042: VC SO SURREAL

VOL 001

i did not enjoy learning about surrealism.

it was probably one of my least favorite isms to learn in art history, and i think part of that had to do with the way i encountered it. surrealism was presented in a unit where the subject was not surrealism. we were moving through european artistic movements of the early twentieth century, and we moved through them fast. everyone had a manifesto. everyone was responding to war, industrialization, modernity, and the increasingly obvious fact that the world they inherited was changing underneath them. by the time we got to surrealism, i understood what i needed to understand for class and kept it moving.

some notes.

that was early march. it is funny how quickly something you barely cared about can come back for you.

i was interested in martin margiela. particularly the masks, the jabots, the exaggeration of the human body juxtaposed to the ever-absence of margiela himself. i care about the oddballs out, especially margiela, and i became increasingly interested in what happens when the work literally must speak for itself. we live in an age where almost everything produced is prefaced or marketed adjacent to the identity of the creative person behind it. margiela scratched an itch in me. i have never particularly cared what people have to say about me, all while still hoping that something in my expression can inspire them.

from “martin margiela: in his own words”

about thirty minutes into margiela: in his own words, he began talking about his first collection. he said it was heavily inspired by the surrealists and opened a book with man ray's work across the cover.

that book.

suddenly i was learning why i had to sit through the surrealism unit of art history: renaissance to contemporary. gratification is not always instant. in my life it almost never is.

margiela's relationship to surrealism gave me a reason to return to something i had already decided wasn't particularly interesting to me. this time i wasn't trying to remember who wrote which manifesto or organize a group of isms around their responses to war. i could actually look.

martin margiela: in his own words

and once i started looking, everything got bigger.

the masks were no longer interesting to me solely because they concealed a face. they completely reorganized the way the body could be read. when personality is removed from the equation, attention inevitably shifts to form + construction. the body becomes a surface for composition, and the garment takes on an entirely different responsibility. the surrealists of the early twentieth century became fascinated with disrupting ordinary ways of seeing. dreams, illusion, displacement, and the unconscious became preoccupations. suddenly the familiar had the ability to feel strange.

rayograph, 1921

then there was man ray.

photography without a camera. rayographs made by placing objects directly onto light-sensitive photographic paper and exposing them to light. no negative. what develops on the paper is the image. man ray expanded the possibilities of photography as an artistic medium, and his fingerprints can still be traced throughout fashion, photography, and contemporary art.

then i found his films.

in les mystères du château de dé, bodies move through the villa with stockinged masks pulled over their faces. i had already been looking at margiela's masks. i had already watched margiela open a surrealist book with man ray's work on its cover. now i was watching masked bodies move through a man ray film made in 1929.

i don't need to manufacture a conclusion from that. i am interested enough to keep looking!!!

that has probably been the most fulfilling part of this entire thing. i am not obsessed with surrealism for the sake of surrealism. i'm obsessed with the intersection of all the things i love that i never quite understood how they intersected. photography starts behaving differently. the human body becomes material. clothing changes the way a body can be understood. an ordinary object gets moved slightly out of place and suddenly means something completely different. fashion, film, photography, painting, literature, dreamscapes, all of it keeps finding its way into the same room... my bedroom!

and then, somehow i always end up back in japan.

comme des garcons “dress meets body.”

that has happened enough times in my research that i've stopped treating it like a surprise. japan tends to become the nail in the hammer for me, the thing that confirms that whatever i'm looking at has reached somewhere i genuinely love. i have found myself thinking again about rei kawakubo, about designers creating an ism of their own, about bodies and garments being allowed to become shapes that don't need to flatter or even immediately explain themselves. i don't need japan to belong to surrealism for those things to speak to each other in my head because i'm so fkn in love with the meeting point.

the timing of all of this has also been funny considering how loud the "fashion is art" conversation has been. i wanted to stay out of it at the beginning of 2024, during the MET, and i want to stay out of it now. my stance has nothing to do with whether fashion is art or not.

i can not tell you what art is to you, and i can not tell you whether fashion is more about functionality and practicality than expression. what i can tell you is that to me, fashion is how you do what you do. and art is the byproduct of playing life how you feel it!

i'm much more interested in what happens when these worlds are allowed to touch without needing permission from a debate.

lately i've also been thinking heavily about dreamscapes. i find these spaces and to say i imagine myself there would be an understatement. i literally just go there. suddenly i'm immersed in them and i feel at home. that feeling has started making its way into my own work too. i'm currently building a new world, postcards to soldiers, where everything exists in a really dreamlike way. i'm increasingly unsubscribed and tapped out of a lot of what is happening today, and i'm interested in making somewhere else to go.

maybe that's why surrealism means something completely different to me now than it did sitting in class in march.

there is so much more where this came from that i had to break it into volumes.

this is volume one. also side note: i have been sitting on this post since the early days of may.

xoxo,
vc