Noël, Noël

The Lack of Subtlety, the Art of Making Things Banal and Provincial Masturbation

I went to the "Denis Gagnon Shows All" exhibition at the Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal yesterday. 

Gagnon is a fashion designer - sorry "couturier" - well known for his thick glasses and recent use of zippers. The exhibition was designed by another of Québec's creative force, "famous architect from Montreal" (quote Nathalie Bondil) Gilles Saucier. Gilles and Denis must have agreed that Denis was a gift to the province - sorry the world (of fashion) - and his talents of universal artistic value and that consequently everything would be done to dramatically aestheticize not only his dresses but also the man - sorry couturier - and his sales. 

The dresses, which seem to have been selected for their geometrical proportions and high contrasts, are presented on plastic white models hanging from the ceiling and lit with led lights to project heavy shadows on the costumes and the floor. Since Denis' talent and the outcome of it is as atemporal as it is universal there are no tags with dates or material used for the objects shown - you just have to look to feel their value. If the shadows don't make you feel enough the dramatic music blasting in the background can help. It accompanies a geometrical three screen projection on the ceiling with Denis and his glasses in slow motion during a fashion show. The film plays on repeat just in case you didn't notice it the first twenty times around. It gave me a head ache and seems to purposefully distract you from the dresses.

Honestly some of the dresses aren't uncreative, but since all selected pieces are from his fall/winter 2010 or Spring/Summer 2011 collections, the curator monitoring the show should have put commercial tags straight up. Besides the moment you are out of the store - sorry museum - you can head to Holt and Renfrew a block away and buy your own. I know a lot of stores like to think of their windows as curated - fine -  I'm more curious as to why a museum would want a fashion window in its institution. 

Fashion is far from being a simple banality. More than art, it is key in how we construct our everyday selves for ourselves as well as for and through others, and because of this, like art, it deserves an essential place in public debate. Some fascinating fashion exhibits have been curated in exhibition spaces: at the Barbican Art Gallery in London with Viktor and Rolf or at the FIT on costume and American nationalism. So instead of just presenting two pretty tacky collections by a local designer with the most unsubtle presentation possible, why not use the collection to analyze the role of nudity in culture (a key aspect in his dresses), think about the influence of local vs. multinational trends, the presence of decay in contemporary high fashion, the evolution and relation of craft and fast fashion - in other words making it interesting and more than a boutique showcase.

The real pompom  was that - while the close up images of his dresses (horse hair and zippers) stuck to the walls looked like advertisementss, the music sounded like an Operette from an all-inclusive in Santo Domingo, the shadows contrived and the dresses overall tacky - the promotion material for the exhibit presented a glass-less Denis nude staring in our eyes. Again very subtle. I think you are suppose to read something along the lines of Denis Gagnon: an icon unveiled. Not only is the photoshop poorly done but not even for their Yves St Laurent retrospective - an icon whose influence is seriously difficult to question - was there no image of the couturier.

and that is called provincial masturbation.

The Exclusive Look of Indie Music - Tribal Beats and Possessed Singers

The launch of The Dø's latest video Slippery Slope happened yesterday at noon (very exciting says the web). And I thought the greatness of the web was it's so-called un-exclusivity. If the song itself sounds like M.I.A. meets Beach House, the 'exclusive' video reminded me of the other dozens of videos illustrating the recent material coming out of 'indie rock' (heavy beats, fragile voices and vintage tones): the ethnic 'tribal' looking thing, the geometrical prints, the monochromatic backgrounds for the choreographed scenes, the victimized yet praised singer, the coloured tinted screens, that regal animal set free and the intricate costuming of the main character pouncing around like a wild sorceress. Needless to say the video's creative sensibilities leave me speechless:

Two examples of the same successful recipe: Florence and the Machine's The Dog Days are Over and Yeasayer's Ambling Alp.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Green Porno

Sigmund Freud came up with a few ideas. Including one - later coined death drive - with which he revised his key notion of the pleasure principle. It goes more or less like this: At first Freud thought all humans innately acted upon a unique and repressed sexual drive (a drive to live and reproduce), he called the pleasure principle; a little later - after WW1's trench victims came back with their vivid trauma dreams and his daughter Sophie died - he proposed the more nuanced idea that human beings actually are ruled by a sex drive as well as the more self-destructive death drive directed at one's own organic end. 

As Rossillini demonstrates (wearing a few coloured leotards) seems like insects act out on both drives quite well:

The male bedbug stabs (death drive) his female counterpart in the abdomen to ejaculate (pleasure principle) in the wound. It is through her blood stream that his semen reaches her ovaries.  

To reproduce (pleasure principle), the praying mentis male gets his head eaten (death drive) before copulation is done by his female counterpart's 180 degree rotating head.

There isn't much sex for bees - it's hard to know where the pleasure principle and where the death drive begin or end. The Queen, only female bee of the colony who gets to do it, does it once, in mid air and lays eggs for the rest of her existence, while the 'lucky' male bee (drones) looses his penis (the ovipositer) in the process and immediately dies from the loss.

A Good Curator Gets

Drop Legs sent me this. These are all the reasons for why being a curator is a great career choice:

Fixing Playmates and the Birth of Viagra

December 1992's playmate, aka Barbara Moore, is on sale for an estimated 1,500 - 2,500$. Among the many lots, the centerfold prints showing post-production comments on the Playmates' sexy poses seem like the most interesting pieces being auctioned off at Christie's December 8th "The Year of The Bunny: The Playboy Collection" sale.

While unsurprisingly most of the Playboy memorabilia for sale offer a pleasant array of cookie cutter sexuality and generic eroticism (in this case: here's Barbara about to make you a creamy smoothie) these footnoted photographs offer powerful cues  for a better sex-life. Women, own up to it:
- "better curve" (Dec 1992 Playmate)
- "smoother" (All Playmates)
- "slimmer here slightly" (Feb 2001 Playmate)
- "accentuate nipples" (Feb 2001 Playmate)
- "kill nipple" (Jan 1995 Playmate)
- "kill stretch-marks" (Nov 1996 Playmate)
- "diminish stubble" (Nov 1996 Playmate)
- "kill out veins" (March 1996 Playmate)
- "fill with similar skin" (August 1995 Playmate)
- "kill line bellow lip" (August 1995 Playmate)

And how did the pharmaceutical industry come up with Viagra?