Yvonne Volkart, e-mail yvolkart@access.ch, Zürich. Lecture for the Swiss-Institute, April 10, 1999

Fashion as art as fashion. Stabilizing or hacking the global code

One year ago, in Bregenz, a very small austrian town near the border of Switzerland, guest co-curator Eric Troncy from Paris showed an exhibition called "Lifestyle", including works from Peter Kogler, Franz West, Silvie Fleury, Iké Ude and others. The press release contained the remarkable sentences: "The economy in an individualised, wealthy information society needs art and culture to create new ideal values that will become decisive in tomorrow's markets. [...] Strategies hitherto only known within the spere of culture increasingly find their way into the economy, as well largely on account of their emotional symbolic surplus values." Living in Vienna and Zurich, where public institutions like museums and Kunsthalles until now were rather modest in engaging sponsors or giving the industries a chance to articulate their ideologies, I was quite astonished to read this. Not because I wouldn't know the increasing interviening of culture and industry, but to hear this significant concept of art's and culture's instrumentalisation by the market economy from a marginal young public art institution, was quite new. You, ladies and gentlemen, living in New York, where most of the public museums like the Guggenheim or MoMA and well-recognized awards like the Hugo Boss Award are supported by big companies, which is extensively from the fashion industry, might be used to these legimitazing effects of economy for culture. I was not, but perceived it as not only an interesting example of new forms of ideological internalisations, but together with the show, which was instead of the promised crossovers between art and fashion, a traditional presentation of high art, much more as an indicator, that the gap between mainstream and counterculture did not blur, as most uf us hoped in the beginning of the nineties, but even enhanced. The mainstream tries currently to take over many alternative practices and speaks of crossovers, only for pushing the same names of well-recognized people. Indeed, these takeovers of subcultural capital have an influence above all only on the stylish surface of the phenomenons. Discourses of high and low continue traditionally and the culturalisation of society takes place increasingly. In our globalizing visual culture according to Maurizio Lazzarato who is referring to Benetton, culture functions as a new form of policy. [Dia ] [Dia ] Art, fashion and new technologies have a raising significance and play an important role in maintaining, mutating and constructing cultural identities and ideologies of new bodies.
[Inez van Lamsweerde: Well basically. In this image she precisely brings together the inventions of technology, which are above all a military technology, and its pop appropriations for fashion and every day life. At the same time it is a reflexion on her own technologicaly based photoshop working which is one of the most important visual tools in constructing new bodies and engendering universal esthetics]

[Mariko Mori: Birth of a Star] It is interesting, that star artists like Mariko Mori or Matthew Barney worked before as fashion models.

[Dia Berlin entdeckt Design] The increasing importance of esthetics brings not only a big chance for monetarian profit, but also possibilities of a symbolic political resistance which art as field of reflexion can create. The current talk of the hybridisation of art and fashion grounds in this ambivalence: For some it may be the big chance to make a carrier, for others a opportunity, to act out from the belly of the monster, to subvert codes and engage in a pleasurable discourse where you can enjoy having dirty hands. Thus, as german art critic Isabelle Graw wrote, fashion can be both, symbolic politics and an accòmplice of the capitalist fetishism of commodities. [Dia Madonna, no comment] As postmodernism or posthumanism with its ideas of constructivity, hybridisation, style and esthetics is our state of mind, fashion becomes an essence of our state of being. [Dia Benin Suite] In fashion everything evolves around the body: The body is the reference, but at the same time losses its evidence. Fashion is a medium, a "technology" (in the sense of Foucault and Teresa de Lauretis) of body, gender, class, race, age etc. The only problem is that most of the current makers of these posthuman and fashion discourses mix fashionable exotic differences with ongoing real inequalitis. [example Rosemarie Trockel] Nevertheless fashion's seduction and ambivalence lays in its facility that people can appropriate social constraints and enjoy them as freely chosen. Fashion has the power to convert reluctance into joy and selfdefinition, it may give a feeling of subversion, and although identity shifts happen only on the surface, they may deeply influence a person's psyche. [Dia Nan Goldin]

[White Cube Gallery/Sam Taylor Wood] But let's return to our starting point of the economisation by culturalisation. Fashion is, as many stated, a culture industry: McKenzie Wark e.g. wrote: "Fashion can be thought of as a social rhythm that is both cultural and industrial." (230) And further "As such, enormous concentration of media, design, and cultural skill and capital in the overdeveloped world can act as an anchor for adding value of a creative and cultural kind to the garment industry". (230) We have to perceive the current marriage of art and fashion not just as an example of crossover or postmodern lifestyle esthetics, but rather considering its involvement in addititional value to the image industry. [Dia British Vogue] This double page of last fall's British Vogue abouth British Design shows a sucessful well-dressed couple, The owner of the White Cube gallery, Jay Joplin, and his wife, the video artist Sam Taylor Wood as Prada addict.)
Fashion as art and art as fashion are the current slogans everywhere, one public and private art institution after the other shows fashion exhibitions, organizes fashion defilees or exhibits so-called grand masters of fashion, which are mostly male. At the same time, the numbers of fashion advertisements in art magazines has increased stupendly. [Dia Prada ] No more Artforum or Flash Art without full- or doublepage advertisements of big stars beloved by the artscene, such as Prada, Gucci, Helmut Lang or Vivienne Westwood [Dia ], who plays in this paintinglike advertisement not only with her own strategy of appropriation of art's history, but also with the fashion-as-art- discourse and vice versa.
[Dia Cover Flash Art ]: The Cover of the spring issue of Flash Art showed a work of Pascale Gatzen and Thomas Buxò which was the reworked French Vogue's cover. The white dress of holy Maria was substituted by a redish brown dress of Azzedine Alaia. Flash Art had asked them to comment on Alaia-pictures and offered them the cover including one page inside the issue called "cover story" [Dia ] with an explaining text of art critic Guues Beumer, in addition a small-talk-interwiew of Alaïa with business friends about the ongoing importance of haute couture today was published. [Dia ] The old-fashioned tone was as striking as the art critics overrating of this artist's act for Flash Art: [zurück zum Dia mit Cover F.A.] "Gatzen and Buxò bluntly covered this issue of Flash Art with the December/January cover of French Vogue. In itself a deed that questions the most precious asset of each magazine: it's brand identity. In this case it is almost sacrilegious; art turning into fashion!" However, if the artist were really gone so far, they would have deconstructed perfectly the current art and fashion magazines' discourse, but obviously they didn't. One can hardly read the word Vogue, and the obvious mutation of the skirt makes this picture on the cover of an art magazine instantly became a work of art. For me, this cover indicated much more, how artists working with high fashionsucceed in putting their art works on the best place of a art magazine; some issues ago, Pascal Gatzen in a article of Guus Beumer "only" obtained the less prominent pages.

The mainstream's art & fashion-discourse focuses mainly on visual aspects by stressing the formal parallels of art and fashion. Its differences, especially its different production and working conditions are not reflected. This prooves exactly that the hyped marriage between the two is not only an example of increasing crossovers, but a mutual legitimation of the culture industry in the ongoing process of exclusion of (social, economic, political) realities by enhancing issues of pure style, taste and beauty. Angela McRobbie discusses this fact in the chapter "Fashion and the Image industry" of her new book "British fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry". She cites Dick Hebdige: "Everywhere the same rules [even in The Face or i-D]. Where 'everything is on the surface, laid out as style, there can be no place for a serious discussion, there are only superficial skirmishes or 'style wars'. Although this sounds too pessimistically, i have to agree. Angela McRobbie continues: "Of all forms of the consumer culture, fashion seems to be the least open to self scrutinity and political debate. [...] fashion-as-politics is only conceivable as a catchy idea for a 'fashion story'". (153) This observation of the deep unpolitical attitude in fashion media contexts, may be a reason, why the actual art and fashion discourse is not only so superficial and engenders a new small-talk discourse of art, but fits too well with the new ideologies of global estheticism.

As much as art and fashion are deeply involved in the image industry, photography or rather fashion photography play a key role in the representation of fashion and in the crossover-discourse. McRobbie stresses the importance of magazines as new exhibition spaces, reproaching even to the image industry that fashion as material has been replaced by gaze and photographic image and that the young designers who cannot afford these costs are the loosers.
In the art and fashion-magazine Self Service from Spring 1998, however, the editors of purple, Olivier Zahm and Elein Fleiss, stand for the idea of the autonomous artistic aspect of "real" fashion photography in opposition to a false and misused fashion photography which only would represent the commercial ideas of the fashion industry keeping their consumers happy: "A fashion photo is an exception to every rule. It is first and foremost an act of total freedom. If it isn't, then it is worth nothing. [...] They are the result of neither commercial magazine work nor advertising." I agree that this kind of photography, maybe similar to some fashion design like for example Bless, opens new spaces, which are in-between or crossover spaces of fashion and art, and I agree that this hybrid spaces have something very intriguing.
But the purple institute, Olivier Zahm, Elein Fleiss and Katja Rahlwes, strongly take the position of magazine producers who are more interested in the question of representation of fashion than of its materiality itself. Also for their contribution for "Too wide enough" they choose to be represented by the fashion photographer Mark Borthwick. Let me tell you an example. In spring 1998 The Purple Institute compiled a video platform under the title of "Fashion Video" for the exhibition "art et mode" at the centre d'art contemporain in Fribourg and for the Büro Friedrich in Berlin, where a dozen or so different video tapes were being shown simultaneously. These tapes consisted mainly of fashion shows by Hussein Chalayan, Comme des Garcons, Martin Margiela, Viktor & Rolf and Helmut Lang, Susan Ciancalielo, Tomato and a performance artist who's name i forgot unfortunately. The Purple Institute once again made the intriguing point - as in their magazins there is no visual difference between advertisement, fashion photography, interview or artistic contribution - what interested them from the very beginning: It is the demonstration that aesthetic problems and the search for visual and haptic autonomy were no longer the privileged pursuit of visual artists alone. But in addition, they also make themselves to the represents of a discourse of superficial equality engendered by the new media landscape, which we could define as a flow-discourse: In the press release Zahm wrote: "What interests me in this conjunction of art and fashion is the new surface of the exhibition space. [...] Everything exists within the very nature of this extended surface [... which ] so devoid of all connections, forms a space of nuances, of investigations and of non-stable projections, which is open and freed of any fixed significance." With this statement, Zahm summarises euphemistically the ongoing esthetisation and stylisation of different realities into a single beautiful visual flow by the media landscape where certainly only optical "equivalence" rules. Hardly surprising, then, that Zahm compares his surface methodology to the principles used by Vogue-editor Camilla Nickerson and art critic Neville Wakefield in their illustrated book Fashion. Photography of the Nineties (ed. 1996). In this book, the joint editors compiled photographs by a number of famous artists and fashion photographers, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince [Dia ], Nan Goldin, Jürgen Teller, Corinne Day, Nick Knight [Dia | and Ellen von Unwerth. There is no catalogue text, except for a tiny index at the end of the book listing the names of the photographers and the magazines that first publisthed the photographs. The photographs here, in spite of the diversity of their backgrounds and contexts, are layed-out without distinction as pure pictures, hoping that they would immediately suggest to be "art. Further, the lack of any accompanaying information would seem to guarantee the autonomous status of the images, so that the pictures may speak "art", while the title says "fashion". Interestingly, the concept of 'art' resembles the old-fashionable bourgeois idea of an autonomeous, self-contained entity more than anything else. The images mediate beauty, even the beauty of the ugly, and they reduce their function to mere visual pleasure. This mechanism seems to depend on the strict exlusion of the contexts of the production of fashion, photography and image-production.

[Dia Comme des Garcons. Stylist: Kithe Brewster] However, it seems as if the pure visual of "Fashion" is not so fashionable anymore. What Gatzen and Buxò's Flash Art cover indicated lightly, becomes more radical with Iké Udé's new series of inserts in the same magazine, entiteld "a touch different": On the magazine's exhibition space a readymade-esthetics is layed-out which indicates fashion's offspring of the clothing industry, its participation on the construction of the culture society and its complex levels of collaborations engaged in the making of an image which cancels the idea of the one genius. But this "critical edge of fashion", how Udé announces, is heighly ambivalent, if not as affirmative as everywhere, because in this opening feature of this new section in Flash Art the same few stars are presented: [Dia Comme des Garcons, stylist Kithe Brewster] [Dia Vivienne Westwood, stylist: Miles Cockfield] [Dia Vivienne Westwood, stylist: Kithe Brewster] Photographer: Randall Mesdon, top models: Carolyn Park and Jade Parfitt
Let's hope that Udé will show us "what's going on at the critical edge of fashion" - perhaps by picking up others than the already known names, younger designers, stylist, models, make-up artists and photographers, who are actually involved in cirtical or collaborative practices. Udé's statement on the titel of this insert doesn't sound too promising: "the viewer will discern a subtle touch of difference engendered by each stylist and further augmented by the sheer force of personality exerted by all of their individual characterists". It is remarkable that the promising title "a touch different" adresses only the esthetic and artistic gaze, educated by high art's and fashion's homogenising elitism of taste and beauty, and that this exclusion and style's universalism finds no negociation. While Iké Udé in earlier works, for example when he imitated Vogue, putting himself as black woman on the cover and adding themes from the black movement on it, he deconstructed completely this white glamour homogenity and universalism of 'style-wars', which is now perpetuated and decorated as crossover between art and fashion in the actual Ike Udé's "aRUDE Choice" for Flash Art.

Dia Pipilotti Rist by Kathrin Freisager
I had a long talk to the Swiss artist and former fashion photographer Kathrin Freisager who worked often for fashion magazines, here for example she made a fashion story with Pipilotti Rist for Bolero, a Swiss Magazine. [Dia ] Freisager told me, that in the last years the commercial constints became harder and harder, editors cutting her liberty etc., a process which frustrated her so much, that she prefers now to work as artist in the art context, dreaming of new possible crossovers. [Dia ] [Dia ]

A good example of a crossover practice is the german magazine "Neid" (envy, penis envy) [Dia cover Ina] of the transmedial, now dissolved group Neid, which consisted of about 20 artists working in different media. Their leading person was Ina Wudtke aka Djane T-ina aka Neidmagazina. [Dia working together]: Here Ina and a collegue. [Dia Back: Channel], and here, on the back: Neid's adress, as allusion both on a fashionable "channel" in which you could log-in, and on a clothing, which you can take and dress up. All these advertisements can be read as imitations of corporate identity practices in a capitalist society of taste, style and distinction mechanisms, but on the other hand they make their collaborative and working conditions, which exist only as style and advertisements, a subject of discussion. These are statements of Neid's affection for consumer ideologies, but not in the simple and one dimensional way of the talk of "fashion victims", like Sylvie Fleury [dia ] Karen Kilimnik or others do, and who never would try to create other spaces out of high fashion ideologies. Last summer, Neid conceived "the Neid video show", which was something like a video-anthology of its members. It's intention was to sell this Neid video show together with an installation to art institutions. [dia...]. Here with the video of an artist who's whole affection are shoes. She puts one shoe after the other on her foot, explainig where she bought it, to which of her self-created categories it belongs (working shoes, beautiful shoes, etc.) Unfortunately it is typical for many art collaboratives that they cannot persist for a long time. Now all of the Neid-artists work more or less for themselves.

___fabrics interseason, the label of artists Wally Sallner and Johannes Schweiger, is a interesting example of crossovers too, which are embedded in collective workprocesses and root in critical practices. Wally Sallner, working until 1998 as artist only, created a clothing edition for sabotage communications - a group of people, which work in different media in the popcontext and launched a parfum with the name CASH - a name, which is as significant as the group's name sabotage. The perfum's name CASH stresses the fact, that today big fashion firms earn their money above all by lending their names to the parfum and accessoires industry.
Video
The name of the edition - CASH - and the kind of this defilee subverts in a certain way the flow-discourse, i mentioned before. CASH imitates on the one hand the flow of capital and commodity fetishes: cars, women, men, clothing. Everything is in motion, the people move from car to car, the cars drive, and in the end they all seem to migrate. But on the other hand, unlike usual fashion defilees, these models' behavior is clumsy, as if they didn't know how to walk and to exhibit themselves. Their figures don't fit with ideal masses, they are what you can call "normal", nothing spectacular or even glamourous.
As much as the title Cash and its clothing is a programm which enables a certain ambiguity, so does the name fabric interseason. Interseason is the season which is out of fashion, it is the cheap time, when nothing is going on, however, it is not totally out, but participates in the making of fashion and creates an in-between space. Thus, it demonstrates that you can enjoy the consumer culture and have fun, but that you do not have to be a passive consumer. As this practice is situated at the interface of art and fashion i interpretate it symbolically as a concept of a creation of an own space which is an in-between space, still open for further actions, own production and distribution contexts and value systems: Beyond art and fashion contexts or in-between.
The production of real new in-between spaces is something very basically we have to do, if we want to resist global fashion or rather esthetic codes. Spaces, even very small spaces, in which one can take distance, pause, reflect and have fun are more necessery then ever. Traditionally these spaces were art spaces. With the new intertwinements of global capital and the culture industry this might alter now. Therefore i believe in the fields which engaged crossovers may open, but also in the necessity to reappropriate them for our culture and our art, which is not the art of the mainstream. Although I think that it is not so important wether something is art, or fashion or whatever, in other words, although I have always believed very much in the critical effects of crossovers, nevertheless I think that it is very important now to insist in the differences of art and fashion by practising the mix at the same time. In a time, in which every art institution speaks of crossovers by hireing high fashion represents to lanch a fashion show in a gallery and saying: that's art, it is very necessary to play our slash roles by occupying the art space and saying: this is our space, here we want to stay and to act. Beyond the cited works i see this desire for a reflective art space also allegorically in the work of Morgan Puett: Her waxed and therefore in a certain sense petrified stocks of clothing, cheques and INC. documents do not only, unlike all the other disussed art and fashion productions, unveil her working and firm conditions, but they do also stand for a moment of stillstand in the machine of late capitalism's image industry.