this month's issue

Isak Immanuel Clothes x Sun Clothes wet with tears. Keep walking. The clothes begin to dry. This series of photographs began as a travel work in August of 2006. There are ten images total in the series. Images were taken in Prague, Paris, Berlin, Seoul, Haulien, and Taipei. The clothes used in this work were found discarded in the streets and outdoor public spaces of each city. The primary motivation of this work was to create tableaux that assembled repeating but variant relationships to absence and memory, between two people or between a person and a shifting topography. On arriving in a new city often my first intention is to get lost. Get lost from a dominant given route and from pieces of my own memory. To look for a story of clothes, touch of city and skin, the resonance often to remain in pieces. Discarded. Left behind. The people who wore them that I do not know and are now absent. I begin somewhere here as a wandering point of contention with pieces of urban anonymity, loneliness, and recognition. Images rest inbetween, lost and found, the finding and the losing, the weight of memory, wind to a flag or a kite, and the slipped trace. With a cartography of questions, I take to the road. Why do I travel? Why do I pick up and wear these clothes? From discarded, what movement holds one’s body, what release can be found in movement? To continue on a train. Overlooking the ocean. My son is missing. When I first began this work, the clothes I found where used directly as a series of “costumes” in the context of a live performance. As well, the performance work was site-specific to outdoor spaces of the city creating another link to where the clothes had been found. Initially this work was done in Taipei, Taiwan (apart of a residency at the Taipei Artist Village) and in Seoul, South Korea (where I was working in collaboration with a Korean artist, Dohee Lee, who I met in the US). In August of 2006 I came to the Czech Republic to take part in a residency in Tabor at CESTA (Cultural Exchange Station Tabor Arts). I worked on one project there with a small ensemble and on this work individually. During this time it was no secret I always wanted to go to Prague. It was a little awkward, sometimes strained, sometimes funny because the context of the residency was in this beautiful small town tucked away on the hillside and an ideal haven for artistic concentration for many, but my thoughts remained on this almost mythical city about a two hour train ride away. Ever since I was a teenager I have felt this strong push and pull between rural and urban areas. As a child I grew up on the mesas of a small town, Taos, New Mexico, in the US. When I was thirteen years old my family moved to the inner-city area of East Los Angeles. From this point on, I have always experienced both a strong fascination and alienation to most cities. It is a relationship both intimate and distant. I want to look, but in a way I am always still coming on a train from a mesa above a small town. In Prague, one of the first pieces of clothes I found, near a small bush by the River Vltava, was a turquoise pair of pants with a checkered pattern. I had placed them in a transparent plastic bag and had walked about a mile down the river when a very frail elderly woman approached me. She began speaking softly and urgently, initially in Czech, to which I did not understand; soon after switching to a quiet yet decisive broken English, I gathered that the pants I had found belonged to her son. Her son was missing and she had not seen him for many days. Again and again she kept asking, “Do you know the future?” Startled and at loss, I told her I did not. She said her son had a shirt with a matching pattern to the pants and she insisted that she take the pants as a means to help find him. She then quickly took the pants and ran off in the direction of which she said was her home. Dumbfounded, I continued to walk along the River Vltava empty handed. I did not pick any more clothes up that day, but this brief exchange left an imprint I still carry. It remains with me as an emotional and starkly opaque meditation on absence. A story of clothes I can glimpse but can’t complete. In the following days I collected a few more articles of clothing found in various places about the city. During this same time the DV camera I was using stopped working. The only means of documentation I still had was a 35mm camera. After overcoming my initial distress, I decided to create a series of photographic tableau. If not for the DV camera breaking down, most likely, I would have simply continued the work with clothes for time-based performance and video; I would never have done the constructed still images. This in many ways though was an appropriate return to my earlier studies in painting and photography prior to dance and theatre. Actually one of the strongest inspirations for me to come to the Czech Republic was because when I was a student in the fine arts, I really admired the Czech Photographer Jan Saudek. His work was strange and foreign yet immediate to me. In one small cellar with a boundless window, it was like a fauvist romance layering history, politics, art, fashion, and fantasy. It is easy to see his work as kitsch, but as well, his earlier work in particular has a subtle yet strong social dynamic. Composed so acutely in the relationship of oppression and restriction to the necessity of invention and dreams, as well as the relationship of painting, photography, and performance, it was an inspiration to me in many ways. So it was fitting that now when I was in Prague, to return to the directorial aspects of still photographic images. First though, similar to that of a photojournalist like Weegee in a naked yet often opaque city, with a 35mm camera, throughout the night and into the morning, I wandered the near empty streets, along the waterway, under the bridges, and near the transport stations into the early morning. This became my process and precarious axis. I collected clothes, memories, and stories, yet also I became emotionally and physically emptied. It became easy for a loneliness and social distance to cut me reflexively. As a solitary person, my desire became a question of how to use the clothes to create a portrait of two people. It is with this space of hypothesis, memory trace, and a few select articles of found clothing that the photographic series continued; in Prague, and after in Berlin, Paris, and then in Seoul, and Taipei; each city with their own story, frame, opacity, and unique urban topography. For each tableau photograph I made there were several other images of city exploration made prior. They act as glimpses of a necessary research. The last tableau photograph that I took in this series was in Haulien, Taiwan overlooking the Pacific Ocean and facing in the approximate direction of the western coast of the United States. The clothes I used here, a set of worker uniforms with a factory logo and the English text “Authorized Service” I found behind an abandoned building near the ocean. I felt this was a fitting end point to the travel series, facing back across the horizon line of the water and into the direction from which my travels began. Looking out across a space vacant of the city, in a question of where absence and quotidian memories coexist. Made in. Found in. A retracing of steps. An empty print. One of the first things that I would look at on a piece of clothing I found is the tag. Seeing the brand name and where it was made gives some trace. Regardless, of country, one thing was similar; almost always the clothes were made in a different country than which they were found. This I find to be a significant travel story in itself. Each in their own way, the migrations and the disposability of people or product are often manipulated by economy. Clothes often carry details of this intimate knowledge. I work with incompletion, imagination, and repetition to create my own meditations on impermanence. There is a quote by the fashion designer Ralph Lauren that I find interesting in this regard, quite haunting in a way particularly considering the conditions in which many of his clothes were made, he states, “I don't design clothes, I design dreams”. These “dreams” offer another story of clothes. With the discarded, often stained or torn garments I find, I work directorially with a tableau vivant of looking into a distance, or a dream, and a questionable construct of dreams; the intention is a kind of pictorial mirage that holds the image up between an appearance and disappearance. The perception of another person, or one’s perception of his or her own body shifts often quite dramatically relative to dress. Fashion holds a tremendous power in this regard. It can become a mythmaking that dares, in part, because of its own impermanence. It is as if the sense of dream is designed to appear and disappear. It is a very human preoccupation. Dance can dare because of its ephemerality in its own way. But as well the traces of a past linger with the body just as a body does abandoned clothing and clothing does a culture. The lens here can be similar to that of the Situationist’s term ‘Dérive’ or to drift. These questions of sense phenomena to a place, object, or person relative to a carried or wandering memory often loiter in their own particular agitations. These returns remain as questions to what could be considered ‘past’ or ‘ephemeral’. Seeing or meeting a person for the first time, or for the audience in viewing a performance in a theatrical context, clothes give a direct but partial reply to the question “who are you?” For dance I want to keep this question active, moving and shifting with incompletion and transformation. With clothes, I often am drawn to articles that connect to the everyday or function as uniforms of industry. In looking at the insignias of a city, contemporary movement and stillness, I work in a question of location and memory. I can never fully acclimate, yet I try on different identities while often wishing to forget one’s of the past. Here, clothes often work with movement as an opening and closing, “made in”, “found in”, size, color, a tear, stain, or particular insignia, here dance becomes its own story of clothes. Choreography or a movement phrase, just like clothes can be something you simply take on and off or there can be another layer of asking about the resonance or response of this entire shifting process. Travel has a similar line of questioning of what is carried, what is picked up, and what is left behind. In working with the clothes I find discarded in a given city, for photography, or for dance, I take a lot in as a process, I carry a lot, but as well emptying is a constant activity. I often am inbetween here, if I remember too much I become heavy and unable to move, if I forget all, I am easily thrown by the wind. An erasure and a carried space remain in step. In the stillness of a picture or in dance, always shifting, to remember and forget at the same time. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting” - Milan Kundera www.floorofsky.org