Olivier Theyskens has revealed the most dramatic edge to his dark side yet, in a recent series of fashion images shot by Paris- based photographer Monika Bielskyte, for her black tome SOME/THINGS. Granted access to La Coupole – the secret stage of the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris – the pair choreographed some theatrical magic of their own, working with an eclectic array of vintage and designer pieces to transform the designer with gritty but spectacular results.

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Dan Thawley: What inspired you to shoot Olivier?
Monika Bielskyte: Olivier is a very complex person and a beautiful man, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to propose him to model since that’s really not something he would have normally accepted. However, as we were working on a special feature on Julien Claessens’s work, Julien was showing me his old archive images and I saw this image of Olivier where he really looked like a bird, a very strange, beautiful and slightly alien creature— which is the quality that makes me love almost all of julien’s portraits. So when I saw that image, all of a sudden Olivier seemed like an irreplaceable casting for the editorial we wanted to shoot in Théâtre de la Ville.

DT: What was the significance of the Théâtre de la Ville as a location?
MB: Théâtre de la Ville has long had a program consisting of some of the most groundbreaking and seminal choreographers in the world. La Coupole is a very special place because it’s where most of the creation happens. It’s a rehearsal space where no one but the choreographer and his team are allowed to enter, a quiet rooftop, full of atmosphere and ghosts, with a sublime view of Notre Dame and la Seine, heavy black curtains and worn-out floor— so different from so many spiritless theatres of today.
Personally, Théâtre de la Ville has a very deep meaning for me because it’s really through attending its program, from my first years in Paris, that I was introduced to the magical work of Pina Bausch, Sankai Juku, Hofesh Shechter, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Akram Khan and other choreographers that had an undeniable influence on the way I work with movement when shooting.

DT: From where did you draw your inspiration for styling Olivier?
MB: The theatre, to my knowledge, has never previously accepted the shooting of fashion editorials. So this project, from its very conception, had to be something much more— a portrait, a performance, a moment in time showing a face of Olivier different to the fashion face we know him from. Olivier had accepted to do this shooting on the condition that we do something really different to anything he has done before – he didn’t want anything sweet and ‘nice’, nothing even close, as we joked, to the ‘fantasy boy’. He wanted it to be strong, intense, emotional, a performance project instead of a classic pretty portrait. So we tried to create a bit of a pièce de théâtre and, as conventional styling just wouldn’t have worked, we had to look for something really fresh yet timeless— not a very obvious combination when you think of it.
The main inspiration sprang, of course, from Olivier’s own work— dark, moody, yet very elegant and sophisticated. Olivier brought his personal selection of things— feathers, a gorgeous tiny padded vest which looked like it came straight from the Victorian era, a customised Rick Owens jacket, Carol Christian Poell shoes… and I had dug into the Théâtre de la Ville costume archive to choose some incredibly beautiful and delicate torn dresses from the Sarah Bernhardt era, as well as several personal archive pieces belonging to Michele Lamy, Josephus Thimister and myself… and all that we mixed together with pieces from the Autumn/Winter 2010 collections of Haider Ackermann, Ann Demeulemeester, Nicolas Andreas Taralis, Kris van Assche and, of course, pieces from the Yohji Yamamoto archives. It was all mainly feathers, sheer tops, long pleated skirts— a lot of Japanese influence in the styling, almost feminine pieces, but that create a very masculine ensemble.

DT: What is your favourite piece in the styling?
MB: Definitely the vintage Revillon ostrich vest from Rick Owens’s rack of his personal inspiration pieces. It was all damaged and so old, yet the way it moved and reflected the light was pure magic, the way it was twirling around Olivier’s face, body and hands, it truly looked like it was alive— an art piece, not fashion.

DT: Were any of the pieces particularly rare or hard to acquire?
MB: None of them were really hard to acquire but a couple were really hard to work with! The vintage Josephus Thimister shirt dipped in wax started to crack, peel off and melt (in the images one can see white bits of it looking like snow on the theatre floor!), and it was a terrible hassle to clean Olivier’s skin from it once we were done with the look. Gustavo Lins’s personal 19th century metallic corset was also difficult to deal with since it was so rigid and so fragile at the same time— I was quite afraid we might break it!

DT: How did Olivier react to becoming the subject rather than the creator?
MB: He was definitely very much a creator! I was just interpreting his movements through the images but it was definitely all about him, that’s for sure! Fashion-wise, Olivier’s input to the styling was also undeniable— I may have planned or envisaged many things, some came alive when he put them on and the others didn’t so, once again, it was very much about him— not seasonal trends on him or my own art shooting or anything like that. It was very much his performance, my portrait of him via his performance. You know, Olivier can be really sweet, but he also has a very tough personality and really knows what he wants and what he doesn’t want and so it is impossible to push him in a direction he doesn’t feel like going. I could ask him to move where the light was or look at the camera once in a while, but I had to adapt myself a lot, much more than during any other editorial I had shot. I think, shooting him, I could maybe only compare to shooting Brett Anderson, who is another amazing artist we feature in ISSUE003. They are both very self aware, but they also let a magic moment happen in the image— one only has to know how to go around them, silently, without too many commands, following every movement they make, being attentive to every single detail.

DT: What are your feelings upon finishing the images, were you happy? Were there unexpected results?
MB: Yes, indeed, very happy. I was unsure if Olivier would be happy, but he said he liked them because there was something bird-like about the movements, that it really seemed like it captured instances of a performance rather than still, dead images.

DT: Did you shoot his portrait for the Lift Hand Portrait exhibition at the same time? What did you try to convey with the hand portrait, what symbolism and emotion?
MB: The hand portrait was shot at the same time as part of the editorial/portrait of Olivier. Only later when Masahiro asked me to contribute something for their hand project— which I couldn’t refuse because it is simply one of the most beautiful stores in the world — I couldn’t think of anything better than that image.

SOME/THINGS is released on September 15th, 2010.

Read more about the Lift Hand Portrait exhibition here.

It is our pleasure to announce that A#10 will be curated by  Giambattista Valli.

Giambattista proposes his issue as an essay on the topic “what is beauty?“, with contributions that currently include the work of Louise Bourgeois, Nan Goldin, Chiara Clemente, Lucio Fontana, David Hicks, Richard Avedon, the late Corinne Day and many other contemporary artists, photographers and influential style icons.

The magazine will be released internationally in print and on iPad in November 2010, launching in Paris in conjunction with Giambattista’s flagship store opening in late November.

We will release a digital preview of the issue on the 10th of October 2010 (10.10.2010), with exclusive behind-the-scenes images from the ‘making-of’ the issue.

The images below are our very first look at the issue, with scrapbook ‘inspiration images’ compiled by Giambattista in his Paris studio last week.

http://www.giambattistavalli.com

In an exclusive collaboration, we offer Erik’s never-before-seen photographs from the upcoming Nomenus Quarterly #10, released online on September 1st, 2010.

(This interview and gallery is presented in two parts. Click here for the UNDERCOVER article)

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An interview with Erik Madigan Heck, part II: HAIDER ACKERMANN

(Continued from part I: UNDERCOVER)
DT: Well let’s switch the discussion back to another body of work you just finished for Haider Ackermann. You were recently flown over to Florence to photograph with Haider for his first menswear collection at Pitti Uomo. Can you tell me about how that collaboration came about, and what it was like when you got to Florence?

EMH: I actually had never met Haider before the shoot in Italy, he was preparing for his presentation, and Michele Montagne suggested I fly over to make a series of photographs, as she had seen the project I did last year with Ann Demeulemeester.

When I arrived in Florence it was a couple days before the show and it was a bit chaotic, but I just started shooting immediately. Haider would style a look on one of the models and then I would take them to different parts of this ancient Palazzo and photograph them individually. I consider myself very much an environmental photographer, so working in Palazzo Corsini was a dream. There was so much history to build off of in each space within the Palazzo, so my job was very easy.

DT: What was the interaction between you and Haider on the shoot?

EMH: I would show Haider images as I worked periodically, but mostly I left him to work with Michele on the styling and took the models to random quiet corners in the house. I like to work alone, and have it be quiet, you always get a more pure sentiment I think when it’s just subject and photographer left to face each other alone. I view photography as a sort of dance between subject and death. You have to stare it in the face by yourself.

DT: Can you speak about the actual images presented below (from Nomenus Quarterly 10), and do you have a favorite image from this series?

EMH: There are around 25-30 final images I chose for Haider, and they really range quite dramatically in their appearance. After I arrived and had a chance to really sit with the collection for a while I understood that both conceptually and aesthetically the photographs must vary as much as his constructions did. My interpretation of Haider’s collection was that it was very romantic, while also being vastly different from piece to piece. I really wanted the photographs to mirror this inconsistency, and create a sort of book of images that were all individually beautiful, but didn’t necessarily seem to fit together- like a box of old photographs you would find at a flea market. It was easy enough with the environment and the casting. Everything present was already eclectic and eccentric. I just had to document the interaction.

I think the portrait of Kate Summers is probably my favorite image. She has such a beautifully classic face, and it was a pure moment. There was no make-up, no lighting, she had just turned away from Haider as he was styling her, and I captured her frozen. It looks like a very posed photograph, but in fact she had kind of turned around and looked up right at the exact moment I put my camera up. It was Henri Cartier Bresson’s decisive moment.

DT: Last question, but relating to what we were speaking on earlier, do you view these photographs for Haider Ackermann as more than just fashion images? What is the political motivation underneath them, or do you like everyone else also sometimes make images that are just for the sake of fashion?

EMH: You’re trying to catch me aren’t you! I will say this, one of the most powerful things anyone can do today is to make something truly beautiful. I don’t believe that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder- that is a fallacy. Beauty is universal, its been proven by numerous philosophers over the last century, we all know something beautiful when we see it. So yes, I think the series for Haider is political in that I have created some very beautiful photographs. It was circumstantially different than a lot of my other work, in that I didn’t have time to premeditate a contrived plan for how the photographs would evolve, but I certainly was familiar with Haider’s work before arriving. After sitting with his collection I knew that I wanted to create something strange in terms of sequence, because the way the clothes came together as a whole collection was unusual. In fashion, as in contemporary art, everyone tends to work in series. It is comforting to most artists to create a series of relatable imagery rather than one stand-alone image. However, I personally prefer viewing photographs and paintings as insular objects, so with this project I made a point to move away from having to work in a unified manner. I suppose I was trying to think differently about how we are supposed to look at photographs in sequence and in relation to each other, so I wanted to just take as many individually beautiful images as I could and not have them have to relate to each other necessarily.

(To read part I, click here.)

Nomenus Quarterly #10 is launched online on September 1st, 2010.
http://www.nomenusquarterly.com

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Photography by Erik Madigan Heck.
Styling by Haider Ackermann.
Location: Palazzo Corsini, Florence, Italy

The following is an extended conversation between Dan Thawley of A Magazine and the artist Erik Madigan Heck, who is the Editor of Nomenus Quarterly. They discuss Heck’s working methods, his two most recent photographic series’ for Haider Ackermann and Undercover by Jun Takahashi, and his opinion on the state of fashion today.

In an exclusive collaboration, we offer Erik’s never-before-seen photographs from the upcoming Nomenus Quarterly #10, released online on September 1st, 2010.

(This interview and gallery is presented in two parts. Click here for the Haider Ackermann article)

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An interview with Erik Madigan Heck, part I : UNDERCOVER

DT: It is interesting to hear you speak about your work. I’ve read some transcripts from two lectures you gave, one in New York and one in Sao Paulo where you talk about your working methods and how you approach fashion. You seem to discuss fashion in a more considered, and conceptual manner. Is that right? You don’t view your fashion images as simply commercial or traditionally editorial, but you talk about them almost as fine-art projects. Can you elaborate on this?

EMH: Yes, that is correct. When I was in graduate school at Parsons I was always grappling with how to make my fashion work fit into an art context, or at least expand the vocabulary used to discuss my fashion photographs, mostly because at the time graduate school was concerned with teaching you how to verbally contextualize your work alongside your contemporaries. For the most part my professors dismissed fashion and fashion photography as a cheapened artistic practice that really didn’t have any relevance to the art world. I disagreed considerably, granted I was in an MFA program, not a fashion program, but I always felt that fashion could be discussed and considered with the same amount of thought and social depth as art photography is discussed in journals like Artforum. And I still feel that in reality both are the exact same, even if the intentions for fashion and art images are different. For both types of photographs are a catalyst to discuss something larger, whether it’s a portrait of a woman by Katie Grannan hung in Chelsea, or a portrait of Guinevere in a fashion spread, you can speak about both images in relation to feminism or the current role of women if you choose to take the conversation there. There is nothing inherent in the Katie Grannan photograph that makes the discourse different. It’s just that the art world enjoys intellectual discussion more so than the fashion world at this particular moment in time. However I actually think there is a lot more interesting things happening in the underground fashion scene now then there is in any gallery I’ve stepped into in the last couple years, and I say that after spending a lot of time in galleries in this city. Just look at someone like Carol Christian Poell and what he has done with fashion…

DT: Where does your work fit in to this?

EMH: My work is always changing, but I suppose I am an advocate of more considerate fashion photography, or at least fashion photography that can engage viewers outside of the very small industry that we work in. We have to keep in mind how small our industry really is, and how boring it can be if we just stick to glossy skin with standard fashion poses in a studio. I consider each project I take on and each issue I curate of Nomenus Quarterly with an extreme amount of thought now as time goes on. I have become very much about trying to subtly intertwine my imagery with literal historically relevant information and research, partly because I feel a responsibility to my audience and to the fashion designers whose work I’m documenting. Each project is now about how do I approach this particular fashion designer’s collection ontologically, rather than seasonally, and consciously negating what everyone else is doing around me. I have become very aware of how history affects the images that are being made now, and I try to bring attention to this by referencing specific moments in time with my work. I attempt to use the clothing to talk about things other than just the clothing- things that may be in the back of our minds that are ultimately more important than just a shirt or pair of pants.

But I would like to draw a distinction, because often time there is a misconception that my work is nostalgic, and it’s not about nostalgia at all. It’s definitely not about trying to make “old looking” images, its more complicated than that, and each project appears the way it does depends on a multitude of factors. For example the series I did this spring with Comme des Garcons was a very important project for me personally, because it was taking a brand we know very well and trying to make it face its own nationalistic identity. Comme des Garcons is the most iconic Japanese brand, but I’ve felt that it has always had an identity crisis in the sense that it desperately wants to be Western. It’s always photographed in a very Western manner, and its branding has always seemed a bit more British than Japanese in my opinion. So I thought I would reference the history of Japanese photography from the mid 19th century (when Dagguereotypes first made it to Japan) to create a time warp that most Westerners immediately associate with Japan as a nation. I wanted to make the most literal photographic references I could make in terms of recreating sets that were standard during the 1860s for Japanese portrait photography. We even flew in original objects and props from Japan to help with authenticity. I wanted people to be hit over the head with Comme des Garcons as being the most iconic and stereotypical brand to encapsulate Japan, by accessing the Japan that we all have seen in geography books: the bathing scenarios, the umbrellas, etc. I wanted Comme to be face to face with its history, and I felt the best way to reconcile this was by placing the current collection in this specific time capsule and see what happened. And I think it worked, it definitely put the images in a whole other world altogether- away from just fashion, and literally removed from photography’s inherent sense of depicting time as truth.

DT: That’s interesting that you talk about the altering or removing of time. That is a good tie in to the current project you just finished with another Japanese brand, Undercover by Jun Takahashi, which is a bit controversial. Can you explain the photographs and what you were trying to do with this project?

EMH: Certainly, like all projects the starting point was really studying Jun Takahashi’s oeuvre. I thought about what I could add to the conversation he began with Undercover some years ago. The most important thing I had to remind myself is that the history of Undercover as a brand lies in the street not in high fashion. Although he has crossed over here and there Undercover is considered to be higher end street fashion, especially with this current collection. For me its such an interesting brand because of this cross over from highbrow to street wear, mostly because the price is still extremely expensive. I immediately began thinking of what street culture means now, and specifically African-American street culture, being the origin for so many references in what we consider to be “street culture” that has made its way overseas. I thought, how I could dive into creating a series of images that can access some of the stereotypical psychological fears of the street, or touch upon some darker elements from the street that may or may not even exist anymore here in New York. Many would argue that street culture is dead. So I wanted to think about hip hop street culture as a romantic past notion and from the very stereotypical outsider or white upper class perspective.

I helps that I live in Harlem, the part of New York City that still has a stigma amongst most white middle and upper class people as being very dangerous because of its all black population. I’ve lived here for four years and have definitely watched south Harlem turn into an extension of the upper West side, that is to say, very safe and in the middle of gentrification. But when I tell people I live in Harlem they still kind of seem hesitant as if the projects are still burning, or teenagers are being shot dead in the streets, which I assure you is not the case. So I thought it would be interesting to create a series of photographs that depicted brutal murders in Harlem in the old newspaper style of documentary photographers like Weegee who almost strictly photographed murders throughout the 1940s and 50s. I wanted to give people a series of photographs that didn’t appear to be staged at first glance, but came across as real documents of violence. The series really became a personal comment on Harlem as a place now. Being the quintessential African American neighborhood for the US, I wanted to play up how the community is still perceived by white Americans in 2010. The truth is we might have voted for Obama, but many of us still wont cross 125th street at night out of fear that we’ll be harmed.

The danger with creating this series was that it’s very easy to immediately dismiss the images as naïve, or made purely for shock value. But I wanted to challenge people to really think about what they are looking at, because that’s what street culture does at its core and that’s what Jun Takahashi does with Undercover. The street as a metaphor brings an energy and thought process to a more or less commercialized culture, until the mainstream eventually appropriates it and in turn makes it commercial. Which is what happened to hip hop in the mid 90s by white suburban kids like myself, and what hipsters have done to New York in the last 5-10 years. I used to listen to Wu-Tang Clan in math class, while going to a top-notch private school. Its funny how fast street culture expands through a society, from the origin to the suburbs…

DT: Is this really the role of fashion though? To discuss political and social issues, or is fashion really just about clothing and style, and you are choosing to bring it to another place for your own personal reasons? You studied political science before getting your MFA, can your background have something to do with this desire to stimulate the mind first?

EMH: I absolutely feel that it is the role of fashion to not just create luxury goods but to help educate the populace through alternative thought, and I don’t think I am alone in sharing this opinion. Read any interview with Hussein Chalayan, or look at how LVMH is trying to attach itself to social institutions like the MoMA. My educational background undoubtedly comes forth into my image making, but I also think the fashion designers I choose to work with are also very overtly political in their work. Rei Kawakubo is arguably one of the most radical feminist designers we have seen since the 1980s, like Louis Bourgeois, altered the shape of the woman’s body. Ann Demeulemeester, who has become a dear friend of mine, is one of the smartest designers I have met by rejecting fashion altogether and creating her own insular world that is constantly evolving as our world does, but according to her own understanding of time. I think that we have reached a period where the element of money has become the central focus in fashion, and its very scary to me. Its scary to pick up a fashion magazine today and see a litany of thoughtless spreads created by photographers and stylists who aren’t truly realizing the power they have to make something thought provoking, and instead are imitating their surroundings. I think people should want to alter the norm, or want to make a statement of some sort, even if it is as simple as attempting to create the most beautiful image ever made- which in it self can be a very powerful political statement. Instead we discuss who is paying for the spread, and how to appease an advertiser who wants the same look as their competitor. And that is very frustrating.

DT: To play the devil’s advocate though, isn’t that what fashion is at its core? We’re in the business of selling a product.

EMH: Yes we are, and in Art it’s also about selling a product too. A painting or a sculpture are also commercial products, but there are ways to create that can stimulate minds and conversation, and there are ways to do it where we are just filling pages with catalog imagery and the latter is too often what we are settling with. There is inarguably an establishment of photographers and art directors accounting for 90 percent of what we consume visually in fashion today, we all know their names- they are celebrities. From them we see the same aesthetic formulas time after time: furthering this sort of inverted hipster-utopian American Apparel culture. They are essentially sending the message to emerging photographers that in order to be successful you have to find your recognizable formula and never stray from it. Just look at the obvious examples of Terry Richardson or Juergen Teller, I feel silly even bringing them up because its so mind numbing. It assumes people are stupid and by feeding them mindless snap shot imagery we can all be like the person in the photograph, or are on an equal playing field with the photographer. To take it one step further, the current mindset assumes photography itself is pretentious unless it’s immediately accessible with a point and shoot and a flash. My argument is that we are now perpetuating a culture where standards have become inverted, where serious artists are now looked at as pretentious, or worse, not even discussed. Instead street artists from the LES are put on the front of magazines around the world, and they aren’t Basquiat- or anywhere close. How is someone like Dash Snow immortalized by the fashion world, instead of an actual great artist like Gerhard Richter or Anselm Kiefer who have proven themselves over decades? Lastly, I don’t think it’s enough for those photographers who we do see publishing constantly in the magazines to become comfortable and formulaic in repeating the same image over and over until we can’t take it anymore. I speak for everyone when I say that if I see another 30 page Juergen Teller spread that looks exactly like everything else he has ever produced, I’m going to throw the towel in. The thing is I actually like some of his work. Juergen has produced some iconic images, but at this point you wonder if he is capable of doing anything interesting, or if we’re forever burdened with the same image….

(To read part II, click here.)

Nomenus Quarterly #10 is launched online on September 1st, 2010.
http://www.nomenusquarterly.com

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The age of the ‘roaring twenties’ remains in our collective consciousness as a heady period of flapper girls, jazz, gin and wild parties, when the girls rolled their stockings down and danced up a storm. With such idyllic and opulent imagery in mind, German still-life photographer Michael Baumgarten created this boudoir scene with styling by textile designer Veerle Hommelen (who worked for some years with Olivier Theyskens at the house of Rochas).

Their images offer a true admiration for the intimate accessories and historical elements of the feminine wardrobe, with exquisite vintage pieces sourced from the Didier Ludot collection in Paris, the Collectors Gallery in Brussels, and Antwerp’s MoMu fashion museum. In the soft-focus closeups, perfume bottles are strewn across the floor among patterned high-heel shoes, alongside scalloped-edge dresses in soft pastels. A young girl lays amongst her precious possessions dressed only in sheer hosiery, her curvaceous figure reflected infinitely as she gazes through the floor-length mirror.

Note: Complementing the original shoot, Olivier Theyskens chose to include the painting below in the online edition of NºD, for the perfect semblance of colour and pattern. Unable to recall the artists name, Olivier described him as a poor Russian artist who lived and worked in Nice during the 1950s. The artwork carries the theme of reflection from the original story, as it is filled with abstracted mirror images of the male and female form.

Above: A painting from Olivier Theyskens’ private collection.

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Photography: Michael Baumgarten.
Styling: Veerle Hommelen.
Makeup: Mathias van Hooff.
Thanks to: Didier Ludot (Paris), MoMu Fashion Museum (Antwerp), Betty de Stefano @ Collectors Gallery (Brussels). All items are from the 20s/30s/40s and are anonymous.

Olivier Theyskens has worked together with French photographer Julien Claessens throughout his career, with Julien capturing many of the defining moments of Olivier’s work at the houses of Rochas and Nina Ricci in their recent book “The Other Side of the Picture”.

For NºD, the pair created this series of exotically dark still-lifes in the forests surrounding the Château de la Hulpe, just outside of Brussels. The bouquets of freshly-cut flowers were ‘styled’ by Olivier himself, spewing forth with sickly vibrant citrus yellows and oranges or a barrage of stark white punctuated with deep, royal blue. The blooms seem awkwardly displaced within the environment, resting in the fork of a barren tree or sitting among a wild patch of weeds.

(The series was grouped together under the title ‘Flower fantasy’ in the printed issue from 2004, but for our 2010 online release Olivier chose to spread the images through the magazine as inspirational moments in between text and other stories.)

Photography: Julien Claessens
Bouquets: Olivier Theyskens
Thanks to: Le Domaine du Château de la Hulpe, Agnes Magoga, Françoise Theyskens, Claire Moury, Nicole Minguet, Maguy Duby, Christopher Claessens, Robert Kol.

Last thursday, Tokyo institution Lift opened the doors to their newly refurbished Lift Étage boutique in Daikanyama, celebrating the renovation with an exquisite temporary installation of hand portraits. Founders Minami and Masahiro Tsunoda collected a series of over twenty five photographs from their exclusive list of avant-garde designers, with the only conditions being ‘a black and white image of your hand’.

Their images came in from across the globe with many creative, sensual interpretations of Lift’s concept. From Ann Demeulemeester‘s crisp white table cloth and her porcelain hand grasping a feather, to Rick Owens’ lavish fur background and the gnarly, adorned hands of his wife Michele Lamy dipped in tar, a wide range of aesthetics have been broadcast through this seemingly narrow slate. Choosing to represent their profession, some designers toyed with the tools of the trade, grasping thimbles, fabric, and dressmaking pins (in the case of Dries Van Noten, above).

The overall effect is emotive and somewhat imposing, especially considering the dramatic highlight of Masahiro’s own hand, carved into a 2m high wooden sculpture that stands at the store’s new entrance.

Masahiro Tsunoda talks about the ‘Hand Portraits’ exhibition:

Individuals have their own icons. It can be a face, fingerprint… In opening this installation, we have put focus on “hands” as they form very important part of designs of the creators. We create sketches, write research reports, and make art works through this privilege we are born with. Each hand is different from one another, making it our biggest symbol of identity. Unfortunately, the image of hands, in other words, “the icon of creation”, is slowly fading away from people’s minds. To remind this maximum, but minimum source of creation we would like to present art exhibition created via the icon of individual people.

Participating designers:

CAROL CHRISTIAN POELL / UNITED NUDE / REINHARD PLANK / DRIES VAN NOTEN / ANN DEMEULEMEESTER /INES KAAG & DESIREE HEISS BY BLESS / KIMINORI MORISHITA BY 08 SIRCUS / SYBILLE WALTER & SAMUEL DRIRA BY ENCENS / JAS MB /MAURIZIO AMADEI BY m.a+ / STEPHAN SCHNEIDER / INCANATION / RUGGERO GUIDI BY GUIDI / DAMIR DOMA / GIORGIO BRATO / ISSEI AND SUSANNA BY LUMEN ET UMBRA / CORNELIAN TAURAS TEAM / TOMOAKI OKANIWA BY THE VIRIDI-ANNE / YOKO ITO BY INDIVISUAL SENTIMENTS / MIHARA YASUHIRO / OLIVIER THEYSKENS BY MONIKA BIELSKYTE / ALESSANDRO TINELLI / GUSTAVO LINS / ALEXANDER FIELDEN / RYUSAKU HIRUMA BY SAK / RICK OWENS / LUTZ / LUCA LAURINI BY LABEL UNDER CONSTRUCTION / LOST & FOUND / MUÑOZ VRANDECIC

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The ‘Hand Portraits’ exhibition runs from August 20th at the new Lift Étage store.

Moncheri 3F-2,20-20 Daikanyama-Cho,
Shibuya-Ku, Tokyo 1500034 150−0034
東京都渋谷区代官山町
20−20モンシェリー代官山3F-2

http://lift-net.co.jp/

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Above: Dries Van Noten’s hand portrait at Lift Étage, Tokyo.

Above: Rick Owens’ hand portrait with wife Michele Lamy at Lift Étage, Tokyo.

Above: Stephan Schneider’s hand portrait at Lift Étage, Tokyo.

Above: Ann Demeulemeester’s hand portrait at Lift Étage, Tokyo.

Above: Damir Doma’s hand portrait at Lift Étage, Tokyo, photographed by Sybille Walter.

Above: A wall of hand portraits at Lift Étage, Tokyo.

Above: A wall of hand portraits at Lift Étage, Tokyo.

Above: The 2m high carved wooden hand of Lift director Masahiro Tsunoda, at the entrance to Lift Étage, Tokyo.

Above: ‘Hand Portrait Project’ by Muñoz Vrandecic,   photo ©Muñoz Vrandecic.

Above: A view inside the newly refurbished space of Lift Étage, Tokyo.

‘Etant Donnés: 1. La Chute D’eau 2. Le Gaz D’eclairage’ / ‘Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas‘.

This is the title of Marcel Duchamp’s final artwork, assembled in his New York apartment in secret over the two decades between 1946 and 1966. The haunting imagery of this bizarre diorama has enthralled art critics and historians for years, but it also captured the dark imagination of Olivier Theyskens for his magazine NºD.

Belgian art historian Paul Van Beek constructed the following fictitious interview* with Duchamp, to explore the possible motives, opinions and musings of this most illusive chess-playing artist.

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MARCEL DUCHAMP
by Paul Van Beek

Paul Van Beek: Marcel Duchamp, why did you request this conversation? As far as I know it is the first time you have asked for an interview in the whole of your long career.

Marcel Duchamp: Yes. I am not someone who pursues things. I don’t like chasing after things, first of all because it’s tiring. You see, I prefer breathing to working. What’s more, it doesn’t usually lead to anything. I don’t expect anything. But chasing after things is the consequence of a need. I don’t have that, because actually I feel pretty good even though I haven’t created anything for a long time. I don’t attribute to the artist that social role in which he thinks that he has to do something and make an effort for the public. I hate that sort of thinking.

PVB: But then why did you ask for an interview now?
MD: For exactly that reason. You see, there is the creator of the work on the one hand and the person who looks at it on the other. According to me, the one who looks at it is just as important as its maker. In my opinion, the spectator is just as much of a creator of the work as the maker himself, and vice versa, the creator is just as much one who looks at his work. For more than 20 years I have been working in secret on a major definitive work, more or less a ‘viewing box’ entitled Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas. The only person who knows of its existence is my wife Teeny. It’s about time a person who will look at it plays his rile of spectator. As you know, chance is very dear to me, coincidence is my most loyal friend, but I don’t want her to run away with my work, when I’m dead for example, at the viewer’s cost.

PVB: Am I right in thinking you are working on a diorama? Is that the right word?
MD: Yes, it is a diorama, if you like. Given is very similar to a display in a natural history museum with a stuffed wild animal in the midst of three-dimensional scenery from its natural environment, and with a painted background. The landscape in the background is like that of my L.H.O.O.Q from 1919. In my new work I am constantly trying to create references to earlier work. The title Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas is a notation from my Green Box and refers to The Large Glass, on which I worked for eight years when I was about 30. I have also tried to give away little bits of my secret in small new works, but few people, if any, have understood my ‘messages in a bottle’. As early as 1947 I called my rubber breast, Please Touch, ‘my secret’, it was a breast from my plaster model of Given. In 1959 I tried to make it clear that I was working with gaslight and water, by means of my ready-made called Water & Gas On Every Floor. In 1965 I shaved the moustache and beard off my 1919 L.H.O.O.Q, in the same way as I shaved off the pubic hair of my mannequin. And this year I published the etching Le Bec Auer, in which I drew her outline. In this way I have sent out into the world a great many ‘messages in a bottle’ and ‘purloined letters’. But no one has picked them up or found them.

PVB: You have made up a whole stage setting, or what would you call it?
MD: It is, if you like, an installation, one in which at first sight all you see is an old, weathered, double wooden door with no handles framed by bricks. It is only when you cautiously come closer to admire the work with you own eyes, supposing that it is one of my ready-mades, that you discover two small holes at eye-level. You peep through the holes and there, straight in front of you, lies a naked woman on her back on a pile of branches and leaves, her legs opened wide. You look straight into the hole between her legs. She has no pubic hair or genitals, just a notch. Her face is out of view. She is holding up a burning gas lamp.

PVB: It strikes me as a revolting sight! Is the woman dead? Has she been attacked and left behind mutilated somewhere in the woods? Or is it a masquerade? Is the woman a woman?
MD: Exactly@ What exactly is going on here? A shaved vulva? A dry vulva? A stretched vulva? An open wound where a penis has been? Perhaps its even an anus as unsullied as the Virgin Mary?

PVB: All this raises a great many questions! I suppose Given is as direct and shocking as The Large Glass is hermetic and remote?
MD: It is not so simple and dualistic. Those who are looked at and those who look are one and the same. même. How often have I had to explain in America that the two parts of The Large Glass, the bachelors at the bottom and the bride at the top, are one and the same. Même! Même! I always repeated, so in the end I added it to the title of The Large Glass: ‘La mariée mise a nu par ses celebataires, même’. But they didn’t understand it, and in the English translation même became ‘even’, which I suppose is possible too. There are even scholarly theoreticians who make it into m’aime and on that basis put forward a curious incest theory, according to which I had a relationship with my sister Suzanne, all very interesting. In my etching Le Bec Auer you see the same recumbent woman as through the holes in Given, but now in the company of a man. THe man’s head and the woman’s crotch are next to each other. Yet the man is not interested in her genitals, and apparently not in his own either, even though it’s standing straight up like ‘a pole in the air’, but remains invisible behind the man’s head. What you do see is the upright Bec Auer gas lamp which the woman holds ostentatiously in her hand.

PVB: How important is eroticism in your work?
MD: Very important. If it is not visible or striking, it is certainly implicit. I have a great belief in eroticism, because it is really something very general, something that everyone everywhere in the world understands. If you like, eroticism replaces what other literary schools have called symbolism or romanticism. You might say it could form yet another school. Eroticism is the means by which one tries to reveal things that are constantly hidden. To be able to permit oneself to expose them and voluntarily bring them within everyone’s reach, that’s what I think is important because that’s the basis of everything and yet it is never talked about.

PVB: You say ‘implicit’ but it seems to me that in Given it is more a question of explicit sex!
MD: I think it’s time to give my work back its subversive character. It is time, if you like to put your hand under Miss Beatrice Wood’s skirt and blindly feel her sex with your fingers. That has always been my method. I envelop an idea as a vagina envelops a penis. Under the Underwood typewriter cover, sex and machine are the same, même. Despite the many articles and even monographs that have been written about me, I am astonished that the machines are discussed but rarely, if ever, the genitals. This is a cleaning up operation that involves the dilution of the sexual fantasies and obscene wordplay that I inject like heroin into my works, to make them more suitable for consumption, or to disregard them completely and concentrate on comments on my interest in esoteric subjects like alchemy and mathematics.

PVB: What do you think about the various interpretations by André Breton, Michel Carrouges and Robert Lebel?
MD: Each of their interpretations applies its own personal emphasis, which is not necessarily right or wrong, but interesting. though only interesting when one takes account of the person who wrote it. Nowhere is the literature on my work so much concerned with itself as when it is about my alter ego Rrose Sélavy. She is described and analysed from every angle: from the point of view of mathematics, androgyny, psychoanalysis, identity, incest and bisexuality. In all these hyper-theoretical analyses, Rrose Sélavy’s scabrous humour and hidden eroticism has been lost. Were you not struck by the fact that Rose is not only a terribly ordinary girl’s name but it is also the colour of her lingerie and that which is beneath it? How often I have alluded to this, in covert terms – because I think it should remain concealed – but I never thought that the secret would be kept so long. Even now I do not intend to reveal everything. That is a job for both the work and for the spectator.

PVB: So he who looks and she who is looked at are the same?
MD: If you like. Gladly.

PVB: It is not necessary as far as I’m concerned.
MD: Yes, yes, it’s what I want. It’s not up to me to decide, but it would be very nice.

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*This conversation only took place in the mind of Paul Van Beek.

The artwork is on permanent display in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Above: The view through the peephole door of ‘Etant Donnés: 1. La Chute D’eau 2. Le Gaz D’eclairage’ / ‘Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas‘.
Mixed media assemblage, approximately 242.5cm high, 177cm wide, including: an old wooden door, bricks, velvet, wood, leather stretched over an armature of metal and other material, twigs, aluminium, iron, glass, plexiglass, linoleum, cotton, electric lights, gas lamp (Bec Auer type), motor, etc.

Above: The exterior view of ‘Etant Donnés: 1. La Chute D’eau 2. Le Gaz D’eclairage’ / ‘Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas‘.

Above: ‘L.H.O.O.Q.‘ by Marcel Duchamp, 1919.

Above: ‘The Large Glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even‘ by Marcel Duchamp, 1915-1923.

Tilda Swinton is the perennial fashion muse – a powerful woman whose natural poise and striking beauty have lent her the unwavering fervour of fashion designers across the world. With heavyweights like Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, Raf Simons at Jil Sander and of course Haider Ackermann, Tilda has participated in an organic exchange of energy and publicity – lending her face and lithe frame to some of their most daring creations on film and across the red carpet.

Some years before her avant-garde aura took the film and fashion worlds’ by storm, Olivier Theyskens chose Tilda as the subject for this inspiring collection of images for NºD. Opting for the rich, theatrical aesthetic of Parisian photographer Ali Mahdavi, Olivier styled the story together with French accessories designer Loulou de la Falaise (a long-time friend and muse of Yves Saint Laurent).

The images are an eerie contrast, offering soft-focus shots of naked baby mice and a hairless sphynx cat with the porcelain-skinned actress – who poses in layers of opulent necklaces from Loulou’s own designs and private collection. Deathly pale and devoid of expression, Tilda barely raises colour or emotion against the cool green backdrop, maintaining an icy elegance mirrored only by her somewhat unusual pets.

Photography: Ali Mahdavi.
Styling: Loulou de la Falaise & Olivier Theyskens.
Makeup: Mina Matsamura
Hair: Frédéric Mennetrier
Production: Eugenia Melian.
Thanks to: Ariel de Ravenel, Jerry Stafford, Janvier (Paris) : retouching, Mandrake Production, Tilda Swinton.

Above: Flower brooch by Loulou de la Falaise.

Above: Taffeta blouse and semi-precious stone necklace by Loulou de la Falaise. Oriental necklace, private collection.

Above: Pinstripe pantsuit by Loulou de la Falaise. All necklaces, private collection.

Flemish choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker gained international recognition in the early 1980s with her fresh take on post-modern dance, influenced by her time in the New York Tisch School of the Arts.  Shortly after entering the world dance arena, Anne founded her own permanent ensemble Rosas in Brussels, which continues today as a bridge between human movement and music, attracting collaborations through the worlds of contemporary composers, opera and film.

For NºD, Parisian photojournalist Gerard Uferas photographed Anne in her studio, dancing to her own choreography for the 1963 Joan Baez song ‘Once’. Dressed in a draped black dress from designer Anke Loh, she executes her movements in front of the studio mirror with precision and determination, to the exacting standards of her own drawings (featured below).

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‘Once’ by Joan Baez

Once I had sweetheart, and now I have none,
Once I had sweetheart, and now I have none,
She’s gone and leave me, she’s gone and leave me,
She’s gone and leave me to sorrow and moan.

Last night in sweet slumber I dreamed I did see,
Last night in sweet slumber I dreamed I did see,
My own precious jewel sat smiling by me,
My own precious jewel sat smiling by me.

And when I awakened I found it not so,
And when I awakened I found it not so,
My eyes like some fountain with tears overflow,
My eyes like some fountain with tears overflow.

I’ll venture through England, through France and through Spain,
I’ll venture through England, through France and through Spain,
All my life I will venture the watery main,
All my life I will venture the watery main.

Once I sweetheart, and now I have none,
Once I sweetheart, and now I have none,
She’s gone and leave me, she’s gone and leave me,
She’s gone and leave me to sorrow and moan.