Underworld

Underworld's "Cowgirl" was released as a single in 1994 and is from their 1993 album dubnobasswithmyheadman. The video was produced by the design collective Tomato. Members of the collective are also members of Underworld.

Tomato is one of a number of design collectives that emerged in the early 1990s. Formed in ’91, Tomato is a “multidisciplinary studio and creative collective of designers, writers, typographers, film makers and musicians” (Livingstone, 2003 p.210).

It was established by “Steve Baker, Dirk van Dooren, Karl Hyde, Richard Smith, Simon Taylor, John Warwicker and Graham Wood, Jason Kedgley joined in 1994 and Michael Horsham in 1996” (Livingstone, 2003 p.210). Catherine McDermott also names Greg Rood and Steve Baker as members (1999 p.278).

Tomato. Dubnobasswithmyheadman by Underworld, 1993. Album cover.

 

Tomato has produced a number of record cover including the above one for Underworld. The style has been defined as “Grunge” design (Eskilson, 2007 p.374-375). While the band and the album’s name are legible the rest of the text is either reversed or overprinted. My interest here is with the energy of the design. The design seems to be full of mistakes and any “geometric clarity” is disrupted by the handprint” (Eskilson, 2007 p. 375). It’s layering, like that in collage and the combine (one thinks of cubism, Schwitters or Rauschenberg, or the computer graphics of Greiman), of type suggests a three-dimensional sculptural element that belies the flat surface of the cover” (Eskilson, 2007 p. 375). Does this point to a kind of a resolution to the issues of type and its representation in my own work?

Tomato Show Reel.

Above is a show reel of work by the design group Tomato uploaded by Ricardo Padua. The first piece of work is from 1993 and is a Radio Scotland television advert. To help attract listeners to the station Tomato combined “spoken words-snatches of the programmes- with moving type as subtitles” (McDermott, 1999 p.278).


McDermott, Catherine, 20th Century Design, Design Museum London: Carlton Books 1999

Christopher Isherwood

"I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording not thinking... Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."

Autumn 1930, Goodbye to Berlin p. 9

Vertov

I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse's mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, - manoeuvring in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations.

Freed from the boundaries of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.*

*From a manifesto written in 1923 by Dziga Vertov, the revolutionary Soviet film Director.

Quoted in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972) p.17

Shock of the New 1: Mechanical Paradise

The television series “Shock of the New” was first broadcast in 1980. The above episode was last broadcast in on Sat, 27 September 2008, at 20:00.

The series explores the development of modern art from 1880 to the present or at least to 1980 with the series and the first addition of the book based on the series. The first episode “Mechanical Paradise” (see above) shows how the development of technology transformed art and culture between the years 1880 and 1914. 

The key word was modernity and its emblem was the Eiffel Tower: its creator an engineer and not an architect.  This emblem signalled the end of one kind of history and the birth of another as the 19th moved into the 20th Century.

Hughes discusses Paul Cezanne and his works curious if sometimes contradictory relationship to Cubism. Hughes explores Cubism and its “inventors” Pablo Picasso and George Braque. Cubism according to Hughes was the first time artists confronted these cultural changes, shifts in contemporary philosophy and science and the birth of mass media. The transforming urban experience was explored by artists as diverse as Delaunay, Juan Gris and Leger and the poet Apollinaire.

The Marinetti and the Futurists seized upon the transforming poetry of the machine and speed, while the work of Picabia and Duchamp seem to suggest something less romantic about technology.
   
This episode concludes with the outbreak of World War One and the end of the hopes and dreams of the early machine age.
 
Credits
Presenter: Robert Hughes
Producer: Lorna Pegram
 
BBC Time-Life television series.

Virgin Airways Advert: "Still Red Hot!"

Another dose of retro-sexism?

Barrett, L (2009) “Do birthday ads lead to happy returns?” Guardian, 19 January.

Online: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2009/jan/19/virgin-atlantic-anniversary-advertising.

Smith, Merryn. “Retrobigotry.” Online:

http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2009/02/421444.html .

Digital Collage

Christiane Paul points out that “digital technologies offer an extra dimension to the composite and collage”. That “extra dimension” lies in the capability to blend “disparate elements… more seamlessly”. The digital collage/image generally presents us with a “simulated form of reality” that “often constitute a shift from the affirmation of boundaries to their eradication” (2008, p.31).

Research, Research, Reasearch

Key concerns and further research:

The banal/banality
The Café
The Hub
The everyday
The utopian
Capitalism
Glut
Overload
Static
Noise
Visual noise
Data world
Dataspace
Mass communication
Multiple narratives and multiple meanings
Hypertext
An erasure of boundaries
Mixed media
Multi media
Public Sphere
Private Sphere
Critical theory and performance

Other key works and further research:

My Boyfiend Came Back from the War (1996)The story of two lovers reunited after an unspecified military conflict: http://www.teleportacia.org/war/war.html .  Fragments of disjunctive dialogue convey the profound difficulty the couple has reconnecting.

Electronic Café International: http://www.ecafe.com/. Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz “Welcome to ‘Electronic Café International’: A Nice Place for Hot Coffee, Iced Tea and Virtual Space (1992).

Tilson, Jake (1994) “The Cooker.com”: Macro Meals

James Gilbert, Helen Thorigton, and Marek Walczak, with Hal Eager, Jonathan Feinberg, Mark James and Matin Wattenberg: Adrift

Key to collage or at least the digital collage, as suggested, is the eradication of boundaries.  Adrift (1997-2001), a multi location project, mixes imagery from public spaces, the real with 3D spaces, text and sound. Christiane Paul suggests that this work “depicts journeys that collapse dataspace and physical, mediated environments, creating a collage in which the distinctly different elements reflect upon the spatial characteristics of the language of different media (video, text, sound, 3D)” (2003, p.83).

Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake Part One

Man With A Movie Camera:The Global Remake from Perry Bard on Vimeo.

A participatory video shot by people around the world who are uploading footage to dziga.perrybard.net to interpret Vertov's 1929 classic film Man With A Movie Camera.

Log onto dziga.perrybard.net where there is a list of SCENES. Click on any scene to see the shot list.Click see all uploads to see the uploads for each shot. Click upload to upload your interpretation. You can also participate by selecting SHOTS BY TAG.

Software developed for this project archives sequences and streams the submissions as a film.As the same shot can be uploaded more than once infinite versions of the film are possible. A new film is built daily and streams on the website. Click START to see today's version.

Concept/Director: Perry Bard
Software Development: John Weir
Sound Design: Steven Baun
Participants: See list at dziga.perrybard.net

From: http://vimeo.com/6345709

Slightly different from the one in the previous post.

Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake Part One

 Perry bard invites interpretations of Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929). He is streaming them alongside scenes from the original.

Perry Bard's website:

http://dziga.perrybard.net/

Owen Land/George Landow - Remedial Reading Comprehension [1970]

I came across Owen Land in Malcolm Le Grice's Abstract Film and Beyond. Owen Land was then known as George Landow (not to be confused with  George Landow Professor of English and Art History at Brown University). In Le Grice's book  there is a still from Remedial Reading Comprehension on page 139. It was of the sequence featuring a page of a book where we can see part of the sentence "to pupil is an emot". The rest of the text is blurred.  The page is part of a montage which also includes the face of a sleeping woman.

Le Grice is concerned with the way in which the film addresses the audience directly “giving instructions, asking questions or proclaiming blandly ‘this is a film about you- not about its maker’, it forces the audience to recognize the apparent surface intentions, like the instructions to participate in a way which cannot be complied with, are ‘not’ the subject of the work. They are a provocative demonstration that the audience must treat film, however subjectively structured by the film-maker, as raw material for their own use. This is a demand that film should be approached sceptically counteracting unquestioned acceptance of the film’s authority” (Le Grice, 1977 p.139-40). 




 I like this from the Harvard Gazette: "In several of these films, Land constructs facades of reality, often directly addressing the viewer using the language of television, advertising, or educational films".

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2007/04/film-archive-screening-to-fete-works-of-land/

Research Presentation

The Practitioners

Picasso (1881-1973)

Olia Lialina (1971-)

Picasso:

• Key theorist: Clement Greenberg

• Key essay: "The Pasted-Paper Revolution" of 1958

• In his sophisticated formalist reading of the work he argued that the various elements, the lettering, the charcoal lines and the coloured papers:

"begin to change places in depth with one another, and a process is set up in which every part of the picture takes its turn at occupying every plane, whether real or imagined, in it".

 Guitar, Sheet Music,
and Wine Glass 1912
Pasted paper, gouache,
and charcoal on paper.

• Pictorial allusion gave way to what he called an optical illusion.

• This is reading the collages and purely autonomous decorative objects.

Glass and Bottle of Suze 1912
Pasted paper, gouache,
and charcoal on paper.

• The collage is a still life

• But what does type represent?

• Patricia Leighton (art historian) suggests that there is a relationship between the two pieces of newsprint in this collage

• The collage represents a café- in which ‘we’ are drinking Suze

• The newsprint cut up and arranged, may represent conversation or thoughts regarding the Balkan War

• Collage: a modern idea of a painting of the absolute now

Baudillaire: Modernism/the modern describes what is new in one’s own culture and implied an obligation to be of one’s own time.

"You read handbills, catalogues, posters that shout out loud: Here’s this morning’s poetry, and for prose you’ve got the newspapers… Lettering on billboards and walls, Doorplates and posters squawk like parrots” – Apollinaire, Zone  1912

Violin  1912
Pasted paper and charcoal on
paper

Other readings are possible: Rosalind Krauss (art historian and critic)

• Type can represent light reflected on dust moats

• Type/newsprint can represent the broken surfaces created by stumbling, like those in paintings: Impressionism, Constable and Turner.

Olia Lialina

Key work:

My Boyfiend Came Back from the War  (1996)

The story of two lovers reunited after an unspecified military conflict

http://www.teleportacia.org/war/war.html

Fragments of disjunctive dialogue convey the profound difficulty the couple has reconnecting.

Olia Lialina was born 1971 in Moscow. Finished Moscow State University in 1993 as
a journalist and film critic. In mid 90s one of the organizers of Moscow experimental film club CINE FANTOM. Net Artist, one of net.art pioneers. Lialina writes on New Media, Digital Folklore and Vernacular Web.

Conclusions

Both artists are linked by conflict: Picasso the Balkan War and Lialina a conflict in the late 20th Century. Both works suggest multiple narratives and multiple meanings.

The Icebook at Illuminate Bath and Illuminating York

The Icebook - A Miniature Theatre Show



The Icebook is a pop-up book that comes to life in front of an audience's eyes as if by magic. It could possibly be the smallest show in the world - a 3D cinema made from sheets of paper and light. Each page unfolds an animated miniature world, telling the story of a princess who lures a boy into the forest in order to warm her heart of ice. The Icebook is an intimate and immersive experience of film, theatre, dance, mime and animation designed for an audience of 8 people lasting 20 min.
www.illuminatebath.org







Location Bath: St. James Square, Bath, BA1 2TW (map)






Date/Time:Sat 6 November, Sun 7 November and Sat 13 November. Shows every 30 min from 12:00 – 17:00






www.illuminatingyork.org.uk






Location York: Deans Park, York, North Yorkshire YO1 (map)






Date/Time:Wed 27 October – Sat 30 October. Shows every 30 min from 19:00 – 22:00


 
 
 

 
The Icebook is a production by Davy & Kristin McGuire.

Gertrude Stein and Picasso: The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas

"All of a. sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C'est nous qui avons fait a, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had" (Stein 1962, 84-85).

Visual Cultures 1

A classic TV series and a canonical text, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is an excellent introduction to the complexities of visual cultural. Part one of this series draws heavily on the ideas of the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). His essay is called ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) and is available in a collection called Illuminations (and on the website below). Benjamin questioned ideas about originality and authenticity. Berger’s use of Benjamin’s arguments is not only relevant to discussions of painting, photography, animation, film and television, but other areas of mass culture: the internet, computer games, magazines, newspapers, CD-ROMs amongst other visual cultural artefacts. When transmitted the images meanings are multiplied and fragment into other meanings and often jostle for attention alongside other images and pieces of information under gaze of a mass audience. Berger encourages us to view images as a language that can be manipulated to communicate all kinds of ideas.



Before this ‘technological age’, the invention of the camera and even before the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg, images adorned the walls and stained glass windows of churches, their meaning singular. This was as Berger suggests the age of pilgrimage: we went to the images; they did not yet travel to us. Information came from one source and it resided in one place at one time, the camera, digital technologies and television changed all of that.
 
Berger, John Ways of Seeing London: British Broadcasting Corporation Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972






Texts of interest and linked to Berger and his book:
 
Clark, Kenneth Civilisation: a personal view London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1969
 
Web sources:

John Berger Homepage: http://www.johnberger.org/

Daniel Chandler Semiotics for Beginners, Denotation, Connotation and Myth
www.aber.ac.uk/media/documents/54b/sem06.html


The Marxist Internet Archive: Benjamin, Walter The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936 www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Digital Imaging and Photography Production II

The working title for project two is Dialogues in the Cities. Project 2:

• Aims to build upon previous approaches to digital imagin

• An attempt move away from imagery that is inward looking. 

• An attempt to create work that has a social context. 

Pablo Picasso Glass and Bottle of Suze November 1912. A recent reproduction.

Picasso's collage seems to represent the public sphere in some way: the cafe and the newspaper. It also presents us with an image of modernist consciousness. I like Patricia Leighton's use of Charles Baudelaire to describe this image as a "true painting of modern life".

 

Rodchenko Photomontage For "About This" by Vladimir Mayakovsky 1923



The Rodchenko photo-montage is fascinating because of the way in which communications technologies are represented. It is as if the communication, the phone call, takes place through the medium of the city.

Dialogues in the Cities (2010)

Dialogues in the Cities (The Ecstasy of Communication: After Baudrillard) (2010)

The above pieces are attempts at combining and re-combining text and image and theory and practice. The top image is an unsuccessful combination of photographic imagery and a film still from Hans Richter's Dreams that Money can Buy.  

The bottom image presents a series of photographs combined with text from Jean Baudrillard's "The Ecstasy of Communication" from Hal Foster's Postmodern Culture  1987 p.132. 

This image is attempt to compress a variety viewpoints and representations into one moment.



Rosalind Krauss on Postmodernism

Copyright approved

ADAGP has given me  its permission for the use of the Marcel Duchamp's soundpiece "La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...même" as a soundtrack only during the presentation of your MA project.

Adagp: www.adagp.fr - Banque d’images : http://bi.adagp.fr


Many thanks.

Total recall: Gordon Bell's Digital Life

One man has made an online record of every document, every location and even every conversation that he has had over the past decade. Channel 4 News science correspondent Tom Clarke meets Gordon Bell - one of the pioneers of the World Wide Web - to find out why such total recall is necessary.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/total+recall+gordon+bellaposs+digital+life/3731782

FUTURISM & DADA REVIEWED

Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme: Copyright: 3

My search has connected me to some very interesting people. I am grateful for the kind responses. The New York Foundation for the Arts have provided with some very useful pointers, of which I am very thankful.

I did come across this great resource: The Dada Companion. I contacted them and that led to Ubu Web who have proved helpful in matters of copyright.

Ubu Web have suggested I next contact the ARS: Artists Rights Society. I think the New York Foundation for the Arts may have also suggested contacting them. 


ARS are quick to reply. I now await a response from DACS: Design and Artists Copyright Society.

Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme: Copyright: 2

I contacted LTM recordings, Caprice Records and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. LTM pointed to Caprice Records and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts seemed to be the wrong  organisation. The Foundation for Contemporary Arts pointed me to the New York Foundation for the Arts. The New York Foundation for the Arts also seems to be the wrong organisation.

All the above have suffered my rambling emails, for which I apologise to all concerned.

Caprice Records will I hope get back to me regarding Duchamp's  La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme and the ownership of the copyright and publishing rights.

Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme: Copyright: 1

Does anyone know who has the publishing rights to of Marcel Duchamp's sound piece La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme


The recording of Marcel Duchamp's La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...meme (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelor's Even) is a "musical erratum" to the sculpture of the same name. The sound piece was composed by Marcel Duchamp (ND 1913?) but performed and recorded by Mats Persson and Kristine Scholz 1980.The CD is called Futurism and Dada Reviewed, LTM Publishing 1988/2000. In the sleeve notes it says that the recording was reproduced by kind permission of Rikskonserter/Caprice Records and published by New York Foundation of Contemporary Arts.

The record company website includes details of FUTURISM & DADA REVIEWED 1912-1959 (LTMCD 2301) and a digitised version of the booklet (omitting the details about New York Foundation of Contemporary Arts):

http://www.ltmrecordings.com/fdrcat.html


http://www.ltmrecordings.com/fdrtxt.html

Caprice Records are yet unable to confirm copyright, while the New York Foundation of Contemporary Arts (if I am contacting the right organisation), are unaware of their possible publishing rights of the piece.

John Cage

Dillion, B "The Visual art of John Cage" The Guardian, Saturday 10 July 2010

Wolfgang Tillmans

When going through the Saturday Guardian (26.06.10), I came across an article discussing the work Wolfgang Tillmans. He was an artist I had seemingly ignored despite the fact that he had a high profile: he did win the Turner Prize in 2000.

half page
Installation view, Regen Projects
October 23 - December 6, 2008

I was interested in the critical response Tillmans received, which was on the whole negative. It seemed at odds with our pluralistic times. Tillmans’ work, especially in the nineties “used magazines particularly the street style magazine i-D as one of his outlets for his pictures while exhibiting in contemporary art galleries in London, New York and Cologne” (Jobey 2010 p. 16). One can I think, without reading the reviews, understand Adrian Searle’s position, but I am surprised by Matthew Collings’ dismissal of Tillmans’ work.

 half page
Installation view, Regen Projects
October 23 - December 6, 2008

My own felling about Tillmans work is rather ambiguous. However, what drew my attention were his influences. Tillmans is quoted as saying that “all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol” and “of course Dada and Kurt Schwitters” (Jobey 2010 p. 16).

 Silver Installation VII 2009

The Guardian reports on Tillmans’ shift towards abstraction. The production of large inject prints seems to be a bold move. The images he produced “have taken on a spectacular and seductive presence in his installations… like works of a latter-day abstract expressionist” (p.17).

Serpentine Gallery, London, 26 Jun - 29 Aug 2010

While part of his work “developed towards abstraction, another took a more political route” (p.17). In a series of collages titled Truth Study Center, Tillmans “drew attention to the exercise of power behind ideologies of Islamic fundamentalism, Catholicism, Capitalism” (p.17).

.

Serpentine Gallery, London, 26 Jun - 29 Aug 2010

He is quoted as saying “I know that this won’t change the world. But then again I think the most important  thing is to start doing something” (p.17)

Sources:


Jobey, J. (2010) "Wolfgang Tillmans: the lightness of being" The Guardian, Saturday 26 June 2010 

Available from World Wide Web: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2010/jun/26/wolfgang-tillmans-serpentine-photographs-exhibition > [last accessed     27/06/10]

Feedback and Reflection

The external has brought up some very interesting observations about my work. It certainly reinvigorated my thinking and energised my reading of the imagery produced by myself and imagery in general.

The externals reading of the work helped to identify problems within the first project. The first part of the work which is called Deepest Autumn seems to be, as I suspected, the most convincing – although this depends on the format or the type of technology it is represented upon (a monitor  or via a projector) the first three minutes the transitions within the montage seem too slow.

The second section, Intimations seems sloppy. The painterly nature of the first section takes a back-seat. The transitions also happen too quickly. A flower dominates part of the second montage sequence.  The external questioned the use of such a motif, arguing that such a forceful graphical element creates a vortex, drawing the eye towards it.  The effect undermines the attempt to evenly distribute the eyes attention across the imagery. The dominant motif undercuts and disrupts the attempt at an all-over design that flows naturally.

The Irritated gaze section suffers from the inclusion of striking yet unsubtle and possibly clichéd imagery. The eye montage is full of mistakes and there are errors within the sequencing that causes a disruption to the narrative.

The comments and the time taken to reflect upon them have proved extremely helpful. Now it is a case of correcting these problems and finding ways of improving on the work.

Work on show

Barnett Newman, Cathedra 1951, installation view, 1958.

Gardner Rea, 'One nice thing about TV...' New Yorker cartoon, 1951.

The above photograph and the wry comment on abstract expressionism from the New Yorker is interesting, because it connects with a way of seeing that is suggested by the digital montages presented below; a slowness of inspection. It is not as slow as looking at a Ming vase or a Braque, but slower than most cinema (apart from the majority of Wenders work or Tarkovsky, perhaps) or indeed television (except late night Big Brother). I also oddly began to think of Sergei Parajanov’s Colour of Pomegranates for the first time in years.

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

As I watch the montage projected on the screen (via a very high end projector in a lecture theatre) I wonder of the effectiveness of the slowness of some of the dissolves. Are some too quick? Are the elements at the beginning of Deepest Autumn too mundane and slow in terms of there transitions? I consider the colour. The influence of Anselm Kiefer is startling, however I reminded of Robert Hughes criticism of his work. Hughes suggests that Kiefer’s “drawing lacks fluency and clarity, and his colour monotonous” (Hughes, 1991 p.409). Is that what is happening here in terms of its colour?

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.





Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

Deepest Autumn: The Irritated Gaze I 2010.

The Deepest Autumn section seems to work. It is fluid it does not have any jarring moments. On the large screen in the main lecture theatre (the Co-op) all the subtleties of the modulations of deep lamp black and Prussian blue are revealed. The bright white orbs and flashes are very strong and solid. This does not quite play out on a large monitor, where every thing is a little pale, bleached out, exposed.

Intimations: The Irritated Gaze II 2010.




Intimations: The Irritated Gaze II 2010.


Intimations: The Irritated Gaze II 2010.



Intimations: The Irritated Gaze II 2010.

The Irritated Gaze: The Irritated Gaze III 2010.

The Irritated Gaze : The Irritated Gaze III 2010.

Intimations and the Irritated Gaze lack this delicate handling. The final two parts do not have the same paint-like quality as the first section. Objects and imagery are overplayed. Is the all-overness of design maintained? Does it fall into surrealist cliché? I will have to see what the external has to say.

The Irritated Gaze: The Irritated Gaze III 2010.

Outside of an exhibition space, in the street let us say, the projections would not, I don't think, have a hope in hell of competing with the outside world and the spectacle of neon and the street.

The documentation is a little crude, but it does show some of the transitions.

Hughes, R., (1991) The Shock of the New, London and New York: Thames and Hudson.

Robert Motherwell and the New York School | Knowledge Network

Robert Motherwell and the New York School | Knowledge Network

Fuel

I first came across Fuel in October or November 2000: rather late considering that they had been around since 1991. Formed at the Royal Collge of Art by Peter Miles, Damon Murray and Stephen Sorrell they adopted what Alan and Isabella Livingston called "a visually aggressive stance" (2003, p.91).

This particular film, featured if my memory serves me correctly on OneDot TV on Channel 4 in the late 90s or the early part of the new century. I am not sure of the title of this piece. They represented a new trend in collective approaches to design that "seek to reject individual celebrity of a Carson or Brody" (Eskilson, 2007, p. 381).

Further Reading:

Eskilson, S., (2007) Graphic Design: A New History, London: Laurence King.

FUEL: http://www.fuel-design.com/

Livingston, A. and I., (2003) The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Graphic Design and Designers, London: Thames and Hudson.

Dave Whatt

Hull Underground original design Dave Whatt for Remould Theatre Company (no date).

It is hard to categorize the Hull-based creative Dave Whatt. He is an accomplished Blues guitarist, a multi-instrumentalist musician and artist, set designer, photographer, graphic designer, illustrator and writer. He is avant-garde, anti- avant-garde, an anti-poet and, he will hate me for this, a poet. I like to think of him as a polyartist, for he is “a master of several unrelated arts” (Kostelanetz, 2001, p. 486) as well as many related ones.

Above: A kid for two farthings by Dave Whatt. This drawing was I assumed, based on a still from the film of the same name directed by Carol Reed in 1955, I believe now however that it is a based on this book cover for the novel of the same name of which the film was an adaptation, written by Wolf Mankowitz:

No doubt Dave Whatt owns a copy.

'Acting' by Dave Whatt

I am not sure about the source for the above picture or the date.

As you can see many of the works here are representational. However there is plenty of his work that I would describe as abstract, recalling the “landscapes” of Yve Tanguy. Unfortunately I do not have a copy of these works. The surreal nature of such works and of his writing made him the ideal founding member of the Hull Surrealist League.

Dave Whatt's website contains examples of his own compositions: music and poetry and a list of his diverse influences that include early nineties rave:

The Plasmatics:

Captain Beefheart:

and

The Cramps:

amongst others! All great bands and artists!

Take a look at http://www.myspace.com/davewhatt

Kostelanetz, R. (2001) Dictionary of The Avant-Gardes, New York and London: Routledge