Fashion, Capitalism, and Collier Schorr
Walter Benjamin, the twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, died without finishing his masterwork The Arcades Project, an attempt to describe and understand modernity in all of its teeming complexity. To elucidate capitalism’s ever-increasing impact on daily life, Benjamin’s final masterwork analyzes everything from architecture to popular music. The center of his project, and the source of its title, derives from a concrete historical phenomenon: nineteenth-century Parisians perusing and choosing products in newly built shopping passages, or arcades.
Benjamin considered fashion, the subject of one of 36 chapters in The Arcades Project, a quintessential part of life in capitalist society. He associated it with Karl Marx’s idea of “commodity fetishism,” which describes how consumers ascribe almost magical properties to the things they wish to purchase. In the arcades, which were conceived as elegant alternatives to shopping in the open street, middle- and upper-class Parisians could acquire the latest styles of umbrellas, dresses, and hats. These products allowed those who sported them to put their wealth and social status on view; not coincidentally, the glass-and-mirrors architecture of the arcades made them unbeatable spots for people-watching.
In the Jewish Museum exhibition The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, on view through on August 6, interpreting Benjamin’s convolute for the twenty-first century falls to the artist and photographer Collier Schorr. Born in New York City in 1963, Schorr came of age during a period of volatile identity politics. Her practice embraces commercial fashion photography as well as fine art; in both milieus, she explores photography’s often problematic ability to construct identity and to pique desire. Both in fashion and throughout art history, the gaze of an invisible and presumably male viewer has been used to turn women into objects. Schorr, a gay woman, is a deft interrogator of both traditions.
Schorr’s photographic series 8 Women includes outtakes from fashion commissions she had worked on from the mid-1990s to 2014 as well as other portraits from the same period. It deploys many recognizable conventions of fashion photography — exquisite lighting and statuesque models, for example — but shifts the focus from clothing or makeup to the subjects themselves. All are clearly aware of the camera, and their poses, as Schorr suggests, are performances through which they construct their identities for the viewer. Schorr’s goal is not to get her subjects to stop performing, but rather to engage them as agents in their own presentation as objects of desire.
Jennifer (Head) (2002), from Schorr’s 8 Women series, seems to adopt the conventions of high fashion photography completely — at least at first glance. In the well-saturated and glowing photograph, the head of a woman appears aggressively cropped, her blond hair rippling past the edges of the frame and down her bare chest. Jennifer’s cool green eyes materialize out of shadows cast by heavily weighted lids, addressing something out of frame with an utterly familiar, yet no less disarming, smolder. Though the model is perfectly groomed and strikingly beautiful, elements such as the claustrophobic cropping and unnervingly surreal effect of color correction confront the viewer, rebuffing Jennifer’s positioning as a commodified body within a commercial space. In this work, Schorr critically engages the culturally-determined tendencies that influence desire by rendering them strange, embedding fractured mirrors that refract and deflect our erotic gaze. Despite all of this, the image remains extraordinarily powerful: the photograph provokes an awareness of the ways in which commerce and culture shape desire, but it does so while inciting that desire in a heightened form.
Schorr frequently utilizes appropriation (often of her own work, as in the case of Jennifer (Head)) in her art, heightening the ambiguousness of her photographs’ import through concentric references. This technique is consonant with fashion as Benjamin describes it in The Arcades: ranging freely over history, fashion continually steals, borrows, and transforms what has come before. Such cyclical self-referencing makes fashion difficult to categorize and, with even minor shifts in historical or cultural context, impossible to read. This slipperiness of meaning extends to identity on all levels; clothing stands as only one manifestation of self-presentation, which encompasses everything from cosmetics to attitude and gait. Though we may experience these factors as true reflections of ourselves and others, their significance is deeply contingent, and, as Schorr’s subversive treatment demonstrates, liable to shift.
The arbitrary and commercially-driven nature of societal standards concerning beauty and desire is also addressed in The Arcades Project. In the chapter on fashion, Benjamin compiles nineteenth-century accounts of Parisian women’s clothing, a fantastic realm of bustles, hoops, and girdles whose preferred shapes were constantly in flux. He proposed that the impulse to follow fashion, no matter how objectively ludicrous or even physically debilitating it might be, was a perverse channeling of human energy to things that could be bought and sold. In fashion, the subordination of human beings to objects effected by capitalism found its literal form: cosmetics claimed to impart to skin the “gloss of rose-colored taffeta,” and women labored to look like mannequins. Schorr asks viewers to recognize these urges within themselves and pinpoints their profit-motivated, emotionally manipulative undercurrents.
By invoking the genre of fashion photography in works that unsettle its objectifying norms, Collier Schorr prompts us to reflect critically on a culture that commodifies desire. She does so by making looking — culturally and historically inflected, but always rooted in individual subjectivity — the subject of her work.
The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin is on view at the Jewish Museum through Sunday, August 6.
— Josh Tarplin, Curatorial Intern
