{christo and jean claude wrapped trees (1997-98)}

so i now have a studio. its all set up and there are now no excuses for lack of productivity.
i ahve to make up some good homework assignments for myself these days. to ensure productivity heading in the right direction this summer. i'm feeling a little disorganized -- but i really want to go through all my images and pick out the successful pieces, go through my writing, organize my materials, so that i can figure out how to begin. i started working on that quilt piece, and also compiled all the garments i have made with clothing patterns, but i'm still feeling paralyzed in terms of actually making things happen. maybe going through old images would help?
i really want to get an sf library card.
yesterday for 4th of july i went to bolinas and on the drive there maddie and i passed by a field of wrapped hay bails that we photographed extensively-- as it looked so much like an installation. it reminded me of christo's wrapped trees whicha re so evocative-- also reminded me how much plastic can take the place of fabric. i think about clothing as a barrier between intimate human and elemental world-- using plastic as a substitution here adds a notion of suffocating nature that is pretty important. also when things are wrapped you can't see whats inside, you have to imagine. reminds me too, that hiding and revealing have to do etymologically with the word apocalypse, from calypso, the one who hides oddysius in the oddysey. When clothing is incased in a plastic drycleaner bag, you know it is clean, preserved, hanging there pressed and special. When clothing is in a plastic shopping bag, depending on the brand insignia on the bag, the clothing seems to have more value, or at least be new.


also coming across a lot of good material on urban planning and design at work-- good aerial photos, maps, articles on textile design and tensile structures.... excited to start more pieces that involve maps...

I've noticed a funny cycle that I go through as I go in and out of being inspired. sometimes i feel void of all inspiration and all i want to do is numbly look at fashion collections on style.com or in magazines, but then it backfires and i see something that really throws a wrench in my numbness and makes me so excited and angry at the same time because i wish that i made it so badly and i can't handle it. I was especially inspired this fall ‘10 by the ‘09 fall/winter’s comme des garcons collection. that is to say that i think it is one of the only things that i thought about for an entire 3 months. One thing kawakubo (the designer) did that inspired me to the point of wanting to copy were these ghostlike coats of flesh colored tulle, where all the seams were made visible by the sheerness of the fabric. Brought to my attention one of the reasons I love sheer fabrics so much, is because when the light shines through it’s the seams that really become the focus.
I also love kawakubos sense of utility/fragility that screams survival in this collection—there's the sheer ghostly flesh colored tulle but then there's also military nods of army/navy type fabrics, even ethnic blankets, jacket facades, all collaged together, and I love how she uses what looks like twill tape (that you use to draw on dress forms normally) but she uses them to draw on her garments—completely brilliant! also there are toes painted on the oxfords...

When I was working at Berkeley rep, I learned from the tailor kathy that there are so many innards inside a men’s jacket, and I have been thinking for a while about making a coat where all these 'guts' (interfacing, padding, stitching, etc.) are visible. Or what if there were commercial patterns encased inside? I’ve always thought of the patterns/instructions as being just under the surface of clothes, as if you go back a step and they are revealed. I wonder if I could play with this idea, make the metaphor literal. There is something about sheer fabric covering things, like a haze, or veil, that really gets me; there is a little suggestion of time, or presence, without full disclosure.

[etymological side note again--the word apocalypse comes from Calypso from the Odyssey (there is the Odyssey again, should I re-read?). Calypso is the nymph who hides Odysseus away for years, and the ‘calypse’ part of the word means to hide of cover, and apocalypse originally meant revealing, disclosing, uncovering, which I just am so excited by in the context of clothes, or knitting/unraveling, or getting dressed.]

I wrote before about clothing as protection for survival of change, of being uncomfortable, of the harshness of the world. immediately I think of the convertibility of tents, bullet vests, forts, childhood forts. Lucy orta’s costumes. When I was in philly I found these ‘shelter halves’, (these buddy system ponchos), and I was thinking about rei kawakubo, and this fall winter ’09 collection in specific, mostly just about clothes as cocoons to protect people from the harshness of the world. This was when I was screen printing onto fabrics and found objects at the Fabric workshop and museum where I was an apprentice recently. I was focused on refashioning flat patterns, printing on lots of different fabrics ranging in sheerness/thickness from organza to canvas, even printed on army tents and army jackets that I found at the army surplus store. I even printed on an Indian silk sari. But I printed instructions to make a freaky tankini for siamese twins onto these shelter halves, these buddy system tents, that they actually used in world war II, called Zeltbahns. I love the implied convertibility (from poncho to shelter, the fact that there is this buddy-based assembly that needs to happen, that they are so readily garments and also architecture. Plus there is something so astro turfy about camo. something very nature v. culture in a sneaky way that becomes uber deep. Through some handy internet research, I found these diagrams for set up, that are so incredible I keep thinking of replicating them in some way. I am scared of making 2 dimensional work again, but I think i would be able to if it was disguised as instructions. I will post pictures of the shelter ponchos once i finish sewing together the printed clothing that will emerge from the side, but today i just finished this pixelated camo screen printed siamese tankini (that wont be the title don't worry.) i plan to epoxy it so it will be more like a stiff body shell, so i have to make a mold for that. but you can see in the detail how i screen printed directions for its making directly on the fabric itself. the pixelated camo was really exciting to me, especially when i found out that it is harder to detect a person wearing it than regular camo, like on cameras the pixels hide the wearer better. another bonus about the epoxy that i learned from my prototype is that it will actually tone down the brightness of the camo and the screen printing i did just sings out, louder than pictured here. hawt.

On another note, here are some possible show titles for portland:

universe, cloth, map

ordinary vestiges

instructions and extroversions

seams and extroversions

any favorites? or other suggestions?

{photos: 4 comme des garcons fw09 photos from style.com, lucy orta's refuge wear intervention london east end (1998), u.s. 1943 army photo from olive drab, , my own screen printed pixel camo siamese tankini (currently untitled, prototype)}

I got a library card and have been trying to read before bed to quell my cold self (fighting at times with my impulse to watch a law and order internet episode). I just read Gertrude Stein’s Writings 1932 – 1946, a nice intellectual ramble after the over the top sexy apocalyptic sci fi of Gary shteyngart’s super sad true love story. There is one passage that I need to transcribe here before I return the book to the library:

‘one must not forget that the earth seen from an airplane is more splendid than the earth seen from an automobile. The automobile is the end of progress on the earth, it goes quicker but essentially the landscapes seen from an automobile are the same as the landscapes seen from a carriage, a train, a wagon, or in walking. But the earth seen from an airplane is something else. So the 20^th century is not the same as the 19^th century and it is very interesting knowing that Picasso has never seen the earth from an airplane that being of the 20^th century he inevitably knew that the earth is not the same as the 19^th century, he knew it, he made it, inevitably he made it different, and what he made is a thing that now all the world can see. When I was in America, I for the first time traveled pretty much all the time in an airplane and when I looked at the earth, I saw all the lines of cubism made at a time when not any painter had ever gone up in an airplane. I saw there, on the earth, the mingling lines of Picasso, coming and going, developing and destroying themselves…I knew that a creator is contemporary and as the 20^th century is a century which sees the earth as no one has ever seen it, the earth has a splendor that it has never had, and as everything destroys itself in the 20^th century and nothing continues, so then the 20^th century has a splendor which is its own and Picasso is of this century, he has that strange quality of an earth that one has never seen and of things destroyed as they have never been destroyed.’ (Gertrude Stein, p. 532 – 533)

so I’ve been getting apocalyptic vibes lately, from everything. i loved so much how gertrude writes of artists’ existing and responding to their time and also the unknown that is the future, and how even though Picasso never saw the earth from high above, his work almost predicted the way it might look. And I also loved her comparison of the way the ground looks from an airplane to drawing. It reminded me of this very stupid critique I had with dennis oppenheim when he came to Wesleyan. I guess I say it was very stupid because he seemed so listless and dispassionate when he spoke about his own work, discouraging to me that the art world could take someone who’s early work was very ‘70s earth-worky conceptual, and churn them out into someone so clearly apathetic about art. But anyway, during his crit with me (about my abstract commercial pattern unmakings), all he really said was that my work reminded him of the topographical quilt that is the earth seen from the window of an airplane. And like the seams running through my pieces, roads bisect farms, lines mingle and ‘[come and go, develop and destroy themselves…]’ (stein).

it was also stein’s hinting at the fact that different eras destroy the ones that came before them, that really struck me, I guess I’ve thought about that before but never dared admit it. Just with all the contingency I think everyone feels right now but may not always acknowledge, I want to grasp this thing that is so remarkable to me, that things get destroyed, and leave a trace, and there’s just this push and pull as time passes. and for me, I derive comfort from inventing and engaging in processes of making and knowing and gathering, comfort in clothing, clothing that is a cocoon that could work to protect me from the harshness of the world. I think this is something I’m trying to get at for my portland show (I’m doing a show next month at Appendix project space), finding this place where time, everyday ritual, and interaction with materials can be in dialogue with what goes on outside my studio, where things are confusing and there is hardship and destroying and rebuilding, constantly. There is fragility and beauty, but there is also utility, convertibility, mappings, systems, some sort of master plan.

{photos, from top to bottom: glynis chaffin-tinglof's native, google image search for 'aerial view from airplane window', my own unmakings, and a photo swiped from this blog.}