“About seventy per cent of the world’s tufted carpet is produced in the vicinity of Dalton, Georgia, according to the Carpet and Rug Institute, a trade association whose continuing-education program includes such seminars as ‘Fibers and Yarns’ and ‘Carpet in Acute Care Facilities.’ On its Web site, the institute boasts, ‘Gone are the days of having to select only conventional loop pile… New technology can produce multilevel loop and cut-loop patterns allowing diamond, bow, pin dot or fleur-de-lis designs that ‘pop out’ in sculptured effects.’ Almost all of the world’s most elaborate tufted carpets, according to an informal study by a New York-based photographer named Chris Maluszynski, can be found in the casinos of Las Vegas.

Maluszynski, who moved to the U.S. from Stockholm five years ago, first noticed casino carpets—like the upholstery on Chinatown buses, they tend toward trippy, Day-Glo patterns—on assignment for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. He was supposed to be doing a story on the World Series of Poker. ‘You step out of the plane in Vegas and you’re surrounded by slot machines and all these sounds and lights and colors,’ Maluszynski recalled. ‘You’re in a prison of sensory impressions. I was trying to rest my eyes, and I looked at the carpet and thought, Shit, I can’t do it there, either.’ Just for fun, Maluszynski started taking pictures. He found himself thinking about the scene in the movie “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” in which Johnny Depp’s character hallucinates that his leg is being attacked by a deep pile carpet, which the movie’s production designer described as resembling ‘living pink worms.’

As far as Maluszynski can tell, Vegas carpets come in three categories. Many of them are geometric: dots, orbs, metastasizing lattices. Then, there are what Maluszynski calls ‘the organic ones,’ which feature curvilinear elements: underwatery ripples in turquoise and cobalt, gilded tendrils that seem to be derived from plants. At the nicer hotels, carpets often have themes. The Luxor used to have sphinxes. New York, New York once had subway tokens. At the Paris, the carpet evokes lily pads. ‘It made me think of the Impressionists,’ Maluszynski said. ‘It was, like, spots of different colors, but they were almost smeared.’

Maluszynski is an admirer of the Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk, who, several years ago, published a series called “Office,” which made visual exotica of potted plants and trash cans. The casino carpets are fascinating in their baroque mundanity. Like those public-service announcements at the beginning of movies, in which there’s always a popcorn box with legs, the carpets represent an aesthetic tradition that is as identifiable as it is mystifying.

Theories abound about why casino carpets look the way they do. The camouflaging argument makes sense—the more curlicues, the less noticeable the dirt and Coke and vomit. But Christine B. Whittemore, who runs a blog called Carpetology, believes that the carpets’ primary function is psychological. ‘A lot of the busyness of the patterns may be about keeping people active, as too much relaxing may not inspire gambling,’ she said. ‘You also have to be careful not to use the same pattern on stairs as you do on flat surfaces, because of how the brain processes depth.’ Recently, Whittemore took a tour of Steve Wynn’s new Encore hotel. She recalled, ‘There’s some carpet in this delightful little café-bar area, and what comes to mind is Marc Chagall—the idea was the butterfly, the metamorphosis, the dream.’ The butterflies flutter over a scarlet grid. Whittemore went on, ‘The head designer explained that red is a good-luck color in many Asian cultures.’

In 2005, David Schwartz, the director of the Center for Gaming Research, at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, gave a talk called ‘Art for Gamblers’ Feet: Casino Carpets from Coast to Coast.’ He posted a gallery of pictures and wrote on his Web site, ‘Note the regal tones of Caesars Palace, the bountiful bouquet of Mandalay Place … all whispering ‘Gamble, gamble’ just out of the range of consciousness.’ Schwartz keeps getting calls from people who want to buy the carpets. As for Maluszynski, he’s moving on to motel bedspreads.”

TEXT AS WRITTEN BY LAUREN COLLINS, TAKEN FROM THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2010; ALL IMAGES BY DAVID G. SCHWARTZ AND CHRIS MALUSZYNSKI, TAKEN FROM HERE AND HERE RESPECTIVELY

[1], [4]

“We became used to his harmless presence, to his soft babbling, and that childlike self-absorbed twittering, which sounded as if they came from the margin of our own time. During that period he used to disappear for many days into some distant corner of the house and it was difficult to locate him.

Gradually these disappearances ceased to make any impression on us, we became used to them and when, after many days, Father reappeared a few inches shorter and much thinner, we did not stop to think about it. We did not count him as one of us any more, so very remote had he become from everything that was human and real. Knot by knot, he loosened himself from us; point by point, he gave up the ties jointing him to the human community.

What still remained of him—the small shroud of his body and the handful of nonsensical oddities—would finally disappear one day, as unremarked as the gray heap of rubbish swept into a corner, waiting to be taken by Adela to the rubbish dump.” [1]

[4]

“He occupies the driver’s seat with an air of insouciance, a blue helmet atop his head, two proud white steeds under his command and a sly smile across his lips. Bruno Schulz looks out at the world from his painting as if he owns it. But like much else in his life, cut short by a Nazi bullet, this is pure fantasy.

The work and story of Schulz, a Jewish writer and painter in Poland who was forced to illustrate a children’s playroom in a Nazi officer’s home and then killed, have long attracted literary attention. There was something about his humility, talent and fate that captivated writers like Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth and David Grossman, who all made him a character in their works.

Yet until the wall drawings for children were discovered in 2001 by a documentary filmmaker, fading and peeling like ancient Roman frescoes, they were thought to have been destroyed. Spirited out of Schulz’s hometown in what is now Ukraine under contested circumstances by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel, they have been painstakingly preserved and put on view here for the first time.” [2]

[3]

[3]

“And while this haunting show, a permanent exhibition titled “Wall Painting Under Coercion,” will not end the lingering controversy over whether Schulz belongs more to Polish than to Jewish culture, or whether the wall drawings should have remained in Ukraine rather than go to Israel, it offers a poignant example of artistic defiance in the face of overwhelming cruelty.

‘There was something very Kafkaesque about his abhorrence of bureaucracy and authority,’ said Yehudit Shendar, senior art curator at Yad Vashem. ‘He is sometimes called the Polish Kafka. He took courage with a brush in his hand. It became a weapon of rebellion.’

For example, the Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Hansel and Gretel that Schulz created for the officer’s children’s playroom bore the faces of real people: Schulz himself, his father and other members of the Jewish population in their town, Drohobych. Putting himself at the reins in his drawing struck a note of defiance, since Nazi law forbade Jews from riding in or driving carriages.

His face is also that of the witch, a reference, curators believe, to the witch hunts that Jews faced in eastern Galicia, then part of Poland, in those months after the Nazi conquest of his town in June 1941.

Instantly, some 900 Jews were rounded up and shot. Most of the rest were pressed into forced labor before being killed. Schulz was a sickly man and a talented one, and the Gestapo sergeant in charge of Jewish laborers, Felix Landau, held him aside and ordered him to decorate a riding school and his children’s nursery. It seemed to be his salvation.

Marila B., who was 11 at the time and lived in the house next to the riding school, eventually escaped through the forest with her family and lives today in Israel. She remembers the Nazi sergeant and the wall drawings because she was ordered to baby-sit for the officer’s children, aged 4 and 2.” [2]

[2]

“’I would play with the children in the garden and then take them up to the playroom, and there I saw the drawings,’ she said in a brief interview at the opening of the exhibition at Yad Vashem this month. Loath to be obliged to repeat her story, she asked that her full name not be published. ‘Landau used to walk around with a pistol in one hand and a whip in the other. He was the very embodiment of evil.’

Landau did save Schulz for more than a year, until November 1942, by providing him with work and the means for minimal sustenance. Schulz, whose literary reputation as a short-story writer had already been established, had obtained false Aryan papers and was about to escape when another Gestapo sergeant, Karl Günter, angry that Landau had killed his Jewish dentist, put a bullet in Schulz’s head. He is said to have told Landau: ‘You killed my Jew. Now I’ve killed yours.’

Schulz was 50 and a bachelor, and though he had published only a handful of works, he was viewed as brilliant by those who mattered most in Polish literature. His reputation later grew immensely. As Isaac Bashevis Singer put it, ‘What he did in his short life was enough to make him one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.’

Always rooted in Drohobych, his work had a magical vitality to it.

As one of his famous lines reads, ‘My colored pencils rushed in inspiration across columns of illegible text in masterly squiggles, in breakneck zigzags that knotted themselves suddenly into anagrams of vision, into enigmas of bright revelation, and then dissolved into empty, shiny flashes of lightning, following imaginary tracks.’

Mr. Grossman, the Israeli author, says he discovered Schulz when someone told him that Schulz’s influence was evident in his own first novel. He had never heard of Schulz, but he picked up his stories and felt a chill of admiration and recognition. Upon learning of the infamous line about Nazis’ killing each other’s Jews, Mr. Grossman was filled with the ambition to write about the Holocaust.

In his widely admired novel ‘See Under: Love,’ a character named Bruno escapes a ghetto under Nazi occupation and jumps into a river, joining a school of salmon.

Most of Schulz’s artwork has not survived but was also esteemed by his contemporaries. Expressionist in the way of Middle European artists of the interwar era, it mixed dreamlike fantasy with a touch of erotica. Because he was an assimilated Jew who wrote in Polish and whose hometown is now in Ukraine, the discovery of the murals was greeted in Eastern Europe as the retrieval of a piece of national heritage.

For officials at Yad Vashem, however, Schulz was killed for being a Jew, and his work belonged here. When they learned of the discovery, they negotiated with the family living in the house and the municipality to get permission to rescue the paintings from their neglected circumstances.

What happened next is disputed, but most of the paintings were removed and taken to Israel without the Ukrainian government’s permission. After years of bad feelings, a deal has been struck whereby the murals belong to Ukraine but are on long-term loan to Yad Vashem. The Ukrainian deputy culture minister attended the exhibition’s opening.

So did Mr. Grossman. He told the audience an anecdote from Schulz’s childhood. His mother caught him feeding sugar water to flies one autumn day, and she asked him what he was doing. ‘Helping them get through the long winter,’ he replied.

That, Mr. Grossman said, is what Schulz’s work does for us all.” [2]

IMAGES TAKEN FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, 2.27.09, AS PHOTOGRAPHED BY BENJAMIN GEISSLER [1], JIM HOLLANDER [2], DROHOBYCHYNA MUSEUM, UKRAINE [3], AND THE ASSOCIATED PRESS [4]; TEXT TAKEN FROM “VISITATION” BY BRUNO SCHULZ, 1934, AS TRANSLATED BY CELINA WIENIEWSKA [1], AND BY ETHAN BRONNER [2]

ALL IMAGES OF WORK BY MATTHIEU LAVANCHY, VIA THE ARTIST’S WEBSITE

” ‘Fashion is unjust — even brilliant things sometimes don’t work.’ So complains one of the participants of RJ Cutler’s film The September Issue, a spectrographic analysis of the frivolous. And what more shocking example of this injustice could there be than the closure of the fashion house of the protean designer Christian Lacroix? The selling-off of the furniture of the couture salons this spring is a further distressing repercussion of the stroke of bad luck that hit the company last year.

There is no doubt that this sale will be epoch-making, precisely because it sets the seal on an era, in much the same way as a few years ago the destruction of the magical Royal Lieu, a stucco masterpiece on the Boulevard des Italiens did or more recently, the famous Café Costes on Place des Innocents, a Starckian embodiment of the 1980s. Very few places capture the spirit of a time and give it form; that is one of the qualities of the rooms seen here. Perhaps it stems from the union, the communality of references and culture, of three baby boomers who were not bound by anything: Lacroix, plus Elizabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, two young designers in their late thirties on the verge of a famous collaboration (which they maintained until 2001).

Inquisitive and well-informed, a lover of the 1940s as well as of contemporary design, Lacroix had seen the exhibitions of the other two at Paris’s Galerie Néotú. He was a regular at the privilège, a restaurant later described as ;bijou; by Americans, where the pair first collaborated in 1981. He was familiar with their ‘Barbarian’ chair. Perhaps he had even seen their exhibition at the MAison JAnsen gallery on the Rue Royale, in which they were already using unexpected materials, such as papier-mâché and wrought iron.

‘I had no wish,’ said Lacroix at the time, ‘to surround myself with that cold and cerebral design that had been advocated for ages.; This was 1987, when Lacroix was the talk of the town. Having just left Jean Patou, he planned to produce out of nowhere something that had not been seen for a long time: a new haute-couture house. In April he got in touch with the two ‘Barbarians’; in July they held their first fashion show. ‘It was meteoric,’ says Mattia Bonetti placidly. They had to invent a place in three months starting from scratch: a suite of three salons, separated by arches and extending for 350sq m, between a courtyard and a garden. Lacroix adopted his usual manner: graphically, ‘graphomaniacally’ you might say, issuing ideas, cuttings, torn-out pages and suggestions, which all contributed to a gigantic collage that summed up his idea of the place. As none of the three designers particularly cared for the established codes, a first line of action was established. ‘We wanted,’ Elizabeth Garouste recalls, ‘to give an idea of luxury, without using traditionally luxurious materials’, to get away from the banal codes of good taste. Luxury, she says, would be expressed in the flamboyance of colour, in the richness of pattern and — Mattia Bonetti adds — in the ‘luxury of the handmade’, the skillful joinery of the furniture serving as shorthand for the perfectionism of haute couture.

Hence the sophisticated ‘poverty’ of the materials (Arte Povera was then in fashion): a simple block of wood (but studded with bronze); pieces of branch (but richly lacquered); long drops of natural linen (but hemmed with velvet arabesques); surfaces of teracotta (but enhanced with gold leaf)… The references intertwine or clash in a sustained assault on the economic orthodoxy of the design of previous decades. It was a return to what 18th-century theoreticians called architecture parlante, one that is expressive of its purpose: not so much in a narrative dimension but as a portrayal of a personal mythology. ‘Here,’ said Lacroix, you will find everything I love: the overtones of Jean-Michel Frank, the Cocteau Spirit, the influence of projects by [Emilio] Terry and a whole host of references to the theatrical aspect of things, but … devoid of any obsession with the past.’

[1]

[2]

The first allusions are obvious ones: Spain, Provence, small chairs with bulls’ horns, commedia dell’arte wall lamps, operatic colours, and the East — the fitting rooms, according to Bonetti, waver ‘between beach huts, sheds and the Kaaba’… Mediterranean references are accentuated by the black wooden cut-outs, reminiscent of moucharaby lattice, which slide open or shut against mirrored walls. But anyone familiar with Lacroix will recognize yet another dimension: that of the fairy tale, especially Goldilocks and the Three Bears. The story’s spirit can be seen in the contrast of scale that set for example giant sofas against tiny chairs, enhanced by fuchsia and chartreuse. And the idea of a plunge into the supernatural also lies behind the arrangement of the salons, which is conceived as a visual crescendo: from the understated beige sheen of the entrance to the orange reception hall, punctuated with the first graphic patterns and branches of coral, then in the final salon with its flamboyant furniture and carpets, ablaze with hot colours.

In the opinion of Garouste and Bonetti, these salons marked the beginning of their rise to international prominence. They were, and are, one of the essential elements of Christian Lacroix’s ‘brand image’. They express a particular moment when it finally became possible, and urgent, to move away from the cold functionalism of Modernist orthodoxy. It was a return therefore to the imagination, the dream, the taste for ornament, to the short circuit between past and present. Thirty years have passed. ‘That it is dated is a fact,’ comments Bonetti, ‘that has to be accepted. That you can even immediately date it is great… I have gone onto something else, but I don’t repudiate any of what we did. It’s not an “evolution” to move from the Neo-Baroque towards the minimal; I am, at least, dual: I can want something clean and pure one day, and something “baroque” the next. In matters of style… you don’t go from something “less good” towards something “good”. The worst errors are committed in the name of progress.’

Engraved in its time, but always of the moment: perhaps this stems from the perfect harmony that presided over the birth of these rooms. It also stems from the fact that this place, this work of applied art, was just one of may means of expression open to Lacroix, a self-described ‘creator of illusions’ — and illusions, remember, lie beyond the grasp of time.”

ALL TEXT AND MOST IMAGES AS TAKEN FROM THE JUNE 2010 ISSUE OF THE WORLD OF INTERIORS; IMAGES 1 AND 2 TAKEN FROM SOTHEBYS.COM; TEXT BY MARIE-FRANCE BOYER; PHOTOGRAPHY BY IVAN TERESTCHENKO; FURNITURE AND WORKS OF ART BY GAROUSTE AND BONETTI FOR THE CHRISTIAN LACROIX FASHION HOUSE

“Elastic City intends to make its audience active participants in an ongoing poetic exchange with the places we live in and visit.

Artists are commissioned by Elastic City to create their own walks. These walks tend to focus less on providing factual information and more on heightening our awareness, exploring our senses and making new group rituals in dialogue with public space in the city.”

Centroids and Asphalt / Neil Freeman

“Centroids and Asphalt will identify hidden loci of New York City— invisible hinge-points upon which the city’s people, buildings and population turn. The walk will explore our physical interactions with the street and how to reconcile these encounters with a conceptual, bird’s-eye view of the city. We will physically map both our own perceptions and present realities at different points and use drawing, map-making, and careful study to form new narratives from our everyday environment.

This walk holds 10 people.”

IMAGES AND TEXT VIA ELASTIC CITY;  CENTROIDS AND ASPHALT IS LEAD BY NEIL FREEMAN AND PRESENTED BY ELASTIC CITY; THE WALK WILL TAKE PLACE JUNE 12, 19, AND 26; SEE HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION

CLYFFORD STILL GUN SHOP, 2010

MODIFIED DAVID [INSTALLATION VIEW], 2010

CÉZANNE CORRIDOR, 2010

PARKER ITO CONDO, 2010

JASPER JOHNS CONFERENCE ROOM, 2010

ADOLPH GOTTLIEB DINING ROOM, 2010

ALL WORK BY JON RAFMAN, TAKEN FROM THE BRAND NEW PAINT JOB SERIES; VIA TUMBLR

“Decorating, Thomas Prayer is happy.

He is throwing different swatches of patterned fabric against the back of a chair, stepping back a few steps and looking hard at each one. It is a light-hearted undertaking: When he dismisses a piece of cloth, he does so playfully, in a kind of mock horror, reaching forward and taking the offending piece and tossing it into a discard pile, which he occasionally bends over and neatens, at the bottom of a canvas bag with a few painted flowers by Matisse on it. He is delighted and absorbed.

It is a good life.”

ALL TEXT AND IMAGES TAKEN FROM “THE REARRANGEMENT” BY ADAM LEHNER

“TONIGHT | 8:00 – 9:00 PM | at Jack Hanley Gallery, NYC

Presented in conjunction with Amy Yao’s solo exhibition,

Woman merges w Car is a rhythmic puzzle played out in sequential gestures by three performers. The performance is set inside an abstract bathroom. In the piece, one woman merges with technology, another with nature, and the third acts as a mime narrator functioning as the opposing particle to each.

Woman merges w Car is written and choreographed by Megha Barnabas and Gloria Maximo, and performed by Megha Barnabas, Gloria Maximo, and Melissa Ip. Set design and sculptures are by Shawn Maximo, with a sculpture by Paul Kopkau. Music by Tim Dewit.

Yemenwed is a collaborative project series, which brings together an expansive cast of artists from varied disciplines. Through video, performance, sculpture, and music, Yemenwed explores abstracted concepts of displacement and detachment, fluid identity, domesticity, and the peripheral. Each project provides an aperture to an expanding visual language of icons, objects, characters, and architecture.”

VIA DIS MAGAZINE

“A chair has waited such a long time to be with its person. Through shadow and fly buzz and the floating dust it has waited such a long time to be with its person.
What it remembers of the forest it forgets, and dreams of a room where it waits — Of the cup and the ceiling — Of the Animate One.”

TEXT OF “A CHAIR” BY RUSSELL EDSON, AS TAKEN FROM THE VERY THING THAT HAPPENS; ALL IMAGES PHOTOGRAPHED AND STYLED BY MYSELF, TAKEN FROM “YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND YOU ARE A CHAIR” FOR DIS MAGAZINE, MAY 2010