Ever since “Loving Care,” (1993) when she remixed Yves Klein (“Anthropometries of the Blue Period”) by using her hair, dipped in Clairol color, as a paintbrush, Janine Antoni has been worth following. Her gender bender continues in her current show, “Up Against,” at Luhring Augustine: in one photo, she’s literally strung up in her kid’s room, in bondage to domesticity; in another, she’s usurping male power by wearing a copper phallus that allows her to pee standing up (what next—pulling a Pollock in the de Menil fireplace?). Compelling as they are, these images have a whiff of Women’s Action Coalition era antics. 
It turns out the most spellbinding piece in this show, “Tear,” isn’t about gender at all: it’s a giant eye (Antoni’s) projected floor to ceiling in a room crackling with ambient industrial sound. Every blink triggers a thunderous boom. The skittery, insect-like shifts of the pupil, even as the eye stares straight ahead, take on a freaky intensity the longer you look. The cornea pulsates like a prickly sea anemone. And a two-ton wrecking ball lying like a meteor in the center of the room punctuates the spectacle of the eyeball suspended in perpetual motion: That sound you hear is the wrecking ball on impact, recorded taking down a building in Pittsburgh. So each slow motion blink wipes clean the image—you—the eye consumes, over and over again. There’s nothing to do but submit to your own demolition. And it feels sublime–better than peeing standing up.
Appetite for Destruction: Janine Antoni
Friday, October 2nd, 2009Wintour Issue
Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009
The most remarkable thing about “The September Issue,” R.J. Cutler’s documentary about the making of Vogue’s 2007 biggest issue ever, is not Editor Anna Wintour’s botoxed personality, Creative Director Grace Coddington’s unexpectedly fresh, funny and genuine presence, or the surprising preponderance of older women without makeup running a magazine devoted to beautiful young things with pancake faces. It’s that Wintour, the most influential force in global fashion, has so little to say about the art she embraces.
Wintour is alternately so excruciatingly inarticulate (its takes her ages to say that her siblings, who work in more socially redeeming fields, find her profession “amusing,” and almost as painfully long to repeat the same observation) and evasive (she dodges questions with weak jokes) that the film never plumbs her relationship to fashion—it merely tracks the way she packages it. There’s zero content in the scenes in which she discusses spreads or selects shots (“too much black”) and she seems barely capable of an extended conversation, much less substantive commentary on the industry she dominates (except for a tantalizing little summary of what was happening in fashion when she became a model in the 60s, in which she actually uses the word “class”—a subject Cutler assiduously avoids.)
You have to wonder if some robotic sensor accounts for the fashion radar that made her famous. Who cares if she’s a smug, self-satisfied, truly unappealing martinet (we wouldn’t hold that against a man in her position of power); what I want to know is, what does Wintour, surely a woman of colossal insight, have to say about fashion?
Knit Pick
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
If you gave Yayoi Kusama a crochet hook, she might mount the kind of fuzzy spectacle you’ll find on the corner of 47th St. and Lexington Avenue this week. “Covers,” a collaboration between choreographer Carrie Ahern and fabric artist Olek, is a silent performance/installation piece in which two women wrapped (or trapped?) in bolts of kooky knitwear move in slow motion in a storefront gallery itself webbed in wool. It’s as if a spider on acid had spun out of control, trading silk for yarn and catching moving mannequins in its web.
Between the buzz of fashion week in Bryant Park and the bustle of people rushing along Lexington Avenue at rush hour (the only time the women appear) the performance is a midtown island of calm, craft and counter-consumerism. Nothing here’s for sale. Step closer and you’ll notice random crochet-covered objects—an iron, a sled and a t.v. —along with crazy little phallic sheaths (and balloons) dangling from the ceiling. While the two artists perform in a trance, a third figure, wearing a head-to-toe fitted number (half burqua, half spidey-suit) knits maniacally in the corner, stopping only to glare at random spectators. This is an only-in-New York moment: Linger, and you’ll be glad you did. Hurry past, and admit you’ve lost your sense of urban wonder. The Covers women are at the Lab Gallery, next to the Roger Smith Hotel, September 16, 18, 21, 23rd and 25th from 5:30-6:30.
Toxic Cocktails: The Men of “Mad Men”
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
Since everything relates to “Mad Men,” but most of the armchair pundits I know focus on the women in the series, Lauren M.E. Goodlad’s meditation on the criminally handsome, monumentally repressed Don Draper and American masculinity is a thoughtful departure. From the Chronicle of Higher Education, here’s an excerpt from her August 31 essay, “Why We Love ‘Mad Men’”:
“Although Don Draper is the show’s center of gravity, a constellation of intriguing personalities surrounds him. Several of those characters suggest series that might have been: Mad Women, in which Joan Holloway and Peggy Olson take different paths in the struggle for integrity in a man’s world; Mad Closet, the story of Salvatore Romano’s slow-motion sexual awakening; Bad Men, a close study of Pete Campbell’s toxic cocktail of ambition and insecurity; Race Men, in which Paul Kinsey strives to be a hero in the civil-rights movement without exposing himself as an insufferable honkie; Sad Men, a nighttime soap in which Roger Sterling deludes himself about his impending mortality; and of course Mod Men, a show about style.”
Caving In to Ageism: Charla Krupp’s How Not to Look Old
Tuesday, August 18th, 2009And now for a comment on a book I haven’t read and don’t intend to. The problem is first with the title, then with the book’s promotional video, then with, well, the author’s hair color. Charla Krupp’s popular How Not to Look Old: Fast and Effortless Ways To Look 10 Years Younger, 10 Pounds Lighter, 10 Times Better, is like something out of “Madmen.” Are we still to assume that the goal of women over 40 is to look younger (as opposed to looking good at their actual age, like Michelle Obama?) and that every woman over 40 should lose 10 pounds (and that dyeing your hair Tori Spelling blonde in middle age makes you look like anything but a badly used cheerleader?)
Why do I care? Because Krupp uses faux feminism to promote it: “It is the ultimate feminist statement for us to be able to look great and to beat the system in this youth obsessed culture,” she says in her Youtube video, after swinging a Le Mystere bra over her head and shouting that it will “lift you higher than you have ever been lifted before!” If by beat the system in this youth obsessed culture she means cave in to ageism at any cost, including Botox, her definition of feminism needs a serious makeover. This is the same chop logic that posited “Desperate Housewives” as a feminist breakthrough for presenting women in their 40s as attractive—because they look like women in their 30s.
There’s a sociology project lurking in the New York Times paperback bestseller list Krupp landed on this summer, joining these women’s titles: Skinny Bitch, Hungry Girl: 200 Under 200, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, Naturally Thin, and Cook Yourself Thin. Enjoy your pregnancy. Then work on your diet, fatty. And while you’re at it, decline to age. By comparison, finance expert Suze Orman (at #3) looks positively progressive for writing a bestseller that isn’t about the flesh. (For the record, the suggestively titled Cook Yourself Thin does not involve cooking or eating one’s own body parts).
I see nothing wrong with a book about age-appropriate fashion and makeup, but I’d be more inclined to read it if it weren’t delivered as an insult. With its reproachful title and a subtitle that invokes the timeworn women’s magazine credo that aging is a personal failure that requires a lifetime of uphill remedial labor, this is one for the “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” files.
“Mad Men,” The Bell Jar, and The Feminine Mystique
Sunday, August 9th, 2009
Weird synchronicity: On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath committed suicide, just weeks after the The Bell Jar was published. Eight days later, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique, a book that named “the problem that has no name,” which afflicted Plath’s protogonist, Esther (not to mention Plath herself). Plath characterized it; Friedan diagnosed it, and feminism’s second wave soon knocked everyone sideways.
Now “Mad Men” (whose second season ended in mid 1962) dramatizes the problem. There’s Manhattan copywriter Peggy Olson struggling to make it in a man’s world, and Westchester homemaker Betty Draper, bored cross-eyed with domestic life, whose discontent is treated as a psychological disorder–the twin faces of mid-century feminine malaise.
“Mad Men” is like some new anthropological dig, unearthing, shard by shard, an era buried for decades in myth, nostalgia, and denial. For all its period beauty, it’s ugly as hell and painful to watch, yet riveting—the ultimate history lesson. My sister is showing it to her 16 year-old daughter to enlighten her about prefeminist work life. Not surprisingly, there’s a reason for the show’s unvarnished gender politics: an amazing seven of its nine writers are women (The “Mad Men” corporate ethos isn’t as retro as you might think: only 27% of t.v writers are women, and even fewer write for prime time).
As Esther notes in The Bell Jar, working women of this period are “secretaries to executives and simply hanging around in New York waiting to get married to some career man or other.” She imagines marriage and motherhood to be “a dreary and wasted life for a girl with straight A’s.” One Plath allusion has already surfaced in “Mad Men”: in episode six, season two, a country clubber relates the summer heat to the year (1951) the Rosenbergs were executed. (The Bell Jar opens, “I was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs,” and follows with a full page on Esther’s preoccupation with the incident.)
So with “Mad Men”’s spot-on period references and historical accuracy, will the rumblings of the women’s movement rock season three as it advances into the Sixties? Will Betty crack up or spring free? Will Peggy utter the f word? (And while I’m at it, will Julia Child, a pioneer of another stripe, hit the little screen, as she first did in 1963?)
Roman Holiday
Sunday, July 19th, 2009
Here at the American Academy in Rome, the weather’s hot, the oranges are thumping to the ground in the back yard, and someone’s getting murdered every night at 11:30 on the stage of the open air theater just across the street. Above, Bernini’s St. Theresa in the throes of rapture during what she called ”an intercourse between the soul and God.” She said, “The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it.” (And despite what you were thinking, “The pain is not bodily, but spiritual, though,” um, “the body has its share in it, even a large one.”)
A 19th Century Art in the 21st Century
Friday, July 10th, 2009The video was supposed to be about Jeff Johnson, who has a book coming out (why?) next week and works in Bert Grimm’s old shop in Portland. But Rio DeGennaro, who worked with Grimm (who tattooed Bonnie and Clyde) stole the show with a lovely quote that explained something to me about my own interest in tattoo art: “…it’s a 19th century art in the 21st century. They can’t computerize it. No big business is gonna take it over because it’s too labor intensive and [requires] to much skill. So no matter what they do to it, it’s still gonna remain a very individual kind of business.”
L.A. Woman: Kat Von D.
Wednesday, July 1st, 2009
I wasn’t paying attention, and it happened: Kat Von D. has outpaced any of the women in Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo, for sheer fame, if not talent. She’s the star of L.A. Ink (set in her shop), where she deliberately chose to work with other women (some recently departed) in order to showcase female talent in a historically male-dominated industry. The show was TLC’s highest rated through the 2008 season, and Von D. is now probably the biggest name (male or female) in tattooing, period. She’s the first to achieve fame outside her industry (The average Joe doesn’t know that Ed Hardy is a respected elder statesman and important tattoo innovator, now that his atrocious clothing line has brought him international fame in another industry altogether.) She’s also become a major influence on women’s tattoo choices. One artist tells me “Now, when women want something small, they ask for black and gray.”
Her new book, High Voltage Tattoo could have been a typical slapdash photo collection, but it has substance: Von D., best known for her portraits, talks about designing her own machines with the help of master jewelers, the difficulty of making color portraits that don’t look like cartoons, how shading gives a tattoo soul and brings it to life (especially on a face , in which you can see “the roundness in somebody’s cheeks or the shadow a nose casts, depending on the light in the image”) and the importance of white highlights (“what makes eyes sparkle and faces glow”). She has artfully recreated Dali’s “Christ of St. John of the Cross,” with its bird’s eye perspective–even on some guy’s rib cage, rendered a nautical scene with a sense of depth that makes the wearer look like a ship is passing through his back, reproduced precious family photos and simulated Japanese brushstrokes.
Even the most moronic tattoo choice (Sharon Tate) gains integrity in her hands. There’s just one standout stinker, a scene from “Thunderball” showing Bond and two women, that looks inexplicably like it was done by an 8th grader. But it’s a fluke (possibly the poorly proportioned limbs are rationalized when seen by the wearer, from above?). Von D.’s willingness to share the kind of trade secrets tattooists have guarded for so long is a refreshing change, and it’s nice to see a swashbuckling woman of worth grab the limelight and put the term “girl tattooer” to rest, one hopes, once and for all.
Guerrilla Girls Redux
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
The old Guerrilla Girls question, “Do women have to be naked to get in the Met. Museum?” comes to mind as Jerry Saltz challenges MoMA to explain why only 4% of the work on its 4th and 5th floors is by women artists. Exactly 20 years ago (after a “weenie count”), the Guerrilla Girls observed that only 5% of the art in the Modern art galleries at the Met was by women, though 85% of the nudes were female. Did anyone imagine progress would be so slow–or that we would actually regress?