Tag: cultural

Initiated by theLouis Vuitton Young Arts Project,Culture Shop: January Saleis a south London art group's calledArt Assassins’ most recent venture - an off-site live exhibition by bunch of 14-20-year-olds offering responses to the idea that ‘culture makes you who you are.’Installed – aptly – in a disused Poundland unit inElephant and Castle Shopping Centrethis space s far from your stereotypical white cube. Exchange is rife in the middle of the place once voted London's ugliest structure, but not of the materialist kind, as a plethora of audio and video works confront conventional cultural perceptions of profession, class, nationality and race.

True to their name, the Art Assassins are not taking the war on youth lying down. Back in Autumn 2011 they created a stimulating youth led publication in collaboration withHato Pressin response to the London riots -Voice of the Voicelessproving engagement and openness vital to the Art Assassins’ philosophy. Working with high profile collaborators no doubt enhances their message’s impact, the Young Art’s Project’s Summer Academy engaging in a public sculpture workshop with the well known Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset last August. As a three year partnership between five of London’s leading art institutions – Hayward Gallery, Royal Academy of Arts, South London Gallery, Tate Britain and the Whitechapel – the Louis Vuitton Young Arts Project exposes the Art Assassins to an snazzy series of cultural programmes – keeping them busy alongside their regular SLG Thursday evening meetings, college and school commitments.

Ryan Valentine’s videoGamerand George Flanagan’sWe Don’t Get Lawyers ‘Round Here, are two of many works that illustrate the assassination of the commercialist dictum ‘nothing in this world is free’ through their poignantly open creative exchange. Voicing his cultural curiosities, 13-year old South London Gallery forum member George talks to Rose Commander -a paralegal at Goldman and Bailey Solicitors- about how ‘people from where I live aren’t lawyers’. Gemma Andrews’s live experimentElephant Toothpastedemonstrates how her cultural diversity is bubbling over (literally) in a confluence of art and science. Turkish Art Assassin Mehmet Ccel performs his passionate intro to professional wrestling inFront Bump/Back Bump,where in-between body crunching moves he demonstrates the importance of ‘bumping’ -the safety measure used in professional wrestling that determines learning how to fall without causing injury to yourself or others.

There’s no two ways about it: George Saunders is one of the greatest living writers of fiction in America now. Since his scorching debut collection in 1996, he’s stuck with admirable firmness to his short-fiction guns, publishing only stories and novellas, almost all of which take place in either the contemporary US or a harrowingly shit-awful, worryingly near-futuristic version of it. Saunders’ stories tend to be faultless masterclasses in sentence-perfect brevity, hilariously dismal corporate language and that weird unquantifiable thing that squishes up your heart and makes you do embarrassing involuntary audible laugh-sobs in public. He is a MacArthur-Fellowship-certified proper genius and we were pleased as punch to get to talk to him about his forthcoming collection Tenth of December, which might be his best one yet.

Congratulations on such a head-spinningly good new collection! Your publishers are calling this one your ‘most accessible collection yet’. Do you think that's right?
I think it is more accessible. By which I mean, maybe, that a person who isn’t necessarily a big reader of contemporary short fiction could dive right in and find something in it. Lately I’ve been writing these non-fiction travel pieces and have noticed that a lot of very bright, engaged people I know, who don’t really get my fiction, seemed drawn in by these. So I had that goal in mind – to, where possible, reach out – put up a bigger tent, so to speak.

There’s a pleasing structure to this new one. Do you set out to write a cohesivecollection, or do you just do one story at a time until you've got enough to lump together into a book? When does it become a book?
I don’t have a big, overarching idea for a collection when I start out, no. I try to keep my focus on the small stuff – on the sentences, on keeping the energy high – trusting that the greater whole – story, then book - will take care of itself: it will be coming directly from the subconscious and therefore will have some sort of cohesion. It’s what I think of as a ‘seed crystal’ approach, like in biology class: start with something small and let it accrete organically outward. Using this approach, you can sometimes outwit that simplistic/thematic guy inside yourself.

We’ve always been brimful of admiration at your sticking exclusively to short fiction. But will there ever be a novel?
I think there might be. But not if it would cause you to stop admiringme. Ha. No – I try not to have too many ideas about what I might do/might not do/should do. My hope is just to follow my own natural energy and interest and see what happens. So far, the natural DNA of my writing has been inclined toward brevity. It may be a version of that sports idea, that there are fast-twitch and slow-twitch muscles – maybe there’s something similar re: prose style? I imagine my stories as little wind-up toys: wind them up, put them down, they go directly under the couch. I would like to write a novel, just because – at least here in the States – there’s a certain level of cultural and critical attention that seems reserved for that form.

You've said before that it's the improvisatory quality that attracts you to the story form: the way you can start out and not know how you're going to end up. Don’t you know what you’re doing from the outset a bit more these days?
It’s changed a little. In some cases now I have a sort of pre-sense of what I need to make a story – usually just these broad action/escalation markers. If I can figure those out in advance, I can engage that improvisatory energy in figuring out how I get from one marker to the next. In Tenth of December, ‘Victory Lap’ and the title story were written like that – the rest were pretty much improvisations.I love that Gerald Stern quote: ‘If you start out to write a poem about two dogs fucking, and you write a poem about two dogs fucking – then you wrote a poem about two dogs fucking.’ Or, as Einstein said it, in his slightly more snooty manner: ‘No worthy problem is ever solved in the plane of its original conception.’ So the trick is to keep the conscious, conceptual mind at bay and thus stay open to mystery, revelation etc.

So the character who turns out to be narrating his story from beyond the grave, for instance: did you know he was going to end up dead when you started out?
No, I didn’t know that. I actually wrote about 100 pages of that story where he lived and actually did escape, before reeling it back in and finding out he was dead/had to die.

You've done quite a bit of dead people speaking or acting, post-mortem: ghosts, disintegrating zombie aunties, narrators who’ve already killed themselves in the most horrifying way possible. Why do you think you keep coming back to this talky-dead business?
There are probably all sorts of thematic implications and so on – but for me the main reason for writing about ghosts is the little rush of pleasure I get from doing it. And I hope that pleasure shows up in the quality of the prose, and also takes the story in an unexpected direction – a story will often take an intriguing turn while you are occupying yourself with making the language energetic.

And why all the futuristic stuff?
My futuristic tendencies are more a means to an end – I want to write about human tendencies at the end conditions. Like in a science experiment: if you want to know something about a concrete beam, put it under extreme stress. One can do that pretty handily in an alternate world.

The other thing we see a lot in this alternate world is this constant anxiety about poverty. You're writing about the richest country on earth, but almost all of your characters are dirt-poor and fretting like mad about it. Not exactly The Great Gatsby, is it?
Well, I think that’s the real American story: the severe divide between the rich and the poor, and the cost the poor pay in grace and ease, and how untroubled the rich are about that. Just about every American life below a certain level is dominated by work and the depredations caused by far to talk about sex or religion or even a small disgusting goitre we have in some private place.

Legal and thoroughly depressing mind-altering drugs come into play a lot in Tenth of December. Is America’s dependence on pharmaceutical drugs an issue you're particularly worried about, or are drugs just a good device for a story for you?
The latter. I loved the opportunities those drugs gave me to write in different registers. I’d made a living out of writing in a sort of stripped-down, vernacular minimalism, and sometimes feel like busting out – ergo, drugs. In the story, that is.

You’ve said before that you came late to literature and that your scientific background (studying and working in the field of geophysical engineering) meant that your writing was “Like if you put a welder to designing dresses.” Do you still feel like the welder, or do you admit by now that you’re basically Karl Lagerfeld?
No, some things die hard. I was poorly trained as a reader and I think will always suffer for that. So what I’m trying to do is make that malformation to work for me, ie make really cool metal-dresses.

It’s kind of reassuring that the final sentiment of the new book – in the acknowledgements in the back where you thank your daughters – is, ‘Goodness is not only possible, it is our natural state.’ It’s way-grim in the world of your fiction, and outside of it much of the time; are you really optimistic about the world your kids are going to inherit?
I don’t think I’m optimistic or pessimistic – these are both versions of the same disease, the disease of wanting to say, ‘Oh, I see how life is (all good/all bad) – now I can stop thinking and worrying about it and interrogating it.’ I will say, however, that one of the revelations I’ve had over the last few years is that goodness is possible and attainable – that we do have the power to move ourselves in the direction of openness and awareness and so on. And that there are remarkable people in the world who are inclined – through disposition and/or training – to positive vision and action.

Cool. What about Ben Stiller? Didn’t he buy the rights to one of your stories, and wasn’t he going to direct and star in it, and you’ve written the screenplay, and oh-God-please let’s have that film soon, please? What’s going on with that?
I think that’s not happening. I wrote one for Ben Stiller that came very close but the signals I’m getting is that that ship has sailed. Or sunk. So we will just have to watch the movies that our minds make. Eesh. That sounds like a bad self-help book: Improving the Movies Our Minds Make: Reinventing Your Inner Tape Loop.

Tenth of December is published by Bloomsbury on January 3

The Contemporary Wardrobe is a resource in the address book of every London stylist who gives a damn about their craft, its proprietor Roger Burton archiving an exhaustive collection of 20th century style and streetwear on packed floor-to-ceiling rails.

Now, as part of vintage clothing website Byronesque, Burton has shared previously unseen footage of Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren in conversation, the only time they were ever filmed together discussing their legacy, at punk exhibition Burton opened in 1993.

Westwood and McLaren's contrary contribution to youth culture in the 70s can't be overstated, their World's End shop Sex/Seditionaries changing the course of fashion through pieces seen here like the Anarchy shirt and Chicken Bones t-shirt – as relevant a cultural document of their time as anything you'll find in a glass case at a museum, these clothes are emblems of fashion at its most arrogant and ambitious.

Here, we run an extract from the footage of Westwood talking about punk rock and ideas.

"The real word, I mean apart from the word anarchy, of the punk rocks was this idea of 'destroy' and I think it was the most heroic attempt as an exercise to see if rock and roll really could live up to what rock and roll was supposed to be about. Malcolm once said to me 'rock and roll is the jungle beat that threatens the white civilisation.' And like I was saying at its sweetest, it's like 'see you later daddy and don't be square and everything.' But it is supposedly, according to people like Patti Smith who used to go 'peace and love, rock and roll,' if you're getting off on rock and roll, it's going to change the world in some sort of way.

Now looking back on it, I would say that someone like Sid Vicious was very intelligent, because he was saying 'I'm brain damaged, I don't have anything to say or to put in its place but I do want to destroy.' And what he did was an attack at the older generation to say 'we don't accept anything that you have to tell us, we don't accept any of your advice, we don't accept any of your taboos and we are going to put Swastikas on; you've mismanaged the world horrifically. And alright, maybe we can't do any better.'

...I don't have to say it in that way but it was like, you know, 'you've tried to put all your hypocrisy under the carpet but we're going to wear your hypocrisy on our back.'

...And I do say that the only subversion lies in ideas. Not even in ideas but in unpopular ideas, because popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If you think about it there wouldn't be any art if you had to go along with popular ideas, it's only the fact that art was unpopular that it ever was supported by an avant-garde and very few people that constitute something we call civilisation. Something the Greeks discovered really. You know it's a sceptical point of view, that I mentioned before, 'establishment' in inverted commas. What I mean is that the establishment is not a word written in stone. In fact establishment is something that uses the energy of the token rebels and, so it's something that changes according to how much it wants to soak up. And I myself prefer to ignore it and to sort of concern myself with the cultural crisis that we have. I mean everyone knows we're in the middle of an ecological disaster and I don't think that you can disassociate the cultural one from that.

I mean Hitler burnt books, but you don't need to do that anymore today, most people don't read them anyway. The only ideas are in books. You can't have a conversation with someone that hasn't read something, cause that's where ideas are."

ClickHEREto see the film of Westwood and McLaren in its entirety.