Project Description:
This came out of some of the work done for the Fictive Boutique project. At the time that exhibit was mounted we had contemplated doing some fake fashion photography to accompany it. In the end we decide to wait on that part of the idea, and came back to it later.
Here a series of pieces of clothing which were part of the installation on Elizabeth Street are used to create a set of seeming fashion photos.
Credits:
Photography – Paul Clay
Clothing Design – Yukiko Takagi
Models – Mayumi and Miho
Fictive Tear Sheet-Project Description
The term “tear sheet” refers to a picture of a fashion designers work which appears in a magazine, and can then be torn out and displayed to show the designer is being successful.
This particular project happened quite serendipitously. The photographer Jo Lance stopped by the Fictive Studio in a quest for clothing to shoot for an upcoming fashion spread for a possible new magazine. Some of the Fictive fashion art caught his eye and after short initial hesitation we suddenly realized it was a fantastic opportunity to create a new work. Some items were manufactured expressly for Fictive Tear Sheet. Jo incorporated the Fictive pieces seamlessly into the shoot along with actual clothing from various other designers.
Little separates Fictive’s fashion art from regular clothing. It is usually an element of a larger artwork which is conceived as a whole. It often involves a performative aspect, and always has some conceptual element involved. One of the very few ways it differs is that it is not for sale as clothing. This is one of the only ways to keep it from spilling over the edge from conceptual into actual fashion.
A disclaimer is in order here. Unlike other recent Fictive work we didn’t first conceive the project and then find creative people to collaborate on it. This work is very ephemeral and after-the-fact. Most of the people involved were simply doing their regular jobs and had no idea we imagined ourselves to be creating an artwork. We never met the editors of the magazine. Jo was simply doing his normal work.
I think this relates in a variety of interesting ways to contemporary fashion. Half the time clothing chosen for a fashion shoot doesn’t even fit the model being used. Clips, clothes pins and other methods are employed to make the clothing look the right way. Photographers frame only elements they like. Stylists grab odd bits of stuff from home, off-the-shelves, or even find something lying around in an abandoned lot near the photo shoot (no lie). These elements are incorporated into the visual look without anyone ever mentioning that they are not for sale and in many cases not even pieces of clothing.
Runway shows are notorious for showing items that would never be ordered by buyers for later sale to the public. These articles function as centerpieces, giving a marketing impression, mood, or sense of how the more normal clothing should be perceived.
There is also a huge focus on the show itself, and designers often see their work entirely wihin this structure. The number of groups and the order of the clothing items down the runway is often being determined before the garments are even designed. One is not creating a variety of clothing items for people to wear so much as one is sculpting a strong show.
The special runway items, (often dear to the designers and essentially, artworks) will be available in the showroom along with all the other items after the runway event, and stylists can and do borrow them for photo shoots. Often they are sought out as the best pieces even if they will never see production.
Thus, between the stylists, photographers and the designers a lot of what one sees in magazines is actually fictional fashion art to begin with.
As you search the periodical literature for what’s hot, what’s now, who you should be, and what you could buy next, we hope you’ll look for a copy of H6K. Whether this new magazine ever actually sees the light of day, It’s an excellent resource for today’s Latin man, and a nice little piece of accidental contemporary art. – Paul Clay
Installation involving a 3D Computer model consisting of a navigable mile-wide virtual cube of visual and textual information.
In the group exhibit BAD SCIENCE, INTERACTIVE INSTALLATIONS AND FABRICATED DIALOGS, presented by mixed mess@ge, in association with The DTW Gallery, New York City
Project Description:
The title refers both to the look of digitally produced landscape, but also to what’s on the horizon if present trends in our cultural perception of space continue. The work can played with like a big video game you fly around in and explore, but my hope is that for some it may be viewed as a sort of critique of western visualization. It is about the Western historical perception of landscape in the most basic sense.
Digital Vista
Review by Chris Jordan
[abstract]
Digital navigable environment projected on surface of metal tube cube approximately 8′ x 8′ x 8′; two facing surfaces covered and used as digital projection space; pillows, carpet, keyboard and trackball.
[details]
Digital Vista is a multifaceted artwork that questions the massive societal movement towards all things virtual. It blurs the boundary between digital and tangible through viewer interaction, both physical and mental. The traditional role of artist-audience is torn down through the collaborative and interactive nature of the installation.
This is a participatory artwork, utilizing the calm stillness of Zen to create a gateway into the virtual experience. The real life space, contained within the square mesh, welcomes you as well as supports you through the virtual experience. Once you are seated and Paul has coached you, like the Zen master, on the controls, you begin the exploration. The first thing you see are three dimensional green lillypad-like extrusions floating on a cyan background. Zooming into these stark structures, you notice gray tombstone-like obelisks on them. Further navigation towards these obelisks reveals simple words and phrases on their surfaces. As you stop and look around these spaces, you begin to notice words combining into more complex thoughts as different obelisks line up in 3 dimensional space. While shifting around these cubes, the combinations change; some disappear, some emerge, positions are altered, and you begin to realize the delightful complexity of this experience.
Your mind soars, dreamlike, while your body rests comfortably within the peacefulness of the cushioned cube. For me it felt like an out of body experience. I zoomed from lillypad to lillypad, creating different motions, rhythms, and phrases out of the objects. It was exciting, thinking of Burrough’s work with audio cutups in the 50′s, conjuring 3D meaning out of the recombination of words. The smooth response of the system allows you to hunker down in a cluster of cubes, and spin around, the words and shapes combining in a blur of meaning, form and phrase fusing into one.
As I became more immersed, the starkness of the environment created a feeling of walking through a graveyard. I then interpreted these tombstones as a memorial to the actual words written on them. Initially the flash and discov- ery of this virtual space gave the Digital Vista meaning, showing humanities moth-like draw to all things bright and shiny. But paradoxically it is a statement on how that flash is eroding society’s connection to not just literature, but the use of words. We see this every day, as more and more people turn on, and tune out. People have been reading less and less, opting instead for the somnambulism of television, and the bang of video games. Digital Vista not only questions that shift in society, but creates a memorial to the casualties in this future atmosphere.
The Dadaist notion of the “Exquisite Cadaver” opened the 20th century with word play exploration as an art form. Now at the close of the century, Paul Clay’s Digital Vista is appropriately representing the use of language or words as the modern Cadaver.
Project Credits:
Digital Vista by Paul Clay
Text: Karen Williams with additional text by Paul Clay and Ed Pastorini.
Early versions of the presentation included contributions by Yuki Takagi, Willyum Delirious, and Jamie Leo.
A pair of objects made at invitation, to be auctioned as part of a benefit for Harvey Lichtenstein in celebration of his retirement from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) after his 32-year reign as the institution’s executive director. In 1999 President Clinton awarded Mr. Lichtenstein the National Medal of Arts.
Made from old fashioned silicone furniture sliders, lingerie garters, shower curtain hooks, 50′s era holiday fetish images via internet download, picture hanger hardware.
Mr. Lichtenstein is famed for his consistent presentation of cutting edge work exploring difficult issues, including power, sex, and gender. His first season at BAM (1968-1969) included Alban Berg’s sensational and Lurid opera “Lulu,” in which the main character actively prostitutes herself and also included The Living Theater’s “Paradise Now,” involving audience participation, and a notorious scene in which actors recite a list of social taboos that include nudity, while themselves disrobing; which led to multiple arrests for indecent exposure, during the life of the work.
The pair of objects is designed to resemble earrings or Christmas ornaments and references fashion and costume fetishization, while at the same time evoking a sense of “wholesome” 1950s era nostalgia.
The work partly explores what it means for a powerful male from this era to retire. The figures suggest theater starlets, a tawdry version of the Radio City Rockettes Christmas show, and notions of the “casting couch”. In one reading, we see the oppressed woman presented in the attitude of trophy gift and rightfully deserved object for the male who has achieved a heightened social status, and who will now, in retirement, reap the rewards of a lifetime of oppressive power accrual. Though gendered, they also stand in for all people who must labor and “put out” for the powerful in order to survive.
At the same time a heightened sense of the humorous absurdity in codified gender and power roles, (the awareness of which might more typically be found within gay and transgender communities,) could read these as idillic souvenirs of a bygone era. A kind of tribute to an imaginary past where sex is idealized and the fictional roles of “Boy” or “Girl”, ”Dominant” or “Submissive”, “Object” or “Objectifier” can temporarily be inhabited and reveled in by anyone, no mater what their gender or orientation. A kind of bacchanalian celebration of richly deserved reward.
They are intended to suggest decoration and celebration, provocation and transgression, costume and theatrical spectacle, all in honor of the man who founded the Next Wave Festival, and showed us things that others were afraid to reveal.
An art runway show featuring a series of artist/designers which included dacron, string and foam outfits designed by Paul Clay, with agency models. Part of the event Culture Jam, Night Owls, New York City.
Project Description
While working a freelance day job for a professional drapery and rigging company, I ran across a material called Bonded Dacron made from polyethylene terephthalate, a thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family used in synthetic fibers.
Dacron is used in upholstery, and looks a little like the fake cotton ball snow used in miniature scenes at Christmas time, but has high tensile strength and resistance to stretching. It is very light weight, can be purchased in bulk in 30″ or greater width rolls, and is approximately one inch thick.
When I was invited to participate in this group exhibit/runway show, I thought Dacron and foam rubber might be interesting sculptural materials to work with. The bulky physical form was a good challenge when trying to create something that could be worn as fashion.
Credits for Fictive’s contribution:
Paul Clay (Designer)
Tsukuru Asada (Photographer)
Models:
Christie Dinham (New York Model Management)
Rodger Gary (New York Model Management)
Munyana ( Model)
Tiffany ( Model)
Ebon (Model)
An illusory retail space and lounge environment…experience the joys of actual shopping - without the hassle of having to take it all home.
An art installation and set of performances at the temporary site EXPO | SURE, 242 Elizabeth Street, New York City, presented through the Downtown Arts Festival, in space created by Pompei AD for Levi’s® Vintage Clothing, festival sponsor.
Project Description:
The idea behind Fictive Boutique was to create a fake clothing store where people could “shop” but where nothing was actually for sale – a way of provoking thought about boutique culture and the nature of shopping.
Fictive Boutique occupied the front third of a former retail space in Nolita, procured by the design firm Pompei AD, as a “Pop Up” display space showcasing New York artists. Three projects were chosen with curatorial input from the Downtown Arts festival. The DAF for 1999, and the entire Expo Sure event was sponsored by Levi’s®. The project Fictive Boutique was one of three projects chosen for the exhibit.
In addition to the fake clothing store installation, Fictive Boutique also included a series of live performances in which dancers performed a set of choreographed actions in the “dressing rooms” of the boutique and were captured by multiple video cameras. These video feeds were further manipulated by two VJs, live, in time to music from a dj, and were combined with text about the nature of shopping. A live audience watched the spectacle as it was projected onto the walls of the space.
A few random thoughts: As shopping has become the main form of activity in public space, boutiques in Nolita and the surrounding Downtown area have become a breeding ground for emerging culture. They have begun crossing traditional boundaries of what a store is supposed to do and be, and are creating spaces where creative people come to hang out and exchange the kind of day to day information that, through the process of accretion, actually creates positive growth and change.
Young designer/artists are making small numbers of items, or even one-offs, not solely as a means to generate samples, but as the actual mode of production. This low volume means low profit, especially if the clothing is priced so that like minded individuals can afford it, but the process of making what they love and controlling the content of what is produced outweighs, for them, the drive to purely do business. The argument goes “ignore everything you’re supposed to worry about and make the things you yourself want to see in the world. Opportunities will follow, allowing you to continue.”
Along with this is a radical shift from emphasis on design to emphasis on styling. In Tokyo a great number of contemporary street fashion mags have sprung up because kids are combining elements of clothing from so many different cultural esthetics into a single ensemble, that the process of simply reporting on new designers doesn’t reveal any of this whole alternative cultural aesthetic.
In Italy a new class of design professional- a cross between fashion researcher/color predictor and actual designer is occurring as professionals buy vintage, style it, cut, paste and modify, assign alternate colors through swatching, and then advise clothing companies all the way through the production process. They don’t do fashion sketches, and don’t have final say, yet they are essentially the original authors of the clothing’s aesthetic.
Along with this also goes a general shift from things mass produced back to an appreciation of hand crafted work. As styling begins to have similar weight to design, there is now a new process of using historically iconic, mass produced items, in association with radical craft pieces and young designer’s one-offs to create a look and make cultural statements through clothing. In the current fashion era, people aren’t so ready to let others control what there is to wear. Each individual becomes, in a way, his or her own designer.
Credits:
Conceived and Produced by: Paul Clay
Choreography: David Neumann
VJs: Paul Clay and Willyum Delirious
DJ: Hiro
Live Performance: Miho Nikaido, Terry Bartlett,
David Neumann, and Yukiko Takagi
Clothing Design: Yukiko Takagi
Interior Design: Paul Clay
Presented by:
The Downtown Arts Festival
Expo | Sure
Levi’S® Vintage Clothing
A Project of Fictive.
Construction:
Mark Power, Torsten Schneider, Toshimi , Arron
Cantor, Joe Foley, Shelly McGuinness, Clement Remy, Noriko.
Patterns Advisor: Lise Kovar
Special Thanks:
Levi’s ® Vintage Clothing
Ron, Alison , Michael , Lynn, Laura ,Zoe, Jonathan, Vajra, Henry,
Shannon, and everyone at Pompei AD.
Simon, Craig, and Downtown Arts Projects
Lipe, and everyone at LANGUAGE
Joe Plotkin, and Broadway.net
Peter Scharff and Scharff Weisberg
Covad
Apple Computer
Shoes for the performance generously donated by:
Norman Smitherman through Suzi Funahara and Antenna 88.
(For more info, Contact # 212.645.0700)
Project Description:
On the internet there is a bit of text code named for the physical buttons used on older car radios to select preset stations – when one of the buttons was pressed, other buttons would pop out, leaving the pressed button the only button in the “pushed in” or chosen position.
Sometimes when you are filling out an on-line form you are asked to click on little buttons to indicate a choice between one of several possibilities. These elements within HTML web forms are called Radio Buttons, and if you look at the source code each one is actually only a piece of text and will have a “name” and a “value” ascribed to it.
As I was teaching myself HTML for the first time, and looking for examples of forms to better understand them, I ran across the code for a form which was a long on-line survey for some company that sold vibrators and sex toys. They wanted to understand their customers in order to serve them better.
As I looked at the source code, I was struck by the word “value” which is part of programming language but can relate to money and commerce, can also be used to indicate that which we as human beings care most deeply about, on a fundamental level.
Reading further through the code I felt a sudden overwhelming sense of sadness at the human condition. Not a disgust for the subject of the survey but rather a heightened awareness of the isolation people can suffer from and the genuine emotional needs that bring people together.
Many elements of the code seemed to be speaking with multiple meanings. Even practical and mundane elements of the survey such as a button at the end for anyone who had accidently made errors, which was labeled “I need to start again” seemed also to reference a lonely soul.
Radio Name, A kind of loss or Heartache is a revealing or a making visible of the original hidden text of the HTML source code for that sex survey, with edits and alterations which both break the code and add to its poetic meaning.
It is presented as a series of slides in either 800×600 pixel resolution on a computer monitor or alternately on a DVD as 640×480 pixel SD video resolution output. It has also been presented in two different iterations, one in color and the other in black text on a white background. In the color version the blue of the text refers to color coding in HTML text editors and the red of the background alludes to the lurid quality of the original survey.
Presented as part of Fashioned, The Runway Show, an art runway show featuring half a dozen artist designers, and which included outfits designed by Paul Clay and Adriana Arenas, presented with agency models. Produced in conjunction with Fashioned, a group show, at White Box art gallery, New York City.
Partial photo documentation of the Fictive section of the runway show:
At the end of an earlier project, Fictive an art and Fashion Event (or Fictive Runway), a number of pieces of women’s fashion crafted from bedspreads purchased in Chinatown were not ready to be exhibited. When approached by White Box to participate in this event, we decided to finish the works and then present them as a “group”, for Fashioned.
These works explored industrially produced off-the-shelf products which still contain some hidden trace of the actual craft objects they were manufactured to replace. It is an attempt to find hidden beauty in things usually dismissed as kitsch.
Credits:
Conceived and Produced by Paul Clay
Outfits Designed by Paul Clay and Adriana Arenas
Drapery and Pattern making by Lise Kovar
Makeup by Yukiko Takagi
Photography by Tukuru Asada
Models:
Aysel
Greta
Jen
Kamila
Keith
Marg
Lea
A line of fashion made from a wide variety of everyday materials and products. Everything from plastic table cloths, to bed spreads, to children’s jump ropes, gets incorporated into actual wearable clothing. Presented at The Tunnel, 27th Street and 12th Avenue, New York City, Thursday, September 18, 1997. Sponsored in part by the Downtown Arts Festival.
GROUP 1. Six (6) outfits, Plastic Table Cloths/Car Upholstery
GROUP 2. Ten (10) outfits, Curtain/ Mattress Fabric & Digital Prints
GROUP 3. Three (3) outfits, Little girls dresses worn on the front of the body with latex backs
GROUP 4. Three (3) outfits, Jump Rope Dresses
GROUP 5. Three (3) outfits, Rug Stop & Digital Prints
GROUP 6. Five (5) outfits, Bed Spreads from Chinatown
In an earlier age the majority of people on the planet lacked financial resources to buy clothing worn by the upper classes, yet they had traditional clothes made of natural materials, and with the use of generations-old craft techniques and the devotion of time toward the making, they had clothing of great beauty.
With the coming of the industrial age of mass production and global cultural homogenization, many of these traditional techniques got washed away in the flood of inexpensive Euro-american material culture items. As a result most of the poor around the world wear and use cheap synthetic fabrics and products. Things made of natural materials through craft processes are hugely expensive, and only the rich can afford them.
Often the artificial products look like the worst of Western culture, but sometimes these synthetic objects mimic the beauty of the original natural craft products they came to replace. Plastic tablecloths printed or cut with a lace design, machine quilted acetate bed spreads, plastic jump ropes with a cork screw pattern to imitate braiding, all are examples of such products.
Recreated in these new materials they have been read by most arbiters of taste as either undesirable abominations or as interesting kitch objects, but to the people who use them they are not kitch, but rather the most beautiful objects they can afford. Further, despite the apparent loss of local culture, indigenous communities are the ones from which the original material culture arose and so the new cheap synthetic materials sold in these markets eventually begin to absorb and reflect earlier cultural aesthetics which might seemingly have been lost. Cheap everyday synthetic products containing some jewel or trace of little recognized aesthetic value form the basis for this fashion/art project.
The event is in the form of a fashion show with six groups of clothing each based on a different set of everyday synthetic products used as raw material from which to make the clothing. These include plastic table cloths, car upholsteryfabric, curtain and mattress fabric, Little girl’s dresses from 14th st., children’s jump ropes, rug stop (the material put under rugs to keep them from sliding) and quilted acetate bed spreads from Chinatown. Accompanying the show is video art reflecting the aesthetic. The idea is to explore the grace inherent in these materials through the medium of fashion, and to put forward a new set of notions about beauty and elegance by juxtaposing the origins of the materials with the carefully crafted qualities in clothing’s finished form.
It may be made from a plastic table cloth but we hope you’ll wish you could wear it. – Paul Clay ‘97
CREDITS:
Conceived and Produced By Paul Clay
Clothing Designed By Paul Clay and Adriana Arenas
Lise Kovar – Draper and Pattern maker
Diego Valencia – Additional Pattern maker
Thomas Miller – Executive Coordinator
Jeannie Yi – Key Coordinator
Reiko Catakura – Illustrator/Coordinator
Naomi Sebu – Additional Coordinator
Frances Sorensen – Make up Concept
David Hicky – Hair Concept
David Newman – Choreography
Rick Murray – Technical Associate
Mike Shlafer & Scott Laully – Set design and technical help
Jamie Leo – Invitation and Program Design
Stephanie Diamond – Assistant to Paul Clay
Lisa Salvador – Assistant to Lise Kovar
Sewing:
Soyeon Kim
Charlott Corday
Jennifer Clemente
Make Up Team:
Frances Sorensen
Patricia Johnson
Danielle McDonald
Liza Zaretsky of Make Up For Ever
Kim Wahmann of Make Up For Ever
Alberto Machuca of Make Up For Ever
Angelrafael Gonzale of Make Up For Ever
Shannon Frank of Make Up For Ever
Make Up provided by Make Up For Ever
Hair Team:
David Hicky for Red Salon
Brad Langtry for Red Salon
Gregory Melendrez assistant at Red Salon
Shannon Williams
Almog
Video:
Christy Edwards
Veronica Vasicka
Photography:
Esao
Danielle Levit
Dressers:
Kerrin Hoeffler
Patrizia Hoeffler
Katherine Sidor
Eric Pritchard
Linda Serrone
Ron Serrone
Nana baek
Naomi Sebu
Erica Pritchard
Models
Ford:
Kate Hromada
Karin Models:
Tuesday
Stephanie Richards
Rebecca Brock
Cortney Miller
IMG:
Audrey Quock
Company Management:
Jamison Ernest
Independents:
Aaron Cantor
Adrine Hurd
Megan Mitchell
Marchcelina
Mariana Suarez
Miguel Bohmer
David Newman
Rick Murray
Arron Cantor
Keith Krystofolsky
Jennifer Clemente
Special Thanks:
Louie and Ashton at Ford Models
Mora at IMG
Nicole, Christian, and Sara, at Karin
Danielle at Make Up For Ever
Brad & John at Red Salon
Jennifer Clemente
The Downtown Arts Festival:
Simon Watson
Craig Hensela
Ron Lasko
Xplosions Productions:
Heidy
Ed
Patricia
Sasha
Mike
The Tunnel:
John
Felix
New Age Productions:
Maya
Leeza
Soren
