Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 31 - Art/Fall 2022 i L'OFFICIEL USA

What do you do when you’re stressed? Do you call a friend, or meditate, maybe go for a walk? If you’re Adria Arjona, the 30-year-old megastar on the rise, you might instead jump out of a plane. If frequent skydiving doesn’t fit your image of an in-demand ingénue, well, that’s what we like to call a “you problem.” Arjona decided long ago that she was going to carve her own path. “When I first started, there weren’t many careers of Latin American women that I could model mine after,” the Tiffany & Co. ambassador tells L’OFFICIEL over martinis in LA in early September. She elected to use the blank slate to her advantage. “My biggest fear was always to be put in a box. I went to acting school; I…

If fashion is about looking perpetually forward, then it makes sense to go where the future is. That’s why Fendi has teamed up with The Juilliard School once again for its Fendi Vanguard Awards, an annual scholarship given to four Juilliard students across the college’s primary disciplines of music, dance, and drama. This group of up-and-coming performing artists are bursting with talent and personality, even as they navigate the usual senior year anxieties of what’s next after graduation. Raven Joseph (BFA ’23, dance) has been dancing since early childhood. “My mother put me into dance when I was three years old, because she didn’t want me to break all of the furniture in the house,” she laughs. Joseph’s compulsion to keep moving has been handy as she masters ballet and…

On a Sunday summer afternoon, L’OFFICIEL sat with legendary curators Hans Ulrich Obrist and Daniel Birnbaum to discuss the future of art through augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR). Friends since the ‘90s, Obrist and Birnbaum have led critical theory and curation through a myriad of mediums, from apartment galleries to the Venice Biennale. In 2022, as Co-Director of the Serpentine Gallery and Director of AR/VR art production company Acute Art, respectively, Obrist and Birnbaum are at the forefront of technology and the new wave of artistic expression, participation, and criticism. Their excitement is palpable, and with infectious fervor, the conversation is merely the beginning of a fascinating paradigm shift of contemporary art, all thanks to AR/VR. DANIEL BIRNBAUM: The dominant tendency in art, theory, and philosophy has been one of critique…

Hustle culture: The ding of an email notification warrants an immediate response, and a fourth Zoom meeting often calls for yet another cup of coffee. Though many of our homes now function as both an office and a space to relax, pausing to slip into something a bit cozier can help us also shift our state of mind. Leaning into the benefits of solitude and refuge, Loro Piana brings forward its new Cocooning Collection. As a caterpillar must first hide itself away before it morphs into a butterfly and takes flight, humans, too, wrap themselves in calm, enveloping garments in the hope of transforming. Cozying up in the collection is the busy activist, businesswoman, and actress Maggie Q, who places a high value on living intentionally. After achieving success as…

When does an Instagram photo become a work of art? Is a TikTok a short film? Is the metaverse something ‘real’ or worth taking seriously? What’s truly original? Today, our culture is wrestling with these definitions in a way not seen since Warhol’s time. This year we’ll get some help in understanding these frontiers via the work of the late artist Michel Majerus, in various exhibitions around the globe marking the 20th anniversary of his untimely death in a plane crash at the age of 35. “He really expanded on painting as a medium early on,” says Stephanie Seidel, co-curator of the show Progressive Aesthetics at ICA Miami, which opens November 29 and will be the first museum survey of Majerus’ work in the United States. “Painting is so much…

An online meme can be many things in 2022, but one of its primary and most prevalent forms remains the image macro, a traditional format featuring a captioned picture, often used to express a feeling or reaction. There are evolutions and trends, discontinuations and moments when certain memes come into popularity or fade into obscurity. They’re pervasive in our daily Internet usage, filling up our newsfeeds and eyeline during hours of doomscrolling. You’ll have your favorites, and some that won’t speak to you. For me, when the words are capitalized, written in a bold white Impact font and outlined in black, it’s particularly old-school. I felt a pang of nostalgia when I saw one appear in The African Desperate, a new, irony-heavy critique of the MFA experience from multimedia artist…

A visit to Isabelle Albuquerque’s studio overlooking LA’s MacArthur Park feels a bit like an archaeological excavation, with clues to her process and inspirations scattered about. Tacked to the walls are images of the Wicked Witch of the West, Classical Greek sculpture, and a painting of a victim of the Salem Witch Trials. Several cast wax feet, in shades ranging from ivory to amber to chocolate brown, are neatly arranged on low shelves, above which hang three Shaker brooms. Family photos of her mother, the artist Lita Albuquerque, her grandmother, and great-grandmother—all Sephardic Jews from Tunisia—are laid out on a table in preparation for an upcoming monograph. In the center of the room, there is an apparatus somewhere between an exercise bench and bondage harness that Albuquerque uses to perfect…

David Hockney famously assured, “Optical devices certainly don’t paint pictures…the use of them diminishes no great artist” while proposing his hotly debated Hockney-Falco thesis. The theory, crafted with physicist Charles M. Falco, uprooted our understanding of art history by examining the Old Masters’ usage of camera technology. Caravaggio, Velázquez, Da Vinci, Vermeer, and Rembrandt were all put under a microscope for their probable use of early optical instruments such as the camera obscura and/or curved mirrors—technological advances that fundamentally altered the course of art history, allowing artists to, in effect, trace their subjects. Centuries later, use of these technologies was ubiquitous. Technology had entered the creative process, dictating the practices of Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and James Turrell. The tools we use to create propelled the evolution of…

By the late 1960s, the women’s liberation movement was gaining traction throughout the United States, giving rise to the women’s health movement at the end of the decade. At the moment when activists urged women to take control of their reproductive health—often beginning with handheld mirrors, flashlights, and speculums—women’s art of the period similarly focused on the female reproductive system. Several artists who would come to define the women’s art movement in the 1970s were already experimenting with vaginal iconography by the mid-’60s. Judy Chicago’s vulvar-painted car hoods and anatomical ceramics appropriate the minimalist idiom; Hannah Wilke’s labial porcelain, terra cotta, and painted and glazed ceramic sculptures force the viewer’s to confront female anatomy; and Barbara T. Smith’s yonic drawings, sculptures, and Xerox works demonstrate her early interest in gender…

Artist, Bauhaus teacher, and illustrious explorer of the photographic medium László Moholy-Nagy declared in 1928, “The illiterate of the future will be ignorant of the use of camera and pen alike.” Photography was perceived as a tool that embraced modernity and “true” representation; this faith in the medium underpins our contemporary perception of photographic images. So much so, that eighty years later, laws were proposed that would require digital retouching to be stipulated under any published image. But isn’t the photographic image inherently misleading? Artist and photographer Thomas Ruff is of the mind that capturing “real reality,” as he calls it, cannot happen. In Ruff’s soberly titled Portraits series (1986–91), Ruff photographed friends and coworkers in a style that was described as “cold” and “distant.” When showing the photos, he…

As the future hurtles towards us at lightning speed, the art world inevitably reflects the ever-shifting ways we can approach interaction and creation. This issue of L’OFFICIEL Art is dedicated to the intersection of art and technology, whether it be the much-buzzed-about AI system Dall-E 2 and its implications for visual artists, or the new crop of creatives who are utilizing AR and VR. Artists incorporating technological advancements into their work is not a recent phenomenon. In the 1960s, feminist artists like Miriam Schapiro used computers to create graphic paintings, as explored in “Shape Shifter,” while today, self-described Late Stage Feminist Emma Stern uses 3-D software to render her fantastical, busty subjects, which she then paints with oils on canvas. In her essay “Eulogy for the Male Gaze,” Stern dives…