9 Beats

Understand that these images are not in any chronological order, neither of the time they were produced nor when I encountered them.  These nine images are absolutely non-representative in-so-much-as the nine could be any nine at any point in time, and it just so happened that I picked these out of some metaphorical hat containing perhaps billions of images, at this particular moment in time. These images are not intended to be the best of anything, just available to my short-term memory at a singular moment in time.

The images of my youth, in particular those years between the ages of 17 – 21, have haunted me for the past three decades, some are represented here.  So, in no particular order are nine images which, to some degree, have rocked my little world.

1            ANDY WARHOL – VELVET UNDERGROUND WITH NICO – ALBUM COVER (1967)

Prince of Pop Art Andy Warhol suggested that we all might have 15 minutes of fame he, of course, had a great deal longer.  This is Andy’s infamous Banana skin album sleeve to the Velvet Underground with Nico album (1967).  The banana skin was peel-able, and when peeled revealed a very pink banana beneath – subtle huh!  I first heard this album in 1968 and, as we used to say then, it blew me away.  On occasions I still listen to this incredible album, in particular to Welshman John Cale’s electric viola and ‘ostrich tuned’ guitar.  It was a milestone – I never imagined that music could sound like that, nor album covers peel.

2            JIM STERANKO – NICK FURY AGENT OF SHIELD NO 7 – COMIC  BOOK COVER (1969)

I had been ‘into’ comics since a very early age.  I’ve been a comic book collector on and off for probably five decades and owned my own comic shop at one point. It just so happened that I saw this cover in 1969, just after the Rene Magritte retrospective at the Tate Gallery London.  Admittedly this image is by Jim Steranko – one of the finest comic book artists, and references Dali rather than Magritte, but it reminds me of seeing Surrealist art for the very first time at that Magritte retrospective.  Later I was to meet British Surrealist and jazz man George Melly and study Dali under Dali biographer - Dawn Ades.  Many people forget the inextricable link between what is considered High and Low art, the many crossovers and referencing between arts.  Comics/graphic novels have mostly had a raw deal when it comes to talking about art.

3            ROGER LAW - AXIS BOLD AS LOVE – ALBUM COVER (1967)

Summer of LOVE, hippies, beads bells and incense – we were all into things Indian. The Beatles sojourned in Rishikesh, India, Donovan wore a paisley kaftan on the cover of The Best of Donovan.  We all were listening to Ravi Shankar.  Jimi Hendrix produced this album with a cover which spoke directly to his buying audience.  It is a rip-off of a Hindu devotional poster – first indication of postmodernism perhaps or just a rip-off.   I believe you can still buy the original posters in Brickfields or Jalan Musjid India, KL, sans faces of The Jimi Hendrix Experience.  This gatefold sleeve doubled as a nifty poster to state you claim on your in-crowd of choice, reveal your tribal affiliations and display the lurking hippie for all to see, even if you didn’t have a convenient headband to wear. Oh and the music was, er, groovy man.

4            DAVE GIBBONS – K ALBUM COVER FOR KULA SHAKER (1996)

Like the band Kula Shaker, the album cover was a retro gaze to the psychedelic era of the 60s, in some ways mimicking the Pop Artist Peter Blake’s 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s cover.  It also looked back to albums like Roger Law’s Axis Bold as Love - Hendrix album cover.  Again, it was a shrewd choice to have Dave Gibbons as the artist, as he is well known for his British comic strips - especially in 2000 AD and Dr Who, not to mention American works like Alan Moore’s The Watchmen and Green Lantern Corps. Let us not forget that band leader/frontman  Crispian Mills is the son of 60s actress and all round groovy chick Hayley Mills.  He was initiated into Gaudiya Vaishnavism and his Hare Krishna name is Krishna Kantha dasa.

          

5            JIM FITZPATRICK – LUGH THE IL-DANA (1979)

I love this work because I was going through an ‘I love everything Celtic’ phase, which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that I am half Irish.  This included buying all I could on Irish mythology including The Mythology of the British Isles by Charles Squire.  It was then I came across the works of Jim Fitzpatrick – Celtia, The Book of Conquests, The Silver Arm and The Children of Lir.  He had also designed many of the Thin Lizzy album covers at that time.  That was round about the time I was using an airbrush to paint.  I was commissioned to airbrush a series of ‘Hell’s Angels’ motorcycle petrol tanks.  My showpiece was based upon Celtic mythology and included the warriors seen at the back of this picture – in silhouette.  Many years later (in 2008) Jim Fitzpatrick was to comment on a digital work (Peace) that I had produced and had exhibited in Spain.

6            BARRY WINDSOR SMITH – PANDORA (1975)

Known for his illustrations for Conan the Barbarian and ‘Art’ books like Opus, Barry Windsor Smith, in conjunction with Gorblimely Press, produced a number of stunning Fine Art print posters.  Pandora was one such, available as a limited edition poster.  It was one that I bought shortly after it came out, in 1975, and subsequently left in England when I came to Malaysia.  Like the comic book artist P. Craig Russell there is always the Fine Artist trying to burst out from Barry Windsor Smith’s pen or brush.  He treads lightly from the one world into the other, always leaving the faintest of scent of the Pre-Raphaelites wherever he goes.

          

7            ROGER DEAN – TALES FROM TOPOGRAPHIC OCEANS, ALBUM COVER - YES (1973)

I admit to being a past YES fan.  I was in a small town, in England, searching through a box of record albums in a second-hand shop.  I saw this album cover and loved it, instantly.  I bought the record and all the others with similar covers.  There were four or five YES albums.  Only later was I to love the music too.  Roger Dean, airbrush artist and watercolourist extraordinaire, became an instant hero of mine way back in the days before Adobe Photoshop or CorelDraw.   It was Roger Dean’s work which encouraged me to learn to use an airbrush.

8            HECTOR HYPPOLITE – MAITRESSE ERZULIE (1948)

Hector Hyppolite, the Haitian naïf painter, was discovered by the American De Witt Peters.  He helped Haitian artists set up their first art gallery.  I came across this picture when I was studying for my first Master’s degree and taking Latin American art.  My thesis for that course was Haitian Naive Art.  Since then, this image reminds me of that course and the lovely people I met there.

Last but by no means least

9            ZULKIFLI YUSOFF – MERDEKA 57 (2009)

It is difficult not to repeat myself when writing about Zulkifli Yusoff.  This work was my introduction to the genius of Zulkifli Yusoff.  It and I met face to face in Galleri Petronas and it was love at first sight, well at least for me it was.  Like many other of Zulkifli’s works it resonates deeply, while casually appearing to be slight.  It is the careful juxtaposition of the symbolic imagery which tantalises and teases the visual palette.  As an introduction to Zulkifli’s work this installation was the best that I could have imagined.

Off the Edge May 2010

Senses of Malaysia May/June Issue

Meditative Minimalism?

From 29^th May to June 19^th, 2010, the visual artist Sand T (Sand T Kalloch) exhibits her most recent epoxy resin/clayboard works, in an exhibition entitled ‘Material Tendencies’, at Paris CONCRET, Paris, France, alongside artists from France and the Netherlands. 

Last year I was very disappointed not to be able to see Sand T’s works, in her proposed solo exhibition, at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) in Penang.  The exhibition was cancelled due to lack of financial support.  It would seem a pity that an artist of Sand T’s international repute, and a home grown artist at that, was unable to draw sufficient support for her show.  Thus denying many the chance to engage with her exciting works, and discover more about the art of minimalism.

Sand T was born in historical Melaka, land of Nonya/Baba, cincalok and gula. This extremely prolific artist, whose work is also in the Malaysian National Art Gallery collection, drifted towards the US of A for her Master of Fine Arts degree - and stayed on, in Massachusetts.  There she has developed her stunning visual style and makes a point in promoting better understanding of fine art through her minimalist works and her ST Gallery.

For those more familiar with the figurative art of Zakaria Ali, Rafiee Ghani, or indeed the more abstract works of Latiff Mohidin and Ibrahim Hussein, Sand T’s take on minimalist art refreshes the senses that other arts cannot reach.

Michael Fried, in Artforum 1967, suggested that the concept of minimalist art, or liberalist art as he prefers, is an entirely ideological enterprise.  To a large extent minimalist art separates itself off from modernist art, and more especially from the contemporary arts of the time – Op Art and Pop Art.  Released from the boundaries of painting, minimalist art becomes freed from the need for pictorial illusion and, to a large extent, representation and ‘flat’ art altogether, in favour of an art utilising three dimensions. 

Minimalism, in its stillness, transcends the mere mimetic, stripping away the irrelevant, revealing the fundamental and it is these very qualities which are inherent in Sand T’s works, and may go some way into describing the otherwise indescribable qualities of her transcendental, seemingly tranquil, art.

Sand T specialises in art made using epoxy resin, usually on a clayboard, with additional colour, and occasionally the use of graphite too.  Her works are highly reflective, making use of internal colour and space as well as reflections and shadows cast onto her works. 

There is a sublimely sumptuous quality about Sand T’s epoxy resin works which, though termed by the artist ‘minimalist’, actually defy categorisation.  At moments when visitors wax lyrical, these highly polished and reflective epoxy resin works, often graced with graphite, appear to have freeze-framed 1970s lava lamps (as seen at the Massachusetts exhibition Negotiating the Irrationalities hosted by artSPACE@16).  At other times the viewer might be encouraged to imagine that the tiny globules of semi-opaque fluid, are, seemingly, suspended, transfixed in time and space (Black Ecstasy B-2). 

The self-delusionary viewer, who may or may not be a budding art historian high on the uniqueness of Sand T’s art, may imagine water droplets on the Pop Artist Allen Jones’ black patent leather boots (Voice of Silence), or perhaps the steamed windows of Dali’s surreal Rainy Taxi (Dancing Lights (clear)) as seemingly represented by Sand T’s radiant epoxy works; for there is little doubt that her works lend themselves to such reveries.

Old hippies may recall the 1960s band – Traffic, singing ‘...capturing moments of life in a jar’ from the song ‘Heaven Is In Your Mind’ (album Mr Fantasy-1967).  From one perspective that is exactly what Sand T appears to do with her works.  Observing globules of epoxy resin seemingly suspended within the works lends a notion of time transfixed, or caught.  This notion might be encouraged by the resonance of the spectacular Time and Space B-1 (in the National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur), where carefully placed semi-translucent epoxy drips and lines, against a backdrop of deep reflective black, may give the viewer the illusion of a transcendental, Zen-space.

A mind oft used to indulgent fantasies might imagine strains of Miles Davis’ cool jazz, John Cage’s Dream (1948) or Phillip Glass’s Opening (from Glassworks 1981) frozen at a potentially mind-blowing ecstatic moment, solidified music, entrapped in epoxy resin, forever blowing, notes gelling into reality, reincarnated into resin.   

In German philosophy, Martin Heidegger reveals the concept of the Augenblick, a specific minimal moment in time – quite literally the blink, or glance of an eye, time frozen, reduced to its smallest component part.  And in many ways Augenblick may be enough to describe Sand T’s work, where drops of epoxy resin, on clay covered board, come to represent, in the eye of the beholder, infinite time and space encapsulated.

Whatever the viewer projects onto, or into, Sand T’s works, there is certainly little doubt that those works, whatever they may appear to be, are a trigger to meditation, or prayer, if ever there was one.  For the viewer, observing Sand T’s work becomes inundated, washed with spiritual, Zen-like vibes; this is one of the most vital, intrinsic values of these alluring works - their innate ability to seemingly encourage contemplation and introspection.

Sand T’s frozen Zen drops are painstakingly placed for maximum effect, despite minimalist content, delivering surfaces which at once reflect an external world of physicality, while revealing a transcendental space for meditation, inner reflection and projection.  Her intricately constructed resin works literally mirror external shifting reality while, simultaneously, capturing moments forever in stasis, sitting somewhere between realism and abstract, reality and construct.

While Sand T’s works have the appearance of trapping the moment, catching the Augenblick that notion is, in reality, a sheer fallacy, for movement and time continues reflected on the surface of her works in a gleam of her highly polished epoxy resin.  The works’ surfaces, with their mirror-esque qualities, bring exciting new dynamics into an already complex artistic equation.

It is true that Sand T’s artworks may appear as stasis, time encapsulated, but that is all it is - a Platonic appearance, not reality.  Where romantic artistic interpreters dream of flies in amber and imagine raindrops on tropical leaves (Euclidean Space in Electric Lime), sheen on black metal (Voice of Silence), condensation in taxis (Minus Space) reality is, in fact, reflected on the works’ surfaces.

 Like froth on a daydream, life is being lived external to the epoxy resin works themselves - reflections of cameras, lights, visitors, and in the darkened gallery – shadows, all dance to the tune of light reflected on the surface of Sand T’s works.  For that, essentially, fundamentally is the delicious tension of Sand T’s constructs – the projected into and the reflected onto.  Ultimately her artistic constructs are non-representational, in so much as they are things/goods/objects in themselves, and need exist only for themselves.

I, for one, hope that Sand T may be persuaded to bring her works over to Malaysia, to exhibit them in a space worthy of them, so that a larger Malaysian public may share in what the world has already seen – the exquisiteness of form, the meditative grace of her epoxy resin coated clayboards, in all their unique splendour.  

Off the Edge April 2010 - Signs of Life

Seni untuk AIDS 2 (Art for AIDS two)

The severity of the AIDS pandemic remains a prime concern across the world. Although statistics from major monitoring organisations, including UNICEF, UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation report some significant major changes in the virulence of the pandemic in Malaysia, there still remains a great need for awareness of HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) and AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), particularly among the young.

In Malaysia, where there are more than 80, 000 reported cases of HIV infection, and nearly 14,000 reported cases of AIDS, official international and national organisations - like the Malaysian Aids Council (MAC) spearhead the fight against AIDS. MAC is seen to be in the vanguard of authorities spreading awareness and education concerning the pandemic, within Malaysia, but there also local, non-profit organisations, engaging in the devastating war against HIV/AIDS.

In between film making and music making, last year local artist/musician/academic Kamal Sabran teamed up with a project worker - Dr Ismail bin Lasa, president of Prostar Malaysia (programme for healthy adolescents) - a club raising awareness of HIV/AIDS among youth, to engage in the spreading of awareness about HIV/AIDS.

Together, doctor and artist initiated Art for Aids (Seni untuk AIDS), and successfully engaged in bringing the anti -HIV/AIDS message home to younger people.

The concept of Art for AIDS may have began in San Francisco (USA) some fourteen years ago, when a few local artists got together and decided to sell art to help their friends suffering from HIV and AIDS, but it continues worldwide with Malaysia also making its mark.

In 2009, Seni untuk AIDS (Art for AIDS) started in Malaysia as a network of artists, scholars and social activists pooling together ideas and resources to bring AIDS awareness to the general public’s view. Their intent was to raise consciousness, as well as funds, to continue the fight against one of the world’s most crippling virulent diseases – the HIV/AIDS virus.

Known as Fighting AIDS with Art – an online visual art competition and exhibition, the Malaysian Art for AIDS initiative (Seni untuk AIDS) founded a web based art competition which evolved into an exhibition with over two hundred stunning entries.

A website poll enabled visitors to vote for their favourite image, or the most effect/striking image and closed with 1,693 votes being registered on the website meter. Prizes were awarded for the top three artworks at a ceremony including the national poet A. Samad Said in Shah Alam, 20th February this year (2010).

Nur Suria Mansor won RM1000 for her evocative expressionistic work ‘Fading Away’ - a powerful piece full of emotive command, and obviously popular with the website voters. M. Syazwan gained RM500 for the nostalgically resonant image ‘Mangsa’ and Ammin received third, but not least, prize of RM250 for demonstrating, pictorially, ‘How HIV cannot be Spread’. All the artists and collaborators involved, as well as those who voted, deserve praise for just being involved in this initial project.


However, all art is in a way subjective, and the one work that caught my eye is – Jerit (scream), by Abdullah Hamdan (number 116 on the website). This is a poignant digital artwork, for me saying all there needs to be said about the fight against AIDS, the pain and suffering this disease brings not only to the individual whose body has been invaded by the virus, but for those connected to that individual, friends and family. The top 30 artworks can still be seen online, at http://seniuntukaids.blogspot.com .

That was merely a beginning. On the 28th March this year (2010), Perak witnessed the launching of a second initiative concerning art against AIDS. At the Prostar convention, in Bukit Merah, Perak, YB Datuk Rosnah Shirlin bt Hj Abdul Rashid Shirlin helped launch ‘Drop the Hate’, the fresh Seni untuk AIDS project initiative for this new year, concentrating specifically on photography.

Seni untuk AIDS, in this fresh venture, asks everyone, beginner, amateur and professional to send in their best photographic shots for the photography exhibition which closes 12 noon 31st May 2010. As last year, there will be cash prizes and certificates available to the winners, and there will be an online exhibition of the received photographs. Entrants are asked to send their photographic images to seniuntukaids@gmail.com by 31st of May this year.

As well as a second website – http://seniuntukaids2.blogspot, Seni untuk AIDS can be reached through a Facebook page. Links to Facebook and to the web pages of Kamal Sabran and Dr Ismail Lasa can be found on the aforementioned website if further information is sought regarding both the Seni untuk AIDS project itself, or this year’s initiative.

These initiatives are most important to draw attention to the AIDS pandemic, to facilitate spreading awareness of the disease, promoting ways in which sufferers may be assisted, and helping prevent fresh people from becoming infected in the future.

Off the Edge March 2010

my first article in Off the Edge.