LOGBOOK, ENTRY 1
SPRING 2015
SPRING 2015
i am an eye. a mechanical eye
“I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see. I free myself from today and forever from human immobility, I am in constant movement, I approach and draw away from objects, I crawl under them, I move alongside the mouth of a running horse, I cut into a crowd at full speed, I run in front of running soldiers, I turn my back, I rise with an airplane, I fall and soar together with falling and rising bodies. This is I, apparatus, maneuvering in the chaos of movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.... My road is toward the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you.” —Dziga Vertov, 1923
Avant-gardists of the interwar period were not documenting their world; they were building a new one. A cultural zeitgeist defined by radical invention and violent upheaval. The mechanical lens is unclouded by subjectivity. Without sentiment, the body is no longer a sacred whole. It is free. It can be disassembled and reconstructed. It becomes order, rhythm, acceleration. A man more perfect than Adam, remade through montage.
Factories, barracks, and infirmaries speak in utilitarian tongues. Uniforms imply function and conceal labor. The body becomes machine. It is diagram. It is speculation. Discoloration spreads unseen. Stains appear only when the uniform is peeled away. Stripped of support, fragility becomes visible. Adam is undone. What remains is residue.
Twelve looks proposed. Six patterned, cut, and sewn. All structured to interfere.
Take menswear apart at the level of logic. Remove, extend, and reintroduce collars. Stitch seams where none are needed. Ensure there are no buttons where some should be. Unzip a hood down the spine in a distended semblance of unfurled wings. Extend the crotch of full-leg underwear so it must be visibly worn. Pattern culottes into draped forms that no longer resemble trousers. Layer gauze into lengths that strain the category of “shirt” into “dress.” Then tear. Then tear again. And again.
Unfinished cotton welcomes saturation. Discarded materials—tea bags, coffee rinds, onion skin—crudely hasten signs of age and oxidation. The red ink came from a manual press. It exists only to record the frantic movement of human hands. Metal corrodes quickly in plastic tubs if fed the right chemicals.
Nothing in this collection offers clarity. It is a sequence. A distortion. A system in collapse.
The machine does not mourn Adam.
It composes his remains.