Cora Isabel David

Studio Visit

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Cora Isabel David is busy. The 27-year-old designer is currently involved in several different shows, at Wedding Dress #5, at the Showroom-Meile, and as a nominee of the P&C Designer for Tomorrow Award at the tent. Her studio and flat are in the heart of Kreuzberg at Kottbusser Damm.

If your current collection was a building, what would it look like?
It would be big, wide, airy. I imagine large windows that allow many perspectives, since my current collection works with contrasts between closeness and openness.

What type of building would you choose as a temporary studio?
The more space, the better. A loft is probably the standard answer, but a large, wide space above everything else would be great. I love it when no one is moving above my head. I love a wide view and to not feel too restricted. I tend to leave my stuff lying around. Being able to let things lie scattered across the space for a while often helps develop new ideas.

How would you describe your relationship to your studio?
Very intense. I am very happy with the combination of living and working. I find peace here.

How important is the space for your design process?
I simply have to feel at ease. I need personal things, my walls are full with pictures. I find these anchors to my own person, which accumulate automatically over time, very important. I like being surrounded by memories, but also new things which are added to that.


Whose studio would you like to take a look at?
Those of all the designers whose work I’m interested in: Marc Jacobs, Hussein Chalayan, Giles Deacon, Riccardo Tisci, Rick Owens, Maison Martin Margiela, especially now that Margiela left the house. I’m interested in inspired spaces, where also unusual things and personal stories pile up.

What inspired your new collection? 

My collection is inspired by the global economic crisis: what psychological effects does the crisis have on people, how does it change aesthetic preferences? In the interviews that I did, people repeatedly told me that they feel a greater need for security and intimacy. To this, I added proverbs, phrases from the media: 'don’t let it get to your head', 'tighten your belt'. I knitted stock prices into the fabrics and used thick strings to gather cloth, playing with the German saying 'to put one’s head into the gallows'.

Which object is dearest to you in your studio?
The kaleidoscope, which I look through when I can’t stand seeing cuts, fabrics and seams any more. 

What does a moment of inspiration feel like? 
When something inspires me, a thousand ideas start rushing into my head and I’m equally convinced by all of them. It can be too much to handle for the moment.

How do you go about designing your clothes?
Most of the time, it’s a combination of patterns and draping. I often imagine two-dimensionally how a cut could work well. Then I usually rely on that, start making a first model and modify it a lot on the dress form. It all goes hand in hand.

What do you do with a finished piece?
I put it away. Onto the next one.

If you could travel through space and time, where would you like to stop?
I always played that as a child! I’d pick the 1920s: art, fashion, the suffragettes, going out in Berlin. It must have been a fantastic lifestyle – but maybe that’s only the stories that have been told afterwards.

What do you see when you look through your window?
Roofs, the tops of trees and a different sky every day.

What does Berlin mean to you?

Berlin is a melancholic city to me, it feels unfinished. I think it has the highest quality for living – I’d even be so bold to say that that statement holds international truth.    ◊    - SSt

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www.coraisabeldavid.com 

Picture Credits: Nicolas Kantor für DERZEIT

The abstract moment of talking to Scott Schuman
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He is said to be the most influential fashion blogger. On his site The Sartorialist, he documents street styles from around the world. No matter how big, influential or different, he’s certainly the blogger with the largest carbon footprint. We’ve met him in Berlin.

     

DERZEIT: What does the Sartorialist offer to its readers that online versions of fashion magazines don’t, or can’t?

Schuman: It’s free of any advertising pressure. This is the most sincere, honest form of fashion journalism right now.

But you’re here for a campaign event.
And how would that affect my blog? If I put photographs of it on my site, I will reference the job. It’s not like in a fashion magazine. My blog is totally honest, totally sincere. I shot 100 images for Burberry and I only put about 9 on my site. I liked all 100 that I did and was proud of the work. I said very clearly that this was a project for Burberry and quoted the link. In that way it’s absolutely honest and sincere.

How do you understand your work?
I’d describe myself as a photo-journalist, but as opposed to a journalist telling facts, I’m just giving you my opinion. I don’t have the patience to sit down and get all the facts right. I feel like the master of ceremonies of like-minded people. The comments are incredibly important on the site. My question about "Would you rather be the Celine woman or the Louis Vuitton woman" got like 600 comments.

 

There are a lot of blogs about street photography. What makes your blog different?
My girlfriend Garrance has a blog, but we shoot in two very different ways. She shoots in a much more personal way, things that literally inspire her to buy something or something she’d like to wear or a girl whose persona inspires her. My approach is much more abstract. Sometimes there might be a photograph that I take and I don’t necessarily like the outfit, but you look at it and think: that’s a great, abstract moment. There is one I haven’t put up yet of a girl with a big, floppy purple hat and a tailored purple coat. I don’t really like the two things together, but it’s an undeniably beautiful shot. She’s just in mid-step, there are always people around her, beautiful light. If I were a designer, I would look at that and go: I love that moment, but I would change her hat this way, I would make the jacket this way. Maybe that abstract moment that the designer takes away from it is the idea of a hat that matches your coat. It’s much more abstract than to stamp in: This person is nicely dressed.
Also, there is so much more variety on my site, with so many style blogs it’s twenty-somethings shooting twenty-somethings. It’s incredibly narrow what some people shoot, whereas I shoot Cowboys, old guys, a 17-year old girl.
The thing that separates me from the other blogs is that I have a 60-40 split between men and women, so the comments come from both sides – straight men, gay men, women, lesbians, old, young, European, American, such a diverse group that’s creating such an interesting variety of comments. Many other blogs are so narrow, you really only get one opinion.  

Do you think that web content needs to be printed to last? Is that something that’s important to you?
I think there is a difference between web content and photographs. I like to hold photographs, that’s why I did the book. But I think the internet is going to hold a lot longer than the photographs are.

What do you personally gain from your work? 
I love the variety and I love fashion. Some people think I started this as something against fashion, to go away from it. But I love the fashion system; I just see it in a slightly different way. In the months in between the fashion shows I go to Berlin or Japan, India or Peru – to walk around all over these places. Sometimes you get something and sometimes you don’t. Seeing how people live, seeing the different cultures, the different expectations, I think it’s fascinating.

If it wasn’t fashion, what would you obsess about? 
A lot of what I do in my blogging is based on what I know from the sports world. It is so far ahead of fashion, e.g. in terms of marketing, because it’s so much bigger. The fashion blog is not much different from Sports Talk Radio, where you have sportscasters who talk about what’s going on with the local soccer team and then callers call in to say their two things. A lot of my concept of how I wanted to have the blog is based on that.

Print publications always have a last page. What do you imagine the end of the Sartorialist to be like? 
A worldview. Hopefully, I will have the chance to do this for 40 years and hopefully I will have a snapshot catalogue of style from around the world during that period.

My next question would have been when would it be time to move on, but you just said that you are planning on blogging for the next 40 years... 

They will have to pull me out of this thing. It’s the perfect lifestyle for me. It might evolve and not always be a blog though.  - SSt

(Picture credits/  Portrait: Nespresso, Street scenes: Scott Schumann für Nespresso)

Jessica Mitrani

Jessica Mitrani’s work - video, theater, objects, installation - pushes clichés until they fry like bugs under a magnifying glass. Take, for example, the Single Shoes I went to borrow from her one day to shoot for the DERZEIT Prognosis Issue. Two feet, one shoe; maryjanes and Vivienne Westwood clompers; porno and staid at once. Mitrani, who’s originally from Colombia, has lived in New York since 1999. She collaborates with the collective Threeasfour; her videos have been exhibited at the Pompidou; she’s made theater in New York and a skywriting intervention in Miami. The T-shirts from her Six Inch Heel line will be exhibited at the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich starting in February, and an upcoming multimedia study of he 19th-century insurgent journalist/industrialist Nelly Bly is slated to open this March in a new gallery in Geneva. I talked to Mitrani at her Soho studio about cartoons, Claud Cahun, and getting flagged on Craigslist. – by Emily Segal

When did you begin making films?
In 1999, I made a short film called Rita Goes to the Supermarket. In every aisle of the supermarket Rita finds these different phantoms. Did I tell you this story? It’s true: I was a housewife in Barranquilla, Colombia and I went to the supermarket and this woman stopped me in the vegetable section and offered me two breast implants (laughs). So I took them and I actually turned around to see if a camera was filming. I put them in and tried them on, thinking: this isn’t even the shampoo aisle! It’s vegetables! Do I cry? Of course at the time I was reading all this lesbian jewish feminism.

Who was this woman?
A promoter, from a South American company. Effectively, all my work has a basis in reality. I decided to make this little short film. The woman in the film walks through every aisle and finds different ghosts of femininity. There’s a scene where she buys meat and drips it everywhere. She meets all these different people: Lady Di, Frida Khalo, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a very famous nun. At the end of her life, de la Cruz signed a document saying, “I, the worst of all.”

In the film, the characters almost look like they’re in drag.
I was living in Colombia then, so I was very influenced by Almodovar, by the color, by my surroundings – not to mention a very charged hyperfeminity. When I came to New York, I did a masters at the Actors Studio – first I was a lawyer, before the theater. For me, form and content were the same. I was more inclined to take into account every part of the aesthetic, from costumes to set design, and videos to go with them. So my work was already becoming less ‘theater,’ more multimedia.

Let’s talk about how you came to the idea of the Single Shoe series, your shoe-objects that fit two feet into one shoe.
I did a piece in 2004 called Some Historic / Some Hysteric at the New Stage Theater company in New York. All the women in the space were silent and the only woman who was permitted to speak was the narrator, perched on this very, very high platform shoe, wearing a long red dress: sexy, sexy, sexy, sexy. She was basically this icon, the only one who was able to speak, and I was interested in her concomitant power and powerlessness...

And how that endowed her with the permission to speak?
Yes. The shoe was inspired by French fetish shoes, but we decided to take it out of that context and apply it to this all-powerful heroine, because it reminded me a little bit of how psychologically you can feel totally seductive, completely powerful, dominating the world, and at the same time it’s completely useless, since you’re running around in these crazy shoes with this cramp in your toe. I was trying to tame the stereotype.

I like the whole idea of being seductive while simultaneously bound.
That was the first idea, to have this bound icon that could speak for the hysterics. And then I became so obsessed with the shoes I didn’t care about the actresses. That’s what I become, the complete servant of my work (laughs). I always say if I wasn’t a feminist I’d be a misogynist. So then I became obsessed with the shoes and thought: why don’t I do more, you know, domesticize the fetish – not to try to make it sexy or appealing or anything, just bring it out of that context, put it in different scenarios. So I made maryjanes because of the typical childhood connotation. I’m always interested in cliches, in stereotypes of representation. After the maryjanes, I did a series of pumps and maribou mules – recreating very identifiable styles through history of fashion. At my show at Spade and Partners in New York I exhibited the shoes as objects, independent of the videos that document them. Before, they were sort of like props. I also did the vitrine, which was three women, wearing the nurse-style shoes, locked in the window.

The images are so chilling, in a really good way.
They stood in the vitrine for two days! The girls did rotate every two hours. My post on Craigslist got flagged twice.

Have you done any other fashion-related work recently? I just did a video for Threeasfour. In september, I collaborated on the documentation for their collection. There’s a piece of Yoko Ono’s, Cut Piece, from the late 60s / early 70s, where she’s in front of an audience, and the audience takes a pair of scissors and cuts until she’s basically naked. And it’s very of that period, with the consciousness about the audience. So I thought it would be great to have a video piece to reference the original Yoko Ono piece, which was documented by the Maysles brothers, so I took the documentation of the Threeasfour show and a documentation of the Yoko Ono and did a split screen.

A split screen is about as precise a combination of art and fashion as it gets. It’s funny, in the art world, the vanity about art as being somehow truer or more righteous than fashion. A friend of mine was recently joking about what’s more depressing, to do PR for fashion or art. There’s something lovely about how explicitly fashion is a business.
I believe in eclecticism, I believe in art, in high and low, art as commercial, commercial as art. If you’ve freed yourself from a fantasy of purity, you can navigate. It’s the articulation of Bordieu, which we all know when we go to these stupid art fairs: how blatant is that?

I mean, fashion week is also a trade show. But in a way it feels less like a car convention than the Frieze fair does. Still, there’s always something embarrassing about being obsessed with fashion.
My work has always been an intersection of the two worlds. When I first did the Hysteria show, we wanted to make some T-shirts to raise funds for the theater. Do you know the artist Claude Cahun?

The queercore Surrealist. Who did self-portraits.
Did you know she was fucking her step sister? How hot is that?! In 2003, nobody knew who the fuck Claude Cahun was. The Grey Gallery at NYU had a show of Maya Deren, Claude Cahun, and Cindy Sherman, and I got obsessed. So when we were doing the hysteria video, we had a black and white photograph as a mask with the lips cut out and the Cahun character was talking about how hysteria was amazing, how all beauty should be convulsive or should not exist at all. I ended up doing a series of T-shirts based on her iconic photograph that says “I am in training don’t kiss me.” It was such a success, I did another that said “beware of domestic objects.” And then it was very funny because everyone got so fixated on the T-shirts and wanted more, so we did a line called Six Inch Heel, with six limited edition T-shirts of different sayings. One was based on Colette: “the only thing that keeps me from crying is the mascara on my eyelashes.” We used fashion as a dialogue, as a reference to something else. And my work is always like that, a constant dialogue with all these different ideas of women.

Fashion is always deferred that way, which is what’s so appealing about it as a medium or a text. 
At the same time, what’s so nice about it is that there’s something ultimately anti-intellectual about fashion.
Right: first it’s visual, but then you recognize your lover, you want to give your panties away for somebody to smell on the airplane. It’s tactile, it’s architectonic.

A fashion show is a completely visual spectacle, but I think clothing is most significantly a personal-spatial experience. There are always so many references at once, fashion is always quoting, but never directly.
It’s incessantly quoting. There’s no neutral stance. You’re always making a choice. If you’re wearing jeans-and-sneakers, that’s a choice too. It’s so foundational to your identity, I don’t understand how people can devalue it so much. Just look at the power of fashion in dictatorships, in the military –

In medicine.
The history of the world is backed up by this. Take a judge: in Spanish the word is “investidura,” to enter: when you enter the clothes, you enter the persona. It’s a kind of magic, the power of the costume. It’s beautiful in a way because it’s true; like Fidel Castro, or Lagerfeld, or Gaddafi.

I love Gaddafi!
I was talking about this with some friends – can you imagine a look book of Gadaffi?! Amazing.

Think about Balmain – I hate it, I think it’s just trash, but their spangled military schtick would look so fly on Gaddafi.
Or take cartoons, for example. Think of Olive Oyl from Popeye: her power is that you can identify her instantaneously. I remember when I was a little girl, one day – I don’t know if I invented this – but you know Wilma Flintstone?

Of course.
Well one day, I saw Wilma with long hair, and a different dress. I don’t know if it was a dream or if I really saw it.

There’s something so unnerving about that.
Yes! And exciting!

There’s a joke about that in the Simpsons sometimes, watching Marge comb her hair and having it spring immediately back up.
I want to see Gadaffi, Olive Oyl, and Claude Cahun in a row.

You’re working on a project right now about the Nelly Bly, the journalist who exposed New York’s insane asylums in 1887 and then, two years later, travelled around the world in only 72 days, 
beating Jules Verne’s “Around the World in 80 Days” record.
Right now, the project consists of two “seasons” in a bag, since global warming has left us with only Spring and Winter. The Spring version is a black bag with three pieces of black silk clothing, for a woman to travel around the world, and all the pieces are versatile: the dress can serve as a negligee, the kimono can be worn for the beach or over leggings at night. Winter in a bag is a white leather bag with the same three pieces in white cashmere. Each bag also includes a manual, sunglasses by Selima, a teacup, a jar of cold cream and a leather clutch. I’m also making paper Nelly Bly monoliths, among other things. They’ll all be exhibited in Geneva in March.

I found out recently that Nelly Bly, after being this prophetic journalist, went on to be come a very successful industrialist: she manufactured steel containers. In her case, being radical didn’t have to preclude mainstream success.
She has a completely modern spirit. Since I’m also interested in hysteria, I love the fact that she had the guts to go under cover as a journalist in a mental institution. Women have always served as recipients for instability – the crazy woman, the mad woman, the witch – and in contemporary fashion you have all these references of the different things they’ve been assigned. I’m reading the biography of Jung, and whats amazing is that so many of his patients started off crazy, then got cured, and then ended up as doctors. And I think there’s a similarity with Nelly Bly, daring to enter a mental institution and blur the line between sanity and insanity. There’s a certain thing about women: they’re more permeable. They become prophets of their own time a little bit sooner than men.   ◊
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See Single Shoe in the Prognosis Issue fashion shoot

Helen DeWitt

Helen DeWitt published The Last Samurai in 2000, and some time later, moved to Berlin. Her new book, Your Name Here, 580 pages co-authored by DeWitt and the journalist Ilya Gridneff, is being digitally distributed: the longest PDF I’ve ever downloaded. It’s about Arabic, luck, airplanes and disappearance. And reading, always reading. Dewitt’s blog, Paperpools, is subtitled »Lies, damn lies and statistics (especially statistics)«. 

As a component of the DERZEIT Accident Issue, I interviewed Dewitt via email about her views on risk and gambling. – by Emily Segal

Emily Segal wrote:
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Dear Helen DeWitt,
I’m Emily, the managing editor of DERZEIT, a newsprint magazine out of Berlin and the official publication for Mercedes-Benz Berlin Fashion Week.
I am also an enormous admirer of your writing. I’m currently wedged into the first chunk of Your Name Here (I realize I’m reading a copy pirated from my friend and should paypal you some cash). To take some unnecessary credit, I was the first of my friends at school to read The Last Samurai and proselytize madly, thus starting a little knot of you-obsessives.
I would love nothing more than to interview you for one of our next issues, coming out during this next Berlin Fashion Week, Jan. 20.–23.
Basically the idea of the magazine is to take the most commercial form possible – essentially a trade publication, funded by a huge car company – and use it as a trojan horse for whatever weirdo texts we’d like to publish, or those that could possibly be used to gloss the reading of fashion / spectacle / and / or Berlin. (We started from scratch last July as a small team, managed to get funded by Mercedes-Benz, and put out four issues over the course of four days. Here’s our site, which is pretty bare, and a write up the New York Times T Moment blog did on us.
>
Last year, the issues were centered around architecture / art / design / fashion, but this year it’s origin / structure / accident / prognosis. I’m really digging Lotteryland () and I think for the accident issue it could be cool to talk about luck, forecasts, the gambler’s fallacy, games, whatever--
or we could talk about none of these things, and that would be cool too.
I’m sure you’re super busy, but email, skype, phone or meeting in person in Berlin (any time between tuesday and january 20th) would all work for an interview.
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Let me know!
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Looking forward to hearing from you,
>
Emily
 
EMILY SEGAL: When did your interest in statistics start, and how?
HELEN DE WITT: A friend who started out as a mathematician before switching to Classics said he thought it would be interesting to see a book that showed the way mathematicians think. He gave an example of the way mathematical vagueness misleads people.
Suppose we’re told a DNA test is highly accurate: there’s only a 1 in a million chance that traces of blood left on a corpse will match the DNA of someone who was not involved. Someone is found whose DNA matches that of the test – someone for whom there is no other evidence of involvement. Can we be confident that X was the murderer? Well, no. If there are 65 million people in Britain (that may not be the correct figure), we can expect 65 people to match the sample – there’s only a 1 in 65 chance that X is the guilty one.

Where has it taken you?
I started reading around – one of the first books I read was Gerd Gigerenzer’s Reckoning with Risk, which talks about how humans are bad at working out probability if given percentages, do better when a problem is set out in terms of frequencies. The thing that’s interesting is that probability is counter-intuitive – our sense of how likely something is turns out to be highly unreliable. But fiction, after all, works partly by presenting individuals and events which the reader perceives as normal, unsurprising, or, perhaps, as exceptional, highly unusual. Since most writers of fiction have no background in probability or statistics, they tend to replicate the misconceptions of the untrained reader. I wondered whether there was a way to present statistical ways of thinking without using complicated equations, which many readers would not be able to follow. It seemed to me that one might be able to do this using the techniques in information design of Edward Tufte; one might be able to use the methods of Isotype developed by Otto Neurath beginning in the 1920s. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do.
I haven’t thought so much about deliberate deceit. It’s possible to mislead using statistics, but it’s very common for people to mislead because they themselves don’t have enough data, or have data but don’t know how to interpret what they have.

A lot of Your Name Here is in the form of an email exchange. What did you think of emails when you first started sending them? What platform did you use?
Before emails came on the scene I thought I was a bad correspondent. I would get a Christmas present, start 20 drafts of a thank-you letter, and finally write and send something 10 years later. I also have a horror of the phone, so I had virtually no contact with family and absent friends. Then I worked in an office from which emails could be sent; started writing to my ex-husband David. Wrote hundreds, thousands of emails. Fabulous. I can’t remember what platform the office used. Went on to Eudora after a while. Now I’m on Thunderbird.

One of your characters mentions reading 900 words per minute. So, speed reading, can you, how fast? I like youtube videos of people learning to speed read because of the way they touch their paper – it looks pious.
No, I can’t do that; the friend who got me interested in statistics reads that fast. He is a bad influence, probably: he read YNH at a single sitting, and it didn’t strike him as particularly long or complex, but I gather other readers have had more trouble.

Let’s talk about Lotteryland. Can you trace your writing about the lottery to any particular starting point for you or in your work?
Lotteryland was originally a self-contained book in its own right which I wrote in 1999. (It got interrupted when I got an offer of publication for The Last Samurai, so it never got finished; it seemed as though it might be better to use some of it as a book within a book in Your Name Here. I do wonder, though, whether it doesn’t just make the structure impossibly complicated.)
I started thinking about it when Britain introduced the National Lottery. Before the Lottery there was an investment scheme called Premium Bonds which gave participants the chance to win a million pounds: you had to buy a minimum of 100 Premium Bonds for Ł1 apiece, you were assigned 100 numbers, and your numbers went into the draw every week. You could get your Ł100 back at any time. You could leave them going into the draw for years. You could buy up to Ł20,000. In other words, you were gambling the interest you could otherwise have earned if you had left that Ł100 in a bank. When they brought in the Lottery, they reduced the frequency of draws in Premium Bonds to once a month. They also promoted the Lottery very heavily – it was widely advertised, tickets could be bought over the counter in newsagents, people could pick their own numbers. So it was much more entertaining, but you were almost certain, not just not to win, but to lose the money you put in. That was interesting in itself, and also seemed to be connected to other things that were going on in Britain at the time.

In terms of the lottery, aren’t you basically always guaranteed not to win?
No, you are guaranteed an extremely remote chance of winning.
You’re gambling on your perception of odds, or of an emotional distortion of odds. I was just in Vegas, where I thought a lot about the idea that the more you play, the more times you pull the lever on the slot machine, the better your chances are (ignoring that your chances are always the same).
Er, I think I would have said the more you play the more money you are likely to lose.
 
Would you call fashion (/costume/uniforms) a game?
I think I would see fashion as ludic, which is perhaps not quite the same thing. The types of clothing you mention involve quite different practices: dress as costume happily admits to the ludic, dress as uniform purports to mark compliance with the requirements of a task, the formalized constraints of a particular place int he social order.
 
You make me think of this quote from the Swiss writer Robert Walser: »We wear uniforms. Now, the wearing of uniforms simultaneously humiliates and exalts us. We look like unfree people, and that is possibly a disgrace, but we also look nice in our uniforms, and that sets us apart from the deep disgrace of those people who walk around in their very own clothes but in torn and dirty ones. To me, for instance, wearing a uniform is very pleasant because I never did know, before, what clothes to put on. But in this, too, I am a mystery to myself for the time being.«
That’s awfully nice. I used to look at those ads for Benetton and think they were playing at radicalism (and now that game is all too familiar). If you walk into a Benetton store there are these arrays of sweaters; a handful of styles, dozens of colors. Saussure says language is a system of differences; Benetton offered the differences, but no one had used them to create a language. So the signifiers are just there for the asking, and if you wanted to you could create a system of signifieds and deploy – the signified (an array of desires) is not given, you could select any range of objects of desire you liked. So you could use an array of sweaters to create a system of signals that did not exist. A company with its sweaters could devise this, or the people who walk in off the streets could appropriate. One only sees the range of possibilities if one sets out different possible systems of signifieds.
 
When and why did you move to Berlin?
I went in September 2004 after a bad time in New York. A London friend, the painter Ingrid Kerma, has an apartment in Kreuzberg, in Naunynstrasse; she said I could stay there a month. It was very good being there – very quiet, no people to deal with – so I thought if I found a short-term rental in Tip or Zitty I could finish a book. I found a place for 3 months in Mehringdamm; hadn’t finished my book so took a place for 5 months in Kurfurstenstrasse; found another short-term let (all this time, unfortunately, there were all kinds of business problems to deal with); sublet a place in Hornstrasse and finally took over the lease. I’ve never really mastered the art of living with Kohlheizung, though, so I think I’ll have to find something else. 

What do you think about hair dye?
Hm. When I got to Berlin I would go to this or that Frisür with the idea of having some highlights, and the hairdressers would try to persuade me to include brown highlights as looking more natural. Every time I would get dragged into a discussion of the Natural. I slightly felt that the Natural could be mine without recourse to a hairdresser, by the simple expedient of leaving the hair to its own devices. My German is not really up to discussions of the Natural and the Artificial, though, let alone the Natural as understood by early 21st century German hairdressers.   ◊

Bruce LaBruce

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Momus

The musician-slash-writer-slash-blogger-slash-theorist Nick Currie aka Momus is hard to miss for his trademark eye patch and the group of oriental girls that are usually found in his wake. I’ll always think of this arrangement as Momus’ take on Muammar Gaddafi’s Amazonian guard. Last year he published two books, the novel The Book of Jokes (Dalkey Archives) a campy take on Arabian Nights, and The Book of Scotlands (Sternberg Press), which offers bizarre solutions for the nation-island. His literature is as provocative as his canny lyrics, dealing with subjects from incest and violence to futurism and the British government – though his soft voice always made it all sound like photo captions read from Vogue Bambini. I’ve interviewed the time-traveler via email: Momus in Osaka, me in New York. – by Eva Munz

You’re kind of an ethnological mystery to me: you were born in Paisley, Scotland, lived in London, Paris, Tokyo and New York. Why on earth did you choose Berlin?
I was living in New York, but two disasters befell it: Bush and 9/11 (I watched the second plane hitting the south tower from my roof in Chinatown). Everything changed; suddenly New York was full of flags, paranoia, and rubble. So I went to Japan, but I had visa and language issues, and my relationship with my girlfriend began to fizzle. So, in early 2003, I needed to choose a place within the Eurozone to live in. At first I went back to Paris, but I’d lived there before and found the city a bit aggressive and intense this time. A trip to Berlin in February 2003 convinced me that it was a much better city for me. I’d been visiting the city for years, and had had good experiences. There was a post-protestant deadness I liked in Berlin, a sobriety, as well as a liberalism (also post-protestant). There was also a sense that the city was unfinished, and welcomed input from visitors – particularly artists – on the existential question of what it could become. You don’t get that impression in Paris or London. Berlin’s attractive fluidity, and the excess capacity in its infrastructure (its empty buildings and trains, cheap rentals, and so on), was really attractive to me. I moved to the city and began to both buy into and sell (via my journalism and interviews) the myth of Berlin as a paradise for »creatives.« I don’t think it’s so much of a myth, actually. Berlin really is a paradise for creatives. It contains, preserved in aspic, every subculture which has ever existed. But it’s a laboratory as well as a museum; the cheap prices and lack of opportunities to sell out really do encourage experimentation. If you’re able to structure your time and impose self-discipline, Berlin is a great place to get things done.

Do you have a next dream destination where you’d want to live?
I’m in Osaka right now, and I’m thinking seriously about moving here next. In a way Osaka is the Berlin of Japan; it’s possible to live here very cheaply. Apart from the bread, beer and asparagus (better in Berlin), the food in Osaka is vastly superior and the city has a density, intensity and commercial dynamism Berlin couldn’t even dream of. Weird underground music (Oorutaichi, Doddodo) thrives here. It never gets too cold. And there’s some gorgeous scenery very close by; the ancient cities of Nara and Kyoto, the mountains and forests of Shikoku.

Where have you been in the last year? Which places did you travel to?
I spent a month in New York doing an art show, a month and a half in Osaka and Tokyo researching contemporary art – I’m curating a Japanese art exhibition in the UK in 2012. I traveled to Athens and the Greek Islands, and performed in Boston, Philadelphia, London, Utrecht, Eindhoven, Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid and Warsaw.

Does the rudeness of Berliners ever bring tears to your eyes - especially after living in Tokyo? (I lived in Asia for 8 years and upon my return I was traumatized.)
I think Japanese people are rude in their own, more subtle, way. For instance, if you’re a foreigner in the company of a Japanese person, they ignore you completely. And you’re constantly asked whether you know how to use chopsticks! I like the absolutely fanatical devotion Japanese bring to their service industries, the complete lack of ego, the sidelining of personality and mood. But I also like the complete opposite: a waiter who’s openly grumpy if he’s having a bad day, for instance. That strikes me as very human, and not a bad thing. The British and the Germans are like that. Grumpy, human. There’s something a little scary about the Japanese way, as well as inspiring and sweet.

Do you speak German?
If not: is that kind of liberating?
I speak a kind of pidgin German which gets me by. But yes, I do find it liberating not to read the newspapers in Germany, for instance. I devour other countries’ newspapers, which gives me the impression that the bad things newspapers tend to report only happen elsewhere, and that Berlin is the still eye at the centre of a global storm; a place where nothing happens, and you can just get on with your daily domestic life.

You’ve been wearing an eye patch over you right eye since you rinsed your contacts in contaminated Greek tap water in the late 1990s. What’s wrong with the Greek?
To be fair to Greece, it was actually cabin water from a ferry between Italy and Greece, so it might have been Italian! Anyway, the amoebas which infested my contact lens are very common, they’re called Acanthamoeba. What’s not so common is to get them living on the surface of your eye, and to lose the use of the eye because of them.

Are you aware of the loss of vision?
Do you remember the difference a second eye made?
I’m a little bit in denial about it. I keep the eye shut when the eye patch isn’t on, so that I don’t notice the black void on the right side. It frightens me, that void. Apart from allowing me to avoid people on the right of me in crowded railway stations, the missing eye also gave me depth perception, which was very nice when looking, for instance, at a naked woman’s body. Now breasts seem flatter to me, and essentially the same as photographs of breasts.

You have a very distinctive style in dressing. Kind of a salvation-army dandy chic. Japanese wabi-sabi with a Scottish quilt thrown in. How would you describe your sartorial choices?
I deliberately try to challenge a style of dressing I’d call »global monocultural,« which really means American. So I never wear jeans or hi-tech running shoes, and rarely T-shirts. I haunt uniform shops, especially those which combine traditional workwear with a certain secular sacredness (so Berufskleidung stores in Berlin, or Japanese workwear shops). I’m particularly attracted to clothes which encode otherness and inhibition. So, old people’s clothes, clothes from obscure professions and traditional cultures (as long as they aren’t too New Age looking), priestly clothes, peasant clothes, women’s clothes, clothes for fishermen and golfers, clothes donated to secondhand stores by the relatives of the recently-deceased. I mix these garments up, breaking their grammar in the manner of those childrens’ flip-card games where you can give someone a Scotsman’s beret, a Flemish peasant’s breasts, a miniskirt and some riding breeches. I’d recommend Tibor Kalman’s book (Un)fashion.

How would you dress if you were for some reason really, really fat?
Like Leigh Bowery.

The Madrid based design group created a Momus doll from red fabric with eye-patch. Do you think they did a good job in appropriating you?
Yes, I think they did. We should all aim to be reducible to affectionate stereotypes.

I listened to a ton of Momus albums in the late 90s. The only thing that ever came close to your brittle voice, smooth pop arrangements and canny, provocative lyrics was Pulp’s »Different Class.« Do you ever have the feeling that you were not rewarded with the stardom/money you deserved?
Yes. It’s an international conspiracy – the Japanese were the only ones who didn’t get the memo.

What does money mean to you?
It’s a kind of thermostat which regulates our body’s input-output systems. And by »our body« I really mean our need to exist physically in the world.

You were an early blogger and have written about design and art for the longest time, last year you published your two first books. Does that mark the end of your music, or is it just a gentle shift of balance from one leg to the other?
I actually would like to end my music career and be known entirely as a writer from now on. Working on music actually gives me a kind of nausea now, because it triggers low-level tinnitus. So I get hot and uncomfortable around music, like Alex from A Clockwork Orange listening to Beethoven after he’s been given Ludovico’s Treatment.

You go by your nom de plume Momus as a musician and as a writer. What’s the difference between Momus and Nick Currie? What do your friends call you?
Nick Currie is the creation of my parents, my school, and society. Momus is my own creation, or rather an elective affinity with a character from mythology, a minor (and »failed«) Greek god exiled from Mount Olympus for simply doing his job, which was to criticize. My friends call me Nick, but I like it when they call me Momus.

Your music is basically poetry. What do you read? Which authors and books do you find influential?
I’m attracted to the classics: Lucian, Juvenal, Martial, Horace, Virgil, Aesop, Propertius. I’m also drawn to figures like Pope, Swift, Sterne, Leopardi, Gogol, Kierkegaard. Then, from the 20th century, people like Kafka and Brecht, Calvino and Pirandello, Ronald Firbank, Marcel Schwob, Bruno Schulz, Ivor Cutler and Viv Stanshall.

At a book reading for Solutions you showed an incredible talent for accents. I have a fetish for accents. Which accents do you like in particular? Which ones are you good at? Are there any you despise?
My sister is much better at accents than I am (she’s an actress). I tend to do Cockney, Scottish and American, and that’s it. I dislike Australian accents, perhaps. When I was young I disliked the Scottish accent intensely and tried to lose mine. I called the Glasgow accent »the Glasgow accident«!

You seem so incredibly productive and document a lot of the things you do, see in your blog. Do you ever hang around, loiter, do nothing for no particular reason?
I think I might often seem, from the outside, to be rather passive and dreamy, but my mind is always racing. I totally understand what Kafka wrote in his diary about »this tremendous world I have inside my head.« The anxiety is that your time will run out, and you won’t have been able to share even a tiny fraction of those dreams, visions, insights and ideas, and you’ll die and that world will vanish.

You’ll turn 50 in February. How does it feel?
It’s perfectly horrible!   ◊

One Job at a Time Would Burn Me Out

Adriano Sack talks to Alexander Wiederin

What‘s the first thing you ask of a magazine?
Whether the content’s what the title promises. Are there interviews in Interview? Do you see people‘s features in The Face? The name is also usually the only thing I can not change, when I work for a magazine.

Do you have to read all the texts in a publication, in order to be able tojudge the layout?
Yeah. I even have the texts translated at Italian Elle. Everyone tells me, I‘m the only one who reads everything before I start designing, but I find that hard to believe.

Why do an exhibition now, and why in Berlin?
I don’t see myself as an artist. My work should stay where it belongs: in a publication. That’s why I wanted to show more than magazine pages. I made extraordinarily small editions of typography posters; they’re each only one piece. And I created a soup dish, 1,80 Meters in diameter and filled it with ca. 2300 rubber letters. It reminds me of the Alphabet Soup of my childhood, except I designed the fonts of all the letters myself. The timing made sense. I just became a father; its a good moment to look back.

Is our world more designed today than in the past?
Of course. Anyone can but a computer and download fonts and images from the internet. That is the reason I develop an original font for every publication I work for.

What’s erotic about typography?
Erotic? The most beautiful thing there is, is the power of words. The font has a supporting function. The sex is in the words themselves.

Please explain one of your fonts to me.
The font Moonwriter was actually developed for a magazine, that was supposed to be called Moon. I wanted it to be a typewriter font, cause for me the romance of old typewriters and the dream of traveling to the moon are connected. Typewriter fonts are strange hybrids. They have serifs, but very bold ones. They were originally developed to keep the line straight, cause old typewriters were mono-spaced, which means the distance between the letters was always the same. With the thick serifs and equally bold strokes, I wanted to coin a new look and create a font that functioned on a modern computer.

You are always working on multiple projects at the same time. Why is that?
If I didn’t I wouldn’t function. I’d get bored. My creations have a lot to do with reactions. Something that happens while working on one project will help me on another. I would burn out if I only had one job.

Is there an Alex Wiederin look?
No look, but hopefully a presence, a similar approach. If you have a recognizable style, you can sell yourself easier. On the other hand my clients always get something that was actually created for them.

You told me that 80 percent of your work consists of telling other people what kind of pictures they should take.
I don’t only do graphic design, I also work quite closely with photographers. I help them to see their images in a different way or to discover something new in them. Magazines communicate mostly through images these days. I’m afraid they have become more important than words.

How do you stop yourself from taking these pictures yourself?
It‘s easy. I never pick up a camera. And for the few private pictures I take I use my iPhone. The magic of photography does not lie in the technology or the equipment it’s the chemistry, that the photographer can create with his subject. I would not be as good at that as the photographers who I work with are.

Does fashion today need to be charged by art?
Of course (laughs). I find it much more interesting to name sources and inspiration, than to leave the creation to play in a dream world. There’s nothing new and there’s nothing unique. So you can just show where something comes from.

Where do you come from?
I’m from a small village in Vorarlberg called Frastanz, surrounded by big mountains. As a child I had a strange habit that people thought would be a huge developmental problem. My notebooks looked totally different in each subject because I always copied the teacher‘s handwriting from the blackboard. That made me quite popular because I was the best at forging signatures for excuses. Later I studied at Ortweinschule in Graz. My professor didn‘t really like me, because I worked on the side and won a few competitions he was in.

Who were your most important teachers?
In terms of photography the different Vogues and other fashion magazines, in terms of storytelling and layout Tempo. I learned from Neville Brody that you can do anything and everything. From Lo Breier I learned that sometimes you have to leave things in a publication that you don’t like yourself.

Which photographers opened your eyes?
As a student I was fascinated by the Old Masters like Blossfeldt, BillBrand, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton. Later I worked with what you could roughly describe as my generation of photographers: Norbert Schoerner, Mario Sorrenti, Ines van Lamsweerde, Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Wolfgang Tilmans. They have been essential to me and they changed fashion photography and the way we see the world.

What was it like to work for Helmut Newton later?
Listening to his stories was fascinating and hysterical. The work was as
expected. For me it’s always the case that I’m more intrigued by people
before I meet them.

How has the job of the designer changed in the last few years?
There are more images than ever and they’re all at-hand. The question about a photo is, what makes you take a second look? Today there’s hardly enough time for a second look. Watch a classic film from the 30s! There are scenes when you know exactly what will happen, even if you haven’t seen the film before. What took two hours to tell back then we can sum up in twenty minutes. We’ve become a lot faster. That is the reason why we live in the most exciting time that I can imagine. The language of images is radically changing right now. You overload each picture with information and at the same time the techniques are becoming less important. 

What are your criteria for a good photo?
Beauty, composition, light. Or the right idea or story. We did an issue of the magazine Big with Lauren Hutton. The picture of her that was most essential to me, we didn’t end up using, because I was the only one who saw something particular in it. It was a picture of the tiny prosthetic that she used to have to wear to conceal the gap between her two front teeth. At some point she was famous enough that the defect became a trademark. Also, context has become more important today than ever before. When you combine photos by Martin Parr and others from FlickR, nobody can see the difference. Probably not even Martin Parr himself.

How have you failed as an art director?
With Tempo. Back then I wanted to realize myself. We packed in too much. In terms of design, it’s incredibly important to set priorities. At that time I was still battling windmills. In hindsight it’s charming, the same way Don Quixote is charming, but it’s also totally crazy.

What makes you a good art director?
Doubt.

In the press relewase for your exhibition Alles Liebe you are described as someone who achieves his tasks with the help of logic.How can logic and love exist together?
I am active in communication and see myself as a problem solver. I offer a service, not artwork. I approach a new job rationally and strive for finding a systematic. Once that is done I use my gut feeling and my emotions. For me logic and love aren’t contradictory. One cannot exist without the other.   ◊

Aids 3D

Michael Ladner talks to AIDS 3D 

How did you meet?
I (Daniel) was born very close to the Summer equinox and he (Nik) was born very close to the Winter equinox. This professor was like, you should collaborate. This was before we had anything in common. We had opposite strategies for getting problems solved. it was really eerie.

Do you believe in fate, considering your birthdays fall on opposite equinoxes?
We believe in The Secret and self-actualization. The Secret posits, that if you believe something, it will come true. You visualize what you want to have happen and it becomes reality. For example, we were like, we have to get a show at the New Museum, and one day we were talking about it a bunch and then this email came and said we were in.

What do you think is more important for technological advancement, space exploration or deep sea exploration?
Space travel! But we don‘t think thats the right axis, its should be either inner-space or outer-space. Before we can even explore space we have to achieve ultimate computing, which means reaching the smallest possible matter, like nano-technology. Once that happens, it will sort of turn everything in the world into a computer. And then once you run out of space by doing that, there’s a necessity to go to other planets.

How does the planet become one big computer?
It starts by the internet becoming self-aware. Then we have to give up our bodies. and then everything gets smaller and smaller and denser and denser. And then you have the computronium.

Computronium?
Thats the term for the ultimate computing substrate at the densest physical level. Zero time to send a bit. It‘s similar to Platonic idea of god. Its kinda inconceivable.

Whats the ideology of AIDS-3D?
That technological advancement is supremely important. Its a sacrifice for individuals; its kinda fascist. It’s like there is one goal and the goal is to create artificial life. Its actually not that fascist, but it isn’t socialist. It’s technocratic.

Is that the goal of your art, to publicize the positive aspects of technological development?
Not so dogmatically. I think we just want it to be discussed a little more neutrally than it is in The Terminator.

How would you use AI?
It‘s a good art tool.

What kind of technological developments do you think will influence fashion?
Wearable video screens. Increasing trends for smart everything: a flower vase will have to have a duel function as a computer. I think with clothes it will also have duel functions, like recycling electricity. Also integrating machines. Like sunglasses that have a heads up display. A laptop thats right on your skin. Do implants count as fashion?
How are you constrained by money?
We wanted to make some anamatronic stuff, like a Grace Jones robotic head. But that was gonna cost 50K.

Can you talk a bit about why you moved to Berlin?
We were doing this laser scanning job in Chicago. Which is really cool. It creates 3D models of building interiors. You can calculate to the nano-inch how much paint you neet etc. So anyway we were doing that and thought we were gonna go on a laser scanning journey. But it fell through. We were like fuck that, and we had already applied to an exchange programs in Europe, so we decided to do that.
 
Where?
We were deciding between London and Berlin. We decided Berlin cause we like Germans; we like their reputation.

Can you clarify that?
I don’t know, they’re just so intense. They‘ve gotten so many things done for good and evil.

How did you end up at Städl?
Some friend of ours recommended it and we were like, we need to stay in Germany. We heard the reputation and then Mark Leckey actually chose us. So that was a nice feeling cause hes a cool artist. He just won the Turner Prize. But we didnt really spend that much time together.

Art has expanded extensively into the internet. What kind of possibilities will the internet provide for fashion?
Selling shit, distribution. For us thats the best thing the internet has done to art. Yes it’s a new venue, but the best thing about it is that its a linked network that allows you to connect. That created a presence for us that was not at all related to our success. All the sudden we had a destination and people were going there. You can externalize your ego and make it into this beacon. So designers could do the same.

Would you like to work with designers making clothing?
Sure, yeah. We’d like to do that. I mean technology, and the tools of design are so smooth now and so easy that you dont need to become a master of something to express yourself. In basically every medium, you just collaborate with someone who has a little bit of expertise and you delegate and then all of the sudden: poof! It appears. We think it’s a responsibility that artists have these days because it’s so easy to collaborate. Artists should work in as many media as possible and spread their ideas.

Can you tell me about your current work?
We have an idea for a public sculpture. There’s this thing called distributed computing. It’s a screen saver where you download information from a big server and it networks a bunch of computers around the world together into this super computer. So SETI uses this to process radio telescope data to look for alien life. Other programs do simulations for AIDS drugs. We want to make a public monument sort of like Stonehenge. Megalithic servers which are actively solving these problems. AIDS is one example; it could be cancer or Parkinsons. All the topics that distributed computing works on are termed „grand challenge computing.“ Like really big social problems that we need to solve.

Utilitarian art?
I think that’s a trend that we’re exploring in our work: an earnestness. The compromise that computers still take up physical space, art maybe doesn’t. But then, if you combine the two, there‘s a compromise: a sculpture that is a computer.

But you were talking earlier about the fascist nature of technological advancement, how do you reconcile this with the trend of social awareness in your art?
Well it‘s just socially positive. Does the sculpture do anything? Yes. You can calculate the amount of megabytes of good that it has done. You can have a website where you see how much data this sculpture has calculated. It quantifies a positive thing. We could make art about our personal experiences but there are also these greater issues like starvation, war. Most art is really impotent. This may sound heavy handed, but this art is actually socially positive.


Tell me about your upcoming exhibition at Montgomery.
Its our first solo show in Berlin. There’s this piece that we made, where we ordered a meteorite with a specific weight from a website called catchafallingstar.com. The meteorite weighs exactly 50.907 Grams on the digital scale. When you reverse the scale it spells out the word logos. The word logos means to derive things, but it can also mean the divine organizing force. The organizing force known as logos, is a paradoxical side effect of entropy, but not its opposite. While energy is spent, matter is simultaneously organized into more efficient and dense forms. Sort of like a spiritual DNA. So its a lot about looking to space for these cosmic meanings and looking for symbols that aren’t really there. Like, all of the sudden a meteorite falls from the sky and because we don‘t have total understanding of what it means we take it as an omen. But it’s basically the same thing as a calculator that spells out boobies when you turn it upside-down. It’s the same effect but with a smart word.   ◊