Jack Shankly, A&R Guy, Record La- Twenty-Eight-Year-Old Saudi-Born Video Director Bel-Owner and Music Blogger, Teen Club Mo Ali Debuted with Lethal B’S “Pow”

FREE VOLUME 8 NUMBER 11 Fresh

DWVL]H"

ODQGLQJLQVWRUHVVRRQ 10 YEARS

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

out on ///++++#'+* (& 19th November

2 #+( ,', *,#'& ', %%#!",+ + *. ++++#'5+ * #+( ,'," #+( ,%(!(* ,* &*$+( #+( ,', *,#'& ',#'," '(*(," *(-',*# + 3%1,,#('4'," 34&#%1%(!(* * !#+, * ,* &*$+'3 4'," %1,,#(' ,/(*$%(!(* ,* &*$+( ('1 (&)-, *', *,#'& ','#*(+( ,(0(0 (0'," (0%(!(+* ,* &*$+( ," #*(+( ,!*(-)( (&)'# +'* -+ -' *%# '+ *(&#*(+( ,( ,/* )%, (*&%(!('2

36FRWW3RPPLHU The platform for individual creative self-expression since 1966. So Cal icon meets So Cal icon as Mr. Cartoon joins the Vans OTW advocates.

The DNA of an original is a special blend of vulcanized rubber. Perfect grip Classic Vans style warmed up for winter: Rata Vulc, SRPLS, SK8 Mid and Raglan and board feel since 1966. for Vans Holiday 2010. 9DQV,QF

CURIOSITY IS REWARDED AT FACEBOOK.COM/TIGERBEERUK

;0.,920*2,+6--;/,09 56;256>5,=,5;:,90,:>0;/(:7,*0(3 /(336>,,57(9;@(;;/,365+65-0,3+:656*;6),90;>(:( 50./;6-+9@0*,)()@A64)0,:)366+(5+:,*9,;/69969*05,4( >0;/+1:,;:-9645(;/(5.>03205:(5+),5;9<*2,9

-69469,7/6;6:(5+;0*2,;:;6<7*6405.,=,5;:=0:0;-(*,)662*64;0.,9),,9<2

05(::6*0(;065>0;/

7/6;6:)@:;,7/(50,:0(5:40;/ WHEN LEVI’S AND VICE DECIDED TO SHOOT REAL PEOPLE—MODELS BEING PRETEND PEOPLE OBVIOUSLY—TO SHOW THE NEW 519 SKINNY BACKSTAGE FIT JEANS FROM LEVI’S, WE DIDN’T WANT TO MO GO DOWN THE OVERUSED GUYS WITH PINK OR GREEN HAIR, PLUGS AND TATS ROUTE. INSTEAD, WE LOOKED AT THE MUSIC INDUSTRY GUYS WE ALI LIKED. AGAIN, BANDS WERE TOO EASY, SO WE HEROES SPOKE TO JACK SHANKLY, A&R GUY, RECORD LA- TWENTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD SAUDI-BORN VIDEO DIRECTOR BEL-OWNER AND MUSIC BLOGGER, TEEN CLUB MO ALI DEBUTED WITH LETHAL B’S “POW”. FOR A WHILE, HE BASICALLY BECAME MR GRIME VIDEO DIRECTOR, SHOOTING PROMOTER SAM KILCOYNE, DJ AND PRODUC- PROMOS FOR THE LIKES OF ROLL DEEP, TINCHY STRYDER, TION PARTNERSHIP JOE AND WILL ASK?, VIDEO SKEPTA, AS WELL AS PLAN B AND A WHOLE BUNCH OF TO FIND OUT MORE LOG ON TO VICESTYLE.COM/LEVIS519 DIRECTOR MO ALI AND THE FLESH & BONE COL- OTHER PEOPLE. THIS YEAR SAW ALI MOVE INTO FEATURE THE FULL SET OF INTERVIEWS CAN BE READ AT VICESTYLE.COM LECTIVE ABOUT THEIR MUSIC STUDIOS. FILM WITH THE RELEASE OF SHANK, HIS FUTURISTIC TALE ABOUT UK GANG VIOLENCE IN 2015.

JACK SAM SHANKLY KILCOYNE LONDONER JACK SHANKLY DOES A LOT OF STUFF. AT JUST 21 HE RUNS TRANSPARENT RECORDS, WORKS AS AN A&R FOR DOMINO, CO-EDITS ALTERED ZONES (PITCHFORK’S MORE WE CAN’T IMAGINE THAT ANY LONDON-BASED MUSIC FAN OUT-THERE SISTER SITE), WRITES FREELANCE FOR NME, DOESN’T KNOW WHO 18-YEAR-OLD SAM KILCOYNE IS. IN AND IS THE AUTHOR OF THE TRANSPARENT MUSIC BLOG, CASE YOU DON’T, HE MADE HIS NAME AS AN UNDERAGE WHICH IS KNOWN FOR CHAMPIONING SOME OF THE MOST CLUB PROMOTER AND FESTIVAL ORGANISER OF THE APTLY ORIGINAL AND EXCITING NEW ARTISTS AROUND. WE LOVE NAMED UNDERAGE CLUB AND FESTIVAL. THAT’S THE SORT HIM FOR GIVING PHYSICAL FORM TO SOME OF THE EARLIEST OF THING THAT HAPPENS WHEN YOUR DAD IS CALLED RECORDS FROM BANDS LIKE WASHED OUT, YUCK AND THE BARRY 7 AND WAS A FOUNDING MEMBER OF LATE 90S ELEC- SMITH WESTERNS. THE ONLY LOGICAL EXPLANATION IS TRONIC BAND ADD N TO (X). WHEN HE’S NOT PROMOTING THAT HE’S A ROBOT WHO SURVIVES ON ZERO SLEEP. HIS FESTIVAL, HE’S ALSO THE KEYBOARDIST IN S.C.U.M.

JOE AND FLESH WILL ASK? & BONE JOE AND WILL ASK?, 24 AND 25 RESPECTIVELY, HAVE JUST BEEN SIGNED TO A MONTHLY SATURDAY NIGHT RESIDENCY AT 90S RELIC, MINISTRY OF SOUND, WHICH THEY THINK FLESH & BONE IS A TWO-YEAR-OLD STUDIO IN EAST LON- IS THE GREATEST THING EVER. SURE, WILL WENT TO THE DON. BETWEEN THE SIX PARTNERS, THEY’VE ALREADY WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS FASHION SCHOOL AND HAS HIS WORKED WITH PEOPLE LIKE CRYSTAL FIGHTERS, ELECTRIC- OWN LABEL, AND JOE WORKS ON GARETH PUGH’S SHOW ITY IN OUR HOMES, MASSIVE ATTACK, THE WOMBATS AND MUSIC WITH ART GUY MATTHEW STONE, BUT SNOBBERY WE ARE SCIENTISTS. WE TALK TO THEM ABOUT RUNNING ISN’T REALLY THEIR THING. ALL THEY WANT TO DO IS PLAY A RECORDING STUDIO WHILE STILL AT UNI, KEEPING THE MUSIC FOR WASTED TEENAGERS AT PLACES LIKE THE CAGE- BUSINESS ALIVE WHILE WORKING PART-TIME JOBS, RHYS BEDECKED HOIST, THE SORT OF LEATHER AND RUBBER GAY WEBB-LED SUPERGROUPS AND THE WEIRD FASHIONS THE BAR NO ONE ADMITS THEY GO TO. BANDS IN THEIR STUDIO WEAR.

All models wear Levi’s 519 skinny ﬁt jeans. TABLE OF CONTENTS

ENTERTAINMENT

Photo by Ryan McGinley. See page 26 for more. WITHOUT

VOLUME 8 NUMBER 11 Cover by Rob Pruitt. Rumspringa Quilt: Window Pane, 2010, spray paint on linen, 90 x 72 inches. LIMITS. BRIGHT LIGHTS COSEY FANNI TUTTI ...... 66 Sketches for Fireworks Displays by Ryan McGinley ...... 26 FEAR, DESIRE, DRUGS AND FUCKING ON ANTI-AUTHORITARIANISM Photographer Antoine D’Agata Lives a Life Less Ordinary . . 72 An Art Critic Reviews a Bunch of Dicks ...... 30 RAYMOND PETTIBON ...... 78 THE 90S WERE INTENSE FIGURES A Marlene McCarty Retrospective ...... 34 A Series of Poses to Aid in Your JACK KIRBY IN THE VALLEY ...... 40 Sketches of Female Anatomy ...... 110 HERMANN NITSCH ...... 48 TONETTA ...... 118 RUSSELL HASWELL ...... 124 The new Galaxy Tab is perfectly sized for life on the go. With a 7" touchscreen, it’s small enough GOD IS PISSING FROM A GREAT HEIGHT to ﬁ t in your hand, yet big enough to be packed with incredible entertainment and communication Ged Quinn’s Curious Oil Paintings ...... 54 WHITE PUNK ON HOPE features. Using the Android 2.2 operating system, it offers voice and video calling, a Readers Hub AGREEMENT IS NOT WHAT WE LOOK FOR Gee Vaucher Finally Agrees to Talk to Us ...... 128 full of up-to-date newspapers, magazines and eBooks, plus access to blockbusters and classics Film, Art, the Moon and Vidal Sassoon, YOU ARE THE ART on Samsung Movies. The Galaxy Tab supports Adobe® Flash® Player and comes with free Google According to Cerith Wyn Evans ...... 60 Cartoons by Jim Krewson ...... 52, 57, 64, 70, 76, 85 Maps™ Navigation, awesome games and an ingenious integrated phonebook that combines all your social network contacts. Start living life without limits.

18 Masthead 20 Employees 86 DOs & DON’Ts 95 Fashion: Girls of Saint Martins College 102 Fashion: Artist Shoots Friend Clash of the Titans available now from 134 Literary 136 Video Games Killed the Radio Star 138 Reviews 146 Johnny Ryan’s Page samsungmovies.com www.samsung.com/uk/galaxytab 16 | VICE FOUNDERS Suroosh Alvi, Shane Smith

EDITOR Andy Capper ([email protected]) CEO, VICE MEDIA GROUP EUROPE Andrew Creighton ([email protected]) MANAGING EDITOR James Knight ([email protected]) EMEA GROUP PUBLISHER Matt Elek ([email protected]) 0207 749 7816 ASSOCIATE EDITORS Piers Martin ([email protected]) UK PUBLISHER Matt O’Mara ([email protected]) 0207 749 7819 Bruno Bayley ([email protected]) PHOTO SUBMISSIONS [email protected] ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Darren Boroughs ([email protected]) STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS Jonnie Craig, Ben Rayner, HEAD OF FASHION SALES Kristen Lazaric ([email protected]) 0207 749 7817 Jamie Lee Curtis Taete ACCOUNT MANAGER Angelica Gola-Ebue ([email protected]) 0207 749 7817 PHOTO EDITOR AT LARGE Alex Sturrock HEAD OF MARKETING & EVENTS Claire Bartolomeo ([email protected]) EDITOR IN CHIEF VICE GLOBAL Jesse Pearson PRODUCTION Gareth Johns ([email protected]), EXECUTIVE EDITOR VICE GLOBAL Chris Cechin Imogen Bellotti ([email protected]) LAYOUT inkubator.ca WORDS Jon Blyth, Andy Capper, Jonnie Craig, Nicholas Gazin, Amy Kellner, VBS.TV PRODUCTION Milène Larsson, Dan Nadel, Bob Nickas, Stephen Sprott, Alex Sturrock, Jonas Vogt Vida Toombs ([email protected]), Pegah Farahmand ([email protected]), PHOTOS Alison Severs ([email protected]), Hugo Donkin ([email protected]), Asger Carlsen, Jonnie Craig, Seth Fluker, Nicholas Gazin, Dorota Zylewicz ([email protected]), Rhys James ([email protected]), Jerry Hsu, Richard Kern, Kathy Lo, Ari Marcopoulos, Alex Hoffman ([email protected]) Ryan McGinley, Boris Mikhailov, Akiko Miyake, Alexander Nussbaumer, VBS.TV POST-PRODUCTION James Pearson-Howes, Lele Saveri, RJ Shaughnessy, Saga Sig, Alex Sturrock Al Brown ([email protected]), Mike Horlock ([email protected]), ILLUSTRATIONS Laurence Cleary ([email protected]), Jim Demuth ([email protected]), Jim Krewson, Rob Pruitt, Johnny Ryan Niall Kenny ([email protected]) COPY EDITING Steve Yates VICESTYLE EDITOR Daryoush Haj-Najafi ([email protected]) ONLINE EDITOR Alex Miller ([email protected]) FASHION EDITOR Aldene Johnson ([email protected]) WEB DESIGN Solid Sender JUNIOR FASHION EDITOR Sam Voulters ([email protected]) ONLINE DEVELOPER Daniel Hockley ([email protected]) FASHION INTERNS Charlet Duboc, Thais Mendes, DIGITAL MARKETING Alice Harold ([email protected]), O Thongthai, Scarlett Valentine Holly Foster ([email protected]), Nicole Kai ([email protected]) OFFICE MANAGER Leyla Treble ;gZZBjh^X OLD BLUE LAST Russ Tannen ([email protected]), INTERNS Camella Agabalyan, Ellie Bunston, Ross Allmark ([email protected]) Henry Fry, Mark-Taylor Hutchinson, Kev Kharas, Henry Langston, Melissa McFarlane, Chris O’Neill, Dave Pullen DIGITAL Dylan Hughes

VICE UK VICE FRANCE Send us: Letters, DOs & DON’Ts, all CDs for review, 21, Place de la République, 75003 Paris lî]ZkZgn magazines, books, neat stuff, etc. Phone +33 953 267 802 Fax +33 958 267 802 New North Place, London, EC2A 4JA VICE SPAIN Phone +44 (0)20 7749 7810 Fax +44 (0)20 7729 6884 Joan d’Austria 95 – 97, 5 1, 08018 Barcelona VICE NEW YORK Phone +34 93 356 9798 Fax +34 93 310 1066 97 North 10th Street, Suite 204, Brooklyn, NY 11211 Phone +1 718 599 3101 Fax +1 718 599 1769 VICE AUSTRIA Favoritenstraße 4-6 /III, 1040 Vienna VICE MONTREAL 6giAVWZa Phone +43 1 9076 766 33 Fax +43 1 907 6766 99 127 B King Street, Montreal, QC, H3C 2P2 Phone +1 514 286 5224 Fax +1 514 286 8220 VICE MEXICO Merida 109, Col. Roma, Del. Cuahutemoc, México DF 06700 VICE TORONTO Phone +52 55 5255 1909 Fax +52 55 5203 4061 1349 Queen Street West, Toronto, ON, M6K 1M1 HeZX^VaVgiaVWZaWdiiaZhVcYXVchd[7ZX`ÉhEâh!7ZX`ÉhK^ZgVcY Phone +1 416 596 6638 Fax +1 416 408 1149 VICE BRAZIL 7ZX`Éh7ajZcdlXVggnVjc^fjZXdYZlî]l]^X]idYdlcadVYV VICE AUSTRALIA Rua Periquito 264, São Paulo, SP, CEP 04514-050 igVX`d[ndjgX]d^XZ![gdbdkZg+bâa^dcVkVâVWaZViEaVn#Xdb! PO Box 2041, Fitzroy, Victoria, 3065 Phone +52 (555) 533 8564 Fax +55 11 5049 1314 Phone +61 3 8415 0979 Fax +61 3 8415 0734 VICE ARGENTINA VWhdajiZan[gZZ# VICE NEW ZEALAND Darwin 1154 PB 6, 1414 Buenos Aires PO Box 68-962, Newton, Auckland Phone +54 11 4856 1135 Phone +64 9 378 1111 Fax +64 9 378 1113 VICE BULGARIA IdXZaZWgViZi]^h!a^hiZc^c\idi]Z^g[VkdjgîZbjh^XYdlcadVYh! VICE SCANDINAVIA 12 Anton P. Chehov Str. bl. 87 Iztok, 1113 Sofia ?Vb^Z7gdlcVcY>ckZcidgnHijY^d^chiVaaZYheZXiVXjaVgVgildg`h Rosenlundsgatan 36, SE-118 53 Stockholm Phone +359 2 870 4637 Fax +359 2 873 4281 Phone +46 8 692 6260 Fax +46 8 692 6274 idi]Z;djcYgn^cH]dgZYîX]VcY7jaag^c\^c7^gb^c\]VbdkZgi]Z VICE SOUTH AFRICA VICE ITALY Studio 401, 66 Albert Road, Woodstock, Cape Town XdjghZd[i]gZZWjhnYVnh^cDXidWZg# Via Watt 32, 20143, Milano Phone +27 72 128 0015 Phone +39 02 4547 9185 Fax +39 02 9998 6071 VICE CZECH REPUBLIC VICE GERMANY Hasˇtalska´ 1, 11000 Praha 1 Brunnenstr. 196, 10119 Berlin DkZg&-Éhdcan#DcZ[gZZYdlcadVYldgi]..eZcXZdgaZhheZgVgiaVWZaWdiiaZdgXVc#

Phone +420 222 317 230 Fax +420 222 317 230 '%&%>c7ZkJ@A^bîZY!Vaag^\]ihgZhZgkZY Phone +49 30 246295-90 Fax +49 30 246295-99 IZgbhVcYXdcYî^dchVeean"k^hîWZX`h#Xd#j` VICE JAPAN VICE GREECE 3-3-3, Minami-Azabu, Minato-Ku, Tokyo 106-0047 22 Voulis Street, 6th Floor, 105 63, Athens Phone +81 35419 7763 Fax +81 35419 7764 Phone +30 210 325 4290 Fax +30 210 324 9785 VICE NETHERLANDS VICE PORTUGAL PO Box 15358, 1001 MJ Amsterdam Rua Infante D. Henrique, 16-3ºFT—4050-296 Porto Phone +31 20 673 2530 Fax +31 20 716 8806 Phone +351 220 996 891 /2 Fax +351 220 963 293 VICE BELGIUM VICE POLAND Klokstraat 12, 2600 Berchem, Antwerp ul. Czarnieckiego 64 /2, 01-548 Warszawa Phone +32 3 232 1887 Fax +32 3 232 4302 Phone +48 22 839 52 32 Fax +48 22 839 52 32 H]VeZndjgbjh^XZmeZg^ZcXZ All submissions property of VICE Magazine, Inc. The entire content is a copyright of VICE Magazine Publishing, Inc. and cannot be reproduced in whole or in part without written authorisation of the publishers. For subscription information go to www.viceland.com. WZX`h#Xd#j` Vice magazine is published twelve times a year. 18 | VICE EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH: ROB PRUITT

Is the painting on our cover based on one specific Amish quilt? Yes, but when I made this series, I played with all the proportions, and for this one I made the grid pattern a lot smaller. I thought it was interesting to make it look like a computer keyboard. And you use colours that are a lot brighter than the originals. Right. I used this kind of spray paint called Montana Gold that’s manufactured for graffiti artists and comes in a wide range of amazing colours. The Amish quilts are made from their recycled clothing, so they’re mostly just earth tones. Your recent exhibit, shown jointly at Gavin Brown and Maccarone, was loosely based on Rumspringa, the coming-of-age period in which Amish teens are allowed to leave the community and go party their asses off. They either choose their new crazy Western lifestyle or come back to the fold. It’s something that’s been in the air for me from a few years back, when I saw Devil’s Playground, the documentary about Rumspringa. It made perfect sense in my own personal history too. About 25 years ago I started making a body of work called Artworks for Teenage Boys, and I’ve thought about issues of teenage rebellion for a long time. With these quilt paintings, you know, they’re all made by grandmothers sitting around in quilting circles, so it was a fun fantasy for me to think about handing that material over to the wild kids on crystal meth and seeing what they would do with that part of their rich tradition, what kind of quilts they would make during their period of recklessness and abandon. And this is what one might look like, really bright and colourful. Yeah, and supercharged, with the proportions altered, and instead of taking a year to make one, this is what it would be like if it was made with stencils and spray paint in a 24-hour period. Is that how you made these? They’re huge, almost eight feet high. It takes a really long time to cut out 1,000 little cardboard shapes, but once you’re done with the stencil preparation, then it goes really fast. Rob Pruitt, Exquisite Self-Portrait: The Artist, 2010, silk screen on canvas, 84 3 /4 x 63 3 /4 inches. I read an interview with you where you said that being an artist is like being in permanent Rumspringa. Yes, I do think that, especially for myself. I can’t believe what a great Vice: Hi Rob, guess what? You’re our employee of the month! decision I made 28 years ago to not have a desk job. Rob Pruitt: [laughs] I’m so honoured. I haven’t the slightest idea how it happened. I thought my enormous number of coffee breaks might That is an excellent decision. have disqualified me. Every day is a brand-new opportunity to do whatever the hell it is I want to do. I don’t have to answer to anyone, and it’s like per- Well, you made the lovely painting on our cover. Could you tell us manent experimentation. I mean, it’s not about drug taking and something about it? sexual abandon… It’s based on a traditional Amish quilt pattern called “window- pane”, which I think is really funny because they’re just Oh no? describing the optical effect that makes it look like a series of 3-D Well, yes and no. [laughs] But I was thinking more about creative windows, and I don’t think they have any idea that it’s also a experimentation. You know, I can throw away everything from yes- name for acid tabs. It reminds me of this thrift shop in North terday and start something entirely new, if that’s what I want to do. Fork, Long Island, where Jonathan [Horowitz, artist and Rob’s It’s so amazing to have that. boyfriend] and I used to live. It’s in the basement of a church and If you had been raised Amish and gone through Rumspringa, do you it’s called the Glory Hole. think you would have come back? No way. Ummmmmmm. [laughs] We could never drive by there without laughing and thinking about I’m surprised no one’s asked you that yet. how these little old ladies have no idea what they’ve really named That’s a great question, but I’m embarrassed to answer truthfully their shop. Of course they’re just innocently thinking of the “glory of because I think I may have gone back. I really love a kind of God” and how the shop is so small that it’s hole-size. And it’s been masochistic structure that I have to work within. You know what I called that for like ten years. mean? Which is funny because I’m talking about how my life is this I can’t believe no one’s ever told them. total freedom. Plus, Amish boys are really hot. I love those beards I know. You would think they’d get an anonymous letter or some- and those high-riding workpants. thing, like, “Dear ladies, you might want to rethink this.” INTERVIEW BY AMY KELLNER

20 | VICE Babycastles: DIY Arcade The arcade gets an extra life. Photo: Vincent Skoglund colorway Featured AUBERGINE Models: TANTO MEDIS PLATTAN 12 colors: 12 Available in microphone andremote. Feature 3.5mmstandard [email protected] www.urbanears.com Bright Lights Sketches for Fireworks Displays by Ryan McGinley

26 | VICE VICE | 27 28 | VICE VICE | 29 On Anti-Authoritarianism An Art Critic Reviews a Bunch of Dicks

Doctor Charlie Miller teaches a course called (Neo-)Avant-Garde in Theory and Practice at Manchester University, which spans everyone from Georges Braque to Crass. He’s currently writing a book called The Ambivalent Eye: Picasso and Surrealism and he’s also curating a Picasso and Salvador Dalí exhibition which travels to Barcelona, St Petersburg and Florida. We asked for his critical eye on our favourite new art book, New York D!@K, Galen Smith’s compilation of cock doodles and lewd drawings on New York ad posters, published by Mark Batty Publisher.

This mixing of genitals and different body parts is very typi- You can talk about these in the terms of the logic of the fetish, which as you know, Freud described as the substitute for cal of some kinds of surrealism. Artists like Miró and the maternal phallus that he conjectured that boys fantasised their mother had. After the discovery of sexual difference, the Picasso were into the disorganisation of the sexual body. But boy deduces that the woman has been castrated and that’s the reason the boy—according to Freud—acceeds to the law of also it’s a silly way of subverting that sort of sexual imagery. the father and that the fetish becomes a memorial to his previous belief in the maternal phallus. That guy is kind of enjoying that picture of that fit bird and then you have the grotesque possibility of the umbilicock.

That’s brilliant, isn’t it? In a way you could read this in terms of the symbolics of the Word of God. If you associate that I suppose all of these are just kind of detuning advertis- Word with a kind of primary paternal presence, you could argue that there’s a phallic logic or a phallogocentrism at play, ing. With these they’re completing the sexual logic of the which this cock-spliff or “Cockberwell Carrot” is playing on. Quite often, in traditional representations of Jesus, you see a advert. One of the key moves of consumerism is to sexu- sword coming out of the mouth. In fact there’s a line in Revelations about that, but here it’s a cock. alise the commodity or to commodify sexuality and to re-deploy sexuality as a commodity, a dominant order of the economy. And a lot of these are exposing that in a very, very obvious way.

30 | VICE I am the ﬁre, I am the ﬂame. I am the one who stands strong. My fabric is tough, my heart is brave. My soul is also proudly made by each of you who wears me now and screams it loud,

It’s a set of very familiar, simple moves that everyone does in their text books at school: you colour in the teeth, you put on a moustache, you draw specs and you draw a flying cock. Actually there is a classical tradition of flying cocks as a sort of good luck charm. In Roman art you get these sort of winged phalluses as a good luck or fertility charm. But these are quite a puerile and anti-authoritarian type of gesture, but some are quite effective. Others are just the crude fantasies of sociopaths, though.

Jean Clair once said that the gaze is the erection of the Quite a few of these are religious and in fact the genitals of Christ were really important in the Renaissance. There was a eye. There’s an association between the masculine gaze theology of Christ’s genitals and quite often you’d get a suggestion of an erection, or in nativity scenes Mary is pointing at aimed at a feminine object and a phallic erection. In psy- Jesus’s cock. There’s a really good book about it called The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. choanalytic imagery or iconography eyes are associated with the phallus, so Oedipus blinds himself as a substitute castration. But here it’s the woman with cocks coming out of her eyes. In general with these things there seems to be a joyous disorganisation of the hetero-normative bodies in sexual relationships that are set up by the posters. 32 | VICE Dr. Martens celebrated their 50th birthday in London last month by throwing a free party with Black Lips, Mazes, Flats and French Kissing. Black Lips provoked yet another stage invasion, bringing their personal tally to about 789, which in turn led to general disorder, some stuff getting broken, and angry security staff—hey, at least the crowd and bands had a good time. And to anyone annoyed to have missed out on the fun: the Dr. Martens festivities continue with a second bash featuring Fucked Up and Pulled Apart By Horses in Leeds on December 3. If it’s anything like the London party, you might want to wear some protective clothing. “I did eight or so of these painting installations at this music venue called Kulturhaus Palazzo outside of Basel, Head to viceland.com/drmartens50th for tickets. Switzerland, between 1980 and 1982. It’s paint dripping down plastic that I stretched around the room. All the Central European punk and new-wave bands played there, like LiLiPUT, Yello and Der Plan. It was great because I was just a kid in school studying design, and I could do whatever I wanted there.”

Marlene in her studio, 2002. The 90s Were Intense A Marlene McCarty Retrospective “In the late 80s and early 90s I was doing a lot of text first saw Marlene McCarty’s artwork in the late 90s. She made a series of huge portraits paintings. I would piece together sheets of iron-on material and then heat-transfer them onto giant raw canvases. It of teenage girls who had killed their mothers, accompanied by captions describing the was about the idea of painting as this male arena and murders in grisly detail. The girls were drawn painstakingly with no. 2 pencils and cheap what happens when the content becomes antithetical to I that. So I was adopting this heavy female voice, and ballpoint pens—the tools of a kid doodling in a notebook in class—and their clothing was see- using ironing, you know, this female thing.” through, which made them look ghostly and simultaneously menacing and vulnerable. They were tragic monsters. Marlene’s drawings have since evolved to include a whole bevy of murderers: teen girls who killed their whole families, groups of girls who killed a friend, Christian evangelists who killed their children (because God told them to), as well as a creepily sexual series of children and families praying and, most recently, a series about the bonding between female scientists and the Fitzhugh Teddy Photos by apes they study (also sexual). Prior to these pieces, back in the late 80s and early 90s, Marlene’s work was primarily text- based, stretching from her large canvases printed with dirty words to her work with AIDS- activist collective Gran Fury, which created iconic posters like that one with the portraits of same-sex and interracial couples kissing (alongside the slogan “Kissing doesn’t kill: Greed and indifference do”) that ran on the side of New York City buses in 1989 and wigged out tourists from Iowa. Political and feminist art thrived in the 90s, and Marlene McCarty is an important part of that history. You can see a lot of this work at Marlene’s first major survey, at NYU’s 80WSE Gallery this month. And if you can’t make it, you can pick up the accompanying catalogue, which includes a great essay by Kathleen Hanna, who met Marlene when they taught a graduate seminar at NYU together two years ago. I would have killed my mother to take that class. “First there was the original Robert Indiana LOVE sculpture, then the art collective General Idea made a version What follows is a selection from the exhibition of some of Marlene’s earlier work, along with that said AIDS, which incensed members of Gran Fury, Marlene’s thoughts on each piece. who thought it was a passive way of dealing with the AIDS crisis, so as a response they made one that said AMY KELLNER RIOT. So my response was like, “Oh, just… FUCK.” “I’m Into You Now: Marlene McCarty, Some Work From 1980–2010” is on view at 80WSE Gallery from November 2 to People were always getting their feathers ruffled back December 18. then. The 90s were intense.”

34 | VICE “‘Honk if your body’s not yours’—meaning, who owns your body: your father, your husband, the state? It was also part of the whole AIDS discussion; how many pharmaceuticals can they put in your body to control it? I did a series shown at White Columns in 1990 where I collected bumper stickers and had stacks of them that people could take. Things like ‘I heart fags’, ‘I brake for queers’, ‘Pray for RU-486’. I was following right after Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger, who were everywhere at the time. They were so adamant about what they were suggesting, I was trying to be more humorous or oblique with the language. Not that it was always so successful.” “A lot of this work was about posturing, reacting against the male mythos of art. Like what does it mean when a girl says, ‘I fucked Madonna,’ and what is the potential reality of that?”

“Oh, the corn penis. It’s called Colonel. It’s a piece of “A majority of the text I used was found language, either graffiti or something I heard somewhere. This one is called dried corncob adhered to the middle of a canvas. In Factory Wall in Cincinnati. I went to school in Cincinnati and literally saw that graffitied on the wall of a factory. It hangs on 1990, the art historian Anna Chave wrote an essay called the wall at tit-height. Unfortunately this is only going to be in the catalogue because it was bought from Metro Pictures in ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’ and it was about ’91 and all they have in their records is a name and we cannot find that person anywhere. I hope whoever bought it still how minimalism claimed that its power was in its mute- has it and enjoys it.” ness, but in fact, she wrote, minimalism reeks of the status quo. Anna and I were both on a panel at the Whitney and this is the work she chose to represent me. It coincided with her idea about the mute object that speaks volumes.”

36 | VICE “This is a floor sculpture and it’s 15,000 matchbooks. They’re standard matchbooks you can order from a catalogue. On one side they have pin-up girls on them, and on the other side I had them print, ‘I got a clit so big I don’t need a dick.’ If you’ll notice, clit and dick are handwritten. The company had called me up and were like, ‘Ummm, we have a problem. We can print dick but we can’t print THAT OTHER WORD.’ She wouldn’t even say the word clit. So I said OK, take the mechanical—this was in the olden days—and just slice the dick and the clit off. Then I got some friends together and we wrote them all in by hand. I’m reproducing these for the retrospective, but the curator is worried about whether we can have NYU students writing dick and clit 15,000 times. Maybe the seniors can do it.”

“As part of my research for the ‘Murder Girl’ series, I did these road trips to the murder sites and then I did small drawings “This is Gina Grant. My research started with girls who of them. I needed to have the feeling of what it was like to be in these places. Plus it was a great excuse for a road trip. only killed their mothers. I wanted to find situations This was the creepiest house. It was Gina Grant’s house in South Carolina. She was a 14-year-old honour student and she where the female-to-female relationship, which is sup- crushed her mother’s skull with a candlestick after an argument over a boy Gina liked. The house was down a steep drive- posed to be so important, imploded on itself. Then I way, so once you drove down it was like you were trapped there. There were major bad vibes in this house. I wanted to get expanded to include girls who killed not just their moth- out of there quick, but when I started to drive back up the driveway, I couldn’t get up the hill and the car stalled. I was ers but sometimes also their fathers or their entire family. freaking out.” So it became a rage against domesticity in a way, a desperate attempt to free themselves from the structured environment being imposed on them. I did these drawings for a long time and I did them all in pencil and ballpoint pen because I like to torture myself. When you spend that long on one drawing you kind of merge with the drawing in a way that is not normal.”

38 | VICE Jack Kirby in the Valley

BY DAN NADEL

hen he first settled in Southern California in 1969, Jack just so happened that the deals to be had from a comic-book company Kirby was kept up at night by hippie bikers circling the were more like demands, the most important of which was that the W hillside on which his ranch-style home was perched. The company owns what the artist creates. Kirby didn’t raise a fuss until noise drove him to distraction, and Kirby, a man already infinitely dis- much later, when he couldn’t bear it any longer. And Kirby was not tractible—a man who was forbidden to drive by his wife, Roz, because naive about his own abilities. Speaking to Mark Herbert in 1969, he his daydreams were too vivid—was in agony. Kirby, at 52 years old, said, “I feel I’m God because these things are living or moving to my was moving deeper into the 20th century and was disturbed and concepts. Good or bad, that’s how they come out. I can even punish inspired by it. Even in his new paradise, as with the fantastic vistas in them by erasing them but I’m not that mad yet. I like to make them his own work, chaos was always cracking the surface. as perfect as I can, and I feel now that’s what God is doing with us” Kirby moved west from Long Island primarily for his daughter (Nostalgia Journal 30-31, 1976). Lisa’s asthma, but the American dream and Hollywood didn’t hurt A man with this attitude, combined with a strong sense of loyalty either. Except for his years in World War II, he’d spent his entire life and a need to provide for his wife and three kids, was going to have in the New York City area. He had drawn comics since 1936. He a hard time. A tortured time. Kirby, who grew up poor and Jewish was, and remains, justly venerated for his dynamism and visual on the Lower East Side, was godlike in his abilities. He was a one- inventiveness. Kirby’s drawings have the buzzing energy we associate man mythos machine, and he knew it. But he was powerless in all with the best of comic books, with characters bursting across pages. other practical matters. So when the movie deals were announced His ability to design costumes, cities and worlds was unparalleled. and the animated cartoons aired and other artists began steering his He was an invention machine, and in the 1960s he had co- characters, Kirby was angry. All he could do was leave. created a universe of characters (ahem, “properties”) for Marvel He split from Marvel in 1970 and accepted a three-year contract Comics (the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Iron Man, and (plus a two-year extension option) with DC Comics that allowed him Thor were all Kirby’s) and seen them merchandised to the max with complete(-ish) creative control, if not ownership. In California, he took nothing given to him but empty promises and his regular page rate. over his own production, and for five years he wrote, drew and edited Jack Kirby was a dignified man, and a man who honoured a deal. It various titles, including his grandiose “Fourth World” saga, in which

All scans courtesy of the Jack Kirby Museum’s Original Art Digital Archive (www.kirbymuseum.org), with help from Tom Kraft of What If Kirby Kraft of What with help from Tom Original Art Digital Archive (www.kirbymuseum.org), All scans courtesy of the Jack Kirby Museum’s All images are pencil and ink on board all characters likenesses TM © DC Entertainment. (www.whatifkirby.com). A pillar of Kirby’s “Fourth World” construction: Mister Miracle 16, 1973. One of Kirby’s talents was injecting familiar genres into unlikely scenarios: here’s a lone horseman, à la John Huston, in a cosmic world. Forever People 7, 1972.

40 | VICE VICE | 41 The bikers destroy the peace in this highly cinematic, noisy visual from Kamandi 6, 1973. The beginning and middle of Kamandi 6, 1973, as Kamandi and Kirby move from carefree to solemn.

bikers zoom through Kirby comics as good or bad guys, but always bonanza, and now it was time to woodshed and return to his 1940s was still there for him to see, as he later remembered: “All the guys It’s an abstraction of the most really fucking loud guys). The two must take cover. Flower is a zaftig and 50s roots, projecting through the most basic pulp forms in order on the landings were still laying there.” Kirby saw and lived through girl who is strong and beautiful and free, like all the best Kirby to realise a vision of the world that was godlike in his history-mak- horrific events, including the liberation of a concentration camp. basic mythological values, women. Our heroic couple take shelter in a bombed-out suburban ing and value-enforcing. Thirty years later, he was drawing the war, spinning yarns 30 years house, where Kamandi solemnly stands guard through the night even It’s often remarked by Kirby associates that when he drew (mov- gone. He’s not mythologising. Neither is he moralising, as becomes somehow transmuted into as Flower beckons him. As he watches, the feral boy thinks, “It seems ing from left to right across a page, rarely planning an entire clear by reading an entire story. The drawing is clear and diagram- we have all the comforts in here. A man could stay here indefinitely composition in advance), it was as though he were rendering from matic—oddly clean for such frequently grotesque subject matter, but entertainment. with food and shelter supplied to him.” Kirby was an infantryman in some inner projection. Kirby once said, “I always felt that when I look at the pages one after the other and you see that the clarity is the army, and this scene reads much like his descriptions of his war pencil a drawing, that’s it for me. It may sound very eccentric but I necessary because the Losers are in constant motion: the next action experiences in numerous interviews: sitting in the rubble of some feel that’s it for me, and if I were inking it I would be drawing that is always about to occur, and Kirby never brings the forward motion he imagined a new pantheon of gods in conflict across four titles: chateau waiting for help to arrive or the other side to lose. A man picture all over again for no reason at all. I won’t ink it if I don’t have to a halt until the end of the story. “The Losers” is a ghost version of Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen; The Forever People; Mister Miracle; could abide, Kirby /Kamandi supposed, huddled under a blanket, to. I feel inking in itself is a separate kind of art.” (Nostalgia Journal war, played out in Kirby’s mind as if to invent some way to truly reck- and New Gods. This was Kirby’s moment of operatic, cosmic comics. weapon in hand. But morning brings a new attack, and Flower, at 30-31, 1976). For Kirby, the initial act of creation was the beginning on with World War II. These titles defined his life’s work and cast a long shadow backward first captured, frees herself only in time to hurl her beautiful body in and end of his process. Other artists considered the inked images “There is nothing that you would call ‘romantic’ about war,” he and forward. Then DC cancelled them after just three years, leaving front of a rifle shot, dying to save her lover. Silently, Kamandi carries (only inked images could be properly photographed for reproduc- told Ray Wyman (Jack Kirby Collector 27, 1999). “Sure, in the Kirby at full steam and loose ends. He’d already begun work on ancil- her outside to grieve. tion) to be the end, but not Kirby. For a man racing from one idea to movies and on television they paint a great picture of the fellowship lary titles, like Kamandi (1972), but he picked up other jobs in a variety Kirby was a man of pulps, and this is silly material on its surface. the next, a man capable of 20 pages a week or more, spending any that it creates. I’ve seen war bring lots of people together, but I can of genres, the restrictions of which often pushed him hard. War, espe- But he burrowed deep into it, discovered the most primal aspects, time “redrawing” a page would be a waste of valuable creative ener- tell you that the cost is extremely high: not just in terms of lives, but cially, was a natural for Kirby, so Our Fighting Forces came along in and highlighted them. For Kirby, a man must protect and fight if nec- gy. And Kirby was the rare artist who could move back and forth in in the human spirit. I think that we are diminished by war; our char- 1974. Both titles, while not the free-form blowing of the “Fourth essary, but he prefers peace. A man stands solemn, but is unafraid to time with ease, seeming to grasp past and present in a single shot. The acter as a race is somehow reduced by each war that we allow to World”, show Kirby at his best as a wily and inventive freelancer, a hunt and to love. It’s an abstraction of the most basic mythological two-page spread from Kamandi 8 is a perfect encapsulation of this happen. Hitler had to be destroyed, there was no choice and I was man whose sense of the world was sometimes best expressed in the values, somehow transmuted into entertainment. It’s not didactic, but sensibility and of Kirby himself: an imagined postapocalyptic muse- glad to do my duty—but if there were another way to bring him most seemingly generic venues. Kirby gets his point across. He wishes for sensible manliness and um in which the Lincoln Memorial is hoisted aloft among artifacts of down I would have preferred it. Perhaps the Germans would have Kamandi began as a Planet of the Apes rip-off. DC wasn’t able to responsibility and yet is unafraid to love and mourn. He’s not a hip- an esoteric new civilisation. been defeated by their own ambition; they could not possibly hold all obtain the licensing to adapt the movies, so they tasked Kirby with pie, not a cold-war Spartan, but some kind of pulp humanist. Or And none of those artifacts were more telling than those left of Europe forever—the more you force people down, the more they coming up with something that would take a slice of the Apes audi- think of it this way: Kirby was a visionary who had vivid memories behind by war. At the end of his DC comics run, he was doing a story will push back. It is human nature to be free and I feel that eventually ence. He revived a comic strip idea he’d had in 1956 and set to work. of his Austrian-Jewish immigrant mother; who supported his family named “The Losers” for a third-tier comic book called Our Fighting there would have been a revolt. Perhaps it was the right thing to do, Kamandi is a boy adrift in a post-apocalyptic world ruled by a race with his drawing in the depths of the Depression; who co-created Forces. The intrigue of “The Losers”, which, like all of the comics he but I do not think that this applies to other wars that this country has of humanoid lions. Like nearly everything Kirby did, it is infused Captain America and then fought and killed in the European theatre wrote, drew and edited, is that it feels like Kirby’s war. Instead of lead fought. This country has always been at war—it was started by war. with humanity and urgency. during World War II. Then, from a house on Long Island, he began heroes or patriotism, Kirby is drawing a gang that, while interesting Perhaps that is how it will end.” Issue 6 is not only the best of the series but also a highlight of to watch the century pass. He understood how different things once enough, functions mostly to serve the action and to support stories. In issue 156 of Our Fighting Forces, Kirby remembers a glam- Kirby’s entire career. Out for a buggy ride, Kamandi and his topless were and that he’d bridged an unimaginable divide. It’s reflected in Kirby himself was drafted in 1943 and arrived in Normandy in orous wartime NYC, complete with an elaborate marquee and a hippie girl, Flower, are harassed by lion bikers (all through the 70s, his work, particularly in the 1970s. He’d passed through a pop-cultural August 1944, just ten days after the invasion, the evidence of which bustling crowd resplendently turned out. But in Kirby, normalcy 42 | VICE VICE | 43 v8n11 026-085 (final).qxp 11/9/10 1:10 PM Page 44 v8n11 026-085 (final).qxp 11/9/10 1:10 PM Page 45

The three climactic pages from Our Fighting Forces 156, 1975.

“Who’s got the answers? I sure would love to hear the ultimate one. But I haven’t yet, so I live with a lot of questions, and I find that entertaining.”

is always in peril: as the heroes recognise a Nazi spy in the crowd, the explosion of action and parting of bulky masses of people is vintage Kirby in the drama and velocity of the lines and forms. Once again, the themes are heroism and nobility even in chaos. And once again, Kirby seems to be asking for some humanity in it all. The 1970s were good to Jack Kirby. Set loose in California and briefly given a new start, he invented and reinvented at a startling pace—jumping between worlds and eras with a success he would not again achieve. In 1975, he reluctantly returned to Marvel for a few years before finally going to work in animation, semi-retir- ing from comics. He lived until 1994. His final years were spent receiving the accolades of fans. But the roar of the bikers was never far behind, and to the end Kirby would maintain his dignity and his implicit search: “I’m a guy that lives with a lot of questions,” he said in the 1987 documentary The Masters of Comic Book Art. “I say, ‘What’s out there?’ and I try to resolve that, and I never can. Who’s got the answers? I sure would love to hear the ultimate one. But I haven’t yet, so I live with a lot of questions, and I find that entertaining. And if my life woulda went tomorrow,

it would be fulfilled in that manner. I would say, ‘The questions A half-inked page from the still-unpublished True Life Divorce 1, 1970. This page is a notable example of just how much detail Kirby would put into his pencilled pages before have been terrific.’” handing them over to the inker. 44 | VICE VICE | 45 Photos by Michael Otero

I 03/11/10 RUN LONDON November 3 saw the first VICE and Nike Running event at the new Nike Running flagship store in London's Covent Garden. The store's a home for a new breed of runners who take style and creativity as seriously as they do speed. We used the space to exhibit the running-inspired work of some of VICE’s talented friends, including DJs and producers Elijah & Swindle, fashion designer Katie Eary, illustrator Jon Burgerman, photographer Michael Otero and filmmaker Zaiba Jabbah. The launch party featured a set from Elijah & Swindle and drinks, of course. There was also a Q&A session with the aforementioned collaborators on the themes that inspired their pieces – from running the urban streets of London to the Nike athletes that were muses for these pieces of creativity. The pinnacle of the evening was the 5km run through Soho, Chinatown and back, which was surprisingly fun – people even applauded as we ran past. You should try it out, it makes you feel like you own the streets.

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE nikestore.com

NIKETRUECITY.COM Photos by Ben Rayner v8n11 026-085 (final).qxp 11/9/10 1:10 PM Page 48 v8n11 026-085 (final).qxp 11/9/10 1:10 PM Page 49

Hermann Nitsch

INTERVIEW BY JONAS VOGT, PORTRAIT BY ALEXANDER NUSSBAUMER

n first viewing the work of Hermann Nitsch: Before we start, what’s What was Vienna like at the time of your Hermann Nitsch, the uninitiated your line of work? first exhibition? O may wonder whether he’s a mur- Vice: I study political science. There wasn’t much going on. I remember a derous psychopath who conned the art That is bad. few people—Peter Kubelka the filmmaker, world into funding satanic rites and blood- Karl Prantl the sculptor, and so on—but drenched bacchanalia. The reality is that Why? apart from them, Vienna seemed quite igno- Nitsch is the scraggly-bearded ringleader Because politics is the world’s biggest nuisance. rant when it came to art. And politicians are a half-witted frustrated of the Orgy Mystery Theatre, a perfor- How did you meet the other artists with lot who try to administrate power. mance-art group and ongoing project that whom you later came to be known collec- staged nearly 100 ritualistic performances Has that always been your feeling about tively as the Vienna Actionists? from the early 60s to the late 90s. The politics? First I met Brus. After that I went to see exhi- events were bizarre orgies of the senses Yes, always. And I can give you a good reason bitions by Muehl, Frohner, and Niederbacher. replete with animal immolation, crucifix- why: I had to greet peers with “Heil Hitler” Schwarzkogler was my colleague at university. ion, piles of fruit, entrails, white robes, when I was in elementary school around 1943. I attended master classes while he was in his nudity, gallons of vital fluids, and God And then two years later, the country was lib- first year. It resulted in a likeminded network. knows what else. These irreverent celebra- erated. After that, every occupying power—the I was working on my Orgy Mystery Theatre tions culminated in the Six-Day Play, Americans, the Russians and so on—had their project, without being very successful at Nitsch’s take on the story of creation, own newspaper. In those papers, the Americans first—meaning that I was arrested three times which was held at a castle he has lived in badmouthed the Russians and the Russians for it. for more than 40 years. badmouthed the Americans. It was then that I What happened? Nitsch received his formal artistic realised that all the politicians and whatever They found my work to be blasphemous, instruction as a painter at Wiener comes with being one—it’s all a big sham. pornographic and whatnot. On one occa- Graphische Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt in So, you are a non-political person. sion, it was an art-action performance in Austria. His large-scale canvases are Thoroughly. Muehl’s cellar. We had actually planned two drenched and splattered in reds, browns Are there reflections of war experiences in sequential performances. A dead sheep was and greys. They look as if he pulverised a your work? needed for mine, but the whole thing was large mammal in a giant blender and You see, that is a question, which—in a best- broken off by the police after about 45 min- tossed the outcome haphazardly onto a case scenario—could only be answered by utes. Muehl’s performance couldn’t even take wall. A closer examination reveals that using depth psychology. I can’t really talk place. Both of us had to stay in prison for great care and meticulous palette selection about which influences may have affected my three days, and then later on we got a 14-day went into the finished pieces. He is fre- own future life. Of course, there were trau- sentence. Back then, I was kind of proud of quently cited as a Vienna Actionist—a matic incidents that nurtured my expressive that. My work agitated the people, and I saw loosely affiliated group of off-kilter and disposition, but I don’t feel like a damaged myself in the same league as other great mis- confrontational Austrian artists that also man. I feel more like a man raised around two understood artists. includes Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, and horrible world wars. My parents and grand- Later you were sentenced to six months Rudolf Schwarzkogler—but Nitsch long parents lived through the first, and then I lived parole. ago transcended any identifiable “move- through the second. People always had to deal Yes, in 1966, for my menstruation painting ment” and began honing a gory craft that with war in some way or another—the Thirty Die erste heilige Kommunion (The First Holy is solely his own. Years’ War, the Napoleonic Wars, et cetera— Communion). That’s what led to me leaving Of course, Nitsch’s work pisses off all but not necessarily with two wars at once. my home country and going to Germany. sorts of religious and conservative folks, but they are completely missing the point. He is You started out quite conventionally, study- Was it as difficult in Bavaria as it was in only holding up a mirror to his detractors’ ing graphic design at the University of Austria? own hang-ups with religion and the weird, Vienna. What influenced you as a young man Germany was very good to me. I spent ten antiquated ceremonies inherent to their at that time? happy years there, found wonderful friends, beliefs. And besides, anyone who thinks I was lucky to have many good teachers, who and was able to accomplish a lot. Even if that a fictitious six-day festival of naked always supported my artistic inclination—a there were troubles and scandals in Munich people, mass intoxication, and stomping on career in advertising never interested me. I now and then, there never was as much animal intestines inside an ancient castle intensely studied the old masters: Michelangelo, intrigue and scheming as in Vienna. After my doesn’t sound like a good time is so boring Leonardo, Dutch paintings, Rembrandt and wife’s tragic death in a car accident, I that they might as well not exist. Still, lots Rubens. They fascinated me. returned to Austria. of questions are raised by Nitsch’s work And on a philosophical level? Had the country changed much? regardless of one’s faith. So we meekly At first I was rather detached from the world, We are now talking about the Kreisky admin- asked for some answers after presenting him ascetic, mostly influenced by Schopenhauer. istration. All of my colleagues—Artmann, with a sacrificial offering of three eviscerated Nietzsche was the turning point to a rather Brus, and so on—had returned from exile. lambs and a big jug of mead. positive mental attitude for me. The climate was definitely friendlier.

48 | VICE VICE | 49 v8n11 026-085 (final).qxp 11/9/10 1:10 PM Page 50 v8n11 026-085 (final).qxp 11/9/10 1:10 PM Page 51

Hermann Nitsch surrounded by collaborators during his action 122 at the Burgtheater in Vienna in 2005. A blindfolded man was crucified in front of a bisected bull while several naked men stabbed him with giant spears as blood spewed from his mouth during action 122 at the Burgtheater, Vienna, 2005.

more than one line of work that concerns “There are artists who are all about itself with blood: physicians, for example, and huntsmen. And it’s an important theme landscapes. For others it is portraits or in many religions. It’s just that for most people it’s hard to get used to because they don’t still lifes. I am the artist who is into meat have to deal with it that much. and blood.” Have you ever considered working with something other than these materials? You could have created a similar intensity with faeces, for example. You held a few of your performances in and coincidence. To me, the number of per- Some of my colleagues worked a lot with America as well. formers is of no actual concern. faeces. I didn’t. Just like Monet didn’t paint Do you know who Peter Kubelka is? But more people means more logistical many portraits. Yes, the Austrian experimental filmmaker. investment. Do you sometimes feel like a What are your feelings regarding provocation? He was quite successful in America, and we musical conductor or a dictator? I never intended to provoke. I always looked were good friends. One day in 1967, I received Please drop the political terms now. With for intensity. The intensity in historical art a postcard from Kubelka saying, “The that logic, every director would be a dictator. always fascinated me. The tragic plays of Americans are inviting you. Money’s available, To me, it is the same artistic procedure as antiquity, the Passion of Christ… intense art you just have to give your consent.” I conducted painting a picture. How many objects I use is always had my love. If one of my actions pro- two performances at the Cinematheque in not relevant. New York and another at the University of voked the people at one point, well, so be it. Cincinnati. All in all, I have to say that I was a Do you feel relief when a performance is over? But provocations were never cooked up at major success in the USA, and that was some- When the thing goes well, I feel great. The the drawing board. thing I wouldn’t even have dared to dream of. artistic act, the aesthetic process, that’s what But breaking taboos is an essential element There was immense feedback from the press. I makes me happy. of your work, is it not? was on the cover of the Village Voice. What’s it like to work with blood and flesh? I’m very interested in taboos, mostly in their Sometimes you conduct your art-action per- It is our flesh and blood I work with. People origins. I’ve spent my whole life involved formances alone, and on other occasions it’s always ask me why I deal with blood, with depth psychology, and my work is con- a big spectacle with almost 100 people. entrails, and so on. I say: look, there are sistent with psychological dramaturgy. How much of it is staged, and what happens artists who are all about landscapes. For oth- Sophocles’s tragic plays, Grünewald’s spontaneously? ers it is portraits or still lifes. I am the artist Isenheim Altarpiece—do you know that? It’s Both are necessary, staged and spontaneous. who is into meat and blood, which is an brilliantly intense stuff. Again, I never meant The trick is to be able to calculate spontaneity incredibly interesting field. Also, there is to provoke. Maybe some of my colleagues A group of actors organised by Nitsch tore apart a calf carcass as a crucified and blindfolded man held still underneath during action 111 at Fondazione Morra in Naples in 2002.

50 | VICE VICE | 51 A man kneads a pile of entrails as a part of action 129 at the Galleria Officina Dell’Arte in Rome in 2002. did. But I also wasn’t stupid enough not to and honestly than the followers of level. Theory only makes sense to people who think: “This could provoke.” German Idealism. have already woken up and smelled the coffee. Does it make a difference to you how this How do you feel about religion? What about the people who confront your intensity is generated? Whether it’s some- I am fascinated with religion of every era and work without any theoretical knowledge? body tied to a cross or you putting sheep every culture. I respect them all, without I would like for them to be touched by my entrails on a penis? belonging to any of them. I only have reli- work. They should know: this is where con- I follow certain shapes. It doesn’t matter gious feelings for life, nature, the cosmos sciousness ends; we are entering deeper realms. what the main visual theme is, the intensity and eternity. Are you a missionary? is crucial. Your work reflects that. I’ve been a missionary for art all my life. Where do you draw the line? I am mainly a person who works with imme- And you want to be comprehended. There are no limits in art. In my opinion, diate materials and incidents. I try to I would very much like that. everything can be art. Although at some produce real events in my theatre, which can point you might have to face the penal code be experienced with all five senses, thus and your own conscience. Sometimes I think: being an artistic synthesis. That’s my effort: “This I cannot account for, it could just cause to deal with immediate colour, real flesh, too much distress.” real entrails, the human body. In addition, Where does your moral understanding my work is also more or less a psychoana- come from? lytic realisation of subconscious I’m sure you have read Nietzsche. He may associations. I am a great admirer of Freud not have influenced humanity in the way he and Jung. Myths of all times play an impor- wanted to, but he longed for some kind of tant role in my work. It’s almost a change in ethics through compassion and philosophical event, an ontology, a search such—but you know all about that. for one’s self—but not like Heidegger teach- Traditional ethics underwent a certain tran- es. Though I hold him in high esteem while sition because of Nietzsche. It’s still my resenting his political views. Since early opinion that people should not be harmed antiquity, many have dealt with the phenom- and that there must be a fair distribution of ena of existence. I do that too. goods produced by man, but I am against For whom are you writing your thick, theo- the notion that you have to define philoso- retical books? phy based on ethics. I think that scholars For those who already understand my work. before Socrates philosophised more candidly It’s not some introduction on an academic

52 | VICE God is Pissing From a Great Height Ged Quinn’s Curious Oil Paintings

BY MILÈNE LARSSON, PORTRAIT BY JONNIE CRAIG Images copyright of the artist. Images courtesy of the Wilkinson Gallery, London

couple of months ago I walked into some strangeness or subversion to them, it the Wilkinson Gallery in London, works like a Trojan horse. Suddenly, you A expecting to potter around as usual, have a critical debate around these classic rubbing my chin at mediocre art as if I was works people are otherwise unquestionably definitely going to buy a piece for five trillion warm towards. pounds. However, on this rare occasion I was So you use actual paintings, but give them met with the large-scale, meticulously a twist? detailed oil paintings of Ged Quinn. I looked I use works that interest me and start build- left, I saw Adolf Hitler with tits surrounded ing a story from that. Claude Lorrain is ideal by flying dick-clouds. I looked right, I saw a because his paintings are idealised versions of moody still life of a crack pipe. I got in touch an idea that didn’t really exist. With his with Ged and he invited us down to his visions of idealised civilisation he created Cornish studio in the middle of a windy spaces that I can work in. The area he paint- meadow near the sea. He was pretty nervous ed outside Rome was a mosquito-infested about a painting of his being sold at an swamp, but he made it look like Arcadia, the upcoming auction at Sotheby’s, but it went home of the gods. There was this great essay for such an astronomical amount it recently I read about him suggesting that the notion made international headlines. We sorely wish of the sunset and golden light of the West we’d bought a piece back at the show when didn’t exist until Claude Lorrain. He devel- they were still £20,000. oped that romantic notion of the sunset and Vice: Did you move to Cornwall to be a part that poetic message it has about endings. I of its art scene? think it brought a lot of interesting Ged Quinn: No. Cornwall’s art scene is very metaphors into art. I’m also drawn to the abstract, that’s why the Tate opened here. I Photo by Jonnie Craig Hudson River School, because their land- hitchhiked here with a girlfriend when I was scape paintings look astonishing but, really, 17 and always wanted to come back. I had That’s still a lot of time. What motivates you they’re incredibly sad: Native American an architect design and fix this barn into a to finish them? Indian hunting lands painted by Europeans, studio for me, and he put in these really Well, unfortunately, it’s usually external dead- there’s violation there. It’s visual colonialism. strong lamps so that I can have daylight in lines. I think Francis Bacon was the same. I used two Hudson River School backdrops here even at night. But then the neighbours You had to take the paintings away from him, in my latest show. started complaining about light pollution. or he would’ve just carried on working and Does it annoy you when people try to inter- working until they were destroyed. Light pollution? pret your work? Yeah. They thought a spaceship had landed, Is there a story behind your paintings? No. For 20 years there’s been a great empha- or something. Yes, but not one that makes sense in a linear sis placed on interpretation and making sure How did you find your style? way. It’s more like a sort of formalist experi- people leave galleries with a coherent under- Before 2002, 2003 I made abstract paintings ment in literature, like Finnegans Wake, in standing of what they’ve just seen. But now, that took a day to make. If you’re making which all these languages are mixed up the visual literacy of the public is getting so paintings that take a day you’re making hun- together but still form a coherent under- advanced people are happy to not be com- dreds. It’s too much. You can’t store them. So standing. You have a sense that you pletely resolving what they’ve seen, or I thought, “How can I restrict that?” and understand it at some point, but I’m not sure drawing their own conclusions. whether it’s conscious or not. started thinking about making a painting so OK then, while we’re at it, is that God piss- packed with information it would take me a Do you study the old masters in order to ing in a toilet from the sky in The Great Art year instead. Then I happened to be leafing paint like this? of Light and Shadow painting? through some books about American land- Only their cultural significance interests [laughs] That’s a really good interpretation. scape, and thought, “These probably would me. Their paintings are so established The original idea was dealing with beliefs take one year to make.” nobody questions them any more. Because and using imagery of communication with You spend a year on each painting? of that they’re potent to work around; if the dead, and the death of the hippie. The The Anxious Attempt of Art to Mourn the Silence of Melancholy Over Everything, 2010, oil on canvas, 61.5 x 49.5 cm. No, not any more. I spend between four to you let them travel through time by intro- ray is something called a spirit uplink. If six weeks on them, working 12-hour days. ducing modern elements, and slipping in you look closely at the painting you’ll see

54 | VICE VICE | 55 Melancholia, 2010, oil on canvas, 61.5 x 49.5 cm. Country Girl, 2010, oil on canvas, 61.5 x 49.5 cm. My Lunch is a Philosopher, 2004 /5, oil on linen, 31 x 46 cm.

The Great Art of Light and Shadow, 2007, oil on canvas, 183 x 234 cm. that there are little spirits up there in the which I thought was illegal. I think the use of Top of the Pops and signing a major record Well, they seem pretty harmless to me, start- clouds, and the uplink is through the toilet such symbols is disarming. It’s important to deal so that you could get on a wage. ing fashion labels and whatnot. What about of Andreas Baader’s prison cell. It’s fash- refer back to the political disasters of the Although there were some great people this skull, are you going to use it? ioned like a camera obscura, so these rays 20th century. Even where we are now it’s still doing some interesting stuff there was an It’s a real skull and you’re not allowed to show are suggesting the image is actually some- relevant because, for example, there is a slip- awful lot of really bland pop music. human remains. You’d need a licence. There was a scandal with some guy who showed where else. But I prefer going with God page into a similar thing with the English That’s a nice picture of Varg Vikernes on pissing from a great height, now that you’ve human bones ten to 15 years ago and went to Defence League. your working table. Have you heard any of said it. prison for it. I’m using the skull to do a semi- True. It’s better to discuss these things, and Burzum’s music? recreation of an image I saw in a book by What about the crack pipe? your work is obviously not celebratory of No, I haven’t. But he’s the one who went to W.G. Sebalt, showing a skull on a pile of That’s a play on simple Spanish still life, Nazism. Have you ever had any bad reac- prison for killing his mate, right? books. It’s a memento mori thing that symbol- painted like a valuable glass. The historical tions, though? Yes. He killed the guitarist in his former ises the ultimate futility of thought. In classical place of the still life was to celebrate your At Art Basel in Miami someone almost band, Mayhem. painting, skulls sometimes symbolised that belongings or your wealth, and people attacked my gallerist, Anthony Wilkinson. there’s no point thinking that you’re flattering would hang them in their dining rooms. “You’re not allowed to show this here!” they My friend Ricky, who’s in the Brian Jonestown Massacre, went to Norway yourself if you think your ideas are important. You’ve also made a portrait series, painting said. “You can’t do this!” Ironically, a about two years ago and thought he was Depressing. But didn’t that Chinese artist people like Hitler with tits and flying cock- wealthy Jewish collector bought that very going to get killed by some of those black- who ate a baby get away with it? clouds in the background. same piece. metal guys, because he was off his head a lot Zhu Yu? I don’t know, maybe, but he didn’t Yes, I was looking at authority, social accep- You also played in some 80s new-wave bands and felt threatened. exhibit any remains, I think. tance and messages and notions of status. when you lived in Liverpool. For example, statues of generals make them That was also just by chance. I was working seem important because 1) there’s a statue of as a dishwasher at a café opposite the punk Crack Pipe, 2007, oil on canvas, 25.5 x 41 cm. them, and 2) it’s on a plinth so you’re look- club, called Eric’s. All the bands used to come ing up at them. I think that language in and I got to know them, and particularly reinforces a lot of depressing things about this one band, Teardrop Explodes. The key- society. I used some Freudian notion of the board player was leaving the band and he carnivalesque, using humour to undermine wanted my job. I’d been playing the piano the seriousness of the most powerful and since I was a child, so we swapped jobs. I did- wickedest figures of the 19th and 20th cen- n’t stay with them for very long, though. I turies. According to Freud, humour is an ended up starting a band with the guy who’d expression of the repressed self. taken my job instead. I guess it works. I laughed when looking at Was that when you started Lotus Eaters and some of them because they’re so absurdly Wild Swans? disarming. Yes. But I could only ever do one thing at a Then there’s also the anatomical bit, like the time and if I was doing music I wasn’t paint- exposed open arm in the Hitler portrait. It’s ing. I much prefer painting because you’re an expression of the idea of where evil more in control. I found it difficult to resides—you can’t analyse it, you couldn’t achieve what I wanted to with music. make an autopsy on it. It’d be impossible to I mean, I started doing it because I wanted to find. I was raised a Catholic with that notion sound like the Velvet Underground, but of good and evil. everything just seemed to get diluted. I think Is it a big taboo to paint Hitler and swastikas? at the time in Liverpool everybody was quite Well, I thought it was. But that painting has poor and just wanted to make money, so The Exiled Forever Coming in to Land, 2010, oil on canvas, 200 x 320 cm. gone to a private collector in Germany, everything was geared towards getting on

56 | VICE VICE | 57 NOTTINGHAM CONVERSE TOUR BRISTOL SHEFFIELD

;/,*65=,9:,;6<9/(:*64,;6(5,5+(-;,9907705.0;:>(@;/96<./56;;05./(4 )90:;63:/,--0,3+30=,97663(5+365+65¶:;67705.6--(;:64,6-6<9-(=6<90;, LIVERPOOL )(9:/6:;,+)@;/,)0.7052>0;/(=(90,;@6-:<7769;(*;:05*3<+05.+(5*,4(.0* +(5*,+,(;/)@:/6,:(5+>(33:;/,;6<9*,3,)9(;,+;/,,?*3<:0=,;9(*29,3,(:,+ )@*65=,9:,)905.05.;6.,;/,9<24<:0*3,.,5+:302,),95(9+:<45,9/6; *0;@(3,?0:;(@369(5+16,.6++(9+6-/6;*/07>(;*/6<;-69;/,:,*65+;9(*2 LONDON -,(;<905..9(/(4*6?657(364(-(0;/(5+;/,*69(3»:-694,9.<0;(90:;)0339@+,9 165,:>/0*/>033),(=(03()3,051(5<(9@;/(52:;6(336-@6<>/6*(4,(365. @6<*(5+6>536(+;/,;9(*2¸+0+5»;256>>/(;36=,>(:¹56>(;*65=,9:,*6<2 7/6;6:)@969@+*:4(1(4(;(*A/(A,3-9(4,(5+,44,;;4*3(<./305 Agreement Is Not What We Look For Film, Art, the Moon and Vidal Sassoon, According to Cerith Wyn Evans

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER, PHOTO BY ALEX STURROCK Artwork courtesy of White Cube

trangers to the art world may have I’ve still got all of the books they used to give a polarity between A and B, and in the A come across the work of Cerith Wyn out—I never read them but the pictures are course you had these artists like Richard S Evans in his collaborations with the quite nice. Long, Gilbert and George and Hamish director Derek Jarman. Together the two Now, on the ground floor, there is a Jewish Fulton, and they were people walking the made videos for the Smiths, the Fall and the South American dentist who was once hit by boundaries between performance, art and Pet Shop Boys in the 1980s. He has also lightning while playing golf last year on some heavy metal sculpture. worked with artists such as Throbbing golf course in Hampstead!. The B course was famous at Saint Martins Gristle, Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker. Good. I hate golf. What are you working on for people like Henry Moore, and for people To art world people, Cerith was kind of a at the moment? who were concerned with techniques for cool, older brother type to all the lunatic mil- The next piece of work will be with some much more formal construction. It didn’t lionaires that came out of the Young British robotics engineers in Japan, building an ani- have that documentary necessity which I Artist movement of the mid-90s. His work is matronic crystal flute. It’s going to be super, thought “real life” was about at the time, made from light, sound, fireworks, explo- super amazing. We’re going to get these hands which was probably more happening on the sions and photographs, with an emphasis on to play a flute made from one piece of onyx streets outside on Charing Cross Road than the words “spectacular” and “beautiful”. crystal. I really would chop my arms off and it was inside on the art course. Film really Born in 1958 in Llanelli, Wales, in a fami- chop my legs off to pay for this because I real- grew out of this idea of documenting things ly of nine children, his father was an architect ly, really want to do it. We’re trying to get it to that weren’t going to last. It came from the who constructed local buildings. be powered by the moon, because you can get idea of things that were more like situations I first met Cerith on one of the worst these very large field sensors now that can har- or events, not about things that were going to nights of my life. I was “celebrating” my stag ness moon power. Solar power is very, very be rusting in a field for the next 100 years but do in an illegal drinking den in east London predictable, and very, very strong and you can rather things that were going to be over with a few friends and lots of awful have batteries that can store that, but the before you got new batteries in your camera. strangers. A tawdry ordeal in which I was moon is very, very weak, so it’s a challenge. I What equipment do you use? stripped naked and tied to a chair took place. want it to be a lunar-powered flute but I have I was never really interested in technical Russell Haswell had brought Cerith along to find the people to pay for it things, or learning the specifics of a camera. for a laugh, and were it not for their gener- You make do with what you can get away ous company and adeptness with profound How much do you need? with without getting bogged down in the tech- philosophical conversation, I probably Not that much really. Automatic flutes have nical aspects. I grew up as a photographer would have hanged myself that night. been made since the 18th century, so they’re and I was taught all I needed to develop pho- With that in mind, here’s Cerith! easy to do. You need a pump and a power source. It’s simple. I would like the power tographs from the age of about four, because Vice: Hello Cerith. Where are you at the source to be an 18th century-looking item with we had a dark room at home. So when it came moment? weird clunky engineering. Depending on how to my own recording, we used very basic video Cerith Wyn Evans: I’m at my studio. It’s much money you have—somewhere between equipment owned by Saint Martins. It was directly opposite the road I live on so I can £1,000 and £20,000—you can go from the these cumbersome 1.5-inch reel-to-reel video- put on pyjamas and come here whenever I lowest quality to the very highest quality. Then tapes and they were called ENG, which stood want. It’s across the road into Bloomsbury, it’s a question of the bogus romantic intelli- for Electronic News Gatherers. opposite the British Museum. gence that will lead people in. I do like the idea I remember walking down Oxford Street, How long have you been there for? of something being moon-powered; Minerva, walking into the Count Club, near the 100 I’ve been here for seven years on the third the cult, the left side—nothing direct about it. Club, in the middle of the afternoon. The floor and four years on the fourth. Once a It’s a beautiful idea. club was open 24 hours a day and so we year the building is marked and celebrated by Join the club, Andy! Talk to your bank filmed footage of people getting pissed in the devotees from the Hare Krishna movement. manager. middle of the day. It was the first Hare Krishna temple in We filmed it, sent the film to Kodak and it Europe and I believe that in 1968 the Beatles I’ll check my balance and get back to you. So came back a few days later. You couldn’t eas- and Rolling Stones signed the lease together you started out making short films, right? ily make a copy of the films we had back then because they wanted to support the move- How did that happen? so if you scratched it or fucked it up, that was ment. It only lasted for about a year because I was at Saint Martins College, studying that. It was fragile. These days it all seems the Krishnas soon became so successful that Sculpture A course. even more fragile—when you think how it outlived these premises. It’s nice to think Did you have a thirst for knowledge? people have a mental fucking breakdown just that I’m inhabiting this place with all those Well, the course focused on people who did if their back-up drive fails. Back then, the strange ghosts. performance and photography, and what attitude was “so what?” You just got a piece In Saint Martins in the late 70s you used to was thought of at the time as conceptual. In of Sellotape and pieced together a new film. get a lot of guys bouncing down the street in effect, it defined itself against sculpture prop- That’s just what happened. Things were a lot orange robes, but there’s a lot less robes now. er, which was Sculpture B course. There was less precious in a sense.

60 | VICE VICE | 61 La Part Maudite by Georges Bataille (1949), 2006, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo by Stephen White TIX3, 1994, neon, 14 x 34 x 2 cm. Photo by Stephen White. Courtesy Modern Collections.

Do you think people are spoilt now with all What’s your favourite medium then? large, the ones that have really lasted haven’t tional structures of the acceptable thing. I would really rather go out of my way to are going to teach at least seven precocious the technology? I don’t know, I don’t think you can really say been like that. And now that’s all been going for the past be perverse about things rather than do this Italian children the meaning of prevaricate I think it’s just different. People weren’t that. Walking in the fresh air is my favourite I’ve known Genesis for a long, long time, 30 years and been commodified and put grovelling populism that I find really rather and it won’t go to waste.” more or less spoilt at any one time really. I medium, I think. and then Sleazy Christopherson. I worked into museums, and at the same time it’s a irritating. I do quite a lot to escape from pop- Because what are we going to do? People ulism’s confines because populism’s confines remember when I was teaching architectur- What about music and film as a medium? with them when they were in a different out- kernel of experimentation and radicalism don’t read that stuff anyway. It’s just blurb are happening to you every fucking day, like al students from Romania a long time ago Well, the musicians that I’ve worked with fit, when they were Psychic TV. And then which has been shied away from. Either for catalogues. When people say, “Why can’t it or not. and a guy named Ivan, who was very gifted employed me, because it was my job. there’s been things with the Fall, Michael because people think it’s too naive for the they put things more simply?” I say, “Why Recently I was commissioned for a piece and approachable, said, “I like London Sometimes Derek Jarman would give me Clark, Russell Haswell and Florian Hecker. time we’re living in, culturally, or that it can’t they put things more complicatedly? of work for these architects in Venice which I because in Romania I had to walk two the opportunity to work on a pop video. What do you like about collaboration? holds some kind of potential for threat Why do I have to understand this?” And tried to make really absolutely as mystifying hours to get to the art shop to by pencils And when that happened the small band It’s nice to have some company sometimes, or uncertainty. And therefore it holds that’s where I come from. I know it comes as possible. I thought, “Right. This is a per- and in London everything is so handy.” It’s around Derek would be able to pay the really. Some people can’t do it, and some political values. across as being a camp rant, but to some fect opportunity to do something really, a bit like that. rent for a couple of months. We did all people can only do it, but I just treat working You once said, “I hate the idea of being extent I really do think that. really fucked up and twisted.” So I don’t look back on my time at Saint sorts of things including the Smiths and the with other people as a luxury because you accessible.” I wanted to do something to offset the over- It feels as if, with every passing second, the Martins as being any better or worse than Pet Shop Boys. As things go on you devel- can measure something else in the work, and Yeah. I think people should make a fucking determined functionalism of what is perceived information being given out in the world is now. It’s just different. I think with the pas- op relationships and keep in touch with not just be a narcissistic psychotic baby in the effort, really. For example, [the Fall’s] as being architecture, which is usually about becoming more and more simplified and trite. sage of time people notice there are changes people, so I owe Derek rather a lot. A lot middle of it all. You can share that with Mark Smith can be accused of being obtuse having a roof over your head and warmth. Francis Bacon used to say, “In art, as in friend- which technology affects. Change is about came from that time; a lot of things were another one. and all those things, but his heart is so in Now on one level that’s all architecture is ship, agreement is not what we look for.” formed at that time. A lot of things devel- the right place. I remember Mark once the advent of something and I think it is quite Why do you keep going back to working about, but we mustn’t reduce things to this It’s that sort of response that I think is oped. I actually met Genesis P-Orridge going “We are making it easy for you” to interesting when certain analogue technology with musicians? denominator which is lower than the common worth maintaining, or looking out for. through Derek. an audience. And of course with that kind makes a comeback. It’s interesting how Well, not all musicians, by any means. I because that actually insults the diverse thing Innocence is the key. Love is the law. of approach to your art you really have to shares are rocketing in Polaroid, for instance. How was that? don’t like musos, for instance. What I like is which the common can be. Because as you It’s a “what if?” scenario that can provide be on top of things. People are looking at ways of image produc- Whenever someone asks me, “Where do you not only the way music is made, but also the know, the common is not common at all. people with so much power, and to that tion which aren’t as super-saturated and first meet someone?” I sort of go blank— way it is used. In the same way, people who How so? So they told me to describe what I was doing extent I align myself with a libertarian tra- maybe ideologically over-determined as unless something really drastic happened. On are good at drawing aren’t necessarily the It’s a murky territory, because you have to and said, “You do appreciate you have to make dition. Punk certainly had that. A lot of much as digital technology. the other hand, there are times where I best artists. be careful not to come across as some fuck- things as plain speaking as possible because a people of my generation had the feeling of But who would have thought 20 or 30 remember very clearly where I met them but In that art-music scene there are people ing old fogey. But at the same time, lot of people have to understand it. So please: “we’re going to have to make do with that”. years ago that the pencil would make a I don’t know them any more. I don’t know who are so important like John Cage and whenever I hear the word “layman” I hear 100 words of 400 characters, including gaps.” I don’t. For example, I don’t like the fact I dreadful comeback… or charcoal? I was one what that says about me. Iannis Xenakis. They were the difficult some Nazi being rather patronising, you So I made a list of words, knowing they had have less hair now. But I can’t do anything who predicted the death of life drawing and I’ve had relationships that have started composers who went against what was know. It feels like Talk Radio or Vanessa to be translated into Italian and I thought: with my hair now so I have to think of other you know what? I think it will outlive me! suddenly, like a clap of thunder, but by and thought to be the mainstream representa- Feltz. God help us. “Right! I’m going to start on the basis that we things to do!

62 | VICE VICE | 63 C=O=N=S=T=E=L=L=A=T=I=O=N (I Call Your Image to Mind), 2010, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photos by Todd- IMAGE (Rabbit’s Moon) by Raymond Williams, 2004, White Art Photography mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo by Andy Keate

I remember the first time we met, you told could go to a social situation, be part of it, makes it so comfortable and at the same time me you always got it cut at Vidal Sassoon. but read it and somehow have it reflected extraordinarily pernicious given the cultural Well, that’s not true! But there’s an answer to outside at the same time. imperatives of American society, because it why I said that. There used to be a very good At this point in the interview the brand new seems like even Zen has been appropriated person at Vidal Sassoon and his name was digital dictaphone that was purchased the now. It is the antithesis of Glee, which I fuck- Jean-Baptiste. But he liked to be known as JB, day before the interview inexplicably stopped ing loathe by the way. Glee must be the but for some reason I couldn’t stop calling him recording. While the machine was broken, antithesis of Vice magazine. It really, really BJ, like blowjob. It’d gotten into my brain in Cerith talked about social identity and how must be. Glee is so… fucking hell, I really that “don’t mention the war” way. think somebody has really got us by the nuts that was reflected in art and said some won- So he was a hairdresser who was hetero- and I really can’t stand it! derfully profound things that ended with a sexual, but super camp in the way that only Everyone is so in their place in that show, quote from an episode of The Simpsons. hairdressers can be. And he would go out of aren’t they? It’s just suffocating. I think it’s Horrified by the technological breakdown, his way to say how well he was getting on about time we caught those scuzzy little bas- we called him back and told him what had with his girlfriend, and I was like, “Why are tards and sorted it out! We should really be happened and asked for more of his time. you telling me this?!” heading towards the ancient world when it This is what happened. He would tell them that French women comes to them! didn’t like getting their hair cut, they wanted So yeah, the machine broke and we lost about There are things more urgent, more their hair set. And it was only the likes of 20 minutes. Can you say that stuff about valuable, than somehow being treated like Vidal Sassoon who were interested in struc- social identity and The Simpsons again? some homogenised piece of shit. It’s the ture. So I was having these metaphysical Well, I won’t. I don’t see why we can’t keep mildest, blankest form of diarrhoea in the arguments with the hairdresser, so I used to it real and play out the irony of the fact world. It’s vile. Glee must die. It’s even like seeing him. But he left to do a tour of that sometimes these things happen, called Glee! William Blake must be turning Japan and he would go to stadiums where because of what I was saying before about in his grave. thousands of fans would show up and he our old film equipment. would do these things to be relayed on LED Like how when something got scratched, you screens across the arena, showing them how just forgot about it, Sellotaped over it and to do a classic bob. I went there [Vidal started again, and the beauty of it was that Sassoon] on a recommendation, and it was a the mistake added to the outcome. weird time. They felt their look had been per- Yes, exactly fected in the 80s so they paid no attention to OK, let’s do that. But can we start at the the 90s, and kept the weird kind of remodel- Simpsons line, which was the last thing you ling of a 30s art deco. So everything in the said before it broke, please? salon was chrome and black which also [sighs] Homer sees a contemporary abstract made a big statement in interior design in the public sculpture in a shopping mall and says, 70s. They really maintained this look that “Well, what is that?” At which point our was quite old-fashioned. It was so much more interesting than a barber shop. There hero Marge says, “Oh Homer, it’s a contem- were women everywhere, talking and reading porary public sculpture.” He says, “What magazines. It was like being in a documen- does it do?” And she giggles for a while in tary. There were the amazing capes they put her glorious Marge way and says, “Well, over you and it had an amazing hierarchy whatever it does it’s doing it now.” and, of course, I’m talking about this more Ha ha. than anything else because I’m completely So it has that philosophical resolve at the obsessed by it, but the reason why I would go end, which is really quite profound. Marge’s there is that I felt like when I went there I position is essentially Zen, which is what

64 | VICE Cosey Fanni Tutti

INTERVIEW BY STEPHEN SPROTT, PORTRAIT BY ALEX STURROCK

osey Fanni Tutti has cut a singular We did one earlier this year in May at the A TG had an ambiguous relationship with path along the outer limits of art and Palazzo Gallery in Brescia for the “120 Day technology. On the one hand you used a lot Cmusic. Growing up in Hull, she fell Volume” exhibition. The second one, also in of equipment—gristleisers, electronics, syn- in with the local communal scene in the early Italy, was held at the end of July on the thesisers—but there was always something 70s. It was there that she met Genesis P- grounds of an old fortress in Ancona. We incongruous between the mechanised Orridge and joined his group COUM had a quadraphonic sound system for that. sounds and the messiness of the content. I Transmissions. Their freewheeling musical It was quite beautiful. think of something like “His Arm Was Her Leg”. There’s a constant theme of mechan- shows (“Coumceptual Rock”) quickly Sounds it. I wish I could have made it over ics being mediated through the body and expanded into anarchic and immersive hap- there. mutating from your bodies to the bodies in penings; by 1973, with Cosey and Genesis There’s so much going on at the moment, having moved to London, COUM pushed the audience. my mind is puddled. I had a group show in their live actions still further, confronting and The whole point of doing music with TG and Los Angeles in mid-July. Then there’s mut- confounding all manner of societal and bod- even now, though the music Chris and I do terings of TG doing some shows later this ily taboos along the way. Peter “Sleazy” together is more melodic, is that there’s still a year as well. There’s always something bub- Christopherson joined the group a year later, need to create a physical feeling in people, an bling under. and with the addition soon after of Chris emotion—whether it’s with electronic music Carter, COUM reformed as a band, calling I’m interested in the way that TG began as or with guitars and acoustic instruments that themselves Throbbing Gristle. Their music a group. You set out with a kind of willful are treated in some way, whatever means we was contrarian, both menacing and oblique, amateurism, like techno-primitives. But can use to create that end effect on other peo- and the image they projected was atypical of soon enough you became quite good at ple. Obviously first it’s on ourselves, because the punk groups of the time. Their casual what you were doing. It seems there was we’re the ones making it. I’ll say, “Oh, that’s feints at English domesticity barely concealed always a tension in the group between nice, I’ll try and remember how to do that.” their deep interest in wayward and militant developing a technique and stepping aside But when you’re in a live situation, you get behaviour. Cosey had also begun posing in from that to allow something more primal things you can never get in the studio. You adult magazines and doing adult films and to pass through. have the feedback from the audience, which striptease acts in order to help support both With TG, we adopted the same approach we pushes you to do things you wouldn’t ordi- the band and COUM’s ongoing art actions. had with COUM—that anything is possible, narily do. It can make you really angry, which While these activities provided a needed but nothing mainstream and nothing that is is what a lot of early TG gigs were about. source of income, Cosey made them into art- already there. It was a fearlessness rather than There was a lot of aggression in the audience works themselves. Her explorations of an amateurishness. We felt we had a right to in response to what we were doing and we sexuality, both as a commercial fetish and as make whatever sound we wanted. For us, a were throwing a lot more back at them. It’s an instinctive drive, have been a central definition of “music” ceased to exist at the really interesting to have this kind of sound theme of her work. Since 1981, with the point we started making these sounds. So conversation with people. demise of TG (they’ve since reunited now that’s why we used to swap instruments. But With so much music now being made entirely and then), Cosey and Carter have been like you said, there comes a point when you on computers, the idea of music as a rela- recording albums under the name Chris and realise that one person is better on one instru- tionship between bodies has almost vanished. Cosey (more recently as Carter Tutti). Cosey ment than another and you like the sound But that’s something that really carries has exhibited and performed her work they make when it comes in combination with through in your music. worldwide, and her influence continues to the sound you’re making. I don’t think it’s Well, I hope so, because I’d have broke the grow. By way of example, this past March, right to cut off the creative process when you damn things if we didn’t manage to do that. London’s ICA, the site of COUM’s notorious can physically feel something great happening When the ease and readiness of electronic 1976 “Prostitution” exhibit, presented a one- just for the sake of the concept of “being instruments and computers take over creativity, day event of “Cosey as Methodology”, free”. That’s quite a destructive thing to do. that’s when you get that empty, repetitive and hosting a range of artists, writers, and other It’s almost denying creativity when you take mechanical sound. There are certain frequen- practitioners with shared interests in her that kind of approach. I think if you go into cies that you have to isolate to tweak the nerve polyvalent life. This was properly rounded it with an openness about anything that will endings in people’s bodies. We’ve always made out with a late night of “Cosey Club”. make sound, then you have a way that you our own samples or modified things so they Vice: Hi Cosey, how are you? can form a structure, designate different do what they’re not supposed to. instruments to people, and still maintain a Cosey Fanni Tutti: I’m well, doing good. Compared with the excessive number of kind of freedom. There is a problem inso- recordings and documentation of TG, which I named one of my cats after you. much as you can become stuck with an kind of approximate that experience, part of Oh, did you? instrument. Like the cornet, for instance. the beauty of the COUM actions is that I have two. Her brother is named Sleazy. Sleazy couldn’t blow it properly, and that was they’re gone, that they can’t be reenacted. Oh wow, that’s nice. the reason I ended up playing it. I just blew it Our initial approach to the performances and made a sound straight away, and I So what are you working on these days? and actions we did as COUM was a enjoyed doing it. At the moment, Chris and I are planning to reaction against the documentation of rerelease some Chris and Cosey albums on I enjoyed hearing it. It’s a very remarkable action art. We wanted the actions we did to vinyl. After that I’m going to work on sound that you made. be shared with the people who were there. releasing a DVD /CD of the piece I wrote A lot of people do it now. I hear it more and And like you said, they’re gone, and they’re and performed for the Tate Modern tenth more. It’s quite odd. I still enjoy playing it ever living in some other form in people’s memo- anniversary. We also started a series of so much. It’s really a fantastic physical thing ries and by word of mouth. There is a whole sound works called “Harmonic Coaction”. for me to play, my cornet. And my guitar. society of artists that work for art institutions

66 | VICE VICE | 67 Genesis P-Orridge and Cosey in Studio of Lust, Nuffield Gallery, Southampton, 1975.

and therefore get access to equipment. We never had that. We never had access to any kind of film cameras, so we couldn’t docu- ment what we were doing. We were working very much on the outside. It wasn’t until TG came around and we could afford to rent a video camera that we ever docu- mented anything. But at the beginning you did get very meagre subsidies from the Arts Council. Only so much, but never enough. So was it a conscious decision on your part to walk away from that and from the constraints they were placing on you? Some friends recommended that we claim for some grants to help us get what we needed in terms of materials and the costs of travelling. So we did that, but then it started getting quite closed down, and there were account- abilities enforced. You had to tick all the right boxes, and that’s not what we were Cosey and Genesis P-Orridge in Cease to Exist No 4, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1976. about at all. That’s when we decided to stop claiming government money. And that would have changed the way you There are some pretty gory pictures of the Is there a particular action from that time related with Genesis? After Cease to Exist action. that still stands out for you? Yes, completely. When Sleazy came, he Yeah, some were real and some were fake. Probably Studio of Lust, when Sleazy came brought some technology we didn’t have— So you were contrasting these deceptive or sym- along. That was quite an interesting one. access to cameras and film and things. That bolic wounds with what seemed to be someone Sleazy was a none-too-many figure as far as was the first one that was photographed on a going through a really painful experience. when we did the action. He was suddenly a timed-shutter release on Sleazy’s camera. We improvised things. The nearest we got to part of it, there were three people in there I also understand that he was very handy at planning anything was After Cease to Exist instead of two. That was more interesting faking wounds, is that right? and situations like that. We were more about Cosey in Studio of Lust, Nuffield Gallery, Southampton, 1975. for me. Yes, he was. He was very good at that. relating to our own personal lives and fetishes

68 | VICE VICE | 69 What do you think of the boundary between your live actions and how you act in your daily life? I don’t think there is a boundary, to be honest. Of course I don’t do those things every day, but I don’t think there is a boundary. I don’t go out and do a nine-to-five job. My whole life revolves around my work. And having said that, even when I did do a job to fund my art, it was a functional part of my life, rather than the work and then my life. That’s why the magazine work and the film work came in handy, because they provided income for my other artworks and music, even though it was like a “job”. That was more interesting for me, even more so with the striptease work.

Have you done actions when no one was 02 looking? How would they be different? Yes, I have. I’ve done that more recently in the Selflessness actions that I did, starting in 2002. I did them with no audience at all. Where did they begin and how do they end? and interests than trying to make a point to stepped away from that, because it was less Selflessness is in four parts. The first part 01 anyone. Sleazy was in the Casualties Union like theatre for me if I did it naked. And was done in Disneyland. It was done as soon and making fake injuries and so on, and I also I like the form the body makes. I like as I was ready to do it and lasted two and a was into dominatrix activities and Chris was watching body forms rather than colours half minutes. The second one then took a very willing victim. and costumes. place at Beachy Head, with no audience But faking wounds is also a way of playing How do you relate your nakedness in the live again. It was about six o’clock in the morn- with the emotions of whoever is watching. actions to that in the magazine actions? ing, and that took about an hour. The fourth Of course. At the time there was a whole I was laying myself open in a different way one was done in Sandringham Woods, which thing with snuff films going around. That when I did the magazine work in that I didn’t is Queen Elizabeth’s estate near where we piqued our interest, and our sexual prefer- have any control over what was done and live. The third one I realised had already ences leaned toward that kind of action. The what I was asked to do. That was a deliberate taken place, and that was at the Hull house next door to us was empty at the time choice on my part. I went into it because I Cemetery. I was estranged from my parents and was a perfect place for us to go and do it found the work I did in the gallery spaces had when I was 17 and then completely black- as if someone was kidnapped and taken just become quite safe for me. People I’d met listed after the ICA “Prostitution” show. there. We were just playing with ideas and who were already in the sex industry said, That was it. When my mother died, I wasn’t 03 fantasies, making them available for people “Do you want to do something here?” And allowed to go to her funeral. Then, in 2003, to see. It’s great as you’re going along and that presented actions to me that I wouldn’t I went to her graveside with my sister. That learning and finding reasons why you like normally have pursued or even thought of, or was because my father had died and the the aesthetic of it, the feel of it, and the ideas I would have just turned around and said, obstacles between me and my mother were it provokes. I think improvisation will “No, I don’t fancy doing that.” gone. So that became a part of the always be there for me rather than sitting Selflessness series, because it was such a huge 04 down and trying to analyse things and make In the films and magazines, you took on part of my life and tied in with everything ready-made personas—different names and something from that analysis. By that point else I had done. So things present themselves 01 02 03 04 it’s become a totally empty gesture. I like wigs—giving your body a certain anonymity. as actions and pieces of work without you charged gestures, so the more real it can be, Maybe this becomes a sort of mask in con- realising they’ve already happened. 22/01/10, 10:18 05/01/10, 12:07 25/04/10, 16:19 25/04/10, 14:52 even if you use fake blood to try and enhance trast to your live actions. Johan Jonsson Johan Jonsson Johan Jonsson Johan Jonsson that feeling, then that’s fine with me. It’s Exactly. In the gallery and in the live actions, Murren, Switzerland Engelberg, Switzerland Abisko, Sweden Abisko, Sweden Photo: Mattias Fredriksson Photo: Oskar Enander Photo: Gösta Fries Photo: Gösta Fries about vulnerability as well. You’re laying that is 100 percent me. In the magazine work yourself open completely and then seeing and in the sex films, it isn’t. It’s my body, but what happens. And that’s what you learn it’s being used to make and present some- from. You learn from mistakes as well as thing that they want. It’s not me. I’m using from positive experiences. You don’t learn by that process to learn something about myself, The North Face® playing it safe, that’s for sure. the sex industry, and the people in it. You Snow Report NSE TRACTION MULE can’t do a film in the sex industry without When it comes to body art, naked bodies being naked at some point. My nakedness WARM ENOUGH FOR BASE CAMP, COOL ENOUGH FOR THE RESORT often seem to be used to show that nothing is there was basically part of the job descrip- being hidden and that what you’re seeing is THENORTHFACE.COM tion, rather than me in the gallery using my objective and transparent. body as an art object. The nakedness in the art actions mainly came about because I felt freer naked. My Much of the tension of these actions seems to body gave fewer wrong signals to people. come from the pressure of the people watch- MEN’S WOMEN’S The minute you put clothes on, people start ing you. trying to find some symbolism in the When I do actions I go into a particular state clothes, whether it’s the colour, the style, or of mind. I go inside myself and choose things whatever. There were a lot of performance out, I allow a channel to remain so I can artists who actually made costumes to do respond to stimuli. I have to be on that plane their art with. That’s another reason why I of receptiveness and yet be removed. TNF® Yellow/Black Graphite Grey (Plaid)/ Shiny Black/Black Shiny Insane Blue/White Shiny Moonlight Ivory/ Shiny Black/Black 70 | VICE Moon Mist Grey Demitasse Brown Fear, Desire, Drugs and Fucking Photographer Antoine D’Agata Lives a Life Less Ordinary

INTERVIEW BY ALEX STURROCK, PHOTOS BY ANTOINE D’AGATA

ntoine D’Agata is a contentious char- truth. A picture only shows a given situation vival. I don’t feel close to her because of some acter in the worlds of photography under a very specific perspective, consciously similar experience of marginal communities, A and art. Signed up by the Magnum or not, openly or not, relevantly or not. or some alleged obsession with sex and photo agency in the period when they started Photographers have to accept they can just drugs, but because she never gave up. She to realise there was little money in photojour- convey fragments of illusory realities and never hesitated to compromise her health or nalism, his work’s brutal and self-destructive relate their own intimate experience of the sanity for the sake of her work and I am just content has a habit of upsetting people. world. In this process of fictionalising an grateful to her for her courage and stubborn- Born in Marseilles in 1961, D’Agata left unreachable truth, it’s up to them to impose ness, for staying faithful to her own pain, France in the early 80s. He later studied at their doubts about any photographic truth, fear and desire. the International Center of Photography in or accept being impotent pawns in the medi- You’ve talked before about photography as a New York alongside Nan Goldin and Larry atic game. language—do you ever feel trapped by the Clark, with whom he shares a fascination for You’ve spoken in the past about photogra- way in which you have communicated in the the seamier side of things. D’Agata has lived phy not being art. What are your thoughts on past, or do you enjoy having a unique voice? a murky and nomadic life. He regularly photography as art? Can you explain how I am not sure I’ll ever have the strength to immerses himself in his subjects, which typi- you see photography as opposed to art? make myself understood in a clear and cally tend to be prostitutes and other I do think of photography as a perfectly coherent way. I came late to photography as marginalised misfits, often throwing himself legitimate artistic language, but I believe it a desperate attempt to stay alive, and I don’t into dangerous, drug-addled and sex-fuelled is underused or misused most of the time. have the discipline or energy to always situations. We spoke with him about photog- The world is not made out of what we see make sense in the way I try to communicate raphy as art, honesty, morality and what it’s but from what we do. Photographers who my understanding of things. My books are like to be addicted to the drug ice while liv- ignore this state of things—and today, as in careless and full of flaws, my images are ing with Cambodian prostitutes. the past, most of them do—reduce photog- messy and my writing is awkward. But all Vice: Which artists are you interested in, in raphy to its capacity for recording reality. these are just tools, not quite assimilated particular those who aren’t photographers? They don’t take responsibility for their posi- yet, in an absolutely determined search, that Antoine D’Agata: I respect artists who have tion while looking at the world and end up allows no concession or compromise. It is the courage to live up to the madness of their assuming voyeuristic, sociological or aes- difficult to be as excessive as I am in my art. Céline, Artaud or Rimbaud are geniuses thetic stands. Contrary to writing or work and be completely efficient. Every not for the dexterity or subtlety of their painting, you have to confront reality while book, every exhibition, every assignment is words but for their truth. I don’t see art as photographing. The only decent way to do just one more small compromise I have to competition or a spectacle but as a privileged it is to make the best out of your own exis- accept. Mistakes are my only possible way, space to give a radical form to one’s perspec- tence. From a moral point of view, you have but my route is my own. tive on the world. Art has long been the to invent your own life, against fear and Nan once said to me that everyone always says hostage of technique and today the criteria ignorance, and through the action. to her how dark your work is, but she thinks it would be intelligence, not to say cynicism. Intelligence and beauty don’t compensate looks like you are having a great time. But I look at art when I sense there’s space for passivity. The only way to keep one’s I guess reality is never as dark as the way I there for excess and despair. I didn’t have a dignity is to confront human condition and used to depict it, but I can’t ignore the feelings chance to consider the history of art. I look social context through direct action. It is a that overwhelm me when I go through the at Georges Grosz because I find there, difficult balance one has to keep between horror of the world. Meanwhile, I leave out of instinctively, the monstrosity of society, and the creation of situations to go through and my pictures the most dramatic and sordid ele- in Francis Bacon’s, of the flesh. I look at art the development of a narrative technique to ments, the appalling conditions of living faced when it is shouted or vomited, not conceptu- share one’s perspective. In this process, life by most of my characters. I try to express, in alised or marketed. overcomes art at some point, and art per- the most precise and arbitrary way, the inde- How would you describe your own work— verts life. By deliberately living in this finable and unbearable beauty of keeping as reportage, as art? Do you feel that photos constant tension, I expect to go through alive, physically, mentally and emotionally, for can be an honest and effective way to convey existence without having to give up lucidity those who don’t own anything but their own a situation? or experience. bodies and sell them to survive. The only type of connection I have to the tra- Do you think your work has much in com- Most of my photographic strategies are dition of reportage is coming up with the mon with, say, that of Nan Goldin’s? aimed at reaching the highest levels of plea- most efficient ways to deny, denounce or The few photographers who, like Nan sure or unconsciousness and, in this sense, destroy its prejudice. Beyond humanistic pre- Goldin, have influenced me as I was trying to sex and drugs are highly enjoyable working tence, reportage always conveys twisted or get accustomed to the history of the medium, methods. Part of my recent work could be insidious values. Its economic survival has have struggled to throw back some of the easily described as some chaotic and biased always been dependent on logical means to rawness of the world into photography. This sociology of ecstasy. I live my life with people perpetuate the efficiency and the profitability language is often reduced to its capacity to be who use pleasure as a way to impose their of a system controlled by the elite for their somehow neutral. What Nan Goldin has existence and identity in a world that denies own benefit. And one has to remember that taught me is to stand up, against all odds, in them every right. But pleasure can’t be sepa- no photography can pretend to show the a political and existential struggle for sur- rated from pain and alienation. Pleasure is

72 | VICE VICE | 73 still a dark territory to me and I am exhaust- I think when Nan was really high she saw we have to make the best out of it. But I ed exploring its limits. It’s just a route. and photographed the world very differently. have my limits, due to my own cultural Satisfaction isn’t the aim. Feeling might be Do you think that your work is shaped in a background. I don’t have that many but the point. I’m hooked on adrenaline. similar way? they are not flexible. I don’t make a moral I have read you talk about “innocent images”. Like Nan, I do what I can to create my own issue out of it. It’s just a matter of desire and Do you see your own images as innocent? route. Like her, I don’t like the idea of look- integrity. To be on the side of innocence has My images are innocent because they are ing at the world and I speak about my always been at the heart of each one of my accidental. I’ve used every possible method experiences. It is occasionally acceptable to moves. I stick to this. It is not an ideology. I’ve been able to come up with to give up be a viewer, a spectator, but I use drugs It’s an intimate philosophy, born out of control. I’ll use whatever I can put my hand because they make me act and react differ- experience and pain. I have been accused by on—alcohol, drugs, rage, sex or fear—to ently. Drugs can’t be reduced to some some anonymous voices on the internet of push my own limits and make sure the final mystical way to open a perception of reali- many things. They are cowardly and insidi- image is not an illustration or a statement. ty. I value the hardest and most physical ous attacks. I know where I stand and don’t This doesn’t mean I won’t be a maniac drugs, which alter and intensify the con- feel I have to justify myself. As far as what when it comes to building the coherence of frontation to reality. Not the ones which others do with their lives, I don’t judge but the work later. Each image is to some allow you to escape to some fuzzy, comfort- react to what I see and feel with my eyes, my degree independent from my will. Each one able or exotic state of mind. It all comes heart and my brain. is more a product of my nervous system down to not being a consumer but to take What do you make of criticism of your work than of my brain. And in the world we live the risk of your own destiny. To consume on the grounds that you are exploitative? in, I see this type of innocence as subversive drugs the way you would consume a TV As for most photographers, it is essential to in the contemporary struggle between the reality show wouldn’t help. Drugs help me me to deserve the trust of people I get close obscene forces of abstraction, of moral, of to feel, with my nerves and my stomach, to. But unlike them, my ambition is to abol- religion and the mechanics of the flesh. The where real life takes place. I don’t know ish any kind of political, emotional or instinct against the mind, the ultimate what real life is but I can’t bear feeling anes- physical distance with my subject. This strength of those whose only way to thetised any more. I try every day to dig out process can only happen if you constantly emancipate themselves from physical depri- the raw forces of instinct. In modern society, show respect, love and compassion. My vation, is orgy. pleasure is the only norm. Everything is work quickly became even more of an auto- done to eradicate all traces of desire, rage, So being high actively helps in creating that biographical journal. This was my very violence, pain, fear and all types of animal innocence? personal way to step away from the tradi- drive. Through drugs, through excess, I try Through the tension released in narcotic tional documentary photography methods, to fall back to these essential levels of drunkenness, through these bare moments of which I find very frustrating and hypocriti- uncontrolled emotion. high emotional fragility, I can explore a sense cal. There’s a part of cowardice in the usual of annihilation born out of it that I couldn’t As far as your own work goes, what purpose position of documentary photography in reach otherwise. I said drugs allow me not to do you feel it serves? Did you have an aim in between voyeurism and safety. This is think too much. They give me the raw ener- mind when you set out to work in Cambodia, where exploitation lies. The last few years, gy to break all barriers, and to go beyond for example? I have been experimenting with new work- acceptable limits. They open a perspective on I wasn’t looking for any kind of exotic con- ing methods, slowly abandoning the new possible strategies. As far as I am context for any specific perversion. But I had position behind the camera to enter the cerned, I’m done with fighting inhibition the sense of a place where barriers are few image itself, as a character within my own through excessive consumption of alcohol. and I knew I would encounter more of those images. That’s the only legitimate position. But there’s a new generation of synthetic people who are victims of global social vio- Photography is the only artistic language drugs which allow you to destroy yourself lence and find, in their own despair, the that has to be elaborate in the very same while, on the way, damaging the efficiency strength to invent new ways to survive. In time that the experience it relates is taking and sanity of the system. While fucking and Cambodia, this happens through the use of place. I just use photography in the most getting high, I reduce myself to a state that is new generations of cheap street drugs relat- coherent way, while experimenting with the a weird mix of flesh, emptiness and panic. A ed to methamphetamine. I grew tired of the world in the most intense way, trying to be bare state of being, a most innocent way to idea of transgression. But I tend to give a responsible for my actions and acknowl- experience the world that is essential before chance to immorality, the way it’s been tra- edging the existence and feelings of the trying to make sense out of it. ditionally defined. Life is an impasse, and persons I photograph.

74 | VICE VICE | 75 WeActivist CHRIS PASTRAS SHOT BY CHERYL DUNN 2010 www.wesc.com

The story “Cambodian Ice Triangle” reflects the violence of the economic and political overcomes desire, and desire never over- some familiar aspects of your work: drugs, elite. Any weapon will do. I see sex, drugs comes compassion. women and at times extremely unsettling and criminality as perfectly legitimate ways I’ve had no home for years. I have the images. To what extent is your work premed- to stay alive when you are treated as a non- same nomadic habits I had all my life. I don’t itated? Or is it more something that develops? accountable entity. To share time with my see my personal odyssey as a coming back to The only strategy I can come up with is to fol- characters in the most authentic way, I need any mythical home. Movement towards the low people all the way in their excessive way of to go beyond sympathy or empathy. I don’t void, fear of the unknown and the instinct of life. I never know where I am headed to but want to understand the people I photograph. survival define human existence. I try to live using photography, the way I use it, allows me I want to be with them, but inside them. I up and survive to my convictions, mistakes to escape from the lethargic world that sur- don’t want to look at the pain, but feel the and doubts. rounds us. I am the actor of a scenario I develop pain. Solidarity has to go through the flesh. in a very conscious manner. Self-destruction Words and thoughts are not worth much. can be premeditated. More and more, I rely on They just help to identify the nature of the other people to do the actual shooting, while gap between the other and myself. The com- keeping control, as much as possible, of the mon experience of sex and drugs helps me to light, the perspective, the position of the cam- fill the gap. Prostitutes and drug addicts era, the angle of the lens towards the subject, resist economic oppression and social alien- the shutter speed. Of course, I lose some kind of ation with their own body and destiny. control in this process but it allows me to stay, Violence is part of that process; it’s part of in an absolute way, something other than a that world. Most people I meet in the mar- mere spectator. The essential in the nature of gins of the cities had no choice and adapted the situation I provoke is the tension that is to the conditions of life imposed upon them. released beyond my control. My own personal As far as I am concerned it’s been a more strategy to go through the violence of the world conscious process in my case, but in the end isn’t to avoid it but to go for it, and not to hurt we share the same position in the world. I anybody but myself on the way. learned to accept better the legitimate and Your images are very intense and sometimes scandalous nature of ecstasy or violence. I feel violent. Does that reflect the relationships learned to endure the pain: physically, ner- you have with some of the people in them? vously, and emotionally. I do everything I can The violence of the communities I submerge to make sure I keep being vulnerable. I do myself into is proportional and adapted to everything I can to make sure fear never

76 | VICE Raymond Pettibon

INTERVIEW AND PHOTOS BY NICHOLAS GAZIN

’ve learned so much about drawing lection, and above that, stairs lead to a mini together like that. They are very hit-or- from staring at Raymond Pettibon’s apartment. We talked for about two hours. miss. I have many drawings that are I work that I’ve completely assimilated Raymond seemed distracted, but it was still half-finished and need a lot of work or his influence. Sometimes I’ll work for fun hanging out. He invited me to an art open- rethinking. This one’s not finished. One months, believing that I’ve reached a new ing and then we ate at In-N-Out. While we ate artist who I admire, and who’s an influence, level of creativity. Then I step back, take a he was looking through books, trying to find is Milton Caniff. He did Terry and the closer look, and realise that most of what I’ve reference and inspiration, I assume. I drew his Pirates and Steve Canyon. He was a master done was just ripped from his art. girlfriend. From there I followed him to Mike who had a heavy brush style. Like most people, I was first introduced to Watt’s birthday party at a cowboy bar in Long This might be a corny question, but here it Pettibon’s images when I started listening to Beach. It was one of the best nights of my life. goes: what is your favourite thing to draw? punk. I noticed that he had drawn the covers Vice: I had some questions prepared, but Waves. To me, it’s natural. I grew up with for many of my favourite records, Black Flag I’m getting distracted. How about we just ocean views—not even so much from the being first and foremost, and most of them start with some questions about the stuff in shore in real life but rather from surf maga- worked pretty great as t-shirts too. His show your studio? zines. It’s imagery that, for a lot of people flyers appeared in all sorts of magazines and Raymond Pettibon: Oh yeah, sure. around here anyway, is pornography. books I liked. (Most recently, he did the cover How about this painting of a guy surfing giant Although it’s probably been a few years since artwork for the debut record by OFF!, a super- waves? Why did you decide to make this? I drew one, there are people who want to see group fronted by Keith Morris of Black Flag, I grew up near the beach. Violence at the them. I like waves as images but I don’t rel- which is on Vice Records, which is owned by shoreline can be worse than street violence ish doing them so much lately. Each time I the same company that owns this magazine. So sometimes. Local surfers are despised and don’t know how it’s going to look, like it’s an there’s that.) It’s almost impossible to avoid hated by most other surfers throughout the ordeal or a challenge. Pettibon if you’re into this sort of stuff. world. There are good days, but if the waves Have you ever seen Secret Identity, the col- At first I thought his work was rough and aren’t coming, you’re sitting on the sand and his lines were sloppy. As with a lot of great praying for surf all year. Then you go and lection of black-and-white illustrations Joe art, I had to grow in order to appreciate it. poach other people’s breaks. Shuster made for porno booklets after he was Eventually I began to see his lines as beauti- fired from Superman and estranged from DC ful strokes that pushed the possibilities of I love the concentric lines of colour. I’ve been Comics? A lot of your drawings remind me black ink to powerful places. I realised they accused of ripping off that sort of texture of his use of black ink. were wild and free like ponies in a field, from you. No. There’s nothing original, really. There’s an doing whatever it is that they want to do. All the characters look a lot like Superman I met Pettibon via the band Cerebral original style or a fingerprint of anyone who makes the first line in what they do, and and Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen and Perry Ballzy. He was hanging out with them one that’s it. White, but they’re sexually humiliating each night and happened to see a t-shirt I drew for other. There are butt-paddling machines, men them. According to the band’s singer Honor, Can you tell me about this drawing with in hoods, people tied up, and lots of whips. It’s he demanded that they give him one. I nearly the skinheads? really strange and scary. died of joy when Honor told me about this There’s not necessarily a lot to tell about it Wow. That sounds like the Tijuana bibles. exchange. Weeks later I ran into Pettibon and until I have a sense of where it’s going or You can hardly condemn Shuster for it his girlfriend, video artist Aïda Ruilova, at what it means. because both he and Jerry Siegel were so one of Ballzy’s shows. Raymond was with- Right now it’s just a bunch of guys carrying abused by the comics industry, and they drawn but friendly, and his girlfriend was an a body? were just kids at the time. To experience enthusiastic lady who seemed as awestruck Yeah. He could be injured or even dead. that after creating something like Superman by him as I was. After chatting with him for Does this type of stuff come from your head, that resonates so much and has been so a bit, I asked if I could interview him during or is it based off photographic references? influential and powerful in terms of cul- my upcoming trip to LA. He agreed, and a This one was definitely from a photo, which ture… it’s more than being a disgruntled couple of months later I was in a car, anx- was projected. employee. I’m sure that was part of iously anticipating the visit to his workspace. Shuster’s frustration, and the sex stuff is Raymond’s studio is hidden inside a build- So the characters are slowly fleshed out the probably closer to Superman’s true charac- ing that was previously a furniture store. It still longer you work on them? ter and personality anyway. has the old business’s sign and ugly mural on Right. You can get a feeling for that at odd the outside, and the big storefront windows times. That’s why I hang them up. It’s partly Do you remember when you first read a have been covered with long sheets of paper. for the editing process. comic book? Inside, Raymond has dedicated an entire wall This one with the large inky shape and light My father had a handful of horror comic to pieces in progress so that he can work on brushwork is interesting. What’s going on here? books from the pre-Code era, and he’d take multiple things at once. Towards the back This was based on some pamphlet for them out maybe once or twice a year. It was there are shelves containing his giant paper col- either dentistry or tonsil work. I just put it always a cool event.

78 | VICE VICE | 79 Depending on how Raymond decides to complete it, this may or may not be a skinhead funeral.

Raymond has stacks of drawings inside his studio. He pulled this one out to talk about something but got distracted.

because what can a parent do, really? It’s “I can’t think of any crucial moments in easy to teach a kid how to ride a bike, but drawing or making visual art is something my childhood when the veils were lifted that’s a total mess until certain kids figure out their natural way of making marks and from my eyes...” figures. If a parent stepped in, it would be frustrating on both sides. I have never sat over the kids I’ve worked with and suggested Were they mostly EC titles? When did you start drawing regularly as a that they do this or that. I’d just give them Not EC, but other ones of that nature—horror serious endeavour? the subject matter. and crime, just a handful of them. Other than Let’s say about 12. I drew quite a bit. It became Were there any specific visual references that that, I didn’t read comics. I think I bought or a part of my life quickly, an everyday thing. I inspired you as a kid? read some other comics a handful of times, was doing editorial political cartoons at first. I don’t know if there were any. I can’t think but as a kid I wasn’t a reader of comics or Did your father teach you to draw at all? I of any crucial moments in my childhood part of the comic fandom. Of course, my art know he was a painter. when the veils were lifted from my eyes and borrows heavily from comics. I like many Oh no. He was a writer, and he taught I saw the world or imagined things in a new comic artists and writers and so forth, but it’s English. Many of his paintings are very good, way that I could transpose to the actual kind of a universal language. It lends itself to I think. In my case, there are influences one practice of making art. I was more interested reproduction and the practicalities of making can hardly even be conscious of. in words and literature, and I still am to a art and also to writing and narrative. They’re How about your mom? Was she supportive large degree. a good place to borrow from when you’re of your art? When did you change your name from Ginn learning to draw, especially without a formal There just wasn’t any kind of direct mentor- to Pettibon?

art education. But my work also comes from ing influence in terms of my art. I don’t My father had nonsense names for everyone, This is some sort of scary demon-monster drawing that exemplifies Raymond’s use of Sandy Koufax is one of Raymond’s favourite baseball players. This illustration of him is other things as well, like anyone else’s. know if that is even worthy of attempting so people always called me Pettibon. My cross-hatching and black ink. almost life-size.

80 | VICE VICE | 81 A random drawing that was on the floor near piles of comics.

brother was Tiger—you know, that kind of thing. He called me Pettibon after this foot- “If you gave an assignment to 100 ball player John Petitbon. illustrators to do a logo for a group named At what point did you start playing music? I never have. I wouldn’t start now. Black Flag, half would likely do almost But weren’t you in a band with your brother Greg before Black Flag got started? exactly the same logo, except better.” Somebody somewhere said that once, I guess. And like anything else anyone says about someone, it’s going to be endlessly parroted block, so you’d hardly know about my Black Flag came out of a time when unarmed and repeated and disseminated to all corners singing talents from my music work and live black people were being shot in LA. Every of the world forever. I learned the bass parts gigs. I’ve done some recordings as well, but week there would be one or two shootings, for the early songs, some of them, and that’s it’s just things I’ve been backed into. Today I whether they were older or younger. All we about it. I didn’t have the interest, time, apti- think there are probably only a handful of did was describe reality without editorial- tude or talent to make anything out of music. people who haven’t recorded something or ising it. The common denominator and the I understand that making music is hardly put out their own 45 or cassette. Nowadays rationale were to put a happy face on the sit- even a part of what being a rock star is there’s no excuse for anyone not to have their uation if possible, and it’s definitely possible about. I guess I had enough respect for music own CD, you know? to do that when you have the cooperation of and also probably the fans to leave it to the the LA Times and other newspapers. Their musicians. I have been in bands or had band When Black Flag formed, were you already rationale was that if you smoke angel dust projects over the years, and at times I sing drawing these confrontational and provoca- then you have superhuman powers and are a some things. I’m the unfortunate case of tive images? For instance, the drawing of the real danger. I was not creating caricatures or someone who has a beautiful lyric tenor, but giant devil throwing a cop. cartoon exaggerations. I was describing how there aren’t many spontaneous choruses or That drawing is about growing up in mother- the police would say that some guy, with the orchestras out there. You can find a guitarist, fucking LA. NWA and Black Flag were very aid and abet of smoking sherm, could come This is a good example of how Raymond juxtaposes slight lines of ink with big fields of black. drummer or bassist to jam with on every alike in their message and aesthetic of realism. to life as a force of nature and pick up a

82 | VICE VICE | 83 police cruiser. I apologise for once again ref- Is there any reference to worshipping evil or authority or their parents or their teachers. If erencing Superman, but that was the deal in anything like that? I’m not implying that you you ignore it or look at it from some benign this case. The cops used to use a choke hold, admire that idea, but maybe it’s some sort of indifference or distance, they will tend to find and again race had something to do with it. commentary on the weirdness of flags and some other way or grow out of it. So it The cops couldn’t have been facing an unusu- pledging allegiance to them? became violent because the police were ally terrible crime or imminent threat if they No. A black flag is a symbol for anarchism, extremely violent. That’s the beginning and were able to get close enough to put them in and that in and of itself instills ideas of fear, ending of that. If you use a group of people a choke hold, but there were several deaths, violence, chaos and uproar into John Q. as a scapegoat then there’s going to be some and eventually the police chief said, “Well, Citizen or Joe Public. And this is an example kind of reaction. It was such an uneven play- maybe it’s because the black people are of when you blame the caricature to avoid ing field that the only reaction was to cower anatomically different than ‘normal’ peo- the reality. Anarchism is about throwing and defend yourself against the blows. For ple.” I know I don’t have enough confidence bombs, which is not something I want. I me, to be in a position to have to send these in reality to be superconfident about any- don’t want to remake a new world from the types of signals… I’m not completely against thing. That’s my epistemology, but it’s OK ashes of the old. My politics come more from violence. I think people should be able to for the newspaper to tell me that someone is hardcore UCLA free-market economics. defend themselves, but even then one should capable of picking up a police cruiser and Peace and nonviolence. I’m not some right- think hard about physically retaliating. tossing it down the street? Or choking some- wing or market fundamentalist. I’m not Usually non-violence is a better way. Don’t one is just like some embrace at the airport, libertarian either. I’m for peaceful coexis- give the media what they want. They’re usu- a send-off to your wife or father or mother or tence and not intervening in everyone else’s ally the instigators, and the soldiers and the whatever? This is in the news section of the affairs—to have enough respect to let them pigs will mop it all up afterwards. Really, it’s New York Times? grow on their own. I’m a realist. It’s like about when your wiener doesn’t get hard. All the news that’s fit to print. dogs. If you give them a longer leash their Impotence? That’s really obnoxious and rhetorical. behaviour will adjust to it, and civil society When symbols are impotent of any real They make these outlandish characterisa- can do a lot better on its own without inter- power and they’re symbolic and they’re play- tions of all people and races, flights of fancy vention. I could get away with mayhem, and ing with rebellion or whatever, then they are that go above the realms of physics and act the threat of jail has nothing to do with pre- just empty logos. And even if a symbol does as justifications for going to war. They’re venting me from doing something. I simply have real power behind it, it’s still just a not only prepping it but cheerleading it and wouldn’t want to do it in the first place. badge of youthful revolt against baseball jer- laying the groundwork. Not the kind of So you’re saying human nature is not inher- seys or button-downs or grey flannel suits or groundwork that a grunt or an infantryman ently evil or violent? wingtips or bell-bottoms or whatever. At that does, but from a distance. My way of It isn’t a perfect world. It’s never going to be, point, it’s more than just a fashion statement, defending against this is the medium I work and I’m not perfect either. If I were confident but fashion is nothing to be disdained either. in, which includes cartoons and comics. that I could build some utopian society I I’ve never really thought of it in this way, but Whether it’s hung in a frame in a museum or would probably start here [points to his it is kind of cool to be the Gucci of my kind a gallery or tacked to a telephone pole or drawings]. As of now I’ve probably not done of work. I mean that in the way that Gucci taped to the bedroom wall of some 15-year- anything that’s near a success, not even a and all those types of trademarks can be old kid who hasn’t even gotten his first half-assed version of it. With Black Flag it cheaply copied and reproduced like my Black Flag tattoo or whatever. You can cut was their dancing or their look, the volume comic books or flyers. I don’t get any royal- all of this stuff out of the interview if you’d and the primitive vows and hardness of their ties from that. I haven’t got a cent from SST like to. music. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of vio- ever, and I don’t get any royalties from the lence. That did come later, but it was from tattoo trade. The tattoos are when it becomes No, I think it’s insightful, but I really want to an even more substantial brand because it’s know the story of how you got pulled into the media and the shock to the sensibility of mothers and fathers—their kid coming home stuck on someone permanently. And if some- doing so much of Black Flag’s graphics. one wants it off, then the motherfucker has My brother was in the band and ran the with pink hair or something. Those kinds of things are very important to kids. They often to go through even more pain to have it record company. The graphics for 45 records taken off than he did to put it on. or flyers or whatever the case may be were play out transgressions and rebel against usually just an afterthought, and I was the Do you have any tattoos? person who did those. I drew, you know, so I have this huge swastika on my back. I did three years at Pelican Bay. My cellmate did it was nothing more than that. tattoos, and I showed him a picture of my What about the Black Flag logo? It’s almost girlfriend. I thought he was going to do her as ubiquitous as the McDonald’s logo in my as this kind of angelic mother Mary with her mind. How did you come up with that? legs spread, but you’re lucky to get a tattoo If you gave an assignment to 100 illustrators needle smuggled in or made there and he did to do a logo for a group named Black Flag, in what he wanted to do. the same context, as we know them, half Why were you at Pelican Bay? would likely do almost exactly the same Copyright violation. When I finally saw the logo, except better. I don’t have any of the tattoo on the visor of one of the COs there, skills of a commercial artist. The height of the reflection of it, I got really mad at my the bars were never even. Most flags, if cellmate. But now I’m almost glad that I got they’re illustrated, are waving lines. the swastika, as abhorrent as anything to do Yours is rigid and imposing. with Hitler or Nazism is. The fact is that I’m And it suggests movement and power, like pis- in the business of making symbols and repre- tons for instance. The name came from me as sentations and stuff on paper. Ideas and well. My politics are pretty far to the left and drawings and illustrations can have conse- I’m not a colourist, or at least I wasn’t then at quences. As much as I despise that tattoo and all. If I were I would have considered Red Flag, as much as my girlfriend came to despise it, for aesthetic reasons as well as for what it rep- she turned out to be Hitler incarnate. So at resents. Also, I want to be clear that Black Flag least I was relieved that I didn’t have her At this point Raymond was just shuffling through hundreds of old drawings by him and his relatives, all of which were great. isn’t a reference to the ant spray. image tattooed on me.

84 | VICE VICE | 85 DOs

If you’re ever editing a psychology text book and need a photo for the chapter on depression, this sums it up nicely. This girl just invented a new game—it’s called Subculture Jenga.

THE A COLLABORATION BETWEEN AND

A great way to get in to festivals for free is to volunteer to I say we don’t give the gays equal ANYTHING until we Well, that’s one way to get around the sweaty fart smell work at one. It means doing some crappy job for a couple see some party equality up in here. that’s been lingering since they banned smoking in clubs. of days, but what’s the worst they could have you doing?

86 | VICE GSM EUROPE - PH: +33 (0)558 700

DON’Ts

Man, getting married must suck if you’re a girl. You spend your entire life making little scrapbooks of dream dresses The Sims is great and everything, but why does their and pretending pillowcases are veils at sleepovers, and then you have to walk down the aisle with a 16-year-old who random sim generator have to be so out there? just borrowed his dad’s suit for his first job interview. Seriously, what the fuck am I gonna do with a sensibly dressed trainee-clown, Eurotrash-lesbian, rebellious kid sister?

Dear Gallery Owner, I think you might be getting Punk’d. Seriously, guys, just take it down a notch. You’re Sorry, but in this climate of Uggs and footgloves (or Love, Someone who’s been on deviantART at some point alienating real people. How is anyone meant to whatever those things are called), “it’s just so comfy” is in the last decade. understand a piece this complex? no longer a valid excuse. Duct-taping a duvet to yourself would be comfy too. You know who else is more interested in comfort than what people think? Babies.

Scan for more information Get free App at: http://gettag.mobi

88 | VICE DOs

SIX INNOVATIVE PRODUCERS. SIX UNIQUE COLLABORATIONS. ONE STUDIO.

Andrew Wyatt meets Mark Ronson Diplo meets Lee Scratch Perry Gareth Jones meets Emmy the Great Jamie Reynolds meets The Cabin Fever Toddla T meets Dave Invisible Daniel Hunt meets Marina Gasolina

FOR EXTRAS CHECK OUT REDBULLSTUDIOS.COM

These guys are gonna have some fuckin’ SEXY babies. I like to imagine these two involved in some Truth About Cats and Dogs scheme where the smart one is telling the hot one what to say to the guy she likes through an earpiece. But a bee flies into the smart one’s ear and she’s all, “Argh, get out of here!” And then the hot one would repeat that and the guy would realise what’s going on and end up falling for the smart one.

Airing November 10 Oh look, someone made an art piece that deals with “Bad Photoshop” is a really popular costume in Russia Man, I love art. But I wish it didn’t have to be so over what my mum thinks this magazine looks like. at Halloween. my head all the time. Real-estate ad-style photos of bombed houses on the Gaza Strip? If only I could decipher what themes this piece deals with. vbs.tv/watch/the-producers

90 | VICE DON’Ts

“Most magazines are driven by a desire to make money by putting celebrities in them. But Vice looks like it’s here because it wants to be.” — Ian Hislop

“Magazines can be very dull and shallow, Vice seems to have turned that on its head.” — Dame Vivienne Westwood THE WORLD ACCORDING TO VICE

“Yes, it’s cute, isn’t it? But it’s actually a lot more than that. You see, the seven Snow Whites represent the way that So lemme get this straight. It’s the year 2010 and your big corporations reinforce negative gender... Why are you crying?” art is a canvas painted white? So you’re attempting to challenge my preconceived notions of challenging my preconceived notions of what art is?

A full colour, 352-page hardback compendium of the best of the last few years of Vice magazine If you’re gonna take one part of an outfit and turn it all Dude, I know we said that with enough confidence you “You see, everything I do IS art. My hair was inspired by and VBS, featuring brand new interviews, the way up to 11, why’d you have to turn up turn-ups? could pull off any look. But we meant, like, “Victorian the way nature has evolved certain physical attributes articles, photos and illustrations. Those things SUCK. Were you not satisfied with getting gentleman remix” or a weird hat or something. No to act as a warning. The way a wasp’s stripes let others home and just finding grit and cigarette ends in there? amount of confidence is gonna pull off the “imaginary know they should stay clear, my hair lets you know that On sale in all good bookshops now. You wanted to move on to bigger and grosser things? gun at a SWAT raid” look. talking to me at a party would be the biggest mistake of your life.”

92 | VICE CONNECTIONS LONDON 2010 Girls of Saint THE CUSTOM MADE TRADESHOW FOR THE CREATIVE COMMUNITY BY WEDNESDAY 10TH / THURSDAY 11TH NOVEMBER 2010 Martins College THE LINDLEY HALL, THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL HALLS, ELVERTON STREET, LONDON, SW1 PHOTOS BY SAGA SIG, STYLING BY SAM VOULTERS Hair by Michael Jones, Make-up by Kanako Yoshida, Stylist’s assistants: Thais Mendes, Scarlett Valentine Thanks to Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design GARETH PUGH LEBOOK LONDON 2010 LEBOOK LONDON RUTH HOGBEN FILM STILL O.COM DIRECTION SEESTUDI ART

SCARLETT TULL, 21

Lacoste jumper, 55DSL shorts, vintage socks, DSquared2 hat, Dr. Martens shoes 55DSL shorts, vintage socks, DSquared2 hat, Dr. Lacoste jumper, Third year, BA (Hons) Fashion Womenswear

VICE | 95 JET SWAN HYAM, 20 SOPHIE KOKO GATE, 21

First year, BA (Hons) Fashion Communication b Store dress, Lina Osterman top, vintage tights and shoes, The Great Frog ring t-shirt, Uniqlo vest, McQ trousers, Casio watch, Bjorg necklace, vintage bracelet, boots from Mint Vans Third year, BA (Hons) Graphic Design

96 | VICE VICE | 97 LOIS BLAMIRE, 22 Second year, BA (Hons) Fashion Womenswear

LILY ATTWOOD, 21

Vintage shirt, skirt, necklace, bra and belt, Nike socks, Reebok shoes Vintage underwear dress, Nike jacket, Topshop Westwood Anglomania by Vivienne Second year, BA (Hons) Fashion Print

98 | VICE VICE | 99 O THONGTHAI, 20 Second year, BA (Hons) GRACIE WALES BONNER, 20

Graphic Design Insight t-shirt, vintage jacket, American Apparel leggings socks, Kickers shoes, Eastpak bag necklace, Toast Original Penguin top worn as dress, N2 earring, Topshop First year, BA (Hons) Fashion Design and Marketing

100 | VICE VICE | 101 Artist Shoots Friend PHOTO SELECTION BY JONNIE CRAIG STYLING BY ANNETTE LAMOTHE-RAMOS

PHOTO AND WORDS PHOTO AND WORDS BY ASGER CARLSEN BY JERRY HSU

Blazer and shirt by agnès b. own sunglasses, t-shirt model’s Ray-Ban Wayfarer Tim Barber of Tiny Vices is someone who has helped me countless times over the years by featuring my work or showing it in exhibitions. He has done so much for the photographic This is Katina. When I first saw her she was too beautiful to approach. She was so pretty it scared me. It turns out she knew my photography and approached me. community so it’s an honour to be appreciated by him. Tim also wrote the foreword for my book, Wrong, with Mörel Books. So this portrait is in homage to that series. Now she is basically my muse and I couldn’t imagine not having her in my photographs.

102 | VICE VICE | 103 PHOTO AND WORDS PHOTO AND WORDS BY KATHY LO BY JONNIE CRAIG

Smaxa shirt by Diesel Shirt Wesc This is my boyfriend Kaelin. Most of my personal work revolves around him; he is my number one go-to for input. I trust his opinions and he is always there for me Jeanette Steinsland is my Swedish gallerist. She runs a gallery called Steinsland Berliner in the centre of Stockholm which just hosted the exhibition “Vatican Gold”, to which 24 /7. Jerry Hsu, Kevin Long, Ed Templeton and I contributed. I love how excited Jeanette gets about art. When we were hanging the show, we intended to hang around 20 of the 50 Templeton pictures, but because of Jeanette’s enthusiasm, we ended up hanging all 50 on one wall as a collage. 104 | VICE VICE | 105 PHOTO AND WORDS PHOTO AND WORDS BY LELE SAVERI BY SETH FLUKER

Vintage Descendents t-shirt, long-sleeve American Apparel shirt, Diesel jeans, Nike shoes, Nabi bag Vintage denim jacket with vintage leather sleeves, Crumley necklaces American Apparel t-shirt, altered Levi’s This is Giuseppe Furcolo. I’ve known him for around 12 years and there is nothing he cannot do. He takes photos, does web design, edits videos and he’s even writing a movie Redia Soltis is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Zero 1. Redia has helped promote my work through its website and in group exhibitions that she and script. After I shoot videos, Giuseppe takes care of all the editing and graphics that I don’t know how to do so well. Oh, and we got arrested together around ten years ago for her partner Jennilee Marigomen curate. doing graffiti in Rome. 106 | VICE VICE | 107 PHOTO AND WORDS BY RJ SHAUGHNESSY

Diesel shirt, Lacoste trousers, Oakley sunglasses, Sperry shoes Jake Trott is known for his continuous attempts to quit smoking cigarettes, as well as the time an art director exploded a water balloon on his crotch at a fancy dress dinner. He once also got hit in the balls during a tomato fight in Spain. Jake is my digital tech, my second set of eyes, my support system, my fire starter, guidance councillor and friend. I owe him a lot.

PHOTO AND WORDS BY ARI MARCOPOULOS

Adidas shoes, Diesel jeans This is Camilla, my assistant. She basically does everything for me, from designing my books to helping with my organisation to keeping track of weather reports. I’d find it very difficult to operate without her.

108 | VICE VICE | 109 FIGURES A Series of Poses to Aid in Your Sketches of Female Anatomy

PHOTOS BY RICHARD KERN Photo assistant: Max Dworkin. Hair and make-up: Erin Green. Models: Yesenia and Deanna

SQUATTING WITH HANDS EXTENDED RECLINING ON ONE ARM

110 | VICE VICE | 111 LEANING BACK, ONE LEG UP STANDING WITH ARMS AND FEET CROSSED

112 | VICE VICE | 113 ONE ARM AND ONE FOOT EXTENDED LEANING FORWARD, HANDS ON KNEES

114 | VICE VICE | 115 STANDING, HANDS BEHIND HEAD KNEELING WITH FOREARM ON LEG

116 | VICE VICE | 117 Tonetta

BY BOB NICKAS

“ ’ll be your drain tonight.” How’s that for an opening or even Sir Elton John. When most people are busy rolling line? Unforgettable? Perverse? And yet somehow... over and playing dead, Tonetta jacks up addictive hits like I tempting? Keep in mind that it’s being delivered by a “Drugs Drugs Drugs” and “Yoassismine”. Pull the ninja man in his early 60s, with a platinum-blond wig screwed to mask over your head, break out the leather vest, oil up your his head as he shakes his moneymaker for the camera in his six-pack, and get ready to wail on that toy guitar. Forget Toronto apartment. Although the “Dancing With Myself” zoning out to a coma in the corporate atrium of MoMA, factor may be precipitous, Billy Idol has nothing on this guy. this is performance art, as messy, invasive, and unrelenting In his “Grandma Knows Best” video he’s totally buff, as the day is long. But just when you thought he couldn’t squeezed into a little black bikini bottom, with his hair cut take you higher, there’s more. Tonetta, it turns out, is also short and spiky. His styling decisions are nothing if not deliri- an unexpectedly fine draftsman whose frisky imagination is ously twisted. For “Sweet & Sexy”, his face is obscured by at the service of curious drawings that skim the surface of what looks like a white porcelain doll mask. Visual and sonic the unconscious and plumb the depths of the everyday. collisions can be eerily inspired. Dressed in a belted lady’s A tour of Tony’s drawing gallery is a matter not only of swimsuit and singing about Jesus, he’s a gnarly Serge navigating a series of bizarre twists and turns but also of Gainsbourg meets a silvery Jeanne Moreau by way of 1960s surrendering oneself to more mysterious and ravishing devi- French yé-yé. Equally cool and disturbing, this is Tonetta, one ations for which you are never fully prepared. In one Tony Jeffrey, an artist, songwriter, performer, and contagious portrait, the upper half of a woman’s body faces forward, force of nature. In a world of parrots, Tonetta actually lip- while the lower half is somehow turned around, pendulous synchs to his own lyrics. “What’s a caveman to do?” he breasts hung over the ledge of a considerably wide bottom: wonders. “Eat, drink, and screw / That’s all I want and all I a crisscross Venus Hottentot. In another, a faceless figure, know / I was blessed with a ten-inch pole.” While Tonetta has anatomically female from the waist up, has been endowed been recording his irresistibly catchy songs since ’83, the with a gargantuan uncircumcised penis. The naturalistic videos made at home have only been spilling out over the past image of a naked skater would be unusual in and of itself, two years, quickly finding a devoted if not bewildered cult and yet the addition of an oversize beagle cradling her dis- audience via YouTube. Any artist would give his eyeteeth for tended, pregnant belly gives one pause. A sweet black baby the kinds of comments that are regularly showered on in its crib could have been copied from a family snapshot, Tonetta: “I’ve never had this feeling before... I’m horrified but but a group of tragically emaciated African children, wide- can’t seem to look away... like a car wreck.” “I’m blasting this eyed and bearing empty cups, is its nightmarish inversion. and dancing in my underwear! Tonetta connection!!!” The Here, Tony asks, IS IT FAIR, and wisely omits the question most succinct is also the most undeniable, simply stated: mark. As social realism turns towards a free-floating surre- “This cannot be unseen.” alism, we are submerged into pure reverie. In one dreamlike While terms like “creepy” and “scary” come up with image, the corpus of a woman embodies a trio of alien some frequency, Tonetta clearly offers something people are lovers. Or an adorable ET is somehow enraptured by a missing in their increasingly predictable lives, whether they veiled baby-elephant trunk. (Of course it’s not, but we’re know it or not, or care to admit. Tonetta’s redefinition of adrift in magic ether. Suspend your disbelief for the briefest “guilty pleasure” isn’t simply a matter of permission, of of moments, at least.) For all that seems “disturbed”, there allowing an audience to have a good time without any of is real poignancy and tenderness in these drawings, and as the attendant and boring remorse: he gives himself permis- befits a worthy heir to the realms of the surreal, an obvious sion. In a repressive society, doing exactly what you want is undercurrent of obsession and an unrepentant delight in tantamount to the greatest crime of all; the ever-prolific fetish. Welcome to the world of Tonetta. Drain you. Tonetta, particularly at his age, is a genuine role model, not Tonetta’s recordings are available from the daring Black Tent Press label a goody-goody type like Naomi Campbell or Tiger Woods (blacktentpress.com). Stills from Tonetta’s music videos for “Sweet & Sexy” and “Grandma Knows Best”.

118 | VICE VICE | 119 All drawings by Tonetta.

120 | VICE VICE | 121 38 Great Eastern Street, London, EC2A 3ES

FRIDAY 12 NOVEMBER FRIDAY 19 NOVEMBER WEDNESDAY 24 NOVEMBER WEDNESDAY 1 DECEMBER DD/MM/YYYY FRIENDS OF AHAB SHOUT THE OLD BLUE LAST ALBUM LAUNCH PARTY November Coming Fire Live Namazonia Live 310TH BIRTHDAY PARTY DD/MM/YYY Live Throats Live The Murder Act Live O.Children Live Hymns Live Tropics Live Ghostcat Live Salem Live Entry: Free Thrash Hits Dj Entry: Free Vondelpark Live Entry: £5 adv Entry: Invite Only SATURDAY 13 NOVEMBER THURSDAY 25 NOVEMBER SKILL WIZARD SATURDAY 20 NOVEMBER THIS IS YOUR LUNCH THURSDAY 2 DECEMBER Conan Live SCREAMING AT THE WALL DT Live FLASHGUNS EP LAUNCH Decrepid Live Wiht Live The Menzingers Live Maria and the Mirrors Live Flashguns Live Entry: Free Apologies, I Have None Live Peepholes Live Entry: £5 Leagues Apart Live Zarcorp (LOTP) Dj MONDAY 15 NOVEMBER Whatever Happened Lillica Libertine Dj MONDAY 6 DECEMBER LITTLE ACORN to P-Rock? Dj Entry: Free OLD BLUE LAST PRESENTS The Good Times Live Everything Sucks Dj The Good Natured Live De-Railed Live Entry: £5 adv / £6 door FRIDAY 26 NOVEMBER Entry: Free Jade Browne Live CLUB.THE.MAMMOTH Entry: Free SUNDAY 21 NOVEMBER COLD IN BERLIN WEDNESDAY 8 DECEMBER TOUCHÉ AMORÉ ALBUM LAUNCH ALCOPOP! TUESDAY 16 NOVEMBER Touché Amoré Live Cold in Berlin Live Ute Live STROLL ON Lighthouse Live Neurotic Mass Movement Live Elephants Live John & Jehn Live Throats Live Crossbreaker Live Wild Palms Dj Entry: Free Big Deal Live Wardogs Live Entry: Free Entry: Free Alaska Live FRIDAY 10 DECEMBER Entry: £7 SATURDAY 27 NOVEMBER HOLY ROAR CHRISTMAS PARTY WEDNESDAY 17 NOVEMBER STREETS OF BEIGE HANG THE BASTARD THE OLD BLUE LAST PRESENTS MONDAY 22 NOVEMBER Airhead (Brainmath) Dj ALBUM LAUNCH Le Corps Mince de THE OLD BLUE LAST PRESENTS Lapalux Dj Hang the Bastard Live Françoise Live Emanuel and the Fear Live Drop/Dead Dj Brontide Live Rotkäppchen Live Evryone Live Bare Girls Dj Abolition Live Conquering Animal Sound Live Drum Mode Live Fat Controller Dj Black Mass Live Entry: Free Entry: £7 adv Entry: Free Slabdragger Live Entry: Free THURSDAY 18 NOVEMBER TUESDAY 23 NOVEMBER TUESDAY 30 NOVEMBER VICE ISSUE LAUNCH SADDAM HUSSEIN RECORDS COOL FOR CATS SATURDAY 11 DECEMBER Porcelain Raft Live Don Vito Live Idiot Glee Live SKILL WIZARD Eat Skull Live Shield Your Eyes Live Woe Live Mutant Live Sensation Live Cuss Words Live The First Loves Live Deceptor Live Entry: Free Entry: Free Entry: Free Entry: Free Free Jukebox & Wi-Fi

For full listings visit www.theoldbluelast.com

122 | VICE Russell Haswell

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER, PHOTO BY JAMES PEARSON-HOWES

f you were to encounter any notable per- Where was your flat? work. However, when I went to the one in son operating in the fields of art, music, It was on Myrdle Street [in Whitechapel, east Helsinki, directly from Stockholm, I went I fashion, technology, media or science London] and it was where everyone lived. with Coil because they were on tour at the during the last 15 years, chances are they Jake and Dinos had made it big by then. In same time that I wanted to go to Helsinki. I would have a story to tell about Russell the late 90s I left that environment and I took the tour bus and ferry with Peter Haswell. The British multidisciplinary artist went to New York to be a curator. Christopherson and John Balance, and when and curator, who turns 40 this year, has chis- How did you get that gig? we got to Helsinki, I was living on this elled out his own highly idiosyncratic niche I was headhunted by Alanna Heiss, the then fortress island called Suomenlinna, which is across an enjoyably unorthodox career that director of PS1. This was before and during this UNESCO World Heritage site, and I was has seen him produce a small but perfectly its merger with MoMA. At the time my girl- there for the winter period, so there were no formed body of work in a variety of media, friend was Cecily Brown and I was working other artists there, nobody to meet and hang most of it characterised by its uncompromising on various shows. The first thing I was work- out with. But there were all the advantages of physicality, brutal honesty and black humour. ing on was Children of Berlin, a group show Finland, like avanto, which is where you cut Over the years, Haswell has collaborated of people from Berlin, so I actually spent a hole in the ice, go to the sauna, take your with artists such as Aphex Twin, Zbigniew about three months in Berlin, hanging out sauna, come naked to the hole in the ice, and Karkowski, Jake and Dinos Chapman, with the artists. Because there were a lot of you soon realise that the air is colder than the Autechre and Carsten Höller, and has released musicians there I did a kind of monolithic, water you’re in. So you get more into the a number of records on the Warp and Editions mega CD changer where every band and water until it’s unbearable, climb out and Mego labels. He’s also a lot of fun to hang out record label from Berlin provided their new then leg it back to the sauna. All the snow with and could talk the hind legs off a donkey, releases and back catalogue, which filled this and ice on your body melts, it would be great provided there’s enough beer on hand. 200-odd-CD changer. I spent fucking ages to be there with a girlfriend. Vice: How did a lad from Coventry end up cycling over to every record company, meet- So all this time, what was the art you were working for Gilbert and George? ing all these people. In a true curatorial sense making yourself? What was the music like? Russell Haswell: Well, I once helped them. In I had to meet all these people, some who I That’s the thing, if you look at my web page the art world some artists don’t fabricate their didn’t like, and work with the music of some at haswellstudio.com, there were exhibitions own work, they get other people to make it for artists whose work I thought was shit. To cut I contributed artworks to. them when they hit the big time. Gilbert and a long story short, I didn’t want to do it any Like the cockroach painting? George hit the big time in the 70s. more. I wasn’t prepared to do work with Dave Falconer curated that show, Frass. It How did you end up doing that? artists whose work I thought was shit. To was held in the decommissioned UBS bullion It was after spending years in London, unem- work as a curator, in any curatorial capacity, vault in the City. So there I exhibited a new ployed. I went to all the gallery openings I was only going to work with artists that I version of the cockroach paintings. At that every night because at that time in the art liked. If I thought they were a pile of shit, I time the art world was getting really large world, Beck’s first started to sponsor the arts. was either going to do a bad job, or not do scale, and it was before it crumbled. In the early 90s, every gallery opening you the right thing, so as a consequence I left What was it like when it got like that? went to had free Beck’s, and when you’re New York. Well, there were a lot of artists who would be unemployed, getting free beer really was a It all went tits up? given big money from powerful galleries and key thing. All my friends, Jake and Dinos, Yeah, it did. their work was still shit, but they were get- and Dave Falconer, we all used to go to the What happened exactly? ting big commissions. Their work was openings. You go to meet the artists, it was a Well, if you go on the internet you’ll see loads manufactured, fabricated, and it was still shit scene, and over the years I met Gilbert and of different stories about what happened, work. And anyway, I was quite cynical, and George. and they’re all incorrect. It all got a bit hectic it just seemed like an interesting idea to use Why were you in London? and shit hit the fan big time when it wasn’t cockroaches, as they can survive in any kind I’d just left Coventry, my hometown, and I supposed to and it didn’t need to. of environment, whether it’s a nuclear- had studied at the Art Faculty there. Coventry What caused it? bombed area or whatever. The idea that you is the Detroit of Britain, it’s where they made I still don’t know. General dissatisfaction could kill them with Chanel nail varnish was all the cars and aircraft engines. Rolls Royce, with things you just don’t want to be doing. this strange contradiction. And there was Jaguar and Peugeot Talbot are there, the also the fact that I’d have to go through this largest speedway track in Britain is there, and What happened next? physical, structural, materialist process of it was the second most bombed city in Britain. When I came back to the UK, I realised I did- actually killing these things myself, which So yeah, it’s a pretty grim place. When I got to n’t really want to move back to London. And was more gruesome than I ever expected. London I was in a flat with a guy called Dave exactly at that point I went to Sweden, I They tried to escape the whole time. They Pugh who was in a duo called Critical Decor, spent a year there on an artist’s residency, were so brutal that even when you painted who were really great. Dave Falconer and Jake then half a year in Helsinki. them in nail varnish they’d still keep going, and Dinos had their first exhibitions in What were they like? but would leave a Chanel trail! When the nail London when we lived there. Amazing! varnish gets caked on enough, they would What art were you doing then? Like jumping in to freezing cold water and stop, suffocate and die, and then that’s that. Nothing. Thinking. I had no studio, no mate- stuff? How many did you kill in the end? rials, no equipment and no budget. Well, that was in Finland. In Sweden I was on Fuck knows. Not that many, 60 or 70-odd. I So what would you do day-to-day? the IASPIS, which was an international made a video of them being killed, painted or Sign on, cash your Giro, go to the cafe, go to artists studio programme in Stockholm. perpetuated... a gesture. The thing is, now an art opening, then go to a nightclub and That’s where you’re invited into the city and the piece is destroyed, so it didn’t help with then do the same the next day. you just do whatever you need to do for your the gesture. 124 | VICE VICE | 125 could buy an up-and-coming artist’s entire 5$:6(;:2:)$&7252))7+()8&.,1*&+$,1 graduation show and then never show it ever again. It’s Catch 22. Why does Saatchi do it? Well, the thing is, you can’t play unless you’ve got the cash, if you’re talking about collecting. The illusion is, as an artist you’ve got to live in the gutter and the collector picks you out of the gutter, and puts you in the gallery, and you’re sponsored because they think your work’s good. But I don’t think it’s like that any more. You’re a big fan of the Tony Hancock film The Rebel, aren’t you? I think that’s one of the best films about art. One of my favourite scenes from it is when Tony Hancock, playing the artist, is looking at a painting on the wall, with his landlady, Irene Handl, and she asks the artist, “What’s Russell Haswell and Toshiji Mikawa of Incapacitants performing live at IKKI, Kitakyushu, Japan in 2007. Photo by that?” The artist replies, “It’s a self-portrait.” Akiko Miyake And she says, “Self-portrait? Who of?” Given your experience, where’s the best place What happened to the piece? drivers with no seat belts. They’re all drinking to be an artist? Nobody bought it. I didn’t have room for it, Turkish coffee by the pint and driving 80 mph It depends what you’re trying to do. If so it just got chucked in a skip. I don’t know, down alleyways backwards. you’re just trying to experiment and do your maybe somebody has got it somewhere. I’m also currently compiling surround own thing at the start of your career, you’re recordings of all the solo gigs I managed to probably best off in a place like Sweden. Recently you’ve been doing this thing with archive while on tour in Europe this year Because if you’re from there you get sup- lasers? supporting Autechre. This is to be released ported really heavily. Well, it’s based on this Iannis Xenakis UPIC on DVD, vinyl and CD. The two-channel system. Florian Hecker and myself got to use You were fucked for years here, right? versions are encoded in this old two-channel the UPIC system in Xenakis’ old studio in When you go to the dole and the person format called UHJ, which can be decoded by Paris. After we completed the recordings and behind the desk says, “Artist? What? It’s not the end user into surround. edited the material into a release, we knew on the list of jobs I have here.” If you’ve got we were going to do concerts with this music. You’ve been living in the countryside for a a body of work and it’s good, then London’s We basically decided to choose to use and few years now. Has this had any influence on probably a great place to get a break. It’s make gestures towards Xenakis’ efforts in the your work? probably better than New York. New York is just cutthroat and full of wankers. Though I past, like the fact that he always had these Well, the Wild Tracks thing [a collection of field haven’t been there in over ten years, so what lasers when nobody was using lasers—it was recordings released last year by Editions Mego] do I know? well before Jean Michel Jarre. To date, we’ve was really about making something there. I’d spent a lot of time with Chris Watson, who done 20-plus UPIC Diffusion Sessions, these Ever been close to making a shitload of cash? makes lots of natural history recordings, and multi-channel surround sound concerts, and Your work doesn’t seem like it would. was in Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trio. nearly all used multiple lasers. But I’m more I’ve not been making any work, even for With my latest record, Value + Bonus, I or less over with that now. years. I’ve never made much, because I’ve wanted to compile an album that was different always had to do other things to make my Why? to everything I’d done before. It kind of comes living. And that’s one of the simple things It’s just done. I’m more interested in getting on from that emphasis of going “I’ve done that, I artists have to do to get by—it takes over. In with my own editing. That was something we want to do this now”, and then that’s the next New York, I realised, when you’re curating did five or six years ago, we’ve done it. It’s been stage. This is me doing what I wanted to do artworks in a gallery, the last thing you want done. That’s not to say we don’t do it any more; when I was 16. I was watching all these bands, to do is your own artwork. I was complete- we have an invitation to do one next year in but I didn’t have any equipment. All these ly castrated. France. We were invited by Sharon Kanach, tracks here, the second half of the first disc, are who was Xenakis’ assistant for two decades. what I’d like to have done when I was 16. Would you say the art world revolves around drinking? What now? How much of art is a racket? How many Not necessarily. There’s a lot of promiscuity, I’ve curated some artists for a project called artists do you think are blagging it? especially in New York, people trying to get The Morning Line, which is in Istanbul and Fucking hell! Well, who isn’t blagging it? together and get up the ladder, people trying commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Everyone’s blagging it in some way. The to become nepotistically entangled with other Contemporary. It’s a sculpture pavilion with thing is, it’s better if you’re blagging it! people. It’s the culture of the gallery girl. There five Meyer surround sound systems contained And the money? are lots of hot ones in New York. Not that I within it. I’ve curated the musicians Peter It’s gone up 800 percent in the last few years. was doing that, but that’s what New York is, Zinovieff, CM von Hausswolff, Yasunao Tone that’s the strategy. I mean, people probably do Explain how you make that money. and Jana Winderen, who are providing sur- that here. The reality is it’s like every job: if it As an artist or a collector? round soundscapes and compositions for this. gets out that you’ve shagged the receptionist, 6KRZLQJQRZRQ That’s while Istanbul is celebrating being a city As an artist. then that’s it, you’re over! of culture. I just think of Midnight Express. I Well, you need someone, a patron or a col- Value + Bonus is out now on No Fun Productions. More at don’t like it. It’s tons of mosques and crazy cab lector, like Charles Saatchi. But someone haswellstudio.com. 126 | VICE White Punk on Hope Gee Vaucher Finally Agrees to Talk to Us

INTERVIEW BY ANDY CAPPER, IMAGES BY GEE VAUCHER

ee Vaucher was a member of Crass A lot of people thought the original Crass I don’t really like working with people I and is a genius who made some works, things like 1978’s Feeding of the don’t like—I just won’t do it, what’s the point? G of the most iconic punk rock 5000, were collages. It’s a nightmare. I like to meet the people who artwork ever. Yeah, but they were paintings. The collages I’m doing a job for and more often than not Her style of collage and painting has been started when I found that I couldn’t deliver a that’s perfectly possible. Sometimes it’s not but ripped off by roughly 890,786 other artists job overnight—they wanted a ten-foot by you get a dialogue over the Atlantic and you on their crap album sleeves. nine-foot painting or whatever, and it’s speak with them, they send you their ideas—I Gee is a co-resident of Dial House in impossible. So I took some short cuts and haven’t got a problem with that. Some of it you Epping Forest, Essex, alongside Penny started combining short cuts with painting. I do for nothing because they’ve got nothing. Rimbaud, who we spoke to in the Anti- really liked what looked like paintings that Have you ever had an agent? were collage, so it really came of necessity, Music Issue. We’ve been friendly for a No. I’m not interested in all that. I’m happy and then I started working with it on my own number of years but our previous requests to with my work, I’m happy I can get by with it without a commission. have her in the magazine have always been and I get really excited when people offer me met with a polite but firm no. How come you were in New York at the time? a space to work in because I love putting up The first time we asked her was after we’d I was there really because I’d been living in a show. What more can I want, really? I’ve sent her a copy of a Photo Issue which we one place most of my life—at Dial House, got a few things for sale. I’m not trying to were particularly proud of and she said where I still live. I needed to get some dis- make a million. something like, “Well, I was looking at all tance. I thought, well, if I’m going to work Over the last 20 years the art market has this stuff in your magazine and I just within the system I’d rather do it in New gone bananas. thought, this is all total crap.” York than London because at the time as an It always does in recession. It’s the one thing The last time we hung out was at the illustrator in London you were treated like that never goes down. Raindance Film Festival, after she’d kindly shit. You were expected to illustrate some- helped get our films Swansea Love Story one else’s crappy idea, which was not my With your experience of the art world, did and the Vice Guide to Liberia into the festi- idea of fun. New York was very different, you see a change when the likes of Charles val selection. very respectful. I was working as a political Saatchi came in and commercialised art? At the Q&A following the screening, Gee illustrator so I was given some fantastic Well, it wasn’t so much the commercialisation loudly asked, “Yeah, well it’s all very well work to do. of art, it’s more, “Here go the bastards again.” It’s a bit like taking a young band and making doing these films about poor people in Such as? them into a commodity, making them stars, Liberia but why don’t you do something I covered things like corruption of school and when you’re that young you can’t handle about it, starting off by putting your hand in photos and how the parents had to buy them it. They dangle a big carrot in front of you with your pocket?” and how much for, for the New York Times, fame on one side and money on the other, and Gee, who is in her mid-60s, is currently so that was kind of nice. It was very much the minute you step out of that they drop you working on a series of paintings of children, carte blanche: they’d give you the story to like a ton of bricks. That happened to a lot of which she stores in a cowshed along with the read and left you to it. Now I’m never one for people from Goldsmiths. Saatchi bought up a cows. We had a talk about Dagenham, doing preliminary stuff, but they said, “Go whole year and then dropped the lot. I think a Charles Saatchi buying people’s souls, and away and do a preliminary drawing and let lot of really good artists got fucked over. Young the dangers of communal living. us see what it’s like” and I was like, “No people see art as a means of being a star now. way.” So I just did the finished piece and they Vice: Let’s talk about the new work you’ve You cannot sell your soul, and I think Saatchi really loved it. So it went from there. It got just done. bought a lot of souls. That’s not acceptable. heavier in subject—it went to Freddie Gee Vaucher: They’re very big, seven feet OK, a couple of people have come out of it well Cowen, a Nazi sympathiser who lived with square, portraits of children that have seen but a lot have fallen by the wayside. It’s very his mum and one day he took his collection too much too soon. I’ve tried to make them hard to make a living off your work. I’ve been of guns and started shooting people from the non-gender-specific. You draw your own very fortunate all my life, I’ve made money off top of a building before killing himself. Then conclusions really. I love the tenacity of my work but I don’t have any expectations. As I did Carlos the Jackal. I had to do an illus- children. Even though they’re confronted long as I’ve got my fucking studio and I can get tration after he took a shot at [Joseph] Sieff, with horrific situations, they somehow get in there with some materials, then that’s great. the [British] Zionist leader. through it and find that there’s more And if I haven’t got any material I’ll go out into I did a lot of work for the New York Times to life. the street and find some, for fuck’s sake. magazine and then for magazines like Ebony, Did you paint them from memory or make which I really enjoyed because there were a Can you give me a bit of background on why them up yourself? lot of black issues and I got on with the staff you became an artist? I tend to collage things together, then I paint and it was a nice challenge. I also did some Well, it’s the usual old thing really—when the collage. There’s a couple that were work for High Times. you’re a kid into art and you don’t give it up straight pictures that I found but obviously What was it like in the UK compared to the and keep doing it. they’re not reproductions. My work is never States? And you grew up in? the same twice—it goes from prints to sculp- They were very tight on what you could do Dagenham. Everyone’s mum or dad worked at ture to paint on canvas. and in the end I decided not to do any illus- Ford or Allied Trades so the school really tried What started you on the path to collages? tration work that demanded imagination. I to keep you off the street and prepare you for I was working in New York at the time. I was just did work on the life cycle of an oyster, jobs there. We only had two outings but it was doing very detailed painting. for example, technical stuff. a gas for me because the factories were beau- Child 1, 2007.

128 | VICE VICE | 129 Dictator, 2008.

Penny Rimbaud, San Francisco, 2008. Inside Head, 2009.

Oh America, 1989. really because if someone makes a suggestion Are you religious or superstitious in any way? I’ll run with it and that can be a bit off-putting Well, religious is a very strange word—spiri- for some people. At the time I’d been doing tual is probably a better word. My parents work for the International Anthem newspaper were Methodists and I’ve only just realised and doing my own work and I don’t really that. I went to the Banksy show in Bristol remember how it worked out. I just got back and as I was wandering around the city I and I just did it, kept doing it and keep doing walked through a shopping centre. I looked it. But I imagine I bulldozed and got on with to the left and there was the Wesleyan it. I just get an idea and I have to do it, I’m church. I just looked at it and thought I real- Classical Head, 1993. very quick. It’s hard for people who aren’t so ly needed to go in and get some peace from quick but still have equally valid ideas. But all the “Buy! Buy! Buy!” around me. I went now I’m beginning to think, sod it. That’s upstairs and there were all the storytelling en and shouts out to the neighbours, “Get me another reason why I like working alone rooms and suddenly everything clicked—my some needle and cotton!” and one of the jok- Children, 2007. Inside Head, 2009. because I don’t like being controlled in any parents were Methodists! I don’t know why ers next door yells, “What colour do you way, I’m very choosy. If someone doesn’t give it took me so long to realise. My father was want?” I didn’t really understand it at the tiful. You went out onto the factory floor and As a child, what would you say had an influ- prize once, which was great—that was the end me some leeway I can’t be arsed. a great storyteller—not religious stories, but time. I just saw everybody laughing when he looked out onto these vats about half the size ence on your artistic sensibility? Were your of entering competitions. told it because they knew the situation and as Have you ever gone through with a job hilarious stories that all the neighbours used of this room full of colours, lipstick colours, I I got older I understood. parents dragging you to galleries? What happened after you left art school? where people have pressured you into alter- to come and listen to. And that’s where it I loved the camaraderie of the area too, loved it. It didn’t entice me to work at Yardley No, I never saw any of that. We only had one I worked for three days a week in an arts day ing your work? comes from. Isn’t that weird? So I enjoyed everyone unhooked the fences at the back so though, but it was a great visual thing. Then I set of books and that was Charles Dickens. I centre in Barking where schools would come I left New York because it was beginning to Banksy’s exhibition, but I got most of it from they could walk through, everybody kept a key, just applied to go to the local art school and used to copy a lot of things out of the newspa- and do art for the day. I was like a technician. show that my work was becoming unaccept- the Methodist church, which I thought was everybody gave and shared, it was such a great got in on the merit of my work. In those days, pers and magazines and I remember at school able. I did alter one piece and I felt a bit really funny. Were you living at Dial House at this point? community. And since then I’ve always lived if you had a great portfolio of work and noth- once a teacher said to me, “You should stop unclean afterwards and I told myself if that There’s not much iconography in a I’d got my own place about two miles down the communally—if it hasn’t been Dagenham, it’s ing else, you’d still get in. When I speak to kids copying and do something for yourself.” I was happened again I was out of here. And it did Methodist church compared to a Catholic road from Dial House. I decided not to move in been Dial House, and even in New York every- about art a lot of them say they’re going to do quite shocked and I didn’t know what to do. I happen again, for New York Magazine; actu- church, is there? with the gang, I wanted to be independent. But one knew each other in the building. a PhD in art and I always say, “Would Picasso entered a painting into a competition but I got ally they wouldn’t even use the piece. So it No iconography—it’s all experience and sto- after a while I moved into Dial House. It fuck about with a PhD? Why don’t you just disqualified because it had writing on it. It was was time to go. My life has been very linked rytelling. There was a particular story that What do you like about communal living? seemed a bit pointless moving Hoovers and get on with it?” The only reason you go to art a painting of the Last Supper in a cave with with serendipity; the band had just been over, my dad used to tell, set during the war. The I like extremes of things. I like the adventure of lawnmowers up and down the road. school is for the materials. When I went to art Christ standing there with blue skin and some- things started to happen with the work—it family had moved out to Dagenham and he working together and Dial House has always school everything was free. Nowadays I don’t one was sat at the table with a sign saying “Ban When did it become clear that you were was just a very good time to go. I’ve been kept chickens in the garden. Dagenham was been a challenge. Most of it’s been fantastic, know how people can afford it. I couldn’t the Bomb”, and I got disqualified. I wish I had going to do all the artwork for Crass? very fortunate in that way. I’ll be stuck out in getting bombed a lot and a bit of shrapnel cut some of it has been a nightmare, but you know, have done it coming out of Dagenham now it now, all the table was green, it was very odd. Well, you know me, I’m terrible—you give me the middle of nowhere with nothing and sud- through a chicken’s neck. Now, my dad loved with every situation you learn something about with the sort of income my parents had. I But then I did win some things from some- an inch and I’ll take a yard. I love working denly someone will step out of the bushes his chickens because they’d lay eggs for the yourself because we all have so much to reveal think it’s awful. where else. I won a “How to Draw” book as a with people and I’ve had to learn to pull back and offer me some help. kids, so he goes running out, grabs the chick- in ourselves. And of course, you’ve got that

130 | VICE VICE | 131 Business as Usual, 2010. Welcome to Palestine, 2008.

Great Scott, 2008. open-house situation where you’ve got guys turning up that are on the edge of hell. Do you ever feel that it’s a bit dangerous? No, not really. If I did I’d have to trust that I’d pick up on it. There was one guy, a bit of a boozer, he drank three bottles of vodka in the morning. It’s quite amazing because it didn’t seem to hit him, no staggering or anything. He didn’t eat either. I had to force Bull, 1997. some bread down him. I couldn’t take him on though. He’d come all the way to live here paint over, but I thought, it’s got something be given carte blanche. I love to go travelling and I said to him, “If you want to get out of in it and I need to push on with it. I’m hop- and I love to do things but I just love to get into this you need to treat yourself a little bit bet- ing to finish that in a few days. the studio on my own, otherwise I feel like a ter.” It was hard for me to just say, “Only How many will you have done when you fin- fake. If I get asked to put on a show and I haven’t got anything that I’ve been doing one night,” so I had to drive him somewhere, ish that one? recently I don’t feel comfortable about it I just couldn’t handle it. Six. I keep them in the barn with the cows. But, having an open house, you’re going to because I’m struggling enough as it is. I’ve got no option. I’d rather not keep them have something like that every month, that’s the Sometimes I get into the studio and there’s noth- there, but I’ve got nowhere else to put them. principle of the place. But as you get older you ing there, but something always happens. I’ve think, I haven’t got much time really, I need to Have you ever had a cow eat something? been asked to do this big exhibition next year, get on with it. It seems like 30 years since Crass. No, I’ve had them bash things down. I would and another one the year after in Paris, so I need like to store them properly but we just don’t to get a lot of stuff together for that. But I can’t What’s your favourite kind of art to make— have the space. Serves me right for working contrive it because I need the time and space to film, painting, music? so big. do it, I need to push myself and experiment and I like everything really. I mean, if I wanted to that takes time. I’m cautious about it. paint a canvas and I was forced into making Are you offered a lot of opportunities to do The Crass back catalogue, complete with new artwork by a film then I wouldn’t enjoy it. I just go with shows? Gee Vaucher, has been remastered and released by how it comes out. I didn’t intend to do Yeah, a lot of things, ideas and stuff and I have Crassical Collection through Southern. New work by Gee can be seen at the “400 Women” show at Shoreditch another face this week but I found one that I to take a step back and look at it. It’s like work- Town Hall Basement, 380 Old Street, London EC1V 9LT, had put aside and I was actually going to ing on someone else’s ideas again and I need to until November 30. More at 400women.tumblr.com. Inside-out, 2010.

132 | VICE VICE | 133 LITERARY

the pound had fallen dramatically right when I approached you with the idea to do a book. I financed it purely with credit cards and luck- ily it all worked out well. Before that I had only made little poetry and photography zines. The first one was a collection of found photographs called When Lost is Found. It was only in an edition of 100 and, still, bookshops like Claire De Rouen and Dashwood Books picked it up. Gerard Malanga and Stella Vine both found it somewhere and theirs became the next two books we published. Stella Vine is a pretty big artist to choose to work with a small publisher. Yeah, it was really surprising when she approached me. It was great that she decided to do something so simple when she has enormous print-run monographs out with various prestigious publishers and museums. What do you think attracts high-profile artists to do these kinds of projects? I think it’s the freedom that comes with working with independent publishers. It’s a much more personal and hands-on collaboration, allowing the artist to put out their own vision. You also approached Ryan McGinley about doing the Moonmilk book, right? Yeah. That book was very fun to make; Ryan is great to work with, no attitude problems or anything like that. Even though he was in the middle of shooting the Pringle project with Tilda Swinton, we would speak till the early hours of the morning about layouts and selections for the book. What are you up to at the moment? We’re working on a book with Terry Richardson which is not about dicks and spunk, but about his parents. So the book comes as two bound halves, housed in a sleeve, one about his father and one about his mother. The book is great, it gives you more of an idea of how Terry became Terry. And now you’re working with Boris Mikhailov? Yeah, we’re working on a book called The Photo by Boris Mikhailov, taken from his upcoming book The Wedding. Wedding which depicts, in classic Mikhailov form, a troubled homeless couple getting When Aron Mörel of London’s Mörel Books married in Russia. put out my first book, which was also his first How was working with Boris? proper full-run publication, he was a poetry It was interesting. Most of the communica- zine publisher with big dreams. One year later, tion goes through his wife so I’m more he’s putting out highly sought-after books by familiar with her. the likes of Ryan McGinley, Terry Richardson, So what’s coming up in the future for Mörel? Jürgen Teller and Robert Mapplethorpe. We’re going to be releasing books with Agnes Which, in case you were born under a rock Thor and David Armstrong and we’re in talks with “I hate art photography” painted on it, with some other artists about projects. Then you will realise is a very big deal indeed. when that’s all done I can close the doors on the Vice: Hi Aron, when we first met you had publishing company and start a chocolate shop. never put out a proper book before, right? JONNIE CRAIG Photo by Asger Carlsen, from Wrong. Aron Mörel: Yeah. It was nerve-wracking as For more Mörel, visit morelbooks.com.

134 | VICE VIDEO GAMES KILLED THE RADIO STAR By Jon Blyth SUBSCRIBE FREE VOLUME 8 NUMBER 11 TO VICE

cremating her with a fireball. That For years we told people not to subscribe to Vice because it doesn’t really really gets the villagers talking. The make us any money and, unlike most other publications (which are corrupt twist this time is that you don’t stop organs of lies and filth), we don’t use our subscriber numbers to try and playing when you get to be king, and squeeze an extra quid out of advertisers. Plus, the whole managing the list the last half of the game is you, as and mailing thing is a huge pain in the arse to deal with. ruler, having to deal with how expen- This is all still the case, but after untold years of emails and letters from sive it is to be nice. The slightly people whining about how they can’t get their hands on an actual physical alarming subtext is that being openly copy of the magazine because some idiot keeps grabbing 20 copies at a First things first. If you’re thinking evil and breaking every promise you Speaking of disappointing friendships, time and then selling them on eBay, we are throwing our hands up and about buying a game for a child this made that got you into power is fine it was only playing Pac-Man Party saying, “FINE!” Christmas, don’t buy them Doctor as long as you’re trying to maintain an (Namco Bandai) that I realised that Who: Return to Earth (Wii). It was army to fend off the spectre of a loom- Pac-Man and the ghosts were now So if you want to get Vice in the mail every month, it’s £35 for 1 year including the behemoth Photo Issue in June. Send cheque or money order never going to be the best game in the ing attack by a faceless evil. Makes friends and that they’ve basically been (payable to VICE UK Ltd) to: world, but to sculpt a turd so pro- you think, doesn’t it? scrapping over cookies for 30 years. foundly misshapen and grotesque It works, though. If you want to For a Mario Party clone it’s got some VICE Subscriptions takes some effort. To plumb such take the virtuous path, you’ll end up great mini-games, but it’s let down by New North Place depths of badness is absolute proof forced to fund the army yourself, a ponderous board game element. If London that “so bad it’s good” doesn’t always which involves a long game of spec- you can’t think of a better reason to EC2A 4JA work. Certain kinds of badness just ulation and exploration. It’s an invite friends over than a series of Pac- Or subscribe online at: www.viceland.com keep getting worse without ever effort, but Albion offers such a Man mini-games, then forget the becoming entertainingly naff or wealth of nooks, options and person- board game and just go straight into Please allow 6 to 8 weeks for delivery of your first issue. endearingly inept. I’m not saying ality—plus it boasts a fantastic cast the games menu. everyone involved with this product is and script—that it’d be a shame to evil, just that they’re abusing a well- rush through it. loved character to effectively steal £35 from families during a recession. And that’s not to mention the crushing disappointment of thousands of children whose endless sobbing will trigger countless incidents of festive domestic abuse. I haven’t had a chance to play Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (Ubisoft, PS3, Meanwhile, the Wii enjoys its own Xbox) yet, and I’m running out of exclusive—Epic Mickey (Disney space, so I’ll just transcribe a brief chat Interactive). If Disney’s Kingdom I had with a friend who’s reviewing it Hearts felt like a populist roll-call and for the Official Xbox Magazine. was way too mainstream for your refined tastes, then this is its cheerful- Vice: Is it any good? ly obscure half-sister. Not only is it Friend: It’s eight-out-of-ten good. Anyway, that’s just a friendly warning designed by Deus Ex’s Warren Not better than Assassin’s Creed 2, to anyone whose gift ideas extend no Spector, a celebrity in the video game then? further than “a book of that TV show world, it features the forgotten cast- No. The storyline’s more sandbox-y, you like”. There’s plenty of good stuff offs from the Disney universe. which is great, but you don’t get the knocking about. Fable 3 (Microsoft, So the bad guy is Oswald the Lucky same feeling of momentum. Xbox 360) is the latest—and proba- Rabbit, a former mascot of the studio And what about the all-new multi- bly greatest—game to take place in who proved to be so unlikeable and player? the world of Albion. It’s a world charisma-free that he was supplanted Oh, that’s brilliant. It’s really well where passers-by have no inner mono- by the hateful, hooting Mickey. The done. You’re all given someone to logue, deciding instead to shout their research that’s gone into filling the stalk and murder. You get clues as to opinion of you across the market- world with unknown one-offs is what they look like, and other people place. A place where morality has no impressive, and puzzles involve paint- might have the same target, or some- shades of grey, just different depths of ing things in and using paint thinner good and evil. Farting, for example, is to remove items from the world. This one else might be targeting you. It evil, but not as evil as dragging your being Disney, of course, everyone ends really works. daughter into the town square and up friends. Excellent. Thanks.

136 | VICE REVIEWS

BEST ALBUM OF THE MONTH: THE SEXUAL OBJECTS

under wraps—until now! Not only that, but TENSE Street Kobra and his crew have started dressing Memory like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix and seem to Module /Desire have roped in anyone who’s ever picked up an V/A instrument in Helsinki to appear on this (admittedly excellent) second album. YouTube Blow Your Head: “Liian Myöhään” for an idea of how genuine- Houston, Texas duo offering new-era Diplo Presents ly eccentric Finland’s answer to the Super Furry 7 EBM sounds for the Endurance trench- Dubstep Animals are, but bear in mind that that kind of coats ’n’ fishnets crew. Ten tracks of Dalek Mad Decent behaviour passes for normal out there. synth, emotionless vocals and pneumatic Hello, did someone order a curveball? LES PANINI drum-pad beats make this an endearingly 5 Yep, the man like Diplo finally enters the stern proposition, although it must be said void with his own take on the urban mongrel FUJIYA that the sleeve is wanting for pictures of that is dubstep. Venturing where Annie Mac & MIYAGI European men flashing their oil-smeared fears to tread, Diplo picks a couple of cork- Ventriloquizzing six-packs. ers by Zomby and Joker and some absolute Full Time Hobby EL PEE shit from Rusko and Caspa, before shedding V/A a tear to James Blake’s anti-smack jam While the gauze of warm analogue synths “Sparing the Horse”. Truly, all the colours of Rough Trade 5 that all Fujiya & Myagi records come Shops Synth the dubstep rainbow are here. bathed in is always instantly welcoming, the ZANE BLOW sense that they’re trying just that little bit too Wave 10 V2 /Co-op V/A hard to impress never allows you to fully embrace their accomplished electro-pop. In It’s not quite an act of excellent cultural Riddim Box case you doubt that, have a listen to track philanthropy on a par with Wierd Soul Jazz 7 four which reimagines Dylan’s “Boots of Records and Minimal Wave unearthing the Spanish Leather” as an eco-conscious electro best in long-lost early-80s minimal electron- hymnal entitled “Taiwanese Boots”. Hate to ics, but Rough Trade’s synth-wave collection I love Soul Jazz, but they tend to take a say it, but we told you so. rounds up a selection of mostly very good 6 genre that’s about as pretentious as a trol- GORDON LIGHTFEET tracks in a synth-punk vein. Come for ley dash around TK Maxx—in this case, UK Crystal Castles and Fever Ray and stick funky—and compile it in a tastefully mini- JAAKKO around for Factory Floor, Cosmetics and mal sleeve with all the fun bits about EINO KALEVI Xeno & Oaklander. drinking champagne and instructions on silly Modern Life FLORENCE RIDA dance steps neatly excised. Helmi Levyt NED BUNGER V/A Tradi-Mods This is a very cool and unusual record by vs Rockers 9 a tall, longhaired Finnish guy with a freestyle approach to life who makes charis- Crammed matic pop in a variety of styles. Sounds vague? OK, how about: Modern Life sits As the title doesn’t really make clear in UUSI FANTASIA somewhere between the Knife and Jonathan 5 any way at all, here a lot of your more Heimo Richman, Julian Cope and Jackson and His open-minded indie-rock personalities Computer Band, and after just one listen, (Animal Collective, Deerhoof, Oneida) and Celebrities Records even though you’ve never met Jaakko Eino dance producers (Shackleton, Optimo, Bass Kalevi, you feel like you know him pretty Clef) go frolicking in the recorded output of well. One song in particular, “Flexible trash-playing African ensembles Konono There’s always been a jazz-funk element to Heart”, is a masterpiece. No.1 and Kasai Allstars just to see what hap- 8Uusi Fantasia, but they managed to keep it THEYDON BOIS pens. What happens is, you buy this out of 138 | VICE REVIEWS

WORST ALBUM OF THE MONTH: SWEDISH HOUSE MAFIA:

curiosity because Animal Collective are on it EARTH lighting the bits he likes, the bits he doesn’t, and ten years later you end up at Womad A Bureaucratic Desire and, where necessary, certain background asking a shopkeeper if his didgeridoos are for Extra-Capsular information. Take “Total Death”, for carved from authentic native timbers. Extraction instance. He keeps saying “fuck the scene” HUEY MATTESON Southern Lord with regard to how said scene reacted to Aura Noir et al for playing “uncool” black thrash SWEDISH The recording that launched a thousand back in ’94. Priceless stuff, and the original HOUSE MAFIA 8 downtunings. Before the timeless barbitu- album still sounds great. Until One ate bliss of Earth 2, there was this: a ROCTURNO CULTO Virgin collection of beer ’n’ downers anthems using bass, guitar and a caveman drum machine. KÖRGULL THE Dylan Carson somehow created high art EXTERMINATOR I know pretty much nothing about War of the Voivodes while attempting to batter the blueprint the Swedish House Mafia but I just watched 0 Melvins had laid down into troll-like submis- Xtreem Music a trailer for a documentary about them on sion, and what was once an oddity in the Sub YouTube—I say “documentary”, but they’ve Pop catalogue ended up birthing the entire obviously made it themselves—and it makes It’s kind of hard to get your head round post-metal drone-doom syrup that’s oozed them look a bit like a cross between Tiesto the fact that the vocals on this record are VICESTYLE.COM ever since. The first EP, the stolen bootlegged 7 and Rambo. OK, I just listened to the CD by a girl from Barcelona (Lilith Hellslut, if 7-inches—they’re here for the first time in and it turns out they’re a bunch of you want to buy her a beer), but they are. their entirety. Maharishi-wearing sleazeballs who make This is modern black metal at its finest, KURT CREBAIN pop-trance for people who think David although little of the album’s content makes Guetta is way too debonair. WINNEBAGO you believe it was recorded this year, never mind this century. It is black and thrashy in LUIGI PATAZONI DEAL the vein of the great Bathory, borrowing Career Suicide Qurothon’s rasp and crushing riffing on the Cargo /We Deliver the Guts way to the eternal fire, while hailing the band from whose song title they chose their name, What is it people love so much about Voivod. This is an all-out 80s-style black 3 these guys? Sure, they rock out but so do thrash attack. Lock yourselves up. GHOST all seven bands that play your local open mic SGT. ROCKWELL Opus Eponymous night every Friday. People have been rocking Rise Above out since the 1950s and not every single per- BANG! son that does has been able to cut records Bullets— with Jack Endino and tour with Mondo The First Generator. Maybe I’m losing touch. This was never going to be a disap- Four Albums GYPSY DAVEY 10 pointment, but even sky-high Rise Above Relics expectations can’t temper the sense of exhil- ISENGARD Rise Above’s fine track record of prising aration. It is insanely addictive, and due to Høstmørke 9 up the stones to see what lurks beneath the clarity of the vocals you’ll find yourself continues with a career retrospective of Peaceville singing along to every satanic verse after a Ohio’s Bang! who, along with Sir Lord few listens. There’s more evil in this record Baltimore, Blue Cheer, Dust and Pentagram, than in 99 percent of black metal releases in really defined that American proto-doom, recent years, and this just about makes the Yes, I know this is a Peaceville reissue, but pre-metal sound of biker discontent. The real category “metal” in my iTunes. And the per- 8there is something very special about it— star here is the unreleased portentous concept formance at Live Evil this year? the bonus disc. Never in my wildest dreams doom of the proposed first album, cruelly Transcendental just sounds corny. A Group could I have imagined what lies in store. shelved by a major for fear of public rejec- of Nameless Ghouls forever they may be. Fenriz, the album’s sole contributor, submits tion. No such concerns for Lee Dorrian’s DR. ROCKTAGON commentary over the tracks as they play, high- brave men, who resurrect it here to sit along- 3KRWRE\5-6KDXJKQHVV\ 140 | VICE REVIEWS

From the makers of Swansea Love Story BEST COVER OF THE MONTH: JAAKKO EINO KALEVI

side its marginally more commercial, and in recorded. This includes the soulful floor- Newsom album, which sucks for Faun some cases power-poppish, brethren. This filler “Try Me”, the much-sampled Fables because everyone immediately ejacu- also has top-notch vinyl LP-style packaging “Different Strokes” and the divine “Is It lated and fell off their chairs at the and a ruddy great book to boot. Because I’m Black?”. Essential, obviously. wonderful child-voiced elfin harpist lady METHEL MERMAN TONY MOLESTER and probably never cast so much as a sideways glance at the other record. But LORDS OF THE SEXUAL if you like your psychedelic folk to FALCONRY OBJECTS sound a bit like the Incredible String Band S/t Cucumber scoring a gothic pantomime then this is Holy Mountain Creeping Bent / highly recommended. Aktion Und Spass WALTER DA SOFTY Lords of Falconry? I’m going to stay on Who’da thunk that the Fire Engines’ WIRE Davy Henderson, Boards of Canada 8 the fence on this one, band-name-wise. 10 Red Barked Tree Before I’d listened to the record I was imag- and John Disco from Bis would end up con- Pink Flag ining sub-British Sea Power indie-nerdism tributing to a single album? The timeless but as soon as I popped the disc in and the quality of Henderson’s songwriting helped psychedelic sludge of opener “Doomsday bring such a mish-mash of talent together Legislation” kicked in, I took it all back. and it is the songs that shine through: pacy, Those sour old guys in the corner of the These stout Hawkwind worshippers own engaging and as brilliant as anything in the 5 pub that everybody gave up trying to talk their ludicrous moniker so fully that you can great man’s back catalogue. These Sexual to a long time ago have made another fairly forgive them almost anything. Objects are not to be slept on. Sorry. decent record, though it sounds like they’re PETER GUSHING Couldn’t help myself there. going soft as they dodder into their twilight WAILING JENNY years. It’s all very well droning on about how “vital and relevant” Wire are today, but the TANLINES fact is they’re just like every other act. In Volume On order to stay afloat, these heritage rockers Family Edition need to keep their fans happy with limited collector editions of back catalogue and a SYL JOHNSON range of new t-shirts. These new songs will Complete This grab-bag of everything they’ve just get in the way of the old ones. Mythology 7 released offers the unfamiliar a chance to GRIZZLY BORE Numero get familiar with New York’s skewed indie- pop types Tanlines. If you’re a convert it’s WARPAINT The Fool The history of soul teems with kings still likely to contain a few tracks you never Rough Trade 8 who never were. For every James Brown knew existed. Either way, it’s nice having a there’s a Nathaniel Mayer. For every Otis bunch of songs by a new band that will keep Redding there’s a Tony Clarke. Mississippi- you occupied until their debut album drops born Syl Johnson has been cruelly forgotten at some point next year. For some reason all anyone ever talks even though his career spanned five PEWTER PERRET 7 about when it comes to this band is the decades. Despite countless local and FAUN FABLES fact that they are all chicks. Who cares if a national hits and producer credits, this is a Light of a band has boobs or not when they can weave man who threw it all in to open a fish intricate, rhythmic dream-pop so good it restaurant. Numero do an incredible job Vaster Dark makes you pinch yourself in case you’ve redressing the balance with this deluxe Drag City dreamt the whole thing up? The bass player A film by Andy Capper and Leo Leigh boxset containing six LPs, four CDs and an even has a Minor Threat sticker on the back Coming to VBS in 2011 in-depth book covering all the bravado, The first Faun Fables album for Drag of her guitar. You couldn’t even make that innuendo, rip-offs and tall tales that 7 City was sent out to journalists in the shit up. accompany some of the finest music ever same envelope as the debut Joanna CANDI APPLE

142 | VICE REVIEWS OSAMU KOYAMA, JEWELLERY DESIGNER NEWERACAP.COM/FLAGBEARERS

RILEY home in their bedroom playing Angry Birds men calling you a cunt on instruments like Grandma’s on their iPhone. It takes an impressive feat clarinet, trombone and harp. Turns out they Roadhouse of cultural disconnection to write a song are particularly focusing on the needling, complaining about how there’s “nuthin’ on discordant strings-y pieces that have Delmore the radio” when in fact there’s 50,000 cropped up on the last couple of Whitehouse internet radio stations probing the contours albums. The band hit a shrill note of terrify- Wonderfully raw skillet greasing from of your personal taste with their uncannily ing animal panic and don’t let up for half an 8 1971 from future Nashville acolyte Gary intuitive algorithms. There’s also a song hour, but no one calls you a cunt once, Stewart. Originally self-released and buried called “Uncle’s Got an Asbo” which sounds which is a little disappointing. until now, this is a family bucket of country exactly how you imagine it might sound in CHARLES HANSON fonk and sweet harmony recorded with ease your head. and panache. That mythical patchwork CHILL DAVE CYCLOBE Confederate gumbo that non-Southerners Wounded The Band and Creedence were always striv- Galaxies Tap ing to channel is here—naturally unforced and in spades. Gloriously, transcendent head- at the Window neck heaven. Phantomcode DAN GLENZIG Coming encased in a sleeve by Fred TIM KEY 7Tomaselli, and with Coil, Current 93 and HANNAH PEEL Tim Key. With a Nurse With Wound connections aplenty, it The Broken Wave String Quartet. would have been naive not to expect this latest Static Caravan On a Boat offering from shadowy duo Cyclobe to be a little odd, but nothing can prepare for the Angular /The Invisible Dot onslaught of glorious weirdness that follows. The star of some of our favourite TV Highlights include the 17-minute “The Woods A timely antidote to the plethora of vac- programmes and late-night BBC Radio 4 8 Are Alive With the Smell of His Coming” and uous, coma-inducing, Marling-apeing, shows, we like Tim Key a lot. We like him 7 the hurdy-gurdy-laced “We’ll Witness the fem-folk automatons. With a textured take so much that we spent three pages of last Resurrection of Dead Butterflies (Three on folk involving bubbling synths and a month’s issue talking to him. One of the Tunng connection (Mike Lindsay produces) main topics of that interview was this very Moons)”. A worthy companion to the band’s it probably won’t be long before people start album, which combines poetry, prose and 2004 split with NWW, Paraparaparallel- labelling what Peel makes as folkt%@*!ca. conversation in one unique release on a ogrammatica (Angry Eelectric Finger 2), We refuse to print that word or accept that it piece of vinyl. Unsurprisingly, we like this a I’d say. exists as a genre so instead we’ll congratulate lot too. ALEPH RIDER her on making a great folk record that GAPPY BANKS improves with each listen. LOCRIAN JUDEE PILL ZEITKRATZER The Crystal Whitehouse World THEE SPIVS Zeitkratzer Records Utech S /t Damaged Goods Sunn O))) have totally opened up the Here’s an album of songs by seminal (in 8 landscape for a new generation of metal- 6 both senses of the word) power electron- not-metal bands that exist in a weird Oikish young men in buttoned-right-up ics band Whitehouse reinterpreted by a hinterland of glacier-speed tempos, black- 6 Carnaby Street shirts playing no-brainz nine-piece Berlin ensemble and packaged in metal shrieks and things that might be guitar garage punk, Thee Spivs appear to hail a sleeve featuring a really old racing car, for or synths but equally might be a microphone from some halcyon age of bitterness and some reason I can’t quite fathom. If you tossed in a cement mixer until all that’s left is boredom, an age where kids used to lurk know Whitehouse you are probably wonder- dust and wires. angrily on street corners instead of sit at ing how easy it is to render the sound of two CHARLES HANSON

144 | VICE JOHNNY RYAN

146 | VICE