Portraits Of An Artist V

1. Yves Klein Gelsenkirchen Opera, 1959
2. Andy Warhol The Velvet Years, 1965
3. K.P. Brehmer Berlin studio, 1974
4. Marina Abramović Rhythm 10, 1973
5. Joan Mitchell Paris studio, 1957
6. Yayoi Kusama Infinity Nets, 1961
7. Yayoi Kusama Infinity Nets, 1961

While portraits of male artists often show the subject dirty and proud, either right before completion or while revealing the final result, female artists seem to be captured in the sensual act of creation itself - in an almost meditative manner, pausing, thinking.
/HORST

Post London VII

A 'False Encyclopaedia' double feature with Taj Ragland, discussing:
Agi & Sam Spring/Summer 2014

Agi & Sam get idyllic about city life. Snatching pages from the books of Paul Smith and Walter Van Beirendonck, Agi & Sam have been pumping out wonky quirk for the last couple of seasons, but for this outing the duo got a little crucial. Agi & Sam always seem to be designing for little boys in businessman drag, so in keeping with that they presented potent tailoring in 80's neon, trainer hybrids and an array of digital prints. Rich and playful in its context and references, the collection mimics its potential buyers; rich and playful.
/TAJ

The German term 'Alltag' describes the unagitated, the normal, the casual and everyday. Which is exactly what Agi & Sam did: hazardly dressing their man for Spring/Summer 2014. Establishing a kind of random, out-of-bed formal wear. In general, the 'accidental' seems to be a strong theme for a new season. Calculated chaos as mindset for the 2010s? An embrace and surrender to failure? A return to humanity? It would make a nice categorisation, in fact, the Unhappy Readymade decade.
/HORST








1. Agi & Sam Spring/Summer 2014
2. Lou Reed The Velvet Underground, 1973
3. Andy Warhol Mao, 1972
4. Bus Interior
5. Marcel Duchamp Unhappy Readymade, 1920
6. Willy Vanderperre Class Act, 2010
7. Wolfgang Tillmans Sportflecken, 1996
8. Agi & Sam Spring/Summer 2014

All about Taj Ragland

Post Paris XXXIII

A 'False Encyclopaedia' double feature with John-Michael O'Sullivan, discussing:
Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014

It's a boy/girl thing.

Before Raf Simons became boldface RAF SIMONS, he was just a shy Belgian student, hanging around with the cool kids - kids like his girlfriend, Véronique Branquinho, who would go on to collaborate with him at Ruffo, and to teach at the same fashion school in Vienna. And though Simons' star quickly outshone Branquinho's, you get the sense that he's never entirely shaken the vestiges of that outsiderish-ness, that lack of the intrinsic cool which Branquinho so effortlessly had.

The surfaces of this collection were so alive with associations to the past - the neon-pink shoulders from AW09, the rainbow stripes from Jil Sander Spring 2011 - that you had to pick away to get to the nancy-boy softness of thigh-grazing polo shirts, pinafore vests and fluid tees. Increasingly, his own-label collections seem as much about the flesh left exposed - the lean, gangly legs and arms emerging from cropped shorts and sleeveless shirts - as they are about the garments themselves. And the barrage of slogans (like the Jean Prouvé house, and the Calder mobile, and the Warhol illustrations stamped onto his last Dior womenswear collection) felt like semaphore; appropriated shorthand for a message that Simons won't, or can't, quite articulate.
/JOHN-MICHAEL

Undeniably, there is some kind of excitement attached to Raf Simons. And when you divide its parts, there is nothing exciting about it. Maybe it could be called 'Analytic Pop'. Ordinary things we know, signature ideas we crave, irritation we surrender to. Rave and advertising. Subculture and commerce. Raf is selling himself, selling out, selling dreams. A mass-media machine, a masturbation factory, a perpetuum mobile. The TV station that will exceed MTV. We have to admit the 'happy yeah' and swallow the pill.
/HORST








1. Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014
2. Jean Prouvé 1962 & Alexander Calder 1957 & Raf Simons 2011
3. Helmut Lang Spring/Summer 2004
4. Raf Simons & Véronique Branquinho Ruffo Research, 2000
5. Andy Warhol Four Dollar Signs, 1982
6. Damien Hirst Lullaby, 2002
7. Dior Fall/Winter 2013
8. Raf Simons Spring/Summer 2014

All about John-Michael O'Sullivan

A Short History Of The Comic Strip In Popular Culture X

1. Unknown
2. Andy Warhol Tongue In Ear, 1980
3. Jean Cocteau Le Livre Blanc, 1930
4. Barazoku Magazine 1971 - 2004
5. Gengoroh Tagame Gunji, 2005
6. Sadao Hasegawa Paradise Vision, 1996

Sex and comic strips or 'Outline Porn'. What begun with the introvert drawings of a young Jean Cocteau, a homoerotic dreamscape, has found its culmination in Hard Yaoi. In that sense, Warhol's idea of repeatability has turned into hardcore mass-comsumption.
/HORST

Post London

A false encyclopaedic guide to the London collections, presenting:
Marques'Almeida Fall/Winter 2013

1. Elad Lassry Woman (Puzzle), 2010
2. Hans Arp Maskenspiel, 1932
3. Anselm Reyle Untitled, 2012

Andy Warhol's Do It Yourself (Landscape) from 1962 has not only perpetuated the 'organic school' of Arp and Aalto, it has influenced generations after and anticipated the idea of post-digital DIYPBNCP ("Do It Yourself Paint By Numbers Camouflage Puzzle") as seen at Marques'Almeida.
/HORST

Post Paris XXVI

A 'False Encyclopaedia' double feature with Rudy Katoch, discussing:
Dior Fall/Winter 2013

“There is no political power without control of the archive, or without memory.”
Raf Simons fully understands the gravity of Derrida’s footnote. He plays with this idea lightly as he closes the show with three black silk memory dresses.

Look at the black leather Opéra Bouffe 1949 dress by Simons. It is a pastiche of the 'Pisanelle' cocktail ensemble Fall/Winter 1949–50. Dior was inspired by Renaissance artist Antonio Pisanello for his refined attention to clothing materials. Simons deflates the look, yet still foregrounds Dior’s fascination. He reduces the garment to its component parts. Warhol did this, with the same elegance, throughout his 1984 portfolio: 'Details of renaissance paintings'.

Silk velvets were reserved for eveningwear, not the cocktail hour in 1949. Leather replaces silk in 2013. Pop the New Look.

/RUDY

The re-evaluation of Dior has progressed. Raf Sander has found himself married to the ghosts of Dior and Schiaparelli, and to a certain degree, recovered from a traumatic change. Finding piece with his own past and the heritage of youth culture, altered towards surrealism. It's all about the (reversed) shoe, and Mr. Simons is running.
/HORST








1. Dior Fall/Winter 2013
2. Nat Finkelstein Andy Warhol and Silver Clouds, 1966
3. Christian Dior Fall/Winter 1949
4. Andy Warhol Venus, 1984
5. Raf Simons Spring/Summer 1999
6. Elsa Schiaparelli Fall/Winter 1937
7. Christian Dior Fall/Winter 1974
8. Dior Fall/Winter 2013

More about Rudy Katoch