Yuck 'n Yum - We are seeking a new committee member!‏

Dearest Yuck ‘n Yummers,
 
Just a quick reminder of our upcoming deadlines.

1 - We are looking for someone to join our team /// Deadline this Saturday

We’re looking for new committee members. The type of people who put the commit into committee. Highly focused and driven individuals who breathe art and sweat zines. Sounds like you? Great! Well, here’s the deal:

• You’ll assist with the publication of our quarterly zine and special editions, the curation of our launch events and projects, and you’ll help make the Annual General Karaoke happen.
• You’ll be working alongside the Yuck ‘n Yum team who are all super nice and friendly types.
• It’s an ideal graduate opportunity, one that gives you the chance to make real actual things happen!
• Just send us an email at info@yucknyum.com with ‘new committee member’ in the subject line.
• Please enclose an expression of interest and a CV.
• The deadline is 1st December.

2 - Submission deadline for the Winter Issue /// December 1st /// 2 days left

The submission deadline for the Winter issue of YnY is only a couple of days away. Please send black and white artworks to submissions@yucknyum.com by December 1st. As it is approaching the festive season, we are even more excited to receive your submissions (although please note it is not a 'Christmas themed edition').  Both digital works and high quality scans of original artworks are accepted.  We've updated our submission guidelines, so if you are unsure of format, etc, please cast your eye over 'How to submit' .

3 - YnY exhibition at DCA During Book Week Scotland /// 24 November 2012 - 1 December 2012

Don't forget that for Book Week Scotland, Dundee Contemporary Arts are presenting a display of books, published ephemera and zines all made by artists. The display draws on works from a number of sources including work from the Centre for Artists’ Books which is based in the Visual Research Centre in the building. There is also a focus on Yuck ’n Yum and the unveiling of new books from DCA’s recent exhibitions programme by Ruth Ewan and Torsten Lauschmann.

We have selected images from issues of YnY past and present and have created an installation of these situated in Gallery 1 of the DCA.

http://www.dca.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/artists-books.html
24 November 2012 - 1 December 2012
Dundee Contemporary Arts

Lots of love from Yuck ‘n Yum

Team Yuck 'n Yum @ DCA 29.11.12

The Yuck 'n Yum lineup 2012, now with added interns!

(L-R) Andrew, Alexandra, Alex, Morgan, Becca, Gayle, your correspondent.

http://www.yucknyum.com/

YNY @ DCA - official pictures!

The DCA is showing a display of artists' books for Book Week Scotland and Yuck 'n Yum is right there in the middle of it. After my own rather underexposed efforts last week I'm happy to present a batch of official documentation:

http://www.yucknyum.com/

http://www.dca.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/artists-books.html

Unica Zürn - notebooks

Untitled, 1961

Unica Zürn (6 July 1916 in Berlin-Grunewald – 19 October 1970 in Paris) was a German author and painter. She is remembered for her works of anagram poetry, exhibitions of automatic drawing, and her photographic collaborations with Hans Bellmer.

Together with Hans Bellmer, Unica Zürn frequented surrealist circles and befriended people such as Man Ray, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Henri Michaux and Max Ernst. From 1957 onwards she suffered from depression and was treated at various clinics in France. One of her doctors was Gaston Ferdière, a friend of the surrealists, who was also psychiatrist to Antonin Artaud. Her illness inspired much of her writing, above all Der Mann im Jasmin, written between 1963 and 1965.

She killed herself in 1970 by leaping from the window of the apartment she shared with Bellmer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unica_Z%C3%BCrn

 



















Untitled, 1961
 
During the 1960s, when she was well into middle age, Zürn made a series of psychologically intense line drawings that combine Surrealist automatism with the mania of Outsider Art and a certain residue of contemporary experiments in psychedelic drugs. Erotic and trancelike, the works depict fantastic chimeras, bizarre creatures with double faces that represent multiplications of herself, either repeated across the page or set in intricate dream landscapes of mystic animals and otherworldly plant forms.
Valery Oisteanu
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/reviews/oisteanu/oisteanu3-14-05.asp 

Chateau d'Espagne, 1970

One day at Wittenau the head doctor had called her to a room in which a group of students and psychologists from other clinics was assembled, and asked her to comment on her drawings as he showed them to the others. The drawing Recontre avec Monsieur M (ma morte) prompted a discussion, and she was asked: ‘Why did you cover the entire surface of the paper right to the edges? On the others you’ve left the space around the motif white.’

And she had answered: “Simply because I couldn’t stop working on this drawing, or didn’t want to, for I experienced endless pleasure while working on it. I wanted the drawing to continue beyond the edge of the paper – on to infinity…”
Unica Zürn, The Man of Jasmine, trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas, 1994).
http://siglioblog.com/2012/05/22/two-halves-unica-zurn/

Untitled, 1963

The superb, fantastic drawings Zürn produced, often during her hospitalizations, have recognizable affinities with Hans Bellmer’s linear finesse as well as Henri Michaux’s calligraphic spontaneity. More specifically, Zürn adopted Bellmer’s use of the “cephalopod,” a variable, amorphously shaped humanoid form. But she gave the techniques she adapted from others a crispness and bite all her own, particularly in her rendering of eyes, veins beneath flesh and colors suggestive of lividity and bruising. While Zürn produced some paintings in tempera and oil during the early 1950s, her preferred mediums were colored inks, pencil and gouache on paper. Many works were produced in notebooks given to her by Michaux when Zürn was at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris. Between hospitalizations, she made a quantity of large-scale drawings; while they are always startling, one can’t really say they “develop”—rather, they elaborate a fixed set of obsessions.

While “outsider art” usually connotes untrained naiveté and beguiling clumsiness, Zürn’s virtuosity is that of an artist willing her madness to manifest itself on paper, rather than a mad person exuding symptoms in the form of pictorial expression. Her pictures are radically skewed and shattered self-portraits that mirror the splitting of her personality. They duplicate her face and body, or parts of them, amid or inside avian predators, felines, vegetal accumulations; these Unicas sport claws, razor teeth, multiple mouths, extra limbs, several breasts, antennae. It’s often as if Zürn has internalized as self-image the profuse, mutant doll parts of Bellmer’s paintings and sculptures, replacing herself with the freakish assemblages of her lover’s imagination—as if she has become the doll and, in retribution, invested Bellmer’s reinvention of her with an autonomy and visionary power he withheld from it.
Gary Indiana
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/features/a-stone-for-unica-zurn/1/

Rodney Graham - Halcion Sleep

Rodney Graham (born January 16, 1949) is an artist and musician born in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He is most often associated with the Vancouver School. He is married to the artist Shannon Oksanen and lives in Vancouver.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_Graham

The artist Rodney Graham, wearing his pyjamas, is filmed in blue nocturnal light, knocked out by a sleeping draught called halcyon. Comatose in the back of a car, he has been taken from his motel bed and driven around Vancouver, the traffic and city lights flaring over his recumbent form. Attracted by the word halcyon, and remembering the childhood experience of being driven home after an exciting day, Graham not only recreates a memory of his youth, but shows us a man in the cinema of his dreams.
Adrian Searle
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2002/sep/24/art.artsfeatures

The metaphor is The Trip. In Halcion Sleep (1994), Rodney Graham’s new black and white video, the artist is seen dressed in stylishly striped satin pyjamas, sleeping deeply and blissfully laid out on the back seat of a mini-van. Through the soft glow of the rain-traced rear window, we can follow the path of the van as it travels endlessly down the avenues of Graham’s hometown. At face value, the chain of events seems uncomplicated: Graham downed a heavy dosage of the sleeping agent Halcion and, once under its spell, was transported from a motel on the outskirts of town to his home in the centre of the city. The continuous video loop was shot in a single take. The heaving of his limp body in and out of the mini-van (the trip’s beginning and end) are not included in the action; ‘travelling from the outer limits to the centre’ is the heart of this event.

Perhaps Graham is gesturing toward an enlargement of Breton’s famous proclamation: ‘I believe in the future resolution of the states of dream and reality, in appearance so contradictory, in a sort of absolute reality, or surréalité, if I may so call it’. But how we think about ‘absolute reality’ has become more complicated, and the stakes are higher than Breton could ever have envisioned. Graham no longer points to Breton’s resolution of dream and reality, instead he is that resolution. Sleeping under the effects of the drug, Graham gently bobs on the van’s back seat wearing the Halcion daze. The look on his face naturally makes you feel a tinge of envy. The artist is someone transported somewhere else, to a place remote in time and place. From where we stand on the outskirts, he appears to journey toward his self’s centre. True, he has given up his faculties, but given them up to a different, otherwise unavailable set. The relationship of artist to audience is made perfectly clear: the softly effulgent rear window hovers above Graham’s head as would a thought balloon in a cartoon. Only Graham can ‘see’ where he is going, leaving us in the realm of hand-me-down experiences, staring into the silently glowing waves of passing lights and attempting to reconstruct where he has been.
Ronald Jones
http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/rodney_graham1/

halcion sleep (1994/2012) from clint enns on Vimeo.

video made for my augmented reality assignment in "future cinema II" at york university.

augmented reality is used to enhance conceptual artist rodney graham's 1994 seminal work halcion sleep.
clint enns 

Vampyros Lesbos

Vampyros Lesbos, 1998

Vampyros Lesbos (Spanish: Las Vampiras) is a 1971 West German-Spanish horror film directed and co-written by Jesús Franco. The film stars Ewa Stroemberg as Linda Westinghouse who is an American who works in a Turkish legal firm. Westinghouse has a series of erotic dreams that involve a mysterious vampire woman who seduces her before feeding on her blood. When she travels to an island to settle an inheritance, Lucy recognizes a woman as the vampire from her dreams.

The film was a popular success in theaters in Europe on its release and was the first film to have a more psychedelic score for a Franco film and the first to have a lesbian theme as a prominent feature of the film. The film's score became popular in the mid-1990s when it was included on the compilation Vampyros Lesbos: Sexadelic Dance Party, an album that became a top ten hit on the British Alternative charts.

On September 29, 1997, a remix album titled The Spirit of Vampyros Lesbos was released. The album was a collection of remixes from various electronic artists including Two Lone Swordsmen, Cristian Vogel and Alec Empire who released their own mixes of the films soundtrack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampyros_Lesbos 

Vampyros Lesbos (1970) starred the black-eyed Soledad Miranda as a mysterious countess who lures young women to her castle in Istanbul so that she can gorge on their blood. None of it makes much sense, but Miranda, who died as a result of a car crash before the film was completed, is utterly beguiling.

Jess Franco has a unique way of making movies. He rarely writes a script, and even if he does it's only a couple of hours before shooting. He likes to do everything himself on set, but leaves the completion of the film to somebody else. He considers himself a feminist and claims that he hates porn, but the films look like manifestations of his erotic fantasies. And he'll run over the same themes again and again, but never bother to tell a story. Perhaps this succinct explanation by one of his favourite leading men, French actor Michael Lemaine, is the most satisfactory: "He's a total madman."
Will Hodgkinson
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/jun/29/1

A enjoyable and sensual watching with visible fake blood, some exaggerated interpretation and all the kitsch a B movie type can offer.
Different from what you would expect of any vampyre movie, in Vampyros Lesbos most scenes are in a sunny and paradisiac outside and the plot is insteresting, playing with "reality" and imagination.

*Soledad Miranda was terrific beautiful.
Rubia Carolina
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/vampyros_lesbos/

I was very curious to see this film after having heard so many things about it! And indeed, "Vampyros Lesbos" even exceeded my expectations! Loaded with symbolic language, an almost dream-like atmosphere, unusual camera angles, a fantastic score and some Franco typical lesbian soft sex the Spanish director created an absolute masterpiece of Europe´s early 1970s sleazy cinema. Both main actresses Soledad Miranda and Ewa Strömberg are excellent in the lead and maybe one of the hottest lesbian couples ever brought on the screen. Some people may find it boring, cheap and eventless, but "Las Vampiras" is not a film you should watch about story or suspense! It is a brilliant mixture of art and trash, and I was truly surprised what great film it is after having seen so many different works of the director. This gem is a pure trip into surreality: Wonderful! Psychedelic! Watch it and LIVE!
DJ Inferno
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0066380/reviews

YNY @ DCA - pictures

To the DCA this morning for a look at their display of Artists' Books. It's been quite a few years in coming, but I'm delighted to report that Yuck 'n Yum has finally sold out and joined the art establishment. I took a few photos and here they are:

Every issue of the zine published since 2008, and a few specials

A selection of images from inside the zine, along with 3 framed originals by cover artists

Paul Jon Milne

Ross Hamilton Frew

Helen Flanagan

The display includes rare examples of the landmark ‘multimedia magazine in a box' Aspen featuring work by Andy Warhol, Marshall McLuhan and Dan Graham

Zines including Raymond Pettibon's legendary Tripping Corpse

Classic zines by Val Norris alongside Yuck 'n Yum ephemera

http://www.yucknyum.com/

Zazou with special guests The Guild of Calamitous Intent @ Kage, Dundee 23.11.12 - pictures

To the Kage last night for Zazou, Dundee's premier nitespot. Guests of honour were The Guild of Calamitous Intent, a shadowy cabal of Glasgow party facilitators. I took a few photos and here they are:

The name of the club is Zazou

Il Discotto in the mix

Assorted Zazouers

The aforementioned Guild of Calamitous Intent

https://www.facebook.com/zazou.nightclub

OMG YNY @ DCA from tomorrow!!!!!!

cabin:codex, co-curated by DJCAD Exhibitions and artist David Faithfull, (installation shot), Centrespace, VRC, 2011. Photo: Ross Fraser McLean.

For Book Week Scotland DCA will be presenting a display of books, published ephemera and zines all made by artists. The display will draw on works from a number of sources including work from the Centre for Artists’ Books which is based in the Visual Research Centre in the building. This collection has been built up over many years and comprises books made by artists as part of their practice, rather than books about artists. 

Alongside these works the display will include rare examples of the landmark ‘multimedia magazine in a box' Aspen featuring work by Andy Warhol, Marshall McLuhan and Dan Graham kindly lent to Dundee Contemporary Arts by Heart Fine Art, Edinburgh. There will also be a focus on the Dundee quarterly art zine Yuck’n Yum and the unveiling of new books from DCA’s recent exhibitions programme by Ruth Ewan and Torsten Lauschmann.

24 November 2012 - 1 December 2012

http://www.dca.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/artists-books.html

Receipts

Bought a few items:

Antonin Artaud - The Theatre And Its Double (Oneworld Classics), £2.87
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4637828-theatre-and-its-double

Rodney Graham - Through the Forest (Hatje Cantz), £12.00
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7868059-rodney-graham

Mike Dunn presents MD III - Face The Nation (Clone Classic Cuts) 12", £5.00
http://www.discogs.com/release/808621

X-TG - Desertshore / The Final Report (Industrial Records) 2LP, £17.99
http://x-tg.com/

Mike Nelson - To The Memory of HP Lovecraft

The work was called To The Memory of HP Lovecraft which was the subtitle of a Borges short story called There Are More Things where he emulated the style of HP Lovecraft. In the piece I was emulating both Borges and Lovecraft but flung into a white walled space. I rebuilt the space – the walls and the corridors – and attacked it as though a beast had ravaged through it. I like that piece. It was quite confronting and there was plenty of aggressive action in it. It took me weeks with an axe to chop it up. It was a small axe.
http://sciencefictional.net/2010/09/02/metaphorical-and-analogous-forms/

 

In horror literature, the narrative quality of buildings is made literal in the form of the ‘haunted house’: the house with a story to tell. With To the Memory of H. P. Lovecraft (1999) at the Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Nelson allowed something terrible to haunt a space that was about to close for renovation. Building false walls that replicated the look of an archetypal modern art gallery, he then unleashed a beast to slash and tear the place apart, its claw marks on the walls apparently traces of some unspeakable horror.
Jonathan Jones
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/species_of_spaces/

In the (Hayward Gallery) remake of the artist’s ‘To the Memory of HP Lovecraft (1999)’ previously installed at the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh, it’s the subtitle of a story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges that was inspired by the US horror writer.

“It’s kind of a parody of a parody of a parody.” said Nelson, standing in the room which is meant to look as it does, of a creature causing general destruction.

Nelson also barred the windows and installed a large trapdoor over the stairs — as if to keep us out or the ‘thing’ in.

Nelson himself just went mad in there, in an exhausting orgy of very calculated, premeditated and staged destruction, taking an axe to walls the English artist put up himself.

“I’m sort of enjoying it. But you have to use an axe so it’s quite exhausting, each mark is done by hand.” he added, with holes in the wall around him, splinters all over the floor, and feces of the beast.
Deborah 
http://www.lifeinthefastlane.ca/psycho-buildings-made-by-artists-gone-wild/art

Something has been here before you - a malevolent, spooky, cheeky something with sharp claws and a sense of humour. In what was a decorous gallery space lies chaos: ripped-out shreds of plasterboard, still-steaming excremental piles of - oh, wood chip. Where once were pristine white walls, now are gaping holes revealing fuse boxes, dust.

There is method in this messy madness, or at least 'sculptural intervention' by artist Mike Nelson. Dedicated to creepy maverick HP Lovecraft, Nelson's going-over of the space does have a supernatural quality to it, not least because it looks freshly wrecked. Lacerations in the wall only go so high, and have been made with such force that this looks like beastly work, perhaps that of a deranged, trapped bear. If it's man-made, it's madman-made.

And yet it makes perfect sense, with the gallery about to close for major redevelopment. Once you know that this is a precursor to what the builders will be doing, the magic diminishes somewhat - but it's the first encounter that matters. It has the revolutionary vibe of blowing up the institution, destroying the Establishment, ruining the white cube of the gallery.
Elisabeth Mahoney
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/1999/aug/23/edinburghfestival.art