Georgina Starr - Before Le Cerveau Affamé @ Cooper Gallery 10.10.13 - pictures

To the art school's Cooper Gallery this evening for the opening ceremony of Georgina Starr's new Gesamtkunstwerk Before Le Cerveau Affamé. I took a few photos and here they are:

The name of the artist is Georgina Starr

The Dundee art massive waits patiently

"Imbued with inexplicably emotive renderings of her own languages and characters, Starr’s work is an intense and introspective cosmology"

http://www.dundee.ac.uk/djcad/news/2013/article/internationally-renowned-artis

Yuck 'n Yum is dead, long live Yuck 'n Yum‏

Dear Yuck 'n Yummers,

Sit tight and stay calm, because we have some very important news to tell you.

The bad news is that THE YUCK ‘N YUM ZINE IS DEAD! We will no longer be publishing the quarterly zine that bears our name. We’d like to wish a huge thank you to all contributors, and to all those who’ve helped the cause over our 5 years' lifetime.

The winter 2013 issue of Yuck 'n Yum is to be the last ever. We hope to leave behind a beautiful corpse, and we hope you’ll all play nicely with it.

The good news is that YUCK ‘N YUM IS STILL ALIVE! We’ll continue to produce art events and multiples, and we’ll still work outside the gallery context. Look out for further announcements in due course, and the AGK will still carry on as scheduled.

Now that bombshell is over with, there are also a few other things we'd like to tell you, including the last ever submissions deadline and how you can help our AGK. Read on to find out.

1 - Autumn edition now online

We'd like to say a big thank you to GENERATORprojects for hosting our Autumn13 launch and to Beth Savage and Ruth Aitken for their fabulous performances. The Autumn edition is now online and will soon be at stockists throughout the UK.

2 - Last ever Yuck 'n Yum zine submission deadline is November the 16th 2013

Winter13 will be our final black and white musing delivered to you in an A5 booklet, however we need your help to make it special.  Without your contributions over the years there would have been no Yuck 'n Yum and for that we are eternally grateful.  So lets go out in style and send it off with a bang and send send send in your delectable treats!  However before you do, remember to glance at our how to submit guidelines, which are on our website.

2 - The Annual General Karaoke 4/// Please support our Indiegogo campaign

For the last few months tremendously talented videomakers from all over Scotland and further afield have been sweating over their AGK videos. The deadline is fast approaching, and on November 9th we hope to deliver the best AGK yet… but we need your help.  Despite tremendous support from our volunteers NEoN and the HMC, pulling off our amazing AGK nights is always an expensive enterprise. PA hire, documentation, screen building, prizes, printing and technical equipment all adds up.  If you enjoy or have enjoyed any of our free events, including the last three AGKs or free zines over the last few years, and think “I can spare £5 to help these guys improve upon the already amazing AGK” then please do. Anything you can afford would be brilliant. Don’t underestimate that help, it would be tremendous!  If you can’t give us anything then please just share the link with your friends and family and please please spread the word.

The AGK is part of NEoN Digital Art Festival this year and will be taking place at the Vision building in Dundee on the November the 9th.  For more information about the festival please visit the festival website.

Plus watch out for an email from us next week as we have a VERY exciting opportunity for zine makers in the pipeline!

Love from the Yuck 'n Yum team

John Leyton - Johnny Remember Me

"Johnny Remember Me" is a song which became a 1961 UK #1 hit single for John Leyton, backed by The Outlaws. It was producer Joe Meek's first #1 production. Recounting the haunting – real or imagined – of a young man by his dead lover, the song is one of the most noted of the 'death ditties' that populated the transatlantic pop charts in the early to mid-1960s. It is distinguished in particular by its eerie, echoing sound (a hallmark of the Joe Meek production style) and by the ghostly, foreboding female wails that form its backing vocal (by Lissa Gray). The recording was arranged by Charles Blackwell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Remember_Me

Thanks to Telstar, Joe Meek is seen as British pop's first great futurist, but the vibe of this Meek production reaches back into our fog-struck, ghost-ridden past. It's an urgent Gothic romance, with John Leyton's vocal clutching at your sleeve, desperate to tell a story of loss and madness. Meek turns the drums into phantom horsemen and fills the record's dark spaces with melodrama – a keening female voice on the chorus rounds the effect off. Pure corn, perhaps, but sold with a dread conviction, which makes this the weirdest and most gripping British record to hit the top yet.
Tom Ewing
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/may/31/john-leyton-johnny-remember-me

This is a Joe Meek production and it’s about death and ghosts. The original line of the song was, ‘A girl I lost who died a year ago’, but to get it played on the radio they changed it to, ‘The girl I loved and lost a year ago’. It’s basically a proto-goth record, and Marc Almond re-did it in the ’80s.

Joe Meek was the first significant record producer. There had been people who had been messing about with tapes and stuff in America, like Les Paul and Mitch Miller, but Meek was the first person to make records that really didn’t sound remotely like somebody playing live in the studio – it always sounded like a studio concoction. So this one’s got manic galloping drums like something from a Western, and a wailing girl in the background like a ghost. It’s an amazing record.

There are so many ‘death discs’ like this – loads of girl group ones, like the whole Shangri-Las career basically, and Joe Meek did several others as well. At the time, obviously with Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, famous people died in plane crashes and car crashes who were very young, and teenagers could relate to them. It would have been a very real part of your life. And teenagers are morbid, they’re really morbid! It was an interesting micro-genre.
Bob Stanley
http://www.factmag.com/2013/10/08/yeah-yeah-yeah-saint-etiennes-bob-stanley-picks-five-songs-that-tell-the-story-of-modern-pop/3/ 

A sublime record where TV exposure was deliberately used in a canny manner to gain publicity and sales. John's manager was Robert Stigwood and he got him a part in a popular TV soap opera of the day called "Harpers West One" in which John played Johnny St Cere, a pop star opening a new record section in a department store. Stigwood managed to wangle a deal where Leyton would mime to his new disc "Johnny Remember Me" within the show. The gambit worked since after the broadcast, people rushed out to buy the record sending it number one.

What also helped was negative publicity about the song itself, being a "death disc" so automatically some derided it as being "sick." In fact the original recorded lyric featured the line "The girl I loved who died a year ago" but this was changed to "The girl I loved and lost a year ago" since it was feared it the original line would lead to it being banned.

So there was a lot of hype attached to this disc which worked in it's favour. It brought Joe Meek into the public eye too since critics ripped it to pieces saying it was over the top and that Leyton sounded like he was singing from the bottom of a well!

The reality was and remains, Meek, Stigwood, Geoff Goddard, arranger Charles Blackwell and Leyton combined had created a memorable record that sounded unlike anything else heard up till that time.
biffbampow
http://www.45cat.com/record/jar577 

I can’t take any of Joe Meek’s futurist cred away, and I wouldn’t want to try. But with forty-years of hindsight it’s also obvious how bound some of his records are to the past. “Johnny Remember Me” comes at us, bodice heaving, straight out of the Victorian gothic – “when the mists are rising and the rain is falling and the wind is blowing cold across the moors”. It’s a ghost story! But more than that, it’s a country ghost story – Leyton’s accent slips into pseudo-prairie and the urgent gallop of the music shares a bloodline with western standard “Ghost Riders In The Sky”. And more still, it’s a love song – a haunted, desperate love song. As the dead beloved’s vocals ring out high and clear Leyton’s own replies become more crazed – “Yes I’ll always remember – till the day I die I’ll hear her cry!”. Meek’s use of echo here is perfect – Leyton’s voice has a tint of it but the dead woman’s words are sharp and true; out on these moors we have slipped more than halfway into the beyond and it’s the living who sound muffled and eerie.

Gothic, western, romance – a pulp trinity, and “Johnny Remember Me” is on this list because the British love a melodrama. The best melodrama is played with an intensity which dares you, snarling, to take it lightly. The best melodrama is also often a little camp. Leyton doesn’t let his audience down – as he rips through those wonderful opening lines you can almost hear his nostrils flare. By the end of the song, as his spectral lover keeps calling he sounds genuinely doomstruck. A rich treat and a remarkable record.
Tom
http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2004/08/john-leyton-johnny-remember-me/ 

Yuck 'n Yum AGK TEASER 6

WE NEED MORE WINNING KARAOKE VIDEOS !

Yuck ‘n Yum are delighted to announce that the fourth Annual General Karaoke will be held in Dundee on Saturday November 9th 2013. We are proud to be part of this year's NEoN Digital Arts Festival.

What’s the AGK? You must have been hiding under a rock!

OK listen up and listen up good: it’s a karaoke night where YOU make the videos. Be as wild and crazy as you wanna be. You might sing along yourself, or a friend could take to the stage and give the performance of a lifetime. Anything could happen. It’s a karaoke video competition!

Want to submit a video? The deadline is October 14th (or pay £10 to submit after the 14th but before the 21st!) and the winner gets £300!

For full details on how to submit your video, handy tips and all the latest up to date AGK news visit agk.yucknyum.com

AGK 2013 TEASER 6 from yucknyum on Vimeo.

Yuck 'n Yum winter 2013 deadline

We’re already taking submissions for our winter issue!

Wanna know how? Here's how: 
http://www.yucknyum.com/#how-to-submit

Yuck 'n Yum autumn 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our latest issue is online for you to read and download. Stay tuned for some big Yuck ‘n Yum news coming soon!

http://www.yucknyum.com/the-zine/?read=autumn2013

Paulina Ołowska - Applied Fantastic

Cake, 2010

The polish painter Paulina Olowska describes the subject of her work as “anti-fashion, fashion.” Her images depicting Eastern Bloc women wearing chunky sweaters were taken directly from communist-era postcards of DIY knitting patterns. Olowska originally intended to produce the knitwear—which one could imagine might be successfully sold at Opening Ceremony—herself, but stopped short of becoming an artist-slash-designer. Olowska found additional inspirations in photographer Daniele Tamagni’s book Gentlemen of Bacongo, which reveals a glamorous subculture of the Congo through images of dandies dressed in designer duds and bespoke suits.
Adam Shopkorn
http://www.wmagazine.com/culture/art-and-design/2010/11/paulina-olowska/

Bee, 2010 

The show featured paintings primarily, along with small collages and assorted elements from her studio's "inspiration wall"; the show was titled "Applied Fantastic" after the Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand's term, coined in the 1950s, for socialist pastiches of Western fashion. A number of the canvases are based on tasteful Western-style magazines from that period, and feature models posing in stylish attire before rustic backdrops. Jacket Oktawia, for example, shows a woman in a belted sweater, arms akimbo, before a sun-dappled wood fence; the two protagonists of Wool mark stroll in a wintry birch forest in thick overcoats. Ironically, the paintings are nostalgic for an era likewise characterized by an intense pining, but for the glamorous West.
Tom Williams
http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/paulina-olowska/

Sweater 2 (Klaun), 2010

An increased interest is being paid to fashion under the Eastern Block. Chiefly, Djurdja Bartlett’s “FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism” was recently published by MIT Press. The repository of over ten years of research by Bartlett—a research fellow at the London College of Fashion—this ground-breaking book is an in-depth and beautifully illustrated study of fashion’s relation to socialism throughout the twentieth century. By employing a vast array of sources, it traces the history of fashion under socialism in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland and Yugoslavia.

An interesting parallel to the book was a recent exhibition at Metro Pictures showcasing the recent work of Polish artist Paulina Olowska. Titled “Applied Fantastic,” the exhibition was comprised of paintings as well as actual sweaters based on home-knitted patterns from late communist Poland, which were in turn based on adaptation and re-interpretation of Western fashion, thus showing a protracted engagement with Western fashion in communist Poland.

The title of the show is a reference to Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand, who, “describing the localized re-creations of Western styles,” coined the term ‘Applied Fantastic’ in 1954. Thus, similarly to Bartlett’s book Olowska, in a strikingly different medium, explores the Eastern block’s fascination with Western fashion, or as described in Bartlett’s book fashion’s role as “the spectre that haunted socialism.”
Francesca Granata
http://www.fashionprojects.org/?p=1728

Applied Fantastic, 2010, Installation view

Over the past 10 years, Paulina Olowska's take on pop culture behind the iron curtain has made her a prominent figure within a younger generation of Polish artists. Using collage, performance and painting she reimagines poster and magazine imagery depicting long-legged pin-up girls, or takes vivid promotions for the communist good life and illuminates them with brilliant neon signage. Her most recent series of paintings, Applied Fantastic, showed models striking poses in snazzy 1980s knitwear. Typically for Olowska, this take on consumer mores is shot through with Soviet bloc touches, from a knitted Cossack hat to a male model's copious moustache. Indeed, rather than referencing ads for branded clothing lines, the paintings are based on Polish patterns for fashion-forward home-knitters. With their localised take on western trends, Olowska's paintings present a vision at odds with capitalism's vision of eastern Europe. 
Skye Sherwin
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2011/apr/06/poland-artist-week-olowska-molska-ziolkowski