Creative Fur Award 09

... aaand the winner is: Serife Nur for Authried.


She pulled it off at this year's edition of the Creative Fur Award, another of these totally sought-after (ahum) fashion competitions.

After all, fashion starlet Thomas Kirchgrabner was "produced" by one of the previous editions (he was actually the mentor of this year's second place, Annemarie Grass for Liska). The good thing about this furry event: only skins from animals used for alimentary purposes are used. Not sure, though, whether this makes a huge difference. Whatever: the range of inspirations for these up-and-coming furmongers, I'd say, is anything from the Stone Age to Russian luxury.

3rd place: a design by Nikola Brzulovic; all images © Bernhard Berthold

And you know, why not...

Siggi Hofer, Otto Mauer, and St Stephen's Cathedral

... when Siggi Hofer received the Otto Mauer Award (paradoxically, sponsored by the diocese of Vienna), we went there and experienced this fantastic and spooky view of St Stephen's Cathedral from the courtyard of the building where the award ceremony would take place...

... and Siggi is also part of an exhibition hosted by apartment draschan, following an invitation by fortune & carter from London.

duration: nov. 28th - dec. 19th 2009, by appointment robby: +49-177-6725260 thomas: +43-699-12930710 , grüngasse 12/18, a-1050 vienna
with works by following artists:

paul brandford / robert crumb / matthias deutsch / christian eisenberger / andreas exner /michael freund / sebastian gögel / marius görner / birgit graschopf / greif & hennig / mark hammond / siggi hofer / marc hulson / harry hund / daniel jackson / ronald kölbel / phillip lammer / constantin luser / lee maelzer / hanno millesi / christine molis / ciprian muresan / katharina oder / lea asja pagenkemper / manfred peckl / katrin plavcak / lukas pusch / dennis rudolph / paul sakoilsky / georg Salner / stefan schuster / leopold schuster / eva schwab / dallas seitz / jan sledz / clarissa stadler / nadim vardag / michael wutz / klaus- dieter zimmer / bernard zösmayer & wolfgang schwarzenbrunner

George Clooney: from Nespresso to Tchibo...???

... all too vivid are my associations with George Clooney's involvement with Nespresso, since I was in charge of handling their two-million-printrun-seven-languages corporate magazine at some point and that was really something, believe you me.

Anyhow, George seems to know no limits where it comes to his commitment to coffee makers and/or distributers, since he has now agreed to dedicate his creative energy (or his assistant's creative energy, more likely) to designing a t-shirt collection or a one-off item, whatever, for Tchibo.

The collection features designs by Georgey, Wolfgang Joop (who I met just two days ago...), Donna Karan, Coldplay, Giorgio Armani and Phil Collins and is available in stores now (or very soon). The initiative benefits the Whatever It Takes charity. Well, then... Merry Christmas???...

Wendy & Jim and Haban jewellers

... Vienna's fabulous fashion duo Wendy & Jim put together a collaboration with high-end jeweller (read: haut joaillier...) Haban for the occasion of the luxury fair Luxury Please that takes place this weekend in the Austrian capital.


While I'm a little unsure as to what the exact nature of this collaboration was, I guess it's about the striped dress and not the daringly dangling earrings. If I were to make a wild guess, I'd say this collaboration is the fruit of Wendy & Jim's "Austrians of the Year" title dating back to late 2008...

NY, leek and corduroy

everything vintage except for sneakers (swoosh)

... to me, to merely think of NY City always inspires a vision of brown bags with some leek sticking out at the top and someone (Robert Redford?) wearomg a grey cotton pullover carrying it up a narrow staircase, or brown corduroy jackets with fake-fur collars - imagine how happy I was when I found just that just there. Vintage, not from L.A., for once...


And to add the last little touch of finesse, I adorned it with my Tokyo Tower pin. Kind of my jetset look...

petition for the right to choose...

... we've now got a law that previews some kind of official status for homosexual partnerships in Austria - but it's far from being perfect. Since politicians more or less openly told us that improvements would have to be made but that they wanted to go on with the project anyhow, here's a chance to sign the petition that will lead to further changes, hopefully. And they are necessary, no doubt about that...

go see LA PIVELLINA

... such a touching and yet totally unpathetic film, a wonderful feature film, an absolutely insightful metaphor of life at the margin of established society, featuring totally astounding amateur actors of all, and really all ages. Rightfully, La Pivellina by Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel was a participant at the QUINZAINE DES REALISATEURS section of the Cannes film festival in 2009, and a perfect choice to open this year's VIENNALE. Now screening in - alas all too few! - Austrian cinemas...

illustrous DJ Battle

... how stylish - a DJ Battle organised by T-B A21 and HRH FvH will take place next Friday in Vienna's Ankerbrot factory. As it's a charity event (benefitting Unser_Kind), admission fee is 50 euros min., tables for ten are a trinket, at 1,000 e each. Simon de Pury, Richard Dorfmeister, Raven, Chris Brandon etc etc will rock the floor. Meanwhile, I still try to figure out why Diesel Black Gold is a partner of the event. But you know...

guilds and emblems in Salzburg

quite comme il faut chez LV

... last week I had the chance to visit the pretty jewel case that is Salzburg - and before I went to my interview appointment, I took a good look at Getreidegasse - for the first time in years, actually...

self-explaining

... with its weird mélange of traditional guild emblems (which this little street is famous for) and the versions that global brands created for their presence in this very chic part of Austria...

Zara has little dancing figurines

... from reduced Nordic design (not so appealing: H&M) via luxury (comme il faut: Louis Vuitton) to surprising pageantry (McDonalds...?)...

Salamander sells its shoes

no great ado from the Swedes...

you might not recongise it: it's a shoe, and it's Bally

Mc Donalds does make its point VERY clear - new noblesse oblige...

Festival du film lgt à Paris

... lesbien gay trans, et amis : venez nombreux ! C'est le 20ème anniversaire du Festival de nos films. La soirée en l'honneur de cela a lieu samedi prochain. Youpieh !

knitting in Linz

... since knitting seems to be on many a mind these days, voilà what I saw in a shopwindow in Linz recently - you can knit for everyone and everything, obviously - even furniture...


And then, of course, and talking about Linz, there's always the artistic approach - really beautifully represented, I find, by a graduate of the Linz-based University of Fine Arts, young Veronika Schubert - whose knit-paintings, recently shown by Vienna's Museum auf Abruf, are quite something...

Her master thesis was a knit cartoon - to be animated, actually... Fashion & art, nowhere are they closer than here...

why is this man never allowed to wear a shirt?

... I just came across ANOTHER image of bare chested Markus Schenkenberg - and realised that actually this is the rule rather than the exception, I mean, seeing him without clothes on (a great thing, okay, super torso and everything - but constantly?) - and therefore conducted a little image search on Google, and alas! - the first page and NO CLOTHES IN SIGHT, above the waist at least...

Seeboden roundabout - sheer horror

... while Leo Schatzl's onion, which I featured yesterday, is a really nice example of roundabout-compatible sculptures, what goes on in Seeboden (a random example out of a million possibilities) is sheer horror. Carinthia's body painting capital is careful to let passers-by know what they are missing if they don't decide to make a little stopover...

Romy Schneider (just a carpet, no knitwear)

... while others (adorable: Blica) establish an interesting link between knitwear and Romy Schneider, my boyfriend brought to my attention the first sentence of a review published by the *very* notable German weekly Die Zeit about a recently screened tv-production about her life:

Dieses Land ist nie auf einen grünen Zweig gekommen mit den drei größten Kinostars, die es hervorgebracht hat: Marlene Dietrich, Hildegard Knef und Romy Schneider.

Meaning, literally, that Romy S., alongside Marlene Dietrich and Hildegard Knef is one of the biggest stars "this country" (Germany) ever gave to the world...??? hummm...

Well, and I must now quite simply ask all of you - maybe regardless of the fact that she was, given that she was born in Vienna in 1938 and therefore received the German citizenship -, but was she not quite simply the greatest cinema actress that Austria ever gave to the big screen??? Or, unbelievably, is Romy a German actress... And what then, a Bavarian, or one from Berlin, from Hamburg? Apart from the fact that really, she belongs to Paris. Is she not actually a clear case of ParisVienne? So what then ... ...

a Public Art genre in its own right: the roundabout sculpture?

... I was lucky enough to meet Katharina Blaas from the Public Art Lower Austria Fund yesterday, and it was such a charming conversation we had about aspects of Public Art outside urban areas - and then she briefly mentioned that the roundabout-sculpture is kind of a Public Art genre in its own right. True, no? There are good examples, and absolutely horrible ones. Adorable: the big little onion by Leo Schatz in Unterstinkenbrunn...

What is Public Sculpture?

... that's the answer Franck Scurti found back in 2005 or 2005 for an installation in the Tuileries gardens in Paris.

He gave a more extensive answer in the context of a show held in Grenoble in 2007.

And his point seems to be: Public Sculpture is open to interaction with the public. Hence the tags and graffitis. An answer I absolutely LIKE...

Guerilla gardening?

... and on we go with the Public Art thingy. I had to stick this image together as some kind of bricolage-panorama... Sorry for that, but with my camera... Anyhow, someone draw and wrote and sprayed "Dies könnte ein Garten sein" (This Could Be A Garden) on a parking lot somewhere near my place in Vienna. Really nice.

It also reminded me of an image I used to illustrate an article about "Les déboulonneurs" in France. Their main point is that advertisements in public space should be limited to a maximum billboard size of 50 x 70 cm. Mini mini, no? And there was this billboard with "ICI, UN ARBRE" (A tree, here) sprayed all over it. Sadly, I can't find it any more. But the point is quite similar. Do we need all those parking lots, and billboards, and stuff? I'm actually REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO GOING TO SAO PAULO in January and seeing with my own eyes what it's gonna be like there, without billboards.

Is it gonna be like "Delete" by the Viennese artist duo Steinbrener Dempf? Or totally different? I'll keep you posted...

demo on Fri 13th, 3 pm, Vienna parliament

... just this: you gotta fight for your rights, obviously. It's a shame really. Everybody who doesn't agree with what's going on in terms of bizarrely made-up legal texts for second or third class gay partnership models (that will hopefully be modified, regardless of the SHADOWS that certain people/political parties have to overcome), next Friday at 3 pm in front of the Vienna parliament. Please! And: spread the word!!!

Public Art, where willst thou go...

... okay, so basically, forget everything I said about the Replay project in Venice as a contribution to Public Art - I mean, of course - SOMEHOW it is an example of Public Art, but really, it isn't. Just as little as any other MARKETING-BASED strategy to PERVERT the aims and functionings of communication guerilla.


That's really not what it should be about, and initiatives of the kind only serve to promote a brand and do not contribute to the discourse of art in public spaces. No?

Most recent and TOTALLY ABSURD example - the Mini (yes, the car) designed (or should I rather say: DECORATED) by "street artist" Craig "KR" Costello "Krink". Apart from the fact that a press release stating that the car as such contributes to the aesthetic quality and character of public space (I mean: HELLO?) is a rather typical example of the bizarrely poetic verve we find in many a PR and marketing office, Mr. KR Krink has himself found a totally absurd way of converting the symbolic capital he accumulated as a street artist into hard $$$ €€€ ¥¥¥ - by launching a line of ART SUPPLIES with all kinds of applicators and markers and such.


I mean, if we think we have to discuss Banksy's activity as a gallery artist, then what's that. And, sorry, but - the car isn't even "nice to look at" (which could have been some kind of positive result). So, really...

Paris Montparnasse

... what I so like about Paris (and, surprisingly, also Tokyo, which is far from being a 100 % super modern hi-tec cosmos, actually) - is that you can still come across some futuristic structures dating way back, which gives them some kind of Barbarella outdated utopia feeling. This starts with the centre Pompidou, in a way, and gos on to residential buildings at the Place des Fêtes, the Charles de Gaulle airport, and so on and so forth.

Gare Montparnasse is definitely a great territory, too. I realised this when I recently went there to have a look at the really fantastic "Accessoires et objets. Témoignages de la vie de femmes 1940 - 1944" exhibition put together by the Musée Galliera in collaboration with the Musée Jean Moulin.

Quite an impressive show, indeed. Should you want to read more about it, try this (German language...)...

Circus book presentation in Tokyo

... just received this bit of information from Edwina Hörl, the famously Tokyo-based designer from Austria. A friend of hers, Leonardo Pellegatta, presents a Circus photo book entitled IL CIRCO this coming Thursday at Now Idea in Tokyo. Since so many fellow Austrians seem to be in Tokyo these days...

The opening starts at 6 pm at Now Idea,
2F PALACE MIYUKI 5-3-8, Minami-Aoyama, Minato-ku, Tokyo, Japan 107-0062
.

I think this could actually really be a nice volume...

I've got a blog, you've got a blog...

... ev-ery-bo-dy's got a blog now...

Yeah!

Replay Loves Public Art?

... some days ago the Replay Loves Art project realised in collaboration with the Fondazione Claudio Buziol reached its second chapter with a new artwork by Sébastien Lallemand exposed on the façade of Ca' Rezzonico (in Venice) which is currently under construction. Since I've been wondering for a while whether and in what way fashion as an applied art and public space could be brought together under the roof of Public Art (a thought I'm still pursuing, as it doesn't really seem to have led me anywhere precise, but yet... I'm not giving up!), this is at least a project sponsored by a fashion company involving art that is, in a way, to be considered as public art (albeit a not very revolutionary one, with the temporary exhibition of artworks on a façade being somehow very conventional) and which is transformed into a fashion item after it has reached the end of its lifetime (the plastic cover is removed after the end of an exhibition chapter and turned into bags). Not uninteresting, the whole thing, and yet, not really knocking off my socks either...

outfit post: preppy, somehow

cardigan and corduroy trousers American Apparel, shirt Boss, tie Joop, shoes Vans by Marc Jacobs

... not that I would want to be contacted by international advertising companies in order to help them put together their SLVR campaigns (and that's not a lie - I'd really rather not...), but since I'm having so much fun with my little collage-bricolage de mode - here comes my most formal outfit proposition - and remember: there's nothing like a silk knit tie...