Jacqueline Fraser: The Making of Dressed To Kill 2019: Exhibition | Paris
The Making of Dressed To Kill 2019 (2019) is the title of Jacqueline Fraser's show and installation, departing from Brian de Palma’s 1980 erotic thriller. All Fraser’s works take a particular film as a starting point, adding “The Making of” and the year of the work’s production to the title as an indicator of its “remake” status.
Fraser’s works tackle the violence and virality of imagery and visual culture. It is said in cinema, “after the shooting ends, the cutting begins”; Fraser’s collages literally foreground the “cutting” of people and places, highlighting symbols of social, cultural, and sexual hierarchies, sampled from high and low culture, past and present. Music—the latest hip hop or pop songs—is an important structural element that completes the mise-en-scene. In The Making of Dressed To Kill 2019, pink tinsel, collage, glimpses of bodies, celebrities, and historical French gardens vie for attention. A tinsel centerpiece sweeps the floor, while swathes of fabric hang on the walls.
De Palma’s original film offers an extended sequence of the victim perusing an art museum. She plays a seductive game of tag with a stranger—a potential sexual conquest—they skirt one another, dodging from hall to hall; the artworks become accomplices in an arena of erogeneous potential. Unbeknowst to the two, the murderer—an unobserved voyeur, in drag—stalks their movements, too. After the victim unwittingly drops a glove, the camera lingers on another’s gloved hand lifting the accessory slowly off the steps of the museum.
Restricted relationships of viewing and access are the fabric of an art museum—indeed, of art institutions.
In the tradition of French gardens, a single uninterrupted line of view pierces the to- pography, imposing the will of man over nature. Straight lines are celebrated. The topiary famously lend themselves as geometric props. Paths are widened, flattened, and prized for their high visibility and maximal exposure: undeviating in its form, the French garden path is a long, unimpeded runway built to be seen, to survey the historical elite leisuring through the grounds, dressed to kill.
In 2018 two significant cultural events in Paris took the world by storm.
Virgil Abloh, the new designer of Louis Vuitton, made his debut in the Tuileries, on a rainbow carpet presided over by the voice of Kanye West. Beyonce and Jay-Z shot a music video in the Louvre. The Tuilleries and the Louvre—for centuries, strongholds of white tradition—a garden and a museum, French icons, veiled in emotional pop statements to redress Western historical imbalances of power.
In Paris, global fashion capital, The Making of Dressed To Kill 2019 (2019) surfaces in these waves. Fraser’s work has, over decades, exhaustively framed and pursued pop, cinematic, and rap tropes, bulldozing the restrictive insular tautologies of art, to affirm the inclusion of other bodies, pools of reference, and norms. Any “remake”, and act of doubling (echoed by the date’s repitition), serve as ghostly reenactments of a much larger framework: the history of oppression, art, and privilege.
