By Maksymilian Fus-Mickiewicz

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Artist, photographer, writer, dj, promoter, shaman? London-based Mathew Stone has survived much of the media hyperbole surrounding his activity as spearhead of the !WOWOW! collective to rise as a respected 21st century thinker. I caught up with Mathew ahead of his latest salon, an event curated by the artist as part of the Great British Art Debate.

What brought about this collaboration?

The curator Cedar Lewison is working on a series of events and publications called “The Great British Art Debate”. He had heard that I ran salons and asked if I could do something similar for the project.

Interconnected echoes as a series seems to comprise of interviews, exhibitions and now a debate, could you explain a bit more about why you’ve chosen to use this title so often and what we can expect in the future?

I often re-use titles when I see a work as having the potential for translation and further exploration in another format. To me “Interconnected Echoes” is a poetic statement on how I see collaborative thinking occur.

You work on many projects. Would you still define yourself as a painter?

No. It seems silly to call myself a painter. I studied painting and feel informed by the history of it, but I don’t paint.

I thought about this specifically because you are now a curator for this project – which aims to provoke debate much like an installation artist would bring objects and images together to create an artwork.

I try and employ the same type of approach to all the different things that I do. I enjoy collaborating. My discussion-based events can in one sense be viewed as distinct artworks that I have instigated, but I feel it’s much more interesting to see them as evolving, multi-authored beings that are constantly redefined.

Herbert Read made a clear distinction between Art & Culture. What do you see as pure art today? Or would you argue against Read. Say, argue that the culture surrounding art is just as important.

I believe that a definition of art should encompass all of human endeavor, but I also believe that art should act as an aspirational model for human behavior. I understand the contradiction in that statement, but I think that it’s a necessary one.

As a DJ do you ever consider the exhibition should have a soundtrack or do you think its necessary to keep art and music separate?

Mostly when I DJ, it’s to earn money to keep making work. It’s interesting what you learn. Somebody once pointed out to me that in America in the early nineties there was this particular type of dance music, Baltimore club and they use this one break. But in the UK the same drum beat was being used except in rave records and I kind of like the idea that there is something that stays the same across the world but that there is also a part which is influenced by the context. The country that it emerges from. It’s obviously creative. But I don’t expect it to function in the same way as other parts of my output. It’s different if I am working on a soundtrack for a film of course.

Is there anything identifiable as British in London now?

The problem is multiculturalism as something that is specific to London and not actually a British thing. If I see an artistic scene in London, it’s going across lot’s of different levels, I see people working outside of art in a way that is informed by art or is shaped by art whether its music or different types of events. I think there’s a new type of messiness to the scene which is why it’s not so identifiable.

I’m particularly interested in gender and sexuality. Do you think Performance art is a certain late 20th century obsession with the body?

I would imagine that an obsession with the body is something that has always existed. I think that it’s interesting to try to understand performance-based art by relating it to ritual. Often this relationship is explicit, for example, I see Joseph Beuys and Marina Abramovic making overt references to spiritual practices from history, as well as to the present. I think that ritual within a contemporary (art) context facilitates a credible and relevant re-empowerment of ancient mythological thinking in the present.

Does Performance art serve to solve issues of gender and sexual confusion in a ways that institutions outside of the art world cannot?

I think that the triumph over suffering can occur in any context. The problem with institutions is their rigidity. When we serve a concrete social structure, we limit our opportunities to serve our communities. It inhibits the potential for self-sacrifice, which altruism relies on.

Do you think the web can break down such boundaries?

In a mass sense it’s weirdly democratic. I wondered if there is a case for arguing that actually by seeing mediated images on Google, it’s a more realistic understanding of the impact of art work than it might be if you see it in a gallery space which is a reverential environment.

Do you ever think we will reach a stage when gender will no longer be an issue. Personality as the sole factor people are judged on?

I think that the potential for this type of open-mindedness already exists. There will always be conflict, but there will also always be space to find creative solutions to it.

People have called you a pioneering force in the art world. What is the future for art, what form do you think it will take?

Robert Fillou once said “The great lesson of modern art is freedom. Now we have to incorporate ‘art as freedom’ into the fabric of everyone’s life.” I feel that this is a continual process.

http://matthewstone.co.uk/

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Maks is freelance journalist. He has contributed articles to Don’t Panic, FACT, USELESS and AnOther Man as well as managing his own arts and culture website Haus Digital. Maks is interested in photography, graphic design and instillation as well as the relationship between cultural, gender and sexual identity in relation to art and architecture. He will be regularly contributing articles to the Off Modern blog.

http://www.icallarchitecturefrozenmusic.com/

Charlie Gibson contributed some wonderful collage work to the first issue of our journal, which you can buy here.

By Maksymilian Fus-Mickiewicz

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While Alexander has a roster of internationally acclaimed accounts he always maintains a strict ethical code which all members of the Distil Ennui studio abide by. The issue for him is authenticity, never cropping or editing his work – exhibitions take place in abandoned spaces. Like his photography he aims to find the overlooked and the displaced; asking us to engage critically with subjects we may find ordinary. Contrasted as a minimalist Gregory Crawson (of the White Cube) and ‘Man Ray meets Jet Lee’, Alexander James is a man of strong belief who should be taken seriously. As soon as I saw his Organic Studies I knew I had to investigate further. It mattered deeply that the images had had an immediate impact on me without the aid of context or gallery captions. These emotionally charged moments where manufactured chemicals meet delicate flower bouquets transcend language. A fascinating aesthetic that burns the issue of the current oil crisis into the eye of the beholder, refusing to let photography become irrelevant and stale.

How did this project come about? What were the steps you took?

We have had an idea to shoot burning flowers for a while now but couldn’t find a relevant thread or meaning which delayed production. Then the globe concept came about, a planetary sphere which instantly gave us the meaning we were looking for – it evolved over a period of about a week before we got on set, only then did we really have the chance to experiment.

How were the images captured?

These images were shot on Hasselblad medium format equipment on both film and digital mediums. The beauty for me is supported by the in-perfections. I perform no post production whatsoever on my personal works either traditional or digital; always presenting my works ‘as-shot’.

Even on the most planned shoots there are always little accidents. These accidents or imperfections are what suggest the possibilities of developing the image further in a way that I had not thought of. It can however prove very difficult when aiming for such deep blacks with rich detail and tonal range.

What was the chemical process behind these?

We used a chemical compound which anyone with basic chemistry knowledge can do. This was shaped and inserted into the heart of the globe which when lit, started an irreversible burn process where shards of energy engulfed the sphere until it’s inevitable collapse. For me this was just thrilling to shoot. There is something mystical about the moment when light crosses through a lens, things can be very different from one side to the other, especially in this case it all became so magical on film.

Is there a particular reason why you chose flowers which are often associated with femininity?

The flowers specifically in the form of a sphere or circle for me is perhaps a reinforced suggestion. The circle being the most profound and the most common symbol in existence. With the infinite billions of stars, planets, moons and galaxies full of the same. A circle, having no beginning or end, representing infinity, eternity, wholeness and femininity. The floral subject focusses us more on it’s positive symbolism representing the beauty and spiritual power of our environment. We wanted to represent the spiritualized Mother Earth or sacred environment.

Is destruction, raw energy seen as a masculine trait?

No not at all, it is a male doctrine to consider a physical effort to prevail destruction… but I believe that this is baseless, and genderless. I believe that every action has a direct and opposing reaction, we all fade to dust. Whilst now I consider myself a mid-late career artist, it is something that grabs my thoughts more and more these days and I use my work to help express this.

When seeing these images I immediately thought of the BP oil spill, the heat of the chemical explosion with nature. Would you say the crisis had an influence on you?

I am absolutely thrilled that you picked up on the BP driving force behind these images. As an artist I am always looking to engage art with key artistic, intellectual and political issues of our time, I have a responsibility to do so. Whilst I am not making a comment on BP themselves this is very much a series based on our hunger for consumerist destruction. I want to re-engage only but a thread of thought into the wonder of our environment, perhaps making the viewer consider the concessions that they could make to stop this stupidity.

What role did Davy Pittoors have in styling?

Davy only recently joined the team but is already finding his groove. He has a clean, discerning and extremely detailed aesthetic which was a direct influence on the series. He was Instrumental in effecting the styling and concept brief both before and during the shoot. He was a great help accomplishing the aspired quality of work I had in mind.

The image represents a fleeting moment. Do you think the oil crisis will be forgotten about quickly?

I think it’s legacy will live on for a long time to come, and rightly so. Now we can all see that essentially we are tapping into something buried deep under water for a reason. Hopefully this series will be a reminder to err caution. Those who so readily forget the past are likely to repeat themselves.

You work with a lot of commercial clients, has the crisis made you think twice about working with un-ethical companies?

It has re-affirmed the belief certainly, although for the past eight years we as a studio have had a strict suppliers & client ethical policy in place. During that period we have sourced all our energy from renewable sources, we all bike it around and have a hybrid studio runaround car in London for when we need it, we also offset our carbon emissions on every travel booking and our office supplies come from green sources provided by ethical companies wherever possible.

That includes our client rosta I have refused major projects to the great detriment of the business, because I have strongly disagreed with an ethical position on the business model. I remember just recently a major hotel client that we had worked with for years, were just about to fly us to Dubai to shoot their latest property prior to opening. It was a big job which we had been planning for months, when we discovered that the client had a monstrous idea to refrigerate 4 acres of beachfront – yes you heard me right… literally cooling the sand so that guests did not burn their feet. Imagine the power consumption of a four acre fridge in the middle of the desert – and leaving the door open.

I am already a serious doubter of all that goes on in Dubai after spending a lot of time out there. Things like paying construction workers $25.00 a week and housing them in squalid conditions with minimal equipment or regard for their safety, all whilst working on some of the most expensive real estate in the world. If they are injured at all on site, their work visa is canceled and they are unceremoniously thrown out of the country as they are now unable to work.

It took no time at all to reject the brief, it sounds foolish now as I know there would be ten suitably qualified photographers ready to take over the job within minutes, but that’s just it really – I wouldn’t be doing it.

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Maks is freelance journalist. He has contributed articles to Don’t Panic, FACT, USELESS and AnOther Man as well as managing his own arts and culture website Haus Digital. Maks is interested in photography, graphic design and instillation as well as the relationship between cultural, gender and sexual identity in relation to art and architecture. He will be regularly contributing articles to the Off Modern blog.

We are proud to announce a new art competition for Architectural Regeneration, South East, the governing body for sustaining the growth of the arts in underprivileged areas of London. Architectural Regeneration, South East have asked us to collate proposals for a new sculpture to be built by construction company Jarvis in front of Peckham Library for the start of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

Everyone is welcome to submit a four hundred word draft proposal detailing the technical specifications of the sculpture and a rough sketch of how you envisage it. The sculpture must be made of or include up to thirty tonnes of concrete, but can include other materials.

Please send all proposals to; contact@offmodern.com, the closing date for submissions is the 1st of June and the short list will be announced in July.

Claire Baily, Champion, 2010.
Steel, brass, paint, cotton, ribbon.

For more please visit www.clairebaily.com

I’m all for the celebration of failure, but celebrating waste is another matter.

Last year I started on an ambitious triptych, a painting made from a smooth, angled shards of wood, depicting a misty, ambiguous landscape, made from photographs of the lovely Peckham Rye common. I made the first piece, primed it, and experimented with some colours on it, then promptly abandoned the whole plan and started on something else.

Since then it has sat quietly in my studio, a non-entity, a third of a painting, never to be completed. So when I heard that Michael Landy was constructing an ‘art bin’ in the South London Gallery, right next door to my college studio, I knew my little failed painting had found its final calling.

Landy’s enormous glassy, classy skip fills the single roomed (though soon to be greatly expanded) SLG totally, acting as a very pleasing sculpture in itself. Steel frame and plexiglass windows rise from the ground in satisfying diagonals, and a grand staircase at the far end of the bin ends at the rim; it is from here that my painting is to be flung.

By the time I get to the gallery, the bin is already loaded with a mixture of stretchers, drawings in smashed frames, sculptures, casts and frabrics. Looking in I can pick out some things that are immediately recognisable. I catch the glinting print of a large crystal skull and littered on top are some scratchy prints, depicting crudely etched genitals and cryptic, lovelorn messages. Hirst and Emin are joined by, among others, Gary Hume, Landy himself and Julian Opie, who seems to have thrown out about half his studio.

Landy spends most of the time sat in the corner of the gallery, he alone has the power to judge what is allowed to be cast into the bin. I lean my painting against the wall, and ask if I can just throw it in. Landy takes a look at it and asks me to explain why it is a failure. I talk about its aborted brothers and he agrees that it I have indeed failed. It’s a strange experience and I can feel myself going red as I show him my work. I mean, I’m showing an artist I admire a shit painting I made, and he’s in accord that it is shit. Anyway, as we are both in agreement, in it goes. I climb up the stairs and from the top, the bin looks far emptier, a large pile directly below the drop off point, with the detritus petering out towards the other end. I pause and enjoy this view, and then throw mine in, where it makes a satisfying loud bang, and slides underneath one of Landy’s own framed drawings.

I don’t feel that great about it really. In fact I’m glad that my piece of crap is now partly obscured by Landy’s work, which is considerably less crap than mine. I’d imagined though that our experiences of tossing our work in would be very different. This is where Landy’s art bin gets problematic for me. While I was throwing a genuine piece of tut into the bin, Landy and the other famous, successful artists were throwing money away. There’s potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds wrapped up in Hirst, Emin and Opie’s rejected work. In this way, the bin to some extent proves artistic integrity, while also insulting younger, more struggling artists. There’s an arrogance to Hirst et al (obviously) casually throwing thousands of pounds into the bin, and for what real reason? To make themselves feel better? Maybe I’m missing the point, but imagine if all the money currently lying in the bin was given to charity instead. 100 yards from the gallery entrance lies Peckham town centre, not only one of the poorest and most dilapidated areas of London, but one filled with these aforementioned young, struggling artists. Imagine if these failed art works were put to good use, raising money for youth art projects in the area, or failing that, raising money for Oxfam, or a children’s home, anything. As someone with art world aspirations myself, and with the full knowledge that the likelihood of me throwing away prints worth thousands of pounds in the future is slim, I feel this is all a little insensitive.

Also, the age of the bloated London art market is most definitely over. The art world has been crippled by the recession just as everyone else has, and so Landy’s comment on the true worth of art is somewhat diluted. There’s people being made redundant every day in the UK, millions unemployed, and Hirst, Emin and Landy are publicly throwing away tens of thousands of pounds? They can fuck off. I’m not saying that these artists have an obligation to sell their work and give the money away, but such frivolous and public celebration of waste makes me sick. There’s a reason it’s frowned upon to go through people’s rubbish. What people throw away can be private, embarrassing and fantastically wasteful. Landy claims that in the bin, all the artists are equal, but for me and my fellow poor students graduating this year, this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Landy’s work just doesn’t seem relevant in this current artistic, and environmental climate. Just like his worldly possessions after his 2001 piece Break Down, all the art in the bin will end up in a landfill, with a few unbroken frames and stretchers being donated to Camberwell College of Art (thanks). Aren’t landfills full enough without artists purposefully adding to them? Granted much of this failed work may have ended up there eventually anyway, but surely there’s a more appropriate way of disposing of this stuff. Most of the work being either wood, paper or canvas anyway, I propose an enormous elaborate bonfire in Burgess Park, with Landy supplying free sparklers.

As I leave the gallery, I watch another Camberwell student, Samuel Craven, throw hundreds of pieces of A4 paper into the bin. Printed on each piece is photocopied fifty pound note. I don’t know the original intention of Sam’s work in this case, but it seems a fitting piece for the bin, showing what’s really in there, the money that could be used for something truly worthy.

I now regret throwing my painting in to Landy’s bin. What I throw away is my business, just as what Damien Hirst throws away is his. I’m in favor of admitting and (to an extent) celebrating failure, it’s a part of how all artists work. But really, I think we should all dispose of our waste in private.

By Tom Harrad

For Nail The Cross music festival. Poster designs by Off Modern, Patrick Barrett and Charlie Gibson.

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Aaron A. Angel is part of Deptford based Friendly Street Gallery, which is currently in the process of moving to a new location. As part of Friendly Street Gallery he exhibited and curated an exhibition with Off Modern as part of our week long South East in East festival, that happened way back in August. We thought we’d catch up with what he’s been up to since then as well as recap on his work form SEINE.

RELEASE, PART OF SOUTH EAST IN EAST, 12″ RECORD WITH HAND PAINTED SLEEVE AND ISSUE ONE TO FIVE OF VOTIVE ANCHOR.

UNTITLED. A DEPICTION OF BRITISH COLONIAL TROOPS DEFENDING A SCALE MODEL OF HENRY MOORE’S RECLINING FIGURE (LH 608), WHICH WAS STOLEN FROM THE GROUNDS OF THE HENRY MOORE FOUNDATION AND MELTED DOWN FOR SCRAP METAL IN CHINA.

MORE OF AARON A. ANGELL -

WEBSITE

MASSIVE WANKER (VOTIVE ANCHOR)

Architecture exists, or more correctly it is design to exist, which is why it is interesting when an architectural design is never realised and is instead left to float unsuspended through history. An exemplar of this is Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, which exists now as a monument to the constructivist theories of architecture and not to the Bolsheviks who commissioned it. By never being built it is denied one of the primary functions of architecture, to be a place, and yet neither is it a negation of place, non-place.

Architecture exists, or more correctly, it has different states of existence, it moves from realm to realm, from idea, to planning, to building, to completion, and then possible destruction, destruction can occur during any of these stages, and yet there is some fluidity between these states. We have renovation and rebuilding as well as destruction, we can resist the movements of time upon architecture. So what is interesting is when an architectural project never moves becomes anything more concrete than an idea, never passes from planning to building, and it instead becomes a symbol. This can also occur if a building is completely and irrevocably destroyed. There is a juxtaposition here, it is because architecture is a designed as a place for human interaction, architecture defines the way human beings feel, act and behave, and if an architectural project is never realised it can never play host to the exchanges that make up society. Never realised, it can only form part of a semiotic system that hints at these actions, it becomes part, not of architecture, but of philosophy.

When we consider this, in relation to the designs for the playgrounds Isamu Noguchi planned for outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, we must consider the planned type of human interaction that would occur there. For example, Tatlin’s Monument was planned to house Soviet government, Noguchi though, designed a playground, a place where one of the purest types of interaction occurs, play. Psychgeographry is concerned with how we live and how we want to live, but it is also concerned with how we ought to want to live, this rogue ought forms the basis of theories of psychogeography, especially in theories of urbanism. This will often focus on play, especially in the use of play to create new geographical contours for the city. Noguchi’s architectural playgrounds are the place designated for enjoyment, and all other spaces of enjoyment, from sporting arena to the cinema and the pub, follow on from the role play has in socialising young children in the playground. And because these playgrounds were never realised they themselves turn into the psychogeographical theories of how we ought to want to live.

Noguchi’s playground are not usual playgrounds, his approach is via the theories of urbanism, those that centre on the radical use of play and on the idea of maximising the spaces in a city designated for areas of play, by titling and angling the surfaces of his playgrounds they become part moonscape, part Dali’s draping clocks. Play is turned into a surreal activity, mythic in its ritualism, they are putting forward suppositions about how we should be socialised into functioning civilian adults from children, and yet they represent a sort of dystopian image of socialisation, it is Lord of the Flies as Modernist architecture not as allegory. Through their geographical location, next to the United Nations building, they are positioned as an area for the socialisation of future world leaders and so it predicts dystopian futures. It sits in the theoretical shadow of the United Nations organisation itself. The playgrounds aimed to pervert the way we ought to want to live through altering the environment that contains the early acts human interaction and socialisation; it twists our future, adult relationships into dystopia.

Here’s a preview of a photo poster series that will be fully exhibited at the 10th Off Modern, on December 3rd at Corsica Studios.

Tasha’s work is often both photographic and performance based, see some more of it HERE

Click the images for lager versions.

VHS VIDEO BASEMENT are a group of like minded squatter souls who are in the process of screening an eternal film festival in many acts and in many locations across London, (they’ve been evicted and rehomed a few times now, they can currently be found behind the Odeon in Leicester Square), Alex Ressel and El Dunk have worked with Off Modern before, putting work into our first two exhibitions and magazines way back in 2008, as you know we recently celebrated our first year anniversary so its nice to our old comrades up to new things.

Click through to watch a selection of some of the work the VHS Video Basement have produced.

Alex Ressel presented us with their manifesto during our South East In East festival, here is a digital version of it.

If you long for more infomation about the VHS Video Basement please click here.

These posters are on display around various locations in New Cross as part of No Pain In Pop’s ‘Nail The Cross’ festival. Thanks to longtime collaborators Charlie Gibson for her Spaceman Collage and Patrick Barrett for his image of electricity lines at Bletchley Park.

Claire Baily is one of our favourite young artists, she exhibited this movable, changeable and adaptable sculpture at our exhibition, FRONTIERS, back in May. Here are some nice pictures of it. If you want to follow what she is up to, she has just set up a blog, which is still looking a bit sparse, but keep an eye on it, good things are bound to follow.

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We thought we should bring your attention to a new design/photography/art/interesting things blog run by Peckham based graphic designer and future tree surgeon Nicholas McQueen.

Ranging from Joseph W Kittinger’s worlds highest ever sky-dive to musings on the BBC shipping forecast, The Elastic Novice has plenty to keep you interested.