Australian artist-designers Perks and Mini released three excellent new books through their Someday store recently: Rolling Stones Fans by Joseph Szabo, Around The World by Genevieve Gauckler, and Your Logo Here by Deanna Templeton. If you can get your hands on one of the 1000 copies of each, we suggest you do so. We spoke to the rarely spoken to PAM in Issue 45 about their motivations and aspirations. Read the Q+A after the jump.
(Book info via Hypebeast)
Synchronicity
PAM makes art and fashion in tandem
By Evet Jean and Lucy Morieson
Australian duo Perks and Mini (government names: Misha and Shauna), have been working together as PAM for around six years now, producing their ever-radical fashion line, working on international installations, making music, mixtapes and their book series and zines. When we caught up with them amid sawdust and paint fumes, they were putting the finishing touches on their newly-expanded Melbourne store, Someday, and helping visiting homies Diplo, Spankrock, Justice and Busy-P rifle through their latest collection.
You both seem heavily involved with music and your record collection is legendary. How does music play a role in what you do?
M: Music and art—visual information—and food, even things like incense, are really important to us, they’re all very sensual. It’s part of basic human existence. Getting inspired by visuals and making visuals is a bit dangerous, but music provides you with something really abstract, and for me, it’s nice to take it in a way that I can make things from it.
What do you mean when you say that food plays a big part in what you do?
M: I think everything comes down to sharing, and food allows you to share. That’s why we make so many things, and I guess we have to sell some stuff because we’ve gotta keep a business to be able to make things, but also making the free things like the CDs or the little zines or whatever. It’s just the idea of sharing that’s really what drives us.
What about politics?
M: I hate it.
Lots of your work seems to draw on it—aesthetically at least, with the use of peace symbols, doves and so on.
S: Misha is really against politics and I’m not interested in it either, but I think it’s important that people have that sense of freedom. Sometimes, having to wear your bike helmet or having to put your seat belt on, there’s always someone telling you what to do and you forget that you can just say no and be free and individual. So there is (Shauna gives the finger)–a lot of that in our work.
M: But it’s a friendly fuck you.
When you think about collaborating internationally do you think about yourselves as an Australian brand?
M: Not at all. Everyone is just a human.
S: But I appreciate where I’m from and I feel like because we are Australian, you have this freedom, which you don’t have when you come from a country that has a lot of history. Like when we first started—just to walk into Colette and sell our T-shirts—a lot of people wouldn’t have the gall to do it. But it wasn’t that we had gall, it was “Isn’t that what you do if you want to sell T-shirts in a shop, you go in and ask them?” That sort of innocence is really Australian.
What can we expect from PAM in the future? We’ve heard you plan to start a free newspaper?
M: Well it’s not really a newspaper, it’s more like a giant zine in the form of a newspaper. It’s called the Free Independent Times. It will be free, and independent, and it’s of the time.
Who’ve you got writing for it?
M: People like Ari Marcopoulos, Fergus (Fergadelic), Thurston Moore and Nieves. So many people.
S: You have to make the time we live in interesting. And it’s kind of up to you to make it.