Serious Eye Candy - Roberto Capucci

'Spectacular, stunning, dazzling, amazing - where do you begin with the work of Roberto Capucci, the Italian designer whose work is currently on view at the Philadelphia Museum of Art? The exhibit, Art into Fashion, showcases a magician of fabric and color with a long career that includes some film work (Theorem by Piero Pasolini 1968) and many extravagant showings in various European locales. He is not a work-a-day kind of fashion designer - his statements about distancing himself from the commercial and institutional demands of the fashion trade make that clear, but even if he hadn't said a word, the work on displays testifies clearly that this is not Art INTO Fashion, but ART on its own terms. Many of the designs - most are more or less formal 'party dresses' - are given the name 'Sculpture Dress' - emphasizing that the point is not how the dress would look on a woman's body, but how it looks by itself. In fact, in an accompanying video, the clothes in action looked somewhat awkward; folded and pleated appendages that were spectacular as details on the stationary work, bumped and jerked against the model as she walked.  But who cares? No one can afford these anyway, so they are fun to appreciate as sculpture in the round. Color bowls you over the minute you walk in - Capucci has a rich drenched palette of glorious jewel tones - green, pink, magenta, clear red, blue, turquoise that he mate with gleaming taffetas and sensuous satins - against black backgrounds and under dramatic lighting, the exhibit makes for a delicious experience. He also the skills of an engineer/sculptor and a whimsical imagination - you never know what he's going to do next - ruffles, patches, pleats, folds - the possibilities keep opening up as you watch. There is an underlying debt to nature throughout, paid out in the use of materials - a dress covered with polished pebbles, another belted with bamboo - as well as themes and ideas. A dress titled 'Bougainvillea' is a paean to the namesake vine - the multicolored ruffles twine up the core garment, as if growing before your eyes.
Sculpture is not always this chic - this exhibit is fun and interesting on several levels.
Art Into Fashion is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art until June 5, 2011.

The News from China

Art is still very powerful. If you ever doubted it, you just have to read today's news. The focus is on China, and 'power' is defined by extremes. One the one hand, the art market is buzzing at the $10.1 million dollar price of a painting by a living Chinese artist, Zhang Xiaogang. One the other is a very different show of power - the disturbing news of the disappearance of Ai Weiwei, arguably China's most important artist - in fact, arguably one of the world's most important artists at this moment. Ai Weiwei designed the 'Birds Nest' Olympics stadium (a project he has since disowned) but that is hardly the cause of the actions taken against him. Chinese authorities have harassed him for years because of his often elegant, sometimes subtle, but always outspoken protests again human indignities and injustices, and this week the stakes went way up when he was detained and his Beijing studio raided. It is interesting to try to understand why Zhang Xiaogang appears to have escaped disfavor, despite what seem to be critical elements in his work, while Ai Weiwei is marked for harsh treatment. Both have shown widely in the West and have a great deal of international stature. Zhang Xiaogang's series 'Bloodlines,' based on old family photos, presents a view of China trapped in a motionless reality of obedience - mother, father, child, all neat, somber, and nearly interchangeable. The expensive triptych, 'Forever Lasting Love,' is a surreal, Bosch-like landscape of global cultural, sexual, religious(ish) symbols - a fat American-looking turkey, Hindu-seeming ascetics in a sort of Nativity scene, a vagina-like flowering tree sprouting heads, etc. It may be hard to understand exactly, but it has a human and artistic logic, with recognizable bodies, faces, trees. Ai Weiwei, by contrast, may be more of a threat because his work is more slippery - at first glance it means little beyond the obvious, but as you think about it.... Art that cause one to think makes certain regimes very uncomfortable. For example, Ai Weiwei had a recent installation at the Tate Modern - I saw it when I was in London in December. A room of sunflower seeds, each one made of porcelain and hand-painted by an anonymous Chinese worker, formed a gray sea of tiny elements, each one exactly alike, none of them standing out in any way. A more overtly critical work was his response to the loss of so many children in the 2009 earthquake as a result of poorly constructed schools, when he used childrens backpacks to spell out the pained cry of a grieving parent. Other strikes against him seem to be that he is openly critical of Chinese policies on Twitter - he has 75,000 followers, and he is comfortable in the West (he lived for an extended period in New York.) A large public art project by Ai Weiwei, based on the animals of the Chinese Zodiac, will be installed in New York soon and will be on display at 59th and 5th Avenue from May 2 - July 15. Let's all hope he is there for it. 

Liz and Warhol

RIP Elizabeth Taylor - what a life. Her portrait by Andy Warhol from 1964 shows her when she was 32 - she'd been in the movies for 23 years already, having signed her first contract with Universal Pictures at the age of 9. He also made a series of images featuring her in National Velvet when she was 11. She was an inevitable draw for him - he created much of his own fame by his fascination with the shadow and substance of celebrity and beauty. He once said that a celebrity should know the difference between themselves and their image. "An actress should count up her performances, a model her photographs. This way, he said, 'you'd would always know exactly what you're worth, and you don't get stuck thinking your product is you and your fame". A fitting match is Liz's comment, quoted in Mel Gussow's NY Times obituary “The public me,” she said, “the one named Elizabeth Taylor, has become a lot of hokum and fabrication — a bunch of drivel — and I find her slightly revolting.” Warhol died in 1987 (shortly after my one and only in-person encounter with him, at a party, where he stood in the corner giving the rest of us a cold-eyed stare - 'observing,' his noted preference for social interactions) and the portraits he made of now-dead celebrities seem more and more elegiac - less sensational and more richly beautiful. The sharp separations of color dictated by the silkscreen process he used give the images a straightforward, robust kind of vigor that both underlines and confronts the fragility of some of the celebrities he recorded. Tragedy and human frailty were as much the attraction for him as beauty and fame: Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Liz Taylor - and Warhol himself. These images that seemed so 'Pop' and transient when they were made now have a kind of poetic depth, and form some of our most iconic memories.