Artesian magazine

The house magazine of Go Together Press is Artesian, to be published twice a year in an edition of 700 numbered copies. It will both celebrate work in all areas of human endeavour that serve the philosophies expressed elsewhere on this site, while also marking the qualities of creative resistance necessary to search for alternatives to the present, destructive, alienating and unjust dominant order.

We have decided to bring together many branches of human creativity, from potters, tunnel engineers, doctors and geologists to filmmakers, thinkers, writers, poets and more. The focus of our magazine is not found in specialisation, but in the nature of attention, and therefore the level of commitment.

Its first issue - within the informal frame of 'earth' - includes original contributions from John Berger, Don DeLillo, Anne Michaels, Jan Svankmajer, Iona Heath, Deborah Levy, Rosalyn Driscoll and many others, alongside articles on the spiritual geology of place, tunnels, imagination.

Artesian is now available at selected outlets across the UK and Europe. Special Launch Subscription offer - Free Second Run Dvds

 

Please click HERE if you wish to purchase a single issue or subscribe.

Each issue of Artesian will cost £6 at the newsstand. However, if you subscribe for four issues (two years at £24 + relevant postage and packing) you can choose one of three exceptional films to own completely free on DVD from our wonderful partners Second Run DVD, who run an exemplary list of the very best in world cinema. Please choose one of the following:

See below for more information on each film.

If you would like to subscribe to Artesian, please contact us here. By subscribing, you will help the creation of future issues and guarantee trouble-free receipt of what we believe will be a unique and rewarding publication.


Palms (Artur Aristakisyan, Russia, 1993) 139 mins. Subtitles.


"I would like the film to answer the need for community - to show how people are tied together, sometimes paradoxically" - Artur Aristakisyan

Palms is Aristakisyan's astonishing portrait of people who live on the margins of life and exist outside normal society. Profound, spiritual and hallucinatory, Palms is remarkable at every level and one of the most visionary films of recent years. Narrated by the director addressing his unborn son, the film is compassionate, revelatory and bold in its originality and was awarded the NIKA (Russian Oscar) for Best Documentary in 1994. This is its first-ever release on DVD.

"Aristakisyan's debut, set among the beggar population of his native Kishinev, the capital of Moldavia, takes fundamental issue with the foundations of the post-Soviet madhouse, but would seem challenging in any context. First, its form is unlike any conventional cinematic genre or stratagem. Drafted as a cinematic epistle from the film-maker to his unborn son, it allies individual case studies of several beggars, the visible subjects of the film, with a philosophy of socio-economic degeneration and individual salvation expounded in voice-over through Aristakisyan's counsel to his boy, soon to be 'scooped out' of his mother's womb. Aristakisyan presents a moral and political argument that is complex, alien and enigmatic. Crucial (if undefined) terms here are 'the system' and 'the Spirit'; the former corrupts and suppresses while the latter must be embraced with a stoicism and asceticism akin to that by which the beggars live. Pitched somewhere between Christian dialectical materialism and metaphysical anarchism, Aristakisyan's treatise ranges in tone between mysticism, gnomic utterance and deep pessimism. The monochrome photography can be very beautiful and the beggars are filmed with a respect which is neither sentimental nor fatuous." - Nick Bradshaw, Time Out London


Black Sun (Gary, Tarn, Britain, 2006) 75 mins.


Gary Tarn's remarkable film, winner of many international awards and co-produced by Alfonso Cuarón (Y tu mamá también, Children of Men) and John Battsek (One Day in September), tells the story of Hugues de Montalembert, a French artist and filmmaker living in New York, who was blinded during a violent assault in 1978.

With this portrait of an unique man and his extraordinary reaction to a life-changing trauma, Tarn has created an expressionist film whose power lies in visualising a world from the perspective of the blind de Montalembert. Part- survivor's testimony, part- philosophical meditation on the nature of perception, Black Sun is a celebration of life that makes us see the world anew.

"… In a feature-length voiceover, the artist reveals the inevitable despair that initially ensued, but then moves into an emotionally and philosophically charged celebration of being alive in the phenomenal world. A remarkable statement of personal resistance, it is accompanied by a river of images, of cities and landscapes - the locations visited by de Montalembert - that deploy a lyrical but grounded visual language similar to that of work by Jonas Mekas, Peter Mettler and, most relevantly, Chris Marker, with Sans Soleil. But this project is no pastiche of influences. Entirely Tarn's film, Black Sun never seeks easy illustration of its subject's journey, physical or otherwise; rather, it catches the luminous materiality of the seen as a means to the most searching spiritual enquiry. A work for all places and times, for anyone who seeks fully to live, to engage, it is indeed essential viewing." From Time Out London


Party and the Guests (Jan Nemec, Czechoslovakia, 1966) 71 mins. Subtitles.


Distinguished by being 'banned forever' in its native Czechoslovakia, Nemec's film is a masterpiece of barbed, darkly sinister wit. As a biting satire of authoritarianism and conformity and with its astute observations of human nature, the film's universal relevance continues to this day. It was considered the most politically dangerous film made during the short flowering of Czech cinema in the 1960s.

"An acute piece of historical fore-sight, and a marvellous idea. A group of picnickers wandering in a summery wood changes into evening-dress, emerges into the grounds of a stately mansion, and is rescued from a band of roving thugs by their host, who ushers them to a magnificent banquet laid out under the stars. Then a man is reported to have left the party; the urbanity vanishes; tracker dogs can be heard howling in the distance. The allegory is obvious, of course, with the avuncular dictator mouthing platitudes, his brutish minions straining at the leash, and the guests submitting like patient sheep to the pointless show of the party." - Time Out London

"an extraordinary allegory, evocative of Kafka or Dostoevsky"- International Film Guide