Creativity with alterations, emancipations and refrigerations - upcoming artists

Interview, March, 1994 by Steven Garbarino

BEVERLY SEMMES

Beverly Semmes makes art out of clothing, which she stretches beyond the human form and hangs on gallery walls. Because she walks a line between art and fashion - mixing media to dramatic effect much as Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger do with art and words and Pablo Picasso did with painting and journalism - Semmes shows the kind of bravery that trapeze artists of all kinds are made of. We asked Marcia Tucker, director of The New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York, and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi to offer their thoughts on the artist's material world and the crossover of art and fashion, respectively.

"It's Beverly Semmes' sense of the comic and the forbidden that has literally blown everything in her pieces out of proportion. Her work is as big as women's appetite for parody."

"Without art there is no fashion. Art inspires fashion, and fashion sometimes motivates art - but it is not art; it is an applied art form. Besides the fact that it hangs on a wall and not on flesh and bones, Beverly Semmes' work truly is art and not fashion, because it speaks about so many things that have nothing to do with clothes. For instance, her piece House Dress makes you think of a kitchen and some traditional matriarch presiding over it. I admire Semmes for having the nerve to take on the whole idea of art and fashion crossing over because it's so incredibly unpopular, and nobody has patience for it. It's just like being bisexual: nobody wants to believe it; nobody has patience for it - they think you have to be gay."

WHITING TENNIS

STEVEN GARBARINO: As part of your ongoing exploration of American history, you made a series of oil-and-woodblock art based on prominent figures from the Civil War, including Abraham Lincoln. You even dressed up as the Great Emancipator for a photo shoot, donning a beard and topping off your six-foot-eight frame with a top hat. So tell me, what or whom would you free if you had the opportunity?

WHITING TENNIS: I'd like to free all the turtles from pet stores. I'd like to free all the birds from their cages and the fish from their tanks and all the animals that are meant to roam. In one way or another, we're all enslaved. We are slaves to our ideas, slaves to our careers, slaves to success, slaves to the almighty dollar, slaves to the American Dream, slaves to the pursuit of happiness - and I'm no exception. I'm enslaved in my way of thinking. I'd like to free all slaves, of all kinds.

KARL XTRAVAGANZA

"Karl Xtravaganza is an angel with a sense of humor, and his refrigerator-door works are very cool. He knows the landscape of the city, which has its share of discarded things, like refrigerators. I like the economy of his work; I like the necessity of his work. He has the innocence and the enthusiasm of a puppy dog. We need more angelic presences like Karl in the world."