This Is Not Fashion

What makes the the designs of Jum Nakao and Hussein Chalayan art

And the designs of 'Haus of Gaga', Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen fashion?

Are the latter merely pop-culture fashion extremists, or postmodern cultural icons of fine art?

When do the likes of Lady Gaga, Marilyn Manson and Leigh Bowery stop being pop stars and start being performance artists?

This is what I plan to explore in my next project: This Is Not Fashion, as well as exploring innovative and exciting materials in fashion and sculpture; not to mention a heavy emphasis on video, poetry and music. Not much then.

Chinese Sculptures ReCap

Whilst two of my Su Blackwell-inspired sculptures are being proudly displayed for the public in Falle Fine Art Gallery, my 15-hour finale-piece: the Buddhist Temple, is suffering a worse fate.

The heat is starting to cause the paper to sag and the adhesive to break and what the Chinese managed to engineer to last thousands of years - I have single handedly managed to insult and deface.

At the moment the piece looks like a powerful statement on the downfall of traditional Chinese culture and religion. I only wish I believed this was true in order to justify my own accidental work. Quite the contrary I have experienced first-hand that the culture is still alive and well in comparison to many Western equivalents.

I shall nevertheless record the sculptural occurrences and work onto the paper sculpture - illustrating, writing, defacing and commentating the piece with black lines upon the crisp, white surface until finally burning the remains. From art, to art.

From the ashes... and all that.

Alright, Treacle?

I attended my first ever piece of Performance Art last week.

Treacle, by Robert J. Anderson, performed at St James - a performance space that was once a church, owned by the Jersey Arts Centre.

In one sense it was everything and nothing I expected from the genre. It was closer to a piece of abstract theatre that I would have studied in Performance Studies than a piece of live art that I would have investigated in Fine Art - but the cross-genre postmodernism of the piece was warmly accepted by myself and (a majority of) the audience. The OAP's beside me disagreed.

At a memorable climax of Avant Gardism, I found myself watching a naked man standing on a step ladder being painted by four members of the audience in treacle whilst a young man (also from the audience) recorded the process with a disposable camera. Church-like music played as four more members of the audience were invited to wipe the performer clean whilst a man shouted crude remarks. Admittedly, the man was not part of the performance, which added to the spontaneity of the genre.

In short, I was left moved by the piece. The bellowing vocals of the artist as he attacked his piano in a way that crossed Patti Smith (I must broaden my music knowledge) with Henry Cowell and Florence 'and the Machine' Wells was deeply emotive, whilst the image of him straining to push the piano across the space as he played proved both comedic and powerful. In hindsight, there was a careful balance of lightheartedness (when Anderson stripped on an elevated stage to pop music, dollar bills thrusted into his underwear and socks) and more enigmatic content that could have been mistaken for pretentiousness.

The religious imagery of the cleansing was sufficiently mirrored by the performance space, which still had church pillars, arched windows and an altar clearly visible behind the stage lighting and stripped-down vacuum of performance space. The religious connotations also reminded me of a recorded dance piece I viewed entitled Flesh and Blood, choreographed by Lea Anderson.

This is a very brief evaluation of the piece, and I would go further into detail if I felt that anybody would enjoy reading it at all.

I want something new...

I want to try my hand at performance art, or rather, recorded performance art. It is interesting to consider whether this is possible, as performance art since the 1960's has strongly relied on the audience to create the art - most notably in the work of Yoko Ono. However I am interested in blending installation, video, performance, dance and text into one big THING - heavily inspired by DV8 Physical Theatre - a performance group who do sort of mix all these together.

For now, anyway, I'm trawling through Youtube Videos of performance art (most of which are in European languages), slowly munching away at a book named simply: 'Performance Art' and scrawling down any ideas that the likes of Patti Smith, Jum Nakao and Lady Gaga bring to me.

More black tea please.

In Quick Succession / Our Song

In quick succession, our eyes met and the songs began.
I didn’t know the words – and if I did,
I can no longer remember
The words that chained our eyes and lips
Together as we walked.

The crisp snow that shattered the sky
Had melted, now, to a slush.
The type that sets your hands to stone
And dampens the socks on your feet.

We stood and sang – our lungs, in the cold, had broken and burst;
Spilling out the words as a whisper
That rang around the sky for a thousand years
Of a country we could never call ‘home’.

And as the night fell
The shifting stars - carrying our words like a brooch -
Followed the train as we sped far away.
Singing songs, once again, and I knew.

And now we are home – to a place cold and still,
Where the weather is notably hot.
And you and your love, write your songs once again
And your songs, like her love, you shall have.

But one day – believe me – when the air falls frosty
Those stars from afar will orbit.
And in quick succession,
our eyes will meet and the songs will begin,
and we will remember the words.

J. Videgrain, March/April 2010