Tearing up Vogue and mining the detritus: A montage approach to challenging the racialised and gendered bodies in fashion media

Vogue is a global mass media brand that creates and circulates images of gendered and racialised bodies. Arguably, by dint of its widespread circulation and economic power, Vogue enjoys significant cultural status and contributes substantively to a contemporary politics of representation. Through the practice of montage, my research aims to visually, materially, and theoretically tear apart fashion media to challenge its homogeneous representations of women. Montage is an intermedium, a technique that operates between and amongst media, providing resistance to easy categorisation and seamless representation (Higgins 1965, 18-20, 22).

My practice-based research seeks to address three questions:

1) How can the physical procedures of montage allow an artist-researcher to challenge and destabilise fashion mass media, particularly Vogue’s representations of women as racialised and gendered?

2) Why appropriate mass media like Vogue and for what purpose, when it risks centring already dominant or normative viewpoints about representation, visibility and visuality?

3) What does an analysis of selected contemporary and historical montage and its critical literature, alongside feminist and race-critical scholarship contribute to this practice- based research and its potential to extend an existing visual art method?

Answering these research questions, my research draws upon and extends techniques of montage pioneered by German Dada artist Hannah Höch during the inter-war years, and further developed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries by artists like Martha Rosler, Candice Breitz, and Wangechi Mutu. In addition to artists who have turned to montage to challenge media representations of gender, race, sexuality, and class, my thesis builds upon the writing of a range of scholars who refuse to dematerialise their thinking and who aim to resist hierarchical ways of doing, making, and knowing. Not least Ariella Azoulay, Tina Campt and Hazel Carby.

I have developed a two-stage montage method called primary and secondary montage. This allows me to examine the montage I intend to make with a chosen source, what I have called primary montage, and aleatory montage found when mining the detritus of the used source material, what I have called secondary montage. By mining the detritus, I refuse to ignore what I leave out, enabling me to assess my impact on the source and evidence it to viewers. The source materials used in this research include four Vogue and four Teen Vogue magazines produced between 1968-2017 in France, the U.S. and Italy.

There are three strands to this thesis: the primary and secondary montage approaches are interwoven with a written montage as part of the practice. The total seeks to avoid a seamless contribution and weave together a breadth of inquiry to support the substantive argument that glossy magazines, such as Vogue, are seductive through their homogenising forces ensuring seamless sameness whilst declaring a commitment to diversity and difference. In this process attention to source material is shown as crucial, something that has not- so far- been drawn out in the research and practice of montage.

The thesis has two volumes: Volume I is comprised of the written montage with some images of the primary and secondary montages and related material as guides. Volume II is comprised of photographic and captioned documentation of all the primary and secondary montages, as well as montage by other artists to provide an artistic lineage for this research. Together, Volumes I and II constitute an integrated thesis of interdisciplinary practice-based research that extends an existing visual art strategy and makes a substantive contribution to art practice, ongoing debates in the field regarding montage and representation, and to feminist anti-racist thinking and making.