Tuesday, October 12, 2010

KM: body? legend? ghost?

KM represents an interesting dialogue between the material and the immaterial. She is the 'ideal' - a corporeal canvas. As a model she is also used to promote and display garments and other material objects. Yet the legend surrounding her celebrity strikes me as something akin to mythology. Her presence is no longer contained to a single body. She is shy and avoids interviews, leading some to fill in the blanks. She is often used to represent the ethereal and immaterial.






'look at us but do not touch'

An issue here is that women are often cast under these representations - hence the prevalence and popularity of 'it' girls, beauty icons and so forth. These representations are not entirely developed - they are not exactly a person - they are not always given a voice - they are mostly prevalent as an image - they are deliberately incomplete. The 'other' is often cast in this way. It is perhaps the main reason I struggle with reading the mainstream fashion press or hearing designers talk muses (ie, every video on style.com). It seems shallow, misleading, deceptive.

Photobucket
Charles Dana Gibson was seemingly aware of how limited constructions/archetypes are, his drawing above parodies his own work on the first American beauty ideal. What interests me here is that all fashion images are a) constructed and b)representative in some way. Sometimes these representations take on a non-material form or 'type', which seems to live within societal consciousness.

There is something unreal about fame - the famous are not entirely known or unknown to us. They are often crafted as material representations of something elusive and unobtainable. That something spurns obsession and desire among some, as mystery intrigues. As Karl Lagerfeld said "I don't want to be a reality in people's lives. I want to be like an apparition."

I might try the pepper's ghost method for displaying my work... will try that out soon.

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