Aran Dorsey

December 5, 2023

Re-fashioning

Nine different people are going to have nine different perspectives on climate change. This project was partially inspired by an analysis of Aesthetics of the Anthropocene by Eva Horn. This text focuses on defining an artistic aesthetic when making art about human-caused climate change, which Horn refers to as anthropocenic. While this text is interesting for its analysis of how climate change causes a feeling of instability which is reflected in this art, such as in the Oil series by Edward Burtynsky. However it is also limiting in its definition of aesthetics. What inspired this project was not the text itself, but a reaction against this idea of a single defined aesthetic. Every group member contributed a square to have our different voices and perspectives combined. A piece of art does not need to have one single unified aesthetic to make a meaningful statement on climate change.

Image from Oil series by Edward Burtynsky

The focus of this project is on reducing consumption of textiles, especially clothing. According to Aaron Elstein, fast fashion is one of the greatest polluters in our modern age, using hundreds and thousands of gallons of water every year. This water is taken out of the environment, filled with harmful dyes and microplastics, and then dumped on unsuspecting communities. This leads not only to human illness, but also a sort of illness of the Earth. Plants and animals who drink from this water are hurt or killed even faster than the humans who consume it, and are even more vulnerable as they are not considered as important. This is just one of the many, many ways that fashion contributes to climate change, but it is one of the most actively visible. This and the massive piles of barely-used thrown away clothes, making knotted tangled islands of trash have been the focus of many pieces of art protesting the waste of textiles.

The artist Shinique Smith tackles the issues of clothing sustainability and equity into her works, using found fabrics tied together in massive bundles. She was initially inspired by the fact that garment manufacturing, especially fast fashion, uses slave labor in much the same way that the burgeoning cotton industry used it in the 1400s. She has since expanded the project to also focus on reducing garment waste by utilizing found fabric. The collection Forgiving Strands in particular was a huge inspiration for this quilt project. However at the same time Smith’s works lack the accessible element of touch, hanging mostly in art museums. They also lack utility, something that was important when making the quilt was to make sure it was not just artistically expressive but also a utilitarian object that could go back into the textile ecosystem rather than being thrown away.

Reusing textiles has been a popular trend in recent years. The term upcycling has begun to gain popular attention from media like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. Anecdotally Disney Channel (a channel mostly for children, tweens, and teens) ran a campaign during the early 2010s about thrifting and upcycling clothing rather than buying new, and this is one of the most mainstream outlets there is in the U.S. However upcycling is merely a new word for a much older phenomenon. Prior to industrialization and even into the 20th century people would often reuse old garments or other tatters of fabric to make clothing, simply because there wasn’t as much to go around. An example is the dresses made in the 1920s-40s out of soldier’s parachutes from the world wars. At least one person made an entire wedding dress of one which is currently in the Smithsonian’s collection (image above).

Parachute Wedding Dress in Smithsonian Archives

Learning from the lessons of the past is one important way we can move towards the future. Upcycling is just one example of this, which fits into the larger movement of eco-futurism. Artist Sophia Al-Maria created the sets of videos The Future Was Deserts Parts I and II to explore an ecological space set free from the feeling of time. The desert feels all at once to be part of the past and future and present. In the same way, fashion is of all times. It is cyclical, all will happen as it has once happened over and over again. This is demonstrated by the re-emergence of corsets as a trend pulling from a garment that has existed for hundreds of years and re-making it for the future. The main difference is that while the desert needs no man and will exist with or without humans, fashion is a uniquely human medium that is tied to our innate drive to create.

The Future Was Desert Pt. II by Sophia Al-Maria

Climate change is a massive issue, so big that most can’t fully understand it, much less realize it tangibly. The way to tackle this is through creation, the act of making art helps us take the big ideas and break them down into something we can touch and feel. This is the process of de-alienation, re-integrating physical work with its products, letting people own their own labor. When Marx defined alienation, he also says that creation is essential to the human spirit. “The practical creation of an objective world, the fashioning of inorganic nature, is proof that man is a conscious species-being, i.e. a being which treats the species as its own essential being or itself as a species-being” (Art in Theory). Creativity is the beginning of connecting humans back to their bodies, and therefore the environment.

A huge issue with fashion right now is the over-consumption of it. Consumption is a huge contributor to climate change in general, and something that many other groups have mentioned inspired their response. The work Venus of the Rags is a very well-known piece where Italian sculpture Michelangelo Pisoletto sculpted Venus, the beauty of love, only to place a massive pile of rags in front of her entirely obscuring her front from view. The original was created in 1967, and there are re-creations worldwide, including many postcards and other products featuring its image. It is sad that Pisoletto’s work is being used to make objects sold in art museum gift stores, something he likely would have abhorred.

Venus of the Rags by Michelangelo Pisoletto

Creating one’s own clothing and other items, including art, is also important to reducing corporate consumption. As Rose B. Simpson talks about when interviewed for The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, when people have to make or grow everything they have, they are much more aware of where their things come from and tend to consume only what they need. Most people never pick up a sewing needle their entire life, but even just learning how to fix a small hole can reduce masses of textile waste. Many members of this group had never sewn before, and none had ever completed a whole quilt. Hopefully with this experience under their belts they will feel more empowered to repair their own clothing, or at least to buy/throw out less. Ideally the audience that saw the piece in person and those that will see it on Manifold will similarly feel inspired.

The collective is very important towards climate science work, and towards moving towards a healing if not an overall solution to all the problems humans have caused. We as people have to learn to get along with nature, and to do so we must put aside our differences to work together. Of course saying that is easy, the actual work of doing it is much more difficult. Artist Korakrit Arunanondchai created a series of video installations under the collective title of Painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names (usually stylized with no capital letters). Arunanondchai is a Thai artist, and his work focuses on a character who works in the denim industry, churning out painted jeans for people far away. The various films grapple with how history, religion, and other societal factors combine to make a person’s life, and affect how they see the world and work with others. This quilt is not on this same scale, but it was created in solidarity, combining many perspectives to make at least a small scale shift.

Painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names by Korakrit Arunanondchai

This project focused on taking old fabrics, garments or pillow cases that were no longer in use, and giving them a new life as a collectively made quilt. Author Jeremy Rifkin proposes that the solution to climate change is to learn to work collectively, both as a human society and as actors on the Earth as a whole in Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth. He focuses on collective action over the internet (as he says the internet of things) and 3D printing, but it can also apply to older creative methods. Rifkin’s idea of transitioning to a resilient society, based on collective action and re-use, requires that we make new life of the objects and ideas that have supposedly been outgrown, such as fabrics that would otherwise be treated as trash.

Hours of tireless work went into making this quilt. From those picking up a paintbrush for the first time to those who thought they knew what they were doing, all nine group members put a piece of themselves into the final product. We have all learned and grown over the course of this class, and we wanted to share our knowledge with others. To create something that will be useful for many years to come, even though many would have considered it trash to begin with. It will keep our hearts (and our toes) warm through the harsh winters to come, and cover our beds as a reminder during the increasingly warm summers.

Bibliography

Demos, T. J., Emily Eliza Scott, and Subhankar Banerjee. 2021. The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change. Milton: Taylor & Francis Group.

Elstein, Aaron. 2018. “BETTER WAY to DYE: A Garment District Scion Takes - ProQuest.” Www.proquest.com. June 18, 2018. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2057544509?parentSessionId=QHYn%2FS53VJMU5HGrklOxLpnDLq42lZI%2FQLdIu2BT4F0%3D&pq-origsite=primo&accountid=14784.

Harrison, Charles, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. 2009. Art in Theory / 1815-1900. Oxford: Blackwell.

Horn, Eva. n.d. “Aesthetics of the Anthropocene.” 1.5 Degrees: Interdependencies between Life, the Cosmos, and Technology.

Rifkin, Jeremy. 2022. The Age of Resilience. St. Martin’s Press.

Image Bibliography

Al-Maria, Sophia. 2023. “ the Future Was Desert (Part I & II).” Onassis.org. 2023. https://www.onassis.org/whats-on/climate-culture/audiovisual-works/the-future-was-desert-part-i-ii.

Auth, Miranda. 2017. “Painting with History in a Room Filled with Men with Funny Names 3.” 21st Century Digital Art. June 5, 2017. https://www.digiart21.org/art/painting-with-history-in-a-room-filled-with-men-with-funny-names-3.

“Parachute Wedding Dress.” 2011. Smithsonian Institution. June 6, 2011. https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/snapshot/parachute-wedding-dress.

Rapaport, Brooke Kamin. 2021. “Shinique Smith and the Politics of Fabric.” Sculpture. June 15, 2021. https://sculpturemagazine.art/shinique-smith-and-the-politics-of-fabric/.

Segreti, Giulia. 2023. “‘Venus of the Rags’ to Rise from Ashes in Italy’s Naples.” Reuters, October 27, 2023, sec. Europe. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/venus-rags-rise-ashes-italys-naples-2023-10-27/.