The Myth of Power and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

The 1956 film The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit helped establish the visibility and significance of the modern business suit as the premier emblem of corporate power and, by association, as an icon of masculinity. The suit represented the ideal man: successful, wealthy, a family man living with his wife and two children in suburbia. A certain paradox of masculinity, however, emerged after 1945 with the war veteran becoming domesticated for suburbia. There was a push to see the ideal male as both tough and tender; as virile, yet not a philander; to be the breadwinner; and to raise a family. The conflict between the social exterior and the psychological interior did not always live up to the imagined standards.

The business power suit legitimized and mythologized a variety of personalities and professions. Consider the hundreds of male commuters queuing on a train platform in Connecticut rigidly adhering to the strict dress code. The Brooks Brothers suit became the armor, the uniform for all males of that era. Highly visible political leaders, such as, JKF, MLK, Jr. and Malcolm X, wore the uniform and took full advantage of the suit’s implied aura of power and control. The so-called Rat Pack led by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Jr. made the suit an affirmation of masculine power and charm. The suave and sophisticated movie character James Bond as played by Sean Connery underscored the seductive allure of the business suit and its exotic cousin, the tuxedo. Jazzmen Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck, as well as the Beatles, wore suits to enhance their image. The rebel comedian Lenny Bruce wore a suit to deliver his counter-culture homilies. More recently, the suit and its most fundamental accessory, the tie, have taken center stage again with the debates centering on the President. George W. Bush has tried to distinguish himself from his father (and his Republican forefathers, including Ronald Reagan), by changing the color of his tie, further indicating how significant the business suit is to establishing male identity.

Given the suit’s mystique of power and bearing on masculine identity, it is not surprising that women’s fashions during various moments of the 20th century appropriated men’s business suit as their own. Throughout the century high-profile women have appropriated the suit, from Swedish-born Greta Garbo, to the movie character Annie Hall (played by Diane Keaton), to rock star Madonna and performance artist Laurie Anderson. Women have always understood the business suit as one signifier of male power.

The fourth Verge artist, Swedish videographer Maria Friberg examines and allegorizes the conventions and conditions surrounding masculinity and its multiple relationships to the myth of power. Friberg’s leitmotiv is the male body and its most important skin, the modern business suit. Her art uses the immediacy of video and photography to capture the nuances of performance and to express the often-elusive vagaries of social conditioning. Her method is subtle; the messages she creates are poetic, and often equivocal.

Friberg’s work opens our awareness to the elasticity of representing masculinity. As recent cultural studies have shown, there cannot be one simple definition of masculinity. It exists in many forms (aggressive, passive, and points in-between) and within multiple contexts (gay, bi-, trans- or heterosexual). Masculinity is performative, meaning that its definition is grounded in the acts we perform as men and women. It is fluid, constituted by gender and social conventions. Certainly, a greater awareness today does not hold people to narrow definitions of what it means to be a man or woman, but social conventions still do place certain restrictions.

The societal conventions of masculinity and its relation to the business suit inform the art of Maria Friberg. Her work addresses the other sides of masculinity, the ones missed or passed over by most observers. As gender and the distinctions it makes are performative, video offers one of the surest ways to capture, examine, and reveal those performances. Friberg carefully directs her installations selecting which works are shown on monitor and which are projected. Each decision directs the viewer’s understanding of the meaning of the work.

blown out is a projected video showing a man absolutely immersed in a sea of foamy, turbulent waters. It is an environment he can never be in total control of. Is he in any danger or is he merely swimming? The large-scale projection of the work adds immeasurably to the visceral experience of it by threatening to engulf the viewer into its swirling madness. The sheer physicality of scale, which envelops the viewer, is one of the work’s key components. Time has been distorted in blown out, slowed down, sequences dissolve and overlap. This temporal distortion creates a magical scene, a metaphor for control, abandon, and the process that negotiates the two. Although stripped of his business power suit, the man nevertheless shows no fear or emotion. In a context of near total abandon, the man has symbolically become disembodied. His head floats in an ever-shifting environment. blown out is a powerful and brilliantly simple representation of man versus his context (insert any terrifying context here, i.e., corporate boardroom).

somewhere else depicts a scene in a corporate environment, a conference table meeting. In an utterly absurd gesture, Friberg has us looking under the table. Underneath we see five men dressed in business attire, sitting side by side. First one and then another begin moving their legs, touching one another, as if sending a code, beneath the meeting presumably going on above. As much anthropological document as it is art, Friberg considers what most would pass over, if ever notice. Curious details unfold, bringing significance where there seemed to be none. somewhere else portrays the seemingly socially regulated environs of a meeting room, yet the men, as read through their legs, break manly, and thereby social, conventions as they jostle one another.

almost there is a series of five, large-scale photographs depicting four men floating aimlessly in a luxuriously vivid cerulean pool of water. All wear identical business suits. The water churns with bubbling energy, symbolically suggesting it is not a placid environment. The photographs have a strong relationship to blown out: both depict men in water, completely immersed in environments of which they may or may not be in complete control. Friberg, however, has upped the ante: her central theme of the modern man’s business suit has been placed in a radical new context. Formerly well dressed, and ready for business, their environment has reduced the men to floating chum. In comparison to somewhere else where the legs seem to communicate with each other, almost there suggests an almost eerie lack of camaraderie; they do not acknowledge each other’s presence. Inert, not swimming, they are “fish out of water” in a sense. Their suits give them no special cache here. Metaphorically trapped in the churning waters of business, they are “almost there,” waiting for their next chance to move.

Similar to “reality TV” but without the sensationalism, no time to fall collapses the distinction between public and private identities and thus exposes the private, sensitive underside of a man who happens to be one of the most powerful leaders of the world. It develops into a brilliant and revealing character study. As with most of Friberg works, she does not comment or make statements that are one-sided or that trivialize the subject; she is always seeking a loftier goal than mere political commentary. Although her projects often begin in a social arena, and may eventually impact the political, they do so only in an indirect way.

no time to fall is something of a masterpiece by virtue of it not being staged by Friberg, it was an real performance that she skillfully edited. Yet, Friberg clearly demonstrated her social perspicacity by artfully identifying the chinks in the armor. Each of the other videos or photographs succeed by having some aspect of their social convention be exaggerated or staged by the artist, either its “text” or “context.” With no time to fall, she edited the text so that it revealed something new about the man. With the other videos, she manipulated some aspect that drew attention to the social convention she was critiquing. With no time to fall she emphasized the way personal speech and body gestures follow their own rules of behavior, which may be at odds with social conventions. She exposed the very real and vulnerable side of the masculine psyche in a way that the staged videos could not, by the simple fact that this video was based on a real, live performance.

no time to fall reveals personal and public aspects about President Bush that might have gone unnoticed to all but his closest friends and advisors. Friberg isolated a very human and personal side of the president. Ordinarily, we would have focused on Bush’s speech, it’s usually all we would “see.” Friberg’s editing has excavated a series of actions that fall below our normal register. The president’s winks, nods, grins, twitches, and smirks are the real subjects in her video. By making this collection of personal signals and quirks become the message, Friberg has brought out another side of the powerful politician, and in the end, revealed how very present the personal side is, even as the man stands cloaked in the social armor of the business suit.

The video confront me back is a short allegory about the protagonist’s untenable position within his corporate environment. It has formal (aesthetic) precedents that reach back to the early films by Andy Warhol and the early videos by Bruce Nauman. Warhol filmed such prosaic thrillers as Sleep, 1963, Kiss, 1964 and Empire, 1964, all of which depicted exactly what their titles declare, and for notoriously long periods of time. Nauman recorded Slow Angle Walk (Beckett Walk), 1968, which depicted the banal act of the artist simply walking around his studio. Although conceptually not related to these artistic gambits, Friberg’s video is formally related to their precedent setting use of the banal act as art.

As if we were spying on the subject, we have caught the man in what was the semi-private environment of his company car, only to see him turn flaccid before our eyes. This private moment of collapsed resignation portrays male vulnerability in a corporate environment. But Friberg is not simply highlighting a mere weak moment of the man, for the subject reforms itself and coalesces back into his original upright position. Friberg’s works often use such metaphorical signs with subtlety. Weigh the importance of the theatrical setting of the man and car. All too easily coded as phallus, the gearshift nevertheless takes on ominous overtones. Is it the cause of his slow melt? Consider too, his awkward position of sitting between the driver’s seat and passenger. The colloquialism “being in the driver’s seat” comes to mind here, but the driver is clearly not in control. As confront me back suggests and as Friberg does throughout her work, masculinity is never a clearly defined condition, but a folding and unfolding process of performativity, that embraces vulnerability and resolution, and not coincidentally, humor.

A unique feature of this Verge exhibition is the off-site installation Atlanter, a thirty-two foot photographic representation of a businessman that towers dramatically over the City of Fargo’s horizon. The mural has been installed in Island Park Ramp, a recently built, modern parking garage, located downtown just a few blocks from the museum. The stylish building features an all glass tower, which the giant fills. The monumental work, fabricated in Stockholm, is one continuous, transparent print that was shipped in, hand cut and mounted to the glass walls.

Historically, human figures have adorned buildings since the first ones were built. Caryatids are architectural support columns, or pillars, in the shape of women. The most famous caryatids are found on the Erechtheion in Athens, 421-409 BC. Male columns are called atlantes, the plural of atlas. The pillars support the building on their heads. Typically, caryatids stood upright showing no strain, whereas the atlantes were often sculpted to suggest the effect of carrying such weight.
As the atlantes of old literally bore the weight of the building, this new Atlanter has symbolically become the “pillar of society.” The giant may also represent the new modern cowboy, perhaps a reincarnation of William George Fargo himself–founder of Wells, Fargo and Company–recast as the businessman of today.

Society regards aggression, independence, ambition, and competition as the best traits of masculinity. The business world reinforces those conventions. Friberg has taken these characteristics and portrayed them in the various business contexts of the corporate boardroom, the company car, and against its most important social armor, the business suit. Friberg questions these masculine and corporate conventions, and their relationships to the personal and social, the strong and the weak, and the powerful and the vulnerable. At times, Friberg has wielded the video like a scalpel shrewdly separating incongruent elements. At other times, the artist functioned like an anthropologist carefully observing the conventions and conditions of her subject. Moreover, she has stood as director behind the camera, as the artist who seeks to understand the anthropologist’s findings. Friberg has excised certain aspects from the psychological and social dimensions of masculinity and recast them, refocused them in varyingly nuanced ways, and thus has created allegories that offer new and subtle musings on the masculine identity and its various relations to society.

Rusty Freeman 24 March 2002