Described as ‘the only one of its kind in America’, the 2009 triennial is ICP’s signature exhibition and marks the ending of its Year of Fashion. With an exclusive focus on ‘Fashion (as a form of social communication)’, the intention of this exhibition is to understand it by using ‘costume, clothing and disguise’ and expressing it by means of ‘specific references to history, culture, gender and geography’.
Some of the featured 34 artists were successful in establishing a strong connection between fashion and social communication. In Tagged, Julika Rudelius has invited young immigrants of Turkish and Moroccan decent who spend extravagantly on branded clothing. Shot in a hotel room, the narrative shows these young men trying on their clothes while talking about the amount they spent on each. The video is about the interplay between the men’s need to be accepted into the society they migrated to by wearing haute couture and guilt of spending these amounts in face of prevailing poverty back home. Yto Barrada’s The Belt, Step 1 to 9 is a series of nine photographs that reference the smuggling of clothes by an elderly woman into Morocco. With a bland face, the woman methodically unties the contraband clothes hidden under her djellaba. Both these artists reference fashion in terms of social, cultural and geographical context.
However, not all artists conform to ICP’s focus so agreeably. In Laurie Simmon’s Ballroom II, she first photographs an empty miniature set, then adds cutouts of women posing in fashionable clothes and a plastic toy male figure. She also places spotlights and a dreamy, starry background. The end result is aesthetically pleasing piece about fashion, but its social or cultural connection is rather weak. The case of Kota Ezawa’s lightboxes is similar. In New! ($2.99/ea), he takes images from Ikea catalogues and stylizes the scene by reducing the objects to flat shapes. He does however retain some of the advertising and pricing, thus the ‘New!’ and ‘$2.99/ea’. Even though his lightboxes are comment on material culture, its relationship to fashion is seems ambiguous.
Overall, not all works in this exhibition measure up to its objective of placing Fashion in terms of social, cultural and historical perspectives, especially for a Grand Finale. A more selective collection of artists’ work that conforms to the exhibition’s mold better and/or adapting the focus, perhaps making it broader would have made the show stronger and helped encompass all the works.
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This offers a comprehensive background and interesting critique of the ICP Triennial’s goal of presenting fashion within its social context. The author successfully notes that while artists like Rudelius explicitly reference fashion’s cultural context, others approach fashion “as a form of social communication” in a less overt way. Simmon’s Ballroom may not embody the ICP’s statement of purpose as clearly as others, but her message may ultimately be the same. Perhaps Simmon’s image presents the naive notion Rudelius seems to suggest in his investigation of overspending in order to fit in: that all one needs to be happy are the right clothes.
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