Elle Muliarchyk Photographer e-mail: elena94521@yahoo.com URL: http://www.myspace.com/ellemuliarchyk

FP: The fusion of fashion and art has become so seamless...I am fascinated by Damien Hirst's new piece, the $100 million diamond-encrusted skull which he explains as his "victory over death." Somehow I am wierdly reminded of Victoria's Secret's diamond-encrusted bra-- Do you consider your photos a sort of "victory over fashion" or an homage to fashion?
EM: On a practical level the purpose of art is to record the history of humanity. In fact 'The Human Revolution' theory proves that the very moment when the history of the humans began (after the Neanderthals) was when we started creating art - painting on the sides of the caves. That's when humans began to think. Why did they do it? It wasn't essential for the survival, but they chose to be creative and share their vision of their contemporary environment, so generously, for the future generations. I can just imagine them, making their quite beautiful paintings while a buddy is watching out for a lion that may be lurking behind the corner of a cave, like the present day graffitti artists watching out for the Police! I wonder what urged them to do it - was it their deepest unexplainable urge to create, or was there an ego involved? Did they have their own Artforum to praise them, did they have their exhibitions with prehistoric Champagne and hors d'oeuvres served on little bones?

That is why I GREATLY admire and respect guys like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons, for example. They use general symbolism to vaguely justify the "artsiness" of their mega-million-dollar work... But the message behind it is so much more powerful: they acknowledge that incredible hype over art now, and they make a joke about it. They take it to the highest absurd levels, just to see how far they can push it. It's so smart! That's the ultimate reflection on the present society, and that's why I am so fascinated by what they do. The society right now is all about achieving new levels of unimaginably nauseating luxury, and Damien Hirst has the guts to iniciate a debate about it, like opening a Pandora's box! I feel that's exactly what I've done with my Dressing Room pictures, and I hope to do it in a more powerful way in the future.

FP: How has your upbringing in Vietnam and Belarus inspired your work? I don't know if you describe your work as political, but to me just the idea of a girl exposed to things like the rebuilding of Vietnam and the aftermath of Chernobyl then arriving as a model in both NY and Paris, to come to photographing herself in these exclusive boutiques seems like a highly political thing in and of itself...
EM: I would love to talk about my political convictions, and they are very strong, trust me... But I'm afraid of the KGB... All I can say is that, considering my tender age..., experiencing all three political regimes in my life (Communism - Belarus is probably the Jurassic Park, the perfect natural preservation for what it was like during the USSR...Socialism in Prague, and the ultra-Capitalism in the US) made me who I am. It's amazing - I feel like I've lived a life of three different generations! I'm lucky! I love studying political science and discussing how diferent political systems function, their goods and their bads... That's something that has always been a heated topic in our family. Very European...haha...Chernobyl was a terrible disaster, much more horrible than the West knows about. One of my stupid classmates in Prague told me once: "Why are you so tall? Did you eat too much of Chernobyl potatoes?". I remember I cried then. But the people were able to move on. They even have a super funny joke on this subject - At a farmers market: a Grandma is shouting "The best potatoes from Chernobyl! Good price! Hurry up before they're gone". Someone asks "Grandma, no-one's gonna buy these if you advertise them as "from Chernobyl"! She replies "You are wrong - I already sold three hundred pounds! People do buy them, some as a present for their boss, some for their mother-in-law..."

There is indeed a photo I took that represents my thougths on the worlds' politics: I was shocked after I learned that the US government spends $1B a year on keeping a bunker running, so in case of National emergency the officials can hide there. But they are never being used (thank God, I guess) and there are many of them in secret locations all over the country! I was shocked by how much money goes to waste, I related it to my own "fabulous" life in New York. I was inspired by the most outrageously "fabulous" dress I've ever seen in my life (and could touch) by Zac Pozen at Barneys. I orchestrated my own Nuclear Attack Emergency situation, re-creating a bunker inside the Barneys dressing room. I pretended I was one of the political wives having a decadent fun time in the bunker. I was wearing that Zac Pozen creation, the diamonds that I borrowed from an Upper East Side grandma girlfriend, a bottle of Champaine, and eventually ... a WW2 gas mask! Plus I covered the walls of the dressing room with aluminum foil, to represent a "layer of lead" that would normally protect from the radiation during a Nuclear Attack. It took me a long time to create the set, the sales person was getting nervous, while I was trembling because only a thin curtain with gaps was separating us! He asked me how I was doing... I was going to anwser coolly "I'm doing fine, thanks", but I was wearing the gas mask and my voice came out distorted and deep (I'd never tried to talk with a gas mask on before!). He freaked out hearing that! "Are you ok? What happened to you??" He was about to come in! I ripped the mask off my face, started hiding all my props while caughing as loud as I could so he wouldn't hear the very loud noise of crinkling aluminium! It was so scary and funny!

I also took a picture called 'Rats' at Comme Des Garcons. I imagined it as the End of the world after the Nuclear explosion. The rats are the only creatures that are not bothered by the radiation. So here I am laying on the ground, in a crucifix-suggesting position, with rats coming out from various directions. I also used the weird green light as, maybe the Green Sunrise on the First day the world ended... The question is - is the CDG jumpsuit, the fashion, gonna save me? ;-)

FP: Personally, I would be labeled middle class. When I enter a designer store, there is definitely a mind shift. I might just be able to afford a belt, or once in a while, a shoe, but it's almost as though I need to put on an act, especially for myself, to even be in there. Do you consider yourself an actress, and does this happen to you in your process? Has that changed with experience?
EM: Yes, you are right, being in one of those stores is something...I don't know how they make it so uncomfortable...But it's always been like that. Even Celine in the Journey To The End Of The Night noticed: "This instinctive revulsion that shopkeepers inspire in anyone who goes near them..."
I certainly learned how to behave there. You need to pretend you shop in those places all the time. The Japanese made it an art form and developed special techniques (like carying designer shopping bags and putting cheaper stuff in them). I had to develop my own tecniques. For example, last week at a party, I met a publisher of a cool New York magazine called Black Book. Steve challenged me to shoot in a dressing room of the most impregnable boutique (according to the most official reviews) a virtually impossible task. My friends made bets that I would never be able to do it... But I did it! It took so much preparation and investigation. I had my hair done and wore all of my most expensive clothes, my best shoes and handbag. I said the designer was my friend etc.. etc.. pretended a limousine was waiting for me outside...I can't disclose what boutique it was so far. But it's all going to be revealed in the magazine, with the pictures I took there. i definitely would have won an Oscar for my performance there! I definitely gained more confidence on my missions. I always think of this "self-improvement" trick I learned as a child: When you don't feel completely confident, pretend you OWN this place!It always works!

FP: Can I ask you a technical question, Do you always use natural light or flash and can you manipulate the lighting at all in a dressing room? And what kind of camera do you use?
EM: I use Lumix camera. I love it because it's so small, and has wide angle lens. Which is very useful in a tiny place like dressing room. Also when I take Guerrilla pictures outside for a project (like my latest collaboration with Bella Freud) where I am not supossed to shoot, the design of the camera makes me look like a tourist, while I get the professional quality photos. So I avoid getting permits, etc... 99% of the time I don't use flash. And I never used flash in the dressing rooms.Although I tried to manipulate it often. For example I'd bring paper and scotch tape and cover lights that I don't like, or put color gels over the available lights. (For example, in my "Rats" picture I put a green gel over the lights. The reason I chose this color is because I was inspired by Bruce Nauman's Mapping The Room video instalation. it was an edit of the basement in his house in New Mexico, shot with a night vision device. You just sit there and watch as a rat or a cat or a moth moves by ocassionally. It sounds boring, but it's quite cool. Bruce Nauman has always been very inspiring to me. In his videos he worked with his own body, as a material; one can sense exactly what he was experiencing just by watching the videos! He also made interactive sculptures, like narrow corridors or double-layer cage you sqeeze yourself through and feel terribly claustrophobic. Basically he created a body/out of body experience for his audience. I feel like I've done that in my own way, with the dressing rooms - using my body in a confined spaces. Eventually people who see those photos feel like, wow - I wish I could have done it!

FP: Can you explain your process...is your work pre-meditated or spontaneous?
EM: Fifty-fifty. Sometimes it's so pre-meditated that i spend sleepless nights thinking about the shots. I am a very obsessive person about projects that I'm passionate about. It occupies all of me and takes complete control over me. Sometimes I dream a shot up then I wake up, and scribble them on a scrap of paper,(I suspect it and then re-create it photographically I may be an incarnation of Mozart;-). I have a bunch of those drawings I'm working on bringing to life. Like Martin Kippenberger liked to use hotel stationaries for his drawings, when I travel to London, my favorite most easily available paper source is the Evening Standard large sheets where they write the latest news announcements. I use the back of those papers. And it's funny because i don't have to date them - each dream corresponds with the news that happened the day before. Some of my favorite ones from last summer are "Shorts Ban In A Heatwave", "A Woman Mugged For a 50p Bottle Of Water", "Killer Wasps Attack!" Some of my very best photographs were a result of my dreams. Also I love telling a story thorough a picture. I'd love a photo to be like a magic spell, that carries so many symbols and messages for different people. How amazing it would be to create a photograph that makes people stare at it and lose themselves in it because of the thoughts it evokes and takes you on the journey in your mind. However, my other best shots are completely spontaneous. Because of many shoots I do are Guerrilla style, no permits, or shooting all by myself at nights in dangerous neighborhoods, or on the contrary, running away from the Police...I can't worry and calculate, it's best to have faith that if things go wrong there will be a good surprse to redeem it.

FP: How do you feel about a $10,000 (I'm just throwing out a number here) dress or handbag?
EM: I have a funny relationship with expensive clothing. my parents never spoiled me. Until I was 13 I had only two outfits plus a school uniform. I had to wear shoes handed down by our neighbours, and one winter, even my school teacher, an older lady. I never knew there were amazing clothes out there! I was just happy my toes were not hanging out of my shoes. Soon after, when I began modeling and I came to Milan, I had to wear a dress on the news on TV. That dress was made of platinum and diamonds, and at that time was considered the most expensive dress in the world, ironically it cost as much as Damien Hirst's Skull! I had a vague idea of what I was wearing, but still it's something that is impossible to comprehend for a regular person. That experince devalued any expensive garments for me and removed my possible excitability about their prices. But in general, expensive clothes and shoes are of a better quality than the cheap ones. Very rarely I spoil myself with nice shoes, or a bag (Prozac alternative). But I have wonderful clothes from modeling for the designers, so I guess I am a spoiled bitch now...

FP: If you consider self-portraiture to be a form of autobiography then what chapter of your life are you in?
EM: Wow - there is a lot to tell. The project i just completed with Bella Freud was the illustration of who I've become since my dressing room shots. In the past few months I've become a completely different person. The dressing rooms were my selfish and narcissistic period, not because I didn't care about the others but because I knew myself best of other people, and I found my salvation in myself... I never cared about other peoples' opinions or judgements for example, My Grandma used to say "Why should you care of what someone thinks - you are not going to baptize your children with them". Meaning - you are not going to tie your life with them together on both social and devine level. But lately there have been a few things that turned my world around and caused me to start thinking of myself as a part of this incredibly complex world, the society. The first shock came with the movie I saw at ICA in London. The movie was Sooo sllloooowww, I actually fell asleep. But it was so powerful that even what I did see made me look at the world with different eyes. It was a French documentary called Beyond Hatred, about the trial of the group of young kids who killed a boy because he was gay. The family of the murdered boy and the prosecutor were dicussing the value of human life. Is 15 years in jail enough, is 20 too much? Are the murderers allowed pity and slack because their parents were drunks? And remember, that was the boy's MOTHER who was debating it - not some strangers or the jury. Come on, it's her flesh and blood that they murdered! So the film ended with the family writing an open letter to the killers in jail, saying that they hope they will regret what they did, and learn a lesson from that... and if they ever need anything - the family's door is always open for them! The young prosecutor was also so passionate and truly hoped the skinheads will come out of jail as better persons. Can you believe it? I realized that I was an uncivilized beast out of the jungle comparing to these people! At the same time I started reading Celine's Journey To The End Of The Night. (which happens to be considered one of the few most important books written in the past two centuries). When you read it, you become twenty years older, whatever age you are.

Both of these influences together caused a Big Bang in my head! I was seeing sparkles coming out of my ears! Collaborating with Bella (for the first time in my life, working together with another person, so unselfishly and devotedly, to create something meaningful and beautiful, not just shooting myself in the dressing room, but this time creating OUR self-portrait together) fueled, finally ignited, this explosion and my moving to a greater chapter in my life. On the top of that I barely escaped death twice while shooting at nights in London. (Doing my first shot I was mugged by a gang of ten, they took everything I had, they even ripped off my shoes, except for my camera that i was stupidly defending with my life! They couldn't believe their victim's insolence, so they threw me on the ground, but I saved the pictures inside the camera! Second time I literally bumped into eight guys dressed in black clothes and head masks who were robbing a high end boutique at 2am in London. I started to run and swisted my ankle, so I climbed under a car and saw one of them riding his motorcicle back and forth looking for me. That was the scariest moment of my life. But the pictures came out so beautiful that I could have done it all over again!

FP: Who are your current influences?
EM: As one of my other favorite writers Jean Genet talked about his lover, I would say "I'm preserved within the memory" of Celine's 'Journey'. It's like having been in love for the first time... For example I reinterpreted some of the most moving scenes from the book into the pictures for our project with Bella. Since the 'Journey' was a large part of who I was at that moment, it was an essencial element to show as a part of OUR self- portrait with Bella. I love people, and I am fascinated by people who make a difference in my life.

Another special person, a big time art director, Lee Swillingham, who has the most regarded art/fashion individuals listening to his advise, made quite an impression in my life. Considering his huge influence he manages to remain very real, while others would have become "diva" in his situation. I look up to him in this sense. He also introduced me to the coolest comic book series called Fables. It's a story about all the famous fairy-tale characters, surviving up to these days. The human ones (like Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, Snow White, Blue Beard) live in a secret neigbourhod in Manhattan, while the non-human fables (like the Three Bears, blind mice, dwarfs, hoblins...) live on the Animal Farm somewhere Upstate New York. The location is protected by the spells so only the magic creatures can find it. All of these characters are living modern lives, just like us, filled with betrayals, sex, crime, deceit... It's so incredibly smart and bizzare! Since I grew up travelling all over the world, I found my real home inside the magic of folklore of those countiries. Some of the stories I've heard from the natives had never been put on paper... That definitely made a special childhood. it made me very passionate about fairy tales. I know brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen by heart, also I love Swedish childrens' writer Astrid Lingdren who is most known for her Pipi Longstocking. But my favorite novel by her was Karlson Who Lives On The Roof. It's about a little man who had a propeller on his back and a button on his belt that activated it. He lived in a tiny house of one of the rooftops in Stolckholm. He made friends with a little lonely boy and they had many crazy mischievious adventures together. But my absolutely most favorite childrens writer is Gianni Rodari. He won many prizes in childrens' literature in Europe, but his books are surprisingly virtually unavailable in English language. One of my favorite stories was about a boy who found an old TV set on the garbage, soon discovering that it showed all the programms a day ahead - the future (including all the world news and sports events)! How fantastic but simple is that! I actually referred to this story in one of my shots for Bella Freud.

Another story told about a man from Rome who wanted to steal the Colloseum. He was totally obsessed about possesing it. Every evening of his life, coming back home from work he stuffed his bags with as many bricks as he could carry. After many years his entire house was filled with the bricks. They were in his drawers, on his shelves, piled by the walls... Until he had to turn sideways to squeeze himself on the way to his bed. One evening, fifty years later... he was very old, hunched over, wrinkled and short of breath... he stopped by the Colloseum again. He was looking at it and realized that the Colloseum was as grand and magestic as always, glowing gloriously in the light of the Sunset. The man wasted his entire life working on trying to posess something...When I read this story i must have been ten years old. It terrified me and taught me a big lesson. I guess my dressing rooms were influenced by this idea of non-possesion that I've been developing inside myself since I was a child. And finally, it all leads to inspiration by children. I have a little barely-five year-old beautiful girl Sophie as my protege. She is so passionate about photography, she takes beautiful pictures with her little camera. Her family is very excited about our "working" together. i believe we can learn from each other and inspire each other fundumentally. She can teach me her own perspective, the one we were born with, but have lost. She still has it. I haven't had my first camera until about three years ago. I see Sophie as myself, of what I could have been at her age if I had a camera then! What could I only be like NOW if I had had a camera wane I was five???

FP: Where do you see your work evolving? Can we have a taste of the future project(s) of Elle Muliarchyk? Are you continuing to use fashion as a medium of expression?
EM: Yes, I have several projects going on. They are fashion-oriented at various degrees. Using fashion as good medium for me, because it becomes self-biographic and it's genuine in this way. Fashion is a huge and undeniable part of our lives - it involves our basic instincts - like ego, greed, desire for acceptance, desire for beauty... So why not use it simply as a material, as an artist uses plaster, to create any message you want. My most "world-changing", as I would dare to call it, project is a very wide-angle, (documentary, beautiful, exposing, poetic, philosophical) story about a group of girls who pursue the most difficult dream there is. It's a very tragic, heartbreaking story, but also the one that fills you with strength and faith. This group of girls is the golden kernel that reflects the deep nature inside all of us. The details are a secret so far (because it will take time to complete it), but I'm sure it will be a shocking eye-opener for the society.

Another project will address an issue that is very important to me.I am going to explore the language of violent images. I think that art involving that kind of imagery has a kind of transcendent relevance. It starts with my traumatic childhood experience with living in a constant fear of a serial killer in Belarus. The story continues when I come to New York to be a model... I was submerged and drowned in the culture that embraces the cruel and violent treatment of women in an accepted and glamorized manner. I was at the very nucleus of the society that encourages women metaphorically and physically to mutilate themselves (compulsive and absurdly excessive plastic surgeries) and kill themselves (eating disorders). Personally I was hurt by it a lot, so it's a very important and painful subject to me. I know it's a far reaching dream, but i want to make a difference in this culture promoting this kind of physical brutality towards women. A series of the shoots that I'll be working on will be a metaphor to that agony and masochism women are going through. The pictures, although mouth-watering by aesthetic standards, will show violence and pain. I want my "fashion" imagery be a shocking messenger, I want to tell a story that disturbs you and makes you think, instead of simply producing "off-the-conveyor-belt" predictable, brain-softening, crowd-pleasing pictures.