This past April, Machado went back to Shanghai for the first time since 1946, accompanied by her husband, her daughters, and her grandsons. She’d avoided the visit for five decades, thinking it would be “too painful,” that she’d be reminded of the war or, worse, of how all her close family members had either passed on or been scattered around the world without her ever seeing them again. “Tears were running down my face,” she says, when she visited her old apartment in a beautiful Art Deco building fallen to ruin. The Catholic church she’d attended was just a façade; the nave had been gutted and turned into offices for the Communist Party. Still, she loved the life and spirit of the new Shanghai and returned home to Long Island inspired enough to paint a guest room in the theme of what she’d seen and to redo one of her gardens in the Chinese style, complete with manicured dwarf maples and custom-made moon doors. And the pain, well, it didn’t feel like pain, exactly. “In Portuguese you call it ­saudade,” she says. “It means a kind of longing and a love that still remains, that every once in a while when you think about it, it is with nice memories. It’s a missing. The other word in Portuguese that is similar is lembranças. Memories. They’re both beautiful words.”

“I didn’t think of myself as good-looking at all: China Machado’s many beginnings,” by Jada Yuan, New York Magazine, Aug 14, 2011

“See, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing”

Friday, March 25, 2011 is the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which claimed the lives of 146 garment workers trapped at their machines. Most of the people who died, either consumed by flames, or jumping out of the windows on the ninth floor, were young women, recent immigrants. This is the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of New York City.

Terrible Karma is project Merle Patchett and I put together. The title - Terrible Karma – refers to both the title of a protest song sung by Cambodian female garment workers at a union rally in Phnom Penh (July 2010) and to the idea that events of the garment industry past continue to haunt the present, that they are always coming back.

Merle  and I will be out this Friday morning and afternoon (10-2) in downtown Manhattan, at Cooper Square, and near the location of the fire, at Washington Place and Greene Street. Follow the path on the map, and look out for our UHAUL truck, containing the audio-visual installation above. If you’re in town, drop by and spend some time in the back of the truck, feeling the reverberations of the fire, 100 years later.

It’s fashion week in New York, and you know what that means… a lot of walking! I went to see Victor de Souza’s showing of his Fall/Winter 2011-12 collection at Exit Art, in Manhattan’s fashion district. Victor is my downstairs neighbor, an impeccably disheveled man who is always hard at work on Fashion, into all hours of the night. It is hard to believe how, in the death-grip of laziness, I lounge about reading and sleeping in the rooms right above his busy little workshop. I was excited to finally see the finished work, after getting glimpses here as there on visits to the apartment. I was not disappointed. See for yourself:

Legendary street photographer Bill Cunningham is an observer of subtle shifts in the city’s seasons and moods. On his walks and bike rides around town he takes pictures that together constitute an archive of the ephemeral: style.

In his January 23 dispatch from the streets he discusses the way footwear, in this case the high-heeled ankle boot, can define an era. He points out the 7-year life cycle of the fashion trend, which go hand in hand with shifts in the relationship between ankle-boot-wearing women and their urban environment.

Being one such ankle-boot-wearing New York lady, I appreciate Bill’s sensitivity to the huge difference a shoe makes in posture and movement–in the way I travel through city streets, in my body’s lines of flight. He picks up on the crossed-leg posture that seems to come with the shoes. While I’m not a leg-crosser, the way I stand, my attitude, the way I imagine the potentials in my relationship to other walkers is certainly shaped in no small way by the sort of shoes I wear. One might say that choosing shoes for the day is a way of selecting a mood, a way of approaching the town, and my fellow urbanites.

Style and fashion–the fabrics, cuts, shapes, and the ‘postures’ that come with them are as much archives of urban experience, as any documents down at City Hall. Maybe even more so!

I need sticky things. Ideas that are flexible, malleable, with plastacine qualities; things that can keep sticking to other things, that can be used to build SCULPTURES, not structures

What  is the difference between a structure and a sculpture? forms we can mold, assemble improvisationally–forms with feeling. I want to make flexible sculptures that can mold into/onto places, that can mold around corners, that can mold into the parts of the city I care about, that can become real in the world in a particular way—that can take the shape of the world.

I am repelled by the block-like nuggets we are given to work with at school.  We are asked to use them to build these fortresses which we call theory.

Great, hard, solid, unbreakable as these theoretical structures may be, they don’t actually seem to be able to take hold of the city, or to find a hold in the city, in a visceral way.

They can’t fit anywhere in the world. Instead, they become the kind of things that people who build them get locked into, attached to, unable to get out of—forget they even have to try to get out.

Let’s never forget we have always to try to get out.

images from V Magazine #61

Who needs realism?

Luckily, the nature of fashion is anti-realistic and the perfect place to park one’s own understimulated, grey realistic everyday life. This is a place of dreams, a place where almost impossible beauty is created; a place where curiosity, wonderment and fiction thrive–all things that block out the sneaky boredom of mediocrity that threatens to take us down.

–Uffe Buchard, DANSK magazine, S/S 2010, editorial note.

One day last winter, I noticed this interesting exhibit/display in the windows of Macy’s Department Store. These images grabbed me immediately: The drawings and posters of Josephine Baker as a fashion icon, and the mannequins, with their expressive hand gestures, and the colorful printed text, of (real? and) imagined “Baker-isms”

“Maman” Josephine       Beyonce you can have my costume
No, I have no regrets   A certain smile!    Ah. Those Bananas!     Me, a diva?

All of this imagery is meant to help us in ”Rediscovering Josephine Baker” during Black History Month. We are also to meant to “discover” the great items on sale at Macy’s.

Like Betsey Johnson Handbags on [Floor] 1.

What can we make of this as an archival practice? I think the use of images, original posters, and fashion drawings “on loan from the Jean Claude Baker Foundation and the Jean Rennert Collection,” is a traditional museum practice. But paired with the mannequins advertising the latest fashions on sale in the store, and the colorful fictional utterances, the Baker archive changes from a document of the past into an image of contemporary urban sophistication. But not without raising some disturbing issues…

The fictional text takes liberties (“Beyonce can have my constume”) in order to link the past and the contemporary (Baker and Beyonce) in an exuberant celebration of fashion. But linking these two American icons, especially during Black History Month, also reminds me how black women’s bodies have been casualties of the racial minefield.

Josephine Baker, in her bananas, playing the role of colonial savage in hit French films like Princesse Tam Tam is uncritically celebrated in this poster in the window.

Watching Baker, in the role of Princesse Tam Tam, overcome by the “African” rhythms, stripping off her disguise of ”Western” sophisticated evening wear and plunging onto the stage to the chagrin (and delight) of her French milieu, is both exhilerating and painful to watch. It is as though her elastic body is charged with expressing the repressed desires (the shame and pleasure) of the audience. As though her body is both hers and theirs at once.

When Beyonce reprises Baker’s classic banana costume in this 2006 performance, I can feel the same issues stirred up. What does is mean for black women’s bodies to be “used” in this manner?

The shop window display seems almost benign in comparison with the uses of Baker’s image in the 1920s and 30s. And Beyonce’s “innocent” reprise of the Baker act is also fun and entertaining. But somehow black ladies shaking ass in bananas for mostly white audiences is still pretty disconcerting.

Combining all of these issues almost seamlessly is part of the power of archival practice, I think. Inspired shop windows can definitely be archives of affective experience of the city. I am obviously affected ;-]

What I love about these performances is the precision, the attention to detail, the sheer perfection of the copy. At the same time, each of these performers infuses the song with personal soul, attitude and humour, in the style of the jazz greats, giving a new meaning to the otherwise trite, (hetero)sexist sentiment of single ladies having to “put a ring on [that special finger].”

And, of course, you gotta love the fashions!

To more love and beauty in the new year. Happy 2009!

I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria during the oil boom of the 1970′s and 80′s. Fashion reflected the city’s exuberant modernism and futurism. There were great hairstyles, which all the fancy ladies wore. The city was changing and growing fast. New structures seemed to be going up everyday. The new hairstles were intended to simulate the forms of the urban structures they were named after. Like the hairstyle pictured above was called “Eko Bridge,” after the new bridges built to link the city’s islands. There were also styles like the skyscraper, the stadium, etc.

As you can probably tell, hair for Lagosians, and many other Africans, is a big deal. Look here for more about the significance of hair and the head in West Africa.

I think hair done like this could be a way of archiving the city, don’t you?