The post-fashion forest
Jul. 15th, 2007 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI spent several hours yesterday walking about with Phiiliip, who gave me a copy of his forthcoming album "Magically Bad" (both more poppy and more natural-sounding than his previous records). He also told me about the 77BOADRUM event he attended last weekend -- a big drum circle held between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges on 7/7/07, in which Eye Yamataka and Hisham Bharoocha basically hosted a huge drum circle featuring 77 drummers. It was great, said Phiiliip.
"Eye is one of the coolest people in the world," I said. "He's always pushing formats just that bit further than anyone else dares to."
Later, at Smart Deli, Yumi the owner told me about some Argentinians who were looking for places in Berlin to distribute their magazine Sede. I checked their site and was confronted by photos (by Guadalupe and Silvina Wernicke) of Mark Borthwick's Brooklyn studio, which has become an open house for people like Hisham, and Eye too, no doubt, and Miho Aoki from United Bamboo, and Yukinori Maeda from Osaka fashion house Cosmic Wonder. There's a whole gang of them -- neo-hippies of a sort, post-fashion and yet not post-fashion.
The neo-hippy vibe comes across very clearly in the photos of Borthwick's house. This is a big, open, plant-filled place (a "creator's space") where you sit on the floor and play guitars, bells, and so on. Borthwick has a music project with Hisham called Usun. Hisham also has a music project with Yukinori Maeda involving the same sort of windchimes-and-floormats. (You can see Hisham engaged in a formless acoustic strum in Prospect Park here.) These people all have links with Purple magazine in Paris, with Sonic Youth, with Animal Collective, with Susan Ciancolo. They're a scene, and a sensibility. (There's a further list of Hisham's friends on this Me magazine cover, and you can read an interview with him here.)
Now, I quite appreciate this scene, as do the kind of people I hang out with. Every female Japanese art student I've known reveres Mark Borthwick intensely, for instance. It's something to do with the refined, understated, tender-minded, nature-loving quality that comes through in his photographs, and the sense that, for the truly beautiful people, the fashion industry in itself isn't quite enough. The truly beautiful people go back to nature, hang out in the forest, have children, cook, get together and jam on acoustic guitars. They are, in other words, neo-hippies, too aloof to sell their souls to The Man.
In an interview with Fecal Face magazine, Mark Borthwick talks about being post-fashion, or rather how the fashion industry itself is out of fashion.
"I had to stop editorial photography" he says. "I was in fashion. I was always trying to find a new way of approaching how we use clothes, how we apply clothes, and how to attach myself to what it meant to be a fashion photographer. That was something that has always been very important to me. But I was placing too much importance onto continually putting myself in a position where I was questioning the industry. What is the importance of clothing? What is the importance of fashion? I think I lost that importance because I no longer believed in the industry itself..."
"You have these hypocritical fashion editors out there, a few of them that try to attain their rules and put that forth. I don't believe in any of it anymore and fashion itself has become extremely unfashionable in that sense. Especially today, I think it's amazing to hang out on stoops here [in Brooklyn] where we live and see there's another way. There's always another way. Magazines took such a step backwards over the last twenty years trying to close the door to the other way. And I'm always interested in the other way, and I attach myself to that, whether it's with the clothes, the music, the cooking or just the idea of bringing people together. There's so much joy to be had with the small little events that happen to you daily. The last couple of days have been magical. I walk out of this place, vibrating at a pace that's just phenomenal. There could be two or three people walking down the street, could be a kid and its mother and they sit down on the floor and... that's very precious. That lasts forever."
Now, I totally appreciate what he's saying here. I feel the same way about the music industry. And as a follower of John Cage (who got this from Eastern religion and philosophy) I share the hippyish belief that real life -- the view out of the window, or the sounds coming in through it -- is more exciting than most art, especially aggressive commercial art.
The thing is, the people Borthwick sees on the street are unlikely to share his views of their own beauty. They're probably hooked into the very commercial culture he abhors. If he were to go home with them and be forced to listen to the music they listen to and the TV they watch, he'd probably stop approving.
Certainly, when a bigger public is forced to confront what Borthwick does, the result is huge dissatisfaction. Check out the comments on the Amazon page for Speaking for Trees, the Cat Power DVD Borthwick released in 2004: two hours of Cat Power standing alone in a forest playing guitar and singing, shot with a fixed camera and no edits.
[Error: unknown template video]
Speaking for trees, maybe. Speaking for Cat Power fans, well, no. They'd have preferred a pretty standard film with cliched editing and close-ups of their idol, it seems, rather than this neo-hippy, post-materialist stuff.
"The video is awful," says Dredfish, writing from a basement in Seattle. "The whole "Chan in nature" thing falls flat. It looks like they filmed it in the parking lot of a city park. Probably the worst are the three "music videos." If Mark Borthwick is an artist I'm sure he'll be a starving one. His filmmaking style is sadly lacking. Anybody, and I mean anybody, with a video camera could come up with something more compelling than this drivel... Blech."
At the end of his Fecal Face interview, Borthwick talks about his love of nature and the street as "universal", and there's a hint that he might want to make "universal" art -- follow figures like Mike Mills and Spike Jonze into movie-making, for instance, taking his neo-hippy values mainstream as he does it.
While I don't think Borthwick will starve -- he'll eat much better than Dredfish, and in better company -- I doubt he'll be able to pull this "universalizing" trick off. His values are too non-toxic for that. And what comes after disillusionment with the fashion industry is not a re-uniting with the great mass of the populace. It's isolation in a creative ghetto -- a very, very pleasant one -- with people after one's own heart, other post-professional beautiful people who want to hang out in the forest.
Rather than "the universal", this place we reach in the middle of our creative lives is somewhere very specific and restricted, somewhere you can only go to after passing through all the rings of fashion hell. The ring of the stylists, the ring of the publicists, the ring of the models, the ring of the press. It's a post-fashion forest where the appeal is all bound up with abhorrence of one's more mercenary colleagues, and the way they edit, angle, plot, and style life. You can see this in Cage's disdain for standard musical education and professional musicians just as clearly as you can in Borthwick's scorn for "hypocritical fashion editors".
It's a scorn which is totally understandable and largely correct. But it would be a mistake to assume that big majorities of the public shared it, and were just waiting to join us in the post-fashion forest.
"Eye is one of the coolest people in the world," I said. "He's always pushing formats just that bit further than anyone else dares to."
Later, at Smart Deli, Yumi the owner told me about some Argentinians who were looking for places in Berlin to distribute their magazine Sede. I checked their site and was confronted by photos (by Guadalupe and Silvina Wernicke) of Mark Borthwick's Brooklyn studio, which has become an open house for people like Hisham, and Eye too, no doubt, and Miho Aoki from United Bamboo, and Yukinori Maeda from Osaka fashion house Cosmic Wonder. There's a whole gang of them -- neo-hippies of a sort, post-fashion and yet not post-fashion.
The neo-hippy vibe comes across very clearly in the photos of Borthwick's house. This is a big, open, plant-filled place (a "creator's space") where you sit on the floor and play guitars, bells, and so on. Borthwick has a music project with Hisham called Usun. Hisham also has a music project with Yukinori Maeda involving the same sort of windchimes-and-floormats. (You can see Hisham engaged in a formless acoustic strum in Prospect Park here.) These people all have links with Purple magazine in Paris, with Sonic Youth, with Animal Collective, with Susan Ciancolo. They're a scene, and a sensibility. (There's a further list of Hisham's friends on this Me magazine cover, and you can read an interview with him here.)
Now, I quite appreciate this scene, as do the kind of people I hang out with. Every female Japanese art student I've known reveres Mark Borthwick intensely, for instance. It's something to do with the refined, understated, tender-minded, nature-loving quality that comes through in his photographs, and the sense that, for the truly beautiful people, the fashion industry in itself isn't quite enough. The truly beautiful people go back to nature, hang out in the forest, have children, cook, get together and jam on acoustic guitars. They are, in other words, neo-hippies, too aloof to sell their souls to The Man.
In an interview with Fecal Face magazine, Mark Borthwick talks about being post-fashion, or rather how the fashion industry itself is out of fashion.
"I had to stop editorial photography" he says. "I was in fashion. I was always trying to find a new way of approaching how we use clothes, how we apply clothes, and how to attach myself to what it meant to be a fashion photographer. That was something that has always been very important to me. But I was placing too much importance onto continually putting myself in a position where I was questioning the industry. What is the importance of clothing? What is the importance of fashion? I think I lost that importance because I no longer believed in the industry itself..."
"You have these hypocritical fashion editors out there, a few of them that try to attain their rules and put that forth. I don't believe in any of it anymore and fashion itself has become extremely unfashionable in that sense. Especially today, I think it's amazing to hang out on stoops here [in Brooklyn] where we live and see there's another way. There's always another way. Magazines took such a step backwards over the last twenty years trying to close the door to the other way. And I'm always interested in the other way, and I attach myself to that, whether it's with the clothes, the music, the cooking or just the idea of bringing people together. There's so much joy to be had with the small little events that happen to you daily. The last couple of days have been magical. I walk out of this place, vibrating at a pace that's just phenomenal. There could be two or three people walking down the street, could be a kid and its mother and they sit down on the floor and... that's very precious. That lasts forever."
Now, I totally appreciate what he's saying here. I feel the same way about the music industry. And as a follower of John Cage (who got this from Eastern religion and philosophy) I share the hippyish belief that real life -- the view out of the window, or the sounds coming in through it -- is more exciting than most art, especially aggressive commercial art.
The thing is, the people Borthwick sees on the street are unlikely to share his views of their own beauty. They're probably hooked into the very commercial culture he abhors. If he were to go home with them and be forced to listen to the music they listen to and the TV they watch, he'd probably stop approving.
Certainly, when a bigger public is forced to confront what Borthwick does, the result is huge dissatisfaction. Check out the comments on the Amazon page for Speaking for Trees, the Cat Power DVD Borthwick released in 2004: two hours of Cat Power standing alone in a forest playing guitar and singing, shot with a fixed camera and no edits.
[Error: unknown template video]
Speaking for trees, maybe. Speaking for Cat Power fans, well, no. They'd have preferred a pretty standard film with cliched editing and close-ups of their idol, it seems, rather than this neo-hippy, post-materialist stuff.
"The video is awful," says Dredfish, writing from a basement in Seattle. "The whole "Chan in nature" thing falls flat. It looks like they filmed it in the parking lot of a city park. Probably the worst are the three "music videos." If Mark Borthwick is an artist I'm sure he'll be a starving one. His filmmaking style is sadly lacking. Anybody, and I mean anybody, with a video camera could come up with something more compelling than this drivel... Blech."
At the end of his Fecal Face interview, Borthwick talks about his love of nature and the street as "universal", and there's a hint that he might want to make "universal" art -- follow figures like Mike Mills and Spike Jonze into movie-making, for instance, taking his neo-hippy values mainstream as he does it.
While I don't think Borthwick will starve -- he'll eat much better than Dredfish, and in better company -- I doubt he'll be able to pull this "universalizing" trick off. His values are too non-toxic for that. And what comes after disillusionment with the fashion industry is not a re-uniting with the great mass of the populace. It's isolation in a creative ghetto -- a very, very pleasant one -- with people after one's own heart, other post-professional beautiful people who want to hang out in the forest.
Rather than "the universal", this place we reach in the middle of our creative lives is somewhere very specific and restricted, somewhere you can only go to after passing through all the rings of fashion hell. The ring of the stylists, the ring of the publicists, the ring of the models, the ring of the press. It's a post-fashion forest where the appeal is all bound up with abhorrence of one's more mercenary colleagues, and the way they edit, angle, plot, and style life. You can see this in Cage's disdain for standard musical education and professional musicians just as clearly as you can in Borthwick's scorn for "hypocritical fashion editors".
It's a scorn which is totally understandable and largely correct. But it would be a mistake to assume that big majorities of the public shared it, and were just waiting to join us in the post-fashion forest.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 01:32 pm (UTC)or, the most mercenary artist can take a page out of the book of Post-Modernism in 2007: The Investment Banker's Guide to Interior Decoration.
I personally think we're approaching a post-visual culture. hmm???
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 01:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 01:53 pm (UTC)Are those musical instruments in Borthwick's house there to stop people talking? Do you strum a guitar instead? I'm sure they talk a lot more than I do, in fact. Living that particular idyll would be the opposite of "zipping it"!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 02:19 pm (UTC)While I wouldn't refuse to join the beautiful people in the art forest I am sure I wouldn't last there very long.... at least not at this point in my life. Their self-imposed exile smacks too much of defeatism. It seems that they view mainstream fashion, music, and art as a fixed point where they cannot/ will not make any interesting intervention or be part of an ideological shift. Does this speak to a lack of creativity and imagination amongst them or they all really that fed up already?
While I think it is possible for them to be "waiting in the wings"-- ready to swallow up other defectors from those worlds and build up some new movement--- Borthwick doesn't sound that ambitious or interested....
Anyway, great post, and great timing as it fits right into my newfound obsession with Hisham. :)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 02:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 02:38 pm (UTC)This, I'd venture to guess, is why this forest stuff gets so much play. It's not that people actually want to hang out in the forest. It's that the nature imagery makes one very, very hot.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 02:44 pm (UTC)It's all well and good saying "the mainstream doesnt do it for me" but when youre rebelling against the status quo to the detriment of your creative output it becomes clear youre rebeling for reasons other than the art, its just credibility chasing. That Cat Power clip was horrible, not because he tried to do something different, but because the music was drowned out and it just didn't work with the music. I could make a clip like that with standard video-recorder at my local park -- who fucking cares? more to the point, why am I gonna consume something that works against the music?
If I had to hold up particular artists as an example of being completely outside of the indie credibility fashion bullshit, artists who've truly been doing it differently for themselves, but have still managed to be successful and 100% credible, It would have to be Boards of Canada.
They're different not only for their sound but for their lifestyles. All their music is made in a big bunker in the middle of the scottish countryside where they live, they dont involve themselves in the media machine. And where as Borthwick has tried to roll back the cliched polish of standard media and done it poorly in that video, Boards of Canada have built their entire careers on making music incorporating analog noise. They havent done it as a Backlash against the mainstream, they've done it because it truely works in harmony with what theyre trying to achieve. The scratchy, warm sound of BoC's work has become their trademark, and people appreciate the nostalgia it evokes.
Board of Canada probably arent obscure enough to get your love Nick, but I personally believe they embody the values you described in this post much better than someone like Mark Borthwick.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 02:49 pm (UTC)But it could very well not be as straightforward as this, obviously, and I haven't actually seen it. The concept though, seems a little hypocritical to me, at first glance.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 03:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 03:04 pm (UTC)Re: commercial, commercially anti-commercial (hot), or aggressively commercial (which no-one buys any more) - I wish Kurt Cobain hadn't obsessed with proving he hadn't 'sold out'. No-one cares, in truth. No-one you'd want to have a drink with. The average house sale is more an intrinsic rip-off than any creative contract or profit.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 03:06 pm (UTC)I did this joke in front of Dash Snow's work at the Whitney biennial last year. I basically read out excepts from a Dash Snow interview in a fashion mag that detailed how he didn't have a cell phone and hated technology, the city, the media. Then I said "It's just a pity that I had to read these admirable sentiments in a fashion magazine, and not scraped in the dust of a forest clearing with a ram's horn."
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 03:14 pm (UTC)I do <3
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 03:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 03:50 pm (UTC)It's a strange trajectory: bands like Animal Collective move from noise to "freak folk." (They were my first introduction to this type of music, around 1999.) At the exact same time, we were seeing the visual prototype for the last few years coming out of the Yale school (a group of women photographers who studied under Gregory Crewsdon, like Justine Kurland (http://www.artnet.com/artwork/424692789/568/justine-kurland-baptism.html)). It's funny, because both things hit the streets around 1999, mirroring a sudden interest in the London "freak folk" scene. Hisham and the gang came out of the Providence noise scene, which, of course, comes out of the Boredoms, and although their music has softened, it's still deeply rooted in noise, but, as I said, has moved toward trance and eradicated most of the standard punk tropes. At about that time (2001?), Devendra popped up in my neighborhood heralding his version of the same.
In the next few years, the street in Williamsburg moved from theatrical and club-orientated Electroclash to communal group shows centered in "authenticity" and thrown in parks, parking lots, etc., and re pleat with noise drum circles (such as the great Aa (Big A, little a)).
What I distrust (and I always have to distrust something) is the intense pressure placed upon authenticity, even if it is usually tongue-in-cheek, and the reliance upon transcendentalism and "dropping-out," which I think is one of the worst aspects of hippie-culture. I also deeply distrust notions of authenticity, and have always associated it with violent male culture, as opposed to theatrical culture which tends to be gay, but those are personal biases.
That said, I love EYE (he no longer uses his surname, no?), love what Hisham is doing, love the community in the new scene, and thought that 77BOADRUM was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 03:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 04:00 pm (UTC)The "drop out" forest stuff, I think, is largely visual metaphor. All of the bands and people Momus writes about are firmly city based. Even Vetiver and Devendra (and they're all friends with Andrea, the biggest cosmopolitan I know).
But we see the "back-to-the-land" communalism in how the community comports itself - from Todd P's group shows on the periphery to the frequent word-of-mouth-only shows.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 04:00 pm (UTC)MOMUS TRIVIA QUESTION!
Date: 2007-07-15 04:03 pm (UTC)The winner receives a premium anonymous account with 100 different proxy IP addresses for Momus to look up and crack a joke about!
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 04:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 04:05 pm (UTC)Who would want to leave all this behind for a bunch of trees?
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 04:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 04:09 pm (UTC)So yes, your accusation holds.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 04:14 pm (UTC)What!? Those grubby, stained hoodies are a symbol of their anti-fashion... no wait, POST-FASHION values! ;o)
People garbed in morning dress are not allowed in the Post-fashion forest, Lord Whimsy...
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 04:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-15 04:38 pm (UTC)The funny and cruel cycles of nature.