Given their constant presence in our lives, we think surprisingly little about our bodies. When we do, we are often thinking of ways to make them less body, more commodity. For women in particular, the body is the site of our social acceptability and our abjection. Fashion is how we navigate that landscape. Philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has proposed that the true challenge of the present cosmopolitan landscape, in which many disparate groups must adjust to living together, is not in navigating “difference” but in negotiating disagreements around the relative importance of a set of values in relation to one another: “Even if we share a value language, and even if we agree on how to apply it to a particular case, we can disagree about the weight to give to different values.” [1] If, as described, the prevailing values of fashion idealize and commoditize the female body, Comme des Garçons designer Rei Kawakubo emphasizes material and formal investigation, interaction with the body through movement, and building self-esteem. She takes this commercial, aesthetic medium and uses it sculpturally, advancing difficult ideas about beauty, embodiment, and access. Kawakubo’s radical reshuffling of clothing’s function, purpose, and form is the work of an artist, as the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute exhibition, Art of the In-Between, demonstrates.

Rei Kawakubo. Clothes/Not Clothes: War/Peace; installation view, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between, 2017. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Beauty, for women, is a devil’s bargain. Little can be accomplished without it, given that society values women’s bodies most as decorative objects and least as active agents of consciousness. Though few women can conform to the strict social expectations of beauty, all are consistently encouraged to spend significant resources of money and time on beauty products, rituals, clothing, and accessories. Enter Kawakubo, whose creations show that rethinking the values that traditionally govern fashion and commerce can produce subversive results. Her clothes operate in the reified realm of desire as couture objects while making the female body “ugly” in every way imaginable. They quote copiously, and hilariously, from the history of aristocratic fashion, annihilating conventions of idealized physical form to instead dwell on the extreme, unexpected, and grotesque. If the expected relationship between the body and fashion requires both to submit to a regime of commodity fetishization, the relationship between the body and Comme des Garçons is one of symbiotic augmentation, two parts that make a greater whole.

Rei Kawakubo. Self/Other: East/West; installation view, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Kawakubo gives little weight to the usually prominent values of comfort and flattery. Many of her outfits restrict the body, particularly the arms. A hooded, armless black sweater invokes a massive shroud but also makes the wearer resemble a grade-schooler pulling her head and arms inside her shirt. Jokes about craft are tucked in throughout the show. Billowing gowns are made from materials usually used for blocking and lining, such as craft paper and unbleached cotton ducking. A skirt that looks like an inversion of a suit is mostly cotton ducking with a bit of blue serge wool showing through at the seam. In other collections, layers of richly embroidered and printed fabrics juxtapose contemporary and historical textiles, drapings, and silhouettes. The infamous 1990s gingham dresses with large tumescent protrusions are featured along with a video of Merce Cunningham’s dancers performing Scenario, a dance choreographed to be performed in the clothes, in which the dancers’ angular movements contrast with the rounded forms.

Rei Kawakubo. From left: High/Low, Model/Multiple, Fashion/Antifashion, Design/Not Design; installation view, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Shrouding of the head and shoulders is an ongoing interest in Kawakubo’s work. The famously private designer invites her wearer to literally disappear into many of her creations. Arms, legs, heads, torsos—these specificities no longer matter. “You never reach the Body without Organs, you can’t reach it, you are forever attaining it, it is a limit,” say Deleuze and Guattari.[2] The Deleuzian turn in Kawakubo’s work resides in her lack of interest in consistency of a conventional sort, either historical or material, while maintaining what the French philosophers called “the plane of consistency specific to desire” [3] that characterizes the Body without Organs. Unlike the “organism” that represents an organized system, such as a shirt with one hole for the head and two for the arms, the Body without Organs “constitutes the ontological unity of substance.” When a consciousness is fully integrated—when we make ourselves a Body without Organs—the layers or strata that make up a personality such as upbringing, cultural background, race, class, and education can no longer be picked apart and individually analyzed. The internal and external givens of the body, such as limbs, torso, genitals, intestines, lungs, blood, heart, brain, are not experienced by embodied human beings as a collection of discrete parts. The body is an integrated unit, a mind–body totality, moving through the world as a sometimes-incongruous thing that simply is.

Rei Kawakubo. Object/Subect; installation view, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The female body is regularly objectified in fashion (as in every other sphere of social relations). Women often forego comfort for beauty, for example wearing towering heels or enduring scorching hair and skin treatments. Deleuze and Guattari: “The masochist’s suffering is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the pseudo-bond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure.” [4] Kawakubo’s lack of interest in flattery should not be mistaken for an aversion to sexuality, or to suffering, as some of the clothes render the body alluring in surprising and potentially painful ways. Crucially, desire is decoupled from external validation, freed from the approval or disapproval of others. A bloomer and bondage-straps getup is topped with a Peter Pan collar, recasting Victorian repression and reverence for childhood as a costume for a modern, flirty woman. The history of aesthetics is likewise rewritten to make explicit the imperial violence carried within. In this, her work parallels other forms of midcentury popular Japanese art such as manga, in which restrictive and sexually problematic social mores are rewritten to accommodate liberatory female desire. Bright red “blood” spatters, heaps of black mourning lace, embedded with children’s organza dresses, lumps of felt, and massive swaths of fur—all challenge the distinction between organic and inorganic, between living and dead, between a caress and a violation.

Rei Kawakubo. Clothes/Not Clothes: Form/Function; installation view, Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Deleuze and Guattari challenge the reader to invent a Body without Organs made of desire and intensity, a social body in which intentionality and self-awareness seamlessly produce new forms of being, disentangled from the imposed order of old histories and old hierarchies. Once you have made yourself over in this way, you are in control of what you embody and what you enact in the world you inhabit. The ideal Body without Organs manifests “immanence,” a kind of embodied spirituality that is rooted in the unified self, and can be felt as a powerful energy by others. Kawakubo shows what that ideal Body without Organs might look like. It could be strange, seductive, awkward, and effusive. It might be a dress for two, or a coat that swallows your head. Freedom for the body might even, for the uninitiated, resemble bondage.

Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through September 4, 2017.

Mickalene Thomas. Collage Wall, 2009-2016; installation view. Photo: Jeffrey Johnston.

This question is not small, and its profundity is rendered expansively in Thomas’s large-scale paintings of women, which are arguably her most recognizable work. Whether her subject is a friend, relative, or stranger, Thomas finds a way to articulate their power and beauty by engaging the history of female representation. Though the work in the exhibition utilizes various genres and media, the strength of much of Thomas’s work is clearly rooted in a deep investment in the history of painting, its long tradition of masters and masterpieces, and the generations of audiences that have accepted its tropes and icons. Thomas’s work both depends on this rich context and smartly subverts it by claiming its own space within a tradition that has largely excluded, demeaned, and caricatured persons of color and women.

Mickalene Thomas. Shinique: Now I Know, 2015; rhinestones, acrylic, and oil on wood panel. Courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia (Paris and Brussels).

Thomas’s intervention into the grand narrative of the lounging nude and the seduction of the female body—a lineage that runs from Titian to Manet to Matisse—is staged most performatively in Shinique: Now I Know (2015). With her back to the viewer and head swiveled toward us, Shinique’s gaze plucks at the heart of a visual tradition dependent upon looking at women, but which has rarely provided the female sitter with such control over the space outside the picture plane. Under Thomas, the archetype is called up only to be destroyed—the enticing seduction of the female figure only recapitulates the strength of the sitter’s presence. These women aren’t being looked at, they are looking at you. Not only does Thomas upset the power dynamics at work between passive sitter and active viewer, which structure the history of art, she makes a case for upsetting a gendered dynamic beyond the space of the picture.

Mickalene Thomas. Ain’t I a Woman: Keri (2009) and Diptych (2009); rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel on wood panel; DVD and framed monitor; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and Artist Rights Society (ARS). Photo: Jeffery Johnston.

Thomas’s intention to articulate the constructed, “slippery” potential of female selfhood is put to work through her employment of different materials, techniques, and juxtapositions of different visual genres within her paintings and collages. The encounter of both painting and video—the stilled self and the self in motion—are moments of great strength in the exhibition, and acknowledge the artifice and consequence that exists at the heart of all representation. Oscillating between two separate works, Thomas’s painted homage to Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech of Black female empowerment, “Ain’t I a Woman,” and a religious altarpiece, Diptych presents the sexy, Black female body sculpted out of flat planes of primary colors in two dimensions on the left (a gesture reminiscent of the painterly techniques of her idols Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden), and in a televised two dimensions on the right. Thomas is asking us to look at these two images together; the back and forth required in creating unity out of a presented duality forces a consideration of the slippery self, as well as Truth’s speech: Isn’t it a woman? Is it not? What is a woman? Who decides? The subject or the surveyor? What, or where, is woman when her likeness is rendered flat on a wall or screen? When is the self most recognizable? Authentic? Staged? Embodied?

Mickalene Thomas. Waiting on a Prime-Time Star, 2016; mixed media; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist and the Newcomb Museum of Art at Tulane University (New Orleans, LA). Photo: Jeffery Johnston.

The true highlight of the exhibition is Thomas’s re-creation of a flashy, glamorous domestic space filled with nostalgic 1970s interior design fads and references. By creating a space where her figures might live, relax, lounge, and cavort, Thomas points to the ways in which identity is created and constructed by things, spaces, and forces outside of our own physical bodies. In a true celebration of the self as a constellation of “stuff”—visible and invisible to the eye—Thomas poses an emancipatory narrative of female Blackness that is transposed and transformed across times, spaces, and persons. Within this space, the voice of Thomas’s mother echoes from the video interview, “Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman” (2012). Her voice undulates across the staged installation—a reminder that history is inalienable from the present, as is the projected self inalienable from the imagined.  This notion of playful bifurcation—or the understanding that the self is a fractured and multifarious process and product of becoming, scattered across both the artist’s representation and the sitter’s own performance of it—calls attention to the hybrid foundations that define Black femaleness and beauty in today’s world.

Mickalene Thomas: Waiting on a Prime-Time Star will be on view at the Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University through April 9, 2017.

[1] The impossible unification of the self is a great theme of Jacques Lacan’s work. See “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Jacques Sheridan, (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2004), 3–9. The reference to the French psychotherapist is not out of bounds, as Mickalene Thomas has discussed the impact of Lacan’s writing on “the mirror stage” as being tremendously important to her work in interviews and other publications.

Whitney Houston, center, with her mother, Cissy Houston; father, John Houston, second from right; brother, Michael Houston, left; and half-brother, Gary Garland in Newark. Circa 1979.

“She could have been signed on the basis of her pedigree alone,” said columnist Stephen Metcalf, talking about Whitney Houston on Slate’s culture podcast Tuesday, four days after the singer’s death. “Her godmother was Aretha Franklin. Her mother was an accomplished gospel singer. Her cousins were Deedee and Dionne Warwick. She could have been signed based on her looks alone”–she’d modeled and appeared on the cover of Seventeen before she’d sold records–“and she could have been signed on the basis of her voice alone.” Metcalf concluded, “To have any one of those things could make you an enormous star. The fact that she had all three. . .”

“Just in technical terms, I don’t think I’ve heard a better instrument in my lifetime, even from singers I prefer, who are better. . . in terms of expressiveness or just the vibe,” added Slate music critic Jody Rosen. Her performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, just after the Gulf War, showed that instrument’s full force; it also again showed Houston had it all. Said Rosen,

You can really really hear the extraordinary range and nuance in her voice. She’s just technically out of this world, and, also, it tells you something about the stature of Whitney Houston: here was this black women who was quote-unquote America’s sweetheart–she was called that many times–and at this moment of National crisis or of fervent jingoism, she was called upon to play the Kate Smith or Bing Crosby role . . . as F-16s roared overhead.

The “whole package”– sweetheart, stunner, virtuoso–is something you can only be if your body, your image, is put out into the world along with your talent and brain. So it’s pop stars who deal with the pressure to be/have everything far more often than other artists.

Hannah Wilke, "S.O.S. Starification Object Series," 1974-82. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art.

In the visual arts, in fact, being/having the whole package is sometimes suspect. When, in the 1970s, Hannah Wilke made small vulvar, fleshy forms out of latex, ceramics or bubble gum, attached these to her body,  and posed topless for pin-up posters, critics accused her of flaunting her beauty. Amelia Jones, in her essay “Everybody dies. . . even the gorgeous,” quotes Wilke: “People give me this bullshit of, ‘What would you have done if you weren’t so gorgeous?’ What difference does it make?. . . Gorgeous people die as do the stereotypical ‘ugly.'” Looks didn’t give her an advantage, she implied.

But Wilke’s looks and attitude were special. Her dark-haired, svelte form; her flawless skin speckled by those unsettling orifices and folds of flesh; and how she looked at the camera in that disaffected, disinterested way Linda Evangelista would later adopt — all this emblazoned itself into your memory in a way the vulvar sculptures on their own would not have. She became the perfect conduit for her art and, attached to her physical, visible self, her sculptures showed even a conventionally “gorgeous” body to be cavernous and complicated.

Narcissister, Still from "Every Woman," 2010.

“I had started developing performance work where I used the orifices of my body, and for me it was about achieving my own grander virtuosity,” said the artist Narcissister, whose short film Every Woman (2010) screened in L.A. on Valentines day, as part of Dirty Looks: Long Distance Love Affairs at the Hammer Museum. At the start of Every Woman, Narcisster, whose entree into performance was as a dancer in the Alvin Ailey company, appears nude except for the  plastic barbie doll mask she always wears and her red, long-fingered monster gloves. Chaka Khan’s singing “I’m every woman, it’s all in me/Anything you want done, baby/I’ll do it naturally” as Narcissister’s performing a reverse strip tease. She’s pulling her clothing out of first her mouth, then her vagina, then her hair, until she’s dressed in tube top, earrings, tight striped skirt, panty hose and heels, with purse and sunglasses to complete the picture. Chaka Khan’s refrain (“I’m every woman, I’m every woman,” again and again) plays on as Narcissister runs her gloved hands up and down her flashily, unnaturally, clothed body until the curtain closes and the video ends.

There is something virtuosic about her; she’s striking, composed, clearly a skilled performer.  But she’s stuck inside the “whole package.” And if she weren’t so gorgeous, it wouldn’t be so obvious that having it all doesn’t ultimately help.