| This (untitled?) work that Els Patoor refers to as "the
work showing 2 female dresses" (das Bild mit den 2 Frauenkleidern)*
uses the reproductive technique of lithography to achieve a certain "repetitive"
or "duplication effect" that includes variations. The fact that we note
the reduplication as well as the changes sharpens our senses. It is possible
that indeterminacy or "chance" comes into play. In the field of music,
John Cage was one of the first composers who relied on indeterminacy as
an aesthetic approach. A few years earlier, "chance" was a central category
in surrealist reflections centered on the creative process. Or rather,
in their lived existence, they were exceedingly open to chance as a stimulus.
Els Patoor has obviously taken to traditional dresses
(possibly, Belgian dresses worn by peasant woman or, less likely, by petit-bourgeois
women in the towns) from a collection of images showing historical garbs.
They have been printed one below the other, but not perfectly
so. The lower depiction of a dress deviates slightly to the left.
A background that seems, on first sight, merely
decorative but that suggests to me rows of plants has been printed on the
pictorial support.
Probably, this "background" was printed before the two
dresses were printed.
An effect typical of superimpositions is created because
of the slightly translucent color.
I note that the pale blue of the support and the equally
pale violet of the patterns that suggest, in the upper part of the work,
rows of plants to me, are repeated in stronger tones in the lower half.
Can I read it as a visualization of "time", a juxtaposition of a more distant
past (remembered) and a past that is not quite as distant (and that is
also remembered)?
I might mention that there are those art critics who think
of the spatialization of a "temporal" art, music, and of the introduction
of time into visual works of art (which by definition are two dimensional
or three dimensional, thus, spatial) as characteristics of modern, or contemporary
art.
To me, Belgium seems to be a country where Surrealist
influences are still very much alive.
The representation of the dresses suggests "3dimensionality".
I see "dresses walking" as if filled or inhabited by a human body but I
don't see a human body. Without any doubt, it might be ghost walking, a
ghost out of a Chinese (or Flemish) ghost story. And the stylized landscape
this "ghost" is traversing, ambulating on and on, as if walking absentmindedly
through the moon-lit night, seems to me suddenly like a Flemish mist-filled
marsh.
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