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Narmine (Expressive Gesture) 2017
HD video without sound
Narmine’s movement here complicates the notion that sartorial expression is produced for the visual consumption of another. It can be said public performances of dressed bodies are an important aspect of fashion as a cultural practice. This aspect is also pleasurable through participation in a shared social and cultural community as well as the visual pleasure of looking and being looked at.
Yet Narmine’s movements indicate there are ways of being comported in public space that does not orient the body towards others. Within those unusual, yet graceful movements I identify a somatically experienced sartorial pleasure in being dressed. For example, there are moments when I have experienced the sensation of sartorial movement in the experience of walking, this sartorial, sensate walking can induce moments of reverie and one is happy in one’s skin.
Narmine’s movement is somewhat resonant with Baudelaire’s flaneur (Benjamin 1999). Born of 19th century Paris, the flâneur was a well-dressed gentleman, who walked without haste and was led by the visual lures of a then incipient modern metropolis. Ambling through the newly built Passages Couverts de Paris (covered shopping arcades), galleria, public parks and squares the flâneur was distinguished by an excessively leisurely pace and a complete abandonment to the aesthetic pleasures of urban life.
The flâneur would be pursuing no particular end nor making his way to any particular destination, but would be completely absorbed in a kind of reverie. According to the poet Baudelaire, the flâneur could quite paradoxically lose and find himself in the faces of passers-by, their fashionable dress, in building facades, advertisements and the new, seductively displayed goods found in shop windows.
The fluency of the movement expressed by Narmine indicate a similar mode of absorption but not in the visual displays around her, as there was little for her to observe in the gallery space, but rather in the self-fulfillment or Poise, when one achieves a felt sense of comfort of Poise in what one is wearing. It is not important to the flâneur if he is the subject of the gaze of others or not. His pleasure derives from aesthetic absorption of the urban environment around him, not from the availability of his body for others.