The Art of Style: An Interview Between Margarita and Masha Tupitsyn
by Masha Tupitsyn
I spent the summer of 2013 traveling around France and Italy. I did an artist’s residency for the months of August and September in a small, abandoned village called Marnay-sur-Seine, 40 minutes north of Paris, and a moody stint in Cannes at a family friend’s 1960s villa. But before I did those things, I rented an apartment in Paris and lounged around with my mother and father, who have been living there on and off since 2001. I spent part of the time in Paris trying to write and doing interviews for a new book, Love Dog. The rest of the time, I met with my mother, the art historian, curator and critic Margarita Tupitsyn at outdoor cafes, restaurants and the Palais Royal gardens, for daily discussions on life, culture, the meaning of work in late capitalism, the politics of style, and our family’s personal and political history of aesthetics. The interview, which I recorded on my iPhone, was hours-long, and originally intended for an anthology on women and style. During our epic talks, my mother and I smoked cigarettes, drank wine, ate, walked around, went to galleries, museums, and movies; shopped, all the while covering a tireless range of subjects, as we always have. Minus the wine and cigarettes, my days with her were a lot like my childhood. For this reason, my mother continues to be my favorite person and interlocutor, simply because I can talk about anything with her, on any register. One of her ongoing jokes is the way in which our family’s idea of “normal, every day conversation” is what other people might consider elevated or formal. But for us, there has never been a difference between the personal and the political, the everyday and the rarefied.
PART I
Masha Tupitsyn:
Let’s start by talking about your unique and special upbringing. All the women in your family were artists, seamstresses and knitters, so art and clothing were fused early on. For a long time, both your mother and aunt made clothes for you. Was this purely because you didn’t have money to buy the clothes you liked? Did you design the clothes together? When I look at some of those clothes now I think of them not simply as articles of clothing, or even examples of innovative style, but as art objects. And I still wear a lot of those pieces myself because they’ve lasted. Where do you think style comes from? Where does yours?
Margarita Tupitsyn:
Most Russians were really poor, so they couldn’t afford to wear the high fashions of the West. But there was also simply nothing to buy in the department stores. The only people who dressed well were people who had access to the West or who made their own clothes. On rare occasions, things were brought from abroad and people would stand on these long, horrible lines to buy something. And most people didn’t have any money anyway. In my case, my mother, grandmother and aunt compensated for that absence by making basic things for my family and me to wear. My aunt, Lydia Masterkova, was a different story however. She could sew, but that was not her primary vocation or interest. She was an abstract artist, and therefore had an avant-garde approach to form and could make anything — clothes, jewelry, furniture. If we think of the history of the Russian avant-garde in the 1920s, where design played a dominant role, often overshadowing painting, my aunt was steeped in this tradition. She also liked to dress me in vintage clothes dating as far back as the 19th century. She also loved Fellini’s La Strada, which was a big hit in Russia in the 1960s, and would style me as Gelsomina, played by Guilietta Masina. Lydia gave me all these identities and characters through clothing. Of course she also made clothes for herself and was always amazingly dressed. She was a feminist, too, which she, funnily enough, expressed through clothes. Married to the abstract painter, Vladimir Nemukhin, she had this rule that whenever he needed his shirts ironed for some important party, she would only iron what you could see! She wouldn’t bother to iron the part of the shirt that was hidden underneath the jacket. So my aesthetic sensibility came from my aunt and uncle, who collected antiques and had completely unusual and atypical objects in their homes. They showed me beautiful art history books with amazing Renaissance paintings.
Margarita Tupitsyn and Lydia Masterkova, 1964
Lydia Masterkova in her Studio, Moscow, 1968
Lydia Masterkova and Vladimir Nemukhin, Moscow, ca. 1961
Masha:
So what role did fashion play in the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, and how did it influence artists like your aunt and uncle later on?
Margarita:
Russian avant-garde artists believed that fashion should be egalitarian, part of everyone’s life and that all things should be beautiful and aestheticized. They were against fashion as elitist. Artistic creativity was a way to realize the utopia of beauty and refinement. But after Stalin’s regime of violent repression and unprecedented austerity, this sensibility was lost as a social standard. My aunt subscribed to this ethos of aesthetic unity because she could make things herself and because she had this incredible eye. She believed one’s whole environment should be cultivated. And of course rich people had always pursued this idea of the total environment — the difference being much of this luxury was economically driven. But for my aunt it was part of this artistic, bohemian ideal.
Lydia Masterkova, Priluki, Russia, 1966
Masha:
We know that people can be very interested in aesthetics in a way that is compartmentalized. For example, they might go to a museum to appreciate art, but have no interest in clothes or in surrounding themselves with so-called beautiful objects. Or, they might decorate their homes but not their bodies — so very heightened and cultivated aesthetics in one area and inactive aesthetics in another.
Now, of course, with the prominence of the nouveau riche model of instant fame and wealth that celebrity culture has made more visible, this idea of refinement and deep style has been further degraded because there is rarely a personally fostered relationship to aesthetics over time. Now we have a buying and spending mentality. Wealth is comprised of cheap status signifiers. You have no idea what you’re buying, or why — only that it is “expensive” and brand driven. Before wealth had everything to do with worth and taste. When you had something beautiful, however corrupt it was to acquire that beauty, and it’s always been corrupt, you had it because you knew having it meant something. Wealth and beauty are not about what lasts anymore, or where something comes from. New equals value. Upgrading reigns supreme. It’s the gaudy cost of things we’re seeing, not the value.
Margarita:
The ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s art world in Europe and America, but also more generally too, could not afford the clothes that figures like Audrey Hepburn and Jackie Onassis were wearing. The art world was poor, so art and glamour were still separate and distinct. The ‘60s can be compared to the 1920s avant-garde because the ‘60s were a rebirth of those incredibly innovative ideas — the notion of all-around elegance. The art bohemia of the ‘70s boycotted glamour; they did they stake their identity in clothing. Artists were doing conceptual things. It was about the dematerialization of an object, dematerialization of clothing, the politicization of everyday life. So decorative and aesthetic indulgences just didn’t matter to them. And then in the ‘80s, it changed again. Clothing became synonymous, as you point out in your essay, Prettier in Pink with identity. It mattered. If you wanted to be visible, you had to dress in an interesting and radical way. You had to communicate your ideas through dress. People in the art world started to pay attention to how people were dressed and that’s when Japanese avant-garde designers like Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto and Issey Miyake appeared. In the ‘80s, my style changed radically. Before that my mother had been sewing patterns based on designers like Valentino and Dior for me to wear, and while some of those clothes were beautiful, they never really suited my sensibility, and my husband, Victor Tupitsyn, who has an incredible eye, knew that before even I did.
In 1984, I bought a pair of shoes at a department store on 57th street in New York, without knowing they were CDG. And then later, I was walking through SoHo one day, in 1985, and I saw this totally minimalist store, fashioned out of gray concrete with nothing in it but a few racks of black clothing (CDG’s first store in the ‘80s was on Wooster Street, which opened in 1983), and I looked at the clothes and felt the way I did during my childhood — that clothing is art rather than something you simply cover or gender your body with. The clothes reminded me of what my aunt was making as far as formal invention is concerned. I could hardly believe it, and from that point on, I was stuck on Japanese designers.
Masha:
I can vividly remember you picking me up from school wearing a CDG ensemble. I was maybe 7 and everyone was staring at you. I think you had just cut all your hair off, too. This was the age of big, long hair and bright colors and shoulder pads, and you were dressed in Spartan black and looked like a boy. The clothing really confused your gender. Everyone at school would ask me if you were my brother. I could tell how much those clothes excited you. It was a total shift, but also a very organic one. However, while you discovered your style utopia, I also felt that the power and radicality of what you were wearing, and its effect on others, was very profound. And yet, I never felt embarrassed by you. I always felt pride. I knew, somehow, that those choices and gestures were an essential part of your individuality and character, and that it would be to mine as well. I also remember having postcards of Christy Turlington wearing CDG and how unadorned and laconic those early fashion ads were. Like the reality, the ethos, was the clothing, as you said. The clothes were a state of mind — a social and intellectual value system. How you lived, not just how you dressed — a very Zen precept. That’s why there is nothing else in the background of these ads. No commodity-relation, as it were.
Christy Turlington, Comme des Garçons, 1985
Margarita:
Yes, there was a mindful austerity and asceticism to these clothes; no accessories, visible make-up, or fashion “scenes.” Everything was stripped down to the bare essentials, while in today’s cultural economy aesthetics function as pure excess. There is also the fact that people essentially stopped paying attention to avant-garde clothing. I remember when I wore Jean-Paul Gautier in the ‘80s, who was radical but in a very different way from Japanese designers, people would stop me on the subway to ask me if I was wearing a costume. The only time I didn’t get stopped was on Halloween. So there was something powerful and shocking about being outrageous or different. The result was that people were surprised and curious. A lot of this has to do with the problem and proliferation of the copy and of the marketing of “style” in general, which is an effect of mass production and culture. You can reproduce anything and recirculate it endlessly, both in images and in copy. When you copy something and make it available everywhere, the originality and effect degrades. So again, while that utopian Russian idea of the egalitarianism of design is a great idea, it doesn’t work in consumer culture. When promotional culture tells us where to get high-end designs for cheap, how to recreate high-fashion looks, and everything turns to cheap affective labor, we lose the personal value of things. We lose the source — the context — of why and how that clothing functions and why we choose to wear one thing and not another.
Masha:
But now we have an additional problem — we are over-aestheticized and over-styled about everything, so that there is no real individual style anymore and therefore no real thrill in dressing up. If it doesn’t result in difference, it’s very hard for me to understand the point, as much as I love and have always loved clothing. Style for me is fiercely personal. It is about discovery and finding your ownlook. I learned that from you. Now everyone knows what’s what and who’s who and who wore what to what — everything is worn in a very meta-way, which makes me feel very ambivalent about the power and value of style. So given this total appropriation, what’s the point? I like beautiful and interesting things, but I no longer believe in the power of aesthetics as something outside of commodity culture. What are your thoughts on this, especially in the context of artist and aesthetics?
Margarita:
The worst thing that’s happened to our concept of clothing is this all-pervasive concept of sexy, of women having to be uniformly and excessively sexy, which is what Japanese designers defied by de-sexualizing and de-gendering clothing. For them, clothing was about expressing who you are through clothing, not simply signaling cues of desirability. The clothes deformed women’s bodies and distorted them, so that even if you were thin, that wasn’t the point. You didn’t have to show that you were thin or what your body actually looked like. It was formless.
Masha:
Exactly. You didn’t have to parade the body or some ideal of the body. Avant-garde clothes, but even just the voluminous, asymmetrical, slouching shapes of mainstream ‘80s clothes, which carried over into the ‘90s, did not present straightforward representations of the body. It wasn’t some rudimentary outline of tits & ass. Now, if you have large breasts, you have to wear tops that showcase your breasts. If you have what the culture has determined as a “nice body,” you wear form-fitting clothes. And with Sex and The City, you must always wear heels now. It’s all gone very basic and into this normative direction. That cynicism and commercialization of alternative culture has definitely affected my relation to clothes. It’s disenchanted me.
Margarita:
I always dressed up for myself. Wearing those clothes was a very strong part of my psychology. Of feeling happy, feeling confident. It was not only my uniform; it was extension of my creative and intellectual sensibilities. Your dad always said that I mopped the floor in my best outfits, which means those clothes were not simply about “dressing up,” they were fused with my everyday life. Whereas today clothes are trophies and status symbols — it’s who’s wearing what with what and how much it cost. It’s how their body looks. So while Japanese designers like CDG de-emphasized schisms between everyday life and glamour, rich and poor, inner and outer, male and female, celebrity culture re-emphasizes all these norms and binaries.
Masha:
I used to do that, too — paint or clean my apartment in my best dress. As a result, I ruined a lot of clothes with paint and bleach stains! But, as you say, I just couldn’t take those things off because psychologically they were part of me and of what I was doing. For me, clothes are internal, not just external. Clothes framed things for me psychologically and put me into a certain kind of mood.
Why do you think some people lose their style? Does it simply have to do with the individualism and aesthetic freedom that sometimes comes with the freshness of youth? We were talking about Johnny Depp yesterday. How elegant he used to be, along with Winona Ryder, his girlfriend in the early ‘90s; how their style was part of being anti-style in Hollywood. Depp is so tacky now. But many formally transgressive and stylish people reject hierarchies of taste and embraced tackiness, outrageousness, and shock value. Is that what Depp is doing? I can’t tell.
Margarita:
Again, I think one of the biggest problems today for artists especially, is what and who influences us, and also the loss of milieus, traditions, and social attitudes. We are influenced by media and promotional culture, more than actual coteries and meaningful social interactions. One of the reasons Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp had interesting style back then has a lot to do with the ‘90s — the last moment for alternative culture in America. When they wore those clothes, they were open to possibilities. And they obviously had great, raw taste. They were still sort of outsiders in the Hollywood industry — half in, half out. But as soon as you become fully enmeshed in an industry, and develop a very specific public image and status within it, then of course celebrities get counseled about what they should do, how they should act, how they should look. And that’s part of the process of fame and the horrible victimization of one’s identity that happens with it. You lose what is personal in order to appeal to the collective. That’s what fame is. For me, clothing should be one of the key markers of independence, and famous actors inevitably become dependent on their images, which can only be under one’s control for so long. Over time, Ryder felt that her wealth, success, and style should be signified through wearing and being styled by, what I would call, “post-designers” like Mark Jacobs.
Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder, 1991
Masha:
What’s interesting about Depp now is that he still sees himself as bad-boy bohemian, but of course his so-called outsiderness reeks of being bought, which is maybe why it’s so tacky now? There is nouveau riche and there is nouveau style, hence the saying that you can’t buy style. This takes us back to the fake and the copy you were talking about earlier. Why do you think we used to believe in the identity of clothes (with avant-garde designers, etc.), and the identity of who was wearing them, but don’t now? Is it simply because of the commercialization and gentrification of everything?
Margarita:
Today, everyone, artists included, aspire to be part of the mainstream. There is no alternative culture anymore. No outside. In the past, being against the mainstream — being critical of it — was what motivated radical artists and thinkers. A good recent example is Alain Badiou’s public admission that he wants Brad Pitt to star in his new film about Plato rather than some (French) character actor. Even Badiou wants to be part of Hollywood. It suggests that even Badiou feels that outsiderness has no real power or value anymore. Like everyone, he seems to believe that his ideas can only be validated through conspiring with the culture industry.
Masha:
Yeah, we don’t have many serious role models left. Everyone wants total visibility and recognition. Even when someone is stylish, it doesn’t feel individual or personal. I feel like I don’t know why people wear what they wear these days.
I’m interested in style as distance, in the aesthetics of distance, which I learned from you, both directly and indirectly. For me, style as opposed to fashion or trend, is really about finding yourself. Another recent example of this culture industry complicity is Jay Z’s six-hour “Picasso Baby” at Pace Gallery, which has him dancing around with Marina Abramovic, among others — the clip went viral. In fact, someone was just it watching it on their laptop next to us in this café in Paris’ where we’re talking now. Art has become completely tied not just to promotional stunts and spectacle, but the desire for celebrity and institutional alliance. But, as you point out, it used to be highly suspect to have such commercial motives if you were an artist. Of course Warhol changed all that.
Margarita:
Another issue is the fear of being defined as bourgeois, a fear no one in the art or literary world has anymore. In the past, if someone was too well dressed or lived in some lavish apartment, they were considered bourgeois, both aesthetically and intellectually. This bohemian fear, of course, was subverted, as you say, by Warhol who said there is nothing more bourgeois than being afraid of being bourgeois.
Masha:
That’s funny. That statement is of course very dialectical, both true and untrue. If your aunt Lydia was your earliest influence, you and cinema were definitely mine. I remember being obsessed with using clothes to fashion certain identities and outsider positions for myself from a very early age. Posing as these characters — usually androgynous, loner boys from movies — like James Dean and Ralph Macchio from The Outsiders. I wore what and who I felt I was inside. And of course my whole sense of style came from inside (my family) as well — from you and dad. So style was completely linked with internal life for me — something originary. I always saw clothes as a way of being different, and like you, used them to emphasize — not mask — my difference, even when it cost me popularity and acceptance. I never saw clothes as a way in. I saw them as a way out, and you always encouraged that. I can’t remember you ever telling me not to wear something and sometimes what I wore to school was pretty weird. My fondest memory of your style influences on me was dreaming about going to the Oscars in one of your outfits to accept an award for best actress. It never occurred to me that I would have my own clothes as an adult and that time would inevitably change what I would wear! I wanted to wear your wild outfits like Cher wore hers to the Oscars in the ‘80s.I loved her then. There are a few photographs I wanted to look at with you now that document how your style evolved over the years. Can you take me through some of these pictures?
Cher at the Oscars, 1988
Margarita:
Sure.
PART II:
Masha:
Tell me about this “all red” photo? Where was it taken, what year, and what are you wearing?
Margarita Tupitsyn at the opening of the exhibition Sots Art, Russian Mock-Heroic Style, Semaphore Gallery, 1984
Margarita:
This is me at the opening of the Sots Art show, which I curated in 1984 for Semaphore Gallery in SoHo. In the background is a fragment of the painting by the Russian artist Aleksandr Kosolapov. In this photo I am still taking advantage of my aunt Lydia’s designs. She made this outfit. I’m still in my pre-Japanese designers phase. Lydia is applying Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist, geometric forms to clothing. She would also make accessories for the clothes. As you can see, I am wearing her earrings in the photograph. So the idea of “total” design is being taken from the Russian avant-garde — the idea that everything, when it comes to style and design, has to coalesce. You can also see that my hair is already shorter, and cut asymmetrically, echoing the clothes and the earrings. It is not cut off completely yet, but it is no longer the classically long hair I’d always had before that. When I was at the CUNY graduate center, studying for my PhD in Art History with Rosalind Krauss and other important art historians, my classmates would always comment on my long hair and how it made me look like a pre-Raphaelite. So to reject this, I started cutting my hair shorter and shorter.
Masha:
You were already subverting classical notions of female beauty to spite your beauty. I love this next photo, where we’re looking at each other. This is in Moscow, during Perestroika. We are at the opening of IsKUNSTvo, an art exhibition of German and Russian artists. The title, as you explained to me, is a play between the German and Russian word for art. You and dad had moved to Moscow for a year work on the Russian edition of the Italian art magazine, Flash Art, and you were also publishing your first book, Margins of Soviet Art: Socialist Realism to the Present. We had just come from Milan, where we lived for six months, and where I became interested in clothes in a way that was also feminine, not just masculine. I stopped being a tomboy in Milan. I grew out my hair and became obsessed with knee-highs and tights, which is an obsession that continues to this day, and that you and I share. In this photo, you‘re wearing a fabulous nautical-inspired Jean-Paul Gautier dress, which I now have. You’re also wearing the Italian designer Emilio Cavallini. This is an interesting photo because it shows another side of your aesthetic. All your hair is now cut off, but you are not just wearing austere Japanese designers. You also wore “sexier” designers like Gautier and Dolce & Gabbana and Romeo Gigli, a great ‘90s Italian designer, who played with ideas of sexiness. But with Gautier, and especially in your case, you deconstructed and subverted femininity and sexiness by pairing it up with the more austere and cerebral contemporary Japanese clothing you wore. You never played it straight. You always made sure to combine different aesthetics. For example, you would wear that amazing red satin Gautier bra top, with the pointed breasts, which you did before Madonna, by the way, but with some austere clownish black CDG kulats. Also, look at the knee-highs you’re wearing in this picture — the garters are on the knee instead of the thigh, which I find really smart and funny.
Masha Tupitsyn and Margarita Tupitsyn at the opening of the exhibition IsKunstvo, Moscow, 1991
Margarita Tupitsyn in the studio of Oleg Vassiliev, New York, 1998
Margarita:
Yeah, those knee-highs were amazing. But I am also wearing these big ‘60s-inspired glasses, like the ones you wear now, and that 1960s pillbox style bag, so there are all kinds of styles at play. I don’t know why I didn’t keep those gorgeous Cavallini shoes. What happened to them? But anyway, that’s what was interesting about all these different influences. It was an interesting period for Italian design, too.
Masha:
Right, the kind of dresses you see Sophia Loren wearing in neo-realist Italian films, which of course wasn’t cheesy at the time. Or Bridget Bardo. It had elegance despite being a hyper-feminine exalting of the female form. You see this in Fellini films, too, though Fellini always had a kind of early Gautier approach to beauty ideals — he always made everything beautiful grotesque or strange, like with Masina in La Strada, as you mentioned earlier. He deformed beauty. One of the problems is that famous design labels have been taken over by a new generation of designers, with entirely different backgrounds and aesthetics, so the aesthetics of Channel and Gucci, etc., totally shifted, the original context severed. These fashion houses were not yet these super corporate conglomerations of mass-produced, mass-circulated brand design.
Margarita:
And the new incarnation of designers have only ever worked in that kind of corporate structure, so they are jaded from the start, and don’t even fully oversee their own designs. They treat it as a business and corporate brand first and foremost, and a creative endeavor second. The aesthetic is fractured into a lot of unseen forces — input — but only one person takes sole credit. And because couture, or at least the circulation of it, is now mass-produced and infinitely copied, the people who design it don’t have a sense of the value of originality and quality. Moreover, because they don’t have any real creative control over it, they no longer feel obliged to design well. Trends intensify and quality degrades. It benefits the design industry as a whole. They know all their designs will be copied by chains anyway. The gap between original and the mass produced, between quantity and quality, is getting smaller and smaller. Nothing is made well anymore, and if it is, it costs a fortune and only the richest people have access to it. But it is also important to point out that different things look different on different people. It’s not just total style, it’s total effect — context. We’re constantly being told what looks good and what people should wear. What I used to like about shopping at Japanese stores is that they were empty. But more importantly, I was left alone. They didn’t try to sell you things. Nor did they pamper you with lies about how you looked in something.
Masha:
You had to form your own opinion about what you were buying and wearing. Form your own connection to style.
Margarita:
Yeah, the shop assistants wouldn’t say anything. If someone tells you that you look good in something but you don’t feel it, it doesn’t really matter what the thing itself looks like. It’s a sales pitch. I remember in the ‘90s already, when you would come to the Yoji Yamamoto store in SoHo, the shop assistants started doing that. Being bothered, or aggressively “sold” something went against my approach to style. I wanted to experience clothes like a work of art — thinking about it, considering it. I wanted to decide if I liked something myself. Contemporary Japanese designers were the same way; they were sort of copying this ascetic, gallery-distant attitude. It was bad taste in galleries at that time to jump on viewers who came to look at the work. It’s propaganda, which is what fashion has been reduced to. If you tell people that everyone will look good in the same things, it’s propaganda. It’s conformity.
Masha:
It reminds me of that famous scene in Pretty Woman, when Richard Gere gives Julia Roberts thousands of dollars to buy new clothes on Rodeo Drive, and she’s dressed from head to toe like a doll by all the shop assistants who had previously refused to sell her anything. All the aesthetic decisions are made for her, and it’s seen as this celebratory, triumphant moment in the film. She has finally passed for a rich (“real”) lady. But I preferred the way she way she looked before. At least those “sex worker” clothes were her choices. Her reality. Being dressed up — styled — is perceived as the highest symbol of flattery and wealth — an indoctrination into polite bourgeois society and traditional femininity.
Margarita:
But that’s a very important issue that we discussed yesterday. The fact that everyone gets dressed up by “tastemakers” now. The minute people have money, they stop dressing themselves. There is a loss of autonomy and agency that happens with fame. These tastemakers are only concerned with making money and bringing money to the designers they promote. It’s about connections rather than attitudes.
Masha:
Which brings us to the idea of the mainstreaming of the avant-garde and the mainstreaming of style, which while democratic and good in theory, as you point out, has also killed individual style and aesthetic agency. There is a whole industry behind teaching people what to wear now, making people over. The modernist idea in the ‘40s and ‘50s, by all-around designers like Eames, was that you could mass-produce quality. It was believed that everyone should be able to own beautiful things for not a lot of money. Now it’s the mass production of cheapness, which is, in fact, not a democratization at all. Most people have shit and only a few people have quality. It’s actually a widening of the gap between those who can have well-made things and those who can’t. What is built to last and what is built to fall apart. And getting things cheap always means there is an increasingly long (global) chain of exploitation.
Margarita:
Bauhaus envisioned this affordable model of quality before Eames. Take Mies van der Rohe’s furniture, which is now very expensive but was originally meant to be affordable. And yet, his furniture was always the property of rich people, so that ideal only functioned in theory in this case. But as I was saying yesterday, the Russian avant-garde and Bauhaus had this utopia of good taste, of quality mass-production, but this utopian vision has obviously failed. It ended up being generic and cheap, like IKEA. Nothing at IKEA is built to last in any sense. In fact, it’s disposability that has come to stand for quality and style.
Masha:
And what about this final picture?
Margarita Tupitsyn at the opening of the exhibition The Work of Art in the Age of Perestroika, Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York, 1990
Margarita:
This is me at Phyllis Kind gallery in SoHo, where I curated my exhibition, “The Work of Art in the Age of Perestroika” in 1990. The painting I’m standing next to is by the artist Vadim Zakharov and Viktor Skersis. Here you can see that my style has once again completely changed. I look like a boy. My hair is cut off, and I was only wearing Japanese designers at that point. This is the CDG coat that you wear now, by the way. It’s a man’s coat. But again, I am wearing a Constructivist-style red Russian watch and a big blue ring that Lydia made. But what’s interesting is, at that time, in 1990, it wasn’t just about looking good or cool, or having some hip style, like it is in the art world today. It was more about wearing things that reflected your attitude — a little bit severe, conceptual, intellectual, critical — grouchy! So these clothes conveyed that internal stance. It was important for me and other artists and intellectuals at that time to wear clothes that reflected how we thought and felt. These clothes were my identity. The identity of the art world in the ‘80s and ‘90s was probably the last time when this was true.
Masha:
For me, the ‘90s were really important because I was lucky enough to be a teenager in a still relatively culturally dynamic and edgy time. There was still some alternative culture, so my sense of identity, femininity and culture wasn’t being monopolized by corporate consumer culture. Being independent was still important. Today even much of the subculture comes from some highly visible place. Granted, I know a lot of my sense of personal autonomy as an adolescent came from being a New Yorker, having you and dad as parents, and going to LaGuardia, a public art high school, where difference was celebrated and I never felt any pressure to be anyone other than myself. Everyone hung out with everyone — a very rare high school experience, I know. Obviously that played a big part in my development. Nevertheless, I do see it as a profoundly different time.
About the Author:
Masha Tupitsyn is a writer, critic, and multi-media artist. She is the author of Like Someone in Love: An Addendum to Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), Love Dog (Penny-Ante Editions, 2013), a multi-media art book, LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (ZerO Books, 2011), Beauty Talk & Monsters, a collection of film-based stories (Semiotext(e) Press, 2007), and co-editor of the anthology Life As We Show It: Writing on Film (City Lights, 2009). Her fiction and criticism have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals. She has written video essays on film and culture for Ryeberg Curated Video. She is also a contributing writer to Entropy. Her blog is: http://mashatupitsyn.tumblr.com/
About Margarita Tupitsyn:
Margarita Tupitsyn is the author of many books and articles on modern and contemporary art. She has curated exhibitions for the Guggenheim museum, the Tate Modern, the New Museum, and the International Center of Photography, and has written for Art in America, Artforum, and Art Journal. Her book “The Moscow Vanguard Art, 1922-1992” is forthcoming from Yale University Press.
