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Venus in Pieces: Invocations, Ergonomics, Advertising

                   "I just want to be a rich white girl in the suburbs."
                        Venus Extravaganza, Paris Is Burning, 1990

     Vernon Price’s new series of work, which opened Mathew NYC, paraphrases the
desires of the young transsexual in Livingston’s gender industry touchstone, Paris Is
Burning, 1990, saying, "I just want to be a photograph in a Down Town gallery." Unlike
Venus, who ends up dismembered under a bed, Price’s works have achieved their
desired goal. They serve up a kind of photographic realness, which allows them to
pass, here in a new downtown gallery, as the real thing. And this, their successful
aesthetic drag, begins the Los Angeles based artist’s interrogation of the networked
discourses of ethics and engineering that crosses bodies, objects and symbolic
orders, which, via languages of design, run rampant under the unchecked functioning
of capital.

      Eight large–scale photographs in specially designed transparent lucite frames
are hung throughout the gallery. These objects as pictures feature various
choreographies, involving Giancarlo Piretti’s 1967 Plia chair, a later knock-off of
Piretti’s design, and a transgender model and dancer discovered by Price in a Los
Angeles nightclub. As a set, the numerically titled series (No. 1 - No. 8), indicates a
progressive system, staged here as a product test shoot, choreographic dance
sequence, or even a design manual, being played out in order to demonstrate a
comparative set of relations between the designed object and the designed body.
Piretti’s Plia chair, produced by the Italian firm Castelli and made famous by its three
layer chrome hinge and transparent surfaces, brought a new Cardin-esque pop finish
to a firm functionalist favorite the folding chair. At Mathew NYC, Price pictures
Piretti’s pop version in changing groups quoting directly from Castelli’s original
advertising for the chair. These different groups acrobatically display the functional
and ergonomic perfection of its design - stacked, unfolding, balanced on top of each
other, the famous hinge at various angles (No. 2,
No. 4, No. 5, No. 8). Some arrangements feature the later knock off as a viral
interloper within these groupings, pointing towards the mechanics by which the life
span of a design classic is often extended by a kind of continued appropriative
prototyping. In other groupings, Price’s transgender model appears posing naked
behind the chairs, her form obscured and fractured by the transparent lucite panels
which make up an appropriated image of Piretti’s now classic design (No. 1, No. 3
(Shimbaree Shimbarah), No. 6 (Who is?), and No. 7). Via Post-production techniques,
the model appears in different versions; Price’s series offers her up in shades of ultra-
violet, biochemical green, St. Tropez Bronze and ultra-black shadow - a prototype of a
very different kind.

      It is important to note, that if we take Price’s series as a sequence, the different
prototypes of dancer/model never appears, putting Piretti’s chair to use. Rather, she
is always pictured sitting on the infinity background of the studio floor with her body

                                           1

set behind three flattened chairs placed closely together. From behind the three
chairs, which she supports in front of herself, pieces of the model’s head, arms, legs,
genitals and surgically altered genitals are visible, where the positioning of the rest of
her body is ambiguous - somewhere between a choreographed pose of a glamour
model or cabaret dancer, a child playing hide and seek, and a woman taking shelter
from attack. None of these descriptions, however, are entirely convincing as a means
to articulate the models relation to the chair. Her glamorous pose is obscured
through the contours of Piretti’s design, in as much as, her desire to hide or her
desire for protection is thwarted by the transparency of Piretti’s material choices
which is echoed in Price’s specially designed frames. Just as the chair is never
pictured fulfilling its function, neither is Price’s model, who like the female models in
automobile catalogues, is neither pictured as the central object of the camera’s
desire, nor the consuming subject who puts the commodity captured in the picture to
use. It may be argued, that in Price’s images, the roles between the functional
promise of the designed object and the consuming subject, are trans-identified. Price
repurposes Piretti’s Plia chair in order to refit his transgender model for a different
use, reversing the standard subject/object relation, which define the erotics of the
striptease. When we think of the first time that we encounter the figure of Sally
Bowles, in Bob Fosse’s 1972 film version of Cabaret, perched high up, legs akimbo,
on Adolf Loos’ Café Cupua Chair, 1913, singing out the command to the camera, "You
have to understand the way I am Mein Herr", we begin to see how, in Price’s series,
the body does not functionalize the object to demonstrate its libidinal appeal, but the
other way round. In Price’s work, it is the object which functionalize the body in order
to perform its erotic possibility. Here, the Plia chair dances around the stationary
body, making the command, "You have to understand the way I am Mein Herr". This is
also to understand the ways in which Price’s images stress the ergonomic relation
between subjects and objects in the production of commodities. This relation is
strikingly gendered. Here we might think of the private message of Italian Designer
Carlo Mollino’s darkroom whose polaroids picture objects of design with Turinese
prostitutes, betray a compulsive need to picture the design object in relation to erotic
subject. While the ergonomics of Loos’ Café Cupua chair allow Liza Minelli to perform
her function as a commodity fetish via Fosse’s choreography, it is the transfigured
body of Price’s model which allows Piretti’s chairs to function as means by which
Price’s images themselves become objects.

      This role reversal, which produces images as objects, and forms the through line
between Price’s series as a set, might be clarified by invoking Werner Blaser’s 1964
photograph of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in which the architect leans back in a nickel-
plated tubular Architect’s design, MR 10, cigar in hand. Apocryphally, the photograph
also documents the moment in which the Bauhaus master first stated his ambiguous
quip that "A chair is a very difficult object. Sometimes more difficult than a
skyscraper." If we extend the architect’s logic falling in line with Price’s series, and
argue that the relationship between a chair and the embodied subjectivities it might
presuppose is difficult - the machinery by which Price’s endeavor actually dispenses
with comparative logics between bodies and objects becomes clear, pushing Mies’
assertion even further, perhaps even arguing that "An image is a very difficult object."
Price stacks the body of his transgender model against Piretti’s transparent chair; he
then stacks the transparency of Piretti’s chair against the camera’s lens; he then

                                          2

stacks the cameras lens against the gloss surface of the print; and finally he then
stacks the gloss surface of the print against the transparent surface of the lucite
frames. In Blaser’s image, unlike in Price’s series, Mies’ chair is perfectly suited to its
function; it elegantly cantilevers the statesmen like body of the architect without
betraying the immense weight, which shows the transition of the utopian ergonomics
of the Bauhaus into a technocratic enterprise, has continued to exert on bodies and
spaces since the photograph of the architect was taken.

      In Price’s series, as single images as objects, Piretti’s chair functions as an
extension of the camera’s lens, thematizing what might be its central concern, that is
the shared erotic mechanics by which objects might design subjectivities, cameras
might design subjectivities as images, and, if Price’s bespoke lucite frames in the
spirit of Piretti’s design are taken into account as further extension of the lens,
institutions design images as commodities. Price’s critique of these shared
mechanisms is most clear, when the consecutive titling of the series is broken at
works 3 and 6 with two parenthesis - (Shimbaree Shimbarah) and (Who is?). If we ask,
"Who is Shimbaree Shimbarah?", however, we do not seek to know further, as might
be suggested, the transgender subjectivity before us. As, if we realize that Shimbaree
Shimbarah is not the stage name we might take it to be, but the magical spell by
which Barney, the dinosaur, turns the world around him into a drawing, we might
more astutely then ask, "Who is able to say Shimbaree Shimbarah?". This is to
question the shared logic which Price reveals, asking who holds the power and the
means by which to transform chairs into design classics (Shimbaree Shimbarah),
bodies into rhetorical objects (Shimbaree Shimbarah), and perhaps most importantly
those objects into commodities (Shimbaree!!! Shimabarah!).

      Price’s series then takes Adorno’s assertion regarding the importance of the
occlusion of labor to the art object’s autonomy and applies it to the rigors of
functionalist design and the photographic image, in order to ask "Who is able to say
Shimbaree Shimbarah?", both in relation to utopian promise of design and the
academic utopian figuration of transexuality as a site of Utopian potential. Ironically,
occlusion in this case often then necessitates a secondary body, as after the
designer’s labors have been hidden from view, the consumer’s desires appear. The
appearance of this second body, an essential image for the function’s ability to
perform its use value. In the body of Price’s work, however, neither occlusion
successfully appears. The designer’s ghostly presence in animated forms of the Plia
chair and the consumer remains spectral as Price’s model is obscured and endlessly
exposed by the transparency of both Piretti’s design and Price’s lens. Price reveals a
less resolved dilemma behind the astute brand management of the Mies’ design
maxim, (I guess Judy Garland was right, drunk as she was, when she says in Cukor’s 1954
A Star Is Born, while strumming the leather supports of a Barcelona chair - "Every dream
sequence does need a Harp") and critics like Terre Thaemlitz, who assert, "within
transgendered communities the struggle for visibility seems to be nothing more than
the struggle for an alternative invisibility. I find this alternative invisibility inspiring
because (…) it implies that the transgendered body has, in effect, eluded dominant
systems of representations and operates below the radar (…). It is “A spell to break
all spells", without addressing the continued surveillance with which the Academy has
instrumentilized the transgender body as a supposed sight of radical example.

                                           3

The "Spell to end all spells" which Price’s series offers up, is not the transgender
body pictured in his photographic lens or Piretti’s classic design, but the procedural
mechanics of production by which a body, object, or image may become a
commodity. Here, Price pushes forward the cyber-chrome elegance of pictures
generation appropriation, à la Douglas Crimp’s analysis of the dead time embedded
in the commercial image; Price and his series negotiate photography, fashion, and
advertising, invoking a mode of contemporary appropriation more in line with Jan
Verwoert’s text Living with Ghosts, 2007. I am struck in the end, by the ways in which
Price’s series as a narration, invokes, in its conclusion (No. 9), a particular ghost that
the culture industry might have to live with. The ambiguous posture of Price’s model,
somewhere between the Venus de Milo and the Venus Pudica (the Venus of Shame),
leaves me again with the ghost of Venus Extravaganza, whose dismembered body
under the hotel bed and unfulfilled move to the suburbs, is neither cared for by the
ergonomics of any chair - if a chair implies a body, a bed only implies a corpse - nor,
safeguarded by an Academy who still functionalize both the pieces of her body and
remnants of her subjective desires as a form of parodic critique.

                                                               Than Clark, October 2014

                                          4

L'Uomo Vogue, Ottobre 2017
                        , No 484

A Los Angeles health & fitness, la cultu-      earth era la casa di Pauline Gibling e       passaggio in città. Tra questi c’erano
ra del corpo e il desiderio di vivere mag-     Rudolph Schindler a West Hollywood.          Frank Lloyd Wright, John Cage, John
giormente secondo natura sono istanze          Costruita dalla coppia di coniugi nel        Bovingdon, Sadakichi Hartmann, Galka
culturali importanti. È passato ormai un       1921 come uno spazio condiviso di vita e     Scheyer. I proprietari del ristorante ve-
secolo da quando le avanguardie del pri-       lavoro per due giovani famiglie, la casa     gano erano tra gli habitués ed è attraver-
mo decennio del Novecento hanno infu-          era dichiaratamente concepita contro le      so questi incontri che Philip Lovell, me-
so nella città il tipico spirito “back to ear- regole domestiche dell’epoca. Era fatta      dico naturopata e health columnist
th” che ha poi caratterizzato la Califor-      con materiali industriali poco costosi       dell’LA Times, affidò il primo progetto
nia fino a oggi. In nessun altro luogo co-     che erano considerati inadatti per l’ar-     di una casa a Schindler, la Lovell Beach
me a Los Angeles quel pionieristico ri-        chitettura domestica e la sua pianta rifiu-  House, e a Richard Neutra il primo pro-
torno alla natura è ancora così vivo al        tava apertamente la tipica divisione de-     getto architettonico di un fitness centre a
punto da essere diventato oggi per molti       gli spazi organizzata intorno a funzioni     Downtown Los Angeles. A quel tempo il
versi mainstream. La differenza è che la       come lavarsi, mangiare e dormire. Lo         ritorno alla natura era un modo per rive-
natura a cui adesso si vuole tornare non       spazio, invece, era composto da una serie    dere gli aspetti più radicati della vita
è la stessa di quella di un secolo fa, per-    di aree all’interno e all’esterno dove ogni  quotidiana. Appellarsi alla natura, per
ché il concetto di che cosa sia natura di-     persona poteva esprimere la propria in-      esempio, permetteva di combattere l’i-
pende dai diversi                                                                                                  deologia della chie-
momenti storici in                                                                                                 sa e dello stato a

                               THE BODY
cui viene definito. Il                                                                                             proposito dei ruoli
primo ristorante ve-                                                                                               di genere, e consen-
gano di Los Angeles                                                                                                tiva di farlo sul loro
aprì i battenti esatta-                                                                                            stesso terreno, visto
mente cento anni fa,                                                                                               che li presentavano

                                 AS A
nel 1917. Secondo la                                                                                               come se fossero
sua      dichiarazione                                                                                             ruoli naturali. Con-
d’intenti, la cucina                                                                                               tro questo Eden
crudista e senza ver-                                                                                              normativo, i Schind-
samento di sangue                                                                                                  ler e i loro amici

                                HOUSE
dei Richter era, co-                                                                                               praticavano        una
me è oggi, una cuci-                                                                                               sessualità non mo-
na contro i cibi indu-                                                                                             nogamica, i loro
striali e la produzio-                                                                                             medici prescriveva-
ne industriale di car-                                                                                             no il nudismo quoti-
ne e contro qualsiasi                                                                                              diano, e crescevano
trattamento chimico
                                                      by VERNON PRICE
                                                                                                                   i figli tutti insieme.
che alterasse le pro-                          text by OCTAVE PERRAULT                                             Anche se questi
prietà nutrizionali                      fashion editor and creative director                                      esperimenti        non
naturali attraverso la                               ALESSANDRO BAVA                                               erano esenti da abu-
cottura. I Richter                                                                                                 si – misoginia e raz-
promuovevano           il                                                                                          zismo erano triste-
crudismo anche per eliminare i fornelli,       dividualità, un concetto di lifestyle vicino mente dilaganti – rappresentarono uno
un elettrodomestico che secondo loro           a quello espresso oggi dal loft. Una resi-   slancio che di certo ha influenzato in
era, da tempo immemorabile, simbolo            denza che dava forma architettonica al       maniera positiva i nostri tempi. Oltre a
dello sfruttamento delle casalinghe in         tipo di vita a cui aspiravano gli Schindler, essere l’iniziatore di gran parte della filo-
cucina. Il concetto di natura espresso dal     ed esprimeva quella totale reinvenzione      sofia e delle pratiche health and beauty
veganesimo era una reazione contro le          della vita per cui le avanguardie del tem-   contemporanee, il ritorno alla natura è
malattie e i disagi della vita di città di al- po si battevano. Dal cibo che mangiava-      stato un veicolo per la difesa dei diritti
lora. Era un principio invocato per resi-      no agli abiti che indossavano, dagli spazi   delle donne e dei (Segue a pag. 124)
stere a opprimenti regole sociali e a          che abitavano alle relazioni sociali che
un’industrializzazione disumana. Sugge-        intrattenevano, non c’era aspetto della      Il servizio di queste pagine è stato
riva l’idea di un’immaginaria età pre-ci-      vita quotidiana che non venisse reinven-     realizzato a Schindler House, West
vilizzazione, di un giardino dell’Eden         tato. Negli anni Venti e Trenta Pauline      Hollywood, prendendo come spun-
dove la vita non era stata corrotta da ri-     Gibling Schindler ospitava regolarmente      to l’innovativo stile di vita dei co-
gide convenzioni e da dogmi dannosi.           a casa sua un salotto in cui invitava arti-  niugi Schindler e il loro ruolo nella
Oltre al ristorante vegano, un altro luogo     sti, musicisti, attori e pensatori radicali  definizione di un retaggio socio-cul-
pionieristico della Los Angeles back to        che vivevano a Los Angeles o erano di        turale prettamente californiano.

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