Run With Zeros

1999, 9 min, color, sound

Writes Antek Walczak: "Commissioned in the margins of a 90s fashion-art exhibition called 'Exposing Meaning in Fashion Through Presentation,' the video starts by documenting Susan Cianciolo's Run 8 collection fashion show in the intimate bourgeois setting of Lady Mendl's Tea Salon, but very quickly it lets other things intrude. B-52s and cruise missiles have been launched at Serbia. The Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches record highs. Fog envelopes lower Manhattan with a fin de siècle melancholy that anticipates a dull and pointless (zero) future. A document about a fashion video that gets depressed, not by mourning things lost or passing, but from the mortality and fatigue of a continuously triumphant present. On the streets, giant billboards dominate pedestrians with sex and style, yesterday's model cards lie scattered in the trash, while indoors, the perfect order of a luxury boutique is guarded by toxic, ageless mannequins. In 9 minutes, fashion promises freeze and fizzle in a camera's flash, and then suffocate in the tail exhaust of idling curbside limos."

Susan Cianciolo presents a video by Antek Walczak. Production Assistance: Alleged Films. American Montage, Inc., Andrew, Barney's, Bernadette, Jennifer, John K., Julia, Kim.

 

See also