Neue luxury Issue 1

A GLOBAL DIALOGUE ON LUXURY IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Issue No.1 | Free

neueluxury.com

WELCOME TO NEUE LUXURY

STOP THE FASHION SYSTEM I WANT TO GET OFF

A note from our Editor in Chief

What is luxury? How do we define, understand, communicate and engage with it? Luxury is a slippery word, its etymology is constantly challenging us with its meaning over time. As cultural and commercial agendas change, so do the values and characteristics of luxury and what it represents to an individual, a culture and even a civilisation.

In recent times much has been written about the paradigm shift in our relationship to luxury and how the established pillars of conspicuous consumption are being replaced by a much more experiential ideal. Driven largely by the emergence of a younger, more affluent and self-aware consumer, it could now be said that if old luxury was about the thing, then new luxury is about the experience.

Neue Luxury exists as a global discussion on luxury in the 21st Century.

Our printed and digital platforms present varied, differing and at times contradictory perspectives from those at the vanguard of cultural and commercial practice. In this, our inaugural issue, we have devoted our attention to those visionaries challenging our understanding of luxury through their contributions to fashion, architecture, contemporary dance, art, music, food and wine.

Each of these artisans are finding success not just through their oeuvre but by acknowledging their roles as cultural ambassadors, sensory agents and hubs of knowledge. As a consequence each are forging long lasting and more meaningful relationships with their patrons and audiences. But how do they define luxury and what are they doing to be considered as purveyors of luxury goods, services and experiences? What clearly emerges is an understanding that as part of our engagement with luxury, we are now expecting immersive and curated experiences that involve the exchange of knowledge, the presentation of unique content and a respect of our cultural and intellectual desires. Luxury is now a deeply personal and intimate notion, shaped by our engagement with ideas and creativity.

And while I believe that luxury should be a term used to describe a set of beliefs that unite and inspire some of the worlds most engaging and innovative people, some of you may still consider luxury to be defined by status, wealth and exclusivity. Whatever your position, it is our hope that you engage with the beginning of our conversation and the ideas, opinions and people that are helping to shape this brave new world.

BRETT PHILLIPS Editor in Chief

EDITOR IN CHIEF Brett Phillips brett@neueluxury.com Telephone +61 3 9687 4899 EDITOR Rechelle Friend rechelle@neueluxury.com CREATIVE DIRECTOR David Roennfeldt david@neueluxury.com SENIOR CREATIVE Lachlan Sumner lachlan@neueluxury.com CREATIVE Corinne Theodore corinne@neueluxury.com PRODUCTION Maryanne Stanic maryanne@neueluxury.com SPECIAL PROJECTS DIRECTOR Kaya Sorhaindo kaya@neueluxury.com INTERNS Friedel Meyer-Ebert Nik Bouras Lukas Penney Ava Pham ACCOUNTS Gary Charman gary@neueluxury.com ADVERTISING & DISTRIBUTION Brett Phillips brett@neueluxury.com PUBLISHER 3 Deep 35A/91 Moreland Street Footscray, Victoria 3011 Australia Telephone +61 3 9687 4899 Facsimile +61 3 9687 5133 Email: info@3deep.com.au Web: www.3deep.com.au © Neue Luxury MMXIII ISSN: 2201-6309 SPECIAL THANKS: Gary Charman, Deryll Naidoo, Maryanne Stanic, Friedel Meyer-Ebert, Nik Bouras, Lukas Penney, Ava Pham, Paola Di Trocchio, Kaya Sorhaindo, Karen Webster, Claire Mulquiney, Alannah Vinci, Crystal Dunn, Marc Freeman, Luke Rynderman, Adam Myhal, Kim Vernon, Lisa Di Crescenzo, Julia deVille, Robert Nelson, Ray Edgar, Mark Loughnan, Jane Devery, Andrew Hazewinkel, Matthew Bird, Rory Kent, Abel Gibson, Toni Maticevski, Mieke Chew, Amelia Bartak, Phillip Adams, Garth Paine, Beth Weinstein, Rennie McDougall, Brooke Stamp, Peter AB Wilson, Shannon Bennett, Callum Fraser, Samantha Lewis, Susan Dimasi, Shelley Lasica, Ryan Euinton, Mark Cunliffe, Jacquie Dixon, Amelia Lackmann, Jane Hayes, Zoe Graham, Luke McKinnon, Collette Stewart, Adam Brown, Robert Knoke, Michelle Campbell, Neil Perry, Jonathan Coles, Matt Vines, Emma Van Haandel, Barry Barton, Briony Hamilton, Alison Wheeler Kirsty Wright, Mary Poulakis, John Poulakis, Nick Hufton, Mary Jessica Woodrum, Allan Crow, Mitchell Oakley-Smith, Neil Davies, 3 Deep, National Gallery of Victoria, Materialbyproduct, Prince Wine Store, Yering Station, Phillip Adams Balletlab, Rockpool Bar & Grill, Vue de Monde, Elenberg Fraser, Orlebar Brown, Harrolds Luxury Department Store for Men, Studio Bird, Visual Thing, Young Guns of Wine.

Page footer image credits: Andre Leon Talley (flickr.com/shankbone). Anna Dello Russo (flickr.com/limpciano). Anna Wintour (flickr.com/karinbar). Carine Roitfeld (flickr.com/blogsorbeta). Charles Darwin, (flickr.com/photonquantique).

Ferran Adria (flickr.com/cronicasdesdelomejordelagastronomia). Gareth Pugh (flickr.com/rodolfoschmidt). Grace Coddington (flickr.com/11901158@N00). Iris Apfel (flickr.com/54585499@N04). Keith Haring (flickr.com/tomjoad). Nick Cave (flickr.com/nrk-p3). Oscar Wilde (flickr.com/dpms). Peter Saville (flickr.com/31004024@N04). Sofia Coppola (flickr. com/danyanais). Stephen Jones (flickr.com/blogsorbeta). Suzy Menkes (flickr.com/macsurak). Tetsuya Wakuda (flickr.com/ evarinaldiphotography). Tyler Brûlé (flickr.com/newmediadaysdk). Vinoodh Matadin (flickr.com/58553732@N03). William Forsythe (flickr.com/us-mission). Zaha Hadid (flickr.com/arcticpenguin).

Cover photograph: Jeff Busby with 3 Deep for Balletlab.

Dancers left to right: Rennie McDougall, Brooke Stamp, Peter AB Wilson.

Disclaimer: Neue Luxury is free and published twice yearly by 3 Deep Design Pty Ltd. 35A/91 Moreland Street, Footscray Victoria 3011 Australia. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without permission is strictly prohibited.

Every effort has been made to ensure that all information is correct at the time of publishing. Opinions published are not necessarily those of the editor nor the publisher. Every effort has been made to trace accurate ownership of copyright materials used. Errors or omissions will be corrected upon request provided notification is sent to the publisher.

The moral rights of the authors have been observed.

RETAIL

By Karen Webster

A recent visit to a suburban shopping complex on a busy Saturday evoked a sudden gut wrenching nausea. Walking into a mass fashion chain, the smell of plastic and chemically related materials emanating from the children’s shoe department was overwhelming. Imagine if you worked in the factory that made these shoes, would the potential toxins leave a long-term impact? Part of the effect was just how many of these shoes filled the shelves? In some cases the price was less than what we pay for a reasonable cup of coffee. I scanned the store with its high shelves and masses of racks that housed an overpowering multitude of merchandise.

Why, as consumers, are we led to believe that we need so much stuff?

Our grandparents spent a significant amount of the family’s earnings on clothes. They didn’t buy a high number of garments but they did spend more on better pieces. Statistics that are alluded to, indicate that fifty years ago approximately 20% of the family income was spent on clothing related expenditure. Fast forward to today and that figure is purported to be less than 4%. Are we then buying less? According to Sandy Black in her book Eco chic – the Fashion Paradox, “Clothing sales have increased by 60% in the last ten years.” When is too much, too much? We spend significantly less to buy excessively more. Stop the fashion system I want to get off.

No other creative industry works at the speed of fashion, producing new product on a constant basis at ridiculously low prices, encouraging a disposable culture. Fashion has shifted from an historical formulaic process of two significant collections a year, to multiple delivery drops on a fast track turn around where similar styles are released across the globe simultaneously. This aspect of the industry has created significant impacts including unsustainable practices and overt consumption leading to excess waste.

The yearning to get fashion product created quickly and cheaply contributes to a system where ‘speed to market’ is given priority over quality product that is unique and market ready. The current global system exposes a lack of respect for design originality through blatantly shortcutting manufacturing processes and encouraging product disposability. Online portals have directly connected anonymous product development teams with designers of influence, who release their latest looks on international runways enabling a plethora of medium to large scale fashion organisations across the globe, to download and translate the key trends into commercial adaptations. For an industry that is renowned for being innovative and creative the practice of overt adaptation is prolific.

As the system continues to ramp up and is speeding ahead, is the fashion industry in a position to reverse or change? Simply, there is no choice. The considerable cost to the environment cannot be ignored and alternatives should be considered. There are millions employed in this industry and to reverse its unmitigated implosion will not be an easy task.

What if the fashion industry wasn’t constricted by a fashion calendar?

The larger chains and department stores function on weekly drops.

Although the fashion seasons are divided by Spring/Summer and Autumn/Winter, the year is punctuated by the constant flow of new product that quickly fills floor space in anticipation of quick turn around sales. The reality is that chains now have over-arching markdown strategies embedded into their buying systems. Fashion obsolescence is an ugly reality of the industry. The costs of oversupply go beyond the fiscal issues faced by companies who have to dump sale product often at loss.

There is also the significant environmental impact.

Excessive supply is united with the quest for speed, which sees designs released into retail merchandise and delivered into store in time frames as tight as ten days. This pattern has been spearheaded by global power brands such as Zara, H&M and Topshop who have set the unrealistic pace. More does not equate to better.

Why is it that the fashion industry has adopted a system where product is released into the market based purely on calendar requirements, not

consumer demand or product readiness? In parallel industries the time devoted to design development is purposefully considered. This ensures sufficient review and analysis to refine an idea, test it in the market and produce it to a quality level that will align to customer needs. Does an architect release concepts and models before they are perfected? Would a high profile electronics company release a new toaster before it has been resolved? A fashion product development team by contrast is required to provide a constant flow of ideas for not one product, but mass collections that are developed in the fastest creation time frame of any design industry.

Equally it’s a denigrating process where once released the assumption is made that the design efforts are transitory and of no lasting value with a limited shelf life. Any product that is still in store after two months (and sometimes shorter) is regarded as mark down material. Disposability and obsolescence are now expected within the world of fashion. The only other industry that works with this level of disposability and abandonment is the food industry. Food by contrast is directly linked to sustenance and the reasoning behind high levels of disposability are straightforwardly ‘in sync’ with the potential chemical changes that lead to contamination and the viable time frame for consumption. Clothes do not require a use-by- date. Reflect back to the habits of our grandparents who, by contrast, bought a really good coat and a pair of carefully constructed shoes that would last for years. A man’s suit would be a life long purchase.

In the premium sector of the fashion market the concept of rapid turnarounds has increasingly become an issue. The late Alexander McQueen, an exceptional designer, addressed the issue of the fashion industry churning out merchandise on a constant basis: “This whole situation is such a cliché. The turnover of fashion is just so quick and so throwaway, and I think that is a big part of the problem. There is no longevity” (The Real McQueen 2009). There is a belief within the fashion industry that the pressures of the fashion industry were directly linked to McQueen’s suicide in 2010 and contributed to the embarrassing public demise of fashion designer John Galliano in 2011.

Galliano and McQueen have a history of exceptional and innovative talent; their abilities should be heralded and nurtured within the fashion system. If the system contributed to their demise, then it is a resounding wake up call to the industry that the mechanisms driving it are simply not right. Is it possible to create a system that promotes unique and innovative product that is developed without the pressures of timing constraints?

If we were to shift the focus from constant supply, as well as the existing calendar decrees imposed by fashion weeks, we may start to make a difference. This is not a radical shift as the traditions of major fashion weeks, scheduled twice yearly, are already starting to blur from a buying model to a marketing model. Historically fashion weeks were of importance as they provided an opportunity for the retail buyers to view collections and place an indent order in advance, providing the company sufficient time to produce the quantities required. Today they have evolved into a media circus marketing tool with front rows filled with bloggers and celebrities, who will capture the experience and spread the visual extravaganza across the world to inspire the purchase of more handbags, perfume and makeup aligned to the brand concerned. We all love a fabulous fashion spectacle but it doesn’t have to dictate the release of seasonal collections.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

NEUE PERSPECTIVES What does luxury mean to you?

Ask any group of people their opinion on sport, politics, art or religion and you are bound to receive a series of didactic and passionate responses.

Ask a group of people for their perspectives on luxury and you open up a conversation that will anchor somewhere between the philosophical and the tangible. In this issue, Neue Perspectives takes a cross section through the zeitgeist to expose personal perspectives on luxury to create a dialogue on the role and significance of luxury in our day-to-day lives.

The physical and experiential notions of luxury are important ingredients in what could be described, at times, as facilitating self-actualisation, self-awareness and self-fulfillment. Introducing...

CLAIRE MULQUINEY STUDENT, 21 (MELBOURNE) To me, luxury is all about a feeling. It’s the feeling you get when looking at a beautifully made garment and seeing the work that has gone into it.

It’s the breathtaking feeling of touching delicate materials and noticing the structure that’s hidden in a beautifully tailored garment. It’s the feeling of satisfaction you get when wearing a garment and receiving compliments and the inconceivable feeling you get when knowing that a garment is one hundred percent perfect for you.

ALANNAH VINCI STUDENT, 22 (MELBOURNE) Luxury is something unique, innovative and original. Whether it’s a piece of clothing, a handbag or a car. It’s quality materials and attention to detail that reflects passion and craft. Luxury is an art form and to own one small piece of it can transform my ordinary day into something special. Luxury is something you hold close to your heart amongst all the fast fashion and other junk in your wardrobe.

LUKE RYNDERMAN FILM MAKER, 34 (MELBOURNE) Since the abandonment of my graphic design career, luxury now has a completely different meaning. I used to think seeing the latest glossy magazine or fashion campaign by an immensely talented photographer as luxury. Even the printing of a luxurious document was pure fantasy for me. The extraordinary transitions of a gloriously imagined website or Showstudio video. But now my tastes are way more infantile...

Dematerialised into the simplicity of living, eating, paying for my own goods and being able to sleep.

MONIQUE MARTINO CREATIVE PRODUCER, 45 (LOS ANGELES) A moment in time defines my notion of luxury. These moments change and grow as we evolve, they have the power to take us back to the past and dream of a future. The sight of a hand written love letter, the taste of an organic apple or the scent of a pine forest may take me to a place that I have always dreamed of or perhaps captivated me to revisit.

I often find myself hesitating when I discover a new treasure or delight, like a child fascinated and transfixed. In awe of its form and slightly humbled. Luxury is for me, a personal revered dream come to life.

LISA DI CRESCENZO PHD STUDENT AND PRINCIPAL OF INVENTORY OF PARLOR, 39 (MELBOURNE) Luxury is an experience that enriches. Aesthetically, intellectually, even spiritually, transformative, luxury is not necessarily anchored to expense; it can be experiential rather than expensive: an abstract luxury that becomes a state of mind, and a manner of carrying oneself. Studying a masterwork in a gallery, reading an antique edition of Shakespeare discovered at a flea market, arranging a bouquet of roses or listening to Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony - tangible and intangible at once. Luxury is a way of experiencing and reflecting upon, the beauty, refinement and rarity inherent in the details of the world.

CRYSTAL DUNN DESIGNER, 25 (MELBOURNE) Luxury is tactile. Luxury is a sensuous experience, a material experience.

The crisp, smooth texture of a linen napkin, the heady and spicy scent of eucalyptus oil, the cold soft shine of a precious stone…luxurious objects are absorbed through the skin, the nose, the eyes. Potent and immersive, a luxurious object gives itself over to your senses, flooding and befuddling and consuming you.

MARC FREEMAN, VISUAL ARTIST, 33 (MELBOURNE) I see luxury as time and space. In my case, the time and space to think and create artworks. Some argue that the creation of art is a necessity, which is true, but I believe it relies heavily on the environment in which it is made to make it possible. That said, I also love my collection of designer sunglasses. But whatever the luxury, I believe it should be a reward or earned. I think the time when one enjoys luxury most, also incorporates the time it took to achieve it.

Neue Luxury, No.1, The launch issue.

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Plate 01. Photography: Terence Bogue

JULIA DEVILLE Julia deVille and the luxury of imagination.

ART

By Robert Nelson

The sculptures and jewellery of Julia deVille are both luxurious and forbidding.

No baroque extravagance is alien to her repertoire: silver chargers with cartouches on their architectural flanges, urns with volutes and florid articulation, copious ornaments from the age of authority. As if preparing the mise en scène for some exquisite banquet, she then sets the table with splendid rarities, like foetal deer or baby rabbit.

With these delicate condiments, however, the other side of baroque consciousness—vanitas—looms fatefully and grimly through taxidermy: all life, however young, ends in death. As spectators, we aesthetically savour animals who died in exquisite perfection, their bodies morbidly conserved as elegant artefact, encrusted with gems.

The idea of combining opulence and death has more than lurid motives.

DeVille’s discourse is not about love-death; her work has no interest in the vision of voluptuous expiry, where Romantic artists might have seen some heady appeal in perishing aesthetically. Her tender beasts sit in state and experience neither ecstasy nor pain in succumbing to their death, which must have happened in the abstract. Rather, her combination of natural beauty, ornamental grandeur, sentimentality, and the language of gastronomy invites us to contemplate the aesthetic economy, right down to the structure and basis of luxury.

Few concepts are so fraught with moral and aesthetic contradictions.

Luxury, though sought with envy and cultivated competitively by all the advanced economies, has always attracted criticism. The ambivalence is so deeply a part of European culture that it finds an expression in the very language by which the idea is communicated. Our word luxury derives from the Latin for plenty (luxus) which spawned a derivative (luxuria) that already indicates a kind of rank superabundance, a sense retained in the English

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term luxuriant, as in describing thick undergrowth or a prolific pot of basil.

In the Renaissance, however, the somewhat wanton and overgrown associations of the Latin overtook the root, so to speak, to express an outrageous libidinous energy, impulsively lusty and expressing lack of control.

The Italian term lussuria expressed lust or ‘illegitimate lewdness’, as Cesare Ripa says in his book of emblems from the early seventeenth century, which became a famous source-book for artists.1

Is luxury good or bad? You can almost see the development of language neurotically hedging its bets. To get around the embarrassment that we don’t know, that we simultaneously want to admire luxury (and to possess it) but also to abhor and stigmatize it, the European psyche hatched two terms which might take care of the equivocation. Let lussuria be disgusting and lewd; let it go wild and convulse, whence it indicates moral abandon and fornication alongside the randy appetites of goats and rats. Meanwhile, let us—as people of culture and aspiration—have the luxury of things, lusso, grand halls bedight with pictures and stucco and replete with tables bearing unaffordable sweetmeats.

Although the idea of luxury as a purely material superfluity—untainted by erotic excess—retained a separate term (lusso), in fact this form of privilege was also not without anxious suspicions and concerns for social control. Anything good by the neurosis of western culture is also something bad, because it might be owned by the wrong people or put to the wrong effect. In the fourth book of his influential treatise The Book of the Courtier from the early sixteenth century, Baldassare Castiglione implores us to ‘temper all superfluity’ for economic reasons, because wasting resources lays cities to ruin.2 Around lusso, he includes over-sumptuous private buildings, banquets, excessive dowries and pomp in jewellery and clothes. Productive capital would be tied up in aesthetic nonsense or vanity.

In the exorbitant decorative century that followed, lusso would remain

under suspicion, even with such a flamboyant poet as Marino, who saw ‘soft luxury and barbarous ornament’ as a phantasm that seductively gets into his hero’s nostrils;3 though Marino is not such a hypocrite that he doesn’t also express his fondness for ‘superb luxury’4 elsewhere because he flagrantly demonstrates his liking for it. Whatever one decries as unnecessary one can equally extol as superlative. It depends on your expectations and values, which are likely to be in contention in all epochs

This ambivalence explains why Shakespeare, whose language is at least as luxuriant as Marino’s, sings: ‘Fie on sinful fantasy! / Fie on lust and luxury!’ or complains of ‘hateful luxury, / And bestial appetite in change of lust’, always associating luxury with libido. As if remembering the etymological link with lust,5 Shakespeare associates ‘the devil Luxury, with his fat rump and potato finger’ with lechery.6 It’s why old King Hamlet’s ghost associates luxury with erotic vice in the famous lines: ‘Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / a couch for luxury and damned incest’.7

Plate 02. Photography: Terence Bogue

Neue Luxury, A global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

Julia deVille Studio 2010 Photography: James Geer

Plate 03. Photography: Terence Bogue

Plate 04. Photography: Tony Owczarek

And it’s also why Lear makes an apology for lechery and ‘luxury, pell-mell’, because adultery couldn’t produce worse offspring than his own treacherous surviving daughters, who were nevertheless ‘Got ‘tween the lawful sheets’.8

In the world that Julia deVille inhabits, the archaic confusion of luxury and lust persists. Infuriatingly, in fact, expensive consumer goods or services for the socially aspirational are associated with sex through advertising.

One capriciously represents the desired product or service with the vector of naked legs or youthful cleavage. So strong is this appeal that decades of feminism and rational reflexion are to no avail.

Wealth and power are popularly considered to have aphrodisiac properties, so the archaic link between luxury and lust is not likely to disappear any time soon, no matter how much we recognize that the connexion is illogical.

But deVille associates it with death.

The ancient critique of luxury as an inappropriate way of spending resources also has a contemporary counterpart, which in many ways is dear to deVille’s heart. We are wary of many luxuries for reasons of sustainability.

The more luxury we desire, the more luxury is produced, the more energy is consumed and emissions are produced. One is anxious about the exponential global consumption of goods and services, which is now reckoned to be unsustainable and also impossible to arrest.

The animals that deVille puts on her extravagant platters are much more than morbid tokens of a vegetarian distaste for carnivorous culture.

To the ethics of breeding livestock in order to kill it, we now have to add a set of environmental scruples that make meat even less morally palatable than before. Once upon a time, we only had to think of the damage to the animal itself, whereas now we are obliged to think of the damage to the planet as well. The carbon footprint of the steak is several times greater than that of the tofu; and so meat—though not yet a luxury in our relatively prosperous community —is further stigmatized as an ecological catastrophe.

As a vegetarian, deVille could afford to be sanctimonious about these scandals; but she is an artist who speculates rather than a moralist who

denounces. In this discourse, we need humility, because all cultural production —including this text that I fondly preen and primp on a snazzy laptop while sitting in a handsome armchair—is a kind of luxury. For my survival as a person who eats, needs shelter and nourishes children, I don’t altogether need a library crammed with music or a cabinet with decorative glass.

Likewise, deVille needs to produce art and, up to a point, her work, like anyone else’s, can be thought of as a luxury, something that you could, if push came to shove, do without. Given that her iconography of épergne and salver is ostentatious, you are invited to see both form and content as a luxury, a sign of privilege, an expression of rank by means of exorbitance. And of course her work is not cheap, because it is highly collectable and sustains her as an artist.

Anything prestigious could be deemed a luxury and condemned accordingly. It is a puritanical foolishness which Jesus himself considers shortsighted. When Mary Magdalen anoints Christ with expensive unguents, the disciples object: ‘they had indignation, saying, To what purpose is this waste (απωλεια)? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor.’ Jesus however answers them: ‘Why trouble ye the woman?

For she hath wrought a good work upon me. For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always. For in that she hath poured this ointment on my body, she did it for my burial’.9

The disciples only see the material value of the myrrh but Christ sees its symbolic value as oblation, which turns out to be necessary in honouring his divine mission. Maybe this is not a good example if you consider the higher religious purpose an irrational superstition; nevertheless, the point is made that definitions of luxury are relative. What is a luxury? The criteria are never absolute. What looks like money-down-the-drain for one purpose is essential for another.

In deVille’s sculptures, curiously, the sacrificial character of the altar and sacrament are not so far away, because the lamb, so to speak, has its throat cut and the host is presented for some mysterious transformative or redemptive purpose.

Plate 06. Photography: Terence Bogue

Even without those symbolic associations, and whether they are sacramental or not, luxury is in the eye of the beholder. Luxury is extensively subjective and dependent upon prior values. In a beautiful comedy by the eighteenth-century playwright Carlo Goldoni, a shrewd English noble, Milord Wambert, says to his skeptical creative compatriots: ‘Friends, if you so detest fashion and luxury, if you so love the common good and reformed custom, why do you yourselves make such rich works which wreak such waste (recano dispendio) and cause damage? You earn your bread with silver and gold.

You study unusual ways of shaping shoes. Therefore, O wise and prudent heroes, luxury is only harmful when buyers don’t spend on you!’10

As among the disciples of Christ, the accusation was that costly foreign trends are wasteful and therefore bad for the prudent management of the economy. But if you succeed in achieving profits by producing very similar

always were, whereas city people always want to be something else, something more, something different, ‘oppressed by luxury, ambition and appetite’.13

We could therefore answer Goldoni with an existential question: why be so industrious and parsimonious if it isn’t ultimately to win some greater comfort, welfare, amenity and enjoyment for ourselves and community which may also be a kind of luxury? Then, looking at the extravagant works of deVille, we can add the principle: luxury is justified if it makes us think and feel, if it adds curiosity and vision, like philosophy itself. It’s then down to us to luxuriate in the work to its full discursive potential.

Image Plates Plate 01. Actaeon 2010 25 x 44 x 19cm Stillborn Deer Plate 02. Couverts à salade 2012 10.5 x 17 x 25cm Blue-faced Parrot Finches Plate 03. Orcus 2010 32 x 30 x 36cm Stillborn Piglet Plate 04. Majesty 2012 146 x 200 x 89cm Spiky (adolescent stag) Plate 05. Élan vital 2012 61 x 41 x 29cm Stillborn lamb Plate 06. Élan vital (detail) 2012 61 x 41 x 29cm Stillborn lamb Footnotes 1. ‘concupiscenze illecite’, Ripa, Iconologia, 1610 s.v.

2. Il cortegiano 4.42 3. ‘il Lusso molle e ‘l barbaro ornamento’, Adone 6.151.8 4. ‘lusso superbo’, 8.91.7; cf. 12.182.3 5. The Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.98 6. Troilus and Cressida 5.2.55 7. Hamlet 1.5.83 8. Lear 4.6.119 9. Matthew 26.8–12 10. Il filosofo inglese 2.3 11. I malcontenti, foreword 12. Le smanie per le villeggiature, preface 13. Il filosofo di campagna 1.5

Plate 05. Photography: Terence Bogue

Neue Luxury, No.1, The launch issue.

artefacts to the ones that you condemn, all of a sudden you no longer need to be so critical. A case of hypocrisy, then, that translates to criticism today: you deplore luxuries that you don’t have or that you have no interest in.

Meanwhile, you forget all the luxuries that you have accrued and continue to invest in almost unawares.

Goldoni was acutely aware of this hidden devotion to luxury in his countrymen. Italians, he considered, were ridiculous spendthrifts both on unnecessary fashions but also on ways of spending time. In four of his comedies, the Venetian humourist reserves particular scorn for holiday houses.

These vacationers are pure indulgence, which cause families to forget their business in town, seek abandon in unproductive sports, gambling and consuming prodigious amounts of wine and chocolate. Today, he says in the preamble to The Malcontents, ‘holidaying has arrived at an excess of luxury, waste and liability’.11 Echoing ideas that he would express in his play called Crazes for Country Holidays,12 he indicates that it might have been fine for the idle aristocracy to enjoy such indulgences but for the aspirational productive community to consume its scarce resources in this frivolity is a recipe for calamity.

Ironically, the very economic vigour that Goldoni recommended ended up doing little but generating more luxuries, especially in the burgeoning industries of the British Isles that he so admired. The industrial revolution which began in the north at the time of Goldoni’s late plays promoted the very motif that he despised in middle-class Italian communities, namely, as Nardo says in The Country Philosopher, that country folk are content to remain as they

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1111 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach, Florida, USA. © Hufton + Crow and MBEACH1, LLLP

AUTOEROTIC 1111 Lincoln Road, Miami.

ARCHITECTURE

By Ray Edgar

RARELY HAS A BUILDING INSPIRED SO MANY PEOPLE TO WAX POETICALLY. A “NOBLE SPACE,” “GENERATOR OF A NEW ARCHITECTURAL EXPERIENCE IN CITY” AND A “WORK OF ART.” AND ALL THIS TO DESCRIBE A CARPARK.

That’s the thing, says Mark Loughnan, principal of HASSELL and former associate architect with Swiss-based architecture practice Herzog & de Meuron (HdM) where he was involved in the design phases of the carpark 1111 Lincoln Road, “in an ideal world there is a possibility to experience that feeling in any public project.” We interviewed Loughnan about his experience on the early phases of the Lincoln Road project, and his current thoughts on architecture and its process.

RAY EDGAR: How did the project start and what was the client asking for?

MARK LOUGHNAN: The client [developer Robert Wennett] wrote a letter to 10 or 12 of his preferred architects around the world with an idea about a project with a mixed used and car park program. He mentioned afterwards that he wasn’t sure that he’d get any response. He wanted to question and consider site and its impact on Lincoln Road and how a carpark can be integrated within the urban realm. To many architects that was intriguing.

It opened the door to design, as there was no pre-determined idea. He then flew around the world and interviewed and spent some time with the various architects, before deciding to engage HdM. The whole commissioning process was quite interesting.

RE: It’s not just a carpark, were the apartment and shops part of the initial proposal?

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ML: Yes, the former bank building was partly redeveloped as well. The ground floor was redeveloped. The retail and entrance to an elevator provided direct access to the rooftop restaurant. The bulk of the building was already let

by MTV Latin America. The ground floor and roof were redeveloped with a section of the roof connected to the top-level carpark as a private residence.

RE: How big was the team that was working on this project?

ML: Probably six to eight people.

RE: Is that a lot?

ML: No it was the right amount. When it went into the next phase there were probably 8 or 10 and there was a lot of studies and experimentation. The project needed to work on many levels from its integration with Lincoln Road and its retail component and we also had the psyche of ‘let’s reinvent the carpark. What can we do? What makes sense and what doesn’t?’ So there were a lot of ground-floor integration and structural, access, parking and circulation gymnastics to consider.

RESEARCH DRIVEN RE: What do you mean by gymnastics?

ML: In terms of the carpark – testing the rationale for why things are the way they are: access, turning circles, slopes of ramps, ease of movement and all these things. In Miami the general regulation is that carparks should be clad so that they appear as ‘buildings’. We decided quite early on that we would question this requirement, and the notion of the car park in the context of Miami. So we had an approach that flipped the regulation on its head and said ‘We’re going to celebrate the car, and the movement of the car, and the movement of people.’

RE: How did you convince the council that cladding was surplus to requirements?

ML: HdM studied the whole context and content of Lincoln Road and Alton Road and the neighbourhoods all the way to South Beach. We researched right back into the history of the city.

RE: In this case, presentations show images of Lincoln Road being cleared of its trees in the late 19th or early 20th century. The irony raised is that even though trees had been felled to create Lincoln Road, it was the only part of Miami that had been converted into a tree-filled mall.

ML: It’s much more compelling to put forward a proposal that you understand, as opposed to just ‘pull this and twist that and there it is’. Understanding a history is part of building that story – that makes sense for this particular project. What’s also important – it’s a philosophical approach – that each project is for its place. It’s for Lincoln Road.

RE: Why wouldn’t this carpark sit anywhere else?

ML: You could ask the same question of many projects. I think there’s a lot of reasons why 1111 works in Miami. Miami has an outdoor climate. It’s also part of the culture of Miami. It’s ‘here I am let me show you what I’ve got attitude’. Miami is more like that than other cities, which are less overt.

I think it had been referred to as ‘all muscle’.

RE: Is personifying that muscular beach culture really what the structure was referring to?

ML: It came out of those early studies and direction not to clad the building.

Straight away it has a strong muscular presence. The structure is the architecture. At HdM we had many study models of a carpark structure and they were all different and had a different rationale. We clearly had to make it practical and fulfil the clients brief for a mixed-use project (including a certain number of cars).

TESTING RE: Were the studies wildly different?

ML: We looked at the variation of floor height and tested the circulation of cars and all variations of driving through the building, for example, driving up the middle in a spiral, driving on a whole series of sloped platforms or rising and circulating the perimeter. The size of the car and radius of the turning circle was a factor. The building would almost react to the movement of the car.

It was very rational in the end.

RE: So the greater the height between floor plates the steeper the ramp?

ML: No, the ramp would simply be longer to rise to that height and therefore it might land in a different space, which might have a minor impact on the floor plate.

MIXED USE RE: Why did you want to make it mixed use?

ML: It was part of the client’s brief. It’s also about context on Lincoln Road and adding diversity of use and life. So the car park was a building HdM were interested in adding another dimension to. Rather than just have similar stratas, we thought it would be interesting to introduce a potential for mixed program,

Neue Luxury, A global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

which also partly generated the floor-to-floor heights. This divided it from a typical car park environment and resulted in floors with a much more spacious and brighter environment, that could present opportunities for varied programs.

It could be used for retail and commercial outlets through to cultural events.

It’s also very much a building for the arts. It’s also been used for fashion shows, weddings, yoga, fitness and athletics training.

RE: Is that because of the view?

ML: For many reasons, I think it’s a very dramatic building to be in.

RE: How does it achieve that?

ML: There is a generosity of space and the outlook is great. Ferrari had an event there where they filled the carpark with a collection of Ferraris that celebrated their history.

RE: Are any ugly cars allowed in?

ML: Of course, it’s a public carpark. The owner joked one day saying he might have a day where only white cars are allowed in, for example. The beauty of it is that because of its aesthetic nature and how open it is each time it fills up it’s an art piece or installation in a way, because it’s different every time and it’s exposed. I’ve even heard taxi drivers are getting asked to divert through the carpark on their way to various destinations.

PUBLIC BUILDINGS Very few buildings encourage people to describe them in such poetic terms.

It’s certainly interesting and questions many issues. The typology of a carpark is that it’s a public building – anybody can go into a carpark. You can’t say that about a lot of buildings any more. With security and the changed world somehow – even museums and office lobbies now scan you on entry. There are the public squares, public civic buildings, libraries, and other cultural buildings, and then there’s also carparks – maybe. It’s a typology that is for anybody to enter.

RE: Was this realised after the fact?

ML: These were all part of the early discussions. I think that’s why all the architects were interested in participating, because of the nature and the prevalence of the carpark in our urban environments. There is also an interesting architectural pedigree of carparks around the world.

RE: Which did you look at?

ML: There’s quite a few in South America. Simply also just from an engineering point of view there’s some beautiful carparks and very sculptural objects. It’s a purely functional building, but there’s no reason it cannot be engaging spatially and aesthetically pleasing.

MAJOR INSPIRATION RE: A Detroit cinema that has been transformed into a carpark informed this project didn’t it?

ML: There were many inspirations but it certainly grabbed a piece of our imagination. It created a lot of discussion about re-lifing, and just the drama of a carparking lot in a theatre is really interesting, especially in the American context. Again it’s this everyday, public building put into a more cultural and spatial environment.

RE: Did you try to bring that literal theatricality into this project?

ML: That’s part of it. Rather than getting sandwiched in a dark narrow basement you’re suddenly in an environment that is really pleasing to be in.

It’s celebratory. You know those places where you go and just stand there and take it in again. It’s a place that’s comfortable.

RE: Was Coop Himmelblau’s BMW World – or a showroom aesthetic – an influence?

ML: Showrooms were something I never remember coming up.

It was never about deliberately showing off the car.

SPATIAL EXPERIENCE RE: HdM often works with galleries like London’s Tate and Serpentine and artists like Ai Wei Wei. How important is art to this particular project?

ML: During my time at HdM on the Miami project I can’t recall specific artists being involved per se. Certainly art was going to be part of the program and the use, and potential for the building. We were looking at the opportunities for mixed use and art related use as if this could be a cultural building in a way.

We never presented it that way, but we always hoped that it would have a diverse life beyond the car.

RE: Why is that?

ML: It’s this whole idea of it being a public building with flexibility of use.

One of the most interesting things about architecture – whether it’s a house or a carpark or a museum or whatever – are those moments of uplift and inspiration you experience in a particular place, for example the feeling you get when you walk into a cathedral. It could be a lot of different things.

It might just be the feeling of materials.

RE: So how do you achieve it?

ML: It’s very difficult and the client is a key component.

CREATIVE PROCESS RE: How do you set in place a process that allows you to create a great experience? What questions do you keep reiterating?

ML: What is the client looking for? Who’s using this building? Who are the actual users? Do they really need what you are telling us they need? Do they really need that much space? Do they need something else? Do they need something more? Do they need something bigger or smaller? Do they need something alternative to that to give them something else? Is there some other program that we can add to it? Is there a different way of doing what you’re asking us? There are many questions and a great deal of dialogue.

THINK DIFFERENTLY RE: Is it about being different and going against the grain? Does every experience have to be different?

ML: Well does everything have to taste the same? That would be pretty dull and boring. Everything doesn’t have to be different, but I think we certainly look at everything in a different way. We would never copy something somewhere and build it somewhere else.

LIFESPAN RE: Did you also consider the idea that ‘one day this carpark’s use will also change’?

ML: As architects we often think about that in buildings we design because we’re aware that the lifespan of buildings is much less now – depending on the building typology. The general office building may have a 30-year lifespan, then it will get reclad or even knocked down and redeveloped. Whereas a cultural building might have a 100-year lifespan or more.

RE: Is that one of the questions you ask?

ML: Sure it’s another one of these parameters about buildings. A modified carpark could become a something else in the future – an office building at some point, or perhaps even residential. There are often lots of potential uses

to consider in the future. The materiality was a question and how do we build this. So concrete was a topic and we decided early that this was the right material because it was very much an integral material. It had mass and quality and it was contextual to the Miami experience.

LUXURY RE: How do you capture or convey luxury, particularly in something as utilitarian as a carpark? What sort of detailing and finish do you provide?

ML: We talked about the experiential thing before – smells and touch and the aesthetics of something. There’s the detail of a building and there’s the experience within. Luxurious in this context would have to be the space, and the aperture, the air, the freedom and a new and surprising experience.

RE: That’s a rare commodity in Miami?

ML: No, but it’s a luxurious experience in terms of a beautiful carpark. Even the vistas from the different floors and the experience going down open stairs.

You don’t have to go in to an enclosed fire escape to get through the building.

You circulate through a public open stairwell.

RE: So it’s not your typical bunkered carpark stairwell?

ML: There are art installations all the way up and the balustrade is transparent and elegant.

RE: Everyone describes its sculptural qualities.

ML: Yes I think it’s very sculptural. That’s the other thing about using a carpark. The process involves that you’re transferring, turning, rising.

This is reflected in the structure. So there’s this celebration of movement and exposure. You can see people and vehicles moving up and down and in and out. This was also part of redefining carparking. You don’t have to be in a basement. You don’t have to have low ceilings. You don’t have to put people in a firestair. People can simply circulate safely and adequately through

this open public environment.

RE: Did that project change the way you worked or have you always followed the same working methodologies?

ML: Similar methodologies were used and with the client we were given some time where we worked together developing and discussing ideas.

RE: How long did you have?

ML: The design concept was probably three months.

SIGNATURE STYLE RE: Is it your approach to be as open to as many ideas as possible?

ML: Yes. It’s also the philosophy of design here at HASSELL that there is no signature answer. There are some designers for example, who have a particular style or signature. You can sometimes pick certain architect’s buildings relatively easily because of a particular aesthetic. I wouldn’t say I have a particular philosophy other than to be open. Each answer is slightly different. That’s not to say that I don’t draw one from the other. There are certain strings that go from this to this to this.

RE: What would link, say, the de Young Museum in San Francisco, which you also helped design during your time at Herzog & de Meuron, to the Lincoln Road carpark?

ML: The one thing that probably does go across those projects, is that nature of the public building and what does that mean to how you design it? And what other layers can you add to it that provides even more richness or opportunity or diversity of experience or use or program? But there wasn’t anything from a particular aesthetic or piece of material, for instance.

I guess I’ve worked and been mentored and now work in a particular way – so I’m probably more of the opinion that having a signature style is almost imposing something, as opposed to being completely open about a solution.

There’s clearly no absolute right or wrong way of designing a particular outcome. But my approach is that ideally there is a rationale for why something’s done. It’s a collection of ideas and processes that you try and narrow down on a particular response rather than throwing everything in and keeping it all in there. One of the nicest things about the profession is that every project is different, so I believe it shouldn’t have the same answer reinterpreted or relocated. There’s the client, the site, there’s city, there’s weather, there’s culture, there’s geography – there’s hundreds of variations on why a project could or couldn’t be something. I believe using a similar approach or similar language is not as interesting as thinking about it almost as new each time. That’s not saying that you don’t take things from one to the other, or reinterpret something you did before in a different way.

That’s what’s great about the city, is the richness and diversity of life.

Life itself is of course full of diverse experiences.

THE RAW AND THE COOKED RE: After you put a team together how do you know when your idea is right, ‘that’s it’?

ML: There’s no recipe for how that happens. Sometimes an idea from within the team comes quite early or quickly that you’re happy to investigate.

Other times it can be a wrestle and diversity of opinion over a longer period is beneficial.

RE: Is there a risk of overcooking things?

ML: Sometimes if you get the idea too early the trap is you can fuss too much on one idea rather than test things. There’s probably a balance between too much and not enough.

RE: How do you know when you have that balance?

ML: Each project is different.

RE: Is there a mentor in the background who’s in your ear when you worry about things?

ML: Yes I told you my father died recently and I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

RE: Was he an architect?

ML: No he was a doctor.

RE: And what’s his phrase?

ML: He’s got lots. ‘Patience is a virtue’ is one of his favourites.

RE: But how does that help your creative process?

TIME IS A LUXURY ML: Patience doesn’t help the creative process much [laughs] because there’s often no time. Time is an asset that we seem to be losing in our profession.

There’s often not a lot of time for detailed investigation and thinking.

RE: Why’s that?

ML: People don’t generally want to pay for time unfortunately.

RE: If time is the ‘luxury’ here, how would you spend it on a project and idea?

ML: It’s time to think about and discuss what you’re doing. Question things or test things or consider what the client wants, and what else can contribute to the process and outcome. Some of the deadlines we have these days are very difficult. On one hand the expectation is that the client and project team all agree we need to do the best we can, but sometimes we’re collectively not given the time to do that.

RE: What was the wildest idea in the discussion of the carpark that stimulated something else?

ML: There was always lots of dialogue and a certain rationale. We couldn’t be too crazy because we knew it was never going to fly. But we certainly tested and questioned them as much as we could.

Mark Loughnan spent seven years (1999–2006) with Herzog & de Meuron.

Since then he has been a principal at HASSELL.

FOR MORE WWW.HERZOGDEMEURON.COM WWW.HASSELLSTUDIO.COM

Neue Luxury, No.1, The launch issue.

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Plate 01. Photo: Andrew Curtis

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Neue Luxury, A global Dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

ANDREW HAZEWINKEL The (re)order of things: The Art of Andrew Hazewinkel.

ART

by Jane Devery

Silver, copper and aluminium leaf, sandpaper, wax, leather, gemstones, mirrors, carbon, found photographs and glass-plate negatives, electroluminescent light panels, industrial ropes and recycled ship engine oil. These are some of the materials and objects that appear in the work of Andrew Hazewinkel.

The Melbourne artist, who has exhibited in Australia and Europe for more than a decade, has an uncanny ability to intuit the potential of things and draw out their hidden meanings. Borrowing from museological, archival and archaeological practices and fields as diverse as geology, anthropology and Surrealism, his largely photographic and object-based works are striking for their strange arrangements of repurposed materials that unearth unexpected associations.

Plate 02. Detail. Photo: Andrew Curtis

Plate 04. Installation view: Transparency, Westspace 2012. Photo: Andrew Curtis

Objects caught in unusual states of transformation course throughout the artist’s work. In the single channel video installation Turbulence 2007, for example, plastic bottles and abandoned footballs caught in an eddy of a river form a deluge of unexpected beauty. In the larger Aqua Alta project 2006-09 of which this video was a part - an ambitious set of spatial interventions staged across four architectural sites in Rome and Melbourne - found objects estranged from their everyday contexts formed part of a complex web of interconnecting ropes. Some formed anchor points while others were suspended mid-air like debris left by a high tide. Elsewhere in video projections, ordinary objects seem to take on unusual significance, whether a half-submerged tree branch in a swollen river, or lengths of bunting fluttering in the wind. In a photographic component of the project, images of makeshift shelters found in present day Rome were combined with nineteenth-century photographs of the flood-damaged city, paired together with the artist’s eye for material traces of destruction and survival that span across time.

In more recent works, Hazewinkel draws on strategies of collage and the readymade. Part-sculptural and part-photographic, the ongoing project Head Replacement Therapy 2010 consists of a series of hybrid objects that appear to be governed by an uncanny logic. In its most recent presentation in 2012 at Melbourne’s Centre for Contemporary Photography in the exhibition On the Nature of Things, Head Replacement Therapy: (plundered #1 - #6) 2012 consisted of six ‘portraits’ comprised of images of Greek and Roman sculptures screen-printed onto sandblasted glass plates, each ‘completed’ with a slice of agate in the place of a missing head. Superimposed onto electroluminescent light panels and presented in a darkened exhibition space, these softly glowing mysterious aggregates take on a spectral presence, as if retrieved from another time and place.

Hazewinkel’s unusual artefacts play with junctures between artifice and nature, the illusory and the real. They confront us with our anthropomorphising impulses and our need to find meanings in images. Considered in this way, the artist’s use of agates and other geological matter – one might call them ‘natural readymades’ -- suggests an affinity with the work of Roger Caillois (1913-1978), a one-time friend and collaborator of Andre Breton, a lesserknown Surrealist who formulated a theory on the visual language of geological

Plate 03. Photo: Andrew Curtis

Neue Luxury, No.1, The launch issue.

Plate 05. Detail. Photo: Andrew Curtis

Plate 06. Installation view: Centre for Contemporary Photography Project Room. Melbourne Art Fair 2012. Photo: Ross Coulter

formations. In his book The Writing of Stones, a poetic investigation into the images found in stones, Caillois speculated that hidden meanings lay hidden within their structures and that with the aid of the human imagination they could unlock the secrets of the cosmos.1

There’s a humorous side to Hazewinkel’s misshapen forms but also a violent beauty. They call to mind the disfigured imagery in the collages of Dada artists Max Ernst and Hannah Hoch, but equally reference the game of chance exquisite corpse favoured by the Surrealists. There is something severe and almost surgical about seeing dismembered forms of classical sculptures lit up like medical X-rays, and the sub-title ‘plundered’ accompanying these works certainly suggests a violation. The images of classical sculptures that appear in this work were drawn from the Marshall Collection, a little known archive of nineteenth and early twentieth century photographic documentation of antique sculptures that Hazewinkel discovered in 2006 while he was artist in residence at the Australia Council’s studio at the British School in Rome. His repeated use of material found in the collection throughout his works opens a window onto the role of early photography in the burgeoning international trade of antiquities in the nineteenth century, inviting a reading of archaeological and museological practices as forms of systemic cultural violence.

Hazewinkel draws parallels between his own artistic processes and the archaeological and archival practices his materials have been subjected to.

Reflecting on the multiple layers of burial and retrieval that are embedded in the objects he works with, he has commented, “the documented objects that I am looking at have been excavated at least twice. First the stone is cut, as raw material; then if chosen, worked, usually followed by a slow process of forgetting and the slow re-burial by time, faded value or conflict. Next comes the second exhuming, the modern discovery, and subsequent archaeological activities. I also participate in this layered cycle of burial and exhumation.

I bring them back to the surface from the limbo of a forgotten archive and rework them, with no interest in ‘restoration’ rather reconsidering them and allowing them to … speak.”2

The ghostly imagery that developed from the artist’s research in the Marshall Collection resurface in Portraits of the Living and the Dead #1- #6 2010-12, a series of monumental works on paper. Responding to photographic negatives he uncovered of sculpted heads of Roman and Greek antiquities, these delicately rendered drawings built up in layers of silver and aluminium leaf on fine black carborundum sandpaper, appear like apparitions emerging from a dark sparkling ground. An important feature of Hazewinkel’s artistic project is a conscious referencing of materials that link to the methods of production of his source material. Sandpaper, for example, is used by Hazewinkel to full illusory effect, but also references the work of the sculptor.

Silver leaf creates a mysterious shimmering presence in these works, but are also emblematic of photographic processes, as curator Dr Kyla McFarlane has noted: “Hazewinkel’s material reference points are consciously elemental here; his is a sculptural response to the raw elements of nineteenth century photographic

documentation – gelatin silver, glass plate and, more broadly, its base elements of light against dark.”3

The Material Collision project shown at the artist run space Westspace in late 2012 represented a distillation of ideas and material associations that run throughout the artist’s work. Photographic, sculptural, archaeological, geological, cosmological, art historical and bodily references multiply through a series of two- and three-dimensional hybrid experimental forms.

In Material Collision #1 (we are all star stuff) Hazewinkel picks up on the visual language of Minimalist sculpture in the restrained gesture of pinning a single piece of leather to the wall, however the title inflects this work with a heightened atmosphere, alluding to the idea that everything in the universe - whether flesh and blood or stone - is ultimately comprised of the same matter.

Reinforcing this idea and in a poetic invocation of the night sky, sections of the

gallery space were covered with the artist signature material of carborundum sandpaper, a readymade substance rich with allusive and illusory potential.

In the sculpture Material Collision #2 (mantle plume) 2012, columns of molten wax and sliced agate allude to ancient geological transformations but also hint at bodily associations, a theme that also plays out in Material Collision #3 (staring together into night) 2012. In this large photographic screen-print printed onto the same sparkling surface that runs throughout the entire installation, we see the sculpted head of a classical Greek sculpture of a young man. In this intimate portrait of a forgotten ancient sculptural object, the skilled craftsmanship of the ancient sculptor is accentuated. Hazewinkel brings the fine stylized form into crisp focus, enlarged and screen-printed from a digitized image taken from a nineteenth century glass plate negative. Yet in spite of the close encounter with a fragment of antiquity that this work allows us, the overall sense of contemporaneity is striking. The relationship between viewer and object is also interesting here: only the reverse of the subject’s head is revealed to us, implying that we share the same gaze. Thousands of years might separate our experiences yet together we face the darkness beyond. Sensual and vulnerable, it is a work of considerable poetic force.

Andrew Hazewinkel is alert to the shifting values and meanings of materials over time, and their potential to open windows to a range of associations. His hybrid structures and photographic objects consciously

reference the material culture and processes of archaeology, photography, archival practices, museum displays and modernism, drawing attention to histories and stories that might otherwise be lost. His magical transformations of materials and re-animation of archival objects stir up multiple associations that all seem to revolve around the question of our relationships with things.

How might objects and materials unlock secrets between the living and the dead, the contemporary and the ancient, the future and the past?

Hazewinkel’s art comes close to providing an answer, but leaves the question open for now.

Image Plates Plate 01. Head Replacement Therapy # 5 2012. Screen printed image, sandblasted 6mm low lead glass, sliced agate, electroluminescent light panel. 79 x 48.5cm.

Plate 02. Material Collision # 3 [staring together into night] 2012. Framed screen print on carborundum sandpaper on carborundum sandpapered wall with rolled edge. Overall dimensions variable.

Plate 03. Material Collision # 1 [we are all star stuff] 2012. Metallic leather , carborundum sandpaper overall dimensions 303 x 233 x 12 cm.

Plate 04. Material Collision # 2 [mantle plume] 2012. Wax, sliced agate, timber, aluminium, carborundum sandpaper, plastic saw horse 180 x 100 x 70 cm.

Material collision # 1 [we are all star stuff] 2012. Metallic leather, carborundum sandpaper overall dimensions 303 x 233 x 12 cm.

Plate 05. Material Collision # 2 [mantle plume] 2012. Wax, sliced agate, timber, aluminium, carborundum sandpaper, plastic saw horse 180 x 100 x 70 cm.

Plate 06. Portrait of the Living and the Dead # 1- 4. 2010-2011. Silver leaf, aluminium leaf on carborundum sandpaper, 155 x 117 cm.

Footnotes 1. For further discussion on Caillois see Marina, Warner, The Writing of Stones, Cabinet, Issue 29 Sloth Spring 2008 http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/29/warner.php, Accessed 21 January 2013.

2. Artist notes provided to author, January 2013.

3. Kyla McFarlane, CCP Declares: At the Fair, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, 2012, p4.

FOR MORE WWW.ANDREWHAZEWINKEL.COM

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HOTEL OTHERWORLDLY The luxurious and the site specific.

ARCHITECTURE

By Neue Luxury

One does not often use the terms ‘guerilla’ and ‘anarchy’ to describe a luxury hotel experience. In much the same way you don’t typically imagine architects moving in secret, planning and scheming the reconfiguration of luxury hotel suites under the thin veil of a ‘do not disturb’ sign. But, Australian based architect Matthew Bird has never really viewed the world of luxury through a conventional lens.

Hotel Otherworldly (2012), Bird’s most recent guerilla style architectural event, witnessed the secret hotel room transformation within an existing iconic Melbourne hotel, unbeknown to both management and staff. Planned for more than a year and installed over a period of three intense days, the project draws comparison to the practice of ‘Secret Wall Tattooing’, where artists install hidden art behind existing hotel room paintings and mirrors.

Hotel Otherworldly, however, manifested within the decay of an existing 1970s landmark Melbourne hotel and is intended as a new leisure oasis for the experience-seeking traveller. Sharing a significant lineage from Conrad Hilton’s original ‘Hilton International’ hotel chain, namely the modernist incredibleness of Hilton Nile, Istanbul Hilton, Tel Aviv Hilton and Hilton Athens, which were built in privileged areas of historic tourist locations and to luxurious American standards. Each showcased American innovation and the power of the democratic west within an eastern exoticism.

Realised in the 1950s and 1960s, these buildings were seen as brilliant

American air-conditioned aliens touching down in major historic centres for the privileged tourist to gaze upon from the comfort of their streamlined armchairs. The interior spaces, guest rooms, lobby, restaurants and pools were never devoid of regional reference and were often ‘decorated’ in abstracted geometries that typified each location. The Hilton Nile, for example, was richly decorated in abstract, handcrafted murals of hieroglyphics.

Hotel Otherworldly’s location of choice was a much later and less exotic 1972 derivative. Built within affluent East Melbourne, the building takes on Conrad Hilton’s principles of a privileged position and multilevel proportions, but drastically falls short in all other aspects. The brown brick, balcony-less and generic ‘anywhere in the world’ interior is far from the exotic and innovative ideas of its founder. Working within an existing typical ‘king guest’ room,

Bird’s installation covers the existing décor with a repetitive trapezoid geometry, architect crafted in various locally sourced materials. The repetitive geometry plays homage to early European modernist facades but subverts bespoke décor with colour and texture that references indigenous flora, fauna, history and culture.

Native fauna references of furry wallabies and leaping crocodiles float within, folding and illuminating trapezoid wall artworks. The bedroom’s gold and green tones reflect the Australian floral emblem of golden wattle and the Aurora Australis (the southern lights), whilst subtly announcing a proud ‘Australian Made’ palette. Complimented by both blue and maroon the colours evoke Australia’s colonial and British royal family ties.

The bathroom installation is crafted from thousands of bubble wrap trapezoid forms articulating a surreal liquid soap foaming dispersion. The texture of the domestic shower curtain is reminiscent of the reptilian scales of the salt-water crocodile. Inventively, the bulk of materials used throughout the project were sourced from various DIY warehouse suppliers, along with low-cost construction materials such as gold floor underlay, plastic shade cloth and blue anti-slip rubber flooring. Further materials such as wallaby furs, automotive leather, brass washers, pink and clear bubble-wrap were all sourced from local manufactures as off-cuts. The low-cost materials luxuriously articulate throughout both the main bedroom and ensuite bathroom spaces.

A local effigy, or perhaps an effigy of a future traveller, was crafted to guide the process of cutting and weaving over 10,000 trapezoids with over 7000 cable ties.

Fast forward to the future and we will see Hotel Otherworldly continue with the redesign of other aspects of the Hotel building (with or without permission no doubt). With Bird’s vision of transforming the building’s exterior with a balcony installation facade and the roof with a new entertaining ‘pleasure’ deck & pool. Further interior public areas will also be modified with the same textural vision and detailing.

In discovering Bird’s vision for Hotel Otherworldly and in understanding the move back towards the considered and the bespoke, we can’t help but wonder if the next generation of experience-seeking luxury hotel pilgrims will witness a departure from a current homogenised brand-led genericism, in favour of a more overt, Conrad Hilton-esque sensibility of the alien, the luxurious and the site specific.

FOR MORE WWW.STUDIOBIRD.COM.AU

Photography: Peter Bennetts

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Neue Luxury, A global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

YOUNG GUNS

A conversation with Abel Gibson, the 2012 winner of the Young Gun of Wine Award.

WINE

By Neue Luxury

Rory Kent, Founder of Young Guns of Wine, spoke to Abel Gibson, the winner of the 2012 Young Gun of Wine Award, about taking risks, making luxurious wine and Mother Nature’s varied gifts.

RORY KENT: In 2009 you were working for Pete Schell of Spinifex, the year he won the Young Gun of Wine Award, and I understand it was Pete who encouraged you to go out on your own and start your own label.

Skip forward a few years – it’s 2012, you’ve had your products in the marketplace for little over a year and you’ve taken a clean sweep of the Young Gun of Wine Awards, picking up both the People’s Choice and the Young Gun of Wine. When you were starting on your journey with Ruggabellus, what did you imagine success to look like?

ABEL GIBSON: Definitely not that. I was going to be happy that the wines would get some intrigue from a couple of good palates and then try and sell through them throughout the year. That’s all I was hoping for. That’s all I imagined. I definitely couldn’t have seen this happening. All I had to do was just knuckle down and make sure I made wines that were true to myself and true to the Barossa, release them and see how they go, see what happens. It’s been incredible.

RK: What do you mean by being “true to the Barossa?”

AG: At the start of that decade, a lot of Barossa wines were made for the American market.

RK: You’re talking about Parkerization: those big, extracted, heavily oaked, high alcohol wines where more-is-more.

AG: Yes, Parkerization. This Parker phenomenon really did dominate the Barossa from the early to mid ‘90s. I saw it happening before my eyes and was frustrated! I went to the U.S. in 2007 promoting my father’s wines.

We met buyers who were frustrated too with these big styles of wines. But they kept ordering them because they had demand from their customers.

RK: Does this mean your motivation to start Ruggabellus was a reaction to the Parker effect of wines from the Barossa?

AG: It definitely played a big part. I just wanted to create something that would be enduring, that wasn’t a reaction to consumerism, to achieve the

highest level of quality I could. I wasn’t going to do it until I owned my own vineyard, but Pete Schell said to me, ‘there are plenty of good vineyards in the Barossa you can source fruit from, and just have a go. Go and ask them and see if you can buy a bit of fruit and have a go’.

RK: Starting Ruggabellus, was it a big risk?

AG: Yeah, definitely. We lived, Emma (my partner) and I, pretty frugally for a few years there, and we still do by the way! Hopefully next year we’ll hit the sweet spot that I’m sort of aiming for. I tried to minimize risk by living frugally, and we were both prepared to do that, so I’m very lucky to have Emma’s support. She could see the passion. She’s in the arts and really loves passion and respects it. Of course, we’ve had to tightly control our costs.

I’m out there picking the fruit myself. I do hire other pickers because I can’t pick it all physically, but I’m out there with them every time, which suits our crafted approach perfectly. By nature, wine should be made by hand. When I’m in the vineyard picking the grapes myself, I can monitor what is picked to make sure we get the bunches in at the right moment because the sweet spots vary throughout the vineyard.

RK: Luxury is an ongoing pursuit and how it is measured changes over time.

Therefore defining a new luxury in wine is going to involve change. With any change comes risk. In the struggle between art and science, what is your philosophy or relationship with risk in making your wines? When do you allow modern practices to protect the ferment or wine from making a wrong turn?

AG: I suppose I respect both the art and science in winemaking.

Having started making my own wine in the backyard, it’s been some

AUSTRALIAN HIGH COMMISSION Design history in the making.

LIMITED-EDITION

By Ray Edgar

THE PAST NEVER LOOKED SO EXOTIC. BROACHED COMMISSIONS CREATES BESPOKE OBJECTS BY MARRYING AUTHENTICITY AND SPECTACLE. The sheiks are coming. The gossip whips through Dubai’s design fair like a desert sandstorm. Each one of the 30 international design galleries knows its fortunes could change instantly. Entire stock could be bought in one beneficent gesture. Better still, patronage and commissions could flow like gulf oil.

Amid the contemporary furniture design collections, the star of the Design Days Dubai show is Lucy McRae’s exotic Prickly lamp. Resembling an unholy union of alien tripod and Australian echidna the lamp is constructed from a quarter-of-a-million colour-graded toothpicks. Nearby stands Trent Jansen’s equally strange Briggs Family Tea Service made from wallaby pelt, bull kelp and slip-cast porcelain. Steeped in Australia’s colonial history these works represent Broached Commissions.

One of Australian design’s most ambitious ventures, Broached Commissions is unusual in curating and commissioning its own designs.

Using a core group of designers – Trent Jansen, Adam Goodrum and Charles

Photo: Lucy McRae

Neue Luxury, No.1, The launch issue.

what of a necessity that I take a more natural or minimalist approach to winemaking. As it so happens, natural wines are going to be more elegant because you have to pick the grapes with less ripeness to ensure the sugar and alcohol levels do not inhibit the ability of indigenous yeast to do their work in the ferment. The biggest challenge, the biggest issue is the sun, and things getting too much sugar too quickly. In this example, I minimize risk by picking earlier.

On the winemaking side, there has been a process of experimentation.

Having said this, I was confident that the quality of the fruit would allow me to do things such as include stems with the ferment without the end wine being too confronting or unbalanced.

It’s just sort of the process of elimination, trying to trust my feeling of where I thought things would work and where they wouldn’t. But I think the biggest risk was those bottles. They’re not the best looking bottle out there. There was a philosophy behind the choice of our bottles that I had to make the call on. Pete Schell’s expression is, “grab your balls, hang on, and see what happens.” We did that. I kind of had to, everything that I had done before and after that had to honour our philosophy of creating something to endure. So, really, I didn’t have a choice. It was kind of nice to be guided by our philosophy, so that sort of removed the risk a little for me. It put the risk in perspective.

RK: Without the risk, you’d end up making pretty boring wines.

AG: Yes, you would.

RK: Where would you be if you didn’t take those risks?

AG: Would I be making wine? I don’t think so. I don’t think you can make wine without risk. I’m quite prepared to sell stuff off, give it away, put it down the drain, whatever, if it doesn’t fit.

RK: Your approach is, less is more.

AG: Absolutely.

RK: You use inexpensive lightweight bottles in your packaging. Obviously, that’s with your environmentally friendly mindset. Were you tempted to use heavier bottles, which might be considered more fashionable for luxurious wines?

AG: I was definitely tempted. I think wine is a beautiful thing, and I would love the package to be innately beautiful as well. At the moment, I don’t think these bottles are beautiful, they may become in the future.

It will be interesting to see how the perception changes.

I was interested in your comment that luxury equals change and risk.

It’s almost like it’s pre-programmed into the planet that things change.

We’ll be fashionable for ‘X’ amount of years, and that will be a small amount I suspect and then it will change. I’m really trying to fight that somehow.

At the moment, I’m really keen to consolidate what we’ve started. I probably didn’t expect to be in this position this soon. I thought we’d still be working hard to get awareness of our wines for probably four or five years, and then we’d work hard on consolidating it but it’s happened in two years, and I’m really keen to catch up. Yeah, really consolidation is where it’s going and the risk associated with that is that it doesn’t become fun anymore.

The beauty of wine is that it varies from year to year with the seasons, it’s intimately connected in the seasons. I get change, I get natural change, every year, natural variation, which is a beautiful thing. So I’m hoping that will cater to that necessity for people that need change. So hopefully they see it just from what Mother Nature gives us every year.

Max Allen, Judge of the Young Gun of Wine Award said, “You see, wine’s not just about what’s in the glass. It’s why we ultimately chose Abel Gibson as our 2012 Young Gun of Wine. Yes, his wines are stunning, but it’s the whole package, from the lightweight bottles to the minimalist labels, sophisticated blending and maturation philosophy and sense of tradition that sets Gibson apart.”

Photography: Neue Luxury

FOR MORE WWW.YOUNGGUNOFWINE.COM WWW.RUGGABELLUS.COM.AU

Wilson – Lou Weis’s Melbourne-based venture is an exercise in design history. It explores how ideas arrived and evolved in Australia.

“It’s about deepening the narrative of place,” he says.

Each Broached Commission series examines a specific historical period.

Where Broached Colonial explores the collision of European settlement with aboriginal society and Australia’s flora and fauna, Broached East investigates the influence of Asian migration on Australia in the wake of the 1850s gold rush.

“History is the glue for us,” says Weis, creative director of Broached Commissions. “I don’t think you can be new and interesting unless you understand what the old is.”

Weis likens his venture to haute couture. “A mixture of art and design installation, it’s the bleeding edge of the design market,” he says. As such these highly experimental pieces (with just two to eight made of each), come with a premium price tag, ranging from $8,000 to $45,000.

Weis’s invitation to Dubai is not just to spruik his limited-edition commissions, but host a panel on ‘authenticity in design’. In the wake of Dubai’s massive development over the past decade the cultural desert has been transformed into an oasis of art and design. It’s the latest economic powerhouse that hopes to define itself not just through primary-industry commodities but sophisticated culture.

“It’s frontier land stuff,” says Weis, who sees parallels across the centuries.

Today it’s oil. In 19th century Australia it was gold.

Just as Dubai has thrust itself in the global marketplace as a travel hub between east and west, during the 19th century Australia’s gold rush brought about the greatest migration seen up until that point. It saw Chinese prospectors directly engage with locals, the emergence of mass media and the spread of the Japanese aesthetic. Then as now a fear existed that internationalisation would ruin the local artisan base.

“The dilemma starts during the high point of the industrial revolution in the mid-19th century,” says Weis. “[In England] you’ve got the 19th century Arts and Crafts movement saying ‘if we lose all of our making capabilities then what makes us distinct disappears, and basically you’re just in a sea of ubiquitous industrialised product’.”

English designer William Morris most vocally perceived industrialisation as a threat to integrity and honour. Indeed Dubai and the Emirates face the prospect of a similar fate, according to Weis.

“I would suggest they ought to develop the narrative of what gets made there, look more deeply into the Pan Arabic aesthetic and draw on the most

Photo: Scottie Cameron

Photo: Scottie Cameron

beautiful elements of it,” he says.

Perhaps unwisely Weis attempted to draw the sheiks into an enthusiastic discussion on comparative design histories. “I pitched it wrongly,” he concedes with a chuckle. “They do not have time for a conversation, but can only stop for literally a minute or two and then move on.” The sheiks, he says, “respond less to the historical spiel and more to the forms and the textures of the materials”. McRae’s Prickly Lamp sells to an advertising creative instead.

Indeed it’s creatives and entrepreneurs who react most positively to the Broached series. In part Weis attributes this to his collections’ emphasis on narratives.

“Entrepreneurs have built their lives around a story that they believed in, or they’re involved in venture capital and they help build that narrative with that person from the ground up,” he explains.

Designer Trent Jansen has produced work for both Broached Commissions.

His Briggs Family Tea Service took its inspiration from the marriage between a European whaler and a Tasmanian aboriginal woman. Jansen’s Chinaman’s File Rocking Chair responds to the stories of the roughly 16,500 Chinese prospectors who arrived in Australia and walked 480 km to the goldfields.

Both were created using traditional craftspeople and artisanal techniques in Australia and China.

Conceptual thinking and authentic artisanal practices are essential to Broached Commissions says Weis. “If we work internationally we have to work with local curators and local makers and at least one local designer to be authentic,” he says.

Hence the series involves designers from the culture that influenced the Commission. Broached Colonial commissioned English designer Max Lamb, while Broached East commissioned Chinese designer Naihan Li and Japanese designers Azuma Makoto and Keiji Ashizawa.

“Design is a set of incremental improvements to the functionality and beauty of the things we use in our daily lives,” says Weis. “I want to go back and look at how those ideas arrived here.”

If the rise of international design fairs, specialist galleries and million dollar auction prices for the likes of Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge suggest a renewed appreciation for design, Weis believes a passion for limited-edition design exists among every generation.

The appeal of the limited edition lies in being the prototype of great thinking, says Weis: “It’s about being close to the origins of the brilliant thinking that resulted in something that then became ubiquitous. The idea of the limited-edition design goes back to where artisanal practices begin.”

“A certain part of the population understands that is what contemporary luxury is. That the time has been taken to investigate, because time is a big part of contemporary luxury. It’s not just the product, it’s the investment of time and research.”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

9

PHILLIP ADAMS BALLETLAB Heightening the human experience through collaboration.

Photography: Peter Bennetts

PERFORMANCE

By Mieke Chew

Phillip Adams BalletLab is a company defined by collaboration, not because its collaborators make the work, but because the collaboration is the work.

It is a site for expression and experimentation, for the unheard and the unspeakable. The company’s practice enacts a dialogue between artists, ideas, research, sound, movement, fashion and architecture. A constant process which has no beginning and no end.

Fittingly no single voice, phrase, or text would be adequate for discussing Phillip Adams BalletLab. To be part of the process one needs to join the conversation. Seeking out perspectives from Artistic Director Phillip Adams, composer Garth Paine, designer Susan Dimasi and architect Beth Weinstein, each offered an insight into their collaborative utopia; a working space that spans from the Arizona desert to the dance studio.

PHILLIP ADAMS Whenever words are unable to express our innermost feelings, the body takes over. For me, dance is sustainable because it accesses the sensuous and corporeal. This is an approach to the world that I think is neglected in day-to-day life, which is filled with images and language rather than touch and movement. Moreover, dance can be regarded as a successful model for global action. Dance is created through international networking, mobile protagonists and flexible production methods. Collective movements possess a political potential, a force that can shape society. My practice is often categorised as ‘other’, an assumption that I’m quite comfortable with, as it allows the utopian potential of dance to be put up for discussion.

I choreograph and present dancers in extreme states, standing on the fringe. I experiment with ideas of hysteria, alienation, and empathy. The luxury of this experiment is the notion of collaboration. Dance is inherently interdisciplinary and transcultural. It’s an art form that allows an artistic mode of research, one where the disciplines of dance, music, and science work together to pursue a social and artistic phenomenon. In my choreography, ritual is merged with synchronized fictional accidents and folkloric encounters.

This is the utopian ideal, one of the uncanny and the experimental. With Phillip Adams BalletLab, I seek new kinds of participation, to create a space where alternative aesthetic strategies can be tested and fucked with. At the core of this pursuit is always my definition of choreography: Choreography is a preoccupation with exploring the organisation of the body in space, and how its architecture is shared with others. From this definition I suggest a narrative striptease, one that tantalises audiences with a promise of access.

Most often I struggle to conform. I have my own set of rules and they are continually being broken and this is a luxury unto itself. Phillip Adams BalletLab constantly reworks recipes for art that mix the old with the new and experiment to deliver an experience rather than a common offering.

Most of the time my work is trying to articulate the inexpressible, and this unknown language is experienced as an elegant eruption of avant-garde expression. Where this creative trigger point finds release is in the studio.

I consider the studio to be a holy place for choreographic practice. I, along with the dancers and collaborators, discover things about each other as well as about our creative expression. Working together we are a library full of spines (excuse the pun), with titles that provide our audience with visions of the everyday and tomorrow. We offer our understanding of dance up for debate to our audience, as much as we do to our dancers in the studio.

10

GARTH PAINE The final piece of the jigsaw in my collaboration with Phillip Adams BalletLab was to travel to a structure in the desert in Arizona. This structure is called the Integratron and was built by a man who claimed to have been abducted by aliens. According to him, aliens taught him how to build a machine to rejuvenate living human tissue and sent him back to earth to build it. The Integratron is this machine. He died before he finished it so unfortunately there’s no eternal life yet, but this theory and history is why we went there together.

We put loud speakers all the way around the building and then played white noise through them, effectively creating an even white noise field inside the building. Then Phillip danced and moved through that field and I put a special microphone in the centre that records a 360 degree sphere of sound.

The idea is that what I recorded and then played back into the loud speakers is a shadow in the noise field of where his body was. When I recreate that back into the loudspeaker during the performance work, what the audience should

perceive right at the end is that there’s still movement going on around them but the dancers have all vanished.

It’s absolutely critical to have an organic element in my compositions, otherwise electronic sound feels very abstract and detached from human experience. What we are making together is about heightening and accentuating human experience. Giving us an anchor to reflect upon things, about the way we construct our lives and the relationship to our environment.

The reason I work in a studio with the dancers, is that in the past I approached composing music for dance by going to the studio seeing runs, and then going away, composing and bringing what I’ve created back. But it doesn’t matter how much effort you put into it, doing it this way is always just bringing two separate elements together. The outcome is really tightly bound and hopefully you can perceive this when you see it. One couldn’t exist without the other, they are in conversation all the time.

SUSAN DIMASI With my design process there is no hard start and finish and I think that’s really inherent to Phillip’s choreography. There’s no set choreography at any point. When I go to rehearsals I’m always looking for conceptual parallels

between the ideas that Phillip, Brooke, Garth and Matthew are exploring and the ideas that I’m exploring; therein lies the space where I can create something that is an extension of what I do and not a response to what they do. We’re finding and negotiating these parallels all the time.

A very specific parallel with what I’m doing right now is that I’m experimenting, exploring, and proposing accumulative systems.

An accumulative system is something that doesn’t have a specific finish point and that the audience, or the wearer in my case, is a part of the design process.

That is, I think, a very specific parallel with And All Things Return to Nature Tomorrow, where the audiences will be taken on a journey and assimilated into the product. I essentially propose that my clients become a part of the journey, not just get an artefact of it.

Phillip came to me with a very specific briefing that he didn’t want costumes, he wanted fashion, which is really exciting because I don’t see myself as a costume designer. If I were to approach that brief really simplistically I would create a collection and say, “here’s five pieces, or here’s three pieces. Take your pick.” But in practice it’s a lot trickier.

If one were to create costumes for a ballet or a more traditional dance performance, then one would think about movement in terms of the garment needing to stretch and not tear and of the costumes being able to withstand and enhance movement. But the approach that I’m taking to this is absolutely counter to that traditional point.

Because I run an artisan studio and I literally handle every piece, there are moments in the construction process where I see beautiful shapes and forms but they’re only a transitory moment before the garment’s finished.

This is when a garment is being made for a woman to wear down the street, so there will be certain seams or spaces that I have to close for the constraints of practicality and modesty. Working with Phillip Adams BalletLab allows me to leave certain spaces open and to finish forms at different points.

It’s not just appropriate to do this in a dance context, but highly suitable.

In my current project, Bleed, I have hand marked garments with texta, with the proposition that when the wearer wears this hand marked garment it will bleed through contact with body heat and through application of perfume and deodorant. That’s a slow and subtle process in terms of being in a private wardrobe but in a dance context that’s something I can really exaggerate through the fact that the dancer is going to get really hot and sweat in the garment. It’s an ability to observe it on a much faster cycle of cause and effect. In a traditional wearer sense, tearing would be considered a fault. I see it as an opportunity for the wearer to continue the design process.

I’m really interested to see how garments will tear and stress in the more intense wearing environment of dance and then trying to take those propositions back into the studio.

I’m specifically interested in how movement will activate the clothing not the other way around. The clothing is not there to enhance, it’s not made out of Lycra and I’m not employing specific ballet costume techniques. Rather I’m interested in the ways that movement will tear the clothing to pieces and open up spaces that would otherwise be closed.

MATTHEW BIRD I’m thankful that my world has intersected with Phillip Adams. He is an extraordinarily creative and visionary choreographer, a man that pushes the envelope of dance through experiment and an interdisciplinary collaborative approach. Phillip invited me to design the performance environment of BalletLab’s 2011 project Aviary, specifically crafting two

bower nests and backdrop for the third act ‘Paradis’. Throughout this project development there was a professional ‘click’ between the two of us, allowing for the possibility to ask and materialise the ‘what-if’ aspirations. This interaction has certainly supported the creative outcomes of our current collaboration TOMORROW and no doubt strengthening and broadening our creative and professional ambitions.

We are an uncanny pair of collaborators working and researching worldwide around the notions of experimentation in our practices. We research and utilise guerilla techniques in the most unlikely places from the Mojave Desert CA USA Bunnings Hardware to valleys and hillsides in Luxembourg.

These experiences shaped the direction of Tomorrow, importantly discovering the success of utopian structures that collectively support the construction phase in the performative installation.

The collaborative nature that transforms our work from a top-down approach is a ‘community of ideas’, allowing us a team to iteratively develop projects into an ‘architectural performance’ outcome. As a group we spent hours nurturing a participatory way of constructing a utopian space interconnected with further ideas of vibrational energy, alien encounters and abduction. It’s the ultimate research experiment: we travelled and absorbed ideas beyond our expectations. We have collectively tested new experimental ideas of space, material and experience within a performative arena. Ultimately I believe we have developed a successful interdisciplinary framework to cultivate intriguing intersections of architectural space with performance. In our next outing, we will rethink the conceptual house of tomorrow; a performative-architecture structure that demonstrates the form, material and experience of a futuristic domestic environment based on the Monsanto House of the Future 1957 in Disneyland 1957.

FOR MORE WWW.BALLETLAB.COM

Neue Luxury, A global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

VUE DE MONDE The liberation of memories.

DINING

By Neue Luxury

NEUE LUXURY SPOKE TO CHEF SHANNON BENNETT AND ARCHITECT CALLUM FRASER ABOUT CREATING A SENSORY DINING EXPERIENCE. Over the past decade Australia’s dining landscape has changed beyond the imaginable. Composed as a perfect gastronomic double helix of sorts with adventurous, educated and demanding consumers forming one structure while intelligent, entrepreneurial and inventive Chefs provide a dynamic counterpoint. Binding the two are growing teams of sensory nucleotides such as architects, advertisers and marketers. Neue Luxury spoke to Chef Shannon Bennett (Vue de Monde) and Architect, Callum Fraser (Elenberg Fraser) about the evolution of Vue de Monde and their new theatre of experience. To borrow from the French, it would appear that ‘bonne renommée vaut mieux que ceinture dorée’ (A good reputation is better than riches).

NEUE LUXURY: Let’s rewind a little to begin with, how did the relationship between yourself and Callum begin?

SHANNON BENNETT: Callum was dining in Vue de Monde and came up and asked for a discount. No, Callum came in and dined. That’s how

Photography: Neue Luxury

it all started.

NL: Obviously the vision for Vue de Monde has changed over the years, so what was the brief for this particular site?

SB: I started out by asking Callum to visit, that we have something that could be very tacky. The view is something that makes it pretty tacky, but at the same time, it’s one of the reasons we wanted to be here. We wanted Vue de Monde to finally have a view. The next phase of that would be looking backwards actually, looking back in history.

NL: Obviously for you Callum, the notion of site and place was important?

CALLUM FRASER: This is obviously the second restaurant with Shannon.

We’ve also completed a couple of cafes over the past ten years. We’ve come to an understanding about what Vue de Monde is and how it’s much bigger that just a restaurant. This place is an idea. It has many connotations and many aspects to it, which are difficult to define. The engagement with contemporary art, with single sourced very specific suppliers. The instances of how this restaurant comes together in an atmospheric sense is very different to most other restaurants where you know exactly what you’re going to get when you turn up at the door. The idea at Vue de Monde is sort of the reverse if you like. You never get the same thing. You always have a new and different experience. So we came to the project with that understanding. It seemed to me that this is a logical destination for the restaurant as its name means ‘view of the world’.

NL: How did you reconcile the ideas found within the food, the place and the architecture?

CF: Well, place is inescapable in all things. When Shannon talks about the history of food and dining and doing new things with old techniques, I think we tried to find a similar role for the architecture within the restaurant.

The first thing we came to was exactly where we are, which is pre-civilization.

The Yarra River is a kind of logjam directly out the front of the restaurant, which separates the salt water and the fresh water. It’s a very important spiritual place and it’s a place people come to catch their food, to eat their food, to celebrate together. We try to bring something of that back in a contemporary sense. Using what it was in pre-civilization to try to liberate the themes of the restaurant today. That’s why it looks very closely at the river estuary, its materiality and its ritual. For instance, when we come up through the lifts and break through the reeds we appear at the billabong and then move through to the grasslands. It puts together an understanding of landscape and place within an orchestrated, ritualistic composition.

NL: A theatre of experience?

CF: Well, that, and how you take someone through that journey. It’s one thing from an architectural point of view to try and imbue those notions, to make them sometimes visible and sometimes not. It’s one thing to have architectural intent and then another to transfer that intent down to the customer.

SB: It’s important that we don’t force feed people knowledge. The architecture always had an intent. It has several different layers to it and we wanted customers to discover it. If they want more knowledge behind the scenes all our team are trained extensively. I remember in the final presentation before we went into construction drawings our management team had a presentation within Callum’s office. It was important for the whole team to be there so they knew the philosophy from day one.

NL: So it’s really about a serendipitous exchange of knowledge?

Photography: Harvard Wang

Neue Luxury, No.1, The launch issue.

Photography: Harvard Wang

Photography: Neue Luxury

SB: Well, for the first time you come here, I think it’s all about the view.

And when you come here for the second time, it’s all about what’s inside.

The first time, you don’t want to overwhelm people. They come here, they enjoy themselves, they may only come for the bar. They only see a small part of what we’ve done. You just need them to be consumed by the whole atmosphere.

CF: The other thing that we’re all conscious of, is a lot of recent restaurant design has put design in the way of the experience and we really tried to avoid that and take quite a different path. Our cue was actually the sensory nature of the food that’s presented and the way that it affects the palate. It’s very interactive and engaging with the chefs delivering the food and explaining what they’re doing and where things are from. But overwhelmingly for me, what was at stake was this idea of sensory dining. So if the restaurant could actually

amplify these ideas, really make you ready to receive the message of the food, then it would complement what the restaurant is rather than getting in the way of the restaurant.

NL: So did the menu change along the way as a result of the design process?

SB: The menu continuously changed throughout the process. Like the design of the table changed from saying, ‘No, actually, we’ve got something there that we may want to do in the future. Where we may plate a dessert straight up on the table.’

NL: It sounds like there’s a back-story there?

SB: There’s many little things like that, but we also wanted the dining room and the bar to have a sense of heritage without having to force it on people.

If a customer wanted to inquire about a detail we’re more than happy to sit there for 15 minutes and tell them about our ideas. The design is being created in such a way that we can actually add to what we’re doing over time.

NL: Have you witnessed a change in the customer in recent times?

In terms of their level of knowledge and what they’re expecting from a dining experience?

SB: I think every time you dine in a restaurant, your second experience is always going to be much more difficult to meet expectations.

NL: Like a second date?

SB: A second date with a supermodel.

NL: Luxury has always had a relationship to materials and I’m curious about how the curation of materials, whether it be the raw brick or the kangaroo hide or…

CF: Or the Chesterfield latex…

NL: Or the Chesterfield latex… How have you managed that relationship between materials?

CF: When I think about what luxury is personally, it’s actually about the experience and interaction. I think we’re trying to amplify the sensory nature of design and the dining experience.

SB: I think the other component to luxury is uniqueness. Luxury no longer is something materialistic. It’s got to be something that’s completely unique.

We have tried to achieve that uniqueness through design materiality. Our mission statement for Vue de Monde is to always try to create something you cannot create at home. That’s a continuously shifting bar, and design is something, like using kangaroo leather, that creates a sense of luxury.

NL: It sounds like you are liberating the fine dining experience from its historical shackles.

SB: In a sense it is. Fine dining and the basics of fine dining have not changed in so long, I think it’s about time it does. Why do we really have a tablecloth?

In certain eras there were practical reasons for having table clothes, tables were used in different functions. Obviously they’re all scuffed and marked up and used for one purpose during the day, and then at night they were used for dining. We don’t need that anymore. We’ve got people who care for our tables, boot makers who make and service our tables for us. They make our tables feel organic and luxurious. You look at them and you say, ‘What are they?

Why isn’t the leather just one stretched piece across the top? There were these little curious design problems that in the end revealed a unique set of luxuries.

NL: What about the notion of time? Obviously, time plays a critical factor in the reading and the delivery of the experience. How have you managed that notion of time in the restaurant?

SB: We want you to be lost in the moment and to not think about time.

NL: Was that something for you Callum in terms of the narrative and design of the space?

CF: Yes, definitely. I think the restaurant is not a single, one-shot gesture.

It’s actually something that layers up and is activated by the people within it.

Upon arrival, you’re taken through a very arranged ritual to get to your table, it doesn’t stop when you actually arrive there. Things unfold around you, and the room takes on many different aspects throughout the night, which is the great thing about restaurants, isn’t it? Pure phenomenon. Pure ritual.

NL: Did you work on the experience together?

SB: When Callum designed the last space, we always had that in mind.

NL: So it’s almost an accumulative process, the relationship between architect and restaurateur?

SB: Absolutely. That’s why it baffles me when a restaurateur will use a different architect on each new restaurant that they establish. Your architect can only progress with the knowledge they have accumulated over time. It should be an evolution.

NL: Almost episodal?

SB: Pretty much – you don’t know where the future lies, but you look at where we are now and I always felt that the space Vue de Monde occupied in Normanby Chambers was only ever a stepping-stone. It was available at the time and it served the purpose. But we always fought against a lack of space in that design.

CF: I think that’s key, because when people work together in a serial relationship, it can sort of go two ways. They can either predict what they think the other person is actually after, continuing the same kind of language

and story, or it can be a genuine interaction. I think with this place, it required a suspension of disbelief to begin with because when you arrived in the old observation deck, it was a nightmare. There are many stories of restaurants going to the tops of the world and become tacky, touristy experiences.

So having suspended belief actually gave us the opportunity to reinvent something from first principles. I think what you see here in the restaurant is unlike any other restaurant. It’s a brand new palette and completely different method of service and delivery. The restaurant’s been thinned out to 48 seats.

It got smaller, not bigger. There are a whole series of crazy inversions.

NL: Shannon, in terms of the evolution of Vue de Monde is it as important to discard experiences as much as it is to accumulate them?

SB: There are layers of the old restaurant in here, and that’s one of the things about time, you just learn. We made mistakes in the last design and there are mistakes you live with, but at the time they weren’t mistakes. It’s very hard to give an architect a brief, everything is always related back to produce, plates, screaming at other chefs.

NL: You obviously really enjoy the process though?

SB: I enjoy the learning process. It’s always a new experience, designing something. And you get better at certain points of it, but one thing about design is it never stops. There’s always something new, something new to learn. It can get very, very addictive. Vue de Monde will continue to evolve.

There will be elements that will become stronger the longer we stay here and some parts of the design will no doubt speak to us and say, ‘don’t ever change’.

NL: What is it that you hope people will take away from an exchange with Vue de Monde?

SB: Well, hopefully they get the story. In the end ignore the view, look at what’s on the table, look at what’s around you and ask yourself if you get a sense of place and occasion, of being in Melbourne. If you don’t get that then it’s back to the drawing board.

FOR MORE WWW.VUEDEMONDE.COM.AU WWW.ELENBERGFRASER.COM.AU

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MATERIALBYPRODUCT A luxury goods house for the 21st century.

FASHION

By Paola Di Trocchio

Susan Dimasi established luxury fashion house Materialbyproduct (MBP) in 2004 as a means to invent future systems for fashion design. These systems are shaped by the Australian context, as well as the fashion industry’s needs for smaller production runs within less physical space. She has refined her craft with the simplest of tools – her own two hands and her active mind over an extended period of contemplation, training, trial, reinvention and review.

The byproducts of her system are garments within her Artisan collection which she sells to her influential clients. Soon Dimasi will introduce a diffusion line titled Production and has contracted Ryan Euinton as Designer and Technical Director to develop the translation.

In October 2012, Susan Dimasi, Ryan Euinton and NGV curator Paola Di Trocchio met to study three garments at the National Gallery of Victoria.

These garments recorded technological innovations in garment construction over three centuries and have informed the invention and influence of MBP. The 18th century open robe and petticoat selected by Dimasi recorded the technological inventions derived from the quest for beauty in its rich textile.

The soft pastel bodice and skirt by Chloe from the 1970s interpreted the 18th century floral motif through twentieth century modes of mechanical reproduction with both beauty and compromise, while the 1996 Martin Margiela dress reinvented elaborate handmade clothing through the photographic image.

In the fashion and textiles viewing room Dimasi, Euinton and Di Trocchio

discussed these three pieces and how Production will continue the dialogue of future invention.

PAOLA DI TROCCHIO: Are the garments as you remember them?

SUSAN DIMASI: They are like old friends. I hope my garments are like old friends. I always prefer when people tell me that they have lived with one of my pieces and its been part of their life’s journey.

PD: But they have also been part of your life’s journey in a way because you met them whilst you were working here at the NGV. SD: Yes, working here at the NGV was my quiet internship that I had with many European design houses through the ages. So it’s actually quite moving to be back. What I loved so much about spending time with these pieces and why I wanted Ryan to see them is because they talk to you from the inside

Photography: Neue Luxury

out. Through spending many many hours in the quiet space of storage I felt like I could travel back in time and re-engage in a set of decisions that have been made to come to this outcome. Some are decisions I agreed with and others I didn’t agree with. Some were logical and process driven and some were illogical.

PD: So did you choose these pieces to show Ryan because you felt they were logical?

SD: Not necessarily. I think a successful piece has both logic and emotion.

It’s not purely one or the other. Take this exquisite 18th century gown for example, the logic behind creating these amazing jacquard fabrics was finding a mechanical way to embroider. So the jacquard loom was invented. It was considered the first computer, so there was a logic. But it was also expensive and time consuming. So why? For beauty. The drive is completely poetic.

The drive is one for beauty. The outcomes are extraordinary. But the drive was for beauty not for the first computer so that’s in a way illogical. I find myself often in the same quandary. This is where Ryan comes in. Currently I have this concept of wanting to scan my garment half way through the artisan process to create something which is less

hands-on and more mechanised. But our initial interventions are revealing that it’s not necessarily going to be hands-free and non-emotional, but rather a highly emotional way of approaching the idea of scaling production.

PD: Designers often create diffusion lines with economic motivations, but from what I know about Production I’m wondering if that’s actually part of it?

SD: Production is not supposed to just be a cheaper version of what I do as an artisan. It still has to have poetry, integrity and beauty and has to be a really fulfilling experience. I talk about it as a diffusion line as a way to position it in the fashion landscape, but the word diffusion suggests that you are diluting what you do here in the ivory tower, whereas that’s never been my view. The diffusion line has to be an altered experience, but still a legitimate experience. It’s about reaching the most people to achieve real cultural change. That’s important to me. Just looking across these garments helps to explain it. Life in this 18th century dress would be a very different life to life in that 1970s Chloe or that 1990s Margiela. In the 18th century dress you needed someone to dress you, so the way you physically felt, emotionally felt, the way you moved through life and inhabited the world,

where you went, how you got there and your experience of life was utterly different.

PD: So how will all these processes of invention inform Production?

SD: Ryan and I have been having a conversation about how to digitise and mechanise what I do as an artisan. The aspiration is to make a handsfree garment.

RYAN EUINTON: I think the reason why Sue brought me into the house is that I spent 5 or 6 years with Materialbyproduct and then some time outside working in a much different production environment. So to me it was actually quite a simple and a logical marriage. Having been in the MBP world and then out of it, how do I come back into it?

SD: I know that people have found it disconcerting when I’ve said I’m going to bring a designer into Production, because in the “cult of the genius” designer it would stand to reason that I’m supposed to pretend that I design everything. But Ryan’s not going to go away and draw a bunch of dresses and come back to me and say, what do you think? Ryan will be engaged in the process alongside of me and his role is to translate that artisan process into a digital, mechanical means of production. It’s a highly technical role, as much

as it is a creative responsibility and the axis that Materialbyproduct has always pivoted on, is that technique and creativity are not separate things.

RE: In Susan’s work there are inherencies that we can’t discard. There are so many different aspects to the product that it’s actually impossible to send something off to a factory and have it produced. It’s not physically possible.

SD: I think this Margiela piece is brilliant. Margiela takes a 1920s sequin dress, photographs it, prints it out and reproduces it in multiples. So like Duchamp, he’s playing with the tension between the original and the reproduction.

But he does it in the 90s which is deeply seeded in grunge culture. In a culture of jeans and t-shirts he produces the dress like a t-shirt, which is a masterstroke.

This relates strongly and philosophically to what I do in MBP in that it’s recycling. He’s recycling a sequin dress in an intellectual, funny and poetic way.

His sense of humour is in the grey panels. The 2D photograph does not wrap around the side of the body, so Margiela fills in the negative spaces with grey panels which I think is brilliant.

RE: Would you also say it’s an honesty?

SD: Yes, and it’s a bit blunt. By the time we get to this point in culture, we consume images which are 2D but the fact is our bodies are still 3D and I love the way he highlights that here. We are still physical entities and this grey space to me acknowledges that we can’t get away from that.

PD: So will Production influence Artisan?

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SD: Production will have a conversation with Artisan. It is looking to intervene and document essential data from Artisan and extrude it in a new way. We’re taking an artisan garment when it’s still flat and we’re scanning it with the view of then printing it out and machine embroidering the prints together to create a garment. It’s a homage to this Margiela in a way.

RE: In some ways it is the idea of the facsimile, but it also has to do more than that because it has to fit and accommodate sizing ranges. The points where the scans are joined through mechanical embroidery will become our sizing ranges.

SD: That machine embroidery is really what relates to the Chloe here. While this Chloe is machine embroidered, it’s also very delicate. The key difference between this 18th century gown and the Chloe is that the Chloe cuts through flowers. That’s an economic decision. The difference between Artisan and Production is in cutting through the flowers. You never cut through flowers in couture. It’s a sin. There is also a sense of the hand in the application of the hooks and eyes in this garment. This is not considered economically appropriate for reproduction. This is a particular area of development for Ryan and I because at the artisanal level I still put on all my hooks and eyes by hand and it’s very time consuming. Whether you put three hooks and eyes on or five really impacts the final price.

PD: But it also impacts the way that it sits on the body. It’s either held properly or there’s a slight compromise.

SD: This is why I was talking about this Margiela garment. It’s like a t-shirt.

There are no fastenings on it. You literally just pull it over the head. From an execution point of view, the construction of it is dead simple.

From a wearability point of view, it’s dead simple. But as soon as you start putting hooks and eyes in garments, the economy changes. This is a real area of study and development for Ryan and I. How to translate what I do as an artisan into Production and how to develop the mechanics of the garment so that the experience of getting in and out of a garment is utterly satisfying.

RE: Generally it’s not the designer who designs the mechanics of the garment, but the factory.

SD: This is why Ryan’s role is so pivotal. He has to make sure that that’s a good experience, and make sure that it’s the best experience by inventing it.

Neue Luxury, A global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

Photography: 3 Deep

GARMENT CHOREOGRAPHY FASHION

By Paola Di Trocchio

The positioning of Materialbyproduct’s fastenings shape the wearer’s experience of the garment. Not just in how they secure the garment to the body, but also in the movements that they lead the body to make. Dresses slip over the head and fastenings which adhere to either side waist, force a two way twist from side to side as one fastening is secured and then the other. On jackets, internal cords are carefully negotiated and pockets are positioned back and down to encourage an upright posture. Dimasi designs this experience to which there is a natural choreography of twists and turns as slippery silks are anchored with gentle rhythms to bare skin. Dimasi has recently commissioned choreographer Shelley Lasica to develop a piece for the presentation of MBP’s Bleed project presented in 3 parts. Over a meal, Dimasi and Lasica reflected on the rehearsal and performance of the collection, their shared experiences as artisans and the years they spent learning and developing their crafts.

PAOLA DI TROCCHIO: Susan, how did you train to become an artisan?

SUSAN DIMASI: When I was a tailor’s apprentice the tailor tied my hand into the right position to teach me how to sew. To be very dexterous with your hands you have to train them.

SHELLEY LASICA: Yes, like everything else.

SD: My hands were not developed, so he got a piece of selvage and tied my hands to hold them in the right position.

PD: How did that strike you?

SD: I wanted to be good at it. I used to take this kind of tourniquet home and put on myself. It took a long time before it became really natural and remembered in the muscles.

SL: Yes that kinaesthetic memory does take a long time. In dancing it’s learning to achieve certain movements in the most efficient way as well as the different ways to do them, so that then that kinaesthetic pattern can be changed.

PD: How did you both meet?

SL: I’m a client at Materialbyproduct.

SD: But we also met through luxury fashion retail before that. I was still firmly in the wilderness then and firmly on the sidelines of my career as a designer.

I was working in luxury retail and still studying and fiddling. In luxury retail you have a lot of time for observation, so I could spend time really looking.

I was observing how the clothes went onto people and how they went into life.

I worked here in Australia and in London for about 10 years.

SL: I think that observation is so important. My mother was my teacher and had a company in Melbourne, so I watched her. She taught adults but was also interested in teaching children and developing the imagination. The idea

Neue Luxury, No.1, The launch issue.

of becoming a choreographer was derived from her. She regularly brought people from overseas to teach, as did the Russell Dumas in Sydney where I repeatedly spent time and had access to different people. I went overseas to New York when I was 21 and studied with many different people there also.

I was also incredibly lucky to be taken to see so many different types of performances. My training was quite unusual. The typical trajectory for a choreographer is to finish college and join one or several companies and only then, 10 or 15 years later, begin to make work. But at university a lot of my friends were visual artists and it became apparent that the working life of a visual artist was more of a useful structure for me than what I was seeing in dance. After establishing contact with American performer and choreographer, Dana Reitz, I saw that a solo practice was actually something I could do.

PD: Tell me about the rehearsal process for Bleed II. SD: I commissioned Shelley to develop the choreography of the Materialbyproduct template for the show. This is to dress and undress a single model in front of an audience, usually within the House. I realised there was a natural choreography to that and a sense of dance and ritual but I didn’t know how to develop it. Shelley’s been very conscientiously listening to me and responding.

SL: Often the pieces don’t exist yet, which is not the way a fashion show usually works.

SD: The whole point of the dressing and undressing was to get to show the detail of the clothing and to get people close to that detail. I really don’t enjoy being backstage of a catwalk show. They are really brutal places to be. Models just come off the runway in their heels and run, tearing off their dresses.

SD: One of my greatest joys is that once you invest all of that time, you become very good at making decisions and making decisions fast. I used to hate the time at the tail end of my sample collection but now I love it. After creating most of the collection I get to a point where I can cut and make two dresses in two hours. My assistants just look at me, their eyes spinning. The reason I can do that is because I do it every day.

SL: A similar experience for me is in the rehearsal studio when things happen by chance. I’m not interested in knowing how something ends. If I knew how something was going to turn out I wouldn’t bother making it. I’m much more interested in the process and embracing the serendipity that occurs within it.

It can be using your understanding and experience of a garment to complete it in the choreography and to allow something else to happen that you may not have anticipated. This can occur when you follow your instinct.

SD: That’s what I love about the dress rehearsal space.

SL: Things change every time you rehearse and both of us rely on having enough confidence to completely shift direction.

SD: It’s important for me not to have things in compartmentalised spaces in order to allow for nuance and richness to occur. This is precisely why I want to have a conversation and not an interview. An interview always seems a bit capped and doesn’t allow for mingling of ideas, but you can’t anticipate a conversation. So the dress rehearsal process becomes like a conversation.

You can’t anticipate the outcome.

It is the complete antithesis to me of crafting these pieces. So in being part of fashion, but apart from it, I decided to design my own experience and way of presenting my work.

SL: My interests intersect because I’ve been involved with fashion. My mother was a designer and pattern maker who taught me about clothes and fabrics.

I was involved as a model and as a choreographer in parades with the Fashion Design Council as well as with Kara Baker on the label Project. So the ways of presenting clothes are fascinating to me. Susan’s show is different to a fashion show, but is still absolutely a fashion show at the same time.

PD: The invitation to Bleed II described it as an enactment. Why did you choose this word?

SD: I think when you invent a different word around something it automatically creates a different space. Shelley has also crafted a way of making people feel comfortable being so close.

How do you craft that Shelley?

SL: Years ago, I’d seen a performance where people were in a position where they felt extremely uncomfortable in a small space. I’ve seen several performances like this, where no thought had gone into the proximity between the space and the performance and I thought, I wonder how I can make it work. That’s how this whole body of work started. That was 20 something years ago now. I’ve spent a long time working that out.

PD: You have used the term shepherding to describe this?

SL: That’s a term I used very casually during the rehearsal process to describe a way to get people to move away from the edges of the room and into the space.

SD: I always thought it was such an apt word, it’s warm. I think it actually reveals something of the nuances of your craft.

SL: It’s about allowing people their own space and not encroaching on it.

It’s literally feeling how close you can get to people before they feel uncomfortable and hopefully I don’t misjudge it. There’s no recipe for it.

SD: It’s interesting because I didn’t even realise there was such an outward correlation with your work and what I do every time I fit a client. Not just fitting and taking measurements, but helping people in and out of their clothes and judging how close you should get to someone. There’s this correlation between my years in luxury fashion retail, helping customers in and out of their clothes, which totally informs what I do now and how I judge it.

SL: I don’t find being dressed such an unfamiliar thing. I remember it from when I was a child and from when I was a model. It feels incredibly familiar.

There’s a moment in one of the enactments where I channel my grandmother who sometimes dressed me and also when I channel dressing my son.

SD: I used to always think about it from a historical perspective of being literally stitched in. We think in contemporary clothing we largely dress ourselves, but then you just brought out all these lovely examples of being dressed by someone else. It’s a lovely, subtle part of engagement. I love ‘being helped into a coat or helping my dad in and out of his coat. It’s a sign of affection.

SL: It’s amazing how if we haven’t done a part for a while, as soon as you put your hands on the garment, the sensorial weight and texture stirs the kinetic memory and it just comes back.

This interview is part of an ongoing dialogue with MBP that will be developed in subsequent editions of Neue Luxury. As an episodal discussion, new voices will be added over time capturing the accumulative nature of MBP’s creative process and practice.

FOR MORE WWW.MATERIALBYPRODUCT.COM WWW.SHELLEYLASICA.COM

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YERING STATION Creating a platform for creative exchange.

CULTURE

By Neue Luxury

In many ways creative collaboration has become the key to marketing and business expansion in the 21st century. The trouble is, not enough of our biggest and most capable businesses know it yet. Championed historically by those closest to the epicentre of cultural and creative practice, there have been numerous contemporary examples to inspire and comfort even the most sceptical CFO’s. Technology giant IBM used radical collaboration to save their leading edge chip technology business by opening their doors to competitors in order to share research. HUB, a collaborative platform, established a unique global ecosystem of people, places and ideas dedicated to creating innovative solutions for a more sustainable world. While Microsoft collaborated on their Xbox Kinect platform to develop a hands free technology assisting surgeons in the operating room.

So why do those capable of realising the richest tapestry of collaboration often favour the most vanilla form of its expression, the all persuasive and rudimentary nomenclature of brands? Karl Lagerfeld for H&M, Jean Paul Gaultier for Piper-Heidsieck Champagne, Stella McCartney for Target.

What happened to the substance? What happened to our expectations as participants?

Mr Mark Cunliffe, Brand Manager of Yering Station, a winery situated in one of Australia’s oldest wine regions, admits he wasn’t quick to see the potential in a new platform for creative collaboration – he was thinking more about the nuances of wine. But in January 2013 he was certainly responsible for bringing one to life. Passionate about establishing an ongoing platform where new possibilities could flourish from the fertile terroir of collaborative ideation, knowledge sharing, resource pooling and interdisciplinary thinking, Mr Cunliffe and the Yering Station team assembled a list of Australia’s most formidable and influential cultural institutions to discuss the future of commercial and creative practice. As a result, the Yering Station Creative Workshop 1.01 was born.

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The event commenced with a coffee in Yering’s spacious and wellappointed restaurant. Overlooking the ancient terrain of the Yarra Valley, the history of the site was amplified by Yering’s large contemporary architectural footprint. In many ways it was a fitting metaphor for the venture – contemporary framework / archaeological investigation. The workshop itself was held in one of Yering’s heritage listed barns and began with the introduction to the inner workings of our most respected institutions. The Melbourne Writer’s Festival, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Balletlab, Melbourne Spring Fashion Week, Spirit of the Black Dress, Biennale of Sydney, Materialbyproduct, Queensland

Art Gallery – Gallery Of Modern Art (QAGOMA), 3 Deep, Chunky Move, Melbourne Festival, Melbourne Arts Centre and artist Amelia Lackmann all introduced their commercial objectives, idiosyncratic challenges, current affiliations and future aspirations. Mr Cunliffe, a gracious and passionate host, facilitated the discussion and delicately formed connections between each of the creative giants. It was impressive and subtle in equal measure.

Mr Cunliffe enthusiastically affirmed that “the opportunity we have to engage and interact with such an influential and inspiring group is beyond measure.” At all times throughout the morning he advocated for the notion

Photography: Yering Station

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that alliances are critical to the longevity of Yering’s business and that when managed with care and thought each can be immensely rewarding. Not only for the organisations, but for their customers, their patrons and their supporters.

“Taking on the challenge of addressing and nurturing our partners was the obvious next step.”

Mr Cunliffe recognises that in Yering’s case, alliances in the arts sector are often shared. “Collectively I’m interested in exploring solutions to all of our shared challenges, whether that be around raising awareness, driving visitation, understanding consumer desires or critiquing the fundamental structure and fabric of our cultural landscape.”

Ms Zoe Graham, Senior Sponsorship and Business Development Officer from Queensland Art Gallery and the Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), said, “The real high-light for me was that they (Yering) really mean what they say in terms of they want to support the arts and cultural creativities, without hiding the fact that they are using it as a platform for their beautiful wines.

It’s just exciting to be a part of that and to be a part of such a privileged group and be really involved with them.”

Throughout the workshop it became apparent that there were common challenges for each organisation that were underpinned by resourcing, digital innovation, the need for more substantial partnerships, funding, re-engaging

current audiences and establishing a greater national and international footprint.

Mr Luke McKinnon, Marketing and Development Manager from Chunky Move and Ms Fiona Kelly, Head of Marketing and Communications from Melbourne Festival, both reiterated the need to reposition their brands in a fluid and dynamic landscape. Ms Kelly introduced plans for a new brand rollout in 2013, which she said was ignited by the need to redefine the festival brand to necessitate the changing sensibilities of the city. Ms Kelly also discussed the success of the Festival Hub erected on the bank of the Yarra River. The Hub responded to the young and vibrant nature of Melbourne city and established a broader spectrum of audience through generating a new mode of engagement with the community.

Mr McKinnon specifically highlighted the need for Chunky Move to “Change pre-conceived notions of what contemporary dance is” in order to establish a position of longevity for the brand while simultaneously having a greater influence on culture. He was also excited by the prospects of the Yering Station Creative Workshop 1.01, “We have a whole bunch of audiences that we can tap into in different states, at its base level it’s fantastic for all of the organisations. I hope it’s the start of something new and different that we can do as partners.”

As the numerical title of the workshop suggests, Mr Cunliffe believes that the initiative was one of introduction and that “Now is the time where people can go away and think about ideas, the new ways of working and how each organization can contribute. In 6 months time we will reconvene and start to bring specific initiatives to life. The consistent feedback we keep hearing is that this process is evolutionary and outcomes will manifest themselves over time.”

Interestingly, the workshop revealed notions of combining multiple platforms to diversify topics and experiences at cultural events. Ms Collette Stewart, Marketing and Development Manager for The Melbourne Writer’s Festival, was interested in a potential collaboration with Balletlab on Buddhism. Stewart was excited by the idea of an academic discussing notions of Buddhism and how this could be enhanced by a curated performance to create a more immersive platform of cultural exchange.

Ms Graham also welcomes the potential for collaboration. “I think there is a lot of exciting opportunity around creative collaboration and I think as some of the people talked like Balletlab, Chunky Move, The Writers Festival, Melbourne Festival and Biennale of Sydney about the cross collaboration and that diversification of art forms and practice.” “Phillip Adams,” she said, “was talking about taking contemporary dance into galleries and museums and

I know he isn’t just talking about putting them on a little stage in a gallery, but really inhabiting the space and changing the perceptions and understanding of what dance could be.”

Ms Susan Dimasi, from luxury fashion house Materialbyproduct (MBP), affirmed the significance of Australia’s cultural fabric through her view on the potential behind collaboration. “It’s less about creating things and more about creating culture.” Ms Dimasi went on to discuss her recent collaboration with BalletLab where the pair envisaged ‘fashion for performance’. Her intuitive approach to garment construction and material helped to generate a curious assortment of outcomes that responded to the body overtime, changing throughout and during a performance.

As a Luxury Fashion House that defines the 21st century, Ms Dimasi’s contagious view on Melbourne’s creative landscape was expressed when articulating MBP’s role within it, “Often when I try to position MBP in peoples minds I say, ‘for me now, Melbourne is what 1930s Paris was.’ I have

amazing collaborations with Balletlab, Shelley Lasica, 3 Deep and Julia deVille. I don’t need to go anywhere else in the world to get this sort of network. I have these sorts of relationships and collaborations on board right here, right now. Often the way I try to contextualize that in people minds is that you don’t need to go overseas to access this and you don’t need to travel back in time. I think Woody Allan’s movie ‘Midnight in Paris’ summed it up beautifully, it’s happening right here, right now, embrace it.”

Mr. McKinnon from Chunky Move agrees - “The best art is of its time and you know it’s certainly lodged to the past and its respect for the past but the best art is being touched on by a lot of people today.” He believes that those on the vanguard are merging new genres from all spheres of the Arts.

“Something that chunky move has always done is broken the mould in terms of what contemporary dance can be, by bringing in a sculpture artist or working with multimedia artists and challenging what contemporary dance can be.

The best art is always challenging the status quo to an extent, or at least

building from it so I think that the future is bright. You just have to look at the amount of organizations that are here today supporting young artists, as well their regular program. It’s an exciting prospect and one that I hope to be involved with for a long time to come.”

Artist Amelia Lackmann gained great insight and built a new network through presenting her work to the group. “I found it incredibly inspirational for someone who is an artist. It provided a window into the world of marketing and branding and how alliance works and how that might flow into my own practice in terms of expanding. It was just great to have insight into what the options are.”

The inaugural Yering Station Creative Workshop 1.01 was very much about new beginnings, new partnerships and new thinking. Mr Cunliffe and the Yering Station team aim to hold the workshops biannually in order to stimulate conversation and keep the networks and opportunities expanding. “There are some incredible thinkers in that room and I see that part of our role was to connect them with each other and provide a curated forum to discuss, talk and act. That was our main objective to be honest and I look forward to actively nurturing the discussions moving forward. Some may not necessarily involve us, but either way we feel like we contributed to the discussion and that’s important for us. I’m really looking forward to pursuing a group project together, where the strength of our collective group instigates something special, something lasting. Be it an aesthetic outcome, a new platform, a new work or a solution to an existing social problem.”

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ORLEBAR BROWN An interview with Adam Brown.

FASHION

By Neue Luxury

ADAM BROWN, FOUNDER OF ORLEBAR BROWN, IS TAKING A MORE CONSIDERED APPROACH TO MENS SWIMWEAR. HIS INSIGHTS INTO QUALITY AND THE EXCHANGE OF KNOWLEDGE IS ENCOURAGING CONSUMERS TO RECONSIDER THEIR PERSPECTIVE. Creating men’s beach and swimwear since 2007, Orlebar Brown is based

on the tailored simplicity of a well cut suit. A relief from the ubiquitous baggy shorts of recent decades. The brands inaugural release of product involved only four styles, four sizes and five colours, a modest but potent offering. Since its inception, Orlebar Brown has snowballed into one of the world’s most inspiring mens brands sold in iconic department stores across the world. Neue Luxury spoke to Adam Brown about the success of his brand and consumers changing expectations.

NEUE LUXURY: Congratulations on the success of Orlebar Brown, you must be pleased with the brand’s trajectory?

ADAM BROWN: We are on a fantastic journey that started from a desire to make something that we knew wasn’t in the market. Every day we are on a vertical learning curve and we strive for perfection and excellence in everything that we do. Our attention to detail is second to none. So essentially we are always finding things to improve on. We hope we are building the foundations of a brand that has a long future ahead of it.

NL: Do you think that the exchange of knowledge is an important ingredient in our relationship with luxury?

AB: Yes, but I always believe that an exchange of knowledge in any area of how we live, what we do and why we do it is an important ingredient to truly understanding anything. Our customer is very intelligent and educated about all aspects of their lives, why would they not apply these same rules to their relationship with luxury? True luxury for me says something about integrity, provenance, consideration, a confidence and service. For me the ultimate Luxury is authenticity and originality and the time to find and consider both.

NL: How has your perspective on luxury affected the choice of materials in your own work?

AB: The exciting part of what we do is finding the materials to help us create our collections. I think this can mean the most classic of fine cottons or the most innovative of quick dry man-made fabrics. I don’t just equate luxury with nature, I think that technology allows us to create the very best products that perform in the way we need and want them to.

NL: How has your relationship to, or perspective on, luxury changed over the years? Why do you think that is?

AB: In my younger days, whilst always hating ‘average’, I felt that luxury was something slightly superficial, something you could buy just by spending money. Now I absolutely understand that it is something far deeper, something far more intelligent and something really truly personal.

NL: Having grown up in Malaysia, Hong Kong and Japan, how do you think that those cultures view luxury?

AB: Although there is so much dialogue about the Far East and its relationship

or obsession with ‘luxury’ and over recent weeks we have had the first signs that maybe this might be cooling off. For me I think it is unlikely that they are caring less about luxury, but just that maybe their understanding, belief or faith in luxury is evolving. I think luxury started off being associated with status and was something quite disposable and imported. Now, it is much more about sustainability and celebrating the best and most authentic of local as well as global culture. Just as with people from all over the world you can come into contact with the stereotype who shop for labels and labels sake and cant get enough of it - but the Chinese and Japanese customers I have met have always been far more concerned with where the product was made, why it has been made, what was the thinking behind it and really concerned with detail and quality. They appreciate, and are looking for benchmark product, the specialists in a particular field who do their job the best - something we strive to deliver.

NL: Why do you think that these cultures view luxury in this way?

AB: I am sure the emerging elites from these places have done their quick spending and realised that this does not give any real satisfaction and they have not actually bought luxury, just stuff. Now we are all far more canny and understand what really gives a lasting kick, what will really stand the test of time.

NL: Have you ever used the term luxury to describe the experience of your own work?

AB: It is a luxury for me to be working doing something that I absolutely love and am passionate about and I am lucky that I have a team around me who feel the same way. What could be more luxurious than waking up in the morning excited about your working day?

Orlebar Brown currently has three stand-alone stores in London (Notting Hill, Chelsea and Mayfair) and is sold at exclusively at Harrolds, Australia’s Luxury Department Store for Men.

FOR MORE WWW.ORLEBARBROWN.COM

Images: Courtesy of Orlebar Brown

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STOP THE FASHION SYSTEM I WANT TO GET OFF

AUSTRALIAN HIGH COMMISSION

Continued from page 1.

Continued from page 9.

Perhaps a change in the fashion system will come to fruition if the seasonal dictates of fashion week focus more on exciting promotional projects that contextualise the designers vision, rather than demanding full collections to be produced.

There are some smaller independent organisations that are implementing alternative processes. In Australia this includes designer labels such as S!X and Materialbyproduct who respectfully release concepts within the framework of the seasonal calendar but their collections evolve from ongoing archetypes that embody and build on the key elements of their overall ethos. They do not need to reinvent new collections from scratch. It’s a journey of creative development, rather than distinct reinventions.

There is an emerging cultural shift which recognises the implications of excessive supply and the lack of value in cheap disposable product. There is a mindset shift in the contemporary consumer, who has increasing awareness of the value of buying less and buying better. The adoption of slow fashion principals across the globe has shifted from a fringe construct to larger organisations.

Consumers of fashion recognise the need to acknowledge the social, cultural, economic and environmental impacts of what they purchase.

A considered opportunity for designers and fashion consumers lies in fashion that embraces longevity, within the genre of heirloom products. The concept of heirloom fashion does not have to focus only on what is often assumed to be long lasting classics such as the tuxedo jacket, the refined white cotton shirt or the little black dress.

Contemporary fashion embraces concepts of personal style and individuality. As a consequence the fashion consumer could buy longlasting, exceptional designs that are unique, eccentric and flamboyant if that aligns to the wearer’s personal ethos. Longevity equates with quality manufacturing, considered design and consumer attachment, not whether the product fits into a classic genre.

For the fashion industry to prosper, there is immeasurable value in reconsidering current practices to implement slower and more purposeful processes. Reflection and analysis will help to reinvigorate design development models that understand appropriateness to the market within sustainable frameworks. This involves reassessing the fashion calendar and reducing the constant supply within the fast fashion sector. Most importantly, the fashion consumer has to take a considered approach to facilitate change. These practices are integral to the continuing vitality of the fashion industry and its future prosperity.

EXPERIENCE AND THE SPECTACLE Indeed Weis’s research extends beyond product design. It involves an appreciation for the marketplace. Now more than ever people crave authentic experiences, he believes.

“For those who travel and live an elevated first-class lifestyle when they land [in a city] they want to touch something that feels real. If that’s been ripped out of the city then they don’t want to keep going back. That’s the problem with the industrialised manufacturing cities of China.”

Further proof of the quest for authentic experiences can be found in the retail sector. “People are spending their disposable income on experiences – yoga, restaurants, bars, travel,” he says. “They’re not necessarily buying a lot of products. A certain class of the population is after a luxury of experience rather than a luxury product.

“You can see in contemporary art the privileging of experience over traditional plastic objects,” he adds. “I think there’s a reason why artists like Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell are two of the biggest artists in the world currently, because they offer a sensory experience that makes us aware of the limits of our optical or aural capabilities.”

Such experiences also provide an antidote to the overwhelming time spent mediated through computers. That desire to have our bodies made active again and understand our relationship to space and to the environment through playing with your senses also explains why signature architecture such as the work of Herzog & de Meuron has become so popular now, Weis believes.

“We want to be shocked a bit in our urban environment. We want the spectacular as an experience. Owning that for brands and showing that they understand what an unusual and interesting experience is and that they can curate it is a very powerful thing. When we design our exhibitions we use a theatrical lighting person. We don’t want to be just a white cube gallery. People want to go somewhere and feel like they are engaging in a larger narrative and an experience even if they’re not buying.”

Memorable design succeeds not just through spectacle, but detailing.

“Packaging is a big part of luxury,” he says. “The drama of opening it and how you get it out is a big part of the experience.

The letter of authenticity needs to be really beautiful. Every aspect of the purchase transaction from my perspective needs to reinforce what we’re about, which is we’re creating pieces only for a few people and we’re really honoured that they’ve bought into our narrative.”

Broached Commissions’ next series will focus on the legacy of the Vietnam War and its impact on Australian design.

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WWW.NEUELUXURY.COM TWITTER/NEUELUXURY

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Neue Luxury, A global dialogue on luxury in the 21st century.

Plate 01. Photography: Roland Schmidt

BLACK MATERIAL An interview with Robert Knoke.

ART

By Neue Luxury

Robert Knoke is drawing portraits of a very different nature. The German born artist has been recording contemporary fashion and art luminaries over the past seven years. From fashion innovators such as Rick Owens and Bernard Wilhelm to iconic musicians such as Casey Spooner, The Kills and Patti Smith, Knoke is surreptitiously challenging traditional notions of portraiture through his abstract and intuitive depictions. His graphic application of materials and techniques include a simple paper canvas, black markers, pencils, fingerprints, glitter, ballpoint and grease pens which all sit in stark contrast to the majestic oil paints commonly used in historical portraiture. Knoke’s fervent use of ‘anti-artist materials’ is cultivating a contemporary ideology around portraiture and the portrait.

Drawing with intuition instead of inhibition is what makes Knoke’s portraits aesthetically unique. He has the instinctive ability to measure the time and transcendent energy that infiltrates the brief sittings with his subjects.

Knoke establishes a connection with the people he meets and exposes part of their dark enigma through his abstract and animated renderings. From a distance the faces are easily distinguishable, as are each of the renowned figures that inhabit his work. Upon closer inspection, however, the lines are chaotic and embody a frenetic energy that reveals a deeper realm of the subconscious.

Neue Luxury, No.1, The launch issue.

Knoke’s process is the key to unraveling the energy and depth evident in his portraits. “It’s necessary for me to meet the subjects in person and to take their photos. I have to see the architecture of their face and body,” he says. Knoke continues his process from these photographs alone, away from of his subjects. Minimal time is spent meeting and familiarising himself with each person. “I don’t want to destroy the first impression I have of them.

The longer I spend with a person, the less I can see them. I never did portraits of my parents, for instance.”

Each portrait reflects an enigmatic stance, idiosyncratic to the subject.

It also appears that the detachment and romance of the photograph assists in preserving Robert’s initial impression of them. The real transition occurs when Knoke retreats to his studio, where, starting with the articulation of the face, he manipulates the paper until the seemingly invisible energy permeates the surface.

Knoke is quick to admit that not every portrait is a great success.

His enthusiasm, however, is renewed upon the successful application of what he perceives to be a strong and perfect drawing. After completing his most recent works of Creative Director Fabien Baron, and fetish porn Director Bruce LaBruce, Knoke felt a sense of accomplishment with the outcomes. “You draw for so long and all of a sudden it happens. One fucking drawing happens to be so much stronger than the drawings before. It’s like going up another step and you reach another level. That’s what happened with Bruce LaBruce’s piece and I felt the same with Fabien. That only happens once in a while and I’m not sure if that has something to do with them, or with me, it doesn’t really matter. I guess it’s just luck and coincidence. Things happen or they don’t.

I wish I could force this and make every piece as strong, but I can’t.”

What still astounds Knoke is that people he personally respects are supportive of his practice. “So many people let me do their portrait. They aren’t doing it because a very famous artist is asking them, but because they believe in what I’m doing. That is still very surprising to me.” Submerged in an undercurrent propelled by the creative class, Knoke still manages to find a sense of grounding and appreciation for the people he gets to meet. “This might sound completely naïve but I’m just always very excited to meet new people. That is one force to do my work. It’s about life.”

There is a certain energy that tickles him to commence working. It’s an energy that invades the embellishments on and around the figures he captures.

The myriad of jaunted lines manifest themselves into thick, thin and rolling knots. Some burst onto the page spontaneously as dark shapes, harsh

scratchings and dramatic entanglements, others flow freely and effortlessly around the canvas, creating a kind of invigorating performance imbuing each portrait with a sense of depth.

Knoke insists that he is not interested in artistic collaboration with his subjects, that is not what his work is about. However, when he met Chase and Joey from The Black Soft, it became apparent that the artistic connection was of influence. “Before we met personally, we discovered each others

work simultaneously. I felt very attached to the way they make music and they reacted very strongly to my work. So when we met, we decided right away that the portrait would be the image for their new record. They gave me their music to listen to while I was drawing. That felt like some sort of artistic exchange.”

There is no preconceived notion of what each portrait should be. Knoke believes that when it comes to his work “everything is abstract in the end.”

Knoke’s interpretation is not fussy, allowing us, as spectators, to analyse and infuse our own meaning into each work.

Knoke does not shy away from risk, he has immersed himself in a creative landscape through serendipitous introductions and exchanges, shying away from the manufactured artifice of the art world. Knoke has a candid nonchalance towards status and fiscal gain, teamed with an untamed bravery that exists at the core of his creative success.

As an artist,” Knoke believes that “ it’s necessary to realise, that you might be poor all of your life. Even though your art is very good, you have to be aware that you might never be successful within the art market. You can’t produce an art piece that is uncompromising while simultaneously trying to please people, make a living or even get rich.”

Image Plates Plate 01. The Black Soft 2012. Ball pen, grease pencil, marker, gloss paint, glitter on paper. 210 x 200 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

Plate 02. Fabien Baron 2012. Ball pen, grease pencil, marker, gloss paint on paper. 210 x 200 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

FOR MORE

Plate 02. Photography: Roland Schmidt

WWW.FACEBOOK.COM/PAGES/ROBERT-KNOKE/36766656405 00 VOLUME 1: BLACK MATERIAL, ROBERT KNOKE WITH 3 DEEP CAN BE PURCHASED THROUGH WWW.NEWMUSEUMSTORE.ORG

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