“I said, ‘What if we made videos instead?’ and she said, ‘Yeah, do it!” said Cole. The videos, one by Cole, the other by Su, quickly joined the program, which included topics like “Dark Age Jesus,” “Peacocks, Natural Philosophy and the Edible Art of Altering Nature” and “What Did the Medieval Laity Hear When They Heard Latin?”
Cole and Su “already were going to be heroes over spring break, doing poster presentations,” said Miller, an expert on medieval religious beliefs and practices, “but instead they just ran with the idea of videos for the virtual conference and developed their projects in unusual ways. Presentations among us academics can be on the dull side, and theirs were fabulous and thought-provoking and visually great.”
“It makes me wonder,” she added, “if my future students could do video versions instead of final papers.”
Miller’s fall 2019 seminar was prompted by the Met exhibit because, although stunning, “Heavenly Bodies” sparked controversy and criticism for being “all style, but no substance,” said Cole. Scholars felt the exhibit didn’t explain how these designers drew upon medieval Christianity to create clothing that engaged and commented on the world today.
Miller went to New York City to see the exhibit and agreed that it presented “incredible outfits, but insufficient information about them, and the catalog was equally insipid.”
The exhibit and catalog also were insensitive, she said, since Catholic priest sex abuses cases were a spiraling crisis in 2018. “There were garments displayed that I thought would be really traumatizing to anyone who’d been abused by a cleric,” she said, describing a series based on priests’ garb where one robe was suggestively open down the front, and another had a peephole at the crotch. Accompanying verbiage referred to the garments as “playful,” she said.
Miller asked her students to choose a garment, or a collection of garments, from the exhibit and then guided them through research and analysis of key issues, including the designers’ background, ideas and work, and the meanings evoked in the exhibit by the garments’ juxtaposition with medieval and Byzantine works of art.
Su said she chose “the Lochner dress” by Alexander McQueen since it “really caught my eye” and was one of the few garments with paintings on it. It also was detached at the Met from its symbolic meaning and its connections to the personal life of Lee Alexander McQueen, who committed suicide in 2010, said Su. In her video, “Alexander McQueen’s Lochner Dress: Changing Identities and the Heavenly Bodies Exhibit,” Su used existing footage from the exhibit and discussed the inspiration that the British fashion designer and couturier drew from Catholicism, Gothic art and life and death. She also explored the different presentations of the dress when worn on the catwalk by a human model — with a falconer’s glove and shoes with talon details — and on a mannequin at the Met, where attention was diverted from the dress to a nearby altarpiece.
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