Men in Suits
Maria Gvardeitseva
Performance
Riga, Latvia
2024
“Men in suits missold me pensions and endowments, costing me thousands of pounds. A man in a suit led us on a disastrous and illegal war. Men in suits led the banks and crashed the world economy. Other men in suits then increased the misery to millions through austerity. If we are to start telling people what to wear, maybe we should ban suits”.
Henry Stewart
In his Anthropometries, Ives Klein expressed the general tendency towards reduction in avant-garde. In that performance, from the eternal chain of model-artist work, he excluded a seemingly irreplaceable element - the artist. History and time move forward. And from this position, in modern optics, the role of the artist in costume, as an observer, has changed. And the artist is again a character, and this is a woman. Action and practice, like ritual, remain. The coordinates of time and memory change, and they, like horizontal and vertical, lead us to a different perception of time. This “repetition” takes us to a new level of perception through gestures in art, through the objectification of the body and physicality, through the muscle-centric image, symbolized by the suit and white collars... and this rhythm... Maria Gvardeitseva drips suits in blue paint that she named International Misogynistic Blue. The suits are being painted and soaked in paint, it's dripping out of it. The artist is dropping the suits, they fall, and she walks on them. The paint is imprinted on the paper, leaving marks. Marks and drops are everywhere — in this men’s suits world, everything is still filled with misogyny. The future is full of unknowns. The prints of the costumes are like prints of memories, pulsating, appearing and drowning in the white paper. But the emptiness left by the costumes thrown onto paper gives hope for new rhythms. To a new drawing of the future. The Blue Hour is coming - a special period in between, the change of cycles from day to night and vice versa - the time when nocturnal insects fall asleep, and daytime insects have not yet woken up. As a metaphor for hopes, dreams and leaping into the void. Transition from one state to another. From one memory to another. Rigid forms of costumes - like masculine-centrism, absolute femininity and absolute masculinity, unattainable and socially desirable, disappear - and the rigidity of forms, conservatism and solidity of structure will become flexible. The uncertainty of the future is softened by a new cycle - the whisper of the wings of an emerging butterfly
