Issue #18 / SheOne Rides Alone / No New Enemies, Art and Anti-Folk / Banksy Sprays Cans: Giving Back / Kill Pixie flutters in flux
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Amy Gunther, Jason Lee & Giovanni Ribisi in “A Superlative Day“. See the whole photo series in the palm / pocket sized WeSC winter catalogue 2008.
photo: Vincent Skoglund
www.wesc.com
Flip 2
10 Open 12 Spy 1: Frerk 14 Spy 2: Miss Lotion 16 Julian Butler
53 Modart and Scope Art
18 Riders Ink
64 In Your Ear 66 Show and Tell
Smile Orange Films
With Jim Houser
24 Word From Adz
Spotlight on Wilma S
28 Squatting the White Cube
No New Enemies at the Botanique Museum
33 Inside
MOHS Exhibit, Copenhagen
34 Illustrated Works
Kill Pixie Pax Paloscia SheOne
46 Rise Above
South Central Wraps Up
Scenes from the Art Basel boat party
54 Fantastic Nobodies
Invasion: New World Order
58 Kenn Munk’s World
and Kenn’s Amazing CCTV Insert
Cai Guo-Qiang Retrospective. Text: Benjamin Tischer
68 Show and Tell
Electric Windows Text: Anya Yurchyshyn
70 Show and Tell
Cans Festival Text: Tristan Manco
72 Photo: Unfreezing Frames
The Jens
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Creative action = active creation
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s d Anhitst Flux det anon S in Riies Arperatui tters
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Cover: Kill Pixi
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Issue #18 Managing Director Christian Vogler christian@modarteurope.com
Creative Director Harlan Levey harlan@modarteurope.com
Art Director Tobias Allanson tobias@modarteurope.com
Distribution/ Production Manager
Next Storm Coming Reality is not an accessory; neither for your dress, nor for your emotions, even if it often seems like something people wear.
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We’re inside now. Still we talk about the resistance as if we were lighting candles. We follow the rainbow and try to forget Jaws. In the US this means swimming faster. You can. If not, we can build you. The 6 million dollar man will save us. If he doesn’t, God will, so we keep on going forward so there is no other choice. Europe remembers how fast the tide can turn and proceeds with caution, often turning a blind eye to what’s up while reminding itself to never forget. I like hot dogs at the ballpark. They’re made of horrible meat and not that clean and even better with the Stadium Mustard whose taste no company could package. I also like a good Bratwurst at the pitch. I’m making broad generalizations. This is dumb. Dumb as checking swimming pools for sharks at age 34. Jaws crossed the Atlantic and I’ll assume we find consensus in the brilliance of the music if not the movie. The world’s greatest predator circled us all; us hot dogs, us brat worst, us merges, us who are disgusted by the process of bringing that to our lips. I was only a year old when it came out, how would I know that Jaws was the perfect metaphor for capitalism? How old was I when I saw it? I don’t know, but Jaws in an early memory. Shut down the beach, protect the citizens! / No chance, bad for business. / But there are kids in the water. / Lets send a drunken cowboy, a brave suburban academic and
Oliver Kurzemann oliver@modarteurope.com
Associate Editor Evie Haines
Modart Editorial Jo Waterhouse, Ripo, King Adz, Eva Cardon & Tristan Manco
Modart Music Florent de Maria, Jon Kennedy
Contributors a nerdy Midwestern simple sort of hero in waiting out to tangle with it. That’ll appeal to all sectors of the audience. / Oh shit, Jaws 6. Don’t forget your popcorn. That’s not butter, that’s oil and plot, it isn’t what is there and is greased with what’s not.
Jim Houser, Julian Butler, Miss Lotion, Frerk, Art Bastard, Wilma S, Mr. MOHs, Kill Pixie, Pax Paloscia, SheOne, Above, Oli, the Fantastic Nobodies, Eric Laine, Downtown David Brown, Benjamin T, Abner Preiss, The Jens and Ayo B.
Advertising: Oliver Kurzemann oliver@modarteurope.com
Don’t go near the water. Don’t forget to vote.
+43 676 4205126
Meanwhile the water rose. It buried New Orleans and couldn’t put the flames out in Athens. Nor could it get citizens into the stalls on a hot November day. People cried and sighed and carried on as people have been carrying on since the torch was first lit. Here we go Beijing! China has made drastic efforts to improve the air quality prior to the event and among other things shut down several factories. It would be great if you didn’t think about the workers. What if they all got a two-month paid holiday?
Publisher
And Modart rambles on, every one of us in training; today for tomorrow. Art is important to this in so many shared ways. Hope you enjoy this issue’s spread of inspired work and the characters that create it to inspire the rest of us. Harlan July 8th, 2008 Greysville, Euro Capital, Earth
Rebel Media Limited
Editorial Office Good Guy Marketing GmbH Modart Magazine Erlerstrasse 1 6020 Innsbruck, Austria
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Distribution: ASV Vertriebs gmbh Süderstrasse 77 20097 Hamburg, Germany Modart magazine is published 6 times a year by Rebel Media Limited. Reproduction of editorial is strictly prohibited without prior permission. Views expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in any retrieval system of any nature without prior written consent, except for permitted fair dealing under the Copyright Designs and Patent Act 1988. Application for permission for use of copyright material including permission to reproduce extracts in other public works shall be made to the publishers. All rights reserved copyright 2007.
www.modarteurope.com
Spy 1 Frerk: Outside Impacts w w w. mys pac e . com / f re r k l e b ra s | w w w. m a rcwo e h r. d e / m w - d eta i l / 8 0
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His given name is Marco Eckert and he was born and raised in Karlsruhe, which is pretty tough for a non-German speaker to pronounce. These days he’s living and working in Stuttgart where he pays rent by working as a graphic designer and illustrator while he continues to pursue his own aesthetic and falls in love with rust and time. Like many of us, Marco cites movement as a fertile bed for inspiration, imagination and new ideas: “By moving to another town you meet new people and find good friends. I have to mention Marc Woehr here, because it was Marc who told me to draw big!”
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} Movement is never easy to capture in a word though and Marco plays on this, creating his artist pseudonym by twisting the root of his grandmother’s name. Traveling backwards, he explains that we can “find something of my past in every work I create, but you’ll also see the evidence of influences from everyday life.” He marks these down as outside influences and those that he has already ingested, internalized and taken in along the way. “Drawing or painting is freedom. I can do what I want and I’m my own boss. I can forget my environment and concentrate on myself. In a way it is a meditation. I’m there and I’m not there. I step into my own world and feel completely free.” If you’re looking for another source for young urban art, Frerk recommends www.iloveartbastard.com, which is the site where we first stumbled across his work.
SAPCEJUNK OLI NOt in
Spy 2
Miss Lotion on Miss Lotion www.misslotion.com
Miss Lotion, aka Louise Rosenkrands, lives in Copenhagen where she works with 3 other self-proclaimed geeks at the Skyclappers studio and will soon welcome members from another collective she works with, the Dot the Eyes crew.
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I have always been a creative monkey. So I quit college back in 1997 and started to take a lot of art courses. Eventually, that led me to the Design School in 2001, which I graduated in 2006. Right now I work as a teacher of graphic design & illustration at the Scandinavian Design College. I also work as a freelance illustration artist and am preparing paintings for exhibitions.
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I think my talent comes from my grandfather, who was a painter. I have always been drawing and I do it almost every day. I think it sometimes has a sort of therapeutic effect on me, whether it’s a small doodle on a piece of scrap paper or a large drawing that takes me several hours, it’s an important thing for me to do. It doesn’t really matter if it makes any sense, but the fact that I let go and just draw along makes me feel very free. Art to me is something that comes from inside, but its always grounded in reality. I think every human being has a creative spirit, but not everyone knows how to let it out. I am very much inspired by folk art and all sorts of mythologies and I think these references can be seen in my work. I am also inspired by comic book artists like Moebius, who I discovered many years ago in the adult section of the local library... Technique is also an important factor to me. I think I never stick to one technique or medium for too long, of course I have my favorites, but I want to constantly push my work into new dimensions. I usually get hooked on a particular material or technique for a while and can be quite obsessive about it. Art is long – life is short!
Character by Friends With You
n Butkels eBar Julia ck O’North Stri The Cock By King Adz
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our first day of I’ve known Julian for nearly 20 years. We met on legendary ‘The the d founde then and Art St.Martin’s School of (yonks before World Famous Temple of Shaolin’ art crew in 1989 then after a and n) Shaoli the about g thinkin even were g the Wu-Tan s. 16 years succes our of height the at prolific few years, parted ways as one morning later it was the hand of fate that reconnected us, (Razzle) in the in April I spotted him leafing through the magazines newsagent at a station.
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ection ‘Stop Thief!’ I shouted and he turned and the reconn in a was made. We fell back into our old patterns of banter we but up, other each g crackin were soon and cond, nano-se and were on separate trains (him to London, me to Brussels) we parted, exchanging digits like you do. Within a month Julian we had a TV series and a feature on the go together. is one of the funniest, most progressive film and TV comedy directors in England, and he has shot a prolific four feature two films, two series of his killer TV Show ‘Focus North’, and Comedy Lab shows and a shit load of one-off shows g includin shite) satellite that of (none TV. ial terrestr pilots for a show on Donald Trump’s hair. How did you get to make your first film? Started making what we called ‘Video Grafitti’: getting videos vers, out from the video library and rerecording voice-o other dubbing different dialogue or splicing in shots from to the films or stuff we’d filmed. Then taking the tape back . video shop to be rented by the next unsuspecting person How was Donald Trump’s Hair? ys. Beautiful.You don’t see hair like that anymore nowada other You should see his pubes! Donald (or The Don as I and
kind, close friends and lovers know him) is a wonderful, despite man s generou and c altruisti tful, though passionate, what he did to those kids. g in What has your experience been like of workin England as a film/TV director? when UK Films: When editing Fatliners we wanted to see if, would it was submitted to the BBFC for classification, they g assiduously watch every single second of the film, includin of the credits. So, amongst the film’s 7 minute Aston scroll in made up names and daft fictional song titles we slipped British the of head then the , Ferman a message about James y Board of Film Classification. We wrote something typicall an being him and clitoris wife’s his about rude and childish the omphacerast, hoping to sneak it through. In the end company who were distributing the film, Screen Edge, insisted of out we removed it before it was submitted. But at the back BBFC minds we wondered what would have happened if some had what Ferman James told then and it noticed had er classifi aster headm full a in would, he that been written. We hoped film like strop refuse to classify any more films and stop the lion: MGM the with agree I then! and there Britain in industry Ars Gratia Artis. me TV: The UK TV industry is a Munchausen and Down’s Syndro ion is suffering wizard from The Wizard of Oz: its decept bad based on fear, trickery and dishonesty…it also has some points too. www.smileorangefilms.co.uk
Conference on Contemporary Character Design / September 5-6 / New York City Friends With You, David OReilly, Tokyoplastic, Tim Biskup, Fons Schiedon, Motomichi Nakamura, Akinori Oishi, Studio aka, Gangpol + Mit, Aaron Stewart Further information and tickets on www.pictoplasma.com/nyc
Photo: Adam Wallacavage
heartfelt: Jim Houser does more than hang on. Jim is a prolific, autodidactic artist from Philadelphia. His elaborate installations have grown in size and complexity over the years, and feature a plethora of paintings on all manner of surfaces: wood and canvas, handmade and found objects. His shows are like an intricate patchwork quilt. Isolate each piece of text or imagery and they could appear random and nonsensical, but viewed together, as a whole in his calming colour palette, they fuse into a wonderful blanket of very personal, heartfelt art.
What is your starting point for a new show/ installation? Do you plan them out before hand or is it a more intuitive process once you arrive at the space? Do you ever stress that you'll have too much work or not enough beforehand? The starting point is always just making paintings, just sitting at home painting. After a few months of work it adds up. I try to give myself at least 6 months to work for any show, but it usually ends up being 3 or 4 months. I don’t plan anything out beforehand, short of maybe one grand idea that I might want to try as something new. Other than that, I make it up as I go along. As far as stressing,
How long does it usually take you to install a show? For a big space 10-14 days is good. My friend Brian works as an assistant and we've got it down to a science. He does all the big stuff, so I can worry about the small stuff.
I read in your book Babel that in the past you used to buy and use whatever cheap paint that was to hand in whatever colours, but over the years your colour palatte seems to have become defined and deliberate. How did your choice of colour palette evolve? I don't know. How does your taste in anything evolve? It just happens, I guess. Certain colors don't speak to me anymore. Other colors have a lot more to say.
When a show/installation is over, does it ever feel like a shame to take it all down and separate it all up? I have never taken one down myself, in eight years. I am stoked on that. I have never even been there to see it taken down. Are there any specific pieces in your shows that reoccur, special pieces that aren't for sale that you'll re-use in other shows? Yes, there's a bunch of stuff that travels with me and gets used over and over. It might change a bit, but it's still the same object. I'd say out of any show, only about two thirds of the stuff is for sale. The rest stays with me.
I know that making music is also a big part of your life, and for your last few solo shows you've created soundtracks for them. How would you describe your music to those that have never heard it before? Repetitive, honest, and heartfelt: just like my paintings are. Photo: Adam Wallacavage
What was the idea behind producing soundtracks to your shows, what experience did you set out to create? Do the two creative outlets of painting and music feed one another? Music for me is what I turn to when the brushes don't work. If I am not constantly making things, I feel like a piece of shit. I feel worthless. So, it's an outlet for me to use when I am frustrated by art-making but can't just sit around doing nothing. The way it relates to the art, in my mind, is that an individual installation has become: "here is EVERYTHING I have made in the last few months." Words and text also play an important part in your work. How do you choose the words you use? And how would you describe/explain their role in your work?
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yes, but that is just the background noise of who I am as a person. I stress about everything. I live in a constant state of doom and worry. When you're painting your individual pieces, do you already have an idea of how they'll relate to each other before you install them, or does that all happen at the point of installation? I think they would all relate whether I'd want them to or not. The way I make paintings doesn't change. It's the same train of thought over thousands of pieces of wood.
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When was the first time you created an installation for a show, and was there any particular catalyst for that evolution in your work? The first time was in 2000, for the EAST MEETS WEST show at the Institute of Contemporary Art [Philadelphia]. I had done a hand full of small shows before I got asked to do that show, and the space I had to fill was gigantic. I had been considering installation work before that, simply as a way to communicate that my hundreds of little paintings were to me, just one big painting. I wanted to find a way to connect all the little bits together. The ICA ended up being a perfect place to try it. It's still my favorite thing I ever did. I look back on it as very stress-filled, because for me it was a chance to show with 2 of my heroes Chris Johanson and Margaret Kilgallen, and I remember being proud of myself for making something I was happy with.
R i d e rs I n k
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Interview: Jo Waterhouse
Neither would exist without the other. I make paintings that have no words on them, and I also make paintings that don't have any imagery other than words. They are the same thing to me. I make an active choice not to examine it too closely, because there is an unconscious process involved that I don't think would be good for me to make conscious. It just is what it is. There aren't choices made about it. When you read a new word you like, do you instantly 'see' how you'd use a word in your artwork, and do you think that through your art, you are more aware than most people about how individual words make you feel? Again, that speaks to me not really wanting to diagram how things work for me. But yes, I think I am overly as sensitive to language as I am to everything else, for better or worse. Has skateboarding been a major creative influence on you over the years? Yes, a skateboarder is the first thing I ever defined myself as.
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What was the last board graphic you produced, and of all your graphics, do you have any favourites? 99% of the work I do is for Toy Machine, because I love Ed [Templeton] and respect him. But my favorite was getting asked to do my version of Natas' panther graphic for Designarium. That graphic was burned into my brain as the coolest thing in the world as a kid. Natas was this mysterious, insane, talented ripper. That board was special to me. There were always the shitty pros with the rad graphics and the rad pros with the shitty graphics. That panther board was the rare combination of the raddest pro having the raddest graphic.
Photo: Adam Wallacavage
Photo: Adam Wallacavage
R i d e rs I n k
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Photo: Adam Wallacavage
Do you still get to skate much these days? Nope. Back, hip, and ankle trouble: body destroyed at 34.
possibly never that I have been working on for a year or so. I am putting a new kitchen in my house for my girlfriend Jessica and I’m going to Hawaii to try to surf. That's it.
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In this internet-obsessed age most artists now have personal/portfolio websites. Was it a conscious decision on your part not to have one? I am lazy about that kind of stuff and don't care much. I guess I have always been pretty lucky to have other people willing to promote me, so I don't bother promoting myself. And as far as using it to display what I do, well, that is what the installations are for. Come to the gallery.
R i d e rs I n k
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Can you recommend some other websites for folk to check out in the absence of your own? Google these people, places and things: Rebecca Westcott, Space1026, Merry Karnowsky, Jonathan Levine, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [artintheage.com], Richard Colman, Isaac Lin, Ben Woodward, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Plastic Little, Jayson Musson, Rebecca Suss, Free News Projects [www.freenewsprojects.com], AJ Fosik, White Walls Gallery. That's all I can think of right now. What projects/upcoming shows do you have in the pipeline? I have a show in November in San Francisco with Richard Colman, at White Walls. Richard is awesome and I am excited for that. I have a record coming out Photo: Adam Wallacavage
Photo: Adam Wallacavage
“I always thought the art world was full of wankers and tried to avoid it for a long time.”
Her art is a breath of fresh air in a world where ‘Street Art’ has become all to often a brand exercise. Once mainstream newspapers, magazines and TV channels begin to run features on how cool something is then you know it’s, like, so over, motherfucker. Just remember you can’t buy cool and my peeps out there can’t be fooled, so my message to all parasites trying to rip the art out of heart, just to sell some shit made in China by
kids or prisoners is simply: fuck off, we don’t need it! Anyway the upside of this little rant is that Wilma S. is out there making the freshest art this side of the equator and I got down with her at her graduation show (yeah, she is fresh outta art school) and asked her what’s up.
What is your work all about? At the moment it’s about making art out of cult iconic objects, many of which are obsolete, and then turning them into something valuable again… But my work is not going to stay the same… It changes all the time. Mutates the more confident I get. I want to keep an open mind so that my possibilities can expand. I get bored quickly. How do you approach the pieces? I try to make stuff I like that will also appeal to the generation of ‘screenagers’ - those who grew up in the 1970s with television and computers - I want to trigger childhood memories of play and good times, and then throw in some criticism of our totally mediated culture. I use the urban aesthetic because - like everyone else - I’ve always been surrounded by it… and it looks hard.
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This is the shit that gets me out of bed each day. This is the real deal Holyfield. Forget all those macho ‘street’ art men with their stickers and bad stencils, trying to rip it up and go all city when all they’re gonna do is go home (to mummy)… Wilma S. is one of the new wave of urban artists, combining fine art techniques with street art sensibilities and imagery. In other words urban art you can walk around and actually feel; tomorrow’s yesterday.
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King Adz speaks with Wilma S
KIN G A D Z
Straight outta Nowhere
What are you up to right now? I’m about to start making print work for my final show, and finishing off my ceramic sculptures. The past nine months have been totally manic because I’ve changed course for my final year after realising I’d probably go mental as an interior designer – what I had been studying initially. I’m a late starter because I always thought the art world was full of wankers and tried to avoid it for a long time. Now I realise there’s nothing else for me to do. It scares the shit out of me. My working life is a mix of terror and excitement. Working stops me thinking too much which is a good thing; it keeps me sane.
What is the process? I make a multi-piece mould of the object, slip cast, then decorate with coloured slips (liquid clay I paint/stencil on). Next it’s fired, then more decoration is added with under-glaze colours and pencils, then it’s glazed and fired again. After that I use on-glaze painted/drawn/ scratched on, then photoshop[ped] imagery is applied by digital ceramic transfer, a bit of metallic lustre and then fired again. From this sculpture I then create 2D images through photography, screen printing, digital printing, hand-drawing and painting. There is the work you can walk around and then there is the work that is wall-mounted. What are you aiming for? To make work that sells! I just want to get a dealer so I can make a living from the things I make. Ultimately I want to make massive shit: really big work. Sad, but I’m impressed by big art. I want to use massive brushes and just slap it on. To have that amount of space and freedom appeals to me… My goal is to have a huge studio I can make a mess in…
“...I want to make massive shit: really big work. Sad, but I’m impressed by big art.”
What/who are your main influences? I admire ordinary people who have done what they want with their lives, not sold themselves out; people who don’t give up on their dreams, refuse to let life destroy them, and are willing to deal with their shit - d’you know what I mean? That’s the kind of energy I want to surround myself with. But if you’re talking about other artists, then at college I discovered people like Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, Jake Tilson, Basquiat, Havant, Kiefer, Schwitters. I have been influenced by their mark-making.
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— Cans Festival
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“Some people are calling it the greatest stencil art show that has ever taken place in a tunnel underneath Waterloo station.”
KIN G A D Z
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Contact: wilmasart@googlemail.com
“This Machine Kills Fascists.”
The London Police, Galo, Bo130, Microbo, Stephen Smith/Neasden Control Centre, Will Barras, Allanson, Boris Hoppek, Alex Diamond, Btoy, Guillaume Desmarets, RuediOne, Ado Jahic, Smash137, Jerome “G” Demuth, L’Atlas, Ephameron, Never Effect, Jon Burgerman, Morcky, Wayne Horse, Maoma, the Reverend Abner Preiss, the Boghe + viewing of the Don Collection (www.thedongallery.com)
The culture industry keeps itself fit, and as the profit before people perils of capitalism drip thick on the popcorn of unnaturally chubby children, Folk keeps doing whatever it does and meeting up at the corner. That’s
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- Woody Guthrie
WC
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all this show was about, people doing what they’re doing and doing it with their hearts in the wind. In both music and visual arts, Folk is generally defined (always noted that there is no ‘real’ definition) as a language or practice employed with little interest in academic training or faith in institution; experimenting with the established techniques and styles of a particular place, with no desire to produce objects perceived as ‘fine art.’ If we talk Folk, process is more relevant than end product; value a path, not a figure for society’s able art patrons or collectors to drool at. Folk is community based. We invited members of our network to this show based on no other criteria than personal confidence. If there is some accuracy to the term “street art,” it may not live in location any longer. The shared thing is motion and crossing and on the road I’ve encountered a community of like minded, warm hearted people, who opened their doors. A community with no common passport or mother tongue, yet with a shared lexicon of references and resent for establishment and brutality. None of these people would ever define themselves as street artists,
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Woody Guthrie’s album ‘This Machine Kills Fascists,’ never became a popular classic, but was the inspiration for a song by AntiFlag and a series of other statements. The phrase hints at the essence of folk art, of travel and the little places that make up large nations. It is a poignant comment on the artillery of our imaginations and weapons for change, which include pens and picks and actual human beings. In the 60’s singers like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan followed Guthrie’s footsteps writing protest and topical songs, and vocalizing their support for Civil Rights and rejection of the need for war. This is the popular example. Folk art has always been an important community catalyst, activity and vocal outlet for the silent majority, but since Woodstock, it’s never had the sex appeal it has today when gangster and cowboy are Ken’s two most popular costumes, while Barbie’s grinding a pole in a smoke-free Hilton hotel.
WC
“Yes, through this world I’ve wandered, I’ve seen lots of funny men; some will rob you with a sixgun, and some with a fountain pen.”
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In May, the No New Enemies network was invited to produce an exhibition alongside Brussels’ annual music festival, ‘Les Nuits Botanique.’ With acts like Tender Forever, Audio Bullys and Jamie Lidell playing next door, the show welcomed 10,000 visitors and while the media was hot to discuss Street Art and Graffiti, Harlan explains why this gig was more folk fusion than gangster rap.
“One of the best forms of free communication is painting messages on a blank wall. The message must be short and bold. You want to be able to paint it on before the pigs come and yet have it large enough so that people can see it at a distance… Pick spots that have a lot of traffic… If you are writing the same message, make a stencil.”
Jerome “G” Demut
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The London Police
Stephen Smith/Neasden Control Centre & Will Barras
Boris Hoppek
WC
Both our public spaces and our private lives are swamped with messages urging us to consume, to build our own realities on well-tailored images and their subsequent agendas. We could say it is ‘normal’ that so
Ado Jahic
L’Atlas
Jon Burgerman
No Jews Blacks Dogs Irish Gypsies Long Hairs. Gays can’t marry. The enemy is everywhere. 2 for 1 on Plastic Surgery. You can’t paint here. Obey. Really, the weapons were right there. I don’t remember. Whatever! First, whatever with a shoulder shrug. “Yeah, whatever.” “Whatever you’re selling, I’m not buying.” “Whatever you’re promising, I don’t need it.” Whatever. End of story. Move on. But ‘whatever’ is also possibility, a subject without predicate, free to become without the burden of our prejudice, including common sense; a series of possibilities that won’t be presented on your TV screen or advertised on the bus you take to work in the morning. Whatever is not the reproduced images of human suffering that media, arts and advertising both like to funnel into our eyes. Whatever is not part of War’s vocabulary. With the advent of Reality TV as a genre, what became clear is that the real and surreal were shagging out in the shed. Many artists linked to this movement, work to create their own alternate visual universes as they moved within breathing communities. If we think about the work of Jon Burgerman, the famous Lads of the London Police, or the Trademark doodles of Microbo, we find political activism at play in the action though not necessarily the aesthetic. There are no overt messages, and McLuhan would have categorized their characters as cold media. This has nothing to do with frigid. On his scale, cold meant media that demanded imaginative interaction, as opposed to hot media like a sitcom that gives you all you need to know including the canned laughter so you feel like you enjoyed it. Visitors were encouraged to experience Creative Action = Active Creation for themselves. For the vernissage, everybody was welcomed to the show with a paint filled balloon, which they were encouraged to hurl at photographs of the police taken during Parisian riots by Jerome G Demuth. His work, Le Trebuchet (The See-Saw), also had the people playing. The barbwire and borders were there, but this installation of found and handmade objects indicated that once we acknowledge them we might learn to play together. Simple ideas. Silly about the serious and serious about the silly. From the sensitive illustrations of Ephameron, to the mixed mythology of Alex Diamond, the haunting design of Never Effect or the
Boris Hoppek has earned acclaim for his drawings, paintings, characters, installations and silence. His unique style and subtle optimism cloaked in cynical lines and direct gestures have reached a wide audience, building off of each other to create a poignant approach to media aesthetics and a playful though concerned world view. The Black Sheep was first created for a Comic Art festival in Switzerland and complete with bobble head, a bell and the perfumes of dried sheep shit, was a direct reference to an image used by the Swiss right wing party UDC, which depicted three white sheep kicking a black sheep out of Switzerland for ‘plus de sécurité’ Boris is a man of few words, but recently felt obliged to say that he does not have time to explain his work to which he faithfully added no further explanation. Most visitors didn’t recognize his sculpture as a sheep and will never connect it to the prejudice it spoke towards, but this doesn’t matter. Old and young alike loved to tug the rope, talk with the sheep and smell the farm in downtown Brussels. “The barber can give you a haircut. The carpenter can take you out to lunch. Now, I just want to play on my panpipes. I just want to drink me some wine, As soon as you’re born, you start dying, so you might as well have a good time, Sheep go to Heaven, Goats go to Hell, Sheep go to Heaven, Goats go to Hell.” — Cake And here in limbo, music meets visual arts, emotion precedes calculation and the song of the silent majority finds new melody, clinging to that old hope that this machine just might kill fascists. As Street Art eventually becomes last season’s fashion, what grows out of the ashes may be an eventual twin tower to that of established art and media industries; a call to the coming community that may remain after the bubble has burst. And if that isn’t there, at least my friends and a bunch of forgotten headlines will be. www.nonewenemies.net www.myspace.com/nonewenemies
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The Street Art phenomenon is somehow logical considering the last decade of media’s marriage to manifest destiny. Like in the 60’s, forty years later, Folk began reappearing as a relevant and potent voice. At both points in time, the casual ‘whatever,’ became a standard and heated response to the ramblings of authority. There are shelves full of books discussing the build-up to this in the 60’s; we can easily count the actions, cultures and events that made sure the world was more recently ripened for a new approach to media aesthetics and authenticity: Graffiti, Anti War Activism, Comic culture, Skateboarding, Surfing and the publication of No Logo; Adbusters, CNN, Critical Mass, the WTO protest in Seattle 1999, Bush, Blair, Britney Spears, Rupert Murdoch, or Reality TV. More importantly, if we forget specifics, for the first time in history the stories on which we fabricate our opinions are built more frequently on second hand smoke from our screens than from real voices within our communities. We know this is true and we also know that mass media is shot into our lives from a few conglomerates with sales agendas. Ok. Consent is manufactured. But what to do about it without following the rules you wish to reject?
Whatever.
photography of RuediOne, the show offered work in a wide range of both digital and analogue mediums. Then there was Ado Jahic’s work, ‘Don’t Love Me Too Much’, which had people writing down the name of a person they loved, sticking it to the wall, drinking a shot to wash down memory and breaking their glass into a heart that would eventually crack as empty bottles began to fly.
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Folk does not have to be anti-establishment, but it is something other than establishment. It is not pretentious. It seeks direct emotional response based on everyday experience. What we call Street Art is Folk Art become fashionable at a time when media references have seeded common cultures in Brooklyn and Brussels, Beijing and Berlin. Indeed influenced by the attitude and aesthetic approach of Graffiti Writers, what’s called Street Art has other strong ties, including to a history of political activism, which you’ll find for example in the poster campaigns of L’Atelier Populaire (Paris 1968, later remixed by Banksy), or Abbie Hoffman, who in ‘Steal this Book’ (1971) said:
many people were crying out for this individual sort of visual song. In desperate times could we turn to Emo? Tecktonik? Dancehall? (Or are these just some of the prototype clones of the culture industry?)
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even if many were armed with imagination and the instinct that theory needs to be put into action and yanked out from under the ivy. If the medium is the message, this global folk movement suggests that today, action is the medium.
Inside
MOHS exhibit
A Danish haven for unlikely characters of all kinds… Words: Evie Haines
As the world watches the shift of illustration and graphic arts into a
Valdemarsgade 36 1665 Copenhagen, Denmark
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mainstream gallery scene, MOHS heads the pack in Denmark. Artists who despite years of experience have never been given access to those kinds of possibilities get a chance to play for a public on canvas or in installation. Younger ones get to test their teeth. Above all, MOHS is a oneman project, the relationship between the artists and the space stays personal, so green or greyer, homegrown or international, each show is a mutual voyage of discovery. Through a developing collabora-tion with Islands Fold in Canada and a pitch at Art Copenhagen, that trip looks promising.
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The focus of the space is on character design (in the broadest sense) and his mission is to present that to the Danish public as an artform in its own right. The original name of the gallery ‘Doodletown’ was chosen to reflect the curious and instinctive way that many character designers began the creative process. The shift to its current name (MOHS) was selected to avoid the cliché of the space as a cartoon-galleryshop. Necessary, because the range of the work is so much more. ‘Character’ here becomes a stepping-stone into all kinds of different fantasies. Jakob Tolstrup reframes social stereotypes with a keen eye and a sharp knife, for Mette Glyholt and Venom Yum the humans and animals function as waymarkers in a journey through surreal and unknown landscapes.
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MOHS exhibit is a project of Morten Hemmingsen Sørup, the brains, the hands and the heart behind this upcoming space in Denmark. After getting slowly hooked on art and its possibilities, the experience of becoming a father motivated him to turn that fascination into a full-time occupation, and thus the gallery was born.
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Kill Pixie Outside In. Kill Pixie’s world is in flux. While his reputation grows, the artworks just get more condensed. Words: Joseph Allen, 2008
With themes of futuristic lost cultures and extrasensory communication Mark’s work imploded becoming so detailed and intensified that worlds were opening up inside worlds. From a throw-up executed in seconds his current pieces on box mounted paper in inks, acrylics and watercolour take weeks to complete. The detailed line work is so precise and intricate that it can take hours just
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Peculiar god-like structures made up of much smaller objects and particles tower over industries of minions and shamans. It’s like a folk art from a time that never happened, or perhaps has not yet happened; a future-primitive formed in a place very deep inside, where tiny synapses spark and pop, where the folds of the brain hide new and original narratives. From public works to excite and revolt come intuitive personal pieces that are objects almost like a scripture or tablet. The works question our current customs and urges alternative scenarios for religion, race, industry, capitalism, communication and spirituality. As the group shows give way to prestigious solos and the murals turn into detailed sculptures, Mark’s work becomes tighter – compact and solid, coherent and precise. With upcoming solo exhibitions in Berlin, Los Angeles and Sydney Mark’s renown grows as his craft is continually honed. Bringing the outdoors in to meet on paper with the outpouring from inside his head, Kill Pixie’s creations are a perpetual tug-of-war as all the known past implodes into dense parables for future living. www.killpixie.net
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Of course when a writer is so preoccupied with output, the other writers get touchy and the law gets flustered. The latter finally caught up with him in Tokyo. When he got out of the rice and hotdog bun institution under 24 hour a day fluoros and back to his studio in Surry Hills, Sydney, his subject matter had dramatically intensified. After ten days without marking surfaces he had a lot to get out of him. Hence came an incredibly furtile period of creation - he spent less time on the sidewalk and on the tops of buildings making large, bold inscriptions and enveloped himself in new complex narratives under his desk lamp.
to look at it. Like a multi-vitamin - his paintings are everything you are lacking compressed into a concentrated capsule.
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Starting with large-scale throw-ups and pieces on almost every street in Sydney, Mark Whalen – the artist better known as Kill Pixie - earned his craft by working while you were awake and continued after you had gone to bed. Being up all the time, out all the time and painting big all the time it was only a matter of time that things would swing the other way.
M a k e Yo r O w n G o d
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Pax Paloscia Rabbits in the Open Road Pax Paloscia was born in Rome in 1974. Her work has been widely exhibited in galleries all across Europe. As an illustrator she contributes for a variety of recognized agencies (Mc Cann Ericsson, Leo Burnett, Saatchi&Saatchi) and publishing companies (Feltrinelli, Mondadori, Este).
Drago books recently published her first monograph: “Let The Kids Play”. Here is Laura’s take on her friend, sister and partner. Rabbits, guns, kids, colors, the blue of the water, the children at play… Comics and poetry, memories and reality merge on canvases, in photographs, videos and installations from Pax, a young Italian
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artist that lives and works between Rome and New York. The contrast of styles and techniques, the collage of the images, the expression of her signs bleed through colors dripped to the surface; tight rhythms, the repetition of a photographic series frozen yet in motion, these are the ingredients of her visual language forming a relevant lexicon. Her background and cosmopolitan sensibility sucking life out of the unique and the particular, praising diversity and its surprises while playing with cliché: from pop to graffiti, or expressionism to cinema or comic art,
there are certain elements continually at play in her work, and many of these speak to the crossing of cultures, the desire for something like democracy and a new generation of Nomads going out in search of it. Nomad as voyager; journey essential; as path, as growth, as an understanding of the unknown, and the subsequent enhancing of experience, Pax gives the journey time, takes time to revisit moments and place a critical eye to the ordinary in hope of revelation. www.paxpaloscia.com www.fotolog.com/studio14
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Pax contributes regularly to Italian and French magazines (Rolling Stone, Enville, Urban, Ventiquattro) and together with Laura Lombardi manages an international network of independent artists, Studio14.
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Words: Laura Lombardi
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SHE ONE Riding Alone,
Traces and Fades
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Art// Richard Prince. Christopher Wool. Warhol. Helmut Newton. Philippe Starck. Keith Weesner. Ridley Scott. Charles Krafft. RockGroup// FearWeMayCome. TheLucraziaSociety. NOGODStudio. AndYouWillKnowUsByTheTrailOfBuntlack. FrenchHouse. BarStool. OfficeFurniture. CalibratingDelinquency. Liqour&FineQuills. HipDate. HautLiaison. Return. Lanegan. Shuffle. Yorkstone. Stoneage. Coffee. Design. Photoshop. CityReverb. 12inch. Sleeve. Smoking Girl. Version. Done. Send. Mr Site. RideALone. Blogpost. Publish. Teeshirt. Graphic. Photoshop. Handstyle. YouSend. Invoice. FrogMint. Technical. Irony. Stop. Phonecalls. Ashtray. Jack. Ice. Branding. BlackAtelier. RattleCanOutlawry. Since1969. LondonBlood. LightningProject. SixWhiteSons. VLNTR. Cave. Shuffle. Youth. Parker.
SloganPaintings// NostalgiaIsOverated. MakeyourOwnGang. PaidMyDudes. WallsAreMadeToBeBroken. SendMeOpposition. FaxMeYourReligion. BrutalNestingHabits. SmokersDieCool. Image. Capture. Leica. Digital. Olympus Mju. Print. DebrisStudio. Book. Project. VeinPorter. KuroInori. poisonSmile. trophyWidow. QuietOpinion. SubtleInvasion. InventoryDisdain. Save. Refill. Jack. Orange, Slice. Zippo. BlackLodges. Upload. PlayToLose. Publish. Simone. Mills, Meadow. Hand. Written. Notes// [ BustedAlter ] [ EgoDriveby ] [ LowRaters ] [ GraceOverload ] [ BurnPalace ] [ SpiteRoast ] [ VoodooBallroom ] [ SourHorse ] [ ShadowPeer ] [ HotMedicine ] Glass. Empty. Sunset. Dinner. Guests. DavidLynch. JoshHomme. CaryGrant. Schnabel. Rommel. JunTakahashi. St. Johns. Nice. Movie. InTheMoodForLove. StuckOnDelete. Save. Sleep. Dream. House. Concrete. Ocean. Peace. www.ridealone.net
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Friday, June 13th. Five past cool. Jeans. Black Tee. Raybans. CDG2. Coffee. Black. Cigarette. To do. Words. Modart. Magazine. Open. TextEdit. File. New. iTunes. Shuffle. Malkmus. Inbox. Distraction. Request. Addict. New. Camo.. Winter 09. Starting point. Military. French. Abstract. Typographic. Rumble. Reshift. Outline. Overspill. Photoshop. 300dpi. Image Size 75cm x 75cm. Repeat. Pattern. Layers. Patients. Back Burner. Coffee. Reminder. Paint. Title. List. [ Death Before Brunch ] [ ChurchProof ] [ LipstickRecital ] [ FastTokyoBaptist ] [ TearDownLove ] [ GreyStateMuse ] [ KinkSlot ] [ SailSale ] [ envyHarbour ] [ complexNeon ] Inspiration// Lightning. Blood. Snow. Pre 66 altered. Streetlegal. Drags. V8. Whitewall. Mooneyes. Rust. Brylcream. Diner. SuicideShifters. Executioners. AutoButchers. Them!. Buckley. May. Shuffle. Stripes.
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SheOne was born in London back in 1969. For more than two decades, his unique style of shorthand and expressive approach to painting has continually heard him praised as one of those post-graffiti artists who take the original violence and turn acid burn into tight flower beds. Here’s what was in his head on …
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Rise Above: 4 Tours of Duty The Journey is the Destination Images: Images: Above (and Ripo 06/07)
Departure
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It is never easy to say where a story begins, so it inevitably begins with a choice. Then it narrows in and starts with something you once heard, with a flat tire, a smile you can’t stop feeling, or maybe with coffee and a hungover jigsaw of what you will and won’t want to remember of last night. It could travel back to begin, a lullaby your mother sang or the first time you found yourself forced to fight. It could be right now.
ABOVE
These questions however, are of crucial importance for the cracks they form and the doors they open, distance always allowing for an alternative response to emotion; where is there a better place to check the bottle of your answers than on the road?
2004
Talking about America The USA is as different from Europe as it is from itself. Its states share common media and marketplace and monetary system, but the border remains a chaotic experiment running forward as fast as possible towards tomorrow before biting itself on the ass. The truth may be in similarities, but the reality of the United States lies in colorful and aged differences. Most people talk about America as if it means something, with no clue about what that might be. Media doesn’t help, newscasters categorize citizens as beer drinking voters vs. wine drinking voters, as red or blue, democrat or republican, and all sorts of statistics that miss the sarcasm they demand. Above’s first trip took him across his own country to see for himself what America might eventually mean. Reno, Cleveland, Portland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, 14 cities and more than 3000 miles in the car where he often slept during the day,
this was no glamour trip. Most of the time he saw the country by the light of the moon, the lamps, the cigarette butts, shadows and yellow stripes of the streets. Already skinny as a rail, Above lost 15 pounds on this intensive 3 month long trip. He referred to the work he left behind as Arrow Mobiles; spinning hand cut wooden Arrows, designed and slapped with words on each side of the wood: STOP/BUSH, LAZY/JOKE and so on. Instead of going to the wall, he left something that didn’t touch property (in a sense) and could be removed, symbols of positive provocation and a new discussion for sociologists and police who discuss the famous ambiguous sneakers dangling as death on the wire. He begun the trip with 289 arrows and returned with none. The longer the trip, the lighter we must travel. Above had finished what he started and found a place for all the work he had prepared for the journey.
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I’ll start this fragment of a tale with America, because I think it’s a true American tale from start to wherever it finishes. California played its part and we could begin with skateboards, with Zboys, with sun and music or Manifest
Destiny; with hippy gatherings or Hendrix reinventing time on his guitar. Above was born in California where he remembers his parents telling him that there is no way to draw something wrong, and quickly picked up the idea that sometimes when you’re brave enough to take this approach you end up asking a lot of questions about yourself. The flavor isn’t always pleasant.
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Words: HArlan Levey
2006
Trains and Hustles
When he completed his US tour, he got to working, waiting on tables and on tips, hustling as for more than 6 months he started setting up his next trip. A new batch of arrows were again all hand cut, as were the fabrics, as were, as is, everything Above has produced until now. Above always has two jobs. One is labor he does for money. It is pragmatic reality. He uses this to pay himself time to do the other job, a labor for love. It is hope, desire and possibility. As he built and designed a new body of work, he mapped the proposed journey and considered its demands. When there was some form to the desire, he began sending around blind mails, asked friends where they had friends and putting the most important link of street art or Graffiti to the test by seeing if these so called cultures were actual communities. They are.
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Above knew this. He’d lived in the nets of this community in Paris where he’d worked as an Au Pair some years earlier and had made the runs, fallen in love with various elements of the Parisian Graffiti and street art scenes and picked up influences and information.
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This was just the start. He felt the ethic. He lived it and believed in it. Above made an art of tapping the wire as he gave heads up to a network that exists, and chooses to stay off the radar whenever possible. Over four and a half months, he visited 13 countries. This was a longer trip, and the work he prepared was a slightly mutated medium compared to his previous work. Unsure how locations and reactions to his mobiles would play out, he prepared wooden arrows and on arrival built himself a series of long wooden planks that formed a U at the top. He’d use these to press the arrows up on walls, hitting places that he otherwise could not reach. It was on this trip that we met. I’d received that friend of friend of friend email and eyeing its tone, my arm didn’t need any twisting. I hung around with Above for a few days; tagging, building things, pasting arrows, painting rooftops and avoiding trouble. 3 years later, a few of the forty arrows he placed are still up, and a house that was constantly covered in tags hasn’t lost the paint job Above gave her and its dress remains clean to this day. The owner is chuffed. The neighbors are jealous. Above was on his way. There were still eleven countries to go before he headed back to home and continued asking himself what that really means.
“I was a year out of art school and pretty disenchanted about the bullshit they had been spitting at me for the past 4 years. I always felt that I had to reject what they had (or hadn’t) taught me and discover things for myself. When I met Above I felt what he was doing and the attitude he had towards it and it gave me a lot of confidence to go for it myself. As he says, “Trust in the Unknown and Go With the Flow.” This is how I was raised to live my life and probably why we hit it off from the start. The number of different thoughts and evolving ideas that are always going through his head are also inspiring, and even when things don’t work, he does indeed just keep going. At his most manic, he doesn’t stop. It can be 4 in the morning and all anybody wants to do is sleep and he’ll get up, go out and crush it. Generally he’ll somehow convince others to join him. When he’s got an idea in his head of something he wants to accomplish, he’ll follow it to the end no matter how exhausting, dangerous, insane or even stupid it might seem.” – Ripo When Above visited me in Brussels for the second time, Ripo was with him. They share more in common then that slogan and more in their differences then they do in their similarities. I remember coming home and hearing Ripo up in my attic. It must have been at least 30 degrees that day, hot enough you could barely breathe and I found him next to the one small window, the floors and walls covered
In terms of their next trip, Ripo brought his own connections and skills to the table even before it began. Coupled with the Wooster Collective reports on Above’s last trip, word traveled faster than a train about their next comings and goings. Recognition always plays an important role in seducing opportunity, yet its exposure eventually also brings in some hate. I’d say Above understands the ill and joy of media pretty well, the mixed consequences of that mixed up media. This is a trait, which allowed him to take another lesson on the chin as it came out as cold hearted as ever. Naturally as more people knew about Above and his projects, for all those who were touched positively, even inspired, there were others quick to voice their skepticism. People called it Graffiti Tourism and snickered that Above was a brand and his trips self promotional tools. This attitude also came out of a sort of Graffiti thing: do it over and over and over again and people will recognize you for it. Does it become self branding? Definitely. Do most artists eventually find a visual language that viewers will link to them? Blu has. So has Os Gemeos, Richard Serra, Jenny Holzer, Chuck Close, and many who haven’t are in search of it. What’s the problem then? Here criticism reveals what a waste of time it can be. What if this were all true? A guy earns his money, spends it doing something he believes, works constantly as he travels, meets people, learns about the world, shares and loves. He does what he does, is conscious about the impact and potential benefits as well as consequences of what he does and he gives like a person who believes that this sort of adventure depends on giving. Nothing wrong with ambition, but why attack it when it’s laid on the table honestly and vulnerably?
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“One of the main thing that attracted me to Graffiti when I was 16 years old was the fact that you could make and paint something under a different name and personality. I like to keep my personal name and face out of the media as this is not important nor is it even relative to the artworks. I choose to be called ABOVE so why would I switch it up and start using my family name. Same goes for my face or body. The photos of “Me” on my website are not me and will never be me as its just simply not important on what an artist looks like, but what they create! For this ideal I have friends in photos that are supposed to be “Above.”
Off the top of my head I would say I’ve been hosted by something like 50 different friends who hosted me in their city/country with a wealth of help. I have said it before and I keep saying it over and over that without the help and assistance of my friends in foreign cities and countries these tours would be extremely difficult if not impossible. Thank you everyone that has let me into your home, and helped with the tours and artworks.” - Above
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Graffiti Gave Paris Life
in plastic, 6 or 7 pieces on the go and grinning like an idiot. While Above came and knew exactly what he was going to focus on. Ripo seemed like the guy who didn’t want to miss the party simply because something great would happen. Here I feel like I should tell you something about Ripo, but it has started feeling like a plug. We ask him to contribute to Modart, collaborate on exhibitions, random ideas and show more than voluntary support both to the geezer and his work. That’s straight and probably says the most.
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2005
By the time he returned to Europe the following year, Above had an upgraded batch of Arrow Mobiles and had made other useful adaptations to the travel plans. For one, he realized how easy it would be to save 1000’s of euros by forging a eurail pass. Having seen how slack the conductors were enough times to weigh the odds and brave the easy bet, he decided to make his own tickets to ride. He’d also picked up a partner, a like thinking nomadic American artist and an accomplice who could actually pull off the forgery: RIPO.
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Arrival Answer A: Death Answer B: Beginning
Busted in Brazil
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There will be new beginnings. If you’re wondering what’s next from Above. Chill out. There’s a whole body of work from these tours that’s waiting to be shown. These photographs are just a microscopic glimpse. And of course, a tour has ended and he obliges himself to begin working on new ideas immediately. If it is an American story, we must mention speed. Things go fast. We’re forced to keep up. We learn to slow down; that speed often overlooks satisfaction and is the reason those teeth are snapping at our bottom. Above isn’t even 30 years old, he’s afforded himself the opportunity to see a great deal of this world, listen to it and learn from it. He’s living the dream. And sharing it. www.goabove.com www.ripovisuals.com http://southcentraltour.wordpress.com/
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“One Sunday in Sao Paulo we were out all day painting with a number of bombers and pixadores from the city. On the last spot of the day I began painting a larger piece while Above was hanging around tagging and our friend Nao was on a really big detailed piece. Apparently the owner of the lot whose walls we were painting wasn’t so happy and called the cops. By the time they arrived we were all in our cars waiting to leave except Nao who was nowhere near finished. They went up to him and began giving him shit, than they turned around and saw us sitting there and came up and dragged us all out and lined us up. They searched our pockets,
the 2 cars, everything they could, and found a countless amount of spray paint and luckily nothing else incriminating. Obviously Above and I figured we were fucked. Two cars full of spraypaint, caught red-handed, tags all over the walls, and up against the wall with some Brazilian cop cupping our balls looking for drugs, not an ideal situation. After having everything searched and then explaining where we were all from, why we were there, what we did, and what we were doing with all the paint, the cops turned to look at what we had done and said, “Well we can see you guys have some talent and are painting graffiti, not pixacao. We like it. If this guy wants to drop the charges then you’re free to go, if not we have to take you in.” At that point our friends, and we, relaxed a lot realizing that the cops were kind of on our side. In the end the guy who called the cops came over, began joking with us and said he liked graffiti but we had started tagging everywhere else and weren’t listening to him when he was yelling at us. By that point the cops were relaxed, smoking cigarettes and Nao was actually allowed to go back and finish his piece.” - Ripo This trip included more walls, collaborations, festivals and distances between cities than any other. While you can travel Europe seeing the countryside at the train’s frame and pace, on this trip they had to get out and smell the fields. America, South, Central or North has massive urban sprawl linked by an openness that reminds you there is a third way.
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On the road again with Ripo, this one was massive; nearly 6 months of travel from Brazil, down to Argentina, over to Chile and all the way up to Mexico through 15 cities and 11 countries. Correctly and playfully called, The South Central Tour, this time Above had spent more time engaged with the words spinning out his Sign Language, developing some of the ideas he’d found on the last trip. Looking to challenge himself and spend more time experimenting, he was also well aware of the relaxed attitudes towards Graffiti and other forms of street painting making South and Central America appear has a sunny paradise for more spontaneous access to the action behind his art. While these attitudes had both boys high on the smell of paint in the dry hot sun, they were equally impressed by the communities getting behind these actions and even the police who had them nearly pissing their pants out of fear and then laughter in a ten minute span.
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2007
There will be no arrival. This is the story of one guy writing his own story and trying to prove that you can live the one you write. He’s in the south of Italy getting ready for the FAME festival as I write this. He told me that he now considers Europe home and this isn’t because he’s settling here just yet.
Images: Oli
The Boat was full, up, down and all around, and it was bouncing. While at the fair art becomes part of the market, at the party art was there only for the imagination. The public reaction to the work made us proud and from those who got busy with the chalk to those who came in fancy dress, everybody seemed to escape a bit, fantasy and fun the common denominators as the tide rose.
Special thanks to Working Class Hero, Lichtfaktor, the Invisible Heroes, Ro, Die Seiner, Frerk, Marc Wohr and Stefan Strumbel for sharing their skills and treats + shouts out to those who made the music: Jesse da Killa, DJane Kay, Moe, Zest and Jahmazing.
CREAT I V E BOAT PART Y
Many thanks to all those who joined Modart at the Creative Boat Party in Basel, to celebrate the opening of the Scope Art Fair.
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SCOPE
Words: Ev Haines
FA N TA S T I C N O B O D I E S
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We’ve got a bit of a crush on them you see. Yeah, we’ve been watching the videos online, reading their texts, flicking through their photos; gasping every now and then and chortling a lot. So just why do we think they’re so great? Well first off because while governments are picking fights and politicians are loading into offshore accounts the Fantastic Nobodies are playing heroes and villains with the razorfine line between the tragic and the comic slicing into their feet. Two. Because they’re on amission. Amission like amoral. Amission to conjour up as much primitive chaos as possible and defeat the two-point perspective of daily life. Three. They’re taking it face on in an intensive, challenging collaboration. Writing on the legacy of Jackson Pollock, Allan Kaprow proclaimed that “Young artists of today no longer say, “I am a painter,” or “a poet” or “a dancer.” They are simply “artists.” All of life will be open to them. They will discover out of ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. They will not try to make them extraordinary, but will only state their real meaning. But out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well.”
FA N TA S T I C N O B O D I E S
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This month Modart’d like to take the time to present you to the Fantastic Nobodies, a New York artists collective who are made up of: Catjaw Brock Enright, Chudly Chad Spicer, Big Daniel Joseph, Dapper Dave Brown, Crasher Eric Laine, Guapo the Clown Marc Grubstein and Wildstyle Steve Johnson…
Poloroids: david henry brown jr
Nobodies and nothingness, Nihilism and a history of philosophy and thought that still rests on negative dialectics, ...has nothing to do with good or evil, says no prayers for divine intervention and frames every action as an exercise. Nietzche didn’t believe in happiness, but rather in objectives. Kierkegaard claimed our only duty is to live, to act, and that playing is everything. Different from gaming because play is the ultimate objective. There is no goal, there are no winners. The Fantastic Nobodies play as a team- but they’d all take a different stance on that. They’d all be right and all be wrong and aware that they are simultaneously neither and that none of it matters. Kaprow wrote that in the late 50s, but we reckon he is still spot on. Being an artist carries a responsibility, but only to self, extended self, to community, not to truth. Artists take the truth, the sacred and like patriots they gnaw at it until its profane scars are revealed. This is the moment the orgy begins.
marc grubstein
Does any of this have to do with these Fantastic Nobodies? Who knows. When you’re talking about a nobody, every opinion forms its own body, every influence parasites onto existing impulses. Refusing the urge to follow their lines towards discussions of lifestyles, behavioral art, politics or pranks, we’re going to pass the mic and hear from one Fantastic Nobody and maybe two. “Where pure grace ends, the awe of the sublime begins, composed of the influence of pain, or pleasure, or grace, or deformity, playing into each other, that the mind is unable to determine which to call it, pain, or pleasure, or terror.” — Ibid “The worst we could do is act afraid. Whether or not it works. Whatever it is. Say hello to the fantastic nobodies. A way to communicate. A wonderful show about horrible things.
daniel joseph daniel joseph
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marc grubstein
Find more info on the collective at: www.myspace.com/fantnob www.fantasticnobodies.com
It’s simple and simply impossible. It’s showing people stuff and trying to see what happens. It’s taking advantage of the space given. To connect to dots you can’t see and approach them as if you know they are there. Everything is connected. It’s so fucking obnoxious. And it’s really fucking hard. To accept that. To embrace these things. Still, I’m sorry to say I could do it alone. That I could do it myself. Whatever it is, it’s more fucked with you. I mean that in a good way, no matter how it sounds. Working with people you know shows you how little you know them at all. How little you know yourself. That’s the great beauty and the punch-in-the-face. That’s what you know vs. what you learn. More about them and more about you. Leaps and failures. To create together can burn the whole house down. Can destroy the building. All those egoes. All those opinions. All those points of view. All that good intention. But those moments where all go beyond these habits together, unaware too well of all the reasons why it actually works and links up dot to dot is basically magic. I can’t be what you’re not. It could never be so pretty, if it didn’t get so awful. Within and without what we do and outside our control. The struggles are the struggles no matter what. Always on the verge of being awkward.” — Daniel Joseph And with that, look and read, find what isn’t there and replace it by what is in this selection of visual traces from the situations that they set up or ran into. This summer, it won’t be in theatres, but Operation Shitstorm is real, very very real, it is bloody, it stinks and laughs so hard the saliva goes through the sprinkler as the Fantastic Nobodies march on Berlin, where they are taking over Brot.UndSpiele. Galerie from July 11th. Costumes, sabotage, sauce, deep thoughts, and humour fill their weaponry -We recommend that you keep an eye on their progress… www.brot.undspiele.com/
or on some of their individual websites: www.davidhenrybrownjr.com www.bipolart.cc
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It’s not as deep as it sounds. It’s hard to remember all that inspires you even if you write it down. Art should speak for itself, you shouldn’t have to speak for it. It’s like David Bowie makes a better myth than Bob Dylan. Bowie was wide open and all over the place. Dylan talked too much and made it too precious. It’s completely random in a certain order.
That’s the thing. The complete spazz and casual disregard of context/critical theory/selling points/ so on. While at the same time being fully aware of and, in fact, playing into these very notions and orders. BE A MESS, BUT CLEAN IT UP.
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daniel joseph
FA N TA S T I C N O B O D I E S
marc grubstein
C
is for Creatures
Huh. This street looks ok. I recognize you. You recognize me. Sniff, scratch, spit, stick. My genetic codes evolved a little but I’m still animal, and the path back to ape is a very short one. Kenn is on the lookout for the cracks in the human façade… and the links to the cuddly and not-so cuddly cousins of our species.
T
is for Teaching
Teaching? Like, I tell you what you should know? Where’s the fun in that?…Welcome to Calligrafight Club.
First rule of Calligrafight club is, you do not use writing equipment. No pens, pencils, biros, no paint, no ink, no printouts. You do not use anything that leaves a bit of itself behind when you drag it over a piece of paper. What you do use is string, fire, spaghetti and hair.
This is Kenn Munk’s World
(1
(2
(3
(4
5(
Words: Ev Haines
Sometimes you come across people who seem to see the flow and not the traffic. That cut away the deadwood and spiderwebs that are hanging on old concepts down to a ridiculously primitive form only to build them back up into something complex and elegant. With a fair dose of humour. Meet one of them.
is for Hunting.
Whether you stand surrounded by forests of aerials, streetlamps or trees, instinct still drives us, and the strongest of all is to dominate and possess. Thousands of years ago man moved softly through the landscape spear in hand stalking his prey. As human life has drifted towards the city, our territories have changed their form but not their importance. And the human forest-stalkers of old are stalked in their turn by machines. ‘In April 2005 I released my series of do-it-yourself hunting trophies called ‘Antlor - The Deer Departed’. Each Antlor is made up of two sheets of thick, nice quality A4 paper, you cut out the individual pieces, glue them together and voilà, you’ve got the glory of a hunting trophy.
E
Rules are important to the Munk universe. Not in that stereotyped Scandinavian desire for order… but as a motor for creation. Inventing rules makes life easier but also more interesting as you’re always out to bend or break them. Take a system, and then test it, multiply it, and squeeze the last drops of juice out of it then put it aside. Every Thing is Black and White, started as a eureka moment, ‘I’ll limit myself to two colours and base my work on this, base everything on this, toys, graphics,
clothes…’ Then it became the starting point for designing figures. Other rules got layered onto the first... The figures evolved into shows, and other things got sucked into the monochrome vortex: events in various European cities… new objects, installations and finally an open-call for a collaboration with sticker artists. ‘I wanted to make a travelling show with the figures and got started on making them, they were part manufactured by me, part resampled of existing bits of toys - inspired by the way graphic design/art direction works, you get these pieces, texts, messages, photos, logos and so on and your job is to make these many things one thing.’
The folding camera is the sequel to the hunting trophies. They’re based on something I noticed when I moved to London part time. There are cameras everywhere, cameras and warnings and it made me think about what I call “fear economy”: people are afraid something bad’s going to happen to their property - they buy fear, but then they flip it around and put up a camera and thereby
‘Along with a briliant copywriter - who for the time being chooses to go unnamed - we made these yellow vinyl stickers to go up on traffic bollards around London. The beauty of these things is that in daytime they’re virtually invisible, come night and they stand out. We put them up around the time of Star Wars’ 30th birthday so we used tweaked AT-ATs and Probe Droids.’
KENN MUNK
58 KENN MUNK
“Most fun paid for job is without doubt a logo I made for an American named John Young who will run a gorilla suit construction workshop in West Chester, Pennsylvania this autumn. Yes, you got it right: A workshop where the participants will make their own gorilla suit.”
is for Every Thing is Black and White
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H
A paper kit made for a show benefiting endangered species.
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sell fear of getting caught – a lot of fear-dealing back and forth. Once again it’s about playing, sports hunting is really (deadly) playing, the hunter doesn’t need the deer he stalks. I thought for this urban series of hunting trophies I’d take something that “hunts” people in the street and make it the hunted, the trophy.’
Kenn Munk currently haunts an invisible space that is somewhere between Denmark and London. Perhaps it’s his enormous curiosity and imagination that keeps him afloat as he moves on, by and through, hooking on a detail, throwing the rope back to another thought from last week and bridging ideas and objects that were otherwise very unlikely to make contact. Dividing his time between teaching, designing, intense observation and a lot of dreaming there was a whole lot of things we wanted to share with you. So dipping fingers into every pot in the kitchen, mixing Alien with architecture, dead deer, and spaghetti, in a kaleidoscope email conversation Kenn and Evie Haines ran up a few entries from his dictionary to try and spell out the language of his world.
NO
ST
EP
NO
ST
EP
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KENN MUNK
KENN MUNK
Why should anything do just one thing when it can do two, or eight or ten? Why should anything be just one thing when it can be two, eight or ten? Why should fonts just write letters and not spaces, sighs, silence? Why shouldn’t reality always be dressed up in something a little sexier, more entertaining or just something more eccentric? Visual word games. And it can be so simple. Shift the scale or rotate 90° to the left and ladies and gentlemen, your rabbit is a hat.
The love-element is about what makes me happy and what doesn’t. The work I did at the advertising rarely didn’t - the agency didn’t really try to be creative, the focus was on the invoice. What I did love was projects that made people happy or puzzled them or made them see the world in a slightly different way.
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Love in the contract is a nice commitment, you won’t call me and say that you want the “love” bit left out. The “love” covers a lot of things, pride in the workmanship, not cutting corners - it shifts the focus slightly away from myself or the client and towards the project, it’s about doing what’s best for the project. As for self initiated projects, they’re mostly started on the love of an idea, so love comes natural to them.’
KENN MUNK
There’s always a destination somewhere in the back of your mind. A utopia that could be a collage of favourite moments or something totally invented. Where different rules apply. Where new possibilities arise. There are several hundreds of universes that at one moment we’ve seen, read or been told, that have flashed up in our minds and then died away. Intergalactic worlds of samurai honour, or a planet where apes are King. Sometimes they stay to haunt you- and just occasionally the edges of those worlds bleed gently into our own as the great mass of the public sub-conscious starts to act out their stories. Designers are always struggling with utopias, how things are, and how they could or should be- and one of Kenn’s latest adventures is into architecture and the mentality behind the structures that we use, adopt and suffer every day. As the act of building bridges into fictional landscapes or futures. ‘In the Natural History Museum in London there’s a statue of a fella, unfortunately I’ve forgotten his name, but his job title on the little plaque is “Explorer” which is an amazing job title.’
D e ’s i g n s F i c t i o n
One week, 18 people turning a Danish barn into a slice of the future. The space was converted into a late 21st century factory-cum-pharmaceutical marketplace, we made props, including facemasks, medicine, guns (of course there were guns) and so on, we made costumes, we made a language (called Nordic). The results weren’t the set, the costumes or the props, but the pictures taken - stills from an imaginary movie never made…
Bonzai Britain
‘Sniptape is 66 meters of cut-out-ability. It’s a joke in the form of adhesive tape, it’s the fastest way to convert your ride into a convertible, it’s the fastest way to add a new doorway to your house, the fastest way to make anything a coupon you can cut out and bring to the store.’
The bonsai oak logo is called “bonsailand” and it makes sense if you say it out loud and it’s all about
how England is a mighty, lonely oak in miniature.
Semper Numquam
‘Semper Numquam is a club, much like the Adventurers Club but for time travellers. In collaboration with John
Young- (the guy running the gorilla suit workshop) we’re planning to publish a book…’
The Puma Skullwhale
‘Working with a pair of not very nice sample shoes, I came up with this thing that’s both a Day of the Dead-type skull and a whale. I love the whale most.’
The Lloyds building
‘Pazzle is a little puzzle with no solution, just a lot of visual confusion.’
‘The Lloyds building in London, sure, I didn’t make it - but I can’t walk past it
without stopping. It’s a mindboggling machine.’
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You have to be passionate to take a group of people on a sightseeing tour of your local city, in order to point out its graphical oddities, in shorts and a T-shirt, well, jogging? Why not. To invite them for juice afterwards. And then publish the pictures? An adventure that began overhearing a guided boat tour in Berlin during a leisurely riverside jog evolved into a series of guided running tours of Århus and is possibly soon coming to London…
G
is for Great Places you’ve Never Visited
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I had a job at an advertising agency that I hated for eight years, I didn’t try to find a new job because the pay was all right and it wasn’t very busy, working hours were good so I could do my own stuff in my spare time, it was important that what I did on my own was something I loved as I didn’t need the money at the time. When I then left the job and started out on my own I thought that the Love-aspect was a good idea and that I should hold on to it – even if I now did need the money. It’s even in my standard contract for clients. My clients and I are legally bound to do a project with “love and spirit”.
O
KENN MUNK
‘Hmmm. Describing love...
is for Overlap
Kenn Munk is the creator of the fold-your-own security camera in this issue of Modart. Surveillance for the imaginative… For more voyages in the Munk world and a myriad of ‘ways to get a lot of new information in a short space of time’ try the website www.kennmunk.com
F
is for Finding Love
In Your Ear!
Florent de Maria & Jon Kennedy are:
June’s TOP 5 Music Videos In Ten Words (each) By: Florent de Maria
Brighton Port Authority – “Toe Jam” Comic. Sixties. Nymphs. Dance. Undress. Puritan. Video games. Censure. David Byrne. Dizzee Rascal.
By Florent de Maria & Jon Kennedy. Special guest: Abner Preiss
I N Y OM U UESAI R C
By: Jon Kennedy
DJ Frane presents “Electric Garden Of Delights” ( tuff city massive ) 2 x LP | www.
Howard Lloyd | “The Quickie EP” ( wretched of the earth entertainment ) | www.
myspace.com/djfrane What can I say apart from YOU NEED THIS RECORD IN YOUR LIFE. It’s a mixture of psychedelic rock, funk and jazz from this generation. With Peter Frampton tinges, DJ Shadow flava’s and all that is good about instrumental hip hop ! Some basslines and drum breaks we all have grown to love placed over selected loops you won’t have heard. Generally a fuking superb release from DJ Frane. I also recommend checking out his latest CD…. RESPECT IS DEFINITELY DUE !
howardlloyd.com A hard hitting introduction to Howard Lloyd the producer / emcee here. Howard can certainly battle rap. He’s gotta be a hard emcee opponent to face on stage with a mic ! With all the lyrical skills worthy of an, as yet underground, emcee and some tight production this EP is all round…. A splendid listen. Each side is graced with instrumentals if you want to try and keep up with our Howard and the whole thing is pressed on lush matt white vinyl. Collectors piece in music and style if ever I saw one !
Afrobeat | www.biggabush.co.uk/news-lionhead. htm As the title suggests this is an afrobeat influenced 12”. Honestly not what I play out or my cuppa tea when Djing at all, but I can appreciate the rhythms and soul in here. For me the bomb is “Bokoor Sound Special” with skippy drums, cheeky keys and Africaan vocal samples. It’s deep stuff !
DJ Vajra | “Cuts & Drums Vol. 1” | www.djvajra. com A tuff collection of breaks and scratches, bass lines and speech samples. With all the “Fresssssh”s and “Hit Me”s missing and in its place some fucking original stuff. All the beats are in triplets ( that’s 3 beats to the bar timing instead of the regular 4 beats we all know so well ) for ease of use, which I am assured by my scratchy DJ mates is exactly the way they like it ! Check his website for some fucking INSANE scratching ! and I mean……. this guy is out of this world !!!!
RSD | “Prophecy” / “Koto” ( white ) | www.myspace.com/dubrockers
Rob Smith drops another fat booty bass dubstepper in the form of this 10” from Japan. “Prophecy” is a sure-fire dancefloor gloomstepper ( that’s a good thing ) with all the Smith & Mighty, More Rockers soulful dub we all love Rob for but with a new dubstep injection. “Koto”, as the name suggests, has a more oriental tilt in a similar fashion to side A.
Gripper | “A Life Of Consummate Ease” 4 track album sapmler ( atic ) | www.myspace.com/djgripper
A little taster of what’s in store from Gripper’s new album on Atic Records in the shape of this 4 track 12”. It’s certainly summery and jazzy and a little bit house but I do wish he’d put “The Daddy” from his website player up there ! Guess we’ll have to wait for the full length. Welcome back Gripper !
Mr Confuse | “Lookout Weekend” ( legere ) | www.legere-recordings.com
The B-Side here is the bomb-side, with dancefloor breaks in a jazzy hip-hop fashion. “Groovin On The Spot” shines through with tough drum breaks and drum sounds married to child-like horn and flute riffs….. Quite splendid indeed ! I’m also loving the Mr Confuse logo a lot ! NICE !
Roszja I Lu | “Przez cian” | 9moves@gmail.com
This hand numbered and, by far, best release of the month is Polish emcee Roszja and producer Lu. They effortlessly bring an amazing soundscape to your speakers. Inspired by 70’s Polish Jazz records the pair manage, superbly, I might add, to manipulate, cut and drop in new instruments over the original samples with STYLE ! It’s deep, clever, jazzy hip-hop. I fucking love this record and I want more !!!
Soul Sugar – “Ritual (part 1)” / “Ritual (part 2)” (mocambo) | www.mocambo.de
Shake Before Use | Kids Go Free | www.myspace.com/kidsgofre
Funky as fuk, latin funk here with a tasty space moog leading the way. Produced and mixed by the legendary Kid Loco from Paris. “Part 1” is a proper groover with outstanding organ riff’s, while “Part 2” concentrates on the drums and rhythms from all things percussion in the Soul Sugar outfit. Nice summer track this one.
Spanish rockers KIDS GO FREE dominate this split 7” release with “The Mercy Rule” and “Tutti”. Both tracks rock tightly in an 80’s fashion. Superb guitar riffs and vocal licks hold the afore mentioned “The Mercy Rule”. Pressed on lovely, lovely white vinyl and packaged in such a manner as to grab anyone’s attention on the shelf !
The Headhunter | “Get it On” / Wicked Lester – “Poo” ( muto ) | www.lounge-records.de
City Reverb | “Everything Wil Be Alright” ( dumb angel ) | www.myspace.com/cityreverb
This piece of vinyl accompanies the Club Tikka CD series. “Get It On” Pretty Purdie’s fat fat fat drum break from “Soul Drums” sit behind a sub-synth bassline and dirty funk hammond here in a bootleg fashion. Got to be a dancefloor stomper this one. On the flip-side Wicked Lester appear once more in my reviews. Tight as fuck drum breaks and generally silly hooks ride “Poo” along nicely. It’s daft and it works ! Bounce ta THIS !!
Dublex Inc | “NHL” ( muto ) | www.lounge-records.de
As previously mentioned this piece of vinyl accompanies the Club Tikka CD series. It’s a bit cheese for me to be honest this one. It’s skippy as fuk and I don’t know how to dance to this kind of groove. It’s just a little awkward, 2-step thing !
The Sugars | “Way To My Heart” / “End OF Our Love Affair” ( bad sneakers ) | www.badsneakers.co.uk
Leeds, UK based Bad Sneakers Records are doing it the way a label should. They release solid tunes packaged beautifully. Here sees The Sugar’s rocking gently with their trademark retro-swing sound on “Way To My Heart” while on the flip “End Of Our Love Affair” takes me back to a more motown style crossed with early Paul Weller. This track is the bomb from this 7” for me. Any fan of sleazy swing and rock and roll will melt for this one !
This Limited 7” is the first release from City Reverb. The A side combines ballad style downtempo with mid 80’s vocal hooks. A pretty unique sound here to be honest. Think French downtempo masters AIR without the keyboards. On the flip the Butch Cassidy Soundsystem dub it up to the chest to great effect ……. SUPERB
Soul Sugar | “Nothing But The Truth” ( sugar shack ) | www.myspace.com/soulsugar
Kid Loco once again features here on production and mixing duty for Soul Sugar. On the A side, “Part 1” is the god-damn bomb. Tight as fuk drums and basslines ride the whole thing while the keyboard players let rip. “Part 2” meanwhile is just an extension from “Part 1” ! **warning** ESSENTIAL 7” limited to 200 copies !!!
Das Fleur Earth Experiment - “Ahnen” / “Lass Mal Beginnen” ( d’akkord ) | www.dakkord.eu
Not particularly new this one but a nice excursion into downtempo gear. Containing all the essential rhodes, light basslines and hip-hop-esque beats. Nice lyrical skills too, although I have no idea what Fleur Earth are on about, it’s soulful….. Mildly essential for late, late night chill out sessions. Lovely artwork attracted me to this one, created by Josef Krill.
Daedelus – “Make It So” Love. To. Make. Music. To. Synthetic. Collage. Superposition. DIY. Well Done!
Munk – “Live Fast Die Old” Single. Cloudbuster. Modica. Gomma. Black & White. Close. Graphics. Asia Argento. Hypnotizing. Hit.
Minitel Rose – “Magic Powder” Frenchies. West Coast. Richness. Any Kind Of Music. Eighties References. Tellier. Daft Punk. Original. Efficient! (I know, it’s more than ten words…)
I got fired again- it was a good job (well actually making art is a good job- making others art- in the end -is bullshit)-- I got fired because I was not being a team player…. Ok, well, so I was not a team player- but I swear I’m going to work on that. Three months ago, a friend of mine, “Duchamp” who is a blogging musical expert, gave me some music that he said was good. I was having trouble with my Ipod- so he “fixed” it- by losing all my music and putting his favorites in exchange! God bless the Ipod Terror Team. Anyway- somewhere in between Sufjan Stevens, Zeta Swoon, Tom Waits, Ween, Otis Reading, Of Montreal, and a few others – he placed a MAGIC PILL. Axel Rose went to my high school in Lafayette Indiana- to say that I have a good taste in Music would be an extreme exaggeration- Guns and Roses are the Greatest and Axel ROSE still kicks ass. I’m 33 now- and becoming less of a team player- more cynical, angrier, and I really don’t care so much about anything. Its sad, but its also so romantic- I love the life I am living. I was speaking about a MAGIC PILL my friend left me on my Ipod- well, for three weeks I didn’t stop listening to this pill- Bon Iver “For Emma, Forever ago”, its magic. http://www.myspace.com/boniver One of the advantages of living in Europe and having American bands come is that you can see them in a really small venue. Amsterdam is really good like that-, and also, its nice when you know the venue, and some people who work there- and you can get free beer---oh that’s nice.
Speechless………Blisssss……….. After the show I asked them about the idea of creating music, which is amateur like? I don’t think they got it at first. What the hell was I talking about…? Oh, yes, Amateurism- I tried to explainAmateurism- Blahhhh, blahh, blahhh, that blahhh blahhhh, blahhh… like this hand drawn poster, blahh blahh, or a song which is “not so technically cleaned”-blahh blahh, something which comes from the HEART blahh blahh- kind of pure blahh blahhh. They told me that they used the sounds from dropping hangers in one of their songs. In fact, one night while I was listening to song called “the wolves (Act 1 And 2)” I heard a pan dropping, or was it a chair, or a spoon or…a car… I was too drunk that night- maybe…. Well… Yes, that album sounds like a beautiful dropping of hangers- Or is it angles? Dirty Dirty dirty- that how I felt after I asked them if they were amateurs! Not to back down from an explanation- I went back to the table we spoke at- and I say I’m sorry if they misunderstood my question… about Amateurism! “Actually, we get what you are saying…The thing is… We think that you can’t take yourself too seriously.”
Four of us went to See Bon Iver- all junkies for their music- their pill.
Memphis Industries, talents a gogo By: Florent de Maria
Some labels just deserve our chatter for all the good things they bring to ours ears… What is Memphis Industries? Memphis… Every music lover would softly thrill, thinking about the city where the blues and the rock n’roll are born, and where artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis, B.B. King or the other King, Elvis, obtained their letters patent of nobility for eternity. However, the matter is a bit more contemporary, and concerns Memphis Industries, an English label which invaded the dithyrambic reviews in the specialized press more than once these past years, but which also keeps on being amazingly discreet while releasing stunning records.
The recent recordings from Tokyo Police Club or the sublime El Perro Del Mar’s album are two more steps towards this global recognition, after Field Music and Blue States did the same last year. Memphis Industries already tears away and surprises for a decade now. And to celebrate this epochal birthday, the label doesn’t mince its words! The very awaited new Tokyo Police Club record is available since May, in company with three new revelations (again…), The Shaky Hands, The Ruby Suns and School Of Language. The catalogue gets thicker and remains splendid. Run on www.memphis-industries.com to learn and hear more from them.
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In Your Ear!
64
By: Jon Kennedy
7” Reviews Top to bottom . Left to right
By: The Reverend Abner Preiss
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12” Reviews Top to bottom . Left to right
Bon Iver
I N Y OM U UESAI R C
Portishead – “The Rip” Come Back. Animation. Jewel. Nick Uff. Vertiginous. Eminent. Exquisite. Troubling. Disconcerting. Applause.
Show & Tell Cai Guo-Qiang I W a n t To B e l i e v e www.c aiguoqiang.com Guggenheim Museum N e w Yo r k | U S 22/2-28/5 2008 www.guggenheim.com
“Asian art may be hot, but he adds fire. And there’s nothing quite like watching a well-planned joyous explosion.”
Text: Benjamin Tischer
CAI GUOQIANG
Red Flag, 2005 P h o t o b y M a s a t o s h i Ta t s u m i , c o u r t e s y C a i S t u d i o
Why Not Tigers?
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This is just one of the spectacles present in the mid-career retrospective of Chinese-born artist, Cai Guo-Qiang. A pack of flying wolves, a 100 year-old shipwreck and arrowriddled tigers also lay in wait for the unsuspecting viewer.
SHOW AND TELL
Another sculpture/installation consisted of an ancient fishing boat floating over head, every inch covered with some 3000 arrows, with a Chinese flag blowing bravely from a cheesy metal fan. This piece—Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows—is another Chinese fable, this one based on the story of a third century Chinese general who ran out of arrows, then sent out a decoy boat at dawn for
But despite the popularity of his faux taxidermy scenarios and mythmaking prowess, Guo-Qiang’s true renown is for exploding things, and not in the harmless simulated manner of the rental cars. Over a ten-year residency in Japan from 1986-1995, he developed what he referred to as “explosive events.” These were fireworks as artworks, sometimes orgiastic but always specific in their aesthetic: spirals of explosions in a desert, a circle of smoke and flash in a deserted German military camp, firework rainbows crossing New York’s East River. One video on display at the retrospective was from a 2005 piece at Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Poland. Entitled Red Flag, the entire façade of the building erupted an apocalyptic war zone in the shape of, wait for it, a red flag. It’s shocking, violent and beautiful, even in its crappy video form. That such ephemeral art can be made, even governmentally sponsored in our terrorist times is evidence of GuoQiang’s eminence in the art community. Asian art may be hot, but he adds fire. And there’s nothing quite like watching a well-planned joyous explosion. There were no actual pyrotechnic pieces in the retrospective, which is one of the few disappointments of the Guggenheim’s look back. But keep your eyes open, Cai Guo-Qiang is in charge of the pyrotechnics for the opening of the Beijing Olympics, and it’s sure to be something.
He also has been “drawing” with fireworks, covering huge canvases with smatterings of gunpowder, covering the whole thing with some sort of support held down by stones and exploding them. There are some great videos online of him working is his airplane hangar-sized studio. All his studio assistants jump as the work flames up before disappearing in a cloud of smoke, then rush out to quell the flames. The results are stunning scorched sketches, reminiscent of elemental Nihonga paintings, trading fire for the traditional water. Cai Guo-Qiang alos has a knack for employing fellow immigrants. The Gugg offers two examples of his sincerity. In Reflection - A Gift from Iwaki is a weathered hull of a shipwreck set within piles of broken china. The local residents from the small seaside town who originally excavated the sunken ship were flown to the Guggenheim to assist with the installation, as they have with previous incarnations. Another piece in progress of sorts was New York’s Rent Collection Courtyard. Here the artist has ten Chinese artists recreating an installation that first appeared as China’s entry in the 1999 Venice Biennial, in which the propagandist sculptures from China’s Cultural Revolution—farmers and peasants being worked hard by some nasty looking armed soldiers working for cruel landlords. The reproductions are amazing, and the artists worked during museum hours, making clear what hard work art making actually is. The hall was remained littered with tools and old plastic even when the artists
Head On, 2006 Photo by David Heald.
had left. The figures are unfired clay, so they crack, doomed to fall apart. One is left with a very voyeuristic impression. A glimpse at the Oz behind the behemoth that is contemporary art. And with these works, as with most of the exhibition, Guo-Qiang skates that impossible line of being political without falling into propaganda himself. While much has been said of the terrorist implications of his work—everything seems to be a metaphor for a car bomb these days—this is all left to the viewer not the maker. All said and done, this show is a crowd pleaser, something for everyone. Much has been said of this survey being a circus, on par with Matthew Barney’s Guggenheim takeover. But Guo-Qiang delivers a much more Hollywood version of an exhibition, with its focus on special effects and illusion. The tigers are fake, as are the wolves, very much so in fact. Up close, they look more like cheap props than fine art. Rumor has it that both predators are actually dyed rabbit fur, though they seem dyed wool. While this may make animal rightists sleep easy, it’s in strange contrast to the authenticity he insists in with work such as the exhumed boat.
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Cai Guo-Qiang, pronounced “sigh gwo chang,” has a reputation as an artist who easily assimilates eastern and western traditions into something else. Chinese folktales and Maoist references nestled into a cocoon of western spectacular. The aforementioned tigers—Inopportune: Stage 2—refer to 12th century story of Wu Song, the bandit who saved a village from the man-eating tiger who terrorized it. Tigers also allude to Chinese scroll painting tradition, a tradition that Guo-Qiang inherited from his painter father. That said, the artist has blissfully stated, “Why not tigers?” as part of his decision.
his enemy to attack. He then retrieved the boat, recycled the enemy’s ammunition and won the day. Clearly, GuoQiang likes a good story.
Inopportune: Stage One, 2004 Photo by David Heald.
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Cars exploding with light, flipping through the air, hurtling clear up to the top floor of the Guggenheim from the museum’s lobby. It’s not a destructive explosion, more like an eruption of showmanship, a freeze-frame Muybridge meets Evil Knievel-like stunt. The vehicle lands safely, right side up.
Self-Portrait: A Subjugated Soul, 1985/89 Gunpowder and oil on canvas Photo courtesy Cai Studio
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B l a c k R a i n b ow : E x plo s i o n P r o j e c t fo r Va l e n c i a , 2 0 0 5 Photo by Juan García Rosell
Cai Guo-Qiang has stated that he wants his work to be “as lofty as the Qin Dynasty or Greek or Roman tradition, and at the same time I want contemporary effortlessness and fun.” He succeeds, though perhaps more on the latter end. Because he’s best when he’s blowing something up. The mid-career retrospective is headed to China next, at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, from August 19 to September 2, 2008.
Borrowing your Enemy’s Arrows, 1998 | Photo by David Heald
Show & Tell electricwindows www.electricwindowsbeacon.com www.openspacebeacon.com/index2.html www.beaconartsupply.com www.burlockhome.com
“...they pulled it off with the frenetic and contagious energy of any DIY project. Wait—that’s understatement. They nailed it.”
17/5-18/5 2008 510 Main Street Beacon NY | US Te xt : A nya Yu rc hys hyn
Electric Windows
Tina Darling
Open Spaces and boarded up frames.
Final Building
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Street artists have always gravitated to abandoned buildings for their faded glory and potential for artistic free-for-alls, and Kalene Rivers and Daniel Weise—two of the event’s organizers—were no exception. Street artists themselves, the couple moved to Beacon last year to establish a gallery, OPEN SPACE, and a studio for their design firm Thundercut. They immediately fell in love with the hulking factory across the street. While some people might consider it an eyesore, it was one of the major reasons they took the space. “We loved that the building was across from our studio. We always thought it was awesome and that we’d love to do something with it.” After painting an abandoned building with Wooster
Though they had been casually discussing the project since moving in, when they found out about DIA’s five-year anniversary celebration, they hustled to ensure Electric Windows would coincide. Along with co-organizers, Jeff and Nicole Ashey of Beacon Art Supply and Burlock, they found people and companies to donate materials, places to stay, and most important, their time and talent—in only three months. They got an impressive group of artists to participate, all of whom were friends or people they’d worked with in the past. Rivers said they selected people who could fill up the large canvases quickly. “The artists needed to be able to paint big and relatively fast—over the course of two and a half days. We knew that if the project was going to be successful the way we wanted it to be, working fast
A number of artists arrived on Friday to construct the 12x12x5 easels, which were made primarily out of wood donated from a shipping company—wood that had to be returned in good shape. (Those that couldn’t be there, such as Tes One and The Love Moment, had their pieces printed beforehand.) Unexpected rain pushed them inside a large garage and a local artists’ complex, where they worked on... On Saturday afternoon, under menacing rain clouds, eighteen artists worked back-to-back on the town’s east end of Main Street. They swapped supplies and tools and took breaks to rave about each other’s work, drink beer on the DL and give autographs to kids. Most worked with spray paint, and some, such as Lady Pink and Cycle created traditional graffiti images. Some artists added to their paint work with markers and bucket paint. They were inventive with their materials: Rene Gagnon’s piece was comprised of stencils of Krylon cans, and Tina Darling used extra fabric from her wedding dress to give parts of her mural a lacey effect. When it started to rain, the artists just kept going, adapting their methods when necessary, or erecting shelters. As pieces were completed, they were hoisted onto the building. The bright murals hung perfectly framed in the windows, and the building slowly lit up.
That evening, everyone went to the after party in town where local DJ El Jeffe and Denver DJ Bobby Collins got people dancing under the wild projections of An-Ism, another Denver resident and visual artist.
Lady Pink
Riiisa Boogie
Installing Daryll Peirce’s piece
Friday night with Ripo and Tina Darling
Although the rain kept falling Sunday, the remaining pieces were completed. With all the windows full, you could feel the electricity sparking in the air despite the dampness. The murals, which are not for sale, will stay up for a year. After that, they may go on the road as a traveling exhibition. The organizers plan on having the event again next year, but even bigger, and even better. Now that the long-dark factory is bright again, it will be exciting to see how it affects the town, bringing in people to see the building, or inspiring a different breed of artists to seek out Beacon as their home. In the top row of the windows, Ripo’s mural— a hand clutching a disposable coffee cup styled after the kind typically used in New York City Delis—tells viewers to “WAKE UP, GET UP.” Beacon doesn’t seem to have been sleeping, but no matter what, the community seems willing to take the direction.
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Beacon has attracted artists for a long time, but visitors were more likely to encounter antique shops and galleries displaying more traditional work than anything created with a spray can. Still, Rivers and Weise weren’t really worried about Electric Windows fitting in. “We liked that we were bringing in art that people normally associated with big cities to a relatively country setting,” Weise explained. “It looked great. People were painting with mountains in the background.”
would be important.” Though they didn’t even know if the street in front of the building would be closed to traffic until a few days before the event, they pulled it off with the frenetic and contagious energy of any DIY project. Wait—that’s understatement. They nailed it.
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An empty factory. Broken, boarded-up windows. A scarred brick frame. It’s a familiar sight in our post-industrial landscape, but it sure stands out when it sits at the base of a lush mountain, in a small town on the Hudson River that’s experiencing an artistic and economic rebirth.
Collective the previous year at 11 Spring St, they were inspired to use the building’s industrial windows as an innovative way to frame and display twenty-four 8’x12’ murals.
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Over one weekend in May, street artists from all over the country converged in Beacon, New York for the first installment of Electric Windows, an outdoor live-painting and music event where artists created murals that were later hung in the windows of a long-empty electric blanket factory. Lady Pink, Elbow Toe, Michael De Feo, Ron English, Ripo and Cycle were there, along with many other artists and what seemed like most of the town, even the kids. The work was beautiful and surprising; the local bands were loud and proud. And then, of course, it rained. But since when does rain shut a good party down?
Participating Artists: Above / Chris Stain / Cycle / Dan Funderburgh / Daryll Peirce / Depoe / Elbow Toe / Jim Darling / ILOVEMYBOO / Lady Pink / Michael De Feo / Mr Kiji / Peripheral Media Projects / Peat Wollaeger / Rene Gagnon / Rick Price / Rissssa Boogie / Ripo / Ron English / Tes One / The Love Movement / Tina Darling / Ultra / UPSO / You Are Beautiful
Show & Tell The Cans Festival thecansfestival.com Leake street se1 7 nn London | England Text: Tristan Manco
“Some people are calling it the greatest stencil art show that has ever taken place in a tunnel underneath Waterloo station.” — Cans Festival
The Cans Festival
POW, Blank Expression and Street Art Philanthropy
Before its great unveiling the event was shrouded in murky secrecy. Publicity was minimal with fly posters announcing only the dates of the event, one week ahead of opening. The location itself remained secret until the day before the event. Meanwhile artists worked behind closed doors day and night to transform the 200 metre long bricked tunnel into a paint-splattered wonderwall. Even the artists were not aware of where they had been invited to paint; so much of the work was improvised. Sponsoring the project were Pictures on Walls, the pioneering print company behind Santa’s Ghetto, also well known for publishing Banksy’s screenprints. Thereby securing the central involvement of Banksy himself. Also involved were Blank Expression, a charity whose aim is to find public walls and get permission for artists to paint them. It was their work behind the scenes that secured
the audacious venue, vastly overlooked, yet only minutes away from the familiar South Bank tourist spots such as the London Eye.
Roadsworth
Portugal who produced a reverse stencil by drilling his designs into the fabric of the wall.
It is hard to measure the success of a one-off weekend like this, especially if you were involved in it, as I was. Trying to put my biased views aside, the facts and figures speak loudly. With nearly 30,000 visitors over three days and over 50,000 photographs tagged “Cans Festival” now on Flickr – the public and artists thoroughly enjoyed themselves. Perhaps most gratifying was the level of interactivity, with 651 artists from the public registering to paint their own stencils during the event. The main attraction unquestionably was Banksy, with four new large-scale murals, sculptures and anarchic installations, his work brought in a diverse crowd that art galleries can only dream of attracting. Not to be overshadowed, around 50 artists invited from 15 countries also made their mark with a diverse range of styles and subjects. From the well-regarded stencil graffiti hubs of Buenos Aires and Melbourne to the lesser-known hotspots such as Lisbon and Bergen, the cream of the stencil art world was in attendance. Why stencil art? This was one question that came up a couple of times. After all limiting it to one technique does restrict the artists one could have invited. In reply I think the key is that stencils are a level playing field, the public could bring their own and add to what was already there. The end result although varied would also have an over-riding aesthetic. Space was also a consideration, if it was a regular free-style graffiti jam the walls would have had to have been painted over and over again to accommodate the number of artists. A few artists did bend the “stencils only” rule a little, notably Vhils from
Pobel Watering
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Eelus
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Mayday is traditionally a time to let your hair down, perfect for a parade or a spot of Morris dancing. This year was no exception and for Londoners the ideal place to celebrate was at a stencil art hoedown, otherwise known as the Cans Festival. Saturday morning this May Bank Holiday, a large crowd began to form at the entrance of a tunnel beneath London’s Waterloo Station. Word had got around that this vast subterranean space had been given an artistic makeover by a gathering of stencil artists, including the world-renowned Banksy. The only chance to see its full glory would be that weekend. The location was undoubtedly part of the events’ appeal, until that moment this Victorian subway had been closed to the public for “essential maintenance” and only as the barriers opened could the public appreciate its artistic transformation. As the first public visitors were let loose, hushed awe turned into a party atmosphere – feeling something like a graffiti jam crossed with Glastonbury Festival.
Banksy
So what next? Was the most often asked question of the weekend. The answer for now is that the art will remain and be maintained for six months, managed by Blank Expression. Many have pleaded for the Tunnel to be preserved even longer as an art space, whether that happens or not if you’re in London it is well worth a visit now and it’s free… As the Cans Festival website proclaimed - Some people are calling it the greatest stencil art show that has ever taken place in a tunnel underneath Waterloo station. They could be right.
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Banksy
Free for All Walls
John Grider
UnFreezing Frames Intention and Actualization after abandonment 10,000 square meters of white walls; a writer’s wet dream stripped down, abandoned and waiting to be reinvented. Was it a matter of minutes or days before the first color was spat onto the walls? This is the Kodak Hill building, you’ll find it if you follow the westbound train tracks in the Swedish capital and it was part of a trend in the 1960’s that saw small businesses starting to spread out to the suburbs of Stockholm. Traces of this time remain in the neglect, and the original blueprints were found.
U nf r ee z ing F r a m es
— The Jens
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“I documented the building by taking interior shots of it and then printed the photographs onto the original blueprints. I like the fact that every piece is unique, which is sort of unusual when it comes to photography. The final size of each print is 60cm x 120cm and these will be exhibited in Stockholm this fall.”
U nf r ee z ing F r a m es
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Photographer Jens Andersson documented the building as the white walls were given color fascinated by an object’s ability to begin life again.
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Born outside of Stockholm in the town of Väsby Jens is currently releasing a book focusing on the skateboard scene in Stockholm during the 1990’s called The Sheraton Years. While watching the urban environment evolve, Jens has also worked for clients like Kangol, Nike and Wesc and was the photographer behind the respected Streethorsing book.
U nf r ee z ing F r a m es
Meet Mr. Shelltoe
27/7 - 18/8 | 2008
Code Gallery Oudezijds Voorburgwal 121 Amsterdam www.codegallerystore.com www.redlightfashionamsterdam.com www.thejens.com
U nf r ee z ing F r a m es
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