To Suffer is To Shine: Decadent Dresses by Leah Modigliani

In a dark space lit dramatically by spotlights, the skeletal dresses made of latex hospital tubing by Leah Modigliani pulse, spit, and tremble gently at the touch. Glowing like ghosts in the half-light of the gallery, ranged in a circle around the water pump, this could be a coven of witches or a gathering of angels. These presences are things which are unambiguously experienced as constructions yet clearly they live and they are undeniably female.The surgical tubing that is the primary material of this group, composes not only the individuals but the connection between them. Through it courses the water passing through each figure before returning to the central reservoir to be pumped out again without end. Above each figure a light irradiates the action.
This radial arrangement of forms, lights, and fluids creates an arena of interdependency that the artist uses to illustrate her investigation of women’s pitiful reliance on the received culture. Modigliani tells us in her notes to the exhibition that she sees the tube dresses as cages and that the dresses in turn represent the feminine suffering an addiction to the societal imperatives of Fashion and Beauty.
My feeling is that this is true only in part and that the exhibit tells us even more than the artist is willing to admit. The dresses in fact become much more than empty exoskeletons. Their very nature suggests a living presence. One could not imagine “putting on” these garments because they are already full, of light, of water, of sound, of movement. In short, they live, and in doing so they speak deeply of the pathetic necessities of our dependencies, of our inability to detach. At the same time there is a strong humorous current in the work, underlined by the spouting gurgling arcs that spring from the breasts of these figures into the shining funnels placed just so, to catch the water before it hits the floor. The layers of conflicting associations cannot help but provoke a smile. A figurative fountain, spouting breast milk, in a hospital foyer? A group of mothers exchanging breast-feeding secrets over the party line? An evil laboratory experiment gone awry? An anorexics-only cocktail party?
Besides which, the artist admits to the sensual, fleshy nature of the tubing and the irresistible impulse to touch the dresses, and to feel the wetness of that mysterious liquid. Is it really water, or something more dangerous? The viewer must know. In satisfying curiosity one ceases becoming simply a viewer but engages the other senses as well and in doing so one’s empathy with the “figures” increases enormously. Once you have set them trembling with your touch, they do not simply “represent”, they become. They tell us about themselves, not so much as individuals, although they do possess unique personalities, but about the reasons for their connections to each other. We must see this work, finally, not only as a critique of society’s pressure on women to conform to some absurd standard of behaviour, but also as an elucidation of how and why women connect with each other as friends, companions, supporters, confidants, soul-mates, in ways that are qualitatively unique and separate from male relationships. Through these relationships a kind of life-force flows, comically, haphazard, sputtering, painful, sometimes obligatory and mechanical, but also redemptive, nurturing, and protective. In spite of the half-lit silence of the gallery where the figures are suffering their pitiful fate, a light is glowing and a gurgle of life is pumping its way, round and round and round.

~ Mark Nisenholt

11/12/95