What or who influences your work?

Wow! Influences are many and wide. I take a lot of photographs so people like Martin Parr, Zach Gold, Martha Cooper and Boogie have influenced the photos I take. I’ve also been influenced by artists such as Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Swoon, D*Face, Ron Mueck and Faile. But all art and design I see around me will influence me. I love the feeling I get when I see something new and exciting that makes me want to work even harder at my art.

What sort of music do you listen to while working?

I like a lot of ska, Mf Doom, The Knife and anything that’s got an ounce of passion.

Have you any tactical advice for those planning on erecting work in the streets? Banksy for instance advises that drunk nights will result in some great work but some arrests as well.

Being drunk does help as you can feel a bit odd at 2am when everyone else is drunk and lairy. I suppose it’d just a matter of keeping your eyes open, having a mate out with you doesn’t hurt. I like to look around during the day for good spots that I can hit at night. You want to find spots that are visible where you know your work will last longer than a few days.

Why did you take the name Asbestos? It's a material you use a lot right?

Street art is a little bit like Asbestos. Asbestos is all around us, (in the walls and in the very fabric of many buildings) but it often goes unnoticed. When we realise that it's there it really gets our attention and we question it and it gets discussed. When I started putting work up on the street, that's what I wanted my work to do, to become part of the fabric of towns and cities and to make people notice, question and discuss what's really around, the name Asbestos represents my message perfectly. As for the material Asbestos, I’ve not used it as I’d be a bit paranoid about giving myself lung cancer so I use plasterboard for my Dolls heads.

From the Dolls heads and some sporadic lost stickers there was a gap of about a year in any real street level output from you. Why was this and how come there has been such a sudden resurgence of activity from you?

Just like the rest of the world I was trying to pay the rent, and was also doing a lot of travel. I’ve also taken a long hard look at the work that I was outputting and decided last year that I needed to focus my style, concentrating on painting and more handmade work. I love the idea of putting up uniquely painted one off pieces on the street. I started doing more of these paintings in the run up to my show ‘Hope & Despair’ with Canadian artist Other in The Bernard Shaw last year. I love this new direction, so you’ll be seeing more of my paintings on the streets. I’ve also done a lot more Lost stickers (36 different ones to date!) and have put up over 2000 of them all over Dublin and London in the last few months.

I noticed some signs on Henry St warning Saturday shoppers of 'dry paint' paint on lamp posts - was this, you?

Not me I’m afraid, but strangely enough I did put up a few Dry Paint signs about three years ago. Not saying that this person is biting me as I put up so few they may have gone unnoticed. I’ll have a look out for them though.

How do you feel about people picking up some of your stuff like the tile work off the street and bringing it home? Don't you find it funny people can do this while others pay money in the likes of Cool for the same?

I’d prefer that someone takes a piece down because it inspires them, not because they want to destroy it. When I put something up on the street I relinquish all control over it, if someone wants pull it down then I can’t stop them. But I don’t think it’s strange to sell work in a gallery as I think it brings my art to people who may not have seen it before or who’d prefer to leave my street stuff on the street.

What exactly were the Doll heads all about?

The Dolls Heads represent innocence, their eyes blindfolded from the evil of the world – lonely icons of lost souls. I love doing them on plasterboard with gold leaf as they’re like little jewels for the public to find. Some people love them others get a bit freaked out by them.

When will you run out of ideas for the lost series?

How longs a piece of string (actually that’s a good idea for a new one). But yeah I’ve got lots more sketches in my black books. When they start getting really stupid I might stop them, but for now I’m still enjoying them.

What was with all the genetically challenged animals?

Too much cheap wine and a dodgy copy of photoshop.

In Portobello there is a large more traditional mural piece with your name on it - do you come from this more traditional writing background or was this a once off? How did you get involved in street art?

That piece was done by some of the guys who were over for the Eurocultured event in Smithfield last year, they signed it with the names of all the artists who’d painted at the event that day. I’ve always loved the traditional graff movement and got interested in it when I found a copy of Subway Art as a kid, but I never painted graff. I got into street art years later when I started seeing art by Faile and Swoon in New York. I realised that there was no reason why I couldn’t try the same.

How do you feel about the way ICN and others have scrawled all over Dublin - do you see it as visual piss or writers delight?

I kinda like it. The thing about tagging is it can be ugly and is the simplest form of graffiti, but it’s still the most democratic act that a kid can do. I like seeing tags in a city as it means that there’s a heart and personality to the community. When I go somewhere without street art or graffiti I feel that something is not quite right. ICN are the most up people in the city as is Grift, so I gotta take my hat off to them, they’ve really hit this city big time.

Do you feel more attachment now to the gallery scene or the street art scene at the moment?

The street art scene is always my first love. I think a lot of galleries sell stale art that they know they can sell to bland middle class people. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t good galleries that takes chances. I don’t need to sell my work in galleries but it has challenged me to do different things with my art.

Remind us again what the Secret Santa Swap was and how important it was in the street art global community?

It was a desire to make peoples Christmas a bit happier by organising a Chris Cringle between 300 street artists. It turned into huge event with some great art being produced, but I’m not sure if I’ll do it again as it took over my life for a few months. But it was worth doing for a couple of years as the reaction and excitement from artists around the world was inspiring.

Friends have noticed some D*Face material appearing in Dublin - are you putting up these as some relationship of exchanging favours?

A relationship of exchanged favours, how dare you! But yeah, he was over here a few weeks ago and we went out pasting. He got about 10 or 15 posters up, most of them have been torn down by now, so I may have to get him back for some more street improvements! It’s good to see some more stuff on the streets of Dublin.

Labels: Art, Asbestos, Interviews, Street Art

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Last Spanish Civil War Pen and Ink Soldier Dies

The last surviving artist behind the gallant mobilizing posters lighting up the walls of Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War passed away earlier this year. Fontsere, one of many "pen and ink" soldiers, produced the famous FAI poster of a peasant raising a scythe in defiance while strong modernist letters issued the battle cry of "libertat!" Fontsere escaped into exile as the revolution subsided and spent some time in NYC, but his concerns lay with the plight of those third class emigrates ignored by what he termed the "relevant figures" of the republic and trapped in a cycle of concentration camps and production in the French war industry.

Looking at some of the revolutionary works produced during this period, influenced originally by South American revolutionary artists, you are struck by a chronic lack of output of original artistic material put to the service of political movements today. This is even more startling given the emphasis some activists insist on placing on art for containing some sort of inherent radicalism striving to promote its own autonomy against the market. What we have is recycled images churned through a mill of Photoshops and an unfortunate aesthetic that fails in its mimicing of street art all too often. Now Fontsere - there was someone who knew how to produce truly original street art.

Labels: Art, Politics, Street Art

# posted by antrophe @ 10:07 PM

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Sunday, September 24, 2006

Fringefest Pt 3: Rock Candy Carnival

The Fringefest came to an end today, but it concluded good and proper for us last night with the Rockcandy Carnival event in the Speigaltent attempting to draw in some dosh for the Dublin Simon Community. The tent was certainly less crowded than on other nights, with the wooden ballroom style dancefloor never reaching more than half of its capacity. If the night was dominated by anything it was by that backward glance to eighties sequined chic that seems so ubiquitously attached to the non-chalent Dublin hipster scene. So there were synths and lots of them.

Les Bien opened up preceedings, heavily reminiscent of a car crash between Petty Hate Machine Nine era Inch Nails and the gritty bass undertones of Air's 'Sexy Boy', with the tempo of Underworld and the catchy drum kickings of New Order added for a dash of good measure. The next act Produse, left me rather confused; dwarved behind stacks of mean looking synths, drum machines and various hardware contraptions their bastardised blend of four by four dance left me eyeing around convinced they had to be Hystereo. Packing in the crowd pleasers they moved easily between they're own pieces and classics like 'Block Rockin' Beats.' Gawking over their myspace they seem linked into the wider Hystereo/Backlash scene so dominant in Dublin right now. Hystereo, such a highlight at the Electric Picnic and last weekend failed to really live up to the expectation that dragged me down to the Spiegaltent again, the sound seemed to some what falter after Produse, the bass never kicked in the same way and it felt a little empty on a dance floor of drunks barging each other out of the way and bumping into each other with out apologies.

Despite its all good intentions, the night smacked of that lack of critical air that's so dense around fundraisers for the NGO's. Some bloke who said 'groovy' so often as MC, you began to hope he'd choke on it bigged up a raffles for Budda Bags and signed acoustic guitars, and you are wondering 'my god where are my drugs?' Surrounded by over priced ethnic jewelry and knock off Banky designer t-shirts and art prints, the night had that Electric Picnic soul about it without any of the music to boot.

On nights like that you expect a party to arise and bite you with a taste of sanity in the nouveau riche hell that Dublin drowns you in. Then quickly instead you find yourself in the very hell mouth as 'Break on Through' by The Doors blares and the new students roar 'I fucking love this song.' That hell mouth is called Doyles and with the torrential downpour forcing you into cover on a window ledge behind some railings another Fringefest and another year in terms of the student calendar comes to pass. Now that I think of it where the fuck were the Betamax Format at that gig? Weren't they billed?

Labels: Art, Doyles, Dublin, Fringefest, Gig Review, Hystereo, Music, Theatre

# posted by antrophe @ 5:11 AM

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Friday, September 22, 2006

Fringefest PT2: The Anarchic Antigone Interactive

Lightswitch is a Dublin based production company promising to bring theatre goers the 'ridiculously serious and the seriously ridiculous.' If its a chaotic humour and theatre of the absurd they aspire to then through a healthy mangling of a Greek classic, Antigone Interactive proves to hit the nail partially on the head but falters at the point of audience interaction and political depth. The Antigone lead comes across oozing sassy stylistic rebellion like a photo shot prepped baile funk star MIA - all gun belt for show and Che Guevara t-shirt as poseurish portend to an inevitable martyrdom for ritually burying her brother against her father's edicts.

Her father of course is Creon and in keeping with the pisstake atire of the rest of the cast he has the physical presence of Only Fools and Horse's Boycie in a South American junta costume straight from the back of Del Boy's mini-van. With speeches conciously echoing some of the 'with us or against us' discourse of the war on terror, he melds in and out of purposefully two dimensional political caricatures that add the main political punch to a play that uses circled "A's" on its posters but fails to develop any political depth beyond a rather cliched critique of the gap between democratic vision and practice.... review continues at Indymedia.

The play runs upstairs in the International Bar every evening at 1830 pm until September 24th. Its 10e, but unlike After Dakota it won't leave you feeling the desire to shoot the cast. What more can I say?

Labels: Art, Fringefest, Theatre

# posted by antrophe @ 4:22 AM

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Sunday, September 17, 2006

Fringefest Pt1: Theatre to Avoid, Some Party Weirdo and Acii Disco

From Dakota: An Audience Crushed Under Emotional Weight.

Your head must be wrapped in cling film if you haven't noticed the Fringe Festival coming into colourful effect during the week with lantren art dotting the city. On Friday I managed to blag two tickets for Colin Gee's solo performance and video installation 'From Dakota.' This work focusses on Doug, a poor rural truck driver just released from jail after being done for drug trafficing. Trapped between the material ambitions he wishes on his family and their desire for improving family relationships, he is desperate to raise cash to extract them from the isolated dust patch they call home and takes one last job in illegally transporting immigants.

Having gotten over his addiction to speed, his journey takes on a monumental significance. He is delusionally haunted by memories of missing his daughters growing up due to his work ethic. The roadside stragglers he gives lifts to along the way focus his mind and he realises he leaves home because home itself makes him homesick. With the road as his home he puts an increased distance between himself and his family, this one last job will provide the means to end all that. But as it goes dramatically wrong, Doug is led to a bewildering emotional breakdown in the thumping sun.

At this point Colin Gee stumbles on stage as the lolling half hour drama that was the video installation ends. A former clown with the Cirque Soliel, there's an undoubted tint of mime in his solo performance. Unfortunately his excellent acting does little to comfort an audience that ends up buried in the overly wrought emotional weight of a man muttering the same several lines of dialogue repeatedly for half an hour. This final descent into tripe could have been limited to five minutes and contained all the punch needed in a far more restrained fashion. Taking place in the lounge of the Mill Theatre in Dundrum, an uncomfortable twitchiness took hold of the audience as phones were checked for times with the most courteous levels of subtelty manageable.

Colin Gee's play ran in the Lounge in the Mill Theatre until the 16th of September. If you missed it consider it a saving grace that means you won't freak out and absolve yourself of all desire to visit the theatre again.

Dorfmeister: Is this really what you call the shit?

Meanwhile down at that posh crannog we like to call the Spiegeltent. A serious cock up by security led to a queue of people developing outside who were being refused entry despite having tickets to the Dorfmeister gig. Spying an opportunity for a blag, three of us joined the throng and added our own complaint to the chorus of annoyance before eventually being let in. It seems the cock up was down to the Fringe Fest rather than any attempt at unscrupulous over selling from Remedy. The gig itself seriously sucked and was totally lacking in 'oompf' with a clinical delivery of a rather smooth set of house that brought images of sleazy wine bars hurtling towards the fore front of my mind. That this was clearly lapped up by a sweaty crowd was truly beyond me.

Fucking Weirdos and Stoner Dirge.

On Saturday it was down to a Hivemind gig in the Hub to finally check out the much mooted Party Weirdo. With the Dublin underground Indie scene so small, it'd be easy for the various creatives to hype each other up through the net but Party Weirdo deserve the praise they are getting at this early stage. An odd multi-instrumental barrage of quite and loud, they pay homage to the musical weight of riot grrl before rushing the barricades of experimentation in creating a very classical NY sound that should answer the needs of Dublins art-punks for some time to come. Even the great Estel sounded quite lost after them, wheter this was because they opted to play a piece of 19 minute stoner rock dirge, complete with church bells or because I've seen them all too much before is a point up for grabs.

You can check out Party Weirdo at the next Skinny Wolves night in the Hub on 28th of September, where they will be playing alongside xBxRx from the Kill Rockstars label. Also on the bill are Ten Past Seven and Retards.

Hystereo: They Call It Acii!

With a failed attempt to get tickets for Roni Size, leaving me a broken man I bet a retreat back into the Hub where unbeknownest to me Acii Disco took off. In looking back it was probably the jammiest fuck up of a night yet, with my 8e giving me a chance to throw a gawk back towards one of the highlights of the Electric Picnic, Hystereo right after seeing Party Weirdo. Delivering some seriously heavy chops of tech -houseto an absolutely mad for it crowd, you'd be crazy to miss out on catching these guys before they inevitably fuck off to Berlin to join the other stalwarts of this scene. Dublin we have never had it so good, someone in the club described how the Acii Disco night was just like Backlash on Thursdays. I've generally avoided much of the whole Bodytonic related scene, eyeying it up as a more successful but recognisable house beast with all the burgy as fuck connotations that emerge when you take a once popular form and hand it over to nerdy middle class whites in Dublin. However, it may well be time to dip the feet in even if its well over a year late.

Hystereo will be playing the Spiegaltent on Friday, September 23rd alongside Betamax format, Porntramua and others. Entrance will cost you an unkindly fee, so sell your childern for meat now.

Labels: Acii Disco, Art, Dublin, Fringefest, Party Wierdo

# posted by antrophe @ 8:18 PM

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Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Street Art In A Pub - What Is It Good For?

Absoultely nothing would be the obvious answer, well apart from say maybe attaching yet another particularly knobish and upper crust Dublin bar to the continuing upward vogue of street art. If you want to see the heart and soul sucked out of this relatively disobedient form of art you could do far worse than take a stroll down to Four Dame Lane for the 'War What is it Good For?' exhibition taking place in tandem with Coors until mid-October.

Banksy's Gitmo exploit at Disney and his recent punking of Paris Hilton turned the eyes of the world once again to the subversive world of street art. The English guerrilla artist replaced 500 copies of her new album in shops around England with mangled culture jammed versions of the original cover. Taking aim at the cult of narcissism around her, the CDs were accompanied by audio remixes asking the question 'Why am I Famous?'

One of Banksy's most famous works 'Napalm' is currently featured in the exhibition which aims to sketch the intersection of war, consumerism and pop-culture through the visually arresting medium of street art and thrash culture collage. This print display by some of arts most critically engaged pioneers includes work by Warhol, Bast and Ralph Stedman. Shepard Fairey of "André the Giant" fame spreads the message of disobedience through his iconic postage stamp portrayal of revolutionary women. Also featured is Irish born Will St Leger, a sometime Greenpeace crusader running under the guise of 'artivist,' he apes the dominant aesthetic of graphic design to undermine advertisement culture. Here he provides a crude but effective ironic meshing together of traditional Irish nationalism and Celtic Tiger consumer when Michael Collins gets a pair of high-street shopping bags. Meanwhile Gee Voucher's visually arresting portrait Soldier undermines masochistic military culture with a simple set of pursed scarlet lips.

Unfortunately most of the work on display looks like prints locked away behind glass in a frame. You could do as well yourself lazor printing your favourite collection of street art off the net and wheatpasting it to your toilet door. There was no attempt to create an atmosphere from the work, it was left diminished in stature against the barren yuppie environs that is this particular dress code hell hole of a venue. In fact its impossible to get up close and view the prints without interupting someones evening at a table, mounted as they are above various booths.

This exhibition is meant to say more about Four Dame Lane's events over the coming winter months than either war or street art. They couldn't even have been bothered spelling Will St Leger's name right in an extraordinary display of half arsed latching on. I can't be bothered commenting on more of the art some of its great but really you can see it better on the net. This wasn't even worth going to for the opening night free drinks. Take a walk around the city and see whats on the walls, avoid this like the plague and hope for the best that the exhibition that took place in the Digital Hub last year returns again to showcase some of Ireland and Europe's finest street artists.

Elsewhere: Banksy's recent punking of Paris Hilton has drawn cynicism in some quarters ( 1 ). There is a view that paints it as a double edged attempt by the record label and him at promoting the various egos involved in it in a mutual wanking session of genius marketing. As usual make up your own mind.

The art on display in Dame Lane includes: Andy Warhol - John Lennon Banksy - Napalm Gee Voucher - Soldier Bast - Thug Ralph Stedman - Daily Mail Obey/Shepard Fairey - Revolutionary Women AN? - Hearts and Minds Will St Leger - Duty Free State Morgan - Def Con

Labels: Art, Banksy, Street Art

# posted by antrophe @ 9:25 PM

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Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Mind Numbing Muppet: Neil Boorman The Brand Burner

Presenting the sixth in a series of Mind Numbing Muppets - a Soundtracksforthem response from the underbelly of the keyboard to the kaleidoscope of dazzlingly silly cahnts who impose themselves on us via their access to the media.

Number 6: Neil Boorman

A one time DJ ( 1 ) and music critic, Neil Boorman has raised the eye of the English press this week with his promise to burn all the brands in his possession in some bewildering act of randomness against the over-riding power of brand culture. For a man well into his thirties he's of that rather odd vintage that suffers from some sort of irony deficiency in believing music should be 'difficult for adults to understand.' It is exactly this sort of pathological desire to offend in an attention grabbing 'fuck you I won't clean up my bed-room' act of childish spite that earns him our catty contempt and that grand aul Dublin title of muppet.

Naomi Klein used brands as a point of departure for developing a popular and well needed critique of post-Fordist capitalism. But the gap between his confused and obviously pampered view of how to shop our way out of a particular set of social relations and the No Logo exposition is never made clearer than on his blog. Full of guff about acclimatising to the process of wearing non-branded runners, in his world the options are between Dunne Store's knock off high-tops and Converse originals. He admits to 'travelling to Hong Kong to get some items of clothing copied (non-branded naturally)' without ever questioning the systematic sets of power relations that have led to this warped priveliging of the commodity.

He almost admits being the living incarnation of Nathan Barley, with several collapsed efforts at publishing loud mouth chic London style magazines, brazenly shallow he describes having no interest in his current partner ' had she not been working for a very important contemporary art gallery'. You can be sure someone will give him a quirky column writing an 'anti-fashion' fashion column or even better designing summer wear for Pennys. At the rate vintage clothing is selling these days, he should have no problems dressing like the pretentious knob he is just in time for the latest Marc Jacob's grunge revival.


He likens himself to Cayce from William Gibson's Pattern Recognition ( 1 ). A 'cool-hunter' character who becomes violently ill at the sight of particular company emblems. If he does share a similarity to her, it is far from sharing a post-modern neurosis to the ever lingering logo imprints of hegemonic brands, and more in his own ability to hunt out underground cultures such as subvertising. Then strip them of their depth and ideological worth to pimp them out like sullied street walkers with a simple and crass message to earn a few fleeting moments of press to sell his up-coming book. Neil Boorman is a man no longer content with writing the art and culture features, now he wants to graduate into being the actual focus of the cultural supplements.

What you have here is a rather grandiose dose of liberal bourgeois. When history looks back it will not see a brave soul raising the deep ethical questions that haunt late capitalism. Instead it will see a pampered rich little bitch that has foregrounded his own individuality through yet more consumer choices rather than pushing for critiques of the system grounded in developing social solidarities. Bending the corporate semiotics to subversion you ain't mate, now hand over those Addidas Super Star before I set the dogs on you.

Related: No Logo Documentary: Naomi Klien lucidly explains the deepening of consumption as part of an overall capitalistic project The Century of the Self: a documentary by Adam Curtis examining how those in power have used Freud's pessimistic theories of human nature in order to demobilise democracies, instead deflecting our inner needs away from social solidarity to consumerism.

Labels: Art, Brands, Media, Muppets, Social Movements

# posted by antrophe @ 2:04 AM

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Tuesday, June 20, 2006

NCAD and The Liberties: Categorise Under Philistine

Living within five minutes walk of NCAD opens up a world of potential for browsing through its regular showcasings of student output, but I've never been bothered. NCAD strikes me as a closed, self-contained world with only morning and evening strings of boho dressed students filtering in and out of it, back down to the city centre and onto Georges St. Occasionally a mob of them standing outside its gates, provide the only hint that there may even be a bar in there that could provide the same boozing potential as Trinity's pav during those lolling summer evenings. Concerns that NCAD may be moved to UCD have always struck me as an impulsive wish from students there to slide into an expected leftist reaction against the college authorities there. I've seen little evidence to suggest the presence of NCAD adds anything to the area, other than a nice little gloss over major socio-economic problems in the area with the occasional bill board art display on its front or the randomness of a hopeless Karl Marx stencil on its gate. Anyone who turns around and starts telling me that by keeping some arts and supplies store open you are putting something back into the area must be making better use of their glue than for bonding card board model walls together.

The Liberties is undergoing a dramatic level of gentrification at the moment. Many of the old industrial Corrie style streets are already well in the hands of the market through private ownership, attracting ridiculous prices that make ridicule of their original purpose as housing for factory workers. New gated appartment buildings spring up like mushrooms in October, devoid of both character and community with court yards designed to give the impression of soical space but absence of the substance of such spaces like a playground or benches. This gentrifaction really just matches the pattern of what has been happening throughout the city, with an old manufacturing working class, that was the very backbone of the city being pushed out and replaced with a new cognative class that is more reliant on the digital hub/IFSC than the traditional employment provided by something like Guinesess.

The presence of an art college in that area strikes me as something that will be used a peg upon which to hang a vast change in the area starting with Francis St renovation around new cafes and galleries that will deplace the more traditional pubs and greasy spoon cafes in the area. Cafe's like the Pale Space specialise in over priced breakfasts consisting of eggs on over sized bread. The recent opening of a Lidl threatens the traditional fruit market there and habits of selling household essentials on the street. That means the price of some where like St Nicholas of Myra is going to hop through the roof and whatever protestant church owns it could well be tempted to sell it, depriving the libertarian political movement of one of its key social and organising spaces. Thats even ignorning the more important issue of depriving long term residents of a community centre that provides hot meals for the elderly, a creche, night classes and more.

I wonder if NCAD students have any sort of awareness of this process? For a sector of the city that has spouted those obnoxious Defastenist muppets, with a website that confirms my own mantra of never trusting those of an artistic bent that can't pull together the basics of online design. . I'd hope at least that some of them would have paid some attention to the critiques of the city as a machine advanced by the situationists. Instead of lazily chopping them up and feeding them back through the post first world war avant garde and passing them off as the teenage flight of fancy that mostly comes out of the NCAD art world. If the Defastenists were the best the press said NCAD had to offer, it truly was a horrendus moment. Having stumbled across one of their exhibitions over two years ago and immediately being struck by the idea that a child drunk on Buckfast, armed with several crayons and a po-mo gibberish generator could quickly find themselves on a par with these tools. Hopefully Defastenism was a fleeting moment, its manic end something maybe the work at the recent spate of student art shows can testify to in many of its achievements .


Gig News : Ventian Snares that Canadian based mentalist of the chopped up beats persausion will be playing the Hub in what promises to be a sweat fest on Thursday night, June 22nds. This is an eagerly anticaipated follow up to his climactic gig in the TBMC last year, coming after the acclaimed release of Rossz Csillag Alatt Született which blended a Hugarian classical music vein with tense drum and bass atmospheres. Aaron Spectre will also be delivering some bashment madness with ragga vocalists being tortured over spluttering breakcore beats and the occasional splurge of a grinding guitar line. This one is in the intimacy of Kennedieson friday. Support in both nights is from Herv. For those of you knowing me its my 23rd Birthday tomorrow so be sure to put in an appearance at Spectre for some idiot dancing time...

Labels: Art, Dublin, Music, NCAD

# posted by antrophe @ 5:10 PM

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Saturday, April 29, 2006

aLAF Keeps On Rocking Throughout The Year

aLAF has proven its self year after year to be part of the Ireland's yearly festival circuit. There mission is to "foster artistic and creative expression that promotes lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer women's visibility and identity." I say nice one. Considering how shit the music scene is in Dublin's queer world they really have reached new hights in thier musical sellection at the fest. For the past five years they have had a Grrrls Rock night at the George. Its such a nice change from the top forty djing you usually get here in the queer world. Even Dublins Q&A (Queer and alternative) looks like a gay D4 party and believe you me thats not very good at all.

So its nice to hear that ALAF has branched out and started putting on gigs throughout the year as well. Last Thursday with Hive Mind Promotions (a small all woman promotion team that brought you Party Line and Spider Web earlier this year.) Irelands own Queen Kong and Canada's Lesbians on Esctacy took the stage at Eamonn Dorrans. You can read reviews of Queen Kong on an early post on this site.

Lesbians on Esctacy were brillant . . .but I would have to say they don't really fit into the description. You would think they are a blatent rip off of Chicks on Speed but actually I would say they are closer to The Need. They really had more of an electro-rock eighties revial thing going on versus the Le Tigre, Chicks On Speed etc electro-pop. They were dressed more like eighties gay leather men then lesbians . . .but I suppose what does a lesbian look like eh?

aLAF takes place over the 1st weekend in April in DUBLIN, IRELAN. This year's festival is on Thursday 30th March to Sunday, 2nd April 2006. See http://www.alafireland.com for more info.

Labels: Alaf, Art, festival, Gig Review, Music, Queer

# posted by Reeuq @ 7:46 PM

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Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Black Brain Radio: Manic Online Preacher?

Lurking somewhere just before Radio One on the dial there's been this utterly bizarre "pirate" broadcast moaning away for the past few days. I picked it up in UCD and someone else I know managed to pick it up in location as far flung as Maynooth.

It consists solely of this bloke in a mild Dublin accent, possibly tinged with the drawl of an upbringing in the environs of the leafy southside talking in a monologue for hours on end. One moment it sounds like he's reading from Wikipedia and following the embedded links within it as he disembarks from one topic to another.

At other times it sounds like he's reading Amnesty International reports. So far he's been going on about Dante's Inferno, Mugabe shutting down opposition radio stations, Aristotle, the levels of radioactive contamination in the general population and the immune system. All day I found myself asking myself "what the hell is this?" Has some lone bloke picked up a radio transmitter off the net for cheap and set himself to work? Its the radioactive equivalent of a street ranter with no given specialty, and the oddest thing of all is you can hear Ray Darcy's show in the background...

There was some comfort in the whimsical thought that this was a lone nut, drowning his thirst with tea, his only company the inanity of Ray D'Arcy's perky morning advice on love, walled in inside his house, a box in the suburbs - lashing out against the infotainment machine and waiting for Babylon to come crashing down around him. Turns out it was just the latest public art series from IMMA and Garrett Phelan, a transmitted sound installation which some how tries to close the gap between the visual arts and audio in an investigation of how ideas spread in society. What toss - since when does the title of "art" justify such a tedious lack of cop on?

If IMMA and the Irish art establishment want to investigate the spreading of ideas in society, and have the capacity to give someone access to a transmitter powerful enough to hog a frequency all over county Dublin, the least they could do is turn it over to an open public access project.

What THEY say: "Black Brain Radio is an unconventional and innovative radio artwork created by Irish artist Garrett Phelan with Temple Bar Gallery and Studios and in partnership with the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA). The transmission will be broadcast around the clock over a thirty-day period from 19 January 2006 to listeners within the greater County Dublin area on a frequency of 89.9fm. In addition, Black Brain Radio will have the capacity to reach a wide international audience through its dedicated on-line presence."

What The COMMENTARIAT of Indymedia say: "Recognition? What does this mean precisely? Does it mean that he can exhibit meaningless scrawls on the windows of the Civic Offices while other people are prosecuted for painting political slogans on walls, and posters advertising public meetings are torn down? He can set up a "safe" pirate radio station, or do some obscure collaboration with the free state army that amounts to a tape of the same bit of morse code being repeated over and over again in a darkened gallery?"

And now for two tech (no) ical points: there has been an array of problems with blogger lately, which have been preventing me accessing this thing even from a reading point of view, never mind posting. Worst part is no radge seems ta hav nae answers. Meanwhile over on the good ship Old Rottenhat, the good captain Krossphader has delivered a Nietzschean parody of the demise of techno in Dublin after the closue of D1's weekly club.

Related: 1 and 2 (now if only our own techno fiend Cogsy would get his blogging ass in gear a little more often!)

Labels: Art, Black Brain Radio, Media

# posted by antrophe @ 8:07 PM

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Sunday, February 05, 2006

Art Review: Whats The Difference Between Blek, Bansky and Will St. Leger?

The art world is definitely a funny one. Just three or four years ago the subversive mashing of pop-cultural images with political sloganeering that flowed from a certain Banksy's can gave a graphical edge to the simmering anti-war movement. For once proving that political posters/propaganda does not have to resort to certain tired themes, as boring and as staid as a tabloid front cover or as hackneyed as a '82 style punk album cover. Movement material could instead flit around at the edges of pop-culture, taking what was needed to wholly redefine the aesthetics of our politics. It was a nice idea, not that much of this was done. The wall stencils of Banksy, mainly ended up inspiring advertisement agencies and interior designers laying out shops like Motion Picture. Leftist graphic designers would grab one or two of his images to repeat untill vomiting, or exploit the brightness and contrast filter in Photoshop to produce obnoxious photocopied travesties that strove for the aesthetic but dropped the effort to remix pop cultural commodities to sell a point.

On display in the Front Lounge this month is the work of Will St. Leger, a sometime activist with Greenpeace he runs under the guise of an artivist and is one of a generation of us influenced by the work of Banksy. Leger engages in stencilling on canvas, basically rendering his playings in photoshop on to a permanent surface. From a graphic design background he has designed various subvertisements for Greenpeace, picking up on the general vogue for aping the undermining of the diminant values of advertisement culture. Some of these are on display in the Front Lounge, his peace on nuclear power shows Sellafield with a car freshener clipped to the smoke stacks. One of his more impressive pieces has several US transport helicopters plonk an IKEA into Iraq. There's a friendly play on the Robocop franchise when a pair of the emblematic Mickey Mouse ears are daubed onto a three tone stencil of the droid that was to replace the original Robocop in the sequel. There's a crude but effective meshing together of traditional Irish nationalism and celtic tiger consumer when Michael Collins gets a pair of shopping bags placed in his hands.

None of this is amazing though. Look at the price list and it quickly becomes enraging. Down the back of the bar there are maybe three single tone pieces, down using card baord probably, free hand cut outs, no evidence of preparation in photoshop and botched with the spray paint having leaked over the stencil borders. Still they carry a hefty €50 tag. Most of the other work comes in and around €300 for what is generally second generation Banksy cloning. But then Banksy did rip off Blek Le Rat ( 1 ) himself. Blek was one of the first stencil artists, who left Paris covered with potted images of Northern Irish riot cops and old catholic men and women looking out from their door steps onto the streets of the left bank as one of his many stencils. The difference between Will St. Leger, Blek Le Rat and Banksy is that two of these have plastered their streets and one hasn't. The guilty one here is Leger, who is really engaged in the lazy reproduction of an art style that at one stage may have had an original, subversive character but now is quickly becoming tired.

Good discussion on "ICN..art or just visual piss?" over on Thumped.

Labels: Art, Banksy, Street Art

# posted by antrophe @ 7:43 PM

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Thursday, January 12, 2006

Who Thought Kurt Cobain Had Anything To Do With Rebellion?

Everyone knows the one about the latent political symbolism of the X Men. Written against the background of the emerging civil rights movement, those that wanted to find politics, could find it - in neat metaphors for the repression of minorities in the form of mutants. Or in the Mutant Registration Act, that was the kernal of the early story as a parallel with the Nuremburg Laws, while Malcolm X or the Black Panthers were manifested in the character of Magneto, the bold revolutionist who refused assimilation on human terms providing a stark opposition to the reformism of Xavier. In the later sixties, youthful drop outs with minds tweaked on acid would see echoes of themselves in the blossoming of extra-normal powers of perception in the students of the X university and isolated home town teens getting turned on by the freak evolution.

I've recently become rather enamoured with graphic novels, the €20 + tag provides quite the block, so lets call it an aroused interest as opposed to a full blown decadent infatuation. Channel Zero is the work of Brian Wood, the first in a series of graphic novels that play off the slogans of the anti-capitalist period, and the more technical minded fantasies within it. Ward sees comics as an outlaw medium which are perfect for the expresson of political dissent. Channel Zero is essentially a comic about turning off the TV, to follow Le Tigre its about getting off the internet and on to the street. As the introduction by Warren Ellis puts it "pop culture rolled over and died sometime ago. Some people actually think Marilyn Manson is scary, that Kurt Cobain actually had something to do with rebellion." Into this stoked pile of shit enters the the Channel Zero narrative, growing up as a student in NY prior to 9-11, Wood obsessed over the idea that Rudi Guiliano's political reign would go national, alongside a rejuvanated christian right and a bolstered imperial ambition in the contintental south -this is the world of Channel Zero. In a wave of moral hsyteria the state has introduced the Clean Act with a huge bureacucracy censoring DATA deemed dangerous to the moral and security fabric of the nation, wheat pasters are routinely shot, the American population is made suspectible to propaganda through chat shows and is ever further removed from the reality of geo-political politics.

Enter Jennie 2.5, like the main protaginist in a William Gibson novel, tattooed all over with the brands and logos that proliferate and polluate her visual horizons, she is geeked and ready to use her technical skills to undermine the whole god damn mess by hacking the TV stations and broadcasting her own anti-system propoganda. Along the way she deals with the consequences of using a mainstream medium to propogate rebellion, how politics can manifest itself as dead words in the mouths of sub-cultures and the consequences of state repression. Woods graphic design background makes a bold break with traditional comics, its stark black and white style aping the DIY photocopied seriousness laden in punk zines. Its failure is in a coherant politics, everything that is seen as against the American beast is who-haa-ed up with out any real questioning of the content. Still anyone with an interest in Cyber Punk ought to check it out.

Maus by Art Spiegelman is a two part comic which attempts to come to terms with the author's fathers experience in the Warsaw ghetto and later in the camps. The narrative contains two elements, as the cartoonist illustrates his own relationship with his rather irritant father the aged Vladek, and a history of his fathers experiences during the holocaust. Spiegelmann uses an old comic device to represent his characters, turning jews into mice, poles into pigs and germans into cats, all in an ironic nod to propoganda posters issued by the Reich during the period. The first epsiode of Maus, saw the cartoonist win the Pulitzer prize, a rather handy anecdote to throw in the face of those who willfully defy the notion that there is any intelligence in comics. The comic may not hold the same impact as a Primo Levi novel, but its purpose stands as the authors own attempt to come to grips with his family's experiences, as he navigates his own sense of identity and guilt over living in a world without the same repression, and a refusal to understand the experiences of those that survived.

Another comic that bears some similarity to Maus is Joe Sacco's Palestine, his illustrated journal of his experiences in the aforementioned occupied terroritories at the tale end of the first intifadia. Most of Sacco's experience seemed to have consisted of listening to the stories of those living in the Gaza Strip, these he illustrates with a stark dignity that brings a sense of the personal to what can often seem like an overmediated situation. As with Maus, Sacco's comic reaches out to an audience that may not neccesarily read the more weighted standards on topics that are so gravenly serious. Again, this effect can be seen in the work of Marjane Satrapi, who uses a simple comic book form in Persepolis to trudge up memories of her childhood under communist parents in a secular Iran before the revolution and the pass over to eventual fundamentalism. She is a master of the daily anecodotal, illustrating political upheavel through the prisms in which it made itself felt to her, primarily through family members and school. Her follow up volume sees her contend with exile abroad as her mind dwells on the situation at home.

Some other graphic novel authors I've yet to get around to but come highly recommended include Grant Morrison, who was responsible for revisiting the Batman series with a gothic eye for the darkness implicit in the tales of Arkham Asylum, much of his influence can be seen in the latest Batman movie. Morrison also created a series based on the adventures of the Invisibles, with the lead figure, King Mob named after the London based situationist group of the early seventies. He also riled the tabloid press in the eighties with a strip called St Swintins Day, a urban drama about a young teenager who dreams of assisinating Thatcher. Alan Moore is another British comic author who's V Is For Vendetta is about to make it on to the silverscreen, again there is meant to be a latent political content in this tale of life and resistance in a fascistic post nuclear war based Britain. Maybe its a spurning on from the cinematic wonder of Frank Miller's Sin City, but I think I can see myself being drawn into these wonderous little worlds for a period.

Labels: Art, Film, Media

# posted by antrophe @ 8:47 PM

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Friday, September 09, 2005

Someone Lost Their Junior Cert Art Project

It's meant to be bronze, but reeks of imitation plastic, if this were in papier maché and designed by a fourteen year old it might have something going for it. But as it is, it stands outside Bruxelles with all the quality of a junior cert art project that accidently made its way on to the set of "Honey I Blew Up The Kids" and got morphed seven foot upwards. The collar on it hangs on brittle and ready to be snapped, the hair has the same texture as a head of broccollii while the bass strings could be severed by rabbit headed plastic scissors. If I were the manager of Ad Lib or any of the dozens of music stores around Wicklow St, I'd be well pissed off at the prospect of faded denim rockers from the eighties leaving plecs in the bass-strings in honour of "Philo ooo Philo ooo." Every cheap ass teenager in a band's just going to be down there, pilfering them back to strum out lazy Nirvana songs while screaming at their wardrobe. Sure ya can't even see the abcesses on his bloody feet from the gear.

Labels: Art, Street Art

# posted by antrophe @ 5:03 AM

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Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Candy: A PDF Of A Magazine/This Way Up: A Wall Of A Magazine

Candy: There's no doubt that technology has hugely impacted upon the media world. Before anyone says anything, this isn't going to be one of those rants on the mangling effect of a biased corporate media on current affairs (- there i got it in anyway, says he). The PDF has long been industry standard for shipping documents intent for physical reproduction back and forth across the electronic frontier.

Off the inter-web highway and back to the terrestrial domain, stark black and white photocopies have equally been the fuck-the-industry-standard for zines of all shapes, sizes and ilks. Back in the day, one way of judging the health of a music scene, was through gauging the producer/consumer ratio through counting the number of fan-zines knocking about. This all changed when the net and the use of bulliten boards on line created a ready made form of distribution and a forum for obsession. Over at Backlash there has been a marriage of these new technologies in the production of Richard Seabrooke’s Candy - a magazine designed like one heading for the printers but distributed directly into your email address. An online zine, for you to print off DIY desktop stylee. The advantages of this are obvious.

While on web forums you have to wade through endless amounts of clique based in-jokes, other people with crap humour and the tiresome guilt of just lurking and not contributing,. Then there's the pain of static pages which never change. By the time they do, you've lost interest. Candy is the best of the web, with the option of printing it off on your desktop for viewing straddled across the toilet. Cost-free the designers can wank off to their hearts content with full colour exposure of their ideas, and no requirement to chase ads. If the thing gets a readership base, and there's a rumour 2,000 people already subsribe, it has a ready made format to chase up the ads with.

Aside all that is the magazine worth your "right click save as"? There's been two so far. With the first topping the second in quality. With roots somewhere within the regular nights organised by Backlash in Wax (I'm guessing kids, they give the mag it's webspace....) it betrays something about self-perception within that particular zeitgeist. Unfortunately, without being a cruel auld wench, like Mongrel I’m divided -design and the means of production are the best thing this magazine has going for it - no doubt. As with content, it gives some insight into what you can expect Totally Dublin to be covering three months down the line.

It lazily tries to come to grips with street art by harpering on about Asbestos and by cuting and pasting the front of his webpage in to the mag. It does have some really beautiful spreads on graphic design. Something to relish when its coming for free and without any of the industry jargon you get in mags like Computer Arts. Musically its focus is more Electric Picnic and Sonar than Witness or whatever the hell the kids are calling it now. I have to hold back: this magazines is the work of one bloke, and while it totally apes the trend of publications like Mongrel. It is beautifully designed, and as a testament to the interests and loves of one head, then it gets a props from me. The next issue hits the Backlash site mid September.

This Way Up: Another crowd who are doing themselves no favours with a shoddy web presence but really can be said to have their finger firmly stuck on the pulse of Dublin are This Way Up! Coming from somewhere out of the Blackfortmileu (who recently put on Planet Mu's excellent Chevron to a moribund Eamon Doran crowd) they take the aesthetic of street art and apply it to a comic strip. I fell in love with this from the off - their logo is a stencilled series of arrows around a circle, which can be seen graffitied in the Liberties. The second cover was perhaps the best representation of Dublin I've seen graphically in sometime, as several shades of black and white cranes tower over a defeated Georgian landscape. All framed in a mucky burnt orange flower print wall paper from your granny’s parlour. Inside its common to find ICN scrawled on every wall in the background. The Ha’penny Bridge is out and the garden at St Pats gets a look in once when a character is coming down from mushies, other Dublin city tourist spots are similarly resigned to debauched splendour.

The idea behind the comic is unique. A cabal of street artists, graphic designers and illustrators all agree collectively on a plot line and then take separate responsibility for illustrating various parts of the script. This mag just drives me the compulsive belief that working for a corporation design wise is equivalent to sucking Medici or the church's cock medieval style, or fawning over bourgeoisie wedding scenes in the 17^th Century - shit happens - if you produce things like this by night, then fair play. Record stores have always been the best art galleries anyway.

The magazine is chocker full of advertisements, with Tiger beer again playing a special role in prompting the solvency of an edgy Dublin art project. There are other ads from All City, purveyors of spray paint and on the run markers to the Dublin tagging scene, Red Ink the local anarcho bookstore gets a look in as do such regular sponsors as the Hemp Store. Just goes to show that even the oddest of ideas can get financial backing in a city seemingly enamoured with bohemia.

The characters are life-like. A white bearded old miscreant James haunts the old scenes of the city, where tourists stalk. He's like some escapee from Joyce's notes that will never make it into the hands of David Norris. The illustrations that frame his day achingly betray his perception of reality lost as he is in the past, plodding around the tourist brochure style colour pencil drawings of popular landmarks. There's Jimmy: who has scored his ideal job as a postie and sweeps through the city at night on his bike, home to his pirate radio fantasies and beautiful dreamscapes. There's Declan the pirate radio engineer, reminiscing about the first RTS in Dublin in 2002. The design itself drops back and forth from playful Photoshop driven filtered photos and cut n pastes, to stark black and white charcoal. The continuous changing of the guard when it comes to design has left quite a few rather baffled about what’s going on with the script - but stick with it, its well worth it.

Candy is available for download at http://backlash.ie/candy.html while This Way Up can be picked up in the usual spots like Lasar on Georges St or similar haunts. If its too late try your best at http://things.vm.bytemark.co.uk/~thiswayup/index.html

Labels: Art, Internet, Media

# posted by antrophe @ 5:35 AM

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