Interview

Lisa Rovner and Alice Heart's project, "Message is the Medium," is composed of beautifully blended fragments from Godard films, Guy Bordin film clips, or elegant vintage footage with brands such as Agnes B., the New York Times' Style Magazine, Chanel's Coco Mademoiselle Perfume, and other high-end labels. The results represent the associations between the disparate images and the timeless essences of the labels better than many of their own contemporary ad campaigns. But is that art, or artistic advertising? Rovner and Heart were not commissioned to create the videos. So are they really just well-crafted valentines to the labels that they love?

Here I discuss their joint video project, "Message is the Medium," which named as a reference to cultural critic Marshall McLuhan's 1967 study "The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects" with Rovner and Heart, who answer as a duo.


ANA FINEL HONIGMAN: How do you distinguish between selling art and using art to sell?

LISA ROVNER AND ALICE HEART: I'm not sure we've thought about that question enough. We'd like to live in a world where one wouldn't have to... Like William Burroughs: images, millions of images, that's what we eat.  We are interested in using the space of advertising to convey messages. We see mass media as an art material, and a curatorial space.

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Monki, Scandinavia's answer to H&M, has a name that refers to a cast of more than 40 mutant monkis whose furry un-simian shapes adorn sweaters, bags and other mascot items in the shop. The shop's bulbous colored lights are real-world representations of the toxic ooze that, according to Monki-lore, turned the creatures into whatever they are now. The cast of fully fleshed out characters is limited to only seven monkis, whose allegorical, adorable off-kilter antics can be followed on the Monki website. As Rike Doepp, of the Berlin-based PR firm Agentur V explains, "The monki characters are all a little screwed up. Some are mean and others are naughty, but they have good intentions. They make great imaginary friends."

German shoppers are blissfully embracing Monki, which opened in Hamburg last Thursday. In Scandinavian form Monki offers a wide array of socialistically priced high-end gear in spaces designed with endearing eccentricity.The Hamburg-branch of Monki is a bubbly multi-tiered shop set to woo young women with slightly wonky but discerning taste in playfully designed Cyndi Lauper-style dresses, slim tie-dye trousers, and laced up leather heels.

Monki was founded in Stockholm by Orjan Andersson and Adam Freiberg the heads of the Cheap Monday denim brand and the Weekday chain which features of chic, artsy, vintage and designer capsule collections. They hope to extend the international success with Cheap Monday, which was recently purchased by H&M and hired London-darling Ann-Sofie Back to head its house line. "We were really lucky with Cheap Monday because we did skinny jeans that no one liked and then they suddenly became really popular," explains founder Adam Friberg, "We just don't want to compromise. We will be popular or not, but we mostly we just want to make things that don't exist or make existing things better. We're not too interested in popularity."

The design concept for the shop's decor and its wares combines Swedish style with Japanese-inspired anthropomorphic design and otherworldly color combinations. "If you are a weird girl in your class, you could come here, experiment and figure yourself out," advises Doepp.

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For the next two Sundays this month (Nov. 14 and 21), Will Cotton will turn New York's Partners & Spade Gallery into a wonderland of cakes, macaroons, pies, tarts, gorgeous girls, and the other delights that typically appear in his paintings. Cotton is living a fantasy of his own–by acting as a premier pastry chef and selling his goodies at bakery prices.

Cotton is exposing his fans to the sensual warmth and smells of his own studio, where he often personally cooks his own props on site. Cotton's pastry shop connects the visual fantasies his paintings illustrate to all of his viewers' senses that they stimulate. Here, Cotton discusses baking for gallery goers and offers tastes of the deeper socio-political, psychological and culture specific meanings that permeate our most indulgent treats.


ANA FINEL HONIGMAN:  Did you read that article in the New York Times about the man who only eats candy? You don't think he's cool, do you?

WILL COTTON: I read that. Seems like he's missing out on an awful lot of culinary pleasure. At the same time, I respect his decision to not follow conventional eating habits.

HONIGMAN: It seems that he does though. Most people out there seem to eat primarily for pleasure and immediate energy. Are you very aware of your paintings being perceived differently in different parts of the US or abroad?

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How can a fake Rolex become desirable in itself? Natalia Brilli has the answer. She covers a Nolex watch in subtle, high-quality glove-makers' leather and transforms it into a genuine item of understated intellectual elegance. The men's and women's versions of her "Nolex watch bracelet" are named for the faux bling brand so budget-priced that it hasn't bothered to invent a snappy original name like those used by Designer Impostors' Perfums de Coeur (remember: "If you like ‘Calvin Klein® Obsession®' you'll love ‘Confess'") and instead simply hopes marks won't notice the difference between an "R" and an "N." Brilli covers the Nolex in black, cherry red, or cracked silver leather that tightly hugs the watch's features, allowing only the bulges on the braided band and the raised dial to create sculptural texture identifying the object underneath.

Brilli's sensitivity to the statements that accessories make about their wearers' character and status comes from her work in theatre design and Olivier Theyskens's atelier, where she designed accessories while he headed Rochas. Brilli launched her own art and design label in 2004 by encasing drum-sets, skateboards, domino boards, medical alert bracelets, dog-tags, and bows in skin-soft leather. While most of her objects are black or silver, she has also used bright electric hues, naturals, and pastels to further scramble the associations between the original objects, her luxurious materials, and the artistic end-result.

Following fellow Belgian designer Martin Margiela's preference for signature anonymity, Brilli has created a sly logo based on subversive understatement. By encasing recognizable status-declaring items like the fake Rolex watches in leather, Brilli cloaks the clock's affectation, transforming them into genuinely desirable elegant objects which speak of their wearers' intelligence and good taste.

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