Posts tagged construction methods

A couple of days ago I went to an art show reception with someone I barely knew.  This last is only important because since I barely knew the person I was with, it also meant that I knew almost none of the people he was talking to, and so I did a whole lot of listening.  At one point during the evening, my friend was talking to another graduate student, and by then I was getting pretty spacey, having not really had lots of food and being rather busy processing everything I had seen (black unicorns, people made of orange corn puff balls, blown glass forms that were either slugs or penises, larger-than-life animal/people forms made from stuffed animals, all having sex—you know, the usual), but one phrase stuck with me, and that was when my friend mentioned an art show he had seen on his recent travels, from which he had just returned.  The show he had seen, he said, had achieved something he had been trying to do, but in a somewhat different execution.  

“Yeah,” his friend said, “That’s a good and a bad feeling.  On the one hand, you know it can be done.  On the other hand, somebody’s already done it.”

I think anyone who has ever made something, whether it’s a group project for your junior high geography class or a full-fledged artistic endeavor, is familiar with this feeling.  It’s one that’s hitting me kind of hard right now.  I’ve been toying with some ideas for outrageous costumes that I haven’t seen anywhere.  One, of which I’ve been particularly proud, I’ve been thinking about for months, puzzling over techniques to learn, challenges to overcome, etc.  I thought I was really clever.  Until, that is, I saw this picture of Katy Perry in the newspaper yesterday:

Take a goooood look at that skirt.  On the one hand, it’s nice to know that my construction plans were right on the money.  On the other hand…the thing that I wanted to make, that I came up with without ever hearing the name Manish Arora or even following Katy Perry’s fashion choices closely, the plans for which currently exist on three sheets of green, lined steno-pad paper, folded neatly inside a book in my wreck of a workspace until I can summon time and funding, has already been produced to perfection, and, thanks to Katy Perry, to popularity.

Luckily, though, I still have a couple of ideas up my sleeve for exciting, exotic headgear.  Oh, but what’s that you say?

Okay, okay.  Staying optimistic.  Oh, but wait…bringing the magic of paper art into the fabric world?

Manish Arora.  Okay, but, creating a construct that makes a human look like a doll?  Oh…

Manish fucking Arora. Well, Jesus Christ.  It’s pretty clear that I have a favorite designer (it’s just that, you know, I thought that in this case, it was me).  I mean, has this man been sneaking into my screwed-up reveries and stealing my ideas?  Have I been tapping into some crazy wavelength as I sleep?  Since he began seriously constructing shit like this when I was in junior high, I’m going to just go ahead and say that maybe I’m stealing his, but until today, I was as unaware of him as he is of me.

Still, I think I have one more thing up my sleeve.  It’ll be a small miracle if it ever makes it to a stage, but somehow, it will happen.  And I hope he doesn’t do it first, because if he does, I’ll have to get all frustrated and sweep all my materials off of my worktable, which will suck, because my materials include a hefty amount of dressmaker’s pins.

Like that guy whose name I don’t know said, it’s a good feeling and a bad feeling.  Someone else got to my idea first (okay, and this is yet another thing that I have been thinking about, which I have either already written about and not posted, or will write about soon).  But: someone’s done it.  It can be done.  And it can be done the way I was thinking of doing it, which means that I was right.  So, I’m glad, I guess, that it’s out there, even if it means that by the time I actually get to make mine, I’ll look like a copycat.

Hats off to you, Manish.

Check out some more of his great stuff:

Here.  And here.  And here.