At an art conference in 2004, Paul Laffoley shocked his audience by appearing at the lectern with a lion’s paw in place of the lower part of his right leg. Three years before, the American artist had fallen badly in his Boston studio. Recuperating on the hospital ward after an operation to remove his leg below the knee, Laffoley was visited by a group of psychiatrists who wanted to measure what they called his Happiness Index. “What,” they asked, clustering around his bed, “would make you feel better about the loss of your leg?”

Laffoley’s reply, “a lion’s foot”, was not the answer the doctors were expecting. Laffoley, though, had never been more serious in his life. He made contact through a mutual friend with Stan Winston, the late Hollywood special effects designer who made his fortune with the Terminator films. Intrigued, Winston fashioned a lion’s limb that would attach to Laffoley’s stump exactly like a conventional prosthetic. But… hang on a minute. Why a lion? “I’m a Leo!” says Laffoley, as if merely stating the obvious.

With his shaved head and mad professor’s stare, above the knees the 69-year-old resembles a cross between Buddha and Back To The Future‘s Doc Brown. (His voice, appropriately enough, is an exact replica of Hubert J Farnsworth, the aged scientist in Futurama.) Yet his physical appearance is positively mundane compared to the workings of his mind as expressed through his art: dense, geometric paintings which resemble Eastern mandalas or the covers of fantastical 70s prog rock albums; six-foot square arrangements of diagrams and texts; images of flying saucers, occult symbols, human skulls and impossible mathematical shapes. Intricately detailed, they can look almost computer generated, but are in fact painstakingly pieced together by Laffoley using only paint, ink and stick-on letters.

These fascinating works, which Laffoley has been producing since the late-60s, are based on encyclopaedic and tireless research. His references and reading weave together ancient Eygptian lore, Medieval mysticism and the theories of 20th century scientist-dreamers such as Wilhelm Reich. Obsessed with the relationship between science and the spiritual, with time travel and out-of-body experiences, he returns again and again to themes of transcendence and higher consciousness, many of which are outlined in long texts on his gallery’s website. (Be warned: the essay accompanying his 1992 work Dimensionality: The Manifestation Of Fate alone runs to 12,000 words.)

This mix of learning and conjecture has seen Laffoley labelled a visionary artist; it’s a description he doesn’t seem to mind. “It has to do with the connection between the physical and metaphysical,” he concurs. “The structure of the mystical experience.” Laffoley has linked that structure to a four-dimensional mathematical figure known as the Klein Bottle, which when drawn as a diagram looks like a trumpet bent round on itself. He on to explains that such a shape allows our consciousness to pass seamlessly through time and space – or, as Laffoley puts it, “from one dimensional realm to another”.

It’s probably clear by now that Laffoley’s explanations of his own working methods rarely simplify matters. When I call him at his studio at 9am on a Monday morning, it turns out he’s just finished fitting his (conventional) artificial leg and morning reading. Naturally, he was immersed in nothing so lowly as a newspaper, opting instead for a chapter of Joscelyn Godwin’s 1987 book The Harmonies of Heaven, subtitled ‘The Spiritual Dimension of Music from Antiquity to the Avant-Garde’. And then, before I can stop him, he’s off into a description of a new painting which takes in Plato’s Republic, the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria, the Faust legend and 19th century religious doctrine Theosophy. It comes as no surprise to learn he usually works a ten-hour day. “I consider what I do to be like inventions,” he says. “An invention can be very quick when you think of it. But the craft of art can go on for a long time.”

Born in the university town of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Laffoley’s early life was outwardly conventional – his mother was a staunch Roman Catholic with an addiction to soap operas. By contrast, his father, who worked as a lawyer and some-time lecturer at Harvard Business School, maintained a life-long fascination with eastern religions and the occult, even performing as a medium at a Boston theatre. When Laffoley was diagnosed with mild Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, as a child he found himself first examined by psychiatrists (who pronounced him to have an intellect around “room temperature”) then assigned a tutor – an Indian Brahmin who taught in the Mathematics department at Harvard and told Laffoley’s father, “ I can fix him up.”

Laffoley claims his IQ “rose immediately” after meeting the Brahmin. Certainly by the time he graduated from Brown University with a degree in Classics and Art History, it was up to 183 – which puts him amongst an elite group of geniuses. “I just said to myself, ‘This means an IQ is stupid’,” Laffoley demurs. On leaving Brown in 1962, Laffoley found himself taken up – and quickly dropped – by a series of prestigious academic institutions, companies and fellow artists, many of whom were unable or unwilling to engage with his prodigious intellect and unorthodox ideas.

He enrolled to study architecture at the Harvard Graduate School Of Design (only to be asked to leave after suggesting a solution to low-cost housing based on genetically modified plants). He worked briefly for New York architect Frederick Kiesler (who chased him out of his studio when Laffoley damaged a sculpture he was supposed to be cleaning) and for Emery Roth & Sons, where he helped draw up the floorplans for the World Trade Center (and was fired for daring to suggest the twin towers should be linked by walkways). And, after cold-calling as many famous artists as he could find numbers for, he was hired as part of a team watching a bank of televisions left on day and night in Andy Warhol’s Harlem studio. Laffoley got the graveyard shift, between 2am and dawn, when all that was being broadcast were testcards. The repetitions of the cards across multiple screens reminded him of Warhol’s own work. When he reported his observations back to the pop-artist, however, Laffoley claims Warhol seemed affronted and refused to discuss the matter further.

By 1968, Laffoley had had enough of the Big Apple. He returned to Boston to work on realising his own artistic ambitions. Unable to afford a proper live-work space, he rented instead a utility room in an office block – a room he ended up living and working in alone for the next 38 years. Only in 2006, after his landlord finally threatened to evict him, did he move into a purpose-built studio.

Laffoley has always been a peripheral figure in contemporary art. The artist group he is cited as being a founder of, the Boston Visionary Cell, has just one member: him. Although his new works sell for upwards of $95,000, he is best known by a wide spectrum of obsessives and cranks. Over the past decade, though, there’s been increasing interest from cutting-edge curators and museums, and this May his work forms the centrepiece of a new show at one of Paris’s premier modern art spaces, Palais De Tokyo. Laffoley admits he’s delighted with the prospect. Although even Palais De Tokyo’s dramatic spaces fall some distance short of his ideal: “a giant sphere where you can have different works talking to each other across the space, with the viewer in the middle.”

In many respects, Laffoley is both a true visionary and a product of far-out 60s idealism. His work is often utopian in outlook and hallucinatory in execution, evoking an art history which spans eons rather than mere millennia. Had he been less intellectually minded, he might have become one of the first art stars of the psychedelic era. Yet he was as misunderstood by 60s hippy radicals as he was by his fellow artists and architects. When Timothy Leary turned up at one of his early shows in Boston he simply turned to Laffoley and told him, “I like your sense of humour.” And when a rogue gallerist transported one of his shows to Woodstock and exhibited it in a tent, Laffoley drove to the festival in a truck and took it back. He also claims never to have sampled LSD, though when he exhibited in a rock venue in Boston in the 1970s, bemused visitors would ask the manager, “What does he take to do this?”

Laffoley dismisses such interest in his work as superficial. “It’s like in the 19th century,” he says. “Because artists in Paris liked absinthe, there was an association made between being creative and the substance. I don’t think creativity has anything to do with that. It’s behind everything, so you can’t easily account for it.” For Laffoley, art isn’t just about sensations; it’s a way of accessing thoughts and feelings which might otherwise remain hidden or closed off. In 1975 he claims to have “received” the idea for a time machine based around a kind of gyroscope made of nested fibreglass spheres. Named the Levogyre, the machine wouldn’t actually transport anyone. Rather, the user’s mental abilites would be enhanced to the point where they could see far into the past and future. It all sounds hopelessly far-fetched, yet Laffoley insists he has the theories to back up his conjectures.

He also says that to come to an understanding of his work requires effort on the part of the viewer (one of his best-known paintings, Thanaton III, actually requires people to place their hands above the picture’s surface on special pads and stare into an all-seeing eye). Not to mention patience. A lot of patience. “I don’t do the kind of art that you see if you go to the meat market in New York,” he says. “In terms of executing it and observing it, it takes a long time. People who have bought my work say the usual time it takes to comprehend it is 15 years.”

It should come as no surprise to learn that Laffoley is obsessive about everything. He says he likes watching films in his spare time, but admits that he tends to watch the same ones over and over, especially Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and 50s sci-fi classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Because of Asperger’s, he says his brain “operates in a different way” – and, certainly, it might help explain the almost overwhelming detail and sense of a private world evoked by some of his paintings. But he’s equally happy to entertain the possibility that he might just be, well… a bit crazy. “The question is, ‘What is madness?’” he asks cheerfully. “Think of what happened from the 16th- to the 19th-century, from the Renaissance to Freud. People’s ideas as to what constitutes being nuts keep changing. Maybe we’re just starting to wise up to that’s how the mind operates.”

Words: Rupert Howe

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #18, Apr/May 2009

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The cold sweats and crazed imaginings of Charlie Kaufman have given us Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Now, with his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York, things have got really weird. Damon Wise takes him on.

Charlie Kaufman has changed a lot since the year 2000. Back then, he was a shy, frizzy-headed man of 41, and the most noticeable thing about him was his height. He was sitting down, perched on a sofa at the Dorchester Hotel, but even then it was obvious he was tiny: his shoes barely touched the floor. After a string of non-encounters with journalists, his publicists were at their wits’ end, hoping for a miracle, praying he’d open up. He didn’t, and they finally gave up on him altogether, combining his interviews with those of Spike Jonze, the director of the film he was supposed to be promoting: his first produced screenplay, Being John Malkovich. That didn’t work either. After just one sensible interview, Jonze became bored and went gonzo, electing to answer questions with awkward pauses and a blank stare.

Those thirty minutes with Kaufman were bizarre. Not because he was bizarre, particularly, but because, when I played back the tape, it was barely useable. Where had all the words gone? What was frustrating was that I knew we had communicated. He’d talked about the trippy, strange Malkovich. And, more fascinatingly, he’d talked of the films to come. Like a new script he’d written, based on the outrageous autobiography of Chuck Barry, host of The Gong Show, in which Barry claimed to have been a hitman. And another, which was about to filmed. Kaufman, I remember, was unhappy with rumours that it was about a man with the world’s smallest penis and the world’s hairiest woman (even though it was). There was a third screenplay, this one still at the treatment stage, which even he thought was ludicrous – he’d been asked to adapt a book about an orchid thief, but since it had no story, he’d added one, with himself and his fictional twin brother as its heroes. And, finally, there was the script he was in the middle of writing: a romantic comedy set almost entirely in a man’s memory.

His ideas seemed wonderful but unworkable, yet one by one they have materialised. First came Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, then Human Nature, then Adaptation. And when I saw The Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind it dawned on me that this must have been the film keeping him awake at nights when we first met. I realised then that Charlie Kaufman was not to be underestimated. He didn’t talk in riddles, just a very abstract form of the truth. Which explains why he’s really not joking when he says that his directing debut, Synecdoche, New York, began life as a horror movie. Because, although it deals with art, mortality and relationships rather than axe-wielding psycho killers, it does in fact tap into some of the same primal fears.

Starring Philip Seymour Hoffmann, Synechdoche (pronounced sin-ek-docky, it means ‘the subsititution of the part for the whole’, as in when threads mean clothes or plastic means credit card) tells the story of Caden Cotard, a small-time theatre director whose world is in freefall after his wife leaves him. Things pick up when he receives an arts grant, but Cotard’s plan is quite insane – wonderful but unworkable. He creates a life-size replica of New York and fills it with actors who play ordinary people, to no discernible end, for an audience that never arrives.

If it seems like a fever dream, it is. It could even be the death dream of a suicidal man, a suggestion Kaufman takes in his stride when we meet again, this time at London’s Charlotte Street Hotel. “It’s certainly not the first time I’ve heard that,” he grins amicably, “and it’s certainly not something I haven’t considered. But your interpretation is what I want – you could tell me that it’s about anything and I would be happy to hear it!” Which is just as well, because, I say, the film also seems to be about writing: Caden can’t figure out how to finish his spectacular art project, a problem Kaufman has surely encountered while crafting his kaleidoscopic fantasies? “Well, again, it can be about the writing process,” he admits, “but it’s also about constructing your view of the world, which we all do, even if we’re not writers. And I think there isn’t really any ending that isn’t artificial. Except your death. That’s the ending. Every other ending for every story is not an ending. It’s an artificial stopping point. How do you finish something? You can’t. That’s why Caden can’t finish his play, because it doesn’t end.

“Death is the only end,” he continues. “Just look at a very concrete example in film: the romantic love story that ends at the beginning of the relationship, that ends when the obstacles are overcome and the couple gets together. But that’s not the ending. Even if it takes them through the first ten years of the marriage, that’s not the ending. Even if they separate and go their different ways, that’s not the ending. There’s no ending! There’s only an ending when they die!”

Caden – whose surname is a taken from a delusion called Cotard Syndrome, which causes sufferers to believe they are already dead – is a hypochondriac, afraid of being alone, afraid of dying and, worst of all, of dying alone. With such a specific set of neuroses, it would be tempting to see Synecdoche as a personal exorcism of some private fears. Kaufman, however, denies this. “I think Caden’s fears are everybody’s fears,” he says. “Maybe with a few extraordinary exceptions, I think everyone’s afraid of time passing and loneliness and getting ill and dying. We’re the animal that knows it’s going to die. That’s our speciality. But it’s really important when you’re trying to do something like this to not get immersed in the ego of it – because then I think you’re in danger of writing crap.”

Looking at Kaufman now, it’s hard to reconcile him with the shifty, inarticulate novice of 2000. He still looks at the floor when he’s speaking, but he’s better dressed (in black) these days, his body language is less guarded and the conversation much more fluid and confident. Nevertheless, he bristles slightly at the suggestion that he’s changed. “It’s hard to say,” he shrugs. “I don’t feel like I’ve changed. I feel like there’s a continuum. I’m the same person I was when I was nine. But if you say that I’m different in this interview, I’ll take your word for it. I don’t feel that, but I do know it’s probably true. I couldn’t meet actors nine years ago without being really nervous, and the fact that I can direct them now obviously means there has been a change.”

One thing he will agree on, however, is that he is no longer crippled by nerves: “Something I think has served me in doing interviews is: if you’re nervous, you’re nervous. Be nervous. Don’t try to pretend you’re not. And it’s actually really helpful. It goes away once you acknowledge it.” To illustrate the point, he mentions the scene in Adaptation where Nicolas Cage is having lunch with his publisher, sweating and twitching like an idiot. “Afterwards, when everyone had seen that movie,” he explains, “I realised, ‘Everyone knows I sweat a lot.’ And suddenly I didn’t sweat a lot. Once it was, like, out of the bag, it stopped. Which is bizarre, and curious, and I don’t know what it means. But there’s a life lesson there somewhere!”

By time the sweating stopped, Charlie Kaufman had become a phenomenon. In the course of those four screenplays, the word “Kaufmanesque” was coined, usually as an unimaginative way to describe the over-imaginative. “You know what’s funny?” he grins. “I just did a radio show in the US. They used a clip from Adaptation, the scene between the Charlie Kaufman character and the executive who’s hiring him to do this screenplay, and she says, ‘Boy, I’d like to find a portal into your brain!’ I used to get that all the time. All the time. So I was listening to it, thinking, ‘God, I haven’t heard that in years.’ And I always say exactly the same thing that Nic Cage says in the movie, which is, ‘Believe me, it’s no fun in here.’ Y’know, that self-deprecating bullshit thing! Because… what do you say?” He laughs. “So that was this little Abbott and Costello routine I did with everyone who said that to me.”

If Kaufman feels insulted or trivialised by this, he hides it well. “Yeah, people think everything I do represents me in the world,” he chuckles, “and of course naming a character after myself probably contributed to that! I guess there are elements of me in everything I write, but it’s not me. Otherwise I’d be writing my autobiography and I’d be calling it that. I like using fiction because it gives me the freedom to move away from myself.”

So what’s next? “I dunno,” he sighs. “Trying to write something new. I got nothing.” Which, in a sense, is truly Kaufmanesque: the bathetic drama of a writer whose brilliant career is based on the new, trying to think up something new… and failing. It’s a worrying thought that Synecdoche, New York took five years to make, and after the amazing 1999-2004 run from Malkovich to Eternal Sunshine, there’s now nothing left unproduced lying in the drawer back at Kaufman’s home in Pasadena. “I wanna write something that’s challenging,” he muses, “that gets me to think about things I haven’t thought about. I’m a little concerned about the world of film, and how it’s closing up. There might not be a place any more for what I like to do. So that keeps me anxious. I don’t really want to embark on something that I’m not gonna be able to sell.” He lightens up, realising that the conversation is getting a little bleak. “But I’m trying to put that out of my head a little bit.” He shrugs, because, after all, even the woolliest, most berserk ideas have come through for him in the past. “I have to trust that the work will provide.”

Words: Damon Wise

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #18, Apr/May 2009

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Arriving at Vivienne Westwood’s Battersea studio, a non-descript grey building behind a wire fence, I recall our first meeting in 1977. She was the Queen of Punk and I was a snotty first-year student interviewing her for my fanzine. We spent hours chatting about everything from her time as a primary school teacher to her affection for Sid Vicious.
One thing hasn’t changed. From snarling anarchist – all spiky bleach-job and tartan bondage – to eccentric national treasure in Harris tweeds and headscarf (knickers optional), Westwood has coolly maintained her sovereign position in British fashion. And, in 2006, was handed a D.B.E. to prove it.

In the flesh Westwood is indisputably regal. The porcelain white skin and shag of marmalade hair make her look more like Elizabeth I than Blanchett, Mirren, Duff and Dench combined. She even holds herself like a blueblood. I shouldn’t then be surprised to find her husband of 17 years, Andreas Kronthaler, lying at her feet stretched out on a bolt of shiny fabric. It’s almost disappointing to learn that the Kronthaler is not in fact indulging in Sir Walter Raleigh-style prostration. They are discussing the difference between a quilt and a counterpane.

I am here ostensibly to ask about Westwood’s new World’s End range of designs named for (and on sale at) the iconic shop at 430 King’s Road where punk rock was born. But it’s impossible to spend any time at the court of Dame Vivienne and not be exposed to a passionate barrage of her meditations on the environment, literature, civil liberties and artistic freedom. This is the stuff that makes the post-office manager’s daughter from rural Derbyshire tick. And it’s also the stuff that makes her a complete one-off. “I’ve hijacked the fashion to say what I want to say about everything else,” admits the 68-year-old, with a breathy giggle. “I didn’t do fashion by choice, but it has given me this opportunity to open my mouth: now I’m really trying to do something with the problem with the ecology.”

Westwood’s office is rammed with dress rails, fabric swatches, sketches and the requisite inspirational photographs and books – including Jane Arnold’s Patterns For Fashion. A cutting table that doubles as her desk is barely visible under piles of rough designs and samples of braids and buttons. The pin-board sports a collage of postcards and portraits: Brigitte Bardot, Naomi Campbell, Edith Sitwell.

A model appears wearing a calico toile. “That’s lovely with all that thing sticking out in front,” observes Westwood, before sweetly singing her husband’s praises: “Andreas has worked with me for about twenty years and had an incredible influence on the way I work.” She explains how she told him she wanted the dress to fit like an “old granny” and how Kronthaler – who is 25 years her junior and looks like Johnny Depp’s stand-in from Pirates of the Caribbean – exaggerated the idea. She shows me an askew skirt that he also designed. “He said he wanted to make it as if the tailor was drunk,” she recalls. “He’s such a visual person, the lining is more important to him, the way it feels on your body, he’s very good at that.”

What does she consider to be her gift? “I’m very good at this certain geometry, this certain spatial intelligence. I know I have definitely influenced the way clothes look with my cutting techniques.” The other weapons in Westwood’s formidable armory are her natural intelligence, her overflowing rag-bag of cultural influences, her appetite for knowledge, and her unswerving self-belief. “I do everything for myself,” she says simply, “but I somehow feel quite sure that people will like it.”

The World’s End collection is pure Westwood. Her idea is to rework iconic garments from her own archive in leftover fabrics and off-cuts. Quantities will be dictated by what materials are available, creating limited editions by default. “It’s the nature of what I do,” she explains. “I just don’t like doing amazingly big collections… When I used to have SEX and Seditionaries [earlier incarnations of the King’s Road shop] I never had a sale, we just used to add things. I want to do those muslin T-shirts again and put our prints on them.” Westwood’s early punk T-shirts featured half-naked cowboys and kiddie-porn pin-ups that stuck two fingers up to censorship. Her newer designs are more overtly political, one slogan reading I AM EXPENSIV (“We’re privileged because we’re subsidised by all the suffering people in the world,” she says), and another I HEART CRAP (“This is our best selling T-shirt of all time”). Both are also available printed on baby-gros.

Westwood is frank about the ironies attached to attempting an ethical stance on the environment while working in an industry that demands constant novelty. “The fact is that people want to buy things… sometimes even I think I don’t have anything to wear,” she confesses. “I am not a very acquisitive person, but I have to have the best things. Everybody is part of the problem.” She hesitates. “What I say is, ‘Choose well’, because most people just buy lots of rubbish. But that’s very self-serving because people can get something that will last from my shops!” She bemoans the passing of the DIY element that originally fuelled punk fashion: “People made things out of bin-liners, that was fantastic. You can take a tablecloth or a bit of beautiful cloth and just tie it round you.”

With its emphasis on recycling, World’s End is a logical next step for Westwood. In 2005, inspired by the writings of Aldous Huxley – who, she explains, identified society’s biggest threats as nationalism, organised lying and non-stop distraction – the designer created her Propaganda collection. Models were draped in protest banners and sported headbands which read Branded. “If your brain is filled with rubbish, nothing else goes in.” She pauses. “We’re certainly being lied to at the moment about the ecology; it’s not as simple as taking the C02 out of the air. We are facing the most horrendous things.” There is a tremor in her voice as, after an anti-government diatribe, she cites writer James Lovelock’s apocalyptic thesis: “He says within a hundred years there will only be one fifth of the world’s population left.”

With a view to reaching out to a wider public, Westwood subsequently set up her AR “movement” – Active Resistance to Propaganda. And, in December 2007, launched the movement’s Manifesto at The Wallace Collection, a tiny London gallery that houses works by Boucher and Watteau, painters who have both inspired Westwood gowns.
“You can’t understand the present if you don’t know something about the past,” she insists. “The whole thing about the Manifesto is to encourage people to become art lovers, so you get out what you put in. Once you are more in control then you become impervious to propaganda.” On her AR website she lists ‘Things you can do’ which range from signing up for Prince Charles’ Save The Rainforest petition, to buying tickets for classical music concerts “for as little as £7”. She also recommends Lovelock’s seminal eco-horror text, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. “It’s not an easy read,” she admits, “but persevere.”

Her own voracious appetite for books informs everything: “If I didn’t read I couldn’t have any interest to do fashion. It’s very important for me to read, for ideas. People come to me who want to be fashion designers and I just say ‘Follow your deep interest’. People don’t really teach fashion and you’ll just end up looking at magazines.”

Westwood’s archival designs are as strikingly original today as when they originally hit the streets. “Punk rock, the rubber wear, Buffalo girls or the Mini-Crini, they’ve all got a certain character to them,” she says. “I think my clothes are heroic. They always want to cut a figure and have fun.”

Today she’s practising what she preaches in a donkey-coloured silk dress that looks not unlike the lining of an overcoat, and a pink mirrored ‘V’ brooch. She shows me a grey dress that will sell in the store: “It’s a copy of something I wear all the time with a little cap. I always like the look of an urban guerilla… and you can do that with badges and things.” Another favourite piece from the new collection is the Alien suit constructed with rectangles for a silhouette that manages at once to be both fitted and slouchy. “I don’t think I could do a better jacket,” she says, stroking the fabric. “I think it would look great on an old grandma. I mean, I can wear it and I’m an old grandma!”

The conversation suddenly veers off, Westwood-style, on a detour into the past. “I used to sit in bed with bits of fabric and stuff,” she says, a little wistfully. “It was nicer in a way when I first worked – even though it was more difficult because I’ve got better at it since. The fact that I used to do everything myself, it was very satisfying. Now I can’t always look after my second lines. I still try with my first line but it needs a lot of delegation. Fashion is the most time-consuming part of anything I do, and I’m always trying to squeeze in these other things I want to do.”

Ah yes, the other things… Westwood knows the score. She knows that most people who are passionate about the environment don’t care for fashion. But she is determined that they be shown the light. “They think it’s wrong… but I think it’s really great to try and dress up and get engaged with the world,” she says, her eyes twinkling as she warms to her theme. “If you’re dressed up, then you feel like you’re doing that and you attract other people as well. Those two Geldof girls look good, especially Pixie… And also Jamie Winston. She came to my show, ‘So pleased to meet you. Major fan. Can I kneel down?’ sort of thing. And I told them all to come to my Manifesto reading. Peaches started her own magazine. I just thought if you are dead serious about this then really start putting a bit more in… I haven’t heard any more from them since.” She dispatches her critics with a queenly shrug: “A lot of people apparently said, ‘Oh, Vivienne’s just saying all of this because she wants to sell us this T-Shirt’. But if that’s what they want to think well that’s too bad. Buy the T-shirt anyway.”

Photography: Simon Thiselton
Fashion: Grace Cobb
Words: Iain R Webb

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #18, Apr/May 2009

The post Vivienne Westwood appeared first on Wonderland.

I’ve never been the most confident of people about my looks but I am far more confident now than 25 years ago.

Part of me originally felt uneasy about this ‘sex symbol’ thing. I knew it would be difficult to prove myself as an actress after that. I started getting complexes. Then I thought, ‘Why not accept it for what it is?’

A lot of female roles are not fully realised before they’re offered to you. Good writing is hard to come by. When I’m reading a script it will just hit me whether it is right or not. You just see so much that is just not good.

A woman’s relationship with her body is one that no poet has ever captured or has really been depicted well in any book that I’ve read. I think it’s one of the most psychologically intrinsic, interesting relationships that occur on Earth. I think you can tell the strengths and weaknesses of a woman from the relationship she has with her body. That is unless of course they’ve mastered hiding that relationship with a façade, which many women do.

The bad publicity I’ve had in the past has helped my acting, helped me to find emotions I didn’t know I had.

Rejection is such a universal reality for men and women. It is part of the journey of life that we all go through, and I don’t just mean in a love affair… It can be at work, or whatever. But, however it comes, rejection is a hard one to take.

There is a time for self-indulgence in this business and then you get over that. Other things seep into your life. Motherhood is one of those things, and is my top priority.

I wake up around 6 a.m. every morning. I have a 13-year-old daughter and it takes me a good half hour to 40 minutes to get her out of bed. I tell you: right now it’s great exercise in the morning.

My daughter Ireland’s friends know way too much about my life. All these boys are now 13 or 14 years old and they know so much about my business. I used to walk her into school, and then of course as she got older I wasn’t allowed out of the car. But now I wouldn’t want to, because these boys they wave to say hello to me. I ask my daughter, ‘What is up with this?’ And she tells me stories that I don’t want to hear or repeat.

Being a mum is a huge advantage if you’re playing a mother. You can’t help but carry that – not learned, but forced upon you – wisdom with you into the role. I was watching a movie the other day, and the actress – who I’m friends with – had never been a mother. I just wanted to see what I would have done differently. And, although she did the scene beautifully, I could see that she was coming from another place.

The idea of being immersed in another culture has always intrigued me. I’ve always wanted to do a film in another land. I’ve always wanted to speak some kind of weird language. I remember 20 years ago at a press conference in Paris I told everyone who was there that the next time I returned to France I’d really know how to speak French. Well in two decades I’ve made no progress whatsoever.

Believe me I’m no Mother Teresa. I’ve done a lot of wild-ass things in my life. It’s just that I can be wild without drugs and alcohol. And so can anybody.

I don’t have a really great relationship with me on film, or pictures or anything like that.

I avoid watching myself on screen. I’ve lived so deep in the character that somehow it seems that it would be too shallow to watch it. It’s a weird thing but once you have gone the depths that you need to go, I don’t think you have anything to gain by watching yourself back. It would be like, ‘Why?’

Women are pounded over the head with the idea of turning 50. I can’t wait to see what’s up the road. There’s a looseness, a letting go, that I welcome. I’ve let go of bad feelings, anger and anything else that can destroy you.

These days I’m much more liberated in terms of not caring what people say about the choices I make with film roles. Sometimes I just want to do a film because it’s a physical challenge, or I don’t know where the part will end up leading me, or I just want to surprise myself.

Words: Kaleem Aftab

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #18, Apr/May 2009

The post Kim Basinger appeared first on Wonderland.

When Oliver Payne and Nick Relph left Kingston University in 2000 without their degrees – just some spray cans and a few “shitty” videos they’d made – their fine art tutors presumed it would be the last they’d hear from them. No such luck.

Armed with a video camera, a love of hardcore punk, rave, skateboarding and graffiti, and a ballsy swagger, the pair set to work on a series of films. The results are witty, provocative and underpinned, as Payne puts it, by “a ‘fuck you’ to corporate intervention in youth culture”.

2001’s Jungle featured a sword-swinging warrior in chain mail armour doing battle with a WWII soldier dressed in a white t-shirt and tin helmet, clutching a machine gun. Divorcee line-dancers are intercut with suburban bedroom DJs to the tune of Terry Riley’s Motown classic “You’re No Good” in 2002’s Mixtape. And in Comma, Pregnant Pause (2004) random text messages run below a suited Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars and two figures in ludicrous mobile phone costumes and Scream masks.

By 2005 the London double-act had exhibited at the Serpentine gallery, won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion Award, signed to Gavin Brown in NYC and were being heralded as the young gun saviours of film art. Not that it went to their heads – at 2007’s Frieze Art Fair, Relph sat at a card table burning bootlegs of their films on a MacBook Pro – “£20 each or six for £100”.

Payne and Relph (aged 32 and 35, respectively) are now based in Los Angeles – “it’s reeeeeally sleepy here… just the way we like it”. This month sees them return to London with a specially commissioned film for the revamped Whitechapel Gallery. The two took time out from this site-specific project to chat online from their Hollywood homes (Relph lives “just near The Bowl” and Payne in Koreatown). The following is a transcript of that Sunday evening encounter…

Ben Cobb: Where did you first meet?
Oliver Payne: At an abandoned warehouse in West London. We were vandalising it. Doing graffiti.
Nick Relph: Stencil art… just kidding.
OP: There should be stiffer penalties for stencil art. Lock ’em up. I hate street art. Tagging is the pinnacle of the graffiti world.
BC: Why go to Kingston University?
OP: We thought it would be full of kids that couldn’t get into the cool schools.
BC: Couldn’t you get into the cool schools?
OP: No chance.
NR: I couldn’t get into Middlesex, which isn’t even cool!
OP: I think we both might have been turned down from the same ones. I couldn’t get into Middlesex either.
BC: I heard you hated Kingston… why?
NR: We probably talked a bit of shit about it but we didn’t hate it all that much – we had each other. And you’ve got to be a bit antagonistic in art school. It’s part of it unless you’re gonna be really pally with everyone and hold hands, which is not really where we were coming from.
OP: It was actually quite fun in an odd way. I remember some kids getting upset that there wasn’t a kettle in the studio! Like somehow an interesting dialogue can be opened up through a shared interest in tea.
BC: You were on the Intermedia course… what on Earth is that?
NR: Hahaha. Exactly! It means you don’t want to paint.
OP: Nobody ever told us.
BC: So you just got on with your own thing?
NR: Yeah, from day one. We sealed ourselves off and locked the doors… not to make it sound too romantic or anything!
BC: Is that why you got asked to leave Nick?
NR: I got asked to retake the year… like a ‘special’ student.
BC: And you failed the course, Oliver…
OP: Yes. I’d love to say it was for something more exciting but basically I refused to do some coursework that related to business and professional practice because I was at art school for fuck’s sake!
BC: Why did you decide to work together?
OP: We had no choice. It needed to be done.
BC: Had either of you made a film before?
NR: Ol had made some great ones…
OP: I had made a really shit one called The West Four Days Of My Life. It was about growing up in London W4.
NR: Which is now lost.
OP: Yeah, I lost it. It was rubbish.
NR: I have the poster.
OP: Do you? I’d like one of those!
BC: A poster? That’s business and professional practice!
NR: Hehehe.
OP: Hahaha.
BC: Have you ever wanted to go under a collective name?
OP: I don’t like it when people go under those sort of collective names…
NR: But if we had to… Moral Poverty 3.
OP: … they will call themselves The Doubt Configuration or something silly… when really it’s just two blokes called Keith and Steve.
BC Have you ever lived together like Bert and Ernie or Morecombe and Wise?
NR: Hahaha. Yeah, we lived together in NYC. Shared a bed – the works.
OP: It was well Bert and Ernie. Or like The Beatles in “Help”… or do I mean “Hard Day’s Night?”
BC: Who does what in the partnership?
NR: We press the record button at the same time.
BC: Do you ever argue?
NR: Never.
OP: And if we did… it would be about which is the best Fugazi record or something of that nature.
NR: But it wouldn’t come to fisticuffs.
BC: If it did, who would win?
OP: Nick… with a swift left hook to the nuts!
NR: I’m Willow The Wisp, me.
OP: It’s true… Nick is more a lover than a fighter.
BC: If one of you was too ill to work would you both get credit?
OP: I’m too ill… I represent Park Hill… See my face on a twenty dollar bill… Sorry, impromptu Wu Tang lyrics! Yes, we’d both share the credit.
BC: What do you think of most film art?
OP: I’d have to see some first.
BC: Why can’t you see a lot of your work on the Internet?
NR: Because you have to afford the work some respect, which it doesn’t get as a window on a PC somewhere.
BC: What effect does your work have on the public?
OP: Absolutely zero… ziltch times nothing plus zero times air.
NR: Almost none at all. I mean it’s good to show at the Tate and the Whitechapel cos you get more casual visitors but we’re not so concerned with ‘reaching out’.
OP: That’s true. And they’re free.
NR: Art isn’t for everyone, clearly.
BC: Do you care what people take away from your work?
OP: I was a little miffed when someone took away part of one of our sculptures in Miami. It was a series called Ash’s Stash – we’d bought the entire contents of our gallerist Ash L’ange’s basement and made 35-40 pieces from it all – and someone pinched a floppy disc that was sticking out of an old Mac.
NR: It was a Mac from the mid-90s… with a big Nike basketball shoe on top.
BC: What was on the disc?
OP: It was a disc that came free with a toy from the film…
NR: Independence Day! Hahaha. It was a hot item…
OP: … probably on eBay.
BC: Did you take it as a compliment?
NR: I just felt a bit depressed for that person to be honest.
OP: Yeah, it’s not quite the same as nicking a Monet.
BC: What message is behind your work?
NR: We’re not too big on messages. We do say things and we stand behind those things…
OP: … There are recurring ideas that pop again and again.
BC: Such as?
OP: Navigating the area between reluctant acceptance and defiant resistance to the capitalisation of counter culture.
BC: Right. This conversation is getting like the text messaging in your film Comma, Pregnant Pause.
NR: You mean awkward and full of misunderstanding?
OP: Hahaha.
NR: Speaking of that film… did you see the boss of Ryanair dressed up as a cellphone because you can use your phone on their flights now? The costume fitted him so badly…
OP: I loved that picture!
NR: He looked insane. And they’re charging one pound to take a piss… it’s fantastic.
BC: How much to go for a shit?
OP: Hahaha. In the same article he said if you try to sleep they will wake you up to sell you something! He’s fucking amazing. He fires his employees for charging their phones at work!
BC: Do you have a favourite piece of work?
NR: I like Swoon a lot because we used something very modern and throwaway – those little animated giffs that probably won’t exist in five years – and did something with them. Created a world with them. It’s about being blissed out and in love with today.
OP: Word.
BC: What inspires you?
NR: The ecstasy of walking past a JC Decaux bus stop.
OP: When kids took that high-pitched noise that only people under twenty can hear – it’s used to stop kids from loitering outside shopping centres – and turned it into ringtones for their phones.
BC: How long before an exhibition do you decide what to do?
NR: About six months and then we make it about two weeks before the show… when people are waiting outside at the opening. OP: It makes it ‘hot’ for ourselves.
BC: Tell me about your new film for the Whitechapel…
NP: Well the Whitechapel are expanding into the old library next door and we were commissioned to make a piece that related to the history of the building. We had been thinking about libraries in that area a lot anyway.
BC: Really?
NR: Because of the ‘idea store’, which is a New Labour creation – libraries but with considerably less books and more big colourful panels of air. It’s just really insulting.
OP: Like a crèche for depressed people. Somewhere to write your CV.
BC: Have you started the film?
NR: Yeah, we shot it in an abandoned library in Hollywood and used mates as extras, as usual… It’s a proposal for a public library where you can also drink.
OP: A bib-libation-oteque, if you will. Nick worked in a library for eight years.
NR: I loved it. I mean, for a crappy job when you’re 18 years old it’s fantastic. You get to meet different people from your community.
BC: Did you steal any good books?
NR: Not at all. I cleaned and repaired them. The three places you are never allowed to steal from are hospitals, libraries and schools. Anyway, for the film we used the aesthetic that a lot of regeneration projects have – the artist’s impression of a finished building with people pasted in. But the proposal is grounded in something deeply human and civilised… learning and drinking.
BC: Great. That’s everything. Thanks so much for your time.
OP: Thanks… that was fun. I’m going to skin up now.
NR: Yeah, spafe.
BC: What does ‘spafe’ mean?
NR: It’s from that Nissan ad campaign where they created new words. ‘Spafe’ is spacious and safe. ‘Modtro’ is modern and retro.
OP: ‘Jazzual’ is jazzy and casual.
NR: Just a failed attempt at buzz marketing.
OP: Start dropping spafe in jazzual conversation.
NR: I’d better dust – gonna get kicked out of my home in 30 mins! Bye.
BC: Thanks Nick. Bye.
OP: OK Nick, see you here shortly. Hey, Ben…
BC: Yes?
OP: What are you wearing?
BC: Hotpants. You?
OP: Hahaha. A smile. Cool – I’m out. This spliff isn’t going to smoke itself.

Words: Ben Cobb

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #18, Apr/May 2009

The post Oliver Payne Nick Relph appeared first on Wonderland.

The UK’s favourite synth-pop princess Little Boots on Jamie Cullum, Phil Oakey and “that horrible little child off X-Factor.”

For anyone who has been living under a rock for the last year, a quick skip through the Little Boots phenomenon so far… Classically trained pianist Victoria Hesketh grew up in Blackpool. The 25-year-old cut her teeth singing jazz at wedding receptions, jamming in a punk band that only covered Blink-182 songs, plucking a harp in a prog-rock outfit and, dressed as a Blues Brother, performing “Gimme Some Lovin’” to Belgian tourists. Early flirtations with fame include a failed bid for Pop Idol at the age of 16 – “I sang Nina Simone’s “Birds Flying High” to a producer in a hotel room, he said no, I cried and went home”; and as a former member of the almost-ran indie band Dead Disco. Her best friend started calling her Little Boots after seeing the film Caligula – the Roman Emperor’s name is Latin for Little Boots; “I guess because I’m pretty small and wear boots a lot!” In February 2008 she started appearing on YouTube – sat in pyjamas on her bed with a keyboard – doing cover versions of everything from Girls Aloud to Joni Mitchell. Within a year she’d appeared on Later… With Jools Holland, signed to EMI, topped the BBC’s Sound of 2009 poll and, most recently, narrowly missed out on the Critics’ Choice Award at the BRITs. With her debut album due out this summer, it’s odds-on that the best is yet to come…

Describe your music in five words?
Electronic. Melodic. Escapist. Kinda Disturbing. Futuristic. Is that five?

What was the first record you bought?
Take That was the first album I bought out of my own pocket. Pretty good. I don’t have it anymore. It was on cassette. The first record I was bought was Kylie Minogue Locomotion.

What was the best Blackpool nightclub from your teen years?
There were only two vaguely alternative clubs. One was a goth club, which I didn’t go to. The other was kind of indie. It was called Jokes and I loved it. I used to go every bloody weekend. They used to play Stevie Wonder and Led Zeppelin and stuff like that. I bet I’d still love it now.

What’s your favourite YouTube cover you’ve done?
I really like the one of Wiley’s “Wearin’ My Rolex.” It was a challenge from a friend who didn’t think I’d do it. It’s really funny, I sing it wrong because I thought it was ‘babble’ not ‘bubble’ – it makes me sound southern. I had a bad cold that day anyway. I started doing them as a joke but people just started emailing requests and it snowballed. I’d like to do one of “Bizarre Love Triangle” by Depeche Mode. Is it Depeche Mode? No, New Order. I might do that next when I have time.

Worst gig to date?
As Little Boots? One I did in Newcastle – nobody turned up. I guess doing things like The Blues Brothers in a Belgian theme park is pretty up there. But that was character building. It was a 30-piece big band and we’d do a medley – everyone wearing shades. I had some very embarrassing dance moves… I hope there isn’t any video evidence out there! But if you can get up in front of a bunch of tourists in a stupid outfit and do that, then you can get up in front of anybody.

What was your thesis on Jamie Cullum all about?
I didn’t write a whole thesis on him. I mentioned him in it. It was to do with how he covers someone like Radiohead in what’s supposed to be a jazz style. Jazz is supposed to be about improvisation and spontaneity… he just comodifies those elements and turns it into this packaged version of jazz. That was my point really.

Which artist would you most like to collaborate with?
Phil Oakey from The Human League. I’m a massive fan – they’re great. Their record Dare is just brilliant.

Singer you’d most like to hit?
That’s a bitchy one… Eoghan Quigg, that horrible little child off X-Factor. He’s like a man-boy with a baby-face grafted on. But I wouldn’t want to actually physically hurt him because his big stupid squidgy face would look at me and I’d feel bad. But I’d like to stop him singing.

Without music where would you be?
Gardening. I’ve got a garden in London now! I’m not really into flowers. I love growing vegetables. I like the whole process from seed to edible produce. It’s like you grow this thing and it becomes a part of you.

If you could teach the world to sing… which song would it be?
“Mirrorman” by The Human League. That’s my answer today… it’ll change tomorrow.

Photography: Jon Bergman
Words: Will Alderwick

A full version of this article first appeared in Wonderland #18, Apr/May 2009

The post Little Boots appeared first on Wonderland.