade and in particular the close interrelationship between colour, fashion and film. In order to explore these themes we will limit ourselves to two colours that were 'hot' in the spring of 1926 but were also linked to color films: Alice Blue from Irene (Green, 1926) and Phantom Red from Phantom of the Opera (1925). Both functioned within a remarkable intermedial network, not only were they famous for the use of a Technicolor II inserts but also for their connection to glamorous women. These stars functioned as examples for young girls that were searching for their identity in this ‘jazz age’ or 'années folles'. The paper will explore the history of both colours, their origins and changing meanings, through their interaction with the film they were featured in and the wider world of fashion and beyond. In this way, we hope to provide a better understanding of the meaning and function of colour in connection to cinema and fashion and of the friction between the wish to control and the need to vary in capitalistic consumer culture. "