Arcadia Missa launch second edition of HTSF. Details here

Beneath the bright lights of the Las Vegas strip in a series of deadly flood tunnels, a community of mole people reside, turning the once dormant catacombs into not only their homes, but also a series of art galleries. A city consumed by extreme levels of wealth, the American Dream way of living has bread a homeless population of nearly 14,000 but, with only space for around 1000, many have turned to the treacherous flood tunnels underneath the affluent hotels and casinos. Three years ago a Nevada reporter, Matthew O’Brien, went in search of what lies beneath for his book, ‘Beneath The Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas’, and mentioned the discovery of an art space. O’Brien documented the tunnels and the makeshift art gallery he encountered full of bizarre sculptures and graffitied walls, noting that ‘art is most beautiful where you least expect it’.

The Las Vegas flood tunnels span around 200 miles but with no light source and the ever present threat of being drowned and washed away, very few have encountered this most ‘underground’ of art galleries. It is currently illegal to paint the tunnels yet no arm of the law has dared to reach down and enforce it, especially as graffiti is rife on the surface of the city, so it’s inhabitants have been free to create and decorate as much as they can, with no restrictions, guidelines, or monetary purpose.

It is believed that artists have been working in the tunnels for the past two decades, decorating the walls from floor to ceiling. Some works are simple tags, whereas others are more art historical pieces, referencing Cubism and Post-Modernism. With no curation and no reviews, artists come to enjoy the unlimited canvas and time they have to master their craft. Many graffiti artists go down to the tunnels after having been arrested for graffiting elsewhere, and though it is still illegal, and a highly dangerous location, they nonetheless enjoy the freedom. One graffiti artist, known as Iceberg Slick, stated to the Las Vegas Sun that the tunnels provide a place where kids can create, instead of destroying public property. The tunnels let them be artists, where they can find a form of validation without having to run from the police. Legal murals and street art galleries are becoming more common in Las Vegas, yet with so much stigma and vandalism attached to graffiti it is still for the majority treated as a crime.

The Las Vegas Strip boasts some of the most expensive and decadent hotels in the world, where on the rooftops and in penthouses money can buy you anything. Staying at Caesar’s Palace, for example, could set you back £5000 for one night, a price that thousands are willing to pay for the luxury and the celebrity watching that entail. Yet, directly beneath Caesar’s Palace, it is estimated, lies one of the larger art spaces of the labyrinth, where you’re more likely to find hypodermic needles and, as local legend has it, a weapon-wielding man referred to as ‘The Troll’, than slot-machine chips and complimentary towels. It is an interesting to see which vices the local authority chooses to focus on; the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department spend 30 million dollars a year, their biggest domestic expenditure, on fighting graffiti crime and were the first police department in the U.S. to employ graffiti detectives. So much seems to be in place for street crime prevention, yet there appears to be no crack down on illegal activities in the penthouses. Many have questioned what this Sin City is built on but the truth is what lies beneath. The city has long been famed for the extremes of wealth it encompasses yet perhaps the resulting art is only possible as a reaction to this juxtaposition and conflict of cultures. Only the light of a flashlight will ever see the graffiti that adorns the walls of the tunnels; it remains the hidden gem of Las Vegas and open only to those who aren’t afraid of the dark.

The Best Painting in London Right Now

The last painting I wrote about here was Miro’s The Hope of a Condemned Man, a stark triptych composed of snaking lines, wild drips and glowing patches of colour. Looking at Cy Twombly’s The Four Seasons: Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, I can see a possible theme emerging, at least within my own taste. These four goliaths are currently holed up in the final room of the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s Arcadian Painters exhibition, which pairs the Canadian with seventeenth century master Nicolas Poussin.

The show follows the various similarities between the two artists, both thematically and stylistically, and focuses too on Twombly’s adulation of Poussin. The classicist’s clear, graphic style is thrown into sharp relief when stationed next to Twombly’s gestural paintings. Where Poussin was obsessed with disegno, or the triumph of logic and design over colour and excess, Twombly applies colour architecturally, building thick, porous layers, or scratching spindly spider-web designs into his delicate pinks and yellows.

The show pitches the two men against each other, subject by subject, room by room, but for me, it’s Twombly who emerges victorious. Though they both made a ‘painting in four parts’ of the four different seasons, it’s Twombly’s that is on show here, Poussin’s are tragically absent, represented instead by a small reproduction, completely dwarfed by Twombly’s four enormous canvasses. Each one is scrawled with clues to the season it represents, obscured writing in different languages, hiding amongst ferns, lifting clouds and birds. Look and see a raw sun pierce the canvas, a pillar of dappled light shimmering on the surface of a wide lake, snow bending the branches of trees. Much of the other work in the exhibition references classical mythology; epic poems, Greek and Roman Gods, ancient legend. The Four Seasons however, seem to me to be just about getting up in the morning, and going outside.

It finishes soon, on Septber 25th, go and see it.

XXJFG have just started a new show on Network Awesome called 120 Megabytes, it’s a selection of music and some amazing video work, focusing on a weird and hallucinogenic mixture of the two. Like TOTP for a still tripping post-party sunday morning.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Hussein Chalayan, where fashion shows are placebos for avant-garde performance art, and clothing is only a canvas for experimentation with light, smoke, and, that most recognizable aspect of Chalayan’s clothing, pyrotechnics. Across the channel, Paris’s Musee Les Arts Decoratifs is currently host to a retrospective of the fashion designers’ most memorable works and collections, including the furniture outfits from ‘Afterwords’, a video of ‘One Hundred And Eleven’, the show that launched a thousand Lady Gaga outfits, and several versions of the iconic ‘Aeroplane Dress’.
The exhibition is flawlessly curated to promote Chalayan as a pioneer in the fields of fashion, design, sculpture, video, and architecture alike. Since his Central St. Martin’s graduate collection, in 1993, Chalayan has been famed for his unique take on the limits of fashion design and the structure of couture. Tackled thematically, his body of work is depicted through multimedia to best highlight his grapple with anthropology, politics, religion, and technology, on which his work is founded.

One of his most famed pieces, albeit one of the most controversial, is ‘Between’, 1998, a show that concluded with six models wearing chadors of varying lengths, an expression of Chalayan’s sentiment that through “the religious code you are depersonified”. This S/S show was run in the fourth year of his fashion house, just five years after he graduated, and received widespread acclaim. The Turkish designer’s work was described as ‘beautiful’, ‘moving’, and he was praised for putting social issues on the catwalk. Chalayan has long been recognized for bringing avant-garde art into the fashion world, but seeing his creations, his videos, his inspirations, within the wing of The Louvre, it is clear that he brought fashion into contemporary art.

The moving dresses from the ‘Afterwords’ show exemplify the designers’ talent as an architect. The fact that the pieces are worn, instead of hung on canvas or displayed on pedestals, does not detract from their qualification as ‘art’, but because of the strong ‘performance’ nature of his shows, his works of art are given life. Would the lights dress from the A/W 2007 show ‘Airborne’ have been so memorable without the swirling steam rising behind it from the catwalk? Would we have been so impressed by a table turning into a skirt had it not been innocently standing on the catwalk for the preceding show? Hussein Chalayan fuses the ideas of art and fashion for no other reason than that each is made more powerful, more exciting, because of the amalgamation. ‘Recits de Mode’ aligns fashion as the intrinsic art to the fabric of contemporary society, promoting Chalayan to the forefront of this pioneering juxtaposition of cultures, materials, and expectations, firmly cementing fashion’s place in the arts. This unique insight into one of the worlds’ most exciting couturiers is one not to be missed.

Hussein Chalayan’s exhibition Recits De Mode is at Musee Les Arts Decoratifs until the 15th of November.