Model Behaviour

Yesterday I opened my regular newsletter from fashion.psfk, only to discover an intriguing headline: Guerilla Modelling. This story described the exloits of model Elle Muliarchyk, who, in trying to break free from the creative constraints and passivity of modelling, began to visit the most expensive designer boutiques, and changed into beautiful, worth-more-than-your-car dresses, bringing with her such strange props as a 300-year old mirror, a 6-foot stuffed panda or a giant King Kong hand without rousing shop assistant's suspicions. Often she is gone, snapping away inside her cubicle, for lengthy periods of time, and when she is discovered there are all kinds of bizarre explanations people invent for her behaviour, at one point eventually leading to her arrest.

There is something oddly touching about these hasty, spontaneous works of art. The risks she has taken and the creative medium seem to raise her work to almost glorious heights, embodying to me what contemporary art aspires to. And it really is a marvel how professional some photographs look, the King Kong one especially having the suspension-of-belief qualities of digital imaging, while others look so home-made and mundane that one feels there beside her, taking self-indulgent pictures in countless familiar changing rooms.