Secret places

Steve McCurry

New Orleans

Jack Tilson

The Virgin Suicides

David Wojnarowicz

Beautiful Images

Dali by Philippe Halsman (1951)

Natalie Wood and Robert Wagner, Motion Picture magazine (1957)

Julie Christie and Omar Sharif in Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1965)

London 1960s

Free Huey Newton, Black Panther Rally
San Francisco, May 1, 1969

Princess Maragret

Wedding party at Princess Maragaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones (1960)

Princess Maragret

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, film stills from Cleopatra (1963)

Audrey Hephburn, Grace Kelly backstage at the 1956 Oscars

Audrey Hephburn- Funny face

Serge Gainsbourg and France Gall

Josephine Baker

Jazz age beauty

Jack nicholson and Angelica Houston by Klaus Lucka von Zelberschwecht

Jack Nicholson and Angelica Houston at Marisa Berenson's wedding in 1975

By Bob Colacello

Image by Lord Snowdon.

Pat Booth by by Harri Peccinotti

for Pirelli Calendar, 1968

R.I.P. Gil Scott Heron x

MAY ISSUE: JOE WORLEY

Sometimes I think that objects I see on a regular basis don't make any sense until I can't see them anymore, like the pieces of a puzzle have clicked together long after I've discarded the game. This is how I feel about Joe Worley's sculptural work Aseptic Miura Faraday Shelter. Worley has meticulously cleaned, joined, and folded 216 soy milk tetra packs together to create a silver tent, large enough for at least one occupant. The work was originally shown in a makeshift gallery, hanging from the ceiling, alongside photo shopped images of the tent in settings more fitting for the work, such as the Waihopai satellite communications base.

Upon first seeing the completed work I was impressed by the care and labour which was evident in the piece. Worley has stated that Aseptic Miura Faraday Shelter is mainly about paranoia and mental illness. The folds in the silver soy milk cartons are designed to scatter satellite beams in different directions, making the tent safe from real or imagined forces, and the cartons are indestructible and capable of keeping it's contents at a controlled temperature. So, in theory, the Aseptic Miura Faraday Shelter would allow its occupant to remain undetected by thermal imaging and radio waves. At the time of the work first being exhibited, I saw it as both industrial and futuristic, but the simple idea of the work managed to elude me. This is not a criticism of the piece at all, but instead a vague overview on my behalf. Having seen the work regularly as it was being crafted almost took away from the impact of seeing the final product. It is only recently that I can see the work in a different light- it does not seem industrial anymore, nor does it seem futuristic, instead I find the idea of a collapsible, portable, and, most importantly, undetectable nomadic home to be incredibly comforting. The thought which has gone in to making the Aseptic Miura Faraday Shelter so wholly imperceptible through form and material has resulted in a work which provides the dweller, or, in my case, the viewer, with a sense of mitigation without employing any trappings of cliched comfort.

By Jane McEntyre

MAY COVER

LAUNCH PARTY NUMBER 2. 29TH APRIL 2011 SAMMYS

FEATURING: NICOLE VAN VURREN, MR BISCUITS, ORIGIN, HEKA, THE DOYLEYS

APRIL ISSUE: ANDY MCCREDY

APRIL ISSUE: MAGIC TRICKS + CHARLIE SHEEN

APRIL ISSUE: YAYOI KUSAMA INTERVIEW

Today I am interviewing Dots Obsession, a piece by Yayoi Kusama, an artist renowned for her use of recurring patterns and environmental experimentations. The work consists of a bright yellow room, covered in black polka dots, containing a number of large vinyl balloons in the same pattern. I enter the Wellington Art Gallery with some measure of trepidation. After all, how does one interview an inflatable vinyl environment? Will I stand on its face when I enter the room? Where do I look?

Marrow: ... hello?

Dots Obsession: [a booming sound gradually starts to fill up the space] ... Hello.

M: I’m sorry, did I wake you?

DO: Yes. But no matter. Please sit.

M: What can you tell me about yourself?

DO: Polka-dots is where it all started, I am one of the many products of Yayoi’s obsession with her visions.

M: Many say you remind them of their childhood, the imagination of that time. Is this your experience?

DO: Oh yes. This bright yellow and bold pattern are evocative of children’s playthings, clothing and so on. The fact that I comprise an entire environment in this pattern also transports the viewer in an imaginative and playful way. For children the experience is doubly magnified. But everyone is a child really. We do not grow up but only learn how to act more appropriately in public. Yayoi did not want me to be about politics or money, an ‘art as hard as diamonds’, as she would say.

M: I understand Kusama rejected all labels, yet her work still fits within many 20^th-century movements such as Surrealism, Pop Art, Abstract Expressionism , and Minimalism. What is your take on this?

DO: I am a manifestation of Yayoi’s sub-conscious. Her brain contains many aberrations as a result of childhood abuse and the social context of World War Two and its lingering effects in Japan. It has produced beautiful and surreal results. The ultimate result is intensely personal and distinguishable from other work.

M: Can you give me an example?

DO: Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show. A boat covered in protruding stuffed phalli sits in the middle of a room, the walls covered in posters featuring the same boat. This was a counterpoint to Andy Warhol’s Cow Wallpaper. An assertion of the real over the fake, the original over the facsimile. Her earlier work had a distinctly handmade feel, an imperfection distinguishable from the systematic and mechanical productions of Minimalism and Nouvelle Tendence. This has changed with time. I am not handmade. But it is pedantic to focus on categorisations rather than visceral sensations. To which approach did you lean in entering me?

M: You make a relevant point. But given her success, can it really be said she was that mad?

DO: What is madness? Living on the edge of existence? Oh, yes. But she was clever.

M: How so?

DO: She understood the machinations of the human mind. Our desire to be obliterated. Our compulsion to stereotype.

M: Can you give me an example?

DO: Wearing a witch’s hat and sorcerer’s robes in my pattern in her older age. The photo of her lying naked on her stuffed phalli couch in her twenties. She acknowledges stereotypes at the same time as using them to her advantage, thus manipulating our entire system of categorisation.

M: What do you think of Kusama’s stuffed phalli Accumulations?

DO: A reaction to a male-dominated art world. Phalli taking over stereotypically female articles, phalli dominating all. In Yayoi’s repetition she can make banal and ordinary what was once sacred.

M: You mention Kusama a lot, how do you feel about her?

DO: I am Yayoi destroyed and reincarnated. It is not a question of emotion but of being. I accept my nature as an extension of her madness and do not feel anything in regards to this fact.

M: How then does her work relate to the viewer?

DO: I can feel that you want to intellectualise this experience but you must try to forget yourself. Forget the personality you have constructed for yourself, lose yourself in me. The human tendency is to normalise the experience of living. It becomes mundane and everyday, task after task - this is the only way most people can see to cope with the absurdity of existence. In her madness Yayoi understood something of this and I am this realisation - a conception of infinity, eternal time, absolute space, but connected like these polka-dots. We are all mad here. It is simply that most people will do anything to avoid this fact, rather than face self-obliteration.

M: What do you mean by self-obliteration?

DO: Fully accepting and experiencing the truth that we know nothing. Where did we come from? Why? What for? The fact that the earth is just one polka-dot in an infinite space of polka-dots. The fact that we will ultimately die. Even I will deteriorate into nothingness. It is a terrifying realisation. But we also come to better appreciate the mystery that is life and to understand freedom and adventure, daring to do something, to speak, to dance, to talk to each other, to be naked like the performers in Yayoi’s Naked Happenings. It is liberation.

M: Damien Hirst interviewed Kusama in 1998 (coincidentally we’ve also interviewed his The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living who also discussed death and related issues). You talk of liberation but in that interview it seemed as though she wasn’t very happy in her old age. Quite lonely in fact.

DO: It is true. Yayoi was always an outsider. But like she says, loneliness is a matter of perspective and cured with the passage of time. But I never said this wasn’t complex.

With that our time is up. I thank Dots Obsession and leave feeling an affinity with this strange work. It’s hard to know how to exist, what moral choices to make. But speaking with Dots Obsession, I feel a beautiful perspective. I hope I can remember that.

Interview by Kari Schmidt

COVER APRIL ISSUE

COVER MARCH ISSUE

MARCH ISSUE

MARCH ISSUE: STRENGTH THROUGH DIFFERENCE THE MALLEABILITY OF HUMAN RIGHTS, EXERT OF AN ESSAY BY BEN CRAVEN

Are human rights a fiction of modern, western liberal democracies that bring us no closer to a shared ethical framework?

Human rights, especially human rights abuses, are often talked about in western media. The term itself can mean different things to different people. This essay will seek to argue that human rights are a fiction of modern, western liberal democracies and that it is in our best interests to not come to a shared ethical framework, even if this were possible. It will also prove that human rights are detrimental to cultural diversity and that their foundations are deeply infused with Christian undertones, making them unappealing, imperialistic and alien to many peoples and cultures. This essay will first cover and critique the Liberal doctrine of John Locke, then assess the significance Christianity has played on the emergence and evolution of human rights. The latter part of this essay will assess contemporary and historical issues to enforce the thesis statement, from diverse areas such as; the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, US foreign policy in regards to the Armenian Genocide and the evolution of Buddhism and eventual emergence of Zen Buddhism in China.

John Locke is credited with being one of the founding fathers of Liberalism, through this he was also an instrumental character in the formation of human rights and the fiction thereof. An avid admirer of Euclid and his axioms, Locke attempted to establish his own in regards to political philosophy, coming to the self-evident axiom “Where there is no property, there is no injustice”.[1] Locke believed that injustices stemmed from individuals in the State of Nature and in subsequent political communities encroaching on another’s property rights. For him, a right to property, along with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were to be seen as being intrinsic, inalienable rights of every individual.[2] Locke’s emphasis on the rights of the individual was instrumental in founding the modern fiction of western human rights. However, Locke’s philosophy was drastically influenced by the current political and social climate at the time. During the time that Locke wrote his works of political philosophy, there was a mass emigration of people out of Europe heading towards the New World.[3] Critics of Locke argue that his philosophy of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness extended only to men of European extraction and that Locke would not have dreamed of the same liberties being given to women and blacks. Furthermore, it is argued that Locke believed that his theory of property rights extended to include slaves held in bondage.[4] Locke, therefore, though traditionally held to be a revolutionary force against the monarchs of the Old World, could be viewed as leading a populist movement – his target audience being comprised of industrious white men with high ambitions of becoming successful upon making it to the New World. Such a claim is not without merit, as Locke, amongst other theorists can be linked to the intellectual background to the United States Declaration of Independence.

---

[1] Patricia Sheridan, Locke: A Guide for the Perplexed, (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 88

[2] Shelley Wright, International Human Rights, Decolonisation and Globalisation. Becoming Human. (Routlege, 2001), P27

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

MARCH ISSUE: JESSIE ROBERTSON

MARCH ISSUE: JANE MCENTYRE

Wikileaks cable

The Wikileaks cables
ISSUE WHAT WE LEARNED KEY QUOTE READ MORE
Afghanistan

Concern among the US and other foreign officials over the fitness of President Karzai to govern.
"[Karzai is] a paranoid and weak individual unfamiliar with the basics of nation-building."
July 2009 cable published by the Guardian
China

The US urged China to stop a shipment of missile components from North Korea to Iran in 2007, and also expressed concern over Chinese computer hacking.
"The best way to prevent these shipments in the future is for Chinese authorities to take action."
November 2007 cable released by the Guardian
Germany

In 2004, a German citizen was snatched in Macedonia and allegedly taken to a secret prison by the CIA. In a separate cable Chancellor Angela Merkel is labelled "Risk averse and rarely creative".
"Our intention was not to
threaten ... but rather to urge that the German Government weigh carefully implications for relations with the US."
June 2007 cable from the US embassy in Berlin concerning the CIA row
Iran

A number of Arab leaders called on the US to attack Iran to stop its suspected nuclear weapons programme. President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad is also referred to as "Hitler" by the UAE defence minister. In a cable from April 2008 the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Adel al-Jubeir, recalled King Abdullah's "frequent exhortations" to the US to attack Iran.
"[King Hamad of Bahrain] argued
forcefully for taking action to terminate their nuclear program, by whatever means necessary."
November 2009 cable details Arab views on Iran, published by the New York Times.
Italy

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi is described as "feckless and vain" and had profited from a "nefarious connection" with Russian PM Vladimir Putin.
"Berlusconi admires Putin's macho, decisive, and authoritarian governing style, which the Italian PM believes matches his own."
January 2009 cable speculates on the relationship between Berlusconi and Putin published by the New York Times.
Libya

Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi relies heavily on his long-time Ukrainian nurse, described as a "voluptuous blonde".
"Gadaffi has been described as both mercurial and eccentric, and our recent first-hand experiences
with him demonstrated the truth of both characterisations."
September 2009 cable on Gadaffi published by the New York Times
North and South Korea

China was becoming frustrated with North Korea's behaviour and was coming round to the view that the Korean peninsula should be reunified under Seoul's control in the long term. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il is described by US diplomats as a "flabby old chap".
"We need to solve this problem. It is very troublesome," China's ambassador to Kazakhstan told the Americans.
June 2009 cable published by The Guardian
Mexico

The Mexican army was failing in its fight against drugs cartels.
"Mexican security institutions are often locked in competition... information is closely guarded, and joint operations are all but unheard of."
January 2009 cable published by The Guardian
Pakistan

US and British diplomats feared that Pakistan's nuclear material could fall into terrorists' hands and that the US had been trying to remove highly enriched uranium from a research facility since 2007.
"The UK has deep concerns about the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear weapons."
September 2009 cable published by the Guardian
Russia

The country is descibed as being a corrupt, autocratic kleptocracy centred on the Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. A separate cable describes President Medvedev as "Robin" to Putin's "Batman".
"[Spanish prosecutor Jose 'Pepe' Grinda Gonzalez] stated that he considers Belarus, Chechnya and Russia to be virtual 'mafia states'."
February 2010 cable published by the Guardian
Saudi Arabia

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warns that donors in Saudi Arabia are the "most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide".
"More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources, often during Hajj and Ramadan."
December 2009 cable published by the Guardian
Spain

Embassy claims Rolls-Royce lost out on a key contract with the Spanish military following lobbying of Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero by Washington.
"Moncloa - the office of the President - overturned the decision and it was announced that GE had won the bid. The Ambassador is convinced that Zapatero personally intervened in the case in favor of GE."
Cable published by the Guardian
Sri Lanka

President Mahinda Rajapaksa was responsible for alleged war crimes, according to a January 2010 cable sent by the US ambassador.
"There are no examples we know of a regime undertaking investigations of its own troops or senior officials for war crimes while in power."
January 2010 cable published by the Guardian
UK

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was perceived to be "finished" by US diplomats in summer 2008, while the UK also kept quiet about a loophole allowing the US to continue storing cluster bombs on its territory despite an international ban.
"A terrible by-election defeat in Scotland has left the Labour Party reeling and fuelled fears among MPs that Brown's premiership may now be beyond repair."
July 2008 cable published by the Guardian
UK - Royal Family

The Duke of York criticised the Serious Fraud Office probe of an arms deal between BAE and Saudi Arabia and spoke in a rude manner during an official engagement.
"[Prince Andrew] railed at British anti-corruption investigators, who had had the 'idiocy' of almost scuttling the Al-Yamama deal with Saudi Arabia."
October 2008 cable published by the Guardian
United Nations

Diplomats were instructed under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's name to collect DNA samples, fingerprints and credit card details of key UN officials.
"Reporting officers should include as much of the following information as possible... organizational titles; names, position titles and other information on business cards; numbers of telephones, cell phones, pagers and faxes; compendia of contact information."
July 2009 cable on UN espionage published by the Guardian
United States

US State Department asks US missions for list of key facilities around the world it describes as vital to its national security and provides 2008 list.
"BAE Systems (Operations) Ltd., Preston, Lancashire, United Kingdom: Critical to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter..."
February 2009 cable published by Wikileaks