10
Michal Lynn Shumate
First there is nothing, then there is a deep nothing, then there is a blue depth.
Yves Klein quoting Gaston Bachelard (KLEIN 1959)
In an effort to understand the complicated relationship between fashion and color, this text enlists a case study Bluescreen (Long Live the Immaterial!) as a starting point, a point of return, and indeed a maypole around which to weave ideas and references. Staged by fashion design team Viktor & Rolf for their Autumn/Winter 2002 season, Bluescreen featured chroma-key blue, a color commonly used to create moving backgrounds in cinematic special effects, to present an alternate reality on projection screens that flanked each side of the runway. The show is at face value a visually arresting and innovative use of film technology within the fashion show genre. Upon closer examination, however, it is a door to the haunting power of blue in art and culture, and to the myriad issues that accompany it: color and line, surface and depth, and nothingness and infinitude—binaries that, as this text will illustrate, are central to the study of fashion, its histories, and its relationship to color.
In their twenty-year career, Viktor & Rolf, Viktor Horsting, and Rolf Snoeren respectively, have often mounted monochromatic (and in many cases non-chromatic) shows: the installations L’Hiver de l’Amour (1994) and L’Apparence du Vide (1995); the runway shows Black Hole (Autumn/Winter 2001) and All White Show (Spring/Summer 2002); and more recently Zen (Autumn/Winter 2013) and Red Carpet (Autumn/Winter 2014). Their work with color extended beyond the runway and into the gallery in 2004 when they guest curated Fashion in Colors, an exhibition of historic costume presented along a strict curatorial divide of color groupings (Fukai 2004). As an example of their monochrome projects, the fashion show Red Carpet gives a good sense of how the designers employ color: the show was in fact entirely red (Plate 10.1). Dresses made of red carpets were draped over models that walked in red shoes down a red carpeted runway while Steve Reich’s 1972 Clapping Music was performed on the balcony overhead. The basic shapes of the garments—many reminiscent of a quickly wrapped towel, combined with the cultural signifier of the red carpet and the awkward non-applause clapping of Reich’s piece, together formed a kind of surrealist comment on emptiness, pointed sharply at the fashion industry as per usual and, in this instance, directed at celebrity culture as well.
Viktor & Rolf (V&R) appropriate color in their work the same way they appropriate all other elements: as something to be manipulated at the service of a visual commentary. Commenting on fashion with fashion has defined the career of this Dutch design duo; their play with formal elements drawn from sartorial tropes and traditions oscillates between celebrating fashion and all of its infinite possibilities and the cynical exposure of fashion’s inevitable unattainability and general absurdity. In fact, a V&R show frequently operates in both modes at the same time, taking the form of a sinister and seductive beauty—an aesthetic experience that is intensely pleasurable in its genuine celebration of fashion and, simultaneously, intensely disturbing in its mocking critique. Bluescreen (Long Live the Immaterial!) makes explicit a contradiction that is hinted at in many of their other shows, that is, fashion’s association with both nothingness and infinitude: the notion that fashion gives nothing while promising everything.
This text considers how V&R use color in their ongoing mission to unpack fashion’s promises, focusing on Bluescreen alongside the work of contemporary artists in order to explore some of the parallels between color and fashion—specifically, the ways in which both color and fashion occupy a space of tension between the superficiality of surface and the great, unending expanse of the void. Mid-century French artist Yves Klein looms large over these themes. His oeuvre has long informed the work of Viktor & Rolf, and his 2001 retrospective Yves Klein: Long Live the Immaterial! was their stated inspiration for the Bluescreen collection and runway performance. In his own work, Klein was preoccupied—perhaps even obsessed—with color, and with blue specifically, creating in the late 1950s the very blue that unites this text: IKB (International Klein Blue).
In pursuit of a context for Viktor & Rolf’s Bluescreen, this text will first consider color from a broader perspective: What are the challenges inherent to studying color? What is given up by focusing on color and by extension setting aside line (if only momentarily)? Klein expresses his opinion quite clearly on the matter of line: “I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars” (Perlein and Cora 2001). Despite Klein’s firm convictions, the question of color versus line is relevant here because the study of fashion has historically been a study of lines: the study of outlines of garment silhouettes, the shapes and markings of historical patterns, timelines and the paths of textile trade routes, lines on graphs showing any number of social or economic trends related to fashion, and of course necklines, waistlines, and hemlines.
The work of James Laver, the beloved patriarch of costume history, will prove useful here. In the introduction to his 1961 Costume Through the Ages, a collection of line drawings showing depictions of dress from the history of art, he describes the method employed in the book: “The figures, all founded upon original documents, have been redrawn, but with an absolute minimum of personal expression. The aim has been to preserve the essential lines while giving due attention to detail, and these details are sometimes clearer than they would be in, for example, a photograph of a painting or a piece of sculpture” (Laver 1963: 10). In this passage, we get a sense of line as something reliable and translatable, while color—belonging to the world of expression—is instead extraneous and confusing. A similar approach is evident in Laver’s earlier publication, Style in Costume, which showcased the parallels between dress and décor through the centuries with a side-by-side comparison of lines: images of garments paired with those of buildings, chimneys, and furniture (Laver 1949). In the hands of the Assistant Keeper of the department known today as Prints and Drawings at the Victoria and Albert Museum (the post Laver held from 1938 through 1959) it is perhaps no surprise that the history of dress was understood and communicated graphically through line via the literal outline of shapes.
Furthermore, it can be suggested that in the study of fashion, line has been adopted in an effort to convey seriousness, rationality, and clear-headedness. Line has been embraced in an effort to cast disapproving glances at the silliness of our subject, to rub off its glittery eye shadow and its wet-looking lipstick, to wash its hair and scrub behind its ears, to give it a square meal and a warm bed and a crisp, clean shirt for its court appearance in the morning. Because it only takes a cursory perusal of the rhetoric in the line versus color debate to see where the line has been drawn between the two: line is rational, honest, and normal, while color is primitive, feminine, messy, superficial, emotional, deceptive, and poisonous. As filmmaker Derek Jarman summarizes, “colour seems to have a Queer bent!” (Jarman 1995a). And perhaps we intuitively seek structure for something so inherently ephemeral, subjective, and slippery as fashion. So what is gained by addressing color’s relationship to fashion? What does color mean?
In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, philosopher Julia Kristeva tells us that “color is not zero meaning: it is excess meaning.” And again, “color is bodily; it is erotic. It comes from the body, like voice” (Kristeva 1980: 219–221). Color not only comes from the body but is also absorbed by it; color is a corporeal experience. This idea manifests itself frequently in the work of contemporary installation artists such as James Turrell and Ann Veronica Janssens. Visitors to Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson’s 2009 installation, 360-degree room for all colors at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, stood in the middle of a circular enclosure and were presented with nothing but a smooth panoramic wall that slowly throbbed and pulsated with different colors in different tones. The enclosure extended well above head height but not so far as the ceiling, and was bright enough to envelop anyone who stepped in: a real-life, morphing color filter. It was both a room to inhabit and a garment to wear for a moment; visitors felt shifts in mood and bodily awareness with each shift in the environment. Color as employed in Eliasson’s installation directly affects the appearance of clothing, and the experience of the body.
This bodily experience of color is at times untranslatable. In her autobiography, fashion editor and curator Diana Vreeland wrote:
This story went around about me: Apparently I’d wanted a billiard-table green background for a picture. So the photographer went out and took the picture. I didn’t like it. He went out and took it again and I still didn’t like it. “I asked for billiard-table green!” I’m supposed to have said. “But this is a billiard table, Mrs. Vreeland,” the photographer replied. “My dear,” I apparently said, “I meant the idea of billiard-table green.” (Vreeland, Plimpton and Hemphill 1997: 105–106)
Similarly, color is at times untrustworthy. In Chromophobia, David Batchelor’s seminal book on the topic, the artist and writer contextualizes this subject within the tradition of Western philosophy, which, as he describes,
is used to dealing with ideas of depth and surface, essence and appearance, and this just about always translates into a moral distinction between the profound and the superficial. So where does colour lie along this well-worn path? Well, if colour is make-up, then it is not really on this path at all … It is not simply a deception; it is a double deception. It is a surface on a surface. (Batchelor 2000)
This returns us to the centrality of fashion to the discussion of the surface-ness of color, since fashion is in itself entirely a kind of surface, given that it is a covering for the body, and it is also generally regarded as entirely superficial, among many other pejoratives. The shared surface-ness of color and fashion brings Viktor & Rolf’s Autumn/Winter 2002 Bluescreen: (Long Live the Immaterial!) into focus.
The first glimpse of blue in Bluescreen is a square of pseudo-piping on the interior of a coat; a model holds open an otherwise solid-black coat to make visible the outline of an oversized pocket (Plate 10.2). The full extent of what is happening is not yet clear to the viewer. Then, on subsequent models there appears a blue collar, a blue hat, blue shoes, then blue stockings and a (very) oversized blue scarf. Eventually there are blue skirts, short blue dresses, blue floor-length dresses worn under blue floor-length coats spread open and lined in blue. But it is not just blue. It is not turquoise, it is not cerulean; it is chroma-key blue, it is International Klein Blue and, as this text will explore further on, it is Derek Jarman blue, David Hammons blue, and Giotto blue.
Contrarily, on the screens that flank the runway, there is no blue at all. Blue stockings, shoes, scarves, and skirts all turn into moving images of nature-scapes and city-views; sometimes the videos are barely glimpsed on a collar ruffle and sometimes they are viewed in their entirety across an evening gown (Plate 10.3). The staged image as a whole is dreamy but uneasy. Viktor & Rolf have broken the cardinal rule of chroma-key blue: be sure your subject isn’t wearing blue or “when you remove the color you will also remove the clothing of your [subject] and will instead get the effect of a floating head and arms” (Robertson 2012). And indeed, the models become floating heads above blank screens, more so (or perhaps more literally) than usual: they are a portal for the projection of images and dreams and anxieties. It is not just blue; it is a void that can be filled with unlimited possibilities, infinite garments, or scenes to be imagined in its place. On the one hand, there is cheerfulness in the limitless possibilities (your clothes could become anything!); on the other hand, Viktor & Rolf are showing us that our clothes are hollow, and that our clothes (and ourselves) could disappear, leaving nothing behind. Or worse, they could be perceived in ways that we never intended. Ultimately, V&R give us a mode of camouflage, but with the caveat that this camouflage may prove too effective, sending us from a glossy surface into an infinite void.
This same color blue, as experienced in artist David Hammons’s 2002 installation Concerto in Black and Blue, was absent until activated by visitors with blue flashlights as they entered a series of pitch-black rooms. As described by one critic, the piece was initially “darkness, emptiness: at least 10,000 square feet of completely lightless space with a very high ceiling in a progression of empty rooms off a central corridor” (Baker 2003). Just as the moving backdrops in the Viktor & Rolf show weren’t visible until the models carried the blue garments down the runway, Hammon’s piece waited in anticipation, perhaps even non-existence, until inhabited by visitors. It was a study in making something out of nothing, and also a study in simply basking in nothing. As Hammons said in conversation with critic Peter Schjeldahl, the installation was inspired by a trip to Japan and ruminations on the idea that “There are so many kinds of nothingness” (Schjeldahl 2002).
The same blue ten years earlier spoke of absence and presence in Derek Jarman’s 1993 film Blue. The soundtrack was first broadcast in Britain by BBC Radio 3, synchronous with a solid chroma-key blue screen broadcast on Channel 4. In subsequent versions, a transcript is sometimes visible at the bottom of the blue screen not unlike subtitles, but in every viewing the overwhelming visual is a single, penetrating blue glow. Jarman’s voice is heard alongside Simon Turner’s soundtrack of ambient instrumental music and the noise of Jarman’s own surroundings: a streetscape, a hospital, a beach.
Blue flashes in my eyes.
Blue Bottle buzzing
Lazy days
The sky blue butterfly
Sways on the cornflower
Lost in the warmth
Of the blue heat haze
Singing the blues
Quiet and slowly
Blue of my heart
Blue of my dreams
Slow blue love
Of delphinium days
(Jarman 1994)
The film is an exploration of the color blue, the experience of losing friends to the AIDS epidemic during the height of the crisis, and Jarman’s own physical deterioration from the disease. His symptoms included losing his sight; the blue of the screen is homage to Yves Klein but it is also the blue of Jarman’s own blindness, the color that comprised his field of vision more and more as his eyesight waned. The emptiness of the screen becomes the embodiment of his lived visual experience, throwing his words and the sounds of his life into sharp relief. At times he recounts mundane daily interactions, at time he reads poetry, at times he remembers friends and contemplates the future. Completed less than a year before he died from complications due to AIDS, Jarman’s blue is a blue of loss and blindness and ultimately death, but also a blue of remembering all the beautiful blue things in the world. The soundtrack, together with the intensity of the glowing screen, makes Jarman’s blue a persistent nothingness and everything.
Forty years before the blue of Jarman, there was the blue of Yves Klein: International Klein Blue. And since 1306, almost seven hundred years before IKB, there has been Giotto di Bondone’s blue of the Arena Chapel in Padua (Figure 10.1). As art historian Carol Mavor describes the fourteenth-century fresco in Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a Colour, “Giotto’s blue gives us wings: we inevitably sprout them … It is as if Yves Klein has gone back in time to miraculously join hands with Giotto. Flying is blue. It is as if Giotto has gone forward in time to miraculously join hands with Yves Klein” (Mavor 2013: 20–23). Understanding Klein as a pious Catholic and devotee of Giotto’s work makes Mavor’s imagining all the more fitting (Schjeldahl 2010), but Giotto’s blue is perhaps also a blue of nothing and everything. At the top of his fresco of the Last Judgment, which covers the entire interior wall of the entrance, two angels emerge from behind the surface of fresco. As Kristeva describes, “Abruptly, the scroll tears, coiling in upon itself from both sides near the top … revealing the gates of heaven and exposing the narrative as nothing but a thin layer of color” (Kristeva 1980: 212).
Figure 10.1 Detail, “The Last Judgement,” Giotto di Bondone, 1306, Arena Chapel, Padua. © Photo: Wikicommons.
This thin layer of color renders our world flat and at the same time connects our world to the next. This thin layer of color brings us back to Viktor and Rolf’s chroma-key blue and the easy slippage that it builds between the second and third dimensions—between the models as flesh and the models as flat surfaces that reveal images of faraway places. The film that documents Bluescreen in its eighteen-minute entirety creates another layer of perplexity, as the real-time video projected onto the flanking screens frequently includes one of the screens within the frame alongside the models. The effect is that the blue garments appear to be composed of moving images from another dimension on the physical runway. Questions of What is real? What came first? and What dimension is at the service of the other? (Do we privilege the object or an image of the object?) are as relevant to the fashion system as they are to art theory or theological philosophy. V&R’s models reveal, emerge from, and fade into the prerecorded series of landscapes, acting as a conduit between here and somewhere else, not unlike Giotto’s angels: linchpins between this world and an imagined one, between this world and the way we imagine it to be.
Yves Klein had conduit angel-models of his own. Thought-provoking and ground-breaking despite its misogynistic overtones, his Anthropometry (1960) was a performance—and resulting painting—in which nude women were directed to cover the front half of their torso and thighs in IKB paint and then transfer the paint onto an upright canvas while being steered and placed by Klein along the way. Acting as both powerful interlocutors and passive human paintbrushes, the women leave their imprint in blue on the canvas: a three-dimensional body and a four-dimensional performance create a two-dimensional record of the event.
Viktor & Rolf have followed in the footsteps of their dear poet-prankster in this general practice and frequently incorporate models as props in their garment theater. This is seen in Bluescreen as well as many other runway shows in which the designers place the models like stones in a rock garden (Zen, Autumn/Winter 2013), dress and undress them on stage (Russian Doll, Autumn/Winter 1999; Autumn/Winter 2010), or send them down the runway bearing their own lighting and sound rigs on their shoulders (The Fashion Show, Autumn/Winter 2007). “For us really the show is the performance, that is the real work. Those ten minutes [are] our work and the clothes are like actors in a play” (Martin 2008). NB: it is the clothes that are the actors and by extension the women who are props. Like Klein’s human paintbrushes, the models are simultaneously subhuman and superhuman: treated as objects while elevated to the status of the art they help create.
Giotto’s thin layer of color brings us back to International Klein Blue and all that the designers owe to Klein himself. As seen in many of their performances, Viktor & Rolf had already made a habit of quoting Yves Klein long before they borrowed his blue and named a collection after him. Their odorless “Le Parfum” was conceived as homage to Klein’s “Le Vide” from 1958. Sealed shut, the fragrance was given the same reverent attention as a functional branded perfume: packaging, a photo shoot, and full ad campaign. As they later commented, “the scent has an intoxicating effect. Anticipated by its advertisement, [it can] only be imagined: sealed by a wax cap, the flask cannot be opened. The perfume can neither evaporate nor give off its scent, and will forever be the potential of pure promise” (Evans 2008: 53). So clearly Bluescreen was not their first quotation of Klein, nor was it their first time celebrating emptiness and all of the possibilities it promises.
“Le Parfum” and “Le Vide” bring us back to this central question of nothingness and its proximity to infinitude. Theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad wrote a piece for the catalogue of documenta (13), the thirteenth iteration of Kassel’s contemporary art festival, about this very conundrum: “Shall we utter some words about nothingness? … Have we not already said too much simply in pronouncing its name?” Throughout the essay, Barad interlaces quantum theory and the mechanisms of particles and vacuums with poetic reflections cum scientific treatise:
The void is a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming. The vacuum is flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what it could be … Nothingness is not absence, but the infinite plenitude of openness. Infinities are not mere mathematical idealizations, but incarnate marks of in/determinacy.
She concludes with the revelation that these assumed binaries are in fact intrinsically linked: “Infinity is the on-going material reconfiguring of nothingness … Infinity and nothingness are infinitely threaded through one another so that every infinitesimal bit of one always already contains the other” (Barad 2012).
Applying this revelation to color brings us full circle back to Kristeva, back to simultaneous zero meaning and excess meaning, back to the limitations of James Laver and the everything and nothing crafted by David Hammons and Derek Jarman. Applying this to fashion returns us to Viktor & Rolf, back to color as an important and often-used formal element in their work, back to Bluescreen (Long Live the Immaterial!) and the ways in which it encapsulates ideas about color and fashion that are central to Viktor & Rolf’s entire project. Namely, the shift between surface and the infinite void that it suggests is lurking just below: an exploration of the nothingness and the infinitude of fashion through the nothingness and the infinitude of color. In this vein, fashion is understood as something empty and yet full of promises—or perhaps full of promises precisely because it is empty.
References
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