The Haunting of the Fashion Spectacle:
The Phantasmagoria of Dan Graham’s Sculpture at Céline Spring 2017 Ready-To-Wear Runway Presentation

On October 2, 2016, Phoebe Philo, the creative director of the French ready-to-wear and leather luxury goods fashion house Céline, showcased the brand’s Spring/Summer 2017 collection at the Tennis Club de Paris. Philo’s models walked round pavilion made of a set of undulating glass walls, that were hemmed in on one side by a wall of metal mesh. Show notes for the runway presentation included a quote by the artist and writer Dan Graham, who made this pavillion: “I want to show that our bodies are bound to the world, whether we like it or not”.

Since 1976, Dan Graham’s two-way glass pavilions have been described by critics as structures interdependent with bodily processes of perception. His long-standing fascination with the physical, perceptual, and affectual reciprocations between bodies in proximity to one another and/or the built environment, have been a continuous subject of concern throughout his career. Fashion has played another important, albeit less recognized role. In a conversation with Frank Perrin published in Crash Magazine, Graham stated that his “best ideas come from fashion second hand.”. In this essay, I identify a research gap in scholarship on Graham, and address the context of fashion in his art—as an institutional system operating under the motives of capitalist consumption and as sartorial dress enveloping bodies in motion.

Graham’s earliest artist pursuits took form as printed matter published in magazines. Among these early conceptual art gestures was the work “Figurative”, a cash-register receipt published in Harper’s Bazaar’s March 1968 issue, sandwiched between a Tampax ad and an ad for a Torpedo bra. The amounts on the receipt rarely exceed a few dollars, but they are never tallied, or “figured”. The ink is unclear and illusive; veering off the page, and cannot be registered as total. Through the spatial and allegorical positioning and framing of the figures that surround this receipt, Graham re-mediated subject-object relations and subject-subject ones as well, evoking and questioning an illusory world of female beauty and desire.

Graham’s practice may be also understood in dialogue with Walter Benjamin’s critique of consumerist desire and glass architecture. Benjamin saw das Passagen-Werk of nineteenth-century Paris as a site and apparatus for realms of perception for the citizens of the metropolis. Benjamin described the spectacle of iron-and-glass covered arcades as a “phantasmagoria —a magic-lantern show of optical illusions: ghosts of rapidly changing size and movement. Previously, Karl Marx had used the term “phantasmagoria” to refer to the deceptive appearances of commodities as “fetishes” in the marketplace. While referencing Marxist philosophy, Benjamin’s point of departure was a philosophy of historical experience rather than an economic analysis of capital: he firmly believed that what is eternally true can only be captured in the transitory, material images of history itself.

For this essay, I use Walter Benjamin's concept of the “phantasmagoria” of the Arcades Project to critique the aesthetic qualities of consumerism and spectatorship as they are mediated through Dan Graham’s site-specific, glass sculpture built for the Céline Spring 2017 Ready-To-Wear runway presentation. I expound upon the uncanny effects of the show’s choreography: the parades of models weaving through the rippling mirrored glass and perforated metal, their figures layered and obscured to the spectators’ gaze when framed by the glass pavilion as a false Panoramic vista that otherwise denies any total view and renders its subject ‘consumable only as fragments.

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