quote of note

“[As a kid], I wanted to be an architect. I don’t even know where I got that idea from. I think I was told ‘you should be an architect’ somewhere early on, and I just latched onto it. My idea of being an architect was envisioning variations of what my room could be, split-level secret chambers, transportation in and out, that sort of stuff. I guess that’s why I enjoy getting to build these fantasy locations.

My house in New York is pretty spare; it’s sort of organized, but it is very simple. I do have some old telephones, but they are touch-tone. Everything else I use is all Apple. In a movie, if someone is going to listen to music, nine times out of ten I have them put on a record, which I myself never do. It looks so much nicer to me, to see this thing spinning and put a needle on it. It is what I grew up with, but it is also just a more beautiful object and it does something, you know – it spins. At the same time that is a little bit like fetishising this stuff. I met this guy in Italy who wanted to take me to this place where he has his collection of reel-to-reel tape recorders, because he thought I was obsessed with them. Well, I’m not obsessed. I don’t own a reel-to-reel tape recorder, but it does look nice when it spins and you film it.”

-Filmmaker Wes Anderson, in an interview with Tim Noakes for Dazed & Confused. Anderson’s latest film, Moonrise Kingdom, is in theaters Friday. Click below to watch the trailer.
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“I don’t pull [a Chado Ralph Rucci collection] together until very late, because I keep on adding—and editing. It doesn’t all come together until the fittings are finished, and then I line up for the show, because I don’t work with a stylist. I don’t understand how I possibly could, for two reasons. Part of my work, after I design the clothes for consumption—for the buyers to pull apart and buy for their locations—is also to make a presentation that tells a story for the press and for the history of our profession. And so how could a stylist know what’s in my psyche? And after having this huge period of solitude of just working with my friends [to design, construct, and edit the collection], how could I sit down with a stylist and talk about all of that? Perhaps a psychiatrist that I’ve worked with, but not a stylist to put together clothes! The other part of that is that I find that the formula that has occurred in our industry in the past however many years while I’ve been in this business, where a stylist prepares it for the press so that all the messages read somewhat the same, I can’t do that. I would choke.”

-Fashion designer Ralph Rucci, in an interview with modaCYCLE (video below). Rucci will receive the André Leon Talley Lifetime Achievement Award this evening at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s annual fashion show. An exhibit of his work opens today at the SCAD Museum of Art.
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“At the Otsuka Museum of Art in Naruto City, [Japan], a committee of six art historians determined the most important works of art in the Western world. The Otsuka Pharmaceutical Group funded the ambitious project of photographically replicating more than 1,000 works on ceramic board, in the original size, orientation, and installation position. Museum directors, curators, and artists’ descendants authenticated the works as exceptional reproductions. The museum calls attention to the authentic nature of the works with words such as ‘real’ and ‘exact,’ and by making little distinction between copy and original, claiming that the image-replications allow visitors ‘to appreciate the true artistic value of the original works.’ The introductory text reassures guests that, if the original works eventually perish in a natural disaster or expire from conservation problems, the reproductions are guaranteed to keep their ‘shape and color’ for 2,000 years.”

-Rebekah Modrak, in Reframing Photography: Theory and Practice (Routledge)

“Calvin actually once said to me that he never looked back. I think it’s probably the genius about him. I try not to look back. I try not to look in the archives or at stuff I’ve done. I think it’s so much more interesting what’s to come. I never consider myself a minimalist. But another word is reductionist, and that’s something I’m beginning to understand….What bothers me about the term minimalist is that it is so connected with a distinct period. It links me to the past. But I design for today. I’m a book freak. I’m buying five, six, seven books a week. I just want to feed myself. So I start with a lot—millions of pictures, millions of fabrics, millions of colors. Then as I work, it starts to be reduced and I pin the things that are relevant up. So, yes, those words carry a lot of weight and I don’t want them to be misrepresented, but I try not to associate myself with terminology. I want to be free to some extent.”

-Francisco Costa, women’s creative director at Calvin Klein Collection, interviewed by art photographer Ryan McGinley in this month’s issue of Interview with a stunning portfolio by Patrick Demarchelier. Click below to watch the fall 2012 Calvin Klein Collection runway show.
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Juergen Teller, “Pettitoe, Suffolk, 2011,” a photograph from his “Keys to the House” series exhibited earlier this year at New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery.

“I can achieve something in a very quick moment. But it does get very personal. I think I open up a lot too. I don’t come around as the archetype fashion photographer dude, playing the big guy with the horde of assistants. I let them know I’m also nervous or insecure. Then I let them relax. The way I photograph is quite hypnotizing. I found a way to hide my insecurity—I have two cameras and I photograph like this [mimes cameras in each hand moving hypnotically] and this helps me to figure out what I should do, where they should go…it’s so intense, so psychologically draining, it’s like my brain works on overdrive in those minutes—or hours or days—I’m photographing. That’s why I can’t do it so much because I’m really super-concentrated. Other people think it’s a stupid snapshot—I get that a lot—but it’s very precise. And it has to be very fast because if I’m on a job or something, I can’t just doodle around and days go past and I take a picture. Sometimes there’s a lot of money involved and I have a responsibility to the client to get the fucking thing done. A lot of other people say, “Stand like that, stay like that,” and they do a Polaroid and everyone—all the assistants, the hair and makeup, everyone—stands around looking at the Polaroid or nowadays looking at the screen, then they say, “Let’s do it, shoot,” by which time the model is so tense the Polaroid is better than the end product. I ease that up where they don’t feel necessarily, ‘This is the big decisive moment.’”

-Juergen Teller interviewed by Tim Blanks in the fall 2012 issue of Style.com/Print

A sofa designed by Peter Shire. (Photo: Peter Shire)

“I keep thinking about sofas. They’re weird, right? You can get into a sociological conversation about the value of furniture and the way it has evolved over the last 500 years. Once, nobody had furniture unless they were wealthy. Castles had thrones, and the rank and file sat on benches. It was a social signifier. Now you see sofas thrown out on the street. In ceramics, we have kiln furniture to set your ware; in printing, they have furniture that holds the type into a matrix. That’s kind of what we’re talking about: objects that we piece together like a puzzle to hold our perceptions in the matrix. In a house, that can range from the way we move around to the things in it that cause social interaction. Many people would say of Memphis, which was so extreme, ‘I can’t imagine living with a house full of that!’ But you’re not meant to live with a whole house of it, unless you’re Karl Lagerfeld. So I’ve been thinking about what I’ve done, what it means within the world, and what its value is.”

-Artist and designer Peter Shire, an original member of the Milan-based Memphis group, in an interview with Jill Singer for Surface magazine

“There may be only one designer more absolute in her confidence than [Miuccia] Prada: her fellow-honoree at the Costume Institute. [Elsa] Schiaparelli did more than any of her peers to promote fashion’s status as an art, and she would no doubt have found it natural to mingle at the Met with Phidias and Vermeer. Prada’s statements about art suggest that she must find her own enshrinement somewhat ironic. Her fortune has financed an adventurous private collection, an exhibition space outside Milan, and a foundation that supports cultural experiments. In 2010, she was invited to present the Turner Prize at Tate Britain, partially in recognition of her prominence as a patron. (She wore a pair of plastic banana earrings with a stark black coat.) She has also worked with the Dutch architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas on the design of her major retail spaces, which she calls ‘epicenters,’ in New York and Los Angeles. Yet Prada insists that her vocation and her avocation are unrelated. She has refused to collaborate on limited editions of Prada merchandise with any of the art stars in her collection. (‘Anything that doesn’t sell,’ she once said dryly, ‘is a limited edition.’) In her somewhat heretical view of a profession that often hankers after transcendence, fashion design may be a creative enterprise, concerned, as art is, with culture and identity, but it isn’t what artists do.”

-Judith Thurman in “Radical Chic,” her New Yorker preview of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s imminent spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations”

Above: Elsa Schiaparelli in a 1932 portrait by George Hoyningen-Huené and Miuccia Prada photographed by Guido Harari in 1999. (Photos: Hoyningen-Huené/Vogue/Condé Nast Archive and Guido Harari/Contrasto/Redux)

“I think I just do what I feel is good to do. Everybody can give me their suggestions, but at the end, the final risk is mine because it’s my name on the magazine. So I only do what I really feel. Everybody tries to influence you, of course: ‘Oh, this is the right moment to do this’ and ‘This is the right photographer to choose,’ and ‘This is the right model to have…’ I listen, but I must go my own way. When you take risks, it means that you know every month people are there to judge you. Some months are good; some months are bad. When you make a mistake, they call you immediately. And when you do something good, they send flowers to the stylist. So this is a way to say that I want to do it myself. I don’t care if you like it or not. I do the magazine that I think is correct. If you like this issue, I am more than happy. If you don’t like this issue, you will like the next because we do 14 issues a year. So once in a year you will love, no?”

-Franca Sozzani, editor-in-chief or Vogue Italia and editorial director of Condé Nast Italy, in an Interview interview with Livia Firth. On May 4, Sozzani will be in New York to discuss her career (and, if history is any guide, a lot more) at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Register here to attend the free event.

“Everybody likes objects; everybody likes different objects. It comes down to what objects you want to put in your art. [Jeff] Koons and [Claes] Oldenburg both seem to have their agendas with their objects. So do I, I guess. I like them all: high, low, used, new, whichever works. I don’t know if the Lamp/Bear has anything more to do with Koons or Oldenburg than all three of us and everyone else have to do with [Marcel] Duchamp’s liberation of the real thing. Before him, it seems objects appeared in, or maybe as, still-lives. Duchamp’s the guy, the legend, who liberated objects from being second-class citizens. Even if his greatness lies in our imagination and how he built himself to make us imagine his work as we imagine it. His objects are often not very satisfying to spend time with outside of the fictions he created for them.”

-Artist Urs Fischer, whose solo exhibition at François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi opens Sunday

Ron Arad’s 1992 “Narrow Pappardelle” chair. (Photo: Bruno Scott)

“People in the art world are happy saying ‘I’m a designer’ and architects are happy saying ‘I’m an artist’ but I’m not allowed to be all of the above. If I do a sculpture it’s written about as ‘designed by Ron Arad‘ but if my friend Antony Gormley does one, no one ever says he ‘designed’ it. I thought it would get easier to escape these kinds of distinctions, but no. Frank Gehry told me he didn’t get taken seriously as an architect until he stopped designing furniture. I understand it: if you are doing these huge buildings it is difficult to accept that someone who isn’t an exclusive member of your club can do it too. Personally, I have no problem designing stuff for Vitra or Moroso that is made to be sold in shops, but I also like to do big projects or products that cause people in the bolshevik art world to be uncomfortable. But that’s a problem of their perception. I don’t want to stop doing anything. I want to do it all as seriously as I can, whether it’s industrial or a useless installation.”

-Ron Arad, in conversation with Reed Krakoff in this weekend’s Financial Times