Graham Dolphin Lecture 27th January 2015 Full Write-Up

Graham Dolphin

Film - Sound - Drawing - Objects

This was by far my favourite lecture of the series.

Graham started by talking about his childhood and his early memories of his parents renting a VHS player (oldskool) and him and his brother watching video nasty's such as Driller Killer, Cannibal Holocaust and Koyaanisqatsi.

He went on to - and spent most of the lecture- talking about his interests in music, an area which excited me probably more than it should have. 1987 to the mid 90's was a fertile time for music, and good music at that. Because there was no YouTube or Spotify, people had to guess what music they would enjoy judging by a cover alone, and the same applied for VHS and magazine.

Long haired Americans from noisy bands dominated the music scene at this time.

Graham started out taping his own things onto VHS and cassette tape, ah the good old days, and making and drawing his own covers for them. Some of these covers are still in existence today and hold their culture within their drawing.

He went on to talk about some work relevant to his that started around 1991 with Damien Hirst and the shark in formaldehyde.

Graham started talking about some of his own work, starting with some work he had done with magazines, which was right up my street, and other work using found objects, stuff like hair, screws and the contents of vacuum bags. His magazine work is heavily fashion based.

He commented on Gillian Wearing's 'Dancing in Peckham' as a reference to other video artists, saying he hated it. We were then shown a piece of Graham's video which contained 1500 photos of Kate Moss in 60 seconds.

Graham often works with words and song lyrics, and has made a series of works where he has scratched song lyrics onto the surface of vinyl records. Some of these include a 10" Elvis Presley LP with 26 songs hand carved, and a Beach Boys 10" LP with 10 songs etched. The scale of this work is amazing and I have great appreciation for the time and effort that has been put in to each of these pieces. Other works like this include Jimi Hendrix records, and one that is etched with 117 Sonic Youth songs. The etchings mimic the grooves in the surface of the record. These are some of my favourites by Dolphin.

We then went on to see some of the work Graham had done based around famous dead people. Graham had looked at Kurt Cobain and a bench in Seattle opposite Cobain's home that has become a shrine of sorts. Fans would come and carve, paint and write messages on the bench. The bench has been replaced several times, after being burnt and marked to a point of destruction. Graham expressed that he would have liked to visit the bench in person, but felt it might change this mysterious object for him and make him feel indifferent to something that was once wondrous. He feels it is more the site location of the bench that is important rather than the object itself. There are an amalgamation of images online that are regularly refreshed which kept him ticking over.

Jim Morrison was the next dead famous subject. Morrison was the frontman of The Doors and is buried in Paris at the Pére Lachaise Cemetery, the same place where Oscar Wilde is buried, in an unmarked grave. The grave was later marked with a statue of Morrison, left by a Croatian sculptor. The statue was later defaced, as is seemingly anything that is left outside, and Graham took inspiration from this. He made a recreation of the statue and displayed it alongside a recreation of the Kurt Cobain bench.

Graham has also worked with drawing and has taken on the last views of people that have committed suicide as his subject. He again used famous musicians, re-featuring Kurt Cobain and introducing Joy Division's Ian Curtis into the mix. He has redrawn their suicide notes and drawn what he imagines to be their last views on a large scale.

He has also looked at death sites and the symbolism that they hold to fans of music. Marc Bolan of T-Rex was mentioned, after Marc lost his life after crashing his purple mini into a tree. The tree is now a shrine to T-Rex fans. Again along the same line as the Cobain bench, the T-Rex tree has been defaced, and so has the door of Freddie Mercury's of Queen's London home.

In conclusion, I am glad to have been lectured by Graham Dolphin, he has inspired me to continue trying to find a link between music and art that I can utilise. I think I responded so well to this lecture as music is something that really interests me and he talked about artists that I already enjoyed, but then taught me things that I didn’t already know.