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THE NEWPAPER
News 2 World News 8 Old News 12 Art News 16
IN THE NEWPAPER TODAY
Art 16
Imagine there is war and nobody shows up?
The Art News show curated by Hugh Mendes.
Film 22 Interview with filmmaker Carol Morley.
Books 25 Fiona Banner’s ‘All the World’s Fighter Planes.’
Rainer Ganahl
Comment 15 Obituaries 26 Crossword & Listings 27 Business 29 Sport 34 ♣♠♥♦
The Newpaper
Home of the brave land of the free extra cheese sausage mushrooms
Thank you to all the artists and writers involved for your generous help and support.
Michalis Pichler
Front cover: Eva Weinmayr
Published by Art after Parties Eleanor Brown 2007
www.thenewpaper.co.uk Elizabeth Price: Dead body dial 999, detail.
Cover Story page 7
New York Stories
The Newpaper is an art publication that has edited together a broad spectrum of artists who make work using the language, visuals or structure of newspapers, to create an unique broadsheet newspaper.
Printed by Newsfax International Limited 36 pp broadsheet newspaper 419 x 578mm Printed on 52gsm improved newsprint
The sense of immediacy when picking up a paper; the sometimes instructive, other times entertaining time we have; and once we’re done with it, the illusion that we’re somehow keeping track of what’s happening in the world we live in today. It’s another day on earth and we’re part of it. But there’s also another reason why a newspaper still holds a special place in our heart in an online world. It’s an object - and an uncommonly intense one. It ages quickly; you can’t use it twice; and yet, just like a burning match, over its brief vital cycle it harnesses our attention. If video art’s chief benefit from the media age was the reinvention of documentary as an art form, the print media has found its niche in Michalis Pichler’s sculptural work. Pichler planted the seed to his tree in New York about five years ago, when he was on a residency. As many post 9/11 visitors, he could hardly fail to notice the huge wave of emotion and patriotism that affected the city and its inhabitants, often translated in an exuberant display of stars and banners. Inspired by the events as well as Michael de Certeau and Walter Benjamin’s writings, Pichler started to put together a visual archive by documenting barely perceptible political signs spread around the streets only to reemit them in the flux of the city’s street life undercover. For New York Times Flag Profile (2003), Pichler picked up the 9/11 anniversary copy of the newspaper, carefully removed every American flag from the issue and subsequently pasted it on a series of blank sheets of paper along with a schematic
description of their original context. Initially conceived as a sculpture, New York Times Flag Profile subsequently developed into a form closer to the original. Reprinted in a larger edition, it was priced at $1 and distributed with other daily papers in outlets in Brooklyn and Manhattan exactly one year later. WAR Diary (2005) is an edition made of collages, and has the artist proposing a variation of the method adopted for New York Times Flag Profile, this time using front page headlines from the Daily News and merging them with images from the New York Times. In line with Dada tradition of collage, the random mix of visual references and sensational lines from the two rival papers produces startling results. Ground Zero-photographs of faces frozen in horror during the attack or mourning the losses in the aftermath are juxtaposed with columns of Dow Jones and Nasqad indexes, scrolling in the background like a Matrix-based wallpaper. In a not too subtle metaphor, titles and events end up outdoing headlines such as ‘Outrage’ and ‘Baghdad’, and the fading b/w images selected by the artist, which dramatically sink in a sea of stock exchange numbers and figures. New York Garbage Flag Profile (also known as Stars and Stripes) (2005) is part of a larger body of works, some still unpublished. They all focus on symbols and signifiers reproduced on common-property objects and their ephemeral urban phenomena status is reflected in titles like Soviet Stars (2003), hearts (2005), and ‘political’ (2006/07). NYGFP’s is characterised by a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour. Combining Ronald Reagan’s first ‘Anti-flag-burning amendment’
and Garry Trudeau’s response to publish an American flag in one of his Sunday strips to emphasise how the amendment wouldn’t let you dispose of your newspaper, NYGFP is a book that chronicles the artist’s trip through the streets of New York looking for literally anything with an American flag stamped on it – from cardboard boxes to paper cups. Every item is photographed and reproduced with its original text, generating amusing combinations like ‘Home of the brave land of the free extra cheese sausage mushrooms’ or ‘United we stand open 24 hours door to door courteous service’. “For me, collecting objects in public space and documenting their appearance and disappearance is about the object but also about the space it leaves behind,” acknowledges Pichler. “If one pays attention not only on the objet-trouvés themselves, but also to the place where they have come and disappeared from and the situation their disappearance leaves behind, this focus constitutes the objet-perdu.” Whereas the first two projects explored a bias towards representation of stars and stripes within the media, Pichler’s idea of mapping New York though American flags is a reflection of the influence that the media had on the resident population in return. New York Times Flag Profile’s paradox was that the flag, once taken out of its highly emotional patriotic and yet inappropriate context, looked much more dignified. And its hefty warning, namely, that a symbol is not made for marketing strategies, clearly indicates where this road leads to – the trashcan. Michele Robecchi Pages 3 and 4, Michalis Pichler: “the girls from page 3 and 4,” 2006 (source; BZ, Sunday June 18 2006, page 3/4)
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NEWS
Mark McGowan: I vandalised 47 cars ‘for the sake of art’ Metro article, Monday April 18 2003
Mark McGowan: This is not a protest It is hard to miss Mark McGowan, media-performanceartist-extraordinaire, with his absurd protests and frequent incursions into TV newsrooms and newspapers. In 2003 in perhaps his best-known work he pushed a monkey nut with his nose, on his hands and knees, from Goldsmith’s College to 10 Downing Street to present it to Tony Blair. He asked Blair to reinstate student grants and cancel his student debt. He has also eaten a fox to draw attention to the plight of crack addicts and rolled from Elephant and Castle to Bethnal Green to campaign for people to be nicer to cleaners. He has sat in a bath of baked beans with sausages on his head and chips up his nose in defence of the traditional English breakfast. His works, heralded by eyecatching press releases, unfold in the public domain. They then continue to exist only in their media documentation: newspaper article or TV news item. The work survives in expensively produced TV montages, whose slickness contrasts with McGowan’s strictly DIY aesthetic. McGowan plays humorously with the history of performance art’s use of the body and of protest culture, both now subsumed into MTV shows and advertising campaigns. There is still, however, a residual poignancy in displays of physical endurance. McGowan strikes a mock-heroic pose, a comic figure speaking in sound bites, a media-friendly everyman. Watching a video archive of his work, all footage recorded from the TV, it is striking to note how consistently the artist is represented. TV journalists are all as lazy and patronising as each other. They ask the same redundant question ‘But is it art?’ and make the same unimaginative quips about Van Gogh and Damian Hirst, the only
artists they think the population has heard of. They inevitably interview a man on the street, prompting him to pronounce of McGowan: ‘That’s not art, he’s a nutter!’ The journalists’ attempts to understand McGowan miss the mark and their efforts to mock him on live TV merely reflect back on themselves. McGowan says the most insightful interpretation of his work was from an interviewed passer-by: ‘He’s rolling on the ground for no reason’. Like a Trojan horse, McGowan exposes and undermines journalists and broadcasters’ condescending disdain for their audiences, as they try to use him as a readymade ‘human interest’ story. He plays the media for entertainment value but simultaneously demonstrates both just how easy it is to manipulate the media and just how much people are influenced by it. It seems the media has yet to tire of McGowan, he has gained a strange kind of celebrity. In fact he has just become Richard and Judy’s artist in residence. Has he pervaded the national consciousness? Well, Camberwell-dwellers can thank him for putting them on the map and epitomising their local breed of eccentricity. McGowan’s performances are open-ended and often take on a life of their own. While attempting to break the world hamburger-eating record in Hamburg in 2006, his event was hijacked by students protesting about college fees who brought along a 3-legged dog to try and out-eat him. McGowan antagonises the art world and its institutions from within, sabotaging the highly serious claims they make for contemporary art. An art that is already held in suspicion by the general public, the same people he interacts with in his work.
McGowan enthusiastically adopts the role of village idiot, the fool who speaks the truth. He passionately practices his own peculiar brand of outsider public art. In a project where he scratched cars with a key in Camberwell, with cheeky logic, he said he was involving local people in an art performance. The media went wild. McGowan knows people love to get cross, buoyed by righteous indignation and he gives them what they want. He inhabited the spectre of the hooded vandal, giving people someone to direct their anger at. He has caused hysterical reactions on several occasions, by leaving taps running for a year to highlight water wastage, threatening to drown kittens in protest at Tate’s commercialisation of Joseph Beuys. The more ludicrous his proposals, the more seriously he is taken and the more outrage is vented. He plumbs the boundless credulity of the public and the media. McGowan often becomes a scapegoat figure; he even dressed up as a traffic warden and invited people to beat him. There are endless variations on a theme. McGowan has crawled to Canterbury covered in chocolates and roses and a sign saying ‘Could you love me?’ to draw attention to those lonely at Christmas. He has pulled a bus with his big toe and tried to cartwheel from Brighton to London with his face masked in sticks of rock. He dragged a TV through the streets of Milan with his ear in protest at Berlusconi’s control of the media. McGowan recently deadpanned his way out of an encounter with the Police when he was caught walking backwards through the exclusion zone in Parliament Square wearing, in homage to Magritte, a t-shirt declaring: ‘This is not a protest.’ Ali MacGilp
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NEWS 2003; the world watches as the space shuttle Columbia disintegrates over Texas; as Iraq is invaded for the second time; as the deadly SARS virus broke out and that kiss between Madonna and Britney. That was the year that was. Some of the most shocking front pages of the 21st Century and yet the thing about news and especially the newspaper that tells it, is that it’s so very quickly not new anymore. In One Year of the News, a piece first exhibited in 2004, Angus Fairhurst made use of six different newspapers from 2003 collected over the course of 52 weeks. The front pages of the newspapers during the course of one week were photocopied on top of each other to form 312 panels. The six newspapers weren’t mixed up, the stories weren’t discernible.
One Year of the News Angus Fairhurst Miria Swain: Obviously you couldn’t have possibly known what the news of 2003 would be, but when you first started collecting the newspapers at the beginning of the year did you know what form the work would eventually take? Angus Fairhurst: I had done some pieces before that were just a week or just a month of the news, so it was then a logical step to do a whole year. In making the piece, I was less concerned with the content of the newspapers, than I was with the idea that what would normally be revealed by the news, would instead be hidden by the process of printing the newspapers on top of each other. The piece was never going to be about specific events, it was more about the sense of how specific events are communicated, but also gradually covered up by the sludge of time. I suppose the piece deals with the transient nature of newspapers… the sense of things being forgotten. It’s kind of a memorial to forgetting as much as it is about the homogenisation of information. MS: I guess the process of archiving that material over the course of a year must have been quite an arduous task. Did you start off by designing a system, or did you make the work as you went along? AF: I was definitely interested in the idea of archiving ephemeral information that other people have thrown away, so the organising principle came as I was doing it. I wasn’t clear about the piece until I started to collect the newspapers, I was actually a little unsure about the
idea, or a little bit lazy about it to start with, so I ended up scrabbling around later in the year for the few days that I had missed at the beginning… it’s difficult to find old newspapers once they have gone. MS: The use of newspapers as both material and subject matter sits within a strong art historico Schwitters and Warhol. Yet the way that newspapers have often been appropriated in the past has been about the use of found text and image. Your work cancels out the text and the image so that it becomes something other. There seems to be a tension in your work, between the political gesture of censoring or cancelling out the news and the simultaneous production of an aesthetic object. Would you say this was true? AF: I’m interested in the sense that newspapers are already a kind of edited, manipulated information… that there are differences of political bent within newspapers, that there is supposedly one left leaning, and one right leaning and others which position themselves in the centre. And yet there’s not such a great range of information portrayed, just subtle differences. By destroying or compressing the newspapers, you take away their power lead as an information carrier… the thing that gives you the information. At first the piece retains the sense of being a carrier, but it quickly becomes thwarted by the process and switches into something else. In a sense there is a transformation between the destructive political gesture and the creative process. It is both politically and formally significant that the pieces are not solid black; that they have quite an inflected surface, with lots of different colours and ghostly images
coming through. In a sense, what is left is a residue or composite image where unpredictable or chaotic elements are made explicit. MS: Are you interested in a kind of random aesthetic then, in the idea of a sort of entropic uniformity? AF: Yes, the aesthetic that is generated by cancellation and exploring the point can be reached with a kind of randomness. Like a lot of people I guess, there is the potential to get stuck in a trap, where I can’t find a way to make an image, so I’ll find something which exists and use that to bite through a set of rules, to create a new image. It’s sort of a way out of subjective decision-making… but then I end up finding other subjective forms and I am always trying to find a way of marrying the two together… this rigorous structural side and then this much looser sculptural aspect to my work where the subjective always comes in quite strongly. Miria Swain Top; Angus Fairhurst: One Year of the News, 1st January-31st December 2003, (detail) Below; installation shot.
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lockwise from C; Elizabeth Price: ‘Dead body dial 999’, 2002 (detail). Serkan Özkaya: Today Could Be a Day of Historical Importance, 2003, The first page of the issue from 21 September 2003 of ‘Radikal.’ Vibeke Tandberg: IHT Sept. 29, 2004, (detail). Eva Weinmayr: Suitcase Body is Missing Woman, Published by Book Works, 2003. Gillian Wearing G2 cover, January 7, 2003. Kim Rugg: Coronation, 2005, newspaper (The New York Times). Alex Hamilton: The International Herald Tribune, 2006. Graham Dolphin: Iraqi, 9 April 2003. Elizabeth Price: ‘Dead body dial 999’, 2002 (detail).
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uicide was the starting point for Elizabeth Price’s newspaper ‘Dead body dial 999.’ A cover story from the Hackney Gazette described a young man who had jumped from the roof of a building to the street below with the words ‘Dead body dial 999’ written on his back. The story had a profound impact on Price who embarked on a publishing project where she retyped the entire copy the Gazette into a new newspaper devoid of any images, colour or typefaces. The result is an unnerving homage to the local paper, stripped of life, only the bare bones of the stories remaining, but with no visual stimuli to encourage the reading of them. The screaming advertisements become silent, the juxtaposition of text becomes inappropriate (the suicide story next to an accident insurance policy) and the fleeting life of the news stories are cemented on the tombstone style pages. See pages 33 - 34.
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n September 21, 2003, to coincide with the opening of the Istanbul Biennial, Serkan Özkaya produced a work in collaboration with the daily national newspaper Radikal. On the evening before this particular issue of Radikal was due to go to press, when all the copy and images had already been laid out and the newspaper was finished and ready to print, Özkaya and his team entered Radikal’s office. Using tracing paper, they drew over every word, image and headline that appeared on the front and back page of the paper in its original form. The newspaper then went to print that night in the usual way, except for its cover, which was replaced with a printed version of the hand-drawn copy made by Özkaya and his team. Although the work was not commissioned by the Biennial, Radikal’s media sponsorship of the event meant that Özkaya’s initiative was available and free to all the exhibitions visitors. The paper was also distributed nationally as normal and available for sale at the usual price. As an afterthought Özkaya titled the work Today Could Be a Day of Historical Importance, as the newspaper had shifted from its everyday standardization to an object to be kept rather than disposed of; a copy suddenly more of a genuine article than the original.
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he newspaper drawings of Graham Dolphin are quite politically charged. “I was listening and reading to a lot of news at that point, the start of the second gulf war.” remembers Graham. “ It felt like history, with events being rewritten and analyzed every moment, which made for very odd but great entertainment in its remoteness. Newspapers seem so slow in reacting to this rolling news, but their power to fix things in print is fascinating.” These are working drawings drawn directly on top of newspaper pages and the ink from the page is traced on to the paper below. The chosen front page is usually one of religious or cultural importance. Dolphin uses a physical approach to reinterpret through line drawing the notion of repetition and layering. This process led to a larger body of work ‘Everything in Vogue.’ where the artist overlaid a series of items, all the handbags, adverts, words etc in the fashion magazine Vogue. See World News page 11.
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ibeke Tandberg’s series of 46 collages from the IHT September 2004, came after months of cutting up an entire copy of the International Herald Tribune into integral parts and placing them into a new order. Instead of the usual column headings like economics, feature pages or politics, Tandberg developed 31 categories derived directly from working with the material. At first glance, Tandberg‘s work is reminiscent of the concrete poetry of the ’Wiener Gruppe’, of poems and collages of Rühm or Achleitner. With them she also shares the intention to look at language in terms of mere material and to stress its visual dimension as well as the desire to counter the daily stimulus satiation of information through a system of its own. The collages appeared in her show Reading the Newspaper Without Hands at Klosterfelde gallery, Berlin. This was also the title of Tandberg’s film (2005) where the artist reclines on a deckchair in her garden, a newspaper on her lap, the pages of which are being turned by random gusts of wind.
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riginal content of this front-page format of the International Herald Tribune by Alex Hamilton is now out of date. Precisely rendered drawings replace the text and pictures of The International Herald Tribune. Seemingly disconnected from the newspaper’s content, it is difficult to place which part of the world these drawings are taken from. Columns and picture squares of newspapers are easily recognised universal systems. Even when newspaper formats are used for drawing in they can still trigger shared memories and we can still imagine and play back in our heads some sort of news content to fit inside them. Like this newspapers drawn in content, this imagined news would certainly be formed from our experience of reading many thousands of newspapers. See Art News page 16.
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va Weinmayr has produced the front cover especially for The Newpaper. Using titles from posters from her local newsstands she has split the headlines and reordered the words alphabetically. Eva started collecting the posters in 2002. The words were collected from headlines in the Holloway area explaining why there are so many references to the football team Arsenal. The words are very Londoncentric; they come from local papers like the Evening Standard or the Islington and Hackney Gazettes. There is very little mention of international news. The words, worlds and people they refer to are part of an insider’s terminology. The headline has a short life – a day at the most of front-page glory or less for a paper with several updated editions. New headlines are constantly being created using variations of the same words.
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e-arranging important news into curiously well ordered gobbledygook, Kim Rugg takes the front pages of top newspapers on especially historical days and cuts out every single letter and then re-arranges them alphabetically The New York Times, for example, becomes eeehikmNorsTTwY. Rugg’s front pages include the Financial Times from Sept. 12, 2001, whose headline originally declared “Attack on America,” and the issue of the New York Times that reported on “The Coronation of George W. Bush.” Rugg cuts the photographic images into tiny pixels and rearranges them by color, resulting in a fuzzy image that could be static or a strange digital landscape. See Art News page 17.
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obocop’s, Rock, Royal Rubbish …. The alliteration and repetition of words is important as it hammers the message in to our psyche. The alphabet then becomes the machinery that creates the poetry. When you split the sentences and reorder them, a whole series of new meanings and juxtapositions arise. Diana’s Dirty Diet Disease could even become a believable story. Splitting the headlines into single words highlights how the word can carry the weight of the whole story. Headline writers have got the use of these words down to an art, they can make each of the words mean something in their own right. Macca, Maxine, Di; there is no doubt as to the person they are referring to. The names are personal, media constructed celebrities and victims. They make the world a smaller place. Things are complicated enough. See Books page 24.
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BA artist Gillian Wearing got the Guardian into hot water with its readers when she used her invitation to design the G2’s front cover (07/01/2003) to declare ‘Fuck Cilla Black’! “It’s the fuck that does it,” mused the Guardian staff, “ Is this an invitation to Fuck Cilla Black ... and blue? Or is someone telling the perennial star to go away, in the crudest possible terms? However you read it, it comes over as a calculated insult, and some loyal Guardian readers might feel it is being uttered on their behalf. If this is art, there’s nothing much new here. In fact what matters is that it is here - and not so much “in” the newspaper so much as seeming to be the newspaper talking.” Wearing’s cover was included in the Art News exhibition featured on page 16.
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WORLD NEWS
‘Imagine there is war and nobody shows up?’
Vibeke Tandberg: “IHT Sept. 29, 2004” (detail) from 46 collages made by cutting all the words out of the International Herald Tribune.
Rainer Ganahl War makes me sick! War is escalating as I sit here trying to write something, though completely ignorant on the subject. War reports as “headline news” are a constant element of the media design of our environment. On the radio and internet, in the newspaper and on television, they take on a quasi-decorative function. War reports run next to
advertisements, shopping, entertainment, and a hundred other bits of information and distraction (“info tractions”), and are released and sold by a few large agencies – Reuters, Associated Press – non-stop, like on an assembly line. Just now the situation in Lebanon is escalating, and its airport has been bombed by Israel. (BBC, NYC Radio, Yahoo News, derstandard.at). Yesterday’s newspaper published disaster photos from Mumbai of nearly 200 dead. (New York Times). I
also read there that in the last 3 days in Iraq there have been over 100 killed. The constant killing in Sudan and in other regions of the world doesn’t make the news or headlines right now. Furthermore, the deliberations and defacto preparations for a preventative war against North Korea (Japan’s politicians and defence minister are in agreement with this as of last week) and Iran are forced into the background, although this changes the situation only
slightly. I feel sick. I belong to the generations of Europeans who have no direct experience of war. (No European wants to admit that the war and genocide in Yugoslavia actually took place in Europe.) The current escalation in Lebanon could theoretically have directly affected me when I visited this region two years ago – something that further drives my ideas on the subject. I also have plenty of friends here in New York
whose relatives live in Haifa. I experienced the destruction of the World Trade Center with my own eyes. It still felt very abstract and unreal, even though I know quite a few people who lost friends in this catastrophe and I had to inhale dirty toxic air for a month and developed breathing problems. Based on worried questions and discussions with Europeans and Americans who don’t live here, it seems to me as if the destruction of the Twin Towers was experienced for a longer time and more
intensely than by those who were here in the city. This has also been confirmed by all of the post-9/11 polls about the estimation of danger, the level of fear, and the desired response in America. It is in this discrepancy between direct and imagined experience that I see the power of the media over our ability to imagine. The media plays a part in creating reality as it transforms an abstract scene into pictures that feel like something personally experienced. When I was in
Moscow in 1991 (Yeltsin crisis, siege of parliament) protesting with Russians between the tanks, I felt like a protagonist in a déjàvu soap opera, and so felt relatively secure, even though quite a few protesters were shot nearby on the same night. I know war only from the media and from the personal reports of people who were affected. I remember, for example, a young Kosovar artist from London, who I came across three years ago
on the beach in Albania. In response to my questions about war, he explained to me that he and three friends from London flew to Kosovo voluntarily to participate in the war, in order to defend his people. He was the only one who survived. That took my breath away. I couldn’t ask anything further – I didn’t want to know anymore. An oppressive feeling of shame and guilt mingled with the heat of the day. I sensed that behind all these unimaginable destructions called war
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WORLD NEWS
that constantly surround us
via impressive, aestheticized photographs and reports, was a gaping banality that insignificantly, unrestrained, and senselessly feeds the realm of the escalation of violence. In the 60s and early 70s the two world wars were a matter of curious questions and selective answers and accounts within the family, and were hardly brought up in my schools. (My question to my father, “Did you shoot, too?,” still remains unanswered, although his silence and the shrapnel in his neck and skull are a kind of answer.) As children we could also play in the ruins and old ditches of the wars, where we hid and even kissed. Munitions shells and things from the attic like medals, pieces of uniforms, duffel bags, shoes, and Reichsmarks were our toys. We also saw many people with wartime disabilities, for whom we gave up our seats on the streetcar, ahead of pregnant women, the blind, and the elderly. In the 70s and 80s the threat of a nuclear winter hung over all of us like a real and unreal ghost. In “London Calling,” The Clash sang about “nuclear fear.” This ambivalent real-unreal aspect of the so-called Cold War was part of a personal deep-rooted feeling. As a nihilistic teenager with only an immediate shortlived sense of time, I was sure that I wouldn’t make it to 30, having already lost my mother and brother prematurely (which was attributed to the indirect psychological long term effects of the Second World War.) War would destroy us all. My grandparents had survived two world wars, and my parents one, and their memories and accounts – as well as the media – were not totally wasted on us, but were rather compartmentalized into a part of our minds. To us children, these world wars seemed very monumental and historically overwhelming, and seemed to have been sent from God. Grandmother sometimes took us to pray that another war would not break out. The war took on a meteorological-theological quality, like a thunderstorm sent from God. In Vorarlberg I felt geopolitically secure. The mountains seemed to offer protection from atomic attacks, and there were no significant targets in the immediate area. The mountains did not, however, protect us from the radioactive fallout of the heavy clouds from Chernobyl, that quietly, normally, harmfully, and inconceivably banally moved over the Alps. We were unprepared for and unprotected against the rain that followed the nuclear reactor disaster, and it brought countless numbers to their deaths. This year’s dominant atmosphere of disarmament and peace movements turned me into a confirmed pacifist. People protested and wore t-shirts, bandanas, stickers, and buttons about peace and disarmament. People hitchhiked to protest rallies, marches, and peace concerts in Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. A famous quotation circulated in many forms, that was (perhaps falsely) attributed to Bertold Brecht: “Imagine there is war and nobody shows up.” I think
Rainer Ganahl: Fox News Channel, Black Hawks Crash in Iraq, Killing 17 Americans, 11/14/03. Acrylic paint on canvas.
it was also a subject for essays in German schools. I was surprised to learn from Google just now, that this quotation, which was so frequently printed on posters, was actually incomplete, and that it has a deceptive ending that would dash the pacifist’s hopes: “Imagine there is war and nobody shows up. Then the war comes to you.” This ending, which contradicted the goals of pacifism, astonished me. Without soldiers the war battlefield should stay empty, and war could not continue on, and also not come to us. If a soldierless war came to us, this would mean that the pacifist solution would not be preventing war, but
rather subtly calling for a mobilization for war. This would make this solution of refusing to go to war pointless. Today we can see that the complete quotation can also be understood literally, and that battlefields can exist without soldiers. There is technology where destruction can be programmed on a screen, and armies are replaced by non-military outsourcing to semi-privatized special units. Soldierless battlefields can also arise where unresolved political conflicts are unevenly manifested, and gym bags and suicide bombs bring death and misery to packed
restaurants, commuter trains, subways, theaters, and outdoor markets. It seems to me that battlefields have increasingly disappeared – that is, spread out – over whole regions and halfcontinents. According to the reactionary theoretician Samuel Huntington, whole cultures and civilizations will turn into war scenes. Furthermore, troops are no longer necessary, and no soldiers need to be there. The media brings the war to our living rooms and desktops in an instant. The hopeful solution of not going to war mutates into the question, “What would happen if there was a war and nobody looked?” Or
more specifically, “What happens when we see the onscreen headlines but don’t click on them?” All of us at least look at the computer and the “headline news.” Thanks to sensitive technology, these news currents track our internet activity. Whether or not we notice it, every hit and site visit is counted, registered, analyzed, and turned into user profiles. Without intending to, one runs the risk of landing on a site that propagates radical content of every kind. The Big Brother from “1984” lives on in 2006, within a large family with innumerable siblings that take on every conceivable form, in a logarithmic nightmare and
mathematical butterfly effect. As we know, the State Department demanded search data from Google and other search engines, in order to be able to create a picture of the interests of many millions of users. There is war, and if you look, you will be observed. It is surely a subtle form of self-censorship and paranoia when I say that I don’t dare to follow all online links and to study sinister news sources. (There are secret no-fly lists to screen for potential risk groups. Meanwhile we have found out that all telephone conversations in the USA were being analyzed.) I look in spite of the
depressing global situation, though I must say that I find it overtaxing. Looking, clicking, and navigating supplement my newspaper subscription. With the click of the mouse, I can get the radio programs from various international stations around the world, acoustically rounding out my worldview through the Infopipeline. It is striking to notice that there are hardly any differences between reports from Germany, Austria, France, England, Japan, and the USA, not only in their presentation, illustration, and time of release, but also in their interpretation. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the original reports come from
just a few sources. War wants to be looked at, to be listened to. What we call terrorism can’t exist without cameras and reporting. War and terrorism, terrorism and war, become cut out and shaped for an international news audience. U.S. citizens hardly see any U.S. casualties, and even fewer wounded soldiers. The world is full of complicated interests and conflicts, and should not be characterized as a fairytale. We have recently seen how cartoons themselves can trigger violence, and trigger their own war scenes. An accurate description of war involves not only the numbers of bombs and deaths, but Continued on page 10
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WORLD NEWS Stories from afar ‘I am interested in the sheer quantity of news from elsewhere that is available to us without leaving home.’
Melanie Jackson The new day brings a fresh offering of humaninterest stories singled out to replace those of the day before. They are often stories of people’s defiance or survival against quite adverse situations. How do these tales from strange places enter the public’s consciousness? Sitting at the kitchen table each turn of the page reveals extraordinary events happening to ordinary people around the globe. Unvisited places turn into imaginary landscapes that are passively consumed then often forgotten, replaced by the next pagegrabbing headline. Melanie Jackson is interested in the sheer quantity of news from elsewhere that is available to us without leaving home. “When I collected foreign language newspapers in London I found 250 just in the newsagents and vendors around my work and home. I’m interested in how much people have to filter, how they make sense of what comes into their lives through the TV and through newspapers.”
stories and news media. Imaginary landscapes of minutely detailed architectural models were laboriously hand crafted out of newsprint into cranes, water towers, satellite receivers, refugee and holiday camps which were dotted throughout the gallery. Jackson describes these as wanting to make physical landscapes out of words and paper.
context. Contrary to news reporting, the authenticity, linear and logical conclusion of a story was unimportant. Jackson collected the stories from word of mouth and news channels, aware that the physical journey to the source of the story could be fruitless in authenticating it, so instead tried to make sense of it other ways.
“The way that the landscapes and structures sited the video screens reminded me of the way that words and text boxes accommodate photographs. I also wanted to explore what I love about newspapers; their storytelling, temporality, low grade materiality, and what I hate about them; urgency, faux authoritarianism and objectivity, discontinuity, - and ultimately their entropy. I wanted to make something intricate and time consuming in defiance of their single day of currency.”
‘Some Things’ was oriented around a central story, the tale of a Filipino maid working in Hong Kong whose “bedroom” is a kitchen cupboard. At night she removes its contents and climbs inside to sleep; in the morning on rising, she refills it and starts her work. Jackson re-told the woman’s story via a brief, simply-drawn, looped video animation screened on a partition at the installation’s entrance: a hand stacking plates; a person disappearing into a tiny cupboard; a window darkening and growing light again. It is a commonplace in Hong Kong for domestic workers to occupy marginal spaces in its tiny flats – but this is an extraordinary scenario.
The films collated stories investigating migrant labour forces and their movements in a local and international
Jackson has a long standing interest in the newspaper cartoon and its ability to simultaneously accommodate gravitas and the comedic. A later animated work, Made in China retells the story of a young Chinese girl labourer forced to work in an eyelash factory in Hong Kong who escapes from the confines of an overcrowded workers dormitory by making a leap for freedom via the window using her woven bed sheets. This modern day fairytale spotted by Jackson in the South China Post had been circulated round the globe by the media. Continuing the Chinese whisper Jackson interlaced the themes of work and migration with another story of a young musician who took the journey from China to London to study the traditional Chinese string instrument the ‘erhu’ under English tutorage. ‘The work wasn’t about authenticity in the end’ notes Jackson, “ but about an impression of space and the resonance of the tale.” Eleanor Brown
The first newspaper story to appear in her work was inspired by an article in a Norwegian newspaper. It was story about a fishing trawler that when it tried to haul in the nets, the herring all turned simultaneously causing the ship to capsize. Inspired by the how the small collective act of turning had caused such devastation Jackson made a miniature of the vessel capsized as a ship in a bottle. She exhibited this with a film edited with footage of the north Atlantic that she had acquired after writing letters detailing her project to the coastal local newspapers in the UK. “A fantastic woman sent me 40 years worth of the footage her merchant seaman husband had documented. She also sent me his wartime diary of what it was like to be capsized on a boat.” For her exhibition ‘Some Things You Are Not Allowed To Send Around The World’ at Matt’s Gallery in London, Jackson constructed an installation of small-scale sculpture and video that had grown out of her ongoing interest in found
Melanie Jackson: Some things you are not allowed to send around the world, 2003 (detail)
Continued, also many other kinds of representation. It is not surprising that
journalists and entire television networks are always coming under fire. They have become another battlefield. Pictures follow bombs and bombs follow pictures. In the post-Watergate era, this means, “follow the money.” This advice is also crucial in the study of violence and its causes. Americans understand the business of money and the quick worldwide transfer of money very well. They understand even better its power to finance, directly and indirectly, their political, ideological, economic, and social interests worldwide. But the money and power also follow the pictures. Power, money, and pictures go together just like war and interests. Knowledge and power, resources and violence. The interesting difference between “Follow the money” and “Follow the pictures” is that while money drains from our pockets in the form of taxes, high prices, state robbery, corruption, etc, pictures come to us. Pictures and misleading explanations also come to us without us asking for them, wanted or only estimated. The unbalanced trade of money, power, and the demands of powerful monopolies for pictures, calculations, and lies has also become a billion dollar business. The former Prime Minister Berlusconi, the most face lifted and richest man in Italy who gave Bush complete apriori support for the war in Iraq, controls the majority of the Italian media, and tailored laws like shirts for his own purposes. The corresponding pictures followed. Power and money determine how war is delivered to us, through either celebrations of or publication bans against inadvertent pictures. Images of war are therefore
loaded with money, gods, and power, as well as pictures, ideologies, and interests. Soldiers are secondary. There is much more to not going to war: not paying, not believing, not participating in commerce, not looking, not listening, not wanting, not consuming. But the war comes right to us – is flung onto the population. Everyone is involved, whether on the frontlines or at home, wearing a helmet or supposedly safe from the weapons of death and destruction. During the Vietnam War (probably after the death of Martin Luther King), they said that every bomb that fell on Vietnam also exploded in an American city (“innercity”). Today international terrorism illustrates these words again and again (London, New York…). The miniaturization of every kind of technology and weapons system (pocket-sized laser guided weapons) and the global demographic changes and revolution in transportation of the last 40 years have made every capital into a reflection of the world’s population, turning the Niebelungenlied dream of absolute invulnerability into fantasy. Mandated conflict resolution has also changed the situation, so that absolutely clear military dominance is increasingly an illusion. (The “mission accomplished” in Iraq is an example.) After barely two weeks of fighting, the Israeli army must realize their miscalculations, since Lebanon’s air attacks have not been reduced 50% as expected. They are dealing with an enemy that has not only Iranian weapons systems at its disposal, but also modern Chinese rockets, with which they succeeded in destroying a ship at sea. Meanwhile here in the U.S., the media discusses this as a “proxy war” – as connected to a war between the USA and Iran (what a nightmare!), with its potential to spread across the region. Fasten your seatbelts!
The utopian hope that one could somehow snatch the war, gods, pictures, bombs, and rockets out of the sky mingles with melancholic aporia, political powerlessness, and confused hatred toward all the decision makers. What is missing in that hope is at least some sense of complicity in every war, resulting from our dependence on and benefit from the acquisition of raw materials and other western hegemonic claims. We drive cars and fly on planes and use TVs, computers, air conditioners, and other energy guzzling comforts. Much of our clothing, equipment, food, and drinks – even water – travel constantly across continents and seas, the associated costs of which we don’t pay directly. I’m surprised that nature itself, global warming, and glacial melting are not considered terrorists and part of the “axis of evil”. Nature is a great protagonist that is rarely provoked by arrogant unilateral decisions. The consequences, however, are already terrorizing us. The provocative question, “Imagine, there is war and…” is not some underrated crazy idea, but rather one that must be further considered in your absurd-utopian, quasipoetic, crazy artist ideas! Imagine if today’s wars – for example Israeli, Lebanese, or Palestinian – were fought without weapons, uranium-enriched rockets, helicopters, suicide bombers, and homemadeor Iranian-supplied projectiles, and instead only with hands! Imagine if the media could only publish stories and marathon runners! Imagine if the U.S. media published not only the numbers of dead Arabs and Afghanis, but also the 2,500 killed and 19,000 wounded American soldiers in Iraq! Imagine if the true costs of war and consumption were passed on to the consumer! Imagine if military strategists were bicycleriding artists with knowledge of Arabic and
Chinese, without direct links to lobby groups! Imagine if peace negotiations were carried out not with the arrogance of military supremacy, but rather with respect for the opposing side’s vulnerability! Imagine if at least half of the consumers who think oil prices are too high were to organize daily protests in Washington and London! Imagine if Sudan were as important as the western powers, and if every time a village was liquidated the prices of all goods rose one cent! Imagine if the religiousand media-driven fears of the masses dried up, like the advancing evaporation and devastation of global warming that creates new conflicts. Imagine if world trade would be negotiated liberally, mutually, and justly, and if interests and wealth were distributed equally instead of being greedily concentrated! Imagine if the absurd repetition of these quasidadaist demands for peace would disgrace people into protesting in the streets against weapons! Imagine if the ideas of poetic dreams, of spoiled urban alternatives and the readers of this awkward essay would have a defacto effect on today’s politics! Imagine if people begin to grasp that different thinking stands in dialectical relation to different action! Imagine if the residents of New York, Washington, Los Angeles, and a hundred other American and European cities would pour out of their homes and into the streets like they did during the last power failure, and protest against the universal prevailing war policy! Imagine… Rainer Ganahl New York, July 24, 2006 www. ganahl.info translation: Margaret Ewing Top, Vibeke Tandberg: God Bless America, 2004 Opposite page, Graham Dolphin: Iraqi, 9 April 2003
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WORLD NEWS
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OLD NEWS
‘When I first started thinking about Old News, I thought about how I would react to my own Old News request. Would I read and look at the daily paper differently?’ Jacob Fabricius Old News is an ongoing project about information and the media curated by Jacob Fabricius. The travelling exhibition and newspaper publication examines and explores the selection and manipulation of our daily news. Throughout 2004 the Danish curator invited one artist a month to participate in the project. These twelve artists each chose a fellow artist to join them in clipping four articles or images a month from the news sources they read during that period. These cuttings were collated, along with specially commissioned essays by John Miller and Joachim Koester to form the first issue of Old News, a meticulously designed tabloid publication which was exhibited alongside a range of newspaper related items at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in 2005. Recycling news articles, headlines,
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images and using information from the print media were at the core of visual art in the 20th century. The expressions are many and varied from intervention, incorporation, appropriation; reproduction of news to self published newspapers and montage newspaper fragments. Jacob Fabricius: When I first started thinking about Old News, I thought about how news, newspapers and information influence my life. How I select my news sources and how information can be manipulated in the media. I thought of how I would react to my own Old News request. Would I read and look at the daily paper differently? Since starting the project the maelstrom of news has increased. In Denmark the last 2-3 years have brought us the ‘free’ newspaper - first there were two, now there are six (among them are Urban, Metroxpressen, Dato, and 24 timer). Its been named the Danish newspaper war and you hardly can’t sit in a train without sitting on
3 editions of the same newspaper. Many artists, writers and musicians have inspired me in my research. I would like to mention Sylvan Hoffman and C. Hartley Grattan’s book News of the World, a History of the World in Newspaper-style (1953), On Kawaras I read (1966 to the present), the news paper insert in Dead Kennedy’s album Bedtime for Democracy (1986), Tom Lehrer’s That Was The Year That Was (1965), Ken Loach’s segment from the film September 11 and Guy Schraenen’s exhibition Kunstzeitung/Zeitungskunst about the history of artworks in and around newspapers. I looked for, but regrettably never found, Aleksandr Mosolov’s Four Newspaper Advertisements (Chetyre gazetnyh obyavlenya) a 1926 composition inspired by real advertisements in the Russian newspaper Izvestija.’ Jo Brinton: Which was the starting point for the project, the exhibition or the publication?
JF: The starting point was the Old News newspaper, the printed matter, which can easily exist (and is meant to exist) outside the exhibition space. The Old News newspaper is part of the exhibition and the exhibition is not meant to be without the stacks of newspapers. JB: How does the production process differ between the exhibition and publication, in terms of location, financing, timescale and people involved? JF: Putting together the Old News newspaper seems to be more like doing an exhibition than an actual publication. Time wise it is very consuming, especially the first one. The newspaper has to be financed before it can be printed, so there is a lot of work before anything is actually in print. The distribution of the first issue of Old News was done with the help of the Danish daily paper Politiken who sent it out to Danish schools for free. Some 400 schools have received information about the project and
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the teachers have the possibility of ordering as many as s/he wants to use in their teaching. It is interesting that the artist’s selection of cuttings, and their thoughts and comments are discussed outside the regular exhibition space by teenagers in schools. JB: You exhibited other newspaper related material alongside the cuttings at LACE. What were your particular favorites and their origins? JF: There are so many great artist projects that use newspapers, and so many that I didn’t present at LACE, so I can’t give you a favourite from the exhibition. I find it really interesting that Tom Lehrer’s That Was The Year That Was (1965) record still is so relevant as a comment on American foreign policy today. The song Send the Marines (1:46) is fantastic, but there are 13 other tracks for your entertainment. JB: The redesign of Old News No.2 included a format change
from tabloid to broadsheet, was this adjustment related to content, finance or just for an update? JF: Going broadsheet seems passe these days, since many papers go from broadsheet to tabloid. The reason why No.2 is B/W and broadsheet is to get a better reading quality. B/W makes it easier to read and cheaper. It is not as handy, but I think it reads better. The idea is that the design changes every year. Jo Brinton Old News issue 2 includes clips by: Adam Broomberg/Oliver Chanarin (South Africa, Gerard Byrne (Ireland), Tacita Dean/ Mathew Hale (England), Celine Duval (France), David Shrigley (England), Kawasaki/Sound Bum (Japan), Cecilia Wendt/Annelie Nilsson (Sweden), Jan Mancuska (Czech R).Insert by Thomas Hirshhorn. Newspaper excerpts from Old News 2, 2006. Curated by Jacob Fabricius. Published by Pork Salad Press.
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COMMENT
Death of the Newspaper “Paper will be replaced by material which does not depend upon the slow growth of trees for its production.” Norman Bel Geddes, 1931, Ten Years From Now, Ladies Home Journal
Like a Juggernaut, whose force and direction has yet to be appreciated, the internet has trampled across all existing media industries. Music, radio, television, print; have all quaked under the reverberations of this all encompassing medium. Yet nowhere has this proven most self-evident, most damaging in its implications, than the foretold death of the newspaper. The newspaper industry is fragmenting under the strain of shrinking profit margins, and diminishing readerships. Its business models are in crisis, and its journalistic standards are proffered as sacrifices to appease the god of hard capital. The finger is pointed directly at the internet for setting in motion this crisis in the industry. On the website of any leading Daily, Friday’s print news, can be downloaded by Thursday afternoon. For sheer light-speed delivery, multi platform and multi device penetration, newspapers cannot hope to compete. And as such, industry analysts have begun to predict its inevitable obsolescence. According to academic Philip Meyer, 2043 will be the year that the newspaper finally dies. Roots of its salvation, however, may lie in the circumstances of its birth. The origin of newspapers was almost simultaneous with the advent of the printed press. Over three hundred years ago one simple technological advance was able to tap into an inherent impulse shared by all societies. An impulse at times as prosaic as exchanging gossip, and at times as solemn as sharing in collective tragedy. It wasn’t until the late 19th and early 20th century however, that the newspaper industry enjoyed its golden era. Technical advances in printing and communication combined with a professionalisation of journalism and the prominence of new, capital rich, owners. Newspapers became more partisan with the emergence of socialist and labour papers, as the very commodity became the free voice of the people. In nothing less than the most self-aggrandising terms, the industry began to recognise itself as the fourth estate, and as the most valuable and necessary commodity in a functioning democratic polity. In fact, the free press, newspapers and journalism went hand-in-hand with the emergence of an evolving mass
participatory political system that is presented still today as the defacto model for all democratic societies. And as a model it remains. A nations democratic viability is judged in terms of the freedom of its press. The crisis faced by the newspaper industry is today couched in no less terms than a crisis in democratic vitality. But with the newspapers now spending less on this function of a reporter’s job, this arm of the fourth estate is leading to what academic Meyer refers to, as the “death spiral” of the entire industry. The internet has attracted advertising content away from the big dailies, and taken vast swathes of their readers. The response of newspapers has been to cut staff, spend less on originating journalism, and resort to increased commercialisation. Corporations are hedging their bets with a spate of new free papers, which sell advertising space as news bulletins rather than spaces for uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. Analysts, however – those whose job it is to advise avaricious shareholders and investors – speak of a maturing of the industry and the emergence of a new business model. Far be it for them to lament the passing of a diverse, or robust journalistic tradition. This new “business model” will see the survival of a select few strong newspapers, such as the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, whilst the middle order of the industry will fall by the wayside. On the internet, newspapers have turned into multimedia sites, providing a combination of audiovisual content; they seem complicit in their own demise. Advertising revenues are available to them, but only if they offer significant content for free. However, the habit of today’s news junky is more sporadic and more targeted. Internet news readers look at fewer pages and are ultimately less appealing to advertisers. Though advertising grew on the internet by 70%, the share of this landing on the sites of the established newspapers is small in comparison. Instead the industry has adopted various models that are comprehensively undermining the once august role of journalism.
The Daily Telegraph is already morphing into a glorified catalogue for pillows, baskets, and insurance – with a few pages dedicated to comment. In its pages, glossy supplements fall out selling china plates decorated with rare British ducks or emblazoned with a young Queen Elizabeth. Its news is lazily gathered from news-wire services such as Reuters, as an increasing number of its staff are brought into retirement. This is a double-edged sword. The increasingly commercial nature of the news industry – the only way media corporations know how to maintain profit margins, is leading most of the industry to irrelevance. Free papers will easily trump any newspaper enterprise in terms of pure commercialism. At the same time, those papers wishing to retain and expand a pre-web profitability on the internet will be doing this in the face of scant advertising and point-of-sale revenues. Is the answer then an inevitable decline in journalistic standards? Not necessarily. As the Economist magazine recently noted, journalism on the internet is being pioneered by a selection of not for profit organisations. The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, and television news sites such as the BBC, continue to invest heavily in investigative reporting, all with non-profit making business models. In terms of keeping the ‘national conversation’ alive, the internet has provided more vitality not less. Grass roots journalism, especially with a local flavour has received added impetus on the internet. The future of the newspaper industry may indeed look bleak. But this does not necessarily spell doom for journalism. The industry will fragment. The very etymology of term “news” will change. Tabloids, with their diet of celebrity gossip, can no longer hold the word newspaper. Podcasts, blogs, wikis, and messageboards have turned the journalistic monologue into a dialogue. In this defuse environment, space for journalism continues to exist. The internet is a juggernaut that not only destroys, but also creates. However the catch-all term newspaper – which has evolved into lifestyle guides, sudoku puzzles, and theatre reviews, will be a thing of the past. Khuram Aziz
The Daily Telegraph is already morphing into a glorified catalogue for pillows, baskets, and insurance. Opposite, Mirtha Dermisache: Excerpt from “9 Newsletters / 1 Reportaje” published by Manglar (Nömes, France), 2004. Mirtha’s recent publication “Libro no.2 / 1968, is published by Manglar and Le Clou dans le Fer (Nömes / Reims, France), 2005. Her publications are available in London from Bookartbookshop, 020 7608 1333.
ART NEWS Martin Creed, Amikam Toren, Gordon Cheung, Louise Hopkins, Hugh Mendes, Kim Rugg, Alex Hamilton, Chris Cook, Melanie Jackson, Eva Weinmayr, Gillian Wearing. ‘Art News’ was an exhibition of contemporary artists working with newspaper curated by Hugh Mendes in 2004. The show first opened at the Three Colts Gallery in London and then travelled to Los Angeles to show at Raid Projects in 2005. Newspaper has been an important material in the artist’s studio ever since Picasso collaged ‘JOU’ onto a Cubist painting almost a century ago, transforming a throwaway scrap of paper into art. In the midcentury, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg both used newspaper, sometimes investing political significance in their choices. Many contemporary artists are rediscovering this ubiquitous daily object as a site of beauty, political opposition, formal device, or just a convenient medium for their art. ‘Art News’ aimed to bring together a group of artists exploring the possibilities of this most ephemeral of media. As a material, newspaper is
tantalising: it’s everywhere, it’s cheap, and, most importantly, it retains a unique power even after being discarded. Once read, the day’s news, and the paper it’s printed on, should be just a useless object to be tossed away. Yet imagine finding a sheet of newspaper from a few years ago, or even a few weeks ago. It has to be examined, looked at, read. What was happening at the time? Did I miss anything? Has history progressed at all? How has the design or format changed? An old paper always conveys a whiff of nostalgia, and even, perhaps, mortality.
paint that would be used to depict a letter of the alphabet. Kim Rugg cuts individual letters from the paper and rearranges them alphabetically, in a strange, obsessive pursuit of purity and order. Louise Hopkins blackens pages of newspaper, leaving only a single word, isolated and overburdened with meaning. Other artists enact a kind of redemption: Hugh Mendes paints fragments of newspaper, preserving a bit of obituary or snippet of photojournalism, while Gordon Cheung creates haunting landscapes from the Financial Times.
Not surprisingly, many artists work with the building blocks of the paper itself: letters. When Turner-prize winner Martin Creed was asked by The Independent to do a project on their pages, he requested a whole page on which to print the alphabet in successive days. For over ten years, Amikam Toren collected The Times, pulped the paper and transformed the material into
Craig Burnett Clockwise from right: Kim Rugg: Attack on Iraq, 2003 newspaper (Financial Times,) March 20, 2003 (detail), Gordon Cheung: Top Ten Billionaires, 2004, Hugh Mendes: Obituaries: Pope News 3, 2006, Louise Hopkins: Untitled (the of the), 2003, Gillian Wearing G2 cover, January 7, 2003, Melanie Jackson: Cactus, 2004, (detail), Alex Hamilton , The International Herald Tribune, 2006, (detail) , Page 16-17, Gordon Cheung;Rider, 2006
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DESIGN
A Kat Topaz
I started in New York on magazines. It’s funny I think I was a snob, I never really thought that much about newspapers. I went out to Salt Lake City, Utah, for a few months for a project and a friend of mine kept telling me about a local newsweekly. It was called the Private Eye back then, now it’s the Salt Lake City Weekly. She kept saying ‘they need your help, there’s this paper and it’s really great, but they need good covers.’ She kept pushing me to go there and I kept thinking ‘I’m not going to go to design for a newspaper!’ It’s so funny to me now. I guess I just thought it wasn’t sexy. I finally went in and it really changed my life. I had been working in New York City on high-
end stuff and it was fun but it didn’t really feel very meaningful to design a catalogue for something no one really needs. All of a sudden I was at this newspaper in Utah, a primarily a Mormon area. People who live there that aren’t Mormon really don’t feel like they have a voice. This paper would write about anything that needed to be written about and it would say things about the church that would never appear anywhere else. They would receive bomb threats and the building got shot at. It was the first time that I thought, “wow what I am doing really makes a difference.” I got hooked. We didn’t have a big budget. We didn’t have weeks to work on a piece. I found it thrilling. I still visit that paper when I can. I tell the owner that I feel so lucky that he hired me because from then on I’ve mainly only worked on newspapers.
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DESIGN
I started working for myself just doing newspaper redesign in 2000. It is an exciting time for me right now. Newspapers are panicking because classifieds and personals are going away and everyone is reading on the web. Papers are doing desperate things; they have to because they are losing money and readers. Suddenly there are so many papers that are willing to redesign or rethink and not do things as they have done forever. People are reading differently since the advent of the internet and yet so many papers in this country look exactly the way they did twenty years ago. Now it’s getting newspaper bosses in the pocket they have to do something different. It is an exciting time as a designer because you are going into new territory. It’s not just about making the paper look good; it is about making it stay in existence.
People don’t want to read half of the story before they can understand what is going on. They want to be able to look and see before they start reading if it is something that they want to read. They are not reading from front to back, they are reading all over the place. Designers have to realise this and make the paper something that people can dive into. I try to get them to look at the pages and reconsider everything they are putting on them and ask themselves the question ‘does this add value?’ I try to get subs away from the pun headlines or the dumb little labels that don’t mean anything like ‘buzz’, things that annoy the reader. I try to get them to think about the navigation within the paper and to think about the artwork. A lot of people don’t think about the art. They think of it as an after-thought like sticking a stamp on an envelope. You need to get them to think of the art as a tool instead of a postage stamp. They print a story about a tattoo and then stick a dumb picture of someone with a tattoo next to it. You don’t want your paper to be saying that ‘we’re dumb’. You want it to be saying ‘we’re smart, hip or thought
provoking’, so the images should be smart hip or thought provoking.
I work with everybody but I work really closely with the editor and their editorial mission. Some editors are more excited about design than others. Some say – ‘well we have to do this’. Some appreciate how good design can help their writing. The design can make a huge difference in making someone decide if they are going to even read the story. Good design also helps their papers look more credible. Then the page count keeps growing as the advertising increases, which is usually a good indicator that more people are reading the paper. I get every newspaper that I work with to send me every issue for the next year. I have built an office which has a long shelf along one wall and every paper I have redesigned just gets stacked up there, and I walk down the row and look at all the covers and think ‘I’ve got a really good job’. Eleanor Brown
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FILM
EVERYDAY SOMETHING When the filmmaker Carol Morley wanted to contact people who had known her in Manchester during the early 1980s she took out a small ad in the local newspaper. From this modest 4-line appeal came the film The Alcohol Years (50 mins, 2000) gaining a BAFTA nomination for its director’s debut documenting 1980s Manchester and the raw music scene that had emerged pre-Madchester. Respondents spoke to camera, animated and unsparing as they recalled a promiscuous, alcohol driven girl/musician, Carol Morley herself. Subsequent films include Everyday Something (14 mins, 2001), Stalin My Neighbour (15 mins, 2004) and The Fear of ..Trilogy (3 mins, 2005 a micro film incorporating mobile phone technology). Each of these films explores the news story, where ‘news’ is a true incident that tilts our conception of daily life in a way
Althea Green: The Fear of... Trilogy is described as a set of cautionary tales for the 21st century. Is that how you would describe all the news cuttings you collect? Carol Morley: I am attracted to news cuttings that in many ways are to do with domesticity- so “the fear of … trilogy” dealt with fear of falling plant pots, which for me seems very ordinary but at the heart of it is domestic horror-deaths caused by plants falling from balconies and windowsills! All the cuttings I collect I think are in some ways connected to a notion of peeling back the curtains and looking at domestic life, family life and personal stories. They are stories that do not make the front pages- but for me have the substance to indicate so much about modern life. I see many of my cuttings as being dark but somehow humorous too, and I think the cautionary tales tag I put on the fear of … trilogy was a humorous underlining of how everyday life can be so strange and so fascinating, that within the seeming monotony of domestic life there can be drama. I suppose I am trying to look at the neglected area of domestic life, both celebrating it and being concerned by it! AG: Is it like what the Guerrilla Girls said about having to get naked to get on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum: a woman or girl has to be mad, bad or murdered to get in the news? CM: It seems that a woman has to be mad, bad and/ or murdered to make the front
that large scale world events do not, as news anyway. Morley has a collection of news cuttings, a rich source of episodes from the human comedy, but her relationship to these stories is personally charged beyond curiosity and complicated by her relationship to the newspaper itself. Three memories were triggered by the interview that follows:
Shame
“I remember at school my friend sitting next to me and taking out this folded up page from the front of the Manchester Evening News and it was about her dad (she was 14) and how he had been found sleeping rough in a car, and violently reacted to police officers and it was a report on the court case... and I really remember the shame she had, the fact people had seen it (though I hadn’t) and that had a big impact on me I think, the shame she felt. Her family story (mentioning the break up of her parents etc) on the front page.
pages, yes, but I think that news stories about women do turn up in throw away columns; these are the columns I am interested in. Like the story from my film everyday something where a woman took her washing machine repair man hostage, this was actually reported in the consumer pages of a major newspaper, or the story of a woman forced to go jogging by her husband, this was a small column buried in a newspaper. So I think that stories about women’s lives do make the newspapers, they just aren’t prioritised or expanded on. AG: Do you collect news items off the internet or do you need to come across them in print? CM: I used to just use newspapers, contemporary ones and I also used to do microfiche research. A film I made I’m not here (1994) was made up of stories based on newspaper cuttings that I had library researched. It was about shop assistants and boredom, and the title of the film came from a letter that was written to the times about shop girls. At the time of researching the film a friend found a scrap book in a skip, with most of the cuttings coming from the Jewish chronicle and other London papers, about ‘miss London stores 1970’ and this contributed a lot to the film. Nowadays I use print and internet stuff. If someone tells me a story they read, and they haven’t kept the cutting for me, I’ll often be able to find it online, which is fantastic. And if I find a story in print, I’ll often net search it too, to see if other
Ex
I also remember a local newspaper thing about my sister’s ex-boyfriend and how he had clambered onto a roof and stolen a tv aerial, for his sister he said, and this seemed very funny at the time, and somehow we were glad that my sister wasn’t going out with such a lad anymore.
Suicide
Also, I remember being about 11 at school and a school friend said that she’d read about my dad’s suicide in the local paper and that he had had a dog with him at the time. I never saw this particular news story, though I wonder if one day I might try and find it, or others that may have existed in local papers, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have had a dog with him... so I don’t know where that came from - this embellishment of what had really happened. But I remember being struck that other people knew about what had happened to him (and at the time the circumstances of his death seemed very shameful).”
papers have written about it. AG: Would you ever choose articles that have accompanying images and do those images ever influence how you visualise a filmed scene?
weaving around with a bottle of beer, jogging painfully, getting flower pots dropped on their heads or stand in “the EXACT spot” of another woman’s transgressive act, and arrest.
CM: Most of my cuttings don’t have accompanying photos, because they don’t warrant the space, it seems. With the film I’m not here and the miss London stores 1970 winner, I did use the actual newspaper pictures that accompanied her story, but that is the only time. I find that the visualisation of the stories comes from the initial print reporting, and becomes a case of imagining what things looked like. I prefer it that way, it feels like going deeper into a story somehow, and doing what a reader always does anyway, which is to expand on the details in one’s head.
CM: I’m really interested in female protagonists taking the story forward, showing their involvement in history and making history. In “Stalin my neighbour” Annie stands in the spot of a victim of Jack the Ripper, and I love that I discovered from newspaper reports at the time (1888) that the victim had been arrested for impersonating a fire engine and causing a scene. This for me humanised the victim, she became a character, someone with humour and interest, not just a ‘victim’. It became more of her story than Jack the Ripper’s story. And seeing as women are often so marginalised in history, and are usually not the tellers of history, I really
AG: Do you have favourite sources, papers that yield the
together generally surprise me, and I don’t know where they will lead, whereas with one story I’m much more clear as to where that will go. By the time I have scripted the film I know where it’s going though! But I love the bringing together of newspaper stories and making them weigh more as a whole, if you know what I mean. But I am open to working in different ways. At the moment I have development money for a long form artist’s film and I have chosen one reported case, and in a way I don’t know where that will take me, as I am going to do a lot of research into the facts behind the case and meet the people involved in the story, something I have never done before. AG: And do you know from the start which ones you can take through the entire process of filmmaking? CM: I tend to expand on them and write them up, and I think they’ve all made it through the process so far. But actually, I haven’t used all the ones I’ve got, so I think that the selection process comes very early on, if I use a story, I will work it into a film idea (whether or not I get the money to make it is another matter!) AG: You mentioned in another interview that you’re drawn to stories that are tragic and comical at the same time. When your work is based on a particular news story, is there a point where you feel that you part ways with the reporter? CM: I think that most of the stories I choose are so slight that there is very little of the reporter apparent, in terms of point of view or subjectivity. I always feel I’m giving a twist on the original story because I tend to collect
AG: Do you feature your small ad as the opening image to The Alcohol Years because it sums up something particular? CM: I like the red circle drawn around it, and the ads that are above and below it and that it gives an authenticity to the project, that the audience knows that this is how the people in the film were found through a small ad in a local paper. AG: What happens when you collect these cuttings? Is it like gathering evidence and they add up to a bigger picture? CM: Yes. I think I’ve always been interested in notions of documentary and factual evidence and how it in itself is so highly constructed (just as much as fiction sometimes). It does feel like gathering evidence, evidence of modern life, or of the time I am looking at if it’s historic. I like playing around with form and structure and constructing evidence to create stories and themes. The cuttings and the connections I make between them do feel like drawing a bigger picture of modern life, ideas of ordinary life coming together out of snippets of news, or the person behind the news snippet being profiled. AG: Do you think an archive of cuttings such as yours somehow resembles the kind of local-linkedto-world history that Annie in “STALIN MY NEIGHBOUR” has absorbed? CM: I guess so. They somehow provide insights into life. They aren’t grand or big stories, they’re not about war or world events, they are local, everyday, somehow familiar and ordinary. The cuttings I have worked with
They aren’t grand or big stories, they’re not about war or world events. They are the stories of everydayness, that fill our daily lives as we try and get on in the world. best stories? Does it matter which paper a story comes from?
loved the idea of Annie having control over how she delivered the history.
CM: I look at lots of papers, regional, local, etc. You just can’t tell where a story will appear.
AG: Do you choose a news item to see where it takes you or because you know where it leads?
AG: It’s interesting how news items seem to take your camera and actresses into the streets and the way the women in your films occupy the pavements:
CM: I think I tend to choose a group of news stories and make films with them. I have never just chosen one story yet. I think this is because I find that the stories brought
several or more stories together and in weaving them together I make different connections and enable a different comment/ perspective to come through than I could with the one story. So, yeah, I think I’m very grateful the reporter who reported on the case, but I never particularly feel that I’m that connected to them, I sort of tend to forget about the originator!
are about supermarket trolley rage, fainting schoolgirls, and obsessive housewives. They are the stories of everydayness, that fill our daily lives as we try and get on in the world. I am of course especially interested in the lives of women. So the stories I collect are domestic stories that tell of a female history or condition, and for me tell of female preoccupations.
AG: In your films Everyday Something and The Fear of.. Trilogy the news stories expose the vulnerable human condition though Everyday Something is less easy on the audience maybe because you put the viewer right in with people performing their isolated madness before they become newsworthy. CM: Yes, with everyday something I wanted people to at first laugh and feel comfortable and then start to feel uncomfortable with the stories. The narrator’s voice starts to become much sparser as the film progresses, so we are left to review the lives behind the news cuttings without the authority of the voice over. These stories that titillate then become something much more powerful and we perhaps feel a little guilty for turning the page and forgetting the stories and the people involved in them. AG: “STALIN MY NEIGHBOUR” goes further by drawing out and leaving Annie to continue in her isolation; the news is already out there -”Everybody knows!” - and it’s no consolation. Does the film have a different relationship to ‘news’ and ‘facts’ because it is more autobiographical? CM: It’s not really autobiographical. The character of Annie and the story of her sister, I actually based on news cuttings I had found about missing people. It seemed such an agonising position to be in as a relative of a person that had gone missing (sometimes for years, with no conclusion), so for me Annie has finally become unhinged because the bones of her sister have been found. The relatives of missing people are usually newsworthy for a while, around the time of the disappearance, but then they become old news, unless something new happens in the case. In “Stalin my neighbour” Annie once again becomes a character of interest to a reporter- but she doesn’t want to talk about her own history, so she escapes into other people’s history. I think it was really an exploration of how we are defined by history and reported events, but at the same time how we can attempt to transgress our reported histories, or at least construct something more meaningful to us out of them. I wanted to look at personal history and public history and somehow present the two existing side by side.
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FILM
Nooshin Farhid: Acid Drops, 2005, video stills.
ACID DROPS Nooshin Farhid Acid Drops 2005 is a video installation first installed at Keith Talent Gallery for the exhibition Use this kind of Sky. It took the form of a nine monitor arrangement and a projection which in this presentation was located in another part of the gallery away from the monitors. The monitors were randomly placed though in close proximity to each other, they gave the appearance of having ‘just arrived’ in the space, provisional and waiting to be ordered into the aesthetics of the gallery. In many ways this strategy of placement gives an important entry into the work, each monitor had its own video looped partial narrative, sequences of imagery, fragments of a larger narrative to which we have no access. As the viewer we are teased by these narrative fragments that offer us a story line that seems familiar having its references to mainstream cinema and the more interesting regular drama we see on a weekly basis on TV. However these narratives remain unresolved they become furtive glimpses of potentially dark happenings. What holds this fragile structure together is the overwhelming nature of the imagery, each sequence shot in real time and carefully edited is set against the background of a fantasy space, a space of fun, pleasure, enjoyment and excess. Pleasureland, the
funfair, the uniqueness of the English pier clinging on to the mainland but not quite part of it metaphorically becoming an other place were the extreme can be experienced and indulged in. A dominant feature of this is the power of colour, not the subtly of ordered sophisticated design but that of the clashing and outrageous, a flooding of reds, yellows, purples, greens all vying for our attention. Drifting through this space appearing and disappearing from location to location from monitor to monitor is the image of a young man carrying a bundle of newspapers. He carries these disposable belongings close to his body, sometimes dropping them and anxiously gathering them readjusting their position again close to his body. There is the sense that in the space of the fantastical which verges on madness these conveyors of news, information about the world becomes his hold on sanity. The newspaper also becomes multi-functional, its columns of text offer stories from the local to the international from the serious to the frivolous, its material being becomes a protection against the cold, as a rolled up object it becomes a powerful weapon of resistance. The newspaper is emblematic of a kind of stability,
it stands for something morally, politically, ethically yet it is disposable, it has a short term shelf life, its authority is for 24 hours to be super ceded by more news by more opinions. One of the most powerful sequences in the installation depicts a bright pillar box red stairwell the camera placed precariously at the top on the edge of a guard rail, sheets of newspaper float down to the basement below, the poetic of the initial single sheets becomes a torrent of sheets showering down. The order and structured form of the newspaper as an organised entity, edited, designed to take us from the important through to the frivolous but linked by the ever present advertising, the life blood of the publication is summarily dispatched into chaos and collapse, into dispersal and dis-order. Paul Eachus
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BOOKS Whitechapel Boffins To Study Lapdancers Eva Weinmayr We should all be thankful to Eva Weinmayr for making an art form of the street side narrative function of the Evening Standard’s newsstand posters. Whether in the capital or far-flung provincial centres in decline, newsstands lend each city their own peculiar narrative. Growing up in the north during the 1980s, the all-too frequent ‘Jobs Blow Hits Town X’ lent itself to both an enduring fascination on my part and schoolboy titters from friends. In London itself, city of thousands of competing narratives, the Standard’s own proclamations are designed to bring a sense of urgency to the working day, replete with either sensationalism (‘ALL-OUT RAIL STRIKE CHAOS’), celebrity tittle-
tattle (‘PARTYING PRINCE – PICTURES’) or political jibes (‘NEW COUNCIL TAX BLOW’). It is not alone in this regard, after all some of the more borough-based local papers (South London Press etc) can out-bid it in either the sensationalism stakes or the outright bizarre. ‘WHITECHAPEL BOFFINS TO STUDY LAP-DANCERS’ is a particular East London Advertiser favourite of mine. The Standard in particular merits discussion, as though not alone in the tendency of evening papers in its (often unwarranted) sensationalism, it makes this its USP. As part of the Associated Newspaper stable, most commonly associated with the xenophobic God-fearing Daily Mail, the Standard’s own brand of M25 small-c conservatism has to
Eva Weinmayr, Suitcase Body is Missing Woman, Book Works, 2003, 40pp
compete with dire warnings of Atkins Diet-related deaths, rocketing house prices, constant ‘tube chaos’ and Kate Moss. We should not discount the effect this has on our daily lives. Along with the Metropolitan Police’s yellow ‘murder boards’, these newsstand images form a constant bombardment of the ‘fear of crime’, which has a negative effect of those who experience it. In London, we forever run the gamut from A to B surrounded by these tiny reminders. The only factor missing from this book is any discussion of to what extent Associated Newspapers feel it legitimate to mount such an intrusion in the name of paper sales. Are they conscious of the psychological damage they might inflict? Probably yes. Though we ourselves play our own not so small part by
buying the thing every day. In an age where the Standard appears to be losing ground to the lifestyle journalism of the free papers now abounding and littering the streets in the capital, Weinmayr’s book might even be said to serve as a small piece of nostalgia for a disappearing facet of daily life in the capital, possibly destined to join Fleet Street itself in the graveyard of print journalism. Suitcase Body is Missing Woman, devoid of commentary as it is (which we cannot criticise as a matter of fact presentation of these images as art), does however chart London’s own meta-narrative as a city of fear and the need for distraction from it in the form of celebrity. The pre-9/11 era of dismembered prostitutes being found in canals in Camden segues into the era
of hate-monger clerics over a series of images. There is also space for the Ballardian ‘BIG BROTHER VIOLENCE’), political commentary (‘BITTER BROWN ATTACKS BLAIR’) and the downright untrue (‘BROWN GIVES CASH TO ALL’). The abiding editorial obsessions of the paper is there for all to see over a number of pages, suggesting that we should indeed be thankful for having not succumbed to ‘superbugs’ or ‘obesity’ panics. Our creaking public transport system is still here, despite years of predicted meltdown and chaos on every single page. Though for some it has all been clearly too much (‘FINGER BITTEN OFF IN BUS RAGE ATTACK’). Andrew Stevens
Fiona Banner, All the World’s Fighter Planes 2006, The Vanity Press, 176pp
Partying Princes Pictures
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BOOKS
List1 1. a series of related words, names, numbers, or other items that are arranged in order, one after the other 2. an ordered set of data
Love, Hate, War Fiona Banner We live in a world of lists. Pick up the Sunday newspaper, open any fashion magazine, or even any art magazine for that matter and you will find at least a couple of top ten lists. There are the top 10 best cover songs on C4 TV or the 10 best ways to loose weight. But just wait, why stop there, come the end of the year and you will be deluged with the top 100 favourite songs of the ‘80’s and ‘90’s or the ‘Forbes 400 Richest Americans’. They are linear and neat. They quantify our world, they create the market place of consensus; what we should like and dislike, even if we don’t agree with them we want to know who’s on top or on the bottom. Being from Los Angeles, I always loved the former fashion designer Mr. Blackwell’s list of the ‘Worst Dressed’. (There was also his ‘Fabulous Fashion Independents’, but no one cared about that). His announcement at the beginning of the year is awaited with baited breath. You can imagine the names on his list and his poetic description of the accursed. In the end all these lists are disposable, we think we have learned something that can be regurgitated at our next cocktail party. The artist Fiona Banner is not interested in the top 10. Her lists relate to a totality, to the idea of ‘all’. Banner’s lists embrace the popular vernacular. In the 2003 book, BANNER, she has included
a series of images of a typed list of insulting, name-calling words, “…EGOMANIAC, EGOTIST, FAILURE, FART, FEMENIST, FLIRT, FRAUD, FUCKHEAD, FUCKKER, GIT, GOOGIE GOODIE, GREENEYED MONSTER, IGNORAMOUS, INCOMPETENT, INSECT…” they have been crossed out or ticked off. Other images ultimately reveal a work entitled Concrete Poetry. The words have been made into text sculptures. There are two versions, one with the words scattered while the other is a heap of letters piled in the corner. The supposed source of the work is all the insults that have ever been flung at Banner. In the end it is less about the personal and more about a human understanding of these insults. It’s the total amassing of these words. There is a momentary feeling of sympathy for the recipient. And then the creation of making them real out of concrete and Styrofoam makes it seem all so permanent, so definite. But they look fragile, they look like they could break apart if moved or thrown. You move a letter here or there and the insult is no longer. It is a list of ‘all’, a total collection brought together to be purged or eradicated. Her most recent work of lists is All the World’s Fighter Planes. Originally formatted as a book it is a double list, an index on the outside of the book and a visual list on the inside. The cover, a list of the contents, reads like a
Fiona Banner: Mega Hornet, All the World’s Fighter Planes 2006 (detail)
“The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists of ‘Ten Best’.” H. Allen Smith
concrete poem of wizards, native Americans, forces of nature, and predatory animals. Many of the names are tagged as if we could control their force, Apache AH-64, Foxbat MIG-25, A-10 Warthog or Black Hawk UH-60. Some of the names are recognizable mostly from war films or news reports Next to the name of each planes is the page number it appears in the book. For the contents list to appear on the cover perhaps indicates the purpose of a book that, for the other 170 pages presents only images.
desire to look at military power domesticated, contained. It is safe. It is what war is not.
Inside, Banner has culled together images from newspapers of fighter planes and helicopters from news reports on recent military actions. They have been cut out, identified and indexed in a scrapbook approach. The word ‘All’ in the title constructs a universe of totality, striving towards the control of achieving a complete collection, yet as any train-spotting mind will tell you, it is anything but complete. This is a front line version of Jane’s Aircraft Recognition Guide’ (the standard in aviation reference, providing exhaustive technical detail on over 950 civil and military aircraft). The list and the images add up to a powerful collection of war machines. Banner plays with the scale and format. She includes helicopters and transports. They are in action. They are at home in the book in our hands. This is where Banner’s list goes, to the heart of the matter and our
In a form we can comprehend and be attracted to, the book is simple in this desire and structure; it is when Banner translates this to moving image does All the World’s Fighter Planes take on a new and particularly complex reading. The pages from the book are projected one after the other accompanied by a looping sound track Banner has compiled from war film scores from 1960 to present. The film was originally devised for Banner’s book launch at Cubitt gallery in London. It served as a promotional backdrop. It used all the tactics of promotion to sex up the book, swelling music and action shots. The promotion complicates our reading. There is a blurring between fiction and truth. Depending on when and how you view the work could create a far different reading. Seeing the images coupled with the electric guitar riffs of ‘Top Gun’ you could assume that All the World’s Fighter
“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.” Winston Churchill
Planes is a celebration of this machinery; a testosterone thrust to war and a fitting conclusion for such a promotion. The images parade past while the music compounds. There is the soaring overture for “Battle of Britain”, the adagio for “Platoon”, the haunting masmoudi of the final credits in “Black Hawk Down”, the refrain leading into the theme from “Patton”, and so on. The play list is independent of the visual list. We create the connection to the emotional response. We never get to the end of the play list; the images are made new by the ongoing soundtrack. We understand the structure from years of watching movies. Therefore, there are moments the images look to be heroic, macho, bold, powerful, playful, comical, ominous, menacing, poignant, rousing…sorrowful. Banner has created a spectrum of ‘all’ our emotions. There is no real knowledge of each aircrafts learned here. Banner does not divulge which one is fastest or its manoeuvring capability. Yet, like earlier works she uses the list as structure. Banner understands our familiarity to this language and our desire for it. Not just its use in the visual arts, but how we use the list in our daily life. She exploits our built-in curiosity to know ‘all’, however in each case the list unravels to reveal complex ideas about our human condition: love, hate and war. Brian Butler
One last top ten list as found on the FBI’s website: FBI Top Ten Art Crimes 1. Iraqi Looted and Stolen Artefacts 2. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Theft 3. Theft of Munch’s The Scream 4. Theft of Caravaggio’s Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco 5. Theft of the Davidoff-Morini Stradivarius 6. The Van Gogh Museum Robbery 7. Theft of Cezanne’s View of Auvers-sur-Oise 8. Theft of Da Vinci’s Madonna of the Yarnwinder 9. Theft of the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Murals, Panels 3-A and 3-B 10. Theft from the Museu Chacara do Céu or more topical The Top Ten Fighter Planes Ever: 10. F117 Stealth Fighter 9. DR 1 Fokker Triplane 8. Mitsubishi Zero (A6M2) 7. Harrier Jump Jet (AV-8B Harrier II) 6. F 86 Sabre 5. Messerschmidt ME109 4. F 18 Super Hornet 3. MIG 21 (F-13 / Fishbed C) 2. Supermarine Spitfire 1. M51 Mustang
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OBITUARIES
Clockwise from left; Hugh Mendes: Obituaries: Richard Pryor, Obituaries: Philosophy, Obituries: Floyd Patterson.
Out of Print Hugh Mendes
The daily newspaper has an average of 115 pages with approximately 120 articles and 700 words per page. When considering the life span of a newspaper, a mere 24 hours, the avid consumer is confronted with approximately 1,000 headlines on a weekly basis. We are a society that is bingeing and binning a vast amount of information. The painter Hugh Mendes works closely with the topic of mortality and in particular the life span of the newspaper, referring eloquently to its phenomenon as “fleeting moments of press”. For Mendes the consumption of the material has an aesthetic purpose rather than satisfying a personal desire to be informed. Mendes paints still life but rather then a bowl of fruit arranged on a platter, or a goblet of wine dripping with condensation, he uses the daily papers as his subject matter. Having a background
and training in painting still life, his ability of reproduction appears effortless. With the skills of a trompe l’oeil painter the delicately reproduced newspaper clippings have the illusion of lifting away from the canvas with a thin fragile quality of weightlessness. Mendes spends up to a week on one canvas; this he explains “is in stark contrast to the speediness of most communication these days.” By choosing to represent his subject matter with paint he extends the life span of the newspaper article and gives it an after life. In his Obituary paintings this is an important process Mendes describes, “as a mark of respect and a degree of contemplation of death,” for himself as well as all of existence. When entering his studio one encounters a wall filled with newspaper clippings, some aged, their colour yellowing and edges curling. Headlines such as ‘Scientists Creating Monkeys With Human Brains’
or ‘Girl Next Door Who Became Suicide Bomber’ are placed next to familiar and iconic media images. Removed from their context both images and text muse at a more comical existence and almost trivialise the emphasis our culture places on the media. Out of a barrage of images and towering columns of print Mendes limits his reference material down to three main sources, The Times, The Guardian and The Independent focussing his attention on articles which address themes of terrorism, cloning and the obituaries. His witty and comical juxtapositions reveal that Mendes is not solely a skilled painter, he is an accomplished editor as well offering an unbiased contemplation of the way we see things with sometimes uneasy and arresting juxtapositions. Out of the death of a newspaper article is born the life of a painting. Rebecca Page
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Clockwise from top: Quick Times Crossword (unfinished), Times Crossword (unfinished), E Brown: One Thing Led to Another, 2006, Contributed by Ria Kirby: Ideas of March, 2006. Following pages: Page 28, Adrian Lee: Upgrades 4 U. For more projects visit Inquino.com. Page 29 - 32, Michalis Pichler: DEAD MAN WALKING / excerpt from “WAR” diary, Michalis Pichler, published 2005 by Revolver. Headline from the Daily News front page of April 5 2003 / image from the New York Times of April 5 2003, page C1, subtitle: Like many other Hummer owners, Sam Bernstein of Marin County, Calif., said that his big S.U.V. made him feel patriotic. Page 33 - 34, Elizabeth Price: Excerpt from ‘Dead body dial 999’, published by Elizabeth Price, 2002. Page 35, Mirtha Dermisache: Excerpt from “9 Newsletters / 1 Reportaje” published by Manglar (Nömes, France), 2004. Mirtha’s most recent publication “Libro no.2 / 1968, is published by Manglar and Le Clou dans le Fer (Nömes / Reims, France), 2005. Her publications are available in London from Bookartbookshop 17 Pitfield St, LONDON N1 6HB, 020 7608 1333.
LISTINGS
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33 999 tabloid print outs
31/3/03
21:40
Page 6
24 HACKNEY GAZETTE 31st August, 2000
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34 999 tabloid print outs
31/3/03
21:40
Page 9
Have you got a story to tell tel: 020 7790 8822
48 HACKNEY GAZETTE 31st August, 2000
GAZETTE
Sport
Spurs cant shake away-day blues SPURS have started the new season with the same problem they encountered last campaign suffering from the away-day blues. Tottenham managed just five wins in 19 games on their travels in the Premiership and also crashed out of the UEFA, Worthington and FA Cups away from home last year. And it looks the same old story
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this time after picking up just one point from their doubleheader in the north east with a 1-1 draw against Middlesborough and a 2-0 defeat by Newcastle The worrying trend has set alarm bells ringing at the club just a few weeks into the season and full-back Stephen Carr has warned that the team needs to start overcoming
SPURS NEWS By STEVE HOLLIS their travel sickness. "Weve not done too well on our travels in the last few years and that is something weve got put right. We have to do better away from home," he said. "Our home form was good last season until we
dropped a few results in the second half. But were not putting many results together away and that has to change. Its all about consistency thats the key in this league." Spurs won 10 of the 19 league games at White Hart Lane last Season, including memorable victories over Manchester United, Arsenal and Liverpool, but failed to recreate that form
away from home. The only clubs they came away with a win from were Sheffield Wednesday, Derby, Southampton, Coventry, Southampton and Leicester, who, apart from Leicester, all finished in the bottom seven. It looked as if Spurs had cured their homesickness when they took the lead through Oyvind Leonhardsen against
FRENCH FANCY Sylvain joins Arsenal for record £ 12 million FINALLY, after weeks and weeks of painful and protracted negotiations, Sylvain Wiltord became an Arsenal player on Saturday -and became the Gunners record signing at the same time. With all the millions of pounds that have changed hands over the summer and the sizeable pile of pesetas still bulging in the Highbury bank vaults courtesy of Barcelona, it hardly seems remarkable that the club have parted £12 million to secure the signature of the 26-year-old striker from Bordeaux. In the end it seems Arsene Wenger and David Dein could take no more from the French club after being at loggerheads over the price since the end of Euro 2000 almost two months.
OFFERING Bordeaux had reportedly wanted £15 million for the player, but Arsenal were only offering £10 million and neither party looked ready to budge. Common sense finally prevailed though with Wiltord refusing to play for the French side and Wenger desperately needing to land his man before tomorrows (Fridays) Champions League deadline. Wiltord becomes the fourth member of the triumphant Euro 2000 squad at Highbury, and with six goals from 18 international appearances is the senior member of the French quartet of strikers completed by David Trezeguet, ex-Gunner Nicholas Anelka and current hero Thierry Henry. A fairly unspectacular career 28 goals in 105 games for Rennes and a non starter move to Spanish club Deportivo La
ARSENAL LATEST by PAUL CHRONNELL Coruna gathered pace in Bordeauxs title-winning season of 1998-99 when Wiltord topped the French scoring charts with 22 goals in just 33 games.More impressive performances in the Champions League last season made him a hot property but he signed a new contract with Bordeaux last year that complicated matters enormously. The striker who will inherit Marc Overmars number 11 shirt was in the stands for Saturdays 5-3 win over Charlton and by the way Patrick Viera and Henry Saluted each time they scored, he clearly already has some good friends at the club. "Sylvain is a player with great ability and attitude and I think he will fit in well here." said Wenger on Saturday. "He is a mobile player I want to play a game based on mobility and technique and quick movement and I think I can be part of that. "We have already seen signs today that a player like Pires can adjust quickly to that kind of game and I still think we can improve that kind of game," continued the Arsenal boss who has finally ended his search for his fourth striker needed to fill the boots of Davor Suker who joined West Ham in the summer. "We need the bodies over the season" continued Wenger, "I dont know if Kanu will go to the Olympics, Dennis Bergkamp cannot travel in the Champions League and Thierry Henry cannot play 70 games a season it would not be responsible to go on like that." Ironically Wiltord will meet some of his team mates face to face for the first time when he plays against them in the France England clash in Paris on Saturday night. Wenger may be tempted to tell Messrs Adams and Keown to go a little easy on his new striker with Kanu and Bergkamp almost sure to be ruled out of the Champions League opener, Wiltord looks certain to partner Henry up front in Prague on September 12.
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* GETTING SHIRTY New Gunners signing Sylvain Wiltord shows off his new shirt to the Highbury faithful before Saturdays 5-3 win over Charlton Athletic.
Carr on the road? Stephen Carr has warned Spurs to reward him for being one of the clubs most consistent performers or he could walk out of White Hart Lane. The Republic of Ireland international is still one of the lowest earners at Tottenham despite winning the player of the year award last season. The 24 year-old is unhappy his wages have not been improved in line with his starring performances and has told the club to pay him more or else he could look elsewhere. Carr said: "You can be as loyal as possible but at the end of the day footballers are not in the game long enough and you have to look at what is right for you." "I think Ive done OK in the last couple of seasons - the club know that and I think it should be rewarded to be fair, they know that as well. "Hopefully everything will turn out alright. Im sure it will. I love being at the club, but as Ive said, in this game you have to look after yourself as well." "Its in the clubs hands ans well open negociations and see how that goes. I want to stay at the club because Ive been here eight years I love it and Im very comfortable. "Its all ifs and buts at the moment but I would like to say that the club has been brilliant to ne. Thats why
SPURS NEWS By STEVE HOLLIS I signed a big deal 18 months ago." Big clubs such as Manchester United and Liverpool have been alerted by Carrs situation but Spurs are confident they can sort out a deal soon which suits both the club and the player. Director of football David Pleat has already sat down with the full-back to discuss the situation and is hoping to finalise the deal this week. He promised Spurs fans: "Stephen is one of the most dedicated and sincere boys that Ive across in football he has improved most definitely over the last two seasons so youve nothing to fear because well sort out a new deal. "I have sat and spoken with Stephens agent and we will obviously be looking to do something, not necessarily immediately, but we will do something." Carr still has 18 months to run on his existing contract but Pleat is determined to secure his services for a longer period after making a good start to the season with a goal against Ipswich and starring performances in the north east. And the club will not be frightened off putting their money where their
mouth is after they made Steffan Iverson the highest paid Norwegian in the world football during the week to keep him at the club until 2006. A number of clubs on the continent had been monitoring last seasons top scorers position which prompted Spurs to offer him a new deal though to be around £1.5 million a year. Iverson said: "I want to be here and thats why Ive signed a new deal Im looking forward to another four years very much because we have a good team now. "I have a good feeling for this season we have a much stronger squad than last year and if we can all stay fit then Im sure we can have a very good season." Although Iverson still had four years left on his contract at White Hart Lane, Pleat said he was delighted the player had committed himself to the club for a further 2 years.
Middlesborough last Tuesday until the home-side equalised. Then the allergic reaction to away grounds really kicked in against Newcastle on Saturday as Spurs were comfortably beaten 2-0 despite George Graham hoping to bring home the points. "Looking at both sides beforehand, we really fancied our chances. After the good performance against Middlesborough during the week. I thought our play would warrant having a good result up here", he said. "But I dont think you can come up here and afford to give a team a goal start. It was a little bit suicidal and that first goal was the killer." However, Graham refused to ponder on the reason why his side cannot get results away from home and preferred to look forward to getting back to winning ways at White Hart Lane. "Thats two away games weve played but now weve got two home games so youd like to think wed win those," he said.
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