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Section 5 - Dress me up

Let me introduce you to 3 artists in various stages of Dress - Dress, Half Dress and UnDress. Well this is a 'Dress' rehearsal and only Half Dress has bothered to turn up - Dress has just sent her Dress and UnDress has sent her Mum.



Let the striptease begin...(1)

Character 1 - Jana Sterbak is Dress (2)

One of my favourite ever pieces of art is Sterbak’s electric dress – I Want You to Feel the Way I Do ... (The Dress). A very simple wire frame work with live electric filaments threaded through. She is known mostly for her meat dress, I love the texture, but don’t like the shape as it is sewn on to a showroom dummy. This alienates with its idealised female form. IW YTFTWID is not constrictive in constructed femininity and it flows like the juice and you can see it stepping Frankenstein like towards you to embrace you in its tender arms and you are gripped to the chest and die like a fly – buzzing and fizzing.

To me as a painter, IW YTFTWID is a fantastic iconic 3D representation of Dress (3) - the minimal sculpting keeps it freshness as a image of femininity without being 'loaded' with psychological baggage. I look at this Dress and it is female - I look at this Dress and it is destructive - I look at this Dress and its smiling, spiteful and sweet. When looking at clothing and technology this Dress is an image of the primaeval beginnings. The black rubbery wires dropping loosly from the frame - like the body's connective neurons and bloody waste.

If weaving was to count as an achievement, it was not even one of women’s own. Their work is not original or creative: both the women and their cloths are simply copying the matted tangles of pubic hair. Should they have pretensions to authority, they would only be faking this as well. Women "can, it seems, (only) imitate nature. Duplicate what nature offers and produces. In a kind of technical assistance and substitution." Weaving is an automatic imitation of some bodily function already beyond the weaver’s control. She is bound to weave a costume for the masquerade: she is an actress, a mimic, an impersonator, with no authenticity underneath it all. She has nothing to reveal, no soul to bare, not even a sex or a self to please. He pulls aside the veils, the webs of lies, the shrouds of mystery, and the layers of deception and duplicity, and finds no comfort, no there there. Only the "horror of nothing to be seen." Good of her to cover it up for him. (4)

Cloth has a bloody history as with the newly formed cloth trade in Halifax which lead to the gibbet. The heater elements may be an 'old' technology but the electric chair is still used in America.

Static from cloth is hair raising
and E textiles make
Our clothes permanently connected
Constant raised browsing
Dress Up and wear your computer

The mobile phone is now an extension of our bodies and has made the transition into biological evolution. We groom each other like monkeys with texting fingers and ear stroking. (5)


Character 2 – Leigh Bowery – Half Dress (6)

The freak – says chic – even monsters want to party. I like my femininty translated through the body of a huge queer and this photograph epitomises transgender translation (7). The fetish transparent skin of the female ‘ideal’ from behind which Leigh’s real body spills around. The real fantasy and the unreal reality of his inner being exposed brilliantly. Leigh Bowery was film in 3D - his lack of comfort with his own physicality meant he was role playing constantly with the human eye of his 'audience' become the camera. A living embodiment of celloid fantasy – the Slasher and Final Girl rol(l)ed into one. The feminised male debased and debasing. The assaultive and the victimised vision.

We catch sight of them only in glimpses - few and far between in the beginning, more frequent toward the end. They are usually large, sometimes overweight, and often masked. In short, they may be recognizably human, but they are only marginally so...

The gender of the Final Girl is likewise compromised from the outset by her masculine interests, her inevitable sexual reluctance, her apartness from the other girls, sometimes her name. At the level of the cinematic apparatus, her unfemininity is signalled clearly by her exercise of the ‘active investigating gaze’ normally reserved for males and punished in females when they assume it themselves; tentatively at first and then aggressively, the Final Girl looks for the killer, even tracking him to his forest hut or his underground labyrinth, and then at him, therewith bringing him, often for the first tie, into our vision as well. When, in the final scene, she stops screaming, faces the killer, and reaches for the knife (sledge hammer, scalpel, gun, machete, hanger, knitting needle, chainsaw), she addresses the monster on his own terms. (8)

Lights – illuminated light bulbs in his ears – (9)
Camera – the lens of five different glasses –(10)
Action – anus explodes and covers you with shit.(11)

Film projects meaning onto bodies/surfaces - the singular viewpoint is stripped away - the notion of subjectivity is destablished and gender and sexual roles are interchangeable. There is no clear cut - film is always surface - an image of something.


Character 3 - Melanie Manchot – UnDress (12)

Most difficult and closest to the ‘truth’? This is a photograph of a real woman with real flesh.

Working on over life-size nudes of my mother came out of a desire to work with an older woman's body in the process of aging. (13)

As we can see from the above photograph – Melanie in that process of 'work' with older woman's bodies has decapitated her MOTHER.



The reality of the body is shocking so lets build a new one…

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