Book art piece for Insight

Since early 2008, including the amazing Blood On Paper at the V&A, there's been a really pleasing growth in that whole book art thing. In June 2008 we decided to cover its impact in Brighton.

A new generation of book artists have been quietly redefining everything you know about the tied and bound for over a decade – and judging many a book by its cover. With an international event on our doorstep in July, Charlie Jones has a pressing engagement.
A new global generation of artists are basing work on the printed and bound – remaking novels, rescuing pulped fiction, printing on potato and fur and creating fine art from £5 paperbacks. For these artists, the printed page is a way of creating art itself, rather than a means of reproducing existing work. It’s a broad church, ranging from Dieter Roths early experiments stuffing crap lit into sausage skins, to David Shrigely’s horror-drawings to Denise Hawrysio’s bound Union Jacks to Sam Winston’s word remodeling. It’s subversive, quaint and literate art in the midst of a renaissance that recalls the installationist’s rise in the early seventies. Most exciting of all, many leading lights are coming to Brighton this month for a one-day symposium.
“Eight years ago, no-one had heard of book art, but now almost every art school will offer a course in it. It’s a very exciting time,” says Sarah Bodman, editor of Artists Books Yearbook, the definitive international journal on the form. Sarah, who was introduced to book art when she happened across a handwritten stream of consciousness inside a novel in her university library nearly twenty years ago, is speaking at the Books That Fly event this month at the University of Brighton, a conference and two-week summer school bringing together typographers, artists, academics and writers from around the world. This exhibition comes hot on the tails of last months Phoenix gallery collection, Press and Release, a show of independent and small scale publishing, including many Book Artists, and one of the country’s leading Book Art shop is on Bedford place – Permanent, a group who specialize in small run art books. Lee Shearman of the shop: “It’s been huge recently! It’s exploded, just in the last year. Every month we hear of more event, more artists, more places. I really don’t know what has created this, but that’s the way with inspiration, isn’t it? Someone does something amazing, that makes people go ‘wow, I could do that’ and so these scenes happen.”
Brighton is one of countless hubs worldwide. Sarah Bodman:“Is it a global movement? Very much so! There are practitioners based on every continent, with incredible regional variation. With the new possibilities of internet publishing, it’s easier than ever to get works made – twenty years ago it would cost £100 to make a book, but today you can make one for a fiver, meaning that the person on the street can take home an piece of art.”
permanentbookshop.com
bookarts.uwe.ac.uk

Brighton bound – our list of local bookies

John Dilnot
Through his beautiful re-renderings of milk packaging designs, bad-apple guides and the like, John Dilnot’s work is both weightily political and playfully subtle, and that's all for the better.

Illustrator's Elbow
A newly formed group of 20-odd artists currently studying at the University of Brighton, working in drawing, printing, painting, photography and book-making.

Borbonesa Publishing
A collective of writers and artists who design and make conceptual occasional papers, currently working with filmmaker Jeff Keen to republish RAYDAY, a private broadsheet from the 1960s.

Doing fine for Insight

An art feature on the growth of fine illustration in street art, printed in Insight under the title: Doing Fine: OContemporary favours finesse this month

If Olivia Connelly, gallery director at OContemporary is right, then what could loosely be described as urban art is the most globally significant movement since Pop. And, seeing as her new exhibition of delicate illustration and fine graphic art from three artists, a Brazilian, a Frenchman and a Brit, is set to sell out, we believe her. It’s this truly international aspect that gives art outside the academy its form – but this is often left off the walls: “Much of the fluff from the UK at the moment is loud, brash and big. Like any fluff, it will be forgotten. I’m concerned about curating works that will stand the test of time, and this is a quality all three artists this month have.”
It’s this timelessness and universality that marks the work on show out from the madding crowd. Banksy and his band of his imitators’ glory comes from their ability to point to one moment in time – when gay policemen became a badge of civic pride, when we started to feel uneasy about that CCTV camera on the corner, and so on. On the other hand though, Thais Beltrame’s work is quintessentially Brazilian, it can be enjoyed in any time or place. A trained illustrator who runs with the São Paulo art família Em Foco, she depicts child-like figures with intimate simplicity, and in one series of miniature pencil etchings she maps the childhoods of her friends, those day-to-day experiences that mark growing-up – from being scared of a dog leashed outside a shop, or loss felt when an ice cream scoop falls on the pavement. “I asked all my friends for things they remembered feeling when they were young,” she told us when she visited. “The interesting thing is that whenever anyone sees the pictures they instantly tell me that they have the same memories, that they remember the same things.”
A high level of technical skill unites the artists, though none of the three were formally educated in Fine Art – Thais studied illustration in Chicago, and San and John are trained graphic designers. John’s monotypes follows the master Goya as much as the urban artist Futura: “I worked on commission for years [for workwear brands like Carhartt] and it’s nice to have complete freedom, and to not be tied to a brief. I like ancient mythology, and when you look at people like Goya, you realise how little changes.”

Keeping the piece: Graff lockdown in Brighton for Insight

A piece from the Insight Art and Design issue:

While street art is increasingly presented as a vital part of our city's creative geography, the council are removing legal places for graffiti artists, young and old, to practice their craft. Charlie Jones writes some wrongs

"It's gonna be a rough summer, properly." David Samuel is smoking a cigarette outside his Trafalgar Street gallery, RareKind. The artist and gallery director, who has been painting since he was 13, is discussing the impact of the recent closures of tolerated graffiti zones. Most notable of these was Tarner Park, which was pulled by the council after nearly after nearly twenty years of legal writing at the end of January. The closure has met with no small controversy. Environment councilor Geoffrey Theobald said that "Managing graffiti in Tarner Park hasn't worked and some local people have told us that they avoid the area," as a result of which "[action was taken] to reclaim this park for local residents." However, the closures are appearing to have the opposite effect. "You can already see more tags on the streets around the centre, which is what [places like Tarner Park] kept down, and it's only be two or three weeks. And it's only going to get worse."
Brighton has always had a strange relationship with street art. With a large art student and hip-hop community, Brighton is a prime location for a flowering of urban art, and the existence of large, professional city-centre murals are examples of the council's active funding of the graffiti writing community, encouragement that has lead to worldwide acclaim and a surge in regional pride. At the same time as these developments were being sprayed, the legal parks where the crews learnt their craft were being closed. The legal – or at least tolerated – areas of Davingdor, Blackrock. The Level and Tarner Park have been shut down. "The public are in two minds about graffiti – they love the quirky, fun stuff, but can't stand certain images, or artists who aren't as strong or developed," argues Snub, a graphic designer and street artist. "Councilors wanted a Banksy-style mural, but you can't order something like that. There's this '100 broken windows' idea – as soon you allow a bit of mess into an area, it goes down the pan. But the opposite is true – they act as a pressure valve." DarkDaze, a prolific photograher, has something to say about the regenerative effect of graffit. “The Kensington Street walls have definitely opened up a street that people used to stay away from – it was grimey, stank of piss and had tags and throw ups all over it. Now it’s the most photographed street in Brighton and brings in more tourists, has been featured on calendars, talked about in magazines and has even made money for Brighton traders who sell prints and postcards of the walls.” Places like Tarner Park act a community base, he argues. “Every time I used to go up there kids would come up to the writers and ask questions and seemed to love what was going on. Writers used the park as much as anyone and were aware that it was also a kid’s playground. Many of the artists I know have kids of their own.”
David Samuel agrees. "The public have this idea about that any young person doing graffiti will take be taking drugs and robbing anyone who walks past. I'm not saying that every writer is a saint, and I don't like seeing tagging everywhere as much as the next person. Parks are training grounds, places where the older heads can show younger writers where not to paint – and how to paint well. The people who painted dubs outside of the parks were by and large from out of town and they didn't know the rules about where and how to paint. To take away all our parks because of a few tags outside is like giving the whole class detention when one kid acts up."
Five years trading graffiti goods to the writers (as graff artists call themselves) and art to the buyers of Brighton makes Samuel something of an authority on the state of graffiti art in our fair city. "With less paint being used, less people are buying it. I know two people who've had to close down because no one was buying their paint, and I can't afford for my takings to go down." I ask him what would have happened to him without such parks. "I learnt my craft there! When I was a kid I didn't give a fuck about myself," he says frankly. "But being able to go to these parks made me see what an incredible tool graff can be. 14 years later and I'm running this place and doing what I love. Something as simple as drawing in notebook and then creating something beautiful that's 14-foot-high – it makes you realise that anything in your life is possible."

rarekind.co.uk
snub23.com
darkdaze.com

BOX OUTS:

Graff glossary
Graffiti – for purists, graff means spraypainting outside areas, (often in contravention of the law) not stickers, stencils or gallery works.
Writers – Those who paint graffiti
Produtions – Large-scale murals. Also called "pieces", short for masterpieces
Tags – Small, basic stylised signatures, often in permanent marker
Dubs – Simplistic two-colour paintings
Halls of Fame – Places with many pieces, usually from several different writers or crews
Jams – A one or two-day event that brings many writers together to paint, often from around the country or world

Places to see graffiti art in Brighton
RareKind – The country's only commercial gallery dedicated to graffiti. Check out the wall above the two story shop as well.
Kensington Street – Some stunning murals from Paul Barlow, Alex Young and the Heavy Artillery crew, amongst others.
New England Quarter – Over 500m long, this is the longest single piece of graffiti in country
AliCats – Snub, Mishfit and Bringa got on the case and revamped the inside of this Brighton institution
Prince Regents Swimming Pool – Some great hoardings from the RareKind boys

Nathan Coley interview for Insight

Nathan Coley makes beautiful, Turner prize-listed art from Western sets, Scottish islands, Belgrade housing blocks and cardboard churches, and I got a chance to speak to him in June 2008. House is a feeling:

You should pop down to the De La Warr Pavilion in July to see Nathan Coley’s show. Photographer, sculptor and installation artist Nathan has exhibited at some of Europe’s strongest houses, including the hyper-next Haunch of Venison, the CCB in Lisbon and the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh, where he made knee-high cardboard models of every place of worship in the area. Of course, the thing that got him the most column inches was his Turner-Prize shortlisting, which he picked up last year for, among other pieces, beautiful scale miniature show homes and terraced houses. We love him because he wrestles with the hugest of issues – faith, country, art, nature, you name it – with heartfelt wit and rare humility.

Hello Nathan! What’s the work you’re showing at De La Warr Pavilion?
Hello… It’s a new commission from the DLWP and Haunch, and it takes as its starting point a Western stage set. Westerns are about decline, at least in part, and from it hangs five words; BELIEF, LAND, WEALTH, MIND and FAITH, which are the five rights granted under Islam, but also are appropriate for the frontier mind. Also, the idea of a stage set is very interesting to me as a sculptor. You can’t go for a whiskey in the salon, but that’s what people around the world think of when they think of “a salon”.

It’s really cool.
Cheers.

I really like how your work is totally political – in the sense of being about, y’know, “stuff” – but it doesn’t order you about.
Yeah! That’s what draws me to buildings – it’s the way that people build their environment and community around these things. You know, I don't think of art in that modernist sense of something which you stand before and "experience" – I think of it as something that builds up in your mind. It’s as simple as “This is what I think, what do you think?” Art should provoke discourse and make you see the world around you… Well not differently, but at least make you look around you and give you something nice to talk about when you’re having your tea.

Is the place something you give real consideration?
I think where a work is changes its meaning and effect, definitely. With There Will Be No Miracles Here [a huge carnival light display carrying the words of the title on bare scaffolding], it was originally erected on the Scottish island Bute, where it said something about what we want out of nature. When it was placed in front of a Belgrade communist-era housing block, where it might say something about the dream of socialism. Of course, where it is now [in the Tate] might mean something else entirely.

Dan Hillier for Dazed and Confused

An art piece for Dazed from way back in February 2007, about a Max Ernst-biting modern engraver. Last I heard he was on Neil Gaiman's thing, which is great news:

If there is a movement in art toward the dark, weird and down-right odd in art at the moment (see those Chapman boys, Sebastian Gogel and any given grub street gallery) then Dan Hillier is definitely a part of it. Hillier creates intricate, dark, surreal, graceful and iconoclastic engravings, sourced from ephemera such as Victorian medical encyclopaedias, religious imagery and found photographs. “I like using found pictures and drawing out new narratives from them by bringing previously unrelated images together. I particularly enjoy the results when they're dark and a bit weird,” he says. The results are like postcards by Beardsley from a Victorian inventor’s mansion. If the mansion was populated by circus freaks and Werner Herzog, that is. No surprise that he lists his influences as wine, Max Ernst and mushrooms, then.
He grew up in between the dreamy towers and rough-as-guts estates of Oxford, and studied art Cambridge fifteen years ago. Whilst working as a henna tattooist, he was drawn to doctoring images in his work and, as a hobby, collected fragments of Victoriana. Recently, he started combining the two and realised that new, twisted stories could be told from the most banal of materials. After sifting through car-boot sales and back-street charity chops, fitting images were found. Quite simply, he trawls though “old anatomy and science books, vintage wallpaper, old advertisements for ludicrous Victorian quackery and labour-saving devices” so we don’t have to. The images, once found are combined and doctored on Photoshop or illustrated with vintage Indian dipping ink.
The works depends on the use of forgotten images and discarded memories to re-write a gorgeously dark period of our history, full of elephant men and taxidermy, death and medicine. There’s rich vein to be tapped, and Hillier is only too happy to oblige. With a wink, he calls his work “the quiet dedications of a slightly idiotic man with a fledgling perception of the universe's mysterious charms and a joy in the pleasures of communicating a love of strangeness, darkness, nature, beauty and human people.” He pauses and laughs. “Or just lines of ink on paper and wood.”