The influential post-hardcore band, Fugazi, has never sold shirts. Neither has MacKaye’s record label, Dischord Records. This opened up a market for bootleg t-shirts and MacKaye spent a fair bit of time throughout the ‘90s tracking down manufacturers engaged in copyright infringement and shutting them down. After a phone call with a Boston-based t-shirt printer, the manufacturer pivoted from straight up bootlegs to these. McKaye insisted that the shirt manufacturer be equally creative with the accounting as he was with the design and suggested/insisted that the manufacturer give what would typically be an artist’s royalty to a local women’s shelter. which he did.

The back reads “You are not what you own,” a line from the Fugazi song, “Merchandise.”

“I just don’t give a fuck about T-shirts.” - Ian MacKaye

His father, Kostadin, works in construction, and his mother, Tinka, worked as a cleaner but now works in the studio, helping her son with a variety of logistical tasks. She has short-cropped hair dyed purple. That day she was sewing buttons onto a batch of newly arrived grey hand-crocheted cardigans from the Autumn and Winter 2022 collection and also booking flights from Bulgaria to London so that a family friend could personally courier over the final samples for the Spring and Summer 2023 show due to take place later in the month in Paris.

Save for a short period just after founding his label, when he worked with factories in the United Kingdom, Kiko has manufactured all his collections in Bulgaria, using a mixture of artisanal handicraft and garment factories. Tinka has been key in establishing the connections. “She’s basically our fixer out there,” Kiko told me. “Some of the factories are very traditional, former Soviet places, but actually they are surprisingly open to the things we send them. They’re willing to try things – more than a lot of factories in Italy would be.”

Those “things” end up as Kiko’s runway collections. He wheeled over a rail of clothes that were being prepared for his show. The collection was inspired in part by the artist Danh Vo, whose work repurposing the colonial history of his native Vietnam had inspired Kiko’s decision to embrace influences from the era of Ottoman rule in his own country through cuts and fabrics reminiscent of janissary uniforms.

“I wanted to ask whether you thought that finding an eyelash under your foreskin was significant?”

Ed Atkins, a British contemporary artist, has referenced foreskin in his work, including the line "the eyelash trapped beneath your foreskin after a forgotten night": 

 

Textual image

A striking image of foreskin sets the tone for Atkins' work, even though nothing graphic is shown. 

 

Found myself thinking today, whilst driving back home from co-op, about the heady days of London 2012 when you could make a video about something trapped in your foreskin and be pronounced the most important artist of your generation. 

Tillmans operates according to a set of rules, many of which he has followed since age 25.

• He does not use specialized cameras.

• He carries a small snapshot camera to be open to the “gift of chance.”

• He never retouches or alters photos.

• He does not search for examples of a particular phenomena in the world. When an idea interests him, he believes, the moment will present itself.

• He does not photography people without consent.

• He does not publish photographs of underground spaces or parties until the venues have closed.

• He does not take portraiture commissions from collectors.

• He does not shoot advertisements.

These working rules have contributed to his recognizable aesthetic. Additionally, the human body or evidence of the human body is a constant theme of his work

Jan Verwoert, the Berlin-based art critic and cultural theorist, has discussed Tillmans’ style through the ‘degree zero’ of photography - one lens, no retouching, no special lights; he just points and shoots. The photograph is also a functional record and document of a moment, rather than purely a significant aesthetic object in it’s own right. In his essay ‘Picture Possible Lives: The Work of Wolfgang Tillmans’, Verwoert writes, “through the deliberate reduction of his photographic style to a basic economy of means – one type of camera, one type of lens, no theatrical light effects – Tillmans approximates a ‘degree zero’ of photography. His work aims at the point where a photo is taken and an image emerges.”

"yoghurt caps was my research of space, spectatorship, the viewer, the poetic, the emptiness, the body in movement, the white box as a container, the container in general, the circle...Everything was in that work" Gabriel Orozco 1994

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/30/t-magazine/david-hammons-art.html

In a defining one from a 1986 issue of Real Life Magazine with the curator and historian Kellie Jones, he discusses his disdain for traditional galleries. “The rooms are almost always wrong, too much plasterboard, overlit, too shiny and too neat,” he says. “The work should be somewhere in between your house and where you’re going to see it.”

throw back to Laura Langer in Madrid 2015 (i think)

Thanks Eva