DATE: 18-11-24
TIME: 15:44
AUTHOR: SAM HARDING,
IMAGE COUNT: 24
TAGS: X
A landscape is not the terrain itself but the view. A covert distinction. As in the word ‘picturesque’, how it presupposes mediation as well as aesthetic.
The landscape represents a primordial site of these invisible mechanisms, the subsumption of the world by its lifelike imitation: the image. It manifests a hyper-visual programme— both the forest and the trees, the whole as the sum of its parts, visual surplus squared, the world traversable by the eye, preserving distance from that world.
From our post-industrial, urbanised vantage, the dimensions of this genre, and their origins in the natural vista, have become indistinguishable from everyday visual parameters that now have their basis in lossless data compression. Amalgamating macro and micro scales, optimising visual information, collating pixels, scrubbing matter, standardising aesthetic codes, evacuating the space between individual details and greater whole.
This scaling has become instant, compact, mobile, culminating in the iPhone camera and the fact that taking a photo horizontally with one feels like overkill. Because all images are already landscape now. They constitute it.
Here the ground vanishes, a process aligned with the growth and fragmentation of contemporary audiences. Where a landscape is now the line that records vast amounts of eyes all seeing the exact same thing across space and time, an operation that has internalised its procedures of abstracting legibility out of an increasingly atomised, asynchronous, immaterial world.
The show-notes for GR10K’s SS25 collection, entitled Nine Pounds of Dead Landscape, reference “hours of backstage footage from field recording director James Benning’s movies, statically depicting factories, taxidermy and anti-horizons”. An experimental filmmaker known for his long still frames of infrastructural expanses, these cited offcuts, stitches of industrial and rural fabric, pose a desire to confront the obscured losses of this space-time complexity trade-off. Taking the decaying sources of generalised natural aesthetics and re-engaging them through the collapsed middle-ground between formats, these durational photographs evoke a moody aggregate of surveillance and land art, linking to GR10K’s broader behaviour as a fashion label whose main production is noise.
In an auditorium near Duomo, central Milan, Fashion Week, earlier this year, these are the conditions surrounding a performance called “Stringent Manners”, designed as a presentation of the new collection. The final interior of the building is a slope of red seating below concrete balconies, looking out onto a lightless, empty stage. Arranged here and there around the seats and rows and levels are several performers bearing string instruments, modelling full SS25. This is an androgynous neo-uniform of colourful hooded jackets with school-boy shorts and socks, and occasional protective eyewear. CCTV domes are hooked up to each performer’s outcrop, next to sheet music stands, harsh lights and exposed sound equipment.
The performance is an active still life. A tuning session. The musicians remain in their positions as the audience moves around the grainy space. Contemporary reading habits are already thrown into focus by this splicing of stage and audience, and the dissonant sounds played by their violins, cellos etc. maintains a frayed and inchoate atmosphere. The endurance of the performers becomes the only access point for what is going on, a thread that traces back to a figure behind the tinted sound-box window, who appears to receive the raw vibrations produced by the performers’ exertions, perhaps layering them back into the proceedings in no-more filtered form. The wood of the instruments is disturbed by wires, the tactical-wear trades acoustics for ballistics. The performers are diverse in body shape, form and age. They are trained musicians, AKA not models and they look back at you when you photograph them, twitching slightly under the light of the phone camera. The space is house-lit and murky, the affair feels like the behind-the-scenes of its own production. The mechanical backdrop or red lodge where images pass through on their way to becoming everywhere.
Everything offhand or impenetrable about the proceedings makes me consider the format of my self-imposed frame for being there, which is to provide coverage. Deployed in its more literal sense, this entails “the area that can be covered by a specific volume or weight of a substance”. A kind of landscaping then, like wrapping a geotextile across a field as if to fully record it. However the more generic definition of the word provides a far more diffuse set of possibilities. “The extent to which something deals with something else.”
With this, a vacuum starts to form. The implication of a zero-extent, some gap between modes, allowing for a more sawn-off set of interrelations. At the very least, a kind tension or way of operating in a state of constant suspense against the assumed intersections of the art, fashion and architectural landscapes.
Since its first collection as an offshoot of the Italian technical clothing manufacturer Grassi in which the factory’s dead stock fabrics became re-cycled into designs for the fashion market, GR10K has continued to muddy and refine this MO. Taking the friction between fashion and function far beyond the gorpcore trend, which doesn’t so much inflect the design of technical garments themselves than dramatise the context in which they are worn, GR10K instead strips back these layers of semiotics and utility towards a volatile definition of plainclothes, one that recalls the military origins of most everyday technologies and even fashion aesthetics. From this baseline, the results are an array of high-performance materials tailored into post-digital staple-wear, evoking a murkier set of applications for the wearer amidst a techno-political contemporary overrun with shell companies, obscure machinery, monotonous violence and hyper-masculine doomsday-fetishism. This is all shrouded by communications that employ technical language in a floral manifesto/impasto that substitutes itself for branding exercise,
Over the course of the exhibition it is not possible to get a vantage. People arrive and fan out and sit on the stage. Individual musicians take breaks. We dip out for an aperitivo and discuss the way people dress in our vicinity. Someone mentions horizontal summer (much later). On our return the sounds have not changed except in some unknown transmission between the performers. There is a final act that siphons the distinction between air and vibrations from the room.
Throughout “Stringent Manners” I take photos on my iPhone, all of which are not-good. The lighting results in degraded textures that are cancelled out by the camera’s attempt to force resolution. Out of this sealing off of possibilities, another set blooms in individual pixel clusters. Fine-details are already scattered around the space. From rips in socks to the bowstrings wrapped through the straps of shoulder-bags next to the performers. Something painterly emerges. As if the vanished ground from which all canvases derive might be regathered piece by piece but only on the other side of the digital scree. The edges of the centre. The landscape-inside out.