Bushes for Sale

Art F City is hosting an auction on Paddle8. You can bid on items online through Monday, February 17th at NOON or head over to Postmasters Gallery for the live auction with CK Swett at 7:45PM.  The best of the bunch are the bushes! Two ink jet prints of Marilyn Minter's hyper-real paintings:

Fur, 2013		Carpet, 2013

Art F City supports emerging artists and critical writers by exposing them to a broader and underserved audience through informed, straightforward discussion.

Denise Grünstein: Figure Out

Swedish photographer Denise Grünstein's 2009 series "Figure Out" places solitary, faceless women masked by hair in surreal, Dali-blue-skied environments or dark, simple rooms reminiscent of those found in 17th-century Flemish still lifes. The woman are positioned centrally, yet appear passive. The effect is dreamlike - women at odds with their environments, placed awkwardly, displaced and misplaced. Many images depict hair found on dining tables draped in white linen, suggesting that the hair is edible, can be consumed. But the women are also being consumed by hair their hair. If hair can be understood as something that directly shapes our looks, perhaps these images imply the contradiction of both consuming and being consumed by appearance/appearing.

Denise Grünstein's work is on view in Different Distances: Fashion Photography Goes Art, an exhibition at Aperture Gallery from February 6–February 14, 2014.

  Head over Heels, 2009

 Figure Out, 2009

Female Gaze, 2009

Figurine, 2009

Headhunter, 2009

 Inside looking out, Outside looking in, 2009

 Tied, 2009

Video still from All Flesh is Grass. The title refers to the perishing, temporary nature of everything.

Roy Orbison

"Roy Orbison's voice entered the room like a floating silk ribbon....That voice.
And the hair. Black as melted-down record vinyl."

~ Rachel Kushner's Flamethrowers, page 63.

Roy Orbison's signature look consisted of a pompadour hairstyle with dark sunglasses and an ensemble of almost entirely black: boots, pants, belt, jacket, and shirt. Alternately the shirt was white, but regardless, the cumulative effect was the creation of a  man of mystery. With eyes lost behind black-rimmed glasses, he became an artifice, an abstraction, with hair black as melted-down vinyl. Perfect.

The Hammer Wig

This is an eighteenth-century metal, painted sign for a Parisian hairdresser. The wig represented is called a "perruque à marteaux" - a hammer wig. The hammers are the curled loops of hair rolled over a tube. The guild of wigmakers date from the reign of Louis XIV and number of variations existed.
 
This work is from the Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris and was accessioned as early as 1884.



 

The Belly of the Beast

While Martin Magiela made a splash in spring 2009 with his wig jackets (below), I was unaware of his Fall 2005 Artisinal Collection that included a jacket, top and collar utilizing the reverse of wigs. By reversing the wigs, the patterning and decoration produce a wonderful tactile texture, formed by the wigs' interior stitching and elastic construction.

"Artifice is a standard tool of the fashion system, but Margiela is uniquely adept and willing to expose it for all to see. Just as Margiela turns a garment inside-out to flaunt its construction, so the artifice behind contemporary beauty itself is revealed and hence called into question."1

While Margiela is no longer involved with his namesake company, while he was a designer he consistently questioned orthodox notions of beauty and attraction. In both his 2005 and 2009 collections those questions relate to the seduction and revulsion of hair. Sure, this is not real hair. Rather it's fake hair but with the finest level of workmanship applied to it, thus calling into question an essential paradox of luxury - that its value rarely lies in anything of literal material worth. 

Are these wiggy fashion objects really something we should want to wear? Margiela taps into cultural anxieties about taste, attractiveness, and being "cool." Oh no, could fake really be better than real? What would it mean if i wanted to wear human hair? Am I grotesque? Am I hip? Is this fashion? These objects sit uneasily on a narrow ledge between that special and elusive sensation of desire that is called up by fashion and the revulsion fed by the common subtext of self-hatred we feel towards our body, its features and its functions.

1. "Mind Games" by Alex Fury,  December 11 2008, showstudio.com

Mustache Monday at the NYPL

I would like to draw your attention to a long-running tumblr project over at the New York Public Library....Mustache Monday.
Enjoy!

Deluxe Play with Hair

An Ellen Gallagher (b.1965) show recently opened at Tate Modern. Running through September 1, 2013, Ellen Gallagher: AxME is the artist's first major solo exhibition in the UK. Of Irish and African American heritage, Gallagher appropriates source materials from science fiction, the vaudeville tradition of black minstrels, and advertising targeted to African Americans.

Of note is DeLuxe (2004-5), sixty individually-framed prints that hang in a rectangular grid arrangement. Each print is a re-working of a magazine advertisement from a publication such as Ebony, Our World or Sepia dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. The ads, aimed at African American consumers, "promote a range of beauty products for women and men, especially goods relating to hair including wigs and pomades."1   Gallagher has appropriated these images and modified them using a variety of techniques -- in particular, collage. To the prints she has added materials such as glitter, gold leaf, coconut oil, toy eyeballs, and molded plasticine in the shape of wigs.

Gallagher's interventions to these beauty ads parody the idea of "improvement" through a process of erasure and alteration and "underscore in particular the role of hair as a signifier of difference."2 While her work is often characterized as political art, as it investigates of social and racial identities, it also has a playful approach that “confronts issues of race...with clever, even antic, satire."3

This idea of playfulness resonates both in format (she "plays" with the traditional print) and in content (poking fun at hairstyles and appearance). In Gallagher's hands, looks that are intended to help us "conform" to an ideal become fantastical masks, jazzy helmets, or fanciful hats from outer space. "When viewed together, these prints offer a history lesson about modernism, fashion, mass media, and race in mid-century America."4

‘The wig ladies are fugitives, conscripts from another time and place, liberated from the “race” magazines of the past. But again, I have transformed them, here on the pages that once held them captive.’ 5

One of Gallagher's tropes is the grid. Not only is Deluxe installed in a grid formation, the wig ads themselves are laid out in rows and columns of wigged heads. "Gallagher was drawn to the wig advertisements because of their grid-like structure...[having been] influenced by the sublime aesthetics of Agnes Martin’s paintings, as well the subtle shifts and repetitions of Gertrude Stein’s writing."6

These grids reminded me of another work by another artist: Tom Sach's James Brown’s Hair Products (2009). I saw this work when it was on view at the Sperone-Westwater Gallery in 2011. While the Sachs work has little in common with Deluxe in regards to motivation and interpretation, the works do align themselves formally. Confronted by a grid of hair products, each a specimen of physical conceit and tool of identity construction, we might ask ourselves to look at how we fetishize our hair rituals.

1-2. Tate Museum object catalogue record
3. "In Black and White" by Mark Stevens. Feb 21, 2005 issue of New York magazine
4. Walker Art Museum object catalogue record.
5. Exhibition description
6. PBS series Art21 from the episode "play"