Meatpacking District Design Week

I only made it to a few of the Saturday events for Meatpacking District Design Week, but there were a lot of interesting things to see.

I attended a seminar in Bumble and Bumble's education center at their downtown compound. Titled "Colliding Worlds of Design, Fashion, and Art," it was moderated by Barbara Bloemink (curator for the Museum of Art and Design) with panelists Mary Alice Stephenson (contributing editor for Harper's Bazaar), Shonquis Moreno (design editor for Surface), Catherine Malandrino (fashion designer), and Janet Ozzard (strategist editor for New York Magazine). I love these sorts of discussions about media crossover. Although I arrived on time, the event was standing room only when I got there, and it was difficult to hear most of the discourse. One of the panelists was apparently from Iceland (and had some interesting things to say), but I'm not sure which one she was or if she was a substitution panelist.

There was some mention of furniture versus fashion and the disposability of current clothing market leaders' products. This is the H&M wear-it-for-a-month trend compared to the implied (or assumed) permanence of a couch in the living room. I wish this had been discussed a bit more by the panel but only one panelist seemed really interested in it. I like thinking about furniture and objects and spatial relationships as fashion and parts of a story. Like Andre Austin was saying about creating a character from clothing, you can certainly do the same thing with props and furnishings. I would like to use my photography to expose more people to not just wearable art but environmental art. Environmental textures fascinate me almost as much as stories and light, and I really want to incorporate more physical things into my images, beyond just shooting the model and their clothing, make a whole world around them. Having been exposed to good design all my life, thanks to my mother's involvement in the industrial design world, these things speak to me in a way I think most other fashion photographers probably cannot experience. I have developed an innate connection to forms and surfaces over a long period of time, and want to explore that much further in my photography and filmmaking.

Barbara Bloemink made a comment about the difference between art and craft. I'm not sure if she was quoting someone else. She said that a crafts person is an extreme specialist and spends their entire career perfecting command of one simple material. This is opposed to the artists, whose career hops from one material to another, always exploring.

I suppose, you could say craft involves the microscopic examination of material properties and art is the macroscopic, or blue sky approach. This poses the question, can you be both a macroscopic and microscopic thinker. Probably the best artists and craftspeople are predisposed to hybridize. I think of myself as an artist, having leaped from animation to acrylics to dramatic film to fiction writing to video documentary and currently being into fashion photography, but also I recognize a long-term relationship with attention to light and sequence and time. Those ties pint more to craft than art. The disciplinary dividing line, as I described in my last entry referring to photography and acting, is hard to nail down and often when approached and considered seems almost non-existent.

When I was in grad school for film, I took a sculpture class with Mark Oxman, a really talented sculptor and educator. Working three times a week on the same sculpture for several months really taught me a lot about the shared properties of the multitude of fine arts disciplines. Although my command of sculpting technique was primitive at best, while working I could see threads connecting to story, awareness of light, form, and texture and that fashion essential mood/vibe. Am I a filmmaker or am I a photographer or am I a writer or am I a storyteller? If I'm all of those, am I a generalist and is that lack of focus detrimental to my command of craft in any one discipline? Is it therefore damaging to my ability to communicate clearly? I think the answer is no, that all art is communication, all art is metaphor. In craft the one medium matters greatly, but in art the metaphor is medium-independent, and you can and should hop around a bit and see what works best for specific expressions.

So are a craftworker and an artist that different? Yes and no. It's all relative and there is a lot of crossover, but the artist moves. I think you don't have to be an artist to be a craftsperson, but to be an artist you need to have craft tendancies. Even if you don't always work with wood, you may always work with materials that have grain, or like me moving from medium to medium with relative frequency but still being tied to story and light and spatial relationships.

There was also a discussion of the misuse of the word Couture. I am guilty of that faux pas, though, much more when I first started than now. I think it's all Carson Kressley's fault. He really threw the term around a lot on Queer Eye for The Straight Guy. Is that show still on? The first two seasons it was so fresh and interesting. Don't get me started on reality TV, it goes bad faster than chinese food left in the sun. Ever see the Far Side cartoon where there is a picture of the planet Earth and then there is this line of clowns in orbit, and it says "The Bozone Layer: protecting the universe from Earth's harmful effects." I love that cartoon. Anyway, until a few months ago I just assumed anything that was created by a senior designer and really expensive was "couture." It's not. Haute Couture is a legal distinction, and true Couture is produced by a very specific group of accredited Parisian designers, essentially the French knights of clothing design. If you think a featured dress shown in Bryant Park is amazing, you would be truly astonished by the true Haute Couture outfits. They represent literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of precision crafts work and cost anywhere from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've only seen a few pieces of the real thing, but they were truly absolutely over the top of the breathtakingly gorgeous chart.

I also walked through the Valvomo-sponsored exhibit on new Finnish design at Down East Fish Locker on 13th St. The fashion on display from CTRL Clothing was interesting. They has some great jackets. I asked the rep if I could borrow a few of their pieces to put on a model I plan to shoot on Tuesday, but they're unfortunately leaving to go back to Finland that day.