Art & Fashion.... unlimited borders

[BerlinRocks]

not sure about the title....
but I thought we could open a thread about Art & Fashion and their relationships.... when you think about the presence of Art in Fashion, or the presence of Fashion in Arts....
just look at Dysfashional, Hermes, Chanel, Louis Vuitton and recent Murakami exhibition in Boston.....

Let's start with Louis Vuitton and its relationships with Art....

Store beats trade ban with bags of cultureKim Willsher in Paris
Tuesday May 9, 2006

Guardian
When is a shop not a commercial enterprise? When it calls itself Louis Vuitton and transforms itself into an "art gallery".

Until now, the French luxury goods chain, whose leather bags adorn the arms of the rich and famous, has shown no cultural pretensions outside the fashion industry. But, in what is seen as an attempt to circumvent France's strict Sunday trading laws, the company has turned its Champs-Elysées branch into a store with a "cultural role".
It has created a spacious gallery on the top floor of the seven-storey building, opened last year after a two-year renovation. The change of classification, from commercial to cultural, has been approved by the Paris authorities. But it has angered the CFTC-Commerce shopworkers' union, which opposes Sunday opening.
The union is taking legal action against the firm, saying the move is a ruse to get round Sunday trading laws. "The cultural activity of this store is very small compared with the commercial activity," a union official told Le Parisien newspaper.
LV boasts that the store is the "largest luxury boutique in the world", with 1,800 square metres of retail space and 6,000 customers a day.
But it also insists that the new building, which has retained its famous art deco facade, is focused on contemporary art and culture - hence its new "Espace Louis Vuitton".
"We have done everything necessary to obtain permission to open on Sundays," a company spokesman told Le Parisien. "We have put enormous investment into the creation of this cultural space where leading contemporary artists will be exhibited.
"We've also recruited at least 70 staff to enable us to open seven days a week. Apart from the debate one could have about the notion of 'Sunday' in a tourist area such as the Champs-Elysées, these jobs are at risk."
Louis Vuitton, which at times has had to ration the number of handbags sold to Japanese tourists who queue for hours outside the store, admits it hopes the gallery will attract more customers. Yves Carcelle, the chairman and chief executive of the luxury goods firm, said: "Sell more handbags? Yes, that's my dream."
Day of rest
Under France's strict trading laws only small food outlets are allowed to open on Sundays, but there are exceptions. Shops run by the patron or a relative are allowed to open, as are stores catering for tourists in designated areas.
There are seven tourist zones in Paris: Montmartre, the Champs-Elysées, the Rue de Rivoli (opposite the Louvre), the road outside Notre Dame, the Viaduc des Arts at Avenue Daumesnil, Place des Vosges and Place Saint-Germain. Clothing and luxury goods shops are not permitted to open on Sundays, even in these areas, and face fines if they do.Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

via Liberty33r1b

[BerlinRocks]

now Murakami exhibition in Boston

all next reviews from nytimes

April 4, 2008
Art Review | Takashi Murakami
Art With Baggage in Tow

By ROBERTA SMITH
Who knew that the first Louis Vuitton boutique in Brooklyn would touch down smack in the middle of an exhibition in one of the borough’s most venerable art institutions?
But there it is, at the Brooklyn Museum, bright and gleaming and blending seamlessly with its setting: a sleek, stylish and sometimes silly survey of the work of Takashi Murakami. Mr. Murakami, who is frequently called the Japanese Andy Warhol, is an astute manipulator of visual languages, artistic mediums and business models. The boutique will sell Vuitton bags, wallets and other accessories dotted with the signature Murakami jellyfish eyes, red cherries or pink cherry blossoms for the duration of the exhibition.
Guardians of museum purity were outraged by the Murakami-Vuitton boutique when the show made its debut last fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it was organized by Paul Schimmel, that museum’s chief curator. The shop has been criticized for blurring the already fuzzed line between seemingly functional and nonfunctional luxury goods (i.e., art).
But actually it’s an ingenious key to the Pandora’s box of Mr. Murakami’s art and stuffed with questions of art and commerce, high and low, public brand and private expression, mass production and exquisite craft. None of these, it turns out, are ever mutually exclusive. Fuzzing is the point. (And by the way, those who attack a store in an art exhibition might better protest the recent and quite awful redesigns of several of the Brooklyn Museum’s permanent collection galleries.) The Vuitton shop is also one of the visual high points of this show, which has definite ups and downs. The bags, their shiny brass fittings and the impeccable white-enamel display cases achieve an intensity of artifice, tactility and visual buzz that Mr. Murakami’s higher art efforts don’t always muster.
Raised by parents who drummed Western art into him, Mr. Murakami studied traditional nihonga painting, and attempted a career in animation, before deciding to become a contemporary artist. Since emerging in the 1990s Mr. Murakami has often been seen as out-Warholing Warhol by giving back to popular culture, as well as borrowing from it and by excelling at branding. Not for nothing is this show titled “©Murakami.”
But the more interesting comparison may be with hands-on artist-designers like Louis Comfort Tiffany or William Morris. After all, Mr. Murakami oversees a company, Kaikai Kiki (kaikaikiki means something both elegant and bizarre), that produces his art and its spinoffs. By now it employs around 100 artists, animators, writers and artisans and has an office in Tokyo, two studios in Tokyo suburbs and one in Long Island City, Queens. And of course he belongs to a long tradition of Japanese artists who lavished equal artistry on painted screens, ceramics, calligraphy or lacquerware boxes — which were in some ways the Vuitton bags of their time.
Mr. Murakami siphons motifs from Disney and Dalí, strategies from Pop Art, and sexual fantasies from Japan’s anime (animation) and manga (comics) subcultures. His cast of variously cute, erotic or grotesque creatures and intense decorative pilings-on range across paintings, sculptures, animations and wallpaper, building at times to a hallucinatory intensity that has more than a touch of darkness.
One example is the riot of manically cheerful flowers created by the combination of wallpaper, paintings and one sculpture in a large gallery. The blooms look like petal-ringed smiley faces, only better — and crazier. The ensemble fulfills almost too completely Mr. Murakami’s stated desire to make art “that makes your mind go blank, that leaves you gaping.”
At the opposite pole of such relentless innocence are two life-size but hardly lifelike sculptures of anime-manga derivation: “Hiropon,” a busty woman, and “My Lonesome Cowboy,” her well-endowed male consort. Both are mostly naked, with streams of bodily fluids spewing from various body parts. Like Mr. Murakami’s paintings of mushroom-cloud skulls, these renditions of Eve and Adam have been interpreted as comments on a collective Japanese psyche traumatized and infantilized by World War II, the dropping of the atom bombs and the lengthy American occupation. Whatever. They are sensationally sexy and sexist at the same time.
Most of Mr. Murakami’s creatures recur in an array of toys, T-shirts, pins and decals fabricated at Kaikai Kiki. Many of these are on display (but not for sale) one floor below the Vuitton boutique. The connecting staircase, covered with skulls-and-camouflage wall paper overlaid with big mushroom-cloud skulls, provides a “vanitas” moment to reflect on mortality. But there’s still time for worldly possessions: Nearly all the Kaikai Kiki items are on sale in the gift shop.
This show begins with work dating from 1991, but it doesn’t gain traction until the late 1990s. It defines Mr. Murakami, now 46, as a late-blooming talent with a steep learning curve. Interestingly, most of his best works were made after 2001, the year he started working with Vuitton.
The exhibition’s spine is formed by the demonic mutations of the artist’s signatory and most ubiquitous character, Mr. DOB, the Mickey Mouse derivative that is something of a self-portrait. (The name is a condensed version of the Japanese for “why?” — the eternal existential question.) Splitting, multiplying, flashing jagged teeth and shapeshifting almost beyond recognition, Mr. DOB appears here as an enormous inflatable, a sculpture menaced by colorful mushrooms, on flagstonelike floor covering and in way too many slick, brittle paintings. Luckily other experiences like the flower room and the Vuitton boutique balance things out.
One is the enchanting 23-foot-tall “Tongari-kun” (or “Mr. Pointy”), a space-alien, 18-armed Buddha on a lotus throne surrounded by four guardians that dominates the museum’s lobby. Its sinuous designs and rich colors evoke a fusion of Surrealism, Art Nouveau and Japanese kimonos. The label counters by pointing out that the palette and symbols are inspired by Maya art and Tibetan Buddhist imagery.
Even more spellbinding is a new animation dreamed up by Mr. Murakami and his Kaikai Kiki cohort (the credits take several minutes). “Planting the Seeds,” an instant classic, stars Kaikai and Kiki, two spirit guides in footy pajamas who are probably descended from Mr. DOB. They travel the world in a living spacecraft that gives new meaning to the term “mother ship.” Extraordinarily beautiful, with a deeply Japanese respect for nature, the tale suggests that there is no such thing as waste through a hilarious emphasis on manure — or as the three-eyed Kiki squeaks at the top of his/her tiny lungs, “Poop??!!”
And, finally, in the last two galleries of the exhibition, Mr. Murakami’s painting explodes with a new complexity of color and meaning, matching the intensity of the flower room, but without the mind-blanking repetition. The combination of scale, rich detail and brilliant color and compositional and narrative drama is riveting. In “Tan Tan Bo” (2001) Mr. DOB is reincarnated in a kaleidoscope of color whose mixture of geometric and biomorphic forms is a kind of comic summation of modernist abstraction. “Tan Tan Bo Puking” (2002) is a Daliesque apocalypse: Mr. DOB in his death throes with globs of brilliant color spilling from his jagged teeth, and strange protrusions, at once foul and gorgeous, erupting all over his enormous head. One culminates in a golden hand that meets another hand in a flash of light. And in the lower right, the Kiki stands among four Shinto staffs dangling with sacred paper that signal the soul crossing to the afterlife.
In the show’s final four paintings, all from the last two years, different Japanese art forms, materials and styles create a great contrapuntal energy. In “727-727,” Mr. DOB’s snarling head bounces on an elegant unfurling wave, against layers of sanded colors that encompass the entire spectrum, and evoke ancient screens and Warhol’s Oxidation paintings as well as atomic radiation.
Two large portraits of Daruma, the revered sixth-century Indian monk who introduced Zen Buddhism to China, mimic the calligraphic flair of ink painting (writ very large) but on surfaces of gold, silver and titanium leaf customary for screen painting. The fourth painting introduces a new character, Chibi Kinoko, or Little Mushroom, a wan creature with some of the strangeness of the mushroom-cloud skull and seen against a shiny hard surface of pale green squares that suggest both digitalization and lacquer. One leaves this show feeling that Mr. Murakami has found a new benign Pandora’s box: the richness of traditional Japanese art.
“©Murakami” is at the Brooklyn Museum through July 13; 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, (718) 638-5000.

[BerlinRocks]

this is still in a MUSEUM......


Roberta Smith writes: Who knew that the first Louis Vuitton boutique in Brooklyn would touch down smack in the middle of the borough's most venerable art institution? But there it is, at the Brooklyn Museum, bright and gleaming and blending smoothly into a sleek, stylish survey of the work of Takashi Murakami. Mr. Murakami, who is frequently called the Japanese Andy Warhol, is an astute manipulator of visual languages, artistic mediums and business models.


When the show made its debut last fall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the shop was criticized for blurring the already fuzzed line between seemingly functional and nonfunctional luxury goods (i.e., art). But actually it’s an ingenious key to the Pandora’s box of Mr. Murakami’s art and stuffed with questions of art and commerce, high and low, public brand and private expression, mass production and exquisite craft.



Murakami Party



Mr. Murakami's authentic Louis Vuitton bags outside on street displays at the Brooklyn Museum.

nytimes

nytimes

[BerlinRocks]

April 2, 2008
Watch Out, Warhol, Here’s Japanese Shock Pop

By CAROL VOGEL
The fifth-floor rotunda of the Brooklyn Museum on a recent afternoon was strewn with a curious array of body parts. Resting on a mover’s blanket was most of “Miss ko2,” a busty blond waitress whose jellyfish eyes stared up at the ceiling (and whose white-painted fiberglass bosom pointed skyward too). Nearby, her counterpart from “Second Mission Project ko2” (pronounced ko-ko) balanced on one leg.
Overseeing the scene was Paul Schimmel, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles but in recent weeks a fixture in Brooklyn as he mounts a major retrospective of the creator of these works, the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. The show closed on Feb. 11 at the Los Angeles museum’s Geffen Contemporary space and will open on Saturday in Brooklyn.
“It took 11 trucks driving across country to get everything here,” Mr. Schimmel said as he surveyed the pieces of Mr. Murakami’s art in the rotunda and the battalion of installers at work.

“The Geffen Contemporary is a large, theatrical space,” said Mr. Schimmel, who organized the retrospective. “Brooklyn has more traditional galleries, so the layout here is more chronological, more classical.”
The show includes some 90 works, sampling Mr. Murakami’s entire whimsical world in paintings, wallpapers, colorful sculptures, drawings and a 20-minute animated video. It will consume 18,500 square feet of exhibition space spread over two floors.
This show is the Brooklyn Museum’s largest after “Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,” which opened in 1999 to considerable furor over Chris Ofili’s depiction of the Virgin Mary in a painting that included elephant dung. Mr. Murakami’s retrospective is expected to generate talk of a different sort.
Popularly known as the Warhol of Japan, Mr. Murakami, 46, has earned an international reputation for merging fine art with popular Japanese anime films and manga cartoons. Intent on exploring how mass-produced entertainment and consumerism are part of art, he teamed up with the fashion house Louis Vuitton in 2003 to create brightly colored versions of the classic LV monogram on Vuitton handbags.
The show — its title, appropriately, is “©Murakami” — includes a fully operational Louis Vuitton shop selling some of Mr. Murakami’s designs for that luxury brand. A leather strap for a cellphone carries a $220 price tag; handbags range from $1,310 to $2,210. He has designed three new patterned-canvas wall hangings just for this exhibition; printed in editions of 100 each, the first 50 will be offered at the shop for $6,000 apiece, and the rest at $10,000 apiece. Other leather goods designed for the show will be for sale too.
The shop was also part of the retrospective when it appeared in Los Angeles, and some criticized the marriage of art and commerce as crass and inappropriate in a museum setting. But Mr. Murakami says his product designs are simply an extension of his art.
“It is the heart of the exhibition,” he said of the Vuitton shop.
Arnold L. Lehman, the Brooklyn Museum’s director, does not object to Vuitton’s presence. “I think it’s absolutely fine,” he said in a telephone interview. “It would be very different if it was after the fact or a curatorial add-on. But it was part of Takashi’s original idea.”
The Vuitton boutique isn’t the only shopping experience museum visitors will encounter, of course, as the museum will have its own Murakami gift shop right outside the exhibition, with postcards, T-shirts, mugs and stuffed animals of Mr. Murakami’s characters. Most of the merchandise, however, is produced by Mr. Murakami’s company, Kaikai Kiki (from the Japanese words for bizarre and elegant ), and it will share in the proceeds.
Mr. Murakami first became famous in the 1990s for a theory he called Superflat. Derived from traditional Japanese painting, it was adopted by the contemporary art world to indicate a mix of high and low art. The retrospective begins with his fantastical and sometimes dark universe from that period. Creatures like Mr. DOB, a Mickey Mouse-type character, and Mr. Pointy, another cartoonlike creature, inhabit this space alongside smiley-faced flowers and colorful mushrooms.
The artist’s latest, largest and most colorful version of his Mr. Pointy character greets visitors just inside the museum’s front door. Known as Tongari-kun in Japanese, this character is represented by a 23-foot-tall edition flanked by smaller pointy guards that wear different expressions — smiling, yawning, sleepy, etc.
“In order to get Mr. Pointy into the museum we had to take out half the glass in the front of the pavilion,” Mr. Lehman said. The piece is on loan from the New York collector Richard B. Sachs.
One work that was on view in Los Angeles but is not in Brooklyn is “Oval Buddha,” a platinum-clad sculpture made by Mr. Murakami in 2007. Standing 18 ½ feet tall and weighing 6,613 pounds, it is a comical self-portrait of the artist sitting in a lotus position, perched on a lotus pad. Too large to fit into the museum, it is instead being installed this week (and on view starting on Saturday) in the sculpture garden of 590 Madison Avenue, the former I.B.M. building, between 56th and 57th Streets.
Mr. Murakami, clad in a green down jacket, navy blue down vest and blue jeans, was on hand in Brooklyn the other day as the show was being installed in the rotunda. The skylight had been blacked out — the only lighting in the space will come from three spotlights — and wallpaper with a lightning pattern was about to be hung on the walls and ceiling.
“It’s been very busy in my studio,” Mr. Murakami said, explaining that he has been working on new designs of wallpaper and vinyl floor coverings to be shown for the first time in Brooklyn’s version of the retrospective.
In Los Angeles, he said, “people kept saying that they hoped I would make some new things. So I have. It helps keep my attention.”
As Mr. Murakami spoke, he kept an eye on a small room off the rotunda where the rapper Kanye West’s hit song “Good Morning” could be heard wafting through the space. An installation team was testing a new, longer version of his animated video, the story of his fictional Kaikai and Kiki characters. (When the 20-minute animation isn’t playing, an MTV-style video of “Good Morning” will be shown there.)
The room is a small, cozy nook with black-and-silver carpeting depicting the Kaikai and Kiki characters. “This room was so popular in Los Angeles,” Mr. Schimmel said, “we had to have security guards posted the entire time because kids tried to record the videos on their cellphones and post them on YouTube.”
The Los Angeles show attracted young people who had never been to the museum. “Many of the kids were first-time visitors, who came because they heard about the show through various kinds of cross-branding,” Mr. Schimmel said. “Names like Louis Vuitton, Kanye West and eBay.”
“©Murakami” opens on Saturday and continues through July 5 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718)<133>683-5000.

....

see more from the show onto the nytimes slideshows (3 for the same exhibition!)
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/200...HOW_index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/200...URA_index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/200...LYN_index.html

and there's a video report, too : http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_stor...8b357a884ac908


if this isn't BRAINWASHAMAZING publicity, I don't know what it is.....

enough about murakami

[BerlinRocks]

OUt of Fashion by Elmgreen and Dragset @ Perrotin, Paris

Elmgreen & Dragset présentent une nouvelle série de sculptures abstraites de taille humaine, vêtues par des créateurs de mode.
Alors que les formes organiques et doucement incurvées de ces objets couleur chair, fabriqués à partir de matériaux synthétiques high-tech, imitent parfaitement l’aspect de la peau, leur esthétique minimaliste évoque les sculptures modernes d’Henri Moore, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth et de Constantin Brancusi. Ces œuvres ont également un côté « cartoon », comme si les artistes souhaitaient réécrire l’histoire de l’art en bande dessinée.

Elmgreen & Dragset ont fait appel à la collaboration exceptionnelle de stylistes et de photographes de mode internationalement connus. Une nouvelle collection de vêtements est créée à cette occasion pour habiller les sculptures, photographiées dans des contextes leur donnant une personnalité et publiées dans l’un des magazines de mode les plus en vue. Les sculptures habillées seront ensuite exposées dans la galerie tels des visiteurs figés.

L’exposition «Out of fashion» questionne les limites entre les arts plastiques, l’esthétique de la bande dessinée et de la mode. Les « sculptures cyborg » ouvriront le débat sur l’idée du corps idéal que se fait aujourd’hui notre société.
:::::
english translation via babelfish
Elmgreen & Dragset present a new series of abstract sculptures of human size, vêtues by fashion designers. Whereas the shapes organic and gently curved of these objects color flesh, manufactured starting from synthetic materials high-tech, imitate the aspect of the skin perfectly, their esthetics minimalist evokes the modern sculptures of Henri Moore, Jean Arp, Barbara Hepworth and of Constantin Brancusi. These works also have a side “cartoon”, as if the artists wished to rewrite the history of art as a cartoon. Elmgreen & Dragset called upon exceptional collaboration internationally known designers and fashion photographers. A new collection of clothing is created on this occasion to equip the sculptures, photographed in contexts giving them a personality and published in one of the magazines of mode more in sight. The equipped sculptures will be then exposed in the gallery such of the fixed visitors. The exposure “Out off fashion” questions the limits between the visual arts, the esthetics of the cartoon and the mode. The “sculptures cyborg” will begin the debate on the idea of the ideal body that is made our company today.

communiqué of this exhibition

Supermodels, 2008 - exhibited for Out of Fashion, 2008






older work Prada Marfa, 2005

[BerlinRocks]

more about Elmgreen and Dragset

As a special treat for readers of The Moment, the power gallerist Emmanuel Perrotin writes about three new exhibitions in Paris.
When I first heard about this exhibition by Elmgreen & Dragset, I liked the idea of associating art and fashion. This is not new, but I liked it.
In our rue de Turenne space, they are presenting “Side Effects,” a new series of sculptures: abstract and with organic shapes, these objects are dressed by well-known fashion designers. Vanessa Bruno, Alberta Ferretti, Sonia Rykiel, Henrik Vibskov, and Gaspard Yurkievich kindly accepted the invitation of Elmgreen & Dragset and created unique clothing.
These strange creatures do not have any specific human characteristics, except their round and generous shapes and the pinkish colored surfaces. In a way, they make me think of traditional modern sculptures, like Henry Moore, Jean Arp or Constantin Brancusi.
Their collaboration with the fashion world goes further. Elmgreen & Dragset asked the fashion photographers Sofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello to shoot the sculptures as if they were fashion models. You can see the result of these photo shoots in magazines like Jalouse, Numéro, Dandy, DAM, Elle, among others, as well as in our brand new issue of BING (the magazine published by the gallery).
One room in the exhibition offers a totally different atmosphere. The installation represents a typical bourgeois interior decorated with the usual objects: fireplaces, clocks and candlesticks fill a room painted in black from floor-to-ceiling. Being in this room is very odd, it’s as if time stopped. The rigidity in the repetition brings a strange feeling: two fireplaces on each wall with the same clocks and the same candlesticks on top of them. The gold waitress also emphasizes this sensation; she stands still in the corner wearing her traditional clothes waiting for us to give instructions.

themoment.blogs.nytimes.com

How odd! Most of my interaction this Paris Fashion Week has been built around breakfasts/lunches/dinners in these places of conspicious social display. Which is why it was such a relief to escape to the Emanuel Perrotin Gallery and peruse a really brilliant exhibition of work by Elmgreen and Dragset, the duo known for their provocative installations and performances. I've been hearing the buzz on "Side Effects" since the men's shows, but seeing it in person gives you a good laugh, even as you admire the quality control the artists muster. This exhibition features, as the press release explains, " a new series of abstract, human sized sculptures, dressed according to the following famous fashion designers Vanessa Bruno, Alberta Ferretti, Antonio Marras for Kenzo, Sonia Rykiel, Henrik Vibskov and Gaspard Yurkievich." What makes the work even mor fashion ironic is that Sofia Sanchez and Mauro Mongiello have photographed the sculptures in various settings such as parks, clubs, and the streets. nd I must say the sculptures do make for fantastic models. The show runs until March 8th and when the monograph comes out, I'm first in line.

theimagist

[BerlinRocks]

itw of Michael Elmgreen

He's done an 'Opening Soon' gallery that confused the hell out of those Chelsea New Yorkers, a gallery hoisted by two black balloons, a sunken building, and let's not forget the Prada Marfa! SUPERSWEET's Tiffany Tondut chats to her hero Michael Elmgreen, installation artist and one half of the Elmgreen & Dragset collective, about the works acoss the span of their career.
SS: Michael, in ‘95, you began collaborating with Norwegian performance artist Ingar Dragset and as a duo, gone on to secure highly prestigious awards, such as the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst in Berlin. Did Ingar dramatically impact on your working life and artistic vision? Was this the sudden genesis of ‘Elmgreen and Dragset: the visionary installation duo’ that post-modern art reveres today, or was the relationship much slower in developing its artistic potency?
Michael: Neither Ingar or me have any proper art education and the main reason for starting to work together was that we had met one year before and were boyfriends. To be honest we just wanted to have fun. The more serious turn in our career happened after moving to Berlin some years later. In a ‘Scandie’ context we were considered complete losers since the scene up there was rather macho and only focused on f***ing back then. We were a gay couple who did performances! It was almost suicidal. Even the first years in Berlin were a bit tough. We came to an opening and everybody but us were dressed in white shirts, nerdy black glasses (like those that are back in fashion again today) and worn out black-suit shoes - and we arrived in our hoodies and sneakers - that made the gallery ask us if we were just coming to the show to get free beer. It was very German avant-garde old-school in Berlin 10 years ago. Strange how fast this city has changed.
SS: Your last known collaboration on British soil was The Welfare Show at the Serpentine Gallery back in 2006. Can you talk a little about where you’ve been since then and what you’ve been working on?
Michael: At the moment we are working on several bigger and long term but rather diverse projects simultaneously. The national memorial for the homosexual victims of the Nazi regime will be inaugurated in April here in Berlin and located opposite Eisenmann's Holocaust memorial. This project has been stretching out for 2 years now - to be selected to do a memorial like this is a very bureaucratic process. Besides we are using a lot of energy on the staging of a new opera that we have chosen to turn into an animation film and it will have its premiere in May. Finally we are about finished renovating a building - an old, giant, water supply station which we bought off the city two years ago. It’ll host both our studio and our living spaces. It's kind of crazy that we now move back together as we split as boyfriends almost 4 years ago.
SS: You’ve worked and exhibited in varying differing countries from Iceland to Australia. Does your voice travel, or do you create art in response to that particular country’s geo-political environment?
Michael: Sometimes we work site specific, sometimes not. We don't want to hook up to a local situation if there’s nothing there that we find interesting for ourselves. Other times it feels natural to include or comment on some of the social structures that are already present but our working methods are consequently changing all the time. I find "social engagement as an artistic logo" - this idea of being a political artist who per se finds social issues to relate to in every project - doing more harm than good since the social topics then become pure aesthetics.

SS: I read that Tracy Emin was nervous of participating in Venice’s Biennial Festival. You’ve participated in this, and in Sao Paulo and Istanbul‘s. Were these your most difficult projects to date?
Michael: No. I think we are too ignorant to such kind of pressures. If we feel we have a good idea for a project we care less about the context. Sometimes we do our best shows in remote places where no one ever sees them (haha!). In 2009 we will be responsible for two neighbouring pavilions in Venice. The Danish and the Nordic one. It makes it more interesting since we can work in a transnational way - across national representation - and we will do one big staging of the two pavilions. We intend to exchange the national representation with a presentation of various identities and to turn the pavilions into some fictional private homes.
SS: 1997’s most evocative series Powerless Structures appears primarily as a critique on social structures and the founding principles of modernist architecture, such as form and function over aesthetics, which you successfully subvert. Was it your intention to 're-empower’ people against these factors, and in turn, do you believe the original modernist manifesto failed to empower society, instead merely oppressing and segregating it?
Michael: The whole idea of a public space which is for everybody has failed. Sad but true. Because no one ever felt comfortable in these rigid environments where all kind of personal and diverse cultural signs had been reduced to a minimum. Nobody wants to be a rat in a lab.
SS. Can concerns as these be tackled by work such as yours?
Michael: Art will never trigger any revolution but it can sometimes makes us reflect upon certain things - for a split second.
SS: Installation artists Robert Irwin and James Turrell wrote “The Object of art may be to seek an elimination of the necessity for it”. Was this the philosophy behind 'Prada Marfa', the lone-standing Texan-desert boutique?
Michael: It's a very Adornosk idea. Of course we don't want art to be instrumentalised but on the other hand I don't really see the point in making l'art pour l'art which is the other extreme. 'Prada Marfa' derived from our first Prada project which took place in Chelsea, New York. There we covered the front window of our gallery with a white paper sheet upon which there was printed: Opening Soon - Prada. Everybody believed that the gallery had run out of business and that Prada would move into the space. The work was about gentrification. Not really popular by our former gallerist there since she didn't have any visitors for the duration of our show. The idea of doing the forever closed Prada store in the dessert was basically to isolate this ‘emblemic’ architecture, to take it out of its usual context and through this displacement to be able to look at it in a refreshed and critical way. The dessert close to Marfa was a good location since you have the Judd foundation in that area, too. And we are interested in how Minimalism got turned into kitsch.
SS: The 'elimination of necessity’ seems to be a concurrent theme in your work, as End Station displays similar principles. But of all your projects, it seems that 'Prada Marfa' garners the most attention. Why do you think this is?
Michael: Prada is a powerful player - both in the art scene and on the fashion market. Koons joked about liberating the American upper middle class from their guilt of having such a bad taste - Prada educated them to have style - at least in their dress code.
SS: Is there any known record of anyone attempting to enter and purchase anything from the outlet??
Michael: No
SS: In terms of your art, are you satisfied with what you’ve achieved? Or is there plenty more rocket fuel left to burn?
Michael: Oh, we have just started. This is the first day of our lives.

http://www.supersweet.org/index.php?...8972029f9fbb2d