Selected Writing:
Jane Yeh, Courtesy One in the Other Gallery, 2004
Chris Townsend, 'Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion, 1970-2002', 2002
Rapture: Art’s Seduction by Fashion, 1970-2002
The following text is from ‘Rapture’, a catalogue essay by Chris Townsend published by Thames &Hudson, 2002 to accompany the Barbican exhibition of the same title.
Kirsten Glass proceeds from the spectacle of ephemera which is the fashion magazine, from the stunning photographic image to which we never give a second glance. (…) The photograph, which should be the arrest of death, the stopping of the moment, guarantees mortality, inhumation, forgetfulness. As coding of the body it is too easy to circumnavigate, too easy to read presence as absence. The only way to resist your being forgotten: pose for another photograph until, as Siegfried Kracauer suggests, memory is heaped in a garbage dump of imaginary and anonymous, captive time.
Glass obfuscates this disposable transparency. Her principle is the collage: a scything through of mass market magazines, a harvesting of glamorous figures. Her purpose in reusing the mass image is its revivification. The violence of collage yields a mobility of figure and meaning that escapes the petrification of time, putrefaction of memory, the photograph’s encryption of a corpse. Glass’s medium is generic confusion – is collage, is photography, is painting. Surgically knifed from context, the model’s figure is re-photographed and blown-up as a photographic stencil. Returned to the studio in this new form, the ghost of fashion’s past is recirculated in a fluidity of paint. The instability of the reproductive medium resists the fixed intent of the photograph. An image of commodity or celebrity- which amounts to the same thing- whose first intent was to communicate the fact of the object, embodied within a network of potential identifications and personal meanings, is displaced into another temporal register, another regime of visual scrutiny. Rather than emptying the sign of meaning, Glass overwrites it, creating a double inscription, where one text occludes the other. (…)
As Barthes, Bazin and Metz persistently remind us, in arresting the passing moment the photograph is a kind of death. The fashion photograph- that massively costly investment of photographer, model, stylist, hairdresser, make-up artist, location finder and assistants, recouped only in the instantaneous, low-cost encounters of mass audience- is death heaped upon death. The image and its subjects are both ubiquitous and utterly disposable.
(…) No matter how closely concerned with the disposable pleasures of commodity culture are, say, a Koons or a Rosenquist, those paintings will still be on display, valued long after their subjects are decomposing in a city dump. The reiteration of expressive strategies might give rise to Neo-Dada, Neo-Expressionism, even to Neo-Pop, but alongside the new is exhibited the old, the object of the past sustained or at least rediscovered in the present, very often precisely as a context in which we come to understand the contemporary. (…) History- for fashion- is best understood through the all- consuming filter of the present. It is this changed context into which Kirsten Glass hauls her subjects, their transformation made more obvious as painterliness- an emphasis on gesture- develops in the young artist’s oeuvre. Appropriated to the painterly commodity, the model becomes, with a resonance of Glass’s own titles:
SOMETHING ELSE