Abstract
In October 2000 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City debuted a retrospective dedicated to the Italian fashion designer Giorgio Armani. The exhibition was co-curated by Germano Celant, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim, and Harold Koda, then Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, and was designed by the stage director Robert Wilson. Giorgio Armani subsequently embarked on a five-and-a-half-year-long international tour that included stops at the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, London’s Royal Academy, the National Roman Museum Baths of Diocletian, and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, among others. The inaugural exhibition at the Guggenheim was the subject of criticism and controversy regarding a reported $15 million donation to the museum from Giorgio Armani S.p.A. As with other monographic exhibitions of contemporary fashion designers, Giorgio Armani was perceived as an advertisement rather than a retrospective.
Highlights
In the article “Fashion and the Art Museum: When Giorgio Armani Went to the Guggenheim,” John Potvin underscores the exhibition’s inaugural venue as exemplary of the spatial metaphor of the “notional white cube.”[6]. The “white cube,” as initially outlined by Brian O’Doherty, is both self-referential and subject to a particular set of established architectural codes and conventions that largely concern the demarcation of sacred space
Through its art and architecture, the museum embodies a “complete experience of radical modernism for the visitor and marks a significant if not sacred space, whose famous spiraling pathway, as if ascending heaven-bound, feels physically analogous to the modernist upward trajectory towards pure form, or purity itself.”[8]. Ideology is embedded in architecture
Grounded in a close reading of texts by and about Walter Benjamin and, secondarily, Michel Foucault, the labyrinth will be introduced as both a metaphor and a method. These theoretical considerations will be put in dialogue with two case studies, Giorgio Armani (2000) and Rei Kawakubo / Comme Des Garçons: Art of the In-Between (2017)
Summary
The labyrinth is, not a realm of transcendence but of inversions in which the repressed realities of the mundane world return...”[15] They continue, “As an institution MoMA appears to be a refuge from the materialist society: a cultural haven, an ideal world apart It exalts precisely the values and experiences it apparently rejects by elevating them to the universal and timeless realm of spirit.”[16] By implicating the everyday and consumerism, Duncan and Wallach’s classification of the museum as labyrinth is rendered poignant for displays of fashion, design, and decorative arts. Grounded in a close reading of texts by and about Walter Benjamin and, secondarily, Michel Foucault, the labyrinth will be introduced as both a metaphor and a method These theoretical considerations will be put in dialogue with two case studies, Giorgio Armani (2000) and Rei Kawakubo / Comme Des Garçons: Art of the In-Between (2017). Throughout the essay, fashion’s unique potential to activate and illustrate the labyrinthine model will be emphasized
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