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May 4–August 7, 2011
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, 212-879-5500

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, recently finished at the Metropolitan Museum, is an exhibition that is Important with a capital “I”. It drew in the crowds, the money, the new members, and fulsome critical praise. A game-changer, it is the type of show that many hope could influence museum practice for years to come. Why, then, am I so very uncomfortable with the positive response pouring in from all sides, from cultural mediators both high and low?

There is the sheer shock value that McQueen’s creations emit. Collection titles like “Highland Rape” (autumn/winter 1995–96) and “Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims” (1992) have been cast as easy feminist targets, distracting from the designer’s true calling as an icon reshaping standards of beauty for all women. While there is merit to these arguments—his work denies the viewer the pleasure of the typical feminine silhouette—the violence remains. Not only do names suggest horror, but the construction of the clothes, which McQueen’s own words frame as centered on destructive motions of cutting and slashing, also depict an unending cycle of deformation of the female figure by a man’s hands. The materials chosen for these designs, ranging from objects found in worlds both natural and man-made (glass, medical slides, razor-clam shells, aluminum), perpetuate this thematic of pain, derived from a variety of sources. At times, McQueen distorts the model’s body to such an extent that it no longer exists. Consider his famed hologram of Kate Moss that closed the show for his autumn/winter 2006–07 collection, “Widows of Culloden.” Presented in such a way, woman becomes a weightless being; with no physical presence of her own, she exists rather as a phantom apparition that the celebrated male genius manipulates for his own purposes.

But, more problematic, is how the museum completely abandons its institutional responsibilities of critical scholarship. The feminist complaint against McQueen is well-established—the claims that he sexualizes violence towards women have existed since he emerged as a fashion powerhouse in the mid-`90s—yet is never acknowledged within the exhibit itself. Wall text is limited, often overly dependent on the artist’s personal quotations, and the catalogue disappoints with its overreliance on a simple narrative of McQueen’s never-questioned achievements. One could even argue that those behind Savage Beauty, instead of allowing for a neutral space that would provide much-needed intellectual distance, reinforce the fashion designer’s violent fantasies through the too-theatrical displays that dramatize the conflict inherent in his pieces. Why else does the museum exist but to analyze and engage critically with the visual world overwhelming us? When an organization as well-regarded as the Metropolitan fails to address the most basic of controversies facing an artist, it ignores its mission and sets a dangerous precedent.

Where Savage Beauty does take a firm academic stand is in its casting of McQueen as a Romantic artist. Curator Andrew Bolton certainly argues this point convincingly, laying out galleries according to various Romantic tenets like Nationalism, Exoticism, and Naturalism. Despite the quality of the presentation, the scholarship here again makes me squeamish. Romanticism was a movement rich in rightly-celebrated artistic successes, yet it left a complicated heritage, one which McQueen inhabits without creating a productive dialogue. His observations lay the groundwork for a real discourse, as he stated that “[f]ashion can be really racist, looking at the clothes of other cultures as costumes. . . . That’s mundane and it’s old hat. Let’s break down some barriers.” Yet nothing on display here evokes anything but the cultural pillaging and misrepresentation characteristic of the 19^th century. And when a citation like, “What I do is look at ancient African tribes, and the way they dress. The rituals of how they dress. . . . There’s a lot of tribalism in the collections,” follows the previous quote, McQueen squanders much of his previously gained progressive goodwill. Dismissing the complex traditions of a continent as mere “tribalism” situates the designer in the same ranks as a Romantic like Delacroix: a talented artist, yes, but one also prone to fall under the spell of an imagined unified culture-scape existing solely in Western minds, a universe where a multi-faceted society can be deduced to its most exotic parts, as the French painter once did in his Orientalist canvases. Again, curatorial failure emerges as these concepts are presented without more critical discussion of their socio-political undertones.

Art, a wide-ranging term encompassing fashion, is never easy. The job of the museum is not to simplify, but to illuminate, challenge, explain. Savage Beauty ultimately disappoints not because Alexander McQueen turned violence towards women into a stylish spectacle, but rather because of the Metropolitan’s unwillingness to expose and flesh out this dynamic. Contemporary cultural colonialism is troubling, but not nearly as distressing as one of the art world’s most-respected institutions failing to address this issue.

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Nor does McQueen’s love of color and pattern and his sculptural use of fabric, hair, wood, leather, metal and other materials invite comparison to Woodman’s austere and almost exclusively black and white photographic medium.  More obviously, McQueen’s art involves the making of clothing, while the better part of Woodman’s self-portraiture shows her without any on.  Yet critical similarities link these two fascinating and disparate artists: apenchant for sumptuous texture, constant focus on the female body, performative self-expression, extravagant theatricality,and–in quiet contrast to their proclivity for shock–overriding, disciplined classicism.

Each of these commonalities is brought into play by a theme at the core of their highly personal work:  the transformation of the body, and thus the self.  Entirely magical, and yet reflecting our very real connection to the natural world, metamorphosis is a powerful metaphor for life, death, and all the dramatic and often frightening developments in between—none more miraculous than the changes a woman’s body undergoes in adolescence and pregnancy.  And if the body is the animated instrument of the self, then metamorphosis is a conceit par excellence for the expression of the (re)invention of the self and all its transformative desires, fears, dualities, and fantasies—about self and other, identity and gender, exposure and privacy, to name just a few.  While both Woodman and McQueen remained deeply respectful of the rigor of their respective crafts of photography and dressmaking, they nevertheless determinedly sought to stand out within those traditions.  This tension, which runs throughout both oeuvres, is distilled in their use of the echt classical trope of metamorphosis to represent the wish to create—and to be—something entirely new.

Spending her summers in the family’s farmhouse outside of Florence, and studying in Rome for a semester while at RISD, Woodman grew up steeped in art-historical tradition.  Many of her images juxtapose her body with natural elements—shells, eels, flowers, fruit, ferns, birch trees—mimicking metamorphic equivalence.  In one photograph, she stands in a field with her head drooping like the towering sunflowers that surround her.  In another (Untitled, New York, 1979-1980), she caresses a swan’s head, her body a gossamer column of white silk, as lustrous as the swan’s feathers.  Her arm extends the swan’s neck, fusing with it to form a strangely graceful chimera.  In much of her work, Woodman’s face is averted, draped, veiled, or, as it is here, cropped altogether, directing attention to her expressive body much the way a headless manikin defers to its clothes.  Also recalling the headless statues of antiquity, this image with its utterly elegant form twists the myth of Leda, seduced by Jove in the guise of a swan:  here, Woodman becomes Leda-as-swan, a woman made seductive—dangerously so—via dress. It is an image of power, countering her achingly vulnerable nude self-portraiture.

Clothing is a natural vehicle for meditations on metamorphosis: it is, after all, the main way that we alter our appearance.  Woodman first showed an interest in art when, as a child, she began to copy paintings of women in fancy dress. By the age of 14, she had begun to layer her body with sheer lace and disrobe in front of her camera. Tellingly, McQueen got his start on Savile Row, and then worked with theatrical costumiers. Imaginatively and impeccably tailored, his clothes impose structure on the body, typically emphasizing femininity by accentuating the hips and shoulders and corseting the waist.  Some of his most brilliant designs are subversive variations on the tailored jacket that morph its proverbial form in playful, often feminizing ways.  McQueen also exploited the power wrought by transformation more literally, incorporating many animal forms into his designs: vulture’sskulls form menacing epaulets, horns and antlers sprout from heads and shoulders, dresses are encrusted with shells and upholstered with feathers.  One exquisitely conceived example from the Horn of Plenty collection (2009-2010) makes explicit the relationship between the hourglass silhouette of Dior’s New Look and the mythical transformation of a woman into a different species altogether.  In his hands, this feathered garment gives birth to a plausibly new creature, neither woman nor bird.  In empathy, and possibly in identification with them, McQueen said that he ultimately wanted to make women feel powerful—to impact their “mentalities,” not just their bodies.  A woman clad in such magnificent armature becomes a formidable raptor, not too far off from Woodman’s silken seductivity.

McQueen found the back, arguably the most androgynous part of the body, and certainly one of the most vulnerable, especially erotic. One of McQueen’s more chilling pieces, the 1998 “Spine” corset, features an anatomically correct spinal column, complete with erect tail, suggesting a sort of metamorphic hermaphrodite.  Arming the female body with an inventive version of male virility, McQueen toys with gender while defending the back against predators. The corset is also a concrete elaboration of costume’s exhibition of the body, while at the same time covering it, sometimes revealing more than we care to know:  uncharted, unexplored identities—as alien, perhaps, as the weird chimeric forms in myth.  As Woodman wrote in her journal, “Real things don’t frighten me, just the ones in my mind”.

Woodman engages these very issues in an image in which she, too, superimposes a second spine—a fishbone—over her own (Untitled, New York, 1979-1980).  Its delicate filigree is repeated in the pattern of her superimposed dresses (peeled back as though filleted) and the herringbone scaffold exposed in the disintegrating plaster wall.  Woodman folds her body in the shape of a fish, with pointed head and fin.  This image is perhaps Woodman’s most powerful statement on the duality of inner and outer realities, and the ability of art—like dress—to expose hidden interiorities via metamorphic suggestion, while camouflaging them with mystery and ambiguity—to uncover, while covering up.  We look, we wonder,we want to know more.

In a gentler vein, McQueen invokes floral metamorphosis in a dress from the Sarabande collection (2007).  A shell of sheer silk organza, shaped with boning, is festooned with both real,–and embroidered silk–flowers.  Taking the cliché of the flowery dress as its point of departure, this work embodies various dualities—between the natural and the synthetic, between plush blossoms that cover the dress and its visible, skeletal trellis, and the fundamental duality between dying (and living) flowers and the living (and dying) body they adorn.  Flowers are a locus of desire, and a metaphor for the brevity of life.  In myths of metamorphosis, their beauty is a transformative foil for the cruelty of life’s passions and frustrations.  The dress may have functioned in a similar way for McQueen.  His use of the name Sarabande is not clear, but he may be alluding to Ingmar Bergman’s last film, Saraband (2003).  Its protagonist, a musician, attempts suicide after his daughter and protégé, a young cellist, eludes his dominating control and leaves him to study elsewhere.  In 2007, after having made serial serious suicide attempts, Isabella Blow, McQueen’s mentor and muse, finally succeeded.  “I used flowers because they die,” said McQueen.  Three years later, McQueen took his own life, nine days after his mother passed away.

Woodman herself makes frequent use of flowers in imagery that celebrates her blossoming female form.  In a diptych (Untitled, New York, 1979-1980) made in the last year of her life, Woodman layers her extended arms in diaphanous sheets of clear plastic pierced by spikes of foxgloves, as if growing into and through her, their tapered forms echoing her graceful fingers.  Dressed in a slip as fragile as the evanescent plastic—which is, like McQueen’s sheer organza, a ghostly intermediary material–Woodman is the elemental matrix which gives rise to flowers, their beauty as mute as an image.  More darkly, one can also see this four-armed goddess trapped or impaled by these seemingly innocuous blossoms (recalling how Woodman and her work has been devalued by virtue of their beauty).  On the left half of the diptych, Woodman looks down, the embodiment of a shy Pre-Raphaelite maiden in the garden. On the right half, we get a rare look into her heavy-lidded eyes—challenging, knowing, receding.  The divided image comments on the elusive, dual nature of this enchanting chimera, available but not available, slipping from one world into another.

Woodman’s final project, The Temple, is a photographic reconstruction of a Grecian temple in which she poses as its various caryatids:  a mortal body in an immortal image, a virtual metamorphosis into stone.  In Angels and Demons, his last, unfinished collection, McQueen presented sumptuous neo-Renaissance garments, including a breathtaking, close-fitting coat of gilded feathers.  Some pieces were fashioned from fabric digitally silkscreened with images from Breughel.  At the close of careers in which these two artists consistently situated their oeuvres within the context of art history, McQueen and Woodman literally incorporated art history into the heart of their art.  They each made a persuasive claim for their place within a glorious legacy, perhaps their metamorphosis was complete.

Alexander McQueen:  Savage Beauty was at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 4 – August 7, 2011

Francesca Woodman will appear at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, November 5, 2011 – February 20, 2012, and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, March 16 – June 13, 2012

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