Dear Terry…

OMG! A-list Fashion photographer/longstanding and storied sleazebag Terry Richardson is in hot water over allegations he’s behaved less than professionally toward some of his models!! In some industries (industries less appreciative of spiritual beauty and raw talent) heads would roll, but fashion knows better – thank God! – than to be swayed by hysteria and hyperbole… Murdofleur is proud to publish this letter from Fashion Itself to Terry, as intercepted by Emma Hopkinson.

Dear Terry,

I hear you’re in a spot of bother re: some teenage models and your penis? What have you done, you silly thing? Everybody knows that when you invite young girls over to your house and take pictures of them naked before engaging them carnally, to always, always have them sign a contract of absolute confidentiality. It’s on page one of the Sex Pest’s Manual. What a fool you’ve been!

Obviously nobody’s saying that you shouldn’t exert your influence as one of the industry’s most prolific photographers to get emaciated girls to tug on your johnson, just that, when you do, it might be an idea to try it on with the quiet ones, you know? The ones that won’t accost you at parties and send you running from the room.

You did exactly the right thing by complaining to Rie Rasmussen’s agency when she did that – if anything will keep these girls quiet it’s the threat of being blacklisted, dropped by their agents and unable to work.

I really don’t see what all the fuss is about anyway. What’s a little pressure to have sex between a 45-year-old-man with a camera and a half-starved teen from Eastern Europe? It’s par for the course and it’s been going on for years. Like institutional racism and fox hunting.

So Terry, darling, don’t be down. You thought the dirty hand jobs and illicit late-night fuck-a-thons with these girls were beautiful, they thought it was creepy and inappropriate and possibly the grounds for a criminal prosecution. Swings and roundabouts. What they call exploitation we know is just you being quirky. Keep being an individual, Terry. Keep being you.

Love and kisses,

Fashion

X

On David Foster Wallace and abbreviations

by Orlando Whitfield

• I’ll keep it brief, even though he didn’t.

• The tools: ‘ abbreviates at the beginning and . at the end (of something  - (smthg.))

• David Foster Wallace (DFW) is an elongation surrounded by abbreviations. Before the publication of The Broom of the System he was always David Wallace. But then he, too, was abbreviated: he cut himself short. (Remember, Sept. ’08?).

• DFW became indispensable as if by stealth: a writer at once vital to his contemporaries (The Corrections [‘Correx’ / ‘Correct’]  would have been impossible w/out Infinite Jest (IJ)) and to his readers. There is an element of the abbreviated in this stealth, is there not? Do you see?

• Abbreviations stand apart from the body of a text as their own language. The jargon that DFW writes in is the unnoticed language of our world – the musak of literature. Often vowelless, they are unpronounceable like the Russian names one skips over in W&P. Do we pay them enough attention? They are, after all, the things that decide; they are often the action points, the committees, the societies, the organizations and the conferences. They are the inactive language of actions that look like stones littered throughout his book: textual roadblocks taking form and moving all that flows around them.

• They are ambiguity and clueless. Eliot asked: ‘Where is the Life we have lost in living?/Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
/Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ DFW has answered.

• The abbreviation of a name – O, Hal, E.T.A itself – is a renaming and he knew it. Names have a property more than words – they are closer to a purer, spoken language: what Derrida called an ‘original’ language; they are meant, created to be spoken and called. The abbreviation of a name can be affectionate and teasing: here it’s in jest.

• Imagine the length of IJ if he hadn’t abbreviated.

• DFW is now www.hrc.utexas.edu/dfw

ROFLMFArtO

Does making things shorter and simpler always mean dumbing things down? Is there a middle ground between the ZOMG!-y inanity of twitterspeak and the sort of impeneterable jargonese the artworld holds so dear? These are the questions that keep Sophie Frost awake at night.  Here’s her (bitesize but thought-provoking) response to Murdofleur’s request for some reflections  on artspeak, hype and inclusivity.

1. Have you been to the new Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi photography exhibition at the Whitechapel? Now there’s an exhibition with too few words - there are basically no historical asides or explanations to any of the photos, which renders the unassuming viewer clueless as to the difference between Gandhi, problems facing eunuchs in India and the caste system as they are randomly placed side by side in bizarre categories such as Place, People, Performance. What is the solution to this other than meaningless art blurb?!

2. In his book on communism, Tariq Ali says: “For many educated in the spirit of postmodernism, there is no such thing as a proper narrative, only fragments – all of which are of an equal value. Surely this most recent phase of global capitalism, rampant and turbocharged, that has transformed politics, culture, sexuality and the economy, is a striking example of a strong narrative requiring a robust intellectual response – not wishful thinking illustrated by vignettes from various cultures.”
When is artspeak/critical rhetoric “robust and intellectual” rather than a pointless vignette?

Capture competition

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Thanks to Charles Gouldsbrough for this one.