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Art that envisions the human body in architectural terms is not a new phenomenon. Last year, Kestenbaum & Company auctioned a 1707 Hebrew, Latin and Turkish edition of Tobias Cohn’s medical encyclopedia, Ma’aseh Tuviah (“The Work of Tobias”), in which artist Antonio Luciani drew Cohn with bared innards. Cohn’s body is mapped out over a three-story house, and Hebrew letters help readers discern that the kidneys become stoves, the intestines a fountain and the liver a cauldron. Indeed, Luciani’s drawing is just one example of many, but he and his body-mapping, architectural colleagues never anticipated the sort of collaborations which the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art explores in “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture.” |
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Body Building – Menachem Wecker
Art that envisions the human body in architectural terms is not a new phenomenon. Last year, Kestenbaum & Company auctioned a 1707 Hebrew, Latin and Turkish edition of Tobias Cohn’s medical encyclopedia, Ma’aseh Tuviah (“The Work of Tobias”), in which artist Antonio Luciani drew Cohn with bared innards. Cohn’s body is mapped out over a three-story house, and Hebrew letters help readers discern that the kidneys become stoves, the intestines a fountain and the liver a cauldron. Indeed, Luciani’s drawing is just one example of many, but he and his body-mapping, architectural colleagues never anticipated the sort of collaborations which the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art explores in “Skin + Bones: Parallel Practices in Fashion and Architecture.”
According to the museum release, both garments and buildings function in two important ways: protecting and sheltering the body and helping to express identity. Although the clothing and buildings of yesteryear were “devised out of necessity” and not designed, “contemporary practitioners in both fields have continued to address the human imperative for shelter in ingenious ways.” Even the title alone of Rei Kawakubo’s “Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body” fashion collection illustrates this modern sort of conceptual thinking.
Turkish-Cypriot artist Hussein Chalayan’s “Afterwords” collection includes objects that double as furniture and clothing. A group of models enter a room with a coffee table and chairs, and proceed to transform the coffee table into a skirt, the slip covers on the chairs into dresses and the chairs into suitcases. According to the LACMA catalog, this sort of work explores “having to flee home in times of strife.” Another Chalayan series, “Between,” features models wearing burkas of different lengths, so that the most modest woman bares only her eyes, hands and feet, and the most brazen model stands naked except for her sandals and face covering.
If Chalayan’s clothing oscillates between useful (doubling as furniture) and useless (does not even cover the body), Viktor & Rudolf’s “Russian Doll” collection, a reverse striptease of sorts, is downright uncomfortable. The model, who continually spins on a circular platform, initially wears a simple, coarse dress, which she might very well have borrowed from Saint Francis’ closet. As she spins around, the designers add garment after garment until she is wrapped in a coat that only exposes her face. The eight layers of clothing carry a particular irony in the climate of Los Angeles.
In a project she describes as based upon the “memory of making forts as a child,” Tess Giberson’s Structure 1 begins as a circular wooden platform with standing poles. Ten models clad in hand crocheted outfits enter the space and undress down to matching white slips, all the while hanging their clothing on the poles until they create what the catalog describes as an “enclosed communal shelter.” Elaborating on the fort theme, Giberson says, “As a child there is a common need to build one’s own environment, pulling from whatever resources are around: blankets, pillows, sheets…I wanted to create a structure pulling from the very direct and honest methods a child might use.”
Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House effectively does in architecture what Chalayan and Giberson do in clothing design. The house, as the name suggests, contains a two-story curtain that functions as walls, with help from sliding glass doors inside, which, hopefully, provide warmth. The house looks wrapped like Christo’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, or Kunsthalle, Switzerland. Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that Christo’s work, which creates clothing for buildings, does not appear in an exhibit about interdisciplinary fashion and architecture. But unlike Christo’s work, Ban’s wrapping is the building rather than the building’s covering.
In Blur Building, Diller Scofidio and Renfro, who designed the newly opened Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, find a different way to combine architecture and clothing; fog surrounds their structure, which requires viewers to wear raincoats (uniforms or a dress code of sorts) to enter the building. The building sits on Lake Neuchatel, and 31,500 nozzles spray water, which surrounds the building with mist (they use the term “enclosed” with mist). Real life irony, which always has a way of surfacing in situations of ironic art, emerged when the building failed fire codes and fire extinguishers had to be added to a building already surrounded by water.
Other buildings, like Eric Miralles’ and Benedetta Tagliabue’s Santa Caterina Market, which uses colors from the fruit market below for the roof tiling so evocative of a flowing skirt, and Ateliers Jean Nouvel’s Arab World Institute, a “hinge between two cultures and two histories,” which combines metal shapes reminiscent of moucharaby (Islamic latticework) and a mirror reflecting the Western, Parisian cityscape, essentially only slap clothing onto buildings. Like McLuhan’s medium-message conceptualization, the market roof and the Arab institute take aspects of the buildings’ functioning roles to use for the actual material and design.
If “Skin + Bones” can be said to encounter any problems, these difficulties pertain to function. The halls and rooms of the show are jam-packed with some of the most interesting design solutions to some of the most bizarre and quirky projects which are by some of the most gutsy and ambitious artists. Yet, for the most part, the work mostly proves impractical.
The notion of wearing a living room set is quite wonderful in an Alice in Wonderland sort of way, as is living in a house where the forecast always calls for a raincoat. But, since it remains more efficient to wear clothes, to sit on furniture and to live in a house with visible contours giving way to nice, sunny days, the work of “Skin + Bones” remains, for the most part, art that does nicely in a museum, but poorly as far as clothing drawers and closets go. Even the fully functioning structures that do stand in cities and towns across the globe seem to be more interesting as curiosities and photo shoots than as everyday living spaces. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling Water (not in the show) makes lovely postcards, but a house that is falling down and filling with water has failed as a building.
A piece like Wilkinson Eyre’s Bridge of Aspiration, which connects the Royal Ballet School and the Royal Opera House in London, is an exception. The bridge, which uses skewed elements to create an accordion bridge that forms a “twisting concertina-like form [which] appears frozen in motion and evokes the grace and fluidity of dance,” represents a very interesting metaphorical use of motion and even some elements of a ballerina’s clothing.
“Skin + Bones” does the artistic and museum-going community a great service by identifying many of the key players in new trends in architecture and fashion. Each room gives way to even more fascinating works until the grand finale in the final room leaves the viewer feeling somewhat hung-over, deliriously stumbling for the exit. Nonetheless, there is yet a good deal of work to be done in order to collect a body of pieces that indeed speaks fluently in languages of both architecture and fashion, and in a mutual, rather than commensalist or even parasitic relationship.
