Three installation artists comment on the social and emotional impact of clothing.
By: Ilene Dube
Did video kill painting?
Dress Code, an exhibit at The College Art Gallery at The College of New Jersey, seems to take up that challenge. Curator Liselot van der Heijden, a member of the art faculty at the college, recently showed a video in an Amsterdam show titled Video Killed the Painting.
Dress Code combines three installations by three emerging artists all commenting on the social and emotional impact of clothing. All three artists, as well as curator Ms. van der Heijden, are New York based, and the show has a New York sensibility with international flair all three artists and the curator are foreign born.
Walk into the space and you are struck first with the video work of Momoyo Torimitsu, who created a lifelike robot of a Japanese businessman and had him crawl along the streets of six big cities as she accompanied him, dressed as a nurse, stopping occasionally to remove part of his clothing to change his batteries.
Born in Japan, Ms. Torimitsu dragged her robot through Paris, New York, Sydney, Amsterdam, London and Rio de Janeiro, videotaping reactions from passersby.
"In New York City, everyone was so curious, but in London, no one talked to me except the immigrants," the artist recounted at the exhibit’s opening. "In Paris, they’d speak French at first, but I don’t speak French, so then they’d speak to me in English." In her native country, Japanese passersby didn’t speak at all.
The 10-minute loop begins with the nurse opening the back door of a van and pulling out the robot Ms. Torimitsu refers to as a "corporate soldier." (She made a small model of the robot and had a fabricator reproduce it life size in polyester resin.)
The title of the piece, "Miyata Jiro," is Japanese for salary man, and crawling is the most humiliating position for the salary man. The nurse’s uniform implies that the situation is taken care of. "… the crawling salary man is the perfect corporate cipher, not only representing the anxieties of the… corporate workers, but perhaps our own corporate fears," says the wall text.
One whole wall of the installation is covered with 40 newspaper accounts of her actions in the languages of the countries she visited.
"I didn’t want to do this for an art crowd," she explained at the opening, because it wouldn’t get the same reaction; it would be more acceptable in an art gallery. Instead, she chose to take the corporate soldier to his own milieu business districts, bus and train stations, a shopping mall.
The fashionably dressed, attractive-looking artist says she has never been arrested for creating a public nuisance. At Grand Central Station in New York, when stopped by a policeman, she pretended not to understand English. On occasion, she has been accused of shooting a promotional video.
Ms. Torimitsu says she can usually work for about 20 minutes in a place without getting kicked out. The part that creates the most commotion is when she stops to remove the back of the shirt and jacket of the salary man to replace his batteries everyone wants to see what’s going on but as long as she keeps moving along with the crawling robot, the crowd moves.
In "Seams," Canadian-born artist Jillian Macdonald set up a storefront in lower Manhattan a year after Sept. 11, 2001, and invited passersby to lend an article of clothing that held personal significance. Participants were promised the garments would be returned unharmed and not altered after the performance intervention. They were asked to speak to her about their personal fears and anxieties, and she then stitched messages of personal protection into the seams of the garment.
In a black hat, embroidered in gold, we read: "For a calm and meaningful life"; in the pocket of a red jacket, "for patience, wisdom"; in a tweed hat, "for protection against greedy war enthusiasts and their actions."
"Rebagged," an installation by German-born Elke Lehmann, hangs on suspended mannequin torsos. These are ready-made tops with the signature shopping bags they were purchased in incorporated into sleeves, skirts, hoods and adjustable design elements. One yellow T-shirt looks positively pregnant as its lower part becomes a blue and white Armani Exchange shopping bag.
Hung from nylon wire, the forms spin, and for the show’s opening, live models were hired to parade some of these "fashions."
The models, TCNJ fine arts students Jessica Lauren Lipton and Satchell Drakes, were chosen because "I thought (the shopping-bag garments) would look really good on them," says Ms. Lehmann, who formerly taught at TCNJ and now teaches fine arts at Yale University.
Mr. Drakes says his French Connection shirt/bag feels comfortable and mobile, though it had to be delicately slipped on with help from Ms. Lehmann. Ms. Lipton, when asked how much she would pay for a shirt like this, first explained that she lives on a student budget, but felt it was functional and cool enough that she’d spent up to $50 on it.
As the models crinkled away in their shopping bag garments, Ms. Lehmann said, "These are meant as prototypes, rather than what you’d find on the rack."
Ms. Lehmann, who studied at the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts in Paris and L’Institut Des Hautes Etudes en Arts Plastiques, says her specialization in sculpture includes video and installation art. These include public projects and site specific interventions.
As for clothing, Ms. Lehmann says she’s always been interested in how we express ourselves with what we wear and become victims of logos and brand names. Living at Broadway and Canal Street in New York City, she is constantly confronted with bags and became fascinated with advertising on them and how they become status symbols.
Professing not to be a seamstress, Ms. Lehmann did all the stitching with her sewing machine. "I don’t want them to be perfect I think it’s better if it looks crudely made," she says. "I don’t want it to be about technique. It’s not a craft. The bags were just ripped apart."
Curator Ms. van der Heijden, a Netherlands native, has known these three artists for years, having been in exhibitions with them, and wanted to show her students at TCNJ some of the more challenging aspects of contemporary art using an accessible everyday subject such as clothing. Studying sculpture at Cooper Union in New York, Ms. van der Heijden says her installation work evolved as a more contemporary approach. This is her first curatorial effort.
Dress Code is on view at The College Art Gallery, 111 Holman Hall, The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, through March 28. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. noon 3 p.m., Thurs. 7-9 p.m., Sun. 1-3 p.m. For information, call (609) 771-2198. On the Web: www.tcnj.edu/~tcag

