Wallpaper

 

Edinburgh Toile

Client : Edinburgh International Festival

Date : September 2009

Edinburgh was added to Timorous Beasties' toile collection when the design was commissioned by theEdinburgh International Festival in 2009.  The design was the cover of the EIF magazine for the event and also appeared on the Omni building in the city centre, a window in Jenners Department Store and on taxis and billboards across the city.  The controversial images of traffic chaos, drunks beside Greyfriar's Bobby and a traffic cone on the statue of David Hume provoked strong opinion in more conservative circles.

http://www.timorousbeasties.com/projects/

Design by Timorous beasties

 

Timorous Beasties is the Scottish textiles and wallpaper label who have taken the concept of old fashioned toile and given it a twist. They have created an urban collection of toiles which reveal subverted scenes of modern day debauchery. Entitled London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, the prints touch on social and political themes in a most decorative way.

The complete 'Edinburgh Toile' as created by timorous beastie

To execute this story we chose to work with Timorous Beasties whose exploration of the ‘Toile’ style has seen them receive international praise and recognition for their surreal and provocative textiles and wallpapers. The final toile delivered this and much more in its depiction, challenging perceptions with its originality and creativity.

The urban landscape in many UK cities appears to be changing all the time. Iconic modern buildings give us a strong sense of identity and sit alongside monuments to great minds of the past, stunning period architecture and the practicalities and realities of a modern city. These provided a rich source for our ‘Edinbugh Toile.’ At first glance it looks like one of the magnificent vistas portrayed on early Toile de Jouy wallpaper, but closer inspection reveals a different vision of contemporary Edinburgh.

The toile revealed a different vision of contemporary Edinburgh

Elements of the design include iconic buildings St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh Castle, the Scottish Parliament and Carlton Hill; historical figures including David Hume, James Boswell, Robert Burns and Greyfriars bobby; tour buses and tartan tourist shops; tramworks and roadworks; people going about their business, fast food caravans, homeless people, modern housing developments and a love of drink. EIF references included the Bank of Scotland Fireworks Concert, a firebrand conductor and ballet dancer incorporated into elements of the cityscape. It added an affectionate, frank and honest vision of modern Edinburgh for Festival 09.

Milan 08: textile and wallpaper designers Timorous Beasties will launch a collection printed with images of “contemporary urban life”, including skateboarders, tramps and CCTV cameras, and another design based on the conflict in the Middle East.

The Decouper Toile Collection (top, above and below) is based on 18th Century chinioserie and toiles de jouey patterns.

Bloody Hell (below) is ” an experimental wallpaper design based on the theme of war and conflict in the Middle East”.

Another designer updating the Toile de Jouy is London based artist and designer Julie Verhoeven. Having established a diverse career in the arts ranging from moving image to fashion illustration, she collaborated with renowned illustrator Peter Saville last year on a range of wallpaper entitled ‘Forget Me Not’. Starting with the traditional toile, their design took a more  sexual and perversive stance with their prints showing images of Japanese bondage and pornography.

The beauty of Toile de Jouy is in the details. From afar it can appear chintzy and rather old fashioned but as many new designers are proving, the detail reveals very modern ideas.

The American interior designer Sheila Bridges has updated the Toile de Jouy by replacing the quaint rural scenes with those of everyday New York life. Characters dancing, playing basketball and carrying boomboxes make up this vibrant print which come in modern shades of yellow, robin’s egg, pistachio and cherry.

Paris based designer Manuel Canovas has produced a series of traditional printed wallpapers in acid tones and bright colours such as this bubblegum pink print below.

Back to the present, some “modern toile” plates with houses by the great Scottish design firm Timorous Beasties, who make amazing wallpaper and fabrics, but also china.  Their “London Toile” pattern, while not exactly centered on a single house, certainly focuses on structures.  Somehow it reminds me more of the eighteenth-century delftware than the nineteenth-century toile-like transferware, as does the Juliska “Country Estate” charger below.

And here’s one last merging of architecture and ceramics, by EstherCoombs, a British illustrator who often uses vintage tableware for her canvases, always with charming results.

Some scans from one of THE best books ever, Twenty-First Century Design by Marcus Fairs.

After Willow Ceramics by Robert Dawson

Ceramics

Glasgow Toile by Timorous Beasties

Textiles and Wallpaper

Both these products take traditional design and subvert them, using photomontage and copy and paste, as well as satire to bring them into the 21st century. I am interested in the idea of employing traditional crafts, such as quilting, but also making a product that is original and conceptual in our digital age.

Toile de Jouy

The inspiration of Timorous Beasties is this 18th Century French Wallpaper. Usually made of a white or off white background, with a highly complex pattern. The pattern colours are normally black, red or blue. Rarer ones are green, browns and magenta. The themes on these wallpapers are of what people did for fun back in the 18th century these were mostly playing in parks, picnics by the lakes and tea party's. Not only was Toile de Jouy wallpaper, it was bedding, cushions, curtains and other fabrics. The also include arrangements of flowers which are of the same or similar colours to the main pattern. I like the way this turns out as it really makes the pattern look very fancy. It is like the wallpaper of kings and queens, I think that this wallpaper would not look out of place in Buckingham Palace. I can see that Timorous Beasties drew a lot of inspiration from this style of wallpaper. Then turning it into something of a polar opposite, but still keeping the flowers and colours to distract you from the subject matter.   

Grayson Perry: Map of An Englishman

Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry, according to this disputed article on Wikipedia “best known for his ceramics and his cross-dressing”, is the artist behind this obsessively detailed cartographic self-portrait.

His Map of An Englishman (2004) is a mock-Tudor etch of an imaginary island, not coincidentally resembling a brain, surrounded by Psychopath, Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, Delirium and other unpleasantness at sea; divided into counties with alluring names such as Tender, Bitch, Romance, Cliché and Guru – Normal and Easy are pretty small areas, and Fear is a large, scary forest in the east.

Hills, houses and castles, but mainly churches, dot the countryside, each bearing the name of character traits (or flaws) or other words somehow connectible the artist, expressing prejudices, fears, desires, vanities and other attributes of the artist, ranging from Two-Car-Family and Stuck over Cuddly and Intersubjectivity to Dream-Date and I’m-Out-Of-Control.Some elements seem to be thematicallygrouped together, hence the region labelled Posh is thick with place-names like Chattering, Broadsheet, Yoga, Chardonnay, School Run and Bulemic.

Hayward's invisible art show

Hayward's invisible art show offers more than meets the eye

from http://www.theweek.co.uk/art/47390/haywards-invisible-art-show-offers-more-meets-eye

This show about nothing is surprisingly engaging - if you leave your cynicism at the door

LAST UPDATED AT 09:03 ON WED 13 JUN 2012

What you need to know
The Hayward Gallery's new exhibition, Invisible: Art about the Unseen 1957-2012, explores ideas related to the invisible, the hidden and the unknown. The show features works by celebrated artists such as Andy Warhol, Yves Klein, Chris Burden, Yoko Ono, Maurizio Cattelan and Carsten Höller.

Exhibited works include Yves Klein's plans for an 'architecture of air', canvases 'primed' with snow water and brainwaves, an empty plinth space 'cursed by a witch', a pedestal containing Andy Warhol's aura and a room containing an artist's ghost. 

The exhibition is curated by Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, and runs until 5 August.

What the critics like
This exhibition is a seriously brilliant jest, says Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. Of course it courts tabloid headlines and sarcasm. It is like Jerry Seinfeld's sitcom, a show about nothing. "But it succeeds because it is in on the joke, which it makes unexpectedly profound." Frankly, there's a lot more art to see here than there is in many exhibitions around today.

Among the surprises of the exhibition is the realisation that artists have used invisibility in so many different ways, says Richard Dorment in The Daily Telegraph. The delightful Tom Friedman's cursed plinth has something to say, as does Maurizio Cattelan's send-up of the whole idea of conceptual art. The show is almost entirely without visual interest, "but everything else about it is fascinating".  

This is not a show for the cynic, says Ben Luke in the Evening Standard. It places great faith in its audience, lending us an active role in forming the art. It playfully questions the foundations of art, shaking up the idea of the artist as a gifted creator and the viewer as an observer of their genius. "By giving us little to see, it actually makes us look harder."

Traditionalists might scoff that this exhibition is just a new rendition of The Emperor's New Clothes, says Artlyst, but, as clichéd as it might sound, "there is much more to the exhibition than meets the eye".

What they don't like
Though the show gives you a lot to think about, says Richard Dorment in the Telegraph, I preferred reading the punchy catalogue essay by curator Ralph Rugoff. An occasional invisible artwork is one thing, but a show where everything is invisible requires "a great deal more of my powers of concentration than I am prepared to give". · 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/9325152/Invisible-Art-About-the-Unseen-1957-2012-Hayward-Gallery-review.html

Invisible: Art About the Unseen 1957-2012, Hayward Gallery, review

Is art invisible to the naked eye any less potent than that which we are able to see, asks Richard Dorment.

A woman at the Hayward Gallery looks at Tom Friedman's 'Untitled (A Curse)', 1992  Photo: REX FEATURES

By Richard Dorment

8:00AM BST 12 Jun 2012

111 Comments

'Unseen’ at the Hayward Gallery is an exhibition about invisible art. Apart from white walls, blank canvases, unmarked sheets of paper and nearly invisible labels, the building appears to be empty – or rather it is empty, except for 50 works of art that, as it happens, nobody can see. The show is almost entirely without visual interest – so if that’s what you’re after, go to the Royal Academy. But everything else about it is fascinating.

Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Obvious examples in everyday life are radio waves, X-rays and magnetism. You can’t see faith or intuition or telepathy either – but all are very real to those who have experience of them. In the 20th century, the idea that the most important thing about a work of art might not be visible originated in Marcel Duchamp. In his ready-mades, he tried to liberate art from aesthetics in order to put it once again “at the service of the mind”. His charming 50 Cubic Centimetres of Paris Air bottled in a glass ampoule is arguably more interesting to think about than to look at, but it could only have been made by a homesick Frenchman.

This is the historical background against which the Hayward show starts. Yves Klein created The Void in 1957. The original work (which still exists) consisted of an empty gallery in which Klein claimed to have infused his artistic sensibility, a commodity – like wit, desire, or intelligence – that you cannot see or feel, but know when it is there.

Klein considered his sensibility to be so precious that he would exchange it only for a bar of pure gold. And if the customer would agree to burn the receipt proving he’d bought it, Klein would throw most of the gold into the Seine, thereby rendering every aspect of the transaction invisible.

As a devout Catholic, Klein understood that belief is as necessary to the practice of art as it is to religion. Both require an ability to make a leap of faith into areas of human experience that have no material dimension. Only a fool or a saint would agree to the transaction Klein proposed, but to do so would be to transcend materialism and worldly self-interest – and so from a theological perspective to live in a state of grace

The idea that an artist’s sensibility is in some way palpable did not die with Klein. The American performance artist Chris Burden once spent three weeks in a gallery lying in a prone position at the back of a high platform where he could not be seen by visitors to his show. What interested Burden was whether the knowledge of the unseen artist’s presence altered their response to the space they were in. Of course, it did. A consecrated church feels different from one that is unconsecrated and the presence of a Royal or a celebrity at a public function changes the atmosphere whether we actually see them or not.

And not just famous people, either. The performance artist Bethan Huws has hired professional actors who will pretend to be visitors to the show at the Hayward. They will look and act like everyone else in the gallery, except that they are not there to look at the works of art but to render themselves “invisible” by disappearing into the crowd. I bet you a fiver, though, that if you go to this show, you will feel their presence or at least be more attentive to the person standing next to you, even if you do not spot who they are.

Among the surprises of the exhibition is the realisation that artists have used invisibility in so many different ways – some successful, some not. Late in his career, Andy Warhol announced that he had imprinted an empty plinth with the aura of his celebrity, but the work feels like a perfunctory recycling of old ideas. Yet when that delightful artist Tom Friedman paid a professional witch to curse an area of about 11 inches above an empty pedestal he was saying something worth hearing. For the piece will evoke as many responses to it as there are visitors to the show – indifference with some, fear in others, and a cackle of laughter from me.

And I laughed, too, at Maurizio Cattelan’s send-up of the whole idea of conceptual art when he reported the theft of an invisible art work to the police, then exhibited the solemn police report in the gallery.

In art, death is usually treated as a thing or an event. In this show we are shown that it is more often an absence. During his lifetime, the performance artist James Lee Byars created an installation about his own death consisting of a pitch-black gallery that the visitor enters and leaves by passing through heavy velvet curtains into a total, enfolding darkness. Fifteen years after his death, it has become even more macabre.

Claes Oldenburg proposed a memorial to John F Kennedy in the form of a gigantic statue of the assassinated president buried upside-down in the ground. Conventional memorials are designed to comfort (and delude) future generations into thinking that the heroic figure somehow lives on. Oldenburg suggests that we should instead know what it is like to have had something extraordinary, and then have it taken away.

I am sure that Oldenburg’s idea influenced the thinking behind Maya Linn’s monument to American soldiers fallen in Vietnam, because that, too, is a sort of grave, into which visitors descend to meditate not on a glorious victory but on the tragic waste of human life.

Though Unseen gives you a lot to think about, I enjoyed reading the punchy catalogue essay by curator Ralph Rugoff rather more than the show itself. I’m prepared to engage face to face with a work that’s invisible every once in a while. But to spend hours in a show where everything is invisible is to ask a great deal more of my powers of concentration than I am prepared to give. My loss, I know.