ALL IMAGES BY THE FAKERS; TAKEN FROM THE BAND’S IMAGE BLOG “REPURPOSE”

ALL STILLS TAKEN FROM WOODY ALLEN’S “INTERIORS”, 1978; CAPTURES BY NICK SCHOLL, VIA FACEBOOK

“Imagine, if you will,” he said, “that we are not in a dank and mossy crypt, but in a room of gold; that upon each solid brick is stamped a fine and florid eagle, crown, or fleur-de-lys; that warm rays make the air softer and yellower than butter; that you breath not this base, black, wet mist, but a sparkling bronze infusion that has been mellowed by its constant reverberation within walls of pure gold.” He sucked in his breath. “The light of this room would be just the shade that we are told arises sometimes against the clouds beyond the bay, making the world gold the way it is said happens once in …every…well…sometimes. My plan, you see,” he said in pain, writhing internally, “is to build a golden room in a high place, and post watchmen to watch the clouds. When they turn gold, and the light sprays upon the city, the room will open. The light will stuff the chamber. Then the doors will seal shut. And the goldenness will be trapped forever.” The thieves; mouths hung open. “You can come there, all of you! You can bathe in the light, drink in the air, run your hands along the smooth walls. Even in the pit and trough of night, the golden room will be brightly boiling. And it will be ours.” Tranquilized with longing, he looked dreamily at the ceiling. “In the center, I will put a simple bed, and there I will repose in warmth and gold…for eternity.” [1]

“The original Amber Room (English sometimes Amber Chamber, Russian: Янтарная комната Yantarnaya komnata, German: Bernsteinzimmer, Polish: Bursztynowa komnata) in the Catherine Palace of Tsarskoye Selo near Saint Petersburg is a complete chamber decoration of amber panels backed with gold leaf and mirrors. Due to its singular beauty, it was sometimes dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World”.

The original Amber Room represented a joint effort of German and Russian craftsmen. Construction of the Amber Room began in 1701 to 1709 in Prussia. The room was designed by German baroque sculptor Andreas Schlüter and constructed by the Danish amber craftsman Gottfried Wolfram and remained at Charlottenburg Palace until 1716 when it was given by Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm I to his then ally, Tsar Peter the Great of the Russian Empire. In Russia it was expanded and after several renovations, it covered more than 55 square meters and contained over six tons of amber. The Amber Room was looted during World War II by Nazi Germany and brought to Königsberg. Knowledge of its whereabouts was lost in the chaos at the end of the war. Its fate remains a mystery, and the search continues.

In 1979 efforts began to rebuild the Amber room at Tsarskoye Selo. In 2003, after decades of work by Russian craftsmen, the reconstructed Amber Room was inaugurated in the Catherine Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia.” [2]

ALL IMAGES OF THE AMBER ROOM VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS; TEXT TAKEN FROM “WINTER’S TALE” BY MARK HELPRIN [1], AND FROM WIKIPEDIA [2]

“Richard Wrightman’s take on campaign furniture combines the vernacular of traditional form with a modern aesthetic, mixing memory with invention and creating pieces that subtly reference the spirit of the original idea - furniture built for travel. The collection is comprised of 18 distinct designs with over 50 variations. Each piece is built to order entirely by hand with precision, the diligence of craft, and impeccable attention to detail.

The Modern Campaign collection is offered in a variety of American and tropical hardwoods, hand-applied finishes, canvas, and leather. Each piece can be built to custom dimensions, choice of wood, finish, and C.O.M. Some of our designs have been client driven, and we welcome the discussion of new commissions.”

ALL WORK BY RICHARD WRIGHTMAN DESIGN; IMAGES AND TEXT TAKEN FROM THE RICHARDWRIGHTMAN.COM

“The dream of many people: to spend a night inside a museum, to fall asleep within an art work. Antonio Presti has changed radically the idea of the hotel room in order to deliver it to his utopia: ‘It’s only entering and living the room that the art work will be totally realized; the presence, the use of the room, will be the rundamental and interating part of it’.”

ALL IMAGES OF ATELIER SULMARE; IMAGES AND TEXT TAKEN FROM THE HOTEL’S WEBSITE

“It is no coincidence that Torsson would draw upon the Overlook’s corridors - along with other settings that have become very topoi of cinematic violence - in his next work. Evil Interiors is a series of sixteen digital prints that depict the sets of some of the key scenes in film history: the home of the old man in Clockwork Orange, the hotel corridor in The Shining, the empty warehouse in Reservoir Dogs, the motel room in Psycho, Hannibal Lector’s cage in The Silence of the Lambs. Using the editor in Unreal Tournament 2003, Torsson worked painstakingly on the architecture and on the texture of the various parts of the furnishings to make the polygonal reconstructions totally believable.

‘These images point at the psychological dimensions of violence, at least those that are imprinted in collective memory. As we live in a society where violence is accepted and ritualized, our own consciousness is full of images of violence which can be triggered by a digital architectural space. Violence is not actually depicted here, but it certainly exist in the eye and mind of the beholder,’ Torsson explains. The result is a sort of theme park, in which the theme is the media’s production of fear. This “crossing” of the polygonal-based visuals of video games with some of the classic images generated by a more consolidated medium means that the artist shifts our reflection from film to video games.”

ALL IMAGES BY PALLE TORSSON, TAKEN FROM THE “EVIL INTERIORS” SERIES; TEXT TAKEN FROM A REVIEW OF THE WORK BY DOMINECO QUARANTA, VIA THE ARTIST’S WEBSITE; IMPETUS VIA VVORK

“Mycroft, Kaugummi Books and nofoundproject are proud to present the portfolio nofound(bedroom). We asked all the photographers who contribute to nofound to send us one photograph of an empty bed or an empty bedroom.

Nofound(bedroom). Collective portfolio. Printed in april 2009. First edition : 400 copies. 39 artists, 39 sheets, black and white printed - 30 x 42 cm, isbn : 978-2-35862-005-5. Cover printed on cyclus 350 gr, inside printed on cyclus 115gr. Avalaible online.

with: Henry Roy, Tania Theodorou, Chris Taylor, Agnes Karin Thor, Jeremy Liebman, Alec Soth, Tema Stauffer, Alessandro DiGiampietro, Irina Rozovsky, Andra Chitimus, Andrew Phelps, Asen Ognyanov, Christina Maria Oswald, Chris Heads, Dana Goldstein, Elkie Vanstiphout, Knotan, Erika Svensson, Vincent Delbrouck, Jackson Eaton, JH Engstrom, Lina Scheynius, Julie Pike, Mihai e acolo, Olivia Jeczmyk, Tod Seelie, Vincent Ferrane, Philippe Gerlach, Maximilian Haidacher Kur, Monika Bielskyte, Rikki Kasso, Paul Herbst, Olivia Malone, Marianne Mueller, Raul Hofer Torres, Yiki Liu, Ryan Foerster, Margot Herster and Osvaldo Sanviti.”

IMAGES AND TEXT VIA DANA LAUREN GOLDSTEIN; PORTFOLIO AVAILABLE VIA KAUGUMMI BOOKS

“Granite countertops. Terraces. Marble bathrooms. Walk-in closets. The homeless are livin’ large in Brooklyn.

The city is paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to rent luxury condos in a Crown Heights building for homeless families, the Daily News has learned. “It’s like a hotel. It’s the nicest place I’ve ever lived in,” said Nelson Delgado, 36, who moved into a swanky two-bedroom, two-bath pad two weeks ago.

“It’s beautiful,” added Delgado, an out-of-work truck driver from Miami who’s living with his son Jeff, 17. “The closet in the main room is so big you could put a twin bed in there.”

Raymond, another resident who moved in more than a week ago with his wife and two young daughters, said he is still trying to get over his good luck. “When I first saw it, I was like, ‘Damn, everything is brand new,’” said Raymond, who wouldn’t give his last name. “It has marble counters and marble floors in the bathrooms, too. I like the big kitchen. That’s my favorite.”

City officials said the condos - which couldn’t attract buyers in the fizzled housing market - are part of an effort to help an “unprecedented” number of homeless families who have ended up on the street because of the tough economy. It appears to be the first time a faltering upscale building has found a new purpose as a shelter, said Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York.

Neighbors were furious the 67-unit building on East New York Ave., where apartments were supposed to sell for $250,000 to $350,000, has been turned into a shelter. “I’m a hardworking taxpayer, and I don’t think homeless people should be living better than me,” fumed Desmond John, 35, a window salesman who wanted to rent one of the fancy apartments. “They said it’s not for rent. It’s a shelter. I was shocked.”

Luxury brokerage firm HQ Marketing Partners started promoting the condos last summer - with the hook that buyers could custom design the units. When the market started to tank in the fall - and his gamble on a fringe neighborhood didn’t pay off - developer Avi Shriki said he had to come up with a Plan B. “When the market went south, we knew we had to do something different,” said Shriki, 44. “With the market being the way it is you have to be creative.”

This spring, Shriki signed a 10-year contract with the Bushwick Economic Development Group to turn the building into a homeless shelter. Shriki wouldn’t say how much he gets paid - but he said he jumped at the chance to get people in his building. “At least we still own the building and we are paying our mortgage, so that’s good,” said Shriki. “The outcome is not as bad as some people I know who had to surrender the whole building to the bank.”

The city is paying Bushwick Economic Development Corp. $90 a night for each of the apartments, about $2,700 a month - a figure that also covers social services, housing help and job counseling designed to get families back on their feet. The nonprofit declined to comment.

City officials defended the move, calling it a creative use of a building that otherwise could have become an empty blight. “This is a case of innovation and outside-the-box thinking that benefits all those involved,” said Department of Homeless Services spokeswoman Heather Janik.

Shelter residents said it’s not their fault they landed in such swanky digs. “People are saying we don’t deserve to live here,” said an 18-year-old man who gave his name only as “Boss,” who moved into a two-bedroom apartment with his mom last week. “Just because a person fell out doesn’t mean they don’t deserve a place to stay,” he said.”

ALL TEXT AND IMAGES VIA NEW YORK DAILY NEWS AS WRITTEN BY BEN CHAPMAN AND ELIZABETH HAYS

Rooms For Young People (Frankly Feminine), 2008; MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS, 10” x 8”  [1]

Personalize Lifeless Halls With Art, 2008; MIXED MEDIA ON CANVAS, 11” X 14”  [2]; Decorating With Fabrics, 2009; OIL ON CANVAS, 16” X 12”  [3]

Untitled, 2008; OIL ON CANVAS, 8” x 10”  [4]

ALL WORK BY JEANETTE MUNDT; IMAGES ONE, TWO AND FOUR VIA THE ARTIST’S WEBSITE; IMAGE THREE VIA JOHN CONNELLY PRESENTS. IMPETUS VIA THE K48 BULLET

[1]

“His thick flannel shirt, dark jeans and battered pair of boat shoes suggested that after finishing his coffee, he might just head out to the wood-shop to continue planing his sailboat or check on those miter joints he just glued into the cabinets he’d been detailing earlier in the day.

I’d wager that he did none of those things (who can resist an afternoon in the used bookstore followed by a nice uttapmam, after all?), but the prevalence of mid-century, working-class duds among the stylish set is indisputable.

Not only have classic American clothes, including Pendleton shirts, Red Wing boots and Woolrich outdoor gear - all made in America, as it happens - come back into vogue, but newer, far more fashion-forward companies have also looked to the garb of mill workers, lumberjacks and carpenters for inspiration.

Several currents seem to be informing this trend, the sorry state of the economy being foremost. Humble as it is, I see work wear as having a strong aspirational quality. Like the couple-seasons-in-vogue for all things ’60s and skinny, work wear harks back to an era of American abundance. Though far less fussy than the just-so tie clips and oiled hair of the dapper Dons on “Mad Men,” work wear alludes to the same period, one when a man could work - and dress like he worked - in a factory (seen one of those lately?) and still afford a house, a car and proper vacation each year. More broadly, work wear suggests work, which has become scarce in many parts of the country.

This trend also evokes production craft and industry: our grandfathers burning a pile of leaves on the weekends, hauling a load to the dump, heading to the garage to putter on the Packard. Hardly the stuff of preening metrosexuals, these are clothes for men unafraid to roll up their chambray sleeves, we are to believe, even if those chambray sleeves set them back $200.” [A]

[2,3]

“This dualism of town and country often involved romanticizing the latter. The arcadian tendency to do this, as opposed to romanticizing wilderness, stretches back beyond the Romantic period, as noted (Introduction; Short 1991). Williams (1975, 9) observes:

In the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, simple virtue. In the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition: on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between city and country, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.

From time to time in history one aspect of this dualism surfaces while the other becomes relatively dormant, but the two strands are always there, in fundamental tension. Williams shows us that there is a powerful Western tendency to associate the country’s more benign image with the past: a past where things were invariably better than they are now.” [B]

[4]

[5]

“There is, of course, a real danger of romanticizing the working-class communities of the past. It is very easy to slide into an idealized nostalgia for the past, especially among those who were brought up in a traditional working-class environment but who have now become middle-class. It is easy to forget the horrors and conflicts that existed in working-class communities, their conservatism, their xenophobia, their sexism in which so many women were imprisoned.” [E]

[6]

[7]

“Labour imprints itself on this fabric in another way. Denim was once the stuff of work clothes. But what is work? Work is transformation, or specifically, historical action upon nature or nature transformed. As such work marks itself on the jeans. Their particular unevenness, operation in conjunction with the body that is dressed them, makes ‘to wear’ and active verb again. The jeans record the wear and tear of movement, of usage, of a use-value that can be consumed and exhausted eventually by someone who marks a specific selfhood on the item. This marking is not, though, on a passive receiving material, but a material that is, in turn, assertive.

[…] History and labour imprint on matter, and matter asserts its own part in the process, its particular propensity to bend or resist, to be rubbed or rub in turn, dependent on the quirks introduced by the labour process. Forcing their own effectiveness to the fore, labour and matter conspire to speak back against the fetishizing socioeconomic push towards invisibility. In such a process of concealment, as Adorno notes, in an echo of Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism, commodification acts to confect an appearance of the never-made, by repressing all traces of labour. ‘[A] consumer item in which there is no longer anything that is supposed to remind us how it came into being. It becomes a magical object, in so far as the labour stored up in it comes to seem supernatural and sacred at the very moment when it can no longer be recognized as labor’ (Benjamin 1999: 669).

Here though, in the jeans that make up Hauser’s evidence, there is the shock recognition of human activity and material substance. Ideal forms are besmirched. With the jeans the flaws reveal: the layers of dyes that rub off under friction, fading tints, the anomalies of stitching, the scuffing of pavement at the heel, the force of the leg asserting its shape.

To generalize from this: is there something here that hits against fashion and its inextricable linkage with modernity? The complex fashion/modernity frequently implies presentness not pastness, consumption not production, expenditure not labour. Is a trend bucked here? For is not everything in modernity’s and fashion’s purview always to be thought of as new and ever-same, that is constant in itself and only ever at the beginning of its (shelf-)life — once passe, then it passes into another state?

[…] Jeans are, then, simultaneously the ultimate modern fashion item and not modern, outside of fashion, because they are more a document of the past. They are documents of the past because they retain on them a record of the past (which perhaps includes their own generic past as work wear) and a chronicle of the interaction between wearer and worn, as well as the trace of labour, the actuality that subtends the fetish. […] To focus on the history, labour and activity ensnared in the material exposes the social guilt of a society, where commodity fetishism typically refuses labour any articulation or voice. But it also, in this case, under these social conditions, allows the discipliners and surveillers another means to ascribe guilt and to act with the force of law upon that.” [C]

[8,9]

[10]

“Rent a flat above a shop/ cut your hair and get a job/ Smoke some fags and play some pool/ pretend you never went to school/ But still you’ll never get it right/ cos when you’re laid in bed at night/ watching roaches climb the wall/ if you call your Dad he could stop it all

You’ll never live like common people/ you’ll never do what common people do/ you’ll never fail like common people/ you’ll never watch your life slide out of view/ and dance and drink and screw/ because there’s nothing else to do” [D]

IMAGES ONE, SIX AND TEN VIA THESELBY; IMAGES TWO, THREE, EIGHT AND NINE VIA NOTHINGISNEW AND BLACKBUTTERFLY, FOUND VIA THENOMADICSUN; IMAGES FOUR AND FIVE VIA HOLLISTERHOVEY; IMAGE SEVEN VIA ACONTINUOUSLEAN.

TEXT TAKEN FROM “POCKET SQUARE: IT’S POSSIBLE TO LOOK LIKE YOU WORK HARD FOR A LIVING, NO LABOR REQUIRED” BY AARON BRITT [A]; “MODERN ENVIRONMENTALISM: AN INTRODUCTION” BY DAVID PEPPER [B]; ESTHER LESLIE’S RESPONSE TO “THE FINGERPRINT OF THE SECOND SKIN” BY KITTY HAUSER, FROM “FASHION AND MODERNITY” [C]; LYRICS TO “COMMON PEOPLE” BY PULP [D]; “THE CHALLENGE FOR THE COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL: CULTURE, CURRICULUM, AND COMMUNITY” BY DAVID H. HARGREAVES