"The Taste-Maker: Murray moss Takes His Store-Cum-Museum to L.A."
Cont. (Page 3 of 4)
In 1978, Moss wound down his acting career, but not before playing the Gentleman from Rhode Island in a regional production of 1776. "I was 28, and I had come into some family money, so I stopped," he says. "I thought, I'll start a fashion company. Franklin was at that point working at Sesame Street." Moss put his money behind a Dutch fashion designer named Ronaldus Shamask. "The idea was sort of an atelier-slash-shop. We rented a space on Madison and 70th, on the second floor. There were three sewing people in the back. We stole Halston's tailor. Everything was made to order, and it was really expensive and very architectural. In March of '79 we did a show--and mostly the audience was my family. But it was quite exceptional. Six different weights of black-and-white linen--all torn so it would be on grain. The New York Times wrote a rave review; Lily Auchincloss rang the first thing the next day. She was our first big client."
After a decade, Moss and Shamask had a major falling out. "That was a huge struggle of 12 years," Moss recalls. "I was thinking, What am I going to do with my life? In other words, I had a good old-fashioned 1960s encounter session with myself: Who am I? What do I want to be?
"Because I had spent so much time in Milan for the clothing business," he continues, "I knew all this work that was happening. It was the beginning of a revolution in industrial design out of Europe, and I saw the real stuff--Ettore Sosttass, Gaetano Pesce. I bought all that stuff in Italy and set it up in our living room. I could call everybody up--like Saks Fifth Avenue--and say, 'You should hire me to take a hefty part of your store and create this design element in it.' But nobody would do it." Finally, he convinced the owners of the cutting-edge boutique Charivari to let him create a coffee bar-cum-design store in their clothing store at Madison and 78th Street. He called it Bar e Oggetti (Bar and Objects in Italian). "That was like the little tiny precursor to the Moss," says Getchell. "Because it was where Murray met Harry Allen, the architect who would design Moss, and Ron Ryan, who would design our graphics."
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In 1993, Moss opened a store under his own name in Soho, which was then almost exclusively an area of art galleries. "I thought, We have to position this with an audience that's awake," he recalls. "The idea was to crash the art audience--not the art market, but that audience, because they were, by definition, people who would go regularly to look at what's new. I positioned the store between Pace Gallery and Metro Pictures, so I knew twice a month they'd show up. In retrospect, it was very audacious to put it between Pace and Metro Pictures, but it needed to be violent." Eventually, the galleries left SoHo for Chelsea, and expanded to three storefronts on Greene Street. Moss and Getchell also own a restaurant and wine store around the corner on Houston Street, called Centovini, which they opened last year with restaurateur Nicola Marzovilla. Moss designed the interior.
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Moss changes the store around every day, and he paints the walls every week.
"Every day should be like opening night," he explains.
He can be quite subversive and irreverent with the "narrative texts" of his displays.
"Do you speak Italian?" he asks me. "I need someone to translate for me, because I think I have put some very dirty, very nasty Italian words in the windows." We go around to the front of the store, where his assistants are installing a black-and-white-lacquered bedroom set emblazoned with 1970s cartoons by the Italian artist Guido Crepax. The cartoons feature a sexpot called Valentina. "Look at the headboard," says Moss. "You are literally looking up her butt. It's horrible. I had them get a red satin sheet for the bed." The guys in the window are expertly forming hospital corners.
"Can you translate that for me? I am afraid it's too pornographic. It reminds me of the year we had sperm-shaped light bulbs designed by TK in our Christmas windows and a sign that said, Santa is coming! People hated it. We actually got many letters. I was so surprised."
I ask Moss to explain one of his display case "texts" to me, a bravura assembly of blue and white porcelain from different eras and producers.
"Objects are loaded," he says as we stand before the beautifully arranged porcelain which gives a brief history of "the blue and white," in Moss's phrase.
"Our eyes are dead in a certain way," he continues. "We think we have got it. I saw this from my years in the fashion business: people walk by a rack and run their hand across it, then walk on. We pass by a case of blue and white porcelain, and we may think, I hate blue and white porcelain. That is what my grandmother had." His excitement builds. "But this case of blue porcelain is not what meets the eye. Take that tureen from Meissen, which was obviously a noble object, and it was intended to differentiate as it signified class--people who had, and people who didn't. Then, next to it is a platter from Royal Copenhagen, which stole from Meissen. The whole subject is very ugly and very rich, because there were wars over blue and white. You know people killed each other over the white gold. It was the power, in the Age of Reason, of transforming base materials into art." In the same display, Moss features a contemporary, "ironic" blue-and-white porcelain squirrel from the Dutch Studio Job. "They are making fun of the conventions by overdoing the design, gilding the squirrel's nut, putting too many patterns on one piece." Finally, the pièce de résistance, at the center of it all: the 2005 work of Oooms Studio, called Dutch Dildo, a $700 porcelain sex toy.
"What I am proposing, with this cacophony of the blue and the white," says Moss, "is that maybe I can light a spark--because it's worthy. That's the job. And if I don't do that, I am hawking blue and white porcelain, which is just nothing as a job."
We walk down the line and look at a display of desk implements juxtaposed with models of fighter planes. "Macho war games and desk accessorie--it's not particularly interesting, but I get a kick out of it," he says. Of another case, he says, "Just perforated metal things. None of these things have to do with one another. It's just a four-foot case with examples of perforated metal." We come a case of dozens of Alvar Aalto vases. "This I love, because the thing that people see that we are all so dead to. An Alvar Aalto vase. Here are scores of curvy glass, colored Alto vases." Moss has stacked them in a sort of geographical pattern. "When I went to Finland, I saw that it is all lakes, and the lakes bleed into one another, and they are not the same. Then I thought, The Aalto vase is not just about a fluid line in the 1930s. It is site-specific. It comes from a culture, from a locale, from a longing for something."
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The new Moss in Los Angeles will continue to blur the boundaries between museum and gallery and store. "It will be a kind of gallore," in Getchell's words, "which is limited editions, unique pieces, lots of Swarovsky crystal chandeliers. Because we are going into a fashion district, with Marc Jacobs across the street and Carolina Herrera next door, we thought watches and jewelry would work well there."
Moss seems to be simultaneously bullish and hesitant about the new venture: "Audiences are different. There are regionalisms. One performs differently when he is at home and on the road. I will be asking, Where am I? What am I doing? In L.A. we are on Melrose. The front of the building looks like a doughnut shop. The Moss logo would look silly, so we are doing the logo seven feet high in neon on wheels. This is the theater of it. For me it is theatrical. I get to say, If Moss moved to L.A. what would it look like?"
"It will be somewhat gold-plated," says Getchell. "We are gold-plating Vitsoe shelves [the laboratory-chic shelves designed by the ascetic German modernist Dieter Rams]. We had to convince the head of Vitsoe, Marc Adams--who is very doctrinaire, will not allow the shelving to be described as attractive, only functional--to let us gold-plate them." Getchell's Emmy award, which he won for producing the CBS series The Body Human, will be displayed on the gold shelves, though Moss finds it "hideous."
"This is an opportunity for me to do things that I could not do if I had one store in New York," says Moss. It remains to be seen if an L.A. audience will embrace Moss's narrative approach to design and his interest in designers who are pushing the boundaries of furniture as art. His new star, the 26-year-old Maartin Baas, for example, sets fire to such famous designer objects as Eames, Rietveld, and Macintosh chairs.
"I don't have a brief to find new talent," says Moss. "I operate on obsession because I like extremes. It's very rarely that I fall in love like I fell in love with Maartin Baas, whom I met at his booth at the Milan Furniture Fair. I saw the chair he called Smoke: a Victorian grandma armchair that he burned. Or Franz Anton Bustelli, the chief sculptor of Nymphenburg from 1754 to 1764. He was considered the master of Rococo porcelain sculpture. I showed every one of his figurines. I stumbled onto him. I learned a little bit, and then I became obsessed with it. All of this is really just my education. I am selling heart valves. I am not trying to save your life. I own chairs that you cannot sit on. Then I own chairs that you can sit on. People need to wake up to the fact that these objects sometimes are canvases that have meaning that snuck in underneath the manufacturer's radar. That can be very uncomfortable to people."
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