What Not to Wear: Art and Fashion fuse in Manhattan Style
By Faran Krentsil
A very long time ago, John Donne remarked, "no man is an island." Not so long ago, the art world began to realize that its production was not taking place in a vacuum either. From the Warhols on the wall at the Met to the Gary Hume sculptures on the Marissa Marks floor, works of art are in constant dialogue with the world around them. Architects have long realized the importance of art within a space: the Guggenheim’s circuitous galleries frame their art with such force, it’s as if the curling walls and curving floors are writing an editor’s note for every piece. The Agora gallery in Soho does the opposite, placing its paintings on anonymous slabs of smooth white wall. But art’s surrounding space is only part of the equation. The real dialogue between a piece of art and its encasing world comes when the piece and the people around it come together.
What happens when a painting’s meaning is reinforced, or challenged, by the visuality of its surrounding viewers? Does the Birth of Venus shift its semiotics if a naked woman stands in front of it? Does Marilyn undergo changes of meaning and content if a drag queen dressed as the silver screen queen plopped herself in front of Warhol’s famous silk-screens? How do works lose, reinforce, or restructure their meaning based on the surrounding spectators?
In Keith Moxey’s tome "The Practice of Theory: Postculturalism, Cultural Politics, and Art History," the theorist suggests "visual representation has less to do with mimetic accuracy… and more to do with cultural projection." If Moxey’s idea is to be embraced (and judging from the number of art history students who have to plow through his books, it’s definitely been embraced), then the projection of cultural values onto a work of art is just as important as the art itself. Nowhere is this idea more tangible than in a museum or gallery space, where the visual elements of spectators merge with works of art to form ideas, messages, and meaning. In some ways, that pair of Lucky jeans slung low on your hips is as significant as that angry red brush stroke sweeping down a Graham Nickson seascape. To find out how, we visited three Manhattan mainstays–the MoMA’s photography wing, the Met’s modern art gallery, and the Lauder Wing of the Whitney (sorry Williamsburg, we’ll get you next time), observing not the official artwork, but the visual messages set off by its surrounding spectators.
Our first stop was to the MoMA, where the much-mentioned Fashioning Fiction In Photography exhibit was in full swing. Any exhibit featuring Prada ads is bound to have some fashion-plated voyeurs, and sure enough within seconds of stepping into the space, we had a winner: a lithe brunette with stringy hair and strappy sweater-tank stood stoically in the corner, half-swooning over Craig Dean’s Spring Scapes series from a 1999 Harper’s Bazaar issue. Dean’s photographs are angular and stark, with bleached-out colors and mod models sporting nude lip-gloss, flippy haircuts, and geometric-print coats in front of a Bauhaus backdrop. The slouchy hipster, who considered the painting with tilted hips and a thumbnail in her mouth, provided strong contrast to the image before her, the futuristic look of the photo juxtaposed against the grainy guise of the viewer. Further down the room, a group of polished tourists paused–or rather, posed–in front of Larry Sultan’s "Visiting Tennessee," the memorable Kate Spade campaign two seasons ago. Like the characters in the photograph, the viewers seemed larger than life, in coordinating colors and strong silhouettes that suggested an affluence and confusion most often conveyed in the Carlyle Hotel lobby. In this case, the viewers surrounding the piece served to reinforce its theme and meaning, and became almost a play-within-a-play–to the point where the poor family noticed me staring, and I had to quickly turn away. On to the Juergen Teller photograph "The Clients: Marie Chantal of Greece," a portrait of the socialite shows her dawning a poofy white dress and a dour expression of exhaustion. Crowded around the picture was a gaggle of Greenwich girls, complete with swishy short skirts and requisite Country Day sweatshirts. Staring at the girls staring at the Princess of Greece (once a Country Day student herself) was like a before-and-after shot. The shiny highlighted hair of the teenagers, carefully combed into an I-don’t-care bun, mimicked the effortless tresses of the oldest Miller sister, and one girl wore a ballet skirt from Intermix, which mimicked Marie Chantal’s own couture clothing. After a moment of staring at the princess, the girls sought out their own reflections in the photograph’s frame and began to fix their hair, transfixed by the image but also seeking to look beyond it.
While the fashion choices at the MoMA integrated the viewers into the compositions of the pieces on display, the visitor’s style at the Met’s Modern Art wing seemed to be shadowing instead of interacting with the works. Andy Warhol once wrote, "I could never stand to watch TV, because it’s the same shots over and over again. Apparently, most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite: if I’m going to sit and watch the same thing I watched – I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at exactly the same thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel." As if illustrating the point, Andy Warhol’s Last Self Portrait was flanked by three women of identical height with–count ‘em–three denim jackets, three pairs of black pants in trademark Gap boot cut, and three identical, and very fake, Louis Vuitton bags.
Further down, the area in front of Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30) was studded with five young children, zooming back and forth in multi-hued Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls. Even though the glaring red and purple corduroy contrasted with Pollock’s black-and-white masterpiece, the whizzing streaks of color that crossed the painting were completely in-sync with the painting’s pulse. Looking down at the Levine court, shiny black-haired women with shiny black leather jackets from Kenneth Cole and BCBG gathered underneath the Calder mobile, speckling the white floor with deep dots and serving as the shadow of Calder’s oval silhouettes.
The synchronicity seen at the Met wasn’t repeated at the Whitney, where Edward Hopper paintings graced the Lauder Wing and staunch New Yorkers stood in rapt attention, gazing at scenes in which they were not present. A black-clad woman with salty hair stood column-like in front of Hopper’s Second Story Sunlight, her rumpled cashmere cardigan alien to the sleepy-town scene in the piece, and her pallid skin contrasting sharply with the rich blues and greens of the background. A 20-something redhead in a threadbare tee and Salvation Army cargos peered cautiously at New York Interior, the painting of a pale young woman pulling on a party dress from the back. With his battered Birkenstocks and his scruffy corduroy jacket, the viewer couldn’t have looked more out of place in front of the ball-going subject–until his two friends, in equally Lorimer-friendly threads, joined him to savor the view. Two women with acrylic fingernails and Juicy Couture sweat suits crowded in front of Cobb’s Barns and Distant Houses. With their terrycloth togs, Fendi totes, and pink Mei Mesh sneakers from Adidas, they were the picture of city casual chic, slammed up against an idyllic scene of country Cloud Nine. As more urbanites crammed into the Lauder gallery, sporting Ecko hoodies, anonymous aviator sunglasses, white I-Pods stemming from Jack Spade messenger bags, it looked like the city dwellers came searching the Whitney for an oasis, and the Hopper paintings were postcards stamped "Wish You Were Here." Only at the gallery’s exit, with Joseph I’m-Not-Frank Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge, Variations on A Theme did the painting style and the viewer style fuse. The cacophonic harmony of shapes and the dingy, delightful color palate of the painting highlighted the metropolitan manner of the museum-goers, merging viewer style and painting style into one Manhattan mess.
