Untitled Vintage Bomber:2005:Vacuum formed high impact polystyrene 33X 48

I worked all through the weekend, which I usually hate doing. One of the gigs was a shoot where a rising photographer friend of mine said "I like your Imagist thing. Its well put together, but I'm totally confused by it." Truth be told I'm completely confused by it too. After years of a love-hate tension with the thing, I have finally conceded that I'm seriously in love with the idea of fashion. Same for art. Or at least the idea of art. The relationship between the two, art and fashion, is the seed of the confusion my friend was invoking . Artists like Seth Price perfectly solve this conflict for me. Not because Seth Price is fashionable (god forbid!) but because he has really influential ideas about industrial images : the value of those images and the disposable nature of those images. Lately when I look at fashion images it occurs to me that all of fashion is a high grade form of industrial waste. Which possibly makes me love it more.

New York magazine may have damned Seth with faint praise when they named him as one of their 10 Young Masters of the new art boom by leading his blurb with this sentence "It’s hard to know what Price is best known for—his plastic vacuum-formed sculptures of breasts or contributing the same press release as his “art” to multiple shows." A press release as "art". I love it! Vacuum sealing is a recurring motif in Price's world and it is an easy example of how looking at art can trigger inspiration in avenues like clothes design and graphic design. That Price mounted a vacuum sealed bomber jacket on the walls of the Friedrich Pretzel Gallery last year is the ultra-obvious illustration of the cross-dialogue between art and fashion I'd like to put on display . Its not the jacket that counts. The jacket has no value, or at least not to this subjective viewer. It looks like a glob of industrial waste, much like a mass of black plastic floating in a sea soiled by a massive oil spill. It is the discipline of the mounting that is genius and the best talent in art , as in fashion are the ones with a discipline for mounting. In a manner of speaking. In other words, it is not the clothes, or the picture, or the girl or the blog that counts. Its the aura around it...the world it is embedded in. The genius talent carry a very specific world around in their heads and stay true to it always.
Hostage Video Still: 2005: Ink on plastic film , grommets, dimensions variable

This is why Seth's world can go from sculpture to text to video (available at my new idee fixe: Electronic Arts Intermix) and maintain the integrity of its current. I really love his videos, especially the consumerist wit of "Spills' where a new TV/DVD player remains embedded in its styrofoam packaging. I love too "Hostage Video Still" an ink on plastic film piece with grommets which, if you'll pardon my superficiality, is so Raf Simons, I expect to see clear macs with blue ink illustrations on his runway very very soon. I can't afford those pieces yet, but I'm gobbling up those EAI videos as fast as I can! I guess I'll be working many a weekend to come.