Sep 08
Quote of Note | Richard Simmons
Posted in: Uncategorized
“I’m an illustrator. I’ve been drawing since I was a kid in New Orleans. I started hanging around Jackson Square and learning different techniques. When I went to college in Florence, Italy and spent a little time in Palermo, Sicily, I took up fashion illustration, graphic design, and I worked on a couple of children’s books. Then I got jobs doing fashion illustrations, but there was something missing. I was alone in the room with a dress, and it wasn’t for me—I needed to be around people!”
-Fitness fanatic Richard Simmons, interviewed by Eddie Roche in today’s kickoff issue of The Daily, the ebullient tabloid distributed at Fashion Week show venues throughout New York City
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“I first became interested in type when I bought David Bowie‘s Hunky Dory album in my teens. Taking it home on the upper deck of a London bus, I remembered staring intently at the sleeve for clues to what might lie inside. Hunky Dory offered its wares in a type called Zipper, a classic bit of buzzy sci-fi text that suggested something spacey and robotic (the songs were actually spacey and vulnerable).
“I like when people have opinions—especially about art. You can hate my art. I made my art to be hated. That’s why I made the name paintings. So rather than someone coming to my studio and saying, like, ‘Thank you for your time. I’ll see you later,’ and me not knowing why they don’t like my work, I understand now why they don’t like it. I made work specifically for them not to like. If you made paintings of flowers and someone says they hate it, it’s like ‘What do you mean? It’s a flower!’ But if you make a painting of your name and somebody says they hate it, it’s like, ‘Well, why would you like a painting of my name anyway?’”
“This is a profession that generates an enormous amount of arrogance. Architects feel empowered to give opinions about politics and sociology and philosophy without knowing much about it. Kind of in the same way that they think they can design furniture or fashion or utensils for dining. I think architects tend to believe that they can almost do anything, which is a wonderful characteristic, but in some cases you just fall flat. Theatrical design is just a completely different vocabulary. It’s a very, very difficult thing to do well.”
“It’s like going to a Broadway stage crew, who are very talented at what they’re doing, and saying, ‘Can you help us create the next summer movie blockbuster?’ I think it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the way design works.
“It seems to me that the end of the Cold War produced a very important effect: the Internet. The Internet was released and realized because of the end of the Cold War—it was declassified. The Internet brought about a kind of extreme democratization of art. Now anybody, not just artists, can make photographs and videos and put them online, offering their videos and images to global audiences….So, what distinguishes a professional artist from everyone else? Today’s professional artists are those who reflect on and respond to the economic, political, and social conditions of contemporary image production.
“For all the high-toned potential theater in [Todd]Eberle’s pictures, however, nothing moves. Everything is nailed in its formal place. There is not a trace of ‘snapshot aesthetic,’ and the consequent wit and taste of Eberle’s photographs is so delicately balanced that the single bad photograph in this collection of 250 was probably intended to be: Eberle’s photograph of Tom Ford‘s black painting by Ad Reinhardt in a decorator installation on a polished wood wall. The image chills the heart. Reinhardt’s painting, one of the greatest masterpieces of postwar American art, looks like a duchess in a whorehouse, and Eberle catches the egregiousness with as little commentary as possible.”