“Costume Art,” the upcoming exhibition at The Met, considers clothing in relation to works of art in the museum’s collection using the “dressed body” as the point of connection. Curator in Charge Andrew Bolton’s aim, he writes, is “reframing fashion as a primary site of visual and social formation”—rather than as an illustrative or lesser one. This elevation of fashion above frivolity, of placing it on equal footing with the painting, sculpture, and the like, is reflected in the catalog, where artworks and dressed mannequins are shown side by side. Working with designer Anna Rieger, photographers Paul Westlake and Anna-Marie Kellen connect the objects and fashion by using gray backgrounds for each. The cropping of the images and positioning of the artworks emphasizes the symbiotic connections in the pairings.
The exhibition is organized around different body types: the naked and nude body, the pregnant body, the aging body, etc. These are introduced in the catalog with paper assemblages commissioned by Bolton from Julie Wolfe, who worked in collaboration with photographer Nathalie Agussol. Together, Bolton and Wolfe used a 1+1=3 approach. The idea is that the assemblages are more than the sum of their parts, that the melding of art and fashion yields something new, “a separate sort of hybrid entity,” as Wolfe put it. “I think this is brilliant of Andrew, because it sort of gives a different perspective on the pairings that are in the exhibition.” The hope, she continues, is that the viewer or reader will “see from their own perspective how they want to put the puzzle together.”
Wolfe employs Exacto knives, scissors, and archival adhesives in her practice, often using unusual materials, like vintage book pages, as a foundation for her work, which she layers, writes, paints, or draws on, and sometimes overprints or gilds. “I wanted to make these pieces very much analog in themselves, very much like a human touch, not perfect. There are cut marks and there are some irregularities and I love that sort of beauty.”
In addition to the catalog, the Metropolitan Museum will offer The Body Electric, a keepsake box in a numbered edition of 500 that will include a signed and numbered print by Wolfe and unbound pages with which readers can curate their own connection between art and fashion.
Costume Art is published with Yale University Press.
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