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Abstract
Tamara Kostianovsky creates three-dimensional sculptural forms with repurposed clothing, fabric and needlework. It is argued that these sculpted textiles become meditations on flesh. Her works that depict carcasses and body parts, in particular, explore the paradoxes of embodiment in order to speak to issues of gender, trauma, and migration. In this article, the author describes a number of ways in which Kostianovsky has parodied canonical works of fine art by Manet, Goya, and Botticelli as well as the eroticized anatomical illustrations of Gautier. The five works on which she focuses here metabolize their diverse quotations such that they engage with restrictive tropes and conventions that operate in representations of female bodies and subjectivities. Sculpted clothing reads as flesh, flesh as meat, and meat as a symbol for conscious embodiment and a vulnerable and violated mortality. They thus become a parody of the dualistic moralism of the memento mori, as well as the phallocentric hypocrisy of the idealized Venus. The author also explores how Kostianovsky’s controlled and ferocious stitching makes visible the suturing of identity, the cartography of violence, and the conscious and unconscious scarring that writes bodies into the landscapes that produce them.
Acknowledgements
Funding for this article was possible thanks to Professor Brenda Schmahmann, the South African Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture, with whom I hold a position as postdoctoral research fellow. I appreciate the input of participants at the Intertextual Textiles Conference, hosted by Prof. Schmahmann, where I presented a paper on my initial research. I am also grateful for the comments of the anonymous reviewers of the first draft of this article.
Notes
1. Born in Jerusalem, Israel in 1974 and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Kostianovsky now lives in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from the National School of Fine Arts of Buenos Aires, Argentina with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Kostianovsky moved to the United States to pursue a Masters in Fine Art in Sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Kostianovsky has exhibited in solo and group shows at venues including: The Jewish Museum (NY, USA), El Museo del Barrio (NY, USA), Nevada Museum of Art (NV, USA), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY, USA), The Volta Show (NY, USA), Maison et Object (Paris, France), and the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (MI, USA). She is the recipient of several grants and award and is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts, New York and a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2. Several art makers, often of Jewish descent, have made works with clothing that reference the Holocaust. For example, Christian Boltanski—working at the same time as Kostianovsky but across the Atlantic in France—has piled clothing in installations to recall viscerally the people marched naked into the gas chambers of Nazi Germany. The inadequacy of the remains to speak to the human lives annihilated.
3. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, December 29, 2016.
4. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, April 24, 2017.
5. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, December 29, 2016.
6. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, December 29, 2016.
7. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, April 24, 2017.
8. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, December 29, 2016.
9. Edouard Manet. Olympia. (1863), Oil on canvas. 130.5 cm x 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France.
10. Carcasses adorned with wreaths of flowers or roses positioned like a corsage in a woman’s décolletage were display practices adopted by butchers in nineteenth-century France. In a work such as Gustave Caillebotte’s Calf in a Butcher’s Shop from 1882, a veal carcass is gutted, splayed, amputated, and hung upside down while strung with flowers, and in Caillebotte’s handling becomes a more grotesquely overt caricature of a female torso, which arguably parades a feminine lasciviousness and indulgent appetite that deplores the flesh by dwelling on its transitory and vulnerable nature. Tamar Garb (Citation1998) analyses this grotesque coquetry as an aggressively contemporary satire of the butcher’s new consumer-focused display practices, as well as of artists’ aspirations toward purity and transformation of their subject matter.
11. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, April 24, 2017.
12. Sandro Botticelli. The Birth of Venus. c. 1484, Tempera on canvas. 172.5 cm x 278.5 cm (68 x 110 in.). Florence, Uffizi Gallery. It is worth noting that this title is thought to have been bestowed in the nineteenth century, and that Botticelli may perhaps have been visually illustrating not the mythological account of Venus’s birth but rather the goddess's landing on the island of Cythera or Cyprus (Corsini Citation1998, 7).
13. Birth of Venus is not the only work that the artist has made that references Gautier's mezzotint; others include Little Wing, from the Still Life project (2013) and Little Rib, from the Actus reus project (2016).
14. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, April 24, 2017.
15. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, December 29, 2016.
16. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, April 24, 2017.
17. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, April 24, 2017.
18. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, April 24, 2017.
19. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, December 29, 2016.
20. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, December 29, 2016.
21. Email communication between Tamara Kostianovsky and the author, December 29, 2016.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Irene Bronner
Irene Bronner is a postdoctoral research fellow with the South African Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg.