Bill Hammond | Jingle Jangle Morning, 2007
Passover, 1989. Acrylic and varnish on aluminum, 1200 x 613mm. Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery – Toi o Tamaki.
Shallow Graves, Enderby Island, 1990. Acrylic on aluminum, 550 x 620mm. Private Collection.
Buller’s Table Cloth, 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 1682 x 1675mm. Collection of Auckland Art Gallery - Toi o Tamaki.
Camoflage, 1997. Enamel on hinged panels, dimensions variable. Collection of Peter and Ann Webb.
Zoomorphic Detail, 1998. Acrylic on canvas. Private collection.
Unknown European Artist, 2004. Acrylic on canvas, 2000 x 1200mm. The Stevenson Collection.
Ancient Pitch, 2007. Acrylic on canvas, 1200 x 1800mm. Private Collection, Wellington.
Bill Hammond occupies a unique place in New Zealand art history; he has established a visual language and a painterly technique that are wholly his own. The enormous breadth of material found in his work reveals an artist who is constantly working, always thinking about the next painting and the next direction. His paintings change in mood throughout his career, from the frenetic works of the 1980’s, to the cynical expose of human exploitation of native flora and fauna, the rock surrealism of the 1990’s, and to his later works which increasingly explore mythical realms and reveal a disciplined richness and poetic depth.
A distinctive pictorial language has unfolded over thirty years of practice, tapping into elements of the decorative arts, popular culture, New Zealand history, symbolism, surrealism, Renaissance art and, notably, Ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock printing) and paintings by the fifteenth-century artists Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. It is his interpretation of their significance for his own means, that makes his art so spellbinding.
Hammond’s acute eye for the macabre and the beautiful conflate in his celebrated Buller series of painting. It is these, his signature bird creatures, watching, waiting and poised amid emerald forests, that have led to Hammond often being thought of as the artist of luxurious and intense bird paintings that decorate expensive interiors. Birds feature in creation myths, stories and parables across all cultures, and it is through their depiction that Hammond is able to deliver an analysis of humanity, or in the case of the Buller series, humanity lost. Over more than two decades a nation of – and other shape-shifting creatures – has populated Hammond’s canvas realm. From the maligned birds of the Buller series, to the ominous flock that occupies his zoomorphic paintings of the late 1990’s, the birds rise above us through a world of limbo where, regal and godlike, they remain uncomfortably watchful.
From early beginnings as an art student in Christchurch, Hammond has consistently displayed an oblique wit. His observations of the world around him, and the ever-present influence of music and popular culture, are a constant beat in his practice. Pop, rock, classical, jazz and punk music not only provide endless emotional scenarios but also a way of approaching the act of painting. The ritual of performance in theatre, dance or music, playing the drums or mixing on a sound desk, materialize into staccato paintings. As a practicing musician himself, Hammond’s compositions are, as he once said like an instrumental ‘laid out flat’, replete with choruses and rhythms.
It is well known that Hammond ‘doesn’t do interviews’, that he is a private person who refuses to talk about his work. This presents quite a challenge for any curator or historian charged with the task of unravelling the many threads of his practice, yet it also confronts anyone who approaches his paintings. And this is exactly what he wants: for people just to look, to bring to the paintings their own reflections and to be open to receiving an extraordinary visual experience that has the ability to transport them to other worlds.
- Jennifer Hay
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Bill Hammond | Jingle Jangle Morning
Jennifer Hay : Lawrence Aberhart : Chris Knox : Ron Brownson
Christchurch Art Gallery - Te Puna o Waiwhetu
2007
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Christchurch Art Gallery – Te Puna o Waiwhetu
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Don McCullin
Zanskar, above the Padam Valley, Kashmir.
The elephant festival, Sonepur Mela.
The Kumbh Mela.
Gathering for early morning prayer, Ganduk River.
Herdsmen, Bihar.
Blind beggar with his son in the Muslim district, Kolkata.
Dawn, Kolkata.
Old lady in the House of the Dying.
Saris drying, Sonepur Mela.
Dusk on the Ganges.
Beggar, Sagar Island.
It can’t be easy bearing the title of the world’s greatest war photographer, but that’s only one of the burdens Don McCullin carries around with him. After 20 years of confronting the world with unforgettable images of war, from Congo to Biafra, Beirut, Cambodia, and of course Vietnam, he doesn’t have many alternatives. It all used to be addictive too. By his own admission, McCullin used to be ‘a one-war-a-year man’, but then it grew to two, and then to three, until it had it stop; not because wars stopped, or killing stopped, or inhumanity stopped, but because there came a natural limit to ‘looking at what others can’t bear to see.’
In the 20 years or more that he lived with death, often those of his close friends and colleagues, or diced with death personally but cheated it, McCullin never lost his own humanity, his care for the people, soldiers and victims whom his lenses caught in the most agonising of extremities. He did it through possessing a mixture of qualities, summed up as: ‘the balls of a commando, the cunning of a rat, the eye of an artist, the anger of a man with his eyes open.’ John le Carré has said he would rather watch any amount of TV battle footage than have to leaf through one of McCullin’s albums of human suffering. Visitors to McCullin’s exhibitions have been seen to wander in a flood of tears.
After making his first trip down the Ganges in the company of travel-writer Eric Newby in the mid-sixties, McCullin has returned to the sub-continent again and again, sometimes on harrowing photojournalist assignments, but more often to capture what is to him ‘the most visually exciting place in the world.’ The results; ghostly, film-like accounts of India’s everyday diversity, allow a sense of beauty and dignity to rise above squalor and degradation. Charged with McCullin’s trademark ability to challenge and uplift the viewer, they reveal a style that has graced some of the more unfortunate corners of human existence, one that is at the same time surreal, but nonetheless human.
Today there are no more wars for McCullin. He is content to photograph the Somerset landscape, still-lives, and the victims of other tragedies, such as the Aids sufferers of Africa. He shares his time between the State of New York and the British countryside, with his wife Marilyn Bridges, an American aerial photographer.
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India
Don McCullin
Introduction by Norman Lewis
Jonathan Cape
1999
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Raf Simons: Redux, 2005
Spring-Summer 2003. Consumed. Photographed by Mario Sorrenti. Syling by Panos Yiapanis. Arena Homme Plus no. 18, 2003.
Isolated heroes no.1: Robbie. Photographed by Raf Simons. Antwerp, 2000.
Autumn-Winter 1999-2000 (flag). Photographed by Raymond Jacquemyns. Antwerp 2005.
Robbie. Photographed by Willy Vanderperre. Styling: Oliver Rizzo. Grooming: Peter Philips. Antwerp, 1999.
Autumn-Winter 2003-2004. Collaboration with Peter Saville. Hand-painting on garments executed by Stef Driesen and Antonia Deluca. Cis, Johan, Peter. Photographed by Willy Vanderperre. Hair: Tom Malomgre. Make-up: Peter Philips. Paris, 2003.
Robbie. Photographed by Willy Vanderperre. Styling: Oliver Rizzo. Grooming: Peter Philips. Antwerp, 1999.
Collier Schorr. Base Portraits/Barracks. New York, 2005.
Spring-Summer 2002. Alexander. Photographed by Kurt De Wit. Grooming: Peter Philips. Paris, 2001.
Video still. Spring-Summer 2002.
Raf and me – we are the Nicky brotherhood. Other people might look at out two members only-congregation as just another Nicky Wire (of Manic Street Preachers) fan club, but both of us know the word “Nicky” means so much more, so we don’t care. For the uninitiated, it would take a long, deep plunge into the complete history and output of the Manics to fully understand, so just take it from me that “Nicky” stands for conviction, fervor, pride, defiance and self-belief against ones own lucky or unlucky fate. When Nicky Wire falls to his knees onstage, bass guitar low, his eyes closed, lost in melody and noise, signing along to to the very words he himself wrote, it’s not your typical freeze-framed rock pose. It’s the very white-out of deliverance and intent and melancholia all true art has, or should have. Life the Nicky way is what all of us like to aspire to. Above all, “Nicky” stands for passion. There’s so, so much passion in Raf’s head and heart. He’s a believer – always. Take anyone working in his office or somehow associated with him as an example. He has this ability to see the spark in people, no matter what background or possible shortcomings. and then fan the flame until it becomes a glowing fire. Passion is what drives his work, too. If there’s one thing I wanted to get across with this book, it’s this; put aside, although never erase, the schoolboy, the robot, the goth drop-out, the protester, the nature kid, the space-age casual. They’re only symbols, indicators. What they really convey is pure emotion without any trickery. Raf has proved that, in one big natural swoop and before the commentators can make their seasonal shopping round-up, fashion can indeed say something all-encompassing and essential about masculinity, society, individuality and freedom. Whispering, wondering, hesitant, shouting, jubilant or unafraid, Raf’s voice has always been for real. And I’m glad that the world has been taking note.
In 1991, Nicky Wire changed my life when he and Richey wrote the lyrics to “Motown Junk”. Five years ago, Raf also radically, positively redirected my own route by inviting me wholeheartedly into his world. If it wasn’t for him, I probably would still hide my strange scribblings and paste-and-cuttings in a box under my bed.
If the cover and the spine of this book could have taken more letters and words, this excerpt from Wire’s Manics lyric should have been the full title, because it truthfully sums up the full ten years of Raf Simons:
“It was no surface but all feeling
Maybe at the time it felt like dreaming”
Raf: Nicky and brotherhood.
- Peter De Potter
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Raf Simons: Redux
Raf Simons : Peter De Potter : Maria Luisa Frisa
Fondazione Pitti Discovery
Milan
2005
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The Omega Suites, Lucinda Devlin, 2000
Electric Chair, Greensville Correctional Facility, Jarratt, Virginia, 1991
Final Holding Cell, Greensville Correctional Facility, Jarratt, Virginia, 1991
Executioner’s Room, Greenhaven Correctional Facility, Greenhaven, New York, 1991
Electric Chair, Greenhaven Correctional Facility, Greenhaven, New York, 1991
…we are present at the moment before or after the body twitches it’s last spasm and not when the death rattle is heard. However, once we cease to be seduced by the beauty of the designed formal space, the civilized moral consciousness asserts itself to challenge privileging the esthetic reaction. Slowly, as we begin to understand what we are looking at, we must question whether the unseen action is any less brutal and barbaric because we perceive its instruments with out witnessing it actually taking place.
Some great moral works of art, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist drama Les mains sales, André Cayatte’s film Nous sommes tous des assassins or Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C., in which viewers cannot read the list of the war dead without seeing their own faces mirrored among the names of casualties, are based on forcing our acknowledgment of participation in human tragedy.
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The Omega Suites
Lucinda Devlin
Introduction by Barbara Rose
Steidl
2000
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[N.B. - Although I have had this book for years, I have been reticent to post these images feeling that they are slightly verbose and border on the glorification of death, something that is reasonably threadbare in modern expression(s).
It is an aspiration of ours to strive for a multidisciplinary approach while still advocating subtlety, reduction and process.]
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White Silence: Grahame Sydney’s Antarctica, 2008
Flags denote ‘roadways’ and safe paths across the ice. Red and green flags are a sign of safe passage, black flags mean danger.
A natural monochrome: the dark volcanic stone of Observation Hill meets the sea ice on a cloud-blanketed day.
Pegasus Airfield, on the permanent Barrier ice. The Constellation aircraft crashed on landing years ago, and is slowly being swallowed by the wind-blown snows.
Condition One blizzard at McMurdo, November 2003.
Everyone is a visitor in the Antarctic: no one belongs. One or two secretive lichens aside, there is no life away from the ocean; too far straying from the life support of the sea and all animal life perishes. Nature makes it abundantly plain that this is no place for humankind, and that our presence on the sterile frozen continent is a temporary pass, as unwelcome and inappropriate as on the moon.
Grahame Sydney was born in Dunedin in 1948 and gained his secondary education at King’s High School. Though art classes were not on offer (Sydney learnt his painter’s craft through private classes) there was a Camera Club, and he was introduced to photography under the inspired tuition of the late Reg Graham. While photography remained a satisfying pastime well into Sydney’s adulthood, it took a back seat to the development of his painting. Sydney embarked on a full-time artist’s career in 1974. Working in egg tempera, watercolour and oils, his paintings have been widely exhibited and are held in private and public collections around the world. He also is both etcher and lithographic printmaker.
In November 2003 Sydney flew to Ross Island and, frustrated by attempts to paint in conditions where the brush hardened and exposed fingers threatened frost-bite within seconds, he turned again to the camera. So captivated by this lens-view of a frozen world, he returned in 2006 and took another series of photographs. Exploring a continent that appears at first glance to be devoid of colour, warmth or comfort, each image in fact reveals an extraordinary terrain that is solemn, sparse and poised with a magnificent stillness.
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White Silence: Grahame Sydney’s Antarctica
Introduction by Grahame Sydney
Penguin Group
2008
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New York Death Trip 4, Joshua Smith, 2008
New York Death Trip 4
Joshua Smith
38th Street Publishers
2008
Edition of 1,000
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The Image as Rememberance, Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Myasnoye, 1980
Myasnoye, 1980
Myasnoye, September 1980
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, September 26, 1981
Myasnoye, October 2, 1981
Seated on the railing of a balcony against a backdrop of pale birch trees, a handsome woman, her lips closed, gives a hint of a smile. A young solider, his machine gun slung over his shoulder, stares ahead with an intense melancholy, his face stiffening under his bearskin cap, decorated with the five-pointed star of the Red Army. An old house, it’s logs worn and split by the passage of time, stands alone, immersed in the light, along the line of shadow at the edge of a wood.
These are Andrei Tarkovsky’s most beloved black and white images, the ones crucial to his destiny: his mother Maria Ivanovna, his father, Arseny, his childhood home at Ignatievo. Tarkovsky selected, reproduced, and pasted these and other photographs from his family album into a black diary he carried with him. A visual sequence of his life, a presence from the past that would accompany the director in his preparation and making of the film The Mirror and would stay with him, like a portable flashback that could be replayed again and again in moments of home-sickness throughout his short life, right up to his exile in Italy and his death in Paris on December 29, 1986.
Acceptance of the history of the people and the family of his birth, acknowledgment of the cultural tradition in which he was raised, a profound love of the desire for freedom and the creativity of mankind, made in the image and semblance of God: these are the foundations of Tarkovsky’s art. ‘In all my films,’ he wrote, ‘it seemed to me important to try to establish the links which connect people… those links which connect me with humanity, and all of us with everything that surrounds us. I need to have a sense that I myself am in this world as a successor, that there is nothing accidental about my being here. …I always felt it important to establish that I myself belong to a particular tradition, culture, circle of people or ideas.’*
The vitality of his sense of belonging also comes from accepting, acknowledging and loving the little images of his own genealogy, these humble traces of daily life observed through memory, viewed by remembering. Just as the dream sequence that runs through Ivan’s Childhood, awakens the little orphan to the sacrificial fulfillment of his destiny, so too does The Mirror reflect the decisive moments of the story by literally reconstructing those black and white photographs on the set as backgrounds for some of the scenes.
*Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair, London, 1986
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Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids
Edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte & Andrei Tarkovsky
Introduction by Tonino Guerra
Thames & Hudson
2004
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Yohji Yamamoto
Fine Weave Woollen Dress, Spring Summer 1988 / Loose Coat with Crushed Effect, Autumn Winter 1984 – 1985.
Yohji Yamamoto in Paris, making final revisions to the show for Spring Summer 1991.
New York Catalogue, Autumn Winter 1984 / 1985.
A fitting in progress in Yohji Yamamoto’s workroom in Tokyo.
Evening Gown in Black Gabardine, Spring Summer 1993 / Cutting to the millimetre, rather than the centimetre.
“People wear my clothes to make a statement,” explained Yohji Yamamoto, summing up, in the laconic style we have become familiar with over the last twenty or more years – a contribution to fashion that constitutes an exploration of fashion itself. For this was not the leisured opulence of haute couture, the flashy brilliance of prêt-à-porter, nor even the futuristic vision of the avant-garde. What became clear, gradually but inexorably, as we followed the Japanese designer’s repousal of the great archetypes of fashion, was that his choice of a neutral vocabulary, his adoption of a simplified palette and range, was the power and essential difference of the Yamamoto style. It was an approach which, while taking into account the contribution of Paris couture, and indeed traditional Japanese costume, nevertheless set out quite deliberately to tap new areas of creative potential in the domain of fashion in all its modes and manifestations – a world that had experienced more fresh starts in a single turbulent century than it had in the previous thousand years.
When the first Yamamoto model insinuated itself into the brilliant, structured, over-accessorized world of Paris prêt-à-porter in the eighties, the line was loose-fitting. The garment stood right away from the body it delicately encased, apparently never touching it. Usually thick, opaque and dark in color, it often seemed to be standing up by itself. Of positively medieval severity, it had a second-hand look about it that prompted some to describe it as post-punk (grunge was still light years away). It looked lived-in, as though it had acquired a patina with the passage of time, like those items in our wardrobe that have become special favorites. It reflected that hatred of what is new that is so wonderfully exemplified by a certain sort of English dandy who used to have his boots broken in for him, and got his valet to wear his camel-hair suits for the first couple of years. To Wim Wenders, who made a feature film about him, the designer confided: “My dream is to draw time.”
One thinks of all those oversized capes, unstructured coats, and asymmetric jackets. “Symmetry – the symbol of perfection – is not sufficiently human.” And it is, precisely, to humanity that this master of scissors and fabric looked for his inspiration – to the work clothes worn by hundreds of anonymous figures; for example, those men and women from the German heartland who posed for the photographer August Sander between the wars. To boilersuits, dungarees, overalls, pea jackets. Even the railwayman’s outfit made up of layers – the apotheosis of the tramp who carries the world on his back. A garment that becomes one with the person who wears it, so much a part of him that it is entirely subordinated to the force of his personality. “Whether a season’s fashion is interesting or not does not depend on the designers who created it, but on those who see and buy it.”
Although he would not go so far as to lay claim to the status of artist, in his approach to clothes Yohji Yamamoto shows himself to be exceptionally responsive to contemporary trends – in the same way that couturiers of preceding generations responded to Cubism, say, or the Ballets Russes or Pop Art. Caught up in the delirium of the seventies, Andy Warhol was heard to remark, “When you think about it, department stores are kind of like museums.” (indeed he went so far as to reserve the formula, explaining that he liked Rome because it was a sort of museum, “like Bloomingdale’s.”) Arte Povera went further still, with its refusal to be seduced by smooth surfaces, Pop colors and the consumer society, opting instead for basic elements that had not been transmuted: wood shavings, rags, mud, coal, and so on. In the “roaring eighties,” Yohji Yamamoto would attempt something comparable – one of a small number who tried to break away from a fossilized conception of what clothes were. He did this by disrupting the codes by which clothes made their appeal; by rethinking the glamorous signals sent out by their external appearance; by redefining their relationship with the male or female body; and, ultimately – to near universal incomprehension – by radically reinterpreting the respective contributions of beauty and ugliness, past and future, memory and modernity.
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Black Than Crows / Number (N)ine, HUgE Magazine, December 2006
The romantic ideal of the tortured artiste is always in fashion — even so, the Number (N)ine designer Takahiro Miyashita seems to take special pains to suffer for his craft. When planning the portrait that accompanies this article, he asked that his face be obscured, perhaps fearing that the gigantic frames he wears wouldn’t provide sufficient cover. During our interview, he fielded several questions with enigmatic pronouncements like ‘‘You would have to ask my brain’’ and ‘‘I am a shadow.’’ At times, he simply stared into space, as if submerged in an autistic trance. Thus the sobriquet ‘‘Taka the oyster.’’
Miyashita is part of a relatively new wave of Japanese designers,including Junya Watanabe, Undercover’s Jun Takahashi and Daiki Suzuki of Engineered Garments and Woolrich Woolen Mills, who are obsessed with American style; in Miyashita’s case, his dark side yields clothes of paradoxical luminosity. His fall collection, My Own Private Portland, features updated Northwest classics like plaid shirts, fur-lined trapper hats and nubby, grungy cardigans. In the spring of 2009, his Lonesome Heroes dudes will be sporting a mishmash of brocades and Navajo patterns.
At 16, Miyashita came to the States and fell in love with Americana. While his contemporaries were struggling with algebra and first dates, he was assisting stylists for Japanese magazines like the defunct Check Mate. ‘‘I got expelled from school because I did so many things,’’ he says cryptically, before admitting to having smoked pot. Miyashita spent his days on the streets of Harajuku and Shibuya, the epicenters of Tokyo teenage street style; what little money he had he spent on clothes, which he’d tear apart in order to remake and customize them. Through this process he taught himself how to design and started working with Nepenthes, a label that specialized in American-inspired clothing. Eventually he began traveling regularly to the States for research, focusing on cities like Austin, Tex.; Butte, Mont.; and his favorite, Portland, Ore.
Miyashita wears his pop-culture infatuations on his sleeve — and everywhere else. On a recent afternoon in Paris, he sported old khakis with Birkenstocks, a lumberjack shirt, a Victorian-inspired vest, a dangling fur satchel, an assortment of necklaces and trinkets, a jeweled guitar pin, a large stone ring, a leather cuff, a big plastic watch, a rakish hat and a crumpled cigarette pack worn as a brooch. His shows are set to the tracks of idols like Nirvana and Johnny Cash. He constantly adds to the collection of vintage clothes, records and images that inform his work; ‘‘The Outsiders’’ and ‘‘Rumble Fish’’ are two of his favorite movies, and he’s crazy for Joseph Szabo’s pictures of American teenagers in the ’70s and Slater Bradley’s ‘‘Doppelgänger Trilogy’’ featuring Kurt Cobain.
‘‘What sets us apart from older Japanese designers like Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto is that we are much more influenced by youth culture and, especially, music,’’ says Jun Takahashi, Miyashita’s close friend. He’s right: while their predecessors have traditionally focused on intellectual experiments with texture and shape, these new designers have an innate understanding of global street trends. Miyashita, who not surprisingly loves American punk rock, has formed two bands, the Highstreets and the Ivory. ‘‘I still believe that music can change culture,’’ he says. (The name Number (N)ine refers to the Beatles’ ‘‘Revolution 9.’’) ‘‘I just made a song called ‘Dark Shadow,’ ’’ he says. ‘‘The lyrics say, ‘Please, please, please kill me.” All my work, whether it’s in fashion or music, is about rebellion and not being conventional.’’
He recently traveled to Portland to see Wipers, a favorite band, but says he’d instantly give up music if he had to choose between that and fashion. His men’s line is growing steadily, and he hopes to further develop his women’s range, which at the moment consists only of adapted versions of his men’s collection. ‘‘Without fashion, I would have nothing,’’ he says earnestly. ‘‘It’s my life.’’
It’s the quintessential designer sound bite, but in this case it feels painfully real.
- Armand Limnander
Image / HUgE Magazine
Text / T Magazine
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Debris, Ari Marcopoulos, 2009
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking, talking about his feelings or his ideas of relationships. But when I hear the sound of traffic outside my house, I don’t really have the feeling that anyone is talking. I love the activity of sound. I don’t need sound to talk to me. I love sounds just as they are.
- John Cage
Whether one is at home or traveling, there is constant visual input. An image-maker is asked to make distinctions and decisions on what to extract. Having been involved in this practice for over 30 years, I try and free myself of expectations, even of my own. I’ve looked at graffiti all over the world. I appreciate its noise. I didn’t look for anything in particular; I didn’t look for skill. I just accepted graffitti’s visual noise. For the last three years I’ve captured what had previously passed in front of my eyes as something that was just there, just the everyday. The noise was like sound to me.
…extracts from the constant visual noise we witness, if our eyes are open. I long to make this book endless. …something that just keeps on going: a book-loop.
- Ari Marcopoulos
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Debris
The Ari Marcopoulos Purple Book
A special edition for Purple Fashion Magazine #12
co-published with Studio Zero
2009
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