ALL IMAGES TAKEN FROM “BARSOI, 2009” BY ROZA JANISZEWSKA; IMPETUS VIA VVORK

“In the spring of ‘82, armed with a trusty 5x7 camera, a tripod and an assistant, [Jon] Ericson set out to record the structures and spaces [of the piers] objectively, letting whatever ghosts appear be in the eye of the beholder. ‘I’d done some shooting before, not exactly to record architecture, but of parts of buildings. The way things deteriorate and decay interestes me, particularly in this sort of place, where people put their mark on it too.’

Some of the shots have an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ sense of mystery, with doorless frames seeming to stretch on forever. Others look like a Fellini film on ancient Roman catacombs; the graffiti has that same weathered and timeless look. Still others look like the aftermath of a fiery climax to a Vincent Price/ Edgar Allan Poe movie. The people present seem to blend, chamelon-like, into the suroundings. An inevitable few are brazen and demanding, but while most photographers would have concentrated on them, or on huddled and groping groups in corners or on lascivious couplings on the roof, he has given us a gentle, yet revealing , glimpse into the heart of the building itself.”

“He moved to NY in the summer of ‘79 and a friend brought him to the piers in the fall. He didn’t go again until the following spring, and then again this past April. The closed pier had changed dramatically; there’d been a fire, and charred cinders were everywhere. Parts of the roof and walls had caved in. He realized he wanted to document this area of New York before it disappeared.

‘I was somewhat personally involved with the phenomenon simply by having known about it and going there on occasion. Even though the photographs document a place at a certain point in its deterioration in a pretty objective manner, somewhow you can’t extricate the people completely from the phenomenon. Over the passge of time, they went in ther for the purpose of crusing, or to have an adventure in a non-commercial atmosphere, and they left these marks on teh wall swith the elements. So in a subtle way these pictures have to do with sexual/social aspects as well.’ “

“Had he been assigned the series specifically as an ‘homage’ he would have approcahed it somewhat differently. He woudl have included many more men—not only involved in sex, bu twalking, watching, talking and relaxing. ‘In many ways, it was a park. You were in the city but you could go there and be on the water, and see the Empire State Buliding and the World Trade Center. A lot of us live in cramped, tight apartments—so the appeal of the pier was much more than sexual.’ “

ALL WORK BY JON ERICSON, TAKEN FROM “PORTFOLIO: HOMAGE TO A PIER”, TORSO MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1983; TEXT BY GERRY GEDDES, FROM THE SAME ISSUE

“A few years ago, Parsons School of Design in New York held a symposium on the subject of professional enmity between architects and interior designers. The finger pointing got off to an early start when members of Parsons’ interior design department objected to the announcement poster, which featured an archival photo of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, with a manicured poodle digitally inserted into that icon of modernist splendor. Protesters denounced the poodle as an antiquated stereotype of decorators as frivolous interlopers in the exalted realm of architecture.”

“I was reminded of Poodlegate recently when a friend sent me an old photo of a discotheque designed by Phyllis Morris in the 1970s for Allan Carr. For you sweet, ignorant sprites who don’t know anything about anyone who isn’t on Facebook, Carr was a Hollywood producer and a grand queen of the old school. His producing credits included Grease, the underappreciated Grease 2 and his chef d’oeuvre, Can’t Stop the Music, starring the Village People, Valerie Perrine and Bruce Jenner (back when he was still cute and not saddled with that gaggle of Kardashian harpies).

Morris was another colorful character from a bygone era of Hollywood glamour. She began her career by selling poodle lamps from the back of her car, and she was often photographed cruising around Los Angeles in a pink convertible, swathed in a mink coat (regardless of the season) and accompanied by her pet poodles, which were peppermint-dyed to match her supersweet ride.”

“Flamboyance paid off for Morris. Her extravagant style was embraced by Joan Crawford, Howard Hughes, Lana Turner, Lucille Ball, Hugh Hefner, Gladys Knight and Totie Fields. Oh, and she also designed a dining room for Lady Bird Johnson. Mercy, that’s some client list!”

“As I look around the decorating world today, I have to wonder: Where have all the poodle pushers gone? I realize decorators have struggled to overthrow degrading stereotypes and demand professional respect. Still, I hope the design world always has room for a few insane, over-the-top characters. We need them. If I have to attend one more canape-filled book signing for some restrained, ultraclassy, ultratasteful decorating tome, I might have to pull out my BeDazzler gun and start shooting.

For now, I’ll content myself with contemplating the odalisque figure of Allan Carr in his louche harem fantasy. I can almost smell the poppers and the hustlers. Come back, Allan! Come back, Phyllis! We need you now more than ever.”

ALL STILLS TAKEN FROM THE FILM “TOO WONG FOO, THANKS FOR EVERYTHING, JULIE NEWMAR”, DIR. BEEBAN KIDRON, 1995; TEXT AS WRITTEN BY MAYER RUS, AS TAKEN FROM “QUEEN FOR A DAY”, VIA LA TIMES MAGAZINE

ALL WORK BY VIVIANE SASSEN, VIA THE ARTIST’S WEBSITE

“What is the human being? Twenty five centuries ago, Plato gave a lecture in the Academy in Athens where he defined the human being as an animal, a biped and featherless. He was warmly applauded. Upon hearing this definition, Diogenes the Cynic – once described as a ‘Socrates gone mad’ – left the lecture room, found a chicken, plucked it clean and brought it back into the lecture theatre, declaring ‘Here is Plato’s man’.

Here’s another, better definition of the human being from the great 18th century satirist, Jonathan Swift. In A Tale of a Tub, he writes ‘What is Man himself, but a Micro-Coat or rather a compleat Suit of Cloths with all its trimmings (sic)’. Without clothes, human beings are hideous. We’re simply forked animals with bandy legs. Thus, clothes are necessary. But I’d like to go further and argue that clothes are essential and we might learn much from pondering their meaning.

Ask yourself: what is the human being but a garment and what is the world but the living garment of God? If language is the expressive garment of thought, then clothes are the expressive garment of the body. Nature and life itself are but one garment woven and ever-weaving from the loom of time. As the Earth-Spirit in Goethe’s Faust says – and note that these words betray the fact that God himself is not naked, ‘Tis thus at the roaring loom of time I ply, and weave for God the Garment thou see’st him by.’ “

“Or as Carlyle writes in Sartor Resartus, or ‘The Tailor Re-tailored’, The whole external universe and what holds it together is but clothing and the essence of all science lies in the PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES.’

The philosophy of clothes is not some specialized sub-discipline taught in fashion school ghettos. It is the key to understanding everything. It is the germ and gem of all science.

The human being is the fashioned animal and fashion is the key to understanding the human being. Put simply:

Mankind = manikin = mannequin”

“The fashion designer is not just the maker of clothes or purveyor of frocks, he is the creator, something almost divine. Like Plato’s demiurge or creator-deity in the Timaeus, the fashion designer in the sky and the fashion designers here on earth are his prophets, his true disciples: mortal portals to his immortal power.

In our depressingly sick society, we must fashion a new garment, a new and splendid outfit to clothe the naked body politic. And it must be a beautiful garment. Against the dominant utilitarianism that reduces all human experience to a mechanism of profit and loss governed by a crude hedonistic calculusm the body politic needs a sumptuous and gorgeous new frock. This is the eternal truth of dandyism and what we might venture to call ‘the dandiacal body’. Where most people dress to love, the dandy lives to dress. God loves dandies because, truth to tell, he is one himself. All forms of utilitarianism have to be refused through a refashioning of the human being through fashion. Dress and dress beautifully, for by doing so you are honouring the deity and becoming a little closer to the deity yourself.

But not too close. Remember why it is that we need clothes. To cover our shame, of course. It is because Eve was tempted by the wily serpent and Adam tasted the forbidden fruit that we were forced to exit paradise. It is only with the Fall and the fact of original sin that we felt shame in the eyes of God and covered ourselves with the first clothes, a tiny fig-leaf. If our entire social order is based on covering our shame, then the world that we inhabit is based on the need for clothes.”

“But here’s the delicious and essential paradox: clothes conceal and cover. They hide. But they also disclose, they reveal precisely by concealing. Think of the extraordinary importance of the slit, the hemline, the décolletage, of the symbolic phallic display of collar and tie. We see more in seeing less. Or at least we think we do.

This, of course, in a rigorously Heideggerian sense, is the true function of clothing, its bivalent play of disclosure and concealment. Full nakedness is always a crushing disappointment because it extinguishes desire. It is only in concealment that desire is mobilized. It is only through the slit, through the dark recesses of what the slit conceals, that desire takes wing. It is only in the not seeing that we desire to see, perchance to touch, even to taste.

You might ask: am I serious in advancing this clothes philosophy as the single key to everything?. My dear, I’ve never been more serious in my life. As Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh counsels, we must pass from the everlasting No, through the Centre of Indifference, to the everlasting Yes. We can only begin to think this through if we seriously meditate on the meaning of clothes and give ourselves up wholeheartedly to their philosophy.”

ALL IMAGES TAKEN FROM THE “DISKEA” EDITORIAL BY DAVID TORO AND SOLOMON CHASE, VIA DIS MAGAZINE; TEXT TAKEN FROM “THE ONE TRUE PHILOSOPHY OF CLOTHES” BY SIMON CRITCHLEY AS IT APPEARS IN A MAGAZINE NUMBER NINE, VIA A BLOG

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ALL IMAGES OF WORK BY YOKO ONO; IMAGES [1] OF “ANTON’S MEMORY”, 2009, VIA THE ARTIST’S FLICKR; IMAGES [2] VIA THE ARTIST’S TWITTER, TAKEN FROM “THE OTHER ROOMS”, 2009; VIDEO STILL [3] ALSO OF “ANTON’S MEMORY”, TAKEN FROM THE IMAGINE PEACE ARCHIVES

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“Rafael de Cardenas situates his practice between architecture and interior design, neither of which he subscribes to entirely. “I don’t care weather it’s considered architecture if you put tape on a wall,” he muses, referring to the dizzying black-and-white zigzagging applique he did for the Greasy Spoon pop-up shop (run by art collective O.H.W.O.W.)in Athens, Greece. De Cardenas studied architecture at Columbia and UCLA, but initially worked as a collection designer for Calvin Klein (and as a production designer for BMW car shows and the film Minority Report). Two architectural references particularly haunt him: the bondage room at the late, great ’90s nightclub USA, “where reference and effect turned self-aware,” and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, “where High Modernism strips architecture of decoration… as too gay,” while still employing decorative I-beams. He now considers architecture, among others, a medium for provoking an emotional response: “You don’t design a mood, you design the instrumentation that produces a mood.” De Cardenas’s architectural moods tend toward disorienting, and slightly melancholic. In the New York home of model Jessica Stam, he channeled Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s tragically fashionable and famously claustrophobic The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) through gothic, feminine colors. And in his design for the Charles Restaurant in New York, smoked mirrors and fragments of Rorschach-like marble surround patrons in order to create, as de Cardenas puts it, “a dissected version of yourself, an exquisite corpse.”

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ALL IMAGES OF WORK BY RAFEL DE CÁRDENAS, VIA O.H.W.O.W. AND ARCHITECTURE AT LARGE: [1] O.H.W.O.W., MIAMI; [2] WRECK CENTER, NEW YORK; [3] CÁRDENAS RESIDENCE; [4] BRANCATI RESIDENCE, NEW YORK; [5] NY MINUTE, ROME; [6] GREASY SPOON POP-UP, ATHENS; TEXT BY ALEX GARTENFELD AS TAKEN FROM PIN-UP ISSUE 7, F/W 09/10

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IMAGES TAKEN FROM “GHOST”, DIR. JERRY ZUCKER, 1990 [1]; “FATAL ATTRACTION”, DIR. ADRIAN LYNE, 1987 [3]; AND FROM THE MUSIC VIDEO FOR “THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE” BY JANET JACKSON, 1986, DIR. DOMINIC SENA [2]; TEXT TAKEN FROM “LOFT LIVING: CULTURE AND CAPITAL IN URBAN CHANGE” BY SHARON ZUKIN

“As I moved out of my lavish studio in the 6th arrondissement, I moved in to a small and cheaper flat in the 10th and had to make all my stuff fit in. I sold the large double desk, donated my 2000 books to the local public library and turned my new place into a three dimensional scrapbook much inspired by my recent trips to India.

Originally white, I painted the ceiling dark brown and the walls in a shade of drab to balance the awkward proportions of the room. I was not in a sedentary mood then and had recently become passionate about sailing.

This little flat became my harbor between long travels and had to shelter the memories of my adventures across the sea. Between the urban and the exotic, this place is me, entirely.” [1]

“”Inhabiting” does not only mean living within. It means occupying—infusing a particular site with our presence, and not only with our activities and physical possessions but also with our aspirations and dreams. Samuel Clemens wrote of his Hartford home: “Our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart and soul, and eyes to see with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benedictions. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out in eloquent welcome—and we could not enter it unmoved.”” [2]

ALL IMAGES OF IVAN TERESTCHENKO’S FLAT TAKEN BY THE ARTIST, VIA ITOPUS.BLOGSPOT.COM; TEXT AS WRITTEN BY THE ARTIST [1], AND BY WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI, AS TAKEN FROM “THE MOST BEAUTIFUL HOUSE IN THE WORLD” [2], 1989

“Microsoft research has shown that the more users feel that working with a computer is like working with another person, the more intuitive it becomes. The “social” interaction is more predictable, and, as a result, users find the computer easier to master and enjoy.

Research for the Bob product included close collaboration with two of the leading experts in human-machine interactions, Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves, professors at Stanford University and directors of a major project studying social responses to communication technologies at the Center for the Study of Language and Information. Their studies have focused on the automatic, unconscious and powerful social responses that all users have to computer programs and provided a research foundation for the development of the Social Interface.” [1]

“In addition to the personal guides, Bob offers users a natural “Home” environment for easy navigation. Users can personalize their home environments, choosing from more than 40 different combinations of rooms and home styles, and they can “decorate” their rooms and even change the scenery outside the rooms’ windows to suit their unique tastes. From within any room, users access Bob programs and can launch any other Windows(TM)- or MS-DOS(R)-based applications they have installed.” [1]

“Microsoft Bob was a Microsoft software product, released in March 1995, which provided a new, nontechnical interface to desktop computing operations. Despite its ambitious nature, Bob was one of Microsoft’s more visible product failures. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer mentioned Bob as an example of a situation ‘… where we decided that we have not succeeded and let’s stop’.” [2]

ALL IMAGES OF VARIOUS ROOM STYLES, VIEWS AND OBJECTS TAKEN FROM MICROSOFT’S “BOB”, 1995, VIA D2CA.ORG’S ABANDONWARE ARCHIVE; TEXT TAKEN FROM “MICROSOFT BOB COMES HOME: A BREAKTHROUGH IN HOME COMPUTING” [1], VIA SEATTLE PI, AND FROM WIKIPEDIA.ORG [2]