EXORCISING THE POP GHOSTS OF A TRANSITIONING ARTIST
Rob Pruitt has been riding a wave of late. There’s the art Awards—which Pruitt came up with for the Guggenheiman—an Oscar-type presentation that includes categories such as “Group Show of the Year, Gallery” and “Curator of the Year,” which held its second presentation in December of last year. His show Patterns and Degradation at Gavin Brown’s enterprise was a substantial exhibition, with ideas of Rumspringa and Amish-patternmaking encrusting what was ostensibly a mid-career survey. And in March, Pruitt and Public Art Fund unveiled “The Andy Monument,” a shiny...
LANVIN’S FREESTYLIST MENSWEAR DESIGNER’S FALL 2011
When i was a student, i found an old vintage hand-stitched jacket at a local Amsterdam flea market. Instead of wearing it, I turned the jacket inside out and unstitched the lining. I saw the extraordinarily detailed sewings, trims, and ribbon reinforcements—all this detailed work lay hidden behind the nylon lining. That’s what drew me to men’s fashion—the precision of construction, and how this craftsmanship is practically not apparent on the surface,” Lucas Ossendrijver describes of his initial fascination with menswear, as he sits on the vast rooftop porch of the block long...
YOU BETTER PAZ YOURSELF BEFORE YOU PLAY YOURSELFTHE SINFULLY BLESSED LEAD EVISERATES BLACK -AND-WHITE A cursory scan of paz de la huerta’s recent press, including a piece in The New York Times Magazine, suggests yet another wild child pin-up disaster story—a talented, but legally troubled, young woman whose wardrobe malfunctions on the red carpet threaten to overshadow her performances onscreen. [Ed. note: In other words, she has a lot of fun.] But the de la Huerta encountered on a muggy September afternoon in Toronto is no tabloid tragedy. In fact, the soft-spoken 27-year-old could almost be called demure, though she has no trouble attracting attention...
James Franco’s ass stares at me from my desktop. it almost farts in my face. It feels like it wants to. Like it’s wanted to for weeks. But alas, this two-dimensional ass can’t blast any audible sass. It’s simply a photo, intended for our art cover—its gassy desires aren’t relevant. Of relevance is: how did we get here? How did Flaunt Magazine find itself a participant, throughout kept at an usual arm’s length, in the multiplicitous James Franco off-the-backlot artistry—what some amidst the fray might call an egoistic cluster-fuck, but what we’ll call a modern portrait of an ambitious man of means—onto not one, but two covers? It begins with...
Infernal Sentience
Nocturnal Slaying In the Bayou with Dominic Cooper
Here, it was six feet. There, it was eight. The gentleman who chauffeurs me from Louis Armstrong Airport is called Gerald, and he guides me into the eerily concussed, yet ever-electrified Big Easy. I’ll be here for 20 hours, much of which will be spent with 33-year-old British actor Dominic Cooper. Gerald’s pointing out the varying water heights of Hurricane Katrina’s devastating summit—against and above homes, universities, graveyards, landmarks—many of which still lean limply like in fields of war. Later, while Cooper and I share beef cheek and river shrimp in the orange...
A Meditation on Fashion, Shamanism, Beauty, and Optimism with the London-Based Artist
Anyone that’s ever zoned out (or munched a button of peyote) knows that our imagination is a vast and expansive place. Or, is it really our imagination and not some other side we cross over to? Where ever it is, Matthew Stone’s been there, in that blank desert of the shamanistic trance, and under his tutelage, we can learn that things aren’t always as they seem—or, they are as they seem, only they are more than they seem. Think of it as if you’re going to see Superhero X movie in 3D, only you happen into a movie theatre that’s showing it in “...
The Rise and Fall of the Tan
A cigar, as Freud told us, is sometimes just a cigar, but oftentimes, as the father of modern psychiatry implies, it’s a smelly, brown penis. Similarly, sometimes a suntan is just a suntan, but frequently it is more than the mere oxidation of melanin brought about through exposure to ultraviolet radiation. For the past hundred years or so in particular, the suntan was a kind of cultural shorthand for ideas about health, wealth, sex appeal, and status in the Western world.
The tanning of animal skins goes back to the advent of leather in 3000 BCE, but human tanning didn’t really catch on in the West until...
