A couple weeks ago I was very impressed by an exhibit I saw by chance, a retrospective of works by the artist Charles LeDray. It includes the installation “Men’s Suits.” The pictures here, as good as they are, do not represent the piece very well since its effect depends on its peculiar scale and the way its component parts are made to look old and worn, two things that don’t really show up in photographs. But together with the accompanying descriptions of the work drawn from various journalistic sources I hope some idea of it will be conveyed. It can be seen along with many other interesting works by the artist at the Whitney Museum in New York through February 13.
–Alan
LeDray spent three years making “Mens Suits.” The exactitude of his work, and the transformation of scale, create an intensely symbolic atmosphere. It's a strikingly original, frankly unmissable work of art that uses clothing to construct an existentialist meditation on identity, individuality and mass society. In the past, collections have been used to evoke the Holocaust; there are too many Hawaiian shirts for that. These aren't your typical gladrags: LeDray's fashion style is bold and eccentric; it's all about showing your personality through what you wear. It nods in the direction of Comme des Garçons with its mismatched and loud fabrics, but LeDray is an artist, not a designer. He uses pattern as abstract painters use paint, constructing a little masterpiece of colour with one outfit on an old-fashioned tailor's dummy - a clash of checks and tartans between jacket, trousers, tie, shirt and pocket handkerchief.
No detail has been left to chance. A low ceiling of miniaturised polystyrene tiles hangs over the interiors, which are lit by panels of neon lights, some of which have an orange glow, as if they are old and worn out. On the top of this ceiling LeDray has carefully arranged large amounts of grey dust, thereby contrasting the cleanliness and order of pressed clothes for sale with the chaos and filth which gathers, wherever it can, just out of reach. This is also, finally, the thrift shop as memento mori.
London Evening Standard
The installation consists of three separate but thematically related tableaux, each a sort of sculptural still-life made of arrangements of hundreds of men’s garments in tiny sizes. Each of the miniature articles of clothing was designed by the artist, individually tailored in different sizes, and sewn with his own hands, right down to details so minute they are almost invisible to the naked eye.
The first “scene” is set in the basement of a charity shop such as Oxfam or Shelter, the place where newly donated clothes come in to be sorted out, ironed and folded for presentation in the showroom upstairs. In the other two scenes, articles of clothing have been tidied up, hung on racks and laid out on tables for display, sale or distribution to the needy.
The sorting room is an utter mess. Canvas laundry baskets on wheels overflow with grubby used clothes, stinking of stale sweat. Piled up on the floor, nylon and cotton laundry bags tied with drawstrings bulge with dirty clothes we can’t see. Someone has brought a jumble of old sweatpants, T-shirts, polo shirts and trousers loosely tied up in a worn tablecloth.
From two coat racks made of metal piping, rows of sports jackets – in denim, wool, and cotton – hang on plastic coat hangers alongside trench coats, fluorescent safety vests, woollen scarves and chequered trousers. A dozen or so tiny leather gloves are fixed to a hanger with clothes pins.
Each item of clothing tells a story. Many of the suits and jackets, for example, have loud patterns and strong colours that suggest their owners would not have been wealthy or sophisticated men. You can also see how cheaply made many of the garments are, probably in Third World sweatshops before being sold to poor but not indigent people. Now they are being recycled for men trapped on an even lower rung of American society.
The settings, too, were made by LeDray, including the dirty, scuffed and patched linoleum floor and the low ceiling with its harsh fluorescent lights.
Because we look down on each scene we can see something those who might work in the room can’t – that above the ceiling, the surface is covered in a thick coating of dust – which I’m told the artist brought specially from America on the assumption that British dust is different to the kind you find in the Bowery.
The Telegraph (UK)
Mr. LeDray’s most recent effort, a haunting, three-part extravaganza called “Mens Suits” (2006-09), occupies a large, darkened gallery all by itself. It represents different sections of a grungy used-clothing store. One is a messy, behind-the-scenes area where clothes are sorted. A wheeled canvas bin is loaded with old garments and stuffed laundry bags, and more clothes are piled on wooden palettes and draped on a stepladder.
The second part juxtaposes a suit on a headless tailor’s dummy and a table offering a radial array of outmoded neckties; the third part has shirts and jackets hanging from circular metal racks and a table bearing piles of folded T-shirts.
Each section is under a gridded, roughly three-foot-high ceiling with white pasteboard panels and frosted panes through which cold fluorescent light shines. You have to bend down to see everything under the low-hanging ceilings, and because of the near-perfect miniaturization, you get the impression of looking in on a Lilliputian parallel universe.
Much of what makes “Mens Suits” so riveting is in the attention to detail and labor-intensive determination to get everything just right. But the atmosphere of neglect and abandonment it conjures is equally compelling. The tenderness that Mr. LeDray exercises in the making of his work becomes an expression of redemptive compassion for things uncared for.
The New York Times
In his most ambitious, room-sized installation, LeDray simulates three sections of a thrift store, overflowing with ties, shirts and suits. He cunningly mimics the shabby linoleum, mismatched hangars, and fluorescent lights in various shades of sickly grey, topping everything with layers of dust. The suits are “vintage”, which is to say battered, cheap and loud. Each cast-off item embodies some small failure, perhaps a loss or a regret. It’s all so real – you can almost smell the sourness – except for the dollhouse scale. We viewers, made suddenly, awkwardly godlike, tower over grim displays of dreary stuff and have to bend to see beneath the lights. It feels like revisiting a childhood place that seems to have shrunk in the intervening years. Time rushes through LeDray’s mournful dioramas, and in their gloom we can see the present receding tragically into the distance. Already it has grown quite small.
The Financial Times
Charles LeDray: workworkworkworkwork at the Whitney Museum
Charles LeDray at Sperone Westwater
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p.s. Hey. (1) The purveyor of fictional finery and d.l. Alan is your host today, bringing his particular grace and intuitive grasp of postdom to bear on an exhibition by the artist Charles Ledray that you guys in and around NYC can actually see for yourselves if you make it uptown in the next several days. Please explore and then respond accordingly to Alan, and thank you, and, of course, thank you hugely, Alan, for your generous intervention. (2) Yesterday, d.l. Wolf suggested the idea that we collectively put together a Joy Division-related Day for the blog, and I'm game. So, here's the deal: Send me something or other to do with Joy Division. It can be by them, by you, inspired by them in some direct or poetic or oblique way, etc., etc. It can be pro- or against them or neutral. It can consist text and/or image(s) and/or video or music file(s) as long as I can imbed them or create links to them. It can be short or longish. Please send me whatever you want to send to dcooperweb @gmail.com. Let's say the deadline is your bedtime in your time zone on next Monday, February 14th. I'll post this info/request in a box at the top of the blog's right hand column tomorrow. Please participate. Thanks! ** Bollo, Top of the top of the morning's comments to you, man. Yeah, I was confused by the fried food thing at first. I have eaten a deep fried Mars bar, or maybe it was a Milky Way bar, at the LA County Fair where deep fried every kind of food is a specialty. Once was enough. Deep fried pizza? Uh, like ... how? You make a pizza normal style and then deep fry it? Intense in theory. Here's hoping the French avoid the museum, but you know how cultural French people are, so you might want to pop a Valium come Friday. ** David Ehrenstein, You saw that blind boy porn? I know, porn was so interesting when it was made specifically and only for people sitting in a theater. 'Ghost of a Chance', sure. I used to want to write a book about that generation of porn filmmakers, many of whom came out of the UCLA film program, and who wanted and tried to make artful gay porn and who were heavily influenced by Sirk, Fellini, Anger, Warhol, and many others. But my chops as a writer aren't those kinds of chops. I've always hoped someone would write that story though, and hopefully someone will while at least a handful of those directors are still alive. 'Sondheim Day' news: awesome, thank you! That New Yorker piece was both long and very interesting, yeah. Everyone, courtesy of D.E., this is a very interesting and long piece in the current New Yorker about the director Paul Haggis' renouncement of Scientology and the resulting fall out. It gets a little slow in the middle, but it's worth it. ** Changeling, Hey, man! I'll have an email for you today. The gay porn films of the early 70s could be really plotty and artsy/ experimental and, well, not all that intensely erotic in most cases, but they were very curious, and their hearts were in the right place. Really nice to see you! ** Jax, I have an email in, and I'll pass on the response. Striking while the iron is heating, dude, totally. ** L@rstonovich, Hey. The Mexican place, El Nopal, is in the 10th arr. just off the Canal St. Martin. Wait ... Here's a link you can pass on to your friend. I'm totally like your friend whenever I'm in the States, and I think this El Nopal place will help, or it only can. ** Alan, Thank you mightily for today, sir. ** ASH, Hey, good to see you. Oh, no sweat on the delay. Time is random here. Sorry you had to go through sickness, but I guess you're on top of it now? It's crazy to me that those Paradise Lost guys are still in prison after all that. Thanks for answering my question. Heavy going, but yeah, at least it has that brighter half. Your blog refreshing would be very cool of course, but first things first, obviously. I'm doing pretty good, busy, okay. I kind of hate summers i.e. heat, but I won't mind its arrival. Spring is the first priority. Take care until next time, man. ** Paul Curran, Thanks, Paul. How's it with you? ** Statictick, Cool, cool, on the inspired front and very much on the pushing of the 'ACT' Go button. Hope LA is still hugging you. ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. Yeah, the robot mannequin is pretty cool. And I'm excited about working with 13 of them, each with different robotic abilities and skills, when we start getting to the big maze piece in a couple of months. Thanks! ** Kiddiepunk, Neighbor! Hey, I tried to call you and the big O four times yesterday but you guys were vamoose. Let's talk and meet today, yeah? Oh, and if you don't know already, guess what is supposedly being fixed tomorrow at long last? No, not the clothes driers. You've redug your toe in the blogging universe? Awesome. Shall I dare? I did. Beautiful! I haven't seen those before. Beautiful! Everyone, the master of most art-related things Kiddiepunk has rejoined the blog makers of this world after a long hiatus, and his initial volley is a bunch of amazing new photos by him, and you should see them, and you can do so very easily, just by putting a slight bit of pressure on this word. Consider this your hall pass. Go! ** Wolf, Hey. Your presumption about me is incorrect, my dear. Yeah, it's good Mexican. These use cactus as a main ingredient in their food, and, whew, it works. Oh, so we're off and running on the Joy Division Day. Should be interesting. Thanks for the inspired and so helpful idea, pal. Yeah, bring some that chocolate to Paris, I beseech you. I'll save a little of my little stash of Wasabi KitKat bars for you. ** The Dreadful Flying Glove, Seems like you have everything you need to sculpt your internal drive into a personalized work schedule. Based on your you-ness as displayed in your commenting portion, I mean. Let the spaciness find its rightful place the mechanism. I'm spacey as hell sometimes, but that space can add a kind of interesting tone and shape to one's drive to work if properly nurtured. ** Dandysweets, Hi, I. Oh, yeah, Vegas is only about four hours drive from Redlands. That's a plus. And the land there is kind of strangely red. Well your horror at that newspaper article is very understandable. That's completely grotesque, if you ask me. Ugh. *skakes head* How are you? ** Thomas Moronic, Thomas! Did you see that I reposted your Moe Day here last week? It went good. Yes, yes, my lips are sealed, but, yes, yes, what absolutely wonderful news, my friend! I was giddy to get it. Let us know when the news is public fodder. Great about your cemented Paris plans! I'll be here for the first part and then I go to Oslo on the 24th, but that should give us plenty of hanging time. Owen Pallett ... that might be nice, yeah. I'll check for the listing. Lots of love to you, T. ** Steevee, It might be that I know of Madsen through the art world presence. That would make sense. ** Bernard Welt, Hi, B. No, I haven't run into AA. He was going to be staying at the Recollets originally, but I think the museum put him up somewhere. I'm trying to find out if the GI show opening is an 'open to public' affair so I can go, actually. If so, I'll see him there for sure. ** Benjamin S., Hi, Benjamin! Really nice to see you! Yeah, that's a good connection, actually, to the boy in 'Container', as that story is called in English. Or, at least it partly explains why I found those photos so compelling and intense. How are you? What are you doing? ** Little foal, Wow, hey, Darren! It's so very good to see you! I've been wondering how you were and have been missing you. I'll go find your email. Hold on. Yeah, it's there, and I'll read it later, thank you! Whatever happened to you sounds really important, and, man, so beautifully corralled by your words. Solar Luxuriance is great, yeah. Do you know about Nephew? It's an impending imprint of the also great Mud Luscious Press. I'm kind of excited about it. I love ltd. ed. special things and the mystery, and, if I have decoded the identity of the first Nephew booklet's author correctly, then I'm even more excited. Okay, I'm off now, but it is such a fine thing to see you here, my friend. ** Rigby, Hi, R. Kier, if you're out there, here's Rigby: 'is it ok to print one [of your drawings re: the post yesterday] out and post it on my wall? i've just landed some lisa 'suckdog' carver paintings and she wants pics of them hanging to put in a book.. i thought i'td be cool if one of yours is in shot.. what do you thunk?' Cool. Tell me how to get those records you designed when the time is fit. Oh my God, that monkey waiter thing ... I don't even know what to say. Everyone, via Rigby, try the monkey waiter. Thank you for the 'Black Swan' good luck wish. I'm going to need it, man. ** Chris Cochrane, Hey, Chris. Hm, well, I guess I'll resend the email. I just think my concerns are legitimate, and if they're not considered in the making of the decision, I'm going to be pissed. Anyway, sorry, I know you're as out of the loop on this as I am. I can't wait to hear the music too, man. Big time! Gig with Eszter went well, I'm imagining? ** James, Hi, James! Well, that is the very same House of Pies I was talking about. That's my neighborhood. I got lucky and moved there in 1990 before it became such a desirable area and when rents were still average because I could never afford to live there now. Skylight is my favorite bookstore in the world too. Much love to you as well. ** Esther Planas, Oh, my Paul is Dead conspiracies were all related to the big hoo-hah back in the 80s or whenever when people were trying to decipher the Beatles songs and album covers for clues based on some university student's thesis that Paul had died and been replaced with a lookalike. It was big fun. ** Andrew, I don't know the story behind those pictures. I found them in a newsgroup. They weren't porn pictures, or there wasn't any sex going on in them, and the boys weren't even naked in most of them. I just cropped the pix to make them seem like they might be porn-derived. ** Nb, Oh, so it turns out to have been a really good film after all, eh? Good to know. I'll rent it. What's up with you, the moving, the writing, the Bieberness, the anything? ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hey. Thanks, J. Well, yeah, when writing 'Period', I had to pay even more attention to my idea about how readers' attention span works. I did a lot of different things to try to keep readers on board. I was working a lot with an attempted transliteration of the principles behind the magic trick and how it holds the attention span sans narrative. I employed certain basically appealing pop culture tropes like mystery of the disappearance, the spooky house, the magic mirror, Satanism, the evil rock band, the radio talk show, the horror movie 'spooky woods' premise, and so on to spark the reader's interest in a graduated way. And the language was pretty clean and rhythmic and using the device of cleverness very strategically. A bunch of things. 'Period' was an intensely difficult and taxing book to write. I would say it was the hardest to make work, but 'The Marbled Swarm', which is also very, very complicated in a different way, was maybe just as difficult and taxing. Yeah, 'Period' involved a tremendous amount of recalibration and rewriting, and a ton of stuff was discarded along the way. It's hard to go back and deconstruct the process because my head was so involved in the book and decisions within decisions within decisions were being made all the time, and I haven't stored all of that in my memory in an organized way. ** Misanthrope, I feel so out of it sometimes what with all these common reference point American TV shows that most people here have as a second nature. Oh, well. Oh, you think that's what I should do in The Paris Review interview, do you? I was thinking I'd save that for the transcript of my trial. But I'm such a bad careerist. ** Creative Massacre, That's cool, pal. I'm not full of things to say for myself today either, and shared 'hi's' are plenty sometimes. ** Emptythesun, Hey, Joseph. Wow, that's a pretty good crowd for Book Soup. Not bad at all. Awesome. Thank you tremendously for that. And, as for the book sales figures, whoa, yeah, that's just great news all around! As I move on today, I bow and bow to you. ** Inthemostpeculiarway, Hey, man. Porn storylines used to be really complicated. Like there was this porn called 'Brothers' that was directed by my friend Jason Sato wherein this guy sees this young soldier somewhere and gets all hot and bothered, and then it turns out the boy is his younger brother who's on leave from the Vietnam War, which is I guess is supposed to explain why the guy didn't recognize him (?), and, during the movie, the guy is wracked with depression and guilt about desiring his little brother, who ends up staying with him, and the guy gets this female friend of his, played by the later to be famous movie director Penelope Spheeris, to seduce his little brother for some complicated, self-hating reason, and afterwards she tells him she thinks the boy is gay, and, sure enough, the brothers have super emotional sex, and then the younger brother goes back to Vietnam, and he gets killed in combat, and the movie ends with the older brother kneeling and crying on his little brother's grave. You don't see porn movies like that anymore. Oh, that your book you're reading sounds a lot better than the title sounded. I will try watching 'BS' as a horror movie. Maybe that'll work. It really might. A horror movie has to be really bad for me not to like it at least a little. 'Epic Mickey' is a video game for the Nintendo Wii system. It's like an adventure game with Mickey Mouse as the star, and his weapon is a paintbrush. Your doctor visit was colorfully depicted. Oh, so, is the idea that your ear problems of late were probably caused by your wisdom teeth? Despite the day ahead of a blood-filled mouth, it would be great to have that problem solved, if I'm right? You're always good with describing nature and animals. I hardly ever mention nature in my reports. I don't know what that means. Thanks for the movie news. I only knew about the 'Pet Sematary' one. My day: The new TV arrived, like I said, and we set it up, and it was exciting because we now have, like, 30 TV channels to choose from rather than five. I hadn't even turned my Wii on for two years, so we had to update a whole bunch of stuff in it, and that took hours and hours thanks to our terrible internet connection. I was going to start playing 'Epic Mickey', but I decided to wait until today. I read through 'TMS' like I'll be doing every couple of weeks to catch mistakes and make further refinements, and I got the 'no one is going to get or like this novel' reaction that I sometimes do, so I got kind of depressed for a while. I bought food and cigarettes and stuff. I paid my rent, and the Recollets boss said that the internet is finally going to start getting upgraded tomorrow, although I remain wary. I worked and did some emailing and so on. In the evening, I watched the French Top Chef. It was pretty good. The contestants had to make food for a kids' birthday party, so it had to be all chocolatey and/or sweet and look really exciting to little kids, and the kids were the judges. Then they had to make food for the French national Rugby team, so they needed to make food that wasn't too artsy fartsy, since the rugby players are all macho and not that sophisticated, and the players were the judges, and the contestant who lost made chocolate ravioli, which the players thought was weird and elitist or something. After TS, I went to bed, kerplunk. How is Tuesday going? ** Dusty rose, Hi, Dusty. I found those images in a newsgroup. I don't know where they came from. A couple of them had this text in the corner, if you saw that, so I guess they came from there, but 'there' didn't exist anymore when I googled it. It's hard to imagine I'll ever be asked to do a reading in Texas unless it's because my parents were Texans. Oh, yeah, I like Deerhunter a lot. There's a song on that album ('Helicopter') that's based on something I wrote, actually. Good day, man. ** Jeff, I've never done DMT. By the time I could have, I was already into my post-drugs, protecting my brain cells phase. I find the gnome stuff extremely hard to believe, one, because gnomes living in another dimension or whatever just seems silly, and, two, if it's supposed to be a shared hallucination, I don't buy that a drug could target your brain/ imagination that specifically. But I don't know. Terrence McKenna was a charming buy, and smart and cool, but I guess I take what he said with a big grain of salt. ** Zack, Hi, Zack! Oh, sure, anytime. No, I was chuffed and happy to see that Epic Mickey thing. Thank you. I will be inaugurating that game today. I'm excited. How are you? What's going on? ** Postitbreakup, I don't think you'd find the Mexican food here very foreign. The Mexican guy who runs the place and is its cook is from New York. Good luck with the super long week, man. ** Armando, Hi, A. I'm good. No, I can't say that I have ever heard anyone say they've seen Jim Morrison after this death, Not even here in Paris where such sightings would make more sense since he died and is buried here. Where did you hear these stories? Are they online or something? I've never heard any of them. ** Math, Oh, you're most welcome, Mathster. ** End. Or is the beginning? Be with Charles Ledray and Alan as much as you can or wish to be until I see you again tomorrow. Oh, and please start thinking about Joy Division-related stuff to send me for the JDD, okay? Thank you!
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