The black figure has always been a subject of entertainment in popular culture, as well as an image to sell things. In some ways, that’s how people relate to us—because they’ve seen us on television.
—
Derrick Adams
Hardy Blechman & Alex Newman’s DPM: Disruptive Pattern Material by Jon Caramanica
Part of the Editor's Choice series.
- Julie Mehretu by Lawrence Chua
- Bruce Mau by Kathryn Simon
- Brad Cloepfil by Stuart Horodner
- Constant by Linda Boersma
- Robert Antoni by Lawrence Scott
- Kiyoshi Kurosawa by Jim O’Rourke
- Roscoe Mitchell by Anthony Coleman
- Pearl Abraham by Aryeh Lev Stollman
Interviews
- Lou in the Moonlight by Trinie Dalton
- In Love Blood Shall Follow
- Lake Hollywood by Jacob Forman
- Opening Her Text by Kimiko Hahn
- A Chinese Folktale by Mei Chin
- Three Poems by Alexander Theroux
- Three Poems by Joy Katz
- Three Poems by Sidney Wade
- Contranatura by Sergio Valero
- Octavio Paz Sees the Name Born by Hernán Bravo Varela
First Proof
- Whitfield Lovell by Tom Otterness
- Danica Phelps by Christine Hill
- Adam McEwen by Angus Cook
Artists On Artists
- Phillip Lopate and Vincent Katz’s Rudy Burckhardt by Rackstraw Downes
- Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl by Carlos A. Gutiérrez
- Kate Simon’s Rebel Music: Bob Marley & Roots Reggae, Photographs by Betsy Sussler
- Aesop Rock’s Fast Cars, Danger, Fire, and Knives: The Living Human Curiosity Sideshow by Nick Stillman
- Lydia Cabrera’s Afro-Cuban Tales by Jaime Manrique
- Steve Erickson’s Our Ecstatic Days by Robert Polito
- Hardy Blechman & Alex Newman’s DPM: Disruptive Pattern Material by Jon Caramanica
- Minna Proctor’s Do You Hear What I Hear? Religious Calling, The Priesthood and My Father by Victoria Ludwin
- World Psychedelic Classics 3—Love’s A Real Thing: The Funky Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa by Peter Margasak
- Rob Mazurek’s Mandarin Movie by Elliott Sharp
Editor's Choice
Photo courtesy of DPM LTD.
Camouflage was first nature, then it was strategy. Soon it became art, and inevitably, it was commerce. That’s where Hardy Blechman would like to keep it. Founder of the influential Maharishi streetwear line, which specializes in post-military uses of disruptive patterns, Blechman has assembled in DPM what amounts to a letter to a loved one with a troubled background.
Part social history of camouflage, part catalog of its uses, with no instance too small to document, his stunning, weighty encyclopedia traces camo from survival of the fittest in the animal kingdom to domination of the stylish in contemporary fashion. Key stops include the camofleurs of the first World War (including the noted interior designer Andre Mare) who, taking cues from Picasso and Cubism, helped refine evasion warfare. (Later creatives recruited for the cause included Ellsworth Kelly and Bill Blass.)
Primarily driven by a museum-worthy collection of photos, DPM also teems with unlikely tidbits—for example, after the first Gulf War, the United States sold off a great deal of its desert fatigues surplus to other governments, including the Taliban, a practice they didn’t stop until after 9/11, when they found themselves fighting soldiers attired a bit too familiarly.
By that time, they could have been fighting on the streets of Tokyo or London or Berlin and encountered the same problem. The mainstreaming of camouflage, Blechman hopes, will “force the military to redefine its public image.” Maybe so, but military tasks will remain the same, and just as camouflage is a product of evolution, it’s also a practitioner of it. As soon as one form becomes recognizable, the demands of stealth will have dictated new ones, as yet undetected.
Blechman believes that these patterns connect with our “subconscious love of nature,” but is perhaps too sanguine about the widespread civilian use of such clothing. Everyday life is becoming more regulated and militaristic—wearing fatigues might be nothing more than a coping mechanism, a symbol of psychological preparedness, a shield. We are all camofleursnow, hiding in plain sight.
Jon Caramanica is at work on a social history of rap music.
The British edition of DPM is now available in the US.
Related
The artist’s first monograph makes a case for Jang’s place in twentieth-century photography nearly fifty years after he began making pictures…
The revealing/concealing nature of self-portraiture.
The novelist on the enduring AIDS crisis, the resonance of the Lost Generation, and writing her way around questions.
Originally published in
BOMB 91,
Spring 2005
Featuring interviews with Constant Nieuwenhuys and Linda Boersma, Julie Mehretu, Alexi Worth, Pearl Abraham and Aryeh Lev Stollman, Robert Antoni and Lawrence Scott, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Jim O’Rourke, Roscoe Mitchell and Anthony Coleman, Brad Cloepfil and Stuart Horodner, and Bruce Mau and Kathryn Simon.
