Undergarments and armor
A contrast between males and females as portrayed in the art of Tanya Marcuse
Jen Haggerty
Issue date: 10/9/03 Section: News
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Undergarments and armor are seemingly two completely different items, but there is a connection between them, as discovered at the Fall Honors Lecture Tuesday evening with nationally known artist Tanya Marcuse.
Marcuse has received numerous awards for her photography, including the National Foundation for the Advancement of the Arts Award, the Dutchess County Arts Fellowship, and the Center for Photography at Woodstock Photographers Fellowship.
More recently, Marcuse was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship and a Kittredge Grant from Harvard University for her project, "Undergarments and Armor." Just finishing a rough draft of her photographic book two weeks ago, Marcuse presented a part of her numerous photographic collections of historical underclothes and armor in the United States and England.
"When people find out that I'm photographing undergarments, they think it's going to be sexy and they're not. They're clinical and, in some cases, very industrial," Marcuse said.
Marcuse showed slides of her work, which she explained has completely obsessed and moved her throughout the past decade after graduating from Yale.
"My work facilitates between nineteenth-century romantic and post-modern," she said.
Marcuse explained that she wanted to show the explicit side of the body through her photographs, even if it is as subtle as veins underneath the skin.
"The body always seemed really central," she said. "This first photo [of the lecture] shows that I'm interested in the body, space and form; it becomes a place you enter."
"[This shows] the inner structure pushing through to the outside," she said while pausing on a self-portrait of her collarbone.
Marcuse's fascination with the details of the body provided the foundation for her obsession with undergarments and armor, items that would frame the body and later represent the body that they once sculpted. This aspect would be crucial to understanding why undergarments and armor has mesmerized her.
Encompassing the body
Marcuse has always been interested in the "individual" body not an ideal "perfect" one that people often try to achieve. She spent time photographing at the Temple of Olympia in Greece to learn more about the human form.