Tactile Self, 2020

Writing by Inneke TaAl

Review for Adelaide Film Festival, Reflective Screens

Georgia Button reflects on the intertextual qualities of fashion through her work Tactile Self (2020) commissioned by the Adelaide Film Festival 2020 in response to the film by Alison Ellwood, The Go-Go’s, that documents the 1980’s pop group. In response, Button has extracted a focus on costume and female performativity through an intensified look at fabric and make-up, their sensuality and autonomy of substance, as well as their sculptural attributes.

The work is being shown in Prospect on their street-facing screens outside Newmarch Gallery and in the city on the outdoor Adelaide Festival Centre screens, both at cinematic scale, during October 2020.

Tactile Self sets the table for a banquet that could incite a feeding frenzy, slowly revealing one dish after another but instead of succulent meat and slippery seafood we are dealing with intricate threads rolling upon themselves and buttons pushing upwards as if in desire for their own making. Woven, shaken, pressed and released, minerals pounded into micro-beads are coming loose or awaiting a further mincing by a powder-pillow.

This work reads not just about identity through fashion, but sociology, broadly speaking. When these surfaces are applied to skin, or as they sit encased as minerals, their earthly qualities come forth. They are made of the dust we walk on and the fibres we breath in – among other less natural substances. Humans, across all cultures and histories, have covered themselves in grounded pigments for skin application or dyed fabrics. These applications operate within social organisation for ceremony, war, status, beauty and seduction.

Tactile Self builds on this idea of ‘make-up’ and ‘fashion’. Rather than the more exploitative interpretations of make-up application in the media, Button reduces the iconised image of celebrity or performer to shifting surfaces at play and frees up a form of ceremony and costume that otherwise remains wrought with gender politics and hyper-sexualisation.

 The extreme close-ups of these materials reveals a process of becoming other that is writhing and shifting beneath the surface (the question posed to the viewer; of what?). Tactile Self appears to be reducing fashion to its essential qualities and in doing so, opens space to question the labelling and relationship to the properties of it when applied to the human body.  

Button comments in her opening speech that we all participate in these practices even through the rejection of them. The artist, however, seems to embrace it. It was hard to separate the presentation of Button in an azure blue dress alongside her work, appearing actively engaged by the materiality of the film’s subject matter, in celebration of its contribution towards how we are in the world. As distinctly visual animals we are all subject to the conditions of this type of self-representation. We are faced with its social and political implications. It both divides and separates, unites and destroys.

 Do we not all co-exist with the very nature of make-up and fabric?

Inneke Taal is an artist and writer currently based in Adelaide, Australia.

This review comes from a commissioned piece of writing for the artist, made possible due to the generous support of Adelaide Central School of Art. The writer attended the opening night and is also referencing the artist’s speech; October 2020.