Larry Clark: more KIDS a couple decades on

Larry Clark: Los Angeles 2003 – 2006

Larry Clark, one of the most admired photographer-filmmakers of his generation, renowned for the cult classic “KIDS” and further, if slightly more obscure and controversial films such as “Another Day In Paradise”, “Bully” and “Ken Park” – now exhibits his photography in London.
Berkeley Square is a far cry from the deadbeat sun-drenched Los Angeles that is the subject of the exhibition, and affects a strange irony as neo-yuppies eye malcontent tear-aways.
LA is present in the reflections caught in the eye of the main muse, a young Latino boy who grows up with each click of the shutter, LA is the atmosphere and the aesthetic, the mood and the moon that gives the boy’s coming of age a rhythm and a context.
The exhibition is the latest installment in a life-long artistic preoccupation with youth in its urban sprawl, transformation and descent, intimacy and detachment. The exhibition unfolds Jonathan Velasquez’s personality before the lens as it shifts and retreats, as he steps forward and withdraws, doubt and bravado in turn glimmering in his expression, his personality both revealed and constricted by the deadening lit setting of LA.
Larry Clark started working as a photographer at thirteen for the family business in Tulsa, by sixteen was shooting amphetamines and pictures of his friends shooting amphetamines and it was a preoccupation and subject matter he never left. His work has sparked outrage and discussion about social issues since the sixties and today it is no less astute and illuminating. He continues to capture the essence of youthful experience and the momentary sensuality and vulnerability of the dispossessed or distracted. He has inspired countless young photographers and artists; Bret Easton Ellis notably cited his work as inspiring his legendary novels, “Less Than Zero” and “The Rules of Attraction”. Even at sixty Larry Clark continuously captures youth with a combination of hard-earned wisdom and the same candor and freshness caught in the faces of his subjects.
This collection of photographs continues Clark’s exploration into the heart of adolescence, into motion without meaning and quietude without drive, into fleeting enlightenment and falling darkness, into what it is to be individual and alone in one shot and at one with the group the next. The drama of human identity on speed, unfolding and developing and evoking in the viewer an intimate connection with the photographer, the boy and and the atmosphere of tension and torn vanity.
Larry Clark is a photographer whose motive is honesty. He does not glamorize his subjects, he does not smother their identity with make-up or bleach them with clever lighting (see Vanity Fair Portraits if your preference is glamour). He depicts his subjects at their most vulnerable and personal without preying or prying or disturbing. The click of the shutter sounds so faint it could be mistaken for the beat of time, as he chronicles with a sort of modern naturalism what it is to be young and to lose it.

Larry Clark: Los Angeles 2003 – 2006
Simon Lee Gallery
Berkeley Street W1J 8DT

Big Bang: Creation and Destruction in 20th Century Art

The Pompidou Centre, Paris
15 June 2005-27 February 2006

The Pompidou Centre does not usually present its art works thematically. But, as its latest exhibition, 'Big Bang' demonstrates, its approaches are expanding and developing and the Pompidou is indeed the space of iconoclasm it was intended to be. Its exhibition really is a blast. As Catherine Grenier, Curator of the exhibition explains:

'Big Bang' is an entirely novel experience ... This change of approach is based on a theme which is critical to understanding art since the beginning of the 20th century: the modern Big Bang. By demanding radical liberation and shattering established values, modern art produced a kind of creative destructiveness ... Released from the weighty burden of History and the constraints of the academic approach to art, the artists of the 20th century introduced a rich and entirely new way of perceiving the world around them which has had a profound and irreversible influence on our contemporary consciousness. This new approach to structuring the collection has been based on the idea of continuous expansion of forms and creative forces emanating from the destruction of the original centre.1
Nietzsche's announcement in the 19th century that God is dead was significant in art's 'Big Bang' for the explosion of philosophy that succeeded it: a destruction of the original concept of God preceded the creation of humanist philosophy, which in turn influenced art and literature. The parallel 'Big Bang' of the Industrial Revolution - the spark of globalisation and political explosions - the first two world wars and the Russian Revolution in particular preceded not only an intensely violent period in world history, but a scientifically and artistically progressive one, in that ideas and constructs were and are continuously challenged. Many argue that society, and, therefore, art, has been regressive rather than progressive - recently Tom Wolfe in I am Charlotte Simmons echoed this sentiment with a paradise lost on campus - and others insist on essential rotundity; Sisyphus still pushes the rock up the hill. 'Big Bang' at the Pompidou encompasses all of this: planets turn around within progressive galaxies, but, essentially, progression supersedes individual absurdities. The Pompidou sees the bigger picture.

Each main theme - 'Destruction', 'Construction/Deconstruction', 'Archaism', 'Sex', 'War', 'Subversion', 'Melancholy' and 'Re-enchantment' - is then split into several rooms and sub-themes. The rooms are linked by artists whose exhibits cross over themes - Warhol, Picasso and Duchamp, for example - and the beat of partly acoustic installations, whose sound carries through the rooms. Just as the mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland carries a ticking clock, so the presence of time is domineering throughout this exhibition, with a variety of works that tick and chime so that the beat goes on and on.

In the first room is a work suitably named 'My attempt to raise hell'. It is a small iron sculpture of a sitting man, whose head loudly clashes with a large bell, with large enough intervals in between so that the trick affects screaming, laughing and expressions of horror from unsuspecting viewers. In other rooms, a man counts numbers and monotonous music plays. The cause and effect of this is parallel to a theme explored in The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald. In this novel, Gatsby is obsessed with time:
... His dream founders on his impossible insistence that time can be not only reversed but erased ... The attempt he is making to stop time, but elsewhere the clocks are ticking like mad. There is an unusually large number of time words in the novel - over four hundred.2
The habitual rhythm is a constant reminder of the presence of mortality - of life, of time running out, and the immediate problem of being lost in such a wonderland, and such a wasteland.

As the exhibition points out, in a subtle display of significant literature of the 20th century (Beckett, Kafka, Sartre), art and literature are two galaxies created from the same Big Bang. They are parallel worlds, in fact, where only the mirrors look different, but the beats differ in pace; hence the residual chaos. There is an atmosphere of flux in a space that sprawls with people of all ages and backgrounds, filled with artists whose only common denominator is their involvement in the 20th century. Hunter S Thomson, the explosive American writer, who committed suicide in 2005, wrote recently that a Chinese wise man cursed him, 'May you live in interesting times'. His curse was universal for bohemian habitués of the 20th century, for they all lived through such fascinating blues and jazz.

The exhibition certainly brings together highlights from the zeitgeist. It is wonderland, a circus, a hell, a paradise, and a parody. It is a curriculum vitae of the 20th century, a dolce vita captured on canvas, a vital stab at human suffering.
One room named 'Mirrors/Entropy' is filled with mirrors and illusions, designed to play with your perceptions. The adjacent room is constructed around childhood, and there is a garden of fake flowers and grass, aluminium and body parts, all much larger than an ordinary garden. There is also a video film where children are shown dressed as adults in their own garden party, with adult voices dubbed over their movements and gestures, in a comic manner.

Juxtaposed against playful illusions and childish games are outright confrontations with the darkness in the night skies - the wasteland - and the grotesque aspect of this circus, our world. A piece by the recent winner of the Venice Biennale, Annette Messager, entitled, 'Les Piques' (1992-1993), shows dolls smothered in black transparent fabric, pierced with five foot sticks in a voodoo fashion, lined up against a white wall, as if massacred - the valley of the dolls systematically destroyed by another firing squad. The piece is disturbing but somehow familiar, taking advantage of the common experience of childhood to create a violation that is universal in identification. 'Jeux d'enfants' by Sigmar Polke (1988) is another work of similar point, which shows two children playing in a wild battlefield. Everywhere in Paris, in self-promotion for the city's bid for the Olympic Games in 2012, was the slogan 'L'amour des jeunes' under the famous photograph 'Kiss by the Hotel de Ville, Paris' by Robert Doisneau. The juxtaposition of two young children playing in a no man's land and two young people embracing is ironic and touching.

To understand art's 'Big Bang', it is important to examine the actual Big Bang, and its implications for its metaphysical counterparts. It is widely assumed that the universe began with the Big Bang. But what is relevant now is what this explosion precedes: that is, the universe in the present and the future. The exhibition at the Pompidou gives a brief history of 20th century art: but what now? What next?

The stars in a galaxy cannot move away from one another because gravity holds the galaxy together. However, the galaxies themselves are moving away from each other and astronomers do not rule out the possibility that all galaxies will come together in about 70 billion years. This would happen if the universe contained more of a substance called dark matter, than the matter that is seen in galaxies. The gravitational pull of the dark matter would slow the expansion and all the material in the universe would eventually collapse, then explode again. The universe would then enter a new phase, possibly resembling the present one. The search for dark matter is a major area of research.3

Now, in art, the revolutionary movements that began so simply with cubism, fauvism and surrealism have expanded and moved away from each other, into new independent galaxies of thought and practice. And yet, some of these movements have come together in new forms - post-everything - and the original definitions are blurred and ambiguous. The stage has come where dark matter overwhelms what already exists in the art universe. As modern artists, such as Annette Messager, increasingly confront the dark matter of these terrorised times - an artistic instinct - so these differing movements and media combine to an essential observation and understanding. Therefore, it is indeed timely that the Pompidou should bring together such diverse movements of art, which represent the post everything return to an essential understanding of creation and destruction, and the realisation of dark matter, the subject matter of today. 'The Triumph of Painting' exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in London bears witness to this: 'The search for dark matter is a major area of research.'

So, as the 20th century has recently closed and artistic movements congregate in Paris, where they began in the original Big Bang, it seems that after the dark matter, a new explosion is imminent. The art world will enter a new phase, which will be the real test: will it be progressive, or will it simply resemble the world that passes slowly? One thing is certain: it will be even bigger:
And the astronomers - could they have understood and calculated anything if they had taken into account all the complicated and varied motions of the earth? All the marvellous conclusions they have reached about the distances, weight, movements, and disturbances of the celestial bodies are based on the apparent movement of the stars round a stationary earth - on the very movement I am witnessing now, that millions of men have witnessed during long ages, that has been and always will be the same, and that can always be trusted. And just as the conclusions of the astronomers would have been idle and precarious had they not been founded on observations of the visible heavens in relation to a single meridian and a single horizon ... He heard Kitty's voice ... She would not have been able to make out his expression had not a flash of lightning that blotted out the stars illuminated it for her. The lightning showed her his face distinctly, and seeing that he was calm and happy she smiled at him. This new feeling has not changed me, has not made me happy and enlightened all of a sudden, as I dreamed it would ... But be it faith or not - I don't know what it is - through suffering this feeling has crept just as imperceptibly into my heart and has lodged itself firmly there.4
'Big Bang' explodes all residual dark matter of the past, of the 20th century, and precedes new movement, subtle as the transition may be. As the installations at the Pompidou tick and chime, so we wait for it all to go off again. We are addicted to the beat. Our ears still ring from the last explosion and that ringing has been orchestrated into a masterpiece at the Pompidou.

So even when it all blows up, there will always be stars and there will always be dark matter: for this is the art world.

Christiana SC Spens

References
1. Grenier C. Big Bang: Creation and Destruction in 20th Century Art. Paris; Editions du Centre Pompidou, 2005.
2. Tanner T. Introduction to The Great Gatsby. Penguin Classics, 2000.
3. Brecher K. World Book: the Universe. 2003.
4. Tolstoy L. Anna Karenina. London; Penguin Books, 2003.

French Book Art/Livres d'Artistes: Artists and Poets in Dialogue

5 May-19 August 2006
The New York Public Library

'Never give into routine; at each step, through books or in a wider context, everything must begin anew, from zero.'1 So Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet and Henri Michaux forewarned after World War Two, a catastrophe whose destruction sparked a new wave in the development of book art in France, which began in the late 19th century with the publication of L'Après-midi d'un Faune in 1876 by Stéphane Mallarmé.

The period in which book art gathered momentum in the interrelated art forms of visual art and writing was defined by tempestuous and dangerous times, by wars, poverty, rebellions, flux and a widely spread need to grasp some sense of comprehension; to resurrect oneself and one another through art. With such passion in both the literature and art of the time, it seems inevitable in hindsight that the two art forms should have collaborated in what was, effectively, a wartime romance of the most powerful modes of human expression and emotional renewal.

Magritte separately played with the relationship between words and pictures in his paintings, in which he subtitled paintings of everyday objects with contradicting texts, to expose the convalescence between a thing and its linguistic definition. In the Surrealist ideology, he broke down the relations we assume between a thing and its representation - visual or literal. His paintings expressed a broken relationship between actual and art, and between painting and words. He was a Surrealist, and this movement, although with clear artistic influence thereafter and into the modern age, scattered when war began: 'The sense of chaos, of panic, which Surrealism hoped to foster so that everything may be called into question, was achieved much more successfully by those idiots the Nazis … Against widespread pessimism, I now propose a search for joy and pleasure'. So Magritte and his fellow Surrealists signed in a manifesto: Surrealism in Full Sunlight. After that, Magritte entered a Vache period, an explosion of political satire and grotesque ridicule, albeit affecting no more than nausea in the critics of the time. Those critics were prone to nausea, though.

More importantly, his stance had changed from the deconstruction of the relationship between Art and Reality - and Painting and Words - to a style that, despite being essentially satirical and critical of the world he saw, was an attack against the negativity of the world rather than an attack against its salvations. With the oncoming of war, therefore, the mood changed. Artists did not disintegrate their forms, did not expose the inadequacies of art forms - but rather they expelled those inadequacies by collaborating with one another. The poet needed the artist to elaborate his meaning in visual terms - and the artist needed a spark of inspiration, a leg-up. They needed each other equally. Amid the devastation of war, artists and poets recognised the most essential front against absolute destruction - human solidarity. In their works, therefore, they formed excellent dialogue, in which the brilliance and possibilities of human relationships are celebrated.

This romance of the two complimentary art forms, poetry and painting, proves itself to be extraordinary with the careful and informed curation of the 'French Book Art/Livres d'Artistes' exhibition on show in the middle of Manhattan this summer. It is the realisation of the original concept for the show by Yves Peyré and has travelled previously from The Fitzwillian Museum, Cambridge, England; to the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon; and the Sorbonne, Paris. With clear admiration for the artists and writers whose collaborations star under delicate spotlights, the exhibition represents a wide range of artists, mostly based in Paris, but also New York later in the century, through 126 artists' books. Other related works from corresponding periods and artists furthermore complemented the books, as well as photographs and sculptures that enrich the exhibition. The technique and care with which the exhibition is arranged parallels the incredible skill and sense of perfection with which the books were originally published. The exhibition, in a sense, is simply the continuation of a line of thought - where collaboration, sociability and mutual artistic sensibility are the centrepiece ideas. As one book expresses the imagination and creativity of two artists, so the exhibition publishes the entire movement with appropriate understanding and finesse.

The setting of the New York exhibition, furthermore, is ideal. It resides in a large room of the New York Public Library in the middle of Fifth Avenue, surrounded by other manuscripts and delicate works in other rooms … with people writing angry and yet eloquent letters to Mayor Bloomberg concerning the snatching of a million or so dollars of public funding for the institution by the entrance to the French Book Arts exhibit. The day I happened to see the exhibit, employees were rushing around in preparation for that night's 'The Beautiful and The Damned' party in another room. There are granite lions guarding the Fifth Avenue entrance and Fitzgerald's spirit drinking bourbon in the bar (it is a rare thing indeed to find a library with an open bar, with such a discreet elite). Never before has a library been such a happening place.

But chandeliers, fashion editors and glitterati aside, the Livres d'Artistes is a soirée that the masses can attend: why, admission is free of charge. Even a Fitzgerald whose inheritance has still not come through - or a Picasso who has smoked all his dollar notes with tobacco - could afford to see this exciting exhibit. Such is the democracy of the New York Public Library: the rich and famous dress as flappers, raising funds so that the artists can be enlightened for no expense. It is a beautiful thing.

One of the most illuminating features of the exhibition, never mind the pretty lights and bourbon in the air, is the timescale of the represented cultural association. The book art movement, subtle and understated in comparison with other movements that exploded and burned out quite rapidly, stretched over more than a century. More than that; the books are interrelated, not by simple form - a concept that these days, given the boom in graphic design and so on, does not seem so revolutionary. Rather, the books form a single and yet encompassing movement, at one with its central ideas of dialogue in reaction to destruction - a clear link between war and relationships - with the first ‘Make Love Not War’ banner to exist, where a love heart described the idea in place of the prose, but only in the context of the worded statement.

To print and paint had its developments and ramifications in the visual arts to such an extent that one cannot go into any collection of contemporary art without seeing some wordplay. Likewise, whether or not they admit it, most people do judge a book by its cover, as publishers realise, and they exploit the desire for a seductive picture with approaches that vary according to country. American publishers, for example, I am told by someone in publishing that night at the party, tend to describe the whole plotline in one revealing photograph, whereas the British remain inclined to provoke the reader, or viewer, with a suggestive detail. Words and pictures these days are inseparable - so inseparable, in fact, that it seems a strange concept that books were ever plain prose, in a superficial manner, or that paintings demanded no poetic license.

To see the Livres d'Artistes exhibition - in New York or anywhere else - is to fall in love all over again. It is to see the most luminous and yet understated mutual expression of solidarity in the face of disintegration. These books were made during war, in the grieving silences that followed, and in the fever that precipitated a new one: in a time when all three modes seemed to be playing grotesquely at once and when dialogue, writing and art were needed more than ever before. 'Manuscripts don't burn', Bulgakov wrote,2 and one statement with its entwined picture remains especially clear through all the smoke - it just sparkles in reactive romance: 'Make Love Not War'.

Fitzgerald isn't even at the Beautiful and Damned party: he crept downstairs, a Manhattan in hand, to see the soirée of poetry and painting, so silent and yet so musical, a discreet romance in the dusk of the library, as the revelry and glitter colours the sky pink in renaissance.

Christiana Spens

References
1. Exhibition Introduction. Yves Peyré, Director, Bibliotheque Litteraire Jacques Doucet, Universités de Paris.
2. Bulgakov M. The Master and Margarita. London: Penguin Books, 2004.

ANDY WARHOL Self-Portraits

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
12 February - 2 May 2005

Andy Warhol is best known for his iconic portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Jackie Kennedy. However, in this exhibition the focus is on the artist (or perhaps artiste) as he saw himself, or as he wanted to be seen. The works are portraits of the artist's masks and their ambiguity lies in whether they are, in fact, accurate representations of the real Andrew Warhola, or simply a means of deception - an act in pursuit of privacy.

Every portrait in the exhibition projects both a vacancy and an allure, but essentially a superficiality that appears to betray no clear feeling. The artist's face drifts or stares blankly as if bored by the attention. In averting the gaze of the viewer, Warhol seems to deflect analysis and confrontation. He appears to say, 'Look at me, look at me! Stop staring, stop staring', both craving and scared of the attention. When he cast himself next to Hollywood's most famous, his own worth of celebrity was questioned - he had become well known by association with other famous people and by depending on the kindness of photogenic strangers. An actor out of place in the show, Andy's sketch was more in the tradition of Samuel Beckett than Hollywood. Part of the frustration induced by the self-portraits is their tendency to tease the audience in its attempt to understand Warhol:
We end up knowing everything and nothing. So it is that artists' self-portraits, whether intended as disclosure or as concealment, remain as fictional as their other work … Andy Warhol's self-portraits constantly shift back and forth between telling us all and telling us nothing about the artist, who can seem, even in the same work, both vulnerable and invulnerable, both superficial and profound.1
The viewer is waiting for the real Warhola, waiting for some insight, some depth, something more than the superficial. But the paintings do not, in fact, go anywhere; they do not show anything except a grey void behind dead eyes. Although the portraits were completed over a period of several decades, the expression hardly changes through the collection. There is no movement or vivacity beyond tension, no narrative and little communication, like a single frame in a film of a mime act, repeated many times.

Even when Warhol is at his most serious and confrontational, for example, in his series of portraits with skulls, there is an underlying black humour that dismisses any real sincerity. Connotations of Hamlet talking to Old Yoric's skull imply a theatrical prop and Warhol's earnest dialogue with his own mortality becomes another artificial play. Another painting of Warhol, wearing an exaggerated expression of horror as he is strangled, implies a B-grade horror film rather than anything more serious. And yet, to dismiss these explorations of mortality is perhaps to be too cynical. Warhol also painted guns, 'wanted' criminals and car crashes: his use of death as subject matter was not a passing whim, but a motif in all his work. It reflects his own near-death experience after he was shot three times by the deranged Valerie Solanas and pronounced clinically dead on the operating table. Although this subject is treated sardonically by Warhol in his film 'Andy Warhol TV', where he reflects upon the importance of good make-up in the coffin, the gravity of his expression, which is present in nearly all the portraits, suggests genuine fear and loneliness; but as a clown, he chose to paint it as a joke. He also turned Hollywood - through repetition of its symbols - into a theatre of the absurd and his own presence in the great parade turned it to parody:
'One of the standard devices of the art of clowning is endless and unbearable repetition. It serves as an excruciating illustration of the fate that condemns humanity to repeat itself - the same mistakes, the same recurring illusions borne of the same impossible dreams. Like Camus' Sisyphus, clowns express a condition of absurdity from which only awareness and feigned submission can offer any hope of emancipation.'2
Warhol was aware of the absurdity of celebrity, of Hollywood and Western society, proven by his own place in it. He was both the prima donna and Pierrot of Pop Art, tragi-comic in essence. Only through his ability to ridicule the art world – by selling repetitions of soup cans and portraits of his masks, by avoiding the gaze of the viewer, by sending an actor incognito to lectures in place of himself and by giving monotonous 'yes', 'no' and 'I hadn't really thought about it' answers in interviews – could he gain liberation from the masquerade in which he was trapped. Only by acting like a clown could he be an artist.

A mask can have a number of uses: to scare, to entertain, to conceal, to deceive and to exaggerate. Warhol's self-portraits do all of these things; his works are an expansion of his masquerade and an insight into an artist who was a clown. Ultimately, in their vacancy, the self-portraits are not informative or insightful, but disarming. There is no person, no celebrated artiste, behind the masks any longer; only these portraits – the masks themselves – that will never fulfil the audience's curiosity towards an invisible man whose legacy was a collection of his own and others' masks. Warhol gives the viewer nothing more than the superficial, and the implications of absence. Here, there is no record of the actor, only the act. If Warhol was speaking the truth when he said, 'Just look at the surface of my films and my paintings and me, and there I am. There is nothing behind it', then he admits that behind his mysterious persona there was no substance, no meaning. Either the self-portraits are an accurate portrayal of a man who was nothing but a superficial construction, or a portrayal of a man who did not want to be seen as anything more than that; they are the invisible man's silver-grey hairpiece and dark glasses. He appears to have been dehumanised by his art, which often represented the nihilistic vacancy of society and celebrity. He came to epitomise his subject matter, or rather, the artist used the actor to represent the insubstantial masquerade that he became a part of.

In this collection of paintings, Andrew Warhola has not portrayed himself, but painted Andy Warhol, the star, the act, the mask. His self-portraits are a trick, teasing the audience with the implication of a man behind the mask. As Dostoevsky wrote in The Double, 'I put on a mask only for a masquerade.'3

Christiana SC Spens

References
1. Rosenblum R. Andy Warhol’s Disguises. 2005
2. The Circus of Cruelty: A Portrait of the Contemporary Clown as Sisyphus. In: Clair J (ed). The Great Parade. Yale University Press, 2004: 35.
3. Dostoevsky FM. The Double. Dover Publications, 1997.

Elsa Schaparelli

L’union centrale des arts décoratifs (l’ucad), le musée de la Mode et du Textile, Paris
17 March-29 August 2004

Elsa Schiaparelli, the flamboyant fashion designer of the Art Deco period, is renowned for her fabulous eccentricity and innovation. She changed fashion and people's attitudes to it with her scandalous dresses and colourful personality. Her legacy of spectacular designs and an entirely innovative approach to fashion design has moulded contemporary fashion and inspired countless fashion designers, including Galliano, McQueen, Gaultier and Yves Saint Laurent. In short, Elsa Schiaparelli was the woman who shaped fashion as we know it today - creating the pattern for all dresses to come.

The lady who defined 20th century fashion was born in 1890 into a wealthy and distinguished family in Rome, where she spent her childhood. She was outrageous from a young age, offending the nuns who taught her in her strict Roman Catholic school and disgracing her family when she attended a ball in Paris wearing only a length of fabric wrapped around her body, which promptly unravelled. When she was 23, she first travelled to Paris, and then to London, where she met William de Wendt, whom she married the following year. In 1919, Elsa Schiaparelli gave birth to a daughter whom she named Gogo. The marriage, however, did not last - due to financial difficulties and William's unfaithfulness - and the couple divorced in 1920. This left Schiaparelli a single mother, and fuelled her determination to succeed independently in the fashion world. She moved to Paris and met the celebrated designer, Paul Poiret, who introduced her to the art of couture.
Elsa Schiaparelli never learnt to sew, but relied on couturiers and seamstresses to materialise her designs - a method of couture production that has been widely adopted by contemporary designers. She sketched designs on paper and directed her assistants in the construction of the dresses - instructing alterations until the final design matched her vision. Schiaparelli first became successful as a designer with the creation of a line of innovative sweaters. An American friend who was visiting her in Paris wore a simple yet stylish top that inspired Schiaparelli to design a sweater that was tight fitting and elegant. She made contact with an Armenian seamstress, and the two agreed to go into business together. The new business acquaintance agreed to reproduce a simple design of a big white bow outstretched like a butterfly on a black woollen top. The American shop Strauss saw the potential in this innovative sweater and ordered 40 to be made in a fortnight - they sold out. This initial success was only the beginning of Schiaparelli’s fantastic career.

Schiaparelli became famous for being superbly original in her fashion design and in her marketing. She printed press releases on fabric, for example, and produced fashion shows that were uniquely spectacular. These days such performance in relation to fashion is commonplace; in Schiaparelli’s time it was unheard of.

Her collections and shows most often had themes. One collection was inspired by African iconography; another drew inspiration from sailors’ tattoos, and dresses bore snakes and anchors. Other collections included 'Musical Instruments', 'Butterflies', 'The Pagan Collection', 'The Astrological Collection' and 'The Circus Collection'. Each collection of highly original and often eccentric clothes caused scandal and success - and Schiaparelli became famous.

Schiaparelli’s success caused intense envy on the part of Coco Chanel, her greatest rival. The two were continuously compared and constantly competed with one another. While Chanel was minimalist and conservative, Schiaparelli was outrageous and flamboyant and the pair fought to achieve popularity with the Parisian fashionistas. The rivalry was also heightened by the fact that the two designers moved frequently in the same social circles, with similar ambitions and aspirations.

As well as envious acquaintances, Schiaparelli had a wide circle of friends, with whom she often collaborated. She was good friends with the writer, filmmaker and artist Jean Cocteau; Schiaparelli once reproduced a drawing by Cocteau on an evening cape in embroidery. She was recognised as an artist by such people as Marcel Duchamp, Picasso and Stravinsky, and closely connected to the Surrealist movement - for example, Schiaparelli’s 'Lobster Dress' was a collaboration with Salvador Dali. This connection with the wider art world set Elsa Schiaparelli apart from most other fashion designers - she was not merely interested in beauty or fleeting fashion trends, but in art, culture, ideas and innovation. Essentially, Schiaparelli was distinctive in her involvement with the wider intellectual and creative world.

Schiaparelli was a true innovator, and the first person to make fashion available to the masses. She opened a clothes shop - the House of Schiaparelli - in Paris in 1927, where she sold designer clothes off the rail. Before this, all haute couture was 'made to measure', and customers had to be fitted before tailored clothes were made for them. This meant that only a very few elite members of high society could wear fashionable clothes. Schiaparelli's shop was the first step in changing all of this: the clothes chains and availability of fashionable clothes all started with Schiaparelli. She also started, parallel to Chanel, the trend towards comfortable sports clothing, rather than restrictive couture, as acceptable daywear.

When the Second World War started, Schiaparelli moved to America, where she continued to be a successful designer and entrepreneur. However, when she returned to Paris after the War, she found it to have changed profoundly. There was no longer the demand for scandal and flamboyance that there had been before, and her designs no longer captured the public mood. Meanwhile, a new generation of designers - particularly Christian Dior - were becoming the new stars of the Parisian couture scene. In 1954, Schiaparelli closed her clothes shop and ceased to work as a designer. Her perfumes ensured that she had a good income up until her death in 1973.

Schiaparelli is remembered as the woman who changed fashion profoundly, a lady who made scandal and flamboyance chic, and who has inspired countless fashion designers. She was a true innovator, artist, entrepreneur and style icon, whose legacy of fabulousness has never gone out of fashion.

Barbara Kruger: Politics, Pop and Protest...

Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow
21 April - 26 September 2005

Barbara Kruger, American artist and political activist, is exhibiting in Scotland for the first time, contributing to the 'Rule of Thumb: Contemporary Art and Human Rights' programme of exhibitions, workshops and events that confront the exploitation of women. Her exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow features an installation that fills the whole of Gallery 4 - the floor, columns and skylight windows - with enlarged newspaper articles and slogans. In an interview with Amnesty International early in 2005, Kruger commented:

I try to address notions of power and how they make us look and feel: how they dictate our futures and our past. How power is threaded through culture impacts both men and women. We all live in a world constructed through the dense machinations of trade and expenditure, of pleasure and desire, of labour and wages. I think that pictures and words have the power to make us rich or poor. I try to engage that power using methods that are both seductive and critical.
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. She attended the Syracuse College of Visual and Performing Arts, before studying under Diane Arbus at Parsons School of Design in New York, emerging out of the New York art scene in the 1970s. Kruger's ideals and methods are reminiscent of the Guerrilla Girls - albeit in a less radical form - but her work is not new. It is perhaps even passé; but this may be a response to a political and social situation that has changed little in the past few decades and whose particular issues are still relevant. The exhibition effectively communicates the extent of domestic abuse, prostitution and general exploitation of women in contemporary society. This aspect of her work appears to be socially conscientious and compassionate, but it is only one side of a paradox. Although the exhibition does not show a large amount of Kruger's work - it is a single installation rather than a retrospective - it does give access to the artist's other work through a well-stocked gallery shop. In fact, her work is suitable gift shop material; her pictures reproduce well, and her puns are entertaining. The concern is that there is little to distinguish between Kruger's work, which has been exhibited in the Tate Gallery in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the comic retro kitsch to be found universally in pretty gift shops. Kruger's work, tinged with politics for sincerity, sells well - but has Barbara sold out?

As with many Pop artists, Kruger has a background in advertising. She began her career working for Mademoiselle magazine and uses such techniques to publicise her cause. As well as the visual arts, Kruger writes essays and articles and a collection of these entitled Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances is for sale, giving an insight into the artist's concerns and political orientation. Although of honourable intention, displaying a clear drive for social reform and cultural liberation, her writing is reminiscent of American film-maker Michael Moore's book, Dude, Where's My Country? when she comments:
In a society rife with purported information, we know that words have power, but usually when they don't mean anything ... This concerted attempt to erase the responsibilities of thought and volition from our daily lives has produced a nation of couched-out softies, easily riled up by the most cynically vacuous sloganeering and handily manipulated by the alibis of 'morality' and false patriotism. To put it bluntly, no one's home. We are literally absent from our own present.
Kruger attempts to solve the apparent lack of perception in modern society by facing the viewer with outsize slogans splashed across photographs; if people do not notice statistics about domestic violence in newspapers, then perhaps they will if they are blown-up and pasted onto billboards. It is the same concept used by Michael Moore, whose films Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 911 were shown in cinemas globally. Similarly, Kruger fights against a selective media with media of her own that is bigger, more colourful and in residence in a large city for six months. She is using art for activism, just as Moore used cinema to expose the American nightmare. It has become a dirty game.

Hidden somewhere amid the metre-long letters there must be some small print - the art world's fee for giving political activism space to advertise - as in this otherwise reputable and refreshing art gallery, there is no art in Gallery 4. There is a gift shop where you can buy a T-shirt with the - ironic? - slogan, 'I shop therefore I am', but there is little original substance here to balance the style. In imitation of Barbara Kruger, I quote The Strokes: 'Is this it?'

Paris Architecture

ROBERT MALLET-STEVENS
Centre Pompidou, Paris
27 April - 29 August 2005

Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886-1945) has, in many ways, been forgotten outside of Paris, and to those who have studied his work, he is often described as a relatively unimportant architect in comparison with Le Corbusier and other modernists. At the Pompidou Centre, in summer 2005, his work was resurrected from the dust and given the platform to be criticised afresh. Sixty years after his death at the end of World War Two, he has finally been given a wider audience.

Very much an Art Deco designer, Mallet-Stevens exhibited in the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris - he designed film sets and grand interiors as well as buildings. The main attraction of this exhibition are his illustrations, but his colour drawings and simple, black and white diagrams are also featured. His 'Ideal City' is particularly interesting and aesthetically attractive: the collection of individual buildings includes a school and a hospital, among other expected features. Although they are pretty rather than technical, the drawings are worth seeing, if not for their architectural significance, then for their decorative qualities. As Tamara de Lempicka's work was criticised for being too stylish at the expense of substance during a recent retrospective of her work in London, so Mallet-Stevens appears to have made his ideal city impractical. Indeed, the structures are merely hypothetical and wishful in conception - a deeper analysis of their practicality would ruin the fantasy. Against the backdrop of the mass destruction of war, however, it may have been better if Mallet-Stevens had developed the technical insight to parallel his stylish experimentation. There is always a regret, when viewing fantastic designs, that they would be impossible to realise.

However, Mallet-Stevens did not only dream of buildings. Although the 'Ideal City' was not constructed from the debris of war, other buildings materialised from his commissions from wealthy patrons. The exhibition shows the original drawings, models and actual buildings of the Villa Noailles (1923-1928), specified by the aristocratic Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles to be, 'A little house, interesting to live in, to take advantage of the sun.' After a series of enlargements and alterations, it later became a backdrop for Man Ray's surrealist film, 'Les Mystères du Château de Dé'. The small, modest house eventually became a large villa, 2,000 square metres in size, with a studio, swimming pool, a high, stained glass ceiling, squash court and 60 bedrooms. Other elaborate buildings designed by Mallet-Stevens are Villa Poiret (1921-1923), home of the great couturier Paul Poiret, as well as Villa Cavrois (1929-1932), a synthesis of the modernist conceptions of the European avant-garde. Rue Mallet-Stevens (1926-1934) is also featured, though it would make sense to go and see the actual buildings in Paris, in the 16th arrondissement, and Barillet House and Studio, nearby, in the 15th arrondissement.

The drawings are beautiful, and rather mesmerising; particularly the 'Ideal City', which is quintessential escapism. The rest of the exhibition is interesting in that the architectural processes are well presented and there is proof that fantastic buildings can be materialised after all, even if a uniformly decorative city is unlikely. However, to see a city that is more realistic in its juxtaposition of clashing styles and approaches to architecture, and so fantastic that it is beyond the limits of a single imagination, you need only walk out of the Pompidou and explore Paris itself.