M A K I N G - O F - L U C A shoot

Rethinking Speed

– by Matthew Evans Designer Martin Meier recently resurrected the ghosts of the Lamborghini Countach with a series of furniture objects inspired by the revolutionary 1974 Italian sports car. The series is epithetly titled „In Loving Memory,” drawing our attention to the car’s indispensable influence while emphasizing the appropriate tones of mourning. The Countach was a symbol of the potency and senseless vigor of design. I’m thinking of when Farrah Fawcett (R.I.P) hightails it in a black Countach in the 1981 film The Cannonball Run. She stops the car, playfully steps out in a bright red jumper and heels, and spray paints an „X” over the 55 m.p.h. speed limit sign. As she speeds off laughing, you realize just how much the car, with its Stealth Bomber look, could whip up pure sensationalism. 
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Today, however, that effect is scant. Lamborghini was once the most emblematic car for boundlessness with its design that seemed to come from nowhere but promised to take you everywhere: first appearing in 1963, it had no historical precedent to follow like its competitors Ferrari and Porsche, and it used that leverage to create a product that radiated possibility. But beneath Lamborghini’s matchless and robust confidence, there lies a long and hustled story of corporate mergers and acquisitions that includes bankruptcy and four different companies, each struggling to cope with the financial impracticalities of the machine. Earlier this year, a prominent American Lamborghini dealer had to part with a brand new Murcielago LP640 for a mere $60,000 (43,000 Euro). It’s normal market value? $387,000 (276,500 Euro). Somehow that lucky new owner could never muscle the playful gamesmanship of Fawcett – reduced-rate sensationalism for all parties. But if there’s any way to hang onto the exhilarations of Lamborghini, and particularly the Countach, it might very well be through Meier’s designs. He’s fabricated several chairs that recall the car’s extreme aesthetic without seeming gawdy. One takes its cue from the Countach’s notorious trapezoidal panels, while the cantilevered forms in several of the chairs appear updated instead of outdated with their winking reference to the car’s trademark „scissor” doors.
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When I spoke with Meier about the work, which is currently on view at Berlin’s Appel Gallery, he ruminated over a toy model of the Countach he had as a child: „When I played with it, it never seemed practical or convenient. It was just simply culture.” Now, years after that „culture” has dwindled, we may finally be able to rediscover traces of its extravagance in Meier’s designs, which, ironically enough, are very practical and convenient.   ◊

Remembrance of Things Past

– by Michael Ladner When you die, you will most likely be either buried or cremated.
Then you get a headstone, or you simply blow away. These institutions of remembering the dead reinforce the gloom and solitude attached to our established fear of death. This fear is what most people try to battle by achieving fame. Anything to be remembered.
The Swiss company Algodanza offers a twenty-first century novelty for memorialization: flashy, high-end diamonds, forged from the carbon remains of your loved one. But doesn‘t the mystifying allure of a diamond lie not in its „beauty,“ but rather in the frigidity of crystallization? Even here, the Todesangst is reflected by an attempt at imitating individual immortality.
The German writer/artist/theorist Ingo Niermann has conceived of a tomb for all people, a collective, democratic place of rest. The Great Pyramid Monument is constructed from personal gravestones containing the remains or whatever the person wishes to be remembered by. Each stone is the same size. Inherent in this ancient architectural form is its ability to steadily expand without degrading the shape. So sky is the limit in terms of size.
The idea is analogous to Rem Koolhaas‘s proposal for a European flag as a barcode made up of individual countries‘ flags. New members of the Union can always be added onto the whole, while retaining individual identity, rather than being signified by an anonymous star in a alienating sea of blue. No wonder Koolhaas is the president of the jury board of Friends of the Great Pyramid Monument.
But more intriguing than the magnitude of the project is its innovative take on memorialization. Rather than compartimentalizing the deceased into plots or receptacles, which have classically been further divided by cultural hegemony or religious belief, the Great Pyramid Monument brings our remains together, regardless of creed. Death is no longer confined to the blackness of a coffin; rather, it radiates the plurality of the human race while providing a spectacle in public space for the living to enjoy. 
– Michael Ladner

A Stalker Tale

– by Emily Segal „Sandra D“ is my all-time favorite celebrity stalker.
Over the course of five years she repeatedly threatened to kill Jil Sander (and Sander’s wife, Dickie Mommsen), in writing and over the phone, convinced as she was that they were destined to be together. In 2006, Sandra D was sentenced to 6 months in prison, despite the fact that no German anti-stalking laws existed at the time. It’s simple to understand. First comes the crass, easy part: Jil Sander is a babe. She’s hot and gay and industrial-strength. Then there‘s my sympathy for any chemical imbalance masterly enough to generate headlines like the Times UK’s May 2006 „Gay Stalker Threatened to Kill Queen of Fashion.“
But Sandra D is stationed firmly in my pantheon in part because of the subtlety of choosing Sander as a stalkee, and in part because of a connection I’ve installed myself: between the act of stalking, of seeing without being seen, and Jil Sander’s own menacing aesthetic. Though it might not seem menacing at first, there’s something scary in Sander‘s revolt against ornament: the extreme modesty of all those cashmere zwiebel-layers, nipped close to the wrist and neck. It’s the figure of a business woman with the core of a bondage-y nun; look, but you won’t really see. Sander’s austerity is the kind that goes a hair too far. The moment where extreme modesty, in a dialectic flick, becomes an uncanny kind of sexy, motors Sander‘s (feminine) power – the same power she imparted famously to Angela Merkel and which lives on in the current Sander franchise.
I guess Sandra D must be back on the streets, standing near the counter at a Jil Sander store, fingering the fringe of Raf Simons’s new leather bags. As for Sander, she chills in Wilmersdorf or Hamburg, somewhere on the recluse spectrum between Pynchon and Lauryn Hill. I hear she really loves to garden.    ◊