Bongoût means ‘Good Taste’

 

1. L’histoire de Bongoût

Bongoût is Christian ‘Meeloo” Gfeller and Anna Hellsgård. They produce silkscreen artist books
and prints, all of which are hand-made from start to finish. They are also commissioned to do
graphic design work for everyone from underground record labels to skateboard brands, from
illegal noise concerts to world music festivals, movie productions, corporate clothing companies,
and tobacco companies.
Christian started Bongoût in 1995, in Strasbourg. The name was inspired by ‘The Cramps” song
“You Got Good Taste”. Translating this into French, he cam up with the combination ‘bon goût’.
For the first five years, the Bongoût atelier was located in a warehouse in Kehl, the German sister
city to Strasbourg, just across the Rhine. Along with several other people, the studio was used as
a rehearsal space by bands and a place to hold concerts and parties.
Christian met Anna in Berlin, September 11, 2001. At that point, the atelier was relocated to Bordeaux
for one and a half, high production years. In 2004, they moved to Berlin, spending 6 years
in a former tanning shop in East Berlin’s Friedrichshain.
In 2008 they opened the doors to Bongoût shop and gallery, showcasing original art works, as
well as selling books, multiples and prints. This space is considered a place where contemporary
art meets graphic, underground art, as well as numerous forms of sound and visual cultures. At
this point Bongoût transcended into a public platform for dialogue between artists.
At present day, 2010, organization is key, and Bongoût’s graphic design office, silkscreen studio,
atelier, gallery and shop are all centrally located in Berlin’s Mitte, Torstr. 110.


Exhibition, Installation & performance view in the 90's. (Strasbourg & Kehl)

2. Le Méchanisme de Bongoût

Abstract vs Figurative, Art World vs Underground
Bongoût books are usually considered too raw to be contemporary art and too arty to be underground.
They seem to be in flux between the two, not particularly fitting into any one place. The
same applies in the graphic design world. They are not classical graphic designers. The bulk of
their imagery comes from hand drawn and printing techniques, which projects a raw, whimsical
twist on computer graphics.
Most of the collaborative silkscreen books have a cross-bread of abstract and figurative drawings
in them. The images are never obvious representations, and are not too easily understood.
Thoughtful time is required to look into each page and appreciate each book. It can be difficult,
in the sense that most people like to put things into separate boxes, so they can easily recognize
what it is. A self-gratification results from this. With Bongoût books however, people do not know
how to react, there is no box to fit them in to. It is uncharted territory, and Bongoût is leading the
expedition.
All books and posters are printed in limited editions, usually somewhere between 50 and 180 ex.
Nothing is, or ever will be reprinted. This holds no interest to Bongoût, as they are already on to
the next project.


Zeitgeist (RELAX) 2009


AESTHETICS


Our influences range from contemporary art to outsider art, underground comics culture, Swiss
typography, Cuban, Polish and Russian posters. We try to be as open as we can to new influences
that cut across all disciplines of art and culture. The visual aesthetics and attitude of independent
cinema, noise music and underground culture inspire us as much printed material.
One of our earliest influences were the record sleeves designed by Nick Garrard, manager of
British psychobilly band The Meteors. He had a garage punk label and was putting out a lot of
rockabilly reissues in the late 80s and early 90s. The covers were all really well done. They were
inspired by vintage design and used a lot of old fonts found in 50s magazines but he used them
in a contemporary context. It was similar to the work Art Chantry was doing in Seattle but nobody
else was doing stuff like that. The Killed By Death sleeves, a series of compilation LPs featuring
rare and raw vintage punk songs, were also a big influence.
This was all before computers, when everything was still done by hand. It wasn’t really illustrative,
more like graphic design but also inspired by punk aesthetic. It was work that played by the conventions
of graphic design but also set out to destroy them. That was very inspiring to us.
Most of the fonts and typesetting in our works are done by hand. We hand draw most fonts or use
a lot of Letraset. You can see when something has been typeset by computer, it’s all really straight
and clean. Even if you don’t notice it, you feel it. We want to keep a hand-made quality in our
work. We use the computer as a tool without letting it dictate to us and becoming a slave to it.

D-I-Y


For the books, for exemple, we do everything ourselves. We choose the artists together. A lot of
people contact us but it’s quite rare that we find artists that way. We usually contact the artists
we want to work with. We print the book, do the colour separations, choose the paper stock and
print, fold and bind the books by hand. We also do all the shipping and packaging, contacting
distributors and bookshops.
We don’t consider our work to be overtly political. It’s part of what we do even if it’s not something
we want to promote or scream about. We don’t make political posters but we do, for example,
use environmentally-friendly water-based inks instead of oil ones. We think it’s important to take
responsibility things like that within your business wherever you can. We do try to do everything
ourselves – and that in itself is a statement.
In some ways it also relates to the images we work with. For example, the act of printing images
from an artist like Antoine Bernhart (who deals in images that contain explicit sex and extreme violence)
is political. It’s about freedom of speech, freedom of thinking. Asking questions about the
limits of self-expression and what you can and can’t publish. In that respect, to be ‘subversive’ is
to defend some value. On the other hand, knowing that it’s a losing battle, we also just like subversion
for its own sake; to be the grain of sand that fouls up the well-oiled machine.




RECYCLING


All the silkscreen materials and equipment in our atelier was either found or bought for virtually
nothing at auction. When businesses go bankrupt, people usually come to buy the furniture or
computer equipment. Nobody’s interested in the silkscreen materials. We bought around 500
pots of ink for 200 French Francs at auction once. They gave us a guillotine for free. We just had
to pay the rental for the truck to move it.
Sometimes, we find paper the same way. Offset printers usually have an overstock of paper
ordered for a specific job. It might be anything from 10-500 sheets. It would cost them money
whether they store it or have it taken away for recycling, so they’re usually happy for you to take it
for free.
Around the corner from our atelier in Bordeaux, there was a disused print shop. The printer had
committed suicide 2 years before and the place had been abandoned. These speed punks had
squatted the atelier and trashed the place, destroying all these beautiful old Heidelberg offset machines.
There was dog shit and piss everywhere. But it was also full of printing materials and tons
of paper. So early one Sunday morning, when we knew they would still be sleeping off the night
before upstairs, we forced the door and packed all the paper into the car 3 or 4 times over while
all the dogs just looked at us.

Silkscreen over old prints.

COLLABORATION


Often what happens, especially when we’re doing a poster, is that one of us will start drawing.
If it’s not going anywhere after a couple of hours then the other one will come in and take over.
There might be tension sometimes, but we are each aware that the other is more able to look
at the work objectively, get excited by the ideas and push them further. That way you never get
stuck and the work tends to go in new directions that you’d probably never go in by yourself. It’s
really creative. We complement each other.
We might end up with several different drawings that when we then scan into the computer and
collage as one design. Anna will draw some roughs. Christian will do the layout and typography.
Then Anna will do the colour separations… Working this way is a lot faster and more efficient than
if you’re working on your own, especially if we have a deadline for commissioned work.

IMPROVISED BOOKS


We came up with our own method of making books. It all started when we didn’t have any commission
work and wanted to work on something. The idea is to start a book without any idea of
where it is going. It’s all improvised, like improvised music. Each book is printed identically but
the production process is completely improvised. When we start one, we have no idea how it’s
going to turn out at the end.
We usually begin by drawing straight on film with a heavy density pen, these red opaque markers
that block the light from going through the film. You can also use normal pens. That way you
can make the lines look really rough when they’re printed because the light comes through the
film. It might look badly-printed but it’s intentional, a way of adding texture.
First, we’ll print one colour on a page. Then we’ll look at it and think how we’re going to add a
second colour. We’ll print over each others drawings or use leftover films we have in the atelier
and cut and paste them all together. We try to produce it fast to keep the energy going. So we try
to print 3 colours a day.
We usually print several images on a 50x70 sheet. We learn an awful lot printing books like this
too because we’re just improvising new techniques. We’ll find out how inks react with each other
and how they react on different paper stocks.
We don’t plan out how many pages to do beforehand. When we think we have enough to do a
book we stop. Then, once we have all the material printed, we cut and fold the sheets into pages
and try out all the different combinations, figuring out how to give the book some rhythm. We try
to find double pages that will work together as one big page, or others that work because they’re
different and lead you on to somewhere else.
Working on an improvised book is a good way of relieving stress, especially after producing
an artist book that requires precise registration and specific Pantone colours. With these books
we’re just freaking out. It’s play time!


A.C. Yxlan 2010



3. OEUVRES CHOISIES DE BONGOÛT


AMEN KAROL (2002)
We found this comic book about Pope John Paul II, so we ripped it off and made a book by collaging
images from it. We printed it with holy water.
We had gone on a trip to Lourdes, brought back some holy water from there and added that to
the ink. That year it was one of the hottest summers on record in France. People were actually
dying because of the heat. It was about 37 degrees Celcius in our atelier (in Bordeaux) while we
were printing. So, as well as holy water, we were also dripping sweat onto the book.
Then all these crazy things started happening. First the power blew, so we couldn’t clean the
screens because we didn’t have any electricity. And then we destroyed a screen while we were
printing, which normally never ever happens. That book must have been cursed.

POT-POURRI DE BONGOÛT (2004)
This is a collective book that was meant to be a melting pot of all the different books we done
already. It features 37 artists from 11 different countries, places like France, U.S., Japan, Sweden,
Portugal, Mexico, Israel, Finland. We approached some of them after seeing their work on the
internet and others were people we had already done books with.
We gave them the dimensions of the book, they sent us finished images and we did the colour
separation. We included some fold-out pages using different paper weights and stock. Other
pages were printed as 4-colour process. Everything was printed by hand. We made 175 copies
using 88 different screens. It took us 2 months to print the whole thing. After that we bought
a one-handed printing press. But it’s the biggest and thickest silkscreen book we’ve ever done.
That was the challenge we set ourselves to do.

GONE FISHING (2005)
An improvised book we did with a Canadian artist called Brent Wadden, who was helping us in
the atelier in Berlin that summer. Brent would draw something, then we would go over it and collage
it with other images.
Some of it was printed on leftover paper stock that we found at a printer in Sweden. We just
packed it all into our van. It’s the cover of a fishing magazine that had been misprinted. We just
played with that, printing over the top of it, leaving some of the images from the original visible
and printing black over the rest of it.
In one part of the book, still have the registration from the offset things. It makes no sense to
have that in a silkscreen book but it’s a funny little detail. And since it was printed on pages from
that magazine, we called it Gone Fishing; even though there’s no real theme to the content of the
book. It’s more abstract.

WALLPAPER (& TREEHOUSE)
This book was a by-product of another art project we were asked to participate in. It’s an ongoing
art project called Zaishu (www.zaishu.com) which invites people from around the world – anyone
from street kids to artists – to customise these Japanese wood seats in any way they choose.
They deliver them as wood panels about 4 x 2 metres. Afterwards, they laser cut them into different
parts which you can mix and match to build your own structure. As we make silkscreen
books, we decided to silkscreen on them.
We had the idea to only use images and drawings that related to wood. We also thought it might
be clever to take wood patterns and print them over wood. So we scanned them from wood catalogues
and then blew them up really big. You can see the knots and the structure of the wood on
some of them. But it’s funny to print that on something that’s basically plywood. We also drew a
lot of insects and printed those on the wood too, as well as a lot of other more abstract images.
The whole point of the Zaishu project is to recycle material, so we were supposed to clean our
screens on the wood panels. That’s how these two books came about.

SUNDAY 01 (2005)
Another improvised book. We made it over 2 days while we were hung-over. It was started on a
Sunday. We drew and printed one day and then bound it the next. By Monday, it was finished.
A lot of it was printed on paper stock we bought from a print shop that had burnt down round the
corner from our atelier in Berlin. There was a huge stack of paper inside. The guy sold it to us for
100 Eur. We’ve been using it for a couple of years, it smells of smoke and there are lots of terrible
colours.
We often mix the coloured papers with white so you don’t notice them so much. But when you
have a big sheet of purple paper, it’s a real challenge to work out what to do with it. In France,
you can get toilet paper that smells lavender in that colour.
During the winter, we stay in and draw every evening. So we used a lot of those images in this
book, mixed them together and printed them with flat colours. We also reused elements from
some of our graphic design work, taking images from some of the posters we had done but putting
them in a different context.





ÖL (2007)
This is our first improvised collective book. We picked artists from our mailing list and asked
them to submit us black & white images. The email we sent out to them all is on the first page of
the book. We told them, please don’t participate if you are not willing to see your art trashed. We
ended up with images from 20 different artists in the book. We essentially curated it. It’s a real
collective work, like one artist made up of many different people.
People sent us photographs, line drawings, doodles and illustrations by mail, email and on CD.
We took stacks of these photocopies and print-outs and put them straight onto film through a
photocopy machine. Then we cut and pasted and collaged them together so that there were
between 2 and 4 images on each page. We wanted the book to be somewhere between abstract
and figurative.
The idea was also to do something quite snobbish: a silkscreen book printed only in black. It
could almost be a photocopy when you look at it, but it has more texture and the black is much
stronger. A very few pages were printed as 4-colour process. The cover was printed as a tone on
tone with no title. We thought it would be interesting to have a cover that looked really plain and
provokes you to look inside.
There was a lot of binding work done afterwards. First we drilled holes in the pages with a drilling
machine, then bound those by hand with a needle and thread. After that we printed the cover,
glued it onto card and re-bound it with all the pages inside. We did one copy as a test and treated
it as roughly as we could to make it.