Book of Sanskrit Animal Fables (Panchatantra) India, Rajasthan Dated Samvat 1811/1754-5 AD Sanskrit manuscript on paper
There is a vast history of animal folklore in literature, and the Pancha Tantra is one of the most ancient. Here are some images from the original book, and Walton Ford’s anecdotal stories that relate to some of his drawings from his collection that takes after the ancient tome of the same name.
By Kiša Lala
Walton Ford photographed by Bobby Fisher © Bobby Fisher, 2011 -- Arabian proverb from beginning of King Kong: 'And the Prophet said, ‘And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.'
A witty narrative of thwarted simian desire is the theme of Walton Ford’s new series of watercolor paintings at Paul Kasmin Gallery. Ford’s obsession with King Kong, the super-sized movie monster came from his childhood viewings of the 1933 cinematic tale of abduction depicting the clash of the beastly brute Kong and delicate, blonde sophisticate, famously played by Faye Wray.
The story is less Beauty and the Beast, more unrequited love akin to Nabokov’s Lolita in which Kong, the faux monster gorilla, is trapped by unnatural desire and vanity towards an act unacceptable to consummate.
In his other series, displayed like a comic strip narrative on the gallery walls, Ford returns to his earlier Audubon inspired style, depicting a scenario described in the naturalist’s journals about his pet parrot. I chatted to Ford about his new work and flipped through his past drawings in my old copy of Pancha Tantra, a collection inspired by the ancient Sanskrit book of animal fables, possibly the oldest on the planet.
Walton Ford wearing one of his collection of gorilla masks, photographed by Bobby Fisher for Spread © Bobby Fisher, 2011
I asked Ford about his inspiration behind the story of the dead parrot and masturbating monkey, and Ford explained that Audubon’s father was a ship’s Captain: “He used to bring exotic animals home to France,” recounted Ford, “Audubon himself was born out of wedlock: the Captain had a mistress in Haiti, and after Audubon was born from this mistress, the Captain brought the young boy home to his wife in France who raised Audubon.”
David Lynch, Rain
Director David Lynch was a painter before becoming more well-known for his films Eraserhead, Elephant Man and Blue Velvet, and yet Lynch sometimes referred to his earlier films as attempts to ‘make his paintings move’.
“When it comes to painting, it´s the darker things I find really beautiful. All my paintings are organic, violent comedies. They have to be violently done, and primitive and crude, and to achieve that I try to let nature paint more than I paint, and stay out of the way as much as I can. In fact, I don’t paint with a brush too much any more – I prefer to use my fingers. I’d bite them if I could,” Lynch stated in his catalogue for an exhibition in Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art.
“I never end up with what I set out to do. Whether it’s a film or a painting, I always start with a script, but I don’t ever follow it all the way through to the end….One of the reasons I prefer painting in black and white, or almost in black and white, is that if you have some shadow or darkness in the frame, then your mind can travel in there and dream.”
Here I Am - Me As a House by David Lynch - Galerie Karl Pfefferle.
Richard Dadd, Contradiction: Oberon and Titania (1854 -58)
Richard Dadd, Portrait of the artist
Richard Dadd was an English faery painter whose promising career got derailed when he had a mental breakdown after a visit to the Holy Land in 1843. The Victorian papers must have had a field day when Dadd killed his dad – murdering his father in a park with a throat razor. He fled to France, but after attempting to kill others he was put away in an asylum where he began work on a series of influential masterpieces, painted from his imagination with an obsession towards detail. Paintings such as The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke 1855-64 and Oberon and Titania (1854 -58) have inspired such artists as Octavio Paz and Sigmar Polke, and even Freddie Mercury with their fantastic, magical scenarios.
A new book Richard Dadd: The Artist and the Asylum by Nicholas Tromans explores 18th century asylums, the impact on artists’ creativity, and the remedies prescribed at Bethlem (from where the word bedlam comes).
A photo taken at Burning Man, David Art Wales 2010
Festivals have been sprouting love, peace and happiness across the planet, and some like the Festival in the Desert in the Sahara in Mali, Afrikaburn, and Burning Man which take place over several days, become watering holes for artists, musicians and a place to show off distinct styles.
Escape to New York was a festival organized in early August in South Hampton New York with installations, live music, performance art and experimental theatre. The organizers put up private teepees, suitable for glamorous camping, “glamping,” to accommodate the Hampton’s taste for sanitized partying – in contrast to the tents and wagons that spawn chaotically in the crowded fields of Glastonbury.
By Kiša Lala
Gypsy woman showing her golden smile - Romania - © Photo Kisa Lala 2011
Living on the edges of townships in the grey zones between cities, the Gypsies of Central Europe stay off the grid. Myths, rumours, lies cloud their histories for they leave few traces and heed no rules, instead, they live off the land, and sometimes they beg, thieve and steal.
Count Kalnoky tells me, that at his residence, in the village of Miklosvar in Romania, where I was staying as a guest, he was indeed wireless: the gypsies had cut the cables to fence the copper for their lawless trade.
The roving life seems romantic, but it’s not for the timid. To winter in open fields, to bed in barns, wagons, trailers means Gypsies are strong in their will to be free. They barter for work and stow their riches in silver and gold, knowing it can’t burn like paper, or vanish when people stop believing in its value. Gypsies are always on the move but when they halt, they build silvery houses, knowing if all else fails, they can just melt the metals and leave.
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By Kiša Lala
Ashley Bickerton photographed at his studio in Bali by Bobby Fisher, 2011
Ashley Bickerton has darkened his timbre after carousing the neon-lit nights of Pan-Asian hotspots. He says that he’s entered a new phase – his kids have grown, he’s newly separated, and as such, work follows life. He tells me that a while back it was filled with “Pregnant wives and giggling babies. My work was full of sun-dappled, sparkling, turquoise blue waters, beauty and optimism. And somehow, now we are in this dark neon wilderness.”
Bickerton, who has been in Bali 17 years, has for sometime been documenting that life in the nexus of tranquil beaches and rapacious megacities that spike the world’s coastlines. His art is a collision of cultures, peopled with the migrant archetypes that spawn the sun-bleached shores typical of Bahia, Goa, Ibiza, and in his backyard, their Thai and Balinese replicants. Gluttonous tribes of tourists, screaming banshees with neon skins snake across canvases splashed with iridescent colours in toxic contrast to nature’s paradisiac beaches.
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Moby photographed in his studio by Justin Hollar
Moby, Destroyed, Desert California
By Kiša Lala – Part 2 of Interview. Read Part One
The crowd pictures are not really about individual people.
Sometimes things become very familiar to us. So much so that we don’t see them, have no insight into them… I’m more drawn to places that people have created but not occupied. It’s almost like forensics, looking and then trying to understand what led humans to create these bizarre, empty, isolated places.
The last 160 years of photography, it’s safe to say that 99% of the pictures taken have been of people.
This is your first photography project?
Yes. I have made a lot of records. There is this dialectic created when you put a record out into the world. There is a relationship to the person experiencing it, because they re-present my work back to me, which enables me to see the work more clearly, and because the work is personal, it allows me to see myself with a degree of objectivity.
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By Kiša Lala
Moby photographed in his studio by Justin Hollar
Pathways connect cities, direct travelers through them. In between lies fallow earth, empty lots, desert plains. Moby’s new book captures the density of space as it expands and condenses around city centres and rarefies to the ether above. His gaze falls outside of things into places never looked at, empty sky over urban sprawls, arid lands, the foam-flecked seas, the spaces between cities where forests grow. Estranged in a metal tube afloat in space Moby’s vision seems to hover, then plummet through city ports past tunnels, terminals and paths into arenas of convulsing crowds.
A big part of the artist’s life is based on touring and he launches into another soon for his new album and book entitled Destroyed – inspired by, and created during touring (The title comes from the LED display that reads “Unattended Luggage Will be Destroyed,” which Moby snapped as it flashed up in a deserted hallway at NY’s La Guardia airport).
James Jean Shattered Analog, Tristan Eaton 3D Art Book
The Supper Club and Spread ArtCulture hosted an intimate dinner this week at Lair NYC to launch Tristan Eaton’s “3D Art Book”, featuring art by luminaries such as Shepard Fairey, Mark Ryden, Stephen Bliss, Ron English and Dalek, amongst many others.
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