-Arthur C. Danto 

When I became fascinated with the work of Karen LaMonte, my interest was in the genius of her vision. It was bestowed as a gift of the creative imagination, and transformed her into a very different artist than she would have been, had the vision not been granted her. LaMonte’s pieces, whatever their weight, proclaim beauty and evanescence, fragility and delicacy, transparency and light, luxury and magic.

Her decision to make the dress her central motif led to the kind of dress she chose for transubstantiation into glass, where the fragility of the glass augments the fineness and translucency of the fabric, and the lightness expressed by ornamentation of the garment—flounces, bows, ribbons, ruffles. At least initially, the dresses she chose were declarations of radical femininity on the part of their wearers— garments so constructed as to project an image of ideal grace. In her brilliant book, Seeing through Clothes, Anne Hollander argues that “the primary function of Western dress is to contribute to the making of a self-conscious image, an image linked to all other imaginative and idealized visualizations of the human body.” The garments LaMonte worked with were not, except from a cynical perspective, working clothes—housedresses, business suits, uniforms. They were ornamental garments for special occasions, and they translated into visual terms the metaphor of the woman as herself an ornament, whose substance was aesthetic through and through. Most of the dresses that LaMonte has cast in glass are as much vestiges of a vanished time as of an absent person.

They are as dated as old photographs, found in the backs of drawers or forgotten between the pages of books. This brings me to one of the most interesting features of LaMonte’s work. We can see through the fabric to the naked body of the women who wore it, as if the body left its imprint on the dress that concealed but alluded to it. It is as if the beauty of the wearer’s body were preserved in her garment, and we see the navel, the nipples, the shadowed delta between her legs, her buttocks. I see this as adding a dimension of tragedy to the poetry of

the work. The dress belonged to a moment when the wearer was, to use an expression of Proust’s, en fleur. The dress belonged to a certain moment of history, which it preserves—it shows how women dressed for certain occasions at a certain moment. The wearer will have aged. She looked like that then, but, if she is still alive, it is certain she will not look that way now. There is a double melancholy—the melancholy of fashion, and the melancholy of bodily change, from nubility to decrepitude. The breasts have fallen, the waist thickened, the skin has lost its transparency and luminescence. The poignancy of LaMonte’s dresses is a product of two modes of change in which we participate as human beings, composed, as we are, of flesh and meaning. Their poetry is the poetry of beauty and loss.

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