Nike 1/1 Art Prize
April 28, 2008
Nike 1/1 film, by AKQA. Creatives: Davor Krvavac, Greg Mullen, Nick Bailey
Art and football become unlikely bedfellows in a new competition launched by Nike, which offers the chance for artists to exhibit during the Basel Art Fair and design a limited edition series of Nike Dunks.
Devised by AKQA, 1/1 invites artists to submit work to the brief ‘The Art of Football’. Works entered will be displayed in an online gallery where they will be judged by SHOWstudio’s Nick Knight - winning entrants will then see their work exhibited in a show held in Basel (coinciding with the contemporary art fair held in the city in June), alongside the work of 11 established creative talents.
One overall winner will then be chosen to have their work immortalised on a limited edition series of Nike Dunks, and the best work from the exhibition will also be included in a 1/1 book.
All work can be entered online at nike1-1.com. Submissions close on May 18.
Spiritualized and Farrow: made for each other
April 28, 2008
Detail from the inside cover of Spiritualized’s new album, Songs in A&E. Concept, design, direction: Farrow/Spaceman. Photography: John Ross
Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce cut several minutes off his album Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space just so that the running time looked better typographically on the packaging. His partnership with designer Mark Farrow has produced some of the finest sleeve design of recent times. CR interviewed the pair of them on the eve of the release of Spiritualized’s new album
Songs in A&E (Universal, 2008): The main format for Spiritualized’s new album will be a typically lavish affair with a 32-page booklet (above) referencing Pierce’s recent illness – a bout of double pneumonia that necessitated a lengthy stay in intensive care and nearly killed him, hence the title, Songs In a&e. The starting point for the design (which was an 18-month process, work in progress shown above) was a set of photographs of Pierce in the icu taken by his girlfriend. Pierce had countless needles coming out of his arms, connected to various drips. He, Farrow and the main designer on the project, Gary Stillwell, were struck by the beauty of these functional objects. “The idea was to elevate them and draw attention to them,” says Farrow. “They are incredible things … on a completely la-la level I love the fact that [in the photographs] they look like pinned insects, they take on a beauty when you see them presented in that way….” The jewel box edition of the album will feature a fold-out poster of the needles on one side
with the song titles and other information on the reverse, set in the manner of medical packaging
.
Type on the cover is in a surgical green with the ® in the Spiritualized logo changed to a +. Despite the references, most of the album was written before Pierce became ill. “Presenting the album as a document of my illness is a slight problem as that isn’t strictly the case,” he says, “but it’s more hinged around the pun of the title, which is too good not to use. I still get people asking me if all the tracks are in the key of A and E though.” Concept, design, direction: Farrow/Spaceman. Photography: John Ross
cr: How did you first start to work together?
jp: Before I worked with Farrow, I did an album called Pure Phase. Even then I wanted to try and get away from the CD jewel case. It was a cheap product in an ill-designed box, the plastic cracked, the spindles broke. People were spending decent money on design but they were putting it behind the cheapest bit of plastic known to man: it seemed like the music wasn’t important. I’d seen Mark’s work for the Pet Shop Boys and thought it was beautiful. It fitted what needed to be done in order to get the music packaged and onto a rack, but it managed to do something different with it.
cr: The first album that you worked on together, Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space, was presented in a blister pack as if it was a packet of pills: can you explain how that came about and how you got it through?
mf: In the first meeting you said that “music is medicine for the soul” and the idea came from there – that’s the way I remember it.
jp: It was a crazy idea that didn’t fit anyone’s notion of how much to spend on a cover but there was a girl called Juliet Howells at [record label] BMG and she supported it.
mf: There was definitely a spirit around then that you’d find difficult to cultivate now: they were happy to divert some of the money away from the spending on advertising to the packaging…
jp: They also tapped me for it [Pierce ended up part funding the packaging]. Spending more eats into profits but music’s too important to package as a throwaway thing, even though that’s what much of it is. If you make something that’s beautiful and with passion, it has value and it retains that value, and not in a monetary sense…. After Ladies And Gentlemen I had it put in my next contract that we have to work with Farrow and that there has to be a decent spend on the packaging.
mf: Clients that think like that are the ones you actively seek out – that’s why we’ve produced the work we have because Jason’s bothered about it. Ultimately it’s much easier for Jason to push things with the label and life becomes much easier for us … but [to Pierce] you enjoy that process in the same way that you enjoy making music, you involve yourself much more in that than most clients of a design company would, to a fucking annoying degree – that’s not true actually – but you make your music in that way don’t you?
jp: I think you learn more. I don’t mind pursuing blind alleys that have a gem at the end, something that you can take out of it.
Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space (Dedicated, 1997): The first album designed by Farrow for Spiritualized won a host of awards for its pill package design. The idea came from Pierce’s statement in the first design meeting that “music is medicine for the soul”. Despite its success, Farrow says that “It has a novelty value to it that bothers me. It’s not a pastiche in as much as the way in which we arrived at the idea and the way we presented it is more of a pun than a pastiche, but I hate both those things.” A special edition (shown above) was produced with each of the 12 tracks on a separate mini CD, but even the standard album was packaged in a blister pack that had to be made at a drugs factory. The outer box illustrates just how committed Pierce is to the design of his sleeves: he actually shaved several minutes off the length of the album so that it would be exactly 70 minutes long, as a round number looked better typographically on the box. Design: Farrow/Spaceman
cr: So where are the sources of friction, where do you tend to disagree?
jp: I don’t know that there are a lot. Right from way back the work was all about purity and accuracy and simplicity.
mf: So on that level we’re obviously completely on the same page.
jp: There are no bits that are superfluous, with any of it. If anything the problems are when we have to use the products that are already made [such as jewel cases].
Let It Come Down (BMG, 2001): Farrow cites this sleeve as his favourite. He had seen the work of sculptor Don Brown at the Sadie Coles hq gallery (a client). Brown’s work centres around his wife and muse, Yoko. At the same time, says Pierce, “I’d been reading some psychology about the workings of the brain and I got interested in the idea that when you see an image of a face that is concave your brain is so used to seeing eyes and noses that stick out that it finds it impossible to read.” So Farrow asked Brown to create a Yoko portrait that could be vacuum formed in bas relief onto a type-less limited edition plastic case (shown above). “Let It Come Down, to me, was a lot more satisfying than Ladies and Gentlemen, even though we didn’t create the image,” says Farrow. “It was almost like product design, we were constantly doing prototypes and so on, and I really enjoyed that process.” Concept and design: Farrow/Spaceman. Sculpture: Yoko by Don Brown, courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ London
cr: But now there is a seemingly inevitable shift towards downloads, is there a future for great music packaging?
mf: We don’t actively pursue music work any more. It’s very difficult to do things in music that are special now, there’s no money being spent on fees or production and I only see it declining. Personally I can see a point where the only way to get music is to download it: there are 12 year-olds out there who don’t see why music should come in packaging.
jp: But downloads aren’t as good quality. Maybe in the mainstream it will go like that but there are labels now that are doing really beautiful packaging. I’ve been raving about a label called Mississippi Records. All its sleeves are handmade: sometimes they even stick their artwork over old sleeves from other records. You can see that somebody’s put some work and love into doing them. I don’t know anybody that downloads music, or if they do they tend to do it while they are waiting for the real thing to arrive, and I find that most kids that I know are buying records, they’re buying vinyl, but the business of record companies is motivated by profit. They got lucky with CDs. The Rolling Stones, Neil Young, Led Zeppelin, you name it, they could sell the whole catalogue again to people who already had it, so their profits went up a thousand fold. Now they’re not making that kind of profit everybody is saying the future of music is looking desperate but no it’s not, it’s looking exactly like it was before. Maybe you’re not selling 200,000 seven-inch singles in a week anymore but people are still buying music…. The packaging is the first point of contact with anybody who doesn’t know what your album is about so, in an odd way, it’s as important as the content.
mf: It’s the presentation of the content: it’s nice of you to say so but it’s not as important as the content.
jp: But I don’t come in here thinking it’s not.
mf: To you personally the way your album is packaged is as important as the album, but you’re rare in thinking that.
jp: It’s like owning a copy of a book: would you rather own a William Faulkner that’s in its original dust jacket by whoever designed it at that period of time and thought that was the way that this thing should be presented or some kind of modern retake? I loathe re-editions where they redesign the sleeves to make them more contemporary because they are part of the period within which the work was presented. They are as much about where you are and what you’re doing as the content.
The Complete Works…. (Spaceman, 2003/2004): “These are almost sub-albums, but we still managed something relatively special,” says Farrow. The compilations were “the most minimal piece of packaging we’ve done. The type in the centre of the CDs (shown above) was printed backwards in grey, then overprinted in white,” he explains. “This obscured the type when you looked at the printed side of the disc but it could be read through the disc when viewed from the playing side. We did this because we wanted this package to be as minimal and pure as possible which meant no text on the discs, just a colour bar to show which disc was which, but the copy is a legal requirement and has to be on there. Once the card sleeve is removed you are left with a white box containing two white discs each containing a coloured line which corresponds with the track listing on the card outer. The people at the record company think you’re mad but these are the things worth fighting for,” Farrow insists. “Most people wouldn’t bother but there’s almost as much joy at achieving that as there is in Ladies and Gentlemen.” Complete Works Volume One and Two: Design and direction: Farrow/Spaceman. Photographs: John Ross
cr: Looking back on the body of work that you have done together, is there one that you are less happy with than the others, one that didn’t work?
mf: I could honestly say that there’s not one that I’m unhappy with and I can’t say that about anything else I’ve done. Even with the compilation albums we did something relatively special. You’re just battling against someone in a production department who doesn’t give a fuck, who’s just going “no, you can’t do that”, so it’s a different battleground each time if you like.
jp: This is a non-committal answer but the record business has got a huge time delay on it so when you present the record to someboody, what you’re really saying is that I had some thoughts I wanted to put down about two years ago and here they are now, so it’s really hard to get perspective on things.
I think they’re all absolutely amazing in their own right and yet people really loved Ladies and Gentlemen. Perhaps because it was picked up so widely in the press it got pulled out from the rest as if to say ‘this is the good one’. It’s great but it’s no better than Amazing Grace which is more simple and more direct, more evocative.
Amazing Grace (Sanctuary, 2003): “We’d found [photographer] William Selden, and loved his portraits,” says Farrow. “We toyed with the idea of a family portrait of Jason and his kids and his girlfriend but he became uncomfortable with that. We didn’t go into the shoot with the idea of photographing his arm, but I just got Jason to do it. He got the references straightaway – needles, crucifixion, holding the chord on a guitar – it was perfectly on-brand for Spiritualized.” Design, concept, direction: Farrow/Spaceman. Photographs: William Selden
cr: So of all the Spiritualized album sleeves, which one is your favourite?
jp: Pure Phase.
mf: Thanks Jason. You should put that in, it’d be a good last sentence.
This article is featured in the May issue of Creative Review, out on 24 April. Spiritualized’s new album, Songs in A&E is released on 26 May on Universal Records
The Strange Art of Misery Lit
April 28, 2008
Borders bookshop has a “Real Lives” section. Waterstones ups the ante with “Painful Lives”. Amazon’s catch-all is the more enigmatic “True Endurance and Survival”. But earlier this week I found myself in the “Tragic Life Stories” aisle of WHSmiths. After taking in that, yes, a whole section of shelving had actually been given over to this subject, it struck me that while each book pertained to be a traumatic tale of an individual, they were marketed in such a way as to look entirely the same. Unlike the covers within the nearby Crime section, where even the most conventional might feature a gun, a knife, or something vaguely noir-ish; within Tragic Life Stories there is, apparently, no need to differentiate details. Each one is a tragic tale; each one has the same cover: a child’s face and a scrawled, handwritten title.
While the genre itself isn’t particularly new – the book said to have launched this market, Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, came out in the mid-90s – WHSmiths have seemingly only carried a Tragic Life Stories section since the start of last year. (It’s been blogged about before, too: Chris Applegate’s post on “Grief Porn” is from late 2007, while Iain Rowan’s encounter happened earlier this month). But now “misery lit”, the industry term apparently coined by The Bookseller magazine, is big, big business.
And the repetitious design aesthetic is there for a reason; namely, that the people that like this stuff will know what to look for. The title, usually handwritten, often scrawled, has something of the confessional about it; while the supporting image of an aggrieved child looks out with doe eyes (though rarely is this, of course, the actual victim or author – models are frequently used).
Esther Addley, writing on the subject in the Guardian, put it succinctly: “the volumes invariably carry a washed-out close-up of a particularly pretty child’s face on a pale background, with the title of the book in handwritten script. As Peter Saxton, biography buyer for Waterstone’s [says]: ‘White cover, swirly writing, big-eyed child. These are the visual clues that tell prospective buyers that they are going to be in their comfort (or discomfort) zone’.”
Addley also goes on to look at the nature of the titles of the books themselves: “In the UK at least, these increasingly follow one of two paths: the dramatic past participle (Wasted, Abandoned, Damaged) or the more discursive, directly heartstring-tugging phrase (Daddy’s Little Girl; Don’t Tell Mummy; Please, Daddy, No).”
One title that leapt out at me while in Smiths was Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl – included here (above, far left) among the reams of other no doubt troubling memoirs and diaries. Somehow, piling Frank’s work into this section seemed inappropriate. For one, Frank didn’t write her diary retrospectively or for publication – this was a thirteen year-old girl’s private record of her thoughts as her family hid from the Nazis during World War II. Written between June 12 1942 and August 1 1944, Frank’s Diary was published by her father in 1947, a few years after her death.
And while the cover of this particular edition (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000) features a portrait of a young girl; the girl is actually Frank.
March 2000, Penguin edition
Yet this edition is eight years old. So what does it look like now? Well, the way her diary has been presented since 2000 is revealing:
March 2000 Penguin new edition
January 2002 Puffin edition
June 2007 Penguin edition
The different treatment of the portrait is interesting, as is the use of handwritten text in the later editions (while one is Frank’s own signature, the title in the most recent edition can’t be Frank’s own; she originally wrote her diary in Dutch). It certainly looks like Penguin have been keeping an eye on a burgeoning market.
But there are signs of a growing backlash against Misery Lit. While authors who obtained book deals and, indeed, notoriety and sales through their stories of pain and misery have been exposed as fakes (see JT LeRoy and James Frey’s efforts), there have recently been even more high profile exposés: Kathy O’Beirne’s memoir, Kathy’s Story: A Childhood Hell Inside the Magdalene Laundries was recently revealed as fictitious; as was Misha Defonseca’s, Surviving With Wolves, which in a crude nod to Frank’s writings was billed as “the most extraordinary story of World War II”.
I didn’t find Defonseca’s book in the section – perhaps it had quietly been moved back into Fiction when the news broke.
Interactive Art Gallery For International Train Travellers
April 28, 2008
Land Design Studio has worked with Studio Simple to create Station Masters – a new interactive digital art gallery experience in the Eurostar departure lounge at St Pancras International in London.
The project, which launched earlier today, is a collaboration between Eurostar and the National Gallery which offers travellers the chance to explore a database of 100 highlights from the National Gallery’s collection of Western European painting – including masterpieces by Caravaggio, Constable, Leonardo da Vinci, Money, Rubens, Titian and Van Gogh.
Six tailor-made, touch-screen coffee tables provide the interface with which users can scroll through the database of images. Once an image has been selected, it is then displayed on one of six free-standing plasma screens situated within the brick archways running along the eastern wall of the departure lounge.
Not only can users see the paintings, but a zoom function enables the discovery of otherwise hidden details and artistic secrets that are far harder to spot in a conventional gallery setting. Zoom in, for example, on the round mirror in the middle of Jan van Eyck’s early oil masterpiece of 1434, to enjoy the reflected scene that reveals a scene being played out behind the artist’s viewpoint. Information about each image also appears on the table-top interface.
A New Wave of New Wave
April 28, 2008
Sleeve for Sebastien Tellier’s album, Sexuality, artwork by Manu Cassu. Layout by Olivia Jourde
Here at CR towers we’ve recently received some record sleeve designs that transported us back to the early eighties. Perhaps the most retro looking is the artwork created for Sebastien Tellier’s new album, Sexuality, and supporting singles (Divine, shown below) on Lucky Number label.
ehquestionmark’s artwork created for Neon Neon (Boom Bip’s collaboration with Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals) also feels a bit new wave. Here is the CD artwork and the 7-inch picture disc of I Lust U.
Label: Lex Records.
And it’s not just record sleeve design, we even spotted this 80s throwback video - by Partizan director Kinga Burza for a Ladyhawke track Back Of The Van.
Later this week we’ll show you some more new sleeves which aren’t quite so 80s!
Designing Dante
April 28, 2008
Cover of Dante’s Inferno by Nicole Peterson
Nicole Peterson, a recent graphic design graduate from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, designed these book covers for Dante’s Divine Comedy. “I wanted to create a set of covers that didn’t use images from the [Hieronymus] Bosch Hell painting, or any images of Dante and Virgil that are normally found on covers for the Divine Comedy,” writes Peterson on her Flickr page. “I was inspired by Dante’s use of mathematics and architecture in describing Hell, Heaven and Purgatory [and] employed simple geometric shapes and color to represent these places, while still keeping the design simple and allowing the reader to use their imagination when reading these vivid poems.” Click through to see how the design was carried through to Purgatory and Paradise…
Cover of Dante’s Purgatorio by Nicole Peterson
Cover of Dante’s Paradiso by Nicole Peterson
Thanks to Armin Vit’s Quipsologies for the original link.
Blek le Rat: The New Banksy?
April 28, 2008
Ha – only joking. While Banksy is a relative newcomer to the graffiti scene, Blek le Rat has been stencilling, pasting and daubing his way around the world for nearly thirty years. But the perception of Banksy as the pioneer of street art is certainly the one favoured by the media and the art world. As a result, Banksy’s artistic reputation – no doubt helped by his anonymity – has been elevated to near mythical status. While Blek’s reputation, at least beyond the world of street art, is far less well known, a new book of his work looks certain to bring his art to a wider audience and throw up a few more questions on just how influential he’s been.
Apparently, when Blek was pasting up an image in a London street last year, he was asked by an inquisitive passerby: “are you Banksy?” Such is the notable similarity between the two graffiti artist’s work. But Blek, a Frenchman, has been working on ironic self-portraits, stencilled socio-political commentary and, interestingly – rats – since 1981.
In Blek le Rat (published by Thames & Hudson) Sybille Prou – who is also Mrs Blek le Rat – and filmmaker King Adz have done a fine job in bringing Blek’s story across, collecting together a range of images of his iconic street art.
Coincidentally, Banksy’s very first “unofficial biography” is also published next month. And here, the reference to Blek’s potential influence is brief, but nonetheless revealing: “Every time I think I’ve painted something original, I find out that Blek le Rat has done it as well, only twenty years earlier.”
We suggest checking out Blek’s book for some of those original ideas.
Blek le Rat is published by Thames & Hudson on May 12 (£11.95). A Blek le Rat exhibition also opens at the Thru Cargo Garden, Arch 461, 83 Rivington Street, London on May 9.
Banksy’s Bristol: Home Sweet Home by Steve Wright is published by Tangent Books (£12).
