Living Style:
Olaf Nicolai's conceptional works on
fashion
Fashion, brands, and
designer labels provide the raw material for Olaf Nicolai's objects and
conceptual works, which investigate the changing ways in which
individuality and society become culturally interlocked. Harald Fricke
spoke to the Berlin-based artist about bootleg Prada copies, the aura of
running shoes, and the "subtle differences" between art and fashion. For
Nicolai, a paradoxical question lies at the heart of an ever-present
socio-design: "Is it possible to manufacture a positive form of
alienation?"
Olaf Nicolai: Still life - A Sampler, Detail, 2000
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART
Leipzig/Berlin
©Olaf Nicolai
The couple lives in the
Villa Savoye, built by
Le Corbusier in 1930 in the Parisian suburb of
Poissy. She's wearing a silk scarf by
Mila Schoen and a long, sleeveless dress by
Martin Margiela with staggered arm holes; he's sporting a woolen shirt by
Bless, grey shorts by Six Eight
Seven Six, and
Adidas jogging shoes. The bed was designed by
Michael Marriot; the silk covers by
Nicole Fahri. In the background, music by
Benjamin Britten is playing, and scenes from
Gerard Damiano's porno classic
Deep Throat can be seen on the TV. No, this isn't something out of
Bret Easton Ellis' bad-boy book
Glamorama - it's part of
Olaf Nicolai's text piece Stilleben [translator's note: a play on
words combining Still Life and Living Style] from 2000, in which the
artist combined various examples of "rooms," "people," and "objects" and
printed them on double-page spreads calibrated to
Pantone's gorgeous color spectrum. In Ellis' novel, descriptions of this
kind are usually followed by scenes of violent horror; Nicolai, on the
other hand, leaves it all up to the viewer's imagination. But it's clear
that they're both of the same mind: "The better you look, the more you
see," as Ellis put it.
Olaf Nicolai: Nach der Natur I, 1997,
Deutsche Bank Collection
©VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2000,
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Olaf Nicolai: 1994,
Präparat/Instrument, 1993
Deutsche Bank Collection.
VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2004 ,
Now take a good,
hard look, throw away all your preconceptions, and analyze precisely what
you see. For Nicolai, whose sophisticated
images of plants attracted the attention of the art world in the 1990s,
the subtle differences existing in the world of design, fashion, and
consumerism on the whole have become the material for artistic
investigation.
Catherine David showed his lushly verdant
lava rocks at
documenta X in 1997; in 1999, he was commissioned by the
Federal Garden Show in Magdeburg, where he developed Smell, a
perfume designed especially for trees and advertised in lifestyle
magazines at the time. Ever since his Stilleben project, the
artist, who was born in 1962 in
Karl Marx Stadt in East Germany, has increasingly been working with
elements from the world of fashion; for Nicolai, its patterns, labels, and
designer brands constitute an expression of today's "socio-design." Note,
however, that we're talking about expensive name brands, chic labels, and
exquisite tailoring here: Nicolai's investigations, objects, and
environments are dedicated to the lifestyles of people in the art world.
Olaf Nicolai: Big Sneaker (The Nineties), 2001,
C
ourtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin
©Olaf Nicolai
One of his works is the
inflatable sculpture Big Sneaker (The Nineties), which was on show
in two one-man exhibitions in the
Gallery for Contemporary Art in Leipzig and the
Migros Museum in Zurich in 2001. Conceived as a kind of jungle gym for
kids, the space looked like it had been transformed into an event
playground with the sporting goods firm
Nike ubiquitous in the form of an oversized jogging shoe. While
younger visitors were free to knock themselves out on the thirty
foot-long, ten foot-high sculpture, Nicolai printed an excerpt from an
essay by Zadie Smith on
the room's walls - a fictional dialogue in which the British author
describes desires and longings revolving around a paradoxical hope of
becoming satisfied at last through consumerism.
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