By Chris Mousdale, courtesy of Design Assembly
Beyond the ubiquitous screen – paradoxically transmitting light even when the scenes it relays are unremittingly dark – books remain. Hanging in there amongst the maelstrom, a reflective form in an increasingly chaotic world.
At Beatnik the light always seems bright. Their shop, on the corner of New North Rd and Basque Rd in Auckland, has two sides of its triangular structure glassed allowing the sun to illuminate large trestle tables laden with stock, an eclectic catalogue that mirrors their ethos. Diverse, independent, creative, they survive in a business that is fickle and consistently risky. They are committed to print. Beatnik love books.
The perfect publisher then for Grafix Knox, a book project that seeks to bring together in one volume the graphic and visual art of Chris Knox.
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We hope to delve back and retrieve work Chris made as a teenager in Dunedin, then dig into the late 70s and early 80s when edge and attitude came to the fore during his stint as New Zealand’s prickliest punk, and on to the 90s and noughties as a contributor of distinctive, acerbic illustration for the Listener, NZ Herald and Real Groove magazine.
We aim to tell Chris Knox’s graphic story.
He was always about drawing, obsessive even. His domestic environment testifies to that. Walls, cupboards, furniture, musical instruments and more are decorated and daubed with all manner of weird creatures, assorted grotesquery and his own mysterious glyphic iconography. Welcome to Knoxville, NZ, where things can get wiggy. And Iggy.
Iggy Pop, a particular Knox passion, appears in a number of portraits and, touchingly, via his own hand in the form of a 7” picture sleeve copy of Lust For Life, autographed by Pop and dispatched to Chris as a get-well-soon after his devastating stroke in 2009.
From one fan to another and Chris, most definitely, is an uber-fan. This passion is a key trait that informs so much of what he does. It’s what really jumps out from the work, especially his ‘record reviews’ which cross over from the dry textual formatting of traditional magazine style into the frame structured, character based dialogue more commonly associated with comics.
An example such as 1998s The Real Roots, a special edition of his Real Pits column in Real Groove magazine, is a tour-de-force of hand lettering eloquently and authentically voiced by Chris’s ‘actors’. The tone here is spot on, beautifully weighted, and he directs it with flair and precision.
But that formal appreciation comes after the pure buzz of his enthusiasm. You want to become involved with the music discussed and the characters that made it. Harry Smiths famously obsessional desires spill across the years and infect Chris and he’s unable to stop himself extending the flow.
There are piles of this stuff. Literally. Chris’s Grey Lynn studio is stacked with teetering sheaths of original illustrations – paintings are everywhere especially his new series titled Electric, fascinating and provoking portraits depicting the seizures and epileptic events Chris has experienced since 2009.
There are objects, animation cells, audiotape boxes, posters, record covers. The works. It’s a huge archival process. Everything needs to be dated, annotated, scanned, photographed, and stored. We want to do it right. One time and one time only.
That’s why we need help. We need $50,000 to make this happen. We tried Creative NZ, they said no. To do justice to this body of work we want to produce an amazing looking high quality and authoritative book.
Chris Knox makes things and they tell a story about him, us, New Zealand. It’s a story we believe is worth telling and one we really believe people will want to read and see. So help us shine some light and spread the word about Grafix Knox.
Buy a ticket to Knoxville and prepare to wig out!
Through NZ based crowdfunding platform Fundnation you can support this project to reach its goal of $50,000 and produce this book.