Performance In the
Cabinet of Curiosities
Or, The Boy Who Lived in the Tree
Johannes Birringer
Dedicated to Herbert Blau
Celebrating the creative talent of one of the most innovative designers of
recent times, Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty1 was announced by the
Victoria and Albert Museum in the artist’s hometown of London as the
first and largest retrospective of McQueen’s work presented in Europe. The V&UN
later published its success “in numbers” by claiming that half a million visitors
from eighty-four different countries attended the museum, which remained open
throughout the night during the final weekends due to “unprecedented demand.”
The original show was organized by the Costume Institute for the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City back in 2011, becoming one of the most visited
exhibitions ever, and creating problems, as curator Andrew Bolton admits, dans
channelling the onrush of spectators.2 How is it possible that a fashion designer
could make such an impact in the museum/art world? New York City was quick
to capitalize on the controversial fame and rock star mystique that followed
the artist’s suicide in early 2010. Before his untimely death at forty, McQueen’s
last picture show, so to speak, was his Plato’s Atlantis collection staged at Palais
Omnisports de Paris-Bercy (Octobre 6, 2009), hailed as the first ever runway
show to be live-streamed over the internet.
Multitudes could now see McQueen’s work or read about it through all the
channels available today, moving beyond the closed-circuit fashion weeks in
Paris, Milan, Londres, Tokyo, and New York. Fashion is, bien sûr, a very large
industry, its commercial tentacles reaching into every corner of our society, mais
High Street is unlike haute couture or the closed circuits of our opera houses and
ballet stages. Ainsi, who would have seen McQueen’s collaboration with French
ballerina Sylvie Guillem, for example, for whom he designed the costumes in
© 2016 Performing Arts Journal, Inc.
PAJ 114 (2016), pp. 19–30.
est ce que je:10.1162/PAJJ _a_00331
19
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Eonnagata (2009), presented at London’s Sadler’s Wells in a dance concert cre-
ated with Russell Maliphant and Robert Lepage? Or who would have seen the
dazzling, Bill Viola-like image of Alla Kostromichova floating in a water tank
wearing colorful, digitally-engineered prints inspired by sea creatures and moth
camouflage patterns (“The Girl from Atlantis,” Vogue Nippon)?
Plato’s Atlantis combines complex fictional and cinematic references, along with
dystopic philosophical undertones. It was the designer’s most futuristic digital
performance and was inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution, Plato’s descrip-
tion of an island that sank into the sea, marine life, climate change, sci-fi and
horror movies, art work by Ridley Scott’s special effects team for Alien, laser
print technology, and more. McQueen constructed avatar-like models of animal-
human-alien hybridity, somehow walking on very high armadillo shoes that had
a form entirely without reference to the natural anatomy of feet. The models’
staggering movement, as I could glimpse from the film footage projected behind
the mannequins in Savage Beauty’s last chamber, brilliantly white with tiles,
was monitored by two cameras moving alongside the models on large robotic
arms—the images thrown towards the back of the space. Here another film
was projected, displaying Raquel Zimmerman writhing nakedly in desert sand,
a dreaming Cleopatra succumbing to the erotic slithering of sensuous snakes
over her breasts. Not even Jean-Paul Gaultier could have thought of it, despite
his dabbling in perverse erotics while working with Madonna, Kylie Minogue,
and Naomi Campbell, and devising his Mermaid and Frida Kahlo collections.
It seems that more designers have been drawn to performance, including Hus-
sein Chalayan, whose new dance work, Gravity Fatigue (Octobre 2015), recently
featured more than one hundred costumes at Sadler’s Wells.
Fashion’s erotic appeal is as global as is its outreach. Its techno textiles and digital
imaging techniques are swiftly becoming all the rage of the new media world,
with the BBC recently honoring these forays into the arena of wearables that used
to be populated by sound artists, Silicon Valley computer scientists, and sports
companies catering to athletics markets. Fashion’s proximity to the arts—and
perhaps less acknowledged, to the theatre and its ontological confusions about
ephemeral performance appearances, as Herbert Blau notes in his book on the
“complexions of fashion”—has more recently been explored by cultural critics
surprised to note the interest fashion designers have taken in film, performance,
architecture, and dance, as if the kinetic constructions and choreographies of
the body were not of foremost concern to those who adorn flesh (and anatomy)
with vestimentary gestures. By drawing attention to their excess or subversive
apparition, the latter is inevitably aligned with the edgy avant-garde (cf. Caroline
20 PAJ 114
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Evans’s Fashion at the Edge, or Claire Wilcox’s exhibition of Radical Fashion for
the V&A in 2001).
Why there would be such a dark attraction to the perverse, gothic, and uncanny,
to the “deathliness and haunting,” the “symptoms of trauma” and “apocalyptic
distress” before and after the turn of the millennium, which Caroline Evans dis-
cerns in recent experimental fashion (McQueen, Galliano, Chalayan, Margiela,
Viktor & Rolf, et coll.) is another matter, not easily unravelled in a short article. My
concern here is to look at an exhibition that aims to define this dark attraction
as a search for the sublime, a point on which curators Andrew Bolton (Met) et
Claire Wilcox (V&UN) agree. They have confessed that their curation is a kind of
“love poem” to McQueen’s “almost shamanistic approach to materials” and their
fetishistic qualities.3 Both curators speak of the sublime beauty and emotional
intensity in the work, referring to the “personal voice” of the designer, alors que
my questions are more specifically directed at the shows (performances of the
collections from 1992 à 2010) and what this exhibition does not seem to be
able to reveal.
McQueen’s runway shows captured my interest from the very moment I stepped
into the first gallery of the London exhibition. Never having experienced one
live, I was forced to make my own montage of impressions culled from the large,
wall-sized projection of slow-motion footage. The exhibition included some
incredibly alluring and disturbing images of models asymmetrically adorned in
fashions that left their flesh exposed, one breast hanging out, shirts sliced, têtes
shaven, contorted toughness and aggressive postures mixed up with pain built into
the addenda, the jewellery, the braces. There was something about the postures
that struck me and that I could not pin down. These images were splayed over
the mannequins with the dresses from the early 1990s (such as The Birds and
Highland Rape), and so I watched the film while perusing the materials silently
hanging there: synthetic lace, leatherette, metal studs, tire-tread prints, a lock of
hair. Plus tard, I composed my Eisensteinian montage from the innumerable video
monitors, stacked on shelves inside cubicles all over the Wunderkammer (Cabinet
of Curiosities), the double-height room near the end of the V&A’s Savage Beauty.
This surely was the fetish room par excellence, the interior of the ruined castle,
full of trophies of the dead, the ghosts of armors, sharp feathers, outlandish
platform shoes, spooky wooden wings, coiled corsets, all kinds of metal and
leather S&M accessories, gimp masks, headgear, and other bizarre extremities
created in collaboration with jeweller Shaun Leane and milliner Philip Treacy. Dans
the middle, a slowly rotating dress (once worn by model Shalom Harlow at the
end of the No. 13 show, Spring–Summer 1999) had been sprayed with paint by
BIRRINGER / Performance in the Cabinet of Curiosities 21
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
two robots that first seemed to dance with Harlow before turning into attacking
predators jerking their metal fingers toward her.
I will return to the performances of these runway spectacles, but begin with
the “set” that sprawls across a number of specially-designed galleries, none of
which made much visceral sense except perhaps the lurid, cramped ossuary of
skulls and bones, featuring extravagant garments with horse hair, animal skin,
and horns—the designer’s reworking of items worn by Yoruba and Amazonian
Indian tribes, from It’s a Jungle Out There (1997), the Eshu (2000), and the Irere
(2003) collections—as well as the glass box from the 2001 Voss collection, lequel
resembled a padded cell in a psychiatric hospital with tiled floors and walls
formed with surveillance mirrors. When the cell is dark you only see your own
reflection. When the lights come on inside, you see the trapped models and a
film of McQueen’s live staging of Joel-Peter Witkin’s 1983 photograph, Sanitarium,
with the voluptuous naked figure of fetish writer Michelle Olley reclining on a
horned chaise longue, her masked head attached to a breathing tube, and her
body surrounded by living moths.
The room with the glass box featured a number of other designs behind glass
panels (from It’s Only a Game [2005] that slyly mashes up Eastern and Western
influence, toying with Japanese kimonos and American football shoulder pads
and helmets), as was the case in the next gallery themed “Romantic Naturalism,»
with its spectacular razor clam shells dress. Most of the other rooms allowed a
close-up look (and almost touch) at the finer details of embroidery, the pleats,
sashes, ribbons, feathers, the hoods, straps, and eaten-away silk gowns. The close-
up look was encouraged, though the staging on simple platforms (as with the
“Romantic Nationalism” suite of tartan dresses from the 2006 Wives of Culloden)
or the grey concrete warehouse look for the opening hall, with static mannequins
along the walls, did not bring to life the scenography of the runway performances
nor the cultural and historical environments of the collections. Thus the garments
remained oddly contextless, in spite of the associations the dim mortuary bone
room or the tarnished, gold-framed Venetian mirrors in the “Romantic Gothic”
Room might have wanted to arouse. Unlike the New York exhibition, the V&UN
exhibit opened with McQueen’s early collections and his notorious Jack the Rip-
per Stalks his Victims student show (1992, Central Saint Martins), alluding to the
designer’s youthful years in London and his apprenticeship as a tailor on Savile
Row. But with very little text, and no context given, the V&A’s seemingly autobio-
graphical narrative quickly disappeared into the facets of “Romanticism” offered
by Bolton and Wilcox as an organizing principle. Each subsequent section offers
a variation on a theme: Romantic Gothic, Primitivism, Tribalism, Nationalism,
Exoticism, Naturalism.
22 PAJ 114
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Yet frustratingly, there is no critical trajectory and no questioning into the Roman-
tic Gothic, into the birds and feathers and moths, the psychic tremors caused by
terrifying bird-women and hybrid creatures. There is no comment on McQueen’s
scrutiny of nature, primitivism, and colonialism, nor his tortuously surreal sexual
passion (misogyny?) and tantalizing queer absorption with sadomasochistic
headpieces and wearables (le 1997 La Poupée inspired by Hans Bellmer), his
attraction to the story of Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper, to Carpenter,
Hitchcock, or Kubrick thrillers, to pulp fiction, death-obsessed Brit artists such
as Damien Hirst or the Chapman brothers, or to Rebecca Horn’s installations
and body modifications. The exhibition has many gripping, perplexing moments
when one marvels at the craft and technical finesse of a beautiful garment, like
the jacquard-woven silk dress from 2010 that had been printed with a detail from
Hieronymus Bosch’s The Temptation of St. Antoine, or the stunning red dress with
hand-painted microscope slides and dyed ostrich feathers (2001 Voss collection,
modelled by Erin O’Connor).
Yet the Cabinet of Curiosities, in particular, fails to bring the clothes and contrap-
tions to life to affect our sensory imagination or prop up their narrative threads,
in ways that only embodied performance can do. In the cabinet, the small video
screens, along with a complex and layered mutating soundtrack by John Gosling
(including heavy breathing and the sound of scissors slashing) make the lack
of the runway drama and movement glaringly obvious. Scattered around the
four sides of the room at various levels, groups of monitors show randomly pro-
grammed and repeating short sequences from the runway shows, and there, sur
these small screens (without the live sound), we see the models silently perform
while wearing McQueen’s fashion fantasies and erotic obsessions. What I saw
was riveting. I glimpsed a stunning array of different scenographies and design
leitmotifs for theatrical productions in which the models act parts, so to speak,
or respond to the invariably sculptural garments and accoutrements in ways
that resemble the kind of physical theatre we would imagine coming out of the
Bauhaus or an experimental Kabuki lab.
Shifting my attention to the runway shows, I inevitably find resonances with body
art and dance—the endurance performances of Marina Abramovic;, the blood-
letting of Franko B., the techno-robotic body manipulations of Stelarc, the striking
physical mise en scène of Pina Bausch’s tanztheater, as well as the sexual energies
in the physical theatre of DV8, Wim Vandekeybus, or Jan Fabre. I also recognize
kinky burlesque and queer desire —a splendid perversity that comes from an
aesthetics of the 1980s and 1990s affected by the impact of gender- troubling
pop, punk, and Brit art movements, MTV, gay/lesbian club cultures, controversies
over photography (Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano) and live art, video and film
BIRRINGER / Performance in the Cabinet of Curiosities 23
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
that exploited taboo subjects. Bausch’s often stunningly cruel gender battles
(Par exemple, Blaubart and Auf dem Gebirge hat man ein Geschrei gehört) must be
recalled, but also the somber physical-spiritual existentialism of butoh (tel que
Sankai Juku’s slow minimalism) and the hectic techno-fantasies of Dumb Type
and other Japanese cracked media/sound art (not to mention the deconstructions
in Kawakubo or Miyake’s designs and how they resurface in costumes design for
dance)—they all had emerged in the 1980s and after. The runway spectacles,
in fact, mark McQueen’s embeddedness in the performance subculture of the
late-twentieth century; he is a conceptual art director who shares, I believe, un
affinity with Romeo Castellucci and Jan Fabre, and perhaps less overtly, avec
Matthew Barney’s quixotic Cremaster films and Lou Reed’s (post–Velvet Under-
ground) thanatic music about pleasure and death.
The V&A should have dared to stage the runway shows instead of making us sit
in the cramped cabinet. Only through the live dramaturgy of the shows would
we have gotten to experience the full impact of McQueen’s fascination with
abused and violated bodies, and his deeper exploration of the narrative threads
of revenge and female warrior power, mixed up with the submissive dolls, pros-
thetic corsets, and shackled silent anger, the seclusion and melancholy, the weird
poetic fantasy encapsulated in something like the (head)dress titled “The Girl
Who Lived in the Tree” (autumn/winter 2008). I tried to glimpse the decadent
abysses looking at the tiny monitors: here are dancers and models in Deliverance
(spring/summer 2004), performing an exhausting dance marathon in an old
nineteenth-century Parisian dance hall, eventually staggering across the room.
They seem wasted. After the high kicks that fling the sequined skirts into the
air, the performers tire and one of the models is caught by her partner just as
she collapses on the floor. He then carries her off. In a later video clip section,
the now disheveled model-dancers (wearing utilitarian denims and patchworks)
seem completely spent. Attempting the high kicks, they crumble on the floor.
There is the black model (Debra Shaw) in La Poupée (spring/summer 1997)
wearing a sliced dress of bugle beads, her elbows and knees shackled to a square
metal frame. She slowly descends a staircase and wades through water, awkwardly
balancing her body while adapting—trying to move—to the encumbrance that
makes a normal walk impossible. Just as Bausch did in Arien, the stage is flooded
with water, the models thus forced to “articulate” (to use a reference to the Bell-
mer subtext and the surrealist artist’s series Poupée: variations sure le montage d’une
mineure articulée) their movement in a restraining environment which at the same
time transforms the stark oppositions that seem to run through the designs (le
sculpted jackets or the pink silk brocade cheongsam with funnel necks) influenced
by Asian styles (and references to origami) mixed up with Western punk, graffiti,
24 PAJ 114
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
Top: Installation view of Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the V&UN. © 2015 Victoria and Albert Museum London.
Bottom: Installation view of “Cabinet of Curiosities,” Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the V&UN. © 2015 Victoria
and Albert Museum London.
BIRRINGER / Performance in the Cabinet of Curiosities 25
and unusual branch-like headpieces. McQueen evidently wants to generate an
emotional, visceral shock. His masque-like pageantries are calculated, spectac-
ular scenic effects, such as the snowy, frozen landscape in The Overlook, or the
former morgue in Paris used as a stage filled with antique taxidermy, in Natural
Dis-tinction, Un-natural Selection (spring/summer 2009). They evoke a particular
atmosphere, and watching Debra Shaw, I could not help feeling anxious and
distressed as she seems visibly uncomfortable trying so hard to keep her poise
with the metal shackles forcing her into distorted motion.
The choreography, if we call it thus, lacks the sense of abandonment and joy we
experience in Arien (the dancers playing and splashing around in the water when
the huge fake rhino appears), or the tenderness and sadness that also always
marks Bausch’s emotional expressionism. For the tanztheater, the flooded stage
becomes a zone of regression, mixed with the marvels of fairy tale or trance-
like transcendence (as it was also danced to an utterly exhaustive and uplifting
end in Vollmond, the performance that concludes the Wim Wenders film Pina,
featuring a rainy stage landscape filling up with water). For McQueen’s runway
orchestrations, the models are obliged to perform (emotionless) tableaux vivants of
complex characters who cannot actually become them, so to speak. Shaw’s shackles
do not connote slavery or entrapment in a simplistic manner. The metal square
is enigmatic. But Shaw’s movement stays vulnerable without ever betraying a
sense of her turning (realizing the actionable image as something she can alter),
altering or affecting the impact of the wearable. She thus remains thoroughly
stuck in the image McQueen fashioned. Commenting on the vulnerability even
of so-called supermodels, Blau argues:
However rich, sanctioned, and self-assured they may be, one might expect
that in or behind any fashion photograph, and even more on the run-
chemin, there may be a certain leakage of anxiety, about being objectified,
about returning the gaze, about the high-tension vacuity of it all, in its
most resplendently gorgeous manifestations, this spot or protrusion of
the body (Naomi’s hips or Cindy’s mole) or a sense of the discrepancy
between what is being projected and, with no less vanity in the versatility
of becoming, some sense of violation, including the possible feeling, comme
she makes her turn on the runway, all flashes going off, that this dress
is not for her.4
McQueen’s associate, Sarah Burton, is quoted in the catalogue’s essay on the cat-
walk shows, saying “The thing about Lee was the pure, pure vision. He wanted to
move people,”5 but we are not told what this implies, other than that McQueen
seemed to have loathed the theatre and preferred to think of club culture as
26 PAJ 114
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
his inspiration. But the spectacles are not “pure” vision; they are calculated and
knowledgeable references (to Tudor masques, for example, or bloody Jacobean
revenge tragedies written by John Webster and his contemporaries, to Arthur
Miller’s The Crucible, Kubrick’s The Shining and A Clockwork Orange).6 In the
finale of the Widows of Culloden show (2006), McQueen’s cinematic and gothic
inclinations play havoc with his Scottish Highland rape and battle associations,
the bagpipe music and refined tartan designs, mixed up with game-keeping
traditions and twisted heirlooms (a bird’s nest headdress filled with seven blue
speckled eggs encrusted with Swarovski gemstones). He literally recreates the
nineteenth-century mechanics of a Pepper’s Ghost (holographic) construction
featuring Kate Moss’s ethereal dance apparition as if she were a cloud, dancing
in the air and slowly disappearing into the Milky Way. The V&A recreates this
hologram, scaled down, in a small dark room right behind the wonder cabinet,
where we can watch the apparition dance to music from John Williams’s score
for Schindler’s List. There was a hushed silence in that holographic room which
I found pathetic. So now I have contradicted myself many times: I am attracted
and repelled, I am exacerbated.
Like the pathetic hologram, the runway shows are spectacles, but their theatri-
cal beauty and shock value also make one cringe because they are so excessive,
flaunting pathos and perversity, that even the clear moments of danger —when
the model wearing the razor clam shells dress creates an intense tactile awareness
of the sharp edges that could cut and harm the body, or when the Prosthetic
Corset turns the fashion garment into a monstrous contraption that disfigures
the female body—do not negotiate a sense of deconstruction of protocols as
much as they suggest willful radical (and empty) gestures. As Blau intimates in
his reflections on the vicissitudes of the look, such fashion shows resemble the
tradition of the avant-garde, where the conceptual operations behind the effects
are overshadowed by the scandal of the effects.
Nevertheless, the operations caught my interest, especially as I tried to compare
McQueen (or Gaultier for that matter) with Japanese avant-garde designers such as
Kawakubo, who deconstruct the fetishistic, erotic staging of the body at the heart
of Western fashion and seek to find an intimate, physical symbiosis of clothes
and embodiment, one that allows space (ma) between garment and wearer’s body,
as Akiko Fukai suggests, and thus a more subtle interplay between wearing and
the “garment’s evolving into three-dimensional form.”7 Watching the models in
the videos, in all those moments when they must wear particularly striking and
constricting headdresses or garments which create a certain mechanics of moving,
McQueen’s wonder at mythical creatures, at specimens as they might be shown in
medical or natural history collections, seems apparent. He is like a boy, attracted
BIRRINGER / Performance in the Cabinet of Curiosities 27
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
to the bizarre beauty of curiosities. This attraction informs McQueen’s aesthetics,
his interest in nature transformed into extreme artifice getting mixed up with his
views of the politics of the world, “the way life is,” as the catalogue quotes him.
But the way life is does not translate into movement choreography for models.
Erin O’Connor, Debra Shaw, or Snejana Onopka (who wears the bird’s nest on
her head) create a manner of walking that intensifies space just enough, not in
the sense of theatrical projection of character, emotion, or action, but through a
calculated minimalism which charges movement to a garment. Postures become
dramatic, with a light tilting of the head, a soft sensual lifting of hands, eyes
averted or closed, a sudden animated, exaggerated motion cocking the hip out,
torso slightly shifted out of axis: contrapposto evocations of an invisible (depth)
hiding behind the often glazed look of models, on the brilliantly void surface.
Sam Gainsbury, show producer on most of the runway presentations since spring/
summer 1996, told the curators that “McQueen could never begin a collection
until he had developed an idea or concept for the show. Most designers develop
their fashion before their presentations, but McQueen was the opposite. For him,
the runway was not only critical to his creative process, it was the catalyst.”8 This
is a significant statement that encourages us to situate McQueen’s art direction
in the wider context of conceptual and performance art, comparing fashion’s
theatrical constructivism to cinematic/kinetic art that energizes the visual form
through movement and the narrative or symbolic resonances of the form. It also
justifies McQueen’s huge impact as an artist in the contemporary museum world.
McQueen’s pervasive interest in film, soundtracks, and photography is docu-
mented by collaborators John Gosling and Nick Knight. Gosling worked on
numerous edits for The Overlook aiding McQueen’s cinematic treatment of sound
to build dramatic suspense or create temporal ruptures in the fashion show
(such as the surprising entr’acte when ice-skaters suddenly appear in the snow
landscape) that mimic Kubrick’s play in The Shining with the time frames in the
Gold Room (when Jack Nicholson is transported back to 1921). Film titles and
visual tropes, as in The Birds, The Hunger, or Deliverance, point to the designer’s
keen ambition to develop visual interpretations of narrative film in his fashion
moyen. The dancers borrowed for Deliverance (from Michael Clark’s dance
entreprise) are also featured in “Blade of Light,” a staged photography by Knight
which transposes the frantic dance inferences from McQueen’s staging of Sydney
Pollack’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? into a Hokusai-like woodcut showing the
figures whirling though the air like a wave or gust of wind.9 Knight also photo-
graphed McQueen’s “Fashion-able” series with paralympic athlete and amputee
Aimee Mullins for Dazed & Confused (Septembre 1998)—after Mullins had
walked on stage at the end of No. 13 on a pair of prosthetic legs hand-carved in
28 PAJ 114
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
wood—and he captured the live fashion performance The Bridegroom Stripped Bare
(2002) for SHOWstudio’s Transformer series, during which McQueen transforms a
male model in a white trouser suit into a bride, working frantically with scissors,
tape, paint, cloth and other props. It is a strange déjà vu, seeing McQueen paint
the bride, conjuring the ghosts of Jackson Pollock and the uninhibited action
art by Gutai.
If McQueen scripted the cinematic scenography first, which also seems true, pour
example, in his set for In Memory of Elizabeth How, Salem 1692 (autumn/winter
2007), where he evokes the Salem witchcraft trials in New England—building a
huge forty-five foot inverted black pyramid suspended over a blood red pentagram
traced in black sand—then he must have believed that his art can function on
a film set/soundstage for his runway shows. He must have believed that fashion
is about more than fashion, that it can comment on a world of nightmares and
dreams, dystopic landscapes of wasted beauty and phantasmagorical cruelty. je
think McQueen really was a designer who had a similarly astounding creative
eccentricity as Matthew Barney displayed in his Cremaster film/sculpture cycle,
which I remember watching with my painter friends at Houston’s MFA audito-
rium. We all were wondering what on earth we were looking at, not having seen
anything like it before.
What is unique to fashion, obviously, is the surplus beauty or vanity of excess.
McQueen’s velvet underground elaborations, Par exemple, and the way in which
he also tries to ironically meta-stage luxury designs (haute couture classics of Dior,
Chanel and Givenchy) and lampoon them via goth- and drag-queen caricatures
or trash and bubble wrap references, are formidable. His runway performances
are eye-opening live punk movie-theatre. They take me into different states of
consciousness, and I would only have liked the museum to understand the impact
of performance more clearly than it did. Offered in such immersive runway
spectacles, fashion performance needs to be re-evaluated from the bottom up,
as we are probably not accustomed enough to its aesthetic pulse and rhythm, ou
too easily turned off by its accursed share and conspicuous waste.
NOTES
1. Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, in partnership with Swarovski, supported by
American Express, with thanks to M•A•C Cosmetics, technology partner Samsung
and made possible with the co-operation of Alexander McQueen, ran at the V&A from
14 March–2 August 20115. www.vam.ac.uk/savagebeauty.
2. Rejecting the idea that the show can be considered a “blockbuster,” the Metropolitan
Museum curator Andrew Bolton mentions that the exhibition’s success came as a complete
surprise to everyone, evidenced by how badly equipped they were to handle the mass of
BIRRINGER / Performance in the Cabinet of Curiosities 29
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
visitors. Cf. “In Search of the Sublime,” in Claire Wilcox, éd., Alexander McQueen (Lon-
don: V&A Publications, 2015), 15–21. This essay appears in the catalogue for the V&UN
exhibit, which is different from the New York catalogue. My reference to “Savage Beauty
in Numbers” is to the V&A website (https://vimeo.com/135467907#at=126).
3. Bolton in Alexander McQueen, 19.
4. Herbert Blau, Nothing in Itself: Complexions of Fashion (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press), 241. If Debra Shaw wearing the square metal frame constitutes a surface
image, whose “symptomatic emptiness is not without depth,” does the alluring or perverse
fashion image play in a “theatre of cruelty,” Blau asks, citing Deleuze’s book on masochism
(footnote 86, page 289)? And does the image, even if performed on the runway, freeze
into the kind of still posture that underlies the condition of fashion’s fetishistic disavowal?
5. Alexander Fury, “Show, and Tell,” in Alexander McQueen, 227.
6. As Akiko Fukai points out in her introduction to Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese
Fashion, Japanese designers like Issey Miyake understood the significance of fashion as
cross-over media and performance, and began using museums or galleries to stage their
work already in the 1980s (cf. Miyake’s Bodyworks, 1983, which toured Tokyo, Los Ange-
les, San Francisco, and London). Kawakubo and her Comme des Garçons label published
magazines and photographic books in Paris. Yamamoto worked with filmmaker Wim
Wenders, and both Miyake (with William Forsythe/Ballet Frankfurt, The Loss of Small
Detail, 1991) and Kawakubo (with Merce Cunningham Dance Co., Scenario, 1997) col-
laborated with choreographers, The challenging exchanges (and distinctions) entre
fashion and the performing arts deserve much more detailed attention than I can offer
ici. Akiko Fukai, Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion (Londres: Barbican Center,
2010), 13–25.
7. Fukai, Future Beauty, 16.
8. Bolton, in Alexander McQueen, 18.
9. Cf. Alistair O’Neil, “The Shining and Chic,” in Alexander McQueen, 261–79; le
image is reprinted on 256–57.
JOHANNES BIRRINGER is a contributing editor to PAJ and co-director
of the Design and Performance Lab at Brunel University, Londres. He is
the author of Performance, Science and Technology, a PAJ title. The DAP-
Lab’s new metakimosphere installations were exhibited recently in Madrid
and London.
30 PAJ 114
je
D
o
w
n
o
un
d
e
d
F
r
o
m
h
t
t
p
:
/
/
d
je
r
e
c
t
.
m
je
t
.
e
d
toi
p
un
/
j
j
/
je
un
r
t
je
c
e
–
p
d
F
/
/
3
8
3
(
1
1
4
)
/
1
9
1
7
9
6
1
5
2
p
un
/
/
j
j
_
un
_
0
0
3
3
1
p
d
.
F
b
oui
g
toi
e
s
t
t
o
n
0
7
S
e
p
e
m
b
e
r
2
0
2
3
