True Faith: Joy Division/New Order
30 June-3 September 2017
£13,658.82 each http://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/29033/1/vintage-raf-simons-parkas-one-sale-for-20000
'The collection itself debuted in 2003 and was dedicated to Peter Saville, who is known most famously for the record sleeves for he designed for Factory Records artists. Simons drew inspiration from the graphic designer’s archives, which he was granted full access to, as well as early Russian Constructivism, Bauhaus and British vintage clothing. These coats were hand-painted by Saville himself and are the ultimate token of this iconic collaboration.'
At this exhibition there was a room with a cinema showing the different music videos. My Dad and I watched all of the loop of music videos twice. I wasn't distracted at all, absolutely captivated. I forgot how powerful a stimulus a music video is. Having some sort of imagery to accompany the music... makes it very engaging.
Blue Monday music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GMjH1nR0ds
The amount of different frames in this video is mental! It is also crazy how the different sections have been arranged, like a visual collage of lots of different sketches arranged together. They actually turned this music video into a flip-book of different images used to created the video and this features within the music video itself. I find it fascinating how they chose all of these random things... I suppose they represent modernism and having the dog in there almost takes the piss out of it.
True Faith music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfI1S0PKJR8
This is a personal favourite. I really like the characters created.
Perfect Kiss music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3XW6NLILqo
This music video isn't something especially artistic, it is a show case of the talent of the band as musicians. It is incredible that they were playing all of this at once in one go, where as now a days with all of the technology you can create as many layers as you want and each musician can play as many parts as they want at the same time.
After watching this video I was so close to just start clapping, like if you were watching them live. The silence of the art gallery didn't seem right at all... Everybody watching was tapping their foot or bopping a little bit but the nature of being in an art gallery and watching a screen restrained all the energy that was so obviously bursting in the video and that everyone watching was feeling... Berger discusses this in his 'Ways of Seeing'.
The quote "In the form of the record cover, art could be part of the everyday" is a key argument to the benefit of analogue items; argued by Benjamin.
Michael Bracewell- Peter Saville: Estate redux
Published by Manchester Art Gallery
Printed in the UK by County Print
'Savilles design's for Factory anticipated this shift more than 30 years ago. His album artwork time travels, takes the style collage of classic postmodernism and restores to that strange reconfiguration of values the gravitas' p41
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| p42 |
'body of work that has its origins within the highly sophisticated style codes of iconic, immediately post-punk music'
'Saville's work employs the devices of post-modernism, yet places them in the service of cultural requiem' p42
'in the pre-digital, pre-computerate, pre-punk years of the 1970s, there was a materiality and scale about pop and rock music - symbolised most directly through the physical weight and larger-scale format of record sleeves, which was matched by the near imperial status which leading pop and rock stars then enjoyed.'
'the density and richness of this relationship between fan and star would be rearranged and dismantled first by the sub-cultural revolution of punk, and nearly 20 years later by the replication of punk process (DIY music and music distribution) enabled by digital technologies.' p44
'Wolfe's contrary but interesting essay asserted that designers who had created the source materials upon which much Pop art was based (from advertising logos to filling-station signs to comic books) were in fact more sophisticated. creatively, than the Pop artists who has appropriated their work.' p45 (Tom Wolfe 1975 'Chester Gould Versus Roy Lichtenstein')
'It is typical of Wolfe's career-long antipathy towards the fashionable rhetoric of contemporary art that he should choose to favour the industrial designers of Mass Age products and technologies over their fine artistic interpreters'
'Saville would be virtually unique in blurring the boundaries between art, design, product, context, status and value to an almost unprecedented degree'
'the design and creation of record sleeves provided for the pop generations - those born from the early 1950s onwards - with a medium of extraordinary potential'
'the appreciation of the artistic status of pop album packaging would be vastly enhanced by his equal enthusiasm for the ideas and examples provided by the development of classic modernism' p46
'career-long belief the design could be liberated form the containers of product, brief and market and allowed to exist as an untethered artistic form'
'Factory products (...) were often bought and regarded by pop consumers as art objects in their own right'
'their packaging regarded as integral to the finished work, and as having complete artistic parity to the music, image and performance of the recording artist' p48
'Mobility along the Pop art/Fine art continuum - an oscillation between High and Low cultural forms - would also shape the impeccably art directed radicalism of Roxy Music' p49
'Saville was colliding exquisite, highly poetic imagery with a kind of brutal formalism, for all the world as though Factory products were muniments of a crematorium in deep space'
'Saville's work for Factory was brought to the vast audiences commanded by pop music - thus making pop music itself the gallery for his work' p50
'how being a pop consumer could provide a simultaneous education in sociology and contemporary culture' p51
About 'A basket of Roses' 1890 for Power, Corruption and Lies album: 'Saville had created an object (the only function of which was to protectively package a vinyl record) which was simultaneously and knowingly created as an artistic statement, and one of considerable importance' p52
Saville same position as 'Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again' 1975 'Some company recently was interested in buying my "aura" - an observation which heralded an epoch that is with us still' p53
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| Blue Monday New Order Factory Single 1983 Design Peter Saville and Brett Wickens |
'happened to pick up a floppy disc that was being used to store pre-set sounds and sequences for the band's synthesisers.'
'originally composed for their equipment and intended as an automatically generated track that the band could programme to play as an encore once they had left the stage'
'saw the floppy disc as a signifier of information and its potential as a design form'
'it was whilst listening to the track on (analogue) cassette tape on his way home that he conceived the idea for the cover'
Record also contained a 'colour-code containing information about the record'
p64
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| Power, Corruption and Lies New Order Factory Album 1983 Design Peter Saville Associates A Basket of Roses, Ignace-Henri-Theodore Fantin-Latour 1890 |
'At this time, he was particularly interested in what he terms 'the convergence of computerisation and historical data' - the collision of history and technology in contemporary culture and particularly curatorial practice. As works of art started to be uploaded to computerised retrieval systems, allowing curators to store information and sear for artworks in the digital realm, he imagined new visual compositions occurring'
'seductive work that was also covertly interactive - as the key code (an alphabet) was in a colour wheel on the reverse, allowing the possibility of deciphering the title and other information'
p66
Substance New Order
Factory Album 1987
Design Peter Saville Associates
'Saville embarked upon a mission to create a series of contemporary images from nature'
'Long before Photoshop allowed photographs and designers the freedom to digitally manipulate imagery, the pair developed a technique they called 'Dichromat' to selectively re-colour their images using layered filters'
p73
