The Dash column explores art and its social contexts. The dash separates and the dash joins, it pauses and it moves along. The dash is where the viewer comes to terms with what they’ve seen. Here, Nicholas Gamso picks through the polymer mounds of branded culture to find two photographers who recycle the Adidas trefoil into a sign of hope.
Micaiah Carter, Alton in Brooklyn II, 2016. Digital chromogenic print. Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Hasted Art Advisory, New York.
A full consideration of visual culture must account for clothing—not just high fashion, but branded, mass-produced apparel. Streetwear labels like Nike and Adidas adorn countless bodies as they move about the social spaces of modern life. Brands shape cultural imaginaries and structure symbolic economies. They sway the aspirations, affinities, and desires that form group identity. But brands also conceal the underlying conditions of production. A corporate logo on a sweatshirt or a pair of shoes may obscure the manufacturer’s large, underpaid workforce, its global supply chain, and an immense carbon footprint. To further abstract this reality, many prominent brands avow commitments to progressive causes, drawing especially on the themes of liberal multiculturalism. Adidas’s Pride Collection—brightly colored sneakers and hoodies emblazoned with the words “love” and “unite”—is billed as “an opportunity to stand in solidarity with victims of discrimination, to hear and share their voices, and join the movement for justice.” Amid a national uprising against police violence and structural racism, Adidas praised the role of “Black athletes, Black artists, Black employees and Black consumers” in the company’s success. After complaints of hiring discrimination, Adidas pledged to increase company diversity beyond marketing and celebrity endorsements.
Appeals to the politics of representation come clearly into focus via the brand’s partnerships with art institutions. In 2018, Adidas celebrated Black History Month in collaboration with the Brooklyn Museum. The company commissioned fashion photographer Micaiah Carter to create elegant portraits of young Black entrepreneurs (“the next generation of cultural and community catalysts,” in the words of Carter’s agency), which were displayed alongside Adidas sneakers in vitrines. Carter’s work is sensuous, his subjects exaggerated by filtered light and oblique angles. His style is ineffably cool. But here the work appears to provide the Brooklyn Museum with a cover. Ever since hosting the 2015 Brooklyn Real Estate Summit, the institution has faced widespread criticism: charges that its board and curatorial team lack diversity, and that it caters to white art-goers at the expense of its Black and Caribbean neighbors. In partnering with Adidas, the museum embraced the company’s supposed associations with Black culture, employing what geographer Brandi Thompson Summers has called a “post-racial visual rhetoric” that “forestalls the possibility for explicit engagement on questions about the fashion system and the aesthetic logic upon which it depends as part of a racial and gender project.” While the Adidas exhibition provided an opportunity to highlight Carter’s work, it was part of a larger effort to artwash the expansion of racial capitalism from the factory floor to the city street to the gallery.
The Adidas x Brooklyn Museum project prompts us to ask whether institutional partnerships with corporations like Adidas might ever result in social and political change. Can representation alone lead to a shift in power dynamics? Can an artist use a brand without being used back? Art critic Antwaun Sargent has praised Carter as one of several young Black fashion photographers who “allude to the ideas of self-presentation” and thus “illustrate their own desires and control their own images.” For Carter, this means developing a personal aesthetic. He is attracted to 1970s style as well as a kind of futurism: Sargent notes Carter’s intention to, as the artist puts it, “create moods and environments that are almost unworldly within the context of blackness.” His 2016 portrait of Alton Mason (Alton in Brooklyn II) shows the model balancing a basketball on his outstretched fingertips. His arms bend together, his torso slinks in a graceful curve. He turns his head, staring stoically into the lens. The setting, a Brooklyn basketball court, loses focus behind a glistening spume of water that seems to rise from nowhere. The diffuse glow is accentuated by the model’s gold sequined blouse, which is neatly tucked into his Adidas pants. The image is of course representational. It discloses person, place, and mise en scéne. But its power resides in sensation and kinesthesis—something like the “unworldly” quality that Carter describes.
In its use of a branded object, Carter’s image calls to mind Wolfgang Tillmans’s engagement with streetwear and queer soccer culture. Although Tillmans has expressed ambivalence over commercial imagery, Adidas has proven a source of constant fascination for the artist. His interest is evident in Lacanau (self) (1986), an out-of-focus photo of his own leg clad in black Adidas shorts taken while he walked along the beach. The photographer’s perspective morphs and abstracts the composition, forging a continuity of fabric, body, and landscape, while the brand’s familiar trefoil logo lends the picture a perverse immediacy. The image encapsulates multiple visual traditions in a single snapshot. Tillmans’s Red Adidas (2007) and his (unbranded) grey jeans over stair post (1991) redouble this conceit, removing the body entirely. One illuminates the sheen of red nylon fabric, the other explores the topography of rumpled denim.
As photographs by Carter and Tillmans approach a level of abstraction, they transpose everyday commodities into an aesthetic idiom of form and light, exceeding simple exposition. But advertising has always relied on the image’s evocation of something (or someone) more, beyond what appears in the frame. Images that defy obvious meaning may still produce fetishistic ways of seeing. Even when Tillmans’s photos do not show a body, for example, they are plainly sensuous and libidinal (the body that wears the garments also takes them off). And while Carter’s portraits do of course show bodies, they are shrouded in auratic effects. In both cases, the work’s representational function is only part of its power.
Fashion photographers may be more aware of this simultaneity than other artists. After all, it is their charge to elevate the profane worldliness of branded objects to transcendent heights. The logo reflects light, the fibers and folds of the garment fall on shoulders and limbs, and clothing itself appears to take part in the social spaces we inhabit. We might disentangle brands from their source, but it is almost impossible to rid our lives of them entirely. Logos clutter visual culture just as synthetic shorts and sneakers litter urban landscapes. Ironically, it is out of such terrible abundance that the brand becomes available for recuperation. Obdurate plastic commodities offer an aperture to a future in which the cruelty of production is superseded by creative possibilities—where images become untethered from the marketplace and recalibrated toward a dynamic ontology of sense, body, polymer, and being. X
Nicholas Gamso is the author of Art After Liberalism, forthcoming from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.