GEOMETRIE VARIABLE

Excerpt from Den Der, a Danish photo book about group sex experiment in 1969. More to see...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:19:53 -0500

Excerpt from Den Der, a Danish photo book about group sex experiment in 1969. More to see here.

Extracted from PARIS-LA magazine

These New Puritans - We want war (Domino) (2009)

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:19:47 -0500

These New Puritans - We want war

(Domino) (2009)

SANTE D'ORAZIO REMEMBERS !

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:19:41 -0500

In the early 1980s, Andy Warhol gave Sante D’Orazio his first assignment for an American magazine (this one), right around the time the then-budding fashion photographer started making his diaries. “I started [making them] because back then I had to be my own accountant, my own lawyer, my own producer and I wasn’t going to remember how many rolls of film I shot that day. Even back then I didn’t have a memory,” says D’Orazio of his process, which references the infamous style of the diaries kept by his great friend and mentor Peter Beard. “Then I hated the empty pages so I’d just fill them in with the things I did that day, the label of a wine bottle I had at dinner or matches from the restaurant. It became my daily meditation when I ended my day, my transition from my workday to my so-called home life.”

In 1998 he turned these meditations into his first book, A Private View, a behind-the-scenes look into the frenzy that is the fashion world and the attendant celebrities who make it sparkle. Now he’s back with the follow-up, Barely Private, which launched last night at New York’s Taschen bookstore. I spoke with him before the source material for yet another bawdy diary descended. Whether it’s the witty marginalia of late nights at the Rose Bar with Jack White and Warren Beatty, a funny snapshot of Larry Gagosian parading around in a mask in St. Barth’s, or a decade’s worth of self-portraits ,the book is a wild romp through the life of a truly indefatigable jetsetter who’s revealing more and more of himself these days.

“It’s a self-portrait. The first one was a little more decorative in the sense that you have supermodels, this and that. I don’t want to use the word careful, but in comparison it’s a tiny bit more careful,” says D’Orazio. “This book is where I make girls who are not supermodels look just as good if not better.” Or as Ed Rusha puts in his pithy intro, “His pictures are remarkably free of staging tactics…he makes cleavage growl like a dog.”

MICHAEL SLENSKE: Have you always been doing journals like this?

SANTE D’ORAZIO: I’ve been doing them since ‘81. I was in Milan and somebody gave me a Trussardi diary and I thought “Genius.” Inside I put the Polaroids, how much film I shot, who I shot with. This way for billing later on I had all the information.

SLENSKE: So it’s almost for your own record?

D’ORAZIO: Yeah, and every day became a note because I either edited that day or shot that day or met so-and-so. It developed out of necessity, and then it became total addiction and habit.

SLENSKE: Did you always have this book in mind after A Private View?

D’ORAZIO: You know, after the first book I had 10 times the material still left from the first one. I don’t want to repeat myself but 12 years later you just say, “Fuck, yeah.” That’s why the first one’s called A Private View and this one’s called Barely Private because I exposed even more.

SLENSKE: Then there are those quiet moments with Larry Gagosian in a mask. It’s one of those photos you never think you’d see.

D’ORAZIO: [LAUGHS] He still doesn’t know it happened. I’ll be getting phone calls. I don’t give a fuck. You only live once, we’re all going, and I’m going to leave a record.

SLENSKE: Is there a theme you’re trying to hit?

D’ORAZIO: There’s no theme, it’s life. I barely remember a night, but then I do when I look back at the Polaroids. “Did I do that? I did. Oh shit, I’m glad, I wish I could remember.” It’s a self-portrait. If you could remember all the moments in the last 10 years you’d highlight this one, this one and this one. Same thing.

SLENSKE: Was there anything you had to cut that you regret?

D’ORAZIO: There are a few. [His 15 year-old son walks in the room] This is my son, Nick. You got to get to a point in life where you really don’t care anymore: Everything gets contrived when you care too much. One of my dearest friends is Peter Beard, and I don’t want to hang out with him because he’s crazier than anyone I know Peter’s so out of control but his diaries are the most genius because you see how little he cares and how in the carelessness there’s genius.

Look, when Nick was three years old I drove him over to Peter’s house in Montauk, and on the way over I said, “What the fuck am I doing bringing my three year old to Peter’s?” He’s liable to drop him off the cliff or something. We went there and Peter was happy to see us. He had a beer in his hand, but he couldn’t find an opener so he smashed it against the table and started drinking. Then he grabs Nick by the side to take him for a walk, and the bottle cuts my son’s eye. And I just thought how much shit I was going to get for this. But I got the pictures.

Extracted from Interview Magazine

CHANTAL AKERMAN PRESENTS MANIAC SUMMER

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:19:30 -0500

05 déc.-09 janv. 2010

Maniac Summer by Chantal Akerman at Marian Goodman (Paris)

Pour cette exposition, Chantal Akerman a tourné des images et des sons à Paris pendant l’été 2009. Ces sons, ces images se sont installés dans le bas de la galerie dans un tryptique sans attaches.

Au rez-de-chaussée: un film orphelin
Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai prélude à «Maniac Summer» dans une frontière poreuse, entre la salle de cinéma et la galerie.

En bas: d’un film orphelin à l’autre, en devenir.
Sans sujet ni objet.
Sans début ni fin.
Un film qui implose
Entre l’Eden et la catastrophe.

En devenir. En éclats. Éclats de catastrophes.
Un film qui se multiplie au moins quatre fois, parfois 5 quand il est pris dans la catastrophe, quand la vitesse de la lumière semble être dépassée.
Comme à Hiroshima. Et comme à Hiroshima, il laisse des traces, mais en devenir.
Un film qui explose et glisse avant de mourir.
A côté de lui, les fantômes gigotent toujours. Continuent leur danse macabre.

Un film qui se répète jusqu’à en perdre ses couleurs comme des ombres, des fantômes, des traces.

Un film qui se réorganise dans un paysage,
Se sépare.
Du noir et blanc au blanc et noir.
Presque méconnaissable.
Des formes souvent presque abstraites.
Voilà ce que peut devenir un film orphelin.
Sans auteur, sans sujet, ni objet. Muet.

Extracted from Marian Goodman

-The Dust of Times, the latest film by the master Theo...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:19:20 -0500

-The Dust of Times, the latest film by the master Theo Angelopoulos, featuring the omnipresent Willem Dafoe-

RICHARD WRIGHT WINS THE 2009 TURNER PRIZE

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:19:11 -0500

Chancing upon one of Richard Wright’s paintings for a second time is like the relief you might experience on bumping into a softly spoken acquaintance in a crowd. Then, just when you feel as if you had begun to connect, it disappears into thin air, leaving a ghostly after-image in the mind’s eye that won’t to go away - all wit, urbanity and enigma.Wright is an exponent of wall painting: a hybrid of painting and installation that has become something of a genre. It began in the mid-1960s when painting stepped off the canvas and onto the naked wall, and re-emerged in the early 1990s. But there’s something terribly wrong with this attempt to locate Wright’s work within the genre, since his paintings somehow make you forget that anyone ever had the idea of painting directly on the walls of interiors at all.

When you enter a room housing one of his works, for a split second it seems empty. Then you might notice a small patch of coloured pattern near the floor, or running up one edge of a corner. Occasionally you won’t see it until you’ve turned around to leave. Reminiscent of sculpture or, perhaps more accurately, modest pieces of furniture or personal belongings, they occupy the room in a completely original way. Most ‘wall painters’ either use the room’s dominant wall as a substitute for the stretched canvas (Sol LeWitt, Simon Patterson or Jessica Diamond, for example), or they cover each wall from floor to ceiling and corner to corner (Robert Barry, Michael Craig-Martin or Martin Boyce). Essentially, the former strategy derives from the mural; the latter from wallpaper. Wright’s interventions tend to occupy very little of the total available wall space, often electing to work those parts of a gallery which no one in their right mind would choose, such as awkward thoroughfares outside the exhibition spaces themselves - stairwells, corridors, entrances.

When Wright does work in the gallery proper, he riffs off the eccentricities of the space and its door frames, skirting boards, alcoves, exit signs, pipes and shelving. Rooms with Rococo cornices don’t seem to bother him (Inverleith House, Edinburgh, 1999); nor does beige floral embossed wallpaper (Belmont Hotel, Glasgow, 1995), stained concrete and scruffy windows (Luxembourg, 1998) or black rubber folding partitioning or views of obscene pink walls (Salon 3 in London’s Elephant and Castle shopping centre, 1998). Sometimes the relationship between Wright’s painting and a certain fixture gels to evoke a new figurative association. At TeclaSala in Barcelona in 1999 he painted four strips of what look like arabesque ironwork in blue and black, starting from just beneath a protruding pipe and ending just above the skirting board. The effect half-suggests a shower curtain, with the pipe standing in for the rail. The odd colour change from blue to black implies that the pipe is casting a slim area of shadow. By bringing the space’s anomalies into play, Wright pulls off a paticularly sly version of institutional critique. While most other interventions tend to require, ironically, the authority of the most immaculate white cubes, Wright’s additions bring out narratives of historical identity lurking beneath the matt emulsion of a given space.

Hence the very particular styles found in his motifs. Wright’s predominantly abstract designs tend to fall into two categories: Modernist and Gothic. The latter manifests itself as Victorian Gothic, while his Modernism feels like the kind of delicate British thing the National Trust is now beginning to preserve, such as the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea. Often the two converge, as in his corner piece at the Drawing Center, New York, 1999, where a gothicky, quite sexual strip of red tendrils abutted a repeated ocular motif of radiating straight lines, or the Minimalist-style serialization of a spiky, hairy motif that ran across the top of one wall in the show ‘Intelligence’ (2000) at Tate Britain. As with Sarah Lucas’ fatally crashed car, with which it was partnered, there was a suggestion of malevolence in Wright’s piece, but in an obscure, occultish sense. This is evident elsewhere in his work, not just in the occasional use of a skull motif, but also in the blurred signification of spaced phrases delivered in the gilt script of medieval illumination: mathod (2000) and furkitoot (1998).

Very occasionally Wright paints small, illusionistic vignettes instead of flat patterns. One, executed at the Centrum Sztuki Wseolczesnej Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw, in 1998, is a carefully shaded monochrome picture of what looks like four Donald Judd shelf/seat furniture units. Another resembles a Na ive artist’s painting of a mirror-image landscape with castle tower. These works sit strangely alongside Wright’s other wall paintings and their 1960s precursors. If anything, his practice puts me in mind of San Marco, the Florentine monastery where Fra Angelico and his assistants painted exquisite, sparse frescos of St Dominic with the crucifix in all 45 cells, each one a very slight variation on the master design. Perhaps it’s partly Fra Angelico’s serialized formalism that evokes the comparison: the vertical ribbons of red blood, the gold discs that stand for haloes, the spaced letters ‘INRI’, and the simple pink and turquoise frame motif that forms the perimeter of each image. Also, as with Wright, the ratio of white plaster to artist’s painting is tipped dramatically in favour of the former, lending the art works an intense jewel-like aura while also enhancing the identity of the room itself. Jumping centuries, Wright’s somehow hallowed and profane paintings turn galleries into living spaces, drawing out the subjective, the irrational, the domestic and the historical from rooms that are otherwise intended to signify the Modernist sophistries of neutrality, autonomy and transcendence.

Alex Farquharson

Extracted from Frieze

GABRIEL OROZCO AT MOMA

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:18:13 -0500

December 13, 2009–March 1, 2010

With a body of work that is unique in its formal power and intellectual rigor, Gabriel Orozco (Mexican, b. 1962) emerged at the beginning of the 1990s as one of the most intriguing and original artists of his generation—and one of the last to come of age in the twentieth century. Orozco resists confinement to a single medium, roaming freely and fluently among drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and painting. From one project to the next, he deliberately blurs the boundaries between the art object and the everyday environment, instead situating his contributions in a place that merges “art” and “reality,” whether in exquisite drawings made on airplane boarding passes or in sculptures made from recovered trash.

Many of Orozco’s works—which are often created specifically for the occasion of an exhibition—have become indisputable classics of 1990s art, such as the Citroën automobile surgically reduced to two-thirds its normal width (La DS, 1993) and a human skull covered with a graphite grid (Black Kites, 1997). This exhibition presents many of these works for the first time in New York, alongside rich selections of work from Orozco’s vast body of smaller objects, paintings, and works on paper.

The exhibition in New York will be followed by presentations at Kunstmuseum Basel, April 18–August 10, 2010; Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, September 15, 2010–January 3, 2011; and Tate Modern, London, January 19–April 25, 2011.

Extracted from MOMA

EVA HESSE / STUDIOWORKS

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:18:00 -0500

11 December 2009 - 07 March 2010 at Camden Arts Centre (London)

A solo presentation of the work of German-born American artist Eva Hesse (1936 – 1970), a major figure in post-war art. The exhibition is the result of new research by renowned Hesse scholar Professor Briony Fer and is curated by Fer and Barry Rosen, Director of The Estate of Eva Hesse.

Throughout her career, Eva Hesse produced a large number of small, experimental works alongside her large-scale sculpture. These objects, so-called test pieces, were made in a wide range of materials, including latex, wire-mesh, sculp-metal, wax and cheesecloth. Left in her studio at the time of her death, sold or given to friends during her lifetime, these objects evade easy definition, seen variously as experiments, little pieces, moulds, tests or finished pieces.

In her recent research on Hesse’s work, Briony Fer collectively renamed these objects as studioworks, proposing that their precarious nature places them at the heart of Hesse’s work and questions traditional notions of what sculpture is.

This exhibition brings together around fifty works drawn from major public and private collections around the world, showing works which are extremely fragile and rarely travel. The exhibition and the accompanying major publication offer a timely new interpretation of Hesse’s historical position, as well as highlighting her relevance for contemporary art now.

‘The joy and freedom of Hesse’s art is staggering. Any young artist could get an education just by coming to this show a few times’ Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

Eva Hesse: Studiowork is organised by The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in collaboration with Camden Arts Centre, London; Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.

The exhibition is supported by The Foyle Foundation, Columbia Foundation Fund of the Capital Community Foundation, Mike Davies Charitable Settlement, Brian Boylan and Cathy Wills

Extracted from Camden Arts Centre

CAPITAL X BY ELISE FERGUSON

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:17:44 -0500

Envoy Enterprises
East Village / Lower East Side
131 Chrystie Street, 212-226-4555
November 12 - December 12, 2009

Elise Ferguson’s work is a series of reflections on the flexible nature of perception, abstraction and interior space. Continually referring to the creation and/or definition of space, the patterns and color choices encourage a fluidity and movement within all her work. Demonstrating a sensuous enjoyment of materials, much her work is process oriented in which form and surface play a primary role.

In addition to her interests in perception and spatial transformation, her studio practice is also very “process” oriented. Her current paintings – reflecting this approach – are created from plaster, inlayed metal and have relief and drawn-on surfaces. These physical, process driven works are based on mathematical puzzles and geometric variation. Each piece is a search for a perfect point of transition – a portal.

Elise Ferguson works in Brooklyn, NY. She received an MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions including at Luhring Augustine Gallery, Andrew Kreps Gallery, CRG Gallery, Lombard Fried and Team as well as at the Socrates Sculpture Park and the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio

Extracted from Envoy Enterprises

Pantha du Prince - The Splendour (Rough Trade) (2009)

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:17:32 -0500

Pantha du Prince - The Splendour

(Rough Trade) (2009)

PRESENTS

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:17:24 -0500

Slow and Steady Wins the
Race presents a holiday shop installation…

‘P R E S E N T S’ at Brachfeld gallery (Paris)
Specially commissioned Artists boxes by Chris Caccamise and Christina Moon, Dorothée Perret , Nuage. Tacoma and Oscar, Harry Roseman, Matt Wolf and Carl Williamson, Mika Tajima, Nathalie Ours, Tauba Auerbach and Hannes Hetta, Terence Koh and Garrick Gott with surprises by Alexandra Cassaniti. Hansel from Basel, Miranda July and Tavi

What is under your tree?

This holiday season Slow and Steady Wins the Race will be opening up first Parisian shop at Brachfeld gallery in Paris from December 1 to Christmas Eve.

In addition to two specially designed nesting gift towers by Slow and Steady Wins the Race, one dozen or so artists will offer their version of PRESENTS, as a series of nesting boxes exploring this concept of the holiday spirit of giving, discovery and surprises. (Each box revealing a smaller box with a smaller gift)

From the traditional to the conceptual each series of nesting boxes will be a curatorial edit of special objects, abstract hemes or ideas of exchange. All items are limited edition and will be for sale only for this time period.

Guest artists and designers include filmmaker Matt Wolf, graphic designer Carl Williamson, artist Chris Caccamise, artist Harry Roseman and Catherine Murphy, artists Mika Tajima, art director Sonny Gerasimowicz (Where the Wild Things Are), Los Angeles designers Hansel from Basel and Alexandra Cassaniti and many more to come…

Slow and Steady Wins the Race will also unveil its inaugural holiday album with 100% of the proceeds going to the charity One LapTop Per Child.

The album of is a specific selection of contemporary sounds and tonalties carefully chosen by us and artfully arranged by Rob Carmichael of Catsup Plate records.

The shop will also feature the Marais’ first CHRISTMAS WINDOW, inspired by the American tradition of bringing the holiday spirit to the street, passersby can enjoy a true holiday window, complete with stuffed animals, moving model trains, surprises and toys.

Extracted from Brachfeld Gallery

IN CONVERSATION WITH BILL VIOLA

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:17:15 -0500

Bill Viola: Bodies of Light 
James Cohan Gallery 
533 West 26th St.
New York, NY 10001
23 October through 19 December, 2009

Bodies of Light, currently showing through the 19th of December 2009 at the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea, is the gallery’s fifth exhibition from the American video artist Bill Viola. Spanning two decades of Viola’s work, this exhibition shows both his recent high definition, plasma screen videos, as well a new installation of an older black and white video. The gallery’s ambiance, dimly lit, hushed, and divided into individual rooms, reverently offers Viola’s videos projecting luminously outward.    

Meeting with Bill the afternoon before the opening of Bodies of Light, we discussed the larger concepts and interests behind his long career.

Alissa Guzman: I have spent the past two weeks researching your career, and as I did so I became very aware of the fact that your body of work exceeds my own life-span.     

Bill Viola: Oh, that’s an interesting thought!     

AG: Not in any negative sense, but I was looking for connections, interests you had or concerns, especially in your early writings that were from a time I don’t remember. One of the things that initially interested me was that your media, video, seems so time specific. I feel like each video you make is based in the time that it was made technically, and yet your themes I find incredibly timeless—life, death, consciousness, memory. Could you address the dichotomy between your materiality and your themes?    

BV: We are literally prisoners, or guests, in the stream of time. Ancient cultures described three great reservoirs of humanity – the Unborn, the Living, and the Dead, but only one of these domains is finite–our world of the living. This makes our life here on earth so precious.  These are the “timeless themes” in my work that you mentioned. However, as Buddha said, “All life is change,” so you can only be of your time. I just happened to have been born in 1951, and I was fortunate that, in the timeline of history, I came of age when television was just beginning – a barely functioning, black and white, low-resolution medium.

As a young boy I watched the first live television broadcast between Paris and New York, which had never been done before. Soon after, the 1964-65 World’s Fair opened and it was all about technology. I was 13-years-old, living in Queens, and I could walk down to the World’s Fair Expo from my house after school. I saw all these pavilions with exhibits of science and technology. It was all about moving forward into a new future. It gave my generation optimism. We felt like we could do anything. The world was changing, and we were riding the new wave. At the time, technology for me was a positive force – the dark side was to appear later….

I first saw a video camera in high school, and I never forgot it. The next year when I arrived at university I immediately started looking for a video class. On the very first day of the workshop I held the camera in my hands and turned it on. I saw an image of the room, and the people in it, live. Instinctively I knew that this was the future, my future, and that I would be doing it for the rest of my life.     

AG: Did you feel when you were in art school that there was a material hierarchy, like using video was considered not a real way to make art?

BV: Completely. When I had my first show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the space they gave me was the gallery next to the toilets in the basement… the least desirable place. The senior curators had the painting and sculpture galleries upstairs – that was where the “real” art was. So video art was discriminated against from the very beginning.   

AG: …like photography?      

BV: Yes, photography is a perfect example. It was already “sanctified” by the establishment when video appeared. These struggles gave us incredible strength and defiance. When someone is telling you they’re going to put you next to the toilets, it is empowering because that is where they first put Monet in the 19th century, in the Salon de Refusé. When you’re the refused ones it makes you more focused, more tenacious, and it makes you believe even more strongly in what you’re doing.

Also, there was no market for video art in the beginning, and this gave us a platform and the time to develop our craft for ourselves, outside of the commercial art market. I had my first commercial gallery show when I was 41-years-old, so I worked for almost seventeen years without gallery representation.   

AG: I am curious about your video The Passing (1991). You talk about the inspirations for this video being the loss of your mother and the birth of your son. You state, “for the first time my private life was in my studio,” and you talk about this work as being a transition into dealing with more personal topics. Can you talk about this transition, or if you see it that way?   

BV: Well, I do and I don’t. First of all, my work has always been personal. When I was younger I was working differently than I do now because I was engaged with intellectual ideas from the current art practice and theory. But when I look back on those years, the real agenda was held very deeply within myself. Yes I was an artist, yes I was operating within the art world, and I was familiar with all the big names one is supposed to be familiar with, but ultimately those were just the means towards an end.

I started reading spiritual texts as a student, and one of the first ones that caught my eye was Rumi’s Mathnawi, an amazing five-volume discourse on human existence and the divine written in the 13th century. When I started to read that material and apply it to what I knew about art and art making, and what I knew about contemporary existence, I began to see things in a much more connected way. The death of my mother in 1991 was the moment when the barrier between life and art disappeared. In a way it wasn’t even a barrier because I didn’t even know it existed. The borderline between life and death is not a brick wall that you battle your way through, it is fragile and porous, like a soap bubble. This is a profound thing, and it gives us this urgent need in life to touch the infinite.

AG: The first time I saw your work was for the Venice Biennale. My mom showed me your work because my best friend had just died at 27. I had grown up with him ever since I was a child, and he died of a brain tumor.     

BV: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, that’s so sad.     

AG: It was definitely a moment of discovery for me. In your book, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (1995), you talk about discovery as being not something new but something that has always been there, and I felt like that about death. Obviously it’s not something new, but it’s something new to you when you personally have to come to terms with, say, the fact that young people die…     

BV: We usually think that it’s only old people who die, don’t we?          

AG: …yes, like death is assigned to old people. That work for me had a lot of meaning. Can you talk about how death relates to Ocean Without a Shore?   

BV: Death is the root system that holds the unconscious psyche together and illuminates this island that is life. All of the work I do originates from the unconscious self. After I completed my art school training, it took me a while to break away from the way of thinking and working that my art professors had taught me. When I finally broke free from that, that’s when I really started to make progress.     

AG: [laughing] Now how long did that take?     

BV: About eight years. Of course, to this day several of the really good teachers and mentors I’ve had are still within me, and when I work I do think about them and visualize their presence. However, it was the whole system that seemed problematic to me, with its overemphasis on external benchmarks like grades, technical proficiency, and public presentation, and an under-emphasis on the subjective disciplines of mind training – cultivation of self-knowledge, maintaining awareness and balance of body and mind in the creative act, and the honing and purification of the inner intention behind the work.

AG: Actually I wanted to ask you something about art school. Going back to the idea of “the personal,” you have talked before about how the personal wasn’t accepted as a way to work, and you refer to dealing with emotions as “the forbidden zone.”   

BV: An important breakthrough occurred at the end of the 1990s. The year previous to that I had been a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute. We went through the history of emotion in art, tears and crying Madonnas, and at the same time my father was dying. I would literally drive to the Getty, be in these seminars, and then I would drive home and stop off at the hospital to see him. For most of my adult life I’d always thought that crying and emotion had no place in my art. You put your art practice over here, and your personal life over there. Since the Enlightenment, we in Western culture have been taught to put knowledge in boxes. Think of the “Wunderkammer,” the “Cabinet of Curiosities” with the rows of small boxes for specimens.

All those boxes finally dissolved for me at that time, a wall just melted away. Human beings are transformers. We devour something, it is somehow transmuted into a vision or knowledge. What comes out from the process is a completely raw, open, unguarded you. The best artists excavate their souls. The ones who are more intellectual or more formalistic in their work might hear me say that and disagree, but I would still argue they are doing this without knowing it. You have to get the conscious mind out of the way, because he or she is the clever trickster always waiting there to trip you up with ego.

AG: That reminds me of something you said, “artists shouldn’t make the images they want, they should make the images they need.”     

BV: I think postmodernism has amplified the scientific/intellectual habit of starting an investigation at the end, like a crime scene and gradually working your way toward the beginning. This is called “deconstruction.” If you invert it around and make it construction, you start from an incomplete state without a precise idea of where you’re going to end. This requires creativity, risk and faith. Not knowing where you’re going to end and not knowing the answer is life giving… We live in an age of information pollution. Information is drowning out the places where we don’t know what we’re doing, the ones you can’t describe before you experience them.     

AG: You have talked about landscape, [for example] your experience with going to Death Valley, and how landscape can be very overwhelming. Growing up in California where there are so many vast spaces I felt like every family vacation was to somewhere completely dwarfing. I grew up with this complete love of going to these places that made me feel so insignificant….   

BV: You feel like a little tiny flea.     

AG: …and so vulnerable. I would go to these places and I felt like I belonged to this very large system of things, and that was really very comforting.     

BV: That’s a very nice thought.     

AG: When you talk about the “barriers” in your work, when I am in that sort of place is the only time I feel like the barriers get thinner for me.     

BV: That’s why from antiquity onward people always left civilization and went out into the untamed wild lands… Those were not the picturesque places we know now, National Parks like Death Valley, which you loved the first time you went, and I absolutely fell in love with, too, in 1974. I will never forget sitting at Zabriskie Point for a whole afternoon watching the sun and light shift and change. Pure beauty… However, in Saint Anthony’s time it was extremely dangerous to go out “there”, out into the “great loneliness,” hostile territory where the hermits and mystics went to push life to the edge. This was serious business. Many never came back.

AG: Do you feel like these ideas relate to Ocean Without a Shore?     

BV: Yes. They all deal with the idea of a “threshold.” Fundamentally, Ocean Without a Shore is about a threshold, a threshold that is porous, transparent, wispy and inconsequential… The belief of some kind of power, energy, danger or mystery at the crossroads is very ancient. The old black blues singers in the U.S. used to sing about the crossroads. Back in the Middle Ages, and even in the ancient world of Greece and Rome, the idea of the crossover point was always some kind of threshold… Human beings need barriers and resistance… Limits create friction and energy. Artists need that. We love it when someone tells us “it’s not possible.”

AG: I think it just makes us push harder.     

BV: Yes. That’s why we’re in a danger zone right now. In our comfortable modern world we are in a constant state of not being challenged. I just received a commission to do two permanent, plasma screen video altarpieces for one of the biggest cathedrals in England, St. Paul’s in London. One is on the theme of Mary, and the other is on Martyrs. They will be permanently installed in two chapels in the north and south quire aisles respectively. Now that’s a challenge! Artists will always rise to the occasion. We love it. Even if no one gives it to you, you still have to figure out a way to challenge yourself, to raise the bar, to put a threshold there, whether it’s a brick wall or water. You just put your head down and go right through it. That’s where the great artworks come from throughout history – they always arise from some kind of obstacle. Get yourself to the edge, and then…. Jump!

AG: You have talked a lot about empathy, mostly in the context of your work The Passions. I am curious about the limits of people to empathize with emotions that are outside their realm of experience. I find people’s reactions to death interesting because I feel like people are quick to empathize, which makes sense because everyone knows loss, but I also felt like it is a way to dismiss actually feeling or dealing with the real emotion.     

BV: Do you think people pretend?     

AG: I feel like it’s a quick way to compartmentalize. I’m curious if you found any of these issues with work like The Passions?

BV: Well, I think you’ve put your finger on something really important and interesting about America. America is one of the most diverse countries on the planet. It has immigrants from literally all over the world. With all the traveling I’ve done I realized what is unique about America. It’s a simultaneous combination of all these various cultures, so you can’t unify it the way you can unify the Germans, Italians, Japanese, or French. We are a society of individuals. This is why individuality and identity are so important, as are issues of race, uniqueness and personality, and why the internet, social networking and role-playing sites are so popular.   

We recently observed the holiday of Halloween, known as “The Day of the Dead” in most countries. It’s only in America where Halloween is not about honoring the dead, but disguising your own identity. In places like Mexico or Brazil, the dead literally come into your home and the grandmother who died ten years ago has a place setting at the table for the holiday meal.   

AG: I feel like that would be much scarier to us.        

BV: That is just one example of how, in a society that has no common cultural roots, we are constantly asked to be an individual, to be unique. In a way this gave American culture vitality and energy, but I think it also creates the need to be different from everybody else, which socially can cause problems.   

AG: I lived in France for a year, and I feel like the great thing about French culture is their tradition. There is such a specific way to do everything, and it’s even very regional. I was envious but at the same time I felt like it was sometimes oppressing. You might want to be able try something new and have it fail.   

BV: I think the middle ground is potentially very interesting… I think we spend far too little time here honoring those who came before us.

AG: One last thing I want to ask you. In the introduction of your book you mention what a rare opportunity it is for an artist to be able to communicate unmediated with the public. I am very inspired by artists like Robert Smithson who redefined how art was talked about, by who, and what got discussed.     

BV: Exactly. No one had to “approve” it.     

AG: Right. As an artist and someone who is also writing I wonder if you think this has changed any since you wrote that. Is it easier for artists now or do you think it’s just as meditated only in a different way?   

BV: It depends on the artist. There are artists who have a voice outside their art making practice, and there are other artists, who I greatly respect, who have internalized their practice to the point where they cannot stand before a group and explain their work. I have no problem with an artist saying, “It’s all in the work, just look at my work.”

At University, I was one of the shyest kids in my class until one day a professor asked me to talk about video to the class. I’ve found that if you know something well you can talk about it convincingly. I had this knowledge, this very special, specific knowledge that not a lot of other people had at that time. Once I found my voice I realized I could literally write down my art. I have stacks of notebooks in my closet going back to my college days that are a continuous narration of all the twists and turns my life path has taken, from the traumas to the revelations. Every once and a while one of these buried secrets takes on a life of its own and becomes a work of art.   

AG: Well, thank you so much.     

BV: My pleasure.

Extracted from Whitehot

IVAN NAVARO AT PAULA KASMIN

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:16:56 -0500

IVAN NAVARRO
“Die” at Paula Kasmin (NYC)

December 10 thru 23, 2009

Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of Iván Navarro. An exhibition of Navarro’s new sculpture “Die,” (2009) will take place from December 10-December 23, 2009 at 511 W. 27th Street.

Iván Navarro’s work, constructed mainly out of fluorescent tubing and electrical materials, transmits social and political commentary in a functional, complex and visually stunning sculptural format.

“Die” (2009) is the second of Navarro’s sculptures to respond to the American sculptor Tony Smith’s famous six-foot steel cube, “Die” (1962). Smith’s sculpture was designed to match human scale; he claimed that anything larger would be a monument and anything smaller an object. In 2006, Navarro made a twelve-foot black cube titled “Die Again (Monument for Tony Smith).” From the outside, “Die Again” is a massive black cube made of steel and plywood. A door-like entrance on the surface invites the viewer to enter the structure, whose interior is filled with lights, mirrors and sound.

“Die” (2009) is a four-foot plywood black cube. In accordance with Smith’s statement, it appears as more of an object. Although the piece is hollow, its mirrored inside allows viewers to look down through a virtual space that extends beyond the actual material boundaries of the cube and into an illusory hole plunging deep into the earth. This spatial effect is produced by a neon light that is installed between a mirror on the floor and a one-way mirror on the top of the cube.

Extracted from Paula Kasmin

MIAMI OVERVIEW

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:16:43 -0500

IS THIS THE NEW “MATURE” MIAMI? The story this year, after the success of the New York auctions, was supposed to be one of recrudescent decadence and sybaritic splendor: big sales and Sex Pistols on the beach. Instead, the first two days were an (arguably more enchanting) mix of “low-key” dinners and “intimate” soirees. UBS canceled its annual ecumenical extravaganza on the shore; the Sex Pistols gig turned out to be a flighty rumor hawked by the press. Christie’s Amy Cappellazzo, herself a onetime Floridian, took a moment at an opening to wryly reminisce about a time when art parties consisted of “squares of orange cheese, Carr crackers, and cheap wine.” Looking around, even postboom Miami has standards. But oh for the days of easy lobster and Iggy Pop.

The NADA fair’s usual early view had been moved to later in the week, so Tuesday night’s trek instead began with a preview of the fifth Design Miami. First big surprise of the year: proximity parking. Traffic gridlock approaching the fair had been the most notable feature of last year’s fete, but this edition was surprisingly … accessible. Inside was an attractive crowd complemented by attractive objects, including surreal works from Designer of the Year Maarten Baas and Styrofoam-cast furniture by new It Boy Max Lamb. The well-worn distinction between “design” and “art” occasionally seemed superfluous, though there were some around to defend its borders. “Art can be design, but design can’t be art,” said Ben Jones, one of a few crossover artists with a project at Design/Miami. But perhaps another bystander put it best: “Here you get to touch the merch.”

From Design Miami we hoofed it to Terence Riley and John Bennett’s elegant glass pied-á-terre—“A mix between Philip Johnson’s guest house and a David Hockney,” Riley smiled—where the pair was celebrating the launch of Antoine Vigne’s smart-looking book Le Corbusier in His Own Words. Bill Arning, who knew Riley from “his ACT UP days,” arrived snapping photos with an enthusiastic entourage. The party felt small and classy, and its coziness didn’t diminish, even when Calvin Klein dropped by to pick up a book and tour the house’s collection. Personal fave in the master bedroom: a Tom Sachs compartment, made for Riley as a tribute to his tenure at MoMA, filled with old phone-message notes to Riley and a lighter. (To someday burn them with?)

Excess might not quite be back, but at least there’s still plenty to do. Forced to choose among a) Emmanuel Perrotin’s typically raucous buffet dinner, b) a glammy opening for “The Reach of Realism” at Miami MoCA, and c) Art Basel’s welcome reception at the Mondrian, we opted for another option entirely: the preview of “Beg Borrow and Steal” at the Rubell Family Collection. Thankfully—or not, depending on your perspective—it seemed everyone else had the same idea. Collectors Adam Lindemann and Amalia Dayan brushed shoulders with public art producers Nicholas Baume and Anne Pasternak and artists Ai Weiwei, Karl Haendel, and Ingar Dragset. “You have to hand it to them for the title,” said Art Basel codirector Marc Spiegler, who dropped by on his whirlwind tour of the evening’s events. On the back patio, a wall of donuts hung in a grid echoed Forrest Myers SoHo Wall, while upstairs a Cady Noland Budweiser installation suggested inspiration for some of Jennifer Rubell’s more novel catering ideas. I followed Clarissa Dalrymple, who was herself “following Andy Warhol,” i.e., a peripatetic Mera Rubell trussed up in a spiky black wig. “If you don’t do what you want to do, how can it be worth doing?” Rubell opined. The pair raved about the Sterling Ruby masturbation video recently on view at New York’s Foxy Production. “It changed the way I look at men,” Dalrymple said approvingly.

A broken drawbridge on the Venetian Causeway made us late to Paul Kasmin’s plein air dinner for designer Mattia Bonetti at the Standard. We arrived in time to catch a few stragglers and a glimpse of the menu (choice of grilled branzini or skirt steak—a rare moment of real food in Miami). Some skinny-dippers lapped the pool; some brave souls set off for one of many parties at the Fontainbleau. (“All suits and tits,” one friend helpfully noted the next day.) We decided to call it a night.

Next morning: the big fair. I showed up to the press conference hoping for some coffee, but all they had was champagne. PR genius? The line at the entrance for the 12 PM “First Choice” view was less dramatic than in prior years. MoMA trustee David Tieger had hustled his way to the front of the pack; collector Eileen Cohen was less hurried but not far behind. After the first big rush through the gates, people seemed to take their time, and we soon lost ourselves in the new layout. This year, ABMB strove to be simultaneously more spacious and more focused, bringing its various programs (“Nova,” “Positions,” “Kabinett”) under one roof and expanding the square footage from 385,000 to more than 500,000 (and adding five new galleries in the shuffle). Most had more floorspace, but this also meant that quiet moments were all the more palpable. On occasion, prominent dealers could be spotted sitting alone at their booths, confirming that sometimes there’s no lonelier place than a fair.

At least the work looked good, and those collectors who were around seemed to be buying. Jorge Pardo designed an eye-catching booth for neugerriemschneider. Wallspace brought a stack of Walead Beshty copper boxes that had been shipped sans packaging through FedEx, making for some nicely aestheticized bumps and scuffs. A series of six hundred Hanne Darboven notes was turning heads at Klosterfelde, while down the aisle at Regen Projects, Gillian Wearing’s uncanny reprise (with creepy face mask) of Robert Mapplethorpe’s late-’80s memento mori self-portrait won a few hearts. “I told her that she should try to redo his self-portrait with the bullwhip,” Shaun Caley Regen quipped. Pause, then a thought: “But that would probably require a full bodysuit.”

Gmurzynska’s booth was also on many tongues (at least among those that could pronounce it), due to some complications that morning involving US marshals, a recondite lawsuit, and the seizure of six million dollars’ worth of paintings. The whole story seemed a canard until some of the details were splashed on the cover of the Art Newspaper, the fair’s daily broadsheet. To its credit, the gallery somehow managed to pull itself together that afternoon to host an informal press conference for Sylvester Stallone, who was having a retrospective of sorts in the booth amid all the Picassos and Boteros. Halfway through the day, at least two of the actor’s works had sold: Childless #1, from 2009, and the more figurative Trapped Ideals, from 1977.

More conspicuous was the empty booth of Christian Haye gallery (né the Project) in Row H. “We just thought they were taking their time to install,” noted one dealer, “but then they never showed up.” On the upside, the fair’s organizers allowed Sies + Höke gallery across the way to take over the space (at least temporarily) for free; they used it for a scattered, forlorn-looking chess-piece installation by Kris Martin, titled Lost.

Blissfully gone was “Supernova,” the fair’s closest approximation of a red-light district, where dealers were once forced to stand all day in open-spaced minibooths. That program’s successor, “Nova,” comprises sixty-four galleries glommed together at the fair’s north end and includes upstarts like the Breeder gallery and Dubai’s the Third Line. “I’m going to put out cards so that people stop asking about my hometown,” said Sunny Rahbar, a proprietor of the latter. “I tell people, ‘Dubai’s going to be fine. Now buy some art!’”

But also gone were the much-loved (by attendees, at least) Art Containers on the beach, which meant no engaging stopgap between the fair’s 9 PM closing and the public “Art Loves Music” concert by the ocean (this year headlined by UK musician Ebony Bones). Without the anchor between, crowds drifted, and many set off for other events: Stallone’s dinner at the Setai; Bruce High Quality Foundation’s performance at the W; a reception for the Jumex Collection at the Bass Museum; AnOther Magazine’s soiree at the Delano solarium; cocktails for Teresita Fernandez, ForYourArt, and Cartier.

Others (myself included) took a brief break from the festivities and prepared for the night ahead. More rumors abounded about a Shepard Fairey/Dr. Dre set at the Delano (unlike the Sex Pistols, this one turned out to be true), but it seemed as though the best fun was Deitch Projects, Art Production Fund, and Campari’s postprandial concert at the Raleigh Hotel—Miami’s version of the kunsthalle bar—this year featuring a performance by the unquantifiable and charismatic Santigold. Designer Jeremy Scott got sweaty near the stage; by the end of the set, even collector Eli Broad, at his usual table up front, was on his feet, hands raised. “This year, I’ve been to silly parties and respectable ones,” said (Sir) Norman Rosenthal. “But this is Renoir in Miami.” Bal du Raleigh?

Extracted from Art Forum

GLENN LIGON / OFF BOOK

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:16:34 -0500

GLENN LIGON: OFF BOOK at Regen Projects (Los Angeles)
December 12, 2009 – January 23, 2010

Regen Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by New York based artist Glenn Ligon. This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition at the gallery and will mark the 20th anniversary of Regen Projects. The exhibition will present a suite of new paintings entitled “Figure” that continue Ligon’s investigation of James Baldwin’s seminal 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village.” The themes in the essay – cultural identity, the decipherability of the other, and the burden of history – find a conceptual and formal resonance in Ligon’s work.

The paintings were made by silkscreening an image of an existing painting onto variously colored backgrounds and flocking them with coaldust, which built up the text while simultaneously obscuring it. Passages where the silkscreen printed lightly produced gaps and grey areas that interrupt the paintings’ surfaces and further degrade the text. As images of an image, these paintings move between legibility and abstraction, exemplifying Ligon’s interest in the mutability of text and shifting views of notions of the self.

Glenn Ligon has a wide-ranging art practice in multiple media, including text-based painting, neon, print, installation, and video. His work engages social and personal histories, memory, and the ways in which groups and individuals are represented – revealing the complexities and subtleties of social constructs of race, language, sexuality, and gender. Ligon uses text, language, and imagery from a wide range of popular culture sources, from stand-up comedy routine and children’s coloring and schoolbooks, to slave narratives and the literary works of James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Genet, and Gertrude Stein. Ligon alters and revises these materials in paintings that often repeat phrases in stencil or silkscreen; neon wall pieces that isolate a single phrase or word; and installations that incorporate paintings, prints, neon, wallpaper, and sculptural elements. These works oscillate between pointedness and dissolution – the original text and imagery literally become blurred through overlapping words and purposely smeared or muted surfaces. Ligon’s practice of appropriation changes the meanings of his source materials and investigates the ways in which language and imagery function as social, political, and personal tools in society.

Extracted from Regen Projects

STERLING RUBY / ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:16:17 -0500

10 December 2009 – 14 January 2010 at Xavier Hufkens (Brussel)

Xavier Hufkens is proud to announce the forthcoming exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe – Sterling Ruby. In his first solo exhibition at the gallery, Sterling Ruby enters into dialogue with the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. Alongside a highly personal selection of photographs by Mapplethorpe, the artist takes the
opportunity to create new collages entitled Transcompositional and shows sculptures in various materials including several from the series Acts.

Sterling Ruby is attracted to Mapplethorpe’s work because of “(…) the choice of subject matter and the contrast between marginal subcultures and the formal beauty of his flowers and still lifes”. The formal beauty of Mapplethorpe’s work is fascinating, but it also raises questions about the motives of the artist. Does he want to create distance from his subjects? Is he a collector? Are flowers, penises and bodies one and the same for him?

The work of Sterling Ruby explores control and the concealment of subjectivity. His collages entitled Transcompositional are based on maximum-security prisons like Pelican Bay and Guantanamo. Yet there is almost nothing in them that refers to isolation or prison life. The collages consist of a pattern of nail varnish on a background of mirrored paper. They also contain photographs of transsexuals. The relationship of the artist with his subject is far from clear. Is he playing the role of a predator? A prisoner? A schizophrenic?

Ruby strives towards a transgression of fixed identities. He departs from preformed dichotomies such as beauty/marginality,architecture/ vandalism, Zen/subculture. These contradictions are perverted in his artworks. Thus, the sculptures from the series Acts consist of two parts, which together form a contradictory whole. The square, geometric pedestals bear traces of graffiti. The sculptures themselves are an explosion of liquid and solid colour held fast in a block of urethane. Their form eludes liquid and solid, volume and colour, beauty and abjection.

Sterling Ruby’s work opens and closes meanings. It stimulates new suppositions about art and irrational readings of his work and the work of Robert Mapplethorpe

Extracted from Xavier Hufkens

-La Demimondaine by Vision On and Flair Austrias starring Iris...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:16:02 -0500

-La Demimondaine by Vision On and Flair Austrias starring Iris Strubegger-

I HAVE KNOWN YOU TOO LONG

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:15:50 -0500

Joshua Wildman
I have known you too long at Fuse Gallery (NYC)
Exhibition: December 5, 2009 through January 2, 2010

Presenting images of New York City and the people in it, photographer Joshua Wildman shares his perception of the city that never sleeps. His array of photographs and ephemera will line the walls of Fuse Gallery.

Wildman was born in Colorado, and has lived and worked in New York for a long time. His work has been published in New York Magazine, Dazed and Confused and The Fader. Most days he is in a good mood and grateful for all he has seen. Says Wildman, “I want to stay in New York forever.”

Extracted from Fuse Gallery

ADAM KIMMEL / HOW THE WEST WAS WORN

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:13:59 -0500

Text by Armand Limnander

A few months ago, the men’s-wear designer Adam Kimmel found himself 150 miles off the coast of Mexico, underwater, with a group of great white sharks circling him. Kimmel was looking out from a protective cage, but the entertainer David Blaine, a friend, was swimming in the open, breathing only occasionally through someone else’s regulator. To make things more interesting, Blaine was wearing a black tuxedo and red cape made by Kimmel, and was being filmed by the director Bob Talbot as a diver pushed him toward the toothy behemoths.

It was, to be sure, an unusual place for Kimmel, 30, to be hanging out. But then again, he has already done the schmoozy bar and club scene; plus, the sharks were work-related. Kimmel will upload Talbot’s film on his Web site to go along with, among others, the one by Ari Marcopoulos of skaters dressed in Kimmel suits while “riding some gravity” at 60 miles per hour down Claremont Canyon in Berkeley, Calif.

Kimmel studied architecture at N.Y.U. but had more to say through clothes than through maquettes. “I just started making a few things for myself and some friends,” he says. “After I graduated, I put together a small line and tried to go out and meet people.” He found Joe Serino, who had been a men’s-wear president at Calvin Klein. With his support, Kimmel moved to Italy for six months in 2002 to learn production; he soon started selling at the Parisian store Colette. “It was a very homemade collection that consisted mostly of jumpsuits,” he recalls.

Aside from fashion, Kimmel’s other passion is art. But unlike designers who make references to, say, Jackson Pollock by splattering paint on jeans and shirts to create an expressionist effect, Kimmel always attempts to recreate an artist’s entire universe. “I love to research pockets of American culture that maybe get forgotten,” he says, glancing at a wall in his Manhattan studio plastered with stylish pictures of John Baldessari, Larry Bell and other art-world legends. “I try to reanimate them. A lot of designers are inspired by art, but I’ve always been more interested by what the artists themselves were actually wearing at the time. A lot of these guys are so cool — who wouldn’t want to dress like them?”

A key supporter in this pursuit has been Neville Wakefield, Kimmel’s good friend and a curator for Frieze Art Fair and P.S.1, who has brokered key introductions within the art world. “Adam is always willing to take considerable risk because he trusts the artists and gives them license to do what they want without diluting their work into a marketing strategy,” he says. “He’s creating a platform that benefits everybody.”

For fall 2009, Kimmel asked Gerard Malanga, Warhol’s cinematographer from 1963 to 1966, to photograph the likes of Matthew Barney, Slater Bradley and Francesco Clemente wearing tweeds, corduroys and jeans reminiscent of that era; Malanga also filmed the de facto models for three minutes, in the same black and white, 16-millimeter format of his famous “screen tests.” When Kimmel was invited two years ago to the Pitti Uomo men’s-wear fair in Florence, Italy, instead of putting on a runway show he invited some friends to participate in a photo shoot by Alexei Hay, his half brother, and had the artist Jim Denevan put together a dinner party in the Gipsoteca of the Instituto Statale d’Arte, where a cast of Michelangelo’s David is displayed. Kimmel was paying tribute to Wallace Berman, the central figure in a California-based postwar art movement that revolved around Semina, the art journal that Berman published; the guest of honor was George Herms, who along with Dennis Hopper is a surviving member of the group. Some of Kimmel’s New York peers, like Nate Lowman, Dan Colen and Ryan McGinley, reminded him of Semina’s lyricism, so he had asked them to come along on the trip, too.

After events like that, it’s easy to see why everyone knew better than to expect a bunch of plain old jeans when Kimmel said he had done a cowboy collection for this coming spring. He started off by traveling through Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico, talking to real cowboys who, to his surprise, shared an idol: Roy Rogers. He then approached Jim Krantz, who was responsible for the original Marlboro campaigns, and asked him to shoot the clothes at the ranch in Moab, Utah, where the ads were first staged. In a statement accompanying the Marlboro Man-meets-Roy Rogers presentation held a few months later at the Yvon Lambert art gallery in Paris, Kimmel wrote: “I’ve always had a fantasy about more New Yorkers wearing Western styles. In particular a guy who wears a suit with Western yokes.”

Now might be a good time to clarify that, despite his cowboy daydreams, Kimmel is straight; he recently settled down with the actress Leelee Sobieski and is having his first child. If Kimmel has a discernible fetish, it’s probably retooling Americana: the cowboy-inspired clothes are coolly functional and understated. Blazers are reversible and have subtle piping on one side and a smile pocket on the other; denim jackets can also be flipped inside out to reveal a different color; plaid shirts come paired with jeans, dress pants or a jumpsuit.

“Like Adam, his customers are informed and knowledgeable,” says Jay Bell, the men’s vice president at Barneys New York. “They know what they want: stylish clothes that fit well and feel comfortable but that are realistic and relevant, not outlandish and trendy.” Wakefield concurs: “For the most part I can’t really wear men’s fashions, but I can wear Adam’s. He’s taken the standards of work wear and made cover versions that are softer and more luxurious and just look better.”

Without much fanfare, Kimmel has also been dressing a few women in extra-small sizes of his men’s clothes. For the time being, it’s an off-the-cuff business, but he’s thinking about developing a more complete women’s range within a year or so. He’s also been spending a lot of time making furniture. In his office there are already a few pieces in use: smart wooden chairs with rows of neat little holes in their sides, reminiscent of industrial metal bookshelves. At home, Kimmel has other prototypes in copper and leather. “I’m putting my first collection together, and then maybe I’ll present it,” he says. “But it takes time. Right now I’m just making a few things for myself and some friends.”

We’ve heard that before.

See the LOOKBOOK

Extracted from The New York Times

Erik Enocksson - I nox egoque soli (Kning) (2009)

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 10:13:46 -0500

Erik Enocksson - I nox egoque soli

(Kning) (2009)