Fashion high man

Is fashion the ultimate public art or the ultimate symbol of wealth's self-indulgence? Is art's current embrace of fashion a sign of craven complicity with the oppressive mechanisms of commodity culture, as Benjamin Buchloh recently averred? (Think of major museums' cultivation of corporate sponsors such as Hugo Boss and Donna Karan; the slick, fashion-photo techniques of artists such as Yasumasa Morimura, and the late Dan Flavin's decision to ornament Calvin Klein's flagship boutique.) Or is it a recognition of the natural kinship between two modes of modern expression? Can fashion be subversive? Does it liberate or does it enslave? Does art have the capacity to elevate fashion into intellectual realms? Or does fashion inevitably drag art into a debased commercial arena?

However you might be inclined to respond to such questions, you probably could have found evidence to support your position in the recent "Art/Fashion" exhibition at the SoHo Guggenheim in New York. Indeed, the most striking aspect of the art/fashion nexus was the apparent instability of the relationship between these two fields of endeavor. At some moments in the exhibition, they creatively fed off each other, while at others they seemed to recoil in mutual incomprehension and distaste.

The show was a version of the 1996 Biennale di Firenze, a new addition to the international exhibition scene which debuted last September with a multisite project in Florence, Italy. Organized by Germano Celant, Luigi Settembrini and Ingrid Sischy, the Biennale mounted a number of separate exhibitions devoted to art and fashion. It also offered a series of collaborations between contemporary artists and fashion designers installed in pavilions designed by Arata Isozaki. At the Guggenheim, viewers saw an expanded version of the Biennale's survey exhibition of 20th-century interactions between art and fashion, curated by Celant, Sischy and Pandora Tabatbai Asbaghi. Also included were small models of the seven Isozaki pavilions, with miniature mock-ups of the collaborative installations.

Some of the most fruitful art/fashion interactions were encountered early on. The show, which was structured in roughly chronological order, opened with a gathering of drawings and garments by the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists, for whom clothing design was part of a larger quest for the implementation of a utopian society. Some, such as an array of early 1920s Futurist vests by Fortunato Depero displaying colorful animal and plant motifs, exude a buoyant sense of freedom from convention, though others, such as a 1923 set of work outfits by Varvara Stepanova, are uncomfortably prescient of drab Mao-era Chinese work uniforms.

By contrast, fashion was an expression of personal and social freedom for the French painter Sonia Delaunay. A designer of clothes which were esthetically and commercially successful, Delaunay was one of the stars of the show. Her fashion career was so substantial that she gave up painting during the 1920s and '30s to support her husband Robert's art with a line of garments. As one can see from Delaunay's drawings and documentary photographs of her designs, she liberated the female body with dresses characterized by loose lines and exuberant geometry.

With Surrealism, fashion became fetish, a means to explore the eroticism of the unconscious. Elsa Schiaparelli, doyenne of 1930s Parisian couture, dominated this section of the show. An intimate of Surrealist circles, Schiaparelli collaborated with Salvador Dali on a number of designs. Among them were a 1937 organza evening dress painted with an image of a lobster (an accepted Surrealist emblem of female sexuality) and the Tear Illusion Dress, also 1937, painted with trompe l'oeil rips reportedly inspired by the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. This latter garment was featured the same year in a fashion spread Dali designed for Vogue.

The exhibition also documented the work of Man Ray, both as a straightforward fashion photographer and as purveyor of more private fantasies. Sometimes these identities merged, as in his famous photograph for Harper's Bazaar in which a woman in a beach robe lounges beneath the artist's curiously analogous painting of huge red lips floating in a cloudy sky.

By the 1960s art and fashion were in close communion, as was evident in clothing designs created by Italian artists such as Lucio Fontana, Arnaldo Pomodoro and Enrico Baj. Sponsored by a well-known Milanese dressmaker, this mock fashion collection of 1961 translated the artists' signature motifs into women's dresses. On the American side, painters such as Ellsworth Kelly and Roy Lichtenstein also created artistic wearables.

From this point on in the exhibition, the full ambivalence of the dialogue between art and fashion began to emerge. The rise of Pop art, which broke down so many barriers between high and low, seems to have altered contemporary art's response to fashion, creating a more competitive and sometimes adversarial relationship. Since the 1960s, artists have variously sought to undermine fashion's pretense to elegance, exaggerate its kitschy aspects and critique its assumptions regarding charged issues of class and gender. Reflecting this changed dynamic, the works in the later part of the exhibition were less likely to be functional garments. More often the artists created provocative objects which took fashion as their target.

In Christo's Wedding Dress (1967), ropes attach the bride to a massive wrapped bundle that she must drag behind her. While obviously a comment on the social and psychogical implications of marriage, in the context of this show Wedding Dress could also be read as a literal representation of the notion of the "fashion slave." Nam June Paik and Charlotte Moorman's TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969) is a brassiere made from two small video monitors. Moorman wore the TV Bra during her cello recitals, while Paik's video camera fed images of the performance to the twin monitors mounted on her breasts. This mechanical appendage humorously emphasized the woman's role as voyeuristic object.

A number of artists turn clothing into unsettling body extensions. Both Yayoi Kusama and Louise Bourgeois were represented by garments replete with phallic protrusions. Others fabricate garments out of repellent materials. Wall of the Ascending Angels (1993), Jan Fabre's tight-fitting evening gown constructed of dead beetles, exudes a pungent odor. Jana Sterbak's Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987) requires the model to be draped with raw flank steaks. Another Sterbak dress in the show sports heat-conducting coils that encircle the wearer in a painful cage.

There were also more fanciful approaches, such as Piero Gilardi's 1967 watermelon dress, complete with a hat shaped like half of a split melon, or Colette's 1981 fantasy dress which turns the wearer into an overupholstered pink confection. But even when tweaking or critiquing the conceits of fashion, the works here presented what is essentially an upbeat view of the interactions between art and fashion. The show steered clear of recent feminist-inspired works such as Janine Antoni's mock lipstick counter which uses chocolate and lard to comment on the relations between ideals of beauty and eating disorders, or Maureen Connor's impossibly skinny dress (though the latter did earn a mention in the catalogue). Nor was there any suggestion of the fashion industry's romance with decadence that recently culminated in so-called heroin chic.

The last section of the show was devoted to the models of the Isozaki pavilions, which were displayed at eye level, allowing viewers to peer inside. Each is based on a different geometrical form and painted a distinctive color. While the reduced scale made it hard to assess the full impact of these structures, they appear often to rely on a manipulation of the viewer's sense of scale within the environment.

In some of the pavilions, artists and designers seemed content to simply coexist. A nine-sided structure contained dresses by Azzedine Alaia surrounded by gestural paintings by Julian Schnabel. In an elongated structure, Roy Lichtenstein and the late Gianni Versace paired art and fashion more satisfyingly by allowing us to note a resemblance between the artist's willowy brushstroke sculpture and the designer's flowing translucent gowns.