Art à la mode

Daniella Dooling, “Ten Foot Restriction (Bellevue Hospital),” 1998, C-type print

Art à la mode

By Stephanie Murg

The white jacket is propped primly on a pedestal. It is cropped and impossibly elegant, with buckle closures and a collar playfully rimmed in a band of red. And what adorns the bodice? Is that chinchilla? One has to get pretty close to this pristine piece of outerwear to discern that it hails not from a Lacroix runway but from Bellevue Hospital. It’s a straitjacket. And that insouciant red binding? The color corresponds to the patient’s weight and chest size. Red = 80-120 pounds, 32-39 inches, according to the label. It is covered in acrylic nails.

This straitjacket-cum-luxury good, playfully titled “Camisole,” is a 1998 work by artist Daniella Dooling, and it anchors “Dangerous Beauty,” an exhibition on view through April 21 at the Chelsea Art Museum. The show features 46 works by 27 contemporary artists and aims to “investigate and challenge society’s ideal of beauty and the designer body created and supported by mass consumerism.” Upending or even questioning assumptions about beauty is harder than it sounds. Works such as Dooling’s accomplish this by encouraging the viewer to take a second look, to revisit and revise initial impressions.

Upon entering the show, which occupies two floors of the museum’s ethereal exhibition space, one is invited to step on the scales of Jacob Dahlgren’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” (2006), a checkerboard floor covering of bathroom scales. It’s Carl Andre meets Weight Watchers. On a recent Saturday, most museumgoers tiptoed around the piece. A few were bold enough to test the scales, if gingerly, and one was pleased enough to jump on and shout out the reading: “Hey Dad, it says I weigh 126!”
A few steps from the tiled scales is an installation by Argentinean artist Nicola Costantino. In a room hung with clusters of white balloons and fake roses, an advertisement for soap plays on a loop. “Prends ton bain avec moi” (“Take your bath with me”), coos the model/artist/pitchwoman, shedding her filmy flesh-toned slip and stepping into a pool. She means it literally, because the soap is “Savon de Corps” (body soap), a limited edition bar produced in the shape of the artist’s torso. Three percent of each bar is comprised of the artist’s liposucked body fat.

For Costantino, whose oeuvre includes taxidermically-prepared pigs and clothing made from a silicone replica of human skin, “Savon de Corps” was a way to shift the focus from the body to a body — her own. “The animal body, the copies of human skin, and now, my own body become the arena for debate,” she has said. As for the origins of the idea, Costantino has noted that her soap has an antecedent in “Fight Club.” In the Chuck Palahniuk novel that was made into a 1999 film starring Brad Pitt, the character of Tyler Durden scavenges liposuction clinic dumpsters for fat that he makes into soap and sells to department stores for $20 a bar. Costantino’s has a higher price, and it smells of milk and caramel.

Two stunning works by Marilyn Minter also reward a closer look. The first, “Vomit” (2003), is a C-print of a lipsticked mouth brimming with strands of sweating pearls. Minter’s “Bottle Blond” (2006) looks like a photo of a bedazzled eye peering out from under blond bangs and layers of mascara. Only at the closest range does the viewer realize that the work is a painting, in which the artist has perfected the photorealistic illusion with the subtlest of smudging. The whorls of Minter’s fingerprints are barely visible in the enamel.

Less successful pieces in “Dangerous Beauty” include the flat, kitschy canvases of Tom Sanford, who has rendered the likenesses of the Olsen twins, Paris Hilton, and Nicole Richie in fluorescent acrylic portraits framed in fake diamonds. Large color photos by Lauren Greenfield depict girls with distracting clothing, jewelry, and hair accessories as they struggle with eating disorders. And E.V. Day’s “Portable Cat Fight” (2006), while technically impressive for its painstaking wiring of the skeletons of two felines frozen in mid-scuffle, is relevant to this exhibition largely for its title.

Ultimately, “Dangerous Beauty” casts its net too wide to enable viewers to focus on any one idea — identity, beauty, consumerism, fashion, the maddening quest for bodily perfection all vie for attention here — but a wander through the diverse works prompts viewers to question what is considered beautiful and why, as well as the repercussions of those ideals.

In her canonical 1981 book on body image, “The Obsession,” Kim Chernin writes that “it is possible to study fashion the way one can study a work of art, so that it reflects significantly upon the issues and conflicts of its own day.” Many of the works in “Dangerous Beauty” prove that art that studies fashion, and fashionable wares — whether straitjackets that might be fur chubbies or self-made soap — can pack a powerful cultural punch.

Of course, the flipside of this is that works that aspire to study the issues and conflicts of their time can amount to nothing more than a passing fad, soon to be replaced by tomorrow’s fashion.