(Des)vestir y (des)obedecer

Museo de Arte de Zapopan presents (Des)vestir y (des)obedecer, a group exhibition curated by Rodrigo Santoscoy.

A 2000 Levi's commercial shows two young naked people lying on a sofa. As they exchange caresses, a fluid choreography begins in which they gradually dress each other. They start with a sock, slowly and provocatively unrolled over one foot. From a top-down shot, we see them rolling on the floor intertwined in a kiss, while a bra is fastened on one of their backs. As their hands continue to explore their bodies, a pair of jeans is pulled up over a hip. The caresses blend with the different garments they put on. With frenzy and intensity, the action accelerates until finally the two bodies are revealed, fully clothed. This scene creates an alloy between the act of dressing and pleasure, thus revealing the power of the desire to cover the body.

Western modern institutions —such as medical and health institutions— were responsible for regulating the body through strategies of domination and control. To do this, they established agendas that made it possible to distinguish between the civilized and the barbaric, the manageable and the condemnable. One of the main consequences was the regulation of desire. Desire, as a private sphere, migrated to the sphere of public interest, delimited by secular values around gender, race, and social class. It is no accident that clothing is considered one of the most efficient tools of biopolitical control: dressing the body is a desire in tension with the society that regulates its behavior.

In her text on nudity in film, American cultural critic Susan Sontag emphasizes the symbolic power of clothing by stating that undressing a body is equivalent to stripping it of its identity. Far from being a naïve observation, Sontag finds that the act of dressing has the potential to transform. For this, it is important to understand that the sign is the perceptible association of an idea and that it is composed of two elements: its signifier and its signified. While one encompasses the material and sensory qualities, the other gathers its contextual associations. However, when understanding clothing from the symbolic, it is essential to establish that it not only has the capacity to transform, but simultaneously questions and reinforces established values.

Historically, clothing has been constructed around its utilitarian and cultural relationship with the body, in service of bodily protection, modesty, and ornamentation. This transaction consists of revealing certain parts of the body while hiding others. In this way, clothing is a second skin that rests on the naked body. The skin —the largest organ of the human body— is an exposed, sensitive, and vulnerable organ that, belonging to the biological realm of the human being, is loaded with political details that place it in the cultural realm. If clothing is a second skin, the dressed body is an expression that reflects the political relationships intrinsic to that skin.

Dressing the body is a polysemic mechanism that simultaneously reinforces, questions, and transforms; on the one hand, it allows the satisfaction of the desire to alter the established order, and on the other, it is a sentence to parade dressed in the emperor's new clothes.

Artists: Pia Camil, Edgar Cobián, Mella Jaarsma, Mike Kelley, Sarah Lucas, Yeni Mao, Balleth Meccanicue, Guadalupe Montes, Maximiliano Ruelas, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Urara Tsuchiya, Sentimiento.

—Museo de Arte de Zapopan