Hurrah! Poor people need never be bored again! Or so say the team behind toy design project, Latex for Fun. Founder and designer Max-o-matic put forth the challenge to create an affordable toy using nothing more than DIY ethos and a balloon. ‘It started by chance’, he explains. ‘I found a bag of balloons at work and started drawing over them. It was so simple and so catchy and at that point, I knew this was something really cool and invited other people to join in. In that precise moment the Latex for Fun project came to life’. Entries have been pouring in from all over the world and the team will now narrow them down to a selection for display in a book and exhibition in Barcelona later this year. ‘The reaction was fantastic. It was quite a shock seeing that in only a few months we had tonnes of awesome submissions from great artists from all over the world. Gary Baseman said something that summarizes what many people thought of the project: “I love this stupid and incredible project”. It’s such a simple idea with so many possibilities - this will be quite an exciting year for latex lovers!’ [Tim Biskup's artwork above left; Sauerkids' work above right]
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Also by NATALIE LIECHTI
Current UK beat-boxing champ, Beardyman, recently kept impatient crowds entertained between sets at London’s Lovebox Weekender. We spoke to the Brighton resident about his offbeat style: ‘I’ve been doing it since I was a baby, but I never knew it was called beat-boxing. I thought it was just a habit, like biting your nails, and people were always telling me to stop. Being a good beat-boxer is a mixture between being a good DJ, a cheesy street magician and a vocal athlete’.
Sydney-based artist, James Jirat Patradoon on his career defining moment: ‘If I could trace my artistic inspiration back to one event, it would have to be the Neo Tokyo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2001. I had never seen art like that before; I didn’t know you could be so playful with it. I vividly remember the Yoshitomo Nara sculptures made out of bandages, and Kenji Yanobe’s atom suit and Godzilla/Astro Boy sculptures that blew bubbles. It was just so fun. I think because a lot of Japanese art contains references to pop culture, it’s more accessible for audiences. They aren’t so intimidated by it because it can be quite light-hearted but still have a serious undertone to it’.
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We caught up with artist Chad Liebenguth recently and asked him what had been keeping him busy of late. Read more
I almost forgot — metal is really about being drunk, pissed, offensive, and satanic. I have Bestial Mockery to thank for this. Their no-frills black thrash is barebones and snarling without being too dead-pan serious. These guys from Sweden are clearly having a blast worshiping the Dark One in the tradition of old-school bands like Venom, early Bathory, and Sodom. Nothing too original here, but it’s fun as hell.
Legend has it that Paul McCartney hated the line from Hey Jude - ‘the movement you need is on your shoulder’ - so much that he was going to scrap it until his partner in grime John Lennon told him it was the best part of the song. So it stuck. Read more
On a recent trip to San Francisco, I was lucky enough to meet with John Trippe, the main man behind the popular arts based site, Fecal Face. Read more
Oh, ok, so now I’ve seen it all. Or perhaps, in this case, I’m not seeing enough. Japanese game shows are so much fun. Seriously.
Jean-Julien Pous’ Seeking You is an animated love letter to the city of Hong Kong. It presses all the same buttons as Blade Runner and In the Mood for Love, with a touch of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s gothic style, and though it’s really amazing eye candy, it also smacks of creepy, orientalist expat. Here, an entire Asian city is exoticized, fetishized, and finally anthropomorphized in a rather unsubtle way. Why are so many creepy old European dudes so lecherous when it comes to Asia?
Australian-born creative, Marc Newson, is considered to be one of the most influential designers of the past few decades. Having originally studied jewellery and sculpture at Sydney College of the Arts, ‘he started experimenting with furniture design as a student and, after graduating in 1984, was awarded a grant from the Australian Crafts Council, and staged an exhibition — featuring the Lockheed Lounge — at the Roslyn Oxley Gallery in Sydney’. Read more
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Muraida, Radioactive Green Edition
This wicked new villain, Muraida, from the OSK line is a 10 inch vinyl with six points of articulation. It comes in a combination of solid and clear vinyl, and is packed with more punch than a thousand GI Joe’s.
While I am as impressed as anyone with an artist’s ability to render accurate and lifelike human figures, I’m more often compelled aesthetically by looser and more stylized images such as Camilla Engman’s. The wide-set eyes, bulbous bodies, and skewed proportions of the people and animals in Engman’s paintings lend them a certain expressiveness and melancholy. Read more
Argentine illustrator Poly Bernatene miraculously creates many of his beautifully textured, painterly images in Photoshop. Despite his twenty-first century method, his illustrations achieve a sort of timelessness that is bound to mesmerize children for years to come. Read more
James Blagden’s neon fantasies
New York illustrator James Blagden’s work is so wonderfully trippy, I feel like I need to wear shades and a top hat when looking at them just to do them justice. Read more
When I was living in China, a friend of mine had an idea to publish a guidebook about the country’s bathrooms because many expats spend the first few months living abroad going through unfortunate, awkward, and nightmarish experiences coping with sanitation issues, squat toilets, and curious locals trying to catch a glimpse of Western junk. WorldToilet.info is a hilarious but very useful resource for travelers wondering what to expect and how to behave in various exotic locals when nature calls.
Legendary pop culture artist and Agit Pop founder Ron English will be a guest compiler of an upcoming issue of our email newsletter, writing about his favorite cultural discoveries. To read Ron’s edition of Lost At E Minor, simply sign up to our weekly newsletter. It’s free, you win!
From this artist selection of t-shirts comes this Michael Gillette illustrated t-shirt, limited edition and distributed in a vinyl sleeve, with a biography of the artist on the back of the sleeve. Each tee is numbered and signed by the artist, and comes in organic cotton. Read more
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