April 22, 2012
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Gaultier and Physics
I'm in the middle of an IM conversation with my nephew. We're discussing a visit for him to take to see me here in SF in August:
[9:31:13 AM] S7: Very good. I'm thinking August, before your school starts for next year.
[9:31:48 AM] Nephew: Sounds great to me, I'd be glad to go down there anytime.
[9:32:47 AM] S7: "Come up over"
We're across the country and north of you. Prepositions, prepositions.
[9:33:10 AM] Nephew: Whatever, I'm taking History, not Geography.
[9:33:29 AM] S7: You still need to know where the heck you are, don't you?
[9:34:51 AM] Nephew: Well, if I have someone who does know where I am, then it's not very logical to have two people know where they are, when the person who doesn't know where they are can just ask the person who does know.
[9:35:21 AM] S7: Ah, you haven't started geometry yet, have you?
[9:36:25 AM] S7: Two people need to know where they are to make a line. Of course, then you get to physics, and they'll tell you that you can either know where something is or how fast it's moving, but not both, so basically I just rely on the cat
[9:37:16 AM] S7: Cat calm and sleepy? It's not dinnertime around my house. Cat loud and screamy? It's dinnertime around my house. It's the Bella School of time/space relativity
[9:38:54 AM] Nephew: So I'm apparently no[t] the only [one] that relies on their animal to decide what time it is.
[9:39:01 AM] Nephew: And I start geometry next year.
[9:40:00 AM] S7: Nope, you're not. Bella's better than an atomic clock, except for the litterbox thing.
[9:41:34 AM] Nephew: That probably smells atomic.
[9:41:52 AM] S7: You don't know the half-life of it!I love this kid.
I went to the DeYoung Museum yesterday to see an exhibit of Jean-Paul Gaultier's work. He's had a one-of-a-kind career, casting a wide net for inspiration, designing clothes for coture, for film, and for music stars since the 80s, and, oh yeah, he designed those missle-tits corsets that Madonna wore. The exhibit had some of his haute coture clothing -- quite a lot really -- from a wide variety of his collections. Like any good museum, there were ample thoughts by the artist available in text, video, and, most amazingly/creepily, the mannequins themselves (you'll see).
Here's the man himself, at the front of the exhibit, with a series of mannequins arranged from right to left vaguely chronologically. And yes, the faces moved. They were projected from overhead onto the surface of the dummies. They'd periodically open/close their eyes, talk to you, look at you, sing, and generally creep you the fuck out in the best possible way. Gaultier's recording here was actually excerpted from an older interview. I'm guessing that he re-filmed it for this purpose here. It was a long recording, and he wandered from subject to subject.
On this side of the staging, you see his iconic Marinere stripes he lifted from French sailors.
Queue the religious iconography...
There were a few from his Mermaids collection as well.
Detail from the purse
His early years, corset fascination, and Madonna collaboration. He was fascinated by his grandmother's corsets and chose to look at them as an object of power, not subjugation. His old teddy bear is on display, for which he, as a young child, attempted to design a corset for it. Look out, Smokey!
This is a man's corset. The mannequin is facing the corner of this part of the room, and he is facing a "mirror" accross from him. The mirror is actually a digital moving image of the same mannequin with the same projected face having a dialogue with himself about men, clothing, and fashion, the mirror trying to explain to him that men should be able to wear beautiful things if they want: "Clothes have no gender," the mannequin says at one point.
More Madonna/S&M stuff.
The next gallery highlights some of his more internationalist stuff, casting his eye to Africa, Mongolia, China, Spain, and other countries that sparked his creativity.
PETA will be happy to know: this isn't fur. It's amazingly done beadwork!
These are from an early 1990s collection of his called Chic Rabbis. Mazel tov!
Various collections of UK-Punk-inspired coture, and an emblematic codpiece. Not the one, however, he designed for Cameo, which was featured in a video in the exhibition.
Ultramodern!
And at the end of the exhibit, some of his more recent work and film collaborations with Almodovar, Luc Besson, and others. These next two pieces are from a collection called Movie Stars. The woman's dress is using a fabric printed to look like film, and the bodice is actually made of celluloid film strips.
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