KAWAKOONING

Did DeKooning ever design a dress? Not that we know of. Yet one of his favorite inspirations was the feminine form. Think of the Women series.

Did Kawakubo ever depict the feminine form, as in a drawing or a painting? Not that we know of. Yet she completely redefined what a human being can wear.

And they are both  non-representational.

Kawakubo’s series called Invisible Clothes demonstrates her “…indifference to the ‘representational’ characteristics of clothing.”  This resulted in her transformation, displacement and removal of traditional clothing cues.  Example:  if you think of a sleeve as a form, rather than something that your arm goes into, it can be placed atypically or completely eliminated.

DeKooning also displaced and shifted the traditional forms of the human body.  A leg, depicted as a shape on the canvas, is typically displaced, shifted, re-proportioned, etc.

So here we have one master who is painting in two dimensions the female figure on a canvas.  And at the same time, we have another master sculpting the forms that the human figure fits into.

We have bemoaned the modernist painter mindset of employing non-representation to arrange opaque two dimensional shapes on a canvas: see Modernist Form Givers.  Yet with the same non-representational principals, we have Kawakubo crafting resolved three dimensional forms that modify space, function and the very fabric of our culture.

Kawakubo makes the work of the modernist painting masters to look almost silly.  How can there be any cultural parity with those who re-arrange our cultural understanding on a canvas vs those who re-arrange our cultural understanding with resolved three dimensional forms that function?

Yet, it might be argued that Kawakubo could not have done her work without the trail blazing efforts of a DeKooning.  It might be that the breaking of the representational barriers could have only been done in two dimensions.  And it might be argued that the Comme de Garcons designs are part of the logical evolution of our culture.

The drawing above started off with DeKooning’s painting, Woman (above left).  And then as I used the basic geometry of the painting, I kept asking what would Kawakubo do?

1.  Rei Kawakubo / Comme des Garcons, Art of the In-Between. exhibition guide, 4 May – 4 Sept 2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York.
2. Right photo.  The Infinity of Tailoring.  Autumn/winter 2013-14.