“To (un)dress Clothes, Women and Feminist Ideology

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).

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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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“To (un)dress Clothes, Women and Feminist Ideology