L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

John Galliano, 2009.

John Galliano has a lavish-sounding last name (he shares it with an Italian liqueur), and lavish taste (“He knows, and we know, that no one would ever wear a 12-foot-wide crinoline over a baggy pair of printed drawers with, perhaps, a pair of plastic carrier bags on the feet,” wrote Sarah Mower for Style.com). That he would also take a lavish approach to outbursts, uttering a line of anti-Semitic epitaphs instead of just one or two, isn’t that surprising. So when, days before Paris Fashion week began, Galliano, the first Brit to head a French couture house, let his God-complex spin out and became, at least according to certain headlines, a dissolute failure, his fall seemed more irksome than surprising.

What’s happened since has been predictable; it’s exactly what happens when someone who’s found a certain niche of notoriety takes an egregious misstep and everyone sees. Dior let Galliano go; Naomi Campbell and Kate Moss urged him into rehab; then pregnant, pixie star, Natalie Portman, the antithesis of the punk designer in deportment and pedigree, became unwitting spokesperson against anti-Semitism in general and drunken fashion gurus in particular, refusing to stay on as face of Dior fragrance if Galliano stayed on, too. (In an effort to defend Portman’s spokeswoman clout, articles keep noting that her great-grandparents died at Auschwitz, a serious fact that this fiasco almost trivializes.)

It had been rumored, probably baselessly, that Portman would wear Galliano to the Oscars two weeks ago. Instead she wore simple plum Rodarte. Which is more or less where this string of who-did-whats has been heading: the work of the Rodarte sisters, whose somber idiosyncrasy recalls the Brontës, is the subject of a current exhibition at MOCA’s Pacific Design Center. Presented by Swarovski (yes, of the crystals) and curated by Rebecca Morse, Rodarte: States of Matter features a selection of dresses from the designers’ recent Fall and Spring collections and a few costumes designed for the Darren Aronofsky film Black Swan.

MOCA PDC fares much better when it remembers that it is the satellite of an experimental contemporary arts institution and not a history of design museum. It rarely does, however, and it’s installations too often stray toward the pedantic. But Rodarte: States of Matter tries too hard to push the other way, going to great lengths to present the gowns as sculptural experiences and thus making it a battle to appreciate them as design at all.

Vito Acconci, still from "Claim Excerpts," 1971.

Downstairs, Rodarte’s Black Collection is darkly lit and hung in the center of a black painted room. You have to get close to see the the raw alpaca wool that climbs up a mannequin’s chest toward the shoulder and the tulle that twists in on itself like nautical netting after a storm. Upstairs, the lighting is at first severe and all-exposing, but then it flashes black and the dresses from the White Collection glow like they would in a bowling alley. This theatricality doesn’t give the clothes the credit they deserve–after all, they’re gorgeously crafted objects, with a pre-Raphaelite gentility that butts up against a DIY scavengery—or doesn’t credit viewers with the ability to understand Rodarte’s drama without the help of special effects.

But as with Galliano, the MOCA exhibition fails only in stark contrast to success–it fails because it could have succeeded. That’s the most common, prominent kind of failure. It’s also the dullest, the kind that can be explained away and potentially remedied.

The last time I was in a room as dark as the one that now holds Rodarte’s Black Collection, I was at Emma Gray Headquarters, a tiny, narrow, bird’s nest of a space perched above the corner of La Cienega and Venice. Performance artist and photographer Dawn Kasper was re-inhabiting Vito Acconci’s 1971 workClaim, wearing a black hoodie, wielding a pipe and sitting blindfolded in a candle-encircled corner.

During the original Claim, Acconci, also blindfolded, sat at the bottom of a stairwell in the basement of a New York gallery with a crowbar, two pipes and and relentless tongue at his disposal, “claiming the space.” Any time steps approached, he’d swing his pipe, and threaten to kill. “I’ll stop anybody from coming down here in the basement with me,” he’d say, his outburst far less viscous but more ominous than any iteration of Galliano’s. “This space is mine.”

Kasper sat at the same level as her audience, not below. And her piece, more about wondering what could have compelled or propelled a performer like Acconci, lasted an hour to Acconci’s three. Carol Cheh of Another Righteous Transfer recorded pieces of Kasper’s intermittent monologue:

I want to be aggressive, I want to be convincing, I want to claim this space . . . I am alone in this space . . . but I don’t really want this space . . . I don’t want to be him, I am a woman, I am claiming my own space, my own honesty.

“My work was about getting to a place that you couldn’t get to,” Acconci said recently, looking back on earlier performances. In that sense, Kasper’s Claim succeeded by failing–failing to get somewhere she never could have gotten anyway.

Carmen Papalia, "Blind Field Shuttle--Mildred's Lane," 2011. Digital Print, 11" X 17." Photo by Kristin Rochelle Lanz.

Some philosophy holds that the fundamental role of human beings is to be “world disclosers.”  Medusa’s Mirror: Fears, Spells, and Other Transfixed Positions, a small yet conceptually powerful show at Oakland’s Pro Arts Gallery, demonstrates this principle via the visual arts.  The exhibit, curated by Amanda Cachia, is expansive in at least two important ways. First, the objects on view include both traditional and new media.  Even fashion, often omitted, is interestingly addressed.  The second inclusion is the more significant one: the makers of the work are all disabled people who have made disability their subject.

Some of you, I know, have just gone on to read another review.  Haven’t we had thirty years of identity politics?  Yes, indeed we have.  And some of it, as the critic Robert Hughes loved to point out, was narrow and preachy.  But hold on a minute.  The voices of “Medusa” are not “victimized voices.”  You’ll find enough canon-stretching and humor here to make a trip (or this article) worth your time.

True, this work is not heavy on visual appeal.  During my two-plus hours in the gallery, several visitors came and went rapidly, neglecting even the wall text.  But unlike the norm over the past three decades, there are sufficient enough making skills and aesthetic value present to capture the interest of a beholder longer than the standard, three-second gallery goer’s glance.  Slow and patient viewing is rewarded by encounters that permit seeing disabled people, our shared social world, and even ourselves differently.

Laura Swanson, "Peggy Lee," 2008. Inkjet Print, 20" X 30".

Some favorites include the inkjet prints of Laura Swanson.  Swanson has four punchy self-portraits exhibited that, at the very least, challenge the widespread narcissism rampant in contemporary Western society.  In them, the subject teases and frustrates our gaze.  Pillow depicts the artist, a little person, seated on a king-sized bed virtually hidden behind a red-and-beige checkered pillow with only her child-sized feet and hands visible.  Shower also nearly eliminates the portrait subject, who is engaged in the private act of washing behind a bunched-up veil of a translucent shower curtain.  Here the disabled body is blurred and hard to grasp.  Point made–in a teasing and sophisticated way–and well taken.

One of the images I would purchase, if not for my part-time teacher’s salary, is Swanson’s Peggy Lee.  At the center of the image, set in an interior, Swanson stands dwarfed by the stereo speakers of her own sound system; her entire wee form revealed in a blazing red t-shirt reading “West Coast” and hippy-flowered, dark pants.  Her face, traditionally the most revealing portion of a portrait, is substituted by an album cover featuring that of the comely 40s starlet, Peggy Lee.  While us able-bodied folks might try to avert our gaze from the sight of a little person out of politeness (“It’s not nice to stare at others”) or disgust at difference, or a complex mixture, Swanson beats us to the punch, reminding us that somebody at the other end of the viewing transaction also has mixed feelings, which we able-bodied can only imagine.

Joseph Grigely, "Songs Without Words (Eartha Kitt)," 2009. Pigment Print, 18" X 14". Ed. of 12.

A similar point about empathic imagination is made in Songs without Words, a pigment print by a deaf artist, Joseph Grigely, who employs the image of a yet another recording diva to convey his ideas.  Grigely has used an image appropriated from the New York Times obituary of Eartha Kitt, the Cherokee-African American actress and singer known for her distinctive sound.  This memorializing image, meant initially to do the work of evoking collective memories of the talents of the performer, is used here to evoke the private memories of the artist, and, subsequently, to pry open his audience’s minds.  When Grigely was ten he lost his hearing.  One wonders if he ever actually heard Kitt, but whether he did or not is moot.  His appropriation of the legend as the epitome of unique and individual sound is a telling metaphor of the death of his ability to enjoy the sensuous pleasure that many of us take for granted.  The ability to hear the ordinary rumblings of daily life is not the issue here; rather hearing is proposed as art.

Sunaura Taylor, "No Arms! (Self-Portrait)," 2010. Oil Paint on Print on Raw Canvas, 72" X 48".

Sunaura Taylor pulls off a similar coup in at least one work, as well.  Taylor deploys a compelling, intermedia blend of oil paint on printed paper (or canvas).  Her No Arms! (Self Portrait), a Photoshopped reworking of an old-timey photograph of a sideshow “freak,” communicates a sincere sense of just how a physical deformity (in this case, a congenital disability) might distort the self-image of the owner of that body.  If we can be coaxed to reflect on the effects of social judgements–such as calling someone “freak”– we then open to the possibility of altering our received notions of others.  And not just of the disabled, but of all other sorts of categorical name-calling.  At their most powerful, the works in “Medusa” engage viewers in a consideration of complex psycho-social interrelations and projections that are often denied.

A word must be added about the step this show takes toward disability fashion: a step which I hope combines with sustain-ability fashion.  Sandie Yi contributes photo-chromogenic prints of her wearable art, as well as some of the artifacts themselves.  The wall text explains that for generations, Yi’s family members have been born unpredictably variable numbers of toes and fingers.  Yi uses what some might view as a handicap to dream up self-defined standards of attractiveness, and–perhaps even more essential in wearables–of physical comfort.  Yi’s most alluring objects are delicate cuffs, constructed of translucent white fabric and white plastic molded into the shape of wrists, hand-embroidered with an inventive design of pink and beige floss that evokes the beauty of health and aliveness.  Arguing effectively against the look of conventional prosthetics and orthotics, Yi encourages a kind of innovation that links her work with DIY-art, theory, and aesthetics.  If this mode of thinking/making doesn’t sufficiently challenge our smug definitions of who is capable and who is not, what could?

Chun-Shan (Sandie) Yi, "Em-brace," 2011. Plastic, Fabric & Embroidery Floss. Set of 2 Chromogenic Prints, 20" X 30".

I continue to be intrigued by Carmen Papalia’s Blind Field Shuttle, which stretches the definition of art furthest here.  Unfortunately, like most other viewers of this exhibit, I was unable to experience the work firsthand.  What is on offer at Pro Arts is documentation of Papalia’s participatory performances, in which the artist, who is not fully blind but has impaired vision, leads a shut-eyed human train over urban and rural terrain in acts of compassionate trust.  Three digital prints and repeating slideshow images portray able-bodied folks lined up behind Papalia, linked to one another by an extended right arm to the right shoulder of the person just ahead: a fleshy corpus of coordinated cooperation.

Although unrepresented in the show, a rendition of Shuttle was conducted in downtown Oakland on Wednesday, September 21, 2011, when to my chagrin I was already booked to lecture in a classroom.  Since I was not able to have this experience firsthand, I can only speculate.  But I am willing to wager that participants in this experience came away with an expanded sense of what it means to be impaired; and that, on reflection, they discovered something about their habitual way of being in the world by having “tried on the mode” of another.  If identity-politics in the visual arts have brought us anything lasting, it is the accumulation of just such significant moments of what Heidegger and his contemporary followers call “world disclosure.”

Carmen Papalia, "Blind Field Shuttle--Open Engagement Conference, Portland State University," 2011. Digital Print, 11" X 17". Photo by Heather Zinger.

For an earlier American educator and critic of the arts, John Dewey (who wrote during a period of economic Depression like that of our contemporary one), to produce, to trigger or to memorialize an experience that was distingushable from the habitrail of our everyday lives was the fundamental characteristic of an art work.  At its best this kind of art can enable us all to imagine and articulate alternatives to current social and even political conditions.  It can disclose possibilities previously untried or suppressed, or refocus our attention in ways that clarifies things previously unclear.  This kind of art could begin to regenerate the sense of hope that has been strip-mined from all but the most fortunate few in our society and thrust into the light of public discussion new ways to go forward, but differently.

“Medusa’s Mirror: Fears, Spells, and Other Transfixed Positions,” is on view at Pro Arts Gallery in Oakland through October 20, 2011.

Jean Paul Goude. Maternity dress for Grace Jones, 1979.

My interest in Glenn Adamson’s work began in 2006 with his essay “Handy-Crafts: A Doctrine,” which is included in the anthology What Makes a Great Exhibition? In this essay, Adamson posed a question that was to become an encapsulation of his practice as a historian and curator: “When the climate is so militantly hostile to an intelligent handling of craft, how is a curator who is interested in craft to navigate the shoals?” His answer is disarmingly simple: “treat craft as a subject, not a category.”¹

Over the past decade, Adamson has been one of the few to investigate and re-envision craft from this wholly new position. He followed “Handy-Crafts” with the 2007 Thinking Through Craft, which argues that the supplementary status of craft is its very strength and that its position in the margin of art allows it space from which to provide a critique. Recognizing the absence of any standard for basic craft education, Adamson edited The Craft Reader in 2010, providing a foundational-level education in materiality, objecthood, and labor through the inclusion of essays by Karl Marx, William Morris, Annie Albers, and Lucy Lippard. I sat down with Adamson on April 1, 2011, just before he gave the keynote speech at the “Craft Forward” symposium hosted by the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

Jayme Odgers and April Greiman. Cover, Wet Magazine (the Magazine for Gourmet Bathers), 1979.

Bean Gilsdorf: You’re putting together a show at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London on postmodernism, and I wonder if you could start by defining that term, because it’s so contentious.²

Glenn Adamson: The definition that we’ve been using—or the application of the term that we’ve been using—is that postmodernism is the proliferation of responses to the collapse of the modernist project. Rather than defining it positively, we’ve defined it as a phase of thinking and practice that occurs because the sometimes utopian or progressive practices and certainty of modernism—best known in architecture, but known in the other arts as well—collapses and you have something in its wake. That’s postmodernism. It’s very much a relational term, and it’s essentially based on the idea of freedom and difference. Modernism is like a transparent window, and it pretends to show you the world clearly, and postmodernism is like a shattered mirror, so it reflects yourself at yourself, but in fragments. It doesn’t necessarily pretend to truly show you anything; it’s simply a reflection of your own situation. That’s the long version; the short version is that postmodernism is what happens after modernism dies. What’s interesting, of course, is that modernism was revived in the 1990s. To some extent, it didn’t ever go away, because you always had modernist holdouts, but modernism again became the dominant style, and then you arguably have a kind of hybridization of various modernist and postmodernist motifs and approaches. But in any case, we’re thinking about postmodernism in the ’70s and ’80s, in that reactive, destructive way.

BG: In your previous craft projects and in your interest in craft, I am interested in your application of the term friction—where you identify a sense of working against something. Is that how you came to the idea of doing this project on postmodernism?

GA: The museum leadership pitched the idea to my cocurator Jane Pavitt and me, but it immediately appealed for exactly the reason you’re saying. I help edit The Journal of Modern Craft, which places modernism and craft in opposition. I’ve always thought of craft as something that is both produced by modernity and contests it. Postmodernism is the same thing, except with a very different structure.

Martine Bedin. Super Lamp, 1981. Photo: Christie's Images, Ltd.

BG: Do you tend to think in poles of opposition?

GA: Dialectically. It’s always about exposing a false opposition, or seeing how an opposition works, sometimes to create a synthesis and sometimes, possibly, to create further fragmentation as well. Marx thought that a real dialectic was one that was resolved. So he would say that if there was no possibility of resolution, you weren’t looking at a dialectic. But I think of opposition in postmodern terms, as leading to further fragmentation, or a rhizomatic, infinite cascade.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Today on DS, we look at the desire and longing for rebellion embedded in the work of Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Dash Snow and Ryan McGinley. Check out how the acts captured in these artists’ work become an icon for a generation desperate for a more rebellious lifestyle.

Nan Goldin. Joana with Valerie and Reine in the Mirror, L'Hotel des Beaux Arts, Paris, 1999.

Thinking back to the days of being a rebellious teenager make me want to run the other direction. There is nothing worse than revisiting the angst and discomfort of adolescence – my mild rebellious behavior and general dislike of the world around me. Rebellious acts always seem mediocre and immature to me these days, despite living a very 20-something lifestyle. But there have always been those artists that so tactfully ride the line between a perfectly composed yet rebellious life that I inherently envy. I find it fascinating to watch the career of artists who successfully make work that is both personal and universal, unruly and conforming, attractive and disgusting – who document their own outsider world and show our distance to it.

Dash Snow. "TBT", 2008. Photograph - Digital C Print 40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 151.8 cm) + frame Edition of 3 + 2AP. Courtesy of Peres Projects.

This rebel has long been the muse of the artist. And when I consider the muse, Nan Goldin and Larry Clark‘s use and abuse of the rebellious lifestyle become both personal document and cultural reality, while assuming the roll of Art Historical mainstay in the category of the documentary photograph. But Dash Snow, a true example of both insider and outsider, straddled this relationship and found a way to make the chaos of his life appear both seductive and desirable. A hero of punk culture, Snow’s rebellious history and lifestyle was the subject and an embodiment of his work – both personal anthem and documentation. Snow sold his own context, using his life as a guarantee of credibility and reality to the outside world, by choosing to participate in the contemporary art system, yet his product was a life through the photographic document.

Both “genius” and tortured soul, Snow’s lifestyle was muse and product- and ultimately it was his rebellious lifestyle that brought him to an early death. Ryan McGinley equally rides this ambiguous line, to the point that I can’t decide if his work is rebellious or utopian. There is something about the idealized reality in his work that harks back to the personal documentation of Clark and Goldin, but successfully sells his own contemporary youthful lifestyle.

Ryan McGinley, Coley (Injured), 2007

The act of rebellion doesn’t always lead you in the opposing path of the system or lifestyles that it moves against. And, often the very thought or association of rebellion becomes so desirable to the masses because it appears to be simply out of their grasp. All of these artists have successfully depicted their own rebellious lifestyle and have offered this spirit back to a complacent public that longs for the moment to  give up the boredom that fills their normal lives and grab onto the freedom that is falsely associated with rebellion.

Dirty Hands; Mella Jaarsma; 2010; Chains, lamps; Installation size variable; Photo: Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay

Recalling the stateliness and beauty of warriors, the delicate chainmail in Mella Jaarsma‘s latest work, Dirty Hands, is only interrupted through the visitor’s intervention in the form of light projections of 17th century Dutch prints picturing early colonial confrontations in Indonesia. While on one hand, the interactivity provides a recreation of these historical tensions, the intervention subtly implicates the viewer in their role as teller of incidents which fade into the shadows of history. Of Dutch origin, Jaarsma travelled to Jakarta, Indonesia in the early 1980s to study art, and has since been based in Yogyakarta. The use of shadows has been a fascination throughout her artistic practice, inspired by wayang (shadow puppet theatre) performances and reflections of visitors’ shadows by traditional wall lamps on roadside stalls. In Jaarsma’s body of work, one will find that her shadows have been employed as a representative of the human body and its position in relation to these cultural, social and religious surroundings.

Hi Inlander; 1998/99; frog legs; Image from artist

Jaarsma’s garments also indicate our membership to specific groups by posing as a second skin.  Hi Inlander is Jaarsma’s first in a series of works invoking cloaks and shelters, as symbols of human habitats in physical and cultural forms. Each garment employs a sensation of taboo, through sensitive or contentious materials to provoke dialogue and diverse interpretations of these materials across cultures. The first cloak of Hi Inlander exhibited comprised frog leg skins processed into leather and has been worn by a man at exhibitions in Indonesia, referencing the racial riots against the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia in 1998 which made apparent the fractious relations in the multi-ethnic society. The deliberate choice of frogs was used to carry across the different perceptions of animals and their roles in human culture and in this specific case, how Chinese consider frog legs a delicacy which Muslims consider unclean, yet when presented in Australia, it took on another cultural context.  Jaarsma included cloaks from chicken feet, kangaroo skins and fish skins, and the wearing of the animal cloaks coincided with an event offering the meat of these four animals with a variety of spices to an international group of visitors, bringing about communal eating to open up communication and cultural insight into viewing animals and food. Chinese and French members began preparing frog legs which were eaten by other visitors for the first time and likewise, Australians did the same with kangaroo meat.

The Follower; 2002; embroidered emblems; photo by Mie Cornoedus; image from artist

Another work based on a tumultuous historical milestone is The Follower, which was conceived of immediately after the  Bali bombing in 2002 and the ensuing representation of Indonesia as a country fueling terrorism by the international media. Jaarsma carefully selected embroidered badges from a range of social organizations in Indonesia, from sports clubs, social clubs and political parties to religious communities, and sewed these emblems together – some adjacent to each other, and some on top of the other – to create a cloak which illustrates the moderate, hybrid and diverse cultural landscape of Indonesia.

Jaarsma’s work, Dirty Hands, is currently on view at The Esplanade in Singapore is a group show entitled  Making History: How Southeast Asian Art Reconquers the Past to Conjure the Future. Jaarsma was born in the Netherlands in 1960, and studied visual art at Minerva Academy, Groningen, the Art Institute of Jakarta and the Indonesia Institute of the Arts. In 1988, together with her partner Nindityo Adipurnomo she founded the Cemeti Gallery in Yogyakarta (now known as Cemeti Art House) organizing exhibitions, projects and residencies. Both Jaarsma and Adipurnomo were awarded the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Prize for their significant contribution to art in Asia.

Installation View, Halsey Institute, photographs by Rick Rhodes

Call and Response: Africa to America / The Art of Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo recently opened at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibition brings together the work of two American artists intrigued by the formation of cultural identity and individual experience within a society. Drawing inspiration from the rich ceremonial traditions and elaborate guises of African nations, Nick Cave and Phyllis Galembo create objects that are visually captivating and conceptually charged. Cave’s imaginative Soundsuits and Galembo’s photographic portraits of West African masqueraders prompt the viewer to regard the world in terms of connection and community.

Installation View, Halsey Institute, photographs by Rick Rhodes

Upon entering the Halsey, one is struck by the mystical presence of Cave’s Soundsuits. Cave, a former dancer and current Chair of the Fashion Design Department at the School of the Art institute of Chicago, combines his experience in modern dance with his expertise in fiber textiles to create his Soundsuits. The first soundsuit was constructed entirely of gathered twigs, resulting in a subtle rustling sound when worn; thus, the name. The kaleidoscopic costumes reference the ritualistic garments worn by Galembo’s subjects, the people of Africa whom she has spent decades photographing. Cave’s sculptures, anthropomorphic assemblages of materials such as dyed human hair, plastic buttons, beads, sisal, sequins, fabrics, feathers, and other natural ephemera, are layered with personal and cultural associations. The disparate materials are masterfully woven together by the artist, ornamental embellishments create undeniable tactile and visual appeal for the viewer; the soundsuits incite a collective sense of awe.

In the adjacent gallery, Phyllis Galembo’s photographic portraits chronicle masqueraders from various West African countries, including Benin, Nigeria, and Burkina Faso. The masquerade is a meaningful mode of cultural expression for several African groups, and Galembo presents a straightforward observation of individuals within particular cultures. Galembo’s work is a field study on these regions, a modern documentation of their ancient ceremonial traditions. Disguised as animals, spirits, or ancestors, her subjects enact ancient legends and stories, but the artist captures them in stasis. Galembo, described as a “photographic hunter-gatherer” by writer Emma Reeves, incorporates her subjects’ natural surroundings in detailed compositions that highlight the garments, the accoutrements (i.e. a staff to connote authority), and the occasional glimpse of a bare, or sneakered, foot of a masquerader. Galembo elegantly achieves a personal encounter with a masked individual, and successfully conveys this engagement to the remote viewer.

Courtesy of Phyllis Galembo and Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Call and Response: Africa to America will remain on view at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art until June 26th. The exhibition is taking place during Spoleto Festival USA, an annual performing arts event held in Charleston, SC every spring. The Halsey’s sincere presentation of Cave’s soundsuits and Galembo’s photographs offer an exciting visual arts alternative to the citywide performing arts festival.

Rachel Zoe, 32" x 24" , oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The art world. It’s way more serious and important than every other industry! This thinking at least seems to persist even though the field of contemporary art has maintained an open flirtation with its sassy sister, the fashion industry, since long before even Andy Warhol trotted his wacky wigs around Studio 54 with the likes of Diane von Fürstenberg. There is a mutual fascination between the two fields, and yet it seems that the art world would prefer to keep its consorting with the fashion industry confined strictly to social events, rather than consider fashion (so low-brow!) as a worthy subject matter for actual works of art.

Los Angeles-based artist, Kimberly Brooks‘, current solo show at Taylor De Cordoba gallery in Culver City breaks with this norm to explore the intrigue of the fashion industry’s most iconic stylemakers—without the precept of farce or condemnation. The Stylist Project (on view through April 3rd) presents Brooks’ latest body of work—a series of oil painted portraits of fashion industry insiders, including stylist to the starts and Bravo TV fixture, Rachel Zoe, and award winning costume designer and Madonnaʼs personal stylist Arianne Phillips, among others.

The work on view blends the fields of art and fashion astutely, presenting the fashionable set as they have styled themselves, while at the same time drawing upon the ages-old artistic tradition of portraiture. The regal positions of some of the sitters recall Renaissance royals, and the sprawled poses of others touch on the early Modern depiction of courtesans, such as Edouard Manet’s Olympia.

Arianne Phillips, 30" x 24", oil on linen. Courtesy Kimberly Brooks and Taylor De Cordoba, Los Angeles.

The Stylist Project is the third solo show for Brooks at Taylor De Cordoba. The first two, Mom’s Friends (2007) and Technicolor Summer (2008), explored much more personal subject matter than the present show. Brooks’ outward shift to now document the fashion industry with this latest series has garnered a lot of attention from media and publications that wouldn’t normally publish gushing articles about fine artists. At the Taylor De Cordoba gallery, they’ve laid out a stack of glossies with Brooks’ name inked onto them. When I asked Heather Taylor, Director of Taylor De Cordoba, to discuss the widespread reception that this exhibition has received, she told me, “The bottom line is that people are hungry for this dialogue and Kimberly is pulling the curtain back on the fashion world, which up until the past year—with the popularity of [the film] ‘The September Issue’ and [the TV show] ‘The Rachel Zoe Project’—had been fairly mysterious.”

New York born, Los Angeles based, Kimberly Brooks maintains her studio in Venice, CA. She earned her BA from UC Berkeley and trained in fine arts at Otis College of Art and Design and UCLA. Her work has been included in numerous juried exhibitions, including at Pleiades Gallery of Contemporary Art, New York; Risk Press Gallery, Los Angeles; and Phillips de Pury Auction House, Los Angeles.

There is a long history of art being presented along side fashion. These exhibitions have left one with the feeling that the art is being used to lend conceptual weight to the clothes. But the rigorous exhibitions mounted at Antwerp’s Fashion Museum makes it clear that fashion designers can be as conceptually strong as visual artists. Their current exhibition is an overview of fashion designer Veronique Branquinho. She graduated from Flanders Fashion Institute in 1995. Since 1998, she has shown her collections on the world’s fashion runways, but this is the first museum presentation of her creative output.

With this exhibition, Branquinho leads us on an expansive journey. Upon entering the exhibition, the sound of your shoes is amplified, by the gravel on the floor of the darkened forest room where her shoe collections come to light hanging from the trees. Past a moving video installation, the viewer is lead through an empty chamber that functions as a Bruce Nauman Absorbing Chamber, circa 1983. Another room is outfitted with a jukebox playing cool club music. It’s like a Jeff Koons icon to American pop culture. Clearly, Branquinho knows her art history. Dark evening wear is presented, revealing her passion for combining different materials that layer and drape to accentuate the female form. The procession here leads from dark, to the darker, and then there is light.

For this trip, Branquinho provides an overcoat for the discerning man, along with a Porsche outfitted in matching tweed, both inside and out. Presented along with a video of a car racing through the open desert, we’re finally ready to go. The desert provides the metaphor of endless openness as we head forward into our unknown future. At least we can be well dressed for the surprises that await us. Finally, bursting into the light, with the stunning beauty that a clear vision can provide. Visual artists take note; creative thought will lead us, as we head into the excitement of the unknown.

Veronique Branquinho at Modemuseum Provincie Antwerpen, through August 17th.

There have been many recent exhibitions exploring the relationships between art and fashion, but the current exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen surveys the exhibition through a previously unexplored angle. “Vreemde Dingen” or translated to English, “Strange Things” looks at the influence of Surrealism on art, design, fashion, film and architecture. Curated by the Antwerp based fashion designers, Walter van Beirendonck and Dirk Van Saene, they combine all the above to provide a well rounded overview of this important, although short lived, art movement.

The exhibition combines historical works such as, Rene Magritte’s “Le Modele Rouge III”, Salvador Dali, “Mae West Lips Sofa”. 1937- 38, and Elsa Schiaparelli, “The Skeleton Dress” 1938, with more recent works by Cindy Sherman, Martin Margiela, Andrea Camarosano, Sarah Lucas and Van Beirendonck’s, “Finally Chesthair” 1997, which reproduces Walter’s own chest on a stretch fit tee shirt, (please provide your own belly). This full exhibition, with over 200 works, shows the influence that surrealism continues to have on the creative output of today.

“Vreemde Dingen” is realized in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and Mondriaan Stichting, Amsterdam.