Addressing art that highlights the ephemerality of earthly pleasures, fragility of life and inevitability of death, “Vanitas: Fashion and Art,” opening March 13 at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, brings together a tightly curated selection of clothes, photographs, videos and sculptures by the celebrated curator-in-charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Harold Koda.
Koda, in conceptualizing his vision for the exhibition, wanted to present “a very concise essay about fashion as a compelling system of obsolescence,” he told BLOUIN Artinfo,” with a haiku-like authenticity and elegance.”
Fashion is just one method he employs to play on the original idea of vanitas as 17th century Dutch still-life paintings containing symbols of death or change as a reminder of their inevitability, because “most designers don’t think about this. Fashion as a discipline wants to project beauty, luxury, and all the positive aspects of life, even though within the system there is a built-in transience. It’s meant to engage you into buying a fantasy about the present. Someone like Alexander Mcqueen is a rarity: He had a dark, romantic sensibility that was able to integrate these heavier questions about existence while somehow making fashion light objects.”
Koda opens the exhibition with a Schiaparelli jacket (ca. 1989-1939) with beautiful Lesage embroidery and gold rococo hand mirrors with broken glass.
“It really invites you to look at a woman’s breasts, but what you see is a fractured reflection of yourself. It’s a weird kind of optical armor, with the mirror as an unrelenting reflection of the passage of time,” he explained. “Broken wine glasses were very specific symbols in true vanitas still lifes, while [this is a play] on the importance of mirrors in vanity.”
The exhibits following the opening number have largely been organized as a series of juxtapositions, one of which, for example, puts Shaune Leane’s “Spine” corset for McQueen — a steel and black leather spine with rib cage and a tail — against Jason Salavon’s “Still Life (Vanitas),” a four-hour long video by a skull morphing through animal-types including bear, human, baboon, and boar.
In another pairing, Damien Hirst’s “St. Peter’s” (2007) conveys “a weird conflation of spirituality through both natural history and religion,” said Koda, while a butterfly dress from Sarah Burton’s first collection for Alexander McQueen (Spring/Summer 2011) — which appears to be floating off the ground toward the ceiling — shows how the DNA of the label (whose founder hung himself in 2010) is channeled “through the lens of someone whose imagery is much more poetic, romantic and optimistic, not framed toward the shadowed corners of the psyche, but bringing everything into light.”
Koda further explained: “What becomes clear in the juxtapositions is that… the fashion works have a different kind of way of engaging the viewer, because they’re alluding to darker issues, but they’re filtered through a sensibility of the exquisite, the elegant and the beautifully crafted. With fashion, there’s a mediating principle of aesthetics that tames the morbid aspects of the theme [that is not present in] the artworks.”
Other fashion highlights include a large, 24-inch poppy hat made by milliner Philip Treacy for Jasper Conrad and a poppy-print dress by Isaac Mizrahi — both reminding Koda of the red-and-black flower’s symbolism of war and remembrance — as well as a 3D-printed corset by Iris Van Herpen.
Other contemporary art highlights include a series of photographs by artist Pinar Yolaçan of older British women wearing garments made of sagging animal flesh, which Koda reads as a statement on the modification of a woman’s body and the expiration of vanities, and a print of Ori Gersht's “Blow Up: Untitled 1, 2007”.
All told, Koda wants show-goers to feel that everything is open to interpretation. “I want a few things that will be a surprise to some people,” he said. “It’s about the subjectivity of the viewer, not the intentionality of the creator.”
To see highlights from "Vanitas: Fashion and Art," click on the slideshow.
