Week 3- Hussein Chalayan

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?

Not all clothing is fashion, so what makes fashion fashion?

I found the work ‘burka’(1996) very interesting because of the original meaning of it, the burka was at first supposed to be wearied by the prophet’s wifes, the texts has been changed 20 years ago and the burka’s been applied to every wife.  in my opinion, the Muslim have set the sexuality as a taboo but they seem more attracted by it than any other religions, for example the burka is suppose to hide the beauty of the women and save their dignity when she is outside, but it has transform the women as an object just against man jealousy. I think that’s what Chalayan wanted to show, a kind of perversion of the idea of the burka.
 Her second work ‘afterwords’(2000) could be more considered as a fashion work, it seem like she has tried to experiment another kind of fashion by playing with architectural materials and new technology such as metal cylinder, plastic bubbles, and lights.     

Hussein Chalayan, Burka, 1996

                          Hussein Chalayan, Afterwords, 2000

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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?

I think an artwork still an art even if it’s for selling products, some advertisement on TV are actually very concerned in art. In some way commercial business may have influenced her and his work that he couldn’t entirely express himself, advertisement have only one gold, convince the audience of a good product.

His work ‘The Level Tunnel’ is 15m long and 5m high and it’s made of different materials. This work can be experimented from the exterior or blindfolders  inside, the viewer from the inside follow a path that have different levels like “a cut through landscapes”, he’ll have some sound of a flute made with a bottle of vodka activated by a sponsored floor.  He succeed to create at first an artwork instead of a selling product installation because if we don’t know that the sounds made are from a “vodka flute” or that the inspired landscape is used to purify the water used in the vodka, this piece of art could be in a museum.

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?

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?