The 'Z'-Chair, a Zaha Hadid design, on view at PMA

On view through spring, 2012, the Philadelphia Museum of Art features a unique exhibition, Zaha Hadid: Form in Motion. This show includes furniture and design objects in a space entirely transformed by the prominent female architect. The fluid, site-specific installation is the first of its kind in the United States, assembled by a team of designers from Hadid Architects. The show reflects Hadid’s seamless work methods, as well as her technological breakthroughs in architecture and design. artes fine arts magazine

Hadid's Opera House, Guangzhou, China (2010)

Born in Bagdad, Iraq, Hadid is known worldwide for her visionary architecture. She is responsible for many breakthroughs in her field, and is the first woman recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She is the founder of London-based Zaha Hadid Architects, and has numerous projects completed around the world, most recently including MAXXI: National Museum of XXI Century in Rome (2009), Guangzhaou Opera House in China (2010), and Olympic Aquatics Centre in London (2011). She is now based in London and works internationally in the fields of urbanism, architecture and design.

Mesa Tables, Design by Zaha Hadid

The museum gallery housing the exhibition, in the Perelman building, is completely transformed. The installation greets the viewer with sleek, attention-grabbing furniture and functional objects, such as the Z-Chair, Vortexx Chandeliers and the Mesa Table. To the left, there is a rippling wall—a temporary structure built on site. This undulating form also serves as a shelving unit for Hadid-designed objects, including limited-edition footwear, jewelry and silverware. The silver lines painted on the floor echo the shadows made by the furniture, creating a seamless visual composition.

Lighting plays an important role in this exhibition. The metallic chairs and tables reflect the natural light casted from the window, evolving and morphing as they are viewed from different angle. The functional objects on the shelving unit, including Flatware, Crevasse Vases and other items seem to flash from the light cast through a small opening in the shelves. The Vortexx Chandeliers, continuously changing hues with the use of high-intensity, light emitting diodes LED, cast an ephemeral glow on the surrounding objects and walls.

Flatware, by Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid makes it a goal to integrate her designs to their environment. In this exhibition silver lines painted on the floor fuse the shadows to the objects, at times creating a 3-dimensional effect. The fluidity in her work stems from her creative process. According to curator Kathryn Bloom Hiesinger, Hadid works on her designs simultaneously, having several computer screens open at a time with various objects and architectural images, resulting the work that is interrelated and flowing. Design similarities can be seen throughout both her architectural and object designs.

Most objects in the exhibition are made from steel, aluminum, and polyurethane, apart from the sofa, which is upholstered with metallic fabric. Despite the hard materials, the objects are surprisingly organic. They walk the line between fine art and product design, and are often viewed as functional sculptures. Hadid sells her objects as both art and useable products.

Hadid's Z-Car I, a Hydrogen-powered, 3-wheel prototype

Some of the highlights of this exhibition are the mini-sculptural jewelry pieces—Celeste Necklace and Cuff and Glace Collection Jewelry—which are both made with Swarowski Crystals. Like most of the objects in the show, the unusual jewelry shapes elevate them beyond mere utility, to become works of art. Another unexpected design offering by Hadid, is the hydrogen-powered, three-wheel vehicle, Z-Car I prototype. It is presented outside the immediate gallery area, gracing the hallway of the Perelman building with its aerodynamically sleek, quirky presence. As if to leave no part of our lives unattended to, the exhibit also features futuristic Hadid footwear designs, produced in conjunction with clothing brand Lacoste.

Not only does this show offer an exclusive look into the future, with spectacular Hadid designs, the museum also honored the architect with a Design of Excellence Award on November 19, 2011. Collab, a volunteer committee specializing in design at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be presenting this award to Hadid, with her multi-faceted contributions in the fields of design, architecture and urbanism. The architect used the award event as an opportunity to share her views on design with the audience.

By Ekaterina Popova, Contributing Writer

Visit the Philadelphia Museum of Art at: www.philamuseum.org

See more of Zaha Hadid’s design concepts at: www.zaha-hadid.com

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (Great Salt Lake), 1970. Photo: George Steinmetz (2002)

The Utopian desire of 1970s ‘Land’ artists, who broke away from the stranglehold of the art market by producing earthworks far removed from cities, has given way to new projects that demonstrate a global ecological awareness through cross-disciplinary investigations concerning environmental sustainability. artes fine arts magazine

A move in this direction emerged in the early 1980s when Agnes Denes created, Wheatfield—A Confrontation, 1982 in Battery Park. She planted and harvested two acres of wheat on a landfill close to Manhattan as a discursive act to demonstrate that a wasteland could be made useful once again. (Below right) Agnes Denes, Wheatfield—A Confrontation  © l982. Two acre wheat field on Battery Park landfill, Manhattan. Commissioned, Public Art Fund, NYC. Photo: © John McGrail, Time/Life. [see: End Note 1]  Moreover, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, an artist in residence at the New York Sanitation Department, dealt with the problem of waste as early as 1983 and continues today. Inventively, she transformed a garbage-recycling center of the NYSD into a place where the public could come and observe how rubbish actually is disposed of in New York City. The walkway, bridge and viewing wall are made of recycled materials.

The expanding term of environmental art today encompasses a vast scope of territory and issues. Just as certain earthworks in the deserts of the American West, grew out of ideas of landscape painting, the growth of public art stimulated artists to engage the urban landscape as well as other environments as a platform to present ideas and concepts about the natural world to a diverse audience. According to John Beardsley, “Many environmental artists now desire not merely an audience for their work but a public with whom they can correspond about the meaning and purpose of their art.”[2]

In our day, certain artists persist in moving away from single-issue approaches toward a rising energetic hybridization of art, activism and engineering. The notion of sustainability has spread from the field of environmentalism to many areas of human activity, including art and culture. Some refer to this as sustainable art and this perhaps might be an alternative term to environmental or green art, in recognition of the challenges that sustainability brings to contemporary art as a whole. The co-curators stated “In fact, the closeness to sustainability of much challenging contemporary art practice owes more to the legacy of 1970s conceptualism, and even primarily the non-market East European variety of conceptual art, than for example to Land Art.”[3] Artists now have an impulse to grapple with pressing social issues as a means to enact communal change through new modalities of working that include working outside the usual art community and often collaborating with scientists.

The exhibition Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water, guest curated by artist and educator Carolyn Speranza for the American Jewish Museum of the Jewish Community Center (JCC) of Greater Pittsburgh, was a testimony to this emergent direction that artists are developing and their desire for social engagement. This wide-ranging show is emblematic of an upward thematic trend as evinced in numerous films, writings and exhibitions over the past decade. Once more the Fowkes stress, “There is a rising understanding that radical change is required, if we are to find a way to ‘meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”[4]

Still from film, The Day after Tomorrow, Courstesy 20th Century Fox (2004)

The perils of nature and environmental consciousness have become a cultural barometer globally. Our daily engagement with recycling contributes to a sustainable environment, and progressively more households engage in this act. Artists cannot but take into account the crisis facing our planet given the escalating daily news about the dangers threatening our environment as depicted in CNN’s documentary, Planet in Peril and in such films as, The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and I Legend (2007) that address an inevitable doomsday. In recent years, the topic of environmental crisis has been explored in several notable exhibitions. Unframed Landscapes, curated by the Fowkeses in 2004, offered a reassessment of landscape in contemporary art aiming to focus on humankind’s relationship with nature across the full range of media. Other significant exhibitions include Lucy Lippard’s, Weather Report: Art And Climate Change (2007), Mass MoCA’s, Badlands: New Horizons In Landscape (2008), Stephanie Smith’s, Beyond Green (2008), EPA: Environmental Performance Actions (2008) curated by ecoartspace with Exit Art, and Criteria (2009), curated by Jimena Acosta and Emiliano Godoy, at Chicago’s Columbia College Art Gallery.[5]

The exhibition, Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water reveals the increased interest of cross-disciplinary artists whose innovative work evinces the critical situation facing our planet.  Artists, scientists, writers, community leaders and others in the past decade have focused on this topic and are increasingly bringing an important message to a larger global audience. Too Shallow for Diving specifically focuses on problems surrounding water and its impact on our natural world, human health and public welfare. According to its curator, Carolyn Speranza, “…the sixteen artists aim to provide viewers with new insights and perspectives about our existing world and the enormity of the dilemma facing our water supply.” Several fuse aesthetic concepts with scientific findings as a catalyst for viewers to consider the future of water sources. However, in choosing the artists, Speranza was less concerned with aesthetics and more with concepts about acute water issues.

The investigations of the artists range from the macro to the micro and from local water topics to those in Africa. Each artist, in a unique inquiry, explores the implications of the ‘hard realities’ and ‘new materiality’ for political action, artistic theory and practice and sustainable living in the 21st century. They are working with transformative approaches and processes towards a new vision that is ecological and participates with the living cycles of nature. This work covers an array of responsiveness in which the artists tackle different topics including oceans, climate change, water quality, recycling, water purification and plants for restoration. Artists today are finding inventive ways to call attention to the problems facing our environment, as corporate greed and profit impose destruction on our planet. Each artist works very differently and explores viverse territories; yet they share an awareness about the critical loss of natural resources and a desire to save the planet from human destruction. Many of these artists have been aligned with the nonprofit organization, ecoartspace, founded in 1997 by Patricia Watts and New York City curator, Amy Lipton, who joined Watts in 1999. This was one of the first Web sites online dedicated to art and environmental issues. For over a decade they have curated exhibitions and programs, providing a platform for artists who are working with scientists to address our global environmental issues. In 2002, Amy Lipton and Sue Spaid co-curated the exhibition titled, Ecovention, for the Contemporary Art Center (CAC), in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Grant Kester, one of the leading figures in this emerging critical dialogue around “relational”[6] or “dialogical” work, has expressed that “Art takes its form not from a final object but through play forms, process and dialogue.”[7]  Many of the artists in the exhibition Too Shallow for Diving work along similar lines and incorporate sustainable thinking in their art and social change in their message. Additionally, several credit the collaborative team Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison[8], the leading pioneers of the 1970s eco-art movement, as being especially prominent to their thinking and methods.

This is primarily apparent in the projects of the team of Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, who often work with government and environmental groups on ecological restoration-based projects. Their installation is comprised of in-depth photographic documentation, booklets filled with statistical data and charts from two projects titled, Nine Mile Run Greenway Project (in collaboration with Bob Bingham and John Stephen), (1997-2000) and 3 Rivers 2nd Nature (2000-2005), left.  Through their research, Collins and Goto address the meaning, form and function of public space and nature in Allegheny County of southwestern Pennsylvania. These multi-year projects include extensive research and public educational components as well as brown-fields restoration projects, and their gallery installations highlight images and data about the cultural and ecological history of the region. They raise questions about nature and post-industrial public space; the focus of their work is always to benefit the public realm and to create outreach programs intended to enable creative public advocacy and change.

(above) Tim Collins and Reiko Goto, Documentation of the artists’ projects (detail), Nine Mile Run (with Bob Bingham and John Stephen). 3 Rivers: 2nd nature. All photos that follow, except Vanessa German, Love Song for Water Operetta, credit: Jenny Jean Crawford.

Felix Guattari in The Three Ecologies, published in 1989, anticipated many of the issues facing the globalized world of today and laid the blame squarely at the doors of what he called, “Integrated World Capitalism.” Guattari’s focus in ‘The Three Ecologies’ is his conception of ‘ecosophy’— the three related ecologies of environmental, mental and social worlds and their amalgamation into a methodological practice. His argument, and it is rather simple, is that we have an erroneous conception of ecology, of environmental struggle, and that only by broadening our views to include the three ecologies will we be able to affect any enduring changes in our social/cultural/natural environment. A number of the artists in this exhibition illustrate these concepts.

Carolyn Speranza & Frank Ferraro, with Angelo Gatto, Requiem for the Netmakers (detail), mixed media (2011)

This is especially noticeable in, Requiem for the Netmakers (2011), Carolyn Speranza’s impressive multi-screen, mixed media collaboration with sonic artist Frank Ferraro occupying two large walls (right).  Floating in front of an irregularly shaped parchment-like blue background, a transparent sheet resembling a wall hanging discloses quotes a section of President Richard M. Nixon’s State of the Union address of January 27, 1970, and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, as amended by the Clean Water Act of 1977. The president states, “With the help of people we can do anything, and without their help, we can do nothing. In this spirit, together, we can reclaim our lands for ours and generations to come.” Contrasting this idealist rhetoric, numerous monitor screens continuously display changing videos and still imagery capturing the actual realism of water today; images of catastrophic affects of oil damage to our oceans and environment, along with scenes of families struggling to make their livelihood from the fishing industry unfold. This assortment of imagery came from the artist’s online archive taken from the Associated Press Archive (media licensed for this exhibition), Library of Congress Archives, National Archives, Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica project and photographs made available through Creative-Commons licenses. Filling this space is a musical composition produced by Frank Ferraro inspired by conversations with Speranza about environmental calamity. Peculiarly this installation evokes a mode of poetic beauty spiked with an appalling realism about water and the catastrophe facing our environment today.

Prudence Gill, Wishes for Water and Memories of the Deep (detail), 2011. Thanks to Eve Dater, JCC.

Prudence Gill, too, is concerned about the fragile ecology of the Gulf of Mexico and the potentially devastating consequences of the oil industry’s negligence. In Gill’s cerebral minimalist text piece As Heard on NPR April 18, 2011, she paraphrases reporter Scott Tong’s commentary that “The explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform killed 11 people. And, enough crude to fill maybe 10,000 or more average-size swimming pools gushed into the deep, dark sea.” An abridged version of this poignant message spans across the three large windows overlooking the JCC’s swimming pool. It states in blue vinyl, framed by a continuous black grid band of squares representing globs of oil, “…10,000 Swimming Pools of Oil Flowed into the Deep Dark Waters….” Incorporated within this streaming text installation is a small sign with alarming information: “1 1/2 cups of crude oil will kill all life in one swimming pool of ocean water.” Across the hall is a seemingly whimsical window box titled Wishes for Water & Memories of the Deep (2011). In this fantastical mixed media installation of suspended, floating, enigmatic star-like shapes and lights, Gill has manufactured an under-the-sea glittering world. Notwithstanding its lyrical elegance, the diffused and murky visibility of this setting devoid of any life forms suggests a haunting mystery about life in the underworld of water.

Jim Denny, Obstacle, o/c (2011)

The art of Jim Denney focuses on the natural and social history of the Pacific Northwest, especially in Oregon around the McKenzie Bridge region of the state. Frequently, the subjects of his dynamic environmentally rooted work include river dams, the distress of fire on the landscape and animals. Denney’s strong views about nature and his sensitivity about man’s destruction of the western environment stem from a deeply rooted personal connection. A native of Oregon–this is where he grew up and continues to live, however work part of the year he resides in New York City.

His large-scale, richly colorful paintings illustrate the ongoing manipulations of nature. He expressively portrays and captures the tensions existing between nature and society in the hope of sounding an alarm about the seriousness of this critical problem. In both works, Obstacle (2011) and Abandoned (2011), Denney points to a bleak future of the western landscape.

Richard Harned, This is the Tasteless Water of Souls...This is the True Sustenance (detail), mixed media (2011)

Richard Harned directs viewers to the importance of water and air on this earth in his conceptual sculptural installation, Laws of the Earth and Air (2011). His four-part construction consists of a map of the USA, a globe, a video and a silver plane resembling a 60s peace sign. The video, produced by his brother Douglas Harned, continually shows beautiful views of Yellowstone National Park; Glacier Park; and Great Falls, Virginia, while the sounds of Mocking Birds and the Ocean, recorded by another brother, Thomas Harned, fill the space. The artist calls our attention to all the available freshwater in the United States by placing red dots denoting FINE their locations throughout the wall map. The globe sits, encased in a transparent dome, and underneath it sits a tray of clear marbles intended for visitors to take away. The gem-like marbles, in scale to the globe, represents the 21-mile diameter sphere of all fresh water on the planet. Visitors are invited to take one with them as a reminder of the urgency of water issues. The blue blown-glass marble attached to the globe is made to scale with all water of any description on earth, comprising an 860-mile diameter sphere. One of the lessons to be had perhaps from this multiple part work is the importance of specificity and place and the reality of limited natural resources we easily take for granted.

Roger Laib, Glutttttttttttt-Hut mixed media (2011)

On the lawn of the JCC sits a bizarre skeletal structure titled Glut Hut (2011) that resembles a small mobile home made of found and discarded objects and equipped with the amenities of a house. Roger Laib is known as a master wood craftsman; however, in this one-of-a-kind, eccentric looking large-scale shack and transparent soft sculptural atlas, refinement is not an issue! Manufactured from diverse recycled objects, this construction is intended to catch rainwater and brim over. With sufficient rain, the water will eventually leak and spill out of the hut and onto the lawn, demonstrating to observers how water is wasted and how it could be saved and put to good alternative use, such as watering lawns. Laib highlights how environmentally friendly choices can make a difference if one bothers to pay attention and make the simple effort to recycle rainwater.

Jamie Gruzska, Notes on Water, 1940-2011 (detail) toned silver gelatin prints (2011)

Notes on Water (1940-2011), a selection of predominantly black and white a selection of photographs by Jamie Gruzska, is reminiscent of cherished snapshots found in a household album. The place, date and reference to a person are written under each of the fourteen images. The importance of water to Gruzska’s personal history is highlighted in this memory record of times shared and past. What we are witness to are uncontaminated scenes—no factories—only trees and water. These are places preserved and held in respect for enjoyment and solitude, yet one cannot assume from these bucolic images whether or not the water is contaminated.

Wendy Osher, Something in the Water, used plastic bags (2011)

Conversely, environmental activist artist Wendy Osher’s communal project, resulting in a floor sculpture titled, Something in the Water (2011), is opposite in meaning from the sublime portrayal of water depicted in Gruzska’s work. This collaborative eco-project connected women from around the globe by using plastic bags to crochet breast-like shapes. Osher joined each component to fabricate a sizable, eye-catching, colorful and organic shape intended to call attention to toxins seeping into international waters. A map of the world hangs on an adjacent wall to this arresting textural form. Framing this atlas are portraits of the women who participated in this worldwide project along with a list of names and locations of the crocheters. Dots placed on the map indicate the origin of each participant. Whereas this is an artwork in an exhibition, it is concurrently a public advocacy project intended to raise social awareness about the importance of rectifying water contamination. Jointly, the women point out how plastic bags are linked to poison that leaks into one’s bloodstream and directly affects women’s breast milk and the future of generations to come.

Ann T. Rosenthal & Steffe Domike, Watermark:Wood,Coal, Oil, Gas (detail), digital print, acrylic paint, water on canvas (2011). Thanks to Hilary Klein, graphic design

Ann T. Rosenthal and Steffi Domike have been collaborating on environmental installations for years. Rosenthal refers to herself as an eco-feminist artist and Domike is an activist artist who is inspired by real world events. Their most recent wall installation, Watermark: Wood, Coal, Oil, Gas (2011) consists of four panels that illustrate an evolutionary timeline of energy resources—wood, coal, oil and natural gas—and a delicate blue linear wall drawing depicts a local watershed. Regardless of being on canvas and hung like ancient Chinese scrolls, these color-field compositions amidst Technicolor blue, green and yellow graded tonal backgrounds, with a photomontage containing the silhouette of a bass (wood), an eagle (coal/mountaintop mining), turtles (oil) and a child (natural gas), in no way should be perceived as decorative pieces. The artists do not endorse beauty for beauty’s sake through conspicuous paintings; rather, their art is about the idea and an environment in decline. The silhouettes are life-size, and within each shape are scenes of the landscape and of water. Even though this salient metaphorical piece is perhaps the most aesthetically gratifying in the exhibition because of its rich color, facade and composition, it commands an edge that peels back the veil on mankind’s abuse of natural resources and the environment’s vulnerability. The message alludes to our culture over time and America’s conflicting use and relationship to water and land for energy.

Vanessa German, Love Poem for Water Operetta (perf. 5/14/11). Photo: Jae Roberto

Vanessa German, the youngest artist in the show, is a nationally recognized performance poet and multidisciplinary artist who, in her spoken autobiographical word poetry, bring into play the transcendent and indefatigable power of the human spirit. In her expressly orchestrated live performance operetta, Love Poem for Water [9], exclusively performed the opening night of the exhibition, she stunningly shared with her audience emotional episodes from her life and the mixed experiences she has had with water, ranging from terror, to love and respect. Her striking words, powerful gospel-like -music and projection of water textures onto a huge skirt, which takes up an entire dramatically lit stage, provides a platform for the contemplation of both destruction and hope. German’s bellowing words and bigger-than-life theatricality command attention, and this work signals its own illusion through a series of overlapping colors that unfurl as the message of her performance evolves. German’s powerfully gestural poetic essay addresses the precariousness of life and the involvement of water with all living things on earth.

Maritza Mosquera, The Conversation and Prayer, 30"x74", digital photo wallpaper prints (2011)

The celebration of water is very much present in numerous cultures manifested in diverse myths and folklore. Working in a highly personal manner, Maritza Mosquera utilizes myth and photographic documentation in the multiple-component piece Body in Water, composed of mythic text and digital prints depicting her treading water. After reading the wall allegory, it is apparent this artist comprehends the allure of water. She demonstrates that there are many connections between water and spirituality in her ritualistic performance, alluding that water is the central source of our being and it is part of every cell and fiber in us; it is our very essence. As I walked away from this piece, I asked myself, “Could water be the common denominator that weaves us all (earth, animal, human and plant) together as one? Is it the ultimate connector?

Lisa Link, Waterways Project, selected image (2011)

Lisa Link, an artist and web designer at the University of Massachusetts for the past thirteen years, has been creating artworks that address critical social issues. The focus of her work is directly political and activist rather than aesthetic. Link aims to give people voice and acts as a catalyst for conversation and connections because she understands solutions can only arise once disaster is recognized. Through her undertakings, she desires to make a positive impact that perhaps can influence public policy for the improvement of Boston Harbor and drinking water. The project, Water Ways (2010-2011) developed out of a series of conversations she had with scientists and residents throughout the Boston area, including Dr. Anamarija Frankic and Dr. Sarah Oktay of Boston’s University of Massachusetts. In this multi-component wall installation, consisting of twelve 21 x 21 inch digital photomontages and detailed text as well as an online map, the viewer becomes informed of the critical situation between water and humans. Pervading throughout the densely layered compositions is an eerie calm, perhaps because of the stylized organization resembling posters or advertisements. Nevertheless, on closer inspection, the juxtaposition of text against the visual image reveals the urgency of its message.

David Stairs,(upper) Powerful:Proposed Hydro Site at Bujagali Falls;(lower) Powerless:Lake Victoria at Source of the Nile, Jinja. large format inkjet (2011)

David Stairs is the executive director of Designers without Borders, a consortium of designers and design educators working to assist institutions in the developing world. He believes everything is connected and that we are all part of the problem and the solution. In his explorations of Africa’s water crisis through maps, photographs and statistics, he illustrates the culpability of global human behaviors. In both large inkjet images, Powerless: Lake Victoria at Source of the Nile, Jinja (2011) [10] and Powerful: Proposed Hydro Site at Bujagali Falls (2011) [11], he presents two water scenes in Uganda that have been exploited. Stairs expresses, “Water and power are inextricably linked in Uganda. Most of the nation’s electricity comes from the facility on the Nile at Jinja, and more dams are planned. Trouble is, 30 million poor people depend on this source (Lake Victoria), and it is unstable and shrinking.” His contrasting photographs, with the titles Powerless and Powerful, are most telling given the history of Uganda and the lack of consideration of both water and the people of this region!

It is overwhelming to think that during the past 85 years, human beings have imposed so much pollution on the earth’s water. As a civilized and informed society, it is now our obligation to become water’s caretaker and to cause it no further harm. On the other hand, this is a difficult task given the intertwined uses of water, issues of benefits and costs and the vested economic interests of numerous individuals and governments. Still, the real connection with our environment can only be found when individuals in unison feel their sense of true belonging. Today, we are in vital need of artists who can provoke this sense of attachment and stir up volition to act out and bring forth social, political and environmental changes. Artists are catalysts for change, and this “change” takes place when we feel deeply for a precious cause. The artists in Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water without a doubt are noticeably reacting to news about the perils distressing our natural water resources. Their intersections between globalization, ecology and contemporary art tackle the shifting ecological and political dimensions of water.

Recalling Milton’s Paradise Lost, and also perhaps regained, the question for our era is: where are we now, and what is the proper balance between nature and civilization? Or, is this after all a divine comedy performed before an audience that is too afraid to laugh? The hope for those of us who see the glass as “half-full,” yet awaiting the fulfillment of the empty portion, is that when destiny closes a doorway of one view upon nature’s garden, she always opens a window of opportunity to further explore “where no one has gone before” in placing the creative machinery of the one at the service of the needs of the many. With the growing privatization of water and impending global warming crisis, it seems more reasonable than ever that artists’ voices not only are heard but also that their work is seen and experienced by diverse audiences. It takes the unusual vision of artists to inform and alert us, and most importantly, to propose innovative ideas as to how we can aesthetically reclaim, restore and co-exist within our natural environment.

By Elaine A. King, Contributing Writer © 2011

Professor, History of Art, Criticism/Theory & Museum Studies

Freelance Critic/Curator

Carnegie Mellon University

End Notes

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[1] After months of preparations, in May 1982, a 2-acre wheat field was planted and harvested on a  Battery Park landfill in lower Manhattan, two blocks from Wall Street and the World Trade Center, facing the Statue of Liberty. Two hundred truckloads of dirt were brought in and 285 furrows were dug by hand, cleared of rocks and garbage. The seeds were sown by hand and the furrows covered with soil. The field was maintained for four months, cleared of wheat smut, weeded, fertilized and sprayed against mildew fungus, and an irrigation system set up. The crop was harvested on August 16 and yielded over 1000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat.
 
Planting and harvesting a field of wheat on land worth $4.5 billion created a powerful paradox. Wheatfield was a symbol, a universal concept.  It represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, economics. It referred to mismanagement, waste, world hunger and ecological concerns. It called attention to our misplaced priorities. The harvested grain travelled to twenty-eight cities around the world in an exhibition called, ‘The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger,’ organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (l987-90). The seeds were carried away by people who planted them in many parts of the globe.

[2] Beardsley, J. (1998). Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape. New York, NY: Abbeville Press.

[3] Fowkes, Maja and Reuben. The Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art: 27 February 2007, Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design.

[4] Fowkes, Maja and Reuben. The Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art: 27 February 2007, Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design. As translocal independent curators and art historians, Maja Fowkes and Dr. Reuben Fowkes organize exhibitions dealing with memory (Revolution is Not a Garden Party, 2006-7), ecology (Unframed Landscapes, 2004) and Translocal exchanges between the UK, Hungary and Croatia.

[5] Collectively, these exhibitions are about sustainability, ecology or environmentalism. The artists are concerned about our humanity and its incapability to sustain its habits and culture for future generations as well as the creatures living on this earth.

[6] Bourriaud, N. (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Paris, France: Les Presses Du Reel. Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term relational art to describe arts that gain meaning through participatory engagement among the players: creators and audience. Bourriaud defined the approach simply as, “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”

 [7] Kester, G. H. Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art. Variant, 9, www.variant.org.uk. Kester, G. H. (2004). Conversation Pieces Community and Communication in Modern Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. In Conversation Pieces, Kester discusses a disparate network of artists and collectives—including The Art of Change, Helen and Newton Harrison, Littoral, Suzanne Lacy, Stephen Willats, and WochenKlausur—united by a desire to create new forms of understanding through creative dialogue that crosses boundaries of race, religion, and culture. Kester traces the origins of these works in the conceptual art and feminist performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and draws from the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas and others as he explores the ways in which these artists corroborate and challenge many of the key principles of avant-garde art and art theory.

[8] Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison (often referred to simply as “the Harrisons”) have worked for almost forty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions that support biodiversity and community development. http://theharrisonstudio.net/. A key early endeavour was Portable Farm: The Flat Pastures (1971-1972).

[9] Pierre-Félix Guattari’s concept of interrelatedness of ecological and social issues and the three interacting and interdependent ecologies of mind, society, and environment stems perhaps from the outline of the three ecologies presented in Gregory Bateson’s Steps in an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology, University of Chicago Press. 1972.

 [10] Scott tong, “Era of ‘tough oil’ won’t deter drillers” Marketplace, Monday, April 18, 2011.  http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/04/18/pm-era-of-tough-oil-wont-stop-drillers/

[11] Vanessa German performed A Love Poem for Water at the opening reception of Too Shallow for Diving: the 21st Century Is Treading Water on May 14, 2011, at the American Jewish Museum at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO9ogS_iueE

C

Closing out the business day, the city’s workers would file out to swarm I-95, or head for the Amtrak station or DART stop, and report in again the next day. Wilmington was another city whose ebb and flow ran in twelve hour tides. Little by little, restaurants and bars have begun to reclaim the shoreline that is the downtown. And now, World Café Live has opened at the renovated Queen Theater on North Market Street, delivering world class music to these revitalized corridors.

One tip-off that Wilmington was destined to become a musical epicenter is the musicians who have lived below the radar here. Resident, David Bromberg performed resoundingly at the Light up the Queen Foundation benefit in 2010, while New Orleans native Trombone Shorty played outrageous saxophone on the roof of the nearby Shop Rite! The Peoples’ Festival held annually on the riverfront honors one time Wilmington resident Bob Marley. But nothing exactly prepares you for the full on architectural overhaul at the Queen Theater or the radiance of its performance stage. Once a repository for fetid rain water falling through its roof, and an aromatic blend of rubble, pigeon droppings and mold below, this thoughtful renovation has brilliantly revived the stylized ceiling medallions, three ten-by-ten foot frescoed murals, and ornately-gilded surrounds beside the organ pipes. The restoration process has also unearthed a fiercely burning, but dormant underground love from the Wilmington community.

Originally conceived in 1789 as the Indian Queen Hotel, and then operated as the luxurious Clayton House, the Queen Theater morphed into a movie palace in 1916. By April 1959, it shuttered its once-beloved doors, following a showing of House on Haunted Hill perhaps presciently, and remained dark for the next five decades. Enter Hal Real and his Real Entertainment Group, a dynamic consortium of music club developers who collaborated with WXPN radio station on its maiden enterprise, World Café Live, in Philadelphia. Seeing the possibilities with imperturbability required Wilmington based real estate developers Buccini/Pollin Group and city officials to join the initiative to restore the Queen Theater. With straight faces, a Spring 2011 opening date was announced in October of 2009 on the 45,000 square foot project.

The finished building comprises great paradox; predictably dramatic spaces – the proscenium stage – combined with textured balcony seating and open plan for approximately 900 persons. The acoustics, both structural and mechanically-enhanced, are precise, clear, yet luminous and effective in a variety of ranges. Witness the intense complexity of opening act, Sonny Landreth, on April 1, followed by the intimate and personal renditions of Ingrid Michaelson’s sold-out performance.

The Queen serves all.

Telescoping from the spectacular to the specific is also the hallmark of its interior configurations. Generous spaces create a sensory time sequence that satisfies both a taste for imposing public domains and an appreciation for surface detail. Many of the oldest paint layers have been conserved in their naturally eroding state and preserved into collage like patterns. The bars are eco-friendly strokes of genius. Reclaimed from other, funky locations, they highlight the knots of pine or diagonal herringbone one expects to find in a Pocono lodge, or a shack at the beach. This familiarity of time-worn material and the surprise casualness of natural wood in a beaux arts environment is a welcoming and warming touch. In this building of somewhat grand volume, one makes small discoveries; ancient movie projectors found with their film reels still in place, a whiplash of time and space.

One might desire a parallel alternative to the rich vibrancy of the stage: Upstairs Live now serves lunch, happy hour and dinner. Or, take a break to the smaller downstairs bar, pop into the palladium windowed Olympia Room – sometimes used for private parties – or the witty gift shop, and you will have changed the gestalt completely and primed yourself for the dance floor. The Queen’s relationship to the street outside is direct and harmonious, if what you crave is simply air. Another passerby may spontaneously stop in, provided the evening’s musical act has not already had its tickets swallowed up. Reservations are recommended.

Wilmington’s many banks now advertise in the sponsor pages of the Queen Theater’s program. They too understand the importance of continuity and re-invention. Projecting civic pride to the Light up the Queen Foundation – the ongoing non-profit that brings talent, illustriousness, and history to their home base – makes banks seem almost human again. A crowd gathers on the sidewalk outside the Queen’s doors at night. For Wilmington, whose motto is A Place to Be Somebody, those words may finally ring true.

By Diane Dewey, Contributing Writer

World Café Life at:

The Queen Theater

500 North Market Street

Wilmington, DE 19801

Tel: 302 994 1400

www.queen.worldcafelive.com

www.lightupthequeen.org

Gorham silver coffee pot (c. 1932)

How can you explain the allure of silver? Like its rich cousin, gold, silver is one of those rare earth elements that has served the imagination and creative hand of artisans over the ages- often with breathtakingly beautiful results. Silver in its purest form is soft and pliable, reflective and lustrous when polished to a high shine and filled with beautiful light-effects when cut, shaped, hammered or cast.

Over the ages, silversmiths have taken their inspiration largely from nature to create works of art with both utility and beauty. Most familiar are the elaborate coffee services, candelabras and jewelry fashioned in the style of 19th Century Romanticism. These pieces showcased the craftsman’s skill with elaborate floral scenes and design elements inspired by the classical Revivalist style of the Romans and Greeks. In America, the austere, but elegant creations of the colonial silver-making tradition, popularized by our most famous silversmith, Paul Revere, can be found in many well-to-do homes.fine arts magazine

Chrysler Building, NYC, 1930. An Art Deco masterpiece

But few are aware that silver design flourished well into the 20th Century, reflecting the new sensibility of an industrial age, where streamlined utilitarianism became the guiding principle of the newly-defined modern lifestyle. In the first quarter of the 1900s, many were ready to throw off the mantle of Victorian sensibilities and embrace the spirit of “The New”. Advances in science, manufacturing and inventions such as the airplane, the automobile and wireless communication were shrinking the world. Speed and radical reform became the watchwords of a new and outspoken group of intellectuals called, The Futurists.

The public fervor surrounding this new industrial age inspired many artisans to redefine traditional approaches to their craft. They increasingly sought inspiration in the changing world around them, rather than in the lessons of generations past. Notably, Cubism had emerged from the artists’ studios of Paris and the International Style of architecture (Bauhaus) was employing the fundamental lines of the square and the minimalist effects of glass in their building designs.

Silver makers, too, began to figure the clean lines of geometric shapes into their designs. Some of the most beautiful examples of this radical new objets d’art were being created in French studios. A handful of progressive designers, many coming from families with a long heritage of working in precious metals and jewels, set the stage for this revolution in form.

Covered serving piece by Jean Puiforcat (1930s). Note industrial chain incorporated into design

To learn more, I traveled to the lower west side of New York City to meet an expert on the topic of 20th century silver. Audrey Friedman has spent a lifetime collecting and learning about modern silver, glass and artifacts and her Primavera Gallery contains some of the most beautiful examples from that period.

She explained that the Paris exhibit of 1925, Exposition des Arts Decoratifs introduced the public to a new design movement, Art Moderne, later deriving the name Art Deco from this show. Here, artisans like Jean Puiforcat, Tétard Fréres and Maison Desny would exhibit their sterling and silver plate creations to the acclaim of some and the disdain of others. But there was no mistaking the reality that modern sensibilities were taking hold in a field that had been dominated by traditionalist views.

Gorham silver brooch (c. 1934)

The event was originally scheduled to be held some years earlier, but was delayed because of World War I. “If the show had come off earlier, the silver of the time would have had a very different look,” according to Audrey. “The Deco ‘look’ was heavily influenced by the sleek and aerodynamic appearance of the machinery of the time and the technological advances made possible by industrial expansion. Ironically, the complexity and beauty of these early modernist designs meant that they could only have been turned out, one at a time, by the hand of the craftsman, himself.”

In the handful of years that followed, before the Great Depression of 1929 changed the face of the American economy, retailers attempted to promote the Art Deco style for use in the American home, but with little success. Audrey points out that resistance here was due to, “the American view that silver was something to be passed on by previous generations, hinting at inherited wealth; or at the very least, that classic silver could be purchased to become an ‘instant heirloom’.”

Georg Jensen, ‘Pyramid’ Sterling Silver Tea Service, Waste Bowl and Waiter Tray (1927)

Nevertheless, a number of well-known European silver designers were rushed to New England factory studios and, by the following year, 1926, several American companies, including Gorham, International Silver, Reed and Barton and, to a lesser extent, Tiffany & Co. were embracing the cause of modernist design; although some would argue that their offerings were more heavily inspired by architecture than by a desire to capture pure form. In spite of these constraints, many of these New England manufacturers made timeless designs in the modern style right up until the eve of World War II.

To see some period pieces from the American school of Art Deco silver, I called on my friend and colleague, Bernard de Maillard, of Westport’s Léonce Antiques. As if by sleight-of-hand, he made several beautiful examples of mid-20th century silver magically appear from the back row of one of his many display cases.

Georg Jensen, 'Lily of the Valley' flatware pattern (c. 1925-1935)

He explained that the Art Deco movement allowed room for design influences from an earlier, more stylized period. Here, European moderne geometrics are supplanted by softer, more graceful lines inspired by nature. Taking their cue from the turn-of-the-century Swedish designer, Jorge Jensen, these silver pieces are designed to appeal to the eye using the same modernist’s techniques of form, balance and surface effects, but with a very different result. “Many of these companies are now history,” Bernard says, “leaving us with examples of the period that will never be replicated.”

With such a broad range of unique designs to choose from, consider including several examples of modern silver in your collection. But, I have to confess that, for pure geometric symmetry, quality of craftsmanship, luxury of detail and balance in the hand, these functional works of art beg to be used and enjoyed!

By Richard Friswell, Managing Editor

____________________________________________

DEFINITION OF TERMS

Understanding 20th Century design means differentiating between several design movements that may sound alike, but have different influences and objectives. There is some overlap as certain styles emerged from others:

Romanticism (1780-1880)- An artistic and intellectual movement in Western culture that rejected established values in favor of individualism and reason. The life and times of the ancient Greeks and Romans were idealized and impacted all phases of artistic design. Nature was extolled and its themes were idealized in painting, literature, functional art (silver, ceramics, furniture, architecture, etc.). It was in response to overblown sentimentality and flourishes of Romanticism and Victorianism that many of the late 19th century artists, writers and craftsmen rebelled.

Art Nouveau (1880-1914)- An international style of design, begun in Paris, using highly stylized, flowing and curvilinear designs incorporating floral and plant-like motifs to create repeating abstract and geometric patterns.

Arts and Craft – A British (1880- 1910) and American (1910-1925) aesthetic movement, founded in response to the increased use of industrialized methods, emphasizing the importance of hand crafting and natural inspiration; sometimes called the Craftsmen Style.

Modern (1880-1945)- A period or fervent social, cultural and political changes, defined by a shift in power and influence from Europe to the U.S. and reflected in a rejection of Victorian values for a more open social value system, artistic experimentation, innovations in manufacturing and scientific research and the realignment of the world political map by two global wars.

Art Deco (1920-1939)- A functional art movement that incorporated several influences [Cubism, Symbolism, Bauhaus Internationalism, industrial design and Modernism] into the design of everyday objects

Art Moderne (1920-1925)- The early name for geometric functional art design until the Paris show of 1925, Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, lent its shorthand title to the movement, Art Deco.

Alice Ball House, New Canaan, CT. Design by Philip Johnson (c.1950); Interior Design, Victoria Lyon; sculpture, Matthias Alfen; Photo, Eric Roth.

 “I shall confess to you that I have only had one teacher: the past; only one education: the study of the past.”  - LeCorbusier (1929)  

Moored like sleek Cigarette boats in a harbor full of luxury yachts, the growing number of New Canaan ‘moderns’ (more than 75 exist today), offer an unexpected visual respite in a small New England town where, for generations, tradition has ruled supreme. Their sleek, simple façades, flat roof lines, and ample, oversized windows will either shock or delight the observer today, much as they did more than a half century ago, when they were first constructed. Just like an overpowered speedboat, these bad boys of the harbor (and the men who conceived them) were out to make a point—and they succeeded. fine arts magazine  

Walter Gropius, Director of Bauhaus School, Germany; then Harvard's Architecture School director, inspired the 'Harvard Five'

These distinguished New Canaan architects, known as ‘the Harvard Five’ (Marcel Breuer, Landis Gores, John Johansen, Philip Johnson and Eliot Noyes), introduced a novel design sensibility on the American scene, beginning in the late 1940s. Their designs were shaped by an unexpected post-war prosperity and honed by a desire to upend the notion of “traditional house and home.” Clean angles, open floor plans, efficient space utilization and an unencumbered connection with nature and the materials of construction were foremost in their minds. Many critics found the structural solutions they applied to these design goals cold and uninviting. However, a handful of visionaries saw in modern homes the promise of an exciting, open lifestyle—a setting in which the American dream of luxury living could finally be realized.  

The visual language of modernism is an acquired skill; it requires that the viewer be ready to open his or her eyes to the possibility of elegance in its simplest form. The pristine architectural gems that dot our landscape symbolize another time in our history, a time when life promised to be carefree and filled with leisure hours. These rare creations—extant now in just a few locations throughout the world and constantly threatened with destruction—stand as symbols of a belief that innovative architecture could somehow point the way to making our world a better place to be. For that reason alone, the mid-20th-century moderns, living monuments to that conviction, deserve to be appreciated, preserved, and cherished.  

50s Look magazine life-of-ease ad, with caption,"Go, Robo-mower, and bring me the shapely form of my next-door neighbor's sunbathing wife!"

Modernism—the cultural shift that led, in the early 20th century, to radical changes in art, design, literature, architecture, and political expression—carried with it the idea of, ‘a break from old ways of thinking.’ This is the accepted sense in which the term modern is often used today, on issues ranging from child-rearing to space travel to religious beliefs—that is, meaning new, different, or non-traditional. But for most of its brief history, modern also meant controversial! With that in mind, we will be tracing modernism from its earliest European origins to a warm spring day in Berlin when, in 1933, a dedicated group of architects, artists and weavers were led away at gunpoint for their radical views about modern design.  

'White City' Chicago International Exposition 1893

It is one of the accidents of history that an unlikely Midwest American city first became the laboratory for modernist experimentation. The Columbian Exhibition in 1893 (held in Chicago in honor of Columbus’ journey 400 years earlier) featured an exhibition called ‘The White City’ —a classical Beaux Arts showcase of American industrial engineering, designed by D. H. Burnham. Appalled by his excessive use of decorative detailing, Chicago resident-architect Louis Sullivan fulminated that “it would set American architecture back for half a century.”  

Sullivan, like some of his European counterparts at the time, was decidedly anti-ornamentation. Extensive decorative embellishments had been a feature of many architectural styles of the 19th century, including Victorianism- and for some it had run its course. In 1892, Sullivan declared that, “We should refrain from the use of ornamentation for several years and concentrate entirely upon the production of buildings well-formed and comely in the nude.” Listening well and carefully watching Sullivan’s every move was a young assistant in his Chicago firm—Frank Lloyd Wright.  

Frank Lloyd Wright (c.1900)

Soon on his own, Wright was just 34 when he introduced his design for a ‘Prairie House’ in 1901. His answer to a concern of the day about the deleterious impact of industry on artisanship was to advocate for the use of the machine to bring out the beauty in natural construction materials. Wright’s vision for residential living was uniquely American and unlike anything seen before. The “prairie look” featured a cruciform footprint; asymmetrical wings; deep, overhanging roof lines that floated above bands of transom windows or glazed walls, forming deep shadows that emphasized the horizontality of the structure. His “organic architecture” took full advantage of its natural setting, both settling into it and appearing to float above it at the same time.  

Wright saw the space within the building as the “reality” of that building, and he avoided the sensation of being walled in through the ample use of glass and open-floor planning. He advocated for “…the destruction of the box—in the corners and at the junction of the walls and ceiling—where windows would let light flow in and create light play in the room.” Thus, the simple geometrics that often served as a starting-point for a design were soon softened and redefined by the creative use of light, space and interior appointments. Eschewing the past, architects like Wright would apply a range of new building materials along with carte blanche from their forward-looking clients, willing to pay for that experimentation, to create something truly unusual on the American landscape.  

Wright-designed Robie House, Chicago, 1907-09

Wright was not the only one responding to the changing social climate around him. Europe, too in the early years of the 20th century was in flux. A call for modernization could be heard in industrialized countries on both sides of the Atlantic. In response to this call for ‘the new’, the first two decades of the 20th century saw a profound and dramatic increase in creative output by the architectural, artistic, literary and musical communities. An extraordinarily concentrated burst of creative energy occurred during this time, unlike anything seen since the Renaissance. The culture of change had reached a tipping point—perhaps because of the steady and irrevocable march of industrialization, or the rise of nationalist fervor among certain European nations, or maybe because the reality of the new flying machine and the speed and excitement of the automobile had managed to grip the human imagination– It could now be said that the Modern Era was officially underway!  

Villa Stein de Monzie, by Le Corbusier, Garches, FR, 1928, featuring an early garage

In France, architect, Charles Edouard Jeanneret, who adopted the name Le Corbusier was particularly taken by the purity of line and form extolled by the modernist movement. His designs from the period of the 1920s were reductionistic in the extreme, celebrating the virtues of simple geometric forms. Like other European designers, Corbusier extended his belief in the purity of basic shapes to other endeavors, including painting and industrial design. His aesthetic that, “a house is a machine for living in”, spoke as much to his belief in the universal order of simplicity in design as it did to the firm hold that science and engineered solutions for everyday problems had on the imagination of his contemporaries.  

While elsewhere in Europe, a group of artisans banded together in Weimar, Germany in 1919, determined to revitalize the charter of the defunct Berlin-based Arts and Crafts School of the previous century. They called themselves the Bauhaus School. Given that the country was gripped by social unrest, monetary inflation, and political instability after World War I, the mere fact of the creation of such an ambitious project in light of the times was remarkable. Headed by architect Walter Gropius (who had viewed the American architectural scene around Chicago in the 1890s and called it “the look of the future”), the school attracted the best and brightest of the time, including furniture designer Marcel Breuer, artist László Moholy-Nagy, and architects Josef Albers and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, among others.  

Bauhaus School exhibition flier during Weimar location years

For the next 14 years, the staff and students of the Bauhaus School redefined modern design in everything from apartment buildings to serving spoons. The creative energy at the school was fueled by a belief that design should not be defined by tradition, but by a constantly renewing and critical analysis of society’s needs and values. Open to more eclectic influences than the American modernist movement, Bauhaus faculty regularly included some of the best-known abstract painters, photographers, surrealist writers, fabric artists, muralists and actors of the day. Underlying all their efforts was the now-famous dictum put forth by faculty member Mies van der Rohe, “Less is more.”  

Soon, though, the winds of war began to blow again in Germany. The radical views about social change and the experimental art forms they supported soon brought the school to the attention of Hitler’s ultra-right National Socialist Party. Deemed degenerate by the state, the Bauhaus School (staff and students alike) were soon functioning under the watchful eye of the Gestapo. On April 11, 1933, the school was closed by Nazi police, who arrived with weapons drawn.  

This unfortunate turn of events impacted directly on the core members of the Bauhaus faculty—Gropius, Breuer, van der Rohe, Albers, and Moholy-Nagy, who eventually immigrated to America. Consistent with the axiom that “every time a door shuts, another opens,” these masters of the modern would soon imprint a new generation of architects and designer much closer to us here in the United States.  

St Georges Hall, Liverpool (1854). Fine example of Neo-Classical architecture

History teaches us that no important cultural shift occurs spontaneously, without the emergence of novel and sometimes hotly-debated ideas that spark the imagination. The seeds of Modernism that eventually flowered in the 20th century were, in fact, planted three centuries earlier, during a period in the late 17th century that later came to be known as, The Enlightenment. During that period, European philosophers first wrote about the power of the individual to determine his own fate. This was a revolutionary—possibly even heretical—idea in the 1600s, when the power of religion and superstition largely held sway over public behavior and beliefs. In 1689, John Locke, an English intellectual, declared that “every man is entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property.” (borrowing from these sentiments, “Happiness” came later, thanks to Thomas Jefferson.) Locke was not alone in his thinking. The emergence of scientific inquiry, the printed book, industrialization, the growth of cities, the loss of political influence of the church, the challenge to the divine right of kings to rule unconditionally, and the new concept of “free will and self-determinism” all had the effect of defining a new way of thinking for the average 18th-century man-in-the-street.  

Thomas Jefferson-designed Montecello (late 18th c.) Mathematical perfection in American Classical-inspired design

This reformist wave was accompanied by some new ways of thinking about architecture, too . . . or, rather, some new old ways of thinking. With the emergence of enlightened thought, which placed a premium on the wisdom of once-idyllic and grand civilizations, came a renewed interest in ancient Greco-Roman style. The search for perfection and balance in nature and design was to be rediscovered in the works of Greek and Roman philosophers, architects, and mathematicians. Eighteen-century exploration and colonization of, and trade with, increasingly far-flung, exotic locales triggered further interest in non-European cultures. Egyptian, other North African destinations and Eurasian and Japanese design elements soon worked their way into architectural motifs, creating a blizzard of building styles and rampant eclecticism in design…with names like federalism (Neoclassical with certain American influences, such as the eagle motif); Greek Revival; Gothic Revival; Romanesque Revival; Colonial Revival; Tudor Revival; Spanish Revival; Beaux Arts; Arts & Craft; and Victorianism, to cite just a few.  

Haute Victorian design- Carson Mansion, Eureka, CA (1895)

Throughout most of the 19th century, on both sides of the Atlantic, the architectural agenda was being defined by nobility and the aristocracy. Design was the pursuit of the privileged and those favored with the money and time to indulge. The vast disparity in wealth found in all of Western Europe and in the newly-formed United States, for that matter, meant that a handful of powerful and influential individuals (and those employed to express their vision in bricks and mortar) set the stage for architectural fashion. And for them, there was a shared belief that historical hindsight held the key to enlightened reasoning.  

It took the flowering of the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s and the emergence of a newly-created middle class, demanding realistic and affordable housing near the city-centers where they were increasingly employed, to finally move the design and construction of mass housing into the realm of the realistic and practical. Here, we can finally say that American initiatives in factory and residential design led the way; and by the late 1880s, Europe was looking to us for inspiration and direction in innovative architectural design.  

Invention of standard 2'x4', balloon frame made mass production housing possible in late 19th c.

It was at this critical juncture that the term modern was first used to describe the shift in values away from established, traditional ways of thinking and toward the search for solutions for the rapidly emerging class of workers and their families. The term cut across class boundaries and touched every aspect of human behavior; but when it came to architecture, modern soon took on the meaning of fast, practical and affordable (milled 2”x4” lumber in various lengths and the ‘balloon frame’ of standardized home construction used even today made their appearance at that time). The class-conscious posturing of previous generations, given expression through their elaborate homes and buildings, gave way to the new reality of a melding of culture and class at the urban neighborhood level–meaning that the expression of wealth and influence through adornment and embellishment became less important than the rapid and practical accommodation of families, workers and the wide range of facilities needed to support them. These pressures to produce on the part of designers and builders, alike, first gave rise to the axiom that, “form follows function”, clearing the way on the eve of the 20th century for a new of thinking about architecture, for which the term modern was soon appropriated.  

Along with the emergence of a new, residential middle class in both Europe and the U.S., innovative commercial building materials were being introduced—materials that could serve the growing space and performance demands of industrial, and retail construction: fireproof steel beams, cast-iron façades, reinforced concrete, and plate glass. With these products, architects were being increasingly called upon to design large, well-lit, utilitarian spaces for large-scale production, where efficiency and unimpaired performance were the main requirements. These newly-developed construction materials, along with the mechanical lift and the telephone, made the creation of the first multi-story building (meaning over three or four stories) possible in the 1880s. The Flatiron Building, NYC (1902), left, was an example of a structure that took advantage of diminishing land resources in the city and the invention of the Otis ‘Lift’, which meant buildings go be taller than four stories.  

Jacques Henri Llartigue, Grand Prix de Circuit de la Seine (1912)

Due to rapid innovations in both science and industry, society was gripped by a desire for the changes in life style that these improvements promised. A call for modernization could be heard in most industrialized countries. Harking this call for ‘the new’, the first two decades of the 20th century saw a profound and dramatic increase in creative output by the architectural, artistic, literary and musical communities on both sides of the Atlantic. An extraordinarily concentrated burst of creative output occurred during this time, unlike anything seen since the Renaissance. The culture of change had reached a tipping point—perhaps because of the steady and irrevocable march of industrialization, or because of the call-to-arms by sociopolitical activists like Marx, Baudelaire and Nietzsche, or maybe because the reality of the new flying machine and the speed and excitement of the automobile had managed to grip the human imagination– It could now be said that the Modern Era was officially underway!  

By Richard J. Friswell, Managing Editor  

Editor’s Note: The vital role of architect, Philip Johnson, a protégé of Gropius and his impact on the growth of American Modernism, will be the subject of Part IV in our series.

I

A recent visitor to the gallery commented, “A part of Harry Wishard lived several hundred years ago.” Her observation was insightful. Wishard’s representational paintings don’t simply give us a historical glimpse of old Hawaii. They transport us into that world. There is a keen intimacy between the painter and his subject that is startlingly apparent. As viewers we are ushered into this almost sacred realm where Hawaiian heritage connects with the land or aina.  

(Above) Harry Wishard, Pohaku Opio (Hanalei), 2010, 20×30″ available as Giclee on canvas fine arts magazine  

Harry Wishard, Stream Above Honokane (2010), 20x30"

Unlike viewers of Edouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass, we are neither caught off-guard nor embarrassed by Wishard’s scenes. Awe, reverence, and respect are our responses. If great art is autobiographical, Wishard’s paintings tell his story. Growing up on a plantation in Hawaii, Wishard lived a Huckleberry Finn existence—hunting, fishing, hiking, surfing and painting. It is this natural landscape of his childhood innocence where he is most comfortable. His paintings beckon us to follow him deep into the forest, to crouch on a stream rock overlooking a vast canyon, to fly like a seagull into lush waterfalls, and to feel the surf tumble at our feet.  

What keeps his paintings from being sentimental or simply nostalgic? His realistic style is meticulously accurate in foliage, geography, atmosphere, color and light. Using the centuries old glazing process of the masters, which he learned as a boy by watching his uncle, renowned artist Lloyd Sexton, he recreates forest terrains, stream beds, and ocean scenes he has explored all his life. Although related to Sexton by marriage, Wishard is self-taught.  

Harry Wishard, Kawai Nui (2010) 26 x 42”, frame: koa, green suede liner, gold fillet

His limited formal training may also be what keeps his art fresh. He continually experiments with painting techniques and insists on having fun with his subjects. Recently he began using an abbreviated form of pointillism and the vivid colors of the California Impressionists. Clearly his images have become lighter and brighter over the years.  

Although Wishard depicts idealized scenes of long ago, his personal love of the islands and the vantage point he selects for his paintings immerse us directly into his scenes. As observers we are always clear where we are in the painting—waist deep in the waves, walking along a forest trail, or at the top of a lava formed hillside (pu’u). This double connection: first between the painter and his scene, and secondly between the viewer and the painting is present in the best Wishard works.  

As viewers we are transported inside the painting until we feel our spirits join hands with Wishard and journey back to our true island home. His framed paintings literally function as windows of a world of long ago where panoramic vistas of snow capped mountains fall into lush canyon walls and blush colored Ohia trees.  

Elmer Adams, various Mediterranean-style vases, Mango, Milo and Cook Pine, 40" to 70" tall.

Wishard’s art translates into a desire to conserve and preserve all that is unique to the islands. The best of his paintings literally take our breath away so that for a moment we can feel the wind against our cheek and the water lapping at our feet.  

Wishard Gallery is host to other ground-breaking artists as well; notable among them are wood workers Elmer Adams and Tai Lake, sculptor Holly Young, photographers Michael Cromwell and Julie Eliason, and fellow painters Lynn Capell and Edwin Kayton.  

Recently deceased wood turner Elmer Adams has several pieces in the gallery. Using massive logs of Mango, Milo, and Cook Pine, Adams created gigantic Mediterranean style vases measuring over 40” tall, 70” in circumference, and weighing less than 10 pounds!  To do this he custom built a lathe made to handle the weight and large logs. He devised a series of 2” X 3” steel beams with a hollowing tool the size of a pencil attached to the end. These allowed him to hollow out wood length weighing up to 170 pounds from a distance of eleven feet. The results are stunningly light, graceful, yet massive wooden vessels.  

Tai Lake, Trestle Table, Kao wood, ebony inlay, 90" x 40"

Preeminent Koa craftsman Tai Lake is also represented in the gallery. Tai’s work tours with the SOFA shows. You only have to look at his Koa table to understand why he was chosen President of the Hawaii Wood Guild and the Hawaii Forest Industry Association. Tai designs and builds fine furniture from island hardwoods and from the Koa forest project he manages in Kailua-Kona. His work has received numerous awards, and images of his work have been published nationally.  

The Koa dining table in the gallery is over 90” inches long and 40” wide. Aside from the Ebony inlay, there is not a ninety degree angle anywhere. Every edge of this red Koa table is slightly curved. The legs are fashioned after a Kyoto temple and allow for people seated at the corners to have ample leg room. Although large in dimension, this classic table is both elegant and unassuming. His dining table chair legs and back duplicate the arc of the table leg creating an overall unity to the set.  

Sculptress Holly Young uses bronze and marble to build life size monuments, as well as portraits, reliefs and abstracts. A former biochemist, Young’s work has gone from the chemical to the realms of the alchemist. Her sculptures capture the harmony, gratitude and peace she feels when sculpting.  

Photographer Michael Cromwell’s work is reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe canvases in size and focus, but his subject is Hawaiian flora. Julie Eliason uses her marine biologist background to strengthen her sea images and to create unique borders for her photographic paintings. (Photos on right, left-to-right: Julie Eliason, Dancing Light; Michael Cromwell, Amber Night Bloom)  

Lynn Capell, Young Girl in Hammock (2008) 30 x 50”, oil on masonite

Lynn Capell loads her oil brush and palette knife for her mason board paintings. Gauguin and Hawaiian artist Madge Tennet appear to have influenced Capell. Her paintings depict modern scenes with a relaxed but haunting loneliness. Loosely painted couples cling together in a dance hall amid dim lights. A girl lounges in bed with a TV in the foreground. Seascapes are un-peopled.  

Prize winning Edwin Kayton uses muted tones to capture the Hawaiian cowboy “paniolo” life. Pau Hana (“finished work”) shows the back of the cowboy as he and his horse gallop toward home. Comin’ in Outta the Rain, one of his most popular paintings, unites horse and cowboy as they struggle against pouring rain.  

By Nancy Slain, Guest Contributor  

Wishard Gallery, Parker Ranch Center, Waimea, Hawaii  

Representing over 30 different artists, Wishard Gallery is definitely the place to visit, when you come to the Big Island of Hawaii, or at our website www.wishardgallery.com. For further information or to view more artists and their work, contact Nancy Slain at art@wishardgallery.com, or by phone at (808) 887-2278. [Right: Wishard's, The Front Yard (2010), 30 x 40”]

Ed Bing Lee, BURGER 2 (2006), 5x5x5”, waxed linen, linen, cotton floss, cotton. All photo credits in this story: Ken Yanoviak

When a Pittsburgh gallery representative asked Ed Bing Lee if he could create a teapot for an upcoming exhibition he thought, “of course, that’s child’s play.” Then his imagination went to work. “I like the idea of taking an art form that already exists and then reinterpreting it,” Lee says. “I knew I could do a regular teapot, but if you look at something and it leads you to something else, that’s what I like.” Leafing through reproductions of “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” by the Japanese printmaker Katsushika Hokusai, Lee found a favorite, “The Great Wave off Kanagawa,” created during the 1820s. Lee envisioned the great wave washing up over the top of the teapot and a fully-occupied fishing boat projecting underneath as the spout. Four and a half months and countless knots later, Lee completed the 8”x 8”x 8” teapot (see the video story, below).fine arts magazine

POPCORNY 1 (2007) 10x8x8”, synthetic ribbons, shoe lacing

Ed Bing Lee’s parents immigrated to San Francisco, where the artist was born, from Canton, China, at the beginning of the 1920s. In the fourth grade Lee had a teacher with a particular interest in art notice his drawing ability and she continued to encourage him to draw throughout his high school years. He won a scholarship to the Rudolph Schaeffer School of Design in San Francisco, and later received a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State College, where one of his part-time jobs involved model-making. “I loved the idea of constructing stuff,” he says. Because he wanted to further his art studies and live in New York, Lee enrolled in Brooklyn College, receiving a master’s degree in painting and graphics. A classmate, who was a director of Boris Knoll fabrics, urged him to join their studio, which he did for several years. Later, he became head of the design department at Craftex Mills, near Philadelphia. His expertise in the textile market led to teaching posts at the University of the Arts and Moore College of Art, both in Philadelphia. And his teaching led to a class in off-loom techniques and to Lee’s discovery of knotting. “I thought of all the off-loom techniques, this was the most direct. It had the greatest freedom,” Lee says. “You can go two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or you can do both at the same time. And there’s no machinery.” That’s important. No machinery. Ed Bing Lee is strictly hands-on.

TEMOKU 2 (2010) 6x5x5”, paper ribbon, waxed linen

At the University of Pennsylvania, he studied art history, obtaining a second master’s degree, and he started using his favorite paintings to inspire his work. He thought how like pointillism his knots were and he began creating two-dimensional pieces that incorporated segments of George Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”. But just reproducing parts of the painting would be boring. What would today’s picnickers take to the park? Fast food, of course. So Lee introduced images of sundaes, hamburgers, and Coca-Cola containers to his interpretations of Seurat’s work. In later two-dimensional pieces he chose Vermeer, Gauguin and others to inform his designs. Inevitably, he began experimenting with three-dimensional works. Visits to various natural history museums inspired a series on the earth crust, on minerals and rocks, and on exquisite orchids. Lee creates his pieces by axial weaving, by rotating them as he works. Using the double half-hitch knot, which he sometimes ties vertically, and other times horizontally, depending on the texture he wants to achieve, he works with DMC embroidery floss, Belgian linen and synthetic ribbons. His pieces seldom contain any form of support. For the most part, his work is hollow. The tension in the knots creates the shape. Viewers of his art frequently ask how many knots are in a piece. In the flat, two-dimensional works, it’s approximately five hundred per square inch. In the three-dimensional ones, well, you’ll just have to count them.

An admirer of two California artists, watercolorist Mark Adams, and Wayne Thiebaud, best known for his brightly-colored pies, cakes and other foodstuffs, their work inspired Lee to begin his “Delectables” series. He created assorted pies, ice cream cones, popcorn stuffed in a container covered in the American flag, a hot dog on a bun, and one of everybody’s favorites, a hamburger with all the fixin’s. Amazingly, the tomato on the hamburger was made by knotting single-ply embroidery thread. Lee likes to work with pieces in a series. “If you do only one piece, you have no idea of its possibilities,” he says. “I always find if a work doesn’t lead your mind to expand, you’re at a dead end. Each time I pick an idea and it doesn’t go far enough, I abandon it. I always want to work on something that will make me think, make me want to do the work, to find the solution. Challenge moves my work forward.”

BRAMBLE (2009) 4x5x5”, synthetic raffia

Challenge brought him to one of his most recent series which he named “Meditation on the Chawan.” Chawans are bowls, usually antique, used for mixing matcha, a powered green tea used in the Japanese tea ceremony. Lee chose the chawan because he wanted to train himself to think differently, to complete a structure that wasn’t totally enclosed, but still had body and volume. He moved from using waxed linen, which is very strong and structural, to ribbons, paper, even shoe laces. “Moving into ribbons, which have no body whatsoever, I wanted to still achieve volume just by the technique of knotting,” Lee says. “Just thinking about structure that way, with this floppy material, gave me the confidence that I can do certain things just by imagination and by thinking it through. And I sought to explore the concept of unity in variety. I wanted the series to be an open-ended adventure.” In 18 months, he completed 40 chawans (all approximately 4”x 4”x 4”), experimenting with different knotting techniques in addition to new materials.

Earthcrust Series: ATACAMA (2003), 3x4x1”, linen, cotton, waxed linen

He compares the experience to going back to school and says without it the cranes probably never would have materialized. Displayed in Lee’s studio is a fold-out greeting card depicting an elegant illustration of cranes. He always enjoyed looking at it, but only Ed Bing Lee would look at it and envision a teapot. But if you can turn “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” into a teapot, why not three cranes? And there’s the series thing. One teapot does not explore enough possibilities. The cranes teapot (12”x10”x10”) took Lee three and a half months to complete, and he has other ideas for teapots under development. In addition to his teapots, he wants to explore something different based on a favorite jungle scene by Henri Rousseau. “It’s always been one of my favorite paintings – charming, imaginative, a flight of fancy,” Lee says. “It’s a real challenge to my imagination.” He also wants to work on other designs that allow him to borrow the geometric, soaring arcs of Frank Stella’s work.

A recipient of numerous awards, including the 2007 Pew Fellowship in the Arts, awarded annually to 12 outstanding Philadelphia-area artists, Lee’s work is in numerous private collections, and regularly shown throughout the U.S. and at Philadelphia’s Snyderman-Works Gallery, where his art has been represented for over 30 years. At 77, Lee continues to create from fully-formed images in his mind. Often he will work on three or more pieces simultaneously, occasionally stopping to make sketches on scraps of paper or to record random thoughts in a notebook about a work as it progresses. His studio, high above the Philadelphia skyline, is lined with meticulously-organized threads, his collection of art books, and examples of work from throughout his career. Working at a small table, he does what he most values – challenge his imagination with endless exploration, one knot at a time.

By Kathleen McCann, Contributing Writer

Kathleen McCann writes about the visual arts from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Watch master, Ed Bing Lee working in his studio at:

A mid-20th century architectural rendering for urban renewal

“E xcept man, nobody lies. A rosebush cannot lie. It has to produce roses; it cannot produce marigolds — it cannot deceive. It is not possible for it to be otherwise than it is. Except man the whole existence lives in truth. Truth is the religion of the whole existence — except man. And the moment a man also decides to become part of existence, truth becomes his religion.”   -Indian Mystic, Osho

Architectural Forensics is a term to describe how it is that the ‘built environment’ perfectly expresses the intrinsic quality of any society’s sociological, economic, and political nature. In the search for truth, the parsing of concepts, deliberation of ideas, or the use rhetorical analysis to glean the essence of our reality pales in comparison to the truth at it is revealed by the world which we have wrought; and with this fact, there can be no mistake or equivocation. fine arts magazine

Boston City Hall (KM&K Arch.,1962-67). Blocks of Boston's West End neighborhoods were torn down to make way for sprawling plazas and Brutalist-style I.M. Pei-inspired architecture

Architects and urban designers are renowned for their ability to define concepts by employing formal constructs and then to argue the merits of their design as is expedient to gain favor for their proposal. The completed projects however are rarely given the proper scrutiny to gauge the product against the initial arguments upon which the physical expressions are based; and when they are, it is clear that the idea rarely matches reality. Western Civilization’s fundamental philosophical postulation to reason can readily facilitate the contamination of the truth by infusing ulterior motives into its meaning; whether or not consciously intended in order to advocate a pre-conceived objective; the resulting built-landscape purveyed as a litany of conjecture in which we continually bear the consequences of real structures and places.

Once clear about our intent, there can be no equivocation about our perception. If the discovery of truth is our objective, then it exists all around us; ready to reveal the unassailable reality that will guide our course of action and indicate the direction of our pursuit. For example, one may argue the merits of permitting a modern glass and steel tower to occupy an infill site within the context of early 20th century, pre-war masonry apartment buildings on Park Avenue in New York City. The architect or developer may cite the benefits of infusing a contemporary architectural expressions to an otherwise tired streetscape; the visual benefits of contrasting transparent forms to masonry facades; the wonderful addition of a brutally honest structure to the dated historical formalism so prevalent in the neighborhood; and even argue the merits of including modern and ‘relevant’ forms of expression within an historic context… all which sound like cogent arguments at the front end of the process when the project strives to gain approval. Yet the simple reality of such an experiment has indicated quite a different legacy; one that has only served to erode a wholesome identity often caused by economic initiatives that are conveyed by architectural seductions. We know this to be true not as a consequence of clarity derived from the initial conceptual debate, but we know this truth to be evident because we can walk the streets and see and feel the physical evidence of our actions as one misguided seduction leads to others until integrity of the place has been thoroughly compromised.

Rendering of Le Corbusier's 'Ville Radieuse', his concept of 'machines for living' (1923).

When the initial arguments were made for the ‘Urban Renewal’ of the lower east side in Manhattan as the dereliction of these neighborhoods was considered to be unsustainable, theory usurped observation and the consequences were swift and dramatic. A wave of gentrification prompted the previous generation of immigrants to move further uptown and to occupy larger homes and more spacious neighborhoods. As soon as the migration had gained momentum degradation was swift even though the urban fabric remained in-tact and might have been resurrected. Concepts abounded for what to do with the tenement structures that lined the lower east side of downtown Manhattan. The prevailing notion that won favor conveniently employed Le Corbusier’s concepts of urbanism as described in his diatribe Toward an Architecture (1923). The concept that large, densely-populated towers, these ‘machines for living’, would be set within rectangular park-like green spaces and permit its residents a gasp of nature if they so dared to venture onto that barren land seemed like quite a good idea. Unfortunately for idealism; reality presented a far different picture; stark in its contrast where crime followed the anonymity of these faceless towers, while the utter segregation of an impoverished socio-economic class of the population was clearly defined by these piles of masonry blight. Traditional neighborhoods where migrants flowed into this nation and then graduated to another existence gave way to these new, urbanly-renewed ghettoes that held its inhabitants largely captive to the now very familiar architectural stereotype that defines public housing. We know this to be true because we see and witness the effects of this reality. There can be no argument to the expression of the world that we’ve built as is indicated by the construction as it exists, and the effects that are consequential to our built environment.

A typical New England 18th c. era village center- church, commerce and homes facing the town green

The truth as revealed by architectural forensics. We are the detectives who observe, investigate, and reveal unassailable realities as expressed by the physical world. The aim: to provide clarity as to the purpose and understanding of the consequences for that which we’ve created. What does the ‘village green’ tell us about 18th Century New England colonial society? That the church dominates the essential position of power, authority, and honor is no accident. Other homes that surround the ‘green’ are generally of similar if not identical shape, size, materials, and coloring to each other and they surround a very regular and ordered pastoral setting around which the townsfolk gather, share, provide, and protect one another from the threats of savages and secularism. The yearning for freedom, for equality amongst one’s brethren; to conform, to live humbly and yet with determination; to control their environment and yet with a clear respect that society persists or perishes at the whim of what nature issues forth, as conveyed by God’s will… All of these attributes are qualities gleaned from observation with just a modicum of written history that serves to temper the inclination one might have to go too far astray. The truth about this society, as immortalized by the wood frames and clapboards of their construction—what remains in our time and that which has long since disappeared due to our delinquency, obstinacy, ignorance, and willful intent—are quite simply more evidence that provides clarity of the society as conveyed by its architecture.

Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda (1591)

Andrea Palladio’s Villa Rotonda (1591), serene, powerful, perfectly symmetrical in plan, the rotunda and cupola elements that terminate the center of the Greek cross plan; the point of focus to the entire composition, the universe where man is at its center, controlling of his destiny as expressed by this creation… the art which adorns the walls, ceiling, each and every nook and crevasse of this palatial home; the saturation of form and attention to each surface whether it be adorned or left spare as an intended repose; the owner’s clarity of purpose, no hesitation, willful, wonton, desirous, thoroughly committed in its expression of erudition; that art is the consummate expression of beauty; that beauty is both the point of departure and realization to what mankind can aspire in this life, perhaps the only life; as if that remains the sole vestige of his paradise and salvation. To observe any subject building; allowing it to speak through its form is a certitude upon which we can rely, because it is unassailable. We are witness to these realities; and only that awareness can provide clarity and meaning.

If Charles Darwin spent months on the Beagle floating up the Hudson River instead of off the coast of the Galapagos Islands, having sequestered his observations in an investigation entitled Conclusions of our Civilization instead of The Origin of Species, would we be any less impressed with the veracity of what he’d witnessed and assessments drawn accordingly? Society is, in fact, the expression of the environment that it has inherited coupled with the built environment that it has created. Our society has become overly seduced with the “what-ifs”, and no longer cares to acknowledge the “has-beens”; and yet we live in a world that we’ve made; there can be no dispute about that.

I’ve often thought that it is a fool’s errand that architectural publications and journals evaluate built projects shortly after their completion. There is hardly a message to be conveyed about a newly minted project that couldn’t be have already been reviewed when it was merely a conception on either the drawing board or in the fancy of one’s mind. A building or urban landscape can only be truly evaluated after it has existed for some substantial period of time; after when it has been burnished by the elements; trodden upon; been used and abused; becomes part of a fabric or recognized as a carcinogen that has assaulted the world already extant.

My position is quite simply to observe that which we’ve created in order to know the truth. The built environment is the perfect mirror in that it tells us everything about ourselves and perfectly expresses who we are; with utter disregard for propaganda or innuendo.

Architectural forensics is the tool to gain this understanding. They are clear and ingenuous; forensics discover the reality that gives birth to form and makes eminently clear the choices that may not have been initially understood because they were not yet expressed physically and could have been subject to willful or even unintended deception. We as employers of this powerful tool need know nothing about architecture or urban planning in order to draw our conclusions. In fact, we will no longer be seduced by the critical experts of architectural proposals as we become more confident that words cannot be used as a substitution for the reality of what buildings tells us through their forms and physical presence. We now possess the tools to have a clear understanding to the meaning of that which was destroyed in order to make way for the existence of a new structure; or even how a street, city, or forest may have benefited or suffered as a consequence of the new physical landscape . Truth gained in this manner of observation and description is unassailable.

Thus is the power and potential of Architectural Forensics- a force for truth and meaning.

By William Green, Contributing Writer

William Green holds a fine arts degree from Tufts University.  He continued his studies with a year at the University of Copenhagen, Royal Academy of Architecture; proceeding to the University of Colorado in pursuit of his Master of Architecture degree. This was followed by an internship at the prestigious Studio Coppola in Milan, Italy. After several years of practice and a number of awards, the opportunity to design offices for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Inc., in New York City, provided the impetus to establish his own firm in 1986.

William has served on the faculty of the New York School of Interior Design and has lectured at various universities and numerous design symposiums.

His firm can be reached at: www.wgaarchitects.net

A

J&S: The Juvet Landscape Hotel is located at Valldal, near the town of Åndalsnes in north-western Norway. Passing tourists are attracted by a spectacular waterfall, in a deep gorge near the road in Gudbrandsjuvet. The client, Knut Slinning, is a local resident. The idea emerged as an opportunity to exploit breathtaking scenery with minimal intervention, allowing locations which would otherwise be prohibited for reasons of conservation. fine arts magazine

ARTES: How did the client, Knut Slinning, and your firm come to work together?

J&S: The client, Knut Slinning, comes from the coastal town Ålesund, about 100 km west of Gudbrandsjuvet. He is a property developer. He has owned a cottage in Gudbrandsjuvet since late 1980′s. He listened to our first presentation of ideas for the site (part of a national tourist road project Gudbrandsjuvet viewing platform, http://www.jsa.no/galleries_index_2.html) where we, amongst other things, proposed a ‘landscape hotel’. This idea originally came from another project we did, in the Aurland valley further south, in the Sognefjord, but it is still not realized there. About two years after our presentation in Gudbrandsjuvet, Knut Slinning bought a farm with a river, close to the waterfalls in Gudbrandsjuvet, and he asked us to help him realize the landscape hotel idea. We did the zoning plan (he is allowed to build 28 rooms on his property) and have now realized the first seven rooms. A small spa will be completed this summer as well, very close to the river, with one wall just in glass in each of the saunas, relax rooms and massage rooms.

ARTES: Of course, the green theme is on everyone’s mind right now, but what inspired you for this particular design?

J&S: We wanted to create rooms that does not have the conventional borders (the walls), but which offer an experience that is as large as the landscape—a mountainous gorge three-to-four miles wide in this case. To create this, we worked a lot with the windows so that as much as possible of the “bordering” or “enclosing” effect that a window and its framing usually gives were eliminated, or made as small as possible. This is intended to give an effect of being in a large and grand landscape (not merely looking at it), but maintaining absolutely private, while also being protected and warm.

Instead of the conventional hotel, with guest rooms stacked together in one large building, the Landscape Hotel distributes the rooms throughout the terrain as small individual houses. Every house has one or two walls that are entirely built in glass, making the experience of being in the space truly breathtaking. Through careful orientation, every room gets its own exclusive view of a beautiful and unique piece of the landscape, always changing with the season, the weather, and the time of day. No room looks out at another, so the rooms offer the ultimate in privacy, even though curtains are not used.

At the moment there are seven units completed, but with the possibility of adding 21 additional, according to the master plan. All the rooms have slightly differing designs, as a result of local topographical needs and vegetation, as well as to maximize the requirements for privacy and the best possible views. Construction was carefully planned to eliminate the necessity of blasting of rock or altering the terrain in any way. In this way, the rooms become the least invasive addition to the existing topography.

ARTES: Each room seems to have its own character. Why are the rooms laid out differently?

J&S: We did not want to use dynamite, we wanted a project that could be removed without leaving scars in the landscape, and therefore we regarded the houses as guests on the site. Basically we discussed a lot what each single room should contain. All the rooms are slightly different because of the typography and conditions on each plot, but with same basic services.

ARTES: The construction and interior design considerations must have been a challenge, given the rough terrain and harsh winter conditions. How did you solve those problems?

J&S: The units are over-engineered for harsh winter conditions, built with massive spruce construction (85mm in the walls, 120mm in the roof and the floor), as a finished reveal on the interior (roof and walls). On the outside there is pine panel, treated with iron vitriol, which creates a chemical process on the surface of the wood that resembles ageing; the wood turns grey in a couple of months because of a reaction with the daylight.

The modular units are intended for summer occupancy only. Each building rests on a set of 40mm massive steel rods drilled into the rock, with existing topography and vegetation left largely untouched. The glass walls are set against slim frames of wood, locked with standard steel profiles, using stepped edges to extend the exterior layer of the main glass surfaces all the way to the corners.

The interiors are treated with transparent oil with black pigments, so that reflections from the inner surface of the glass wall are minimized. Shelves, benches and a small table are all built by the same massive wooden elements to maintain a certain degree of deliberate monotony, serving as a visual counterpoint to the complex nature views outside and to keep the visual presence of the interior at a minimum.

ARTES: Tel me a bit more about J&S’s commitment to green design and how you optimized those guidelines in this project?

J&S: Today’s concern for sustainability in architecture focuses almost exclusively on reduced energy consumption in production and operation. At Jensen and Slodvin, we think that conservation of topography is another aspect of sustainability deserving of attention. Standard building procedure requires the general destruction of the site to accommodate foundations and infrastructure before building can commence. Conserving the site is a way to respect the fact that nature precedes and succeeds man. Also, dutiful observation of existing topography produces a visual ‘reading’, where the geometry of the intervention highlights the irregularities of the natural site, thus explaining both itself and its context in a more powerful way. In this way, a sustainable connection is established between structure and site.

The hotel had a planned opening for summer, 2009. A small spa is being built very close to the river, with two saunas and a massage room. It is inserted into the ground, but with glass walls facing the view of the river and the mountains.

ARTES: Thank you for your time. The photographs themselves were breath-taking. I hope I can get to see the finished project someday soon.

Client: Knut Slinning; Project Architects JSA: Jan Olav Jensen (pl), Børre Skodvin, Torunn Golberg, Helge Lunder, Torstein Koch, Thomas Knigge; Landscape Architect: Jensen & Skodvin; Static Consultant: Siv. Ing. Finn Erik Nilsen; Year Planned: 2004 – 2009; Year Built: 2007 – 2009; Status: Under realization;  Area: 800m2; Cost: 2 Million Euro

All photographs courtesy of Jensen & Skodvin Architects. For more information, see: The Juvet Landscape Hotel website at: www.juvet.com

or contact Jensen & Skodvin at: www.jsa.no

(Jensen & Skodvin Arkitektkontor AS, Sinsenveien 4D, 0572 Oslo, Norway)

Shilpa Chavan, Headgear, mixed media (2010)

Is art a part of life, or does it, in certain ways, stand apart from other forms of expression? Though sometimes challenging to categorize, broadly and philosophically- speaking, artistic expression deals with constantly evolving notions of aesthetics and rasa (taste), that is, varied ways of seeing and perceiving life and the surrounding world, but always with creativity as the central axis. More specifically, the distinction between art and craft, or between fine art and design/ fashion/applied art is equally disputed. All creative endeavors, in any form of visual art or the performing art or literature, epitomize a given time and space. Artists of all genres and designs- painters, sculptors, designers, illustrators, craftsmen, architects, fashion designers and new media practitioners, individuals or groups, in a juxtaposition of art and artifacts represent the vision, vitality and plurality of the cultural matrix in which they exist. Resulting from a cross fertilization of ideas and experiences, immersed in aesthetics as well as some form of functional value- may be just visual or sensual stimulation, each art form with its distinct characteristics, in whatever genre, color, style or media; involves cerebral and emotional inputs as well as skills, materials and a play of creative energies as a complete human activity.fine arts magazine  

The Indian Context  

Nayika Shringar: depicting one of nine moods or feelings, illustrating how fashion is integral to Indian artistic practice.

Intrinsically rooted in classical, tribal and folk forms that have traversed everything from the sacred to the profane, the decorative to the functional; Indian art in all its kaleidoscopic variety continues to engage life and society. Drawing on sound philosophical principals of Shilpasatras (the study of arts and crafts), expressed in both sacred and courtly terms, it has retained its aesthetic appeal while maintaining its functional role. Artists continue to perform important roles as communicators and harbingers of change, providing both guidance for those who pursue the arts purely for enjoyment, while also rendering works that illustrate popular ballads, epics and love stories and producing functional objects, including garments and other adornments. Arts add colour to Indian life, serve as a document of our history and enhance the cultural environment.  

Shringar (preparation for the day) to evoke one of the navrasa (nine juices with corresponding moods or feelings) is depicted with finesse in ornately-adorned sculptures and temple deities, or beautifully painted manuscripts and miniatures. They reinforce a tradition and illustrate how fashion has been integral to Indian artistic practice. Historical accounts and literary texts of the past describe in captivating detail the rustle of pure silks as the rich pass by. Renowned for their colors and patterns, Indian textiles, in fine muslin and handloom fabrics, received royal patronage, while also being accessible to commoners, who wear them in elegantly-folded, often unstitched, fashions such as saree for women and dhoti or pagri for men. Elaborately embroidered and embellished costumes, intricately designed jewelry and decorative patterns on hands, face and body, have been an integral part of Indian culture, cutting across all socio-economic strata, regardless of region, age, sex or community. Each distinctive style serves a specific occasion.  

Re-fashioning Art  

Menhdi: application of henna dye for weddings, festive occasions. Here depicting sexual positions from kamasutra

In this constantly-evolving world, nothing remains the same. India is not exempt and, given its prominent role in the global marketplace, its art and culture have also undergone an unprecedented transformation. The resulting free-flow of materials, styles and techniques has generated a refreshingly-hybrid style of art. Clearly impacted by all-pervasive Bollywood films, pop culture, kitsch and an explosion of material available through the Internet, Indian art in all its forms, from fine art to performance and installation art to design, fashion, architecture, photography, video and new media seem to have been refashioned as a new Avatar. Going well beyond decorative and spiritual themes, wider issues of human interest such as sexuality, feminist themes, regional identity, corruption, violence, world events, environment and human rights issues are being addressed and re-shaped in forms that can be either beautiful or beastly. In terms of scale and ambition too, Indian artists exude a new vigour and confidence. There is daring, depth and glamour in contemporary Indian art, offering provocation, reflection and pleasure. In an inclusive approach, the old and the new co-exist as canonical texts. Vastu shastras (architecture), Silpashastras (arts and crafts) and Kamasutra (art of sexual pleasure) are studied and practiced with as much fervor as ever, while innovation and experimentation, brought about by digital technology and new media, continue to open new doors for ancient practices.  

Alankar or embellishment for the self and one’s surroundings is a natural human desire. It is an essential element of visual language and an inseparable component of aesthetics. By analyzing costumes, decorative tradition, motifs and iconography used by a particular group at any given time, art historians can reconstruct a stylistic progression that traces the changes in a cultural milieu. Though often criticized merely for its glamour value, the evolution of fashion, in fact, is a creative endeavor akin to the study of fine art. Fashion artists work with colour, material, texture, form and design while painters, sculptors and other visual artists work with similar materials and concepts, often in an abstract realm. In a significant judgment, the Bombay High Court recently ruled that fashion designers are, in fact, artists. Fashion artists add beauty and visual appeal of garments, enhancing the utility, look and value of what they create–a decorative piece of clothing or a functional object. In turn, visual artists create to articulate their own and others’ dreams, fears, ideas and to catalogue events, with the similar result that our cultural environment is further enhanced. All artists take forward the age old concept of working together in groups and across disciplines, learning from each other in the process, as did the sthapatis or architects who excelled in building design, or the master artist who worked in karkhanas (studios/workshops) with the rangamez or colourist, calligrapher, framer and binder.  

Convergence  

Dileep Sharma, My Pavilion, fiberglass, steel (2010)

Both creative domains, though inextricably intertwined in their search for aesthetics and visual language, involve certain characteristics peculiar to each. While fashion artists appear to play vigorously with materials and premeditated design and for functionality as required by the rasik or market, artists seem to focus primarily on inner urges and spontaneity to reach the viewer or collector, often relegating the practicality of art to the background. Creativity and their ability to handle material and transform ideas into shapes, seem to be equally significant for artists and couturiers.  

A recent exhibition in Delhi provided a platform with space and scope for artists and designers to cross over the fence and converge experimenting and re-working their creativity with functionality as the goal. Each of the ten visual artists created a fashion garment or object of physical adornment, in addition to creating a work from within their own realm. The fashion artists play with unrestrained creativity making a two or three dimensional or virtual art work and designing a garment in their signature styles. In the process, both groups celebrate the exchange and cross-fertilization of ideas, experiences and practices, free from the pressure of commissions and the market, reliving their early, dreamy days of training and learning.  

Exhibitors include a mix—renowned artists and some younger and cutting-edge—but all straddling the genres to create paintings, photographs, sculptures, installations, videos and interactive art; fashion garments, functional objects and even food complete this inclusive, cohesive forum. This convergence of art and fashion makes a feast for the eyes, mind and body, challenging the intellect and charming with aesthetics.  

Dileep Sharma's woodblock designs printed on saree (detail)

Amid the ten visual artists in the exhibition is a large fiberglass brightly coloured sculpture of foot tapping legs of a young girl, My Pavilion, by Dileep Sharma. A symbol of modernity and pop culture, she is seductively poised as her mini-skirt flares in the air, bringing the exuberant pink of the inside out, showing off her yellow panty with precisely painted imagery in place, playing with its own shadow on the shiny plate below. A resident of Bollywood city, Sharma, known by his pseudonym, Kunwar ji, then returns to his roots in Rajasthan to work with craftsmen and get his intricate colourful imagery of provocatively playful female legs, in variable posturing, engraved in woodblocks for the hand block printing of his fashion art piece, the evergreen saree, in georgette.  

Baba Anand, Life Boxes (1 of 22), mixed media installation (2004)

In a similar pop and Bollywood streak appears the art of Baba Anand. Shuttling between the East and West, his artwork as an installation of 22 framed boxes that he has worked on since 2004, painted in a glossy laboratory-white. There is a clear imprint of his bohemian, open mindscape and his global exposure in the imagery and form of his work. The ‘Life Boxes’—painted mixed media imagery glued to the wood-threads, grub, wheels, money, luxury brands, advertisements, slogans, wax dolls, photos, etc.—create a collage illustrating the “culture of consumption and consumption of culture…” a clinical examination of westernized society, “an artistic anthropology of the habits of the Global Village at the dawn of the 21st Century”, to quote Jerome Neutre. This trained fashion designer, whose current practice engages fine art works in a kitsch- influenced, heavily embellished oeuvre, comes to the fore in his rock- star- gold jacket specially designed and created for the exhibition as his functional, wearable entry.  

Satish Gupta,Shwedagon, silk, pashmina, turquoise beads (fabric by India India), 2010

In contrast is Satish Gupta’s, ‘Shwe De Gong’ meditative creations in the Zen spirit, inspired by his recent visit to Myanmar. The icon featured in the painted canvas is also the central figure in his fabric creation for adorning the body. The shawl, in silk and wool fabric specially created by skilled crafters at ‘INDIA INDIA’, brings the artist’s vision to life in his maroon and black, handmade appliqué-worked piece with Buddha images superimposed, complimenting the painting. Together, the two follow the grid of the Cosmic Matrix series that has engaged and inspired the artist’s creative energies for years. As for the symbiotic relationship between art and fashion, the artist believes, “… creativity cannot be restricted to any one medium. What is expressed is of value through whichever medium the artist chooses for a particular work”.  

Seema Kohli (squatting on floor, middle) looking at embroiderer working on her design for ornate embroidered jacket

Engagement with iconography appears differently in artist Seema Kohli’s painting as a fine blend of myth and feminist energy with poetic elegance. Her densely painted canvas filled with nature, semi- anthropomorphic forms and a sensuous feminine figure prominently placed centrally, recreate mythology associated with the concept of procreation in ‘Hiranya garbha’ and the ‘Golden Womb’. To reflect on a woman’s search and urge for beauty, she presents a complete outfit in her fashion creation influenced by fashion designer Poonam Bajaj. A hand –embroidered, richly embellished jacket, digitally printed silk Lycra body suit, suede embroidered clutch bag coordinate to illustrate a feminist streak in her art.  

In a vastly different mode appear abstract renditions of Paris based artist Sujata Bajaj, whose work remains firmly rooted in the soil of her birth-land, but exudes a touch of the West—where she is based now—in its marked finesse. Her richly coloured canvas completely covered with evocative abstract impressionist markings of panchtatva—the five natural elements—accompanied by calligraphic, textual and textural interventions, looks bright and alive, drawing in the viewer. She complements it with a leather clutch by an Italian designer who has included a small canvas strip, hand painted by Sujata, on its cover. Easily carried and used, the handbag is an interesting companion to the painting on the wall.  

Sujata Bajaj stands beside a recent work (2007). From, The Hindu On-Line News

Manu Parekh known for his still life and Banaras series of paintings turns to Lord Ganesha for this exhibition. The painted canvas featuring that god in red yellow and green has orange and pink smeared all over his benevolent face, broad forehead, long winding laddoo holding trunk, pot belly and multiple hands. The bright eyed, generous God presents a picture perfect lovable image with an interesting touch of the artist’s unmistakable signature style. His rendition of the lord in a smaller work on cardboard is beautifully turned into a locket, given his experience as design consultant for the Weavers’ Service Center and then the Handicraft and Handloom Export Corporation of India. The locket strung together as a necklace makes a wearable piece possibly for special occasions, may be for invoking the Lord for good luck!  

Manu Parekh, hand-painted pendant (2010)

Landscape is at the centre of all that Paramjit Singh creates. His gentle exploration in subtle colours with laboriously textured thick brush work on canvas re-calls quiet pictures of silent valleys, flowing streams and water bodies, rising sun or moonlit nights, hills and mountain- scapes, walkways between towering trees, thick forests or streetscapes in autumn, covered with falling leaves. The artist’s painting for the exhibition explores a similar, other-worldly dreamscape, in a haven of its own, far beyond the chaotic urban world. Singh then selects a section of his painting, transposing it into digital imagery, printing it on fabric as a stole, usable by any individual with taste of any age and of either sex. The artist’s ability to work across media and domains is well-exemplified by both of his creations in the exhibition.  

Ravi Kumar Kashi specializes in making his own paper; working with various materials and genres, he has created a series of human torsos of cotton, jute and paper. A reflection of the times we live in, the visual culture of media re-presentations and hype are recurrently featured in his ‘non-linear’ artistic career that encompasses collage, moulded paper sculptures, assemblages, paintings, photography and new media work. The torso or armory of Doubting Thomas’is linked to his fashion art- wearable T shirts, aptly titled Inside Out. There is an uncanny resemblance between the two. The T shirts’ images of inner body parts painted in water-proof ink, and the torso, reveal how we hide by wearing clothes or otherwise covering up. Kashi’s work is also a comment on the human body’s fragility and the concept of regeneration.  

Paramjit Singh, abstract imagery digitally printed on a chiffon stole.

 As an artist, Yusuf Arakkal works across media and disciplines, appreciating the bond and interdependence between art and design: “We all know before fashion designing became specialized it was artists who created fashion and designed costumes. For example, Michelangelo had designed the beautiful out fits for the Swiss guards at Vatican that are still worn by them”.  

Ravi Kumar Kashi, Doubting Thomas, torso installation (2), paper pulp, mixed media (2008/9)

 Fashion artists and designers, just as many visual artists, work to bring high aesthetics to their creations. Yusuf has painted two canvases with familiar wearable garments: a jacket and trousers. The red hanger and line running through each canvas lend an animating, painterly touch to both images. A light blue shirt in soft denim, paired with a piece from his Child series of paintings, creates a wearable fashion garment with unisex appeal.  

The role that models play in giving the designed fashion wear its full glory is often limited to their appearance in ramp walks and glossy magazines or the advertising world. Young Viveek Sharma features a European model that he met during a recent residency in Germany in his oil on canvas on display in the show. He then cooks a meal and prepares the table showing the model waiting at the window and titling the whole installation ‘Who is coming for dinner tonight?’ This in-your-face interactive art work brings the fashion design and art domains together via a performative mode, a telling comment on the uncertainty in a model’s life. It also reflects the frailty of human relationships in contemporary society. Sharma adds another dimension to his work given, that the Zanana Table Chair, part of the installation, was created by designer duo, Sahil and Sarthak, who used local material and ethnic wear for this ultra-modern luxury furniture.  

Yusuf Arakkal, Generation Gap,o/c (2001)

Rajesh Pratap Singh, Meditating Man, scissors, 48"x48"x13".

 The ten fashion artists likewise play with their creative energies to embody art, beside design and fashion, within its folds. While Ritu Kumar chooses to create a painting in mixed media to feature her love of the fabric and colours, along with an elaborately textured ornate costume, JJ Valaya finds recourse in photography to document his long time association with that form, in addition to his signature fashion creation. In a mix of everyday materials and street culture, Manish Arora, inspired by Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, creates his own flamboyant, contemporary design; while his name-sake from Mumbai, Manish Malhotra, known for his designs for many of the Bollywood film stars, also showcases a couple of his ornate creations. Gaurav Gupta juxtaposes his garment with an installation to explore “the blurred line between the accepted norm of functional and non functional”. Himanshu Dogra and Play Clan give us “an experiential walkthrough showing different processes and development of an art work from concept to print….as a garment, a painting or a utility item….” Malini Ramani’s garment and installation with video, flesh out the ambience that connects the two within their context. Rajesh Pratap Singh’s sculpture of a meditating man made out of scissors, and his men’s wear suit worn by one of his associates, both illustrate his love for simplicity with substance. Shilpa Chavan, or Little Shilpa, as she is more popularly known, styles a hat and an installation made with humble materials found in a local street market, transforming it into a spectacular sculpture with a feminist thrust (see opening image). In his fashion designs, Varun Sardana uses masks theatrically, turning fashion into a performance: “…the theatre of fashion….a play between wearable garments and their heightened presentation”.  

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Viveek Sharma, KALIYUG, o/c (2009). Fabiant Claude Walter Gallery, Zurich

 This versatile collection features many new art works across the genres, all aesthetically endowed and technically virtuous. They respond to the concept behind the exhibition, with a fresh outlook, as fashion creations and fine art works coalesce in a free exchange of creative energies. Both domains, influencing each other in frequently varying proportions, now inhabit today’s art galleries and museum spaces. Historically too, both forms have remained current with society, part and parcel of its time. Original patterns, whether painted on canvas or drawn on paper, may be equally creative. Artists patronize fashion designers, as fashion designers have traditionally collected art, as was the case with French couturier Paul Poiret, who collected works by Picasso, Matisse, Dufy and Rouault, among others. Artists likewise design costumes and sets for theater, as did Neelima Sheikh for one of Anuradha Kapoor’s stage productions. MF Husain and Laxma Goud have both designed clothes, and artist Sanjay Bhattacharya began his career as a designer, and Shuvaprasanna, as an illustrator. Creative influence has flowed both ways as fashion imitates art, and art imitates life.  

And life continues to be impacted by both!  

By Sushma Bahl, Contributing Writer  

This article is an edited version of the curatorial essay that was featured in the catalogue for ‘Convergence: Art & Fashion’ exhibition, presented by Art Positive in Delhi in Nov-Dec 2010)