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.

Escape2NY Festival 2011 © photo Kisa Lala

Escape2NY Festival 2011 © photo Kisa Lala

The festivals offer a chance to dress with imagination, but unlike the dressier Carnivals, masked parades and Halloween Balls, in these summery arenas, there’s more of the Byronseque aesthetic of the casual nomad.

Escape2NY Festival 2011 © photo Kisa Lala

Alison Lucek at Escape2NY Festival 2011 © photo Kisa Lala

© Iain McKell - “The New Gypsies” (Prestel)

Glastonbury Photos by Andrew and Joey Allcock © Glastonbury 2011

The festivals have archives that keep a record of spectacles from past years:
The Escape2NY festival
Glastonbury Festival
Burning Man
Festival in the Desert
Afrikaburn Festival

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.

Romanian Women © Photo Kisa Lala

The Romanies or Gypsies, were nomadic tribes that migrated from central India, probably Rajasthan during medieval times. I am told that the word Gypsy comes from the Greek for “Egyptian.” But their clans are frowned upon in cities because Gypsies are forever outsiders – much like the Jews were made pariahs for praying to a different god.

A silver Gypsy house Romania - © Photo Kisa Lala 2011

Rajasthani Women © Photo Kisa Lala

Walk anywhere in a straight line and pretty soon you will cross a gate, a fence, a road or come to the end of a field and reach the beginning of a town. It is hard to get lost when every inch of soil is mapped and watched through the cross-hairs of Google earth. Like the pirates of the seas, the Gypsies claim the right to rove. Walking on land means a series of roads followed by border crossings that only birds may ignore, because they perch wherever they land. The Gypsies have learned to do the same.

© Patrick Cariou - Gypsies - powerHouse Books

© Iain McKell - “The New Gypsies” (Prestel)

Some books out recently that explore Gypsy style are Patrick Cariou “Gypsies” that retraces the migration of the Romany people from India, and Iain McKell’s “The New Gypsies” inspired by the British fringe cult whose members are known as “horsedrawns,” who eschew modern city life and thrive as intercity nomads.

Varvara a Romanian woman lives off the land in ramshackle cottage - © Photo Kisa Lala 2011

Romanian Farmer © Photo Kisa Lala 2011

A Rajasthani woman cooking- © Photo Kisa Lala 2011

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.

Ashley Bickerton, Untitled 2006 mixed media collage on wood LM9930

Ashley Bickerton in front of Red Scooter Nocturne, at Lehmann Maupin, New York, photo: Kisa Lala

In this new world the white man’s vision of romantic primitivism is taken for a spin by the dragon-lady’s daughter. There’s no victim or seducer in this tango. The garlanded belles belie their dark junkie sides. Bickerton parodies the tropes of island-exotica, unlike the other Tahitian tourist, the ‘syphilitic sarong-wearing euro-trash degenerate’ painter who we won’t make gratuitous mentions of here. “I live in a far too complicated world down there. Tourists aren’t western or eastern. It’s not the time of Kipling anymore. My kids are different races.”

It’s not the world of Raffles or Maugham and martinis in Macao either. With two wayward teens, he’s peeked into the wild side. “It’s terrifying down there. A friend of mine sent me a text on the kind of drugs they were taking, a popular concoction was Xanax, Red bull, vodka and some sort of ephedrine or something,” recalled Bickerton, describing the elixir du jour.

Ashley Bickerton, TITNW7, 2010-2011, in “Nocturnes,” May, 2011, Lehmann Maupin, New York

Ashley Bickerton, Preparation with Green Sky, 2010, Lehmann Maupin, New York

But far be it for me to suggest some of his characters look like they are plugged into life through something special; speed freaks in a neon-scripted wasteland-wonderland. “It’s like an Edith Piaf song – and she’s wailing away and it’s beautiful and mysterious and evocative, and suddenly you go online and try to translate it into English, and it’s like, ooh baby, baby, yeah, I miss you baby, and you go, oh god…” And I don’t want to know what things mean. I don’t want to know what my own work means. If it gets nailed down in fluourescent lights on a white formica slab in the lab, it’s no longer art, it’s science. Art has to somehow flitter in the half-light, in a sort of phantasm, just out of reach.”

Some of the paintings scream with hallucinatory midnight psychoses, motifs replay in acid-laced colours like a buried rant hard to dislodge. They can be humorous and terrifying. Or they are excessive and compulsive, voluptuous and fecund like the erotic carvings on Indian temples. They are on sensuous overload like in his new series of tactile nighttime paintings, Nocturnes, which feel like an immersion in a nightclub.

“I don’t really want to know if these kids are tricking or are on drugs. Probably. They’re too young. Decidedly too young. I don’t know if they’re street urchins selling themselves, or if they’re middle-class adventurers just out on a tear. I do know that I love all those pictures from Woodstock or Burning Man festivals where people step outside their daily lives. End up covered in mud, or crap, standing around smiling with their arms around each other.” The exuberance of pigments in the Indian festival of Holi is another inspiration. It’s tribalistic, it’s organic; it’s a stepping into the earth.

Ashley Bickerton, Yellow Canoe, 2010, Lehmann Maupin, New York

Ashley Bickerton photographed at his studio in Bali by Bobby Fisher, 2011

Ashley Bickerton photographed in Bali by Bobby Fisher, 2011. Fisher says, Bickerton's process was open and frenzied, that he was 'barefoot, manic, concentrated'.

I imagined it was stunning at his cottage near the Bukit peninsula in Bali…?

“The thing is I don’t go anywhere because of traffic.” He tells me that the surf is good, but his wave is now a mecca for tourists.

Surfing is still an inspiration and Bickerton celebrates the pomp and ostentation of stickers and tagging that glorify surfboards. But apart from the crafted frames there isn’t any reference in his newer works to the natural side of Bali. It’s more human ephemera. “Well, this is National Geographic!” he quips. “I get asked about the indigenous material I put it on – for me all that Bali chachka tourist stuff, is just that – it’s bombast, hyperbole.”

Bickerton’s art is figurative and digs deep in emotional gore; it’s a swan dive from the en-vogue asceticism of contemporary art, and he suggests a kind of inversion of Allan McCollum’s spartan aesthetic with his paintings spilling over in visual diarrhea onto his driftwood styled, logo-pocked frames. Working with clay is enjoyable because it is earthy and fecal. “When I’m making frames, it is all sweat because it’s all done in clay. I make holes in the clay, [he shows me it’s done with one finger or a double finger] and funnily, my assistant was helping…and then the maid came in – we were bent over sweating…”

“There’s something physically sexual about pudendas and holes,” he explains to me. If you are grabbing a Bickerton frame you may well find your fingers in a compromising position.

Bickerton, Bickerton, Bickerton scream the tattooed, tagged sex-charged women with fetishized skins stamped like LV hand luggage. “These girls are hybrids, with complete Bickerton logos all over. Stamped chattel. I like it because it’s so wrong. I like the belief that I could be wrong and that my whole life could be wrong. But if you know what you’re doing, and you are unabashedly wrong in so many ways, then you are actually stimulating dialogue as opposed to just being an asshole.”

“It goes back to my 80s work,” he explains, referencing earlier works where he suggested the value of art is often set by the mystique of its author. “The time and place it’s made. Picasso 1914 has a certain value – doesn’t really matter whether you have a bad piece by a major artist and a good piece by a not-so-well-known artist. The name branding thing, it’s been taken to it’s extreme with the Koons-Murakami-Hirst phenomena in the last decade or so.”

Ashley Bickerton, Red Scooter Nocturne, 2010-2011, in “Nocturnes,” May, 2011, at Lehmann Maupin, New York

Bickerton’s alter-ego is the blue-man. Once he was his own model for the ‘blue man’, he now uses a heftier muse, Jimbo Pellegrine, who projects a mental-state of intoxicating danger and glee.

I wondered, why have a fixed character at all? It’s once removed from a purely autobiographical gesture. When Genet describes his longing for a lush piece of ass, his words drip with undisguised lust. But Bickerton deconstructs desire, and for him it represents, “The twentieth century man, escapee from the future, an existential anti-hero…loaded with clichés in his Picasso shirt.” This debauched character absorbs all the occidental stereotypes that had been the elephant in the room. Literally so, this big bundle of bacchanalian excess, his new muse, at 350 lbs, also happens to be a graceful surfer. “I was playing a role, he doesn’t have to. He is bent.” Surprised that he could stay float on the board I had to check him out. Watch him surf a tube here:

Bickerton sets up the scene, paints their bodies then stitches it back into another reality in Photoshop. It’s a painting of sculpture. The bimboesque girls with bouncy-butts are flavours of the exotic orient, the two entwined in an amoral tryst. “Did I get her face right? I spent a long time in photoshop – it’s not fear. I wanted a bit of apprehension. A bit of like, where is this going to lead? Naughty excitement.”

Anti-septic steroid-driven porn pushed by western internet media can make its way even into a Masai’s hut. I ask Bickerton if he is exploring the difference in the way these two people approach sexuality. “I am very interested in the meeting of those two worlds. The clashes. The worlds cannot mix in so many ways but when it comes to sexuality and money they dive deep into each other,” says Bickerton. He says of Paul Theroux’s The Elephanta Suites “He always brings sexuality into it, and how it’s complicated by other cultures. What mixes and what doesn’t and the possible misinterpretations. He might have a more moral reading, although maybe not…”

“I went down to Pattaya to shoot,” Bickerton recalls, “I basically shot every neon sign in Thailand. The most dense-packed tawdry low-budget neon alleys from hell – one giant eleven km long monument to mid-life crises. Hairy-armed old farts in their singlets bent over their beers at ten in the morning with an ageing, over-the-shelf tart bouncing on their knee. I forced myself to stay – I hated Pattaya passionately. On the other hand I liked Bangkok.”

He pauses, musing about the way it might be read, and adds, “I am not a documentarian, I did not capture these people about to do it; it’s a set up. It’s a picture, it’s humour.” He continues with a wicked grin, “I am completely amoral. How can it be wrong, when it’s so funny?”

Ashley Bickerton in front of FITNW3, From 'Nocturnes', 2011, photo: Kisa Lala

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.

My uncle had been a photographer from the NY Times so I was exposed to the greats – André Kertész, Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange, Irving Penn. One of my favourite photographers of all time is Sally Mann. And then there is Richard Billingham and Wolfgang Tillmans.

My uncle and all the professional photographers all focused on craft – shooting medium to large format, producing huge beautiful, b&w archival prints. And then Wolfgang Tillmans showed me that it’s nice to have craft but a quick shot on an instamatic can at times have more emotional weight and resonance than a flawlessly produced archival print.

Some people just like their stick-shift cars rather than automatics.

I was brought up very formally studying classical music & music theory and I discovered punk rock. Sometimes emotion is best explored with well-trained orchestra and sometimes it’s best expressed by a crazy kid with a guitar and sampler.

Sometimes craft can be an impediment to the impact of the work, where a photographer desperately wants to pay attention to the craft and the subject can be platitudinal and trite, and the craft is amazing.

Moby - Destroyed, hotel room - i live in hotel rooms. they are functional. they are also almost

Moby, who was born on 148th Street, will be leaving the cramped quarters of the island of Manhattan to move into his spacious new home in Los Angeles. He is tired of hedge fund managers as neighbours and in Los Angeles he would have weird musicians and artists around him. “New York has priced out every body, unless someone is a hedge-fund manager, or a European heiress… A lot of artists are realizing that if they stay in NY they will be able to rent 400 sq feet in East NY and pay $1500, or go to Los Angeles where they can get a big studio for very little money and make bigger art…” One might have to make a little more effort at finding the beauty and inspiration in Los Angeles but while Hollywood can be grimy, the outskirts are spectacularly beautiful, he says. He tells me he had just read a piece of statistic that said London has 5000 acres of parkland. NYC 28,000 acres, (mainly by the airport I find out, incredulously). Los Angeles has 2,700,000 acres of parkland.

“When I came back to NY, my knee-jerk reaction was to email my friends and say, hey, I’m home but, as I was writing home, I thought oh, it’s not home anymore.”

Moby - Destroyed, perth this was a few days after new years eve, but it felt as if new years eve had lasted for weeks.

Signed copies of the book will be available at Clic Gallery, 255 Centre Steet, NYC. To preorder call: 212.966.2766.

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).

Moby - Destroyed, london actually, maybe it’s switzerland. or paris. i don’t actually remem- ber. i like tunnels.

Moby - Destroyed - new york there was this little sign in this weird hallway. it said ‘unattend- ed luggage will be destroyed’, but one word at a time.

We talked in his small studio in Manhattan about his feelings of space, and got seriously chatting about philosophy, until he realized he’d been nodding his woolen finger puppet at me for some time. I liked the woolly wagging alter-ego, but he puts it away.

Works on transience and transient places have been made by other artists. I think of the images Nobuyoshi Araki took of the sky from the same window every morning for 365 days after his wife died. Of Eno’s music for airports, of Charlie Watts’ hotel room sketches, of Alain deBotton’s airport project.

KL: This book to me is about interstitial spaces.

Moby: It’s a series of repetitive juxtapositions – between very crowded spaces and empty spaces. The crowded spaces make me nervous and the empty spaces fill me with comfort and peace.

Everybody takes airplane pictures. It’s sort of banal mundane photography… One of the things I like about art is to see the miraculous and the strange in the common place. And also, see the mundane in what should ostensibly be remarkable.

A picture from the airplane is a view of the earth that was impossible to have up until 80 years ago. Now people take it for granted. Oh, everyone knows what the earth looks like from 40,000 feet. The earth has been around for five and a half billion years…But almost no species has looked at the earth from 40,000 feet till 80 years ago, birds don’t fly that high.

Is loneliness a factor of touring?
It’s partly a product of growing up as an only child. I live alone and work alone. I have a general tendency towards isolation. I find that a certain degree of comfort in isolation as well. A journalist in Europe found the crowd pictures really exciting and the empty pictures disconcerting.

The crowd pictures freak me out a little bit. And the empty pictures feel calm, they breathe.

We focus on the connection points in human societies that get one from point A to B the ports of destinations. The gaps are unaccounted for.

I really love the original Taoist texts. I started reading them – I had a crush on a woman when I was 15, and I wanted her to like me so I thought I’d be into Taoism. My crush waned but my interest in the original Taoist texts remained.

It was a central component of original Taoist thought. There is more wisdom and more potential for transcendence in the things that are ignored than the things, which we pay attention to.

Meditation is a way to partly achieve that.

The way they describe it in I Ching is to let things settle of their own accord. If there was such a thing as a Taoist icon it would be a puddle of mud in midtown on a Tuesday morning at rush hour that everybody was treading on and no one paid attention to. And there’s more potential for wisdom in that than the church or the temple nearby.

It certainly informs a lot of my world-view. By extension it would probably inform my pictures…trying to find what’s ignored.

I was a philosophy and photography major and I was doing my photography since I was ten and I wanted to focus on it; the school I went to had a darkroom where other people mixed chemicals, and that was reason enough. I hated mixing chemicals.

I had a lot interest in philosophy – but as can often happen, you can take something really interesting and subject it to rigorous academic investigation and everything interesting about it falls by the wayside. At this point I like light-hearted philosophy, I’m a dilettante philosophy student, I like Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. A little more fun and more general. But when you start getting into the metaphysics of morals, reading Kant and Schopenhauer, it’s so dense.

It’s like with music, I don’t need to take a grad student level class on counterpoint…

More Moby in Part 2 of this interview