Rebecca teaches Art and Design Studies. Her research focuses on connections between architecture and what might be thought of as 'improper' to it.
Productive Excess: Clothing, Landscape, Architecture
Clothes render the bodies that wear them culturally visible. As Kaja Silverman points out, "clothing is a necessary condition of subjectivity."Through dress, one becomes manifest in the world, articulated as a gendered, social, cultural and political being. Thus, clothes may be understood as an attempt to represent the self. However, as in any form of representation, there is no true match between signifier and signified. In the mapping between there is always something uncontainable, left-over, surplus. There is always an excess. This paper is a consideration of "excess" as a site of production, a site where one is acutely aware of the impossibilities of not dressing up, of not wearing a masquerade and the potential for becoming something else that is implicit in this. Sartorial excess is explored in relation to two conditions, that of the garden and that of the interior, similarly sites of cultural production. In the conjunction of clothing, landscape and architecture, and their respective excesses, slippages occur and boundaries start to blur. The paper reflects on the potential for contamination that results. Through an investigation of the overlaps of wearing and inhabiting, the paper proposes a reassessment of the scopic regime that so dominates the discourse of fashion. It suggests a repositioning of the visual in relation to the wearer, questioning what might happen if viewer and viewed are the same. In the excesses of clothes, gardens and interiors, another way of understanding fashion is suggested, one in which subject and object are conflated, and new kinds of visual pleasure result.
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