Stephen Harwood

The Boys are Back in Town

2012-01-21T02:11:00.000-08:00

These are my first figure-paintings since my MA exhibition at St Martins in 2010. There was a definite fallow period after I finished my masters; the research paper and that final push of an exhibition, particularly on top of a full-time 'day-job' exhausted me (how I miss those casual/part-time days prior to the economic collapse!). It was some months before I had an urge to make anything, however the work started to come back in stages as I gathered my energies. It began with small A5 drawings of Shropshire using Google Streetview, including Wilfred Owen's house in Shrewsbury, semi-rural roads and shopping precincts. Then, after some weeks of searching, I found a copy of John Piper/John Betjeman's Shell Guide to Shropshire on eBay, the first edition from 1951, generally thought of as one of the best Shell Guides which were quite avant-garde in their day, and began making drawings of the Piper photographs (they have his Neo-romantic eye). For a time I enjoyed being in the midst of all this drawing: one of the main things St Martins did for me was to encourage my drawing, which I'd always hidden from people, as something that could stand alone, it didn't need to be a try-out for a painting and could be important in its own right. Then the painting started again, after almost a year, again based on the Shell Guide, but I had become so attuned to graphite pencil and the strange beauty of these 1950's photographs, the paintings were almost entirely Paynes Gray and monochrome.

I knew the figurative element would be back at some point, but I was unsatisfied with the figures I had made on my MA. They were largely fictions: the painted proportions based on a real person's facial structure (most people's facial proportions are generally the same - it could have been anyone), and the boy himself invented over the top of this template/armature. This was interesting to a point, but not surprisingly they ended up strangely empty: an Alex Katz blankness. There was no sense of the person being tied to the place in which they were situated, no sense of personal history or of them looking to their developing future. I was therefore determined to find a real model, however this time I had a requirement: they had to be from the place I was painting.

I met Dan on Facebook, he went to my school so he came up in my 'people you might know' list, we also have mutual friends, actually people I went to school with who are still in the area, which is Church Stretton, a small town in South Shropshire. His face seemed to fit, so I sent him a message and was pleased to get an enthusiastic response almost immediately. He said he liked my work, recognised all the locations in my paintings, and my film too, and would be pleased to help. We did the photographs in a couple of hours driving in Dan's car around various country lanes on and around the Long Mynd, the countryside immortalised by Mary Webb and Powell and Pressburger's Gone to Earth, the very centre of my rural fixation. There were to be no fictions this time other of course than my own which are brought to the work in any event by the very nature of my making it. Also, and this is key, Dan was happy to be photographed; amazing the number of people who change the minute a camera is pointed at them, and as an artist the very thing you wanted to capture has slipped from view.

I think the work has been richer for having Dan as a starting point and my working practice is now more balanced. I am working on both drawing and painting projects, my sources are becoming varied and more diverse, and I no longer feel that blocked sensation that I did for a time after St Martins (only a continual mild annoyance that I've never got enough time...), and he is a part of that. Painting real people is something of a collaboration after all, and it was important that Dan was not only in the place, but also of the place: that is something the work needed.

The Devil's Chair

2012-01-01T04:41:00.001-08:00

This is an image from a current series of drawings about the Devil's Chair, a rocky outcrop of the Stiperstones ridge in Shropshire, a area of Victorian tin mines rich in myth and legend.

'Around the chair lie scattered boulders which, it is said, fell from the Devil's apron when its strings broke one day as he seated himself there to rest; he had carried them all the way from Ireland, to block up the ravine called Hell Gutter. Yes he often sits there, hoping his weight will drive the rock into the ground, for if that should happen it would spell disaster for England; anyone who climbs up to the chair in hot weather can smell brimstone round it.'
The Lore of the Land, A Guide to England's Legends (Westwood & Simpson, Penguin, 2005)

'It drew the thunder, people said.'
Mary Webb, The Golden Arrow (1916)

Zoo

2011-11-27T03:06:00.000-08:00

The Zoo is something we all know, something we all did, like the first day at School, or learning to ride a bike. But as children we are in awe of the experience of real animals, oblivious to the complexities of their situation. Zoo, at new artist-run gallery Meter Room in Coventry, seeks to challenge these ideas of the Zoo as a space of childlike wonder and tranquil pastime, by bringing together five artists intent on exploring what this complicated space might mean.

Mike Bartlett's series of small-scale paintings explore the public spaces of London Zoo. The paintings began with a chance hearing of the BBC's radio interview with Andrew Sachs at the time of the Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross scandal; the interview took place at the Zoo, seemingly by chance (perhaps Sachs lives nearby), but the location enabled an enlightening and emotional interview in which the actor recalled his childhood visits to the Zoologischer Garten, growing up in Berlin in the 1930's. The paintings, of the ramps, concrete enclosures and walkways, cafes and staff quarters, are hung in a broad constellation, and made in unlikely day-glow colours, luminous greens, and hot pinks. We are not told whether or not these are contemporary views, or perhaps the Sachs story so forced Bartlett into his own recollections that no revisit was necessary, or perhaps Bartlett painted from family photographs, but the paintings, with their luminous pinks are truly 'rose-tinted'. But then colour is often adjusted violently in painting that struggles to recall the long-distant past, the resulting distortion of a pan-handling of memory.

London Zoo is also the starting point for Alli Sharma's large group of painted animals, based on a collection of faded postcards, previously for sale to past generations in the Zoo's shop, now encased in plastic sleeves and stored in the Zoo's archives, which house all manner of printed ephemera dating back to the Zoo's opening in 1828. Sharma's project is ambitious, comprising some thirty-odd characterful portraits, seemingly a Zoo's worth, featuring proud lions, oblivious hippos, a tiger with a challenging stares, and all manner of birds, geckos, penguins, hippos, zebras. The installation occupies a large corner of the gallery space, like a veritable, chattering menagerie; one small group has even been released (or escaped?), out of the space and into the corridor. The paintings are deftly done, in the antique browns and paynes grey of the penny postcard, and a natural extension of the artist's previous explorations of the natural world. But these are, broadly speaking, small sadnesses, vignettes that remind of these hulking beasts in their confinement, particularly when one thinks that many of these images originate from photographs of the days before Zoos required licences. There are some cute pandas..., also a manic wildcat, the card that would have needed to be constantly re-filled in the postcard rack, bought by coach-loads of 1980's school children at a few pence a go.

Stephanie Quayle's sculptures also remind us of the sadness of Zoo-space, the eyes of her Orang-utan captures are uncannily lifelike, and the sensitively of Quayle's handling of her materials (terracotta, porcelain) with something of the clay-molding and pinching of Rebecca Warren, reminds us of their fragility; she is interested in 'the us-ness in their eyes'. Her Langur Monkey, made of white porcelain, sits mournfully on the window-sill of the gallery space, staring out to freedom, her animals are often perched on (unlikely) stools, or domestic objects as if to emphasise their wildness. A fascination for 'animal-ness', drives her practice, and her sculptures remind that animals possess intelligence and sensitivity, the personality behind the fur.

Cathy Lomax's Becoming Animals explores a dreamlike state, somewhere between sleeping and waking, nature and fantasy, where humans take on animal attributes or forms, We are on comfortable ground with Swan Dream, the fantasy of the princess of Swan Lake, or Cat Dream, which depicts cat-woman, but then the series quickly turns into a sliding scale of nightmarishness, as a young girl turned is into a bear, a man becomes half-horse (by desire or magical curse?), a indeterminate person is transformed, in dreamland, into a faceless rabbit, and a pagan deer makes himself known, like some image of pre-history, on a snowy mist-filled plain. These humanoid creatures, half-man half-circus, belong as much to the gothic novel or Victorian parlour story-telling, as to the land of dreams.

Anton Goldenstein's practice is an exploration of the history of anthropology and empire, with 'a sprinkle of absurdity'. Goldenstein is showing his sculpture The Pinkers - Ape Gothic, a teetering assemblage of cardboard boxes, the uppermost a 'Marlboro' box turned upside down, with a confusion of chimp's hands and straw, poking lifelessly from underneath, atop the box a plastic banana, as thought the chimps were just caught short of their comedic sustenance. The Marlboro box is key, and Goldstein uses references which seem glib at first hand but then one remembers that they may be shorthand for 'the world', or America (as with his past use of Micky Mouse, or Nasa in his series of Monkeys in space uniforms) and as well he might because for Goldenstein we are, or certainly have been, merely animals crawling the fact of the earth, trampling and imposing our control. As the artist says: 'We are just monkeys'.

Zoo forces us to consider what a Zoo is. Do we see them as educational places? It is interesting to reflect that it is only since the mid-1980's that Zoos in the UK have required licenses, and to remain open they should concern themselves as much with conservation as with the exhibition of animals. Or are they outmoded institutions connected to old-fashioned ideas of captivity and trophy-capture? Merely a constructed village of concrete sheds or enclosures, where species are transplanted to and imprisoned with no chance of escape; where they perhaps, loose the natural compulsions to hunt and source, to be part of breeding programmes generating new beasts, born into these unnatural spaces, unaware of their natural environments perhaps a day away on the other side of the world. There is an argument that the Zoo belongs to another era; perhaps that of Peter Beard, the big-game artist who made collages and photographs of Kenya, and who survived being skewered by an elephant's tusk.

But although the notion of the Zoo as a compound of brutality is perhaps too easy an assumption, Zoo tells us that the arguments are not easy ones, reminding us of the challenging cruelties that may sometimes be found underlying the furtherance of science.

Originally written for a-n interface

Zoo finishes today at Meter Room, in Coventry.

Meter Room, 58-64 Corporation Street, Coventry, West Midlands, CV11GF
Meter Room

New Drawings

2010-12-18T05:37:00.000-08:00

Part of a group of new drawings of the Shropshire of my childhood. These views are drawn from Google Streetview, which has now ventured out of the major towns and cities to survey much of semi-rural England. The use of Streetview seems to set up a similar distancing to the photographs that my parents send to me that I use for my paintings. Places are therefore revealed anew, but at a distance, both physically and in time.

DIRTY KUNST

2010-12-18T05:33:00.000-08:00

Curated by New York writer and critic Christian Viveros-Fauné, Dirty Kunst purports to be something of a naughty survey, promising ‘rude art’ and filth that ‘frightens, provokes, angers, and just plain disgusts’. The majority of the artists hail from New York City, and the first piece encountered on entering the gallery is Joel Castro’s image of the Statue of Liberty rising from a pair of parted buttocks. This supposedly dare-devil shoving of America where the sun don’t shine jostles for vulgarity with Michael Joo’s three jars of piss of varying shades, Yellow, Yellower, Yellowest (1991), and Lisa Yuskavage’s acid-green study of a reclining girl thrusting her vagina forward, one of the few works that manages to be interestingly repellent, not least for its sickly-green luminosity.

Tom Gallant, one of three UK artists in the show, is showing a series of pages from porn magazines cut into with delicate filigree waves and sweeping curls, his interventions both beautifying and submerging the sexual shapes below. Less elegant is Patrick Hamilton’s dog kennel that houses a flickering VHS of a labrador performing cunnilingus on a woman, the sign ‘Bobby’s House’ hanging cutesily over the entrance, but rather than shocking the piece is comedic, even slightly silly.

I was looking forward to seeing Sebastian Errazuriz’s piece, a golden projection of a supposedly well-hung Jesus Christ, but the projector, jutting from a half-opened suitcase, hadn’t been switched on. I looked at the wall expectantly, then looked at the gallery assistant, who silently switched the projector on at the plug, but it was a shame that the magic of that hovering image was now slightly tainted. A shame too that the gallery space was soundtracked by loud, off-putting Jazz. I asked if the music was part of the exhibition and the assistant replied ‘No, I’m just listening to the radio’. I wondered if it was worth having a conversation about whether or not the music might affect the viewer’s experience of the show, or how he thought the artists involved might feel about having his personal soundtrack imposed on their work, but decided against it.

The gallery aside, I desperately wanted this show to live up to its press release; I wanted to be challenged by an art taken up to, and perhaps even over, those lines of ordinarily acknowledged modern decencies – but none of this work shocks. In fact I can think of many artists whose work of thirty or forty years ago was more shocking and provocative. Genesis P-Orridge’s actions of the mid-70′s for example, in which he harmed and injected himself, wrapped in wires and his own blood and sperm. Or the art of Chris Burden, or that of Cosey Fani-Tutti exposing herself in mens magazines. These artists risked being ostracised, or worse, risked prolonged personal injury in challenging the accepted. They were also artists whose work used something of themselves, so perhaps an artwork which shocks does so because it results from the artists use of self as artistic device. The old adage of suffering for one’s art may not be merely an aimless cliche, after all.

So: Dirty Kunst does not provoke enough, not because London is made of sterner stuff than New York, but because few of the participants seem to really mean it. Which image of a national symbol disappearing up a human rectum is more affecting: a real image of an experience of it, in all its sexual nastiness, or an approximation of that experience shot out of photoshop? Many of these artists seem to be operating at an arms length and, in this context, Dirty Kunst becomes a mere playground of appropriation. At best, a show about artists laying heavy claims on the situations of others – at worst, a show of artistic excuses.

Dirty Kunst finishes today at Seventeen
Dirty Kunst

This review was originally written for and published on Art Wednesday

Leon Kossoff - The Elder Statesman of British Painting

2010-11-28T07:04:00.000-08:00

Leon Kossoff is a London painter; his art is concerned with the East End of his childhood, and certain North London territories, too. Like Frank Auerbach, his contemporary and artistic twin, he does not travel, preferring to paint these familiar stomping grounds again and again, so that the work seems like some obsessive investigation carried out in the hope that something new and unexpected might reveal itself. Kossoff is drawn to the underbelly rather than the grand-view: the railway tracks and arches, the beaten back-roads, places of demolition and dilapidation. His landscapes of Kings Cross or Dalston Junction suffocate under leaden skies, or seem filled with darkness and rain; London weather described in paint. And for Kossoff, as for Auerbach, the paint is the thing. Lashings and scrapings of it, the thicker the better, so that each picture becomes something of a battleground. Portraits and landscapes are taken almost to the edge of recognition as he works and reworks; the subject almost lost in the sheer stuff of paint, the impasto seeping out over the edges of the boards (mere canvas couldn’t stand such brutality). Each work seems more an excavation of the city than a mere painting of it.

At 83, he is something of an elder statesman of British painting – he is also a solitary individual who, despite a career spanning some fifty years, remains little known to the general public. Like Auerbach, and the third gang-member Lucien Freud, he has never courted attention, or even, especially, an audience, but even so there have been a number of quiet fanfares for a current rare event: a show of brand new work in London, his first in almost ten years...

Stephen's full review is on Artwednesday.com

Leon Kossoff is at Annely Juda Fine Art, London W1, until Dec 17th.

Occult Window at Donlon Books

2010-11-07T07:03:00.001-08:00

Donlon Books, Broadway Market, Hackney
www.donlonbooks.co.uk

Sensing Nature at Mori

2010-11-02T14:54:00.001-07:00

Japan, with its seasonal extremes and ancient landmass, its crowded futuristic cities and mountainous outlying areas, seems an ideal island on which to carry out a modern survey of nature and its varied depictions, its effect on man and his environment. The gallery too seems ideal: Mori Art Museum is after all an international outpost of big ticket artists, able to mount whatever it wants, when it wants - provided it is big and bold, for Mori specialises in installations with the wow factor, lavished with its must-have catalogues.

The show opens with Snow, an installation by Yoshioka Tokujin in which thousands, perhaps millions of tiny feathers are heaped into an enclosed glass-walled area of one of Mori's interstellar spaces. Unseen electric fans whoop the feathers up in a glorious three-minute blizzard of whiteness then cut-out, leaving the feathers to settle lazily and beautifully into drifts and mounds before another cyclone of air spurts it all up again a few moments later. Yoshioka is a former clothes designer turned artist and was once an assistant to Issey Miyake; in fact Snow was originally designed and produced for a Miyake shop window in 1997 and is reproduced in Sensing Nature for maximum art-effect in a space fourteen-meters wide by six meters high and eight (count 'em! Eight!) meters deep. Yoshioka is also showing a group of sculptures; Waterfall, a 5.8-meter lozenge of gently rippling solid glass, is his weakest piece. The (rather bossy) catalogue commentary tells us that it is 'sublime and overwhelming' and that it was inspired by the crash of a waterfall into a pool, but there is no echo of that crash in the piece. The catalogue also informs us that we are looking at the longest piece of 'optical glass' in the world; bit of a boast of production costs there, and it's probably fair to say Yoshioka's work is very over-designed. Alexander von Vegesack, director of Germany's Vitra Design Museum says Yoshioka is 'unique in the field of design'. Perhaps so, for his work is sought after in both the design world and the international art circuit.

Shinoda Taro, a former landscape gardener in the Japanese tradition, is showing Reverberation: projected moving images of Tokyo and outlying rural areas presented as three hugh screens in a triangle formation, soundtracked by a persistent rumbling; we are not told if this is the sound of distant heavy industry, or something altogether more sinister from deep underground. The first screen shows the suburban Tokyo where Shinoda lives interspersed with images of Tapir at Tama Zoo; the second screen takes the viewer on a journey along the canal-ways of Tokyo, and the third pans across the reservoirs that feed Tokyo's inhabitants: beautiful images of water and sky. The space is so large it is possible to move around this triptych, viewing the moving developing landscape images both separately from each other but also at the edges where the screens meet, so that the descent into the the gloomy tunnels of Tokyo's urban canalways abutts the sweeping wide open waters of the reservoirs and their lovely attendant skies in a sort of natural tension. It becomes apparent, in the darkness, that these three screens are folded around a further space, a small white room, clinically bright, in which we encounter the Model of Oblivion, a work Shinoda has been developing since 2006. We are confronted with a long white table, and what appears to be a white plastic mountain range at the far end over which pours red liquid, ostensibly blood, but it is too thin, which gathers in a seeping, encroaching pool covering about two thirds of the long tablet before dripping down the sides where it is collected by pumps and motors and regurgitated back over the mountain range. It is the very model of futility (Nature's lifeblood on a cyclical slab); the continuous bleeding of the landscape, and its regurgitation, seems filled with a sort of earthbound hopelessness. But all is not lost!... for in the next room is Ginga ('Galaxy'), an immense, round basin of white liquid, its peaceful stillness suddenly and occasionally irked by the jetted propulsion of droplets electronically released from some thirty mineral-water bottles suspended above, causing a dance of pin-pricks, ripples radiating all over. The piece was informed by the gardens of Tofuku-ji temple in Kyoto, where the stones are the stars around which the small pebbles are raked in a swirling representation of starlight... the milky-way in microcosm. If Ginga is Shinoda's Heaven, and the filmic expanses of suburban Tokyo, and its accompanying bass-ratting soundscape are his Earth, then perhaps the Model of Oblivion is Man, bleeding inbetween.

The third artist is Kuribayashi Takashi, who studied traditional Japanese landscape painting and lives and works in Germany. His vision of nature is surveyed from the world's edges and borders; he constructs immersive, somewhat theatrical environments that force the viewer into an act of territorial exploration. There is an obvious playfulness - a trompe l'oeil surprise in his control of the viewer entering into or merely peering through a hole, from one world/space into another. His installation Wold aus Wold (Forest from Forest), is a bleak, bald, pale landscape, made entirely from molded paper pulp of handmade Japanese papers, featureless apart from skeletal, leafless trees. This land fills a room, but the work is not installed on the floor as one might expect: it bisects the room so that the viewer is able to move both under the landscape, albeit crouching at certain points, but also able to stand and look out over it through various occasional openings in what appears to be the forest floor. Examining the underneath of this mysterious forest-space, it's opposite under-space with it's wooden frame and tape, is a bit like seeing the main play-act but also backstage, the pulleys and lighting rig... In this work we are experiencing the main event but also all that supports the unfolding fiction; dual dramas unfolding in parallel lands. That his work is titled/named in German further forces the viewer to consider where territories begin and end. The final rooms of the exhibition house Kuribashi's landmass/mountain Inselu (Islands), a big squat Mount Fuli, some ten meters high, with a perspex dias atop. The viewer is invited to climb a makeshift platform of wood and scaffolding to peer over the peak and its clear lid, which seems to reference the ancient belief of wordly-flatness, the remaining mountain space beneath perhaps representative of the great hulking depths of the world's oceans. In Kuribayashi's final room we come across a Yatai, a traditional Japanese food stall, like a sort of hut on a wheelbarrow, installed in the gallery space, which Kuribashi uses to explore border territories throughout various locations. It is a travelling vantage point that not only has to be pushed (controlled) by the artist, it also opens a flap at its chosen site and receives visitors, an immediate engagement with the artist's chosen site. Kuribashi films his adventures with this Yatai, and is often accompanied by jolly musicians (the stall is a traditional feature of festivals), but that does not mean this work is glib. We see in one film for instance, the artist being admonished by guards at the border of North and South Korea.

There is such an energetic universality at play in Sensing Nature; the show seems to reach into both sea and sky and further, to the stars beyond, all played out against Japan's rich cultural bedrock. It seems remarkable that such a broad investigation is possible with only three participants... but they are an interesting and articulate grouping, and all three in their thirties, with a modicum of international exposure but not too much, which suggests they were chosen for their separate abilities to speak about the world, rather than any sort of tick-boxing of fashionable artists. Oh dear, there I go again... I am clearly suspicious of some of these big, overblown spaces. I admit I occasionally mistrust the motives of their programmers and curators, but Sensing Nature is such an artistic success that it is, of course, a curatorial success also. The artists are interesting too, for their former activities: Shinoda's time tending ornate Japanese gardens is an utterly appropriate grounding for his current cosmological concerns, likewise Kuribashi's patrolling of borders feeds off the endless horizons of painted scrolls he spent many years studying.

Coming to the end of the show I felt a slight hankering for some drawing, but this was not lost on Mori for they have this too, in a punchy display of drawings and studies in the shop, many of which are for sale and reasonably priced. Shinoda's are particularly interesting: he draws colourful cartoons of himself naked and gesturing amongst naive, childlike studies of his sculptures and ideas, Yoshioka's plan for Snow, a small red-pencil drawing of a man seen side-on, standing before a great elemental whoosh seems to have something of ancient Japan about it whilst remaining a modern picture, and such is the success of this show: it manages to show us new ways of speaking, without being afraid of or wishing to escape or deny the broader cultural context, which is Japan is particularly complicated. Sensing Nature succeeds in its reexamination, and like all successful art exhibitions it sheds new light on our perceptions.

Sensing Nature - Rethinking the Japanese Perception of Nature
Mori Art Museum
Mori Tower., Roppongi Hills,
Tokyo
http://www.mori.art.museum/eng/

Private Workings

2010-10-03T05:41:00.000-07:00

They are quite secretive really. I use them very much as a sort of worrying technique, of doodling and understanding how a work is going to happen
Rachel Whiteread on drawing, Art World magazine, Feb/Mar 2008

Rachel Whiteread is showing drawings at the Tate Britain, representing her various preoccupations and projects over some twenty years, but they are not plans or technical workings in any exacting sense – more a diary, or a thinking-ground of artistic process. They are sculpturally rich, for Whiteread uses varnishes and gums that pinch and flood and wrinkle the graph papers so that the drawings take on something of the materiality of sculpture; correction fluid is used like paint, and it is perhaps understandable that Whiteread would wish to use materials other than oil paints and acrylics in exploring sculptural ideas, loaded as they are with painterly baggage. The drawings are accompanied by maquettes and models of works that we are, in the main, familiar with, so that it is possible to continually cross-reference. There is also a vitrine of objects – further pointers towards a greater understanding of Whiteread’s concerns with material and with surface: crystal balls, skulls, teeth and jaws, fossils, books and bones, waxen tablets, twine and rock, children’s shoes and natural stone. Collected objects kept close in the studio, radiating their strange suggestive powers. We are shown a similar, ongoing collection next to the vitrine comprising rows of postcards, mainly vintage tourist postcards with old-fashioned sepia colourings. On many, Whiteread has intervened with white-out, or with pen; some have punched holes of varying sizes in whole or in part of the photographic image so that we view something of the space behind, slight shadows throwing the flatness into three dimensions, an attempt, seemingly, to upgrade the pictorial flatness to the condition of sculpture.

The centrepiece of the show, for me, was something quite personal. When I arrived in the East End of London, in the Autumn of 1993, there was a commotion going on down the road – at the corner of Grove and Roman Roads, in one of those desolate, bombed out pockets, Whiteread had made House, the now famous cast of the inside of number 193 Grove Road, the middle-house of a crumbling Victorian terrace. The ambition began a year previously with Ghost, a cast of an North London sitting room installed at Chisenhale Gallery. Whiteread’s proposal was to ‘mummify the air’, so that the chalkyness of the plaster filled every inch of space, the resulting, and corresponding, negative reassembled in blocks; its focus the sooty traces left in the fire grate. But House went further than Ghost: a weighty reminder of not merely a single room, but an entire dwelling. The work was commissioned by Artangel, and sponsored by Becks Bier, and it was technically difficult. Whiteread hadn’t discovered at that point, for instance, how to cast stairs, so the main staircase – which would have been viewable from the south side of the sculpture – was missing. Tower Hamlets Council gave their permissions, which were subsequently and sadly reneged, adding fuel to the fire of the resulting hoo-ha. It was a confrontational work.

I knew I would find something in the exhibition that would remind me of House, and, sure enough, I spent a good deal of time with a group of four colour photocopies. Blown-up photographs of the Grove Road terrace taken prior to the demolition and the reinstallation of 193, when its dusty corners were preserved, briefly, in concrete, Whiteread had filled in the house/void on the copies with an approximation of its proposed sculptural re-draft in tipp-ex. They look oddly accurate, and I realised, in the middle of this exhibition, how important House was to me. It was probably the first time I became aware of the complexities and potential power of public sculpture, but also the first time I became aware of a sort of locking of horns between the art-world and the general public, and this is probably the case for many artists of my generation. The work provoked a big debate on modern art, of how and why it could/should be sited, and what on earth its point might be. It was an interesting time to be making art in London. House survived only a matter of weeks. Whiteread has spoken of her regret of barely being able to spend any time with the work, but it was perhaps fitting that it should be bulldozed, that it should have been allowed to exist only fleetingly – as transient and elusive as the void-space it filled.

Rachel Whiteread Drawings
Tate Britain
Until 11th January 2011

Burnt Offerings

2010-09-19T05:47:00.000-07:00

The word ‘black’ is a referential void, sucking in all kinds of ideas, images, stances and politics. The show dives into this semantic fluidity and looks at the idea of blackness in all its shades: sensory, aesthetic and cultural. Each artist was asked to select or make a piece of work in response to the word ‘black’ – a simple, open framework devised to encourage artistic digression.

Kieran Brown has been collecting wooden ornaments and knick-knacks from charity shops and car-boot sales over the last two years. You know the sort of thing... African heads with dangling metal earrings and those elongated masks (Easter Island approximations), statuettes with metal necklaces or spears, miniature pagoda's, carved giraffes. Remnants of travel and sunny climes to be found cluttering many a charity shop or junk shop shelf, nestled among the coloured glass and bad pottery.

As part of his ongoing, ever evolving project No air, no care, Carbon archives Kieran buries these discarded exoticisms in steel drums filled with sand, firing them in a kiln at searing heat. The sand prevents the objects from destruction and they emerge from their incinerations intact, but newly fragile, as charcoal objects. Some even retain their metal components like favourite trinkets carried through to the after-life. The blackened souvenirs are then clustered over sturdy plywood crates, the sort reserved for sculpture and object d'art travelling between museums, the lids and boxes arranged haphazardly as though briefly unpacked for inspection at an airport.

I have often noticed these dusty unloved things in charity shops, objects of the far-flung, both geographically and in time. Many have a curious sadness to them, having sat on the proud mantel of a suburban sitting room only to end their days thrown into a bin-liner during the eager house clearance of a dead relative. But the burning somehow deletes these sentimentalities and the objects are cast anew in the flames, like some sort of ancient fire ceremony. They are reborn to a new life, no longer on dusty musty old Earth. The packing crates assist in this removal of the personal, the earthbound, and our mementoes are released back into the far-flung, whatever and wherever that happens to be. As such this piece can truly travel. It may be sited anywhere, or nowhere, in constant permutation.

It is too obvious to describe this piece as simply being about foreignness, or the other, as the press release tells us (and in any event the clogs, presumably from Holland, are not distant enough). Some of the objects Kieran chooses complicate matters, and quite right too.

The process of death and rebirth is at the heart of this work, and the bestowal of new sculptural life. As the piece develops I hope it becomes bigger and sprawling, gradually taking over the gallery spaces it inhabits, like a charcoal army spilling from the crates, perhaps strewn with packing chips and polythene. This piece, already two years in, feels like the beginning of a much longer project.

But the overall show is overcrowded and difficult to negotiate; Kieran's work swims vigorously, while the rest unfairly sinks, but this is no fault of the artists. There is not enough space put between these works. Paul Chiappe's deserves a quiet communion impossible here, and Michael Lisle-Taylor's sculpture is done a similar disservice.

BLACK - A Referential Void*
Until 3rd October 2010
Madder 139
1 Vyner St., E2 9DG

T +44 (0)20 8980 9154
info@madder139.com

*I notice from a google search that the original title of the show was Young Gifted and Black. Thank God they changed it.

Heartland, The Film

2010-09-12T05:45:00.000-07:00

Filmed in Shropshire June 2010 in collaboration with Filmaker Jonathan Tritton; the project grew out of our Matt's Gallery project on the MA where we were encouraged to envisage our work in Robin Klasnik's gallery space, a challenging gallery with a formidable history which lead to many students adopting a leftfield approach. The film existed as an idea for some months, and spawned so many sketched projects, paintings and drawings (collages of how it might look, iMovie approximations) that I wondered if it should be made - perhaps the idea was itself something of 'an ideas factory'? In any event a suitable collaborator evaded me, until a chance email exchange with a friend I had not seen for twenty-years introduced Jonathan, who I had never met despite our growing up in the same village. Jonathan was as interested in capturing this landscape as I was, and the project finally had its own momentum.

MA Fine Art Degree Show 2010

2010-09-12T05:24:00.000-07:00

Some images from my MA show, last week... I showed ten paintings, some drawings, and my film 'Heartland', below.

Private Quarters

2009-09-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

August Strindberg has been at the back of my mind, like a stern shadow of Northern European wind-chill, since the show at Tate Modern four years ago. I occasionally pick up the catalogue, particularly when I want to look at really free, small-scale painterly landscape. Somehow his worked is twinned in my mind with the young German painter Uwe Henneken whose work is little known in this country but who shows frequently in New York and Berlin, and whose non-figurative works are sometimes strikingly similar. Henneken also uses the form of the oval and and paints landscapes with foregrounds that inhabit the edges of the picture, that look like a doorway, a surround. Landscape as gateway. I look at reproductions of their work together; turning pages simultaneously. They shed light on each other.

I was recently in Stockholm, land of Strindberg, and took the opportunity to visit Strindberg's apartment, now preserved as a museum. Strindberg lived in some 25 apartments in Stockholm however the Strindbergsmuset is the last surviving and where he spent his final years before his death in 1912.

The apartment at the top of a grand house, reached by rickety old lift, but I preferred to take the stairs. An adjoining flat is a museum proper, with paintings and papers, posters of Strindberg plays and props in display cases. There is also a small bookshop and on a separate floor the Strindberg library, but the flat is what people really come to see.

You have to put covers over your shoes and you enter into a small hallway, off which is a tiny neat bathroom. The flat is dark, bookish, masculine; it comprises only three small rooms, and would be musty if it were not so well kept. There is a hushed reverential atmosphere as tourists, a handful at a time, pad through the preserved three rooms in their big plastic slippers. A sign tells you the furnishings are mostly replias, as close to the originals as possible, but that the furniture and books, the fixtures and fittings, are all Strindberg's.

I enjoyed looking around the sitting room, which with its piano and dining table looks like it has played host to a thousand earnest conversations. It is all dark reds and greens, brass gas lamps, and heavy drapery. The scene of a séance. I inspected the writing desk, which is as he left it but I was beginning to feel voyeuristically ghoulish. We were at one stage alone in the flat, but even so I was beginning to have the very odd sensation that I was being watched, and when I turned into the bedroom, that most personal of spaces, I apologised inwardly to Mr Strindberg. The flat is interesting, but I'm not so sure how valuable it is to look over a dead artist's effects; I realy felt as though I was intruding.

Strindbergmuset

Drottninggatan 85
11160 Stockholm

Kettles Yard

2009-09-23T09:08:00.000-07:00

In 1993 I went to Cambridge for a day-out with Peter Ackroyd, who was writing a catalogue essay on my paintings. I remember enjoying the Fitzwilliam Museum, though I scarcely appreciated it then, and Kettles Yard, former home of Jim Ede, champion of the avant-garde and author of one the best books on an artist, Savage Messiah: the memoir of Gaudier-Brezeska. I revisited Cambridge recently, at the invitation of a friend, and found Ede’s house more magical than I remembered. It is only open for a couple of hours a day, just as it was when Ede lived there. It is actually three small cottages knocked together to make one rambling space and you ring a tinkling bell on a pull-cord to gain entry. It is a gentle place, all natural wood, pale creams and off-whites; grey stones are arranged artfully on table-tops and the bay windows are hung with lights and crystals so that when the sun is shining beads of light reflect around the creamy whiteness. It is left much as Ede enjoyed it, and best visited on a hot summer’s day when it turns into a place of cool refuge.

It houses Ede’s fine collection of early-twentieth century artists, and the bleached colours punctuated by Miro and Ben Nicholson paintings. It’s probably not a place for a flying visit; it’s small but marvellously labyrinth and a place to linger, with hidden treasures. It is the best place, perhaps the only place, to experience Gaudier-Brezeska’s sculpture and drawings; particularly in the attic room full of Gaudier’s drawings, where his scowling portrait of Ezra Pound dominates, and throughout the house his sculptures Bird Swallowing a Fish, Red-Stone Dancer, and The Wrestlers (above), and a small but brilliant sculpture of a Dog on the stairs. There is sadness in this work when one understands Gaudier’s inquiring mind was cut so cruelly short in the trenches of the Great War. But Kettles Yard is not a dead museum and is often home to contemporary work, including film and video. Michael-Craig Martin no less has just painted one room puce pink, which shocks amongst the drift-wood, and under an arts and craft’s bench sits an installation of plastic coffee-cups, twisted and torn into shapes. So the house is a show-case, but it is also very much in use, in a way that Ede would have approved of.

Kettles Yard

Stephen and Sadie

2009-09-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

The distinguished artist Sadie Lee and I, outside Retro Bar last night.

The Walk is the Work

2009-06-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

I remember seeing a Richard Long piece a couple of years ago in Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery. One of his slate circles, in a badly lit room, out of any meaningful context and on scruffy parquet. I was shocked to see the piece was unkempt: the delicate gaps between the slates were clogged with fluff and dust, as though Mrs Mopp had come along and emptied the contents of her Hoover bag. I remember thinking that while the lack of space and funding was understandable there was no excuse for the sorry state of the sculpture. I hope things have improved; if not then given the West Country is the manor of Mr Long himself, the trustees should, frankly, go round and explain themselves to the artist. I shudder to think of the state of my favourites there: the Gaudier-Brzeska perhaps, or the Henry Scott-Tuke (thankfully that is at least behind glass otherwise it would probably be hung three-feet from the floor and covered in kiddies crayon).

This memory has erupted to the fore in trying to remember when I’ve seen Richard Long’s work before, and what I thought about it. I had not seen a big solo show up until now, so I have perhaps missed the opportunity to know the work fully. Or rather part of it, because Long’s work is made up of separate ways of working that feed each other. But I should have been more aware of him for he is all about landscape and territory and, crucially, man’s relationship to it. The work is about our place in the world.

Heaven and Earth opens with Heaven and with Earth on opposing walls (as if to get this minor cosmic binary out of the way prior to hitting the landlocked human condition with a bump). Two brand new wall-sculptures of huge i-Ching symbols described directly on to the wall by hand in River Avon mud that has splattered pleasingly onto surrounding walls and ceiling as though the interior space were struggling to contain the natural stuff of nature. We are then shot back in time with Long’s earliest documentation of his remote walks. Walking is central to his dialogue with the landscape; it is how he interacts and involves himself with it; it is also the walking that is the sculpture. What we see in the gallery is the documentation and the show gives the chance to see the early stuff - beautifully presented handmade records of the sculptural activity. Lines on maps connecting up routes or black and white photographs presented in a frame with a white surround and a short suggestive text: perhaps just a place-name printed underneath, or a brief description of the route, together with a plotted observation of trees, streams or stones. The documentation is the record of the sculptural involvement. It recalls the look of it, something of the scale of it; the sculpture has passed but it's surround and after-effect is offered up for our consideration. Towards the end of the show the documentation component is given over to huge, over-designed, shouty wall-texts; I am unsure about the text taking up entire walls but perhaps this is a brash update of Long’s 1970’s careful pencil captions for the 21st Century.

Long's other area of documentation is the book; and there are is a room of them as an aside to the exhibition, all beautifully designed in Long's stylish aesthetic over some fourty years. The catalogue too has been designed by Long and the free handout for the show, which folds out into a sort of poster and text piece, is as beautiful as the books in the vitrines. You can also pick up several nice paper things from the Long archive in the shop - in particular a lovely booklet called 'Five Six Pick up Sticks' from Anthony d'Offay in 1980 for the sum of two quid.

There's also a great room of indoor floor sculptures. Long was keen to show ‘real work in public time and spaces' in addition to the documentation of his walking sculpture so began making the floor pieces for which he is perhaps best known. The room is big but I couldn't help thinking it might have been better to show perhaps three with more space around them rather than five; it was great to see these works I just had some difficulty separating them. Perhaps the Tate is too small to show them together.

It occurs to me in thinking about this show that it is strange how cultural relevance can hit one unexpectedly. I have often been dimly aware of an artist, even seen work regularly, but failed to connect with the artist’s intentions and ideas until some unexpected time when it seems to plug into my current concerns.

Long’s investigative searching, his use and plunder of wild lonely swathes of Britain and of elsewhere, has fed my own explorations of landscape at a time when I am most ready to receive it, and more than I could possibly have hoped.

Richard Long at the Tate

The New Whitechapel

2009-05-22T05:07:00.000-07:00

The Whitechapel has been lotteryfurbed. Nearly 20 million quid later the place is twice the size having expanded into the beautiful old library building next door. There's a big survey of Isa Genzken; I think its safe to say I responded to her early work better as I enjoyed the work downstairs and not the more recent work upstairs; I especially enjoyed the paintings; flat, explorations of surface in emerald greens, the paint having being dragged with some sort of squeegee over canvas laid flat and fixed on the rough unfinished concrete floor of the studio; catching the sudden jarrings of pattern in the flaws and shapes. They are strangely beautiful. The problem of making sense of surface and space continues in the concrete casts of non-space (fragments of the inside of a cupboard space or room), and the tall Manhattan skyscraper sculptures in coloured -deco-like resins and glass inspired by Manhattan skyscapers; the city also presented as models and scrapbooks - an investigation of place.

There is also an embarrassingly small show (given the strength of connection) of Gertler, Rosenberg, Epstein, Bomberg et all called The Whitechapel Boys; a tapestry Guernica in cow-muck sludge by Polish artist Goshka Macuga, fitting as the Whitechapel was the first and only UK exhibition of Guernica; however the colours are pretty grim: look instead at the vitrine of historical ephemera concerning the picture: - high-powered correspondence between the then owners, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitechapel Gallery’s requests to borrow the picture; I enjoyed Picasso's emphatic non communicated in brusque terms; this all long prior to the work being released to Spain in 1981. There’s a rotatation of Jurgen Teller portraits in the Lobby part of the John Kobal Award (one of which is a supremely unkind portrait of my friend David H half asleep and covered in fag-ash); two projects that plug into the neighbouring territory:- Social Sculpture, a sort of noticeboard of place and belonging, and Minerva Cuevas' S.COOP, a 'cultural experiment' exploring notions of community, commerce and exchange by way of a minted coin (the S.COOP) that can be exchanged for white ice-cream in Wentworth Street.

However be that as it may, the real leaps of artistic joy are to be had in Passports, a tiny show of a tiny selection of the British Council collection; an little known and misunderstood organisation that exists to promote British culture aboard forging international links (one of its main jobs is the Brit component of the Venice biennale). The title refers to the document accompanying each of the works setting out their foreign lendings and it is the first of five plunderings of the British Council collection of some 8500 (8500!) works, generally bought from Brit-trailblazers on the up. The show includes a superb Frank Auerbach, with not a single dull or wasted mark, a slab of hard-won Kossoff, a great Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, and a great 60’s Hockney. There’s also a Peter Doig but you can’t have everything. It has been curated by Michael Craig-Martin, who also used the curation to launch a small attack on the British Council’s current lack of international movement and visability in The Observer (‘We must start sending our great art around the world again’ 29th March 2009); the comments taken on board, wrist duly slapped etc as reported in this months Art Monthly. I’ve visited a few times and I’m ashamed to say on my first visit I was in such a hurry to see my favourite Gilbert & George that I practically ignored Isa Genzken; racing through the galleries on a mission to see Intellectual Depression from 1980; that great, humanoid tree, caught in twisted angst against the dead-yellow ground; a summing up of mental exhaustion. In fact the room is a triumph; its just such a shame it’s such a small show small selection of a great collection; my overriding feeling is that Isa Genzken should have been given the downstairs space only, with the Passports given the entire upstairs for a mammoth celebration of a great collection of great work that is rarely seen en masse. Surely that would have been a far more fitting opening show for this new expanded public space?

British Council

Whitechapel Gallery

Michael Craig-Martin in The Observer

Some Texts

2009-04-26T08:15:00.001-07:00

Been very busy with new work and college, so apologies there has been nothing new to look at for weeks and weeks and weeks; amazing how time flies... or more correctly how time disappears... (I bet you were sick of the sight of that sodding tree stump...) However there follows a number of texts I've been working on and some references I've been considering for my course, on the themes of Englishness, landscape, and romanticism. Normal service resumes shortly; I am currently collecting my thoughts on the new Whitechapel Gallery.

The Territorial Imperative

2009-04-26T08:04:00.000-07:00

"English writers and artists, English composers and folk-singers, have been haunted by this sense of place, in which the echoic simplicities of past use and tradition sanctify a certain spot of ground. These forces are no doubt to be found in other regions and countries of the earth; but in England the reverance for the past and the affinity with the natural landscape join together in a mutual embrace. So we owe much to the ground on which we dwell. It is the landscape and the dreamscape. It encourages a sense of longing and belonging. It is Albion."

Peter Ackroyd, from Albion, the Origins of the English Imagination

What Beauty is there in a Young Life Snuffed Out

2009-04-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

The English Romantic tradition has it’s origins in the Eighteenth Century, but it was the Nineteenth Century when the notion of what we might call the doomed sensibility, the poet or artist at the beck and call of unseen forces, was at it's height, but I believe this peculiarly English notion is still in some ways alive and kicking and the following excerpt from The Times, concerning Heath Ledger's untimely death, illustrates not only a prime concern of the romantics of the past but also the impact of romantic imagination on contemporary culture.

"One image immediately sprang to mind when I heard that the actor Heath Ledger had been found dead on his bed in a New York apartment, surrounded by prescription drugs. The image was not from Brokeback Mountain or his other films, but of a much earlier picture: Henry Wallis's 1856 painting, The Death of Chatterton.

In that extraordinary painting, the poet Thomas Chatterton, just 17, lies sprawled across the bed in his garret. Through the open window, dawn is breaking over St Paul's Cathedral. On the table stands the bottle of arsenic, with which he has just killed himself.

Chatterton, penniless and starving, probably committed suicide in despair, although it is possible he was self-medicating for syphilis, and overdid the dose. Ledger, 28, already wealthy and celebrated, may also have killed himself by accident. There is a direct link between them: two gifted individuals, dead long before their time, destined, like butterflies, to live gorgeously for too brief a season.

The notion of the artist doomed to early death, bequeathed by the Romantics and most memorably depicted by Wallis, remains deeply embedded in modern culture. Ledger now joins the roster of the talented young, untimely dead: Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe, River Phoenix and Kurt Cobain.

Our relationship with movie stars is as intense and intimate as it once was with poets. Actors live other lives for us on screen. We live through them in other worlds, and we expect to grow old with them. When they die young, we are immediately reminded of our own impending deaths, and the need to seize the day."

Ben Macintyre, The Times, Friday 25th January 2008

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/ben_macintyre/article3247678.ece

Rupturing the Surfaces of the Given

2009-04-25T09:20:00.001-07:00

"But, for all these artists [the Neo-Romantic painters of the 1930's], the pursuit of landscape was always something more than the quest for phenomena, or the appearances of natural and human forms. They were intent upon a transfiguration of what they saw: often, they laid claim to a religious or spiritual vision; always, they wanted to rupture the surfaces of the given with imaginative transformations. Landscape, for them, was an arena in which the subjective and the objective, the deeply personal and the richly traditional, could be mingled in new and previously unseen ways."

Peter Fuller, Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions

The quote is in respect of a very particular group of British painters, however it seems to me to also apply equally well to freer landscape painting of this or any age, and in considering it I was reminded of Constable’s oil sketches. There is a often forgotten room of them at the V&A.

Constable's oil sketches seem to me to be closer to the actuality of life, closer to the real; than his finished paintings; there is something in the movement of the paint, the unfinished quality, the flux of it, that brings one nearer to an approximation of the experience of real landscape and real weather; yet they are packed with unreal actions and inventions. Perhaps a looming cloud that’s oddly coloured or, as in the picture here, a dark streaking of black, which we know doesn’t appear in the real view and was never before the artist’s eyes in this way, yet it brings us closer to an approximation of the experience of being in landscape than a photorealist view might.

Freely approximating the landscape, in not striving for a photorealist view, brings us closer to it; it assists us in understanding the effect of place: how a landscape can disturb and encroach. But I am also interested in how, in landscape painting, the picture plane has the potential to behave in front of the viewer. I am interested in the insertion of a device, or an area, that throws the real off course; this can perhaps be considered in a similar way to Barthes' punctum: the wound in the smooth plain. This device, or wilful guidance of the viewers eye, can be deliberate. It is possible to welcome the viewer into a painted picture plane and control, to some degree, where they go within it and where they experience shock; such unsettlement can, I believe, lead the viewer to consider the landscape on a far broader basis than would be possible otherwise. A broader consideration of their place in the world. For this reason I am interested in making an art that perhaps looks as once like traditional landscape painting but closer in one might experience the uncanny or the unsettling: the unexpected. I am also interested in artists who are unafraid to present a vision of the world where all might not be well. The shift of a balanced focus.
Although because of the nature of paint, and the wish to communicate excitement, the result can not alwyas be exactly foreseen, but it the intention that matters: a gesture of disruption. The slashing of a comfortable view.

Thinking about the notion of guiding the viewer reminded me of Noel Coward’s poem 'The Great Awakening', which I remembered from my childhood as deeply shocking:

The Great Awakening

As I awoke this morning
When all sweet things are born
A robin perched upon my sill
To signal the coming dawn.
The bird was fragile, young and gay
And sweetly did it sing
The thoughts of happiness and joy
Into my heart did bring.
I smiled softly at the cheery song
Then as it paused, a moment’s lull,
I gently closed the window
And crushed its fucking skull.

- It too lulls the reader into a false sense of security before delivering the shock of the poem; which is the crushing of the birds head at the end; which seems at once humorous but also I think illustrates how it is possible to guide or control the viewer, at least in an opening stage.

But in talking about the guiding of the viewer’s consideration we need to consider the imagination; because what we are talking about is the extension of the real by way of an invention.

But the element of imagination - the taking of the landscape beyond the real, the transfiguration of the landscape that Peter Fuller talks about, brings us into the realm of the romantic; the imagined; the hightening of the real experience through invention, and perhaps the expansion of landscape using imagination is more a typically English condition: the landscape traditions of other countries have been perhaps embedded in classicial mythologies and reworking of overplayed legend; the English landscape tradition could be considered to be said to have originated through an engagement with the landscape itself.

Constable Oil Sketches

A Parody of Englishness as an Artistic Vantage Point

2009-04-20T05:21:00.001-07:00

In the early 1970’s Gilbert & George, who had already for some time been presenting themselves as ‘Living Sculptures’, produced a number of works that showed them walking in idyllic English countryside. The majority of the work took the form of composite black and white photopieces hung in clusters; the photography looked dismally old fashioned and stagey; they wore Edwardian-looking suits and carried walking canes. The whole looked like amateur photographs of a bygone age: an illusion of a now vanished England.

The persona Gilbert and George adopted in these early works was part of a broad personal construct the artists were developing at that time, which fed into their lives and relentless promotions of their art. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s they bombarded the art world with texts and announcement cards, most of which looked like invitations to a dance on a turn of the century cruise liner, or a Mayfair ball. They flirted with emblems of Government, and used symbols of Royalty and Freemasonary; cards for exhibitions urged the recipient do please get in touch, as though the card were an invitation to an Edwardian high-tea or the calling card of a bright young thing out of PG Wodehouse. They hand-signed their photopieces beneath a Royal crest, marking their joint signature with the year, as though each completed work were the passing of an act of Parliament; they used odd, stilted, over-enunciated syntax and overplayed politeness; a letter would look more like a note from the vicarage than a communiqué from within the contemporary art world; but perhaps this early distancing ensured their success; and all more interesting too when one considers the art world of that time.

But given they used themselves in so much of their work it is perhaps as though they needed to adopt the parody of Englishness to speak about the broader world,enclosing themselves in a protective construct that allowed them to keep their real personalities at a distance using the formality of manners; allowing them to begin to speak about difficult subjects.

To my mind the most successful of their works of this period were their first and last ever group of oil paintings –called simply The Paintings: they were a series of large triptychs carried out in 1971 of perhaps the sort of scenes one associates with the grand traditions of English art with the artists themselves in the mid-panels engaging with the landscape: leaning against a five-bar gate in relaxed, resigned pose or sitting in woodland; sometimes merely surveying the horizon, as though discovering alien territory for the first time - the mid-panels flanked by panels of foliage and landscape.

The Paintings have something of the quality of the amateur Sunday painter, as a painter one notices the colours are not quite right, perhaps the greens are too emerald, too hyper-real, and the colours look as though they are straight from the tubes, rather than developed in a way most professional painters would; they look a little like paint by numbers and were it not for the scale they would look like any picture one might find in a car boot sale; they are full of painterly errors, one even has a whip of dripped paint that flicks the air – but the mistake is left as is: the errors are accepted; it is as though Gilbert & George were intentionally concerning themselves with the unsophisticated, and while aping the traditions of English landscape painting in hamfisted fashion they are also challenging the proper painterly way of things; but the amateur intent lends the work a curious, disjointed strangeness; as though a non-artist were given a crash course in the romantic tradition then short-lived access to abandoned village and ordered to recreate what he found there.

We seem to be looking at the uncovering of a sensibility; there is a sense of glimpsed access to a parallel world, in much the same way as Martin Parr’s quietly invasive photographs of village fetes (up close and personal with the homemade jams); an investigation of the unsophisticated, the other. These works too seem to get close to a depiction of Middle England, or a Little England, that tells us all is perhaps not quite right. But are they are survey of a land that once was and is no more? A canny acknowledgement of a part of our history? Or are they a valid component of England as we know it?

Strangely, these works have only ever been exhibited twice, once in 1971, shortly after they were made, and once in the mid-1980’s. They remain sorely neglected and are not widely known; the paintings did not form part of the recent Gilbert & George show at the Tate and neither do they appear in either the original edition of the Complete Pictures or the updated edition for the Tate retrospective.

Perhaps this is because while the work uses an idea of England, and speaks of it, it also, in it’s painterliness, strongly references the English landscape tradition and while Gilbert and George are admirers of Constable, say, or Samuel Palmer, the referencing is perhaps more than the artists are comfortable with; in my view it would be typical of Gilbert & George to wish to edit their work of referencing of other art movements to keep the G&G story as uncluttered as possible for the viewer.

The Empty World

2009-03-10T14:01:00.000-07:00

It's perpetual twilight in Tile Hill, the West Midlands estate George Shaw grew up in. It's also Autumn, about 4.30pm in the afternoon, and you can smell the gently rotting vegetation mixed in with a faint whiff of dogshit, and everyone's indoors. Shaw quotes The Smiths' song lyrics on the gallery's information sheet for his new show Woodsman, as well he might for the work is filled with the dark poeticism of this very British band. He paints the empty stillness of drab England: communal parks, garages, prefabs, primary schools. The shared spaces, the semi-urban edge of damp woods.

The estate was built in the 1950's/60's just outside Coventry, one of many government council housing initiatives of the post-war push. Like most of the industrial Midlands Coventry was a booming economy, and monies were flowing off the backs of the motor and aviation industries. It was just one of many new estates built to house the workers of British Leyland, Jaguar and Rover, but the city was hit hard by the decline of these industries in the early 1980's when Shaw was a teenager, and the subsequent recession of the 1990's compounded the desolation.

Shaw returns to the now faded estate infrequently, taking hundreds of photographs of places that were important (so many that I wonder if he now experiences the place at all other than from behind the arms-length of a lens), and it is these childhood haunts that find their way into the paintings, which are mostly large and photo-realist and painted with Humbrol enamel which itself has the association of childhood. But he now lives in the West Country, far from the gallery-hotbeds of Hackney and Mayfair in, I imagine (although I have no particular reason for thinking this), a sort of rural enclave with a view of the sea where he can get to grips with remembering his formative years in solitude. I understand George's need to remove himself from the landscape in order to artistically map it: I know from my own childhood explorations that it is difficult to investigate the peculiarities of memory unless you remove yourself in order to sort the fictions, which come thick and fast, as memory is layered over the distance of time, and of place. Memory also changes, and to use childhood and personal history as a subject is to wrestle with a moveable feast, constantly evolving. You have to be slightly obsessed with it.

And there is something obsessive about the paintings. They are painted in minute detail, the artist picking over the nuances of the photograph, copying flatness so that it is even flatter. The work is very still, and quiet. Each mark is tightly controlled: there is no shake of the hand, no emotional response to the landscape itself. The paintings are stoically blank-faced, and although naturalistic there is nothing natural about the work because there is nothing spatial about it. But perhaps that is how they are meant to be, because other than being uncannily still they are also devoid of life, which feels like a denial of people and of family, of formative personalities. The intention seems to be to allow them to be filled with a sense of sadness or loss, perhaps a sadness for personal place damaged by economic circumstance or sadness for people we are not allowed to see. Perhaps it is merely sadness for the passing of time.

Like most people, my memories of my own childhood are filled with the clamour of noise and colour and, importantly, people, but the only figurative inclusion to the show is the woodsman on the pub-sign of the same name on the exhibition invite card, but even that's been demolished. But peopled or not, flat or not, there is no richer seam than personal history.

George Shaw
Woodsman
Wilkinson, until 9th April 2009

Wilkinson

Let's Drift Again

2009-02-21T15:04:00.000-08:00

Laura Oldfield Ford makes work about agitated urban space. The work is informed by walks or, in the psychogeographic tradition, drifts, but a drift is no ordinary walk, and it certainly isn’t an amble. It is the mindful, purposeful, watchful, vital movement of Man within the built environment, and a true psychogeogapher remains open to suggestion. The phenomena has it origins in a sort of political playfulness posited by Situationist originator Guy Debord to describe a process of gaining awareness of the predicament of the urban environment with a view to political activism. It didn’t quite come off as intended but nevertheless became an interesting construct or starting point used by a great many thinkers, artists and writers not least the current depoliticised coffee-table psychogeography of Peter Ackroyd (he never uses the term but is generally lumped in), and Iain Sinclair.

Laura has bravely, and freely, adopted the term and she describes her process as “subjectively mapping the city in its intensive state of movement and flux”, the explorations laid bare in her fanzine Savage Messiah (which as a platform title doesn’t work for me as in my mind it is inextricably linked with H.S. Ede's biography of Gaudier Brezska), currently on issue ten and the bedrock to her work. The zine is based on the down and dirty, black and white, xeroxed DIY post-punk aesthetic, with high-contrast grainy photos, urban drawing and inky type, owing a great deal to the snarling energies of punk and the people who fed off it. Each issue investigates a district, documenting observations of London as a place of disaffection. Remember the scene in Derek Jarman's Jubilee where the glamorous pretend punk is crucified on a lamp-post on a deserted street of burnt out cars while feral children dance round her wrapping her in barbed wire in a cruel imitation of a maypole dance? This is Laura's territory. London as a place of social unrest; London psychically damaged beyond repair.

For her new show London 2013 Drifting through the Ruins Laura has made over a hundred drawings of East London’s Olympic zone, that swathe of the lower Lea Valley currently being pulled to bits in preparation for the most expensive party attempted by UK Government, but the drawings imagine the space post-Olympic, a state of urban abandonment and failed optimism; no-go wastes overrun with rats and gangs. A place in trouble now that the natural histories are submerged and the lay of the land lost forever, sealed in a matrix of new transport systems and glass and steel.

Places vent energies that work through people, creating micro environments, and there are several micro worlds presented here: Angel lane to Balfron Tower, Altab Ali Park, Loot Asda/Burn Barratts, Rave Enforcer vs Pitchless and so on. Beautifully drawn in ball point pen on watercolour papers, they are fragments of human stories of the economic effect of this zone of upheaval, of estates, pubs, shopping streets, communal space, London foliage, filled with indistinct tracings and nervous energy, free marks and spurts of garish luminous colour. Some include people going about their daily business or swaggering gangs, some are quite devoid of human life but you know they were there, once. The implied trace of recent presence is key in these works as Laura considers each drawing a palimpsest - an old word for an eraseable tablet - so that the putting down and scraping off reveals the echo of earlier observation, perhaps half realised, the multi-layering coming together in the final work to reveal a layered truth and insight.

But the hang bothered me. Sadly all the works are hung together along one long wall of Hales Gallery in a huge composite block so that it impossible, other than by using the picture guide (15 drawings, 3 across, 5 down' etc) to tell where one piece ends and another begins. I like the power of the wall, but the individual works, which are sensitive and each comprising some 12-15 drawings, are lost, and I would have preferred to see them hung separately. For me the most successful of the drawings are the ones with space in them, where the fragment of place is allowed to hang in the air on the page, rather than crowded in by immutable energies, but there is room for both. These drawings exist in and out of time, being both informed by the present and the echoes of the near future, but they are not warnings of potential urban despair, of what might happen, in fact quite the opposite: the turmoil is presented as a fait accompli, and to borrow from Lud Heat "...in this air certain hungers were activated that have yet to be pacified; no turning back"...

Now, I should really at this point declare my interest when it comes to so-called psychogeogphical drifting, or London's hidden energies, because for nearly fifteen years my work was entrenched in the haunted London of the aforementioned Lud Heat, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem and Hawkmoor. I made dramatic, pantomimic paintings of besuited skinheads set against backdrops of Tower Hamlets Cemetary or Limehouse Reach. I painted Spitalfields aflame, East London's spooky churches, and tormented rough trade. My supporters included the late great Dan Farson (who made Limehouse famous and is now scarcely remembered), Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd who, in an essay for my show East End Paintings in 1994, was kind enough to write "there are few painters who have so well divined the true life of the city and, by an act of astonishing intuition, have been able to unite the past and present, mythology and reality, in artistic communion". But five years ago I decided I'd had it with the London thing: I wasn't operating entirely out of myself and I was dissatisfied that my work was informed by the fictions of others. My work is still very much about place but I now paint the landscape of my personal history, and I am a Shropshire Lad, not a London one, but if I'm still painting place through a filter of fiction, in much the same way a smashed mirror casts a shatter of fragments over the reflection of a familiar room, then at least they are my fictions and not someone else's.

So at first I wanted to turn away from this work, finding it at violent odds with my own London love affair, now dismally over, and my own understanding of what psychogeography has turned into, but I am left with a rankling that while Debord would baulk at my claiming that term for my own fog-bound Limehouse driftings (should I have been brave enough to do so), in Laura's political offensive he would almost certainly recognise his original intentions. Laura is right to adopt the phrase as her work has a rightful claim on its original meaning.

Laura Oldfield Ford
London 2013, Drifting through the Ruins
Hales Gallery, until 14th March

Hales Gallery

Savage Messiah

The Decade of Bad Art

2009-01-27T04:01:00.000-08:00

There was a lot that was bad about the 1980s. Bad hair, bad clothes, bad TV; some very bad mainstream music. What people forget however, and what this small display demonstrates, was that was also some very bad painting. UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980s comprises a scant survey of the resurgent figurative movement that was happening largely in New York City but also semi-spontaneously in Italy and Germany in that bad-taste decade.

Let's examine the big three C's:- Chia, Clemente and Cucchi. Sandro Chia's Three Boys on a Raft has the colour and texture of a wet woolly jumper on a drizzly day in Llandudno and frankly I had better colour sense when I was 8. Francesco Clemente's Self-Portrait is lazily executed with no discernible impetus or excitement for the personality, it is flat and unsearching and not what one could call the result of emotional inquiry. Enzo Cucchi's supposedly Homeric odyssey is horribly, clumsily painted and actually rather silly in a serious art context: like bad prison art, or something from an art therapy class in a home for the mentally ill on the outskirts of Basingstoke. The only difference is size: but making it big does not a work of art make.

Then there is the king-pin of the New York darlings, Julian Schnabel. Apparently Humanity Asleep (above), one of his awful smashed crockery pictures (which needless to say, like everything in the show is about ten-foot wide), was influenced by William Blake. Stop right there. This is exactly the sort of padding-out I detest when it comes to this tribe of pretenders, and Julian Schnabel is, to my mind, a talentless individual who happened to be in the right loft with the right size painting in the right market conditions at the right time. Will anyone talk about him in 200 years? Will they buggery.

And I'm not going to start on David Salle; I will however remark in passing that My Subjectivity is singularly awful, and the right-hand panel of the young girl in sickly green downright creepy. It looks like it was painted by someone who spends a good deal of their time in restaurants heavy-breathing over a waitress young enough to be their Granddaughter.

So what's good? Well, I very much enjoyed the early Basquiat who, in thankful contrast to the aforementioned, was driven and angry and made works filled with personal meaning. He also unleashed blistering comment on both historical and contemporary America, and Tobacco vs Red Chief is no exception. It is a picture of a wooden North American Indian Chief figure, a commonplace advertising device that used to be found outside US Tobacco shops, but placed in his demarked space of teepees and sprayed with blood his fistful of cigars becomes the currency received for relinquishing the lands he stands on. Basquiat shined at opening up uncomfortable subjects but he also made pictures that looked great; they followed all the painterly laws of balancing weight, space, texture, emphasis, milli-second calculations all over that built up an instinctively realised and considered whole. He knew what to leave out, which is more important then what you put in, and he knew when to stop. There is not a bad mark.

I also enjoyed seeing Bazelitz's Adieu from 1982, two human figures pinned like butterflies in a case, characteristically upside down, writhing on a chequer-board of jaundiced yellow, with such a freeness to the paint I was reminded I must put a bomb under these little landscapes I am doing, so tight and close-knit is the paint becoming.

So how did Schnabel and the Three C's who, it seems to me, have little or no natural painterly sense or ability, become so celebrated? I believe the paintings were so vacuously bad you could say whatever you like about them, thereby providing raw material on which curators' could hang their hyperbole in a time when dollars were burning holes in pockets. Furthermore, they produced work of impressive size with which it is easy to bombard the viewer. They often included mysterious imagery and referencing that somehow enabled a sense of them being intellectual outsiders (but paradoxically within the safe confines of the New York party set), which somehow married up to people's expectations of the mythic idea of the artist. With the exception of Jean-Michel Basquiat, these are not blazing lights who remind us what it means to be alive: they are as dull and as straight as your average financial adviser. But perhaps this was how America liked it's artists for a time, with Basquiat cannily added to the mix to show fair-play.

UBS Openings: Paintings from the 1980s
at Tate Modern until 13th April 2009

Tate Modern

Landscapes of Loss

2009-01-14T06:39:00.001-08:00

Alfred Sisley was born in France but to English parents, who sent the young Sisley to London to study business. This sounds like a cruel fate but his parents did him a great service because instead of studying hard to become a banker Sisley kept bunking off to hang out in the National Gallery, entranced by what he found there. Sisley returned to Paris four years later determined to become a painter, and undertook an apprenticeship in the studio of Charles Gleyre, who also taught Renoir and Monet. The rest, as they say, is history, as Sisley, along with his classmates, rapidly captured the imagination of the cultural public with their experimental plein air painting (and as Frank Auerbach once said "artists often come in gangs"…).

Sisley in England and Wales is a small show of two distinct groups of pictures Sisley painted over two visits to England. The first, in 1874, shows the bustling Thames (now ghostly quiet), and sun-filled Regattas at Molesley and Hampton Court palace. The pictures are light-hearted but Sisley was a dab-hand at finding a challenging view and the paintings are filled with interesting perspectives and spatial explorations such as the gently curving Road from Hampton Court to Molesley and Under the Bridge at Hampton Court. The paintings also include hints of industrial progress: water plumping stations, wiers and dams, as though Sisley wanted to show the beauty of the countryside but wanted also to present the viewer with a modern view. However whereas these paintings seem light and carefree the paintings resulting from his second visit, which was at the very end of his life, choke the throat.

Sisley’s parents disapproved of his relationship with his partner Eugenie and cut him from their will. In 1897 the couple headed to England to marry in secret docking first at Southampton and travelling to Cornwall, before tying the knot in lonely circumstances at Cardiff Registry Office, settling at Langland Bay for a time so that Sisley could get to artistic grips with the ragged peninsula at Gower.

In stark contrast to the paintings of 1874 these later works were made at a time of great emotional strain and personal difficulty. Not only were the couple effectively outcast, they were both dying; Alfred had throat cancer and Eugenie cancer of the tongue. Given the circumstances it is hardly a cause for surprise that the Welsh landscapes are made of sterner stuff that the Molesley Regattas of some 20-years earlier. In Sisley's hands, Welsh Coast (Penarth) and Cliff at Penarth are places of futile contemplation, imbued with Sisley's heavy heart, and Storr's Rock at Rotherslade Bay becomes a summing-up of the violence of life, an immoveable, tangible mass of tumultuous emotion. This work is Sisley's emotional life laid bare, shipwrecking itself on lonely coves and violent outcrops, and that these paintings are his final reckoning of the world only strengthens that palpable, plummeting sense of loss.

It's free to get in, and the brilliant catalogue is only 6.95, but you might need to take a hanky.

Sisley in England and Wales
at The National Gallery until 15th February 2009
and at National Museum Wales, Cardiff 7th March to 14th June 2009

The National Gallery

Brion Gysin at October Gallery

2008-12-28T09:31:00.000-08:00

“I may write only what I know in space: I am that I am”
Brion Gysin, Notes on Painting

Brion Gysin was interested in the juxtapositon of word and image, and he developed a unique visual language combining repeat-image calligraphics (he studied Japanese and Arabic as a young man), photo-based work, collage, and some of the most extraordinary landscape painting of the Sahara and Tangier. But his calligraphic investigations were central to his art and at the end of his life a patron donated studio space in order that Gysin could make one final work: a large ten-panel calligraphic piece inspired by a Japanese makemomo or folding book called Calligraffiti of Fire.

The work is some 16-meters long and designed to be ‘read’ from right to left (i.e. in Eastern picture space). It begins with Gysin’s personal sigil that ignites panel one before racing in blazing solar yellows and oranges across a further nine canvases; the glorious yellow colours vibrate into the room and that the end panels have to sit at angles to the middle of the piece in this installation only adds to the dancing, life-enhancing journey of Gysin's signature.

A chance to see Brion Gysin's work in the flesh is rare in any event but a chance to see Calligraffiti of Fire is rarer still. The work does not belong to a public institution and has been shown only once since it's original exhibition at Galerie Samy Kinge in Paris in 1986. Sadly, it’s current home is a Parisian bank-vault.

Gysin was dying with emphysema when he made the painting, which was not only his last but his most ambitious. Once he had finished Gysin proclaimed it "THE picture of my lifetime", and I like to think of it as his joyful summing up. It's on until 7th February 2009.

Brion Gysin
Calligraffiti of Fire
October Gallery
24 Old Gloucester Street, London WCN 3AL

http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/

There are also a number of smaller paintings and calligraphic pieces in the exhibition, in particular a great roller-and-ink and photo college Burroughs in Tangier (1974).

October Gallery are also screening the new Nik Sheenan's new Gysin documentary FLicKeR on 31st January.
See also Burroughs Life-File at Rifemaker (until 17th January) and the Royal Academy GSK Contemporary Season Burroughs Live (until 19th January).

The Damned and the Saved

2008-12-14T04:09:00.000-08:00

"The show is divided both between the two venues and the classical themes of 'Portrait' and 'Landscape'; Standpoint will be peopled with souls in transport or torment and here at studio1.1 we will present their various hells and/or Edens. The onus as ever is upon the viewer to judge."

The Damned and the Saved is an exploration of modern morality shared between two gallery spaces. I have a portrait of a stranded young soul at Standpoint in the company of Chris Humphrey's screaming souls in rivers of flame, Cathy Lomax's Mary Bell paintings and Matt Lippiatt's occupied body-bags among other participants.

Respite (salvation?) from these figuritive unsettlings can be found several minutes walk away at Studio 1.1. Michelle Fletcher's lushly sinister painting of a forest glade dominates the front gallery space and Tom Wolseley's film 'Mountain Harmonica' reminds us that all may not be well in the rural idyll. My landscapes are in a small back room next to Andrea Gregson's sculpture 'Lair': the twigs seeming to reach over and into my paintings, dragging them into the room and allowing them to be something other than painted improbabilities.

The Damned and the Saved asks us to judge modern moral predicaments or at least be mindful of age-old notions of good and evil as we find ourselves before yet another Christmas in front of the TV. It's on until 21st December.

http://www.standpointlondon.co.uk/
http://www.naimad.co.uk/studio1-1/

Chuck out the Chintz

2008-12-07T03:16:00.000-08:00

Have you ever been to the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London? The chances are you haven’t. In fact, I don’t think many people have judging by a quick gin-sozzled straw-poll in the pub last night (I refuse to say ‘survey’ - it sounds suburban) and neither had I until an acquaintance of mine was talking about the G.F. Watts show the other day in terms so urgent I thought I’d better go and see what all the fuss was about.

The Guildhall are showing the holdings of the G.F. Watts’ Museum (just outside Guildford) which are on holiday while the place undergoes a lottery-furb and the first thing that strikes is the unfinished self-portrait of the artist aged 17 immediately to your left as you enter, a bit like being given the opportunity to say a cheery 'Hullo!' to the artist on the way in. It's one of those confident portraits of talent too young, and reminded me of Samuel Palmer’s great teen self-portrait, only less intense. On into the exhibition proper and in the first room I was captured by the painted sunlight of Fiesole, Italy (above) dappling across deep rolling fields below a changable sky and creamy yellow clouds. But the joy was shortlived as the picture is unfortunately hung opposite a picture of Victorian children so emetic I am surprised I didn’t decorate the floor.

The second room is, thankfully, more balanced, with a great trio of gothic Victorian dramas, Irish Famine, Found Drowned, and Under the Arch, and, just for good measure, a six-foot Satan. As if this wasn’t enough, and just as you find yourself time-travelling into a fog-filled land of gas-lamps and ticking clocks (it's OK I don't expect you to share my penchant for dramatic reaction) there is another dazzling landscape, with curling clouds and hulking mountains scraping the heavens: it’s ‘In Asia Minor’, and so am I, realising, by this point, that far from being a dusty old Victorian painter Watts is a strong painter of place. I believe his far flung locales. I'm just not sure I can say the same for some of the figures.

Moving on, the big room holds further greats. Psychedelic slabs such as Sower of the Systems and After the Deluge, followed by Sunset on the Alps, Mammon Dedicated to his Worshippers and Obama’s fave picture Hope (or as G.K Chesterton would have it ‘Despair’ - but no matter - it’s beautiful). The mysterious The Ghost Ship is barely there, emerging from the snowy blizzard with the chill of a M.R. James and, in the last room, a wonderful landscape of the Isle of White... But I’ve rarely been in a show that needs editing as much as this: I want to take all the forementioned pictures, and put them in a large white gallery with plenty of space around them. They are crammed in to what amounts to a Rotary Club function room and too much of the work is the schmaltz that makes people give Victorian painting a wide berth. The duds are in danger of diminishing the greats.

While you're there, the permanent collection is worth a look, but a shock awaits on the landing as you’re confronted with 9-foot of chaotic Constable that assaults in too narrow a space. I took a few steps back and nearly went over the glass barrier into the downstairs area below (like Lee Remick going over the banisters in The Omen). The landing should be kept for small works and the Constable moved downstairs where you can get ten-feet away from it. There are some great pictures by Landseer, including the Well-Travelled Monkey which will make you smile and The First Leap which you will want to hate for being chocolate boxy but your inner taste-police will be scrapping like two cats in a sack as you fight to stop liking it. Popping back in to the Watts' show it occurred to me that the same can not be said for the chintzy duds.

Moments from the Marmite

2008-11-30T09:34:00.000-08:00

For the second Marmite Prize for Painting, held at Studio 1.1, each entrant had to submit a painting and a drawing, the rules stating that 'no judgements will be made as to what the words painting and drawing mean to you'. The shortlisted paintings became the show but ALL the drawings were included in the catalogue which is handy if you're interested in what several hundred artists are currently concerning themselves with. It's published by Susak Press and it's a fiver. Hours of fun, I promise.

I also took part in the first Marmite show at Residence in 2006 where all the work was hung upside down in tribute to Baselitz. This year the hang was up along the top of the walls, snug against the ceiling and the RSJ's- hence these are largely photographed from below. My landscape is at the top.

My favourite thing in the show was Richard Bateman's small landscape picture (above, second from bottom). Richard makes a weekly pilgrimage to London Zoo to draw the cages and pens, minus the animal inhabitants, returning to the studio to paint architectural spaces filled with after-images of captivity and confinement. "I’m thinking about the brutality of keeping an animal in a cage and, from there, the brutality of life generally." It's a cracking picture, and having seen it a few times in the last few days (in the gallery's storeroom, at the opening, on Saturday afternoon taking these photos) I have to say I have become mildly obsessed. Now I've even got photos of it to keep looking at too... but it IS a picture that creeps up on you. It has a stange power and far from being drowned out by the two large works it was sandwiched between was so punchy it rather seemed to suck out their strength. So there you have it. Richard was my winner, but not the official one. The prize returns in 2010.

The Marmite Prize 2008, Studio 1.1, ran 25-30 Nov
Oliver Kossack presented The Marmite Prize 2008 selected by Liz Neal, Michele Fletcher and Milly Thompson to runner up Eve Peasnall for her painting 'Sexy Weeper', runner up David Drey for his painting 'Logs and Axe', and the winner, Dai Roberts for his painting 'IAO'.

http://www.naimad.co.uk/studio1-1/
http://www.marmiteprize.org/
http://www.susakpress.com/

"My Heartland, Heartland, Heartland"

2008-11-09T10:51:00.000-08:00

This is 'My Heartland, Heartland, Heartland', painted for 'Awbopbopaloobop', Transition's show of new work informed by song lyrics.

I chose Heartland by the Sisters of Mercy. It's from about 1984 and the b-side to Temple of Love. It was one of my favourite songs as a teen and I used to listen to it on my walkman on the school bus travelling through this very landscape.

I've been playing a few old tunes while making these small personal pictures, but Heartland in particular has become something of a talisman. I think it's expansive doominess has bolstered my investigations or at least helped remind me of being a teenager in these big natural spaces. It's a sort of romantic goth lament, and when I listen to it I see leaden skies, twisting mud-tracks and distant hills. My mind travels over endless fields from above like a sweeping camera hurtling through the air, and I smell utterly un-London smells, like moss and mud, and all very definately on the edge of rain, as it often is near Wales.

A goth-rock b-side probably seem a strange soundtrack to be echoing through Housmans 'blue remembered hills' but not to me, to me it seems entirely appropriate. But then that's the surprise of working with personal memory, throwing up as it does 'a crowd of twisted things'.

Show coincides with a special rock'n'roll edition of Garageland.
Awopbopaloobop
15 Nov - 21 Dec 2008
www.transitiongallery.co.uk

Tangier

2008-10-12T03:59:00.000-07:00

Old Goth in 'Beach Visitation' shock...

The Islanders

2008-10-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

Installation view of Charles Avery's 'The Islanders: An Introduction', at Parasol Unit. A decade-long investigation that uses the mapping of an imaginary island in text, drawing and sculpture to explore philosophical positioning and enquiry. The show comprises work completed since the project began in 2004 and has a gloriously unfinished, meandering quality. I was very much aware of being allowed to see a work in progress, particularly with the drawings which are shown uncompleted with crop-markings around the edges and sparse suggestive areas. It's on until 8th November.

14 Wharf Road
London
N1 7RW
Tel: 020 7490 7373
www.parasol-unit.org

Notes from an Exhibition

2008-10-05T03:22:00.000-07:00

GUILLERMO KUITCA
Hauser & Wirth
196a Piccadilly and 15 Old Bond Street
London W1, to 10th October.
---

Floorplanned: design plane
a thousand empty rooms
design for dwellings or of bombed out
City from Above

encroaching muddy Cubism,
free marks,
describing an enveloping world
crowding in on organisation

plans and compartments

the people have deserted

is it the beginning of place
or the end of place

---

one like a head
Naum Gabo / Frank Auerbach
angular reckoning in heavy space

and all over
fragments of Braque

Imaginings of space
in and out of density

the world is allowed to be glimpsed
through shadow

overlaid with fractured dust-clouds

--- [Large white piece]

Slashings in shadow
Silent violence: clustered knifings

illusionary technique:
this is not real

--- [Large dark piece, far wall, opposite main doors]

Widespread Cubist world
developing space
Busyness of the medina -
Filtering out to blankness
Slow motion drawdown
as Burroughs' camera pans down the sweeping medina
to whiteness and death and extinction

---[Upstairs print room: 8 small prints and large map painting]

Prints of foreign maps
and floor plans
Computer-aided
pulled apart
troubled territories and damaged plans

Clicking co-ordinates
Digital bleepings
Cursor dragged to explain an extreme

Rooms are pulled
Blitzed fractal mappings
Frozen pre-combust

---[Exhibition continues at Colnagni in Old Bond Street]

You are buzzed in to a damask chamber in the afternoon
Lit from above with diffused October light

And the Slashings creep in...
Larger opening sections and shadings
Angles
Sharps

Thorns spike up, curling gently,
thorns become [... text illegible]

in the last piece,
patches of muted cream and grey,
crimson,
over the top the thorns snake

barbed wire supported by free marks

Critical Perspectives

2008-09-29T12:14:00.000-07:00

I bought all the papers at Heathrow off the plane from Marrakesh, and happened to read three pieces on the Rothko show in the Taxi home: two reviews and Louise Jury's piece in the Evening Standard 'Rothkos reunited at Tate' (a news item, not a review). The Evening Standard piece was fine and dandy but the reviews, as is often the case when a blockbuster trundles into town, were interesting for their very different standpoints.

Rachel Campbell-Johnson's piece in The Times, 'The Doorways of Darkness', was balanced and fresh and spoke about Rothko with sensitivity. The review was not afraid to acknowledge the difficulty of the work and dealt with any potential concerns that the viewer may have that such non-representational work is a huge joke and there may be sniggers at the back of the class if you don't 'get it'. The review didn't shy away from the work's overwhelming religiosity, further reason why people find Rothko so very heavy, but crucially the piece ENCOURAGED the reader to go and see the show. It also provided an intelligent realistic framework within which to consider the work, and this, I believe, is ultimately the critic's role. A good critic can also deal common prejudices a mighty blow: I think it was Brian Sewell who once said he wrote for both the artistic connoissieur AND the man on the Clapham omnibus, which when you think about it is actually a bloody good summing-up as well as a difficult task.

By contrast, in The Independent, a now dreary paper, Tom Lubbock likened the affective powers of Rothko's visual language to the 'the hook' of a pop song, even quoting 'Lady in R-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-d' and 'I can't L-I-I-I-I-VE' to illustrate his point, encouraging the viewer to see Rothko's artistic force as being as gimmick-filled as the average 3-minute top-10 hit. He even called the paintings 'big tragic riffs'.

Contrast Lubbock's last sentence:- 'But by all means go along to the Rothko show and be moved, it's just a pity you can't buy the LP', with Rachel's:- 'And what if you feel nothing in front of his canvases? Well, that's not nothing because to feel nothing is one of the strongest feelings you can have'. I think that simple comparison speaks volumes. My overriding feeling is that where The Times provided what I would like to describe as 'a key to assist', The Independent was being glib, leaving the viewer and/or readers short changed.

Here Comes That Day...

2008-09-27T02:59:00.000-07:00

No posts for a while as I've been on hols... communing with the local mysteries in Tangier. So there.

Brilliant, breaking news.... Cherry Red are releasing the Into a Circle back catalogue on CD for the first time. I've written something for the sleeve notes - Alex from the record company tells me they've got 'a fan, a critic and an artist' (i.e. me) providing reflections and memories.

I cannot stress this enough but In2aO were utterly sublime and absolutely the most formative thing in the world of teen-Stephen. I always thought it criminal they were never bigger than they were. Here's my text for the CD; if you've never heard of them I strongly recommend you get the compiliation when it's out. I'll post a link for it in November!

"Into a Circle's songs were and are dreamlike, sexy, and dangerous. They inhabit a strange sound-world of alternative religions, sexual experiments and bare-chested boy assassins. When I close my eyes I imagine them echoing through an other-worldly landscape as endless as one of Brion Gysin's Sahara paintings... I love these songs and in recent times I have been listening to them again and playing them whenever I get a chance to DJ.

"One of the interesting things about Into a Circle, aside from a fantastic image, was that the band surrounded themselves with the cultural and literary influences behind the songs. Bee's graphics and art-work referenced Hans Bellmer and William Burroughs, and the sleeve-notes always listed enough counter-cultural pointers to keep the library card of a provincial teen busy for weeks in those pre-internet days. All of this strengthened the songs and made Into a Circle a more complete and intelligent outfit than a good many bands who were around at the time. It is only now, some 20-years later and thinking about my development as a practising artist, I realise quite how formative the world of Into a Circle was for me. I can draw a number of lines of influence of those artists and writers who have affected my own work, or the way I carry out my work, back to Bee. I therefore find myself wondering how my work as an artist might have happened, and what art and books I would love and admire, were it not for Into a Circle."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Into_A_Circle
Bee's now in Bangkok doing Futon:- www.rehabisfab.com

Publish and be Damned

2008-08-18T04:42:00.000-07:00

I had a very enjoyable time at Publish and be Damned the other weekend. I couldn't go last year and I was amazed at how much it had grown in two years. It had spilled out into the couryard of Rochelle School, onto the lawn and up the stairs no less. And at 2.00pm on a Sunday afternoon in Shoreditch It was also rammed. So rammed the small far room was bottle-necked.

In case you don't know P&bD is the annual self-publishing fair and comprised some 80 participants for 2008 with output ranging from simple black and white fanzines to full-blown glossy colour mags with all manner of badges, scrapbooks, stickers and posters inbetween. Some of it funny, some serious, but all of it hardwon out of personal passion.

We saw some favourites like Transition's Arty and Garageland, Rachel Cattle, Sartorial's The Rebel, Laura Oldfield-Ford's Savage Messiah and Steven Willat's beautifully designed Control. Timothy Winchester was there with People Like Us, which was a nice suprise. He gave us free zines and stickers and Tomato Selleck badges. Tomato Selleck is a tomato with a Magnum PI moustache who has his own Facebook page and travels the world (one is encouraged to take photos of Tomato in foreign locales and post them). I also enjoyed Alex Zamora's Fever zine which I had not come across before. Sadly no Sarah Doyle this year (but I wore one of her badges to the fair) or Tangent, which is taking a rest while Tangent Projects gets up and running.

For the first time P&bD have published a guide to the participants. It sits on my coffee table and I'm picking it up from time to time. It looks like something challenging one might have bought from Compendium Books on Camden High St at the end of the 80's, or David Robilliard's 'Inevitable', self-published by Gilbert & George. I'm a sucker for black and white things in A5, with artful photos, perhaps a dash of red typeface and lots of Times New Roman.

Needless to say I left the fair with a tonnage of zines. I spent £25 and as most things are £2 or £3 my arms were flapping with papers in the rainstorm we got caught in afterwards. I think people are hungry for hand-made material. Perhaps it's a natural reaction to an overbearance of the internet.

www.publishandbedamned.org

David Hoyle in Oz

2008-08-10T04:40:00.000-07:00

As a discerning London culture-vulture you will have noticed The Wizard of Oz, the musical, is showing at the Festival Hall; it's had some decidely lukewarm reviews, despite housing the delectable Adam Cooper who I once met backstage at the Piccadilly Theatre wearing only his underpants (God, that Swan Lake was brilliant: I saw it six times, including it's opening in LA).

There is however an alternative Oz on Friday nights; a cabaret treat for the grown-ups after the main event. Last week's turn was a collaboration between David Hoyle and Nathan Evans: 'We're Not in Kansas Anymore'. It was a new production created specially and Dickie Beau was superb as a slightly sinister Dorothy complete with stuffed Toto. It also starred Fred Bear from Bearlesque, Thom Shaw and Fancy Chance. David was the Wizard, at first looming large and green as a projection on a makeshift screen before taking to the stage in full top-hat and satin tails in a blast of bombast and confrontation.

It was a riotous show, and not for the kids. Needless to say the Wizard of Oz story got lost but there were a good many of those nihilistic diatribes we all love, and much throwing of shapes, nudity and artful posturing. Much use of the word 'Cunt' too, generally by David hectoring audience members who dared to talk during his act. In such moments he's utterly poisonous but completely hilarious. The costumes were great: my favourite was the psychedelic body-suit David wore with a green face and hands and his hair full of what looked like dead-birds. He looked like an insane 1970's housewife on drugs who had been dragged through a hedge. The evening climaxed with body painting session with the cast orgiastically rolling around on a massive canvas before the power was cut and David lead a mass exodus with a loudhailer (cast AND audience), outside to the South Bank where the performance petered out in the South Bank fountains. It was as strange as it sounds. A bit like being off your face at a love-in hosted by the Brixton Fairies and mugged at the same time.

The show was even more brilliant for being in the polite confines of the Festival Hall ballroom. There must have been people who had popped along for a free truncated Wizard of Oz only to find themselves in the midst of some very queer proceedings. We had a few walk-outs near us... Horrah! Needless to say David lives to challenge middling world-views and long may he procrastinate.

Foto nicked from Joe Pop's facebook.
Also see David Hoyle chronicler A.M. Hanson's blog
http://alexcalledsimon.blogspot.com/2008/08/stories-from-night-david-hoyle-in-were.html

Musique en Plein Air

2008-08-01T10:29:00.000-07:00

There's been very little to report from the bohemian underground recently but I have been very social, mainly at outdoor music things like o2 wireless, (g)Lovebox and Ben and Jerry's, so the last few weekends have been a sort of musical summery blur with lashings of pear cider and extreme hay fever.

My favourite gig-thing so far, apart from Siouxsie at o2, has been Sebastian Tellier at Glovebox... He's all Parisian posturing, Prog Rock indulgences and analogue synths in overdrive. Right up my alley, frankly. I loved his keyboard player too, in his full leather with oversized-Raybans and a fag on, twiddling his Moog in a very cool, very keyboard-player-ish sort of way. Like a French Nick Rhodes. And it's not over yet with Field Day next week and then 'V'. I still can't get my head round shorts and sandals though, so if you see someone tottering around V dressed all in black with a tootal scarf and utterly inappropriate cuban heels that'll be me!

The pic is Sebastian Tellier reclining on his piano, courtesy of Crazy G.

The Voltage that Shines

2008-07-13T03:12:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I enjoyed two Sacred Monsters. What is a Sacred Monster? Well it comes from the French phrase 'les monstres sacrés', and was originally used to describe particularly haughty matinee idols of a certain age but also applies to those trailblazing engines of genius who have given to the world through particularly powerful literature, art or music. Although it's hard to separate, I'm talking about them, rather than their work.

They are often difficult individuals, although of course they are entitled to be, and highly eccentric, but at the same time formidable, in the way that the village idiot or someone who is just a tad kooky is not. They are also, and this is an important qualification, Life Enhancers; they can light up a room (or bring it crashing down) but are often prone to drink and drugs, meaning that the voltage that shines is often at the detriment of themselves. But they have panache: a great sense of fun, and a style all their own.

As Francis Bacon said 90% of people are passive, docile, inactive: waiting to be entertained. What we are talking about is the remaining 10%, of which Francis was definitely part. (I should mention I can believe the 90/10 split applying in heady 1950's Soho; in London 2008 I would put it at more like 98/2).

Anyway, such thoughts were stirred by the Curzon Soho screening two Arena documentaries from the 80's, introduced by series editor Anthony Wall, of Jean Genet and William Burroughs. Genet was first up, coaxed out of Moroccan seclusion with a large fee and a plane ticket. I gather it was a massive coup gaining Genet's agreement, and the arena film may be the only television interview he did. The interview took place in the suburban London house of one of the production crew, and started off on reasonable terms. Genet seemed mildly amused by the camera crew, the lights and the earnest questioning; he was playfully, but cruelly, taking the piss out of Nigel Williams' french language skills, particularly when 'la Mort' got confused with 'L'amore' (mind you that's quite a Genet moment in itself). Genet wasn't giving anything away in isolation but Nigel prodded Genet's memory bank for stories and Genet spoke movingly of younger times spent in the shadow of reform school and prison. But Genet was bristling in his chair like a harpooned alley-cat and it was only a matter of time before the interview took a sinister turn and, sure enough, by the last ten minutes, Genet had turned against his interrogators with the resentments of the teen thief he once was.

Then it was time for Burroughs. Utterly conservative, highly controlled, middle class middle-American in a sober suit. It is well-known that the man who wrote Naked Lunch looked like a financial adviser but the respectable veneer hid a man possessed by demons, who could never fully escape the spectre of drugs, or his paranoia of a controlling state. There are some lovely moments in the Burroughs film. Burroughs travels back to his birthplace St. Louis and his brother Mort reveals how he found Naked Lunch unreadable and 'kind of disgusting', and Burroughs looks to the sky in a sort of 'oh well, you can't have everything' resignation, fighting back the tears. He also, in discussing the infamous 'William Tell' stunt that shot Joan Burroughs dead, spoke of the dark malevolent spirit that he felt was attached to him, a spirit that occasionally claimed him, but then Burroughs stole himself perhaps sensing he had revealed too much. There were some hilarious moments too, like the famous 'Dr Benway Operates' routine and Burroughs as high as a kite drunkenly singing Danny Boy at the dinner table. We also saw him showing off his vast array of weaponry in his Bowery 'bunker' railing against infringement from potential intruders with such spirited strength that you felt a sudden twinge of concern for the local cat-burglar.

They do a Q and A after these screenings, but unfortunately Nigel Williams, interrogator of Genet, was stuck in South London traffic and couldn't join the discussion, but I'd happily watch it again if he could be available to talk about it. We were however blessed with the company of Barry Miles, chronicler of beat culture and author of biographies on Burroughs, Ginsberg and a brilliant study of the Beat Hotel. Barry happily shared his memories of Burroughs with us and coloured and qualified a good deal of what was in the film (for example James Grauerholtz, Burroughs' long standing assistant does not come across at all well in the documentary but Barry confirmed he was misrepresented). Crazy G and I had an enjoyable chat with Barry in the bar afterwards about the film and the poet Jeremy Reed, and Barry was happy to sign the hardbacks I'd bought with me (I've been enjoying his books for years so it was a pleasure to meet him).

My late mentor Dan Farson clinched the Sacred Monster in one of many musings on the theme: "Sacred Monsters have that extra force or brightness. They are special people - to the advantage of ourselves." Above I've pasted Giacometti's portrait of Jean Genet which seems to sum up that special extra force or brightness: the picture seems to me to be of a firecracker going off in an empty room. These films showed that Burroughs and Genet had that brightness in spades.

http://www.curzoncinemas.com/whats_on

The Worst Paintings in London

2008-06-29T14:26:00.000-07:00

For as long as I can remember I have had a very physical response to art, and I sometimes feel overwhelming excitement in front of something truly thrilling. Take me to the Van Gogh room in the Musee d'Orsay for example and I'm wide-eyed with wonder and brimming with tears, with a fluttering of butterflies in my stomach and a breathlessness in my chest. Sometimes I have to steal myself: I get overwhelming urges to run around or shout, like a sort of artistic tourettes. If this wasn't bad enough, my face screws up looking at pictures, and I squint terribly, as though straining to read or connect (this is of course exactly what is happening), and sometimes rock to and fro, or hunch up and dance slightly. All of this makes me look mad and can occasionally mean security takes an interest.

Oh, and I get very impatient with crowds: I really hate those shuffing packs of tourists with their rucksacks and sound-guides, whose only experience of art is through the receiving end of a handycam lens. In fact, thinking about viewing really great art, I would go as far as to say that I can think of no other experience in life that can make my heart sing with joy but also turns me into a murderous fascist at the same time. But for me that's the signal of good art: my emotional alarms go off and the work affects me. The overriding feeling is the enjoyment of sharing in the thing that another person has created. The work has added something to my understanding of myself and the world. It's a joyful feeling and I feel richer for it.

Unfortunately I felt no such enrichment at the BP Portrait Award yesterday. I've been to loads of them now and they're always pretty dire, but this year's is car-crash awful. I should know not to go. It's almost like a little private torture I put myself through every year. Luckily i went thirty minutes before closing-time, so the exposure was shortlived, but it was enough to have me reeling round the room in a stupor of disgust.

Pretty much the first picture I was confronted with was a boring portrait of an artist in his studio, surrounded by motifs symbolic of the various stages of his artistic development. An idea so obvious it could have come off a GCSE syllabus. I began to spit blood... Then row after row of rather flat likenesses, dead-looking models and subjects wistfully gazing into the middle distance out of badly over-varnished canvases with too-big signatures (signatures!). All sort of flat, and bored and grey. One silly old fuck had even continued the painting onto the sides of the canvas for God's sake like something off the fence at Green Park (mind you in this show that's pushing the envelope). If you saw most of this crap in a provincial gallery in Godalming or Tunbridge Wells you wouldn't give it a second glance. The crowd seemed pleased, but 'the crowd' aways needs a collective shake. Cooing and Ahhing as they were over photographic copies, most even bearing the carefully studied sheen of the Snappy Snaps lab and, in one painting (Gabrielle Groves' 'Manuel'), the horrid glow of a photo taken under florescent light without a flash. Why paint something that mimics a photograph? To show how skillfully one can copy flat colour? Oh, and my stomach lurched when confronted with the double horror of Benjamin Sulllivan's triptych together with Lucie Cookson's 'Her Name is Rio': They are tributes to the sitters, but they do not remind us what it means to be alive. That, surely, has to be the point of art.

But it's not all bad. Well, actually it is, but there IS one picture worth seeing: It's by Arth Daniels and called 'WordtoMother'. It's a portrait of Arth's college friend Tom Park aka graffiti artist 'WordtoMother'. Tom has an intense, direct gaze; he is wearing a basball cap, with his jutting chin propped on a tattooed hand, gritting his teeth playfully at the viewer. He's set against a sketchy suggestive landscape painted in a stained oil that throws Tom's features forward. It's a very immediate piece. It also has a more interesting handling of paint than many of the other participants. Rather than being still and flat, or smooth and blurry and suffocating under varnish (see Craig Wylie's awful winning pink cardigan), the paint of Tom's face has a liveliness to it. It's probably the only alive face in a room full of dead ones.

But back to the dross, I just do not see the point of an art that seeks to recreate the quality of a photograph. Perhaps the museum should consider changing the show to 'The Realist Prize' or 'Annual Copyist Award'? Tellingly, in this month's Art Review, the sponsors BP have bylined their full-page ad with something like 'Snap up a Portrait', or 'Make it Snappy' or somesuch, which suggests to me that the overbaring photo bias has at long last seeped into the the PR's creative spins. 'The Annual Photo Painters' here we come!... Time was however when the Portrait Award banned the use of photography and you had to paint from life. The show was better in those days.

This show is so bad I was seriously considering leafleting it but the gallery has redeemed itself by opening Wyndham Lewis: Portraits. So if you want to see meaningful views of others go to that instead. But go and see Arth Daniels' picture. It's the only good thing there.

Tomma Abts in New York

2008-06-08T04:11:00.000-07:00

Tomma Abts
Lübbe, 2005
Acrylic & oil on canvas
48cm x 38cm

'The final painting is a concentrate of the many paintings underneath'.
Tomma Abts, in interview with Peter Doig

The Museum of Contemporary Art, formerly in Chelsea, has reopened in its new incarnation as the New Museum of Contemporary Art. It's now on the Bowery in a great new building pleasingly at odds with the surroundings: it looks like three steel boxes of varying size piled on top of each other. I knew that whatever was on would be interesting and felt a quiet pang of artful joy when I read in the New York Times that the museum was showing Tomma Abts' paintings.

Tomma is German and lives and works in London. She won the Turner Prize in 2006, and had the strongest room in that year's Turner show (bolstered in no small way by Rebecca Thomas' hamfisted clay sculptures in the room next door). Tomma's paintings are complex compositions with circles, lines and geometrics, all bisecting each other in throbbing dark reds and poisonous greens. Imagine a detail of Wyndham Lewis' 'Workshop' reduced down to a low voltage and remade in muted colours.

Like the Turner show there is plenty of space around the work, and I love the small uniform size. I'm sick to death of large paintings where it's easy to create an impact with so-so content, but brilliantly all Tomma's pictures are only 48 x 38cm. This gives the show a very together feel and the paintings feed off each other almost as though they are wired up behind the scenes. As the work is so human in scale you get up close, noticing the faint underpainting and raised patterning of several painstaking reworkings sitting underneath the finished work. They have titles, like 'Eppe', 'Meko', 'Keke' and so on, which are apparently regional German first names chosen at random from a dictionary Tomma keeps in her studio, and probably a code of convenience rather than an attempt to provide a further key into the work, but I wondered how a German viewer might see them.

Also showing is a joint show by Daniel Guzman and Steven Shearer called 'Double Album': ambitious self-portraiture investigating adolescence and male identity using pop icons and teen-subculture. As is this wasn't enough there is also Paul Chan's '7 Lights' - a darkened room filled with flickering projections and animations in silhouette of the natural world, moving trees and developing landscape. The projections are about the 7-days of creation, most using obsolete technology giving the projections a shakey handmade feel like moving fuzzy felts around on an overhead projector.

The building also has a very cool shop attached, where you can buy artist's multiples, badges, books on Throbbing Gristle and, marvellously, Black Flag canvas tote bags (just the thing for the George and Dragon). As so many things in New York are bigger and better than it's London counterparts you can imagine the 'New Museum' is a sort of ICA times ten.

'Tomma Abts' is on until 29th June 2008.

New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery between Prince and Spring streets
www.newmuseum.org

Some New Work

2008-06-02T11:19:00.000-07:00

I had no idea it's been over two months since my last post!... I was suitably admonished in our local over the weekend by her Royal Redness Dawn Right Nasty and threatened with expulsion from the Nasty list of links should no posts be immediately forthcoming...

So here I am getting my house in order. In fact I'll go one better:- I hereby pledge to post something, anything, once a week. Promise. Even if it's just a photo. Anyway, we are just back from New York City so I shall formulate some thoughts and in the meantime here's a small selection of the new work I am currently absorbed by.

The project is called 'Heartland'- a group of small pictures, a film and some drawings about the landscape I grew up in. The paintings are small oils, most no larger than A4, either painted outside or based on drawings made in direct response to the landscape itself and the important memories provoked.

I've been enjoying using oils again, after the flatness of the Doctor Who acrylics. In a recent interview Maggi Hambling described oil paint as having 'organic' human qualities. I feel as though I knew this once but somewhere along the way forgot how sensitive the stuff can be. I don't think I could have made these pictures in acrylics. They are not emotionally responsive enough. The scale of the pictures too feels fitting. They're not big gallery pictures. It's small, contemplative work that will need space around it.

Many of the views are of places I have not been too since I was a child (or, ahem, in the case of 'Sex Alley' since my mid-teens...).

SEX ALLEY (2008)

VIEW FROM LYTH HILL (2008)

LYTH HILL WITH GATHERING CLOUDS (2008)

INWOOD, JASON REMEMBERED (2008)

The Curse of the Curator

2008-03-16T06:44:00.000-07:00

To the Serpentine with Don on a grey windswept afternoon to check out Derek Jarman curated by Issac Julien. Just the sort of dramatic weather that lends itself to Jarmanesque thoughts of sweeping English shingle, lonely power stations and beds on beaches surrounded by boys with flaming occult torches. No? Oh OK, just me then.

Oddly, I have been revisiting Jarman-world in recent times, prompted in no small way by TG's presentation of the super-8's at the Tate last year. In recent weeks I've dug out the old VHS's and re-read Dancing Ledge, The Last of England and At Your Own Risk. I also bought Chroma, Jarman's sensitive book on colour which was duly devoured in an excitable two hours while cursing myself for not buying it back in the day. I dug out my old cache of letters and cards from the great man himself. God, no wonder my parents were beside themselves. Worrying enough that I should be hanging out in the East End with Messrs Gilbert & George, worse still that I was in active prolonged correspondence with the bent maker of Sebastiane and Jubilee when I should have been out riding my bike. So in terms of my artistic exploration the show couldn't have arrived at a better time.

The highpoint is the very beginning. The first things the viewer sees on entering the gallery are the stunning, knock-out triptych of wall mounted beds, leaden with tar and twisted sheets like darkly sexual Rauchenberg combines. There is also a similarly impressive side-wall of a number of Jarman's small icon-like embedded-tar pieces, with their smashed glass, pendulums and scrawling texts on mirrored black, like multiple scrying mirrors paused in mid-reveal. I've always felt that of his painted work these small assemblage pieces were the most successful; a summing up of the underpinning that fuelled Derek's art. His Catholic concerns, anger at the injustices of the world and of his own mortality and his aching Middle Classness all cemented into gloopy tar tablets. A joy to see then, but this wall of small works should have been spread out around a big room rather than crowded together. It's difficult to see them properly.

Then one notices Issac Julien's lightboxes, decorative and unnecessary. They look like magazine spreads. Quite what these back-lit stunts are supposed to achieve I cannot think. And the curator's hand starts to loom over the show like a bad smell. Julien should be letting Jarman's work speak for itself not adding in 'a flavour of Jarman', with silly bits of Dungeness driftwood and rusty metal photographed against country cottage pine.

The exhibition continues with Derek's big, messy aids work: interesting, but so of it's time they almost need a specially curated show of their own to be meaningful. I'm thinking big blow-up pics of Outrage! snog-ins and earnest boys with flat-tops wearing t-shirts saying 'Criminal'... Then, rightfully given a room of its own, we walk straight into Blue, which fares somewhat better as an installation you can move around in rather than a film viewed in the traditional sense.

Following Blue is a large room of varying screens showing the Super-8's. They are Derek's best work and for such a hallowed legacy to be crowded in so that you only ever see snippets of the whole feels like a dumbing down or a sacrilege.

Finally the exhibition concludes with a further room given over to Issac Julien's documentary film Derek, featuring Tilda Swinton and already shown on TV and it has no place here. It is a TV film, made for TV or a cinema screening if you're feeling generous. It is a wasted room. In any event, I cannot bear Tilda Swinton's over enunciated reading voice. I accept she is a significant part of the Jarman story but I cannot bear to listen to the woman or her badly drafted observations (in fact, Burroughs night at Patti Smith's Meltdown was ruined for me by Swinton's singularly awful reading).

I left feeling disappointed. This show should have been a retrospective of Derek Jarman's paintings (he was celebrated as a painter long before he became known for his films). With the exception of Blue, which works, the filmic work should have showed at an accompanying cinema where it belongs and the Issac Julien TV film safely relegated to the telly. I wondered if the show would have been more effective curated by jobbing gallery staff then by someone with a public profile to maintain.

Now, where's my mallet!? I want to do some lightbox smashing in the name of Derek's ghost who in my minds eye I see whirling around the outer walls of the Serpentine in a fury, unable to bear the backlit horror of Issac's advertising spreads.

----

There's an interesting gallery of Derek's paintings can be found on the queer cultural centre site
http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/Jarman/JarmanIndx.html

Dark Science in Paris

2008-03-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

Hello, back in blogworld now. So what's been happening? Well I've been in Paris and one of the high points was a visit to the Palais de Tokyo, which I'm currently raving about to anyone who will listen.

It's next door to the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The Palais is unremarkable on the outside, oddly industrial on the inside with an artistic bookshop and a bar full of bohemian types. It also has a lime green mobile home perched on the roof which is an artistic project by Sabina Lang and Daniel Baumann called 'Hotel Everland' in which it is possible for anyone to stay. You can book online. Venture inside the museum proper however and you'll come across Loris Gréaud's gloriously dark installation: 'Cellar Door'.

The starting point for Gréaud's show, which is a kind of mutating space opera you can walk through, is the artist's obsession with building a studio without ordinary accepted boundries. A place of continuous interactive development rather than somewhere objects are merely made and sent out from. But studios cannot function without having an idea to investigate, and Gréaud's idea is the development of a musical score. Such sonorous concerns bring us to the show's title: 'Cellar Door' is reputably the most beautiful, harmonious combination of words in the English language, apparently particularly so when spoken with an English accent.

The viewer is disarmed from the off, which is no bad thing, by entering the installation through a large industrial door like the entrance to an aircraft hangar, that opens mechanically and only occasionally, meaning you have to stand and wait. Suddenly the door lifts with a swoosh and a clank of metal, and you have about five seconds to enter the large dark chamber beyond with the uneasy feeling of imminent despatch. Once you are in there is another swoosh and the door slams down behind you and you are in semi-darkness.

To the right is a small ante-chamber with a mirrored floor filled with a mass of glaring white neon wires, to your left a small sound studio housed in a glass box with a mixing desk and a technician (who I liked to think was the artist) controlling the work. The air is filled with ozone from the glimmering neon chamber, and the low drones of antique Korg synths echo through the half-light like a Throbbing Gristle b-side. A small video screen flickers into life, the room fizzes with electricity. There are backlit perspex plaques detailing pages of musical notation. There is a large platform of chequered carpet in pop-art black and white. You are armed with your copy of a special edition of the in-house 'Palais' magazine (also black and white) containing much bolstering of ideas behind the work with articles on phonetics and brainwaves. You have also worked out that one is not exactly in Kansas anymore.

Further chambers open up as you move through the installation. In one, a forest of spiky black trees you can walk through and a hallowe'en moon, like a stage set by Tim Burton. Another chamber is arranged with photographic paintings of empty corridors and a melting mass of white orbs draped in slick black melted plastic like a huge melting dessert in the centre of the room. A further room houses a table of plants incubating under a shelf of neon surrounded by dimly glowing light boxes. And all around the inescapable soundscape eats into every inch of museum space. It seems to be emanating from deep within the dimly-lit space itself, rather than from anything as prosaic as a speaker. There is also a large caged paint-ball chamber (no-one was in it but there were signs of frenzied recent activity and a sign reminding the viewer to mind his clothes) and various vending machines dotted throughout the strangeness supplying multicoloured space-sweets, like gummy pills, for two Euros.

It's a very suggestive show: with no labels to read the objects and atmospheres bombard with ideas and pointers. There are frames of reference to be had, via the accompanying magazine, but I wondered how many people would plough through that document to get a handle on the show. But it's enjoyable whether you want to read about the ideas around the work or not, and I think most people were enjoying the sheer wierdness, the mesmeric sounds and the sense of out-there science. And while the atmosphere was futuristic, the paint ball chamber, although not in full conflict when I was there, and the interaction of the vending machines, seem to anchor the installation with us mere mortals on terra firma.

It's one of the best uses of space I've seen and similar to the late great Jason Rhodes' work (the architect of 'Black Pussy') in that respect. It also reminded me, in scale and ambition, that few single-artist projects on this scale are realised in the UK. Or if they are it's Anthony Gormley. Also, most people here in positions of power wouldn't have the balls to hand over this much space to a young artist not quite 30, such as Loris Gréaud.

'Cellar Door' is on until 27 April 2008.
http://www.palaisdetokyo.com

Fotos courtesy of Crazy G.

Classy Notting Hill

2008-01-15T14:37:00.000-08:00

I'm taking part in Notting Heaven, a group show at Sartorial Contemporary Art about 'class, place and social mobility'. There are 23 of us in the show, and most of us have made new work on the theme for the appropriately extreme setting of Kensington Church Street. In addition the gallery's in house magazine 'The Rebel' is devoted to the subject for the duration and features a revealing piece by Matthew Collings and an interview with George Galloway. It also includes all of us artists describing our Social Class, and sounding, for the most part, like a rather joyless bunch. For the record, I described myself as "Forward thinking bohemian out of a bedrock of non-posh country farming stock". I qualified that with "I should mention that i never wish to go back there, however neither can I entirely escape...".

My picture for Notting Heaven is called The Call of London. It's a painting of me aged 16 in the South Shropshire countryside that I come from. It's based on a photo - so the sunglasses, eighties flick and raffish tie are all authentic, as is the Gilbert & George badge and superior attitude. I've inscribed the picture 1988 to set the painting very definitely in time. I'm bending the rules slightly as in reality the idea of 16-year old Stephen setting foot in a muddy field, never mind picking his way across the Long Mynd or any other hilly range is frankly hilarious, but it speaks volumes for me about how I felt about home at the time.

Sartorial, if you've not been there before, is a mere stones throw from Notting Hill Tube and spead over two first-floor rooms. The main room is dominated by a dizzying wall piece 'The Gilded', by Gretta Sarfaty Marchant. Gretta runs the gallery and the piece is a repeated image of her wedding photograph multiplied over 100 times and wallpapered. Gretta is pictured with her ex-husband and attendant family. She is smiling, with big hair. She is also wearing a sunshine yellow dress that on big repeat lights up the room. It's none of our business what happened but the knowledge that the marriage subseqently took a turn and the subjects are no longer basking in their joyful yellow happiness, or at least not with each other, is what gives the piece its power. The other strong piece is Fran Richardson's watercolour of an ornate chandelier. It's cleverly hung between the two large windows looking out over Ken Church St. It seems fitting that such a symbol of refinement and elegance should be flanked by sunny stucco, but it comes crashing down from its lofty heights when you realise it is painted in a rather realistic feacal brown. It reminds us not to take such images at face value and for this reason it's the centrepiece of the show.

The hang in the second room is too crowded to see most of the work properly but I loved Stephen Walter's entrancing piece about London: Hub. It's a large drawing on paper and an obsessive arial view; brimful to bursting with galleries, buildings and landmarks in gunmetal graphite. I particularly enjoyed roving around Stephen's East End checking his findings against the territory I know. Galleries predominate and although the piece may have begun as an artist plotting his personal landscape using art-spaces and pubs I think Stephen is saying important things about modern London on a far broader scale. His modern mapping is full of surprises. He not only captures the flighty here today, gone tomorrow fashions of Hoxton but also Leyton's leylines and the 'Wrong Bow Bells'. But then this IS how we experience London (if we have half a mind to see beyond the usual): Ancient rubbing up against New. The Museum of London should buy it immediately.

I also loved James Unsworth's unsettling pen and ink pieces. James makes minutely detailed, finely wrought fantasies of leering depravity. Monstrous creatures, half-man half beast, eating shit, and cooking cocks. They are filled with violence, vomit, daggers and all manner of sexual imaginings. They reference Hans Bellmer AND Hansel and Gretel, and I love them for it. They don't sound beautiful but they are. You shouldn't like them but you will (but your mother wouldn't).

Be quick... It finishes this Saturday 19th at 5.30.

www.sartorialart.com
www.sartorialart.com/rebel_mag_class.html
www.jamesunsworth.com

Happy New Year!

2008-01-14T10:52:00.000-08:00

In the sparkling company of Dr Philip Normal, fashion scientist, at Retro Bar on New Years Eve. Photo courtesy of Jon Haugh.

Dark Nudes

2008-01-05T03:08:00.000-08:00

I often pop in The Courtauld and wander around the permanent collection if I have a spare hour in the West End. They have some great pictures and you can go to the Admiralty bar afterwards for a champagne cocktail. What's not to like? Great art AND a sympathetic bar! They also do some stonking small shows, like last year's Wyndham Lewis and, at the moment, Sickert's 'Camden Town Nudes'.

The show comprises probably less than 20 pictures and a handful of supporting drawings. He painted the nudes on his return to dreary old London Town in 1905, having been abroad for a time no doubt sampling continental delights.

He was excited by getting up close and personal with some cockney ladies and they are painted in a lively, broken, sketchy way. The annonymous models set on crumpled beds in dark airless north London rooms, a sliver of light falling over voluptuous curves from a slit in the heavy drapes. The nudes are utterly mixed. Some are sexy, some delicate and tender, some with more personality than others. Some are death-like with hollow eyes and gashes for mouths, like the autopsy photos of Jack the Ripper's clip-clopping victims. But the backdrops are the same: mouldy rooms in boarding houses. London damp, Rembrandtian gloom.

The paintings remind you how much the London school held Sickert in high esteem in their developing years. The second nude in the show is tied to the bed by Auerbach's signature zig-zags (describing atmosphere). Kossoff and Freud are all over, and Kitaj's chalky lines. There is a surprise in the three paintings Nude on a Bed, Nuit d'ete and La Hollandaise, hung together. Mentally trace the three nudes in their abandoned attitudes on their single beds, fenced in with wrought iron bedsteads, surrounded by suggestive bordering and walls in sickly colour demarked by window shapes... Well, we're pretty much looking at a Bacon triptych. Or what Bacon could have been if he hadn't chanced on a happy accident and used the same template for forty years. I'm entranced by these three. I think they are the centrepiece of the show, not the so-called 'Camden Town Murder' paintings, which barely figured for me.

In addition to reminding me of good painting, and the London school, the show reminds me of the power of oil paint in particular, and also how effective domestic sized pictures can me. Human scale. All such painterly thoughts are bolstering me for my new paintings.

Sickert's Camden Town Nudes is on until 20th Jan.

Kevin and Vinnie

2007-12-30T11:08:00.000-08:00

I was interested to see this poster on Hackney Road. It's Kevin Mitchell, the undefeated featherweight champion boxer from Dagenham and his younger brother Vinnie. Needless to say they are playacting (with a convincing chill) at the classic attitude David Bailey used in his iconic 60's portrait of the Kray twins. The poster also mimics the movie typography.

I know who Kevin is because I've painted him. In about 2000 I'd seen Harry Borden's photographs of Kevin in the Observer and I was captivated by them. I got in touch with Harry who let me borrow several unpublished pictures and agreed I could use them as the basis for a painting. At the time I'd been painting about the East End for ten years but I was in the death throes of my involvement. I'd got stuck in my interpretation of the landscape and I no longer believed in my red visionary skies. I was becoming mannered and slick. I needed a change of gear and Kevin's image, for want of a better description, so grabbed me that it inspired an entire body of work called London Youth. The exhibition was with my then gallery in Clerkenwell and was the last show I did about East London. Kevin's picture was the centrepiece of the show and he became a kind of summing up of the toughness of the East London landscape, invigorating my East End work for one last gasp.

Kevin Mitchell inspired me at a time when I was losing my artistic faith, and arguably enabled me to start thinking more about people and personal history. This in turn initiated my current childhood exploration and more general concerns with origination.

So I was pleased to see him Krayed-up with his brother beside him. Both handsome chaps capable of damage who no doubt love their Mother. I still think Kevin's image, or the image that he chooses to project to his fans, encapsulates much of East London, or rather what a part of East London means, and for that reason I'll always follow his career. I think culturally Kevin and Vinnie are very important people.

PROGRESSION

2007-11-24T10:41:00.000-08:00

"FERREIRA PROJECTS is proud to announce its inaugural exhibition titled PROGRESSION; where participating artists Marcela Alejandra, Helen Barff, Helen Elizabeth Cocker, Derek Curtis, Stephen Harwood, Katherine Lubar, Adaesi Ukairo and Lynn Wray, have focused on creating an illustrative journey, highlighting the development of their work, through progressive stages..."

Just back from Hong Kong and environs, of which more shortly, however before that I just wanted to blog 'Progression', a group show at Christian Ferreira's new gallery that I am taking part in.

It was an interesting exercise, deciding what to show for this one. I've never really been asked to stop and think about past efforts before, so I found myself dusting off boxes of ephemera (i've been going eighteen years next year!), pulling out dodgy canvases from the racks and thinking about how best to describe, or at least provide pointers to, how I got to 'Now', and what might be coming next.

As regards the past, if we're lucky we sell the good ones, and are left with the not-quite-made-it's (or if my current fallow period is anything to go by we don't seem to sell anything...is anyone buying any fucking paintings anymore?): so it's a difficult task to be able to describe a developmental process with work for sale from the studio.

We're all showing seven or eight pieces, and I think I managed to say something about the change between my East End involvements of the 1990's and the childhood paintings of the last few years (place segues into autobiography). But it's probably fair to say that the idea of Progression is more obvious in some of the participating artists than others.

Katherine Lubar paints the shadowplay of strong light on walls and surfaces. The story begins with a very well painted domestic environment from around ten-years ago, of light pouring into an attic room, with a suburban landscape visible through the window. The point of the picture is the light seems unnecessarily harsh and although the painting is skillfully made, the shadow cast by the light does not look as natural as the painted landscape outside the window. Initiating our idea of progression, this picture gives way to bold abstractions of light flowing into sometimes harsh man-made environments (factories, prisons, concrete staircases) through industrial windows. The shapes are then distilled into an exploration of pared-down shadow that leaves an impression on the minds eye.

Katherine Lubar's work is particularly successful in this show as there is very definately a beginning, a middle and a current concern, and Katherine is now working on a sequence of studies of domestic lamps in living rooms that, startlingly, have a very figurative feel to them. They look like portraits, and although made from the same stuff as the earlier work there's been a change of gear. They make you want to look out for the next show, and that surely is the point of 'Progression': to get the viewer interested in what an artist is going to be doing in the future, as well as what they have done in the past.

Progession is on until 2nd December.

Lower Ground Floor
23 Charlotte Road
Shoreditch
EC2A 3PB

www.ferreiraprojects.com

"Lovely Party!"...

2007-11-10T12:14:00.000-08:00

... as one of the Transylvanians remarks during 'Hot Patootie' in Rocky Horror.

We began at around 6.30 with a lethal gin for every arriving reveller and although our place is pretty big it soon filled up. Once everyone had arrived it was time to move up to the roof terrace and the fireworks started cracking away over in the park a bit late at around 8.00 due to a delayed start. As it's such a good vantage point we were also able to see dozens of other displays all over London. I especially enjoyed the reflections flickering away madly over tower block windows, like the East End was burning. We were joined on the roof by other parties from next door and downstairs which felt nice and neighbourly, including at one stage a group of people dressed as superheros. Spiderman, Wonder Woman and Superman amongst others who all appeared one after another out of a trap door! Their costumes were great.

The fireworks were amazing and after so much visual excitement and ooh's and ahh's and much use of cameraphones dinner was served back downstairs ("Careful of the ladder!"). Crazy G excelled himself with his rare roast beef and homemade coleslaw amongst other culinary treats. No credit due to me as I can't cook!

It was a great evening with old friends arriving unexpectedly. Pretty much the entire Retro Bar contingent in attendance as well as art-pals and my former neighbours from my Limehouse days Spencer and Sonia and daughter Maya. It was probably the booze but at one point, having a quick smoke on the roof, I looked down through the glass ceiling into the party and watched the little conversations going on, quips and witty banter and thought how lucky we are to have so many varied and wonderful friends. 'Multi-faceted' as Hayley would say. I felt moved, I really did, and happy in my milieu.

Anyway, sentimentalism soon gave way to serious hard boozing and as these interesting types do rather like a sherry or three I had a chance to expunge the drinks trolley of various exotic/dodgy spirits and wierd liquors collected over the years which seemed like a good idea at the time.
"Bit of this one? Yes? Good!"
"Bit of this too!? Excellent!"
"No Sorry! The tonic went an hour ago dear, just have another cube of ice ha ha ha !" etc etc. There were perfectly normal drinks available but 'a nice white' ain't half as much fun as industrial gin from Mahon or a luminous green grappa when the mood grips one!

The decks went down very well. It was a bit of a free for all with people playing whatever they wanted spotlit from below in blue neon lights up on the mezzanine (it IS a great flat for a party!). I couldn't get on those decks for love nor money but enthusiastically fetched my Throbbing Gristle cd's from the studio just in case (i.e. I was pissed). What I really wanted to hear was Fireworks by the Banshees but I forgot to ask someone to play it. We were joined by our neighbour Suzy at one stage who proved a hit at ballroom dancing as were her friends and things got increasingly hazy. I think G decided to call it a night when after various people had staggered out Toby and I were amongst the hardcore four or five left putting the world to rights at 4.00am. We were apoplectic with red wine and falling off our chairs. I very much disagreed with G's stance as ever ("One for the frog?") but given that poor Tobes walked into a lamp-post on the way home it probably was time to say goodnight!

The photo is one of Peter Robinson's, posted on Facebook.

"We are Fireworks - slowly, glowing
Bold and bright
We are Fireworks - burning shapes
Into the night... "
'Fireworks' Siouxsie and the Banshees

Siouxsie at Astoria II

2007-10-28T09:52:00.000-07:00

The support act was utterly derivative of lots of things. The vocals were also very very Siouxsie. As Owen mused on his blog: Was somebody having a cruel laugh? Putting the imitative children on before the Grande Dame? Her vocals were watered down Banshees, but without substance, delivered in a blonde bob and mummy's shoes. I kept turning round and asking our friend Geoff 'Ooooh is it me or is this on Kaleidoscope?'...and 'Oh... i know this!... it's off JuJu!'... Actually, delving deeper, if that were possible but you know what I mean, they sounded more like they were doing a bad impression of Hazel O'Connor fronting Death Cult (yes, it IS an inspiring thought but that's ALL). F*cking Fantasy 80's. Let's play SOUNDALIKE. Not pleased... Anyway, thankfully, The Point of the evening arrived soon enough.

I expected the new album, plus a couple of extra things 'in progress', and maybe an encore of recent single 'Into a Swan' and a sparse Banshees b-side or Miss the Girl, as probably were most people. Well, of course she didn't do that but took to the stage and launched into Israel instead, which was thrilling but mildly outrageous without Severin and/or other Banshees.

Sadly it took a while for her voice to warm up but by the second tune Arabian Nights (Swoon! Gush!... *Stephen turns to PUTTY*!) it was fine. She looked great, and by and large sounded great; and she was really haughty and throwing old-school Banshee 'shapes' all over the shop. She even got her bells out. Fantastic.

The show was to promote Mantaray, and I knew the new songs already from listening to them while painting. My favourite is Here Comes That Day which is sad but gently furious at the same time. The new stuff belongs to the same 'sound world' as Classic Banshees but it's more polished. The songs don't have that edge of having been recorded through the night on drugs. For example, I can't imagine Robert Smith looking 'completely gone' wearing Raybans and feeling his way along a wall in
Venice to them if you get me. Actually talking about that video (the best video of the 80's in my opinion, that and View to a Kill), she did a great version of Dear Prudence that was pure psychedelia just as it should be.

Nightshift was sinister enough, and Hong Kong Garden during the encore, which isn't normally a fave of mine, was tremendous. The band were expert. In a way they played the songs 'better' than the Banshees ever did but I know a few people didn't go because they couldn't bear to hear session musicians murder Banshee classics. They weren't murdered, they just weren't quite the same but it still felt mildly wrong, morally speaking, for a gang of imposters to be tinkering with sacred history. On the other hand, I think Siouxsie should be allowed the chance... and what a back catalogue to plunder. I did feel howver that she could have been a bit less obvious once or twice: I'd rather hear Pulled to Bits or Coal Mind than Spellbound (that really is a bit 'SingalongaSiouxsie'), but I s'pose a girl's gotta sell tickets!

Siouxsie's on again at the Roundhouse next month. I can't wait, and I'm pleased she's finding a new lease of life going it alone as a glamorous divorcee. I like her better now. Living in France surrounded by cats always felt a bit cosy for Siouxsie who really should be out there exploring dangerous territories and kicking against the pricks. Talking of new leases of life all I need now is The Glove to reform (in a blast of bad acid!)... to really line up my formative heros! God I'd kill for a ticket to THAT comeback gig !

Art Weekend

2007-10-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

Went for a troll round Zoo Art Fair last Saturday, the smaller, once so-called 'edgier' sibling of Frieze. But it's no longer at London Zoo, where it started, having relocated to the former Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens, now part of the RA building or perhaps it always was. And it's got bigger and more international (which is probably a good thing), but doesn't quite feel as vital as it did two years ago. And you can't go off cooing at Meercats afterwards. Anyway, as regards the art I thought the best stands or 'booths' belonged to out of towners. Of the London contingent shamefully two London galleries that share the same building in Vyner Street looked as though they had merely unpacked the same work as last year and most of the others were not much better. But no matter... onto the good stuff...

The marvellous Workplace from Newcastle were showing one of Marcus Coates' madcap shamanistic investigations and also 26-year old artist Laura Lancaster. Laura makes paintings lifted from random anonymous photos found in junk-shops, and has built up a battalion of painted memory belonging to others. Laura showed a wall of white canvases, painted (or rather lightly sprayed or 'touched' as they're hardly there at all) with ghostly impressions of faces in silvery grey taken from a school photo. The canvases were all different dimensions, some stapled some pinned in up the sides, but all whitewashed to uniform funereal effect. It's one work. But in the crowded small space it didn't look like that. I could only see them separately, but I'd love to see it in a big sympathetic room. The gallery showed me more of Laura's work, secretly stored in a draw behind the scenes. In colour this time, on small tablets and MDF boards, forgotten holidays and beaches, dead family scenes unearthed. The drawer felt fitting for such sensitive stuff. The assistant should really have been wearing autopsy gloves, lifting out memory tablets with hushed reverence: 'and here are two more forgotten lives, from, we think, Weymouth, but one cannot be sure...' . I'd like to know Laura's intent in this work, whether it's a removal of long-forgotten people from their dusty junk-shop homes for a new lease of life and a second chance or whether the work assists Laura in an examination of her own origins and place in the world. Or perhaps both.

I also enjoyed the 'The Happy Lion' from Los Angeles who were showing Tabitha Morris, an LA artist who paints sylvan glades and rolling landscape in pleasing greens and pastels, with just a touch of acidic yellow and lime, crowded with roaming maniacs with gurning faces and lolling tongues raving or drugged like they're on the run from the local asylum. The pictures are made in sensitive watercolours or inks and painstakingly detailed on paper sheets, and from ten feet look like the trad landscapes your Mother likes, but take a step nearer and its bedlam with an injection of Otto Dix. I enjoyed the view. But my God, those colours! Like dropping an acid tab in a Lovehearts factory. 'The Happy Lion' were also showing Thaddeus Strode's works on paper, similarly peopled with strange beings and fantastical imaginings. My favourite was an evil pumpkin perched on a post called 'The Haunted Mailbox'. I'd like to see his larger mixed media pieces.

After that I dropped in on the 'Pop Art Portrait', at the National Portrait Gallery, worth the £9 entry alone to see Ray Johnson's 'Oedipus' : a treated magazine page of Elvis crying blood. Also worth the dollars are Warhol's 'Screen Tests' playing continuously and opposite Peter Gidal's 'Heads' in a darkened middle chamber. I also enjoyed two great Rauschenbergs, and a Warhol 'Double Elvis'. I simply MELT in front of Warhols.

On Sunday we went to Freize, having giving it a wide berth in previous years. Freize was huge, and overwhelming. We did it in three hours. When you arrive you take in a massive amount very quickly, but after an hour and a half of seemingly endless 'high-end' international galleries you start to get a kind of art-induced selective fadeout, and instead of taking in as much as you can with wide-ranging parameters you just start looking for punchy things that grab and missing out on sensitive quieter things. Or at least that was my experience. At Zoo I found it easy to find things that interested me and that I still remember but Freize was serious overdose. Although I've got a list of scribbled galleries, I can barely remember what I liked about them.

The Doctor Who Project

2007-10-16T12:36:00.000-07:00

Show opened on Thursday. I forgot to take any photos, or commandeer someone else to, so i've got no pouting pv pics. Thank goodness I hear you cry! Anyway, it was a great night, busy all evening, although the gallery gets a bit hot with that many people as it's small with a low ceiling so it's not ideal for openings, but I'm pleased with the exhibition. It's on until 6th November at Nancy Victor, 36 Charlotte St, W1. Tel: 020 7813 0373, Mon-Fri 10-6, it's also open on Sat afternoons but call first.

Daleks!

2007-10-05T05:11:00.000-07:00

The photo is four of my Dalek drawings, on the table at Five Years as part of 'Peer Esteem': a project that brought together submissions by 104 artists. Each artist provided four A3 flat works on paper, and initially each set of papers were shown in the order they were received. Thereafter, and during ordinary opening hours at the gallery, it was up to the viewer to choose which piece they wanted to view on the gallery wall. The invigilator then slotted the four papers into a group of frames and hung them. The entire process was filmed by video camera with a microphone recording the conversations between the viewer and the invilator. You were not warned at the door that your requests and observations were being evidenced for posterity and quite right too. I'm all for ambushing. Unfortunately however I'm two weeks late posting this so it's finished now... but cos i've been busy.

The drawings are studies for my 'Doctor Who Project', initially mooted on this very blog as a side-project back in August. I've been on Gallifrey ever since. Hence no posts for ages. You can see the results in Charlotte Street from October 12th. Details to follow.

On the Roll of a Dice...

2007-08-16T05:56:00.000-07:00

Made the journey to Camberwell on Saturday. I rarely go any distance without a worldly-wise escort or the privacy of a fast black and typically although I made a map complete with elaborate pictures (think Narnia or Middle Earth:- 'There be Dragons!') I left it at home. Fell out of a bus at Camblewick Green or somewhere and luckily had stored the gallery's number as a fail safe and they directed me to the show. I was there to see 'Flock' at GX Gallery, actually the launch show for their new initiative Deviate Projects. I was there specifically to see Karen D'amico's involvement.

Karen's work is concerned with origination, identity and place, and uses mapping, text, photographs and index-systems, re-ordered and re-presented in enlightening context enabling us to consider our place in the world.

Karen main piece in the show is 'Luck of the Draw', an installation two years in the making comprising a heavily subverted poker table, with chips piled high and playing cards strewn over the green baize as though a bunch of cads had just left mid-game. Two steps nearer and you realise that instead of queens and clubs the playing cards are faced with excerpts of maps and cities, and the chips are marked WEALTH LITERACY EQUALITY HEALTH. That the map facings are from atlases of differing styles only highlights the micro-world effect. The piece reminds the viewer that the world is a landscape of bad-luck, and just in case we harboured further doubts as to the fragility of life the UN Human Development Index, a ranking of livability, is pinned up on the opposite wall.

I also enjoyed Clare Blundell-Jones' utterly desolate 'Tumbleweed at British Service Stations' series. Empty photographs of drab services taken in the early morning sunlight, with their strange mini-malls and petrol-station forecourts. They all have pillows of tumbleweed floating in the foreground of these nowhere places that you only experience on the way somewhere else, and only because you have to. Some have a few human beings sneaking in the frame, but I preferred the completely empty ones. They are not depressing at all, actually quite uplifting as they look as though they were photographed at about 6am on a Summer morning. They have the day ahead to look forward to. 'Birch' and 'Cairn-Lodge' were my favourites. There's also 'Newport Pagnell'. I thought at first it was a shame that they were hidden away downstairs in a small ante-chamber (the gallery basement is marvellously labyrinth) then realised that the small long chamber suited the quietness of the work. You can only fit one person at a time in there. There is also a film piece, with the artist chasing tumbleweed around early-morning London with one of those wind tubes that you clear leaves with accompanied by a twanging guitar soundtrack. I don't wish to unlock the seriousness of the piece, but it looked as thought it was great fun to make. If that was me I'd have stayed out all night, got completely trousered, and got Gerald to film me chasing foliage round a deserted London as the sun rose. What a joyful way to greet the day. Probably quite funny too... in fact I'm certain I caught a few near-giggles in that film, and why not. Why shouldn't the art process tickle one!?!

The other artists who grabbed me (not literally) were Helene Kazan who was showing a group of framed architectural drawings of built-up crowded views bisected by arcs and projected parts like a Wyndham Lewis drawing (very BLAST! manifesto), and also Angela Smith's beautiful painting of a child.

Needless to say I'll be at Deviate's next one; in the interim all escorted offers to places off the beaten track cheerfully accepted!

Flock is on until the end of August.

www.deviateprojects.com

Time And Relative Dimensions In Paint

2007-07-30T06:34:00.001-07:00

"The Residence rises to sacred ground as it re-launches at The Verger's Cottage in Hackney Wick, Olympic BangBang E9. Departing from its previous shop location, the gallery reassigns Director Ingrid Z's living space as exhibition platform. The inaugural show stems forth from ideas of private prop(erty) with links to reasonable facsimiles, identity theft, intellectual property,& paparazzi…, featuring new work from our favourite artists and latest fancies"...

This is my 'Self Portrait Study as Doctor Who', painted for the re-launch of Residence Gallery. I was rather pleased with the scarf, and the colours are reasonably close to the original (did you know that there are entire website's devoted to Tom Baker's scarf...!?). The show opens this Friday with performances, a DJ and garden party. You can email off the galley's website to be on the guestlist.

I was torn between painting myself as a child dressed as the fourth Doctor Who, or as an aduIt, and decided in the end that the picture would be stronger set in the present time. The picture holds a lot for me, and having only just finished it last night, and having had to deliver it today, I haven't spent any time with it. On the surface it's a picture about being an obsessive fan, but I'm not actually a fan anymore especially, so perhaps it's about remembering a fanaticism, having left it behind. Although the face is manic there's a sadness too. I think it's also a picture about seeking solace in a character, and attaching yourself to a hero to absorb bits of them in an attempt to escape the trials of life.

Painting the picture made me remember the descent down the dark stairs of the Doctor Who Exhibition in Blackpool, to the loud churning of the seventies theme tune, feeling mildly terrified but not wanting to show it. I remember my Dad driving Paul and I all the way there as a birthday treat or something but my little brother being so hysterical at the thought of entering that dark Tardis off the Golden Mile that we couldn't go in. I was far too young to be allowed in on my own, and I don't know where Mum was that day but there was noone to leave him with so we had to come home again. It was probably days and weeks before I forgave him. Blub!

In any event, I think that this may be the start of something and I'll be doing more. The 'Doctor Who Paintings' anyone?! We'll serve 'sonic screwdrivers' at the opening!

'Private Prop'
4th August - 2nd September
www.residence-gallery.com
www.myspace.com/residencegallery

Festival-lite

2007-07-25T05:19:00.000-07:00

Back now... no excuses, and been up to loads over the last six weeks or so and it would be far too difficult to condense... So, what's new? Well, I'm feeling better now after nursing the mother of all hangovers (and I should know, I'm an expert) after spending the weekend getting smashed at Lovebox in Victoria Park. How marvellous to have a festival ten minutes walk from one's front door! Saturday was a bit hit and miss weather-wise, and we missed most of Patrick Wolf due to having to wait in for a plumber (the boilers gone...) but we still managed to catch his last few songs and the remnants of 'I love Mika' smeared over his bare chest in lipstick. What an athletic voice that young man has, with a proper pop-star stage presence, jumping on cameramen, throwing microphone stands and half his clothes into the audience... just how pop-stars should be. Kicked myself for not being in the right place at the moment his black and gold sequinned waistcoat came hurtling into the crowd. God I wanted that. Didn't really understand why he wasn't nearer the top of the bill. Hung out with Bouncy David and friends most of the afternoon and bumped into various Retro bar/Duckie types. Very much enjoyed Fujiya and Miyagi who were in a sort of small clubby tent and The Presets were good too. Blondie sounded good but Debbie Harry's voice was far too low in the mix and also she appeared to be having difficulty hearing the music, fiddling with her earpiece, but the crowd didn't seem to mind. Blondie's easy to dance to anyway and after ten cans of Red Stripe who the hell cares.

Sunday felt bigger and busier with considerably more sunshine and we arrived to the ery pleasant Tinariwen who were a nice start to the afternoon. They were a bit too 'world music' for my tastes but it was nice sunny music for a sunny early afternoon and all the cute boys had their shirts off. We were joined by her Imperial Highness Dawn Right Nasty, Jon and Small Tom. Didn't feel too hungover as luckily Crazy G had put the kaibosh on going to UnSkinny Bop (my drunken pleadings fell on deaf ears).

Didn't like the first song Hot Chip played but they were good after that, quite nice to be won over during a set. Loved The Rapture who I realised I'd heard loads but didn't know who they were (not being as musically educated as most of my peers) BUT the B52's were nothing short of INCREDIBLE! I thought they'd be good, but wasn't quite prepared for quite how good. Grown men were actually crying with pleasure (this is so NOT an exaggeration). They were Fierce with a capital F with their big hair and 50's styling... and Kate! How completely incredible is she?! A seriously cool lady... Curvacious, sexy and glamorous with tumbling red hair and flared sleeves with flames on. She makes Ana Matronic look about as effective as a 5-year old clip-clopping around in Mummy's shoes. In fact these old-timers could blow the Scissor Sisters out of the water any day of the week... not that the SS would wish to enter the competition of course... I mean who would want to risk being shown up by their bigger and better template? They were my absolute highlight and their new songs sounded as fresh and impressive as the old ones we all know.

Talking about things being fresh the good thing about these festivally things is that I get to see loads of bands I wouldn't normally so it serves as sort of a occasional crash course in modern music meaning I at least have some idea of what Gerald/Jon/Peter natter about in the bar.

I also, as an claustrophobic with no sense of direction, find traditional gigs increasingly difficult because finding the loos/bar/exit in a dark gig packed with people is just asking for trouble. I dread it being my 'round' at such things because no matter how many markers I visualise I can never find my bloody way back to my friends. At 'things in parks' however I feel instantly relaxed and calm, getting comfortably sozzled in the company of shiny happy people, with fairground rides twirling in the distance. Perhaps I've got a strong hippy streak. The only thing I don't like is mud which means I can never go to Glastonbury so I'm destined forever to remain 'festival lite', rather than hardcore. But I don't mind. I'll look forward to corporate V and not wear a bin bag thanks!

Baby 'Bigger Trees Near Water'

2007-06-10T03:26:00.000-07:00

In DH's studio in Kensington last weekend looking at the baby version of his enormous undertaking 'Bigger Trees Near Water' that has just opened at the RA Summer Show. The original work is some 40 foot wide and comprises 50 canvases, all painted outside, using a computer to track the progress of the work. The entire project took 4 weeks and was a race against the encroaching spring. This smaller version is a 60 per cent facsimile of the original work and was made by photographing the individual canvases, the resulting files being printed in LA and flown back to London.

Although it's a bare winter scene, I find the way the trees reach upwards joyous and celebratory, and even though it's a bleak view there's plenty of unexpected colour. Looking at my own winter painting 'The Melting Snowman' at my last show David pointed out that he could tell I hadn't observed my spindly winter trees because the branch ends all pointed slightly, and probably depressingly, downwards (one of many comments pointed out forcefully and described in the air with the aid of his walking stick). I think for the next stage of my childhood explorations I should revisit the places that made me. I think the work could take on a greater depth by exploring memory in situ, rather than using flat photographs as triggers over a distance of years.

TG Twice

2007-06-03T03:32:00.000-07:00

Went to Tate Modern over the bank hoiday weekend for for the one-off event featuring Throbbing Gristle's specially composed piece in celebration of the work of Derek Jarman, performed against a backdrop of Derek's shaky early Super-8's.

The Turbine Hall's steel and polished concrete seemed an appropriate place for a TG gig. The screen and stage were set up at the bottom of the slope and we were sitting on cushions on the floor, not as uncomfortable as it sounds because they were double thickness. I was aware while waiting for TG to come on of a loud electronic hum, which I thought was merely their equipment echoing round the hall, but it gradually got louder and louder as TG-time approached and I realised it was part of the build up. Being in nappies when they were around for real, I've only ever seen them once (at the Astoria, the replacement gig for the ATP and part of there recent commitment to a a handful of live performances) but I could tell this was concert as memoria rather than a TG gig in the ordinary sense. They played a TG piece proper to begin with, which I really liked (especially Cosey's cornet), but no words were sung or spoken. Then when it was time for the filmic component and TG were joined on state by the New London Chamber Choir.

The films were Studio Bankside, Journey to Avebury, Ashden's Walk, Fire Island, Gerald's Film, B2 Movie. The shortest 6-minutes, the longest 14-minutes, with no stops between them. The films were projected at a speed of 3 frames a second (by Derek's design, being the speed of the human heartbeat). The speed was effective and the images seemed to occupy a half-life somewhere between ordinary film and still photography. The speed made the close up portraits in particular seemed revealing, like quick glimpsed nuances of character.

The most beautiful section was 'Journey to Avebury', which I had always wanted to see, and it was as thrillingly mysterious as I had hoped. I also loved 'Studio Bankside', a record of Derek's 1970's bohemian enclave at Butlers Wharf, and the characters that met there in a time when such a way of life was possible.

We were slightly unlucky with some (but only some) of the our fellow cushion-sitters, some of whom seemed to have come to the event for a chinwag. There was one couple who really pissed me off, because they were immediately behind me and their sweet nothings carried right into my ears. She looked shocked and upset when I turned round and hissed at her to 'fucking shut up' but what did they expect? This was clearly a sensitive evening, and important stuff for some people. There was a couple to my left too. She spent all of the pre-film TG-solo part with her fingers in her ears and her head bowed as thought she could hardly bear to be there and when the rare Jarman films shuddered into life she started talking over the sound. Luckily her boyfriend arrived from the bar and put some space between us, but it made me wonder why some people bother paying the money to be honest... Why not stay at home or just stay in the bar???

A week later and we were at the TG recording session at the ICA... no problems with the crowd there, in fact it couldn't have been more different. TG are reworking Nico's 'Desertshore' album and set up their recording studio in the ICA theatre. We were at number four of six recording sessions each incorporating an audience a la TG's 'Heathen Earth' in 1980. I wouldn't have missed it for the world. They recorded for about two hours. They were working on the Nico songs, with Gen struggling with a German verse, and had some magnifient jam sessions that were classic TG, with chaotic bursts of sound and dones and bleeps against muffled beats, and that sort of overriding effect of impending doom. It was interesting seeing the four of them operate, and although there was an audience watching their every move they seemed at ease in front of us. With the exception of Gen they actually looked a bit like a group of kindly geography teachers (Gerald said that). If you weren't a TG fan it would probably have been very dull, with bits being repeated over and over as they got levels and vocals right. I think it would have been interesting for anyone interested in electronic music, but it wasn't a gig in the traditional sense, more an installation.

We repaired to the ICA bar afterwards (one of my favourite places), and knew that we had attended something special. Just as I thought the evening couldn't get any better Sleazy appeared and joined us at our table for much merryment, cultural chat with naughty bits and assorted tales of Bangkok all washed down with a shedload of Budvar. A great end to a fascinating evening.

Cocks and Wolves

2007-05-12T09:09:00.000-07:00

By way of an update we are enjoying our new district. I don't miss Whitechapel one bit and I've been surprised by the number of people who recoil when you say you've 'moved to Hackney'. This place beats Whitechapel hands-down. I haven't felt this positive or certain about a part of London since I first found Limehouse 20 years ago. I feel a sort of lift walking out on to Well Street Common every morning, rather than a growling depression picking my way up the scuffy backstreets behind the hospital up onto the choking Commercial Road. I haven't sorted out my studio yet, and we're nearly there with the rest of our stuff. We did a mini-blitz over the bank holiday weekend, but there's still been some time for too many drinks and of course, art, although strictly as a consumer until I find where the blazes I packed my brushes.

Went to see Martin Creed at Hauser & Wirth Coppermill on Sunday. The vast warehouse space in Cheshire Street has been used brilliantly to within an inch of its life, and has a very successful accord with the work. I loved the massive left hand wall, which has been painted with slanted black stripes on white that reflect playfully in the polished concrete floor. Also the tiny row of seven nails sticking out from the wall that graduate in size from maybe one inch to four inches and are lit in such a way that they cast a beautifully complicated diagonal shadow. The enormous iron girder in the centre of the room is also made elegant and beautiful rather than ugly and hulking by careful positioning and lights. It's perhaps 15-metres long and made up of three separate components. The roar and noise of the trucks and cleaning vehicles swooping up the market detritus of Cheshire Street late on a Sunday afternoon seemed to be rumbling from the depths of the iron pieces themselves. There's also a pleasing but sinister scribbly sketch of a smiling woman with green hair, a yellow neon piece that flashes up 'FRIENDS', and, in the corner of the room, a lone gallery attendant with her back to us plays an upright piano, slowly and one note at a time. I liked the vast white square suspended in the front of the industrial walls, and just as I was admiring how perfectly empty and clean and, well, just how perfect it looked, the lights went off. Instead of coming back on again (and going off again and coming on again), the whiteness flickered into life and a vast projected black and white close-up a freshly trimmed cock began gently fucking a willing female participant from behind. The film was so perfectly composed, with such a kept register, I feel certain the models must have had apparatus holding them in place. I think that there were a few surprised viewers in attendance (this is twenty-foot of close-up moving cock remember). We watched for a while, not for long enough to discover whether said fuck completes itself, blinking into Cheshire Street. G spotted some nice graffiti and snapped it. I thought the show was the best starting point for thinking about using a space to the work's advantage I've seen in a long time.

Less captivating was Leon Kossoff at the Sunley Room, National Gallery. I can't help feeling that most of his investigations of the old master paintings should have been kept under wraps. A good many of them remind you of the dynamics of the original works, some upward surges of energy or a busy crowd racing across the picture plane and expressions on faces in a crowd (like Pound's 'petals on a wet black bough'), but others felt like private memory-joggers not for the viewer's eyes. I felt the show could have been ruthlessly edited and about twenty pictures removed. There are some good ones though, so it's worth going. Unfortunately, the Christchurch Spitalfields picture (I think the only non old-master 'exploration') is not one of his best (bird shit / putty sludge), and the Rembrandt painting too sort of sits there as a conused mess on a scruffy board rather than impresses with craters and hard-won dips and slurries, having been wrestled out of Kossoff's wet world of painted chaos.

Popped into the NPG afterwards and thank god that fucking Andrew Logan's 'Zandra Rhodes' has fucked off into storage. I hope someone pushed it over the banisters. Crazy G seemed interested to know when the the next BP award is. The answer is of course hopefully never (being as it's the art world's answer to the Eurovision Song Contest).

Aside from Martin Creed there's another couple of shows i'm telling almost anyone who will listen about at the moment. The first is Arboreal at Transition, that aims to explore man's place in the world by rubbing the physicality of organic form up against coarse synthetics. Nature verus hard material.

I particularly enjoyed Lee Maelzer's photographs of Chistmas trees. A row of photographic prints of the corners of several different sitting rooms (or the same room every year?), at Christmas time that have been attacked by household fluids resulting in unexpected chemical shifts. As though fragile memories of special family time have been soaked in bleach. The prints have that creamy/fuzzy chemical distortion of old polaroids that have been sleeping in family photo albums for 30 years, taken one step further into a kind of irreverent danger zone as it feels wrong to spray this destructive stuff on special times.

Talking of childhood, and in the same show, I was transfixed by Debbie Lawson's expansive landscape made of a large cheap veneered wood panel, that reminded me suddenly of the doors in my parent's proud 1960's semi and of the wardrobe doors in the bedroom my brother and I shared on which we had a large sticker of an orange teddybear. Debbie's veneered landscape doesn't house teddybears however, but instead a braying pack of wolves that appear to be both on a mission of hunger but also lost in an endless landscape that seems expansive and undulating but also suffocating. The wolves are also made of veneer and delicately spliced into the broader panel. Maggi Hambling has also used veneers and wood slabs, chiselling out likenesses of her dead dad and her lover Henrietta but whereas those felt like like signposts on the way to broader portraits Debbie's are highly finished successful works in their own right. I'm a big fan. Like most shows at Transition it made me want to return to my studio and work... or, more correctly in the current domestic chaos, sort my studio out so that I CAN work!

The other show that has me gushing at the moment is the marvellous exhibition of Picasso etchings at Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood. Picasso carried out the 31 prints of birds, animals and insects in the mid-30's to illustrate a classic natural history text 'Histoire Naturelle'. They are really lively and pleasing and of course being Picasso almost annoyingly brilliant. There's some great shapes and textures and each one uses slightly differing techniques and styles. Each has wildly differing characters: some are delicately done and described in about three marks on a plain ground. Some are bold and weighty. I'll never get tired of visiting this exhibition as it's one of those ones that reminds you of the sheer joy and pleasure of making marks on paper and just how much freedom can be enjoyed in such simple processes. Luckily it's on until July so I'll be able to see it some more yet. My favourite is the toad with the two big eyes swirling in different directions and a back so detailed and hatched into you can almost feel the hard damp nobly bits. It's brilliant and will make you smile loads, so if you find yourself bored to tears in Vyner Street down pop down the road and look at a frog or a dragonfly instead.

Hackney Here We Come

2007-04-19T06:40:00.000-07:00

They're selling our rented flat in Whitechapel for a massively unrealistic sum. It is huge, and it's 'live/work' or whatever it's called with big industrial windows, but I've had enough of the backstreets behind the hospital. While I adore the East End broadly speaking, this particular segment is changing fast. There is a strange atmosphere to the streets (and I'm not talking psychogeography). Boy gangs are marauding in a way they weren't four years ago and muggings are on the up. I should know it happened to me last year. OK so i was plastered but I still think i should have the right to stumble down my own street without being set upon by feral teenagers and having all my belongings nicked (or worse).

So we've been househunting, Crazy G and I, careering all over 'South Hackney' (in Estate Agent speak), in and out of the Kingsland Road and up and down Mare Street. We even ventured to Clapham, just to check we were still content with the East End. G could probably happily live more or less anywhere providing there's easy access to a Waitrose and a farmer's market, but it has to be East for me. Limehouse is my spiritual home, the centre of my interest, and became the focal point for my work throughout the 1990's. So much so that in order to make a half decent attempt at my current childhood obsessed nostalgia project I had to move out to Whitechapel, to escape the pull of the place, and the distraction of Hawksmoor's 'St Annes'. Well, I am a romantic with a strong sense of place (I once told Dan Farson who was interviewing me for Art Review that I was so obsessed with the Thames I was occasionally tempted to throw myself in - he rolled his eyes and called me 'an hysterical youth').

We spent the Easter break tramping East London streets, making notes of what looked affordable/habitable and peering in Estate Agent windows. Viewing endless flats that looked like penthouses but were actually rabbit hutches and 'live/work spaces' in converted pubs that were either in damp basements or attics so small even I was in danger of banging my head (and I'm 5'7"). We've also seen enough laminate flooring to last a lifetime (isn't it horrid? Give me knackered old slats any day of the week). But thankfully the Des Res has been found, in Victoria Park. A converted school in Bramshaw Road by Well Street Common.

The irony is that our estate agent showed us two flats in the other converted school just by the villagey bit which were a bit small but we liked them, and decided not to view the one we went for as it felt too far away. Thankfully he sensed we were making a mistake and insisted we take a look.

Walking into the flat I felt a strange fluttering in my stomach, and couldn't stop grinning. It's a similarly large space (has to be for artistic purposes), but with the addition of a mezzanine main living space, a glass ceiling (with electronic blinds), ladders everywhere, an industrial curly wurly staircase, a roof terrace and a kitchen so cool Gerald was mentally rustling up quiches soon as look at it.

I always had a hunch that I would live there at some stage, and have known the area on and off for a few years. I used to have a part time job doing admin at a propmakers in King Edwards Road, so I know the Broadway Market/Well Street/Mare Street area well, and a mate of mine lived above the kebab shop in Victoria Park Road by the roundabout so I was always about. I really hate moving (but then doesn't everyone) but I can't wait to get in there next week. This weekend is 'Operation Pack' and we move on Tuesday. Fizz will be served in the roof garden once we're settled (invites in due course). We've always been quite quiet when it comes to entertaining: the Whitechapel pad never felt conducive to large numbers of guests because it felt featureless and sort of empty and cold but as far as the Hackney abode goes I don't think the flat could scream LETS HAVE A PARTY!!!! any louder if it tried. The kitchen even has an ice machine! (no comments saying 'well so does simply everyone darling' please). Expect a domestic update next week and potentially some enviable pics pour moi relaxing with a large gin sur la terrasse. Horrah!

Freezing in NY

2007-03-21T11:23:00.000-07:00

Just back from a blizzard-filled New York City. It seemed freakishly cold as we queued for our cab at JFK, and luckily we managed to make the safe confines of the Chelsea Hotel just before the sleet and snow really got a grip. Unpacked in our room (with a balcony this time, and quite a smart one for a change), got glued (as Warhol used to say) and repaired to our favourite diner for dinner.

The next morning, I realised I'd packed precisely 3 thin black suit jackets, several neck scarves and ties, a couple of rock'n'roll t-shirts, some skinny black jeans and a pair of cuban heels. More Nick Rhodes than Scott of the Antarctic. So we struggled with newly purchased umbrellas (which, given the wind, were useless) against a howling sleety gale up towards mid-town in search of sensible winter wear. Wasted half a day in and out of Macy's and various others and in the end, returning to Chelsea for lunch bitterly cold, I bought a fantastic black fedora ($50), and a big olive-coloured overcoat for $40 in a cheap gent's outfitters within 5mins walk of the hotel lobby. All set.

Stayed mostly around Chelsea again that second evening. It was just disablingly cold. Had a few Martini's (including a rather yummy 'what happened to my legs' cucumber one... *falls under table*) and some beers, most of which I barely remember due to Martini prefix. Woke up on Saturday to six inches of quite nice crusty snow, and the NY smoking rules meant that my hangover was clearer than i deserved, chiefly because it was far too cold to go outside even for an old puffer like me so I wasn't sneaking out for headache-forming fags all night . After breakfast (eggs and ham pour moi, syrupy waffles the size of a house for Crazy G) we headed over a couple of blocks to the galleries. Almost no street salting around Gallery Land, so all was draped in nice crusty snow and looked very pretty.

Saw a brilliant show of Brazilian street art at Jonathan LeVine by eight graffiti artists from Sao Paulo. Amazing bold colour and shapes that seemed to explode all over the gallery space; large hung works were joined up by painting directly on the gallery walls, so that it was difficult to tell where one artist ended and another began. Just when I was wondering who was getting paid and how I noticed that some of the work was broken down into smaller components with little red dots here and there. Big work chopped into commercial chunks.

I liked Mathias Schmied's 'I Hate the Way I Love', at Josee Bienvenu, some of the most startlng works on paper I've seen in a long while. The bulk of the work uses cut-up comic heroes, and pop 'POW!'s and 'THUD!'s pinned to the walls like insect specimens. There's also a disturbing series called 'Pin-Ups':- glamour models cut from magazines, again pinned up, with sections of their sexy torsos scalped out and draped out across the surface of the gallery wall like miniature innards in an autopsy. Very fragile small scale papery work, but made more powerful for being shown surrounded by acres of white in a massive space.

Also enjoyed Matt Ernst's 'Future of an Illusion' at 511, playful mixed media collage that had strong childhood undercurrents that interested me. The gallery has a lovely big white dog which sort of nudges and sniffs you and follows you round as you look at the art. I was in raptures over 'Mystic Visions' by Alan Davie at ACA Galleries, bright likeable canvases full of mysterious folklore referencing and occult imagery, cartoon snakes and all-seeing eyes. At the friendliest gallery, Kathryn Markel (one of only two galleries in the entire 529 W 20th building that said 'hi' or 'good morning' and 'if you need any help please don't hesitate to ask', etc), Gerald liked Dragana Crnjak's beautiful wall pieces, while I explored Lenore Thomas's sensitive wax tablets.

At the Chelsea Art Museum we saw 'Dangerous Beauty', including a confrontational work by a surgically bruised Orlan and, one of my favourite artists, Barbara Kruger. You know what the show is all about from the off. As you descend the steps into the museum's sunken exhibition floor you are faced with an expanse of artfully arranged multicoloured Ikea bathroom scales below vast projections of catwalk models and an accompanying dance track.

I was disappointed by Karel Funk's 'The Hooded Man' at 303 Gallery. I was brought up short by one of his 'from the back' images of hooded, capped youths ('Untitled 12'), in March's Art Review (now a good magazine again... couldn't believe it turned into 'World of Interiors' for about seven years), and was looking forward to the exhibition, but I found the work empty in the end. Gerald made the comment as we left the gallery 'What's the point? They just look like photographs...?', which seems glib when you understand that the artist probably spends six weeks on each painting, but they do look like technical exercises. A layered up photographic likeness that leaps off the page of an art mag. Fucking fantastic painting it has to be said, although it did occur to me that you can framework the backs of people's heads with more hyperbole than you can the fronts. I wanted to turn the boys round so that I could see them. I wanted them to look like Collier Schorr's pictures of high school athletes or young soldiers remade with Karel's astonishing technique. Actually, if I'm honest, I wanted to see them naked (sorry).

Actually, talking of being naked, one of the most powerful shows in Chelsea was Oliver Herring at Max Protech. Again, I was familiar with the work from the art press, but this time the reality was breathtaking. Oliver makes, out of polystyrene or some other base material, blank life-size images of his subjects naked, then photographs every inch of their bodies, and fixes the finished photography all over the statues building up a montaged likeness over the body contours. Not only are you seeing photography collaged so that it attempts to portray the world as we see it, as constantly moving viewpoints, you can also move around the image and experience it as sculpture as well. Hours of fun.

Anyway, that's enough art. We got pissed again on Saturday, ('Phoenix Bar' and 'Nowhere'). I bought loads of books, (including an interesting exhibition catalogue from 1999 that draws parallels betwen Nadar and Warhol and, on a hunch, a copy of Van Gogh's letters for the plane), and ate loads of big American grub (although was workin' a semi-atkins so no chips allowed). On Sunday the temperature lifted slightly so we explored some of Brooklyn and Williamsburg (crunching through sunny snow) and in the evening went to our favourite Japanese restaurant (Sharaku, 14 Stuyvesant St) then met up with Retro Bar Alex at Joe's Pub for Kiki and Herb, who seemed more anarchic on home turf (Kiki and Herb, not Alex). Monday, shopping at Bloomingdales (I bought some new raybans) and a blow out lunch at BAR on 23rd St, taxiing out of manhattan around 4.30pm for the red-eye back to London. Having caught the weather on CNN it seemed we were leaving the city just in time for the setting in of ordinary spring:- Bugger. Nevermind... I quite enjoyed battling through a dramatic, snowed in New York... and I'm VERY pleased with my new hat (see above).

Some Very New Paintings

2007-03-08T13:03:00.000-08:00

The first is 'Aunt Sylvie, Drunk, 1970s', which for me has a air of Abigail's Party about it. I imagine most family photo albums have a faded polaroid of a slightly tipsy aunt gurning for the camera after a smidge too much pomagne. The yellow is my invention, to throw Sylvie into a 1970's gaudy colourway.

'The Road to Tintagel' is one of my new Cornwall pictures, of the ruins of King Arthur's castle and the winding pathways and roads that lead to it and around the coast. This place was so romantic to me as a child, full to bursting with magic and mystery (I even collected stones in Merlin's Cave believing them to be talismanic). I enjoyed painting the expansive rugged landscapes. I wanted them to be deep and spatial so that your eye moves around, and the air around the landscape thick with the remnants of legends and stories of ghosts and wizards.

'The Beach' is Blackpool at some point either at the very end of the 1960's or early 1970's. I don't plan to identify the figures in the picture as I want the viewer to consider it in the light of his or her own life... (Although my work is rooted in personal memory and my own nostalgia, I believe the subjects dealt with are universal). I was quite pleased with my bus. There are number of stories going on, if you want them, or the focus of the picture is the sad boy. I was amused by the layers of clothes everyone's wearing. The old man asleep in the deckchair is in full three piece Sunday best. I want to paint the tower too... I have some fantastic faded pictures of Blackpool Tower against brooding skies (stormy afternoons). One of the few obsessions I miss from my East London subject is the sinister Hawkmoor churches I used to paint, and Blackpool Tower in my hands at least could be a similarly mysterious monument. We used to stay in a bed and breakfast in Blackpool run by a Mrs Vera Broadbent who used to let me play on her organ. I can't remember the name of the B&B but I do remember the taste of ginger beer served from the small bar in the sitting room, and reading palms in the breakfast room (at the time I was obsessed with fortune telling and the occult).

'Blood Brothers' is my brother and I, in my parent's bed, making funny faces. I like the way that Paul is looking towards me as though taking his lead from me for the camera.

'New Arrival' is about the birth of my sister. My mum has just returned from the hospital and i'm holding my baby sister with a wide-eyed sense of exitement and wonderment. I enjoyed painting the teaky 1970s furniture (my parent had some VERY funky furniture I have to say... including a fabulous orange leather sofa) and the antique stereo in the background. When I look at this picture I remember the smell of my new born sister, the lemon coloured blanket and the records my dad played on said antique sound system.

I've been working on some drawings as well. This one is called 'Mother's Dentistry, Cold Morning'. I once went with my mum to the Dentists, and being too young to be left in the waiting room on my own was taken to be sat in the room while the denist set to her. I remember this as one of the most terrifying experiences of my young life. Watching a masked man in a white coat and surgical gloves, gauging at my Mothers mouth with steel and mirrors, surrounded by glaring artifical lights and strange smells and fluids. The horror was extreme, and I had to carried off, hysterical and screaming, convinced that my mother was being tortured to death in this alien environment. The shapes in the drawing become the violence of the Dentist's attack.

"Pay Up and Fuck Off!"

2007-02-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

Well i'm back now after titting around on myspace for six weeks... having discovered it about three years after everyone else.

I've also been 'up to here' *gestures around neck area* with new paintings. Including a large beach in Blackpool circa 1970, with so much period detail that it's taking weeks to finish. Also some portraits of my brother and I, some dreamy psychadelic landscapes of King Arthur's Cornwall (from memory), and some 'nightmare paintings'.

The nightmares are based on recurring dreams I had as a kid. My favourite is one in which I am sinking and struggling in an enormous neverending sea of cannon balls... like a sort of quicksand. There is also the painting about venturing out to the garage to check out a noise only to be snatched away by a burglar, screaming soundlessly while Mum and Dad are glued to Tomorrow's World on TV... Anyone in their 30's might remember the opening credits to late 70's/early 80's Tomorrows World: the camera traveling through valleys of the surface of a human brain with Oxygene bleeping away. To me, this is childhood terror personified. Needless to say, I now get slightly twitchy around Jean Michel Jarre or medical models. I'm also, thankfully, out the other end of a seriously long standing collage phase, which has stood me in good stead, but it's the big colourful painted confessionals that cement my interest and I'm back in the thick of it. Other ways of working feel like happy adjuncts, but probably necessary from time to time. Painting is the thing.

But there's still been time to party, and on Tuesday night we made our merry way to the opening of Gilbert and George's Tate Modern 'Major Exhibition', which seems special enough to warrant blog-space after a gap of several weeks.

I've been a G&G fan for 20-years, and first met them aged 15 and on the run from A.E. Housman's boring old Shropshire. I remember sitting in one of their thrones in their Fournier Street sitting room, nervously chain smoking, in full Throbbing Gristle/Psychic TV industrial camo and an Into a Circle t-shirt (which was fitting as I'd first come across their work through Bee). I was far too young and not the slightest bit streetwise but I had a sort of inner compulsion to meet people who might help me do things, or at least escape my background. We spent that first afternoon having thrilling conversations (for me at least), and I remember large chunks of it even now. They had such an overwhelming effect on me. I was wide eyed and astonished one minute, and in fits of laughter the next. I knew as I left them that my life was fucked and things would never be the same again. I wanted what they were doing, or something like it. Up until that point I thought I might either be an art teacher or design record covers. I don't see them much these days but am always thrilled when I do and am showered with kisses.

Anyway, back to the opening. Well, it was a top-notch do as you might imagine. Lots of wealthy and intense looking collectors, a few well-known artists and an assortment of liggers, dealers, hacks and window dressers. And very much an international crowd. The turbine hall was lit in red and blue, with large shadows and Carsten Holler's slides adding dramatic effect. The vodka cocktails were flowing with no expense spared. We had a mooch about, glugging lethal pink things in martini glasses. It was very much one of those do's where you recognise half the room.

One of my favouite moments was catching sight of Maggi Hambling who almost sent a pedestal table flying, while leaning on it making an important point to a a small group of admirers. She then yelled (with camp gusto) 'WELL that's ONE way to take a table!' sounding like a retired colonel (much to my delight). But having come a cropper in past meetings, I didn't dare approach. I also enjoyed spotting Jason Donovan looking slightly disturbed in the Naked Shit room. Gerald was very pleased with himself for recognising Grayson Perry. There were lots of establishment stalwarts in attendance, Norman Rosenthal and the like, as you can imagine.

On up to the show (the new bomb pictures at the top of the escalator aside) the first few room are drop-dead sensational. The stark black and whites, with acres of blood red, hit home immediately, and I have a strong preference for the Bloody Life / Dead Boards / Mental, and Dirty Words series' of the 70's. There is also a large collection of important G&G ephemera. They made beautiful writings, 'postal sculptures' and all manner of playful material when they were cheeky and on the up and these are almost never shown. The 'Charcoal on Paper Sculptures' are beautiful too. The only thing the early part of the show lacks is one of 'The Paintings' (yes, real G&G oils on canvas) from 1971. Enormous tryptychs of G&G in English countryside, surveying nature, traditionally painted like a Sunday painter's picture blown up to ten feet wide.

As G&G work very much in series more or less each room is devoted to a major run of work, so that you get a very strong sense of their creeping development as you move through the show. My favourite moment is when you turn a corner and are heading towards the mid-80's and mad explosive colour with pictures like 'We' (for years I thought the dicks were fingers... have a look), 'Death Life Hope Fear, 'Coming', 'Shitted' and the completely mad 'Life without End'. I also like the very late 80's, like 'Edge' and 'They' and the 'For AIDs' pictures of 1989, and the early 90's pictures like 'City Fairies'. I warmed more to the Naked Shit pictures this time. All of this work was labouriously hard won, projected onto light sensitive papers and hand coloured. It was a process that took weeks and weeks in semi darkness: an experience G&G once likened to 'shagging in a sack'. The latter part of the show on the other hand is made up of the recent digital work.

I've been amused and interested by the press interest thus far. There has been a tonnage of material written about them in the Sunday supplements over the last few weeks, and quite right too, but almost none of it is new. I've kept them all. The coverage has ranged from the lovely portrait set out by Deborah Ross in the Independent (walking arm in arm with George to the tapas bar in Spitalfields Market; she clearly loves them) to the downright impertinent (Tim Teeman in The Times: 'So, do you actually sleep together?', or questions about George's marriage). Most journalists probably get those in late on rather than risk the shutters coming down early. The best piece was in Time Out (whose art coverage I generally hate but that witch has gone now) - they actually set out several pictures and talked about the pictures rather than (yawn) G&G's daily routine. AT LAST! An article about their work rather then where they have breakfast!!! I can't wait for the show reviews. Most establishment critics are generally quite shocked and/or worried by G&G, they're still far more revered abroad rather than on home ground. I look forward to reading Brian Sewell, who will be crazed and poisonous as always, but I do long to read something NEW about the G&G phenomena.

I must mention the merchandise. There a heavily subsidised 200-page colour catalogue for £12 (who else would chip in as much as they do to make them so cheap for people?) AND a two-volume slab of their entire output over 35 years for just shy of £40. There are also 'Death Life Hope Fear' cufflinks and mugs, 'London E1' courier bags, fridge magnets, t-shirts and a multitude of signed posters. There's also a G&G swear box with 'Pay Up and Fuck Off' emblazoned across it. I love that... I also like the wooden G&G toy. It's a bit like those animals on little plinths you had when you were a kid. You'd press the bottom in and the animal would jig around and sort of dance and collapse. Well, when you press in G&G's plinth the minature G&G's look as though they're furiously sucking each other off. Humour is an essential part of the mad world of G&G.

We went back down for a cleansing beer in the turbine hall afterwards, and I started to feel slightly giddy. We had rushed round it, really. You could easily spend half a day in there, and I probably will at some stage.

I have to say my overriding impression, seeing all (or pretty much all) of their work laid out for the first time is that I think that the work carried out prior to their discovery of computers has more depth. I find the photoshopped smoothness holds less weight. They don't speak to me as much. But I also think that G&G still make the best pictures of modern human experience, and they are the ONLY modern artists prepared to be COMPLETELY open. There's little left once you've shown the world your arsehole or your own shit, blood and spunk, but of their current involvements I remain unsure. But I love and admire them more than I can say, and the world would be poorer without them.

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/gilbertandgeorge/

A Flurry of Group Shows

2006-12-26T06:39:00.000-08:00

This is my painting of Wilfred Owen for Brick Lane Gallery's 'Peace Camp', curated by the gallery and Bob and Roberta Smith. Wilfred Owen is one of those people who are/were very valuable but were so forced upon me at school that I've only just discovered him (he was 'a Shropshire lad' too so perhaps we got it hotter and stronger than anyone else when I was growing up). He was the first thing that entered my head whilst musing on what to make for the show and I decided to paint him at the canal where he was shot. It's worth making more than one visit to 'Peace Camp' to catch the various performances going on in the gallery space, although I'm far too late posting this as it finishes on December 31st. There's a schedule of performances on their site if you have time to hurry down there prior to new year. It's a busy show, there must be over 100 artists, and some interesting work.

I've also been involved in 'Grotto' at Studio 1.1, a similarly chaotic and lively show, that aims to 'take Christmas by the throat'. I'm showing a Melting Snowman. It's worth spending time here as there's a lot to see and there are a number of gems to uncover. It's on until mid-Jan.

Also did the painting prize at the Residence, which I think was their last show prior to moving to brand new premises. Although I wish I'd read the small print as I didn't know that they were planning to hang the show upside down. I often add text to my pictures and would have liked the idea more had I included a picture without.

http://www.thebricklanegallery.com
http://www.naimad.co.uk/studio1-1

"Visions of China"

2006-12-01T07:56:00.000-08:00

Just back from a very enjoyable and long overdue break to Hong Kong and environs. We stayed in the fantastic Langham Place Hotel high above the colourful chaos of Mong Kok, in Kowloon, opposite Hong Kong Island itself. The Langham is the tallest building in Kowloon, perched above a 'high-end' shopping mall, crowded in with colourful street markets, mad restaurants and more neon than you can shake a stick at. I preferred Kowloon to the smarter 'Central' district on Hong Kong Island. It has bags more atmosphere and I for one felt as though I was in a Japan video for ten days. So, while my lungs are still full of temple incense, and my nostrils remember the stench of corner cafes cooking tripe and the fug of the pollution, some highlights and/or recommendations:-

'Central' is good fun, and reached by Star Ferry from Tsim Sha Tsui at the bottom of Kowloon or a couple of metro stops. We enjoyed the street markets, Hollywood Road 'Antique District', the ex-pat bars and some of the streets that cling against the 'escalator' that carries you up the steep levels. The majority of Central is 'office land' however, like our City but negotiated largely above ground by walkways and shopping malls to keep determined bankers and brokers out of the humidity. Of the bars in the (largely) ex-pat district of Central we spent a very enjoyable afternoon getting hammered with our friend Jon (also over from London) in 'The George' (traditional Olde Worlde pub with 80's music) followed by '1997' (Gay on Fridays but only until 10: they actually take down the rainbow flag and the entire crowd changes within 20mins) and Soda on Wyndham St.

Talking of Gay pubs, there aren't any really apart from Tony's in Bristol Avenue (mental karaoke bar) which was very friendly and seem to really like Brit visitors and Wally Matt's (trad pub), both in Kowloon. Hated the 'Rice Bar' in Central which was empty apart from bunches of funereal lillies and a couple of ancient suspicious looking ex-pats. It's dark and the walls are covered in drapes. We called it the 'last chance saloon'. Out of there in ten minutes especially as the barman wouldn't let me smoke (unusual for Hong Kong... no wonder it was empty).

The street markets are mostly in Kowloon, and very cheap. The goldfish and flower markets are beautiful and very relaxing. The Temple Street night market is amazing, mainly full of tat to be honest but very colourful. Loads of fortune tellers and street food too. Our favourite was the Bird market. I bought a bird cage (God I bought loads of rubbish back, as ever) and we had a chat with a Minah Bird which was hilarious.

Saw some amazing temples, including Wong Tai Sin in New Kowloon which is a good one. Large, with a 'good luck garden' to wander around in and other areas too. Lots of fortune tellers again, and face readers. Amazed that so many small domestic temples are everywhere, on street corners, cemented into walls, in dry cleaners, car exhaust shops. The only places you don't see them are in the sanitised office block area of Central and the shopping malls.

Had a few trips out including to (Portugese) Macau which is worth going to for the Portugese restaurant 'A Lorcha' (have octopus salad followed by clams and pork!) and Lantau which is really tranquil. Of the two Lantau was my favourite. It takes about half an hour from Hong Kong on a ferry to get to Lantau then a bus for a hour to get to the monastery. You can get a combined ticket to go up the enormous bronze Buddha on the hill and a veggie meal in the monastery afterwards (but not with the monks). It's not really spoilt or touristy and I felt very relaxed and at peace with myself afterwards. Of course then we went and sunk ten pints of lager in Central.

Also went to Stanley, a sort of rich ex-pat's enclave with a very touristy market, but it's nice by the harbour and a huge temple to Tin Hau (she's to do with the sea), and a smaller more isolated temple a walk away from the harbour. Went to Aberdeen (nice fishing port) on the south side too, but not much there apart from the wholesale fish market.

We had some astonishing dinners. Breakfasts were solely bacon and eggs in the hotel (call me old fashioned) but the good thing about having a foodie for a partner meant that we tried loads of different places and had some amazing things. I'm not that adventurous normally but we went everywhere from back-street caffs to huge clamourous dim-sum restaurants full of shouting families, main-road noodle bars and out-of-the-way restaurants where almost everything was in Cantonese. In the majority of places we ate in we were the only westerners and it's worth knowing that lots of places off the beaten track have at least one English language translation menu even if it's not strictly accurate. 'Shun De Yummy Fish' is good (you can choose your own eel) on one of the roads parallel to Temple St (possibly Woo Sung St) and 'Heaven on Earth' on Knutsford Terrace is a good Chinese restaurant popular with westerners and locals alike.

'The Peak' is worth going to. If you can cope with the 'white-knuckle' 45 degree tram ride up the side of the hill to the 550 odd metre summit. The safety record is spotless but you never know. The view is amazing if the air isn't too polluted, but there's a ghastly couple of shopping malls at the top. The one you have to go through to get to the actual viewing gallery is just depressing and unnecessary and one of those ones where you are tricked through the shops with no option to bypass them.

I had hoped to see some traditional Chinese painting. Luckily, we caught the last day of the Qi Bashi show at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, traditional views of landscape and nature on silk scrolls. Enjoyed the show even more as reading about Qi Bashi himself (1864 to 1957) he sounds like an awkward old bugger who had strong ideas on how his work should be bought and sold and seems to have spent most of his time thinking up rude signs (in perfect calligraphy) for his studio door to keep out the riff-raff.

Can't wait to go back. Would also like to explore further into China. I normally only ever go west rather than east so it was all new for me.

Horrah for the Artistic 30's

2006-12-01T04:55:00.000-08:00

Been in Hong Kong... of which more shortly, but meant to post about Bloomberg's 'New Contempories', in Club Row before I went and ran out of time.

I loved Andrea Buttner's large format donkey piece, actually a woodcut made up of ten large sheets. I like the quality of woodcut printing and I've never seen it on this scale before. I imagine the sheets were enlarged up but I like to think they are actual size prints rolled off enormous inky 3'x2' planks following months of hard-won carving.

I also enjoyed the corner installation of Henrietta Simpson's meticulous and haunting suburban houses and roads 'Between Heaven and Hell in Suburbia'. Domestic size oils in gilt frames. All fake half-timbering and picket fences with no sign of life, not even a twitching curtain. They look like cul-de-sacs in Surrey and are oddly unsettling. They reminded me of my home town and I imagine probably work on that level with most people; the work could even be called 'A Thousand County Towns'. They are various although similar sizes and are hung in a corner, like a small gallery of small-town depression.

My fave was Neil McNally who is showing a row of very affecting watercolour studies of gas oven deaths and lonely hangings. There's very little information on Neil on the Bloomberg site, other than his date of birth (1971) and that he left his BA at Goldsmiths in 2005. Presumably he spent a decade or so doing something else prior to his BA but it's none of our business and I like that approach. It underlines the mysterious nature of his work. In fact, while I'm on the subject I like people who resist traditional biographical detailing full-stop... the work's the thing. I would love to go and see these again. All the suicides are named, but we're not told anything further. Quite right too.

All my favourites were in their mid-30's. I find this happens quite a lot at the moment. I respond to the work before knowing how old the artist is though so I'm not being drawn in artificially. I do think it is just something about older artists (or rather not-so-young young ones) having hammered away for so much longer that they have worked up a more original or genuine way to speak about the world. It's on until 20th December.

www.newcontemporaries.org.uk

Kings and Queens (and Trannies)

2006-11-02T06:24:00.000-08:00

Went to the Holbein exhibition at Ye Oldey Tatey on Saturday. A Saturday sounds like a ridiculous time to go to a blockbuster museum show but suprisingly it wasn't too hot and/or crowded. The paintings were, of course, completely breathtaking. Amazing faces, so real they look as though they might twitch or flinch. I enjoyed his odd nuances too, like a raised eyebrow, or a sideways glance. They're society portraits basically but they don't feel flat and lifeless, although for me all those glistening folds of fabric start to look a bit slickly showoffy after a while. A bit 'Look what I can do'.

I actually preferred Holbein's drawings to his painting, I waas surprised how sensitive they were, like Ingres. I found it difficult to understand why there were so many people crowding around paintings of Henry VIII and countless courtiers when the drawings were ten times more powerful. My favourite drawing was of the Archbishop of Canterbury, a beautiful summing up of old age.

I also enjoyed seeing the 'Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling', which I spent so many tea-breaks looking at when I worked at the National Gallery Shop yonks ago. I always thought her hands looked overly large, as thought they belonged to a different model. I like the blank spacial background, with the foliage. I thought that was unusual for Holbein but there's actually several with that backdrop in the show. They must have looked very daring at the time. Just colour with a sprig of something.

While I was there I thought I'd better have a look at the Turner Prize. I liked Mark Titchener's big wall piece, I like work that looks like sloganeering. I loved Tomma Abts paintings. All the same size, 48 x 38 cms, pleasing abstract forms in very cleverly measured colour, like pared down Vorticism. They're very stylish, highly finished, and I like the fact that they are such an easy size. It was good to see work that isn't eight foot high for once, and they are all the more powerful for it. They look great hanging in the big white room at the Tate with acres of space around them. I didn't especially respond to Rebecca Warren's lumps of clay. They are reworkings of sculptural masters that "explode out of and merge back into the amorphous properties of the material". I just thought they were rather dull and scruffy, and although I don't mind it as an adjunct I don't especially wish to have to wade through an essay of hyperbole prior to being able to get an idea of something (call me old fashioned). I normally love Phil Collins' work but didn't enjoy his piece this time either. I guess it's difficult to like anything much when your head's swimming with exquisite drawing.

On Sunday we went to Dawn Right Nasty's launch party for her new drag-induced fanzine 'Trannyhag'. It's a great read, comprising guides on successful stalking of one's idols, 'How to Look Like Pete Burns', film reviews, pin-ups, and interviews with Buck Angel (transgendered female to male porn star) and Peaches Christ (member of the 'Trannyshack' contingent in San Francisco). All in full colour. Being concerned for a chum's personal finances I pleaded with her to do it in black and white but as she said impatiently 'You can't DO drag in black and white darling'. Anyway, it looks fab and if that's your bent you can get it off www.trannyhag.info or I think at the ICA shop courtesy of Russell.

Dawn was also showing three very funny, b-movie shorts featuring Peaches and her mad circle Martiny, Heklina, and Squeaky Blonde. The first was 'Season of the Troll' being the story of an evil knife wielding creature that refused to die, and 'Nightmare on Castro Street', the story of Peaches' employment of a quaint English nurse "just like Mary Poppins" to take care of sick friend Martiny, but who turns out to be killing Martiny by force-feeding her/him processed cheese or something. All very bonkers, and brilliantly hilarious. Lots of wigs and fake blood and set in San Francisco (where else). The third film was 'Whatever Happened to Peaches Christ' but unfortunately we had to miss that as we were destined to see Kenneth Anger, in person no less, introduce four of his films at the NFT.

Kenneth Anger has sat on the sidelines of my imagination for years and I've got tapes of his films but I'd never seen them before on a big screen, which is obviously what it's all about. These are new 'preserved', cleaned up versions. The first, and arguably the best, was 'Fireworks', a gay fantasy of sailors made by Anger whilst still a teenager in 1947 (while his parents were out). Followed by 'Rabbit's Moon', "a japanese myth of romantic yearning" set in a beaufiful luminous blue/sliver landscape. Also showing were 'Scorpio Rising' and 'Kustom Kar Kommandos' which were fetish central, the first one non-stop biker boys and the second focusing on a tight pink-trousered crotch lovingly caressing a gleaming sports car with a giant powder puff. There was also a new one 'Mouse Heaven', finanaced by Anger's friend, the late J.P. Getty, and an obsessive study of Mikey Mouse.

He did a q&a afterwards. I wanted to ask about the film of the Crowley murals he made in the 50's but we were so far back I doubt he could have heard me. It's one of my life ambitions to make a book of the Crowley murals at the Abbey of Thelema at Cefalu while they still exist (but Crazy G refuses to scramble up steep sicillian hillsides in search of a lonely ruined farmhouse full of squatting drug addicts and unsavories... can't say I blame him!). He spoke briefly, and very funnily, about Bobby Beausoleil, then a handsome 19-year old Californian who later got caught up in the Manson sect and still serving time. You could tell however that it was a testy topic.

I gather Mr Anger lives in LA, with almost no dosh, and hates modern Hollywood with a vengence. He is full of anecdotes and Hollywood gossip, and would be a hit at parties, but doesn't strike me as the sort of man who'd wish to parade himself around any sort of social circuit.

He was in a remarkably good mood, which I know isn't always the case. I remember once reading an interview with him, set in an LA restaurant, where he was cheerfully recounting the sorry tale of a well-known "straight" Hollywood heart-throb who began his career as a rent-boy and ended up contracting gonorrhoea which he passed on to half the industry. Of course the article couldn't name him (though Anger gladly did). The story was so outrageous that at a nearby table was a poor innocent diner began laughing uncontrollably and Anger whirled over in an instant fury and practically attacked her for her intrusion. Then it was, 'now... where was I...' as though nothing had happened. He is one of life's Sacred Monsters, for sure, and it was thrilling to see him. I had the unmistakable thrill you get when you see someone you've admired or read about for years in the flesh for the first time.

Zoo Art Fair

2006-10-20T05:35:00.000-07:00

Went to the Zoo art fair last Sunday afternoon. It was in a large marquee this year and comprised several 'internationals' from Mexico, LA and Berlin, and some interesting out-of-Londoners. The London component was more or less the same as 2005.

The best stands (is it stands or booths?) in my humble opinion were TemporaryContemporary and Bearspace (fuzzy felt pictures!? LET's GO!!), both near neighbours in south east London, and Studio1.1 in Redchurch St. I also enjoyed Bureau from Salford, who were showing Jacob Cartwright. I enjoyed seeing Jacob's work again (I was bowled over by his show 'Godwottery' - in conjunction with Nick Jordan - at Transition earlier in the year).

My favourite absolute tops was Workplace from Gateshead who were showing Marcus Coates' shaman ceremony. We saw it at the Britsh Art Show in Bristol. It's called 'Journey to the Lower World', and its Marcus wearing a stag skin, doing a shamanistic dance and channelling some pagan horned god in a suburban sitting room supervised by a group of bemused OAP's. He sort of rears up and make stag noises. Workplace were not only showing the piece itself but also the stag skin drapped on the wall, and a large still from the dvd piece. They also showed Jo Coupe's 'Enough Rope'. A old wooden table, with gently rotting fruit piled on top. Electrodes attached to the fruit power tiny cutting devices that chip away at the table legs. It's a lively thing. Humming with electricity, and moving. The table rocks and chatters, like Victorian table tapping. Spiritualism wrapped in wires. You can see it the foreground of my photo, with Marcus Coates behind.

The rest of the place was a bit dull I thought. There wasn't much memorable painting , what painting there was was either flat and lifeless (all a bit 'match the curtains'), or just plain scruffy. There was a tonnage of rather dreary photography, and everywhere you looked paper sheets pinned or taped up bare against the walls (what happened to frames for fucks sake!!!????)... Only TemporaryContemporary, Bearspace, Studio 1.1, Bureau and Workplace seemed to be showing original and innovative work, new ways of working. They made me stop, take photographs, make mental notes. They made me think about my own practice and things I'm concentrating on at the moment. I thought about materials, how to present ideas, how to do improve things.

Also enjoyed meeting Patrick Wilkinson, of Wilkinson Vinters no less - one of the sponsors, was there showing off his rare G&G drinking sculpture from 1972, fittingly displayed above a wall of wine cases. He had a Philip Guston too. I was momentarily concerned for him that the most expensive things in the room were not only eminently carryable but hung only feet away from an open plan entrance.

So a big thank you to the forementioned, and a mild thumbs down for all the others, some of whose stands looked exactly the same as last year.

Hot off the press!

2006-10-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

Am in this week's Time Out. It's the 'My Favourite Londoner' bit at the back.

I chose Dan Farson who was a big supporter of mine and somebody who's not written about or remembered nearly enough these days in my opinion. The photo they've used of Dan is the John Deakin portrait on the walls of the Colony Room in Dean St. I like the fact that you can just see the edge of a Bacon poster poking into the photo, and a photo of Muriel Belcher, the first proprietor of the Colony Club and the Annie Walker of 50's Soho. All very in-keeping!... Definately Dan in his own milieu.

My only problem is there was some kind of mix-up and they've said I'm showing new work at Nancy Victor in Charlotte St this month. I'm not, it's not until the Spring. But I wouldn't have thought that an article on Dan would actually want to make people come to a show anyway, in particular. It's not about my work after all.

Anyway, talking of Dan Farson I found this recently on a search website for newspaper articles. It's Iain Sinclair on Gilbert and George from the Independent on Sunday in about 1999:-

"It's clear that G&G operate two modes, both equally valid. There's Living Sculptures - with strict rules and Zen discipline. And there is the book buying, pottery collecting, restaurant visiting, chatting up waiters, off-duty existence of unexceptional Spitalfields millionaires. According to official doctrine, they never go to art shows. But locals still speak about the opening of an exhibition of Stephen Harwood's "East End Paintings" in the Art East Gallery in Spitalfields market. Peter Ackroyd and Dan Farson also attended. And the evening climaxed, riotously, in a tapas bar brawl."

The tapas bar is still there but the gallery is long gone. How marvellous to think that not only did one's cultural heroes all have a drunken scrap but that another one of one's cultural heroes saw fit to write about it! I didn't know about either!

The Art of Gen

2006-10-11T05:55:00.000-07:00

Saturday was Psychic TV at the Astoria with Crazy G and Dawn Right Nasty. Genesis P.Orridge took to the stage in a blast of 'Papal Breakdance', with new gold teeth, a neat blond bob, white mini-skirt, Psychic TV t-shirt (slogan: "Nothing Short Ov A Total Gender") ripped down the breastbone exposing handsome boob cleveage and hints of tattoo. He's even more injected, filled and painted and, in short, fabulous, than last time we saw him at the forum two years ago (imagine Judi Dench in best summer frock thrown to a pack of feral drag queens).

LOVED the music, as ever. Musically they are difficult to describe and with Gen a lot depends on who his current collaborators are. I guess it's part trippy psychadelia, part rock, part industrial dark bits. Plenty of impressive walls of sound and ground shaking cresendos. There was some great new stuff but also 'Terminus' from 'Force the Hand of Chance' (which was cheerfully introduced with 'this one will depress you!'). 'Papal Breakdance', was slightly reworked. 'Roman P' was so completely reworked I hardly recognised it. It had been slowed right down, meaning the sinister lyrics had a chance to sink in in a way they don't normally.

The sound seemed a bit odd for the first couple but they sorted that out fairly quickly. I thought that they sounded better than the Forum gig.

They played in front of some startling projections , including collaged close-ups of Gen being botoxed and surgically adjusted. Not surprisingly, given Gen's background, it was more like performance art than a gig. Like artist Orlan with a Velvets soundtrack. My favourite was the film of Gen and his "other half" (his words) Lady Jaye gliding around Times Square in fur coats, faces wrapped in bandages, but in full make-up, and relaxing, both at home and in medical environments, in four inch black patent heels to a slow New York love-song. Other projections included good old fashoned 'Temple of Psychic Youth' insignia (spinning crosses and wolves) various other operations and gender bending graphics.

Nice piece on him in the Guardian on Saturday (rightly described as 'rock's most notorious provocateur') and I admire Genesis for being uncompromising. But I was disappointed for the band that the place wasn't full to bursting. A half-empty venue can make you feel as though you are enjoying something unattached to the mainstream, but a strong personal vision needs sheckles in the bank and I hope they pull bigger crowds in the States for their sake. Gen seemed in a good mood though and having a great time on stage. There was no 'Godstar', no matter how many people shouted for it.

The atmosphere came crashing down at the end of the night, for me at least, with Jeremy Joseph's urgent tones over the PA ordering everyone out to make way for G.A.Y only about two seconds after Gen had left the stage. I knew that there would be a strict curfew being tight t-shirt night (you have to be at the Astoria on time for gigs on clubnights), but they DID play for two hours so I was more than happy. It was one of those gigs that you come out of blissfully smiling and almost walking on air. Jeremy Joseph would have hated it however and was probably locked away in some ante-chamber wishing death on PTV while unpacking flyers with pictures of Steps on.

Recent Times

2006-09-28T08:41:00.000-07:00

Time for an update, I thought. I really must get into some kind of a routine doing this thing...

Seem to have been to a ridiculous number of gigs in the last few weeks... Patti Smith's paean to Robert Mapplethorpe 'The Coral Sea' was pretty amazing. She did it as part of Meltdown last year and we saw almost everything she did for that except The Coral Sea, so we were pleased to have another chance.

Saw The Fall in the sweatbox that is 93 Feet East. Mark E. Smith seems suited to long small dark rooms rather than huge echoic chambers. Also saw The Cult for the first time at Brixton. One of those bands I grew up with but by the time I was old enough to get to gigs on my own they had turned into Guns and Roses... but no matter. They played 'Spiritwalker' which made me VERY happy... and Love Removal Machine which practically had Crazy G playing air guitar. For the encore, Ian Astbury shouted 'She Sells Sanctuary' rather than sang it... it seemed a shame to throw away such a classic but he's probably sick to death of it. I prayed for a Southern Death Cult tune but no joy. That would have made my YEAR... Once a Goth, always a Goth I guess...

Have also been enjoying Club Lippy, hosted by DJ Lush and Kirsten Glass at the Vauxhall, which is becoming firmly established on Friday nights. The numbers are climbing and they've been having some brilliant bands on like Motormark and Kings Have Long Arms. Last week Samuel Beckett's 'Not I' flickered from the stage while Lush played one of the best sets ever. The turn was Pam Hogg who I'd only ever seen singing once before at Marvellous when the sound let her down a bit but she was great at Lippy. She played a couple of her videos (one had Siouxsie in) before she took to the stage... all gold sequins, big shades and tequila. She only forgot the words once (blaming the tequila)... but hey, she's a diva! Who cares! She looked and sounded great.

Artwise we just saw 'How to Improve the World' at the Hayward, a celebration of sixty years of the Arts Council Collection. Over 130 artists, big names and small names, pulled out from dusty racks and provincial museums. It's a broad survey... one of those 'licquorice allsorts' shows. Something for everyone!

There's a magestic Leon Kossoff (up there with the gods in my humble opinion), a Lucien Freud, a Bacon pope AND David Hockney's 'We Two Boys Together Clinging', which sorts of smells of unrequited love in college art rooms. Talking of smelling of oil paint there's also a rare chance to see Bruce Bernard's photographs of Leigh Bowery modelling for Freud, that seem to take on Freudian colouring.

Also enjoyed Frank Auerbach, Patrick Caulfield, and the Sarah Lucas photo self-portraits which have a tremendous strength hung en-masse.

I LOVED Gilbert & George's early films 'Portrait of Two Young Men', which features George smoking stylishly while Gilbert looks perplexed and 'Gordons Makes Us Drunk'. The Gordons film is 20 minutes of G&G getting slowing pissed on gin in their front room in Fournier Street (before they bought the whole house) in 1972, with something like 'Land of Hope and Glory' (but not) blaring out while somebody, probably George, gloomily dones...Gordon's makes us drunk.... Gordon's makes us drunk... Gordon's makes us drunk... over and over. I found it uplifting, and actually quietly hilarious. Also loved their photo-piece 'Smashed' from the Dirty Words series of 1977, and, speaking of G&G, there's a David Robilliard in the show.

David Robilliard was an artist and poet, who is scarcely remembered now but shared a studio with Andrew Heard in Brick Lane in the 80's and was a young protege of G&G. They helped by publishing his poetry in beaufiful limited edition books called things like 'Inevitable' and 'Swallowing Helmets' (ahem). He wrote bullet-like snippets on love and romance and the detritus of daily life (or should that be residue?)... Sometimes sexual, mostly scowling. My favourite poem of his I know off by heart... It's called 'Dear John' :- 'I'm sick of love behind the scenes / They all come and go / Forgotten names and faded jeans / John, now that we have left our teens / I think it's time to tell you / You're the man of my dreams/ It's up to you, John / Know what I mean?' I love that... (I can do some of his and about six of Ezra Pound's). In my opinion his most powerful line is 'My private hell is hiding my happiness', which is sad when you know that he died of AIDS in 1988 aged 36. I was so excited I could have burst when I saw his picture on show; and moved when I read that it was bought in the year of his death.

Wandering out of the Hayward, my head swirling with sixties painters and Brick Lane poets, I got 'doorstepped' (is that the word?) by a nice young man from The Times 'Information' section. One of those 'what did you think' things. I was quite happy to rabbit on for five minutes and then I had my picture taken ('Would you like the Raybans on or off?'). I don't think G got asked because he was wearing grey marl.

Also enjoyed Hans Bellmer at the Whitechapel last week. It amused me that a woman with a loud posh voice and two seven year olds in tow was asking at reception 'Excuse me,,, is the Bellmer suitable for young children?' and was told 'Well, it depends how broadminded you are...' I'll say! Don't go if dark images of sexual obsession turn your tum... For the uninitiated Bellmer fled the rise of Hitler in 30's Germany finding solace in the surrealists of Paris who welcomed with open arms his creepy obsession with photographing sinister plaster dolls abandoning themselves to snuff scenes and sexual onslaught. He was not widely known in his lifetime, simply because his work was so damm shocking, but I've noticed in recent years various books and shows cropping up from time to time, and this must be one of the only chances to see so many Bellmer photographs, drawings, books and sculptures all in one place.

But it's not for the fainthearted... This show is jam-packed to bursting with strange dolls tied to trees in dark woods, twisted sexualities, fantastical gang rapes, multi-limbed predators and all-in three-into-one sexual violence. All manner of orifices, thrusting organs and faceless rapes... His work IS monstrous, and very quickly upsetting, but Bellmer is admired today for having smashed through traditional notions of sexuality like a bull in a china shop. Even if you hate the subject matter, and many do, go for the drawings. There are a small number of drawn traditional views and they're among the best drawings I've seen. Bellmer's draughtmanship was of course eclipsed by the bigger darker picture. He's probably a bit of an artist's artist really. It's sort of surrealism crossed with sexual violence. Your mum probably wouldn't like it but it's a strong show and makes even the most shocking contemporary artists look as dangerous as humpty dumpty.

http://www.hayward.org.uk
http://www.whitechapel.org

"A Year in Yorkshire"

2006-09-14T06:47:00.000-07:00

To Annely Juda for the pre-private-view private view of DH's new show 'A Year in Yorkshire'. 25 stunningly spatial views of Bridlington and surrounds in highly charged colour.

The gallery was a third full if that, just friends and models, some collectors. Lashings of very fine champagne and platters of beautiful sushi, most of which Gerald ate, and posh things on chicory and/or banana leaves floating past continually. Having spoken to the great man himself who called earlier in the day and was 'dreading it, love', we were thrilled for him and for us that they'd put on this special night and kept the numbers manageable. He's very deaf and just can't hear at all in crowded rooms. A good many artist friends rocked up (proper senior ones... no messing about) and friends from Kensington and Los Angeles. David's sister margaret who I hadn't seen for five or six years got the train down from Bridlington.

Importantly, because it was reasonably quiet, you could actually see the work. I'd been sent a catalogue, which was breathtakingly beautiful in itself, but the real work brought me up short, as it always does. Some of the paintings are sunny and light, nanny England fried in death valley heat, some are wintery and cold. But even the cold ones are full of terrifically loud colour. Some colours don't appear to make sense from three feet away but step back further and they pull together. Pinks become misty dewy mornings, purples become shadowy country lanes. In the Summer pictures the cornfields roast in the sun and the yellows blaze so intensely that they light up the room. And the skies are among the best I've seen him do.

Even the looser paintings have a deftness of touch and it's just very good quality work. Expertly made, pleasing and joyful... The critics will hate it but that hardly matters.

These paintings make me want to expand my 'childhood explorations' by setting up an easel in a Shropshire field or returning to Cornish resorts to paint memory charged locations. Can I show trad 'oils on canvas' alongside 'difficult' projected dvd's of emotional reminisances and conceptual looking collages?... Yes of course I bloody can !!!!

The 'opening' itself is tonight, but without the artist. It really was a private view, in the true sense of the word. Not a piss up where you can't see the work. Absolute quality.

David Hockney 'A Year in Yorkshire'
Annely Juda Gallery:
Until 18th October 2006
http://www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk

'British Art' Bristol Fashion

2006-08-07T05:59:00.000-07:00

We went to Bristol at the weekend to see Crazy G's Mum who has recently moved there from Lancaster and tie in the British Art Show. My geography is rubbish but it was an amazingly easy journey, only an hour and 40 from Paddington. Once you've read the papers and had a couple of gins you're there.

The British Art Show is a Hayward Gallery touring exhibition that has already called at Gateshead, Manchester and Nottingham. It happens every five years and is an attempt to highlight current practice trends among artists living and working in the U.K. The intention is that it is not a survey of college prizewinners or 'tips for the top' and one of the things I found so valuable about the show was that the majority of the artists being shown were well into their mid-late thirties. In my humble opinion this is actually one of the most interesting periods in an artist's development. If you've not dried up, burnt out or just got bored at continually plugging away by then the chances are the work has fallen into a weighty stride. I think this is why I enjoyed it so much. Interestingly, about half of the 60 or so artists featured were born outside of the UK.

The show is spread across Arnolfini, Bristol City Museum, the Royal West of England Academy and several smaller sites. It doesn't show in London but hey, why shouldn't we travel out from time to time!

At Arnolfini I was bowled over by Ergin Cavusoglu's four-screen video installation 'Tahtakale'. It's set in an bazaar in Istanbul. Two screens focus on a small group of contraband money changers, a third screen sets out their speech and activity in rolling text like credits for a movie, and a fourth screen shows porters carrying baggage. The screens are suspended in a darkened room with a booming soundtrack of a male voice choir singing some kind of early religious choral music. The music is cleverly set at an inescapable volume and the effect is like walking into a small cathedral or chapel. I liked the way that the projected screens are suspended in such a way that you have to move around as they're not all visible at once.

I also enjoyed Anna Barriball's found photographs, blurred sepias of unknown people made sinister with ink filled soap bubbles lightly burst over them. The little ticks and splashes catch the features of the unknowns as though bouncing off them, like little pops of ectoplasm. Very nicely framed too, which sounds glib but I'm sick of seeing work on paper pinned up with those clear archival pins.

At City Art Gallery I enjoyed Mark Titchner's lightbox, typography like political sloganeering and presented mandala-like. I was interested to read that he calls on elements of Austin Osman Spare and the Golden Dawn. I like the idea of Occult informed billboards and there's not enough of the Occult in modern art in my book.

At the Royal West of England Academy we enjoyed Hew Locke's huge queen heads, built up of plastic tatt from pound shops, glistening swords, insects and gaudy flowers. I found I wanted to spend more time with them, they're made up of so much sheer stuff it's hard to tear yourself away.

Our highlight of the entire show, also at the Academy, was Phil Collins' 'They Shoot Horses'. Young palestinian teenagers disco-dancing to loud Ricky Martin and suchlike on and on for as long as possible. Two screens in a pitch black room, five dancers tightly cropped into one, and a smaller screen with I think four dancers. A mixture of girls and boys, different shapes and sizes. Some take breaks, some get bored then find a second wind, some keep on and on inventing their own little disco interpretations. Some even do back-flips. It's brilliantly funny and very quickly trance inducing. They're always in shot and must have been dancing in roped off rectangles to keep them from straying.

It's the second piece I've seen by Phil Collins. The other was 'Dunya Dinlemiyor' in New York, of Turkish teenagers singing along to the Smiths in a similarly marathon excercise. From my blog at the time:- "...it was shot in Istanbul in 2005 for the Istanbul Biennal and features various 'disaffected youths' singing karaoke Smiths songs. Some are clearly fans, like the camp young shirtless teen with plastic roses (in lieu of gladioli) sticking out of his back pocket who flounced his way through 'Ask' (and was actually rather good). Some however have almost certainly never heard a Smith tune in their lives (like the two girls who stumbled through 'Panic')… At first sight it's deeply, rivetingly hilarious, but a few songs in and the lyrics and vulnerability of the singers come together to make a deeply touching piece...".

This piece was similarly affecting. Underlying is that Collins' work is rooted in areas of conflict and political difficulty and after a few minutes I found my grin had subsided, and I was thinking about people's lives half a world away.

We also saw some 'other art' at the City Museum, including a Richard Long slate sculpture unfairly crammed in a corner but worse was that the gaps between the slate chunks were filled with dirt and detritus. Someone needs to get their feather duster out! They had some fantastic pictures tho, including a great Wyndham Lewis and a Scott-Tuke which seemed fitting given that Bristol is brimful to bursting with fresh faced boys with 'roll in the hay' West-Country accents.

Talking about Bristol itself I'd never been before and quite enjoyed it. The harbour area is pretty but crammed full of chain bars and so probably carnage by closing time on a Saturday nite (marauding youths, decorative but dangerous). Luckily we had local knowledge and so found some great bars and restaurants.

It's a great place for a nite or two and the British Art Show is on until mid-Sept.

"Quick'n'Dirty/Black'n'white"

2006-07-31T11:47:00.000-07:00

Sunday I felt like a bag of s*it after a particularly excessive 'Thursday-thru-Saturday' which I've no wish to bore anyone with but nevertheless struggled to the Publish & be Dammed self-publishing fair at Arnold Circus in Shoreditch.

P&BD is a annual gathering of independently produced fanzines, journals and various other ideas on paper, with assorted posters, stickers, badges and manifestos and all points inbetween. The fair was held at Rochelle School with stallholders attending from far and wide.

Visited my favourites 'Arty' and 'Garageland' published by Transition Gallery and Karen D'amico's 'Tangent' (I did some pages for the 'Inter-national' issue the other month). Sarah Doyle was there too with her beautiful paper jewellery and drawings and badges.

Needless to say it was fanzine heaven and I discovered a tonnage of new material... xeroxed little books of wisdom I had not previously been aware of. I'd not made it to previous fairs and I gather that this year was the busiest yet in terms of participants. The stallholders set out their wares outside in the play area and in the alleyway, in the school hall and classrooms. The variety was pretty amazing. Stephen Willet's 'Control' looks like a far-right political pamphlet from the '70's, whereas others look like hippie rags. Some follow a long standing narrative like Olivia Plender's comic strip 'The Masterpiece' (Episode 5: 'The Road to Ruin') or the hard-hitting psychogeographic exploration 'Savage Messiah' by Laura Oldfield Ford. Savage Messiah is beautifully produced and a labour of love incorporating hand colouring. Some are highbrow but accessible, some not so. Some are literary like 'Pen Pusher' which I'd not come across before, and some are just great fun and a bit silly and most things only a quid or two.

There is a 'Publish & be Dammed' archive at Canal for the next few weeks, weblink below.

www.publishandbedamned.org
www.canalonvyner.org
www.tangent.org.uk
www.artymagazine.com
www.transitiongallery.co.uk

In Search of Art...

2006-07-24T13:15:00.000-07:00

On Saturday Crazy G and I decided to explore South East London in search of cultural interest. We headed to Temporary Contemporary, who've been going a couple of years, but the space wasn't open. Then we discovered the excellent new gallery 'Mashed Potato' in the same building as TC at the Old Seager Distillery Building. Their current show is 'Muscular Pet', an exhibition of work by an artistic collective of recent graduates called Black Cube.

Our favourite piece was by David Atkins, who makes sensitive plantlife out of tissue paper and watercolour. It was fragile and tiny, sprouting from middle of the floor and only about 20cms high. We were so busy chatting to one of the artists in the show, that we almost missed it. In fact we would have missed had it not been pointed out (just in time... it was in danger of being destroyed by G's big clumsy feet).

There was no info on the artists though. It was a big room full of interesting work but no information on who was who or even a mention of the collective's website. I guess you had to ask (which I happily did) but a lot of people wouldn't.

Wandered to the Bear Space gallery up in Deptford High Street, which according to the listings opens at 12 but we were there at 12.45 and all was locked and dark. Galleries being closed when they're supposed to be open actually make me quietly furious. It's a crime against artists in my book because the gallery can never second guess who's planning to pop down. I've been lucky a few times with reviewers for example with no inkling or notice that any luck was on the cards (it's an odd sensation opening The Independent on the tube and seeing that you're 'Pick of the Week'... one of those pinch me moments) . Not opening the gallery when you're supposed to removes any sort of lucky chance for the artist and gets my goat, frankly.

Anyway, thankfully APT (Art in Perpetuity Trust) were open. I've seen the place listed for years and often thought 'Creekside' sounded like a cool address: sort of dropsically dickensian and narrow, lots of old wood, with willow trees and tidal reflections (in reality it's a dusty slip road through an industrial estate).

APT is huge, with a long-standing block of artists studios attached that subsidise the gallery space. We enjoyed Alex Ramsey's exhibition 'Nowhere Special'. Alex lives and works in Ladywell and teaches at Central St.Martins. His paintings are big and dark, lots of paynes greys and inky-stained backgrounds with strange signs and symbols scattered all over in waveringly unsteady white chalk. The chalkings falter and fade in and out across the large canvases, like snippets of stories or chattering voices struggling to be heard. Alex was invigilating his own show (a braver man than me) "I'm the artist!... can't you tell by my scuffy t-shirt?" so we had an interesting chat about South East London. Talking to Alex reminded me how much I enjoy talking to older artists.

After that we had a look at the Laban Centre which I thought was mildly terrific (but not blow-your-head-off terrific) then continued towards Greenwich into more familiar territory, but unfortunately it started raining and we decided to cut our Cultural Exploration short. Greenwich is definately a sunny sort of place, or an autumnal one, so we went round the sales in Canary Wharf instead. I purchased a veritable bounty. A 'tootal' blue and white stripy silk scarf with tassles, a skull and crossbones tie from Cecil Gee (I'll buy anything with skulls on, it's the goth in me), and a pinstripe waistcoat (a bargain at £12). I also toyed with the idea of a panama hat from John Lewis but decided it might look a bit silly.

I must admit artistically speaking I've given South East London a wide berth for several years. There used to be a superb project space called Gallery Fresh on Greenwich High Road in about 1999. They did some great group shows called Disaster, Concrete Jungle, Go Girl Show Girl and Diamond Geezers and were always in Time Out. I did two solo shows with them. The first was practically a sell out, with the great and the good beating a path to the door, but the second kicked off (or rather spluttered into life) with a lacklustre private view on a dark and rainy October night in 2000 with a grand total of about six people over two hours. The opening was inexplicable and an omen of things to come as I sold one piece for £500 when I needed £5,000. Living solely off my work at the time meant that I lost my flat in the aftermath and art and South-East London have not sat well with me ever since!

I intend to resume cultural explorations into South East London again soon; if anyone has any suggestions of venues I might not have come across I'd be grateful.

www.mashedpotatogallery.com
www.aptstudios.org
www.theblackcube.co.uk
www.tempcontemp.co.uk

New Work and Explorations

2006-07-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

This is a large mixed media collage called 'The Boscastle Flood (or the Death of Memory)'; it's about my memories of our childhood holidays in and around Boscastle and the recent destruction of the place in the flood that swept it all away in August 2004. It's made up of a repeated image of the flood damage overlaid with the same image torn and painted. There are also details of family photos blown-up and incorporated and all worked over in paint, charcoal and pastel. If you look closely you'll see the 'Witch's House' (actually a long-standing Museum of Witchcraft, now restored), various wishing wells and gnomes, there's also the 'Pixie House' from Boscastle Harbour (now a clothes shop). My brother is at the top left of the picture inexplicably blinding himself with a couple of ginger nuts and my sister is on the right hand side being trodden on by my brother. All the images apart from the flood damage are from my parent's photo albums. I've not been back since I was a child although my parents visited the place last year. They sent me postcards "so many lovely memories here", and I might use them in a piece of work.

This is 'Teenage Lightning'; an obsessive portrait of the young East End boxer Kevin Mitchell:-

I've painted Kevin before for my show 'London Youth' in Clerkenwell in 2004. It's a picture about teenage energies and ambition, and Kevin is for me a tough summing up of that one chance you get before a bigger picture starts to take over. This piece made me think alot about the direction of my work at the moment. I abandoned my own painted East End Teens for making work based on my own personal history... and I was interested to find myself drawn to teenage life again, but I think it's all the same subject really. It's all about young life and the battles therein. The title comes from the Coil song of the same name. The piece also incorporates Kevin's autograph to me 'For Stephen From Kev'... and four large bloody hearts which go nicely with the red boxing gloves.

God knows what the boy himself would think. We didn't actually meet when I painted him a couple of years ago: I made the pictures from Harry Borden's contact sheets (he'd photographed Kevin for the Observer and gladly lent me his material from the shoot). I did write Kevin a letter, with an invite to the private view (his portrait was on the card) but he didn't reply. He probably thought it was a bit wierd, being painted... I remember Harry saying that it was odd to think of such a handsome (dare I say 'pretty'?) baby face being attached to such a dangerous body, and it was that thought that stayed with me while I was painting the crackling electricity that surround the multiple barechested Kev's. The idea that he could inflict serious disabling damage or even kill with his bare hands captivates me.

Talking of dangerous boys (and I never tire of it), I was strongly attracted to a sad news story a little over a year ago, of a teenage bully who murdered his classmate. The photos in the papers of both boys affected me deeply, it seemed such a sad loss of energetic young lives. The murderer in particular, Charles Manson eyes and pretty boy looks, struck me. I attempted to explore this 'look' by way of a repeated image that I wanted to look kind a kind of psychological study, with small nuances of mood brought about by subtle collage and little twists and adjustments.

I also did a number of single studies, overworked in paint, and mostly of the blown-up press photo staring out of darkness or splattered with blood. They all catch the eyes, but each one's different. Lost child here, blood drenched little assassin there.

Other small projects I've been working on include a series called 'Fragments' being repeated images and single small pieces of inscriptions from inside the front pages of my Doctor Who books from when I was a kid. One in particular is called 'The Sad Day', and the inscription commemorates the day that Tom Baker turned into Peter Davidson. I've also been exploring Merlin's Cave with a series of painted studies largely based on old fashioned postcards bought off ebay. Merlin's Cave was a very magical and special place for me as a child, as was all of Tintagel and Boscastle. I've also made a small series of cut-away photos, where fragments of place, lifted from family photos again, are suspended in whiteness, as though lost and distant.

I'm hoping to make a small film which records my emotional reaction to a film I used to watch as a kid that still provokes a strong reaction in me, but having little knowledge in that direction I may need a collaborator. I want to record my grown-up reaction to remembered sadnesses and joy, in real time; my reaction being the full length of the film.

I've also been working on some paintings of the 'Witch of Wookey', from Wookey Hole in Somerset, another important place (you've probably gathered by now that anywhere involving witches, demons, buried sleeping Kings and the like was pretty much guaranteed to fire my attention as a kid). The Witch is actually a frozen stalagtite(mite?) formed in an oddly unsettling witch-like form that sits underground in the caves. The legend was that she was turned to stone by a parson for having eaten a child from the village. Needless to say I believed it.

This is a snap shot of the studio, or rather a corner thereof.

The Power of Paint

2006-07-13T06:13:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I made the pilgrimage to ‘Ye Oldie Tatey’ to see the Constable show. It’s the first and potentially only chance to see Constable’s ‘Six Footer’ landscapes alongside their corresponding full size preliminary canvases.

The difference between the finished pieces and the worked up studies is immense. Where the finished canvases are majestically detailed and highly finished, the sketches are vigorous, with a rough-edge. They are as compositionally correct as the finished pieces but the studies look more like real life. The skies have a distance and movement, and because the brushstrokes are unpolished and racing all over your eye travels around, like in real landscape, rather than a stilted hopping from detail to finished detail and thinking how well painted they are.

The big sketches make the finished paintings look as dull as old boards. Maybe at the time the sketches would have been seen as unpracticed and messy but the life is there. Amazingly (or rather perhaps not) the ‘Constable Shop’ hasn’t got a single postcard of one of the sketches, but loads of the dullards. Extraordinary.

I scrawled some notes about the sketches on my ticket:-

“View on the Stour”
White Paint Hurtling Out
SNOWBLIND SKIES

Roaring Skies Eating into the Landscape
The Sketches are Alive

“Sunlight on the Lock”
This is Noisy Countryside, there is WORK going on

In the SKETCH
the Muscles of The White Horse are ready to move
Toiling; Smell of earth; Dappled Sky

FEEL THE DAY
in these Autumn Afternoons

Then I went round the Hodgkin. I didn’t enjoy this show as much as the one the Hayward did ten years ago, mind you its worth going to experience the shock of the slightly muddy-salmon-pink washed walls that make the first room look like sort of Mediterranean themed café. HH picked the colours himself apparently but why someone so interested in colour would wish his pictures to sink into the walls is beyond me. I didn’t think the walls did anything to assist the pictures at all. They sort of sucked them up.

I’ve never met him but have an idea of his temperament and sensitivity and I think that the fact that he’s a shy and emotional man is a good starting point for these paintings.

I think the earlier work is interesting as information but it’s only in the late ‘80’s that he really hit his stride and the shapes and dots became fluid and free. I admire him for sticking to his guns. He’s a definite example of hitting on a language, developing it and keeping to it.

One of my favourites is the ‘Sad Flowers’ painting, where I think that his curious language comes together successfully. I also like ‘Lovers’, which I call ‘the fucking picture’ or the ‘Spermy Fried Egg’. Amazing that it took him eight years to paint a lustful lunge that would have lasted only moments. I also like the smaller studies that seem like rememberances of love affairs or dinners in far-flung hotels.

As if by magic, as he got more celebrated, the paintings got bigger and he got quicker at them, and I thought the last room was deeply disappointing. ‘Come Into the Garden Maud’ makes no sense to me, it doesn’t tell me anything. I wouldn’t have remembered it if it wasn’t for the title. It’s very big, and a sort of sketchy not quite there garden, with odd shapes in charcoal and some faint gestures of grass and roses over almost bare plywood. Perhaps that’s Maud for you, but it leaves me feeling flat.

I cant’ remember anything much about the other paintings at the end of the show. On the other hand, the pictures in previous couple of rooms are heavyweight emotional slabs.

More notes:-

Personal Memory Art.
Remembering the glint of an eye
Reflected Restaurant Walls in Glassware
Loving Abroad

Only he knows the origination of the green surround in “Clean Sheets’,
or the gash of tulip red.

Some are easy to read
Venetian glamour
The colours are his but most mean nothing unless you were there

Romances are played out in the Plazzo Albrizi
Whose are the shorts in ‘Bermudas’?

Whose indeed!… in fact I realised that the paintings made me think more about HH’s life rather than considering them in the light of my own, which I think most good emotional painting does because it can jolt you into remembering.

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/constable/rooms/3-riverstour.htm

The Great Outdoors

2006-07-05T09:10:00.000-07:00

No blog activity for about three weeks... It's not often that the job du jour overshadows my artistic practice but June is the busiest month in my particular line of (day)work unfortunately.

I've been doing 12-hour days, in at 7am and often not leaving the office until 8 or 9 then falling out onto Bishopsgate exhausted and into a cold vat of rewarding lager. The idea that some people work like this all the time horrifies me. Deskbound and necking pints... it's doing wonders for the waistline but at least I'm keeping the 'Wolf from the Door'.

Luckily, amidst the awful day-job drudgery I sold four paintings last week. The studio is so near the City I met the buyer in my lunchbreak (changing out of the pinstripes first), did the deal and was back at my desk at 2.15... talk about a double life! BTW not that anyone probably gives a toss but I wanted to post a batch of new work on here a couple of weeks ago and on the site (currently being overhauled having been advised by my web man that it had got ‘nonsensical and sprawling’). But then my camera bust and Sony have yet to finish mending it so fat chance of photographing anything at the moment.

In other news we went to see the wonderful Depeche Mode at the O2 Wireless Festival in Hyde Park. That David Gahan looks pretty good though doesn't he!? …all things considered. I’d not seen them before. Fave tunes were 'Enjoy the Silence' and 'Photographic'. No probs getting a drink on demand and all very well organised and civilised, as were The Cure and REM on other Hyde Park visits. In fact *makes thoughtful face* is it a sign of getting old when you like an nice orderly toilet queue and you appreciate being able to get a drink without having to join in any pushing and shoving?

We also saw the Pet Shop Boys at the Tower of London last week. Day-job-horror threatened to cause a cancellation but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

It was classic old fashioned PSB full-on DISCO SHOWTIME with some great tunes, great sound and stunning visuals. They had a big square white cube that opened out and up and housed lights and projections, including a disco-dancing soldier (an echo of Jarman’s promos). They’ve got a new book coming out called ‘Catalogue’ all about the visual history of PSB and I can't wait. They've always had an interesting, artful stance.

The 'big white cube' must have evolved into twenty different backdrops, and even had dancers high within it for one song. I liked the way they incorporated some of their own early video imagery into the films too. It was lucky it was busy visually because the only problem with the nite was the fact that the stage was quite low and the seating area was flat. Even though we were reasonably near the front it was still difficult to see the boys themselves even though everyone stood up (although I am short). We would have been better off in the cheap seats in the raised area cos everyone rushed forward into the aisles anyway. In fact at this Tower lark you can safely see all from the pavement on Tower Hill itself if you’ve half a mind. Quite nice to have a gig 15mins walk from home too and we bumped into loads of familiar faces and some friends who’d been picnicking on the grass (but don’t fancy the idea of that especially).

Favourite tunes were Minimal / I'm with Stupid / Suburbia / Rent / Shopping / Where the Streets have no Name / Opportunities and Dreaming of the Queen. Loved those ‘80s ones. Anyone got a Vid of 'It Couldn't Happen Here' to lend? Or Derek Jarman's 'Projections'? I’ve fallen back in love with them.

So, horror of horrors I've decided at long last that I like outdoor music things (as long as it's not raining and/or muddy).

The idea of mixing music and mud always reminds me of watching Magenta Davine on Network Seven at Glastonbury in the '80s. Dressed up the nines and picking her way around a sloppy field like a dowager in disgust. She SO couldn't wait to get back to her winnebago. She coloured my opinion of such things right there and then (I was only 13) and it's held firm ever since. Mud just doesn't equal 'good times' and/or 'nice outfit' but as long as the weather holds I may be ok for my FIRST festival type experience at 'V' next month. Bring on the sedan chair!

A Boy in the Bush

2006-06-12T06:04:00.000-07:00

While the rest of London was going 'football crazy football mad' on Friday evening I made the long and unpleasantly humid trip across London on quite possibly the hottest day of the year so far to the little known Bush Hall over in Shepherds Bush (about 10 mins walk west of the Empire). I was there to rendezvous avec her Royal Haughtiness the Right Nasty Dawnella for Boy George's first solo gig in ooooh aeons.

Unforch DRN's transport from Crystal Palace was cancelled and finding myself with about an hour and 20mins to spare (in so NOT my stomping ground being naturally gravitated to the East of things) decided to explore Shep Bush. I had a quick look around the market and the shopping centre which isn't very exciting but I managed to kill 20 mins in Books Etc and purchased Crazy G's 'Idler' and a book about the Assassins (medieval Islamic sect of murderous young boys based in a paradise called Alamut and controlled by the 'Old Man of the Mountain', yes I know it's hardly what one could call 'light') and had a couple of very pleasant cold lagers and a burger in the window of Vasbar, opposite O'Neills by the Empire, reading said purchases and nattering with the waitresses feeling a bit like Billy No Mates but thankfully D arrived eventually.

I loved Bush Hall, and was surprised by how beautiful the room is, like a traditional concert room. It's smaller than the Wigmore Hall and more beautiful. Lots of decorative plaster lit from below and crystal chandeliers and only about two-thirds full, if that, although the gig was 'sold out' (probably just a low capacity venue). The bar was nice, lots of familiar faces from Duckie and Le Bar du Retro, had a few nice chats and lots of hello!s, 'oooh isn't this nice!' and 'where the f*ck are we dear took me ages!' kinda thing. Good to be somewhere where you could actually move about freely and get to the bar and the loo's without having a panic attack or getting hopelessly lost and requiring a search party due to having no sense of direction (oh that'll just be me then).

We missed the 'first turn'. Second on was Amanda Ghost, co-author of that James Blunt song, and a long standing mate of Mr O'Dowd's. Ms Ghost is undoubtedly a talented songwriter but it was a bit middling for me although I wasn't spitting venom like DRN who was clearly diametrically opposed. Must admit her American / cheesey audience interaction was more than a tad wearing.

Time then for more cold beers (bar was air con'ed, concert room most definitely not!) and George took to the tiny stage in a blast of reggae beats, eighties style club-posturing and hand movements. All big hat and big black suit with diamante CND symbols. Such a cool man, and I'm always struck by how large he is (the first time I ever set eyes on him 'in the flesh' was when our eyes met in boots at Piccadilly Circus many years ago but that's another story). I can't quite remember most of the setlist, probably mainly because I'm not the biggest fan, but I enjoyed almost all of it and even some of the newer songs which some reviews I've read slagged off mercilessly. I also enjoyed his throaty interjections and bitchy asides.

Of course there were some Culture Club numbers, and why not. 'Do you Really Want to Hurt Me' was deeply moving and I felt tingles up my spine when he sang the slow beginning (God, they were such a great pop band). 'Everything I Own' was lovely too... and reminded me of all the heroin headlines, or rather the aftermath. I'd never seen him live before, he has such a lovely soulful voice.

Karma Chameleon on the other hand, was his last tune of the encore and that turned into an 80's sing-a-long; not my thing but perhaps George needed to give the (oddly square) crowd what it wanted. I would have preferred The Crying Game followed by something by The Twin (which probably wouldn't have got 'em hollering) or Jesus Loves You (which probably would). Or Funtime!

I bought some fantastic B-Rude badges in the bar which I shall be wearing with pride. Boy George I adore you.

I didn't accompany Dawn to Yo! Suzi afterwards as I was gearing up for two solid days of finishing off new work (and would be showing you the results on here now had my camera not decided to give up on me this morning!)... I had a very productive weekend while Crazy G was transplanted to the sofa in 'the football room'. Even the cat (who hates me) came to join me once or twice such was G's overriding involvement. I guess I better get used to it for the next few weeks!

Superstar DJ !

2006-05-26T03:41:00.000-07:00

To La Bar du Retro last nite for 'Who's in your Record Bag?'.
My set list ran thus:-

Psychic TV - Papal Breakdance
Into a Circle - Inside Out
Banshees - Make up to Break Up
Andi Sex Gang - Ida Ho
Gene Loves Jezebel - Worth Waiting For

I hadn't done it for a few weeks, the last time being Hayloid's birthday when I was far too pis*ed to be playing records and f*cked up everything; that put me off for a few weeks (oh! the shame)... however last nite I ROCKED! Horrah!! (and quite probably due to a couple of pints of sturdy pepsi max prior to said set).

Psychic TV worked well... it's not even a very well known PTV but one bloke came up to the booth to thank me for playing it so I was very chuffed by that. Into a Circle and/or Getting the Fear always sounds cool... and even Crazy G came dashing up to say he wants it on his iPod 'Oh my GOD is this Bee's voice! WOW!' Indeed it is. Still criminal that In2aO weren't MASSIVE in my humble opinion.

I love the Banshees 'Make Up'... one of their famous early tunes and it's on The Scream reissue. I think Andi's tune sounded good but not sure about Gene Loves. I love that album tho - 'Immigrant'... it's years old now but every now and then I like a bit of gothy 'soft-rock' kinda thing.

In other news we saw the Tiger Lillies at Soho Theatre on Tuesday avec Dawn Right Nasty... I absolutely adore the TL's and wrote about them on my former blog site:- http://stephenarteast.blog.co.uk/main (scroll down, it's called 'From Hell') but that was a show ('Mountains of Darkness') in conjunction with Alexander Hacke and the current Soho Theatre production is solely the TL's and was, if anything, even more brilliant than I could possibly have imagined. Their dark 'demonic jazz cabaret' appeals to my twisted nature AND my sense of humour and with song subjects as diverse as sticking hamsters up your arse, raping one's mother and removing her skin, beastiality, suicide, lonely schizophrenics gassing themselves and all assorted dementia inbetween you never know whether to laugh, cry or, well, just be plain shocked really... Even if you are sitting there thinking 'he can't sing THAT can he?!' the double bass, mad drums and sleazy accordian keep you feet tap tap tapping, and his voice has to be heard to be believed.

If there are any tickets left, Go! It's only on until the 3rd June. A must for all the family.

Oh and Le Bar du Retro have started serving MARTINIS! There's a little chalkboard with a choice of martini cocktails and you get BOWLS OF OLIVES! Oh lord, whatever next. A tinkling piano!? Where are we for god's sake the f*cking Delano Hotel (one of my fave places on earth btw) !!!???... I haven't worked out whether this is a Wonder Wendy initiative or a brewery promotion but I'm staying well clear... I have to stick to weak lager due to the fact that I drink at a hundred miles an hour so I would be on the floor within minutes... I'm also one of those people that speed up as they get drunk whereas most people slow down so I'm stepping away from the chalkboard... (....who am I tryin' to kid!?).

www.tigerlillies.com

Pervy Pottery

2006-05-23T05:29:00.000-07:00

To the British Museum to see the 'Warren Cup'. I walked from Holborn through the backstreets of Bloomsbury, past Howard Hodgkin's house and Atlantis the Occult bookshop in Museum Street (ghosts of Yeats and Crowley). I like Bloomsbury best on overcast Autumn afternoons. It puts me in mind of secret societies, and conversations about magic in dark sitting rooms with ticking clocks and candlelight. When I first met Peter Ackroyd we arranged to meet outside the Museum gates on such an afternoon. At the time I was obsessed with the 'House of Doctor Dee' and spent entire afternoons in the backstreets of Clerkenwell looking for it. When I told Peter this he said 'oh you silly cow it's all a fiction darling you should know that' and of course I did... but I like the idea of blurring fiction and fact. I often forget which is which.

Anyway... Luckily I didn't have to fight my way through too many Sunday afternoon tourists as the cup in just inside the doors in an antechamber. The cup is Roman, but depicts Greek figures, and was probably made in the first century AD by Greek craftsman for a Roman client. It's made of silver and I thought it would be massive, more of an urn than a cup, but it's only 11cms high. It's in a glass case and spotlit from below casting strong shadows.

On both sides are male couples. The first side depicts a bearded older man with a smooth muscular youth lowering himself down with the help of a sort of ceiling strap (bet you can't get those in Clone Zone) whilst a boyservant peeps at them from behind a curtain.

On the other side the older seemingly dominant partner is himself a youth and his 'Beloved' (as they were called) is younger still. In fact, very young.

The first owner of recent times was the American Anglophile Ned Warren, the commissoner of Rodin's 'The Kiss'; thereafter the cup was in a private collection. The British Museum paid £1.8 million for the cup six years ago. It was offered to them half a century ago at a fraction of that price but as the signage guiltily admits because of the climate of the time the object was rejected by the trustees as it would have been impossible to display without risking a huge public outcry.

The room is small, and the cup is center-stage. I expected to find a small crowd of Shocked-of-Tunbridge-Wells types pursing their lips around it but in fact all of life was there and very interested and fascinated everyone looked too... although a number of teenage boys were a bit wide-eyed it has to be said.

The cup is padded out by other examples of early AD sexual depiction on pottery, plates and assorted knick-knacks including some very athletic women with women and even (gasp!) some heterosexuals.

My favourite thing was a large green flying phallus (yes, with wings) with various smaller dicks attached and hung with bells. I asked in the shop for a replica but they don't have one, but quite what you'd do with it I have no idea. I suppose it could be a sexy windchime... I should think it added a sort of frisson to Roman swinging parties and maybe they rang it when it was time to change ends and/or partners.

The first older partnership shown looks at least nearly-legal in a modern context and makes one think that perhaps the Greeks weren't 'all that bad' but then I can't help thinking that the focus of this side of the cup is actually on the boy peeping through the curtain rather than on the partnered figures.

We know now that at that time there was no word to describe homosexuality. Men did not live together and same-sex relationships were not recognised socially, so I was interested that the museum have also hung contemporary visuals of chaps together.

This appears at first glance to be an apt context I can't help thinking that the cup has little to do with gayness by and large, or at least gayness as we we understand it.

"The Warren Cup: Sex and Society in Ancient Greece and Rome" is on until early July

Bertie Berlin... and Last Weekend

2006-05-05T07:30:00.000-07:00

Bank Holiday Saturday was a bit of a right-off... which was a shame as I did want to go to Duckie, but only the spirit was willing. The weekend had started with lashings of lager beer (what a surprise!).... as I was lured at lunchtime by my friend Big Nose. We put the world to rights outside a tiny Olde City pub behind Aldgate in the sunshine over several freezing Carling Extra-Colds... Friday evening I'm ashamed to say we did more of the same with the added pleasure of Mrs Big Nose in attendance at Ye Olde Watling by St. Pauls. It's tres Dickensian: lots of dark corners and old wood. If you're ever looking for a pub near St. Paul's go there instead of one of the blond-wood brigade in the new Paternoster Sq.

I did however purchase a fantastic pair of Raybans in Selfridges (part of my grand plan to revive 'The Glove' photo-shoot fashion: polka-dots, shades, white jackets, and tiger tooth necklaces) but I did get to spend the rest of the day on the sofa (wearing said Raybans) with a bunch of art magazines and Bertie Marshall's new book 'Berlin Bromley'. I've been waiting for this to come out since the reviews started appearing weeks ago (how annoying is it when stuff you want gets reviewed ages in advance !!) and anything club-cultural generally has me hooked.

Bertie (or rather Berlin) was a Bowie fanatic 'Scenester and Rent Boy' and an original member of the Bromley Contingent. He was befriended by the pre-Banshees Siouxsie and Steve Severin. Siouxsie is referred to as SS throughout the majority of the book but not all of it... I don't know whether that's Berlin's pet name for her or perhaps she sues..... Anyway, they hung out at Louises Club and Seditionaires and idolised Cabaret and Christiane F and danced the nite away at Sombrero's on Ken High St and clipp-clopped their way around the West End in a haze of Vodka and Purple Hearts.

The book lurches from Bromley to Soho and back again and there are some lovely moments especially if you're a Banshees fan. I met Siouxsie and Budgie once at an Alan Bennett play of all places at the Piccadilly Theatre. Budgie was chatty and we discussed the lighting and the sets, Siouxsie floated up, all long black fur and gauloise, saying 'Who's it TOO?'... which was slightly embarrassing as I hadn't asked for an autograph and nor would I but we had a good chat for half an hour or so. Once she'd stopped being Joan Collins I enjoyed her lively mind but I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at how interesting she was. I remember being struck by her big beautiful face, like a large square moon.

Anyway back to Bertie Berlin... Boy George lends his celebrity endorsement having written the forward... Amazingly there are a few spelling mistakes and the page-and-a-half chapters don't seem to work after a while (it sort of feels as though it was left unedited); there aren't any pictures either which is a shame cos that would add a lot in terms of texture and I bet he's got tons of great ones. In fact the only pic is the one Steve Severin took on the cover in which Berlin is posing on a bed in a kind of half-drag (but with hairy legs).

Berlin's early rent boy scenes are pretty brutal and the book really does only focus on about two years of Berlin's life experience and I wanted to know more about what happened to him afterwards. There is an epilogue however and he actually travels to Berlin for the first and only time, the place that fostered and informed his attitude and personal culture, probably to recoup something of his earlier energies or at least to connect in some way with the place that so much of what moulded him came from but he seems downbeat and depressed and is running out of funds. We don't really get to find out what happened to him between the two years covered by the book and the recent depression of a squat in Berlin with no money, no fags and no german and probably the crushing realisation that you never get the carefree years back.

It's punchy and short (which suits me due to my damaged attention span) and very readable. It's got BAGS of atmosphere and although I've read quite a lot about 'that scene' it was interesting to read something believable and in the first person rather than something ghosted or distant. I think to call it the 'Post Punk Naked Civil Servant' (as it says on the cover) is being a bit generous... the Marketing Dept I guess. But it's published by SAF, who I think are pretty cool having published 'England's Hidden Reverse' about David Tibet, Coil, Throbbing Gristle and that rather astonishing cast of avant-garde characters so it's worth investigating for that alone.

Artistically I am currently wrestling with collage. I'm up to my neck in repeated images of blown up childhood photos, holidays, my brother and sister, the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, model villages and pixie houses with 5' high boards and enough spraymount to asphixiate a small city.

I completed a HUGE repeated image of a photograph of the Boscastle flooding on Sunday while G was at 'the last home game of the season' (whatever THAT is). I felt emotionally pulled by this large printed riot and set about attacking the board with paint.

I have had some success with my collage explorations and I maintain that the only way to make something worth looking at is to to go mildly mad behind closed doors and lose youself. Normal people would call it 'getting into it'... I mean I make car noises when I paint street scenes for god's sake. Idiot child or serious artist?! Probably idiot child.

Talking about going mildly mad, on Monday we went to Gothic Nightmares at 'Ye Olde Tatey' which thankfully we caught on it's last day... it's a lavish show (but closed now so no point in raving about it) centred around the darkly romantic paintings of Fuseli, William Blake and other loony visionaries. It didn't really tell me anything new, and I'd seen almost all the Blake's before. I was looking forward to finding out more about the connection between literature and dark gothicky painting, but the show didn't really expand on that. I was surprised quite how much the dark romance seeped into popular culture with cartoonists and satirists borrowing well known art-imagery for their cartoonic ends. I guess the print culture was massive and people would have known the paintings from prints that would have been all over the place. I hadn't seen the Fuseli's much and was struck by how practised they were. He's a better painter than Blake for sure, but while Fuseli has technique in spades he didn't have Blake's vision. This was apparent in the last room of the show called 'Revelations' as in the 'Book of'. It was obvious that Blake HAD seen all this stuff, Angels and Devils, or thought he had. He had the ability to see beyond the usual, whereas Fuseli could copy it and inject some playful imagination. I still adore bonkers William Blake.

We also saw the Tate Triennial, which I wasn't expecting to enjoy as it's had such bad reviews. They do it every three years and it's all about new developments in British art and although she's one of my cultural heroes quite what Cosi Fanni Tutti is doing amongst this gang of mid-30-somethings is beyond me! But I was THRILLED to see her... But I would suggest that it's not one for the fainthearted. From the website:-

"For this Triennial, Cosey Fanni Tutti presents her live actions from the late seventies. During this period, she consciously utilised the pornography industry as an apparatus to convey multiple identities. Modelling in the sex industry was one aspect of a wider art project. As founding member of the performance art group COUM Transmission and the Industrial band Throbbing Gristle, Tutti's changing self-image was deployed equally in the worlds of art, music and pornography.

Some of the material you will see beyond this wall was first displayed in 1976 at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London in an exhibition entitled Prostitution mounted by COUM Transmission. Tutti's accompanying captions provide an anecdotal chronicle of and reflections on her lived experience".

I never ever thought I'd see stuff from 'Prostitution'. Cosey was/is terrifically brave and the work is powerfully self-exposing. It must have caused such an outcry at the time.

Needless to say I had to give more than one person a 'Paddington Bear Stare' for nervous tittering...

It's on until 14th May.

Lost in Music... or rather Not

2006-05-03T05:39:00.000-07:00

Oh dear... I feel terrible. Not hungover or anything, just mildly guilty at having walked out of a gig for the first time in my life. And not just any old gig you understand, the Sisters of Mercy Gig.

'The Sisters' are dear to me historically, but Tuesday night at the Astoria was pretty bloody awful. The sound was TERRIBLE!.... Muffled and quiet, squealing feedback and not in a good way. The band kept the gaps between songs to about 5 seconds to cover up the screeching. I don't know enough to know whether this the fault of the venue or the band but the Astoria is hardly large and we were able to have a conversation at normal volume while an unseen Mr Eldritch droned inaudibly somewhere in the customary cloak of dry ice only a short distance away.

Even diehard fans were shouting 'off, Off OFF!' and people were leaving in droves... Ordinarily I'd see it through but this was very bad. I couldn't even make out what they were playing. It was like listening to something in another room!

Comedy value was had however by Crazy G sympathising on the way out with a statuesque lady goth. When G said 'yes I complained as well but they didn't want to know' she looked him up and down said 'well, I'm not surprised dressed like that!' and swooped off with a twirl of her cape. It seems that grey-marl Duffer tops cut no mustard with vampiric ladies of the nite or indeed gothic mixing desks. Dawn and I rather enjoyed poor G's knock-back as you can imagine and we repaired to the pub for a titter. Ha!

Well, in honour of their long-standing importance, and to remind me of the good times, I held a little Sisters disco in my head on the walk to work the morning after courtesy of my iPod. My favourite Sisters tunes are Heartland, Temple of Love (the original version only, please), Alice, Body Electric, Body and Soul, Afterhours, Train.... I could go on. The sad thing about last nite was that the last time I saw them they were great and I couldn't stop dancing. Anyway, I enjoyed my own little inner concert in the sunshine. I had smoke and mirrors AND laserbeam searchlights.

In contrast I LOVED Morrissey on Bank Holiday Monday at Alexandra Palace with Hayloid, Skinny Jake and Kevin. Also met up with Ritchie Rich and saw a few familiar faces.

Hales gets SERIOUS Morrissey Mania and was beginning to blub before we'd even left the Retro... the atmosphere build-up was so tense I thought she was going to burst and needless to say the poor love was practically SCREAMING by the time he eventually took the stage with 'First of the Gang'... I did wonder whether we should have been slightly nearer the medical tent..

Morrissey did 'Still ill' which sent shivers down my spine (how great is it that you can still see someone who can do that!!??) and 'How Soon is Now' but not 'Everyday is like Sunday' or 'Last Night I Dreamt' or Piccadilly Palare' which are my faves. Actually probably just as well for Hales that he didn't do 'Last Night I Dreamt' otherwise we could potentially have had a serious casualty on our hands... (believe me...something akin to beatlemania is alive and well and we've two Sundays at the Palladium to go yet... NURSE!! THE SCREENS!!!)...

We've seen Morrissey a few times before and he seemed more fluid and relaxed this time. At the Albert Hall he was a tad wooden but slightly better at Earl's Court. I'm not a massive fan but always like to see him and I like the laddishness of the crowd, although the Morrissey crew doesn't feel a aggressive these days.

Ally Pally is a great venue with the added bonus of punters being able to smoke and drink anywhere (this is becoming increasing difficult at larger places): you couldn't do a thing at the Cure the other week. The orange squash and no fags brigade are taking over! Only one encore which seemed a bit disappointing but then I guess you should always leave the crowd wanting more... which makes more sense than dispelling them after five songs!

Intimidation in One's Own Back Yard

2006-04-17T05:47:00.000-07:00

A reasonably quiet Easter weekend. We're normally away (last year was a riot of Catholicism and Vino Tinto in Madrid) but this year having just been in New York we decided to stay at home. We wanted to go to Kew Gardens on Good Friday but we had to abandon the idea due to dismal rain and Crazy G feeling a tad 'under the weather' and went to Borough Market instead.

I spent most of Saturday on new work including a montage of large blow-ups of the inside covers of my old Doctor Who books with inscriptions I made when I was about 8 years old, they will form the backdrop to a portrait. I'm also working on a huge montage of a repeated image of the Boscastle flood damage, the basis for a work about childhood holidays (the destruction of magical memories by natural forces). Another piece I'm working on is called 'Kev's world', a collage-based work of young boxer Kevin Mitchell who for me is like a summing up of teenage power and ambition.

I enjoyed watching Doctor Who in the Retro on Saturday, this Doctor has the otherworldliness that Christopher Thingybob lacked. Duckie was excellent on Saturday nite at the new look smarty tarted-up Vauxhall, and Dawn Right Nasty's 'New Look' incorporating heavily beaded drag queen eyelashes set a glamorous tone (although I'm convinced she couldn't see a thing poor love... but as Quentin Crisp once said 'there are others to look where I'm going..." ).

Last nite I repaired to the bar du Retro but sadly no games of Uno were in the offing. G was in merry mood as were many having sat through Twin Peaks all afternoon.

On the way back we popped into Budgens for late snacks and I foolishly remarked (sarcastically) to a woman who had pushed in front of me in the queue 'thank you for being polite' as we moved our stuff over to the other checkout to be served. I didn't of course see her big burley cockney husband who was standing ten feet away minding their tatty luggage. They were probably just back from some holiday. She of course went straight up to him and duly complained. ''Ere Terry you'll never guess wot e just said" I then had a punch-drunk 6.5 foot tall maniac in my face (or near to my face him being a foot taller than me and a good deal broader). I was so shocked I couldn't say a word but my face clearly riled him and he decided there and then that he was going to smash me to pieces. I know i've sometimes got a pouting self-satisfied snottiness about me (as Crazy G has remarked many times during rows and bust-ups) especially if I'm feeling under attack. My accent doesn't do me any favours either (good job I was too stunned to speak) but I've never been called 'Cunty' before (or at least only affectionately by Joan Dairy Queen) and asked whether I'd like 'to be fucking killed' by someone who, in that moment, meant it.

Luckily, and thankfully, Crazy G stood between me and Chalky the Punch Drunk (or should it be 'Battling Burrows' out of Broken Blossoms with Lillian Gish? I'll be Lillian) and calmed him down. The staff did their best but they probably get that once a night being on the Whitechapel Road.

I've been beaten up a couple of times, largely due to unwise East End wonderings. The worst was on Burdett Road, and I'm still a bit deaf in one side from being kicked in the head outside Lidl supermarket by a drunken man shouting homophobic abuse. I've also been mugged by several teenagers at once (those kids are impossible to fight off en masse) in an estate off Brick Lane, but again my own fault for taking shortcuts in a pin stripe suit twirling an umbrella like Burlington Fucking Bertie. I was pleased they didn't have a blade as the mugging was in such a remote side turning that I may not now be alive.

Other than that I'm pleased to say I've only had a few bits of money stolen by no-good rough trade boyfriends (an important lesson in fantasy versus reality!) which I suppose is a sort of domesic mugging minus the high drama of being slammed against a wall (although not always). I've been roughed up in Aldgate for my mobile (happily surrendered and with relief) and I've also had money nicked as a result of drug taking, being too strung out to neither know nor care. But this is all my fault, for looking for adventure when I should have been looking over my shoulder.

So having been in London for around 15 years it's not often that I've encountered violence or come face to face with potential violence, and this guy scared the shit out of me or, more correctly, us.

We naturally gave them a few moments to leave, and leaving that shop was terrifying, being at the mercy of quiet Whitechapel back-streets. But he'd disappeared thank God.

I'm left feeling that I should do something about it, but i don't think there's anything I can do nor would it merit it. It felt like an assault of sorts but I was in the wrong in the first place and shouldn't have made the sarcastic comment I did. God knows what would have happened if G hadn't have been with me.

There are worse horror stories of course, and perhaps I'm feeling sorry for myself, but the overriding feeling I have today is why didn't I keep my fucking gob shut. Lesson learnt.

(Re)SEARCH and DESTROY!

2006-04-13T06:09:00.000-07:00

'The lord chisels still, so don't leave your bench for long'....
Gilbert & George

Studios are powerhouses, workshops that should be about research and focus.

I can work anywhere as long as it's a dedicated space, and often if it's not, and I've had several fantastic studios. My favourite was in Pixley Street in Limehouse, in the next street to my old flat. I had 400 square feet on the roof of an industrial building off Burdett Road, with an amazing outdoor roof terrace. The bills were paid by my then gallery who were selling my London paintings like hot cakes; I didn't have to do anything other than get up in the morning and walk round the corner and paint, and barely saw an invoice for anything... but then the work took a change of direction and I was dropped like a stone. My next studio was at Cable Street Studios. An enormous Victorian former sweet factory at the corner of Cable Street and Butcher Row and amazingly its still in use as studios and hasn't been turned into posh flats (yet).

These days I have to live-work due to having the job du jour. If I had to schlep up the wrong end of the Hackney Road everytime the muse descended I'd never get any work done. I need to open a door to a room and 'go to it', not hang around hatless looking for a fast black.

If you've been reading this and my other blog for a while you'll know I painted about the East End for years, only recently discovering the subject of my own childhood memory; all those paintings I made of bengali teenagers now seem like a dress rehearsal for the exploration of my own young life.

But the workroom was full of these earlier involvements, all my East London interests (Ackroydian romances) in some way diluted by recent images but not enough. I needed clearer space, and current research to hand.

So I set about destroying my work.

Frenzied canvas-slashing feels both violently wrong and strangely satisfying and the photo is of unsold work, paintings that went wrong, numerous try-outs, rejections and explorations and just sheer crap and frustration stockpiled over about six or seven years.

A couple of people have been horrified that I would wish to destroy my own work, but its my work and I can do what I like with it and I'm glad it's gone: it was absorbing energy like a fucking sponge.

Now the earlier involvements are deleted I feel free and I have plastered the walls with my brains in preparation for new paintings and object-based work.

Doctor Who books, Family photos, Cornish travel Guides, letters, leaflets, maps, drawings, texts, pictures of my brother, my sister, caravans, beaches, sunsets, my teddy bear, cornish postcards sent by my parents last year saying "so many memories here...".

I am cocooned in my current obsession.

Last Weekend

2006-04-08T06:38:00.000-07:00

What an exhausting few days.

On Thursday we went to the Royal Albert Hall to see Razorlight. I'm not a fan but G wanted to see them and it was for charity and the lead singer is rather decorative so I didn't mind one bit. According to my pal big-nose who saw him in a pub the other week he's only about three foot tall. Ah bless!... a pocket sized pop pixie...

It was a good job we trundled into the Le Bar du Retro for pre-gig lager-beers otherwise we'd have completely forgotten that it was Duckie's tenth birthday party at the Fridge in Brixton on Friday. I couldn't for the life of me remember when I was last at the Fridge but it must have been at least 13 or 14 years ago... I love Duckie special events and I've got so many fond memories of them. Always interesting to take the Duckie spirit elsewhere and the agenda for 2006 is more fulsome than ever. Prior to Brixton however we popped in on Indo, the best bar in Whitechapel, for a chinwag with the proprietors and Keith the Sculptor, before heading for the Whitechapel Art Gallery for the Wigwam gig (Alex James and Betty Boo), which wasn't really a gig more two songs prefixed by Alex James' soundscapes and space-films. We didn't hang around after Wigwam but there were DJ's in three rooms at the Whitechapel so I imagine a good nite would have been had by all. Big mistake for them to let people stub cigs out on all that art-gallery paraquet tho.

The performances for 'Duckie Decade' included the Featherstonehaughs (I think it was them) semi-naked and and draped, twirling on podiums all nite and very much setting the scene, and an enormous white stallion (yes, really) ridden through the crowd by a semi-naked lady in full vaudeville headdress and tit-tassles.

David Hoyle (the artist formerly known as 'The Divine David') firmed up his return to the London stage following a psychological hiatus (six years in sealed retreat in his native Manchester). He's a legend as far as G and I are concerned and G lambasted a bunch of stupid queens who insisted on chattering noisily more or less all the way through his act. G said something along the lines of 'Shut the fuck up or go and stand at the fucking back!!!!'. It worked. Wankers. David's got shows lined up throughout the summer including at Soho Theatre so he'll be on here from time to time. He was still confrontational, and slightly terrifying and it was great to see that the old 'Divine David' artful nihilism alive and very much active. He threw daffodils into the crowd but for some of those silly tarts they should have been hand-grenades. Duckie's not an ordinary club and sometimes people should listen.

We on the other hand would have listened to Hazel O'Conner when she sang later on but we could barely hear! God knows what happened to the sound, but it didn't matter too much.

Simon Strange, Duckie founder and curator extrordinaire, had Can's of Kronenberg at £3 ferried in for the Duckie punters due to the venue only being able to provide bottled beers at £4.50, but then I think the Fridge is the sort of place where they normally only serve water). Various personalties got hammered and Readers Wifes DJ'ed superbly as ever.

On Saturday we enjoyed early evening drinks with Joan Dairy Queen avec charming boyfriend Grant mulling over the previous nite's events and mending our heads with bloody mary's. Mr Justin Bond joined us for a natter then it was time for a fast black to the Royal Albert Hall for The Cure. I love the plushness of the place and going there always reminds me of the Banshees' historic two nites there in 1983, recorded for 'Nocturne'... (ever wish you had been born a few years earlier than you were !!????)... The moment on that album when Stravinsky bursts into Steve Severin's bass on 'Israel' has to be one of my all time favourite moments in sound. The Cure's intro meanwhile was long and choral with blinding blue lights. The last time we saw them was at Hyde Park a couple of years ago when Robert Smith was swigging from a pint glass of what looked like red vino and got plastered at alarming speed. He seemed to have put on a tad more weight this time, or perhaps we were just closer.

The back catalogue got a rigorous plundering with Play for Today, M, The Drowning Man and at least three tunes off Pornography including 'The Figurehead'. They also did 'Shake Dog Shake' off The Top (probably my favourite album) and 'The Blood' and 'A Night like This' off The Head on the Door, the last Cure album I really loved. These songs always make me feel like I'm 14 again (don't laugh, it's true). At the end they did Fire In Cairo, Three Imaginary Boys, Boys don't Cry and Killing an Arab (with a new lyric). I always enjoy the earlier album tracks and these are the ones I go mad for.

The Cure are one of those long stinting bands that attract about six different generations. Teenage kids with their Dads, hardcore goths, young couples, old couples, gay, straight. I guess everytime they release a new album there's a whole bunch of kids who find out about them. I couldn't believe that they played for nearly three hours but with a back catalogue like theirs I guess you could go on all nite. Loved Simon Gallup and his low-slung bass... he looks like an 18-year old from the back (cut off t-shirt, pert buttocks in tight black jeans) and like a ravaged old goth from the front.

They played three encores and the last tune was 'A Forest', which was great in Hyde Park when they lit all the trees up in hallowe'en green, and just as powerful at the Royal Albert Hall only the real trees were replaced by filmic ones.

Marvellous feeling afterwards walking to South Ken feeling as though one had had an injection of one's favourite tunes... Our only gripe was the fact that you can't take alcohol in the auditorium and we should have remembered this from Razorlight two nites before... Next time we're taking loaded hipflasks!

Sunday ended with a mammoth game of Uno with Retro Wendy until about 3 in the morning. It's my new favourite game and even though I do say so myself I was rather good at it... Even beating old cleverclogs Crazy G on several occassions although it has to be said it did take me some hours to get 'into the swing' of what was actually going on. W however remained firmly convinced that I had no clue whatsoever... and I shall of course be using this to my advantage in future bouts... On Monday at the Job du Jour I was not at my best and/or prettiest and needless to say a half day was duly booked. The effort to appear spritely and focused having got the better of me by about 10.30am....