PARALLEL TRACKS

There’s an exhibit at FIT called Black Fashion Designers that is, simply, a collection of clothes designed by men and women of African descent. The show includes designers like Anne Lowe, who worked in the 50′s and 60′s in relative anonymity, pioneers like Stephen Burrows, Willi Smith and Patrick Kelly, icons like Azzedine Alaïa, and contemporary tastemakers like Duro Olowu and Public School NYC.

The garments on display are, almost without exception, finely proportioned, stunningly crafted, and smartly conceived. But they do not embody ideas or trends that are earth-shattering, or that would suggest that Black Fashion is anything contrary to, or out-of-step with, Regular (which is to say, White) Fashion. While walking through the gallery, it becomes clear that the fashion world has been, for decades, almost entirely segregated, with talented black designers working on a parallel track, separate to their contemporary white counterparts, addressing the same trends, technologies and movements.

There’s an Eric Gaskins evening gown here that’s a swathe of liquid ivory silk with bands of shimmering black bugle beads running around it like monumental brushstrokes, in the manner of a Robert Motherwell canvas. It might be the most elegant gown I’ve ever seen. (I can’t look at photos of this dress without fantasizing about what it would feel like to wear it while walking into a ballroom, approaching a podium, climbing into a black car…) It’s a functional evening gown so meticulously conceived and executed that it rises to the level of fantasy, abstract expressionism stitched into a dress. That Gaskins, a contemporary of Michael Kors and Isaac Mizrahi, remains relatively unknown, suggests that there’s a way to go until the industry becomes entirely open, and exhibits like this serve no purpose.

Image courtesy of FIT. Eric Gaskins, Dress, 2014, USA. Gift of Eric Gaskins.

December 31, 2016 by Nalina Moses

MOVING PARTS

Every architect works best at a particular scale: that of the detail, piece of furniture, interior space, exterior shell, site plan, or city plan. French architect Pierre Chareau excelled at the peculiar in-between scale of the device, an element larger than furniture and smaller than a room: the staircase, the sliding door, the screen, the storage cabinet. As a handsome retrospective at The Jewish Museum makes clear, it’s these devices, with precise mechanical functions, that animate his designs.

Chareau’s masterwork, the Maison de Verre in Paris, remains a favorite for architecture students who are seduced by its tricked-out fittings and ultra-modern feeling. It’s a house that doesn’t feel domestic, a kind of architecture that exceeds construction to produce effects that are eery – both bodily and emotionally. Its richest rooms are its secondary or “servant” spaces, where the shower stalls, closets, stairs, entryways and shafts are. In these parts the building engages its inhabitants like an organism, a living thing.

The exhibit includes illustrative video clips, in which a straight, plainly-dressed, 30-something couple enact daily life in the house, silently, and to unintentionally comic (or maybe just French?) effect. She climbs up a folding staircase, and He closes the hatch behind her. He enters through a revolving door, and She locks the door behind him. She leaves a coffee cup in a chamber in the kitchen cupboard, and He retrieves it from behind. They interact with the building in a proscribed, ritualized way.

The exhibit is exquisitely designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Other shows they’ve designed, like the Charles James retrospective at The Met, have been overly cerebral, obscuring the raw power of the objects on display. Here their strategy is lighter and more agile, and the high technologies they employ (i.e. a monitor “scanning” a virtual model of the Maison de Verre like an MRI machine, and VR headsets showing views from inside the house and garden) are put to good use. The Maison de Verre defies easy description through photographs and orthogonal drawings. Only by visiting it, seeing it in film, or through VR, can one see it quickly and clearly as a whole. Rather than a single structure, it’s best understood as a web of smaller movements. It’s a building that’s like a dance.

December 29, 2016 by Nalina Moses

UGLY

So much contemporary art, particularly installation, has a purposefully unattractive aesthetic: rough, unbalanced, distended, and downright ugly. The works of contemporary American sculptor Ed Kienholz certainly do. These diorama-like set pieces are assembled from found objects (old furniture, carpets, appliances, and automobiles) and life-size cast figures, and tell stories of domestic violence, tawdry sex, and male aggression. When seen in photographs they can appear exploitative, engineered for titillation. Women often appear naked and dismembered, and men often appear masked and armed.

Kienholz’ best known work, Five Car Stud, first shown at Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, has been reinstalled at his current retrospective at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. One approaches it dramatically, after passing through a string of brightly-lit galleries, through a floor-length black curtain, into a room piled with dirt, so dark that one can only step forward guided by the guard’s flashlight.

The sculpture depicts five rural, working class, masked white men castrating a black man, lit only by the headlights of their trucks, which are parked in a circle around them. It might be the most viscerally affecting artwork I’ve ever seen, a deep, direct critique of American life. The other gallery-goers, older, well-to-do, Milanese couples, didn’t seem to find anything amiss. They stepped gingerly to the center – careful not to get sand in their drivings shoes – and inspected details of the grotesque, cartoonish figures closely, laughing. One woman, in an ankle-length mink coat, posed for a photo standing right above the black man’s head.

Though this piece was made over forty years ago, it might have been been made in the summer of 2016. The five rednecks with their trucks could have rendered just as powerfully as five uniformed city cops in patrol cars. The racial and sexual violence lying just below the niceties of American life remain relevant, as does the disregard for black life. The ugliness in Kienholz’ sculptural expression – the bloated figures, the melting-wax faces, the horror movie lighting – equals the subject matter. It captures the terror correctly.

Edward Kienholz, Five Car Stud, 1969–72. Photo: courtesy of Delfino Sisto Legnani Studio.

December 11, 2016 by Nalina Moses

OTHERWORLDLY

The Fondazione Prada in Milan is a former distillery that’s been remade by the luxury brand as an art center. It was opened in 2015, after OMA Europe refurbished the existing structures and added three new ones. The ten-building campus lies along the city’s southern edge, in a precinct of warehouses, factories, and abandoned lots, and is secured with a masonry wall and uniformed guards. Stepping inside from the sidewalk is like falling into another world, one that’s radically interior, like a convent, a prison, or an asylum.

The artworks are sealed away in a series of strange, seemingly unrelated structures, that set a tone of unsettling quiet. It would be a sterile experience if not for the dazzling quality of the architecture. The buildings are cerebral in their planning, restrained in their geometries, and luxurious in their finishes. The Cinema is framed in brushed aluminum and clad with mirrored stainless steel panels. The Hall floor is a richly figured travertine. Staircases in all of the buildings are lined with perforated brushed stainless steel panels. Pragmatic elements like vents, access panels and stair handrails are gorgeously concealed.

Circulation, both through the campus and through each building, is obtuse. There are lots of ramps and staircases, and no door handles. Most of the buildings are entered through immense, unmarked automatic sliding doors. Signage is minimal, and no artwork is visible from outside. Young guards, dressed in unisex blue nylon Prada topcoats and Doc Martens, are required to give detailed directions to visitors. The restrooms are particularly difficult to navigate. All surfaces in these underground facilities, including the ceiling and the stall partitions, are constructed from a heavy steel grate. Dark and disorienting, the space is also slightly maddening. A sensible adult wonders, Where is the door? Where are the stalls? Where are the paper towels? And where, again, is the door?

Recent OMA projects have had a disappointingly commercial aspect, but this one bears the sly, witty signature of Rem Koolhas. The Fondazione has no center, no front face, and no real image. Its most iconic element (until the high-rise Torre under construction is completed) is the “Haunted House,” an existing four-story concrete building that’s been finished in a flat, softly-glowing 24-karat gold leaf, and that houses the permanent collection. It’s nestled at the end of a drive inside the campus, so that it remains invisible from the outside, and from most other points on the campus. Its small bare chambers offer sculptures by Robert Gober and Louise Bourgeois and, more alluringly, opulent views into the city. Yet one isn’t permitted to step onto the balconies or take photos; one remains caught inside.

Photograph courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milano. By Bas Princen, 2015.

December 10, 2016 by Nalina Moses