OUSA Art Week Zine

So just found out that the 2011 Art Week Zine which I edited can now be downloaded from the OUSA website

Have a flick through - I reckon we produced quite a nice publication!

Large Scale Painting by Lindsey Horne

From the 2011 Art Week Magazine - will post a pdf and photographs soon. It was so exciting picking them all up!!!

Lindsey Horne's large-scale painting is impossible to miss. Hanging just inside the Richardson building, her portrait of a boy with braces was almost imposing.

"I've kind of always just done art," she explains as we sit down. But it was only when she went on exchange to California that she started doing a lot of it. "It was there that I had the studio space and the time to get into it."
The incredibly large scale of her canvases comes from when she started stapling them to the wall because she "felt really claustrophobic within the small canvas", and is largely influenced by her admiration of "that duality of going up really close and seeing a texture or a pattern, then having that really zoomed-out effect as well." Surprisingly, they're not very hard for her to paint, taking two eight-hour sessions to get through. "I don't really paint up close, I get sore arms from my style which is big and fast and swipey. I like working on the whole thing at once, so I use lots of linseed oil to keep the paint runny. I like how I don't let myself have rules when I paint."

Influenced by Jenny Saville, Horne's exhibited portrait has a similarly striking beauty, but not quite the same element of grotesque. Rather, the work is only slightly disturbing insofar as it looks sickly; the colours of the boys' face unnatural and feverish, his eyes longing and emptying.

A huge contributor to Art Week, Lindsey also made a fascinating presentation for the Pecha Kucha night on personification and how faces can represent something purely because of people's super-sensitivity to them. "Faces can be a really powerful tool no matter what realm you're going into. I was talking about that and how if you don't see a face people act differently. I just like faces."

They said that when Lucien Freud died earlier this year, it was the death of painting. But thanks to the likes of Lindsey Horne, I beg to differ. In the contemporary art world where portraiture has been almost exclusively replaced by photography, it's refreshing to see a painter so inspired by faces yet not entrapped by classical representation.

P.S. I found and changed an editorial faux-pas in this piece - particularly embarrassing as the writer AND editor!

Naked Lunch

Heya!!!


Just reviewed David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991) for the awesome Dunedin zine "Marrow"... Also been postering for their promotional gig for the last few days with my illegal bucket of paste hehe so much fun! But don't say I told you that because I'll deny it to the authorities. 


And here's the film review! I rented it from the coolest DVD rental place- Mint. It's next to the Dunedin train station and you get stuck in it for hours every time. 

Although this film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' 1959 novel is, at most, only abstracted from the literary work, by no means does it detract from the overall experience. Widely criticized for not being close enough to the original text, it's important to remember that Burroughs himself wrote "it is probably an understatement to say that the novel does not obviously lend itself to adaptation for the screen". What Cronenberg does instead, and very effectively, is combine aspects of the hallucinatory and disjointed novel with other works by Burroughs, alongside his biography and the psychological effects of narcotics use, switching them around to be suitable for film. We are thus presented with what is quite a comprehensive commentary on all that is William S. Burroughs and the culture surrounding him.

Burroughs, also the author of Queer and Junkie, was born into a wealthy American family in 1914. Educated at Harvard, he graduated with a degree in English and Anthropology and went to study Medicine in Verona, Italy. But despite the potential to have such a romantic life story, he got hooked on opiates-  monetary support from his family gave him an immense freedom, and he instantly got in with the underground crowd of the time. Now, there is always unrest in the world- that's inevitable- but when Burroughs was writing it was particularly strong. World War 2 had ended in 1945 and what proceeded to occur was a period of absolute conformity. The self-reliant hero had survived in the depression songs of Woodie Guthrie and the novels of John Steinbeck and had been transformed into the GI during World War 2, but young men returning from the South Pacific and Europe were not told to brave new frontiers. Instead they were to get an education, a family and a home; all at government expense. The final years of this was epitomized by President Kennedy, leading the very conservative "new frontier" back to the favorite high-school English theme of the American Dream. Basically, Burroughs was an integral part of forming the public mind-set which got the president assassinated. I wasn't there, and I couldn't possibly imagine how boring life would have felt during those years without the Beat Generation. There's no wonder why they came about. They were a strong liberal movement which involved experimentation with drugs, different forms of sexuality, minimalism and personal expression. You could go so far as to say they were related to Bohemians and evolved into Hippies, and the main creative works of the movement were Allen Ginsberg's extended poem "Howl", Jack Kerouac's novel "On The Road", and Burroughs' "Naked Lunch". These three writers weren't just contemporaries but also great friends, and had a huge influence on the world. 

Anyway, the cinematic technicalities of this film are a solid effort on Cronenberg's part. Peter Weller is amazing in the role of protagonist Bill Lee- a character who represents Burroughs himself. His gaunt face and distant gazes are perfectly matched to the images of a young Burroughs we've all seen, as he convincingly stumbles after injections, stares blankly over coffee, and shoots his wife in drunkenness. The Mugwumps of Burroughs' invention with their jissom-excreting phallic head crests are wonderful considering there are no special effects, as are the type-writer-cum-beatles which talk to a doped Bill. The film even has an original jazz score for the soundtrack- both chronologically and cinematically fitting because of the atmosphere it creates and the influence of opiates on the jazz culture around the same period. Another point Cronenberg seems to understand implicitly is that a lot of the beauty of Burroughs' novel is his prose. The particularly striking chapters are often experienced simply as a dialogue by Bill Lee- they're far too obscure to attempt on film and would lose beauty and meaning without Burroughs' exact wording. Cronenberg achieves quite an interesting feat in doing so, as he maintains prose and film as separate entities, playing to the strengths of film in replacement for the strengths of prose. As far as film-for-film's-sake is concerned, Naked Lunch is stunning. 

With the central themes of sexuality and drug use in both the novel and film, there is still variation between the two. Cronenberg only alludes metaphorically to the homosexuality and violent sexual encounters Burroughs wrote of, and the strong anti-narcotics message of the novel isn't felt at all to the same extent in the film. Rather than showing the heroin and cannabis Burroughs wrote of, Cronenberg substitutes his own fictitious drugs such as Mugwump jissom, bug powder and The Black Meat. I must admit that at first I was deflated by this sense of the film being dumbed-down, but enthusiasm returned with due haste as I realized that this was Cronenberg putting his own personal stamp on the work, finding horror in the alluded-to rather than the explicit. It's hard to believe this film was made 20 years ago (happy 20th birthday!!!), yet this also could possibly explain his restraint from presenting marginalized subjects. Although Burroughs' novel was released 32 years prior, censorship in film has been a lot slower to progress, and had Cronenberg not taken precautions in the subject matter, it is a feasible proposition that it may not have made it off the ground. 

The creative process, and in particular the writing process, is also a central idea because the plot is built around it. At the end of the day, this is quite fitting considering it's about a writer. His type writers give him missions and attack each other, he has to 'prove' he's a writer to cross the border into a fictional country called Anexia, and he can't remember writing most of the manuscript. Burroughs himself said that he wouldn't have become a writer had he not shot his wife, and this key event sits nicely at the start of the film before all the crazy heroin trips start. A really kick-ass moment for this aspect of the film is as Bill Lee writes Naked Lunch in Interzone (an opiate-clouded Tangier). The characters who represent his friends Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac tell him to "stay until you finish the book, but then come back to us." Having seen the chaotic and dangerous haze Burroughs writes in, it's surprising any writer or artist ever finishes a creation alive. 

Love this film!!!

I Love Mail

Yesterday contained a small but exciting change to my health sciences routine; in my pigeon-hole at Knox was an envelope addressed to me in beautiful, elaborate handwriting. Of course, it's not often that you receive such mail, and the sheer beauty amidst the typed university bills everyone else was receiving made it feel so very special. Part of the charm was that I honestly couldn't answer the looming question of who the heck was writing to me.

A slight disappointment was that it wasn't a long hand-written message after all. It contained no news of the weather in a little French town, the political situation in a huge American city, nor the family gossip back home in Wellington. Instead these romantic images floating through my head thanks to an excess of movie-watching and Jane Austen reading, along with thoughts of a secret admirer, dissipated as a small pre-printed card fell out.

But that card itself was wonderful- an invitation to preview the Ben Cauchi exhibition at Brett McDowell Gallery this Friday, which I'm now definitely going to of course.

Anyway, it's made me think just how great hand-writing actually is. And although it turned out not to be one, the  beauty of sending physical letters rather than emails. Sometimes I do curse the age we've grown up in and long for the times of the Bronte's.

Looking back at the envelope now I also realize that the Gallery is stamped on it. Awkward how an emotional response changes how you view things (or don't)...

xx

Barnaby Weir

Hey'all!

I'm back after a looong break from the blogging world, excited as hell to get back into it. First and foremost, my thoughts go out to all those families affected by the devastating earthquake in Christchurch last week. It was certainly a sobering down-buzz to our Orientation Week at Otago University. The minute silence yesterday was a great way to think over it; to put yourself into the mindset of families who have lost loved ones and homes, the architecture which has been ruined (the cathedral even needs to be demolished), etc. 

Anyway, to try and bring a bit of positivity back to life: the very day that the earthquake happened I was due to interview Barnaby Weir. This was only two hours after the rumble and so all the phone lines were dead, but luckily the next day it was all sorted. The interview (along with a review which I'm yet to do) will be appearing in this year's second issue of Tearaway, but for now here's the title track from Tarot Card Rock:

Barnaby Weir is the go-to guy of New Zealand music; he would seem to be New Zealand's present-day equivalent to, say, Bob Dylan. His previous projects included the incredibly successful band The Black Seeds, followed by Fly My Pretties and the lesser-known Flash Harry. His music is wonderful and my mates were all willing to confess their jealousy at my interview opportunity. 

Here's to Christchurch, here's to starting Uni, here's to New Zealand Music, and here's especially to Barnaby Weir

xx

13 Most Beautiful

So, coming to the end of the year I've been reminiscing quite a lot. And as far as 'work' goes, by far the biggest thing which happened was winning the senior category of the New Zealand International Arts Festival review-writing competition for my review of Andy Warhol's 13 Most Beautiful. It was enough to get me a permanent writing position at Tearaway Magazine and what seemed to be the position of events-reviewer at Wellington College. What I still laugh about is the fact that I wrote it on a whim, in about 15 minutes, the night the competition closed, and there's aspects of it which I'd edit.

So here's my piece and here's to Andy Warhol!

Walking into the Wellington Town Hall with band equipment and a projector screen at the front certainly sets a different atmosphere. The audience were absolutely wired, and apparently it was contagious as everyone took their seats in anticipation. This was to redefine what we knew of Marilyn artist Andy Warhol. 

Amazing in its originality, Dean and Britta set the scene in style playing somewhat of an electronica theme song for Richard Rheem as the screen test of him- the former boyfriend of Andy Warhol- played behind the untouched instruments. The musicians, unnoticed, only arrived as Richard’s time came to an end, and from then on they treated the stage with the utmost confidence of ownership. They know their creation is quite the spectacle, and as it was unlike anything most of the very mixed audience had ever experienced before it was totally transfixing. 

The music throughout fitted naturally and instinctively with these intimate portraits of the individuals in Warhol’s life, evoking strong emotional response throughout as you felt somewhat of a connection forming between you and the Beauties with their demonstrations of pure, unrehearsed and spontaneous emotions. You pitied Dennis Hopper’s frown. You laughed at Ingrid Superstar’s perfected but insecure posing. Dean and Britta carried you through each of them by briefly outlining each Beauty’s life and their connections with Warhol. Mostly they were sad stories, and a thought-provoking commentary of the effect of fame upon the humanity of individuals. 

What you could easily pass off as black and white experiments by an artist well-known in the film industry for his Avant-Garde work, were colourised and brightened by the heartfelt performance of two incredibly talented and creative interpretive musicians. You couldn’t help but be transfixed by the depth of this show. It was a stunner. 

But yeah, basically Andy Warhol is amazing. I know that way too many people like him and I just sound boring and typical but really, he had something!

Love

xx