It’s a staggering thing that a person can write 600 words a week on the subject of radio programmes and the result be near addictive every time. I never listen to the radio. Apart from in the car and that’s because the CD player’s broken and I have no idea how to fit the shockingly expensive in car ipod converter that a company called Ipod Car Kit Direct assured me, just before they took my credit card details, any idiot would have working within minutes. Disappointingly the little red LED lights on the dashboard have broken too so the radio is stuck on Heart FM – I swear I never tuned it to that - which means I have to switch the volume down to almost inaudible levels every time a calamitous tune comes on. Which is most of the time. If I’m in bombastic mood I might switch it up for Gloria Gaynor, but otherwise probably not.

I’d love to be the sort of person who listens to Front Row and Woman’s Hour and Jeremy Vine (whoever he is). But I’m just not. How I’d adore to say to friends and family and anyone unfortunate enough to be within ear shot, “oh I heard on Thought for the Day this morning…” But despite my best pretensions towards cultural middle age I just can’t do it. Even a radio programme dedicated to Richard Wright’s £25,000 victory is a turn off. Every time I switch the radio on I’m instantly and invariably gripped by the urge to switch it off again. Which I suppose makes it all the odder that I should be such a fan of Antonia Quirke’s New Statesman radio review column. I almost never have even the slightest clue what she’s talking about, but it’s thoroughly engaging nonetheless. She writes beautifully and with an idiosyncratic random humour. It’s a pleasure to get lost in the eccentricity.

Not so Enrico David’s surrealist strangeness. I can see that for some it’s probably playful and witty and obscure, but it doesn’t tickle my fancy a bit. It’s just not my bag. I do like the other three though. Particularly Roger Hiorns - on first thought more for the sparkly elephantine council house than for the atomised passenger airplane. On further thought, almost the plane more actually. Apparently planes get atomised all the time. That’s just what happens to ex-planes. Retired planes past their useful age. It’s rather a tragedy. Seeing the dust on the floor one is confronted with the theme indisputably central to human life, articulated with such haunting, almost terrifying beauty in Eliot’s immortal line: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”


And I like the way Hiorns looks like a school boy. He reminds me of the really clever boy at school. The slightly gawky fellow who looked twelve but had the smarts of a wizened old man. It’s endearing. But I’d best make no further comment on that as I’ve already had my knuckles severely rapped for flagrant sexist objectification of the male of the species in my musings on Me and Orson Welles. Aha, boot on the other foot for a change. And they don’t like it any more than we do!


Former jury member Adrian Searle points out rather wonderfully – as always – that Tomma Abs is the only woman to have won the prize this decade and suggests that this imbalance needs to be addressed. I shall say nothing further on this either, as it’s much better coming from him than from me. It’s a hot one to handle and - once again - I tip my hat to you Mr Searle for having the bottle to get stuck in there.

I was also delighted to encounter the re-introduction of the word ‘beautiful’ into the lexicon of art speak this year, apparently without the encumbrance of the ill-fitting psycho baggage of its type casting in recent years as the embarrassing uncle at your big sisters wedding, who insists on pinching everyone’s bottoms, much to the mortification of all. If Stephen Deuchar and Alan Yentob are both to be heard using the ‘B’ word, seemingly in auspicious tones, to describe Richard Wright’s prize winning and almost universally lauded abstract gold-leaf murals, then it must be ok. Joy.







My favourite comment on this year’s Turner Prize exhibition though came from the perennially peachy Scotsman and former victor Martin Creed: “I think it’s really nice. The works are gentle and soft and nice.” I couldn’t agree more.

Altermodern: aka the Fourth Tate Triennial. It’s new alright. But it hasn’t come out of thin air. Think Einstein. Think Buddha. Think Lao Zi. It’s almost impossible to understand in words because what is being pointed to is beyond words. It’s more like a leap of faith. And if you’re not in the mood for a leap of faith you’re probably not going to be in the mood for Altermodern.

But what is life without faith? It is doubt. It is cynicism. It is victimhood. It’s everything that was summed up by postmodernity. And that’s so over guys. But actually, it’s not completely over because Altermodern grows out of the post-modern but does not exclude it. Altermodern includes everything. Altermodern is everything.

I like Altermodern. It’s brave. It’s fantastically audacious to be grappling with ideas as profound and all encompassing as this - to put them together in your own unique style, stick a name on them and attempt to describe them with a bold selection of very contemporary works by artists of all nationalities. That takes some serious bottle doesn’t it? Even with the backing of Tate, that takes guts. Probably in a forum as public as Tate, it takes even more guts. I’ve got to respect that. I know how difficult it is putting on even a four-person show of local artists in a small gallery in Ladbroke Grove. I know how tough it is juggling people’s fears; battling with egos and bureaucracy and politics and logistics and finances and press and all the other minutiae you probably wouldn’t even dream of. And I’m not at the same time coming up with what might prove to be the next great cultural and theoretical phenomenon. OK so it might not. But even if it doesn’t, Altermodern will still have been a mighty undertaking and I take my hat off to Nicolas Bourriaud. He’s a brave man. Far from being a ‘curatorial dunce’ (Januszczak, ‘The Sunday Times’), he is in fact, a voice of the zeitgeist. And the zeitgeist is on the move. Times are changing. If the credit crunch is a sign of anything, it is without a doubt, a sign that that is not a moment too soon.


I’m not sure I fully understand the specifics of half of what Bourriaud says in his by now famously impenetrable theory heavy texts. But in a way you don’t really need to. Just walking around the exhibition, I knew in my gut, that this was worth taking note of. Big time.

So what is it all about? I’m not that confident with academia and theory brings me out in a sweat. Neither am I entirely keen on the idea of a public attempt at translating these intellectual mega-concepts into the colloquial. But I’ll have a go. You’ll have to excuse me if I wander from the path of common sense. That’ll be nothing new anyway.

Altermodern makes room for a ‘multitude of possibilities, of alternatives to a single route’. (Nicolas Bourriaud). So far, so post-modern. But wait, because it isn’t.



To describe this plurality, this ‘multitude of possibilities’, Bourriaud uses the spatial / geographical metaphor of the archipelago. What he’s getting at with the archipelago reference is ‘the relationship between the one and the many’ (Bourriaud). We’re not talking about one or the other here. It’s way bigger than that. We’re talking about the whole shooting match. All in one go. All on a level playing field. No victim, no oppressor. Just what is.

This is the crux of it all and the point from which Altermodern takes off. As with the archipelago, it’s the relationship between the One and the many that underpins everything. Not just everything Altermodern: Everything. It is the relationship between the one and the many that underpins life and the human condition.

Now, I’m not sure I should be getting into this because it is a little ambitious for one such as I, without Bourriaud’s talent for the hugely aspiring. However, what I lack in smarts I make up for in enthusiasm. So here we go.


I nearly fell out of bed the other evening when, staggering through The Idiots Guide to Quantum Physics at nearly one in the morning, I came across Einstein’s theory of relativity. For an ‘idiot’s guide’ it made my brain disconcertingly achy! What seemed to be on the table was the notion that space and time are one and the same thing. (I can hear the ex-boyfriend getting impatient with my less than scientific understanding already - but I shall persevere!) It seems a moving clock marks time more slowly than a stationary clock. The order of events in time will be different for observers moving relative to one another. Simultaneity, it seems, is relative. It would further seem then that there is no absolute meaning to apparent time orderings. Fundamentally, there is no truth to the notion of universal time, there is only personal time. Linear time as we commonly understand it, as the clock appears to measure it, does not exist. This is not poetic, this is literal. Absolutely literal. There is no such thing as absolute time.

So this means we’re pretending. We’re imposing a linearity on life that does not exist.

For me this is what Altermodern is about. For me Altermodern is attempting to make the point that space and time are not the sequential, linear safe-houses we like to pretend them to be. There’s no use stuffing everything into a neat little box with a name on it, says Altermodern. That’s nonsense. That’s denial. Even space and time - it’s all nonsense. What we are really living in is a big fat jumble. But actually that’s fine. For me, Altermodern is saying, that’s fine, the jumble is fine, let’s explore that, let’s go with that, let’s celebrate the chaos. Let’s live the in-between. Forget binary. Forget you and me. Forget love and hate. Forget East and West. Let’s all just be. ‘A positive experience of disorientation,’ Bourriard calls it, ‘a positive vision of chaos and complexity’. How wonderful!

This is why to look at the exhibition Altermodern as though it were simply a roll call of individual works by individual artists is to miss the point. The chaos is the point. Any negative criticism of the exhibition that calls it ‘ill-thought-out’ (Wullschlager, ‘The FT’) or ‘art that makes its own completion impossible’ (Januszczak, ‘The Sunday Times’) is just missing the point or else being deliberately obtuse. This exhibition is not attempting a conventional linearity. Because as Einstein pointed out at the beginning of the last century (and Jung agreed) and as the Buddha pointed out two and a half thousand years ago, such a thing as conventional linearity just doesn’t exist outside the human mind. So, basically, get over it.

Despite saying that Altermodern is nothing to do with individual artists and all to do with nucleur-less arboriality, I really can’t pass up the chance to wax on about a few of my favourites. But then that’s ok, because this is Altermodern. It all exists within a wider context. And besides, many of the individual works engage on a local scale with the same ideas of nomadic interdependence that the whole exhibition is about.



I have to mention Charles Avery’s gynormous head. For ten years Avery has been cultivating ‘The Islanders’, a multi-media installation mapping the life of a man whose name is never revealed, who casts anchor on ‘The Island’. He becomes a hunter, with the ambition of capturing the Noumenon, a legendary indigenous creature that has never been seen but whose closest relative is believed to be the Aleph Nul. One day he kills an Aleph Nul causing its huge head to drop off. This vast sculpted head forms the centre piece of his installation. You don’t need me to point out the metaphorical references to the human condition. The infinite search for that which already is, the wilful destruction of all we had hoped would fill the absence, and the resulting inherent confusion and despair. What’s more, legend has it that Avery was kicked out of St Martin’s after six months - a story of academic tomfoolery come good that warms me even more to this whimsical Scottish artist.

Nathaniel Mellors’ ‘Giantbum’ is something else actually, something else entirely. One can’t simply tag ‘Giantbum’ onto the end of a sentence. Adrian Searle (‘The Guardian’) describes ‘Giantbum’ as a “somewhat alarming if not actually insanitary video installation with animatronic sculpture, entailing a journey through a felt-lined room, where a bunch of people are filmed rehearsing a play about being stuck inside God's bottom”. That’s true, but for my taste it’s undercooking it somewhat. On each of the three occasions that I’ve witnessed the spectacle that is ‘Giantbum’, I’ve been left with a deeply unsettled feeling that I’m not sure I’ve so far quite managed to shake off. Mellors is here squelching around in the deeper and less charming recesses of the human psyche, digging up stuff one would probably rather leave buried. I struggle to bring myself to warn you that human coprophagia features. Mellors’ drags us kicking and screaming into the heart of phobia territory. It really is beyond monstrous. Funny, revolting, stomach turning and profoundly nihilistic scenes of utter despair. I overheard a passerby whispering to her mate a question as to whether Irishman Mellors mightn’t be Roman Catholic. Yeiks. I feel guilty just repeating the words. I distance myself utterly. These are not my views. Then again ‘Brideshead’ isn’t exactly feel good. Hmmm. I seem to be swimming in shark infested waters. Time to head for the good news.

‘Tremors where Forever (Frequency of an Image, White Edit)’ by Frenchman Loris Greaud who lives in Ho Chi Minh City (Siagon) Vietnam was my favourite piece of work in the fourth Tate Triennial. It’s pointless to try and describe this work. It’s a visceral experience. It’s so beautiful you just have to go and experience it yourself.




If you can bare it, I must tell you one more thing I came across at Altermodern, and that is the International Necronautical Society. I have no idea what this is. Like so many things Altermodern, it seems to blur the boundaries between what we laughingly refer to as ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’. Apparently “the INS is a group of rogue agents who have infiltrated the worlds of art, literary criticism and philosophy” (‘Art Monthly’). If that doesn’t help you out then I’m sorry there’s nothing more I can do. It gives me the goose bumps.

From the INS’ ‘Tate Declaration of Inauthenticity’:
“Delivered by INS Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley and INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy at Tate Britain, London, 17th January 2009.
…We begin with the experience of failed transcendence... Being is not full transcendence, the plenitude of the One or cosmic abundance, but rather an ellipsis, an absence, an incomprehensibly vast lack scattered with debris and detritus. Philosophy as the thinking of Being has to begin from the experience of disappointment that is at once religious (God id dead, the One is gone), epistemic (we know very little, almost nothing; all knowledge claims have to begin from the experience of limitation) and political (blood is being spilt in the streets as though it were champagne).

For us, art is the consequence and experience of failed transcendence….”

Again I’m afraid words elude me. In the light of this I may need to rethink the writing career.


+++++++++++++++++++++++

A professor of mathematics sent an email to his wife. It read ‘Dear wife, you must realise that you’re 54 years old now, and I have certain needs which you just can’t satisfy anymore. Otherwise, I’m happy with you as a wife, so I sincerely hope you won’t be hurt or offended to learn that by the time you receive this letter, I’ll be at the Grand Hotel with my 18 year-old teaching assistant. I’ll be home before midnight.’

When he arrived at the hotel, there was an email awaiting him. It read, ‘Dear husband, you’re 54 years old yourself, and by the time you receive this, I’ll be at the Breakwater Hotel with the 18 year-old pool boy. Being the brilliant mathematician that you are, I’m sure you can easily appreciate the fact that 18 goes into 54 a lot more times than 54 goes into 18. Don’t wait up.’



Altermodern: Tate Triennial 2009
Tate Britain
until 26 April 2009
www.tate.org.ukB

I now own a rucksack. A serious rucksack. I know it is serious because it is black. So far it contains 3 packs of imodium, 3 packs of diorhalites, 2 cans of 100 per cent deet, 3 packs of water purification tablets, an LED torch, a funny little gadget that claims to do seven tasks at once including navigating, and a mosquito net.

My rucksack has got wheels. Last night I had a hysterical moment at the realisation that a rucksack on wheels is fantastically bourgeois. It's true of course, but I'm over it now.

In ten days time I shall be dragging this mobile medicine cabinet around the subcontinent. For three weeks I shall be getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning every day to chant the bhagavad gita even before breakfast, in a place where the list of staples provided includes 'buckets'. BUCKETS??? What am I thinking of? Just what? The only silver lining here is that in leaving my comfort zone I am hoping I will enter an area of personal expansion. It's the issue of how far behind I am leaving my comfort zone that is posing the problem for me now. Before I go I seem to have about a hundred million people to see and nine million things to do, including yet more assault by spiky needle and Christmas shopping, which I intend to keep to an absolute minimum, but which is nevertheless going to be beyond intolerable.

And here I am now about to waffle on about the Turner Prize, although it couldn't be considered wasting precious time because, as we all know, and as Sarah Thornton reminds us, the Turner prize is "a benchmark of validation that distinguishes the British art scene."

"Turner prize strikes it Leckey", "Happy Go Leckey", etc etc. Yes, Mark Leckey is now £25,000 richer than he was this time last week and if Turner history continues to repeat itself, his career is now destined for greater and greater things.

Love it or hate it, Leckey was the bookies favourite all along, whilst Cathy Wilkes, poor thing, had the worst odds in history, taking only three bets to win and none of them over £10. The piece she exhibits for the prize is entitled 'I Give You All My Money'. It's not funny! I found this work quite difficult to engage with and when I watched the video interview with the artist on tate.org I found it even harder, not least because the interview starts with the word 'Nietsche' - not a crime in itself, but a sign for me that the artist may be too caught up in her head for my taste. As a friend of mine said, quoting from Captain Beefheart I think (!), we've all "had too much to think". If I'm understanding it right the inaccessibility of the work is part of the point. Wilkes is alluding to the pain of our perceived separateness. It's classic existential angst stuff. But in a way the pain of separateness is taken as read isn't it? The more interesting question is what's beyond that and how do we deal with it? It has been said that the intellect creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. We all know the abyss is there. How we each attempt to bridge it is the critical thing.

The 2008 Turner Prize has been decried (yet again!) as 'dull' (what, no unmade beds, no lights going on and off - bo-RRRRING!) We have to settle this year for the tedious predictability of a mannequin sitting on the loo, Felix the cat taking centre stage and Goshka drawing on the walls. If that constitutes dull these days then I'd suggest, as a population, we're a little over stimulated. If criticism can be levelled, I suppose one might say that much of the work is inaccessible if the viewer isn't prepared to engage intellectually to some degree. If you go along to Tate Britain knowing nothing what-so-ever about Runa Islam, Mark Leckey, Goshka Macuga and Cathy Wilkes, then you might struggle. However if you're going to take the trouble of dragging yourself over to Pimlico, you might as well go one step further and do a bit of reading. Once you do that, then riches are available at this years Turner, as at every other. If you're not into reading then contemporary art circa 2008 probably isn't for you. Just now, it's as much about the text as it is about the work. On the other hand, if you're not into that you could try stepping outside your comfort zone. At least you won't need imodium and diorhalites to google "Mark Leckey".

And, at the risk of being a crashing bore, please can I gently point out that whilst three quarters of this years shortlist are women, only three women - Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing and Tomma Abts - have won the Turner in its 26-year history. That's 11.5 per cent. And please - don't shoot the messenger already!



LINKS:
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/turnerprize/turnerprize2008/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/turnerprize
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=lEw4fbyh_to
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=kkMtx5WUrDc

Now and then I come across something so awe inspiring it reminds me, even if only for a few minutes, seconds, or perhaps more honestly, only for a flash of a second – maybe that’s all it takes – to remember that contrary to how it absolutely seems on an almost 24/7 basis – I am not the centre of the world.

Yes, oh yes, it’s a rude awakening - but not all bad.

The other day I was in what an acquaintance of mine, Shirlee, would call a ‘funk’. I would call her a friend, but as I have to pay her for the illusion of friendship I’m not sure it entirely counts.

So I’m sitting there at my desk in an absolute hump. Not one of my rages, although they’re a bit special too. No, this was a hump alright. Everything and everyone was absolute unmitigated rubbish and nothing was ever going to be even as acceptable as OK ever again.

I was trawling through my email wondering why so many monstrously tedious people kept sending me so many monstrously tedious emails (it was a silly hump my beloved friends, I do appreciate and value you, please forgive my momentary foolishness) when I came across an email from somebody I didn’t know, telling me about a viral marketing campaign committed by so-called artists group mindheist, upon Martin Creed’s Work No 850, currently showing at Tate Britain. Famously, and of course, not un-controversially, Creed won the Turner Prize in 2001 with Work No 227 – subtitle – The Lights Go On and Off – in which, errr, the lights go on and off, at periodic five second intervals.

Don’t even get me started. Scoff if you want but you know what happened to Doubting Thomas. Actually I’m not sure I do know what happened to Doubting Thomas, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t win the lottery. It’s easy to scoff and sneer and look down your nose but it doesn’t get you anywhere. It’s that self-respect thing Groucho.

Martin Creed’s Work No 850 consists of a relay of semi-professional athletes running the 86 meters down the length of the main Duveen Galleries, every thirty seconds, as fast as they can.

For me, to see this was to lift the heart. To see this was to get over myself.

Why?

Because the profoundest truths can only be expressed in the simplest terms. The fundamental straight forwardness of this work contains, investigates and communicates, so many of the most complex facets of human existence, but it does so in a way that even a child can engage with, enjoy and learn from, but at the same time, in a way that I imagine, even the most compassionate, intelligent, and self-aware being would be able to draw something from.

The simplicity, beauty and profundity of Martin Creed’s work by-passed my brain and touched my soul.

The runners represent the consistency we all long for in an inconsistent world. The regularity and predictability a source of great comfort amidst the chaos and senselessness that we struggle, always unsuccessfully, to make sense of.

The work is like life – the runners come and go just as we do. At the same time it is the opposite of life apparent – regular, rhythmic, predictable. It’s a paradox and at the same time, a non-paradox. It’s wonderful.

‘I want to make things. I’m not sure why, but I think it’s got something to do with other people. I think I want to try to communicate with other people, because I want to say “hullo”, because I want to express myself and because I want to be loved.’ Martin Creed

It doesn’t come more universal than that.

And so it seems Puma thought they fancied a bit of the universal action. Puma and mindheist apparently cooked up the idea of sending what I assume, from the look of him, was a professional actor, to interact with Work No 850, and grab a slice of this particular love pie for themselves.

The result is an advert for pumps that somehow wavers on the border between the grotesque and the ingenious.

The camera follows a handsome blonde athletic looking guy up the steps of Tate Britain – freeze frame on his sexy black Pumas whilst the funky music kicks in. He takes the steps two at a time, then hangs around the Duveen Galleries reading his newspaper (I haven’t figured out why he couldn’t bide his time looking at the art, but I guess that says it all) until one of Creeds runners appears, doing flat out, whereupon the Puma wearing actor/artist runs ahead of him – seemingly for his life – looking over his shoulder shouting the words “I didn’t know she was your wife”. Clearly mindheist scrimped on the script-writers.

Probably I shouldn’t be wasting so much time further promoting Puma’s offensive piss take in the face of Creed’s brilliance, but it’s interesting that a global mega corp such as puma should choose to piggy back on a piece of conceptual art. I don’t know what Martin Creed made of it, but in many ways, whatever mindheist’s intention, it’s hugely flattering, if not exactly respectfully executed. It only goes to re-iterate how important this work is. You don’t negate something, you don’t mimic it, you don’t attempt to undermine it, if you can’t see, on some level, conscious or otherwise, the truth of it. If something isn’t relevant to you, you simply don’t engage with it.

But enough about Puma and mindheist and their silly subterfuge.

Martin Creed’s work is about love, about our universal need to love and be loved. Sorry to bang on slightly, I know this is my pet subject at the moment, but it always seems to come back to the love. Without love what is there? What else is the point? Really? What else matters?

In the words of Work No 300 (2003) “the whole world + the work = the whole world.”

and in the words of Work No 790 (2007) “everything is going to be alright.”

After that what else is there to say?



Links

http://www.martincreed.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TWIrZYC25g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqmDwMTj7zY&watch_response

http://artlife.blogspot.com/

CURRENTLY SHOING AT BEVERLEY KNOWLES FINE ART
In Bed With The Girls, until 1 November 2008
The Girls are emerging British artists Andrea Blood and Zoe Sinclair, both alumni of Central St Martins who met at school aged 16. The Girls work consists of staged portrait photography, including self portraiture, and performance art. The duo have previously exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery, The ICA, The National Portrait Gallery and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.

ABOUT BEVERLEY KNOWLES FINE ART
Since its launch in 2002 Beverley Knowles Fine Art has been developing an international reputation for championing women artists, dedicated to assisting the development of talented young graduates into successful challenging artists, as well as showing the work of more established contemporary masters. The gallery programme promotes interrelations between artists, curators and collectors to bring into being a platform that explores exciting new creative possibilities.