Making a Fashion Statement of Subtlety in ‘Fancy Pants’
Post-mod bodice-ripper Alexander McQueen to head the venerated House of Givenchy! English eccentric John Galliano steps in to save Dior! Brown is (once again) the new black!
Consider the breathless pronouncement, the endless parade of the new (especially in the middle of a recession) and the industrywide mastery of the semiotics of display. No kidding, art and fashion have a lot in common.
It’s no wonder then that the art world is lately obsessed with fashion: as form, subject matter, mode of discourse and perhaps even inspiration. In this context, “Fancy Pants,” a show of clothing-related artwork organized by Monique van Genderen at the super-hip Fred Segal Melrose boutique, is one of the more subtle exercises I’ve seen.
Compare “Fancy Pants” to this fall’s multi-venue, would-be show-stopping extravaganza, Italy’s first Florence Biennale. A $7.5-million budget was spent justifying fashion as art (a retrospective of Elton John’s outfits), as well as to say all sorts of big things about everything (Valentino evening gowns as cultural manifestations on par with Michelangelo’s “David”).
“Fancy Pants” doesn’t want to say things so much as show them and perhaps ruffle ritualized ways of seeing along the way. Pamela Bailey’s screen-printed cotton wraparound skirts, shirts and ties all but disappear into their ultra-luxe setting, which is not to say that they are invisible but perfectly integrated, and primed to perform their mischief. So is Niki Munroe’s glass-encased nylon jumpsuit, which--however insane--looks perfectly apropos among the $1,000 shredded cardigans.
Michael Couglan’s wire-hanger assemblages and LouAnne Greenwald’s “Gothic Arch,” made of pantyhose and steel, are poetic without trying too hard. They lay on the irony pretty fast and thick. Dries Van Noten’s clothes are also poetic and ironic, though, and they’ve been at Fred Segal for many a season.
Fashion and art have laid claim to similar kinds of conceits, but it’s probably important to note that they do so in different contexts for different audiences. Wisely, Van Genderen’s mix-and-match show doesn’t attempt to pronounce upon much more than this.
* Fred Segal Melrose, 8100 Melrose Ave., (213) 651-4129, through Nov. 16. Open daily.
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Concepts: Steve Roden’s new paintings and sculpture at Griffin Linton Contemporary Art are a curious lot, especially if you subscribe to the theory that a body of work should have some sort of internal coherence. Here are a bunch of flamboyantly mottled oil and encaustic paintings, covered with letters, numbers, organic forms and geometric shapes; several thin watercolors that look like loose-limbed Mondrians (so loose they favor a 1960s tie-dye palette); and a trio of wax-dripped sculptures that are at once sloppy and refined.
It’s not too hard to guess that there’s a system lurking here somewhere, structuring these rudely tactile, even clumsy things. But to Roden’s credit, it’s not a mechanistic one. There is room for things to slip in and out of place, to muck around with their own internal dynamics.
Take, for example, “approximate epiphanies in the life of a super-hero,” a painting whose surface, studded with a seemingly insensible pattern of numbers and elongated white circles, is based on a chronology of key events in Joseph Beuys’ life. The image pays homage to an artist who opposed precisely this kind of conceptual tease; that it does so knowingly makes it more self-effacing, and more interesting, than it could otherwise have been.
Nonetheless, Roden has a ways to go. “Seven Deadly Sins,” a large painting whose rectangular shapes are modeled after the relative proportions of the seven art magazines lying around the artist’s studio, seems to want to be expressive, funny and at the same time perform a critique of the art world’s dominating structures. As long as Conceptual art remains one of them, however, this artist would seem to be in the wrong position.
* Griffin Linton Contemporary Art, 915-B Electric Ave., Venice, (310) 452-1014, through Nov. 23. Open Thursdays through Saturdays.
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Towering Monitors: Matthew McCaslin is no slouch when it comes to themes. “Nature and culture” is as evocative of Milton as it gets, and it takes a lot of moxie to take this sort of thing on. But grand ambitions don’t always translate well, on the small screen or in art galleries, and this show at Shoshana Wayne Gallery is a case in point.
As if Nam June Paik had never existed (not to mention Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Fischli and Weiss and Steina Vasulka), McCaslin creates video installations in which multiple monitors--piled, stacked or merely juxtaposed--project landscape images or create a sense of place that is ostensibly larger than the sum of its parts.
The most characteristic of these is a TV tower: On the top monitor is footage of a flower blooming; on the middle one, cars speeding; and on the bottom, cows grazing. It’s fairly ho-hum.
The best features a quartet of TVs--one right side up, another upside down, a third balanced on its right side, the fourth on its left--all playing the same image of cars moving through traffic. At moments, these become radicalized stripe paintings, the kind that give Barnett Newman’s “zip” a whole new lease on life.
But the most interesting part of the show is its setup--the dimmed lights and the thick cables that snake across the floor, trampling random bits of hardware that never made it to the trash can. The seduction of all this techno-clutter is far more atmospheric than the spectacle itself, not to mention wittier.
* Shoshana Wayne Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., (310) 453-7535, through Nov. 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
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American Dreams: “Road Test,” a show of Russian-born Andrei Roiter’s work at Blum & Poe Gallery, rehashes what has now become a classic narrative: the foreign visitor who comes to America seeking truth, adventure, self-knowledge and the rest of it.
Alexis de Tocqueville played it straight. Robert Frank and Vladimir Nabakov went for irony. Jean Baudrillard played it for laughs. Roiter’s project--which encompasses a hodgepodge of artifacts relating to the artist’s travels, including photographic documentation, merrily amateurish sculptures made of objects found along the way and a slew of rather accomplished drawings--is cheeky and rich with attitude.
However, so many attitudes are on display here (sincerity, irony, contempt and regret, just for starters), together with homages to so many predecessors (from Robert Smithson to Matthew Barney to Kasimir Malevich), that the entire endeavor feels somehow unformed.
There is much to pique one’s interest: an image of a roadside motel whose cast shadow resembles one of Malevich’s geometric compositions; a cardboard movie camera, perfect for Roiter’s low-budget antics; and a collage of flags wryly hailing the “Future Tourist Self.” It’s encouraging to note that this is the beginning of an ongoing project, because it means that things will inevitably get clarified.
* Blum & Poe Gallery, 2042 Broadway, Santa Monica, (310) 453-8311, through Nov. 16. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
