The success of ‘Adidas Star Wars Collection’ campaign’s theme of ‘let us reconcile Geeks with the streets’ is yet to be seen, but the advert series is impressive. I especially liked Central St. Martins graduate Nima Nourizadeh’s commercial produced by Partizan Films, a production company on my watch list; such minimal but efficient use of vertical narration has made the commercial quite interesting.
Autechre announced their new album titled ‘Oversteps’ to be out on 22 March. The album design is aptly created by The Designers Republic which reopened in 2009. Designers Republic is a cornerstone of the global alternative culture evolving since mid-90’s and one of the design studios whose output I appreciate greatly. Their reunion with Autechre among other Warp Records artists has made the news of this album launch all the better.
The combination of Victorian steampunk, asterism, Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law and Guy Ritchie makes any film worth watching despite all possibilities. I started watching Sherlock Holmes with this mind relaxing prejudice; with a great opening sequence, a mediocre narrative tempo and a ‘baddie’ not enough strong to counteract Holmes’ image as a protagonist, the film could not go beyond average for me despite all its fun.
Guy Ritchie’s adoration for himself and his work usually leaves the film audience watching how Ritchie plays with the film. This ‘authorship’ approach is a style I quite like, especially when carried out in a formalist way, however the excitement of working with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law is added to this in Sherlock Holmes. The lack of scenes without Robert Downey Jr. means there is no secret for the audience to discover without Holmes’ services. Watching a detective film tends to lose its appeal when we are not allowed to play detective.
Detection as an occupation originating in the Victorian period is frequently used in popular culture to describe the modern enlightenment at the end of 19th century. I think we will continue to see these themes as we are going through what is a projection of the early 20th century (religion/enlightenment=eclipse of reason + esoterism). Two good books on this topic are The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale who describes the initial period when detectives enter social life as a new notion and Alan Moore’s From Hell which i had mentioned in an earlier post.
It will be difficult to expect a film from Guy Ritchie that manages to do more than just watchable films, however he is very skilled in using the camera and the suddenly speeding up slow motion trick. Whether the fact that this was the best element from Sherlock Holmes, and his other films, is a good or bad thing, I leave it up to him to decide.
Video for unitxt u_08-1 by Carsten Nicolai‘s personal project Alva Noto; just the combination of japanese aesthetic and consumption machines (these mechacreatures deserve a separate blog entry) which I find no less uncanny than the japanese themselves was enough to make it remarkable. I have always found Alva Noto’s music suitable for becoming videos, he has done a great job doing that himself.
The beauty of a well-executed simple idea.
Dir: Phil Sansom & Olly Williams
A series that I have always been meaning to start reading, Fables‘ 81st issue is drawn by Brazilian illustrator Joao Ruas who I have been following for a long time. This super talented illustrator has won the Eisner Award for Best Cover this year. Fable’s previous cover designer was five time Eisner winner James Jean. As someone who keeps an eye and takes ‘must-read’ notes on covers of the comics I don’t have time to read, I ‘must read’ Fables.
Video for Black Bones by Australian band teenagersintokyo shot by another Australian, Rhett Dashwood. Nothing special in the concept, but quite aesthetic and impressive in its execution.
I don’t tend to enjoy fashion shots, but I really liked these photos of Polish Sebastian Szwajczak for Vint Magazine. The rest is here.
I went to the Ed Ruscha exhibition at the Hayward gallery two weeks ago. Usually I do readings and chats after such retrospective and intense exhibitions, but it did not happen this time. I got the chance to rethink the exhibition only now.
The balance that Ed Ruscha sets between graphic design and art is remarkable as an intensely discussed issue re-emerging nowadays. Ruscha’s output is quite interesting with typographical installations, colour patterns and symbol-image-message style, which has now become a convention, and used these visualisations of ‘consumption’ declarations to reflect his subjective issues. As someone trained in graphic design and visual arts, Ruscha hasn’t found it difficult to formulate his works and stroke a nice balance between design conventions and arts.
My favourites from the exhibition were ‘The mountain’ series trying to represent the notion/image of the mountain using uneven canvases and the diptychs depicting the changes an industrial complex has undergone over the years. Generally, I enjoyed the works of Ruscha who I perceived to have grown weary of the capitalist propaganda that
post-60s America subjected its public and focused on the concept of ‘degeneration’. It is intriguing and inspiring for an artist to reflect himself in such a concentrated and clear way through experimentations running from shape of the canvas to various semantic games, typography to different painting techniques.
As for the rest of the exhibition, I had a difficult time navigating Hayward Gallery, perhaps one of the most irregular spaces in London; it may be because it has been a while since I went to an exhibition on my own and I forgot to take care of myself in an art environment. However, someone ever coins a term like ‘curatorial labyrinth’ one day; this will be the exhibition to come to my mind.
The promotional video of UK fashion brand Fly53. It is the work of directors who did not shy away from using The Wade Brothers cliché but I discovered it while looking at DP Michael Stine‘s work. Shot with Red One, the cinematography and camera movements, the video’s key trick, are very successful.