I used to love Katie Paterson's work. I (and more or less the entire art appreciating cosmos) adored her from the moment she planted a microphone in a melting glacier in Iceland in 2007. Via the neon advertisement of a mobile telephone number on the wall of her Slade MFA degree show she invited the public to listen live to the sound of time melting into itself. On your own mobile telephone you could access the visceral, other-worldly clicking and popping sounds of the earth in flux. Entitled Vatnajokull (the sound of) it was poetic, startlingly fresh and poignant.

Vatnajokull was accompanied by the soulful sound of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata spilling gently from a self-playing grand piano, not even a hand to caress its tragic keys. The music we listened to had been sent, via radio transmission in Morse Code, quite literally to the moon and back. Only the moon didn't return every note. Some of them it kept for itself, absorbed into its shadows. This music that we all knew so well, we perceived as faulty, incomplete, and yet, curiously, even more beautiful for that imperfection, for the loss experienced through intimacy across a universe.


From that moment on Katie Paterson was everywhere. What she's achieved in the five short years since her MA degree show is staggeringly impressive. Nine international solo shows, twenty-seven groups shows - Tate, Performa, BALTIC, Venice – we're talking high, high end. So I headed to 100 Billion Suns, the inaugural exhibition at Haunch of Venison's new 2,750 sq ft space, with a lightness of heart. Perhaps too great a lightness of heart for I left feeling a little flat. Not because the work isn't good. The work is good. But something isn't quite right. Somehow, after such an awe inspiring beginning, it felt thin.

As far as I can ascertain none of the work in this show is new. 100 Billion Suns was a piece commissioned for last years Venice Biennale. The project involved explosions of confetti at 100 or so unspecified locations across Venice. Each piece of confetti was colour matched to the brightest explosions in the universe, gamma ray bursts, which burn at a luminosity 100 billion times that of our own sun. The work manifests itself in Eastcastle Street in the form of a proliferation of whole punched paper circles that burst from a contraption in the ceiling at 1pm every day. Accompanying it are five large scale prints showing the original events - charming views of the canals and streets around Venice foregrounded by a snow storm of metaphorically cosmological ruptures.

There are a lot of other works in this exhibition. As the World Turns (2010) is an adapted record player that rotates in synchronisation with the earth, that is to say one revolution per year, playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Headphones are supplied but, at that rate, there's nothing to hear. Black Firework for Dark Skies (2010) is the vitrined remains of a firework that's been set off at an 'unannounced location'. Neither quite works.

Then there's Dying Star Doorbell (2008) in which the symbolic sound of a dying star, a tiny hum close to middle C, plays every time a visitor opens the door. But why do I care if middle C plays when the door opens? The simple answer is: I don't. Not in the way I cared that notes of Beethoven's cherished sonata had been absorbed by the moon, never to be heard again.

I don't want to be critical of Katie Paterson's work, I like her work very much. But I do feel (my usual curatorial criticism) that in this particular exhibition there's too much of it in too small a space and that in overloading the work in this way it's cheapened it, made something that isn't gimmicky seem as though it might be. I'm afraid to say it comes across as a sort of celestial Hamleys.

But maybe it's not all the fault of the curatorial team. Maybe there is something missing from the work. Maybe such astronomical success over so short a time does take its toll. One can understand of course why an artist, why anyone, would want to take the opportunities when they arise, don't look a gift horse in the mouth and all of that. But by the same token there does come a time when you must recognise your limits or suffer the consequences. This is all stuff that her gallery, or in Katie's case galleries – she has three, London, New York and Seoul - should be advising her on, helping her to manage her career to the optimum, neither under nor over producing. I don't know what relationship the three galleries have with each other but I wonder if she wouldn't be better choosing one and sticking with that for the time being. Perhaps it's too much to juggle for so young an artist working at so high a level, incredibly talented though she indubitably is.

All that aside I very much hope this is a minor aberration in her otherwise faultless career and that my next encounter with her will be every bit as loving as was my first.



Katie Paterson
100 Billion Suns
Haunch of Venison
Eastcastle Street London
9 March to 28 April

written for Spoonfed

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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Gorgeous Ellie the Intern from Sweden and Minnesota is away finishing her dissertation. Incarcerated in New Cross. Twenty thousand words on memory and the family album with an opener from Anna Karenina. Nice. Plus a further twenty thousand words on various theory-laden Goldsmithsie topics. We got an email from her yesterday saying she thought she might be having a nervous breakdown. I hope she was joking, poor flower. Thank goodness those days are over. If I had the chance to be twenty-one again I wouldn't take it. Even the beauty and naivety of youth are no temptation. Thirty-something's okay. And seventy something's going to be a right laugh I reckon. The older you get the more outrageous you can be and nobody bats an eyelid. What's infantile at twenty-five seems sage at seventy-five.

But nothing could excuse the private view I went to last night in Kings Cross. It was terrible. I don't like to slag things off too unthinkingly, but really, this was terrible. It was beyond terrible. 'A cosmological ricochet which is conceptualised through repeated images of bananas...' I'm not even kidding. That's what the text says. An artist + gallerist showing her own work in her own gallery. Supporting texts by artists the gallery is showing later in the year. A tad sycophantic they turned out to be, rather unsurprisingly. I'll treat you to one Q&A.

Q: 'And now you have a new enormous gallery space in Kings Cross and you collaborate with all these different artists. It feels like a very exciting new chapter in the story. Do you ever feel so happy you could burst?'
A: 'Yes, all the time… Britain is the most civilized and polite places (sic) I've ever been. I like British people a lot. They are reliable, creative and exciting.'

For the love of God.

Warm white table wine served in a plastic cup for a pound. Bargain. And a bowl of pretzels. Yummy. And in the catalogue a photograph of the artist in 1992 with Lauren Bacall. A joke peut-être? A performance? I tried so hard to sniff out even a hint of irony but failed utterly. There was a great quotation from Albert Einstein on the promotional material. 'The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.' That was by far the best thing about the show. In fact it was the only good thing about it. But one good quote does not an exhibition make, unfortunately. If it did, the curator's job would be rather easier than it is.

By contrast there was a cracker on at Haunch of Venison in the ex-Museum of Mankind, now the Royal Academy. Or is it Haunch of Venison? I'm not sure - it's confusing. Anyway, it's 6 Burlington Gardens. No matter whose patch it is, this exhibition – Mythologies – was a delight. The only bad thing about it, and thereby also about this untimely 'review', is the fact that it's now over. I'm quite of a mind though that such details don't make the mention of it redundant. People are still talking about the seminal Freeze show they never saw and maybe Mythologieswill turn out to be another such myth – the show one never saw but never admits to not having seen! So in case you're in that slightly tragi-comic boat, here you are: a belated / pre-emptive heads up.


The fact that it was staged in an ex-museum and on/off Royal Academy venue presented a significant double-edged sword. It meant that an exhibition devised by a gallery that's ostensibly a commercial concern was competing, in terms of viewer perception, against publicly funded exhibitions that have no selling agenda at all. Haunch of Venison set the bar very high for themselves. The stunning location meant the work and the curation had to rise to the occasion in quite spectacular fashion. On this kind of platform they couldn't afford to put on anything even approaching a so-so show. Any hint of mediocrity would have translated immediately into a tremendous flop and staggering embarrassment.

On the other hand, the setting would lend vast kudos and seriousness, as long as the show had broad enough shoulders to carry it. Which it did. It was intelligently curated, visually beautiful, conceptually meaty, and incredibly wide in the range of work it delivered. Tony Cragg, Bill Viola, the magnificent Sophie Calle, Simon Patterson, good old Damo of course, still on the sparkly skull thing – now wall-based – but never mind! Some fascinatingly disturbing taxidermied Dobermans – 'archetypes of urban violence and disorder' so we're told – courtesy of German artist Jochem Hendricks, and relative newcomer Nicholas Hlobo in the wake of his solo show at Tate Modern's Level Two earlier in the year. And much, much, more to thrill and delight.


Art Rabbit described it as 'one of the most ambitious group exhibitions ever mounted in London by a private gallery.' It certainly catapulted Haunch of Venison up to a new level. I'd go as far as to say it rose head and shoulders above most exhibitions currently showing in public galleries in London, many of which you have to pay to see. For my money, it knocked the socks off theRussian Linesman, the Hayward show curated by Mark Wallinger, that plays an unsuccessful round of Russian Roulette with the always tempting but highly risky game of curatorial ego trip.



The only sad thing is I can't now recommend you go and see it. Have I let you down dear friend and reader? I feel the need to stick up for myself, to remind you that I'm not often bringing you a cup of tea that's already cooled. Forgive me, you know how insecure we arty types are! In my defence I mention that the 2009 Turner Prize nominees include Roger Hiorns' Art Angel commission Seizure, an installation bigged up in the diary by yours truly some six months ago. I risk life and limb in the Elephant & Castle to bring you the latest news. The Elephant & Castle, New Cross, even Fulham – surely a destination more than any where a balaclava is more or less mandatory in order to respectably disembark the tube.



Apparently one of the jury members, Guardian critic Jonathan Jones, is big into Enrico David, but that aside, my money's on Hiorns for Turner victory 2009. Twenty five grand for Hiorns and a first for little Ellie.