The Rick Owenscene Future Is Here

At first I thought the sunblasted video of Rick Owens’ 2027 collection, presented last week on the shadeless place of the Palais de Tokyo in the midst of the 40-degree Saharan omega heatdeath of Europe, felt like a prequel to Mad Max, with stranded club kids trudging through the desert, clinging to the increasingly tenuous expectation that there’ll be a gas station, and it’ll have gas. As I was typing this out, I thought of a rebooted Gerry, Gus Van Sant’s near-wordless exploration of survival and the violent sublime, with the roles of Casey Affleck and Matt Damon replaced by 100 models. But then I come back to Sand and Sea (Marina), the climate catastrophe opera installation at the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, where performers loll about on a doomed beach, only it’s restaged by the S&M goths scurrying under the glass floor of Anne Imhoff’s Faust in the German Pavilion the Biennale before. Having experienced complicated awe at Owens’ similar show on the identical…