betwixt

Fabula is actually a word. Located somewhere between fable and fabulous in your Webster’s. I interpret fabula to mean an extraordinary story. Fabulation is the act of inventing or retailing fantastic tales or unrestrained otherworldly visions. A fabulist is a prevaricator.

It’s not all shopping.
To me, this exhibition is more about cultural expression, media and language, than a critique on consumption. Creativity is alive and well in the agency of retail and communication. This exhibition is a way to investigate Printmaking’s a.ka. PrintNation’s practice, program and creative production – through mediating sources from contemporary culture, media, technology and communication systems. Like “prêt-à-porter” ready to wear, Fabula locates the merging currents of art, fashion advertising and design.

The girls…
Perhaps film analogies are overdone but I see the concept of Fabula; somewhere between Breakfast at Tiffany’s [1961] and Basic Instinct [1992]. Audrey Hepburn [Holly Golightly] and Sharon Stone [Catherine Trammell] give us two different types of “playgirls”. Holly finds the building of attraction and allure of elegant consumption to be the skin of her identity. Catherine Trammell is really a character constructed out of pornography. She is a lethal fetishized bisexual object of deadly desire. Both women are somewhat perverse constructions gender, of their times – authored by Truman Capote and Joe Eszterhas. Capote is also the notable author of In Cold Blood . Capote deals with prescriptions of substitution for symptoms of loss, anxiety and restlessness. Eszterhas makes Basic Instinct a neo-noir style of television mediation – sort of what TV wants to be.

Maybe in typical fashion, let’s compare the visualization of identity and possession from the stills in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Basic Instinct”. In the opening title sequence of Breakfast’s credits, we see this condition of betwixt. The scene begins w/ Holly Golightly standing outside the elegant Tiffany’s display window, peering inward. The camera then moves inside, framing Holly in the display, looking outward, on to Fifth Avenue. That image, merging interiority and exteriority together - locate what is between wanting and having. In her black gloved hands Holly holds a cup coffee and a breakfast roll, seemingly denying her ability to grasp what she wants to possess.