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

Scott Campbell, Noblesse Oblige, 2011, Cut uncut US currency sheets, copper box, 21 x 25 x 18.75 inches

Tattoo artist Scott Campbell has migrated his etchings from skin to galleries – OHWOW inaugurated their new space yesterday in Los Angeles with a show of Campbell’s new work inked on the insides of ostrich eggs and stacks of paper money, using styles of vanitas imagery traditionally associated with the arena of tattooing.

Campbell, who is probably making a mint through his recent collaboration with Louis Vuitton, had enough currency on hand to carve a skull from $11,000 of uncut sheets of US dollar bills. The show, titled Nobelesse Oblige, signifies the artist’s pride in his blue-collar heritage, and plays with the idea of what is precious by removing value from social currency or placing value on the artefacts of common trade (by gold plating copper plates made with his tattoo gun).

© Scott Campbell, Courtesy of OHWOW Gallery

This Spring Campbell lent street cred to the more up-market LV luggage with delicate Asian style renderings of figurative dragons on bespoke leather bags. His collaboration though with LV began long before on the supine back of its Creative Director, Marc Jacobs on whose skin he’s etched such endearing icons as bull terriers and the face of Elizabeth Taylor.

Louis Vuitton and Scott Campbell inspirations for 2011 Spring Collection

The LV brand motif on a pig hide - © Wim Delvoye - Art Farm, Yang Zhen, 2005, 140x100-cm, tattoo on pigskin-tanned

This will be the third space opened by OHWOW founders Al Moran and Aaron Bondaroff’s following Miami and New York, where they had also opened a soho bookshop.

Scott Campbell speaks on his LV collaboration (below):

Scott Campbell, Noblesse Oblige, March 19, 2011 – April 22, 2011, OHWOW, 937 North La Cienega, Los Angeles, CA 90069

The Brooklyn Griffin, © Robots, GiantRobots.co.uk

Robots an art collective in London creates public interactive sculptures, giant robots, from recycled furniture, old wood and rejects from leftover trash that prove for them, that ‘one man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure.’ The two artists, former movie-set builders, Jimmy Bumble and Leonard White, also constructed the Brooklyn Griffin on a trip to New York last year.

Slinkachu's Relics, 2009. Photograph: Slinkachu ©Slinkachu

During all the furor over Banksy’s nomination for the Oscars (he was denied the option to show up in disguise) many street artists took to the streets of Los Angeles taking advantage of the added spotlight.

D*Face in Los Angeles, Courtesy of the Artist

© Robots, GiantRobots.co.uk

Banksy, LA Trailer - This Looks a Bit Like an Elephant

Banksy LA Trailer, This Looks a Bit Like an Elephant

Mr. Brainwash in Los Angeles: http://www.unurth.com/1009722/Mr-Brainwash-Banksy-Oscar-Los-Angeles

In London Slinkachu has been getting attention for his tiny street art sculptures. And Issac Cordial’s microcosms, sometimes overlooked in pedestrian traffic, invite people to stop and take a closer look…

Follow the Leader, from Cement Eclipses series, placed in a Hackney puddle in 2010. Photograph: Isaac Cordal ©Isaac Cordal

Phlegm @ Black/Light Gallery, London, curated by Robots

A week long event of international street artists ROA and Phlegm curated by Robots is at Black/Light in London till 5th March

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Adams Theater, Detroit

Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre met online in 2002, drawn by their love of contemporary ruins. Meffre was only aged 15 when he met Marchand, and they began visiting ruins in the suburbs of Paris to capture the lost grandeur of old movie theaters and document architecture in decline. In the beginning they took images separately, but after investing in a large format 4×5, they began their collaboration. They spoke to me recently from Paris about their photographic project, “Detroit in Ruins,” published by Steidl in 2010.

Their visions of Detroit are the record of a fallen empire. What makes the duo’s work different from Robert Polidori’s photographs of post-deluge New Orleans and Chernobyl is that their focus is not a record of the aftermath of a natural disaster but of slow decay, caused by neglect. The photographs reveal the exotic in the ordinary and observe what is overlooked: dilapidated habitations, the hidden backs of dwellings, obsolete machinery, utilities in disrepair, the absurdity of once hi-tech systems, the extravagance of architecture devoid of function. The simple poignancy of a disused dentist’s chair seems to reflect on the collective failure of a civilization to rise. But Detroit is only one of many world cities, and these images are universal in their depiction of the fragility of human empire-building.

© Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Detroit in Ruins, Ticket Lobby Michigan Central Station

© Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Detroit in Ruins, Telephone Switch Board, Fort Shelby Hotel, Detroit

Working as a team, the photographers have formed a creative bond, sharing a vision so strongly, they tend to finish each others’ sentences in conversation.

I asked, why America? It is a place where old things are replaced quickly, and still a country evolving its sense of antiquity.

“We’d been taking pictures around Paris when we saw images of Detroit,” said Meffre. “It seemed much more a world-city falling apart. In France there were smaller places – but Detroit looked like a ghost town compared with elsewhere.” It was their interest in modern decay that drew them to America. Says Meffre, “It depends on what you are looking for, Americans probably have the best architectural heritage from the 20s. That is the place where big buildings were made. Early American buildings of the 20th century are symbolic in a way you would not find anywhere else.”

In Asia and in developing countries the speed of urban renewal is much faster than in countries with slower economic climates. “Sometimes buildings are around for only 20 years before they are demolished to make something bigger,” continues Meffre, “In Detroit it is the opposite: nothing was rebuilt and very few buildings were made in the 50s – buildings remained derelict, and those that were demolished were replaced by parking lots. It is a very unusual concept of a city.”

Apart from the decline of the automobile industry, Detroit’s story is one of self-destruction that began with its policies of racial segregation. The wealthy whites migrated to the suburbs fleeing the influx of African-Americans seeking economic opportunities, creating a white noose around the increasingly poor black inner-city, choking off funding for its infrastructure and the cultural incentives it needed to survive.

The boom and bust cycles have left architectural residues – collapsing rings around Detroit’s urban sprawl. Still, we rarely let things lie as our civilization constantly looks back on its own traces, reexamining its own recorded past, too busy dissecting and foraging its own history to let things turn into relics. It is rewarding then to see that a few decades of neglect and forgetfulness can reveal such resonant windows into our past.

I asked why they thought the owners of these deserted properties had chosen to forget them. “It depends,” said Meffre, “most of the building owners in downtown are billionaires who own entire blocks. The price went too low, and there were no valuable projects. They were waiting to turn them into condos and new lofts – the owners have been waiting for 30 years…”

They cannot remain vacant forever. I imagined that they would eventually be demolished?

“It might happen in downtown Detroit within a few years,” says Marchand. “Most of the buildings we’ve been to will be converted into luxury condominiums. They try to make rich people from the suburbs move back downtown. But in other areas where they have no money for electricity and rent, they have to close the buildings. So they are sitting empty and decaying, waiting to be demolished or to fall apart.”

© Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Detroit in Ruins, Dentist Cabinet Broderick Tower

On the other hand who can complain when vast tracts of downtown Detroit are being reclaimed by nature. Like the ancient temples of Cambodia the earth always wins against the will of men. The city’s asphalt is cracking open and reverting back to prairie; foxes and deer are making malls and parking lots their new hunting grounds. The green invasion may enable a new vision for urban agriculture.

The pair do extensive research before each trip, and I had wondered how they had come across the dilapidated buildings and gained permission to enter them. “We researched from books,” says Marchand, “and also online Google maps, Bing maps; aerial views where you can find potentially closed buildings. Concerning access, we usually wait for the door to be opened by some scavenger… admits Marchand, wistfully adding that “in Detroit it was just a matter of time [before these buildings disappeared]… Even when Detroit tries to secure them, it will not stay that way for very long.”

They had a similar experience photographing old movie theaters and performance spaces: “It was not possible to modernize or renovate the big theaters. Most of them are sitting there to be developed into a concert hall or a new project but [sometimes] they are too big… In New York, Chicago Los Angeles, it is the same. A lot of them are being demolished.”

© Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Detroit in Ruins, Public Schools Book Depository, Detroit

In some ways they are modern archeologists, unearthing the forgotten splendors of the past, the abandoned and the discarded leftovers of civilization. Were they interested in going back deeper into the past, to photograph castles and mansions of old Europe?

“Sometimes we go back earlier to the 19th century,” said Meffre. And in Europe they had explored remodeled castles that went back originally to the 16th century: “It is monumental, delusional architecture. [But] we are more interested in the current epoch,” said Romain Meffre.

Though the Detroit premises are largely devoid of people, they remain stained by the lives of those that had inhabited them, which makes them more captivating than the hosed-down artifacts of museum archives. The photographers try to add notes on their histories, their architecture, and function. “We try to find pictures of the place while it was alive just to imagine how it was,” said Meffre, “there are also lots of books concerning how those places were before; and we get a lot of emails from people who tell us they used to live in these places. Quite moving.”

© Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Detroit in Ruins, Remains of blood samples, Highland Park Poilice Station, Detroit

At the Highland Park Police Station they came across blood samples and evidence from the investigation of a Detroit serial-killer who had murdered several women.

So you photograph these remnants, then leave them, and walk away?

“We try – we don’t know what happens – it is on Ebay probably right now… we can find some of the old polaroids being sold on Ebay,” they say, amused by the sudden onset of interest.

Once unearthed, photographed and published, the places are irrevocably changed, and attention can either bring the public’s awareness to the need for preservation, or it can hasten demise. “A lot of the buildings are not very cheap and we hope that some people will buy and restore them,” says Meffre. “Sometimes attempts are made, and at times it doesn’t work. As Detroit is coming back and there is international attention, people will realize maybe there is a lot of heritage buildings and some people want to preserve them – but there just is no money.”

Some of the sites seemed abandoned in a hurry, as though disaster struck mid-day, Pompeiian-style, leaving dusty closets still filled with clothes, kitchens fully stocked, the grand concert halls had suddenly emptied, laboratories appear to be deserted in the midst of experiments. One almost hopes, that like enchanted palaces, they remain buried for another thousand years, preserved as time-capsules for future treasure-hunters to break their spell.

© Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Detroit in Ruins, Laboratory-Cass Technical High School, Detroit

© Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Detroit in Ruins , Lobby Broderick Tower, Detroit

© Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, Detroit in Ruins, Old Lobby Michigan Theater, Detroit

Here is poem that resonates to me on the rise and fall of past ambitions, Shelley’s Ozymandias:

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveler from an antique land 

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear: 

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

View more photographs by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Roa on Hanbury Street, Courtesy of artist and Six Oranges

By Kiša Lala

Belgian artist Roa created one of the biggest displays of street art in Hanbury Street in East London earlier this year. The event was  filmed by Six Oranges who sponsored the artist’s work for their documentary on Brick Lane.

This week the artist had a solo show in LA at New Puppy Gallery presented by Thinkspace. The gallery show, which runs through Nov 24th, exhibits many of Roa’s creatures but the artist’s work is best viewed in the urbanscape, in places like Zaragoza in Spain, where he painted rabbits, crows and squirrels using the uneven textures of the walls while incorporating existing features like cables and ropes into the paintings. His work can be seen on abandoned buildings, billboards and warehouses in industrial suburbs of many cities like Ghent, Berlin and Brooklyn.

ROA - photo by RomanyWG - Courtesy of Pure Evil

Roa in Zaragoza, Spain

Closing Reception: New Puppy Gallery, 2808 Elm Street in Los Angeles, Wed, Nov. 24th 6-9PM

More Pictures of Roa’s work in London can be viewed at Pure Evil Gallery and http://dearie.me/roa-14

Shepard Fairey and friends

SPREAD|Artculture magazine co-hosted a party with The Supper Club in honor of iconic artist Shepard Fairey at the H.Wood Tea Room. Party-goers were treated to bespoke Bombay Sapphire tea-based cocktails that were paired with sumptuous Indian food from Deep Sethi, owner of Bombay Palace and Nirvana in Beverly Hills.

Shepard Fairey is the founder of creative agency Studio Number One. At the after party, Studio Number One’s animated art became part of an interactive texting experience where guests were invited to text their answers to the question “The secret of happiness is…”. Answers were displayed throughout the night for everyone to see.

The Txtual Healing installation, the beautiful table setting at H.Wood Tea Room

SPREAD|Artculture Managing Editor Louisa St. Pierre, Supper Club's Tamsin Lonsdale, Amanda Fairey, and Shepard Fairey

To view more pictures from the event, visit PatrickMcMullan.com

MOCA's new director, Jeffrey Deitch

Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art has officially ended its worldwide search for a new museum director today, announcing that renowned New York gallery owner/art dealer Jeffrey Deitch would take the reins effective June 1, 2010.  Deitch stated publicly, “MOCA has an extraordinary history, and it’s my goal to position MOCA as the most innovative and influential contemporary art museum in the world. I am excited by the opportunity to play a role in making MOCA and Los Angeles the leading contemporary art destination.”

He received nods from his distinguished contemporaries, including co-board chair and co-chair of the Board’s search committee, Maria Bell. “Jeffrey Deitch is the perfect fit for MOCA New, and he has the vision and energy to make the museum the world’s preeminent contemporary arts institution. Jeffrey lives, eats, sleeps, and breathes art. He is passionate about contemporary art and is committed to the future of MOCA.”

A luminary in the contemporary art movement and curator for such artists as Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Ryan McGuinness, SPREAD ArtCulture wishes Mr. Deitch the best of luck in this endeavor.