What’s in a dress?
Karen LaMonte, “Dress 3,” 2001.
In the case of Karen LaMonte’s “Dress 3,” it’s what is not in the dress that matters. LaMonte’s cast glass sculpture is hollow, creating a luminous ghost of a woman’s body. The dress looks as if it was liquid silk contoured exactly to the model’s sensual and substantial flesh. The wearer was no emaciated runway model. Nor was she corpulent. The body captured in the hollow dress is a kind of feminine ideal of centuries past. Yet the piece itself is contemporary, made in 2001.
When I encountered this piece at the de Young Museum in San Francisco this April, I couldn’t stop looking at it – and through it. The de Young has cleverly positioned LaMonte’s “Dress 3” in a room with a classical Greek sculpture of a seated woman. In the background hang dreamy paintings of picturesque American landscapes. (Seen here is Albert Bierstadt’s “California Spring,” 1875.) “Dress 3” echoes Bierstadt’s diaphanous clouds.
If “Dress 3” and “California Spring” had been placed immediately together, we could imagine them lifting off the ground into the ether. But situated between them, the stone sculpture of the seated woman grounds “Dress 3” as if to stage an argument. While “Dress 3” is cast in three pieces, the Greek sculpture is a whole, buttery-textured body. Is the glass dress really an ideal? Or a reflection on how women construct femininity, layer by layer?
About her work, LaMonte says, “I use the absent nude cloaked in transparent glass dresses to investigate the tension between humanism and eroticism, the physical and the ethereal, the body and the spirit.”
In a video for the Smithsonian American Art Museum, LaMonte says she was surprised when one viewer commented, “Look at that beautiful glass cage.” Whereas LaMonte says her intention with her glass dresses is to present something “fragile, alluring, and inviting.”
LaMonte claims in that same video not to be a feminist but instead to be pro-feminine. “Allowing women to be women,” she says. (One wonders what kind of conversation she might have about drag and trans images, but that’s for another time…) I, however, did see her work as feminist (I’m not alone). The fact that the figure is in blocks – which is presumably an unavoidable result of the cast glass process – seemed to me to be a direct commentary on how gender is literally constructed. Being hollow, too, felt evocative. The actual woman is nowhere to be found. Where does the person reside outside of her clothes?
The day I saw “Dress 3” I was primed to look at it both with wonder and a critical eye. I had just passed through several galleries of the de Young’s American art collection which has been expertly curated to recast and redress the racism and colonialism always present and yet not acknowledged in such work. I was able to view the staid paintings of aristocratic ladies in their frilly frocks in a new light: as signifiers of a white supremacist regime. Encountering LaMonte’s dress after visiting other galleries and in a room filled with poetical landscapes such as Bierstadt’s, I saw connections between traditional white femininity and idealized landscapes free of indigenous peoples. “Let’s dress it all up in pastels and bows and call it heavenly,” I could hear the conquerors whisper.
Another viewer might not make these associations. I share mine here to suggest that individual art pieces seen in different contexts can take on unexpected meanings. There is no rulebook for viewers – you can make your own associations. Next time you visit a museum or gallery notice if the layout and the arrangement of artworks spark anything for you. We bring to art our own narratives and inquiries. We might be surprised by how art answers back.