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To (un)dress: Clothes, Women and Feminist Ideologyin Modern
ArtTal Dekel, Tel Aviv University, Israel
Abstract: Clothes carry inherent implications and can be used
for examining sociological, psycholo-gical and even philosophical
questions. They serve as a barometer of change in society and are
relatedto issues of gender, race, sexual orientation, etc. Starting
with the end of 19th century, during whichthe modern feminist
movement was first established in the West, seminal art works done
by womenartists will be discussed. From the First wave feminism to
the Third wave feminism, feministtheory, politics and activism have
fundamentally changed, giving rise to many various voices
andformulations, such as multiculturalism and gender fluidity. The
paper will demonstrate the ways inwhich women artists made use of
the theme of clothes in order to raise questions regarding
genderand social status of women in society.
Keywords: Gender, Feminist Ideology, Clothes, Multi Culturalism,
Political Criticism, Womens Status
Introduction
IN HUMAN SOCIETY in general, and in feminist ideology in
particular, fashion andclothing are complex and multi-dimensional
phenomena. They raise a wide range ofsociological, psychological,
political and aesthetic issues such as: clothing as a secondskin,
clothing as a mask and a cover, the role of clothes in the myth of
beauty, and the
multiple links between fashion and industry, capitalism or
globalization, to name just a few.In the fine arts too, many women
(as well as men) artists are concerned with the theme of
clothing.1 The inherent implications of certain types of
clothing are important tools for ex-amining anthropological,
sociological, psychological and even philosophical questions.
Theyserve as a barometer of change in society and are related to
issues of status, identity andsexuality, as they touch on the human
body, both literally and metaphorically. Introducinga gendered
perspective to the subject of art and clothes enables new questions
to rise. Thisis true in every period of art history, yet this paper
will discuss a very specific point in time,starting with the end of
19th century, during which the feminist movement was first
establishedin the West. Since the 19th century, feminism has much
changed, giving way to many variousvoices and formulations, some
substantially different from its original goals. The discussionwill
present examples of visual art which reflects the core issues that
are central to the fem-inist discourse. In each phase of feminism
in the Western world, seminal art work will bediscussed, until
reaching contemporary works of art.
1 Clothing was the central theme of two large exhibitions
organized recently. The first is Dress Codes: Clothingas Metaphor
at the Katonah Museum of Art, New York (2009), and the second is
Aware: Art, Fashion, Identity,at the Royal Academy, London
(2010).
The International Journal of the Arts in SocietyVolume 6, Issue
2, 2011, http://www.arts-journal.com, ISSN 1833-1866 Common Ground,
Tal Dekel, All Rights Reserved,
Permissions:[email protected]
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The First Wave Feminism
The first wave feminism which was formulated during the 19th
century introduced manyimportant changes to the lives of women. It
also gave rise to the so-called new woman.2
These new women were closely allied with the achievements of the
suffragists who foughtfor social equality for women, both in Europe
and the United States. The struggle of thesuffragists bore fruit in
various countries in Europe at the turn of the century, and
reachedits height in 1920, when women in the United States and most
of European countries weregranted the right to vote.3 The emergence
of the new woman may be seen as a direct resultof World War I,
whose difficult circumstances created a new social reality,
especially forEuropean women. While the men were fighting at the
battle fields, women were called totake over many of the work
places in agriculture, industry and military that had
previouslybeen male strongholds.4 The four long years of war did
much to promote European womensself-confidence. Their proven
ability to provide for themselves (for the first time in
history,millions of women were receiving a regular salary)
convinced them they were sufficientlyskilled to develop their own
careers.5 This new confidence, together with the politicalmovement
to promote womens rights and suffrage being waged created a
momentum thatencouraged women to seek fulfillment, outside their
traditional roles in the home.
In order to perform their new duties on the farms or at the
factories, women had to shedtheir cumbersome Victorian dresses and
don comfortable work clothes. But the urgent desirefor social
change was also reflected in womens high fashion. One of the major
changes wastheir use of pants. In the early 1920s, the act of
wearing pants was not only a practical solution,but also an
emotional reaction to the silhouette of the Victorian woman whose
movementwas restricted by tight corsets and multi-layered dresses.
Following the new fashion, womenchose to obscure almost all signs
of their femininity, even going so far as to bind their chestwith
elastic bandages in order to make it look as flat as possible.
Female curves (hips, but-tocks, and bosom) were deliberately
concealed, and instead of accentuating their waists aspreviously,
they now wore short straight Charleston or flapper dresses.6
Fashion designerscreated outfits such as suits with matching pants,
skirts and jackets, inspired by the new highpriestess of fashion,
Coco Chanel.7 At the same time, they used lipstick and make up,
declar-ing that they were not men, but a new, liberated type of
women. To declare their newfoundfreedom, women also cut their hair
in a style dubbed la garonne, smoked openly, andin general adopted
behaviors that had previously been associated with men, such as
drinking
2 The term New Woman was commonly used by women in Europe and
the United Stated from the end of the19th century, and mainly
during the 1920s. The term was used by women that were influenced
by the political andcultural changes in the status of women, which
wished to differentiate themselves from Victorian women,
holdingconservative views in regard to the role and place of women
in society.3 Janet K. Boles and Diane Long Hoeveer,Historical
Dictionary of Feminism, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Maryland, Toronto,Oxford:
The Scarecrow Press, 2004), p. 28.4 See for example: Jacqueline R.
deVries, Challenging Traditions: Denominational Feminism in
Britain, 1910-1920,Borderlines: Genders and Identities inWar and
Peace, ed. Billie Melman (New York and London: Routledge,1998), pp.
266-280.5 Prudence Glynn, War, Need, and Social Change, Fashion:
Dress in the Twentieth Century, (London: GeorgeAllen and Unwin
Ltd., 1978), p. 53.6 Mary Louise Roberts, Samson and Delilah
Revisited: The Politics of Fashion in 1920s France, The ModernWoman
Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, eds. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza
True Latimer, (New Jersey: RutgersUniversity Press, 2003), p. 68.7
Sophia Dekel-Caspi, AD-DRESS: Thoughts on Garments (Jerusalem:
Meiri Press, 2011), p. 10.
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alcohol in public and participating in sports. They were
determent to prove that they wereequal to men and apt to
anything.
The new spirit of political and sexual freedom that was
introduced by women at the turnof the 20th century was reflected in
the art and literature of the period. In numerous portraitswomen
artists painted themselves and their friends in the style that
became popular in manycountries in Europe, North America, and even
some places in South America.8 For example,in 1923 Tamara de
Lempicka, working in France, painted a portrait of her friend,
theDuchess de la Salle, presenting her in a bold assured pose,
dressed in male attire, thus ex-pressing the political and sexual
freedom gained by women at that time (fig. 1).9
Figure 1: Tamara De Lempicka, Duchess De La Salle, 1925, Oil on
Canvas Tamara ArtHeritage/Victoria De Lempicka/Licensed by MMI.
8 Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, Becoming ModernGender
and Sexual Identity after World WarI, The Modern Woman
RevisitedParis Between the Wars, eds. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza
True Latimer, (NewBrunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers
University Press, 2003), pp. 3-4.9 Lynn Frame, Gretchen, Girl,
Garonne? Weimer Science and Popular Culture in Search of the Ideal
Woman,Woman in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimer
Germany, ed. K. von Ankum, (Berkeley, Los Angelesand London, 1997),
p. 20.
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The French artist Claude Cahun produced numerous photographed
self-portraits, while usinga variety of clothes and accessories, in
order to present the ever changing and fluid genderidentity:
female, male, androgynous. In one such photograph, which is of a
large series ofself-portraits, she chose to present herself in male
persona, in a short hair cut and a blacksuit (fig. 2)10.
Figure 2: Claude Cahun, Self Portrait, 1920, Photograph.
These works by Cahun and de Lempicka, and many others like them,
present the image ofthe new, self-invented, and liberated woman.
They were produced around the 1920s, theheight of the First-wave
feminism. Although a united and fully formulated set of
politic-al/ideological agenda shared by women artists cannot be
detected among them at the stageof the first-wave-a phenomenon that
would be clear in the next feminist wave-one canclearly see that
they were deeply influenced by the major political and cultural
changes thatfeminism brought to womens lives during that decade,
changes which were clearly introducedinto the work of many women
artists of the time.
Between the two World Wars the economic recession both in Europe
and the United Stateshad an adverse effect on the womens movement
and on the status of women in society. Asmen returned from the
fighting, they sought to reclaim their old jobs in industry and
agricul-
10 This work has an unclear status in the sense of rights of
reproduction, which I have failed to detect (most of therights to
Chauns photos are with the Jersey Heritage Collection, but they
have indicated that this specific worksholders of the rights of
reproduction is unknown at this point).
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ture, temporarily occupied by women.11 For decades to come, the
voice of feminism fellalmost completely silent, since all turned to
emphasize the importance of family and raisingchildren, after
losing so many millions to the World War Ithus bringing on the
massiveBaby Boom.12 After World War II, the status of women
regressed even further, so thatfor nearly half a century the
feminist movement lay dormant.13 Needless to say, womensart
expressing political feminist issues, produced under the umbrella
of a feminist group ofartists and working in allegiance in large
numbers, was also dormant all that time.
The Second Wave Feminism
The second wave feminism was formed during the tumulus years of
the 1960s. That timeconstituted of many revolutionary social
movements, among them the civil rights movement,the anti-war
movement, the hippie and student movements, the sexual revolution,
and left-wing politics. The Womens Liberation movement was formed
during that decade andwould change the lives of millions of women
and men alike. The feminist movement alsochanged the very structure
of the artistic field, providing women artists during the 1960s
and1970s with tools to establish the feminist art movement. Thanks
to the deep-seated paradigmshift, offering new perspectives and
concerns to art creating-mainly the new understandingthat biology
is not destiny, alongside the revolutionary and exciting
understanding that allmen and women are subjected to social
construction-women artists shifted their attentionfrom the
traditional genres and subjects.14 They started to produce art that
was addressingtwo main themes: the first held notions revealing the
social oppression form which womensuffer under patriarchal society.
The second theme described the the female experience,as women
authentically felt and lived it (and not as men were describing it
for them duringthe centuries before). Addressing these two
approaches, the artists of the group used innov-ative tactics which
had clear political agenda.15
Yoko Onos Cut Piece, first performed in 1964, is an example of
art done in the vanguardof second-wave feminism (see fig. 3).
11 See for example: Pam Taylor, Daughters and MothersMaids and
Mistresses: Domestic Service Between theWars,Working-Class Culture:
Studies in History and Theory, eds. John Clarke, Chas Critcher and
Richard Johnson,(London, 1979).12 Tali Rosin, What Is Feminism
Anyway? (Tel Aviv, Zmora-Bitan, 2000), pp. 180-181 [Hebrew].13
Diana Crane, Gender and Public Space in the Twentieth Century,
Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class,Gender, and Identity in
Clothing (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,
2000), p. 123.14 Tal Dekel, GenderedArt and Feminisms during the
1970s in the U.S. (Tel Aviv: Hakibbuz-Hameuhad, 2011),p. 25-28
[Hebrew].15 Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, Introduction: Feminism
and Art in the Twentieth Century, The Power ofFeminist Art, eds.
Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1994), p. 12.
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Figure 3: Yoko Ono, Cut Piece, Performance at Carnegie Recital
Hall NYC. PerformanceDate: March 21, 1965. Photo Credit: Minoru
Niizuma. Courtesy of Yoko Ono.
During the performance Ono sat silent and passive on the floor
wearing a fine dress, a pairof scissors in front of her. Members of
the audience were invited onstage, one by one, to cutpieces off her
clothing. The feminine body, seen throughout the history of art as
an anonymousfemale model or even an object, is thus viewed from a
different perspective-through the eyesof a woman. In other words,
the subjective experience of womanhood is conveyed by
awoman-artist, the creator of the art piece. This performance,
which was very innovative,helped establish a new language through
which women could investigate their victimization,and perhaps even
more importantly, their ability to survive male aggression, an
issue ofprimary concern to second-wave feminism, particularly for
radical feminists who wereconcerned with the power relations
between pairs of men and women and with the roleswithin the family
as a mirror of the society at large, and the effect of phenomena
such aspornography, sexual harassment, rape, and abuse on the lives
of ordinary women every-where.16
While most artists use apparel as a tool to mask or disguise, to
dress up or dress downfigures that represent their perception of
gender and sexuality, Yoko Ono used it to take astand: she cuts
through the clothes, deep under the layers of clothing-the
covering, the cos-tume, the pretense. Cut Piece is a double-folded
art work: it projects vulnerability and power,violence and
compassion, generosity and giving, helplessness, pain, and inner
peace. Ayelet
16 For more on this subject, see, for example: Miriam E. David,
Personal and Political: Feminism, Sociology, andFamily Lives
(London: Trentham Books, 2003); Barbara A. Crow (ed.), Radical
Feminism: A DocumentaryReader (New York and London: New York
University Press, 2000).
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Zohar writes that the artist herself stated that her original
intent was to create a situation ofaltruistic giving in the most
difficult circumstances of near violence and assault.17 The
per-formance was presented several times over the course of the
years, in Kyoto and Tokyo in1964, in New York in 1965, in London in
1966 and later in Paris in 2003. Although it hasbeen given many
different interpretations, many critics stress the element of
womens sub-ordination and their physical abuse, which has come to
be seen as a metaphor for the statusof women in society.
In 1972 American artists Karen LeCoq and Nancy Youdelman staged
a performance en-titled Leahs Room (fig. 4), in which a woman at a
dressing table was trying on clothes andputting on many layers of
make-up.
Figure 4: Karen LeCoq and Nancy Youdelman, Leas Room, 1972,
Performance. Courtesyof Karen LeCoq.
The performance was a recreation of the boudoir of the courtesan
in the French novel Chriby Colette. Published in 1920, the book
tells the story of an aging courtesan about to loseher youthful
lover to a younger woman. As the artists themselves explained, the
performanceexpressed the pain of aging, of losing beauty, pain of
competition with other women....wewanted to deal with the way women
are intimidated by the culture to constantly maintain
17 Ayelet Zohar, The Postgender: Gender, Sexuality, and
Performativity in Contemporary Japanese Art (exh. cat.)(Haifa:
Tikotin Museum, 2005), p. 180 [Hebrew].
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their beauty and youth and the feeling of desperation and
helplessness once this beauty islost.18
The same theme was addressed by numerous feminist theoreticians
in the 1970s, particu-larly those belonging to the school of
radical feminism. Many turned their attention to theulterior
motives underlying male hegemony and the roots of the idealization
of the femalebody.19 Fashion came to be seen by feminist thinkers
and artists as a patriarchal constructthrough which women are made
to wear their oppression. Clothing became subject ofcritical
analysis that revealed its ideological motivation, and feminist art
became a tool usedto expose it. Inspired by a Brechtian aesthetic,
feminist artists adopted the approach that themajor function of art
is to openly educate the public to an ideology.20 This principle
directedthe work of artists such as Martha Rosler, Eleanor Antin,
Hannah Wilke, and many others.The performance Leahs Room, performed
by LeCoq and Youdelman, reflects the prevalentcriticism of the
feminists in the 1970s, and the intensification of their public
struggle againstthe phallocentric tradition that determines how
women are meant to dress, to feel, to behave,and to act. According
to this view, male hegemony dictates fashion and encourages the
useof superficial means and artificial products to disguise the
natural female body, so that mencan control and oppress women.
As early as 1949, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir explored the
hidden mechanism behindthe creation of myths about women, formed in
the aim of oppressing them. In her seminalbook, The Second Sex, de
Beauvoir explained that women are associated with nature, andthat
is the root and connection to the fashion industry, as she writes
in her book: Hernatural body reminds men that they too are
vulnerable to disease, decay, and death, andtherefore they take
pleasure in her artificiality. Men prefer her in furs and elegant
clothes,covered in cosmetics and perfumed. In that form, she no
longer reminds them of their ownmortality.21 Later, Mary Daly, a
prominent feminist of the 1970s, called on women to freethemselves
from the status of painted birds: domesticated, tamed, and
artificial. She ap-pealed women to rid themselves of the
patriarchal dictates, clothing she believed deprivedthem of their
genuine natural selves, such as synthetic fabrics and
make-up.22
Leahs Room might also be seen as a response to, or a direct
product of, the famous fem-inist protest that gave birth to the
bra-burning myth. In November 1968 in Atlantic City,approximately
200 radical feminists demonstrated outside the Miss America
pageant. Theywaved signs with slogans such as Can make-up hide the
scars of oppression? At the climaxof the protest, they threw into a
Freedom Trash Can several articles they viewed as symbolsof the
oppression of women in the patriarchal society: girdles, stockings,
high-heeled shoes,makeup, Playboy magazines, cleaning rags, and a
few bras. All these were set ablaze ina ritualized burning.23
18 Arlen Raven, Womanhouse, The Power of Feminist Art, eds.
Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard (New York:Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,
1994), p. 60.19 See for example: Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology:
TheMetaaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978),pp.
59, 334-336.20 Griselda Pollock, Screening the Seventies: Sexuality
and Representation in Feminist PracticeA BrechtianPerspective,
Vision & Difference: Femininity, Feminism and the Histories of
Art (London and New York: 1988),pp. 162-163.21 Simone de Beauvoir,
The Second Sex, (1952; New York: Vintage Books, 1989), pp.
157-159.22 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical
Feminism, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 334-336.23 Boles and
Hoeveer, p. 31.
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Another artist whose work often relates to fashion and clothing
is American Cindy Sher-man, who produced numerous photographic
series, the first and most famous one beingUntitled Film Stills
(1977-1980). In the second half of the 1970s, Sherman began
employingthe photographic image in a new way. Challenging the
notion that a photograph representsreality as it is, she used her
pictures to express social and cultural criticism, focusing on
themanner in which women were presented in the media at the
timetypically through maleeyes (fig. 5).24
Figure 5: Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, 1978, Black and
White Photograph, 10x8Inches, Edition of 10. Courtesy of the Artist
and Metro Pictures.
For over a decade, Sherman displayed the female figure in
various guises, all of which sheherself assumed (she claimed in an
interview that she had loved to dress up and put onmakeup even as a
young girl).25 Using a variety of articles of clothing, makeup,
wigs andaccessories, she created a series of fictional narratives
that gave rise to a complex identity,as, like a chameleon, Sherman
became all these personas. In her work, it is impossible toidentify
the specific woman to which each figure makes reference. Rather,
especially in theearly series, her characters are succinct
one-dimensional representations of stereotypes, orto use Jean
Baudrillards term, simulacra.26 Shermans work thus demonstrates the
con-temporary insight that even our own body is not the real thing,
that it too, is subject to
24 Chris Townsend, Rapture: Arts Seduction by Fashion since 1970
(London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), p. 50.25 Danoff, Michael,
Afterword: Cindy Sherman Guises and Revelations, Cindy Sherman (New
York: PantheonBooks, 1984), p. 193.26 A simulacrum is based on the
conception of a stereotype; it refers to anything meant to appear
again and againas a simulation, as an imitation of an imitation, as
the image of a reproduction for which there is no original
source.See Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra, Simulacra
and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (AnnArbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 1977).
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rules, perceptions, and social and political ideologies. This
notion was proposed as early as1929 by psychologist Joan Riviere,
who argued in her article Womanliness as a Masqueradethat there is
no distinction between genuine femininity and the mask of
femininity, that isthat women are not born feminine but play
feminine. Without using the term gender,which was not yet in use in
the discourse of the 1920s, she thereby laid the foundations fora
notion that would be developed decades later by Judith Butler:
femininity is a mask thatis put on and taken off as circumstances
require, and gender roles are merely performanceswith no core
essence.27
The Transitory Stage
The 1980s are mostly considered as a transitory stage, in which
feminism was moving awayfrom the ideas of the second wave feminism
of the 1970s, but not yet fully formulating adistinct new wave
(which is commonly said to start with the early 1990). Many artists
offeminist orientation turned their attention during that decade to
the subject of gender relationsand began defining them in terms of
power. In this context, clothing became one of thecentral emblems
of the battle for gender differentiation, demanding recognition of
the needfor a change in the status quo of co-existence, one that
would eliminate the need to distortor act violently against women.
The moment in which the value of clothingits social,political,
sexual, psychological, formal, and visual significance-was
recognized and theorizedby feminists of the 1980s, artists like
Canadian Jana Sterbak started making sculptural useof it, in order
to relate to womens position in contemporary society. Sterbak chose
theconcept of the dress as a tool through which to express
criticism of an intolerable existence.In her work entitled Vanitas:
Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic from 1987, she wore ablood-red
dress made of sixty pounds of raw steak. It was sewn together and
worn by heron the opening night of the exhibition.
Sterbak transformed the Cinderella story from an optimistic
fairy tale into a nightmare.The subject of her piece is what Julia
Kristeva termed the abject body-the female body asa site of trauma
(exploitation, disease, filth, and bodily waste).28 The abject is
that whichdoes not respect rules and refuses to any social or
physical boundaries. It is the liminal.Sterback uses the notion of
the skin, the most significant boundary for the human being,
thatwhich separates our inner selves from the outside world: she
presents herself as skinless,wearing her flesh on the outside,
baring it for all to see. She aims to breaks the rules in anattempt
to destabilize, in hope to undermine the social laws, the
patriarchal order.
Indeed, Sterbaks piece evokes the enormous power of patriarchal
society in which thefemale body is perceived as merely flesh or as
untamed nature, unlike the male bodythat has supposedly lost nearly
all materiality by virtue of its transcendental reason. Praisedbut
also widely denounced, the work treads the fine line between
effective protest and thereplication, perhaps even perpetuation, of
the victimization of women. Nevertheless, bymeans of this brash but
undoubtedly compelling work, the artist sparked discourse on
yetanother troubling subject: anorexia, a lethal disease identified
primarily with young women
27 Joan Riviere, Womanliness as a Masquerade, Formations of
Fantasy, eds. Victor Burgin, James Donald, andCora Kaplan (New York
and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 35-44 ; And: Judith Butler,
Critically Queer, Bodiesthat Matter: On the Discursive Limits of
Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 23-232.28 Julia
Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon
S. Roudiez (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1980), pp. 2-3.
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that has grown to epidemic proportions with alarming speed in
the modern era in the Westernworld. Given the works association
with death, it brings to mind Walter Benjamins famousremark:
Fashion: Madam Death!29 During the six weeks of Sterbaks
exhibition, the dresswas hung on a hanger like a sculpture or
installation and displayed without refrigerationuntil the meat
rotted (after about three weeks). It was then replaced with a new
flesh dresswhich, in turn, underwent the same process. The artist
thus translated anorexia into visuallanguage: the dress slowly
dried out, shrank, and disintegrated, just like the body of
ananorectic woman. Victims of the disease subject themselves to a
draconian regimen in adesperate attempt to gain control over their
world. In response to societys conflicting demandsfrom
women-success in both new and traditional roles, and the ability to
adapt to ever-changing physical standards-they call on inner
strength to overcome their physical needs inorder to carve out a
personal space in the social order.30
The Third Wave Feminism
The next stage of feminism, known as the third wave feminism, is
agreed by most criticsto begin in the early 1990s. Since then,
women artists offer a multi-layered and more complexstatement about
womanhood, gender and fashion, using theories and discourses from
variousfields of knowledge, all inspired by the wide umbrella of
the Post-Modernism thought.31 In1990, for example, the French
artist Annette Messager created a project entitled Histoiredes
Robes (History of Dresses) in which she confined dresses in flat
glass display cases (fig.6).
29 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Convolutions B
(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p.62. A more
obvious reading of Sterbacks work would take its cue from its title
Vanitas, the sin of pride, a pop-ular theme throughout the history
of Western art. See for example: Helen E. Roberts (ed.),
Encyclopedia of Com-parative Iconography, Themes Depicted in Works
of Art, vol. 2, (Chicago and London: Fitzroy Dearborn
Publishers,1998), p. 883.30 Nancy Spector, Jana Sterbak: Flesh and
Bones, Artforum, 30: 7 (March 1992), pp. 95-99.31 See for example:
Sarah Gamble, Postfeminism, The Routledge Companion to Feminism and
Postfeminism,ed. Sarah Gamble, (London and New York: Routledge:
2001), pp. 42-45.
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Figure 6: Anette Messager, Histoire Des Robes, 1990. Pink Dress:
148X58X7 cm. BlueDress: 148X65X7 cm. Total: 148X143 cm. 2 Dresses,
1 Pastel B&W Photos and Safety Pin,Under Wooden Display Cases.
Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris.
Private Collection.
To that she added small drawings, framed photographs, and texts,
giving them the appearanceof holy relics. She thus continued to
deal with a subject that has preoccupied her for manyyears: the
exposure of the female body to what is known as the male gaze.
Again and againshe examines the outer limits, the point at which
the female body vanishes under this probinggaze and the concrete
body is replaced by the metaphoric presence of clothing and
coverings.In this series she presented dozens of dresses,
emblematic of the course of her life, from herfirst communion as a
young girl, through her wedding dress, a frock symbolizing
motherhood,and other garments, until reaching her final garment,
the shroud in which her body will bewrapped before her coffin is
lowered into the ground.32 Each dress symbolized a differentchapter
in the artists biography and a different facet of womanhood: they
are the milestonesof her acceptance by and integration into the
symbolic or patriarchal order. Rather than
32 Nancy Spector, Freudian Slips: Dressing the Ambiguous
Body,Art/Fashion (exh. cat.), (Guggenheim MuseumSoHo, New York,
1997), p. 112.
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presenting her body, she focused on the discarded snake skin
which, according to the artistherself, bears witness to the woman
who once inhabited it. As she explains, it is her secondskin which
embodies all the secrets, dreams, pains, and hidden desires of her
feminine exist-ence. Like many other artists of her generation,
such as Rosemary Trockle, Beverly Sims,and Sylvie Fleury, Messager
strips fashion of its image as an inferior and trivial matter,
partof the female territory associated with vanity and
ornamentation that is represented by wo-mens magazines. Indeed, in
recent decades the theme of clothing in art has appeared mostlyin
the work of women artists, or of male artists inquiring their
sexual identity (just as theword transvestite comes from the Latin
for to change clothes, a change of dress couldbe an indicative of a
change of identity).
The Argentinean artist Nicola Constantino creates various
articles of clothingshoes,evening gowns, coats, corsets, sport
jacketsmade from a material resembling human skin,combining them
with real hair and casts of intimate body parts, such as nipples,
navels, andanuses (fig. 7).
Figure 7: Nicola Constantino, Boutique (Human Furriery), 2002,
Installation. Courtesy ofthe Artist.
The skin-like material is produced by means of a unique
technique of silicon casting andpolyurethane injection. Her
repeated concern with skin, and thus with the body, physicality,and
gender identity, becomes a protest against social dictates,
challenging the set of conven-tions and prohibitions regarding what
is proper and what is not. As critic Tammy Katz-Freiman suggests,
the horror that overcomes the viewer at the sight of high fashion
made ofhuman skin is reminiscent of the horror aroused by Jonathan
Demmes film Silence of theLambs (1991), in which a psychopathic man
killed young women for the purpose of makinggarments out of their
skin. From this perspective, her nipple corsets and navel coats
adornedwith human hair are part of the discourse on the uncanny and
the repressed that began withFreud in the early 20th century. Any
woman who wears Costantinos garments will remain
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naked, a visual tautology grounded in a thoroughly surrealist
syntax not unlike that of artistssuch as Ren Magritte.33
Although there is no agreement among critics or artists of what
exactly third wave fem-inism, or Post-feminism is, the general
notion is that it constitutes the abandonment ofthe past
formulation of the feminist struggle and a rejection of many of the
goals it has ori-ginally aimed for. In a dialectic journeys women
artists who deal with the theme of clothinghave traveled, many have
moved away from a radical message of an overall revolution,
towardan ironic and critical stance in the spirit of our postmodern
times.
A contemporary artist that uses clothing to deal with two
typical postmodern subjects inher feminist work-multiculturalism
and gender fluidity-is Iranian Parastou Forouhar. Herseries
entitled Blind Spot, from 2001, firstly addresses the Euro-American
attitude towardsIslam and the stereotypic representation of Islamic
women, by showing a sitting figurecovered from head to foot by a
chador (fig.8).34 Feminist theorists and activists have promotedthe
understanding that the category woman is not a universal one, but
rather influencedby positionality, depending on race, nationality,
status, sexual orientation, ability, etc.
Figure 8: Parastou Forouhar, Blind Spot (Detail from Series),
2001. Photograph. Courtesyof the Artist. Photo: Jogi Hild.
In addition to turning the attention to the bias and
de-humanizing attitude of the West towardsnon-European traditions,
customs and ways of life, Forouhars series is using the new
under-standing as to the meaning of identity and Self as a
non-monolithic, ever-changing, andfluid entity, as suggested by
critics such as Judith Butler (1990). The figures in the photo-
33 Tammy Katz-Freiman, The Woman who Wears These Clothes Will
Remain Naked,Nicola CostantinoBoutique(exh. cat.) (Herzeliya:
Herzeliya Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002), n.p. [Hebrew]34
Although many Third wave feminism artists frequently address this
issue, it should be stressed that it was firstaddressed by the
Afro-American and Chicano feminist artists of the Second wave that
worked during the 1970s.
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graphs depict playfully a gender-ambiguous human figure sitting
with the back to the cameraand completely veiled beneath a chador,
thus denying the viewers form determining if awoman or a man is
underneath the black cloth.35
The Contemporary-And where do we go from here?
The paradigmatic shift away from second wave feminism onto third
wave feminism isperhaps exemplified most compellingly by Italian
artist Vanessa Beecroft. In her perform-ances, she has stripped the
female body of all its clothing and has left it almost
completelynaked. The exposed and unprotected body thus becomes a
metaphor for the condition ofwomen in the contemporary era of mass
media.
Since the early 1990s, Beecroft has been creating performances
that make use of nude orsemi-nude female bodies which she treats as
her raw materials. Her projects bring togethersometimes dozens of
women, with the model-like appearance (fig. 9).
Figure 9: Vanessa Beecroft, VB45 Performance, 2001, Kunstalle
Wien, Vienna VanessaBeecroft, 2001. Photo: Dusan Reljin
35 Maura Reily, Introduction: Toward Transnational Feminisms, in
Global FeminismsNew Directions in Con-temporary Art, eds. Maura
Reily and Linda Nochlin, (London and New York: Merrell, 2007), p.
41.
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Beecroft dresses her models in the most minimal attire and
accessories and gives them explicitinstructions not to talk with
one another or with the viewers, not to act, and to appear
in-different to their surroundings. The various performances she
has presented over the yearshave all been staged in high-culture
settings such as museums, galleries, or historicalbuildings, thus
both referencing the specific cultural context and challenging it
at the sametime.
Beecrofts performances have a strong visual impact that is more
than merely decorative.As people from the audience have often
commented, the large mass of women neutralizesthe erotic
connotations of bare skin.36 Any potential intimacy that might be
implied by theirnudity is inconceivable: they are totally
inaccessible and there is no opportunity for an eroticvoyeurism.
Rather than being erotic, their nudity becomes a type of garment,
not unlike thesuit of clothes sewn for the king in The Emperors New
Clothes. In the fairy tale, the twotailors are generally seen as
the prototype of scoundrels and imposters. However, as criticRuth
Direktor suggests, they might also be viewed differently: not as
swindlers, but as in-sightful men who raise questions about what we
can and what we cannot see, about thepower of the gaze and the
power of imagination. In this sense, they did indeed dress
theemperor in a shocking and extraordinary suit of clothes such as
had never been seen before-his own skin. Interpreted in this
manner, the tailors become the prototype of conceptualartists who
took the concept of the fig leaf in new directions.37 In the Bible
story, knowledgeis associated with clothes that hide the body; in
the fairy tale, the tailors present the emperorwith attire which
expands the concepts of observation, reflection and
understanding.Whereas the emperors clothes are an undeniably social
construct with political-imperial-representational significance,
the tailors offer the democratic (and shocking) option of
nudity.The emperors nudity enables every last one of his subjects
to become a potential tailor, todress him in whatever garment they
choose,38 a postmodern statement exemplified also byBeecroft.
Beecrofts blunt criticism is directed not against a general
principle, but against a specificsocial-psychological world of
images: advertising. In discussing her work, numerous criticshave
related it to the subject of eating disorders, such as anorexia and
bulimia, which affectmany fashion models and an increasing number
of young women and girls in the modernera, as a direct result of
the image of the ideal woman dictated by the mass media.
CriticNaomi Wolf wrote extensively about this in her book The
Beauty Myth: [The] great weight-shift bestowed on womennew versions
of low self-esteem, loss of control, and sexualshamefemale fat is
the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female
fat,because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, womens
bodies are not our own butsocietys.a cultural fixation on female
thinness is not an obsession about female beautybut an obsession
about female obedience.39 Like in Wolfs text, which exposes
culturesaspiration to unify women into a standard in the intention
of oppressing them, Beecroftsperformances highlight the
uniformization of women in the mass media era: both the facesand
bodies of the models in Beecrofts performances are covered in heavy
makeup, and they
36 Townsend, pp. 96-98.37 Ruth Direktor, Getting Dressed (exh.
cat.) (Haifa: Haifa Museum of Art, 2000), p. 6.38 Ibid.39 Naomi
Wolf, The Beauty Myth (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 1991, pp.
186-187.
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are often dressed in identical wigs as well. The artist thus
stresses their anonymity, the oblit-eration of their identity,
their uniformityalmost as if they were cloned.
Conclusion
Beecrofts performing women certainly shed their dresses, but do
they also don an ideology?Her work can be read in various ways, and
has indeed been given many, sometimes conflict-ing,
interpretations.40 In the spirit of postmodernism, it has raised
numerous ambivalentquestions: Is it art? Is it fashion? Is it good?
Is it sexist? Is it feminist? Whatever the answers,her provocative
performances focus our attention on the role of clothing. All
people, eventhose who claim to have no interest in clothing or
fashion, take part in the shared ritual ofchoosing their clothes as
an act of self-declaration, whether consciously or
unwittingly.41
Clothing not only defines the boundaries of the body, but also
maps the self. Changes indress codes in different periods of
history reflect changes in society and the way in whichits members
express their subjectivity. The daily ritual we perform in front of
our closet isan indication that the psychology of clothing is an
integral part of our inner construct, ourpersonality. Asking What
should I wear? is thus almost like asking Who am I?
This may explain why clothes have held such fascination for
female artists at a time whenwomen have been fighting to change
their social status and redefine their identity. Bydressing, or
undressing-themselves or their models-in various and innovative
ways, theywere able to express the changing paradigms with regard
to womens place and identity.Each wave of feminist ideology and
activism has brought with it a different set of notions.Since the
beginning of the 20th century many women artists were influenced by
the feministideology and politic, thus creating works relating to
clothing, intensely investigated clothessignificance to women,
femininity, and social status. first wave feminism women
artistsstrived to eliminate social differences between the sexes,
portraying women as strong, activeand assertive as men; second wave
feminism brought women artists attention into thedeep social
mechanisms constructing gender relations, using clothes to reveal
this notion;and third wave feminism motivated women artists to
explore gender fluidity, multicultur-alism and the irony of the
false social constructions. All of them, over the decades, use
thegender perspective in important and fascinating artistic
ways.
About the Author
Dr. Tal DekelTal Dekel received her Ph.D. in Art history in
2004. She currently teaches at the Womenand Gender Studies program
at the Tel Aviv University and at the Midrasha Art Collegeof
Beit-Berl, Israel. Tal Specializes in diverse aspects of modern and
contemporary art, fo-cusing on issues of visual culture in relation
to women, gender and multi-culturalism. Talsresearch is currently
focused on various aspects of globalization and its manifestations
allover the world, specifically in the Israeli locus. Some of her
latest papers deal with the effect
40 Seward, Keith, Classic Cruelty, Parkett, no. 56 (1999), pp.
98-105; Junus Evans, Vanessa Beecroft: Analix,Artnews, vol. 98, no.
6 (June 1999), p. 144.41 Ruth Direktor, p. 48.
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of immigration on two minority groups in the Israeli society:
Ethiopian women artists andIllegal foreign workers that are
refugees from Africa.
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