Ryan McGinley, Tilda Swinton, Neville Wakefield at Pringle of Scotland / Serpentine Gallery dinner closing the 195 Collaborations project, at the Webster, Miami. Photo Credit: David X Prutting

Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in Pringle of Scotland

An unusual pairing during Art Basel Miami Beach was the jointly held event between Pringle of Scotland, the design house for Scottish woolies, and Serpentine Gallery, one of the most respected galleries in London.

The sponsorship of the arts is laudable when it’s of economic benefit to the artists, and here the alliance with art seems to be working also to the advantage of Pringle, increasing it’s corporate profile amongst art enthusiasts. Pringle’s sponsorship of artists in Scotland is ostensibly to promote Scottish craft and creativity, but its collaboration with the Serpentine is not only a strategic association that helps to legitimize a corporate brand but is also a smart economic venture for the Serpentine.

Ryan McGinley, Tilda Swinton at Pringle of Scotland / Serpentine Gallery at The Webster Photo Credit: David X Prutting

Pringle has worked with creatives such as photographer Ryan McGinley and Terry Jones (i-D). The 195 collaborations showcased in Miami at Webster’s showroom include designs by Turner Prize Winners Richard Wright and Douglas Gordon – and actress Tilda Swinton, Stephen Sutcliffe and jeweller Waris Ahluwalia – are some of the many other collaborators. The artists contributed on the classic Scottish designs and knits which are available in limited editions through the Gallery and Pringle.  For those old enough to remember her in earlier career, Tilda (aka Matilda) Swinton, originally performed at the Serpentine in 1995 in collaboration with artist Cornelia Parker when she slept for 7 days, 8 hours a day in a tomb-like glass cabinet for the curious public.

Even the most diffused artistic collaborations have an effect on our choices and can impact the chain of manufacturing events – one possible consequence of this partnership could be that we buy more art from the Serpentine Gallery for their association with chic artists who design winter woolies for Pringle, who’d sell more cardigans allowing sheep to grow wool and live one more season before ending up as haggis.

Artist Douglas Gordon

Julia Peyton-Jones the director of the Serpentine Gallery in Pringle of Scotland's designed knitwear

Tilda Swinton wearing Ryan McGinley designed cardigan with Susan Sarandon at Pringle/Serpentine event - Photo Credit: David X Prutting

Tilda Swinton - portrait in Pringle

Marilyn Minter, Trickle, 2010 C-Print

Far from the sweaty sidewalks of New York in the cooler climes of Gstaad, better known for its ski resorts, Marilyn Minter is co-curating a show with Fabienne Stephan titled SWEAT. The show at Patricia Low Contemporary includes works by Matthew Barney, Kate Gilmore, Mika Rottenberg, Cindy Sherman and Kiki Smith among others – with depictions of the skin’s secretions ranging from the erotic to the mundane.

Cindy Sherman : Untitled 1985

Sweat is the conditional response of our skins, the body’s largest organ: try as we might to mask the hint of arousal and exertion, the thin wet odorous film is a primitive and instinctual expression of our latent desires, a Pavlovian reflex to fear and sex. While Minter’s work explores the erotic surface tension of dirt and sweat, Kiki Smith’s work is one of abstract crystallized droplets, and Ryan McGinley photographs a runner in the saintly glow of exhaustion.

In an interview for Spread, Minter spoke to me of her focus on body fluids, “ I am not interested in shock value; anything forensic, like scars, doesn’t interest me.  It has to be something that could happen. Nothing surreal, just things that exist: snot, drool…licking.”

Mika Rottenberg’s video, Fried Sweat, involves a sweaty bodybuilder that subsequently vanishes, the material body transforming into ether. It plays with the ideas of expenditure of energy as in her earlier video Tropical Breeze, where the product of labour results in sweat-soaked tissues that Ms Rottenberg once tried to sell on Ebay as an art experiment, but in this case, the result of perspiration did not lead to success.

Ryan McGingley, Coley (Injured) 2007 C-Print

Kiki Smith, Five Elements of a Dewbow, 1999 Glass

Rottenberg, who was once Minter’s student at SVA, had also collaborated previously with Minter on an installation for Sweat in Paris in 2008. Rottenberg described the collaboration, “It was Marilyn’s work, [with a photograph of] sweaty armpits – you had to move the piece and there was a peeking hole, and I had the video (Fried Sweat) behind her photograph.”

Interview with Mika Rottenberg in issue#5 of Spread p20-21 online;
Interview at installation set for Squeeze, 2010)
Patricia Low Contemporary, Sweat August 8-October 10th, 2010, PARKSTRASSE     3780 GSTAAD     SWITZERLAND