Joseph O. Holmes - workspaces
Interview via The 99 Percent
’ I like to believe that a workspace reveals much about the person who works there, but honestly, that aspect doesn’t interest me. My main criterion is how it looks – the lighting, the colors, the repeating details. I’m drawn to the odd symmetry, to the overall shape of a space.. I don’t consider the project documentary or typology work; it’s about the strange beauty of these accidental sculptures.’
Many of these pictures highlight spaces that are the antithesis of the minimalist, everything-in-its-right-place offices that many creatives inhabit. How would you define the word “creative”?
I’ve actually found the workspaces of most creatives to be too self conscious – or too neat – for my project. But I also have mixed feelings about the term “creatives.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many sculptors and painters have day jobs in the manual trades as contractors, carpenters, electricians.
And like the amusing misalignment of Supreme Memorial with its workplace, the oxymoron in ordered creativity and flexible rule, life don’t just work as planned right?
Alexander McQueen - Plato’s Atlantis
Trust McQueen to come up with this. His Atlantis-inspired 2010 Spring Collection is an inquisitive peek into the alternative side of the world - one where submerged reptilian people strut in embellished claw booties and jelly-boxy volumed dresses that grew on them like second skin.
Encompassing the thought that one day people would morph into such creatures (which isn’t entirely impossible if you believe in your Darwin), the geometry balance of reptilian prints McQueen pulled together was truly bravissimo. Together with the believable nautilus-shell intricacy of plaits/ braids and infinite ‘ocean depth’ of the runway (as set by the sliding camera), it’s hard to tell apart the difficulties of walking in those booties from deliberate role-playing.
By Robert Bound
“War”, Edwin Starr’s 1970 number one hit, is the classic protest song, the quintessential anti-war musical artefact. Written a year before by Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong for the Temptations, the track was given to Starr to release as a single by a savvy label keen not to break the conservative convenant with Temptations’ fans who might have thought the Vietnam War “a really good idea.” Starr made a pencil-sketch song into a masterpiece of raw, heartfelt, sweaty, rhetoric. Can you recall anything other than the pleading titular inquiry - “War. Huh! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” Exactly. The voice and the idea were all the song needed to engender the empathy of a generation and become what all great songs are -addictive, tuneful, quotable - Starr’s version became not just a pillar of the august pantheon of protest pop but a hit for a label that feared their star turns might get their fingers burned by being too close to “War.”
What were they thinking? Art both high and low needs a cause to rebel for, a problem to solve, a war to fight against and a man to challenge. Without rigged elections, falling bombs, muddy trenches and noble deaths, where would art’s outrage be? Things exist in terms of their opposites: where would soft power be without hard power? Mighty things come out of misery, art from adversity: Guernica, Lee Miller, Hemingway, Orwell and Wilfred Owen, Apocalypse Now, “The Charge of the Light Brigade”, “Fuck the Police”. I’ll never forget my English teacher telling me that the best way to enjoy War and Peace was to skip the peace. “Mostly very boring”, she said.
In politics - where all the wars start, anyway - soft power is eroding the edifice of hard power to the point where we don’t know who to believe. Despite the fact that cuddly old Donald Rumsfeld famously and menacingly professed not to understand what the term “soft power” meant, politicians have been trying to head-off the challenge of counter-culture and opposition at the pass by embracing it and being groovy. Lines are blurred when politicians become PR men; world leaders are like TV presenters, potential commanders in chief are actors. When Marty McFly accidentally zooms from 1985 to 1955 in Back to the Future, he has a tough time convincing the Doc he’s from the future: “Who’s the President of the United States in 1985?” asks the Doc with a goggly stare and a sweep of his mad-professor hair. “That’s easy,” says McFly “Ronald Reagan.” The Doc’s inconsolable: “the actor? Then who’s the vice president? Jerry Lewis?!”
Less banal was Juvenal writing about his decadent empire, that “Rome is suffering from an absence of war,” cognisant that conflict is a creator. Don’t knock the dark stuff or those artist will have nothing to wear.
Enric Rovira’s chocolate egg in the making.
This episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations was half of the reason why I was desperately wanting to check out Barcelona. The other half, was Gaudi. From cuisine like $300 canned seafood that tastes better than it was fresh to sculpting the organic chocolate egg by melting it under the sun, how else could ‘revolutionary’ be more exciting than this!
Graduation collection by IRINA SHAPOSHNIKOVA
Absolutely adore the polygonal take on fashion, especially the pants. I like how the controlled chaos of crystal proliferation is well-founded in the quality of translucency and light-reflection from the facets of the fabric, looking like carefully chiselled gems that grew on their miners, and slowly containing their bodies as though they were one (at least in my fantasy world that is not impossible).
Synesthesia via Terri Timely
Ever finding yourself describing things in sensorial expressions that does not quite match up in physical/intangible sense, but we all get it? Put it in technical sense, how many decibels does it take to call a LOUD shirt loud or does snow really taste so bad in the BITTER winter?
You might just have this neurological condition known as Synesthesia whereby the stimulation of one sensory leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive experience. That is to say if you are a colour-graphemic synesthete, your letters and numbers will be perceived as colour; just as how numbers, days of weeks and months bring about personalities in ordinal linguistic personification. Of course, there is also the common visual motion-sound synesthesia that translates visual motion and flicker into sounds, something cinematographers would find very familiar.
This short film summarizes synesthesia at its craziest but also most rhythmically savoured as in a music video. It made the family setting seem, somewhat monotonous as the individuals conducted their daily chores. However, abnormalities of the family’s synesthesia condition brewed beyond skin deep. The film went wild with experimenting the viewer’s imagination, churning out different synesthesia conditions like the synthesizer of an electronic band. Closing with a twist, the taste-hearing (if i’m not wrong) kid plugged himself into thin air, leaving the viewer wonder how did that happen? It’s just like the film saying, “welcome to our world.”
Top:Brooklyn Bridge
Bottom:Chinatown, London
I think I like it better when the world goes topsy-turvy.
D.S. & Durga
In my imagined world, couple collaborations always seem like building castles in the clouds, except that this time, the ethereal romance comes from a musician and an architect, and they make their own perfume at their little laboratory home. With names like Cowboy Grass (Haitian vetiver, white thyme, prairie sage brush), musky Marblehead Reds (oakmoss and bergamot), spiced up Barbados (clove, nutmeg, bay, and Mysore sandalwood), and the cedarwood and mandarin peel Bear Trapper, these creations sound perfect enough as characters for an olfactory fairytale.
As the old folk of Sam Cooke play in the background, the lavender starts to boil, blowing at full steam, and the mist slowly inundate the entire room, it makes me want to buy one of those distillers to concoct my own fairytale too.
exhibition “2027”
at gallery POINT
party “Eating Hibiya Park”
at FIELD FOUR DESIGN OFFICE
exhibition “Fauna & Flora”
by KUBA DABROWSKI
at MARIOS LEFT TANKER
“MErry Christmas Tree”
at MARIOS LEFT TANKER
exhibition “Relife food”
at Living Design Center OZONE
exhibition “Hair”
BLANK+MARIOS
at MARIOS LEFT TANKER
Ayako Suwa solo exhibition
“sensuous food, emotional taste,
at 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Food installation
“Time Crevasse”
at Yokohama Triennale 2008
First noticed her(Ayako Suwa) when she was in town, invited to the Asia on the Edge event last year. Not so much of a chef, her culinary expertise stems from creating food art, with the exception that they are not only visual delights, but edible and tongue-tickling. Communicating ideas through “delivering the concept to the stomach”, Suwa concocts experimental food combinations that bring out the essence of various exhibitions held at the POINT gallery owned by her husband Shinya Furul.
While the experience of eating is getting a new, mind-blowing definition, I still prefer that bacon to sit nicely in my club sandwich. Nevertheless, if you are game for some fresh party ideas, they do catering too.
