November 25 - December 6, 2008

Reena Spaulings
A novel by Bernadette Corporation
paperback, 2004

I have wanted to read this book from the moment I learned of it (you can read the 1st three chapters here). Somehow I never ordered online, but finally it found me. The last copy at the MoCAD bookstore, it was in stock due to the Bernadette Corporation being in the intelligent and captivating exhibition Business as Usual. Reena Spaulings is a fictional character in her 20s (but isn't she all of us), a museum guard, a fashion model, a novel, and subsequently an art gallery and an art dealer. She's not one thing, she's many. And she's rarely still, though despite the fast pace the reader still is able to get inside her head. sometimes.

Some excerpts:
Preface- "If you look at a city, there's no way to see it. One person can never see a city."
-"It has to be informed, imagined, by many people at a time. It's an everyday group hallucination."
-author
3- Reena
4- "She is not happy, not sad, not nothing."
-secrets
-Nobody ever talks in the way it would blow her brains out. Plus she has no desire to interfere with the flows that brought these streams of people, words."
-bangs
7- "Reena could be a Manet, one of these thinking pictures you can't see through, no matter how long you stare at them."
12- "I am often surprised, not to say a little embarrassed, at how blown-away I can be by the street's beauty after a day in the museum."
15- "A body is a living, breathing image that thinks while exposing itself to others."
16- "What if nothing belonged to anybody?"
31- Manet, Young Lady in 1866
34- "The illusion unravels like in a Warhol, leaving something that's not an illusion."
-"Here is observing for those who can no longer see. Or, for those who can't really look into another person's eyes."
53
55- "We move through a city that produces boys and girls and extends itself through them."
57- "...thinking of how the sky is shoved to the periphery of the stage by our monuments and monumental buildings."
61- "I think how can we make a beautiful brushstroke with our existence?"
63- "an economy of essences"
65- "his shirts were always blank"
73- (war) "Anyway, there's no point in discussing such things if we can't find a way of talking about them that's as outrageous as the things themselves."
-dandy- "existence consists in the wearing of clothes"
-abstract painting- "opening a blank space in the texture of institutionally recognized meaning. Few artists leave that void empty for long."
76- hands
78- "It's as if an envelop is falling over this place, sealing us up inside."
-"I feel loads of unspoken words showering down on me. Shooting star sentences that will never be translated."
79- "She's an open book but every turned page presents another cover."
82- "New York is an entire library of books about everything and everybody. Reading here is work, and behind every book-filled room is another room of books and the reading never ends."
-"The city is an open structure that works by calibrating every relationship to its programmed expansion and destruction."
-"The city needs Reena and folds her into its architectures..."
-(NYC) 12 million reader-authors
-"There is no New York story, only an endless effort to make us forget that narration is war..."
-Reena's lighting system
84- "Bedrooms are the site of intimacy. What is more intimate, when shared, than boredom."
85- "Boredom like stupidity contains its own treasures."
93-94- "Was Reena pursuing her desires, or was she inventing them anew with each ring of the cash register."
94- "Its exclusivity lay entirely in the mis-relationship between what it had cost and what it actually was. The price here stood in for any and ever other quality."
95-96- 99 cent store
98- "Shopping together is like traveling: an elaborate way of making the couple visible to itself."
99- "'I'm surprised how much birds sing.'"
133- Voltaire- "That which needs an explanation is not worth an explanation!"
136- "...Capitalism, Empire, whatever...there's a general context that not only controls each situation but, even worse, also tries to ensure that, most of the time, there is no situation."
-"That the desert of these times isn't perceived is only one more proof of the desert."
137- "To live in the world means: to begin with the situation, not to deny it. To give consistency to a situation. To make it real, tangible. Reality is not capitalist."
143- Zizek
154- "Funny how individuality makes you generic."
154-155- "Here is an intellectual body of pure capability, but one that is also open, looking to be determined from outside, ready to re-write everything, to co-write, to be written on..."
158- "Better to eat candy like Andy."
165- "People want to be someone. But the really exciting challenge is to become no one."
174- "Everything emblematic of a being-alive that once was, is not available in a variety of prices and quality."
188- "I wanted to go out and see people and talk about everything I saw."
190- "Nothing ever ends until you let it go."
-"Only the impossible is worth the effort."
200- "because in New York we were sweating the evil they would be photocopying in three years time."
201- "You see? Your love is circular. There is nothing like it. It makes us forget how to change."
202- "I'm trying to wangle my way out of obligations because I need long hours to do nothing, which I consider to be a big part of my work now."
-back cover

March ? - June 17, 2008

Against Fashion

Clothing as Art 1850-1930

Radu Stern

Hardcover, 2003

27 cards

I learned about the Deutscher Werkbund and the Dress Reform movement in Germany last year and this book offered the perfect next step in reading about fashion and dress reform ideas from that period as well as my current thoughts about clothing and clothing production. While artists today like Andrea Zittel are exploring changing clothing habits with the Smock Shop, reading essays from 1850-1930 allow one some space from which to consider what she is doing, and form one's own ideas about fashion, clothing and the forces surrounding it all. While this book covers a period on the brink and within the Industrial Revolution, today from the other side it seems we're in need of another dose of dress reform and rebellion against fashion, particularly when companies like the GAP use child slaves to make clothes today still.

Selections from the cards:

2- "...fashion appears to be not just a consequence of capitalism, but one of the factors that contributed to its rise."

3- "The historical avant-garde would appropriate dress design as a privileged field in which the artist could overstep the limits of 'pure' art and act directly on daily life."

4- Romanticism- first important reaction against fashion

-Louis Magron on the true Romantic, "...He does not acquiesce to an accepted fashion, he creates his own. Instead of resembling everyone else, he aspires to be himself."

5- William Morris, "Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."

8- Greek dress- hanging of garments from the shoulders

19- Kandinsky, dress for Gabrielle Munter

39

44- giberna portatutto- bag attached to a belt

45- Productivists- "utility the only valid criterion that could give legitimacy to artistic activity"

-"'pure' art- no social utility, considered unacceptable"

-1921, Nokolai Tarabukin, "The last painting has been painted."

-Rodchenko- "constructive life is the art of the future. Art that fails to become a part of life will be catalogued in the museum of archaeological antiquities."

-Varvara Stepanova "our task is to find ourselves a place in life"

46- Aleksei Filippov, "artists in varying ways have merely depicted the world but their task is to change it."

48- Tatlin- constructed dress

49- color- chosen for the ability to conceal dirt

50- modular concept for clothes

61- Suprematist dress

67- Ramon Gomez de la Serna- poem on dresses

94- archaeology

96- George H. Darwin's Development in Dress

100- pockets

102- "why do we black and polish our boots?"

103- "patent-leather is an imitation of common blacking"

111- Oscar Wilde- Slaves of Fashion

113- Oscar Wilde- Woman's Dress

-(high heels) "...but what I object to is that the height should be given to the heel only and not to the sole of the foot also."

-warmth, material made of

116- "Ruins, again, may be picturesque, but beautiful they never can be, because their lives are meaningless."

118- "There is a divine economy about beauty; it gives us just what is needful and no more, whereas ugliness is always extravagant..."

119- "...every right article of apparel belongs equally to both sexes, and there is absolutely no such things as a definitely feminine garment."

122- Josef Hoffman- original vs. en masse

123- "One can recognize someone from far away by their personal way of walking or by their movements...In the same way, we would like an element of dress and the way in which dress is worn to be as familiar as the elements mentioned above so that we can recognize it as being in accord with the wearer's character."

131- Henry Van De Velde- visible seams

-"Everything we do to express our personality will strengthen the units of force that we represent, which will then converge to elevate the level of community life as a result of our individual efforts."

144- Friedrich Deneken- seams "make use of them as natural decorative elements"

152- Lilly Reich "Clothes are utilitarian objects and not works of art."

155- Giacomo Balla- Male Futurist Dress A Manifesto

158- no black and yellow

170- Futurist Italian tie- metal

184- Sonia Delaunay- Cezanne- "In an attempt to create volume, he enlarged his strokes of color and destroyed the outline of the object, the drawing. He began to destroy outlines, just as that the Impressionists had destroyed color and it is through him that dependence on academic rules finally disappeared."

-Matisse- inspiration

185- Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay- "Geometric patterns will never become old-fashioned, simply because they have never been fashionable."

186- Sonia Delaunay, "Rather than adapting dresses to the way we walk, we have had to adapt our gait to the dresses, which is absurd."

-"ideas shouldn't be taken from the past"