I’m no fancy-shmancy art historian, so I couldn’t tell you for sure what a pink sky in a painting means. Is it the beginning of a new day? Or the end of an old one? In the reviews I’ve read of Gregory Jacobsen’s work, most critics look on the bright side, referring to the rosy skies behind his gruesome, puffy, hypergenitalized creatures–garish pink piles of meat with improbable orifices dripping with translucent juice and wrinkled, bedsored, snaggletoothed people with flagpoles penetrating their vaginas and heinies–as beautiful sunsets, as though all this moist depravity is about to come to an end.
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I’ve been especially aware of Jacobsen’s favorite theme–human excess–as I’ve gone out these past few weeks. A high-concept fashion show at Open End a couple weekends ago seemed to romanticize the whole idea of unnecessary indulgence even as the program claimed loftier intentions: to “question the common preconception of what a garment is” and explore “the effects of time on objects.” Six current and former students from the School of the Art Institute showed self-conscious designs that bound and displayed the body in impractical ways. Models shuffled down a runway made of old throw rugs as best they could, swaddled in garments for which we don’t yet have names: pantlike things with crotches that hung down past the knees, adult Onesies padded at the belly and bum, ceramic and wood chest casts/girdles with unreal proportions, like one boob way higher than the other.
Recent SAIC grad Jillian Gryzlak showed loud, clunky, unwieldy accessories fashioned from plastic cutlery and old ticket stubs, making tongue-in-cheek reference to the ways people in third world countries recycle and repurpose the first world’s garbage. Of course it’s only first world people who have the freedom to wear things that are impossible to wear. Clothes that comment on our excesses are kind of, well, excessive.
The rest of it was pretty technical–Illustrator this, After Effects that, careful with the lens-flare-filter abuse. Though I didn’t understand most of it, I was digging the tension and was literally sitting on the edge of my seat waiting to see if Team One’s file would transfer in time. I was too hyped to ask myself why the fuck it even mattered.
