Hasta La Ideas

Our interview with ink doyenne Marisa Kakoulas on her grayscale tattoo magnum opus

Originating on the streets and in prisons, tattooing’s shades-of-gray genre initially often told the stories of tribal affiliations and conquests or were homages to the deceased. Methods of inking spanned readily available tools and homemade machines could be as random as “a guitar string, cassette motor, Bic pen tube and India Ink,” explains Marisa Kakoulas, co-author of the heavyweight book on the subject “Black & Grey Tattoo“.

The three-volume tome explores how the artform evolved in technique, materials and popularity, as well as how scale and scrutiny increased with time. Released several months ago, the box-set took a year to put together, which Kakoulas says was mostly spent “researching artists and attending international tattoo conventions,” a process that was “exhausting but lots of fun.”

We asked Kakoulas—who also founded the tattoo blog Needles and Sins—to lend a little more insight into the style she describes as “art that has a buttery shading on the skin that can appear almost organic on the body.”

What schools of Black & Grey tattoo exist today?

There are various sub-genres of the Black & Grey style, and we rather unscientifically broke down the material we collected into three volumes: “Traditional Black & Grey,” “Dark/Horror” and “Realism.” It’s not a particularly easy division as there’s cross-pollination among them. The reason we divided it this way is to show how tattoos with similar stylistic elements are interpreted differently by artists around the world.

The first volume, “Traditional Black & Grey,” is somewhat of a misnomer as it’s simply called “Black & Grey” in the tattoo community. But now that greyscale tattooing has moved in different artistic directions, the “traditional” label is used to set it apart from its offshoots. It’s been referred to as “LA style” as many credit the city as the birthplace of the style as an art form. It’s other street name has been “fineline” or “single needle” because a sole ink-dipped tip is used to create anything from three small dots ([signifying] “Mi Vida Loca”) to full back pieces of religious iconography. And there is indeed a lot of Christian imagery among these tattoos. Jack Rudy is one of the godfathers of this style who, with his mentor Good Time Charlie, refined black and grey and brought it to a higher level of artistry.

“Dark/Horror” delves into personal demons relayed on skin. “Paul Booth“, the “Dark Lord of Tattooing,” is considered one of the great masters of this style. An interview with Paul is featured in this volume, and in it he discusses why people get these tattoos as well as how his own demons have driven his art. Other tattoos here pay homage to horror in pop culture—everything from Frankensteins to even famous tattoo artists (including Paul himself) rendered as zombies.

“Photorealism” encapsulates work that takes photorealistic art and translates it on the body. While the other volumes also feature realism, this chapter concentrates on portraiture, scenery, and even fantastical images rendered in true-to-life tableaux. This style of tattooing has really invigorated the tattoo community with the possibilities of mastering a difficult art on a difficult canvas.

What other projects are you working on?

My next project for Edition Reuss is another large-format hardcover on comic and cartoon tattoos, and the work we’re amassing now is wild. A lot of art that looks like it was ripped from a child’s nightmare, plus tons of sexy cheesecake illustrative work. Very trippy. That will be available Spring 2011.

I’d also like to express my gratitude to all the superb artists and collectors in these books. The work is part of a collective mission to present tattoo as a fine art, in the most artful way. I’d also like to say, on behalf of this tattoo collective that, “Yes, we have a good idea of what we’ll look like when we’re old and wrinkly—and we’re okay with that.”

Co-authored by Kakoulas and Edgar Hoill, “Black & Grey Tattoo” sells online from Edition Reuss either as individual volumes (€98 each) or as one massive collection for €248. In the U.S. the book is available directly from the author (contact marisa [at] needlesandsins [dot] com) for $350 including shipping.

Artists reinvent favorite album art in a group show

Skindeep approximations, deceitful marketing ploys, masterpieces of graphic design—cover art’s slippery role gets a tribute in Cover Version (LP), curator and artist Timothy Hull’s second show to take up the theme. The first, held at Los Angeles’ Taylor De Cordoba gallery, had artists dreaming up alternate covers for books in 2008, but in this show Hull tasked the over two dozen artists with re-imagining record covers that made an impact on them.

Predictably, the resulting exhibit currently at the Brooklyn Academy of Music runs the range, from the iconic (Grace Jones’ Night Clubbing by Colby Bird) to sardonic (
Mathew Cerletty’s stock photograph version of Harvest) and silly (a topless girl astride a dinosaur as envisioned by Dave McDermott).

The show is open through 20 March 2011, check out more images in the slideshow below.

An interview with Italy’s top tour operator on her new website dedicated to alternative travel

Founder of the successful architecture tourism site Viaggi di Architettura, South African-born Mikaela Bandini recently expanded her scope with Urban Italy—a new website devoted to travel, design and the discovery of an alternative Italy in all forms. With a clear goal to help people discover something new and surprising, Bandini tells CH the story of the project in an exclusive interview.

How did the idea of Urban Italy come about?

My day job over the past 12 years has been creating contemporary architecture tours around the world for Italian professionals and architecture lovers for Viaggi di Architettura.

It’s what I do. It’s what I love doing. Scouting for information, contacts and spaces that you don’t get in a cheesy guide book off the shelf. After putting together over 50-plus itineraries worldwide I decided to create a guide-blog for foreign archinauts and design-aholics who want an alternative approach to Italian cities.

The project is based on your personal experience or on a team?

I like to consider Urban Italy a kind of 2.0 version of my Moleskines—basically Italy the way that I’d like to see it (after having lived here for 20-odd years).

The project started as a personal collection of contemporary addresses and insider information from the tip to the toe (literally!) that I gathered while traveling around for architecture, food, interiors and pathological modernist furniture-collecting. Then I asked a handful of foreign friends around the country to give me their ‘best of’ to have a wider coverage of things to do and places to go. There are currently five of us working on the project, all foreigners living in Italy.

We begin the second phase of the project in spring with young Dutch film maker Caspar Diederik, who’ll be doing 2.0 storytelling about people and places around the country.

Are the Italian contemporary cities very different from the postcard-like Italy that many people expect?

We’re looking at a rather more contemporary Italy, which appeals to the kind of traveler who doesn’t collect Hard Rock t-shirts. Stuff like ex-industrial sites that have been transformed into something new, exciting spaces for arts and theater, the latest hot spots for an aperitivo, urban eateries, events, products and people. Not exactly the stuff you get on a postcard.

Then again our readers send Tweets, not postcards.

What do people you take around Italy appreciate the most?

I think it’s our b-side approach, and the fact that our people guiding are mostly journalists, designers, architects, art lovers that know Italian cities from a different point of view. We don’t include spaces just because they have been labeled “cultural,” so we do bar-hopping, shop interiors, contemporary architecture, factory design shopping tours and a whole series of other itineraries that are not easily found elsewhere.

Also the fact that we are traveling around the whole country, not just Milan, Rome or Florence, which get enough coverage as is. We’re going south. Deep south. To places where it’s often difficult to find information for events and spaces in English.

Our offices are in Matera, more or less where you’d find the genuine leather sign on the boot, so we’re looking at the whole country from a novel perspective. The general feedback that I’m getting (keeping in mind that the blog has only been on line for a couple of weeks now) is really positive.

Irreverent artist Eric Yahnker’s new works at Kunsthalle L.A.

Seattle gallery Ambach and Rice takes its gallery on the road, presenting “Cracks of Dawn” at art space Kunsthalle L.A. in Los Angeles’ Chinatown. The exhibition features new drawings and sculptures by California artist Eric Yahnker, who “outwardly refutes moral and political decency in favor of comic rationality.”

Employing a witty sensibility in his works, Yahnker synthesizes the face of Mother Theresa and Marlon Brando as The Godfather as well as a Native American chief dressed in traditional garb wearing blackface (not to mention the five floating anuses that adorn the chief’s headdress). Using what he describes as a “Mel Brooks-ian take on history”, Yahnker suggests “ethical dilemmas through visceral depictions that vacillate between the transcendent and the grotesque.”

Yahnker’s images are unabashedly tongue-in-cheek (the show’s title represents a particularly crude pun) and often absurd—a slice of cheese pizza looks fittingly baroque amid a garland of flowers, the time on a digital alarm clock reads “TITS”—but their lowbrow facade belies a serious exploration into the human ability to accurately assess ethics and authenticity. By obfuscating any sort of true agenda, Yahnker “compels the audience to paddle up shit’s creek without a map or a lifejacket.”

“Cracks of Dawn” opens today and will be on view at Kunsthalle through 20 February 2011.

Also on Cool Hunting: Eric Yahnker: Naughty Teens/Garbanzo Beans

Our interview with The Macallan’s latest Master of Photography

Back in September when we visited The Macallan at their home in the Scottish Highlands we were given a sneak preview of both the liquid and the imagery from the latest in their Masters of Photography series. While the 20-year-old whisky instantly became our new favorite for the way its buttery smooth texture offsets its rich and complex flavor, the imagery Albert Watson created to celebrate it offers a beautiful and educational perspective on what makes Scotch whisky so special. Where Rankin (the last Scottish photographer to create a series for The Macallan) used the Easter Elchies estate as a background for nude portraiture, Watson chose to tell the story of the complex journey Oak wood makes from the forest to the Estate, picking up the varied characteristics through Spain and Scotland that eventually define the whisky.

In anticipation of Thursday’s NYC stop of the one-night-only series of gallery exhibitions of Watson’s series, I sat down with the famed photographer to hear more about the project from his perspective.

You’re very highly regarded as a fashion photographer, I’m wondering if you consider yourself one.

I certainly have been a fashion photographer and I still do fashion. But I’ve also done a vast amount of portraiture and movie posters. I’ve done over the years a lot of landscape work and also a huge amount of still life work. So I’ve done more fashion than anything else, but in the end I’m really a photographer who will take fashion photographs. I’m really a photographer in the broad sense of the word.

There’s a very simple way to look at all of the work that I do because I was trained as a graphic designer for four years at university and then did three years of post-graduate at film school. And that is written all over the work. It’s either one of three things: graphic design, filmmaking or a mixture of the two.

Which photograph was chosen for the label of this edition?

It is the one of the barrel in the shaft of light, which was the first one we did. Due to the logistics, we shot the cooperage first and I went in to the saw mill and there was a big room. The place was very dusty and smokey and humid so this was the perfect condition for a shaft of light to come through. I walked into the room and there was this shaft of light. I turned to Ken Grier, the Creative Director, and said there’s a shot there, so we put a barrel in it. It was an important moment because it laid a standard for the rest of the shoot—a lot of times when working on a photographic project you want to get the best shots first because if you start low and improve you end up wanting to reshoot the early shots.

Where did the idea for the storyline come from?

That came from me. What came from them was that they wanted to do Spain and Scotland. But to tie it all together we had to put a human face on it and to do it as a journey that a young couple takes from a sustainable forest in the North of Spain to the barrels being made in the South of Spain and filled with Sherry there. Then they go from there to Scotland to the distillery where the whisky is put in them. I thought people should discover a forest, a saw mill, the cooperage, the barrels, and through that discover Scotland and ultimately the distillery. Doing that through this couple put a face on it.

The series of photographs you created for The Macallan combine the various facets of photography you described to create a very specific narrative. Was this project different from others you’ve done for that reason?

Once inside the project there wasn’t anything I might do over a six month period for a variety of people—I might be employed to do both landscape work and fashion work. So the Macallan thing was just concentrating it in to a very short period of time. The actual shooting time for the project was eight days, which is not a lot of time when you’re doing South of Spain, North of Spain, Central Scotland and West Coast of Scotland.

What do you think of the whisky?

I don’t drink at all. It’s unusual for someone from Scotland not to drink.

The limited-edition of 1,000 bottles of The Macallan Sherry Oak 20 years old has the specially-commissioned label by Watson and each bottle includes a set of 10 portfolio prints, $1000 from select retailers.