Diary of a thirty-something Art Dealer

2012-01-20T11:50:00.005Z

“The wound is the place where the light enters you.” Rumi

Between 1971 and 1979 Idi Amin's tyrannical despotism over Uganda killed an estimated 500,000 people. In addition many hundreds of thousands were forced to flee the country as refugees. At the age of eleven, British artist Zarina Bhimji was one of them.

“My sister and I had to suddenly flee leaving behind everything except two dresses and a cardigan. During the civil war in Uganda we had stayed indoors with curtains closed. I witnessed violence, shooting and death by Amin's military. We arrived in England not speaking any English."

Astonishingly, from these, to me, unimaginably horrific experiences, Zarina has crafted photographs and film installations of ravishing poetic beauty. It is deeply humbling to see the darkest and most violently abhorrent aspects of human nature transformed into something of exquisite grace through such profound and soulful investigation.

Zarina has travelled extensively across India, Zanzibar and East Africa, immersing herself in their ways and undertaking intense research into their overlapping histories. And yet the final works, film and photographs, exorcised of the human figure and of linear narrative, present surprisingly universal and seemingly apolitical journeys into the shared human experiences of love and loss.

The jewel in the crown of The Whitechapel's recently opened exhibition Zarina Bhimji is Yellow Patch (2011). Shot on location in India on 35mm, Yellow Patch was inspired by trade and migration across the Indian Ocean and is the second and latest film from the artist who was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2007. Loaded with the wisdom of wabi sabi, the melancholic but cathartic allure of decay, of lives lived and others still living, the film is overlaid with a powerfully elemental and haunting sound track: the echo of disembodied voices - crying, chanting, praying - thunder and driving rain, fires raging and crackling and birdsong, the voice of nature's daily life, startlingly but inevitably unperturbed by the catastrophe of humanity's annihilating bent.

Cool interiors, throbbing against the pungent equatorial heat, derelict and deserted, plaster crumbling from once grand, lofty ceilings, sunlight streaming in through wide open dark wood doors, delicately crafted furniture covered in the dust of colonies fallen to ruin, antlers from some long dead beast, lying, broken on the floor. The only movement, a spider's web snagged and swaying on a gentle breeze.

The absence of the human form leaves space for the viewer's own interpretations and projections, inviting us to open our hearts to the unknown, to traces and flickers of memory from personal tragedies, perhaps recalling what might have been as well as what was.

Disinterested by the grandiose, the sweeping epic drama of retrospectively overlaid stories, Zarina focuses instead upon the truth ensnared in the intimate detail, overlooked or ignored by the less discerning observer.

As well as Yellow Patch, also showing at The Whitechapel is Out of Blue, Zarina's first film, commissioned in 2002 by Documenta 11 and shot on Super 16, along with a selection of photographs, film stills and light boxes spanning the last twenty-five years. This is an exhibition you must see. It is an exhibition for the romantic, for the traveller, for those open to the beauty of pain and transformation. It is an exhibition for anyone who has ever loved and lost.

Written for and reproduced here by kind permission of Spoonfed

2012-01-19T09:14:00.005Z

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture
Royal Academy, London
21 January to 9 April 2012

David Hockney's Landscapes: The Forest for the Trees
THERE'S something profoundly enchanting about the English landscape. Ancient rolling hills receding to infinity. Gnarly trees like sagacious, wizened old men, weathering time as they silently witness history. Seductive, ariot and vivacious, full of light and life. David Hockney captures some of this in his new show at the Royal Academy. Some of it he misses.

Presenting over 150 works inspired by the Yorkshire countryside, "A Bigger Picture" is just that. Like his nemesis Damien Hirst, David Hockney enjoys scale. He likes to paint a very large landscape. So much so one feels it would be churlish ....

Click here to read my review for The Economist

2012-01-16T14:20:00.006Z

Damian Hirst: The Complete Spot Paintings 1986 - 2011
all Gagosian Galleries
London: Davies Street, W1 and Britannia Street, WC1
to 18 Feb 2012

Damien Hirst and the art market
Seeing spots, seeing red, but in the black

T-SHIRTS with spots, mugs with spots, plates with spots, skateboards, key rings, credit-card holders, clocks, deck chairs, tea towels, tote bags, cufflinks and even iron-on spots. Damien Hirst's latest extravaganza—25 years of spot paintings on view simultaneously at all 11 Gagosian galleries around the world—is at once far more and far less than an exhibition of artwork by Mr Hirst....

click here to read my review for the Economist

2011-12-20T18:01:00.003Z

Expectation is rarely a helpful viewing companion when visiting an exhibition. On the other hand, one can't very well leave it at home. What one can do though is bring some awareness to it. That is to say bring awareness to the fact that a thing is almost always judged on the degree to which it meets, exceeds or fails to live up to what we, individually, expect of it. In and of itself, it's just whatever it is. It's what we project onto it that causes us problems. And then we want to blame the work for our projections when it doesn't live up to them. It's what makes being a 'critic' an impossible task.

The fact is I can't tell you whether an exhibition is good or bad. I can't even objectively tell you what it's about or what the artist intends. I can only tell you what my experience of it was and my understanding of the artist's intention filtered through my subjectivity. However educated or erudite I might like to tell myself I am, I am never going to be able to be objective. I am never going to be able to exterminate my expectations and my history.

Unfortunately I forgot all of that when I trotted off to see the Bridget Smith exhibition at Frith Street Gallery. The result was, sad to say, crashing disappointment. Probably nothing was going to live up to the breathtakingly sensitive Marlene Dumas paintings that proceeded it nor the exultantly creative press release that accompanied it.

What I was looking at was, in the first instance, six framed prints. Two images of the medical spaces at Lourdes, here empty of people, wherein examinations are carried out to test the validity or otherwise of so called miracles. The other four images were of various locations in As Neves, Galicia, the place where those who believe they've had a near death experience can express their gratitude to Santa Martha by way of pilgrimage. The rest of the gallery is curtained off into a cinema-esque space showing the thirty minute film We Must Live!

We Must Live! is set around the feast day in As Neves, of Santa Martha, who, her devotees believe, has the power to cure illness. The ritual of the day involves those who've been saved from the jaws of death climbing into a coffin to enact, perform as it were, their own death ceremonies. Out of respect they, in their coffins, are carried aloft through the streets of this tiny village, a throng with festivities, drinking, eating, dancing, chanting, wailing, praying, prostrating. All wonderful, rich, other-worldy stuff. And yet we see almost none of that. What we see is a few slices of staggeringly dull (under the circumstances) subtitled interviews with the death survivors, intercut with moments of the local Padre waffling pompously about what a load of old nonsense he finds all of this to be. Then a solitary woman jiving around on a deserted stage like some sort of highly alarming x-factor reject, and a few octogenarians enjoying a quiet vol-au-vent or two from the buffet table.

I'm not looking for sensationalism. Just a little depth would be nice. The press release tells us that the film raises questions of how much recovery from illness can be attributed to personal faith. It's a fascinating question but I don't see it being raised here particularly.

I don't. But you might. So you're probably best off taking my view with a pinch of salt. I'm not trying to tell you what the show's like or even what it's about. I'm just trying to share with you my experience and hopefully to amuse you for a few minutes with some vaguely engaging writing. That's all a writer can hope to do. If I've failed in even that, then it's time to hang up my boots!

Bridget Smith
We Must Live!
9 December 2011 to 11 February 2012
Frith Street Gallery
Golden Square

Written for and reproduced by kind permission of Spoonfed

2011-12-20T17:55:00.003Z

Miriam Kahn
David Roberts Art Foundation, London
30 September to 17 December 2011

click here to read my review for This Is Tomorrow

2011-12-12T11:40:00.002Z

Women and Art
Crane Kalman Gallery, London
to January 14th 2012

click here to read my review for The Economist

2011-12-12T09:53:00.004Z

The work of French conceptual artist Anne Deguelle is engaged in the poetic task of locating the universe within a single atom. She leads us, in her search for all that is, to the most unlikely places. Always her attention is on the intimate detail, the overlooked, the rarefied.

Not so long ago her key preoccupation was a tiny star shaped biscuit the prodigious writer Raymond Roussel had been served whilst lunching with astronomer Camille Flammarion in the late 1890s. Rather than consuming the biscuit with his coffee as presumably did the other guests, Roussel placed it in his pocket, took it home and preserved it in a small glass case which he inexplicably retained for the rest of his life. For the exhibition currently showing at the Freud Museum Ms Deguelle focuses her attention upon the subtlest details of a highly decorative rug woven by the nomadic Qashqa'i tribe of Iran, that was sold to Sigmund Freud by his merchant brother-in-law and subsequently used as a cover for the famous psychoanalytic couch, first in Vienna and then in London.

In both cases the question that occupies Ms Deguelle is: why? Why would Raymond Roussel choose to preserve a seemingly innocuous petit four for decades on end? And why would Sigmund Freud drape the piece of furniture on which his most important work was conducted always with one very particular Iranian floor covering?

Sigmund Freud moved to the house in Maresfield Gardens that is now the Freud Museum in 1938 having left Vienna upon its annexation by Nazi Germany in the same year. There, in a downstairs room overlooking the garden, his patients lay on the couch talking of their dreams. There now we may see his consultation room just as it then stood. It is in this room that we encounter Anne Deguelle's first intervention into the home of the father of psychoanalysis. Above the iconic couch hangs a white neon that reads “to sleep to dream no more,” a quotation from Shakespeare's Hamlet, a play Freud interpreted in essay form using his theory of the Oedipus complex.

'To sleep to dream no more' comes from the 'to be or not to be' soliloquy, itself an examination of the virtues of life lived to the full and the uncertainties of death, particularly death by suicide; which ties in with Freud's own death in the very same room in 1939, when he allegedly drew a line under his agonising battle with terminal cancer by means of a deliberate over-administration of morphine. Deguelle weaves a complex web. But what of the eponymous rug?

A Persian rug is a work of art in itself, every knot bathed in rich symbolism on levels individual (the weaver's personal story), cultural, tribal, spiritual and cosmological. One of the most common themes, and a theme of Sigmund's Rug, is that of lush garden, abundant with flora, fauna and heavenly bodies of water, the later symbolic in Islamic iconography of Paradise, that place wherein the faithful shall dwell in the afterlife, in psychoanalytic terms of the subconscious. The insignia of the cross that peppers Sigmund's Rug represents stars, the cosmos and the Infinite. If the viewer were to attribute an element of the spiritual onto Freud's choice of couch covering she might therefore interpret some link between the individual and the eternal, between that which stands without space and time and that which perceives itself as rooted very much within space and time.

Upstairs Ms Deguelle guides her enquiry into further intricate nooks and crannies, this time art historical. Strong similarities are highlighted between a rug that appears as a table covering in Holbein's The Ambassadors – a painting weighty with spiritual and cosmological reference and again foregrounding the momento mori - and another piece from Freud's twenty strong antique rug collection.

Perhaps amidst all these narrative twists and turns one might begin to sense the influence of Deguelle's fellow French speaker Hercule Poirot, and perhaps a shadow of reservation in light of that might not be entirely misplaced. Certainly the exhibition is heavily research based and not easily accessed on a visceral level. That said, it is so charming, so intelligent, and in many ways so subtly multi-dimensional that I feel to allow it a little elusivity is the least I can do. After all what is psychoanalysis but the search for the elusive, the uncovering of the hidden, perhaps even, ultimately, the locating of the universe within a single atom?

Anne Deguelle
Sigmund's rug - To sleep to dream no more
Curated by Yvan Poulain
at Freud Museum until 15 January 2012

2011-12-03T18:49:00.000Z

James Yamada at Parasol Unit. Wonderful.

2011-12-03T18:00:00.005Z

I've this week uncovered a number of reasons to count my blessings. Foremost amongst them is the fact that I don't live in Paul McCarthy's head.

Paul McCarthy is currently the lucky recipient of the first transatlantic show to be presented by Hauser & Wirth, his work simultaneously filling their New York gallery space and the two in London, whilst an outdoor sculpture dominates St James's Square. In terms of square footage this is some considerable homage to a contemporary artist from one of the most powerful commercial galleries in the world.

Now well into his 60s and known for his in-yer-face grotesquerie McCarthy hasn't let age soften his sensibilities. Impressive in a way because I imagine it must be quite hard work being this repellent. Savile Row, the latest addition to the Hauser & Wirth empire, offers us a larger than life size mechanised pink blancmange-like sculpture of George W Bush sodomising a pig, in duplicate, with a smaller pig in each case humping away at the larger pigs right eye socket. The mechanism is movement sensitive allowing Dubya's double heads to swivel around and stare at the viewer as she enters the room, which intrusion he doesn't allow to put him off the task in hand. If anything the burgeoning audience seems to add to his dense enthusiasm, the heads whirring more and more excitedly.

The most skin crawling elements of this work for me are firstly it's name: Train, and secondly the expressions in the eyes. Dubya's register a sort of numb, semi-conscious, unsalvable craving, whilst the pigs' show a terrified, silently squealing horror. It occurs to me that what's driving the two is not dissimilar. Both are lost to themselves and profoundly unhappy. The idea of an abuser and an abused begins to seem like an oversimplification, a false dichotomy even.

Over at Piccadilly we're confronted with the appex of the shock-merchants double whammy: sex and religion. In front of a row of empty pews, empty that is but for the odd gallery visitor who's plonked themselves down exhaustedly, is a monumental altar atop which sits a naked Christ-like hyper-real sculpture of the distended artist himself. His eyes are closed, his limbs semi-severed. He sits amid pots of paint and in front of his own easel. Entitled The King this is the quintessential self-portrait, the artist surrounded by his insignia and his vast ego. Around the room are enormous canvases; Britney Spears in one of her 'accidentally' indiscrete knicker-less climbing out of a car moments of a few years back, a page from a porn magazine, Henry Fonda in a ten-gallon hat - symbols of our time, placed upside down to indicate mockery and rejection as well as Baselitz style human tragedy on a global scale.

As I wander around I become aware of the sound of a chain saw drifting ominously from the basement. And sure enough, downstairs, in this ex-bank's dark, foreboding vault, a video is playing of the artist attacking the rubber model of himself that is to become King, in what could probably be called a fairly terminal manner. Not content with the sex and religion combo, McCarthy treats us to a slasher movie as well. Only this is a slasher movie with a difference - protagonist and victim are one and the same. We are not the 'victims' of this sorry state we find ourselves in, McCarthy tells us. This is not someone else's fault. We are doing this to ourselves. I can't deny it has insight.

Oddly enough, in a world that smiles fondly at memories of Vito Acconci's SeedBed and laughs knowingly at the Chapman's FuckFace series, McCarthy still somehow manages to generate horror. What I can't quite get my head around is why? Insight and horror do not necessarily go hand in hand. In the long run what's to be gained by horrifying visitors with your freakery? Does it not ultimately have the same numbing effect that Dubya and the pigs are acting out under. Feeling starts to go, life ceases to be experienced in all it's wonderful, rich three dimensionality... pretty soon, unhealthy, ambient discontentment are all that remain, our own lifelessness floating unacknowledged at the edges of our peripheral vision. So dead have we become to our emotional responses eventually we don't even realise they've gone. Loss without awareness of loss. Waking death. Then where will we go for our kicks? Presumably we'll all have to start fucking pigs. Perhaps we already are. Perhaps that's the very point he's making. Perhaps in his somewhat idiosyncratic Christ-like way he's telling us to first take the plank out of our own eyes, and then we will see clearly to remove the speck from our brother's.

Written for NY Arts.

2011-12-03T17:04:00.003Z

Slightly belated review of Charles Avery at Pilar Corias written for and courtesy of NY Arts:

An erstwhile acquaintance of mine once asserted that if art doesn't concern itself with presenting something beautiful to the world then artists have fallen to the level of bad philosophers. Does this suggest then, I wondered, that an artist producing beautiful work is automatically a good philosopher? Or does it imply that the only real tool for the presentation of philosophical ideas is the written word?

Scotsman Charles Avery has embarked upon the creation of a universe parallel to our own. This universe presents itself to the viewer in the form of incredibly detailed mural-like panoramic drawings, a snap shot of some infinitely complex multi-faceted narrative. Objects also feature, anthropological in feel, almost as though they've morphed from the two dimensional plane into the three by way of some yet to be invented teleportation devise.

This ambitious project, The Islanders, was begun in 2005, since which time Avery has devoted his entire artistic output to its realisation. In the latest instalment at Pilar Corrias, we find the eponymous exhibition curated around the four by two and a half meter drawing Place de la Revolution, that details an urban centre over-run with cyclists, feral four-legged beasts and a melange of cameo's brought together into a whole. A haggard looking merchant pedals a curious bicycle made up of Duchamp's readymades, Fountain for a seat, Bottle Rack for transporting his wares and L.H.O.O.Q. nestled between the handle bars; elsewhere an urchin attempts to flog tourist tat to a well-heeled couple who are revolted by him; two men sit chatting happily balanced on unicycles, one is legless, his cycle adapted to be powered by hand; a half eaten sausage sits in a polystyrene box, discarded on the side of the road, along with a lone shoe, a lace up brogue. It is everywhere and nowhere; an eccentric but not impossible amalgam perhaps of Delhi, Bayswater and Futurama's New New York. Alongside the main drawings are various preliminary sketches, maps, maquettes and objects, such as a fully functioning table lamp brought back from The Island. Fiction and reality collide to confuse and delight.

What we're seeing at this elegant Rem Koolhaas designed gallery in Eastcastle Street is a tiny slice of a lifetime's project so vast that to get a meaningful sense of the whole the viewer needs must at least glance through the book originally published to coincide with Avery's show at Parasol Unit in 2008. The book tells and illustrates the story of The Island from the moment of its discovery by the diarising traveller known as Only McFew and of the exotic assortment of beings he encounters there. Avery is a highly accomplished draughtsman, as a wordsmith he is not quite so full in his glory, but it's a charming read nonetheless.

The Islanders has occasionally been described as implausible, far-fetched and that old chestnut, dystopian. But the truth is there's no fiction stranger than the truth. This 'real' world of ours that we take for granted is bizarre, extraordinary and entirely implausible on a minute by minute basis. We don't see that because we're too close to it. But create a subtle shift in our paradoxical, unresolvable, dichotomised equilibrium, wherein details are tweaked just enough that they appear unfamiliar, place it in a gallery setting thereby conferring instant critical distance, et voila, so little do we know ourselves we find the whole thing unimaginably outlandish. People addicted to gin soaked eggs we laugh! But we're all of us addicted to things far stranger than a gin soaked egg. In fact a gin soaked egg is not even so very far removed from Mr Bond's drink of drinks. As any marketeer will tell you, it's all in the presentation.

The truth is Charles Avery's project is not an excessive dystopian vision, not even so much an impressive feat of one man's Blake-esque imagination, more simply it's a mirror of the world we've created for ourselves. What's clever is he's nudged this mirror right under our noses almost without our noticing.

If self-knowledge is the most enlightened knowledge, as just about ever thinker, writer, artist and seer since time immemorial has at some point suggested, then I'd like to see a philosopher who can present us to ourselves more engagingly with a dictionary full of incomprehensible five syllable words than Avery can with a simple HB.

Charles Avery
Place de la Revolution
Pilar Corrias, London (and Frieze Art Fair 13 to 16 October)
12 October to 16 December 2011

2011-11-16T16:10:00.006Z

Newsflash folks... Feminism is cool! And the best thing is a Feminist doesn't have to be this way or that way or any other way. Nope, in 2011 there's no such thing as a Bad Feminist. You can be any way you want (except a tragic little misogenist!) and still be a Feminist.

For inspiration, just whilst you get your Feminist wheels oiled, here's are a few 'cool' styles out there.

There's Caitlin Moran's strident, funny, ladette How to be a Woman Feminism: “What is Feminism? Simply the belief that women should be as free as men, however nuts, dim, deluded, badly dressed, fat, receding, lazy and smug they might be.” Woop.

There's Tracey Emin: “I know having a penis definitely affects your wage packet, but I’m not bitter and twisted. I’m grateful to all the women that work so hard to enable women like me to have a voice. And I’m still shouting.”

There's Lady Gaga's blue armpit-hair wearing Feminism: “I am a Feminist. And I want to change the way people view women.”

And now... there's Helen Carmel Benigson aka Princess Belsize Dollar.

Bigged up on these very pages back in July 2009 after I first spotted her at her Slade BA degree show, and now, just two and a bit years later she's solo-showing it around London, seducing from the pages of Vogue, noted as the one to watch in The Independent's list of successors to Hirst and Emin and performing at Frieze – in short, she's on the way to Made-It-Land.

To walk into The Future Queen of the Screen at ROLLO Contemporary is to walk into a palace, an homage, a (smallish) cathedral, to over the top, in-yer-face, girlie hyper-femininity. It's sassy, it's sharp, it's pop culture with a capital P. It's ironic and sincere, it's direct and abstruse, it's multi-narrated and multi-faceted. It's Benigson and it's Feminism and it's Now. It makes words like 'Girlfriend!' just want to spring right out of my mouth! It wears short-shorts, heart shaped sunglasses and hooped earrings the size of Saturn's Ring. Sometimes it even wears nothing. It flirts outrageously with men twice it's age, it swears in a squeaky little girl voice, it giggles about sushi and chocolate and guns and what's more, it apologises for none of it. It's reclaiming tits and arse with a raw, inimitable style all of its own. But don't make the mistake of thinking it's benign. If you cross it it'll deck you and no messing. It's Miss Piggy in a baseball cap and converse. It's Tracey Emin on speed with de Beauvoir on the side. In other words, it's totally awesome.

The Future Queen of the Screen features multi-layered video-work, print, photography, installation, sculpture, and performance, not to mention stools she's made for you to sit on whilst you watch it all unfold. At the opening she's upstairs rapping for the audience, whilst downstairs a live poker game is taking place. There's nothing she can't turn her hand to in weaving her intricate world of multi-identities and alter-egos. Even @PrincessBelsize crosses the line between reality and fantasy, virtual and actual, art and life. The morning after the opening she writes: “i loved all my sexy boy poker players and i love @gali223 the most xxxx”. Is this an artist remarking on her own private view or is this a work of art in itself?

As far as I can see there is no clear distinction between Helen Carmel Benigson and Princess Belsize Dollar, between her cousin who features in a lot of her work and looks almost indistinguishable from her, the avatar she's created of herself, Helen the academic, Helen the goddaughter of Tamar Garb, Helen the artist, Helen the girl, Helen the woman. It's a maze she leads us into, giggling and wiggling, and leaves us there, lost but amused. Her power is in that she subverts from within. It's not all cupcakes and thongs. Behind the frothy facade the questions she's posing are serious, intelligent and spot on.

It all reminds me of one of my favourite Feminist quote of all time by Mary Beth Edelson: “'The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.' To which I say: Fuck his house—who goes there anyway?" Benigson sure doesn't.

written for Spoonfed:
Future Queen of the Screen
at Rollo Contemporary Art
Until 13 January 2012

2011-11-09T16:28:00.001Z

2011-11-05T18:38:00.002Z

Sylvia Plath: Her Drawings
The Mayor Gallery, Cork Street
to 16 December 2011

click here to read my review for More Intelligent Life

2011-10-31T13:12:00.006Z

Turner Prize 2011
Karla Black, Martin Boyce, Hilary Lloyd and George Shaw
BALTIC Newcastle Gateshead
to 8 January 2012

click here to read my review for The Economist

2011-10-24T19:09:00.006+01:00

In the darkened ante-chamber of the Serpentine Gallery a little drum plays itself. Nobody wields the sticks that whisper it's gentle, ghostly rhythm. They're held in the hands of time.

The next room is more deserted still. Not even a drum here. No paintings or sculptures, just blank grey canvas hinting at nothing and curious oblong holes punctuating the exterior walls so I see out into the park, hear its noises and feel its breathe on my face. I sit on the floor whilst the time passes, certain that something, at some point, will occur. It's a magical pause, a hole in time, a moment of conscious not knowing.

Then the low resonant notes of a saxophone ripple towards me. I turn to see a lone, romantic figure, staring out through one of the small perforations of the gallery wall, playing these long, melancholy, haunting notes. A film starts. On the wall another solitary dark haired man, this one carrying a musical box through the quiet semi-urban streets of a place that could be anywhere, slowly turning the handle that creates an unlikely version of Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Clash twinkles, childlike.

I follow the saxophonist's crepe shoes into the domed atrium like he's the Pied Piper of Hamelin, mesmerising. Here another film starts to play. An empty white room leads my eye to an open window outside which an ambiguous object is suspended. The camera creeps forward and the riddle is solved. A man with white hydrangeas adorning his black dreadlocks hangs mysteriously, suspended high up a residential tower block, an angel from the Gods. He also plays the saxophone. It turns out to be Berlin, the high rise known locally as The Long Sorrow, the man noted free jazz musician Jemeel Moondoc.

The images in this exhibition are exquisite, suspenseful, celestial, but the real power lies in the music and the silences. The sounds and the absence of sounds. The artist, Anri Sala, has worked closely with musician and experimental composer Andre Vida to create a living exhibition through music and performance in which no two days will be the same, no two performances will match. Andre Vida will share with the audience, or not as the case may occasionally be, a marathon nine live saxophone improvisations a day, seven days a week, over fifty-two days. And within that creative, performative, non-fixed space questions will arise that may, or may not, find answers.

Sound is the ultimate poignant manifestation of the impermanence at the heart of life. The very second it is heard is the very second it disappears. This improvised music is not recorded, written down, or planned. It exists in the moment and nowhere else. Vida says: “when you're improvising you have to be as open as possible to the moment, to your responses to it, to what you can actually achieve but also to what you can't achieve, to what you don't know about yourself.”

Vida is responding in an immediate, instinctual way to the music of Jemeel Moondoc, to the space and to the ever changing tide of people around him. The question is, during the course of 468 live performances, will the departure point at some stage cease to be an inspiration and start to become a prison? Will the relationship begin to sour or can the love, the focus, and the openness be maintained? Will the fixed slowly strangle the fluid, wrapping around it like poison ivy? Or will it provide a stable and grounding platform from which the fluid may flourish? Every moment will be a question. Every moment will be unknown.

As I wander round back to the start of this intriguing looped echo of a show, Should I Stay or Should I Go? continues to reverberate around the space at different speeds, on different films, played by different people. I'm in a strange magical wonderland where nothing exists but this very moment – all and nothing. The drum taps out one last heart beat to me as I push open the gallery doors and head back out into the cacophony of London, feeling like I've just dipped my toe into eternity.

Anri Sala
showing at Serpentine Gallery, London
until 20 November 2011

2011-10-18T16:54:00.016+01:00

Pipilotti Rist
Eyeball Massage
showing at Hayward until 8 January
Article commissioned by Artwrit whose much more professional edit you can read here: artwrit.com.
My unedit filed here just for a laugh and by kind permission of Artwrit...

Strings of greying underpants hang like washing on a line. A smoke filled bubble emerges from a machine that turns out to be Nothing, and wobbles away, goalless and gentle, seemingly out of place in this brutal environment. It bursts, a peace bomb or, in the artist's words, like a 'fart from within the trousers'. In a moment another one appears to take its place.

At first glance Pipilotti Rist's work appears fun, playful, a little absurd. On one level it is all of these things, on another it engages a meaningful existential investigation into what creates barriers and the ways in which those barriers may be peaceably transgressed. I'm reminded of Wittgenstein's assertion that a serious philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

Rist is a video artist who's working method is to transgress boundaries in terms of both the content and presentation of her work. There is an atmosphere of something deeply imaginative, free from the usual ways of being in and perceiving the world. “I tend to feel the video pieces inside myself,” the artist reveals. The statement inspires me and I want to know how these works feel inside me if I attempt to break the habit of a life time and engage them as much through my body as through my intellectualising, controlling mind.

I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) is a five minute video played inside a conical structure protruding aggressively from the wall by several meters and into which I must insert my head via one of several holes. The encasement is entitled, significantly, A Peak Into The West – A Look Into The East. The film shows what appears to be a semi-clad Rist frenzidly gyrating her body as though in trance-like ecstasy, chanting the words of the works title. The film speeds up, slows down, speeds up again, the image is variously distorted, the time continuum illusion well and truly messed with.

As with mantra the repetition of a single phrase over and over eventually tricks the power crazed discursive mind into releasing its vice like grip on our experience of the world and for a few moments the body is revealed as the existential mediator it is. Conversely, at that moment, my body is outside my experience of this world of the girl who doesn't miss much. My head, tucked safely inside the cone, my body elsewhere, missing. A sensation of dislocation arises in which I feel, curiously, safer, estranged from the vulnerabilising corporeality of my body's very apparent and very alarming, to the ego at least, impermanence. Je pense donc je suis, leaving me free to ignore the hints given by the slow disintegration of my body and those bodies around me, that this state of affairs will not continue indefinitely. Like the air bubble, I will soon be gone, replaced by another.

Blue Bodily Love Letter and Red Bodily Love Letter are two films in which the camera travels over a naked female form. For Rist the female body symbolises humanity, not so much sexuality, more innocence and a sense of coming home to oneself. This pair of works concern themselves with Love. Rist points out that in German to 'fall in love' is verlieben; liebe translates as 'love' but comes from the word lieben which means literally 'to embody'. The German speaking world then recognises, in the very structure of its language, that love arises and takes place within the body. Far from being a dangerous, contaminated place, the body is the very source of all that is good.

If the viewer seeks to interpret Rist's work on a purely intellectual or theoretical level he may find it lacking. Such a lack is not inherent in the work but in the method of engagement. This work gives most when it is engaged in the manner in which it was created: through a sensory, real-time investigation into the body. It seems to suggest that by embracing the wisdom and vulnerability of our bodies we may go beyond our corporeal, existential fear and thereby break down some of the barriers standing in the way of joyful inter-relationship.

2011-09-28T12:15:00.003+01:00

Occasionally I go to an exhibition so pertinent I'm agog to tell everyone about it. Phyllida Barlow at Hauser & Wirth Piccadilly is one such. Previous encounters with Phyllida's work have left me a little cold, grasping at straws, but this week I had my Phyllida epiphany. I feel now I get it a bit, what the Phyllida fuss is about.

As you enter the gallery you walk straight into a forest. Not the conventional kind but thus inspired. The viewer is jostled about the ugly feet of a cacophony of tripodic monsters whose spindly, jointless metal limbs support vast concrete blocks over which rest delicate beautifully coloured silk veils, like sheets over a bird's cage, to hide or to protect, we know not which.

The feeling as I walked below this weighty platform was anxious and awe-filled. Ms Barlow may have captured something of what Christopher Wren was after when he built the dome at St Paul's. Automatically, spontaneously, my gaze was drawn upwards. The pressure from above was immense. There was a sense of being below, amid the foundations that hold aloft something greater, something mightier; of being in the gutter but looking at the stars. What was happening up there and would such skinny legs hold it, whatever it was, or were these entities about to crash down at any moment? Not rational of course, health and safety being what it is, business being what it is, but the human organism is not, whatever we may like to tell ourselves to the contrary, a ration entity. Gods or monsters I wondered. But of course, always, both.

From the balcony the landscape is different. Here we're in dialogue with the cloaked heads. We're on their level. The view is less daunting. Now we can study them closely and discover finally that they're not concrete but polystyrene. The sense of weight was an illusion. Empty after all. The thing I had looked up to, feared, held in esteem, proved, upon close proximity, to be nothing special. Distance and my own irrational projections had lent it a weight it did not, of itself, possess. It was a reminder to me of an important lesson I've been lately learning - strength is within, never without.

The work in the basement is quite the opposite experience. Here we meet a colony of lemming like beings, perhaps those tiny bi-pods whose individuality is subsumed to the greater collective authority, who move like a sea amongst the feet of the giants above. Fellows meaningful en masse but inconsequential alone. Fellows like you and me, projecting our weight on to those above.

The higher up the building we go the more celestial the atmosphere becomes until we reach the attic. Instructed by the invigilator I pottered through the tiny kitchen and up the narrow fire escape stairwell until at the top I peered through a small hatch into a cramped loft containing a rainbow of entrancing coloured spheres hanging from the ceiling like celestial bodies. An incidental sign reads: 'Caution, Electrical Hazard'.

The title of the exhibition is Rig. One presumes the word alludes to the construction of these works, that range from the ambitiously monumental to the delicately ethereal, in situ and in response to the architecture of the gallery space. Another, perhaps more niche meaning for the word is that of a gelded male horse who inexplicably continues to exhibit stallion like dominance type behaviours. I doubt this is the association the artist had in mind but to me it seems curiously fitting. Appearances, so often, are deceptive.

2011-09-10T22:04:00.001+01:00

"There is no great genius without a mixture of madness."
Aristotle

That's my excuse right there!

2011-09-10T13:07:00.009+01:00

This week I went to visit the studio of an artist whose work I'm curating in a solo show next year, details of which are still under wraps so I'd better not spill premature beans. Hopefully it's safe to mention that Sarah's studio is in the well know artistic hub of Crawley. Not having the first clue where Crawley is I imagined it was going to take me the best part of a day to get there, but Google Maps informed me its not so far past Cobham. So, I thought best thing in terms of time management and my latest quest to make myself a 'highly effective person' was to go after my riding lesson. All very efficient and satisfactory, but it did mean I had to walk round Crawley in riding jodhpurs, knee high black leather boots and an ageing baseball cap concealing stuck to the forehead sweaty riding helmet hair which was a bit self conscious making. Ms Maple though generously pretended not to notice.

Sarah Maple is a feminist artist. Only problem is no-one really knows what that means because nobody knows what a feminist is. No-one knows what an artist is either for that matter, or rather everybody does and nobody agrees. So to say someone is a feminist artist is just to append to them and their work a selection of letters that serve to create various impressions in various minds many of which will be at odds with whatever may or may not have been the intended impression.

The other way of doing it is to state what a feminist is not:

So that's cleared that up. Excellent.

Sarah's work uses humour to discuss sensitive subjects. The one thing we're never supposed to mention in polite society is the elephant in the room. But, like all artists of significance, Sarah doesn't allow herself to be limited by social niceties, that ugly, desperate, and largely successful attempt to control, shape and manipulate. Rather she just says it like she sees it.

Not everybody enjoys the joke. Consequently her 2008 solo show attracted some fairly robust criticism (click here, and don't miss the staggeringly eloquent Suad al-Attar. Good old Auntie scoured the globe twice over to come up with an art historical expert of that calibre. Thank goodness for the TV licence, hey.)

Luckily Sarah hasn't let that put her off. Rather she's spent the last two years creating an entirely new but equally uncompromising body of work for the forthcoming show. I can't wait. It's gonna be a cracker.

Sarah's work is currently forming the inaugural exhibition at Inception Gallery, Paris, in a show entitled Sarah Maple est Croque Madame.

2011-09-10T13:01:00.003+01:00

It must be strange to find yourself seventy-six, you've had three hip replacements and four children, you've been working diligently away in the same Kent studio for four decades without anybody taking the blindest bit of notice of what you're up to when suddenly Sienna Miller's putting your work on the front of t-shirts for her fashion line Twenty8Twelve, Ralph Rugoff's pitching up at your private view, Germaine Greer's bigging you up in the Guardian, you're even being referred to as 'electric and eclectic' by Grazia magazine. (I'm not sure which is greater, The Guardian or Grazia. Actually, no, Grazia obviously.)

Yet it seems this sort of thing is going on for a goodly handful of septuagenarian artists. Never mind life begins at 40. For a certain generation of women, life, it seems, is beginning at 70. Depressing on one level, inspiring on another, because it goes to show, you never know what's around the next corner.

One such is Rose Wylie. I really want to like Rose Wylie's work. What kind of a feminist doesn't like Rose Wylie's work? I'm trying, I'm really trying. But I'm kind of aware that I like the story more than I like the canvases. If I intellectualise the whole thing I can like them. If I'm going on my gut response, I don't.

They're very big, they're figurative and they're painted in that way that sort of implies spontaneity without actually being spontaneous. It's not a pretence, it's a process, just the result doesn't really grab me. Which, as Germaine Greer scathingly points out, it didn't really grab Charles Saatchi either, hence Wylie now finds herself 'imminently collectible'. Thumbs down from Charles, thumbs up from Sienna. Quelle minefield?! Who knew Germaine was such a follower of fashionable taste and its makers and shakers.

The exhibition currently showing at The Approach has Wylie's work alongside US born sculptor Evan Holloway. These, I'm afraid, I found utterly dreary. That sort of folksy, crafty looking stuff isn't my thing, however subtle its comments on modern scultpure's legacy.

That said, The Approach is a great space with an interesting exhibition programme, situated above a charmingly unpretentious pub. The private view was on First Thursday so post-Wylie we really should have dashed off to Vyner Street or Redchurch Street or somewhere equally buzzy, wherein we could have hoovered up three hundred exhibitions in less than half an hour. But my new policy in life is, I'm so over rushing about. What's to be gained from seeing three hundred exhibitions in less than half an hour anyway, when you can see one and then retire to the pub for a glass or two and a relaxed chin wag with a friend?

Yeah, I'm taking it easy from now on. Because apart from anything else, whatever I do, however hard I work, however much pressure I put on myself and on this thing called 'success', I don't know what's around the next corner. And if I do dash about and I do see everything and achieve everything… then what? Rather take it easy and leave a few challenges for next year.

2011-09-10T12:54:00.006+01:00

Two wonderful things entered my life this week. A MacBook Air and a cat. The MacBook Air came from that haven of all gadgets glorious, the Mac Shop. I've never been into a computer shop I've liked before. Never spoken to a computer vendor I've understood. Now I suddenly get why forty-something girlfriends call me up whispering: "Beverley, I'm in the Mac Shop speaking to the most delightful young man. You must get a Mac."

The moggie is, if possible, even more delicious and beautiful. She came from the Mayhew. She's one year old, white and tortoise shell and she's the sweetest little thing since toast. Yesterday she introduced herself to the MacBook Air by typing very many 3's, followed by switching the volume off.

I'm afraid I've been horribly lazy about my blog recently. Or rather I've been caught up with other pressing matters. I've also been out of London for two months and of course there's no contemporary art outside the capital. It's grim up north you know. That's why they have those huge signposts at the start of the M1 saying THE NORTH. It's not information. It's a warning. And hey, I'm allowed to say that, because I'm a northerner, so no letters in from irate Wiganers please. It's true, there was the Manchester Festival, but I missed that, which I was sorry about as I would have loved to have seen the Marina Abramovich thing.

So, the first bit of contemporary art to cross my retina in two months had to be from those purveyors of contemporary art that's stylish, slick and edgy all at once. Of course, Art Angel.

In the name of bringing one's own subjective position into awareness, I should state that I was in a bad mood when travelling to Wenlock Road. Not that that's a bad thing in itself, but I think it's important as a reviewer to acknowledge that, in a way, the viewer is always creating the art work themselves. In part, if not in its entirety, the art work, and indeed the world, is a manifestation of one's internal landscape. And I was cross when I entered Ryan Gander's Locked Room Scenario. Which may (or may not) explain why I didn't really enjoy it, despite the fact that a bit of immersive installation (if I can use that ambiguous term du jour) is usually exactly my bag.

Locked Room Scenario is an exhibition in a depot in East London. But, when you get there the exhibition is ostensibly shut. Doors locked. No going in. So the 'exhibition' as it were, that is to say Ryan Gander's art work, is the viewer's engagement with the setting in which this locked exhibition space is located. The viewer walks down the various corridors that surround the exhibition, coming across nooks and crannies though which to steal a glimpse of what may be hidden beyond; a slide projector clicks through images seen via a mirror you have to lie on the floor to look in, a shadowy figure moves about behind a locked and frosted glass door, one corridor is so dark you have to grope your way along the wall. That was unnerving. At one point I gained confidence from a woman who was following a short distance behind me. I wasn't alone. I looked back a second or two later and she was gone.

Yet for all of that I still didn't really like Locked Room Scenario. It was quite fun I suppose in the way that the fairground might be thought of as quite fun. But it was clunky, a bit obvious and, dare I say it, a bit derivative. At the risk of revealing my ignorance I must confess that Mike Nelson sprang to mind and in the comparison, for me at least, Ryan Gander didn't come out that well. Probably if Mike Nelson or Ryan Gander were to read this they'd both be cursing such a banal observation. Nevertheless, Mike Nelson's works, Coral Reef I'm thinking of particularly, seemed to have more depth, more engagement and more narrative. The 'is it real, is it fiction' boundary blurring game has also been played with greater panache and success by other contemporary artists, notably I'm thinking of Jill Magid. It's rather the leitmotif of the moment.

The best bit was two supposed junkies, teenagers, looking slightly out of it, sitting in the concrete stairwell as I first entered the depot. For a nice middle class girl like me they were a bit nervous-making I'm slightly embarrassed to admit. I hid behind the door and listened to their conversation. I imagine it was scripted. The boy was talking about women and the fact that some girls reveal everything about themselves straight away whilst others are more complicated, revealing themselves slowly over time. So that was a hint for anyone who wasn't quite getting Locked Room Scenario. It's good folks, because it doesn't reveal itself all at once. Aha, it has hidden depths. I guess I must be the shallow type then because I'm still waiting for those hidden depths to reveal themselves and so far… no dice. I can't help thinking though that if you have to signal to someone upfront about how deep and meaningful you are for fear they might otherwise miss that fact, it's not a portentous sign.

Locked Room Scenario
Londonnewcastle Depot
N1 7SL
until 23 October

2011-06-25T16:22:00.018+01:00

I’ve lately developed a healthy obsession for the Greeks. Ancient that is, not modern. Bloodbaths, matricide, all powerful goddesses - what’s not to love? It’s archetypal stuff that anyone with any self-knowledge can probably relate to. Actually I seem to have discovered that even if you haven’t a great degree of self-knowledge – mine’s a bit thin on the ground I’m beginning to suspect, although that in itself seems to be a fairly good starting point on the basis that the minute you think you know is usually the exact minute you stop knowing – you can acquire some through reading these timeless stories and spotting your own habits in the character’s unfolding dramas.

We’ve all got goddess traits of one sort or another and it’s fun spotting your own, although I should confess I did get a bit of a hint on which mine might be from an American girlfriend who, upon hearing of my latest romantic nuclear meltdown, (and we are talking Chernobyl here, a Chernobyl of female rage and destructive indignation at perceived maltreatment of women in general and moi in particular, aka misogyny, from someone who’s public ‘spiritual’ face falsely suggests he should know better) asked me what was with me and my Artemis complex.

A lightbulb came on and I immediately remembered what had been my favourite painting when I worked for Anthony Mould in the late 90s – Sir Joshua Reynolds’ portrait of Lady Anne Dawson as the Goddess Diana, Diana being the Roman equivalent of the Greek Artemis.

I decided this must have been my subconscious identifying with the insignia of Diana the Huntress – the silver crescent moon in her hair, the adoring greyhound gazing up at her whilst she rests a gentle protective hand on its neck, not to mention the enviable antique rose coloured silk gown with plunging, but not immodest, décolletage.

It was like suddenly coming across my best friend and mirror image – a perhaps slightly over competitive, but in its positive manifestation highly focused, nocturnal, animal lover and somewhat aloof feminist loner who keeps a strong army of female friends and a strict approach to the kind of behaviours she expects from her male partner, i.e. a bit of respect if you don’t mind, otherwise there’ll be trouble. Oh, and a nice line in feminine rage with which to drum up aforementioned trouble as needed.

There’s one particularly amusing story about Diana inadvertently shooting dead her lover, Orion, from some miles distance, when her brother, Apollo, challenged her skills with the bow and arrow. After all, who can resist a good challenge?

Another woman who had more than a little Diana about her was ground breaking photographer and Suffragette Madame Yevonde (1893-1975) who’s most famous quote is the nervous-makingly astringent: ‘be original or die’. Quite right, tell it like it is and no messing.

Madame Yevonde was one of the key pioneers of colour photography. At a time when photographers and public alike were so used to seeing the world reproduced in black and white that the new fangled colour version was met with some hostility, Madame Yevonde was flying the flag for the new with alacrity.

Possibly one of her most important bodies of work is the Goddesses series part of which is currently showing at the PM Gallery in Ealing. Here you’ll find her work hung along side a photographic portrait project by contemporary artist Neeta Madahar, which is a shame in a way because Neeta’s work doesn’t have nearly the va-va-voom nor the creative insight to match up to Madame Yevonde’s. To have hung her work with that of the great woman might have been a mistake akin to Damien Hirst’s brainwave to show his first ever body of work with a brush alongside Gainsborough and Reynolds at the Wallace Collection. A bit of humility might not have gone amiss.

But never mind because the trip out to Ealing is more than worth its while for anyone with an interest in female archetypal psychology or powerful portrait photography. With images here of 1930s society ladies taking on the guise of mythological characters including Arial, Hecate, Flora, Venus and even Medusa, it might give you the chance to discover your own inner goddesses.

Role Play
PM Gallery and House
Mattock Lane, Ealing
until 3 July

2011-06-25T16:09:00.010+01:00

I’ve just finished reading a delightful book from Persephone Books who publish forgotten classics by (mostly) women writers. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson was first published in 1938, then forgotten about for many years by all but a few, and then, on the back of its being re-published by Persephone Books in 2000, was made into a ‘major motion picture’ in 2008.

Seventy years after it was penned by a secretary from Newcastle, and six years after her death at the age of 96, Miss Pettigrew grossed $17 million at the box office. Maybe that’s not that much in movie terms these days, I don’t know, but what I do know is that if something I’d written grossed $17 million ever in a million years, I’d be thrilled over the moon. Although of course poor old Winifred was dead by then, so thrilled was probably out of the equation, but nonetheless, my point stands.

And my point is this: I’m always expecting in life that if I do the graft then the payoff will shortly follow. I think actually that’s what we’re taught to expect, but I’m gradually coming to the conclusion that in reality it’s a bit more complicated than that. I’m finally coming to understand that you must put in the graft and that you must then let go of it and, crucially, you must also let go of any expectation of a payoff from it. The payoff may well come, or it may not, but to plan for it is a mistake.

Particularly in producing anything creative, too fixed an idea of any particular end result is a fatal error. For where is the heart to enter if the head has already closed every door? And without the heart what have you created? Nothing more than an intellectual game; nothing of depth or integrity; nothing of meaning. In short then, nothing at all.

If you let the head rule the heart, if you imagine you can think your way through life, you may well dull some of the pain, but you will also numb the joy, and you will never, ever be truly creative. Because creativity comes through the heart, not the head.

But, as usual, I’ve allowed myself to waffle far from the point I had in mind. What I was wanting to say was that I wondered if Miss Pettigrew was perhaps the first ever piece of chick lit. Although I’m aware the term probably isn’t a great compliment and I’m not even entirely sure what it means, I do love Bridget Jones – I read it every time things go a bit stinky in life, and Miss Pettigrew seems like something of a go-girlfriend style precursor.

As well as its ahead of its time post-feminist over tones, Miss Pettigrew is also of that very time specific and very English genre of novel that’s one of my favourites - 1930’s Waugh-esque posh kids lounging about sipping cocktails, going to non-stop glamorous parties in diaphanous gowns, driving their cars far too recklessly just for a giggle, using phrases like “cheese it” and having elaborate conversations that go round and round in circles making no rational sense whatsoever, which is absolutely my favourite kind of conversation.

It must be said though that Miss Pettigrew does lack Waugh’s dark subtle underbelly, but she more than makes up for that absence by the fact that absent too is the Smurfette effect, i.e. that world common to literary fiction wherein the reader finds herself amongst a group of blokes with no more than one or two token women who constitute simply the love interest. Miss Pettigrew on the other hand is written from the girl’s perspective with the fellows taking up the romantic bit parts. Delicious.

What’s more I was over-joyed to find stated in serious literary print that has withstood the test of many decades of time passing, a truth that I have long known but never quite had the stomach to say aloud: that a girl’s most essential tool for successful navigation of the world at large is indubitably her face powder.

“Miss LaFosse and Miss Dubarry powdered their noses.
“Come along now Guinevere,’ said Miss LaFosse. ‘You must powder your nose again. It isn’t done not to. Last gesture before entering a room – powder your nose. It gives a sense of confidence.’
With trembling fingers, nervous, clumsy, contented, for the first time in her life Miss Pettigrew powdered her nose.
‘Do you know,’ she said happily, ‘I think you’re right. It does add a certain assurance to one’s demeanour. I feel it already.’
‘Attaboy,’ praised Miss Dubarry.”

Yes indeed girlies, it’s all about the heart. Without too much in the ‘thinking’ department I find one can manage perfectly well in life, but without the nose powder… one isn’t even off the starting blocks!

2011-06-06T12:14:00.011+01:00

I went to the Mark Leckey performance at the Serpentine on Thursday evening. A grand job was done of building up the suspense as it didn’t start until half an hour behind schedule. But lucky for me as I was running twenty minutes late myself having spent too long with my webdesigner, Helpful Webhosting – excuse the flagrant plug but their utter wonderfulness warrants it - polishing off my new look website that I’m tickled pink with.

If you’re not impressed with that however, then check out this: It looks like a cat but it is not a cat. It is a lion in the living room. I’ve seen smaller ponies.

It was hot and sweaty at the Serpentine but no less appealing for that. So appealing in fact the girl in front of me fainted. Delightful Liverpudlian Mark Leckey apologised for the heat and the soon to be experienced noise levels. I noticed at that point quite a few people were wearing ear plugs and I thought for a moment they must be the uber-initiates and that the next half hour was therefore going to be torture for the rest of us. But it turned out they were just the suckers who’d bought the ear plugs the Serpentine were selling in the foyer. Money better spent on beer because in actual fact the ear plugs were completely unnecessary and I decided it was entirely lame-arse of the Serpentine to go in for such a piece of nanny-state-ism. It’s contemporary art for goodness sake, embrace it as the artist intended.

BigBoxStatueAction took the form of a gigantic speaker stack positioned opposite the Henry Moore sculpture Upright Motive No 9 (1979) in the Serpentine’s main atrium. The performance involved the speaker emitting experimental music, sampling and live interjections from Leckey at a volume that made my jeans quiver but didn’t seem to adversely affect my ears.

The sound was focused directly at the Moore sculpture apparently in an attempt to elicit some response from it. Leckey himself was studying the Moore for signs of said response fairly closely throughout. Nobody else seemed that interested what Henry might have to say. I suppose it’s investigating whether or not one’s perceptions of the Moore sculpture are altered by the introduction of this significant degree of sound into its immediate environment. Of course one’s perceptions are altered. How could they not be? Perhaps then it was investigating in what way one’s perceptions are altered?

Overall the show has caused quite a critical curfuffle. Jonathan Jones in The Guardian gave it the slating of all time. His review, which seemed to me to be a sensationalist, ill-informed and frankly, personal attack, attracted a staggering 308 comments before the comments page was closed 5 days after the piece went live. More than 30 of the comments were from Jones himself, seemingly digging himself an ever deeper hole, even claiming at one point that he doesn’t like contemporary art. There was also a comment from Mark Leckey who came out of the whole thing with his dignity and reputation entirely in tact, a feat Jones failed to pull off.

A few days later Frieze jumped on the bandwagon with a curiously pompous investigation into the credibility or otherwise of broadsheet art journalism:

The whole thing made me realise how much we all love to take the upper hand. Everyone’s always got to be right the whole time. We’re all so keen for everyone to know how much clever we are than they. But if we’re all so much cleverer than each other then who on earth can ever be cleverest of all? Whoever it is it’s bound to be a man. Tusk, Beverley, childish. Anyway, its gin o’clock now so I’m off. You can argue amongst yourselves about who’s cleverest. I’m quite content being thick.

BigBoxStatueAction 2003 performed by Mark Leckey and Jack to Jack at Tate Britain.

2011-06-01T21:24:00.001+01:00

"If you are going through hell, keep going."
Winston Churchill

Tracey Emin, Love is What You Want

2011-06-01T21:07:00.006+01:00

The problem with success is that once you've attained it it's almost impossible to avoid being typecast by it. One of the biggest misconceptions about the twenty-first century phenomenon that is Tracey Emin is that her work is all about sex. In fact as Ms Emin's first major London exhibition clearly shows, her work is about far more than her sex life. In fact, I would argue, her work concerns itself very little with her sex life. A lot of other things go on in a bed besides sex. No, her work is about intimacy. It is about love. By which I do not mean crappy Hollywood-style love with a small 'l' to which most of us these days are already horribly over-exposed, but big Love with a big 'L' that takes no account of gender, race, or even - as we discover at the Hayward via a by turns comic and somewhat disconcerting video sketch featuring a dribbling bullmastiff - species.

Tracey Emin seems to take a lot of flack in this country. What I can't quite figure out is why. Is it her success and our perverse British desire to see the mighty fall? Is it because she went on TV a bit pissed and exposed herself as someone who is occasionally - gasp - out of control? It can't seriously be because she pays people to stitch things for her? Surely not, because Reynolds paid people to paint things for him, as did Gainsborough and we don't have a problem with them. Maybe it’s the narcissism we perceive in her use of her own life as the starting point for her art. But where then would we like her to start? An artist can't really begin a meaningful examination of life with someone else's life can they? For how do we know what someone else's life is like? Maybe it's because we imagine she can't draw and that's why she embroiders tents and submits unmade beds as art? Yet it has often been said, and I tend to concur, that she's a very able draughtsperson. So, it's a mystery to me. But whatever it is, for anyone to provoke that much irritation simply by going about their business, they've got to be doing something meaningful. Frivolity, surely, just isn't that annoying. Could it be then that she's pointing to something we might not want to look at? Something in ourselves? Is it that in showing us her own vulnerability she is also showing us ours? And perhaps we're not completely sold on the idea of gawping into our own wounds?

Maybe the kind of poignant statements her work is littered with are a bit too close to the bone:

"you stop me from feeling anything" / "I do not expect to be a mother but I do expect to die alone" / "every time I feel love I think Christ I'm going to be crucified" / "I whisper to my past, do I have another choice"

For all the vapidity she's accredited with it is fairly strong stuff.

Tracey Emin: Love is what you Want spans Emin's entire career to date including a lot of work that I'd never seen before and some work made especially for this exhibition. It opened my eyes to the vast expanse of Emin's oeuvre rather than the smallish pond of what I had thought was her oeuvre. She's prolific and works very successfully in all media. Add to that she's feisty, she's controversial, she's fun and she's a little bit cross. She's strong, vulnerable, profound, sensitive, brave, insecure, witty and all in all I cannot but to take my hat off to her. I don't care if some love to hate you Trace. I don't, I love to love you.

Tracey Emin
Love is What You Want
Hayward Gallery
til 29 August
My review for Twin
Twin is a bi-annual art, fashion and feminist book inspiring a daily blog

2011-05-23T22:25:00.004+01:00

Got sent a couple of good quotes back to back on Twitter. It felt significant for some reason.

The first:

"The confession of evil works is the first beginning of good works." Saint Augustine

And the second:

"All cruelty springs from weakness." Seneca

2011-05-17T18:43:00.007+01:00

Lismore Castle Arts
Still Life
Curated by Polly Staple
Gillian Carnegie, Anne Collier, Mark Leckey, Sherrie Levine, Seth Price and Richard Wright
until 31 September 2011
Click here to read my review for More Intelligent Life
Lismore Castle Arts

2011-05-17T11:54:00.006+01:00

The Girls will be performing 'Diamonds and Toads' for the final time at PayneShurvell on Saturday 21st May 2-3pm.

Described by critic Herbert Wright as 'compelling and disturbing', I Am A Fantasy was chosen as one of the Guardian Guide's top five shows and described as 'seriously saucy, resplendent with feminist chutzpah.'

2011-04-22T21:36:00.012+01:00

It’s Good Friday folks. The nation’s got twelve days off on three days holiday. Dave’s wearing morning dress for the wedding after all. It’s a scorching twenty five degrees out there. Someone’s mowing the lawn. The cat’s chilling out in the sunshine. Latte from lovely Ben on the window sill. It’s all good. And yet, I’m pissed off.

I’m feeling sorry for myself. I got caught up in someone else’s cowardly and self-deceiving web, a spiritual someone, a vicar no less. I’m feeling isolated and I'm feeling like the victim and it makes me want to run over someone’s head in my big shiny tractor. I can feel myself sitting right up there in my plastic seat, out of which I fly by about a foot every time one of my giant wheels passes over so much as a pebble on the path. And suddenly, crunch, squish, ooops, there goes someone’s head, flat as a pancake, bits of brain and eyeball stuck to the rubber. Grotesque violence sure does have a cathartic effect. Someone got squished and I feel gooooood.

It’s not pretty, I admit, but that’s the way it is. It puts me in mind of that glorious little poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

There was a little girl, who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead,
And when she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

She stood on her head, on her little trundle bed,
With nobody by for to hinder;
She screamed and she squalled, she yelled and she bawled,
And drummed her little heels against the winder.

Her mother heard the noise, and thought it was the boys
Playing in the empty attic,
She rushed upstairs, and caught her unawares,
And spanked her, most emphatic.

That’s me today. I’m drumming my little heels. And - unlike some who prefer the world to find them beyond fault at all times - I don’t give a shit who knows it. I shall be charming and delightful and generous tomorrow. But today I shall be horrid. And I don’t apologise for it. Not one little bit.

There’s something deeply healing about the feeling of someone else’s rage when you find yourself near consumed by this tricky emotional state yourself. As long as that someone else is operating within a safe schema, by which I mean I suppose a controlled, creative environment for example. Maybe it’s just as simple as feeling you’re not alone in struggling with this thing. Rage may be universal but it is not socially acceptable, and certainly not in women, who are instantly hit with the Mrs Rochester 'mad woman in the attic' stick. A woman's rage it seems terrifies the life out of people. Which understanding I began to embody last week when I saw Electra at the Gate Theatre. Wowe, that is one pissed off woman. And I loved it. How I loved it. I can’t begin to imagine what psychosexual horrors this might reveal about me to the shrinkies amongst you my dear readers, but be that as it may.

If you don’t know the plot, basically it goes like this. Electra’s Mum kills her Dad and moves her lover in. Electra finds this unsatisfactory. Electra’s sister (passive aggressive if you ask me) buries her rage and advises Electra to do likewise for her own good. To which Electra says, “Fuck off, I’m killing Mum. Are you in or not?” Sis says, “Err, no. You’ve gone mad Electra.” (classic passive aggressive response – accuse everyone else of being mad!!). At which point the prodigal brother pitches up at the family pile after more than a decades absence. Turns out he wasn’t loving the whole thing either and he’s come back to kill Mum. So he and Electra set too. Mum gets bludgeoned.

As the friend I went with rather sagely pointed out even before the performance began, there’s many more ways to kill a person than with a knife. You can kill with infantilisation, with neglect, with passive control. The death referred to here is not just the death of the physical body. Death can occur on many levels. And I guess in a way the person who’s dying, the ‘victim’ as it may be said, has made choices too. Ultimately we’re all responsible for ourselves. No shit!

Which is why I got a bit irritable when I read somewhere that Chantal Joffe paints victimhood, woman as victim. Chantal Joffe does not paint woman as victim.

If you haven’t seen the Chantal Joffe show at Victoria Miro I’m afraid you’ve missed it. However it was interesting enough to speak about retrospectively.

It was a series of gigantic canvases of largely solitary women, referencing canonical figures from art and literary history: Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, Susan Sontag, Lee Krasner, Tamara de Lempika and others. Bold, brave, inspirational women who kicked some arse at a time when kicking some arse was not what women did. Not publicly at least.

These canvases are massive, three meters high in some cases, Joffe reportedly required scaffolding to paint them. The women dominate the space like goddesses, like a wonderful army of creative, archetypal powerhouses. But these are not two dimensional characters. They’re ‘real’ women - by which I mean unashamedly multi-faceted - living ‘real’ lives characterised by vulnerability, fear, wit, talent, confusion, flirtation, contemplation, aggression, gentleness, coquettery, the hunter and the hunted and so it goes on.

Upstairs these monumental portraits are interspersed with canvases of Joffe with her young daughter Esme. At first I found these curious insertions baffling. Why was my glorious museum to ball-busting women being interrupted by predictable, almost quaint little Mother and Child scenarios such as one’s seen a million times before. Indeed is there a woman alive who hasn’t at some point turned her creativity towards the ubiquitous Mother / Child cliché in this rather literal fashion?

Eventually I stumbled upon the self-evident and crucially important thing that my own chippiness was blinding me to. Joffe was placing herself, the ‘ordinary’ woman doing ‘ordinary’ things, like bringing up her daughter, into the very heart of the lexicon of female power. The predictability was precisely the point. For predictable read universal.

Not that Joffe doesn’t seem extraordinary by virtue of her talent and success, she does, but the point is it isn’t her talent and success that make her worthy of her place in this lexicon, it’s her ordinariness. We’re all up there, is the point. You and me. ‘Ordinary’ women going about our ordinary, and at the same time, completely extraordinary lives. Good days and bad days. Joy and rage. Strength and weakness. Beautiful, wise, sensuous, serene, at the same time harsh, ugly, repugnant, terrifying.

And all of that’s fine. Actually it’s perfect. Things don’t need to be good all the time. We don’t need to be good all the time. Sometimes we smell good and we look good and we love the world and the world loves us. And sometimes we’re angry and we rage and we shout and we drum our little heels against the winder. And that’s fine. That’s perfect just how it is.

2011-04-13T14:35:00.021+01:00

Hanging the show I am a Fantasy last week I somehow found myself in the unfamiliar position of applying tape measure to wall. When I asked the hanging fellow to pass me the yellow thing it was quickly deduced that I was out of my comfort zone and I was kindly rescued and dispatched to do something pressing on the typewriter. A few light-hearted words ensued on the subject of the technician's accoutrement and feminism circa 2011:

Rescuer: The yellow thing? Would that be the spirit level?
Me: (grappling with tape measure) Err, yes.
Rescuer: That's forty years of feminism down the drain then. You'll be asking for the twirly thing next.
Me: What's the twirly thing?
Rescuer: (deadpan) The drill.
Me: We're post-feminists now darling, we don't need to know about drills, we just need to look gorgeous and kick some arse!

There is no simple answer to the question of whether or not I am a Fantasy is a post-feminist show, although if a simple answer had to be given, for me, it would be a yes - despite the fact that Margaret Harrison is not, as such, a post-feminist artist. Rather, she is an artist whose illustrious career began in the late 1960s with work coming out of the tradition of James Gillray and George Cruikshank, influenced by Pop Art and heavily embroiled within the feminist politics of the day. But in 2011 she is producing work that is just as relevant now as it was in 1971 when her first solo show in London was shut down by the police on the grounds of indecency.

On the other hand, performance artists The Girls, aka Zoë Sinclair and Andrea Blood, weren't even born in 1971 when Margaret's career was hitting the buffers of its own inadvertent controversy. The Girls, I believe, would concede to being referred to as 'post-feminist' artists, but in a way, whether they would or not is beside the point, because we are living in post-feminist times and as such we, the viewer, can't but look at this work, this exhibition, through the lens of our early 21st century sensibilities.

Margaret Harrison and The Girls both engage powerful archetypes and gender clichés and whether as a society we like it or not, archetypes and gender clichés have just as much to say to us in 2011 as they did in 1971. Or indeed in 1958 when the post-feminist's heroine Marilyn Monroe breathily told the world: "I have too many fantasies to be a housewife. I guess I am a fantasy."

PayneShurvell and curator Beverley Knowles present:
Margaret Harrison and The Girls / I am a Fantasy
15 April to 21 May / Private view 14 April 6-9pm

The Girls are British artists Andrea Blood (b.1975) and Zoë Sinclair (b.1976), whose collaboration began in 1996 at Central Saint Martins. The Girls' practice focuses on creating private staged tableaux and recording them as self-portrait photography or video, as well as live performance. Themes explored include childhood, gender, feminism, women’s relationship with food, Englishness, obsession and eroticism. In collaboration with The Photographers' Gallery, The Girls were artists-in-residence at Selfridges' Ultralounge in 2010. The Girls have also exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, The ICA and The National Portrait Gallery. 'Irreverent post-feminism. Think Angela Carter crossed with Cindy Sherman.' London Evening Standard

Margaret Harrison was born in 1940 in Wakefield and lives and works in Cumbria and California. She studied at the Carlisle College of Art, Royal Academy Schools, London and the Academy of Art, Perugia, Italy. She has exhibited extensively since her first solo show in London in 1971, most recently appearing in the touring feminist retrospective 'WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution’ at MOCA LA and PS1 New York and solo show The Bodies Are Back at Intersection for the Arts San Francisco in 2010. Her work is part of the permanent collections of Tate, Arts Council of Britain, University of California, Carlisle City Art Gallery and The V&A.

Press for I am a Fantasy:
The Guardian
Art Licks
Spoonfed
Woman's Hour
FAD
Le Cool
FAD
AnOther Magazine
Scene 360
Twin
Grazia
Saatchi On-line
ArtInfo

2011-03-20T22:59:00.000Z

2011-03-20T22:33:00.013Z

I spent last week in silence in Sussex meditating 6 hours a day. On Friday I came back to London and sat in my flat spinning out. Saturday I went to the Ida Applebroog exhibition at Hauser & Wirth. Spinning out shifted to a whole new level.

I stood in front of Monalisa (2009) and tears poured down my face. It was overwhelming. It communicated with me on a level way beyond my conscious mind. It spoke rather to my body. Monalisa is about what it is to be human and what it is to exist as such in a woman's body.

Monalisa is a house, or what Applebroog has named a house, a would-be walk-in wooden box-like structure with membranous walls made up of scanned drawings through which the light filters.

The drawings are of what super-articulate critic, art historian, Applebroog expert and babe with a brain, Julia Bryan Wilson refers to as the artist's cunt. What Hauser's press release prefers to call her crotch. Yeah, we wouldn't want to be outré, we're art dealers for God's sake. Officially they're called the Vagina drawings, although at the symposium that followed the eighty-year-old knock-out-feisty Bronx born Applebroog said she'd prefer to have called Vulva.

Whatever we're calling them, these drawings possess a raw power the likes of which Tracey Emin can only dream about.

They were made in 1969 when Applebroog was living with her husband and four young children in Southern California. Desperate for time alone, a respite from the myth of domestic bliss, she would hole-up in the bathroom for hours at a time with her sketch pad. There she created somewhere in the region of 160 drawings of the intimate details of her own body.

Hearing Ida speak about the creation of the work it became clear that this wasn't conceived as an art project. There was no goal. She wasn't putting pen to paper with the dream locked away in the back of her mind that one day she might see them hanging in a white space in Savile Row, an internationally celebrated artist. No, she was just doing what she was doing. She was trying to find a way to exist in the world, a way to cope with life's grotesque disappointments and sometimes even harder to bear joys. She didn't even show them to anyone. No-one apparently. It was an entirely private and personal undertaking.

An erstwhile acquaintance of mine, a writer in fact, once asserted that no artist would create if they didn't have it somewhere in their consciousness that their work might one day be seen, published, exhibited or in some other way appreciated. This tragic, bourgeois nonsense is examplematic of a pernicious misunderstanding. Creativity is not driven by the ego. It is driven, if driven even be the word, by something far, far greater. Exactly such a limiting and limited notion is responsible for the desert of pointless bollocks that gets churned endlessly into the world. Applebroog's story finally allowed me to dismiss this initially unsettling but ultimately diminutive idea without even casting a swipe at it.

The Vagina drawings languished in Applebroog's apartment until 1974 when they were packed into a box, shoved in the basement and all but forgotten. In 2009 a studio assistant discovered them; waterlogged, rat-eaten, ravaged. Forty years after the work had been created Applebroog conceived of Monalisa.

It is not possible to enter the house. But one can peak into it through gaps in the papery walls. The front door leans up against the house with a space on either side too small to squeeze through but large enough to imagine one might squeeze through. Tantalisingly and frustratingly the viewer is excluded.

The monochromatic portrait that appears at eye-level on the front door punched me in the stomach with its visceral amorphous ambiguity. It reminded me of the Dead Marilyn photographs. The being seems only half alive, only half of this world. The head and neck merge with the body. The hair, or perhaps it is a lack thereof, merges with the black background. There is no pleasing clarity. No safety. No illusion of stability such as we like to gorge ourselves of. There's no sleep here. No numbness. There is only vulnerability and uncertainty.

The larger red portrait on the back wall inside the house struck another universal cord and a hammer blow to the self-exteriorising we spend so much of our time and energy in the management of. Fear in her eyes; anger in her deportment; horror in her body.

Nausea and love rose up in me simultaneously. Confusion and clarity reigned. Only paradoxes to offer. It is pain and joy and indifference all at once. But that's the way of life. We can run from it if we are so moved to try, but we won't get away. Not ever.

2011-03-20T19:33:00.002Z

"Everywhere he saw lids going down on the truth, and easy smiles being painted over the top of them."
Warrior of Peace - The Life of the Buddha

2011-03-09T16:23:00.003Z

www.payneshurvell.com

2011-03-07T23:04:00.003Z

A very, very funny book.

"I always suspected that Jake wasn't really an artist, having read this I suspect he's not a writer either."
Dinos Chapman

2011-03-07T22:44:00.010Z

I’m trying to write about Marcus Coates again but I’m finding it almost impossible. Every time I try to write about Marcus Coates I become stuck, the words don’t flow the way they normally do.

I think it’s because Marcus Coates is really, really great and I find myself possessed of an over-excitable desire to say simply that, over and over. Marcus Coates is really, really great. Then I begin to tell myself, "oh you can't say that, Beverley," and once I've begun to tell myself what I can and can't say that's it, the game's over and it hasn't ended well. So I suppose I shall have to put the internal censor back in her box and do what I usually do, which is to say wing it, vaguely hoping that I don't make too much of a tit of myself. And if I do make a tit of myself I shall be consoled by the fact that it won't be the first time. Nor probably the last.

The embarrassing truth is I have a slight crush on Marcus Coates, although I’ve never even met him. But then that’s usually the best sort of crush, the sort that hasn’t yet been dragged kicking and screaming to its horrible, bloody end via a good pummelling from reality. Marcus Coates is my George Cluney - the art historians bit of crumpet.

What’s not to like about a forty-odd year old man wearing a turquoise shell suit, reflective aviator glasses and a badger on his head, clucking his way around the office of the Mayor of Holon in Israel, emitting notably realistic bird calling sounds. Alarmingly, I'm not even joking around here. I've noticed this tendency in myself, to fetishise a certain sort of individual who appears to have much self-awareness and at the same time very little self-consciousness. At once intellectual and off-beat, eccentric perhaps, or one might go as far as to say, a little odd.

Marcus Coates' work is possessed of a curious magic that seems to defy my every attempt to capture it. Its delicate and perhaps unintentionally ambiguous ethereality lies somewhere between childlike naiveté and knowing post-modern wit and for the most part proves too subtle for the absolutes that words desire. However there seems to be a generosity to Coates’ work, an enigmatic humility, that feels meaningful. Given the particularly idiosyncratic nature of his modus operandi, even by the current standards of contemporary art, it might be tempting to dismiss him as a piss taker, but I suspect that would be a misinterpretation.

Coates is interested in what he refers to as 'becoming animal'. His work often takes the form of a documentation of his attempts to physically embody animal in a ritualistic Shamanic fashion in order to help various groups of people to answer problems they may be experiencing in their lives and their communities.

His latest work though is uncharacteristically taxidermy free. Tucked away in the long room behind the Nancy Spero show at The Serpentine is a 35 minute film entitled The Trip for which Marcus Coates worked with St John's Hospice, and particularly with patient Alex H, to answer the question: 'What can I do for you?'

In a way 'becoming' Alex H, Marcus realised Alex's long term ambition to travel to the Amazon rainforest by following a very precise set of instructions issued to him by Alex. The film documents the conversations between the artist and the patient before the trip and after the trip. Rather than show film of the protagonists engaged in their conversation, or film from the trip itself, the image Coates chooses to show us for 35 minutes is an almost static view from the window of Alex's room. As the two men talk, we watch, at a distance, a critical remove if you will, various road and pavement users going about their anonymous everyday London lives.

Although this latest work may at first glance seem to be quite different to Coates' ongoing Shamanic oeuvre, I think it probably isn't. As with his earlier work The Trip is dependent upon a conscious engagement of the interconnectivity between apparently separate beings, a highlighting of the shared imaginative and symbolic space, in order to bring people and communities together and provide, probably not solutions to problems exactly, but discourses around events; discourses that might, over time, begin to allow space to open up and positions of identification to be seen. And as a thing is seen the possibility for it to begin to consciously change slowly comes into being.

Maybe it's about presenting things to people in such a way that a different perspective becomes available to them. Maybe it's offering the loosening of a fixed and imprisoning position that may have ceased to serve a useful purpose. As Coates suggests in The Plover's Wing, "What the bird represents here is the idea of identifying with a certain position, identifying with a victim position."

Like all truthful ways of engaging with the world Coates' work takes itself lightly but it does so with a sense of great seriousness. It may be ornithology but it's also art. It may be art but it is also life. Yup, Marcus Coates is really, really great.

2011-03-04T20:04:00.001Z

"the answer to how to live is to stop thinking about it. And just to live. But you’re doing that anyway. However you intellectualise it, you still just live."
Damien Hirst (1995)
The Idler

2011-02-28T21:33:00.006Z

If you're going to be in Edinburgh any time between 4 and 14 March you might want to check this out. I'm probably not going to be in Edinburgh any time between 4 and 14 March but if I were going to be then I'd definitely be checking this out.

March 4 / 18.30 to 21.30
March 5-14 / 10.00 to 18.00
Old Ambulance Depot
77 Brunswick Street
Edinburgh

2011-02-28T19:27:00.016Z

I'm in the Hamburger Kunsthalle as I write, the museum Pop Life travelled to after it's stay at Tate Modern. I'm eating chocolate buttons, looking out over the frozen lake, waiting for my friend Regina to finish work and remembering last night at Max Wigram's Gallery.

I was at Max's with an artist friend who likes to 'network' by approaching complete strangers she recognises – art world movers and shakers and whatnot – and saying "hello". The only problem is that once she's said "hello" she's not sure where to take the chat. So she's started to use the classic ice-breaker, "do you know Beverley?" whilst looking around at me apparently expectant that her latest victim / new friend will fall at my feet in awe. So far it hasn't been that successful.

With Nicholas Serota at a Marlborough pv a few months back a beastly chat ensued about women artists in Tate's Collection. I think he thought I was trying to have a go at him. Up went a wall of excruciatingly polite if slightly irritated defensiveness that meant the conversation went exactly nowhere. It was fair enough, I expect people have a go at him all the time about one tedious political issue after another – bloody BP, bloody women artists, bloody Turner Prize. I was just trying to be jolly but mea culpa, I should have said, "crumbs, Ai Weiwei's wonderful," and left it at that. Note to self for next time: you can't go wrong with a banality as long as it's generous and reasonably sincere.

With Jay Jopling, friend herself managed a question about Mona Hatoum's material of choice. "Errr, steel," said Jay, giving the work a friendly, slightly proprietorial pat, as though it were his PA's bottom.

With Max though I think we reached an all time high.
Friend: Max, did you know Beverley lives in the same road as you?
Max: Really? I live in Bassett Road
Me: So do I
Max: So do I
Me: So do I
Max: (blinks)
After that things just got better and better. Actually I shouldn't be a smart arse. Max was very nice and Edwin Burdis' work was not un-interesting.

The gallery walls were covered in cut out paper drawings of what I thought might have been mushrooms, my devout Catholic friend thought were used condoms but were actually, Max informed us, knives. Soft edged knives with tiny handles that wouldn't be very effective at their job. We were pondering on what this might signify when the performance began…

Burdis was sitting at a desk with a laptop on it, drinking a beer. Amidst the gallery chatter he started to sing. "Shake, rattle, we're in a hole…. shake, rattle we're in a hole… shake, rattle, we're in a hole… shake, rattle, we're in a hole…" over and over and over, sometimes faster, sometimes slower. He stood up and wandered about the gallery. Then he put a silk scarf over his head. Then he took it off and looked at us - the select gathered audience - a bit seductively or something like that, one eyebrow cheekily cocked. All the while singing, "shake, rattle, we're in a hole."

He was wearing blue tracksuit bottoms, a blue office-work type shirt with sweat rings, perhaps belying some level of anxiety or perhaps just because he was a bit warmish, and a pair of trainers. He had a good voice but I'm not sure that was the point being it was all chorus and no verse. I don't think he was singing us a song. I'm not quite sure what he was doing actually but it wasn't a problem, I still enjoyed it. If I only enjoyed things I understood I wouldn't be having a particularly fun time for the most part. And I wouldn't be learning anything either. So I'm OK with baffled.

After probably about 10 minutes or so "shake, rattle, we're in a hole…" stopped. There was a short not uncomfortable silence and then Mr Burdis, rather charmingly and modestly, nodded his head into his chin and with the words "that's that then," ambled towards his desk. Then everybody clapped and Max stepped up and thanked Edwin saying it takes "real bollocks" to get up and do such a thing.

Back in Hamburg and I've just looked around the exhibition entitled Overpainted. Smudged. Erased. The Portrait in the Twentieth Century. A wonderful museum and an interesting exhibition featuring, incidentally, twenty-two artists of which five were women. Twenty-three percent. I'm not sure what that tells me. Just that Overpainted. Smudged. Erased. features twenty-two artists of which five are women I suppose and, in a way, not a great lot else. We'll just leave it at that I think. Don't want to upset anybody unnecessarily.

2011-02-08T18:14:00.001Z

"I'm selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
Marilyn Monroe

2011-02-08T17:58:00.001Z

"Courage consists, however, in agreeing to flee rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges. Values, morals, homelands, religions, and these private certitudes that our vanity and our complacency bestow generously on us, have many deceptive sojourns as the world arranges for those who think they are standing straight and at ease, among stable things"
Gilles Deleuze Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

2011-02-08T17:22:00.000Z

"It is not the slumber of reason that engenders monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality."
Gilles Deleuze Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

2011-02-07T18:05:00.009Z

I've decided I spend far too much time thinking. Or rather not that I spend too much time thinking. Thinking's ok. But I spend far too much time taking the results of the activity of thinking seriously. Giving it top billing when really second or probably even third billing might be a more appropriate level for something that's, well, interesting enough, but possibly rather less reliable as a source of wisdom than it gets credit for.

It occurred to me recently that my pony is one of the smartest beings I know. Her IQ might not give me a run for my money, but the fact remains, she's constantly teaching me things I didn't know. Important things - about generosity and spontaneity and forgiveness and relationship. Does she spend all her time thinking? It's difficult to say with certainty but I definitely get the impression not. I definitely get the impression that it's not the thinking part of her being that's offering up the wisdom. And yet the decisions she makes, if the word decision can even be applied here, definitely seem to have more wisdom in them than the decisions I apparently make as a result of all this great weight of thinking that I like to busy myself with.

So I'm mulling over all of this. I've been mulling over all of this for a few years actually. And then last night I came across a passage in a yoga book a friend leant me:

"It is about feeling. It is not about thinking. Although I've come to understand that the heart does think, it's not the kind of thought that comes from my brain. The heart has its own intelligence."

Maybe that's what my pony's up to? She's heart thinking. Sounds good to me. I'm wondering if perhaps I can make a few more decision with my heart intelligence and give my poor tired wee brain a few days off.

And then today I was feeling awed all over again by my recollections of the Martin Creed work at Hauser & Wirth, so I listened to the artist's talk on Hauser's website and to Creed's excellent and hilarious and ridiculous and profound single that just so happens to be called Thinking / Not Thinking (Work-1090). It's 1 minute 40 seconds long with rather a catchy upbeat and the words, sung in his likeable unpretentious Glaswegian way, go:

"I was thinking
Then I wasn't thinking
And then I was thinking
Thinking
Not thinking"

I feel I'm in the presence of greatness listening to this and watching the accompanying video with the tiny dog trotting across the screen and then trotting back, and then the huge dog trotting across the screen and then trotting back. Perhaps it's rather like the light going on and off. But a bit different.

The dogs, Martin Creed says, represent thinking and not thinking.

"The small dog represents thinking and the big dog represents not thinking. The small dog is someone trying really hard to think and control things and the big dog is someone a little big clumsy and out of control. I think that not thinking is better than thinking. I prefer not thinking but I think it's really difficult to not think because when you're not thinking you can't know that you're not thinking because if you did know you'd be thinking so I think it's better to do things spontaneously and instinctively, but you can't control that because if you were controlling it then it wouldn't be spontaneous…. Thinking basically is just not going to get you anywhere… Don't think about it."

Yeah. I've been vindicated in my anti-rationalist madness not once but twice in two days. Thinking, it turns out, is for wimps.

In the North Gallery though Creed gets a bit more down and serious about showing us how to circumnavigate the intellect and go straight for the heart. The dogs lend an air of cuteness and humour to Creed's wisdom. North Gallery lends the gut wrenching, cold-sweat inducing, terror of God and all that surrounds us to the art historical mix. I love a bit of terror. It's where the real stuff's at. If you think it's not terrifying out there in the world then look again my friend, look again! It's no use kidding yourself. Ultimately it won't get you anywhere. Nowhere at all.

For me that's what 'great' art does. It's what great artists have always known. You can talk to the intellect of course, that's fine, that's great in fact, fascinating. But don't overlook the heart. The heart is where the real stuff goes on - the light stuff and the dark stuff, the blood, the gore and the divine. Overlook that at your peril. Sweep that under the carpet and there'll be all hell to pay.

Tennessee Williams once said of Jackson Pollock that he 'paints ecstasy as it cannot be written.' I suspect any attempt to describe the power of Creed's work in Hauser & Wirth's North Gallery will come up against a similar lack. Certainly any attempt I might make. So I guess I'll just have to urge you to go and see it for yourself. But as the friend I experienced it with said at the time: "Probably not for the faint hearted. Or those in therapy." You have been warned.

Martin Creed
'Mothers'
until 5 March
Hauser & Wirth
Savile Row
London

2011-02-01T14:57:00.004Z

"It's better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone."
Marilyn Monroe

2011-02-01T13:23:00.002Z

"These days my practice is teaching me to embrace imperfection: to have compassion for all the ways things haven't turned out as I planned, in my body and in my life - for the way things keep falling apart, and failing, and breaking down. It's less about fixing things, and more about learning to be present for exactly what is. It reminds me how futile are all my attempts to control my body and my life, and that when it comes right down to it, I can't control or hang onto anything that's really important. But it also reminds me that despite all this - or perhaps because of this - my life is precious and glorious. It's teaching me to find some sort of balance and ease in the uncertainty."
Anne Cushman

2011-01-27T16:01:00.004Z

Here's one I wrote earlier. Last June actually. I'm not sure why it has only just made it out into the world. Pablo Wendel was in Bloomberg contemporaries as well. Although I didn't see it because the gallery shut early on the penultimate day, very annoyingly. Bloody ICA. Rubbish....

Visiting degree shows is a bit like going round the sales. Most of what you see is crap but when you do stumble upon a gem, it's a blinder. So it was at the RCA this year. Profoundly unfathomable map of works in hand I trudged round dutifully, stood before a video of someone's bare bottom; bizarre mounds of Styrofoam; a bronze mountain covered in Bosch-esque tiny little people all vomiting or shitting or shagging and a muddle of other strange items.

Then I came to a wall that had been half knocked down. Or half built up. It was a white wall and in that sense fairly unobtrusive. But its disintegration brought it into focus, not as something to be automatically circumnavigated or an unseen support structure for something else, but as a thing in its own right. On the wall were copies of a publication Subject: Re: Accidentally on purpose Pablo Wendel. The cover showed a photograph of a grey door with a lock on it, a sign saying PUSH, another prohibiting smoking and a lot of grubby finger marks. Inside the publication was a series of questions sent by Pablo Wendel to various members of the college.

The questions included "what do you think is the role of studio architecture in influencing an artist's work ethic?", "should student and teacher be able to act independently and courageously in an institution?" and "what do you think about the colour grey?" The emailed replies were published verbatim along with snapshots of structural elements of the college - walls, doors, etc.

Pablo’s other piece of work was listed as 'Number 55, MA Squat, House 14/6/2010-2/7/2010 accessed via stairs in the yard'. I went to the yard. No stairs. Somebody directed me out of the front door and around the back of the building. Eventually I came across a plank come make-shift ladder leading over a low wall and into a deserted shop. Inside was a table with a sleeping bag on it lying open, recently vacated. The place was filthy. I could hear voices from the next room and felt I was intruding so I went back out and walked around to the front.

There I found Pablo Wendel, the artist who is squatting this one time chippie for the duration of his degree show. He invited me to sit on the greasy plastic seating and showed me a video, shot two days before, the day before his show opened to the examiners and two days before it opened to the public, showing two members of the College administrative team in luminous tabards telling him they’re about to destroy his work on health and safety grounds. Wendel's voice can be heard objecting, explaining that this represents the culmination of two years work and the crux of his degree show. His pleas were ignored. What is Art in the wake of the modern demi-God that is health and safety?

This grotty little tableau provides a poetic response to the questions Pablo poses, demonstrating how little anything matters to us beyond the shoring up our own positions of safety against the imagined threats of an atomised world. Not creativity. Not compassion.

Wendel’s provocative action along fault-lines of power and control, freedom and constraint, can be viewed in the context of the art college and its politicking – the institution that defines itself in terms of its free thinking rebellious nature - so long as that rebellion doesn’t cost it. Or it can be viewed in a more universal sense.

Either way there was a rawness to this work that could only be perceived viscerally. Always we want to find meaning in things, to pin down a work of art and extract from it objective knowledge for ourselves. We struggle with the leap into an intuitive way of knowing. But to try too hard to evoke meaning is to miss it altogether.

In a disused fish and chip shop on Parkgate Road I came across a young artist with so much in his heart that he was prepared to risk losing everything in his attempt to express what he felt as he felt it, unmediated by tacit obstruction or the need to conform.

This is what makes degree shows exhilarating. When you find the real thing you’ve found it in its raw form, before the very systems of control that Wendel is grappling with have succeeded in knocking its vitality into the cruel slumber of passivity or mannered negotiation from which it will likely never awaken.

2011-01-22T23:38:00.002Z

“The best way to communicate may be just to sit without saying anything. Then you will have the full meaning of Zen. If I use my staff on you until I lose myself, or until you die, still it will not be enough. The best way is just to sit.” xx
Suzuki-Roshi

2011-01-22T23:25:00.006Z

Gabriel Orozco is ‘lightweight’ apparently. According to Jackie Wullschlager in the FT at least. Maybe she’s got a point. But then she goes on to say that “no visitor can fail to be delighted by its elegance and imaginative wit”. She’s speaking about LA DS, one of Orozco’s most recognisable works, the old Citroen he found in a scrap yard in Paris, sliced lengthways into three, removed the middle chunk and the engine and then squashed back together to form a very skinny ex-car capable of going exactly nowhere.

So she likes that one then. And because she likes it she automatically concludes that ‘no visitor can fail to be delighted by it….”. Tiny bit subjective peut-etre? Subjectivity is, of course, fine. It’s impossible to be anything other than subjective. But what we can do is acknowledge that subjectivity, rather than project our every unprocessed whim onto the entire human population. Frankly, that seems to me to be a bit lightweight.

Although it urks me even to begin to agree with an opinion so dated and out of touch in its self-importance, I have to acknowledge that I did experience an absence of chutzpah in the atmosphere at the Orozco exhibition that I found difficult to get to grips with. Something seemed to be missing.

Sometimes one enters an exhibition and finds the raw energy pounds off the work with such vitality and authenticity that it enters the viewer’s body viscerally before one’s even really looked at or begun to engage with it intellectually. Something more elemental than rationalisation and critique is going on. And that’s a very exciting thing. For me, that’s the power of art that’s akin to the divine; the experience of life and art and something else, some unnameable magic, merging into an experience that can be, if we let it, thunderously meaningful. Something so significant it goes beyond the reasoning mind and its constant need to label, order and control.

For me that didn’t happen with Orozco’s work. Something fell a bit flat. There were objects and sure they were quite interesting objects. Possibly about the idea that we’re so busy thinking we’re going somewhere that we’ve failed to notice that actually we’re going nowhere. The car has no engine, the box no shoes, the elevator no shaft etc. And then, of course, the skull and the obits; the momento mori; we’re all going to die. The lint; we’re ephemeral. Yes, quite. It’s all good old fashioned art historical stuff, presented in a pleasing contemporary-ish way.

There was no growl in the belly though. No meat on the bone. No raw power. Even so I can’t help finding it a bit limited as a critic, as an art historian, as a human being, to assume that any shortcoming one experiences in an exhibition is somehow the direct result of a shortcoming on the part of the artist. Maybe that lifelessness in the atmosphere had its own point to make. The work is, after all, concerned with death, transience, impermanence.

What I did have a problem with though was the curatorial decision to try and bulk out the sculptural work with a sea of photography. I wonder if this didn’t perhaps add to the air of listlessness, giving the impression that neither artist nor curator were confident enough in the sculptural work to let it hold the space. Maybe this stuff would have been much more powerful if its thunder hadn’t been stolen by an overwhelming set of own goals. You can’t show everything. Sometimes bold choices have to be made.

Seeing on the video as we left Orozco’s assertion that actually the work isn’t banal, simply the viewer has to put effort in as well, also felt sad and undermining. Obviously it’s true. The viewer will only ever get back what the viewer puts in. But that the artist feels the need to explain that before the viewer has even entered the space doesn’t garner confidence. Maybe confidence is the key. Faith, confidence, belief. Doubt crept in at a fundamental level. Artistic doubt. Curatorial doubt. Once doubt has got it claws into you you’re doomed. We’re all doomed. Even bloody Wullschlager and her naive universalising assumptions. Doomed.

2011-01-15T21:00:00.015Z

I found out this week that somebody I had thought felt some love towards me, even if was only just a tiny bit, actually doesn’t care about me whatsoever. Or rather I don’t know that they don’t care about me whatsoever but I feel as though they don’t, which is more or less the same thing. Because what’s the use of caring about someone if they don’t know you care?

So when I discovered this fact, ie that I am a poor uncared for soul, at least in respect of this particular person, I thought “…oh!” And after I’d thought “…oh!” for a bit, I spotted my Dior handbag - on the end of my arm you understand - hurtling at speed towards the head of the unloving being. Then I heard the unloving being say, “Jesus!” Then I stood up, picked up my coat and walked calmly out of the café.

Which is OK you know. Sure, it wasn’t my finest moment spiritually speaking but… it just was what it just was. And it did have one redeeming feature. It provided literally hours of amusement amongst my girlfriends. I couldn’t believe it. As I recounted my horrible behaviour with my head held ashamedly in my hands one friend in particular laughed so hard I thought she was having an asthma attack. Even a dharma teacher described it as ‘a little bit hilarious’. So I guess it’s not the end of the world. If there’s one thing you can rely on your girlfriends to do, they will tell you when it’s the end of the world.

Anyway, as luck would have it I’d been planning a trip to Kate MacGarry to see Chicks on Speed and my violent assault on another in Café Nero didn’t seem to be reason enough to deflect from that plan. In fact if there’s any reason to go and see Chicks on Speed this is surely it. What better balm for the soul (and yet more man problems in the absence of Gloria Gaynor) than what MacGarry’s press release describes as “their no-nonsense approach to self-display, sensory pleasure and forthright femininity that places them squarely in the post-feminist camp, where what the lady wants, the lady gets on and does.” Doesn’t that just make you feel good? I’m not even joking. No irony involved here. It makes me feel so goddam happy.

The transformative power of art I find endlessly awe inspiring and humbling. Suddenly I feel like it’s going to be ok. It might not be how I ‘planned’ it, but it will be ok. In fact, it almost definitely won’t be how I planned it, but still, it will be ok. So my new plan for 2011 is not to have a plan. A specifically no plan plan. I’ll do things, of course I’ll do things, but I’ll try and let them come to me a bit more rather than chasing around after what I think I want. Because life doesn’t necessarily bring you what you want, but maybe it does bring you what you need. And for once I’m going to try and embrace that rather than incessantly picking and choosing - this but not that; that but not this. Manipulating, plotting, scheming my life away – just a bit less of those things for twelve months and we’ll see how it goes.

Because let’s face it, we’re all going to be dead before long and I guess we’re not likely to be able to plan that. That kind of thing just happens when it happens. So I might as well start to have a tentative little go at the planless plan. That’s what’s happening anyway so I might as well start to acknowledge it at least.

After the supa-cool E-shoes – wearable guitars with sound producing sensory strings that these extraordinary and upliftingly bananas women wear for their performances – I potter off to Nettie Horn.

Nettie Horn isn’t usually my favourite gallery on Vyner Street but this was definitely one of the best 40 minutes I’ve spent in a gallery in a long time. I’m not sure if that’s attributable to my state of mind at that particular moment or if this really is one of the most glorious pieces of work ever made. A bit of both possibly.

From Here to Eternity is a film by Oliver Pietsch that consists of 40 minutes of movie clips about human death montaged into one fabulous whole. It sounds slightly grim. But it is so not. It’s marvellous. Watching it was like being hit by an emotional double decker bus over and over again until at some point even my will to resist expired and I found myself lying there on my bean bag in a blacked out Nettie Horn with a bunch of strangers I couldn’t see and with not an ounce of tension in my body, feeling totally at peace with the world. Well, maybe not totally at peace, but some level of acceptance had arrived that I don’t think I’ve experienced before. Suddenly what had been quite profoundly un-ok, was… ok.

This catastrophic tragedy we call life – by which I mean the fact that everything we love we lose, like everything everything - suddenly didn’t seem so bad. The fact that I could be pushing up the daisies as soon as this time next week – allowing a few days for the funeral arrangements etc., wheels put in motion and what not, suddenly seemed ok. And not in a morbid way. I feel happy. It’s fine. It’s a no plan plan. What a bloody relief. At some point I will die and I have absolutely no idea when that might be nor any control over it. I don’t have to do a thing. It will work out all by itself. Thank the Lord. And that’s what makes this a great piece of film. I’d go as far as to use the film critics favourite January accolade – I’d go as far as to say this is the best film of the year.

So, if like me you’ve had a bit of bad news, maybe you’ve just walloped someone with your handbag on Elgin Crescent and you’re not feeling that top notch about it, then go to Bethnal Green and check out From Here to Eternity. I promise you nothing is going to cheer you up like 40 minutes of death and dying. It’s a joy. An utter joy.

2011-01-13T13:43:00.001Z

Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott

2011-01-13T13:20:00.005Z

Having to queue up to get into a commercial gallery for a Tuesday night private view is a slightly tiresome thing. Not being allowed to take your glass of plonk into said exhibition due to overcrowding doubly so. If it hadn't been Sprüth Magers I'd have stropped off home. As it was I satisfied myself with a small claustrophobia attack in the back room before hurling myself through the crowds and back into the fresh air. Where do all these people come from? I thought the art world was supposed to be small. Private views are turning into the upmarket equivalent of a football match. There's a serious risk of those at the front being crushed to death as those at the back just keep on piling in.

But with an indescribably awesome aircraft hanger-esque space in Oranienburger Straße Berlin and at the other end of the spectrum this quirky little ex-Medici gallery in Grafton Street Sprüth Magers are a stylish set up. I also seem to intuit a sense of integrity in Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers that died off long ago in most gallerists who've achieved anywhere near their level of success.

The difficulty with success of course is that it’s a honeytrap. Once it's got you in its sickly sweet and sticky paws you can't bear to lose it. Selling your soul, grandmother, artists up the river seems to be simply the hors d'oeuvres in the art world these days. Luckily all of that's never been too much of a problem for me! And whilst it could be a problem for Sprüth Magers they don't seem to let it be.

I'm also a sucker for the slightly feminist ideals lying low somewhere behind Sprüth Magers. I don't want to presume but I believe Monika Sprüth particularly is of such a bent. In the 1980s she set up radical magazine Eau de Cologne giving a voice to conceptual and feminist artists such as Rosemary Trockel, Barbara Kruger and creator of the solo show currently gracing Grafton Street, Cindy Sherman.

The work, considering it was Cindy Sherman, didn't grab me all that much at the time. Initially her work depends upon some sort of recognition of the stereotypes she's evoking I think and I didn't get a particularly strong feel for whatever they might be whilst I was in the gallery. But over a couple of days it's grown on me through my memories of it. There was a potent sense of tragedy that was difficult to be with but retrospectively seems important.

I also enjoyed the fact that the work seemed to be far too large for the space, so each of the self-portrait figures loomed huge over the tiny packed rooms like domestic dominatrices, deities to the religion of middle class perversion and denial. One character sported a revolting yellow pudding bowl and almost frighteningly gormless expression whilst mysteriously cradling a handful of leeks. My favourite wore an expression of melancholy along with a skin coloured track suit type thing with stick on boobs and bush whilst she gripped onto a very phallically placed sword. Come to think of it maybe the leeks were a bit phallic too.

All the figures stood before rather than within monochromatic romantic style landscapes that self mirrored like a Rorschach test. The whole schema decorated the gallery as a mural rather than discrete images, increasing the sense of overwhelment and oppression and also making it tricky to find a spot of wall upon which to lean whilst one got one's ear bent by yet another aggressively self publicising curator / artist / vapid hanger-on. But never mind, it wouldn't be a private view without all that. It's not about the art you know!

2010-12-05T20:39:00.006Z

I went to Cirencester for lunch the other day. You know you’re getting on when you hear yourself saying you went to Cirencester for lunch. OK, not all the way from London. I’m not that old thank you. I haven’t started drawing up lists of restaurants yet and traversing the country in search of gastronomic paradise. No, I was staying with friends near Cheltenham.

We went to a place called Bobs. Bob gets a big talking up over those parts. Bob’s quiche. Bob’s lasagne. Bob’s cappuccino. Bob. Bob. Bob. Ex-Bibendum you know. Apparently the Catholic Church is considering issuing canonisations for the best plate of scrambled eggs outside the M25. And why not? Bob has led a life of almost perfect epicurean virtue. In the egg department certainly. A plate of scrambled eggs in the Shires is much the same as a plate of srcambled eggs in London if you ask me. But when in Rome you know, one’s got to get into these things.

Bob was sporting a movember when we went. Very dashing. Or at least very noble. And who cares about looks when you have virtue on your side? Well, me I suppose. Virtue’s never really done it for me. There was a hint of the rogue about Bob though that I rather fell for. Although perhaps that was more the mustachio. Anyway, facial hair aside as it were, we bellied up to enjoy our cappuccinos and found ourselves looking straight into the chef’s pit. Although I’m not much of a gourmet I do enjoy a visual feast and this was definitely one such. I’ve never seen food prepared with so little effort. It was quite wonderous.

It did cross my mind though that Bob might want to have a little look at the lighting he’s got there. Mood is one thing but this seemed to totter dangerously close to the wrong side of semi-darkness. I had a bit of a job reading my menu actually. And I was quite horrified as I was manoeuvring it discreetly nearer a light source when my friend barked rather too assertively I though: “if you can’t read your menu without moving it under the light Bev it means you need spectacles.” Spectacles? I don’t think so darling. I don’t know, you know someone since you’re eleven and suddenly they think they can say anything to a person and that’ll be fine. It’s perfectly shocking.

When I got back to town I phoned a friend or two. Friend One (who shall remain anonymous to protect the guilty) said she’d had a funny turn in the British Library recently and had gone home on the bus sobbing certain she had a brain tumour. Her husband suggested a trip to the optometrist and… guess what. Friend Two recounted the story of home improvements: “Oh,” she said, “I spent thousands of pounds having the entire house re-wired and fitting ten extra spots in each room before I acknowledged the fact that what I really needed to do was go to the chemist and get some glasses.”

Right. The “accoutrement of old age” it is then. Good. In that case I shall certainly be needing an older man. The one thing guaranteed to make a girl feel younger is hanging out with someone half as old again. And of course they do tend to be more interesting. I shan’t be going back to Cirencester though. Bibendum or no, that was one emotionally expensive plate of eggs.

2010-12-05T14:21:00.004Z

Finally, I am a convert to Shakespeare. Finally, I do believe, I’m starting to get it. Which is to say I watched a Shakespeare play from start to finish last week without once glancing at my watch. I’d go as far as to say I thoroughly enjoyed it.

I feel very pleased with myself. It’s not dissimilar to the experience I had the first time I watched the X-factor just the other week. I felt a whole new world opening up to me. Suddenly I had some connection with this thing huge swathes of the population spend their time engaged with. It’s a bit like the difference between going to France as a French speaker and going to France as a non-French speaker. Either way you’ll get by, but one way reaches out whilst the other withdraws into itself. Shakespeare and the X Factor. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. Although admittedly Shakespeare probably does penetrating observation with a soupcon more depth. On the other hand, that Simon Cowell… nobody’s fool.

It had been the vicar was supposed to be in charge of my induction to Shakespeare. But that never got off the ground somehow. And now we’re not speaking. C’est la vie. Luckily I seem to have stumbled upon what could turn out to be a rather better instructress. She suggested we start with the easy stuff and I appreciated the gesture. She’s from California you know - a little less snobby than our home grown and occasionally somewhat self-aggrandising literary types. As You Like It. Or As You Like It as George Bernard Shaw apparently liked to refer to it, presumably by way of indicating that he himself in fact didn’t that much like it. Ghastly crowd pleaser I suppose he thought. Personally I’m not averse to a crowd pleaser now and then. Apart from Gauguin obviously. But a Seventeenth-Century precursor to Friends with a bit of cross-dressing thrown in. Smashing. Just up my street as it goes.

I was rather mesmerised by Phebe, the frighteningly un-self-reflexive character who pours scorn upon the skinny little wet lettuce Silvius and his continual professions to her of his undying love, whilst she in turn professes her unrequited and thereby undying love to Ganymede, aka of course the charming and beautiful Rosalind. Rosalind - smart enough to acknowledge the foolishness of romantic love without wishing to ostracise it for those foolishnesses. A balanced life which contains no loss of balance is not a balanced life. Sadly one cannot simply delete those parts of oneself that one finds a little unsophisticated. And denial is far easier, but ultimately far more damaging, than acceptance. No amount of health and safety precautions will ever immunise us against this life. In the famous words of (apparently) one of the greatest heavyweights of all time: “you can run but you can’t hide”.

So, all of this and more, free of charge save for a donation if you feel so moved, at Lamda until 9 December. Complete with well stocked, reasonably priced bar and a beautifully simple and effective set designed by Richard Bullwinkle. Bollocks to Jude Law I say. Check out the next generation in a theatre the size of your lounge.

“If thou remember’st not the slightest folly
That ever love did make thee run into
Thou has not loved”
As You Like it by William Shakespeare (2.4.36)

2010-10-30T20:37:00.003+01:00

I used to think the problem with film critics was that they couldn't seem to enjoy the ordinary stuff that everyone else likes. Presumably they've seen it all before and after a while the same old same old doesn't quite hit the spot. Which is understandable. However, I haven't seen it all before and when I go to the movies I want to have a nice time. I want to check out of my day-to-day frustrations and be amused. I'm after the cheesy feel good flick sense that everything's somehow going to be ok. Can't I just have a fun time at the movies?

I notice now though that where art reviews are concerned I'm going the way of the erstwhile scorned film critic. I begin to get where he's coming from. Once your relationship with something gets to a certain point you start to see it differently. You begin to engage with it rather than letting it wash over you. I'm not saying one scenario is any better than the other. I'm just making the observation that that seems to be what happens.

So, Mark Kermonde, with your ridiculous comedy barnet, I apologise for my glib dismissal of your valiant efforts. And to anyone going to Tate Modern this week-end to enjoy an afternoon of escapism and Great British queuing, I apologise to you also, because part of me feels I'm being a terrible spoil sport about this whole thing. I know we all love Gauguin, I really do. But the problem I've got is that once I began to actually see these paintings it became impossible for me to go back to viewing them in that semi-somnatic numbed out kind of a way. I can't just see what I'm told to see any more.

So, as I heaved my way through the beastly gaggle of Gauguin worshipers last week, vaguely wondering when quite I'd signed up for this kind of horror, I remembered last year Tate Modern being flooded with Scotland Yard over allegations of obscenity. Pop Life was temporarily closed down and the exhibition catalogue withdrawn from sale. Eventually the offending work, Richard Prince's Spiritual America (1983) a found image of a naked ten year old Brooke Shields staring provocatively into the camera, was taken down and the exhibition was re-opened.

It wasn't a decision I agreed with particularly being as it didn't take into account the fundamentally questioning nature of Prince's work. But, be that as it may, if the rule of thumb is no images of sexualised under age girls then I'm spotting a discontinuity here. Whether one's a fan of Gauguin's work or not, the fact is that from 1891 onwards his oeuvre does include, amongst other things, images of sexualised under age girls. And several such images are currently on show at Tate Modern.

OK, so Brooke Shields is a famous American and these were unknown Polynesians. The image of Brooke Shields is photographic; these are in oils. Other than that…

But of course there is a fundamental difference. Richard Prince's work held up a found image, taken a decade earlier by one time Playboy photographer Garry Gross, with the intention of reflecting society back at itself. Prince's idea, I believe, was to show us that element of our societal whole which we don't see because firstly, it's distasteful and we don't want to see it, and secondly, we've become so used to it we aren't any longer really even able to see it without its being intentionally displaced. So in a way the work was validated by its removal. We didn't want to hear what he was telling us about ourselves.

Gauguin, on the other hand, as well as making pretty paintings out of these under-age models, had also slept with most of them. Not to mention given them syphilis so that they, like him, would eventually die a long and painful death. So one could perhaps build a case to suggest that Gauguin's work, on some levels, is actually more morally conflicted than Prince's.

I really hope I don't sound too much of a bleeding heart liberal about this, flying the flag for the put upon underdog and getting all shirty about the exoticised 'primitive' and the objectified female. That would be fairly ungroovy. It would also be ungroovy to measure work made a hundred and twenty years ago by today's politically correct yard stick. Gauguin bashing isn't my intention particularly. I'm just saying it's amazing how often we don't see the very thing we're looking at. And I'm also saying, rather snobbily I suppose, that it's quite funny watching this mass congregation of orthodox Middle England gazing up adoringly at what, in some lights, could be seen as one man's self created porn collection.

2010-09-28T14:34:00.009+01:00

Some pleasant things happen and some unpleasant things happen. My back has stopped hurting but the internet keeps breaking down. I've made up with someone I'd fallen out with who I'd been missing terribly, whilst another friend has flung himself from the Christmas card list without a backward glance. I've been invited to write for a new arts website and to curate for a gallery I like, but Surrey Police seem to want to prosecute me for driving down the A3 at 64mph. And why must people insist on telling me what to do? It's not cricket telling a person what to do. In fact it's deeply boorish.

So in a word it all seems vaguely unsatisfactory. Which I suppose beats deeply unsatisfactory. But, funnily enough, only just.

I keep trying to remind myself that life is what's happening now. It's not a state of perfection that's waiting around the corner for me. No, I think this might be it. This mildly irritating state of things never being entirely as you'd hoped. It occurred to me in the bath last night that if I keep on waiting for the arrival of this wonderful state of being that exists around the next corner I may end up missing the point altogether.

I was feeling desperately glum about it all on Friday; that feeling whereby you can't seem to put one foot in front of the other. Somehow I dragged myself to Deptford X. And I was glad I had because London's 'foremost contemporary visual arts festival's lead artist' Mark Titchner cheered me up. His work is at the Old Police Station I think. Actually I didn't make it that far due to a bit of a snarl up in the New Cross area. But his statement of intent for the festival was enough:

"Grand and spectacular, ephemeral or concealed, art qualified and created by daily life... It doesn't matter what 'it' happens to be, but 'it' is experienced and 'it' is lived… Not art but everyday life. Get up, go to work, come home, get up, go work, come home but with an added element, something that wasn't there the day before, something that actually makes you think about all this routine, this place we live and call life. Ridiculous, odd, generous, pretentious and maybe a bit stupid but something that reminds us that real life is not elsewhere. It's here."

You really need to give Deptford X more than the few private view hours I allotted it. There are some satisfyingly unexpected nooks and crannies you're likely to miss if you rush it. Like Matthew Verdon's subtle intervention borrowing from David Hammons on Deptford High Street: "THE LESS DO, THE MORE OF AN ART ST AM." Quite profound. And Shelley Theodore's quiet photograph of the curtained front of Café 187 at 182 Deptford High Street, installed on the wall facing the café. Yes, I missed all that rather annoyingly. Story of my life. I missed it because I was busy dashing elsewhere.

I didn't miss World Within Worlds at BEARSPACE though, curated by the charming Julia Alvarez. I didn't entirely understand World Within Worlds. But then I was in a rush to get to the APT Gallery for an 8.30pm performance by Mark McGowan that promised to be delightfully bonkers, despite being set against the backdrop of a tedious display from the Goldsmiths' Photography and Urban Cultures MA that exuded an intolerable air of mind-numbing right-on-ness.

Mark McGowan wore a cardboard box on his head with a photograph of Raoul Moat sellotaped to the front of it and held beneath his chin two bits of tied together curtain pole purporting to be a gun. He told the story from Raoul's angle; Raoul's tragedy as it were, with a bit of comedy thrown in. I believe he was trying to point out there is always more than one perspective on a situation and that, in a way, it's all fiction. I thought he did brilliantly. Bravo! There's been a furore in the red tops though: '"Sick" Raoul Moat play is like Shakespeare claims writer'. People don't like it when you mess with their archetypes it would seem. Tack up your high horses folks.

Other than that I managed to find time to get chatted up by a sweet dyke at the Arch Gallery, so that was nice. Not my type, but it's reassuring to feel included. The photographs there by Peter Anderson had that pop thing going on. You liked them straight away. It’s a red herring that actually.

It's on until 3 October, Deptford X. I should probably go back next week-end and see some of the things I missed first time around. I won't though. I never do. Always on to the next thing. It'll all be better tomorrow. Who knows, bloody internet might even be working.

2010-09-22T15:24:00.011+01:00

I quite like being frightened in some ways. Not terror probably. Just enough of the frighteners to remind me that nothing's for certain, nothing's really known. I reckon it's good for me. I'm starting to think certainty is an illusion and an unhealthy one at that. In a funny way I like to be reminded how thin is the line between life and death, between things being predictable and comfortable and things being in a state of total chaos. And that however uncomfortable we might be with that there's nothing we can do about it. No amount of extortionate insurance policies or anti-aging creams will protect us from life. Or death. Remembering that teaches me a bit of respect I think, and a bit of compassion somehow.

I was driving up the M6 with my Dad last week-end when he told me the story of a mini-bus carrying a football team back home after an away match one winter's evening. A couple of the players needed to pee so the mini-bus pulled over on the hard shoulder. They got out and hopped over the railing onto what they thought was the grass verge. But the mini-bus had stopped on the Thelwell viaduct. Three healthy young blokes vaulted over the railings to a 100 foot drop into the freezing cold waters of the River Mersey and were carried away to their deaths.

The other month my triathlete friend asked me to write a children's story for her to illustrate for her daughter.
"Oh yippee skip," I said, "as long as it can be something really grisly and gory."
"Well" she said, "I'd been thinking more along the lines of Slinkey Malinki, but I knew I could count on you to come up with something off the beaten track."

I was just about to embark upon my don't-give-up-the-day-job new career as the Bridget Jones era's answer to the Brothers Grimm when, to my vague disgruntlement, I stumbled upon the latest offering of those other infamously gruesome siblings, the ultimate Generation X frontmen, The Chapman Brothers. But disgruntlement turned to reverence in the face of such awesomely stylish fear-mongering.

Innocent cartoonic line drawings superimposed over monstrous etchings of those bizarre bum faced children that the brothers are so keen on; or a schmaltzy stylized deer with an explosion of eyes and teeth and bits of brain where its head should be; or an irritatingly cutesy little red riding hood character offering a buttercup to a blue bird in a tree, unawares of the gigantic spider creeping up behind her on its hairy black legs, with its one overgrown eye on her and saliva dribbling from its fangs. Eiks, eiks, eiks. I had started to become vaguely tired of the Fuck Face thing after one particularly repetitive Frieze season a few years back, but I now find myself welcoming the Chapman Circus back into town with cries of wonderment.

I went to a talk they gave in 2000, I can't even remember where it was now, but it was attended largely by students and art historians as I remember. The brothers were giving the talk what I suppose one might call a Deleuzian twist. Not so much a twist as a knife through the heart as it turned out. I didn't understand a word they said of course, but I did at least have some vague idea what they were getting at. Others were a little less accommodating and the pair got boo-ed off the podium. It seemed to fit quite well in the context of their relationship with the absurd and it was rather funny. I know, my sense of humour isn't the most adult. Then again that's probably why I like the Chapmans. I like their irreverence and their anarchic anti-rationalism. The silliness of it all. Reason these days seems to be this preposterous holy grain we bow down before without even a second thought. But I'm afraid, just because something appears to make sense does not make it true or even useful particularly, in fact probably quite the opposite. Something can appear to be the most reasonable thing in the world if its case is put forward by someone intelligent and articulate, but that doesn’t stop it being utter bollocks. Blind faith in reason, it seems to me, is extremely limiting. No, I'm with the Chapmans on this one.

Almost as good as the Children's Art Commission for Whitechapel is this video shot at the Chapmans studio in East London by their Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Kylie. Ludicrous. But oddly enough, it does give a fresh perspective. Suddenly you almost are that dog. http://www.guardian.co.uk

But the last line has to go to the brothers themselves. One can't really paraphrase their genius. "I don't think artists can do anything. An artist can only add shit to shit. Dinos once said, 'Our art is potty-training for adults.' He got that about right."

2010-09-16T11:25:00.006+01:00

How bizarre when you're actually in an immersive installation and someone with a heavy South American accent wearing a vaguely confused expression asks you where the exhibition is. World's collide. Poor fellow.

But in a way I suppose that's the point of Mike Nelson's Coral Reef. Bewilderment and dumbfoundedness are what it's getting at. Only for some people it's working so well they don't even know it's art. They think they're just lost. It’s the difference between knowing you're lost and being so lost that you don't even know you're lost. Or no, that doesn't make sense. Or does it? No. Being lost but not knowing that actually you're not lost. Actually you're there already. There is nothing more to look for. Yes, that's it. Hopefully that's clear. But then in Coral Reef even if you know you're not technically lost, that you're already there, you still end up kind of lost in the sense that you don't know where you are, you don't know the way out, but you do know that that's ok, you'll stumble upon the way out eventually, so there's no particular point in looking for a way out. You may as well just enjoy the experience until the way out presents itself. Although enjoy might not be the right word either. It's fascinating and it's brilliant but I'm not sure it's quite a pleasure. More an introduction to fear. Your own and our own. Society's horrible lostness.

A few days after I'd seen Coral Reef I instructed my friend Nicks who lives over the bridge in Vauxhall to get over there a-sap. It's that kind of a thing. You want your friends to check it out at all costs. So she calls me up from Tate in full on Challenge Anneka mode.
"OK darling, I'm in the entrance way on the river side. Where do I go?"
Five minutes later and neither of us any closer to figuring out where she ought to be heading when finally it dawns on me:
"You are in Tate Britain Nicks?"
"Err, no. I thought you said Tate Modern."
"No."
"Right, (long pause) I'll call you in half an hour."
Half an hour later and I'm busy or I don't hear the phone or something. So about an hour later I get two messages. The first informing me that she's now standing in the Duveen Galleries and where does she go. And the second, half an hour after that, in urgent tones: "Bev, call me, I think I'm going into shock, I can't do this on my own. I'm having a sit down to try and bring my heart rate back." And then a protracted silence.
This is the effect Coral Reef has on a person.

Which is odd considering it's just a series of empty rooms with a few adjoining corridors. That's exactly it though I think. It's the emptiness. The absense. It's not something we allow ourselves to acknowledge very often and here suddenly we're dropped into the middle of it, no questions asked, no map, no labels, no clues, no indication that anything does or ought to mean anything. It's just empty. No wonder my South American journey mate was looking so lost. It can't be this. This is empty. What's one supposed to do with empty? Well. Quite.

Coral Reef was first show at Matt's Gallery in 2000 and is currently on show at Tate Britain. Mike Nelson is to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale 2011.

2010-08-18T13:46:00.001+01:00

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte

2010-08-09T22:05:00.007+01:00

I went to the London Triathlon at the week-end to cheer on my buddy who was competing. A staggering thirteen thousand tri-athletes pumping their way around the ExCel area of Wapping. Yep, no idea why there’s a capital in the middle of that word either, but there really are that many nutters out there. Seeing that much flesh squeezed into lycra all on one day can’t be good for a person.

Vernon Kay was there - competing. What a tool. Jenson Button on the other hand… I do like a man on a bicycle. But the best moment was when some legend on a Boris bike accidentally found himself on the cycle leg wobbling towards the Limehouse Basin with a bunch of flowers in his basket and folks in luminous skin tight all-in-ones and curiously shaped helmets roaring past at terrifying speeds. You couldn’t make this stuff up. When the Marshall began to whistle frantically and presumably it started to dawn on the fellow that something might be amiss, he stopped in the middle of the track and dismounted.

For some extraordinary reason the whole day was so exhausting I had to go to bed at 9 o’clock. All I’d done was stand by the side of the road and yell, “go Heids, go, wooooooh, you’re looking good babe…” at the shattered figure who tottered by every thirty minutes or so. How can that be tiring? I like to think I was giving her my energy or something, vicariously experiencing her exhaustion with my incredible powers of empathy. Thank goodness I wasn’t also vicariously experiencing the bottom chafing after 40 klicks in the saddle.

As well as on the athletics appreciation front it was also a fairly gratifying week-end on more familiar territory. Tate Towers has done it again people. Actually they’ve excelled themselves. Exceeded expectation by a long cheese. I’ll never look at a red Beetle again without feeling a knot of anxiety in my chest. Neither will I ever again go to Tate Modern on a Sunday. Friday night. Dead as the grave. Me and the vicar even managed to get a seat on the river view side in the member’s caff without having to punch anyone out of the way. It’s easier to get a seat on the lap of the great Sir Nicholas of Bankside himself.

The thing about Francis Alys’s work is that it can always be read in one of two ways. Technically it can always be read in an infinite number of ways, life being a unique experience for each of us. But on a fairly simplistic level, I’m just suggesting his work can usually be read either as a social commentary on whatever political situation each piece is narratively involved with - usually Mexico’s complex socio-political goings on as Alys moved to Mexico City 1986 and has lived there ever since. Or it can be read existentially.

I’m no philosopher of course, but in the limited degree to which I do attempt to engage my wee brain in matters of significance, I find myself to be an existentialist through and through. So it makes me very happy to encounter Alys’s work in this way whilst also appreciating that this is only one side of the story. I just prefer to leave politics to others more engaged with it than I. Which is, basically, just about everyone. I’m simply not qualified. I don’t even read the newspaper. The way I see it, what’s the point? It’s always bad news that makes me feel shit about the world. What more do I need to know? When something genuinely gripping happens someone always tells me. I am aware that Michael Jackson’s dead and Nicolas Sarkozy’s married to someone half his age. Beyond that life’s too short for pickling my brain in the negativity of the world’s baser goings on.

But who’d have thought that watching a red beetle driving down a dirt track hill and up the other side could be so engaging and so emotive. It’s quite a thing. Accompanied by the rousing sound track of a Tijuana brass band in rehearsal the little red Beetle heads off down the hill. Every time the band starts up off he trundles. Every time the band stops the driver takes his foot off the pedal and progress comes to a halt. Not only does it come to a halt, being half way up a hill, the plucky little fellow – the car becomes completely anthropomorphised almost immediately – rolls back down. Then the band starts up and he sets off once again, trundling first down and then struggling valiantly up the other side.

At first one feels hopeful that at some point he might make it to the top. For a good five minutes the viewer believes herself to be simply waiting for the moment at which our little friend will over-come this acoustic obstacle and reach his goal.

Then gradually the car become the underdog and now with some humour we continue to will him on to victory. But after a little longer still we started to become a bit cross. This foolish car refuses to learn his lesson. What sort of an idiot follows the same course time and again imaging that the results will be different next time? Then, after about twenty minutes I got past even that and I simply no longer cared what happened to this preposterous character. After which point it wasn’t long before I decided that to continue watching the film was to do the same as the car – that is to repeat the same action whilst expecting a different outcome. So I left the room, ostensibly to see the rest of the exhibition. But was I leaving because I was moving beyond the futility or because I couldn’t bear to watch it any more? Probably I suspect the later, although I like to tell myself it was the former.

A funny thing was when we were in the next room and we heard the music start up for the millionth time the vicar dashed back in to see if the car made it to the top this time. Of course it didn’t. The failure was in-built. I think. But of course, I didn’t stay to the very end did I? I bailed out after twenty-five minutes. That wasn’t bad going under the circumstances, but I didn’t actually see the very end. Maybe I wanted to retain some hope, to hold on to the oh so remote possibility that at some point the car might have made it to the top of the hill and lived happily ever after. I’d love to believe that. I so would. But I suspect that, unlike the triathlon, there is no neat little finish line, no win or lose. There’s just on and on, on and on, on and on…

2010-07-28T22:29:00.022+01:00

I got a bootie call last night. I'm fairly sure that's what it was although I haven't had one before so I'm not quite up to speed. I didn't know what to do. Answer it? Not answer it? Rather embarrassing to admit but I was freaking out slightly. So I let it go to answer machine and then pretended it hadn't happened. Didn't mention a word about it to the person and neither did he. Was that totally yellow or have I suddenly developed a sagacious streak?

Perhaps it's me with only one thing on the brain? Perhaps he was just calling to say hello. At ten o'clock at night, when he'd only seen me half and hour earlier. Well, if it is me, it's certainly not just me, as I discovered on a visit to Pilar Corrias' super-sexy Koolhaus gallery. Pilar Corrias is one of my favourite London art spots, but you can't win 'em all and whilst Purity is a Myth was an ok show it didn't really light my fire that much. There's only so excited I can get about yet another abstract canvas in 2010 I'm afraid.

What was quite interesting though was the stuff lying on the floor in the downstairs gallery. If anybody's not afraid to admit he's got one thing on the brain, it's this man. What turned out to be a bunch of Leigh Ledare photographs was propped up on storage rugs, presumably not selected for his current show at the uber-hip GuidoCosta Projects, Turin – the solo exhibition brilliantly titled Le Tit. I've spent a lot of time coming up with exhibition titles and let me tell you Le Tit takes some beating.

So what was it that drew me in? Well, first off, it's probably fair to say that Leigh Ledare's work is transgressive and I like someone who's not afraid to stick their neck out. He ventures where most would not. But that, in itself, isn't enough. There's far more going on here than plain vanilla over stepping the mark.

Ledare is grappling with the complexities of the mother son relationship, or perhaps any parent child relationship, which, by its very nature, is fraught stuff. What I love is that he gets stuck in there without the slightest regard for socially acceptable bite sized notions of what this minefield of a relationship might be or where its boundaries should lie. To suggest that he's presenting us with shock material just for the sake of it is to approach the work either too literally, or with a lack of honesty and imagination. The viewer needs to give otherwise they will get nothing back. As in life, so in art. It's not a passive journey.

Human relationships are profoundly complex, so much more so than people care to admit. We love to see things as one thing or the other. Black or white. Good relationships or bad relationships. Good mothers or bad mothers. But it's not like that in real life and Ledare doesn't spare the horses on that front. Murky, inexplicable, usually bizarre and often disturbing - that's what Ledare presents. Precisely the mess of things as they really are. Precisely the mess we don't want to acknowledge.

The cream on the cake is that he conducts this terrifyingly frank and raw investigation with a sense of humour. You can't start messing around with stuff like this if you're going to insist on taking it all seriously. I can't bear the self-important idea that in order to take life seriously we've somehow got to take ourselves seriously. Being serious is not about being serious.

The work that was lying on the floor in Eastcastle Street was from the series Personal Commissions, for which Ledare answered ads posted by women whose desires echoed those of his mother in her personal ads. He then paid these women to photograph him in their apartments in scenarios of their choosing. The result was, amongst other things: Leigh in the buff on a chintzy sofa; Leigh posing in a shower; Leigh naked on a bed with a red fishnet stocking pulled over his head, hands tied behind his back and a dog lead lashed to his throat. In all these photographs he sports the prodigious Village People moustache that seems to set the tone for a lot of his oeuvre. The whole thing reminds me of the Mel Brookes' quote: 'tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.'

The Personal Commissions series though is possibly overshadowed by the gut wrenching body of work Pretend You're Actually Alive that forms a very broad portrait of his mother. From pornographic images of her having sex with her young lover Catch 22, to beautifully still and unrefined shots of her sitting alone in her house. Of course the pictures of her with her clothes on are far more revealing than those without her clothes. It's all part of the paradox.

So what about my bootie call? Maybe I should have answered it. You want and yet you don't want. You crave and yet you're repulsed. Frightened of the pain and also drawn to it. Why are relationships so complicated? Why can't they come in simple boxes marked up good or bad, then we'd all know what to do. But it's not like that. It's a mess and there's no getting away from it. And there in lies the richness. What a dull world it would be if it really were how we like to pretend it is.

2010-07-28T18:47:00.029+01:00

I bumped into an art dealer acquaintance of mine in South Ken this morning. I was tottering out of the French Institute where I'd been struggling to eradicate my mono-lingual ignorance. He was sitting in the sunshine enjoying a coffee with what I took to be his boyfriend. He asked me how business was going.

"Tough", I said, "but on the up side, I've decided to give up chasing non-existent business and enjoy the summer instead".
He smiled sagely into his latte.
"Likewise," he said and further announced, "any art dealer claiming otherwise is lying."
Which all made me feel much better about my recent slothfulness. Until that moment I'd been silently rationalising to myself that summer isn't the time for stressing. What a great thing rationalisation is. Will my running round like the proverbial chicken sans tête alleviate the financial fix we collectively find ourselves in? Of course not.

So last week, instead of phoning round five hundred prospects just to hear them tell me what I already know – ie that business is tight, I decided to push off to what my friend Fi likes to amuse herself by referring to as 'Bev's hippie convention'. It is true that I don't think I've ever before seen so many rainbow trousers, guitars or dreadlocks in one place. I'm a bit ignorant about the whole hippie thing - it was after all before I was born – but the 2010 version was pretty groovy.

Unfortunately it got off to a slightly ropey start when we had no choice but to pitch our tent in a force nine gale and accompanying rain storm. I left my rucksack under a tree thinking it was waterproof. It wasn't. Not even a bit.

Half way through putting the tent up we realised we'd put it so close to the tent next to us that we couldn't get the guy ropes in. So we took the tent down. Then we put it up again. By now I was soaked to the skin in a crappy fuscia Moschino shower proof jacket that was totally inadequate for the job - what had I been thinking of at the packing stage?

Then we realised we'd pitched it on a more or less vertical drop and we wouldn't be able to sleep without all rolling down into one corner. So we took it down. Again. And put it up. Again. By now a sense of humour failure was looking imminent, but I slept surprisingly well after a hearty supper of vegan bean stuff with a solid mass of brown rice, and by morning the sun had come out and things were looking a lot jollier. Hearing that some people's tents had blown clean away during the night made one grateful for small mercies. And there's a lot to be said for a blow up mattress. Worth every penny of £8.99.

In the wake of the accommodation debacle and its subsequent resuscitation some fairly eccentric stuff went on. If I name a few you might get a taste: 'Shamanic Trance Dance'; 'Ecstatic Dances for Universal Peace'; 'Taoist Tai Chi Gong'; Yoga; Meditation; 'Non-violent communication'; 'Hedgehogs and Buddhism' (yeah huh!); 'Raphael's One Love Rastafarian Songs'; 'Gong Therapy' - check it out - wherein you lie with your head 3 inches away from a gong with a circumference of 2 meters whilst some guy bashes away on it relentlessly for half an hour - Lord knows what it achieves other than temporary deafness. I gave that one a miss.

What I did have a go at was the tantalisingly titled 'Sacred Intimacy – Living Love' (subtitle: 'be the love you're seeking'!) wherein you choose a partner of the opposite sex and then sit opposite them on the floor for twenty minutes staring into their eyes. Initially you feel uncomfortable, then you get the giggles, but eventually you get past all that and you really do start to feel deeply compassionate towards this fellow being, which in my case, luckily enough, was a handsome Germanic blonde yogi in fisherman's pants and green eyeliner, somewhat reminiscent of Lady Di circa 1980, only a little bit more out there.

After that there was "the tantric zone". Oh yes, hot tubs in the buff. Six strangers squashed into a receptacle roughly the size of a wheelie bin, into which shoots boiling hot water every few minutes. That was something.

And all the while, everywhere about the place, tonnes of people partied in wild costumes. Many people in no costumes at all. One particularly spectacular fellow in only a pair of knee high pink furry boots and a bum bag, dancing away as though his life depended on it, right in the middle of the main thoroughfare. Even one of my friends completely divested himself of his kit in a state of ecstatic joy on the dance floor. Apparently there's few things more liberating than flinging yourself around a heaving dance tent "with yer todger flying about." I can only take his word for it.

A strict no drugs and drink policy made the whole love-in thing feel wonderfully safe and somehow not at all inappropriate or mad. Just sort of charmingly outlandish and rather lovely. I can only think of it as being akin to visiting a different planet for a long week-end, wherein societal norms are completely unfamiliar, but once you've acclimatised, prove to be far more appealing than those one's used to.

Driving back into London felt strange, not unwelcome particularly, just strange, as one witnessed people charging down crowded streets, eyes glued to the pavement, as though there was no-one else about, each locked inside their little bubbles detached from the world around. And all these clothes. Fabulously bourgeois it suddenly seemed. Oh for the great outdoors. Mud between your toes, love in your heart and group hugs every twenty minutes. You don't get that in South Ken. Not even at the Institut Français.

2010-07-04T13:40:00.008+01:00

"It takes a long time for a mouse to realise he's in a trap. But once he does, something inside him never stops trembling."
Laurie Anderson, Transitory Life
from the album Homeland (2010).

Highly cross-making day. Why must builders hammer things at 7.30 in the morning? This is not an acceptable time of day to commence hammering things. There's scaffolding everywhere. All I can see from my window is a matrix of grey lines, greenery beyond, elusive. Occasionally trainers pass by at eye level. The trainers seem to have decimated the honeysuckle and left the table and chairs half way down the garden. Why must things always need repairing just to stay the same?

Now I come to think of it I've been cross since Sunday. It was probably those bloody tights. There's really not much that can be said of the installation currently languishing on the upper level of the newly re-opened Hayward. Maybe it's a bit Gaudi-esque. Maybe it hints at biomorphic forms or underwater creatures. Maybe the tunnel walls are pierced with what the vicar rather unexpectedly described as 'little cunty things' (I think he thinks it amuses me to be shocked, which I suppose it does up to a point). But frankly, and despite whatever the Hayward blurb writers might like to have us believe, subatomic physics is pushing it way too far. The fact is we could play spot the reference all day, but the ambitiously titled The Edges of the World is one damp squib.

The problem is it suffers from a complete absence of bite. It's fluffy and pretty and rather nice. It smells of lavender and camomile. It's got a little outdoor swimming pool so you can take the kids for a dip on a sunny week-end. It's got a very loud drum that small people like to bang on. Repeatedly. Here and there are step ladders you can have lots of fun climbing up and down. Which is all very nice. It does not, however, invite the viewer to see the world differently and the only thing it led me to question was the wisdom of whoever decided to put it in the Hayward for three months.

I'm far from the expert on South American contemporary art so if Ernesto Neto is indeed the most interesting contemporary artist to come out of Brazil in recent years, as one reads, then I can only imagine there's not much doing down there.

Far less irritating is the micro-exhibition: Keeping it Real: An Exhibition in Four Acts: Act1: The Corporeal at the Whitechapel. As an exhibition I really liked it. I liked the concept, I liked the curation and I liked the work. Quite out of keeping with the current fetish for exhibitions almost as large as their curator's egos, it's deliciously bijou. Plus it's got R Mutt in it, and Marina Abramovic and Sherrie Levine and Louise Bourgeois – what's not to like? Well, there is one thing. It's one of those days, I can't help myself, I have to focus on the negative, doubtless it won't make me feel any better but there we are… What is with the word 'real' this year?

So far we've had Design Real at the Serpentine, The Real Van Gogh at the RA, The Sacred Made Real at the National and now we're Keeping It Real in Whitechapel. What are we supposed to understand 'real' to mean? Sorry, but what quite is 'real'? I'm not sure the nature of reality and phenomenal existence is straightforward enough to be bandied about in this way. But what this bandying about suggests I suppose, is that collectively we're feeling a bit short on 'real' – whatever we might variously understand that to be.

I sat reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying last night, trying to nudge myself out of this week long bad temper I've somehow fallen into - look to the big picture and all of that. Apparently when we die we're presented with the naked, unconditioned truth. We're presented with reality. But, if I'm getting this right (and who knows about that) when we get there, the vast majority of us haven't the first clue what we're looking at, we find the whole experience profoundly terrifying and scamper back down to earth lickety-split for a bit more work-a-day suffering. But here's the good bit. It seems that for those in the know mind and reality are one and the same. What's out there is the same as what's in here. The light has no separate existence from mind. No wonder we're all terrified. Keeping it Real suddenly seems quite ambitious. Not least at the Edges of the World.

2010-07-01T17:35:00.000+01:00

"I only learn from what I fear most."
Marina Abramovic

2010-06-22T00:06:00.006+01:00

Herewith a labour of love comes to you from under the duvet, from whence I am planning on never emerging again. My friend Isabel called me on Friday afternoon to ask me where I was watching the football.

"What football?" I grunt gracelessly.
She's from California.
"Babes, there's like you and one other person in the whole country who doesn't know we're playing Algeria tonight."

A few minutes later I ring off, realising, as I hear the phone go click, that my assumption that the word 'we' refers to En-gur-luhnnd may be just that. A feeling of foreboding shivers through me as I contemplate the prospect of what I think may be my first ever full on 90 minutes of the so called beautiful game.

The foreboding was well placed it turned out as the result is a hangover so catastrophic it now seems unlikely I'll make it through to tomorrow. I may have said it before but this time I really mean it. If I do make it through to tomorrow I'm never drinking again. And I don't think I shall be watching football again either. It was rubbish. Thursday night was better and I spent that standing on the pavement in New Cross. The fire alarm went off during the Goldsmiths' Undergraduate private view, so I'd dragged my arse across the capital for the sake of five pieces of video work and some chapattis. The later looked just about ok on the Saatchi Show back in, what was it, January, but by last Thursday they were looking significantly past their sell by date. What, I wondered ungenerously, has Mr Qureshi been doing with himself for the last six months?

Anyway, I could have, I probably should have, hauled myself around the rest of the show, but frankly by the time I was back out on the pavement with all hell breaking loose in my ears, the prospect of a glass of ropey plonk down the Sun and Doves was looking like a tempting one. Although things didn't improve that much when we got there. The tills had broken down and arty young fellows these days, it transpires, aren't cut out for mental arithmetic. I enjoyed seeing the wave again though. The Great Wave off Kanagawa in reverse, writ huge on the side of a modest terraced house in Camberwell. It's a romantic thing to stumble upon in SE5. It restored me. Briefly. There's some beauty in the world it seemed to say, even if most of it is painful and melancholic. And transient. Horribly transient.

I suppose I'm being unnecessarily gloomy about the whole thing. It just seems that whatever happens, whenever things seem to be going even vaguely ok, life always manages to bring it back around to doing a big shit on you. Gives with one hand and punches you in the guts with the other. I'm not sure if that's how it really is or if that's just how it appears. And in a way what's the difference? What's the difference between reality and the appearance of reality? What's the difference between shit and the appearance of shit?

Anyway, I'll pick myself up and give myself a shake down, nothing too rumbustious, a gentle little jiggle ought to be enough for this evening. I'll be alright in the morning I expect. And the fact is that despite the premature debunk it hadn't been a waste of time at all actually. There was one piece of work – and it only takes one – that made the trip worth while and probably comes near the top of my 'best things I've seen so far in 2010' list. Twenty eight year old undergrad Helen Nymann Hansen's film Mother Mind - quite staggering really, despite maybe a slightly cheesy title. Part film, part performance, part immersive installation, it was atmospheric and archetypal and hypnotising. I was completely carried away into another world and it was a world that somehow felt far more real than the one I usually waste my time knocking around in.

But these things don't really communicate themselves in words. Especially not the words of a bear with a sore head. So I think I'll call it a day now and try and sleep it off. Hopefully the world will seem a sunnier place in the morning. Isabel tells me we're playing Slovenia on Wednesday. I think I might give that a miss though.

2010-06-16T00:39:00.014+01:00

I
"Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it... Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim 'I do enjoy myself' or 'I am horrified' we are insincere. As far as I feel anything, it is enjoyment, horror – it's no more than that really, and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent."
E.M. Forster, A Passage to India

II
I had to break up with my adored boyfriend yesterday - if such he was, I'm still not entirely sure, the word 'my' sits too awkwardly. It was over the email in the end, shockingly. As yet he hasn't responded. Oddly enough one does rather hope for a response at times like this, but never mind, I can't have it all ways I suppose.

Keen on the idea of a few Bovary-esque moments I'm going through occasional and short lived bursts of blaming the failure of this latest romantic debacle entirely upon Him, getting angry and so forth, hurling at the blank wall ahead of me imaginary insults on the voluminous subject of his great ineptitude, even contemplated falling into a swoon; then suddenly and unexpectedly, calm is restored, as though it never left. I put the kettle on.

The truth is I know it's as much my fault as his. I chose to become romantically attached to a man very recently separated knowing perfectly well the problems we'd encounter. I've been there myself. I know the form. We all have. So why did I go down that path? Why choose to be somebody's rebound fling? What does that tell me about myself, I wonder, knowing already the answer.

But I go through the motions nonetheless, the things one expects of oneself in these situations. I call my girlfriends and bore them rigid wailing about my heart ache; take valerian certain that I shan't sleep a wink otherwise; stop eating of course – the pounds are flying off - every cloud and all of that… I text my friend to tell her this. 'Bitch x' she texts back. I guffaw.

Then I catch myself humming in the shower and as I sit here I find I'm feeling not so very far off jolly, or more accurately, I'm feeling, I don't know, not that much.

I've changed the sheets, washed my hair, put his t-shirt – the one solitary possession of his that I have here – into a paper bag by the door. And that's it really. Doesn't add up to a great deal, does it? One lone paper bag by the door. One more failure notched up in a history of same. One more desperate parting. At least it's a brief reminder that I'm alive, a blessed glimpse of horror, a flash of something felt before the curtain falls once again.

III
In this oddly oscillating state of cherished aliveness I saw The Surreal House at Barbican. Everything was more intense, as though a layer of skin had been peeled away. It was an apt show to visit in the circumstances, its raison d'etre, and perhaps that of Surrealism's entire oeuvre, seemingly to shock the viewer out of her slumber, to poke her into a state of vivid aliveness with the disturbing yet strangely beautiful zap of an electric prod.

In the first room Donald Rodney's In The House of My Father hangs opposite Buster Keaton's 1928 projected feature film Steamboat Bill Jr.. Both works tragically sad. Rodney's heart-breakingly poetic image of the frailty of the human body – a tiny house consisting solely of pieces of his own skin held together with two pins that he made whilst in hospital suffering from sickle cell anaemia, of which he later died at the age of 37. Steamboat Bill Jr. features Keaton's most famous and oft referenced stunt in which the façade of a house collapses over him, his life saved by a whisker when the attic window passes over his head and down his body, as the façade slams to the ground - a reminder of the immense physical and emotional fragility we live with day-in-day-out but are almost never aware of. If we were more often aware of it how different our lives might be. In the moment might be the only way to live; compassion the only emotion.

In the background I can hear a noise that turns out to be Rebecca Horn's 1990 Concert for Anarchy. A grand piano is suspended upside down from the high ceiling. Periodically and (at first) unexpectedly, its innards are flung out to the accompaniment of a great cacophony of jarring sound, as though the piano's very heart were being torn out. The keys burst from the noble instruments metaphoric chest as though reeling from a grenade. Next the heavy lid swings open. The piano hangs in this state of vulnerability for a couple of minutes, part shocking and part wondrous revelation, before the keys are slowly and effortfully re-integrated back into the body of the whole and the lid quietly closes over the wounds. Once again the notion of an object complete and in control is presented to the world. Yet it remains, eternally suspended upside down from its legs, its absurd and agonising plight plain for all to see. And then, moments later, its heart is broken once again.

IV
"I did my best, it wasn't much,
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch,
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you,
And even though it all went wrong,
I'll stand right here before the Lord of song,
with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah"
Leonard Cohen

2010-06-11T00:26:00.012+01:00

A mortification has occurred. I just sent a text message to the wrong person. Sent it to the friend I was complaining about rather than the one I was wanting to complain to. Feel like digging a large hole and climbing in. Possibly staying there forever. The recipient called me and informed me of my error, kindly and gently just to make matters worse. I employed the technique of last resort – pretended I thought it was fabulously funny. Who am I kidding?

Why does life insist on giving me these mirror moments in which to see myself with a clarity that I feel is just completely inappropriate? Delusion suits me fine actually thanks. I’m quite keen on a bit of denial as it goes. I do not need to know that I am a beastly ungenerous being. But now that I do know it (once again) I shall have to try and do something about it (once again). I’m not sure what. A pointless and short lived resolution to be less beastly and ungenerous I suppose. And yet already I feel the mortification fading, the protective cloak of self delusion closing in around me and I know that, of course, I shall continue to be the beast that I am, inhabiting my own little world with moi in the lead role and moi in all supporting roles. It’s rather depressing if you think about it.

And Berlin was rather depressing in the rain. The rain followed me around Europe this week. The minute I arrived anywhere the rain began and the minute I left the sun came out. London, Hamburg, Berlin, Porto Fino, London.

For a whole day I thought Berlin was the most rubbish place I’d ever been. I arrived on Monday. As in London, galleries in Berlin are closed on Monday. At least in London you can go to a public gallery. In Berlin - not a bloody wurst. Actually there was one thing open - The Deutsche+Guggenheim. Hmmm, is it a bank or is it a gallery? It’s a bank folks. With some pictures in it. Pictures by Wangechi Mutu as it happened. I didn’t like them. I’m fed up with Post-Colonialism. To the back teeth. “Mutu counters the manifest idea that she is perhaps an ‘African’ artist who draws on the culture of her home continent in her work with a multiperspectival cosmos. The alienation and uprooting in her images and installations is obvious… migrants… blah … hybrid… blah … ‘AlieNation’… blah….”

On Tuesday I ‘borrowed’ a parka from the apartment I was staying in and things began to improve. Hot I can handle, cold not. What this thermostatic failure meant was that I spent Tuesday and Wednesday embroiled in an ethical dilemma. Is it morally defunct to borrow the unlent? I don't know, but in the end the parka and I managed somewhere in the region of fifty odd galleries over a period of two and a half days, a smallish fraction of the four hundred plus galleries that live in Berlin, but I was quite pleased with our drizzled upon efforts nonetheless.

On display was everything from the awesome to the awful. In the first category Spruth Magers, Galerie Birgit Ostermeier, Galerie Isabella Czarnowska, 401 Contemporary and best of all Turkish artist Ali Kazma at Tanas. In the later category the olfactorily offensive Have You Ever Really Looked At The Sun, a two person show by Damien Hirst and Michael Joo at Haunch of Venison. A 365.7 cm diameter Hirst canvas entitled Har Megiddo was composed entirely of dead flies and resin. It stank. Literally. As did Let’s Eat Outdoors Today an installation of various foodstuffs and flies in a glass and steel vitrine. It’s a funny thing déjà vu. It was almost as though I’d seen it all before.

This new leaf isn’t going that well I see. I’m in a bad mood though so I don’t particularly care. Who am I to think that I should be better than I am anyway? And now in addition to being a beast I notice I’m also being a bore. Nobody wants to hear about my tedious moral dilemmas. Even I don’t want to hear about my tedious moral dilemmas. The long and short of it is I’d rather be a beast than a bore so I’m going to shut up now and go off and do something morally reprehensible to take my mind of it all. I hope my friend will be speaking to me tomorrow - we've got a three hour drive to Suffolk together in the morning. God it’s depressing.

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2010-05-17T18:36:00.009+01:00

I’m struggling to understand what it is I find so moving about Lisa Yuskavage’s paintings. This Sunday afternoon I’ve read everything I can get my hands on about her work, I’ve trawled my reserves of art historical reference points, I’ve gone through the obligatory writers pass time of staring at the blank computer screen for hours followed by calling around all my friends and wondering what to cook for supper, but still I don’t know what it is about them that speaks to me so vitally. Given their subject matter, I’m finding my response to them even a bit concerning. Until eventually I remember that the way in is always through the wound.

The truth is I see something of myself in these paintings. That’s what I’m wanting to avoid - the unpalatable conclusion that these women remind me of myself. Bizarre, hyper-sexualised, uber-boobed girls, innocently playful and agonisingly destructive at the same time. Their devil may care performed immodesty; the coquettishly dishevelled hair; the complete absence of balance; the sense of nihilism and confusion and the fact that, however you dress it up, it always comes back to the same thing. And of course, those socks. Everybody mentions the socks. What is it about the socks?

Contemporary painting involving the female nude usually makes me want to poke my own eyes out. Centuries of male dominated art history, followed by decades of feminist backlash have rammed it, as a source of painterly inspiration, well and truly into the back of a very tricky pigeon hole. Many have tried to resuscitate it. Many have failed. Some dismally. Most don’t have the first idea what they’re grappling with. Yuskavage on the other hand, certainly does. Which makes this ballsy stuff.

Despite the fact that her canvases now sell for hundreds of thousands, she hasn’t come out of it completely unscathed. Controversy abounds. But there’s nothing wrong with that. Controversy in art, contrary to how it’s commonly understood, is not a sign of childish attention seeking, but of presenting things in a way that rejects delusions we’ve collectively and silently agreed to adopt in order to ease our trajectory through what would otherwise be a hellish traumatic existence. When you challenge people’s dearly held delusions they tend to get a bit cross. The more they see you might have a point the crosser they get. Ergo everyone loves to hate contemporary art.

Over and above the brilliantly managed subject matter and the ability to describe disconcerting truths about humanity and femininity, the other thing that stands out about Lisa Yuskavage is that she’s one of the extremely rare breed of twenty-first century painters who know how to paint. There’s no reason why artists these days should know how to paint. They’re not taught how to paint. Which is not necessarily such a bad thing as it might sound. Removing the default opens up possibilities. As a result we’ve got this wonderfully rich multi-disciplinary creativity going on, wherein nothing is beyond investigation. In creative terms it’s a very life giving place to be.

But of course there’ll always be people who want to paint. For them the absence of painting from the art college curricula generally means having to make a feature of painting badly. Which is well enough but it does leave a gap in the market. A gap that Lisa Yuskavage, and one or two others, have been able to fill. It also means that when one does stumble upon contemporary painting that’s technically skilled it’s a joy, despite the awareness that that joy is largely driven by a sense of the unexpected inherent in the discovery of painting that doesn’t need to make a deliberately confusing bluff-cum-double-bluff performance of its own lack of proficiency.

Bluster, feminist and otherwise, is thick on the ground. Her work has been described as everything from a “critique of prurient sexuality” to a “disingenuous peddling of soft-porn”. Yuskavage herself has been heard to remark: “I only load the gun.” The weapon with the most powerful ammunition though is not the female form, but that of the darkest recesses of the female psyche. The place few of us are prepared, with such honesty at least, to go.

Lisa Yuskavage
Greengrassi
until end June 2010

2010-05-04T15:02:00.002+01:00

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
Marianne Williamson

"Until we realize the unity of life, we live in fear."
The Upanishads

2010-05-04T12:45:00.010+01:00

The vicar’s got a puncture. On bank holiday Monday. What this seems to mean is that we can’t go to the movies. Or rather he can’t go to the movies. Beezie’s got a friend over from Milan. Nicky’s in France. So I thought I might go on my own. I always forget how enjoyable going to the movies on your own is. A bit like a baked potato. The simple things in life.

It’s a very personal thing I always think. Like travelling. It’s one of those things you only want to do with certain people, or on your own. It affects your consciousness you see, so you’ve got to be careful. Plus, other than a bunch of strangers, who exactly do you want to sit in a darkened room with and watch something that, if you’re lucky, might enlighten you as to the nature of reality?

Dogtooth - that’s an awesome movie for revelations on the nature of reality. Retrospectively reading the reviews it seems some critics think it’s about a warped family over whom we have the opportunity to stand in shocked judgement and, as usual, get to feel superior about the fact that we are not they. This whole shocked judgement thing is wearing a bit thin frankly.

Dogtooth is not about that at all. It’s about you and me and the mad way in which we all live and the fact that we just don’t see it. What we see is ration and reason - a place for everything and everything in its place. But if you look more closely, it’s not rational or reasonable, it’s totally bonkers and we’re all in denial about that fact. That’s what the movie is saying. It’s saying we’re all living in a state of paralysing fear that makes us do strange and damaging things that we can’t see and that we wouldn’t do if we could see them. It’s a parable. People do seem to miss the point about things. Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m missing the point the whole time? Oh whatever, who cares. There’s probably something with Matt Damon coming out soon. Matt Damon puts the baddies where they deserve to be and saves us all from yet another near disaster. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Post-Dogtooth I made the mistake of watching Goldsmiths’ – But is it Art? School of Saatchi was bad, but this is taking rubbish art related TV to a whole new level. School of Saatchi did at least have a certain page turning quality to it and a bit of something woof in the form of Matt Clark. But is it Art? did not have any such qualities, not even in the tiniest measure. It did of course have bucket-loads of that exhausted old cliché “let’s all take the piss out of these half witted idiots calling themselves contemporary artists.” Yes, very funny.

The one thing I do find surprising about this otherwise deeply unsurprising TV programme is the degree of venom it seems to have unleashed that’s now being directed towards these artists on various blogs and things. The one who seems to be coming in for the greatest degree of completely unwarranted and offence giving aggression is Roisin Byrne. One feedback comment on her website reads simply: “slut”. As much as anything for the sake of re-dressing the balance in favour of this poor harangued woman who’s just trying to do an art degree for the love of God, I’d like to say that for me at least, Roisin Byrne’s work raised questions and provoked thought:

Roisin Byrne basically steals stuff. She steals stuff and then calls it art. Appropriates is her term. At her most ‘controversial’ she steals elements of art works by other, more established contemporary artists and creates her own art work out of the embezzled item, along with the correspondence she’s undergone with the ‘original’ artist in regard to this pilfering.

In 2000, in a work entitled Rescuing Rhododendrons, future Turner Prize winner Simon Starling took seven rhododendrons from Northern Scotland and drove them, in his Volvo estate, to Southern Spain from whence rhododendrons were first introduced to Scotland by Claes Alestroemer, a Swedish botanist, in 1763. The plants were to have been destroyed and Starling saved them and that’s very nice.

Technically though, if one were to be a pedant - not something I’d recommend for the most part, but just for a minute let’s indulge ourselves - the rhododendrons weren’t really Starling’s to begin with. Sharp intake of breathe… Starling STOLE them! OMG. But he was stealing them in order to save them. Phew. So that’s all fluffy and OK. Case closed.

But when Byrne took one of them from Spain, brought it back into the UK on an EasyJet flight and incorporated it into her degree show along with a series of emails between herself and Starling, for some reason, that wasn’t OK. That was… STEALING. But stealing what exactly? Is it a hedge that we’re objecting to the appropriation of? Is it an art work? Is it an idea? Is it the (long shot folks!) potential to earn money? And which of these elements was technically owned by Starling in the first place?

So, we could make the questions all about technicalities of ownership. Intellectual property, hedge snatching, when is it OK to steal and when is it not OK to steal? And other ethical brainteasers.

But a larger, and to my mind rather more pertinent question is where does art come from in the first place? Are we fully satisfied with the idea that an art work is created by an artist? Can we answer that question without querying whether it’s possible for an art work to be created by any one person in isolation? Where does influence end and originality begin? Not many people would likely dispute the suggestion that every artist worth their salt studies other artists work in great depth. Hmmm, tricky one.

Then there’s the really interesting stuff - the question of what exactly this alchemical process of creativity is. Before we can assign ownership of the creative act surely we need to know what it is. Does the possibility not exist that there might be something else at work, something beyond the rationalising mind, beyond the ego, even perhaps completely beyond the capacity of human endeavour? And if the creative process is fundamentally beyond the capacity of human endeavour, does that make claims upon its ownership redundant to some extent?

What I’m talking about is the thing that lies at the heart of post-Renaissance Western culture, namely, the appropriation of the divine by the ego. Not my words I have to confess, I ‘stole’ them from the vicar. Although whether he owned them once he’d spoken them across… OK enough.

Basically what I’m talking about is the idea that the artist is more than anything else a conduit of some sort and that the ‘best’ artists are the ones who are able to impose their egos to the least degree during the creative act, thus opening up the channel with the least interference to the forces beyond the material. I don’t pretend to understand it beyond that. It’s just a thought really. I’m just putting it out there. Probably it’s a load of old twaddle and the long and the short of it is that Simon Starling’s a twenty-first century horticultural super hero, an eco-Robin Hood, whilst Roisin Byrne’s the devil in a skirt. Anyway, when’s the next Bourne movie coming out with that nice Matt Damon?

2010-04-27T16:57:00.004+01:00

"If it be so,
so be it!" Having said thus,
why the hurry?

For the shadow trails the light,
implacably, indifferent to men.

Shinkei (1406-75)
tr. Esperanza Ramirez-Christensen

2010-04-22T14:12:00.015+01:00

A friend of mine has just got a job working for White Cube.

"How's it going?" I enquired after day one.

"Great, although there's absolutely nothing to do. So far I've watched Deal or No Deal on Jay's TV and sat in Jay's Mercedes on Duke Street fending off traffic wardens." Ah, the contemporary art world. Who says it's not serious?

But actually, Gallery Girl is a very important figure on the contemporary art scene. First impressions and all of that. The thing is though, I'm not sure the desirable first impression is necessarily the obvious one.

Before I'd run my own gallery I went along with the commonly held but hopelessly naïve view that contemporary art galleries should be more welcoming than they are to visitors walking in off the street. Well, sorry to be a bit uncharitable, but actually, as a gallerist, that's the last thing you want to be doing. Fine if you're Jay and you can afford to pay someone like the glorious golden haired Pinkie to sit there, looking gorgeous, and smiling winningly at everyone who comes through the door, then yes, great, of course. But if like most gallery owners you're only just keeping your head above water even without the cost of a winsome gallerina, and it's you yourself having to deal with what is, for the most part, a fairly charmless general public, then I can assure you, the desire to be welcoming swiftly falls off a cliff.

Artists are alright. I don't mind them. Because they've got half a brain. They're reasonably au fait with what they're looking at. And collectors. One collector in ten might have a slight Scooby Doo. The rest not. Cashola does not a collector make. No idea I'm afraid. Which is fine, having no idea is fine, if you instead have an open mind. This is the key to engagement with contemporary art, far more important than an art history degree, or even any art historical knowledge whatsoever – is an open mind. But about one in a hundred are in possession of such a thing, probably one in five hundred, one in a thousand, less... For almost everyone else, going to a contemporary art gallery is a high brow version of watching Big Brother. You do it so you can sneer at others and feel that however crap your own life may be, at least you're not stupid enough to either a) appear on a crappy reality TV programme and make a complete and utter tit of yourself, or b) lay a load of bricks on the floor (ah, the bricks conversation again, good-oh!) and imagine you've created a work of art. Because only a retard would be that stupid, right?

So maybe that goes some way to explaining why the usual routine at Waddington's, according to Martin Herbert in this month's Art Review, is to be greeted by "a gallerina pointing a shotgun at visitors and bellowing 'Get out!'" Martin doesn't say whether or not this seems to him to be an appropriate reception. Probably not, unless he's run a gallery himself, in which case he'd get it completely. At one private view during the Golborne Road years, I'm occasionally reminded with some glee, the words "get out of my fucking gallery" were heard. I'm not sure from whom. Some retard.

Anyway, I'll stop being chippy now. Sorry. One of those days I'm afraid.

Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin have an interesting approach to the Gallery Girl conundrum. They've got an exquisite weimaraner who trots powerfully from one room to the next, checking that everything's running smoothly and generally being gorgeous. This may be the answer – beautiful, enchanting, capable, but never, ever engages with questions, art historical or otherwise, and yet offends no-one by her aloofness. Everyone's happy just to look and learn. Genius. Trust a Frenchman, eh?

Aside from the weimaraner, other cool stuff around the Marais includes Mona Hatoum at Galerie Chantal Crousel. The Gallery Girl there was a winningly offbeat American lady with short legs and noisy cowboy boots. Offbeat's always a good sign.

At Galerie chez Valentin we looked at some bathroom tubing or whatever you call that stuff that joins the loo to the wall. Hand moulded loo tubing placed on a plinth as per a sort of 3D still-life, a fake ready-made as it were. An interesting idea. The text wasn't very well written though which upset the vicar. Gallery Girl seemed to think we didn't quite get it. I thought it may have been she who didn't quite get it.

One of my favourite shows in the two-day exhibition-a-thon of Paris was Jason Dodge at Yvon Lambert. An affecting piece called The Doctors Are Sleeping, which consisted of an arrangement of nine blue pillows on the floor. They had the look of a hospital, or perhaps it's a smell, an atmosphere, that whiff of being diseased in a frighteningly immobilising way that always carries with it a feeling of contagion, even when there is none. It carries with it the truth of our own impermanence I suppose. We are all going to die. I like that that sounds almost banal. In a way of course it is. In a way it's the ultimate banality.

Later on, whilst we sat in the sunshine on the pavement having a café au lait and a bit of tarte tatin, I read out the blurb:

"New works in the exhibition include:
The doctors are sleeping
Dr med. Jurgen W Bauer
Dr med. Axel Jung and Dr med Annette Jung are sleeping
Dr med. Friederich Schmidt-Bleek is sleeping
Pillows that have only been slept on by doctors
Pillows that have only been slept on by doctors lay in the position in which they were slept on. The pillows were made by a seamstress to know exactly the moment, feathers and fabric became pillows."

"Jesus," said the vicar, and then, "I wouldn't mind seeing a Titian."

2010-04-21T11:16:00.009+01:00

In retrospect it seems the programme of my Cambodia trip was largely dictated by a rat.

The first week consisted of a pre-booked yoga retreat in the sort of plush resort where a lady in a floor length gold embroidered skirt som-pas's you with bought respect the minute you disembark from your tuk tuk. The sort of place that consists entirely of elegant open plan two storey hut-like structures, decked out with colonial style dark wood four posters and tasteful locally harvested sculptures; the Buddha seated in the lotus position on the writing desk, carved Apsara dancers flanking the suite door, that sort of thing. In short, expensive, luxurious and entirely culturally disinfected.

I know, I know, only a spoilt brat who's never had to rough it in her entire life could fail to be enchanted by such a heavenly place. This monstrous travel snobbery of mine, it's naïve and it's pretentious, as I was shortly to learn. For once I was out of the protective embrace of our little community of middle-class western sun-saluters, doing our right-on conscience salving bit for world community by practicing our downward facing dog alongside a gang of friendly local orphan children, once I was out of this tight little clique and having to battle with the big, nasty old world all by myself, my fears and demons, almost at once, embodied themselves in the form of a common or garden rodent. A small furry fellow who was basically just going about minding his own business; for a Buddhist, surely, pas de probleme. The tricky thing was, he was going about minding his own business in my room.

As I'd packed my rucksack in the irritatingly pseudo-Khmer luxury resort my head had been filled with preposterous notions of Robinson Crusoe-esque days spent ruminating in a shack on a deserted white beach or trekking fearlessly, like some sort of spiritualised Indiana Jones in a cheese cloth top, through dense cobra infested jungle.

But of course what actually happened was that I eyeballed this rat, who sat nonchalantly on the shelving unit a few inches from the end of my bed, in this tiny log cabin, miles from the nearest town and a matter of feet above the exquisite quietly lapping shoreline of the Gulf of Thailand. I eyeballed him and he, to my horror, eyeballed me back. No respectful som-pas from this little fellow.

The thought passed through my mind that I should be perfectly capable of sharing my micro space with this being, who, if nothing else, certainly represented the 'real' Cambodia that my inner Miss Quested so keenly sought. Sadly though the thought passed through my mind at warp speed and disappeared around a mountain in the far distance never to be seen again. In its wake followed rather more lingering images of my new acquaintance scampering playfully through my hair and peeing on my pillow, as I slept on in blissful ignorance beneath the quietly swaying mosquito net.

Terrified half witless by the fruit of my own imagination manifest as this small creature, I wiggled off in the dead of night to find some form of humanity who might be capable of helping me out with this fix.

I found a security guard who spoke no English. I pointed to my cabin and drew a picture of something vaguely resembling a rat. My new friend responded by gleefully indicating that a good head stamping was undoubtedly what Ratty would benefit from. This was all deeply alarming. It seemed to me that a rat carcass would be far worse for my mental states and my karmic well being than the breathing version, but supposing we'd deal with that hurdle once we got to it I followed his torch light back to my modest quarters.

Entirely unsurprisingly by the time we got there the rat had long since buggered off, probably relaxing in the nearby woods having a little chuckle to himself at my expense. Having turned the room upside down and finding no other living being present, the security guard shrugged his shoulders and decided to turn his attentions on me. It seemed he felt that some sort of physical affection might be appropriate. I thought not. And so I found myself stuck between a rock and a hard place, not wanting to get rid of him until a solution had been found to my rat problem, but neither wanting to play hostess to his baser enthusiasms.

Having shoved him out of the door and shut it in his face I slumped onto my bed, now re-joined of course by the rat, and wondered what to do. Here I was, my first night in the 'real' Cambodia and I couldn't handle it. All my fantasies realised and I couldn't stomach them. It wasn't about the rat. It was about my own mental fortitude or lack thereof. I simply didn't have what it took. Without digging very far at all, I had hit upon my internal nemesis. It was a bitter blow. The horrible truth became unavoidably clear. I was a spoilt, naïve, middle class bimbo, keen to imagine myself in some way 'real', but entirely unable to cope with 'real' when it arrived.

So I packed my rucksack once again, dragged it back down the hill and sat to wait for something to happen. Some forty minutes later and I was sitting on the back of a motorcycle taxi, rucksack perched precariously on the handle-bars in what would, a few hours ago, have been a disconcerting fashion, as we sped back to town, a monstrous coastal community populated by trustafarian back-packers and opportunist Cambodian's catering to the twenty-something faux hippy tourist trade. Hell in a handbag, or rather, in a backpack. Mojito anyone?

I got an email the other day from a cranio-sacral therapist friend forwarding on to me an email from some German guy styling himself "an elite NLP hypno-coach". In response to the question he claims he is most often asked, namely: "when do the good things start?" he answered: "when you are ready to change your mind". I'm not entirely sure I have a clue what NLP hypno-coaching is, but about this, I think he may have had a point.

After stropping around for a good forty-eight hours feeling like a prisoner of my own crappy limitations, I finally began to get over myself and started to see that wallowing over the tragedy of my dashed expectations was blinding me to the opportunities that were being presented. Almost as soon as I'd seen that, the good stuff started to happen, until finally, in this godforsaken spot that represented every vacuous all over suntanned pretension that I'd wanted to avoid, I met exactly the person I'd hoped to stumble upon.

I met, in a quiet monastery in the middle of nowhere, along with my friend Somg, a venerable monk who spoke no English but who offered, through Somg as translator, to tell me my fortune along with some Buddhist tales of wisdom. For me this was a dream come true, preferable on any day to the farcical Indian Jones fantasy.

I shan't bore you with the details, and anyway I'm superstitious about repeating it, but suffice it to say it was a profoundly positive experience that I shall remember for the rest of my days. And it was all down to the rat. Without the rat my plans wouldn't have hit a wall, I wouldn't have met Somg and I wouldn't have met the monk. Lord knows what I would have done instead, but whatever it might have been it obviously wasn't meant to be.

Maybe my Mum is right with her conviction that faith in life is all one needs. It's cheesy as hell, but maybe every cloud does have a silver lining.

2010-04-20T23:20:00.005+01:00

I used to think Paris a bit overrated. I can't really remember why now. Too many art history coach trips as a student probably. I'm in no hurry to get back to the Musee D'Orsay funnily enough. And too much ham for another thing. Can any one country really consume that much jambon?

Then there's the language barrier of course, but that's just a bit embarrassing really. I bought the CD - Instant French. No time wasters it said, rolling its eyes at the likes of the plume de ma t'aunt. However it was keen that I take on board the phrase "vous avez une Mercedes?" And quite rightly so. What self-respecting thirty-something art dealer can be let loose à Paris without such a critical enquiry at her immediate disposal. Imagine if I found myself quite inadvertently hanging out with someone who did not avez une Mercedes.

But there are, it seems, a few pleasing things about Paris. Firstly the Metro. Very little of having to ram oneself into the smelly armpit of the great unwashed and needing to re-mortgage your flat just to get from Republique to Alma Marceau. The plonk's cheap. The coffee doesn't taste like dirty water. And the über cool Palais de Tokyo. Before I'd visited the Palais de Tokyo I gave a shit about the ICA. Now I'm thinking blow that crappy out of date theatre of mediocrity off the circuit and let's get us a proper shrine to contemporary art going on. Things are in a pretty poor state when the Frogs are nearer the edge than we are. God.

I sat in the Palais de Tokyo for nearly an hour watching a video installation about skateboarding. I probably should have been looking at Charlotte Posenanske's modular cardboard boxes I suppose, but my touristy feet were tired. So I sat on my generous bottom and watched Raphaël Zarka's forty-minute long documentary Topographie anecdotée du skateboard (2008).

Raphaël Zarka, I think, is suggesting that our urban architectural spaces are unavoidably loaded with 'usefulness'. What this means is that, as citizens of these spaces, we're engaging with them passively. We're taking on the uses that are being offered to us, rather than creating our own uses, and by extension, without creating our own lives. Our relationship with the city, and within the city, is not creative. We are controlled by it, not it by us. In effect the urban space will always therefore be repressive to one degree or another.

So, by re-writing these unwritten rules of engagement – ie roaring down the handrail on a slab of wheeled wood, rather than resting a cautious digit or two upon it as one tentatively descends the flight sur pied - skateboarders are undermining their intended status as passive user. They're rebelling against the unwritten law. And rebelling against the unwritten law is far worse than rebelling against the written law because the written law is clearly validated and vindicated. The written law comes with a system of procedures for what to do in the event of a person or persons stepping outside of itself. Ergo it controls both that which is within itself, and that which is outside of itself. Stepping outside of the unwritten law on the other hand is far more dangerous to the structures of power, because it draws attention to the usually invisible hand of control that is wielded over us at all times without our even being aware of it. Basically, Big Brother comes under the spotlight and he doesn't like it one little bit.

I should say that Zarka doesn't allow himself to get as excitable about all of this as I do. He quotes Barthes, speaks of Duchamp and generally takes a far more academic and rational approach to his subject matter than I. In fact I'm probably inadvertently putting words into his mouth, so perhaps take the Zarka reference with a pinch of salt. Suffice it to say, it was Zarka's documentary film that got me started: whichever way you look at it, a skateboarding stunt isn't simply a skateboarding stunt, it is something far more. If it were simply a very skilful and efficient way of moving about a city, then why would the powers that be object to it so profoundly? And object they sure do, as the documentary shows.

It makes me cross that we seem to have to exist in this monochromatic Nazi-esque state, lobotomised obedient bipodic victims of our own idiocy. I'm fed up with being told what to do by someone I can't see. Of being told when and where I can and can't have a fag – not even in the boozer these days for the love of God. When to jump in the fountain for a laugh and when not to jump in the fountain for a laugh; how much salt to put on my tomatoes; how much to weigh; how much to exercise; how much sodding water to drink; when to cross the road; when not to cross the road; when and where to park and when and where not to park - and God forbid you get that wrong or they'll rob you of £880 as quick as blink; don't even get me started on that, £880, it's not a Royal Borough, it's a bloody racket.

Actually, it occurs to me that I'd like to make my own decisions, like an adult. I'd like to be able to take the responsibility upon myself if and when those decisions go wrong and if and when they go right. I'm fed up of being watched over by someone whose omnipotent but cowardly face remains hidden, squinting into his closed circuit wet dream from behind the empty mask of the educated but hopelessly egotistical fat Scottish Fall Guy.

So hail to the skateboarders taking their freedom back without waiting for permission from the invisible middle aged bureaucrat. And hail to a city that's prepared to subsidise the underground without robbing its users of the right to have a Gauloises when they fancy it. Hail to a city of women who still have proper sized arses. Hail to a city that makes a cup of coffee that kicks that proper sized arse. And hail to a city that has an equally arse-kicking home for contemporary art.

2010-04-10T19:09:00.010+01:00

I'm just back from the Buddhist Kingdom of Cambodia. Upon my return one of the first pieces of art work I've seen was in the presence of nothing, an installation by Bharti Kher in the basement of Hauser & Wirth, London. The installation consists of a Tibetan metal bowl such as those used as a bell by meditating Buddhists. The bowl is induced to 'sing' when a wooden mallet is passed rhythmically around its outer rim. Here, taking the place of the role more usually played by a monk, a motorised arm comes down from the ceiling.

I've listened to these bells quite a lot over the last few years and the last few weeks even more so. The sound they create is intense and very affecting and rings on for many minutes after contact between mallet and bowl has ceased. In fact, the more closely you listen the harder it is to discern quite when the sound has faded away, which always serves to remind me that in some ways the sound never really ends, in the same way as it never really began. It's part of an energetic whole that we become aware of when it manifests as sound on that particularly resonant vibrational level.

The thing I noticed about in the presence of nothing is that the sound it produces, compared to many of these singing bells, isn't really very enjoyable. It does sort of 'sing' but not beautifully, not inspiringly, not even musically. The sound does not touch the soul. In fact I'd go as far as to say the sound is fairly disagreeable. It seems that when you remove the energy of a living being and replace it with a mechanism, something fundamental is lost. It is perfectly possible to simulate the human being but some je n'est ce quoi is always absent to one degree or another. It may well be that this absence is filled by a different kind of presence, but nonetheless the absence is felt and in this case symbolised by the strangulated sound gurgling effortfully out of the otherwise romantic old bank vault.

Maybe the title in the presence of nothing refers to this absence, although probably it also refers to any number of other absences, most notably to metaphysical and spiritual notions of the inherent emptiness of things, particularly when located in a Lutyens designed bank vault, the place that at one time stored and preserved the very thing that speaks most voluably of the emptiness that surrounds us. After all currency is representative of debt, not of value.

And then I start thinking about other scenarios in which human beings are replaced with mechanisms and I begin to wonder at what cost. These days it’s a delightful surprise to call up almost anyone other than a friend and have a live human being answer rather than an infuriating pre-recorded voice, or worse, a computerised voice simulator. Not the bank, not the movies, not even Tate: "please press 1 for tickets, membership, educational visits or services for disabled visitors, 2 to speak to an information assistant, 3 for restaurant bookings, 4 for …." Deep breathe Beverley! It's irritating as hell, but it's also more than that, it's also rather tragic.

Come to think of it, the telephone itself, even when answered by a human being, is more disconnecting than connecting in many ways. There's really nobody there. No body as it were. Handy, sure, but possibly not entirely healthy. I suspect it'll be our downfall - the extinction of the entire human race traceable to the common or garden use of the telephone.

But what I was really gripped by at 196a Piccadilly was Bharti Kher's prolific use of the bindi, the Hindu forehead decoration traditionally symbolic of female power, energy and fertility. A plethora of multi-coloured stick-on felt dots - some with little masculinising spermatasoic tails, some not - covers almost every piece of work in the show, culminating, for me, in the glorious indra's net mirror series on the upper most floor. This consists of sixteen mirrors in antique (or antiqued) wooden frames, lining the space like a feminised Upper Room, Chris Ofili and David Adjaye's exquisitely vibrant cross-disciplinary (in more ways than one) Hanuman chapel installation currently showing at Tate Britain. I adore The Upper Room. You don't need to do anything – you just sit and soak it up. People come and people go and all the while you just sit and absorb the sounds and the colours, the atmosphere and the vibration.

And so it is with Bharti Kher's indra's net mirror. I wonder if Mr Wirth mightn't have imagined to provide benches as he so thoughtfully did in the basement. This work needs time. It needs to be allowed to seep insidiously into the system. One needs to enter it passively and calmly and allow it to do its stuff. Later one can form opinions, much later, when the sediment has settled. We're always so keen to have opinions, but sometimes it's better to wait and allow the opinions to form themselves, to let the seat of intuition engage and perhaps even proceed the over active intellect for a change. And perhaps this is the very notion that Bharti Kher is hinting at by covering everything in bindi.

The bindi sits between the eyebrows at the yogic third eye centre, the seat of the sixth chakra and source of that most feminine of wisdoms, intuition. From the third eye centre we achieve clarity of vision and the ability to see the ultimate truth of what is.

Shown in one of the most successful and uncompromising contemporary art galleries in the world and housed in an ex-high street bank – 'the listening bank' rather pertinently - designed by Sir Edwin Luytens, famous for his instrumental role in the development of New Delhi, the Indian sub-continental town in which Bharti Kher's studio is now located, the whole thing seems so beautifully synchronicitous. A multitude of difference comes together to form the perfect moment. To me it feels right. Just right.

2010-03-03T20:33:00.001Z

I've always tended to think of Elton John as something of a twat. But all that's changed on the back of a story I picked up in The Art Newspaper this morning. Apparently a few years ago Elton John asked Gary Hume to make a piece of art work for his shower room.

Hume reports: "I said to him, 'of course, what a nice idea,' but inside I was thinking, 'are you fucking mad? Of course I don't want to make anything for your shower. How insulting!' After that, every time I saw him he would say, 'how's the shower piece going?' and I'd say, 'fine.' Then, after about two years, he said: 'Look, Gary, what's happening?' So I said that I didn't want to do it after all. So he said: "Well, why don't you get a can of spray paint, write, 'Elton is a cunt' in my shower, and I'll buy it."

In the end it seems Hume built some marble thing inspired by William Blake's gravestone for Elton's shower on the back of which he'd written 'Elton is a cunt'.

I've got a few problems with this story. Firstly, if a person doesn't want to do something he's been invited to do then the respectful course of action is to grow a pair and very politely decline the offer, perhaps with a blow softening tale involving the over committed status of one's schedule at the present time.

Secondly, if a person were 'insulted' by the idea of creating a work of art for a shower room, why would he then do it anyway? In ruminating on this question the only conclusion I've been able to arrive at - and I apologise in advance if this is either wildly inaccurate or 'insulting' - is that the artist must have 'sold out', that is to say, abandoned his apparently rather grandiose if fragile artistic integrity over the small matter of a few quid. Fair enough, we all need to earn a living, but you can't have it both ways I'm afraid, or at least not without seeming to be both a snob and a sell out.

Thirdly, what exactly is the problem with housing a piece of artwork in a shower room? I just do not get it actually, this pathetic snobbery around where a 'serious' piece of artwork can and cannot allow itself to be seen. Is this a piece of art we're talking about or is this Paris bloody Hilton on a night out? Is there something inherently unserious about a shower? Is a bedroom more 'serious'? Or a drawing room perhaps? Yes, I'm sure a drawing room must be higher up the social ranking on the art snobs guide to where to hang your overpriced YBA work, than a lowly shower room, the room after all in which one's ablutions are shame facedly carried out. Or is a pitch black climate controlled Momart warehouse the only place that a 'serious' work of art should be seen these days? Assuming, that is, that nobody's planning on having a fag anywhere near the place whilst your stuff's lauding it about in there.

If it were a watercolour we were speaking of then of course a shower room would be totally inappropriate and I would take Mr Hume's point entirely. But what's being mooted here is a site-specific piece in which the characteristics of the intended location be taken into account at the drawing board stage. Wealthy patrons have been commissioning art since the dawn of time so I struggle to imagine that's the problem. No, it sounds to me like a case of good old fashioned insecurity and the inherent belief on the part of its creator that the art work can't stand up for itself without seriousness being conveyed upon it by the supposed gravitas of its surroundings. Doesn't say much for the art does it?

For all his cheesy music, preposterous tantrums and ghastly toupés sitting on his head like old women at a bus stop, at least Elton John's got the bottle to think for himself.

Gary Hume's New Work is currently showing at the New Art Centre, Roche Court until 18 April 2010. A gallery's alright then is it? Oh yes I see, of course, a gallery's alright.

2010-02-25T21:03:00.026Z

I found myself last night at an amateur poetry recital come music evening in a bar on the corner of Boundary Road. Actually, I’m not sure I found myself quite, but that’s where I was anyway.

The last time I was in Boundary Road I was staring at my own reflection in a shiftless lake of sump oil. This time I was listening to an octogenarian wearing an emerald green blazer and a gently listing russet toupé, quietly singing Fly me to the Moon with an almost total absence of harmony, to an audience of eight, six of whom were other performers awaiting their turn.

As Fly me to the Moon goes it was pretty terrible I suppose, but there was something endearing about it in an unobvious way. Perhaps its unobviousness was its charm. There are few things in life more ghastly than someone trying desperately to bonk you about the head with the details of their personal tragedy; their bloody “extreme pain”. Tragedy wasn’t really there for me from the amateur poet whose agonies over his dead girlfriend drowned at sea he frantically attempted to resuscitated for us whilst we chowed down on a burrito or two and quaffed a glass of chardonnay: “aaaaagh, water, water, aaaaagh, water.” It was pure comedy, albeit not for him, but it was difficult to care about him because he was so busy doing that himself.

Tragedy, on the other hand, is the fellow singing a song that nobody hears, that nobody even notices when he’s finished, gets up and wanders away. The inadvertent tragedy that doesn’t ask you to give a damn about it is ultimately the one that softens the heart. The tragedy that has no expectation that things should be any other than the way they are.

My personal tragedy this week is not, thankfully, the untimely demise of my nearest and dearest at the hands of large bodies of water, but the use of the word entropy in essays on art. I’m afraid I just don’t understand what it means. I am incredibly dense when it comes to anything even vaguely scientific. It’s really a difficulty these days for an art historian. I’ve found something on the internet – not on wikipedia thank you – that informs me that entropy means, or rather, ahem, “one of the ideas involved in the concept of entropy,” is that nature tends to veer away from order and towards disorder. Apparently entropy is why, if you shove a pile of books off your desk and onto the floor, they will invariably land in a disordered heap and not in the neat pile they once were.

I like this idea. For me it explains a lot about my life. What it does not explain to me is what is going on at the Camden Arts Centre in Katja Strunz’s installation Sound of the Pregeometric Age. Apparently it does explain what is going on at the Camden Arts Centre in Katja Strunz’s installation Sound of the Pregeometric Age for Adriane Muller, the lady who wrote the essay on this work for the File Notes. And maybe it will for you to, those amongst you who are not scientifically challenged as per moi.

But for those who may find yourselves a bit stumped by the complexities of advanced physics I thought I might expound my own interpretation of this work by Katja Strunz, with my usual lack of regard - although no lack of respect - for what the artist may or may not have had in mind when she created it and my similarly usual lack of regard for what anyone else might care to think. But there we are. That’s a nice bit of entropy for you…. I think?

The installation is made up of a series of vaguely anthropomorphic figures composed of found object and various bits of musical instruments that create the effect of a timeless and not specifically human orchestra of sorts, but human enough for the viewer to identify with - this viewer at least. From amongst this community of oddities a sound is somehow generated; sometimes squeaky, sometimes rumbly, always otherworldly. From one or two of these strange figures a wire leads out of the window to a tree outside in the grounds running alongside the Finchley Road. When I enquired I was told that the object in the tree was a micro-phone but that the sound was pre-recorded. Whatever the details, the set up clearly suggests some sort of link between the world outside and this strangely charming little army of indeterminate beings inside.

The word Pregeometric, according to my sometimes-reliable-sometimes-not-reliable friend the World Wide Web, is a term used in physics to speak about that which existed before space and time as we understand it. Or perhaps that which runs alongside the time and space we are familiar with, in some kind of parallel alternative fashion, that has so far proved to be rather beyond my comprehension, but very much within the grasp of my curious interest.

Being the slightly hippy-chick that I am, I like to think of this alternative sphere of existence, if that’s even the right way of speaking about it, as a sort of Oneness from which we, in our current existence apparent, have somehow manifested. If we are simply Oneness manifesting, then Oneness presumably is a place made up of us, but without the sense of us as separate beings, with the separate lives and separate agendas that seem to cause all of life’s problems. A mulch of energy, light, consciousness or what you will, wherein everything is just, well… One. Apparently some believe that this Oneness emits a sound vibrationally similar to the letters Om. Or Amen. Some can even hear this sound when sitting very quietly in a very quite place for a very long time. Om.

Anyway, the moment I wandered into Katja Strunz’s installation this is what I thought of and I greeted the thought with openhearted enthusiasm and a great big hug, as it is one of my favourite thoughts. I thought that it could be this Oneness, this place of Love, that Katja is referring to, albeit through the medium of mathematics and physics, rather than through this quasi-spiritual investigation of mine. But perhaps it’s all the same in the end anyway. All roads lead to Rome as it were. Or rather all roads lead to One. To Om. It’s certainly a very nice thought, a very warming, calming thought, that makes you realise that there’s really nothing that much to worry about. Life just is what life just is and we just are what we just are. Sometimes that means tragedy; sometimes that means joy. But it’s all One in the end.

To borrow from Eliot borrowing from the Upanishads… shanti shanti shanti…

Katja Strunz
Camden Arts Centre
until 7 March 2010

2010-02-25T13:52:00.008Z

I’m sitting in my cluttered little office in Ladbroke Grove with a cup of green tea with jasmine in one hand and an image of multi disciplinary and performance artist VALIE EXPORT in the other.

VALIE EXPORT sits, legs akimbo, on a wooden chair, brandishing a military rifle, wearing black peep-toe sling backs, a black leather shirt pulled taught across her chest and a pair of black trousers with a large triangle of fabric cut away to reveal her bare crotch. She’s also wearing a massive, unruly black wig that calls to mind shamanic headdress with all its unnerving supernatural connotations. Beneath the wig VALIE EXPORT has a beautiful face and its expression is impassive.

The image is a piece of documentation from a performance that took place in Munich in 1968 wherein VALIE EXPORT entered a porn cinema wearing this awe inspiring feminist get-up and strode angrily between the rows of seated viewers.

Such a bold statement makes an unmade bed, a pickled shark, and perhaps even a gang of child mannequins with genitals where the noses should be, seem tame. Actually, perhaps not the mannequins, that’s a bit fucked-up even by art history’s standards. Nonetheless, Action Pants: Genital Panic took place in the 60s and it wasn’t abstract conceptualising and schoolboy shock tactics - it was for real.

EXPORT’s Action Pants: Genital Panic can currently be seen hanging in Tate Modern and the reason I’m gripped by it is I’ve been asked by an artist friend to collaborate with her on a project about the seven deadly sins. She’s asked me to come up with ideas for seven self-portraits that she will then choreograph with me and shoot on digital SLR, in a Calle-esque investigation of what a whole cross-section of different people will come up with in response to a certain emotive stimulus, in this case, the deadly sins.

I’ve chosen to approach the project as an art historian, mainly of course because that is what I am and it’s always wise to stick with what you know. For each ‘sin’ I’ve chosen a single work by one of seven women artists from 1968 to the present day. They’re all artists I respect hugely and all are largely working with their own bodies and/or incorporating some degree of performativity.

Initially my friend Manu had suggested that these self-portraits should be shot using an absolute minimum of props and that the clothes worn should be limited to a black polo neck and black trousers. So this is what I had in mind. My self-portrait Anger would consist of a symbolic re-creation of this image as an homage to VALIE EXPORT, but rather than getting into complicated outfit territory I would stick with the black sweater and trousers, a silhouette if you like, allowing the pose to do the talking.

So I meet up with Manu at the Camden Arts Centre to show her my ideas.
“Great,” she said, “very interesting approach, but,” she said, “would be so much more powerful as a piece of work in eetself and as an homage and as an illustration of the seens, to reproduce it exactly as the original.”
“Ah, you mean legs akimbo, no pants?”
“Maybe”
“Right, I see. I might have to have a little think about that one then Manu.”
“No problem.”

My initial thought was, “oh bugger, I can’t do that”. But after a while I started to feel a bit pathetic about it. If VALIE EXPORT could do it in 1968 without bating an eyelash, why can’t I do it in 2010? God, what’s the big deal? It’s hardly news. Fifty percent of us look like that down there. It’s nothing we haven’t all seen before in one way or another. What’s so different about me? And now I’m almost thinking that to reproduce it in any way other than loyally would be an insult to the original. Making something that in 1968 was very radically not polite, not polite at all, but enraged and demanding to be heard, into something tame, demure, apologetic almost. That just wouldn’t be right. Even the vicar thought so.

So that’s it then. Decision made. Now I have to decide which trousers I don’t mind destroying in the name of my feminist art historical principals and get the scissors out! Body where mouth is. How liberating. Now I’m just looking forward to Jake and Dinos getting their kecks off. How very noughties that would be.

2010-02-25T13:27:00.006Z

"YOU CAN'T EXPECT PEOPLE TO BE SOMETHING THEY'RE NOT"
Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer
BALTIC, Gateshead
5 March to 16 May

2010-02-25T13:09:00.017Z

I went to the private view of Irving Penn at the NPG last week with my wonderful French photographer friend Marité. I pointed out my favourite photograph, a portrait of Willem de Kooning and Frederick Kiesler taken in New York in May 1960.

"You're not looking at the photograph darling, you're looking at the man. Attractive older man you're latest thing is it?" she enquired.
How maddening the French can be.

Irving Penn Portraits
National Portrait Gallery
until 6 June 2010

"we don't call them shoots here. We don't shoot people. It's really a love affair."
Irving Penn

2010-02-22T16:02:00.014Z

The Kingdom of Cambodia has a shrink - sorry - psychiatrist population of twenty. What I’m wondering is, does this mean that if I have a breakdown in Cambodia I’ll be laughing or buggered?

I’m tempted to think that if one’s wont to have a breakdown anywhere, then in the middle of nowhere is probably the place for it. Not that I’m exactly scheduling it in, but you never know. As my mother keeps reminding me in what is starting to become a slightly unnerving fashion, when travelling in these out of the way places one’s got to think ahead. Be prepared for every eventuality.

Cambodia also has 60,000 resident Buddhist monks, so I’m thinking maybe they’ll be a bit more useful to me in the event of an eruption of chaotic mental activity – more chaotic than usual that is. I’d like to think so, but I’m not willing to bet on it. In my experience no amount of meditating is capable of nullifying the wanker gene when it’s inherent. Nope, you’ve got to look out for yourself in this life because no other bugger’s going to do it for you. “We’re on our own kidda,” – more wise words from Mater.

When I get to Cambodia I’m planning on doing largely not that much. Hit and run tourism isn’t really my thing. A temple a week is about the extent of my site seeing aspiration and that’s cracking on some I reckon. Besides which, after a week of three hours of ashtanga a day – starting at 5am to avoid the blistering 40 degree heat that comes later – all I’ll be good for is lying in a heap, grappling with my, by then no doubt none too stable mental faculties.

A French religious mathematician (whatever such a thing may be) called Blaise Pascal said in 1653 (or sometime around then - who’s counting?) “all our miseries derive from not being able to sit quietly alone.” My feeling is he may have had a point there. So I thought I’d try a bit of that. Rather than aiming to see every temple in South East Asia in the space of twenty-one days, as I understand to be the expected procedure the minute wheels hit tarmac in Siem Reap, I’m thinking I’ll aim to see almost nothing. I’ll try sitting by myself for a couple of weeks in a place where my nearest friend is 4000 miles away. Maybe I’ll make a friend or two out there. Maybe not. It matters little.

If a county’s visa application procedure is any indicator then it seems it’s going to be a quietish trip anyway, which is a promising start. Getting a visa sorted for India these days involves an interminable and entirely opaque pantomime of head nodding and bureaucratic paper shuffling that led me quite quickly to imagining that poking myself repeatedly in the eye might provide an entertaining distraction. Bodies of an international variegation drape themselves across every available horizontal surface and wait, and wait, and wait, the air moist with the not entirely appetising coagulation of stale sweat and curry powder.

At the Cambodian Embassy, way off the beaten track in Willesden of all the random places, you press the buzzer “gently and just once please” on the front gate of a modest semi-detached off the main road. A charming smiley Cambodian lady bids you past the gleaming black Porsche Cayene parked out front (!) into the oak panelled reception area. Not another soul is to be seen. Nobody else, it seems, is after a visa to visit Cambodia this Spring. She follows me in and trots behind the reception desk, asking me for the simple one page form that I had, in seconds, downloaded off the internet and completed, requests £15, gives me a receipt and suggests I come back next Thursday to collect my updated passport. The entire transaction takes about 45 seconds before she's ushering me convivially back out onto the streets of North-West London with another beaming smile. Collecting the visa was even more efficient by a good second or two.

Despite, or perhaps because of their, to say the least, chequered humanitarian history, the biggest danger in Cambodia these days is apparently the landmines, of which there are a reported six million still live and dotted about the countryside. So if my head doesn’t blow up under the pressure of my own relentless company, it’ll be my body. Still, a shrink’s not going to be much use in that event either. But then neither is a Buddhist probably. Still, if I do accidentally blow myself up it’s warming to think that at least I know my Mum will miss me. Not entirely alone then. Not yet.

2010-02-19T19:23:00.016Z

I’ve just written my first love poem. I think it’s probably best if I refrain from imposing it upon you at this stage. Or probably ever. It’s a bit amateurish I’m afraid, because of course, I’m an art historian by training, not a poet. The last line reads “…or am I just afeared of love?” Yes you see, I told you, bit amateurish. It is what I might this month refer to as “a bit Billy Childish”. By which I mean, it’s not without a certain rough charm, but neither is it really much good.

Still, I don’t think one should allow the possibility that one might spend decades of one's life creating stuff that isn’t really much good, prevent one from creating it anyway. Absolutely not. Creativity is everything. Creativity is our connection to the divine. Quality control is a secondary consideration. The thing is though, you might want to exercise a bit of caution in choosing who to share its results with. Or perhaps I should speak for myself here. Perhaps I should exercise some caution in deciding who to share my creative output with. So I’ll spare you the love poem. Don’t mention it. It’s the least I can do.

Of course, a lot of people like Billy Childish’s work. Or so we’re given to understand. If indeed that is what the term ‘cult figure’ means. Or does that just mean most people don’t like it but there’s one or two noisy ones as do?

Actually, you know, to be brutally honest with myself in a support group kind of a way, I didn’t even dislike it that much. His painting is technically inept to a large degree and stylistically derivative. A poor man’s Kirchner, only a hundred years out of date, lacking the compositional and colouristic sophistication and definitely without the fierce edge. But there’s some sort of channelled rawness there that one doesn’t find in a lot of so called ‘outsider art’.

It seemed oddly fitting at the private view that whilst standing in front of Robert Walser Lying Dead in the Snow with Footprints, a rather eccentric looking fellow with very, very rouged cheeks and equally cerised eyelids, loomed his face about an inch from mine, in a voice reminiscent of Mr Bean and with absurdly exaggerated lip movements, spoke the words:
“It’s called Snow isn’t it? Snow?”
I turned around to face him and I said,
“Do you know,” I said, “I’m not sure what it’s called.”
“It’s called Snow,” he repeated, and lest there be any doubt,
“It’s called Snow… Snow.”
“Righteo,” I chortled,
“Righteoooo...” repetition being contagious apparently and Viksie’s expression reading: don’t engage this man Bev, he’s clearly off his onion. It probably wasn’t worth mentioning, I decided, that the painting was in fact called Robert Walser Lying Dead in the Snow with Footprints.
“Wise decision,” opined Viksie.

After that altogetherly engaging interlude the fellow wandered off. We followed him with our eyes for a few seconds before returning our attention to Robert Walser Lying Dead in the Snow with Footprints. “I do believe he was wearing a PE skirt,” said Viksie. And so he was. And plimsolls. And little white ankle socks. This is what happens when a person becomes a “cult figure”. They become a nutter magnet.

If anything I preferred Childish’s poems to his paintings – “writer of poems to lick the thighs of the dead” – but that’s probably because I know nothing about poetry and therefore have no basis for comparison nor depth of understanding beyond the purely intuitive, which will get you so far, but beyond that a bit of education is a real boon, in my no doubt hopelessly middle class view.

It’s a bit like the environmental debate. We’ve all got an opinion of course, but how many of us really have a wide enough understanding of the immense historical, scientific and ethical complexities of the subject to have any sort of an educated opinion? How many of us have read the primary sources? And how many of us are simply paraphrasing a chaotic amalgam of second and third hand subjective journalistic sources usually sponsored by some right wing billionaire or other? It’s very easy to spout off. We can all do that on any given topic under the sun. But to spout off in an informed fashion is a far rarer thing.

It’s education. I just can’t help thinking there’s something in it actually.

So it often is with people who choose to slag off conceptual art. It may well be that Billy Childish’s criticism of concept driven art - “I hate conceptual art, our contemporary culture is as facile as the fucking Victorian chocolate box stuff, but not as talented” – grows out of a deep art historical investigation. But I can’t help wondering when he might have found the time to study the history of art when he’s been so busy getting kicked out of Central St Martin’s for obnoxious behaviour and under-performance and subsequently creating an alleged 2500 canvases, forty volumes of confessional verse, a hundred plus albums, and generally disappearing up his own backside in a rush of self important denigration of something he simply doesn’t happen to go a bundle on, or, dare I say it, understand. If you don’t like something fine, then go off and talk about something else. But leave those who do get something from it to enjoy it in peace. Please.

Born Steven John Hamper he named himself Childish. Not totally without insight then.

2010-02-04T12:02:00.001Z

"one paints because one can't bloody help it."
Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres at 80
Alan Cristea Gallery
until 13 March 2010

2010-02-03T17:50:00.014Z

I’ve noticed lately that my tolerance for what I don’t want far outstrips my capacity to ingest more than a fairly limited quantity of the things I do want. The last thing you want, it seems, is too much of what you want. I suppose the difficulty is that getting what you want unavoidably kills the dream and if, as is almost inevitable, the reality fails to live up to the dream, then you’re left with a rubbish time and a desecrated dream. And then what? I’ve an idea that then one gets oneself another fantasy and makes sure this time to keep the thing at arms length where it belongs. Reality can be profoundly overrated.

And so it is with Michael Landy’s Art Bin. The publicity shots of Michael Landy actually in a wheely bin are rather more intriguing than the gigantic Perspex of Peckham installation itself. It should be interesting – failure, particularly in our goal oriented, ego-driven, success-athon society, is certainly a subject worthy of investigation. But it just isn’t particularly.

Firstly it’s too damn big. And it’s too ugly in a dull corporate everyman not quite ugly enough kind of a way. And too literal. “A monument to creative failure,” Landy calls it. Questions too obvious to list waddle about the outskirts of the space trying to look edgy and “on message”, ie anti-establishment (yawn)… but end up resembling your middle-aged IT guy imagining himself hip in a pair of combats nobody outside the 90s would be seen dead in. Who cares that there’ll be a Damien Hirst diamond skull print on its way to the land fill in a few months time? …ditto Emin, ditto Opie… and a whole load of other stuff that didn’t turn out quite as its less well-known creators intended? All those things would have been on their way to the landfill in a couple of months anyway. Now they’re going there in convoy. So what?

But would they have been going there anyway? In our celebrity obsessed age, it’s not inconceivable that some lesser known artists will be choosing the works they consider to be their most successful for consignment to the rubbish bin, rather than the pieces they consider to have failed, so that their one and only opportunity to show in the South London Gallery alongside Michael Landy, Alison Wilding, Gary Hume etc. - albeit accompanied by the unenviable indignity of being hurled into a dustbin - won’t have to involve the further shame making revelation of work they’re not happy with.

This hint of the Hyacinth Bucket meets Katie Price approach to life is the fault line along which the bin thing, possibly inadvertently, begins to hot up. How far will artists go for fame and notoriety? How far will any of us go? Will we happily destroy the best of ourselves in order to hitch a ride on the back of someone else’s bandwagon just to secure our fifteen minutes? Of course we will. And what does that say about us? To what degree have we lost touch with any sense of integrity? Have we become a bunch of complete phoneys chasing ignorantly after the empty chalice of success? Are we at the bottom of the barrel and still digging? As my favourite anti-hero and quintessential twentieth century failure Holden Caulfield might have said: it’s pretty depressing in actual fact.

That aside I’d probably have found the Art Bin to be a bit more engaging if it had hinted at the pleasure to be found in failure; the possibilities that exist in the gap between intention and realisation; the unknown, unmapped space in which innovation and growth are spawned. Even without the possibility of greatness emerging as the fog of failure clears, there’s an apparently perverse pleasure to be found there and a very real existential solace to be gleaned from the embracing of it.

It’s this joy of failure, wherein the more widely accepted understandings of the term oscillate to a dizzying degree, that Roman Signer flaunts with wit and simplicity in works such as Bottleneck (2000) for which a car was driven down a narrowing concrete tunnel and didn't stop when there was nowhere else to go. Bottleneck engages with the wilfulness of our relationship to failure, the fun to be had there and the lessons to be learned from the sometimes painfully destructive experiences that lead eventually to greater insight and compassion.

But maybe I’m being harsh on the bin. Maybe it’ll have more energy to it in a few weeks time when it’s begun to fill up. Maybe with so many thousands of indistinguishable works all squashing down on top of each other morphing into one giant body of rubbish, a creative buzz might begin to stir.

Or perhaps all along I should have stayed at home and imagined the bin, dreamt of how good it might have been if only I’d been able to get over there, if only, if only… rather than facing up to its (and life’s) short comings with quite so brutal an immediacy. Sad to say, oftentimes the image is better than the reality. And maybe the Art Bin is just one of those times. But even that is not so unfortunate, for were Landy to have created the perfect work of art there’d be no need for him to undertake another, which would certainly obfuscate his career as an artist and probably his entire raisonne d’etre.

So success isn’t all its cracked up to be. In fact success is potentially a pretty terrifying place. Which I suppose is exactly the point Landy is making. As Gertrude Stein said: “A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.”

2010-01-26T18:04:00.004Z

Rumour has crystallised into copy – blood on the walls and one foot in the grave - the ICA could well be dead by May.

When I was at Goldsmiths’ in 2000, the art content of my MA in contemporary art history consisted of the tutors telling me to go to the ICA. That might suggest that the ICA is the heartland of London’s contemporary art scene, but I’m not really sure it is these days.

I love the ICA. Contemporary art aside – priorities people, priorities! - the bar is the perfect after hours hang out in an otherwise fairly derelict area of town, joyfully free of city boys, American tourists and acrylic nails, and vending those yummy wasabi coated peanuts. The cinema programming is second to none, showing a glut of wonderful movies and documentaries you can’t see anywhere else. Lastly, and in all honesty, probably least, some of the exhibitions are interesting too. Up to a point. But the fact is the programming hasn’t kept up with the pace of change elsewhere across our colourful metropolis and over the decades what was once the edgy place to be has become just one of a generous helping of places showing mid-career good but tried and tested contemporary art. Sorry folks, I know we all love to love the ICA, but it’s true.

In recent years the ICA has failed to maintain a strong identity for itself. Not quite edgy niche – that place is now filled by a small handful of really meaningful idiosyncratic little spaces, both commercial and not, largely dotted out in the middle of nowhere, somehow managing to scrape together the resources to support dynamic programmes of genuinely innovative and seemingly un-commercial multi-disciplinary work. Neither is it the staggering behemoth-like Cathedral to modernity and contemporaneity that Tate Modern has burst into, relegating everything else to its shadow. Mr Serota, with his incredible success on Bankside may have brought the Monty Python foot down more or less smack in the middle of the ICA’s once dominant skyline. However, success always has its victims and if the ICA didn’t see it coming and act accordingly then we certainly can’t be blaming Great Uncle Nick. And let’s face it, we wouldn’t dare.

No, the ICA has just become too darn ordinary, a bit long in the tooth, a bit wrinkly, crinkly and set in its ways. The space itself doesn’t even really work that well. A bit of exhibition here, a bit there, a bit in the bar, a bit in the corridor and a bit up thirteen thousand flights of stairs. That’s alright if you’re engaging the quirkiness somehow, but to work around it as if it’s an issue you aren’t even seeing any more isn’t really good enough. So, maybe it’s a relocation they need? Somewhere cheaper and edgier. That’d be a massive gust of fresh air. Get the blood pumping again.

Anyway, the death knell rang out once and for all when, at the insistence of Arts Council England apparently, and as a condition of a fairly fatish bail-out loan last year, they scrapped the day membership fee allowing entrance to non-members. Not surprisingly, since then nobody, bar one or two stalwarts, has bothered to renew their annual membership. A few other unforeseen goings on and revenue fell off a cliff. Tricky. It seems to me though, and perhaps I’m financially naïve, well, there’s no perhaps about it, I am financially naïve, but I’ll ask the question anyway… with all the wealth that’s knocking about in contemporary art these days, can’t they tempt some generous collector / benefactor into bailing them out? There must be a lot of cache in that for some wealthy wannabe. Alan must know a few big hitters mustn’t he? OK, I can see that would put a different slant on things, and we’d have to listen to the fantastically dull conflict of interests brigade once again, but at least it’d stave off closure for a while. And after all, without sugar refinery, where would Tate be now?

The ICA may not be perfect, but who amongst us is? Everything goes through cycles in its lifetime and nobody’s on top of their game a hundred per cent of the time. There will always be peaks and troughs and in that real life context it’s difficult to deny that for most of its sixty-two year history the ICA’s performance has been unsurpassed. Set against the 80 / 20 rule it’s doing extremely well. Add to that the undisputed fact that the government happily shovels seemingly endless resources into any number of crappy, if not down right damaging schemes, and the fact that even in these relatively tough times there still seems to be plenty of money out there if you know where to look, I don’t think I’m just being sentimental when I say I really do think it would be a great shame if we were to lose the ICA. Who knows what the future may hold when (if) it enters its next roll. It might have started putting its teeth on the bedside table of an evening, but as ee cummings tells us: “whenever men are right they are not young.”

2010-01-24T03:11:00.011Z

I went to the dentist this morning for the first time in four and a half years. There’s a new one, opposite the yoga centre, so I felt at least I’d be turning up in a positive mental state even if I’m leaving more or less traumatised. Through that rationalising route I was able to chivvy myself into making an appointment. The experience still took some years off my life but compared with previous nightmares it was like a date with the Lord Buddha himself.

Before today it was my belief that nothing could deflect a dentist from the task in hand. You could go into cardiac arrest right there in the chair and they’d just carry on drilling. Not this one. Peroxide plaits and an Eastern European gentleness behind the white surgical mask and the rolling vowels. It’s a curiously intimate situation. You can see every pore and scar on the face of a complete stranger hovering inches from your own, the tiny brown flecks of her blue irises. You’re putting yourself into a position of vulnerability at their hands. You’re trusting them not to hurt you, despite the fact that, of course, you know they will. Not deliberately, but they will hurt you. The thing about this woman was she acknowledged it. She didn’t just put a wall up and pretend it wasn’t there. She acknowledged the pain. Surprising things can come out of dialogue. And it’s not even the words. It’s the connection that’s the balm. Just allowing the connection.

So I suppose I should give the Royal Academy their due for attempting to further the dialogue around our crusade du jour with the exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World, rather than wondering if they aren’t just jumping on the nearest bandwagon in town with their agenda firmly nailed to the flag post in the shape of the letters GSK – Glaxo Smith Kline that is, if, like me, you’re not up on your TLAs.

I enjoyed quite a lot of the work in the show actually, but I did experience some resistance to the idea of an exhibition about climate change sponsored by a pharmaceuticals company. Quite possibly I’ve been brain-washed by the over active imaginings of John le Carre - but doesn’t this smack slightly of corporate hypocrisy, the auctioning of the grandmother to the bidder in the John Galliano suit? I don’t know, I just suddenly came over all Swampy in front of the Amazonian Field. When is the flu not the flu? When it’s renamed to include some sort of animal life in its title, splashed all over the dailies for months so they can flog a few more copies by aiming their sharpened arrows right into the heart of modern Britain’s unacknowledged existential terror, and simultaneously generating the perfect marketing vehicle for the latest over priced drug only a few of us need but all of us seemingly must buy. It’s safety we’re after. We so want to be safe. I’m not criticising the artists. I’m just saying. It feels like a cynical world some days. Some days.

One of the high points of the show is Yael Bartana’s strangely disturbing Kings of the Hill, a 7 minute anthropology styled film of a bunch of slightly thuggish posh blokes amusing themselves driving huge Big Foot type vehicles up and down preposterously steep mounds of compacted earth next to the sea. The sea, in its vastness, seems poignantly to highlight the tragic futility and utter smallness of the action it foregrounds. What’s all this for? What’s anything for come to that? I don’t know, dominance, I suppose. The impulse to prove to ourselves that we are capable of beating the world into submission before it beats us. Or perhaps that we’re capable of corralling our own demons before they destroy everything we’ve built for ourselves, all the things that tell us who we are and fool us into believing we’re safe. Only, like the looped film, it’s a battle that never ends, because it’s a battle that can’t be won and yet we won’t wave the white flag. We will always be vulnerable and we will always rail against that. As this film - and the whole exhibition and in fact the eco-crusade itself - so eloquently demonstrate, that’s the one thing we’re most afraid of. We can’t stand our own vulnerability. Not for a minute. Which is the sad thing because the vulnerability is the beauty. It’s a big chasm to leap though isn’t it?