The exhibition “Aware: Art Fashion Identity”, currently on at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, sets out to depict how artists and designers examine clothing as a mechanism to construct and communicate individual and collective identities.
Despite some lukewarm reviews in a number of newspapers, mostly owing to somewhat set expectations of what themes fashion exhibitions should focus on, this is an outstanding and thought-provoking collection of pieces by talented artists and designers that addresses the conceptual roles that fashion can have. The exhibition contains work by 30 emerging as well as established international contemporary practitioners including Hussein Chalayan, Andreas Gursky, Susie MacMurray, Alexander McQueen, Yoko Ono, Grayson Perry, Cindy Sherman, Yinka Shonibare and Yohji Yamamoto.
Photograph by Andy Stagg, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts
Occupying the main galleries of the Royal Academy’s Burlington Gardens building, “Aware” is divided into four clearly demarcated sections. The circular and fluid layout of the galleries allows the visitor the possibility of revisiting the art works at different paces and developing personal interpretations of the rich layers of meaning that they produce regarding the role of fashion in the construction of identity.
The first section, “Storytelling”, acknowledges the role of clothing in the representation of the self, within a formative background of personal history and moulded by shared cultural experiences. Visitors are welcomed to the exhibition by Grayson Perry’s ‘Artist’s Robe’ (2004), an elaborate patchwork coat of luxurious fabrics and a comment on the role and the status of artists in today’s world. This section also hosts works by artists Lucy Orta and Cindy Sherman and introduces the narrative of the exhibition by questioning the role of the body and the garment as material embodiments of identity and emotions. In this context, Susie MacMurray’s ‘Widow’ (2009), an elegant dress structure of black nappa leather covered in sharp dressmaker pins, translates the internal pain of love loss into an aggressive external presentation of the garment as object that inflicts pain to the wearer while repelling human contact.
Grayson Perry, 'Artist's Robe' (2004), courtesy Courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro Gallery
Susie MacMurray, 'Widow' (2009), photograph by Andy Stagg, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts
The second section “Building” addresses the concept that clothing can be both a form of protection and a way to carry one’s own shelter, referencing the nomadic, portable nature of modern life. On display is ‘Shelter Me 1’ (2005) by Mella Jaarsma, well-known for work establishing parallels between garments and architecture. Jaarsma’s piece depicts shelter not as a house but as the minimal construction needed for individual protection according to the proportions of the human body. Similarly, Azra Akšamija’s ‘Nomadic Mosque’ (2005) portrays a garment as wearable religious architecture, challenging commonly held notions of the physical public and collective spaces of worship. She removes architecture, usually seen as an important or essential element of worship and replaces it with clothing, clearly demonstrating through her nomadic mosque how clothing is interpreted as the substructure for prayer and religious beliefs to exist as intimate and personal processes that quite literally envelope the individual.
The garments in the section “Belonging and Confronting” examine ideas of nationality as well as displacement and political and social confrontation, recognising the tensions associated with the assimilation of new cultures and traditions. In Palestinian artist Sharif Waked’s captivating video installation ‘Chic Point’ (2003) the opposing interpretations of revealing flesh as fashion prerogative or as humiliation juxtapose two worlds, one of high fashion and the other of semi-imprisonment. Zips, pleats and gaps cut the fabric in the same way that knives and guns inflicted scars and wounds on the skin and flesh underneath, alerting for the physical and mental consequences of war on the construction of the self. Yinka Shonibare’s ‘Little Rich Girls’ (2010) was specially commissioned by the London College of Fashion for this exhibition and executed in partnership with tailor Chris Stevens. It consists of 15 colourful 19th-century children’s dresses made of Dutch wax and printed batik fabric that hang imposingly yet playfully on a vibrant blue wall. Considering that the original fabric was introduced by the Dutch to Africa, the piece questions the crossover of polarised collective identities between the imperial metropolis and the colony and how the semiotics of fabric and fashion can evolve towards constructing opposite extremes of identity through time. Katerina Šedá’s ‘For Every Dog a Different Master’ (2007), a selection from a larger interactive project that included 1,000 shirts printed with images of a suburban housing estate, explores the potential benefits of group identity through clothes in a rather witty way. The printed shirts were made with the intention to be offered and shared between neighbours of the estate as a way for the residents to start communicating with each other and establish a pleasant collective cohabitation.
Sharif Waked, still from 'Chic Point Fashion for Israeli Checkpoints' (2003)
Yinka Shonibare, 'Little Rich Girls' (2010), photograph by Andy Stagg, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts
The final section explores the importance of “Performance” in the relationships between fashion, clothing and the roles that individuals play in daily life. It opens with a red lace dress from Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 1998 collection ‘Joan’, inspired as it was by Joan of Arc. Also featured is the famous film footage of Yoko Ono’s performance of ‘Cut Piece’ at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York (1965). For this piece the artist invited the public to cut strips from her clothes while she was still wearing them. As the scraps of fabric fall to the floor, the unveiling of the female body suggests the liberating destruction of barriers that convention imposes on the self. “Performance” also presents to us Hussein Chalayan’s ‘Son of Sonzai Suru’ (2010), possibly the most significant piece in the entire exhibition.
Alexander McQueen, 'Joan' (Autumn/Winter 1998), photograph by Andy Stagg, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts
Stills from Yoko Ono’s performance of 'Cut Piece' at Carnegie Recital Hall, New York (1965)
Also commissioned by the London College of Fashion for this exhibition, Chalayan’s sculpture, inspired by the 300-year old Japanese tradition of Bunraku puppet theatre, is based around the semiotics of luxury and high fashion. The canvas-like white dress and mannequin are only conferred their identity and aesthetic value through a film projected on to them, showing delicate shapes and colours for the dress and beautiful facial features as socially imposed and artificial layers of meaning about beauty. This distinction between medium and adornment invites questioning of the dehumanised, two-dimensional representation of an item of clothing: despite being imbued with fabricated values of social status, the dress is ultimately an inanimate object devoid of history and meaning. At the same time, the dynamic and gracious flow of the fabric of the dress (emphasised by airflow from electric fans) is restrained by three devilish figures clothed in black that, by holding the dress in an aggressive way, suggest the social impositions that condition individual taste and behavioural freedom. Located near the end of the exhibition, this depiction of style, celebrity culture, religious impositions and other societal forms of group pressure as essentially manipulative social constructs adds a very poignant urgency to the interpretation of the fundamental purposes of items of clothing: as protection against the elements and for adornment.
Hussein Chalayan, 'Son of Sonzai Suru' (2010), photograph by Andy Stagg, courtesy Royal Academy of Arts
As a mechanism of expression, the exploration of the role of clothing has been at the heart of the interpretative processes by several artists attuned to the social situations that surround them. This exhibition allows a glimpse into the artists’ intellectual and emotional processes taken while questioning individual and collective decisions and behaviours on how to clad the body. The final art work can show how such decisions and behaviours can then be deemed suitable or deviant within socially constructed personal and communal environments. In other words, although clothing frequently fulfils a practical and protective function, it can also be effective in celebrating or suppressing identity and in indicating allegiances. This exhibition describes how fashion has the powerful ability not only to engender ways to make individuals feel closer to a coveted social status but also, and more importantly, to inform and address the most diverse personal and collective conscious and unconscious experiences and needs.
Developed by curator Gabi Scardi with artist Lucy Orta, “Aware: Art Fashion Identity” was skilfully co-curated by Kathleen Soriano and Edith Devaney from the Royal Academy and is on display until 30 January 2011. Alongside the exhibition, there is a comprehensive programme of public events including lectures, a two-day symposium, family days, and film screenings.
