A film made on the occasion of DREAM FOURTEEN
Portfolio of 14 prints by Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas published in a limited edition by Paul Stolper 2021
Sarah Lucas in conversation with Michael Clark
Fergus Henderson makes Floating Islands
Direction, Camera, Editor : Julian Simmons
Vocal Formant Synthesis : Julian Simmons
Filmed : UK & Venice
Produced : 2021
#dreamfourteen
Specially designed gatefold artist book
Companion publication to the 14 limited edition prints – DREAM FOURTEEN – by Julian Simmons and Sarah Lucas, published by Paul Stolper 2021
Includes a four-in-a-bed conversation, a catalogue of the print edition and five roomy orgiastic panorama dramas, configurable to your fancies
Gatefolds : 5 concertina spreads comprising 2 single gatefolds opening to 67.5cm wide and 3 double gate-folds opening to 90cm wide!
Photographs : Julian Simmons
Conceptual design, graphics & layout : Julian Simmons
Text : conversation between Sarah Lucas, Michael Clark, Don Brown and Julian Simmons
Dimension : 24.3 x 23 cm, 26 pages
Paper : 200gsm Fedrigoni, chlorine-free pure cellulose, FSC certified
Ink : K + 1 spot colour
Binding : yellow thread, saddle singer sewn, paperback
Publisher : Paul Stolper
Production : Fletcher Books
Printed & bound in the UK : Pureprint
ISBN : 978-1-9160233-1-4
Price : £20.00
Order your DREAM FOURTEEN now, limited copies available : from Paul Stolper (also Blackwell’s, Waterstones, Amazon, Australia / New Zealand : Thames & Hudson)
or drop into the London gallery and purchase direct : Paul Stolper.
Social media : let’s see your configurations of the fold-outs …a centre-piece table sculpture …a pop-up gallery! – use the hashtag…
#dreamfourteen
SCHQ presents TAPED-UP, a one week online screening!
24 – 30 April 2020
20 minutes of Early-Man splitting seasoned logs (harder than fresh wood)
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Demonstration of the Forest-Master Duocut, Manual Log-Splitter :
‘Duocut’ as it cuts both ways (and the lower blade makes kindling)
‘Manual’ as it’s not electric or petrol powered, it’s powered by you and gravity.
Is it more efficient than wielding a good splitting axe? I guess not, but there’s no risk of ending up with a wooden leg.
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Fat Vegan :
is a philosophy, not a person (…or is, in as much as a person is an idea). Conjured-up twelve years ago during Lent – when the oil ran out, at the time he wasn’t popular at all. Since then I keep hearing more about Fat Vegan …though his origin is 100% at home with us. Possibly other Fat Vegan notions are not up to speed on who he is …so tread carefully. Fat Vegan adds a nob of butter and goes to work on an egg …that’s why he’s fat, yet he still knows his onions. Presently, as you’ll see, his main concerns are, due to a loose screw finding a thicker screw; keeping close to the edge; a wobbly pole; your uncle; a metal ring around a bush; Swedish skills.
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Occasional Sounds :
a granular synth engine in development (part of NUMBERSTREAM) capable of playing 128 simultaneous grains, here just running 1 grain.
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Two new films showing 2 November 2019 – 16 February 2020
Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, China
EGG
57 minutes
+
TAPED-UP
44 minutes
As part of FRANZ WEST at TATE MODERN London, ENERGY DAIRIES is screening in ‘A FRANZ WEST LIVING ROOM’
20 February – 2 June 2019
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See more : ENERGY DAIRIES
TAPED-UP
SARAH LUCAS in conversation with LOUISA BUCK
Filmed in the run-up to the 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale 2015.
Direction / Camera / Editor : JULIAN SIMMONS
Filmed on location : London Art Workshop, February 2015
Produced by : JULIAN SIMMONS 2019
PREVIOUS SCREENINGS
SCHQ Electric : 24 – 30 April 2020, online streaming, Sadie Coles HQ
Beijing, China : 2 November 2019 – 16 February 2020, Red Brick Art Museum
I’d been filming extensively around this time, 10’s of hours of footage and talking to the BBC in dark London taverns.
Part of this footage became the 60 minute EGG film – which was shot over the Christmas New-Year period of 2014-15 in Suffolk. Then London in January 2015… judicious filming of Vaseline’d, freshly leg-shaved women being wrapped in plaster bandage, making the molds for sculptures that would hopefully head out to Venice in just a couple of months.
Into February, the location of TAPED-UP was alongside a workshop where Sarah was making the casts from those very molds. Mixing-up large quantities of dusty casting-plaster in buckets, knocking the air out and ensuring that the rough seams of the molds didn’t leak – which they did – they always do.
Anyway, still in an anti-plaster suit, an interview was looming. Sarah didn’t want Louisa to see the new in-progress sculptures, in fact it was imperative not to. The British Council (who run ‘our shop’ in Venice – the GB pavilion there) are totally strict and expert about such matters, surely an unsuspecting hotbed for recruiting spies. The Venice Biennale as you know is where all the countries of the world show-off their cutting-edge creative endeavours. Utmost top secrecy is demanded, I’m sure we had to sign something to that affect. We had an idea of tying Louisa to a chair, to prevent curiosity and an intellectual leak. As you’ll see, Sarah switched this around. She was in this case, a muse of her own making.
As a point of interest, the molds (which you don’t see) are destroyed in the process of extricating the casts. There’s only one chance, and for sure the muses – our nine naked friends, would not gladly pose again, numbingly motionless for a second attempt. In fact there wouldn’t have been enough time. No, if the casts in some way failed, there would only be half a show going to Venice, shipping was imminent.
Sarah could use a drink.
She’s never keen on being filmed, but doesn’t mind me knocking about on rare occasion – this was such an occasion.
Julian Simmons 2020
Premiere screening : Charlottenburg Berlin : 16th January 2019 : 8pm
Location : Delphi-Lux
Details + Reserve Your Seat !!! : Contemporary Fine Arts
UNSEEN TRIPLE-BILL SANDWICH > 16 January 2019, 8pm, BERLIN :
1. I’VE GOT THE BALLS, filmed in Mexico City, 28 minutes.
2. LIVESTREAM FACETIME CONVERSATION : UK KITCHEN <> BERLIN CINEMA, Sarah Lucas & Julian Simmons naked with CFA, anything might happen, 30 minutes.
3. TAPED-UP, filmed in London, 44 minutes.
PRESS RELEASE :
Contemporary Fine Arts is pleased to present Julian Simmons & Sarah Lucas: I’ve Got the Balls, a screening and livestream interview at the Delphi Lux Theatre on Wednesday, January 16 at 8pm. On the occasion of the final week of Sarah Lucas’ New Museum retrospective Au Naturel, which will travel to Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum this summer, CFA will screen two of Lucas’ performances as documented by filmmaker and Lucas’ partner Julian Simmons. Between screenings of I’ve Got the Balls (30 mins, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, filmed 2018) and Taped-Up (44 mins, Venice Biennale, filmed 2017), Lucas and Simmons will be present via livestream from their Suffolk kitchen.
Curators Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton sum up the stretch of Lucas’ significance in the introduction to their New Museum exhibition: “Over the past thirty years, Lucas has created a distinctive and provocative body of work that subverts traditional notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Since the late 1980s, Lucas has transformed found objects and everyday materials such as cigarettes, vegetables, and stockings into absurd and confrontational tableaux that boldly challenge social norms. The human body and anthropomorphic forms recur throughout Lucas’s works, often appearing erotic, humorous, fragmented, or reconfigured into fantastical anatomies of desire. Initially associated with a group known as the Young British Artists (YBAs), who began exhibiting together in London in the late 1980s, Lucas is now one of the UK’s most influential artists.”
Much of Sarah Lucas’ work, and her collaboration with Julian Simmons, begins in the kitchen. A place for gathering and the domain of the eggs that are crucial to her practice, it becomes a natural setting for developing ideas. Lucas’ Penetralia series, based on casting erect penises, began in the kitchen. Simmons recalls: “One winter when the heating oil ran out and the oil truck couldn’t get down the iced-up track, we fired up a neglected Rayburn stove in the kitchen, shut the doors, got really hot, stripped off, I slapped my nob on the table, and Sarah started making a mould with plaster bandage.” Who knows what might happen as Lucas and Simmons open up their kitchen to the Delphi Lux audience.
I’ve Got the Balls captures the Women’s Egg Throwing Event Lucas enacted at Kurimanzutto, Mexico City in 2018. Lucas has used eggs in her work since her 1969 Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, where she engaged questions of femininity and fertility, playing with a fried egg boobs motif. Sarah first brought female friends and collaborators together to lob 1000 eggs at gallery walls at CFA over Easter 2017 and most recently at the New Museum opening. Drawing upon the Pagan fertility rite of egg throwing in Spring, which later evolved into Christian Easter, Lucas’ egg throws are performances of self-actualization and solidarity. They are also a great time. Simmons’ film captures the egg throw in its meticulous preparation and joyful execution, revelling in the slow drip of yolky yellows.
In Taped-Up, Lucas is duct taped to a chair as she discusses her then-upcoming 2015 Venice Biennale Pavilion with art critic Louisa Buck. With one hand mobile to facilitate smoking and drinking, Lucas’ inhibited posture personifies a play with power integral to her practice. In her catalogue essay No Excuses for the Au Naturel retrospective, Maggie Nelson writes: “One thing is for certain: Lucas’s work enacts and shares in power. “Power. The word keeps coming up,” Olivia Laing wrote in a 2015 profile. “Lucas is aware that she possesses it herself, both as an artist and a person.” Perhaps that is what Lucas means when she says she believes in “beyond feminism.” Not that feminism didn’t or doesn’t have to do with power. But it’s easy to slip into presuming that power is only out there, something to be wielded against you, something on the horizon to struggle dourly toward. How to be alive – and even more alive – to the power we already have? How to make good pervy use of it how to not let it turn against you, how to stay on its pulse?” Lucas and Simmons certainly answer.
This is the first movie theatre screening and livestream interview CFA has hosted. It is an experiment we hope will broaden access to Lucas and Simmons’ work and power!
Album download > THE SLIDER on Bandcamp
THE SLIDER is one of ten pieces of music chosen by Sarah Lucas for BBC Radio 3’s programme Private Passions, broadcast 5 February 2017.
01 BRITTEN – Fanfare for St. Edmondsbury
02 YES – Long Distance Runaround
03 BRITTEN – Sally in our Alley
04 GURNEY – Sleep
05 PURCELL – Tis I that have warm’d ye
06 PURCELL – To Woden thanks we render
07 CAN – Oh Yeah
08 SIMMONS – THE SLIDER
09 BRITTEN – Big Chariot, Songs from the Chinese
10 BRITTEN – Dance Song, Songs from the Chinese
BBC Radio 3, edited broadcast Private Passions – Sarah Lucas. NB not available as the original 1 hour broadcast, for copyright reasons all the music in this stream has been shortened to 1 minute.
[Above] the NUMBERSTREAM mixer-panner and the three ‘7-string’ slider instruments plucked and bowed in this broadcast.
“It’s like a bunch of grapes!”, Sarah Lucas.
sound of BLACK MILK electroacoustic gong
Atlas and Catalogue – 11 Orbicular Drawings | Text – Cosmological Tone
Published to coincide with the exhibition NOW JULIAN SIMMONS
55 photographs, 5 diagrams, 12,000 words | Bespoke ultra-dark graphite silvered ink | 72 pages : 200gsm Fedrigoni paper | Matt-laminate softback : 290gsm Fedrigoni grey card | 30.6 x 23.7 cm
Privately Published : Julian Simmons 2015 | Limited Edition : 500 copies | Printing : The Five Castles Press UK
Artworks, Photographs, Text, Design, Layout : Julian Simmons
£20 excl. shipping
Short-run edition – limited copies still available from :
Direct from me, contact
Lychee One, mail-order
‘Black Milk really is something. And something else.
As I read it I kept thinking of William Blake. And then there he was.’ Angus Cook.
‘Looks great. It covers life, the whole universe and everything.’ Mat Collishaw.
‘Are they drawn on a dome?’ Bill Jackson.
‘Terrific show – the technique alone is amazing, but the effects … I’ve just been reading up astro- and sub-atomic physics, so I was right at home there, and the eye as mediator between the two. Loved the paper-maker’s eyelash as well. It reminds me of the obscure story about Elizabeth the First and a comet over London.
ps. ‘the throb of the artery’! – I didn’t know that was Blake. Yeats pinched that line, what a rogue.’ Peter Walker.
…yes, the eyelash! – of an Italian paper-maker – must have been seriously stretching his or her brow after their partner revealed they were having an affair …or some such. Amazingly invisible before the drawing …the drawing revealing it, detective-like, a message blindly indented into a notepad. So yes within Yeats is Blake, and knocking about probably a few other poets; always worth standing on the shoulders of the high-points of civilisation.
PHOTOGRAPHS
In this publication I hint at what may be seen from encouraging a sideways gaze. While to an extent I appreciate the reasoning for photographically recording flat works flat on – as for many works this is the perpendicular in which they were made and intended to be subsequently viewed, but this isn’t how I approached considering or making these drawings.
These are drawings that positively seek and respond to being viewed from all acute and obtuse angles, and under changing angles of natural light; hence their curious nature from the side – they begin to protrude and sink. Aesthetically they correspond to the not-flat not-3D undetermined dimensions of mental space – and it’s state of knowledge that fuels primitive imaginings.
TEXT
Many moons ago I wrote a book entitled – NUMINOUS IMAGE AS COSMOLOGICAL MONOGRAPH; it exists in only three copies, and employed a printing method I would further develop for the limited edition large-format tome, PENETRALIA.
It recently struck me that many of it’s subjects on cosmological tone were feeding these current drawings.
With the request “I need 28 pages of text” I handed a copy over to Sarah Lucas …the bizarre but bang-on extracts in this publication are those that she selected.
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New Series of 11 Drawings
Sheet : 105 x 75cm 640gsm (x 5), 76 x 56cm 300gsm (x 6); graphite on 100% cotton Fabriano.
Frame : 113.5 x 83cm (x 5), 86.5 x 66.5cm (x 6); welded aluminium, powder-coated; AR museum glass.
Publication
BLACK MILK, 30.6 x 23.7cm, 72 pages.
Lychee One, 38-50 Pritchards Road, London E2
Tues – Sat, 25 November – 22 December 2015, 12 – 6pm
JS: “In each between 75,000 and 150,000 feet of graphite line, 15 – 30 miles of tone and bare intention; in all 11 drawings probably over 200 miles …just off Hackney road.”
“How long does it take to make each drawing?”
JS: “I’m often asked that. It’s near to hypnotic limits, …a couple of weeks, though ultimately that’s not of any import. The show is titled ‘NOW’: my experiment is to take time out of the equation, amplitude is key. So I’m referring to X and Y; amplitude – the Y [axis] – brightness, intensity, and when adding another dimension ‘the X’ – which we generally ascribe to time, provides the possibility of fluctuations in intensity – to be recorded and appear as a frequency. We experience this as colour. Basically, colour is built upon rapid variations in brightness caught in another dimension. It’s mysterious, but removing colour in some way decouples our correspondence – or adherence, with time. This could be handy later on.
I recall the Tibetan concept of the cosmos – especially the entirely circular Kalachakra, with it’s various diameters measured precisely in variable units; I’ve always been curious that a philosophy of consciousness can be measured so specifically and elastically! I’m not a whole-sale advocate of any philosophy, except the mind behind.”
“I notice you always write your titles in uppercase.”
JS: “Yes, of course words are primarily visual, their abstract shapes are stronger in uppercase – in the original full-height form of their characters. NOW has a circle at it’s centre – ‘the target of now’ and is surrounded by the saw-tooth-waves of N and W. I’m amazed how this passes people by, so often my titles are quoted in so-called ‘title-case’ – which is not only messy, but loses the abstract presence of the word.” [Addendum: ‘now’ crops-up in titles… ‘Choices Up Now’, ‘Art Now’, ‘Drawing Now’, etc, though as far as I’m aware, NOW hasn’t before been used as the sole title of an exhibition. Six months on from NOW, and a second instance has emerged: Jeff Koons’ exhibition ‘Now’, at Newport Street Gallery.]
“You’ve referred to yourself as a ‘Milkmaster’?”
JS: “I’m Milking the Mystical.”
“Cosmic Eye?”
JS: “…yes – and Celestial Breast!
…and it goes without saying – Self-portrait; they are microcosmic. Nothing has ever looked at you like this.
I can’t recall seeing a two-dimensional work – drawing or painting – that so acknowledged it’s existence by being viewed at an acute angle.
They exist for the not-flat – for not being themself – while being the only agent of themself; when drawing I focus upon the image that hovers above the paper – the undrawable part. Perceptual mirrors? mirrors of consciousness? …I’m not sure how to place them, but they are something strange, powerful, positive, and addictive to the self – operating on similar terms to a chemical device.
“In their recording they seem to have transposed your mind onto a sheet of paper, which plays itself back when observed – such that you wonder if there is someone else in the room.”
JS: …quite, or some mind else …the mind behind.
‘The frame of mind one might need to inhabit in order to cover 200 miles in pencil is suggested in the vague, trippy tone of Simmons’ explanation for the works, in which the “Tibetan concept of the cosmos” is briefly mentioned, alongside the “Celestial Breast”, and the “Cosmic Eye”. These terms allude to a state of consciousness that isn’t founded on logic or reason, but on another kind of cognition which is rooted in the spiritual, or the meditative, or the hypnotic.
Many years ago, Henri Michaux made a name for himself by ingesting mescaline and drawing the results. Through his hysterical scribbles we can observe his obsessive commitment to following the impulses of his mind and to produce, again and again, the same line. Where Michaux’s drawings were wild and deranged, and Simmons’ are obsessively well ordered, we see in both artists’ work the mysterious attraction of automated drawing. Whether or not he is “Milking the Mystical” (as Simmons suggests), this show speaks to the enduring practice of taking a fine-tipped pencil to paper in an attempt to diagram the workings of a mind’, Emma Capps, 200 Miles of Graphite, Art Collector Magazine.
‘Hi James, two of the images are of Sarah doing the plastering, the other two are of Sarah getting plastered! …not suggesting final titles but ‘Getting Plastered’ would be a rather nice inclusion. Very best, Julian!’
‘The artist Julian Simmons, talks about photographing Sarah Lucas as she works on a new piece for the Venice Biennale, casting 10 human figures – including herself’, Financial Times, 25 April 2015, FT Weekend Magazine; pages 22-23 & 24-25 centrefold.
Photographs from the book I SCREAM DADDIO.
Questions for Julian Simmons from Liz Jobey at the FT.
Liz edited my slightly unpredictable answers into a more lucid read, but here are the unedited Q&A’s!…
Featured by ARTSY: A Journey to Mexico with Sarah Lucas, Through the Eyes of Collaborator and Partner Julian Simmons.
‘…we asked the photographer to share insights around the images, the trip to Mexico, and his multivalent relationship with Lucas’…
The unedited Q&A here…
Feature 72:09 | Trailer 1:11
REALIDAD – SARAH LUCAS Y AMIGOS EN MÉXICO
A month in Mexico with British artist Sarah Lucas
Camera / Editor / Colour / Music : Julian Simmons
Music from the album TOWER
Companion to the book : TITTIPUSSIDAD
SCREENING :
MEXICO | 17 March – 7 April 2018 | KURIMANZUTTO, Rafael Rebollar 94, San Miguel Chapultepec 11850, México D.F.
PREVIOUS SCREENINGS :
BERLIN | 13 June – 31 July 2014 | CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS GALERIE GMBH, Am Kupfergraben 10, 10117 Berlin Mitte
BRICK-FACTORY EXCERPTS :
NEW YORK | 5 – 29 March 2014 | KARMA, 39 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012
LONDON | 15 – 20 October 2013 | Sadie Coles HQ, 62 Kingly Street, London
“SUPER GRRRREEAAATTTTT TIT TEDDY. Love the look of it, and sound of it! Always good to shake a stick at ‘limitations’!”, Gregor Muir, Executive Director of the ICA.
“So sexy – the fleshy close-ups at that party, the cigarettes and glue, the brick-making guys massaging wet mud with their hands, and that guy working a pestle and mortar – so sensual!!”
“For anyone who doesn’t know you Sarah, this is really what you’re like! …and some of that footage – it looked like a painting, so vibrant”, Michael Clark, CBE.
‘I watched Realidad earlier this week and loved it. I really dig all the subtle audio and video manipulations throughout, and those guys making the bricks by hand was amazing’, Sam Dunn, British Film Institute.
“Tit-Teddy is essential – he makes you feel so good, after this everyone will want Tit-Teddy!”, Sarah Lucas.
“If this is art, what was happening before?”
“…nobody knows, forget that”
“forget before; exercise”
“…getting fit!”