Die Verwandlung. A Jon Jacobsen Fashion Movie

Die Verwandlung. A Jon Jacobsen Fashion movie Nicole Di Sandro [email protected] Erasmus Student, 1st year MA Art in The Contemporary World Contemporary Art Practices Visual Culture “One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug1”. As in an uneasy dream, the Kafkian character is an entity in between, in the dichotomy of an impeccable, social-shaped life and the nature of his different, unbearable new form. The Metamorphosis is an introspection of the human alienation, constrained in the identity boundaries dictated by the normative power. Reinterpreted and visually translated by Jon Jacobsen in his major fashion movie, Die Verwandlung faces a conscious, disillusioned existentialism, mirroring the human struggling for the self-expression in the negotiation between the subject’s identity and the context. Self-taught 28 years old, Jon Jacobsen is an emergent multimedia artist: his conceptual works discloses the symbolism behind the digital techniques mastery, experimenting new aesthetics and codes in the Fashion Film landscape. The avantgarde style of his conceptual imagery sparked soon the interest of Chilean and European public. It guarantees him spaces for solo exhibitions and the acknowledgment by magazines such as Vogue.it, Harper’s Bazaar Chile, The Huffington Post, Dazed, i-D, WIRED and The Yale Globalist, from the University of Yale 2. Today Jacobsen is under the mentorship of Nick Knight, one world's most influential and visionary photographers and director in the contemporary multimedia fashion scenario. Die Verwandlung is the Jacobsen first editorial project released for SHOWstudio3, and published in the King Kong Magazine’s “Methmorphosis issues” in September 2017. In December the project won in the ’Best Art Film’ category, at the Visual Art Awards organized by the Municipality of Santiago de Chile. Inspired by the Kafka homonymous novel, Die Verwandlung deals with the experience of the body, meant in its identity, enhancing mostly the physical aspects, the details, the composition, the movement. Assuming the Natalie Khan4 studies on Fashion Movies, it can be qualified as an 1 "The Metamorphosis" (original German title: "Die Verwandlung"), Franz Kafka, Classix Press; 2009 edition. http://www.jon-jacobsen.com/info 3 SHOWstudio.com is the award-winning fashion website, founded and directed by Nick Knight 4 Cutting the Fashion Body: Why the Fashion Image is not longer still, Nathalie Khan in Fashion Theory, vol.6, 2012 2 experimental one, characterized by the hybridization with other form of text, involving fashion, dance, performance, sculpture, and digital manipulation. Since the last decades, all the fashion movie outcome has been experimenting a new creative phase, crossing the boundary line with other artistic disciplines; furthermore, the engagement with technological and communication advances affected all the media fashion landscape, generating new digital, aesthetic forms in photography and video production. But we are dealing here with a new textual form, something far from the traditional Pathè as well as from the most recent branded fashion movies, whose primary function is promotional. Conceived as an editorial, Die Verwandlung carries the shift from the viewer as a consumer to the viewer as a spectator, addressing him the visual experience of a concept, rather than a branded object or a Firm vision. Jacobsen develops a game of juxtapositions of raw, plastic matter and digital alterations of the human shape and motion, recreating an unfinished, introspective world, where the temporality of inert materials is discarded by the body movement. Embodying the crisis of the identity in a complex pattern of significance, the project investigates the continuity and disjunction from the natural world. By doing that, the artist makes a broad use of visual references to inform the aesthetic of the shoot, looking at the deconstructive A/W 2017 collections of Comme des Garçons, John Galliano for Maison Margiela and Raf Simons5. A photocollage opens the movie: it shows a human, inexpressive head, reshaped by the plastic, dough and inflated latex condom that are associated to the body in his physical process, among all the video. The exploited matters render the touch through the visual perception, enhancing a haptic experience that marks new aesthetics, divergent from the conventional fashion beauty canon: skill strips basted on a evanescent head, laces bound together the consumed puzzle of materials, the decomposition of the dough… The body is unfinished, fragile, one step forward the metamorphose, immortalized in a process of becoming. Framed in a television screen, the dancer6 is in 5 6 Showstudio.com Jonathan Luke Baker a house. He interacts with a white, rigid blanket, that he uses to cover himself. The subsequent narration, far to be chronological, is based on the match and opposition of three different stylistic sets of shoots, developed in a paradigmatic relation. The first shows the described body in evolution, through dance and music; the slow motion imprints the shadows of the movement, describing fluid shapes in the background. The second paradigm is developed around a hide body, wrapped in green, empty plastic bags and tied with pieces of cardboard. Characterized by the immobility of a white scene – that recalls the contemporary art spaces– it addresses the final bodily state of butterfly, from the rupture of the shell with soft, crunchy noises, to the opening of wings, rendered through inflated bags. The third central paradigm can be defined the bridge between the previous two: it mediates the dialectic of before-after, filtering both the bodies states through digital effects. Rendered in black and white and distorted by the interference of an old television, the body in transformation is at the peak of his metamorphosis, in his twisted, blurred phase of the pupa formation. The evolved entity, instead, is exhibited in a snapshot of its primordiality. Digitalized in a negative filter, the body keeps the green of the empty wings. Particularly accurate, Jacobsen suggests the inside of the chrysalid, that, at its final state, lets the colour shining through its skin. The music and sounds, shyly arising from the silence, and combined with the montage in crescendo, describes an ascendant climax, which is sharply interrupted: a soft wind blows on a static, disenchanted body, stuck in its silkworm, material state. The final plays a negation of the entire metamorphose, allegory of the denied expression of the personal identity and the resulting alienation. An intertextual association, which is meaningful by itself, bring the Jacobsen’s meanings and language in the landscape of the theoretical, philosophical justification – something that for such commercial fashion is thinkable just in terms of consumerism. One could argue that Jacobsen tries to gather many of the contributions that frame the subject experience in the contemporary scenario, where the body has become the cornerstone for the gender, identity, sexuality and race discourses. Deconstructing another Kafka's text, Before the Law7, Jacques Derrida emphasized the discursive norms that create the context that influence the meaning of utterance8. He enhances the performative intentions of a text, underlining how the anticipation of an authoritative disclosure of meaning conjures its object, and focusing on the Kafkian conceptual universality of the law in opposition to the individuality. In the Derrida analysis, the novel carries a deep paradox: the man struggles for an 7 8 Before the Law (original: Vor dem Gesetz”) in The Trial, Franz Kafka, 1915 Derrida on Kafka “Before the Law, Raphael Foshay, Rocky Mountain Review, Vol. 63, No.2, 2009, pp. 194-206 access to the law, just because it is universal and applies to everyone. But he is denied access because he is not everyone, but only himself and no one else. The issue is mirrored in the Jacobsen interpretation of Kafka: in spite of the natural, regulative law that dictates the evolution, the Metamorphosis is denied. Derrida’s studies have been the Judith Butler starting point to read the subjectivity – namely gender - in terms of performativity, to the extent to which the human subjects are meant as discursively constructed. Certain features of the context, specifically certain stylized sets of acts, pass through a process of transformation – in their reception- and interiorization: ‘the inner world […] is constituted precisely as a consequence of the interiorizations that a psyche performs.’9. Questioning the gap between the interiorization outcome and the context’s given meaning, we could sketch a new parallelism with the Jacobsen work, where the inconsistency between internalized acts and the discursive norms causes alienation and abjection. Furthermore, owing much of the Butler issues, Die Verwandlung has found its legitimacy in the contemporary discourse of identity. The body in becoming, caught in its transformative act, can be read as metaphor of the discursively construction of identity categories. The end of the movies suggests a further sociological reading that addresses the identity in terms of mobility of fashion, argued by Alberto Abruzzese: the identities and bodies addressed by the context are in perennial metamorphosis, in an instable, continuous becoming, where the final form is hardly traceable10. It would be reductive to refer to the Jacobsen work just in relation to its coherent, internal contents. The artist mastery and technical skills has guarantee him a place in the SHOWstudio platform. Founded in 2000 by Nick Knight and Peter Saville, it is the Londoner ‘House of Fashion Film’ that focus on media, art, fashion and technology synergies. Within the landscape of the industry, SHOWstudio, as well as its artists, occupies an undiscussed position, due to the high level of experimentation and its contribution to the contemporary visual aesthetics and to new forms of narration. All the SHOWstudio production is developed in the engagement between fashion photography and film in the digital scenario, and it finds venues in museum exhibitions, retail and 9 Butler,1990 Barile, 2001, pp. 7-45. 10 public spaces, and, above all, online fashion magazines. The Jacobsen style, even keeping its own peculiarities, has great affinities with the SHOWstudio vision. In Die Verwandlung all the treat material conveys in the single shoot that opens the movie. It is the simultaneous basis for fashion editorial and online fashion film, with no hierarchy between them11, promoting the hybridisation of genres as well as creative practices. As his mentor, Jacobsen explores the borderline between the photographic stillness and filmic illusion of stillness, recreating an a-temporal experience through digital intervention, that allows a conceptual intersection between the two media. It is possible to recognize other elements from pre-existing visual or audiovisual forms, such as illustration, art film, performance, documentary, exhibition and composition. The exploited aesthetics, far from the fashion beauty canon, addresses new meanings and forms in the fashion filmmaker: inspired by the Deconstruction, Jacobsen plays the dialectic of scomposition/re-composition of the parties, through physical, material and digital constructions, redrawing silhouettes, spaces and movements. Quoting the Armand Hatchuel studies12, such ‘design of separation’ is based on an ambiguous aesthetic of ‘apparition’, rather than ‘appearance’, that requires the cognitive participation of the spectator, generating new experiences and addressing new being. The deep meaning and the technical skills conveyed in Die Verwandlung have affirmed Jon Jacobsen in the artistic multimedia landscape. Honoured as 'Best Art Film' at the Visual Art Awards by the Municipality of Santiago de Chile, it arises out of the contemporary fashion movie production: refusing the commercial function and adopting methodologies, politics and techniques of the artistic practices, it can be seen as a bridge between fashion and art movies. The residency of the artist in the SHOWstudio platforms and the mentorship of one of the best contemporary director and fashion photographer, are guarantee of his high skilled mastery. Die Verwandlung finds venues in the theoretical discourse of negotiation of identity, due the deep conceptual crossing over among different disciplines that assume the performativity of text13, intention and subjectivity. Furthermore, analysing the style, contents and composition from the prospective of Deconstruction, it is clear how the movie exploits the experiential, immaterial and political values that characterize all Lipovetskyan14 hypermodern Fashion. 11 Marketa Uhlirova Hatchuel, 2006 13 Literally we are dealing with the performativity of the speech, argued by J. L. Austin, which is at the basis of the Derrida formulation. For a further reading see: How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin, Oxford University Press, 1962, Great Britain. 14 Gilles Lipovetsky, Hyper-modern Time, Wiley, 2005 12 LINKS: Direct link to the video: • http://showstudio.com/project/die_verwandlung/film ONLINE SOURCES: • showstudio.com • Jon Jacobsen Instagram page • jon-jacobsen.com REFERENCES: • The Metamorphosis (original German title: "Die Verwandlung"), Franz Kafka, Classix Press; 2009 edition. • Cutting the Fashion Body: Why the Fashion Image is no longer still, Nathalie Khan in Fashion Theory: the journal of Dress, Body and Culture, vol.6, 2012 • Before the Law (original: Vor dem Gesetz”) in The Trial, Franz Kafka, 1915 • Derrida on Kafka “Before the Law, Raphael Foshay, Rocky Mountain Review, Vol. 63, No.2, 2009, pp. 194-206 • Essere moda. Appunti sui modi di affermarsi nel mondo ovvero sul mercato delle identità; in Communifashion, Della moda, la comunicazione; Nello Barile, Rome, Sossella, 2001 • Gender Troubles, Judith Butler, Routledge, 1990 • Fashion Film & the Photographic, by Marketa Uhlirova, on www.aperture.org • Quelle analytique de la conception? Parure et pointe en design’, in Brigitte Flamand (ed.), Le Design: Essais sur des théories et des pratiques, Armand Hatchuel, IFM/Éditions du Regard, Paris, 2006 • How to Do Things with Words, J. L. Austin, Oxford University Press, 1962, Great Britain. • Hyper-modern Time, Gilles Lipovetsky, Wiley, 2005