Issue 18 September 2013 AUS: $7.95 NZ: $8.99 UK: £4.95
BEN JONES STUART SMITH KING GIZZARD & THE LIZARD WIZARD LEIF PODHAJSKY PERKS & MINI
MOD is a platform for creative exchange. Be inspired, be challenged.
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Directors Robert Kell Bec Norman
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03 Love Letters from Ed
Feeling unloved? Let Ed pour his soul out to you.
05 Ben Jones
Hannah Stouffer gets to know the animated quirkster.
09 A Torn Tate
How does a man tear a gaping crack through the floor of the Tate? (Answer not included)
13 Leif Podhajsky
A psychedelic experience, minus the drugs? Look no further.
18 King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard
The seven-man music machine talks writing & living.
21 Fermented Smokin’
Smoking alcohol, everybody is doing it.
22 Lip Balm Plan
Sick of forking out the big bucks for a stick? Cook your own.
23 On the Horizon
James Dwight shares his monthly plethora of news.
29 Tennis with Ana Bathe
Old Greg has a hit with Ana Bathe and a chat about her art.
33 The Streets I Loved
Designer duo, P.A.M, unveil tales from their childhoods.
36 Ghanian Pale
A short story by Charles Bonsour.
07 MOD
06 Ben Jones T he fi atte rst rave ndin I c an g echo ing, was in remem on t b er s om ab an h e I wa e outsk doned h ir s ner v fif teen ts of L A angar , an d ou s . anti an x i reca ci o glow usly ap pation ll the p a shoo ing mas roached s we s t fog ing thro , rays of this that ne o u gh n of it s s cav eeped o the hea v Hea e u y r t n th ou v our y bass v s dome e top ib ti . rem ny fram rated t e mb hrou es , a e cons gh n ume r feeling d I d by its p complet This owe el y w r. as w
an or and ld to me ew the it was j , u b eg innin st g.
I was visually re-introduced to this sensation when first engaging in the collaborative work of Ben Jones and Paper Rad in 2006 at a large scale, interactive video installation in the Cosmic Wonder show at the Yerba Buena Museum of Art in San Francisco. As a (somewhat) grown adult, my encounter with the installation’s overwhelming sensory experience was both exciting and confusing. Again, I was faced with an unfamiliar world of stimulation, different and dramatically more intense than anything I had witnessed before. It brought me back to the same initial apprehension of standing outside that hangar, completely overwhelmed but craving more. I wanted to understand it, to become part of it.
Ben’s work has evolved and broadened tremendously since his early days with the collective, and he has broken off on his own individual prolific journeys, while maintaining a similar visual language. His work still beats with the same bizarre intensity that I remember: pulsating patterns, strobing vibrations and ventures into bizarre territories. He elicits a hybrid world of near nostalgia, an amalgam of transcendental psychedelic prisms. reminiscent of distant memories yet completely foreign. As a pioneer in the experimental visual spectrum, his work triggered and compelled me to revisit an experience, to press forward through anxious confusion and onto new understanding. Fully realised.
07 MOD HANNAH STOUFFER: Hey, Ben, what are you wearing? BEN JONES: Jerry Seinfeld said that what men wear on the weekends is an outfit that represents their last proud moment or age. I am wearing that: Umbros and a t-shirt... so, seventh grade. My very first introduction to your work was through your affiliation with Paper Rad and this hyper-neon, overstimulating, sensory experience. I remember my mind being totally melted with what I saw. heard and felt. It was completely staggering, borderline seizure inducing and slightly confusing. I loved it. Are you still currently putting out work with the collective? Rhizome just did an amazing online catalog of all our home pages over the years, with some cool essays and such. Paper Rad lives on to this very day in many different and real ways. I’m currently part of a “collective” called Friends Night which will be making animated TV shows for Fox’s Saturday nights. The website I help design is essentially Paper Rad 2.0, all animated GIFs. The core framework and architecture is literally coded around the GIF. As a kid, which intrigued you first, 2D illustrations like comics and print, or cartoons and animation? What was most appealing to you as a kid? I would copy things as best I could, The Simpsons, Bloom County, and King’s Quest. The medium was less important than the world I wanted to co-opt and add to. I was and am drawn to work that contains a complete vision, from its visual language, including characters and execution. In describing the colours, can you put a name to the kind of palette that you choose? Jessica and Jacob really defined the Paper Rad palette; it came from their souls, but I knew exactly what it was when I saw it. I am trying to evolve that palette for some of the work I’m doing now at Fox. I think there is a timeless, unsentimental way to synthesise a “neon-palette,” and hopefully, continue to spread the message. I think the palette is, in a weird way, spiritual. So I guess I would name the palette G.O.D.
When you see a classic Frank Stella painting up close, it isn’t perfect. Perfection is for people with serious issues. It seems like your work reflects an anti-perfection that you have managed impeccably to convey in all of your creative products, with the same genuine, cohesive nature. There is a distinct appearance of the craft that is evident in the work, and even though it’s usually a digital output, it still looks hand-made. How important is it to you to maintain that crafted look? When you see a classic Frank Stella painting up close, it isn’t perfect. Perfection is for people with serious issues. Your process seems to be almost juxtaposed with technology, even though your output is digital, as if your work is at a constant stand-off with it. How does the ever-evolving pace of digital output and technology make you feel? I was the first generation to have a Macintosh before I hit puberty. So all the millennials who’ve grown up sexting, and had a PC in the crib are great, but my generation has been making art in a native language to the Mac (not translating my art to a Mac) for longest; thus we rule. I think we know the true power, and that the computer is a tool, not a piece of art in itself. Yet we also know the true value of the tool, since we evolved along with it. Having had the Atari 800 definitely informs my artistic process with the Mac Book Air.
Can you talk about your process? I assume it involves a an endless supply of color changing Kool-Aid. What do you need to have in the studio for a productive session? At Friends Night/ADHD a lot of us have the 24-inch Cintiq, which is essentially a big monitor you draw on. I am unable to use any other computer now. What kind of setup are you running on now? Do you mean am I a PC guy or a Mac guy? I’m a Mac guy. There is this great performance art duo named The Andrews, and that’s the first question they asked each other. Because of the nature of your work, I imagine you would have a pretty extensive collection of early computers, and dated technology, runnjng with the first graphic programs ever. like MSPaint and Pong. Do you? What are some of your favorite examples of this pixel-based, early technology? Anything to do with NeXT. What do you see when you close your eyes at night? I like to watch Formula One or Top Gear as I fall asleep.
I know the digital channel will feature around 150 of these original short-form pieces that you’re putting together. That’s pretty amazing. Can you tell me about the content you created for them? Did you produce multiple shorts in that same vein of visual language for Fox? Fox wants us to make the most amount of mint animation using all the techniques of the digital age I’ve been talking about. We do everything in-house. Nothing is shipped to Korea. We have instituted the DIY and digital generations philosophies into a system that I hope will change how we make and consume animation. No biggie. Can you tell me about your history with animation in television before this point, with Adult Swim, The Problem Solverz, and Neon Knome and how this developed into the creation of you! newest work? Has it been an evolution from your previous animation or completely new concepts? In college I started to make shorts with the characters Alfe, Roba, and Horace. After college I started Paper Rad and we put out a DVD and posted videos to the web, before YouTube, in which I feature the same characters. I then made a pilot for Adult Swim with those characters called Neon Knome, which went on to became The Problem Solverz. Now you can watch those on Netflix. I left Cartoon Network for Fox to make my next TV show. It won’t have those characters but will be a more pure, raw, uncut expression of the same artistic impulse that manifested Alfe. There will be feathers. That’s all I can say at this point.
I know you’ve also done a handful of animated music videos in the past with Beck, MIA, and MTV. Do you plan to continue working with musicians, specifically for music videos? We are doing awesome music videos with ADHD also. We did one with YACHT you’ll have to scope out. We definitely will! I know you’ve done work with some pretty incredible talents that mesh your visuals with their music, but what about for your own creative output? How important is music in your creative process, and what do you listen to while you work? I listen to Howard Stern at all times during and after the creative process. So, besides Howard Stern, lets talk about something else that’s equally important: snacks. I feel like you would be a perfect connoisseur of things like flavor crystals and extreme pizza anything. What’s your go-to snack? Kombucha. Interesting, yet equally exciting... If given the choice, what would you prefer-a room full of Magic Eyeposters or hologram wallpaper? Hologram wallpaper that makes it so I am in the holodeck with Data. Shout out to Picard. And then would you add black lights, lasers or a smoke machine? Smoke machines are the biggest bang for your buck, be you a Dutch installation artist or a Strokes cover band. So, you walk into this room solo, full of hologram wallpaper with a smoke machine setting the tone. Are you wearing a Walkman, a Discman, or no man? Walkman. What would be in your suitcase if you had to pack it with your top five things that you can’t live without? My fiance, our cat, and three large packs of turkey slices for us to eat. And lastly, can you let us in on any secrets, your vices? Indulgences? Cutting open packets of turkey slices after jogging and eating them in the most disgusting way.
08 Ben Jones
What was the process like in putting these shorts together? How did the relationship develop? I got John Pham, the amazing artist, to help sculpt a small crew of young, insane animators and designers to do the impossible. We are like the SEAL Team Six of animation. Every week we know we face certain death, but we make a twominute animated short in a totally new, different, awesome style. Actually, that’s totally offensive to compare ourselves to actual heroes, but in the art and animation world, it kind of sucks if you are doing shitty work, so I like to think we are taking huge risks and pushing ourselves. And that’s why America and ADHD are the best.
Words by James Cartwright Photography by Elisa Noguera Lopez
09 MOD
05
hen an artist drives a gully through the heart of the world’s most-visited art gallery it’s almost unthinkable that it’s the product of anything less than divine intervention. Though your gut tells you there’s a rational explanation for what you’re seeing, your inner fantasist doesn’t want to let go of the magic of the piece, the fantastical tear in the fabric of the gallery. In fact, the reality is much more interesting. “Somewhere out there is an engineer that made all of this happen,” said journalist Mark Miodownik speaking on BBC Radio 4 in late 2007. He was referring to Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth, the work of dramatic sculptural presence that transformed the Tate Modem’s main atrium from a polished exhibition space into the scene of some ambiguous natural disaster. Slap bang in the middle of the Turbine Hall’s vast concrete floor was a crack of alarming proportions, splitting the floor right down the centre. The inexplicable crevice began at the gallery doors and trailed down into the body of the room, expanding as it progressed but, mysteriously, revealing nothing of the space beneath. The work was a massive critical success; as an allegory for the colonial foundations of Western society it had heavyweight conceptual punch and for the weekend art admirer it looked utterly spectacular. But the greatest success of Shibboleth was its ambiguity; nobody knew how the concrete chasm arrived there. Salcedo wasn’t for telling and neither were the people she’d enlisted to help. Five years later the memory of Shibboleth persists, albeit distorted by time and our own fallible perceptions. Some people remember being able to step into the crack completely (you couldn’t) others that it was possible to see through to the earth below (it wasn’t) and I remember the opening growing in size as the exhibition wore on (it definitely didn’t). By preserving the mystique of its genesis, Salcedo allowed her viewers to create a lasting personal mythology around Shibboleth that’s as complex and uncertain as the work of art itself, and that’s largely thanks to the complicity of Stuart Smith. “I love looking at these pictures,” he says, thumbing through the exhibition catalogue. ‘I’m still very proud of what we did.”
Stuart’s involvement came about quite by coincidence. “The Tate had commissioned Doris to do this piece and she’d proposed the idea of putting a crack through the Turbine Hall. It had to open in October, but around February they were going nowhere - they couldn’t work out how to do it. The idea was to cut directly into the concrete which obviously wasn’t going to work. At the time I was working on the extension to the Tate and they asked me to help work out whether the piece could be done.” Making Salcedo’s idea a physical reality turned into a six-month personal project which saw the pair slaving through many successive nights (to allow for the time difference between London and Bogota) planning the piece out via Skype and plotting the best way to create the illusion they were looking for. “It was a very personal project, one-toone with Doris.” Stuart tells me. “I went to Bogota to her studio to figure out how it would all work and how the pieces would be made and installed. The complexity of it was enormous because there were lots of ways of doing it that just wouldn’t have delivered what Doris wanted and wouldn’t have been as mystical. The most important thing was for the illusion to work straight away, and for that to happen all the details had to be exactly right.” Constructing that illusion required patience and skill, working in minute detail to ensure the fissure upheld its mysteries throughout its length. “When you looked into the crack, you couldn’t see the bottom, so nobody knew how deep it was, even in the main section.” For all its final polish, driving a chasm through the heart of the Tate was not without its difficulties. The main problem was the solid concrete slope that serves as the main entrance to the gallery. Cutting into it would have blown the entire budget, leaving no room to extend the piece through the rest of the space, but it was difficult to see how else the effect could be achieved. “Looking at it I realised
10 A Torn Tate
Stuart has every right to be proud as the mathematical brain behind some of the world’s most complex architectural structures he ought to have achieved rockstar status by now. But in an industry that produces few celebrities, it’s unsurprising to find he cuts a pretty unassuming figure in person. Stuart is a structural engineer at Arup, a global firm of consulting engineers famed for their work on structures like the Sydney Opera House, The Pompidou Centre, the Olympic Aquatics centres in both Beijing and London and the redevelopment of King’s Cross Station. He’s also the brains behind making Shibboleth a reality; his specialist understanding of concrete facilitated that ominous crack and allowed Salcedo to produce a bewildering spectacle without blowing the Tate’s budget or compromising the building’s structural integrity.
11 MOD
Stuart takes visible pleasure in having fooled so many people. Day-to-day he doesn’t get much of a chance to play tricks on the public - he’s too preoccupied ensuring the buildings they spend their lives in stay standing...
have been moments where the gallery has been very brave to stick with the concepts and carry on supporting the project when they’ve got very highprofile events at stake.” For some, the stress of dealing with a worried Tate or Serpentine curator would be too much, but Stuart takes it all in his stride. “You do these things over and over again and just get used to the feeling of anxiety. You start to learn what is a problem and what isn’t really a problem and you find your way through it. Almost always these projects are successful.”
that you could cast something on top of the slab, and it would be almost invisible that that was what had happened.” But even producing a simple concrete cast was frustratingly complex - the manufacturing all took place in Colombia before being shipped to the UK. Stuart only had a couple of inches to work with as the steps running down the side of the gallery only allowed for a limited amount of adjustment before things started looking awry. Furthermore the resulting fissure had to appear imperceptibly deep. “What we did was put a new slab on top which met the top of the gallery steps. To the eye it looks like nothing’s changed; you can’t see unless you know exactly what you’re looking for. The BBC employed three or four industry experts to come down and work out how we’d done it, and each one of them guessed something right, but they all got something wrong. Everything we’d done somebody guessed, but no one person managed to guess all of it.” Stuart takes visible pleasure in having fooled so many people. Day-to-day he doesn’t get much of a chance to play tricks on the public - he’s too preoccupied ensuring the buildings they
spend their lives in stay standingbut working with artists allows him the opportunity to experiment. Arup has a longstanding partnership with architects Herzog & de Meuron, a Swiss practice responsible for The Serpentine Gallery’s 2012 summer pavilion. For the artists involved the pavilion serves as a three -dimensional play-ground for their ideas. For their architect and engineer collaborators it’s a chance to test themselves, allowing them to explore the themes and materials in a low-risk environment. With Shibboleth, Stuart was under enormous pressure to deliver the piece on time and was still figuring things out on the fly. “I took on a lot of responsibility for delivering it. This one really did have to be done on time. The Unilever series and the opening party is quite a big deal for the Tate, so this was one you really didn’t want to be late for.” In the end Stuart and his team had only about six weeks to transform the gallery. “We really had no leeway and no way of testing all the things we wanted to as it was the Turbine Hall. The Tate were very brave to do it, to stick with it. Sometimes on The Serpentine Pavilion too there
And under this kind of pressure, it’s imperativethat Stuart understands why he is finding these solutions. When you’re making judgement calls on giant structures and choosing which piece of a building can and can’t be built in accordance with a budget then that understanding is key. It’s no different when you’re slicing up a gallery floor. “I’m interested in the thinking and developing of ideas around topics. It was interesting to me that Doris was trying to describe different things with her work. She was going around interviewing victims of torture and creating pieces that somehow referred to them. I find getting involved in that kind of discussion really interesting. Once you understand why the object is there and what it’s doing conceptually you can start to think about how to make it work as an illusion... You need to understand these things to make the piece successful, to know why you’re spending all night, every night working on this thing. If I don’t understand the concept then I’m just fishing in the dark.” So next time you’re sticking your leg down a crack in a gallery or leaping across a temporary structure, spare a thought for the Stuarts of this world, or maybe even spare a thought for Stuart himself. Thanks to his quiet complicity, all the magic of witnessing breathtakingly incomprehensible art is preserved for your enjoyment. “I have never really spoken very much about it,” he says as we part ways, “but I don’t mind so much.”