The DeYoung Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park has the Vivienne Westwood exhibition up. I saw it yesterday, without the aid of the audio tour— I just don't like going through exhibitions with things on my ears.
There are two beaded men's jackets in the collection, their shape inspired probably by 16th-early 17th c. doublets. Integral corsets pull the waists of the wearer in and flatten the chest out. They are literally covered in glass beads, many of which are imitation pearls. Both look as if they're representing naked skin. The first, the one on the left, is covered with dark glass beads. The back of the jacket, which at the DeYoung is the side shown to the visitor, is also adorned with red beads in criss-crossing stripes, along with some red beads strung so that they hang down. The impression is that of bleeding whip cuts. The second, on the right, is covered mostly with pale peach and tan beads and pearls, creating the image of a man's chest. Red beads create the impression of a bleeding stab wound below the left nipple. The two jackets are labeled "Martyr of Love" and "Slave of Love". They are beautiful, from a purely aesthetic perspective. The beads are very intricately applied, and the effect of glistening skin is striking and gorgeously achieved.
At the DeYoung Museum yesterday, I saw these jackets and observed that the object labels declared the black jacket with the "whip cuts" to be "Martyr of Love," and the peach jacket with the "stab wound" to be "Slave of Love." It wasn't the obvious choice, and I found myself wondering if Westwood had named these jackets to counter expectation, or if someone had switched the object labels (the work of a moment, as I noticed when a card elsewhere in the exhibition had slid partially off its stand).
The security staff in the exhibition at the time I went through were people of color, some of them African American, and I wondered what it was like to protect an exhibition that had such an object in it. I wonder what other people were thinking about the differences and similarities between the way "Martyr" and "Slave" are construed. I wonder what the effect on other people is of seeing "Martyr" and "Slave" juxtaposed in this way, and what happened in people's minds because of the fact that the objects were labeled in a way that counters the expectation set up by the historical significance of red stripes on a black man's back.
Thoughts? I've tried to find pictures of the pieces in google images, but nothing comes up. |
