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Effects of psilocybin on hippocampal neurogenesis and extinction of trace fear conditioning.

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melanie martinez

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Melanie Martinez - Cry Baby (Official Music Video)

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Melanie Martinez - Mad Hatter (Official Music Video)

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Melanie Martinez - Sippy Cup (Official Music Video)

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Melanie Martinez - Dollhouse (Official Music Video)

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A new film exploring the erasure and revision of identities and histories past and future

The work features performances by Yumna Marwan, Elizabeth Peace and boychild, and by Al-Maria herself. Each one is cast against the science fiction backdrop of a solar battle, as evoked by Etel Adnan in her 1989 war poem, The Arab Apocalypse. Beast Type Song was shot in the derelict former campus of Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design in Holborn, London.

In the poem, Adnan uses drawing to communicate what cannot be expressed in words. Similarly, Al-Maria explores the revision of history through graphic and bodily gestures. When words cannot express trauma, a new language of drawings, movement and music gives voice to the speechless.

Drawing on personal heritage and fictional future projections, the protagonists reflect on the narratives and languages they have inherited as children of various colonial legacies. Each figure encounters some form of violence either through the hostile gaze of the camera or through the imposition of narrative. We are told stories of a violence inflicted on the body, but at the same time are asked to consider the violence of the storytelling itself.

By weaving together music, literature, oral history, film and dance, Beast Type Song serves as an escape route from the repetition of dominant narratives of an oppressive past.​

The work is accompanied by an installation of script pages, correspondence and photographs relating to the research and making of the work.

Sophia Al-Maria was born in 1983. She lives and works in London.
Made possible with the kind assistance of Anna Lena Films. Art Now is a series of free exhibitions showcasing emerging talent and highlighting new developments in British art.

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art now: sophia al-maria: beast type song

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Art Now: Sophia Al-Maria: Beast Type Song - Exhibition at Tate Britain | Tate

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A new film exploring the erasure and revision of identities and histories past and future The work features performances by Yumna Marwan, Elizabeth Peace and boychild, and by Al-Maria herself. Each one is cast against the science fiction backdrop of a solar battle, as evoked by Etel Adnan in her 1989 war poem, The Arab Apocalypse.

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Gillian Wearing first attracted public acclaim when she exhibited this series of photographs at City Racing, a small artist-run gallery in London in 1993. She had been using video and photography since the early 1990s, but this was her first significant collaboration with members of the public. Standing in a busy area of South London, Wearing stopped passers-by and asked them to write down what was on their mind. With their permission, she then photographed them holding their statement. As indicated by the title of the work, Wearing has written that this collaboration 'interrupts the logic of photo-documentary and snapshot photography by the subjects' clear collusion and engineering of their own representation.' (Wearing 1997, p.3.)

The complete series of Signs is comprised of over fifty colour photographs. A broad cross-section of people participated in the photographs and the series provides a fascinating social and historical document. It refers to the economic decline in Britain in the early 1990s, manifested by statements such as 'Will Britain get through this recession?'. However most of the signs express intimate thoughts or personal convictions. This selection of five photographs shows the wide range of responses Wearing elicited from the collaborating members of the public. One of the photographs shows an elderly couple, standing on the curb of a busy street, holding a sign saying 'I like to be in the country', while another photograph shows a homeless man bearing the poignant statement: 'I signed on and they would not give me nothing'. Among the group is one of Wearing's best known images which depicts a smartly dressed young man with a mild, even complacent, expression holding a sign saying simply, 'I'm desperate'. In a 1996 interview Wearing described how 'People are still surprised that someone in a suit could actually admit to anything, especially in the early 1990s, just after the crash... I think he was actually shocked by what he had written, which suggests it must have been true. Then he got a bit angry, handed back the piece of paper, and stormed off.' (Unpublished interview with Marcus Spinelli, South Bank Centre 1997.)

Like many of Wearing's later works, such as Confess All on Video. Don't worry you will be in disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian. 1994 (Tate ), the Signs series examines the relationship between public image and private identity. Wearing often cites the influence of early British 'fly-on-the-wall' television documentaries such as Michael Apted's pioneering Seven-Up (Granada Television 1964), which charted the progress of a group of children at seven year intervals, or Paul Watson's raw investigation of family life in The Family (BBC 1974). In these television programmes intimate experiences were presented to a nationwide audience as apparently unmediated 'real life'. However the tradition of 'fly-on-the-wall' documentaries, as well as confessional TV chat shows, imply an authenticity which Gillian Wearing persistently questions. In an attempt to break down social stereotypes and masks, Wearing frequently works with people marginalised by mainstream society, such as homeless people. She has said: 'A great deal of my work is about questioning handed-down truths... I'm always trying to find ways of discovering new things about people, and so in the process discover more about myself.' ('Sign Language', Dazed and Confused, no.25, 1996, pp.53, 55.)

Further reading
Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants you to say 1992-1993, London 1997.
Donna De Salvo, Russell Ferguson, John Slyce, Gillian Wearing, London 1999.
Sacha Craddock, Spotlight on Gillian Wearing, exhibition catalogue, South Bank Centre, London 1999.

Jemima Montagu
March 2001
Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

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'I'm desperate'', Gillian Wearing CBE, 1992-3 | Tate

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'I'm desperate'', Gillian Wearing CBE, 1992-3 on display at Tate Britain.

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The Official Clive Barker Website - Revelations - Art Archive I

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Official Site exploring the worlds and works of Clive Barker. Art archive - gallery 1.

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Roy Lichtenstein, (born October 27, 1923, New York, New York, U.S.-died September 29, 1997, New York City), American painter who was a founder and foremost practitioner of Pop art, a movement that countered the techniques and concepts of Abstract Expressionism with images and techniques taken from popular culture.

As a teenager, Lichtenstein studied briefly with the painter Reginald Marsh. After serving in the military during World War II, he attended the Ohio State University, teaching there from 1946 to 1951 and receiving a masters degree in 1949. He also taught at New York State University College, Oswego (1957-60), and at Douglass College of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey (1960-63).

At the start of his artistic career, Lichtenstein painted themes from the American West in a variety of modern art styles; he dabbled in 1957 even in Abstract Expressionism, a style he later reacted against. His interest in the comic-strip cartoon as an art theme probably began with a painting of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck he made in 1960 for his children. Although he was initially dissatisfied with his technique and uncomfortable with direct appropriation, he took great pleasure in presenting well-known comic-strip figures in a fine art format. He increased the size of his canvases and began to manipulate to his own ends the graphic and linguistic conventions of comic strips dealing with such genres as romance, war, and science fiction. In the style of comic strips, he used words to express sound effects. He developed a detached, mass-produced effect by outlining areas of primary colour with thick black lines and by using a technique that simulated benday screening (a dot pattern used by engravers).

Lichtenstein's first one-man show, held in New York City in 1962, was a great commercial success, and his innovative work found an international audience. In 1966 he became the first American to exhibit at London's Tate Gallery.

Lichtenstein continued in this vein for much of his career, and his artworks are readily identifiable by their comic-strip characteristics. Nevertheless he extended these techniques into clever and thought-provoking meditations on art and popular culture. After the 1960s, Lichtenstein's works began to include still lifes and landscapes, and they were a dramatic departure from his earlier style in their use of brushstrokes as well as in their subject matter.

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Roy Lichtenstein | Biography, Artworks, & Facts

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Roy Lichtenstein, American painter who was a founder and foremost practitioner of Pop art, a movement that countered the techniques and concepts of Abstract Expressionism with images and techniques taken from popular culture. Learn more about his life and art in this article.

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You may have run into artist Yoyo Ferro at a recent Root City Market pop-up with pen in hand, listening to some of the attendees' personal journeys as he blindly contoured their faces on paper. Ferro is originally from Brazil, but has embraced Atlanta as much as any native-so much that he got engaged to his now-wife at the top of the Bank of America Plaza building and got married at one of the most iconic views of the city, the Jackson Street Bridge.

He's found a place in the city's arts community, specifically through social media such as Instagram. His work is vibrant and full of patterns, whether it's a mural, a pet portrait or a wood cut. You can't miss it. His work has also showed up at Phoenix Fest, General Assembly and elsewhere, and he's done collaborations with local artists and orgs like Barry Lee, Ray Geier (Squishiepuss) and #FAFATL.

Here, Ferro talks with CommonCreativ about loving Atlanta's arts scene, finding a digital community and embracing the flaws in his work.
CommonCreativ: How did you end up in Atlanta?
Yoyo Ferro: I ended up here thanks to a job opportunity after a series of fortunate events and because of that good ol' "American Dream." Atlanta is the first place I really fell in love with and was proud to be a part of.
CC: Where you involved in the art scene in Brazil?
YF: Back in Brazil, my involvement with art was through music-I played bass in a punk rock band called Razura. It wasn't the most common thing to do, considering the dominance of Carnaval and Brazilian country music. My city had an interesting punk rock scene and there was a feeling of "us against the world." We hated the ridiculous rodeo, all their nonsensical animal abuse, and the mainstream radio that only played Country or Carnaval-style music. I guess that punk-rock kid attitude stuck with me from those times-always trying to avoid the clichés.
CC: Do Brazil's vibrant colors and culture influence your work?
YF: As much as I want to say "No," just because it's such a cliché thing Brazilian artists say all the time, I guess I can say "Yes," as it's engrained in my subconscious in a way. My uneducated theory is that in the USA, because we're a very patriotic country compared to other countries, the flag colors-red, white, and blue-are pretty much used everywhere, from beer cans, car dealership logos to toothpaste containers. This doesn't necessarily happen in Brazil.

I don't remember seeing much of green and yellow unless it's during the World Cup. Also, the fact that in the U.S. we probably learn more color theory and art in school in comparison to Brazil, where art isn't even part of the high school curriculum. The colors you see in your day-to-day life in Brazil might not make much "academic" sense-everything is a little more exaggerated and adventurous.
CC: You've been doing a lot of blind drawings lately of local folks. How did you come up with this idea?
YF: I learned about blind contours on my first date with my wife, Kristin Ferro, who is an Atlanta native, an awesome high school art teacher and a photographer. The freedom and vulnerability of it stuck with me, and it became one of my favorite ways of creating art. I make the blind contour portraits very quickly, in 20-30 seconds, and I ask people to tell me a real story while I'm drawing them. The story is what makes it special for me, and sometimes, for the people being drawn. It's very common for some reason for people to even cry while I'm drawing them... although people "share" a lot about their lives these days in social media, nobody is really asked to look into a stranger's eyes and tell him a personal story.

I plan to do more of these blind contour sessions this year. Terry Kearns asked me to come to his house on Christmas Eve and make blind portraits of his family and it was a lot of fun, especially to play with forced perspective like I did with his glasses.
CC: What's your creative process? Do you use the blind drawing technique in all of your work?
YF: I'm very inspired by blind contour, but I don't necessarily draw everything "blindly." I try to loosen up my hand as much as I can and not look at the paper too much, as I'm not usually trying to achieve anything too perfect. It has to be a little weird and imperfect to feel right. Then comes the coloring process, which is more relaxing and natural. I rarely plan colors, as I like to choose the colors one at a time according to the moment, but I have a few little rules that I've created for myself with regards to patterns. If you pay enough attention to my work, you can figure them out.
CC: Those flaws and imperfections are part of your work then. Do you embrace them?
YF: Oh yeah, all the time. The flaws open doors to possibilities I wouldn't even think of trying. Not all of my work follows the rules of blind contour strictly, and I do lift the pen off of the paper when I'm doing illustrations and paintings. I very rarely draft/sketch things and I hate wasting time, so I really target getting things right the first time. When that doesn't happen, first comes the immediate frustration, but then I remember that in many artworks I've made, my favorite part of them came out of a creative solution to fix a mistake I did. My wife will hear me from across the wall in the studio saying, "Ahhh, damn it!" often followed by "Oh, wait... hmmm... nevermind, I got this."
CC: What's your favorite material to work with as of late?
YF: I'm really enjoying painting on canvas and walls these days. I've played with paper a lot, doing origami, and have done a lot of pen and marker on paper, which I still enjoy. I'm now trying to figure out this wet mess thing that is painting.
CC: Tell me about your 1,000 Origami Cranes project. CC: What inspires you?
YF: I received an origami crane from a guy I met through Instagram that was doing a 1,000 origami crane project. He would make an origami a day and give it to people. That inspired me to start my own project, and I made origami for friends and mostly for people from Instagram that requested to receive one. It was a little positive gesture in the format of origami that I was trying to spread through people I met on social media. I made origami cranes in different styles, customized some, took photos in many different locations, but since making the same thing a thousand times can be boring, I started incorporation the origami cranes into my artworks. I sent cranes to 24 countries and 82 cities so far. Also got one tattooed on my shoulder, which is the 1,000 th origami crane made.
CC: You're really involved in the Atlanta Instagram community. How has this helped you as an artist?
YF: People and places mostly. I also like the contrast of comedy and sadness in my art. People often say my art makes them happy, which is a huge compliment, but I'm never really directly targeting for that.
CC: What do you think about Atlanta's current creative scene?
YF: The Atlanta "Insta-friends" are great. I've been around since the first Atlanta "instameet" in 2011 organized by Brandon Barr (one of the founders of #weloveatl), and it was always fun to meet interesting, creative people. Being around them definitely helped me improve my photography eye and the way I present my artwork and process to people on the internet.
You can see more of Yoyo Ferro's work on his portfolio or Instagram.
YF: I like it. There are many different things going on, which is good. I hear some cities are saturated with the same whatever-is-trendy thing. The only problem is that there's too much cool stuff and I don't have time to catch up on everything. We very often have two or three cool art events going on at the same time. But it's a good problem to have I guess.

Comments are closed.

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You may have run into artist Yoyo Ferro at a recent Root City Market pop-up with pen in hand, listening to some of the attendees' personal journeys as he blindly contoured their faces on paper.

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Marina Abramović Hon RA has earned worldwide acclaim as a performance artist. She has consistently tested the limits of her own physical and mental endurance in her work, subjecting herself to exhaustion, pain and even the possibility of death.

In her early work Rhythm 0, Abramović invited audiences to freely interact with her however they chose - famously resulting in a loaded gun being held to her head. Her later work The House with the Ocean View saw the artist live in a house constructed in a gallery for 12 days. Held in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, the performance invited audiences to witness and share in the simple act of living.

This major exhibition presents key moments from Abramović's career through sculpture, video, installation and performance. Works such as The Artist is Present will be strikingly re-staged through archive footage while others will be reperformed by the next generation of performance artists, trained in the Marina Abramović method.

Live performance art can be both startling and intimate. For Abramović it also has the power to be transformative. Experience this yourself through performances of Imponderabilia, Nude with Skeleton, Luminosity and The House with the Ocean View.

Different works will be reperformed during the run of the exhibition, so no two visits will be the same.

Before you visit the exhibition, please note:
#MarinaAbramovićRA

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Marina Abramović | Exhibition | Royal Academy of Arts

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An art world icon and a performance art pioneer - Marina Abramović has captivated audiences by pushing the limits of her body and mind, for the past 50 years.

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Although she is best known of her stitched blankets, neon texts and the notorious My Bed installation, Tracey Emin also creates remarkable video works that lay some of the most uncomfortable aspects of her life bare. Why I Never Became A Dancer utilizes this straight-forward, narrative approach to recall some particularly upsetting events from her adolescence. The six-minute video stitches together footage of goings-on in Margate, the seaside town where she grew up. She films her old school, the beach, amusement arcades, souvenir shops, ice-cream stands and other attractions that make up the town's "Golden Mile". The crackling Super-8 paints a nostalgic view of the sort of endless summer that only exists in childhood memories, or as Emin puts it: "Summer was amazing; nothing to do but dream."

The artist speaks over these images, explaining that she gave up school at thirteen to hang out in cafés and bars, or drink cider on the beach. Her favourite pastime, she says, was sex: "It was something you could just do, and it was for free." She goes on to chronicle her routine, sleeping with men much older than herself. They would buy fish and chips before going off into an alley, a park or "even a hotel". Her tone is resigned and matter-of-fact, as she muses, "The reason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of fourteen, was because they weren't men. They were less, less than human."

As time passed, she continues, the thrill of sex dissipated and by fifteen her real passion was dance. She describes it as a fantasy, where she could transcend her life in Margate and dream of escape. In a quivering voice she remembers the thrilling expectations of the local dance finals. If she won, she would be off to the 1978 British Disco Dance Championship in London and away from her boring life forever. She remembers the ecstasy of her performance, as people started to clap and she thought "I'm going to win!" But then the chanting started: "Slag, slag, slag." A group of men, some of whom she had slept with, were heckling her, and as the noise became deafening she ran off stage in tears; a young girl with shattered dreams.

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Why I Never Became A Dancer by Tracey Emin - ELEPHANT

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Although she is best known of her stitched blankets, neon texts and the notorious My Bed installation, Tracey Emin also creates remarkable video works that lay some of the most uncomfortable aspects of her life bare. Why I Never Became A Dancer utilizes this straight-forward, narrative approach to recall some particularly upsetting events from her adolescence.

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Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is delighted to present for the first time in Europe a solo exhibition by the Korean artist Hyon Gyon.

Known for her intricate and highly expressive works, often like mid-burst manifestations of explosive raw energy, Hyon Gyon combines traditional Korean textiles, Japanese paper and paint together with various less conventional materials to create her paintings and sculptural installations. She explores themes of sociocultural identity, grief, anger and sexual politics. Her assemblages are powerful fusions of vivid colour and emotion that appear to collide yet somehow live in unity within each work.

Inspired by Korean shamanism, and her own feelings, Hyon Gyon's experience of its rituals allows her to tap into the depths of her own subconscious, to purge her feelings of sorrow and rage by transforming them into creative energy in the hope of freeing herself of suppressed anguish. Through this cathartic process, whereby the artist energetically acts out the awful hallucinations and terror-stricken visions that haunt her psyche, she transcends these agonising emotions and translates them into her art works. Hyon Gyon believes that art has the power to ignite negative emotions from within and transform them, similar in its effect to a cleansing that restores contentment and a sense of well-being.

Using both traditional and innovative techniques, Hyon Gyon makes the surfaces of her works sizzle and scream with vigorous gestures to which no viewer can be indifferent. One of her recurring techniques is first to attach traditional Korean satin fabric to a canvas or panel, then melt the cloth with a soldering iron. This liquefying effect creates works that can appear cruel, haunting, seductive and chaotic, all at once in paradoxical harmony.

Commanding immediate attention on the ground floor of Parasol unit is We Were Ugly, 2017, a long and thickly executed mixed-media artwork that covers almost the entire length of the gallery wall, together with a selection of smaller paintings and assemblage sculptures. First shown at Kyoto Art Centre, Japan, for the Culture City of East Asia 2017 exhibition, We Were Ugly consists of 17 panels and is 20.4 metres long, making it the artist's largest work to date. A sea of horrified eyes and monstrous screaming skulls are seen fleeing in terror from the torturous flames of an atomic bomb in this powerfully immersive work, which references the tumultuous history of political conflicts and wars throughout Korea, China and Japan. Hyon Gyon uses the past tense in her title to imply hope for the future amid the political unrest in this part of the world.

In the first-floor gallery, Hyon Gyon presents recent paintings and sculptures which she has made specifically for this solo exhibition at Parasol unit. A number of these works were made using sgraffito, a technique of scratching through a top surface of lime mortar to reveal lower layers of contrasting painted colours. Such works are created by subtraction rather than addition.

Curated by Ziba Ardalan, Founder, Artistic and Executive Director of Parasol unit, the Hyon Gyon exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive publication and a tailored programme of related educational events.
Parasol unit appreciates the generous support of The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation.

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Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is delighted to present for the first time in Europe a solo exhibition by the Korean artist Hyon Gyon. Known for her intricate and highly expressive works, often like mid-burst manifestations of explosive raw energy, Hyon Gyon combines traditional Korean textiles, Japanese paper and paint together with various less [...]

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Summary of Christopher Wool

Christopher Wool is an enigmatic abstract painter whose formal experimentation and satirical subversion has left him both commercially successful and acclaimed by some critics, whilst condemned as banal or superficial by others. His public persona is reserved, and he carefully monitors the boundary between his personal and private life.

Wool's work is grounded in an investigation of abstract painting through a postmodern repurposing of signs and symbols. Familiar images, including stark black and white patterns, shapes, and particularly words are repeated, manipulated and erased. His most famous works, the 'word paintings', are large canvases silkscreened with phrases that suggest graffiti slogans, lines from movies or tv shows, or other recognizable material. The framing of such works as abstract paintings is designed to question what painting is, how it should be produced, and how an image can incorporate multiple layers of meaning that are revealed by the viewer's attention.

Key Ideas

Wool deploys recognizable or familiar forms (patterns, words or even classic expressionist painting techniques) to question the medium and a viewer's ability to divine meaning from it. By making words seem strange by placing them in a grid system and disrupting their ability to be read, for example, he asks that the viewer sees them as both an abstract shape and as something that conveys direct meaning. This causes the viewer to question their aesthetic attentions and how they perceive the world around them, as well as any formal preconceptions about abstract painting.

Wool's work brings the outside world into the rarified and perhaps remote sphere of abstract art, particularly through his photography. This work is often expressionistic: using focus, perspective, or the frame of the image in creative ways, but taking as its subject the street or city that surrounds him and his studio - grounding his work in everyday life.

Whilst abstract images, his paintings, and particularly the ones which include text, demonstrate influences from other artforms, whether pop cultural allusion or graffiti-esque slogans that evoke narrative. Apocalypse Now (1988), for example, is a formal rendering of a line from Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film of the same name - 'Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids'. This implicitly questions the notion of 'high art' or 'pure expression', suggesting that even abstract painting is informed, influenced and inspired by mass media and everyday encounters.

Wool maintains an air of mystery around his personal life and reveals little about his processes or intention, which relates to his emphasis on individual experience and interpretation. This also echoes other artists and artistic movements, most notably Warhol, who famously claimed that his painting revealed anything a viewer might need to know about him.

Biography of Christopher Wool

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Christopher Wool is an enigmatic abstract painter whose formal experimentation and satirical subversion has left him both commercially successful and acclaimed by some critics, whilst condemned as banal or superficial by others. His public persona is reserved, and he carefully monitors the boundary between his personal and private life.

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Louise Joséphine Bourgeois ( French: [lwiz buʁʒwa] ; 25 December 1911 - 31 May 2010) was a French-American artist. Although she is best known for her large-scale sculpture and installation art, Bourgeois was also a prolific painter and printmaker. She explored a variety of themes over the course of her long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the unconscious. These themes connect to events from her childhood which she considered to be a therapeutic process. Although Bourgeois exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and her work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, she was not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

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Artist page for Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010)

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Unless you are a professional artist or art critic it is fair to say that the color meaning and psychology is based primarily on instinct and emotion. How someone feels about a color or design is entirely up to the individual and there are no right or wrong answers. However the way we feel about color can often be attributed to our subconscious and history, as well as personal preference. PURCHASE THIS POSTER Color meaning and psychology poster will be your most useful reference giving you detailed information that will enable you to quickly identify and select the most appropriate color for any project, occasion, or activity.
Throughout the history color schemes has often been used to define different feelings, seasons and ceremonies depending on one's culture and origin. For example early Native Americans used different colored paints to symbolize times of war and death, as well as for spiritual ceremonies and seasonal harvests. Steeped in history throughout many cultures, certain colors are associated with particular feelings and emotions that are still very relevant in modern design.

Colors can affect how we feel subconsciously. This means that one may not even know they are being affected by the color of an environment or artwork. The feeling behind meaning of the colors sees hues grouped into two main groups commonly known as warm colors and cool colors.

Color Meanings and Psychology

The color of passion and drama. This color attracts the most attention and is associated with strong emotions such as love and anger. Red is the color used universally to signify danger, courage, strength, and power. Red is stimulating, vibrant and exciting. Red inspires desire with a strong link to sexuality and increased appetites. In Chinese culture red represents luck and prosperity. Use red when you want to get pulses racing and to inspire action. However, use carefully as red can evoke feelings of aggression and cause visual strain. Lovers of red are passionate with an enthusiasm for life.

Orange Color Meaning

The color of encouragement. The combination of yellow and red makes orange convey excitement, warmth and enthusiasm. Social and inviting, this is the color of the extrovert, exuding happiness and joy, releasing inhibitions. Need to be inspired into action or have a positive outlook on life? Orange is a motivating and encouraging color. Orange is appealing to young people. It stimulates the appetite and is associated with healthy good. However, the negative connotations of orange include insincerity, exhibitionism and self indulgence.

The color of optimism. Yellow is a compelling color that conveys youthful, fresh energy. This color of sunshine is uplifting and illuminating and associated with success and confidence. Yellow stimulates the left side of the brain, helping with clear thinking and quick decision making. Yellow grabs attention because the eye sees yellow first. The downside of yellow is that it can induce anxiety and cause one to be over-critical. It also signifies cowardice.

The color of sensitivity - The passion of red combined with the purity of white create this color associated with love, tranquillity and femininity. Pink has associations with tenderness and nurturing while conveying a sense of safety and even vulnerability. Seeing the world through "rose (pink) colored glasses" is holds a negative connotation as being associated with being unrealistic and overly optimistic.

Blue Color Meaning

The color of trust. Blue, the shade of the sea and the sky, is thought to induce calm and convey tranquillity, serenity and peace. The popular color instils confidence and inspires feelings of trust, loyalty, integrity and responsibility. Cool blue is conservative and can also be perceived as aloof. Blue tends to suppress the appetite - there are not many foods associated with blue in nature.

Green Color Meaning

The color of growth and health. Think of nature and see green in all its glory expressing renewal and life. Green has a strong association as a refreshing and peaceful color. It evokes feeling of abundance and a plentiful environment while providing a restful and secure feeling. The prosperity signified by green can be negatively perceived as materialistic and possessive.

Violet Color Meaning

The color of spirituality. The energy of red with the calm of blue combine to create violet, a color that inspires reflection and self awareness. It is the color of the sensitive, compassionate intuitive soul - the introvert. Also, violet has long been associated with royalty, and characteristics of quality and luxury. Overuse of violet can invoke irritability and arrogance.

Brown Color Meaning

The color of the earth. Stability and a solid foundation is the message that emanates from the color brown. This color relates to things that are natural and simple. Brown is thought to be dull, but is reliable and wholesome. Although frugal and stingy, brown is a color of safety and quiet confidence; warm and reassuring. Sadly, brown is among the least favourite colors, but conveys honesty and sincerity. On its own, brown seems unsophisticated, but when combined with others can become quite elegant.

Grey Color Meaning

The color of compromise. Grey is considered to be an unemotional, detatched color seeking to avoid attention. It conveys gloom and depression. Very conservative, grey has a stabilizing effect as it is very neutral, but can also conjure up feelings of frustration. Grey is linked with maturity and protection, being reliable and practical. Grey would not be considered a glamorous colour, yet is still elegant.

Black Color Meaning

The color of mystery. Black is actually the lack of colour. It covers, hides and implies that there is a barrier. A strong and powerful color, black is formal and sophisticated, sexy and secretive. It is the color of things that are scary and evil. Black conveys pessimism and a lack of hope. While black has many negative associations, it is a colour that signifies power and control. It is considered unfriendly and intimidating, yet still refined, elegant and confident. Black is helpful to other colours, being a strong contrast and making them stand out more.

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Unless you are a professional artist or art critic it is fair to say that the color meaning and psychology is based primarily on instinct and emotion. How someone feels about a color or design is entirely up to the individual and there are no right or wrong answers.

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Alice was sexually abused when she was very young. She talks about how our Young Witness service helped her to feel supported when she gave evidence at the trial of the man who sexually abused her.

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Edgar Allen Poe

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The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere-
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir-
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

Here once, through an alley Titanic,
Of cypress, I roamed with my Soul-
Of cypress, with Psyche, my Soul.
These were days when my heart was volcanic
As the scoriac rivers that roll-
As the lavas that restlessly roll
Their sulphurous currents down Yaanek
In the ultimate climes of the pole-
That groan as they roll down Mount Yaanek
In the realms of the boreal pole.

Our talk had been serious and sober,
But our thoughts they were palsied and sere-
Our memories were treacherous and sere,-
For we knew not the month was October,
And we marked not the night of the year
(Ah, night of all nights in the year!)-
We noted not the dim lake of Auber
(Though once we had journeyed down here)-
Remembered not the dank tarn of Auber,
Nor the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

And now, as the night was senescent
And star-dials pointed to morn-
As the star-dials hinted of morn-
At the end of our path a liquescent
And nebulous lustre was born,
Out of which a miraculous crescent
Arose with a duplicate horn-
Astarte's bediamonded crescent
Distinct with its duplicate horn.

And I said: "She is warmer than Dian;
She rolls through an ether of sighs-
She revels in a region of sighs:
She has seen that the tears are not dry on
These cheeks, where the worm never dies,
And has come past the stars of the Lion
To point us the path to the skies-
To the Lethean peace of the skies-
Come up, in despite of the Lion,
To shine on us with her bright eyes-
Come up through the lair of the Lion,
With love in her luminous eyes."

But Psyche, uplifting her finger,
Said: "Sadly this star I mistrust-
Her pallor I strangely mistrust:
Ah, hasten! -ah, let us not linger!
Ah, fly! -let us fly! -for we must."
In terror she spoke, letting sink her
Wings until they trailed in the dust-
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust-
Till they sorrowfully trailed in the dust.

I replied: "This is nothing but dreaming:
Let us on by this tremulous light!
Let us bathe in this crystalline light!
Its Sybilic splendour is beaming
With Hope and in Beauty tonight!-
See!-it flickers up the sky through the night!
Ah, we safely may trust to its gleaming,
And be sure it will lead us aright-
We safely may trust to a gleaming,
That cannot but guide us aright,
Since it flickers up to Heaven through the night."

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
And tempted her out of her gloom-
And conquered her scruples and gloom;
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb-
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said: "What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?"
She replied: "Ulalume -Ulalume-
'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!"

Then my heart it grew ashen and sober
As the leaves that were crisped and sere-
As the leaves that were withering and sere;
And I cried: "It was surely October
On this very night of last year
That I journeyed-I journeyed down here!-
That I brought a dread burden down here-
On this night of all nights in the year,
Ah, what demon hath tempted me here?
Well I know, now, this dim lake of Auber-
This misty mid region of Weir-
Well I know, now, this dank tarn of Auber,
This ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."

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The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crisped and sere- The leaves they were withering and sere; It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year: It was hard by the dim lake of Auber, In the misty mid region of Weir- It was down by the dank tarn of Auber, In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir.

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The Greenfield Papyrus

Museum number

EA10554,87

Title (series)

Description

Book of the Dead of Nestanebetisheru; sheet 87.
Full page black line vignette of Geb, Nut and Shu with three registers either side of adoring ancient Egyptian gatekeepers, ba's and deities including Thoth. Every figure has an accompanying hieroglyphic label written in black ink.

Geb is shown as a semi-recumbent figure stretching out his limbs while the elongated body of Nut arches above him. Her feet touch the ground at the eastern horizon and her fingers at the western horizon. She is supported by a third key-figure, Shu, god of the atmosphere, who is aided in his task by two ram-headed deities. Nestanebisheru herself kneels at the right, raising her hands in adoration; her 'ba'-spirit imitates her gesture, and a group of gods accompany her.

More

Culture/period

Date

Findspot

(Africa,Egypt,Upper Egypt,Deir el-Bahri (Thebes),First Cache)

Dimensions

Length: 93 centimetres (frame)

Width: 53.5 centimetres (frame)

Width: 47 centimetres (without frame)

Inscriptions

Inscription Type inscription

Inscription Scripthieroglyphic

Inscription Comment Painted.

Curator's comments

The "Greenfield Papyrus," is one of the longest and most beautifully illustrated manuscripts of the 'Book of the Dead' to have survived. Originally, over thirty-seven metres in length, it is now cut into ninety-six separate sheets mounted between glass. It was made for a woman named Nestanebisheru, the daughter of the high priest of Amun Pinedjem II. As a member of the ruling elite at Thebes, she was provided with funerary equipment of very high quality. Many of the spells included on her papyrus are illustrated with small vignettes, and besides these there are several large illustrations depicting important scenes.

This scene is a symbolic representation of the creation of the world. According to mythology, this occurred when the sky goddess Nut was raised aloft to form a heavenly canopy above the earth, personified as the god Geb. Geb is shown as a semi-recumbent figure stretching out his limbs while the elongated body of Nut arches above him. Her feet touch the ground at the eastern horizon and her fingers at the western horizon. She is supported by a third key-figure, Shu, god of the atmosphere, who is aided in his task by two ram-headed deities. Nestanebetisheru herself kneels at the right, raising her hands in adoration; her 'ba'-spirit imitates her gesture, and a group of gods accompany her. This scene became a common one on papyri and coffins in the 21st Dynasty, for the process of creation which it depicts was closely linked in the minds of the Egyptians with the renewal of life for the dead.

Published:
Budge, E. A. Wallis, The Greenfield papyrus in the British Museum: the funerary papyrus of Princess Nesitanebtashru, daughter of Painetchem II and Nesi-Khensu, and priestess of Amen-Ra at Thebes, about B.C. 970. London, 1912.

Hughes, Richard Smith, The vignettes in the Greenfield Papyrus in the British Museum (BM EA 10554): the Book of the Dead of Nest-ta-nebt-ashru (950-930 BC) . Ridgecrest, 2013.

Cfr.
T. G. H. James, 'Egyptian Painting' (London, 1985), p. 48, fig. 53;
G. Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt (London 1994), fig.9;
Nicholson and Shaw, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Technology (Cambridge 2000), p. 119, p.233 fig.9.3;
Mosher, Catalogue of the Books of the Dead in the BM: The Papyrus of Hor, (2001), p.80 n.25.
N. Billing, Nut the Goddess of Life, USE 5 (2002), p. 331, fig. A.3.
J.H. Taylor and N.C. Strudwick, Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt. Treasures from The British Museum, Santa Ana and London 2005, p. 28, plates p.28-9.

More

Bibliography

Budge 1912

Trismegistos 134519 (http://www.trismegistos.org/text/134519)

Quirke 1993 145

Taylor 2010 fig. 2

Taylor 2010 no. 161

Taylor & Strudwick 2005 p.28-29

Location

Not on display

Exhibition history

Exhibited:

2005-2008, California, The Bowers Museum, Death and Afterlife in Ancient Egypt
2012 July - September, Tokyo, Mori museum, The Book of the Dead: Journey Through the Afterlife
2012, October - November, Fukuoka Museum of Art, The Book of the Dead
2013, May - September, Perth, Western Australian Museum, The Book of the Dead

Condition

Papyrus Survey: Condition Details: Papyrus: stained Black ink Red ink Backed: brown paper Checked for loan to Southampton 1994 Displayed in Room 63 until 1997 Mount Details: Sandwich: glass Sandwich: board Binding: Filmoplast T self adhesive linen tape Object Priority: B Mount Priority: A Overall Condition: B Curatorial condition comment: good

Subjects

Associated names

Associated titles

Associated Title: Book of the Dead

Acquisition date

1910

Department

Ancient Egypt & Sudan

BM/Big number

EA10554,87

Registration number

1910,0509.1.87

Additional IDs

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Book of the Dead of Nestanebetisheru; sheet 87. Full page black line vignette of Geb, Nut and Shu with three registers either side of adoring ancient Egyptian gatekeepers, ba's and deities including Thoth. Every figure has an accompanying hieroglyphic label written in black ink.

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Gillian Wearing's most recent one-person show at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in May and June was called "People," not a surprising choice for an artist who has located human stories at the centre of her practice throughout her career. Her first New York show in eight years, "People" was conceived as something of a mini-survey that included both new and old work in various media: video, photography, installation and now sculpture.

The oldest work in the exhibition was Snapshot, 2005, seven videos for framed plasma screens that dealt with the evolution of still photography and also voiced an elderly woman's bitter and poignant narrative of disappointment. In a version of Wearing's confessional mode, the woman describes an inventory of frustration and anger at the way her life has turned out, while the framed photographs present us with a female version of the Seven Ages of Man. It is a telling focus: there has always been something both common and tragic in Wearing's work and Snapshots continues that doubled duty.

The exhibition also included three self-portraits in which Wearing paid tribute to an unholy trinity of artists for whom she has considerable admiration: Me As Arbus, 2008, Me As Mapplethorpe, 2009, and Me As Warhol in Drag with Scar, 2010. They are extraordinary, both in the accuracy of their portrayal and in the way they engage the layered history of portraiture in photography. This trio makes obvious connections to earlier of her works, like Confess All On Video, 1994, Trauma, 2000, and Album, 2003, in which masks were a2011device that offered to her storytellers a necessary combination of disguise and freedom. Wearing has always been interested in creating what she calls platforms that allow her subjects to articulate the "plethora of stories and experiences" they are waiting to tell.

In this sense, her work functions therapeutically in a healing arc that moves from the private to the public, from the individual to society. Wearing's subjects (she likes to think of them as collaborators) tell stories that can be disturbing: there are narratives of all manner of sexual abuse, planned murders and suicides, ghoulish activities and criminal acts. But despite the bathroom cubicle and tabloid tone of Confess All On Video. Don't Worry, You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian, her 1994 call for participants, there is nothing salacious or tawdry about her videos. Whether her subject is an uptight executive stuck in a 20-year-old voyeuristic memory of sibling transgression, an enraged and politicized gay man exacting a particularly unsavoury revenge on his boss in a pizza joint, or a cluster of inebriated street people demonstrating in equal measure their care and foolishness, she has an unerring ability to wrap a compelling story in a compassionate blanket. The achievement of her art is that everyone involved-subject, viewer and artist-emerges from the experience better informed and more empathetic than they were before their engagement. Wearing's art is inclusively democratic. "I really do believe in the universal person," she says in the following interview, and evidence of that uncompromising humanism is everywhere in her work.

The piece that provided the name for her New York exhibition was a bromide print called People, 2011. It is her most recent photograph and the first of what she intends to be a series. Based on Bouquet, a Jan Brueghel the Elder oil on copper painting from 1606, People is a careful re-construction of the Flemish master's still life by way of silk flowers and leached colour. There is a hint of the commemorative in the genre; floral arrangements play a central role in our recognition of significant events, whether funerary or celebratory. (In this sense, People connects to her trio of tributary self-portraits.) But Wearing wants to use the still life as a hinge-it is still and alive-and Brueghel is her perfect collaborator. His appreciation of the individual character of each flower, and his ability to fit that unique nature into an overall composition, is what Wearing does specifically in People and in her work as a whole. Whether she is asking passersby on the street to write something they want to say on a piece of paper, organizing 26 individuals dressed as London policemen for a still-life video, or choosing the cast for a feature-length film, Wearing is involved in a process of gathering people together and in composing them, giving them composure. Out of that social construction she finds both the form and the content of her dignified art.
The following interview was conducted by phone to the artist's London studio on July 19, 2011. Border Crossings: Was Dancing in Peckham a piece that was true to your authentic self?
Gillian Wearing: It was close to my authentic self. I had seen a woman dance in the Royal Festival Hall, and when I see something that inspires me, I don't know what to do. I got frustrated because I was too shy to ask her, but then I thought, "What would I ask her?" It might be a bit of a shock to be approached by somebody who doesn't really know why they want to talk to you. I think it was through that frustration that I started thinking about how could I take what I found inspiring and turn it into something else. And I do love dancing.

Did you just have the songs in your head so that this was a conceptual exercise as well as one in kinetics?
Yes. I'm not using headphones or anything. I created a tape at home on which I put snippets of all the songs I really loved. I thought if I could remember the sequence I wouldn't dry up. The work became about things other than having watched that woman; it became about not feeling inhibited in a space where you are meant to behave in a certain manner. It was a practical shopping centre, not the centre of London where you get buskers or other street entertainers. This was a place where, if you did something odd, people would find it surprising. One old man who passed me said, "What's the world coming to?" Other people, once they passed the camera, did a bit of dancing themselves. But on the whole, people would either walk past and accept that I was dancing, or ignore me.
Masturbation and "Take Your Top Off" have a certain edge to them. Were you conscious in that early work that you were putting pressure on the audience?
I'm not sure I was thinking about how society would view me. In "Take Your Top Off," I was interested in people who were changing gender, who were being reborn in a way. Since I was photographing them, I thought how would I be imaged in the same picture? I was much more shy than they were because for them it was a new identity. Which comes back to the mask: it's liberating when you can be someone else, and of course, they were going to be someone else for the rest of their lives. So they were quite proud, and they felt more confident than me in those photographs. This was after doing the "Sign" series, when I was questioning my own work rather than asking questions of how I fit into society.
Both of those bodies of work literally deal with the body, either your own or someone else's.
With Masturbation, I had the idea of the mirror image going off into the distance before I had the idea of masturbation, so I was thinking of someone being self-involved. It wasn't necessarily about body. The metaphor was really much more about psychology.
Many of the works prior to 1994 dealt with music. Has it played a fairly critical role in your life?
Yes, but I'd say inhibition has played a critical role. It was because I really didn't speak at all; I couldn't make a sentence. I left school at 16 and was an office junior at an insurance broker and didn't realize at that point how anyone perceived me. There were two women at work who always hoped I would go to the counter because they wanted to see if I could actually speak. I would get out two or three words and then I'd give up. Then I would go on to the next sentence. That followed me for quite a few years, even when I was at Goldsmith's, where a lot of people drew attention to the fact that I was inarticulate. I gave up reading books when I was 11 until I was about 29, and I wasn't picking up verbal skills anywhere else, so I had to work quite hard to speak. Maybe that makes my work about the voice as well. I think it comes from the fact that I didn't have a practical voice myself. It's almost like a part of my brain doesn't function correctly because I wasn't taught to properly speak as a child. My brother and sister are certainly more articulate than me.
You don't seem inarticulate now, so some distance has been covered
Well, some distance has been covered, but if you knew me back in the '80s and the '90s you'd have a different view. I remember I did one particular work at college where I cut up books. We had a seminar and someone asked me why I did that, and the only words I could say were, "I didn't like books." I couldn't say anything else and that was the end of the seminar.
It would be easy to draw a connection between your own muteness and your unusual sympathy for people articulating their concerns. In some way, they are surrogates.
I wouldn't say they are surrogates, though I am saying we learn a lot from listening to people. What interested me from the early days of doing the "Sign" series is that a lot of voices are not heard, and if we bother to stop and talk to people, they can break down our perceptions of them. But words and language have always been important to me, and I think that stems from my own sense of not being well educated and not being particularly verbal for so many years.
In some of your series you have gravitated towards work that is totally unlike you. In the "Pin-Up" series you move into glamour and extroversion. It's as if some process of vicarious inhabitation is going on. Do you live through the experience of these people in having them articulate their anxieties or needs or desires?
I think everyone has needs, desires and dreams. We none of us are different in that. On the whole people are incredibly unique, but all their fears and dreams are shared. From the very beginning, particularly in "Signs," I was looking outside of my own experiences. If the subject matter interests me, then I'll try and make a piece of work around that.

A lot of critics have talked about the ordinariness of the people in your work. But they bring revelations about murder threats, planned suicides and all manner of physical and psychic damage. So the conclusion I draw is that no one's life is ordinary, or that the ordinary is inherently dramatic.
I don't know where the term "ordinary" comes from because everyone is extraordinary, and if you engage with anyone they have a whole plethora of stories and experiences.
In Trauma, you run through a series of stories that are pretty bleak, a boy who planned to kill his father and a sexually abusive grandfather, and then you get to the woman who talks about her incestuous relationship with her brother in a way that makes it sound acceptable, almost a normal extension of her fraternal love. She's apologetic in a very intelligent way. Then the final story comes from the abused kid who talks about the need for forgiveness. Is there a larger story about reconciliation that overrides the discrete stories in that particular piece?
In the confessionals, everyone brings a different take on what is in some ways a similar subject. They all have to deal with their trauma in a very unique way. I never set out to make a narrative arc with the traumas because they are on a loop in the gallery,and the viewer may come in on any of the stories. What I find with the "Confessions" is that they are told without someone else being the judge, or without having a voiceover telling you what to think. Obviously with Confess All, or even with Secrets and Lies, there are so many ways that people deal with what they've gone through in their lives. Who is to say what is the right way to do that? What is so incredible about those people is how articulate everyone is. Surprisingly, everyone was able to create something that had a beginning, middle and end. If I were to hear an anecdote, or if I were to tell the story of my life, I'm not sure that I would be able to do that. Maybe I've just been lucky in that the people who have come forward are able to give monologues. Nothing is tweaked and nothing is rehearsed.
It's clear, though, that they have been thinking about it for a long time. You sense this has been rehearsed in their minds well before you showed up?
Absolutely. They are turning out a monologue that you would have heard in their heads. Maybe it's something they have been able to put away for a moment, but then it comes back and they have to work it through.
What was your interest in the air guitar performers who appear in Slight Reprise?
I was interested in the passion of music fans and finding people who would bring that passion to what they do. You have an image of air guitar as being a cliché, but people bring so much thought to how they're doing it. It's also about a lack of inhibition to go off to this other world, as if they were being transported, but they're actually in their own room. It's how music can lift you into that different realm.
Do you envy people who have fewer inhibitions than you?
I do. Some people are not held back by genetic or cultural restraints. They are able to be quite open and gregarious, and it seems to come naturally to them.
In Trauma and Confess All, why do you think people are so open with you? You have said that one of the things you admired about Diane Arbus was her ability to create a relationship with her subjects. Over the years you seem to have developed that same skill.
When I did the "Signs," I was incredibly shy and stopping people was hard. In London, particularly during the '90s, there were lots of people with clipboards doing personality questions, so it could be quite annoying to be stopped on a busy street. People just wanted to walk on, to go by as quickly as possible. But after they got out the first few sentences, they actually liked the idea. It wasn't because of me; I think the idea was very appealing. It's a question of finding platforms for people who want to speak. I don't actually perceive myself as having any particular talent, though I am properly more versed in how to do it now than when I first started. I'm certainly not one of those people who other people come up to and start telling things about themselves.
I suppose in certain ways your practice of allowing people to wear masks opens up further possibilities. Even though they may be speaking their authentic selves, those selves are not visible to the audience.
Absolutely. I think people felt empowered by that. Because they wouldn't be recognized, they could actually be more truthful. They could be themselves in their talk, but their outer body wasn't being judged. When anyone talks, particularly in front of a camera, they are very aware of their self as a physical being. In "Confessions" you have a way of completely taking away all the evidence of who you are, but you can still say your story.
The mask is a very complicated device. The masks in Trauma are odd, and I know you wanted them to represent the person when the incident being recalled happened, even if it is 30 years earlier. Did you ever worry that they were so preposterous that they would get in the way of the story?
With Confess All I didn't know if they would at all. I bought these joke-shop masks and moustaches and wigs. The advert had said that you could be in disguise, so everyone knew they would be wearing one. I thought masks would work because people often wear masks when they're engaged in criminal acts. So it was just an off-chance idea. But even though most of them were joke-shop masks, they went beyond that, and a sense of power came through because of the integrity of how people spoke and the honesty of their stories. It broke down what that mask was meant to represent.
And in Trauma, the eyeholes give everything away. It's the idea that the eyes are windows to the soul. When you see them, you know how much pain these people have gone through.
Yes, and because Trauma was a very sensitive area, I didn't want joke-shop masks. So I had masks made, and they were like those in Greek theatre. They have a neutrality, and there is a kind of neutrality to young faces as well. So you have this almost neutral face and these pleading eyes telling the story. When you talk about eyes to the soul, that is exactly where you see the soul of that person.
You must have been moved hearing these stories. Were you often involved in an emotional way in what was going on?
Yes. In the work I do I empathize with people.
There are different ways for artists to act out their empathy. We found out later on that Arbus's relationship with her subjects, with the dwarf for example, was that she wasn't just photographing them but sleeping with them as well.
Her life was incredibly different from mine, and I keep a respectable relationship with people and would never be involved like Arbus. You can see from some of the work that she crossed that line. With my work I try and explain as much as I can to people, so they know exactly what we're working on. Normally they just come on the day of the filming, and particularly if they have a confession, they're filmed for a very brief moment.
The phrase "crossing the line" is an interesting one. Do you have ethical boundaries that you have set for yourself?
I think when you are doing anything with documentary you instinctively know what you shouldn't do.
How influential were those television documentaries in the '70s, like Michael Apted's 7 Up and 2011 even the Mass Observation project from the late '30s. Were you aware of the tradition of social documentary projects that had come out of Britain?
It's interesting how you are shaped by the media you live in. We had lots of great documentaries in the '70s and Michael Apted's was incredibly seminal. It was one of those programs that everyone watched, and you'd have discussions at school with your friends. It was the sort of thing that got everyone talking. So being the only media and culture I knew, I didn't realize that a strong documentary culture was particular to Britain.
So did you think of yourself as a documentarian? Was that a tradition you considered yourself a part of?
In art school I was painting and drawing and doing installation, and it was only when I left that I picked up a camcorder. I had thought about going to the National Film School, but I had already done five years of education and I couldn't bear to do anymore. So I borrowed a friend's camcorder, and whilst I didn't know what I wanted to do in the beginning, I knew I didn't want to do television and I didn't want to copy anyone. The one thing you learn at art school is that you should always have a unique voice. But I never really feel I'm a documentarian. There are elements of documentary in my work but it is not straightforward. I think if I'd gone to film school I would have been taught how to make things in a very traditional way. But a lot of those things have gone out the window because the way people make documentaries now is very different than the way they were made 20 years ago. Every one has had to adapt to the way technology and the world has changed. The audience has grown more sophisticated, and when the audience changes, you can't continue doing things the same way. I think 7 Up has probably suffered in the long run. When they showed the last one, which I think was 49 Up, it got quite a small audience. Even though the subject remains interesting, people no longer relate to that old-fashioned format.
There is a distinguished documentary tradition in Canada as well through the National Film Board. The man who was instrumental in its formation was John Grierson, a Scot who emigrated to Canada to make documentaries to help the war effort. His definition of documentary was, "the creative treatment of history." If you cast your emphasis within that definition on "creative" rather than on "history," it gives you a lot of leeway to make art out of documentary. You have raised this distinction in your Homage to the woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down Walworth road, when you say her mask was "more aesthetic than practical."
I think with my own work, the film/photographic structures wear their metaphors on their sleeves. It shows why it is different from documentary; it shows you that I am replacing the woman with the bandaged face, I'm just filling shoes and trying to experience what it would be like to be that person. So the structure was very evident. There were a lot of problems in the '90s in this country where real people were paid to re-enact something, but the audience at home wasn't told they were re-enactments. I don't think Grierson would have accepted that concept of creative play because it was actually pulling the wool over the audience's eyes. If you creatively play with documentary, I think it is very important to show the structure.
Which you do in Family History, where the audience is made aware that what's going on is both a re-enactment and a re-visitation through the interview with Heather many years later. You consciously bring a structure of awareness to the audience.
Yes. The audience knows what it is and the people who are being interviewed also know. So everyone is involved with the creation of this new structure.
Family History is interesting because the television journalist's interview with Heather is innocuous, mostly informational, until the moment when she recalls her encounter with the psychologist and the career counsellor, who basically treat her as if she is lower class and won't amount to anything. Decades later you can still sense Heather's tension and anger.
Yes. Heather is just slightly older than me, and we would have come from a generation and a background where no one would give you any chance, and no one would expect anything of you. No one ever expected anything of me.
They expected you would either fail or be mediocre at best?
I can talk for myself coming from Birmingham, where you were either going to be a junior office clerk or you would work in a factory. Those were your only two options, and they wouldn't have entertained anything else. I remember my career advisor looking so bored that she couldn't wait for me to leave the room. But it was also an era where the majority of people would have been either working class or lower middle class and aspirations were few and far between. You couldn't have too many aspirations because there were no opportunities. Now there is a plethora of choice, but then, there was really very little choice. A whole generation of us had the same career advice. It wasn't career advice-it was just telling you that's your lot, so get on with it.
Did you come from a working-class family?
Yes. I went to a comprehensive school and left at 16 with no qualifications. There were no books on art. I gave up art in my third year of senior school at the age of 13. I did pottery in my final year, but I failed that as well because my methodology was very weak. I had air bubbles in my pots, and I blew up my classmate's pots. They had to re-do theirs, but I was just disqualified.
You have said that all your work is about portraiture, and I wonder what is the nature of the portrait? Does it add up to a view of what Britain is, or what your generation is, or the class you came from?
I would hope it is as universal as possible. Sometimes people perceive, like in "Confessions," that the subjects are working class, when there are also upper-middle-class and upper-class people. Actually, the majority is middle class. I don't know where that perception came from, but I think it has to do with the history of documentary in Britain, which has primarily been watching working-class families and working-class life. I tried to include everyone. Until the day of filming, I don't know what anyone's background is. You can normally tell by someone's voice, or they sometimes tell you their occupation. One of the people in "Confessions" was a senior executive in a large company. I haven't gone out of my way to make class-conscious work. I really do believe in the universal person and that, regardless of our background, we share a number of things.
In "Snapshot," the older woman who is narrating the story is essentially mean-spirited; at the same time, hers is such a poignant story. She admits to so much. It is an amazing tract of inadequacies.
Yes, it's very difficult being old. The sense of it is that you go through a whole life and, at the end, all the things you might have gained are gone because no one is there to actually support you. The loneliness and the anger is what comes across most powerfully. After all those years, no one wants to talk to you, so you go and talk to the shop assistant in the supermarket.
You say the camera lies. Is there a way you can exploit the discrepancy between the camera's truth and the truth of the articulated voices?
When I said that I probably wasn't thinking of a lot of my work because, obviously, when people speak and they are not edited, then that is a truth and there is nothing you can say against that. So the camera is not lying when it is locked off and someone is talking. I think when you are doing a highly edited piece of work you can go back to Grierson and the idea of being creative with the truth. That's when there is a sense that another truth may be evolving. When I was doing Broad Street I had reels and reels of footage and made only a short film. So there was a lot of stuff that was not in the final cut; only the elements that I felt worked together got included. It's in that sense that I was discussing lying as being editing. It's not really a lie, it is an edited truth.
There are photographers like August Sander and Richard Avedon when he went to the American West for Rolling Stone. They were systematically documenting a culture. Have you ever felt the need to be more systematic?
No, I don't think along those lines. That kind of photography has become a genre in itself, maybe created by Sander. At the same time, you can see that his portraits are highly standardized. Everyone seems to stand in a very austere way, and if you go back to photographs from the same era, people would never pose that way. So there is a look that is very personal to him, and he has since influenced so many generations of photographers. It becomes a technique, but it is only one technique for documenting the world. There are others.
In your portrait of Lily Cole you take her extraordinary face, then you have a mask made, and then you bruise the mask. I couldn't help but think of Rimbaud's poem, "One evening I sat beauty on my knees/ and I found her bitter/ and I abused her." What was behind your notion of taking that face, obscuring it and then messing with it?
A mask can be quite scary and eerie, but in this case you have sympathy towards it. At the end of the day it is just a mask, but I was playing on this sense of the Victorian doll and how touching something is when it is physically damaged. Also, Lily Cole has the features of a Victorian doll. But it wasn't that I was damaging beauty as much as re-appraising the mask and asking if you can have some kind of empathy for it if it slightly damaged; does it feel somehow real because it is broken?
I can't resist asking about you and masks. When you do your _Self-Portrait _in 2000, you put on a mask of you.
I thought it would be good to wear a mask of my own face as it was then, and on a whim, I thought I'll take a photograph of me wearing it. It ended up being a very striking image. What I didn't realize, and this happens a lot in my work, is the double take. People have to look again. You think you know what you're looking at but you don't. I think the Self-Portrait with the mask works quite well because I managed to make my hair look quite wig-like, and from a distance, because the colouring of the mask is very similar to my neck, you think it a face with a blank expression. It's quite enigmatic as an image.
Where did the idea come from for "Album," where you cast yourself as members of your own family? Was that unusual territory?
Well, it was new territory. I was going through some old photographs and found one of my mother. I had fixed the photograph in my head. It's an old-fashioned haircut, and not many people have a set hairstyle. When I was a child and looked at this photograph, it really was of an older woman. When you're flicking through photographs you don't really look at them. So over the years, in a Dorian Gray kind of way, I started aging it. If I was thirty, she should have been maybe 60. Then when I found the photograph again, all of a sudden I saw a young woman of 23. I got quite scared and realized that I was an older person and that this young person was my mother before she met my father. She was younger than me, and so I felt slightly more protective towards her. Then I decided, because I looked most like my mother, that it would be interesting to try and be that optimistic young person. That's when I had a mask made.
Then did you realize you could do your immediate family in the same way?
Yes, I thought I'll create my whole family. But it was one of those things when you start out you ask yourself, how should I do the mask? should it look very realistic? should I just put on a wig and wear makeup? I wanted it to be as close to the original as possible. Again, going back to the eyes being the important thing, there would be these false features and my real eyes.
Let's talk about your three-part self-casting as Warhol, Mapplethorpe and Arbus. They are extraordinary images. Why was verisimilitude so important?
First of all, the work of all three artists has a lot to do with masks. When I was thinking of Warhol, the images that stuck in my head after all these years is the one Avedon took where Warhol is showing his scar (it's quite shocking, but he also looks quite cool), and the other one was the Christopher Makos image where Warhol is in drag. He does similar poses in a way, and both have this sense of him being very much in charge of his image. It was all about reference, because Makos is referencing Duchamp doing Rrose Sélavey. I was referencing Makos; Warhol was referencing Duchamp; and then there is Avedon as well. So all these different photographers are trying to capture this enigmatic person. To a certain extent, Warhol was someone who was always in disguise and who always enjoyed playing with it as well.
In the Mapplethorpe, you inhabit the portrait he did when he is dying of AIDS and is holding this death head cane. That must have been a very conscious choice about when to pick up his life. You could have pictured the Patti Smith vibrant, sensual days when he looked like a beautiful biker.
But that final portrait is just amazing, one of the most powerful self-portraits I've ever seen. It's up there with Rembrandt. It's that moment when he is facing death, so it's like his death mask. I don't know how any viewer cannot have some engagement with that image. We all think about mortality, but how do we deal with it? As an artist he dealt with it so frankly by creating a beautiful and powerful image. I couldn't shake it out of my head.
And when you do an edition for Parkett you essentially do a death mask?
Yes.
What is it about Arbus that has her riding on your shoulder?
I think because she built a powerful body of work with amazing images that were identifiably hers. I wouldn't want to step into her shoes and do her work, but I really admire it. I actually didn't know much about the work until I did "Signs" and someone pointed out that our work was similar simply because I went up to people in the street. But some of her photographs are just sublime, and there is a very strong aesthetic that goes with her work. They are not really of this world. In the same way that Sander made a picture that looks like a Sander, she was able to do that through editing. We realize now from her contact sheets that a lot of the photographs look like anyone, but then she finds that one right image. Another thing that we have in common is the eyes. Whether they're thinking of something or whether they're daydreaming, they look hypnotic. They're all haunted in some way. That's how you enter her work. My work is always about interior. I do also work with the exterior, but that is where you enter into the interior. You can trace that back to the "Signs"; what the people are saying is interior, even though the words are on the outside. It is really what they are thinking inside at the moment when I photograph them.
Did you ever worry that you were a kind of clinical ethnographer? So with Drunk, for example, you place these people in a situation and you observe them and film that process of observation. Were there ever questions about should I be doing this, or should I be doing it differently?
When I was working with street alcoholics, I made sure that I got to know the people very well, so that took a two-year period. Most times when we would meet, everyone was already inebriated. Of course, there are moments when a sense of sobriety would come over them because the body can't be in a perpetually inebriated state twenty-four hours a day. To me what the work was strongly about was going back to this sense of being inhibited or not inhibited. We drink to be outside of ourselves, to lose our sense of rationality. Even if it's young people going to clubs, we sometimes want to escape the sense that we are constrained by the society around us. Obviously, I couldn't do that with people who wanted to be anonymous. Street drinkers are very honest about what they are. It was really important to me to film the effects of drink, and so that's why I got to know the people. They would come to my studio and I would film them, and all along the line they knew exactly what it was we were doing. I found it to be a very beautiful piece. It goes through all the emotions-it's not just about losing control. It's sad that people drink, but there's a lot of love and affection in there. I was creating this portrait almost as if it were a drawing or a painting; that's why it's in black and white. When you take away all the effects of a home and put people in a studio, then it becomes all about the person. It is about people losing their inhibitions. It's really about the human condition. I thought about the piece long and hard, and that was why I spent so much time doing it. I felt that Drunk was an important piece to do and I feel really close to it.
I want to talk about emotion in the work. In 2 into 1, re-inhabiting the voices creates a real tension. When the mother says how close is the line between love and hate, it draws attention to the fact that a lot of your work recognizes the complications of emotion. Certainly I Love You does that by returning to the phrase that is articulated in so many ways-from a scream of hatred to the declaration of a need to be cared for. Is one of the things you want to exploit that range of emotion about the line between love and hate?
I suppose I want to show how complex relationships are. There is no one state that anyone ever is in in a relationship. I remember reading years ago that the elastic band breaks the closer you get to someone. But all relationships are complex, and so I wanted to find people who could be very honest about that. When I went to interview Hilary and her two sons I didn't prescribe what they should say. The interviews with all the family members were done in an hour and they were so open. Even though that is a very particular relationship, because she talks about her sons and they talk about her, I think a lot of people relate to it. You could take a sense of what they say and talk about a relationship between two adults, or whether they were partners or siblings, in fact any close relationship. I was trying to create that honesty and openness. When people are that close, some of the opinions have actually come from the other person and some of them are people striking out with their own identity. In Sacha and Mum, I was thinking about relationships and the closeness of love and hate. But it's more ambiguous than in 2 into 1 because you can't really tell what the relationship is in Sacha and Mum. Is the mother restraining the daughter because the daughter is wild, or is the mother the nasty perpetrator? But it was really a metaphor. I didn't want it to be literal, and that's why I liked having two women actresses playing the parts. It would be easier to understand the violence if it were male, but having it be two women is much more interesting and complex. What I wanted was that you couldn't explain it completely; there's obviously love involved and there is violence involved, and it is quite disturbing to watch. It is domestic and it looks very cozy at the same time. There is a moment where you think the mother is being very loving, and then all of a sudden she changes.
The thing that is so captivating for the viewer is this sense of the unexpected, which you addressed earlier, so watching those videos involves a disjunction between identity and voice that the viewer has to deal with.
To me it is more about voices coming from the person who is not saying it. First of all, you can see the apparatus straight away because you can tell that voice doesn't belong to that person. So you can actually illuminate a truth-not the truth of what people are necessarily saying, but the truth about the way we live.
To illuminate the truth is a lovely phrase, because it carries with it a range of metaphors of its own. Do you sense that one of the things you've been able to do in your work is bring out a sense of illumination and, with it, a tremendous sense of empowerment for the people you talk to? Is there a larger ethical and social purpose in your work?
Definitely in that sense of empowerment. Again, I didn't know this when I was first doing the work, so I didn't know what it entirely meant when I was doing the "Confessions." But I got a sense that when people came away, they felt something had been lifted off their shoulders, and that went through into Trauma and other works that I've done, even in Family History with Heather. What people want is to tell their stories. In Heather's case, she wanted to re-tell her story from where she is now. But particularly with the confessional work, they want to tell their stories to a wider audience to get some degree of understanding. Also the fact that they have spoken the words actually makes them feel some kind of relief. People thanked me because they were relieved to tell their stories without the consequences of telling someone else. They can't tell their loved ones because the story is too tragic.
A critic of your recent show in New York says your work is psychologically rattling. You must think of it as being closer to psychologically illuminating.
Let's look at reality; let's look at the truth of people telling their stories. As I said before, it's one aspect of the truth. We learn a lot when we listen to people and also listen without someone telling you what to think. I try and treat both the participant and the audience as intelligently as possible.
That would explain why none of your work makes judgments about the people and their stories. Clearly you have no interest in playing moral arbiter in this world.
Not at all. But we can all be judged, and I think a lot of people have had plenty of judgment applied in their lives. I don't want to put in more. What is particularly interesting is that I find the audience will give empathy when no judgment is being made. They may not always agree, but they are able to understand because of the way the story is told.
It frees everyone up. It's a generous way of making art. Do you think of the people you work with as subjects or collaborators?
I'd like to see everyone as collaborators, but obviously, collaboration operates at many different levels. People are coming in and giving a lot of themselves; they shape their narratives and bring ideas to the plate, so I see them as collaborators as much as possible.
What generated the move to a feature-length film? It is consistent and logical, but it is also a pretty big step to make Self Made.
I've been entertaining the idea of making a feature-length film for many years, actually, and I had been putting in applications back to the mid-'90s, clearly without much success. I really applaud people who are filmmakers all their lives and who stick it out, because a lot of it is struggling to get funding. The great thing about art, even though you can make it more complicated and expensive, is that it can be produced for very little. I made a lot of my early work for about £500. But the application processes you have to go through in film can really thwart your confidence at times because you're constantly being rejected. But I stuck it out because I wanted to do a long-form film. It was a process of elimination, where 10 or 20 artists were asked to put in an idea, and it was a whittling down process. As the ideas got developed over the course of two years, they chose me to make the final film.
Is this the first time you have actually worked with a playwright?
In I Love You and Sacha and Mum, I worked with actors, but I've never worked with a playwright. Feature-film is a collaborative process anyway, and so I worked with a playwright, Leo Butler, and Sam Rumbelow, a method-acting coach. I also had a script editor, and so I was working with a lot of different minds. It's great to have someone to talk with about ideas and it gets things done; your mind works quicker when you're talking to someone else rather than yourself because, if it's just you, there is no one filtering your ideas.
What criteria did you use to select the seven people who appear in the film? Was it their susceptibility to being able to work with Sam and his method?
First of all, I chose people that I liked and who had good stories. I had found 12 people from London auditions, then we did a trial workshop in 2008 when Sam came on board, and we decided on 4 people from that 12. He was also involved in the second tier of auditions that were held in Newcastle, where part of the funding came from and where the filming occurred. For this audition, Sam tried method exercises with each person, so it was very much how they could work with his method.
You have said that all life is partially fictive and also authentic, and how we decide upon the division between the invention in our lives and the actuality of our lives is difficult to determine.
There is a great quote that man doesn't live in reality, he lives in dreams. What partially keeps us alive is that we live in our dreams and in our hopes. The sense of living in the now is the hardest thing in the world, and what method class teaches you is to be in that moment because you can be very creative when you're there. But we all live in fictional states because we are all living in what we hope for and what we want to gain in life, whether in relationships or in work. We try and think of the future a lot and we're living in the past, so it is very hard living in the present. All our lives are a mixture of past, present, future, hopes and dreams.
Back in 1998 you said in an interview that you weren't into "nicely finished-up stories." Are you now more interested in a sense of resolution in your narratives?
Did I say that? I can't quite remember. There is something about resolution that is very satisfactory. We're drawn to endings; we're drawn to knowing what an outcome is. I don't know if I'm going to do more of that, but I'm very conscious of it. There is a lot to be said about having something that gives you a summary at the end. I'm having a show at Whitechapel and K20 in Dusseldorf next year, and I'm working out an idea, which keeps metamorphosing. It could be totally written or something that is not written at all. It's up in the air at the moment. The hardest thing when you have so many thoughts is to try and simplify something.

You've said in the past that you are interested in how other people put things together because they can say something more interesting. Do you trust that you also have some interesting things to say? Have you broken the silence barrier? I don't know. We'll find out. ❚

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Gillian Wearing: The Art of Everyday Illumination

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Gillian Wearing's one-person show at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in May and June was called "People," not a surprising choice for an artist who has located human stories at the centre of her practice throughout her career.

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A conspiracy thread: Did the World End in 2012? https://t.co/gFqh8ntF3S

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A conspiracy thread: Did the World End in 2012? https://t.co/gFqh8ntF3S

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A conspiracy thread: Did the World End in 2012? pic.twitter.com/gFqh8ntF3S
— Nick Hinton (@NickHintonn) July 25, 2019

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A conspiracy thread: Did the World End in 2012? https://t.co/gFqh8ntF3S

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A conspiracy thread: Did the World End in 2012? https://t.co/gFqh8ntF3S

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A conspiracy thread: Did the World End in 2012? https://t.co/gFqh8ntF3S

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“Kusama” redirects here. For the film director, see Karyn Kusama.

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Many references to ravens exist in world lore and literature. Most depictions allude to the appearance and behaviour of the wide-ranging common raven ( Corvus corax). Because of its black plumage, croaking call and diet of carrion, the raven is often associated with loss and ill omen. Yet its symbolism is complex. As a talking bird, the raven also represents prophecy and insight. Ravens in stories often act as psychopomps, connecting the material world with the world of spirits.

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss proposed a structuralist theory that suggests the raven (like the coyote) obtained mythic status because it was a mediator animal between life and death. As a carrion bird, ravens became associated with the dead and with lost souls. In Swedish folklore, they are the ghosts of murdered people without Christian burials and, in German stories, damned souls.

The Raven has appeared in the mythologies of many ancient peoples. Some of the more common stories are from those of Greek, Celtic, Norse, Pacific Northwest, and Roman mythology.

In Greek mythology, ravens are associated with Apollo, the god of prophecy. They are said to be a symbol of bad luck, and were the god's messengers in the mortal world. According to the mythological narration, Apollo sent a white raven, or crow in some versions to spy on his lover, Coronis. When the raven brought back the news that Coronis had been unfaithful to him, Apollo scorched the raven in his fury, turning the animal's feathers black. That's why all ravens are black today.

According to Livy, the Roman general Marcus Valerius Corvus (c. 370-270 BC) had a raven settle on his helmet during a combat with a gigantic Gaul, which distracted the enemy's attention by flying in his face.

The raven (Hebrew: עורב; Koine Greek: κόραξ) is the first species of bird to be mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, and ravens are mentioned on numerous occasions thereafter. In the Book of Genesis, Noah releases a raven from the ark after the great flood to test whether the waters have receded (Gen. 8:6-7). According to the Law of Moses, ravens are forbidden for food (Leviticus 11:15; Deuteronomy 14:14), a fact that may have colored the perception of ravens in later sources. In the Book of Judges, one of Kings of the Midianites defeated by Gideon is called " Orev" (עורב) which means "Raven". In the Book of Kings 17:4-6, God commands the ravens to feed the prophet Elijah. King Solomon is described as having hair as black as a raven in the Song of Songs 5:11. Ravens are an example of God's gracious provision for all his creatures in Psalm 147:9 and Job 38:41. (In the New Testament as well, ravens are used by Jesus as an illustration of God's provision in Luke 12:24.)

Philo of Alexandria (first century AD), who interpreted the Bible allegorically, stated that Noah's raven was a symbol of vice, whereas the dove was a symbol of virtue (Questions and Answers on Genesis 2:38).

In the Talmud, the raven is described as having been only one of three beings on Noah's Ark that copulated during the flood and so was punished. The Rabbis believed that the male raven was forced to ejaculate his seed into the female raven's mouth as a means of reproduction.

Pirke De-Rabbi Eliezer (chapter 25) explains that the reason the raven Noah released from the ark did not return to him was that the raven was feeding on the corpses of those who drowned in the flood.

The name of the important Frankish King Guntram means "War Raven".

According to the legend of the fourth-century Iberian Christian martyr Saint Vincent of Saragossa, after St. Vincent was executed, ravens protected his body from being devoured by wild animals, until his followers could recover the body. His body was taken to what is now known as Cape St. Vincent in southern Portugal. A shrine was erected over his grave, which continued to be guarded by flocks of ravens. The Arab geographer Al-Idrisi noted this constant guard by ravens, for which the place was named by him كنيسة الغراب "Kanīsah al-Ghurāb" (Church of the Raven). King Afonso Henriques (1139-1185) had the body of the saint exhumed in 1173 and brought it by ship to Lisbon, still accompanied by the ravens. This transfer of the relics is depicted on the coat of arms of Lisbon.

A raven is also said to have protected Saint Benedict of Nursia by taking away a loaf of bread poisoned by jealous monks after he blessed it.

In the legends about the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, depicting him as sleeping along with his knights in a cave in the Kyffhäuser mountain in Thuringia or the Untersberg in Bavaria, it is told that when the ravens cease to fly around the mountain he will awake and restore Germany to its ancient greatness. According to the story, the Emperor's eyes are half closed in sleep, but now and then he raises his hand and sends a boy out to see if the ravens have stopped flying.

Middle East / Islamic culture

In the Qur'an's version of the story of Cain and Abel, a raven is mentioned as the creature who taught Cain how to bury his murdered brother, in Al-Ma'ida (The Repast) 5:31. {Surah 5:27-31}

To the Germanic peoples, Odin was often associated with ravens. Examples include depictions of figures often identified as Odin appear flanked with two birds on a 6th-century bracteate and on a 7th-century helmet plate from Vendel, Sweden. In later Norse mythology, Odin is depicted as having two ravens Huginn and Muninn serving as his eyes and ears - huginn meaning "thought" and muninn meaning "memory". Each day the ravens fly out from Hliðskjálf and bring Odin news from Midgard.

The Old English word for a raven was hræfn; in Old Norse it was hrafn; the word was frequently used in combinations as a kenning for bloodshed and battle.

The raven was a common device used by the Vikings. Ragnar Lothbrok had a raven banner called Reafan, embroidered with the device of a raven. It was said that if this banner fluttered, Lothbrok would carry the day, but if it hung lifeless the battle would be lost. King Harald Hardrada also had a raven banner, called Landeythan (land-waster). The bird also appears in the folklore of the Isle of Man, a former Viking colony, and it is used as a symbol on their coat of arms.

In Irish mythology ravens are associated with warfare and the battleground in the figures of Badb and Morrígan. The goddess Morrígan alighted on the hero Cú Chulainn's shoulder in the form of a raven after his death. Ravens were also associated with the Welsh god Bran the Blessed (the brother of Branwen), whose name translates to "raven." According to the Mabinogion, Bran's head was buried in the White Hill of London as a talisman against invasion. He is depicted as giant and the King of the Britons in tale known as the Second Branch of the . Several other characters in Welsh mythology share his name, and ravens figure prominently in the 12th or 13th century text The Dream of Rhonabwy, as the army of King Arthur's knight Owain.

According to legend, the Kingdom of England will fall if the ravens of the Tower of London are removed. It had been thought that there have been at least six ravens in residence at the tower for centuries. It was said that Charles II ordered their removal following complaints from John Flamsteed, the Royal Astronomer. However, they were not removed because Charles was then told of the legend. Charles, following the time of the English Civil War, superstition or not, was not prepared to take the chance, and instead had the observatory moved to Greenwich.

The earliest known reference to a Tower raven is a picture in the newspaper The Pictorial World in 1883 as well as a poem and illustration published the same year in the children's book London Town. This and scattered subsequent references, both literary and visual, which appear in the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, place them near the monument commemorating those beheaded at the tower, popularly known as the "scaffold." This strongly suggests that the ravens, which are notorious for gathering at gallows, were originally used to dramatize tales of imprisonment and execution at the tower told to tourists by the Yeomen Warders. There is evidence that the original ravens were donated to the tower by the Earls of Dunraven, perhaps because of their association with the Celtic raven-god Bran. However wild ravens, which were once abundant in London and often seen around meat markets (such as nearby Eastcheap) foraging for scraps, could have roosted at the Tower in earlier times.

During the Second World War, most of the Tower's ravens perished through shock during bombing raids, leaving only a mated pair named "Mabel" and "Grip." Shortly before the Tower reopened to the public, Mabel flew away, leaving Grip despondent. A couple of weeks later, Grip also flew away, probably in search of his mate. The incident was reported in several newspapers, and some of the stories contained the first references in print to the legend that the British Empire would fall if the ravens left the tower. Since the Empire was dismantled shortly afterward, those who are superstitious might interpret events as a confirmation of the legend. Before the tower reopened to the public on 1 January 1946, care was taken to ensure that a new set of ravens was in place.

Ravens appear as stock characters in several traditional Serbian epic poems. Like in many other cultures, the raven is associated with death - more specifically with an aftermath of a bloody or significant battle. Ravens often appear in pairs and play the role of harbingers of tragic news, usually announcing death of a hero or a group of heroes. They tend to appear in combination with female characters as receivers of the news. Usually, a mother or a wife of a hero will be notified about the hero's death by a visit from a pair of ravens. Sometimes, these are treated as supernatural creatures capable of communicating with humans that report about events directly. Alternatively, these are ordinary birds bringing along scavenged body parts, such as a hand or a finger with a ring, by which the fate of the hero will be recognised. Most notable examples of this pattern can be found in songs "Car Lazar i Carica Milica" (Tsar Lazar and Tsarina Militsa) and "Boj na Mišaru" ( Battle of Mishar).

Hindu / South Asia

In the Story of Bhusunda, a chapter of the Yoga Vasistha, a very old sage in the form of a crow, Bhusunda, recalls a succession of epochs in the earth's history, as described in Hindu cosmology. He survived several destructions, living on a wish-fulfilling tree on Mount Meru. Crows are also considered ancestors in Hinduism and during Śrāddha the practice of offering food or pinda to crows is still in vogue.

The Hindu deity Shani is often represented as being mounted on a giant black raven or crow. The crow (sometimes a raven or vulture) is Shani's Vahana. As protector of property, Shani is able to repress the thieving tendencies of these birds.

The raven is the national bird of Bhutan, and it adorns the royal hat, representing the deity Gonpo Jarodonchen ( Mahakala) with a Raven's head; one of the important guardian deities.

The raven also has a prominent role in the mythologies of the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, including the Tsimishians, Haidas, Heiltsuks, Tlingits, Kwakwaka'wakw, Coast Salish, Koyukons, and Inuit. The raven in these indigenous peoples' mythology is the Creator of the world, but it is also considered a trickster god.[citation needed ] For instance, in Tlingit culture, there are two different raven characters which can be identified, although they are not always clearly differentiated. One is the creator raven, responsible for bringing the world into being and who is sometimes considered to be the individual who brought light to the darkness. The other is the childish raven, always selfish, sly, conniving, and hungry. When the Great Spirit created all things he kept them separate and stored in cedar boxes. The Great Spirit gifted these boxes to the animals who existed before humans. When the animals opened the boxes all the things that comprise the world came into being. The boxes held such things as mountains, fire, water, wind and seeds for all the plants. One such box, which was given to Seagull, contained all the light of the world. Seagull coveted his box and refused to open it, clutching it under his wing. All the people asked Raven to persuade Seagull to open it and release the light. Despite begging, demanding, flattering and trying to trick him into opening the box, Seagull still refused. Finally Raven became angry and frustrated, and stuck a thorn in Seagull's foot. Raven pushed the thorn in deeper until the pain caused Seagull to drop the box. Then out of the box came the sun, moon and stars that brought light to the world and allowed the first day to begin.

Bill Reid created the sculpture of The Raven and The First Men depicting a scene from a Haida myth that unifies the Raven as both the trickster and the creator. According to this myth, the raven who was both bored and well fed, found and freed some creatures trapped in a clam. These scared and timid beings were the first men of the world, and they were coaxed out of the clam shell by the raven. Soon the raven was bored with these creatures and planned to return them to their shell. Instead, the raven decided to search for the female counterparts of these male beings. The raven found some female humans trapped in a chiton, freed them, and was entertained as the two sexes met and began to interact. The raven, always known as a trickster, was responsible for the pairing of humans and felt very protective of them. With the Raven perceived as the creator, many Haida myths and legends often suggest the raven as a provider to mankind.

Another raven story from the Puget Sound region describes the "Raven" as having originally lived in the land of spirits (literally bird land) that existed before the world of humans. One day the Raven became so bored with bird land that he flew away, carrying a stone in his beak. When the Raven became tired of carrying the stone and dropped it, the stone fell into the ocean and expanded until it formed the firmament on which humans now live.

One ancient story told on Haida Gwaii tells about how Raven helped to bring the Sun, Moon, Stars, Fresh Water, and Fire to the world:

"

Long ago, near the beginning of the world, Gray Eagle was the guardian of the Sun, Moon and Stars, of fresh water, and of fire. Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden. People lived in darkness, without fire and without fresh water.

Gray Eagle had a beautiful daughter, and Raven fell in love with her. In the beginning, Raven was a snow-white bird, and as a such, he pleased Gray Eagle's daughter. She invited him to her father's longhouse.

When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and stars, and fresh water hanging on the sides of Eagle's lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and a brand of fire also, and flew out of the longhouse through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got outside he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made so much light that he was able to fly far out to an island in the middle of the ocean. When the Sun set, he fastened the Moon up in the sky and hung the stars around in different places. By this new light he kept on flying, carrying with him the fresh water and the brand of fire he had stolen.

He flew back over the land. When he had reached the right place, he dropped all the water he had stolen. It fell to the ground and there became the source of all the fresh-water streams and lakes in the world. Then Raven flew on, holding the brand of fire in his bill. The smoke from the fire blew back over his white feathers and made them black. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the firebrand. It struck rocks and hid itself within them. That is why, if you strike two stones together, sparks of fire will drop out.

Raven's feathers never became white again after they were blackened by the smoke from the firebrand. That is why Raven is now a black bird.

"

Other notable stories tell of the Raven stealing and releasing the sun, and of the Raven tempting the first humans out of a clam shell. Another story of the Kwakiutl or Kwakwaka'wakw of British Columbia who exposed boys' placentas to ravens to encourage future prophetic visions, thereby associating the raven with prophecy, similar to the traditions of Scandinavia.

In one legend Raven transformed himself into a pine needle which is swallowed by the unmarried daughter of the owner of the box of daylight, who then becomes pregnant and gives birth to Raven in disguise.

Siberia, Northern Asia

The raven god or spirit Kutcha (or Kutkh, (Кутх)) is important in the shamanic tradition of the Koryaks and other indigenous Chukotko-Kamchatkan peoples of the Russian Far East.

Kutcha is traditionally revered in various forms by various peoples and appears in many legends: as a key figure in creation, as a fertile ancestor of mankind, as a mighty shaman and as a trickster. He is a popular subject of the animist stories of the Chukchi people and plays a central role in the mythology of the Koryaks and Itelmens of Kamchatka. Many of the stories regarding Kutkh are similar to those of the Raven among the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, indicating a long history of indirect cultural contact between Asian and North American peoples.

Two ravens or crows, flying over the warrior's head in battle, symbolised in Yakut mythology the Ilbis Kyyha and Ohol Uola, two evil spirits of war and violence. Some other gods or spirits in yakut shamanism, including Uluu Suorun Toyon and Uluutuar Uluu Toyon, are described as "great raven of cloudy sky".

Ravens are common charges in world heraldry and continue to make regular appearances in modern logos and symbolism.

The raven is often depicted in the literature of the Western Canon.

Maggie Stiefvater's book cycle called the Raven Cycle consists of The Raven Boys and The Raven King. There is also a sidekick raven called Chainsaw that was brought from the dream of a main character.

In Susanna Clarke's novel Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), the common title of the long vanished magician king of northern England, John Uskglass, is the Raven King. He often summoned flocks of ravens for dramatic effect during military campaigns, or when he magically appeared somewhere. Throughout the novel, ravens appear as signs of his impending return or particular acts of magic.

In Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, the ravens Huginn and Muginn play an important role.

In Charles Dickens' historical novel Barnaby Rudge (serialized in 1841), the raven "Grip" is an important character.

A shapeshifting alien appears variously as a Tlingit shaman named Gordon and as a raven (as noted above, significant in Tlingit mythos) in Joe Haldeman's science fiction novel Guardian (2002).

In Christopher Marlowe's play The Jew of Malta (written 1589-1590), the raven's darkly ominous image is employed.

The raven is used as a supernatural messenger in Edgar Allan Poe's narrative poem "The Raven" (1845). In this and in Dickens' book, the bird's mimicry of speech is important.

Branwyn Rhodes' children's book, Legend of the Ravens (2013), illustrated by Mike Kunde, is based on the legends about the Tower of London ravens during the reign of Charles II in the 1600s.

William Shakespeare refers to the raven more often than to any other bird; works such as (ca. 1603) and (believed to have been written between 1599 and 1606) provide examples.

In Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (first installment published in 1590, and a second installment in 1596), the raven's darkly ominous image is employed.

In (1937) by J. R. R. Tolkien, Roäc son of Carc is the leader of the Ravens of the Lonely Mountain.

In "The Saga of Larten Crepsley" book Ocean of Blood, Mika Ver Leth is described as being what a raven would look like in human form.

In the A Song of Ice and Fire series (as well as its television adaption Game of Thrones) by George R. R. Martin, ravens are used as a means of long distance communication, similar to carrier pigeons. In addition, a three-eyed-raven figure makes a prominent appearance.

Haisla author Eden Robinson's main character in Son of a Trickster and Trickster Drift discovers his true father is Wee'git, the transforming raven trickster of Haida cosmology.

In the well-known ballad "The Three Ravens" (published in 1611), a slain knight is depicted from the point of view of ravens who seek to eat him but are prevented by his loyal hawks, hounds and leman (lover).

Raven was a blues/rock band formed in 1967 in Buffalo, New York, and active until 1970.

British rock band The Stranglers named their 1979 album after the bird which also appeared on the album artwork and was the title track of the record.

British musician Steven Wilson released an album in 2013 entitled "The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories)" which peaked at #28 on the UK album charts, #57 in the US, and rose to #3 in Germany.

Jimmy the raven appeared in more than 1,000 feature films from the 1930s through the 1950s.

In Disney's The Lone Ranger (2013), the character of Tonto (portrayed by Johnny Depp) throughout the film wears a raven headdress.

In Disney's Sleeping Beauty (1959), Maleficent has a loyal pet raven named Diablo. He is Maleficent's most useful minion. Diablo manages to locate Aurora's hiding place in the Cottage in the Woods, along with the Three Fairies.

Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" has been adapted into films, first in 1915, then in 1935, 1963, and 2012.

In Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the Evil Queen [Grimhilde] has a pet raven as her familiar. Grimhilde's raven is completely silent and unnamed; his fate remains uncertain. He is frightened of the Queen in her Witch Form and is only seen when the Queen is in her Laboratory underneath the castle.

In HBO's television series Game of Thrones, as in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy novel series on which it is based, uses the Raven as a messenger bird. Additionally, the Three-eyed raven appears in Bran Stark's dreams to guide him on a quest. In addition, the members of the Night's Watch are nicknamed "Crows" due to them only wearing black.

Highlander: The Raven was a short-lived spin-off from the television series Highlander

Raven appears as the trickster god of Native American mythology and one of the children of Oberon in the episode "Heritage."

In Sui Ishida's dark fantasy manga Tokyo Ghoul, a ghoul named Renji Yomo is nicknamed "Raven" (カラス karasu) by humans. Like ravens, Yomo is a scavenger, and he procures suicide victims for consumption for ghouls who are too weak or do not wish to hunt for prey. His kagune (main predatory organ), is in an ukaku configuration, meaning its placement is above the shoulder blades, resembling the wings of a bird. They are also the only kagune revealed in the series to be pitch black, identical to a raven. Lastly, as with all ghouls, Yomo wears a mask to hide his identity. His mask resembles that of a raven's beak, and is colored black.

In the On the Fastrack comic strip, the Goth woman, Dethany Dendrobia, has a pet raven named "Lenore" in reference to the Edgar Allan Poe poem. Lenore is a recurring character and appears quite frequently, interacting with Dethany and other characters in the strip.

In Heroes of the Storm, the Raven Lord is one of the oldest and most powerful beings within the Nexus, and the ruler of Raven Court, a realm where the battleground Cursed Hollow is set. A playable hero, called Medivh, can transform into the raven. While transformed, Medivh can see and fly over all terrain and is immune to all effects.

In the fictional Warhammer 40,000 universe, the Raven Guard are an original founding legion of the Space Marines which take inspiration from the Corvidae family such as their beak like helmets, black power armour and the name of their founding Primarch, Corvus Corax.

In the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland, a raven makes several appearances.

The first name "Bram" is derived from a convergence of two separate etymological sources, one being an abbreviation of "Abraham", but the other being the Gaelic word "bran", meaning "raven". The name Bran signifying a raven was used in medieval Ireland.

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Many references to ravens exist in world lore and literature. Most depictions allude to the appearance and behaviour of the wide-ranging common raven ( Corvus corax). Because of its black plumage, croaking call and diet of carrion, the raven is often associated with loss and ill omen. Yet its symbolism is complex.

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Edgar Allen Poe

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Hear "The Tell-Tale Heart" read aloud.
The Tell-Tale Heart

True! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily - how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture - a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.

Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded - with what caution - with what foresight - with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it - oh, so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, so that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly - very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man's sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! - would a madman have been so wise as this? And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously - oh, so cautiously - cautiously (for the hinges creaked) - I undid it just so much that a single thin ray fell upon the vulture eye. And this I did for seven long nights - every night just at midnight - but I found the eye always closed; and so it was impossible to do the work; for it was not the old man who vexed me, but his Evil Eye. And every morning, when the day broke, I went boldly into the chamber, and spoke courageously to him, calling him by name in a hearty tone, and inquiring how he had passed the night. So you see he would have been a very profound old man, indeed, to suspect that every night, just at twelve, I looked in upon him while he slept.

Upon the eighth night I was more than usually cautious in opening the door. A watch's minute hand moves more quickly than did mine. Never before that night had I felt the extent of my own powers - of my sagacity. I could scarcely contain my feelings of triumph. To think that there I was, opening the door, little by little, and he not even to dream of my secret deeds or thoughts. I fairly chuckled at the idea; and perhaps he heard me; for he moved on the bed suddenly, as if startled. Now you may think that I drew back - but no. His room was as black as pitch with the thick darkness, (for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers,) and so I knew that he could not see the opening of the door, and I kept pushing it on steadily, steadily.

I had my head in, and was about to open the lantern, when my thumb slipped upon the tin fastening, and the old man sprang up in the bed, crying out - "Who's there?"

I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move a muscle, and in the meantime I did not hear him lie down. He was still sitting up in the bed listening; - just as I have done, night after night, hearkening to the death watches in the wall.

Presently I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. It was not a groan of pain or of grief - oh, no! - it was the low stifled sound that arises from the bottom of the soul when overcharged with awe. I knew the sound well. Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom, deepening, with its dreadful echo, the terrors that distracted me. I say I knew it well. I knew what the old man felt, and pitied him, although I chuckled at heart. I knew that he had been lying awake ever since the first slight noise, when he had turned in the bed. His fears had been ever since growing upon him. He had been trying to fancy them causeless, but could not. He had been saying to himself - "It is nothing but the wind in the chimney - it is only a mouse crossing the floor," or "it is merely a cricket which has made a single chirp." Yes, he has been trying to comfort himself with these suppositions: but he had found all in vain. All in vain; because Death, in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him, and enveloped the victim. And it was the mournful influence of the unperceived shadow that caused him to feel - although he neither saw nor heard - to feel the presence of my head within the room.

When I had waited a long time, very patiently, without hearing him lie down, I resolved to open a little - a very, very little crevice in the lantern. So I opened it - you cannot imagine how stealthily, stealthily - until, at length a single dim ray, like the thread of the spider, shot from out the crevice and fell upon the vulture eye.

It was open - wide, wide open - and I grew furious as I gazed upon it. I saw it with perfect distinctness - all a dull blue, with a hideous veil over it that chilled the very marrow in my bones; but I could see nothing else of the old man's face or person: for I had directed the ray as if by instinct, precisely upon the damned spot.

And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over acuteness of the senses? - now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.

But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man's terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment! - do you mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous: so I am. And now at the dead hour of the night, amid the dreadful silence of that old house, so strange a noise as this excited me to uncontrollable terror. Yet, for some minutes longer I refrained and stood still. But the beating grew louder, louder! I thought the heart must burst. And now a new anxiety seized me - the sound would be heard by a neighbor! The old man's hour had come! With a loud yell, I threw open the lantern and leaped into the room. He shrieked once - once only. In an instant I dragged him to the floor, and pulled the heavy bed over him. I then smiled gaily, to find the deed so far done. But, for many minutes, the heart beat on with a muffled sound. This, however, did not vex me; it would not be heard through the wall. At length it ceased. The old man was dead. I removed the bed and examined the corpse. Yes, he was stone, stone dead. I placed my hand upon the heart and held it there many minutes. There was no pulsation. He was stone dead. His eye would trouble me no more.

If still you think me mad, you will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took for the concealment of the body. The night waned, and I worked hastily, but in silence. First of all I dismembered the corpse. I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.

I then took up three planks from the flooring of the chamber, and deposited all between the scantlings. I then replaced the boards so cleverly, so cunningly, that no human eye - not even his - could have detected any thing wrong. There was nothing to wash out - no stain of any kind - no blood-spot whatever. I had been too wary for that. A tub had caught all - ha! ha!

When I had made an end of these labors, it was four o 'clock - still dark as midnight. As the bell sounded the hour, there came a knocking at the street door. I went down to open it with a light heart, - for what had I now to fear? There entered three men, who introduced themselves, with perfect suavity, as officers of the police. A shriek had been heard by a neighbor during the night; suspicion of foul play had been aroused; information had been lodged at the police office, and they (the officers) had been deputed to search the premises.

I smiled, - for what had I to fear? I bade the gentlemen welcome. The shriek, I said, was my own in a dream. The old man, I mentioned, was absent in the country. I took my visitors all over the house. I bade them search - search well. I led them, at length, to his chamber. I showed them his treasures, secure, undisturbed. In the enthusiasm of my confidence, I brought chairs into the room, and desired them here to rest from their fatigues, while I myself, in the wild audacity of my perfect triumph, placed my own seat upon the very spot beneath which reposed the corpse of the victim.

The officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them. I was singularly at ease. They sat, and while I answered cheerily, they chatted of familiar things. But, ere long, I felt myself getting pale and wished them gone. My head ached, and I fancied a ringing in my ears: but still they sat and still chatted. The ringing became more distinct: - it continued and became more distinct: I talked more freely to get rid of the feeling: but it continued and gained definitiveness - until, at length, I found that the noise was not within my ears.

No doubt I now grew very pale; - but I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased - and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound - much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath - and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly - more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased. I arose and argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily increased. Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men - but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed - I raved - I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder - louder - louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! - no, no! They heard! - they suspected! - they knew! - they were making a mockery of my horror! - this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! - and now - again! - hark! louder! louder! louder! louder! -

"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! - tear up the planks! - here, here! - it is the beating of his hideous heart!"
Edgar Allan Poe January 1843 Illustration by Harry Clarke

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Hear "The Tell-Tale Heart" read aloud. True! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute.

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Edgar Allen Poe

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Then methought the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose footfalls tinkled on the tufted floor. "Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee- by these angels he hath sent thee Respite- respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore!

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Wolfgang Tillmans (born 16 August 1968) is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium's foundations.

Tillmans was the first photographer - and also the first non-British person - to be awarded the Tate annual Turner Prize. He has also been awarded the Hasselblad Award, the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal, the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition's Charles Wollaston Award, The Culture Prize of the German Society for Photography, and is an Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts London. Tillmans lives in Berlin and London.

Tillmans was born in 1968 in Remscheid in the German area of Bergisches Land. At the age of 14 to 16, visits to museums in Düsseldorf and to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne acquainted him with the photo-based art of Gerhard Richter, Sigmar Polke, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, which counts among his earliest influences. During his first visit to England as an exchange student in 1983, he discovered the British youth culture and the local fashion and music magazines of the time. From 1987 to 1990, he lived in Hamburg; there, in 1988, he had his first solo exhibitions, at Café Gnosa, Fabrik-Foto-Forum, and Front. From 1990 through 1992, he studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design (now Arts University Bournemouth) in southern England. After his studies he moved to London and then to New York in 1994 for a year, where he met the German painter Jochen Klein. After moving back to England, Tillmans lived with Klein until Klein died of AIDS-related complications in 1997.

From 1995, Tillmans primarily lived and worked in London. During the summer of 1998, Tillmans participated in a month-long residency at the last active Shaker community in the world, in Sabbathday Lake, Maine. Since 2007, he has divided his time between Berlin and London. Following a guest professorship at the Hochschule für bildende Kunst in Hamburg from 1998 to 1999 and an Honorary Fellowship at the Arts University Bournemouth in 2001, Tillmans was a professor for Interdisciplinary Art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main from 2003 to 2006.

In 2011, Tillmans travelled to Haiti with the charity Christian Aid to document reconstruction work after the country's devastating earthquake one year before.

Between 2009 and 2014 Tillmans served as an Artist Trustee of the Tate Board. He is also a member of the museum's Collection Committee and the Tate Britain Council. In 2017, he was elected to the Council of the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA); in 2019, he was appointed the chair of the board.

Tillmans was initially known for his seemingly casual, sometimes snapshot-like portraits of friends (most notably, fashion designer Lutz Huelle and fellow artist Alexandra Bircken) and other youth in his immediate surroundings and scene. His photos - from the Europride in London (1992) or the Love Parade in Berlin (1992), for example - appeared in magazines such as and , and established his reputation as a prominent witness of a contemporary social movement. He was made co-editor of Spex in 1997. For the Index Magazine, he shot covers and assignments, including images of John Waters, Gilbert & George, and Udo Kier.

Tillmans was considered the "documentarian of his generation, especially that of the London club and gay scenes" (though he has said "It was never my intention to be seen as diaristic or autobiographical. I was not recording the world around me or my tribe or whatever. There is a big misunderstanding there that still persists to this day."). Half of his work is staged, with the artist choosing the clothes and the location, as well as setting his models up in their positions. The series of his friends Lutz and Alex, also published in i-D in 1992, are considered important photographic documents of the 1990s. In his early photographs of people, Tillmans portrayed freedom in a different way and he says: "I wanted to somehow represent what was not being represented elsewhere." From 1992 to 1994 Tillmans lived and worked in London, moving to New York in 1994. During this time, he began to show more frequently, developing an exhibition style that consisted of nonhierarchical arrangements of unframed photographs pinned or taped onto the gallery's walls. Color photographs are placed next to inkjet prints and next to postcards and magazine clippings of his own images, reaching almost to the ceiling and the floor. He views each exhibition as a site-specific installation, often addressing the exhibition space as a larger composition.

"Pictures, in order to see the world"

Tillmans' photographic practice subsequently developed to encompass a wide array of genres. His portraits, still lifes, sky photographs (e.g. the Concorde series), astrophotography, aerial shots and landscapes are motivated equally by aesthetic and political interests, especially related to homosexuality and gender identity. Tillmans says of his work: "I take pictures, in order to see the world." He produces images for installations in three sizes, from small to very large, and either in signed, mounted prints, which must be protected in a frame, or as replaceable inkjet prints that can be attached directly to the wall (the latter generated by a certificate-authenticated optical disc). They are installed in meticulous wall installations, sometimes combined with photocopies, and magazine and newspaper clippings (for example, in the installation "Soldiers - The Nineties"); or presented in vitrines, arranged in extensive table-installations ("truth study center"). Operating on the basis of the fundamental equality of all motifs and supports, through this continual re-arranging, repositioning, questioning and reinforcement, Tillmans avoids ascribing any 'conclusions' to his work and thus subjects his photographic vision to a perpetual re-contextualization.

In 2009, after Tillmans had been using an analog 50 mm Contax SLR camera almost exclusively for over two decades, he turned to digital photography. In 2012, he abandoned film altogether and became a full-time digital photographer. In an interview that year, he describes the corresponding change from using viewfinders to integrated camera monitors as "completely turning on its head the psychology of photography, which has always been a dialogue between photographer, object and the imaginary image that one is envisioning, thinking, hoping for." According to Tillmans, the higher resolution of digital photographs correlates to "a transformation in the whole world"; he further explains: "In recent years, everything has become HD, so I think it is inevitable that the overwhelming nature of this information density is reflected in my images. In this way, they again describe quite well my sense of perception today."

Wolfgang has a passion and love for the streets and the club. Which this two inspire him in his work along with his work in the gay movement rights.(Jobey,2010).

The 56 photographs of equal dimensions that make up the Concorde Grid were taken in and around London as part of a commission for Tillmans' exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in 1997. Shot from a wide range of places, including private gardens, parks, railway tracks, and the perimeter fence around Heathrow airport, they record the daily passing of the airplane. Total Solar Eclipse Grid (1998), a set of which was included in his Turner Prize installation and is now in the permanent collection of the Tate, documents the spectacle of a solar eclipse. Each of the 21 photographs in the grid was taken during the eclipse of his immediate surroundings in a tropical locale, with varying degrees of light and detail. Snow/Ice Grid (1999) is a grid of images of trampled and melting ice and snow.

Abstractions

Tillmans exhibited his first abstract and damaged pictures as a Parkett edition in 1998. The edition, 60 unique works on color-negative photographic paper collected by the artist since he began colour printing in 1990, was a combination of true darkroom mistakes and years of darkroom experimentation that they inspired. The Silver works, which Tillmans has been creating since 1998, reflect the reaction of the photographic paper to light, as well as mechanical and chemical processes. The name Silver arises from the dirt traces and silver salt stains that remain on the paper when the artist develops the photographs in a machine that is filled with water and has not been completely cleaned.

Since 2000, Tillmans has become increasingly interested in the chemical foundations of photographic material, as well as its haptic and spatial possibilities. The "Conquistador" series of photographs were the first of these interventions to be exhibited. Later works created directly in the darkroom without the use of a camera, and often largely accidental (e.g. "Blushes," "Mental Pictures," and "Freischwimmer"), present photography as a self-referential medium - one that could serve as an experimental ground for the creation of a new type of image structure. These "abstract" works now appear next to the figurative photographs. In "Blushes," fine, thread-like lines, apparently drawn with light, swim over the surface of the photographic paper, and create delicate, fluid patterns.

Tillmans further explores the bounds of photography as a medium in his "paper drop" series (2001-8). He started to make 'paper drop' images depicting photographic paper specifically exposed to coloured light in his darkroom in 2001. He creates extraordinary sculptural forms in photographic paper; then, by photographing them, returns them to the accustomed flatness of that medium. Photography's step from 'picture' to 'object' is best demonstrated in the works from the "Lighter" Series (2005-8), in which the artist dropped the act of photographing and allowed the photographs - in their three-dimensional form - to only represent themselves, recalling his ongoing series "Impossible Color" (1996-present). These colourful photo-paper works are folded, creased or otherwise manipulated, allowing for a subtle play with the material surface and the resulting illusion of lines and contrast. Contained under plexiglas lids, they have a rather sculptural quality.

Photocopies

Tillman's first exhibition in 1988 was composed exclusively of images that were created with the latest kind of monochrome laser copier. He regards these so-called Approach pictures (1987-1988) as his "first work before [he] even owned a camera." Over the years, Tillmans has often returned to this medium. The ways that surface structure and image depth influence each other is shown in his large-format works whose original material is analogue photocopies (ongoing since 2006). Here he also references his earlier works from the end of the 1980s that he began in the course of experimenting with an old Canon photocopier. The uncontrolled contrasts and pigment particles in the images from these old machines are clear only after drastic enlargement (framed ca. 260 x 180 cm). The resulting effects are distanced but also concrete - created through not only the materiality of the printing process but also the play and variation of scale. With the analogue photocopy - probably the most ephemeral form of image (re)production - a system of values for images is brought into a critical light.

Table works ("truth study center")

In 2005, at his major supporter Maureen Paley's gallery, Tillmans showed his large-scale display-case installation Truth Study Center. Going even further than his wall-installations, Tillmans' table works combine a diverse array of image formats and content. His own photographs are presented and arranged under glass next to extracts from books, newspapers, magazines, postcards, packaging and other found materials. The collage-like arrangements of the table displays produce an open-ness and potentiality in terms of aesthetics and content, while raising a critical question about the interpretive possibilities of the visible in a global information-society. With that, claims of absolute (in particular, religious) truth are caricatured, as if Tillmans would like to put them to a kind of test ("truth study center"). The works draw attention to the exercise of power behind the ideologies of Islamic fundamentalism, Catholicism, and capitalism.

In 1987, Tillmans began making videos, and he has exhibited them since 2002. In most, the camera barely moves, the sound is direct, and the only cuts occur when the camera is turned on and off. Lights (Body) (2000-2002), a video installation featuring static shots of the light effects inside an empty dance club, with the bass pulse of the 'Hacker Remix' of 'Don't be Light' by Air, is the first work by the photographer using the medium of film. The only indications of people on the crowded dance floor are the subtle vibrations and occasionally visible particles of dust. In 2002, Tillmans filmed a video clip for the pop band Pet Shop Boys' single " Home and Dry," composed almost entirely of shots documenting the mice living in the London Underground system. The film Kopierer (2010) depicts an open color laser copy machine, the CLC 1100, in the act of copying documents over a period of ten minutes.

In 2001, Tillmans was awarded first prize in the competition for the design of the AIDS memorial for the City of Munich, whereupon the memorial was erected after his designs at the Sendlinger Tor.

In 2015, he was commissioned with creating the official portrait of retiring British Museum director Neil MacGregor, which was subsequently acquired by the museum as the first photograph portrait in a tradition stretching back 250 years.

In 2011, Tillmans collaborated with The Opiates by offering a range of photographs to accompany their Hollywood under the knife album and Rainy Days and Remixes EP.

A fan of the 1980s experimental synthpop group Colourbox, Tillmans curated an exhibition dedicated to the group, Music of the Band (1982 - 1987), at his Between Bridges gallery in 2014, and also selected the track list and provided original artwork for a tie-in compilation of the same name. The exhibition was the first to be held in the gallery's dedicated Playback Room, where visitors can listen to Tillmans' music selections on high-end speakers.

In 2016, Tillmans' track "Device Control" was included on American singer and rapper Frank Ocean's video album After Ocean met with Tillmans to discuss the use of his photography for Ocean's studio album Blonde, Tillmans sent Ocean two of his tracks after piquing his interest. Ocean later asked if he could sample the track, to which Tillman agreed. Although Ocean was initially planning to only sample "Device Control", it was released in its entirety as an opening and ending of the video album.

Between Bridges is a non-profit exhibition space maintained by Tillmans in Berlin.

Between April 2006 and late 2011, Tillmans maintained the exhibition space in the ground floor of his Bethnal Green studio, a former umbrella factory named Moarain House, at 223 Cambridge Heath Road, London. The project's name is taken from a 1999 photograph by the artist, and also refers to the studio's physical location between two rail bridges. The space opened with a show of works by the New York artist and activist David Wojnarowicz. In the small gallery Tillmans developed a program of exhibitions with political art from other artists who he believed had not been given the attention they deserved, specifically in London. Exhibitions were held of work by Isa Genzken, Jenny Holzer, Wolfgang Breuer, David Wojnarowicz, Corita Kent, Charlotte Posenenske, Isa Genzken, the films of Len Lye, and photographs from the Center for Land Use Interpretation.

In January 2014, Between Bridges relocated to a former artist studio and gallery in Tiergarten, Berlin.

Tillmans' Experience with AIDS

Tillmans contracted HIV at the age of 26 from his boyfriend Jochen Klein, a German painter and his collaborator on art during most of his life. Jochen died from AIDS in 1997. Tillmans stated in his interview with the SHOWStudio's Lou Stoppard that after experiencing this he feels like life is fragile, and should not take advantage of it.

In the interview with SHOWStudio's Lou Stoppard, Tillmans talks about how some of his artwork has reflected how he felt about HIV and AIDS:

Tillmans' 2014 photograph, "17 Years' Supply", depicts a giant cardboard box filled with bottles of HIV drugs-some marked with Tillmans' own name. His work, as a whole, has also largely spoken to the LGBTQ experience: 2014's "Arms and Legs" is an erotic close-up of a male hand slipped underneath another man's red athletic shorts; 2012's "Juan Pablo & Karl, Chingaza" features two men smoking and laying [ sic] together on a bed of grass.

Wolfgang Tillmans. Cologne: Taschen, 1995, 2002. ISBN 978-3822888537

Wolfgang Tillmans. Zurich: Kunsthalle Zürich, 1995; JRP/Ringier, 2008. ISBN 978-3905829365

Wolfgang Tillmans. Frankfurt am Main: Portikus, 1995

Wer Liebe wagt lebt morgen. Ostfildern-Ruit: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 1996

Wolfgang Tillmans: Burg. ISBN 978-3822878811

Cologne: Taschen, 1998

Reissued as Wolfgang Tillmans, 2002

Totale Sonnenfinsternis. Cologne: Galerie Buchholz, 1999

Wako Book 1999. Tokyo: Wako Works of Art, 1999

Portraits. Cologne: Walther König / Distributed Art Publishers, 2001. ISBN 978-1891024368

Aufsicht / View from Above. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001

AC: Isa Genzken/Wolfgang Tillmans. Cologne: Museum Ludwig, Walther König, 2001

Wolfgang Tillmans. London and New York: Phaidon, 2002. ISBN 0 7148 4192 7

If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters. London: Tate, 2003

Freischwimmer. Tokyo: Tokyo Opera City Gallery, 2004

Freedom From The Known. New York and Göttingen: P.S.1/Steidl, 2006. ISBN 3 86521 263 8

Wolfgang Tillmans. Los Angeles. New Haven and London: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2006. ISBN 0 300 12022 2

Sprengel Installation. Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 2007

Wako Book 4. Tokyo: Wako Works of Art, 2008. ISBN 978-4-902070-31-6

Wolfgang Tillmans: Interviews. Tokyo: Wako Works of Art, 2010

Abstract Pictures. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2011

FESPA Digital / FRUIT LOGISTICA. Artist book. Cologne: Walther König, 2012

2016/1986 EP (Fragile Records, 2016)

Device Control EP (Fragile Records, 2016)

"Source (Roman Flügel Remixes & Original)" (Fragile Records, 2018)

Despite having already exhibited in Hamburg, in 1993 Tillmans held his first exhibition at the Galerie Buchholz in Cologne. In 1995 his work was included at a show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Tillmans' work has since been shown in large solo exhibitions at European museums, for example the Kunsthalle Zürich (1995), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid (1998), Museum Ludwig in Cologne (2001), Castello di Rivoli in Italy (2002), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2002), the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2008), and Serpentine Gallery in London (2010).

Tate Britain's extensive mid-career retrospective of Tillmans' work was shown in 2003. In 2006, MoMA PS1 presented Tillmans' first exhibition for an American museum. That same year, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles mounted Tillman's first major retrospective in the US, which travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. His first South American exhibition was shown at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art in 2012. In 2005 and in 2009, Tillmans was included in the Venice Biennale.

In 2004, the Portikus, Frankfurt, invited Tillmans to curate "Inventory / Scott King / Donald Urquhart", an exhibition presenting three artistic positions from London. The Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, entrusted Tillmans with the role of a guest curator in 2008, inviting him to present a personal choice of works by Isa Genzken, Roberto Matta, and Ellsworth Kelly from the museum's collection.

1995: Kunsthalle Zürich (exh. cat.)

1995: Portikus, Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (exh. cat.)

2001: Isa Genzken, Wolfgang Tillmans, Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany (exh. cat.)

2001: View from Above/Aufsicht, Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany

2002: Vue d'en Haut, Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Veduta dall'alto, Castle of Rivoli/Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli,

2003: Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, Netherlands

2003: if one thing matters, everything matters, Tate Britain, London (exh. cat.)

2003: View From Above, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebœk, Denmark (exh. cat.)

2004: Wolfgang Tillmans, Regen Projects, Los Angeles

2006: Freedom From The Known, MoMA PS1, New York (exh. cat.); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, (2007) (exh. cat.); Pinakothek der Moderne (permanent collection), Munich

2007: Beugung, Kunstverein Munich, Munich

2008: Lighter, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin (exh. cat.); Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico

2012: Museo de Arte del Banco de la República, Bogotá

2013: New World, Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York

2015: Book for Architects, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

2017: Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017, Tate Modern, London, February-June 2017.

2018: Wolfgang Tillmans: Fragile Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, July-September 2018.

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Wolfgang Tillmans (born 16 August 1968) is a German photographer. His diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of his surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium's foundations. Tillmans was the first photographer - and also the first non-British person - to be awarded the Tate annual Turner Prize.

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Tom Phillips is an artist whose work is fuelled by several persistent preoccupations, expressed through an even larger number of formats. These include painting (both figurative and abstract), opera (composer, librettist, set designer), concrete poetry and ornamental forms of writing, sculpture and site-specific designs (mosaic, tapestry, wire frame objects). He has also taken on several para-artistic roles - critic, curator, committee chairman for the Royal Academy, translator - all of which he has folded back into his art.

Born in 1937, Phillips attended drawing classes and lectures on Renaissance iconography alongside his studies at Oxford. Back in the South London neighbourhood where he has lived and worked nearly all his life, Phillips was taught by Frank Auerbach at Camberwell School of Art.

Phillips's first one-man exhibition in London was in 1965 and he won a John Moores prize four years later. However, in the late 1960s he was possibly better known for his music activities (both classical and with Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra) including his own compositions, as performed by the pianist John Tilbury.

In the course of Phillips's teaching career, at Ipswich, Bath and Wolverhampton art schools, he introduced Brian Eno, his best student, to the ideas that helped Eno develop ambient and generative music.

In 1966 Phillips resolved to dedicate himself to making art out of the first secondhand book he could find for threepence on Peckham Rye. Thus began A Humument, longest of Phillips's extended serial projects. A Humument is a radical 'treatment' of a forgotten Victorian novel by means of collage, cut-up, ornament and other techniques. On the fiftieth anniversary of its inception, in 2016, Phillips completed the sixth and final version of this work - each version with successively more pages reworked, until his original work had itself been completely transformed.

A Humument has become a touchstone of Phillips's oeuvre. The Royal Academy's 2015 Summer Exhibition dedicated a full room to it. Quotations from A Humument populate his other paintings, works of art criticism, and some of the songs he wrote when returning to music in the 1990s. Irma, a central character and the muse of A Humument, gave her name to an opera - conceived in 1969, recorded in 1977 and 1988, with its full score published in 2015. A new production directed by Netia Jones premièred at the South London Gallery in September 2017.

This variety of output is another Phillips hallmark. 20 sites n years, another series, consists of photographs taken during the same week, at the same time, since 1973, in 20 locations that describe a circle (about half a mile in radius) around his studio. Jake Auerbach's documentary film on this ongoing project was released in 2016.

Since the mid 1970s, Phillips has received many commissions for site-specific artworks and portraits, and these provide two further informal series that wind their way through his oeuvre. He has made tapestries for his old college in Oxford, sculpture for the Imperial War Museum, street mosaics for his native Peckham, and ornament and memorials for sacred spaces, including both Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.

Phillips's portrait subjects have included Samuel Beckett as well as friends such as Iris Murdoch, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Richard Morphet (keeper of the Tate modern collection until 1998) and the Monty Python team.

In 1989, he became only the second artist to have a retrospective of his portraits at the National Portrait Gallery. Fifteen years later, at the same gallery, he curated an exhibition of his large collection of postcard photographic portraits from the early part of the last century, under the title We Are The People. This passion for collecting, classifying and curating also found expression in his book The Postcard Century, which portrays the history of each year from 1900-1999 through a collage of these vernacular images. Work on the postcard collection continues, most recently through the publication of a series of six themed selections, each curated by Phillips.

Alongside his postcard interests, Phillips has been a keen student and collector of African art since his first visit to the continent in 1973. He curated a major exhibition, Africa: The Art of a Continent, for the Royal Academy and Guggenheim Museum in 1995. More recently he has published a book Ashanti Weights, about his personal collection of miniature Ghanaian gold sculptures.

Phillips received the Frances Williams Memorial Prize in 1983 for his illustration and new translation of Dante's Inferno. He also made a TV version of the Inferno with Peter Greenaway which won them jointly as directors the Italia prize.

Elected to the Royal Academy in 1984, Phillips went on to chair the Academy's Library and its Exhibition Committee from 1995 to 2007. He also served as a trustee for the National Portrait Gallery and British Museum. Phillips was made a Commander of the British Empire for services to the Arts in the 2002 Birthday Honours list. In 2005, he was appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art, at the University of Oxford, and between 2005 and 2011 he was invited as an annual Director's Visitor to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Now retired from committee work and portraiture, Phillips remains an occasional broadcaster and public speaker of wit and vision.

His works are now taken care of in specialist collections across the world, including the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry (Miami), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the Ashmolean Museum, with an archive of his papers in the Bodleian Library (both Oxford).

Tom Phillips is represented in London and New York by Flowers Gallery.
David Jennings
For Tom Phillips's announcements and updates on current projects, please see the News and Studio Blog sections of this site.

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Tom Phillips is an artist whose work is fuelled by several persistent preoccupations, expressed through an even larger number of formats. These include painting (both figurative and abstract), opera (composer, librettist, set designer), concrete poetry and ornamental forms of writing, sculpture and site-specific designs (mosaic, tapestry, wire frame objects).

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http://www.motinternational.com/clunie-reid.html
Biography

Clunie Reid (born 1971) lives and works in London. She graduated with a BA in Painting from Wimbledon College of Art (1992) and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (1995).

Recent exhibitions include: In Pursuit of the Liquid, MOTINTERNATIONAL, London (2013); ICA Off-Site: A Journey Through London Subculture 1980s to Now, The Old Selfridge Hotel, London (2013); Open Heart Surgery, The Moving Museum, London (2013); Black Light, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2012); Clunie Reid - Hannah Perry, Arcadia_Missa, London(2012); Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2010) and Free, New Museum, New York (2010). In 2009, she was the John Jones Prize Winner at the Zoo Art Fair.

She is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Central Saint Martin's and is represented by MOTINTERNATIONAL, London.

Contemporary Art Society Members' visited Clunie Reid's studio in February 2011. She was featured in Contemporary Art Society's ART futures 2008 held at Bloomberg SPACE, London.

Statement

Clunie Reid employs a degraded, deskilled approach to analyse and comment upon commodity status and industrial standardisation across her practice. Found and staged images are subject to intense re-workings through an arbitrary combination of digital manipulation, collage and a diversity of printing processes; the visual information built and layered to achieve highly structured chaos.

Reid examines representations and relationships between the internal and external, image and text, perception and understanding, looking particularly at advertising imagery. A contemporary idea of beauty is challenged and dismantled by the artist's use of cheap materials and direct interventions on the surface of works with black markers, acts of apparent sabotage that demystify the highly-constructed visuals of the mass media. For their presentation, images are printed directly on aluminium without being laminated, gaffer-taped to the wall and arranged to make a non-hierarchical, non-linear arrangement which can be scanned and negotiated in no particular order.

Links
www.motinternational.com/clunie-reid.html www.focalpoint.org.uk/archive/exhibitions/6/www.saatchigallery.com/artists/clunie_reid.htm

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http://www.motinternational.com/clunie-reid.html Biography Clunie Reid (born 1971) lives and works in London. She graduated with a BA in Painting from Wimbledon College of Art (1992) and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (1995).

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This weekend marks the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. The Nirvana front-man took his own life on 5 April 1994 pulling the trigger of a gun fastened to his mouth. The fired bullet triggered the end of one of the most iconic name s in music history, but his suicide note sparked off an array of speculation to the mental health Cobain had lived with during his 27 years.

kurt cobain's suicide note

Have a look at his note pictured above, one of the first things you may notice is the cluttering mess the message is relayed. Such incoherent patterns reflect Kurt's battle with and traces of disorder.

Bipolar can be broken down into two symptoms, depression and mania - the cocktail of which falls under an umbrella titled a 'mixed episode'. According to a phcysocolist who analysed Kurt's letter a concoction of Bipolar and ADHD can lead to writing such mixed up emotions on paper. The expert also picked up on sentences "Frances and Courtney, I'll be at your altar", which makes little sense, the repeated sentiments (I love You. I LOVE You) written in broken capital locks - the first believed to be directed to Courtney Love, the second to his daughter Frances.

Kurt's battle with depression started at a tender age, he would frequently cut himself out from the world by hiding away in a bedroom cupboard. His feelings about death were clear to anyone who read his journals, the message "I hate myself and want to die" giving out strong clues to what would occur before his twenty eighth birthday. Most people relate to his diary entries to someone living with a severe form of mental illness.

Another significant incident which may relate to Kurt's illness stems from an experience he encountered during his adolescent years. Cobain was wandering around his school one day when he was confronted by a body belonging to a fellow student who had just hung himself. The horrific discovery must have had a lasting effect on the teenager who would later joke about having "suicide genes" himself with one of his friends.

Mental health can be traced through Cobain's family, his great-uncle Burle shot himself in the stomach; his grand-father was submitted to a mental hospital after trying to take his own life on two separate occasions; during his stay he ripped open his stab wounds.

We, alongside numerous others, have stated Kurt was diagnosed with a mental illness, although it has never been made clear if he was 'officially diagnosed 'with the condition. The explanation of such a confused statement lies with Bev Cobain, his cousin. Bev is a registered nurse who made the following statement in a past interview, "Kurt was diagnosed at a young age with Attention Deficit Disorder [ADD], then later with bipolar disorder [also known as manic-depression]. Bipolar illness has the same characteristics as major clinical depression, but with mood swings, which present as rage, euphoria, high energy, irritability, distractibility, overconfidence, and other symptoms. As Kurt undoubtedly knew, bipolar illness can be very difficult to manage, and the correct diagnosis is crucial. Unfortunately for Kurt, compliance with the appropriate treatment is also a critical factor."

Of course, traces of Kurt's mania can be detected in his lyrics which, according to bipolar expert Dr Kay Redfield is a common passage of escapism. Quoting from 'From Napoleon to Kurt Cobain: Cultural Legends" Kay said, ' As music is a language communicating moods, the emotional intensity of bipolar disorder apparently can add depth to musical expression."

The singer also showed signs of depression in his lifestyle, its common knowledge the level of drugs he took, his lazy attitude polarised by his ecstatic bursts of energy, his bursts of uncontrollable temper and his prolific writing - all symptoms of somebody going through depression.
Kurt Cobain - February 20, 1967 - April 5, 1994.

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Kurt Cobain and his battle with Mental Illness

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This weekend marks the twentieth anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. The Nirvana front-man took his own life on 5 April 1994 pulling the trigger of a gun fastened to his mouth.

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Shirin Neshat ( Persian: شیرین نشاط‎; born 1957) is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects.

Since Iran has undermined basic human rights, particularly since the Islamic Revolution she has said that she has "gravitated toward making art that is concerned with tyranny, dictatorship, oppression and political injustice. Although I don't consider myself an activist, I believe my art - regardless of its nature - is an expression of protest, a cry for humanity."

Neshat has been recognized countless times for her work, from winning the International Award of the XLVIII Venice Biennale in 1999, to winning the Silver Lion for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival in 2009, to being named Artist of the Decade by Huffington Post critic G. Roger Denson.

Neshat is the fourth of five children of wealthy parents, brought up in the religious town of Qazvin in north-western Iran under a "very warm, supportive Muslim family environment", where she learned traditional religious values through her maternal grandparents. Neshat's father was a physician and her mother a homemaker. Neshat said that her father "fantasized about the west, romanticized the west, and slowly rejected all of his own values; both her parents did. What happened, I think, was that their identity slowly dissolved, they exchanged it for comfort. It served their class".

As a part of Neshat's "Westernization" she was enrolled in a Catholic boarding school in Tehran. Through her father's acceptance of Western ideologies came an acceptance of a form of western feminism. Neshat's father encouraged each of his daughters to "be an individual, to take risks, to learn, to see the world", and he sent his daughters as well as his sons to college to receive their higher education.

In 1975, Neshat left Iran to study art at UC Berkeley and completed her BA, MA and MFA. Neshat graduated from UC Berkeley in 1983, where she soon moved to New York City, it was there she quickly realized that making art wasn't going to be her profession at the time. After meeting her future husband, who ran the Storefront for Art and Architecture, an alternative space in Manhattan, she dedicated 10 years of her life to working with him at the storefront, which was where her true education began.

During this time, she did not make any serious attempts at creating art, and the few attempts were subsequently destroyed. She was very intimidated by the New York art scene and believed the art she was making was not substantial enough. She states "those ten years I made practically no art, and the art I did make I was dissatisfied with and eventually destroyed."

In 1990, she returned to Iran, one year after Khomeini's death. "It was probably one of the most shocking experiences that I have ever had. The difference between what I had remembered from the Iranian culture and what I was witnessing was enormous. The change was both frightening and exciting; I had never been in a country that was so ideologically based. Most noticeable, of course, was the change in people's physical appearance and public behavior."

As the Storefront ran like a cultural laboratory, she was exposed to creators like artists, architects, and philosophers; she asserts Storefront eventually helped kickstart her passion for art again, making her think deeply about herself and what she wanted to create as an artist. In 1993 Neshat began seriously to make art again, starting with photography.

Neshat's earliest works were photographs, such as the Unveiling (1993) and Women of Allah (1993-97) series, which explore notions of femininity in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy in her home country. As a way of coping with the discrepancy between the culture that she was experiencing and that of the pre-revolution Iran in which she was raised, she began her first mature body of work, the Women of Allah series, portraits of women entirely overlaid by Persian calligraphy.

Her work refers to the social, cultural and religious codes of Muslim societies and the complexity of certain oppositions, such as man and woman. Neshat often emphasizes this theme showing two or more coordinated films concurrently, creating stark visual contrasts through motifs such as light and dark, black and white, male and female. Neshat has also made more traditional narrative short films, such as Zarin.

The work of Neshat addresses the social, political and psychological dimensions of women's experience in contemporary Islamic societies. Although Neshat actively resists stereotypical representations of Islam, her artistic objectives are not explicitly polemical. Rather, her work recognizes the complex intellectual and religious forces shaping the identity of Muslim women throughout the world. Using Persian poetry and calligraphy she examined concepts such as martyrdom, the space of exile, the issues of identity and femininity.

In 2001-02, Neshat collaborated with singer Sussan Deyhim and created Logic of the Birds, which was produced by curator and art historian RoseLee Goldberg. The full length multimedia production premiered at the Lincoln Center Summer Festival in 2002 and toured to the Walker Art Institute in Minneapolis and to Artangel in London. In this collaboration, as well as her other projects that incorporate music, Neshat uses sound to help create an emotionally evocative and beautiful piece that will resonate with viewers of both Eastern and Western cultures. In an interview with magazine in 2000, Neshat revealed: "Music becomes the soul, the personal, the intuitive, and neutralizes the sociopolitical aspects of the work. This combination of image and music is meant to create an experience that moves the audience."

Neshat was profiled in The New Yorker magazine on October 22, 2007.

When Neshat first came to use film, she was influenced by the work of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. She directed several videos, among them Anchorage (1996) and, projected on two opposing walls: Shadow under the Web (1997), Turbulent (1998), Rapture (1999) and Soliloquy (1999). Neshat's recognition became more international in 1999, when she won the International Award of the XLVIII Venice Biennale with Turbulent and Rapture, a project involving almost 250 extras and produced by the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont which met with critical and public success after its worldwide avant-première at the Art Institute of Chicago in May 1999. With Rapture, Neshat tried for the first time to make pure photography with the intent of creating an aesthetic, poetic, and emotional shock. Games of Desire, a video and still-photography piece, was displayed between September 3 and October 3 at the Gladstone Gallery in Brussels before moving in November to the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont in Paris. The film, which is based in Laos, centers on a small group of elderly people who sing folk songs with sexual lyrics - a practice which had been nearing obsolescence.

In 2009 she won the Silver Lion for best director at the 66th Venice Film Festival for her directorial debut Women Without Men, based on Shahrnush Parsipur's novel of the same name. She said about the movie: "This has been a labour of love for six years. ... This film speaks to the world and to my country." The film examines the 1953 British-American backed coup, which supplanted Iran's democratically elected government with a monarchy.

In July 2009 Neshat took part in a three-day hunger strike at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in protest of the 2009 Iranian presidential election.

Since her first solo exhibition, at Franklin Furnace in New York in 1993, Neshat has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2002); Castello di Rivoli, Turin; Dallas Museum of Art (2000); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, León; and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2005). In 2008, her solo exhibition "Women Without Men" opened at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark, and traveled to the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, and to the Kulturhuset, Stockholm. She was included in Prospect.1, the 2008 New Orleans Biennial, documenta XI, the 2000 Whitney Biennial, and the 1999 Venice Biennale. In 2012 Shirin Neshat had a Solo Exhibition in Singapore, Game of Desire at Art Plural Gallery. Also in 2012, Shirin Neshat's photo, Speechless was purchased and exhibited by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. A major retrospective of Neshat's work, organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts, was scheduled to open in 2013.

Since 2000 Neshat has also participated in film festivals, including the Telluride Film Festival (2000), Chicago International Film Festival (2001), San Francisco International Film Festival (2001), Locarno International Film Festival (2002), Tribeca Film Festival (2003), Sundance Film Festival (2003), and Cannes Film Festival (2008).

In 2013 she was a member of the jury at the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival.

Neshat was artist in residence at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2000) and at MASS MoCA (2001). In 2004 she was awarded an honorary professorship at the Universität der Künste, Berlin. In 2006 she was awarded The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, one of the richest prizes in the arts, given annually to "a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind's enjoyment and understanding of life."

In 2010 Neshat was named Artist of the Decade by Huffington Post critic G. Roger Denson, for "the degree to which world events have more than met the artist in making her art chronically relevant to an increasingly global culture," for reflecting "the ideological war being waged between Islam and the secular world over matters of gender, religion, and democracy," and because "the impact of her work far transcends the realms of art in reflecting the most vital and far-reaching struggle to assert human rights."

In 2015 Neshat was selected and photographed by Annie Leibovitz as part of the 43rd Pirelli Calendar which celebrated some of the world's most inspiring women.

Cindy Sherman was the first person to buy Neshat's work, at Annina Nosei Gallery in 1995.

At the 2017 Salzburg Festival Neshat directed Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida, with Riccardo Muti as conductor and Anna Netrebko singing the main character. Asked by the festival organizers about the particular challenge for an Iranian woman to stage a play that deals with the threats of political obedience and religion to private life and love, Neshat said "Sometimes the boundaries between Aida and myself are blurred."

Turbulent, 1998. Two channel video/audio installation.

Rapture, 1999. Two channel video/audio installation.

Soliloquy, 1999. Color video/audio installation with artist as the protagonist.

Fervor, 2000. Two channel video/audio installation.

Passage, 2001. Single channel video/audio installation.

Logic of the Birds, 2002. Multi-media performance.

Tooba, 2002. Two channel video/audio installation based on Shahrnush Parsipur's novel Women Without Men.

Mahdokht, 2004. Three channel video/audio installation.

Zarin, 2005. Single channel video/audio installation.

Munis, 2008. Color video/audio installation based on Shahrnush Parsipur's novel Women Without Men.

Faezeh, 2008. Color video/audio installation based on Shahrnush Parsipur's novel Women Without Men.

Possession, 2009. Black & white video/audio installation.

Women Without Men, 2009. Feature film based on Shahrnush Parsipur's novel Women Without Men.

Illusions & Mirrors, 2013. Film commissioned by Dior and featuring Natalie Portman.

Looking for Oum Kulthum, 2017, film.

First International Prize at the Venice Biennale (1999)

Grand Prix at the Kwangju Biennale (2000)

Visual Art Award from the Edinburgh International Film Festival (2000)

Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography in New York (2002)

ZeroOne Award from the Universität der Künste Berlin (2003)

Hiroshima Freedom Prize from the Hiroshima City Museum of Art (2005)

Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize in New York (2006)

Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship in New York (2008)

Cultural Achievement Award, Asia Society in New York (2008)

Cinema for Peace Special Award, Hessischer Filmpreis, Germany (2009)

Crystal Award, World Economy Forum, Davos, Switzerland (2014)

USA Rockefeller Fellow, United States Artists, New York (2016)

Expressing the inexpressible [videorecording DVD]: Shirin Neshat. 2004, 42 minutes, Color. Princeton, NJ: Films for the Humanities & Sciences. Originally produced by Westdeutscher Rundfunk in 2000.

Women Without Men (2009 film)

Mohammed Afkhami, Sussan Babaie, Venetia Porter, Natasha Morris. "Honar: The Afkhami Collection of Modern and Contemporary Iranian Art." Phaidon Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-7148-7352-7.

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Shirin Neshat ( Persian: شیرین نشاط‎; born 1957) is an Iranian visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for her work in film, video and photography. Her artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects.

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John Stezaker - Artist's Profile - The Saatchi Gallery

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Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (Dutch: [ˈpi:tərkɔrˈneːlɪsˈmɔndrijaːn]), after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian (, also , Dutch: painter and [pitˈmɔndrijɑn]; 7 March 1872 - 1 February 1944), was a Dutch art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He is known for being one of the pioneers of 20th-century abstract art, as he changed his artistic direction from figurative painting to an increasingly abstract style, until he reached a point where his artistic vocabulary was reduced to simple geometric elements.

Mondrian's art was highly utopian and was concerned with a search for universal values and aesthetics. He proclaimed in 1914: "Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality. To approach the spiritual in art, one will make as little use as possible of reality, because reality is opposed to the spiritual. We find ourselves in the presence of an abstract art. Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man."

He was a contributor to the art movement and group, which he co-founded with Theo van Doesburg. He evolved a non-representational form which he termed Neoplasticism. This was the new 'pure plastic art' which he believed was necessary in order to create 'universal beauty'. To express this, Mondrian eventually decided to limit his formal vocabulary to the three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow), the three primary values (black, white, and gray), and the two primary directions (horizontal and vertical). Mondrian's arrival in Paris from the Netherlands in 1911 marked the beginning of a period of profound change. He encountered experiments in Cubism and with the intent of integrating himself within the Parisian avant-garde removed an 'a' from the Dutch spelling of his name (Mondriaan).

Mondrian's work had an enormous influence on 20th-century art, influencing not only the course of abstract painting and numerous major styles and art movements (e.g. Color Field painting, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism), but also fields outside the domain of painting, such as design, architecture and fashion. Design historian Stephen Bayley said: "Mondrian has come to mean Modernism. His name and his work sum up the High Modernist ideal. I don't like the word 'iconic', so let's say that he's become totemic - a totem for everything Modernism set out to be."

Mondrian's birthplace in Amersfoort, Netherlands, now The Mondriaan House, a museum.

Mondrian was born in Amersfoort, province of Utrecht in the Netherlands, the second of his parents' children. He was descended from Christian Dirkzoon Monderyan who lived in The Hague as early as 1670. The family moved to Winterswijk when his father, Pieter Cornelius Mondriaan, was appointed head teacher at a local primary school. Mondrian was introduced to art from an early age. His father was a qualified drawing teacher, and, with his uncle, Frits Mondriaan (a pupil of Willem Maris of the Hague School of artists), the younger Piet often painted and drew along the river Gein.

After a strict Protestant upbringing, in 1892, Mondrian entered the Academy for Fine Art in Amsterdam. He was already qualified as a teacher. He began his career as a teacher in primary education, but he also practiced painting. Most of his work from this period is naturalistic or Impressionistic, consisting largely of landscapes. These pastoral images of his native country depict windmills, fields, and rivers, initially in the Dutch Impressionist manner of the Hague School and then in a variety of styles and techniques that attest to his search for a personal style. These paintings are representational, and they illustrate the influence that various artistic movements had on Mondrian, including pointillism and the vivid colors of Fauvism. In 1893 he had his first exhibition.

Willow Grove: Impression of Light and Shadow, c. 1905, oil on canvas, 35 × 45 cm, Dallas Museum of Art

Piet Mondrian, Evening; Red Tree (Avond; De rode boom), 1908-1910, oil on canvas, 70 × 99 cm, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag

On display in the Kunstmuseum Den Haag are a number of paintings from this period, including such Post-Impressionist works as The Red Mill and Trees in Moonrise. Another painting, Evening ( Avond) (1908), depicting a tree in a field at dusk, even augurs future developments by using a palette consisting almost entirely of red, yellow, and blue. Although Avond is only limitedly abstract, it is the earliest Mondrian painting to emphasize primary colors.

Mondrian's earliest paintings showing a degree of abstraction are a series of canvases from 1905 to 1908 that depict dim scenes of indistinct trees and houses reflected in still water. Although the result leads the viewer to begin focusing on the forms over the content, these paintings are still firmly rooted in nature, and it is only the knowledge of Mondrian's later achievements that leads one to search in these works for the roots of his future abstraction.

Mondrian's art was intimately related to his spiritual and philosophical studies. In 1908, he became interested in the theosophical movement launched by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky in the late 19th century, and in 1909 he joined the Dutch branch of the Theosophical Society. The work of Blavatsky and a parallel spiritual movement, Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy, significantly affected the further development of his aesthetic. Blavatsky believed that it was possible to attain a more profound knowledge of nature than that provided by empirical means, and much of Mondrian's work for the rest of his life was inspired by his search for that spiritual knowledge. In 1918, he wrote "I got everything from the Secret Doctrine", referring to a book written by Blavatsky. In 1921, in a letter to Steiner, Mondrian argued that his neoplasticism was "the art of the foreseeable future for all true Anthroposophists and Theosophists". He remained a committed Theosophist in subsequent years, although he also believed that his own artistic current, neoplasticism, would eventually become part of a larger, ecumenical spirituality.

Mondrian and his later work were deeply influenced by the 1911 Moderne Kunstkring exhibition of Cubism in Amsterdam. His search for simplification is shown in two versions of Still Life with Ginger Pot ( Stilleven met Gemberpot). The 1911 version, is Cubist; in the 1912 version, the objects are reduced to a round shape with triangles and rectangles.

Gray Tree, 1911, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, an early experimentation with Cubism[11]

In 1911, Mondrian moved to Paris and changed his name, dropping an "a" from "Mondriaan", to emphasize his departure from the Netherlands, and his integration within the Parisian avant-garde. While in Paris, the influence of the Cubist style of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque appeared almost immediately in Mondrian's work. Paintings such as The Sea (1912) and his various studies of trees from that year still contain a measure of representation, but, increasingly, they are dominated by geometric shapes and interlocking planes. While Mondrian was eager to absorb the Cubist influence into his work, it seems clear that he saw Cubism as a "port of call" on his artistic journey, rather than as a destination. Piet Mondrian's Cubist period lasted from 1912 to 1917.

Unlike the Cubists, Mondrian still attempted to reconcile his painting with his spiritual pursuits, and in 1913 he began to fuse his art and his theosophical studies into a theory that signaled his final break from representational painting. While Mondrian was visiting the Netherlands in 1914, World War I began, forcing him to remain there for the duration of the conflict. During this period, he stayed at the Laren artists' colony, where he met Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg, who were both undergoing their own personal journeys toward abstraction. Van der Leck's use of only primary colors in his art greatly influenced Mondrian. After a meeting with Van der Leck in 1916, Mondrian wrote, "My technique which was more or less Cubist, and therefore more or less pictorial, came under the influence of his precise method." With Van Doesburg, Mondrian founded ( The Style), a journal of the De Stijl Group, in which he first published essays defining his theory, which he called neoplasticism.

Mondrian published " De Nieuwe Beelding in de schilderkunst" ("The New Visualisation in Painting"), in twelve installments during 1917 and 1918. This was his first major attempt to express his artistic theory in writing. Mondrian's best and most-often quoted expression of this theory, however, comes from a letter he wrote to H. P. Bremmer in 1914:

I construct lines and color combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or, that which I see) inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state so that an urge comes about to make something, but I want to come as close as possible to the truth and abstract everything from that, until I reach the foundation (still just an external foundation!) of things... I believe it is possible that, through horizontal and vertical lines constructed with awareness, but not with calculation, led by high intuition, and brought to harmony and rhythm, these basic forms of beauty, supplemented if necessary by other direct lines or curves, can become a work of art, as strong as it is true.

Over the next two decades, Mondrian methodically developed his signature style embracing the Classical, Platonic, Euclidean worldview where he simply focused on his, now iconic, horizontal and vertical black lines forming squares and rectangles filled with primary hues.

Tableau I, 1921, Kunstmuseum Den Haag

Piet Mondrian and Pétro (Nelly) van Doesburg in Mondrian's Paris studio, 1923

When World War I ended in 1918, Mondrian returned to France, where he would remain until 1938. Immersed in post-war Paris culture of artistic innovation, he flourished and fully embraced the art of pure abstraction for the rest of his life. Mondrian began producing grid-based paintings in late 1919, and in 1920, the style for which he came to be renowned began to appear.

Mondrian believed that "pure abstract art becomes completely emancipated, free of naturalistic appearances. It is no longer natural harmony but creates equivalent relationships. The realization of equivalent relationships is of the highest importance for life.

In the early paintings of this style, the lines delineating the rectangular forms are relatively thin, and they are gray, not black. The lines also tend to fade as they approach the edge of the painting, rather than stopping abruptly. The forms themselves, smaller and more numerous than in later paintings, are filled with primary colors, black, or gray, and nearly all of them are colored; only a few are left white.

During late 1920 and 1921, Mondrian's paintings arrive at what is to casual observers their definitive and mature form. Thick black lines now separate the forms, which are larger and fewer in number, and more of the forms are left white. This was not the culmination of his artistic evolution, however. Although the refinements became subtler, Mondrian's work continued to evolve during his years in Paris.

In the 1921 paintings, many, though not all, of the black lines stop short at a seemingly arbitrary distance from the edge of the canvas, although the divisions between the rectangular forms remain intact. Here, too, the rectangular forms remain mostly colored. As the years passed and Mondrian's work evolved further, he began extending all of the lines to the edges of the canvas, and he began to use fewer and fewer colored forms, favoring white instead.

These tendencies are particularly obvious in the "lozenge" works that Mondrian began producing with regularity in the mid-1920s. The "lozenge" paintings are square canvases tilted 45 degrees, so that they have a diamond shape. Typical of these is Schilderij No. 1: Lozenge With Two Lines and Blue (1926). One of the most minimal of Mondrian's canvases, this painting consists only of two black, perpendicular lines and a small blue triangular form. The lines extend all the way to the edges of the canvas, almost giving the impression that the painting is a fragment of a larger work.

Although one's view of the painting is hampered by the glass protecting it, and by the toll that age and handling have obviously taken on the canvas, a close examination of this painting begins to reveal something of the artist's method. The painting is not composed of perfectly flat planes of color, as one might expect. Subtle brush strokes are evident throughout. The artist appears to have used different techniques for the various elements. The black lines are the flattest elements, with the least depth. The colored forms have the most obvious brush strokes, all running in one direction. Most interesting, however, are the white forms, which clearly have been painted in layers, using brush strokes running in different directions. This generates a greater sense of depth in the white forms so that they appear to overwhelm the lines and the colors, which indeed they were doing, as Mondrian's paintings of this period came to be increasingly dominated by white space.

In 1926, Katherine Dreier, co-founder of New York City's Society of Independent Artists (along with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray), visited Piet Mondrian's studio in Paris and acquired one of his diamond compositions, Painting I. This was then shown during an exhibition organized by the Society of Independent Artists in the Brooklyn Museum--the first major exhibition of modern art in America since the Armory Show. She stated in the catalog that "Holland has produced three great painters who, though a logical expression of their own country, rose above it through the vigor of their personality - the first was Rembrandt, the second was Van Gogh, and the third is Mondrian."

As the years progressed, lines began to take precedence over forms in Mondrian's paintings. In the 1930s, he began to use thinner lines and double lines more frequently, punctuated with a few small colored forms, if any at all. Double lines particularly excited Mondrian, for he believed they offered his paintings a new dynamism which he was eager to explore. The introduction of the double line in his work was influenced by the work of his friend and contemporary Marlow Moss.[page needed ]

From 1934 to 1935, three of Mondrian's paintings were exhibited as part of the "Abstract and Concrete" exhibitions in the UK at Oxford, London, and Liverpool.

Composition No. 10 (1939-1942), oil on canvas, private collection. Fellow De Stijl artist Theo van Doesburg suggested a link between non-representational works of art and ideals of peace and spirituality.

In September 1938, Mondrian left Paris in the face of advancing fascism and moved to London. After the Netherlands was invaded and Paris fell in 1940, he left London for Manhattan in New York City, where he would remain until his death. Some of Mondrian's later works are difficult to place in terms of his artistic development because there were quite a few canvases that he began in Paris or London and only completed months or years later in Manhattan. The finished works from this later period are visually busy, with more lines than any of his work since the 1920s, placed in an overlapping arrangement that is almost cartographical in appearance. He spent many long hours painting on his own until his hands blistered, and he sometimes cried or made himself sick.[citation needed ]

Mondrian produced Lozenge Composition With Four Yellow Lines (1933), a simple painting that innovated thick, colored lines instead of black ones. After that one painting, this practice remained dormant in Mondrian's work until he arrived in Manhattan, at which time he began to embrace it with abandon. In some examples of this new direction, such as Composition (1938) / Place de la Concorde (1943), he appears to have taken unfinished black-line paintings from Paris and completed them in New York by adding short perpendicular lines of different colors, running between the longer black lines, or from a black line to the edge of the canvas. The newly colored areas are thick, almost bridging the gap between lines and forms, and it is startling to see color in a Mondrian painting that is unbounded by black. Other works mix long lines of red amidst the familiar black lines, creating a new sense of depth by the addition of a colored layer on top of the black one. His painting Composition No. 10, 1939-1942, characterized by primary colors, white ground and black grid lines clearly defined Mondrian's radical but classical approach to the rectangle.[citation needed ]

New York City (1942), Paris, Centre Pompidou.

On 23 September 1940 Mondrian left Europe for New York aboard the Cunard White Star Line ship RMS Samaria (1920), departing from Liverpool. The new canvases that Mondrian began in Manhattan are even more startling, and indicate the beginning of a new idiom that was cut short by the artist's death. New York City (1942) is a complex lattice of red, blue, and yellow lines, occasionally interlacing to create a greater sense of depth than his previous works. An unfinished 1941 version of this work, titled New York City I, uses strips of painted paper tape, which the artist could rearrange at will to experiment with different designs. In October 2022 it was revealed that the work, which was first displayed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1945, had been displayed upside down, since at least 1980, at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Germany, where it is now held. The gallery explained that it would continue to display it the wrong way up to avoid damaging it.

His painting Broadway Boogie-Woogie (1942-43) at the Museum of Modern Art was highly influential in the school of abstract geometric painting. The piece is made up of a number of shimmering squares of bright color that leap from the canvas, then appear to shimmer, drawing the viewer into those neon lights. In this painting and the unfinished Victory Boogie Woogie (1942-1944), Mondrian replaced former solid lines with lines created from small adjoining rectangles of color, created in part by using small pieces of paper tape in various colors. Larger unbounded rectangles of color punctuate the design, some with smaller concentric rectangles inside them. While Mondrian's works of the 1920s and 1930s tend to have an almost scientific austerity about them, these are bright, lively paintings, reflecting the upbeat music that inspired them and the city in which they were made.

In these final works, the forms have indeed usurped the role of the lines, opening another new door for Mondrian's development as an abstractionist. The Boogie-Woogie paintings were clearly more of a revolutionary change than an evolutionary one, representing the most profound development in Mondrian's work since his abandonment of representational art in 1913.

In 2008 the Dutch television program Andere Tijden found the only known movie footage with Mondrian. The discovery of the film footage was announced at the end of a two-year research program on the Victory Boogie Woogie. The research found that the painting was in very good condition and that Mondrian painted the composition in one session. It also was found that the composition was changed radically by Mondrian shortly before his death by using small pieces of colored tape.

When the 47-year-old Piet Mondrian left the Netherlands for unfettered Paris for the second and last time in 1919, he set about at once to make his studio a nurturing environment for paintings he had in mind that would increasingly express the principles of neoplasticism about which he had been writing for two years. To hide the studio's structural flaws quickly and inexpensively, he tacked up large rectangular placards, each in a single color or neutral hue. Smaller colored paper squares and rectangles, composed together, accented the walls. Then came an intense period of painting. Again he addressed the walls, repositioning the colored cutouts, adding to their number, altering the dynamics of color and space, producing new tensions and equilibrium. Before long, he had established a creative schedule in which a period of painting took turns with a period of experimentally regrouping the smaller papers on the walls, a process that directly fed the next period of painting. It was a pattern he followed for the rest of his life, through wartime moves from Paris to London's Hampstead in 1938 and 1940, across the Atlantic to Manhattan.

At the age of 71 in the fall of 1943, Mondrian moved into his second and final Manhattan studio at 15 East 59th Street, and set about to recreate the environment he had learned over the years was most congenial to his modest way of life and most stimulating to his art. He painted the high walls the same off-white he used on his easel and on the seats, tables and storage cases he designed and fashioned meticulously from discarded orange and apple-crates. He glossed the top of a white metal stool in the same brilliant primary red he applied to the cardboard sheath he made for the radio-phonograph that spilled forth his beloved jazz from well-traveled records. Visitors to this last studio seldom saw more than one or two new canvases, but found, often to their astonishment, that eight large compositions of colored bits of paper he had tacked and re-tacked to the walls in ever-changing relationships constituted together an environment that, paradoxically and simultaneously, was both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful. It was the best space, Mondrian said, that he had inhabited. He was there for only a few months, as he died in February 1944.

After his death, Mondrian's friend and sponsor in Manhattan, artist Harry Holtzman, and another painter friend, Fritz Glarner, carefully documented the studio on film and in still photographs before opening it to the public for a six-week exhibition. Before dismantling the studio, Holtzman (who was also Mondrian's heir) traced the wall compositions precisely, prepared exact portable facsimiles of the space each had occupied, and affixed to each the original surviving cut-out components. These portable Mondrian compositions have become known as "The Wall Works". Since Mondrian's death, they have been exhibited twice at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art (1983 and 1995-96), once in SoHo at the Carpenter + Hochman Gallery (1984), once each at the Galerie Tokoro in Tokyo, Japan (1993), the XXII Biennial of Sao Paulo (1994), the University of Michigan (1995), and - the first time shown in Europe - at the Akademie der Künste (Academy of The Arts), in Berlin (22 February - 22 April 2007). His work was also shown in a retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, which ran from August - September 1955.

Mondrian's flowers

While Mondrian's theories of abstraction have been his enduring legacy, he was also a painter of flowers. He began to paint flowers at the turn of the century, creating portraits of individual blooms that blended his strict artistic training and powers of observation to his spiritual and romantic yearnings. Mondrian continued to paint flowers in a secretive manner into the 1920's, claiming to friends that he did so for commercial reasons alone. The flower paintings were created under the taboo that was cast upon traditional genre and representational painting by an entire age swept up by the triumph of abstraction. Nevertheless, the Mondrian flowers contribute to a broader view of the life and work of Mondrian - a view that diverges sharply from the traditional reading of his artistic evolution.

Piet Mondrian died of pneumonia on 1 February 1944 and was interred at the Cypress Hills Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

On 3 February 1944 a memorial was held for Mondrian at the Universal Chapel on Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street in Manhattan. The service was attended by nearly 200 people including Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder and Robert Motherwell.

The Mondrian / Holtzman Trust functions as Mondrian's official estate, and "aims to promote awareness of Mondrian's artwork and to ensure the integrity of his work".

Mondrian was described by critic Robert Hughes, in his 1980 book The Shock of the New, as "one of the supreme artists of the 20th century." Likewise in his television documentaries of The Shock of the New, Hughes referred to Mondrian considered again as "one of the greatest artists of the 20th century (...) who was one of the last painters who believed that the conditions of human life could be changed by making pictures". Dutch art historian Carel Blotkamp, an authority on De Stijl, reaffirmed the same belief that he was "one of the great artists of the twentieth century".

In 2022 design historian Stephen Bayley wrote: "Mondrian has come to mean Modernism. His name and his work sum up the High Modernist ideal. I don't like the word 'iconic', so let's say that he's become totemic - a totem for everything Modernism set out to be."

On 14 November 2022, Mondrian's Composition No. II was sold at Sotheby's Auction for US $51 million, which beat a previous record of US $50.6 million for his work. Composition No. II features a 20-inch by 20-inch canvas with a large red square in the upper right corner, a small blue square in the bottom left corner, and a yellow block with all outlined by black.

In October 2020, Mondrian's heirs filed a lawsuit in a U.S. court against the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany, for the return of four paintings by Mondrian.

In December 2021, Mondrian's heirs sued the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the return of Mondrian's Composition with Blue (1928) which had been seized by the Nazis, and passed through the art dealers Karl Buchholz and Curt Valentin before being gifted to the museum by Albert E. Gallatin.

Mondrian dresses by Yves Saint Laurent shown with a Mondrian painting in 1966.

The National Museum of Serbia was the first museum to include one of Mondrian's paintings in its permanent exhibition.[43]

Along with Klee and Kandinsky, Mondrian was one of the main inspirations to the early pointillist musical aesthetic of serialist composer Pierre Boulez,[page needed ] although his interest in Mondrian was restricted to the works of 1914-15. By May 1949 Boulez said he was "suspicious of Mondrian", and by December 1951 expressed a dislike for his paintings (regarding them as "the most denuded of mystery that have ever been in the world"), and a strong preference for Klee.

In the 1930s, the French fashion designer Lola Prusac, who worked at that time for Hermès in Paris, designed a range of luggage and bags inspired by the latest works of Mondrian: inlays of red, blue, and yellow leather squares.[47]

Fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent's Fall 1965 Mondrian collection featured shift dresses in blocks of primary color with black bordering, inspired by Mondrian.[48] The collection proved so popular that it inspired a range of imitations that encompassed garments from coats to boots.

The 1970-1974 American television serial The Partridge Family featured a musical family who purchase an (already-old at the time) 1957 Chevrolet Superior Coach Series 6800 school bus for use as their tour bus, and then repaint it in a colored geometric pattern heavily inspired by Mondrian's grid-based paintings. The reason for this choice of pattern is never discussed in the TV series.

The La Vie Claire cycling team's bicycles and clothing designs were inspired by Mondrian's work throughout the 1980s. The French ski and bicycle equipment manufacturer Look, which also sponsored the team, used a Mondrian-inspired logo for a while. The style was revived in 2008 for a limited edition frame.[49]

1980s R&B group Force MDs created a music video for their hit "Love is a House", superimposing themselves performing inside of digitally drawn squares inspired by Composition II.[50]

Piet is an esoteric programming language named after Piet Mondrian in which programs look like abstract art.[51]

Mondrian is a software for interactive data visualization named after him.

Mondrian is a functional scripting language designed by Microsoft Research for the .NET platform.[52]

Mondrian is a web-based code review system written in Python and used within Google.

Mondrian is an open source OLAP (online analytical processing) server written in Java.

Mondrian is an extension of the Conformal Prediction machine learning framework.

An episode of the BBC TV drama Hustle entitled "Picture Perfect" is about the team attempting to create and sell a Mondrian forgery. To do so, they must steal a real Mondrian (Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black, 1921) from an art gallery.

In 2001-2003 British artist Keith Milow made a series of paintings based on the so-called Transatlantic Paintings (1935-1940) by Mondrian.[53]

The Mondrian is a 20-story high-rise in the Cityplace neighborhood of Oak Lawn, Dallas, Texas, US. Construction started on the structure in 2003 and the building was completed in 2005.

In 2008, Nike released a pair of Dunk Low SB shoes inspired by Mondrian's neo-plastic paintings.[54]

The front cover to Australian rock band Silverchair's fifth and final album Young Modern (2007) is a tribute to Piet Mondrian's Composition II in Red, Blue, and Yellow.

The cover art of American psychedelic pop indie rock band The Apples in Stereo's second album, Tone Soul Evolution (1997), was inspired by Piet Mondrian.

The mathematics book An Introduction to Sparse Stochastic Processes[55] by M. Unser and P. Tafti uses a representation of a stochastic process called the Mondrian process for its cover, which is named because of its resemblance to Piet Mondrian artworks.

The Hague City Council honored Mondrian by adorning walls of City Hall with reproductions of his works and describing it as "the largest Mondrian painting in the world."[56] The event celebrated the 100th year of the Stijl movement which Mondrian helped to found.[57]

The Jersey Surf Drum & Bugle Corps performed a show based on Piet Mondrian in their 2018 production titled [mondo mondrian].[58]

In collaboration with the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, Swatch created a watch called the "Red Shiny Line (SUOZ297)" which pays tribute to Mondrian's "New York City, 3".[59] This was followed in 2022 by the watch "RED, BLUE AND WHITE, BY PIET MONDRIAN (SUOZ344)" which celebrates the painting Composition in Red, Blue and White II as part of a collaboration between Swatch and Centre Pompidou.[60]

The building facades and design details of Chun Yeung Estate, a public housing estate in Fo Tan, Hong Kong, was inspired by geometric elements from Mondrian's work according to the Housing Department's architectural project team.[61]

In 2021, LH Games released a video game inspired by the works of Piet Mondrian entitled Mondrian Squares.[62]

In 2022, Tecno, in Partnership with Museum of Fine Arts, released a Special Edition of their Camon 19 Pro smartphone, incorporating his paintings into its design.[63]

From 6 June to 5 October 2014, the Tate Liverpool displayed the largest UK collection of Mondrian's works, in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of his death. Mondrian and his Studios included a life-size reconstruction of his Paris studio. Charles Darwent, in The Guardian, wrote: "With its black floor and white walls hung with moveable panels of red, yellow and blue, the studio at Rue du Départ was not just a place for making Mondrians. It was a Mondrian - and a generator of Mondrians." He has been described as "the world's greatest abstract geometrist".

Apollonio, Umbro (1970). Piet Mondrian, Milano: Fabri 1976. (in Italian)

Bax, Marty (2001). Complete Mondrian. Aldershot (Hampshire) and Burlington (Vermont): Lund Humphries. ISBN 0-85331-803-4 (cloth) ISBN 0-85331-822-0 (pbk).

Blotkamp, Carel (1994). Mondrian: The Art of Destruction. London: Reaction Books Ltd.

Boulez, Pierre; Cage, John (1993). Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (ed.). The Boulez-Cage Correspondence. Translated by Samuels, Robert. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40144-5.

Busignani, Alberto (1968). Mondrian: The Life and Work of the Artist, Illustrated by 80 Colour Plates. Translated by Beamish, Caroline. Thames & Hudson.

Cooper, Harry (1997). Dialectics of Painting: Mondrian's Diamond Series, 1918-44 (Thesis). Harvard.

Larousse and Co., Inc. (1976). Mondrian, Piet. In Dictionary of Painters (p. 285). New York: Larousse and Co., Inc.

Hajdu, István (1987). Piet Mondrian. Pantheon. Budapest: Corvina Kiadó. ISBN 963-13-2265-3. (in Hungarian)

Faerna, José María (ed.) (1997). Mondrian Great Modern Masters. New York: Cameo/Abrams. ISBN 0-8109-4687-4.

Gooding, Mel (2001). Abstract Art. Movements in Modern Art. London: Tate Publishing; Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 1-85437-302-1 (Tate); ISBN 0-521-80928-2 (Cambridge, cloth); ISBN 0-521-00631-7 (Cambridge, pbk).

Guerrand, Jean R. (1988). Souvenirs cousus sellier: un demi-siècle chez Hermès [Saddle stitched memories: half a century at Hermès]. Paris: Oliver Orban. ISBN 2-85565-377-0.

Hughes, Robert (1980). "Trouble in Utopia". The Shock of the New. British Broadcasting Corporation. ISBN 0-563-17780-2.

Introvigne, Massimo (2014). "From Mondrian to Charmion von Wiegand: Neoplasticism, Theosophy and Buddhism". In Noble, Judith; Shepherd, Dominic; Ansell, Robert (eds.). Black Mirror 0: Territory. Fulgur Esoterica.

Janssen, Hans (2008). Mondriaan in het Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. [The Hague]: Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. ISBN 978-90-400-8443-0

Locher, Hans (1994) Piet Mondrian: Colour, Structure, and Symbolism: An Essay. Bern: Verlag Gachnang & Springer. ISBN 978-3-906127-44-6

Mondrian, Piet (1986). The New Art - The New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian, edited by Harry Holtzman and Martin S. James. Documents of 20th-Century Art. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co. ISBN 0-8057-9957-5. Reprinted 1987, London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-60011-2. Reprinted 1993, New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80508-1.

Schapiro, Meyer (1995). Mondrian: On the Humanity of Abstract Painting. New York: George Braziller. ISBN 0-8076-1369-X (cloth) ISBN 0-8076-1370-3 (pbk).

Seuphor, Michel (1956). Piet Mondrian: Life and Work. New York: H. N. Abrams. p. 117.

Welsh, Robert P., Joop J. Joosten, and Henk Scheepmaker (1998). Piet Mondrian: Catalogue Raisonné, translated by Jacques Bosser. Blaricum: V+K Publishing/Inmerc.

Wiegand, Charmion (1943). "The Meaning of Mondrian". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 2 (8 (Autumn, 1943)). Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics: 62-70. doi:10.2307/425946. JSTOR 425946.

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Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (Dutch: [ˈpi:tərkɔrˈneːlɪsˈmɔndrijaːn]), after 1906 known as Piet Mondrian (, also , Dutch: painter and [pitˈmɔndrijɑn]; 7 March 1872 - 1 February 1944), was a Dutch art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.

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James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, has been charged with drug and gun offences just a week after leaving hospital for treatment for drug addiction.

Brown, 64, the man behind hits such as "Living in America" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", has been charged with possession of cannabis and unlawful use of a firearm. He surrendered voluntarily and was released on bond.

After being charged, he said he had smoked a small amount of cannabis for medicinal purposes.

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Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

"I have bad eyes," he told a newspaper in Augusta, Georgia. "It was just a little tiny bit. It wasn't even a misdemeanour." Brown, who served three years in prison for 1988 convictions on weapons and assault charges, said he keeps guns and doesn't plan to get rid of them.

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James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, has been charged with drug and gun offences just a week after leaving hospital for treatment for drug addiction. Brown, 64, the man behind hits such as "Living in America" and "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", has been charged with possession of cannabis and unlawful use of a firearm.

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Black Mirror season five's first episode is one of many in the Netflix series to focus on video games - but according to creator and writer Charlie Brooker, it's hardly the point of the story.

"Obviously I play a lot of games, and because they are fictional interactive worlds, we quite often draw on that," Brooker says of Striking Vipers, the new episode starring Anthony Mackie and Yahya Abdul-Mateem II as two old friends who make a sexual connection through a VR fighting game.

"I think it's interesting, because there's a game in the story but it's not about games, really. It's kind of more about porn, and relationships."

Friends Danny and Karl (Mackie and Abdul-Mateem) have lost touch a bit over the years, but a new version of Striking Vipers - the video game they obsessively played during the heyday of their friendship - seems like a great way to reconnect, especially given how immersive it is.

In the revamped game, no matter what character you're playing you feel every punch, kick and....kiss, the latter of which the pair discover, almost by accident, during their first bout. Eventually the pair are illicitly meeting up in the game constantly, having sex through their avatars while Danny's wife Theo (Nicole Beharie) worries that her other half may be having an affair.

Eventually Danny breaks things off to Karl's chagrin, later being tempted back, then attempting to find the real parameters of his and Karl's relationship by meeting up in person, sparking an IRL fight between them.

The story concludes with both Danny and Theo indulging in extra-marital moments on one day a year, Danny in the game with Karl and Theo in the real world, leaving an ambiguous note for how both sets of relationships will survive.

The inspiration behind Striking vipers

Charlie Brooker with co-showrunner Annabel Jones
"Striking Vipers came about through a couple of things," Brooker tells me when I ask how the idea for the episode was formulated.

"There was a convoluted idea I'd had about a team-building exercise in a workplace, where they make everyone stage a musical, in a sort of VR environment, where the roles are randomised.

"So you might be Olivia Newton-John, she might be John Travolta. But you don't know those are the roles you've been assigned. You don't know who's playing who, and they fall in love in the musical, and it's reflected in real life."

The other plank of the story, meanwhile, came from Brooker's long experience with computer games.

"I was having a conversation about video games and the amusing sex noises people make when they play Street Fighter-type games, and they sit there going eurgh, ahh, oorrrh!" Brooker said.

"And it sounds like a sort of sado-masochistic affair going on. Those two thoughts went 'doink!' And that's where Striking Vipers came from."

How was Striking Vipers filmed?

Striking Vipers was the first film of series five to be conceived, written and filmed, even before December 2018's special choose-your-own-adventure episode Bandersnatch, which was originally supposed to be part of the line-up before spinning off into its own release.

Shot in São Paolo, Brazil, the episode presented a number of challenges to Brooker, co-showrunner Annabel Jones and their production team, especially when it came to the all-important fighting game scenes (which starred Guardians of the Galaxy 's Pom Klementieff and Ludi Lin as Lance).

"Most of it is live-action, all the stunts are real, but with a few animations helping us through the transitions," Jones said.

"So that's a big ask, as is trying to make the aesthetic evoke classic video games while still giving it a contemporary feel.

"It's quite difficult landing, that - you want it to feel real, because for these characters it is very real when they're in that world. Hence for them their confusion and conflict."

"There's a fighting sequence in it that had to feel like it had come out of something like Tekken," Brooker said. "Where it was like the real-life incarnation."

"It's interesting that I haven't seen many of those movies. They made a Street Fighter movie, didn't they, and they made Mortal Combat, the movie. And I don't think they're regarded as cinematic classics. I saw Mortal Combat the movie on a ferry once, during choppy seas, which was not a pleasant experience.

"I don't know if they gave people in those hyper-real abilities. It's the closest we've come to a superhero sequence, in a way. It was a fun challenge, but it was very technically demanding."

The casting

Speaking of superheroes, one of the biggest draws to the episode will be the casting of Avengers star Anthony Mackie (aka the Falcon) in the lead role, alongside Aquaman baddie Abdul-Mateem - though apparently, the caped crossover was a coincidence.

"One Marvel and one DC, so it's quite a crossover," Brooker said. "It was a happy accident. Quite weird, that, really."

"I know this sounds disingenuous, but you don't really think about what other roles the actors have done," Jones said. "Because you're only thinking about whether they feel right for your film and that character.

"And often, you're having a conversation with the actor about how they're responding to the material and whether you feel as if they're understanding the character and the world. And whether you're both trying to make the same film.

"So it's often about those conversations, and everything else...well, you can't think about everything else. Because you're not really interested in it. By default we sort of end up with two superhero characters, absolutely not by design. We didn't even realise!"

"Then again, I suppose you could hurl a rock and you'll hit somebody in the Marvel extended universe," Brooker mused.

"But you'll have to throw the rock a long way, probably across the sea. Which probably makes YOU a superhero..."

Does Striking Vipers crossover with other Black Mirror episodes?

Fans will be quick to notice that the VR gaming system used in Striking Vipers is almost identical to one shown off in an earlier episode, season four's sci-fi themed USS Callister, right down to the "exit game" voice command used to leave it.

"But they feel like very different films, don't they?" Jones said. "Callister compared to this - and that's not really about games either."

"No, it's tyranny, power, sci-fi and fandom [in USS Callister]" Brooker agreed. "Really, the video game worlds are just a useful backdrop."

Other game-themed episodes like Playtest and Bandernsatch also seem to have a link to the new film - though according to Brooker and Jones they feel Striking Vipers is closer to San Junipero (pictured), another episode about a same-sex relationship in a virtual world.

"Certainly there are parallels with San Junipero, so if you were going to pick any of them you'd probably make it a sister city to that. But it's not, like, directly related to it," Brooker said, while noting that another classic video game had inspired the earlier love story in a very different way.

"In San Junipero I was thinking of Grand Theft Auto Vice City, like a sandbox world set in a sort of heightened version of the 80s," he said, "in which there are no rules and you can sort of go off and do whatever you like.

"So in terms of inspiration there's probably always going to be things to draw on."

"But San Junipero, most of San Junipero took place within that VR world," Jones added. "And that felt like the real world.

"And it was a story about two old people coming back and re-living their youth, so it did feel genuinely like the 1980s. And they found they were able to have a romance because the prejudices of those times had disappeared.

"Whereas in Striking Vipers, we're very rarely in the VR world. That's just a facilitator. And the real conflict and real relationships are sort of taking place outside of that in the real world."

And sadly, the real world is a game that's a little harder to just exit.
Black Mirror season five is streaming on Netflix UK now

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Black Mirror season 5 episode 1 explained - Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones break down Striking Vipers

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Black Mirror season five's first episode is one of many in the Netflix series to focus on video games - but according to creator and writer Charlie Brooker, it's hardly the point of the story.

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Is our world a simulation? Why some scientists say it’s more likely than not

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A swath of technologists and physicists believe that ‘simulation theory’ will be proved, just as it was proved that the Earth was not the center of the universe

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In March 1995, artist Bryan Lewis Saunders began creating at least one self-portrait of himself every day.

Born in Washington D.C. but living on and off in Tennessee, in 2000 he set out to look for "experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of self" - and he came up with an experiment titled "Under The Influence" that did just that.

"Every day I took a different drug or intoxicant and drew myself under the influence," he states on his website.

He was the subject of a documentary called "Art of Darkness" about the experience - which, he says, left him lethargic and with "mild brain damage that wasn't irreparable," which he told Business Insider meant "psychomotor retardation and confusion."

Still, he said he is "still conducting this experiment but over greater lapses of time and presently only take drugs that are prescribed to me by a doctor."

He told INSIDER that his other more recent projects include a drawing experiment where he was totally blind for 30 days straight and, of course, created a daily self portrait.

"I have done other month long drawing and life experiments too; no hearing, no talking and so on," he said, adding that he's "currently exploring arousal and energy."

Scroll down to see some of the most bizarre, terrifying, and incredible pictures Saunders created while on drugs.

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An artist painted a self-portrait of himself on a different drug every day, and he ended up with brain damage

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In March 1995, artist Bryan Lewis Saunders began creating at least one self-portrait of himself every day. Born in Washington D.C. but living on and off in Tennessee, in 2000 he set out to look for "experiences that might profoundly affect my perception of self" - and he came up with an experiment titled "Under The Influence" that did just that.

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Ordering Publications

Call 1-877-643-2644 or:

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NIDA (2015). Hallucinogens and Dissociative Drugs. Retrieved , from https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/hallucinogens-dissociative-drugs

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How Do Hallucinogens (LSD, Psilocybin, Peyote, DMT, and Ayahuasca) Affect the Brain and Body?

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How Do Hallucinogens Work? Classic hallucinogens are thought to produce their perception-altering effects by acting on neural circuits in the brain that use the neurotransmitter serotonin (Passie, 2008; Nichols, 2004; Schindler, 2012; Lee, 2012).

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Wes Wilson attended San Francisco State University and was working at Contact Printing, a small San Francisco press, when his career as a psychedelic poster artist took off. At Contact, Wilson did the layout and design for handbills that eventually established him as a poster designer. When the Avalon Ballroon and Bill Graham's Fillmore Auditorium began to hold weekly dance concerts, Wilson was called upon to design the posters. He created psychedelic posters from February 1966 until May 1967, when disputes over money severed his connection with Graham. Wilson's early work was unique, but by mid-1967, so many artists had copied his style that he was easily replaced.

Wilson claims that he was the first artist to create a psychedelic poster. Intended for a particular audience-one that was tuned in to the psychedelic experience-his art, especially the lugubrious, freehand lettering, emerged from Wilson's own involvement with that experience and the psychedelic art of light shows. His influential lettering was derived from the Viennese Secessionist lettering he discovered in a University of California exhibition catalogue.

Wilson's approach to poster making was quite improvisatory. According to the artist, he selected colors through visual experiences with LSD, as well as from his professional experience as a printer. Eventually disillusioned with the career and financial opportunities of poster art, he moved to the Missouri Ozarks, where he lives on a farm.

Therese Thau Heyman Posters American Style (New York and Washington, D.C.: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., in association with the National Museum of American Art, 1998)

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Wes Wilson attended San Francisco State University and was working at Contact Printing, a small San Francisco press, when his career as a psychedelic poster artist took off. At Contact, Wilson did the layout and design for handbills that eventually established him as a poster designer.

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During the 1936 International Surrealist Exposition, held in London, guest speaker Salvador Dalí addressed his audience costumed head-to-toe in an old-fashioned scuba suit, with two dogs on leashes in one hand and a billiard cue in the other. Mid-lecture, constrained by the scuba mask, the Spanish artist began to suffocate and flailed his arms for help. The audience, unfazed, assumed his gesticulations were all part of the performance. As art legend has it, the Surrealist poet David Gascoyne eventually rescued Dalí, who upon recovery remarked, "I just wanted to show that I was plunging deeply into the human mind." Dalí then finished his speech-and his accompanying slides, to no one's surprise, were all presented upside down.

This anecdote underscores the most absurdist, even clownish, elements of the Surrealist movement, epitomized by Dalí-who was considered something of a joke figure by the early 20th-century art establishment. But the art movement was actually far more diverse than is widely known, spanning various disciplines, styles, and geographies from 1924 until its end in 1966.

What Is Surrealism?

Founded by the poet André Breton in Paris in 1924, Surrealism was an artistic and literary movement. It proposed that the Enlightenment-the influential 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement that championed reason and individualism-had suppressed the superior qualities of the irrational, unconscious mind. Surrealism's goal was to liberate thought, language, and human experience from the oppressive boundaries of rationalism.

Breton had studied medicine and psychiatry and was well-versed in the psychoanalytical writings of Sigmund Freud. He was particularly interested in the idea that the unconscious mind-which produced dreams-was the source of artistic creativity. A devoted Marxist, Breton also intended Surrealism to be a revolutionary movement capable of unleashing the minds of the masses from the rational order of society. But how could they achieve this liberation of the human mind?

Automatism, a practice that is akin to free association or a stream of consciousness, gave the Surrealists the means to produce unconscious artwork. Surrealist artist André Masson's mixed-media canvas Battle of Fishes (1926) is an early example of automatic painting. To begin, Masson took gesso-a tacky substance typically used to prime supports for painting-and let it freely fall across the surface of his canvas. He then threw sand over it, letting the grains stick to the adhesive at random, and doodled and painted around the resulting forms. Artists employing automatic methods embraced the element of chance, often to surprising results. Masson's end product features two prehistoric fish, jaws dripping with blood, fighting it out in the primordial ooze: an unconscious demonstration of the inherent violence of nature.

Not every Surrealist chose to create such abstract works, however. Many Surrealists recognized that the representation of a thing's actual appearance in the physical world might more effectively conjure associations for the viewer wherein a deeper, unconscious reality revealed itself. Artists like Dalí and the Belgian painter René Magritte created hyper-realistic, dreamlike visions that are windows into a strange world beyond waking life. Magritte's La Clairvoyance (1936), for instance, in which an artist paints a bird in flight while he looks at an egg sitting atop a table, suggests a dreamscape or a hallucinatory state.

The Icons of Surrealism

Though Surrealism is indeed most associated with such flamboyant and irreverent figures as Dalí, Breton recruited a wide group of artists and intellectuals already active in Paris to write for and exhibit under his banner.

Building on the anti-rational tradition of Dada, Surrealism counted among its members such major Dada figures as Tristan Tzara, Francis Picabia, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp. By 1924, this group was augmented by other artists and literary figures, including the writers Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Georges Bataille, and Antonin Artaud; the painters Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy; the sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Meret Oppenheim; and the filmmakers René Clair, Jean Cocteau, and Luis Buñuel.

But Breton was notoriously fickle about who he admitted to the movement, and he had a habit of excommunicating members who he felt no longer shared his particular view of Surrealism. Desnos and Masson, for example, were tossed out of the group via Breton's "Second Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1930 for their unwillingness to support his political aims. Bataille, whose Surrealist viewpoint differed considerably from Breton's, went on to form his own influential splinter group, the College of Sociology, which published journals and held exhibitions throughout the 1930s.

Surrealism in the Americas

As an interwar movement beginning in Paris in the 1920s, Surrealism responded to a post-World War I period that saw the slow reconstruction of major French cities, the height of the French colonial empire abroad, and the rise of fascism across Europe.

By 1937, however, most of the major figures in Surrealism had been forced to leave Europe to escape Nazi persecution. Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain II(1940-42) reflects this fraught moment with a post-apocalyptic vision created at the height of World War II. A partially abstract work formed by "decalcomania"-a technique that entailed painting on glass, then pressing that painted glass to the canvas to allow chance elements to remain- Europe After the Rain suggests bombed-out buildings, the corpses of humans and animals, and eroded geological formations in the aftermath of a great cataclysm.

The emigration of Surrealists to various sites of refuge during World War II did, however, spread the movement's influence across the Atlantic, where it would take firm root in the Americas. As Surrealism gained traction in the 1930s and '40s, it brought automatic practices and an interest in psychology and mythology to a new generation of artists. Jackson Pollock's Surrealist-inspired Guardians of the Secret (1943) exists somewhere between his earlier Social Realist works and the later drip paintings that would make him famous: it includes a recumbent jackal, two totemic forms, and a frieze of calligraphic pseudo-script.

In Latin America, Surrealism found its voice in the work of artists like Frida Kahlo, whose highly personal artistic style paralleled aspects of Surrealism without owing it any specific intellectual debt. In Arbol de la Esperanza (1946), which translates to "tree of hope," Kahlo doesn't depict an actual tree, but rather a dual self-portrait set in an unfamiliar landscape, a tableau that suggests both the 1925 bus accident that rendered her infertile, and the possibility of renewal. While its depiction of fantastic subject matter is reminiscent of works byMagritte or Dalí, Kahlo's painting celebrates the everyday artistry of traditional Mexican ex voto painting.

The psychological and mythological underpinnings of Surrealism also enabled non-European artists-like Wifredo Lam, a painter of Afro-Cuban and Chinese descent who studied in Madrid and Paris in the 1920s and '30s-to delve into the native traditions of their own countries. Lam's Les Noces (1947) intricately weaves the Cubist-Surrealist forms of artists like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró into a representation of the Afro-Cuban ritual Santería.

Why Does Surrealism Matter?

Surrealism represents a crucible of avant-garde ideas and techniques that contemporary artists are still using today, including the introduction of chance elements into works of art. These methods opened up a new mode of painterly practice pursued by the Abstract Expressionists. The element of chance has also proven integral to performance art, as in the unscripted Happenings of the 1950s, and even to computer art based on randomization. The Surrealist focus on dreams, psychoanalysis, and fantastic imagery has provided fodder for a number of artists working today, such as Glenn Brown, who has also directly appropriated Dalí's art in his own painting.

Surrealism's desire to break free of reason led it to question the most basic foundation of artistic production: the idea that art is the product of a single artist's creative imagination. As an antidote to this, Breton promoted the cadavre exquis, or " exquisite corpse," as a technique for collectively creating art, one that is still played as a game widely today. It involves starting a sentence, sketch, or collage, and then giving it to another person to continue-without letting that person see what has already been written, drawn, or placed. The term derived from a simple game of creating collective prose that resulted in the sentence, "The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine."

Given the method's embrace of chance and tendency to produce humorous, absurd, or unsettling images, it soon became a viable technique for creating exactly the type of unconscious, collective work that the Surrealists sought. Exquisite Corpse 27 (ca. 2011), a work completed by Ghada Amer, Will Cotton, and Carry Leibowitz, is a contemporary example of the sort of stylistically and thematically disconnected work that can arise from this Surrealist method.

The historian and music critic Greil Marcus has gone so far as to characterize Surrealism as one chapter in a series of revolutionary attempts to liberate thought that stretches from the blasphemies of medieval heretics up to the 1960s and beyond. In this light, Surrealism can be understood as the progenitor of the later, Marx-inspired art movement Situationism, 1960s countercultural protests, and even punk: a project of breaking down the rational order that society imposes on individuals.

Header image: Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931. © Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2016. Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
Photographs of Joan Miró and Max Ernst via Wikimedia Commons.

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The art movement was actually far more diverse than is widely known, spanning various disciplines, styles, and geographies from 1924 until its end in 1966.

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The new trailer for Joker, the forthcoming movie about the DC Comics villain of the same name, opens with a close-up of a sad man. (Well, it actually opens with sweeping views of the New York City skyline at dawn, but the sad man follows pretty quickly.) He's dejected and talking to a Department of Health employee. "Does it help to have someone to talk to?" she asks.

Judging by what follows, it does not.

We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

From 15p €0.18 $0.18 USD 0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.

See, the Joker is moody. It is, of course, his mother's fault - she always told him to smile and put on a happy face, the sad man laments. She told him he had a purpose: to bring laughter and joy to the world. What follows is a montage of the Joker dressed as a clown, trying to do just that - except the world will not have it. The Joker gets bullied. The Joker gets beaten up. The Joker gets called a freak. The Joker tries to smile, but he just can't - and while the trailer only hints at the devastating consequences that rejection will have on his psyche, the outcomes are well known to those who have watched one of the many films in which the Joker features.

As a character, the Joker has acquired a bit of a fan following over the years. His popularity has been bolstered by the performances of Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Jared Leto - and soon Joaquin Phoenix, who plays the title role in Joker. And while I'm sure DC's forthcoming film will find its audience, it's hard not to notice that dedicating an entire standalone film to the Joker (and possibly a couple of sequels if it does well enough) contributes to romanticising one of the most toxic archetypes of pop culture.

It bears reminding that the Joker is, at his core, a psychopath, a mass murderer, a terrorist, and an all-around bad guy. His portrayal varies slightly from one film to the next, and from one comic book to the next, but you can be pretty sure that at some point he's going to commit a crime and/or kill someone, and that he will enjoy it. He's the quintessential toxic man. If you need proof, just watch 2016's Suicide Squad, in which Jared Leto's Joker submits his girlfriend Harley Quinn to "tests" before letting her into his life. The ultimate test, by the way, comes when he turns to her and asks: "Would you die for me?" (Of course she would.)

To be clear, the Joker is a great villain. There's no denying it. That in itself isn't nefarious: pop culture has always needed bad guys, and superhero films are the perfect outlet to have a bit of fun with them. But what is harmful with the Joker isn't how bad he is, it's why he's bad: he's either a bitter loser or a misunderstood, tortured soul - or perhaps a bit of both. He wasn't born this way, not completely: it was others who made him like that.

We are hardwired to respond to that narrative. First, there's something compelling about sad clowns. It's a gimmick that works all too well. But then there's also the fact that so many women have been conditioned to think of toxic behaviour as charming, and as something that's not their partner's fault. There is something sexy about the Joker (there's a reason why people get tattoos of his face). On some level, you want to hold him until the pain goes away. That's the purpose assigned to so many female characters: be that breath of fresh air in a tortured man's life. Fix him. Make him feel seen. Make him feel understood. Dedicate your own life to holding him up.

But here's the thing: you've already met the Joker, and he wasn't nearly as interesting or attractive in real life. Perhaps you didn't realise he was the Joker, because he didn't look like Heath Ledger or Jared Leto. Perhaps he smoked or vaped. Perhaps his favourite book was Infinite Jest - or was it Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Perhaps he wanted to show you the world. There were books he wanted you to read and music you just had to listen to. Few people understood him. He was trying his best, but the world just seemed to be against him. All he wanted was a special soul who would finally get him - and how lucky were you that he had picked you?

We all have a bit of the Joker in us. It is tempting to think that our failures are the result not of our own shortcomings, but of other people's misconceptions. It's a natural defense mechanism, and sometimes it's justified. Who hasn't felt like the Joker at least once over the course of their life? It's hard to watch the new trailer and not think of at least one instance of childhood bullying. Who hasn't been taunted for standing out? Who hasn't been called a freak, or an equivalent insult? (If you answered "me" to any of these questions, feel free to drop me an email, I have about 100 questions for you.)

But the Joker isn't a child. He's a grown man. And yes, I am aware that he's fictional, but here's why I still care: when people see themselves on a screen, they feel vindicated. Most of the time, that is a very good thing (think Black Panther, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, who all filled huge gaps in the pop culture landscape).

But I worry - not to the point that it's keeping me up at night, but still - that some toxic guy will watch this film and think: "See? There's nothing wrong with me. There is beauty in my chaos. I am the chaos. I am the beauty. The ends justify the means."

Of course, Joker hasn't even come out yet, so it's too early to judge its portrayal of the title character. There is a possibility that the film will present a fuller picture of the supervillain, in a way that doesn't completely glamourise his neuroses. I'll certainly be on the lookout.

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Opinion: If Joker is just another celebration of a toxic egotistical male justifying his bad behaviour, I'm not here for it

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The new trailer for Joker, the forthcoming movie about the DC Comics villain of the same name, opens with a close-up of a sad man. (Well, it actually opens with sweeping views of the New York City skyline at dawn, but the sad man follows pretty quickly.)

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What do you get when you take a poor, mentally unstable loner and you treat him like trash? The answer given in Todd Phillips's ingenious new feature is Batman's arch nemesis, the Joker. Phillips gives us a portrait of the future super villain as a troubled young man, while Joaquin Phoenix plays him in a way that makes him seem both sympathetic and very creepy.

As first encountered here, Arthur Fleck is like a cross between Travis Bickle, the vigilante loner in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver and Rupert Pupkin, the would-be comedian in Scorsese's King of Comedy. The presence in the cast of Robert De Niro (as a chat show host very like the Jerry Lewis character in the latter film) underlines the fact Joker is as much inspired by Scorsese as by the DC comic book universe.

Arthur is a painfully awkward figure, living with his very frail mother (Frances Conroy) in a decrepit apartment and eking out an existence as a party clown.

Gotham City has lost its way. It isn't specified when the film is set but it appears to be the 1970s. The cinemas are showing porno films. The rubbish isn't being collected. Rats are on the streets. Crime is rife. The gulf between the rich, represented by the would-be new mayor Thomas Wayne, and the rest of society is enormous.

Arthur can't stand up for himself. He is on medication. When young thugs pick on him and beat him up in a back alley, he is powerless to stop them.

He is suffering from some mysterious medical condition which causes him to erupt into manic laughter at the most inopportune moments. He isn't very amusing either. "Don't you have to be funny to be a comedian?" his mother asks him at one stage, a question he declines to answer.

Arthur is touchingly devoted to his mother. She tells him stories about the rich and powerful Wayne, for whom she once worked. Wayne, though, is presented here as an aloof and arrogant millionaire who cares little for the downtrodden people of Gotham.

The tone of the film is even darker and more Gothic than that of Christopher Nolan 's Batman films. Phoenix's Arthur may be vulnerable, but the more he is bullied the more grievances he stores up. "You've got to protect yourself. Otherwise you're going to get f***ed," a fellow clown tells him. The advice sets in motion the transformation into the malevolent figure with the rictus grin we know from all those other Caped Crusader movies. Not that Batman is ever referred to directly here.

Phoenix's Joker is a heavier, more brooding and introspective figure than that of Heath Ledger in Nolan's The Dark Knight. He doesn't have Ledger's quicksilver energy. He moves more slowly. However, when his malevolence is finally unleashed, he is just as effective a lord of chaos.

Action scenes are in relatively short supply. This isn't a superhero movie and it takes some time for Arthur to get his chops as a villain. However, Phillips includes one brilliantly staged set piece on the Gotham subway, involving Joker, hundreds of protesters dressed as clowns, and two hapless police officers caught in the throng.

As viewers, we can't help but identify with Arthur. Everybody picks on him. We suffer with him in the excruciating scenes when his comedy routines fall flat or when he embarrasses himself by misinterpreting the words and actions of others. It is a natural instinct to want him to succeed, and is therefore exhilarating when he finally stops stumbling and stands up for himself.

Director Phillips' attitude towards his main character is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, Arthur is a murderous psychopath who can't tell jokes and has a horrible, braying laugh. On the other, he is depicted here as a folk hero, wreaking havoc against a society which has ignored the poor and marginalised for too long. "They don't give a shit about you... and they don't give a shit about me either," his long-suffering social worker tells him.

At times, the storytelling becomes very contorted as the filmmakers strive to make a nuanced character-based drama about a figure we are used to seeing presented as a one-dimensional baddie. There has been talk of a "DC Black" label, a series of movies, of which this is the first, focusing on the dark half of the superhero universe. If Joker develops into a franchise, the tensions are bound to increase. It's very hard to make films about super villains which don't either glamourise them or lapse into comic book cliche. This feature, though, is powerful and original, with much of the same kick as the Scorsese movies to which it pays such obvious homage.
Joker is released in the UK on 4 October 2019.

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Joker is a dark, powerful film with a brooding performance from Joaquin Phoenix

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What do you get when you take a poor, mentally unstable loner and you treat him like trash? The answer given in Todd Phillips's ingenious new feature is Batman's arch nemesis, the Joker. Phillips gives us a portrait of the future super villain as a troubled young man, while Joaquin Phoenix plays him in a way that makes him seem both sympathetic and very creepy.

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The Scream is a composition created by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1893. The Norwegian name of the piece is (Scream), and the German title under which it was first exhibited Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature). The agonized face in the painting has become one of the most iconic images of art, seen as symbolizing the anxiety of the human condition. Munch's work, including The Scream, had a formative influence on the Expressionist movement.

Munch recalled that he had been out for a walk at sunset when suddenly the setting sun's light turned the clouds " a blood red". He sensed an "infinite scream passing through nature". Scholars have located the spot to a fjord overlooking Oslo and have suggested other explanations for the unnaturally orange sky, ranging from the effects of a volcanic eruption to a psychological reaction by Munch to his sister's commitment at a nearby lunatic asylum.

Munch created two versions in paint and two in pastels, as well as a lithograph stone from which several prints survive. Both painted versions have been stolen, but since recovered. In 2012, one of the pastel versions commanded the at-the-time highest nominal price paid for an artwork at a public auction.

Edvard Munch, 1921

In his diary in an entry headed "Nice 22 January 1892", Munch wrote:

One evening I was walking along a path, the city was on one side and the fjord below. I felt tired and ill. I stopped and looked out over the fjord - the sun was setting, and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream passing through nature; it seemed to me that I heard the scream. I painted this picture, painted the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked. This became The Scream.

He later described his inspiration for the image:

I was walking along the road with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city - my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.

Among theories advanced to account for the reddish sky in the background is the artist's memory of the effects of the powerful volcanic eruption of Krakatoa, which deeply tinted sunset skies red in parts of the Western hemisphere for months during 1883 and 1884, about a decade before Munch painted The Scream. This explanation has been disputed by scholars, who note that Munch was an expressive painter and was not primarily interested in literal renderings of what he had seen. Another explanation for the red skies is that they are due to the appearance of nacreous clouds which occur at the latitude of Norway and which look remarkably similar to the skies depicted in The Scream. Alternatively, it has been suggested that the proximity of both a slaughterhouse and a lunatic asylum to the site depicted in the painting may have offered some inspiration. The scene was identified as being the view from a road overlooking Oslo, by the Oslofjord and Hovedøya, from the hill of Ekeberg. At the time of painting the work, Munch's manic depressive sister Laura Catherine was a patient at the mental asylum at the foot of Ekeberg.

A Peruvian mummy at La Specola, Florence

In 1978, the Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum suggested that the strange, skeletal creature in the foreground of the painting was inspired by a Peruvian mummy, which Munch could have seen at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. This mummy, which was buried in a fetal position with its hands alongside its face, also struck the imagination of Paul Gauguin: it stood as a model for figures in more than twenty of Gauguin's paintings, among those the central figure in his painting Human misery (Grape harvest at Arles) and for the old woman at the left in his 1897 painting Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?. In 2004, Italian anthropologist Piero Mannucci speculated that Munch might have seen a mummy in Florence's Museum of Natural History which bears an even more striking resemblance to the painting. However, later studies have disputed that theory, as Munch did not visit Florence until after painting The Scream.

The imagery of The Scream has been compared to that which an individual suffering from depersonalization disorder experiences, a feeling of distortion of the environment and one's self.

Arthur Lubow has described The Scream as "an icon of modern art, a for our time." It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety of modern humanity.

Munch created four versions, two in paint and two in pastels. The first painted version was the first exhibited, debuting in 1893. It is in the collection of the National Gallery of Norway in Oslo. This is the version that has the barely visible pencil inscription "Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!" ("could only have been painted by a madman"). A pastel version from that year, which may have been a preliminary study, is in the collection of the Munch Museum, also in Oslo. The second pastel version, from 1895, was owned by the German Jewish art collector Hugo Simon who sold it to Norwegian ship owner Thomas Olsen "around 1937". It was sold for $119,922,600 at Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art auction on 2 May 2012 to financier Leon Black. The auction was contested by the heirs of Hugo Simon. The second painted version dates from 1910, during a period when Munch revisited some of his prior compositions. It is also in the collection of the Munch Museum. These versions have seldom traveled, though the 1895 pastel was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from October 2012 to April 2013, and the 1893 pastel was exhibited at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2015.

Additionally, Munch created a lithograph stone of the composition in 1895 from which several prints produced by Munch survive. Only approximately four dozen prints were made before the original stone was resurfaced by the printer in Munch's absence.

The material composition of the 1893 painted version was examined in 2010. The pigment analysis revealed the use of cadmium yellow, vermilion, ultramarine and viridian, among other pigments in use in the 19th century.

Pencil inscription on the National Gallery of Norway's The Scream

The version held by the National Museum of Norway has a pencil inscription, in small lettering, in the upper left corner, saying "Kan kun være malet af en gal Mand!" ("could only have been painted by a madman"). It can only be seen on close examination of the painting. This had been presumed to be a comment by a critic or a visitor to an exhibition. It was first noticed when the painting was exhibited in Copenhagen in 1904, eleven years after this version was painted. Following infrared photography, study of the handwriting now shows that the comment was added by Munch. The theory has been put forward that Munch added the inscription after the critical comments made when the painting was first exhibited in Norway in October 1895. There is good evidence that Munch was deeply hurt by that criticism, being sensitive to the mental illness that was prevalent in his family.

The Scream has been the target of a number of thefts and theft attempts. Some damage has been suffered in these thefts.

Two men breaking into the National Gallery, Oslo, to steal the gallery's version (1893 tempera on cardboard) of The Scream, February 1994

The Scream back in the National Gallery after recovery and before restoration, September 2006.

On 12 February 1994, the same day as the opening of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, two men broke into the National Gallery, Oslo, and stole its version of The Scream, leaving a note reading "Thanks for the poor security". The painting had been moved down to a second-story gallery as part of the Olympic festivities. After the gallery refused to pay a ransom demand of US$1 million in March 1994, Norwegian police set up a sting operation with assistance from the British police ( SO10) and the Getty Museum and the painting was recovered undamaged on 7 May 1994. In January 1996, four men were convicted in connection with the theft, including Pål Enger, who had been convicted of stealing Munch's Love and Pain in 1988. They were released on appeal on legal grounds: the British agents involved in the sting operation had entered Norway under false identities.

The 1910 version of The Scream was stolen on 22 August 2004, during daylight hours, when masked gunmen entered the Munch Museum in Oslo and stole it and Munch's . A bystander photographed the robbers as they escaped to their car with the artwork. On 8 April 2005, Norwegian police arrested a suspect in connection with the theft, but the paintings remained missing and it was rumored that they had been burned by the thieves to destroy evidence. On 1 June 2005, with four suspects already in custody in connection with the crime, the city government of Oslo offered a reward of 2 million Norwegian krone (roughly US$313,500 or €231,200) for information that could help locate the paintings. Although the paintings remained missing, six men went on trial in early 2006, variously charged with either helping to plan or participating in the robbery. Three of the men were convicted and sentenced to between four and eight years in prison in May 2006, and two of the convicted, Bjørn Hoen and Petter Tharaldsen, were also ordered to pay compensation of 750 million kroner (roughly US$117.6 million or €86.7 million) to the City of Oslo. The Munch Museum was closed for ten months for a security overhaul.

On 31 August 2006, Norwegian police announced that a police operation had recovered both The Scream and Madonna, but did not reveal detailed circumstances of the recovery. The paintings were said to be in a better-than-expected condition. "We are 100 percent certain they are the originals," police chief Iver Stensrud told a news conference. "The damage was much less than feared." Munch Museum director Ingebjørg Ydstie confirmed the condition of the paintings, saying it was much better than expected and that the damage could be repaired. The Scream had moisture damage on the lower left corner, while Madonna suffered several tears on the right side of the painting as well as two holes in Madonna's arm. Before repairs and restoration began, the paintings were put on public display by the Munch Museum beginning 27 September 2006. During the five-day exhibition, 5,500 people viewed the damaged paintings. The conserved works went back on display on 23 May 2008, when the exhibition "Scream and Madonna - Revisited" at the Munch Museum in Oslo displayed the paintings together. Some damage to The Scream may prove impossible to repair, but the overall integrity of the work has not been compromised.

In 2008 Idemitsu Petroleum Norge AS committed an endowment of 4 million Norwegian krone towards the conservation, research and presentation of The Scream and .

The 1895 pastel-on-board version of the work, owned by Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen, sold at Sotheby's in London for a record price of nearly US$120 million at auction on 2 May 2012. The bidding started at $40 million and lasted for over 12 minutes when American businessman Leon Black by phone gave the final offer of US$119,922,500, including the buyer's premium. Sotheby's said the work was the most colorful and vibrant of the four versions painted by Munch and the only version whose frame was hand-painted by the artist to include his poem, detailing the work's inspiration. After the sale, Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer said the work was "worth every penny", adding: "It is one of the great icons of art in the world and whoever bought it should be congratulated."

The previous record for the most expensive work of art sold at auction had been held by Picasso's Nude, Green Leaves and Bust, which went for US$106.5 million at Christie's two years prior on 4 May 2010. As of 2018, the pastel remains the fourth highest nominal price paid for a painting at auction. The work had a presale estimate of $80 million, the biggest presale estimate ever set by Sotheby's.

In Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the main character and his then partner, Phil Resch, view the painting in an art gallery. Resch comments that the painting reminds of him of how he imagines androids feel.

In the late twentieth century, The Scream was imitated, parodied, and (following the expiration of its copyright) outright copied, which led to it acquiring an iconic status in popular culture. It was used on the cover of some editions of Arthur Janov's 1970 book The Primal Scream.

In 1983-1984, pop artist Andy Warhol made a series of silk screen prints copying works by Munch, including The Scream. His stated intention was to desacralize the painting by making it into a mass-reproducible object. Munch had already begun that process, however, by making a lithograph of the work for reproduction. Erró's ironic and irreverent treatment of Munch's masterpiece in his acrylic paintings The Second Scream (1967) and Ding Dong (1979) is considered a characteristic of post-modern art. The expression of Kevin McCallister ( Macaulay Culkin) in the poster for the 1990 film was inspired by The Scream.

The Ghostface mask worn by the primary antagonists of the series of horror movies is based on the painting. It was created by Brigitte Sleiertin of the Fun World costume company for the Halloween market, prior to being discovered by Marianne Maddalena and Wes Craven for the film.

The principal alien antagonists depicted in the 2011 BBC series of , named " The Silence", have an appearance partially based on The Scream.

In 2013, The Scream was one of four paintings that the Norwegian postal service chose for a series of stamps marking the 150th anniversary of Edvard Munch's birth. In 2018 Norwegian comedy duo Ylvis made a musical based on the painting's theft starring Pål Enger who stole it in 1994.

A patient resource group for trigeminal neuralgia (which has been described as the most painful condition in existence) have also adopted the image as a symbol of the condition.

In most renderings, the emoji 😱 FACE SCREAMING IN FEAR is made to resemble the subject of the painting.

US Department of Energy Scream

A simplified version of the subject of the painting is one of the pictographs that was considered by the US Department of Energy for use as a non-language-specific symbol of danger in order to warn future human civilizations of the presence of radioactive waste.

The cover art for the 2018 MGMT album Little Dark Age possesses a figure resembling the subject of the painting, albeit in clown-like makeup.

1893, pastel on cardboard. As possibly the earliest execution of The Scream, this appears to be the version in which Munch mapped out the essentials of the composition.

1893, oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard. The first version publicly displayed, and perhaps the most recognizable, it is located at the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway.

1895, lithograph print. About 45 prints were made before the printer re-used the lithograph stone. A few were hand-coloured by Munch.

1895, pastel on cardboard. It was sold for nearly US$120 million at Sotheby's in 2012, and is in the private collection of Leon Black.

1910, tempera on cardboard. This version was stolen from the Munch Museum in 2004, but recovered in 2006.

Undated, ink drawing. This composition, which features the central figure from The Scream is in the collection of the University Museum of Bergen.

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The Scream is a composition created by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch in 1893. The Norwegian name of the piece is (Scream), and the German title under which it was first exhibited Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream of Nature).

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[Disjointed] Carter dream 2 - Monitor flashback

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An artist with schizophrenia has created a series of images illustrating her hallucinations in the hope of destroying misconceptions around mental health issues.

Kate Fenner, 18, was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 17 after years of being misdiagnosed with other conditions.

She experiences anxiety and depression linked to her illness and hallucinates seeing bugs and hearing voices.

The teenager hopes her images will counteract the negative way the media often portrays mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia.

"I personally feel like the media portrays any kind of mental illness in a way that makes people afflicted look incompetent, violent and lazy," she told The Huffington Post UK.

"While that may be the case for some, most people I know that suffer from some type of mental illness are normal people. The media lacks a portrayal of real people who have to live with it."

She believes inaccurate media portrayals fuel the cultural silence that surrounds mental health.

"People are afraid to be open about it for fear of being ostracised or looked down upon," she said.

"I understand the risks of being public about hallucinating bugs and voices, but I'm willing to take those risks in an attempt to normalise mental illness (by making it acceptable to talk about and inspiring people to seek help if they need it) and to educate people."

Much of Fenner's art is based around flies, which she chose to represent how she sometimes feels "worthless, insignificant and annoying".

Other illustrations, such as one showing a spider, are directly inspired by hallucinations she's had.

"It often feels like bugs are crawling in and out of my skin," she added.

"The fly saying 'set it all on fire' is based off of a voice I hear sometimes, that tells me to light things on fire."

She said people are often confused when she tells them she hears voices, but she hopes her art will change that.

"When I tell people I hear voices they give me a sort of bewildered look. Which I understand, however, it's normal for me," she said.

"It's normal for many people, which is why I'm being open about it. I don't feel like I should have to hide this, so expressing it through these drawings is one way of sharing it.

"Suicidal thoughts and depression are one of the most common ailments and they're also ineffectively treated."

The teenager has struggled with suicidal thoughts and compulsive self harming in the past, which has left her with scars on her arms and legs.

But she finds drawing therapeutic and hopes her illustrations will also have a positive impact on others living with mental health conditions.

"I hope my art will speak to those who feel lonely and lost," she said.

"At times when I have felt that way, I always looked to my inspirations for comfort: Heath Ledger, Tim Burton, Batman comic books. I want my art to invoke something within people that drives them to follow what they are the most passionate about."

See more of Kate Fenner's illustrations below or follow her on Instagram to see more of her work.

Useful websites and helplines:
Mind, open Monday to Friday, 9am-6pm on 0300 123 3393

Samaritans offers a listening service which is open 24 hours a day, on 116 123 (UK and ROI - this number is FREE to call and will not appear on your phone bill.)

Get Connected is a free advice service for people under 25. Call 0808 808 4994 or email: help@getconnected.org.uk

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mental health depression anxiety art mental illness schizophrenia

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Artist With Schizophrenia Illustrates What It's Like To Experience Hallucinations

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An artist with schizophrenia has created a series of images illustrating her hallucinations in the hope of destroying misconceptions around mental health issues. Kate Fenner, 18, was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 17 after years of being misdiagnosed with other conditions.