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.

Molly Dierks. Parts, 2010; car parts, paint, metal and wood bases; dimensions variable; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist.

In her installation Parts (2010), Dierks erects three metal objects with evocative but nonspecific shapes and details. Painted a warm coral hue like lipstick or rouge, the forms suggest sections of mass-produced, utilitarian objects. Strangely feminized by their shapes and color, they appear like hybrids of car parts and pantyhose, fenders and legs. But what is strangest about them is how surprisingly natural it feels to a viewer to see both a car door and lipstick in the same object. Parts goes beyond a mere feminizing of typically masculine objects—the maligned “shrink it and pink it” ethos applied to marketing products to women. The congruity of these readings reveals a deeper entanglement between them, of seeing the production of a concept of a woman in the production of a car.

Molly Dierks. Parts, 2010 (detail); car parts, paint, metal and wood bases; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

The artist intensifies this entangled reading through her Hardbodies series (2012), in which the chromed and car-paint-dipped sculptures look like lipstick, pills, hair curlers, or vibrators. This linkage suggests not only that the ideation of woman is a cultural production, but also that industrial modes are required to effect it—that it’s not just the curled hair, the colored lips, or the Prozac smiles that produce the Stepford Wife aesthetic of normative femininity, but also the factories, machines, and electronics that make the objects that produce the curls and the colors. The end result, Dierks suggests, is like the attractively bright and unyielding Hardbodies. The shaped mirrors under these objects possess a seminal quality: They reflect the image of the sculpture, a commodity produced to reflect heteronormative male desire.

Molly Dierks. Hardbodies, 2012; wood, automotive paint, lathed aluminum, mirrors; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Dierks’s Test Tube Babies (2016), meanwhile, appear to be failures or byproducts, the tailings of feminine production. These silvery, molten masses are squished, pitted, and burned, like ingots subjected to forces much greater than they can bear. They are also peppered with incongruously girlish details: pastel blotches like gobs of melted candy, tubing like a half-dead glow-stick bracelet, a pink plastic bag like a bubblegum balloon, sparkling rhinestones. They seem to be the tortured remnants of the ore of femininity, the raw material from which the commodified female is crafted.

Molly Dierks. Test Tube Babies, 2016; cast aluminum, paint, resin, urethane found objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

But whereas Parts and Hardbodies explore a relationship between the production of femininity and industrial goods, Test Tube Babies offers a way out of this bleak vision. The Test Tube Babies works do not evoke a sense of completion, unlike the sleek forms of the earlier works. Instead, they are abject and grotesque, a rejection of easy modes of consumption. As test forms for normative femininity, they may be failures, but as failures they express the possibility of liminal positions within industrial manufacturing, either of ideas or objects. For those seeking a path away from classification and gender essentialism, the Test Tube Babies offer a template—one less recognizable and perhaps more appropriate—for modes of being and becoming.

Molly Dierks. Test Tube Babies, 2016; cast aluminum, paint, resin, urethane found objects; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist.

Molly Valentine Dierks received a BA in behavioral psychology from Dartmouth College, a post-baccalaureate degree in sculpture and extended media from Virginia Commonwealth University, and an MFA in art and design from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She has participated in exhibitions nationally and internationally. Her work has been included in exhibitions by such institutions as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, University of Michigan Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fort Worth Community Arts Center. She is currently an assistant professor of fine arts at Tarleton State University, and she lives and works in Texas.

Six pieces from the Prototype for New Understanding series greet viewers entering the exhibit.  While these pieces appear to be authentic tribal headdresses displayed under glass vitrines, it is soon revealed that they are in fact made of Nike Air Jordans.  Because of this material transformation, the sculptures are in a state of constant becoming—at once creatures, masks, animals, shoes, and fantastical hybrids.  There is a confusion of body parts as plushy shoe openings become eyes, rubber-tipped toes become mouths, and thick fabric tongues become beaks.  The reassigning of parts designed for the anatomy of a foot to fit the anatomy of a face is as grotesque as it is wonderful.

Jungen ironically critiques the way marginalized cultures have been pillaged for their goods by Western colonialists.  He attacks commodity by making a triple-commodity—tribal relic, Nike shoes, and marketable art object. Jungen brings us further into his natural history museum of commodities with Shapeshifter, a huge whale skeleton made of white plastic chairs.

Side by side, the chairs become the sleek vertebrae and ribs of this immense animal.  Suspended several feet above its platform, the whale’s shadows are haunting and give it the believability of an extinct, magnificent sea creature.  Its empty body and ghostly shadows play foil to the recognizable lawn chairs that are its bones, for as much as we believe that this creature was once living in a faraway time, we know that it is part of our vernacular existence. 

Questioning our own knowledge, we wonder if this whale could have really existed, or is it a made up version of Western history?

The context of the NMAI lends another layer to Jungen’s work.  We are invited to view his sculptures as more than art.  In this context, they become American Indian artifacts.  By marrying seeming opposites, consumer and tribal cultures, Jungen proves that the treasures that fill the NMAI are not merely relics of a faraway past—they are the thoughtful products of a people that are part of contemporary society.  This assimilation into mainstream commodity culture, for better or worse, perhaps provides a “strange comfort,” for both seekers of these treasures, and also the people to whom they belong.

Brian Jungen’s Strange Comfort is on view October 16, 2009–August 8, 2010 at the NMAI on the National Mall, Washington, DC.