When it comes to design, fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm may emphasize an idea over practicality, but at the end of the day, he’s someone who understands the fundamental concepts at the root of dressing and the psychology behind the urge to costume one’s self. He speaks to the peacock in all of us, that desire to preen and to move our bodies in mysterious and rapturous ways.
On Feb. 1, just before the start of New York fashion week, Paris-based Willhelm flew to town for his first New York event, held at the Tribeca Grand hotel, to present “Men in Tights,” a new fashion-based film. Based around his Fall/Winter 2008 menswear collection, Willhelm produced the innovative short in collaboration with Nick Knight, London-based fashion photographer and founder of SHOWStudio, a website that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the fashion world with some of fashion’s most influential figures.
Continue reading ‘Bernhard Willhelm: “Men in Tights”’
“I’m completely convinced that I’m almost a diabetic, even though I’m really careful,” says video artist Shana Moulton, who as an undergrad once did a performance where she covered her face with a caramel mask, waited for it to dry, peeled it away and ate the entire mask. Then she washed everything off in a basin filled with white sugar. “I was almost puking,” she says, and explains how at the time, she’d just learned her parents had Type 2 diabetes. So her self-professed hypochondria isn’t completely unfounded. In Moulton’s ongoing video series, Whispering Pines, she plays a character named Cynthia, an alter ego who is plagued with a variety of illnesses, perhaps more imagined than real. She’s constantly looking for a cure, or some kind of answer to all her problems. Cynthia tries everything from beauty products promising miracles, to water fountains spouting New Age energy speak, to an Avon lady hand healer. It’s these illnesses and the subsequent remedies that are the catalyst for Cynthia’s fantastic, escapist adventures through the looking glass. Whether Cynthia actually finds liberation - or salvation - is unclear, and the video’s low-tech aesthetic and over-the-top citric acid color scheme make the viewer feel a little loopy, as though you’ve just stayed up all night, bleary-eyed, watching cable access infomercials for crystal-wielding psychic healers. Moulton grew up in Northern California, a hotbed of spiritual self-help and seekers of healthy alternative lifestyles, but she’s recently moved to Brooklyn. Her latest solo show, Sand Saga, is on view at Broadway 1602, 1182 Broadway Apt. 1602 (at 28th Street), closing this Saturday, Feburary 16. There’ll be a live performance by Moulton at 7pm.
[Pictured: Shana Moulton performing at the opening of Sand Saga on January 21, 2008. The above text is an excerpt from my forthcoming interview with Moulton in Amsterdam-based magazine Blend, available online next month....stay tuned!]
The New York Times calls ICP’s new retrospective of the artwork of Barbara Bloom a “disappointing survey” - their beef with the exhibit is that the installation doesn’t do Bloom’s work justice. The meticulousness of her displays and the complete Bloom universe she’s created in past installations - The Reign of Narcissism in 1989 at MOCA, for example - aren’t really re-created at ICP. Instead, works are isolated from their original context (a box of chocolates embossed with Bloom’s profile, originally a part of The Reign of Narcissism is displayed here in a museum case along with other Narcissism artifacts). This show is about Bloom’s collections and the artist as collector. For instance, one of her collections is a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov’s books with re-designed covers by Bloom. (According to the museum catalogue, Nabokov also obsessively collected editions of his own books).
As a Bloom fan, obviously I would have liked to see some of her installations fully realized, as the Times suggests, but then again, her work is so infrequently shown that I’ll take this show over nothing, and I’m not sure that was the real point of this exhibit. If anything, the New York Times might want to ask why the Guggenheim will put up the arena rock show of exhibitions, Matthew Barney’s Cremaster but they haven’t yet mounted a Barbara Bloom retrospective. Maybe it’s because her work is more quiet, less aggressive, less monster truckish than Barney’s. But the level of execution - the production value - is very much in the same vein. They both have the same obsessive tendencies. But, well, if Barney is a rock star, then Bloom is the nerdy shoegazer. Barney oozes vaseline, rubs his masculinity all over us, while Bloom’s institutional critique of precisely the kind of overblown, ego-driven museum retrospective of which Cremaster exemplifies, is neatly packaged in a carefully detailed neo-classical drawing room. It’s a lot less sexy, maybe, but then again there is a certain sexiness to a precisely focused gaze on a single object rather than the cold sterility of a virtual reality that overwhelms the eye to the point that no detail is finely examined. Point being: See this show, and relish the small things, like you would in a library or archive. Then buy the catalogue and do it all over again, but this time from your bedroom. The Collections of Barbara Bloom will be on view at the International Center of Photography in New York through May 4, 2008.
[Pictured is the installation of Bloom's The Reign of Narcissism at MOCA in 1989.]
