AND RED ALL OVER

Well this surprised me. It’s Pantone’s new shade of red, Period, accompanied by the line diagram of a woman’s ovaries, fallopian tubes and uterus. The new new hue was developed in partnership with Swish feminine hygiene company Intimina. Pantone explains: “An active and adventurous red hue, courageous Period emboldens people who menstruate to feel proud of who they are.”

Except that this red is not the real color of blood (menstrual or otherwise), period is a euphemism for menstruation, and the diagram depicts a uterus that has no entrance – no vagina. This anatomical cartoon sanitizes the female body’s unique powers of sex, pregnancy and childbirth. Intimina peddles feminine products like rubber cups, pelvic exercise tools, and an “intimate moisturizer.” While the company is body positive and honors women including Alexandria Ocasio Ortiz, Malala Yousef and Vivienne Leigh in a blog called #whilebleeding, its branding reinforces every retrograde stereotype about femininity. Its website is an orgy of bubble gum pink, as are its rubber products.

Right now binary gender and its iconographies are under assault. Liberal parents are trying to raise gender-free children, empowered teenagers select their own gender, and adults freely switch genders. So why is a corporation celebrating biological femininity? Will we honor male bodily functions similarly? Other than to shock, what’s it for?

October 26, 2020 by Nalina Moses

AND A MICROPHONE

Architect Sekou Cooke spoke last month in support of Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture, a survey exhibit he curated at the New York Center of Architecture in 2019. He authored a manifesto on the subject, The Fifth Pillar: A Case for Hip Hop Architecture, in 2014, and is completing a book about it. I didn’t visit the show, which sounded gimmicky, but in photographs, and in Cooke’s presentation, the work collected has power and presence.

So it’s strange that in both speech and in writing Cooke is reluctant to define what hip-hop architecture (HHA) actually is. In the article, after failing to find an adequate definition for “architecture,” he moves on to describe hip-hop as a “subculture” that is at its core countercultural and multi-disciplinary. At the lecture, when someone asked what the formal ideas behind HHA were, its Five Points, he paused, sighed tiredly, and said only that hip-hop architecture was many things, that it really had no rules.

This echoes the words of Deconstructivists. And, formally, HHA might be the inverse of what that movement was. If Deconstructivism, in architecture, suggested forms coming apart centripetally, broken into smaller shards and sucked away into a vast neutral field, then the works Cooke showed might be understood as forms coming together centrifugally, of different parts from different places fitted together within a sliver of space in a city to make a vital new thing. That new thing is characterized by sculptural movement, calligraphic ornament, and percussive rhythm.

The most beautiful works Cooke showed were from his own studio, a series of models made by 3D printing the mass of an existing single-family house while spinning the printer. The resulting forms are bright and bold, human scaled, and accepting and recharging an existing vernacular. Architecture is made, ultimately, of forms and materials, not of ideas. There’s an architecture here; let’s look at it.

August 30, 2020 by Nalina Moses

FIRST LOVE

The movie Columbus, shot on site in the Indiana city, is about a young woman who has trouble leaving her home and her hometown, where she’s tantalized by the celebrated modern monuments around her. When a well-known professor of architecture is hospitalized there, his son and his protege visit, befriend her, and hatch a plan.

The movie is shot almost entirely in one-point perspective, an optical scheme in which all orthogonal lines meet at a fixed point on the horizon, so the viewer is always looking flat onto a surface or deeply into a space. It’s a vantage that gives the city’s iconic twentieth-century buildings a grave formal beauty. The landscapes, lush late-summer lawns and ancient hardwood trees, are rendered similarly. The scenes, firmly and quietly composed, hold the buildings and grounds still so the characters can roam freely in front of them.

The story unfolds slowly with generous spaces and silences that are unusual in an American film. We see that the young woman does not feel secure, the son does not feel loved, and the protege stifles any feelings that might arise. We see that all three characters are slightly unmoored and slightly enamored of one another. They move together and then apart, until they reach a kind of social detente.

Columbus is the only movie I know that shows what it’s like to love a building. Not to find supreme beauty in it, but to be sustained by it. Each night the young woman leaves the home she shares with her mother and drives to Deborah Berke’s Irwin Union Bank, a small, elegant building with a bold parti and deceptively banal detailing. At night its upper floor – a glowing cantilevered bar – casts a cool blue light across the lot below, where the heroine sits on the hood of her car. This building is the only one part of her world that makes sense, that is correctly ordered, that gives her a home. This is a power of architecture, to hold one together, that’s rarely expressed.

Deborah Berke Partners, Irwin Union Bank, Columbus IN, 2009

May 05, 2020 by Nalina Moses

PLAYING DRESS UP

I’ve always understood that costume is one person’s fantasy of another, while fashion is one person’s fantasy of herself. The Anna Sui retrospective at the Museum of Art and Design, The World of Anna Sui, flattens that distinction.

When styled for shows and shoots Sui’s models have a boldly cluttered look. A woman might wear an Alice in Wonderland inspired dress over Op Art patterned tights with a fitted Victorian peacoat, a feathered hat, and elbow-length kidskin gloves. This rich layering and accessorizing drowns out the fineness and complexity in the tailoring. I don’t think any two dresses here share the same piecing; each one is crafted uniquely, inventively. To examine them individually is the great pleasure of the show. The princess seams of this coat, the fringe along this handkerchief hem, the embroidered yoke of this dress. It’s these details that make the garment, and also give them a costumey feeling. The garments are willfully overdone, joyfully baroque.

The show is organized in thirteen clusters of mannequins, spread over three floors, organized by social type, including what the museum identifies as “cowgirls, grunge girls, hippie chicks, hula girls, Mods, pirate rock stars, Pre-Raphaelite maidens, and surfer nomads.” My favorite outfits are the ethnic ones, labelled “tribal,” perhaps to sidestep accusations of cultural appropriation. There are dresses whose silhouettes and embroideries are inspired by traditional Native American, Inuit, Indian, Ukrainian and Chinese dress. Each is so seriously and unironically executed that it seems less like a copy than a dream, in fabric, of a woman. Anna Sui’s clothing supports a woman being herself while allowing her to imagine that she is someone else.

Photograph courtesy of MAD Museum.

May 04, 2020 by Nalina Moses