In the flesh, Busy Gangnes and her ex-girlfriend Melissa Livaudais don’t look like hip-hop fanatics. Slim, boyishly pretty and favouring the oh-I-just-threw-this-on sweater and jeans look more associated with Sofia Coppola circa 1999 than hardcore electronica, the Brooklyn 20-somethings don’t even look like rock chicks. But they formed their current outfit Telepathe – pronounced ‘telepathy’ – from the ashes of a regular four-piece called Wikkid.

“We started Telepathe as a reaction, because we were bored,” explains Gangnes, who trained as a classical pianist. “We wanted to make some drastic changes, we wanted to make greater sonic landscapes and play around with structuring songs in a different way.” Gangnes was a punk in high school, which goes some way to explaining Telepathe’s fuck-you attitude to the music mainstream. “Looking back,” she says, “I guess I decided I wanted to start a band when I realised that people could make music and not technically know //how//! I love the idea that anyone can do it. There are no rules… it’s about creative energy. And besides, does the world really need another regular rock band?”

Lately, Telepathe (named in honour of an animal psychic the pair wrote about on an early track) have been pitched as a vital prop of the avant-garde Brooklyn scene that – since the breakout success of sound collagists TV On The Radio – has been making headlines in the music press. But Gangnes is quick to point out that the hype is just that. “We get asked about the ‘scene’ all the time,” she says. “And yeah, Dave Sitek from TV On The Radio produced our debut album, Dance Mother. But we keep getting asked to be photographed with bands we don’t even know! People think there’s this movement there; that every band knows every other band, and it’s one big cosy family. The truth is that there //are// tonnes of bands there, which is awesome. But it’s not quite the scene that people are asking us to tell them it is!”

Appropriately enough, Telepathe’s music is all about mental associations, either the ones the listener imagines or the ones Gagnes and Livaudais deliberately make themselves. It didn’t take long for them to hit their stride. “At first we wanted to use more effects and ambient sounds in our music,” continues Gangnes. “But then, slowly, after about a year of experimentation, we got into the idea of using computer programmes. We definitely wanted to make dance music, but although it’s dance music, it’s not strictly club music. I’m a dancer from a contemporary dance/choreography/performance background, so it’s dance music in a wider sense!”

To the casual ear, the band’s sound is deceptively familiar: imagine the sounds that would emerge if Pony Up joined the Human League in the studio and Timbaland fought Tackhead at gunpoint for the final mix. Gangnes has no comment to make on the subject: she’d rather be listening to rappers Three-6 Mafia than precisely defining what makes Telepathe tick. “Hip-hop is the most current pop music that we feel is the most influential,” she explains. “It’s the most futuristic music out there already. We wanted to be inspired by that, which you can probably hear in the music – with the beats, the bass and the hi-hat patterns – we use.”

An open, unpretentious woman, Gangnes prefers not to comment on the band’s sometimes “post-apocalyptic” lyrics. But she does admit that she recently spotted an unhealthy obsession with death, war and childhood. When asked to pick her favourite song from Dance Mother she becomes equally tongue-tied. “I think it’s ‘Crimes And Killings,’” she says, then pauses. “’Or Devil’s Trident.’” She pauses again. “Actually, between those two, it’s a toss-up. I really love the melodies and the beats we came up with. The lyrics are really strong and they represent us in the best possible way.” She laughs. “I guess this is how perfect music sounds to us: music that we made ourselves, in our own world.”

Photography: Andreas Laszlo Konrath
Words: Damon Wise

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #16, Dec/Jan 2008/09

The post Telepathe appeared first on Wonderland.

Sunday, February 20th 2005. Owl Farm, Woody Creek, Pitkin County, Colorado. 5:15pm. Dr. Hunter Stockton Thompson is sat at the worktop in his kitchen, clutching a glass of Chivas Regal whiskey and dragging hard on a Clove cigarette with a TarGuard filter. Taped to the fridge behind him is a stern reminder, scrawled in his own handwriting: ‘Never Under Any Circumstances Call 911. This Means You.’ As always, the television is tuned to CNN. Thompson’s only son Juan is visiting from Denver. He, his wife and their seven-year-old boy Will are in an adjacent room. Thompson rolls a blank piece of paper into his IBM Selectric typewriter. He should be writing his regular Monday column ‘Hey Rube’ for ESPN.com – but the 67-year-old has something more important to do right now… He picks up the phone and calls his 32-year-old wife of two years Anita, who’s a half-hour drive away taking a yoga class. He needs to set things right. Last night, they had an almighty bust-up after he waved an air rifle at her. “Come home,” he mumbles gently into the phone. “Everything’s fine. Don’t worry. I love you more than ever.” At the end of the call, Anita hears Thompson place the receiver on the kitchen worktop and then hears a clicking sound. She presumes her husband is typing and hangs up. He isn’t. He’s just cocked a .45 calibre semi-automatic handgun… At 5:42pm Juan hears a noise from the next room that sounds like a book hitting the floor. Two minutes later he wanders into the kitchen. His father is slumped in his chair: a pistol on the floor by his feet; and a bullet lodged in the stove hood behind his bloodied head. Juan notices the sheet of paper in the typewriter. On it is the last word from Hunter S. Thompson – the booze-guzzling, drug-hoovering anti-hero of American literature. That word is ‘counselor’.

“Hunter said to me early on, ‘I’d feel trapped in this life if I didn’t know that I could commit suicide at any moment’,” says Ralph Steadman, mimicking his dead friend’s laconic mumble perfectly. “I knew he would do it one day. It just came sooner than I thought.” The 72-year-old is speaking on the phone from the studio at the back of his sprawling Georgian mansion in Kent. It’s six in the evening and he’s tired. But within five minutes of being asked about past fast times and the uproarious new documentary Gonzo: The Life And Work Of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, he is unstoppable.

In Gonzo, Thompson’s first wife Sandi Conklin delivers a powerful speech to camera about the spineless nature of her estranged husband’s suicide. Steadman doesn’t agree. “It wasn’t a cowardly way out,” he insists. “It was a matter of fact. Hunter was undergoing constant physiotherapy because he went off to Hawaii with Sean Penn and broke his bloody leg. He’d already had hip operations and had to learn to walk again. He told me, ‘This is the death of fun’. And he was sick of it.”

//BREAK//
It was an all-together less stricken animal that Steadman first met, back in 1970. Frustrated by “the terrible Englishness” of assignments for The Times, Punch and Private Eye, the cartoonist had taken himself off to America in search of some “over-the-edge” work. He’d only been there a week when the fateful call from Scanlan’s Monthly came through. One of their writers was heading down to Louisville to cover the Kentucky Derby, a Southern equestrian institution billed as ‘The Most Exciting Two Minutes in Sports’. Would Steadman tag along and do some drawings?

“I’d never heard of Hunter Thompson,” laughs the Welshman. “I wrote a postcard home to Anna, who is now my wife, and said that I was going to be working with a guy called Howard Johnson – which is actually the name of a hotel chain.” Another thing Steadman didn’t know was that Thompson was returning home to Kentucky to settle some old scores. “They didn’t like him because he was a troublemaker,” he explains. “He wanted to go back and fuck them over.”

Steadman was waiting outside Louisville International Airport when Thompson pulled up in a red convertible, beer in hand, and yelled, ‘Ralph Steadman? I’ve been looking for you for two days.’ They drove two miles down the highway in silence before Thompson pulled over, produced a can of Mace, sprayed his passenger in the face and threw him out on the verge with his bags and the words – ‘You make it to the Derby and we’ll have a story going.’ Well, that’s how Thompson used to tell it. Steadman remembers things differently – in his version he was Maced over lunch. Steadman did make it to the Derby, albeit minus his pencils, pens and inks. He used lipstick and rouge borrowed from a generous lady in the betting tent to transform the great and the good of Southern society into grotesque slobbering monsters.

“What a person to meet on your first trip to America,” Steadman bellows. “It was like hitting a bulls-eye first time… Hunter and I got on instantly because we were so different. If we’d both been tough guys it wouldn’t have worked. He could be mean. But it was a meanness we both understood. Hunter triggered something. Suddenly I knew I could draw with a reckless point of view.” Thompson, though, got writer’s block. He had to be locked in a New York hotel room and supplied with “drink and whatever else he wanted” before he would start to type. The result, a scathing article titled The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved, read as follows: “Unlike most of the others in the press box we didn’t give a hoot in hell what was happening on the track. We had come to watch the real beasts perform.” It heralded a new reporting style that Thompson named ‘Gonzo’, in which the writer was bigger than the story; more, the writer was the story.

Steadman heard nothing from his new friend for three months. Then Scanlan’s Monthly called again, this time with an assignment for the pair to go to Rhode Island and cover the biggest event in sailing, the America’s Cup. They took to the water on a rented three-mast sloop in search of a story, Gonzo-style. Steadman, crippled by seasickness, took one of Thompson’s pills. It was Psyclocybin. By the time they made it back to the harbour bar, he was seeing red-eyed dogs. “Hunter produced two cans of spray paint and asked me what I wanted to do with them,” sniggers Steadman. “I said, ‘Let’s spray ‘Fuck The Pope’ on the side of one of the million-dollar yachts. Tomorrow the boat’ll come out into the harbour – all the rednecks on board, standing proud with their arms folded – with ‘Fuck The Pope’ on the side… That will be our story.’”

Thompson maneuvered a dinghy in-between two yachts whilst his accomplice, spray can in hand, readied himself. A security guard caught them before Steadman had depressed the nozzle. Thompson knew the only way out of the situation was to create a distraction. “He set off two distress flares and set fire to some boats,” Steadman remembers, now hooting with laughter. “We managed to escape to a nearby coffee bar. The following afternoon we found out that Scanlan’s Monthly had gone bankrupt… the story never appeared.”

The America’s Cup trip had been a heroic disaster. But not a complete waste of time. “Hunter knew it was a dress rehearsal for something,” Steadman continues, warming to his theme. That “something” came in March 1971, when Thompson took off into the Nevada desert loaded down with two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers, a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. He returned with his undisputed masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream.

This time around, Steadman – back in England, still suffering from “flashbacks and scoured innards” – didn’t accompany him. “I would have liked to have gone,” he says thoughtfully. “But Hunter said, ‘Ralph, you can’t handle a thing like this. I need a lawyer with me.’” Fear and Loathing told the ‘fictional’ story of Raoul Duke (Thompson’s thinly disguised alter-ego) and 300-pound Samoan Dr. Gonzo’s drug-crazed journey into oblivion. Rolling Stone wanted to serialise it. Random House wanted to publish it. But there weren’t any pictures. “Hunter had brought back a few bits like beer mats and labels,” Steadman adds. “Nothing of any use. He said: ‘Get Ralph on the phone.’ They sent the manuscript and a photo of Oscar Zeta Acosta – the real Gonzo, over to me and three days – and a lot of beer and brandy – later, I’d completed it all.”

Steadman’s deranged drawings were instantly iconic. Arguably more iconic than the book itself. In the Gonzo documentary, a wine-soaked Steadman is seen sticking this very point to Thompson in the latter’s Owl Farm kitchen. The writer sneers back, wrestling between amusement and rage. “I wasn’t joking,” explains Steadman. “The truth is that, without my drawings, Hunter’s work wouldn’t have been so easily noticed. The pictures drew people’s attention to it. And Hunter knew it. He was always slightly bitter about my cartoons.”

Nothing had changed by the time Alex Cox attempted to bring the book to the big screen in 1997. The mere mention of incorporating Steadman’s cartoons blew the deal. “Hunter said, ‘I don’t want any fucking cartoons in my film,’” Steadman giggles. “He got really angry about that.” The following year Steadman’s friend Terry Gilliam made the movie. His version starred Johnny Depp – who moved into the basement of Owl Farm for four months to study Thompson – as Raoul Duke. And contained no cartoons.

With Fear And Loathing on every bestseller list, Thompson and Steadman were now a hot double-act. Rolling Stone flew them out to Africa to cover the greatest boxing match of the century, ‘The Rumble in The Jungle’. The magazine’s founder and editor Jan Wenner would later describe it as “the biggest, fucked-up story in the history of journalism.” On October 30th, 1974 world heavyweight champion George Foreman was defending his title against former world champion Muhammad Ali at the Mai 20 Stadium in Kinshasa, Zaire. Come fight night, all the heavyweights of the writing world gathered ringside – George Plimpton for Sports Illustrated and Norman Mailer, who would turn the history-making event into his bestselling memoir The Fight. But, as the first round bell rang, the seat next to them – reserved for a Dr. Hunter S. Thompson – was empty.

“I wanted to see the fight,” Steadman claims. “But Hunter had given our tickets away. He said he had no desire in watching a couple of black guys beating the shit out of each other.” So, whilst Ali punched his graceful way to an eighth round victory, Thompson was down at the hotel swimming pool, drunk on Steadman’s Glenfiddich and pouring marijuana down the filter system. Steadman caught the last couple of rounds on TV. Back in New York, Thompson failed to deliver any written material and Wenner didn’t like the drawings. On the upside, though, Thompson did manage to get his $300 elephant tusks through customs.

It’s perhaps no surprise that the one Thompson adventure Steadman cherishes above all was a rather more low key affair. He joined Thompson for two months on Hawaii in 1980 while the writer was preparing The Curse of Lono, a novel on the Hawaiian god. “My wife and daughter Sadie came as well,” he says, his voice lifting at the memory “We all had Christmas there in big ocean-side cabins. That’s the one I think of most because it was full of joy.”

Thompson and Steadman’s final collaboration was also one of their most spectacular: the writer’s 2005 funeral. Throughout the 35-year friendship, Thompson had raved constantly about plans for his final send-off. He wanted his ashes blasted out over Woody Creek from a 150-foot tower in the shape of a two-thumbed fist clutching a Peyote cactus button. In Gonzo, Steadman is seen in 1978 sketching the design for the anxious boss of the Reed Bros. Tapley & Geiger Mortuary in Hollywood – “I’ve told you a thousand times for ten years, you’ve got to put // two // thumbs on the fist!” growls Thompson, before grabbing the black marker and correcting the drawing himself.

With the help of Johnny Depp’s bank account, Steadman made sure Thompson got his wish. On Saturday, August 20th 2005, a crowd of family and friends gathered on a gondola-shaped deck overlooking Owl Farm. Amongst them, Senator John Kerry and former Senator George McGovern – who Thompson had tirelessly championed in his Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 reports; Hollywood elite Sean Penn, Jack Nicholson and, of course, Depp; Rolling Stone’s Jan Wenner; and the long-suffering bar staff from Hotel Jerome in Aspen. In front of them stood the pyrotechnics-rigged monument – with two thumbs. Parked at its base was Thompson’s beloved red convertible, a blow-up doll behind the wheel.

Steadman’s toast consisted of reading out Thompson’s lengthy faxes sent to him over the years, including one that demanded an immediate loan of $50,000 – ‘Keep your advice to yourself,’ Thompson wrote, ‘and send the money.’ “The thing I miss are those messages and the weird phone calls in the middle of the night,” Steadman sighs. “I wouldn’t hear from him in months and then suddenly he’d call. ‘Ralph, you filthy little animal. You dirty little beast. I need some work, Ralph.’”

At 8:46pm, as Bob Dylan’s voice sang out ‘Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me, I’m not sleepy and there is no place I’m going to…’ through high-decibel speakers, thirty red, white, blue and green fireworks rocketed Thompson’s ashes into the night sky. True to form, he had the last laugh. His ashes floated back down to earth and settled in the drinks of his mourners. As local Sheriff Braudis took a sip of his Chivas Regal he was heard to say, “Goodbye, Hunter… Motherfucker.”

Words: Ben Cobb

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #16, Dec/Jan 2008/09

The post Ralph Steadman on Hunter S Thompson appeared first on Wonderland.

WONDERLAND: Your latest menswear collection features a Geek meets Jock look. But you are the most un-Jock-like men…

ROLF: [Laughs] Yes, but that’s why it works. To have two clichés clash together creates a tension.

WONDERLAND: The new collection made me think of an American tourist in Hawaii in the 50s.

ROLF: [Laughs] For us it started with the fact that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. We just felt the need to go back to this positive time. American-inspired, but from an era when we still all believed in it.

WONDERLAND: So how do you feel now he is President elect?

ROLF: Incredibly happy. Happy and relieved.

WONDERLAND: Do you have a different approach when you design for men and women?

ROLF: They are both about something bigger than clothes but the menswear is more practical and less linked to a show.

WONDERLAND: And there is an autobiographical element to your menswear…

ROLF: Absolutely. When we launched the collection we did a show with just the two of us. It’s the clothes we want to wear; so it’s rooted in something classical twisted with something more ironic.

WONDERLAND: How do you want to be perceived: as fashion designers or conceptual artists?

ROLF: As fashion artists! We started by doing things that were about fashion but not necessarily about clothes. With the dolls’ house [at The Barbican retrospective] and some future projects we are going back into more art installations but it’s difficult to say what’s art and what’s fashion.

WONDERLAND: Your fashion shows are always thought-provoking…

ROLF: We regard our real work as the show. The shows are the performance and the clothes are the actors. A show is a way to tell a story and is so much more than just presenting the clothes for the season. A show is the reason why we went into fashion; it’s the way you can present your dreams.

WONDERLAND: What drew you to each other when you were studying at Arnhem Academy?

ROLF: First of all our shared vision of fashion and our shared taste and I think we also had the same level of ambition. We both wanted to become a fashion label. When we work together there is this extra strength that we don’t have separately. There was never a question to work alone…

WONDERLAND: Your first collections were very conceptual.

ROLF: Even though for the first five years we didn’t get so much attention, we always say that these years were the most important in our career because we could experiment and find ourselves.

WONDERLAND: The fashion industry has an obsession with new, new, new. Is it difficult for young designers to get attention so quickly?

ROLF: Absolutely. In our case that would have been devastating. It takes time to find your own voice.

WONDERLAND: And being able to make mistakes…

ROLF: Our mistakes have been our biggest lessons.

WONDERLAND: How does reality live up to the mini-world of Viktor & Rolf? You haven’t done badly have you?

ROLF: [Laughs] Have you heard of The Secret? It’s this book that is an absolute hype right now. The secret in The Secret is just visualising your dreams. When Viktor and I read that book we thought, ‘That’s exactly what we did!’.

WONDERLAND: You enjoy collaborating with musicians and actors. Why?

ROLF: We are never so interested in celebrities – the nicest thing is to be able to work together with someone you admire, like Rufus Wainwright or Tilda Swinton, to create something new. It’s beneficial for our growth.

WONDERLAND: Swinton’s career mirrors your own – the way she mixes art-house and big bucks mainstream blockbusters.

ROLF: By doing both you create a very rich world in which everything is possible: you don’t want to choose. She knows how to reach a big public.

WONDERLAND: And it stops it from being elitist.

ROLF: Yeah, but if you want to be elitist you can be as well…

WONDERLAND: Did you enjoy seeing your work in an art gallery situation at The Barbican?

ROLF: Absolutely. You know fashion is so much what you said, about newness, and it goes so fast. This season’s ideas are thrown away next season… What is enjoyable when you see all your work together like that, is that you see you have a body of work that you can cherish. We are romantic because we always want to hold on to what we are doing, in that sense we are almost anti-fashion. In our collections we often work with the idea of trying to hold onto things instead of going too fast, like when we dipped everything in silver, it was a wish to freeze a moment.

WONDERLAND: Why specifically dolls and a dolls’ house?

ROLF: You can easily control dolls. They do whatever you want! Recreating the work in a different scale makes people look at it differently, and that’s what we try to do, to look at the world we all know from a different angle. We almost preferred the dolls to the clothes in real life.

WONDERLAND: In your S/S 2009 virtual show with Shalom Harlow you appear like puppet masters looming over the set.

ROLF: Yes, that was the idea.

WONDERLAND: Do you enjoy being in control?

ROLF: [Laughs] Yes, it’s very important for us.

WONDERLAND: Another recurring theme in your shows is dance –

ROLF: It’s very strange because we never dance ourselves. I think it’s about trying to escape the rigid form of a fashion show where models are walking like robots on a catwalk.

WONDERLAND: Which designers do you admire?

ROLF: We admire designers who really have their own style whether it’s very artistic or not, from Margiela to Yves Saint Laurent. In the end that is what lasts. You can lose yourself in trends but its important to really keep it close to yourself.

WONDERLAND: How do you work together as a duo?

ROLF: We do everything together. Every business decision, every idea. That is why we play with our image, the same glasses and the same clothes: to show that we act as one designer; we feel as one designer.

WONDERLAND: Do you never disagree?

ROLF: We don’t always agree but we never fight. We just talk until we find consensus and when we both have a different opinion it means the idea is not yet polished, or finished.

WONDERLAND: Will Viktor & Rolf always work in the fashion arena?

ROLF: Yes, but maybe not exclusively in the fashion arena. But fashion is, let’s say, the love of our lives.

WONDERLAND: Where is Viktor today?

ROLF: He is making sketches. That’s the good thing about being two people.

Photographer: Tom Allen
Fashion: Way Perry
Words: Iain R. Webb

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #16, Dec/Jan 2008/09

The post Viktor & Rolf appeared first on Wonderland.

Dave Portner, Josh Dibb, Noah Lennox and Brian Weitz met in 1992 at high school in Baltimore. In 2000 they formed noise band Animal Collective, changed their names to Avey Tare, Deakin, Panda Bear and Geologist respectively, and vowed to keep things fluid. Sometimes they wear animal masks. Sometimes they don’t. Usually they perform and record together. But not always – for their eighth and latest album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, Deakin has taken a backseat. The only constant in their music, in fact, is that it has remained steadfastly experimental – somewhere between early Pink Floyd tomfoolery, Talking Heads’ art rock and Euro dance pop. Geologist (“I did biology in college but a friend thought I was studying rocks and it just stuck”) – the one to be found standing downstage wearing a headlamp and twiddling knobs – sheds some light on planet Animal Collective’s new obsession with all things water…

What kind of animal is the new album?
Something that lives in a coral reef. Not exactly a fish, something a little more human – a mer-person.

What’s your contribution to the record?
I bring outdoor samples and field recordings to help create the environment of the melody. I made some just around the corner from where we recorded the album – kids playing in the street. The more scientific ones I find from other people. Like the underwater stuff I don’t have the means or the technology to do myself. This record combines the outdoors of the area that we grew up in, Maryland, mixed with coral reef and lagoons.

Where does the Merriweather Post Pavilion title come from?
It’s a venue in Baltimore, an outdoor amphitheatre. We liked the way the words sounded together. And it had ‘weather’ in it, which was important because we’d imagined pictures of weather patterns whilst we worked on the songs. Some sunshine, gentle rain, even some tornadoes and sandstorms but without the violent connotations.

What was your first pet?
A turtle called Teddy. I’m not sure who named him.

Which mythological figure would you like to be?
The sea god Poseidon because he can hang out underwater.

What are your most recent record purchases?
This 80s new-age record by Clare Hammel called Voices. The new Arthur Russell collection Love Is Overtaking Me. Some of Lee Hazelwood’s mid-60s stuff. A ballet by a Japanese composer called Tagi Ito. And some old Grateful Dead on eBay.

What’s Animal Collective’s worst gig to date?
We played a festival in Belgium at the end of a really long tour. We’d had too much to drink and no time to do a sound-check. We couldn’t hear what we were playing and after aborting two songs halfway through we just walked off stage and trashed some equipment on the way. That was a low point. But we did an acoustic set in the parking lot afterwards to make up for it.

How come Deakin isn’t going to be touring with you?
He recorded the album with us. We’ll work around his parts when we’re on the road. It feels really natural to us. It’s the way it’s been since high school. Some people felt like playing some nights and others felt like hanging out with their girlfriends. We established early on that not everyone had to be there to make music. You just make music with whoever is there. It keeps everything feeling really loose and that’s the way it works best for us.

Words: Will Alderwick

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #16, Dec/Jan 2008/09

The post Animal Collective appeared first on Wonderland.

Kim Gordon – leading lady of noise punk legends Sonic Youth – on
making mud huts, junk email and post-election blues…

When I was younger I used to hate Monday mornings. I suffered from school anxiety. I hated school. My elementary was a laboratory school at UCLA where my dad taught. It was a very ‘learn by doing’ school, like we used to make mud huts when we were studying about Africa and we skinned a cow hide once. It didn’t prepare me for the bigger school, which was a real disappointment. So I skipped school a lot.

Since the election, I don’t know what to do with my Monday mornings. I’ve become such a news junkie; now I have this big gaping hole. I’m not a natural morning person. I’m a reverse insomniac: I fall asleep and then I wake up at two or three in the morning and toss and turn. But I’ve gotten out of the habit of sleeping in late. Sleeping late for me is eight-thirty these days.

I live in Northampton, Western Massachusetts but yesterday I was in New York. I don’t have such a constant schedule; the only constant thing is my daughter Coco. Thurston [Moore; husband and band mate] and I take it in turns as to who gets up with her. Coco is 14 years old now and just started high school. This morning I got up at seven. It used to be six-thirty but they start later at her new school, so that’s better.

Sometimes, if there is nothing really that exciting going on, then Monday is hard. If you travel a lot then when you come home you feel disconnected from your life. I’d like to just go away and do a couple of shows and come home. It’s hard to leave one child all the time. In the summer we can take her with us, but she doesn’t want to tour that much: it’s not that much fun plus she’s not the one who gets to play.

The first thing I do is go downstairs and feed the dog and let him out. He’s called Merzbow – like the Japanese noise artists. He’s an Australian sheepdog and very photogenic; he’s either just turning five years old or he’s six. Then the cat wants to come in and go out and come in. I have to put the dog in the crate because he chases her. He likes her but he’s overly energetic and freaks her out.

I have to constantly go up and see if Coco is getting up. I’m back and forth up the stairs. One of the ways I try to wake her up is by asking what she wants for lunch. We’re trying to get her to make her own lunch but she is a hopeless morning person. For breakfast I’ll make Coco some oatmeal. I like that too. But lately I’ve been getting into a fried egg on toast with olive oil and a slice of tomato. And I’ll drink earl grey, green or black tea.

I usually take a shower later in the morning, before I go to the gym. If I’m lucky I go three times a week. I try to time it to watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. During the election I would read the New York Wall, the New York Times and I’d be checking the Huntington Post and Tina Brown’s new blog on the Daily Beast at the same time.

On the weekend I don’t really get that many emails. Mainly penis extension or extra orgasms, that kind of stuff. But I check my email every morning and I look at all the homework I have to do; I sift through and see how the things I have been procrastinating about are doing. That’s sort of a good Monday morning thing to do. If I’m really feeling organised I mentally plan out what I’m going to get done. But lately I’ve really been busy because I have all these projects. I’m starting a clothing line called Mirror/Dash and I’m working on an art book for Rizzoli, which is a combination of some of my recent watercolours and some photographs. We’re working on a new record, I have equipment set up in my basement and a studio in Hoboken, New Jersey. And I have to make a lion costume for my daughter.

I don’t have a regular lunchtime. Sometimes, like today, I’m going to go to Wholefoods to buy food and maybe I’ll grab some sushi or I’ll just grab a sandwich. We have a big Victorian house but the room I paint in is kinda messy, the ceiling is falling down and needs to be fixed. It used to be the servant’s kitchen and it has a sink in there. So I sometimes work in the kitchen because the light is really good and there’s a big table. It’s one of these typical things: hardly anyone leaves the kitchen.

In the evenings at the moment Thurston is trying to catch up on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he’s way behind, so we’re re-watching it with him. So sometimes we’ll watch an episode of that, or I’m really into Mad Men. I’m really behind in watching TV, I’m behind with Entourage and Weeds, and there’s a new vampire show, True Blood.

I go to bed around midnight. I usually read, usually fiction. I’m reading this pretty good suspense book, called “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.” Although I have “My Sister Madonna” next to my bed by Christopher Ciccone. Sometimes I get my best ideas at night. But then it keeps me awake, like I really have to force myself not to think. I can really become a worrier about myself. I don’t dream as much as I used to. I had a really weird one the other night about Thurston’s mother; that she was pregnant. She’s an incredibly youthful woman for her age, she’s very vital. It was pretty bizarre.

Photographer:: Andrew Kesin

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #16, Dec/Jan 2008/09

The post Kim Gordon appeared first on Wonderland.

If the gentlemen behind Jackass were German-speaking installation artists with giant brains, they would be Gelitin. A two hundred-foot pink wool rabbit on an Italian mountain-top; a fountain of a man pissing in his own mouth; and a 35-foot chute of naked bodies down which greased-up members of the public were encouraged to slide. These are just a few of the art anarchists recent exploits. Not challenging enough for you? Try constructing a cantilevered balcony out of a window on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center.

But their most controversial act to date, insists Urban, was a show in Paris called La Louvre. “The Louvre sold their name to a Dubai company for $700 million,” he begins. “So we said, ‘We can get the name for free, we’ll just call the show that. But the gallery said no. So we said ‘Okay, we’ll call it La Louvre’. And then they wrote a letter to the lawyer of the Louvre. Can you imagine? Any lawyer will say no. If Andy Warhol had written to the lawyer of Campbell’s Soup they would have said no!”

Urban is a very droll man. He is also a very thoughtful man. And he speaks in full sentences. This last may not sound like the greatest accolade of all time. But it’s a rare trait, and worth noting. It also means that the conversation printed below is verbatim. Our encounter took place on the telephone (all the Gelitin boys – Urban, Florian Reither, Wolfgang Gantner and Ali Janka – are holed up in their Vienna studio hard at work on their new Art Basel Miami show). Urban’s tone, even filtered down a long-distance line, is drily sweet. He often sounds as though he is just a word or two away from laughter.

WONDERLAND: Okay. So. Let’s begin. Why make art as a foursome?

TOBIAS URBAN: When we were students, we were 17 people. They became doctors and we ended up as four. We are basically the leftovers. It’s much more fun working together. You can tell each other how good you are.

WONDERLAND: You certainly look like you’re having a lot of fun in your Cleaning In The Nude video piece. Quite a few erect penises.

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah. Yeah we were. I saw this thing on YouTube about the last exhibition in New York and this guy said, ‘These guys have way too much fun to be taken seriously.’

WONDERLAND: Do you agree?

TOBIAS URBAN: I think humour is one of the most serious things in life. Also if you take life seriously you have to cry all the time and I’m not a person who likes to cry all the time.

WONDERLAND: So, you all knew each other when you were kids.

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah. We met at a summer camp in 78. I came from Germany and they came from Austria.

WONDERLAND: How old are you?

TOBIAS URBAN: I’m not sure when the others were born, but they were born in the 70s.

WONDERLAND: And when were you born?

TOBIAS URBAN: I am the oldest. But the story changes, you know?

WONDERLAND: I noticed. [Laughs]. Your age is different in every article…

TOBIAS URBAN: Yes. It depends who is in power. If the Nazis had won the Second World War, the Polish would have been the bad guys…

WONDERLAND: Does Gelitin avoid personality or encourage difference?

TOBIAS URBAN: We’re not like a political party; political parties avoid personality. We //are //personalities. We didn’t start an artistic career to become zombies.

WONDERLAND: So who plays what role in the group?

TOBIAS URBAN: I’m usually the artistic person. I’m counting tools and sorting nails. Ali is the creative director because he always likes to put the last bit on it. Wolfgang is the president because he’s a very natural president: he always screams, especially when he’s drunk. And Flo takes care of the food, where we go for food. And I am the German, which is important. We have a couple of galleries and there is always one German working there. Nobody likes him, but he’s there.

WONDERLAND: You don’t live together, like The Monkees, or anything like that?

TOBIAS URBAN: No. We also usually don’t have sex together. It happens sometimes but it’s not the usual.

WONDERLAND: What effect does your work have on the public?

TOBIAS URBAN: Very often they smile. It’s like a liberation. Like when somebody dances really embarrassingly at a party – you think, ‘If he dances like this, I can dance however I want to.’

WONDERLAND: Is there any sort of an ethos behind what you do?

TOBIAS URBAN: There are less and less possibilities to do things in the world. If somebody does things nobody thinks is possible, then everyone’s perspective broadens. So that’s what we do. If it’s art or not, I don’t really care. The good thing is, if you say it’s art, it’s art. Nobody can say it’s not.

WONDERLAND: What inspires you?

TOBIAS URBAN: I don’t know… anything that’s around me. From porn to music, anything that you see, comics, books that I read. Even sometimes art, but not very often. Sometimes we are told, ‘You cannot do this, this is not art.’ We made this fisting video to show in a gallery and they said, ‘You should show this in a private video booth.’

WONDERLAND: Sorry, I couldn’t quite hear you. Did you say fisting video?

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah.

WONDERLAND: Oh God.

TOBIAS URBAN: It was this video where Ali and I are double-fisting a guy.

WONDERLAND: Oh no!

TOBIAS URBAN: And this was my introduction to fisting. I’d never done it before and I’ll probably never do it again. But it was kind of interesting. We wanted this guy to be on stage in London in a box, with just his arse coming out, and if we don’t know what to talk about we just grab into his arse and take out something like a ball with a name or a theme written on it, so we made a test video.

WONDERLAND: And what happened?

TOBIAS URBAN: We filmed it. But he didn’t show up for the actual performance. We gave him what he wanted the day before.

WONDERLAND: [Laughs].

WONDERLAND: [Laughs]. So this video we shot, this guy said if we didn’t show it in his hometown, he doesn’t care, anywhere else. So we showed the video and then there were the arguments about pornography. But pornography is all around us. You just have to go onto the internet. If you read the statistics, a third of males watch porn every day. It’s part of our visual language. It’s not exceptional.

WONDERLAND: When was this?

TOBIAS URBAN: In 2006. They shut down the exhibition a week early. [Laughs]. Usually they do that with us.

WONDERLAND: Any other major scandals? What about the Arc de Triomphe sculpture?

TOBIAS URBAN: Yes. In Vienna in 2003. I was really angry that we gave a national platform to local politicians. Politicians usually like to create problems that they can solve, because they can’t solve the //real// problems, which are too difficult. So they stand in front of our sculpture and say, ‘We have to protect our children from erect penises.’ It’s total bullshit. They built a house around it. Did you read about it?

WONDERLAND: Yes. Wasn’t Prince Charles coming on a visit?

TOBIAS URBAN: The Guardian called us and asked us if we did this because Prince Charles was coming. And we said, ‘Somebody who wants to be a tampon should not be scared of a statue of a man peeing in his own mouth.’ Nobody talks about the innocence you create… The fact is that usually what you see in the public space is a huge commercial for BMW, or for the new Nokia blah blah i-Phone. And then you put this guy in a yoga position with a hard-on peeing in his own mouth with the socks down and with the tee-shirt round his neck. And you are giving an image of someone who doesn’t need anything. And he for sure doesn’t need the new i-Phone, because he’s happy peeing in his own mouth.

WONDERLAND: What about the balcony you made on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center? It’s all over the internet that it was a hoax. But you did do it, didn’t you…

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah we did it.

WONDERLAND: Why lie?

TOBIAS URBAN: In America they sued this guy who climbed it in the 70s. They sued him for $750,000.

WONDERLAND: Shit.

TOBIAS URBAN: So then you start to think that it’s not important that we prove that we did something just for them to fuck you up for the next fifty years. And then there was this collapse of the towers. And then before you know it you have something to do with //that//. And they can do whatever they want to you. You don’t fuck with these authorities.

WONDERLAND: You’ll be in Guantanamo before you know it…

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah. Seriously. For four or five years.

WONDERLAND: So what did it feel like standing outside, up there on the 91st floor?

TOBIAS URBAN: We try to do things that are very natural. You are in this glass prison breathing artificial air and the most natural move you want to do is to step out. So that is what we did. We built a little house around the window inside the room so no one saw what we were doing. It took us a month to find out how to take out the glass without breaking it. We trained how to take it out with suction cups. And then we had our balcony.

WONDERLAND: For how long was it in place?

TOBIAS URBAN: It was out two times for about twenty minutes. It’s like if you step out of an aeroplane. It’s too beautiful. You puncture this skin that is not allowed to be punctured.

WONDERLAND: What’s your favourite Gelitin piece?

TOBIAS URBAN: One really good one was in Australia where we dug a tunnel to the Chinese restaurant. A Hole To China. It was super-beautiful. The organisers of this festival gave us this left-over empty space in a shopping mall – one of those places where you want to shoot up heroin – and we didn’t know what to do. But we found out that there was a hole in the floor, so we opened the floor and there was just sand and we started digging. And then we had the choice between the jewellry store on the right side or the Chinese restaurant on the left side.

WONDERLAND: What did the festival make of it?

TOBIAS URBAN: We opened the tunnel at noon so there is a lot going on in the Chinese restaurant. The organiser had to pretend to the sponsor that he knew what was going on and he went down with the video camera and was saying, ‘How fantastic, how fantastic.’ And he never ever talked to us again.

WONDERLAND: Is Gelitin the inheritor of any artistic tradition?

TOBIAS URBAN: Feminism.

WONDERLAND: Right.

TOBIAS URBAN: Serious. Look at their work. I feel related to them. Because they changed the image of female bodies a lot: the idea that you are not passive as a female; you are not the brush of an artist, you take it in your own hands. Like Carolee Schneeman, who pulled the poem out of her pussy and VALIE EXPORT, who gave herself a new name that was not her father’s or her husband’s and spelt it with capital letters, like a brand.

WONDERLAND: Does your work have a message?

TOBIAS URBAN: Um. No. I don’t want to change the world. I think the people who want to change the world are dangerous. People like Bush want to change the world. If someone wants to improve the world, I’m worried.

WONDERLAND: What do you want to do to the world: make it laugh? Think? Neither?

TOBIAS URBAN: Hmmm. I am just watching it. For me the world is absurd. We are now in this financial crisis. In 2006 Goldman Sachs paid $60 billion to its employees. And you think, ‘What do they produce? Do they produce refridgerators? What do they do? Do they make art?’ They just make money out of money.

WONDERLAND: And you find that strange?

TOBIAS URBAN: Yes. I just watch it. And think about it. Not really criticising it. That’s how it is. I’m not a better person or anything. I’m a person who happens to be an artist. And art is a very free system.

WONDERLAND: How long before an exhibition do you decide what you are going to do? A long time?

TOBIAS URBAN: No. Well. You have the idea somewhere in your head.

WONDERLAND: So somewhere in your head you have a 200-foot pink rabbit?

TOBIAS URBAN: Yeah, you have this 200-foot rabbit and you think, ‘How do I want it?’ And you think, ‘I want it that old ladies are knitting it, because it’s much nicer than a machine.’ So you feed the old ladies with sugar and tea and then there is a pink rabbit coming out. And then you have the rabbit skin lying in the studio for four years and you don’t know what to do with it. And then this person comes by from a gallery and they want to find a good spot for it.

WONDERLAND: I saw some pictures of the rabbit recently, he’s looking quite pale, isn’t he?

TOBIAS URBAN: He’s pale, yes. He’s getting quite grey. Now you can climb on from all sides.

WONDERLAND: Have you been back since he was first installed?

TOBIAS URBAN: I was there in September. We had a little third birthday party for him.

WONDERLAND: That’s nice.

TOBIAS URBAN: I always think, ‘Now it’s over with the rabbit’, but every year it’s getting more beautiful.

WONDERLAND: How long will he be there?

TOBIAS URBAN: Forever. I think you’ll still be able to see it in fifty years if you are lucky. Because even if it’s completely covered in grass, you’ll still see a form.

WONDERLAND: The archaeologists of the future will do an excavation and they’ll find your rabbit…

TOBIAS URBAN: Yes and can you imagine somebody coming from outer-space in the future and seeing the churches and people praying to somebody nailed to the cross. People are crazy. I always think when I go to church, ‘You are praying to a torture instrument. Take him down, please!’ I want Buddha, some old guy that sits down and is happy.

WONDERLAND: Okay, that’s it…

TOBIAS URBAN: That’s it?

WONDERLAND: Yes.

TOBIAS URBAN: Okay. My date of birth you can say what you want. I don’t care if I’m 36 or 45.

WONDERLAND: How old would you like to be today? I’ll just put that.

TOBIAS URBAN: Um. 37 would be good.

WONDERLAND: Nice.

TOBIAS URBAN: [Laughs].

WONDERLAND: Oh yeah, do you have a title yet for your new show in Miami?

TOBIAS URBAN: It’s a long one.

WONDERLAND: Okay… What is it?

TOBIAS URBAN: Hang on, I have to read it. It’s My Face Your Popo, Your Face My Popo, Restefick, Euroink, Pittosporum, The Freckled Show, **Our**Wonderful**Show**, I Say Goodbuy You Say Hello, I Say Hello You Say Goodbuy, Everland, More Is Less More Or Less, In 80 Tagen Um Die Welt, Dim Sum, New Chinese Art, Rubber Americard, Younger Bats Must Back To Bed, Old Farts, Culatello My Ass, Concord Is Here, Never Forget A Billion Has 9 Zeroz, Ass To Mouth, And Back Again.

WONDERLAND: Um. Thanks.

TOBIAS URBAN: You’re very welcome.

Words: Louise Brealey

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #16, Dec/Jan 2008/09

The post Gelitin appeared first on Wonderland.

I like the anarchic idea of coming from nowhere. But I think that’s probably because I had a very steady childhood.

I’m secretive. I like to think that no one knows what I’m thinking or feeling. I happen to be Jewish, but I don’t want to go round exclaiming and tearing my hair.

At 15 I went to the Central School of Art. I was the youngest there and can remember seeing a naked model for the first time. I rang up all my friends and said, ‘Come and see this!’.

Painters who use life itself will eventually reveal every facet of their lives. My work is purely autobiographical. It is about myself and my surroundings. It is an attempt at a record. I work from the people that interest me and that I care about, in rooms that I live in and know.
Through my intimacy with the people I portray, I may have depicted aspects of them which they find intrusive.

Half the point of painting a picture is that you don’t know what will happen. I sometimes think that if painters did know what was going to happen, they wouldn’t bother actually to do it. I hope people will be affected by my work but whether it’s adversely or agreeably I don’t care at all. I’m fairly immune from praise or abuse, but there are a very few number of people where what they thought would count a lot for me.

I’ve gradually worked longer as I’ve gotten weaker. Fading strength makes me drive myself harder. But I’ve never lacked staying power. With age I’ve become increasingly ambitious. It’s a fascination with the difficulties. I don’t like many hours to pass without working. Many people are astonished that anyone would sacrifice the possibility of comfort and what is thought to be an agreeable life to a life of uncertainty and loneliness, where you are engaged in an incomprehensible activity.

All the real pleasures are solitary. I hate being watched at work. I can’t even read when others are about.

The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable. I remember Francis Bacon would say that he felt he was giving art what he thought it previously lacked. With me, it’s what Yeats called the fascination with what’s difficult. I’m only trying to do what I can’t do. There is no free will and the only real work you can do is on yourself. I paint the sort of paintings I can, not the ones I necessarily want to paint.

I think of great pictures, rather than great artists. There are very few painters where I like everything they did because it’s by them. Unlike Andy Warhol, who said ‘People go on asking about my works, they don’t realise that they are exactly as they see, there’s nothing behind them,’ I want there to be everything behind mine.

For me the painting is the person. My idea of portraiture came from dissatisfaction with portraits that resembled people. I would wish my portraits not to have a look of the sitter, but to be them. I didn’t want to get just a likeness like a mimic, but to portray them, like an actor. As far as I am concerned the paint is the person. I want it to work for me just as the flesh does.

I did 200 drawings to every painting in the early days. I very much prided myself on my drawing. [But ] the idea of doing paintings where you’re conscious of the drawing and not the paint just irritated me. People thought and said and wrote that I was a very good draftsman but my paintings were linear and defined by my drawing… I thought if that’s at all true, I must stop.

I don’t use professional models because they have been stared at so much that they have grown another skin. When they take their clothes off, they are not naked; their skin has become another form of clothing. And I want something that is not generally on show, something private and of a more innate kind. I’m really interested in them as animals. Part of liking to work from them naked is for that reason… One of the most exciting things is seeing through the skin, to the blood and veins and markings.

What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince. Surely all good art is linked to courage, isn’t it? The only thing that’s interesting about art present or past is quality. The whole mystery of art is why good things are good.

Lucian Freud On Paper is published by Jonathan Cape on December 4. randomhouse.co.uk
Picture credit: Man at Night (self-portrait), 1947-48

Words: Will Alderwick

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #16, Dec/Jan 2008/09

The post Lucian Freud appeared first on Wonderland.