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Reclaiming the Streets
John Haberin New York City
Knobkerry Designs and Virgil Abloh
Before it had an arts scene, the East Village set its sights on something else again—fashion and local talent. Now SculptureCenter returns to Knobkerry, the former clothing store. It is a long way to the Brooklyn Museum, Virgil Abloh, and fashion in the present. Abloh loved the street but ended up selling out, all too cheaply at that.
How do you commemorate something that no one remembers? Commission artists, of course. How, then, do you channel their creativity rather than constrain them to a lifeless memorial? Do not so much as whisper what they achieved. SculptureCenter does not go that far, but it does leave Knobkerry, in its words, "relatively unstructured." It may not do all that much to celebrate its creators, but it should have you thinking about what goes into a space for art. 
Coming into fashion
To bring back East Village art, SculptureCenter could easily have turned its galleries into an expanded gift shop. And why not, when major museums seem to care about commerce and little else? Instead, the Long Island City arts space has the integrity to let artists loose in its basement tunnels, even if it means all but burying its subject. It has more to say that way about the intersection of design, fashion, and art.
I cannot swear that no one has heard of Knobkerry, although it is new to me. Sara Penn, who died in 2020, opened the store in the 1960s as an outlet for clothing, artifacts, and materials, much of them her own. Over more than twenty years and in three downtown locations, it became a hangout for artists and intellectuals as well, especially African Americans. It anticipated today's interests in design as art, textiles as painting, Pueblo pottery, and diversity. She saw it as "Third World design and art," but it had a rep as hippie fashion. In practice, its patchwork fashion came closer to thrift-store purchases on the one hand and yuppie austerity on the other.
Penn herself felt a little chagrined as others branded something like it, but no matter. Svetlana Kitto sees it as a neglected model. Her oral history fills slim books piled just past the center's front desk, on the way on the way down. I took instead the back stairs, past If Revolution Is a Sickness, a video by Diane Severin Nguyen. It pictures someone very much like herself as a girl from Vietnam, only in Poland, where she aspires to a starring role in K-pop (K as in Korean). It, too, could resonate with the triumphs and anxieties of global diversity, but its concept is barely coherent—and its content a sentimental journey to an inane music video.
SculptureCenter can be oddly short of sculpture, as with video by Rindon Johnson last time out, much less the bland statuary of public memorials. Downstairs, though, Niloufar Emamifar and SoiL Thornton get physical. I found myself in an empty passageway, apart from a brown inflatable chamber at the far end. There is no entering it and no getting around it—apart from another tunnel, leading to much the same soft but implacable wall. Thornton's title calls it a chair, but it would serve as seating only for an alien race huge enough to straddle it and tiny enough not to take up space. And then come weightier obstacles and discomforting clothes for the likes of you and me.
One large shopping bag has stones from the center's bare pebbled garden, a second no end of plastic wrap, like a mound of resinous glop. Full-length garments set against the crumbling brick walls include a Swedish snowsuit with the logo POC (for "Piece of Cake"), twisting foil with sharp edges, and a wire frame for golden foil spheres. One seems emptier of human life and more threatening than the next. Each, though, has its suggestive history and austere beauty. Which might Penn have put on display? Maybe not a one, but they capture dark undercurrents in her open sensibility.
One tunnel over, the lights come on full force and obstacles melt away. Emamifar converts it into what looks like a packed warehouse but is in fact a machine shop. As a sketch at the foot of the main stairs makes clear, it would have been only one workspace in a lavish arts institution. He imagines a fund-raiser for a proposed Upper East Side building with studios for carving, casting, and welding along with a gallery, a sculpture terrace, and offices. His other recreations, like a cardboard box for goodness knows what, are more cryptic, but the message is clear. Art and design come at a cost, in resources and ways of life, and who knows what might come into fashion next?
If you have to ask
Virgil Abloh liked to call his art "social sculpture," but then he loved to collaborate. It took him from a budding architect to a designer of covers and merchandise for Kanye West. It got him off on his own with three successive design firms where others could play along, Pyrex Vision, Off-White in Milan, and Alaska Alaska. It brought him an offer from Louis Vuitton, where he headed up men's wear, a first for a black—and how could anyone as social as he was refuse? At his death from cancer at only forty, he was working on his retrospective, "Figures of Speech" at the Brooklyn Museum. He must have seen it as his largest and most collaborative design project yet.
The same urge may have drawn him to architecture in the first place, as the son of African immigrants in Chicago. When he conceived a red tower, he embedded it in a model city, and he must have loved the thought of contributing big time to a living landscape. With West, he could not resist dabbling in music on his own. He pulled together audio equipment, including a turntable and tape deck, less as sound art than as a ghostly presence. Maybe he imagined himself a DJ in a crowded club. His clothing, too, stuck close to the street, with t-shirts and sneakers, and he got to see real people wearing it.
If one thing unites his work apart from the social, it is color in a field of white, just as in that model city. Otherwise the tower with its sloping base is just a ripoff of the Grace building in midtown Manhattan. He admired Mies van der Rohe and the Bauhaus, but one would never know it, apart from their dream of design for all. His sneakers look like the usual brands, only with bright simple colors, too—and with the t-shirts, mostly white, as their foil. His social sculpture includes green resin street kids, looking none too empowered, but also a white angel. Maybe the flip side of collaboration is aspiration.
The show's centerpiece is a shed, planned as a "house" where people can "come together." Otherwise, as curated by Michael Darling and Antwaun Sargent, this is overwhelmingly a fashion show. Do museum exhibitions for fashion amount to sell-outs, even when they engage Kwame Brathwaite and black fashion? They sure draw crowds, and this one ends in a gift shop, taking up more of the rotunda off the lobby. Tempted by the tote bags and t-shirts but worried about the cost? As they say, if you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Does anything set his clothing apart, aside from its color and cost? Do his sneakers sell far less than Air Jordans and cost far more? It may have worried Abloh, too. A sound piece has a woman shopping in the face of high prices and a saleswoman's disdain. At times he drops in references to art history, at the risk of his own disdain for the masses, but not to worry. Apart from a reproduction of Medusa, by Caravaggio, in the gift shop, I could not spot a single one.
Was Abloh trapped all along between popularizing fashion and branding the popular? Text within clothing may be "figures of speech" but it, too, runs to clichés, like Don't Negotiate and Don't Believe What You Read. An orange chain on a Vuitton handbag may allude to slavery, like manacles for Melvin Edwards, but accepts its fashionable constraints. Social sculpture makes the least impression of all, like a blue stepladder—or, for that matter, the plain wood house. On a given day, people do find a resting spot, but mostly on their own. Those who truly want to gather might prefer a Brooklyn bar. There they could talk freely about the troubled state of the art.
Knobkerry designs ran at SculptureCenter through December 13, 2021, Virgil Abloh at the Brooklyn Museum through January 29, 2023.