Op-Ed: The Avant-Garde Post Mortem

Culture, Fashion

When I founded StyleZeitgeist in 2006, my aim was to build a forum for people who genuinely love fashion as a creative discipline that speaks to a wider culture. I did not mean for it to solely concentrate on the fashion that I loved, the forward-thinking, boundary-pushing, one connected to youth culture, especially music, especially of the goth / industrial / postpunk-tinged kind. But it kind of morphed into that, because it attracted like-minded people. And so StyleZeitgeist became a hub for what’s come to be called the avant-garde – the truly IYKYK stuff, a fashion subculture.

Shiro Tsujimura

Culture

What is art? Does something become art when it’s put into the art context; because it’s shown in a museum or a gallery, or becomes art because an artist says so? Marcel Duchamp certainly thought so. But Duchamp statements had a political purpose, they were addressing the politics of art.

Deborah Turbeville: Under Hidden Layers

Culture

“All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” This excerpt from Susan Sontag’s book On Photography serves as an epigraph to a recent monograph, Deborah Turbeville: Under…

Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage

Culture

In the method / madness of photography a collage holds a rather underexplored space. It is a bit of an afterthought, compared to the pantheon in which most memorable photographic images rest. This is an oversight. A collage occupies an in-between space of still and moving image. It’s not exactly animated, but it’s not exactly static either. A good photo collage has a kinetic quality to it that adds time to the space-time continuum; it has the ability to shift perspective just so.