The peculiar moniker of artist Tenant of Culture comes from The Practice of Everyday Life by French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau. The book is about people individualizing the larger hegemonic systems they live in and how they ricochet and resist within these structures. De Certeau refers to overarching and general culture as it exists in various discrete societies, but Tenant of Culture brings the same ideas into a critique of the global fashion industry. The artist’s name emphasizes an inherent transience, eschewing ownership and permanence. She is a guest in her own work, honoring the discarded garments she sources to make her soft sculptures. Her materials have entire lives and histories unknown to both artist and viewer, and their transformations into her sculptural works mark single steps on longer journeys. Tenant of Culture is a tenant to the forms she inhabits, those of old boots, foam linings, and out-of-fashion activewear.
Installation view of “Host: Tenant of Culture.” Photo: Alexander Boeschenstein
On display in the artist’s current exhibition at the Contemporary Austin , are many such materials in the process of shedding their original destinies to live new lives as contemporary art. Many works on view act as material studies, assemblages of like materials salvaged from recycled and off-trend garments. A leather boot is piled with leather belts with buckles attached, leather straps from handbags, and leather label charms shaped like hearts. Another boot sculpture is a collection of foam, a patchwork of chunks and tidbits of fillings forming an elegantly curved Victorian silhouette. Within the accidental proximities of discard, the artist sorts and organizes by likeness, stripping each garment down to scrap parts.
A work by Tenant of Culture. Photo: Alexander Boeschenstein
Despite the diverse materials, every work on view is a shoe, save for two large swooping curtains that bisect the space. Each shoe is displayed on its own pedestal, occupying the place of perhaps an historical bust or luxury good for sale. The sweeping curtains add to this adjacency, giving the exhibition the air of a department store showroom or dressing room. The resemblance is fitting in more than one way: the original untouched garments would have been displayed and sold in such environments and presented to potential customers. Further, art is itself a luxury good, and though the Contemporary Austin is not in the selling business, the works are similarly offered for examination and attention. Both are bids for the viewer’s consideration.
A work by Tenant of Culture. Photo: Alexander Boeschenstein
The curtains are made of immaculate and mostly identical synthetic garments, perhaps windbreakers. Tenant of Culture often references her materials as en route to obsolescence before her rescuing interference. She does not fish things from the trash; instead, she scours thrift stores and resale sites and receives donations. Some of her items have past lives of use, like the scuffed and broken-in leather shoes, but others never had lives at all. They come to her as consumer refuse: unworn clothing rendered unsellable due to the fickle and cyclical whims of trends. This is the reality for growing numbers of garments, especially those mass produced: deliverance from factory to landfill. The work is small-scale upcycling, the artist’s own efforts at diverting this wasteful trajectory.
Tenant of Culture, “Dry Fit” detail, 2022. Photo: Kristien Daem
The boundaries of avant-garde fashion and fashion-based art are increasingly blurring, and this exhibition falls somewhere new between the two. Tenant of Culture’s work calls to mind experimental fashion labels such as boundary-defying Commes des Garçons and Maison Margiela, both famous for deconstructed, collaged garments. In the art world, she shares an affinity with Women’s History Museum, a duo selling their wearable work alongside sourced vintage finds in both galleries and luxury department stores. Each of these projects subverts or questions the forms of the clothes we wear, each falling somewhere on the spectrum between art objects and quotidian garments, embracing the fashion world and creatively critiquing it. Tenant of Culture’s works are unwearable but are also not transformed beyond recognition. Like most contemporary art, they can be collected, as well as serve a decorative function. Luxury fashion also occupies this space: multi-thousand-dollar handbags and shoes are collected much in the same way, often protected from wear and tear to preserve value, to be recouped in a future resale. Tenant of Culture seeks to repopulate this way of understanding precious objects with what we collectively perceive as disposable: unfashionable clothing. Perhaps the edges of fashion and art are not barriers at all but instead overlap. Like art, commonplace garments have complex provenances; the difference is that we do not value them.
HOST: Tenant of Culture is on view at the Contemporary Austin through August 3.
