Maria Visser

Nowadays, fashion no longer stems from the body’s need for protection from external influences. Instead, it’s a complex system that, since the modern age at the latest, has been used primarily for “self-fashioning” (Stephen Greenblatt) as a special form of self-design. The visual enhancement of a person through a certain form of presentation (which includes accessories such as jewelry) is supposed to enhance their social status. Of course, financial barriers still play a role. But whereas these privileges of self-presentation were once the preserve of the upper classes, these days they’re affordable for almost everyone, not least thanks to the development of a global market. The emergence of costume jewelry, for example, has also contributed to this spread. Whether colored glass beads as a substitute for precious stones in ancient Egypt, or rhinestones made of glass paste hard enough to be brilliant cut, the aim of replacing precious materials with cheaper alternatives and using mass production instead of painstaking manual methods was to make these prestige objects available to a much larger section of society.

The artist Maria Visser focuses on processes of democratization of this kind in her work. At first glance, her wearable sculptures hardly differ from real “clothing,” while her jewelry collections could also be sold in shops. But on closer inspection, it becomes apparent that these items are by no means functional clothing or practical jewelry. Instead, her works deal with current phenomena such as the identity-forming function of fashion as well as complex processes of appropriation and revaluation from high to low fashion and vice versa.

Operating on the threshold between art and fashion, she joins a certain tradition of artists attempting to dissolve the boundaries between the fine and applied arts in order to bring about lasting change in society. Artists in early modernism in particular often made social utopian claims about their work that rendered the distinction between different disciplines superfluous, since all available means were to be used. Artists such as the Italian Futurist Thayaht (whose real name was Ernesto Michahelles) even invented garments to counter the capitalist character of fashion. In 1919, Thayaht designed a garment known as the TuTa that was meant to revolutionize society. Similar to a modern-day jumpsuit, the idea was that people would make their own TuTas. Moreover, being akin to a kind of uniform, it was intended to eliminate the social differences visible from factors such as prestigious clothing. Thayaht’s concept of universal attire found some support among the upper bourgeoisie and aristocracy in Italy, but it never became a real mass movement (1). Although Maria Visser doesn’t claim to develop wearable fashion designs for an ideal society, the starting point of her art is precisely this everyday appeal; unlike classical sculptures, it’s precisely fashion’s profane nature that gives it a degree of revolutionary potential.

A certain socio-political perspective is also evident in Maria Visser’s jewelry collections. While brands and logos primarily serve to gain prestige, there are numerous examples of garments (mainly T-shirts) adorned with lettering conveying a (political) message. Visser takes up this idea of the body as a bearer of a text expressing an inner attitude in her jewelry collection. She quotes and varies words from various contexts and applies them to the body. An earring with the word “ähmbody” refers to the term “Mbody” (i.e. “embody”), which is often used in social media in connection with fashion. By adding an exclamation of hesitation (‘ähm’, the German equivalent of “um”) to this term originally associated with aspects of (feminist) self-empowerment, she critically and ironically illuminates its misuse in the lifestyle context. Meanwhile, by featuring “J’aime du voyage” (“I love to travel”), Visser refers to a fashion campaign by French luxury goods manufacturer Luis Vuitton. The company’s photo spread entitled “L’âme du Voyage” (“The Soul of Travel”) 

featured models with suitcases combining the freedom of travel with fashionable elegance. Visser appropriates the advertising promise of this campaign by reformulating it as a personal declaration and translating it into a necklace made of silver wire. Quite unlike striking advertising slogans consisting of giant letters, however, this lettering produced from a single line seems fragile and like a kind of dummy. The same applies to the headdress made in the same way “What has the future in store for me?” Here, Visser is alluding to a collaborative project between the artist Coco Capitán and the fashion label Gucci in 2017, which the company hoped would improve its image.Handwritten aphorisms by the Spanish artist were printed on unisex garments such as sweatshirts, T-shirts, hoodies, backpacks, coats, and belt bags. To accompany the launch of this collection, Gucci commissioned a mural on a building facade on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan that included the question “What are we going to do with all this future?” (2)

Alongside these pieces of jewelry, Maria Visser presents a collection of earrings, rings and brooches made of varnished wood on which the letters overlap, making the text almost illegible. Decoding these enigmatic messages reveals abbreviations and equations commonly used in text messages. Take for example “<3,” representing a heart as
a sign of affection for the recipient. “Y2K17” is an abbreviation for the year 2017, where Y stands for “year” and K for “kilo,” a thousand. The lettering “Future – X” (also the title of her collection) is a kind of equation: the future minus an unknown quantity X. According to Maria Visser, the variable X denotes the distance that has to be covered by a person in order to reach their future self, their ideal, the image they aspire to.

The transparent Plexiglas bracelet is reminiscent of a digital clock that’s stopped. Five times can be made out (3). For example, 23:28 represents the time when people usually go out at the weekend, 05:47 is when they get home from a party before setting off to work again on Monday morning at 07:36. What happens between these times is left to the viewer’s experience and imagination. When all five times of the bracelet overlap, they seem to dissolve into 88:88 as if during a factory reset.

Finally, the word “Chic” appears not only in the form of earrings and a pendant, but is also the title of the magazines published by the artist, this being issue no. 3. Like her sculptures based on costume jewelry, she has adopted another medium that spreads fashion trends. Magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar (which was first published in New York in 1867) and Vogue (Paris, 1892) with their rapidly increasing circulations enabled the fashion trends of the social elite to be adopted by the population at large.

In both her clothing and her jewelry collections, Maria Visser expertly addresses the symbols of the fashion industry, teasingly creating variations and reinterpretations. As well as critically examining the underlying strategies of communication and seduction, she emphasizes the potential inherent in these materializations worn on the body to change society. She shows that fashion can be an expression of our dreams and desires, and that it also acts as a kind of code transmitting certain messages which – if received by someone who understands them – can convey a special sense of belonging and create identity. Maria Visser draws from the endlessly inspiring and simultaneously unsettling resource of the world of fashion, which affects more or less every one of us, and acts as both a mirror of a society and a projection surface for its possible future.

(1) See Dobrila Denegri: “Transfashionality,” in: Look! – Revelations on Art and Fashion, Marta Herford, 2021, cf. also the website of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, https://www.uffizi.it/en/artworks/tuta-thayaht-en (accessed May 30, 2021).

(2) Cf. https://cococapitan.co.uk/projects/gucci/ (accessed May 30, 2021). 

The metaphor of the prosthesis is often used to highlight the importance of garments. During a pandemic, however, it takes on a whole new dimension. At the beginning of 2020, the face mask was still a social phenomenon largely confined to the Asian region following previous outbreaks of SARS. But as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold, the face veiled by a mask became the global image par excellence for an extension of the human body whose main function was to provide protection from a (hidden) peril. It didn’t take long for the fashion industry to spot the potential of this new “accessory” and start selling ornately decorated face coverings. Originally introduced as a medical utensil, the face mask underwent a somnambulistic metamorphosis into a fashion item that no longer had a solely practical purpose, but was now intended to satisfy an aesthetic need among its wearers.

This brief excursion into our present time marked (or rather plagued) by COVID-19 demonstrates the extent to which a small piece of cloth has not only changed our appearance dramatically, macabrely merging us in this crisis into an ornamental mass, but also radically transformed our entire appearance such that we increasingly resemble sinister mannequins without visible facial expressions. Even in a grave pandemic, the longing to express individuality via our appearance remains a deep-seated human need. 

However, Maria Visser’s works (fortunately) don’t concern the side-effects of the pandemic; instead, they deal with clothing in the broadest sense and its diverse manifestations. Starting out in painting, Visser began taking an artistic approach to clothing and its cultural molding as fashion early on in her studies, using the very same media that are usually associated with the fashion sector. A fitting example is the magazine Chic, devised and founded by her when she was still a student, and whose visual language and format refer to the world-famous Vogue. For her current exhibition Future in Store, Visser is now producing the third issue of Chic. Like the exhibition title, it examines the phrase “What has the future in store for me?”, a common expression in the English-speaking world. The word “store” is deliberately ambiguous, alluding on the one hand to the common retail term “in store” and on the other to the uncertainty of the future. 

The shorter form Future in Store ambivalently alludes to a central psychological message of clothing and fashion which, produced by manufacturers in seasonal collections, always represents a symbol and a fixed point in the future for their fashion-savvy customers. The importance of the spatial presentation of fashion can’t be overstated, the cruise shows staged in extravagant villas where mid-season collections are exclusively displayed to affluent customers having become common practice for major fashion houses. This architectural aspect of presentation is artistically addressed by Visser in several ways, such as by creating architectural miniatures at the beginning of each new work and so, as it were, enabling the spatial presentation to take place as a parallel process of her collections. One of these miniature models entitled “Space Stores Condensed Time” shows how space nestles around each work like a cocoon. 

The inclusion of architecture plays a key role in Visser’s artwork in that the creation of her own collections and their presentation by means of a “défilé” is an essential part of her oeuvre. However, what used to take place as a performance in pre-pandemic times must now be carried out by means of digital tools. Her specially designed fashion and jewelry collections “Future – X”, “Facades” and “Comb Through Gills” are presented by models in front of a green screen and then transferred to the miniature model. The already cool aesthetics of her futuristic-looking works are artificially heightened by digital production. Regarding the “Future – X” Collection, the vividness of the models is especially clear. 

When designing her objects, Visser makes use of cryptic text semiotics that don’t simply subordinate themselves decoratively to the human silhouette, but claim an aesthetic autonomy and interpret the wearer as a physical extension of traditional presentation possibilities. The wearer of the often bulky-looking objects experiences a sculptural quality that, combined with the enigmatic nature of the semiotic systems used, underlines the ephemeral avant-garde idea all the more strongly. By wearing a certain “image,” the person comes to symbolize a diffuse idea of the future. A parallel can be seen with Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics: by adding prostheses or fashion objects, the human being becomes a signifier of a mental image of the future that’s never fixed and instead is always in a permanent state of emergence.

Maria Visser’s art is characterized by a complexity operating on the boundary between sculpture, performance, installation, and publication. It astutely reveals the mechanisms of the fashion world without being judgmental. Using various forms of expression, she playfully fuses her own interpretations of well-known fashion aesthetic codes and thus penetrates to the core of the fashion world which, revealed as a highly complex terrain, unites deep human longings in its supposed superficiality, and whose social significance can’t be overestimated.

– from CHIC issue 3, Future in Store (2021)