Coming into Fashion

John Haber
in New York City

Knobkerry Designs and Virgil Abloh

The Real Thing: Product Photography and Literary Posters

Before it had an arts scene, the East Village set its sights on something else again—fashion and local talent. Now SculptureCenter returns to Knobkerry, the former clothing store. It is a long way to Virgil Abloh in Brooklyn and fashion in the present. Abloh loved the street but ended up selling out, all too cheaply at that.

How do you commemorate something that no one remembers? Commission artists, of course. How, then, do you channel their creativity rather than constrain them to a lifeless memorial? Do not so much as whisper what they achieved. SculptureCenter does not go that far, but it does leave Knobkerry, in its words, "relatively unstructured." It may not do all that much to celebrate its creators, but it should have you thinking about what goes into a space for art.

Speaking of art as product and promotion, where was my ad blocker when I could use it? Where was it, say, in 1844? That was when Henry Fox Talbot photographed fine glassware by any standards, but what was he advertising? His print is not saying, and neither is the Met. It is nonetheless "The Real Thing," opening a show of that name of product photography. It sums up changes in how photography saw itself as well as things—and how advertising emerged as a product, too.

Reclaiming the streets

To bring back East Village art, SculptureCenter could easily have turned its galleries into an expanded gift shop. And why not, when major museums seem to care about commerce and little else? Instead, the Long Island City arts space has the integrity to let artists loose in its basement tunnels, even if it means all but burying its subject. It has more to say that way about the intersection of design, fashion, and art.

I cannot swear that no one has heard of Knobkerry, although it is new and welcome to me. Sara Penn, who died in 2020, opened the store in the 1960s as an outlet for clothing, artifacts, and materials, much of them her own. In over twenty years and three downtown locations, it became a hangout for artists and intellectuals as well, especially African Americans. It anticipated today's interests in design as art, textiles as painting, Pueblo pottery, and diversity. Penn saw it as "Third World design and art," but it had a rep as hippie fashion. In practice, its patchwork fashion came closer to thrift-store purchases on the one hand and yuppie austerity on the other.

Penn herself felt a little chagrined as others branded something like it, but no matter. Svetlana Kitto sees it as a neglected model. Her oral history fills slim books piled just past the center's front desk, on the way down. I took instead the back stairs, past If Revolution Is a Sickness, a video by Diane Severin Nguyen. It pictures someone much like herself as a girl from Vietnam, only in Poland, where she aspires to a starring role in K-pop (K as in Korean). It, too, could resonate with the triumphs and anxieties of global diversity, but its concept is barely coherent—and its content a sentimental journey to an inane music video.

SculptureCenter can be oddly short of sculpture, as with video by Rindon Johnson last time out. Downstairs, though, Niloufar Emamifar and SoiL Thornton get physical. I found myself in an empty passageway, apart from a brown inflatable chamber at the far end. There is no entering it and no getting around it—apart from another tunnel, leading to much the same soft but implacable wall. Thornton's title calls it a chair, but it would serve as seating only for an alien race huge enough to straddle it and tiny enough not to take up space. And then come weightier obstacles and discomforting clothes for the likes of you and me.

One large shopping bag has stones from the center's bare pebbled garden, a second no end of plastic wrap, like a mound of resinous glop. Full-length garments set against the crumbling brick walls include a Swedish snowsuit with the logo POC (for "Piece of Cake"), twisting foil with sharp edges, and a wire frame for golden foil spheres. One seems emptier of human life and more threatening than the next. Each, though, has its suggestive history and austere beauty. Which might Penn have displayed? Maybe not a one, but they capture dark undercurrents in her open sensibility.

One tunnel over, the lights come on full force and obstacles melt away. Emamifar serves up what looks like a packed warehouse but is in fact a machine shop. As a sketch at the foot of the main stairs makes clear, it would have been only one workspace in a lavish arts institution. He imagines a fund-raiser for a proposed Upper East Side building with studios for carving, casting, and welding along with a gallery, a sculpture terrace, and offices. His other recreations, like a cardboard box for goodness knows what, are more cryptic, but the message is clear. Art and design come at a cost, in resources and ways of life, and who knows what might come into fashion next?

If you have to ask

Virgil Abloh liked to call his art "social sculpture," but then he loved to collaborate. It took him from a budding architect to a designer of covers and merchandise for Kanye West. It got him off on his own with three successive design firms where others could play along—Pyrex Vision, Off-White in Milan, and Alaska Alaska. It brought him an offer from Louis Vuitton, where he headed up men's wear, a first for a black—and how could anyone as social as he was refuse? At his death from cancer at only forty, he was working on his retrospective, "Figures of Speech" at the Brooklyn Museum. He must have seen it as his largest and most collaborative design project yet.

The same urge may have drawn him to architecture in the first place, as the son of African immigrants in Chicago. When he conceived a tower, he embedded it in a model city, and he must have loved the thought of contributing big time to a living landscape. With West, he could not resist dabbling in music on his own. He pulled together audio equipment, including a turntable and tape deck, less as sound art than as a ghostly presence. Maybe he imagined himself a DJ in a crowded club. His clothing, too, stuck close to the street, with t-shirts and sneakers, and he got to see real people wearing it.

If one thing unites his work apart from the social, it is color in a field of white, just as in that model city. Otherwise the tower with its sloping base is just a ripoff of the Grace building in midtown Manhattan. He admired Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus, but one would never know it, apart from their dream of design for all. His sneakers look like the usual brands, only with simple colors, too—and with the t-shirts, mostly white, as their foil. His social sculpture includes green street kids, looking none too empowered, but also a white angel. Maybe the flip side of collaboration is aspiration.

The show's centerpiece is a shed, planned as a "house" where people can "come together." Otherwise, as curated by Michael Darling and Antwaun Sargent, this is overwhelmingly a fashion show. Do museum exhibitions for fashion amount to sell-outs, even when they engage black fashion? They sure draw crowds, and this one ends in a gift shop, taking up more of the rotunda off the lobby. Tempted by the tote bags and t-shirts but worried about the cost? As they say, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.

Does anything set his clothing apart, aside from its color? Do his sneakers sell far less than Air Jordans and cost far more? It may have worried Abloh, too. A sound piece has a woman shopping in the face of high prices and a saleswoman's disdain. At times he drops in references to art history, despite his own disdain for the masses, but not to worry. Apart from a reproduction of Medusa, by Caravaggio, in the gift shop, I could not spot a single one.

Was Abloh trapped between popularizing fashion and branding the popular? Text within clothing runs to clichés, too, like Don't Negotiate and Don't Believe What You Read. An orange chain on a Vuitton handbag may allude to slavery, like manacles for Melvin Edwards, but accepts its fashionable constraints. Social sculpture makes the least impression of all, like a blue stepladder—or, for that matter, the plain wood house. People do find a resting spot, but mostly on their own. Those who truly want to gather might prefer a Brooklyn bar. There they could talk freely about the troubled state of the art.

Promoting promotion

Henry Fox Talbot hardly counts as advertising, when the very idea was hard to conceive. Photography took too much care and attention for that, and publications to handle it did not exist. Besides, the medium had other purposes—as staged dramas, portraits, or experiments. Fragments of bishop's miters were surely not for sale, although the anonymous photograph might have been. Is the Met, then, cheating or seeking a broader context in history? The show's subtitle speaks of "Unpackaging Product Photography," but where is product photography without the package?

Art has long had a love-hate relationship with photography—and photos with packaging. Each year the AIPAD photography fair bends over backward to look like art, while the Jewish Museum has exhibited magazine photography and the International Center of Photography a canny fashion photographer who died of AIDS. Then, too, art has always promoted images, going back to Renaissance princes, pharaohs, and kings. And the Met explains its earliest photos as promoting the medium. In truth, it is also looking for an excuse to display its collection and gifts from the Ford Motor Company. It proceeds modestly, though, with a small show.

Advertising in the modern sense emerged with the twentieth century, reluctant to give up claims to modern art. A sample from around 1913 features (seriously) the National Blank Book. Reproducibility became more than half the point, with golf balls, drill bits, and soaps. It was not, though, the only point, and Stella F. Simon leans on a violin's elegance around 1930 to compose a picture. Many identified themselves with a movement, like Piet Zwart with De Stijl in the Netherlands and many more with Surrealism—as if advertising not surreal enough in itself. André Kertész doubles a fork and redoubles it with its shadow.

Grete Stern and Ellen Auerbach (as Ringl + Pitt) embrace advertising while mocking it. Others have fewer doubts. August Sander photographs for once not a German worker, but what a worker might produce—light bulbs spiraling into darkness and depth. James Van Der Zee sets his eye this time out not on salons, town cars, and the Harlem Renaissance, but on a wig. Is it product photography, a preparatory study, or merely a discard? The wig rests off to the side against a black background, looking as small as can be.

Advertising, too, has its evolution, from the blank book. Of course, it acquires text. While the Met's online image for the show features a shoe, in the actual ad it is subordinate to the stylish wearer, who boasts that "I Know Value." Paul Outerbridge poses a shirt collar against a tilted checkerboard, for the play of flatness and depth, black and white. Twenty years later, in 1940, his color photo turns to coffee drinkers (of A&P coffee), one in an apron and the rest in suits, as a meeting among men. He might be moving from product photography as an art to the thing in itself.

Advertising began before the turn of the century, but without photography. Just down the hall, "The Art of the Literary Poster" spans what one used to call the gay nineties, when readers would have admired the new woman and the modern man. Covers for Harper's, by Edward Penfield, appeal to one's sophistication, with a March hare that plays on the month. Calendar and poster art by Will H. Bradley, Joseph Christian Leyendecker, and Ethel Reed show a life of leisure and activity, like cycling and tennis. All share art nouveau styling, from the Leonard A. Lauder collection. One might still receive a calendar in the mail today as a fund raiser, for those lucky few with a big kitchen and not a cell phone in sight.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Knobkerry designs ran at SculptureCenter through December 13, 2021, Virgil Abloh at the Brooklyn Museum through January 29, 2023. "The Real Thing" ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through August 4, 2024, "The Art of the Literary Poster" through June 11.