Creative Process Journal: Exhibiting Absence in the Museum

Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci

When you visit a museum exhibition, do you ever think about what is not there? Do you notice when your favourite artwork or costume piece has been removed from display? After the Louvre reopened after the theft of the Mona Lisa, thousands of visitors came to gaze at the "blank space and the three nails from which the picture had formally hung" (Belting qtd. in Leahy 256).

Helen Rees Leahy wrote an article called "Exhibiting Absence in the Museum" which expores the idea of absence in a museum and the "fantasy of completion" that exists within the walls of a museum. She suggests that "absence in the museum hovers between memory (of objects lost, forgotten or beyond reach) and anticipation (of objects that will be found, returned or acquired)".  Visitors to a museum are typically presented with the illusion that a collection is complete, since most art museums create narratives around the objects that they have on hand, glossing over the gaps. The curator's knowledge of the "ones that got away" and the "reservoir of possibiities" is the fuel for future acquisitions (251-253).

While this article makes no reference to fashion, the idea of absence in a collection is something I am aware of as I continue my work on editing the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection. I see gaps - Canadian designers like Claire Haddad and Marilyn Brooks whose work is underrepresented in the collection. I know that it will not be easy to correct that gap and that absence haunts me. In another sense, I am also haunted by the spectres of the women who wore the rare and fragile historic pieces in the collection. Some of these items are at this point no more than wisps of silk. I cannot replace them and yet feel so protective of them. I am obsessed with these threads of memory and the absence of the vital bodies that once wore them.

In her article Rees Leahy references Brunos Latour's work on the relationship between the original and the reproduction, and cites the "dialectics of presence/absence, visiblity/invisibility, and reproduction/originality". Although her analysis is in reference to artwork, these concepts resonate with me and seem pivotal to what I am trying to accomplish with this project. The question is now how to convey the concepts of "presence/absence" and "visiblity/invisiblity" within my photographs of selected fragile historic garments and fragments of the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection.

References:

Rees Leahy, Helen. "Exhibiting Absence in the Museum". The Thing About Museums: Objects and Experiences, Representation and Contestation. Ed. Sandra Dudley. Routledge, New York. 2012. Print.

Creative Process Journal: Curation and Judith Clark continued

Judith Clark's curatorial work is so rich and so vibrant that I want to read anything I can find about her process. Although the article One Object: Multiple Interpretations (co-written with Amy de la Haye) is about a mass produced women's coat/uniform worn by the British Women's Land Army during WWII, there are fragments of her general curatorial philosophy when she writes:  It is fitting singular objects into historical continuums and possible future stories that endlessly capture my imagination. Quite simply what stands next to what and where does it stand within an infinitely renewable curatorial grammer? (159).

Clark also points out that late Diana Vreeland "very astutely identified" that the exhibition viewer had to identify with the object in some way and make a connection between "finding something desirable and finding something interesting" (159). She goes on to ask: "is curating about the clarity of connections, and if so, how are these made visual or literal? How can objects be presented as a way into different stories?" (160).

I did not see this exhibition about WLA coats from WWII and it might sound rather droll, but Judith Clark finds patterns and connections that leap off the page.  Drawing on Freud's work The Interpretation of Dreams, Clark presents the idea of a uniform as a denial of difference and symbolic of a disguise. She also makes connections to Alexander McQueen's dress-coat from Autumn Winter 2001/2002 and stylistic references to Coco Chanel's design for a coat from 1917. There is a dialogue between the past and present, invoking a non-linear exploration of time. She says "Curating, though its ruthless selection inevitably creates new patterns of chronology.... It also encourages us to read time backwards, to read it from where we are standing, always in the present, acknowledging that this is our perspective" (162).

Clark's words give me much to think about. Whenever I enter the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection, I step back in time, feeling the presence of the women who wore the garments that are entrusted into my care. How do I give them a voice, when in so many cases their stories have not been captured, leaving only the marks, stains and signs of wear that suggest a living body? What is the connection that links them as objects of embodied memory? 

References:

de la Haye, Amy and Judith Clark. "One Object: Multiple Interpretations". Fashion Theory 12.2 (2008):  137-170. Print.

Creative Process Journal: Curation and Judith Clark

Pretentious from The Concise Dictionary of Dress
Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

Judith Clark is a curator of fashion exhibitions that are often unconventional and thought provoking, including The Concise Dictionary of Dress in 2010. In this exhibition, fashionable objects or works of art relating to the clothed body were juxtaposed alongside singular words addressing the psychology of the fashioned body, such as "armoured, conformist, fashionable, plain, pretentious, provocative, tight". The setting of this exhibition was within the confines of the storage facility of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which added a degree of theatrically and exclusivity. This was a show that required advance booking. If your name was not on the security list, you were left standing at the locked gate. All belongings had to be left behind before entry and small groups of visitors were accompanied through the exhibition by a guide. Talking was not permitted and signage was virtually non-existent. In absence of a history the object or explanation of what was being presented, the dialogue was internal, challenging the viewer to create connections and links between the words and the objects. This was a show that haunts me still.

Conformed from The Concise Dictionary of Dress
Photo by Julian Abrams 2010

In the exhibition catalogue, there is a section towards the end in which questions were posed to Judith by an anonymous panel. The fifteen questions include:

Does one need a body to bring a garment to life and why?

There seem to be two categories of embodiment implied by the commission. The ghost-like presence of clothing once inhabited and the absent body of the archivist. What sort of relationship between curator and curated do these shadows and voids suggest?

What is most interesting: finding, collection, drawing or making the exhibition?

What does the desirability of historic/vintage dress say about a particular period in time?

Her answers reveal a fierce intellect, one that is capable of bringing coherence to a divergent array of items of dress. She suggests that the absence of the living body is at the heart of curating dress, and she sees that the priority for her is not the re-enactment of history but to use dress to "talk about other things". In specific reference to The Concise Dictionary of Dress she says: "In this particular series of installations, there is a double loss of life, if you like: that of the garment without its body, and the garment out of sight, embedded within an archive. The archive is a very important ingredient here, as visitors do not expect garments to have been brought to life, but instead stored, classified and protected, and it is here that I am free to wonder: what are we storing when we are storing dress?"

For me, in storing a dress, the garment changes context when it is separated from its owner and placed in an archive for study purposes. It becomes an object with a number and is divorced from its former owner, except within the records. Yet the traces of the wearer might live on in the folds, embedded in the marks and stains of the living body. There is a story, whether it is known or not, whether it is recorded or not. When a garment is accepted into a collection, it signifies the end stage of the garment's biography because it will never again adorn a living body.

References:
Clark, Judith and Adam Phillips. The Concise Dictionary of Dress. London: Violette Limited, 2010. Print.

Mida, Ingrid. "Exhibition Review: The Concise Dictionary of Dress." June 7, 2010. Available online at http://fashionismymuse.blogspot.ca/2010/06/exhibition-review-concise-dictionary-of.html
Accessed September 9, 2012.

Mida, Ingrid. "Book Review: The Concise Dictionary of Dress." June 9, 2010. Available online at
http://fashionismymuse.blogspot.ca/2010/06/book-review-concise-dictionary-of-dress.html
Accessed September 9, 2012.