Tag: people

Taken from her recent experimental lo-fi LP, Will Happiness Find Me? on Not Not Fun Records - London-based, Estonia-raised pop-referencing electronic producer/singer Maria Minerva's track Never Give Up is subtly dark and haunting, made up of her signature softly off-key vocals backed by dreamy piano keys and disparate synths. The accompanying video which we premiere here sees Maria Juur in a monochrome light, gently moving to the melodies she's created - not too far removed from her DIY-feel music videos she first made her name with. Here we fired our some-intimate, some-plain weird questions at her to find out more about her worrying sleeping patterns and coming off like a 7-year-old...

Dazed Digital: Where is the weirdest place you’ve ever put your hands?
Maria Minerva: I think touching other people's heads is pretty weird

When abroad, besides pleasantries, which phrase should you always learn?
Just something to impress the locals, show that you are interested in their culture/language. when I was living in Lisbon I told people I met the days of the week in Portuguese and people thought it's super cute though I felt like an 7-yr-old/retarded person... Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday... I was there for 4 months and all i could say was that basically.

Who is your nemesis?
My own dark thoughts! They come and go.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever done?
Making something out of nothing, becoming independent and courageous, learning how to cope with both love & criticism.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?
I do not usually regret stuff but I hate myself when I start playing games with people, it's not fair, it's not cool, it's stereotypically immature, girl-seeking-for-attention type of behaviour and I hate it, though it does occur.

Describe your swimming style in three words.
I think in Estonian we call it "doing the frog". Froggy style. The normal style? I go swimming like three times a week. I get really angry sometimes cause people are not very considerate. The other day I asked a guy if he could have his splashfest in a row further down. Bet he thought I was annoying.

How do you sleep at night?
Soundly, but not always. Apparently I grind my teeth at night and scratch my wounds til they start bleeding... I also get insomnia. I am armed with some Latvian prescription sleeping pills that my mother sent me from Estonia. Even those don't work sometimes cause my mind is unstoppable. Mainly worried about not being able to fall asleep but also thinking about breakfast. I love breakfast. Sometimes I go to bed just so I could have breakfast sooner, if that makes sense.

What’s the scariest word to you?
I think it is scary when people give you silence, refuse to say sorry, and so on

What is your go-to fancy dress outfit?
I can't do fancy clothes until I know where I'm gonna be living, right now I only own like cotton t-shirts/functional boring wear. Just a hustler in leggings.

If you were a (Roman, or otherwise) goddess for a day, what would you do?
Naomi Klein says we are all goddesses, right. But if I actually were a goddess then yeah, would be great to help women/people around the world to become intellectually and sexually satisfied - at the same time.

What would be the title of your cookbook?
Fucking up with Maria Minerva... or 101 Creative Ways of After-Midnight Munching

What is your spirit animal?
Really love dogs, what can I say.

Who is your hair icon?
Chinese crested dog fo sho'

What was the last sound you heard?
Filling out this questionnaire I accidentally pushed the CD drive eject button, so that made a sound.

Send us a picture of the thing you most like looking at on the internet.
Watches - just bought this from Macy's for myself for Christmas. it's white.

Just a few blocks over from the violence-heavy Overtown district in Miami, Asif’s Guns greeted visitors in Wynwood with a giant striped balloon on the roof that held the name – something you’d find at a fireworks tent somewhere in the deep, deep south. Neon signage, American flags, and shooting targets belied the true contents of Asif Farooq’s Art Basel exhibit: 300+ meticulously handcrafted cardboard guns. Walking in, you’d have seen happy moms and exuberant children handling .44 Magnums and M16 Assault Rifles made from cereal boxes and packaging matter.

Asif Farooq, a Miami-born visual artist and musician, started making the guns as Christmas presents, which he sent to friends that were spread across the United States. Though the guns are models, they contain every single working mechanical piece of the actual pistol or automatic. They cock back, lock into place, and still even intimidate – they do everything but shoot. When Farooq first started making them I’d see him at bars where the bartender’s eyes would go anxiously wide until they recognized their artifice and then hold the ersatz gat like a giddy little kid.

Primary Projects, a gallery based in the Design District, represents Farooq and helped put together the pop-up shop. The guns are composed with fine-art precision and impressive replication due to Farooq’s tireless work ethic and enthusiasm. He – along with a veritable assembly line composed of friends and family – created the hundreds of guns over a period of nine months and 7,000 hours of labor all in his mom’s garage. Asif’s Guns was, as he said, a “real gun store,” with each fake gun selling for around the same price as a real one (i.e. around $300 for a revolver and $2,000 for a rifle).

It wasn’t easy getting the store approved; pushback from authorities was intense. The store and all the guns therein serve as an “open letter” to Farooq’s father as well as his close friend William Stuart Watkins, both of whom are deceased. About Watkins, Farooq said that "He really loved guns and we loved guns together." The works, though representative of literal killing-machines, actually castrate the objects they epitomize. By making guns you can play with and “art that people can touch,” Farooq is taking the allure of violence and transforming it into a display of respect for creation.

The guns still are not monuments to peace. Farooq, a natural entertainer rife with melancholia and dark humor, places the practice of making and selling fake guns in a larger political context. Specifically, he calls out the idea of the social contract – the implicit agreement by the members of a society to give up some freedom for greater social protection – as something that “no one ever really sat down to write.” He applauds the right of people to own guns but criticizes the senseless violence that comes with them. Whether one finds this contradictory or not, there must still be a certain reverence for the sheer toil that went into the making of so many perfect facsimiles.

Some of the proceeds from Asif’s Guns are going to Stop Handgun Violence, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending the maiming and slaughtering of people through education and sensible gun laws. Farooq sees the necessity of laws that regulate the sale and use of guns, but also the obligation of governments to respect the public’s right to protect themselves. With Asif’s Guns, there exists a form of art that decries the savagery of firearms, while also heralding their beauty and deadly virtuosity.

As well as being a self-employed writer, I’m now also a freelance usher at one of London’s most esteemed cultural hotspots. It’s not a bad gig – free entry to all the events when I’m not working, which is quite a lot of the time. Even though I need the money, I find it difficult to accept any more work than the minimum required to prevent myself from starving. That’s because we earn just above minimum wage, and while a lot of people’s answer to low wages is to work more hours, my attitude is to work less. That way, there are fewer hours in which I feel like I’m being taken for a ride.

The staff at the cultural place are mostly aspiring film makers and actors, which means I’m witnessing heartbreak and borderline mental illness every time I clock in. There’s one guy here, Tommy, who works an eighty hour week, stretching his life between a sandwich chain and the relative comfort of the cultural place. He’s selling himself to these jobs so he can buy a camera to make a film. And he’s developing a twitch.

Tommy laughs manically at the smallest things now. Just last week I speculated that maybe he was losing his mind a little because he was shaking his head and talking to himself in a Loony Toons voice as he poured some wine into a glass, but all he did was laugh hysterically, either in recognition or denial, I couldn’t tell. The only girls he dates now are customers, but because he works so much, all he does is invite his potential future wives to the cultural place to go see something on their own while he’s bartending.

On one of my many days off recently, I caught up with a former member of staff at Pret A Manger who was fired for forming a union. Andrej Stopa is a kind of steam-punk Braveheart turned union organiser from the Czech Republic. He was protesting outside the St Pancras station branch of Pret with a banner, a megaphone, a bandanna, a pair of Cyberdog trousers and a pair of aviator shades. But before being moved on by the police, Andrej and a small band of activists were demanding not just that Pret buck their ideas up and stop firing union organisers, but also that Andrej be reinstated.

“Pret A Manger! Reinstate Andrej!” they chanted. I couldn’t understand why Andrej, a finance student at London South Bank University, would want to go back there, so I asked him. And what he said made him seem selfless and kind of heroic.

“I want to keep organising the staff against the bad treatment,” he said. “I don’t care if they treat me so badly. But I really cannot stand when they also treat the other people as bad as they treated me. There were five of us, then our numbers started increasing, but after I was fired they intimidated the staff. So the activity is very low right now.”

One of the other founding members of the Pret union has since been hounded out. But Andrej says regardless of whether he gets his job back, his goal is to get Pret to pay the London living wage of 8.55 an hour to its all staff in the capital.

The living wage is a noble and essential cause. Being able to survive and feed your family, or even save up for a camera, without getting another soul sucking job, is no joke. But as this thunderous tract points out, it’s not as though low wages are the only blight of the contemporary workplace.

While I recommend reading the whole thing, in particular it highlights the alarming methods of control used by large companies in the catering and service sectors. In this instance, Pret, which is at the forefront of getting inside the heads of its staff. At Pret, and no doubt other multinational restaurant chains, not only are workers’ outer actions controlled by the company – the tasks they agree to do for their wages – so are their emotional responses to those tasks. So they don’t just have to make coffee and operate a till, they have to be super happy and enthused while they’re doing it. While I don’t like sweeping floors, I object more to being told to look happy while I’m doing it.

The theoretical term for this is ‘affective labour’, which was given a sickeningly positive reception when Pret was surveyed by a New York Times business correspondent last year. So for example, Pret’s worker bees are disciplined for not smiling enough, or for not creating the ‘Pret Buzz’. And it’s not just an individual worker who suffers, but the whole ‘team’ is penalised for one person failing to be sufficiently ecstatic.

While I admire people like Andrej, global capitalism has proven itself to be pretty much immune to trade unions. It’s just not a fair fight any more. It’s like a team of well-organised rat catchers armed with traps and mallets trying to stop a computer virus. They’re operating on totally different playing fields. One is old and slow, a bi-product of the mechanical age which gets around on foot, whose threats are physical, obstructive and primitive. The other is a complex, nebulous, shape-shifting entity with access to tax havens, devious lawyers, political lobbyists and unlimited reserves of cheap labour from around the world.

What makes this worse is that big trade unions are essentially political structures not unlike a lot of the companies they rile against, whose leaders earn ten times as much as their members. No wonder membership is declining. Besides their dwindling influence and the lack of unity in a global temporary workforce, big old unions just don’t appeal to people who grew up with Tony Blair as a Labour prime minister. Unions embody a 20th Century form of power which struggle see, let alone connect with the thing it’s trying to hit. Even if their interests are aligned, to the young worker toiling in a sandwich chain, big unions are as antiquated and removed from their experience as coal mines and steelworks. Which is why I’m so encouraged by Andrej’s campaign, even if he’s on a hiding to nothing.

Just before I joined, there were rumblings of forming a union at the cultural place, to demand better pay. Again, the London living wage was mooted. While you expect a company like Pret to act like a plantation owner, you’d think there would be more enthusiasm for the living wage in a firm whose director of operations is regularly seen swanning around in a Ken Loach t-shirt. But my friends at the cultural place were just as afraid of losing their jobs to actually form a union as the Prey guys, so they settled for a 20p an hour pay rise from head office, which means we’re still earning less than the guys who serve sandwiches.

“I try to make work that nobody can use if they are not willing to accept a change in whatever logic structure they are stuck in,” explains Lawrence Weiner. It is the day before the opening of his solo exhibition BE THAT AS IT MAY at the Lisson Gallery, and accompanied with a glass of whisky, he begins to unravel a five decade career in which he has deconstructed artistic practices and expanded the accepted notions of the art object. As the title of his new show suggests, Weiner proposes “are we going to accept this as art?” Something that has continued to fuel his fascination with materialism and breaking down the structure of things. THIS AS THAT (BE THAT AS IT MAY) is printed on the window of the gallery, projected inwards and outwards, allowing it to be viewed simultaneously without occupying the room itself. It becomes a material fact, less to do with the way the text is presented and more to do with its relation to space. Here, Lawrence Weiner discusses growing up in the Bronx, pretty girls at MoMa and his dedication to changing attitudes.

When did your fascination with language begin?

Im not even that fascinated by language. Language became the means to break the hierarchal standard. I got good at what I was doing. Language became a necessity because painting had reached a certain point. It just wasn't allowing me to go as deep into the relationship of what interested me - human beings and objects. Remember, at that time, it was not a radical choice. There were thirty or forty artists who began to see language as a means of making art. It wasn't radical. It wasn't even a departure. Nobody was paying attention to you apart from your little art world. It didn't much matter. You didn't have to fit in. The whole point of the work is that it puts a material fact out. It has no metaphor. I don't know how someone will react. It doesn't carry a hidden meaning. You don't miss the point, the point is there. Each individual person comes to art and looks at it. If it doesn't have a metaphor, they will take their needs and their desires and build a metaphor from what they are looking at. That is why Mondrian was so powerful.

You began your career with explosion events...

That was something else. It was 1960 and I was in California. I did a piece of work where I made a mistake, not that we got caught. We didn't even get prosecuted because there was a whole lot of people and I guess the judge at Mill Valley realised that if he held anybody, he would be stuck with all these people. I think we were sort of scary, but not frightening like Hells Angels. I thought that each individual explosion was a sculpture. I had to function and deal with it that way. Four years down the line I had my own crisis. I decided that I didn't want to participate in this world anymore. Looking back, it was a very post-adolescent mentality of not wanting to do something. From then onwards, it wasn't about each individual explosion. Each hole meant something to somebody and the idea became obvious, that each hole would always mean something to somebody. That was the point in making art, that it meant something to somebody. I guess I didn't stop producing this kind of work. Instead, I stopped thinking about the specific individual object. I began to realise that the drama of each individual work was the object. I guess it took me a while.

Growing up in the South Bronx, was there a concept of art?

Only by chance, yes. I had seen art but I didn't really understand it. They gave out free passes to public school kids for the Museum of Modern Art. It knocked my socks off. I made a joke, but it is not really a joke, it is the truth, that whenever you went to MoMa, there were always very pretty girls there. So, that was my introduction into so called 'art'. I guess I wasn't such a loud mouthed kid as I thought. An awful lot of people, and I don't know how they had the patience, were extremely kind to me. Seriously. I didn't have to fight my way through. As an artist it was another story. When it became obvious to me that I knew what I was going to try to do, I remember some very established artists telling me “Hey kid, everybody says your crazy, your not crazy, but how to fuck are you going to make a living?"

Did that excite you?

No, I had used up my excitement by that time. The gentile poverty of being an artist was far less daunting than trying to decide where I fit in positively in society. I come from a background of social engagement and civil rights long before it was fashionable, so I felt a bit of guilt for stepping aside and saying essentially instead of changing the temporal, I was literally trying to change the culture. It took a while and an awful lot of guilt. A lot of self searching to get to the point where I began to think it really was possible, by making art to change the logic structure of society.

There must have been a strong feeling of change since the release of your firstArtist Statement?

No, I was lucky because I had an audience from the very beginning. Mainly consisting of artists. It was small, perhaps it made noise, but it had no power. I never felt like I was one against the world, it just was a little hard. There were difficulties, but they were from my own choice. I had the opportunity to teach, but I wanted not to. When you teach, you take on an authority and you are responsible for people. Artists are not supposed to have authority. You are supposed to really and truly be the scribbler on the ground. Maybe it was a romantic choice. The making of art is about what you show, it is not about this persona that they are trying to build around you.

Do you feel your work is ever romantic?

Aspirational, yes. Of course, doesn't everybody? With every work that I show, if people accept the logic structure it would radically change their attitude towards life. I try to make work that nobody can use if they are not willing to accept a change in whatever logic structure they are stuck in. Art is supposed to change the way you relate to the world at large. Hey, thats not romantic, is it? But, I guess aspirational is not so bad.

Lawrence Weiner'sBE THAT AS IT MAYis held at London'sLisson Galleryuntil 12 January 2013