Extreme Examples of Wearable Art
Not all garments created as wearable art are made from traditional fibers or fabrics, and not all such artworks are meant for ordinary, practical use. Performance and conceptual artists have sometimes produced examples which are more provocative than useful. Trashion is another branch of extraordinary wearable art. The Portland Oregon Trashion Collective, Junk to Funk, has been using creating outrageous art garments out of trash. www.junktofunk.org
A well known example is the "Electric Dress", a ceremonial wedding kimono-like costume consisting mostly of variously colored electrified and painted light bulbs, enmeshed in a tangle of wires, created in 1956 by the Japanese Gutai artist Atsuko Tanaka. This extreme garment was something like a stage costume. Not really wearable in an everyday, practical sense, it functioned rather as part of a daring work of performance art (though the "performance" element consisted merely of the artist's wearing the piece while mingling with spectators in a gallery setting).
In Nam June Paik's 1969 performance piece called "TV Bra for Living Sculpture," Charlotte Moorman played the cello while wearing a bra made of two small television sets.
More recently, Canadian artist Andrea Vander Kooij created a group of pieces called "Garments for Forced Intimacy" (2006). According to an essay at Concordia University's Faculty of Fine Arts gallery website, these hand-knit articles of clothing are designed to be worn by two people, and they, "as the name states, compel the wearers into uncharacteristic proximity."
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“There are many examples of women that have excelled in learning, and even in war, but this is no reason we should bring ‘em all up to Latin and Greek or else military discipline, instead of needle-work and housewifry.”
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“To save the theatre, the theatre must be destroyed, the actors and actresses must all die of the plague. They poison the air, they make art impossible. It is not drama that they play, but pieces for the theatre. We should return to the Greeks, play in the open air; the drama dies of stalls and boxes and evening dress, and people who come to digest their dinner.”
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