Philip Maughan

[philipmaughan]

Interviewed Carly and Julian/LIL INTERNET from newmodels.io for the newest most self-lacerating issue of my favourite newspaper from New York, Civilization.

Buy several copies here: https://civilization.bigcartel.com/

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Doing Donuts in the White Cube

The Swiss visual artist Olivier Mosset originally became a biker after a gang of Maoists gathered near his studio. Seduced by the hum of liberty and leftist foment – this was on Paris’s Rue de Lappe after the uprisings of May 1968 – biking granted the young minimalist and Daniel Buren co-conspirator access to a new material and social world. At first, biking was a counterlife to art, but the aesthetic quality of the object made itself felt in his work. In 1974 Mosset bought a 47” Shovelhead Harley-Davidson, a bike he rode to exhibition spaces across Europe, photographing it to use on invitation cards the way Le Corbusier took pictures of his car outside newly finished projects. In both cases, vehicles were symbols for technological modernity but also the possibility of progress. For Mosset, they became an aesthetic wormhole, a means of pushing and escaping the limits of art.

032c – august, 2018 read it

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How Nightclub Design Cured Modernism’s Hangover

032c – july, 2018 untz untz untz

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where have all the bangers gone?

One thing that separates second generation grime artists from the first is that they are more firmly millennial. They don’t just talk about their own problems, but everyone else’s too. Yet no sooner had grime taken to the podium, lauded by the musical establishment and anointed by the Guardian as ‘the sound of protest’, the hits appeared to dry up. It’s an axiom of underground culture that when an artist or scene gains mainstream acceptance, its days of radical innovation are already long gone. Perhaps most damningly, the fans have moved on too. In 2018, it isn’t grime scoring multi-million YouTube views, but smoother, polyphonic Afro-bashment tunes, or the harsh, trap-tinged sound of UK drill.

frieze – june, 2018 read more

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fucking hell i got a job

in March I started working as assistant editor at 032c. this is my first issue! Inside, I talk to Wolfgang Tillmans, look at the graves of architects, consider the future of nightclub design, photos of Ukrainian teens partying, Harald Szeemann’s archive, and loads of other stuff you’ll never realise because it ain’t bylined. like wi-fi, you’ll just have to assume it’s there. have a look at the other content/schleim here.

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heartbreak, bears and tojo in vancouver

tank magazine – december 2017 read more

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german for dummies

I’ve been living in Berlin for over a year. I have attended classes of varying quality, downloaded apps, puzzled over children’s books and watched bad German sitcoms, yet my own journey might be characterised as a near-constant state of panic, brain fade and isolation, interrupted here and there by brief flashes of insight and comprehension.

In truth, I feel a greater kinship to a different American author, Mark Twain, who concluded his 1880 essay “Die schreckliche deutsche Sprache” (“The Awful German Language”) by arguing: “A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in 30 hours, French in 30 days, and German in 30 years.”

Just another 29 years to go, then. And I certainly would not consider myself “gifted”. In a fit of irritation, both at myself and a language “so slippery and elusive to the grasp” (Twain again), I sought out some linguistic prodigies to ask them where I might be going wrong.

new statesman – october, 2017 read more

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how grime fell in love with jeremy

This alliance between rap and a regenerated Labour Party under Corbyn was neither expected nor planned. It bears little comparison to previous efforts to align parties (the parliamentary kind) with parties (the fun kind), such as the 1980s Red Wedge campaign, in which Billy Bragg and Paul Weller toured the country attempting to convince 18-to-24-year-olds to vote Labour.

The story of how the two sides came together says as much about the changes in the world of music as in the realm of politics. Just three years ago, nobody would have believed that a backbench MP who had spent 30 years doggedly opposing Labour’s drift to the centre would end up leading the party to its largest vote increase since 1945. It was equally unlikely that an anti-system, postcode-centric, DIY music culture discredited by many after its first flush of success around 2004 would end up being that same backbencher’s hype machine.

new statesman – august, 2017 read more

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why i run

“Our relationship with movement and with place is so fundamental that it effects actual structural changes in our brain,” explained Vybarr Cregan-Reid, the author of Footnotes: How Running Makes Us Human, when we spoke recently. Cregan-Reid sees the act of running as enabling “a deep immersion into the environment”, much in the way that the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth immerse a reader in the geography of the Lake District. “When you can run well enough to just follow your curiosity, you get to know a place in a way only runners can: it’s on your skin, in your brain, in your blood. Your embodied knowledge is a runner’s knowledge.”

new statesman – february 2017 read more

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john berger (1926-2017)

Shortly after his 90th birthday, the morning after the US election, I scoured my bookshelves for something, anything, that might lighten the gloom. I picked up To the Wedding, Berger’s 1995 novel about a betrothed couple, one of whom, Ninon, is slowly succumbing to Aids (the book began when a family member was diagnosed with HIV, and its royalties were donated to an Aids charity).

It is an unforgettable novel – no less beautiful, no less political than his essays, poems and reviews – and yet somehow, miraculously, it gives hope. I noted a line I liked in my diary, a question that seemed to know exactly what literature, or storytelling, might be for. “What shall we do before eternity?” it asks. “Take our time.”

new statesman – january 2017 read more profile: visiting john berger in paris (2015)

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dada and drugs in zürich

tank magazine – november, 2016 read more

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in berlin without a job or a plan

Just over a month ago, I quit my job in London, packed as many clothes as I could into two suitcases and left the UK for Berlin. Exactly a week after I arrived, Britain voted to leave the European Union and overnight the country I had departed from felt noticeably further away. “I feel like we’ve lost our friends,” said the mother of a German girl I know. “But don’t worry,” she told me. “You are still welcome here.”

She meant well but her words chilled me all the same. The possibility that I might not be welcome in Germany hadn’t even crossed my mind.

new statesman – august, 2016 read more

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claire-louise bennett and solitude

There is this phrase that something or other “has captured my imagination,” and I think that love captured mine at a young age. The madness and the mystery of it overwhelms me, the beauty and the tenderness of it reassures me. Love channels throughout my imagination in the same way that a fragile yet tenacious vine weaves in and out of an old wall . . . It’s all a kind of searching really, if I knew all along what was there I don’t think I’d bother. I’m not trying to prove anything, I’m just trying to find out what’s out there and what’s in here and if there’s much difference between the two. And in order to do that I need to spend a lot of time on my own, because it’s only when I’m alone that I can really get out of the way of myself.

the paris review – august, 2016 read more read review of “pond”

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why i finally got a tattoo

It has long been observed that most children rebel against their parents but in 2016 I am convinced more than ever that this narrative is utterly defunct. Two years ago, on a rare visit to the unneighbourly and costly south, Gary burst through the door of my London flat with a grin on his face.

“Guess what?” he said. He responded to my silence by lifting up his shirt, revealing a large tree or “Gaia”, that he had drawn himself, tattooed across his back. “And do you know what the best part is?” he said, waving what appeared to be a tube of nappy rash cream. “I need your help to reach it.”

new statesman – june, 2016 read more

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the swiping life

We drank cocktails by the Danube and rambled across the city before making the romantic decision to stay awake all night, as she had to leave early the next day to go hiking with friends. It was just like the Richard Linklater movie Before Sunrise – something I said out loud more than a few times as the Aperol Spritzes took their toll.

When we met up in London a few months later, Louisa and I decided to skip the second part of Linklater’s beautiful triptych and fast-track our relationship straight to the third, Before Midnight, which takes place 18 years after the protagonists first meet in Vienna, and have begun to discover that they hate each others’ guts.

new statesman – may, 2016 read more

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on raoul moat

Soon after murdering Samantha’s new boyfriend Chris and shortly before blinding PC David Rathband (who later hanged himself), Moat decides to head to Rothbury. It’s a place where “the houses are cheap because they get snowed in during winter, and there’s nothing to do . . . where you and Sam were looking at getting a place . . . somewhere different, somewhere nice”. These rare moments of optimism show that Moat was not without options. “I’m an intelligent kid,” Moat concedes. “I could have done so many amazing things with my life.” Yes, you could, answers Hankinson, again and again. You could have done but you didn’t.

financial times – february 2016 read more

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geoff dyer at the geoff dyer festival

I couldn’t help but smile on a recent, drizzly afternoon when an earnest, hyper-intelligent historian from Queen Mary, University of London, concluded a lecture entitled “What Colour Was the 1990s?” – an echo of Dyer’s debut novel, The Colour of Memory (1989) – by putting his head in his hands and confessing: “I suppose I don’t know what I mean by the 1990s. I don’t know what I mean by colour.”

It was a brave and welcome admission. I had no idea what he meant either. The lecture was the eighth in a day-long series of talks being given at the first international conference dedicated to the work of the English writer Geoff Dyer, held on 11 July at Birkbeck, University of London. It was a happy occasion, only complicated slightly by the fact that Dyer himself was seated in the back row throughout the day, taking notes with a yellow pencil on a floppy white pad.

new statesman – july, 2014 read more