Cold Water at Performa 09

Justin Bond in Rodarte. Photo by Hilton Als

Among what seems to be innumerable events occurring in conjunction with Performa 09—the third edition of the performance Biennial started by RoseLee Goldberg—one that caught my eye is the gallery show curated by the singer and performance artist Justin Bond (best know as Kiki of Kiki and Herb) and the New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als. Titled Cold Water, it is described as “an exhibition of works by artists who are also performers rooted in the East Village, downtown, CBGB’s, La MaMa scene.” Featuring an impressive line-up of performers including Tilda Swinton and Rufus Wainwright, it is advertised with an intriguing photo by Hilton Als of Bond wearing a blood-red Rodarte dress and Kabuki-inspired make-up.

Dress Codes at ICP

Miyako Ishiuchi, mother's #49, 2002, Gelatin Silver Print

Today I visited the Third ICP Triennial, "Dress Codes," which is dedicated to the interaction between fashion and art. Culminating the ICP's year of fashion, the outstanding exhibition opens tomorrow and will be on view through January 17.

Some of my favorite artists were included in the exhibition, including Tanya Marcuse and Miyako Ishiuchi, whose moving photographs of her deceased mother's clothes and accroutments were originally included in the Venice Biennale's Japanese pavilion in 2005. Also included is the work of the Brooklyn-based video artist Kalup Linzy (whose humorous work was first shown at Taxter and Spengemann), and the Turkish New York–based artist Pinar Yolacan, as well as a number of artists, whose work I was not familiar with, such as the German-based artist Thorsten Brinkmann, whose extravagant self-fashioning is reminiscent of Leigh Bowery's alterations of the body.

Fashion Projects' contributor Tamsen Schwartzman was also in attendance. She has a long-lasting interest in photography and its relation to fashion, and has written an extensive review for the Museum at FIT, which she has kindly agreed to let us republish:

"Dress Codes opens tomorrow.The third ICP triennial of photography and video and the last exhibition installment in their Year of Fashion explores fashion as a celebration of individuality, personal identity, and self-expression, and as cultural, religious, social, and political statements. Previous exhibitions, if you missed them, included Avedon Fashion 1944–2000, Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, The Condé Nast Years 1923–1937, and This Is Not a Fashion Photograph: Selections from the ICP Collection.

Most survey exhibitions of art or photography are a mixed bag. And Dress Codes is no different. However, there is enough really engaging, thoughtful work to make this a necessary visit for the fashion and photography enthusiast.

Jacqueline Hassink BMW Car Girls, 2004 © Jacqueline Hassink Courtesy Amador Gallery, New York

In my opinion, they put some of the strongest work on the top level. There you'll find Jacqueline Hassink's video "BMW Car Girls" which explores how beautiful models are used at car shows to add human seduction to the man's buying experience. The models, and the way they are dressed, function as a branding device and transfer glamour and sex to the car. The video shows how the men shift their attention back and forth from the cars to the girls and back. A fascinating and captivating video.

Mickalene Thomas Portrait of Qusuquzah, 2008 © Mickalene Thomas Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York

Right next to "BMW Car Girls" are three photographs by Brooklyn artist Mickalene Thomas. Her staged photographs celebrate and critique archetypes of black womanhood. Powerful, enticing, sexy, and confrontational, I thought it was some of the best work in the show. The photographs reference the pop aesthetic of Blaxploitation films, Seydou Keïta’s lushly patterned portraits, and Matisse's odalisques. I couldn't help but think of the recent Yinka Shonibare exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum when looking at "Le Leçon d'amour" 2008 and how they share the persistence of the colonial viewpoint. The photos also brought to mind an article I read this morning about the upcoming Tate Modern exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World that will include the controversial work of Rob Pruitt and Jack Early.

Another highlight of the exhibition is Tanya Marcuse’s exquisite platinum prints from her "Undergarments and Armour" series. These corsets, breastplates, and bustles from museum costume collections (including ours!) reflect Tanya's historical awareness of how the body has been sculpted and modified through fashion. They also expose dualities of masculine/feminine, hard/soft, hidden/revealed, aggression/vulnerability.

Stan Douglas Hastings Park, 16 July 1955, 2008 © Stan Douglas Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery, New York

Sartorial signs are addressed in the works of Alice O'Malley, Stan Douglas, and Cindy Sherman. Alice O’Malley's portraits of downtown New York performance artists and musicians serve to address how clothing and makeup are used to articulate outsider identity. Stan Douglas' "Hastings Park, 16 July 1955" is a large-scale photograph depicting the working class at leisure at a Vancouver horse track in 1955. He utilizes extraordinary detailed period dress that contains subtle indicators of working-class status.

Plase vist the Museum at FIT to read the rest of the review

Music and Fashion: Yoko Ono and threeASFOUR

threeASFOUR, Spring/Summer 2010. Photo: Marcio Madeira

I attended the threeASFOUR show this past Thursday—both the show and the collection were inspired by Yoko Ono, who also contributed some prints for their collection.

Fashion Projects contributors Sarah Scaturro and Jay Ruttenberg were both in attendance. The latter wrote a witty report on the show, which comments on the use of music in fashion shows, for Time Out New York:

"The experimental fashion label threeASFOUR, a kind of art collective that sews, presented its Spring 2010 collection last night at MAC and Milk, on 15th Street. Usually, when fashion designers claim to use a music figure as a “muse,” it seems to mean their collection bears vague resemblance to a British depressive from the early ’80s, or Debbie Harry. The trio of New York designers behind this show turned to an infinitely more engaging idol: Yoko Ono.

The label was not merely paying lip service to the artist’s work. Ono sat front and center under an enormous hat, sandwiched between Sean Lennon and Carrie Fisher. Many of the coolest pieces incorporated prints made by the artist decades ago; other garments came in Manhattan black, Ono’s color of choice—she is not a floral-print kind of gal—as well as a nod to the old avant-garde world in which she made her name. The event’s soundtrack came courtesy of Ono too—relying predominantly on her more ethereal work but concluding, cinematically, with the resounding thump of “The Sun Is Down” from her handsome new album, Between My Head and the Sky. At assorted Fashion Week events this year, I heard music by Palace Brothers (in the background of an art-type thing), Spaceman 3 (accompanying a menswear show in which every model seemed to be auditioning for a Jesus and Mary Chain biopic) and, of course, dreadful dance music (do these designers aspire to cliché?). Ono’s music fit best, lending the threeASFOUR show a savage, dreamlike aura."

Read the rest of the Review on Time Out New York

threeASFOUR, Spring/Summer 2010, Dress with Yoko Ono's Prints and Black Leggins with Circle Cut-Outs

Merce Cunningham and Fashion

Merce Cunningham wearing a bulging Kawakubo's costume. Poster for Scenario, 1997. Photo: Thimoty Greenfield-Sanders.

Merce Cunnigham, who died July 27 at the age of ninety, had an unreputably lasting influence on the development of dance in the 20th century. In addition to his numerous collaborations with a number of visual artists, starting with Robert Rauschenberg, and musicians from John Cage, his life-partner, to Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, he collaborated with the avant-garde fashion designer Rei Kawakubo. This was prompted by the Japanese designer's Spring/Summer 1997 collection “Dress Meets Body, Body Meets Dress and They Are One,” which created a range of unorthodox body shapes by including padding at the hips, back and belly.

The dance borne of the collaboration is titled Scenario, and premiered in October 1997 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the dancers’ movements took place against a stark all-white stage, lit with fluorescent lighting to the contemplative repetitive music of Takehisa Kosugi and Thurston Moore. Scenario is roughly made of three movements punctuated by the change of the pattern and colour of the outer garments from gingham and striped blue and green, to all black and finally all red—while the padding understructure remains the same throughout. The way Kawakubo’s garments became activated by the dancers’ bodies in motion allowed for the creation of novel and unexpected bodily formations—which reinforced Cunnigham's exploration of the limits and scope of bodily movements, as well as enhancing the bulges and “distortions” of Kawakubo’s 1997 collection.

Scenario, BAM, 1997

Much like Cunningham's entire oeuvre, Scenario leads into uncharted formations and articulations of body shapes, this time highlighted by Kawakubo’s costumes. The alteration of proportions, and of one’s relation to one’s body and to the body of the other dancers and the subsequent sense of estrangement it creates is summed up by dancers in Cunningham’s company, who described the experience as alternatively liberating and unsettling: “If I were to be asked about it as a dancer, I would say it was more of a liberation when I came onto this incredibly wide stage in the costume.” “It’s bizarre to roll on the floor. Or when you touch someone, you’re a foot away from them.” There is, in fact, an element of absurdist humour in Scenario. This is especially evident in the first movement of the piece where the dancers are wearing the costumes with oversized gingham and striped patterns, which are not altogether unlike the heavily patterned costumes characteristic of the Commedia dell’Arte—of Harlequin, in particular.

Humor had been previously explored through costumes in a much earlier piece by Cunningham: Antic Meet from 1958. For this piece, which contains parodic references to Martha Graham's dramatic style of dancing, Cunnigham knitted for himself a sweater with four arms and no neck hole, and in a faux climatic scene struggled to resurface from the sweater. (Footage of the scene can be found in Charles Atlas’ documentary Merce Cunningham: A Lifetime of Dance).

Francesca Granata

Scenario, BAM, 1997

Lowbrow Reader Variety Hour at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe

Illustration for Gilbert Rogin's Lowbrow Reader story by Doreen Kirchner

Fashion Projects contributor Jay Ruttenberg is organizing a launch event for the new issue of the Lowbrow Reader, his Manhattan-based comedy journal. The Lowbrow Reader is a small, lushly illustrated comedy magazine edited by Jay Ruttenberg. Its new issue, #7, includes work by Shelley Berman (Curb Your Enthusiasm), David Berman (Silver Jews; no relation) and Sam Henderson (Magic Whistle). Much of the issue is devoted to the novelist Gilbert Rogin, including an assessment of his work by Jay Jennings and the first piece of fiction by Rogin to be published since 1980. It is available online, and in smart stores everywhere.

The event will take place at the Housing Works Bookstore (126 Crosby Street in Soho) on Wednesday July 22nd from 7 to 9 and promises to be an exciting and diverse night. The show will feature short acoustic performances from three great musical acts: The Fiery Furnaces, Peter Stampfel and the Ether Frolic Mob, and Larkin Grimm. There will also be an incredibly funny comedian, John Mulaney, and a reading by Gilbert Rogin, a retired New Yorker writer whose work appears in the new Lowbrow Reader. There is a cover charge of $10 to $5 on a sliding scale, and all of the money raised will go to Housing Works—one of our favourite charities that did pioneering work on AIDS.

For more information on the bands and the event please visit the Housing Works event site.

Update! Below are some photos from the event:

The Fiery Furnace playing at Housing Works as part of the Lowbrow Reader Variety Show. Photo by Jesse Chan-Norris

Larkin Grimm playing at the Lowbrow Reader Variety Hour. Photo by Jesse Chan-Norris

Peter Stampfel and Ether Frolic Mob at Housing Works. Photo by Jesse Chan-Norris

Author Gilbert Rogin reading at Housing Works. Photo by Jesse Chan-Norris