Hussein 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?
I think fashion and art are two in the same. So often fashion is kind of seen as something superficial and ephemeral. Something which is ever changing from season to season. Since its wearable and directly interacts with an individuals body in terms of weather protection. Or is used as a personal means of communication by its audience, and because it can be mixed or matched and used as a a brush and pain by any one who buys it... it becomes its own category.
Anyway I think Burka and Afterwords are fashionable art.
Not all clothing is fashion, so what makes fashion fashion?
Fashion is less function more concept. Fashion is specifically designed for the body, clothes are designed for human function in the weather. Fashion is calculated design which caters to trends and movements through societies, it is an industry.
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?
His work leans more art, but in terms of afterwords and burka he pushes and expands the limits and bounds of fashion.
The second question is debatable, it spills a bit into marketing and advertisement. I think that art is meant to move people to influence them make them think a little, in essence its just like any other expression like smiling, crying, or gasping when surprised. Art is something which comes naturally and the use of art wether some one is communicating their own message or promoting another person's message, it is still the same concept. Art is art.
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?
Science. The whole feel of the work is technical, sterile, and very calculated.
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?
I think it depends on the piece, the message and concept behind the piece, and the roll or setting the work is produced.
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