ANIMALISTIC

The work of Mrinalini Mukherjee, as installed now at the Met Breuer, has a ferociouscharisma. Though often classified as textile art because they’re made from hemp rope, they’d be better described as monumental sculptures. Scaled just larger than the human body, and hanging, standing and sitting directly in front of visitors, without vitrines, pedestals and labels, many have the fera; presence of Rodin’s figures. They’re so richly realized formally that they come alive emotionally. One almost expects them thrash about.

The installation, with mesh curtains and a flat beige carpet pulling one through the third floor gallery in a meandering path, plays brilliantly off the museum’s rough concrete walls and ceiling grid. It opens a soft, secret, shadowed space within the building, a kind of grotto, for these fleshy figures. Some depict characters from Hindu mythology, some depict people, and some depict plants. All have a fundamental axial symmetry that recalls bodies and trees, and curved surfaces that recall organs and leaves.

Weekend visitors were chatty, discussing, with various degrees of success, the iconography (”Look, it’s the peacock god!”), the work (”It’s meant to be seen in the round, not like this.”), and the artist (”She died in 2015”). It’s all rather priceless, since many didn’t know Mukherjee’s work until reading Holland Cotter’s rapturous review in the Times, or hearing about the show through word-of-mouth. At least this crowd took the work seriously. For many this show will be understood as womens art, Asian art, textile art, folk art, and craft, or, cynically, as a political corrective to museum shows celebrating the work of well-known white men. This is, simply, figural sculpture. It can compete with the marble figures on display in the classical wing at The Met, and, in terms of sheer physical charisma, it can win.

Mrinalini Mukherjee, Yakshi, 1984, hemp fibre, 225×105×72 cm. Photograph Courtesy of Jhaveri Contmeporary.

September 08, 2019 by Nalina Moses

DISEMBODIED

MoMA’s new exhibit Items: Is Fashion Modern? might be the most elegant presentation I’ve seen there. The 111 items featured, “clothing and accessories that have had a strong impact on the world in the 20th and 21st centuries,” are mounted with minimal fuss, on headless mannequins on low platforms, and pinned like dead butterflies on the blank walls of the sixth floor galleries, leaving oceanic expanses in between for wandering and reflection. There are simple printed text cards and some small video monitors at the displays, but the installation remains blissfully free of gimmickry. It’s also, sadly, free of drama, glamor and sex appeal. Is Fashion Modern? takes the fizz out of fashion.

Unlike the small, rich, thoughtfully-curated fashion shows at The Museum at FIT, this show feels thematically vague. It’s less about the items themselves, and how and why they’re worn, than about their intellectual associations. Most of the items are types of garments (LEOTARD, BRIEFS, MOTORCYCLE JACKET), but some aren’t “items” at all. They are materials (KENTE, GORE-TEX), brands (Y-3, WONDERBRA, SPANKS, FITBIT), and even ideas (SPACE AGE).

As they prepared the show – only the second fashion show in MoMA’s history – curators must have imagined the throngs visiting The Met's annual blocksbuster fashion show. But instead of presenting iconic garments, like Elizabeth Hurley’s Versace safety pin gown or Audrey Hepburn’s Givenchy cocktail dress (LITTLE BLACK DRESS), there are generic versions from the same designers. And instead of offering Michael Jordan’s hightops (AIR FORCE 1), there’s a sagging, scuffed pair that look like they were lifted from the sidewalk on garbage day. So many of the items are commonplace, overly familiar (SUIT, WHITE T SHIRT, TIGHTS), that they have little charge formally, and don’t hold the eye when set in vitrines or hung on the wall. These 111 items might have been better collected in a time capsule, marked How Everyone Dresses in 2017, and set aside for fifty years.

Most strangely, the show misses timely political connections. We see a replica of Colin Kaepernick’s 49ers shirt (SPORTS JERSEY) but we don’t see a replica of Mickey Mantle’s, though both wear, iconically, number 7. We see a Yankees hat but we don’t see a Make America Great Again hat. And a red Champion sweatshirt (HOODIE), displayed against a big black wall with its hood pointed upwards, has an spooky, unsettling presence. Rather than speaking to trends in athleisure and streetwear, it recalls Tayvon Martin, and the anonymous hooded prisoner in the grainy photographs from Abu Ghraib.

This show is so eager to decipher each of the 111 items semiotically that it forgets that that they are also clothing, charged mythologically when worn on a body, by a person, in the world. These items make our identities and our dreams.

Photograph courtesy of MoMA.

October 28, 2017 by Nalina Moses

DRESS SENSE

As I walked through the sumptuous Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, I couldn’t help but remember the blockbuster 2011 Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met. The Gaultier show suffers by comparison. Though the clothes are exquisitely crafted (many are haute couture), and the installation is vivid (with the filmed facial expressions of live models projected on blank mannequin heads), the experience lacks the emotional intensity of the McQueen show. That show was charged by the fantasy in McQueen’s work, which fused archetypical female characters (maiden, fairy, princess, witch) with archetypical cultural narratives (rape, drowning, mutation, revolution). And the presentation, chronological, was seared by the tragic fact of his death. What we saw at the Met was the complete ouevre of an artist; what we see at the Brooklyn Museum is a retrospective of an immensely skilled professional.

Both designers are showmen, who pair technical mastery with visual flamboyance. They flout conventional styles while executing their clothing with the highest traditional standards of fitting, draping and embellishment. At the Brooklyn Museum it’s starry and also instructive to see the corsets that Gaultier designed for Madonna’s stage shows. They’re kitschy, made of sparkling lurex, with cartoonishly cinched waists and pointed cups. And they are as finely wrought as jewelry, with miles of angelic, millimeter-long stitches holding strips of ribbon, elastic and boning in place. Even garments with simple profiles – a strapless gown with princess seams, flowing sailor paints with a button front – have an overwrought, byzantine quality. They’re shaped with abundant piecing and puckering.

And yet they’re not innovative in form; they’re rich renditions of standard garments. More than a dreamer, Gaultier is an intellectual, able to infuse a garment – dress, suit, jacket – with a single idea to devastating effect. At the Brooklyn show there is a black cocktail dress constructed like a skeleton, a gauzy white wedding gown that takes the shape of a West African mask, and a slithering satin evening gown modelled after a Renaissance Madonna. If McQueen’s works are fantasies erupting into form, Gaultier’s works are garments lit with ideas. They aren’t artworks, they’re clothes.

Virgins dress, by Jean Paul Gaultier, Spring/Summer 2007. Courtesy of Jean Paul Gaultier.

February 10, 2014 by Nalina Moses