Rick Owens
No one has ever accused me of being fashionable, for very good reason. I think my Mum and girlfriend have a secret chat where they share photos of me in shirts because it’s so rare. But, for a year or two, I really enjoyed learning and thinking a bit more about clothing. I was 22, had a new job and needed to stop looking like an overgrown teenager.
Fashion is a really bizarre world. In some ways it’s the most accessible and familiar form of art (along with ceramics and music), yet for all the familiarity, many of us look at the fashion world with just such confusion and suspicion.
Sometimes this is because the ethical concerns are very clear (fast fashion, slave labour, over consumption, body image issues), but more often I think it’s because some fashion is just so fucking weird. Like some atrociously skinny model walking down a runway in some gargantuan mistake of an outfit does, often, feel like a spectacle and a joke. And it's SO EXPENSIVE, it all seems a bit ridiculous sometimes, doesn’t it?
This is also true of the people in fashion. Like a lot of public facing artists, designers are often incredibly idiosyncratic, sometimes problematically so.
However, one of fashion’s more relatable personalities, at least to me, is Rick Owens. Rick Owens makes these super dramatic goth clothes, and I have no interest in dressing in them, but what I do love is that as a person he is so, so, so specific and his oddness sometimes begins to feel almost normal.
In one interview, Owens talks about having a marble toilet and in another he shares that ‘every jacket I make has interior pockets big enough to store a book and a passport and a sandwich’. These are somewhat over the top, but also a bit utilitarian in a way – why not make a bathroom luxurious? Isn’t that more useful than a tuxedo or ball gown you wear once every five years? Why not deliberately design even over the top clothing to have plenty of pockets? At least these will be appreciated and used.
My favourite weirdly relatable Rick Owens quote is where he rejects sketching. In the interview, he’s asked if he sketches his clothes first, he says no and when asked ‘why not’ he says:
“Just get to the point! It’s just an unnecessary step that is not really true. It’s just superficial, it’s not technical. It’s just kind of masturbation. It’s just jacking off. Get a step closer to actually realizing it instead of having some kind of fantasy about it. Just do it instead of talking about it so much.”
I love this so much. In a way it feels vindicating.
Lately I’ve had some struggles trying to engage with art institutions – who don’t want you to get close, they want you to be removed. Or so it feels to me.
So much of the processes I’ve been struggling to engage with aren’t about art work, or making, but about articulating a concept, an idea and a context. These things feel so fluffy and removed from the work of making art at all, I was getting kind of pissed off.
I’d think ‘why does it matter where the idea comes from? The idea isn’t the point, the work is the point, surely it matters more if the work is good?’. But, friends, in some places the output really doesn’t matter, and I kind of couldn't handle that.
I’m someone who often finds his way by following hunches, intuition, feelings, serendipity and working it out as I go. The notion that I’d have it all worked out ahead of time is sort of both bizarre and slightly harmful to me. To be concrete: how will I know what my photos of something I’ve never seen would look like? You can maybe guess, or predict, but you don’t know. Maybe there’s a particular plant that’s in bloom just for a short while and that’s when I’m there, maybe someone who shows me around becomes a main character, maybe it turns out my hunches were all wrong and I need to do the opposite.
What I’m getting at is that I really like the idea of just cutting the crap and getting to it. Let’s try and challenge the premise that concepts, academics or research matter as much as if the art is actually good. Let’s stop pretending that a sketch of an outfit is the same as an outfit that has been cut and sewn. The map is not the landscape. The idea is not the outcome.
I realise this is somewhat of a snarky view. Lots of good friends work in academic spaces where concepts, ideas and research are crucial - I don't quite know where that came from or why - and I don't want to berate anyone who is in those spaces or who enjoys them. I think I'm someone who wants to make things, thoughtfully, but making is the crucial activity for me. So trying to be a square peg in a round hole is always tricky, and then wondering 'isn't art about the art?' is a good question, but maybe coming from an excluded place.
And something worth saying as it should be abundantly clear: all jackets should have plenty of big pockets.
Also:
If you’re in Melbourne, I’m speaking at CCP (Contemporary Centre for Photography, not the Chinese Communist Party!) on Saturday (10th of December) as part of their book event. I’ll be on a panel from 12.30-2pm. If you’re around come along and say g’day. I’ll have The Killing Sink books with me.