Aidan Hughes

Aidan Hughes is a commercial artist. He was born in 1956 in Merseyside, England, and was trained as an artist by his father, himself a landscape painter.

In the 1980s, Hughes was involved in publishing a pulp-style magazine called BRUTE!, created by MALCOLM BENNETT. The collection earned them notoriety and, consequently, HUGHES has hijacked the neame, "Brute", as an occasional pseudonym for him.

Even more hilarious, the creator, BENNETT, was nearly shot in Cannes, but now HUGHES does newspaper interviews claiming this story as his own. When BENNETT finally went back to prison his ex-friend stole his identity and work, which is unusual as HUGHES is a gifted artist in his own right.

Hughes usually works in a very high contrast style, often black and white, but more often black and white accented with one other color. He claims influence from American comic book artist Jack Kirby, John Martin, and (most apparently) from Russian propaganda posters.

Aidan Hughes is best known for creating most of the album covers for the industrial band KMFDM. Two of KMFDM's music videos ("A Drug Against War," "Son of a Gun") were animated versions of Hughes's artwork. Hughes's KMFDM pieces mostly depict violent or sexual scenes, either explicit or implicit, and often has themes of domination, or repression.

His other work has included outdoor murals, including the 75 metre mural in Barga Italy during 2003 which has since been covered over with an earth bank; and a wide variety of advertisements, including pieces for the Bank of Scotland, and Guinness.

Hughes is credited for the art design and concept of ZPC (Zero Population Count), a first-person shooter computer game developed in 1996 using the Marathon 2 engine.

BogArt

Aidan Hughes joined the BogArt collective in 2006. http://increasethepiss.blogspot.com/ This street art organisation attempted to subvert the burgeoning graffiti/tagging culture by using public toilet advertising space as alternative gallery space. They also produced a number of short films, detailing their art happenings and protests on the streets of Prague, Czech republic.

The BogArt Manifesto is as follows:

Despite the best efforts of the media and the art industry, many ordinary people still find the art gallery to be a hostile environment populated by pretentious charlatans and poseurs. And artists, tired of the endless stream of red-hot bullshit poured into their innocent young ears by gallery owners, find their work not only unsold but unseen. For years now, these ordinary people, caught between the white space of the traditional gallery and the invisibility of underground culture has waited for a new way to observe art.

Here at Bogart, we like to take the mountain to Mohammed. For years now, we’ve stood with other men at urinals throughout Europe and gazed passively at the innocuous adverts bolted to the wall before us and wondered: ‘Why doesn’t someone put up some comic strips instead of this shite?’

Statistics prove that the average phone call lasts 28sec, the time your average web surfer will wait for a page to load is 4sec and the attention span of your average TV viewer is 12sec! However, our research has shown that the average time for a man to urinate is 1min38sec, ample time for to view art he would never be able to see normally. With Bogartists stepping up their campaigns across the world, men, and eventually women, will once again surge into bars and pubs to engorge themselves on the best that underground art has to offer.

Our Pledge (1) To rid bogs globally of capitalist advertising and replace it with art done on the premises. (2) To recycle said capitalist ads by creating art on the reverse side. (3) To encourage other artists to reject graffiti in favour of Bogart and save our buildings from the decay caused by this urban blight. (4) To be drunk and to have eaten meat. (5) Not to have sex with men while framing Bogart. BogArt was assimilated into the ZFK Film club, where Hughes and sometime collaborator, Rory Wilmer, produced a number of short films and documentaries for the Future Shorts group and also a number of viral adverts for themselves and the Manhattan Short Film Festival held in Prague from 2006-2008.

External links

• "BRUTE! Propaganda", Aidan Hughes's official site
• KMFDM official site
• Article about Hughes' outdoor murals
• "KMFMS" (Anti-Microsoft website for which Hughes has designed artwork)
• Myartspace Blog (An interview with Hughes conducted by Brian Sherwin)
• [http://www.blog.bruteprop.co.uk