Femke de Vries / Remco Torenbosch

LEO XIII / gastatelier – Tilburg
REMCO TORENBOSCH)
(STUDY MATERIAL, EUROPEAN CONTEXTUALIZATION,
REMCO
TORENBOSCH
FEMKE DE VRIES (2012)
RESEARCH ON THE EMOTIONAL ORNAMENT,
chinic Freudian slips, while ‘plan’ and the
repeated ‘accidents’ in its execution begin
to illustrate each other’s impersonal nature,
to correspond to one another as the failures
– gigantic, geopolitical, or microscopic,
technical and equally anonymous – of the
same desire. Torenbosch’s monochrome
film and the ghostly flashes that disrupt its
seamlessness document the spasms of a
political construct.
Within the modernist canon, the function
of the monochrome is to arrest vision and
confine its motion to the epiphanic concreteness of the picture plane. Invoking the
diversions of Yves Klein, Blinky Palermo or
Derek Jarman is of similarly limited applicability here, yet these references do bring
a speculative museological dimension to
Torenbosch’s project. His vacant and chromatically hesitant flags might be thought
of as ethnographic exhibits in a future
museum of political history, artifacts that
indirectly visualize social convulsions and
economic disparities. There, in the ‘Europe’
gallery of such a museum, the flags might
Although educated in fashion, clothes haven’t
been Femke de Vries’ main object of interest.
However, at the Leo XIII guest atelier De Vries
started working on a project on the relation of
clothing versus fashion. During her studies at
AMFI and the ArtEZ Fashion Masters Femke
de Vries started thinking about the concept of
fashion design and how it is a profession focussed on strategies of seduction, given shape
through the use of ‘ornamentation’ and ‘decoration’. While working on her graduation research,
De Vries became fascinated with fashion as
an “ornament”. In this context, the Austrian
architect and theorist Adolf Loos (1870-1933)
serves as a source of inspiration. In his essay
Ornament and Crime (1908) Loos writes: “They
say (the ornamentalists): ‘we prefer a consumer
who has a set of furniture that becomes intolerable to him after ten years, and who is consequently forced to refurnish every ten years, to
one who only buys an object when the old one
is worn out. Industry demands this. Millions
are employed as a result of the quick change.’”
With these words in mind, Femke Vries went to
STUDIO VIEW,
V
IV
III
work. It seemed to her that in today’s consumer
market, the ornament is an emotional ornament,
as it is more and more the experience that is
communicated through commodities and its advertisements rather than the characteristics of
the commodities itself. As a result, what greatly
interests De Vries is the fact that emotions
have become ‘objects’ of consumption. These
emotions are sold as ready-mades through
commodities, possibly creating passivity in the
consumer because the importance of their own
emotions is reduced. This passivity, the idolization of the designer label and consequently
the reduction of the role of the material have
been essential themes in the work of Femke de
Vries and are also pivotal in her newest project
Dictionary Dressings. In this project, De Vries
looks at the literal definition of clothing items,
as determined by the dictionary (www.vandale.
nl). This is the starting point for expressions
(image, text, objects) that question clothing
and fashion. In definitions in the dictionary, the
aspect of fashion is absent as is sometimes the
piece of clothing itself. The dictionary explains
Femke de Vries (nl) en Remco Torenbosch (nl) / werkperiode – juli 2012 t/m september 2012
ROBERT BICHET, LE DRAPEAU DE L’EUROPE, 1985
Remco Torenbosch’s ongoing project is an
oblique look at post-1989 Europe, with the
blue flag of the European Union as allegorical segue. The project inventories the
different shades of blue produced in Europe’s cheaper workshops, where economic
expedient and color-code mis-calibration
destabilize or corrode the symbol, and
withdraw from the flag the quality it aspired
to: that of a vera icon of European communality, an impression of the reconciliatory,
cloudless sky overlooking it. Were they
assembled diachronically, these chromatic
flickers would work like stills in an abstract
film, where insufficiency or excess – too
much blue or too little or blue of a different
kind – would register as contamination, as
the various degrees to which a parasitical
presence manifests itself. The color of the
flag is never the right one: the dispute here
does not seem to be so much one disuniting
original and failed copies, but an endless
string of imperfections from which no model can be wrested. The rhetoric of European
homogeneity is pierced by abstract, ma-
EUROPEAN
CONTEXTUALIZATION
THE BLUE CURTAIN –
REMCO TORENBOSCH
FEMKE
DE VRIES
DICTIONARY
DRESSINGS
DICTIONARY DRESSINGS –
FEMKE DE VRIES
II
the function, stresses the key properties and
sometimes explains the usage. The definitions
in dictionaries are generally experienced as dry
and factual definitions that, in the case of clothing, show no connection with emotional values
and therefore lack ornament and thus lack
fashion. By using these formal definitions as a
starting point, the concept of fashion is ignored
and thus too the ornament; the emotional value
attributed to the clothing.
The rise of the “emotional ornament” as Femke
de Vries refers to it in clothing has taken place
over the last two decades, but already started
in the second half of the 19th century. In 1858
fashion designer Charles F. Worth opened his
fashion house. Worth was the first fashion
designer to sow a label with his name on it in
his designs. About this fashion historian Nancy
Troy writes: “It is surely no accident that the
development of the couture label in the second
half of the nineteenth century coincided with a
growing commercial emphasis on brand names,
especially in the burgeoning field of advertising, where it was widely recognized that profits
could be made by linking a desirable commodity
with a particular brand name.” During the 1990s,
fashion houses like Louis Vuitton (owned by
conglomerate LVMH), Dior (partially owned by
LVMH), Givenchy (owned by LVMH) and Gucci
(owned by the Gucci Group) embarked on a
major rejuvenation process, recruiting young
designers such as Marc Jacobs, John Galliano,
Alexander McQueen and Tom Ford. Making
large investments, the conglomerates looked
for a way to secure their profits. Each fashion
house sought to differentiate itself by stressing
their unique brand identity: a combination of
their heritage and a modern visual language. On
this process fashion theorist Tamsin Blanchard
wrote: “For any fashion house, a well-designed,
universally recognized logo is the key to commercial success. The logo becomes its own currency, whether printed on a T-shirt, embossed
on a wallet, packaged around a face cream or, of
course, sewn into an item of clothing.” As a result of this, according to Patricia Calefato: “The
brand is a symbol that is soaked with a special
kind of power, sat somewhere in between lan-
VI
guage, commodity and their respective values.
Brands do not only serve to distinguish one
product from another, they are the embodiment
of a concept, a value, an emotion and a story.”
And it is this value, this emotion that Femke de
Vries refers to as the “emotional ornament”,
often boosted by slick advertisements. It possibly makes for passive consumers, as they are
constantly in search of adding emotional value
to their lives by buying into the stories these
fashion houses sell.
During her research, Femke de Vries came
across Robert and Edward Skidelsky, authors
of the book How Much Is Enough?. The Skidelskys are in the opinion that economical growth
should be a means not an end. The Western
world has reached a point where all the primary
necessities of life are covered, yet we still keep
consuming like we never have before. According to De Vries an explanation for this phenomenon might lay in the fact that we in the Western
world are not looking to fulfill our basic needs
anymore, but we are trying to fill an emotional
need. However this need is not easily satisfied,
for there is an ever-growing stream of seduction
in the form of advertisements, appealing to our
deepest needs to keep improving our inner-self.
And so we keep consuming, and we keep on
working our forty-hour work weeks to keep our
consuming pattern in order. As a result we are
doomed to be slaves subjugated to the strategies of large corporations. In the spirit of French
philosopher Michel de Certeau, Femke de Vries
states that to free ourselves of this subjugation,
we should develop our own tactics. She sees
the emotional ornamentation of fashion as a
strategy developed by the large conglomerates
owning the fashion houses to keep our consuming behavior up to speed. With her project Dictionary Dressings, De Vries has developed her
own tactics on how to steer clear of the strategies of these conglomerates. By researching the
definition of clothing items as described in the
dictionary, Femke de Vries ignores the fashion
element and goes back to the literal meaning
of clothes. For example, the word “glove” is
explained on vandale.nl as “the covering of the
hand”. Subsequently, researching the many
VII
ways a hand can be covered, De Vries strips the
glove of its emotional ornamentation, its strategies, and thus she takes back control by formulating her own tactics.
LEO XIII / GASTATELIER
by Hanka van der Voet
LEO XIII Straat 90h
5046 KK Tilburg
[email protected]
www.gastatelierleo13.nl
LEO XIII / gastatelier is een atelier gelegen in een voormalig
schoolgebouw uit 1908 aan de Leo XIII straat 90 in Tilburg.
Het is een monumentale, lichte ruimte ter grootte van twee
klaslokalen. In het gebouw bevinden zich woningen, ateliers
en bedrijfsruimtes voor kunstenaars/vormgevers. Het atelier
bevindt zich op korte afstand van De Pont en het Textielmuseum, beiden centra voor hedendaagse kunst en onderzoek.
Kunstenaars en/of vormgevers kunnen hier als artists- inrecidence werken en wonen binnen een periode van drie
maanden. Juist die geconcentreerde periode, de fysieke
kwaliteit van de werkplek en de culturele omgeving vormen
de uitdaging om een onderzoekstraject of project aan te
gaan, hetgeen kan leiden tot verdieping of verbreding van de
eigen ontwikkeling.
De werkperiode wordt afgesloten met een publieke presen-
be installed in relation to another attempt
to materialize a political figure of speech:
the Iron Curtain. What the Iron Curtain had
held apart, the European flag mends: the
assets, transactions, debts, and losses in
an economy of affects and representations
that unites and divides Europe’s incongruous ‘halves,’ be they organized along EastWest, or North-South axes. It will be a matter of curatorial sensitivity to discuss, in
tandem, the caesura between how subjectivities were fashioned at the two sides of
the Curtain, and today’s efforts to inscribe
hefty bureaucracy, financial scandals,
racially-motivated deportations, the continent’s centres and ghettos into the same,
shared political project. The Iron Curtain
was of uncertain size (but presumably very
large) and occupied an indeterminate location (but presumably zigzagged through the
very heart of what had been, and is again,
‘Europe’). The vast and intractable hiatus
in cultural and political exchange it metaphorized is incommensurate with the
efficiency with which this obstacle was
ultimately dismantled and dispatched to
the historiographic junkyard in 1989. Of
imprecise size and color, the European flag
flutters somewhere between the low-wage
places where it produced and the ceremonial occasions where distinct ideas of
Europe, that its distinct hues of blue might
be correlates for, temporarily suspend their
differences to respond to some fresh crisis.
Our imaginary museum will show how the
rusting detritus of the Iron Curtain is transformed into the alkahest of a new European
sociability, and what the residue of this
transmutation is.
tatie van een weekend, waarin de kunstenaar/vormgever laat
zien waartoe zijn verblijf geleid heeft. Men krijgt de volledige
vrijheid om de inhoud daarvan vorm te geven.
Het gastatelier wordt beheerd door een stichting waarvan
de leden wonen en werken in hetzelfde gebouw. De stichting
heeft een uitgebreid stedelijk en landelijk netwerk en verwerft de subsidies die het verblijf in het gastatelier mogelijk
maken. Stichting Gastatelier Leo XIII richt zich op professionele kunstenaars met een relatief jonge kunstenaarspraktijk.
Zij wordt daarin bijgestaan door een Raad van Advies, die in
samenwerking met een werkgroep van de stichting het beleid
toetst aan de subsidievoorwaarden en netwerken aanboort
om verbindingen met de stad aan te gaan.
by Mihnea Mircan
Colofon
Femke de Vries (nl) – Remco Torenbosch (nl)
werkperiode – juli 2012 t/m september 2012
teksten – Hanka van der Voet en Mihnea Mircan
fotografie – Femke de Vries en Remco Torenbosch
ontwerp – Koos Siep en Vera Bekema
papier – Montana, 115 g/m 2
oplage – 500
Deze publicatie werd mede mogelijk gemaakt door de
Provincie Noord-Brabant en de gemeente Tilburg.
FEMKE DE VRIES (2012)
REMCO TORENBOSCH (2012)
STUDIO VIEW, RESEARCH ON THE EMOTIONAL ORNAMENT,
STUDIO VIEW, EUROPEAN CONTEXTUALIZATION,
RESEARCH, DICTIONARY DRESSINGS,
betekenis: handschoen
betekenis: jas
hand-schoen (de; m; meervoud: handschoenen)
jas (de; m en v; meervoud: jassen)
1. bekleding van de hand
1. alleen buitenshuis gedragen kledingstuk
1. COVERING OF THE HAND
FEMKE DE VRIES (2012)
RESEARCH, DICTIONARY DRESSINGS,
1. A PIECE OF CLOTHING ONLY WORN/CARRIED OUTDOORS
FEMKE DE VRIES (2012)
LETTER FROM ARSÈNE HEITZ TO PAUL M. G. LÉVY, OCTOBER 15, 1951
INSTALLATION VIEW, EUROPEAN CONTEXTUALIZATION,
STUDIO VIEW, EUROPEAN CONTEXTUALIZATION,
(STUDY MATERIAL, EUROPEAN CONTEXTUALIZATION,
REMCO TORENBOSCH (2012)
REMCO TORENBOSCH (2012)
REMCO TORENBOSCH (2012)