Memories of a Dress: Weekly Reflective Journal

In practice-led research, self-reflection is an integral part of the research process. The act of stepping back from creative practice to document and self-critique the development of the work is an essential part of the protocol.

"The creative individual must reject the wisdom of the field, yet she must also incorporate its standards into a self-criticism. And for this one must learn to achieve the dialectical tension between involvement and detachment that is so characteristic of every creative process" (Csikszentmihaly qtd. in Aziz 70).

Separating one's self from one's work is never easy, especially when the act of documentation takes place in the public sphere such as I am doing on this blog. To be self-critical in a public forum makes the degree of risk seem exponential. It is in this place that my identities as blogger, researcher and curator merge. Even though Maria Luisa Frisa said "the notion of risk as implicit to the working method of the curator (171)", most academics seem to see risk as abhorrent. Risk scares me but it also excites me, because it offers up a chance to explore and grow.

In undertaking this creative project which crosses interdisciplinary boundaries, I have assumed enormous risk.  Examining the intersection of fashion curation, photography, collecting practices, and the embodiment of history and memory in clothing is a challenge. It is a messy process and not always linear. It may appear to be linear on this blog, but there is so much that happens outside of this forum. I discover something new in the Ryerson archive, see a photo of a disembodied McQueen dress by Anne Deniau, ask Andrew Bolton some questions about his curatorial process, attend the Ivy Style exhibition at FIT, and marvel at Andy Warhol's influence on contemporary art at the Met. Even at an event that I thought had nothing to do with this project (the Design Intelligence event at Parsons), I learned that emotional attachment to clothing is an implicit assumption across disciplines and considered a possible solution to reducing post-consumer waste. To make sense of all this, I make notes, create lists, draw diagrams, and clip images, which I then organize in a project binder.

I am at that place in the process where things seem chaotic. It is unsettling and uncomfortable, but I know from past experience that this is where ideas are born. Because I think by writing, much of my process work is thus in written form. Even though I can sketch, I don't often do so for this purpose - although I seem to constantly be making pictures and photographs in my head. I've also started taking test photos of the items from the Ryerson archive that fascinate me - the wisps of silk, lace and beading that are so very fragile that they require special handling with gloves. These rare and beautiful treasures are so delicate that I should define and articulate exactly what I plan to do with them before I move forward. They should only be handled once, as many of them are literally shreds of silk just waiting to disintegrate into dust.

There is much yet to do. Research is an essential part of the curatorial process if the exhibition is to be anything more than a historical display of costume. Although I could easily produce that, it is not exciting to me as it lacks the element of emotional connection. In my future research, I want to readdress curatorial perspectives in fashion as delineated by such writers as Valerie Steele, and to consider the nature of curatorial practice as seen in recent exhibitions such as the presentation of the Balenciaga archive in Paris. I want to explore the nature of fashion and death through the writings of Caroline Evans in "fashion at the edge" and its interpretation as an exhibition by Judith Clarke called "Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back".  At the same time, I will keep my eyes open and camera at the ready to capture the fragments in the collection that offer up glimpses of the spectres that wore them.

References:

Azia, Tahera. "Shifting the frame: from critical reflective arts practice to practice-based research". Journal of Media Practice 10(1), 2009: 69-80. Print.


Frisa, Maria Luisa. "The Curator's Risk". Fashion Theory, Volume 12, Issue 2, (2008): 171-180. Print.

Creative Process Journal: Weekly Reflection

This past week, I've been documenting some of my reading on curatorial process, teasing out the fragments of how curators come up with exhibition ideas. It might not seem like creative work, but it is part of my practice-led research project called Memories of a Dress. Using the Ryerson Fashion Research Collection, I am exploring the idea that a garment has a object biography and a memory of its former owner.  

Practice-led research focuses on the "the nature of practice and leads to new knowledge that has operational significance for that practice." From what I can tell, there seems to be a gap in knowledge about the process of how fashion curation takes place. The articles in scholarly journals only offer hints at how curators come up with their ideas and unless I've missed something altogether, this process seems to be largely private. In undertaking this work here, I am making my process transparent  and thereby adding to the advancement of knowledge about curatorial practice. 

If I could, I would mount Memories of a Dress in a space that is raw, with exposed brick and pipes.  This wounded setting would be fitting to convey the idea of decay and that a garment has an end-life, just as its owner does/did. Unfortunately, the School of Fashion does not have a dedicated exhibition gallery and so the end result will be largely conceptual, with the possibility of selected pieces and images being presented offsite. 

In handling the rare and fragile historic pieces within the collection, I am haunted by the traces of the owners - the faint sweat stains under the arms, the worn patches at the elbows, the shreds of weighted silk that have literally turned to dust. There is such poignancy in these pieces. They are still beautiful, but not to a pristine, museum-like standard. 

As I deal with past and present donors as part of my job as Collection Coordinator, I am also sensitive to the emotional nature of such transactions. There is great delicacy required when a donor offers pieces from his or her wardrobe. Giving up a garment that holds memories of a special time, event, or person requires a willingness to let go of that tangible connection. And because of that, the act of accepting or rejecting that item for a collection requires great tact and diplomacy. 

My own experiences with death, tragedy and grief gives me a heightened sensitivity to the symbolic nature of the embodiment of memory in clothing. In the back of my closet, I keep my father's Fedora, four of my mother's dresses, my brother Peter's tie. I have nothing from my husband's father, my sister-in-law Carrie, or my dear friends Brian, Joe, or Diana, but I wish I did. Although I have transcended my grief, I cannot part with these objects and I am only too keenly aware of the delicate dance I play with potential donors. I am acutely sensitive, with a radar to grief, since I have taken that journey far too many times relative to my age. 

Dealing with donor requests taxes curators who are already stretched by tight budgets. I happened to across a written reference to the emotional nature of this work in an article by N.J. Stevenson called "The Fashion Retrospective" from Fashion Theory. In analyzing curator Amy de la Haye's work she wrote:

Reflecting a moment in time has become one of the central precepts of de la Haye's work. She found that interviews with members of the public offering donations to the museum could mean dealing with profound emotion and grief that was precipitated by the associations that garments had for them (230). 

In sharing the nature of my curatorial obsessions, this project makes me feel vulnerable and exposed. And yet, I know that in mining the nature of my obsession and documenting my process for this practice-led research, the end result will be richer and deeper.

For Further Reading on the nature of Practice-led vs. Practice-based Research:
http://www.creativityandcognition.com/research/practice-based-research/differences-between-practice-based-and-practice-led-research/ 

References:
Stevenson, N.J., "The Fashion Retrospective". Fashion Theory 12.2 (2008) 219-236. 

Creative Process Journal: Curation and Maria Luisa Frisa

The Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language 1994 edition gives the following definition for curator:

1. the person in charge of a museum, art collection, etc.
2. a manager; overseer; superintendent.
3. a guardian of a minor, lunatic, or other incompetent, especially with regard to his property (354)."

When I first read this definition, my eyes focussed on the "lunatic",  and skipped over the words "guardian of...". I laughed, because there are times when I feel like I must be a lunatic or at least crazy to have taken on the massive project/job of editing the Ryerson Fashion Resource Collection, while also completing my graduate studies.

I am the "person in charge" of the collection, but this does not convey the essence of what curation means from a contemporary perspective. Nor does it convey the specific challenges of curating fashion.

To explore what it means to curate a fashion exhibition, I turned to a Fashion Theory article written in 2008 by curator Maria Luisa Frisa (who I met briefly in Milan at Fashion Tales 2012). In The Curator's Risk, Maria Luisa Frisa explores the idea that "fashion curating is the exercise of a critical gaze, which recognizes the multiple traces, symptoms and fragments that are around us" and identifies risks "as implicit to the working method of the curator" (171). The article is written in a reflective tone, and Frisa considers curation in general to be about "design, layout, imagining, and constructing" (172). She suggests that fashion curation allows one to "offer new points of observation" while cautioning that  it is necessary to understand "your own insights and being willing enough to take a gamble on them" (172).

Photo of Maria Luisa Frisa
Website: http://www.altaroma.it/luglio2008/Calendario_EN.asp?cmd=view&ID=3

Frisa suggests that an interdisciplinary perpective enriches her process and draws on her background in art history, her work as Director of the Fashion Design program at IUAV University Venice and as curator of the Pitti Discovery Foundation in Florence. She says she is "fascinated by the way in which a single garment, or a fashion photograph or a feature in a magazine can immediately relate us to the major themes of human consciousness, to dreams, obsessions, and all the implications of culture and society (173)."

Although she does not define specific steps to the creative process of curation, she suggests that curation involves an element of pattern recognition, piecing together fragments and clues "that will enable you to confirm a hunch, an idea, and to imagine a story" (173). Her starting point is typically "an obsession", which can take the form of an "image, on the edging of a garment, or on a word that starts like a slogan" (174). She says that her development of an exhibition often borrows "techniques derived from art or film, such as the Dadaist idea of the accumulation of heterogenous materials, or the technique of massing incongruent parts of an assemblage; or the montage of fragments, which may then be articulated in a linear way or collapsed into a dense mass" (174).

In her analysis of the exhibition called Excess: Fashion and the Underground in the '80s, which she co-curated with Stefano Tonchi, she outlines her desire to "create a sort of phantasmoagoria, formed from the recounting of lives lived to the utmost, recalling the memories of sudden deaths and young icons", which was intended to create a mixture "of blinding light and utter darkness" (174). She describes the site of the exhibition, the Leopolda Station, as a "gloomy industrial cavern", which was "lined with a series of containers painted black" with each container serving as "a box, a casket, and a theaterette" which served to convey a specific story (175-176).

Maria Luisa Frisa admits that she has not yet developed "a complete theoretical discourse as a curator" (177). She concludes that she "attempts to observe the unfolding of the time as both past and present together. A dimension that is unconcerned with the chronology of history, but determined by the way that fashion bends and guides the forms of time (177)".

In reading this article, I find myself relating to her reflections on the curatorial process and how fashion and time unfold. I like the idea of a story within container that Frisa used for Excess. For me, the curatorial process is a creative engagement with objects, a process of exploration that seeks to create links or find patterns that come together to form a narrative. Love it or hate it, a strong exhibition conveys a story or a point of view and is in the end thought provoking and that is what I want to achieve.

Within the Ryerson Fashion Resource Collection, there are an array of beautiful dresses and garments that could offer up an aesthetically pleasing display, but what really interests me is the idea that an object like a dress has a biography embodying the stories of the women who wore these dresses. Conveying the sense of who these women were and how their garments ended up in the collection will be a challenge since the records are minimal. Can I imagine a story? How do I convey the element of memory and my affinity for the dark and gloomy?

References:

Frisa, Maria Luisa. "The Curator's Risk". Fashion Theory, Volume 12, Issue 2, (2008): 171-180. Print.

Creative Process Journal: Memories of a Dress

Beginning the first page, post or sketch is the hardest part... and this post marks the beginning of my latest creative project: Memories of a Dress. If you have been a follower of this blog for a while, you might recall the series of photos about my mother's dresses called My Mother/Myself. 

In this series, I photographed dresses that belonged to my mother in the barren winter settings of a local ravine. The intent was to convey my sense of desolation and despair over my mother's decline in health and mobility from Parkinson's disease. I still have these dresses and am unable to part with them, even though they lack provenance or value, because they embody her memory.

Many women have dresses or other garments that hang at the back of their closets, long out of fashion, but imbued with memories of a person, an event or time in their life that they wish to remember (Banim and Guy 217). Disposing of that garment can be difficult, and museum curators and managers of study collections can be overwhelmed with requests to accept donations of wedding dresses, special occasion gowns and other items that have emotional significance to the wearer yet lack provenance or significance from a curatorial standpoint. In fact, I know this now firsthand since dealing with donation offers is part of my job as Collections Coordinator of the Fashion Research Collection at Ryerson University's School of Fashion.

“A single garment may be significant because of the relationship between its particular material form and the body that wears it” (Dant 86). Our clothing carries the imprints of our body, the marks and stains of living, and the rips, strains and tears of movement. Certain items of clothing, particularly ones worn for special occasions like a wedding, may be kept as a treasured memory of the event (de la Haye 14) or a loved one (Stallybrass 37). Such items can be difficult to part with, and the owner may seek to prolong the biography of the object by selling or giving the item away to validate their financial expenditure or emotional investment in the piece (Lucas 18). In becoming part of a museum or study collection, the social biography of the garment lives on beyond the life of the original owner.

The Ryerson Fashion Research Collection, which was founded in 1981,  is a repository of several thousand items acquired by donation, many of which are dresses and evening gowns dating from 1860 to 1990. The goal will be to identify, research, document and create a narrative that links selected dresses from the collection as a photo-based curatorial project called “Memories of a Dress”.

This creative process journal will serve as a documentation of my curatorial process and research journey. Over the course of the next several months, I will share my thought processes, trials and tribulations, sketches, and test photos. Bill Gillham and Helen McGilp have suggested that this type of creative activity "applies in all domains of academic study but is often not reported", and is "fundamental to the kind of arts research which allocates practice a central role" (177).

Although I have used the creative process journal twice before (in fall 2011 for the project Marie Antoinette Slept Here and in winter 2012 for The Uncanny), this time it feels like the stakes are bigger. I am nervous about sharing information related to my job, and not sure how to address that. But here I go!

References:

Banim, Maura, and Ali Guy. "Dis/continued Selves: Why do Women Keep Clothes they no Longer Wear?" Through the Wardrobe: Women's Relationships with their Clothes. Eds. Alison Guy, Maura Banim, and Eileen Green. New York: Berg, 2001. 203-219. Print.

Dant, Tim. Material Culture in the Social World. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999. Print.

De La Haye, Amy. A Family of Fashion: The Messels: Six Generations of Dress. Eds. Lou Taylor and Eleanor Thompson. London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2005. Print.

Gillham, Bill, and Helen McGilp. "Recording the Creative Process: An Empirical Basis for Practice-Integrated Research in the Arts". International Journal of Art & Design Education. 26.2 (2007): 177-184.

Lucas, Gavin. "Disposability and Disposession in the Twentieth Century." Journal of Material Culture 5.4 (2002): 1-22. Print.

Stallybrass, Peter. "Worn Worlds: Clothes, Mourning and the Life of Things." The Yale Review 81.2 (1993): 35-50. Print.