At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ offers a sartorial response to exclusion, dehumanization and identity reclamation
At the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz this autumn, during Austrian election season, a large banner hung over the façade of KM– Künstlerhaus Halle für Kunst und Medien. The banner showed a photograph of Austrian artist, curator and musician Jörg Schlick, sat at a café table in a meadow wearing a beige dress, sunglasses, a hat and brown leather sandals, and holding two crutches in his left hand. In the background, one sees a pond and hair-curler shaped sculptures on a hill. If one knew of the artist’s 2005 cancer diagnosis, the dress could be identified as a hospital gown. There is a fragile glamour in the staging of ambiguity in this photograph, taken a year before Schlick’s death in December 2005.
