Fashioning art.

The burgeoning crossover between the worlds of fashion and art is increasingly apparent - contemporary work is imbued with concerns about gender identity, fashion photography is entering into the commercial galleries and, most recently, the fashion business is a growing source of economic aid for the arts. In the past six months, there have been three major exhibitions at New York City's Guggenheim Museum alone, as well as other international events that interweave fashion and art.

The most publicized event was the inaugural exhibition of the Hugo Boss Prize finalists last October. Hugo Boss is a German men's fashion company that has recently formed a five-year partnership with the Guggenheim, a deal that includes a gallery in their SoHo branch with the Boss name. The Hugo Boss award, open to artists of all ages and nationalities working in any medium, granted $50,000 to the winner for "a significant body of work that imparts a fresh spirit of creativity and expression." The short-list nominees were Laurie Anderson, Janine Antoni, Matthew Barney, Stan Douglas, Cai Guo Qiang and Yasumasa Morimura. As in London, home of the prestigious Turner prize on which the Hugo Boss seems to be, in part, modeled, the time lapse between the opening of the exhibition and the announcement of the winner fostered a certain amount of public gossip about who would be selected. However, unlike the Turner prize, there was relatively little discussion of the outcome (in the U.K. a public bet is opened), and there was even, for a time, discrepancy as to who actually did win. The winner was Matthew Barney. The lack of media attention could be attributed to the fact that it was the first award of its kind, but the significant prize money and national exposure will no doubt lend the prize the prestige that it obviously desires, though not necessarily deserves.

The second event opened in mid-February and was titled "Rrose is a Rrose is a Rrose: Gender Performance in Photography." The title cross-references Gertrude Stein's famous dictum and the name of Marcel Duchamp's feminine alter-ego, Rrose Selavy, which when pronounced in French sounds like, "Eros, it's the life." The criteria of the work in the show, as quoted in the catalog introduction by curator Jennifer Blessing, is "art that takes as its subject the body and its covering." This covering includes make-up, body and facial hair, tattoos and, of course, clothing. Beginning with artists working in Europe in the '20s and '30s such as Duchamp, Man Ray (who also posed as a woman) and Claude Cahoun (whose work has recently been rediscovered), and leading through contemporary artists, such as Lyle Ashton Harris and Catherine Opie, the exhibit examines the photographic production of transgendered dress. As Blessing continues, "This exhibition examines the manner in which photography's strong aura of realism and objectivity promotes a fantasy of total gender transformation, or, conversely, allows the articulation of incongruity between the posing body and its assumed costume." Implied is the cooperation between photography and "dress" that stretches from projected fantasy to opposition of traditionally gendered stereotypes. This interaction could even lead to a comparison of the nude in painting to fashion in photography. (The CCA gallery in Glasgow, Scotland also recently mounted an exhibition, "Inbetweener," which was concerned with gender transformations and dress that included many of the same contemporary artists.) It is interesting to note that three of the six Hugo Boss finalists were also included in this exhibition: Antoni, Barney and Morimura.

In March, the Guggenheim adapted one of the exhibitions featured in the 1996 Biennale di Firenze, "Art/Fashion." The first part of the exhibition traces the interaction of art and fashion in the early twentieth century. Studies for ties, dresses and suits were incorporated into the goals and philosophies of both the Futurists and Constructivists. Surrealist artists Jean Cocteau and Salvador Dali collaborated with Elsa Schiaparelli, a haute couture designer, in the 1920s. Subsequent artists, including Lucio Fontana, Andy Warhol and Nam Jun Paik, all made wearable art, or at least clothing pieces, at some point during their careers. Although some of these works were interesting, these token pieces underscored certain aspects of the second part of the exhibition which was dedicated to contemporary artists whose work centers around clothing that is for the most part not only unwearable, but work whose force is derived from that calculated opposition: for example, Jan Fabre's dress made of scarabs, Beverly Semmes's elongated wedding dresses and Jana Sterbek's frame of heated coils. Weeding through the diverse references, the undercurrent of the exhibition showed that the fashion of the avant-garde of the early part of the century, furthering the collapse of the distinctions between art and life, is now integrated as part of the visible language, a coded index of a society that is both oppressive and liberating.

At New York City's Museum of Modern Art, an upcoming exhibition of 69 black and white photographs from Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills" series is being sponsored by Madonna, whose successful career epitomizes the power of look and style. She also helped finance the recent exhibition and book of photographs by Tina Modotti, whom Modonna hopes to portray on film. Personal intentions aside, this support allows the realization of these exhibitions. Photography models, the grandchildren of the painter's model who once lived in the garret apartment, are now collecting photography with their enormous earnings. These mostly women, and other fashion-types including music and Hollywood celebrities, are becoming an essential part of the patronage of the arts. With the 30-year government support for the arts decreasing dramatically, the high profile fashion industry is now stepping in with enthusiasm and interest. Cynthia Rowley, an internationally known fashion designer based in New York City, was recently billed as the special guest in a "cutting-edge" fashion show benefit for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. In New York, galleries are showing fashion photography regularly - James Danziger, Morris Healy, Pat Hern, Staley Wise. In Paris, one of the most visible art galleries, Galerie du Jour, is owned by Agnes B., the creator of a successful, self-titled fashion line. The gallery is in a courtyard right beside one of her busy shops. Helmut Lang, a maverick Austrian fashion designer, used photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, printed full page with the company name on the facing page, for a recent publicity campaign. Perhaps it is ironic that today, when the possibilities for the future are imagined in simulated or cybernetic terms, that fashion, often handmade and economically elitist, and its entourage are both a critical point of reference for identity and a new mainstay for art institutions.