Exhibitions of the Week: Living in Extravagance with Isaac Mizrahi at the Jewish Museum, Studio Job at the MAD

Isaac Mizrahi: An Unruly History (Until August 7 at the Jewish Museum)

By his own account, Isaac Mizrahi procrastinates quite a bit. You'd never guess as much from An Unruly History, which surveys Mizrahi's career in fashion (main role) and television, film, and drawing (all memorable supporting roles). You could, naturally, take this talk of procrastination as tongue-in-cheek: my source for the "procrastination" remarks was an exhibition preview one-on-one featuring Mizrahi and catalogue contributor Lynn Yaeger, who also spent their time discussing mutual friends, the annoyances of plane trips, and black-and-white cookies. Though there are times, lots of them, when Mizrahi comes off as all four Seinfeld leads wrapped into one person, there is also an undeniable earnestness to his work. Channeling that earnestness, often simply by showcasing fabric scraps Mizrahi likes and womenswear concepts Mizrahi has drawn, is one of the things that this first-ever all-Mizrahi exhibition does best. Maybe not as tongue-in-cheek as you thought, now is he?

The first thing you will see at the Jewish Museum's concise, impactful exhibition defines Mizrahi as well as any single sight ever could: an entire wall of fabric swatches, organized on a color-by-color spectrum. Green, red, orange, and pink are the colors that seem to dominate, when all this is viewed from a distance-yet up close, you'll also notice expertly curated solid blues and patterned grays. A lot of the exhibition is like this-showy interiors, and kernels of deeper interest-starting with the pinks, greens, and pastels of Mizrahi's early 1990s womenswear. A sheath dress with totem pole designs, a gala skirt paired with a cotton t-shirt, a red ball gown with a matching statin baby carrier-with these and more, Mizrahi pointedly, playfully questions the boundaries between high and low fashion. Some of his dresses look ravishing from a distance: are they still ravishing, once it becomes apparent that they're patterned with camouflage and Coca-Cola logos?

Yet curators Chee Pearlman and Kelly Taxter have a couple clever pairings of their own. In between the garment galleries and a three-screen video showcase is a single room of Mizrahi sketches-a sanctuary, almost, for his wide-shouldered, thin-faced, spindle-legged figures. It isn't so much a break in tone as a sign that, for Mizrahi, all tones are somehow possible. Comical dresses, or drawings that could be better-dressed Giacomettis? Mizrahi's opera costumes, or Mizrahi's Les MIZRahi cabaret show? Mizrahi's work for the runway, or Mizrahi's 2002-2008 collection for Target? Take your pick or, much better, take them all.

Studio Job MAD HOUSE (Until August 21 at the Museum of Arts and Design)

A design language like the one that Studio Job is so fluent in isn't normally encountered day-to-day. Despite the age-old trickle-down from high to everyday fashion, home decoration companies would be hard pressed to get the Belgium-based atelier's trains, gorillas, bent-over Eiffel Towers (to say nothing of its excesses of glass mosaic and gold coating) into anybody's home. It's also prohibitively hard imagining the firm's eccentricities front-and-center anywhere other than the Museum of Arts and Design, an institution that seems more eccentric by the year, Columbus Circle address or no Columbus Circle address. Letting Studio Job take over two whole floors has resulted in a show that is at once outlandish and controlled. It naturalizes the firm's approach to design a little too much-prevents Studio Job pieces from leaping out at you, the way they would in a Whitney or MoMA theme showcase-but gives you a complete enough view to see that Studio Job is more than a diversion or an anomaly.

In short, these folks are actually doing what Jeff Koons thinks he's doing. And they just might do camp better than anybody: the floor and wall coverings chosen for MAD HOUSE give off a cartoon dungeon effect, which is only enhanced by Studio Job's taste for flipped-over architecture and huge, cartoony effigies. (Somewhere right now, a toddler is probably losing sleep over the big bronze Candleman that leers out of one of the exhibit's walls.) Of course, there are techniques here that get played to exhaustion (table surfaces that seem to be built out of smoke billows) and acts of homage that are too obvious to be interesting (a smoking pipe meant to recall another Belgian oddball, Rene Magritte). But there is a lot that a screen festooned with animal skeletons or a King Kong covered with 120,000 Swarovski crystals will excuse, and there are a lot of sights like those. I couldn't imagine any of this in my own home, but I couldn't imagine a better, if temporary, home for the fancies and flamboyances of Studio Job.