Stick no bills over the art

By CATHRIN SCHAER

Friday afternoon and there's been what can best be described as an art disaster on Symonds St. Artworks displayed on the street as part of a community project have inadvertently been covered over with advertisements for a Fur Patrol album.

Our hero Chris Lorimer, the man behind this particular project, leaps into action. He phones the bill-posting company and explains that, no, the graffiti all over the artworks was not a bad thing. Because one billposter's presence is another onlooker's unique artwork. And the added illustrations were actually part of the project.

Then he dials the artists responsible, the two women who spent a lot of last night working on this piece only to find their creativity stifled by rockers early in the morning. Lorimer consoles them. He tells them the bill-posting company will sort it out.

But honestly, no one is too upset. Considering the nature of this project - it's all about blurring the boundaries between art, fashion and graffiti - it was an honest mistake.

"This is an idea I had after last year's Fashion Week," says Lorimer, best known for his work as a fashion stylist around Auckland and as fashion editor of new alternative culture mag, Staple.

"I wanted to do something that was fashion-related but I wanted it to be more art-focused rather than commercial."

In collaboration with photographer Rene Vaile, designer Natalija Kucija and powered by some Creative Communities funding, he would turn a fashion shoot into art, and then the art into public property. The project would be called Versus - as in he and Vaile versus several artists with Kucija billed as the guest star.

The first step in the process was a genuine fashion shoot. "We cast a model and engaged a makeup artist," Lorimer explains. "We did everything you'd normally do when you're organising a fashion shoot."

The garments featured are a retrospective of Kucija's collections, eight outfits from her ranges over the past few years. "We shot it in a studio with bare floors and natural light and we tried to keep it as simple as possible so the artist had lots of space to embellish the work."

Eight pictures were produced, the kind we mostly see as full pages in a fashion magazine. These were turned into poster-size images and handed out to eight artists.

"Rene and I chose the [participating] artists together. They are people we knew and people we thought would be appropriate for the concept. They were doing work that could be used on top or around the pictures and they understood the fashion aspect. Because we wanted everyone to respect the work that went before them."

The eight artists - Ben Buchanan, Ruth Buchanan, Kate Newby, graffiti artist Misery, Seung, Brett Chan, Pritika Lal and Jess Vandamon - are a mixture of the new or recently graduated and all are different in style. The final results show just how different.

Lal's poster has become a pretty, moving three-dimensional sculpture while Ben Buchanan's is a graphic collage of shining silver and burgundy paper. Chan has used his to scribble a personal homage to a good friend, Misery's contains her popular cartoon characters, Ruth Buchanan's involves a model surrounded by night sky, and Seung's incorporates more three-dimensional additions.

The posters were then transformed into "art", Lorimer explains. "We had an exhibition opening at Michael Lett gallery. And the artworks hung there for one night only."

This was interesting for Lorimer because "people were coming up to me and asking how much they were and could they buy them? I had to tell them none of it was for sale. But what was fascinating was that the works were given an inherent value because they were created as artworks and because they were in a gallery.

"So they were placed in that context. It's all about preconceptions. I don't think fashion is art or vice versa. But it's obvious that sometimes art can be fashionable. And on the other hand, some fashion people collect clothing labels like Commes des Garcons, for instance, as though it were art."

After the posters' one-night stand at the Karangahape Rd gallery, they multiplied and took to the streets, being posted around the inner city.

Over the next fortnight or so, the eight artists will return to the art and work on it further. And so, it seems, may various other people.

Several pieces have already been tagged by graffiti artists around town.

"There have already been various political slogans relating to GE added to some of the pieces," Lorimer says. "I think it's really great, they were really quick."

And as related earlier in this story, some posters have even been mistaken for destructive graffiti and postered over.

"I'm not too worried if people take it seriously or not," concludes Lorimer, who would like to organise another series of Versus. "Because it's more about having fun. It's got fashion and art and chaos; there's a random factor. All of which I quite like. I also like the idea of introducing something to passers-by that they wouldn't normally see in the street.

"I'm hoping people will walk past these posters on the way to work, wonder what they are. Maybe," he says, with a sly smile, "they'll go past and go, wow, that's amazing, that's art."