Bad at Sports » Fashion

The Quick & The Dead……Busy

Christopher — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 05:14:51 +0000

Ever had a week where you put too much on your plate? Only me? Well this weekend we can all take it a bit easier but in the mean time here are some things you might have missed while trying to be well rounded.

Lets start with Newcity (what no longer using my YCDToT green color scheme?, reds nice to I guess who had a interesting article a while back about the Spice Barrel District in Near South Chicago being turned into a Creative Industries District for galleries, studios, fashion warehouses & other design/visual art incubator projects is getting more attention on many sites and news articles as the story continues to grow and is worth a look if you missed it. Read more here

Pantone releases next years designer colors for both Men & Women; seems Beeswax will be the hot word this spring lol. Read more here

Why no artist should underestimate the toxcisity of chemicals and value of good ventalation, even though I still refuse to wear gloves while I paint with Flake White or Cobalt Violet. What can I say I prefer to do it nude. Read more here

Swedish outfit called TAT (The Astonishing Tribe) made a highly believable video on portable media ID in 2014 (is it just me that finds it odd thats not far off?) which the least likely aspect isn’t the mirror with email but that Apple still makes a non portable OS? Read more here

The Perfect table after a overly packed week for the person on the move, a zen water ripple table that you can drink tea on and the ripples are real, even in California. So lets say your a young British man who’s been working on you house for some time, teaching classes and making art to pay the bills and trying to expand your art career all at the same time but just ran out of Tetley’s well worry not atleast you will be relaxed while you struggle to swallow what passes for tea in the States. Read more here

Review: Bless 10 Years of Themelessness DVD

Martine Syms — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:00:12 +0000

During a recent visit to Los Angeles I picked up the video compilation BLESS: Celebrating 10 Years of Themelessness at Ooga Booga. When I asked Wendy, the shop owner, about the dvd I was told “It’s not for people new to Bless. You won’t learn more anything about them. It’s for the true Bless fan.” For a moment I considered whether or not I was a true Bless fan and decided that I was.

Bless is a conceptual fashion house based in Paris and Berlin started by Desiree Heiss and Ines Kaag in 1996. They release products designed to “make the near future worth living for.” They make thoughtful garments, jewelry for electronic cables, hanging wardrobe mobiles, and other items intended to be used, lived with, and sometimes discarded.

BLESS: Celebrating 10 Years of Themelessness, released by Bureau des Videos, collects 15 short videos from the Bless archive. Many of the pieces are documentation from the public presentations of their varied collections. In N^o25, Uniseasoners, as people enter the dining area of a restaurant they are seated by servers wearing Bless clothing. The servers take orders, bring wine, and later bring food. Everything is normal, maybe even boring, except for occasional pauses to highlight elements of the clothing. A scarf turns into a hooded sweater. In another video, N^o13 Basics, a narrator lets me know that we’re in an apartment in Paris where several friends have spent the day together “wearing sweaters, bodysuits, trousers and customized Levi’s jeans” as if they were their own.

There is nothing precious about Bless. Bless is a project that presents ideas about living. There is no lifestyle to buy, you must bring your own. As their modest iWeb page says, FITS EVERY STYLE.

I want my “Team Tavi” T-Shirt NOW!

Claudine Isé — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 19:32:27 +0000

Art people, are you reading Style Rookie? If you’re not, I’m here to say I think you should be. Although I myself tend to stay away from fashion and style blogs, because looking at things I could never buy for myself tends to make me feel bitter and depressed and old, I am obsessed with Style Rookie. It’s a blog about fashion and pop culture written by Tavi Gevinson, a thirteen year old girl who lives in a suburb just outside of Chicago (I’m thinking it’s the same one that I live in, but who knows). Tavi–already famous enough to be known by her first name only–was recently profiled in the Chicago Tribune in an article on successful teen fashion bloggers who are garnering attention not just from fashion-conscious tween readers but from fashion designers, stylists, and magazine editors themselves. (Read the Tribune’s article, published on December 30, 2009, here). The article describes Tavi’s rise to fame amongst the fashion set, and also contained some sniping about the pint-sized blogger’s success from a few jealous hags (sorry, I meant to say “fashion editors”). An editor at Elle suggested that Gevinson might have had help with the writing of her blog, remarking that she suspected there was a “Tavi team” behind her, while a fashion writer named Leslie M. M. Blume referred to the teen writer as a “novelty” with little staying power (unlike the trends Blume herself writes about).

Clearly, there are some in the fashion world who don’t like it when young women talk back, in this case by taking fashion and making it personal, something that’s wholly their own. Remember, this is an industry in which all the models, regardless of age, are called “girls”. So who does *this* girl think she is?

That’s precisely the question that fascinates me about Ms. Gevinson and her blog. The construction of identity that takes place within and through Style Rookie is made all the more powerful because the subject is a teenage girl. Adolescence is a time of identity flux for all genders, but I’d hazard that it’s young women who are most strongly battered about by its currents. Fashion magazines have always known this and have tried to capitalize on it, to steer, mold and shape it, through discursive forms of address that emphasize “do’s and don’ts”, fashion faux-pas, what’s in and out. And always, above everything else, the primary directive of Thinness. (This last one is more important than anything else). But this is how Tavi describes herself in the “About Me” section of her blog:

“Tiny 13 year old dork that sits inside all day wearing awkward jackets and pretty hats. Scatters black petals on Rei Kawakubo’s doorsteps and serenades her in rap. I have no where near 4 million readers. Rather cynical and cute as a drained rat. In a sewer. Farting. And spitting out guts.”

Although Tavi’s blog focuses on enthusiastic fashion commentary, including regular reports on her favorite designer’s new lines, what makes Style Rookie really stand out for me is Gevinson’s nimble connecting of the dots between fashion, popular culture, and her own daily life. Her blog is a collage of all three. She finds visual similarities between Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic silhouette, the cover of Yohji Yamamoto book and the poster art for the movie Despicable Me (all of this, mind you, in a post titled “Things I Realize While Doing the Polka in Gym Class“), posts collages of fashion models against backgrounds culled from contemporary art works, and details a classroom art project in which she made a tiny version of Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog.” (To see more images that illustrate this point, check out Gevinson’s blog or her flickr set here).

Gevinson’s bedroom-based construction of an online/virtual identity reminds me, to some degree, of Sadie Benning’s earliest pixel videos – the ones she made alone in her bedroom when she was around 15 or 16 years old. By way of privately enacted scenarios that often made use of masks and paper-cut figures and that were filmed with a child’s video camera, Benning used pastiche as a way to come to terms with who she was: young, queer, female, desiring and desirable.

Sadie Benning, It Wasn't Love, 1992. Courtesy of Video Data Bank.

Sadie Benning, Girl Power, 1992. Courtesy of Video Data Bank.

I’m fairly certain that when Sadie Benning rose to prominence as the youngest artist ever to be included in a Whitney Biennial, there was a fair amount of jealous, behind-the-scenes speculation that maybe her video artist father, James Benning, was the true author of her films.

To be sure, Gevinson’s presentation of self in Style Rookie is a far less risky proposition than Benning’s was in those early videos. Gevinson is small, cute, has an innate knack for fashion, and doesn’t seem all that shy about posting pictures of herself with fashion gurus like Chloe Sevigne or the sisters behind Rodarte (Gevison collaborated with the latter on the video for their new line for Target).

Of course, if it somehow turns out that Gevinson isn’t really author of her own blog (and I don’t for a second believe this is the case) all of the above would be rendered moot. But I think that this teenage girl, this (very) young woman, is exactly who she says she is, and that’s whoever Tavi wants to be.

Episode 227: Guerra de la Paz

Christopher — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:23:31 +0000

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This week: The AMANDA BROWDER SHOW! Amanda and Tom start 2010 off with an interview with Miami artists Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz about their collective Guerra de la Paz (awesome composite of their names) about their work, and how clothing can be more than just a shell over one person’s nubile body..but a story and a basis for sculptural exploration.

Then, Mike Benedetto returns!!! He offers up a meditation on Steven Seagal, Lawman.

Guerra de la Paz is the composite name of Cuban born, American artist duo Alain Guerra (born 1968) and Neraldo de la Paz (born 1955), who have been collaborating since 1996. They are based in Miami.

Guerra was born in Havana and de le Paz in Matanzas. Guerra de la Paz work in sculpture, installation and photography. Their work references the politics of modern conflict and consumerism alongside symbols of faith; they often use old clothing to build their sculptures.

Alain Guerra
Neraldo de la Paz
Guerra de la Paz
Steven Seagal
Cobble Hill, Brooklyn
“pepe” stores
Escada
Versace
Fendi
Ralph Lauren
Saatchi Collection
Art Basel Miami
Chicago Cultural Center
Tyson
JCVD

Beautiful Wearable Dress Has Over 24,000 LEDs

Christopher — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:48:02 +0000

The Galaxy Dress is the center piece of the “Fast Forward: Inventing the Future” exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The museum is celebrating its 75 years and has commissioned the GalaxyDress for their permanent collection.

The wearable dress made up of over 24,000 full color super thing LEDs, 4,000 Swarovski crystals & enough bateries to keep it on up to an hour at a time is something to be seen first hand and no photo or video recording does it justice. All this makes The Galaxy Dress the largest wearable display in the world.

The Soundsuits of Nick Cave: Contemporary Art or Material Culture?

Claudine Isé — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:45:59 +0000

Nick Cave, photo by James Prinz, courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Artist, performer, and director of the School of the Art Institute’s graduate fashion program Nick Cave had a big profile in last Sunday’s New York Times. Cave’s Soundsuits–wearable mixed-media sculptures that incorporate every material imaginable to make sounds unique to each garment–are on view in a large-scale exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from March 28th through July 5th; the show will travel to UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 2010.

Nick Cave, Soundsuit 1, socks, paint, dryer lint, wood, wool, 2006

In the Times profile, Cave recalls what he was thinking when he made his first Soundsuit out of fallen twigs gathered from Chicago’s Grant Park.

“It was a very hard year for me because of everything that came out of the Rodney King beating,” he said. “I started thinking about myself more and more as a black man — as someone who was discarded, devalued, viewed as less than.”

One day, sitting on a bench in Grant Park in Chicago, he saw twigs on the ground in a new light: they looked forsaken too. He gathered them by the armful and cut them into three-inch sticks. He drilled holes through the sticks, so he could wire them to an undergarment of his own creation, completely covering the fabric.

As soon as the twig sculpture was finished, he said, he realized that he could wear it as a second skin: “I put it on and jumped around and was just amazed. It made this fabulous rustling sound. And because it was so heavy, I had to stand very erect, and that alone brought the idea of dance back into my head.”

Cave, you’ll remember, had a show at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2006. I really wish I’d been living in this city at the time so I could have seen it–Cave’s stuff is blowing my mind, and I need to know more about it, look at it up close and in person, watch the fur fly, so to speak.

Nick Cave, photo by James Prinz, courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

My own lack of familiarity with Cave’s work makes me wonder, though: Why is Cave’s show traveling to the Fowler Museum, which is a museum of cultural history, and not an art museum that has an equally strong ability to support and exhibit interdisciplinary art of this nature, like, say, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) or even UCLA’s “other” arts institution, the white-hot Hammer Museum*? From the Fowler’s online mission statement:

The Fowler Museum explores art and material culture primarily from Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas, past and present. The Fowler seeks to enhance understanding and appreciation of the diverse peoples, cultures, and religions of the world through highly contextualized interpretive exhibitions, publications, and public programming, informed by interdisciplinary approaches and the perspectives of the cultures represented.

Don’t get me wrong: the Fowler is a fantastic institution and will do a superb job with this show. My quibble is with what seems a questionable location of Cave’s work in terms of “material culture” when it really is better understood in terms of contemporary artistic practice–which is, you know, highly interdisciplinary itself nowadays, and which is why institutions like Yerba Buena’s are an ideal context for it.

Nickk Cave, photo by James Prinz, courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

The NYT piece notes that in his catalogue essay for the Yerba Buena show, Dan Cameron “cites the ‘social sculpture’ of the artist Joseph Beuys, the legacy of the drag queen Leigh Bowery in the London underground performance scene and the ornate costumes of African-American Mardi Gras Indians in New Orleans” as associative touchstones for Cage’s fashion/sculpture/performance mash-up. So why emphasize only the last part of that description?

Cave shows his Soundsuits at Jack Shainman alongside Kerry James Marshall, Carrie Mae Weems, Michael Snow, Odil Donald Odita, Bob Knox, Tim Bavington–a diverse stable of artists involved in a wide range of practices, some interdisciplinary in nature, some less so. Check out Cage’s bio: He’s had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville and a bunch of other smaller contemporary art venues. That the Los Angeles venue of his biggest exhibition to date will be a cultural history museum rather than a contemporary art center seems a little out of context given where Cage has shown previously.

Nick Cave, photo by James Prinz, courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

I’ve sat in the conference rooms where the decisions to greenlight exhibitions are made–the choices are complicated and involve a mutitude of factors, and believe me, I know that outside observers (like myself) often have an overly simplistic view of how it all goes down. Maybe it’s as simple as the show wasn’t offered to anyone but the Fowler. But I’ve also witnessed firsthand how certain exhibition proposals get tossed aside with hardly a second glance because it belongs “somewhere else,” often that conveniently located cultural history museum that’s right down the street, practically next door, maybe we can collaborate with them on something or maybe not…whatever, “it’s not for us.”

Nick Cave, photo by James Prinz, courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

This is not about the relative value of cultural history museums. It’s about context, the meaning of “culture,” and museological responsibility. Is the Fowler’s role, and by extension the role of other cultural history museums, to pick up the slack and plug up the holes left by the fine arts institutions in their city? I haven’t lived in L.A. for awhile now, so I can’t do more than broach the question. But the institutional journey that Nick Cave’s Soundsuits have taken and will take in the future would seem to provide a provocative case study in what qualifies as “contemporary art,” what’s deemed “material culture,” and why that distinction even matters.

Nick Cave, photo by James Prinz, courtesy Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

*(Is this the part where I’m supposed to do the “due diligence/ full disclosure” thing and report that I was once an assistant curator at the Hammer? Well, then, consider it done.)

Louis Vuitton Sues Art Student Who Did Darfur Illustration

Christopher — Tue, 20 May 2008 06:24:22 +0000

Nadia Plesner, a Danish 26-year-old art student, designed a T-shirt depicting a Darfurian child holding a Louis Vuitton bag with a Chihuahua on his shoulder in the vein of Paris Hilton. The image was printed on t-shirts to bring about increased attention to the plight of Darfur and the West’s insistence to trivialize or overlook the issues there.

In February of this year the Marc Jacobs run House of Louis Vuitton issued a copyright lawsuit demanding $20,000 a day for each day she continued to use this image and reimbursement for legal fees. Plesner is scheduled to meet with Louis Vuitton in Paris with her lawyer on May 30th since she refused to comply.

New York Mag has a interview with Nadia Plesner that makes for an interesting read.

While the House of Louis Vuitton is busy spending thousands of dollars suing her instead of capitalizing on the moment by making a donation in her name to charity and realizing that parody/caricature and non competitive market copyright have a considerable barring on this “copyright” case. May Bad at Sports suggest other parody related/for profit targets for their attention.

SNL Season 31: Episode 10 – Where a copyrighted Louis Vuitton like background was used to parody a sweet sixteen skit.

Sue Chewy Vuiton again (and fail again) – If at first you don’t succeed-waste court time agian.

Every Editorial Cartoon ever made that has a Louis Vuitton related caricature – Newspapers used to be for profit industries at one time.

Paris Hilton – A living caricature of a human being who is regularly seen with a LV handbag.

Gap Artist Edition T-Shirts – Jeff Koons/Barbara Kruger/Chuck Close/& More

Meg Onli — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:14:40 +0000

via highsnobiety

Building on its long history of supporting the arts, today Gap introduced Artist Editions T-Shirts, a limited edition collection of t-shirts designed by 13 of today’s most influential contemporary artists, including Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Marilyn Minter, Kiki Smith, Cai Guo-Qiang, Barbara Kruger, Ashley Bickerton, Kenny Scharf, Glenn Ligon, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kerry James Marshall, Hanna Liden and Sarah Sze.

Gap worked in close partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art and Art Production Fund to create the collection with the 13 artists, who are all previous Whitney Biennial participants. The Whitney Biennial is a special exhibition held every two years at the Whitney Museum of American Art that features the most important contemporary art in the United States. Gap is a proud sponsor of the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

The limited edition collection is available exclusively at select Gap stores in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and franchise markets, as well as online in the U.S. at gap.com. It’s also available at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at Colette, a Paris-based boutique. The t-shirts range in price from $28 to $38.

Vera Wang’s new ad agency is so very lost

Christopher — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:59:34 +0000

I am not a music purist or an art hardliner by any stretch of the imagination. I am daily amazed at the fact that the art world thinks advertising is a four letter word and that any ounce of success is met with buckets of scorn. I do have to say though that in all the years that I have kept up with the art business and the advertising business I have rarely if ever seen a mix of art and commerce so off putting and poorly fitting as Vera Wang’s latest blitz for her new clothing line at Kohls.

As you can see and hear in the video below the concept is three women (an asain, a redhead & a blond) are driving across the American west (ala a trip with Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo) with their hair down and feet swaying in the breeze to the tune of…………. America’s “Horse With No Name”. Whether deservingly or not the song has a inherited theme that is about as contrary to the message of the video as is really possible.

It’s as if the writer of the concept was so determined to get the idea of “American” across in the commercial he/she picked the song cause it was written by a band called America and matched his/her use of the barren desert. I can only assume the person went to U2 and tried to get the rights to the song “In God’s Country” and was rightfully told to take a hike and this was their second choice?

To me this is as tasteless as the Sony PSP ad promoting the new “white” player by showing a Aguileraesque white girl death gripping a black girl. Also as mindless as the rightfully humorous perfume ad in Eddie Murphy’s film Boomerang

Vera waits for years to release her budget conscious clothing line to have it played this way? You know someone in that boardroom thought this was dumb but I guess had the sense to keep his/her job and say nothing.

Episode 35b: Fashion, Breasts, Stephanie Liner, Robin Richman

Christopher — Fri, 28 Apr 2006 20:34:42 +0000

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NOVA Fashion Train! Amanda and Sarah go to town. Lots of talk of breasts, interviews with Stephanie Liner and Robin Richman.

Day 2 of the Art Fair Madness!!!

Bad at Sports » Fashion

The Quick & The Dead……Busy

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