Come together - Part one

“Collaborations” is the buzz word of the minute. Everyone’s at it. Record labels are merging, genres are blending, worlds are colliding, club nights are joining forces, brands are fusing - strength in numbers and throwing the marketing net bigger and wider and embracing a more varied skill set has never been so
fashionable. The social networking phenomena has swung open virtual doors for the meeting and exploitation of new creative business, and modern culture is mutating into a blur of boundaries - giving birth to an open space where anything is possible. In this issue, Electronic Beats profiles the most celebratory collaborations across the fields of literature, fashion, art and music, and revels in the magic of good people coming together.

GILBERT & GEORGE
Gilbert & George are the odd couple of the art world - the matching suits, the reclusive lifestyle. Gilbert Prousch was born in Italy and George Passmore in Devon. Now both in their sixties, they first clapped eyes on each other whilst studying sculpture at St. Martins in ’67. It was love at first sight, and a partnership that has chiselled them a prime nook in the canon of British Art. Their recent show ‘Major Exhibition’ was the largest retrospective of any living artist to be held at the Tate Modern. They first hit the art headlines in ’69 with ‘The Singing Sculpture’ which exposed their now famous eccentric style. The pair would stand together on a table, dancing and singing the Flanagan and Allen standard ‘Under The Arches’, which told the story of two tramps sleeping rough. They have always placed themselves centrally to their work, covering the universal subjects of death, hope, life, fear, religion, sex, money and race. “Each of our pictures is a visual love letter, from us to the viewer”, they explained about their 40-year retrospective. “It’s art for everyone.”

EMILE ZOLA & MANET
Artistic life in Paris during the Second Empire was to be the most revolutionary of all art movements. The latter part of the 19th century witnessed the birth of industry and a passion for realism, led by novelists such as Emile Zola, whose Rougon-Macquart series of novels captured real French life, from coal mining in rural France (‘Germinal’) through to prostitution in Paris (‘Nana’). Zola met Edouard Manet in 1866, and the pair became close friends and allies. Manet’s depiction of the empowered female nude caused scandals across the conservative Parisian art circuit, to the point where the now infamous ‘Olympia’ had to be hung high to stop it from being destroyed. Zola, who was also an art critic, defended Manet in many essays and articles, but it was when Manet began to create paintings of Zola’s characters when the ingenious happened. In 1880, Manet painted ‘Nana’, using a well-known cocotte Henriette Hauser to pose as his model, the image is now plastered over thousands of book covers. Manet also painted a portrait of Zola in 1868.

TEXT BY LULU LE VAY | ILLUSTRATIONS BY LEONA LIST