FAST FASHION Edited by Bibiana Obler and Phyllis Rosenzweig With essays by Kirsty Robertson and Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu SLOW ART Contents Contents 2 Foreword Anne Collins Goodyear and John Wetenhall 6 Introduction Bibiana Obler and Phyllis Rosenzweig Essays 18 The Art of Warehousing Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu 26 The Afterlife of Clothing Kirsty Robertson Catalogue 38 Julia Brown Live feed; printer-error identification station and operator at an Italian luxurysilk textile factory; Or, before “Leaving the Factory,” the meditative disposition’s instinct for privacy, 2010 40 Martin de Thurah Stories, 2017 42 Carole Frances Lung Frau Fiber vs. the Circular Knitting Machine, 2015 44 Cat Mazza Electroknit Dymaxion, 2019 48 Senga Nengudi The Threader, 2007 50 Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt, 2013 52 Martha Rosler Martha Rosler Reads “Vogue,” 1982 54 Hito Steyerl Lovely Andrea, 2007 56 Sweatshop—Deadly Fashion, 2014 58 Rosemarie Trockel Yvonne, 1997 60 Wang Bing 15 Hours (Shi Wu Xiao Shi), 2017 64 Suggestions for Further Reading 66 Suggestions for Further Viewing 67 Author Biographies Introduction Bibiana Obler and Phyllis Rosenzweig 6/7 Fast Fashion / Slow Art, both as exhibition and catalogue, aims to catalyze broadranging conversations about issues related to the global production and distribution of textiles. What are the merits of the local and tailor-made versus the mass production of fast fashion? Is it possible to protect workers’ rights and ensure safe working conditions while keeping up with consumer demands? How does technology affect the experience and conditions of labor? What skills do the mass production of textiles require? Can design and technology offer sustainable solutions to the environmental effects of fast fashion? What role do art and popular culture have in raising consumer consciousness? labor activists, conscientious consumers, corporate lobbyists, and others have been studying and discussing textile production and distribution for decades. It was the cotton mills, after all, that sparked the Industrial Revolution. Fast Fashion / Slow Art focuses on the particularities of garment industries’ operations in this age of fast fashion. The quantity of production, the environmental effects of the global movement of raw and manufactured goods, the implications—so far mostly negative—of new technologies (such as fabrics that combine synthetic and organic materials), and the scale of waste have produced a crisis qualitatively different from that which spurred Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to formulate The Communist Manifesto. Labor conditions continue to constitute violence against workers—now especially women—but the combination of technological “innovations” with the speed and scale of moving goods, and the complicated trade politics between nations, have created new challenges. It is beyond the scope of this exhibition and catalogue to provide a comprehensive analysis of fast fashion in the twenty-first century. Rather, the works by artists and filmmakers in this show—through metaphor, poetic sensibility, irony, protest, and humor—ask us to slow down and consider the complexities of various issues surrounding the garment industry and its embeddedness in everyday lives. “Fast fashion” refers to a mode of production, distribution, and marketing that creates and feeds an appetite for the frequent consumption and discarding of clothing. Supplying inexpensive, yet stylish, garments became a leading business model in the 1990s: by restocking stores with new and incredibly cheap options, sometimes as often as twice a week, ARTISTS, FILMMAKERS, ECONOMISTS, 1 Fig. 1. Martha Rosler, Martha Rosler Reads “Vogue,” 1982, video, color, sound, 25:22 minutes. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. 8/9 2 clothing companies encouraged constant and binge consumption. The system relies on poor-quality, high-speed manufacture and low wages, as well as highly networked connectivity that allows for last-minute design decisions communicated to factories scattered across the globe.1 “Fast fashion” is just the latest incarnation of the pleasures and ills associated with garment production. Already it shows signs of yielding to a slowly increasing desire, on the part of consumers, for well-made garments that have at least some claim to sustainability and being “woke.” The videos in Fast Fashion / Slow Art coincide with the rise—and perhaps incipient waning—of fast fashion. They address this stage in the history of the garment industry in diverse ways, but they all play with the documentary form, injecting it with performance and fiction, the better to get at the truth of their subjects. In “The Painter of Modern Life,” Charles Baudelaire defined modernity with fashion in mind: the eponymous artist “makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.”2 Likewise these videos represent the beauty and ugliness of the millennial moment—how this period’s struggles are distinctive, but also belong to the ever-lengthening history of modernity. Martha Rosler’s now classic Martha Rosler Reads “Vogue” (fig. 1) introduces many of the themes in the show: the divide between the privilege associated with fashion and the adverse conditions of sweatshop laborers; murky relations between fashion and art patronage; and the call for viewers to realize their own complicity. Rosler dedicates most of her twenty-five-minute video to a deadpan feminist critique focused on Vogue magazine. In a short musical interlude to the tune of Blondie’s “Die Young Stay Pretty,” she presents footage from a sweatshop, presumably in New York’s Chinatown, accompanied by statistics on garment production: “Over 40% of clothes sold in the US are made in the Third World. Most of the rest are made in Third World enclaves in NYC, Miami, Chicago, and L.A.” At that time, in 1982, the US garment industry was still in a relatively early stage of its seismic shift away from primarily US-based production. In 1965, less than 5 percent of clothing sold in the United States was made abroad. Recent statistics indicate that the opposite is now the case—about 97 percent is made abroad—although the tide may be slowly reversing.3 Many of the videos in the exhibition not only take up issues broached by Rosler but also relate to her tactics. In Lovely Andrea (fig. 2), Hito Steyerl combines footage from multiple sources and inserts herself into Fig. 2. Hito Steyerl, Lovely Andrea, 2007, single-channel video, color, sound in English, Japanese, and German with English subtitles, 30 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. Image CC 4.0 Steyerl. Fig. 3. Julia Brown, Live feed; printer-error identification station and operator at an Italian luxury-silk textile factory; Or, before “Leaving the Factory,” the meditative disposition’s instinct for privacy, 2010, HD color video, sound, 2:49 minute loop. Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 4. Carole Frances Lung, Frau Fiber and Bob standing in front of a ring spinner at Echoview Fiber Mill, Weaverville, North Carolina, taken on-site during filming of Frau Fiber vs. The Ring Spinner, 2016, photograph. Courtesy of ILGWU archive. Fig. 5. Carole Frances Lung, Frau Fiber vs. Stoll, 2016, video. Filmed at StrickChic, Apolda, Germany. Courtesy of ILGWU archive. Fig. 6. Institute 4 Labor Generosity Workers & Uniforms (Frau Fiber’s headquarters and experimental factory, 322 Elm Avenue, Long Beach, California) on the anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, March 25, 2016. Courtesy of ILGWU archive. Fig. 7. Frau Fiber at the Institute 4 Labor Generosity Workers & Uniforms in the annual production of 146 commemorative blouses honoring those who died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, March 25, 2016. Courtesy of ILGWU archive. 10 / 11 the narrative to offer a feminist critique—in this case, of the industry of bondage pornography. Steyerl, even more than Rosler, unsettles distinctions between documentary and fiction. Her focus provides a lens for a broad-ranging interrogation of what constitutes freedom and bondage, including the drone of sweatshop labor (this time to the tune of Donna Summer’s 1983 “She Works Hard for the Money”). The pace of Rosler’s and Steyerl’s videos is deliberate, making certain demands on a viewer’s attention span, but interspersed with dance music and varied visual evidence. Julia Brown’s Live feed; printererror identification station and operator at an Italian luxury-silk textile factory; Or, before “Leaving the Factory,” the meditative disposition’s instinct for privacy (fig. 3) asks the viewer to stand just behind a worker and experience her labor, which appears in an unending loop. The screen glows with scrolling silk as the woman checks for machine-made mistakes. Brown foregrounds beauty and drudgery, and buries, for a researcher to uncover, a critique of the entanglement of the garment industry with art patronage. Carole Frances Lung (Frau Fiber’s archivist and biographer) and Wang Bing take slowness to even more extreme lengths in their durational videos. Lung’s four-and-a-half-hour Frau Fiber vs. the Circular Knitting Machine is the first in a series of real-time films in which her avatar competes by hand against means of industrial production. In addition to taking on a sock factory, Frau Fiber has faced off with a ring spinner (fig. 4) and a flatbed knitting machine (fig. 5). Of the artists in Fast Fashion / Slow Art, Lung is the most wholly concentrated on garment industry critique and activism. Her studio and headquarters, the Institute 4 Labor Generosity Workers & Uniforms (ilgwu), pays homage to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, which Rosler also thanks in the credits of her video. In addition to starring in time-based media, Frau Fiber conducts workshops and performances that draw heavily on historical research. The anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, wherein 146 garment workers died in 1911, is the occasion for an annual event (figs. 6–7). In Frau Fiber vs. the Circular Knitting Machine, Lung approaches her activism with deadpan humor. Wang, by contrast, is a filmmaker who is refashioning cinema verité for the twenty-first century. 3 4 6 5 7 8 15 Hours (Shi Wu Xiao Shi) (fig. 8), his longest film to date, records a day in the life of a garment-processing facility in Huzhou, China—the length of the film determined by the length of the work day.4 Wang’s “cinema of labor,” as Elena Pollacchi has described his oeuvre, relies on vast footage made possible (on his limited budget) by digital technology. His films are notable for how intimately they convey people’s everyday lives and the effects of China’s rapid economic growth.5 Although their work is stylistically different, both Wang and Rosler deploy documentary footage to explore the particular challenges people face in their own time. Martha Rosler Reads “Vogue” comments, for example, on the problem of contracting (the scandal regarding where Nancy Reagan’s high-fashion clothes were actually made). Wang’s attention to garment workers—in 15 Hours and also in another film, Bitter Money (2016), which begins by tracking the journey of two teenage cousins from Fig. 8. Wang Bing, 15 Hours (Shi Wu Xiao Shi), 2017, 16:9 film, color, sound in Chinese Mandarin and dialect with English subtitles; in two parts, 7 hours, 55 minutes each. Edition of 6 + 2 AP, courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris. Fig. 9. Rosemarie Trockel, installation view of Yvonne (1997, video) at the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; courtesy of GfZK Leipzig. 9 12 / 13 10 rural China to Huzhou—provides a granular view of the widespread phenomenon of migrant labor in contemporary China. The videos by Rosemarie Trockel, Cat Mazza, Senga Nengudi, and Martin de Thurah share concerns with the films discussed above, including an interest in the performative and for relations between hand-making and industrial production. However, they take a different tack. Trockel’s Yvonne features friends of all ages cavorting in the artist’s eccentric woolen creations. The only other work in the show from the twentieth century, like Rosler’s video, Yvonne conjures a nexus of ideas that plays out in myriad ways in the twenty-first. Sometimes exhibited as part of an installation that includes photogravures of video stills and a suitcase containing items worn in the video (fig. 9), Yvonne asks to be understood in the context of Trockel’s career. Famously, for example, she interrogated the privileged status of painting by having corporate logos and other impersonal motifs converted into patterns for machines to knit—and exhibiting these in lieu of oils on canvas. Highly personalized adornments were handmade for Yvonne’s cast. Together, the various modes of production suggest an investigation of the relationship between handicraft, the work of art, and late capitalist technologies. As an artist who consistently works with textiles, often with an activist agenda, Mazza is closest to Lung in her overall practice. Perhaps most famously, she organized makers from around the world to contribute to her Nike Blanket Petition, which appealed to the corporation for fair labor conditions with crocheted squares in lieu of signatures (fig. 10). Her scrutiny of the intersection between technology and textiles, however, puts her into a direct lineage with Trockel. For Fast Fashion / Slow Art, Fig. 10. Cat Mazza, Nike Blanket Petition, 2003–8, crochet and knit, natural and synthetic yarns, and web media, 15 × 5 1⁄2 feet. Image courtesy of the artist. Fig. 11. Martin de Thurah, Stories, 2017, video, black-and-white, sound, 2:04 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Epoch Films, New York. Fig. 12. T-shirts produced by National Public Radio’s Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt, 2013. Collection of Pietra Rivoli, photo by Blaine Dunn. Fig. 13. Aftenposten, Sweatshop—Deadly Fashion, 2014, fiveepisode web series. Courtesy Aftenposten, photography by Pål Karlsen. 14 / 15 Mazza has conceived a video installation, Electroknit Dymaxion, that will combine grid-based designs drawn from multiple sources, including the Textile Museum’s collection (Plates 10–11). After converting motifs into knitting patterns with the help of an open-source program she developed in 2004 with the help of programmer Eric St. Onge, Mazza will have her knitting machines use the patterns to create “paintings,” some of which she will animate and project onto a polyhedron inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map. If Trockel targets the elitism and sexism of the art world through outsourcing and hand-making, Mazza aims to connect communities through an open-source web application that generates patterns for hand-making. Nengudi’s The Threader (Plate 12), like Yvonne, glories in the physical relationship between skein and human body. As a portrait of one of the last highly skilled textile workers employed in a New York City factory, Nengudi’s film alludes to the dwindling number of such jobs in the United States. The Scalamandré factory, founded in 1929 in Queens, New York, supplies luxury decorative textiles to the White House, among others. In 2004, for the sake of cutting costs, it moved most of its production to a technologically up-to-date facility in North Carolina. Only a few artisans remained, in rented quarters, including Amir Baig, the star of The Threader. While the film is elegiac in mood, Nengudi’s focus is on the beauty of such work and the way labor can be akin to dance.6 In Martin de Thurah’s short, staged film, Stories (fig. 11), a girl walks through Berlin peeling white T-shirts off her body like some variation of a clown car, discarding them with insouciance. The impression of a camera simply recording without judgment creates a surreal dissonance between real and unreal. That the T-shirt is both indispensable and utterly disposable in this dreamlike sequence speaks pointedly to a theme of so much of the work in Fast Fashion / Slow Art: the invisibility of the human cost of producing fast fashion. A final cluster of videos includes more mainstream fare. National Public Radio (npr)’s Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt, an interactive website combining text with video, documents the process entailed in making a T-shirt, from growing cotton in Texas to sewing in Bangladesh to transporting the shirts back to npr listeners (fig. 12). Sweatshop—Deadly Fashion (fig. 13), a reality show produced by Aftenposten, Norway’s largest 11 12 13 newspaper, took three young fashion bloggers to Cambodia to see what working conditions are like there, turning two of them into activists. In both of these, the imagined viewer is unambiguously the (relatively well-off) consumer and the goal is consciousness-raising. Also worth noting in this context is comedian John Oliver’s meticulously researched 2015 segment on fast fashion for Last Week Tonight, which hilariously and incisively exposes the human price of dirt-cheap fashion and how previous exposés have made no difference.7 Whereas most of the videos focus on production, the two guest essays in this catalogue address what happens after clothing is made: Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu analyzes the labor of distribution, and Kirsty Robertson the environmental impact of discarded textiles. Tu and Robertson point to new directions in scholarship, and in their sensitivity to the cultural connotations of their studies, offer their own play on the documentary form. The work by these artists, filmmakers, and scholars cannot solve all the intractable problems plaguing the textile industry. But they can be sites to address these issues creatively and from new angles. When we (read: consumers) think of mass production, we sometimes forget that there are still people—often with specialized skills—involved. Conversely, when we (read: conscientious consumers) call for local consumption over global, we may not take into account the complex calculus required to evaluate the political and environmental pros and cons. Taken together, the works of Fast Fashion / Slow Art ask viewers to pay attention to the people and issues concerned in the fabrics—quite literally—of our lives. 16 / 17 1 For a helpful overview, see Elizabeth Cline, Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion (New York: Penguin, 2012). 2 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Kapo Press, 1964), 12. 3 Cline, Overdressed, 41; Harry Moser and Sandy Montalbano, “Why Made-inUSA Fashion Is Turning Heads,” Industry Week, January 18, 2018, https://www. industryweek.com/economy/why-madeusa-fashion-turning-heads. 4 Britta Bürger, “Der radikale Blick des Wang Bing,” Deutschlandfunk Kultur, July 15, 2017, https://www. deutschlandfunkkultur.de/independentfilm-in-china-der-radikale-blick-deswang-bing.2168.de.html?dram:article_ id=391151. 5 Elena Pollacchi, “Wang Bing’s Cinema: Shared Spaces of Labor,” WorkingUSA: The Journal of Labor and Society 17, no. 1 (March 2014): 31–43. 6 Julie V. Iovine, “A Song of the Loom Is Silenced,” New York Times, March 25, 2004. 7 “Fashion: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO),” April 26, 2015, https://youtu.be/VdLf4fihP78. Author Biographies Suggestions for Further Viewing Zelnik, Frederic, dir. The Weavers. Austria: Zelnik-Film, 1927. Arnold, Jack, dir. With These Hands. New York: Promotional Films, 1950. Mackendrick, Alexander, dir. The Man in the White Suit. UK: Ealing Studios, 1951. Gordon, Michael, dir. Pillow Talk. USA: Arwin Productions, 1959. Patwardhan, Anand, dir. Occupation: Mill Worker. Brooklyn, NY: First Run/ Icarus Films, 1996. Peled, Micha X, dir. China Blue. Toronto: Teddy Bear Films, 2005. De la Torre, Sergio, and Vicky Funari, dirs. Maquilapolis. Netherlands: Independent Television Service, 2006. Carracedo, Almudena, dir. Made in L.A. San Francisco: Independent Television Service, 2007. Majid, Hannan, and Richard York, dirs. The Machinists. UK: Rainbow Collective, 2010. Martin, Uwe H., dir. White Gold: Texas Blues. Denmark: Bombay Flying Club, 2011. Gupta, Meghna, dir. Unravel. London: Soul Rebel Films, 2012. 66 / 67 Morgan, Andrew, dir. The True Cost. USA: Life Is My Movie Entertainment Company, 2015. Akers, Ben, dir. Alex James: Slowing Down Fast Fashion. UK: Journeyman Pictures, 2016. Jain, Rahul, dir. Machines. USA: Kino Lorber, 2016. Wang Bing, dir. Bitter Money. New York: Icarus Films, 2016. McIlvride, David, and Roger Williams, dirs. RiverBlue. Los Angeles: Paddle Productions, 2017. Bibiana Obler is associate professor of art history at the George Washington University. Her book Intimate Collaborations: Kandinsky and Münter, Arp and Taeuber (2014) investigates the role of artist couples in the emergence of abstract art. She is working on a second book, Anti-Craft, on relations between craft and art in the late twentieth century. Kirsty Robertson is associate professor of contemporary art and museum studies at Western University in London, Ontario. She has published widely on activism, visual culture, museums, and textiles and is a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, a group of artists, scientists, and cultural researchers working on plastic pollution in the Great Lakes region. Phyllis Rosenzweig is curator emerita at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. While at the Hirshhorn, she organized many exhibitions of contemporary artists including Byron Kim, Sherrie Levine, Glenn Ligon, and Kiki Smith. More recently, she curated exhibitions at G Fine Art and American University Art Museum, both in Washington, DC, as well as BronxArtSpace in New York City. Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu is associate professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University. She is the author of The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion (2010) and Consuming Skin: Experiments in Race and Beauty Across the Pacific (forthcoming). Her writing has also appeared in American Quarterly, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and n+1, among other publications. Text and photography © 2019 Bowdoin College Book © 2019 Scala Arts Publishers, Inc. This research was supported by a Craft Research Fund grant from the Center for Craft. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Fast Fashion / Slow Art, organized by the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine in cooperation with the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at the George Washington University and the George Washington University Museum / Textile Museum, Washington, DC. On view in the historic Flagg building of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington, DC, August 8– December 15, 2019; the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine, January 30–August 2, 2020. First published in 2019 by Scala Arts Publishers, Inc. c/o CohnReznick LLP 1301 Avenue of the Americas 10th floor New York, NY 10019 www.scalapublishers.com Scala – New York – London Distributed outside Bowdoin College in the book trade by ACC Art Books 6 West 18th Street Suite 4B New York, NY 10011 ISBN 978-1-78551-223-0 Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. Edited by Magda Nakassis Designed by Antonio Alcalá and Ricky Altizer of Studio A Printed in China 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of Bowdoin College and Scala Arts Publishers, Inc. Every effort has been made to acknowledge correct copyright of images where applicable. Any errors or omissions are unintentional and should be notified to the Publisher, who will arrange for corrections to appear in any reprints. Front cover: (top) Still from Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt, 2013, interactive website © 2013 National Public Radio, Inc. Photo credit: David Gilkey/NPR (see pages 50–51). (bottom) Still from Rosemarie Trockel, Yvonne, 1997, video, black-and-white and color, sound, 14 minutes. Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig. © 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; courtesy of GfZK Leipzig (see pages 58–59). Frontispiece: Cat Mazza, work in progress for Fast Fashion / Slow Art video installation (image altered), 2018. Photograph courtesy of the artist (see pages 44–47). Page 2: Detail (altered) from page 51. Page 6: Detail (altered) from page 12. Page 18: Detail (altered) from page 19. Page 26: Detail (altered) from page 33. Page 36: Detail (altered) from page 11. Page 62: Detail (altered) from page 57. 

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