by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 4 Apr, 2024 | 12Jobsin12Months, Journeys, My books, Psychology of Travel
This is a difficult question to answer. It was easy enough to make the decision to do 12 jobs in 12 months, but now that I’ve done them (I finished in December last year) and have to write up the stories, I’m faced with strong internal reluctance to get started. Part of me knows that what I did last year was unusual and people, presumably, will be interested.
I’ve just finished a decorating job and it’s always really hard to transition from “normal” work to the introspective task of writing. I feel a strong pull towards YouTube, catching up on the news, sharing silly messages on WhatsApp, organising my next journey, cleaning the house, washing up, going for long walks — doing anything other than looking into my thoughts, feelings and memories. Avoidance is the name of the game
They say that money makes the world go round but the same could be said for jobs. Without jobs people would be broke and they’d also be without a daily structure, a routine that gets them up in the morning and pulls them through life.
Most jobs last for years, some for decades, and wouldn’t it be interesting to read about someone who did 12 of them in a year? When I’ve mentioned it to people they often ask questions: What was your favourite job? (Catering). How did you get jobs? (Networking). Did these jobs take you abroad? (Yes). Were you well paid? (Sometimes). Did you get fired? (Yes). What gave you this idea? (A conversation).
Funnily enough nobody has asked me why I did 12 jobs in 12 months or why I’m writing a book about it, and that’s why I’m writing this article as I think it’s an interesting question.
I haven’t come across many books written about jobs, which is odd considering how much of our lives we dedicate to them. One of the most interesting aspects of jobs, in my view, is HR (Human Resources) — how companies recruit people. Everything I’ve seen and heard about HR professionals is appalling: their approach to recruitment is often idiotic, their value is questionable and if you ask someone who works for a big company they invariably have nothing good to say about HR. This gives me an interesting feature for each chapter — how did I get the job? The characters I worked with will be another interesting element in the book.
In terms of political context an interesting factor is A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) which is so clever that it threatens to take away many types of jobs. One of my jobs (working for the Post Office) felt like it was a role that will soon be replaced by machines; I felt like I was being trained and managed like a robot and the job itself (delivering parcels) is so micromanaged that when the machines take over they’ll know everything their human predecessors did, and do it better (at least in terms of maximising profits).
Maybe all jobs will be replaced by AI and robots soon? This doesn’t worry me as there’s enough money in the system to pay every citizen a Universal Basic Income and people could work as carers, artists/writers/musicians, community entrepreneurs, charity workers, academics, or just follow their dreams. It just needs a change of attitude that fits with new technology, and if you think about jobs they are just tasks that were developed during the industrial revolution. Their central function in our society is never questioned. The technology has changed but our attitudes haven’t: to be “normal” you must get a job.
I still haven’t answered the question about why I’m writing this book about 12 jobs? It feels rather arrogant to say “I’m writing it for people to learn about jobs!” Am I? How do I know if anyone is interested? What if they’re not? I don’t have an answer for these questions but what I can do is make it clear that I’m writing this for my own selfish purposes — because I think it’s interesting and I like to share my experiences in written form– and if nobody else agrees it won’t affect me too much. My pride, vanity and ego won’t be too bruised.
The other purpose of this book is to let people know what I’ve been up to (a nasty voice in my head says “Nobody’s interested and you’re an arrogant shit for assuming that anybody is!”) I have learned to ignore these naysayers in my head. As someone who is always on the move I like to let people know what I’ve been up to. I do this with updates on Instagram, this blog and, sometimes, books.
I find this blog a useful place to discuss ideas, some of which won’t make it into the book, and also my struggles with sloth, complacency and procrastination. You, the person reading this article, can help by writing a comment under here. Comments can help make the book better, as they sometimes challenge my thinking.
Finally, this is a good place to launch my new hashtag: #12×12
by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 19 Feb, 2024 | My books, Opinions, Psychology of Travel
Art books can be beautiful but often I get a gradual sense of boredom as I turn from one perfect image to another. Too much art, beauty and perfection can be overwhelming.
I don’t like the way art is presented. What bugs me are those convoluted, oh-so-clever texts that are displayed as you walk into exhibitions; texts that are often so full of obscure words that often I think you need to study art at university in order to understand the gobbledegook that curators sometimes write.
Daoud Sarhandi-Williams, the editor and designer, has avoided these linguistic problems in his latest book — Ukraine at War, Street Art, Posters + Poetry. His descriptions of the street art that he photographed in wartime Kyiv are clear and simple. He guides us through 300 pages of Ukrainian street art — some traditional, some modern — like a friendly local, guiding me (or you) through the medieval backstreets of an ancient Italian city; sharing a deeply personal and light-hearted commentary that’s so much more gratifying than the spiel the official tour guide says every day to the latest batch of tourists.
Since visiting Zaporizhzhia last summer, where I worked as a volunteer, I’ve read several books on Ukraine. The only one I’d recommend is called In Wartime; Stories from Ukraine by Tim Judah. One is a novel called Death and the Penguin by Ukraine’s most famous novelist, Andrey Kurkov. Apparently it’s quite a famous tome among the literati but I found it glum and disappointing. It has black humour in spades but none of the sparkles of joy and humour that can be found in the works of the great Ukrainian-born author, Mikhail Bulgakov, a master of black humour and author of The Master and Margarita.
But I shouldn’t be too harsh on Andrey Kurkov as he did write an excellent foreword for this wonderful book I’m reviewing. Here’s an extract: “Ukraine at War: Street Art, Posters + Poetry will guide you through today’s Ukraine more honestly than any future history might…What this book shows is the restorative power of art in a time of war…Art let’s us look at today’s pain from the viewpoint of the future, so there can be a future.”
It’s not just the images that make this book worth reading. The concise words that accompany the street art transform it into a great book. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an art book like this, with such a subtle written guide easing us through the images, and the tragic modern history of Ukraine. How did this come about? Why isn’t it presented like every other art book — just image after image but no narrative to pull us along.
To answer that question we need to look to the author, an old friend I used to work with in Bosnia: Daoud Sarhandi-Williams. Daoud trained as a film editor at the BBC in London during the late 1980s, when the BBC had a lot more creative freedom than it does now. You might be wondering “What’s this got to do with it?” My answer is “everything”, as he not only wrote the text for this book, he also did the graphic design. (The book was published by Interlink in the USA and is distributed globally by Simon and Schuster).
Daoud’s method is to put together art books in the same way he’d put together a film: selecting images and words that create tension, make highs and lows, and drive the narrative forward. And it works, just as a good film will keep you glued to the screen for two hours. I was pulled through the pages of the book as if by a string.
The bulk of the book covers issues like historic statues being covered with sandbags to protect them against Russian bombs (an image of Dante’s indignant face, peeping out from a pile of sandbags, pops into mind), modern street art and graffiti, traditional Ukrainian folk-art being adapted to a modern setting (like painting flowers on tank traps); a massive display of captured Russian tanks on show in Kyiv’s main boulevard in the summer of 2022, anti-war graphics; and, the most beautiful chapter “Murals, Murals Everywhere” which consists of massive paintings covering the sides of entire blocks of flats. To my surprise, few of these murals show images of war, they tend to portray people, nature and beautiful images from the artist’s fantasy. There’s a lot of children in the book, making their own art and sometimes selling it, and plenty of flowers which are, the author writes, “cherished in Ukraine.” There are photos of people celebrating, having a good time, proving that life goes on despite the war.
If there is a message in this book it is that artists, and presumably the people of Ukraine, don’t want to dwell on the horrors that the Russian Empire has inflicted on them; they want to celebrate their independence, their freedom, and their ancient culture. A deeper message that I picked up is that the Ukrainian people will never give up. Now they’ve got their independence from the Russian tyrant, there is no way they’ll give it up. Some Western pundits say “If Trump gets in the war is over!” But I don’t buy that line. I’m sure they will fight on, just as the Bosnians did when they were invaded by the much-more-powerful Serbian army and despite the fact they were denied Western arms to defend themselves.
The Museum Blues
By now your attention may be flagging, you may have reached the point that I call “Museum Blues” — when the exhibition, or art book (or this article), has overwhelmed you. When this happens to me, as it often does, in museums and galleries, I feel exhausted.
At this point in the Ukraine book Daoud, the film editor, makes his move. He changes the pace and retains our attention as only the best films succeed in doing.
For me, the chapter on murals was the high point and I needed a break. I was also wondering “How are they made?” Like a butler who anticipates his master’s every need, Daoud plunges the reader into two chapters that give a different perspective: he tells the story of how a group of artists paint a massive mural of “the ghost of Kyiv”, a heroic pilot who stood up to the Russian Air Force when they tried to capture Kyiv in early 2022. The next chapter is a documentary-style presentation of a group of graffiti artists who use their skills to paint camouflage on vehicles which have been donated to the war effort. These chapters are the equivalent of the “making of” documentaries that sometimes accompany films.
Most books of this nature, and most films for that matter, end with a slight sense of disappointment. But Daoud Sarhandi-Williams knows that he must end with a bang. Endings are really important for filmmakers but, I suspect, they’re not for those who make art books. The concluding chapter is titled “To End a Book: In Conclusion”, and it’s a play on the title of a book called To End a War, by Richard Holbrooke, the US Diplomat who coordinated the ending of the Bosnian War in a way that didn’t resolve anything and now, thirty years later, Bosnia is still stuck economically and politically. Holbrooke’s mistake was to award the Serb aggressors with 49% of Bosnia’s territory and force this “solution” on the Bosnians. Subsequently, the same Serbs who ran a war of genocide against their neighbours then set up a racially pure Serbian mini-state within the current nation of Bosnia Herzegovina. What could possibly go wrong?
I agree totally with what Daoud writes in the conclusion: “Russia must be vanquished before any meaningful diplomacy can begin– lest it ends up with a Bosnia-style lethal peace deal. Ukraine fights on with awe-inspiring courage. This quality extends throughout the population…Such bravery and resilience — as well as faith in the power of art — still has the capacity to surprise us. As T.P. Cameron wrote in the trenches of the First World War:
Two things have altered not
Since first the world began
The beauty of the wild green earth
And the bravery of man.
From Magpies in Picardy, published posthumously in 1919.”
N.B. I had no intention of writing a review of Daoud’s Ukraine book as I’d seen it in proof form (I helped in various small ways) and rarely write book reviews. But when I read through the hardback version I released it was quite different, and much better, than the version I’d seen on my screen. It’s a gripping and fascinating insight into a country that is managing to stand up to the world’s biggest bully. It’s also a surprising book in that I had no idea such great street art was being produced in Ukraine, that the local authorities encourage it, and this work may well be the testament to Ukraine’s indomitable spirit, in the future, when they finally break the grip of Russia’s rotten empire.
Ukraine at War, Street Art, Posters + Poetry, by Daoud Sarhandi-Willians, was published in 2023 by Interlink Books. You can get a copy from the publisher here or from Amazon here.
All the photos in this article were taken by the author/designer: Daoud Sarhandi-Williams.
by Rupert Wolfe Murray | 1 Feb, 2022 | Bosnia, Journeys, My books
I’m working on an epic book that’s coming out in May this year: Bosnian War Posters, by Daoud Sarhandi. It’s an incredible collection of propaganda and art that he and Alina Wolfe Murray, my ex-wife, collected just after the war in Bosnia Herzegovina. It’s taken a long time to come to life but that’s another story.
The posters are arranged chronologically, with long captions, and it tells the story of Bosnia’s war. Young people in Bosnia Herzegovina are particularly interested because they don’t learn about the war in school – it’s too recent, too raw, too politicised – and they want to learn about it so they can avoid the mistakes of their parents. Young Bosnians also want to see how people communicated before the internet.
Many of the older Bosnians I’ve met, those who have experienced the war, don’t seem very interested in it; on the one hand they want to forget, while on the other hand they can’t stop thinking about it (or so I’m told).
Could we do books like this in other war-torn countries?
The reason I’m putting this article together is that I got a very inspiring audio messages from the author, on WhatsApp. It was in response to a discussion about possible future projects we could do in other parts of the world. “Surely”, I asked Daoud Sarhandi, “we could repeat what we did in Bosnia-Herzegovina? Surely there would be great material in other war zones, as good as what we had found in Bosnia?”
Daoud’s audio message (which I’ve transcribed below) gave me the insight I’d been looking for; it answers the question I’ve been asking myself: what makes our book, Bosnian War Posters, unique?
This is what Daoud said:
“The thing about Yugoslavia is that all the stars were aligned. We were in the right place at the right time, in a country which had a conscious design memory – or history – connected with Europe and Russia. One of our contributors, Bojan Hadžihalilović, says the war happened just before the internet and social media came into its own. I think the great poster campaigns the world witnessed in the past are over. Bosnia may have been the last war that used posters to such effect.
“Artists like Began Turbić, Asim Đelilović, and others are valuable as their posters and concepts are original, unique, and self-generated. I was recently thinking about doing a similar book about the Spanish Civil War as some of the work is beautifully drawn and designed. However, Spanish Civil War posters were produced by propaganda agencies on both sides rather than individual artists. They were just churning out very formulaic stuff and you actually learn very little from this material about the war as a whole, or what the people were really feeling. That’s not true about the posters we found in Bosnia Herzegovina. I think Began Turbić’s work, for example, is stunning compared to anything that came out of Barcelona or Madrid.
“Also, the only surviving Spanish Civil War posters are from the conquered cities. There’s almost nothing from small places and nothing independent left. This is not true of the material we found in Bosnia Herzegovina, as we were able to visit the most remote locations just after the war as well as scores of individual artists.
“What we found is absolutely unique. Not only in terms of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but in terms of world heritage. I can’t think of any war in history that generated such a rich heritage of original poster art, and the interesting thing is that it was genuinely independent in that most of the work we collected was produced by individual artists, working alone, and the government and army seemed to ignore them. It was a moment in time that’s not going to come back. It was something that doesn’t happen everywhere and probably will never happen again.
“In 2004 I went to Palestine to investigate doing a poster book about the Israeli/Palestine war. I travelled with an expert in the field, Dana Bartlett, an American design professor teaching in Prague. She’d already done an art book on some of those posters called Both Sides of Peace. At my suggestion, we went to do another book, a bigger one, and I spent two months in Palestine, mostly in Ramallah, talking to artists and designers, as I had done in the former Yugoslavia (in 1997/98). I thought I could repeat the process in Palestine.
“But all I found was visual dross. A lot of great people, for sure, and some great artists – but no inspiring design. What I found was loads of photoshopped posters with the words Islamic Martyr in Arabic, and a young guy holding up an AK47. After you’ve seen a hundred of these posters – which are more of less the same – you realise there’s no story of design here. I understand it culturally, and I respect it, and in its own way it is interesting, but it isn’t artistically inspiring or even very educational.
“But my Palestinian trip wasn’t wasted as I ended up making a great documentary film, The Colour of Olives.
“Sophisticated design doesn’t really happen in most countries. You could go to loads of conflict zones – Iraq, Syria, Rwanda, Yemen, wherever – and I’m sure you wouldn’t find much – you wouldn’t find a body of design work expressing lots of different aspects of the experience. You might find one or two artists doing something interesting, or quirky, but you wouldn’t find enough for a book. And then you’d have to know a lot about the war. To do what we did with the captions, you’d have to know all the ins-and-outs of that conflict.
“Islamic countries are particularly problematic in this design regard, which is why Bosnia Herzegovina was such a unique situation because there’s an Islamic element in this very special European country. But Islam generally is not very encouraging about modern graphic design. It’s just a fact. If you look at the history of Islamic art, it’s mainly decorative. When I met graphic designers and illustrators in Palestine they complained to me about this, that Islam doesn’t doesn’t like art to be confrontational. Art in Islamic countries celebrates the divine; flowers, symmetry, and non-human representation. You get lots of floral motifs, and calligraphy, and very little that is confrontational in the way that western audiences understand it. It’s a different thing altogether.
“Could we do a poster book in Lebanon? I doubt it. Syria? I don’t think so. What’s more I’ve got no motivation to do a big investigation, going round knocking on doors in another country. I don’t have the energy for that, plus I have a young family that I can’t just leave.
“I’m very, very proud of Bosnian War Posters. As a book it’s beautiful and we managed to save so much of the Bosnian’s wartime experience that would undoubtedly have been lost. As far as I know, we were the only people going around collecting all this material in a systematic way. I think the Bosnians didn’t quite appreciate its value, plus they were exhausted after the conflict. They’d had enough of the whole bloody mess. Sometimes outsiders see things that locals don’t in this regard – the distance helps. I knew from the go get that it was all very special and I’m glad we helped to preserve this bit of their cultural heritage.”
What’s unique about this book of posters?
There is a second part to answering this question: putting it into context. This was done rather brilliantly by Carol A. Wells, who runs the Center for the Study of Political Graphics in Los Angeles. She wrote a foreword which puts the book into historical and artistic perspective:
“It is not surprising that so many artists made posters during the Bosnian War as they are one of the most accessible, easily disseminated, and popular art forms to express conflict and resistance. What may surprise those who are seeing these posters for the first time is their variety, abundance, and often extraordinary design…
“Although few of these Bosnian posters are well known, many of them may look familiar because they incorporate images from advertising, fine art, film posters, album covers, and popular culture…
“The Bosnian posters in this book incorporate Western art from prehistoric to Renaissance, from Pop to Punk. The referenced art includes work by Massacio, Durer, Leonardo, Picasso, and Warhol. Posters that were originally made for World Wars I and II, and the Spanish Civil War, were ‘redesigned’ for the Bosnian War. The familiarity of these shared cultural references draws us in.”
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Artists in Bosnia Herzegovina were able to draw on this rich history of ancient and modern art as many of them had been through a classical education at Sarajevo’s renowned School of Art, where great art is studied over many years. I was at this art school recently and can confirm that it’s still going strong — and the students I met are very keen to see our new book of wartime posters.
My own interpretation of the Bosnian War posters is that it was the only way that artists in Bosnia-Herzegovina could protest about what was happening. As electricity was heavily restricted, the only mass media they had occasional access to was the radio. These shortages made the poster all the more powerful as a means of communication. The same didn’t apply to the other warring parties, Croatia and Serbia, which had fully functional mass-media and national propaganda systems. Although we collected some posters from these countries, very few wartime posters were produced as they didn’t really need them. But we got a few from the start of the war in Croatia as well as some interesting magazine covers from Belgrade.
What I didn’t appreciate until very recently was the level of freedom Bosnian artists had to express themselves – which is ironic considering that the Bosnian people were effectively hemmed in, geographically, by their enemies. They were imprisoned by external forces but their spirits were free.
A Sneak Peak
Finally, I’d like to share with you a couple of images from the book, and I’ll quote from Carol Wells’ foreword which puts them into context:
“A poster titled ‘HEEELP’ by Began Turbić used photomontage to transform an Orthodox Christian-style cross into a swastika by attaching traditional peasant-made brushes to the ends of the cross. Sixty years earlier, the German artist John Heartfield used this technique to create a swastika out of four bloody axes. Heartfield’s 1934 work was ironically titled ‘Blood and Iron,’ which was the motto of the Third Reich.
“Heartfield was one of the originators of photomontage, and made many anti-fascist magazine covers and posters using this technique. Turbić’s use of photomontage to create a swastika thus connects the past with the present. The average viewer may not have known this reference, but it would have been recognized by other political poster makers, as Heartfield is often considered one of the earliest designers of mass-produced protest posters.
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John Heartfield’s 1934 poster “Blood and Iron”
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Began Turbic’s Bosnian wartime interpretation.
Find out more
We’ll be launching a crowdfunding appeal soon, to offer discounted copies of the book to Bosnians everywhere as well as anyone who supports this great country. If you’d like to get more information about this please send me (Rupert) an email: wolfemurray@gmail.com
The headline photo of this article was produced by Trio studios during the war. It’s a re-interpretation of the Coca-Cola symbol and it’s printed on the back of an old army map, as paper was in such short supply.
If you’d like to see more of the Bosnian War Posters just follow this hashtag on Instagram: #bosnianwarposters
As always, I’d be most grateful if you could leave a comment under here. All feedback is useful, every voice is valid and every perspective is true to itself. I’m particularly keen to hear from young Bosnians as I’ve been so impressed by those I’ve met so far. I intend to give more talks in Bosnian schools when I go back to Bosnia Herzegovina later this month.
Finally, if you’d like to know why I got involved in this project, see this article: Why I moved to Bosnia
