We are remembering Team Robbo’s exihibition at Signal Gallery, Shoreditch, London, April 2011. Kali goes Art created these tracks as an atmospheric addition to the TRAIN ROOM for the production company Pranksky Media. The rumour is that a breathtaking graffiti and street art exhibition is being planned for October 2012. Where? In the ultimate spot, of course.
Chilled out art dialogue track
ROB “Like, what would be the core of some distant planet? And I’ll then be creating an artwork that loosely relates to that and then I’ll see what comes out of that exploration.”
ALAN “I’m in love with life, I must say… You know I’m more like a raster, more like a Zen monk….more like a daoist than I am like a professor of science, yeah, d’you understand what I mean? Even though I believe that magic and metaphysics is a very important kind of eh, tool, in our evolution.”
Soundscape based on a dialogue between metaphysical and digital painters Robert Cohen and Alan Card (UK) in connection to their joint exhibition in Manchester June 2011.
Thousands of Thank yous to www.freesound.org and all its mega talented musicians / sound artists. Samples from freesound.org, contributors:
meowtek beatgorilla sleep suonho lancelottjones elmomo patchen
+ sample from Bola – Forcasa 3
Played at exhibition opening of Manchester show, METAFIZZIX at Natuzzi
Edry’s Mother’s Day drawing at the age of 3, her earliest recollection of over-painting
”It is pretty amazing, looking back at life, how I have always had the privilege of being supported. Sometimes I don’t believe in myself, but when there are so many people who do believe in you, it strengthens you to continue on the artist’s journey.” – Noam Edry
In 2008 I got to know a Canadian abstract painter in his mid twenties whose parents dedicated the entire basement to his artistic endeavors. The first time I entered his studio I felt as if I had stepped into a dream world. There were hundreds upon hundreds of huge high quality canvases stacked along the walls like CDs at HMV. They were all beautiful and experimental abstract paintings, strongly influenced by Gerhard Richter. Wandering around in Wonderland, I stumbled on a mountain chain of used oil paint tubes. Luckily enough, I was wearing the epic studio guest-slippers, which were already covered in a Pollock pattern, including the soles. I suspect that those canvases have multiplied themselves without leaving the house, because it doesn’t matter how well you are taken care of by your family and other supporters; in order to succeed as an artist, you need to have Edry’s almost frightening impetus and a determination to keep on going no matter what anyone says.
Edry’s childhood is a wonderful story to be told: At the age of three she was discovered by the local kibbutz artist, who worked as a handy man in her kindergarten. When the man was called in to work, he always found her in the middle of a new drawing and started calling her ‘the painter’. Eventually the very young artist was invited by the experienced artist to have private lessons.
“I remember going to his studio and being totally fascinated by the smells and the colors, thinking ‘Wow, this is what a real artist does, I want to be a real artist!’ He tried teaching me to paint with aquarelle, in a specific technique which I found very rigid. I didn’t understand why I had to paint in his way. I found it very hard, but I also enjoyed the privilege that he was giving me.”
Most kids enjoy making cards for birthdays and special occasions and they are always really sweet with glued on deformed hearts and misspelled declarations of love. I can’t recall ever having seen a child covering a Mother’s Day card in a crayon colored square grid, but I didn’t go to daycare with Edry. For Mothers Day, when she was three, the daycare provided the kids with a square sheet of paper mounted on a wooden frame. Edry started drawing circles and thought it looked really nice, but decided to add a grid and at this point there was no return. The three year old had to keep going, exploring and pushing the limits until the point where the whole white square sheet of paper was full of crayon colors. Smiling at the memory, Edry said “I think that is my earliest recollection of ruining a painting; of over-painting“.
By recommendation of the painter, Edry’s parents bought Windsor and Newton watercolors and the specified brushes for their four year old daughter. One year later it was time for the family to move to London and in their new house, a little painting cove was built inside one of the wardrobes. Whenever the five year old decided to paint with her high quality materials, she would open the door of the wardrobe, sit down and paint. On occasion the little artist would be critical of her creation and throw it in the bin, but it was always rescued by her father.
The most fundamental requirement to achieve success in any field must be to have a limitless interest, a sincere passion for the subject, unless the ultimate goal is financial gain. One of Edry’s pre-school teachers was studying psychology and one day she conducted an experiment on the children. She gave them all a lump of clay and recorded the amount of time they were playing with it. Later on, Edry’s mother was told that everyone abandoned the lump of clay within 2-5 minutes, except for her daughter, who spent half an hour battling with this lump, sculpting it and molding it with her tiny little hands.
“My parents always recognized this gift that I have and they always made sure I had the room to do it. When we lived in London in our second house, we had this wonderful dining room with wooden paneling all over, including the ceiling and a beautiful fire place. They sacrificed the whole room and made it into my studio. I painted enormous paintings inside“.
Edry’s political engagement became evident one day at the orthodox Jewish school she attended in London. It was a strictly religious school, but it was her only option as a Jewish woman in London and despite not being religious, she was fascinated by the opportunity to get an insight into her culture and identity. Early on Edry was discovered by the art teacher Hinda Golding, who gave her leave from various classes to paint massive scenery billboards for the school play. The artist struggled to find her own identity within the school uniform and uniformity of thought, and decided to shave her head at the age of 14. It was a feminist gesture provoked by the conservative policies of the school, in which the male Morning Prayer went ‘Blessed be He for not making me a woman’, and the women’s version went ‘Blessed be the Lord for making me as he made me, according to his will.’
The girls had to pray every week at a general assembly, segregated from the boys. They stood quiet and still, because they were not allowed to join the men. One day Edry had enough and told the girls ‘Ok, we are going to sing today. Take it after me, I will start and you will follow.’ As the leader of the service announced the name of the prayer she had chosen, she started singing and everyone joined in. Once the girls started singing, the rabbi didn’t know what to do. They were not allowed to hear a woman’s voice, so they had to join in.
“From having this monotonous drilling on with mumblings of speech, it became a full sing along prayer. Everyone was shocked afterwards, wondering what had just happened. I was called as the representative of the girls to speak to the Head of Jewish Studies. He asked me ‘So, what do you want?’ I found myself sitting there negotiating the terms for the entire female congregation. I couldn’t say that I wanted women to be equal members of the prayer, because it was still a conservative school, but what we did achieve was to have an all-female prayer as well, where we could sing aloud and do what we wanted to do.”
At the age of 17 it was time to say goodbye to London and go back to Israel. From painting almost non-stop and selling works, Edry had to lock up her passion and learn how to serve the country. In order to say goodbye to London, she spent an entire month sketching a different favorite location every day. Her father would often accompany her for safety reasons and sometimes her siblings joined in as well. The series was called ‘My kind of London’. One day when Edry was sketching her own house, a person walking by took a liking to the drawing and asked her to come and sketch his house. The trend spread and the commissions started pouring in, but it was time for the family to leave the UK.
Back in Israel everything changed. After a fortnight of basic military training followed by a few weeks of specific training for her unit, Edry became depressed and didn’t understand why. “I had never been depressed before, I just felt completely lost. The meaning of life escaped me entirely. When I finally made the connection, I smuggled some art materials into my army post. It was completely forbidden. I had nothing to paint, other than four walls. I don’t remember if there was even a window. I sat there and sketched my left hand”. However interesting it is to sketch hands, the day comes when you get sick of it. Eventually, Edry gathered the courage to venture outside to sketch the surroundings of the military base, which was situated on the edge of a cliff. The military base, the netting, the atmosphere, the military camouflage and the fishermen were among her subject matters. When it leaked out that Edry was breaking the rules, the commander was very encouraging and gave her permission to use his office as a studio when he was away. Colleagues from the UN were given drawings as a gesture of good will and they still follow Edry’s career.
Noam Edry, Study of my Hand 2000 I and II, pencil on paper, 30 x 42 cm
With regards to her present preoccupations, a series of commissions from Israeli art museums, Edry says “The most important thing to me is to not conform, but to stay true to who I am. What is the point of art if it doesn’t engender social change? How long can an artist be preoccupied only with the inner crevasses of the soul and not be a socially productive human being? I strive now to blur the boundaries of what is art and what is social. I wish it will have some kind of effect beyond the art institution“.
::::ContemporaryTalks.com 20 January 2012
Noam Edry Interview Series 1-3
Part 1 – A constant battle for the freedom of speech in a web of taboos and envy
Part 2 – From sharp-edged politics to an S&M club and back again
“a giant toaster is rushing through town, spitting out burnt slices of bread…. a black rock-shaped object seems to have flown out of the coffin and landed on the side-walk.”
In Berlin artist Christian Moeller’s own words: “I create a picturesque room, by making the invisible visible. My works that appear very dramatic are always also directed to the shady sides and the mental abyss of the human existence, with all their facets: What lies in the secrecy and poses questions to me. They address subjects like destruction, pain, violence, horror and chaos. My worldly wisdom is the agitated one in which you cannot breathe.”
CT took a closer look at some of Christian Moeller’s ball pen drawings. They are all untitled and dimensions are 14,8 x 21 cm and 12 x 29,7 cm. Moeller’s visual language is dominated by vast amounts of confidently directed energy, in painting as well as in drawing. The balanced compositions dictates the eye, entices the mind and upsets the body; like a firm grip around the neck slowly choking you. That which is not spoken of – don’t worry be happy – and perhaps that which cannot be explained, is communicated and experienced via Christian Moeller’s work.
above a spiky lady, in heart patterned PJs and a massive syringe wrapped around her shoulder, is holding a box above somebody’s head. the person is either looked after or abandoned by an angel. black matter is distorting the head of the syringe lady. a bird is frozen in the air with its wings spread out and the angel’s wings are spread out as well. the pattern is repeated in the movement around the box. is the syringe lady an eros(a) delegating emotional burdens? this could be a comment on the concept of love – or a comment on the contradictions in human behavior…
above a giant toaster is rushing through town, spitting out burnt slices of bread. the plug is inserted in the impossible wall and two mechanical arms enter the picture. one mechanical arm is either supplying an open coffin with flowers or depriving it of the same. a black rock-shaped object seems to have flown out of the coffin and ended on the side-walk. abstract horror reality… uncanny… here, the lack of rationality in combination with the dominating mechanics paints an image of a hollow society in which the inhabitants are ruled by systems and accidents.
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above pretty straight forward…
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above coming together in this drawing is a gigantic girl in a heart patterned dress with syringes in her hair (and a flower), a tiny little man and the devil himself. the girl is firmly pointing in two directions and her enormous proportions suggest that she is either a goddess (of addiction and love) or incredibly full of herself. hyyyybris?
above an ordinary suburban spot revealed of its undercurrent energy forces… (ever wondered why you feel funny in certain locations?) subjective or objective; the dark forces of anxiety, horror and pain distorts and interferes with the space and with the viewer. this is physically penetrating and mentally disturbing, yet too strong and powerful to resist.
above spiky lady has grown bigger, darker and… no, she has transformed into a monster with two tired/pleading eyes staring at the viewer. it is raining and two people are staring at the creature. the man is holding a heart balloon, possibly rallying for peace and love along with the lady behind him who is standing in a field of flowers. the monster’s right arm seems to be disintegrating in the rain. poor little monster, its body resembles a tree trunk covered in aim targets and the balloon man, who looks a bit like a nutty professor, is expecting victory.
Daniel, a meta-graffiti artist, lives in a house with over 110 printers, spanning from the 1960s up to today. As Daniel walks down the street, the 2D image is rendered and saved in his memory. He adds new elements and plays around with the reality, visually and conceptually and then checks the power of the image by imagining people’s general reaction to it and if it makes him laugh loudly to himself with a repetitive bassy chuckle, he will create the image digitally and spread it over the Internet via his usual channels. Daniel is a designer and an artist and after all these years of being dependent on printers it seems, according reliable sources, as if his own brain has morphed with the machines in his life. Back in the 60s you were forced to have extensive knowledge of the hardware and software to be able to print and today Contemporary Talks have scheduled an interview on the theme ‘Daniel’s history of printing’.
Daniel lives in Leeds. All around the world people have followed his digital adventures in (or outside?) the world of graffiti. We can hear him talking to his printers as we are banging on the door, being a bit late for the interview… “I am busy, please, there is no time for me to open that bloody door you see, and I have been trying to specify the output parameters… bits & pieces that won’t correlate to….” We didn’t get to do the interview this time.
Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is mostly known for her flower paintings with which she sought to share the beauty she witnessed, through magnification. In a letter to William Milliken, director of the Cleveland Art Museum, she wrote: “I do know that the flower is painted large to convey to you my experience of the flower.” At the age of twelve, O’Keeffe had already decided to become an artist and up to her death at the age of 98, art was her primary language.
Abstraction White Rose, 1927, Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 in, Copyright Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Upon reading Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art in 1914, O’Keeffe experienced a sense of unity with Kandinsky’s belief that an authentic artist is creating art from an “internal necessity” and revealing new ways of understanding the world. Kandinsky, who painted rich abstract art full of color, form and lines, has been credited with painting the first abstract works. O’Keeffe went from abstract towards more representational works in the 1920s, contemplating objects and places mainly in nature and architecture. She painted her emotional/spiritual interpretation of the world which was in her eyes never limited to the mundane level. Although O’Keeffe is generally not considered to be a metaphysical painter, she was aware of the currents of mystical thought in the 1930s through personal contact with the theosophical teachers A.R. Orage and Jean Toomer.
Some art historians believe that O’Keeffe moved away from abstract painting in order to distract the theorists who at the time were interpreting her work from a Freudian perspective. O’Keeffe never admitted to painting female genitalia, but rather revealing vital parallels between animate and highly sensual forces in nature and humans.
To achieve the intense, soft and sensual shapes, O’Keeffe preferred dense canvas fabric with a close, fine grain, which she primed carefully on both sides with a special primer. Despite the fact that O’Keeffe stubbornly stated that she was painting forces in nature and humans, which are not in any way restricted to or only inherited by the female sex, she was celebrated by feminists in the 1970s. O’Keeffe rejected their celebration and refused to cooperate with the feminists, because she found that they didn’t understand her work.
Untitled (City Night), 1970s, Oil on canvas, 83 x 47 ¾ in, Copyright Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
In 1925, O’Keeffe moved into a two-roomed suite on the 28th floor of the Sheraton Hotel with her husband, photographer and modern art promoter Stieglitz. They were among the first to live above the roofs of Manhattan and the impressive view inspired O’Keeffe to paint the cityscape. Her male colleagues advised her not to venture into architecture, but the opposition did not discourage O’Keeffe. Despite the sharp edges and right angles, her approach to painting did not change; what we see in these paintings is not a representation of reality, but an emotional response to the spectacular view outside her windows. She said “One can’t paint New York as it is, but rather as it is felt.”
Cow’s skull with Calico Roses, 1932, Oil on canvas, 91.2 x 61 cm, Copyright Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
In the summer of 1917 O’Keeffe discovered New Mexico’s dramatic open spaces with desert landscape and intense light and she wrote to her husband “…it is not a country of light on things. It is a country of things in light…” When she experienced difficulties in her marriage 1929, New Mexico was the place which allowed her to distance herself from all aspects of the big city. The landscapes of New Mexico presented a challenge to the painter, who took on the challenge with great curiosity. From 1929 and onwards, O’Keeffe would regularly spend a part of the year in New Mexico, until finally settling down in her first house, Rancho de los Burros, in 1940.
On her desert walks, O’Keeffe picked up sea shells, rocks, and skulls, pieces of wood and sun-bleached bones and took them home. When the desert trophies started appearing on her canvases, the critics drew parallels to death and resurrection, but for the artist the remnants of deceased animals revealed something else. In her own words: “The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keenly alive… even tho’ it is vast and empty and untouchable – and knows no kindness with all its beauty.” O’Keeffe painted close-ups of other objects in the desert, such as rocks, trees, cliffs and mountains, for more than four decades.
Early Spring Trees Above Irrigation Ditch, Abiquiu, 1950, Oil on canvas, 30 x 26 in, Copyright Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
Untitled (Tree), 1940s/1950s, Graphite on paper, 10 ¼ x 8 in, Copyright Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
From the 1950s to the 1970s, O’Keeffe traveled around the world, visiting Europe, India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the Far East. The view from the airplane inspired her last two major series, Aerial Views of Rivers and Sky Above Clouds. These works were perhaps O’Keeffe’s most quiet, light and meditative works. The subject matter called for huge canvases and the fourth and final work in the Sky Above Clouds series was over 7 meters wide and almost 2.5 meters high. The painter who was 77 years old had to convert the double garage into a second studio, in which she worked from 6 am to 9 pm to finish the picture before winter arrived. The last trip went to the Pacific coast of Costa Rica in 1983 at the age of 96.
The Brooklyn Museum in New York staged the first retrospective of O’Keeffe’s work in 1927 and throughout her career O’Keeffe received recognition in numerous ways. On January 10, 1977, President Gerald R. Ford presented O’Keeffe with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor awarded to American citizens. Although she experienced physical complications in her mid 80s, O’Keeffe was able to create new artworks with the help of her assistant, confidante, pottery instructor and business manager Juan Hamilton. In her late 90s, O’Keeffe became increasingly frail and died in Santa Fe at the age of 89.
Sky Above Clouds I, 1963, Oil on canvas, 36 x 48 in, Copyright Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
References
Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, ”Georgia O’Keeffe, Flowers in the Desert” (Taschen Basic Art Series) by Britta Benke, “Ansel Adams and Georgia O’Keeffe: On the intangible in art and nature” by A Hammond, “Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986)” by Lisa Messinger (www.metmuseum.org), Wikipedia.org
© Jeffrey Silverthorne, From Boystown, The Perfume of Desire
“The land along the Texas-Mexico border, a borderland, is a place for a psychological or physical passage/transgression.
A Boystown is a group of bars or clubs that gringos and some Mexicans go to for entertainment, and or to have sex with a prostitute, usually a woman, sometimes a female impersonator. I did not see an openly gay or lesbian club, though I saw gays and lesbians. Boystowns are located on the Mexican side of the border, and traditionally are physically and medically much safer than having sex with a prostitute working on the US side.
To understand a Boystown it is necessary to appreciate that in the borderland there are a number of divides; geographic, economic, religious and cultural. In a maquilladoro, a factory on the Mexican side of the border often owned by an international business, a woman might earn eight dollars a day. Working as a prostitute she will earn $40 to $120 for thirty to forty five minutes. The client usually pays $10 to $20 to the club for the rental of the room. Two clients a night seems to be average. For the prostitute there is a performance in doing her job well and conforming to the expectations of the customer. In some clubs if the client does not have an orgasm he can demand his money back for services not successfully rendered. His payment will be refunded.
I began my Boystown work in Nuevo Laredo, and it was there, in various clubs, and in Ciudad Acuna that I made most of these pictures. My motivations for photographing are both specific and vague, honorable and defenseless. On a simplistic and juvenile level, a Boystown is a celebration of life, a candy store of flesh, with any psychological or medical consequences deferred. On an adult level, Boystown is a direct observation of a spiritual poverty and economic failure that both countries and cultures share.
Jeffrey Silverthorne”
(http://agencevu.eu/stories/index.php?id=787&p=213)
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Jeffrey Silverthorne Interview Series
Part 2 – Desire, Struggle and Confusion
6th September 2011
Live interview with Jeffrey Silverthorne at Daniel Blau London
During exhibition Haunting the Chapel – Photography and Dissolution
© Jeffrey Silverthorne, From Boystown, The Perfume of Desire
What was your initial attraction towards the Texas-Mexico border?
I started going there with an older student and I didn’t even know that Boystowns existed; it was suggested to us by a taxi-driver. We were new to the territory and started walking around photographing. Later on the government gave me a grant to photograph prostitution in Mexico. Rather than commenting on the degree of humiliation, I was curious about the energy and the social friction. I was also spending time with the border patrol, who were tracking people and hunting for illegals. The Boystown series consists of many photos from the border control, more than the monograph is suggesting. I remember one of the agents saying: ‘These people leave their homes, travel for long distances with no money, risk their life crossing the river, because they can’t swim, to take jobs in places where people in the USA will not work and they send most of the money back home; and we call them lazy?’
The portrait German Man, 1994, is one of my personal favorites; it is a sort of anti-portrait, in the sense that it is portraying the photographer more so than the German Man himself. This is where you are so unique; a, because you chose to go ahead and take that picture with his piercing eyes looking back at you, where most of us would’ve decided that it was ‘wrong’ to do so and b, because something about you seems to encourage people to be themselves; to not shy away from what they are feeling, despite the intrusive lens of your camera. Did you have many negatives of the German Man?
The photographer Peter Hujar, who made lots of wonderful pictures, used to work as a commercial photographer for the business magazine Fords. One time, I assume that this was in the early eighties, he went out take the portraits of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, and during the break Cage sat down on a chair and fell asleep. I said to Peter ‘Did you photograph him?’ Peter looked at me as if I had said ‘You have just grown three extra penises.’ He said: ‘No, I couldn’t do that. I didn’t know him.’ It is interesting how different photographers respond to a situation. With the German Man I think I shot a roll of 35 and some of his wife. The two of them were standing there as if thinking ‘What am I doing here?’ and he was very keen on presenting himself. It was sort of a question of me being still and waiting to let them settle in to their presentation.
©Jeffrey Silverthorne German Man,1994
To me, with my vivid imagination, it looks like you were passing by and he happened to sit there so you asked him ‘May I take your picture?’ He looks at you as if wondering why on earth you would want to do that and the question resides within the image.
Mmm, but that is not what happened at all. I took the chair out of the kitchen to the backyard and said: ‘Sit here, let’s see how that works.’ But imagination is a wonderful thing. It is like photography, it tells the truth and it doesn’t, because of the information add by the viewer.
The photograph Coney Island, July 4, shot in 1990, is included in your book Directions for Leaving. It was taken on Independence Day and it is striking how unreal this ordinary photograph of an ordinary woman seems in comparison to the rest of the book.
It is accurate what you say. In the book it is one of its kind, but I have made many pictures with a similar flavor. Years ago, when I was an undergraduate somewhere around 1967, I was trying out street photography. I really enjoyed photographing relaxed people on holiday and Independence Day gives people an extra excuse to go to Coney Island just to enjoy themselves. I realized at an early stage that street photography simply wasn’t one of my strengths. However, Susanna and the Elders expresses a similar kind of stillness.
You have been teaching at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island since 2002, becoming a full Professor in 2011. What methods are you teaching your students to guide them toward, I quote, “to convey the contradictory natures of making things”? (Quote from University website)
It is an interesting place to teach, but teaching photography is both simple and impossible. In the eighties I was teaching at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. At that time I was in frequent contact with the photographer Robert Frank and in one of our phone conversations I told him about one of my students. This young man’s work was sort of mediocre, but he told me about his father who was making weird and kinky films in his garden. I said to him: ‘That sounds great! Why don’t you bring them in and we will show them in class?’ I was discussing with Frank about how the kid brought in this borrowed courage into his own work. I think that people who are starting often need to borrow courage from some place, to be able to understand that they can do that and to start experimenting on their own. What is so great with photography is that on a 35mm roll of film you have 36 opportunities to fail; 36 opportunities to try something that you think you can’t do.
©Jeffrey Silverthorne Susanna and The Elders, 2004
The two Elders, from the Hebrew Bible ‘Book of Daniel’, tried to force young beautiful Susanna into sexual intercourse. In your take on ‘Susanna and the Elders’ in 2004, we see a color photography with you laying down in a sort of tub dressed in drapery and a young woman pouring water over you from a watering can. It would be interesting to know why you have given Susanna the dominating position, since she is originally the one who is struggling against the dominating elders.
Mythology and religion are very potent influences on the culture that I live in. I was interested in getting the literal content matter dealing with the subject matter. I am wondering where some of the behaviors and body language come from and how images are constructed. That is some of the reasons to why I enjoy looking at Giotto and artists both before and after. I don’t think I would begin with Jeff Wall, and neither does Jeff Wall, there is a long range of references. To tap into what some of the positions meant socially, I wanted to take that and use it in these culture stories. I have been interested in working with these motivations or this impetus and putting it into some kind of frame work that momentarily makes sense to me.
In Susanna and the Elders there is a motivation from the Bible story, but I don’t feel that I have to follow it. I use the parts that I am interested in and make up other pieces. With the shutter in my hand, I am giving her permission to do my will. Water is both cleansing, used to ‘get the Devil out of people’, and used as a form of torture and killing. She is pouring it out of a watering-can; I get to be her garden. On a pedestal you have a piece of wood, which has been neatly cut; I am sure it is not a phallic symbol. It is some of this play that I was curious about.
One year later, you created the work ‘Betrayal, Susanna and the Elders’ where we see the betrayed middle-age woman curled up in bed staring into a void, with the man standing by the side of the bed fully dressed and we can only see the male figure from the shoulders down to the knees. With your attraction towards the mundane and how one persons’ Mon-Fri appears extravagant to others; is this your way of suggesting a new sort of every-day mythology with a narrative closer to contemporary household-complications?
©Jeffrey Silverthorne Betrayal, Susanna and The Elders, 2005
There is the idea of the bathing with stones and a sponge, as opposed to water. I responded to Rembrandt’s paintings Bathsheba and Susanna and the Elders much more strongly than others from the same time period. What the Biblical story offered the painters of that time was a justifiable way to paint naked women. What that offered the client was a justifiable way to have a picture of a naked woman in their house. We look at the figures of Rembrandt’s Bathsheba and Susanna today and their physical features correspond to the ideals of that time. So, it’s not just a rendering of a Biblical story, it also ties to the culture of beauty of that time. Susanna and The Elders was motivated as much by Harold Pinter. In one his writings he is talking about the making of a theater play which begins with one character on stage. As the second actor/actress enters the stage, the totality of the energy is shifted and the viewer is no longer feeding off the energy of that one person. There is also this impenetrable distance between the two of them that I was interested in and a lot of my work since the morgue work deals with not getting what you think you want.
In 2006, in the photograph ‘Staircase’ we see you naked touching a naked young woman with curling pins in a staircase. The same year you also shot an image of young ‘Lauren’ in the bathroom fiddling with her curl pins dressed in panties. These photographs are serene, yet problematic. In what way are these images communicating age and desire?
It is like a defeat of sexuality. It comments on what Kafka said, that many of those things you think you were going to do, many of those things you want to do; they are not going to happen. I was interested in that struggle.
Are we likely to find more mythological references in your work in the future?
I am sure there will be, but I am not working on anything directly.
Since you have begun to take part in front of the camera, it has sometimes been with the help of altered mythological stories, scenographic design, facial paint etc. Has it been necessary for you to do this in order to create a distance from yourself or is it unrelated to your participation?
It is to step into the world of an actor and author, and not to disguise who I am. Although it is difficult to interfere, I am willing to do it. I could probably find some old person to photograph, but I don’t think they would have the mental concentration that I am looking for. Certainly the self-portrait of the artist at work is not a new theme. Judith Leyster painted a wonderful portrait in 1609, where she is looking out at the viewer, whilst painting a fiddler. Max Beckmann did a wonderful self-portrait of himself in a tuxedo (Self-Portrait in Tuxedo, 1927), presenting himself as an author and a participant of a community. I find that positioning interesting and sometimes confusing.
©Jeffrey Silverthorne Susan with a light bulb, 2006
Did you ever have an idea that was too controversial to execute?
Honestly, no. I was in Seville last year and I met some wonderful people who took me to a bullfight. I have seen bullfights before, but this time I was there photographing. I made some pictures which I think verge on a kind of ideal, which is the tourist post card and something that goes further into both the visual history and the culture specific to Seville, in my understanding. I am not Spanish, I am not trying to experience the world through Spanish eyes and I don’t understand their need to kill bulls, but they do have that need. In some versions of Peruvian bullfighting, they take an Andean Condor and they cut the back of the bull and they sew the condor into bull, so the bull comes out into the bullring with a bird on it and the bird pecks out the bull’s eyes while the matador fights it. I don’t know what to say other than that it is fucked. At the bullfight I came to think about blood, bodies, Diego Velàzquez, sacrifice, rituals, transgression, transformation and torture, while watching the banderilla men doing their dance. And then, linking all this back to modern life, I was thinking of women’s menstrual cycle and some of the taboos and sacrifices and of the idea of blood as transformation and I thought ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be neat to photograph menstrual cycles?’, but I haven’t gotten too far on that project yet.
Is it actually too controversial?
No, it is just bothersome. There is a crudity, I think, when you go out to make pictures. You take advantage of people. You don’t need to be mean about it, but you definitely impose yourself. None of my models would lie back like that, people don’t do that.
Jeffrey Silverthorne is currently exhibiting at Daniel Blau in London (www.danielblau.com) and Galerie VU in Paris (www.galerievu.com)
Click to read Part 1 – “I am speaking through hundreds of tongues”
Part 1 – “I am speaking through hundreds of tongues”
6th September 2011
Live interview with Jeffrey Silverthorne at Daniel Blau London
During exhibition Haunting the Chapel – Photography and Dissolution
Introduction by Brad Feuerhelm, Gallery Director
Brad Feuerhelm: I’d like to introduce tonight a man who, for me personally, means a lot to have in the room. I came across Jeff’s work when I was investigating in my early days of photography and the image I ran into first was Woman who died in her sleep from The Morgue Series in 1972. For me it was quite immediate when I found this image, because you have arguably got some of the principal interests of surrealism, but I don’t think that was an intention, and the death of the image combined in one in such a powerful manifestation. The only time I have seen something that even hints at this image later on, was a work by a Mexican photographer named Enrique Metinides titled Adela Legeratta Rivas, struck by a Datsun, 1979. It depicts a beautiful blonde who has been hit by a car. Her body was flung towards a lamp post which her upper body ended up resting on and there is a man in the background in the process of covering her with a jacket.
©Jeffrey Silverthorne – Woman who died in her sleep, 1972
When I came across this uncomfortable beauty absorbed in death it was a game-changer for me personally and I started investigating photography. Not morgue photography per se, although there is history of that as well, but the image really stayed with me and I was lucky enough through the more recent years to strike up a correspondence with Jeff. We finally met a couple of years ago and it is hard to not get along with Jeff, he is such a likeable, lovely character. It was so interesting to meet him, because my preconceptions of who he might be and how he might act and behave were really up in the air – Jeff is probably the nicest guy I have met to this day. That is a bit reaching and wonderful, but I am very happy to have him here tonight for a conversational interview with Elin Henriksdotter, who runs a site called ContemporaryTalks.com, where she covers at length artists and does interviews quite nicely packaged. I definitely think you should all take a look at that.
What physically works for me with these images in the show is this idea of chemical dissolve in these unique prints. You can’t duplicate this chemical burn and it adds an overall feeling in particular which has a sort of double manifest of the idea of dissolve, whether it be of death or materially. What I would like to lead into, is if you (Jeffrey) can enlighten us a bit, quickly, about the process that you used to achieve the physical state of this print and with that initial question I will surrender to Elin.
©Jeffrey Silverthorne, currently on view at Daniel Blau London
Jeffrey Silverthorne: The process sets off with misjudgment or incorrect evaluation of how long the enlarging paper should be exposed, so if it is coming too quickly or not coming up, then I usually take it out of the developer, put it face down on some surface the darkroom could accommodate, like the floor, and I just let it stay there for a couple of months. In that sense, very similar to what Michael Grieve was discussing earlier, you don’t know what you are going to get. It has that element of chance.
So after you have developed the prints you throw them on the ground and the ambient light that travels through your darkroom effects the quality of the print and then you presumably redevelop the print a few months later?
It tends to be from two weeks to a month, or a month and a half.
Elin: I would like to talk about your Morgue Series. I remember reading a very strong comment from a woman, thanking you for the morgue series which had helped her to overcome the death of her husband, who was lost in the Vietnam War. And it is just such an amazing, important and life-changing experience that you led this woman towards. How did this happen?
This happened at a conference in California in a very pleasant environment with ideal California weather. I was walking back to the cabin where I was staying with a friend and this skinny little woman comes up and asks if I am Jeffrey Silverthorne. Usually when I am asked that question there is a problem that is about to come up, and I thought “Oh, shit. What have I done now? But then, I didn’t do it, whatever it was.” But I said “Yes” and she replied “I want to thank you for making the morgue pictures. I saw them at the San Francisco Art Institute and my husband had been reported missing in Vietnam. For many years I was always waiting for him to come back, but after I saw your pictures, I realized he wasn’t coming back. That helped me to bury him.”
How did you feel at that moment?
Well, I am not always that empathetic, so I thought “Oh, good. I didn’t do anything wrong.” I was happy that she had found that, I was much more used to people having an alternative response, such as “Why the hell did you make those pictures and who do you think you are?” It was good for her.
Was there was also an issue of someone wanting to burn down your house?
They didn’t say that, but in 1973, when the pictures were first shown at the Witkin’s gallery in New York City, I was invited to do a talk Amhurst College in Massachusetts, which is liberal, free-thinking and bla bla bla. The photography teacher, who invited me to do the talk, started asking me questions after my presentation, “Who do you think you are to take these pictures and to invade people’s lives?” I wasn’t ready for it at that point, so that certainly took me by surprise.
Did this result in you being contacted by the government regarding your images?
No, we have 20-30 years in between. It is a strong content matter, it is a strong topic. I think that the culture of most people in the United States like things to be happy. We invented Disneyland, you didn’t – we like these nice things. But life is not a neat package, it is bloody, it is messy, being alive is uncertain and those are certain characteristics that really attract me. It is at those points where things meet and unexpected things happen, where I feel have an energy of uncertainty, a messyness, that birth can happen. I am not trying to be deep or suggest a metaphorical existentialist relationship here, it is just that things need to happen and when you let them happen (if you’re always in control, then what is going to happen?) then you get the smallest part of your imagination. If you want something different to happen you can’t keep applying the same rules.
You are saying you are not very emotional, but when you were there doing the Morgue Series, how did it effect you personally? Was it a difficult thing to do or where you more practical and thought “Ok, this is a dead body and now I am going to take a picture.”?
I think what I said is that I was not very empathetic. It is not that I didn’t care about her, we actually became friends, but the morgue was a very emotional place for me. It would be very difficult to not respond to these things, these entities, which surely before were living and often in good health and died in an accident or suicide and certainly sometimes of old age. But the bodies that had come to the morgue were the ones of people who in essence weren’t supposed to die.
The morgue happened for me when the Vietnam War ended, a war which I saw as an obscenity. We were still watching stuff on television and listening to things like “We got 43 and a half of them and only two and a half of us!” That’s weird, to watch dinner while you’re watching people being blown away. I was fortunate to get out of the draft. The whole thing didn’t make sense to me and in 1972, when I decided to make the morgue pictures, it was a different world and Rhode Island was a small place. I went up to the Attorney General, who was probably the only honest politician around at the time, and told him about what I was interested in. His office was across the street from where I went to school, which at that point still had a good reputation, and we talked for an hour. Finally he said “I don’t see any problem with what you propose. We are not the best department, but we don’t have anything to hide.” There was a little bit of delay in terms of formal letters, but then I was given permission over the telephone. His secretary shouted to him “It’s a photographer guy; he wants to know if he can go to the morgue?” And that was it!
You also went to some people’s homes?
Yes, there were pick-ups. Since I had clearance the police let me in.
You mentioned that the Vietnam War was an obscenity to you. We have plenty of wars going on now and I wonder, do ever feel an urge to respond to them through your photography?
It is a natural part of life. I think that I sometimes respond to them, but not in content matter. The response might work out through Susanna and the Elders and The Bullfights or another project. I don’t feel any kind of obligations or an urgency to go to that content matter again. It is more interesting for me at this point to deal with the subject without that specific content.
©Jeffrey Silverthorne
In our previous conversation you were telling me about your productive years between 1971-1974, when you were photographing in the morgue, in massage parlors on 8th Avenue, in the slaughterhouse, female impersonators and portraits of your children. I wasn’t able to find The Slaughter House series on the Internet. Are they not published?
There are some published. There was one in a show recently that I had at Noorderlicht, but there are also quite a few up at VU, and they took one of the horse pictures in which the horse’s head sort of back, because it’s neck is slit and there is this very nice pool of blood that reflected well with the flash. It was also in a show in Shuttgart in 1995 and in a telephone conversation with the German gallery they suggested that one of my pictures would go on the back of the monograph for the show. I said “Let’s put the horse picture there.” The gallerist, who was British but had lived in Germany for quite a while, stopped talking. There was a pause for about seven seconds and that is a long time in the middle of a conversation. Finally he said “Oh, no. We can’t do that, the Germans love their horses.” I also did some photography in a pig slaughter house, which was much more controlled.
© Jeffrey Silverthorne – Demented Billy
From looking at your work, I got the idea that you are the sort of person who goes on spontaneous trips to unknown destinations.
That’s not me. I go to a place and try to open up and not make the same picture I have made before. I try to listen to people, see what they are doing, watch them, pretend to be nice, you know. And if you ask, it is amazing what people will offer. If you don’t ask, most of the time people won’t offer. So it all depends on how you ask and how you present yourself as well. I don’t mean that I con people, but prior to Internet people were in general much more open to talking and engaging in conversations and being photographed.
Are people paranoid?
I don’t think they are paranoid, only much more guarded. It is not that I can make them relax, but I express my sincere desire to work with them and they either respond or don’t.
©Jeffrey Silverthorne – Annunciation, 2006
Your photography is always unconvential; you clearly always go your own way, and in 2004 your work took an abrupt turn. It takes a lot of courage for a photographer in your position to suddenly decide to a, position yourself in front of the camera and b, move from black and white to color, sometimes with high a high level of saturation and one single light bulb as your source of light.
Where do you get this strength from; what has been your motivation for almost half a century?
I think that curiosity and some sort of wonder is very difficult to maintain and I don’t know, maybe because I took vitamins when I was a kid. Maybe because things don’t make sense to me most of the time, maybe because sometimes when I am really interested in something I want to make it a little more permanent, so that I can flick through a contact sheet and say “Oh, yeah, I remember this and I remember that.” I have recently been looking back at the last 40 years of work, trying to find some images to re-print and I come across pictures that I find much more interesting. I guess I look for things that I find really neat or really weird. Edward Curtis talked about the shadow catchers, and that is kind of what I do, visually. I dump my thoughts into it and then can I forget about it and move on to the next situation maybe a little more fresh.
In regards to your recent body of work, I want to reconnect to something that Michael Grieve said earlier, about the attitude towards the viewers and the exhibition medium. I don’t find an element of “This is going to look so cool at the exhibition” or “People will love it and they are going to buy it”, you haven’t compromised, I think. It is just such an authentic body of works and to me quite obvious that you never had that voice in your head.
I always make pictures and I don’t consider the viewer, at all. While I am editing I am driven by the question “Was this getting what I want?” “Was this getting what I am interested in?” Somewhere down the line, hopefully it is distant, I wonder “Gee! Maybe there is a sucker out there that would buy this stuff?” And then I send it off, or don’t. Preferably I let it wait a couple of years and see if it still has resonance. So you make things and you let go of some controls and it really is a kind of addiction of a microsecond. Although, for a while I made long exposures so I got more fulfillment. There is a thrill there.
©Jeffrey Silverthorne – Making an offer, Series Silent Fires, 1982-1984, 2006
In an interview in connection with your exhibition at The BankRI Galleries in 2010 you mentioned the following: “What I am most interested in photographing are things that people feel strongly to do, whether they are socially acceptable or not, almost as if the thing had taken over the person and yet was an integral part of the person.” How does this relate to your own practice?
Most of the time I try to be fairly reasonable about making pictures and there have been some boundaries that have been suggested by people who I care about; they don’t want me to do anything too weird. I believe that I want to explore a wide range of things that I find curious and that I think are genuine and I have a great deal of difficulty with the word and the concept of authenticity, because I think that we are very socially constructed animals and we do these things and they seem genuine, because millions and millions of other people are doing the same thing. I do however believe that there is an authenticity to doing something that you really have to do. You really need to do this and you are putting at risk something. Now, that doesn’t mean you should do it and it certainly doesn’t mean it is going to be good, but I think that when you are doing that, and you are a little more savvy to ways things have been constructed; how it might construct a design to ultimately come to a composition, that I am speaking through many tongues. It is not just a fourth tongue, there are hundreds of tongues and I think that as a maker you try to engage a lot of these tongues so that the image isn’t stuck in one moment. So that it is both in the time and out of the time.
Now, whether this adds to or allows for the thing to last, who the hell knows, at that moment. Did Giotto really think people would still be paying attention to the Scrovegni Chapel after all these years? I don’t know, actually I don’t care, but I am glad that he made things and that people have preserved much of it to be able to look at the hands and how the hand gestures are used, as a part of the social history, as part of the social communication, because then I can steal from it and I can employ some of those devices. I think that there is a realness to the curiosity, to the desire to see something and the desire to make something. Then the work comes to be in a language that I feel uses as much as I can give to it. Whether you respond to it, that is out of my hands.
© 2009 Le photoblog de Renaud Monfourny
Jeffrey Silverthorne is currently exhibiting at Daniel Blau in London (www.danielblau.com) and Galerie VU in Paris (www.galerievu.com)
Click to read Part 2 – Desire, Struggle and Confusion
Cosmic travels at Pure Evil gallery
We leave ordinary life outside as we enter Pure Evil gallery for the DJ Food exhibition on this fine Thursday evening in an increasingly cold and miserable London. DJ Food’s The Search Engine has finally been released on Ninja Tune and this exhibition is showcasing sound, visuals and fine art connected to the close-to one hour of revelation of sonic pleasure. On the ground floor, the crowd is lounging around, sipping beer, networking and loosing themselves in the intricate, mind-numbing and enticing art of Henry Flint, comic book illustrator of 2000AD as well as freestyling artist. A mixed flavor of unstoppable creative flows come together at this show at Pure Evil gallery, which can be explained by the owner’s, Charles ‘Pure Evil’ Uzzell-Edwards, love for all things creative. In addition to Henry Flint’s mind tripping artworks, DJ Food’s psychedelic audiovisual installation and the collaboration between the two, Will Cooper-Mitchell’s hot photographs of DJ Food in a replica astronaut suit are on display. All this is featured in a limited comic-sized 48-page CD booklet for sale at the gallery.
DJ Food, who has been a fan and a collector of Henry Flint’s art/illustrations for years, writes on his blog that Henry Flint’s work was the main source of inspiration for this exhibition. We can read how their collaboration begun on NinaTune.net: “The images were exactly what he [DJ Food] had been looking for as the starting point for the artwork on a series of EPs he was making, later to form an album on Ninja Tune. Henry sent a stack of images for Kev [DJ Food] to pick from and gave him permission to color them for the artwork, which were issued as foldout poster covers on three 12″ EPs.”
I know what is hiding in the basement and make my way down into the audiovisual world of DJ Food aka Strictly Kev. The powerful installation is pulsating in our vision and in our ears, inviting us to jump on that space train with loose teasing rhythms in curious sonic collages. Do I need to mention that the ambiance is hypnotic? The visuals contain details of molecular worlds of unknown life forms and entrancing mandalas are flying over our faces like an extra layer of skin. It strikes me that we are wrapped up in an angular momentum here; the force vibrates between the layers, smoothly merged together in time and the extended body of this mass affects us in some way as we sip our Peroni, but I am not sure how. DJ Food’s sonic art is not disturbing as Gordon Mumma’s The Dresden Interleaf 13 February 1945 from 1965, the notorious noise piece performed on the twentieth anniversary of the firestorm bombing of Dresden, because rather than reacting politically to a world in disorder, Strictly Kev is reacting poetically to the cosmos and the aim of his music is to take us out of the material realm and further. If this music, this sonic art, had been played to Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, who was head of the Royal Air Force during the bombings of Dresden in 1945, he would have resigned and enrolled for NACA (early NASA).
“I began to see sounds, to feel sounds, like waves against my skin [...] Have you ever touch a sound? Ever seen thunder?” From In Orbit Every Monday on The Search Engine
As described by Robert Lamb, one of Discovery News’ contributors, DJ Food has been “dropping cosmic noise, robotic bleeps and alien hip-hop on Solid Steel Radio Show listeners for 17 years”. Coldcut and PC of the Cinematic Orchestra were originally included under the banner ‘DJ Food’, which is now synonymous to Ninja Tune artist Strictly Kev. “DJ Food?” The name puts a smile on people’s faces, but honestly, I want to eat his recent Ninja Tune release The Search Engine. He is still an ambassador of sonically enhanced poetry and track 5 Sentinel (Shadow Guard) rests on the meanest bass line since Squarepusher’s Tetra-Sync. If there is one element that is missing in the show in order to reflect the essence of DJ Food, it is the lyrical. A spoken word performance would be an interesting addition to the next exhibition.
DJ Food asked Henry Flint to draw “A cosmonaut, hanging in space, strapped into an unfeasibly large backpack, the kind you could only wear in zero gravity”
A wide range of art works by Henry Flint is on display and he certainly knows how to use that ink. His art has a life of its own. As an artist, his subject matters evolve around a universe with magnificent potential, mystery and demons lurking in the corners of impossible buildings and perplexing situations; monstrous misfits and unseen patterns pour out of the subconscious mind of an artist who could have been an architect was it not that he had too good ideas. There is dazzling movement, detail, diversity and complexity; all of which comes beautifully together within a sheet of paper. I am almost upset that I haven’t come across his work earlier, but I now have the accompanying publication BROADCAST – The TV Doodles of Henry Flint. This is a compilation of works Flint made while allowing his conscious mind to be distracted by the TV, hence leaving the subconscious in charge.
Many years passed since DJ Food delivered a full length to the world and as I look back on the release of Kaleidoscope in 2000, I remember many nights with The Crow on repeat. In my industrial hometown in Sweden, Västerås, we were listening to the album with awe while plowing the Internet for useful Cubase VST plugins and VJ softwares, painting on the walls and writing poetry in between. DJ Food has always inspired hyper creativity and it is only to be expected that he manages to put this night together at the Pure Evil gallery, with the help of Pure Evil and his beautiful assistant Molly.
The icing on the cake is when Pure Evil comes downstairs and opens up the door to his old school music studio. He urges us to come over and jam on drum machines and on “I think they call them drum kits. It is what they used in the old days to make a beat.”
Tags: astronaut music, Comic book illustration, contemporary, contemporary art, contemporary art magazine, contemporary art review, DJ art, DJ Food, Drawing, emerging artist London, fine art London, Henry Flint, Interdisciplinary art practice, London art gallery, London exhibition, Ninja Tune, Psychedelic music, Pure Evil, Pure Evil gallery, Show review, space art, Space travel, The Search Engine
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