Single Entity

There's an art show in the Kenyon library that's vaguely disturbing to me. It's a bunch of vintage clothes and zippers encased in rubber, some of it colored. Her artists statement at has some bullshit about the inevitability of gendered sterotypes in clothing or something (well no shit, clothes are made to fit our bodies, and women's bodies look different from men's bodies), but it almost seems like a thing you'd do just because it's possible. I don't know; I'm not an artiste.

What I am, however, is someone who loves vintage clothes, and the quality associated with certain eras. I'm also someone who loves history, and the very personal aspect inherent there (ask me about my geneaology sometime). There was someone who wore all the clothes in this art before, someone who bought that beautiful blue dress for her junior prom, someone who sewed that tiny nightgown for her first child. There are stories associated with the garments, stories that you can read, looking at a dress that's had all it's seams moved out so a little girl could keep wearing it when she was growing.

The thing is, with the clothes encased within rubber like this, you can't see those details. You can't see the little things that make these clothes special, you can't feel them. Fabric is physical thing -- the way it feels is a huge part of if a garment gets worn until it's falling apart, or left in the back of the closet until it's given away.

The over all feeling I get looking at this art is that I'm in a mortuary, looking at things that have been preserved, taken into an unnatural state. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of people in this country who would have gladly bought those clothes to be worn, who would have let them live again. I'm not saying I hated all of it -- the zipper art was really cool, and some of the rubber clothes pieces worked really well -- there were some little boys' dress shirts in rubber squares, with the front ruffles sticking out, and some little girls' dresses with the skirts free from rubber, displayed on a wall like a class photo.

This piece doesn't bother me so much, perhaps because the clothes are freed a little bit from the rubber? But it also had a factor of cute, and amusing about it -- look at them all arranged like they're in thier first class photo. It has an idea behind it.

The pieces I really didn't like were a few full-skirted party dresses whose bodices had been crushed and encased in dyed rubber circles, with the skirts spread all around them. These dresses were meant to be worn. Simply keeping them on the floor like this, they've been denyed thier purpose, thier existence. I wanted to pick them up, hold them up to my shoulders, swirl them around like I was dancing, I wanted to love them. These dresses feel abandoned.

It also kind of killed me that she had some of the best quality and prettiest vintage clothes that I have seen, and you can't just buy that stuff anymore -- it's really expensive. So to see it encased in rubber, where sure, it will be preserved, but it won't ever be worn again, it was saddening.

Here are a few links to look at more pictures and a review -- the children's nightgowns are particularly sad, to me.