Desirous Pleats - Folding - Unfolding - Refolding
by Joanne Newman- Extract adapted from longer text -Drape yourself in Pleats Start with a pleated skirt and its structure and form, and let it be the ‘cryptographer’ to ‘peer into the crannies of matter and read into the folds of the soul.’(1) Be a sensualist; start with what is there, how it feels and then with what it might mean and how it might transform. Move ‘across outer material pleats to inner animated, spontaneous folds.’(2) Do a twirl, let the pleats kick out, catch the wind and skim the folds of desire. |
Pleated Skirt
Control of Fullness – Hanger – Hemline – Waistband – Ruined Skirt – Eye of The Fold
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This skirt has a box pleat (3) and the fabric is shiny, smooth to the touch. Desire waits in the crease of the pleats to feel a hand run down it, an outward fold to slide into the space between the fingers. The skirt hangs in the wardrobe as one among many, plication in replication. There is a satisfaction of knowing that the object is owned and ready to be worn. Perhaps newly washed or dry-cleaned without unsanctioned creases, it is perfectly unsoiled, or imagined perfect in anticipation of being worn. In silk or satin it must be handled carefully, it will tag easily. It is delicate, precious, even clean hands damage surfaces. But it must be handled, the fetish object must be touched and its folds caressed to fully activate its desirous power. Waistband Invagination – Performance – Constriction – Contrapposto
At the waistband of the skirt the pleated fabric is gathered then folded inwards on itself, an invagination, an orifice to enter. The external surface (in-down – in-across – out-up – out-over) now folds over and becomes internal. Broad elastic holds this waistband together, stretched to fit over the hips. The pleats are gathered to allow for this movement of expansion and contraction of the elastic, a compression of excess to allow for movement. The waistband could be considered a division between internal and external but instead it is a continuation - it rolls in as the same fabric, the same smooth space where boundaries are dissolved but where space becomes complicated, exciting. ‘The outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside: they are not something other than the outside, but precisely the inside of the outside.’(4) This invaginated space can be pushed into, it can be penetrated and filled, a space to flip an identity or have multiple ones, as many as there are creases, puckers, tucks and folds. To be neither inside or outside but at a permeable boundary, everything all at once.(5)
Step into the waistband and pull it on.
For McCarthy’s Sailor’s Meat an audience watched on monitors a performance whilst it was simultaneously filmed in a hotel bedroom. In an ecstatic contrapposto on a bed of folds, wearing a wig and knickers, McCarthy fucks and is fucked by meat. (6) Gender is both flipped and present in multiples, ‘not just inversion or exchanges of types - penis for vagina, masculine for feminine - but an obfuscation of identity achieved though mixing, slippage, doubling, and confusion.’(7) This obfuscation simultaneously becomes the object and subject of the performance and a ‘subversive multiplicity,’(8) just as in the changing and shifting of the tucks and creases rearranged in the peristaltic stretch at the waistband of the skirt.
Tighten the waistband further, hold it in and feel the weight of the excess fabric fall over the hips and down. ‘An Outside, more distant than any exterior, is twisted, folded and doubled by an Inside that is deeper than any interior, and alone creates the possibility of the derived relation between the interior and the exterior. It is even this twisting which defines the Flesh, beyond the body proper and its objects.’(9) The tightness of the waistband constricts and for the fetishist this constriction on the body ‘heightens not only a sensual and erotic awareness of the skin, but also the sense of the body underneath the skin,’ particularly when the body is in movement.(10) Just as the waistband is simultaneously the inside and outside of the garment, by squeezing against the body, the waistband also flips the inner and outer of the body, twisting them into the same thing, endoderm folding out into the exoderm. The skin becomes ‘a Mobius strip of ribbon that twists around to touch on every organ, muscle and nerve inside the body, and then spirals out to bring the inside surface outward.’(11) The outside mobilizing sensations that torsion inwards, creating desire and folding the skirt into the body.
The skirt, the fetish object, is loved and cherished as much as art, but ‘I defy any lover of painting to love a picture as much as a fetishist loves a shoe.’(12) In the wardrobe the pleated skirt is hidden, its stimulation of desire unknown to others, and without the need for seduction it can be had at any moment.(13) The fetishist’s desire could be read in terms of lack, a desire born of inadequacy, but to make lack the focus means loosing the importance of the inherent qualities of the object, reducing desirous, formal visual and haptic qualities to mere stand-ins, yet ‘what we desire, what we invest our desire in, is a social formation, and in this sense desire is always positive.’(14) Through the obsessive awareness of the qualities of fabric the artist shares with the fetishist this positive relationship. They are in sympathy, immersing and folding themselves within the essence of a substance, ‘the materialism of the fold entails the involvement of the subject within the material experience.’(15) And there is never enough to desire. Not because of inadequacy and ‘not under the guise of the great wailing about castration,’(16) but because ‘the fold insists on surface and materiality,’(17) endowing the fetishist/artist with an excess of multiple visual and tactile qualities. It is a ‘decadent fetishism’ that proliferates differences, rather than disavowing them.(18)
Ruined Skirt
The pleated skirt can be had, so have it. Take it out the wardrobe, off the hanger, handle it and wear it. Take it to McCarthy to smear with mustard and ketchup, for ‘beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.’(19) So stain it, soil its perfection and ruin its pleats with the folds of desire.
Box Pleat[4] Deleuze, Foucault, 2013, p. 80.
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Pamphlet. Magazine - 2014 -