Terrence Moore
Steven Heller
Cult of the ugly - “The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
Cults
Language
4
Simon Cullen
Abel Tasman will be prevented from fishing in Australian waters.
The super trawler
Caught in the act
Latin - a dying language.
6
3
Tokyo - Films to see before you go.
David Byrne talks about his new book How Music Works, The Sex Pistols and being rediculous.
Alan Keighran
Travel
10 questions
Blake Butler
18
10
Companion Issue # 1 October 9 2012 $4.50
Publisher Joanne Davies Editor Justine Barratt Deputy Editor Will Neill Business Development Manager Lane Delany Production Coordinator Elizabeth Rudenko Design Will Neill / Justine Barratt Digital Prepress Davin Lim Sub Editor Madeleine Swan Subscriptions www.companion.com.au/subscriptions Submissions We encourage readers to submit suitable work for consideration by the editor. All correspondance of this nature should be directed to the editor at the address below. To ensure return of material, a postage paid self-addressed envelope must be supplied. Companion Media Pty Ltd accepts no liability for loss or damage of unsolicited material
com.pan.ion 1. a person who is frequently in the company of, associates with, or accompanies another: my son and his two companions. 2. a person employed to accompany, assist, or live with another in the capacity of a helpful friend. 3. a mate or match for something: White wine is the usual companion of fish. This is Companion, your new best friend. Built for you, yes you. This little book has been on quite a journey to reach you, siffting through all the nonsense journalism to refine itself as your perfect friend. It doesnt need food or water, a power point or batteries or to be taken out on dates or walks, yet will answer back to you whenever you please and tell you interesting stories and bring excitement to your life. This book is fiction though sometimes you will question the reality of our world, and is based on the life and culture of the present day. It’s a diary if you will, of the life around you and time you are in. The tradgeties the success the friendships, the enemies the fashion the art the music and the culture, everything you need in one place so one day you can look back, and smile or cringe (because that’s ok) at the times you lived through. We kick off the first issue we a Super Trawler, a talk with David Byrne, we question ugliness, madness and kruptonesia, head to the dvd store (before we fly to Japan) and contimplate the death of a language. Plus a whole lot more.
Chairman Nicholas Dower Managing Director Paul Lidgerwood Financial Controller Sonia Jurista Studio Design Manager Keely Atkins Digital Manager Nugie Lim Printing Southern Colour (vic) Pty Ltd tel: 03 8769 8344 Accounting software SapphireOne www.sapphireone.com Cover Paul Garbett Typefaces Din ISSN 1322-9230 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any other means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the publishers. While every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information in this publication, the publishers assume no responsibility for errors or omissions or any consequences of reliance on this publication. The opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent the views of the editor or the publisher. 2012 Companion Pty Ltd
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CONTENTS HEADLINE Caught in the act - The super trawler Abel Tasman will be prevented from fishing in Australian waters.
04 - 05
CULTS Cult of the ugly - “The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.
06 - 09
10 QUESTIONS David Byrne talks about his new book How Music Works, The Sex Pistols and being rediculous.
10 - 13
HOME + GARDEN The Selby Brings us fashion designer, Alexandre Herchovitch, in his apartement in Sao Paulo.
14 - 15
LANGUAGE Latin - a dying language.
16 - 17
TRAVEL Tokyo - Films to see before you go.
18 - 19
HEALTH Dive into a whole new state of mind - How swimming will change your life for the better.
21
MIND 8 Great novelists who were mentally disturbed
22 - 25
REVIEW Nikon FE2 - Old is the new black, film is alive, and photography is sexy again.
26 - 27
FASHION I wish lenin were my boyfriend.
28 - 29
ART Marisa Purcell, Nick Van Woert, Alan Jones, Katie Petyarre Morgan, Maria Elena Buszek.
30 - 34 3
The Margiris, a Lithuanian super trawler, will change its name and nominate Brisbane as its home port. Picture: Pierre Gleizes / Greenpeace Source: Supplied
ABC News Simon Cullen
The super trawler Abel Tasman will be prevented from fishing in Australian waters until new scientific research is carried out, in a bid to appease community concern about the ship. Cabinet signed off on the plan last night in the face of growing unrest on the Labor backbench which would have culminated in a private member’s bill being put forward to ban the trawler. Seafish Tasmania brought the trawler to Australia to fish for a near 18,000-tonne quota of jack mackerel and redbait. It has described the decision as extremely disappointing and it will be forced to sack 50 people, including 45 Tasmanians, who were hired to crew the ship. Company director Gerry Geen says Seafish Tasmania has spent years working with relevant authorities to meet every rule and requirement. He says the company is considering its options and will not comment further until it sees the legislation. Environment Minister Tony Burke had already imposed restrictions on the trawler to try to limit the number of dolphins,
SUPER TRAWLER CAUGHT IN THE ACT seals and sea lions being caught. But he has now introduced legislation to Parliament that will extend his legal powers under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, while also commissioning more scientific research to assess the impact of the trawler on Australia’s oceans. “There has never been a fishing vessel of this capacity in Australia before and the EPBC Act needs to be updated so that it can deal with it,” Mr Burke said. “If we get this wrong, there are risks to the environment, to commercial operators and to everyone who loves fishing and they are risks I am not prepared to take.” Mr Burke says the legislation will give him the power to stop the Abel Tasman fishing in Commonwealth waters while an expert panel is set up to assess the environmental impacts of the ship. He says research will be undertaken in an “open and transparent” way to restore public confidence in the process, although it may end up allowing the trawler to operate. Mr Burke says it was not the size of the ship’s fishing quota that concerned him, but rather its ability to stay for an extended period of time in the same area which increases the risk of
So will the super trawler devastate a region, or will its catch be a drop in the ocean? The ship’s presence in Australia has sparked a fierce campaign from conservation and community groups, including GetUp!. Its environmental campaign director, Paul Oosting, has welcomed the Government’s intervention. “This super trawler would not have just killed fish, it would also have killed a significant number of protected species,” he said. “For example, under the proposed conditions for fishing, the super trawler could have legally killed up to 10 seals a day.” The Greens have also welcomed the Government’s about face but argue it needs to go further. “The Government has effectively said the super trawler will be stalled until one year after the next federal election. That doesn’t go far enough,” Greens leader Christine Milne told reporters in Canberra. “The community wants the super trawler stopped... and so the Greens will continue this campaign because we need to give Australians assurance that we’re not going to have super trawlers in Australian waters acting as huge vacuum cleaners sucking the fish out of the sea.” But Neil MacKinnon from the Tasmanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry says populism has triumphed over science. “Nobody seems to be standing up for those who are trying to create economic activity,” he said. ‘Stuff up’ Speaking before the Government’s announcement, the Opposition said it supported the assessment process and warned that any further interference would introduce sovereign risk into the multibillion-dollar fishing industry. A spokesman said it would review the legislation before commenting further, but described the latest move as another “stuff up” by Labor. The Abel Tasman is operated by a joint venture between Seafish Tasmania and a Dutch fishing company. Seafish Tasmania has a quota of nearly 17,800 tonnes for the 2012-13 financial year which would have been utilised by the Abel Tasman. It would have operated in the Small Pelagics Fishery, which stretches from Queensland to Western Australia. Fisheries Minister Joe Ludwig says the last time a scientific assessment was carried out on the fishery’s harvest strategy was 2003-04 and that it needs to be updated. However, the fishing industry regulator says it uses the “best available science” to set harvest limits. “AFMA has received criticism from those unfamiliar with fisheries science for using old data in setting the catch limits for some species, however, in accordance with best-practice management, these catch limits take into account the age of the data by lowering the catch limits significantly,” the AFMA website says. •
tonne quota for 2012 - 13
10, 500
tonne AFMA allowable catch recommendation
The super trawler Abel Tasman will be prevented from fishing in Australian waters.
‘Unprecedented campaign’
17,800
Headline
large-scale localised by-catch. “With catch limits in place, there is no evidence that larger boats pose a higher risk to either the fish stock or the broader marine ecosystem,” Mr Findlay wrote last week. “The net on this boat is similar in size to nets currently operating in the Australian fishing fleet - the only reason the boat is so much larger than other fishing boats is that it has the factory and freezer storage on board.”
1, 800
tonne recomended bio catch after scientific stat analysis
30 - 42
% of spawning mass targeted
50
people to lose jobs
SHODDY SCIENCE AND SLIPPERY STATS SUPPORT THE SUPER TRAWLER QUOTA Dr Wadsley’s article in the Tasmanian Times does a great service to the debate by adding some much-needed transparency by providing his analysis in a comprehensive downloadable spreadsheet. He points out that the statistical analysis employed by AFMA includes “outlier” data points. These outliers represent abnormalities in the data collection which skew final analysis results and as such are generally ommited in robust scientific analyses. AFMA’s questionable decision to include the outlier data points results in an estimated spawning mass of 140,000 tonnes … leaving the outliers out, as per standard scientific and statistical practice, results in a significantly reduced figure of between 25,000 and 35,000 tonne. 5
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by Steven Heller
answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.’ -
CultS
‘Ask a toad what is beauty… He will
“The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.”
CULT OF THE UGLY
Ask Paul Rand what is beauty and he will answer that ‘the separation of form and function, of concept and execution, in not likely to produce objects of aesthetical value.’ (Paul Rand, A Designer’s Art , 1985). Then ask the same question to the Cranbrook Academy of Art students who created the ad hoc desktop publication Output (1992), and judge by the evidence they might answer that beauty is chaos born of found letters layered on top of random patterns and shapes. Those who value functional simplicity would argue that the Cranbrook student’s publication, like a toad’s warts, is ugly. The difference is that unlike the toad, the Cranbrook students have deliberately given themselves the warts.
The value of design experiments should not of course be measured only by what succeeds, since failures are often steps towards new discoveries. Experimentations is the engine of progress, its fuel a mixture of instinct, intelligence or discipline is in the mix. This is the case with certain of the graphic design experiments that have emanated from graduate schools in the U.S. and Europe in recent years work driven by instincts and obscured by theory, with ugliness its foremost byproducts. How is ugly to be defined in the current Post-modern climate where existing systems are up for re-evaluation, order is under attack and the forced collision of disparate forms is the rule? For the moment, let us say that ugly design, as opposed to classical design (where adherence to the golden mean and a preference for balance and harmony serve as the foundation for even the most unconventional compositions) is the layering of unharmonious graphic forms in a way that results in confusing messages. By this definition, Output could be considered a prime example of ugliness in the service of fashionable experimentation. The current wave began in the mid-1970s with the English punk scene, a raw expression of youth frustration manifested through shocking dress, music and art. Punk’s naive graphic language – an aggressive rejection of rational typography that echoes Dada and Futurist work – influenced designers during the late 1970s who seriously tested the limits imposed by Modernist formalism. Punk’s violent demeanour surfaced in Swiss, American, Dutch and French design and spread to the mainstream in the form of a ‘new wave’, or what American punk artist Gary Panter has called ‘sanitised punk’. A key anti-canonical approach later called Swiss Punk – which in comparison with the gridlocked Swiss International Style was menacingly chaotic, though rooted in its own logic – was born in the mecca of rationalism, Basel, during the late 1970s. For the elders who were threatened (and offended) by the onslaught to criticise Swiss Punk was attacked not so much because of its appearance as because it symbolised the demise of Modernist hegemony.
CULT OF THE UGLY
Output is eight unbound pages of blips, type fragments, random words, and other graphic minutiae purposefully given the serendipitous look of a printer’s makeready. The lack of any explanatory précis (and only this end note: ‘Upcoming Issues From: School of the Art Institute of Chicago [and] University of Texas,’) leaves the reader confused as to its purpose or meaning, though its form leads one to presume that it is intended as a design manifesto, another ‘experiment’ in the current plethora of aesthetically questionable graphic output. Given the increase in graduate school programs which provide both a laboratory setting and freedom from professional responsibility, the word experiment has to justify a multitude of sins.
Ugly design can be a conscious attempt to create and define alternative standards. Like warpaint, the dissonant styles which many contemporary designers have applied to their visual communications are meant to shock an enemy – complacency – as well as to encourage new reading and viewing patterns. The work of American designer Art Chantry combines the shock-and-educate approach with a concern for appropriateness. For over a decade Chantry has been creating eye-catching, low-budget graphics for the Seattle punk scene by using found commercial artifacts from industrial merchandise catalogues as key elements in his posters and flyers. While these ‘unsophisticated’ graphics may be horrifying to designers who prefer Shaker functionalism to punk vernacularism, Chantry’s design is decidedly functional within its context. Chantry’s clever manipulations of found ‘art’ into accessible, though unconventional, compositions prove that using ostensibly ugly forms can result in good design.
7
“The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.”
Chantry’s clever manipulations of found ‘art’ into accessible, though unconventional, compositions prove that using ostensibly ugly forms can result in good design
Ugliness is valid, even refreshing, when it is key to an indigenous language representing alternative ideas and cultures.
the line that separates parody and seriousness is thin, and the result is ugliness
Post-modernism inspired a debate in graphic design in the mid-1970s by revealing that many perceptions of art and culture were one-dimensional. Postmodernism urgently questioned certainties laid down by Modernism and rebelled against grand Eurocentric narratives in favour of multiplicity. The result in graphic design was to strip Modernist formality of both its infrastructure and outer covering. The grid was demolished, while neoclassical and contemporary ornament, such as dots, blips and arrows, replaced the tidiness of the canonical approach. As in most artistic revolutions, the previous generation was attacked, while the generations before were curiously rehabilitated. The visual hallmarks of this rebellion, however, were inevitably reduced to stylistic mannerisms which forced even more radical experimentation. Extremism gave rise to fashionable ugliness as a form of nihilistic expression. In ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819), the Romantic poet John Keats wrote the famous lines: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Yet in today’s environment, one standard of beauty is no more the truth than is one standard of ugliness. It is possible that the most conventional-busting graphic design by students and alumni of Cranbrook, CalArts and Rhode Island School of Design, among other hothouses where theoretical constructs are used to justify what the untutored eye might deem ugly, could become the foundation for new standards based on contemporary sensibilities. Certainly, these approaches have attracted many followers throughout the deign world. “Where does beauty begin and where does it end?” wrote John Cage in Silence (1961). “Where it ends is where the artist begins.” So in order to stretch the perimeters of art and design to any serious extent it becomes necessary to suspend popular notions of beauty so that alternative aesthetic standards can be explored. This concept is essential to an analysis of a recent work by the Chicago company Segura, who designed the programme/announcement for the 1993 How magazine ‘Creative Vision’ conference and whose work represents the professional wing of the hothouse sensibility. Compared to the artless Output, Segura’s seemingly anarchic booklet is an artfully engineered attempt
to direct the reader through a maze of mundane information. Yet while the work might purport to confront complacency, it often merely obstructs comprehension. A compilation of variegated visuals, the How piece is a veritable primer of cultish extremes at once compelling for its ingenuity yet undermined by its superficiality. Like a glutton, Segura has stuffed itself with all the latest conceits (including some of its own concoction) and has regurgitated them on to the pages. The result is a catalogue of disharmony in the service of contemporaneity, an artifact that is already ossifying into a 1990s design style. It is a style that presumes that more is hipper than less, confusion is better than simplicity, fragmentation is smarter than continuity, and that ugliness is its own reward. But is it possible that the surface might blind one to the inner beauty (i.e. intelligence) of this work? Ralph Waldo Emerson in The Conduct of Life (1860) wrote: “The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.” Given Emerson’s measure, it could be argued that design is only ugly when devoid of aesthetic or conceptual forethought – for example, generic restaurant menus, store signs and packages. Perhaps, then, the How booklet, which is drowning in forethought, should be ‘read’ on a variety of levels wherein beauty and ugliness are mitigated by context and purpose. Perhaps – but given the excesses in this work, the result can only be described as a catalogue of pretence. During the late 1940s and 1950s the Modernist mission was to develop design systems that would protect the global (not just corporate) visual environment from blight. Yet while Modernism smoothed out the rough edges of communications by prescribing a limited number of options, it also created a recipe for mediocrity. If a Modernist design system is followed by rote, the result can be as uninteresting and therefore as ugly – according to Emerson’s standard – as any nondesigned newsletter or advertisement. So design that aggressively challenge the senses and intellect rather than following the pack should in theory be tolerated, if not encouraged. For a new generation’s ideas of good design – and beauty – to be challenged
First published in Eye No. 9, Vol. 3, 1993.
McCalls magazines, and Bea Feitler in Ms. magazine. For these designers, novelty job printers’ typefaces and rules were not just crass curios employed as affectations, but appropriate components of stylish layouts. While they provided an alternative to the cold, systematic typefaces favoured by the International Style, they appeared in compositions that were nonetheless clean and accessible. These were not experiments, but ‘solutions’ to design problems.
Edward Fella’s work is a good example. Fella began his career as a commercial artist, became a guest critic at Cranbrook and later enrolled as a graduate student, imbuing in other students an appreciation for the naïf (or folk) traditions of commercial culture. He “convincingly deployed highly personal art-based imagery and typography in his design for the public,” explains Lorraine Wild in her essay ‘Transgression and Delight: Graphic Design at Cranbrook’ (Cranbrook Design: the New Discourse, 1990). He also introduced what Wild describes as “the vernacular, the impure, the incorrect, and all the other forbidden excesses” to his graduate studies. These excesses, such as nineteenth-century fat faces, comical stock printers’ cuts, ornamental dingbats, hand scrawls and out-of-focus photographs, were anathema to the early Modernists, who had battled to expunge such eyesores from public view.
“{J}ust maybe, a small independent graduate program is precisely where such daunting research and invention in graphic design should occur,” argues Wild. And one would have to agree that given the strictures of the marketplace, it is hard to break meaningful ground while serving a clients needs and wants. Nevertheless, the marketplace can provide important safeguards – Rand, for example, never had the opportunity to experiment outside the business arena and since he was ostensibly self-taught, virtually everything he invented was “on the job”. Jeffery Keedy and Allen Hori, both of whom had a modicum of design experience before attending Cranbrook, availed themselves of the luxury of experimenting free of marketplace demands. For them, graduate school was a place to test out ideas that ‘transgressed’ as far as possible from accepted standards. So Wild is correct in her assertion that it is better to do research and development in a dedicated and sympathetic atmosphere. •
Similar forms had been used prior to the 1980s in a more sanitised way by American designers such as Phil Gips in Monocle magazine, Otto Storch in
Two decades later, Fella too reemployed many of the typically ugly novelty typefaces as well as otherwise neutral canonical letterforms, which he stretched and distorted to achieve purposefully artless effects for use on gallery and exhibition announcements. Unlike Gips’ and Feitler’s work, these were aggressively unconventional. In Cranbrook Design: the New Discourse, Fella’s challenges to “normal” expectations of typography are described as ranging from “low parody to high seriousness”. But the line that separates parody and seriousness is thin, and the result is ugliness. As a critique of the slick design practised throughout corporate culture, Fella’s work is not without a certain acerbity. As personal research, indeed as personal art, it can be justified, but as a model for commercial practice, this kind of ugliness is a dead end.
CULT OF THE UGLY
by its forerunners is, of course, a familiar pattern. Paul Rand, when criticised as one of those ‘Bauhaus boys’ by American type master W. A. Dwiggins in the late 1930s, told an interviewer that he had always respected Dwiggins’ work, “so why couldn’t he see the value of what we were doing?” Rudy VanderLans, whose clarion call of the ‘new typography’ Emigre has been vituperatively criticised by Massimo Vignelli, has not returned the fire, but rather countered that he admires Vignelli’s work despite his own interest in exploring alternatives made possible by new technologies. It could be argued that the language invented by Rand’s ‘Bauhaus boys’ challenged contemporary aesthetics in much the same way as VanderLans is doing in Emigre today. Indeed VanderLans, and those designers whom Emigre celebrates for their inventions – including Cranbrook alumni Edward Fella, Jeffery Keedy and Allen Hori – are promoting new ways of making and seeing typography. The difference is that Rand’s method was based strictly on ideas of balance and harmony which hold up under close scrutiny even today. The new young turks, by contrast, reject such verities in favour of imposed discordance and disharmony, which might be rationalised as personal expression, but not as viable visual communication, and so in the end will be a blip (or tangent) in the continuum of graphic design history.
9
10 questions david byrne Photos by Catalina Kulczar
Vice Blake Butler
You write early on in How Music Works that “Making music is like constructing a machine whose function is to dredge up emotions in performer and listener alike.” Do you think of yourself as channeling something when you are writing a song? David Byrne: Well, lots of people use that metaphor that they’re channeling something, or that they’re a conduit and they don’t know where the inspiration comes from and they’re just a pen that writes it down or whatever. That’s pretty common. And yeah, there’s definitely something to it. I guess what I’m also saying is that it is usually presumed that the emotion is something that’s put into a song, that it comes from the person and goes into the song. And there’s probably a lot of truth to that, but I’m saying that just as much as that happens, I think it happens in the exact reverse way, where a person makes a song and the song makes the writer feel emotional. The song brings out the emotions in the writer. You realize that this chord changing and singing this melody and these words, it takes you to a place. As a writer as well as a listener. I mean, we all share that in common. And so the song becomes the thing that does it. It’s not that the writer necessarily channels the emotions or the ideas or whatever and puts them down on paper. What got put down on paper is also a thing that reaches inside the writer or the person listening and brings that stuff out of them.
I think you put that very well in the book when you said that people want to hear something familiar in a new way. Yes. In a live performance, musicians—or at least popular musicians—are in a kind of difficult place in a way. They’re expected to play the hits, to play a certain amount of stuff that people know, and then if they do only the hits, then they’re a wedding band. They have to find some middle ground where they introduce something new that gets the audience excited, but they also have to give them enough that’s familiar. We all know bands that have gone out and say, “I’m not going to do any of my old stuff, I’m only going to play the new record.” And god bless them if they can do it. I’ve been to those shows too, and it’s sometimes great to hear new stuff, but sometimes you just want a little bit of sugar to go along with all of that. And it’s a difficult thing for us. You wouldn’t go to the movies and say, “Well, I love this director, so I want to see some new stuff, but I’d love to see some of my favorite scenes from some of his older films as well thrown in there. Give me some of that.” [laughs] That would just seem ridiculous. Do you think there’s a difference in the feeling of exploration when you’re writing a love song like “This Must Be the Place” versus something perhaps more directly dance-oriented? Well, with “This Must Be the Place,” like a lot of songs, the music was written first. When the band and I were coming up with the music we had no idea what it was going to be about. But I had a girlfriend at the time and I was very much in love with her, so when I did start to write words that would fit the melody that I’d already come up with, that’s where they went. But the whole melody and the song structure and everything else, that was already there. That had nothing to do with my relationship
David Byrne talks about his new book How Music Works, The Sex Pistols and being rediculous.
10 Questions
Is that why you refer in the book to the big major chord as a trick? Yes. [laughs] And that’s not a value judgment. It doesn’t mean the major chord is bad, or that you should never use it. But it is, it’s like a guaranteed thing. You do that, and you get this kind of feeling. You start to learn things like that. You do this, you’re going to get this kind of feeling, and it’s going to make you feel that way as a writer, and it’s going to make the audience feel that way, and in that kind of way you kind of learn tricks of the trade. And they’re valid. But if you fall back on them too much, if you start using only those and nothing else, it becomes pretty shallow after a while. It’s one device after another being thrown at us and you go, “Oh, wait a minute. There’s nothing behind this.”
Touching on the joy, the physics, and even the business of making music, How Music Works is a brainy, irresistible adventure and an impassioned argument about music’s liberating, lifeaffirming power. 11
d
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i
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with this person. I don’t know if that helps or not. You end up putting your personal stuff in there at some point, but it wasn’t really guiding the whole song. The whole big part of the song had no relation to my personal life at all.
and it was kind of a comedy act. Come on, they could hardly stand up. You can understand a little bit of what Mr. Lydon was singing, but it was sort of hard to make out. And there’s all this lurching and stuff going on…
But then the music brought the lyrics? Yes, if you do it well, it doesn’t sound like you kind of stuck something on top. If you do it well it sounds like they emerged at the same time, that they belong together, that the words you come up with sound like they fit the music so well that you can’t imagine it being some other way.
That kind of made them who they were, right? The album probably would have been gotten forgotten if they weren’t that ridiculous. Well, who’s to say? I think Malcolm McLaren was just a brilliant publicist also. He made no bones about it that he was going to market the shit out of this thing. And he did. Then he moved onto something else. [laughs]
I’m interested in how you sort of map the way you’ll sing first—you sing gibberish, and make the words out of those sounds. There’s that outtake track “Dancing For Money,” which ended up not being on an official record, where we hear the gibberish. You never actually replaced most of the sounds, right? [laughs] Yeah, I did actually try to write words for it, and I just discovered some of those lyric attempts yesterday and I realized, “Oh god, no wonder they didn’t work.” They were pretty interesting, but they didn’t fit the melody that we’d worked out for that. So that wasn’t going to fit. It was something about how we used to go out dancing and have so much fun, but now we get paid to dance. It was just some kind of imaginary scenario. Every time we go out we get paid, and it’s work. It wasn’t about pole dancing or anything like that, it was just about ordinary dancing. You talk in the book about seeing the Sex Pistols, and how clear it was that they were in some ways a comedic act. To me, sometimes it’s almost like the band on record is different than the live one. When you see them play it doesn’t seem like they could have written those songs. Ooh, I’m not going to go there. [laughs] I mean, I will say, yes, they had a very slick producer, Chris Thomas, on that record, who did Roxy Music and Pretenders and all these other things. It was pretty well-produced. It’s a little bit of a stretch to believe that they played everything on there, but whatever. Let’s assume that they did. I don’t know, I was looking at the videos, not listening to the record really,
b
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In the book you wrote that every musician is a potential virtuoso if they can just find where they belong, which you called “their personal slot in the spectrum.” How does an amateur without Malcolm McLaren behind them discover their place? I mean, it’s like that blues guy, Burnside, or one of those guys, it might be somebody else, who does these songs where you’ve just got one chord, and grooves on one kind of blues chord for the whole thing. Somebody else might not have the nerve to do that and go, “I’m feeling this, I’m good at this, it feels good, I’m going to stick with it.” Somebody else might feel, “Oh no, you can’t get away with that. You have to go to another chord at the chorus, or nobody’s gonna… people will think I’m stupid if I just do this.” You know? Often, I think to find that stuff you just basically have to throw out accepted wisdom, or the consensus, and go, I’m going to do this because it feels right to me and it’s something I can do, and not feel like you’re supposed to do this other thing, whatever, a guitar solo, or play drums like this. You don’t have to. You can figure out some other way to do it that works for you. It’s a big step, though. I don’t think there’s a formula for it. Maybe part of it has to do with whether or not your natural way of approaching it is something that people are ready to see. Yeah, once you kind of dig in there people might start to go, “Oh, this person discovered a whole new way of drumming that none of us thought of.” •
n
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Alexandre Herchovitch Fashion Designer In his and Fabio Souza’s apartment Sao Paulo
Photos by The Selby
Since launching his collection in 1994, the Brazilian designer has held fast to his vision, bringing fantasy with a utilitarian streak that’s sometimes politically charged, be it through freaky constructions of molded rubber and gargantuan sequins, brash patterns and religious iconography, or the geometrically daring frocks he’s favored of late. Greatest hits include the Tyvek dress and a new take on the tuxedo; more avant-garde and controversial looks include trash-bags-cum-dresses and woven straw hats. Since launching his collection in 1994, the Brazilian designer has held fast to his vision, bringing fantasy with a utilitarian streak that’s sometimes politically charged, be it through freaky constructions of molded rubber and gargantuan sequins, brash patterns and religious iconography. •
Selby began in June 2008 as a website, where Todd posted photo theselby. theselby.com, shoots he did of his friends in their homes. theselby.com
The Selby Brings us fashion designer, Alexandre Herchovitch, in his apartement in Sao Paulo.
an insider’s view of creative individuals in their personal spaces with an ar tist’s eye for detail. The
Home + Garden
Todd Selby is a por trait, interiors, journalist and fashion photographer and illustrator. His project T he Selby offers
15
DEAD AND ALIVE
The
By Terrence Moore Shot in
Harvard by Sconer
L
atin is a dead language, No one speaks Latin as his native language, and this has been the case for more than a millennium. In fact most teachers of Latin, even very good ones, cannot say more than a few sentences of Latin in succession. Latin has not been required for admissions into American universities for more than a century. Even Harvard, whose motto is “Veritas” (Truth) and The University of Chicago, whose motto is “Crescat scientia vita excolatur” (Let learning increase and thereby life be enriched), and a host of other prestigious institutions with Latin mottos do not require any knowledge of Latin for admission. Classics departments at universities are usually the smallest and least funded. Short of becoming a Latin teacher, and there are fewer of these jobs than any other position in schools or universities, there is not really anything you can do with Latin. So why bother with Latin? The language had its day, a very long one. Sed nihil ad infinitum vivit. But hold the postmortem.
This history has made important marks on modern languages. The Romance languages derive directly from Latin and thus are more easily learned when one has studied Latin first. English, though it grew out of Germanic dialects, owes about sixty percent of its words to Latin derivatives. Knowing Latin thereby gives the student a real command over the English language. The words “pulchritude” and “pecuniary” stump most of today’s high school and even college students, though they are the kinds of words that appear regularly on college admissions exams. Any eleven-year-old who has had a month of Latin, however, knows they derive from the Latin words for beauty and money. The structure of Latin requires the study of the language to be intensely grammatical. The necessity of conjugating verbs and declining nouns causes the student to use memory and logic with the translation of every sentence. Moreover, the student must soon confront his own native language grammatically or Latin will make no sense to him. The Latin dative case requires an understanding of the English indirect object, for example. Whatever today’s students are learning in English class, grammar seems not to be the leading concern, as a conversation with most any young person will reveal.
//
Having a critical and historical knowledge of one’s own language that comes through the study of Latin is plainly useful. Knowing Latin itself is also enjoyable. One can begin to make sense of the Latin found in public places: e.g., “E pluribus unum.” From there one can move onto pithy sayings of the ancients: “Philosophia est ars vitae” (“Philosophy is the art of life.” Cicero). Soon the scattered pieces of Latin throughout Western literature will not seem so obscure. Finally, after much study (from the Latin stadium, diligence, application), the student will be able to read some of the best poetry, history, and oratory the world has ever known. The standards of excellence set by the ancients will unavoidably shape his own.
Latin - a dying language.
LATIN LANGUAGE
First, to say that Latin is dead, though in some sense true, is not a particularly helpful observation when it comes to education. Plato and Cicero and Shakespeare and George Washington and the rest of the Founding Fathers are also dead, but we still study them because they have important things to say about human nature and have shaped our civilization. In a similar way, Latin has influenced the way we get along in the world, namely, by talking and writing to each other. For about a thousand years a vital people in the history of the West, the Romans, spoke and wrote to each other in Latin. After the fall of Rome, Latin remained the language of learning until the end of the seventeenth century. Most learned treatises were written in Latin. Schoolboys in Europe and to a lesser extent in this country studied mostly Latin in school until the end of the nineteenth century. The “Latin Quarter” in Paris is so named because that is what students at the Sorbonne spoke rather than colloquial French.
Language
One curious phenomenon of contemporary school reform is that Latin is making a comeback. Recent press releases indicate that nationwide certain schools are experiencing growth in their Latin programs, the number of students taking the AP Latin Exam has doubled in a decade, and students are actually enjoying their study of the language. The reasons for taking Latin are various, but they all stem from the advantages of either utility or pleasure.
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17
T O K Y O
FILMS TO SEE BEFORE YOU GO
Lost in Translation (2003) Tokyo takes on a muted gleam in Sofia Coppola’s Oscar-winner about two guests at the Park Hyatt, sharing a moment away from loveless marriages. Bill Murray is in finest deadpan form, and the movie made Scarlett Johansson a star.
(Tokyo Monogatari; 1953) Ozu Yasujiro’s story of an older couple who come to Tokyo to visit their children only to find themselves treated with disrespect and indifference.
The Bad Sleep
Tokyo Pop
Shall We Dance?
Distance
Tokyo Godfathers
Nobody Knows
Kamikaze Girls
Train Main
(Gojira; 1954) It’s become almost a cliché, but watch it again and you’ll find a powerful metaphor in this city that spent the first half of the 20th century being beaten down and getting right back up again. (Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru; 1960)
Travel
Godzilla
Tokyo - Films to see before you go.
Tokyo Story
Kurosawa Akira’s first film after breaking from Toho studios centres on a protagonist who marries the boss’s daughter as part of an intricate plan to avenge his father’s death. (1988) Fran Rubel Kuzui’s breezy comedy about a lonely American songstress who finds redemption, fame and love in the heretoday-gone-tomorrow world of J-pop. (1997) A bored salaryman risks it all to learn the low-brow art of ballroom dancing. Footage includes some wistful shots of Tokyo at night. (2001) A subtle meditation on togetherness and loneliness, Koreeda Hirokazu’s follow-up to After Life follows four people into the woods as they seek the truth about lovers and friends who belonged to a murderous cult. Though clearly an examination of the phenomena of Aum Shinrikyo and the subway sarin attacks, this film is blissfully free of dogma. (2003) Kon Satoshi’s animated film uses a group of homeless men to explore the city’s postbubble underside. They come across a baby and don’t quite know what’s hit them. (Dare mo Shiranai; 2004) Koreeda Hirokazu’s slow and depressing but somehow lifeaffirming tale of four children forced to fend for themselves after their heinous mother abandons them. Based on true events. Shimotsuma Monogatari; 2004) One of the daffiest buddy movies ever made, and the only one we know that pairs a country girl obsessed with Lolita outfits from Tokyo boutiques with a biker chick who spits to punctuate her sentences. Written and directed by Tetsuya Nakashima. (Densha Otoko; 2005) After a shy otaku (supergeek) falls for a woman he defended from a drunkard, he turns to online pals for help with his feelings of love. This hit from director Masanori Murakami helped put otaku and Akihabara culture on the map.
19
15 LAWSON STREET BYRON BAY NSW AUSTRALIA 2481 WWW.VSTR.COM
How swimming will change your life for the better.
Health
DO YOU GET OUT ENOUGH?
Vice Blake Butler
T
he cold punches the breath out of you. Your heart slows – an automatic response to drowning. Your skin burns, crawls with a million vestigial body hairs springing to attention, then turns numb. Your bones ache. By the time you surface, you’re already screaming. But scrambling back onto the ice, you feel electric, giddy. The sub-zero wind is balmy. That’s the 20-second sensation that seduces members of winter-swimming club Rastilan Talviuimaritry, who regularly dip into Helsinki’s frozen harbor, sometimes during lunch breaks, sometimes naked. Rastilan is not a strange splinter group; avantouinti – ice swimming – is a national tradition in Finland, and some 120,000 Finns are members of an avantouinti club. Such mass appeal is hard to fathom, and becomes only a little clearer when one enthusiast tries to explain it: “We don’t have sun – we need to be ready for the dark.” Wherever there is ice, there have been seemingly perverse people jumping through holes in it during Finnish winters, the sun can disappear for 51 days, leaving one in eight Finns (about 650,000 people) suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) – depression that avantouinti is said to relieve. But SAD is just the beginning – avantouinti is touted as a cure for everything from rheumatism to tuberculosis, and regular ice-swimming improves mood and memory, while decreasing tension, fatigue, and the symptoms of asthma. When cold-shocked, the human body releases a whole suite of chemicals, including norepinephrine, the same neurotransmitter that gives you a kick out of playing violent computer games or taking amphetamines. Norepinephrine is the little buzz you get every time you tick an item off a to-do list, and cold water will give you a blast of it: norepinephrine
levels rise 200 percent after just two minutes of cold dunking. And you never get used to the rush of winterswimming, either. A 2008 study in the Scandinavian Journal of Clinical and Laboratory Investigation reported that cold-stimulated norepinephrine levels were “remarkably similar between exposures,” consistently rising 200 percent every time subjects took a dip through the ice. Simply refrigerating depressed people may also work. In 2003 and 2007, Polish researcher Joanna Rymaszewska led successful experiments in “wholebody cryotherapy” for the depressed: for a few minutes at a time, recruits from the local mental hospital walked around a room chilled to between -110 and -160ºC, wearing only swimsuits, headbands, woolen socks and clogs, becoming happier. For some people, all this science just confirms something they know instinctively. From the Spartans of Ancient Greece to Finns in the first century, all the way to New York’s “Polar Bears” jumping into the sea off Coney Island every New Year’s Day and the citizens of Harbin, China, who cut rectangular pools into the frozen Songhua River, wherever there is ice, there have been seemingly perverse people jumping through holes in it. In 1857, a patient being treated by hydrotherapy pioneer Vincent Priessnitz in Germany described feeling “so cold that we could not speak plainly,” followed by “a sensation of absolute physical pleasure... I began to think that, after all, water was my element, and that it was quite a mistake that I was not furnished... with a convenient long tail for sculling, like a tadpole.” Mariia Yrjö-Koskinen, president of the International Winter Swimming Association, puts it more plainly: “It’s like getting high, in a very healthy way.” •
21
8 GREAT NOVELISTS WHO WERE MENTALLY DISTURBED
The great mentally disturbed novelists.
Mind
There is no nobility in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility lies in being superior to your former self. - Ernest Hemingway
The life of an author — particularly an author of fiction – is necessarily connected to that which is most dangerous: our consciousness. It is often through the exploratory process of creative literature that we touch the exciting possibilities and subversive consequences of our capacities as a species. Yet for all of the grandiose ways in which writers may achieve greatness, the flipside is a dangerous flirtation with the unknown, the unacceptable and the insane.
23
ERNEST HEMINGWAY P.H. LOVECRAFT
SYLVIA PLATH EDGAR POE
One of the canonical figures of modern American literature, Ernest Hemingway’s psychological wellbeing was fraught with problems. He indulged in infamously heavy drinking for the large part of his life, which likely led to his mental deterioration, as it has to so many creators of great art. Commentators have outlined several other probable diagnoses, from bipolar disorder to traumatic brain injury to narcissistic personality traits. After undergoing as many as 15 bouts of electroconvulsive therapy during 1960-61, Hemingway awoke early one July morning, picked up his favorite shotgun and blew his brains out. Horror, fantasy and sci-fi writer H.P. Lovecraft’s mental state was conditioned by both internal and external influences. He suffered from a traumatic sleep disorder, thought now to be a rare variety of parasomnia, or night terrors. As well as experiencing these nighttime destabilizations, his finances were mishandled, leading to a steep and sudden decline in his family’s standard of living. Lovecraft suffered from extreme depression — he was suicidal for some time and suffered what he described as a “nervous breakdown” — and this tortuous life spun even further into the void when he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and Bright’s disease, determining the intense pain in which he would spend the rest of his life. Author of the roman à clef The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath depicted the descent into mental instability in her work in ways that strongly paralleled the vicissitudes of her own life. Her clinical depression resulted in her undergoing the rather unrefined electroconvulsive therapy techniques being used at the time. After her first series of treatments, Plath experienced a breakdown and attempted suicide. This attempt failed, ushering in a great deal more psychiatric intervention. Then, after a series of further attempts to take her own life, the thirty-year-old Plath was found dead in her flat, her head lain cold on the bottom of her kitchen oven, with the gas still flowing. Known for elucidating the shadows of mankind with such macabre tales as “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Edgar Allan Poe’s work also parallels the demons he fought in his own mind. His self-declared tendencies toward insanity textured his life with an ominous refrain akin to that which we find in his most famous poem, “The Raven.” After his wife’s death, Poe declared: “I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” In October 1849, found in a state of delirium on the streets of Baltimore, unable to articulate anything with much meaning or explain how he had ended up there, Poe died in a local hospital in the early hours of the next day.
8 GREAT NOVELISTS WHO WERE MENTALLY DISTURBED
When Jack Kerouac wrote his most famous work On the Road, it wasn’t a standard, ten-chaptered novel that he had in mind. What was produced was a continual stream of consciousness, typed on one continuous reel that runs the length of a large hall. This unique approach to literature is perhaps less surprising when you consider the fact that Kerouac was under the influence of a cocktail of mindaltering substances, among them alcohol, marijuana and the amphetamine benzedrine. Honorably discharged from the US Navy on grounds of a “schizoid personality,” Kerouac embarked upon the American highway for a lifestyle fueled by jazz and speed with the now-legendary Dean Moriarty.
The scorching prose of Virginia Woolf foretells not just of a unique and creative spirit, but also of the tortuous spins and turns that her life underwent. Bereaved of her mother and half-sister Stella during her early teens, Woolf also faced subjection to sexual abuse by her half-brothers. Throughout her life she struggled with bouts of deep depression and several nervous breakdowns as her fate meandered through different hardships — famously, for example, losing her London home during the British Blitz of World War II. On 28 March 1941, packing her overcoat’s pockets with stones, she walked into the nearest river to her home and was lost to the world. Author of literary mainstays War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy was known for creating deep and far-ranging plots, whose casts of characters — numbering in the hundreds — were largely a way for him to escape the inner struggles he experienced when trying to reconcile the more difficult questions of the human condition. Tolstoy suffered from increasingly serious, frequent and suffocating depressive episodes, and finally resolved to become a wandering ascetic during the eighty-third year of his long life. Tragically, he only made it as far as an isolated train station before collapsing and dying from pneumonia shortly afterwards. In late February of 1974, sci-fi writer and heavy amphetamine user Philip K. Dick, whilst resting in his home following the extraction of a wisdom tooth, experienced a set of powerful psychological visions. These continued throughout the following month — vivid geometric patterns intermingling with ecclesiastical imagery to create new and insightful interpretations of religious and literary history. “I experienced an invasion of my mind by a transcendentally rational mind, as if I had been insane all my life and suddenly I had become sane,” Dick said of the episode’s onset; also claiming that he began to lead a double life, with one half of him a persecuted Christian from Ancient Rome. This period of Dick’s life inspired writings such as Radio Free Albemuth and the VALIS trilogy. •
JACK KEROUAC VIRGINIA WOOLF
LEO TOLSTOY PHILIP K. DICK
25
Review Words + Photo _ Dane Faurschou
Nikon FE2
When I felt the need to venture into a more formal photography, I knew the best way would be to get myself a trusty analogue SLR sidekick. Then, I met this handsome Nikon camera. We’ve been inseparable ever since. Although I had a teeny affair with a manual Canon SLR during my college days, I never quite got the hang of it. Most of my photos were either blurry or overexposed. Maybe I was simply not ready to commit to it, as we were scheduled to part once the semester was over. So I learned what I had to and eventually forgot about it. That was, until I was introduced to the wonders of Lomography and film photography. I started out with a Holga 120 CFN, but it was not long before I felt the need to reacquaint myself with a film
SLR camera. What I found a heavy, complicated, difficult to use equipment in the past suddenly became an interesting contraption to me. So I started visiting Hidalgo, Manila’s camera haven, looking out for a nice model. I narrowed it down to a Canon AE-1 or anything from Nikon. I wanted a Nikon FM3A, but the price was beyond my reach, so I ended up with a handsome and heavy Nikon FE2. It was in black and chrome, in good condition, with really nice prime lens, and it felt nice in my hands. No scratches, no dents, and seemed like it was hardly used. I started shooting everywhere shortly after. Given my background on SLR photography, I didn’t struggle much on learning the controls. Also, it helped that it had an aperture priority mode, which allowed me to get a grip on the proper shutter speed according to the aperture
Type _ Ye ar _ C o st _ Fo und
3 5 m m Fi lm SLR 1983 - 1987 3 0 0 - 4 0 0 AU B o dy _ Ebay
I selected. I looked for an instruction manual and scanned it a bit before giving my first SLR camera a go. I find this a great camera which I bring along with me nearly everywhere. However, as with majority of SLR cameras, it needs a decent selection of lenses to make it an actual all-around camera (that’s why I’m planning to buy a wide-angle/zoom lens for this in the near future). Also, since it requires manual focusing, it’s not really my camera of choice for spontaneous street shots. I use it mostly for portraits, close-ups, and landscape photos. Two years and countless film rolls later, the Nikon FE2, which I decided to call Ken (yes, I have this bad habit of naming my cameras), remains one of my favorite and best-loved analogue goodies.
•
Nikon FE2 - Old is the new black, film is alive, and photography is sexy again.
Review
Kodak Portra 400 50mm 1.4 Immouzer, Morocco
Fuji Pro 200 35mm 1.4 Byron Bay, Aus
R Kodak Portra 160 50mm 1.4 Coney Island, NY
27
i wish lenin were my boyfr iend Photos by Anastasia Ivanova Styling by Dimitriy Shabalin
Adam kimmel jaket and trouser Fred Perry shirt, UNDFTD hat
I wish lenin were my boyfriend.
Fashion Clockwise from top: H&M cap, raincoat stylist’s own // Leather jacket stylist’s own, CK bra, Adidas trousers // Raf Simons coat, My Way Vintage Jeans, Forget Me Not sweatshirt // Penfield bomper jacket, Fred Perry trousers, black jacket and hat stylist’s own
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HALO: MARISA PURCELL 26 September 2012 | Jillian Grant Ethereality is inherent in Marisa Purcell’s latest body of work, aptly titled ‘Halo’, presented by Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney. Her series of oil paintings are contemporary meditations on preRenaissance sacred imagery, responding particularly to the work of Fra Angelico in Florence’s San Marco monastery, which took Purcell’s interest during her residency in Chianti, Italy earlier this year. Purcell takes a holistic approach to painterly practice, an encompassing process that sees her consumed entirely
Trinity, 2012, acrylic and oil on linen, 120 x 95cm Courtesy the artist and Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney
by her work. It was this aspect, she says, that drew her to Fra Angelico. “I became transfixed with the devotional aspect of them… to the act of painting itself as a means to create an intimate space. I aim to make paintings that, for me, are sacred – not in a religious type of way, but in an honest way that deals with the multiplicity of experiences across time”, she explains. The physical, bodily act of painting is, for Purcell, a spiritual experience: noncerebral, almost subconscious. It is about evoking the otherwise unarticulated or
The paintings are experiential; physical records of the artist’s consciousness. The throbbing, expressive forms are drawn from Purcell’s own surroundings and her psyche. The paintings do reference the physical landscape of Tuscany, with its distinctive golden hues– in Trinity one can almost see the dark form of the Cypress tree, and darting red poppies– but these are not literal, nor are they impressions, though there is something of a likeness there. The pre-Renaissance understanding of space manifests itself in a reductive approach that prompts a sensorial, intuitive response. The paintings are distillations of her experience, featuring essentialised forms; abstracted and simplified. With the emphasis ever on subjectivity, Purcell does not want to prescribe a reading of her work. She hopes that the viewer will respond to the paintings in their own personal way, thus establishing an imaginative discourse. “Each person who encounters the work will have their own set of memories and experiences to bring to the work, thus activating the painting in an entirely unique way”, she suggests. The works embody multiple realities, reflecting a variety of experiences; and with a life of their own, metamorphosing for the viewer – and the artist herselfperpetually reacting and changing.
NOV - JAN 2013 | SO FRESH AND SO CLEAN
Floor Cleaner, Kitty Litter, Spic-N-Span, Charcoal, Aluminum, White Foam, Clear Hair Gel, Simple Green Bathroom Cleaner, Yellow Hair Gel, Pink Insulation Foam, Sheetrock Powder, Red Hair Gel, Paint Texturizer, Concrete Asphalt Felt, PineSol, Blue Hair Gel, Fiberglass Insulation, Mouthwash, Ceiling Tiles, Blue Insulation Foam, Yellow. •
Marisa Purcell, Nick Van Woert, Alan Jones, Katie Petyarre Morgan, Maria Elena Buszek.
The attention to light, tone and colour in Purcell’s work is testament to the personal rigor of her painting process. The paintings emanate heat: pulsing, dynamic, light infused works in which one can almost see the rolling hills of Tuscany. Purcell observed that the light and colour in Italy was far removed from the light she was used to, and took great inspiration from it. “These recent works come from paintings I made in Italy where the light and colour was so warm and luxurious I wanted to bathe in it. Upon my return to the studio I think I have taken the ‘feel’ of this light and translated it into work that is spacious and weightless”, she says.
MCA : NICK VAN WOERT
Art
inexplicable. The spirituality of the Fra Angelico frescoes to which she is responding goes beyond sacred subject, down to the reverence the artist has for his craft, the painted object not as sacred, but as the physical incarnation of his own spirit.
70 x 54 x 60 inches.
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Evident in this ambitious project is Purcell’s dedication to her craft. It is clear to this viewer that, as Fra Angelico revered his practice, Purcell loves painting, and submits herself wholly to it. The result: a mature, beautiful, dynamic body of work that will delight its audience. •
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ALAN JONES : ROPEWALK 22 October 2012 | Watters Gallery SYD Alan Jones has long been interested in looking at Australia’s colonial history and the journey of the First Fleet in 1788 – from a personal perspective and from the broader view point of an Australian. It was these initial 717 British convicts that formed the beginnings of what has become modern day colonial Australia. A studio residency at The Ropewalk began the process of collecting images relevant to his British ancestry. Outdoor studies became the groundwork for a new body of work that seeks to piece together his ancestor’s lives before being transported to Australia from where they never returned. •
New South Wales 2, 2012, acrylic on canvas, 85 x 80cm Courtesy the artist and Watters Gallery, Sydney
Katie Petyarre (pronounced ‘petjada’) Morgan lives in the outstation of Irrultja in the Aboriginal community of Utopia in the Northern Territory, approximately 270 kms northeast of Alice Springs. She participated in the Batik Project of the 1980s and has been involved in Awelye (Women’s ceremonies) from an early age. An Alyawarre speaker, her main Dreaming is Bush Orange (Atwakee). In 2006 Katie began painting on canvas, under the guidance of her aunties and particularly her cousin Barbara Weir who encouraged Katie to develop her individual style. Katie has exhibited extensively since 1989 and has work in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW and Holmes a Court Collection. •
Art
WINNER 2012 CITY OF HOBART ART PRIZE – PAINT CATEGORY
Marisa Purcell, Nick Van Woert, Alan Jones, Katie Petyarre Morgan, Maria Elena Buszek.
PRIZE : KATIE PETYARRE MORGAN
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Katie Petyarre Morgan, Bush Orange (detail), 2012. Photographed by DACOU GALLERIES 33
LECTURE: MARIA ELENA BUSZEK Presented by Museum of Contemporary Craft Craft has definitely become an integral part of the contemporary art lexicon and I’m always fascinated by where the sometimes tense border lines between craft and serious art are drawn. Elena Buszek’s lecture on April 25th at MoCC should fire off a few shots in every direction or is this discussion so 2006? What new developments have there been since craft stopped becoming a dirty word in serious contemporary art? (Hint: it coincided with the realization that art from Los Angeles has been the equal if
Marianne Jorgensen and the Cast-Off Knitters, Pink M.24 Chaffee 2006. (Photo Barbara Katzin)
not superior to New York since the 60’s and last year’s PST... or we can blame Dave Hickey’s The Invisible Dragon essays for making “beauty” as an intellectual construct supportable again). Her lecture Wednesday at the Museum of Contemporary Craft is part of the CraftPerspectives Lecture Series and the 2011-2012 Graduate Visiting Artist Lecture Series. •
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