An interview about Spectres with curator Judith Clark

Spectres interview with curator Judith Clark, August 2004, Judith Clark Costume Gallery, London

Directed and edited by James Norton

This exhibition isn' t about catwalk shows, it' s not about glamour and it' s not about lifestyle. I think fashion and academia have been uneasy bedfellows.

I ran a gallery in London from 1997. It was set up to look very specifically at curating dress, so it was very important to me that every exhibition had a different remit: sometimes it was focused on describing dress, an exhibition dedicated to captions, they were themed according to decoration or silhouette, or previous owner or chronology or designer. Every exhibition said something different about this discipline, curating fashion. I think it was a very important moment to do so. Of course this museum,MoMuin Antwerp, was at a drawing board stage, there was a lot of interest surrounding the Costume Institute at the Met, the V& A have always had popular exhibitions, there was something in the air about curating dress and I thought it was important to make suggestions that were low budget and small scale, but where this debate could take on a physical form. That it was not only in the realm of theory but someone could actually make an attempt at building relationships between dresses, not only talking or writing about them and this exhibition is like a series of suggestions about how this might be done but with the opportunity of a greater amount of space.

This exhibition is layered with conversations that I have had that when working in the small gallery I used to run, I probably would have had one at a time, and this exhibition has allowed me in some way to have these conversations simultaneously.

The what ifs which were answered very specifically within the gallery: what if I were to ask a jeweller to design a prosthetic for a mannequin or what if I wrote to a New York illustrator and suggested the word ' Shadow Lantern' to him, the what ifs are now incorporated to create a stage set.

When I started the gallery I wanted to create something akin to a three-dimensional sketchbook. These exhibitions were not meant to be finished, polished presentations but suggestions, suggestions like those presented by Anna Piaggi in Italian Vogue. Every month she designs two double pages, picking up a trend from recent catwalk shows, and juxtaposes them with cut-outs as though creating a scrap book. What she is doing is taking catwalk images and putting them next to their historical counterparts, herself privileging one detail that may have cropped up more than usual - so she creates a trend or the idea of a trend in a rather informal way and I think that this is like a three dimensional version of that: a sort of rather, in a sense unpolished in presentation, but catchy enough to remember. I think she always gives her trends titles, and titles that stick with you. You feel as if you could go and look up all the other references.

This exhibition is about relationships between objects and details, details with details. It is not attempting to be a sort of inclusive story about dress. I am talking about objects and I am talking about the aesthetic relationship between objects. I think we love telling stories about patterns and I think this exhibition allows the visitor to be the detective, to figure out what the pieces have in common, to notice that every section has something else in common.

I think what is interesting about curating dress is what selection you make from this vast history and one thing that this exhibition points to or hopes to point to is the infinite number of possibilities, so there are very obviously pieces that have been put in one section but clearly belong to another section as well: so a black dress may have been chosen for its Victorian detail, that could easily also be in the shadow section or could, because of a distressed hem, be in the last section. So what I want the visitor to do is somehow select their version of where things go logically in their minds, so to sort of prove me wrong; if I have put a dress in one section which they would prefer in another so it is like a game of what goes with what, a game of families so if you are given this red dress do you look at its redness or the fact that it is a particular silhouette and which detail is privileged and it is drawing attention to the fact that curators privilege one detail over another all the time and place the objects forming relationships they believe to be important between two objects but by slightly varying that selection I am drawing attention to it.

The drama is not in the individual pieces but the project is in the patterns the pieces create when juxtaposed. The exhibition is open therefore to different interpretations and different readings that in a sense a child, I believe, could understand this exhibition in a way which children will pick up the rules of a game.

I think it is drawing attention to the creative process within fashion in a way it singles out what I find interesting. I am much more interested in the work-in-progress than an idea of a finished project. It has always been more interesting to me as is the idea of an experiment that I do not mind in a sense if the experiment is good or bad and the gallery that I ran gave me that freedom, in a sense I was free to make mistakes. In a museum context it is slightly more difficult, but I hope that in a sense here I have been free to make the same mistakes.

This exhibition has a sort of freedom about it, the freedom to play a game, a game of patterns of references in a seemingly infinite reference book and what I enjoy in the creative process of dress is how details happen to be incorporated into a new dress, how it is that in a sense one dress becomes another, that there are parallel futures i.e. when I started this project the story which kept coming back to me was the Borges Garden of the Forking Paths - there is a passage there talking explicitly about the forks in time, and so different futures to one past. I feel that the exhibition shows something of that. It also shows a slightly troubled attitude towards it I believe in the way that these details are inevitably distorted and what distortion is about - why they have to be changed in order to be incorporated into a new dress.

Distortion I think is something to do with concealment, it is as though you can disguise a detail, but it is also associated in contemporary dress with a sort of bravado of innovation - as though as far away you can get from the original the more creative you are. Well I think that that relationship is what has always interested me, how to in a sense harness contemporary dress to look at the past and to pick up moments from the past and sort of become an instant expert with a sort of fashionable consensus - it' s an easy path for an amateur historian.

I think exhibitions of dress are a way into exhibitions about a lot of other things and a sort of broader garden of the forking paths if you like feels to me as though it would incorporate everything, and all of life and that I have selected one path and it happens to be how we borrow trends and borrow aesthetic norms and apply them to ourselves, how we wear the present, and how we wear the present as a composite of the past, and so if this were followed up literally it would incorporate the world.

Fashion is about borrowing and stealing and concealing and manipulating and it is something that strangely designers are coy about, whereas I think it is the most interesting thing they do.

When curating an exhibition like this, something that is very important is my architectural background, and in a sense I am always linking two disciplines, fashion and architecture, and to figure out what kind of architecture might aid the display of dress and how to in some way incorporate architecture into this newish discipline of curating dress, saying something about fashion, describing and editing fashion in a way that communicates something to the visitor, so how are those patterns and quotations literally placed in relation to each other in space. When you have two dresses how do you draw attention to something the two pieces have in common? Buildings are about environment as well as about spatial organisation and so both of those things are used in presenting not only a sort of backdrop for a dress but also the relationship, the placing of two dresses in relation to one another. It also determines scale and the scale of dress is human scale, it is not like other objects where the scale can be manipulated. What we are looking at here is the human frame which is a constant, what we measure ourselves against the world with and so how I have played with it in this exhibition is both with a game of optical distortion, playing with what designers might do with a detail even though they can' t alter the scale of the human body.

There is a strong connection for me between a sort of work in progress and utopian experiments. Both are unbuilt. I have always looked at architectural utopias and it is as though they take architectural grammar to its extreme logical conclusions.

I' ve never found myself looking for one solution in dress so the idea of fashion and utopia is complicated, so the closest you can get to the idea of infinity is the investment in fashion as a work-in-progress that never ends so you are part of a process rather than a product.