Slightly belated review of Charles Avery at Pilar Corias written for and reproduced here by kind permission 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

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

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

click here to read my review for More Intelligent Life

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

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

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.