Aesthetica Magazine - The Art & Culture Publication

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The New Generation of
British Fashion Photographers

Alice Hawkins, (detail of) Dashenka Girado and Victoria the Bengal tiger. Las Vegas 2008.

Oh! You Pretty Things
Fashion photography invites us into a bold new world. The boundaries are expanding, blurring into the realms of documentary, fine art, social commentary, celebrity and fantasy. There are progressively fewer rules and limits. It's a lively visual exploration of the very culture that it captures. The resultant photographs are striking and allure the viewer, asking them to indulge in the beauty and vitality of what is presented. Fashion photographers push their unique vision within a constant practice of adaptation, creating enduring images that transcend fashion illustration.

Opening this February at Liberty and selected by Andree Cooke of Spring Projects, Six Creative and Mark Loy, Managing Director of Spring Studios, OH! YOU PRETTY THINGS is a fascinating exhibition that showcases five of Britain's up and coming fashion photographers. Billed, as the "new generation of British fashion photographers", the show invites a discourse around the ever-changing boundaries of fashion, photography, art and design. The five young photographers in this show (Josh Olins, Dan Jackson, Angelo Pennetta, Jacob Sutton and Alice Hawkins) engage with the diversity of the genre and demonstrate how this creative form is constantly developing. They shoot for many of the leading contemporary fashion magazines such as Vogue, LOVE, POP, Another, Dazed, i-D, Harper's Bazaar, Arena Homme +, and Numero, and are amongst the fastest rising talents in the industry...

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Identity Formation & Social History

Bani Abidi (detail of) Karachi Series 1 � Pari Wania, 7:42 pm, 22nd August, 2008, Ramadan, Karachi.

Bani Abidi
Bani Abidi (b. 1971) is one of the leading figures from a generation of Pakistani artists, such as Shahzia Sikander, Asma Mundrawala and Ambreen Butt, who all trained during the 1990s and began exploring the paradoxes of social contradictions through their artistic practice. Abidi's profound social observations have been informed through her experiences living in Pakistan, the United States and India. Although a much quieter artist commercially, Abidi's precise and complex social commentary has seen her work gain significant critical acclaim over the past few years, with the curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York even describing her work as "the best thing of 2008." Her videos, photographic works and drawings use elements of performance and orchestration to explore the processes of political history as in The Ghost of Muhammad Bin Qasim (2006), popular imagination and identity formation. Abidi is most certainly an artist to keep an eye on, but not only that; her work tackles the most relevant themes of today.

Opening this February at Green Cardamom in London, Abidi will present two new works: Karachi Series 1 (2009), a photographic investigation into, and a lament for the loss of Pakistan's diverse cultural character in the face of the Islamisation of the nation that began in the 1980s...

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Manifestations of the Design Art movement

(detail of) Niki de St. Phalle, Nana, 1972.

Walls Are Talking: Wallpaper, & Art Culture
At the end of the noughties the fusion of art and design is ever more apparent, with the decline of the art market nudging a move towards the middling stratums of society as traditional monied investments have dried up. The marriage between the two has seen artists' explorations into mass mediums and products of the domestic as well as of the gallery setting, with Grayson Perry's recent release collaboration with Liberty, designing a range of prints for the department store, epitomising the movement into the mass scale commerciality of art.

Design, be it product, furniture, fashion and interior, was recently branded by Christopher Townsend as "simply another aspect of the market" and the continuation naturally stems from Pop Art's insistence on the interrogation of the everyday. Donald Judd's exploration of furniture combines with the canonical nature enjoyed by Eames chairs and Anglepoise lamps, to develop a new area of output for fine art. The Whitworth Art Gallery's new exhibition, "Walls are Talking: Wallpaper, Art and Culture," explores this relationship, collecting together wallpapers from over 30 artists ranging from Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst, Sarah Lucas, to Niki de St. Phalle, David Shrigley, Martin Boyce, Robert Gober and Thomas Demand.

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Kardia's Alternative Pedagogy

From Floor to Sky
England during the 1960s and 1970s was a tumultuous, exciting and, without a doubt, revolutionary period of modern history: the Cold War, Vietnam, the Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, the Beatles splitting up, and the Watergate Nixon scandal are but a few major events that defined those decades. Art, as a creative method of expression, was vital to those rebelling against the traditional political and social systems. It was used as a tool to articulate the discontent and dissatisfaction felt by much of mainstream society after the previous four decades of austerity and strife. The pedagogy of art schools, specifically St. Martins School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, changed dramatically during this time. There was an abrupt and decisive break away from modernism and its emphasis on the individual arts and how each medium was applied within them. Teacher's, such as Peter Kardia, were instrumental in the development of this new pedagogy, which in Kardia's words: "Focused on developing in students a genuine engagement with their creative process" rather than on the finished piece of art. Unconventional though some of the projects and tasks set to the students were, they did inflame the creative process and force the students to think outside the box...

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The Imagination of Tim Burton

The Imagination of Tim Burton
Since the invention, or discovery, if you will, of the moving image, audiences around the world have not ceased to be confounded, delighted and entertained by television and film. It has come a long way from its humble beginnings in the late 19th century with Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Laurie Dickson's invention of the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, to George Melies's early foray into cinematic production with films such as A Trip to the Moon (1902), and eventually into the glamorous Hollywood version of cinema popularised in the 1920s which has continued to evolve into its present prolific state. Cinema's beginnings truly commenced with the English-born American photographer and artist, Edward Muybridge. Muybridge famously published Animal Locomotion in 1887: comprised of 781 prints and begun in 1878, the 11-volume project was conceived of as an experiment into the ability to photograph and 'stop' (or freeze) motion. Various filmmakers throughout the past century have subsequently explored the idea of 'stop-motion' as a cinematic aesthetic

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Digital World, Art in the Computer Age

Decode: Digital Design Sensations
The 21st century has seen an onslaught of technology into the everyday; the digital age is most definitely upon us. With its influence pervading our lives, digitisation has conquered the way we communicate with one another, the way we watch films, the way we listen to music and increasingly the way we read. The V&A's Decode: Digital Design Sensations explores the role of digitisation in today's art and design, its influences on the artist and the creative possibilities presented by continued technological innovation. Curated by Louise Shannon, Deputy Head of Contemporary Programmes at the V&A Museum, and digital arts organisation, onedotzero's Shane Walter, the realm of the digital is demystified, 'digital pervades all aspects of our lives today and there is a desire to understand...

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A Fusion of Text & Images

Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger's (b.1945) London show, Paste Up, opens at the tail end of an increasingly complicated year making it a timely reappraisal of her early practice. In addition to offering an acute cultural insight, Kruger's work also presents a serious conceptual exploration into the juxtaposition of language and image. By using contrasting layers, Kruger's work has for almost three decades questioned the nature of a media-saturated society in late capitalism, and the significance of highly evolved cultures of consumerism and the making of social identities. Her fusion of text and image is inimitable and resonates in the mainstay of today's over-saturated consumer world.

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The Spectacle of the Everyday

Biennale de Lyon
Since the Biennale de Lyon launched in 1991, society has changed beyond recognition. Through the development of social networking and mass communication the world has contracted. After launching in September 2009, the Biennale is busier than ever surveying these contemporary issues. We are constantly on display and, perception is key. Everything that is not instantly visible belongs to a bygone age, when possessions were not the only social signifiers. Market forces have brought with them a profound change in how we see ourselves. C'est la vie, non?

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Winter in Wartime

An Individual Narrative of the Dutch Resistance
Explorations into the events and complications of the Second World War are nothing new, holding an endless fascination for filmmakers from the last 65 years. The resultant epics, tragedies, dramas and even comedies attest to the myriad of creative possibilities for this period of intense human cruelty and struggle. Something about the extremities created by the Nazi expansion invokes the greatest acts of human courage and sacrifice, as well as deceit and depravity. Dutch director, Martin Koolhoven's award-winning "Winter in Wartime" resumes this tradition, but with the story told through the eyes, fears and enthusiasms of a young boy. The work attains a level of identification with the audience, as the viewer encounters and reminisces on the tribulations of their own adolescence, contextualised in the wider realm of Nazi horrors.

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How to Animate: Part 2

Making & Shaping
In this two-part guide, Myles McLeod of the award winning, BAFTA nominated Brothers McLeod, offers a series of practical hints and tips to help you start animating.

So you've had some ideas for your animation, you've worked them into drawings, a script, storyboards and now you're ready to produce the animation. That must mean it's time to develop some really diverting displacement activities. Alternatively you could actually make something.

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How to Animate: Part 1

Ideas & Inspiration
So you want to make an animation. Really? Are you mad? It takes ages. Plus all the work has gone abroad. It's not a proper job anyway. Immediately stop reading this and whip yourself with birch twigs until you feel very, very sorry. Still reading? Good. Forget the naysayers, we're only here once, so let's do something creative. In part one of this flirtation with animation I'm going to look at getting started in animation with a focus on generating ideas. Animation is one of the most rewarding art forms, creating interplay between the skills and creativity of a visual artist and the precision and dynamics of a filmmaker; it is the best of both worlds.

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Departures

Yojiro Takita's Oscar Winning film
If the only two certainties in life are death and taxes, then Yojiro Takita's Oscar-winning Departures approaches our pivotal certainty with a macabre humour. As Takita's native Japan is one of the world's most heavily taxed nations, with the highest life expectancy, the subject of death is fitting in its inevitability and in the extent to which we ignore this given in life. Departures is quiet, subdued and painstakingly choreographed. It presents a refreshing take on the country where international cinematic outputs have concentrated so firmly on the two-dimensional in recent years, because there are numerous levels to this film. On the one hand, it's an incredibly personal account of one man's poignant journey, of learning...

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Painting with a Microphone

John Wynne, (detail of) untitled. Experimentation that led to the final piece. Beaconsfield gallery. Photograph by Steve Ibb.

Sound Art
A huge buzzing fills your headphones; all-enveloping, whipping from ear to ear. Abruptly, it cuts off, replaced by a warbling, almost bird-like synth sound, which degenerates slowly as it is modulated, becoming more sporadic and erratic. Eventually, it is replaced by an African man speaking about a piece of music he has made, as synths gradually fade in the background. Not a piece of music; rather, a piece of sound art. The sounds belong to John Wynne's Upcountry. It's a recording Wynne made celebrating William Ingosi Mwoshi, a Kenyan musician. Wynne, who first premiered the piece at the Purcell Room in London in 1999, is a sound artist.

Sound art, at its most basic, consists of pieces of sound, which after processing and filtering them according to the desires of the artist, are arranged to form a recording that explores a particular idea or motif. Practitioners of sound art are as skilled and as resourceful as those who create art out of clay, paint, stone or metal...

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The Quickening of Time
with the Most Modest Woman in Music

Kathryn Williams
Kathryn Williams is by no means a novice, and her eighth studio album, "The Quickening," keeps experimental innocence alongside accomplishment. The whole record aims to explore the "small, beautiful things about life, and quiet feelings." Whereas before Williams "invented characters", she now sees herself in the songs, giving them vulnerability, honesty and sometimes darkness. Pushing past the infatuation, Williams explores "slow-burning" love instead, purposely ignoring the technique "taught in stage school about how to make people feel emotional" and trying to instil these emotions in her audience in a more honest and sincere way. "Wanting and Waiting" deals with the day-to-day longings of a connection. However, "being so good at unrequited love over the years" means she had to imagine being on the other side of the world, in order to portray the emotions, which are inherent within the track.

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Promo for the People

How Artists are Doing it for Themselves
Ask Pavan Mukhi about the song Contact, the bouncy new single for his hiphop crew The Foreign Beggars, and you'll get a perplexed, almost bemused response. 'We started a promo on that track about two months ago,' says Mukhi, known in his MC capacity as the interestingly named Orifice Vulgatron. 'There were a few people who responded to the tune and liked it for what it was, and then as soon as the video was released, everybody was flipping over the track. I want to say the track itself is groundbreaking, it's definitely a club banger that can't be ignored, but it wasn't there until people saw the video.' Since Contact was debuted on Youtube at the beginning of October, it has garnered over 160,000 views.

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A.A.Bondy

Unleashing Inner Demons
A.A.Bondy has weathered several band line-ups and genres before finally settling into his bones with When the Devil's Loose. Bondy's former band, Verbena, couldn't sound more different to his latest solo offerings; the grunge-rock outfit's second, most well-known album Into the Pink was produced by Dave Grohl, fuelling comparisons between Verbena and their bigger brother, Nirvana. However, as his new indie-folk offerings prove, Bondy's heart wasn't in the band mentality. While most musicians would be keen to gloss over any turbulent waters among past bandmates, Bondy describes the way his relationship with Verbena comrades broke down simply as 'I just didn't like it anymore.' The band drove until they 'hit water and nobody knew how to build a boat', at which point they needed to head in their different directions.

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Sex, Drugs & M-Theory
in an Asymmetrical World

Paul Murray
In 2003, Paul Murray published his debut novel, "An Evening of Long Goodbyes," to critical acclaim. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize and nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award, "An Evening of Long Goodbyes" was described as both hugely original and a comedy of the highest calibre. This month sees the longawaited publication of Murray's second novel, "Skippy Dies." Touted as a tragicomedy of epic sweep and dimension, "Skippy Dies" is set in a grand old Dublin public school, Seabrook College for Boys. Tackling a broad range of hardbitten subjects including family breakdown, teenage drug abuse, education and the role of the Catholic Church in society, the novel resonates with the issues of modern life. Comic and tragic in equal measure, Murray in turn wraps the reader in warm laughter and then pours cold reality over their head...

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Rhythms of Cuba: Revolutionary Dance

Danza Contemporaranea de Cuba
Last year marked the 50th anniversary of the Cuban revolution. The overthrow of dictator, Fulgencio Batista, on the 1 January 1959 prompted over 40 years of US embargos and state rationing, but while the country's economic growth was slowly strangled by the revolution, other cultural initiatives were permitted to breathe. Castro's communist ideal denounced the concept of private enterprise, leading to the creation of a struggling, state-run economy. Although this has meant that business in the country is now limited and ineffective, its education and healthcare are among the best in the world. All healthcare is public and education is free from early years through to post-graduate study.

One of the other areas that benefited from increased state-support was the arts and culture sector and, in particular, dance. Dance has long been a part of Cuban culture and in 1948 the indomitable Alicia Alonso introduced the idea of formalized dance, founding Cuba's national ballet company and bearing an influence that still resonates today. However, when the company refused to provide distraction for Batista's actions against student protests in the mid-1950s, all funding was cut and it was only when Castro took up the country's leadership that dance was returned to the national cultural agenda.

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Emotional Journeys into the Self

Simon Robson
Simon Robson's extraordinary debut is a perceptive and riveting examination of the dynamics of the individual. Written in prose that is both painterly and precise, it is certain to establish Robson's reputation as one of the finest British writers working today. Catharine, the solitary heroine, is alone with only her thoughts for company. Over the course of a day that comes to represent her entire life, she analyses and challenges her existence in an attempt to find a way forward.

Being shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award and with Catherine Taylor from The Guardian stating: 'This accomplished debut offers a luxurious reading experience'.

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Love & Loss in Palestine

I am Yusuf and This is My Brother
I Am Yusuf and This Is My Brother is set in Palestine amidst the volatile and changing landscape of January 1948. The play unfolds over a backdrop of war and displacement, but it is neither of these events that provide the main drama. Zuabi's play focuses instead on the prohibited relationship between two young Palestinians, Ali and Nada. Ali has a burning passion for Nada, but is in despair because her father will not let them marry.

Despite their success with the Palestinian audiences, the play has yet to be performed in front of a Jewish Israeli audience. The subject of al-Nakba is considered 'taboo' in Israel and a reluctance to discuss the events of 1948 will make it difficult, if not impossible for the company to organise a show for this audience. However, this does not mean that Amir Nizar Zuabi is not willing to try: 'I do hope we will find a brave partner in the Israeli side that will make it possible.'

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