MAR‘13.
FREE
ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON is a not-for profit organisation which attempts to generate awareness and publicity for artists, musicians, performers and writers who need a public platform. We operate a system of nil returns and actively opt out of any commercial interests: the interests of Araf Collective are personal and reactionary; a creative site of resistance against ‘arts cuts’ culture. We are a means for you to get your work seen, in a venue for free: a means of keeping creativity breathing. And before you ask...
‘ARAF’ (pronounced ‘ARAV’) is Welsh for ‘SLOW’. So Take your time and enjoy. YOU MAKE THIS! Send your creative contributions to:
arafcollective@live.co.uk follow us: @ARAFCollective arafcollectivelondon.com ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON THANKS PROFUSELY: Rob @ THE WRECK, Archie the brilliant sound-man, THE FAIRY JAIL, BENEDICT, HOLLOW GIANTS, Contributers to this issue: O.P.G., H.A., E.L., T.W., E.P., C.F, R.S... And you, our Salt Sniffers and Lighthouse Keepers.
>>>ARAF NEWSFLASH >>> January’s LIGHTHOUSE gig was a resounding success! The packedout Wreck rocked to the sounds of Yossarian and The Caulfield Beats (who will return in April for an electronic audio/visual encore! ). But for now... QUICK MARCH!!!
THIS MONTH: ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON are proud to present :
‘LIGHTHOUSE’ at THE WRECK, Camberwell, 28.03.2013 featuring
THE FAIRY JAIL / BENEDICT / HOLLOW GIANTS FOR YOUR LISTENING PLEASURE! And the Second Edition of Free Zine...
SMELLIN’ SALTS featuring
THE BANDS, ART, REVIEWS, OPINIONS, POETRY and more! FOR PERUSAL AT YOUR LEISURE! Coming Soon: a NEW event
FRUIT MACHINE
A Sweet Ideas Jam Session , Free & Open to all! @ Three Kings, Clerkenwell, 08.04.2013
FOR YOUR BRAIN JUICES!
SMELLIN’ SALTS is a strategic rip-off of legendary mid-70s Punk Zine SNIFFIN’GLUE. Our tongue-in-cheek reincarnation, for ARAF COLLECTIVE LONDON, ‘SMELLIN’ SALTS... ‘, is intended as a reviving whiff for the modern nose. It secretly pines for those heady days of UHU, Tippex and Xerox dust.
THIS MONTH ARAF COLLECTIVE PRESENTS...
THE FAIRY JAIL
The Fairy Jail was born when busker/ producer Daniel Spiller(of The Broken Record Project, recently featured on Radio 2) discovered the vocal talents of Cíara Rafferty in an old Irish bar. Frequently to be found busking on the South Bank and London Underground, this year the Fairy Jail are bound for a European tour. Their debut single “Union Town” is now available on iTunes/Spotify.
BENEDICT
Following the release of his first EP ‘Glory Days’ early in 2012, Benedict has supported the likes of Mystery Jets, Karima Francis & Alexandra Burke. 2012 also held opportunities to collaborate with SBTV (Jamal Edwards called him ‘dope’), BBC Introducing Radio and to perform at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, The Royal Albert Hall and at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Pageant at Windsor Castle. Benedict’s second EP ‘Another Way’ was released in November of 2012 and he is now hard at work in the studio finishing his third EP of the series due for release Spring/ Summer 2013.
HOLLOW GIANTS ‘Its like the first slice of cake or ripping open a fresh pack of cigarettes’ -AdamNot Eve Hypnotic rolling drums, scuzzy guitars and powerful vocals: London based garage rockers Hollow Giants have been compared to the BRMC. In true DIY fashion, they make recordings on an 8 track in their garage. Following the success of their free download release Dreams / Fears in 2012, Hollow Giants debut-single featuring tracks Brother and Panic Bill will be self-released on 11.03.13... so check it out!
CATHERINE FLAY on PAGE THREE I find it hard to express myself when asked what is wrong with page three? What isn’t? It’s part of a wider problem of women being undercut as they express themselves in the media, of the increasing agency of women in the 20th and 21st centuries parodied and undercut by circumscribing a woman’s place as naked on camera amongst news she, in her naked state alluding to the privacy of the home she is supposedly allowed to leave in this liberal society, is unable to be part of. In a way, a naked female body shown might encourage its celebration, but the important thing about the bodies in these photographs is that they are not ‘female’ in terms of the diversity of image that word should conjure up, but female in terms of the shape of men’s fantasies and photoshop skills. In the very moment of their nudity, the women who present naked femininity to the masses through the Sun, are clothed in symbolism and maximised and minimised in all the places that modern culture has come to view as appropriate. There’s also a more theoretical (and alienating to a lot of people) argument lurking here which asks what the proximity is between fetishization and humiliation? Men celebrate these women in a very limited sense, in a sense that repetitively seeks the security of a familiar image, a shape that presents no challenges in what it looks like and thereby also in what it symbolizes. The nudity that is to be celebrated is moderated – it fits what has already been seen and is therefore acceptable. The editing studios of the Sun churn out images that tell men at once that it offers them multiple beauties - look at the wide variety of women we have here for you to choose from, in fact you can vicariously have them all – but who are also all the same, symbolize some one thing, some particular security of counterpart to male identity. The women on these pages are intellectually undermined, not simply because their job is as unchallenging as removing clothes and pulling faces and poses, but because comment boxes around their photographs describe some supposedly complex theories that we are to assume could not possibly have come from the innards of these female shapes. We are invited to see the irony in the contrast between the pure visuality of the image of femininity represented and the complexity of internal
working that would be required to arrive at the accompanying thought-statement. The implication is that these women are pure exteriority, pure object. They constitute nothing in themselves, from the inside out; they are generated from the outside in, expected to develop matching behavior for the image portrayed of them which is not of them as individuals but of them as a group of counterparts to male agency.
To be undressed in public is to be ridiculous. I found it very amusing to see that David Cameron was bursting out of his shirt at a recent dinner. He slipped, for a moment, outside of the decorum of his suited position, and into the realms of the unclothed. His public face became dislodged and in place we saw into the weakness of the ultimate privacy of the human body as he exposed his flesh to the world. One dresses appropriately for different occasions, nobody can deny the symbolic weight that clothing carries in a country full of school uniforms, labels such as ‘white collar workers’ and dress codes for just about everything. Why then does anybody try to deny that a dress code that says not only ‘wear nothing’ but also ‘act as a blank canvas for photoshop’ means something more than nothing. This dress code says ‘you are not fit to be seen by the public, yet you are to be seen and enjoyed by them’, it says ‘you should be ashamed of yourself’ but also ‘be proud of your shame’. My opinion is that this is a violence to the totality of any female, to force their naked body, warped to the satisfaction of the male gaze, to circumscribe the rest of their being, to force them to regard their body as an economic good, a possession along with anything else that is
only theirs until they sell it or if they can afford to keep it, to desensitize the male gaze to the radical challenge of the naked female body, and to filter female sexual desire through the bizarre lens of male eroticization. It should be made incredibly clear that this is nothing AT ALL to do with men being allowed to find women attractive. This is an issue of economics and commodification. I would go so far as call it a male pathological problem, this desire to see a women in a weaker situation than oneself; she is naked while the viewer is safely clothed, publicized while the viewer can hide behind closed doors, posed in a sexually submissive manner. Attraction is natural, chemical drives within living organisms inspire a desire to reproduce, but not a desire to peep, to perv, to show so violently the cut-intoshape image of the female body that page three creates. Women should be forging the narratives as writers, camera operators, editors etc, not acting as the stuff of dreams in front of the lens. They should be the object of verbs not objectified as inactive. The male gaze, in part inspired by the cultural myriad of oppression that the Sun is part of, is always watchful for women as they go about their business, undermining their agency with comments that suggest they have left the house for the gratification of those looks. We shouldn’t be reminded all the time of our presence as visual image, we should be allowed an internal monologue of our own volition as we walk down the streets, we should not be interrupted by cat calls or the cries of homosocial bonding – ‘she’s fit… she’s fat….I would…..’ It’s already selling one’s soul to work for News International, it’s unfair that women should have to sell their bodies as well. Banning page three is just one step in acknowledging that women should not be structured by men, that we own visual images of the feminine as much as any male gaze; that we have insides – brains, wombs, organs, thoughts – and outsides; that we are part of the world of the public, and as such also deserve our privacy; in short that we are people, we are real, and we are everywhere. . . . . .
Catherine’s Blog: www.signalbox2.blogspot.co.uk
IAN DAWSON: ARMADA : FIVE YEARS GALLERY: until 25.03.13
The Mutiny of the Bounty Oliver Peterson Gilbert & Hazel Atashroo In 1588, Spain’s ‘Armada Invencible’ was torn to rags and flotsam by divine tempests in the English Channel. Survival replaced conquest. The ships’ crews, starved and longing for a distant homeland, were soon lost to the shipping forecast. All that remained was tavern talk and shipwrecks both gathering limpets: a bounty waiting to be found. In 1956, Alison and Peter Smithson, Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson populated their region of the This Is Tomorrow Exhibition with the profane aesthetics of the ‘As Found’. Found objects, including a rusted bugle and a clock without hands, clung to the corrugated roof of a mock shanty-town shack. Roughly honed and provocatively incongruous in the Whitechapel Gallery, the installation synthesized impressions of post-Nuclear futures and Neolithic pasts in a dialectical vision of its present.
In 2013, we entered Dawson’s ramshackle studios. Crowded with bits, pieces and fragments, his habitat was one of atomic collision and material fusion: the white heat of making. A ‘making’ palpably informed by a vast knowledge of material properties, gained through perpetual experimentation over years of praxis. On encountering the Armada, we found its constituent vessels gathering limpets on the studio wall, braced for the next creative storm… Ian Dawson draws on remains and their tensions. He repopulates. Armada is not a work of conquest but a work of multiple survivals. The work exists as a polemic act. Akin to the clock without hands, conscientiously objecting to its production line duty, Dawson’s Armada refuses its complicit function as art-object/end-product. The alienation of the art product from its laborious ‘making’ process is fundamental to its auratic efficacy: the magician’s trick stays the capital of the circle; the proverbial turd gets polished in secret. Dawson explores mutability in making as a resistant provocation, actualizing ethical concerns over the polished-aesthetic hegemony. He attempts to reinvigorate the dialectic between materiality and interpretability through the carnivalesque parody of ceaseless (re)making. Armada leads a mutiny of the art bounty, anchoring the work in the divine tides of perpetual incompletion. Dawson’s work is informed by a fascination with the far-reaching material biographies of everyday objects. The material lives of manufactured products tend to far exceed the brief roles in production and consumption which we designate them. Accruing layers of cultural significance throughout their voyages, material atoms are reconfigured, their surfaces painted, lacquered and labelled; they are packed, shipped, bought and sold, abused and neglected. Once broken down beyond recognition, material narratives persist, even when lost to us as forgotten particles cast into the ocean. Forgotten particles that repeat in us with every mouthful of fish finger.
Dawson’s studio is itself an ecosystem of living materials in states of transformation, by nature or nurture. A bounty of industrially processed materials are bought in or salvaged, cut down to size, reformed and repurposed. A lump of red clay is reborn as a slice of iron girder, its load-bearing qualities questionable. A constellation of punched metal sheets in pop colours are reminiscent of props from Len Lye’s 1935 A Colour Box animation. When plunged into the inertia of darkness, Armada’s remnants, like bioluminescent sea-creatures fathoms below the surface, begin to glow. And yet we imagine that in an off-cuts bin behind the workshop jigsaw, a further primordial soup of misshapen flotsam is waiting to evolve. Paolozzi famously characterised his production method as ‘Construct. Tack. Destroy. Recommence’. This notion of extended production is evident within Armada’s material biographies and is fundamental to its efficacy thereby evading any commodifiable telos.
Ever the bricoleur, Dawson’s reach is not limited to material repurposing. In a further carnivalesque exaggeration of process and material alienation, a crew of Lilliputian construction workers are pressganged to serve as painters and decorators upon this sculptural fleet. To us, as onlookers, these diminutive workers appear to apply layers of oil paint and
glitter to the units, enacting a transformation of surface not in keeping with the material base. This action introduces a Benjaminian auratic sensibility through Armada’s polished poop-decks. Their theatrical gilding shatters the chain of signification, parodying the hidden stages in the commodification of objects: a semiotic sleight-of-hand spectacle with lashings of neon sludge and glitter globules. Will you accept the King’s Shilling?
Curiouser and curiouser, this nautical Wonderland is also populated by scantily-clad miniature bathers, lounging as though bronzing above deck on some Mediterranean cruise. Are these art consumers basking in the reflected heat of the artwork’s glittering patina? A tonguein-cheek reference to the ‘classical nude’ of tradition? Ray Ban’d cherubs in an ironic Rousseauian arcadia? Is their narrative of less import than the phenomenological sensation of the scale model that they evoke? Then what of the glass eyeballs and monstrously exposed brains that can be found growing sporadically from the sculptures’ undulating surfaces? To offer any finite diagnosis would serve merely to stunt the growth of this ever transmogrifying work. Today’s encounter was but one moment in the biography of Dawson’s Armada, a hastily scribbled entry in the Captain’s log. We experienced the sculpture in its habitat, the tempestuous studio environment, knowing that what we have observed will be but archaeological layers, buried in its own unfolding narrative. Despite its seeming stasis in these catalogue photographs, Armada’s future lies in uncharted waters, a slippery bounty never to be raised. The Armada’s log book awaits your entry, your tavern talk.
be so, because we modern visitors, wouldn’t be able to recognise all the protagonists without this biolographical assistence.
MAN RAY PORTRAITS a review by ERICA PAYET The National Portrait Gallery’s curator of photographs, Terence Pepper, wrote on the NPG blog, that ‘One of the many challenges in assembling a major exhibition on such a well-known photographer and artist as Man Ray was how best to share new research and balance the introduction of great, but lesser known works, together with great prints of his most iconic works.’ Pepper’s concern is interesting: firstly, because it defines what a successful museum exhibition should strive to do, and, secondly, because it helps understand ‘Man Ray Portraits’. Let us first note, with relief, that the exhibition starts with a sentence explaining that the prints are vintage. I was really glad to see this because, lately, museum photography shows (notably, Klein/Moriyama at the Tate) have disconcerted me in their wide use of ‘printed later’ pieces. But here, the prints have this wonderful look of true vintage beauties: some are very small in size, nested in their large off-white marie-louises with a thin dark wood frame that tastefully contrasted with the pale grey walls. The exhibition’s layout is simple, chronological, and NOT TOO LONG. It kept me hooked from beginning to end, with short explanatory wall texts that put everything (I mean everyone) back into the context of the exciting epoch of Paris in the years 1920-30. But maybe this is where something goes wrong: the text slightly overshadows the images. Indeed, it is the text that brings you back to this exciting era. An era when Duchamp, Man Ray, the Surrealists, Gertrude Stein, Peggy Guggenheim, Hemingway, and others shared a life of Bohême in Paris. Of course, this has to
The exhibition focuses on a tiny part of Man Ray’s activity: his photography (which was not the main part of his work, the would-be painter), and his portraits (it feels like a filtered database search of his backcatalogue). Understandably, little is said about his use of photography as a formal experimentation method: solarisation is touched upon in the Lee Miller room, and the central horizontal windows displaying magazines (Vogue, Vu, Harper’s Bazaar) give additional material, such as a double page about rayographs. Man Ray’s portraits (as portraits always do, I suppose) sit in a particular sphere in between artistic research, documentation, assignment and object - destined as a gift to the sitter. This is why you rely heavily on the text, and this is why the exhibition is not so much about Man Ray’s art as about Man Rays’ circle, or Man Ray’s exciting life among the VIPs of the time, if you will. ‘Man Ray Portraits’ also refers to some of the celebrity artistic movements of the mid-twentieth century: Dada, Surrealism, the Lost Generation, the Bloomsbury group, etc. In this respect, it sits well with the Barbican’s current exhibition, ‘The Bride and the Bachelors’, Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns, and also with ‘Schwitters’ at Tate Britain. Ultimately, there are two kinds of portraits shown: the portraits of his friends, men (mostly) and women, who were artists or collectors and defined the history of art; and portraits of models (mostly women, and -ohmostly nude). These nude model portratis are by definition not properly ‘portraits’ because the artist does not photograph their faces in order to show them as ‘individuals’, rather, he makes compositions with their bodies. These works come closer to showcasing Man Ray’s artistic vision. Sometimes these two sides of portraiture blurred and came together, especially when a model was also his lover or wife, such as the outstanding Lee Miller, who was also a photographer herself, and one of the most beautiful women in the show - or should I say a woman whose beauty comes closer to ‘our society’s’ standards of beauty? Nevertheless, it is a fascinating show that I would advise everyone to go see. In the meantime, I bought Man Ray’s autobiography, and dived into it. Man Ray, Portraits | 7 February – 27 May 2013 | National Portrait Gallery Read More of Erica’s art reviews at: watchingphotographs.wordpress.com
CONSIDER THE STOMACH by RUDDEGER Franz Kafka was, like most human beings on this ball we call ‘earth’, born. He was born to a German speaking Jewish family and this was not particularly unheimlich. Some of his family died in extermination camps. Extermination camps were places where prisoners - in this case, the Jewish people - were sent to die: they were shot or gassed or they starved or they were melted and turned into ash and the ash was used in cigarettes.
Franz died, his eyes fixed upon a clock. His stomach was puckered to the size of a fist. He weighed under ninety pounds at the time of his death. Think about these things. His family, dying in the concentration camps. Franz, on his death bed, hollowed out. His own story, the Hunger Artist. The hunger of the human race, desperate for love in a violent climate. Hunger to write, the hunger to burn it all away. Recall the image: Franz’s eyes, fixed upon the clock at the time of his death. The grip on his sister’s hand, still strong. A life consumed by hunger.
Franz didn’t get along with his father. His father was called Hermann. The name Hermann was most popular in the 19th century and approximately 25% of German males possessed this name. This may or may not be true.
Consider the stomach. An empty one is a dangerous thing for humanity.
His father was a bully. He once wrote his father a letter detailing his gross faux pas as a patriarch. Franz found solace from reality in the realms of fiction. Fiction isn’t reality, but it may as well be because it’s nicer there and, more often than not, is made out of paper.
The author of this piece was found dead three days ago by the Southwark Local Authorities. Witnesses say that the last thing they saw near Ruddeger’s flat was a Metaphor. The Metaphor was last seen wearing a moustache and no trousers.
So Franz began writing stories. He wrote a story called The Hunger Artist. His stories were wild and wonderful but Franz was a harsh critic. He burned mostly all of his work. He is now considered a genius. People such as Lawrence Welk- American accordionist and TV personality, 1955-1982 - was a Kafka enthusiast. This may or may not be true. Franz began to die, as we all do. He had tuberculosis. His lungs were racked with illness, tortured into submission and he had convulsive fits and was succeptible to the expulsion of rancid, copper-smelling bodily fluids. He was cared for by his sister. His illness was stubborn and consumed his entire body. He couldn’t eat because his throat was lined with sores and stinging ridges and disease-created gills. Total Parenteral Nutrition had not been invented at this particular time; Franz, then, was left to starve by humanity’s inability to invent solutions before it was too late.
The Pudding Collection James Cornish
THEPOETRY
CORONER
Aluna. Waiting so we can stand upon the silver of the high-rise. Sweet tooth darlin’ a day of blinking. A day without is done. A lunar mist for patchwork eyes and balcony bikes. Jarrowland. Neon stained Friday gas filling. Its scent: Offal Spleen Treats. Drink up. Skittle smooth eyes roll white. Spine recycles while heavy insulation sweeps through piss. God licks wet fence liquorice - if undelivered. Marker Pen Sparrows. Undressing the September black to the warmth of her September back. Smoking on the bed her lips September red. The D bus rumbles on. The D bus rumbles on. The D bus rumbles on... Marker pen sparrows fade on the wall.
Pheasants Georgia Carys Williams I plucked a brace of dead pheasants, just so I could keep the colours of their feathers, to compliment my complexion. I took a picture of dead pheasants, just so I could keep the colours of their feathers before we would eat them as nothing more than a seasoned meat, a pleasant taste upon our palettes, without a hint of affection. Grieving Georgia Carys Williams There’s no crying like it. Instinct’s howl folded him up, chortling its sound like the start of a loud, bellowing laugh. He turned to me, “You wouldn’t understand,” tearing from frightened eyes. True. Nothing to fight. It has not opened its jaws, bitten into my chest and dragged me down. Give me something to grieve about, I am yet to make the sound.
YOU MAKE THIS !!! Send submissions for the APRIL edition to: arafcollective@live.co.uk