Undergarments and armor

Undergarments and armor are seemingly two completely different items, but there is a connection between them, as discovered at the Fall Honors Lecture Tuesday evening with nationally known artist Tanya Marcuse.

Marcuse has received numerous awards for her photography, including the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts Award, the Dutchess County Arts Fellowship, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock Photographers Fellowship.

More recently, Marcuse was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and a Kittredge Grant from Harvard University for her project, "Undergarments and Armor." Just finishing a rough draft of her photographic book two weeks ago, Marcuse presented a part of her numerous photographic collections of historical underclothes and armor in the United States and England.

"When people find out that I'm photographing undergarments, they think it's going to be sexy and they're not. They're clinical and, in some cases, very industrial," Marcuse said.

Marcuse showed slides of her work, which she explained has completely obsessed and moved her throughout the past decade after graduating from Yale.

"My work facilitates between nineteenth-century romantic and post-modern," she said.

Marcuse explained that she wanted to show the explicit side of the body through her photographs, even if it is as subtle as veins underneath the skin.

"The body always seemed really central," she said. "This first photo [of the lecture] shows that I'm interested in the body, space and form; it becomes a place you enter."

"[This shows] the inner structure pushing through to the outside," she said while pausing on a self-portrait of her collarbone.

Marcuse's fascination with the details of the body provided the foundation for her obsession with undergarments and armor, items that would frame the body and later represent the body that they once sculpted. This aspect would be crucial to understanding why undergarments and armor has mesmerized her.

Encompassing the body

Marcuse has always been interested in the "individual" body not an ideal "perfect" one that people often try to achieve. She spent time photographing at the Temple of Olympia in Greece to learn more about the human form.

"The fragment of the body is interesting to me," she said, while reflecting on photographs of Greek artifacts from her abroad journey.

After Marcuse married in 1995, she began to photograph what she called, "the fetish of the wedding dress." These photos focused on her fascination with parts of the dress that became partly an autobiographical connection or an "alternative wedding album" for her.

While displaying her slides, she reflected a moment on the skirt of the dress that resembles a sculpture.

"I never mentioned to my mother that I put a light inside [the dress]. Lucky it didn't burn up!" she joked with her audience.

Marcuse admitted that she makes numerous photos, and part of them connected with what she described as the "little girl fantasy world."

"It's the transformation of chintzy glitzy fabric into something more meditative," Marcuse said.

Marcuse's interest in undergarments, such as corsets and bodices, stems primarily from the structure (the body) that they hold. To her, a major fascination with this type of fashion was the knowledge that someone once fit into these garments that are now stored away in museum drawers.

"When you think of the drawers of these objects and the cold categories and scientific atmosphere, you realize that this was someone's very personal thing," she said.

"The shells of the body outlast their bodies," she said. "Its like a turtle shell that outlasts the turtle."Armor shares similar structure

Armor, according to Marcuse, shows the more inhabitant presence of the body, while undergarments are traditionally more detached from the body. This is mainly attributed to armor keeping its shape with a model to support it.

"The extreme maleness of armor is hard to miss at times," she joked while showing a photograph of the armor's loin area.

Marcuse also suggested there was more to the corset than the idea of a male bondage type of ritual. Even though corsets had serious medical problems connected to them, such as troubles in childbirth and the actual ribs of a person molding together, women still found them desirable to wear. Marcuse believes this still lingers today.

"We may not wear these things now, but we have body disorders," she said. Instead of wearing a corset, she explained, a person may get laser

surgery.

The connection between undergarments and armor through Marcuse's work was seen as a contrast between male and female. She said, however, that she was more interested in the similarities than the differences.

"[It's] the way both wear transformative garments, how you could put this [helmet] over your head and become a war machine," she said. "Neither were made as art, but both are removed out of the original context and have a new life in archives and museums."

So in essence, both undergarments and armor idolize the body they once clothed.

"The goal of the corset is to create a form and shape of the body; it constricts and adorns the body the way the armor protects, shields and adorns the body all at once," said Marcuse.

Marcuse's photographic lecture came to a close when she showed her favorite piece of armor - a fourth-century B.C. Greek body armor.

"It articulates everything that interests me," she said. "[There's] an armadillo-like quality that these things have and just the sense of facade."