One thing keeping me busy over the festive season was working for Crisis Action designing the branding and online delivery of a new campaign called Sudan365: A beat for peace. The clever campaign uses drumming to raise awareness of the critical political situation in Sudan.

Saturday 9 January 2010 saw the global launch which achieved phenomenal press coverage. Sudanese communities and activists around the world joined together to call on international leaders to take urgent diplomatic action to prevent an escalation of conflict in Sudan that could lead to massive human rights violations. The beat started up in Sudan and will be echoed by people from all over the world: from Nairobi to New York, London to Tokyo for the next 365 days.

Famous drummers from Radiohead, The Police, Pink Floyd, Snow Patrol and the legendary musicians Mohammed Munir, Yehia Khalil and Mustaffa Tettey Addy have all lent their support and feature in Jamie Catto and Splinter Films’ brilliant launch film which you can watch here.

Visit sudan365.org to find out more and to join the global beat for peace. The campaign also has its own Facebook group and YouTube channel.

Personal thanks to Richard Howard of Flowlabs for amazing development work on the website!

PRS for Music Foundation (PRSF) is an innovative funding body that supports a huge range of new music activity in all genres across the whole of the UK. PRSF run the UK’s biggest music prize – the New Music Award – which fosters the experimental, the ambitious and the unusual. As part of their 10th birthday celebrations, David has designed their new logo.

David has designed the identity, printed, and digital outputs for Performance Matters which was launched this week. Performance Matters is a creative research project bringing together artists, curators and academics to “investigate the challenges that contemporary performance presents to ideas of cultural value”. The three-year project is a collaboration between the Live Art Development Agency, the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at Roehampton University.

At the heart of the project is the Performance Matters website, which has information about collaborators and events, news stories and updates on activities, as well as being a space for expanded writings, ideas and images about and around the issues at the heart of Performance Matters. The website will move through three themed years of interlinked research activities, and the design will mutate and evolve over the three-year time span of the project to reflect this.

Judging by the content that’s already on the site it should be well worth keeping an eye on.

www.thisisperformancematters.co.uk

David has designed the publicity for a forthcoming sculpture show at the Royal Academy of Arts. Wild Thing features the work of three pioneers of modern British sculpture, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Eric Gill. The poster features Epstein’s amazing ‘Rock drill’ (1913-1915) (surely the inspiration for the Star Wars Battle Droid!) The exhibition opens on 24 October 2009. For more information or to book visit the RA.

The poster for the upcoming exhibition, featuring Epstein's 'Rock drill'...

Remarkably similar!

Art critic Simone Pereira Hind has written this lovely review of SALON16 for the summer issue of local magazine N16…

Sim and Steve visit SALON16

Sim – Well here we are at David Caines’ home on Lordship Road, temporarily transformed into a new art venue and hosting the exhibition We Who Are Not as Others. Have you had a good look around?

Steve – I have. David is showing his own paintings, his brother Matthews’ Jacob Epsteinesque sculptures, and photographs by David Swindells, Tess Hurrell and Kalpesh Lathigra. The work is immaculately presented in the garden, garden studio and in parts of the house. The staging is intimate without being domestic.

Sim – What’s the title all about then? Looking around I’m struck by the idea of ‘outsiders’ in much of the work, such as in Lathigra’s photographs of Sioux Native Americans. The subjects seem alone and lost in the landscape, ironic given that they are the indigenous people. And Swindells’ photos of London clublife star larger-than-life characters like Leigh Bowery, who dare to be different. I’m particularly drawn to his YMCA-style go-go dancer print. Very sexy, but weird to think the guy is dressed as a ‘Red Indian’, given that I’ve just been looking at Lathigra’s work.

David’s work reminds me of one of my favourite films, Freaks, Tod Browning’s 1932 film set in a freak show in which he cast real sideshow performers with deformities. As well as alluding to circus perfomers David’s paintings often represent groups of seemingly disparate people; an aviator, a contortionist and a shaman for instance, who seem unaware of each other, don’t relate to one another, yet share a space on the canvas. I heard someone describe the work as poignant just now and I think that’s true.

Steve  – Without wanting to get too deep, it seems like a comment on the human condition, that in the end we’re all alone.

Sim – Oy, oy Steve. Cheer up, it may never ‘appen. Come and have a look at Tess Hurrell’s work if you’re going to get all earnest on me. As well as being technically accomplished her images are truly enigmatic. In the three photos entitled Basic Needs she transforms mundane objects -  wipers, a chair and an umbrella into mysterious objects of beauty and her Drawing Light No. 1 suggests the sublime in spite of its exposing its own construction. They’re beautiful.

Steve – You know, thinking about it, We Who Are Not As Others is also a reference to these artists kicking the mainstream and taking control of showing their work, rather than relying on the vagaries of the art world. It’s the enthusiasm of people like David Caines that helps guarantee a thriving art scene in spite of the much-discussed financial meltdown at our midst. I’m happy to report that this may be the first of many shows that David plans to curate in this space.

I was recently commissioned by the Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths (STEM) Network to design an exhibition structure for a photographic exhibition of portraits by Richard Cannon entitled Illuminating Futures. Richard has photographed eighteen young men and women who are all working at the cutting edge of the sciences. The portraits were recently featured as a photo story in The Times Magazine.

The design structure needed to be free-standing, and to be able to be configured in a variety of shapes to suit different exhibition spaces. My solution was to design 9 x identical panels which were engineered from plywood and faced with a black gloss laminate. The panels have ‘male’ and ‘female’ pegs at the edge and simply slot together at right angles. Simple to erect and to transport.

The exhibition is designed to inspire young people to consider specialising in STEM subjects and has embarked on a nationwide tour of public spaces beginning in Manchester.

A big thank you to Simon Dormon of Oblique Furniture for doing such a beautiful job manufacturing the panels.

A year ago (whilst I was working at Hoop) I was commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency to design a monograph written by my friend Adrian Heathfield about the Taiwanese/US performance artist Tehching Hsieh. At the time I knew little about Tehching or his work but from the off the project seemed unusual and intriguing. During the 70s, living as an illegal immigrant in New York, Tehching undertook an extraordinary and gruelling series of time-based performances that redefined the concepts of endurance in performance and the idea of ‘life as art’. Over a period of five consecutive years Tehching subjected himself to unbelievable forms of deprivation and hardship, and meticulously catalogued and recorded the entire process.

Year 1: (78-79) Locked in a cage, solitary confinement. No conversation, nothing to read, nothing to watch. Every day recorded with a photo and a mark etched on the wall. Year 2: (80-81) Installed in his studio, Tehching punches into a time clock that takes his photo every hour for a year, day and night. Year 3: (81-82) Tehching spends a year living and sleeping rough in Manhattan. No shelter. He endures a sub-zero winter outdoors and records his experience in a sequence of powerful black and white photos taken with a tripod and timer. Year 4: (83-84) Rope Piece. Tehching spends a year tethered to artist Linda Montana by a 7 foot rope. They are not allowed to touch. Their daily conversations are recorded on cassette and then sealed. Relations between the two were strained to say the least by the end of the year. Year 5: (85-86) In an act of creative self-negation, Tehching denies art, and refuses to make it or view it in any way for a year. For the next thirteen years, Tehching drops out of view, stops making art and starts cataloguing his lifeworks.

Tehching has been overlooked and marginalised by the art establishment, not only for racial reasons, but also because his work was too difficult to either quantify or consume. However, his status amongst the performance art world borders on the legendary, and the publication this week of his lifeworks in the book OUT OF NOW, coinciding with an installation of his work at MoMA suggest his impact on the art world is ripe for reappraisal. This self-effacing and charming visionary seems to be finally getting the attention his work deserves.

OUT OF NOW is available to buy from Unbound and MoMA.

Read Tim Etchells beautiful toast to Tehching from last Monday’s launch event here.

Read the recent article on Tehching in the New York Times.

Author Adrian Heathfield, artist Tehching Hsieh and designer David Caines

I was at the Guildhall last night helping out with the Man Booker Prize dinner. The Indian writer Aravind Adiga won the prize for his debut novel ‘The White Tiger’. He was handed the trophy which I designed, but left it sitting lonely on the lectern when he left the stage. The trophy will now be engraved before it follows Aravind back to Mumbai.

Aravind with the lovely trophy

I have been working for some time now rebranding the Man Booker Prizes for Hoop Associates. This is to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the literary prize, and to bring the relatively new International Prize (two winners so far, Nigeria’s Chinua Achebe and the Albanian Ismail Kadaré) into the family. As part of the project I got to design new trophies for all the prizes (see below) one of which is now on display at London’s V&A (Modern Room) as part of a small exhibition about the prize.

The “bonkers” decision to ban a poster featuring an 800-year old painting of a naked woman (deemed “obscene”) designed by yours truly has now been reversed by TfL. You can read about it here. In case you wondered what all the fuss was about here’s a detail of the painting.

Avert your eyes!