Fabricated Standards: Exhibitions of Textile and Filmic Formatting Practices

Carla Gabrí, M.A.
PhD supervisor: Prof. Dr. Fabienne Liptay

The dissertation project examines contemporary artistic positions at the intersection of the media of film and textiles that deal with formatting processes in industrial and post-industrial eras as well as with practices of standardization, normalization, and scaling in the context of commercial relationships. Beginning with David Summers (Real Spaces), who understands formats as being determinative of the relationship between image content and viewer, and David Joselit (After Art), who sees works of art as globally circulating objects, the specific way textiles are presented in film will be theoretically discussed on various levels.  

For one, textiles, as a medium, can be used to measure and reproduce time-based processes. An example of this is the way in which Frank B. Gilbreth’s chronocyclegraphic studies on the proper way to iron a man’s shirt become “images of efficiency” (Scott Curtis). These images are in turn met with a rebuff in Diller+Scofidio’s multimedia installation Bad Press: Dissident Housework Series (USA 1993–1998) in the form of the subversive gesture of inefficient, dysfunctional ironing as a time regime and a form of bodily dressage. 

Second, textiles can be organized in catalogues and swatch books according to the logic of collection and classification. This precise practice is broken down, for example, in Sascha Regina Reichstein’s short film Patterns of the Conquerors (A/GB 2017), in which John Forbes Watson’s books of fabric samples, The Textile Manufacturers, compiled in 1866, are surveyed and critiqued. In the process, Watson’s idea of a small-scale “mobile museum” (Felix Driver) is further developed in the form of a short film. 

Moreover, on the basis of the manufacture and trade of textiles, one can inquire as to the socio-political power of scale, assembly-line production, and pattern, which can be observed, for example, in Elizabeth Price’s two-channel video installation K (GB 2015). In this work, the image of digitally animated women’s stockings being rhythmically packaged in an industrial manner is juxtaposed with the programmatic title “woman trying to escape a pattern.” 

From these three perspectives, the dissertation will examine the political implications and formatting practices on which textiles – as materials of cultural identities – and film – as an instrument used to survey and disseminate relevant world views and knowledge systems – are based. At the same time, one must also inquire as to the conditions under which a critical reflection of Western hegemonic practices could be possible.