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Deborah Turbeville | Unseen Versailles

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As I was packing for Europe last Monday I got an email about the opening of Deborah Turbeville’s new show “Unseen Versailles.” It was to be on the one full day I was in Paris, and Turbeville would be attending. There is something especially joyful about meeting someone half way across the world from whom you are normally separated by a subway ride. Needless to say, I went.

The exhibit is quintessential Turbeville in its feeling of intimacy. It is held in the Galerie Serge Aboukrat, which must be the smallest gallery in the world (two people holding hands would be able to span its perimeter). Tucked away in a postcard-picturesque and postage stamp-sized Parisian square complete with a roundabout that can barely fit a car and an ornamented lamppost straight out of a fairy tale, the gallery is not easy to find, but the exhibit is well worth the trouble, as was evidenced by the intimate gathering that included the singer Charlotte Gainsbourg and the designer Haider Ackermann.

SZ MIX | EUGENE RABKIN

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Here is my StyleZeitgeist mix. These are some of the songs that I hold dear for various reasons; some reflect my thoughts and emotions, some have influenced my style, some possess the sheer excruciating beauty that needs no comment.

Naturally, quite a few of the songs are from the 90s and the 00’s – the impressionable time that I sometimes miss, the years before my tastes coalesced. The mix starts out fast and hard and ends up slow and soft. It’s a long hard road out of hell. Enjoy it.

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RUSSIAN PHOTOGRAPHY 1908-1938

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It takes a show like the current exhibit of early Russian photography at the Nailya Alexander Gallery in New York to remind us of several things. One, that the visual age we live in is neither as sophisticated nor as original as we think. Another, that the size of a photograph is part of its intended meaning or, at least, an important part of its impact, and that this critical information is frequently obliterated in physical reproduction or on the Internet. Or that we need to get into galleries where we can experience physical prints, particularly vintage prints, because their featheriness, deep blackness, greasiness, technical (im)perfection and chemical tactility ground them as physical objects as much as imagery itself.

SZ MIX | KARLO STEEL

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While the rest of the world is showering you with street style porn from the New York Fashion week, we would like to do something different. Here is our second installment of StyleZeitgeist mixes. This one is by Karlo Steel, the mastermind behind the iconic men’s boutique, Atelier.

In our first volume, Cintra Wilson interviewed Karlo about his vast collection of printed fashion publications and the importance of printed matter.

Karlo wrote about his mix,

SZ MIX | Rick Owens

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Here is the new section of our blog, where we invite people who have participated in StyleZeitgeist Magazine, whether as subject or contributor, to create their own mixtape. Fashion is often intertwined with music, so we thought why not? Our first mix is by Rick Owens. Rick contributed the flagship piece on his role models for volume one. Here is what he wrote about his mix,

THESE ARE SELECTIONS FROM MY FAVORITE PLAYLISTS ON MY IPHONE – “CRACKWHORE” FOR THE LOUD STUFF AND “FAG” FOR THE PIANO BAR STUFF.

IT ALL USED TO BE SISTERS OF MERCY AND WAGNER BUT NOW I CAN ONLY LISTEN TO MUSIC THAT’S SUPERFICIAL – EITHER BIG AND DUMB FOR THE GYM OR SUGAR SHOWTUNES FOR WORK.

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Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets

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To hear “Quay Brothers” is to instantly think of filmmakers famous for handmade, dusty, stop-motion puppet films that harken to some marginal eastern European animation tradition legible to a select few is more a result of the haphazard way we have come to know their work. The principal achievement of the Quay Brothers retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is to correct this misperception.

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Requiem for the sun: The art of Mono-ha

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Acrylic sheets, neon tubes, cement, steel plates, glass, rubber, cloth, paper, cotton, sponges, light bulbs, electrical outlets, wire, stone, earth, water, fire, wood, charcoal, and oil – industrial materials, household products, and natural materials were placed together in neutral arrangements. They were brought into temporary involvements or confrontations with a variety of spaces and phenomena, including the ground surface, mid-air, room interiors, walls, floors, corners, columns, windows, light, and dark. Mono-ha did not use physical objects and space as materials to realize certain ideas; their approach was a way of giving new life to these elements in interdependent relationships.

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Sarah Moon: Now and Then

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For her current show in the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, titled “Now and Then,” the photographer Sarah Moon had the following quotation from T.S Eliot stenciled on a column

— What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present

While Moon may be associated in the popular mind with fashion photography, that understanding does not necessarily serve her work well because, frankly, most of us have not developed as sophisticated an understanding of “fashion” as she has. Where fashion brings to mind frenetic change, disposability, consumption and surface concerns, Moon equates fashion to fiction. And what fiction prizes, if anything, are interiority and empathy.

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Delpire & Co in New York

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The Aperture Foundation’s description of their newly opened exhibition, “Delpire & Co”, is that it “showcases [Robert] Delpire’s rise to prominence in the world of photography through his pioneering and seminal work in magazine and book publishing, films, curatorship, and advertising for the past fifty years.”

This it certainly does — in a herculean installation that will span four venues and two supporting gallery shows. But, beyond the stated goal, it may ultimately showcase photography’s rise to prominence in the world. When the elevator takes you back down from the show to the sidewalk below, it is worth reflecting that what you have just seen represents a world of images that not only predates the Internet and the hellish proliferation of images that marks our time but an epoch in which it was possible to ask with a straight face whether photography matters.

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Brancusi: The Photographs

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A question relevant to contemporary concerns quietly resonates in the elegantly understated show of 30 or so vintage prints shot by Constantin Brancusi in the 1920’s and 30s, currently showing at Bruce Silverstein gallery in New York, and it is namely one of intent. What are we to make of photographs taken by an artist known as a sculptor? What purpose were these photographs intended to serve? To whom were they addressed? What has the passage of time wrought on them and on our interpretive efforts?

The gut reaction is to see the photographs as simply documentation. However, even a cursory stroll through demonstrates that there is more going on than just Brancusi photographing sculptures for his consumption alone.