Series 3 -War and Innocence

Culture clash! Pocko’s third set brings you visual dispatches from the frontline of cultural change. As globalisation accelerates alien cultures are brought inexorably into contact with each other and disruption and weirdness is the inevitable result… Young Japanese girls juggle individualism with traditional Japanese values, a maverick designer takes a look at Finland’s landscape through pixelated eyes, in the former Soviet Union artists and soldiers become unlikely bedfellows, in the mind of a Japanese artist order and disorder become one and on the streets of London an artist of Tamil origin samples freely from the iconography of revolutionary movements and western popular culture.

Pocko Editions

The Pocko Collection, a series of 96 pocket-sized books, is published by an independent arts book publisher based in London. These small books harbour big ideas that are expressed with an intoxicating cocktail of charm, quirkiness and bite. Pocko champions the book as a brilliant medium of expression that by its nature encourages the articulation of sustained ideas, be they purely visual or combinations of words and images.

Pocko People

Behind the scenes at Pocko there is a group of creative communicators “PockoPeople”. A diverse collection of the world’s best designers, artists and writers from across the globe have flocked to the Pocko banner and countless more are waiting in the wings to further Pocko’s cause. The list of clients includes Versace, Burberry, Ed Case, the Pixies and Alexander McQueen. The Pocko Collection, supported by fashion brand Diesel for the second year in a row, will be available from October 2002 in Diesel stores, selected bookshops and art galleries throughout the world.

NO ARTISTS WERE DAMAGED IN THE SPONSORING OF THIS PUBLICATION THE POCKO COLLECTION

Pocko # 7: I Am Me

In the hyper-reality of popular Japanese culture nothing is ever as it seems. Every month thousands of the young Japanese girls that read teen magazine Nicola send in illustrated postcards to Yonehara, the editor. On blank cards the girls draw Manga style personifications of themselves. With wide eyes, dilated pupils and cutesy ponytails the characters mouth thoughts, naïve, tragic and revealing by turns. The saccharine sweetness of the stock phrases ‘Be yourself’ and ‘We are all princesses’ are matched by the despairing knowingness of the girl who wrote ‘There is no place for me’. Caught between the new, shiny surface world of consumer individualism and the old rigid, hierarchical society that still lurks beneath that skin, these pre-teen and teenage girls struggle to form coherent selves.

It is a dark irony that the girls almost uniformly express their search for individuality through images and words lifted straight from the veil of media that surrounds them. And yet in a culture where emotional displays are still frowned upon, postcards that declare ‘You can cry whenever you want’ are revolutionary. As with all evolutionary processes, when a current of rapid change springs up within a culture, the appearance of weird mutant phenomena can be the result and here they are—the psyches of Japan’s youth.

Author: Yasumasa Yonehara

Sitting by his industrial sized letterbox in Tokyo, Yonehara plays the part of guardian of the pliant dreams of his readers. One of the most adept navigators of contemporary Japanese popular culture, he conceives and edits numerous magazines that are inspired by and inspire Japanese street culture. His first magazine Egg spawned its own fashion style-that of the Shibuya ‘gal’ -supertanned and over made-up schoolgirls while the recent Out of Photographers, is a magazine comprised solely of amateur photography from all over Japan. Published by Pocko Editions, available in October 2002. ISBN: 1-903977-07-X

Pocko # 8:Out of Science

Picking up from where Goya left off with his sketch “The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters”, in which a young student lies asleep whilst nightmarish owls and bats fly around him, Hiro Sugiyama, Japanese artist and independent publisher presents us with Out of Science. In Hiro’s world rational scientific order has completely collapsed – it’s almost as if the Enlightenment had never happened! Through a series of related images Hiro describes a world that is surreal, amusing and threatening by turns. His richly coloured, expressionist paintings are populated by a host of characters. Monkeys with lollypops and handbags, figure skaters spreading stardust, a boy relieving excess internal pressure through his ears, mutant-pigeons and humans under physical attack, all play their part. The onlooker is outwitted by Hiro’s capricious mind. Collectively they make up a universe that is perhaps only a few inches distant from ours in the space-time continuum, but is far enough removed to make the familiar unfamiliar and comfortable dangerous.

Author: Hiro Sugiyama

As well as unleashing his twisted mentality in paint, Hiro Sugiyama runs his own publishing house, Enlightenment, which has produced the titles “Fingerprints” and “Appearances are Often Deceptive” among others. Hiro also publishes a free newspaper that is distributed in Tokyo on the 23rd of every month, which is payday in Japan. Out of Science is Hiro’s first solo publication in the western world. Published by Pocko Editions, available in October 2002. ISBN: 1-903977-08-8

Pocko # 9:UEL ELUL EL TEKA

U EL EL UL EL TE KA is the remarkable record of a series of co-operations between the Ukrainian military and a host of respected Ukrainian artists. Boris Mikhailov’s photomontages dissect the stereotyped macho images of men of war featuring Ukrainian soldiers cradling teddy bears in their arms. Meanwhile Iliya Chichkan’s transposition of the visual idiom of fashion photography from the pages of western glossy magazines to the barracks of the Ukraine serves to highlight the absurd orthodoxy of the self-images held by both the worlds of fashion and of the military.

Out of this world, or at least its atmosphere, are the images by the International Masoch Foundation that formed part of the first art exhibition ever held in space. The pictures accompanied Russian astronauts on their trip into space and were installed on the Mir space station. The anarchic spirit that informed all these projects is sustained through the rest of U EL EL UL EL TE KA in which further gem-like examples of artist-military co-operation nestle…U EL EL UL EL TE KA is the epigraph to a small book written by Kasimir Malevich and was his invented battlecry for a new system of art that broke with old bourgeois institutions and instead tuned into the emergent communist ideals of the period. When considered with this fact in mind U EL EL UL TE KA becomes a jaded response to the fragility of ideals and the ease with which they become corrupted by the endless struggles, between humans, for power.

Author: Marta Kuzma and Artists: Serhey Bratkov, Iliya Chichkan, Serhey Ilyin, International Masoch Foundation, Oleh Kulik, Boris Mikhailov, Arsen Savadov & Juriy Senchenko, Oleh Tistol & Mykola Mastenko, Oleksander Kharchenko, Ballistic Missile Brigade, Cosmonauts from Soviet Satellite Myr and the Sailors of the Battleship Slavutych U EL EL UL EL TE KA has been put together by Marta Kuzma an independent curator who works internationally. She was the founding Director of the Soros Centre for Contemporary Art and SSCA gallery in Kiev, Ukraine (1992 – 1999). Published by Pocko Editions, available in October 2002. ISBN: 1-903977-09-6

Pocko # 10: M.I.A

Images and icons of revolution and resistance litter our visual environment. Torn from their original context they are put to work for their own ends by agents of our culture industry. Images of Ché are used to promote a beer brand, the iconography of the Soviet Union is regularly plundered to reference revolutionary chic and symbols that recall the Black Panthers are rebranded in order to assist the sales of hip-hop albums. These are all examples of images that are only half-alive. They are used to weakly reference the notion of revolution and resistance when once they were actually the visual representation of those ideas. The visual languages of both worlds, the distant one of armed struggle in Sri Lanka and the comfortable world of the West, end up blended in her work. Her stencilled images of figures from the Tamil freedom movement, tigers and images of the female leader of the Tamil are graffited onto walls and wooden boards and captured here in M.I.A. With their propaganda-like simplicity the images stay true to their subject matter and yet so jaundiced is the visual appropriate and twist anything, trust is the first casualty.

Author: Maya Arulpragasam

For Maya Arulpragasam this gulf between image and reality in the visual world of the West could not be more poignant. Now a St Martin’s trained artist who has also formed a new band with Justine Frishman (ex-Elastica), writer of the introduction of this book. Maya arrived in London in 1985 at the age of ten, as a war refugee from the Tamil struggle for freedom in Sri Lanka in which her family was closely involved. At that time she only spoke two words in English that were perhaps prophetic of the clash of cultures she was destined to navigate, “Michael” and “Jackson”. Published by Pocko Editions, available in October 2002. ISBN: 1-903977-10-X

Pocko # S:Quattro Stagion

Beware the darkness! This 24 page postcard book is the chilling visual record of the effect of the endless Finnish winter on Haapaniemi’s psyche. Wide-eyed rabbits scurry through stylised, surreal landscapes that trigger memories of the cult English children’s TV program MagicRoundabout. Thistles and leaves weave and warp themselves into semi-abstract patterns. Beneath a pregnant, blood red sun a Cow creature smokes a fag whilst lost in a stark, brown landscape a weird rabbit person stands giving the viewer the finger. Throughout these scenes the imagery of Slavic art combines in strange synthesis with the artificiality of computer design to create Haapaniemi’s unique style, which is in no way influenced by psychotropic drugs.

Author: Klaus Haapaniemi

On periodic breaks between bouts of solitary confinement in his log cabin, Haapaniemi acts as a creative designer for Diesel and also designs their magazine. Incidentally to the Finns the name Quattro Stagioni is just the name of a pizza. Published by Pocko Editions, available in October 2002. ISBN: 1-903977-11-8

The original Pocko Collection Series 3 PDF press release