Where for, Art thou?

The question should not be whether it is Art or not; the question should be whether it is good Art, or not?

It's not made by great men

"Doing art should not be a full time job for the validated few. Doing art should be something we all do as part of everyday life… None of us should be getting our highs and lows vicariously through what other people do, we should all do the fighting, kicking, loving, fucking, painting, throwing, jumping, killing, singing, shouting ourselves, and not have actors, sportsmen, musician or artists doing it for us.”

Bill Drummond on his new book, 100, on Quietus.

Turner trailer

I've just seen the Channel 4 trailer for their Turner Prize 2011 coverage, and my gut instinct was that is was yet another quality output from Why Not Associates, and I wasn't wrong—a quick look at the WNA website and I find that they did indeed do this.



In the usual end of year polls, Why Not Associates have got to come top in the design company category. Equally adapt at turning their skills to good use for corporate and cultural clients, their work just get better and better in my opinion.

Why Not Associates' website

Thank you

A big thank you to Artists of Walberswick for dedicating space in their bi-annual exhibition last weekend to some of the many paintings by my Uncle, Terry Ball, who died earlier this year.


Self-portrait, circa 1949, submission 11 of 15 for entry into the Royal College of Art

View photographs of the exhibition and other work on Flickr.

Terry Ball's obituary in The Guardian

Apocalypse

So this is what they are spending my Tate membership on. I approve.



Apocalypse at Tate Britain

Atrium studios

Atrium Studios is a new art and design space based at University Campus Suffolk, Ipswich. Although the initial idea was to give graduates from the School of Arts & Humanities a stepping stone into the professional world at an affordable rent, the concept of a creative hub has grown far beyond these early plans and will now also be open to local artists and designers. For a monthly rent, residents will have the choice of desk, office or studio space for a maximum of 12 months with options to extend beyond this if demand allows. Rent is inclusive of Wifi, electricity, access to the UCS library, cafes and arts facilities, with the additional bonuses of UCS Waterfront Gallery membership and priority booking to the Arts & Humanities visiting lecture series.

Although similar ventures have been planned in Ipswich previously, none have seen the light of day. With support from the Arts Council, Suffolk County Council and Ipswich Borough Council, Atrium Studios is due to open its doors to the first wave of creatives this September.

If you are an artist, designer or writer and would like more information, please send your details to:
Carol Gant, University Campus Suffolk, Waterfront Building, Ipswich, IP4 1QJ

GraphicDesign&…what?

GraphicDesign& has recently been set up to celebrate the "interactions between graphic design and the wider world". Respected designer and writer Lucienne Roberts, and design educator Rebecca Wright, are behind the venture. Although still in its infancy, with the website content still in development, this could prove an important project for the future of graphic design.

The relationship between graphic design and where it meets society is something that I am particularly interested in. In fact, it could be said that this is exactly what McJunk is about. However, I think GraphicDesign& is pertinent for more than just a personal interest due to some of the debates that came out of the recent St Bride conference; Graphic Design: History In The Making. (See recent post about History In The Making here). At the conference, while debating why graphic design history isn't as revered by the public as art history, Simon Esterson, Art Director at Eye Magazine, commented that to engage the wider public in the subject of graphic design would best happen through discussing everyday design the public knows and interacts with. In doing so, he implied, this would have much more resonance than talking about glossy annual reports the same public will only ever see reprinted in a design press that they don't read. This is an opinion I wholly agree with.

One of the questions I came away with from the conference was whether graphic design historians and academics have a chip on their shoulder, particularly in relation to art history and the weight and pretensions that such a subject brings to the academic table? Graphic design has always been a poor cousin within the arts community in terms of stature bestowed upon it. Herbert Bayer stated in 1967 that, "the graphic designer is designated with the minimising term 'commercial' and is generally ignored as compared to the prominence accorded by the press to architecture and the fine arts", (source; Armstrong, 2009, Graphic Design Theory). Casting your mind back to any recent furore over rebranding costs slated in the press should prove a testament that Bayer's concerns are still true today.

Graphic design historians and writers should not be competing against fine art in terms of academic relevance or public acceptance. For a start, this displays insecurity. Secondly, the descriptor 'fine' art betrays an elitist attitude, and the last thing graphic design should ever be, as a discipline to be understood, is disconnected from the very public it attempts to communicate with.

It is for these reasons that I will be keenly watching the development of GraphicDesign& to see what it brings to the table. Graphic design needs more champions, and those champions should not try to shoehorn the discipline into academic precedents dictated by another, entirely different field of study. We should have the courage to set our own terms of reference.

Links:

GraphicDesign&

Lucienee Roberts

Rebecca Wright

Eye Magazine

Graphic Design Theory

Bloody graphic design gits

The Artist Taxi Driver

Seeds, not with standing

Not standing on Ai WeiWei's Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern today.

Tate stops visitors trampling on Sunflower Seeds

Tate Modern

The last post

A link to Terry Ball's obituary in The Guardian, 23.03.11. A very touching tribute.

The smell of linseed oil

Yesterday I spent some time trawling through old family photographs trying to find a decent portrait of Terry, my Uncle, for his obituary. My brother is currently writing this with someone Terry used to work with at English Heritage, in the hope we will get it published in The Guardian this/next week. While I found some great photos, unfortunately, none really seem suitable for an obituary.

However, during this search, I came across these photos of Terry's studio I took on one of my last visits to the home he and Christine had made in Walberswick. They took me back, and reminded me how privileged I felt being allowed into his creative space and him asking my opinion about the latest sketches he was working from. I had always loved spending time in his studio, even when, for the majority of his life, it consisted of a bedroom in a cramped council house in Rose Hill, Carshalton, Surrey. The smell of linseed oil, the stacks of canvasses leant up against walls, the scraps of newspaper clippings and open books that Terry would be using to fuel his visions. They all helped shaped my view of art over the years.





Then I came across a photo of a model I had forgotten about. Terry and Christine had recently had this studio built—previously he had been working in a small back room that was cold and damp. Terry being Terry had made a model to get a sense of what the extention would be like on completion. This was something he would often do when working on his reconstruction artworks for English Heritage and Cadw, architectural research that gave him a sense of scale and perspective for his paintings. I would gaze in wonder at them as a small boy and I did so again when I saw this on this visit—I've never been particularly good with 3D myself. But what I really like about this crude model is that he has carved a figurine of himself—here he is coming down the stairs.



This personalisation of his work is something that I would also see in his reconstruction artwork. Occasionally I would see some of these staring out at me in an English Heritage guide book and think, "is that monk there my Dad?" Or, "that servant looks a lot like photographs I have seen of my grandmother as a small girl". And of course, like many artists, he would draw himself in, the bald head and thick set mustache being a dead give away.

I also came across a photo of a catalogue of his reconstruction artwork I put together for him about 10 years ago. I think he was hoping to get it published, but unfortunately that never happened.



A slight irony that strikes me as I look at these photographs is that on the night he died, the week before last, I was actually putting together a lecture for students at UCS about workspaces, albeit from a graphic designer's perspective. I haven't yet given that lecture and maybe when I do get around to it I'll include some of these shots. Until then, they can be seen on my Flickr account in their own set.



Dubdog@Flickr

Weekend roundup

A quick round up of things seen on my weekend in Brighton last week. Briefer than I would wish, but time's pretty restricted at the moment.

First up is a statue of Max Miller just outside the Brighton Dome. I didn't really register the statue until Claire pointed out that it had a piece of knitted graffiti attached to it. Apparently this is quite trendy.



We saw the statue on leaving the ever excellent Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. I posted from our B and B last week about how much I enjoyed the Capturing Colour exhibition at the Museum, but haven't really had a chance to talk about the rest of the venue. There are some great exhibits of modernist furniture and paintings, as well as really well put together displays about Brighton's social history, of which it has plenty. There's too much to go into here, and needless to say photos will be up on Flickr over the coming week, but this quote on the wall near a section about cycling has to be posted, (excuse the poor image quality).



The other aspect of the museum I want to mention is the fashion section. What I like about this is the fact that much of it is about street fashion, and lots of the clothes are donated by locals, with back story.





On some items they even has responses from local school children. I wonder whether Tony Lord ever did use his belt to repel vampires?





On the return journey, we decided to take in the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea, another modernist masterpiece.



Apart from the fact that it's always good to pop into this magnificent building, one of the things that drew us on this occasion was the Moving Portraits exhibition.



While I'd seen several of the pieces on display before, particularly Sam Taylor-Wood's David and the Gilbert and George Living Sculptures, what I wasn't expecting was to be bowled over by anything by Andy Warhol. His Screen Tests 64-66 gave an eerie sense of voyeurism as I looked at famous icons from the 60s who were all staring back at me, in complete silence. Wondering what was going through their minds is a natural reaction, steeped as many of them are with cultural significance, but I found them strangely powerful as well—the addition of motion seems to have given the traditional portrait not only life (obviously), but somehow made the subjects more tangible and ordinary, given that our relationship with these people is usually through the eyes of the media. I got the feeling I was being given a very personal and intimate audience with them. Particularly when, (spoiler alert) unexpectedly one of them, Susan Sontag I think, starts to cry. Very powerful stuff.

Other highlights included Margaret Tait's Portrait of Ga in which the unwrapping of a sticky sweet seems to suggest more about the personality conducting the action than seeing her going about her daily routines in the rest of the film. She wants the sweet, the simple pleasure, but is so very careful not to get her fingers sticky. I also enjoyed Candice Breitz' Factum Misericordia, where two identical twins are interviewed on camera, asked exactly the same questions and sat in exactly the same chair so that the only difference you could tell was in their narration, their individual take on their experiences as one of a twin, and how they felt they related to each other. The editing of the interviews, shown side by side, and the sound track running out of sync and switching screens added to the draw of trying to relate to these two people as individuals talking about their collective experience.

Highly recommended, and free.

Links:
Knitted graffiti

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery
De La Warr Pavilion

Bullshit detector

Just under a year ago I had a personal rant in a notebook about Guy Garvey of Elbow getting all precious about people downloading individual tracks from Seldom Seen Kid. At the time I thought about posting about it here but then got over it. Then today a similar rant raged through my head as I read an article on the BBC News website about a record club that believes albums have to be listened to in their entirety, as the artist intended. No skipping, no playing just one track, no playing out of order! They are proudly anti-download.

I felt the blood pressure rising. So in response, and as a cathartic act, I felt I had to post about such bullshit. Stop reading now if you are not in the mood for an opinionated rant.

So, first up, I've dug out my notebook from a year ago and here's what I wrote on 27 March 2010:
"Some may care that Elbow spent two hours in the studio arguing about whether the gap between tracks should be three seconds or two and a half. Fine, they can listen to the CD in its entirety. But there are a couple of tracks on Seldom Seen Kid that I really got into walking to work, a walk that is decidedly shorter than the album length. I kept repeating these tracks to concentrate on different aspects of the songs; the rhythm, the lyrics, the bass, the vocal intonation, etc… just as people have different learning styles, I believe people have different listening styles as well and it is up to the individual to decide how they listen to something. I'm a lover of the portable stereo, as it used to be called. From the age of 15 I don't think I've been anywhere without a walkman, minidisc or within the last 6 years, several generations of iPod. I used to love mix tapes, compilation CDs for the car and now shuffle and personal playlists. That is my choice."

But back to now:
I'm so tired of artists being so precious about their work. Let it go. People who know me well will agree this is a bit of a bug bear of mine, but what got me today with the article on the BBC News website was that it wasn't just the ego filled artist vomiting such pretensions, but pedantic listeners unleashing their fascistic world view of what constitutes an artistic experience, as if they have the right to make that call. For a start the argument is full of holes—artists don't write and record songs in the order they present them on a record, nor do they play a record live from start to finish (excepting the recent trend of 'classic' albums being performed in the whole as an obvious cash cow for ideas defunct performers to milk). Are these music Nazis really telling me that The Clash's Sandinista! isn't a better record when edited down to about 14 tracks? Or that The Beatles White Album isn't a far superior record without Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da confined to the trash? Is there really a Squarepusher CD that works from start to finish? (Leave it Roki!)

No artist or fan has the right to dictate how a work is consumed once it has been unleashed on the world. I've bought the license to listen to it, it is mine now. If a band wants to retain total control over their commodity then they shouldn't release it. Pompous precious fucking artists and their ego massaging hangers on really piss me off.

Right, that's got that out of my system.

Link:
BBC News Anti-shuffle brigade

Where's me jumper?

September has been super busy. After the wedding of some good friends of ours at the end of August, we've been to Brighton 3 times, taken in some art by the sea, been to a private view of some UCS graduate students (well done Luke, Nicki & Tom), grown a moustache for a stag do (me, not Claire), seen the reformed Pop Group in that there London, and given our bedroom over to Claire's daughter and grandson and so have been living out of our front room for the last week. Oh, and then there's the day jobs stretching into evenings & weekends as well, and getting side tracked writing the odd post here! All of which means I'm even more behind schedule with the McJunk book. I should never have made a brash deadline statement online about completing a personal project. What's frustrating is that it's 90% done - someone give me 4 days straight and I'll have it wrapped up. Never mind. Some sort of normality is due to return this week, whatever that is, and hopefully I should be able to plan in time to mop up the remaining 10%. Believe me, you'll be the first to know.

In the meantime, here are a few things that have caught my eye over the last month. Sorry, no tash shots, that's far too embarrassing, but feel free to check out my upper lip menagerie on the Dubdog Flickr photostream.

Art on the Prom, Felixstowe:



Poor Richard, or poor books?



Remixed ad. Reminds me of those plastic puzzles where you have to shift squares around to complete an image (I was always useless at them):



My Garden, Your Litter, the follow up to The Fall's Your Future, Our Clutter?



And finally, in my office this morning I was caught by my shadow as I was about to rush out of the house:



And now my favourite season of the year has arrived, can anyone tell me where I put my jumper?

Homage to Saul and Lee

A short while ago you may remember my tale of trying to recreate a photo from memory that went badly wrong. Well, here's the second attempt. It's in the right location this time, at the Longman of Wilmington, East Sussex. It even has some resemblance to the original. And this time it contains no knob jokes!

Ball by Claire Tolliday c.2010

The inspiration.

Steinberg by Lee Miller c.1954

Original post.

Drux Flux Test Dept remix

Caught this on SkyArts the other evening.

Drux Flux, 2008

It's got the lot; brooding crescendo laden music, industrial landscapes and constructivist references abound; it's dark and grubby and doesn't so much press my buttons as smash them over the head with a piece of lead pipe and a lump hammer. Got me coming over all sentimental about Test Dept.

Test Dept, sometime in the 1980s

Try watching them together. It works.

Try turning the sound off of Drux Flux while Test Dept plays. It works.

Try turning the sound off of Test Dept while Drux Flux plays. It works.

Now this is what I call a 1980s revival. I just wish I could find YouTube footage of what Test Dept did to Jools Holland's car on The Tube.

Links:
National Film Board of Canada

Test Dept

Where is my mind?

I was sure it was Kurt Schwitters or Man Ray, or another one of those Dada bods. I was also sure it was the Cerne Abbas Giant, the chalky guy who is always pleased to see you.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, Dorset

So when holidaying in Dorset recently, and passing Mr Phallic on a nearly daily basis, I commented to Claire that I wanted to recreate a photograph in honour of Dada.

In my mind, Kurt Schwitters, or whoever, was standing near where the visitor car park is today, with the giant in the background about a mile away. In my mind Kurt was looking straight at the camera, pretending to hold the giant between thumb and forefinger playing with perspective and creating an optical illusion. I described this vision to Claire and we pulled into the visitor car park after a day out climbing hills on the Jurassic Coast. Ignoring the tourists staring at us, I proceeded to follow Claire's art direction and pose, thumb and forefinger held up at shoulder height in the middle of a car park. This is the result…

When Claire showed me the result, I pointed out her misinterpretation of my interpretation, and we both pissed ourselves laughing, much to the bemusement of the hikers walking past at that moment. I'm not sure who this photo says more about, my failure to accurately describe from memory, or Claire turning an artistic homage into a knob joke. We gave up at that point as the rain started to piss on our parade.

Attempts to Google the original failed before it even begun as the o2 reception was rubbish in Dorset, so I couldn't show Claire the original to clarify what I had in mind. So on returning home from holiday, between unloading the car and ordering a vegetable balti, I searched my bookshelves desperately trying to unearth the original photo. Several design history and avant garde graphics books later, on the verge of giving up my quest, I turned to the ever brilliant Art Of Looking Sideways thinking, 'this is exactly the sort of thing Alan Fletcher would have included in his vast ideas repository'.

And I found this on p290…

Saul Steinberg by Lee Miller c1954, from Alan Fletcher's The Art Of Looking Sideways

It was neither Kurt Schwitters nor Man Ray. Nor was it the Cerne Abbas Giant. It was the mighty Saul Steinberg 'drawing' the Long Man of Wilmington, in Sussex, several counties away from where we had been in Dorset.

All of which just goes to prove two things to me. 1) that I can't always rely on my memory, and 2) that, er, um, er… sorry, I'm not sure I can remember what the second thing is.

Links:
Saul Steinberg
The Art of Looking Sideways

Fleet: Art In The Haven Ports. Landguard Fort

A weekend trip to Felixstowe saw Claire and I taking in Landguard Fort's part in Fleet: Art In The Haven Ports. Well worth a visit.






Gavin Turk's Les Bikes du Bois Rond.


Elizabeth Wright's Languard Fort Shoot.


Tod Hanson's Containerisation

Links:
Fleet: Art In The Haven Ports
Landgaurd Fort Shoot
Landguard Fort, Fleet

Go to!

NB Dubdog, 2010, after van Doesburg

Yesterday Claire and I went to the excellent Van Doesburg & The International Avant-Garde: Constructing A New World exhibition at Tate Modern. Highly recommended - so much graphic design that came after was highly influenced by this egocentric innovator and those he associated with. He was quick to exploit associations in order to get his vision across and he wasn't afraid to burn those that swayed from his singular mission; being gutted at his rejection by the Bauhaus as a tutor, he set up his own rival course in Weimer that dismissed Bauhaus teachings.

This exhibition is testament to the many visually exciting explorations that were happening at the time, both from the hands and mind of van Doesburg and from those of avant garde art movements. And you can clearly see the reverberations this had on those that followed:

David Carson work arguably couldn't have existed without van Doesburg's Dada type experiments,


Theo van Doesburg. Poster Dada Matinée. January 1923


David Carson



Alan Fletcher's collages owe many a debt to Kurt Schwitters,


Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild


Alan Fletcher



Stefan Sagmeisters work for Lou Reed could be said to be a direct reference to Raoul Hausmann's Postcard to I.K. Bonset,


Raoul Hausmann's Postcard to I.K. Bonset 1921


Stefan Sagmeister



and Müller-Brockmann's posters could have been composed from a De Stijl 'how to' manual, if such a thing existed.


Theo van Doesburg Arithmetic Composition 1929-30


Josef Müller-Brockmann


I particularly enjoyed the De Stijl Typography and Dada & Constructivism rooms, and specifically some of van Doesburg's ramblings written large on the gallery wall. This example almost reads like a CRASS lyric:

DADA, PICABIA writes, does not feel anything,
it is nothing, nothing nothing.
It is like your hope: nothing.
Like your idols: nothing.
Like your paradise: nothing.
Like your politicians: nothing.
Like your heroes: nothing.
Like your artists: nothing.
Like your religions: nothing.
Dada was not made, but came into being.
One cannot become a DADAIST, one can only be one.
(Van Doesbury 1923)

The exhibition on until May 16th 2010, Tate Modern. Go to!

Links:
Tate Modern
Avant-garde
David Carson
Alan Fletcher
Stefan Sagmeister
Josef Müller-Brockmann
Crass