Of art exhibitions in Graz, mental orgasms and other escapes I like to call exploration.

It has not been easy for me lately. Not so much in the existential or emotional part of my life as it was in the artistic expression. I found myself in a position where I literally generated compositional clothing not being allowed to squeeze in the conceptual thought into them, which I like to do. People want to look great, they want to show what makes them appealing and hide that which makes them less of that. They want to look beautiful. Do not get me wrong, I would stand in front of an armored artillery squad defending fashion for being functional and in humble service to people. I still believe fashion is not an art form. Rather I see it as a skillful Kraftwerk, a mastery which can reach to the realms of being so well executed it looks almost divine, humanly impossible to make. The way Caravaggio’s masterpieces do. The way Michelangelo´s statues do. It is completely different story when fashion meets artistic expression, however. Then it becomes something different. Something like “Modart”, I should say. Of course, there can be intellectual stimuli to a garment, an idea that pervades it, a symbol that makes it somehow embedded in a deeper and complex subject. This is where I like to think I stand with my designs. But in the end, for the sake of being artistic, fashion cannot submit to the self proclaimed artwork dipped in nonfunctional conceptualization. To me, fashion still, in the first place, looks for an aesthetic solution to a given composition of a human body and the relations of volume between body and clothes. Thought behind it is an entity of second grade. So I found myself in situations where I was challenged only on the surface, asked to find an aesthetic solution to a given body, type of venue and event that body has planned to go to. (I see a concept developing here). In general, I love to do it, but when one ends up doing ONLY that for a longer time, one starts to look for a stimulation that is not skin-deep. And when town one lives in does not offer anything but morning rituals and afternoon obligations, with no excitement for the eye or the brain, one reaches out. What my sister likes to call an escape, I like to call exploration. And it is that what I did this week. And it is that I would like to write about. I went to Graz, thus the one day delay on this post. I am sorry for that (déjà-vu?). But here it is what excited me.