Artwork: Nick Knighttake that from a concept to something that
looks great as a piece of cardboard, something
that you can hold in your hands.
So you worked on the Mezzanine cover for
a year, just trading ideas back and forth?
RDN: Yeah, and a lot of that process had to
do with materials. We looked at a lot of
diferent materials and printing processes
along the way and that would often deine
how the artwork went.
How many iterations did you go through
to get to what is now an iconic design?
TH: When Robert and I had our irst
conversation, there was a load of references
that he had found. Blown-up pictures of
spider skin and insect skin, and then there
were these Rorschach images that he had
been playing around with. That was very
much our starting point. Nick Knight then
became a big part of the collaborative process
and we wanted to work with him to generate
a palette of ideas. He had images of all these
crushed car parts, but also beautiful still-lifes
of insects. One thing that really drew us to
Nick was that he was into the idea of collage,
and that we could create hybrid forms.
RDN: Yeah, it’s funny because our music is
often described as collage. And I had grown
up with the collage process. But when Tom
started working with Nick, it was almost like
deep collage, working with photomontage,
working on Paintbox and programmes
I hadn’t seen before, and after-efects that
you would normally only see in movies;
to blend things and cut into things, build
things that almost snap together in a
three-dimensional space within a lat plane.
How did the collaboration with Paul Smith
come about?
TH: Paul has always been fascinated by artist
merchandise – how badly produced it is – andit is a conversation that me and Rob have had
over the years. Paul’s passion for music goes
back a long way and he was interested in
exploring limited-edition pieces that the
artist could sell on tour or that could be sold
in Paul Smith stores. But mostly it was about
raising the bar on what exists out there.
What’s the idea with the lenticular covers?
TH: We have taken 15 of the better-known
artworks and represented them as lenticulars.
I’ve always been interested in taking more
traditional processes and bringing something
new to them. So we took the original sleeves
and we’ve remodelled them into a 3D space,
and that’s the data we’ve used to create the
lenticulars. It gives a diferent dimension and
depth to the image. They are a weird half-way
point between the physical sleeve and how
you might view a sleeve on screen.
And Robert, you’ve been painting jackets?
3D: Well, part-printing, part-painting. It is a
sort of throwback to the biker jackets with
the album sleeve on the back, the way a
dedicated punk fan would painstakingly
paint an album sleeve on the back of a jacket.
It’s interesting that the more music
becomes immaterial, because of streaming,
the more there is a fascination with the
physical artefact of rock.
RDN: The physical sense of having that
object in your hand is not something that will
go away. Books and vinyl, they ill that same
need for something to touch and hold. But
there is a way of transferring that value to the
augmented world, there are ways that we are
exploring at the moment. You can represent
the values of what the band is all about, what
it stands for. I think that is where the real
interest is at the moment. ∂
‘Process’ runs from 2-20 May at Paul Smith,
9 Albemarle Street, London W1S, paulsmith.comThe Mezzanine album cover is now considered
a classic of the form and is part of MoMA’s
permanent collection. Here, photographer
Nick Knight, now a long-term collaborator
of the band, shares his original mark-ups for
his irst artwork for Massive Attack∑
Art
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NICK KNIGHT’S
STRANGE CREATURESSLEEVES FOR 1TH WINDOW,
2003; MEZZANINE, 1998;
AND COLLECTED, 2006, BY
HINGSTON, DEL NAJA AND
KNIGHT. ‘THE SPOILS’, 2016, IS
BY HINGSTON AND DEL NAJA,
WITH AN ORIGINAL PHOTO
BY PETER MARLOW/
MAGNUM PHOTOS