On Friday, December 1st, 2017 Rainer Ganahl’s new play Ubu Trump premiered at the unlikely locale of Daniels Wilhelmina Funeral Home in central Harlem. Inspired by the life and writings of Alfred Jarry and following up on Ganahl’s previous text Ubu Lenin, his new work Ubu Trump is a postmodern blend of original text and derivation set in Warsaw/Washington D.C. and starring Donald Trump in the role of Jarry’s King Ubu, along with appearances by Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and Vladimir Putin. The performance can be watched in full here.
Interview by Linda Norden
Tell me a little bit about Alfred Jarry’s Ubu. Why did you chose to rewrite him?
Alfred Jarry was a tragi-comic modernist figure, the quintessential poet-artist who was also a self-destructive loser and died at just 34 in 1907. Yet he managed to influence literature and art for a century to come. Jarry did not really leave any oeuvre, but a bunch of writings, text fragments, plays and graphic works that were all embedded in a drug and alcohol-driven universe of crazy anecdotes, love stories, including with Oscar Wilde, and personal recklessness. His Ubu Roi (King Ubu) was not even written by him alone, but co-written with two high school friends who thought of it as a literary diatribe against an annoying teacher. Jarry ran with it from his native little French town and made it into a literary scandal in Paris. He kept changing it and changing it and produced numerous versions. Jarry clearly stylized himself as an Ubu-esque character, took on weird linguistic and behavioral mannerisms and didn’t refrain even from threatening and shooting at his critics with a pistol he carried with him called “bulldog.” King Ubu, Papa Ubu, Ubu Cocu (Ubu Cuckolded), Ubu Enchaîné (Ubu in Chains) and other versions produced by Jarry symbolized a narcistically damaged, insecure dictator who accumulated as much power as he could by any means and terrorized everybody. This all happened just before the WWI, which was essentially a colonialist war. During that war, in Zurich, Jarry’s Ubu Roi was presented at Cabaret Voltaire, which inspired me to revist this piece for my Dada Lenin project, since it can be assumed that Lenin himself—who lived opposite the Cabaret at Spiegelgasse—attended the performance. So after having already rewritten this theater play for a Ubu Lenin, it became quickly clear that I also must rewrite it as Ubu Trump, since this president resembles Ubu King in many many ways: vulgar, loud, insecure, narcissistic, brutal, and with disastrous judgment that will bring defeat upon his people and himself.
Why stage the Ubu Lenin play in a funeral home in Harlem?
This play is independent of any particular presentation or site. It could be read or presented between friends at a dinner table, in bed with a lover or at a theater.
But given the fact that I’ve been living in central Harlem for more than two decades, and that I’m surrounded by morgues and churches, I started to take this option of presentation into account. I also enjoy finding locations myself. Thanks to my notary public, who runs an actual funeral home, I started to become more curious and familiar with these somehow scary, taboo places. We do not want to have anything to do with a morgue since that represents the last transitory stop on our journeys and when we enter it’s usually for a sad, tragic last moment.
I realized this funeral home could not only house a public that is mourning a private loss, but also a frustrated public that’s suffering a collective political loss. Better than churches, funeral parlors do not relate to any religious belief system. Ubu Trump as a play is very bloody with themes of murder, torture and war that build on a core struggle for power.
I feel like there’s a large part of the community your re-purposing—your “enterprising” use of the funeral home—might offend. People who believe in the sanctity of death. But I was very taken by this performance in that space. I’m often suspicious when a spontaneous, inspired idea becomes fetishized or over-extended. But one of the things I like best in your work is the way you find such inspired sites for each project, as something takes form in response to the very specific circumstances you respond to so keenly in your day-to-day life. Your sites always feel integrally bound up in the issues and questions they assert, because you look at the neighborhoods and communities you live in so topologically. I like thinking of your Ubu Trump project as having something to do with the way war takes form.
I owe the entire structure to Alfred Jarry’s original Ubu King, which brilliantly anticipated the series of dictators we had to endure during the 20th century, when war was omnipresent. It is stunning how this current president has representatives tell troops in the field that war is imminent while he simultaneously shrinks his diplomatic core down to almost nothing. After all, diplomacy’s function is to use means other than war.
How did you decide on characters, besides Trump. And did you know where you wanted play to end before you began?
There is a given textual structure that I respected and did not change the positioning of certain material, which itself seems to have elements lifted from Shakespeare and others. The main characters in Jarry’s version are King Ubu; his scheming wife, mostly referred to as Mama Ubu; and King Wenceslas on the other side. Therefore, Ubu Trump is repopulated with Ubu Trump, Ubu Ivanka, the King and Queen Wenceslas and their daughter Chelsea. We also have Putin, Jared Kushner, Michael Flynn, and other figures from the current administration. I also give prominence to contemporary sexual predators such as Anthony Weiner and Roy Moore.
Were you modeling your text closely or broadly on Jarry or did you do a lot of the writing yourself?
Many of the newly replaced and introduced protagonists come with lines I modified and adapted for the scenes. It is remarkable how the current president and his advisers are jamming the media stream with vulgarities and falsehoods. We are currently witnessing how public discourse that was once mediated by mainstream news sources has been replaced by social media and fake news sites. Therefore it’s not very difficult to scan for material worthy of Ubu. Jarry’s premonitory brilliance becomes more and more apparent through these boundless autocratic, proto-fascist, self-propagating revolutionaries and their rampaging disregard for the world. Make America Ubu Again. Somehow I had the feeling that I didn’t write anything at all, but merely updated it, resynchronized it with our current presidential tropes and tuned it to our attention economy of followers, sharers and likers.
I’d really love to hear what you were after in each of the characters you shaped for Ubu Trump. Would be great to hear how a certain comment or speech conveyed your sense of behavior and character.
Ubu Trump is here really a combination of Jarry’s madman Ubu King and Donald Trump’s publicly displayed idiosyncrasies, which my particular exaggerations and usage render slightly more farcical. I wanted to really decontextualize our president’s shameless, partisan, and self-serving political actionism by placing into literary-political satire. After all, reading the New York Times on Trump’s spontaneous, chaotic decision making and sloganeering already reads like Jarry. And sometimes the reality of our political time seems more authentically captured by comedians than by theory.
I was struck on the night of the Ubu Trump performance by the difference between the performance of the play, which felt more like a declaration, or demonstration, than a question, and by the terrifically curated gathering of art, by so many of your friends and peers, in your home, which you seemed to share as if asking “How about this?” In both cases, you seemed genuinely surprised by the size of the audience or attending group, as if these were both projects you did for yourself. But I’m genuinely curious: who do you think you do the work you do for?
I fully agree with you. Repurposing sensitive spaces can be highly problematic and easily go wrong. I try to be very sensitive and was choosing this site also because of its precarious and meaningful role in society. In Austria, where I grew up, they keep death out of view and when I first saw an actual friend on her final open display in Brooklyn, after a suicide, I was traumatized—even more so since I had never seen a dead person before. Now, death in Harlem is pervasive, given the explosive mix of racism, the high concentration of poor people in sometimes substandard living conditions, police bias, and more. But that already makes us enter the very essence of Ubu Trump, a play where horrific governance creates misery and war.
I think in both cases—my friends’ artworks in my house and this performance—I do it for myself as part of a public and imagined community. Some of my circle of friends and imagined friends are not even alive, and I might have missed them by a decade or a century or a continent. I count myself as part of my own community and I sometimes project myself onto others who are there or who I wish would be there.
Are there any more Ubu Trump presentations planned?
Yes. A similar version will be staged in Berlin in January 2018 and another one in Mexico City in April. That one will appear exactly 50 years after the famously problematic Mexican Olympic games of 1968, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of street protesters. Mexicans, Trump’s wall and the ghost of the student massacre will all be making guest appearances in that iteration of Ubu Trump. I am also working on yet another version to present in London, where curator Saim Demican and I will reorient ourselves with Werner Fassbinder’s version of Ubu Roi, which he presented at the Anti-Theater in August of 1968.
Photo: Susan Froyd
Sarah Staton is an artist based in London, England, whose diverse practice melds sculpture, painting, architecture, design, publishing, fashion, and technology to create objects and spaces that are simultaneously aesthetic and utilitarian. Initiated in 1993, Sarah Staton’s SupaStore started as a DIY art sale experiment that has transpired at dozens of museums, galleries, and alternative venues over the years. Over three hundred artists, ranging from up-and-coming contemporaries, unknowns, and established artists have had a piece they created for sale at the SupaStore. Her most recent installment, SupaStore Human—We are the Product, reflects how technology and automation has impacted social interaction, commerce, and manufacturing. Supastore Human—We are the Product is currently featured at Dikeou Pop-Up: Colfax in Denver, Colorado and will remain open to the public through the end of February 2018.
Interview by Hannah Cole
In the artist talk you gave for the opening of SupaStore Human—We are the Product, you stated that your intentions for SupaStore Human stems from the reality that technology has caused people to less frequently perform the act of going to the store—and you aim to bring it back. Could you further expand on this intention?
Within the UK at least, in recent years there has been a significant expansion in online shopping, and with this has come a shutting down of all sorts of shops from small independents to branches of national and international chains. Clearly much of this is to do with the convenience of internet shopping and home delivery negating the need for buyers to make physical journeys to the store. I would also attribute some of this phenomena to retail boredom, with cookie cutter shops selling predictable products, repeating in every shopping constellation. Other factors playing into the UK’s current slowdown might be contributed to austerity, and along with that a growing desire to tread lightly on the planet. I see all these factors coming into play and contributing to the demise of our collective desire for objects. As a human race we are clearly investing heavily in tech, but not so much in stuff. SupaStore supports the shift to build lives rich in experience over acquisition but laments the coming together of people that these simple acts of shopping facilitate.
There is an interesting parallel of politics, economy, and social climate between Ancient Greece and Western society today. While this observation may be considered a grim prophecy of war and collapse, political scientists such as Graham Allison have pointed out that trade and other ties between countries (such as America and China) help counteract conflict. Would you argue that SupaStore behaves as a microcosm and more inter-personal example of this theory?
I don’t know Graham Allison’s work, but I am fascinated in the history of trade, and specifically in the centuries old relation between art and diplomacy—the use of art as symbolic object to generate dialogue. And yes SupaStore as a microcosm for building networks between people has been a preoccupation since I began the project.
While SupaStore is your creation and features your own artwork, many other artists from around the world also have their work featured; there is an inherently collaborative and global element. How did you come in contact with these artists to participate in SupaStore? How does diversity of artists and the mediums they use as opposed to artists exclusive to one region, one art practice, etc. affect the concept behind SupaStore?
The store has traveled extensively and when logistically possible people living in the hosting cities have been invited and have got involved, this is often facilitated by the hosts at each venue. In Denver this happened with the casting workshop, in which the plaster life casts of our workshop participants’ body parts, are displayed in the store, and will then revert to their owners when the SupaStore leaves Denver.
To date, the concept for each SupaStore becomes the umbrella under which participating artists contribute, often by responding to the theme of each store. The structure of the SupaStore allows for diversity in terms of artists and their mediums, however so far the concept and the invitation precedes the participation of invited artists. Artists like any other group of humans are involved in a meta conversation and it is this meta-conversation that provides inspiration for the SupaStore subtitles. Recent preoccupations, reflected in the titles include SupaStore Air, considering the impact of cheap airlines and the consequential expansion of migrant workers crossing countries to give their labor to markets at every increasing distance from home and family. In SupaStore Human—We are the Product, we note the shift towards AI, and away from the production of objects in favor of the supply of services.
Mr Blobby
Minerva, the Greek goddess of trade, art, wisdom, and war serves as the mascot (or rather the goddess) of SupaStore. The multidisciplinary nature of Minerva is a quality integrated in your own art practice. Does this resonate with any of the participating artists featured in SupaStore Human?
This might be a question for the participating artists as they may know more than I do! However, it is clear that Minerva was rather an exponential multi-tasker, and most of the artists that I know are also very capable in more than one area of activity, often successfully combining the creation of artworks, with a variety of jobs and sometimes also managing care and responsibility for others. Could artists be said to be the role model for the neo-liberal worker in the gig economy?
Many artworks featured in SupaStore Human are utilitarian in the form of blankets, pillows, scarves, bars of soap, t-shirts, and books. Why does practicality appeal to you as the artist and as the creator of SupaStore?
Yes, this is interesting, because some definitions of art negate the functional. I have always liked applied arts and the utilitarian and I think this is reflected in the objects that I choose for the store.
Lastly, who is Mr. Blobby and what is his relationship with SupaStore?
Mr Blobby is a dubious character from 1990’s British TV, he appeared on a show called Noel Edmunds House Party, and he is pretty on the boundary between funny and grotesque. Mr Blobby emerged at the same time as the SupaStore, and he has been the store mascot for all these years. I sense that he is near retirement and it could be time he plans for his future away from the SupaStore. Our Mr Blobby was recently renamed last year as ‘Gustav’ by Asja Inzule Kaspar who is 5 years old. Asja kept amused during our install at Midway Contemporary by dancing wildly every day with Gustav Blobby and it was absolutely the most fun he has had in years.
Photo: Giacomo Cosua
Xavier Veilhan is a French artist born in 1963, living and working in Paris, whose work is mostly based in sculpture and installation. Parisians discovered him in the ‘90s when he was exhibited by Jennifer Flay. Today, he is represented by Andréhn-Schiptjenko (Stockholm), Galerie Perrotin (Paris, Hong Kong, New York, Seoul), Galeria Nara Roesler (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, New York) & 313 Art Project (Seoul). His body of work now brings him to attend Venice, where he was invited by the French Pavilion for the Biennale to present his installation “Studio Venizia,” a musical space in which professional musicians from around the world create new recordings.
Interview by Geraldine Postel
In your installation for the French Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, you created a studio platform and curatorial program inviting other artists to participate. What motivates the artist to escape from this irresistible desire to be the only voice in such a manifestation?
It is not generosity, nor the wish to take a step back, but the logical result of the initial concept of the project: to create a situation that involves several actors. My stimulation and inspiration came from musicians and the whole creative process around music. “Studio Venezia” has become a mix between an exhibition space and a creative lab where people come to work one after the other.
Usually, in your creative process, do you like to share ideas with your curators or gallery owners?
When I have the idea of new work, I start to talk about it with the people from my studio. I refine the idea by exchanging with them, and once it is defined, I begin to work on it concretely. It is only then that I share it with galleries or curators.
The studio has very interesting architecture. Between visual arts, architecture, and music, your installation brings together the greatest aesthetic forms of creation. What did you seek to provoke?
I did not want to compete in terms of quantity of shapes, but rather to create something soft, with almost a domestic feel to it. I want people to feel good when they enter the French Pavilion, with all their senses: from the smell of the wood to the light and acoustic design. It is very important to inform the visitors about what is going on and how they should behave inside “Studio Venezia”. The fact that wood is used almost everywhere—floor, ceiling and walls—gives the impression of being in a closed environment, like a cave, which adds to this softness.
You have built a studio that hides a Neo-Classical building under panels of plywood in Okoumé, wood of the tropical regions. Does this choice of material have a relationship with its musical purposes?
Traditionally, wood has always been used to build acoustic spaces, like Renaissance theatres for example. It is also linked to the fact that theatre halls and philharmonics, just like recording studios, are similar to the inside of an instrument. And last but not least, wood is cheap and very easy to handle, especially plywood. All these different reasons explain why we chose wood as the main material of the installation.
Have you studied composition? Do you play an instrument?
No, unfortunately not. However, if I were a musician, I would probably just be playing the music. Instead, I have created an environment to simply listen, which is a dream situation for any music lover: I invite people I am a fan of, to create new pieces right in front of me, making it possible to live exceptional moments.
There is a real opening of artistic practice with the integration of the musicians and an acoustic chamber where the world is invited—a very beautiful idea, this collective energy, the team spirit that invites musicians and composers of great talent and renown. Do the visitors also participate in the musical process or do they remain spectators?
Visitors cannot participate in the sense that they cannot play the music, but they are definitely participating by having an effect on musicians, which I actually had underestimated. At first, I thought visitors would have been affected by being confronted to new kinds of music, but most of them are in fact open to new experiences thanks to the context of the Biennale. On the other hand, musicians are very much affected by the presence of spectators. There is a pressure—an empathic pressure, but a pressure nonetheless—that comes from the people in the room, which turns every moment into a performance. It is very interesting because it creates a new situation where recording becomes live recording, which changes the typology of the experience inside the pavilion into something new and hybrid, between performance and studio reflexion.
It’s a top playlist of guest musicians, from Chassol to DJ Chloé. Many of them are French but it also includes a bunch of international artists from Lee Scratch Perry to Thurston Moore, it goes far . . . Why give an international dimension to the French pavilion?
It was not planned, it came naturally, but I am happy it occurred. Nevertheless, I think music is by essence international. The music you find in nightclubs all around the world, just like the music on Deezer, Spotify or iTunes is music before it is international music. Music transcends national boundaries, and even though musicians have their own nationality, their music is stateless.
Today while the show is underway, what are the highlights for you?
The other day, I was looking at Pietro, one of the mediators of Studio Venezia, moving stuff around and I realized the studio has been operational for 5 months already. It reminded me of how far we’ve come since the beginning of the project. To me every moment we live here is special in its own way. And there is always something happening, making the project emotionally very intense. I try to share a lot of these emotions on my Instagram stories.
The Venice Biennale is already one of the most important events of art, it is something between the Olympic Games and the World’s Fair. It is a principle of inviting a large number of countries to be represented by an elected artist / winner of a national competition that symbolizes the top of contemporary national creation. You are the gifted/chosen one of this edition and you chose to implement an installation that involves creating or performing other art pieces, an echo effect of creation in a studio. Does the art created by other artists in your studio becomes part of your work?
Yes and no. No, because the music created inside the French Pavilion remains the musicians’ property. And yes, because this music has been created and played for the first time here, which makes it belong in a way to the history of the place and the work. I am more interested in being able to share moments of creativity with musicians than in owning their creations.
Nietzsche has widely demonstrated that we are born from multiplicity, that the centre is everywhere. Do you think that this work shares this sentiment?
It is related in a way. “Studio V—the envelop—and the space for musical creation—the studio. On the other hand, there is the time of the exhibition—7 months—the time of each residency—a few days—and the time of the musical creation—the chronology of music in regards to its creation in the studio. These different spaces and times collide and intertwine to end up changing our perspective on music and on the format of the exhibition.
Marina Abramovic: In Residence in Australia and Urs Fisher at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles both invited other artists to create major exhibitions Similar to these two recent examples, your guest artists are not paid but fed, housed, washed, and in addition, they share the fabulous life experience of artists who work in community in a prestigious space. If they want to, and if the opportunity arises, they can also leave with their own musical creations to use as they choose. During a live recording for example, is there a clause that recommends attribution of production as coming from the studio Xavier Veilhan?
An important part for me is that the invited musicians are not paid. Our agreement includes the possibility to make new recordings, with the simple constraint of having an audience present inside the studio, but it is based on an invitation. There is no money involved, which I find interesting since it is different from nearly all other situations involving music. When one listens to music on streaming applications, when one buys a concert ticket, even with ads one can find on YouTube while watching music videos, there is always money involved. I want musicians to come to “Studio Venezia” with a blank page and no pressure related to money. That way they can take the creative direction they choose, without any financial obligation.
Here do you also play the role of producer, patron, or both?
I think I am more like a host who creates the situation. It is like being in your own house and inviting people over, which can lead to many types of exchange and creativity.
Do you have the feeling of multiplying yourself?
Not really. Actually, it is difficult for me to imagine what will be the result of this experience that has obviously and quite deeply changed me as a person. However, I have the feeling that it centers me more than it dislocates me.
You would of course prefer that the artists leave with the best memories of this magnificent experience. As a result, would you wish for them to get a mega-contract with an international producer, the creation in situ of a future chart-topping hit, or finding a soul mate?
I would like this experience to create a link between all the musicians that have participated in “Studio Venezia”, like a community. I always give the example of universities and some art schools, like Sciences Po Paris or the Black Mountain College, that manage to make strong connections between students or former students. Twenty years after leaving school, one can connect or reconnect with people that one has never physically met but who have once studied at the same school. However, my goal is not to end up with this or that result. It would be more akin to a scientific experiment: putting two things in the same place and observing what happens.
Florence Müller’s curatorial vision was introduced to the city of Denver in 2012 when she presented Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective at the Denver Art Museum’s Hamilton Building. As the first exhibition to highlight all forty years of the designer’s output, and Denver being the only US venue, it was an absolute showstopper that had people lining up throughout its duration, even during extended evening hours. In 2015, the DAM announced Müller as the institution’s Avenir Foundation Curator of Textile Art and Fashion. The following year she presented Shock Wave: Japanese Fashion Design, 1980s-90s, the first exhibition curated “in house” by Müller, with special focus turned to Denver’s local fashion collectors. I had the pleasure of interviewing Müller and her curatorial assistant, Jane Burke, at the DAM offices where we discussed the future of the museum’s textile and fashion department, the recent boom in popularity of fashion exhibitions, and the landmark trends that put the United States on the fashion culture map.
Interview by Hayley Richardson
The Denver Art Museum’s collection of textile art encompasses over 5,000 objects from Asia, Europe, North and South America, and range from archeological textiles to contemporary works of art in fiber. Under your curatorship this department now includes fashion and costume. Can you please talk about what it has been like to take this department in a new direction?
The museum had a huge fashion collection at one time, but it was deaccessioned about over a decade ago, so the idea now is to rebuild this area. It is challenging to acquire a collection that can illustrate the great couturiers and designers of the 20th century, but there is a lot to explore in the decades of the 1970s through the 2000s when you can still find very good examples of interesting designers. My goal is to make sure that the pieces acquired into the collection are seen by the public, so I coordinate acquisitions around the theme of exhibitions. For example, I acquired about 35 pieces for the Shock Wave exhibition, so they were able to be exhibited to the public right away and are now part of the permanent collection.
My curatorial assistant, Jane Burke, is currently working on an exhibition about a fashion illustrator named Jim Howard. Howard was active in New York in the 1950s through the 1980s, and did a lot of illustration for department store advertising. His archive is an excellent example of a coherent body of work with an artistic point of view on the history of fashion over the span of four decades. We hope to acquire some of his work as the museum has only a few engravings and fashion plates, so this will mark the beginning of a fashion illustration collection. I am very happy about this because fashion illustration is something that is rarely collected among fashion museums and it’s a shame because many of these items have already disappeared. Fashion illustrators were not seen as important as fashion photographers, which is one of the reasons their work was not acquired for museums. Right now, we have this opportunity to save one collection at the DAM and it’s great!
You have presented two exhibitions at Denver Art Museum: Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective and, as you just mentioned, Shock Wave: Japanese Fashion Design, 1980s-90s. The YSL exhibition featured environments that took the viewer inside the designer’s home and studio, or the closets of his patrons, and Shock Wave incorporated a variety of media like furniture design, photography, video, and more archival ephemera. Your curation goes beyond exhibiting clothing, it’s more about immersing the viewer within the place and time specific to the theme of the show.
Jane Burke: I think that’s a trend among museums these days, to do cross-departmental exhibitions. With fashion, you’re showing not only the garment but the person’s life, whether they’re a famous designer or a socialite, or the provenance of where the piece came from. You’re showing the lifestyle, or the era. You have to illustrate the bigger picture.
Florence Müller: When you have several types of objects belonging to different areas, whether it’s fashion, photography, artwork, and furniture like it was in Shock Wave, it’s an opportunity to catch the attention of more people. Some people may enter the exhibition who know a lot about design, but not so much about fashion. They will be attracted by the things that they understand, and then learn about new ideas related to fashion and other components of the exhibition. You can show that some movements, aesthetics, and new phenomena are not isolated. It is a way to show that fashion designers achieved great things, and were able to do so by maintaining connections with people in other fields. Shock Wave was the first fashion exhibition in the department, and it was meant to send a message that fashion is a form of art, and the Japanese designers were the best example to send that message clearly.
Jane: Florence illustrated, with the Japanese designers, that their work in fashion is so interrelated with other design concepts. Some were artists before becoming designers and their connection to the art world is strong. Rei Kawakubo from Comme des Garçons also designed furniture at one point, and is really involved in the artistic direction of her brand from print media to photography. Issey Miyaki also operates this way. He now has a whole home line. I think fashion just intersects and overlaps naturally with a variety of mediums.
Florence: And Issey Miyaki has never called his company a couture house or fashion house. He’s always called it a studio, a design studio. He was looking, and is still looking at fashion not as just garments. For him, it is about designing ‘things,’ making ‘things.’
Christian Dior: Designer of Dreams, which you co-curated with Olivier Gabet, opened at Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris this July. It is the largest exhibition dedicated to the designer. In an article for The Guardian, author Hannah Marriot states, “The golden age of haute couture may be decades past, but we are now living in the golden age of the blockbuster fashion exhibition.” What are your thoughts about this statement?
Yes, that is exactly what is happening right now. The day the exhibition opened in Paris, there was a line around the building of people who waited all morning to get in. As for the idea that the golden age of haute couture has passed, in the 1950s, couture was meant to dress very elegant women for the café society who lived a jet-set lifestyle and attended many events and parties. It was a lifestyle very special and specific to that time and it doesn’t exist today. You don’t have the opportunity of being dressed in a very exquisite manner because there aren’t any more of these big balls or private parties in people’s homes.
The phenomenon of today, though, is this obsession with selfies and having photos shared on the internet. There is the need of doing portraits or self-portraits at every moment of your life, and everyone is concerned with their own image. You could go to a party and be photographed and suddenly your photo is spread all over the world.
In regard to fashion exhibitions, people envision what they could look like in these garments when they enter the museum. During the opening of the Dior exhibition, I did the official visit with France’s First Lady, Brigitte Macron, and afterward I did a walk-through with a famous American fashion model. I think people have a very personal relationship with a fashion exhibition, and the first thought they have is, “What would I look like if I wore this?” Then they will read the exhibition text and learn something about what they see, who made it, and what was happening in the world. People are able to relate to fashion exhibitions because they can imagine themselves wearing the clothes and being part of the story.
Jane: At the show in Paris, there was a guestbook people could sign at the end of exhibition, and Florence tells this great story about it, about how people want to dream, which was the whole point of the exhibition . . .
Florence: There was a little girl who wrote in the book, ‘I love the exhibition, so beautiful. I am 10 years old and my grandmother promised to buy me a Dior dress when I turn 18 years old.’
[Florence then quotes the visitors book.]
Florence: ‘Thank you for this magnificent travel in the universe of elegance and absolute femininity. This exhibition is wonderful. [signed] The Parisian’
‘Where is Mr. Dior to thank him for all this beauty?’
‘The dream and grace for the service of women. Thank you for this beautiful moment. Very elegant.’
It’s funny because the word I put in the title is everywhere throughout the guests’ notes in the book. Dream. It is what we see in the first collection of Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior. It was like a dream ball in an enchanted forest. This idea that, in moments of crisis, you have to use beauty and dreams to work through difficult situations. I like to play on this paradox of ideas.
The other great thing about this exhibition is that we now are in a world where everyday clothes are becoming so simple and relaxed and sometimes not very aesthetic. I think it is great to show the opposite of this, just as an example, that you can think about and create dreams in the minds of little girls.
Cities like Paris, Milan, London, and Tokyo are epicenters of the fashion world, each with distinct styles and histories. What would you say are the defining traits or major contributions of fashion and style from the United States?
One of the United States’ biggest contributions to fashion is the development of sportswear. It began in the 1930s through the 1960s, and was something really new for its time. People in Europe were slow to accept sportswear as fashion because they were so ingrained in the tradition of elegance and couture, and sportswear is the total opposite. In America, sportswear expressed a new way of living that is more relaxed and connected with nature, and eventually designers in Europe started to incorporate sportswear into their collections. It was fashion designed for yourself and less for show, but was still developed in a very elaborate manner. American designer Claire McCardell was an important contributor to this idea of creating sportswear that could also be elegant by mixing simple materials like cotton but with elaborate cuts, forms, and shapes.
Another other important contribution is the phenomenon of the jeans and T-shirt style, which is distinctively American. Same with motorbike jackets and everything connected with the counterculture. When this style reached Europe by the end of the 1960s it was very desirable and influential. It totally changed the way Europeans dressed.
Today I think we are in a place between the two forces of T-shirt and jeans and sportswear, yoga clothes in particular, and designer clothes and cocktail dresses. There is a road in the middle of these two extremes, which is high-end street wear, street couture, which has been a huge trend over the past several years. Girls like Rihanna flaunt this style which has an interesting mix of the two extremes.
In addition to being a curator, art and fashion historian, and writer, I understand that you also have created work as an artist and participated in artistic collaborations. Can you share more about this side of what you do?
A long time ago I worked in theater doing costume, makeup, and hair. Then I did photography but not for very long. I also did paintings and drawings. More recently I’ve worked with my husband Goran Vejvoda. We’ve done a lot of happenings and performances using video, choreography, costume, spoken word, and text. Really mixed medium. We did performances in Italy, France, Belgium, and England, but not in the US.
Most people in the fashion world do not know about these other things I have done. I don’t want to create confusion between my work in fashion and my work as an artist. But I use many of the elements and feelings I have from the fashion world in the happenings. The language of body, dress, the way you behave and move around a space and the way you speak, these are all different forms of communication, and by bringing them together I can create a great effect on the mind of the viewer. I did performances with Goran where I choreographed the dancers to change costumes in various sequences on stage, he did the music, and we both created the videos.
Goran and I are also working on a movie documentary about the history of sound art. We started with interviews while we traveled around the world, and accumulated all these videos and documentation. Goran is now working on the final edits and clarifying author rights.
Tim Gentles is a New Zealand born writer and curator based in New York. He completed his MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. He has written for Art-Agenda, Art in America, e-flux, Frieze, XLR8R and many other publications. Last summer, Tim was one of the six curators selected for U:L:O: at Interstate Projects in Brooklyn for his show Back Seat Driver. His dystopic show The Mere Future is on view at American Medium through August 6, 2017.
Interview by Natasha Przedborski
The Mere Future engages with the themes of urban progress and “erosion of the public sphere”. Was there any one moment, object, or person that specifically inspired the idea for this show?
There was no particular revelation or moment of inspiration for the exhibition. Developing the show was actually quite a natural process evolving from certain things I had been thinking about the art world and its relationship to various publics, as well as the work of certain artists who engage with these ideas. One catalyst for thinking about these issues was the ongoing dilemma of the art world’s intimate relationship with a culture industry that has increasingly made a city like New York unlivable for most people. From most artists’ point of view this is unsustainable too, and I was interested in the ways in which artistic practice has sought to be critical of art as an institution, and the ways that it has failed to live up to its promise and ideals in almost every respect.
I feel like bringing up the recent presidential election is inevitable these days when speaking about critiquing institutions and the failure to live up to promises and ideals. The works in the show were nearly all made prior to the most recent presidential election. Have you noticed any effect the current political climate has had on the production of work since?
In many ways Devon Dikeou’s piece in the show, Cajole, which was made in 1992 and is a replica of one of the planters that could at the time be found in the lobby of Trump Tower, was the starting point for thinking about the present day political implications of these ideas. The piece invites a cool examination of how political power is coded and assimilated into one’s environment as innocuous and embedded. The effect of last year’s election and the resulting political climate in the art world has largely been disheartening. Many rightfully feel that a renewed sense of political urgency is essential in combating the current regime and their socially destructive policies, but looking to art and one’s position in the art world to provide a platform for a leftist politics is in my opinion misguided and at worst totally hypocritical.
The title of the show is borrowed from Sarah Schulman’s dystopic novel in which New York’s problems have all been solved and liberalism reigns. Interestingly, the main critique in the media this year was that part of the country lived in a “liberal bubble”. Do you think that art is enabling this liberal elitism?
Art’s relationship to liberalism is complex, and it’s only been within the past couple of decades that the art world has identified with liberalism in its virtual entirety. Only relatively recently, various forms of illiberalism were firmly entrenched within art world power structures—think for instance of the impetus of much early institutional critique work, e.g. Hans Haacke’s Shapolsky et al., or the extreme backlash to the 1993 Whitney Biennial in contrast to the reception of this year’s. That’s not to say that the art world is now politically homogenous—it is not—but a presumed liberalism is mandated more than ever before. I think that this liberalism is often used, quite defensively, as a way of eliding a deeper interrogation of the complicity of well-meaning art institutions with inequality and injustice, as well as the class and race privilege of many of the art world’s participants.
If I’m not mistaken you’re not originally from the United States. What effect, if any, do you feel this had on organizing an exhibition that comments on American politics and space?
I feel pretty well assimilated into the New York City art community, and this exhibition largely reflects the concerns, as well as the cynicism and disaffection, of that world, which of course reflect in turn the political context of the United States. But to answer your question more directly, in my experience non-Americans tend to have less patience with the pieties of American liberalism.
Your show The Mere Future took place at American Medium. I think that the location of the gallery in the heart of Bed-Stuy is noteworthy. What do you make of having a socially engaged show on urban space and gentrification in a neighborhood undergoing gentrification itself?
A large part of the exhibition was to examine how art falls short of its utopic promise. Marc Kokopeli’s piece in the show offers the most succinct distillation of this to me, where in appropriating Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree he not only critiques a certain form of counter-cultural hippie sentimentalism, but its participatory aspect raises questions about precisely the kinds of publics that artworks actually engender. Sitting side-by-side on the tree are wishes made by children from the church next door, and name-dropping and art scene in-jokes.