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Dries Van Noten at MoMu

Culture, Fashion

Two weeks ago I got to see the Dries Van Noten: Inspirations exhibit at MoMu, Antwerp’s fashion museum. As the title suggests, the exhibit provides a glimpse into Van Noten’s world, and the influences that feed the wellspring of his creativity.

I have already seen the initial version of the exhibit at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. It was received with typical fanfare that the fashion press is all too ready to dispense. But while I liked it overall, I was so exhausted by the two floors of continuous explosion of color and ornament that I was happy to get some fresh Parisian air when I finally got out.

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Bjork at MoMa

Culture

This Sunday a new exhibit devoted to the work of the Icelandic singer Bjork will open at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Since Bjork’s first solo album Debut (1993) she has occupied that portion of cultural space that is hard to define except as an oxymoron – pop avant-garde.

The exhibit comes on the heels of the one devoted to another pop avant-gardist, David Bowie. This crowd-pleaser was first shown at the V&A museum in London, went on to Chicago, and opened in Paris this Tuesday.

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Francesca Woodman: I’m Trying My Hand at Fashion Photography

Culture

The work of Francesca Woodman, the prodigious photographer who took her life in 1981 by jumping out of a window, is now on display at the Marian Goodman gallery in New York.

Interest in Woodman’s work has resurged after the 2011-2012 exhibits at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with several books being published in their wake.

On Kawara

On Kawara — Silence

Culture

On making the first turn of the spiral up the Guggenheim ramp you too might question whether there is going to be enough to keep this exhibition of On Kawara going.  It is one thing to walk the thirty-six Date Paintings permanently on view at Dia:Beacon, where the mind has been primed for the experience, and a whole other matter to walk in fresh off Fifth Avenue and immediately hit the ramp with three months of consecutive Day Paintings (“Everyday Meditation” 1971).

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KISHIO SUGA

Culture

The Upper East Side outpost of L.A.’s Blum & Poe gallery takes up the top floors of an unprepossessing brownstone and is easy to miss. That said, you will most likely have the place to yourself, which is a special way to get to walk through the first New York solo show of Kishio Suga that takes up the gallery, including its courtyard-facing terrace.

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DEBORAH TURBEVILLE UNSEEN VERSAILLES REVISITED

Culture, Fashion

I had forgotten that Doubleday editor Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis originally commissioned the photographs from Unseen Versailles by the late Deborah Turbeville that are on view at Staley Wise in 1981.  The mind at first could not, perhaps did not, want to reconcile the withdrawn, intimate vision that is Turbeville’s with the stately, public and, one imagines, rigid New York of Kennedy Onassis.

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Future Beauty

Culture, Fashion

“Future Beauty: 30 Years of Japanese Fashion” is currently showing at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), in Brisbane, Australia. The exhibition comes from the archives of the prestigious Kyoto Costume Institute and explores the influence Japanese fashion designers have had over the last thirty years.

The comprehensive collection is comprised of more than one hundred pieces from the heavyweights like Rei Kawakubo of