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

TEN TOWERS FOR THE TWIN TOWERS

I had to laugh when I got an email blast last week from a design magazine with the subject line “Koolhaas Comes Home, Completes Holland’s Largest Building." That kind of big, dumb pride in big, dumb buildings is antithetical to what Rem Koolhaas and his Amsterdam-based office OMA stood for. If OMA have designed buildings recently, like the CCTV Tower in Shanghai, that seem big and dumb, it’s because their programs and sites (and clients) demanded it.

The email refers to De Rotterdam, the multi-use complex OMA just completed in that city. It’s big, with over 1.7 million square feet of new commercial space. (By comparison, each of the Twin Towers contained 3.8 million square foot of office space.) But it’s not dumb. Rather than a single super-high volume, the structure has been imagined as ten smaller volumes, bundled together, staggered in their heights above the ground and footprints on the ground. These towers touch one another only cautiously, strategically, at certain corners, so that they’re tied together structurally, and so that inhabitants can move between them. But each tower maintains its own volume, with windows along all of its open sides. This arrangement makes for a building that is both massive and porous, with light, air and views rushing through it. It’s a fine contemporary office building.

But when I look at photos of De Rotterdam what I see more than anything else is a tribute to the Twin Towers, though the project was not intended as such. Each of its small towers is, like each of the Twin Towers, a square in plan. Their full-height runs of window frame and window glass resemble the signature black-and-white striped skin of the Twin Towers. And they have a similar starkness as the Twin Towers; their shapes are so restrained that they remain platonic.

The new building looks terribly handsome on the port in Rotterdam, but I think it would sit just as comfortably at the World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan. To include a structure like this in the new complex there – a big but not super-big building whose forms echo and reinvent those of the Twin Towers – would be a gorgeous response to their destruction. De Rotterdam is like the Twin Towers but slighter, shattered, shifted, dancing. It’s quietly heroic.

Photograph courtesy OMA © Michel van de Kar

January 21, 2014 by Nalina Moses

Frances Ha is kind of a prequel to Sex and the City. The movie follows a twenty-seven year old dancer in New York City as she tries to straighten our her personal and professional lives. It was instant nostalgia for me, conjuring a time when my friends and I lived in apartments with stacks of ratty paperbacks, postcards taped to the walls, and furniture rescued from the sidewalk. We heated water for tea in sauce pots, tossed our clothes on the floor, and smoked inside. In his review critic Armond White pointed out that the movie’s demographic of young urban creatives is a highly privileged one. But the movie’s details are so exquisitely and honestly rendered that they’re touching. Frances arrives late at a loft party and searches fearfully in the dark for her friends, Frances throws herself enthusiastically and awkwardly into a dinner party conversation, and Frances suffers gamely through a date knowing all the while that the handsome young man isn’t attracted to her. The only false note is a bright, abrupt Hollywood ending that leaves her with a promising career, a beautiful apartment, and a supportive partner. While I want her to have all these things I know they won’t fall into place so easily, or all at once.

The most satisfying element of the movie is the rich, unfussy black and white photography by Sam Levy. The feeling is looser than that of Manhattan, which unfolds like a series of still photographs, and closer to the eccentric storytelling in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger than Paradise. Frances Ha, like that movie, is set in a cloistered hipster underworld (unnamed bars, walk-up apartments, black box theaters) where characters communicate in an argot of slow spare sentences. The most expressive scenes in the movie are the ones that show us Frances running through the streets from one place to the next, which are used as transitions. The frame is fixed tightly on her figure and the streetscape, barely legible, streams behind her. There’s nothing pretty about the views; they’re raw and energetic. Yet they get perfectly at what it felt like living in New York City when I was young, rushing around passionately and myopically, unaware of the worlds outside my own. Life felt like an endless string of epiphanies, and it passed in a dazzling, exhilerating blur.

Photograph courtesy of IFC Films.

January 13, 2014 by Nalina Moses

STAGING STRANGENESS

I’ve probably seen a hundred plays in New York City – Broadway, off-Broadway, and amateur. But I’ve never seen a level of stagecraft as high as at that in Robert Wilson’s opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramowic at the Armory. This piece is essentially a vanity production that stars the artist as herself. It’s more biographical than philosophical, and locates the roots of her complex body-centric art in predictable traumas including a wicked mother, a feeling of not being pretty enough, and a lover’s abandonment. The show mixes forms: music, film, fashion, poetry and dance. But it’s most remarkable for its stage sets and lighting, which plunge us into a series of worlds that are, as my friend described, “painfully gorgeous." The narrative recreates episodes from the artist’s life, and each unfolds onstage in a tableau as cunningly crafted as a fashion editorial. Actors are positioned on the broad, high black stage with geometric clarity, and brushed with cool white neon light that accentuates their acrid-colored costumes and stark kabuki-like make-up.

I’ve never seen scenes as archly beautiful as these. There is a man in yellow pajamas in bed under a sky full of pie-sized foil stars. There is a lady in a red feather-tipped gown on a chaise lounge who floats, carelessly, to sea. And there is, most thrillingly, a kind of surrealist playground, with four isolated, mime-type figures on stage at once: a man perched a swing, a lady spinning from a rope clenched in her mouth, a naked girl rolling down a staircase, and a clown anxiously dancing in place. Each scene in the play is brilliantly composed and, ultimately, empty, because it conveys no narrative or emotion. A whole lot of strange things happen on stage (figures run back and forth at back, drop down on harnesses, and join up in a parade to march away) and we don’t ask ourselves why. This strangeness isn’t like that in a David Lynch movie, which, similarly ravishing visually, erupts from puckers in ordinary life. And this strangeness isn’t like that in a Pina Bausch dance, which emerges from fevered concentration on a single action. Wilson here seems to be to producing strangeness for its own sake. Nothing in this production really gets at life and death of Marina Abramowic, or at the deep themes in her art. It’s all very pretty decoration.

January 08, 2014 by Nalina Moses