As its name suggests, Mschf can be an exclamatory mishmash of art, consumer goods, projects and other undefinable intangibles.
Now several years after the Brooklyn-based collective started, Phaidon is gearing up for the March 6 release of “Made by Mschf,” a book that draws back the curtain on some of Mschf’s more viral creations.
Provocative and ironic, Mschf has whipped up such pop culture commentaries as a line of designer handbags that are only visible under a microscope and an anime dating game that helps players generate a functional tax return.
Readers of the book will find a blueprint of 12 of the collective’s projects that highlights how they were conceptualized and executed. How else could one understand the ATM Leaderboard, an ATM that was set up at Art Basel Miami that ranked users by their respective bank balances?
Written by two of Mschf’s cofounders, Kevin Wiesner and Lukas Bentel, the 284-page “Made by Mschf” is largely visual and plays up experimentation. Started in 2016 and reincorporated in 2019, by Gabriel Whaley, Daniel Greenberg, Stephen Tetreault, Wiesner and Bentel, Mschf is widely known by some for its “Jesus Shoes” and its “Satan shoes.” Both projects took a jab at consumerism and spoofed larger entities. The former were made from Nike Air Max 97s and featured a gold crucifix emblem on the upper, and the sneakers were said to be injected with holy water to enable the wearer to walk on water. After the rapper Lil Nas X launched the “Satan Shoes,” repurposed Nike sneakers with an inverted cross and a drop of human blood, a social media firestorm ensued in 2021. And Nike sued Mschf for trademark infringement, a dispute that both parties later settled.
A guest is seen wearing the Mschf red boots outside the Collina Strada show during New York Fashion Week on Feb. 10, 2023.
Getty Images
In an interview, Wiesner spoke of Mschf’s inner workings and how it was started by “a handful of people who had been making things of a similar sensibility on the internet.” He and Bentel first met at the Rhode Island School of Design, later took part in the New Museum’s New Inc. program, and had worked together for about a decade before Mschf. He said that all of the founders were essentially asking the same question, “’How do you make any and all of the creative work that you want to do, and somehow exist in the world?’”
Before launching Mschf, they periodically met up for drinks, because “you’re not sure whether you’re competing with each other, or collaborating,“ he said. But after doing a few “little” projects together, they felt that they “worked extremely well together, and that we really complemented each other in a way that felt generative and fresh,” Wiesner said.
Wondering what would happen if they just made things, they set about doing that on the condition that they would release something new every two weeks “come hell or high water,” he said. Although there wasn’t a master plan as to how that would pan out two or three years later, the founders had faith that they “would certainly make some interesting things. And making interesting things can open up a lot of other doors,” Wiesner said.
Democratizing fashion and luxury is one element of Mschf.
Courtesy of MSCHF
The trajectory of the “Jesus Shoes” to the “Satan Shoes” and then the Nike lawsuit established sneakers as “this object category almost by accident that became like a vertical within the larger umbrella of what we were doing. Over time, that became an ongoing business, where you make product and sell product,” Wiesner said.
Currently, Mschf’s output is half physical and half digital. “People say there are two business models. You either sell products or you provide a service. As category-spanning and ADHD as our output is, at the end of the day we sustain the drop cycle by selling the drops,” Wiesner said.
If that sounds like a riddle, it is. Wiesner agreed that as much as the collective does to make fun of consumerism, that also provides a major revenue stream. “Part of what the book wrestles with is, ‘Is Mschf an art practice? Are some of the things it makes artworks? Is that even a useful categorization?’” he said.
A screenshot from Mschf’s “Onlybags” drop.
Courtesy of MSCHF
He allowed that the collective “certainly has an underlying streak of critiquing consumers and being critical of those impulses and often satirizing the behaviors in that space.”
Case in point were the “Jesus shoes,” which were “the conflation of the [Nike] Swoosh and the cross — two brand logos at the top of their game.” From his viewpoint, if you are going to engage with consumerism artistically, you want to work with product. That is “quite different” from institutional art, which he said, “is often engaged in commentary. But unless it’s critiquing the art world, it tends to be silo-ed away from its subject material. Art is kind of this white box at the top of the ivory tower.”
One example of how Mschf makes art more accessible was “Severed Spots,” which involved cutting out the color spots from Damien Hirst prints and selling them as individual works of art. Wiesner also flagged the ATM Leaderboard as another sign of the collective’s reach. “Mschf is really bouncing around a whole lot of spaces,” he said.
Knowing that some people may only have seen one Mschf creation and presumed that was its specialty, Wiesner said, ”It’s not until you see a number of the works side-by-side that you start to observe the similarity of the approach to the work that spans across those categories. This idea of trying to make work and insert it in the relevant arena [like the bank balance-ranking ATM at Art Basel] is the sort of the thing that the practice is built on and that unites these horribly discombobulated pieces.”
The collective created microscopic luxury-inspired handbags, as seen here.
Mschf
Productive as it has been in churning out new material, Mschf’s initial impulse of chasing the things that it hasn’t done before still prevails. “We have a laundry list of things that includes architecture, land art and political campaigns — all of the things that we haven’t figured out how to engage with yet.”
As for whether “Made by Mschf” is giving away secrets, Wiesner said, “Maybe, but I also think that’s kind of nice. There is certainly a hope that the back stories behind these projects that we work through in the book could be helpful to people who are trying to make things and put them out into the world. To be honest, that would be amazing outcome.”
Wiesner and Bentel will participate in a March 13 talk at the New Museum with its artistic director Massimiliano Gioni.
