Living with Legends

Our old Chelsea Hotel-mate Blair Wear (alter ego, Blair Bauer) is showing her hand painted, one-of-a-kind clothes and accessories as part of a show in the East Village.  Titled “In a Girl’s World,” it’s billed as an All Female Urban Art Exhibition.  We went to the press party for the show on Thursday at the Showroom Gallery.  In the front room stoned hipsters posed and milled about, as a D.J. spun tunes that couldn’t even be heard above the din of conversation.
        There were a couple of good artists showing in the front room.  I liked Queen Andrea’s Bratz-inspired buxom child-like women in rainbow colors, though I was dubious as to the wisdom of trying to contain her wild style graffiti in a canvas.  Toofly (I kept saying it like “too-flea” but now I get it: Too fly, as in “Too Fly to Die!”) drew buxom cartoon women as well, though hers had a harder take-no-shit kind of edge.  Both these artists seemed heavily influenced by Japanese cartoon arts such as Manga, though they added their own distinctly American touches.

            Things were a bit livelier in the back room, where Blair had strategically set up shop near the liquor.  Blair had designed the room to look like a psychotic cross between a day-glow gas station rest room and a psychedelic tenement slum, complete with clotheslines draped with her “dirty” laundry, an explosion of graffiti on the walls, and even a hot pink tampon machine.  (The machine took quarters and a girl tried to put a dime in it and clogged it up.  “I thought you were my friend!” Blair joked.)  Blair had outfitted the bar girls in hand-painted wife beaters, and an underwear model pranced around.  It was a funhouse atmosphere back there, and people seemed more excited, perhaps due to the surroundings.  Or maybe it was Blair’s bubbly personality.  Or the liquor.

            Heavy on the pink, as always, Blair’s airbrush graffiti work is more free style than the other artists, more the bathroom graffiti style, “grafilthy” as they used to call it in Playboy.  Her cartoons are based on American comics; no Manga or anime for her–more like D.C. and Marvel.  And her creations have a literate, playful wit.  She hand paints her bras and panties and wife-beaters with clever, risqué slogans, such as: “Did you buy your breath at the ass store?”; “Who pissed in your slimfast?” “The Grim Reep Her”; and “Do you have some sort of sickness, woman?”

            Seeing graffiti out of its natural setting in the grunge of the city tends to expose it’s poverty as art.  The mood of the front room reflected this: the room, and the art, were ultimately rather uninteresting.  Graffiti really doesn’t belong on the walls of a gallery, it’s made to be an integral part of the filthy brick or concrete on which it’s painted, and Blair’s transformation of the gallery into a lavatory was inspired.  She brought the streets—even if they turned out to be cartoon streets–to the gallery.

            “Life is too short to be stiff!” Blair says when uptight critics pose questions about the meaning of her art.  “Lighten up a little and have fun!”

            Completing the carnival atmosphere of the back room, you could pick up a Blair Wear fun pack for a mere $10.  Somehow, one of them ended up in my possession, so I must have stolen it.  I’m opening it right now (I’m sure there will be an F.U. in there for my snide dig at its price).  Let’s see: a piece of Double Bubble, a space man, a finger puppet, a mastodon, a length of measuring tape, a skull ring, a Blair Wear tattoo, and, best of all, a bunch of hot pink Blair Wear trading cards with fun facts on the back (Sample: A Flamingo’s eye is larger than its brain!)  I wish I’d stolen two!

            Even better is the hot pink tampon, a bargain at a quarter, which advises me: Of all the girls in  the world he chose you, now drink the shake! The exhibit continues until July 5.   (Photo: After all these years, Blair’s tampon stands poised to clog the third floor toilet once again.)