ELEPHANT / ISSUE 3 / SUMMER 2010 THE ART & VISUAL CULTURE MAGAZINE 16@7AB=>63@2=G:3 D / C 5 6 / < = : 7 D 3 @ 7A72@=43@@3@ AB/<:3G2=<E==2 ; 7 1 @ = E = @ : 2 A >=AB@3/:>/7<B7<5 >@7<B7<5B3FB7:3A :/5C723 £14.99, ¤19.95,£14.99, $19.99 BP BP SUMMER 2010 (BFRYHUB&RULQGG (BSB92OLYHULQGG B63 by Marc Valli ;7<=B/C@ 7< B63 :/0G@7<B6 D/C56/<Vaughan Oliver’s Extreme Regions =:7D3@Portrait by Giles Revell (BSB92OLYHULQGG ‘Fame requires every kind of excess. I mean true fame, a de- vouring neon… I mean danger, the edge of every void, the cir- cumstance of one man imparting an erotic terror to the dreams of the republic. Understand the man who must inhabit these ex- treme regions, monstrous and vulval, damp with memories of violation. Even if half-mad he is absorbed into the public’s to- tal madness: even if fully rational, a bureaucrat in hell, a secret genius of survival, he is sure to be destroyed by the public’s con- tempt for survivors… (Is it clear I was a hero of rock’n’roll?)’ — Don Delillo, ‘Great Jones Street’ It is diffi cult to think of Vaughan Oliver without making the aughan Oliver is mak- ing coffee with a digital radio playing in connection to music. His story seems to belong to the music the background. It is an unlikely setting: the clean and perfectly fitted kitchen of rather than the design world, following a path that’s closer to his tidy and tastefully decorated new that of a legend of rock’n’roll than a visual art one. Early suc- house in suburban Epsom. He refers to it as a form of ‘scaling down’, though it still cess, through seemingly irresistible, natural stylistic experi- Dlooks pretty nice to me. The kitchen and mentation, followed by the creation of haunting, iconic works the living room open onto a back garden, with a book-lined offi ce on the other side that capture the mood of a particular period, followed by cult of the entrance hall. The only sign that this house is inhabited by the man be- status, followed by silence. A burning planet fl ashing across hind V23 is the typeface of the house num- the night sky, though in the case of Vaughan Oliver, a volcano ber on the frosted glass window above the entrance door. is probably a more apt metaphor, erupting at night, danger- ‘I seemed to settle in straight away. You must have passed the university. I do ous, confounding explosions followed by even brighter con- some bits there. I enjoy teaching. I also do fl agrations, followed by an unquiet silence. a day a week at Kingston with the MA stu- dents. In the last few years, I have been From getting the break of a lifetime, a dream job as art di- working on my own most of the time. rector and fi rst employee of emerging independent record la- Teaching helps you get out. And once you start, you realise how much you picked bel 4AD (Cocteau Twins, Pixies, Lush, GusGus), to seeing his up over the years and how much there is to pass on. It generally energizes me.’ He posters covering the walls of every tunnel entrance in Lon- says, pouring milk and stirring our coffee don, earning six-fi gure sums through the eighties and being cups, ‘Is that colour alright, fellas?’ I have come to Epsom with our art di- the subject of major exhibitions abroad – to seeing the arriv- rector, Matt Willey, a diehard Pixies fan, and an even greater Vaughan Oliver one. al of CDs, computers and digital music, witnessing the implo- He still remembers harassing record sion of 4AD and the music industry as a whole, and ending shop staff all over London trying to get hold of a Here Comes Your Man poster, go- up with six-fi gure debts by the turn of the millennium. But ing from shop to shop, without being able beware: the Vaughan Oliver volcano is still active, and we’ve to get hold of one. He even tried a record shop in Sydney, while on an art school ex- come this way rather in the hope of some new eruptions. change later on. & (BSB92OLYHULQGG (BSB92OLYHULQGG Previous page: Opposite: Poster (detail) from Minotaur Book spreads from Minotaur Pixies Pixies 2009 2009 Photography: Simon Larbalestier Photography: Simon Larbalestier & Rosie Upright (UCA, Epsom) Below: Poster from Minotaur Pixies 2009 Photography: Simon Larbalestier ‘Would you like to see my Minotaur?’ Vaughan Oliver asks, before dragging out the gigantic box-set. We came here in the hope of some volcanic activity and we are not disappointed. This new box set is like something that could have come out from the centre of the earth, strange, complex, dense with layers of compressed images and distorted meanings, burning with visual energy. ‘It contains just the five albums, no new music. This pissed everybody off in the blogs. But that also meant the fans could actually take it or leave it. If we’d stuck a couple of extra tracks in, they might have felt themselves obliged, as hardcore Pixies fans, to buy it. My first response to the idea of the new box set was: Yes, this is a great project, but can we start from scratch? Throw away all the previous art work and give it a more homogenous feel. Going back and pick- ing on things like the surrealism, the dark sense of humour, religion, and the sex and the lust and the lust and the sex... And the nails...’ ‘The project didn’t come from 4AD it- self, but from a guy who licensed every- thing from 4AD. He’s interested in the collector’s end of the market, with high production values. In our first meeting, he told me he didn’t want to make any mon- ey on it. He just wanted to do a beautiful object. (In the second meeting, I asked him, “well, if you don’t want to make any money on it, could I maybe make some money?”) You don’t get many clients like that. To a large degree, he reminded me of Ivo, [Ivo Watts-Russell, joint-founder of 4AD Records], and of Ivo’s philosophy. He would think, “Let’s do a calendar… Let’s do posters…” And I would say, “Let’s do a wooden box!” And he would go for it. Be- cause these were rare things. That’s one of the lessons I’ve learnt: it shouldn’t look like a CD record sleeve, it should look like packaging.’ ! (BSB92OLYHULQGG He would have taken this image that day, in that particular place, and this other image, that other day, and has never seen them in context together. Then I say, ‘Oh, that’s got a hole in it, and that has also a hole in it, so why don’t we put them together?’ And a narrative develops ‘The name was a reference to the sur- realist magazine, Minotaur. I suggest- ed it, and the band went for it. It must be a first instance of a graphic-designer de- ciding on the name of a band’s whole cat- alogue! But the more I thought about the name, the more it made sense for me. There is something quite animalistic in their music.’ And about his designs too – I suggest. ‘Yeah? I like that. The first album was a guy with a hairy back, half man, half beast. In the fifth album, I used bulls’ eyes. I went back to Simon Larbal- estier (who had taken a lot of the photo- graphs for previous albums), and in one of his photographs, there was a bull. It made sense.’ ‘All these graphics in here’, he says pointing at the pages of the large-format book in the box set, ‘were done with this team of students I put together at Ep- som. Part of my job was to get them to re- lax and just do stuff, with the idea of ex- pressive type, spacial type, type as image. I just said to them: don’t worry about what it will look like, or whether it’s going to fit in. It will feel like found graphics, a big scrapbook of feelings and atmospheres. It doesn’t have a linear narrative, just imag- es that relate to images, spreads that re- late to spreads. I could easily have tak- en Simon’s images as they stood. There were about three hundred. I picked about sixty. It would have been a lovely picture book, with a nice bit of reserve type. But I wanted to be a bit more ambitious and create graphic images. I call them graph- ic responses to the images. I started with the book and the photographs, then went on overprinting them to build this tex- ture, turning one thing into something else, then got to the posters, and started taking the overprint sheets, turning and twisting them, rephotographing them, one journey turning into an ingredient for another journey.’ ! (BSB92OLYHULQGG (BSB92OLYHULQGG Left: Below: The 13 Year Itch Exhibition/Exposition 4AD festival poster Exhibition poster Institute of Contemporary Espace Graslin, Nantes Arts, London 1990 1993 Below right: Photography: Tony Gibson This Rimy River Exhibition poster Murray Feldman Gallery, LA 1994 ‘I hadn’t worked with Simon since the never there at the time when he took the labyrinths of images. But Vaughan Ol- Pixies’ days. After his marriage broke photographs.