Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture

Gen Doy investigates the hitherto neglected meanings of drapery and the draped body in visual culture. The baroque and the classical are her subjects, as are Freud's "Gravida", Clerambault's writings and photographs of draped figures, the fetishistic play between veiling and revealing and the meanings of drapery in recent art, from Christo's wrapped Reichstag to the impact of the modern women's movement on fine art practice. Yet she also finds and focuses on the draped body now in places like Algeria and Kosovo where drapery's connotations are no longer those of purity and civilized elegance but of barbarism, poverty, and savage death.