Jimmy and I met by chance when we were both guest speakers at some insane street art fest in Belgium (>p82). It was a strange but interesting weekend and it was one of those meetings where it feels like you’ve known the person forever, which is what friendship is all about: eternity. Jimmy used to be one of the most prominent stencil artists in Australia until he gave it all up to go back to uni and study for his Masters of Visual Art. This was an astute move as now his work has all the influences of the street but with the heavy-weight conceptual backing of the art establishment.
What Jimmy does is travel the world collecting scrawls and graffiti (not the street art kind, but the underclass style — people writing band’s names, expletives, insults, gangs etc). He shoots them on a digital camera, and then comes up with a concept to incorporate the image — like the time he built a facsimile of a Darwin bus shelter (which are renowned for being painted with very kitsch sunsets) and used exact copies of the collected scrawls to cover its surfaces. Thus underclass outsider art (ie art created by members of the underclasses out of frustration) becomes high art. I fucking love it.
‘I’ve always been attracted to graffiti and to people who do things that they’re not supposed to.’
Having spent years knee-deep in the Melbourne stencil scene, Jim knows better than most what he likes and, more importantly, what he doesn’t:
‘I’ve decided that most New York/train-oriented graf is very derivative. As a culture, it often doesn’t support innovation and experimentation. But these are the primary things that I find exciting in all creative endeavours. That’s why I find outsider graffiti so exciting, because it doesn’t adhere to a set of rules and is often unpredictable.’
Araminta has a great story about how she got into photography and subsequently how she shot two different sides to South African — more specifically, Cape Town — life. ‘Prison gang tattoos and matric’ dresses’ for her first exhibition. (Matric’ is short for Matriculation and is when you spend your last year at high school and graduate, like the US high school prom. Then you have a graduation party and this is when the dress comes in!) The moment I spotted her work I knew that she had something special and I had to get her in here. I’ll let her tell you her story in her own words…
‘I did an architecture course in England but what I really liked was shuffling around London looking at sites I was given. I really enjoyed that bit. And then I studied it at St Martins, which was quite an odd course as it hadn’t really started as a course properly, it was just me and another girl. I had walked in off the street and said “Do you do a photography post-graduate?” and so they said, “No, but talk to the tutor who basically had to shoot all the fashion,” and he was rather bored. So he made us a course, which was lovely. And what happened was by then I had a terrible drug habit and everything went a bit pear-shaped for years and then I came out to Cape Town for treatment and rehab. I just locked myself in the darkroom in London and used it as an excuse to do what I wanted and when I came out to South Africa I started shooting properly and also I found that I had all these ideas.
‘It was because of the drug stuff that enabled me to meet the 28s and the 26s [prison gangs], really. When I came out here I had the most horrendous scars, almost disfiguring, on my face, but when I met the prison gangs, the first thing I thought was that the tattoos were such a rich art form in their own right, and I found it so fascinating, and also interesting because of my own scars. Which were nothing compared to the branding that the gangsters get from their face tattoos. It was very healing for me to see this. I had empathy for them as I had made my face peculiar as well. But I had the best year and a half with them because they are like the most amazing men and their stories are incredible. The tattoo is a kind of way for a human being to express themself when they have had everything else taken away.
‘I actually was going to do the matric’ photos across the board, all the people, but I became really interested in the Cape Flats (a notorious area of Cape Town, (>p270)) where the kids there have the best dresses, the most imagination for the one night they can style on. It was quite grinding to shoot the gangsters and I was quite happy to shoot something fun. The girls were full of self-expression and really into making a statement. They all think about the dress they are gonna wear for about five years and the parents spend every penny on it and it’s all focused on the one moment when they step out of their blockhouse in Mannenburg and the whole neighbourhood turns and looks at you and they all go wild. Just unbelievable…’
For me, I first really understood the power of the DJ when I was in a small club (Snoopy’s) in S’arenal, Majorca, in 1986. For some reason I was stood near the DJ booth and I watched him cue up a record. He began to play ‘Last Night A DJ Saved My Life’, not at the beginning but at the end of a 12” mix, and as this was pumping out he quickly cued up a different version of the same record then dropped that in, and with that one swift move he had created a live remix. What the fuck did he just do? I was hooked.
If you went back to 1970 in New York, the year dot for DJing, you’d find it all began with a man called David Mancuso. He started holding private parties at his loft apartment in New York that year at 647 Broadway. The first party was called Love Saves The Day. These invitation-only parties became so popular that by 1971 he decided to do this on a weekly basis at 74 and then 99 Prince Street from 1975-1984. The Loft was inspired by Harlem rent parties of the ′20s and ′30s and if you were a member and had no money, David ran an IOU system so you could pay the following week. It was all about being able to be with your friends, dancing and having a good time. It was a true social experiment where all walks of life got down next to each other. This is why it was important. And then there was the sound system. David designed his own unique sound system which was his secret weapon. It wasn’t about volume, it was about quality.
The Paradise Garage opened in NYC in 1976 at 84 Kings Street, the home of legendary DJ Larry Levan. Originally a parking garage, hence the name, it was largely inspired by the loft parties: no food, alcohol or beverages were on sale, and it was not open to the general public.
You had to be a member to get in. As word spread, people would queue round the block each Friday night, hoping to be able to get in with a member, almost prostituting themselves in order to gain entry. Now that’s a club. This was the birthplace of ‘Garage Music’.
‘The club was down some dingy backstreet by the docks. From the outside it was not what I was expecting. Nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to witness inside the club. The place was rammed. The clientele were almost all black, all male and very gay. The club was