Un/Ordinary Clothes: Destroying and Repairing Experience in Contemporary Clothes-Art

Abstract

The paper analyses the use of clothing in contemporary art, from twentieth-century textile art to clothing as a contemporary art form. The difference is that textile art retains clothing’s functional and distinctive values, whereas contemporary Clothes-art erases any use values to produce meanings related to identity, culture, and memory. Clothes-art occupies a polysemic space that seems to unfold between two synthetic paradigms: the destruction or emptying of clothing, as exemplified by Christian Boltanski’s gigantic 2010 installation *Personnes*, where empty clothing evokes the absence of the body; and the production and repair of the subject, as exemplified by Louise Bourgeois’s 1990s work, which used clothing and tissue sculptures to reconstruct a new corporeal self and repair her autobiography. This work anticipates *Repairing Art*, a contemporary practice with philosophical, political, and cultural implications that addresses collective memories of trauma, such as that caused by colonialism and war, as well as the theme of human survival on a dramatically damaged planet. Against this theoretical backdrop, Clothes-art emerges as a significant contemporary practice of meaning production, questioning the relationship between art, experience, culture and individual and collective memory.