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Since then he has gone onto produce artwork for Radiohead’s ‘The Bends’ (1995), ‘OK Computer’ (1997), ‘Kid A’ (2000), ‘Amnesiac’ (2001), ‘Hail To The Thief’ (2003) and all the other singles, posters, websites and merchandise. He started his career with the launch of the ‘Stanley Donwood Outdoor Gallery’ in Plymouth in 1992, painting elaborate pieces on disused buildings, avoiding retribution by studying the habits and timetables of security guards. By 1995 Stanley had designed his first website entitled ‘Binge’ which has consequently morphed and grown over the years into his current site, the Slowly Downward Manufactory, www.slowlydownward.com. His interest in the internet led him to co-ordinate one of the world’s first ‘cyber - conferences’, DIGITAL CHAOS in 1997. He was so exhausted by the experience that he made the first of many vows “never to do anything on the internet again”. An exhibition entitled NO DATA was held in 1999 at the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol. There was no exhibits except for a lengthy and bizarre questionnaire and a TV monitor which displayed a series of equally bizarre statements. In the same year Stanley wrote some very short stories which were published on circular cards encased in a circular tin entitled ‘Small Thoughts’. In 2001 ‘Slowly Downward; A collection of Miserable Stories’ was published. In 2002 Stanley wrote his second book ‘Catacombs of Terror!’, a trashy noir-exploitation detective story, that features ‘guns, drugs and pigs’. It was written as a result of a bet (£5) that he couldn’t write 50,000 words in a month. Donwood won a Grammy along with Dr Tchock in 2001 for best Packaging/Artwork for the Special Edition of Amnesiac. This gleaming token now resides in his airing cupboard along with his collection of towels. Since 2002 he has been designing teeshirts for Glastonbury Festival, album covers for Matthew Herbert’s Accidental label, and finally getting round to making screenprints for his Slowly Downward Manufactory. He had his first solo exhibition (not counting the strange NO DATA shows) in 2006 at Steve Lazarides’ gallery in Soho’s Greek Street. This exhibition was called LONDON VIEWS, the artwork for which was used for Thom Yorke’s album ‘The Eraser’. In November 2006 Stanley had an exhibition in Barcelona entitled DEAD CHILDREN PLAYING, featuring large-scale paintings produced over the previous 10 years. June 2007 – Stanley put on his second solo show at the Lazarides gallery, called IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D BE HOME BY NOW, featuring new work in the form of etchings, woodcuts and paintings. [+/-] more.. [+] Japanese profile.. |
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Shipping Containers, Southbank Centre, Extraordinary Rendition, Wallpaper.
June 19, 2008 7:53 pm
Massive Attack are curating this year’s Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre in London, between 13th & 24th June. They are working with Reprieve, a charity set up by Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who has been extremely active in exposing some of the horrendous abuses of power that have occured within the parameters of The War Against Terror. The programme of ‘extraordinary rendition’ where people are kidnapped and secretly flown to ‘black sites’ where they are tortured and held indefinitely without trial is a matter that deserves much wider public scutiny than it has recieved. I was asked if I could contribute anything to this debate. Like most people, I had heard about this, but I didn’t know a great deal about it, other than what I had read in newspapers, so I decided to do a bit of research. I bought a few books, notably Stafford Smith’s excellent ‘Bad Men’, and ‘Torture Taxi’, by Trevor Paglen and A C Thompson. I already had a copy of a superbly disturbing book about torture called ‘Inquisition’. This period of research was pretty upsetting. It’s hard to read about torture, hard to believe that people engage in it, and harder to believe that torture has apparently gained something akin to official sanction since The War Against Terror gained momentum. Of course, no government is going to admit that it tortures people. But that’s not the same as saying that it doesn’t happen. In a lot of cases, what most people consider to be torture has been redefined; a process which the book ‘Inquisition’ makes quite clear has happened repeatedly though the ages. When I had finished reading these books, I made some wallpaper for the Meltdown Festival. The letters and numbers used in the wallpaper are flight numbers from the varied aircraft used in connection with ‘extraordinary rendition’. ‘Honor bound to defend freedom’ is a motto of the prisons in U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay. The coloured squares in the background are shipping containers, which are frequently used as interrogation, incarceration and torture chambers. The image is a detail taken from ‘Shipping Containers, 2007’ by Chris Jordan. The monochrome images in the background are wrist and leg-irons, the water torture, the interrogation chair and the ‘Judas Cradle’. All of these monochrome images are taken from ‘Inquisition/ Inquisición’, a bilingual Guide to the exhibition of torture instruments from the Middle Ages to the industrial era, presented in various European cities in 1985. The Guide was written by Robert Held. I thoroughly recommend the books I’ve mentioned here. For more on Meltdown: www.southbankcentre.co.uk/festivals-series/meltdown Episode Five.
April 17, 2008 7:21 pm
In Tokyo the rain fell softly and I thought the drops landed differently to the way they do in England. In England they fall solidly and hard like water deciding to end it all. In Japan the raindrops dance on the ground, briefly, fragmenting in arabesques like the frozen waves drawn by Hokusai. Or perhaps I was suffering from the lag of time, of eight times of day flown through at high speed in a darkened aeroplane. Another time I was awake at some invisible, impossible and unknowable hour, sitting vacantly in the lobby of an hotel, listening to the distant sound of a vacuum cleaner, helpless and difting in space. I existed in some sort of reality that didn’t concur with any of the varieties I had encountered before. I ate strange things and went on foot, on underground train and in taxis to many places which confused and elated me. I think my favourite place was Asakusa, and Kappabashi-dori which was filled with cavernous establishments selling black pans and shining knives. And I think, though I’m not sure, that the Kappabashi itself is some weird sort of cartoonish turtle. To travel directly from Asakusa to Harujuku was pleasantly unremembered as I think I may have drifted off into a kind of slumber.I’m going to try to remember some more things that happened in Japan, but everything is a bit like the rain. nearly
March 26, 2008 6:41 am
Episode Four.
6:23 am
It had definitely been a good idea to sleep in the studio, despite my conviction that the place was haunted. In the hours of freezing darkness I could hear scrabbling noises; scratchings and thumps. It was, I told myself repeartedly, probably only rats. The building where my studio is located is very old and ramshackle. As far as I can discover, during its history it has been a stable, a tannery, a storehouse, a dance hall and a tea room. At night it takes on the qualities of the Overlook Hotel, where Mr Torrance went to stay in Kubrick’s film The Shining.As Spring slowly inched across the country the first flowers began to appear, but if anything the temperature fell further. I bought another heater for the studio, and wore three pairs of trousers, layered over me so I looked deformed. Things improved slowly. I held the first of a series of small parties in the studio; parties which I pretty much ignored whilst I carried on painting. I didn’t really know if having parties would help, but it certainly warmed up the studio, having a lot more human bodies in there. It was a vast improvement, in the end. Having people talking, laughing, drinking and smoking whilst we played records very loud turned out to be a way of working that I enjoyed. I can’t write with people around, but it seems that painting is another matter.The painting was, at last, going very well. There were no more technical difficulties of the sort I mentioned in Episode Two. No more of the other sort of difficulties that I can’t describe in words. Everything was going surprisingly well. Even my new asthma inhaler, the formoterol and budenoside one, seemed to be having an effect. I didn’t think I needed the familiar salbutamol inhalers so much. And I hadn’t used the beclametasone dipropionate inhaler for ages. I was quite happy about that, anyway. Beclametasone is a commonly-prescribed medication for asthma, for people who find that such things as salbutamol aren’t really ‘controlling’ their asthma. And when you’re in that kind of situation you’ll not be too bothered by the slight possibility of glaucoma, cataracts, or osteoporosis, and still less by the possibility of candidiasis.Eventually I had no option but to keep the heating on in the studio, regardless of what the electricity bill was going to be, because I intened to varnish the paintings, and to do that I had to ensure that the acrylic paint had not just dried, but had cured as well. Several days later everything was done, finished, and the paintings glowed under their shiny layers of acrylic gloss varnish. Unfortunately I only had about 48 hours to looks at them, as due to my increasing paranoia about the security of my studio I wanted to get them into boxes and delivered to the gallery in Tokyo as soon as I could. Episode 3
March 12, 2008 8:39 pm
The new canvases sat blankly in the studio, waiting for whatever horrendous disaster I would inflict upon them next. I was avidly reading a book called ROCI; Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange. Robert Rauschenberg is an artist who I admire greatly, and he had created some extraordinary work with screen printing. I hoped to be inspired by this book, but I couldn’t help being a little disturbed. Nothing ever seemed to go wrong for Mr Rauschenberg. It was all great, no viscous ropes of foul acrylic mucous besmearing his canvases. Not that he seemed to use canvas very much; it was all sheet metal and assemblages. I decided to live in my studio. It was extremely cold, but I had a blanket, a coat, and a portable heater. It was the only way that I would be able to devote enough time to the new paintings. I’d done it before, anyway; I’ve spent months painting in sheds and barns before, gradually acclimatising myself to increasingly cold weather. There would be no more ‘technical difficulties’ with solvent-based products. I had learned that particular and, in retrospect, extremely obvious lesson. The way forward was to use a completely water-based acrylic paint system. Side effects of salbutamol: fine tremor (usually hands), nervous tension, headache, peripheral vasodilation, arrhythmias, palpitations, tachycardia, sleep and behavioural disturbances… in prog…
March 7, 2008 1:18 am
Episode Two
February 26, 2008 1:42 am
Episode One
February 14, 2008 8:58 pm
編集部からのお知らせ
スタンリー・ドンウッド氏のブログが今日から始まります。 私たち phofa.net では、スタンリー氏の継続的な参加に感謝の気持ちと喜びを感じております。 (去年の10月にフィーチャー・ストーリーとしてインタビューを受けて頂いています。) 上記プロフィールに述べられていように、スタンリー氏はRadioheadとの共同ワークで有名ですが、創造的な文章を綴る優れた作家でもあります。 今後、このブログページでは、春に予定されているスタンリー氏の日本初の個展に関しての「ウラ話」が記載される予定です。(複数の“主要記事”は日本語に翻訳される予定です。) 個展までの準備作業、展示中の体験、個展後の感想などのスタンリー氏が直接綴るメッセージを満喫出来ると思います。ぜひ、ご期待ください。 From the Editor’s Desk Welcome to Stanley Donwood’s blog page. Below is his first blog entry, and we’re all excited about Stanley’s continued participation in Phofa.net (his first involvement being a featured story interview. As stated in the above profile, Stanley is well known for his collaboration with Radiohead, but he is also renowned for his creative writing skills. If his first article is any indication, we’re certain that you’ll be drawn in to Stanley’s world through his words and his visuals.In this blog page, you’ll find Stanley writing about his upcoming solo exhibit in Tokyo (Several “key” articles will be translated in to Japanese)
I LOVE THE MODERN WORLD
A show of work by Stanley Donwood Tokyo Gallery ( www.tokyo-gallery.com ) April 2 - 26, 2008 We believe that you’ll find many insightful information leading up to, during, and post his solo exhibit. Stay tuned. Asthma is a growth market. More and more people are displaying symptoms of asthma; wheezing, shortness of breath, persistent dyspnoea, exhaustion, high pulse rate, low expiratory flow… and more and more people are using various medications to alleviate their condition. There is no cure for asthma.Asthma is a condition that worsens itself; it engenders a sort of positive feedback loop. A person starts wheezing. They worry that the wheezing may herald the onset of an asthma attack. The worry exacerbates the wheezing… and so on. If that person has left their medication at home, or run out, or if the medication unaccountably fails to be effective…”Severe asthma can be fatal and must be treated promptly and energetically. It is characterised by persistent dyspnoea poorly relieved by bronchodilators, exhaustion, a high pulse rate and a very low expiratory flow. As asthma becomes more severe, wheezing may be absent…” Asthma now affects up to 1 in 4 urban children within what is termed the ‘developed world’. On a global level we are faced with a planetary environment which is rapidly heating up, due largely to airborne pollutants emitted by our suburbanised fossil-fuel based society. On a personal level increasing numbers of our society have to be chemically medicated, due largely to exactly the same cause. I took my bags of used asthma inhalers to the photographer’s studio the other day. I don’t know how many I had; I’d been collecting them for a few years. The criteria for my collection were that the inhalers had to have been prescribed to me and the contents inhaled by me until they were empty. These inhalers, made of plastic and metal, would have been thrown away if I hadn’t kept them. They would have ended up in landfill sites, buried or incinerated with all the other household trash. And household trash, rubbish, landfill, leaking toxic pollution; all of these things, among many others, had been plaguing my thoughts for a while now, but I don’t think that’s really why I kept the inhalers. These inhalers were, whilst they were full, half-full, or nearly empty, very important to me. I carried each one with me in my pocket, and at night I would remove it and place it by my bedside. I worried greatly that if I forgot or lost my inhaler I would die from lack of air. A terrible way to go. So when they were empty, I kept them. Like souvenirs or mementos, small totems of another period of life lived, another small survival. My inhalers were usually salbutamol-filled. Salbutamol is a very commonly prescribed medication, a bronchodilator, for asthma, bronchitis, emphysema and other lung-related problems. Others I was prescribed originally contained beclomethasone dipropionate, formoterol fumarat, or budenoside. I emptied my bags of used inhalers and arranged them, ready to have their photographic portraits taken. The lighting was more difficult than I anticipated; the whole process was, I imagine, similar to that used by product photographers; similar, perhaps, to how the inhaler prototype may have been photographed for medical brochures and pharmaceutical marketing materials. more to come… bye |
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