By CHER POTTER & BEN PERDUE

“Everywhere a hole moves, a surface is invented.”

Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia

HARMONY KORINE AND PROENZA SCHOULER

For the man who lost all but one line of what was to be his masterpiece in a house fire – a script about a Florida pig named Pistachio who could scale walls with a boy on his back lobbing petrol bombs – the barriers dividing fantasy and reality are already a little porous. It was the disenfranchised nihilism of Kids though that had designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez propositioning Harmony Korine with a film project for PROENZA SCHOULER. In Act Da Fool he juxtaposes elongated silhouettes and luxe plush finishes with the rundown squalor of Nashville’s projects, by dressing a malt liquor-toting gang of feral schoolgirls in their fall collection. And that’s not even the twist. Over the palsied and dreamlike camerawork that documents them traversing parking lots and wastelands, rather than succumbing to their miserable surroundings, they do the wholly unexpected and voice their positive musings on love, friendships and ambition.

CHINA MIEVILLE

Science fiction novelist and poster boy of the New Weird, Mieville is increasingly hailed by architects like Geoff Manaugh as an urban science-fictionalist who shows us alternate ways of analyzing the city. His novel The City & The City had two cities laid on top of each other, inhabiting the same physical space, separated only by conceptual avoidance of noticing each other. The book won him an unprecedented third Hugo Award earlier this year. His latest launch, Kraken reforms the urban fantasy around a tougher and funnier core as he threatens to destroy London in the tentacled embrace of a giant squid. He layers this crude 1950s pulp trope BEM (bug eyed monster) onto a prosaic city reality, where a curator who tries to save the population replaces the traditional mad scientist as central character. The city feels bloodied and real with exaggerated but recognizable logics; this is London phantasmagoria.

KENNETH ANGER AND MISSONI

If Kenneth Anger invented the music video (much to his chagrin), it was Guy Bourdin who gave us the fashion film. This genre of art/fashion crossover has evolved to usurp catwalks and lookbooks, while elevating the ad campaign to video art in the process. So re-enters Kenneth Anger, following Ari Marcopoulus for YSL, Ryan McGinley for Pringle, and David Lynch for Dior – to name but a few recent artist collaborations – by directing his own short for MISSONI. Unner- vingly off-kilter at its most comprehen- sible, it would be reductive to call his work simply strange – this new merger of psychodrama and marketing tool is equal parts bizarre and beautiful. Three generations of Missonis in fall 2010 knitwear, layered beneath a signature treatment of overlaid textures and dazzling effects. Grandma Missoni performing for a pagan firebrand should be the ultimate incongruity, but with Anger aged 83 himself, they doubtless got on famously.

REZA NEGARESTANI

Mix obscure readings of political theory with H.P. Lovecraft and a nutter Deleuzean approach and the result is Iranian Philosopher, Reza Negarestani. He is part of a new generation of renegade thinkers gathering under the journal Collapse and connected to the idea of speculative realism. Jeff VanderMeer tagged his latest book CYCLONOPEDIA: Complicity With Anonymous Materials as one of the “best horrors you never heard of.” Part theory, part fiction, part genius, part hysteria, CYC­ LONOPEDIA is Middle Eastern philosophical horror sci-fi, where deceased ancient gods navigate tentacled oil pipelines and petroleum basins under a rotting sun. The book introduces a new crosshatched vocabulary for discussion on the Middle East with spectacular neologisms like “hypercamouflage” and “schizostrategy” that combine the institutional with the demented. According to China Mieville, it is “Incomparable. Post- genre horror, apocalypse theology and the philosophy of oil, crossbred into a new and necessary codex.”

GOSHA RUBCHINSKIY

In the grey built-up world of young Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy, Moscow is such a real and important influence that it feels as if the city has a living, breathing personality all its own. His self-styled Russian Skateboard Fashion owes as much to his close friends, as it does to the recent generation of male youth that has inspired him to create collections reflecting a new global confidence, previously unknown to those – like Rubchinskiy himself – who grew up under Soviet rule. Casual sportswear pieces punctuated with subtle tweaks, hinting at something sinister lying just beneath the
surface, mirror the often uneasy mood captured in the films and photo-heavy fanzines he produces to accompany the clothes. The latest is a stark video essay on a boy’s state of mind when left to his own devices in an anonymous Moscow tower block. “I can’t imagine myself working anywhere besides Moscow, Russia,” explains Rubchinskiy. “I think that says it all.”  032c Workshop Archive

DRESSING FOR PLEASURE

AtomAge is an apt title for a magazine that showcased the sci-fi fantasy looks adopted by rubber and leather fetishists behind the closed doors of 1970s suburbia. Dressing for Pleasure is the legacy of its founder and publisher John Sutcliffe, a book compiling an extraordinary collection of pictures from a time before kink became a high-street commodity. Its homemade fetishwear and amateur photography lift the lid on a mysterious utopia that existed in parallel with the mundane grind of day-to-day reality. Shot in all their high-sheen glory against a backdrop of familiar-feeling living rooms and family cars, Sutcliffe’s subjects seem all the more unearthly, far closer aesthetically to characters in a space opera than they are to “reader’s wives.” It would be intriguing to know what those same escapists think about the recontextualization of their once outrageous fetish as a commonplace influence on the contemporary fashion of today. www.fuel-design.com

PRADA AW2010/11

Somewhere between the PRADA fashion house and the architecture practice of OMA is a cogent brand of metropolitan fantasy. For A/W2010, the Prada catwalk was remodelled into an abstracted city by OMA: a beauty shop advertised unimaginable products, an information center displayed ambiguous facts, a cinema showed model inhabitants wandering through simulated streets and a Central Park made from green resin hinted at the original’s artificiality. The atmospheric, quasi-baroque space was in fact an extension of Miuccia Prada’s seasonal domain of inspiration: “I was reworking my Nineties collection that was itself inspired by vintage.” This code of embedded fake – where everything is a version of a version – is part of a Prada/OMA enquiry into the nature of fashion content. It also helped generate OMA’s art direction for the ‘fantasy lookbook,’ where backstage photos become alien dreamscapes, and colour-blocked buildings bleed into graphic facsimiles of garments.

PHYSICAL THERAPY

“Working with limited design skills, someone tried to convey mystical power and ended up with something striking, but not in a way that he or she may realize,” says New Jersey-based DJ and producer Daniel Fisher – AKA Physical Therapy – of the found European bible studies video modified to accompany his remix of “Unthinkable” by Alicia Keys. The clunky 3D rendering of Jesus wandering a sub-Second Life landscape is unsettling enough, but the true subversive beauty of the project lies in its hypnotically distorted reinterpretation of something as conventional and everyday as a US chart-topping single. His heavy-handed use of delay transforms the love ballad into something impossible to categorize for fear of entering Zeitgeist territory. The fact Physical Therapy works out of the basement of his parents’ home only emphasizes how this brand of New Age R&B has a hauntingly beguiling splendour, utterly at odds with the sterile traditions of domestic bliss.