Events Calendar
In This Section
Most Read Stories
Akron police investigate teen mob attack on family
Woman, 75, charged with beating fawn to death
Akron woman found dead at Brimfield Township store
Man shot outside his Akron home during robbery attempt
Man shot in back near Akron park
Suspect sought in Portage Path bar robbery
Tragic day puts man on path to be Pinnacle owner
Blogs:
Pets:
Dogs' Bark: Not fair! Study shows pups get jealous
The Heldenfiles:
Who Will Get the Michael Media Treatment Next?
Patrick McManamon:
More on Varejao
Akron Zips:
Opponent outlook: Kent State
Browns Bulletin:
Quick thought on Browns rookies
Tribe Matters:
Wedge challenges relievers
Cleveland Browns:
Stallworth test showed marijuana
Kent State Sports:
Men's Basketball Scheduling update
Cleveland Cavaliers:
Andy’s Signed According to ESPN
All Da King's Men:
Does Medicare Have Lower Administrative Costs ?
Blog of Mass Destruction:
CIA Did Mislead Congress
Akron Law Café:
Breaking Story: CIA Lied to Congress about Secret Program
Varsity Letters:
East basketball update
See Jane Style:
Oh Baby!
Car Chase:
Where do We Go from Here?
Let's Talk Real Estate:
Closings….Not the Good Kind!
Ohio Travels with Betty:
Margy inquires-when is a Taste of Hudson?
Sound Check:
LeVert II live performance Saturday night — "Dedication" album due July 13,
HRLite House:
DDI One of Best Places to Work
Akron Gamer:
First 24 'Guitar Hero 5' songs announced
Akron museum pairs avant-garde fashions, complementary works
By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art & architecture critic
Published on Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
My grandmother had several flapper dresses. One was a peach-toned chiffon with rows and rows of beads suspended in classic flapper fashion, and when you moved, the dangling beads shimmered and swung like pendulums.
I once tried it on and walked around in front of my full-length mirror trying to imagine what it might have been like going to a dance in one of those numbers. I quietly mourned the fact that they didn't make dresses like that anymore, and even if they did, no one would dare to wear them because they were made with real chiffon and those tiny bugle beads would never have survived the Twist.
Visitors to the Akron Art Museum's new show, Art + Fashion: A BOLD Union may have similar thoughts, especially if they are of my era and remember the revolutionary fashions of designer Rudi Gernreich and his avant-garde approach to making clothes.
The museum is exhibiting four displays of garments by Gernreich from the collection of the Kent State University Museum alongside works of artists like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Julian Stanczak and Nassos Daphnis, with whom he shared a common philosophy.
The clothing is part of KSU's collection of some 40 items from the Gernreich line, almost all of which were given to the museum by Mr. and Mrs. William Risman of Beachwood. The rest of this collection is on view at the KSU Museum through May 31.
Gernreich ''deconstructed'' women's clothing by removing wires and padding from undergarments (and sometimes removing the undergarments as well) to create entirely new silhouettes. He proposed unisex, mass-produced, functional clothing made from widely available materials, which at that time meant polyester.
Like Judd, LeWitt, Stanczak and Daphnis, Gernreich challenged accepted modes of production as well as aesthetic principles. His avant-garde approach to making clothes helped shape the future of American sportswear, especially the ready-to-wear lines that followed in his wake.
Ellen Rudolph, the Akron Art Museum's curator of exhibitions, has organized the Gernreich pieces alongside paintings of the same era in the Sandra L. and Dennis B. Haslinger Family Foundation Gallery.
Beside the Daphnis painting, 14-67 (1967), she has placed two slender jumpsuits realized in a color that falls somewhere between mustard and school-bus yellow.
Rudolph said Daphnis was fond of primary colors, and this painting consists of bands of red, yellow and black over which are painted giant blue bullet shapes formed by large, intersecting arcs, which he drew using a huge compass he created especially for the purpose.
Next to Ilya Bolotowsky's Yellow Tondo (1974) she has placed a black Gernreich miniskirt and top that incorporates one of Rudi's trademark, midchest circles floating above yellow and black bands.
''We had to have this tondo with this dress,'' Rudolph grinned. ''You can see the influence of Mondrian on Bolotowsky, and how the tondo functions almost as a sun,'' and the dress has the antithesis of the sun as its main element.
Gernreich, who died in 1985, was born in Vienna in 1922. He and his mother fled Europe in 1938 and he became an American citizen in 1943.
Enthralled by a performance by Martha Graham, he became a costume designer (and occasional dancer) for the Lester Horton Modern Dance Troupe. He also did freelance textile designs for Hoffman California Fabrics.
He did a great deal of work for Harmon Knitwear, including, in October 1970, a ''back-to-school'' collection in military style accessorized with rifles and dog tags, inspired by the shootings at Kent State. He's also famous for making the topless swimsuit in 1964, which he called the Monokini.
But his main contribution was to bring high design to ready-to-wear, thwarting the tyranny of the French haute couture industry. In this regard, his approach is very much of a kind with the artists in this gallery, several of whom sent their designs out to fabricators, and all of whom strived to rid their creations of any evidence of hand work.
Moreover, his designs, like the works in the gallery, are all about abstraction and geometry, simplicity of design, bold design, color blocking and abstract patterning. ''They were all looking to use geometry as a language,'' Rudolph said.
One of the most astonishing uses of geometry can be found in the paintings of Cleveland artist Julian Stanczak, one of the pioneers of Op Art.
Placed next to his Dual Glare (1970) are two Gernreich pieces: a sleeveless yellow and red knit jumpsuit with the trademark openings at neck and waist, and a long-sleeved, ankle-length red knit dress with a flared skirt and a plunging V-shaped neckline defined by purple crisscross banding.
The yellow in the jumpsuit has the effect of causing the optical illusion in Stanczak's painting to be even more emphatic.
The painting is essentially a ground of converging chartreuse and light blue rhomboids over which parallel red lines are painted in a pattern. The illusion is that the painting seems from a distance to be orange and yellow and lavender, but when you get within about a foot and a half of the work, you see that there is no yellow at all, nor any orange or lavender. The most striking illusion is that the chartreuse, which this close can be definitely seen to be green, seems, only two feet farther out, also to be yellow.
It's a masterly, multilayered work illustrating with mathematical precision the same optical effects explored by the Impressionists a century earlier, only this time using the forms of calculus and geometry.
So the primary feature of Modernism — the pulling apart and analysis of every aspect of Western aesthetics, dissecting line, form, color, mood, gesture, context, space and volume — is played out in paintings and polyester to the edification of both.
Museum additions
The art museum has made changes in other galleries as well, namely those in which works that are out on loan have left a vacuum.
In the gallery where the museum displays its works that have been influenced by the media, there are four additions by Sylvia Sleigh, R.B. Kitaj, Richard Diebenkorn and Larry Rivers.
In the Pop Art area, an Andy Warhol Brillo Box and his Single Elvis are missing because they're on loan to Warhol exhibits at the Wexner in Columbus and at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada. Similarly, Chair, by Yayoi Kusama, is on loan to a San Francisco museum.
To fill the gaps left by their absence, the museum has brought out the late Robert Rauschenberg's Autobiograph (1968), James Rosenquist's Coin Noir (1977), Jack Goldstein's Untitled 1986 acrylic on canvas, and Howard Finster's altered print, Woman Power (1999). Three of the works are on paper, so are displayed only for six months at a time to help preserve them.
When Autograph was printed in 1968, it was the largest fine art print ever made, using the same processes used to print billboards.
The work is a triptych, consisting, from left to right, of an X-ray of Rauschenberg's body overlaid by an astrological chart; a large fingerprint-like spiral consisting of entries from Rauschenberg's diary, in the center of which is a snapshot of the artist and his family in a rowboat on a lake; on the right is a photograph taken from a performance piece, Pelican, in which participants wore roller skates and parachutes, which Rauschenberg choreographed and performed in 1963.
Rosenquist's silk-screen, Coin Noir (1977), seems to have dire cosmic associations, not only with the imagery, but also with the language, and we are left wondering whether ''coin noir'' could be French not only for ''dark corner,'' but also slang for ''black hole,'' or whether it could have some more nefarious meaning. Given the period when the work was created and its imagery, it's probably safe to surmise that the work is more a warning than a play on words.
Goldstein's Untitled painting looks like a pixilated segment of video or a video that's being shown on television that has become hung up and the illuminating lamp behind the film has burned a hole in it. The work was created using a spray gun, in keeping with the artist's desire to emulate mechanical reproduction and to distance himself from the work of the hand.
Finster was an outsider artist who lived in Georgia. He collected other people's junk and began to create Paradise Gardens Park & Museum around 1961. Woman Power is a poster of Marilyn Monroe he was given by Johnny Carson after Finster was on his show. Finster drew all over it in 1984, showing Marilyn holding sway over the Earth and the church. The work was published in 1999.
These demonstrate that the art museum has changed not only its outer appearance, but also its inner workings. Little is allowed to remain static even in the short run, and if you haven't visited lately, you've probably missed quite a lot.
Details:
Show: Art + Fashion: A BOLD Union
When: Through Feb. 1; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday, until 9 p.m. Thursday. Closed Monday.
Where: Akron Art Museum, 1 S. High St., Akron
Information: 330-376-9185 or www.akronartmuseum.org
Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.
My grandmother had several flapper dresses. One was a peach-toned chiffon with rows and rows of beads suspended in classic flapper fashion, and when you moved, the dangling beads shimmered and swung like pendulums.
Get the full article here.
Comments
Click here to post your comments
