Artifacts Alone, Art Together in deYoung Museum’s Fashioning San Francisco
No item perhaps straddles the line between art and artifact more than an article of clothing. Gowns especially are difficult to formulate this argument with, as they are typically designed first and foremost as wearable art for fashion show collections. Only later are they reproduced for sale, if at all, for many instead inspire less overwrought, more commercially viable alternatives. In the case of Jean Lanvin’s Veilleur de Nuit from her Spring/Summer 1924 Haute Couture, there is an argument to be made that as this piece was owned and worn by one Barbara Donohoe Jostes (an entrepreneur and book publisher, not an actress, a model, a woman famed for her fashion sense, etc.), it fell out of the classification of an art piece into a more practical classification as an artifact, and becomes a viable artifact for an extended discussion of how it is elevated back to art by the context in which it is displayed.
Referring to Veilleur de Nuit as an artifact aligns with Danto’s perspective on the distinction between an artifact and a piece of art in ART/Artifact. “An artifact implies a system of means; to extract it from the system in which it has a function and display it for itself is to treat a means as though it were an end. The use of an artifact is its meaning” (29). As artifacts, clothes share a common spirit with prosthetics: covering our exposed bodies from wear, weather, and wandering eyes, providing utilitarian functions (pockets, protection, etc.), and operating as extensions of the wearer’s internality: their personality, their wholeness. To the body acclimatized to wearing clothes, to go without is to feel exposed, lacking in some essential quality. Clothes are a tool we are rarely without, and at the de Young Museum’s Fashioning San Francisco exhibit, decades of high fashion stand as testament to the beauty, more so than the practicality, of our second skins.
As the first gown the museum visitor encounters in the collection, Veilleur de Nuit acts as an ambassador from the world of high fashions past to the mass produced-present. Yet before we arrive at the exhibit, one must first purchase their ticket. Here begins a subtle exertion of pressure on the visitor to pay more for access to the Fashioning San Francisco exhibit. It is offered to incoming guests as an exclusive opportunity available for a limited time. This sales tactic is referred to as FOMO: Fear of Missing Out. “Come see, come see, for when it is gone, it is gone!” On purchasing access to this exclusive opportunity, the guest is also directed to a room on the first floor, separate from the main exhibit on the floor above, for an Augmented Reality (AR) experience we will address in a moment. The visitor is warned, “The line gets longer later in the day; I would go now while it’s still quiet.” This effort to nudge the guest into participation is unique to the FSF exhibit: elsewise, guests are encouraged to enjoy and sent on their way with a ticket and a map. In a quiet, subtly disturbing way, the de Young establishes a sort of class distinction among its guests by partitioning off certain exhibits except to those who pay an additional fee. This mirrors perceptions of the exclusivity and expense of high art. The additional price of admission to even access Veilleur de Nuit and its companion pieces becomes an effort to remove the article of clothing further from artifact toward art. This divide is enforced by the staff members standing guard in either exhibit: both the AR experience and an entire wing of the museum are denied to guests who have not paid the toll. Further, advertisements for the FSF exhibit abound, encouraging guests to return to the ticket counter and purchase access if they did not before. It does not quite reach the point of shaming the guest for not having access to those spaces, but it is a potential source of embarrassment to the person turned away from these gauzy “inner sanctums.”
Gauzy?
Both the AR experience and the exhibit proper are lined floor-to-ceiling with sheer gauze curtains just thick enough to conceal the walls, though transparent enough to allow some hint of the murals beneath. A metaphor for the divide between the economic base (the solid walls, the carefully crafted murals) and the superstructure to which art and fashion contribute to lofty ideals of beauty might be drawn from this presentation. For the time being a room normally accessible to everyone is denied to them instead, available only to certain “elites.” The former room is small, brightly lit, and overtaken by a roped queue in which guests are asked to connect to the museum’s Wi-Fi to access the AR experience. Here the guest may “try on” some of the pieces in the collection by standing on a specific spot on the floor in front of a camera. The image of a gown is imposed over their own, tracked onto them in a similar manner to an Instagram filter. Veilleur de Nuit is not one of them. Guests are encouraged to scan an accompanying QR code to save a picture of themselves in the gown onto their phones. The AR experience lends itself to a comparison to the observations Denis Dutton makes of tourist-directed works in Tribal Art and Artifact, wherein he notes that despite the immense skill of tribespeople to make a tourist-directed piece seem old and ritualistic, he remains skeptical that they are “indistinguishable from a genre or tradition of tribal artifact. That an art tradition might be indiscernible from a utilitarian artifact tradition seems to me empirically unlikely” (10). Despite the impressive nature of the technology which makes this element of the exhibit possible, every “gown” worn by those in the AR experience is digitally reproduced, cheap (read: free), and ill-fitting. The superimposed image shares an indexical relationship to the gown in the exhibit on the floor above but loses much of its uniqueness in becoming a virtual sticker by those easily amused by technology. That the de Young Museum’s logo is imposed onto the bottom corner of the resulting picture further betrays the game: this experience is a clever way of incorporating the guest into the museum’s advertisements for the exhibit. In participating and disseminating the resulting images, guests exponentially extend the subtle touch of the museum’s marketing FOMO. Further, the lack of any physical works in this room besides the concealed walls continues to press forward the idea that the works associated with that space are lofty art, not artifact, an effect enhanced by the commercial underpinnings.
On to the exhibit proper and the home of Veilleur de Nuit. On climbing the stairs to the second floor, the guest’s attention is first drawn by indistinct, nostalgic strains of music from the open doors immediately to their left, through which Veilleur de Nuit can be seen. A guard stands beneath the painted Fashioning San Francisco sign, indicating both that the guest is in the right place and had best have their ticket ready if they wish to proceed. On first entering a heavy catalog of the pieces in the exhibit is available to guests who wish to carry it, as is a binder of large-print labels to accommodate those with poor vision. The lighting between the mannequins in their gowns is blue and dim, drawing the eye toward the dainty starkly-white-or-black women posed under white spotlights. Plaster hair in contemporary styles cling to heads with indistinct faces that suggest feminine features. Curiously, though the exhibit is called Fashioning San Francisco, FSF exclusively features women’s fashions. The mass-produced feminine forms are posed in ways which lend them personality; they seem to examine one another, to stand together and converse, to watch from a corner of the room. Veilleur de Nuit is posed with her arms down and out, fingers poised as if she might gather her skirt and dip into a curtsy. Like her featureless sisters she stands on a raised white dais, elevated still higher by standing on her toes. White panels behind her decorated with art deco columns further distinguish these stages from the dimly lit sections of gauze which conceal the walls between the stages of posed women. The labels at hers and other mannequins’ feet provide the name of the piece, the designer, the collection to which it belongs, the period in which it was made, and a paragraph on the inspiration(s) behind the design. Villeur de Nuit, for instance, was inspired by eighteenth-century hoop skirts and court robes of the Manchu-led Qing dynasty. Where these labels distinguish themselves from the labels you might see for paintings and sculptures is in the addition of a “Worn by” section. This is arguably tantamount to the museum acknowledging these as artifacts, as opposed to art, for it acknowledges not just that these pieces saw use (as in a fashion show), but that they belonged to people who might make regular use of them.
No one piece in this collection seems intended to be considered for its own merit. Rather, these garments are grouped into sections based either on where they fall in the history of San Francisco (as in Villeur de Nuit’s case, it is grouped with a selection of gowns created shortly after the San Francisco earthquake) or on how they were worn (a selection of “little black dresses”, of formal wear, of sartorial wear, etc.). Unique among these sections is one solely dedicated to “Global Aesthetic Influences.” This arrangement helps to distance these clothing from the label of artifact and pushes them toward one of art: they cease to be pieces in an individual’s closet to lend themselves to a specific period or artistic style.
Fashion will forever exist in a liminal space between couture and utility, art and artifact. In presenting pieces of clothing as part of a wider collection, study, or style, they are relegated to art. Yet when they arrive in the hands of someone who will wear and chase experiences in them, they cease to be “mere art” and become something that takes on qualities beyond aesthetic beauty. It requires, then, that someone wishing to portray them as art again recontextualize the piece away from the wearer and back into the collection. As with Veilleur de Nuit, the death of the wearer and the gown’s subsequent donation to the Fashioning San Francisco exhibit carried it on a journey from a Spring/Summer fashion catalog (art) to beloved piece of clothing (artifact) back to art.
