Sunday, April 28, 2013

Punk (LIVES!)


kathryn simon / culture & couture

England Is Dreaming 

(images and video's follow)

Do I start where it ends in a courtroom at 100 Center Street in lower Manhattan?  Its early morning; in moments the courtroom is packed with reporters and people lots of them, Sid Viscous is being arraigned for the death, the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The Queen is dead. Long live the Queen.

It started with a rumble, things going awry on purpose. Boredom, dissatisfaction, heroin, and anarchy, Vivienne Westwood meets Malcolm McLaren in London. It’s the beginning of a truly explosive and creative union.  SEX, the store is born, after several incarnations (Too young To Die Too Fast To Live, etc.). Taking its initial fashion cues from 'Teddy Boy' clothing, the politics of the Situationists and eventually materials, ideas stolen from sex trade clothing and what was left of the Dadaists concepts and happenings in World's End on the dying Kings Road. (Situationists: look at chapter in ‘Postmodern Turn’ on Guy Debord & the Situationists, SI International which describes various art & political movements that aggravated and supported the Punk movement)

First it’s only the Teds who get it. They need a place to buy their clothes, which until now had all to be all hand tailored not available off the rack. Malcolm smelling an opportunity to make some money and have his fun set about copying the clothing and stocking the store until he had the whole lot of them coming down there to get their gear, get dressed with a few girlie magazines in the display cases.

Then they switched fashion ideologies for more political ones and Malcolm launched the Sex Pistols. There were nearly riots at the store.

Eventually as Vivienne and Malcolm came into their own creatively and were seeking the next step. Malcolm's fascinations became their starting point. The fetishes of the sex trade, rubber clothes, bondage, etc. became that inspiration as well as some nostalgic leftist habits.  Its glaring position on the 'cultured' food chain (not) and its tattooed life carried the mantle for the whole underside of society luring him and Vivienne onward. They began experimenting with rubber and safety pins, chains and other materials to create clothing you were meant to wear on the streets, liberating materials, a culture to the outside world.

The store was reborn again this time christened SEX. Backed by the same political manifesto's that had started Malcolm off, those of anarchy and revolution. A group of people, young kids sensing something was happening had begun hanging out in the store.

Malcolm had been in New York. He had seen and hung out with Lenny Kaye, The New York Dolls, and The Ramones. Let’s just say he knew his way around the Chelsea Hotel and New York’s music scene. He saw a great opportunity in inventing a band to promote the clothing. Johnny Rotten's persistence about backing him, started Malcolm off, he began interviewing for a band that would be the vehicle to fit his profile, look and attitude…a band that wouldn't be afraid of the pranks he had in store for them...the road to total anarchy is paved with the greatest intentions and PRANKS. The Sex Pistols, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Bow Wow Wow were a few of his inventions. In New York, Malcolm put himself into the energy he saw and what he felt from these bands.  He wanted to mainline this passion, this performance of destruction and rupture, like drugs, the speed, and the look.  At the same time Blondie and Patti Smith were hitting the scene in New York at Max’s Kansas City and at CBGB’s.

Things start to heat up, and finally out of the lethargy of the dead 70’s, failed 60's dreams, Punk explodes on the scene. It was finally everything that was marginal, rejected, thrown away, because it didn’t fit, wasn’t pretty, was an outcast. This was a vital source of what Punk was about. To be a punk was a word for someone who was a misfit. The Punk thing was about not fitting and not feeling comfortable in your skin, and anger at all the lies that a complacent culture breeds to ensure its continuance. A rage against the standards that were excluding and outmoded.

It happened quickly and by 1979 Sid was dead and Punk was undeniably everywhere.

Jean Paul Gaultier’s first show was everything that was marginal, ugly, and purposefully ungainly. It reflected the mood in the air. It took years for Gaultier to move away from this strong influence in his fashion design (has he?). It was amusing to watch the bigger designer houses like Anne Klein try to use what was happening (Punk) as a design influence. In their hands, it got even uglier, and clumsier as the meaning was further separated from its intention. Really foreign. Not understanding the concept of what was going on within this ‘anti aesthetic’ they attempted unsuccessfully to make this into another market ‘trend’ (comodification) without even attempting to understand the drum beat.

In the US the scene on St. Marks started again after years of being all but forgotten, like skid row, to become again the focus of the clubs and bars. The whole club scene in New York opened up again The Pyramid, The Mudd, St. Marks Bar, Orlin, Kiev, CBGB’s, etc. Clubs would open overnight for a weekend or within a club at a designated hour; Berlin (with more locations than you could keep up with), The Continental, A.M./P.M., The Peppermint Lounge. Rudolf ruled the night with his various clubs including Danceateria, his constant companion Diane Brill and all the people on the scene with Annie Flanders headed over to St. Marks Place because she felt the stirrings of something beginning to awaken. Details magazine (it’s first incarnation) the brainchild of Annie Flanders (formally of the SoHo News) was born. The Bowlmor Bowling lanes opened, New York sprang to life again. 

The following list are all links some are embedded:

Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders 1979

Chrissie Hynde IMAGES
A rare glimpse of Daryl K looking at vintage more recently
New Wave: Mugler/Montana 

Richard Hell / Jim Carroll / MaryAnn Faithful GANG OF SOULS

Patti Smith Tom Verlaine
Diane Pernet speaking and showing her films
Diane Pernet
Dolce Gabbana
Laurie Anderson Home of the Brave 1987

O Superman (from USA)

Another Day in America
Lena Lovitch Lucky Number circa 1981

The Ramones at Max's Kansas City 1976
VERSACE 1991
Elvis Costello Allison 1977

B 52"s Love Shack 1989

Roam 1990

Teri Toye Model of the Year
Jean Paul Gaultier
Richard Hell Poet
Jennifer Smith/ CODE MESA 1987 You were here when the world began 



Punk Without the Down and Dirty


Julie Glassberg for International Herald Tribune

Punk styles of the 1970s at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Punk: Chaos to Couture" exhibit. More Photos »



  • FACEBOOK
  • TWITTER
  • GOOGLE+
  • SAVE
  • E-MAIL
  • SHARE
  • PRINT
  • REPRINTS



NEW YORK — Ah! Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll. Where would the anarchic world of punk be without them?


Multimedia


The Collection: A Fashion App for the iPad

The Collection
A one-stop destination for Times fashion coverage and the latest from the runways.

Follow Us on Twitter

NYTimesFashion on Twitter
Follow@NYTimesfashionfor fashion, beauty and lifestyle news and headlines.

In much the same state as the sanitized and bloodless version of punk’s origins and influence delivered by the Costume Institute at theMetropolitan Museum of Art in the name of fashion.
The blasting music catches the pounding energy that ought to be at the heart of “Punk: Chaos to Couture,” which opens to the public Thursday and runs through Aug. 14. But the only moment the show gets faintly down and dirty is in the re-creation of grimy and gritty toilets of the 1970s East Village club CBGB. Even that comes minus any tawdry signs of vomiting or drug-taking (or any reference to Marcel Duchamp).
The entire exhibition ignores any negative aspects of punk like swastikas or drugs — unless you count the Ramones singing “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.”
Even the hair — that leitmotif of the period as a rejection of hanging hippie tresses — comes through as identical frizzy wigs, like uninspired Afros.
How could Andrew Bolton, the brilliant and cerebral museum curator, whose blockbuster shows have included the Alexander McQueen retrospective and last year’s fusion of Elsa Schiaparelli with Miuccia Prada, have made punk seem so dull?
Mr. Bolton said that he did not want to “parody” the spikes and mohawks, and gave those directions to the exhibition’s hairstylist Guido Palau. Yet the fantastical hairdos and extraordinary makeup, requiring hours of artistic imagination, were emblematic of defiant, anarchic, rebellious individuals kicking against the boredom of being no-hopers. The hair was as significant as the do-it-yourself clothing.
And why wouldn’t Mr. Bolton, given his intelligent and intellectual foreword to the accompanying book, have linked that nihilistic spirit of London’s political and social crisis in the 1970s to other 20th-century movements like Dada?
“Everyone has an opinion about punk,” said Mr. Bolton as he prepared for the opening gala on Monday night. “It was difficult to keep my thoughts and my focus when it means so much to so many different people who respond to it emotionally.”
He also emphasized that the focus of the exhibition is the enduring influence of the low-down punk on high fashion.
The show opens with Richard Hell, the American luminary of punk, backed up by others including Blondie (New Wave) and Patti Smith. The latter might be seen rather as the end of the hippie era when compared with the British punks whom Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) of the Sex Pistols described as “utterly fearless.”
Then there is Vivienne Westwood, who, driven by Malcolm McLaren, her partner, offered a sense of rowdy revolution. Her vibrant plaid bondage pants, furry sweaters and anarchic T-shirts make a striking display, interspersed with pieces in a similar spirit, like torn dresses and hose from Rodarte.
The rebel-yell T-shirts include the infamous punk Queen Elizabeth. And an outrageous Westwood commentary from the designer can be heard on a 1970s film, played on a period television set, placed in a re-created version of the couple’s store on King’s Road in London. Its name was changed from “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die,” to “Sex” and then to “Seditionaries” as their ideas evolved, says Ms. Westwood, claiming that she did not see herself as a fashion designer “but as someone who wished to confront the rotten status quo through the way I dressed.”
That is more or less it for examples of original 1970s punk. The next four rooms, their grandiose high ceilings suggesting salons of haute couture, are filled with four decades of punk inspirations, right up to Burberry’s current silver studs.
The ranks of high-fashion outfits, shown with no context, start with punk’s first appropriation as wedding and evening dresses by Zandra Rhodes in 1975. That faces off the flesh-exposing black dress, held together with gilded safety pins down the side, that shot Elizabeth Hurley into paparazzi heaven in 1994 at the London premiere of “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
Some of the clothes — the recent collection made by Gareth Pugh from garbage bags or the shredded complexity of Comme des Garçons — absolutely deserve their place as imaginative bricolage. Yet the exhibition is static, neglectful of digital opportunities to show the runways and to bring clothes to life, as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London does with its current dramatic screen-filled study of David Bowie.
To take John Galliano’s recycled shreds and threads for Dior haute couture entirely out of context is to lose the detailed intricacy of broken beauty; and to fail to explain why bringing Dior down to the level of punky do-it-yourself seemed so scandalous.
Having attended every single collection that brought these stationary clothes to life, I can remember the impact of Martin Margiela’s models, dressed in transparent dry-cleaning bags, walking the suburbs of Paris followed by gawping multicultural kids.
I watched the designer Katharine Hamnett, wearing a T-shirt declaring war on nuclear missiles, encounter British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1984. But how many museum visitors will know it as the source of the famous image? And how would they understand its relationship as “graffiti and agitprop” to splash-paint ball dresses from Dolce & Gabbana or the colorful work of Stephen Sprouse?
The final room, focusing on destroy and deconstruction, creates a valid place in fashion history, even if the museum was unable to get the piece that started it all: the famous “gruyère cheese” sweater with deliberate holes from Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons.
The premise of the exhibition is worthwhile. But the Metropolitan Museum is facing a quandary. Its much-anticipated, celebrity-fueled, fundraising galas risk overwhelming the museum shows themselves.
However intelligent and intellectual Mr. Bolton’s commentary in the catalog, the imaginative and often exceedingly expensive concoctions walking the red-carpeted steps on Monday night may well outshine the exhibition.
The true punks — those who lived and survived that moment — should find an exquisite irony in the idea that their no-future kick at a dead-end society should, 40 years on, have moved from a defiant statement from society’s impoverished and self-proclaimed social outcasts to a display of clothes for global celebrities and the super-rich having a ball.
Punk: Chaos to Couture. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Thursday through Aug. 14.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 6, 2013
An earlier version of this article misspelled Malcolm McLaren’s last name. It also misstated the title of the movie “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”   An earlier version of this article misspelled Guido Palau’s surname.  It is Palau, not Paulo.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 6, 2013
An earlier version of a slideshow photo caption associated with this article misstated the designer who created a safety-pin skirt shown at the Metropolitan Museum’s new Costume Institute exhibit.  The designer is Balmain, not Vivienne Westwood.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Art/ Fashion

February 2011

SKIN: The confluence of art, culture and fashion the panel I moderated, and chaired at The College Art Association's annual conference with a group of individuals I invited to converse on a number of new movements happening in fashion. They included Valerie Steele, Director and Curator for Museum at FIT, NY; Vicki Karaminas, UTS, Sydney; J. Morgan Puett, Mildred's Lane, PA; Natalie Khan, Researcher/Lecturer Central Saint Martins, London. It was also a rare occasion that presented fashion as or within the discourse of art. Historically this is one of the most important conferences in the art world. Proposals for all the panels are competitively juried, vetted and selected. One can only submit, and hope. Being selected to present this fashion conversation was quite a moment for fashion, since fashion and the decorative arts most often have the status of 'stepchild' within the arts--if they are considered at all. The panel was an invitation to rethink fashion with the newest turns in the discipline itself, in order to place it within a distinctly twenty-first century context.

The following is an excerpt from my paper on fashion/art, singling out this movement as one of several emerging fashion narratives--since this post was re-edited for this blog, the names that seem random are actually hyperlinked to countless images. 'scratch and sniff!'

Through an examination of new movements in contemporary fashion these panelists set out to explore what is happening in fashion under the influence of contemporary culture with a critical analysis of the blur within aspects of art and fashion and the impact of new media's and technology in making fashion.

 Technological innovations have always led fashion so this is not new. What is however is the reach this is now opening up.

Since the 1990’s fashion (like art) has been affected by a continuing wave of increasingly performance based work--this work often falls outside of traditional industry constraints, which historically have been almost if not exclusively motivated by the production of apparel (rather than the idea of media or performance-for the sake of performance). This panel will focus on some of these new positions and creative endeavors by presentations that open up this evolving visual language where nomadic flows are often expressed best through the medium of fashion. Ultimately what will become apparent is that there are shadows on the horizon indicating some fresh directions that may even be a first for fashion.

The speakers presented their view into various facets of this emerging, multidisciplinary discourse arising out of a field whose major concern until the 1990’s was the ‘industry’ --the manufacture, and production of clothing—and its consumption.

The movement of fashion towards 'street style' that began in the sixties had reached a kind of crescendo in the seventies with Punk. By late 1997 it was clear something big was happening in fashion. Punk, grunge aesthetics and the 'postmodern moment', was giving way to a larger shift--the deterritorialization of fashion was well underway.

On the streets of New York or the deserts of Tehran - there is a visual read informed by the impacts of daily living, nurtured by a society in process, with rapid shifts in all respects. Be it a proliferation of ideas and new ground brought on by a long tail of small niche markets that are multiplying at a dazzling rate as a result of social networks and technology, or the interplay between virtual, mediated, and physical worlds (sometimes colliding) and intense mobility.

Increasing the colliding of images, nostalgia and memories all mixed with the edge of contemporary lifestyles and new wealth-- blending diverse nationalities, local dialects and global cultures, which until this moment was only imaginable in films like Mad Max that envisioned the end of the world.

NEW/OLD NARRATIVES


Over the past 20 years there have been an increasing number of artists working with clothing as an art medium—and designers who reached deeply into the language of fashion for social critique--often creating clothing that was unwearable. In these cases it is not the elevation of the often remarkable craftsmanship of couture that qualifies this work as art, but the reach for more abstract ideas--Following are videos and links to works from some of these artists/designers:



Andrea Zittel, with “Smock Shop”,
Zittel enlisted underemployed artists to create smocks using a basic instruction allowing each the freedom to create variations of their own, in direct contradiction to the usual production line demand and reward for sameness.



www.zittel.org/smockshop.php
http://katsoul11.blogspot.com/2013/04/art-fashion.html

Judi Wertheim, the Argentine performance artist designed a cross trainer for
Insight 05. Named “Brinco” slang for “jumping” the border between Tijuana and San Diego, which in itself is a dangerous act often ending in death for the jumpers. The shoe is emblazoned with an eagle at the toe to remind the journeyers of the freedom they are walking towards. The inner soles show the two best routes for getting across the desert, and are supplied with painkillers, flashlight and a number to a “safe house” once across.

Judi Wertheim/BRINCO (images)







Christian Boltanski (images)

Christian Boltanski’s piece installed in the cavernous New York Armory, titled “No Man’s Land”, an almost inconceivably massive heap of clothing that hard to view without immediately recalling death camps and the Holocaust. The artist references Dante’s inferno, a haunting allegory to the shed skins, and the aura they collectively produce.




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlGg7fKKwH8



And then there are Fashion designers who have freely experimented with clothing in a conceptual realm like Hussain Chaylan, the Cypriot designer whose collection “Living Room” for Spring 2001 could be worn as items of clothing, but transform into suitcases, packed up within seconds for a rapid and traceless exodus, chilling as the stinging recall and grief from recent diasporas and genocides in Sarajevo, Armenia, Tibet, among many war torn areas remain ever present.



In 1997, fashion designer Martin Margiela in collaboration with a micro biologist dipped 18 outfits in different mold, bacteria, and yeast cultures; for the installation "Exposing Meaning in Fashion Through Presentation" he displayed mannequins with clothing rotting away. As the days worn on the moulds and bacteria’s were literally decomposing the clothing… These are only a few of the recent crossovers where designers and artists have worked with clothing to reach into domains not natural to its functionality, where fashion has become an art medium-very different from an 18c ‘historic’ referencing when the decorative arts were considered within the fine arts.





Martin Margelia (images)

Another iteration is the proliferation of media in fashion, the fashion film, and streaming media from the catwalk-- which has become an event in itself, since more often then not what is featured on the runway, is rarely what is, or can be available in the showrooms or sold as clothing. In fact the runway has come to be high spectacle where performance is prized. Viktor and Rolf, the design team, exemplified this, known for their conceptual fashion shows, with fragile materials and conceptual ideas they waited years before launching any actual clothing collections.

And then there is the practice, which some designers would agree places, cutting or patternmaking as the embodiment of philosophy itself. Not a mere superficial line but rather a clear and deep cut defining thought as effectively as text.

Martin Margiela (images)

For those familiar with fashion one wonders how far the work of designers like Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, Comme Des Garcon who launched their collections in the mid 80’s would have gone had the ground not already been vitalized by this confluence of energies. If not before them, certainly with their work, something new was clearly at hand.

VIKTOR AND ROLF (images)



VIKTOR AND ROLF





Fashion is the physical evidence of the way we live in the present now. It has until recently been mute, unmoving, captured in frozen gestures, and under house arrest in the archives of museums, except for a seasonal performance on the catwalk. Historically it’s been governed by a strict hierarchy of signs with their precise index, the symbols that stand in for wealth and capital in all its forms, Fashion is a narrative that tells a story that only fashion can tell. Out of this chameleon-like, ambiguous and visceral language comes an extremely precise articulation of our desires, how we live and the choices we make, visible in our second skin.

This is an exciting time when novel ways of telling are being called for. In contemporary fashion, formalist views of chronological and singular narratives are being outpaced by the entry of a plethora of new values, and an intense diversity of cultural understandings. The position that fashion occupies in visual culture is a positive factor in implementing this shift from representing a foretold history to presenting new open narratives.

It is just coincidence that these new happenings in fashion medium occur at the same time as the proliferation and heightened interest in performance art and the prizing of the lived moment are defining characteristics in contemporary art ?

Nicholas Bourriaud in his book “The Radicant” states:


“And yet the immigrant, the exile, the tourist and the urban wanderer are the dominant figures of contemporary culture, To remain within this vocabulary of the vegetable realm, one might say that the individual of these early years of the
21st c resembles those plants that do not depend on a single root for their growth but advance in all directions on whatever surfaces present themselves by attaching multiple hooks to them, as ivy does. Ivy belongs to the botanical family of the radicants, which develop their roots as they advance, unlike the radicals whose development is determined by their being anchored in a particular soil.


And later—


Contemporary art provides new models for this individual who is constantly putting down new roots, for it constitutes a laboratory of identities. Thus today’s artists do not so much as express the tradition from which they come as the path they take between that tradition and the various contexts they traverse, and they do this by performing acts of translation. Where modernism proceeded by subtraction in the effort to unearth the root, or principle, contemporary artists proceed by selection, additions, and then acts of multiplication. They do not seek order to multiply one identity by another.

The radicant implies a nomadic bias, whose fundamental characteristic would be the tendency to inhabit preexisting structures, a willingness to be the tenant of existing forms, even if that means modifying them more or less extensively. END QUOTE


This sounds very much the same. The areas blur into a new one.

The great proliferation of hybrid identities coming out of transplanted nationalities, grafted cultures and trends, and impossible dreams has created even in the domain of fashion itself, something novel. It is impossible to speak of purity, either in aesthetic terms or in fact with the global flow, intense mobility and speed that mark contemporary life.

The issue we hope to unpack is how these new movements with fashion and art are happening pervasively with the kind of diversity that suggests something fresh and important is at work. It is our intention that you will think along with us and consider the ideas being presented without holding too tightly to already closed meanings but will instead take a what/if or curious listen. Welcome.