To (un)dress: Clothes, Women and Feminist Ideology

in Modern Art
Tal Dekel, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Abstract: Clothes carry inherent implications and can be used for examining sociological, psycholo-
gical and even philosophical questions. They serve as a barometer of change in society and are related
to issues of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Starting with the end of 19th century, during which
the modern feminist movement was frst established in the West, seminal art works done by women
artists will be discussed. From the First wave feminism to the Third wave feminism, feminist
theory, politics and activism have fundamentally changed, giving rise to many various voices and
formulations, such as multiculturalism and gender fuidity. The paper will demonstrate the ways in
which women artists made use of the theme of clothes in order to raise questions regarding gender
and social status of women in society.
Keywords: Gender, Feminist Ideology, Clothes, Multi Culturalism, Political Criticism, Womens Status
Introduction
I
N HUMAN SOCIETY in general, and in feminist ideology in particular, fashion and
clothing are complex and multi-dimensional phenomena. They raise a wide range of
sociological, psychological, political and aesthetic issues such as: clothing as a second
skin, clothing as a mask and a cover, the role of clothes in the myth of beauty, and the
multiple links between fashion and industry, capitalism or globalization, to name just a few.
In the fne arts too, many women (as well as men) artists are concerned with the theme of
clothing.
1
The inherent implications of certain types of clothing are important tools for ex-
amining anthropological, sociological, psychological and even philosophical questions. They
serve as a barometer of change in society and are related to issues of status, identity and
sexuality, as they touch on the human body, both literally and metaphorically. Introducing
a gendered perspective to the subject of art and clothes enables new questions to rise. This
is true in every period of art history, yet this paper will discuss a very specifc point in time,
starting with the end of 19
th
century, during which the feminist movement was frst established
in the West. Since the 19
th
century, feminismhas much changed, giving way to many various
voices and formulations, some substantially different from its original goals. The discussion
will present examples of visual art which refects the core issues that are central to the fem-
inist discourse. In each phase of feminism in the Western world, seminal art work will be
discussed, until reaching contemporary works of art.
1
Clothing was the central theme of two large exhibitions organized recently. The frst is Dress Codes: Clothing
as Metaphor at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York (2009), and the second is Aware: Art, Fashion, Identity,
at the Royal Academy, London (2010).
The International Journal of the Arts in Society
Volume 6, Issue 2, 2011, http://www.arts-journal.com, ISSN 1833-1866
Common Ground, Tal Dekel, All Rights Reserved, Permissions:
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The First Wave Feminism
The frst wave feminism which was formulated during the 19
th
century introduced many
important changes to the lives of women. It also gave rise to the so-called new woman.
2
These new women were closely allied with the achievements of the suffragists who fought
for social equality for women, both in Europe and the United States. The struggle of the
suffragists bore fruit in various countries in Europe at the turn of the century, and reached
its height in 1920, when women in the United States and most of European countries were
granted the right to vote.
3
The emergence of the new woman may be seen as a direct result
of World War I, whose diffcult circumstances created a new social reality, especially for
European women. While the men were fghting at the battle felds, women were called to
take over many of the work places in agriculture, industry and military that had previously
been male strongholds.
4
The four long years of war did much to promote European womens
self-confdence. Their proven ability to provide for themselves (for the frst time in history,
millions of women were receiving a regular salary) convinced them they were suffciently
skilled to develop their own careers.
5
This new confdence, together with the political
movement to promote womens rights and suffrage being waged created a momentum that
encouraged women to seek fulfllment, outside their traditional roles in the home.
In order to perform their new duties on the farms or at the factories, women had to shed
their cumbersome Victorian dresses and don comfortable work clothes. But the urgent desire
for social change was also refected in womens high fashion. One of the major changes was
their use of pants. In the early 1920s, the act of wearing pants was not only a practical solution,
but also an emotional reaction to the silhouette of the Victorian woman whose movement
was restricted by tight corsets and multi-layered dresses. Following the newfashion, women
chose to obscure almost all signs of their femininity, even going so far as to bind their chest
with elastic bandages in order to make it look as fat as possible. Female curves (hips, but-
tocks, and bosom) were deliberately concealed, and instead of accentuating their waists as
previously, they now wore short straight Charleston or fapper dresses.
6
Fashion designers
created outfts such as suits with matching pants, skirts and jackets, inspired by the newhigh
priestess of fashion, Coco Chanel.
7
At the same time, they used lipstick and make up, declar-
ing that they were not men, but a new, liberated type of women. To declare their newfound
freedom, women also cut their hair in a style dubbed la garonne, smoked openly, and
in general adopted behaviors that had previously been associated with men, such as drinking
2
The term New Woman was commonly used by women in Europe and the United Stated from the end of the
19th century, and mainly during the 1920s. The term was used by women that were infuenced by the political and
cultural changes in the status of women, which wished to differentiate themselves from Victorian women, holding
conservative views in regard to the role and place of women in society.
3
Janet K. Boles and Diane Long Hoeveer, Historical Dictionary of Feminism, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Maryland, Toronto,
Oxford: The Scarecrow Press, 2004), p. 28.
4
See for example: Jacqueline R. deVries, Challenging Traditions: Denominational Feminism in Britain, 1910-
1920, Borderlines: Genders and Identities in War and Peace, ed. Billie Melman (NewYork and London: Routledge,
1998), pp. 266-280.
5
Prudence Glynn, War, Need, and Social Change, Fashion: Dress in the Twentieth Century, (London: George
Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1978), p. 53.
6
Mary Louise Roberts, Samson and Delilah Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France, The Modern
Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, eds. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, (New Jersey: Rutgers
University Press, 2003), p. 68.
7
Sophia Dekel-Caspi, AD-DRESS: Thoughts on Garments (Jerusalem: Meiri Press, 2011), p. 10.
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alcohol in public and participating in sports. They were determent to prove that they were
equal to men and apt to anything.
The new spirit of political and sexual freedom that was introduced by women at the turn
of the 20
th
century was refected in the art and literature of the period. In numerous portraits
women artists painted themselves and their friends in the style that became popular in many
countries in Europe, North America, and even some places in South America.
8
For example,
in 1923 Tamara de Lempicka, working in France, painted a portrait of her friend, the
Duchess de la Salle, presenting her in a bold assured pose, dressed in male attire, thus ex-
pressing the political and sexual freedom gained by women at that time (fg. 1).
9
Figure 1: Tamara De Lempicka, Duchess De La Salle, 1925, Oil on Canvas Tamara Art
Heritage/Victoria De Lempicka/Licensed by MMI.
8
Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, Becoming ModernGender and Sexual Identity after World War
I, The Modern Woman RevisitedParis Between the Wars, eds. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, (New
Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 3-4.
9
Lynn Frame, Gretchen, Girl, Garonne? Weimer Science and Popular Culture in Search of the Ideal Woman,
Woman in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimer Germany, ed. K. von Ankum, (Berkeley, Los Angeles
and London, 1997), p. 20.
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TAL DEKEL
The French artist Claude Cahun produced numerous photographed self-portraits, while using
a variety of clothes and accessories, in order to present the ever changing and fuid gender
identity: female, male, androgynous. In one such photograph, which is of a large series of
self-portraits, she chose to present herself in male persona, in a short hair cut and a black
suit (fg. 2)
10
.
Figure 2: Claude Cahun, Self Portrait, 1920, Photograph.
These works by Cahun and de Lempicka, and many others like them, present the image of
the new, self-invented, and liberated woman. They were produced around the 1920s, the
height of the First-wave feminism. Although a united and fully formulated set of politic-
al/ideological agenda shared by women artists cannot be detected among them at the stage
of the frst-wave-a phenomenon that would be clear in the next feminist wave-one can
clearly see that they were deeply infuenced by the major political and cultural changes that
feminismbrought to womens lives during that decade, changes which were clearly introduced
into the work of many women artists of the time.
Between the two World Wars the economic recession both in Europe and the United States
had an adverse effect on the womens movement and on the status of women in society. As
men returned from the fghting, they sought to reclaim their old jobs in industry and agricul-
10
This work has an unclear status in the sense of rights of reproduction, which I have failed to detect (most of the
rights to Chauns photos are with the Jersey Heritage Collection, but they have indicated that this specifc works
holders of the rights of reproduction is unknown at this point).
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ture, temporarily occupied by women.
11
For decades to come, the voice of feminism fell
almost completely silent, since all turned to emphasize the importance of family and raising
children, after losing so many millions to the World War Ithus bringing on the massive
Baby Boom.
12
After World War II, the status of women regressed even further, so that
for nearly half a century the feminist movement lay dormant.
13
Needless to say, womens
art expressing political feminist issues, produced under the umbrella of a feminist group of
artists and working in allegiance in large numbers, was also dormant all that time.
The Second Wave Feminism
The second wave feminism was formed during the tumulus years of the 1960s. That time
constituted of many revolutionary social movements, among themthe civil rights movement,
the anti-war movement, the hippie and student movements, the sexual revolution, and left-
wing politics. The Womens Liberation movement was formed during that decade and
would change the lives of millions of women and men alike. The feminist movement also
changed the very structure of the artistic feld, providing women artists during the 1960s and
1970s with tools to establish the feminist art movement. Thanks to the deep-seated paradigm
shift, offering new perspectives and concerns to art creating-mainly the new understanding
that biology is not destiny, alongside the revolutionary and exciting understanding that all
men and women are subjected to social construction-women artists shifted their attention
from the traditional genres and subjects.
14
They started to produce art that was addressing
two main themes: the frst held notions revealing the social oppression form which women
suffer under patriarchal society. The second theme described the the female experience,
as women authentically felt and lived it (and not as men were describing it for them during
the centuries before). Addressing these two approaches, the artists of the group used innov-
ative tactics which had clear political agenda.
15
Yoko Onos Cut Piece, frst performed in 1964, is an example of art done in the vanguard
of second-wave feminism (see fg. 3).
11
See for example: Pam Taylor, Daughters and MothersMaids and Mistresses: Domestic Service Between the
Wars, Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, eds. John Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson,
(London, 1979).
12
Tali Rosin, What Is Feminism Anyway? (Tel Aviv, Zmora-Bitan, 2000), pp. 180-181 [Hebrew].
13
Diana Crane, Gender and Public Space in the Twentieth Century, Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class,
Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 123.
14
Tal Dekel, GenderedArt and Feminisms during the 1970s in the U.S. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbuz-Hameuhad, 2011),
p. 25-28 [Hebrew].
15
Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, Introduction: Feminism and Art in the Twentieth Century, The Power of
Feminist Art, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), p. 12.
175
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Figure 3: Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Performance at Carnegie Recital Hall NYC. Performance
Date: March 21, 1965. Photo Credit: Minoru Niizuma. Courtesy of Yoko Ono.
During the performance Ono sat silent and passive on the foor wearing a fne dress, a pair
of scissors in front of her. Members of the audience were invited onstage, one by one, to cut
pieces off her clothing. The feminine body, seen throughout the history of art as an anonymous
female model or even an object, is thus viewed froma different perspective-through the eyes
of a woman. In other words, the subjective experience of womanhood is conveyed by a
woman-artist, the creator of the art piece. This performance, which was very innovative,
helped establish a newlanguage through which women could investigate their victimization,
and perhaps even more importantly, their ability to survive male aggression, an issue of
primary concern to second-wave feminism, particularly for radical feminists who were
concerned with the power relations between pairs of men and women and with the roles
within the family as a mirror of the society at large, and the effect of phenomena such as
pornography, sexual harassment, rape, and abuse on the lives of ordinary women every-
where.
16
While most artists use apparel as a tool to mask or disguise, to dress up or dress down
fgures that represent their perception of gender and sexuality, Yoko Ono used it to take a
stand: she cuts through the clothes, deep under the layers of clothing-the covering, the cos-
tume, the pretense. Cut Piece is a double-folded art work: it projects vulnerability and power,
violence and compassion, generosity and giving, helplessness, pain, and inner peace. Ayelet
16
For more on this subject, see, for example: Miriam E. David, Personal and Political: Feminism, Sociology, and
Family Lives (London: Trentham Books, 2003); Barbara A. Crow (ed.), Radical Feminism: A Documentary
Reader (New York and London: New York University Press, 2000).
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Zohar writes that the artist herself stated that her original intent was to create a situation of
altruistic giving in the most diffcult circumstances of near violence and assault.
17
The per-
formance was presented several times over the course of the years, in Kyoto and Tokyo in
1964, in New York in 1965, in London in 1966 and later in Paris in 2003. Although it has
been given many different interpretations, many critics stress the element of womens sub-
ordination and their physical abuse, which has come to be seen as a metaphor for the status
of women in society.
In 1972 American artists Karen LeCoq and Nancy Youdelman staged a performance en-
titled Leahs Room (fg. 4), in which a woman at a dressing table was trying on clothes and
putting on many layers of make-up.
Figure 4: Karen LeCoq and Nancy Youdelman, Leas Room, 1972, Performance. Courtesy
of Karen LeCoq.
The performance was a recreation of the boudoir of the courtesan in the French novel Chri
by Colette. Published in 1920, the book tells the story of an aging courtesan about to lose
her youthful lover to a younger woman. As the artists themselves explained, the performance
expressed the pain of aging, of losing beauty, pain of competition with other women....we
wanted to deal with the way women are intimidated by the culture to constantly maintain
17
Ayelet Zohar, The Postgender: Gender, Sexuality, and Performativity in Contemporary Japanese Art (exh. cat.)
(Haifa: Tikotin Museum, 2005), p. 180 [Hebrew].
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TAL DEKEL
their beauty and youth and the feeling of desperation and helplessness once this beauty is
lost.
18
The same theme was addressed by numerous feminist theoreticians in the 1970s, particu-
larly those belonging to the school of radical feminism. Many turned their attention to the
ulterior motives underlying male hegemony and the roots of the idealization of the female
body.
19
Fashion came to be seen by feminist thinkers and artists as a patriarchal construct
through which women are made to wear their oppression. Clothing became subject of
critical analysis that revealed its ideological motivation, and feminist art became a tool used
to expose it. Inspired by a Brechtian aesthetic, feminist artists adopted the approach that the
major function of art is to openly educate the public to an ideology.
20
This principle directed
the work of artists such as Martha Rosler, Eleanor Antin, Hannah Wilke, and many others.
The performance Leahs Room, performed by LeCoq and Youdelman, refects the prevalent
criticismof the feminists in the 1970s, and the intensifcation of their public struggle against
the phallocentric tradition that determines how women are meant to dress, to feel, to behave,
and to act. According to this view, male hegemony dictates fashion and encourages the use
of superfcial means and artifcial products to disguise the natural female body, so that men
can control and oppress women.
As early as 1949, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir explored the hidden mechanismbehind
the creation of myths about women, formed in the aim of oppressing them. In her seminal
book, The Second Sex, de Beauvoir explained that women are associated with nature, and
that is the root and connection to the fashion industry, as she writes in her book: Her
natural body reminds men that they too are vulnerable to disease, decay, and death, and
therefore they take pleasure in her artifciality. Men prefer her in furs and elegant clothes,
covered in cosmetics and perfumed. In that form, she no longer reminds them of their own
mortality.
21
Later, Mary Daly, a prominent feminist of the 1970s, called on women to free
themselves from the status of painted birds: domesticated, tamed, and artifcial. She ap-
pealed women to rid themselves of the patriarchal dictates, clothing she believed deprived
them of their genuine natural selves, such as synthetic fabrics and make-up.
22
Leahs Room might also be seen as a response to, or a direct product of, the famous fem-
inist protest that gave birth to the bra-burning myth. In November 1968 in Atlantic City,
approximately 200 radical feminists demonstrated outside the Miss America pageant. They
waved signs with slogans such as Can make-up hide the scars of oppression? At the climax
of the protest, they threwinto a FreedomTrash Can several articles they viewed as symbols
of the oppression of women in the patriarchal society: girdles, stockings, high-heeled shoes,
makeup, Playboy magazines, cleaning rags, and a few bras. All these were set ablaze in
a ritualized burning.
23
18
Arlen Raven, Womanhouse, The Power of Feminist Art, eds. Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1994), p. 60.
19
See for example: Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaaethics of Radical Feminism(Boston: Beacon Press, 1978),
pp. 59, 334-336.
20
Griselda Pollock, Screening the Seventies: Sexuality and Representation in Feminist PracticeA Brechtian
Perspective, Vision & Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of Art (London and New York: 1988),
pp. 162-163.
21
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, (1952; New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp. 157-159.
22
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 334-336.
23
Boles and Hoeveer, p. 31.
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Another artist whose work often relates to fashion and clothing is American Cindy Sher-
man, who produced numerous photographic series, the frst and most famous one being
Untitled FilmStills (1977-1980). In the second half of the 1970s, Sherman began employing
the photographic image in a new way. Challenging the notion that a photograph represents
reality as it is, she used her pictures to express social and cultural criticism, focusing on the
manner in which women were presented in the media at the timetypically through male
eyes (fg. 5).
24
Figure 5: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1978, Black and White Photograph, 10x8
Inches, Edition of 10. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures.
For over a decade, Sherman displayed the female fgure in various guises, all of which she
herself assumed (she claimed in an interview that she had loved to dress up and put on
makeup even as a young girl).
25
Using a variety of articles of clothing, makeup, wigs and
accessories, she created a series of fctional narratives that gave rise to a complex identity,
as, like a chameleon, Sherman became all these personas. In her work, it is impossible to
identify the specifc woman to which each fgure makes reference. Rather, especially in the
early series, her characters are succinct one-dimensional representations of stereotypes, or
to use Jean Baudrillards term, simulacra.
26
Shermans work thus demonstrates the con-
temporary insight that even our own body is not the real thing, that it too, is subject to
24
Chris Townsend, Rapture: Arts Seduction by Fashion since 1970 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), p. 50.
25
Danoff, Michael, Afterword: Cindy Sherman Guises and Revelations, Cindy Sherman (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1984), p. 193.
26
A simulacrum is based on the conception of a stereotype; it refers to anything meant to appear again and again
as a simulation, as an imitation of an imitation, as the image of a reproduction for which there is no original source.
See Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1977).
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TAL DEKEL
rules, perceptions, and social and political ideologies. This notion was proposed as early as
1929 by psychologist Joan Riviere, who argued in her article Womanliness as a Masquerade
that there is no distinction between genuine femininity and the mask of femininity, that is
that women are not born feminine but play feminine. Without using the term gender,
which was not yet in use in the discourse of the 1920s, she thereby laid the foundations for
a notion that would be developed decades later by Judith Butler: femininity is a mask that
is put on and taken off as circumstances require, and gender roles are merely performances
with no core essence.
27
The Transitory Stage
The 1980s are mostly considered as a transitory stage, in which feminism was moving away
from the ideas of the second wave feminism of the 1970s, but not yet fully formulating a
distinct new wave (which is commonly said to start with the early 1990). Many artists of
feminist orientation turned their attention during that decade to the subject of gender relations
and began defning them in terms of power. In this context, clothing became one of the
central emblems of the battle for gender differentiation, demanding recognition of the need
for a change in the status quo of co-existence, one that would eliminate the need to distort
or act violently against women. The moment in which the value of clothingits social,
political, sexual, psychological, formal, and visual signifcance-was recognized and theorized
by feminists of the 1980s, artists like Canadian Jana Sterbak started making sculptural use
of it, in order to relate to womens position in contemporary society. Sterbak chose the
concept of the dress as a tool through which to express criticism of an intolerable existence.
In her work entitled Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic from 1987, she wore a
blood-red dress made of sixty pounds of raw steak. It was sewn together and worn by her
on the opening night of the exhibition.
Sterbak transformed the Cinderella story from an optimistic fairy tale into a nightmare.
The subject of her piece is what Julia Kristeva termed the abject body-the female body as
a site of trauma (exploitation, disease, flth, and bodily waste).
28
The abject is that which
does not respect rules and refuses to any social or physical boundaries. It is the liminal.
Sterback uses the notion of the skin, the most signifcant boundary for the human being, that
which separates our inner selves from the outside world: she presents herself as skinless,
wearing her fesh on the outside, baring it for all to see. She aims to breaks the rules in an
attempt to destabilize, in hope to undermine the social laws, the patriarchal order.
Indeed, Sterbaks piece evokes the enormous power of patriarchal society in which the
female body is perceived as merely fesh or as untamed nature, unlike the male body
that has supposedly lost nearly all materiality by virtue of its transcendental reason. Praised
but also widely denounced, the work treads the fne line between effective protest and the
replication, perhaps even perpetuation, of the victimization of women. Nevertheless, by
means of this brash but undoubtedly compelling work, the artist sparked discourse on yet
another troubling subject: anorexia, a lethal disease identifed primarily with young women
27
Joan Riviere, Womanliness as a Masquerade, Formations of Fantasy, eds. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and
Cora Kaplan (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 35-44 ; And: Judith Butler, Critically Queer, Bodies
that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 23-232.
28
Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1980), pp. 2-3.
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that has grown to epidemic proportions with alarming speed in the modern era in the Western
world. Given the works association with death, it brings to mind Walter Benjamins famous
remark: Fashion: Madam Death!
29
During the six weeks of Sterbaks exhibition, the dress
was hung on a hanger like a sculpture or installation and displayed without refrigeration
until the meat rotted (after about three weeks). It was then replaced with a new fesh dress
which, in turn, underwent the same process. The artist thus translated anorexia into visual
language: the dress slowly dried out, shrank, and disintegrated, just like the body of an
anorectic woman. Victims of the disease subject themselves to a draconian regimen in a
desperate attempt to gain control over their world. In response to societys conficting demands
from women-success in both new and traditional roles, and the ability to adapt to ever-
changing physical standards-they call on inner strength to overcome their physical needs in
order to carve out a personal space in the social order.
30
The Third Wave Feminism
The next stage of feminism, known as the third wave feminism, is agreed by most critics
to begin in the early 1990s. Since then, women artists offer a multi-layered and more complex
statement about womanhood, gender and fashion, using theories and discourses fromvarious
felds of knowledge, all inspired by the wide umbrella of the Post-Modernism thought.
31
In
1990, for example, the French artist Annette Messager created a project entitled Histoire
des Robes (History of Dresses) in which she confned dresses in fat glass display cases (fg.
6).
29
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Convolutions B (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.
62. A more obvious reading of Sterbacks work would take its cue from its title Vanitas, the sin of pride, a pop-
ular theme throughout the history of Western art. See for example: Helen E. Roberts (ed.), Encyclopedia of Com-
parative Iconography, Themes Depicted in Works of Art, vol. 2, (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers,
1998), p. 883.
30
Nancy Spector, Jana Sterbak: Flesh and Bones, Artforum, 30: 7 (March 1992), pp. 95-99.
31
See for example: Sarah Gamble, Postfeminism, The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism,
ed. Sarah Gamble, (London and New York: Routledge: 2001), pp. 42-45.
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Figure 6: Anette Messager, Histoire Des Robes, 1990. Pink Dress: 148X58X7 cm. Blue
Dress: 148X65X7 cm. Total: 148X143 cm. 2 Dresses, 1 Pastel B&W Photos and Safety Pin,
Under Wooden Display Cases. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.
Private Collection.
To that she added small drawings, framed photographs, and texts, giving themthe appearance
of holy relics. She thus continued to deal with a subject that has preoccupied her for many
years: the exposure of the female body to what is known as the male gaze. Again and again
she examines the outer limits, the point at which the female body vanishes under this probing
gaze and the concrete body is replaced by the metaphoric presence of clothing and coverings.
In this series she presented dozens of dresses, emblematic of the course of her life, from her
frst communion as a young girl, through her wedding dress, a frock symbolizing motherhood,
and other garments, until reaching her fnal garment, the shroud in which her body will be
wrapped before her coffn is lowered into the ground.
32
Each dress symbolized a different
chapter in the artists biography and a different facet of womanhood: they are the milestones
of her acceptance by and integration into the symbolic or patriarchal order. Rather than
32
Nancy Spector, Freudian Slips: Dressing the Ambiguous Body, Art/Fashion (exh. cat.), (GuggenheimMuseum
SoHo, New York, 1997), p. 112.
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presenting her body, she focused on the discarded snake skin which, according to the artist
herself, bears witness to the woman who once inhabited it. As she explains, it is her second
skin which embodies all the secrets, dreams, pains, and hidden desires of her feminine exist-
ence. Like many other artists of her generation, such as Rosemary Trockle, Beverly Sims,
and Sylvie Fleury, Messager strips fashion of its image as an inferior and trivial matter, part
of the female territory associated with vanity and ornamentation that is represented by wo-
mens magazines. Indeed, in recent decades the theme of clothing in art has appeared mostly
in the work of women artists, or of male artists inquiring their sexual identity (just as the
word transvestite comes from the Latin for to change clothes, a change of dress could
be an indicative of a change of identity).
The Argentinean artist Nicola Constantino creates various articles of clothingshoes,
evening gowns, coats, corsets, sport jacketsmade from a material resembling human skin,
combining them with real hair and casts of intimate body parts, such as nipples, navels, and
anuses (fg. 7).
Figure 7: Nicola Constantino, Boutique (Human Furriery), 2002, Installation. Courtesy of
the Artist.
The skin-like material is produced by means of a unique technique of silicon casting and
polyurethane injection. Her repeated concern with skin, and thus with the body, physicality,
and gender identity, becomes a protest against social dictates, challenging the set of conven-
tions and prohibitions regarding what is proper and what is not. As critic Tammy Katz-
Freiman suggests, the horror that overcomes the viewer at the sight of high fashion made of
human skin is reminiscent of the horror aroused by Jonathan Demmes flm Silence of the
Lambs (1991), in which a psychopathic man killed young women for the purpose of making
garments out of their skin. From this perspective, her nipple corsets and navel coats adorned
with human hair are part of the discourse on the uncanny and the repressed that began with
Freud in the early 20
th
century. Any woman who wears Costantinos garments will remain
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naked, a visual tautology grounded in a thoroughly surrealist syntax not unlike that of artists
such as Ren Magritte.
33
Although there is no agreement among critics or artists of what exactly third wave fem-
inism, or Post-feminism is, the general notion is that it constitutes the abandonment of
the past formulation of the feminist struggle and a rejection of many of the goals it has ori-
ginally aimed for. In a dialectic journeys women artists who deal with the theme of clothing
have traveled, many have moved away froma radical message of an overall revolution, toward
an ironic and critical stance in the spirit of our postmodern times.
A contemporary artist that uses clothing to deal with two typical postmodern subjects in
her feminist work-multiculturalism and gender fuidity-is Iranian Parastou Forouhar. Her
series entitled Blind Spot, from 2001, frstly addresses the Euro-American attitude towards
Islam and the stereotypic representation of Islamic women, by showing a sitting fgure
covered fromhead to foot by a chador (fg.8).
34
Feminist theorists and activists have promoted
the understanding that the category woman is not a universal one, but rather infuenced
by positionality, depending on race, nationality, status, sexual orientation, ability, etc.
Figure 8: Parastou Forouhar, Blind Spot (Detail from Series), 2001. Photograph. Courtesy
of the Artist. Photo: Jogi Hild.
In addition to turning the attention to the bias and de-humanizing attitude of the West towards
non-European traditions, customs and ways of life, Forouhars series is using the newunder-
standing as to the meaning of identity and Self as a non-monolithic, ever-changing, and
fuid entity, as suggested by critics such as Judith Butler (1990). The fgures in the photo-
33
Tammy Katz-Freiman, The Woman who Wears These Clothes Will Remain Naked, Nicola CostantinoBoutique
(exh. cat.) (Herzeliya: Herzeliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002), n.p. [Hebrew]
34
Although many Third wave feminism artists frequently address this issue, it should be stressed that it was frst
addressed by the Afro-American and Chicano feminist artists of the Second wave that worked during the 1970s.
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graphs depict playfully a gender-ambiguous human fgure sitting with the back to the camera
and completely veiled beneath a chador, thus denying the viewers form determining if a
woman or a man is underneath the black cloth.
35
The Contemporary-And where do we go from here?
The paradigmatic shift away from second wave feminism onto third wave feminism is
perhaps exemplifed most compellingly by Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft. In her perform-
ances, she has stripped the female body of all its clothing and has left it almost completely
naked. The exposed and unprotected body thus becomes a metaphor for the condition of
women in the contemporary era of mass media.
Since the early 1990s, Beecroft has been creating performances that make use of nude or
semi-nude female bodies which she treats as her raw materials. Her projects bring together
sometimes dozens of women, with the model-like appearance (fg. 9).
Figure 9: Vanessa Beecroft, VB45 Performance, 2001, Kunstalle Wien, Vienna Vanessa
Beecroft, 2001. Photo: Dusan Reljin
35
Maura Reily, Introduction: Toward Transnational Feminisms, in Global FeminismsNew Directions in Con-
temporary Art, eds. Maura Reily and Linda Nochlin, (London and New York: Merrell, 2007), p. 41.
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Beecroft dresses her models in the most minimal attire and accessories and gives themexplicit
instructions not to talk with one another or with the viewers, not to act, and to appear in-
different to their surroundings. The various performances she has presented over the years
have all been staged in high-culture settings such as museums, galleries, or historical
buildings, thus both referencing the specifc cultural context and challenging it at the same
time.
Beecrofts performances have a strong visual impact that is more than merely decorative.
As people from the audience have often commented, the large mass of women neutralizes
the erotic connotations of bare skin.
36
Any potential intimacy that might be implied by their
nudity is inconceivable: they are totally inaccessible and there is no opportunity for an erotic
voyeurism. Rather than being erotic, their nudity becomes a type of garment, not unlike the
suit of clothes sewn for the king in The Emperors New Clothes. In the fairy tale, the two
tailors are generally seen as the prototype of scoundrels and imposters. However, as critic
Ruth Direktor suggests, they might also be viewed differently: not as swindlers, but as in-
sightful men who raise questions about what we can and what we cannot see, about the
power of the gaze and the power of imagination. In this sense, they did indeed dress the
emperor in a shocking and extraordinary suit of clothes such as had never been seen before-
his own skin. Interpreted in this manner, the tailors become the prototype of conceptual
artists who took the concept of the fg leaf in new directions.
37
In the Bible story, knowledge
is associated with clothes that hide the body; in the fairy tale, the tailors present the emperor
with attire which expands the concepts of observation, refection and understanding.
Whereas the emperors clothes are an undeniably social construct with political-imperial-
representational signifcance, the tailors offer the democratic (and shocking) option of nudity.
The emperors nudity enables every last one of his subjects to become a potential tailor, to
dress him in whatever garment they choose,
38
a postmodern statement exemplifed also by
Beecroft.
Beecrofts blunt criticism is directed not against a general principle, but against a specifc
social-psychological world of images: advertising. In discussing her work, numerous critics
have related it to the subject of eating disorders, such as anorexia and bulimia, which affect
many fashion models and an increasing number of young women and girls in the modern
era, as a direct result of the image of the ideal woman dictated by the mass media. Critic
Naomi Wolf wrote extensively about this in her book The Beauty Myth: [The] great weight-
shift bestowed on womennew versions of low self-esteem, loss of control, and sexual
shamefemale fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat,
because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, womens bodies are not our own but
societys.a cultural fxation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty
but an obsession about female obedience.
39
Like in Wolfs text, which exposes cultures
aspiration to unify women into a standard in the intention of oppressing them, Beecrofts
performances highlight the uniformization of women in the mass media era: both the faces
and bodies of the models in Beecrofts performances are covered in heavy makeup, and they
36
Townsend, pp. 96-98.
37
Ruth Direktor, Getting Dressed (exh. cat.) (Haifa: Haifa Museum of Art, 2000), p. 6.
38
Ibid.
39
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 1991, pp. 186-187.
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are often dressed in identical wigs as well. The artist thus stresses their anonymity, the oblit-
eration of their identity, their uniformityalmost as if they were cloned.
Conclusion
Beecrofts performing women certainly shed their dresses, but do they also don an ideology?
Her work can be read in various ways, and has indeed been given many, sometimes confict-
ing, interpretations.
40
In the spirit of postmodernism, it has raised numerous ambivalent
questions: Is it art? Is it fashion? Is it good? Is it sexist? Is it feminist? Whatever the answers,
her provocative performances focus our attention on the role of clothing. All people, even
those who claim to have no interest in clothing or fashion, take part in the shared ritual of
choosing their clothes as an act of self-declaration, whether consciously or unwittingly.
41
Clothing not only defnes the boundaries of the body, but also maps the self. Changes in
dress codes in different periods of history refect changes in society and the way in which
its members express their subjectivity. The daily ritual we perform in front of our closet is
an indication that the psychology of clothing is an integral part of our inner construct, our
personality. Asking What should I wear? is thus almost like asking Who am I?
This may explain why clothes have held such fascination for female artists at a time when
women have been fghting to change their social status and redefne their identity. By
dressing, or undressing-themselves or their models-in various and innovative ways, they
were able to express the changing paradigms with regard to womens place and identity.
Each wave of feminist ideology and activism has brought with it a different set of notions.
Since the beginning of the 20
th
century many women artists were infuenced by the feminist
ideology and politic, thus creating works relating to clothing, intensely investigated clothes
signifcance to women, femininity, and social status. frst wave feminism women artists
strived to eliminate social differences between the sexes, portraying women as strong, active
and assertive as men; second wave feminism brought women artists attention into the
deep social mechanisms constructing gender relations, using clothes to reveal this notion;
and third wave feminism motivated women artists to explore gender fuidity, multicultur-
alism and the irony of the false social constructions. All of them, over the decades, use the
gender perspective in important and fascinating artistic ways.
About the Author
Dr. Tal Dekel
Tal Dekel received her Ph.D. in Art history in 2004. She currently teaches at the Women
and Gender Studies program at the Tel Aviv University and at the Midrasha Art College
of Beit-Berl, Israel. Tal Specializes in diverse aspects of modern and contemporary art, fo-
cusing on issues of visual culture in relation to women, gender and multi-culturalism. Tals
research is currently focused on various aspects of globalization and its manifestations all
over the world, specifcally in the Israeli locus. Some of her latest papers deal with the effect
40
Seward, Keith, Classic Cruelty, Parkett, no. 56 (1999), pp. 98-105; Junus Evans, Vanessa Beecroft: Analix,
Artnews, vol. 98, no. 6 (June 1999), p. 144.
41
Ruth Direktor, p. 48.
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of immigration on two minority groups in the Israeli society: Ethiopian women artists and
Illegal foreign workers that are refugees from Africa.
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THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE ARTS IN SOCIETY