Aganovich

by Francesca Gavin

Last Updated Friday, 12 September, 2008

Sigmund Freud notoriously referred to female sexuality as the 'dark continent' of psychology. Something too complex and obtuse to ever understand, often defined in relationship to men. Aganovich’s Spring/Summer 2009 collection, 'zeropointzero' defies that idea. The clothes highlight the blurry lines of sexual definitions.

The collection is unusual. It consists of eight separate items of clothing that can be worn separately or together as one item. The clothes are being shown in an equally unusual way, online in a film by director and photographer Jez Tozer. Alongside the central film are two process films that document two major inspirations on the work – matadors and Mata Hari. The project was initially inspired by the parallels between the words but grew to inform wider ideas about what defines masculinity and femininity.

Both matadors and Mata Hari are exaggerated images of seduction. Both focus on performance and public display. The matador sticks his chest out and struts as an icon of virility. There is something pagan about his character and the ritual murder of the bull. His masculine posturing is almost over the top, unreal. At the same time as he fights the bull, he is also tempting the animal in an almost feminine way. Teasing, enticing him with red silk, moving his body around the bull like a dancer. Even the tight fitting matadors clothes in vibrant coloured silk have an almost feminine feel. In order for the matador to express his masculinity he must first become feminised.

Georges Bataille made the connection between bulls and sexuality in his notorious novel ‘The Story of the Eye’. In one memorable chapter, Bataille’s central female character Simone at one point comes while she watches a matador die (with the help of some dead bulls testicles). Roland Barthes argued in the essay ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’, that the novel was really the story of an object. The eye, migrating into different circular forms throughout the narrative from eggs to balls. The erotic nature of the book in part comes from the movement of these fluid floating concepts. That circular imagery is unconsciously echoed in Tozer’s circling camerawork, the circular shape of the fight arena, the circling matador, the spinning movements of the pole dancer.

The spy and exotic dancer Mata Hari, also crossed the boundaries of sexual stereotypes. She garnered the attention of the French military for her sexual liaisons and was hired as a spy against the Germans in World War I, but was later accused of being a double agent and executed. Her punishment for crossing sexual borders was death. Aganovich’s interest was really in the elegance and mystery of the icon. The connected process film depicts a pole dancer, whose impressive gymnastic physicality is incredibly strong and powerful. Woman here sits somewhere between being in control and being controlled.

The matador and Mata Hari are both narratives about death. Mata Hari was killed for crossing sexual codes. The bullfight is essentially a brutal, bloody ritualistic depiction of murder. The matador is very much playing the character of the hunter. The fight in this film is shocking and not celebrated, just as the pole dancer is not seen as a sexual example. That violence or obvious sexuality were not direct influences on the work but starting ideas that Aganovich departed from. Together all three films show the process of an idea. Mata Hari and Matador were two elements needed to reach the end result.

That end result is about transformation – how clothing can cross over from male to female to something beyond that. A utopian idea of female sexuality that is not defined by the male. The model in Tozer’s central film – the designer Aganovich herself – builds different characters around herself through the clothes. Instead of removing elements, pieces are added to form something fierce and almost defiant. Woman is not without weakness or without strength – she is everything.