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[eugeniedalland]

BEYOND THE PAGE: ROBIN GIVHAN IN PROFILE

https://www.culturedmag.com/robin-givhan-reset-the-boundaries-of-fashion-writing-no-shes-taking-an-even-larger-role-in-the-industrys-transformation/

Givhan’s analysis of the fashion choices of political figures brings into sharp focus the similarities in logic between the industries, namely that reality can very easily be warped and manipulated by perception. Politicians and fashion executives alike make use of the fact that the public is often not able to differentiate between fact and appearance, which is something that the Trump administration—as well as most major luxury fashion brands—have exploited to disastrous effect. We buy into brands, for instance, based on what the brand represents to us, not for the quality, beauty or functionality of the physical product. “Appearance doesn’t change fact,” Givhan explained in a 2018 interview, “but it certainly can alter the way in which we perceive the fact; sometimes, it alters whether or not we believe in it.”

[eugeniedalland]

Exhibition Review: Disaster / End of Days

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Pantin

The impulse for destruction is as intrinsic to human nature as is its antithesis, creation, and many of the most elevated artistic creations our culture has produced pertain to that negative impulse. Eugene Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus, an enormous, opulent painting stationed at the Louvre, showcases various aspects of Romanticism including rich and vivid imagery and classical references, but what is most gripping about the image is its sheer violence. When faced with imminent military defeat, Sardanapolus, the last king of Assyria, orders all of his prize possessions destroyed and killed. The Greek story also tells of Sardanapolus’ own suicide, but the viewer of Delacroix’s painting witnesses the destruction before this event; Sardanapolus reclines on a luxurious divan watching all his concubines, horses, and other possessions get slaughtered and ruined. The artistic rendering of disaster - in addition to the viewing of it - are both part of the same preoccupation we seem to have with this darker side of the human psyche.

Roughly two hundred years after Delacroix’s painting, our preoccupation with and proclivity for destruction and violence are clearly still intact, arguably on a greater scale than in Delacroix’s time (or even Sardanapolus’). While blockbuster films make up a huge percentage of the “artistic” reproduction of destruction and violence today, more subtle and provocative interpretations of destruction are found in the work of many contemporary artists. Calamity, terrorism, violence, and torture are all incorporated into works that touch on contemporary as well as classical discourses. One example is the banishment of Adam and Eve from Eden, which provides the focus of American artist Liza Lou’s The Damned (2004), two sculptures composed of glittering gold beads. The figures are devastated and shamed upon the dawn of their self-consciousness, their faces contorted and frozen into expressions of horror. A recent work of artist Barry X Ball entitled Purity also bears witness to a kind of loss of virtue, though here it is expressed in the physical material of the work. Much of Ball’s work is inspired by classical Venetian busts (many of which are housed in the Ca' Rezzonico museum in Venice) that he then replicates using three-dimensional scanning as well as painstakingly detailed hand carving techniques. Purity is a direct reference to Antonio Corradini’s The Veiled Lady/Purity (c. 1720-1725), a beautifully crafted bust of a veiled woman – ostensibly purity incarnate. Ball’s version is equally striking, though it is far more sinister: the marble has been corroded all over the statue, giving the figure an almost corpse-like appearance. The naturally-occurring red and rust-colored stripes of the Mexican Onyx contribute to this image of a decayed and crumbling ideal of purity. When we encounter works that are less abstract and based more directly on specific events, controversy is an inevitable addition to the interpretation of the artwork. These pieces also bring us back to the original question of how and why we make art that represents disaster, violence and atrocity. When the 20th century sociologist Theodore Adorno postured that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” he was primarily referring to what German culture would become after WWII, but his statement speaks to the more general question of the representation of disaster in art. Marc Quinn’s shocking sculpture Mirage (2009) depicts a life-size bronze figure that depicted the infamous image of the Abu Ghraib prisoner that circulated in 2004. The resulting sculpture - a figure that appears Christ-like, standing atop an upended box with his arms held out -presents a complex, powerful, though ultimately perplexing statement. Quinn was partially inspired by Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War, a series of prints that illustrated the atrocities caused by the political strife of early 19th century Spain. While Goya did not make his intentions for the series known (nor were they actually circulated until after his death), art historians today regard them as visual outcries against the violence of the times. While it is sometimes impossible to ascertain an artist’s intention in his or her work, our interpretation of their artwork must certainly echo some of what Goya’s historians believe.

[eugeniedalland]

EILEEN FISHER AND THE NEW FEMININITY

https://www.culturedmag.com/eileen-fisher/

Journalists have often pointedly detailed the difficulty Eileen has with explaining her business approach, sometimes even characterizing it as evasive or flighty. Usually the logic of these profiles follows that of a “success-despite-the-odds” story, the “odds” more or less referring to her inability to draw clear lines around her business practices. This judgement misses a greater point: the price of a business that champions the collective over a single authority might inevitably entail an amorphous disposition, due to the degree of constant flux. It’s something we’re just not used to envisioning or discussing—yet.

[eugeniedalland]

NOTHING SACRED: “INTELLIGENCE FOR DUMMIES” IN REVIEW

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/nothing-sacred-on-intelligence-for-dummies/

The essayist does not have it easy when it comes to gaining entrance to the literary canon, but O’Brien would seem to have an even greater trial than most because his seminal work was defined by its ephemerality. His extraordinary output existed mainly in the glossy pages of magazines: in the editorial columns as well as in the advertisements. He was a prolific copy writer and advertising director whose wit graced many a billboard and perfume bottle, and his ad campaigns were lauded and even occasionally denounced (most famously by the Justice Department in 1995 for a series of Calvin Klein commercials shot by Larry Clark). O’Brien managed to blur the lines between art and commerce in a way that legions of artists today attempt to do but rarely accomplish as successfully, or explosively, as he did.

[eugeniedalland]

COSMIC IDEALS AND SINGING PLANTS: A WEEKEND AT AZULIK

https://www.culturedmag.com/cosmic-ideals-and-singing-plants-a-weekend-at-azulik/

I recently ran into some old high school acquaintances of mine from upstate New York. Many years had passed since we’d seen each other and I was curious to hear what they’d been doing with their lives. “I started a cattle farm,” said one. “I’m a milk-maid,” replied the other. In recent years, a lot of my friends have joined the “return-to-nature” movement in similar fashions—which I concede is thoroughly applaudable in light of the environmental catastrophes that we face today. But sometimes I can’t help thinking about Marie Antoinette and her play-farm, Le Hameau de la Reine, in the Versailles gardens. There, she and her coterie would collect eggs from chicken coups which had been pre-cleaned by servants, and tend to sanitized lambs, indulging in what she believed to be the picturesque life of the peasant who lives close to nature.

[eugeniedalland]

MOZHDEH MATIN’S BEAUTIFUL ENGAGEMENT: A NEW MODEL FOR FASHION DESIGN

https://www.culturedmag.com/mozhdeh-matins-beautiful-engagement-a-new-model-for-fashion-design/

Her collections are the result of a joint decision-making process between designer and manufacturer, one in which the latter maintains a large degree of creative license. This in-the-flesh exchange creates a social structure that stands in stark contrast to the majority of designer-manufacturer relationships today, which tend to be characterized by their social, symbolic and physical distance. It’s interesting to consider that a closer physical proximity between a designer and the person who is constructing her product might be an important factor in the reprioritization of social concerns over economic ones.

[eugeniedalland]

The Evolving Face of Modernity: An Interview with Vejas Kruszewski

https://www.culturedmag.com/vejas/

“Which designers do you most admire?”

It’s a trite question, I admit—one that I often try to rephrase or avoid during interviews (responses are often pat or conventional). But right now, I’m genuinely interested. I’m on the phone with Canadian fashion designer Vejas Kruszewski, who founded his namesake label, Vejas, in 2014, at the age of 17. He’s an unusual designer and I feel sure his response will be intriguing. “I think the life story of [1930s couturier] Madame Grès is really interesting. Her dresses were inspired by ancient Greek statues, but they were so futuristic. Those streams of influence are fascinating. Actually, she also convinced [Cristóbal] Balenciaga to start his own line,” he tells me. “And I’m pretty sure the costume designer for the original Star Wars was looking at her work. I love those hypothetical links and the idea of a lineage of great people influencing great people.”

Kruszewski’s ability to identify the subtle, cobweb-like connections that span decades, visual mediums and a diverse cast of designers makes something light up in my mind. In a creative landscape and market that are besotted with pastiche (and horse-whipped by big business), it’s hard to remember what the sensation of seeing something new and unfamiliar feels like. We’re obsessed with novelty, but only if we can recognize it. As I listen to him talk about the way he engages with influences, I realize that his perspective is quite unique. An innate and unbridled sense of design often engenders this kind of vision. It’s also a requisite for making work that truly feels modern.

[eugeniedalland]

sketches: 1

Then came the rains, and a low, foreboding fog. Tormented leaves, thousands of them, descended upon the ship and its few inhabitants. They rested their elbows on the railing and stared at the sky blankly, unthinking and wise as angels until they sighed and rushed indoors to avoid the heat of the furious sun and furious rain that hailed down in spades from a hysterical bleeding god. A giant face in the clouds with a gaping mouth that shrieked thunder in a hoarse voice. The boat rocked and the deck became a smooth and slippery cold surface and she bent down to kiss it.

[eugeniedalland]

Natasha Stagg’s Sleeveless by Eugenie Dalland

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/natasha-staggs-sleeveless/

If one were to blend all of the entries that make up Natasha Stagg’s new book, Sleeveless, into one massive story, the result might look similar to the disembodied future William Gibson imagined in his 1984 masterpiece, Neuromancer. Extreme body modification, the transmutation between bodies and machines, corporate power superseding that of the government, and the re-envisioning of the self in a digital globalized landscape are just a few phenomena both books investigate. Sleeveless, which gathers Stagg’s essays, stories, and profiles on art and fashion written over the past eight years, speaks to the new spaces and meanings created by the Internet, where the displacement of reality through advertising, the falseness of branding, and the rapid, almost biomorphic mutation of consumerism can often feel like science fiction. The book is framed as “a personal account of a very strange time, and an attempt to identify the invisible strings pulling us in directions we never thought possible.”

[eugeniedalland]

HULA HOOPING IN A BLACK DRESS: PERSONAL REFLECTIONS ON ISABEL TOLEDO

https://www.culturedmag.com/isabel-toledo/

I dreamed lately of Isabel, of her jet-black hair and red lips and wide eyes, eyes like a fawn. They were at once cautious but filled with the innocence that only the greatest minds possess: it is the sword they use to pierce the darkness and pull from it the substance of their art. It was a troubling, see-through dream, because I knew that, in actuality, she was dead. But for now, here, she was alive. Even more troubling was the knowledge, unspoken, that it was her husband Ruben who had died, that half of the heart they shared had indeed fallen away, but that it was not Isabel’s half. Did he give his heart so that she might live, in the dream? I imagine they were so imbued with union that either would have sacrificed themselves for the other to live on. Isabel wore a dress of blood red taffeta, the fabric gathered in bunches and cinched with matching ribbon. Her speech was fast and breathless as if she didn’t know where she was. Her house was cut into the side of a yellow hill made of sand. The desert landscape around us was arid and endless, its color contrasting starkly with the red dress, as if the dress was the heart that she and Ruben had shared for so many years.

[eugeniedalland]

INTERVIEW: ARTIST TANYA MERRILL

https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/culture/she-leaves-a-mark-meet-artist-tanya-merrill

There's something hypnotic about listening to an entire album from start to finish. You begin to sense an invisible network between each song: beats from the first track reverberate with the emotions of the last, like a central nervous system made of low frequencies.

If Tanya Merrill's paintings could sing, they might have this same echoing hum. Her figurative images—like a loosely drawn cat eyeing a lobster, or a woman drumming her fingers across her naked thigh—speak to each other across scale and color. Her deceptively carefree brushstrokes blend impressionist notes with graphic precision. Often, her paintings convey a degree of humor. In a cartoonish barnyard scene, for example, the tables have turned and the animals are attacking the farmer, but behind this comic tone is an exploration of social codes and power dynamics.

Over the last three years, her work has steadily gained attention for its gestural quality. A recent Columbia MFA graduate, she has exhibited internationally at numerous galleries and museums including Gavin Brown’s Enterprise/Unclebrother and Almine Rech Gallery, London. Her work will be included in an upcoming exhibition at Gagosian Gallery (New York) in September 2019, and with Half Gallery at FIAC (Paris) in October.

Tanya and I met fourteen years ago, a week before we started our first year in college. I remember she was wearing a sleeveless top (blue) and a long beaded necklace (green). It’s funny to think back to that moment: I was about to meet someone whose creative vocation would deeply influence and mingle with my own. We've celebrated every step of each other's creative career—my first byline, her first exhibited painting—and for several years Tanya worked with me as creative director of the magazine I publish, Riot of Perfume.

This summer, we met at her studio—a converted bodega in Brooklyn—to talk about handwriting, reinterpreting art history, and how great it feels to wear nothing waist down.

[eugeniedalland]

LEMAIRE: THE BRAND PUTTING LOW-KEY LUXURY ON THE MAP

https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/fashion/lemaire-the-brand-putting-low-key-luxury-on-the-map

The ambiance of the Lemaire atelier in Paris is calm and unfussy when I arrive on a warm, overcast day in March. The brand had just shown their FW19 collection at Paris fashion week, and through a doorway I see racks of clothes in their signature, neutral palette—charcoal, shades of olive, fawn, cream. Draped dresses, square-shouldered blazers, and distinctive knits joined their usual roster of trench coats, pantsuits, and structured separates. The sunlight hits some carefully considered pops of color: reddish brown, forest green, and a saturated azure blue. After this brief reverie of colors and shapes, I am greeted by Christophe Lemaire and Sarah Linh Tran, the designers who created these garments.

Lemaire, founded by Christophe Lemaire in 1990, has undergone several iterations since its original inception almost 30 years ago. The brand received the prestigious ANDAM fellowship twice—an award dedicated to supporting emerging Paris-based designers won by the likes of Margiela, Bernhard Willhelm, and Y/Project. Posts as the creative director at Lacoste and Hermès followed. In 2014 he decided to return his full attention to his own line, this time co-designing with his partner Sarah Linh Tran. Their work together is lauded for its simplicity, elegance, and practicality, but the ingenuity of the brand also lies in its approach. Teamwork and collaboration are held sacred, in stark contrast to the prevailing myth of the auteur designer, a notion that is reminiscent of Martin Margiela's insistence upon recognizing the collaborative nature of fashion production, in the 1980s.

[eugeniedalland]

Love Making Would be Incidental

It dawned on me that I very much wanted a lover for the summer. I thought about the numerous hot nights I’ve spent since my childhood in New York City apartments and houses, looking out of the window at the not-actually-dark sky, the outline of buildings drawn against a deep purple or dirty-orange horizon. The sensation of unendurable heat—simply of the unendurable—slowly making you feel deranged, cut-off from reality, even scared. It is a version of the twilight zone: the hours grow long and you’re not sure if morning will ever come. Sometime around dawn there is a small window of time when the air becomes slightly cool, and the light over the city is a faint and kindly blue. It is a revelatory departure from the torpid hell of night, and all too quickly it is gone, a mirage swallowed up by the imminent return of traffic, noise, and bustle.

At some point it is night again, and you find yourself back on the threshold of insanity as you sweat and writhe on a sheet, unable to sleep. All your clothes have come off and you become aware of the hairs on your skin and the weight of your body, but the tactile consciousness is more claustrophobic than erotic.

Something inside of us becomes reduced in the heat, modified, pared down to a more base and instinctual substance. I wanted someone to share these odd and furious moments with when we peeled off our humanity one garment at a time. Love-making would be incidental on these nights; the experience of lying in the heat with someone is so extreme and so animal already that sex feels, if not exhausting, superfluous.

[eugeniedalland]

LA DÉCORATION! TOUT EST DANS CE MOT: Mallarmé’s Writings on Fashion

The Brooklyn Rail, Artbooks in Review: Mallarmé on Fashion: A Translation of the Fashion Magazine La Dernière Mode, with Commentary, by Furbank and A.M. Cain (Bero Publishers)

https://brooklynrail.org/2011/05/art_books/la-dcoration-tout-est-dans-ce-mot-mallarms-writings-on-fashion

Stéphane Mallarmé’s fashion magazine La Dernière mode, Gazette du monde et de la Famille has long presented something of a conundrum for those lucky enough to come upon it. The 19th century French poet—famed for his dense and complicated verse—edited, designed, and wrote the majority of each issue, employing several male and female pseudonyms to elaborate on such unanticipated subjects as gumbo recipes, prime vacation spots, and appropriate hat decorations. The journal exists in near entirety in only two editions: the Œuvres Complètes de Stéphane Mallarmé (Gallimard) and the 2004 English translation by P.N. Furbank and A.M. Cain, Mallarmé on Fashion. Such rarity is disproportionate to the peculiar and original nature of the work, and the latter translation’s commentary sheds a necessary light on one of the more enigmatic pieces of 19th century French writing.

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Correspondences

The Brooklyn Rail, Artbooks in Review: Nocturnes, by Josephine Sacabo and Dalt Wonk (Luna Press)

https://brooklynrail.org/2013/02/art_books/nocturnes-by-josephine-sacabo-and-dalt-wonk

One of the poems that appears in Nocturnes is called “For Chopin”: “Time pauses before the web / your seanced fingers spin, / glistening and so delicately attached / to anything solid, it consoles like perfume.” Frédric Chopin’s own nocturnes were freeflowing, rhythmic pieces, often lyrical, sometimes melancholy, and always very expressive. His use of the pedal gave to the composition a greater sense of emotional expression by sustaining the resonance of the played note. While Nocturnes, a collection of poetry and images, is not a tribute to the pianist, it is, in part, inspired by the same sensibilities. There is a sustained resonance in the book, too, one that is rarely achieved nowadays by most visual art books.

Nocturnes is the first publication of Luna Press, founded by New Orleans-based photographer Josephine Sacabo and poet Dalt Wonk. It exemplifies their belief in the importance of interdisciplinary associations, and specifically illustrated books. “The best and most natural appreciation of a work of art,” reads their manifesto, “may be a response to it in another.” Partly inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s concept of “correspondences” in the arts, this belief in the natural interrelatedness of all art forms provides the key to understanding the rapport between image and text in Nocturnes.

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Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis

The Brooklyn Rail, Artbooks in Review: Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis, by Aaron Rose, Mandy Kahn, and Brian Roettinger (JRP|Ringier)

https://brooklynrail.org/2012/03/art_books/collage-culture

The overture of Wim Wenders’s 1989 documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothesis accompanied by the director’s voiceover on the concept of identity:

The word itself gives me shivers. It rings of calm, comfort, contentedness. What is it, identity? To know where you belong? To know your self worth? To know who you are? How do you recognize identity?

The film surveys the ubiquity of the electronic and digital image, and particularly how it has changed how people define themselves. Two decades later, authors Aaron Rose and Mandy Kahn explore the same relationship in their study of the aughts, Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century’s Identity Crisis.

Comprised of two essays by the authors and a section of computer-generated collages by designer Brian Roettinger, Collage Culture focuses on the prevalence of appropriation in today’s cultural landscape in everything from musical composition to interior decoration, and makes the claim that artistic production is overly, and wrongly, concerned with extracting material from the past. According to the authors, our culture is now a patchwork of the “already extant,” and therefore our era’s identity is at stake since nothing is original. While part of their claim is legitimate, it is hard to accept that such thinking is enough to warrant an “identity crisis.” What Wenders understands about the concept of identity, Rose and Kahn do not: Identity is always a composite. He suggests that such a construct is even false, or at least deceptive, when it comes to reality, since it does not denote the truth of something, but merely what we imagine to be the truth. Such ontological concerns oddly do not come under scrutiny in Collage Culture.

[eugeniedalland]

Made in China?

The Brooklyn Rail, Artbooks in Review: The Beautiful Generation: Asian Americans and the Cultural Economy of Fashion, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu (Duke University Press Books)

https://brooklynrail.org/2011/03/art_books/made-in-china

The release of Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu’s latest study on fashion and culture, The Beautiful Generation, coincided with the recent Chinese New Year, an event that exemplified issues addressed in her book. The holiday was celebrated throughout China (indeed, worldwide), and yet halfway across the globe it inspired something closer to panic in a small demographic in New York. Many garment factories in China were closed for the celebration, which fell during the fashion industry’s most chaotic period: the weeks leading up to Fashion Week, when designers’ collections are presented to the world. That a significant number of garments consequently didn’t arrive for the shows illustrates not only the global character of the fashion industry, but also the intricate relationship between garment production in the East and design production in the West.