## Pat Oleszko on Fashion as Art, Red Carpets, and Why Her Work Refuses to Sit Still
At a moment when fashion weeks and museum calendars increasingly borrow each other’s language, American artist Pat Oleszko has little patience for the idea that “fashion as art” is a fresh theme. For decades, she has built a practice around outsized costumes, inflatable sculpture, and performance that treats the body as both structure and subject — a way to metabolize what she calls “worldly chaos” in public.
Oleszko, who is currently the subject of a solo show at SculptureCenter in New York, recently appeared in a high-profile fashion context as well: during Paris Fashion Week, her work was presented as a centerpiece by Pat Oleszko, described as a massive inflatable “nincompoop” that “thrives on hot air.” An installation view of “Blowhard” (1995) circulated alongside the conversation, underscoring how her objects read as both spectacle and critique.
In a phone conversation, Oleszko framed red-carpet dressing as a question of context rather than pure display. Asked what she would wear if invited to the Oscars, she said it would depend on why she was there — weighing “place, subject, my relationship to it, and what I have around the house.” If she were attending as a “freelance personage,” she added, the look would likely be “hopelessly exotic, elaborate, and probably inappropriate for their concept of what you should wear.”
The talk quickly turned to the Met Gala and its recurring attempts to formalize the relationship between couture and contemporary art. Oleszko’s response was characteristically barbed. “Did you know that the theme this year is ‘fashion as art’?” she asked, before adding: “I said ‘OK, Iris Apfel is dead, where’s my invitation?’ I’ve known fashion as art for a lot longer than they have.”
For Oleszko, the problem is not the premise but the machinery around it — the way institutional glamour can flatten the very ideas it claims to celebrate. She argued that if the theme were taken seriously, the most coherent gesture would be to hand the styling over to artists who understand clothing as a medium rather than a brand asset. “Yes, that would be excellent,” she said of the idea of attendees being dressed by her. But she also suggested that the sharper move is to confront the corporate logic underwriting these events, describing the red-carpet ecosystem as “self-indulgent over-expression at the benefit of large corporations.”
That tension — between exuberant surface and pointed politics — sits at the center of her SculptureCenter presentation. Oleszko described herself as “a performance person,” and characterized what viewers encounter in the exhibition as “vestiges of performance,” with her own body functioning as the work’s underlying structure. “I am the armature/canvas for the ideas,” she said, choosing “armature” because it makes the proposition sound properly sculptural. “I’m a movable art form.”
The insistence on liveness is not an add-on, she argued, but the core of the practice. “I’ve never had an art show that was just on the wall,” she said. For her, a live rendition is what demonstrates that the work is “lively,” that it “makes it happen.” She contrasted that with the conventional white-cube economy of static objects made to be sold, saying she never felt a “need to make static work that was going to be on four white walls for people to come and buy.”
In an art world that often treats performance as an event and objects as the residue, Oleszko reverses the hierarchy: the object is a trace, the body is the engine, and the spectacle is a delivery system for ideas that are, in her telling, inseparable from the mess of contemporary life.
Her comments land with particular force now, as museums, fashion houses, and biennials continue to test the boundaries between cultural capital and commercial theater. Oleszko’s work suggests that the most interesting performances are not the ones staged for cameras, but the ones that keep asking who the stage is really built for.
