Week 3- Hussein Chalayan

Chalayan is an artist and designer, working in film, dress and installation art. Research Chalayan’s work, and then consider these questions in some thoughtful reflective writing.

1. Chalayan’s works in clothing, like Afterwords (2000) and Burka (1996) , are often challenging to both the viewer and the wearer. What are your personal responses to these works? Are Afterwords and Burka fashion, or are they art? What is the difference?

Not all clothing is fashion, so what makes fashion fashion?

In my opinion, Chalayan’s work in clothing are quite interesting, specially the “Afterwords”, where he uses the idea of a table and turn it into a skirt design, this is a pretty weird but also interesting idea. But in his work “Burka”, mainly about veil, which are designed to cover woman’s face, I am not too interested in this area, specially some images contains nudity with only the face veil, which I find it personally disturbing.

Afterwords and Burka fashion are quite different in my opinion. Mostly is because of the expose of nudity and facial expose due to religious concern. Not everyone can accept Burka fashion, since it is more of a sensitive fashion towards the society now. Afterwords fashion is more of a dramatic /  inhuman style, I mean, who would have thought of wearing a “table” out at the streets, I find this really interesting.

According to Fashion Forever (2000),

 

Fashion is a term commonly used to describe a style of clothing worn by most of people of a country. A fashion usually remains popular for about 1-3 years and then is replaced by yet another fashion. Even though there are a lot of changes in fashion, most people do not easily except the changes.

 nowadays everybody out at the streets are wearing art as they walk around, by having the latest trend fashion sense with unique clothing combinations, which in result brings confidence to people who are wearing them.

Hussein Chalayan, Burka, 1996

 Hussein Chalayan, Afterwords, 2000

2. Chalayan has strong links to industry. Pieces like The Level Tunnel (2006) and Repose (2006) are made in collaboration with, and paid for by, commercial business; in these cases, a vodka company and a crystal manufacturer. How does this impact on the nature of Chalayan’s work? Does the meaning of art change when it is used to sell products? Is it still art?

According to Art tattler,

Motivated by ideas and disciplines not readily associated with fashion, Hussein Chalayan’s pioneering work crosses between architecture, design, philosophy, anthropology, science and technology.

Nowadays, many artist uses varieties of methods to create products which has elements of art in it, this is the change of art, but it is just changed as to make it more attractive for the buyers.

Chalayn is just trying out cross over between art and all sorts of technology methods, to create a new experience for people, and try to explode the art industry. So it is still consider as art, as since both of these products such as crystals and vodka bottles which brings beauty and uniqueness towards viewers.

3. Chalayan’s film Absent Presence screened at the 2005 Venice Biennale. It features the process of caring for worn clothes, and retrieving and analysing the traces of the wearer, in the form of DNA. This work has been influenced by many different art movements; can you think of some, and in what ways they might have inspired Chalayan’s approach?

I think that post modern would be one of the art movement, this is because he uses modern technology to experiment with art, by having the help of a biologist extracted cells to examine their DNA sequences, this shows that he has been influenced with what he has been approach with the current period.

Hussein Chalayan, still from Absent Presence, 2005 (motion picture)

4. Many of Chalayan’s pieces are physically designed and constructed by someone else; for example, sculptor Lone Sigurdsson made some works from Chalayan’s Echoform (1999) and Before Minus Now (2000) fashion ranges. In fashion design this is standard practice, but in art it remains unexpected. Work by artists such as Jackson Pollock hold their value in the fact that he personally made the painting. Contrastingly, Andy Warhol’s pop art was largely produced in a New York collective called The Factory, and many of his silk-screened works were produced by assistants. Contemporarily, Damien Hirst doesn’t personally build his vitrines or preserve the sharks himself. So when and why is it important that the artist personally made the piece?

Personally made artwork are often the best, the reason why i am saying this is because only the artist who did their own work can express it to the others the clearest, with how and what they were thinking while creating this artwork.

Fashion is more of a lower class artwork in my opinion comparing with other art work such as painting or music pieces, and having an assistant to help out creating an garment are often not as important as personal artwork.

Creating art work is something which needs to be done personally, unless creating work such as animation which will, of course, a team is required to do it, since it has a very large amount of work load.

http://www.husseinchalayan.com/#/home/
http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/chalayan.html
http://www.husseinchalayan.com/blog/

Reference:

http://arttattler.com/designhusseinchalayan.html

http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/chalayan.html

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/read.php?

CATEGORY_PK=&TOPIC_PK=2858

http://arttattler.com/designhusseinchalayan.html

http://library.thinkquest.org/J002932/What%20is%20Fashion.html