Surface and Apparition

The Immateriality of Modern Surface

Yeseung Lee, Yeseung Lee

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350130456
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Design
• Categoría: Design General

Surface is one of the most intensely debated topics in recent arts, humanities and social science scholarship. The changing technologies which manufacture the actual and virtual surfaces of today are radically altering our perception of thresholds and borders. In contrast to the responses to preceding industrial revolutions, contemporary concerns with surface seem preoccupied with its function of mediation or passage, rather than with that of separation or boundary. In Surface and Apparition, each chapter explores a different meaning and function of the material and immaterial qualities of 'surface'. Case studies include various surfaces from computer screens, 'artisanal' engines and glass architecture to gauzy veils, the planetary surface of supply chain capitalism, and spatial embodiment in street markets. International scholars of design, architecture, film, media, fine art, fashion, textiles, silversmithing, woodworking and archival practices account for how the material and the immaterial draw attention to each other in both their everyday and artistic practice. Each chapter addresses particular systems (from the human body to manually operated tools and machines); materials (for instance cloth, wood and light); modes of attention, movement and engagement. 'Surface' therefore functions in this book as a multidisciplinary method for attending to critical issues concerning human creative and technological endeavours.

Chapter 1

Folds of Fashion: Unravelled and the Planetary Surface

Jussi Parikka

Figure 1.1 Unravelled (film still), c. 2017, directed by Unknown Fields in collaboration with Tushar Prakash.

Factory-floor fashion

A slow walk across the factory floor, a fashion model stylishly and gracefully gliding across the space with such elegance that one wonders whether she is a ghostly apparition or actually inhabiting the same high-ceilinged factory rooms as the workers busily immersed in their routines.¹ The simple golden dress, reminiscent of a sari, is one striking point of attraction as the garment moves in a row of images of movement, accompanied across three other screens by intense colours of red, blue and more. The walk across the factory floor is ceremonial, and while imitating the movement down the catwalk at a fashion show, it shows something that pertains more closely to the work and travels of fashion than to its mediated end results as fashion products. It shows multiple layers of materials, production, spaces and facilities as part of a condensation of fashion fabrics that is established by cinematic means. The improvised catwalk-style movement – a scene that occupies the whole of the video’s seven-minute length, and is always on at least one screen of the four video channels – ends at a beach and a shipyard with massive, abandoned, rusting cargo ships. Also, this last scene seems to be out of place but indicating something essential about the off-screen of fashion’s visual culture that is part of the usual repertoire of how it is seen: the work, logistics, infrastructures of fashion as media, fashion as film, fashion as movement that entwine with a multitude of other forms of aesthetics of modernity, including that of travelling across geographies (Bruno 2002). Hence, it concerns not only travelling as leisurely pleasure but the transport of mass-produced goods. One starts to ask: what are the forms of travel and crossing geographical surfaces that pertain to the cinematics and movement of fashion?

Figure 1.2 Unravelled (film still), c. 2017, directed by Unknown Fields in collaboration with Tushar Prakash.

The experimental design studio Unknown Fields’ recent video work Unravelled was exhibited in the early half of 2018 in the ‘After the End of the World’ show in Barcelona at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.² The piece was part of a group exhibition that focused on the Anthropocene in theoretical and artistic contexts. It also continued the studio’s earlier work on planetary scales of design culture. However, the four-screen video installation homed in on a different context of audiovisual culture from the earlier work, namely fashion film, in an extended sense that displays an understanding of the format that moves beyond mere branding and marketing: Unravelled approaches planetary logistics through garments, including some of the postcolonial contexts of their production. Hence, the beautiful, slowly unfolding video installation about fabrics and garments can be seen as an example of experimental practices that relate to the genre of fashion film, and of how contemporary design has extended its focus from objects to infrastructure, from things to their distributed nature.³

Unravelled is produced outside the fashion industry; it does not feature any particular brands, and Unknown Fields’ previous work has focused primarily on the global logistics of urbanization in relation to methodologies of speculative design. Perhaps this earlier context is also one explanation as to how the installation engages with fashion in ways that do not feature the usual documentary language (cf. Rees-Roberts 2017) but become expressed in aesthetic shots that refer to conventions of the fashion show as well as to the extended sites where fashion takes place.

The video emerged from a 2017 expedition led by Liam Young and Kate Davies, described as a mix of landscape studies that mapped the rural conditions of contemporary media-cultural urbanization, including the fashion spectacle:

For our 2017 Expedition we pick at a loose thread on the garment we are wearing and unravel it across continents from wardrobe to warehouse, from factory to field, in search of the landscapes behind the runway dreams and street blue jeans. Before we wear them, our clothes make journeys of tens of thousands of miles in their process of production making textiles the most globalized industry on the planet. The garment trade has for a long time played a critical role in the evolution of developing nations. As labour costs rise in China we follow the threads and travel through the factory floors and fabric mills now manufacturing in India and Bangladesh. Here iconic rivers run with the colours of the season as chemicals used in the dye process are dumped untreated to poison the land along the rainbow banks that will mark our trail from mountains to the sea, as we embark on a waterborne journey down river from India to the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh. We will visit the ‘T-shirt cities’ and ‘textile valleys’ that span from field to factory and will pick from vast cotton crops and silk-worm cocoons and draw yarns across deafening shuttles as rows and rows of automated looms weave the fashion fads of a distant world. Plain t-shirts, haute couture and throwaway high street chic all begin their lives in these landscapes.⁴

The film is shot in multiple locations including Chittagong (Bangladesh), Varanasi, Ahmedabad, Gurgaon and Pali (India), shifting views from textile to fabric dyeing, cotton fields to yarn production and garments; the locations provide the fabric around which the themes of materials and production are cinematically composed together.

Figure 1.3 Unravelled (film still), c. 2017, directed by Unknown Fields in collaboration with Tushar Prakash.

I want to consider how this video installation, as images of fabric, sits as part of recent discussions about fashion, moving images and also fashion film. Recent work such as Nick Rees-Roberts’s (2017) has made a convincing case as to how some documentary-style productions can be also considered part of the extended visual culture of fashion film as it spreads across multiple platforms, not least online. Unknown Fields’ take also troubles the definition of fashion film. It does not easily sit as part of the documentary genre either, but it still participates in these questions about the intersections of the aesthetics of movement, fashion and contemporary debates in media and cinema studies. In this vein, I argue that fashion film is not merely limited to contexts of brand-driven post-cinematic aesthetics of marketing, but is part of the wider context of contemporary aesthetics. The aesthetic choices also feature the infrastructure of the technological culture of planetary production that establishes movement across borders while at the same time relying on specific locations and labouring bodies of colour.

My discussion in this text weaves together temporal aspects of garments, their aesthetic features and cinematic movement, and the conceptual themes of surfaces and folds that Giuliana Bruno, Anneke Smelik and others have brought into the transdisciplinary zone of discussions of cinema and fashion. As Bruno (2017) argues, this involves a shift from image to surface; in other words, a refocusing of the question of materiality where the ‘theoretical interweaving of materials emphasizes the actual fabrics of the visual: the surface condition, the textural manifestation, and the support of a work as well as the way in which it is sited, whether on the canvas, the wall, or the screen’. One can observe the obvious relevance to discussions of fashion and cinema as arts of movement, but also, as I will continue, a further need to understand other scales of surfaces. In many ways, this chapter responds to Bruno’s call to ‘propose a different “model” for the theorization of fashion, one that is able to account for the way fashion works as a fabric of the visual in a larger field of spatiovisual fabrications’ (Bruno 2014: 40), and to investigate how this approach to aesthetics and temporalities of materiality can also inform some ways of looking at moving images of fashion that are installed and shown in contexts of contemporary art and speculative design, and hence produce a different stage for the visibility of fashion film too. In other words, can fashion film also relate to the interesting challenge taken up in contemporary film and media studies – a shift that has focused on ‘circulation, infrastructure, algorithms, labor cultures, technologies, and itineraries’, as Elena Gorfinkel (2018: 123) has summarized it?

In Unravelled and the other examples of fashion film discussed in this chapter, the moving image becomes a point of articulation – and in some ways, a point of reproduction – of the logistical imaginary (Rossiter 2016) that includes aesthetic articulations of work and supply. Hence, what follows is a discussion concerning the concept of the surface and folds, followed up by a focus on planetary movement as the mobile site of image/fashion, fabrics of fashion, and a sort of alternative archaeology of fashion film that the installation produces: archaeology not as a historical map of forgotten paths, but as the conditions of existence of fashion items and their travels, where the cinematic movement produced by fashion films is itself conditioned by a planetary-scale movement across a surface that is one of logistics and distribution, of things being worn and things that wear out.

An alternative fashion film

Contemporary scholarly discussions about fashion film have highlighted its status not only as a recent genre of digital aesthetics and video, but one that has also longer roots in early cinema.⁵ In the context of the ‘Archaeology of Fashion Film’ project (2017–19), we extended discussions from contemporary fashion films to early examples of fashion found on newsreels and in promotional contexts that can be discovered in little fragments of examples in multiple archives in Europe and the United States. Conceptually, such archival work benefits from the already existing rich vocabularies that have mapped fashion film not only as a genre, but as a thematic and aesthetic concern that can be seen as central to a cultural history of movement, spectacle, mechanization and mediatization of the (most often female) body.

Caroline Evans (2013) has articulated how bodily movement becomes controlled, defined and refined in relation to the cinematic image: the fashion mannequin as a cultural-historical figure relates to the media-technological contexts where techniques of close attention, new urban spaces and the spectacularization of the female body become enmeshed. The mechanical double of the mannequin and the human body in moving images becomes a key theme in the role cinema plays as production of movement. It expands questions of fashion to those of practices of moving as part of behavioural forms of managing the body where particular examples of movement – from Georges Méliès’s ‘amusing commercials for Mystère corsets’ (Uhlirova 2013: 140) to the various instantiations since the 1890s of ‘Loïe Fuller’s notorious Serpentine dances’ (Baronian 2017) to couturier Paul Poiret’s promotional films and many examples of anonymous and sometimes-named models on-screen, from static to revolving, from close-ups to staged scenes – show the new fashion of fashion showing itself. Fashion is made visible in all the fundamental ways that pertain to the cinematic form of visualizing movement – or as Marketa Uhlirova (2013: 139) puts it, ‘at a fundamental level, movement and change are the touchstones of the everyday “performance” of fashion’.⁶ Furthermore, the question of cinematic contexts of fashion is where sight becomes a question of site and place, movement a question of transport and logistics: the particular situations, architectures and, as I will argue later, infrastructures that are essential for an expanded sense of what movement involves. Hence, the site itself is where scenes both domestic and public are brought into play, while the work of movement becomes part of it too (Bruno 2002: 15–16).

Sites are also part of the settings where cinematic fashion starts to exhibit bodies and where the work of bodies takes place. Cultural techniques of the body were managed both on- and off-screen, from stage to factory. While cinema was one central form of producing bodily behaviour and gestures (Väliaho 2010), it linked closely to the trope of factories too. In this context, ‘factories of elegance’ were not meant as metaphorical units of description, as Evans (2013: 144) also demonstrates. In the words of an anonymous couturier in 1923: ‘My trade? It’s in America that I learnt it best, from the big automobile manufacturer Ford. I apply industrial methods’ (cited in Evans 2013: 145). As Evans goes on to show, the industrialization and mechanics of production, showcasing, exhibition and also embodiment in the female figure were all bundled up in what this particular early film archaeology of fashion included. Hence, there existed already a rich understanding of the mechanics of the body and the industrial production of fashion that was articulated through cinema. As for fashion film as part of this early modernity, one could observe the film as a crystallized expression of its industrial base.

There are various examples of both early and more recent fashion films that take the viewer ‘behind the scenes’, demonstrating the emergence of fashion as a visual spectacle and offering the process as the main feature of audiovisual pleasure. In a way, Alexander McQueen’s The Bridegroom Stripped Bare: Transformer (SHOWstudio, 2002) would perhaps qualify as one example of the stylized – and exaggerated – performance of how a fashion dress comes about as a mix of creative bursts. However, in earlier films, this glance at fashion as a process could include examples that showcased the ateliers and backrooms, the manufacturing and the process of fashion: From Wool to Wearer: The Romance of Pesco Underwear (BFI, 1913), Calais: De sleutel van Frankrijk (Pathé Revue 26, 1924) and Fabrication des gants (Pathé Revue, 1924) count as some of the early examples. They articulate a cinematic interest in key drivers of modernity: machines, chemistry and labour, condensed in the spatial scenes and site of the factory.⁷ Of course, in the core cinematic trope of ‘leaving the factory’, many short examples of workers exiting through the cotton mill gates in Lancashire and Blackburn and other places would count as curious examples of sites of work with fabrics and industrial modernity.⁸

If we extend the theme of ‘behind the scenes’ to contemporary fac...