Hyper Material For Our Very Brain

Background

Monograph on the work of Philip Brophy. The book is soft-cover 138 pgs full colour 170 mm x 220 mm. The cover has extended flaps, the rear one containing a CD compilation of music from Philip's various projects.

Credits

Commissioning editors - Robert Leonard & Alexie Glass-Kantor
Design - Katrina Stubbs
Cover & fonts - Philip Brophy

2012

Published by The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane

Overview

from the introduction

(...) Over the past 30 years, (Philip Brophy) has produced important work in (art, music and film), yet he remains a marginal figure in each of them. This partly to do with the interdisciplinary nature of his project: he pops up in one forum, then disappears to work in another. As his project bridges different specialist audiences, few have engaged with it holistically. To complicate matters further, Brophy is not only an artist, musician and filmmaker, but also a critic and curator. And it is impossible to extricate his work here, addressing others' work, from his 'own' work, because, as he admits, his 'own' work is always a commentary on existing forms. It's always art-about-art, music-about-music, film-about-film, or, indeed, art-about-music-about-film.

(...) Everything Brophy does is underpinned by three ongoing lines of enquiry: Music/Pop (pop music, popular culture, manga and anime), Body/Sex (body-horror films, sex and violence, and gender), and Sound/Music (the unsung role of sound in cinema). Although Brophy is habitually typecast as the 'popular culture' guy, this is misleading. It would be more accurate to say that he is an advocate of unpopular and unfashionable cultures.

Philip Brophy © 2005 - photo by Pancho Colladetti

Technical

Book contents

Robert Leonard

Brophy's Whole: An Introduction

Lara Travis

Interview - Up The Glittering Hole Of Philip Brophy's Body Horrible

Darren Tofts

Essay - The Sound Of Hair

Shihoko Iida

Essay - Performing Sex, Performing Gender: On Philip Brophy & Teiji Furuhashi

Chris Chang

Essay - Text Will Eat Itself