RAWinspirations by Piotr Jarosz

INSPIRATIONS volume 1 MAY / SEPTEMBER 2014

PIOTR JAROSZ 1

INSPIRATIONS / VOL 1

INSPIRATIONS VOLUME 1

TABLE OF CONTENT

7 NORMAN LETO NEW MEDIA

42 WILHELM SASNAL FINE ARTS

10 AUSCHNITTE

45 SEAPUNK

12 CORPUS

48 WOLFGANG WEINGART

14 DUANE MICHALS

50 BOOKS

PHOTOGRAPHY

EXHIBITION

PHOTOGRAPHY

INTERNET

TYPOGRAPHY

17 ANNIE LEIBOVITZ PHOTOGRAPHY

20 MATEUSZ ZĄBEK NEW MEDIA

24 ANIA WITKOVSKA PHOTOGRAPHY

32 NET.ART INTERNET

36 HELMUT NEWTON PHOTOGRAPHY

INSPIRATIONS / VOL 1

This publication is

a compilation of everything that I found inspirational throughout my journey between May and September 2014. It consist of all information about artists I came across and exhibitions I have visited from Kunsthouse in Zurich all the way to Artscience Museum in Singapore. The purpose of this book is to keep record and have an insight into things I find interesting and how it changes throughout the year. Chapters in no particular order.

PIOTR JAROSZ

INSPIRATIONS / VOL 1

Norman Leto LIFESHAPE

“The Lifeshape – or simply a portrait, or rather a specific type of a portrait; It is an image (or better: a visualization) of a given person in the 3D technique. The creation of such portrait is divided into several stages and assumes close cooperation between the artist and the person having his or her portrait made. The result is a portrait which is abstract with respect to the form but very personalized when it comes to the content. The clash of these two seemingly contradictory orders (a portrait, by theory, assumes the closest possible reproduction of the traits of the person being the subject of the portrait) results in a very forceful visual and intellectual effect.” See more; “First, the person having his or her portrait made receives a detailed questionnaire from the artist (over 100 questions), which covers nearly all “parameters” of human life: health, age, interests, professional career, personal life, sexual life, education, travels, etc. Then he / she marks the answers as precisely as possible on a scale, after which he / she sends the questionnaire back to the artist. Norman Leto applies some sort of “doctor-patient privilege” here – he does not share the data received with anyone. Then, the artist introduces the data received to a specially created program, functioning on the basis of an algorithm. The computer processes the terms of the questionnaire, transforming digital data into spatial forms. This is a relatively time-consuming process: depending on the level of complication, the computer may

Lifeshape of an average housewife (aunt Irena)

process the data received from several to several dozen hours. The end result is the title Lifeshape – abstract but organic form with delicate, characteristic features. The last stage of creating such portrait is printout on high quality form and framing [the suggested minimal dimensions are 90 x 90 cm – the Lifeshape has a considerable amount of detail]. The artist has also created portraits of public and historical personages, basing on data provided in books and on the Internet. The Lifeshape is a unique portrait: on the one hand, it is “dehumanized”, and, on the other hand, it is developed according to detailed data regarding the life of the person in the painting; on the one hand, it is extravert to the maximum, exposing the details of the client’s life, and on the other hand, it is “veiled”, invisible, covered behind an abstract figure – clear only for the interested parties; it is made by a computer, but basing on “human” data; it is always individual and unique with respect to the form – just as every single life is unique. It is a specific sculpture arranged in virtual space. All of this makes the Lifeshape acquire an existential overtone; it is a very real image, an “internal portrait” in its strict sense. It does not have any artificial ornaments, hence it does not include falsity. Is this not the purpose of a good portrait? Norman Leto has created a cycle of Lifeshapes, including inter alia the lifeshapes of private clients, a former prisoner, actress Geraldine Chaplin, Polish artist Edward Krasiński, and Larry Page, the co-creator of Google.”

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Lifeshape of Geraldine Chaplin

Ausschnitte BERLIN

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CORPUS

ZACHĘTA / WARSZAWA 01.09 - 19.10 “Corpus” is an exhibition of works relating to the body inspired by the books Corpus (2002) and Corpus II. Writings on Sexuality (2013) by Jean-Luc Nancy, one of the most important contemporary French philosophers. His work extends well beyond the well-worn paradigms of philosophical thought: really these books can be read as philosophical poems on the theme of corporeality. Nancy underlines the role that the body plays in religion, especially in Christianity, where the body of God becomes a real element of the religion’s rites and faith. Holy bodies, our own bodies, divine and secular bodies, bodies suffering, but also those enjoying pleasure: in art we find many such representations in the spirit of Nancy’s philosophy. The exhibition opens with Dominik Lejman’s work Status (1 Hour with Timecode) that makes reference to Andrea Mantegna’s renaissance painting Dead Christ: an anonymous dead body, one of the multitude of dead people without any chance of return, or in other words of resurrection. In Hannah Wilke’s work, So Help Me Hannah, the body of the artist is shown in a similar way, only with the head in the foreground. In this way the artist anticipates her

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own illness, or in Martin Heidegger’s words, her ‘being towards death’. Ana Mendieta’s video Body Tracks similarly registers the experience of one’s own corporeality, the visualisation of its forms: it is the trace of a body that no longer exists. What we are dealing with here is an ontology of being, although in Alina Szapocznikow’s works we might even term it an ‘oncology of sculpture’. The skin of the human body, to which Nancy devotes a great deal of attention, is the first element of the outside that we perceive, that we touch and desire: in the works of Magdalena Moskwa, Marek Konieczny or Valie Export, this skin is transformed through illness, covered in bruises or eroticised with tatoos. Zbigniew Libera’s film Intimate Rites is a philosophical treatise on the body and the final acts of care that we offer it. The skeleton is the internal structure of the body which we do not see other than in xray photos, as in the work of Barbara Hammer, Birgit Jürgenssen or Marina Abramović. Vanessa Beecroft’s ‘live sculpture’, composed of a group of naked women confronted with a public, is an emancipation of nudity and a collective mass of bodies. Strange foreign bodies, as Nancy terms them, which are

sold or undergo peculiar modes of spatialisation, as we can witness for instance in the process of work in the films of Santiago Sierra. In the book, Corpus II, Nancy develops a thesis about the central role of sexual relations as a beginning of being with oneself. He continually reminds us that human bodies are sexual, erotic beings. This is the reason for the presence in the exhibition of works by Marek Konieczny, Duane Michals, Friederike Pezold or Betty Thompkins and her exceptional monochromatic images of sexual acts. In Nancy’s work, it is the word ‘touch’ that seems the most fundamental. It is joy and pain. The pleasure of the touch of that which is untouchable, because this is only the touch of one’s individual distinctness. artists: Marina Abramović, Samuel Beckett, Vanessa Beecroft, Valie Export, Barbara Hammer, Marek Konieczny, Birgit Jürgenssen, Sigalit Landau, Dominik Lejman, Zbigniew Libera, Klara Lidén, Sarah Lucas, Jacek Malinowski, Ana Mendieta, Duane Michals, Magdalena Moskwa, Clifford Owens, Friederike Pezold, Adam Rzepecki, Santiago Sierra, Alina Szapocznikow, Betty Tompkins, Hannah Wilke curator Maria Brewińska collaboration Katarzyna Stupnicka Jean-Luc Nancy (born 1940) – is a French philosopher and author of over 30 books and 300 articles. Born in Bordeaux, he studied biology and philosophy at the Sorbonne. Nancy is Professor Emeritus at the Université Marc Bloch in Strasburg. He has also taught philosophy in Colmar, Berlin, Irvine, San Diego and Berkley. In 1995, he was awarded a Chevalier Order in recognition of his services to French culture. Nancy makes frequent reference in his work to the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, with whom he was a co-creator of the deconstruction movement in philosophy. Derrida, in turn, wrote the book Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching–Jean-Luc Nancy, 2005) about Nancy. Nancy is also the author of analytical works on such classics as Hegel. The books Corpus or Corpus II belong to a rather different category, as they have the character of poetic philosophical reflections in which Nancy focuses on human corporality and its sense. Most significant works: La remarque spéculative (1973), L’absolu littéraire (z Ph. Lacoue-Labarthem, 1978), Ego sum (1979), L’impératif catégorique (1983), L’oubli de la philosophie (1986), La communauté désoeuvrée (1986), Le poids d’une pensée (1991), Corpus (1992), Le sens du monde (1993), Les Muses (1994), Être singulier pluriel (1996), Hegel – l’inquiétude du négatif (1997).

Duane Michals February 18, 1932

Michals’s interest in art began at age 14 while attending watercolor university classes at the Carnegie Institute [Carnegie Museum of Art] in Pittsburgh. In 1953 he received a B.A. from the University of Denver. After two years in the Army, in 1956 he went on to study at the Parsons School of Design with a plan to become a graphic designer; however, he did not complete his studies. He describes his photographic skills as “completely self-taught.” In 1958 while on a holiday in the USSR he discovered an interest in photography. The photographs he made during this trip became his first exhibition held in 1963 at the Underground Gallery in New York City.

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For a number of years, Michals was a commercial photographer, working for Esquire and Mademoiselle, and he covered the filming of The Great Gatsby for Vogue (1974). He did not have a studio. Instead, he took portraits of people in their environment, which was a contrast to the method of other photographers at the time, such as Avedon and Irving Penn. Michals was hired by the government of Mexico to photograph the 1968 Summer Olympics. In 1970 his works were shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The portraits he took between 1958 and 1988 would later become the basis of his book, Album. In 1976 Michals received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Michals also produced the art for the album Synchronicity (by The Police) in 1983, and Richard Barone’s Clouds Over Eden album in 1993. Though he has not been involved in gay civil rights, his photography has addressed gay themes. In discussing his notion of the artist’s relationship to politics and power however, Michals feels ultimately that aspirations are useless: I feel the political aspirations are impotent. They can never be seen. If they are, it will only be by a limited audience. If one is to act politically, one simply puts down the camera and goes out and does something. I think of someone like Hartfeld who ridiculed the Nazis. Who very creatively took great stands. He could have been killed at any moment, he was Jewish, and my God what the guy did. It was extraordinary. You don’t see that now. Michals cites Balthus, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Eakins, René Magritte, and Walt Whitman as influences on his art. In turn, he has influenced photographers such as David Levinthal and Francesca Woodman. He is noted for two innovations in artistic photography developed in the 1960s and 1970s. First, he told a story through a series of photos as in his 1970 book Sequences. Second, he handwrote text near his photographs, thereby giving information that the image itself could not convey.

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Annie Leibovitz ARTSCIENCE MUSEUM SINGAPORE A unified narrative of Annie Leibovitz’s private life against the backdrop of her public image. View close to 200 iconic images by Annie Leibovitz, one of America’s most celebrated photographers. An emotional journey into her life and a testimony of her work over a 15-year period, the critically acclaimed exhibition features photographs of famous public figures and personal photographs of family and friends taken by Annie. Highlights include portraits of celebrities and well-known figures such as Leonardo Di Caprio, Jamie Foxx, Demi Moore, Scarlett Johansson, Nicole Kidman and Brad Pitt; personal photos documenting scenes from Annie’s life, including the birth and childhood of her three daughters, vacations, reunions, extended family and close friends; assignment work such as searing reportage from the siege of Sarajevo in the early 1990s and the election of Hillary Clinton to the US Senate; and large scale landscapes taken in Monument Valley in the American West, and in Wadi Rum in the Jordanian desert.

Annie Leibovitz, considered one of America’s best portrait photographers, developed her trademark use of bold colors and poses while at Rolling Stone. Photographer Annie Leibovitz was born October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. In 1970 she took a job at Rolling Stone magazine. In 1983 she began working for the entertainment magazine Vanity Fair. During the late 1980s, Leibovitz started to work on a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. From the 1990s to the present, she has been publishing and exhibiting her work. Photographer. Born Anna-Lou Leibovitz, on October 2, 1949, in Waterbury, Connecticut. She was one of the six children born to Sam, an Air Force lieutenant, and Marilyn Leibovitz, a modern dance instructor. In 1967, Leibovitz enrolled at the San Francisco Art In-

stitute, where (although initially studying painting) she developed a love for photography. After living briefly on an Israeli kibbutz, Leibovitz returned to the U.S., in 1970, and applied for a job with the start-up rock music magazine Rolling Stone. Impressed with Leibovitz’s portfolio, editor Jann Wenner offered her a job as a staff photographer. Within two years, the 23-year-old Leibovitz was promoted to chief photographer - a title she would hold for the next 10 years. Her position with the magazine afforded her the opportunity to accompany the Rolling Stones band on their 1975 international tour. While with Rolling Stone, Leibovitz developed her trademark technique, which involved the use of bold primary colors and surprising poses. Wenner has credited her with making many Rolling Stone covers collector’s items, most nota-

bly an issue that featured a nude John Lennon curled around his fully clothed wife, Yoko Ono. Taken on December 8, 1980, Leibovitz’s photo of the former Beatle was shot just hours before his death. In 1983, Leibovitz left Rolling Stone and began working for the entertainment magazine Vanity Fair. With a wider array of subjects, Leibovitz’s photographs for Vanity Fair ranged from presidents to literary icons to teen heartthrobs. To date, a number of Vanity Fair covers have featured Leibovitz’s stunning - and often controversial - portraits of celebrities. Demi Moore (very pregnant and very nude) and Whoopi Goldberg (half-submerged in a bathtub of milk) are among the most remembered actresses to grace the cover in recent years. Known for her ability to make her sitters become physically involved in her work, one of Leibovitz’s most famous portraits is of the late artist Keith Haring, who painted himself like one of

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his canvases for the photo. During the late 1980s, Leibovitz started to work on a number of high-profile advertising campaigns. The most notable was the American Express “Membership” campaign, for which her portraits of celebrity cardholders, like Elmore Leonard, Tom Selleck, and Luciano Pavarotti, earned her a 1987 Clio Award. In 1991, Leibovitz’s collection of over 200 color and black-and-white photographs were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Later that year, a book was published to accompany the show titled Photographs: Annie Leibovitz 1970-1990. In 1996, Leibovitz was chosen as the official photographer of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. A compilation of her black-and-white portraits of American athletes, including Carl Lewis and Michael Johnson, were published in the book Olympic Portraits (1991).

Widely considered one of America’s best portrait photographers, Annie Leibovitz published the book Women (1999), which was accompanied by an essay by friend and novelist Susan Sontag. With its title subject matter, Leibovitz presented an array of female images from Supreme Court Justices to Vegas showgirls to coal miners and farmers. Currently, many of her original prints are housed in various galleries throughout the United States. In 2005, the Brooklyn Museum of Art did a retrospective on her work entitled “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005.” As busy as ever, Annie Leibovitz continues to be in demand as portrait photographer, often capturing arresting images of today’s celebrities. Annie Leibovitz is the mother of three children. At the age of 51, she had her daughter, Sarah. In 2005, her twin daughters, Susan and Samuelle, were born with the help of a surrogate mother.

Mateusz Ząbek KATOWICE / POLAND

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Ania Witkovska WARSZAWA / POLAND

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net.art INTERNET

net.art refers to a group of artists who have worked in the medium of Internet art since 1994. The main members of this movement are Vuk Ćosić, Jodi.org, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, and Heath Bunting (irational.org, Daniel García Andújar, Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker and Minerva Cuevas). Although this group was formed as a parody of avant garde movements by writers such as Tilman Baumgärtel, Josephine Bosma, Hans Dieter Huber and Pit Schultz, their individual works have little in common. The term “net.art” is also used as a synonym for net art or Internet art and covers a much wider range of artistic practices. In this wider definition, net.art means art that uses the Internet as its medium and that cannot be experienced in any other way. Typically net.art has the Internet and the specific socio-culture that it spawned as its subject matter but this is not required. The German critic Tilman Baumgärtel - building on the ideas of American critic Clement Greenberg - has frequently argued for a “media specificity” of net.art in his writings. According to the introduction to his book “net.art. Materialien zur Netzkunst”, the specific qualities of net.art are “connectivity, global reach, multimediality, immateriality, interactivity and egality”. The net.art movement arose in the context of the wider development of Internet art. As such, net.art is more of a movement and a critical and political landmark in Internet art history, than a specific genre. Early precursors of the net. art movement include the international fluxus (Nam June Paik) and avant-pop (Mark Amerika) movements. The avant-pop movement particularly became widely recognized in Internet circles from 1993, largely via the popular Alt-X site. The term “net.art” has been attributed to artist Vuk Cosic in 1995. Net.art stems from “conjoined phrases in an email bungled by a technical glitch (a morass of alphanumeric junk, its only legible term ‘net.art’)”. It was first used with regard to the “net.art per se” meeting of artists and theorists in Trieste in May 1996, and referred to a group of artists who worked together closely in the first half of the 1990s. These meetings gave birth to the website net.art per se, a fake CNN website “commemorating” the event. Net.artists have built digital art communities through an active practice of web hosting and web art curating. net.artists have defined themselves through an international and networked mode of communication, an interplay of exchanges, collaborative and cooperative work. They have a large presence on several mailing lists such as Rhizome, File festival, Electronic Language International Festival, Nettime, Syndicate and Eyebeam. The identity of the net.artists is defined by both their digital works and their critical involvement in the digital art community, as the polemical discussion led by Olia Lialina that occurred on Nettime in early 2006 on the “New Media” Wikipedia entry shows net.artists like Jodi developed a particular form of e-mail art, or spam mail art, through text reprocessing and ASCII art. The term “spam art” was coined by net critique and net art practitioner Frederic Madre to describe all such forms of disruptive interventions in mail-

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ing-lists, where seemingly nonsensical texts were generated by simple scripts, online forms or typed by hand. A connection can be made to the e-mail interventions of “Codeworks” artists such as Mez or mi ga or robots like Mailia which analyze emails and reply to them. “Codeworks” is a term coined by poet Alan Sondheim to define the textual experiments of artists playing with faux-code and non-executable

script or mark-up languages. net.art developed in a context of cultural crisis in Eastern Europe in the beginning of the 1990s after the end of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The artists involved in net.art experiments are associated with the idea of a “social responsibility” that would answer the idea of democracy as a modern capitalist myth. The Internet, often promoted as the democratic

tool par excellence, but largely participating in the rules of vested interests, is targeted by the net.artists who claimed that “a space where you can buy is a space where you can steal, but also where you can distribute”. net. artists focus on finding new ways of sharing public space. By questioning structures such as the navigation window and challenging their functionality, net.artists have shown that what is considered to be natural by most Internet users is actually highly constructed, even controlled, by corporations. Company browsers like Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer display user-friendly structures (the “navigation”, the “exploration” are landmarks of social practices) to provide the user with a familiar environment; net.artists try to break this familiarity. Olia Lialina, in My Boyfriend Came Back From The War or the duo Jodi, with their series of pop-up interventions and browser crashing applets, have engaged the materiality of navigation in their work. Their experiments have given birth to what could be

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called “browser art”, which has been expanded by the British collective I/O/ D’s experimental navigator WebStalker. Alexei Shulgin and Heath Bunting have played with the structure of advertisement portals by establishing lists of keywords unlikely to be searched for but nonetheless existing on the web as URLs or metadata components: they use this relational data to enmesh paths of navigation in order to create new readable texts. The user is not exploring one art website that has its own meaning and aesthetic significance within itself, but rather they are exposed to the entire network as a collection of socioeconomic forces and political stances that are not always visible. Rachel Greene has associated net.art with tactical media as a form of Detournement. Greene writes: “The subversion of corporate websites shares a blurry border with hacking and agitprop practices that would become an important field of net art, often referred to as ‘tactical media’.”

Helmut Newton SEX AND LANDSCAPES US AND THEM In june 2014 the helmut newton foundation celebrates its tenth year anniversary. The museum first opened its doors with the exhibitions “Us and Them” and “Sex and Landscapes,” which were selected by helmut newton shortly before his death. Now, ten years later, foundation president June Newton (a.k.a. Alice Springs) has chosen the same combination. “Us and Them” is a joint exhibition and book project by Helmut and June Newton. A photographic journal of their life together, the project includes selfportraits, at times intimate, reciprocal portraits, as well as photographs of actors, artists, and other prominent figures of the times. Taken during the 1980s and 1990s at separate sittings, the photographs of the international jet set by Helmut Newton and Alice Springs are presented side-by-side in pairs. The exhibition “Sex and Landscapes” brings together large-format landscapes and nude photographs taken in black-and-white and color between 1974 and 2001. overclouded seascapes and breaking waves outside Monte Carlo or neo-baroque madonna figurines in small italian towns mingle with nudes in glamorous and provocative scenes of erotic obsession, played out by a female cast. Newton was born in Berlin, the son of Klara “Claire” (née Marquis) and Max Neustädter, a button factory owner. His family was Jewish. Newton attended the Heinrich-von-Treitschke-Realgymnasium and the American School in Berlin. Interested in photography from the age of 12 when he purchased his first camera,

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he worked for the German photographer Elsie Neulander Simon from 1936. The increasingly oppressive restrictions placed on Jews by the Nuremberg laws meant that his father lost control of the factory in which he manufactured buttons and buckles; he was briefly interned in a concentration camp

on Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938, which finally compelled the family to leave Germany. Newton’s parents fled to South America. He was issued with a passport just after turning 18 and left Germany on 5 December 1938. At Trieste he boarded the Conte Rosso (along with about 200 others escaping the Nazis), intending to journey to China. After arriving in Singapore he found he was able to remain there, first briefly as a photographer for the Straits Times and then as a portrait photographer. Newton was interned by British authorities while in Singapore, and was sent to Australia on board the Queen Mary, arriving in Sydney on 27 September 1940. Internees travelled to the camp at Tatura, Victoria by train under armed guard. He was released from internment in 1942, and briefly worked as a fruit picker in Northern Victoria. In April 1942, he enlisted with the Australian Army and worked as a truck driver. After the war in 1945, he became a British subject and changed his name to Newton in 1946. In 1948, he married actress June Browne, who performed under the stage name June Brunell. She later became a successful photographer under the ironic pseudonym Alice Springs (after Alice Springs, the central Australian town). In 1946, Newton set up a studio in fashionable Flinders Lane in Melbourne and worked on fashion and theatre photography in the affluent post-war years. He shared his first joint exhibition in May 1953 with Wolfgang Sievers, a German refugee like himself who had also served in the same company. The exhibition of ‘New Visions in Photography’ was displayed at the Federal Hotel in Collins Street and was probably the first glimpse of New Objectivity photography in Australia. Newton went into partnership with Henry Talbot, a fellow German Jew who had also been interned at Tatura, and his association with the studio continued even after 1957, when he left Australia for London. The studio was renamed ‘Helmut Newton and Henry Talbot’.

Newton’s growing reputation as a fashion photographer was rewarded when he secured a commission to illustrate fashions in a special Australian supplement for Vogue magazine, published in January 1956. He won a 12-month contract with British Vogue and left for London in February 1957, leaving Talbot to manage the business. Newton left the magazine before the end of his contract and went to Paris, where he worked for French and German magazines. He returned to Melbourne in March 1959 to a contract for Australian Vogue. Newton settled in Paris in 1961 and continued work as a fashion photographer. His works appeared in magazines including, most significantly, French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He established a particular style marked by erotic, stylised scenes, often with sado-masochistic and fetishistic subtexts. A heart attack in 1970 slowed Newton’s output, but his notoriety continued to increase, most notably with his 1980 “Big Nudes” series, which marked the pinnacle of his eroticurban style, underpinned with excellent technical skills. Newton also worked in portraiture and more fantastical studies. Newton shot a number of pictorials for Playboy, including pictorials of Nastassja Kinski and Kristine DeBell. Original prints of the photographs from his August 1976 pictorial of DeBell, “200 Motels, or How I Spent My Summer Vacation” were sold at auctions of Playboy archives by Bonhams in 2002 for $21,075, and by Christies in December 2003 for $26,290.

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Wilhelm Sasnal POLAND

Wilhelm Sasnal was born in Tarnów, Poland, in 1972. He studied architecture for two years at the Polytechnic, Kraków, beginning in 1992, and then became a painting student at the Akademia Sztuk Pięknych w Krakowie, Poland. While there, he helped form an artist’s collective that exhibited together as the Ładnie Group until 2000. Ironically named after the Polish word meaning “pretty” or “nice,” the members made paintings of their contemporary, often banal surroundings, using a deskilled aesthetic that countered the style valued by their instructors. Sasnal finished his studies in 1999, and then worked briefly for advertising companies in Kraków while also making paintings, graphic novels (his strips are regularly published in “Machina” and “Przekroj”, two Polish periodicals), photographs, and films.

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Sasnal produces pencil drawings, ink drawings, photographs, videos and paintings. In his art he employs a variety of media and cultivates a nonuniform practice. Sasnal is primarily a painter. There is no limits to what he paints: More or less banal everyday objects, portraits of historical figures, views of his home town Cracow, snapshots of friends and family members and very often existing images from the internet or mass media are his starting point. Other sources include Art Spiegelman’s 1973 graphic Holocaust novel Maus, and stills from Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah as source material. Even if, over the years, one can make out a number of overarching themes, there are always new paintings that shift the emphases and connections once again. The same is true of his painting style. His approach is unpredictable and his methods range from graphic reduction and a pointedly two-dimensional, illustration-oriented style to seemingly autonomous gestures with brush and paint. Like Neo Rauch, however, Sasnal makes the grip of the Communist era on the post-Communist imagination his subject. While painting is still at the centre of Sasnal’s work, he has also increasingly turned to photography and film in recent years. The video work The Band (2002) was made during a live perfor-

mance of indie rock band Sonic Youth. A 2007 piece is a product many times removed from the 1961 Polish movie on which it is based – a fictionalized account of a historical event in which a railway worker accidentally sold industrial methyl alcohol as vodka, causing widespread illness, blindness and death.[4] The 16-mm film projection Untitled (2007) is based on found-footage from the late 1970s of Elvis Presley. Swiniopas (Swineherd) (2008), his first ever feature-length film, is an adaptation of an 1842 Hans Christian Andersen fairytale of the same name yet radically deviates from the original. Shot in black and white, Sasnal’s version is set in bleak, rural Poland. It concerns a swineherd who smuggles letters back and forth between a farmer’s daughter and her lesbian lover. Also in 2008, Sasnal caused controversy in Scotland with his film The Other Church, which focused on the brutal murder of the Polish student Angelika Kluk in Glasgow. In September 2011, Sasnal selected a playlist of music that inspires him in his work. “I always listen to music when I make art. I do about 30 minutes of work and then have a break between records. The link is that they are all very simple songs, classical in structure - from Elvis Presley to Slayer and that’s what I like about them. Some of them ended up in my films.”

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Seapunk INTERNET

Seapunk is a microculture with an identifiable style of music, design, and fashion. It developed online in 2011 via a small group of social media enthusiasts who shared a nostalgia for 1990s internet culture. The New York Times described Seapunk as a web-joke with music. It gained limited popularity as it was shared, forwarded, and linked across the internet. Origins of Seapunk started out as a trend and meme on the website Tumblr and was later described as a microtrend in fashion and music. The term “seapunk” was coined by DJ @lilinternet in 2011 who wrote the first reference on Twitter. In 2011, an article by Cluster Mag reported about the emergence of seapunk. Seapunk was described as “a mostly internet-based phenomenon, birthed [born] out of the tumblr and twitter universes as a means to describe a lifestyle aesthetic that is all things oceanic and of the sea.” Miles Raymer of the Chicago Reader describes seapunk music as “a style of music that incorporates bits of 90s house, the past 15 years or so of pop and R&B, and the latest in southern trap rap—all overlaid with a twinkly, narcotic energy that recalls new-age music and chopped and screwed hip-hop mix tapes in roughly equal measure.” According to the New York Times, the music associated with seapunk constitutes a “tiny” sub-genre that borrows from styles such as witch house, chiptune, drum and bass and southern rap. In January 2012, seapunk made it into international print via Dazed & Confused magazine. Katia Ganfield interviewed Albert Redwine in the article, “Seapunk: A new club scene intent on

riding sub-bass sound waves into the future”. Other artists associated with the scene include Blank Banshee, Kreayshawn,Fire For Effect, Zombelle, Ultrademon, Slava, Unicorn Kid and Splash Club 7. The fashion sees a large amount of colors of blues and greens as reminiscent of aqua-related themes. Symbols such as yin-yangs, smiley faces and references to the 1990s are also a part of the style. Sharing images on the popular networking site Tumblr is one facet of this new trend. Images featuring neon flashing colors and rotating geometric shapes floating above oceans of brilliant blue or green water flood the pages tagged with a #Seapunk hashtag. Seapunk digital imagery draws largely from the 1990s early World Wide Web styles. This imagery has given rise to new internet sub-genres consisting of similar themes, such as slimepunk and icepunk. Rapper Azealia Banks used seapunk imagery in her “Atlantis” music video in 2012. Singer Rihanna was influenced by seapunk in her “Diamonds” performance on Saturday Night Live in 2012. Elements of seapunk imagery were claimed to have influenced designers such as Versace and Soulja Boy’s “Ocean Gang”.

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Wolfgang Weingart ZURICH

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Wolfgang Weingart is regarded as the “enfant terrible” of modern Swiss typography. At an early stage he broke with the established rules: He freed letters from the shackles of the design grid, spaced, underlined or reshaped them and reorganized type-setting. Later he mounted halftone films to form collages, anticipating the digital sampling of the post-modern “New Wave”. As a typography teacher at the Basel School of Design Weingart shaped several generations of designers from 1968 onwards. They came from throughout the world and helped him achieve international recognition. Weingart’s experimental design approach and the connection between analog and digital techniques that he called for are topical again today. His life’s work is shown for the first time in Switzerland and juxtaposed with works produced through his teaching activity.

The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx originally titled Manifesto of the Communist Party is a short 1848 publication written by the political theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It has since been recognized as one of the world’s most influential political manuscripts. Commissioned by the Communist League, it laid out the League’s purposes and program. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and present) and the problems of capitalism, rather than a prediction of communism’s potential future forms. The book contains Marx and Engels’ theories about the nature of society and politics.

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce Slavoy Zizek In this bravura analysis of the current global crisis following on from his bestselling Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Zizek argues that the liberal idea of the end of history, declared by Francis Fukuyama during the 1990s, has had to die twice. After the collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia, on the morning of 9/11, came the collapse of the economic utopia of global market capitalism at the end of 2008. Marx argued that history repeats itselfoccurring first as tragedy, the second time as farceand iek, following Herbert Marcuse, notes here that the repetition as farce can be even more terrifying than the original tragedy. The financial meltdown signals that the fantasy of globalization is over and as millions are put out of work it has become impossible to ignore the irrationality of global capitalism. Just a few months before the crash, the worlds priorities seemed to be global warming, AIDS, and access to medicine, food and water tasks labelled as urgent, but with any real action repeatedly postponed. Now, after the financial implosion, the urgent need to act seems to have become unconditionalwith the result that undreamt of quantities of cash were immediately found and then poured into the financial sector without any regard for the old priorities. Do we need further proof, iek asks, that Capital is the Real of our lives: the Real whose demands are more absolute than even the most pressing problems of our natural and social world?

End Of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama With the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989 the threat of the Cold War which had dominated the second half of the twentieth century vanished. And with it the West looked to the future with optimism but renewed uncertainty. The End of History and the Last Man was the first book to offer a picture of what the new century would look like. Boldly outlining the challenges and problems to face modern liberal democracies, Frances Fukuyama examined what had just happened and then speculated what was going to come next.

INSPIRATIONS / VOL 1

Tackling religious fundamentalism, politics, scientific progress, ethical codes and war, The End of History and the Last Man remains a compelling work to this day, provoking argument and debate among its readers.

Leaven. About Zofia And Oskar Hansen Filip Springer A brilliant biographical report dedicated to a couple of Polish architectsvisionaries, active in times of People’s Republic of Poland (PRL). Zofia Hansen – a renowned architect, a down-to earth person – puts Oskar Hansen’s crazy ideas into effect. They both carried out a few bold projects, including the mythical Warsaw housing estate named Przyczółek Grochowski. And it is there that Filip Springer, the author of the book, decides to move in to have a first-hand experience of how the life goes on in a place where the Hansens’ theory became reality, and to understand why their innovative ideas did not end up working out quite well. Leaven tells a story about unusual fate, brave architecture and Polish mentality. It is also a story about how nowadays we lack a vision to change the world, which – as the Hansens believed – relies on faith in people and a sense of duty towards others.

A Bathtub With a Colonnade. A Book of Reportage on Polish Space Filip Springer Poland had one of the best spatial planning systems in Europe; in fact, it was so good that it was emulated by many countries. For example Germany. But that was before the Second World War. After the war, the system was centralised. And in new Poland there is neither central nor spatial planning. This is ostensibly because the process of planning is boring and boils down to laws, regulations, graphs, drafts and terminology. So there is no planning, only chaos throughout. However, Filip Springer fearlessly dedicated himself to the task of finding a method in this madness. Undeterred by fences, meandering among hundreds of billboards, he travelled the length and breadth of the country. His trip took him to cities and towns big and small, ghost streets, suburbs without roads or pavements, bridges spanning non-existent rivers. He talked to officials, scientists, architects and residents of new, promisingly named housing estates which had turned out to be places of banishment and exile. He found an Egyptian pyramid in Silesia, a variation on the Parthenon in Jelonki and a Venetian palace near Warsaw. During his travels he also stumbled upon a new disease: pastelosis. The seemingly dull topic has been thus transformed into a fascinating story about the country in which we live and the people who shape our reality. A story which is partly funny and partly scary. A story of spatial order ? a phenomenon ?everybody has heard of but not seen in Poland for a very long time?