Adrienne Rich
Woman of substance
Revered by feminists as well as literary critics, Adrienne Rich brought to light the oppression of women, says Nicholas Lezard.

 
Simon Armitage 
Northern lines
The lineage of great bards of the North continues with Simon Armitage, says Sameer Rahim.

 
Peter Porter 
Words without boundaries
Peter Porter’s fecundity of imagination gave voice to his unique and compelling intelligence, says Sean O’Brien.

Daljit Nagra
Passage From India
Daljit Nagra’s blockbuster poetry collection is all about his Asian-ness, says Sam Leith.

Komninos Zervos 
The digital page 
Komninos Zervos’s experiments on his laptop takes poetry into the future, writes Ed Wright.

Lavinia Greenlaw
Crossing boundaries 
Poetry surrounds Lavinia Greenlaw, but her art refuses to be confined to one genre, says Alex Clark.

In 1952, English readers would have encountered their first lines of Adrienne Rich’s poetry, in the Oxford-based magazine Fantasy Poets, in which new work would find its first hearing. She was in good company – the issue also contained writing by Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Jennings, and George Steiner, among others. Here is a stanza from Versailles: Petit Trianon: When we were younger gardens were for games / But now across the sun-gilt lawn of kings / We drift, consulting catalogues for names / Of postured gods: the cry of closing rings / For us and for the couples of the wood / And all good children who are all too good.

She also had good company in WH Auden, who introduced her first collection of poems, A Change of World, in 1951, when she was 22 years old. The introduction, while generous, ends on a note of what may be categorised under the heading ‘faint praise’: ‘the poems a reader will encounter in this book are modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs: that, for a first volume, is a good deal.’ 

Maybe that praise stung, or prodded her into another direction, one in which she was no longer content to speak quietly and respect her elders. Move forward to 1997, and the letter she wrote refusing the offer of a medal, to be presented by President Bill Clinton, from the National Endowment of the Arts – one of the highest orders of artistic recognition the United States can bestow: ‘I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art ... is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration...

 ‘Anyone familiar with my work from the early sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence — as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright.’

Rich’s refusal stood out — stands out — from the award’s well-meaning history. She went on to lambast the Clinton administration for allowing the gap between rich and poor in her country to widen: an uncomfortable message for the self-proclaimed socially liberal at the time.

Her journey from crafter of tidily wrought verse of promising enigma, to one of freer form but unambiguous political message was one that dismayed conservative critics, and it’s hard not to see why when you look at her later verse. Also an essayist,she wrote the hugely influential Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence in 1980, which although not quite kick starting, certainly put a rocket under the growing discipline of gender studies. It was a polemic directly aimed at male power, specifically the male power of ‘institutions of marriage and motherhood as unpaid production; the horizontal segregation of women in paid employment; the decoy of the upwardly mobile token woman; male control of abortion, contraception, and childbirth; enforced sterilization; pimping, female infanticide, which robs mothers of daughters and contributes to generalized devaluation of women’. Some of the language looks rather corny or strident now, but those were different times, and it helped to shock. Besides, by no means have all those issues addressed in that list gone away.

Her poetry, post early 1960s, is certainly a poetry that makes much of its issues, and is perhaps valued more for the purity of its heart than its formal grace. She has, as 1983's One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem puts it, ‘a schoolgirl’s ardent rectitude’. When she writes: that the daughter born a poet / will die of dysentery / while the daughter born to organize / will die of cancer, you may think that sons also suffer from dysentery or cancer; but then as she wrote herself, it was hard to think of yourself as a certain kind of woman poet in the 1940s and 1950s – ‘To be “like other women” had been a problem for me.’ To be a lesbian until relatively recently, even in America, was not easy; to say so as part of your art – the poet’s lover’s ‘you’ becomes explicitly female in her work – is to invite several levels of disdain, and she could be acclaimed as having eroded much of that disdain by her very presence. And as we still see women being encouraged to partake in a certain ideal of beauty, we shall miss that good child who chose no longer to be all too good. She died last year. 

In the last 40 years British poetry has been dominated by the North of England: Philip Larkin lurking in Hull, Tony Harrison railing from Leeds and Ted Hughes, bard of the Yorkshire landscape — who between 1984 and his death in 1998 was the Poet Laureate. Though their verse could be emotionally direct, all three men valued privacy. Certainly, none could be described as fond of the limelight.

Simon Armitage, the Northern poet who lives near where he was born in Marsden, Yorkshire, has more than any other taken up their mantle, drawing on similar subjects – masculinity, North vs South, landscape – but with a more open accessible writing personality. Married to BBC radio producer Sue Roberts, with whom he has a daughter, his early collections are full of familiar references to ordinary British life, whether it is sporting success, pop music or the 1960s Batman television show. As likely to be heard on a pop music show on Radio 1 as he is on highbrow Radio 3, Armitage is not afraid of spreading his gifts: a playwright, librettist, memoirist, translator, nature writer and singer-songwriter for his band The Scaremongers, he has also been awarded the prestigious Forward Prize for poetry among other accolades. All this, in addition to his ubiquity on the British school syllabus, has made him one of the best-known poets in Britain.

Armitage was born in 1963. Unlike Hughes and Larkin he did not attend Oxford or Cambridge or even read English at university. Instead he followed in his father’s footsteps and trained to become a probation officer. Gig: The Life and Times of a Rock-star Fantasist, his 2008 memoir, told how his earliest ambition was to be in a band like The Smiths or The Fall. Tellingly, perhaps, one band he formed had a literary reference in its name: Tess and the d’Urbs. (Thomas Hardy, though not from the North, was also a poet who made much of his humble beginnings.) 

When he was 19, Armitage got his ear pierced – something that caused bemusement and even hostility in his household. In a well-known poem from his  collection Book of Matches (1993), he wrote: My father thought it bloody queer / the day I rolled home with a ring of silver in my ear / half hidden by a mop of hair. “You’ve lost your head. / If that’s how easily you’re led / you should’ve had it through your nose instead.”  These lines give a flavour of Armitage’s style: colloquial but measured, playful with dialect (“queer” meaning both strange but also gay), always approachable.

A poetry-writing course led Armitage to conclude that verse could be a profession. He was so proud of his first published work for a small magazine that he never cashed the cheque for £2 they paid him. He won the Eric Gregory award in 1988 and a year later he published his first collection Zoom! Since then there have been nearly a dozen collections and countless other projects. Armitage’s poetry values graft as well as craft. In an interview he explained a little about his working method: ‘My poems are built. They’re worked on. They’re crafted. And they demonstrate a kind of apprenticeship.’ The references to engineering are no coincidence: the North of England was once the industrial capital of the country, and pride in construction runs deep.

Some of Armitage’s most appealing work has come through collaboration. He won an Ivor Novello songwriting award for his work on the Channel 4 documentary musical Feltham Sings. He spoke to young inmates at the notorious Feltham prison and turned their words into verse, which was then set to music and performed to the camera. Thieves, drug mules and murderers were given a voice – one that neither condemned nor sentimentalised them.

In 2007 he published his astonishing translation of the medieval epic Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Written by an anonymous poet (most likely a northerner), Armitage makes the verse seem utterly contemporary. Before reading a passage at an event in this January, he told the audience that ‘poetry is a solitary act’ that could easily lead to loneliness. One way of combating that, and creatively rejuvenating, is by working with past poets.

The northern landscape Armitage recreates in Gawain was traversed by him for real in 2010, when he walked the famous Pennine Way, as told in his mordantly witty memoir Walking Home. With familiar self-deprecation, he wonders why it took Gawain just three verses to equip himself for a journey across Dark Ages Britain, but it took him an hour to prepare his rucksack for a seven-mile walk.

Inevitably, Armitage’s popular and critical acclaim has led to some gently mockery. Seamus Heaney, a friend, joked that he was so productive he should have his hands cut off. In one of his novels, Alan Hollinghurst, the Man Booker-winning author, has a character mention two gay clubs he frequents – Zoom! and Kid – the names of Armitage’s first two poetry collections.

Though Armitage runs the risk of spreading himself too thinly, his variety of works and highly popular readings have endeared him to the public. When Andrew Motion retired from the post of Poet Laureate in 2009, many felt the job was perfect for Armitage. In the end it went to Carol Ann Duffy, who is redefining the role to make it less about panegyrics to royal weddings or babies and more about commenting on the great issues of the day. Armitage, you suspect, would love to do something similar when the job next comes round. In the meantime he is working away, giving readings, walking, singing – and most of all writing in whatever form his poetic fancy takes him. 

At Cambridge in the 1970s I began to collect Peter Porter’s books, fascinated by his combination of urgent immediacy and highly wrought complexity. Here was a genuinely modern poet who had found his way past the forbidding monument of T.S.Eliot and sought, like Auden, to use the full poetic keyboard. Porter was engaged with everything that history, art, life, love and the imagination had to throw at him. He was urbane and raw, cryptic, visionary, socially observant, grimly comic – a combination to aspire to. 

In The Sanitized Sonnets from The Last of England, (1970) identified by Clive James as the book which confirmed Porter’s importance, Porter wrote: Much have I travelled in the realms of gold / for which I thank the Paddington and Westminster / Public Libraries: and I have never said sir / to anyone since I was seventeen years old.

Here he surely strikes an Australian chord – treating art and learning with urgent, unembarrassed gravity while not taking himself or anyone else too seriously, and simply ignoring the class-consciousness by which any English autodidact would be afflicted. Porter did not go to university, though he was to adorn several; he knew his stuff and other people’s besides, and while he was a supreme ironist there was no irony in his combination of high seriousness and undoctrinaire socialism. Like Auden’s novelist, he could be ‘among the filthy filthy too’, while dreaming his way into the minds of Frederick the Great, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce or addressing Faustian Nazi aesthete: in your last silk / Shirt by bomb light you are fingering Bach.

Born in 1929, Porter arrived in England in 1951 and would live in the same cat-haunted Bayswater flat until his death in 2010. London made sense to him: he read it as a Jacobean tragicomedy of ambition and sexual power, first casting himself as an envious onlooker. The rest of England remained in some sense foreign, though he put in time on the railways, travelling to readings in the back of its various beyonds. At the Castle Hotel, Taunton asks: but where do the people of England live? a question with continuing resonance. Porter himself lived in Westminster; the test bed for local-government economic cleansing and gerrymandering under the notorious Dame Shirley Porter, acolyte of the market rapacity made respectable by Thatcher, indulged by Blair and gloatingly celebrated by the grotesque posh-boy combo of Cameron and Osborne. Porter hated all of them devotedly, but the Cameron coalition lent his last days the colour of nightmare. ‘Life is a dream or very nearly,’ as he had long before written in a characteristically brilliant phrase from Last of the Dinosaurs. Porter himself might be among the last exemplars of uncorrupted civic-minded seriousness, and now the libraries he commended are being closed across the country.

Porter was also notably tolerant, maintaining a long friendship with Clive James, whose political views were, to put it mildly, remote from his own, and extending his generosity to numerous young poets, reading and encouraging them without seeking acolytes. I first met him in 1976 while working on a never-completed study of his poetry. At the time Porter was living through the aftermath of a tragedy, the suicide of his first wife, Jannice Henry, and was bringing up his daughters Jane and Katherine. He also found time for his ignorant young visitor, and gradually we became friends.

I looked forward to lunches in his favoured Indian restaurants, including one known as ‘The Lavatories’, while his phone calls and letters (he was an e-mail denier) were reports from a more interesting world. Porter was a man of unhesitating kindness, but this was matched by considerable powers of denunciation. A book or writer he disapproved of was compared to ‘spending winter in a canning factory in Narvik’, yet the hyperbole could also be affectionate, like his description of his native Brisbane as ‘the Reykjavik of the South’.

Appalled and be-gloomed by literary trends, he was always a great attender and conversationalist at parties and yet extremely professional and prolific in his freelance work for the BBC and the press. He possessed that thing now both fetishised and despised: actual information. Books, art, music and history were his generous province, to which all were invited. His absorption in Shakespeare, Pope, Browning and Wallace Stevens, as well as European literature, was matched by openness to the new: Ashbery interested him, as did younger experimenters such as John Kinsella.

In middle age, Porter began to revisit Australia, and considered settling there. It was a complex relationship: the early death of his mother and estrangement from his father seemed to be factors beyond reconciliation, but the landscapes and flora he frequently celebrated spoke to a sense of prelapsarian possibility in him, an ‘Australian innocence’, in which the physical and metaphysical worlds mingled like salt and fresh water in an estuary. What Porter believed is uncertain. He was not wholly convinced by daily reality, while his dreams involved vast dramatic narratives, and the art worlds of painting and music spoke to him with as much authority as bricks and mortar. This instability of categories provoked his exultant declaration, in Tending Towards the Condition, that: there is a shape to the world, more real / than time, more absolute than music.

Marriage to Christine Berg in 1991 gave Porter a further reason to remain in England: her wry good sense and political seriousness made a good match for him, though it sometimes seemed he felt undeserving of happiness. Australia nagged at him: he seemed both prized and rejected, admired and misunderstood, as well as being conscripted into a cultural border war with Les Murray, the only equal among his Australian contemporaries. He continued to visit and publish there.

And now it is – incredibly to those who knew him - three years since Peter Porter died: the vast body of poems is still settling and the 2010 The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems, which I edited with Don Paterson, is a small interim sample. His papers will soon be transferred to Australia, and there is a good deal of unpublished work that will enrich the picture. But the great roman-fleuve of his imagination has ceased to run. In the meantime, though, let it confidently be said that Porter was a major post-1945 poet of the Anglophone world. There have never been many of those.

There’s a good flavour of what Daljit Nagra’s poetry is all about early on in his second book. A poem called The Gob-Smacking Taste of Mine Inheritance! exuberantly asserts: my rights, as a native poet,/ To graft my heathen-Word on our old soil./ Henceforth the stock of the store/ is the fruit of a mutual realm!

The energy and attack of Nagra’s poetry, its freshness, its openness to the world, is what bounds up at you first. Only on closer examination do you see the cleverness of its construction, the attention to its place in the canon. That poem, for instance, is in dialogue with George Herbert and the history of Victorian imperialism – just as Nagra’s first collection, Look We Have Coming To Dover! (2007), implicitly took on the shade of Matthew Arnold. This first book was as close as the world of contemporary poetry gets to a blockbuster, going into a second printing even before it had officially been published.

It captured a moment – or supplied a lack. It was intended to: ‘My objective for my first book was very much of trying to make sure every poem was about Indian-ness. That was one of my targets. I was aware that there was a shortage of Indian voices in English poetry – about the contact between Indians and English. That was definitely a program: to really brown-up the English tradition.’

The poems – linguistically macaronic and crammed with the incongruous, homely and particular details of Anglo-Indian life – introduced readers to ‘Punglish’, as Nagra jokingly called his collision of English and Punjabi, a term that seems to have stuck.

‘When I started writing poetry,’ he says, ‘I was very aware that I wanted to bring an Indian feel to it. In the sense of their plosive, much more noisy sounds – sounds that really worked the mouth... and rhetorically rich, hopefully – I really like playing with syntax, language structures... partly to create this feeling of an artificial non-standard English voice.’

The sense of being caught between two cultures – a sense that brings excitement but also difficulty -- is his own. His father came to England in the early 1960s to work in the factories. He lived in a house with ten other men, saved up and when he had enough to buy a house brought his wife from India to join him. Nagra was brought up in England, speaking Punjabi at home. He didn’t learn English until he went to school at five.

School ‘was horrible ...  It was in the middle of a council estate and it was just kids from very poor backgrounds who had no respect for anything. It was a completely white area. There were only three of us, three students, who were non-white in school, and we all happened to be Asian. There was me, my brother and this one other boy.

‘This first book was very close to my own life story. You had to be very Indian in the home and very westernised outside the home. The two worlds didn’t mix at all. When you’re young you just do that instinctively, don’t you? You just mimic. You get on with it.’ Does this mean, I wonder, that he experienced his ethnic identity, initially, as fear? ‘Yes. Fear’s probably a good word. Everything always felt quite on the edge of danger.’

Deliverance came when his parents moved from Yiewsley in West London to Sheffield when Nagra was in his teens – and he went to what he calls ‘proper school’, taking O and A-levels and beginning to discover an interest in literature.  Nagra was turned on to poetry by a volume of William Blake when he was 19. Still, though, cultural difference asserted itself. His parents were dead set against his studying English, and ‘obsessed that I should be a doctor or a lawyer’: ‘They wanted me to be a very traditional Indian boy. They didn’t want me to study English or anything like that.’

The teenage Nagra ran away from home, ending up – where else would you head for in the late 1980s? – in Manchester: ‘I just ran away from home, turned up at a dole centre. I found a place that day. Otherwise I was going to sleep under a bridge or something. Just got lucky I guess. I got pretty desperate at that point – just needed to get away from my family.’

He returned six months or so later: ‘I’d made my point by then so my parents backed off. The whole thing just fizzled out. We never discussed it. My parents don’t believe in talking about these sorts of things.’ His point made, Nagra went on to study English at University. It was here that he started writing poems, but stopped when he left. It was nearly a decade – ‘I just didn’t have the confidence. I thought you had to be someone special to be writing poetry’ – before he started writing in earnest and, with the encouragement of the poet Ruth Padel, working towards publication.

Now, with two well-received collections and a shelf-full of awards and honorary teaching posts behind him, Nagra is well established in the poetry world. His next book, out this autumn, is a verse novel based on the Ramayana, ‘based on Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain versions as well as everything from different countries. I want it to have a real melting-pot multicultural thing’. Researching it (he doesn’t know Sanskrit and can speak, but doesn’t read, Punjabi) involved long days in the British Library: ‘Like a proper job! Verse novelist. As an inbetweeny I’ve found my inbetween form!’

With his parents, Nagra says: ‘It’s still a very difficult relationship. It’s quite a tough one  – because of these cultural differences. They still have a five-day week job – earn regular money, rather than being a poet, whatever that means. It’s a farming background. It’s classic stereotype farmers! They live that stereotype.’

He adds: ‘My brother’s a successful businessman and he lives in Canada now. Yeah. So one of us turned out all right.’

Back in the old school days of the early 1980s, when rap meant Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow, Melbourne-born performance poet Komninos Zervos was already performing his own quirky take on the genre. His primary influence though was closer to home — his grandmother.

‘She was a great rapper,’ he says. ‘In Greek. She rapped long repetitive melodic rhymes whilst bouncing me on her knee. It wasn’t song because she would freestyle in between set choruses and make up lines as she went.’

Komninos was born in 1950 and grew up in the fish and chip shop his parents ran in the inner Melbourne suburb of Richmond. It wasn’t an ideal life. In his poem Childhood in Richmond, he wrote of his father: who left Greece / with a bag / full of dreams / but spent the / rest of his life / as a slave / to a stove / till his dreams / were all greasy / and his hope / had all gone.

He wasn’t destined to follow his father’s footsteps: ‘It was the era of The Beatles, hippies and free love, and my dad, with his strict Greek values, tried to protect me from these influences. So I lived a double life: good Greek boy at home, and Aussie teenager at school. I was a weekend hippie who concealed it from my parents.’

In the 1970s, Komninos did ‘the right thing’ and married a good Greek girl. He worked a regular job and set up a family home, but was unsettled and frustrated that he was not expressing himself artistically. So, in 1980, after getting divorced, he kissedthe family and Greek community goodbye and opened up a late night coffee lounge, Tsakpina, in central Melbourne’s Lonsdale Street. The anarchist and street poets held regular readings there, and is how Komninos got to know Melbourne’s poetry community and was inspired to write verse himself.

By the mid-1980s, this long-haired, amiable, grizzly bear of a man, with his gravelly voice — still faintly inflected by its Greek heritage — had become one of Australia’s best-known performance poets. His best poems are primarily observation pieces focused on the everyday, shaped into art by a dry wit, anarchistic sense of mischief and appealing egalitarian spirit.

His success was a function of his ability to pitch his work to adults and children alike and resulted in a heavy touring schedule, playing at pubs and schools around the nation. On lonely nights away from his family in outback hotel rooms he began to experiment with his MacBook, exploring the potential of making concrete poetry that was dynamic on the screen.

This burgeoning interest in digital poetry took him to the University of Queensland where he undertook a Masters in the subject in 1995.

By 1998, he was artist in residence at Artec’s multimedia research centre in Islington, London, and produced a CD-Rom of digital poetry called Cyberpoetry Underground. It was an attempt to create a 3D textual journey (complete with soundtrack) through the London Underground. He chose five stations, each with its own themes: Heathrow (entry/exit); Piccadilly Circus (retail); Leicester Square (entertainment/sleaze); Russell Square (intellectual); and Manor House (suburban/ethnic). Each station then became the home for groups of digital poems he had been composing, poems whose words appear, disappear and move on the screen. To complete the experience he deployed advertising postcards and ‘models’ cards from the surrounding phone boxes for graphics, and sound-recorded trains, buskers and station announcers. In its entirety, Cyberpoetry Underground has a dated beauty reminiscent of the tone of a vintage synthesiser.

Komninos now views digital poetry necessity as a collaborative project. There are ‘too many elements to be mastered by one artist: programming; design; graphics; animation; sound; music; text,’ he says. In recent times, he has returned to his performance roots in the pubs of Melbourne. ‘Genuine emotion expressed as poetry, hecklers and bar cacophony is what poetry means to me right now.’

He’s a generous anarchic spirit with an almost pantheistic notion of poetry. ‘Different poets speak to different audience members and there are such a wide variety of audiences . . . Some text-less acting is poetry, some advertising, some music, some political speeches, some clouds, some windy beaches, some rainforest rivers, some panoramas, some roaring fires, some single malt whiskies, and even some blends.’

Lavinia Greenlaw is a writer whose work refuses to be filed away into neat categories: a poet with four coolly sculptured collections to her name, including 2011’s The Casual Perfect, she is also the author of two novels and an audacious, original memoir about her early life entitled The Importance of Music to Girls, which was published in 2007.

Her interests are eclectic — having gained an MA in 17th-Century art from the Courtauld Institute, she has written about Titian for the National Gallery and Constable for Tate Britain, and she is the author of opera libretti and radio plays. But she is also unwilling to be confined to the printed page: her sound work Audio Obscura, which won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry in 2011, requires the listener to put on headphones and wander through a railway station, listening to what appear to be what Greenlaw calls ‘heightened reflections’ of the passing world. In fact, she explains, what you hear are ‘fractured monologues which hover between speech and thought, and which you can’t help imposing on the strangers around you. My aim is to make you conscious of this transgression but unable to contain your curiosity.’

When her piece won the Ted Hughes Award, Greenlaw remarked that she was particularly pleased that the judges had understood that it wasn’t a diversion from a more conventional way of writing poetry, but that ‘it absolutely goes to the heart of what I do’. When I ask her to expand on this, she explains that all her work has tried to explore the point at which we start to make sense of things: Audio Obscura extends this to the act of listening and working purely with sound, orchestrating it moment by moment, was like being deep inside a poem.’

That last observation is illuminating: Greenlaw doesn’t so much cross genres but bring poetry to everything she does; and finding the right form for what she has to say is a critical part of her artistic process. Her first novel, Mary George of Allnorthover (2001), which draws on her upbringing in rural Essex, where her parents had moved to from London with their young family when Greenlaw was ten, grew out of a poem that ‘accidentally’ became a story. ‘It took me years to find out how to write it,’ she says. ‘A poem is something you can turn over in your hand whereas a novel is a world you have to travel.’ The book was set in the years of punk rock, and her editor suggested to her that she write about music. Once again, she explains, it took a long time to find the right form and to set her experience down as memoir; even now, she describes The Importance of Music to Girls as ‘a series of short, personal essays, organised more like poems’.

But no formal label that one could pin to Greenlaw’s individual works would capture either their subtlety or their ambition, their determination to probe the hidden and often intangible parts of human life. The Casual Perfect, for example, even constructs its own grammar: its intriguing title refers to ‘an invented tense, possibly the tense of middle age’, and to what Greenlaw calls ‘the achievement of the provisional’; that gap between what we are capable of and what we would like to experience.

Poetry’s ability to uncover the complexity and intensity of our thoughts and emotions is what first attracted her to it. She made herself ‘a world of books’ early on, she explains, and ‘the turned-up, broken-down nature of poetry made sense of things for me’. She was drawn both to what she calls ‘live-action poets’ — the metaphysical poet John Donne’s finely constructed arguments, or Elizabeth Bishop’s explorations of the workings of the mind — and by poetry ‘where there’s a sense of the paint still being wet’, such as the early lyrics of Thomas Wyatt or the translations of Ezra Pound.

At the moment, she’s spending much of her time in the 14th century, in the company of Geoffrey Chaucer, as she completes a version of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer’s re-telling of the star-crossed lovers of ancient Greek legend. Chaucer himself had borrowed the story, but it is the psychological dimension that he brought to it that most captivates Greenlaw: Instead of boy meets girl/ girl betrays boy/ boy dies of broken heart, we have an account of people arguing each other and themselves into and out of love. I’m writing it in snapshots, small poems that lift off from his images, which try to tease all this out.’

If all goes well, Greenlaw’s version, entitled A Double Sorrow, will be published next spring. In the meantime she must also fit into her working life her teaching commitments at the University of East Anglia, where she is a professor in the prestigious Creative Writing faculty, with colleagues that include such literary luminaries as Ali Smith (currently a visiting professor), Giles Foden, Amit Chaudhuri and Trezza Azzopardi. Greenlaw aims to teach in the first half of the year and write for the second, although she admits that ‘both activities are more or less continuous’. She divides her time between Suffolk — where her partner runs the Aldeburgh Festival — and East London; she says that she loves the rural setting, ‘the muddle of land and water and a view that is nine-tenths sky’, but is also attached to the city, where she’s lived for most of her life. And, despite the necessarily solitary business of writing, she also values what teaching brings her: ‘I’m heartened by the fact that young people still turn up with the wiring for poetry. Teaching brings me into contact with some of the best of them and I learn a great deal from them. On the other hand, I do need to contain it, so teach half time. I’m easily absorbed by it and it’s also a rather extrovert activity when I thrive on being home alone in my pyjamas with a pot of tea and no one to talk.’

Now, what we eat has also become a political battleground: from methods of production to geography, provenance and even packaging. What’s more, food is ritual. Food is art. Food is sustaining on an emotional and psychological level. Here we explore many of these facets from Dutch former restaurateur Marije Vogelzang’s performance explorations and narrative experiments around meals to Gay Bilson’s Australian culinary trailblazing and Anna Meroni’s agricultural theorising.  Eating is thinking, and moving, and being.

Christine Muhlke
Recipe for success
Christine Muhlke’s insatiable hunger for food knowledge makes her a gourmet choice, says Amy Serafin.

 
Anna Merino
Feeding the Planet
With the prestigious Universal Expo approaching, food and sustainability are first on the menu for Anna Merino, says Peter Lyle.

 
Gay Bilson
Feed the World
Once a pioneer in Australian fine-dining, Gay Bilson is now happier campaigning for good food for all, says Tony Magnusson.

Arnold & Henderson
Good Taste
Understated yet revered by the Britsh cognoscenti, Arnold & Henderson put on the finest of feasts, says Kate Spicer.

Marije Vogelzang
Food for Thought
Marije Vogelzang combines creativity with critical-thinking to heighten the emotional resonance of the act of eating.

Alice Waters
A Good Education
Alice Waters believes in a simple lesson: a healthy nation starts in the classroom. She talks to David Prior.

When Christine Muhlke was three or four, her grandmother read her a story about a moose: ‘I said, “That’s not a moose,”’ she recalls. ‘“A moose is chocolate.”’ Little wonder she grew up to be Executive Editor of Bon Appétit magazine and one of America’s most influential food authorities. Today, Muhlke could give you the top ten recipes for chocolate mousse as well as the best places to eat it.

She grew up in the Midwest — mostly in Racine, Wisconsin — of German and English stock, which helps account for her wholesome and fresh-faced prairie-girl looks. As she tells it, her family ate a lot and ate well: spaghetti and pot roast but also the gourmet experiments typical of American mothers in the 1970s, such as salmon tureen in a fish mould. She has always had a prodigious appetite, coming home from school in the afternoon to devour a box of mac and cheese, followed by ice cream, followed by dinner at 6:30.

Her food knowledge blossomed when she spent her junior year of university in Paris, living with a bohemian French family, an experience she calls a ‘dream cliché’. Meals lasted five hours; even the dog ate couscous for dinner. After graduation, she moved to New York to pursue a career in journalism. It was the 1992 recession and jobs were scarce, so she interned for Sassy magazine, a breeding ground for Indie and Riot Girl culture. The magazine paid her by sending her to freebie events, which is how she got her first writing gig, seated next to the publisher of a music magazine. She recalls: ‘I was polishing off somebody else’s sundae when he said, “If you can write like you can eat you’re hired.”’

Then, as now, Muhlke had a sixth sense for where the action was. While at Sassy she interned alongside Chloë Sevigny and interviewed Kurt Cobain. When her savings ran out on her 21st birthday, she started waiting tables at night (still interning at the magazine by day); her first client was Spike Lee. She held a series of jobs in what she terms ‘scrappy’ but very cool publications, including a stint as the managing editor at Paper, where she covered the downtown scene from music to film, art and food.

‘At a certain point,’ she says, ‘I realised that food was what I was most passionate about. I was travelling a lot, and it’s such an amazing way to connect with people around the world.’ Even if it meant starting over again, she would decide to focus on food. She soon scored a column at the New York Post, inviting chefs into people’s homes to prepare dishes with whatever was in the kitchen. A lamb recipe Eric Ripert threw together ended up being a lifesaver a few days later when she visited a friend in Long Island. ‘Her kitchen was being renovated,’ remembers Muhlke. ‘She had a hot plate and a grill, and at noon she said, “Hey, my friend Sam Sifton is coming over for dinner, would you mind cooking?"’ Sifton was dining editor at The New York Times. The lamb chops were a hit.

Who knows if the dish had anything to do with the phone call she received some time later from an editor at The Times, announcing they were launching T magazine and asking her to freelance. Working there was a dream, she says: ‘It’s incredible after being at so many small publications, then suddenly you’re in a place where you could be in a taxi in India and if the driver asked what you did you mentioned The New York Times and he’d know.’ Muhlke rose through the ranks, becoming deputy editor of T as well as food editor for the Magazine. She wrote about taco stands and gourmet restaurants, California abalone and Iowa prosciutto in an easygoing style that combined in-depth reporting with a fresh, conversational voice. A phrase from a recent cookbook review for The New York Times states: ‘If you can source the ingredients for mouse melon soup with tomato water and leafy goosefoot, go nuts.’

After seven years at the Times, her phone rang again. This time it was Bon Appétit’s new editor-in-chief, Adam Rapoport. He explains: ‘I realised when I got this job that I needed someone who really knew food and what was going on in the restaurant world — in New York, nationally and globally. It’s astounding how on top of things Christine is. She’s constantly telling me about this restaurant or a chef and then six months later there that person is, and they’re everywhere.’

For the first time Muhlke found herself at a publication where the budget was lavish and the editors could realise practically any idea, such as sending the acclaimed Danish photographer Ditte Isager to shoot chef Fergus Henderson’s home in London. With the demise of Gourmet, Bon Appétit had new purpose keeping its 1.3 million loyal subscribers happy while evolving to embrace current trends. ‘There’s this whole new audience for food,’ says Muhlke. ‘In terms of the restaurant culture, the DIY culture, the cooking-at-home culture; you have all sorts of different people who are interested in farming. It’s an incredible moment, so we’re trying to capture that.’

Muhlke is by no means a food snob, and she feels equally at home at Le Bernardin — she co-authored a book with the chef, Eric Ripert — as at ‘any of the old ice cream places that have the swirly cones out front’. She believes that too much money has eroded the soul of the Manhattan dining scene, but Brooklyn excites her with its funky, heartfelt addresses like Roberta’s pizzeria. She sees a similar movement in Paris (where she has an apartment) as well as in Copenhagen, Antwerp, Portland, Milwaukee: ‘You have these young chefs who are like, “OK I’m going to do it myself, my way, I don’t have the money, I’m going to be the plongeur in addition to being the chef, if I could bus the tables myself to save money I would.” Which makes food that much more personal and that much more interesting.’

She loves the breads and pastries coming out of the West Coast, admitting that baked goods are her favourite foods. At home, her husband Oliver, a food writer and former private chef, cooks dinner, while she is in charge of desserts. Ice cream is her specialty, and she has started making yogurt at their weekend house in Woodstock.

This fall, she gave birth to their first child. Pregnancy meant she had to stop drinking homemade kombucha, but otherwise she didn’t let it change her routine much, even cycling until the ninth month. Her current projects include writing a cookbook with David Kinch of the California haute-cuisine restaurant Manresa and ghostwriting a memoir for another (unnamed) chef. In addition to her job at Bon Appétit, she recently penned an article for W magazine and one for Lucky Peach, the magazine co-founded by chef David Chang of the Momofuku restaurant group. ‘She’s trying to search for a new angle all the time,’ says Chang, ‘to tell a story that hasn’t been told. Even if she weren’t talented that would still be great. But she is talented, so that makes it all the better.’

A few days before her due-date, she was planning to make banana bread for the nurses at the hospital. She had bananas ripening and batter in the freezer so that she could bake it as soon as she went into labour. Proof that whatever the circumstance, in Muhlke’s world, it always comes down to food.

In addition to being one of Europe’s most interesting and inventive theoreticians on food and sustainability, Anna Merino has also spent the past half-decade at the forefront of a hands-on programme designed to change how everyday consumers see and shop for food in her home city of Milan.

‘Design’ is the operative word. Anna is assistant professor of service and strategic design at the Politecnico di Milano and holds a PhD in Industrial Design. She says that her applied, practical work on food is in keeping with the traditions of her college, and with the teaching of design in Italy at large. ‘Design in Italy has its roots in architecture,’ she explains. ‘It’s broader and larger than just a focus on singular objects. We work with design and the social side.’ Meroni’s particular interest is in networks and tools that help ‘solve problems in your everyday life’. Not least in relation to that most basic element of day-to-day existence – food.

In 2008, Milan won the right to host the prestigious 2015 Universal Expo – the modern incarnation of the original World’s Fair, a grand exhibition held every five years on a topic of global importance.  The 2015 event, as its title ‘Feeding the Planet: Energy for Life’ indicates, will be themed around food and sustainability.

Meroni was part of a group of experts who, concerned by the gap between the Expo’s aims and the food culture in Milan at the time, campaigned for a city-wide initiative to make the city’s food culture more local and sustainable by the time of the Expo. The resulting programme, ‘Nutrire Milano’ – Feeding Milan – was launched in 2009, with the backing of Slow Food Italy and seed money from the philanthropic wing of a Milanese bank.

Though most non-Italians probably think of fashion houses when they think of Milan, the city is still Italy’s second largest, and also remains the nation’s centre of commerce and industry. So it makes sense that, as Anna explains: ‘Around Milan, lots of food production is very industrial. The “farmers” are usually more workers than farmers  – just employees who are part of a big process.’

Consequently, making the city’s food culture more sustainable was a big process too. Nutrire Milano established neighbourhood bakers, a food-box scheme, agro-tourism opportunities and the city’s first farmer’s market – which today boasts more than twice the number of stalls it started with.

Anna says all these small schemes come together to form ‘a connected network providing mainly local and organic food. It gives producers a channel to reach customers, and it encourages other producers to be less intensive in their farming methods’.

Regardless of her specific concerns about Milan’s food culture, Anna says that, by and large, ‘in Italy the ritual around food is still important, it gives structure and meaning to the way people eat’. For that reason, Italians are better off than many, in that they retain a closer connection to food preparation and local cooking traditions than many other nations.

‘In Italy, if they haven’t seen us for a long time, our mamas don’t ask us, “How are you today?” but, “Did you eat today?”’ she says. ‘It’s a means for creating a positive relationship with their food… Many Italian kids today still dream of McDonald’s – and I think that’s fine, that once a year is better than forbidding it. But generally people don’t go so crazy for these chains like Starbucks and McDonald’s, so they’re just not on the same scale.’

Asked how she herself shops, Anna doesn’t mention any exclusive destinations or esoteric ingredients. Rather, she talks about the emotions she associates with good food habits: conviviality, pleasure in preparation, ‘respect for the producers, not just the product’.

Loving and appreciating food and understanding where it comes from is, she says, the best way to work towards a future where we eat more sustainably: more seasonal and local cuisine, less meat, more veg (‘though this is hard to tell people in the land of prosciutto!’), and a willingness to spend more for quality.

Appreciating the authentic virtues and taste of real food will also ‘help us shed our addictions to the flavourings and chemistry in mass-produced food’, she argues.

A sustainable food future for all may sometimes seem a very distant, difficult goal. But according to Anna Meroni, getting there should be anything but painful. To appreciate food as a valuable resource with a vital context, rather than taking it for granted as disposable ‘product’, we have to start by enjoying it.

Main image credit: Massimo Ferrari

It’s a muggy Friday morning in late spring and Gay Bilson is busy in the kitchen of her new home in Bangalow, near Byron Bay on New South Wales’s north coast. ‘I’ve got people coming to dinner so I’m putting out pretty plates on the table,’ says the retired restaurateur and award-winning author. ‘I think I like the preparation more than when the people are actually here,’ she adds with a rueful laugh.

Her guests are in for a pan-Asian feast with a Middle Eastern kicker: green papaya salad; a Thai soup of pumpkin, dried prawns and coconut milk; grilled duck breast; a Vietnamese stir-fry; a nibble of slow-roasted pineapple dressed with coconut sugar, lime juice and chilli; and for dessert, mahalabia, or milk pudding, flavoured with orange flower water and served with poached fruit.

It sounds like hard work — and it is, but you won’t find Bilson, who turns 70 soon, complaining: ‘When one takes it seriously, cooking is about labour and I happen to think labour is a beautiful word. It’s about being happy to work and not minding doing the dishes later.’ Having retired from restaurants in 1998 after 25 years of being at the sharp end of Sydney dining, these days, she says, ‘I’m much, much happier cooking simply [at home] for my friends.’

Melbourne-born Bilson came to prominence in the early ’70s with her then partner, Tony Bilson, running their first restaurant together, Tony’s Bon Goût, on Elizabeth Street in downtown Sydney. ‘Tony set most of the cooking rules and was obsessed with French food to the exclusion of all other cuisines,’ she recalls. ‘I simply worked my butt off, doing first courses, desserts, the dishes, paying the bills with a child in a papoose on my back. I was a ridiculously hardworking amateur in those years.’

The couple’s next restaurant couldn’t have been more different. Tucked away on the banks of the Hawkesbury River an hour north of Sydney, Berowra Waters Inn was accessible only by boat or seaplane. It was a tall order, but through hard work and ingenuity, they turned it into a dining destination that established them as a leading force in Sydney dining from the late ’70s onwards.

Diners gazed out on an idyllic outlook from the absolute-waterfront property renovated by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Glenn Murcutt, whom Bilson had commissioned, while enjoying classic French and, later, more eclectic cuisine. Were they ahead of their time? Bilson considers this. ‘I think it was more that we were, in part, independent thinkers. We certainly helped to push the restaurant scene out of the fuggy past and into a new and exciting era.’

‘After I’d cooked for a long time I started working in the dining room at Berowra Waters,’ she recalls. ‘One of the joys of being a restaurateur is that you can meet remarkable people. If you properly connect with them, they become very good friends, and it happened to me all my restaurant life.’ She says she was drawn in the main part to writers, journalists and artists. ‘Very few fellow cooks, although one of my closest friends for years – we’re still friends but don’t travel together anymore – was Simon Hopkinson, who was the chef at Bibendum in London.’

It’s odd then, that Bilson chooses to describe herself as a naturally solitary person. ‘I am happiest, most relaxed and feel most productive simply when I’m by myself,’ she says. ‘I’ve experienced being alone but I don’t know what loneliness is.’ One wonders whether her self-imposed exile – she lived alone in McLaren Vale, South Australia for 13 years before relocating to Bangalow at the beginning of 2012 – is a function of a quarter-century spent ministering to the exacting needs of fine diners. She doesn’t see it that way. ‘I’m not very good at looking after humans and animals,’ she says bluntly, although she will allow she’s better at tending plants. Others may beg to differ, including her four grown children – two sons with a man in Melbourne who remains her closest friend, and two daughters with Tony (whom she never married) – but Bilson is resolute. ‘It doesn’t mean I’m good at looking after them,’ she laughs.

Bilson split with Tony in 1981 but continued to run the restaurant, taking on young chef Janni Kyritsis. The food became less French, more eclectic, moving towards a regionalism that would come to be known as modern Australian. Bilson did away with the frou-frou in favour of food presented simply on the plate: ‘The passionfruit bavarois I served for years was simply a triangle of just-set bavarois on a plate – no sprigs of this or puree of that. No bits of fruit…’

Kyritsis stayed with her until the business closed in 1995 (other protégés include Sean Moran and Alex Herbert). Bilson was then enticed to take on Bennelong restaurant at the Sydney Opera House – the apex of event dining, geographically speaking – but hung up her chef’s whites after three years (Kyritsis followed her to Bennelong too, but left in 1997 to open his first restaurant, MG Garage). By that stage, the romance was well and truly over. ‘My relationship to food had begun to change long before I stopped being involved in restaurants,’ she says, ‘but it didn’t change my practice at the time.’

Many of her growing concerns about food and the restaurant business went into her memoir-of-sorts, Plenty: Digressions on Food (2004), named The Age Book of the Year 2005, and her follow-up, On Digestion (2008), which took more of a philosophical route. She expresses her dislike of the connection between money and food: ‘The older and crabbier I get, the more I think food should be free. And if it can’t be free, then good food should cost less than bad food – so McDonald’s should be expensive, and food that’s fresh, organic and mostly local should be cheap enough for people with very little income to afford.’

Bilson says she isn’t interested in restaurants anymore: ‘I find them so prescriptive. I’m allergic to the equation of money with food, of putting a price on a plate of food and only having what the chef thinks you should have.’

These days, Bilson is most passionate about gardening and reading. Although she lived on nearly an acre of property in McLaren Vale, from 1999 to 2011, growing nine varieties of quince and an assortment of other fruit, the soil was sandy, the climate was dry and she had a problem with brown snakes. By contrast, Bangalow ‘is dense and green and subtropical and everything seems to want to grow. Despite my not liking humid, hot weather, the hinterland up here is paradisiacal’. She’s already planted pecan, mulberry, various citrus and is about to get started on her vegetable beds.

Fortunately, that still leaves plenty of time for books. ‘Literature is the most important thing for me,’ she says. ‘I accidentally got into cooking but it didn’t stop me reading.’ Her current reading list includes the American Constitution (‘I’m fascinated by American politics’), the savagely brilliant novels of Edward St Aubyn, and Edward P Jones’ Pulitzer Prize-winner The Known World. One of the joys of retiring from restaurants is that instead of getting up early to collect produce from the market, she can go back to bed and read. She would like to write another book herself, ‘simply for my own ego. When people ask me what I’m doing I say, “Living in Bangalow and not writing a book”, which means that I really want to.”

There’s another passion, one only recently discovered. Twice a week, Bilson volunteers at Liberation Larder, a community kitchen in Byron Bay. In providing simple, nutritious meals using donated food or surplus from farmers’ markets, the charity reaches out to those who are homeless or struggling to make ends meet. Producing 200 meals per week to the community is an undeniable buzz that ticks a lot of boxes for Gay Bilson: ‘I feel as if I’ve been waiting to do this all my life.” 

Main image: Courtesy of Peter Fisher Photography

There’s a letter pinned above Melanie Arnold’s desk, it’s written in pen and ink in a neat old-fashioned hand. ‘I kept it for my Dad,’ says Arnold taking it from the wall and handing it over. ‘It’s from Julie Christie. She often comes in alone. A lot of people do.’

The Rochelle Canteen is in a converted bike shed in the walled and grassy playground of a derelict Victorian school. A step away from the booming hipster mecca of Redchurch Street, and a short walk from Shoreditch House, it is not quite The Secret Garden, but as near, darn it, as found in London’s fashionable east end.

Margot Henderson runs the kitchen and Melanie Arnold, runs every other aspect of the show.  The pair are better known as Arnold & Henderson, a power duo of hyper kitchen-diva and calm droll foil. Together, as caterers and restaurateurs, they have been feeding and entertaining the cognoscenti for nearly two decades while never attracting much attention. To say this is chic in a London restaurant scene fixated on hotness and media is to understate quite what a cool couple they are.

The school itself is also a star. Re-imagined by a private English philanthropist as a creative space that will nourish a once depressed local area, The Rochelle School has provided studio space for an extraordinary roll call of artists, from the choreographer Michael Clark to one of Britain’s few great fashion designers yet to be bought out by a huge conglomerate, Giles Deacon.

Arnold and Henderson fit right in because they are of the creative elite they cater to. They first started working together 18 years ago at the legendary Soho dining room The French House; a favourite of every slumming art star from Francis Bacon to Damien Hirst. Melanie was front of house and Margot in the kitchen. It was one of the canteens of the then burgeoning Young British Artists and the pair would share a bottle of Burgundy with the more famous artists.

Inevitably, Henderson’s food (to her irritation) is often compared to Fergus Henderson’s, her husband and world famous master of the nose-to-tail philosophy. His food, once shocking for its deeply old-fashioned ingredients like bone marrow, entrails and animal extremities, now sets trends worldwide. His St John Chinatown restaurant has a Michelin star now. The Hendersons set trends, they don’t follow them.

Arnold says, ‘Margot’s cooking is less restrained, there’s a feminine plenty and she has that Kiwi thing of being good with veg and salads.’ So we have Margot’s beetroot, watercress and soft boiled egg versus Fergus’ bloodcake and fried eggs; cold roast sirloin on dripping toast versus crispy pig skin and dandelion; grilled red-leggged partridge and romesco sauce versus pheasant and trotter pie. Their aesthetics and menu has never bent to the vagaries of fashion. ‘Every now and then fashion coincides with us,’ says Arnold, somewhat humbly.

Arnold was married to Fergus Henderson’s front of house, the distinctive Jon Spiteri. In many ways Melanie and Margot were yin to their husband’s yang as well as to each other.

Melanie Arnold and Margot Henderson’s Rochelle Canteen opened in 2006 to zero fanfare (they are currently working on finding a second site), no sign hung over the door, and no busy blonde PRs were hired to persuade editors and critics that this was the place to be. Everyone who mattered already knew who these two women were and word of mouth would do the rest.

‘I suppose what we do is like home cooking, food you could eat every day, but much better,’ says the understated yet ineffably stylish Arnold. She is dressed in navy, with a pair of supple and worn vintage Paul Smith biker boots and a thin brown belt. ‘I chopped it off a Luella [Bartley] bag,’ she said, with the sort of style nonchalance rarely associated with those in the catering business.

Arnold and Henderson are rare; they cook and organise events for those at the most knowing heart of art and fashion and those that don’t get it expose themselves as outsiders.

Arnold has impeccable taste, her staff describe her as stylish. She went to Camberwell College of Arts and later worked at the Tate in their print department. Both women’s innate good taste makes grander, better-known restaurants look, frankly, vulgar. ’I like nothing unnecessary on the table. Everything about the food, drink, the people: it should feel comfortable and fit easily. We do, however, rather like a glamorous glass for an event: heavy crystal or a gold rim. The food is fresh, unfussy and looks beautiful, clean and simple on the plate.’ Rochelle Canteen is all whitewashed stone walls and glass, second hand Ercol chairs, Formica topped tables. ‘We rarely have flowers in the restaurant. It’s unnecessary decoration of the table. Salt, pepper and wine glass is enough.’

Their event organising tends to be something more ornate and can involve enormously long trestle tables. Grapes may tumble like a waterfall off a tarnished-silver cake stand and candles flicker among forests of glassware. This is Arnold and Henderson in feast mode and there’s none that can match them at it; they are flown around the world, Moscow, Paris, Berlin, New York to be asked to do what they do best. ’What Margot and I really have in common is family, eating, mealtimes and parties. We like parties. Maybe that’s what we bring. No rules, everything will be fine. We’re nice people and we have fun.’

The accessories designer, Katie Hillier says, ‘Mel’s one of the coolest women I know and I really admire her for her business approach. I look up to her, yes. I am lucky enough to share office space with Mel and that wonderful canteen. I don’t know what I’d do with out them.’

At Moscow art feasts, she caters for Roman Abramovich’s partner Dasha Zhukova. Arnold was surprised to see some people ‘sitting in front of a bottle and a plate of shared food waiting for someone to serve it to them because to serve

themselves is beneath them’. Little do those Muscovite diners realise is that the way the British art and fashion scene oil, smooth and entwine their significant creative forces is by sitting down together for the distinct pleasure of a feast catered by Arnold and Henderson.

‘I would say they do a third to a half of all the arts functions I go to,’ says Matthew Slotover, co-director of Frieze Art Fair. ‘As soon as you walk in and see the staff in their white jackets you know it is them. You can just tell and you know you’re going to have a good time.’

They did the Frieze VIP restaurant this year and one famous gallery owner stated it was the best food he’d ever eaten at an art fair.
Their ability to create the bonhomie of a casual dinner party among friends when there might be 100 terribly important people present is a rare talent.

Surrounding them in the derelict school are creatives like Hillier who adore them. Their staff are lent Boudicca by for high-end catering events and Giles Deacon gives them the odd evening dress because he can and because ‘I feel bad about all the crockery of theirs we have’.

The shoe designer Marc Hare will trade beautiful handmade shoes for food. ‘They’re just classy those two, they make food with such originality and make it look simple. They are the Margiela of food. But the thing I love most about them is that they are not afraid to finish a bottle of wine once it’s opened or open another one.’

Main image credit: Martin Cohen

The esoteric niche that Marije Vogelzang has carved for herself as an 'eating designer' involves exploring our relationship with food by subverting the social conventions that surround food. Whether it's staging a tap-water tasting to highlight the value of this precious yet ubiquitous commodity or leaving dinner guests to figure out that they must share the food on the plates they've been presented with if they are all to get a full meal, Vogelzang's events are always thought-provoking, often humorous and occasionally un-nerving — a dinner gong sounded with every mouthful eaten led one diner to burst in to tears. 

This has led to her being incredibly in demand: cultural institutions, restaurants, design brands, retailers and food manufacturers want to enlist her singular vision to create anything from edible art installations to attention-grabbing product packaging. The upshot is that Vogelzang has become something of a globetrotting gourmand, lecturing in places as diverse as Beirut, Bangkok and Berlin. 

‘There are so many issues going on nowadays with food and I think creativity can be used to take a fresh look at them,’ she says from the Amsterdam home that she shares with her husband and two children. ‘We fly food around the world and never see our meat being slaughtered. Vegetable varieties are going extinct and children in Africa are malnourished while children in America are overweight and malnourished at the same time."

It seems that an impulse to provoke underpins her conversation as well as her work. She has a tendency to alternate between giving considered, detailed answers to flippant one-liners: ‘Food is just food and has to be eaten.’ She gives the impression of being a mischievous alchemist, serving up experiences that linger much longer than the meal on the table.

‘In my work I tend to do crazy things, but most of the time I like to keep the food as pure as possible. I don’t design food. Food is already perfectly designed by nature,’ she explains. ‘I prefer to call myself an eating designer because I work from the verb of eating. I like to be inspired by harvesting, cooking, sharing food, digesting and pooing.’

She cites an example of a dinner where she made sculptures of root vegetables baked in clay. Guests hammered the sculpture and broke the clay to discover the aroma of baked vegetables and herbs inside. It seems Vogelzang really can capture the scent of home-cooked food. This being just one example of the many ways she uses creativity to heighten the sensory and emotional experience of eating. Other projects have included presenting black-and-white meals to mirror a black-and-white photo; cooking little pancakes on light bulbs suspended from wooden trees as a poetic exploration of photosynthesis (‘Instead of turning carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and oxygen using sunlight, we turned electric light into crispy, edible leaves by baking the dough on the light bulbs.’); and recreating a meal for World War II veterans consisting of food they hadn't eaten since they were soldiers, such as dried meats and bread made using original recipes. 

This marriage of conceptual design and food began during her studies at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, where her final year project in 2000 was a funeral table set with purely white cuisine. Four years later, after working as a design assistant for renowned product designer Hella Jongerius, Vogelzang founded Proef, an innovative design studio-cum-restaurant in Rotterdam where, in her typically idiosyncratic style, the cooks and diners all worked, ate and interacted around one central island in the clean-lined, minimalist space. In 2006, she relocated to Amsterdam and continued staging highly anticipated interactive food events exploring the act of eating in strikingly original ways, eventually leading to the selling of the Rotterdam restaurant in 2009. 

Although there is often a theatrical element to what she does, unlike proponents of molecular gastronomy, Vogelzang isn't concerned with ensuring that the dishes served are delicious or extraordinary; rather, her purpose is the overall effect of the dining experience and it's ability to evoke feelings, encourage conversation, but, ultimately, to challenge preconceptions. Cultural identity and questions of class are recurring themes in her work. In Beirut, she brought 25 people from very different backgrounds together to make bowls from dough at the city's first farmers market. Anecdotes about food and life were inscribed on the bowls before they were baked after which the participants sat down to literally break bread.

‘I use the idea of sharing a lot in my work. If food can be shared with others, conversations start to happen naturally,’ she explains. ‘In 2008, I held a dinner at the AXIS gallery in Tokyo. Cloth extended down from the ceiling to drape over each of the guests, who became equal because their identity — as communicated through their clothes — was covered. Every guest got one part of the meal, and people were encouraged to share.’

One of her most provocative and intimate installations sought to foster greater understanding by celebrating the lives of those at the bottom of the social pyramid. 'Eat Love Budapest' saw Roma women telling their life stories anonymously to a stranger while hand feeding them in cocooning, tent-like spaces. The foods all tied in to the memories, songs and stories that were shared, and perfumes with personal significance were worn. Although neither could see each other’s face, this intensely personal experience had a profoundly emotional effect on both parties, with visitors often weeping and comparing it to be being fed by their own mothers.

‘If you asked most people around the world what they would like as their last meal, most of them will answer “My mother’s chicken soup, pasta, etc.” says Vogelzang. ‘Food stands for comfort and many times comfort stands for mother or family. There is no other material a designer can work with that is so close to the human soul as food.’ 

Main image credit: Lucas Hardonk

‘I’m running for office,’ says Alice Waters laughing with exasperation as she hangs the phone up on the fifteenth call of the morning. It is 11am. At 68, four decades since she opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, CA — the restaurant that sparked a revolution in food and agriculture — it is apparent that Waters has lost none of the drive, nor clarity of vision for which she has become legendary. Alternately described as the ‘mother of American food’ and the pioneer of the local, organic and sustainable food movement, the list of Waters’ achievements is long. However, in recent years her individual career milestones have been overshadowed by a broad recognition that what she began as a counter-culture murmur in radical Berkeley and turned into a national rallying cry has now matured into a nascent global social movement that is influencing how we all eat.

Waters is, in fact, not running for office but she might as well be. Of the morning’s calls, the individuals that have found themselves in her sightline that day have included a farmer, an actress, cooks, an artist, activists, journalists and several politicians. Invitations to dine at Chez Panisse have been extended, tours of her food education programme (The Edible Schoolyard Project) arranged, a reprimand delivered, an endorsement sanctioned, a reference given and various statements made. At 5ft 2, with a girlish voice, a bohemian fashion sense that favours flowing purple and a tendency towards extravagant language (she referred to her first meeting with the influential food/environment writer Michael Pollan as ‘like falling into a bed of magnolias’), she makes an unlikely political activist in mainstream America.  

It would be a mistake however to underestimate her.  Alice Waters’ purist message has remained steadfast over the decades whether societal trends agreed or not. Her fiercely held conviction that food that is grown without chemicals is better for our health and the environment (not to mention flavour), that the support of local farms is the best insurance for our culture and diversity and that the priority of government should be to nourish children’s minds and bodies through food education has never swayed. Although recent years has seen her forced to raise her profile as a campaigner, Waters is uneasy being under the spotlight and prefers to ‘feed people ideas’ at the table or have visitors walk into the Edible Schoolyard ‘and fall in love with vegetables’.

Alice Waters her greatest legacy will be perhaps her phenomenal ability to ‘influence the influencers’. Like any visionary, Waters’ worldview can be difficult to digest as a whole, but piece-by-piece her philosophy (which she insists is not hers but one that is ‘as old as time’ and ‘common sense’) has won support.  Although there is still a very long way to go, the real food movement is ‘multiplying geometrically’ (what she means is that it outgrows itself every year) as evidenced in the increased presence of organic produce, proliferation of farmers markets, artisan food producers and, perhaps most sublimely, in the vision of Michelle Obama tearing up the lawn of the White House to make way for an organic garden.

‘I think now is the perfect time for the Obamas to talk about the issues that are important around food,’ says Waters, a longtime supporter and fundraiser who has her sights firmly focused on the first couple’s second term. ‘I know they are worried about obesity and I feel like something dramatic is going to happen in the public school system.  It is the most democratic way to reach every child, by feeding them a wholesome meal in school for free, you address many of the most important challenges we have around food in this country namely access and childhood, obesity and hunger.’

Michelle Obama has credited Waters with having inspired her to dedicate her work as the First Lady to changing American’s attitudes towards food; there are few that doubt the impact that she has had in the last four years and Waters is her biggest supporter. When asked what the challenges are that Americans face in order to change their cultural relationship to food, Waters has a blunt response ‘complete and total indoctrination of fast food.’ She goes on to make the point that ‘fast food is not only an American problem, it’s global, and it is difficult to tackle people who are always getting in front of us all the time and not telling the truth.  That is why it is vital that Michelle Obama is out there speaking the truth and I believe both she and the President will become even bolder in doing that’.

In what was seen as the precursor to the White House Garden, Waters and her coterie of farmers, cooks, artists and designers built WWII Victory gardens on the Washington Mall and in front of San Francisco’s City Hall. Next year the follow-up to Waters’ 2007 cookbook The Art of Simple Food will be released and while the first edition was focused on simple cooking the next will be about simple gardening, inspired by The Victory Garden Waters grew up with. ‘It is the logical other half of what I am talking about and I think we all need to feel the power of growing our own food.’

Last year, Waters traveled to Beijing with a delegation of Chez Panisse chefs to cook a large ceremonial dinner at the American Embassy. They took the same rigour around sourcing ingredients that dictates the food at the restaurant. Somewhat unbelievably in the home of Peking Duck not a single organic duck was to be found and so the occasion managed to turn press attention to the health and future of the Chinese food system.  That experience encouraged Waters to focus on more international projects. ‘I want to do the most visible demonstrations, more global collaborations, ones that can really influence people,’ she says. Pausing for a moment, she reflects and with a flirtatious flourish announces: ‘I’ve always wanted to take over the cafeteria of the United Nations, imagine that, a project for 2014 perhaps?’ Ban Ki-Moon, you have been warned.

Ciguë

The Old Guard

Edwin Heathcote finds out how shopfits made from  salvage-yard finds have become the key to the French practice Ciguë’s success.

Nader Tehrani

Artist Unknown

If ‘starchitecture’ doesn’t appeal, look to Nader Tehrani. His eloquent engineering always lets buildings speak for themselves, says Owen Hatherley.

William O’Brien Jr

Mr Can Do

Academia, architecture, awards ceremonies and product and installation design – welcome to the world of William O’Brien Jr.

March Studio

Two Heads Better

Elias Redstone finds a practice where the husband- and-wife founders have married differing schools of design with arresting effects.

Brighton

Brighton

Jonathan Meades ponders the psychogeographical morality - or lack of it - of Brighton and the mythos of its architectural stylings.

Jeremy Barbour

The Material World

Paper-bag ceilings and newspaper walls? Just part of a day’s work for Jeremy Barbour, finds Douglas Murphy.

There used to be a joke about a French architect being shown a beautiful new building by his British counterpart and saying, ‘Well, that’s all very well in practice, but does it work in theory?’

It’s hard to imagine, then, a more acute reversal of stereotypes than that caused by the young French architects Ciguë. From the opening page of their website, with its graphic of bits of pipes and joints to the interiors they fit and build themselves, it is quite clear that Ciguë revel not only in the ideas but also in the process.

The six architects who make up the practice (Hugo Haas, Camille Bénard, Adrian Hunfalvay, Erwan Leveque, Guillem Renard and Alphonse Sarthout) all met as students at Paris’s La Villette School of Architecture in 2002 and set up their business in 2003, before they had qualified, accommodating commissions around lectures and studies. Their precociousness reveals a kind of impatience, an inability to just sit and study without building into the real world. They knocked up furniture from scraps and interiors from salvaged parts.

What might perhaps appear more peculiar than that precociousness, however, is their success in the world of luxury branded retail. These are architects who lay their own bricks, plaster their own walls, plumb pipes in and sand the century-old floorboards they have sourced from salvage yards. It is resolutely not your image of the flouncy interior designer hardly deigning to appear on site. Ciguë can be seen as part of a kind of youth rebellion against the placelessness of global minimalism and the shiny homogeneity of corporate slickness. If architecture has an equivalent of the scruffy idealism of the Occupy protestors, it can be seen in the kind of self-build anti-aesthetic of the British architect-builders Assemble, or in the work of the Italian architects Stalker. Based in place as well as space, in the conceptual as much as in the practical, it is presenting an attractive alternative to the smooth, bland lines of computer-generated contemporary design. 

So, how exactly did Ciguë, positioned in a workshop and industrial space in a nondescript eastern suburb of Paris, reach these fashionable heights?

I meet one of the founders, Haas, at their new store for Aesop in London’s Lexington Street. Haas’s enthusiasms are clear: he takes me through the condensed histories of all the salvaged materials and the meticulously sourced bespoke products, and his passion proves infectious. He is far more willing to talk about the German producers of a quotidian plumbing product or the decline of the enamelling industry in France than he is about any conceptual framework for the design.

This Soho store was formerly a fried-chicken shop, a banal space in which every surface was covered by some form of wipe-down neutrality. Now it is a bright, light space, centred around a huge sink (Aesop’s signature centrepiece) and framed by a tessellation of white enamelled panels, curving around corners and bent into angles to form shelves for Aesop’s distinctively brown-bottled products.

The sink, he tells me, was salvaged – as were the others that line the window wall – the taps are an amalgam of fabricated heads and standard, industrial plumbing parts welded in their own workshops into utilitarian sections to create wonderfully elegant and expressive fittings that reveal everything about their construction and the way they work. They leave nothing to the imagination.

Those shelves and panels were made by one of the few large metal enamellers left in France, in Nantes, the stub of an industry that once boasted dozens of big plants churning out everything from bathtubs and posters to kitchen utensils. The few survivors get by on a weak trickle of local orders for street signs and buckets. The panels look worn and aged, the blackened steel beneath the enamel is appearing through chips and dents. I express surprise and am told that the products weren’t wrapped for their transit from Nantes to Soho. Apparently, this felt a more natural way of wearing them down ‘than bashing them with a hammer’. This is one of several Aesop stores that Ciguë have designed – others in London’s Islington and Paris’s Merci store, as well as another in the Marais district, have been a great success, chiming with the aesthetic first laid out by Ilse Crawford in the brand’s inaugural Mount Street store in London. The Marais store features round, bowl-like shelves that look like individual stoups; they have been ingeniously tailored from sewage pipe end caps.

Ciguë’s approach is a cocktail of salvage, appropriation and invention. Their first big hit was the Kat table, a chunky U-section (upside down U-shaped section, legs and surface one continuous plane) composed of pieces of that most ubiquitous of contemporary utilitarianism, the transport pallet. The timbers were ‘sourced’ to give a spread of colour, age and grain.

The effect is a powerful, blocky, striated form, an intriguingly robust and refreshingly cheap piece. That simple product, and its banqueting table cousin, the Eur, embodies the essence of their design. This is not the appropriation of the everyday to make museum objects, rather it is an appreciation of the ordinary and the almostinvisible to create strong furniture that is the opposite of design art. These are things to be used, not displayed. Other pieces, such as their delightful secrétaire, an attenuated home office unit, are compiled from found office furniture, the type of grey steel cabinet that was once so universal as to be absolutely invisible but now seems like a well-made treasure from a golden age. Filing cabinets, pigeonholes, flight cases and index-card drawers are stacked and fitted into a timber frame to produce an office wall that contains within it the instantly recognisable language of built bureaucracy but also becomes a very beautiful cabinet of curiosities – in which the cabinets themselves are the display.

Whether Ciguë are working in a small apartment or a chic boutique, the approach is the same. The idea of luxury seems to hold little attraction for them, instead they immerse themselves in the ingenuity of reuse – an antidote to the extravagance of the world they operate in. ‘We’re actually slightly uncomfortable in these shops and in the world of consumption,’ Haas tells me. ‘Everything you do needs to have a meaning, or at least some poetry.’ He finds that poetry and substance more readily in the stories and the auras that linger around these well-used, reappropriated materials. ‘We visited building sites and asked for the wooden planks they had on the ground. We’d take the old planks and replace them with new ones. After a while the builders were phoning us up to say they had more and we could take away the new ones that had now become worn.’ These timbers then went to clad the walls in the restaurant of Centquatre, a big arts centre in Paris’s 19th arrondissement, so that a generic big-box interior began to take on a patina, the engrained narratives of use – and a little abuse. The chairs they put there are the kind of steel and timber school chairs that were once a universal staple but now, after decades of the presence of plastic moulded tat, have taken on the appearance of design classics. These were rusted on the practice’s roof and clad in leather to create beautiful pieces of furniture.

Construction timbers from condemned buildings, meanwhile, found their way onto the ‘mobile restaurant car’ for Les Grandes Tables de la Friche restaurant in Marseille, a seemingly ad hoc concoction that actually contains everything a chef could need to service an entire catering event. To achieve this, the designers worked with the cooks to study their day-to-day requirements and tailored the piece to allow them to work as efficiently as possible.

Their architecture continues this cobbled-together aesthetic of the found and the functional. Their first building, a timber cabin in the woods outside Paris, designed as a meditation space, echoes the organic, anthropomorphic work of Herb Greene and Imre Makovecz, architects who imbued their structures with a sense of place, meaning and movement. The little structure curves around to avoid a tree, its timber shingles seeming to move like scales on a snake. However, it is their installations and reworkings of fashion spaces that have proved their most visible and successful interventions. Their striking work for Yves Saint Laurent at London’s hyper-hip Dover Street Market sees timber seguing into blackened steels that then bend up to form furniture and walls. Their Paris/Milan installation for Céline plays with the historic interior using a landscape of white painted boxes. For the exquisite interior for Diane von Furstenberg in New York’s Wooster Street they created an environment of floating furniture suspended on a modular system of brass rails. A beautiful timber-encased store in an undistinguished Tokyo building for designer Isabel Marant has also garnered much attention. It’s simple, stripped timbers make the perfect frame for the products but, with their carbon fibre planes and lantern-like lights, they also contain within them the memory of traditional Shoji architecture and rice paper walls.

Perhaps, though, despite their success, you shouldn’t expect Ciguë to grow into a big international practice. Their passions demand they stay nimble and engaged – something that becomes impossible when a practice grows too much or too fast.  Their future is defined by what Haas poetically refers to as the need ‘for the head and the hand to work together’.

Main image credit: Bertrand NOËL

‘We,’ says Nader Tehrani, ‘have a deliberate thesis to avoid a style.’ Architect, designer, critic and educator, Tehrani is not limited to one particular profession, so it’s perhaps not surprising that his work as director of architects NADAAA (and previously Office dA) is conspicuously lacking in an obvious signature. Currently, NADAAA are working on a series of projects that are pretty disparate, in a time when well-known designers wouldn’t be expected to have more than a couple of art galleries and blocks of luxury flats in their portfolio – but like the celebrity architects they seem so unlike, their scope is international. They’re designing two schools of architecture, in Toronto and Melbourne, five houses as far away as Paris, Kuwait and the US, a model home gallery in Seoul, and the renovation, using safety meshes, of five bridges in Ithaca, upstate New York. The design approach is as particular as the functions. In the Melbourne architecture school, a rigid steel grid encloses a fragment of a neoclassical building; their bibliophile-friendly Oro Bookshelf is characterised by rippling curves running along the edges of the frame; and in Office dA’s Tongxian Gatehouse, Beijing (an entrance for a sculpture collection), there’s a raw and richly textured brick façade, looking both machine made and organic, hard and tactile. Why do all this, when you could just reproduce a style and a logo?

The most obvious clue to this is in the firm’s peculiar combination of both constructional and academic rigour – and especially an obsession with the properties of diverse materials, rather than a generic over-cladding of concrete and steel frames. In the work of both Office dA and NADAAA, says Tehrani, there’s ‘a consistency in various themes and modes of research – a focus on materials investigation, on modes of assembly, and how they impact geometry. Naturally, because we work with a range of materials and programmes, this leads to a vast range of differences in imagery’. But this isn’t about completely submerging the designer’s identity in the site – ‘While we do not have a specific imagery, I would say that there are consistent “operations” that are decipherable from project to project, and equally I suspect there is a “sensibility” of craft that emerges as a result of our attention to detail.’ But he agrees that the intent is to evade ‘style, signature or centralised authorship’, instead wanting projects to emerge from the brief, the site and their individual and particular circumstances. Those mysterious ‘operations’ can be seen most obviously in that now very unusual interest in what their structures are made of and covered in.

I was intrigued, though, given the obvious differences between what Tehrani (who graduated from Harvard in 1991) and the architectural superstars do, by the fact that NADAAA had designed an ‘urban folly’ for the 2011 Gwangju Biennale, in South Korea – a metallic mesh or ‘swarm’ that, on close investigation, reveals itself to be in the shape of a four-legged creature. This kind of ‘art-chitecture’ has been at the heart of architects becoming celebrities on the level of artists, but it can become a fairly repetitive aesthetic – from Frank Gehry’s Fish sculpture to his buildings that tried to look like it. So I wondered how Tehrani conceived the relationship between architecture and sculpture today, particularly with reference to both becoming vehicles for melodramatic engineering. I was thinking especially of the collaborations between Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond – the massive tubular sculptures that left the art galleries to occupy prominent public spaces in Middlesbrough and London’s Stratford. He demurs when I mention them – ‘I’m a huge fan of both Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond’ – but then disassociates his work from theirs in no uncertain terms: ‘I think London could have done without the melodrama they unleashed on the Olympics. If my Gwangju folly has done the same to the Korean public, I want this to serve as a formal apology.’

So what are the differences? Mainly, it seems a matter of putting their experimental engineering ideas first, rather than an attempt to create an ‘icon’ and then working out how to make it stand up. The ‘folly’ is intended to be permanent, on an important site – on the former site of part of Gwangju’s city wall. Their first plan was so elaborate that the contractors ‘confessed they could not achieve it’, so the second involved redesigning the entire installation around ‘the idea of compressive steel struts, all recycled door handles’.

The use of materials in the firm’s work, although diverse, is often very delicate and intricate, always obviously highly thought out. As a result there’s something quite ornamental about some of Tehrani’s façades – which makes an interesting contrast with the academic and engineering-based rigour of the underpinning ideas. They don’t shy away from visual pleasure. I asked Tehrani whether he sees his work as having much in common with a certain re-evaluation of ornament that is taking place in contemporary architecture – previously, it had been declared ‘criminal’ by its proponents. In the work of Farshid Moussavi, for instance, it is entirely reassessed and rehabilitated. ‘I respect her work,’ says Tehrani, ‘but the focus on effect, I believe, is misplaced.’ The visual pleasure emerges out of structure as much as surface. ‘If anything,’ he says, ‘we have attempted to erase the traditional theoretical dichotomy between structure and ornament. If conventional theories have had a moral claim against the superficiality of the surface, or ornament, or of the idea of the façade, we have tried to demonstrate the centrality of their role.’ So we have seemingly decorative buildings driven by scientific rigour, follies that come out of accidents and experiments. It’s an architecture driven by productive tensions rather than smooth, seamless visions.

William O’Brien Jr is plotting the points where architecture and academe meet. He describes our era as ‘post-digital’, although this does not involve him rejecting anything digital. Rather, by embracing the digital forms that have dominated design for the past two decades, he aims to extend, enrich and diversify them.

At the heart of O’Brien’s approach lies a common denominator: the question of form. Fourteen of his projects, ranging in scale and typology from product to houses and abstract installations, will be shown at the Keller Gallery at MIT in November. This upcoming exhibition, aptly named Certain Aspects of Architectural Form, will neatly expand on his interest in ‘forms, formats, formal issues, form making, formations…’ This refers to elements that influence and help make architecture, from cultural references to methods of organisation and the development of shapes and ideas.

All this translates into clean lines, minimal forms and natural materials, making for a graceful result. Twins, his design proposal for two vacation homes for two brothers and their families in upstate New York, is predicated on an axis of geometry, each house forming a polygon – one six sided and one four sided.

O’Brien set up his practice in 2007 in his late twenties (while at Berkeley, where he taught at the time). Now based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he has a prestigious teaching post at MIT, where he is attempting to address architecture’s contemporary academic pluralism at a studio for the Master of Architecture programme, and has introduced a new practical exercise for students to experiment with. ‘There’s no longer – at least not at MIT – a single, institutionally established value-set, or dogma, that can directly inform a core studio pedagogy,’ he explains. ‘Instead I developed a series of architectural “riddles” that pose problems for which there may be many design solutions.’

So how does academia relate to practice? ‘The academic context enables a level of criticality that is unfettered by some of the realities that can hinder creativity in the context of practice,’ he says. ‘We can do experiments that are both forward-looking and historically conscious with a fluidity that most professional practices simply cannot.’

O’Brien’s background in music theory and sculpture is key to his non-academic work – he studied both, alongside design, at Hobart College, in upstate New York. He is a keen music performer, too, playing woodwind instruments and guitar, as well as being a member of a choir. ‘I [studied] all with an interest in prospective relationships between “forms” across disciplines,’ he explains.

These concerns filter back into his practice, which constantly evolves. ‘Lately, I’m very interested in forms that are muted, less exuberant, still,’ he says. He admits a continuing influence by minimalist composers such as Philip Glass. Similarly, in his courses, abstract minimalism, such as that seen in the work of Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, as well as modernist architecture, often come up, which fuels his concerns with the question of form and his tendency towards clean, yet very contemporary shapes.

His current work is – unsurprisingly – diverse. A visually striking 13ft-tall anechoic chamber installation, a lighting product series called the Ghost Lamp, several private houses and further conceptual installations are all in the pipeline. ‘Our approach is to seek out opportunities to rationalise strange, unexpected and idiosyncratic forms,’ says the architect. His recently designed work includes the as-yet-unbuilt Allandale House, an impressive single-family retreat to be constructed in the Mountain West area of the US that clearly displays the architect’s formal concerns. The structure’s atypical, long A-line shape is set to snake gracefully through the rural site. ‘I’m actually quite intrigued by “the ugly” as a way to unsettle the agreed-upon “beautiful”. The Allandale House, for example, is a project that I was happy to work on because of the challenge of working with such a static/primitive typology.’

A desire for exploration was also behind his recent Aesop commission, the company’s Boston store on Newbury Street. Having opened at the end of September, this is the practice’s first commercial interior to be built and a territory that O’Brien and his seven-strong team were delighted to investigate further. The sophisticated design includes reclaimed wood, combining the old and the new in the brand’s fourth US location.

O’Brien just won the coveted Rome Prize in Architecture, for which he will take a sabbatical and relocate to the Italian capital for 11 months to research architectural vocabularies and digital processes through a study of historical Italian architecture. Futurist rigour and academic prowess are making him one of architecture’s brightest new stars.

‘Architecture can take you anywhere,’ muses 31-year-old Rodney Eggleston. And indeed it does. Eggleston is part of a new breed of young, globetrotting architects delivering projects across borders and continents. His practice, March Studio, has an impressive portfolio, spanning an artisan bakery and homes in Australia to interiors and installations for Aesop in Paris, Zurich, Singapore and a host of other cities.

Eggleston launched March Studio in 2007 with Anne-Laure Cavigneaux, a Parisian graphic designer who was his girlfriend at the time (they are now married). While the multi-disciplinary nature of their practice – working across architecture and graphic design – sets them apart from the crowd, the decision to launch a studio together was far from a marketing gimmick. For them it felt natural to bring together their different creative skills in two and three dimensions. ‘The ideas and processes of architectural design and graphic design overlap each other,’ Eggleston enthuses. The practice currently operates out of a 1930s art deco building on a bleak industrial estate in north Melbourne, next to a lost-dogs’ home. While this may not be the bustling inner-city location many young creatives flock to, Eggleston wanted to provide more space for his staff and foster a creative community in the office. This approach is obviously working, achieving so much for such a young practice.

March Studio has recently completed a shop for Baker D Chirico in Carlton, Melbourne. The interior was conceived as an oversized breadbasket, where the bread products themselves complete the design and define the space. ‘We are inspired by markets where the fruit is stacked beautifully in lines, by a butcher where the meat is hanging from the ceiling, or a florist where the store is the flowers.’ Undulating plywood shelves provide display space and also serve to cool freshly baked loaves of all shapes and sizes. To complete the retail space, the counter functions as one long chopping board.

Whether it is the shelves in the bakery, or the glass bottles and cardboard boxes used to design stores for Aesop, there is a pragmatic approach to materials at March Studio. ‘Good design should inherently be sustainable,’ Eggleston believes. ‘We refuse to use plasterboard or materials that have bad environmental footprints.’ The materials’ qualities go a long way to informing the design process and this can also be seen in an office designed for a finance company in south Melbourne. ‘The material begins to take over and embody the space,’ explains Eggleston. ‘The desks and shelves are made out of the same wooden beams as the walls and the floors.’ The office interior shows an admiration for a simple material, and the ability to unlock its potential. 

Eggleston’s first residential commission, completed in 2010, was an extension to Brent Knoll, an 1850s rural homestead in regional Victoria, Australia, to provide the client with additional bedrooms as well as more space to entertain guests. ‘The clients expressed a desire for large expanses of glass,’ says Eggleston, ‘hence the living spaces are housed in a double-glazed box veiled by a folded roof carefully manipulated by sun angles.’ The copper roof rises at one end of the building to reveal full-height windows, and falls to meet the ground at the other end. Inside, this creates a variety of spatial experiences, more open and airy in the living areas, and intimate in the bedrooms. The design is also quite playful, with a sunken den and some dramatic walls angled by the slopes of the roof.

Brent Knoll has been a hit with the clients and, along with many of their projects, has been published on architecture and design blogs around the world. March Studio knows how to build projects that photograph well, but there is more depth to them than just an aesthetic beauty. The work shows an intelligent approach to design and an understanding of what makes good architecture today – not least the ability to provide experimental solutions to clients’ needs.

Reflecting on his architectural heroes, Eggleston's namechecks some of the great designers of modern houses, Mies van der Rohe and John Lautner. His biggest influence however is OMA, the Rotterdam-based office of Rem Koolhaas, where he worked for two years while still a student. ‘I don't want to design projects that always look the same. OMA taught me the most in that if you apply certain formula to a brief you can always come out with a different outcome.’ 

A new house is nearing completion on Eastwood Street, in the Melbourne suburb of Kensington, and the practice is also designing a boat for a client to be moored outside a beach house on Mornington Peninsula, southeast of the city, that will be able to serve as additional accommodation for guests. These projects both look promising and will no doubt bring the design studio more attention. They are proving increasingly skillful at small, smart designs. The next challenge for March Studio will be to see if they can design projects on a larger scale without compromising quality or craftsmanship.

We used to be taught that cities were founded on a particular industry: steel, fish-smoking, boots, ale, learning, railways, pottery, garrisons, market gardening, small arms, worship, shipbuilding, etc. Helpfully educative illustrated maps would show trawlers alongside Lowestoft, maltings at Burton, cotton mills in Manchester, refineries on the Solent. Brighton was always omitted. The illustrations would have been unsuitable for tender eyes since they would have depicted a seedy private detective photographing a couple in flagrante delicto or a raffish bar peopled by ginny former Gaiety Girls, remittance men and bogus majors or a louche ‘general dealer’ charming an elderly widow while stitching her up.

It is, of course, improbable that Brighton was ever actually more wicked than any other English city. That, however, is beside the point. No other English city has so rich and potent a mythology of transgression attached to it. Such a mythology – or, according to taste, such a font of clichés – may well be at odds with the actuality we witness, but it will nonetheless still captivate us, still persuade us to seek corroborative evidence. Brighton is a tainted ideal as much as a physical entity. The ideal is most obviously associable with fictions of the mid-twentieth century, with Graham Greene, Peter Cheyney, Patrick Hamilton, Robert Hamer. The latter two were magisterially self-destructive artists, puff’d and reckless libertines who trod the primrose path and whose Brightons are foetid, corrupt, overblown, sinister. Brighton might be a mere vessel into which the polymorphously perverse can tip their orchidaceous poison. A regrettable fate? Maybe. But it’s an appropriately self-fulfilling one because, despite the protestations of watch committees and rotarians and prim aldermen down the years, this is precisely what Brighton was made for.

No other English city can boast that the particular industry on which it was founded was the provision of untempered sybaritism, illicit pleasure, princely licentiousness. All of which come at a price: the Prince Regent, never a quiet dresser, became an ample dresser – ‘an old fat Mandarin’. His distended breeches, preserved in the museum, are an XXXXXXL monument to excess. And his pleasure dome, the Royal Pavilion, one of the prodigies of all English architecture, was for more than a century after its creation regarded with sniffy contempt. The measure of that contempt, both moral and aesthetic, is indicated by its lack of progeny. In Brighton it spawned the Sassoon Mausoleum in Kemp Town, now a bar, and a small house hidden away off Western Road. And in north London, on the edge of St John’s Wood, there is a villa built for a Victorian magician which also took its cue from the Regent’s marvellous toy: but that’s showbiz.

The Pavilion’s exterior, for all John Nash’s felicities and caprices and coups de théâtre, forms a stylistic cul-de-sac. It belongs to the end of a tradition. It is the last and greatest of eighteenth-century follies even though it was not finished till the third decade of the nineteenth, when it was already out of fashion. Given the Regent’s profligacy, it would have been derided no matter what it looked like. Its critics were not to know that George IV, as the Regent had become by the time the Pavilion was completed, would be the last British monarch to indulge in adventurous and enlightened architectural patronage. Taste was changing. England was on the point of suffering a sort of evangelical rearmament.

An expression of frivolity, even if executed in absolute earnest, could hardly be expected to excite sympathy even if its fantastical interior did anticipate the high Victorian appetite for accumulated clutter and energetic maximalism: more is more. The Regency’s most celebrated confection is, quirkily, the least ‘Regency’ of buildings in a city which has a greater stock of such buildings than anywhere else. They suit the seaside. Indeed, they condition our expectation of the seaside. Cream stucco, bow fronts, fanciful capitals, delicate ironwork: the formula is simple, yet the responses it invites are several and contradictory.

How can Brighton be at once stately and blowsy, buttoned up and abandoned, douce and savage? It possesses all these qualities. And this is because here we blithely impose them as we would be disinclined to at, say, Cheltenham or Clifton, which are contemporary and architecturally kindred, but unburdened by the weight of reputation. As we would be disinclined to at Victorian Hove, whose collision with westernmost Brighton is that of a thin-lipped bishop with a buxom actress.

The shift from stucco to red brick is not simply a matter of fashion. It also signals, in the space of a few streets, the usurpation of that architecture which best represented the guiltless pursuit of happiness and sensual gratification with an architecture that stands for solemnity and moralising and priggishness – which stands, anyway, for those qualities in public: everybody knows that our Victorian forebears were, in private, laudanum-addicted child-beaters.

Now, fashions in building design are as ephemeral as fashions in thought or polity. What, astonishingly, has not proved ephemeral is the conviction that architecture must be plodding, earnest, ‘serious’, morally rooted. Brighton has suffered as much as anywhere from the puritanically wrong idea that buildings should ‘work’, that they should primarily be functional. Successive generations of Brightonian aesthetic midgets have spent more than a century and a half not learning from the Pavilion’s geometric delinquency and from the Regency’s propensity for legerdemain that building can and should be theatrical, exhibitionistic, illusionistic, lighthearted, camp. Build thus and the gap between the physical and the ideal is closed.

(2005)

Main image credit: Martha Warner

‘If you look at successful architecture, it always comes back to the relationship to the body and the senses,’ says Jeremy Barbour, explaining what’s important to him as a designer. Barbour is the founder of TACKLEBOX Architecture, a small architecture practice founded in New York in 2006 that is increasingly making a name for itself with projects that imaginatively deploy unconventional materials (often ultra sensorial) to create engaging interior environments. Based in a warehouse just beside the Williamsburg Bridge in Brooklyn, and with various artists, designers and artisans as neighbours, Barbour revels in bringing people together to collaborate on projects for a variety of forward-thinking retail clients.

An early project for the fashion designer Phillip Lim exemplifies Barbour’s style, showcasing a series of smart juxtapositions that subvert luxury clichés. In this SoHo store a fairly conventional hardwood floor meets a wall covered in stacked oak tongue-and-groove boards, recognisable from any cheap kitchen, while the internal staircase is finished with the most rudimentary of concrete paving blocks, set off by a decorative steel railing. These deeply textured, almost-rustic materials provide a sophisticated foil to the clothes themselves, an approach that continues in a more recent project for another fashion retailer, OWEN. In this case the displays are highlighted by a feature wall that folds over into a ceiling, all created out of 25,000 brown paper bags – a familiar yet utterly banal material made strange and turned into something haptic, alluring.

‘For us, it is never just about using a material for the sake of it,’ explains Barbour. Indeed, a variety of factors come together to mould each project. The nature of fit-out jobs for retail clients is often that of tight programmes and low budgets, but it is also a world of intense contact with clients and builders, and Barbour seems to relish the challenges: ‘Those kind of constraints, if properly calibrated, can be a powerful catalyst in the design process,’ he says. Consider a project he completed for Aesop – their first store in the US, again in New York. Barbour wanted the design to offer a sense of passing time (a wry comment on the traditionally high turnover of retail space in the city), and decided to create a series of walls from a huge pile of old New York Times newspapers that had been acquired for another project. A counterintuitive material choice like this certainly required a team who would believe in the project. ‘Can you imagine going to a NYC general contractor and saying, “We would love to build a store out of newspaper”?’ quips Barbour. ‘They’d laugh you out of the room.’ Instead, TACKLEBOX approached one of their local fabricators, who put them in touch with a sculptor who uses phonebooks and newspapers in his practice. They in turn brought in an archival bookbinder from Korea, who then helped bind the newspapers into the walls like a giant book. The results are highly striking; the newspapers have a visual texture somewhere between rough concrete and soft fur, and the space has a power that goes well beyond the visual. ‘It has great acoustic qualities,’ explains Barbour. ‘So when you step in there’s an almost-physical sensation that happens, when the smell and sound – those senses – are engaged.’

There’s something unconventional about Barbour, 36. He’s certainly not the stereotype of the architect who imposes his unique formal vision wherever it will go. ‘I had a very blue-collar upbringing in rural southwestern Virginia, and I never had any desire to be an architect,’ he says. Indeed, he transferred into the course quite late, and – he claims – quite whimsically. ‘But the first day that I sat down in an architecture studio, I finally found the thing that really worked for me,’ he says, and after receiving an undergraduate degree from Virginia Tech, he eventually completed a masters at Columbia. But instead of the theoretical journey, where design is a concept made real, the practical activity of building is something that Barbour has always been closer to. ‘I grew up building,’ he says, ‘and there was definitely a time where we heated our house with a wood stove, so we spent every weekend cutting wood and stacking wood, and I can see a bit of that emerge in the work that we do here, working with a material, stacking it in different ways, playing with it as a modular unit.’ With this approach, it’s actually to fashion that Barbour is most closely linked, both through his main set of clients, but also through this way of working in space. ‘If you look at a fashion designer like Phillip Lim,’ he explains, ‘they’ll experiment with materials, and there’s very little fear about working with a material in the wrong way.’

Barbour is part of a current generation of young architects who see the spirit of collaboration as the best way of making work; instead of that familiar scenario of their first commission being a house built for their wealthy parents, many young designers are bringing themselves together in loose collectives, building temporary structures, shops and installations. This new breed often has no immediate desire to move into the world of large structures, which comes with big budgets but a lack of control on the process. TACKLEBOX are distant cousins to the British group Assemble, a fast-growing collaborative practice that has designed temporary cinemas and theatres in abandoned spaces across London. And they also have an affinity with members of the lo-fi west coast design scene, such as the Los Angeles-based Ball-Nogues Studio, whose work has an almost-punk approach to contemporary digital design, and includes creating intricate spatial installations out of old T-shirts or cheap metal beads. ‘We have a privileged position where we’re outside of that world of making, just one degree back,’ explains Barbour. ‘We can look at what a ceramic artist is doing, and someone doing a lot of digital fabrication, and we can make that link between the two.’ It’s a passion for bringing talented individuals together that’s the antithesis of the ‘starchitect’ culture that designers of Barbour’s ilk have grown up through. ‘There’s something in the chance meeting of processes,’ he says. ‘You bring those things together, you set up some constraints, some guidelines for something to happen, you’re not quite sure, but bring this person and this person together, and something interesting is bound to happen.”

Scented Letters

Scented Letters

Bethan Cole invites you to join her on a theoretical examination of the smells women choose to cloak themselves in.

Mark Buxton

The Modern Classicist

Mark Buxton explains to Neil Chapman how a geology student can end up becoming Rei Kawakubo’s favourite nose.

David Morley

Poetry Lesson

David Morley demonstrates how words and metre are just as capable of provoking olfactory memories as smell.

Michael Edwards

Perfume by Numbers

Vicci Bentley meets Michael Edwards, the scent taxonomist who is categorising the fragrance world one launch at a time.

Sissel Tolaas

The Science Bit

Academic and artist Sissel Tolaas is addicted to smell – but only real-world smells. By Tony Marcus.

Geza Schoen

The art of concentration

Intense and intoxicating – words that could be used to describe Geza Schoen and his creations, finds Susan Irvine.

Turn the pages of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, published by Steidl, and you inhale text in bitumen black ink on Hahnemühle paper and the specially mixed vegetable inks coming off the photographs by Ed Ruscha printed on Fuji Crystal Archive. Steidl make the world’s best-looking art books – and arguably the best-smelling ones.

It was a library of such publications that the 43-year-old perfumer Geza Schoen consulted for Paper Passion, a scent that smells like a Steidl book and comes boxed in one. Flick past the texts on grainy grey paper at the front, and you come to smooth scarlet pages, each with a precision-cut, bottle-shaped void in the centre. Slotted into this recess is the perfume with its crystal-dry aroma.

Paper Passion is a collaboration between Gerhard Steidl, Wallpaper* magazine, Karl Lagerfeld and Schoen. ‘Geza was the obvious person to go to for the project because of his progressive and conceptual approach to fragrance,’ says Tony Chambers of Wallpaper*. ‘It’s not a conventional subject matter for a scent, but we knew Geza would understand it.’

Schoen is a maverick, with a history of collaborating on iconoclastic projects. He has worked with artists such as Sissel Tolaas, and lately, Wolfgang Georgsdorf, for whom he made 64 odours for Smeller, an olfactory organ that, says Schoen, ‘spectators can play like a piano to make aromascapes’. (Smeller is on show until September 20 at Sensory Sensation at Im OÖ Kulturquartier in Linz, Austria.)

In 2001, he began working with the British fashion house Boudicca to create Wode, a fragrance that comes in two versions, Scent and Paint – it was launched in 2008. Spritzed from its silver spray-paint can, Paint douses the wearer in a deep blue pigment akin to the woad the ancient British queen Boudicca wore into battle. The colour fades away after a few minutes, leaving an uncompromising blend of black hemlock, raw opium, smoky notes, tuberose and spices. Nothing commercial, then, for Schoen, who explains, ‘My father was a mad art teacher who lived and breathed art 24 hours a day. For me it’s natural to do things differently.’ 

He was born and raised in the German city of Kassel, home to the Documenta art show, which he first attended with his father aged three. At 13, ‘I started collecting samples of men’s fragrance and that was it. After that there was nothing for me but perfume – and football’. After training at the international fragrance manufacturers H&R (now known as Symrise), he worked there for 12 years. But, frustrated at how corporate the industry had become, he left and moved to London, where he got involved with Boudicca, ‘those dreamers’. Nor did he expect his next project to be anything other than the fulfilment of a long-nurtured aspiration.

This was based on his love for Iso E Super, an enigmatic aroma-chemical that appears in the background of many scented products. Schoen’s bold, simple idea was to launch a pair of scents, one of which would have an unprecedented concentration of Iso E Super – 65% – blended with a handful of other notes chosen to lift its low-lit woodiness. The other scent would be even more radical. It would contain nothing at all except Iso E Super. ‘I thought, this one will only sell to the artists, the freaks, the arcane.’

He was wrong. From the moment he launched Escentric Molecules, in April 2006, with business partner Jeff Lounds, Molecule 01 (the single note) and Escentric 01 (the blend) became cult products, and have built to a global phenomenon on word of mouth alone. Daniela Rinaldi, the concessions and beauty director at Harvey Nichols, is a fan: ‘Molecule 01 is the number one fragrance across all our stores, and our most successful fragrance ever at Harvey Nichols. It’s an amazing success story.’ It is often described as an anti-fragrance due to the counter intuitive ‘more is less’ aspect of Iso E Super. A wearer’s nose can quickly become unable to detect the super-heavy molecule when it is unblended, even as it envelops them in an enduring but transparent scent-radiance. Says Rinaldi, ‘I wear it and every day I get followed down the street and asked what my scent is.’

The long-term trend in perfume has been an emphasis on natural ingredients, as if natural were always superior. The Escentric brand takes the opposite approach. Here, perfumery is celebrated as the art of chemistry, a message that, as it turned out, perfume lovers were ready to hear. So, for the brand’s second pair of scents, 02, ambroxan is proudly named as the star molecule, a chemical identical to the key note in ambergris, but which has never seen the inside of whale. While, for 03, the centrepiece is vetiver that has been acetalised to remove the bitter aspects of this root, leaving it smelling more ideally of ‘a green thought in a green shade’ than the original.

Schoen’s projects continue to break out of the box. Last year he was commissioned to make a scent marking 20 years since the death of Klaus Kinski, the iconic German actor – ‘He was a total animal and so I went deeply into the animal notes with a big marijuana top note.’ And he is currently working on the second fragrance in The Beautiful Mind Series, which he conceived as a tribute to women’s intelligence. The first was made in collaboration with the memory grandmaster Christiane Stenger (her face is on the bottle) and for the second he is working with the ballerina Polina Semionova. ‘Forget supermodels,’ he says firmly. ‘The sexiest thing about a woman is her mind.’

Still, the high point of Schoen’s career so far was less about a beautiful mind than the beautiful game. Recently, a friend of his was making a documentary about Messi, the Barcelona striker widely considered the best footballer ever, and the cameraman happened to be wearing Molecule 01. ‘There was Messi, storming down the pitch with a football stuck to his foot, dodging past four defenders and shouting to the cameraman, ‘Hey, what’s that scent you’re wearing?’ I mean, Messi!’ Schoen clutches his head in ecstasy. ‘For me, that was orgasmic.’

Geza Schoen may be a one-man perfume revolution, but he’s still just a guy’s guy.

Sissel Tolaas once went to a film premiere wearing a designer suit and the perfume of a man who lived on the street. His smell, she said, was ‘complex’. Complex? ‘Consisting of the replicated smell of wet paper, alcohol, sweat, vomit, dust, dirt.’

The smell of the man was very present in the room. Really quite marked. ‘No one,’ she says, ‘suspected me. Sometimes I like to smell the opposite of the way I look.’

And while this might sound like a rather glib and exploitative stunt – a middle-class provocateur ‘toying’ with the involuntary odour of someone intensely vulnerable (not to mention stigmatised) – it was not done lightly or insensitively. ‘For me,’ she says, ‘every smell is beautiful and interesting. I have no prejudices. I learn to love them all.’

Tolaas likens smelling without prejudice to living without prejudice. She does a lot of work with kids, primarily to make this point. ‘I really don’t want kids to think about smells in terms of good or bad. This is how I work when I introduce the children to different smells. The issue of prejudice is essential.’

She is a scientist and artist; she works with smell. She won’t use the word ‘perfume’ to describe what she does. Based in Berlin, she was born in 1964 and is now globally renowned – for a long time she was the sole practitioner in her field. She consults and speaks with NASA and on United Nations arts/climate panels. She works for major brands (Ikea wanted something on the smell of Sweden) and has been commissioned and exhibited by MIT, MoMA, Tate, Venice Biennale and Beijing Olympics. 

Her background is academic – degrees, residencies and postgraduate studies at different universities (Warsaw, Oslo, Oxford, Harvard Medical School, Stanford) – she comes into smell (not perfume) from studying visual art and chemistry. She has several undergraduate degrees (mathematics, linguistics, chemical science, visual art) and has a doctorate in chemistry.

Her Berlin flat has a laboratory and storage zone; there are refrigeration units for the 7,000 smells (stored in vacuum-sealed tins) and 2,500 molecules she has collected from around the world. The labels reveal her library: ‘Smoky/fishy. Senegal. 1994.’ Or ‘Sweat. Argentine. In the bars.’

Perfume (and smell) is molecular. There are an infinite number of scent molecules; a single flower might consist of hundreds of individual molecules. Together they make the perfume of the flower. Tolaas uses a piece of technology called Headspace – normally reserved for the perfume industry. It looks like a goldfish bowl with a TV remote attached. It reveals the molecular structure of whatever smell you put in the bowl, pinpointing exactly which molecules, for example, make a rose smell like a rose. And once you know which molecules create a certain real-world smell, if you recombine those molecules, working from the lab up, you re-create the smell.

‘What I do is replication. I am able to replicate reality endlessly for my purposes,’ says Tolaas.

As we speak she has returned from Kansas City and a three-year project researching and re-creating smells of the city and its people. The Kansas show will reach completion when she has established  ’stations’ through the city where people can sample the smells she has reproduced. ’You can catalogue every neighbourhood precisely. Through smell,’ she says 

What is an interesting smell in Kansas City? ‘Cupcakes. There was this cupcake smell in a certain part of the city. We couldn’t work this out but we decided to follow our noses and ended up at the sewage facility. They were covering up the sewage smell with the smell of cupcakes.’ Like pumping cupcake perfume molecules out into the air? ‘Yes.’

She re-created the smell of the First World War for the German Museum of Military History in Dresden. She interviewed soldiers about their experiences in more recent wars. ‘I worked to make the smell of the battlefield. Of dead human bodies. It became a very extreme smell. But a smell I’d never smelled in my life before. I made it in my own flat and my 14-year-old daughter got quite upset. She was saying, “When is the smell of World War I going to be over?”’

There is obviously a connection between smell and the imagination. There are commercial perfumes that are daring enough to smell of black leather, pigskin luggage, tobacco and damp, mossy forests. Tolaas has made a limited edition that smells of coal.

What does she think about the commercial perfume industry? She laughs. ‘No comment.’

Tolaas does not wear commercial perfumes. Or deodorant. But since 2004 she has been sponsored and supported by IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances Inc), a huge chemical-perfume company. They make the molecules that go into perfumes, cleaning products and food products – even household goods. They are one of the handful of companies who, explains Tolaas, ‘control smell and taste on the planet’.

She notes the difference between those who work to disguise the smell of things and her own work, which is to reveal and collect the smells (or perfumes) of life.

‘We have the right to know what’s out there before it is decided to cover it up. As soon as a smell comes along we are covering it up. Whether it comes from the body, the neighbourhood, we cover it up. We clean the floor with products that smell of granny smiths. We don’t have the chance to discover our own body smell. I think you should find out first, before you decide to cover it up. I think certain smells are there for a purpose, for the information they gave you. Something amazing could happen if we thought about this differently.’

There is also a space project. After Tolaas spoke at a NASA conference last year, a Norwegian astronaut contacted her. ‘He described the smell in space as rotten burned meat and dust. Very metallic.’ She will be creating such a thing to help train astronauts.

The French writer and thinker Georges Perec would have loved the way she catalogues strange corners of life. He was convinced we would see our world more clearly, more wonderfully, if we came at things from unexpected but highly precise details, the microcosm revealing the bigger picture. Perec enjoyed lists. Could you list all the smells you meet in a day? Could you question them, inspired by Tolaas? How many, if any at all, are natural? How many are created by companies such as IFF, so that reality, or at least its smell, is lost to us, buried and masked?

But despite her unspoken misgivings about the perfume industry, Tolaas wants to engage in a dialogue with it and even join the fray.

’I have,’ she says, ‘some mind-blowing molecules.’ What are they? A flower? Something from nature? ‘They are abstract.’

She continues ‘I would love to do something but it would have to be right. I would like to go to the North Pole and slowly work my way back to Europe – looking at the different countries, seasons, natures. I would like to go into space. To record. And collect molecules.’

So she is prepared to work with the perfume industry, and she would like to make a difference to it. She exclaims emphatically: ‘This is what I do!’ 

According to him, the source of our current scent tsunami can be traced back to the recession-hit 1970s, when lifestyle fragrances such as Revlon’s Charlie heralded a newer, faster, more conspicuous way of ‘consuming’ scent. ‘For me, modern fragrance started in 1973,’ says Edwards, who has been in the perfume industry since 1975 and whose background is in product management and marketing. ‘For the first time, Charlie changed people’s habits by speaking to a new generation of women who were moving from the home to the workplace and buying scent for themselves.’ By the end of the decade, girl purchasing power had overturned the ‘gift from men’ tradition. And YSL’s Opium had became the first blockbuster to convince multinational cosmetic companies that, more than a seasonal whimsy, scent was a commodity capable of generating a year-round market in excess of $23 billion. Game on.

These days, 75% of the thunderball is controlled by major groups, including Estée Lauder, Coty, Puig and LVMH – giants pitched critically against each other by the pressure to keep their profile high and their perfumes ever-fresh. Hence the veritable slew of limited editions and flankers – variation upon variation of best-loved smells that flood the market perennially.

‘To me, “flanker” is not a bad word. But it has to add something of real interest and not just be a pretty but forgettable fragrance that dilutes the equity of the original brand,’ Edwards says. At best, flankers can revitalise established scents – think Coco Mademoiselle. Or even turn a brand around, as with Drakkar Noir, the 1982 male flanker phenomenon that toppled its ailing parent.

Flankers also mean business for Edwards. For in each edition of his Fragrances of the World he catalogues them all. Each Little Miss…, Extrème, Eau Douce, Summer Lite and Absolut Nuit is duly documented alongside the year’s major launches and deletes – the ones that bobbed up, then foundered in the teeming pond. The current 28^thannual edition files a dizzying 13,000-plus scents regimented into fragrance families – classifications that Edwards also constantly revises in order to accommodate new creations that are constructed in ways that push the boundaries.

Encyclopaedic and ever-evolving, this is the recognised go-to for industry insiders and lay critics alike. As its archivist, Edwards is at pains to stress his independence and objectivity. ‘I am an observer, not a critic. That’s simply not my job,’ he points out. Yet Perfume Legends – the homage to the industry he wrote 16 years ago that is a renowned reference in its own right – is based on a canon of 45 fragrances he considers to be the world’s greatest to date. From 1889’s fauve and spicy Jicky (the great-grandmother of modern perfumes) to 1992’s polarising chocolate fudge-patchouli gourmand, Angel, and its airy, anodyne antithesis, L’Eau d’Issey, these were the scents, says Edwards, ‘whose innovation led to the evolution of the art of perfume’. Each is a ‘major label’ scent accompanied by an equally impressive success story. Small, albeit equally innovative names are notably absent from the line-up. Yet, arguably, independent brands and niche labels such as L’Artisan Parfumeur, Annick Goutal and Serge Lutens, which have challenged the Goliaths over the past 30 years, are slinging the big shots now.

‘Niche fragrances represent experiences, not marketing concepts,’ Edwards comments. ‘Initially, none of the great brands knew how to react, they were so used to market testing everything. They were like startled deer caught in the headlights of a thundering train,’ he recalls. Now, some of the most progressive new smells come from big brand capsule collections cleverly masquerading as niche - the Estée Lauder-backed Tom Ford Private Blend range being one such example. Connoisseur collections – Les Exclusifs de Chanel, Hermessences, Armani Privé, Dior’s La Collection Couturier Parfumeur – testify that niche is now firmly established in the mainstream.

‘Niche is the nursery of the future. The excitement that’s taking place there is at its best,’ Edwards believes. Yet he adds a caveat: ‘Now that niche has matured, increasingly opportunistic brands are pushing through. At times, especially in America, there’s a feeling that if you’ve never heard of it, can’t pronounce the name and it’s very expensive, then it’s got to be good.’ A particular bête noir is the rise of the self-accredited nose – the entrepreneur claiming to be a perfumer, when evaluator at worst, creative director at best would suffice. It takes literally years of training, dogged determination and pure passion to become a perfumer, he stresses. ‘I have too much respect for perfumers. Besides, it’s not particularly good manners to claim to be something you’re not,’ he adds, a resolute censure nuancing his Anglo-Australian lilt.

The foreword for Perfume Legends was, after all, written by none other than the late Edmond Roudnitska, surely the greatest of all grandmasters, whose poised but heart-stoppingly erotic chypres, such as Femme and Eau d’Hermès and the uber-feminine and floral Diorissimo, remain benchmarks of their class. Is there a new Roudnitska in the making? Edwards’s money is on Jean-Claude Ellena, the in-house perfumer at Hermès and ‘the closest thing to Roudnitska’s intellectual genius’. His other suggestions include Jacques Cavallier, who brought us L’Eau d’Issey, Acqua di Gio and Stella, and Olivier Cresp for Angel and Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue. He tips Daniela Roche-Andrier as a name to watch – the nose behind the Prada blockbuster Infusion d’Iris and Maison Martin Margiela’s (untitled). ‘Of all the most recent launches, this [the Margiela] has moved me most. I classified it as green, green galbanum. But when my wife wore it, she trailed woody undertones around the house. I had to think again,’ he admits.

Oversubscribed it may be, but according to Edwards, the fragrance industry is far from being creatively bankrupt. ‘On the one hand, fragrance has become a commodity,’ he concedes. ‘But on the other, thanks largely to the impact of the internet, we’re seeing the emergence of a new golden age heralded by a generation of passionate perfumistas.’ The proliferation of specialist sites and furiously frank blogs constitutes an online watch community. To dismiss their refreshingly free opinion could be regarded as folly. For as Edwards acknowledges, ‘these are the ones changing fragrance now’.

When the Penning Perfumes team contacted me about using perfume to prompt poetry I was delighted. Why hadn’t this been done before? Then I remembered that the 19th-century French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire had been ahead of the game, writing in Parfum exotique:

When, with both my eyes closed, on a hot autumn night
I inhale the fragrance of your warm breast
I see happy shores spread out before me,
on which shines a dazzling and monotonous sun.

The perfume brand Byredo returned the favour two years ago: Baudelaire is a leather fragrance for men; its top notes are caraway, juniper berries and pepper.

The Penning Perfumes project is a unique collaboration between perfumers and poets. The basic concept was thus: 12 poets would write poems based on perfumes and six perfumers would create perfumes inspired by the same poets’ poetry. Three members of the project paid me a visit in my writing studio. Odette Toilette (aka Lizzie Ostrom), the self-styled Purveyor of Olfactory Adventures and founder of the hugely successful Scratch+Sniff events in London. The poet Claire Trévien (Odette’s co-originator), who was sniffing out willing writers she felt could articulate perfumes as poetry. And my perfumer was Penny Williams, the founder of the Orchadia perfume consultancy and a fully qualified, passionate scent-artist and fragrance expert. Penny unveiled her crates of exotic ingredients – vials upon vials of sensuously, smelly stimulation – that would have had Baudelaire eulogising how ‘the perfume elates my nostrils’.

For our nostrils were about to be elated as we played a game of olfactory translation. I would say a word to Penny and she would interpret the word with a single note or raw ingredient. The odour would then open our sensory imaginations to further interpretations of the word. The smell was like a mirror to memory, except a mirror of vapour hung invisibly before us. As Odette Toilette has written on the Penning Perfumes blog, ‘A perfumer’s best tool is actually language, in terms of interrogating references in a brief, and understanding what somebody really wants.’

Then we played a different sensory game.

Penny handed out single notes of scent on her magic paper-wands and asked me to respond with words. This felt like one of those psychological tests to draw out a primal response – ‘What’s the first thing that comes into your mind when I say “bluebell”?’ – except here we were blindfolded to all other senses except scent. This got me thinking. Is perfume a type of poetry? The ascendancy of the eye over the other senses is a recent development in human evolution, and one that should be ignored by all poets. No single sense should be the linchpin in the making and crafting of poems.

And other thoughts crept in as we sniffed our way through the afternoon. Is the scent of something really the scent of the memories it provokes? Or is the memory deceptive and the scent more imagined than real? The evocations grew startling: eros is an unspoken ingredient of perfume as it is in poetry. The process of sniffing so many scents challenged sensibility to breaking point because it felt almost atavistic. It challenged sense and memory also.

And it challenged me as a poet.

For poets, the eye is the ear, and the ear is the eye, and synaesthesia provides a carte du jour of sound and pattern. All senses must be deployed in poetry, sometimes all at once in the space of a single phrase. A poem can carry a physical charge in its cunning and craft. Rhythm can say something about a poet’s heartbeat and breath. Shape and image are touched into place just as a painter might delicately but powerfully weight the angle of a brush. Similarly, the perfumer’s art is not only to touch and brush memory, but to create memory enticing our primal imagination out – into the space between us.

Penny waved another wand at me and my imagination responded with the phrase ‘Bluebell Calyx’. We later discovered the scent was Petitgrain, made from the twigs and leaves of the orange tree. For me, ‘Bluebell Calyx’ arose from my imagining myself right inside a bluebell, as if I were a pollinating insect able to zoom in on a scent within a scent, the calyx within the flower head. Penny described how she composes perfumes by forming a similarly inhabited acquaintance with a thing or a theme, almost by falling into and becoming it. This sounded close to John Keats’s notion of negative capability in the writing of poetry, when one ‘is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. Penny’s process for making perfume is the same as when I make a poem.

So, I gave Penny one of my poems called The Light-Trap.

And Penny took away the poem and over the next month crafted a perfume from it named Moth’s Wings. As she wrote, ‘There are 26 ingredients. Aniseed for a touch of darkness. Geranium, Stemone, for nettle and impending green. Coumarin for softness. And to be like grass when it’s winter dry in suspended animation, on the verge of bursting into crazy growth. Light jasmin, lily of the valley floralcy, representing pheromone trails, like the boat sails filled with the scent of Cleopatra going to meet Mark Antony’ and so forth. Her recipe is like an incantation. A spell. A charm. Then Odette sent me an anonymous perfume (later revealed to be Sartorial by Penhaligon’s).

My task was to use it as a stimulus to write a new poem. Yes, eros was at the heart of my response (how could it be otherwise?), but the memories and images the scent evoked were earthy, physical and sensuous. Of course, the cliché would be to write of flowers. Rather than avoid this, I embraced it and gave it close-up attention as though my life depended on it. And when did my life depend on staring closely into the eyes of flowers and breathing in their perfume?

While rock climbing solo, a sport I have indulged in almost suicidally because it stokes me with energy, unconscious action and the necessity for microscopic attention. You can fall a thousand feet because you misjudged the texture of some lichen. You can climb into the sky alongside peregrine falcons simply by grasping the flower heads of heather. I wrote three sonnets. I pulled them into one poem. I deleted one line from each. Something true happened. The poem declared itself. Thank you, Unknown Perfume. Thank you, Penning Perfumes.

Thank you, Nose.

Alas, I have always hated my nose. It is too hefty and it points East. I had never thought that art could be attained through a purely olfactory epiphany. Yet Shostakovich wrote a whole opera about a nose. And Cyrano de Bergerac spoke of his own huge nose as ‘a rock, a bluff, a cape – no, a Peninsula – a sign for a Perfumery’. For Cyrano, the nose is a sword, or a pen, both as mighty as each other. And like Cyrano, the nose fights its way through a life of sensory tumult, ignored yet inching ahead of the rest of ourselves.

Our noses are humble, which renders them poetic. We all hate our noses as we all hate our poems. In the process of penning perfumes, I have learned to hate them less. For who would we be without them?

Rock-climbs remembered for their perfumes

Grass-of-Parnassus.
Fringecups. Fingertips of saxifrage
clinging to limestone scarps:
I stare down flowerheads as if
clambering into their open mouths,
a pollinator scenting by tongue
the nectars beneath their lips, under
their white necks – not clean-white,
those fingering petals, but veined
with lucent jade stripes cupped
around a wasp’s crown of stamens;
climbing through, wary not to ‘garden’
the crag but to leave bare stone clear.

Ling: straggling
on every grab and ledge; holding
your breath in heather’s swarming scent
as if to knock you down for a dare;
as if their heads breathed bees, each buzzer
with a jab for your grasp as you haul
up through its scratch-your-eyes-out stems
as if flowers were more spikes than flower
or roots were more dirks and razors than roots;
yet when the holds run out, when the clean rock
teeters to throw you around or about,
then your heather-heads are heaven-sent,
and you clutch them close like the dearest hair.

Cloudberry in flower high
in the Cairngorms: a sly, sky-
white hour hiking in a sunned daze
of ropes and chocks and tapes
to the foot of some eyrie of an arête;
then scissoring up the crag in a surge
before the problems pile down like mist
or a missed route or running empty
on body fluids – cramming moss
in your mouth for its few tears
of clenched mizzle; clawing cloudberries
from their stems for an atom’s burst
of water, their scent like slung rain.

Almost 20 years ago, a fragrance appeared in the world of perfume that was like nothing anyone had ever seen or smelled before. This was the echinated, pomander-like and beautifully strange first perfume by Comme des Garçons: Eau de Parfum, a collaboration between the fashion house’s founder and designer, Rei Kawakubo, and British/German nose Mark Buxton. ‘I met Rei several times, but the first time I met her was after I finalised the fragrance. She was with her partner Adrian Joffe,’ remembers Buxton of the encounter. ‘She was very quiet and introverted – quite shy. She wasn’t fluent in English and her partner Adrian would translate her answers to me.’

That very first brief was anonymous – Buxton did not know it was for Comme des Garçons. The commission was for a scent that would invoke a sense of wellbeing in the wearer, a ‘healing’ perfume. And so he crafted a deep and intensely spiced elixir that had the shock of the new, while feeling pleasingly comfortable and familiar. Based on his own travels, in particular the ‘memory of a Moroccan souk’, Buxton’s fragrance had a slightly otherworldly quality and, perhaps crucially, it was an anomaly in the early-1990s era of ozonics. In its smoothly ergonomic bottle, resembling a mix of outer space and the apothecary, this scent of cloves, incense and cinnamon has become an idiosyncratic modern classic that Kawakubo wears to this day. 

This was the beginning of a long-running association with the brand, with Buxton also orchestrating later Comme releases, such as White and Cologne, which were more delicate and emotive variations of the original Eau de Parfum (White smelled like rose petals falling on Christmas snow); Ouarzazate from the iconic Incense series; and Comme des Garçons 2 – an abstract, futuristic composition that includes a brilliantly strange top note of ink. ‘In general, CDG follow Rei Kawakubo’s opinion. She will smell something and say that it is great! Christian Astuguevieille is the olfactory director at CDG, so he briefs the perfumers, but it’s never like a classic brief… It is very abstract and can be something like, “What will a swimming pool smell like?” or, “What would a rose smell like if it were on the moon?” There is 100% freedom of creativity on all of the ideas.’

Buxton’s work for Comme des Garçons, which has made him something of a luminary among perfume lovers, sowed the essential seeds of his current style: a tension of contradictory impulses between tradition and innovation, and the Spartan and the lush. He has described himself as a ‘player’, a lover boy and hedonist, but also as a seeker of sobriety, drawn to churches and the liturgical, and it is interesting how this dichotomy has played out in his subsequent work. The Mark Buxton signature style is not the sometimes-chilling Gallic minimalism of Jean-Claude Ellena, nor the decadent, plush languor of Serge Lutens, but one that keeps the brisk, clean perfume formulas stripped down and simple, yet results in perfumes that are direct, sensual and emotive.  

Now one of the most respected noses in the business, the story of Buxton’s trajectory to the top of his profession is atypical. He did not, in fact, originally plan to become a perfumer, but fell into the profession almost by accident. Born in England, his parents moved to Germany when he was eight to open a restaurant, the aromas of the kitchen arousing a passion for food, and for spices in particular, that has influenced his work ever since. Fascinated by richly feminine classics such as Nahéma and Chanel No 5 – a bottle of which smashed in the family’s bathroom, the smell haunting the space and his mind for years – he nevertheless initially studied geology at university with a view to a scientific career. This all changed when he appeared on the German TV quiz show Wetten Dass, where, blindfolded, he and his friend were required to recognise and name a series of perfumes. They did not win, but it just so happened that executives from the perfume behemoth now known as Symrise were watching and were intrigued. They decided to invite him to work for them. A risk taker, he accepted the offer, switched career paths, and a life in perfumery began. 

Buxton – who, when you meet him, is tall and a bit of a maverick-dandy type, sporting blazers and slightly eccentric attire – has since had an eclectic career, creating obscure ‘indie’ perfumes such as MoslBuddJewChristHinDao, a woody, mystic ‘unifaith’ fragrance by Elternhaus, and Vetiver 46 for Le Labo, as well as more mainstream releases for Cartier, Karl Lagerfeld and Givenchy. 

However, the perfumer is about to release a collection under his own name, Mark Buxton Perfumes, a series of five fragrances inspired by what he calls his ‘personal scrapbook of impressions’, specific moments in time and memory captured in scent. Freed from the deadening commercial budgetary constraints that can kill creativity in a perfumer, Buxton has been able to indulge his love of pioneering, nature-sourced ingredients. ‘All fragrances should hold the most natural and noble products which exist,’ he believes. ’Furthermore, exploring the effect of rare products gives a new and original aspect to the fragrance.’ His sources in Grasse have come up with hitherto rarely used ingredients, such as elderberry absolute, a rich, wine-like note, which is used in combination with an animalistic osmanthus, cassis and leather accord in Sexual Healing to evoke ‘a perfect evening you spent with your partner in bed’. A gorgeously flamboyant and very original note of rhubarb leaves is also used, together with neroli, over a musk in the erotic Devil in Disguise, which was inspired by the experience of sitting at a café in Italy and being beguiled by the smell of a woman sitting somewhere out of sight. The frisson of fruit and carnality works beautifully. 

Each scent in this mischievous collection focuses on one particular note, which the perfumer likes to turn up the volume on to a provocative degree. Black Angel, which tells the story of the heart-stopping moment when a stunningly beautiful woman suddenly appeared through the smoke in a nightclub, has one of the most immediately uplifting and optimistic top accords in years (a jasmine- and mandarin-infused ginger), capturing the feeling of a night to come; cuba libre in hand, that intoxicating sense of summery anticipation. ‘I love ginger – the taste, the smell,’ he says. ‘I’ve always loved the idea of overdose in a product. It’s a certain risk, but no risk is no fun. What I mean is, if you don’t like ginger you won’t like the fragrance, but that’s just the way it is.’ 

Unlike some ‘niche’ fragrance houses, which sometimes use almost wilfully bizarre combinations of ingredients in the quest for the (often unwearable) avant-garde, the fragrances in this collection are designed, essentially, to smell good on the wearer. ‘They are skin scents. The intention of this collection is not to shock people but to try to win their attention with wonderful accords, which I hope will awaken something inside.’ 

Buxton is excited about his oeuvre. Whilst he feels that even some niche brands are becoming tired and repetitive, he’s still questing and hungry for new olfactive experiences: ‘We need something new, a step further – and that is what I am working on at the moment. I am the owner of my brand now, and have total liberty and artistic freedom after all these years in the big industry. I can now finally do what I want. And believe me, there is much more to come.’

What is more interesting, a work of art, with all its intrinsic qualities, ideas and aesthetic innovations – or our response to that work of art? We live in an age where critique and theory is heaped upon any kind of cultural gesture – it’s almost at the point with certain pop-culture phenomena, say, Madonna or punk rock, that the excess of ruminating upon them threatens to suffocate the original endeavour. Sometimes it’s more interesting to read the dissections and merely imagine the ghost of artistic enterprise – the reality of it existing once is almost arbitrary.

Similarly with perfume. The past 10-15 years have seen an industry built out of meditations upon it – literally castle upon castle in the air. We’ve witnessed the arrival of globally renowned and garlanded critics and authors such as Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez, Chandler Burr and Michael Edwards, and a springing up and proliferation of a vast number of perfume blogs, some attracting as many as 1m hits per month.

And thus our responses to perfume are becoming more and more evolved, where once we had a primarily sensorial and visceral (perhaps unsophisticated) response, with the attendant clichéd and underdeveloped lexicon, either ‘that smells nice’ or ‘that is cloying/heady/sickly’, the latter a triumvirate of words that a seasoned perfume writer recoils from with dread.

How to ‘read’ perfume in a more intelligent way, though? The first signs of a more cerebral processing of perfume being in the ascendant were attempts to construct a ‘canon’ of the greats. Now, anyone who knows of, or has read, FR Leavis, the famous Cambridge don and author of 1948’s The Great Tradition, knows how controversial and polarising this was for English literature. So with perfume. In Perfume Legends, Edwards was perhaps the first to suggest there had been landmarks of perfumery where chemical innovation, commercial approbation and connoisseur appreciation collided. The classic example of this is Chanel No 5 (1921), which, if we’re going to be pedantic, was not the first perfume to use aldehydes (that was Rêve d’Or, decades earlier), but it was the first one to popularise them. It not only became the biggest-selling perfume of all time, but has also long been admired and venerated by industry insiders, making it a perfect candidate to become a canonical monolith.

What happens when we ‘read’ perfume through the prism of postmodern theory and critical thought? I was wondering this some two months ago when the new Gucci Première fragrance dropped through my postbox. On first smelling, it did not arrest me with its brilliance and originality. In fact, it seemed like a million other anodyne big-brand white florals out there – their greatest aspiration to be a kind of olfactive leitmotif for people who either want to buy a piece of a famous luxury brand to feel glamorous and sophisticated, or whose overriding wish is to smell nice. Perfume as a prosaic extension of fabric conditioner and deodorant, with no greater ambition than to smell pleasant, clean and inoffensive; perfume that masks the smell of BO and flatus and menstrual blood and all those other supposedly unpalatable smells that are actually profoundly human. In other words, Première, which has notes of musk, generic white flowers, bergamot and orange blossom, was suffocating in its own blend of polite mediocrity. And yet, and yet, it was also interesting. Because, like various other Guccis I have smelled in recent years, it had a smooth, uninterrupted veneer of polish to it that almost denied/extinguished the existence of base notes. True, the press release told me that there was a ‘warm and indulgent foundation’ composed primarily of leather and wood. But I could not smell it. This perfume was hyper-real – it made me think of Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra – a thin, filmy or celluloid image suspended in midair, almost divorced from corporeal reality, an image of what perfume is supposed to be, weightless and untethered, with no dialogue or recourse to the gravitational, earthbound pull of a heavy, lingering base. Figuratively speaking, Première reflects a speculative reality back to us – a faceted jewel of ethereal light, without the leaden, lumpen, embodied heft of real existence – read tangible base notes.

‘You could say that all perfume is Baudrillardian insofar as it is seductive. Baudrillard was the great theorist of seduction, of the deadly allure of the cosmetic,’ offers the author and theorist Mark Fisher. 

Of course, the work of many poststructuralists was a riposte to Saussure. They wanted to divorce the signifier (word/image) from the signified (semantic resonance). In The Death of the Author, Roland Barthes explored the ramifications of losing all narratives about the creator and their intent when we examine a specific text. This is applicable to a perfume such as Maison Martin Margiela’s (untitled) or Tom Ford’s range, where either the creator behind them (in the case of Margiela) or the nose (in the case of Ford) is unnamed and does not provide any kind of back story or information about the inspirations and meanings behind the smell. Once upon a time, writing upon perfume (specifically journalism) was very focused on these back stories, and they ranged from the taboo: tales of nose Germaine Cellier sniffing models’ knickers to garner olfactive ideas for Fracas, Vivienne Westwood also proclaiming (on Radio 4 of all places) that she wanted her first perfume, Boudoir, to have the odour of female genitalia; to very dull and benign ‘stock’ explanations – I remember once watching a presentation about Isabella Rossellini’s now-discontinued fragrance Manifesto that detailed how various ingredients, such as basil and bergamot, had been inspired by the smell of her grandmother’s kitchen. These sorts of stories (though perhaps not so much the anarchic and taboo ones), of course, were ideally suited to the sort of medium they were often reproduced in: the women’s magazine – a publication often predicated on reiterating the hackneyed tropes and subtexts of the fairy tale (pre-Angela Carter).

But in the Noughties, when critics such as Burr and Turin started to focus more on the chemical construction of perfume, displaying sometimes intricate insider knowledge of formulation, it could be said that perfume criticism finally embraced a poststructuralist approach. Once we subtract the explanatory romance, the personal exposition, we are merely left with a smell, its chemical formula, its relationship to ‘the canon’ and intertextual context to the contemporary fragrance market. With Tom Ford, for example, the loss of a perfumer’s narrative means the blatant plagiarism (and, yes, such a thing does exist in the world of perfume, but it is extremely difficult to prove legally), or at least derivation and ‘homage’ to other brands, in particular Serge Lutens, is foregrounded.

We now know that the supposed brilliance and originality of a fragrance does not hinge upon the ‘authorial’ spiel. For proof look no further than Jean-Claude Ellena’s Un Jardin sur le Toit – there has been a huge amount of publicity, debate and general conjecture about Ellena’s self-styled sui generis status as a ‘minimalist’ perfumer. And yet you smell this perfume and it does not smell ascetic or reductive. In fact, it is perhaps impossible for a fragrance to exhibit these attributes unless it is a soliflore. Despite all the trumpeting about Ellena, his radical innovations and brilliance (of which there have been moments, certainly), this is an extremely bland, tepid and limp piece of perfumery, with no discernible minimalistic tenets at all.

Comme des Garçons’ Odeur 53 is anything but limp. Arguably the first ‘conceptual perfume’, it smells of metal, acetone and the dust on a light bulb. Likewise, Etat Libre d’Orange’s Sécrétions Magnifiques, which is meant to replicate the smell of semen. Thus you could read both as a kind of situationist provocation or prank. In some ways, like Guy Debord himself, it asks us to ‘wreck the fabric of everyday life’ by wearing it, to rupture convention quite rudely. Like Duchamp’s urinal, which postulated ‘What constitutes a work of art?’, it asks ‘What constitutes perfume?’, and it also answers: ‘Any smell you pay money to anoint yourself with.’

However, situationist theory also argued that all of our everyday experiences and feelings had been co-opted by capitalism, commodified and sold back to us as images or aspirational products – so perhaps Odeur 53 figures more as this – an instinct to rebel or to smell like a machine (see Marinetti) distilled into a bottle and marketed back to us as an artistic statement/perfume. ‘It could be cited as an example of [the situationist idea of] “recuperation”,’ continues Fisher, ‘which was the opposite strategy, whereby the spectacle absorbed formerly subversive materials.’

Serge Lutens perfumes, authored by virtuoso nose Christopher Sheldrake, also had a sort of subversive, haute bohemian, decadent cachet when they arrived in the late 1990s. In fact, an epistemological connection can be made between Marx’s theory of economic determinism, of the base or infrastructure directly shaping the cultural and societal superstructure and the Lutens oeuvre. Turin, in the mid-Noughties era when he had a blog, rather arrogantly dismissed the Lutens brand as dominated by perfumes that are merely ‘bases’, or certainly defined by their base. In this way, they can be read as having a similar dynamic to Marxist theory (although, of course, on a more literal level, it’s unlikely that Karl Marx would have approved of the aggressive capitalism of the modern perfume industry). ‘For many perfume lovers, the base is the perfume – not the frivolous and transitory top notes,’ argues Les Senteurs perfume archivist James Craven, and in the same way you might find many Marxists who attested the same thing of their attitude to economics. ‘So many of the old classics from the golden age of perfumery relied on bases, and bases are what makes the signature of a great scent – think of Creed’s ambergris, Caron’s leathery vetiver and the Guerlainade. Germaine Cellier’s legends for Piguet are highly reliant on synthetic but unique and memorable bases.’

Perfume is (to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir) one of the accoutrements via which we ‘become’ woman. It would be fascinating to discover what perfume de Beauvoir wore – if any. Perhaps Fracas, because it was composed by the first great female nose in an industry dominated by white men – Cellier. ‘I can’t imagine her wearing any conventional feminine fragrance,’ muses the perfumer Francis Kurkdjian. ‘If I was her I would select a male perfume to show equity and demonstrate that gender is an invention!’

De Beauvoir’s ideological descendant, Julia Kristeva, is known as much for her love of red lipstick and groomed (but not neurotically so) feminine glamour as her sophisticated brand of feminist theory. But what perfume might she wear or feel correlates best to her ideas, I ask the perfume publisher Frédéric Malle, who is well versed in the nuances of French intellectual life. ‘In this case I would think a chypre,’ he considers. Perhaps perfume is a ‘sign’ of what is strong and bold, a symbol of power and prestige to disrupt women’s marginalised place in society. Terry de Gunzburg, another pioneering Frenchwoman who combines indomitable spirit with red-lipsticked, grown-up femininity, has perhaps produced the ultimate French feminist fragrance in Ombre Mercure. It is a chypre, so it is aloof and difficult and cannot be classified as a stereotypically fragile and delicate women’s perfume like a classic floral that is all about prettification. And it is also profound and lingering rather than light and inconsequential – other traditionally feminine attributes. It signals dominance rather than submission. It references ‘the canon’ in its olfactive proximity to the venerable Guerlain greats (in the same way that Kristeva and her contemporaries had a thorough knowledge of the philosophical tradition), yet it is also resolutely modern and forward looking. 

Speaking of feminism – can it be any coincidence that this past decade that has been defined ideologically as an era of postfeminism has also seen a proliferation of suggestive ‘eat me’ gourmand, fruity floral and saccharine confections aggressively marketed at young women? Can it be that these are the logical odorific extrapolations of a generation that sees pole dancing and breast implants as empowering, and Katie Price as a feminist icon? Perfume as soft-pornographic suggestion, as ersatz, faux-voluptuous, caricatured femininity? There seems to be a link. Interestingly, both the culture of postfeminism and the perfumes themselves are deeply polarising. Feminist thinkers such as Natasha Walter and Ariel Levy have written books objecting to so-called ‘raunch culture’, to women disporting themselves as porn stars in the name of feminism, because the bald facts are that we have not yet achieved economic or societal parity with men yet, and therefore playing with the signs of sexual subjugation is dangerous.

Ditto the perfumes: is the ‘come-hither’ subtext of the post-Angel gourmand deluge (from Lolita Lempicka to Prada’s Candy) dubious one for young girls to transmit, are these perfumes infantilising and enervating? Or can women shuck off the metaphorical hair shirt of second-generation and radical feminism and have a little fun with their appearance and the way they smell? If you’re a postmodern postfeminist, the way you smell signifies nothing apart from the way you smell. But if you’re a nouveau-earnest feminist, the insistent seep of pornography into every aspect of our lives – yes, even the way we smell – is pernicious and problematic, and notions that it is liberating delusional.

‘I suppose what is definitely an improvement about the current era is that women buy their own scents, now,’ observes Craven. ‘They don’t wait for a man to bring something back from a business trip to Paris with his own idea of what is suitable.’

Whether you concur with feminism or not, to advance our critical conception of the world of perfume, we must contextualise it, we must see it through the prism of the theories, ideologies and cultural ideas of our day. Perfume does not exist in a vacuum – either literally or metaphorically. It is an alive and vital part of our culture, an artistic gesture, as well as a personal talisman. The next time you choose a perfume, just ask: is this appealing to me on an intellectual or a purely sensorial level? The very best perfumes should stimulate a dialogue with both.

Ashley Gilbertson

Examining the Scars

The concept behind Ashley Gilbertson’s war photography is simple yet arresting, says Adam McCauley, and it hits home hard.

Bart Hess

Feel Your Way

In Bart Hess’s world, texture is king. Francesca Gavin looks through the spikes, metal fur and slime to discover what lies beneath.

Deborah Turbeville

Following the Female Gaze

Penny Martin meets Deborah Turbeville to find out what’s next for the woman who helped change the face of fashion imagery.

Emmanuel Santos

The Human Touch

Charlotte Cotton talks to Emmanuel Santos, the enduring and empathetic chronicler of Diasporic communities across the world.

Esther Teichmann

Stop, Look, Listen

All of Esther Teichmann’s work has a story to tell. Freire Barnes makes sure she is sitting comfortably.

Marchand and Meffre

Sleeping Beauty

Abandoned buildings captured by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre magically come back to life. Alice Pfeiffer takes a closer look.

The way Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre first met in the early Noughties sounds like the plot to a straight-to-DVD heist movie: 15-year-old Meffre and 20-year-old Marchand begin chatting in a ruin-specialising online forum. The two young men agree to get together to break into an empty Parisian building.

They both come from the capital’s southern banlieues (both grew up on council estates) and are used to the bleak, Identikit landscapes of working-class conurbations far from the postcard-perfect allure of the city. They also share a profound passion for industrial ruins and enjoy the post-apocalyptic feel of once-grandiose capitalist dominions.

Soon an inseparable professional unit, the duo started to embark on trips round Europe, from Ile Seguin in Paris to dilapidated factories in Flanders, Belgium. And this became their full-time occupation. In 2005, they bought their first of seven round-trip tickets to Detroit. Little did they know that the trip they were about to set out on was to lead them to global recognition. What’s more, their project, The Ruins of Detroit, coincided with a period of worldwide recession, and their photos’ sombre urban aesthetics have resonated with many. In a strange twist of fate, the project was in gestation around the same time as Julien Temple’s documentary Requiem for Detroit? (2010), which also figures as an elegy for this once-majestic metropolis.

Fascinated by Detroit’s fast rise (the first factories were built in the 1890s, and the car industry took off shortly after; its population expanded from 265,000 inhabitants to 1.85m by 1950) and crushing fall (delocalisation and racial clashes led to the population slowly diminishing over the past few decades. Today, there are thought to be between 500,000 and 700,000 inhabitants), the pair finds a certain, melancholy poetry in the world’s former car-manufacturing capital. ‘The city rose to unprecedented heights in 50 years, and died in 50 years. There is a surreal sense of acceleration of time there,’ says Meffre, now aged 25, with a calm wisdom that is rare for someone his age. ‘Detroit speaks for all the ruins of the world.’

The particularity of Marchand and Meffre’s work is that, in contrast to most ruin photography, it is never related to a direct disaster; it doesn’t depict an aftermath of an earthquake or demolition, but a slow decay and the abandonment of a myth.

Implicit in the shots is the city’s journey from industrial to post industrial, which has been eerily soundtracked by its two most famous music movements: firstly, the ebullient, manufactured pop of Motown (the label, founded in 1959, seemed to mirror/channel the confidence of industrial Detroit at its peak). Later on, techno, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, often conveyed the desolation of a city mired in recession. 

The pair recalls their first impression of the city was that it was like ‘visiting a ghost town. We arrived at 6pm, and the streets, cafés and boutiques were totally empty. This remains the most marking memory, before we made any human contact’, reminisces Marchand, a softly spoken man with a quiet elegance.

They started with the Donovan Building, the once-majestic Motown headquarters, built in 1923 by the architect Albert Kahn, and torn down a year after Meffre and Marchand shot it in order to provide the land for parking lots for the 2006 Superbowl. ‘One must remember that ruins are transient, and, especially in America’s ruthless, fast-moving landscapes, they can just disappear at any time,’ says Meffre.

Their following trips captured the intricacies of a rapid recession: their photos reveal libraries full of now-rotting books, doctors’ practices still fully equipped and strewn with medicines. ‘There is a feeling that people had to flee the city, leave overnight,’ Marchand remembers.

In parallel, the pair has plunged into another series of trips: their current project, Theaters, currently on show at the Polka Galerie in Paris, features old, American movie houses converted for unexpected purposes. The 1950s buildings, once ornate and grandiose places of entertainment and fantasy, went bankrupt on the arrival of multiplex cinemas. Unlike in Europe, where people are eager to protect historical buildings, those in America were simply turned into shoe shops, warehouses, malls. False ceilings and walls have been built for a more modern feel; the staff, unaffected by the golden mouldings and remnants of frescoes on the ceilings, use old stages to stack tennis shoes and equipment. Among the dirt and stock, one can often spot an old soda can or vintage candy wrapper. ‘The contrast between the state of mind the theatre was built in and its current state is mind-blowing,’ says Marchand.

The two men are now about to go off on another theatre-dedicated trip on America’s east coast. They plan on keeping their focus US-based as, unlike European cities, such as Berlin, ruins aren’t romanticised, but ignored or suddenly turn into a glitzy loft. ‘It makes the whole experience more exciting, and more profound,’ says Meffre.

To discover more of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre’s work, click here.

Main image credit: Frederic Champion, Marchand and Meffre

Interested in the slippage between autobiography and fiction, Esther Teichmann explores the intrigue of ‘how we write our pasts’ in her hauntingly beautiful photographs. ‘All my bodies of work stem from autobiographical experiences reworked and restaged into fictional and fantastical narratives,’ she says.

Her recurring protagonists (recurring because they all relate back to her and people close to her) are often caught in intimate moments, from scenes of turmoil to isolation and contemplation. A female head thrown back with jaw stretched in anguish. A lone male figure sprawled in crumpled pink bed sheets, his outstretched arm insinuating a departed lover. These extrapolations of the real make you wonder about the original incidences that provoked them, how they figured in Teichmann’s life (without her providing any kind of explicit explanation) and also what the stylization itself means or adds in terms of emotion and meaning.

Often there is a melancholy taint to her work, or a mysterious shrouded effect, and this is partly to do with her equipment: she is something of an anomaly in a world dominated by digital photography, using an old-fashioned, large-format ‘plate’ camera and bellows. This seems to lend her work the inquisitiveness of early photography – although, of course, hers is a 21^st-century eye. The freshly printed image is frequently, in itself, unfinished. Manipulating the form of the photograph has become prevalent in Teichmann’s ongoing body of work, Mythologies. Whether it is coloured tints, dripping and enlivening her fictive scenes, or the addition of enhancing, collaged components, the two-dimensional plane is transformed into that of an object.

Teichmann’s painstakingly produced images, collages and objects are much in demand. On graduating from the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 2005 (Teichmann is still only 32), she was selected as one of ArtReview’s 25 alumni to watch out for, along with Pablo Bronstein and Boo Ritson. In 2007 she collaborated with the Turner-prize-nominated performance artist Spartacus Chetwynd for a show in Berlin. Not only has she exhibited internationally from Los Angeles to Mannheim and Modena, but her work has featured on the pages of Dazed & Confused, Wallpaper*, 032c and 100 New Artists.

Teichmann completed her PhD project – Falling into Photography: Of Loss, Desire and the Photographic – also at the RCA, some months ago, and after a decade living and working in London, is about to relocate to San Francisco for a year to be guest professor and visiting artist at California College of the Arts.

But with all this exploration of autobiography in her work, what of her own trajectory? Does learning of this in any way give us clues to the arcs of lived experience that inform her work?

Born in southern Germany, Teichmann hails from Weingarten, a village in the Rhine valley near the French border. Her academic parents, an American mother and German father, still live in the renovated farmhouse she grew up in as a child. Her childhood was devoid of television, so she escaped into the worlds of books and cinema, spending her days and nights at the lake with friends, floating on Lilos, talking for hours. ‘It was always a relief to ride my bike through the humid, green landscape and spend the day reading and swimming naked in my corner of the lake,’ she recollects. She came to London after school, ‘unsure of exactly what I wanted to do’, and completed a foundation course, as they didn’t exist at the time in Germany. ‘That was the most amazing year of my life in so many ways, the experiential discovery.’ But at 18 she never thought being an artist would be a viable career option.

Nevertheless, the geography of her upbringing did shape what she was to do later. ‘Growing up near the Black Forest, I was introduced to works by artists such as Cranach and Grünewald,’ she remembers. ‘The eroticism, violence and fantastical landscapes within these paintings had a huge impact on me.’ There is evidence that Orientalist paintings influenced her, too, and her work also bears echoes of the 19^th-century painter Ingres, which is poignant, as it was during the middle of his career that the invention of photography occurred with the first daguerreotype.

‘Photographically, I’m really broadly influenced,’ she explains. ‘From 19^th-century staged images by Julia Margaret Cameron or Rejlander, to contemporary artists such as Andres Serrano and his series of corpses. I am just reading Diane Arbus’s biography that a good friend, the artist Christopher Stewart, gave to me. His references and own work have also had a big influence on my practice. There is also a small daguerreotype in a velvet case in the V&A photography wing I go to visit – it’s a 19^th-century image of two figures in a Turkish baths steam room or sauna. My two favorite things combined.’

Visual literacy is not her only forte. Writing has also started to emerge from the ghosts of her studio scribblings. Her literary references span philosophers, writers and novelists, from Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille, to Julia Kristeva and Marguerite Duras. Her MA tutor, the photographer John Stezaker, recommended she consider a PhD, as her writing was so much a part of her practice.

In fact, the written and spoken word forms the spine of her recent short film, In Search of Lightning, in which it’s acutely apparent how writing has always formed a foundation to Teichmann’s images. Shot in and around the southern German landscape in which she grew up, we hover over dense, wet vegetation and a still, midnight-blue lake, then enter dank, suffocating caves. The lull of the narrator swoons over these dreamlike landscapes; the rain continues. ‘In many ways it is autobiographical,’ she explains. ‘An account of the physical effect of grief – of one loss recalling another. But it is fictionalized, too.’

It will be interesting to see whether the romantic gloom that currently suffuses works like this is in any way modified by her relocation to sunny California. Currently preparing for a group show this autumn at Houston Centre of Photography, her uniquely sensitive image-making invokes fictions and truths we want to explore.

To discover more of Esther Teichmann’s work, click here.

Main image credit: Esther Teichmann, Untitled from 'Mythologies', 2012

Deborah Turbeville wouldn’t call herself a film-maker, which might seem strange from someone who has just directed two films – a two-minute video shot on the set of her forthcoming Valentino advertising campaign, followed by her first ever indie short, Night Cry. But then, she wouldn't call herself a fashion photographer either. So how would the celebrated American lenswoman refer to her 40-year career as one of the world's most controversial image-makers? Whose style, a sort of pointillist haze over the photograph, is arguably the most recognisable in the history of the medium? ‘I just have a lot of creative energy and needed to find ways of channelling it,’ she tells me over the telephone from her home in San Miguel de Allende, central Mexico. ‘People must think I’m strategic. But with everything I did – the fashion, the photography, and now the film – I was simply responding to demand.’

With her continuing to shoot commercial assignments of the very highest level into what must surely be her mid-seventies, the demand continues for her highly personal viewpoint.

Initially, it was her considerable height (5ft 11in) and long waist that was in demand: Turbeville started out as a fit model for the sportswear pioneer Claire McCardell in New York at the end of the 1950s. But soon it was her experimental take on fashion that impressed. She joined Harper’s Bazaar as a fashion editor in 1963, where the experience of watching over the shoulders of master photographers Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Bob Richardson encouraged her to start making pictures that reflected her love of avant-garde cinema. ‘All those images running around my head – Resnais, Fassbinder, Tarkovsky,’ she says, ‘started pouring into my pictures.’ Aware that their extreme soft focus looked blurred by industry standards, she took them to Avedon for advice. ‘And he said, “You’d be better off staying at the magazine because it would be very hard to pursue a commercial career with pictures like these,”’ she says. ‘That sent chills down my spine, because I knew I had to pursue it.’

She set up as a freelancer in 1972 nonetheless, convinced she would find a like-minded audience. ‘The imperfections in my pictures were the things people found charming,’ she says, ‘but I had to work to get people interested.’ This single-mindedness was to serve her well once her career took hold in the middle of the 1970s and she became embroiled in a debate about the morality of fashion imagery. Looking at them now, it’s perhaps difficult to see what was so threatening about the five women pictured in a disused bathhouse on East Twenty-third Street. Yet when the notorious Bathhouse Series first appeared on the pages of American Vogue in 1975, it tapped into a growing distrust of fashion photographers that rumbled on throughout the decade. The scandal reached its ludicrous apotheosis in 1978, when the film producer Jon Peters approached Turbeville to supply the stills for Irvin Kershner’s horror movie Eyes of Laura Mars. In it, Faye Dunaway plays Laura, a leading fashion photographer whose images of glamour and violence begin to bear a resemblance to the crime scenes of a serial killer. ‘Once I’d heard what it was about, I said to him, “You’ve got the wrong person,”’ remembers Turbeville. ‘And he said, “But you are Laura Mars!” And I had to explain, for the umpteenth time, that there was actually nothing sensational about my pictures at all.’

It was she and not her work that had become controversial. The seeds of confusion quite probably lay in a much-discussed 1976 Newsweek feature entitled The Kinky Look, which had grouped Turbeville together with Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton as one of the industry’s three most subversive figures, citing the bathhouse pictures specifically as evidence. What’s striking, reading the report now, is the inequality of the charges: whereas Bourdin and Newton were criticised for the danger and cruelty in their depictions of women, Turbeville was singled out for little more than the isolation and melancholy of hers. ‘It was something about the slouchy way they were standing and the fact they didn’t smile that really shocked people,’ says Turbeville now. ‘Having modelled myself, I was thinking about what was going on in their minds, something intellectual. But it turned into a monster that still haunts me.’ It wasn’t until the early 1980s, when Laura Mulvey’s writing on the female gaze became widely known, that feminist photo historians started to appreciate Turbeville’s work for her models’ autonomy and reticence to participate in the conventional game of fashion portraiture.

Turbeville doesn’t mind talking about work she made four decades ago – it helps her appreciate the highs as well as the lows of her exceptionally long career. ‘The late 1970s were very precious because things were extraordinarily free, editorially,’ she says. ‘Compare them with the 1990s – they were deadly for me. It became all about the famous models and the three superstar photographers they’d agree to work with.’ And now it’s all so quick: ‘You only get a couple of days with the models and there’s far less chance to evolve a story.’

Yet whenever fashion became constraining or assignments waned, it freed Turbeville up to travel to Russia, Rome, Mexico or Guatemala and concentrate on her book projects. And ultimately, it’s been this more personal work that has sustained her. She is currently preparing an exhibition of her famous Unseen Versailles portfolio, originally commissioned by Jacqueline Onassis in the early 1980s when she was an editor at Doubleday books. Scheduled to open in a tiny gallery at Place Furstenberg in Paris this October, the show presented Turbeville with an ideal opportunity to continue her ongoing collaboration with the virtuoso printer Jean-Yves Noblet. The two will spend this summer re-creating the ‘mistakes’ of her earlier analogue photography in the form of cutting-edge digital prints. Whereas once she bent, scuffed and scratched her images to achieve their delightfully decayed appearance, now the work must be done on a computer screen. It’s an immense task, but she has always been strict not to sell off her archive of originals.

Turbeville still shuttles back and forth to New York and Europe for work – she was shooting in Palermo, then Paris, earlier this year and is just about to return there. But mostly she lives a low-key life at Casa No Name, her bohemian house in the heart of San Miguel, which she made the subject of a book in 2009. ‘It’s living half outdoors,’ she says, describing a mise en scène that could easily be from one of her photos. ‘There’s a beautiful courtyard and a wonderful lawn terrace upstairs that’s really my bibliothèque. And once I’m there, with my books, I’m kind of a lounge lizard.’ It’s the perfect setting to dream up her next project. ‘What’s funny about this area of Mexico is you can close your eyes and think you’re somewhere else.’

Unseen Versailles, Oct 17-Jan 31; Galerie Serge Aboukrat, 7 Place Furstenberg, 75006 Paris 

To discover more of Deborah Turbeville’s work, click here.

Main image credit: Stephan Lupino, Deborah Turbeville

Transhumanists believe that technology is the key to a world beyond the confines of the human body. A future where our genetic make-up is just a beginning. Our wildest and most disturbed dreams of this future landscape near the work of Bart Hess. The Dutch creative refuses to be placed within a single medium. Instead he pushes the boundaries between design and photography, art direction and performance, fashion and fine art. Collaboration is at the heart of Hess’s approach. Past partners have included the designers Walter Van Beirendonck and Ann-Sofie Back, Lady Gaga, the iconic photographer Nick Knight, and most notably, the artist Lucy McRae, with whom he makes photographic images and films as LucyAndBart.

Hess has emerged as one of the most innovative and exciting image makers in the world of fashion, and he’s still shockingly young: born in 1984. Working with McRae, Hess is not only changing ideas of what we wear but reinventing the idea of portraiture. In their photos the models look directly at the camera with a neutral, detached gaze. Often, McRae and Hess are the models themselves within their images. Here the materials are the performers. ‘In the beginning there was a practical reason. We really wanted to push the material, which means you have to push your body. Not to be scared to be blue for a week or be completely scratched, hairless. Also, experiencing the material as a model helps you to create new ideas. Feeling the gravity, how you can move, how you’re not supposed to move. The most important part of the project is experiencing it yourself,’ the finely moustachioed Hess enthuses from his studio in Eindhoven, in the south of the Netherlands, where he also studied.

There is a sense of mystery or the otherworldly in their images. A strange narrative undercurrent, which is why the pieces are so inspiring. The photographs of the work are often muted, shot in a cold grey light. The results are all about atmosphere. ‘I start with a new fine material, then I kind of develop my light. Most of the time, it’s been lit from the top. That’s where people see all your wrinkles, you just look – but I think it’s a light where you just see all the details. It’s almost like a lab feeling or being in a fridge. I develop the light differently for each project, just so the material looks the best. I don’t really care how the model looks.’ Instead, we are given a sense of narrative – somewhere between computer games and fairy tales. These loose stories are hinted at with films of skin transformed by growing, itchy, blue thistles, still images with people wearing cloaks of foam or bound in mounds of grass. Where materials breathe and the inanimate comes to life. Yet nothing is specific. ‘That’s also, in a way, my goal, like you feel there is a reference, but then you have to search for it again.’ There is plenty of room for the viewer to bring their emotions and own stories to the table.

Hess’s inspirations include medical articles, transhumanism, prosthetics, genetics and the virtual computer landscape. His natural obsession is with texture. Foam, slime, spines and spikes, metal fur, breathing materials, projections, spots, lumps and bumps – there is nothing straightforward in Hess’s reinvention of the world. He sees his love of texture as something exceptionally instinctive. While some people smell or taste something, for Hess everything begins with touch. ‘I’ve always put new developed materials on my skin. As an interior designer would place newly developed materials in space and rooms. I’m always thinking [in relation to] the body. I don’t know where it came from.’

There is surprisingly a lot of handcrafting that goes into Hess’s work, but it is almost invisible. Instead he prefers people to feel the work has grown in a lab. There is a fusion between the organic and technological, between the physical body and the inanimate. ‘Half of the time I’m really, like, with my hands in materials, and the other part I’m really behind my computer, starting from scratch and making everything virtually. Both worlds and your mind get mixed.’ Blurring the boundaries between the body and the technical, man-made or unreal. ‘I think people feel like technology is hard and cold and sharp. Visually, that is really fascinating to me. You can’t look back – you have to think with a sense of freedom. You have to be completely free and open-minded. There are no, like, clichés yet to fall back on and that is also really nice for me.’

One of the best-known materials Hess invented was a slime project for Lady Gaga’s Born This Way video, shot by the British photographer Nick Knight, renowned for his fascination with reinventing the depiction of the body through the veil of technological advancement. The effect emerged partly after a desire to use the Liquify filter in Photoshop, where the body appears to melt into a physical reality. Working with Knight was a natural fit. ‘I think from our first collaboration we really felt like one plus one is three. I think he is brilliant, shooting really dynamic materials in a fascinating way.’

Increasingly, Hess is entering the world of performance – making an installation of the body, the material is the living performer. A slime performance piece was shown at the Palais de Tokyo, in which the model was still and the material was the moving performer. Other exhibition projects in the pipeline include an interactive installation at MU in Eindhoven at the end of October, where the public makes the work.

There is something often unpleasant to the beauty of Hess’s work – a true embodiment of the discomfort Freud described as ‘The Uncanny’. His objects and images are deeply attractive and repulsive at the same time. ‘In developing a project, I’m also sometimes not sure myself if I find it beautiful or totally unattractive. It’s like the feeling of having a really uncomfortable conversation – the emotion is really strong. I think stronger than being angry or being happy. I like seeing how the public reacts to the work. I’m delighted if they don’t like it or find it attractive. It’s nice to see that you have to have an opinion.’

To discover more of Bart Hess’s work, click here.

Emmanuel Santos is a photographer of the enduringly humanist kind. This eminently curious image-maker uses his camera as a passport into the experiences and ways of life of others. His most well-known and extensive photographic project concerns the international Jewish Diaspora, an endeavour that he began when he moved with his wife to Melbourne in 1982. This extensive survey portrays the diversity of global Judaism – from Hassidic Jews in major urban centres to Diasporic communities in Africa – and, for Santos, now in his fifties, producing it was all-consuming. ‘I ate it, slept it, I was constantly integrating myself into the work,’ he admits.

Santos’s passion for photography was ignited in his native Philippines when he was in his mid-twenties, studying to be an engineer. He was also a keen musician at the time. One night, about 35 years ago, Santos was performing at a folk-music house when a striking Japanese man, laden with professional camera equipment, came in. The two men struck up a conversation, with the photographer asking Santos to play Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind. He showed Santos his scarred torso and explained that he was a photojournalist who had been in Afghanistan documenting the Russian invasion that had begun in late 1979. He had sung Dylan’s seminal anthem to keep himself conscious and alive while he waited for medical attention. These were the dramatic beginnings of a lifelong friendship between Santos and one of Japan’s pre-eminent photojournalists, Masao Endo. 

Soon after, Endo gave Santos a Nikon F2 camera, a technology that was well beyond the financial reach of Santos or his family. Endo gave him the camera to experiment with photography (a medium that Santos intuited was his destiny) and to prompt him to make a decision about his life path. Endo’s tutelage was not especially technical but more fundamentally concerned with instilling a creative philosophy and, as Santos remembers well, ‘the idea of photography as a combination of all of the things that you are as a human being’. They talked about ways of perceiving the world through photography (and making photography a way into closely observing other people’s lives) and Santos’s aspiration to find his own photographic language. ‘It took me about seven years before I stopped mimicking Masao’s approach and I was ready to show him a portfolio of my work. He looked at it and told me that he had nothing more to teach me and I was ready to create my own footprints for others to follow.’ Santos’s hallmark photographic style is classical black and white photography, highly reminiscent of the romantic pictorial style that was introduced by photographers such as Edward Steichen (1879-1973) in the 1910s. Santos’s use of an aesthetic and timeless photographic style serves to emphasise the enduring and historic nature of his subjects’ rites, ceremonies and religious ideology.

In the first portfolio that he nervously showed his tutor, Santos included photographs of a tight-knit Hassidic community in Melbourne, which were the origins of what would become his global study of the Jewish Diaspora. Santos was drawn to this community by the ancient historical trajectory of their rituals and belief systems, and the explicit declaration of their tribalism. He went to the religious leaders of this closed society to ask for access to their communal lives, something that is rarely granted to outsiders, and especially photographers. He promised them that his photographs ‘would be proof of what I will have learned’ from their social group – which, he says, was the ‘universal spirituality’ that connects human beings. It is significant that he made his first visits to their gatherings without a camera, to simply observe and to become a familiar presence. His emotional warmth and quietude engendered a fundamental trust between him and the Jews. Through this unique and spiritual connection with them, Santos made his decision to engage with their world via his camera.

‘I’ve never regretted embarking on this project,’ he contemplates. ‘Photography keeps me inspired, and the practice of photography constitutes my moments of meditation and contemplation. Photography is how I “polish” my deepest emotions into precious jewels. It is a beautiful process and, through my long-term projects, I gain a sense of longevity and perpetuity, and that’s something that I am proud of. I want to create pictures that are enduring and that don’t have a “use by” date. And as long as the universe is breathing, the eternal subject is humanity.’  

To discover more of Emmanuel Santos’s work, click here.

The sand-swept landscape of Fallujah, Iraq – pockmarked by explosives, littered with the fragments of once-inhabited homes, and overrun by insurgents – gave birth to Ashley Gilbertson’s prodigious photographic career. Capturing images of the United States military in action, and the enemies in contest, Gilbertson was indelibly affected by his six years in the Middle East. But the front-page spreads and emotional photo frames excised a toll: it came at a cost so steep that Gilbertson has spent nearly a decade trying to pay for it.

In November 2004, Gilbertson was only 26 years old when he embedded with the United States Marines in the city of Fallujah while on assignment for The New York Times. One afternoon, he was accompanied by a small group of marines as he went off in search of a photograph in one of the city’s mosques. The incident turned tragic. Gilbertson watched as a 22-year-old lance corporal named William Miller was murdered by an Iraqi just footsteps in front of him.

That event left Gilbertson with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a condition that forced him out of Iraq temporarily, and complicated his personal and professional life for years to follow.

‘If anything good came out of Miller’s death, it’s that I know I’m trying to articulate the war to a country that doesn’t really care. I want to make them care,’ says Gilbertson. But finding a way to make people care was the hardest task of all. The visceral images of war and the drumbeat of politics had become the distraction, a superficial form of engagement with war. Gilbertson says he needed distance from the muzzle flashes and frag grenades because war’s true impact couldn’t be seen in battlefield photographs. Too often, the images of war become symbols – uniforms, numbers and helmets – that hide its real devastation. Absence. Emptiness. Loss. Gilbertson says that those aftershocks could be seen clearly by looking at the bedrooms of America’s lost soldiers, thousands of miles from the front lines.

In 2007, Gilbertson started Bedrooms of the Fallen, a project featuring black and white images of the bedrooms of fallen soldiers. His wide-angle photographs, in stark black and white, reveal the lived experience of war – untouched bedrooms with neatly folded clothes, plumped pillows and the paraphernalia of everyday life. The project would win a National Magazine Award with The New York Times Magazine, and it would capture a sentiment he has often repeated: ‘Conflict has a clear and defined end point, but war stays with families for generations.’ What makes these photographs so strong, Gilbertson adds, is not their composition or even their art, but that their message is clear. ‘This is the true cost of war,’ he says. ‘It’s the most authentic war photography that I’ve ever captured.’

Now 34, Gilbertson was born and brought up in Melbourne. He is strikingly tall; a mass of tightly curled, red-brown hair adds inches to his 6ft frame. His disarming smile makes him preternaturally charismatic. Most days he splits his time between his home office and his preferred coffee shops in New York’s West Village. A caffeine enthusiast, Gilbertson may count espresso as his favourite, but his habit is as much function as fancy, given his myriad roles as husband, father, member of VII Photo Agency, and founder and principal of Shell Shock Pictures, an advertising agency based in New York City. He also authored Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, a book of his photography from the war that changed his life.

Relaxed in his signature white button-down shirt and dark slacks, Gilbertson is affable, quick with questions and unrestricted in his comments and quips. He is interviewed often for his work on conflict, but he bristles when asked to define his place or reputation in the industry.

‘Forty years from now I want to be known as a thoughtful photojournalist,’ he says, his Australian accent coating the words. ‘I recognise that I cover conceptual stories, and the environments don’t always create strong photographs.’ Deep down, though, he knows that photography is primarily about communication.

Gilbertson’s own work has been shaped by two critical influences: his mentor, the Filipino photographer Emmanuel Santos, and Masao Endo, from Japan, one of the industry’s most respected war photographers. With art, the influences come down to the little things: Gilbertson, like Santos, prefers a 1950s-style Rolleiflex camera, and opts for black and white film when given the choice.

To date, Gilbertson’s lens has been trained on the landscapes of a war-torn Middle East, the temporarily ‘Occupied’ Wall Street, and even the lawns of the White House. Covering President Obama for The New York Times Magazine, Gilbertson even stole a moment to discuss the difference between photographers and reporters with the President. Gilbertson remembers, ‘[Obama] said, “I like you photographers, it’s the reporters that give me grief”’, a comment that still gives Gilbertson pause. He believes it begs questions about a photographer’s effectiveness, the capacity for a photograph to inspire scrutiny and elicit engagement. Photographs, he says, should challenge viewers, politicians and the photographer him- or herself.

Gilbertson’s career stands as example, as he believes his career was ‘forged’ by his experiences in Iraq. ‘I could cover the Democratic Republic of the Congo for 20 years and I’ll still be the Iraq guy,’ he says with a wry smile. In part, that’s because his own battle with PTSD gave Gilbertson an intimate look at what being a soldier meant and what the experience truly costs. He knows personally that PTSD is too often ignored by the public, in spite of how frighteningly persistent it is among America’s returning troops. And on issues this personal, Gilbertson has become more than mere witness or documenter.

‘It’s widely recognised that by interacting with a subject in the public sphere you are politicising it,’ Gilbertson says about his work raising awareness of PTSD. But the struggle is how to bring attention to an issue without polarising the audience. 

In the case of Bedrooms of the Fallen, Gilbertson says the political leanings of these families, whether Republican or Democratic, Conservative or Liberal, pro-war or promoting peace, didn’t matter. ‘It’s about what’s right and wrong,’ he says. The message in his photographs is clear: young men and women are dead because politicians sent them to war, and the reasons countries go to war should not just be ‘conversations for political scientists to have’. 

That’s why Gilbertson says the most important aspect of his work is not how he frames a photograph, or even what tools he uses to frame it, but ‘his approach and understanding of the subject and how that manifests itself in the photograph’.

‘I don’t think style is represented well by anyone in a technical sense,’ he continues. For a professional who swore off the principle of objectivity (impossible, he believes), his work communicates strongly because of his instinctual and emotional engagement with the story.

Now, Gilbertson is trying to bring a fresh look to the world of advertising, having founded a commercial start-up called Shell Shock Pictures. He believes that his skill at capturing life is unfiltered, and could be great for companies looking for advertising with edge. ‘I’ve abandoned the idea that integrity exists in the advertising world,’ he offers. ‘But we [at Shell Shock] do attempt to bring believability.’ In part, that’s because journalists are responsible for telling the truth.

‘Photojournalists have long understood what the public is thinking,’ he continues. ‘Making the public care about what we do is what forces photography to ride the line of activism.’ But he believes that this knowledge makes journalists better advertisers than many in the industry would admit. 

For Gilbertson, however, advertising is a means to a creative end: ‘As journalists we have to find new ways to fund the projects that we really care about.’

To discover more of Ashley Gilbertson’s work, click here.

Main image credit: Lauren DeCicca, Ashley Gilbertson

OWEN HATHERLEY delves into the monochrome, minimalist world of the architect Joseph Dirand to discover the inspiration behind his achingly hip interiors.

‘I still have the vision in my mind of entering the big, felt room with a black grand piano in the middle. It was very oppressive but so intense.’ The Paris-based architect Joseph Dirand is describing his first acquaintance with the work of Joseph Beuys, having been taken by his parents to see an exhibition at the tender age of eight. It wouldn’t take a psychoanalyst to read into this encounter a starting point for the architect’s mature work. Dirand produces the kind of architecture – mostly interior, with a handful of larger-scale works – that is designed to be contemplated, as well as lived in, a new, decidedly cerebral incarnation of minimalism for a decidedly exclusive clientele. Works such as the Distrito Capital and Habita Monterrey hotels in Mexico, the Villa Malta in Paris, or the 5th Avenue Penthouse in New York show an elegance taken to an arch and supremely sophisticated visual extreme.

Dirand, who at 38 is relatively young for a successful architect, is a recent recipient of awards from Wallpaper* and Architectural Digest, and is currently inundated with commissions from the worlds of fashion and art, including the redesign of Nina Ricci stores globally. As to why, it’s clearly not because of a willingness to compromise his aesthetic. Dirand is a very cool modernist and his signature style has a wonderfully stark and lucid clarity that speaks of simulacra rather than concrete forms.

Modernist architecture was the first to have been designed often with photography in mind; in fact, it was the first architecture to have tried to look more and more like photographs. The early experiments of the 1920s were often very brightly coloured, with architects such as Le Corbusier and Bruno Taut using bright, brash and artificial shades on their concrete façades. Black and white photography changed all of that, as architects began to be seduced by the (entirely inaccurate) visual representation of their work, where the reduced planes and volumes of modernist architecture appeared to fit with the grey-on-grey palette of photogravure. The International Style, as it was called, was based on this relentless monochrome, and the white-cube genre that still dominates contemporary art derives, at several removes, from this change. What makes Dirand unusual in this is that his architecture seems to translate quite strikingly and graphically into his publicity photographs, which are exceptionally distinctive, and have surely helped greatly in making the architect's name. A deep black infuses them, with a clear white as the only relief, an approach that puts the interiors in a space somewhere between film noir and the luxury architecture of the late 1920s, after the photographer’s ministrations have cut in. Their sleight of hand means that sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between a colour and a black and white photograph of Dirand’s architecture.

Asked about these photographs, Dirand points to a familial connection – his father was a photographer who had originally wanted to be an architect; for a time he worked as his assistant. Dirand senior (Jacques) was one of the world’s top interiors photographers, with a long-standing association with The World of Interiors, shooting prestigious homes such as Yves Saint Laurent’s Marrakech retreat when Saint Laurent was alive. Dirand’s brother also takes photographs, for the architectural firm, and it’s likely that this closeness explains the heightened affinities here. But he also claims that the photographs have a key role in the buildings themselves: ‘The photography helps me analyse my own work and learn from it, especially because architecture is about framing compositions and reveals. I am always very excited after finishing a project to see how the photography will reveal the spirit of the project and if I have succeeded in what I was looking for.’ From this, it sounds as if the key to the architecture’s success is partly experiential and functional, but also to do with how the photographs manage to present it; architecture here is a matter of ‘framing’ as well as living. Rooms are often bisected with large black marble partitions, like the borders on a reel of film expanded to three dimensions.

The filmic quality of Dirand’s work is equally deliberate, evoking the austerely elegant world of films that includes Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist. There are various architects and architectures that Dirand could be connected to – the fixation with opulent materials and smooth, monochrome planes in the houses of Mies van der Rohe, the austere modernised classical aesthetics of the Italian Rationalists – but when asked, he points instead outside of architecture, to film and fashion. ‘I always start a project with a lot of research, depending on what the subject inspires, and then I make a concept board to frame the story.’ That the interiors are literally storyboarded helps explain the sense of observation and stillness that takes place inside them, the persistent sense that the visitor, resident or guest is moving within someone else’s narrative. Somewhat elliptically, he notes that, ‘another important aspect is that a story needs contrast and anachronistic austerity – but only if it’s sexy’. That’s what puts the minimalism of an architect such as Dirand far from the unnerving, haunting reductiveness of, say, Aldo Rossi or Giuseppe Terragni, although these influences are sometimes echoed in the narrow passageways and rectilinear columns of his architecture. The difference is that Dirand’s work is interested in glamour as well as memory and history – the willowy models that occasionally populate the photographs are appropriately ornamental.

Most of Dirand’s projects have been for interiors rather than entire buildings, with a handful of exceptions; he doesn’t seem to be worried by this, commenting that, ‘I personally don’t see any frontier between interiors and architecture’. Perhaps it will be in future projects that his architecture will engage with the city and the world outside. For now, he engages with those harsher realities with big picture windows. His work is rooted instead in opulence and luxury, to an occasionally gruelling degree. The polished materials, whether black marble or highly finished concrete, the obsessive neatness, all these are about a particular vision of exclusivity. Among the publicity photographs of the Habita Monterrey is another of those sharp, monochrome corridors, so stark and reduced it seems barely real; at the end of the passageway is a hotel maid, clad in a crisp, matching, white dress. It seems appropriate for this style, one where people appear to be designed around the architecture as well as vice versa.

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Joseph Dirand

Architect Digested

The modernist Joseph Dirand prefers to see things only in black and white. Owen Hatherley finds out why.

Peter Singer

Wishful Thinking

Peter Singer’s ethics may still provoke, says Mark Fisher, but his quest for an egalitarian society will never lose support.

George Megalogenis

Wish You Were Here?

Nick Bryant talks to the author and economist George Megalogenis about why life in Australia couldn’t be sweeter right now. 

Philippe Vergne

‘I see a need for something different.’

Philippe Vergne’s vision is tackling commercialism in the art world, one immense installation at a time. By Edward Helmore.

Jeremy Deller

The History Boy

Matthew Bennett catches up with Jeremy Deller as he prepares to take his political brand of art to Venice.

The Dardenne Brothers

Brothers Grim

A drab Belgian town as a cinematic backdrop? For the realist filmmakers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, it’s perfect. By Jonathan Romney.

OWEN HATHERLEY delves into the monochrome, minimalist world of the architect Joseph Dirand to discover the inspiration behind his achingly hip interiors.

‘I still have the vision in my mind of entering the big, felt room with a black grand piano in the middle. It was very oppressive but so intense.’ The Paris-based architect Joseph Dirand is describing his first acquaintance with the work of Joseph Beuys, having been taken by his parents to see an exhibition at the tender age of eight. It wouldn’t take a psychoanalyst to read into this encounter a starting point for the architect’s mature work. Dirand produces the kind of architecture – mostly interior, with a handful of larger-scale works – that is designed to be contemplated, as well as lived in, a new, decidedly cerebral incarnation of minimalism for a decidedly exclusive clientele. Works such as the Distrito Capital and Habita Monterrey hotels in Mexico, the Villa Malta in Paris, or the 5th Avenue Penthouse in New York show an elegance taken to an arch and supremely sophisticated visual extreme.

Dirand, who at 38 is relatively young for a successful architect, is a recent recipient of awards from Wallpaper* and Architectural Digest, and is currently inundated with commissions from the worlds of fashion and art, including the redesign of Nina Ricci stores globally. As to why, it’s clearly not because of a willingness to compromise his aesthetic. Dirand is a very cool modernist and his signature style has a wonderfully stark and lucid clarity that speaks of simulacra rather than concrete forms.

Modernist architecture was the first to have been designed often with photography in mind; in fact, it was the first architecture to have tried to look more and more like photographs. The early experiments of the 1920s were often very brightly coloured, with architects such as Le Corbusier and Bruno Taut using bright, brash and artificial shades on their concrete façades. Black and white photography changed all of that, as architects began to be seduced by the (entirely inaccurate) visual representation of their work, where the reduced planes and volumes of modernist architecture appeared to fit with the grey-on-grey palette of photogravure. The International Style, as it was called, was based on this relentless monochrome, and the white-cube genre that still dominates contemporary art derives, at several removes, from this change. What makes Dirand unusual in this is that his architecture seems to translate quite strikingly and graphically into his publicity photographs, which are exceptionally distinctive, and have surely helped greatly in making the architect's name. A deep black infuses them, with a clear white as the only relief, an approach that puts the interiors in a space somewhere between film noir and the luxury architecture of the late 1920s, after the photographer’s ministrations have cut in. Their sleight of hand means that sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between a colour and a black and white photograph of Dirand’s architecture.

Asked about these photographs, Dirand points to a familial connection – his father was a photographer who had originally wanted to be an architect; for a time he worked as his assistant. Dirand senior (Jacques) was one of the world’s top interiors photographers, with a long-standing association with The World of Interiors, shooting prestigious homes such as Yves Saint Laurent’s Marrakech retreat when Saint Laurent was alive. Dirand’s brother also takes photographs, for the architectural firm, and it’s likely that this closeness explains the heightened affinities here. But he also claims that the photographs have a key role in the buildings themselves: ‘The photography helps me analyse my own work and learn from it, especially because architecture is about framing compositions and reveals. I am always very excited after finishing a project to see how the photography will reveal the spirit of the project and if I have succeeded in what I was looking for.’ From this, it sounds as if the key to the architecture’s success is partly experiential and functional, but also to do with how the photographs manage to present it; architecture here is a matter of ‘framing’ as well as living. Rooms are often bisected with large black marble partitions, like the borders on a reel of film expanded to three dimensions.

The filmic quality of Dirand’s work is equally deliberate, evoking the austerely elegant world of films that includes Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist. There are various architects and architectures that Dirand could be connected to – the fixation with opulent materials and smooth, monochrome planes in the houses of Mies van der Rohe, the austere modernised classical aesthetics of the Italian Rationalists – but when asked, he points instead outside of architecture, to film and fashion. ‘I always start a project with a lot of research, depending on what the subject inspires, and then I make a concept board to frame the story.’ That the interiors are literally storyboarded helps explain the sense of observation and stillness that takes place inside them, the persistent sense that the visitor, resident or guest is moving within someone else’s narrative. Somewhat elliptically, he notes that, ‘another important aspect is that a story needs contrast and anachronistic austerity – but only if it’s sexy’. That’s what puts the minimalism of an architect such as Dirand far from the unnerving, haunting reductiveness of, say, Aldo Rossi or Giuseppe Terragni, although these influences are sometimes echoed in the narrow passageways and rectilinear columns of his architecture. The difference is that Dirand’s work is interested in glamour as well as memory and history – the willowy models that occasionally populate the photographs are appropriately ornamental.

Most of Dirand’s projects have been for interiors rather than entire buildings, with a handful of exceptions; he doesn’t seem to be worried by this, commenting that, ‘I personally don’t see any frontier between interiors and architecture’. Perhaps it will be in future projects that his architecture will engage with the city and the world outside. For now, he engages with those harsher realities with big picture windows. His work is rooted instead in opulence and luxury, to an occasionally gruelling degree. The polished materials, whether black marble or highly finished concrete, the obsessive neatness, all these are about a particular vision of exclusivity. Among the publicity photographs of the Habita Monterrey is another of those sharp, monochrome corridors, so stark and reduced it seems barely real; at the end of the passageway is a hotel maid, clad in a crisp, matching, white dress. It seems appropriate for this style, one where people appear to be designed around the architecture as well as vice versa.

One of Singer’s most important contributions to left-wing thought in recent years has been his argument – in 1999’s A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Co-operation – that the left must embrace, rather than recoil from, evolutionary theory. It is the right that has enthusiastically latched onto Darwinism, using ideas such as the ‘selfish gene’ as evidence for their claim that capitalist rapacity has its roots in nature. Does he think it is possible for the left to wrest Darwinism from the right? ‘Yes, I do. Those who work in the field of evolutionary theory have a much better understanding of the political and ethical significance of evolution than the right-wingers to whom you refer, or for that matter, than the general public. I think that, in time, this better understanding will spread, and the left will realise that it cannot make progress by rejecting an evolutionary understanding of human nature.’

Singer is an enviably prolific author – he has written more than 40 books – and, at 65, there are no signs of any slackening of the pace. At the moment, he says, he is ‘writing a book about the nature of ethics and the foundations of utilitarianism. It focuses on the work of the little-known 19th-century utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick, the author of The Methods of Ethics, one of the finest books on ethics ever written. The point of using his work is to see how well his arguments stand up – and in fact they do stand up remarkably well.’

For George Megalogenis, this is The Australian Moment. The title of his new bestselling book sounds ominously like the boast of a cocky antipodean, barracking from the stands of, say, The Oval just as Australia is on the verge of victory in the Ashes. Indeed, one of the aims of his book is not so much to make Australians feel good about themselves as to think differently about their country. Outside of the sporting realm, they are surprisingly poor at taking credit for their own achievements, preferring to look upon themselves as inhabitants of a 'Lucky Country' teeming with resources – ‘a quarry with a view’. Megalogenis, a columnist with The Australian, has set out to persuade his compatriots that they have made their own luck.

It’s a persuasive argument. At the start of the 1980s, Australia risked becoming the ‘poor white trash of Asia’, in the cruel estimation of the former Singapore Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Its currency was ridiculed as the ‘Pacific Peso’. Now the talk worldwide is of a ‘wonder down under’: a country that has successfully avoided the past three global recessions, with a currency now enjoying parity with the greenback. Abraham Lincoln described America as ‘the last best hope on Earth’. With the US in decline, Megalogenis asks whether that is now true of Australia. If nothing else, he believes it has become ‘more versatile today than any other first-world nation'.

‘We’re not meant to be great,’ he tells me, ‘and the rest of the world has recognised our success before we have recognised it ourselves. We need to teach ourselves as a country to look at the rest of the world to realise how good things are here.’ The start of the good times can be traced back to the 1980s, when the then Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, assisted by his hyper-ambitious young Treasurer, Paul Keating, began the deregulation process that opened up the Australian economy to the outside world. What turned out to be a 30-year reform era continued under the conservative government of John Howard, and gave Australia a formidably strong economic model by the time that the Asian financial crisis struck in 1997. ‘We found a way to survive,’ says Megalogenis, and it pre-dates the rise of China, a huge market for its resources and now the country’s largest trading partner. ‘We’re not panicked any more. We don’t seem to be intimidated any more. And our big idea wasn’t something that we pinched. We thought it through ourselves.’ 'Are his compatriots listening?' I ask. ‘The penny is beginning to drop,’ he says, especially for older Aussies who lived through the uncertainties of the 1970s.

Time was when Australia was explained by writers with English-sounding names: Manning Clark, its most celebrated historian, and Donald Horne, the journalist who at the start of the 1960s wrote The Lucky Country, a polemic that lambasted the country’s stultifying conservatism and complacency. Megalogenis, who was born in 1964, the year that The Lucky Country was published, personifies many of the changes that have since overtaken his homeland. His Greek parents came to Australia after the war, and met at the Ithaca Club in Melbourne. His father worked as a signalman on the railways, and his signal box became an early playground. ‘My parents did us right,’ says Megalogenis, who is now in his late-forties. ‘They put a roof over our heads, food on the table and put my sister and I through school and university.’ Because of his Greek heritage, he was teased at school, and says he didn’t know how to cope with the baiting and ridicule. ‘I feel sorry for that little boy,’ he says, ‘but don’t recognise him now.’

After getting his start in journalism as a trainee with the now defunct Melbourne Sun-News Pictorial, he worked for more than a decade in the Canberra press gallery, before returning to his native Melbourne, where he now writes columns for The Australian and also a popular blog, Meganomics. The once-bullied schoolboy has become one of the country’s most influential political and economic commentators, and is now a regular fixture on the ABC Sunday political talk show, Insiders, which neatly sums up his journey. From the outer to the inner, classic Australian dream.

Just as the most talked about Australian novel of recent years has been The Slap by the Greek-Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas, Megalogenis has produced the most talked about history. A coincidence? ‘Perhaps people are keen to hear from immigrants who fit in,’ he says. ‘I’m an outsider who joined the mainstream and talks up the mainstream. That is receptive to the Australia ear.’

So should be his thesis. Envious finance ministers in Europe and North America have long marvelled at Australia’s seemingly recession-proof economy, just as many would-be immigrants view the country as one of the world’s great lifestyle superpowers. The challenge for Megalogenis is to convince his compatriots that they, like him, are living in the Australian moment.

The week before we meet, Dia showed 12 hours of films by the highly influential LA artist Mike Kelley, who committed suicide earlier this year. A show of the relatively obscure French artist Jean-Luc Moulène at Beacon through the winter months drew unexpectedly strong attendances. ’I want to believe it’s because this is an artist the audience doesn’t know,’ says Vergne.

The demand, or at least curiosity, for art and art practice that exist apart from the mainstream appears to be growing. Mainstream art tends to go in cycles: when conceptual art becomes dominant, painting comes back, when painting is visible, then performance returns, when performance is too visible something more conventional returns. So this may be exactly the moment for the great classics of the Dia collection (which seem to defy such vacillations and classifications) such as The New York Earth Room, 1977, downtown in SoHo. Attendance figures suggest this is indeed the case. ‘People want to know, "What is this art that has resisted the test of time?" I can’t explain, except that it’s earth and our relationship to nature is going to be the question in years to come.’ Perhaps, he says, like Aesop itself, it’s because the piece is ‘something that respects the environment, whether that’s visual, natural or intellectual. What I see is a need for something different and a fascination and a desire for authenticity’.

Jeremy Deller is a modern maverick who thrives in uncomfortable situations. He dragged the exploded wreckage of a Baghdad car bomb around America to foreground a grim reality lost on TV. He insisted a brass band plays acid house anthems as an oblique unearthing of political subtext. Whilst many see his obsessive reenactment of the Miner’s Strike flash point ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ – replete with ten thousand actors, policemen and former miners in a brutal pitched battle – as his coup-de-grace.

But whichever way you look at his work, Deller demands your attention. His output as an artist is nebulous. He holds up tarnished history for us to never forget. He also prefers to operate far removed from London’s contemporary art circles, and whilst The KLF used to give £40,000 to the worst Turner Prize entry, his ‘History Of The World’ sketch, which helped him win the bona fide art prize, somewhat ironically features the KLF anyway.

Clash finally pinned down this cultural curator after the noise of his first retrospective at The Hayward Gallery had quietened down.

Q. One of the themes we’ve been studying in this issue is how much capitalist economies throw culture right into the middle and everything becomes homogenous via brands and television. How do you feel about that notion?

A. I suppose that’s always happened though hasn’t it? There’s plenty of fringe space for other people to operate and always will be. I’m not pessimistic about that, I know some people be. So, it’s always going to be the case. But there’s plenty of space for everyone else I think.

Q. Do you think there’s enough space? As one of the leaders against the art cuts of 2010 do you think British expression is moving in the right direction or the wrong direction?

A. That’s a massive question. I think some of it is, some of it isn’t, really. I think it goes in both directions. It’s a mixture of things. I think there’s always going to be bad news stories, but I’m not worried because it gives us something to fight against or kick against. So I think it’s okay; you can be pessimistic about these things, but it’s easy being pessimistic. I don’t mind too much, it gives you something to kick against.

Q. Do you think society’s expression was more singular during the uncomfortable social climate that you grew up under?

A. Yeah, well you grew up under Blair, didn’t you? Let’s face it, ’97...fifteen years ago...so, a lot of people who are ten years older than you, it was under a very different kind of regime. I’m forty-six. I grew up under ‘you-know-who’, so we had it differently. We all had the war in Iraq to deal with and that was something that was dealt with...that’s a huge thing, big as anything that happened in the ’80s really. It was a different climate, it was less friendly to the arts maybe. In the ’80s I think there was less opportunity.

Q. As a youngster you were blessed with acid house. That’s been quite a consistent theme with your work from what I’ve seen. Would you say its effect on you was quite typical?

A. I wasn’t out there every weekend I have to admit, and I never pretended I was. But I was observing it more than taking part in it, especially initially. I wasn’t a committed person driving down the M25. But it was quite obvious quite quickly that it was culturally important as well as musically, and that was something I was interested in and still something that’s not as rated as it could have been compared to something like punk, which is much loved by the media because it’s still an outside music form compared to that.

Clash is always striving to find some form of political subtext in music but there’s been very little to grab hold of.

You have to remember acid house wasn’t really political, the songs weren’t political; from what I remember there was very little political message in it. It just became political because of the way it was treated. It became political by accident almost. It wasn’t political, where punk was clearly a message – most of the songs are instrumentals.

Q. But with acid you took, discarded and marginalised communities and a folk form, then fused it with an insidious political type of music.

A. You see, I don’t think they’re marginalised. I mean it was a brass band, they’re a part of everyday culture. They’re not really marginalised. They’re not like hanging around on street corners those guys in the brass band. I don’t do that kind of art, actually. I think it’s just something that gets written about me, but I don’t see them as that to be honest. I think they’re more...they’re a sort of a subgroup of sorts, but they’re just regulars guys, you know. They’re not outcasts, they’re not outsiders in a way you think about outsider art.

Q. But are they not symbolic in a way of a former community that’s been degraded?

A. Maybe, but they’re not degraded people in themselves. So many things are symbolic of that, but I don’t think...they’re not outsiders, I really don’t think they are, but you can read that into it, but it’s not the way everyone reads into it.

Q. As an artist that’s quite involved in actions, when the youth riots happened in 2011 were you drawn to interact with it in any way?

A. No. In a way that’s not how I work, but...no. I was a bystander, metaphorically. I wasn’t interested in trying to make a piece of art about it immediately. So no, I was quite happy...not happy...I just saw it like we all did on TV.

Q. What’s the difference between that, as a Londoner, and towing the car bomb wreckage from Iraq around America? You weren’t a bystander in Iraq.

A. You react to different things in a different ways. There’s no law or hard and fast rules about how you’re going to make work, it’s just an idea I had and was able to do. It’s something I was able to think about for a long, long time. So that’s probably why it wasn’t just a quick reaction to something, it came out of years of thinking about it.

Q. You strike me – and this is a presumptuous statement – as a very political person.

A. Up to a point. I think that I’m interested, as we all are, in politics. I’m just an interested person; I’m not that involved in things that much, not on a day-to-day basis. But I have an interest in it, definitely. I’m just lucky that I can articulate it because of the work I do, the position I’m in.

Q. Does it surprise you that in the music industry specifically, so few people with a voice are willing to use it to try and either improve other people’s situation or rage against some form of inequality?

A. You do what you can. I don’t think you should feel like you have to be critical in what you do. KLF were political; you couldn’t work out what that actually was, but it was just the way they did things. So it’s often the way you do things rather than what you say. I don’t think you can prescribe that people should be more like this and more like that, it’s really up to them, so I don’t look for that necessarily. I try not to look at things in those terms, because everyone has their own way of doing things really.

Q. Do you ever wonder where the next political music movement might come from in Britain, or do you think that’s not going to happen anymore?

A. Sort of, but...I’m waiting for it. I’m not dying to wait for it. It’ll come when it comes, no point getting worried about it. It’ll happen, I’m sure. It’ll probably be surprising.

And so Jeremy Deller continues to provoke, only a hair's breadth away from the reality of the lives of those of us who were brought up in the Thatcherite 80s. Without a doubt it is brave and inspired that this most gently humorous, overtly political and cleverly subversive of artists has been chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2013. We await his contribution with expectations high.

In the course of six extraordinary features, the Dardenne brothers have made a bleak industrial town in Belgium a microcosm of all human life. By Jonathan Romney.

La comedie humaine

At one point in the journals of filmmaker Luc Dardenne, he imagines himself and his brother Jean-Pierre being asked why they make the films they do. He answers, “We do what we know how to.” It's a problem for any fi lmmaker: do you keep doing what you know how to, or do you risk working outside your expertise - and possibly failing? Or alternatively, do you work inside the limits of what you know, but dig ever deeper within the parameters offered by that knowledge?

On the evidence of six features - starting with what might be called their 'real' first fi lm, La Promesse (1996) - Belgium's Dardenne brothers have chosen the third option, producing a series of markedly different variations on a set of possibilities that define their fi lmmaking - possibilities that are variously geographic, aesthetic, economic, political and personal. Those are, respectively: their choice of the Belgian industrial town of Seraing as location and setting; the belief in an urgent, spare, hands-on form of realism; a commitment to small budgets as a way of achieving that realism; a fascination with dramas of the socially excluded and disadvantaged; and fi nally, the fact that they are the Dardennes, brothers working together with shared interests, attitudes, abilities and humours.

Viewers have come to cherish the consistency that marks the Dardennes' oeuvre, together with their enduring commitment to testing that consistency - to making their language elastic, their fi ctions continually surprising. It's true that we prefer to see some fi lmmakers stepping out of their safety zone, and others conforming to type. But there's nothing complacent in the way the Dardennes stick to their last (to use an appropriately artisanal term), and I can't imagine why we'd want to see them doing something markedly out of character. That said, if they ever made the project they once speculated about, a realistic life of Jesus filmed in Israel, who wouldn't be curious?

The Dardennes' new fi lm The Kid with a Bike (Le Gamin au vélo) is quintessentially recognisable, and yet at the same time fundamentally different. It has some familiar elements: Seraing; the presence of actors Jérémie Renier and (fl eetingly) Olivier Gourmet; a heart-stoppingly ambivalent conclusion; and an isolated protagonist (a boy named Cyril, played by the remarkable Thomas Doret) battling furiously for a place in the world.

Yet The Kid with a Bike is something new for the Dardennes: an unusually bright film - the fi rst they have shot in summer - exploring spacious suburbs rather than dreary city streets. The film is also uncharacteristically upbeat, as suggested by the poster image of a boy and a young woman cycling side by side on a sunny day. And it is the first Dardennes fi lm to feature a full-blown star: Belgian actress Cécile de France, best known in the UK for Xavier Giannoli's The Singer and Clint Eastwood's Hereafter. De France fi ts perfectly into the Dardennes' world - and crucially, into its rhythms - as Samantha, a single woman who runs her own hair salon. By chance, Samantha encounters Cyril, living in a care home since being abandoned by his feckless young father (Renier). Out of a no-nonsense compassion that the fi lm never needs to explain, Samantha bonds with Cyril, offering him a home and a connection to the world.

So The Kid with a Bike is very recognisably a Dardennes film. But what makes the brothers the filmmakers they are, and when did they become those fi lmmakers? From the evidence of their work - and from their own comments - it's clear that it happened with their third fi ction feature La Promesse, in which they began again after two false starts (1986's Falsch and 1992's Je pense à vous). Although they'd already explored some of the same themes in the earlier films, La Promesse is the fi rst work in which their signature is apparent. But the precise moment at which they became the Dardennes is, I'd argue, that film's closing shot.

In La Promesse, teenage Igor (Renier) works with his father Roger (Gourmet), a slum landlord and merciless exploiter of illegal immigrants. When an African, Amidou, is killed on Roger's building site, Igor helps hide the body and keep the death a secret from Amidou's wife Asitta (Asitta Ouédraogo). But the dying man has made Igor promise to look after his wife and child, and the boy keeps his word. Fulfilling his moral bond doesn't itself complete Igor's redemption, however; that possibility is apparent only in the final shot when Igor, at a railway station, fi nally tells Asitta that Amidou is dead. He says it quietly; the two silently exchange looks; then Igor follows as Asitta walks away from the camera, and down a long corridor. Cut to end credits.

It's in this two-minute shot that the Dardennes properly become the Dardennes. Everything is here: the play of the camera's distance and extreme proximity; the spare, utterly to-the-point dialogue; the uncertainty around the characters' fates; and yet the sense that some conclusion has been reached – not resolution as such, but at least the possibility of redemption and, perhaps more importantly, reparation. In fact I'd argue that the Dardennes' stories are typically about the question of damage reparable and irreparable. It's a theme that perhaps emerges most overtly in The Child (L'Enfant, 2005), where an irresponsible young father sells his baby for adoption. He then returns the money and promptly gets the baby back – but his debt remains as yet unpaid, both to the child-trading gang and, more crucially, to the baby's mother.

The films' other key theme is will. Screenwriting manuals repeatedly tell us that the vital question in any narrative should be, 'What does the protagonist want?' A character must have a goal, and be prepared to do anything to achieve it. Because of its routine abuse in Hollywood, this tenet has become somewhat disreputable; in art cinema, what a person wants or does is often less important than the way the world acts on him or her - and indeed such cinema often focuses on people's inability to control their own destiny.

But the Dardennes have reclaimed the idea of will, investing it with a ferocious narrative energy. For the brothers, will propels the world; it's the only thing that allows their characters to survive in a hostile universe. This irreducible dynamism is sometimes visible from the very fi rst moments of a fi lm. Take the kinetic start of Rosetta (1999), the camera chasing down corridors after the young heroine (Emilie Dequenne) as she rushes to protest about the loss of her job; it sets the tone for the story of a character who, Luc Dardenne has said, is permanently “in a state of war”. The Kid with a Bike begins with Cyril trying to phone his absent father for the umpteenth time; as usual he's getting a disconnected signal, but he won't take its electronic no for an answer or let the phone be prised from his hand. In both cases, the handheld camera doesn't merely observe the action, but is caught up in it, like a bystander thrown into a bar-room fight.

But there are deterministic factors in their character's lives as well. Igor and Cyril both have bad fathers - respectively, Roger (Gourmet) and Guy (Renier again) - and there but for the grace of God goes Bruno, saved in The Child from becoming a callous Guy, or from meeting the wretched fate of drug-ravaged Claudy in Lorna. Far from being a documentary mirror reflecting and recording individual cases of Seraing life as they present themselves, the Dardennes' oeuvre has become a hall of mirrors, with themes and images multiplying in a process of continued enrichment.

The Kid with a Bike brings new inflection to this world. The brothers have described the film as a fairytale, pointing out its newly simplified terms of reference: Samantha being a straightforward, uncontradictory character, Wes (the older boy Cyril tries to please by committing a robbery) an outright villain. But The Kid reminded me less of a fairytale than of Oliver Twist : an abandoned child taken in by a benefactor, seduced by a criminal, given the chance to redeem himself but, at a crucial moment, betrayed by the respectable world.

The Dardennes don't look directly at the world, any more than other fiction filmmakers do; as Luc's journal ('Au dos de nos images: 1991-2005' which translates as 'On the Back of Our Images' - on their flipside, as it were) which was published in 2005, makes clear with its mentions of Shakespeare, Proust, Sartre, René Char et al (not to mention a host of fi lmmakers, and the Bible), the duo's imagination is richly mediated by cultural references. It may be actors rather than characters who recur in their fi lms, but even so, Seraing - which is both a real and an imaginary place - has become the fertile ground for the brothers' very own Comédie humaine, just as Paris was for Balzac's. It's because of their imagination as readers and dreamers, rather than quasi-documentarians, that we can say of their Seraing: all human life is here.

Penny Martin

“Discussion is my favourite thing”

Tony Marcus meets the editor of The Gentlewoman, the magazine bringing good taste to the world of glossies.

Julia Leigh

Hunter-gatherer
Whether on screen or page, Julia Leigh’s thoughts are keeping her audiences glued and growing. Alex Clark continues the story.

Skye Gyngell

Cooking up a Storm

Most chefs wouldn’t walk away from a Michelin star – but Skye Gyngell isn’t like most chefs, finds Charlotte Sinclair.

Katerina Jebb

Creative Review

Francesca Gavin takes a walk through the life of the mind of the contemporary artist Katerina Jebb.

Cosey Fanni Tutti

Spectacle Case

Fellow performance artists Nik Void and Cosey Fanni Tutti discuss why they won’t ever turn the noise down. 

Lena Dunham

Screen Jump

Melissa Anderson meets the writer/director/actor whose shorts have caused a sensation, Lena Dunham.

Penny Martin, the editor-in-chief of the magazine The Gentlewoman, works from a charming office in Bloomsbury, central London – a basement with old floorboards and a fireplace. The room is small, tidy and feels like a refuge from the whirl of the world. And this is appropriate because The Gentlewoman lives at a distance from other fashion and women’s magazines.

Penny does not present as a “fashion person”. She is not a walking advert for any particular label. Her clothes are not attention seeking. She is 39 and looks like she could be a publisher (of books) or an academic; for several years she was chair of Fashion Imagery at the University of the Arts, London.

“I do not look like a normal woman’s fashion magazine editor. I’m at the shows at the moment [we meet during London Fashion Week]. I’m probably the only woman wearing flat shoes on the front row. There is a paradigm for how I should look and behave, but I’d like to be the one who hasn’t got a reputation for being mean. I don’t think that is necessary.”

The Gentlewoman does not do “nasty”. Their fashion shoots are discrete and romantic. There are no models with legs in the air clutching handbags. They do not pretend that fashion belongs to a cruel, dark and pinched world.

Since its launch issue of Spring and Summer 2010, The Gentlewoman has been the world’s most discreet women’s fashion magazine. They do not do snobbery. And they do not do prurient or lascivious. They have been supported with advertising from Chanel, Prada, Céline, Marc Jacobs, Calvin Klein, Dolce and Lauren. They print 89,000 copies of each issue and have a global reach (Penny’s sister found a copy in Tasmania).

The Gentlewoman may succeed where 1990s “alternative glossies” such as Nova and Frank failed. Penny says she loved reading Frank, but feels that the magazine failed because its backers were too corporate, looking at “untapped markets”. The Gentlewoman is more personal, she says. And published by the same company that producesFantastic Man magazine – a title sold in small, beautiful shops that sell art and architecture books. This niche or boutique publishing is closer to the heart of an A.P.C. than something dreamed up by EMAP or IPC, which published Frank and Nova. 

But to fashion. Penny says The Gentlewoman is more about “good taste” than following trends (although they are “aware” of trends). The editorial seems more interested in “dress” than “fashion”. Like Jean Muir, who took fashion as a verb – “to fashion” beautiful clothes.

“We are interested in clothes, but we don’t do the didactic ‘You must be in this’ kind of voice. I don’t enjoy magazines that speak to me that way. The Gentlewoman takes a sartorial view of fashion. It’s a magazine about women. It’s not really a magazine about what they buy or what they wear.”

The Gentlewoman plays down labels. And shopping. The bulk of the magazine is long-form interviews (all with women). Some have been well timed – they did Adele just before she cracked the US and Phoebe Philo as she was bringing out her break-out autumn/winter 2010 collection. There is substance, too, though.

“Are we political? I think we are a little bit. Clearly my generation are paranoid about being called a feminist. I meet young women and realise they haven’t had the benefit of being around second-wave feminist women who take certain equalities for granted. I want to present a positive view of women that are emitting those [feminist] messages.”

Penny used to work at Nick Knight’s SHOWstudio.com (she was editor-in-chief). She worked on a PhD about women’s magazines – about Vogue, Thatcherism and the representation of the working woman. She is married and lives in Ealing – a “land of sheds”. But this suburban place with local shops gives her “space to think”.

She comes from Scotland originally. Teenage years deep in youth culture with a huge record collection. Her mother was responsible for the art curriculum in Scotland. Her father a musician.

Her loves? Cinema. Bukowski. And… “The best thing ever would be to be back with my parents and in an argument about pretty much anything with my stepfather. I love other people’s ideas. Long, ponderous, earnest, antagonistic discussion is my favourite thing. Probably.”

www.thegentlewoman.com

Image is courtesy of Liz Collins.

The Hunter, Julia Leigh’s first novel and now a film starring Willem Dafoe, is a work of exceptional strangeness and power; when it was published in 1999, it garnered widespread praise among critics who saw in it the arrival of a highly distinctive and original voice. It tells the story of a man – he introduces himself as Martin David, but we understand from the outset that it is an assumed name – arriving in an alien environment in order to track down a creature that he can’t even be absolutely sure exists. In beautifully weighted and intricate prose, Julia took one of the oldest story forms – that of the quest – and gave it a menacing contemporary spin: Martin’s search for the thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger, may have provoked the primeval instincts of the hunter, but in fact he’s working for a faceless, multinational biotech company that wants to extract the animal’s DNA for unspecified, but quite possibly nefarious, purposes.

“Even though I’ve never hunted myself, I was attracted to hunting as an elemental drama,” says Julia now, noting that hunting gave rise to the earliest of human rituals. From that starting point, she developed a story in which her main character journeys between a potentially deadly wilderness and the scarily dysfunctional bereaved family with whom he is lodging, a to-and-fro that constantly disrupts the reader’s assumptions about the “natural” and the “civilised” world.

I asked her what she feels now about those themes, and about how the novel explores questions of whether we’re ever able to revert to a natural state, or whether we’ll always try to assert some kind of mastery over our environment. “A great part of the book touches on how we conceive of and relate to the natural world,” she replies. “For example, what do you actually think about when you think about ‘nature’? What turns rocks and trees and creeks into ‘nature’? And what is ‘wilderness’?”

Despite The Hunter’s impressive intellectual framework and its striking linguistic style, you can see why the simplicity of its plot, the dynamics of the protagonist’s relationships with his hosts and the visual possibilities of its remote setting attracted the film-makers. Julia gave the rights to her good friend, director Daniel Nettheim, but chose not to be involved with the screenplay or editing process.  

But the cinematic version of The Hunter is not her only experience of the film industry – Julia also wrote and directed Sleeping Beauty (Jane Campion was a mentor), which contested the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Unsurprisingly, it’s another highly complex, layered tale, the story of a young student who supplements her income by allowing herself to be drugged so elderly men may enact their desires on her sleeping body. There are two main psychological twists: they are not allowed to penetrate her and, in the morning, she remembers nothing. It’s a fascinating conceit, and one that had its roots in a recurring nightmare that Julia experienced, after The Hunter was published, of being filmed while she was asleep. 

Interestingly, Julia sees more similarities than differences in the processes of writing and film-making. “The novelist and the film-maker are alike in that they both work with the ‘flow of time’. They both work with ‘character’. They both create detailed, full worlds and they both hopefully have something they want to explore.” But surely there’s a vast difference in the working methods involved? “I’d say the perceived loneliness of the writer is not so dissimilar to that of the director’s – because as the director I was the only one holding the whole film in my head. Even so, making the change wasn’t as difficult as people expect. I suspect we are all more adaptable than we realise.”

What she perhaps means is that an artist’s vision – what Julia describes as her sensibility – remains the same whatever medium she chooses. Running through her work is a fascination with fabular narratives – the fairy-tale title of her film is no coincidence – that she can adapt and make even stranger. On the surface, her second novel, Disquiet, published in 2008, could hardly be more different from The Hunter: set in a chateau in France, where Julia lived for a time, it’s a stylised black comedy, in which a family under extreme duress gathers amid manicured gardens and at formal dinner tables. But it addresses, once again, ideas of civilised behaviour and social structures, as Julia explains: “The unashamed artifice of the gardens, their cultivated perfection and mannerism, is mirrored in the masks of politesse worn by the members of the household. To maintain these gardens, to ‘control’ the uncontrollable, that is – nature – is a demanding, near-impossible task. Just as controlling our intense inner feelings is demanding. Even the language of the story is guided, to some degree, by a sense of austerity, the muted formality. There’s little attempt at strict naturalism. I wanted to heighten realism. I like things that are ‘off kilter’, disturbing.”

Julia is based in Sydney; she was born there, studied law and then turned to writing. She then worked for the Australian Society of Authors and subsequently her mentors included Frank Moorhouse and Toni Morrison. A regular swimmer, she particularly enjoys the 50-metre sea pool at Bondi: “I never feel bad after a swim.” She has spent much of the past year travelling in connection with her film work, including visiting East Timor, a place of long-standing interest. 

So, what’s on the horizon for her? “I’m not quite sure what I’ll do next. I do have a script that I truly love – but it’s 16th century, with a galleon, a tribe of Indians in the jungle, a European monastery, a royal court. And it’s not a heavy action flick. So when producers hear the words ‘Spanish galleon’ their eyes tend to roll back in their heads. Whatever happens, I hope to continue both writing novels and making films.”

Image by Noah Sheldon.

Being one of London’s most revered and respected chefs is a full-time job, one that allows little time for a semblance of real life. So why hasn’t Skye Gyngell – whose restaurant, the delightfully eccentric Petersham Nurseries Café, was awarded a Michelin star last year – touched an oven “for a month”? Why are her hands – the most brutalised part of any chef’s body – sporting a perfect new manicure? Because she has left her job, a fact I only discover the morning before we meet via a small news story tucked away on a catering website. Two days after our interview, the news is everywhere, with headlines exclaiming: “Skye Gyngell: curse of the Michelin star”.

To all outward appearances, Skye’s progress at Petersham was unstoppable. From the café’s inception, in 2004, in a Richmond-upon-Thames nursery garden, several postcodes off the beaten track, using a makeshift kitchen housed in a shed and a restaurant with dirt floors, wobbly tables, handwritten menus and only 12 covers, Skye turned out food of such exquisite delicacy and freshness that Petersham Nurseries Café quickly became the hottest table in town. Using vegetables and herbs straight from the garden, it seemed a kind of cooking for now: locally grown, organic, ingredients-orientated and unfussy. The food, the restaurant, and Skye, too, stood in welcome contrast to London’s testosterone-fuelled fine-dining scene. Here was no hint of Heston Blumenthal’s test-tube-tinkering molecular gastronomy, nor Gordon Ramsay’s blustering British fare.

The world of top-class cooking is a sphere in which women are few and far between. For every Angela Hartnett, Alice Waters, Maggie Beer or Hélène Darroze, there are a multitude of male chefs; kitchens too numerous to count are stuffed to the ceiling with whites-wearing, knife-sharpening men. To be a chef, so the public imagination has it, one should be male and mostly angry. “Yelling does not get the best out of people, I can assure you,” says Skye.

Instead, at Petersham, a kind of dishevelled ambience prevails. It is a sensorial delight to eat strawberry granita, or red mullet with fennel and saffron mayonnaise, or a perfect, pinwheeled blood orange in the restaurant’s glass-roofed conservatory, where clematis droops from the ceiling and palm leaves tap at your elbow.

So, what happened? Skye hesitates. “It wasn’t a spontaneous decision. I chose to leave because I think I would like to see if I could do something different.” We’re at a table in the Electric Brasserie on West London’s Portobello Road. Skye is refreshingly weather-beaten among the West London Botox and blow dries; her strawberry-blonde hair is pulled back off her face. She is freckled and attractive, with full lips and a penetrating gaze. Clearly she wants to say more than she can. (Hence she has brought her new business partner, Marie Jackson, to smooth over any difficult topics.) “Petersham was all about wistfulness and intimacy, and then, for me, it lost that,” Skye says.

She blames the Michelin star: “It added huge pressure.” The restaurant leapt from serving 60 covers a day to serving 120 or 180 people. “Because it was only open at lunch times, understandably, the owners wanted it to be as busy as possible,” says Marie. 

Petersham Nurseries was originally a family business, located on the estate of Petersham House, owned by Skye’s friends Gael and Francesco Boglione. It was they who first asked Skye to start up the café. The split “wasn’t acrimonious”, says Marie. “It was that they wanted to take it one way and Skye wanted to take it another way.”

“It wasn’t meant to be exclusive,” says Skye now. “All those shitty words like ‘destination’ and ‘celebrity chef’. Whenever I hear that – celebrity chef – it honestly makes me gag.”

She doesn’t crave fame, having turned down numerous TV offers, and is remarkably grounded. Born into a “nutritionally well-educated” family , Skye grew up on “fish and salad and mango for dessert; trips to the butcher, the fish market. I only ever saw nice thing's”. But it was only while studying for a law degree – “Can you imagine any profession less likely?” she asks – and working part time in a charcuterie that she discovered her natural propensity for cooking. She apprenticed at the Paris restaurant Dodin Bouffant. “I prepped vegetables for a year. I was the only girl in a kitchen of 30. I was terrified.”

Safe to say, her exit from Petersham isn’t the end of Skye’s career. She mentions that she would love to run a kitchen out of the Zaha Hadid-designed restaurant at the Serpentine Gallery, opening in Hyde Park this summer. And Skye is a woman you find yourself rooting for. “I know I can make things taste good. I’m absolutely hopeless in every other area of my life, but I know I can make things taste good,” she says.

In the exacting world of professional cooking, a large part of Skye’s great appeal is this margin for human error. Every interview she has given mentions her past battles with drug and alcohol addiction. It’s not a topic she’s fond of. “One journalist called me the Courtney Love of cooking. I mean, hello? I went through a stage of getting really upset about those stories. I remember thinking, ‘Obviously my food holds no value if that’s the thing they report on.’”

Whatever Skye does, there's an integrity and thoughtfulness to her approach. “The thing about eating is it’s not necessarily even about the food,” she says. “It’s certainly not about paying homage to the chef or the Michelin star. It’s about remembering that perfect peach you ate, or how you laughed when your mum fell off her chair, or the story that had everyone weeping. I want to create a restaurant that has memory.” And, no doubt, a little bit of alchemy, too. 

Katerina Jebb is a cultural seditionary. Her work walks an incredible line between beauty and brutality, the mechanical and the physical, humour and seriousness. Ever creative at 49, she is at the top of her game. Her photographic and film work has been shown at the Whitney, Hayward, Les Arts Décoratifs and Andy Warhol Museum and published everywhere, from Life magazine to The Times.

One of Katerina’s central fascinations is with the industrial, mechanical and medical. In 1991, while working for the French newspaper Libération, she was involved in a car accident that paralysed her right arm. Unable to hold a camera, Katerina experimented with life-size photocopiers and scanners, creating an exceptionally unique aesthetic for documenting her relationship with the world. There is an otherworldly texture to these life-size photocopies and scans of her body. Under Katerina’s mechanical lens, beings and objects appear unnaturally fluid and floating, at times ghostly and unreal. Unsurprisingly, Duchamp, Picabia and the surrealist poet Lautréamont’s fascination with juxtaposition are at the heart of her approach. “My images are electronically and digitally derived – but have a kind of Renaissance beauty. The result is completely at odds with the medium.” Her emotional and very beautiful images emerge from industrial and emotionless machines.

Katerina was entirely self-taught – undoubtedly part of the reason she has such an experimental approach to technique. She was born and raised in the UK but moved to California when she was 21 with the desire to do something creative. “I had just been messing around, I hadn’t done anything. It was like opening up. That place at that time was an amazingly fertile ground for the underground. No one told me what I could and couldn’t do. I just did whatever I wanted, with no money.” Originally working in photomontage, this later developed into a practice ranging from photography to installation to film. She has been living and working in Paris since 1989 and hasn’t looked back.

Her current series of short-film works, Simulacrum and Hyperbole, are refreshingly satirical takes on consumerism, the representation of femininity and the manipulation of image and advertising. Her perfect parodies for a fake channel,Lucid TV, advertise fictional products such as Oral Fix and Life Eraser. The results are as beautiful as they are funny. “Humour is just my way of saving myself. I can be really pretentious. I build something up that’s really serious and esoteric and then completely tear it apart myself.” 

Her pieces often redefine the accepted concept of beauty. She regularly works with women who are exceptionally beautiful but do not conform to prescriptive social examples of youthful perfection. Kristin Scott Thomas and Marisa Berenson have both appeared in her pieces. Tilda Swinton is a regular collaborator. She is drawn to a more mature, self-possessed vision of beauty. “This regulated, standardised ideal [of beauty] is the death of originality.”

Her latest film, also created for Comme des Garçons and being screened at London’s Selfridges throughout April, is a portrait of Madeleine Malraux, a 97-year-old concert pianist, the former wife of the writer André Malraux. She met her fascinating subject through Setsuko, the widow of the artist Balthus. “The film is about a woman who has lived through two world wars and continues to play concerts and work. Titled Silence, Genius at Work, the poetic piece captures Malraux playing piano as sunlight falls on her hands and talking, at times, of her experiences. A larger documentary is in progress.

There is a timelessness to Katerina’s work that, in a way, defines her as an individual. She doesn’t watch television or keep up with art. “I don’t have extra time to look so much at contemporary life, it’s not as fascinating to me as getting into bed with The Ascent of Man. I live in my own universe where it’s not so contemporary. My great passion is reading.” She is a cultural rebel – something that perhaps makes her hypersensitive to the idiosyncrasies of modern experience. Life is a more interesting place through her gaze.

www.katerinajebb.com

Now Chris, Cosey and Nik have teamed up as Carter Tutti Void for Transverse, a one-off collaboration performed last year as part of Mute Records’ Short Circuit season at the Roundhouse in Camden. The rapturously received show saw the two women at either ends of the stage, coaxing violent noises from guitars and electronics over extended tribal rhythms provided by Chris Carter, deadpan in the centre with a laptop. The elongated, hypnotic music resembles nothing so much as a spacious, post-punk version of 70s-era Miles Davis, performed by masterful non-musicians rather than jazz musicians. Dazed brought Cosey and Nik back together to chat about objecting to spectacle, the effects of gender balance on music and the glory of being independent.

Nik Void: The audience is the fourth member, really. It’s a different environment from the studio, and obviously everything is amplified so you get different responses to the instruments you’re playing, and the audience also gives you some type of vibe, you know. 
Cosey Fanni Tutti: The priority is the sound we make together, it’s not about who’s there. I know it often is to the audience but to me it’s just a way of making the sound work. For me it comes from the way I’ve always worked with art and music. It’s just all improvised. I’m not interested in prescriptive things or contrived things at all. It doesn’t excite me. I like the unexpected. 
Nik Void: I have a guitar, which is quite a traditional instrument. But I don’t play it like a guitarist would play a guitar, I play it like I’ve never seen one in my life before. (laughs) And I use it as a rhythmical instrument – I use it with drumsticks and bows. So for this collaboration I just kind of went with a bag of stuff, not knowing what to expect, and just did what I do. I didn’t go back and listen to Throbbing Gristle and try and follow what that was.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: I’ve always said, right through from the mid-70s, that when you see acts onstage and they’re prancing about and everything, I’m thinking, ‘Where do people really think their music is coming from?’ That to me is spectacle, I’m not into it for spectacle at all. In fact, I’ve always tried to take that away. I do object to that.
Nik Void: It’s the notion of music or sound being entertainment which I really object to. I mean, I kind of struggle with the stage. Having a stage in a room and playing, I find that really uncomfortable and much prefer to be in the middle so everyone’s around.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Have you done that yet?
Nik Void: Yeah…
Cosey Fanni Tutti: I didn’t like it, cos they start walking across in front of you, distracting you and tripping over the wires. 
Nik Void: (laughs) That is a concern!
Cosey Fanni Tutti: It’s a pain.
Nik Void: But it’s very English having a stage, especially in a pub or something like that, you know. It’s like, put them on a stage and play. You can’t escape that, I suppose.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: I find it much easier to get on with men than women, I work with men much more readily. That’s why it was so great working with you – it was so refreshing that there was a connection there, because neither of us think of ourselves as female. We’re just people, we’re gonna do what we’re gonna do. It’s not an issue to us. Everything’s open to us. 
Nik Void: I look at films and pictures of you in the past (working in the sex industry and posing for magazines such as Penthouse) and I just think, wow! (laughs) You look amazing and so strong as well. You had, like, this glint in your eye and it’s almost like you were totally in control. And that’s the strength that I got from those photographs.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Control’s a weird word because the reason I did it was because I wasn’t in control. The situation is very controlled in the pornography industry, even way back in the 70s, but there was a control element to what I was doing because I placed myself in that situation. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?
Nik Void: Yeah.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: And when I look through different magazines even now, even with Richard Kern’s books and things like that, I can read the women in there because I’ve been in that situation. And you know, it’s quite odd. You see it quite differently when you’ve been there yourself. Very differently.
Nik Void: But I feel you were in that position or situation but you did it really well. You were like, ‘OK, I’m here.’ It’s the same as the way we use our instruments – we use them to the best ability we know. It’s like you were using your body and your image to the best ability, you know.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: It fed back into using nudity in the art actions (with COUM Transmissions) because I had a really good sense of what the body and its shapes were like after modelling. Particular poses and things they get you to do, you’re very aware. What really interested me was the naked body and the form of it, and how it can look beautiful or absolutely horrible. And you knew straightaway if it looked horrible. I’m not talking about open-legged shots or anything, I’m talking about the angles of legs and thighs, looking big when they can look slim if you just move your leg just a little bit. You know? That kind of thing.
Nik Void: I was always very conscious with my previous band about being the lady frontwoman, and I always dressed down, kind of very simply, because I wanted the music to speak more, I felt really uncomfortable with that. And that’s one of the reasons why I stopped. It wasn’t until I met Gabe and Dom that I felt like, this is where I belong, I can’t escape it any more.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: With TG, literally, we sat around and we just laughed about the thought of actually doing an LP and saying, like, in 50 years time to our grandchildren, ‘Look, can you see that? That LP there, that’s our band.’ As a joke! And then we started to think, yeah, we can do it. And we sort of twisted it round, and made our own label and all the rest of it. So it was just off the hoof, everything just fell into place. We didn’t sit down and say, ‘Right, what’s a good concept? A band that does their own album in their own studio and only does so many copies…’ That’s just happenstance. We only had enough money for 776 copies to be pressed, 'cause if you went above that it cost more and we didn’t have enough money.
Nik Void: 776 copies? (laughs) 
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Then we did another thing you wouldn’t normally do if you’re in business with a record company: we gave the re-press of that record, Second Annual Report, to Fetish Records so they could start their own label up. So we actually triggered two different labels to go. And when we did our first release on Industrial, Rough Trade was just a shop then. And they said, ‘Oh, this can actually happen then, you can actually do your own label?’ And Rough Trade Records was born.
Nik Void: Amazing.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: So it triggered quite a few things. But it was a similar situation to what you have now, where you were forced into doing it yourself because of the financial situation. Everything being in such a mess. I never looked at it as a career at all. Everything I do is just, like, for now, and if it works it works, it’s great. And happily that’s worked well for me.
Nik Void: Well, we’re a prime example of what’s happening with the industry. We’re not signed but we’ve carried on with jobs to pay to be able to do our art. So, luckily, we found this premises we could change into a studio, and we kind of live there unofficially and do our music. And we don’t have a producer, we have a computer that keeps breaking down. And we are engineering it ourselves and we fall out, but we end up discovering things that we wouldn’t discover if we had an engineer, which is great. And even the falling outs are great because it will make us more determined. Just like you, you self-recorded your stuff as well and listened to it and it sounds amazing.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: I think it’s fantastic what’s happening now. It’s like saying, ‘OK now, you’ve got to stand up without your stability frame. Do something yourself. Actually make music rather than just press a play button and record it.’ It’s exciting because it means that it hopefully might go into a new direction at long last. You know, I didn’t like Bowie. I just saw him as a thief.
Nik Void: I do as well! Going back to the male/female thing, I find that a lot more males like Bowie than females. I’ve never been keen on Brian Eno, either.
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Oh, I liked Brian Eno, funnily enough. Early on. Roxy Music.
Nik Void: I love Roxy Music! (laughs) Invite him round, do the next Transverse collaboration!
Cosey Fanni Tutti: Well, he can go to my website and send me an email. Actually, there was a connection, when we were in Martello Street. I won’t go into why that didn’t happen.
Nik Void: (whispers) Was he trying to hit on you? (laughs)
Cosey Fanni Tutti: I’m not going to talk about it.
Nik Void: I see… (laughs)
Cosey Fanni Tutti: That’s the thing when you work with other people that’ve been in the business a long time – they’re used to doing things their own way. With you, it’s refreshing. Someone that’s on the same kind of wavelength and is really open is wonderful. Rather than closed down.
Nik Void: Yeah, totally. You can tell we’re on the same wavelength in personality and talk, and even when we’re playing together it’s just like us having a conversation through our instruments. Would you say my guitar screeching was higher or lower than your guitar screeching? (laughs)
Cosey Fanni Tutti: I don’t know!

TRANSVERSE is out on CD, vinyl, and download on Mute from March 26

Carter Tutti Void - V4 studio (Slap 2) [Dazed & Confused Exclusive] by Mute UK

DAZED & CONFUSED

The 400 Hits

With its many autobiographical elements Tiny Furniture, the first feature by 25-year-old writer-director-actor Lena Dunham, unfolds like the title of the filmmaker’s 2009 featurette: Creative Nonfiction. Premiering in the US in March 2010 at the South by Southwest Film Festival (where it won the Best Narrative Feature award), Tiny Furniture follows the desultory activities of recent college graduate Aura (played by Dunham, who at the time of filming in the autumn of 2009 was also a recent university grad). She returns to her family’s loft in Tribeca (the director’s real home), which she shares with her artist-photographer mother Siri (played by Dunham’s real artist-photographer mum, Laurie Simmons) and her overachieving high-schooler sister Nadine (the director’s actual younger sibling, Grace Dunham).

Unapologetically solipsistic, Dunham is nevertheless a brutally – often hilariously – honest self-assessor. While Dunham may have started as a curiosity on the internet – the destination, often final, of millions of young serial confessors and overweening self-promoters – she’s made the leap to a more ‘legitimate’ artistic endeavour through a commitment to old-fashioned skills: expanding, editing and honing her primary source material, herself. 

Intrinsic to Dunham’s candid self-appraisal is her almost compulsive exhibitionism. The first of many times we see Aura in her underwear occurs about four minutes into Tiny Furniture. After settling into her old room, partly colonised by Nadine in her big sister’s absence, she pads around the chic, minimalist white-on-white loft (shot on digital in pristine compositions by DP Jody Lee Lipes, who went on to shoot Martha Marcy May Marlene) in nothing but a T-shirt and undies, revealing plenty of soft, doughy flesh.

Dunham has bared her ample body before, most prominently in her 2007 short film (and YouTube sensation) The Fountain, in which she strips down to a bikini and performs ablutions and brushes her teeth in a fountain on the campus of Oberlin College, the prestigious liberal-arts school in Ohio where she studied. (In Tiny Furniture, Aura never mentions her alma mater by name, identifying it only as “a college in Ohio”.) During a discussion about “male validation” with her petite, more conventionally pretty dorm-mate in Creative Nonfiction (which she shot during her time at Oberlin, and which also features her in various states of undress) Dunham’s character Ella nonchalantly – and without a trace of self-pity – remarks, “I guess I’m not used to getting it.”

By showing off her plus-size body, Dunham conveys her talent for humble narcissism. Her display of her pimpled and puckered flesh seems to be motivated by neither vanity nor aggression; she asks that we consider her – and all her imperfections – as much as she considers herself. The precise, droll articulation of her self-absorption is what makes Tiny Furniture (and her earlier work) so compelling. Collapsing real/reel distinctions, sending up her highly privileged bourgeois-boho milieu (waggishly treated earlier in Dunham’s web series Delusional Downtown Divas) and playing a character as likely to be humiliated as she is to display outrageous selfishness, Dunham has created a sharp quarter-life-crisis comedy informed by oversharing and inertia.

Frayed bonds

One of Tiny Furniture’s greatest narrative strategies is its piercing examination of the frequently frayed bonds between Aura and her mother and sister; the home in Tribeca that the 22-year-old returns to – and that she seems incapable of ever leaving – isn’t always the most hospitable nest. Moping over her recent break-up with her “male feminist” college boyfriend, Aura is so caught up in herself that she seems capable only of regressing, but Siri and Nadine aren’t interested in joining her pity party. “I just got off a plane from Ohio – I’m in a post-graduate delirium,” Aura announces to her antagonising sister, who’s been posing (well, just her high-heeled feet) for photographs in her mother’s studio, located downstairs in the loft. (Siri takes photographs of staged scenes involving dolls and miniatures – hence the film’s title.) Aura’s ego is bruised within minutes of returning home: “How come you never use me in any pictures?” she asks Siri, who – intensely focused on her work – doesn’t bother turning around initially to greet her firstborn. “You’re never here,” Siri replies, before snapping another photo. Willowy Nadine, who bears a striking resemblance to her mother, can’t resist this dig: “Plus, my legs are longer and more supple” – a rejoinder followed immediately by this tart query to Aura: “How long are you going to be staying in our house?”

The sibling rivalry between Aura, whose most significant accomplishment during her twenty-something torpor is taking an $11-an-hour job as a day hostess at a restaurant around the corner from her house, and the casually confident Nadine, who has just won a prestigious poetry prize (as Grace Dunham actually did), spikes Tiny Furniture with funny, caustic exchanges. What looms over the film more, though, is the anxiety of influence: specifically the desire that Aura, a film-theory major who’s “trying to figure it out”, has to eclipse – or at least equal – her mother’s artistic fame.

“I wanna be as successful as you are,” Aura says to Siri as they snuggle in the latter’s bed. Siri is single in Tiny Furniture, though it’s never made clear whether she’s a divorcée or a widow; that both her grown daughters are shown sleeping next to her on occasion highlights the neediness – and ill-defined boundaries – of all members of the trio. (In real life, Simmons’s husband – and the father of Lena and Grace – is the painter Carroll Dunham, who ‘stars’, along with his wife, in Lena’s 2007 short Open the Door.)

Any exposure

Aura, like Dunham at the time, has some renown among her set as a maker of YouTube videos. “I saw that your dyslexic-stripper video got, like, 400 hits!” Ashlynn (Amy Seimetz) – the hostess of a party and herself an aspiring “monologist” – exuberantly notes to Aura, with just a twinge of mockery. (In 2007, Dunham made a short called Hooker on Campus.) One of Aura’s dissolute friends, fellow art-world brat Charlotte (played by Jemima Kirke, a friend of Dunham’s since high school), manages to get a piece by her pal into a small group show in Brooklyn. The video (The Fountain, repurposed) is presented on a cruddy monitor with no sound. “You’re just so concerned with having things polished and perfect,” Charlotte says to allay Aura’s concerns. “Any exposure is good exposure.” That’s certainly the credo of many Gen-Y artists – and the motivation behind Aura’s (and Dunham’s) exhibitionist practice.

But who gets to call it art? Dunham doesn’t refrain from pointing out the absurdity of the ubiquitous ‘performance pieces’ found online – or of what constitutes fame in the 21st century. And she implicitly includes herself in this assessment. Ashlynn wants Aura to meet Jed (Alex Karpovsky), whose YouTube persona is the “Nietschian [sic] Cowboy”. Impressed, Aura notes that “he’s a little bit famous” – praise that Ashlynn minimises by adding, “I guess so, in a, like, internet kind of way.” The passive-aggressive slam isn’t lost on Aura.

Her own insecurities, artistic and otherwise (“The art world’s my mom’s racket,” Aura tells Charlotte, adding, “I don’t know what I’ll be”), may be what leads Aura to start reading from the journals her mother kept during her twenties (reportedly Simmons’s actual diaries from the time). Pilfered from the closet while Aura is rummaging around for lightbulbs, Siri’s notebooks contain her agonising self-doubts about her own art career and love life, excerpts from which her daughter shares with friends over the phone; later, Aura appears to cannibalise this material for one of her videos.

As obnoxious and invasive as she may be, Aura has a particular gift for perpetuating her own debasements, especially with men. Claiming penury, sponger Jed, on whom Aura has a crush, crashes at the loft. Sharing Aura’s bed, Jed makes it clear that he has no interest in reciprocating her extremely tentative advances; she continues the masochistic sleeping arrangement nonetheless. Even worse is Keith (David Call), the cad sous-chef at the bistro where Aura works. They have miserable sex in a particularly abject location; yet after returning home an hour or two later, Aura re-enacts some of this humiliating tryst in the shower – a rehearsal, perhaps, before turning on the camera.

Both Dunham and Aura are always ready to make the private public – but only one of them is capable of reaching an audience of more than “400 hits”. Aura is the creation of a young filmmaker of exceptional drive and prolificacy; like most of Dunham’s onscreen analogues, she is (as the director explained in a profile in The New Yorker in 2010) “like me, minus a certain kind of awareness. She is one step behind where I’m at, at any given moment.”

Among Tiny Furniture’s most influential – and surprising – fans is Judd Apatow, who is the executive producer of Dunham’s upcoming HBO series Girls, which follows a group of women just out of college navigating work and romance in New York City (an age group in between the characters of Gossip Girl and Sex and the City, as Dunham noted recently). The results of this latest project will hopefully be as furtively entertaining and revealing as reading the pages of someone’s pinched diary.

SIGHT & SOUND

Image by Richard Koek.

Teeming with independent boutiques, hair salons, eateries, and spectacularly designed flagship stores for the likes of Yohji Yamamoto, Comme des Garçons, Arts & Science and Issey Miyake, Aoyama’s narrow streets host a steady flow of discerning shoppers alongside wide-eyed, SLR-bedecked tourists. Retail, however, represents but a morsel of Aoyama’s rich offering. It also pays to explore the diminutive bookstores and loft-style cafes serving satisfying, well-priced set lunches.

Preparatory reading: Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,set in 1980s Tokyo.

Cow Books

Specialist in rare titles from the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Dragonfly Cafe 2F 3-13-14

Minami-Aoyama

Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0062

+81 3 3497 0807

cowbooks.jp

Chachanoma

Rare, exquisite teas; healthy and delicious food.

5-13-14 Jingumae

Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0001

+81 3 5468 8846

chachanoma.com

Doinel

Purveyor of exquisite crafts and Wasara tableware.

3-2-9 Kita-Aoyama

Minato-ku, Tokyo 107-0061

+81 3 3470 5007

doinel.net

F.I.L. by visvim

Sophisticated clothing for men of discerning tastes.

B1 5-9-17 Jingumae

Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0001

+81 3 5725 9568

visvim.tv

Maisen

Famed for succulent pork tonkatsu.

4-8-5 Jingumae

Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0001

+81 3 3470 0071

mai-sen.com

Watari-um

Small yet significant exhibitor of contemporary art.

3-7-6 Jingumae

Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-0001

+81 3 3402 3001

watarium.co.jp

Underground trains

Omotesando Station: Ginza, Chiyoda, and Hanzōmon Lines. Meijijingu-mae Station: Chiyoda and Fukutoshin Lines.

Overground train

Harajuku Station:

JR Yamanote Line.

Boston

Nineteenth-century planners fashioned Back Bay to be the ‘ornament of the city’, inspired and influenced by Haussmann’s redesign of Paris. Row-houses of red brick, sandstone and slate – many pronounced with ivy-sheathed turrets and towering chimneys – cast visitors back to an era of colonial majesty, amid the neighbourhood’s pleasant profusion of contemporary retailers, concept stores and restaurants. For quietude, visit Boston Public Garden.

Preparatory reading: Peter Davison’s The Fading Smile: Poets In Boston From Robert Lowell To Sylvia Plath.

Boston Public Garden

Lush, flower-laden Victorian-era garden.

Arlington Street

Boston, MA 02116

cityofboston.gov/parks/ emerald/public_garden.asp

Copley Square Farmers Market

Superb fresh produce, May to November.

St. James Avenue

Dartmouth &

Boylston Streets

Boston, MA 02116

Juice

Fresh juices in healthful combinations.

145 Dartmouth Street

Boston, MA 02116

+1 617 418 9879

juicebarboston.com

Mistral

Fine French- Mediterranean dining.

223 Columbus Avenue Boston, MA 02116

+1 617 867 9300

mistralbistro.com

Raven Used Books

Specialists in literature, art, philosophy, architecture.

263 Newbury Street

Boston, MA 02116

+1 617 578 9000

ravencambridge.com/boston

The Salty Pig

Fine charcuterie plates, well-paired beverages.

130 Dartmouth Street

Boston, MA 02116

+1 617 536 6200

thesaltypig.com

Trains

Boston Back Bay Station:

Orange Line. Copley Station:

Green Line.

Buses

Bus lines stopping along

Boylston Street to Copley

Square: 55, 39.

Zürich

Order and etiquette reign in Zürich, a city that sports a crisply pressed uniform of immaculate streets and a countenance of well-kept parks and gardens. Rather than the reticent culture this suggests, however, the city nurtures a soul effervescing with creative energies. Not only is it peppered with cultural centres, museums and independent galleries, but also home to an array of green initiatives that have seen perceptions of Zürich shift from ‘fiscally prudent square’ towards ‘exemplar of innovation’.

Preparatory reading: Tom Stoppard’s Travesties, set mainly in Zürich.

Café La Stanza

Excellent coffee, colazione, and evening aperitivos.

Bleicherweg 10

CH – 8002 Zürich

+41 43 817 62 82

lastanza.ch

Coco Bar & Grill 

Meat and fish barbequed to order on an open fire.

Bleicherweg 1

CH – 8001 Zürich

+41 44 211 98 98

restaurant-coco.ch

Old Botanical Garden

Perfect setting for peaceful repose.

Talstrasse

CH – 8001 Zürich

+41 44 634 84 61

bguz.uzh.ch 

The Apartment Store

Stylish and understated Scandinavian clothing.

Löwenstrasse 1

CH – 8001 Zürich

+41 43 243 15 51

theapartmentstore.ch

Xenix Kino

Exhibitor of avant-garde films in an elegant setting.

Kanzleistrasse 56

CH – 8004 Zürich

+41 43 322 13 70

xenix.ch

Widder Hotel Bar 

One of Zürich’s finest jazz venues.

Rennweg 7

CH – 8001 Zürich

+41 44 224 25 26

widderhotel.ch

Trams
Tram numbers: 2, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 13.
Tram stops: Paradeplatz, Rennweg, Stockerstrasse and Börsenstrasse.

Trains 

All S-Bahn lines to Zürich HB.

San Francisco

Stretching from Lower Haight through Pacific Heights to San Francisco Bay, Fillmore Street encapsulates much that is emblematic of the city once known as ‘the Paris of the West’. It has been home to diverse communities and to stellar talents in literature and music – such as Allen Ginsberg (who first read Howl there in 1955), Maya Angelou, and Janis Joplin; and witnessed a rapid ebb and flow of cultural and social change for more than a century. This legacy continues to resonate alongside new retailers, eateries and cultural venues.

Preparatory viewing: Gus Van Sant’s Milk, set mainly in The Castro.

Browser Books

Long-esteemed fiction and philosophy specialists.

2195 Fillmore Street

San Francisco 94115

+1 415 567 8027

browserbooks.indiebound.com

Curve

Debonair clothing for men and women.

2360 Fillmore Street

San Francisco 94115

+1 415 885 4200

shopcurve.com

Jane

Excellent coffee, tea, and house-baked delights.

2123 Fillmore Street

San Francisco 94115

+1 415 931 5263

janeonfillmore.com

Saint John Coltrane

African Orthodox Church

Soul-stirring, jazz-infused Sunday Mass.

1286 Fillmore Street

San Francisco 94115

+1 415 673 7144

coltranechurch.org

State Bird Provisions

Inventive and delicious dinner options.

1529 Fillmore Street

San Francisco 94115

+1 415 795 1272

statebirdsf.com

Zinc Details

A fine selection of furniture and homewares.

1905 Fillmore Street

San Francisco 94115

+1 415 776 2100

zincdetails.com

Bus lines

Muni buses 2, 3, 10, 22, 24.

Bus stops

Sacramento at Fillmore: 1.

Sutter at Fillmore: 2.

Jackson & Fillmore: 3, 22, 24.

Named for the silver coin mint that presided in the area for nearly two centuries, Ginza – which traverses eight blocks – is best known for a concentration of distinctive retailers and hotels and architecturally arresting flagship stores. The district’s red-bricked backstreets, however, abound with more modest pleasures; small cafes serve exemplary sashimi, independent boutiques epitomise Tokyo’s forward-thinking fashion, and tiny cinemas offer late-night screenings for film buffs of all persuasions.

Preparatory viewing: Kenji Mizoguchi’s Tôkyô Kôshinkyoku, set in 1920s Tokyo.

Bar Lupin

Ginza institution since 1928, with literary leanings.

BF 5-5-11 Ginza

Chuo-ku, Tokyo

+81 3 3571 0750

lupin.co.jp

Cine Switch

A haven for arthouse and niche screenings.

4-4-5 Ginza

Chūō-ku, Tokyo

+81 3 3561 0707

cineswitch.com

Dhaba India

Authentic South Indian food served with amiable efficiency.

Sagami Building

1F 2-7-9 Yaesu

Chuo-ku, Tokyo

+81 3 3272 7160

dhabaindia.com

Ito-ya

Wonderland for stationery enthusiasts.

2-7-15 Ginza

Chūō-ku, Tokyo

+81 3 3561 8311

ito-ya.co.jp

Le Theatre Ginza

Japanese-language plays and performances.

1-11-2 Ginza

Chuo-ku, Tokyo

theatres.co.jp/letheatre/

Oedo Antique Market

Sunday market offering multifarious treasures.

3-5-1 Marunouchi

Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo

+81 3 5444 2157

antique-market.jp

Underground trains

Ginza Station: Ginza, Marunouchi and Hibiya Lines. Yūrakuchō and Ginza Itchome Stations: Yūrakuchō Line.

Overground trains

Yūrakuchō Station: Yamanote and Keihin -Tōhoku Lines.

London

Known for its dairy produce and market gardens in pre-Victorian times, Islington is now a lively urban centre favoured for its arts and music venues, restaurants and boutiques. A reminder of its pastoral heritage remains, though, in verdant garden squares prized for the calming reprieve they offer to all. As do most London neighbourhoods, Islington boasts more than a few former residents of cultural note – including Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford, Benjamin Britten, and Joe Orton.

Preparatory reading: Andrea Levy’s Small Island, set in post-war London.

The Almeida Theatre

Intimate space with an intelligent repertoire. 

Almeida Street Islington, N1 1TA

+44 207 359 4404

almeida.co.uk

Camden Passage

An ever-enticing array  for avid antique collectors.

Pierrepont Row Arcade

Islington, N1 8ES

+44 207 359 0190

camdenpassageislington.co.uk

69 Colebrooke Row

Tucked-away cocktail bar with a fastidious approach.

69 Colebrooke Row

Islington, N1 8AA

+44 075 4052 8593

69colebrookerow.com

Folklore

Beautiful, practical  furniture and homewares.

193 Upper Street

Islington, N1 1RQ

+44 207 354 9333

shopfolklore.com

Pistachio & Pickle

Artisan breads, fine cheeses and house-baked pastries.

237 Liverpool Road

Islington, N1 1LX

+44 207 607 6319
pistachioandpickle.com

Victoria Miro

Established and emerging artists from Britain and beyond.

16 Wharf Road

N1 7RW

+44 207 336 8109

victoria-miro.com

Trains

Highbury & Islington Station: Victoria Line and London Overground.

Angel Station: Northern Line.

Buses

Upper Street: 19, 43.

Essex Road: 73, 38, 56,

341, 476.

Sydney

Aesop Newtown resides in one of Sydney’s oldest districts, a few kilometres south west of the city centre. Originally home to the Indigenous Eora people, Newtown was named in the nineteenth century for a local grocery store; over the twentieth century it evolved from authentic working-class borough to student enclave to lively bohemian ward. Visit for diverse eateries along King Street and beyond – particularly Lebanese, Indian and Thai – second-hand books, vintage finds, and independent fashion.

Preparatory reading:  Christina Stead’s For Love Alone,  set in Sydney and London.

Berkelouw Books

A fine selection of new and pre-loved books.

6-8 O’Connell Street

Newtown 2042

+61 2 9557 1777

berkelouw.com.au

Black Star Pastry

Exquisite pastries, savoury and sweet.

277 Australia Street

Newtown 2042

+61 2 9557 8656

blackstarpastry.com.au

Carriageworks

Absorbing exhibitions, performances and festivals.

245 Wilson Street

Eveleigh 2015

+61 2 8571 9099

carriageworks.com.au

Enmore Theatre

One of Sydney’s best performance venues.

118-132 Enmore Road

Newtown 2042

+61 2 9550 3666

enmoretheatre.com.au

Young Henrys

Micro-brewery with a predilection for tradition.

Units D & E

76 Wilford Street

Newtown 2042

+61 2 9519 0048

younghenrys.com

Luxe Espresso

Excellent coffee, flavoursome breakfast and lunch fare.

195 Missenden Road

Newtown 2042

+61 2 8084 1775

Trains

Newtown Station:
Inner West Line.

Buses

From the city: M30, 422,

423, 426, 428.

Melbourne 

While it occupies a relatively contained area (adjacent to West Melbourne, home to Victoria’s largest fresh produce market, and minutes from the centre of the city) North Melbourne has been subject to a flurry of activity and a rapidly evolving demographic since migrant influxes during the mid-nineteenth century Gold Rush. Since the mid-1990s, an abundance of restaurants, cafes and small specialty stores has flourished, attracting enthusiastic locals and well-informed visitors alike.

Preparatory reading: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, set in Melbourne’s inner north.

Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall
Exhibitions, performances and installations.

521 Queensberry Street

North Melbourne 3051

+61 3 9322 3720

melbourne.vic.gov.au

Banter Bar
Excellent wine list and food pairings.

562 Queensberry Street

North Melbourne 3051+61 3 9041 4511

eatdrinkbanter.com.au

Beatrix

Stellar house-baked treats; irresistible rugelach.

688 Queensberry Street

North Melbourne 3051

+61 3 9090 7301

Sosta Cucina

Flavoursome Italian dishes and impeccable service.

12 Errol Street

North Melbourne 3051

+61 3 9329 2882

sosta.com.au

Twenty & Six Espresso

Superb coffee, fresh food and inspired presentation.

594 Queensberry Street

North Melbourne 3051

+61 3 9329 0298

twentyandsix.com.au

Wooly Bully

Rare vinyl and comics aplenty for avid collectors.

104 Errol Street

North Melbourne 3051

+61 3 9329 5820

woolybully.com.au

Trains

North Melbourne Station:

majority of west /north-west

train lines via the city.

Trams

Victoria Street: Tram 57.

Peel Street: Tram 55.

Elizabeth Street: Tram 19, 55.

Hong Kong 

Centenarian double-decker trams coast nobly around one of Hong Kong’s oldest neighbourhoods; complemented by carefully preserved nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture, they are a daily reminder of the island’s colonial past. Britain chose Sheung Wan as its point of entry into Hong Kong, hence the former moniker: Gateway District. Today, ladder streets and leafy laneways host excellent modern eateries, galleries and design agencies amid temples, tea shops, and famed dried-fish vendors.

Preparatory viewing: Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love, set in 1960s Hong Kong.

Asia Art Archives

Incomparable resource for all aficionados.

11/F Hollywood Centre

233 Hollywood Road

Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

+852 2815 1112

www.aaa.org.hk

DeeM

Adroitly curated, elegant homewares.

252 Hollywood Road

Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

+852 2540 2011

deemlimited.com

Kouch

Fine wine tastings; clothing and furniture on the side.

No.12 Ground Floor

12 Tai Ping Shan Street

Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

+852 2376 2871

Po’s Atelier

Traditions merge producing tasty artisan breads.

Ground Floor

70 Po Hing Fong

Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

+852 6056 8005

Teakha

Organic tea and snacks to soothe as well as satisfy.

Shop B

18 Tai Ping Shan Street

Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

+852 2858 9185

teakha.com

Sin Sin Fine Art

Contemporary art from Asia and beyond.

52-54 Sai Street

Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

+852 2858 5072

sinsinfineart.com

Trains

Sheung Wan Station (Exit A2):

Island Line.

Buses

Hollywood Road: 26. Queen’s

Road West: 3A, 4, 4X, 5, 7,

10, 37A, 90B, 91, 94, 101, 104.

Paris

The Montorgueil district, in the heart of Paris, is noted for charming paved streets, food stores and fashion boutiques that attract locals and visitors alike. Those seeking fine ingredients can discover a melting pot of patisseries, chocolatiers, fromageries and fishmongers throughout the neighbourhood. For clothing and accessories, wander rue Montmartre and rue Etienne Marcel, and browse selections at Royal Cheese on rue Tiquetonne, a mere minute away from Aesop.

Preparatory viewing: Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis,set in nineteenth-century Paris.

Terroirs d’Avenir

Three passionate provedores: butcher, fishmonger, grocer.

7, rue du Nil

75002 Paris

+33 1 45 08 48 80

en selle Marcel

Concept store dedicated to bikes and cycling.

40, rue Tiquetonne

75002 Paris

+33 1 44 54 06 46

ensellemarcel.com

Frenchie Bar à Vins

Warm and intimate bar in which the wine list is king.

5-6, rue du Nil

75002 Paris

+33 1 40 39 96 19

frenchie-restaurant.com

Gaîté Lyrique

Dedicated exhibitor of digital culture.

3 bis, rue Papin

75003 Paris

+33 1 53 01 51 51

gaite-lyrique.net

Jardin du Palais-Royal

Sublime spot for a quiet picnic or solitary stroll.

Place du Palais-Royal

75001 Paris

+33 1 47 03 92 16

palais-royal.monuments-nationaux.fr

Librairie Jousseaume

New and treasured titles in a breathtaking building.

45, Galerie Vivienne

75002 Paris

+33 1 42 96 06 24

librairie-jousseaume.fr

Metro

Bourse, Etienne Marcel, Les Halles, Réaumur-Sébastopol, and Sentier Stations.

Buses
Rue Etienne Marcel: 29.

Rue du Louvre: 67, 74, 85.

Blvd de Sébastopol: 38, 47.