Still from It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE!, 2007. Directed by Crispin Glover, written by and starring Steven C. Stewart. Courtesy of www.crispinglover.com

At an early June event in Duluth, Kat Mandeville walked out of a screening of Crispin Glover’s latest film, It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE! Outraged as much by the fact of the film’s screening as she was its provocative content, she wrote a letter in response and sent it around to me at mnartists.org, the daily newspaper, a Duluth-area arts website.

The movie was part of a headline event at the Duluth/Superior Film Festival, an exercise in masturbatory weirdness that included “Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slideshow,” featuring a one-hour dramatic narration-plus-slideshow projection conducted by the man himself, showcasing eight different re-purposed books he’s painstakingly annotated and illustrated with various flights of grotesque fantasy. By all accounts, Glover waxed on (cryptically, often incomprehensibly) for a while about the project and projected some pictures. Then they screened his new movie, a semi-autobiographical flick written by and starring Steven C. Stewart (a screenwriter who has severe cerebral palsy), directed by Glover in 2007. (This is the second in Glover’s “It” trilogy, which began with the twisted and surreal 2005 film, What Is It?)

It is Fine… is billed as a “psycho-sexual tale about a man with severe cerebral palsy and a fetish for girls with long hair. Part horror film, part exploitation picture, and part documentary of a man who cannot express his sexuality in the way he desires (due to his physical condition), this fantastical and often humorous tale is told completely from Stewart’s actual point of view – that of someone who has lived for years watching people do things he will never be able to do.” The character at the film’s center may be seriously disabled, but he’s by no means incapacitated. Indeed, he is a ladykiller in every sense of the word: the film follows episodes of his seduction and subsequent savaging of the various (silver screen–ready) women he encounters.

Violation, subjugation, torture – the film revels in sexual violence, degradation, and pain. Its subject matter is gleefully indecent, expressly made to transgress the bounds of appropriateness, intended as an assault on both viewers’ sensibilities and the Hollywood establishment. In interviews about his films, Glover presents himself as a fearless truth-teller, showing us what the corporate studio process wouldn’t dare. He says he’s putting taboo content front and center, thereby forcing us to contend with the full measure of our shared ugliness and hypocrisy; that he’s just showing us real human experience, unvarnished by wishful thinking or pretty dissembling, as seen through the lens of those typically invisible to popular culture (e.g. people with developmental and physical disabilities). The screenwriter/lead actor died shortly after making the film, but Glover’s quoted as saying he was similarly motivated, that Stewart “wanted to show that handicapped people are human, sexual and can be horrible.”

“Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slideshow” is currently touring the country. In addition to the Duluth film festival, this month Glover stopped in Minneapolis’ Heights Theatre; he’s soon making stops in Museum of Arts and Design and IFC in New York City; Littleton, Colorado; Kansas, City, Missouri.

Engage or Boycott?

Back to our letter-writer: So, Kat Mandeville, not quite sure what she was in for, turned out to see Glover’s event in Duluth’s Zinema. She gleaned from the prefatory remarks what was in store and walked out before the screening began. In emails we’ve exchanged since then, Mandeville has indicated she felt she’d be colluding in the exploitation, part of the problem, if she’d stayed to attend the movie and talk-back that followed — even if she watched in protest and spoke up to challenge the film and audience afterward. Finding entertainment in work that exalts “rape culture” in this way, she says, including public screenings in institutionally upright venues and treating those works as merely provocative, amounts to a kind of “cannibalism.” We’re feeding off pain and hate and violence perpetrated against our sisters, wives, daughters and mothers, she argues. The problem’s a pervasive one, harmful even when it’s dressed up as “art” and presented as a provocative amusement – and when we stay to watch, we’re not just voyeurs on real pain, we’re dishonest about our part in perpetuating it.

Her published response to the Duluth iteration of “Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slideshow” and screening, in full:

In the wake of the screening of Crispin Glover’s film, It is Fine! Everything is Fine, as part of the Duluth/Superior Film Festival last weekend — a film that romanticizes a man’s explicit sexual fantasies of the rape and torture of women — I have questions for progressive Duluthians who were there and for our community as a whole.

Does one man’s pain with cerebral palsy and his being trapped in the prison of his own body eclipse the pain of female identity trapped in the misogynist-sadist fantasy of a romanticized snuff film? Is this an implicit argument the film is making? In the end, isn’t the handicapped man’s subjective experience of sexuality not so different from the increasing demand for glamorized rape and torture of women shown in social media: that of women as soulless mannequins used for sexual exploitation and the destruction of women for pleasure?

Men who were in the audience: how often can you watch rape and torture of women before it alters the way you think about women? The way you look at them? The way you fantasize about them? The way you touch them?

Women in the audience: who among you has experienced sexualized hate crimes or know a woman who has? And did you think of yourself and of these women during the film?

Fathers of daughters in the audience: how do you justify to your daughter supporting a film that fantasizes the same kind of rape and exploitation she has a one-in-three chance of experiencing herself?

And why was none of this discussed at the talk-back after the film? Yes, Glover only screens the film where he can answer questions in person, but how effective is that if the audience is too star-struck and approval-seeking to ask controversial questions?

If Malcolm X or Dr. Martin Luther King were female, what would they think of Glover’s film and the progressive members of Duluth who lined up to support it? Or of the connection between films like Glover’s and the Steubenville high school rape case, in which boys dragged around an intoxicated, unconscious peer, stripped her and sexually assaulted her for the viewing pleasure of social media? Is our nation so desensitized to rape and torture that half of us are unclear how we should react? Would Malcolm X and Dr. King see Duluth celebrating a film like Glover’s as a community engaged in cannibalism? Would they be outraged?

Then why aren’t we?

In the talk-back, Glover remarked that films using propaganda upset him. Why was it not pointed out that 70 minutes of torture and rape romanticized in his film was, indeed, propaganda? Was it so obvious it could be dismissed with the commonly used sentiment of, “Yes, exploiting women is wrong; now move over a little, you’re blocking my view of it”? Or was it because propaganda works and our esteem for women has sunk so low that when it’s depicted on the big screen we don’t see women oppressed by hatred; we see a singular man oppressed by pain?

Do we realize how similar this is to the unconscious hate-propaganda used throughout history to perpetuate hatred of Jews, blacks, and homosexuals? That oppression and exploitation of women is among the most epic struggles, and that progress is sabotaged when a community that should know better takes part in the entertainment of rape and torture? Do we realize how normalized rape and torture has become that we can watch 70 minutes of it being romanticized without impulse to object or critique?

And where was I, you ask? Upon hearing the film’s description, I walked out before it started. Later I listened to an account of the talk-back. And as it turns out, one doesn’t have to wallow through an entire film to discern what it’s about and critique what it’s doing. Looking over the audience as we took our seats in the theater before Glover’s film, I had a feeling of dread I would be the only one to speak-up about the dehumanizing of women, and if I left, I knew no one would start that dialogue. To be sitting in a theater of artists and musicians (among others) who consider themselves elevated; feminist; radical; speakers of the oppressed, and realize none of them are going to challenge the pseudo-celebrity was a sick feeling indeed. To find out later I was entirely right, was even worse.

But despite leaving, I’m still guilty, like those who attended and didn’t speak up. I’m guilty of tolerating what shouldn’t be tolerated. I should’ve said something in the theater before I left, something like, “What are we celebrating by watching a film like this? What does this mean about the culture we’re willing to become?” Instead I simply left. And for that I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of Duluth and the naïveté that filled the Zinema seats last Saturday night. And I’m ashamed of the hypocrisy that applauded afterward.

What will it take for the average person (let alone the well-educated person) to realize it isn’t enough to like women or to love them? We must fight against the hatred directly, or change will not be possible. And to do this, we all must learn to recognize our culture’s unconscious hatred of women. Glover’s film was an opportunity to do so — an opportunity that was squandered.

My commentary and your responses can give us another chance to have the conversation. Duluth, how do you answer?

Kat Mandeville of Duluth graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh with an undergraduate degree in theater. She has worked in television and film in Los Angeles, where she witnessed the exploitation of women firsthand. In the summers she studies philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School in Switzerland.

This commentary was first published in the Opinion section of the Duluth News Tribune, 6/8/13 and reprinted on Perfect Duluth Day, 6/9/13. It is reproduced here with permission. Incidentally, there is a lively ongoing conversation in the comments section of PDD — worth a read if you’re interested.

It Is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE!, 74 minutes run time, 35mm color, 2007.

So, What Do You Think?

When does work cross the line from provocation to obscenity? What’s your reaction to this and other “offensive” art, and organizations which house and promote it? If work offends you, what’s the best course of action: engagement or boycott? If you’d choose the former, what sort of community conversation can/should come out of displays of work that consciously offends the audience? At what point does titillation become outright exploitation? Is it okay to find such entertaining? What about other “offensive” art: Mapplethorpe, Piss Christ, John Ahearn’s South Bronx sculptures, misogynistic hip hop? At what point does outrage-in-action have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and meaningful public discourse about thorny issues and controversial themes?

Have any of you seen Glover’s films? What did you think of them – and the response of the audience around you?

Festival co-founder David Schroeder kicking off the festival. Image courtesy of Carla Januska

This past week the Walker Art Center filled with artists, coders, and interactive intelligentsia as Eyeo Festival, an art, interaction and information conference, brought these creative together for four days of talks, workshops, and interactions. What is Eyeo? Is it an art and technology event? Is it creative coding? Is it a data visualization conference? Is it design? Storytelling? “Yeah,” said festival co-founder Dave Schroeder, addressing an auditorium, “It is all of those things.”

Now in its third iteration, the festival acknowledges that art, interaction, and information — and their intersections — are changing, and these changes, intersections, and the projects that emerge from these territories are exciting and should be shared. Data is also changing; data is no longer numbers — it’s words, a social media feed, a color, a sensor, a houseplant, or a ship. Access points to data are expanding and processes and tool sets that manage data are evolving, becoming more transparent, and are now open and sharable.

What happens when possibilities, ideas and community come together? Great design, alternative storytelling, and inspiring theory ensue.  Here are five reasons to follow the festival, and its practitioners, as this community grows and continues to leave brilliance in its path.

Projects > Products

The beauty of Eyeo is how brandless it is. Sure, Eyeo itself is now a brand, and there are certainly intersections between art, code, and advertising, but “interactive” isn’t limited to the next hot start-up, million-dollar app, or the latest service. Eyeo distinguishes itself from other festivals, like SXSW Interactive, for its lack of commercialization and focus on the intelligence of good projects. Eyeo reminds us that art is essential to digital innovation and the ethics of the community prioritizes responsive ideas, creative solutions, and alternative storytelling rather then trying to make a buck. As one panelist joked, “Data visualization artists are kind of the free R&D departments for [advertisting] agencies.” Perhaps a sarcastic side effect, but producing cool work on ones own volition, for me, is a true artistic gesture.

Light Leaks from Kyle McDonald on Vimeo.

Ideas are better when they are shared

Media artist Kyle McDonald finds inspiration in a collective and continual awareness of how and what is released to the ether of the Internet. We only give things half of our attention anyway, so McDonald encourages us to think of projects in small but elegant and sharable terms and calls us to action with tweet-sized proposals for projects to take and run with. His brainchildren, each of them less then 140 characters, include open-ended proposals for the public to realize like “sand-sorting machine to automate sand granule tonalities” or “subtractive modeling in foam with high-frequency heterodyning.” Take these and do with them what you will. Others the artist turns into real artists projects, like a “scattered array of 50 mirror balls reflect light from three projectors, filling a room completely, casting patterns that fill the visitor’s peripheral vision,” which evolved into Light Leaks or “a room full of Sonos speakers that follow you through the space” turned into a interactive installation and collaboration with musicians the XX for their music video for “Missing.”

Process 18 (Software 6) from Casey REAS on Vimeo.

Software is a relevant art form

Artist and professor Casey Reas offered to dispel the density of software as visual arts medium, as well as the context for viewing and understanding software as art form. A professor at UCLA, Reas articulates that software-as-art arrived as early as the 1970s, and has been ushered out for decades, in tandem with Conceptual Art. Software meets the criteria of an artistic medium as it is both a tool set and matrial. Reas is not only a proponent of this thinking, he developed a series of principals for code that replace the antiquated ‘principals of art’ you may have learned in high school – Unity, Harmony, Variety, Balance – are replaced with computation-specific variables including Repeat, Parameterize, Transform, Visualize, and Simulate. These are not methods of process for emerging software artists, but also by extension criteria by which we can bring clarity to, and critical discussion around, digital art forms.

Chocolate, History Flow (2003). Image courtesy of hint.fm

Data is not (just) numbers.

Visualization typically happens with numbers; quantitative truths are achieved by objectivity. Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg of hint.fm ask us to consider the subjective truths — what people are thinking, or rather, obsessing about: the data on the periphery of the data.  The interesting link between objective and subjective data, and maybe an overarching theme at the conference, is the notion of the self-appointed project. What better example of the self-appointed project than Wikipedia! Viegas and Wattenberg use words with a color-coded ledger as data to uncover the secret obsessions of self-appointed Wikipedian entries, edits, and patrolling, in History Flow (2003). The result is a Missoni-esque pattern in florescent colors only native to hex-codes, riddled with subjective data and human interruptions and vandalism. In a more recent project, the collaborative creates composites from varying discontinuities of digital versions of famous artworks in Reproduction (2011).

Visualizing Painters Lives, All rights reserved by accurat.it

A short, well-designed story

The “show don’t tell” mantra applies for data-visualization artist Giorgia Lupi, who acquaints us with the notion that stories don’t have to be told with articles or event statements. Storytelling through data mapping allows for retelling of non-linear and layered stories in ways that are clear and in data that can represent reductive, but complete, information.  Often constraints — like time, space, and information — are also resources. The founder of Italian data visualization studio Accurat continued to show, not tell, us about the lives and works of 10 abstract painters through clean, well designed diagrams highlighting palette, size and artistic period of masterpieces, as well as love affairs and life events, throughout their career trajectories. The designer is also an advocate of drawing out ideas to visualize as she works, reminding us that the Italian verb for “draw” is synonymous with “design” or “plan.”

Follow the Eyeo Festival community on eyeofestival.com and stay in touch through Twitter and Facebook.

Back at the mnartists.org headquarters, we are inundated with the fruits of Analog Cave, an all-night newsroom of sorts. We received countless entries over the course of Northern Spark. To name a few: torn-out and manipulated pages of books, music reviews, letters to loved ones, and free-form poetry written on a typewriter.

The editors of Analog Cave were tasked with a tall order: transform and tidy disparate written copy from dusk until dawn. We were equipped with red pencils, eagle-eye vision, and a team of artists. Our ever-vigilant documenters caught each entry through photography and evidence of the evening has already popped up on the internet. But how did these personal entries, written in the solitude of Analog Cave, come to our desks? What follows is an account of our evening, only slightly embellished.

Nightfall

As the sun set over the Bedlam Theatre, revelers gathered to provide us with interpretations, reflections, and responses to our petite cave. The cave was furnished in the style of an intimate parlor with a desk and typewriter, a wing-back chair, a lava lamp, a turntable and library of long-playing records, and stacks of books. Visitors were invited to create freely and then slide their work through a mail slot.

Midnight

The editors received the incoming mail, and their desk began to pile high with entries. The editors wielded their red pencils, a sharpened pair of scissors, and a (literal) stamp of approval. Once approved, the freshly-edited entries were delegated to a series of artists. These artists included caricaturists and cartoonists who focused their efforts on creating accurate interpretations of the original thoughts.  A jazz band was invited to the stage of the Bedlam.

Dawn

The editors and artists begin focusing on shortening and extracting. How to convey emotion? Which letters could be combined? What thoughts and dreams will catch an artist’s eye? Check back on our tumblr as we collect and archive the entries.

Balthazor also works as a guard at the Walker Art Center, and draws on his experiences behind the scenes at the museum in his biweekly comic strip for mnartists.org, It Is What It Is!.

Songbird for Nelson Algren, Tony Fitzpatrick

Lester Bangs. Greil Marcus. Robert Christgau. Pauline Kael. Dave Hickey. Just as cowboy boots have figured into my footwear rotation off and on since I was a kid, critics have been among my writer heroes since long before my first published byline — which was for a book review (of poetry) in some scholarly humanities journal nobody’s heard of.

I discovered Bangs, Marcus and Christgau in high school when I was still an over-zealous music snob. Kael I found out about in undergrad, during my Woody Allen/Wim Wenders/Terry Gilliam phase. Heard about Hickey’s seminal Air Guitar essay collection from a friend of a friend when I was living in Chicago, dividing my evenings and weekends between bookstores, Art Institute exhibitions and free jazz and alt-country concerts.

I quit reviewing books and CDs for money and promotional merch when I started performing comedy for free several years ago. I’m dumb that way sometimes.

Over the years I had lucked into some sweet regular gigs, penning reviews for Publishers Weekly, Rain Taxi, All Music Guide and Blues Revue. And I’d only tried out comedy in the first place to fulfill a magazine assignment. But after a successful-ish open mic or two, I decided the world had had its fill of my pretentious opinions and now deserved to sit quietly through some of my pretentious one-liners.

I told you. Dumb.

The big problem with my plan, it would turn out, was that I never really stopped having opinions. I only quit publishing them for a decade or so. Did you miss me? Did anybody even notice I was gone? Probably not, according to my mother. Which is why I live up here in Minnesota, not down in Indiana near my family.

I like to think my Hoosier roots help explain my recent purchase of cowboy boots, at least a little. Steve Earle’s new album, The Low Highway, might have something to do with my new boots, too. That, and the FX TV serial Justified. And the Minnesota poet Robert Bly, too, while I’m playing the blame game.

Album cover (with art by Tony Fitzpatrick) courtesy of steveearle.com

My graying 22-year-old beard doesn’t characterize me as a man the way it used to. Whenever I see hipster dudes younger than my beard walking around with their chin stubble all grown out, I find myself wondering if my facial hair is an ironic statement or a sign of authentic laziness in the grooming department.

I always hope that it’s the latter. I’m so, so tired of irony — or, at least, I like to think I am.

After all, lately I’ve been listening to country music from a Texas troubadour now based in New York City, loving a television drama that barely distinguishes between hill country crime and justice, and revisiting Bly’s Jungian examination of where myth and manhood meet.

There is one thing I can tell you with some certainty: I’ve determined that Tony Fitzpatrick, the self-taught Chicago artist/writer/actor/man whose works grace many of Earle’s album and book covers, is my favorite working visual artist at the moment. Show posters and prints of his work hang throughout my house. (His drawing Dirty Dove is in the permanent collection at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.) The four Fitzpatrick pieces that adorn the cover and insert booklet for The Low Highway I’ve loved since I first saw them in the pages of This Train, Fitzpatrick’s incredible 2010 book of collages and corresponding journal entries inspired by the hobo alphabet, the legend of Crazy Horse and the poetry and politics of what it takes to live in Chicago these days. Which is what it takes to live anywhere in America, I’m afraid.

Like a hobo passing back through a town he’s visited before but skipped in a bit of a hurry, I have more questions than answers. Especially about what I’ll notice and make note of here every couple of weeks. There will be a lot less about me, for starters — and more, for sure, about Minnesota arts. You have my word as a man. Whatever that means.

Brian Beatty’s writing has appeared in numerous print and online publications. His column of one-liners, “Jokes by Brian Beatty,” originated at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and wound up in the gutters of the front spreads of METRO Magazine, which also once rated him among the funniest people in the Twin Cities. In addition to penning “The Columnest” twice each month, Brian hosts mnartists.org’s monthly literary podcast, You Are Hear.

ArtPrize and mnartists.org have partnered up to give a Minnesota artist a unique opportunity: $5,000 and their artwork installed on/around/under the Gillett Bridge in Grand Rapids, Michigan during the city-wide art competition. This initiative, a “regional grant program,” as described by ArtPrize’s Director of Exhibitions Kevin Buist, will reach its denouement this Thursday for ArtPrize Pitch Night: Take it to the Bridge as five Minnesota finalists defend their art proposals to a jury and a live audience. Each artist will keep it short and sweet—with just five minutes to give a presentation—and the recipient of the $5,000 prize and coveted art location will be announced at the end of the evening. Review the five finalists’ ideas below, and bring your best questions for them to the Walker Art Center this Thursday. For, as Buist puts it, “[we] believe that debate is good.”

Broc Blegen

Recent MAEP artist Broc Blegen has proposed A Monument to Community. Rather than erecting a traditional sculpture, Blegen describes his project as a “sculptural project using sandbags as the primary medium;” the idea is to delineate spaces of reflection and alter the movement of pedestrians by employing the tool of utility and disaster relief.

Perci Chester

Sculptor Perci Chester has designed a laser-cut sculpture that embodies the freedom of a joyride: Squealies for Wheelies. The colorful, abstract work in polychrome and stainless steel portrays a woman at the wheel, and Chester has used medium to reflect content by covering her work with automative paint.

Yousif Del Valle

Yousif Del Valle is interested in changing the flow of traffic on the Gillett Bridge. The artist and musician has designed a winding path made of wooden crates that will slow foot traffic and provide viewers with a guessing game: what is inside of those boxes?

Jennifer Newsom Carruthers and Thomas Benjamin Carruthers 

The architect and design team Dream the Combine, Jennifer Newsom Carruthers and Tom Carruthers, have dreamed up a reflective installation along the bridge. The duo plan on streaming a live-video projection of the water underneath the Gillett Bridge and then projecting the footage through five vertical, mirrored theaters and into the sky.

Daniel Feinberg and Alexander Hanson

Daniel Feinberg and Alexander Hanson have envisioned a playful and dramatic site-specific installation that will allow viewers to think about different ways of crossing a bridge. The artists set the scene and let the viewers fill in the rest: “a broken down early-90s Chevrolet Suburban SUV, blocking passage of a frequented footbridge spanning the Grand River,” covered with stairs, will greet each pedestrian.

ArtPrize Pitch Night will take place in the Walker Cinema at 7 pm on Thursday, May 31st. Tickets are free and will be released at 6 pm. Presented by the Walker Art Center and mnartists.org, in partnership with ArtPrize.

Noted exhibition details:

Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites is on view through September 22, 2013 at the Walker Art Center. Autoconstrucción: The Film is screening, free of charge, in the Walker’s Lecture Room on June 8 at 4 pm.

Todd Balthazor is a satirical, often anthropomorphic illustrator, fine artist, muralist and children’s art instructor from St.Paul, MN, with a BFA in illustration from the College of Visual Arts (CVA).  He has done artist residencies at Jackson Elementary and the St. Paul University Club, and his work has been displayed in venues both locally and abroad, including: illustrations in the Altered Esthetics Gallery (Minneapolis), the Walker Art Center blog, and multiple Red Leaf Press publications (St. Paul); visual narratives at the Adugyama Art Exhibition (Ghana, Africa) and the Save the Children Nepal Project (Nepal, India); and murals at an orphanage in Jaurez, Mexico.  Samples of his work can be found at toddbalthazor.com and toddbalthazor.blogspot.com.

Balthazor also works as a guard at the Walker Art Center, and draws on his experiences behind the scenes at the museum in his biweekly comic strip for mnartists.org, It Is What It Is!.

Redefining, Redesigning Fashion: Designs for Sustainability, installation view courtesy of the Goldstein Museum of Design.

Sustainability and fashion aren’t two words usually paired in the same sentence. The fashion industry is based on systemic obsolescence. And as the recent tragedy at a Bangladesh clothing-manufacturing facility cruelly demonstrated, fashion’s trickle-down effect—new season = new colors, styles, fits, fabrics, etc.—among mainstream retailers is to produce more for less, often at the cost of human life.

The rise of vintage and other resale clothing shops is a boon to the eco-friendly and price-conscious among us who still like to buy something “new” now and then. As for off-loading the unused, ill fitting or worn out items from our closets, numerous charities will take the stuff off your hands. So, other than purchasing used clothing and donating to Goodwill, what else comes to mind when sustainable becomes an adjective attached to fashion? Dresses made out of beverage-container labels, soda can pull-top tabs and other detritus? Gowns made of recycled or upcycled tablecloths? Tops and shorts from vintage fabric?

Anny Li-Fen Chang, Eco Pop Dress, collar detail. Photo courtesy of Goldstein Museum of Design.

Examples of each, unsurprisingly, are part of the Goldstein Museum of Design’s current exhibition, Redefining, Redesigning Fashion: Designs for Sustainability on view until May 26 and available online here. By the way, the delightful, high-collared A-line pop-can tab dress, designed by Anny Li-Fen Chang, a faculty member at the University of North Texas, was inspired by Vasily Kandinsky’s 1926 painting Several Circles, and is comprised of 2,500 spray-painted tabs—and would be truly fun to wear.

So would Rosetta LaFleur’s (a faculty member at the University of Delaware) floor-length gown constructed, in part, from salvaged upholstery-fabric yarn woven into a halter top. In artistic beauty and inspired construction, M. Jo Kallal’s (also from U of DE) zero-fabric-waste suit is breathtaking. Hand-constructed with needle felting, the suit was patterned on a “Hokusai-like ‘wave’ similar to those depicted in Japanese waterfalls cut from folded paper,” she says.

Rosetta LaFleur, Amalgamated Anemones, detail. Photo courtesy of Goldstein Museum of Design.

The exhibition, juried from 200 submissions, includes 46 pieces from 30 designers from the US, Australia, Europe and Asia. In the exhibition are works created through up-cycling, repurposing or the reclamation of clothing, materials or products. There are garments with multiple purposes or looks—dresses, for example, with skirts that can be raised (cocktail party) or lowered (evening gown). Other designers converted heirloom or memorable garments or household textiles into shorts, tops or accessories.

The late, great Alexander McQueen’s influence (dresses of shells, flowers) is clear in a knee-length dress by Sherry Sanden Will, a student at the University of Minnesota, festooned with ¼” thick slices of wood collected from dead branches. Martin Flores (a student at Michigan State University) may have been channeling a posher punk Mad Max in his zero-waste jacket. Another student from the U of M, Lauren Kacher, took medical scrubs in distinctly day-glow, sci-fi direction.

The exhibition also includes a lovely dress of traditional, biodegradable, organic Korean linen, and an up-cycled and over-dyed 1963 jacket from Bjorkman. The best quote, however, comes from Colleen Moretz (a faculty members at Immaculata University) about her multi-purpose wedding gown constructed from three damask tablecloths rummaged from friends’ closets: “The biggest challenge in using these repurposed table linens is working around the stains.” She found a way and the result is sumptuously old-world.

Redefining, Redesigning Fashion: Designs for Sustainability is up through May 26, 2013 at the Goldstein Museum of Design, University of Minnesota – St. Paul campus.

___________________________

Camille LeFevre is a Twin Cities arts journalist and dance critic.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)

Todd Balthazor is a satirical, often anthropomorphic illustrator, fine artist, muralist and children’s art instructor from St.Paul, MN, with a BFA in illustration from the College of Visual Arts (CVA).  He has done artist residencies at Jackson Elementary and the St. Paul University Club, and his work has been displayed in venues both locally and abroad, including: illustrations in the Altered Esthetics Gallery (Minneapolis), the Walker Art Center blog, and multiple Red Leaf Press publications (St. Paul); visual narratives at the Adugyama Art Exhibition (Ghana, Africa) and the Save the Children Nepal Project (Nepal, India); and murals at an orphanage in Jaurez, Mexico.  Samples of his work can be found at toddbalthazor.com and toddbalthazor.blogspot.com.

Balthazor also works as a guard at the Walker Art Center, and draws on his experiences behind the scenes at the museum in his biweekly comic strip for mnartists.org, It Is What It Is!.

Dzine, Club Gallistico. From the website of Public Functionary.

Dzine’s show is aptly called Victory: seeing it, you feel as if you are walking through a personal awards-meets-dressing-room. Trophies abound! There are dozens of them along the far wall of the gallery that, upon close inspection, have clearly been reappropriated in the style of kustom kulture: they are decorative works swathed in a variety of bright velvets, fringe and brass knuckles. The artist, né Carlos Rolon, started as a teenaged graffiti artist and has gained popularity for bringing a celebratory Puerto Rican aesthetic into the art world via both installations and flamboyant nail art—a taste of his personal heritage at a large and small scale.

Detail from Dzine’s Victory. Photo by the author.

At the heart of the exhibition, a low-hanging chandelier, Untitled (Around the Way Girl I), drips with fake gold hoop earrings, mirrored surfaces and crystals. Like Andy Messerschmidt’s sheep chandelier in the Walker’s “oculus,” Dzine’s fixture functions as a sculpture but also draws the viewer into its warm and illuminated space. Dzine’s centerpiece is a beautiful distraction from the rest of the exhibition, an inviting place for people to congregate; small groups could be found throughout opening night staring into the work’s low lights like a fire in the hearth. The 2D works along the walls need to be experienced close-up, and every surface of Public Functionary is built up like a wall of a kitschy gingerbread house. Unlike their edible counterparts, these artworks are just eye candy, but still tantalizingly just-within-reach. The textures of the walls and paintings include: sequins, gilding, gold chains, and all sorts of other costume jewelry. I felt like a magpie ensnared by all the shiny things on view, drawn nearer and nearer to each sequined painting, wall and sculpture to investigate.

Detail from Dzine’s Victory. Photo by the author.

Situated in a relatively small exhibition space, Victory lives large. The installation celebrates the delights of surface and texture, but goes deeper too, confronting the viewer with signifiers of success. That said, literature for the show takes pains to invite all manner of viewers in, reassuring them that Dzine’s “work is not difficult to understand.” There are no individual wall labels, and there are many details to explore – it’s an invitation to stay a while and bask in the bright colors.  Victory by Dzine is on view through May 31^st at Public Functionary in Minneapolis.

For more: http://publicfunctionary.org/.

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Chloe Nelson is the program assistant for mnartists.org.

Viewfinder posts are your opportunity to “show & tell” about the everyday arts happenings, interesting sights and sounds made or as seen by Minnesota artists, because art is where you find it. Submit your own informal, first-person responses to the art around you to editor(at)mnartists.org, and we may well publish your piece here on the blog. (Guidelines: 300 words or less, not about your own event/work, and please include an image, media, video, or audio file, and one sentence about yourself.)