FACE TIME

This winter’s Polar Vortex turned our city into a festival of silly hats. People ran around dressed conventionally from foot to forehead, and then topped themselves off with extravagant, irrational headware. I saw fur-trimmed hunters’ hats, lacy cashmere skull caps, mink pillboxes, extravagantly twisted turbans, and even balaclavas. There’s something essentially menacing about the balaclava. This mask, that only leaves a person’s eyes and mouth open, always conjures for me the famous photograph of a rooftop terrorist at the Munich Olympics in 1972. In the context of face-burning cold, the balaclava might be acceptable city headware. But it’s a sinister fashion; it evokes violence and fear.

So Pussy Riot, the all-female Russian punk/art collective who disguise themselves in crayon-colored balaclavas, seized a ripe symbol. They took the balaclava and charged it further, with justice politics and female rage. Two former Pussy Riot members, Maria Alekhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, appeared this winter at an Amnesty International concert at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. They’d been imprisoned for performing, while masked, an anti-Putin rant in a Moscow church. Here they were without their masks, in hipsterish street clothes, tasteful makeup, and long, loose hair. Though they’d lost the assaultive impact of the balaclava, they gained a different kind of power by showing their faces. They are stunning, radiant young women. To see them plainly makes their politics personal, and drives home powerfully the price they paid for their actions.

Maria and Nadezhda addressed the audience that night in a feverish Russian that was translated sentence-by-sentence, moments afterward, into placid English by an American translator. But their intentions shone through. They shouted in barely-controlled bursts, held their microphones like knives, and paced the stage like wild cats. I was sitting in the stadium’s highest tier, and even from there the spectacle of this – two attractive young women lit by pure fury – was transfixing. As both performance artists and political activists they possess monstrous charisma. They might not need the masks.

Photo by Igor Mukhin.

April 21, 2014 by Nalina Moses

DRESS SENSE

As I walked through the sumptuous Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, I couldn’t help but remember the blockbuster 2011 Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met. The Gaultier show suffers by comparison. Though the clothes are exquisitely crafted (many are haute couture), and the installation is vivid (with the filmed facial expressions of live models projected on blank mannequin heads), the experience lacks the emotional intensity of the McQueen show. That show was charged by the fantasy in McQueen’s work, which fused archetypical female characters (maiden, fairy, princess, witch) with archetypical cultural narratives (rape, drowning, mutation, revolution). And the presentation, chronological, was seared by the tragic fact of his death. What we saw at the Met was the complete ouevre of an artist; what we see at the Brooklyn Museum is a retrospective of an immensely skilled professional.

Both designers are showmen, who pair technical mastery with visual flamboyance. They flout conventional styles while executing their clothing with the highest traditional standards of fitting, draping and embellishment. At the Brooklyn Museum it’s starry and also instructive to see the corsets that Gaultier designed for Madonna’s stage shows. They’re kitschy, made of sparkling lurex, with cartoonishly cinched waists and pointed cups. And they are as finely wrought as jewelry, with miles of angelic, millimeter-long stitches holding strips of ribbon, elastic and boning in place. Even garments with simple profiles – a strapless gown with princess seams, flowing sailor paints with a button front – have an overwrought, byzantine quality. They’re shaped with abundant piecing and puckering.

And yet they’re not innovative in form; they’re rich renditions of standard garments. More than a dreamer, Gaultier is an intellectual, able to infuse a garment – dress, suit, jacket – with a single idea to devastating effect. At the Brooklyn show there is a black cocktail dress constructed like a skeleton, a gauzy white wedding gown that takes the shape of a West African mask, and a slithering satin evening gown modelled after a Renaissance Madonna. If McQueen’s works are fantasies erupting into form, Gaultier’s works are garments lit with ideas. They aren’t artworks, they’re clothes.

Virgins dress, by Jean Paul Gaultier, Spring/Summer 2007. Courtesy of Jean Paul Gaultier.

February 10, 2014 by Nalina Moses

Punk fashion is hard to do. Fashion exists to make boys and girls look pretty, and punk requires a fundamental not-wanting-to-be-pretty. No figure illustrates this better than singer Siouxsie Sioux. In black-and-white photographs of her from the 1970’s and 80’s, before she started working with professional stylists and makeup artists, it's clear that she’s a classic English beauty, slender-hipped and fine-boned, and also that she’s willing to throw that beauty, and the privilege it confers, away. She dyes her hair ink black, then shears it close to her skull or teases it freakishly high. She paints her eyes with great black bat wings. She wears trashy slip dresses that expose her breasts, and slim leather trousers and squarish t-shirts that make her look like an adolescent boy. There’s something about her willingness during these years to make herself conventionally unattractive in order to make a statement (I’m not like you, I’m not a lady, I’m pissed-off) that is punk.

Because womens’ identities are, traditionally, so wound up in their looks, punk fashion might be harder for women to do than for men. Courtney Love did it, thrillingly, in the beginning, with bad skin, bad makeup, bad dye jobs, and bad clothes. Debbie Harry never did it but has always carried herself with an artsy disdain, an unattainability, that is, if not punk, impressively defiant. Madonna has wanted to do it all along, very badly, but has, really, never done it. At this year's Costume Institute gala, the night before Punk opened to the public, Madge walked the red carpet pantless, in a studded plaid jacket over fishnets, with black leather gloves, a bobbed black wig, and silent movie star makeup. She was trying to be punk but she was, still, pretty.

Siouxsie Sioux, 1976. By Sheila Rock.

June 04, 2013 by Nalina Moses

In 2004 the Edvard Munch paintings The Scream and Madonna were stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo. They’ve since been recovered, repaired and reinstalled. But look what’s going on over at the Nationalmuseet, which houses its own extraordinary collection of Munch paintings, including versions of The Scream and Madonna that are displayed behind glass shields. There’s a uniformed guard at the gallery door, who spends most of his time and energy enforcing the no-photography rule. The glass shields only draw attention to those two paintings so that visitors head straight for them, their cellphones cocked.

I don’t think the Munch theft was a crime of passion, because if it had been the thieves would have made away with the painter’s portrait of his sister Inger, or Puberty, or The Dance of Life, which get under the skin in a deeper, more unshakeable way. If I were to steal one painting it would be Four Girls on a Bridge, which charges an innocent subject with longing and dread. Munch was a masterful printmaker, and many of his paintings retain a strongly graphic quality – an energy in the line – that trumps modeling and space. His most poweful paintings, however, don’t employ line so much as molten streams of color. In some, like The Kiss, figures melt into one another. In Four Girls (and in Moonlight too) figures melt into everything around them. Here it is into the street, the bridge, and the sky. The world, and not just the figures, is charged with life.

June 27, 2012 by Nalina Moses