Series 4 - “SPEAK AND BE HEARD!”
Pocko, the worlds very own 21st century art missionaries draw our attention to the insatiable voice of creative freedom: fly-poster art, travelling art and believe it or not, your art. The Pocko imagination, bottled at source brings six more visual books surging into life:
EL Cártel, a book of fly-posters that have been displayed all over Madrid, broadcasting visual allegories on western life, society and politics.
Postman, brings us a cynical collection of comic images, each one painted directly onto envelopes and posted around the world.
DIY, is the most telling edition, a blank sketchbook purpose made to encourage a global brainstorm.
In Cheap Pop, reality is not always what it seems, you find yourself pixelated inside the graphic world of computer games and Japanese pop iconography.
Hot Wheels, presents us with the obscure side of humanity’s savage love affair with the car buzzing insanely behind the wheel of a supersonic post apocalyptic drag race auto.
Faulty, the awesome grasp of fervent love, deviant and yet compelling, where image and text merge in poetic constellation.
POCKO EDITIONS
The Pocko Collection is a series of 96 pocket-sized visual books. This small books harbour big ideas that are expressed with an intoxicating cocktail of charm, quirkiness and bite. The Pocko Collection available from October 2003 in Diesel stores, selected bookshops, art galleries throughout the world and from www.pocko.com
POCKO # 11 - EL CARTEL
El Cártel You’ve stomached the papers; you’ve endured CNN, now see the news from the ground. El Cártel is the siren of the city, waging a war of guerrilla news on the streets of Madrid. Chronicling an age where information is industry, this activism art is the visual intifada. A covert street-poster operation calculated to challenge and motivate Spain’s political consciousness.
The political voice of El Cártel four protagonists is broadcasted with an unparalleled fusion of sophistication, irony and sensitivity. This is a collection of visual manifestoes. With El Cartel’s innovative blend of comic art, news and graffiti awesome word-plays and ironic storyboards challenge us with contemporary issues like the recent wars, the impasse of democracy and the endless permutations of consumerism and mass control in contemporary culture.
Each Poster is headed with an iconographic equation that enigmatically challenges the viewer to engage his/her own political views.
About the authors: Olaf, Jaques le Bisquit, Mutis and Eneko make up El Cártel.
Published by Pocko Editions, available Nov. 2003. ISBN: 1-903977-14-2 Each book with 96 pages, 90 colour illustrations, paperback, priced at £4.99 Images and review copies available on request. Contact Iñigo Asis at Pocko Editions London T: +44 (0)20 8964 9580 E:info@pocko.com
POCKO # 12 - POSTMAN
By Jeroen Teunen Dragging the post office back from extinction, this sensational collection of storified envelopes fights the war against phone, fax and email. Addressed to Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and a London Zoo Monkey, these are frescoes par avion that you’ll treasure forever. Jeroen’s travelling artworks transport ideas in space and time. Through air mail these comic masterpieces travel alone but they travel with style. All manner of characters and scenarios are represented including peculiar geeky humans, a divine goddess, a neurotic olive at a party, and a choir of matchsticks singing in the shadow of an authoritarian fire extinguisher. With recurring political references, the compositions express and reflect upon a whole range of themes from existential angst to enlightenment.
About the author: Jeroen was “born to draw” in 1977, Wiesbaden, Germany. Raised in a family of art-collectors, artists and designers and obsessed with comic books since his childhood, he started to use his schoolbooks for drawing instead of homework.
Published by Pocko Editions, available Nov. 2003. ISBN: 1-903977-13-4 Each book with 96 pages, 90 colour illustrations, paperback, priced at £4.99 Images and review copies available on request. Contact Iñigo Asis at Pocko Editions London T: +44 (0)20 8964 9580 E:info@pocko.com
POCKO # 13 - DIY
The Pocko Family has given birth, and you are holding the baby. This Pocko infant is yours to mould into maturity. Lavish its pages with your wildest ideas, your fears and fantasies, all the things you wanted Pocko to do but were afraid to ask. The definitive Tabula Rasa. With 96 pages of blank space this ideas sketchbook is the ideal brainstorming space. You can either send your filled out DIY book back to Pocko as a proposal for a place in the Pocko Collection or you can keep it to yourself. Be a part of the Pocko Family! The cover of D.I.Y. is by Pocko artist Atsuhide Ito and his unparalleled stencilling skills. Cover by Atsuhide Ito
About the author: This is you.
Published by Pocko Editions, available Nov. 2003. ISBN: 1-903977-15-0 With 96 pages, paperback, priced at £4.99 Images and review copies available on request. Contact Iñigo Asis at Pocko Editions London T: +44 (0)20 8964 9580 E: info@pocko.com
POCKO # 14 - HOT WHEELS
By Dan Holliday With flame on their wheels, mad racers are the lunatic fringe of motor racing. A ramshackle fusion of body and wheels is engineered. Oil and organs struggle for supremacy as man and motor drive each other round the bend. Imagine the crashes! Using a variety of techniques Dan Holliday renders a colourful and animated collection of haunting images depicting a savage bond between man and machine. Outsized Picassoesque faces are squeezed and contorted inside the cabin, whilst their blocky, child-like steal chariots fume and spark. Mad Race is a fascinating and sinister take on the human condition gripped by the spell of technology. The car, being the definitive symbol of post-industrial society and individualism is represented here as a place outside of morality, a danger zone teetering between life and death.
About the author: Dan Holliday grew up in Portsmouth, gradually moved away from the British coast to London at 16 and spent the past 20 years painting and designing images for posters, record sleeves, flyers, and street wear clothing.
Published by Pocko Editions, available Nov. 2003. ISBN: 1-903977-17-7 With 24 postcards, paperback, priced at £6.99 Images and review copies available on request. Contact Iñigo Asis at Pocko Editions London T: +44 (0)20 8964 9580 E:info@pocko.com
POCKO # 15 - CHEAP POP
By Takora Futori Houston, we have a problem… What seems to be the trouble, Hubble? Aliens Houston, luminous demons and neon creatures, acid hair and mythical features, slam on the brakes, Houston, we gotta stop, we’re crashing down on planet POP! Beep!! “Game Over.” Say farewell to the reality of soil and water… welcome to Takora Futori’s cyber world of Cheap Pop. This Pocko collection of pop-cards extends pop iconography deeper. Futori’s electric colour schemes and graphic glyphs upload the vibrant and mesmeric world of computer games and cartoons. Cheep Pop introduces us to intriguing complexities and oddities: strange erotic connotations, gaseous blasts playfully emitting from various cheeky locations, grumpy girly girls dangling handbag cum children, drooling demons and many more extraordinary graphic illusions.
About the author: Graphic designer born in 1972, Kobe, Japan. Making mass consumption pop art is his mission spreading a cheap pop feeling all over the world. His motto is: catchy is everything. His latest collaboration is with fashion guro Comme des Garcon.
Published by Pocko Editions, available Nov. 2003. ISBN: 1-903977-16-9 With 24 postcards, paperback, priced at £6.99 Images and review copies available on request. Contact Iñigo Asis at Pocko Editions London T: +44 (0)20 8964 9580 E:info@pocko.com
POCKO # 16 - FAULTY
By Soozy Lipsey and Mike Benson Two views of one love. She draws the pictures. He writes the captions. Together, they blend bleakness and beauty, crafting an arsenal of postcards for murderous love. Remember the pain and ecstasy of love, that excruciating ambivalence of love and hate intertwining in emotional rapture. Faulty occupies a stylish interface between line drawing, graphic imaging and text pulling us into an unfolding visual and poetic adventure of romantic love and desire. This collection showcasing the undiluted essence of Faulty is something for anyone who has endured love.
About the author: Soozy Lipsey is an artist and fashion designer. She runs her own fashion label, also called Faulty, selling her designs around the world. Mike Benson has published his short stories on the soles of shoes, inside album covers, on lampposts and in a few books too. He claims, “We are part of the London-Scottish crime wave”. Published by Pocko Editions, available Nov. 2003. ISBN: 1-903977-18-5 With 24 postcards, paperback, priced at £6.99 Images and review copies available on request. Contact Iñigo Asis at Pocko Editions London T: +44 (0)20 8964 9580 E:info@pocko.com
This can be dowloaded as Pocko Collection Series 4 PDF
Pocko # 7: I Am Me
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.
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.
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.
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.