September 12, 2019 – February 23, 2020
2 Columbus Circle, W. 58th St at 8th Ave
New York City, madmuseum.org

“The World of Anna Sui” is exactly what is delivered through the excellent curating and exhibition design that clearly articulates both the process of Sui’s collections, the inspiration behind her oeuvre and the collaborative methods behind the designer’s practice, runway shows and design studio. This exhibition is an adaptation of the 2017 version at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London.

Sui emerged in the late 1980s as an ambitious, driven, and indefatigable figure that deftly navigated the intricacies of the fashion landscape from her early days working for Seventh Avenue sportswear companies. Sui quickly learned the importance of satisfying the retail market by appealing to department store buyers in designing wearable and thus saleable garments. From her early days as a fashion stylist associated with Steven Meisel and Franca Sozzani, she honed her talent of putting together forceful fashion statements by combining clothing and accessories paired with the work of top hair stylists, make-up artists, and models. No less important was her presence on the NYC Club scene, in the 1980s and early 1990s. Likewise, as Sui absorbed trends in cinema culture, avant-garde fashion, as well as Karl Lagerfeld’s robust reshaping of the House of Chanel, those resources fueled her creative process. Against this backdrop, Sui has forged an immersive, highly imaginative style that transfers her aesthetic obsessions culled from contemporary culture into wearable designs for a youth focused market.

The fifth floor gallery at the Museum of Art and Design is dedicated to Sui’s influences highlighting examples of fashion luminaries such as Zandra Rhodes, Norma Kamali, Betsy Johnson, Diana Vreeland, and Biba (as worn by Anita Pallenberg) that are equally notable as highly influential female role models; against this formidable backdrop Sui’s fashion narrative emerges. The trademark Tiffany-style pendant lamps and glossy black Victorian furnishings that serve as fixtures in her boutiques amplify the mood of the Sui universe within the exhibition design. A wall of rock ‘n roll band posters sets the tone for both Sui’s internal soundtrack and that of her fashion shows.

If the spirit of the times stretching from the 1990s to the present could be encapsulated by a fashion exhibition, this presentation hits it out of the park. The show cogently identifies a uniquely American brand of fashion designer that, unlike her European counterparts, is indebted to the functionality of wearable sportswear that channels contemporary culture to a youth market. Sui’s influences – such as the vintage revival, rock ‘n roll, punk, grunge and surf culture – are displayed in imaginative tableaux reflecting a set design befitting each theme. Thus, a lush tropical backdrop completes the presentation of surfer motifs from Spring 2004, 2016 and 2019. Additionally, there are panoramic projections of video footage from associated collections throughout that bring each runway show and fashion moment to life.

Notable are the exhibition portions illustrating the creative process such as mood boards. For example, one board references the recent Warhol exhibition at the Whitney Museum, including his early commercial shoe illustrations and iconic celebrity paintings, fashion illustrations, various fabric swatches, and passementerie. Video footage of key Sui collaborators such as Pat McGrath (make-up), Garren (hair), and Thomas Miller (studio head), indicate both Sui’s long-term creative relationships and reveals the highly imaginative and collaborative work methods associated with her output.

European designers of this generation such as Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alexander McQueen, Romeo Gigli and John Galliano created fantasy statement-based collections whereby wearablity came as a second thought. Conversely, Sui’s output is grounded in stylistic functionality. Sui notes, in a 1999 profile in the New York Times, in reference to vintage designs, that, “You have to bring it back so that a person can walk down the street and not look like she walked out of a costume epic or a time machine. It’s got to fit how people dress today.”

Sui, as an aficionado of pop music and the associated fashion looks of the punk movement, such as the shock fashion designs of Vivienne Westwood and the anarchistic impresario motives of Malcolm McLaren, nonetheless puts a positive spin on their punk negation and revolt tactics by transforming the rejection of the status quo into bold and fanciful fashions – perhaps as a reflection of American positivism. In a similar vein, the disheveled thrift-store look exemplified by Kurt Cobain and the grunge movement is channeled, not as an affirmation of heroin chic, but rather, by Sui as readymade ensembles for those connected to the grunge aesthetic rather than the actual decadent and ultimately destructive image of the rock star lifestyle.

Sui’s persona and design outlook are best mirrored in the dichotomy of the pirate and the fairy princess as both figures appear in several collections. The pirate ensemble worn by Naomi Campbell (Fall 1992) replicates a swashbuckling outlaw in full seafaring regalia. Sui often transmits the fantasy of the romantic Bloomsbury era with diaphanous florals exuding a nymph-like aura. Likewise, both the Fairytale and Nomadic collections contain several pixie-like designs, such as Icelandic princesses and fairies. Sui’s muse, Keith Richards. is often associated with the pirate archetype with an androgynous bent – that is equally a Sui touchstone. The hyper-feminine girlish tendencies are shot through many of Sui’s collections as in reference to the schoolgirl and surfer girl looks. Her longtime friend and associate Steven Meisel remarks, in a catalog essay, “Anna is extremely feminine and her femininity translates into her fashions… She’s all about dresses – slip dresses, tunic dresses, smock dresses, baby doll dresses.”

The trademark 19th Century Aubrey Beardsley-style Art Nouveau graphics paired with dark gothic Victorian-style and lavender backgrounds appear in Sui’s interior store designs as well as in the packaging of her cosmetics and fragrances. Sui, throughout her career, embraces rigorous branding associated with these visual elements, which evolved over the years through her serious interest in graphic design, interiors, flea markets, and thrift shops.

Also notable within the presentation of “The World of Anna Sui” is the robust public programming that accompanies the exhibition. Panel discussions with fashion world luminaries such as hair stylist Garren and make-up artist Pat McGrath bring the creative influencers to the stage. Likewise, screenings of films such as Marie Antoinette (2006), including a conversation with director Sofia Coppola, showcase the visual media that had lasting impact on Sui’s designs while highlighting key contemporary cultural figures within a dynamic public forum.

Lastly, Sui’s runway productions – which began in 1991, jump-started by model friends Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington – added a supercharged endorsement to her debut show situated in an offbeat Chelsea warehouse. Later runway incarnations, such as a performance by rock band Elastica “in concert” with models strutting the stage perimeter, demonstrate her dedication to indie rock and the performative gesture within a fashion context.

One need not be a bohemian, a rock star, a surfer girl or a hippy to dress the part and touch the magic all the while going about one’s everyday life. Sui designs enable an idealized fantasy version of oneself all the while navigating a contemporary urban landscape, a suburban environment, or a rural outpost. One can dress in a Sui design, and thereby transform into version of a Sui fashion trope, be it a rock star, boho, punk, or a surfer chick. Once engulfed in the magical world of Anna Sui, one finds all that is cool and edgy yet safe to wear both at home and at work. Creative and alternative lifestyles embody fashion looks, and Sui translates such visual statements magically into classic wearable designs.

The post Fashion and Comfort After Punk: Anna Sui at MAD appeared first on artcritical.

May 6 to July 15, 2017
956 Madison Avenue, between 75th and 76th streets
New York City, ceyssonbenetiere.com

In the 1960s, Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, his follower, identified American color field painting as the wave of the future, citing Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland as the inevitable successors of the Abstract Expressionists. And so when Claude Viallat and the other Support/Surface French artists were shown in New York, they offered a serious challenge to this art historical genealogy. In his then renowned treatise on aesthetics, Art and Its Objects (1968), Richard Wollheim argued that “art and its objects come indissolubly linked.” We need, he said, “to understand this envelope in which works of art invariably arrive.”  To borrow his useful language, the painting of Viallat arrived in a very different envelope from the Americans championed by our formalist critics. In a provocative rhetoric redolent of the 1960s Viallat’s French champions argued that he represented a synthesis of Henri Matisse’s decorative impulse and Mao’s political radicalism. This is an obviously paradoxical synthesis, for while Matisse’s pictures of odalisques are often said to be escapist apolitical art, Mao’s favorite style of painting was Socialist Realism. What was at stake, I think, is the old equation between aesthetic and political radicalism. Matisse’s art was aesthetically radical in its day, and so Viallat thought that the next ‘great leap forward’ should be abstraction building upon his achievement, painting that uses his intense color while deconstructing the traditional stretcher.

This varied exhibition offers twenty works over a span of fifty years Using intensely saturated acrylic paints, with reds, yellows, pinks and greens, Viallat works with varied shapes: sometimes rectangles, but as often irregular shapes, including spheres 2016/344, on a striking black background for instance) and the triangular (1991/129). 2016/070 (his titles are consistently numerical, preceded by the year) is painted on a vertically hung mat.  Eliminating the traditional stretcher, Viallat hangs his dyed fabrics loosely on the wall. Taking this structure to an extreme, 2016/050 attaches two horizontal strips, painted in green and blue, to a loosely hanging yellow fabric frame. Occasionally, as in 2016/025, he paints on fabrics. His signature device is a reclined wavy lozenge, a squished trapezoid, which runs across the surface in all of the pictures. Sometimes, as in the rectangular 1993/138, it is relatively large; but usually it’s relatively small. Some of these oddly for  example. Others, however, have richly vibrant color contrasts. In 1077/042, greens and reds vibrate against a pale red background.   

Viallat’s works are decorative in the best sense of that word—viewing them can be compared to looking at a display of Islamic carpets. There is no obvious pattern of development here. For all the talk of Matisse, his art does not display that master’s stringent self-criticality, as evident in the late cutouts.  The exhibition crowds its twenty paintings, some of them large, into two relatively small galleries, a mistake, as such essentially decorative works need room to breathe. And it would be good to have a full catalogue, offering English-language audiences some perspective on the theorizing behind these paintings.  Right now we are much concerned with revising our received picture of 1960s art. MoMA’s large, revisionist exhibition, “Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction,” bringing together well known women like Helen Frankenthaler, Joan Mitchell, and to a lesser extent Jo Baer with many relatively obscure names from outside the US and Western Europe, represents a significant shift in the canon. To have also included Support/Surface painters (they all seem to have been men) in a MoMA survey would be an equally dramatic change, though not of course with the same political implications of the women’s show. But Support/Surface painting needs a more sustained educational effort from its gallery support system if it is to secure a place in the late modernist canon. I would be the last person to scorn analysis of an alliance between radical leftist politics and radical art, which was very much a part of its period style. Not, after all, when a quotation from Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 is the sole epigraph for Michael Fried’s Morris Louis (1971). That said, I would like to understand, in a little more useful detail, the envelope in which these paintings arrived in the American art world. As it stands, the idea that these handsome pictures are aesthetically or politically radical has not been established by this exhibition.

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April 25 to May 30, 2015
54 Franklin Street (at Cortlandt Alley)
New York, 212 727 3323

The subject of Holly Zausner’s 2015 film Unsettled Matter is the artist herself, but just as clearly, it is us, the viewers. It is a cyclical film, which variously embraces and casts off narrative, almost on a whim. Zausner passes through New York as a ghost — purposefully marching through empty streets, lobbies and stations, sometimes no more than a flicker, but just as often stopping to contemplate: a book in the basement of the Strand, the mangled visage of Queen Hatshepsut at the Metropolitan Museum, or us, the viewer, at the center of the swirling maelstrom of Times Square (the only time in which we see other human beings). Though she interacts with no one, she is performing for us, right up until the possible endpoint of the film, when she comes physically crashing down onto her workbench strewn with stills from her last work — death by art.

We cannot tell if the most spectacular special effect of Unsettled Matter is in fact the end of the artist. In Unseen (2007), her previous film, set in Berlin, her silent antagonist is a larger-than–life-sized rubber doll. This feminine and sculptural figure has appeared as a prop in many of Zausner’s works over the years. It is burdensome and seems to provoke danger wherever the artist goes: in Unseen she is watched by a tiger and threatened by a nearby explosion. Unsettled Matter is more foreboding as the enemy is ever-present, and we get the inkling that it is somehow contained within our own act of spectation. Besides a sense of determination in her demeanor and gait, Zausner’s primary emotion seems to be impatience and weariness. At one point the artist, wearing sunglasses indoors, drinks a pint and takes a brief respite from her perambulations — giving us a moment to breathe as well.

If this film has a beginning or an end, it is a tale of escape and alienation, and of the artist’s lonely practice, which, it would seem, always ends badly — the tense lines that support, very literally, this floating life, can give away at any moment. But such a linear narrative to Unsettled Matter is a bit too easy, and Zausner inlays the very simple activities of the film — walking and looking — with a few brief supernatural gestures that lead us to understand that we may disbelieve our eyes at any moment — this is the stuff of metaphor. The mystical details also become more apparent after watching the piece again, when we are half-expecting them and the suspense is much stronger. This is another indication that there is a rhythmic and endless cycle at play. Zausner briefly communes with the pharaoh Hatshepsut, then while admiring a tomb in the Metropolitan Museum, she departs, leaving her reflection standing there a few seconds too long. Similarly weird is a passage in the Strand, in which all the titles are inverted — a mirror of a mirror. Zausner also moves in slow-mo and speeds up until she becomes a blur. Despite these visual sleights-of-hand, the superb sound always keeps us aware of her steps, clack-clacking on the pavement.

Unsettled Matter seems most likely to be a dream, and a rejection of time. Unlike Unseen, which was decidedly tragic — the artist weighed down by her life, her choice, her femininity and her art — here she eludes us, traipsing through memories of past and future alike. She flits and stomps through the city, which is all hers, coldly regards the hysterical Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, and moves on, and keeps us a sympathetic but bewildered spectator, hustling to keep up.

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Group show at (harbor) Regina Rex
Opening September 21, 2014
221 Madison Street (between Rutgers and Clinton streets)
New York, 347 460 7739

Material Way at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College
September 30 through December 1, 2014
81 Barclay Street (at West Broadway)
New York, 212 220 8020

A cult figure, a painter’s painter, the critic’s favorite, Paul Pagk is an artist whose import is whispered rather than shouted, a secret shared by connoisseurs, his name like a clandestine password amongst an entire younger generation now exploring abstraction. His appeal — for students, graduates, artists, and other initiates — is understandable because Pagk’s work is all about doubt as well as strength, about uncertainty and perhaps even a deliberate clumsiness, the chance of the marvelous in a mistake, the freedom to make a mistake and remake it. A painting by Pagk is almost an exercise in thinking aloud. They allow us to see the artist slowly make up his mind and then shift, like a giant ocean liner changing course, leaving the rich wake of its decision trailing through blue water, the long process of composition left as a physical presence.

Paris has always been a center of gravity for Pagk; as an itinerant Anglo-Czech child he attended the storied École des Beaux-Arts. He was a precocious young student and went on to live the full mythic bohemian life in a squat studio worthy of Louis-Henri Murger. Thus although he has been based in downtown Manhattan for the last 25 years, and is considered a quintessential New York artist, Pagk’s work somehow maintains a European resonance, a sort of Parisian “punctum,” which makes his exhibition of recent work here resoundingly right. His show at the generous Galerie Eric Dupont, in the Marais, is pure Pagk: both absolutely straightforward and oddly unsettling, off-kilter. Pagk’s work can also be seen in group show’s at Two Two One and the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The artist hung the show himself, and has laid out with great care the relationship between the works, all the contrasts and continuities in his oeuvre. Their procession is established with a simple sight line from the entrance right through to the large back room, which contains the biggest paintings. To arrive there one moves through a small antechamber with a few smaller canvases. That room is followed by a long, luminous gallery with a wall of pinned, unframed drawings, some in pink gouache, others of graphite, and others with pure pencil or ink lines. They use many of Pagk’s common devices: geometric painting with a free hand and loose edges, occasionally employing reiteration of compositional elements in horizontal tiers across the picture plane. Many have diagrammatic compositions that resemble circuits or the lines of sports fields. Several of the untitled drawings have anxious hashmarks repeatedly scratched into their surface. They’re set next to a small oil painting, Untitled Yellow (2014), and face a large painting Untitled Yellow, Pink and White (2013). The varied works in these two rooms can be sensed at the same time as the dramatic final chamber with its imposing presence.

The two rows of drawings, challengingly asymmetrical, with eight on the top row and seven on the bottom, and Untitled Yellow, challenge any grand gesture, with their intimacy and hesitancy, their off-hand elegance, thumb marks on the white paper — all these accidents and accents which are perhaps carefully plotted, the secret “plot lines” indeed that run through this whole exhibition from beginning to end. This sequence is in fact infinitely subtly calibrated, like a musical composition, suggesting that all of its cumulative elements are contained in the last large works, even if we can no longer recognize them under the weight of their palimpsest of paint. We can make connections, if we concentrate, between the shapes and contours, the reversible geometry of these works, as they share a clearly connected language, a grammar not of ornament but intent.

The Pagk Paradox remains: work that is both seemingly casual, gestural, spontaneous yet also deeply pondered, solemnly crafted, weighted, freighted with their own history. The last room rewards us with heavily worked, multi-tiered large oil paintings (each 65 by 74 inches). The Meetin’ (2012), Untitled White Yellow and Grey (2013), High Tide (2012-13), and the bright fuchsia Once Above Once Below (2008-14) have delicious, glossy patinas built over months from layer after layer of hand-mixed paint, decision after decision, their white scumbled lines like contrails through the sky.

Pagk is not aiming for consistency but for a more challenging sort of complexity. He balances the sheer smoothness of certain surfaces (as in Once Above Once Below or The Meetin’) against the rough-hewn, clotted and dense presence of other paintings (such as High Tide or many small paintings like OGLS 128, 2011). He asks us to follow his path as if it were continuous, kept moving beyond the picture plane and extended invisibly, structurally, through the whole gallery space, a mesh of infinite, intangible perspective. Perhaps this is part of Pagk’s appeal to a young generation of painters: his work seems at first rooted in a long tradition of old-school abstraction (American AbEx and European movements from Constructivism to Support-Surface) but then reveals itself to be an open system of free-floating signifiers altogether appropriate to the contemporary digital environment. Even the sheer surface of Pagk’s larger paintings have something of the deep sheen, the reflective (in every sense of that word, giving space for reflection) smoothness of those screens before which many of us now spend our lives. But these are handcrafted, infinitely meticulous and altogether human screens porting the presence of all the many stages of their making.

Pagk plays between the “worked” and the provisional, mistake and certainty, the heroic and the throwaway, the build up and the letdown. As a result, his work contains a kind of layered time, a deep map of its own making, as if all the marks ever drawn between the Etch-A-Sketch of 1962 and the latest iPhone app were still extant, eternally present, tangible somewhere at some unfathomably distant, unlocatable level, within the surface of the very screen.

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