NEW YORK – Collaborations between fashion designers and artists are certainly not new — Prada, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, and countless smaller labels initiate them all the time — but rarely, if ever, has such a heady spree of them taken place on one occasion as at MoMA PS1‘s two-day “MOVE!” event, held at the Long Island City space over the weekend. For the hybrid exhibition, co-organized by style writer David Coleman and Visionaire co-founder Cecilia Dean (and “initiated” by MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach), the institution gave over three floors of its former schoolhouse building to thirteen art-fashion pairings, from Kalup Linzy and Diane Von Furstenberg to Rob Pruitt and Marc Jacobs.
Nearly 3,000 visitors crowded into the museum over the course of the weekend, many of whom wandered the halls dressed far more festively than when they arrived courtesy of the performance-art quartet the Cheryls and American Apparel, whose makeover room
on the first floor bedecked them with sparkles, neon face paint, flesh-colored costume pieces, and fluffy wigs. Operating with the motto “Let us put our face on your face: it’s the makeover you never knew you wanted!”, the Cheryls and their followers (known, in all seriousness, as Cheryl-ites) danced around the room as they layered makeup on the PS1 visitors who fell into their clutches, furiously photographing the results.
Of the collaborations on display, most ran continuously throughout the afternoons, with the exception of special performances by “Greater New York 2010″ alumni Linzy and Rashaad Newsome, which occurred only once a day, and which filled up so quickly that audience members resorted to using sharp elbows and none-too-subtle shoves to push their way into the front row.
For his billing, Linzy performed a set mixing original songs with a cover of Salt n Pepa‘s 90s hit “Push It” as his alter ego, Labisha — garbed in a sparkly DVF gown for the occasion. A series of music videos of Linzy’s songs, including “Fuck You” and “Labisha’s Bonus Track (Turn It),” looped continuously in the room long after he left the stage. (In that former video, a bit of institutional intertextuality emerged when the Labisha character confronts a miffed lover at a posh garden party in front of a tableau of horrified guests that includes PS1 founder Alanna Heiss, along with fellow “Greater New York” artist Ryan McNamara.)
Whereas Linzy’s performance was a one=man act, Newsome — continuing his “Shade Compositions” piece, brought sampled footage of people “vogueing” to “Greater New York” — took the stage with about a dozen men and women dressed in Alexander Wang clothes and chunky black high-heeled boots, who strutted up to microphones and repeatedly uttered attitudinal noises (“uh-uh” and “pfft”) and confrontational phrases (“stop playin’!”) that were layered by Newsome to create a musical composition. The song, which lasted more than 20 minutes, was accompanied by video projected on the wall of other people making similar gestural sounds of contempt and annoyance, which Newsome arranged to play in sync with the live performers. When they weren’t speaking, the artist’s performers shot nasty looks at the audience, staring them down with intimidatingly haughty glares.
Meanwhile, Swiss artist Olaf Breuning and fashion designer Cynthia Rowley came together for an ongoing “Happening”-like event that was aimed at bridging the differences between the fashion and art worlds, underscoring their shared processes of production and creativity. Moving through a series of rooms, models were outfitted in denim clothes designed by Rowley and led next door where they posed in a elevated box while Breuning poured a cans of paint over their heads. (It didn’t take long for the floor under the models’ feet to resemble a Jackson Pollock.)
Onlookers excitedly squealed and snapped photos as the mannequins grinned and bore the cold paint that oozed over their bodies, coating the protective goggles strapped across their faces. The subjects were then led to a third room for a photo shoot, after which they privately removed the denim outfit — an easy process, Rowley said, since each garment was fitted with zippers allowing it to pull easily away from the body — and showered to prepare for the process all over again. The photographs documenting the process, meanwhile, were displayed on the walls, and the paint-encrusted clothes were arrayed on hangers in another room as if on sale, complete with custom tags that listed “Cynthia Rowley/Olaf Breuning” as the brand. To whit, both art and fashion emerged from the process.
A powerful installation by performance artist Terence Koh and Calvin Klein designer Italo Zucchelli was accessible through a thick black curtain, which gave way to a room shrouded in white smoke where two men dressed completely in silver — from their trench coats to their pants, shoes, face paint, and foil-textured head wraps — walked slowly towards and away from each other, meeting at the center of the space and then turning back. Lights installed in each of the four corners of the room pierced the fog and lit the silver performers as a deep rumbling noise seemingly emanated from within the mist. The light refracting off the men created a dizzying effect, as the beams shifted startlingly but the movements of the performers remained unvaried and methodical.
Some preferred to focus their collaborations on MoMA PS1′s visitors, directly implicating them in the work. When one walked into the installation by Rob Pruitt and Marc Jacobs, he or she was admonished by assistants with clip boards for being so late to the fashion show — “Fashion waits for no one, people!” — and instructed to strut down a green-screened hallway, flash the camera a fierce looks, and stalk back out the door. In the next room, the audience-turned-models could watch on giant screens the digital footage of their runway skills spliced into footage of a politely applauding celebrity audience — with Madonna in attendance — that was lifted from a exclusive runway show. Taking another approach to the same idea, artist Dan Colen and Proenza Schouler screened live video from hidden cameras they had installed in different New York neighborhoods, creating catwalks out of the street to spotlight the fashion and attitudes of everyday — and unaware — New Yorkers passing by.
A film short by designer Adam Kimmel and David Blaine, called “Dressed for Dinner,” showed the magician floating underwater, wearing a formal suit supplied by Kimmel, while pointing at the schools of fish and occasional shark that passed by and, strangely enough, eating a banana. Blaine performed in the galleries throughout the weekend as well, peddling card tricks and other magic acts to visitors as they walked into his first floor gallery.
Among the other pairings on offer were McNamara and Robert Geller, who arranged for 30-minute dance
classes — from stripping to line-dancing — to be taught continuously
throughout the day by professional instructors, and an installation by Brody Condon and the Rodarte sisters that
featured silent performers wearing white robes and face paint who moved
slowly but continuously throughout a space, mysteriously clinking
together the tips of gold-plated sticks that they carried. Artist Tauba
Auerbach and Ohne Titel outfitted young women in blue-and-white patterns that match the striped interior of a room they danced in. Jonah Bakaer and Narcisco Rodriguez presented a choreographed solo performance by an individual dressed
in black who moved methodically upon a black box in a black room under a
spotlight. Then, in a final gallery, videos
by designer Telfar and artists Lizzie Fitch, Rhett Larue, Fatima al Qadiri, Ryan Trecartin, and Leilah Weinraub played.
As opposed to the usual commercially-minded fashion/art combines — think Murakami and Louis Vuitton — what set “MOVE!” apart was that the undertakings were clearly intended simply as explorations, or giddy fun. Visitors who came over the weekend didn’t leave the museum feeling under-dressed, but maybe a little overwhelmed by the sheer manic diversity of work on display.
