Why is the contemporary art world so interested in garments and adornment?

Clothing has become the primary way in which we identify class and personal style.  Fashion evolutions trace and mirror the political and social changes that we are undergoing in society.  Often the current fashion trends—which oscillate between constriction and liberation—tell us more about how the body is viewed in culture than philosophy, science or politics.  Artists who want to prompt viewers to think about our inner experiences and the ways that we conceal them and who also want to expose power and gender structures have turned to fashion as the primary vehicle to express these dialects.

Paralleling the interest in clothing in the contemporary art world, in the past eight years there has been a resurgence of interest in the glass world in the body and clothing.  One of the artists who has been in the forefront of this movement has been glass sculptor Karen LaMonte.  Since 1995 LaMonte has been working with the clothed body as her primary visual image.  LaMonte’s interest in clothing is twofold.  “I use clothing as a metaphor for identity and human presence.  I believe we have two skins that outline and define who we are.  One of course is our natural skin, but we obscure and conceal it beneath clothing which is a second skin, our social skin.”

At first LaMonte focused on producing a series of glass puppets based on Dante’s Inferno and the characters in the Commedia dell’ Arte.  This coterie of kings, devils and jokers allowed LaMonte to explore the expressiveness of glass in both specificity of technique and abstract form.  To personalize and differentiate each piece LaMonte pinched and deformed the garments of each puppet to mimic the natural folds of clothing.  Later, LaMonte created smaller glass dresses out of recycled bottles and hung them on a miniature clothesline.  These dresses had to be made quickly as the bottles came out of the glory hole, as there was a limited amount of working time before the glass hardened.  These dresses captured the immediacy of the glass blowing gesture but failed to create the look of fabric so LaMonte began to focus on honing her mold making skills.

Her goals in using the mold blowing process was to better represent the texture of the fabrics she was using as inspiration and to increase the scale of the work.  These pieces ranged in height from one to two feet.  The results were doll-like—highly textured empty shells headless and armless that seemed to float in space.

These pieces were closer to what LaMonte had envisioned, but she still wanted to increase the size.

As anyone who has worked in glass knows there it is time consuming and difficult to create large-scale work.  Not only do you need large annealers, great molds and skilled cold-workers, you also need a lot of capital for research and development, as there will be a lot of failure.