The Fabric of Felicity

About

The Museum of Contemporary Art "Garage" opened the exhibition "The fabric of prosperity" - an international project dedicated to clothing in art outside the context of the fashion industry. The exhibition presents works by more than 40 artists from five continents - from representatives of the historical avant-garde, the Soviet and Brazilian underground to the classics of modern art and the authors of the new generation.

The geography of the exhibition is based on the “silk routes” of the 21st century - global routes and production cycles of raw materials, fabrics and ready-made clothes. Launched from Stockholm to Dhaka and from Ivanovo to Biella, the research route of the exhibition reflects the irrelevance of stereotyped ideas about the East and the West, the global North and the South and confirms the fundamental equality of artistic techniques, methods and traditions. One example of such a continuous line, drawn by the exhibition across cultural boundaries, is the juxtaposition of Indian folk painting on the plot of the Mahabharata with a large-scale textile sculpture by the American artist Beverly Samms.

“The fabric of prosperity” is the result of a mental experiment: what, if we exclude fashion from the conversation about clothes in works of art? What kind of questions will arise during the deliberate exclusion of the site where art and clothing are used to meet more often? At the exhibition, clothing is understood as an offline avatar, that is, a constructed image of personality in the real world. The choice of the elements of this image can not always be called deliberate. When dressed, a person connects to industries that control style and behavior, and becomes dependent on the resources used to create this or that piece of clothing. A classic essay by German sociologist Georg Simmel “On Fashion” (1905), suggesting two types of use of clothing, became the conceptual basis for such an experiment: affirming “equality” and creating “unity” within a social group. Equality in clothes, according to Simmel, distinguishes societies close to communism, as well as situations of traditional ceremonies, such as mourning. Unity, like a picture frame, marks the inner connectedness of the group, but is fenced off from the environment not belonging to it. Neither equality nor unity exist in pure form, and their intersection becomes the uniform, which a number of works are devoted to at the exhibition. It labels its carriers as representatives of traditional social institutions (medicine, police), separated from society only on the basis of the pure function, and creates caste isolation in cases of uniform carriers close to the resources of power. Unity, like a picture frame, marks the inner connectedness of the group, but is fenced off from the environment not belonging to it. Neither equality nor unity exist in pure form, and their intersection becomes the uniform, which a number of works are devoted to at the exhibition. It labels its carriers as representatives of traditional social institutions (medicine, police), separated from society only on the basis of the pure function, and creates caste isolation in cases of uniform carriers close to the resources of power. Unity, like a picture frame, marks the inner connectedness of the group, but is fenced off from the environment not belonging to it. Neither equality nor unity exist in pure form, and their intersection becomes the uniform, which a number of works are devoted to at the exhibition. It labels its carriers as representatives of traditional social institutions (medicine, police), separated from society only on the basis of the pure function, and creates caste isolation in cases of uniform carriers close to the resources of power.