Murakami, "Mr.Pointy." Photo by Julien Jourdes for The New York Times

The Murakami exhibition which is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, where it traveled from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, has been extensively discussed, particularly in relation to the inclusion of a mini-Vuitton boutique carrying the Murakami-Vuitton products in the midst of the exhibition. The debate raised by the store inclusion is a testament to the still-fraught relation between fashion, art and commerce—or rather the fraught relation between art and commerce, which seems to come in sharper focus when said art is aligned with fashion—the quintessential commodity. (The relation between art and fashion ultimately seems to highlight the status of art as commodity—one which, at least within the confines of the art museum, still seems to make people uncomfortable. In this particular case, it suggests a continuum between museum-goers and consumers, or perhaps the notion of museum-goers as consumers of culture and luxury goods alike.)

However, what I found most interesting about the presence of the Vuitton “boutique” in the Brooklyn museum is not so much how it re-activated these debates, but rather how it framed the store and the activities within it as performative. It highlighted the ritualistic nature involved in the consumption of goods (particularly luxury goods) which often goes undetected. In the process, it made these generally seamless actions strange and slightly unsettling.

Vuitton Store at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo by Julien Jourdes for The New York Times

Witnessing a couple purchasing a Vuitton-Murakami bag from the store clerks dressed in pristine white shirts, the viewer was made acutely aware of the awkwardness of the exchange—the forced niceness of the sales clerk and the equally forced (at least in this context) nonchalance of the luxury shopper. This exchange became even more awkward as the museum-goers, following the unwritten rules applying to exhibition-viewing, stared intently at the space and the activities taking place within it, trying to decipher its meaning…

Francesca

Mika Rottenberg, Cheese

Mika Rottenberg, Cheese, 2007.

I have been meaning to write about Mika Rottenberg’s video installation Cheese at the Whitney Biennial, which just closed. Based on the relation between the body and labor and on the generative ability of the female body, it intertwines grotesque and carnivalesque elements in an absurd makeshift farm setting.

This particular video-installation was shot in Central Florida on the property of one of several women starring in the video—all of whom sport incredibly long hair. (The performers belong to a “long-hair club.”) The piece is based on the story of the Southerland Sisters, 19th century sisters who displayed their extremely long hair in a Barnum and Bailey performance and marketed hair fertilizers: a hair growth formula allegedly made from their own hair, mixed with water from the Niagara falls.

Presented in precarious architectural structures, the footage was shown across a series of different monitors and portrayed the women wearing chemise dresses and engaging in what appear to be absurd and pointless repetitive tasks—many of which involved manipulating their long hair, on a makeshift wood structure, surrounded by farm animals.

In an interview in Flash Artwith Merrily Kerr, the artist points out how “there are parallels between the incredible amount of labor that goes into farming and the routine the women adopt to care for their hair, such as brushing it daily for two hours.” She adds: “My videos employ clichés about femininity, and this one involves associations between women, fertility and the earth. […] But the fun really starts when I dissect the clichés turning them inside out and showing them as they really are—creepy and uncanny.”

Francesca

For more information, see Merrily Kerr’s interview with the artist in the July-September 2007 issue of Flash Art, and/or a video interview with Rottenberg on Coolhunting.

Yves Saint Laurent Retrospective

Original sketch for the Wedding Dress from the collection sketchbook; Fall-Winter 1988; Graphite on paper, gazar sample; Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent; Photo Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent

***Update: Yves Saint Laurent died Sunday, 1 June 2008. His obituary is here.***

The opening of this retrospective exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts has flown surprisingly under the radar for being so close to New York City. Curated by the French costume historian Florence Müller, the emphasis is on the dialogue between Yves Saint Laurent and art, both in terms of considering his garments as actual art objects and in recognition of his inspirations found in art. The display is broken into four themes: sketches, gender-bending, color usage and lyricism. The exhibition includes over 160 looks spanning his entire career culled from over 5000 ensembles and 15000 objects belonging to the Fondation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent.

The museum’s website, while lacking a bit in object photographs, does have a few video clips along with brief biographical notes on his life.

Montreal Museum of Fine Arts The exhibition runs from May 29 to September 28, 2008, before moving on the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.

Veronique Branquinho exhibition

VB, Autumn/Winter 00-01, Photo Annick Geenen (All photos courtesy of MoMu)

If in Belgium this summer, don’t miss the exhibition dedicated to Veronique Branquinho currently on view at the ModeMuseum in Antwerp. As an accompanying article by Cathy Horyn explains, Branquinho—the daughter of a Portuguese father and a Flemish mother—emerged in the generation of Belgian designers following the Antwerp 6. After her studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, she presented her first collection in Paris in 1997 as a series of photographs featuring a white-robed woman running through a forest and was soon embraced by the celebral fashion establishment.

Recounting the ambivalent position Branquinho occupies in the over-signifying market-driven and spectacle-laden fashion world, Horyn writes of the Belgian designer’s work:

“Over time, her work would encompass many of her character traits such as independence, self-reliance, tenacity, and perhaps, above all, mystery. Even if clothes cannot adequately express the complexities of human behavior, Branquinho seems to approach design with idea that not everything needs to be explained or understood.”

VB, Spring/Summer 2000, Photo Jean François Carly

On Fashion Curation

Specter: When Fashion Turns Back (V&A, 2005)

Don't miss the new issue of Fashion Theory, which is entirely dedicated to fashion curation. Edited by Alistair O’Neil, founder of the MA in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion (and, in the interest of full disclosure, one of my thesis advisors), it has a great range of engaging articles exhaustively covering debates on the topic, which have taken place across the academic, journalistic and museum realms.

Among the articles included is an assessment of the history and various iterations of the fashion designer retrospective and its attendant criticisms by N.J. Stevenson, as well as an account of the history of fashion photography in the museum by Val Williams, the director of the Centre for Photography and the Archive at LCF. Also included are articles by Amy de la Haye and Judith Clark, and an interview with Penny Martin of SHOWstudio (also a subject of the second issue of Fashion Projects), about the notion of virtual curatorial practice as it pertains to fashion.

In addition, the issue features a range of exhibition reviews: Caroline Evans reviews the recent Victoria and Albert exhibition "Surreal Things: Surrealism in Design." O'Neil reviews the ground-breaking exhibition by Judith Clark "Spectres: When Fashion Turns Back”—an exhibition which, in my opinion, highlighted the blurring of boundaries between curator and artist and exemplified howcuration can be understood as an artistic practice in its own right.

Francesca