No B-Listers.

NOKI rose from the Shoreditch warehouse scene in the 90s.  His artworks challenge mass-market, homogenous and depersonalised commodity  through reappropriating the powerful logos.  Photography by Axel Hoedt.

PERFORMANCES FROM: KILLA KELLA (beatboxing), FERAL IS KINKY (DJ & MC), MR MAKER(hip-hop DJ), FEE & DJ LADYLAW, and words: KIRSTY ALLISON, ANNE MCCLOY, ROBERT MONTGOMERY & GRETA BELLAMACINA

COLD LIPS III is a poster edition art directed by Jason Kedgely of Underworld’s Tomato collective, who designed the sold out first edition.  Exclusive interview explaining WHO IS NOKI inside the fold-out magazine – pick yours up on Thursday.

Ensure entry by RSVPing: [email protected].

All press enquiries:  [email protected], [email protected] / or Lottie Collins [email protected].

Centred around our New York correspondent, Jeffrey Wengrofsky’s short film festival, Secrets of the Deep, showing 10 films on dreams, his official selection includes the Samantha Morton written, Kubrick-inspired Anywhere Out Of This World directed by Douglas Hart, originally commissioned by Unkle’s James Lavelle.  It is the premiere of Double Play, a collaboration between Cold Lips’ editor, Kirsty Allison and Gil De Ray.  Their film was shot in New Orleans and features the debut of his Dream Pirate music project with Welfare’s Pat Whelan (Vagrant Lovers), and the first music recordings of her poetry, produced by Gil De Ray.  It explores the visionary power of the sub-conscious and creativity.

JEFFREY WENGROFSKY  comes from the punk rock underground of early 1980s New York.  He is dedicated to the notion that, in a free society, citizens are cultural producers, not merely consumers.  He founded the Secrets short film festival.  “Punk taught me that art needn’t be a bore. Five to ten minute films are likely to have more energy than longer films. I wanted to design an event that would have the speed and thrills of the old hardcore shows I used to see at CBGB with eight bands, short sets, and two-minute songs.” The festival also features films from vocalist and multi-instrumentalist She Rocola, Joe Whitney (The Flaming Stars),  British-born L.A.-based filmmaker and twice Emmy Award nominated actor Emily O’Brien (The Young and the Restless), and British-born and NYC based Stephen Rutterford of Brooklyn-Brothers ad agency.

“I believe that higher-order understandings sometimes arrive through seeing an immediate correspondence between a thought and reality, but just as often they develop indirectly, by Freudian suggestion, allusion, and changes in cognition. Films, and art in general, influence how I think, which shapes what I think. Sometimes I am baffled by art when I encounter it, so it runs around my head for a while, tipping over settled thought structures.  So, perhaps, films can open up the world by entering our eyes and ears, altering our perception and – presto chango! – the world appears anew with secrets revealed.”

Secrets of the Deep is the fourth instalment of the Secrets series.  Ten short films are selected on a specific topic: Secrets of the Heart, Secrets of the Insect World, Secrets of the Intoxicated Life, and the new program on dreams.  Secrets of the Deep attracted 415 international submissions.

Read more, and an exclusive interview with Douglas Hart in the new edition.

Secrets of the Deep is happening on Thursday, January 25, 2017, at 8pm.

Location: Gene Frankel Theatre, 24 Bond Street, NYC. Proceeds are being donated to the preservation of this important theatre.

Tickets: $15, $10 (seniors and students w/ID). Cash on door.

Press enquiries: [email protected]

http://www.genefrankeltheatre.com/secrets-of-the-deep-dreams-on-film.html

An exclusive essay by Jeffrey Wengrofsky, will be published in the following COLD LIPS IV.  

Jerry Lewis was lauded in France as an auteur for his freewheeling, unscripted zaniness long after English-speaking audiences grew tired of his antics.  The reason is simple: his humour was physical and more easily appreciated by speakers of other languages unburdened by expectations of sophisticated plot, clever dialogue, and character development.

Lost in Paris [Paris pieds nus] is a feature film written, directed, and starring a married couple: Fiona Gordon and Dominique Abel. The plot is simple: a Canadian woman (Gordon) travels to Paris to save her senile aunt (Emmauelle Riva) from assisted living and falls in love with a homeless man (Abel).  The charm of the film – and, yes, the film has its charming moments – is in the face and posture of Fiona Gordon, who, like Jerry Lewis, is an attractive, graceful actor ably portraying an ugly and awkward outsider.  Opening scenes propel the film into magical realism aloft color compositions that would make Wes Anderson blush and Gordon’s pasty-faced innocence.  Lost in Paris runs aground once Abel appears. With sculpted muscles and perfect posture, Abel is unconvincing as a homeless person.  Gordon and Abel have an excellent scene together while dancing and another in a cemetery, but otherwise, they don’t make for a very convincing couple despite the very fact that they actually are married.

Over the course of two hours, Gordon’s face becomes familiar and the cinematography loses its lustre, as if shot on the cheap.   Even Paris appears underwhelming – neither grand nor grungy enough to maintain the film’s initial magic.  The late Emmauelle Riva, best known for Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), also has a dancing scene craftily choreographed on a bench, but she does not connect well with Gordon or Abel.  An implied sexual liaison she has with Abel’s character, an Oedipal moment by way of Electra’s Clytemnestra in the last few moments of the film, has the texture of a ill-conceived lump on an otherwise flat plotline.

One of the most marvelous things about cinema is its capacity to transport viewers from our perpetually troubled existence, and in that way, Lost In Paris could make for a nice diversion for someone grieving or ill and it has the stuff of a fun date with your favorite elderly aunt.  If, however, you seek to see something more substantial than a Jerry Lewis movie, aim your eyes elsewhere.

-- JEFFREY WENGROFSKY – New York, November 2017

More on Jeffrey Wengrofsky’s short films via the website Syndicate of Human Image Traffickers and the upcoming feature: Song of Hiawatha.

This month, Leo Varadkar, the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister), announced that a referendum in Ireland would take place in May of this year on the 8th Amendment within the Irish constitution which bans abortion in nearly all circumstances. The current law ignores the UN human rights to bodily autonomy, and sits as one of the strictest abortion laws in the world. The Taoiseach commented that “we cannot continue to export our problems and import our solutions”. Room for Rebellion, a collective of Irish pro-choice women featured in the Guardian, Mixmag, Dazed and elsewhere, is in association with London-Irish Abortion Rights Campaign and welcomes the news of a referendum. As the Irish Times poll demonstrated, 56% of the Irish people welcome change to laws that impose over women’s bodies - the Irish people want to trust women and their doctors to access free, safe, legal abortion care. 10 women and girls leave Ireland a day to travel and access safe reproductive care due to the non-fit-for-purpose law. Room for Rebellion believes “it is time to remove the restraints of the church and the patriarchy from our bodies”. Women are continually betrayed by the justice system in Ireland and Northern Ireland, put through distressing trials receiving prison sentences, and needlessly dying when their choice is compromised. State cases like X and Y and A, B and Chighlight the horrors of rape, incest, torture, extreme poverty, and fatal infections which have seen women fighting for the right to access abortion services. With a fight ahead to secure the repeal of the restrictive 8th amendment, Room for Rebellion asks for your support in what will be a historic year for women’s rights.

BUY TICKETS HERE All proceeds raised by Room for Rebellion will be donated to the fight for abortion rights in Ireland. If you are part of the Irish diaspora, check the hometovote.com campaign for more information on eligibility for voting in the referendum.

For more information on the individual events, DJs, and tickets: LONDON: Solid Blake (Apeiron Crew): https://soundcloud.com/solid_blake Aurora (Spectral, Radar Radio): https://soundcloud.com/aurora-mitchell Object Blue (Tobago Tracks): https://soundcloud.com/objectblue DUBLIN: Moxie (On Loop, NTS): https://soundcloud.com/djmoxie Eliza : https://soundcloud.com/lizzie-b-1 Endrift: https://www.facebook.com/endriftmusic/ BELFAST: Violet: https://soundcloud.com/violet Venus Dupree (GIRL): https://soundcloud.com/venusdupree Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/414559068990779/ Ticket links: London - https://www.residentadvisor.net/events/1071441 Dublin - https://www.residentadvisor.net/events/1071445 Belfast - https://www.residentadvisor.net/events/1071443 Socials: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/room4rebellion/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/room4rebellion/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Room4Rebellion Artwork credit: Caterina Bianchini

Producer Flood and Gareth Jones are stars amid a stellar cast of interviewees from Mute’s Daniel Miller to U2, Gudrun Gut, Barry Adamson, Tangerine Dream, and Bowie’s lover spilling the beans on his drugs detox, Romie Haag.

Opens with Alexander Hacke, who joined Einstürzende Neubauten at 15, to break the concept of music, recording found sounds, and those around them, such as razors cutting speed on toilets – and road hammer machines in the studio – as wild as celluloid gets in digital daze.

ENO, FRIPP BOWIE. 1977.

NB. A similar version to this story features in the January ‘Best of British’ editionof DJ Mag, where Kirsty Allison edits the arts’ Off The Floor pages. There’s also an interview with Matthew Collin on his new book: Rave On, and the launch of Craig Richards book of illustrations.

THE HORRORS / Synästhesie Festival / Volksbühne

“The people putting this festival together told me this granite floor was from Hitler’s Bunker,” says Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and A Records, DJing in the green room, two floors of sweeping staircases up in the People’s Theatre of Mitte’s Rosa-Luxemburg Platz – once the centre of East Berlin’s GDR.

“Do you believe them?” I ask, of the 8MM Bar promoters who put the festival together. We consider the plausibility, the Nazi star, in dirty creams and blood reds.

Mark Reeder later confirms it to be from the Nazi Vice Chancellor office. And of the cenotaphs stashed beneath the KuDamm – the Nazi spikes. Close enough. Anton is a hero – DIG! the film he stars in aside spars, The Dandy Warhols – an essential on the rock n roll rites-of-passage Reading List. Between his selection of classic psychedelia: “I was born in 1967, in California, of course I’m psychedelic”, with highlights such as Fabio Viscollios 7”, he sets the record straight on all kindsa connections that zip around my references of the night – the stars that guide us, the magnets who form us.

Arrival in Neukölln

So 90s, no blue arrow locator. Without the digital psychographic veils of my screen, the meaning of wrong direction changes – I love to travel, to feel on top of the globe, wherever you walk, with only the weight of the identifiers you carry.

Natural order leads me to Stroke Order – my faux-god-sista, of the Sacred Sound Club – her haus is pink. Y3 shoes, high ceilings, dribble shower, CK mirror. She’s a costume designer for films, but has been hiding out here for a year. Making minimal techno – using autonomous sensory meridian response samples – sounds that turn us on.

Our mothers are pretend godmothers to me and her. She grew up in Vancouver. Dad is a motorcycle racer and ballet dancer in Japan.

Synästhesie Festival / Volksbühne

CAMERA take to the main stage of seated theatre hall. Brutalist fractal collage films of matrix shifting cities, juddering with intent. Projections of you watching me watching you – perhaps being shot live in the auditorium – full scope. Beaming around the physical force of a standing drummer triballing out for a 20 minute set on a bass drum, snare and cymbal. The centre-piece. Astral simulacrum to The Egg who I played with earlier this year. The standing drummer keels in sweat, throws a death white sheet over the drums as though he has beaten them dead, only to dampen their noise, and continue hitting and hitting. Keys, 2 x guitar, sitar bass, different genereration radical on sax – elf dancing.

I’m reminded of the need for parameters – the ones we invent to live inside. The significance of numbers plays on the screens – another hallucination. A replacement for seeing everything through snapshot Insagram lens. Abandoning our digital religion – is so FKK (freikörperkultur – the GDR East Berliners act of rebellion was to strip on Sundays around the lakes – to rip off the communist soaked nylons of identikit clothing*). So naked.

TANGERINE DREAM

A violinist in black – modular synth Memotron on one side – a bank of other buttons on the other side. One life. One nerve shatters and then rest follow. First they twitch, and glitch the matrix…

I catch a bit of THE PINS – all girls – superhot, riot grrrrl electronica.

THE HORRORS

Violent Lenin Uber Alles track shatters across the increased scale of the stage for this headline performance – punk anger of East Berlin, red deco chandeliers of alles Ku-damm Cabaret glory. Waiting for Faris Badwan, the singer who I first interviewed for Dazed and Confused, making a film about his illustration – and exhibition, I wonder about the symbolism of genre/sound/music/art as signs of the times – about resonance – of what we are creating and producing – of X Factor sounds as the capitalist panacea – of our art resonating our environment – or us gravitating towards it. Stroke Order making techno in Berlin.

The futurism of white noise perfection – the dystopian values, four albums in from when I first met Faris – he was maybe 23 then. Unsure if he was going to carry on at St Martins art school. By the time I interviewed him again for Vogue, he was not going back.

And here, seated in the very front row – I witness the evocation of destiny – he’s become less of the shy frontman, but someone who is commanding the respect of the universe – he violently whips the mic lead – he hails the pulses of front row screamers, bonding their necks with rubber wire – he in black PVC – guitarist in red lipstick – beautiful rockstar boys. Lyrics are lost in the Elritch reverb – Faris is crown stealing. Volatile black energy of goth industrial – contemporised by Tom Furse – and his techno pyramid synths. Ice sweat dripping Hackney vampire bassist Rhys Webb. Faris has become storming iconic balearic, striding over theatre seats, in smart city shoes. It’s cosmic goth, it is power – it is owning the depth of Poe hell to Blakean heavens. From voyeurs to submission, the audience leave satisfied.

WEDDING/NW multi-cultural reaches of the city.

Fire station studio. Danielle De Picciotto walks us across a courtyard in twilight. Pyramid of flowers, split by stairs to a below-sea-level, waiting buddha, draped with beads. Left and right basement of Californian security doors, co-joined studios, His and Hers. Drums on the male side, Alexander Hacke, Einsturzende Neubatten – poles of metal to hit. Next door: paintings of black and white folklore S+M dolls with tripped out wings, and photograph reflections. Hers. With tea. Laughter. Discussion. Love. She is love.

***

Lost – ghetto kid guides me and Stroke Order to the ambient dinner in a bar beneath a block in Wedding: soundproof triangles of three-tone pastel shaved hardwood. Clean vegetables, and a series of performances from three post-Akai-ists. Poetry, soundscapes layering paranoic schizophrenic voices – a DJ girl in from Seattle. The residents, ex-pats, from across Germany, and the world – carrying less ego than London. A wholesome intellect carries through, it gets lost in the whirl of London survival. I think back to hanging with the man commonly known as Rodent, the Sex Pistols’ sound tech – he was saying everything is lost in our digital times – the lack of ability to hang out together, they had to live frugally, himself in the studio of The Clash. The intensity of art. It’s easier here. To get involved in your creativity – away from the grab.

SUNDAY

Home jukebox, coffee, and Okay Cafe cinnamon swirls at Jason McGlade and Anne-Cathrin Saure’s (the art director/photographer, and designer of Cold Lips II, and co-createurs of the Shedville font). They moved back here recently – but Jason’s back and forth to London, working on an incredible analogue Polaroid project.

Stroke Order and I head out to Berghain – but instead collide with a very old friend who’s been living in Thailand for 14 years – Martyn Goodacre. He took the most iconic picture of Kurt Cobain, and many more. We tried doing music together when we worked on magazines. We go to a bar, meet with a midwife – talk about the horror show of birth, the guidance into the world, policed by the womb and the channel to birth and the rejection from the vulvic eye. The propulsion.

MONDAY MORNING COMING DOWN FROM AN EMAIL THAT IS CHANGING MY LIFE

Space, China – coffee with Mark Reeder. His vinyl of Mauderstadt is out now. I’ve just run a trilogy of stories on him in DJ Mag, explaining his part in Berlin, from being the Factory rep in Berlin in Joy Division days, through to putting on punk gigs in East Berlin, recording the music in gay bars to play to New Order – thus Blue Monday – and since, from inventing trance music with his label MfS – getting Paul van Dyk on the map – he’s the man. His uniforms. Rare light.

“Danielle [De Picciotto] and Katia – Love Parade would never have started without them.”

[Love Parade was the street party that began in the ecstatic reunification of East and West Berlin. The wall came down in 1990. The old GDR was a wild land. Read Danielle De Picciotto’s Beauty of Transgression for more…or watch Mark Reeder’s B-Movie…and his forthcoming E-Movie.]

He realises he’s late for his lunch…

Alone, back on the Neukölln streets, I look into the door of a Moroccan cafe – get called in by a round-faced Muslim woman, grey jumper, jeans – trainers – Tangiers market vibes, enter – beans – good – no English – point at a box – I don’t know if she knows I don’t want a tagine but takeaway – they waterfall me mint tea – the door slams shut. There are stickers on the wall tiles – plastic table cloths. Am I about to be drugged? Locked in – I have few Euros and no phone to be stolen.

I sit, read the Unspoken Berlin I’ve picked up – and wait for either the drugs to kick in, or to relax. Oh, some brot on the table – no it ain’t Gucci Bloom sea hedgehog fennel and jerusalem artichoke, chestnut puree and scallop, purple watercress like the exquisite experience of Lokal where local ingredients will dance on plates for us later – nor is is it as refined as the Techno sauna we’ll meditate in around the bar – but it is E2.50 and beautifully wholesome – the chickpeas are larger than London.

—-

Neurotitan have taken Cold Lips and my last 3 copies of Unedited. Stefi there is lovely. It’s somewhere that’s always called me on previous trips to Berlin. Many putting a film together that became impossible, about Manuel Gottching, of Ash Ra Tempel – and E2:E4 – the most sampled record – inventor of ambient – before Eno, before the HANSA recordings of Iggy and Bowie. I tell Stefi of my gig last night with Whisky and Words at the Keith bar – where Stroke Order – her pals – and Jason McGlade come by – and Mark Reeder. And Rasp Thorne [post coming to Cold Lips soon, or buy the second edition for total spread]- the consumate performer – lighter over here – my lips are still red from the wine. Stephen Crane. Rasp’s performance of Crane. He’s so good.

Everytime I get on a train here the stasi black jacket ticket checkers are on the same carriage. It’s happened to Morgan 3 times in her year here – and 3 times with me in as many days. I am able to fight my usual paranoias from the top of my Maslow pyramid – the email from a publisher – saying he wants to publish my novel – the one I have had two agents hawk around in 11 years – during which time, I have changed, and so has the story. It is the best email I’ve ever had. Here, lying in bed on the Monday morning after meeting with Anton Newcombe and front row for Faris – Faris frow.Two days later, I’m still flying, as I hit EchoBucher, back in Wedding – they’re taking some Cold Lips…I drop into Potsdamer – meeting… No fucking way. Ticket checkers.

Zug Fallt aus!

You have amazing eyes – you look like Madonna said the guy from Milano – I’m hoping he means old skool hot Madz. En route to the airport – delays – nerves shot / triggering towards Parkinsons and spiked dreams. He calmed me – so did the guy who was also travelling to Stansted – as we ran for the plane, and vice versa. Detoxed from the phone, train home, to the temple – travelling with Alice A Bailey. Nanobotic karmic overide. More ticket inspectors – haunted by the stasi – on plane now – could do with some extra O2 from the overhead locker after running in a coat I just bought which I think I may be allergic to. But it’s so warm.

For rebellious artists seeking a certain hidden knowledge, downtown New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a seductive speedball of art and sleaze and smack set amid the rotting ruin of a dirty, broken metropolis. Photographer Gail Thacker, then an art student at The School of The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, yearned for a transgressive danger she could not find in that preppy city. She and her best friends – notably, performance artist and photographer Mark Morrisroe and gallerist Pat Hearn – burned with a savage intensity and unbridled ambition whose excesses mirrored those of New York. 

As Thacker recalls: “Mark was ruthless, capable of anything, but he was my best friend. We were terrors together.” In fact, Thacker met Nan Goldin (who had let her and Morrisroe crash at her Bowery loft after her opening at Castelli Gallery) and some other members of the “Boston School of Photography” in New York once they’d migrated out of New England, sometime after graduation. “If you ask me, I think everything happened in 1980, but a lot happened in a short period of time,” muses Thacker, whose own recollections are a bit mottled by having lived through it all. 

Gail Thacker’s Polaroid photos are stamped with the wild beat of their moment – cheating time and sometimes death – offering the viewer a glimpse of four decades of daring art accomplices in her first solo show in Chelsea, the centre of New York City’s art scene.

Mark Morrisroe, whose performances had given grit and scandal to the Boston punk scene, quaffed heavily of the excesses of the moment, working as a prostitute and doing whatever he thought would propel his career. Morrisroe was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988 and died within in a year, in 1989. At one of his last public appearances, at Robert Mapplethorpe’s opening at the Whitney Museum, Morrisroe and Mappelthorpe faced each other as mirror images. As Thacker recalls, they had their “hair slicked back, wearing suits, holding canes, and ravaged from AIDS. There were no congratulations. They locked eyes. Time stopped and they silently passed each other by.”

Punk and affiliated movements like No Wave challenged art institutions by creating alternative spaces for youthful experimentation in nightclubs, living spaces, and small galleries outside universities and the established art scene. It was a brave, young movement that took on most media (except, perhaps painting), and Thacker’s gang of friends – Morrisroe, and gallerist Pat Hearn – were protean and polymath, hellbent on exploring many artistic avenues in search a unique direction. At the time, Pat Hearn was a performance and video artist, and she also had a gallery in her Boston loft. Thacker, then performing with The Stains (featuring Steve Stain), was studying painting and had already been working with Polaroid. It was Hearn who encouraged her to pursue photography instead of painting. Thacker and Morrisroe, as best friends, traded ideas, competing with radical production techniques – waiting long periods of time before developing, working with negatives, altering the chemical processes – to make photographs as a sort of performance, open to chance operations a la John Cage: “Influenced by minimal and abstract art, I experiment with light to create something new, unlike documentary photography that wants to duplicate what is already present.”

Thacker and performance artist Rafael Sánchez, a neighbor of Morrisroe’s, bonded while caring for their stricken friend. After Morrisroe’s tragic death at the tender age of thirty, Sánchez became Thacker’s closest friend and most prolific collaborator. Their playful interactions show a heavy influence of Dada and Surrealism, creating a sheltering reality during the most horrible years of the AIDS crisis, as many of their friends were sick and dying. Thacker, a true believer in the redemptive power of art, always proves able to instigate fierce expressiveness from her subjects. Her photographs, fully posed, are themselves performances that delve deeply into fantasy.

Between the Sun and The Moon offers a unique angle on forty years of Boston and New York underground art scenes culled from Thacker’s book of that title, recently published by the City University of New York. It includes photos of Mark Morrisroe, Rafael Sánchez, Tabboo! (Stephen Tashjian), Joey Gabriel, Kenny Kenny, Sur Rodney Sur, Shelley Marlowe, and Katrina Del Mar. With recent shows at the Museum of the City of New York and Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, and with this show at Daniel Cooney, Gail Thacker, a key but hitherto less known member of a talented cohort, is at last emerging into the light of history.

The show is on view until 22 December 2017, which is likely the date when poet Eileen Myles, who once also moved from Boston to New York, will read from her introduction Gail Thacker Polaroids, Between the Sun and the Moon. Daniel Cooney Fine Art. 508 W 26th St, # 9C, New York, New York 10001

---

Lyrics as spoken word…

I did several records with Myra Davies, the spoken word artist – I did the music, she the text. The most recent Myra Davies piece is called Sirens, where I split the music with Beate Bartel. It is released as an instrumental album as well. For my own recordings I do use ‘Sprechgesang’, which is kind of spoken word with a little tone …

Women & legacy…

Yes: here we are fighting for our rights – fighting for equal rights. Still.

Digital sounds in the anthropocene era – how the analogue and binary interpolate…

Yes, wonderful.

What you’re trying to achieve with your current music practice, how your background plays into that.

My current music practice is using more toys – I try to be not so computer fixated. This leaves me more fun and freedom to develop unexpected results. I am always trying to trick myself in being inventive and to get it exciting. Improv is something I denied for a long time, but actually we did pretty free songs already in my first band, Mania D – with Malaria we went more into fixed compositions – and now with Monika Werkstatt I found a new way in playing with other artists without stopping being a solo artist. We have shows were we play solo and free together. This is a lot of fun, and everyone, even me, learns something.

Where one art finishes and another ends…

is the place for the edge.

You can find Gudrun at her home on the web, gudrungut.com. If in the market for something more tangible, you can catch the legend herself performing in London this Sunday (19th November) with La Leif, Barbara Morgenstern, Pilocka Krach, and Sonae at Café OTO as part of her ongoing all-female project collective Monika Werkstatt.

Details n’ tickets here.

…

Golden Lane Estate is a classic architectural design. Sheltered within Peabodys, Guinness Trust and the latter-built Barbican, it is a space of light and peace separating the city and London Wall with the west/east traffic vein of Old Street. The market of Whitecross Street bustles through the day with lunches. But following countless exorcisms of tenants as private companies scoop up land cheaply from cash strapped councils, under the cry of “austerity”, but it actually being far closer to “I’m a greedy bastard, I wanna profit from people” – do we just roll over and let our city become a ghosttown shell for the superrich, where places like south London’s Elephant Park, which displaced 3000 residents for a first phase of quasi-Spanish coastline/Hamptons/riad properties sold entirely to internationals. The lack of government care for our land has had its day. Councils taking short term backhanders, selling off our roots, and rights. Whether it’s under the guise of London Newcastle-style artistic community support, where they create galleries, street art gardens to reroute pedestrian pathways, or sponsor places like Richmix – in the post-Grenfell era, we gotta reclaim our streets. Taylor Wimpey are one of the newest old fams of Britain to try and deprive long term dwellers of light, by smashing down one building to hit the sky with flats already promised to Hong Kong people who’ll hardly be there. 80% reductions of light into some windows. This is what’s happening at Golden Lane. So, Stewart Home has rallied his Turner and Booker prize winning mates in to decorate the buildings under threat.

Bowater House, Golden Lane Estate, London EC1Y 0RJ. View from Fann Street, EC1.

Visit, share the banners till December 10.

And pop by the BASQUIAT… The Artists & Slogans Iain Sinclair: this sets the positive force of life against the avarice of the Corporation of London, for whom, to quote one Bowater House resident, ‘money is their only God’.

Katrina Palmer: is invoking the 1989 horror movie Society directed by Brian Yuzna; in it the upper classes are aliens who suck the nutrients out of their human victims and they call this shunting.

Arnaud Desjardin: “city = thieves = liars = speculators”. This artist, who lives close to The Denizen site, recently had to take legal advice to prevent a developer from getting the local council to grant them a compulsory purchase order on his right to light in the premises at which he produces his work.

Cornelia Parker: normally for a shadow to fall, the object casting it must fall too. However, The Denizen is already casting a shadow over life around Golden Lane without construction having even begun, and so the darkness surrounding it could be dispelled by stopping it from being built.

Siu Lan Ko: Marx and Engels often used dialectical reversal to make points and in The Communist Manifesto they state: ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’; many now associate the first part of this citation with its reuse in the title of Marshall Berman’s book All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982).

Stewart Home: ghost homes are residential properties which the buyer neither lives in nor rents out, but on which huge profits can be made due to rising house prices.

Stewart Home (loosely translated): a Bowater House resident liked Stewart Home’s English slogan so much he asked a friend to render it in Chinese. Since a literal translation didn’t work well, the friend suggested 陰地上的豪宅 or yīn dìshàng de háozhái, meaning ‘mansion on shady land’. The translator said shady in this instance meant haunted and the phrase had an eerie and poetic vibe; it could almost be advertising for a ghost movie. Purchasing a Denizen luxury apartment will haunt you forever!

Tom McCarthy: quote from Dante’s Inferno.

Mark Aerial Waller: S106 refers to legislation requiring developers to include affordable housing in their schemes subject to ‘commercial viability’. Taylor Wimpey’s The Denizen – like many other developments – manipulates the loose rules about this.

Margarita Gluzberg: French slogan appropriated from Paris, May 68: “No replastering; the structure is rotten”

Fiona Banner: a contraction of the final stanza of the Philip Larkin’s 1967 poem High Windows, seemingly replacing the original’s ambiguous treatment of transcendence with a positive endorsement of inner experience, something that isn’t possible in ‘air-conditioned nightmares’ like The Denizen. As Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse) noted in Poésies (1870): “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It holds tight an author’s phrase, uses his expressions, eliminates a false idea, and replaces it with the right one.”

Pippa Henslowe: many new builds in the EC1 City fringe are bought as buy to leave investments, while in the computer game Black Ops II a denizen is a kind of zombie.

Gavin Turk & Deborah Curtis: Taylor Wimpey’s The Denizen development will steal sunlight from 2 schools, the Golden Lane Children’s Centre and Fortune Street Park; as well as plunging into darkness many of the flats the children who use these community assets live in.

Liz Price: has used the title of both a tune and an album by Eddie Harris (1934-1996), the godfather of jazz funk; and one which highlights the fact that both the City of London and Taylor Wimpey have to date turned a deaf ear to the interests of both local residents and those who work in the vicinity of The Denizen site.

Jeremy Deller & Fraser Muggeridge: invite us to ponder whether there is much difference between Taylor Wimpey’s building construction and the aftertaste of burgers sold by fast food chain Wimpy; while also offering an opinion about the moral robustness of corporations.

Adam Dant: British post-WW1 slogan ‘Homes Fit For Heroes’ in Chinese.

Patrick Goddard: a contraction of a slogan from an earlier text/image work by this artist; the original piece invoked Grant Morrison’s graphic story The Invisibles (1994-2000), as well as drawing on rapper Jehst’s City of Industry (2002). Here the suggestion is The Denizen’s ghost home investors will lead lives that are emotionally and intellectually barren, rather than enjoying cultural riches that echo those of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, as Taylor Wimpey ridiculously suggest in their promotional material for the development.

Esther Planas: “Warning! Frank Knight & Savills Don’t Give A Damn About Our Space” in Catalan. Frank Knight and Savills are the main agents selling Taylor Wimpey’s The Denizen development.

Anjalika Sagar – The Otolith Group: developers are attempting to rebrand the Finsbury/Bunhill/St Luke’s area as East Clerkenwell, to create a ‘hipster central belt’ running from Hoxton and Shoreditch to the east to the real Clerkenwell in the west. The Denizen lying mere metres over the border from the old borough of Finsbury (now a part of Islington) fits this pattern of hipster gentrification although it is situated just inside the City ward of Cripplegate Without. The Denizen is NOT located in the ancient heart of the City of London as Taylor Wimpey have falsely claimed in advertising material, since it lies well outside the old city wall.

Eleanor Vonne Brown: slogan from luxury apartment hoarding in Haggerston.

Artists Against Overdevelopment: a hashtag so that people seeing the banners and wanting to know more could look it up online. #savegoldenlane

The typeface used on these banners is Bureau Grotesque 37, it was also used on all the original 1950s signage on the Golden Lane Estate.

More here:

DELIVER US (Liberami)

As we enter Halloween season, it is, perhaps, important to reflect on the continued experience of the spiritual in the lives of so many. For us moderns, this holiday is not so much a pagan ritual as it is a triumph over religion as superstition, our native folk cultures mocked by children of the Enlightenment freed from the rites and rituals, critters and creeps, sacrifices and stories, and, to fully intellectualize it, the ideological prisms and psychological blinders, of traditional society. Pass the candy corn.

In Deliver Us (Liberami), a new documentary by Federica Di Giacomo, we walk astride a pair of Italian priests whose specialty is exorcism. Yes, that’s right, forty-four years since an adolescent Linda Blair spewed streams of pea soup across a room in glorious spasms of green pseudo-vomit, there are people still terribly concerned about being possessed by a demon and by the Devil in particular. It is not my place to tell you what is real, dear reader. For these priests and their parishioners, this is more serious than life and death, and Deliver Us relates moments more genuinely compelling than late night American televangelists and their twitching hoards of tongue-speaking donors. More than most spookytime entertainment, this film offers a possible actual glimpse of the demonic – Halloween for the hardcore.

Is Deliver Us scary? If seeing people regress into wailing, clawing beasts wrought with emotion, eyes screwed up into their heads amid the vestments, accoutrements, and sanctuaries of old Italian churches frightens you, then yes. This reviewer – who was not raised in Catholicism – found the spectacle of women and men on their knees, howling and pressing their faces into the hands and robes of priests, to be completely fascinating and mildly erotic, especially as they spasm and jolt in response to Holy Water and psychologically-powerful injunctions like: “I forgive those who have done evil to me…”

We meet various people in search of healing – a woman in a failed marriage, a young woman undergoing a sexual awakening, a one-time compulsive masturbator, a man addicted to cocaine, a failed businessman – and Di Giacomo is generous enough to let us decide if the priests are exorcists, psychologists, social workers, or all of the previous. The “possessed” themselves wonder before the camera whether they are crazy or bedeviled, which also adds to the authenticity of their experience, but an encounter between a priest and a doctor – who lavishes him with pills – reveals that even priests do not live “by bread alone.”

It’s easy to dismiss that which we have not experienced and it is a convenient temptation to imagine ourselves the captains of our fates, especially when all is well. But the fates may well swirl about us, demons of “dark energy” whispering in our ears and feasting on our loins. And who doesn’t want to be absolved for their venality, stupidity, wayward impulses and self-destructive urges?

KL: With the first record [as Saint Leonard’s Horses], I thought identity needed to be about beauty and truth. But that is counter-intuitive, and admirable artists, whether Bob Dylan or whoever, they are constructs of a kind, and the idea of being a fraud to myself was clawing, particularly living in Hollywood, and this is the sort of thing that Kieran Leonard would do. And I needed an epiphany of deconstructing myself to work out who Kieran Leonard, the earnest character, was. Writing provided that.

Kieran Leonard is the strange identity I’ve created, and that character has become a guise, and, through the writing, the tortured whisky-drinking songwriter has become arbitrary. The current culture is totally phoney of singer-songwriters, but what I like about writing sentences is you can’t fake them.

There’s an idea in Crowleian magic that you sacrifice yourself or another, allegorically. Although Crowley was mental and a great poster boy for magick, he’s not my favourite – and maybe got the wrong end of the wand … I love the golden dawn and Jorodowsky, Yeats, and you think of Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde, they’re all into the higher order –

It’s the ego we hang onto, so if I created an arbitrary name for it – I could destroy it, then I actualised it, and everything changed; it was proof of magick, it was like a spell – I thought I should have done this a year ago … it’s been very liberating. I’d stopped enjoying the character by making it real, by becoming it – and it became preventative to who I was, restrictive, so when I had a new guise I could explore new avenues, new ways of thinking, and nothing was forbidden. When we develop as humans, we can also limit ourselves, that leap of faith, and that thing of developing themselves is an act of surrendering one’s identity, without sounding too lofty. There’s a moment of Picasso reverting to primitivism, the art has to come to the surface, and in Marlon Brando’s book, Songs My Mother Taught Me – all he had to do was hit the mark, but do that, he said lose your personality, and I had to drop my ego and identity and say it – I just go on stage and express – and leave it there.

COLD LIPS: How far have you experienced the power of prophecy in writing?

KL: I think anyone who writes says there’s that low and fucking behold moment when the exact circumstances occur. Candid experiences are how I even ended up writing the book, but it was my tour manager who realised everything that was fantasy started to happen, and when you’re in it, it can be unsettling. Fanciful episodes almost happened as written. The third song I wrote from this album, I was on a friend’s porch at 3am and had this thing about Kubrick, and later, Kubrick’s grandson was there and allowed me to record in their old house. The exercise of focusing attention and magic is much the same, so it’s caught me to careful.

Kieran Leonard’s website

…

SARAH NORRIS is the founder of Women in Art, a platform promoting women in the art world.

Why did you start W.I.A.?

Women artists are perceived and exhibited differently to male artists. Walking into the Georgia O’Keefe exhibition at the Tate last year, the first picture was of the artist with her tits out! Going into the Barbara Hepworth retrospective, also at the Tate in 2015, I was surprised to see the first two rooms were completely devoted to the work of her lover, husband and peers (all male). Would you do that with a major male artist? You can’t read an interview with a woman without a reference to their children, or why they haven’t had any. Why are women seen through the prism of their partners, or their fertility? Or as sexualised objects? And where’s the diversity? To get a major retrospective as a woman, you pretty much have to be old, white or dead.

So what does W.I.A. stand for?

WIA stands for promoting women’s art regardless of their reproductive or romantic status, and highlighting inequalities like race, lack of representation, lower prices at auction, fewer solo shows, despite the trumpeted but few in number ‘blockbuster’ shows by the big institutions. WIA shines a light on the gendered way women artists are perceived and promoted within the art world and society as a whole.

I’ve been treated differently due to my gender and the assumptions that others have around that. As a woman and a feminist, it’s impossible to overlook it. I find it shocking that 47 years after the Equal Pay Act, women are still working for 13.9% less than men for the same work. In the art world this is considerably wider. If you compare prices paid for work by living artists, Jeff Koons Balloon Dog Orange sold in 2013 for $58.4 million, compared to Cady Noland’s Bluewald at $9.7 million.

What are you doing about it?

We’re raising awareness of individual artists and contributing to the dialogue about equality in the arts. We’re pushing for equality for contemporary art professionals. We’re running a series of events, which include talks about artists. We are organising Wikipedia edit-a-thons to add excluded and forgotten women to the art history canon.

We’re talking about artists that may have been forgotten, or whose work has been mistakenly attributed to other (male) artists. Like Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (her ‘readymade’ sculpture ‘God’ was originally attributed to Morton Schaumburg, the photographer of this piece. Even now the work is attributed to both of them, rather than sole attribution to the artist.) Current research points to her being the author of the first ‘Readymade’ in 1913, as well as the creator of ‘Fountain’, the urinal which Duchamp later claimed as his own, which gave him the title of Father of Conceptual Art.

We’ll be asking why work by artists is in institutional collections but isn’t on show to the public. Ana Mendieta and Liliane Lijn spring to mind.

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