she sees red

crying in exhibitions. aka go and see this fucking show.

2013-04-25T13:17:00.002+01:00

i've seen thousands of exhibitions and some really inspiring and moving shows. i have lists of biennales, collections, artist-run things and performance showings.

the list of shows i've cried at is very small: it consists of just two: vernon ah kee's this man... this woman... at GOMA and the new addition tahera aziz's [re]locate at bermondsey project space.

you can read about my the vernon ah kee response in this post.

background: twenty-year anniversary of the death of stephen lawrence.

this case is a massive one in the english (and especially london) psyche. it's up there with the death of jamie, the battle or orgreave and .
children's deaths are never pleasant - they are a reminder about the rotten nature of humanity. and when a child's death also exposes the cancerous way in which we protect that rottenness, it's especially heinous.

i'm not from the UK, so my experiencce of this show was as an outsider who had heard only a whisper of the murder case - primarily when the killers were finally convicted not long before i arrived here.

the work: audio documentary
the crux of the work at the amazing bermondsey project space is the audio work. it is a darkened sound space - no visual stimulus at all, but a surround-sound, multi-channel re-interpretation of the death of stephen lawrence.

different characters in different sides of the room, some are more audible than others: the people (witnesses) at the bus stop, the police 'responding' to the crime, the locals living in the area, stephen and his friend duwayne brooks, people who were first on the scene and the perpertrators.

it was an intense interpretation/dramatisation/re-enactment of the events of that night, in which a young black boy was killed for his race and in which the police were responsible for the lengthy delay in bringing about justice.

as a viewer, I became a 'witness' to the crime with zero agency. completely unable to change anything about the course of events playing out to my ears. immediately i felt fear, frustration and absolute despair at the ongoing racism and the negligence from the state (and their representatives).

i felt my whiteness and my complicity.
and it is painful.

the contextual imagery, timeline and books about the case shown in the second room were also really helpful for someone like me who is outside the immediate throng of the case (including the incredibly role of the daily mail, risking litigation and challenging the police to charge the murderers).

it's probably not new for those who lived through it to see all the stuff. but it is still powerful.

i also felt the nature of my privilege in that case, i have the chance to view this stuff objectively, to feel the sadness, despair, rage and then walk away. it's not my life. it's not my (immediate) community's life. and it's not the kind of thing i suffer.

and of course it reminded me of the countless australian death-in-custody cases, the TJ Hickey case - the frustrating and ongoing instutitional racism, especially enacted on young black men in the streets.

after experiencing the work, i sat for ages and watched the astounding documentary secret policeman, which exposed the phenomenal amount of institutional racism in the UK police force. it's jaw-dropping and unsurprising at the same time.

i left feeling completely gutted. it's not often i leave a show like that. it felt amazing.

there are a stack of events associated with the exhibition - sadly i had to miss last night's screening of john akomfrah's handsworth songs (1987), but will be there next week for the conversation on expanding the documentary from outside the field of vision.

you must go and see this work. really.

i know that i can't drag any of you by the hand, but this is the closest thing i am doing. please: go and see the fucking show.

art13

2013-03-13T16:29:00.005Z

On the first weekend of March I went to Art 13, yet another art fair in London. Not that I have been to London Art Fair, Frieze or Zoo, but this one seemed to be one of the better ones (for my interest). It didn't feature any of the super-large galleries, which I quite liked, but did include galleries selling high-calibre work, a few more-experimental spaces, some publications and a performance focus.

It wasn't so OTT that it was incomprehensible, but it had enough muscle to present a powerful view of art from the UK - with some galleries from Europe, Asia and South Africa giving a little external flavour. I realise that sounds patronising, but perhaps that's what it felt like.

Method

Because art fairs, like biennales, can be simultaenously overwhelming and underwhelming, you need to have a clear method for maximising your experience.

I was lucky enough to be able to go over 2 days. and, I have to say, over that time I think I nailed it. I did a loose sweep of the spaces of Friday and made it a bit social, catching up for drinks with Simone of discoballbreaker fame.

New galleries
I'm not a long-time londoner, but I do visit galleries fairly regularly, so it was refreshing and enlightening to see some of these new-to-me galleries, meet some of the staff and get a feel for what kinds of works they're showing.

Fold gallery were showing a series of small works, mostly 2D, showcasing the intimate and accessible aspects of their artists' capabilities. I quite liked the relief sculptures by Mark Pearson, totems of bands like Wall of Voodoo* The rest of the show also struck me as something uplifting and comforting - like I could have walked into someone's home with a series of small works on the wall. Small enamel graphic paintings, patterns, etc.

Aando gallery is a German gallery which I had seen at a couple of the (comparitively awful) art fairs during my time in Berlin. It was great to see their works again, especially the work of a German pair Andreas Greiner and Armin Kiplinger - a live sculpture of evaporating water drops, forming perfect spheres of joy, rolling around on a hot plate, fed from a drip feeder. So simple and beautiful.

In my palatial home, I would have it in the hallway.
That's just how I would roll. In my palatial home.

Zimmermann & Kratochwill
When I wandered into this gallery space from the crew in Graz, what struck me was the images of nail art. I hoped that the artist Poklong Anading was critiquing the rise of it.

I fucking hate nail art. It may have something to do with a previous personal jealousy, but I am also a bit perplexed as to why it is a thing. I mean, I get having funky nails - that's way cool, but why now? It has got to be more than just fashion and/or recession (especially as Perth is not in a recession)
And why is Art moving into nails? Grumpy old woman rant....

Anyway, I went to speak to the lovely gallery directors and discovered that the artist isn't necessarily critiquing nail art at all, but was using it to talk about unskilled labour in the Phillipines, and that the objects on the wall were relevant to the process. I also saw a previous body of work featuring the cleaning rags found on the streets of Manila and really liked the singularity of focus and the street-references.

So we started chatting about the Phillipines (where the gallery has a partnership there as balance to its Graz operations) and of course ended up talking about Australian artists TV Moore and David Griggs and his influence in and from the Phillipines. These artists were the last I expected to talk about at the fair, but it was refreshing and comforting, in a way. I reconnected briefly with a particularly Australian (mostly male) art scene for just a second and realised it was something I was craving - that slightly rebellious laddish thing without the irony, the boldness of standing up straight with messy hair - I miss that.

It was so great to chat with these young women running the gallery and I admired their vision and ability to look to art outside the usual London/Euro scene, but still connect to it - it was like a mid-afternoon pick-me-up and I craved the hot, sweaty life of an Asian hood.

IMT
I have been meaning to get to IMT since forever. It was great to see what they were showing and I really liked the coal eyes for the wall by Laura Pawela (above).

It was such a simple idea and, from a commercial perspective, such a great piece. Cast silicone, coated in coal (which initially I though she meant kohl) and mounted on the wall at the height of the artist. Although, I guess they could be mounted at your height, or any person's height really. I love the idea that the works come with measurements - how high to hang them. And that their this slightly creepy, but incredibly beautiful works.

Performance

The last few art fairs I've been to have had lots of talks, but not so much actual performance. And i don't remember being at one that had a booth and a rolling programme dedicated to it. Even if i didn't get to see too much of it, it was an excellent piece of planning and it helped to make the fair more of an event

I got to see about 10 minutes of the Juneau Projects (above) and their bleak futuro-romantic epic, painting a picture of a future centered wholly around data mining, information and post-civilsiation. They read a spoken text work and played intruments - fluoro-pimped synthesisers, surrounded by fluoro plexi-glass toys and wearing wooden amulets. It was like Children of Men, Kraftwerk and last year's H&M range all in a blender.

I enjoyed watching it, and having something to watch. The aesthetic, which is part of the current fluoro woodsy scando flavour left me feeling a bit cold and the content slightly depressed. Probably because I'm still in denial and the truth hurts.

Ceri Hand
As someone who swims around between installation, drawing, performance, etc - it's always refreshing to know that there are galleries who are working with artists to expand that kind of practice into a way to maybe make a living from it. It's not easy and it's not perfect, but Ceri Hand are one of the galleries who are continuing to have the conversation with collectors and artists to bring them together in a way that can serve both sides as much as possible.

Despite my meh kind of attitude towards photography (which is entirely subjective), the performance detail from Bedwyr Williams with false beard, smeary make-up, damsel-in-distress look was striking and an obvious entry point into what performance brings to art collections.

Șükran Moral is a performance artist from Turkey whose work at the Galeri Zilberman stand was of a female mannequin in the middle of the space; legs-up, like in gynae stirrups, with a TV hiding her cunt. The movie was of a naked woman coming out of a haman, being covered by an attendent. Although the word Șükran has no significance in turkish per se, I love the that pronunciation of her name in Arabic/English is the equivalent of 'Thank You Moral'. What a great performance name!
It goes so well with the edgy pushing work that she makes.

I love contemporary turkish art - especially that of a performative nature and a lot of women are keening, striving to break out.
I saw a lot of it at TANAS in Berlin (thanks to the big Turkish contingent there) and I feel like they have a sense of freedom and energy that loads of european artists are unable to access at the moment.

Publications

Jealous
I was slightly sheepish in admitting I hadn't ever heard of Jealous before going to the fair, but boy did i make up for that. I popped my head in to see a gorgeous A0 book open to a beautiful shade of aaaah-zure blue, referring to the seas of the world: Thomas Jenkins' Atlas. I spoke to Lucy, one of the gallery/studio staff and she took me through the whole Jealous way:their work, their methods, programs and I scored a couple of their newspapers too.

With real focus on print collaboration, they work with emerging artists to create limited edition print-based shows and publications to extend their practices. It reminded me a little of Lucas, Micky and Diego at Big Fag Press, but a little more white-glove.

Mental note: make a work that is Jealous-worthy one day.

Outsiders
I didn't manage to get back in time to see the live print-run, but Outsiders (the print-arm of Lazarides gallery) had set up 'shop'/press in the space and were printing and handing out free posters of some of their artists. spewin.

I have a bit of a hard-on for Conor Harrington at the moment, so it was great to see a couple of his prints kicking about. I coveted. Hard.

Given that, in a recession people don't have as much moula to spend on blingy things like art, having a print arm is excellent business from Laz and Co and I could see imagine that loads of people would leave the fair with a print or two under their arm, that will eventually become an original some day soon.

There were more traditional magazine publication stands along one side of the main hall, but they were pretty light on.

I know that everyone goes on about how print media is dead, blah blah, but i think somethig extra special could have been done with the magazines - online and offline that do continue to bring art to our mediated minds: e-flux, artsy, artinfo, zines, small magazines and even art bloggers. Ahem.

Education
Mind had a stall, showcasing a series of work by Simon Sempel and giving away a free poster of his. Focusing on mental health, Mind have a project working with artists to highlight mental health issues and work with artists on related projects, insittutions, etc.

I am personally interested in what Mind are up to inconjunction with artists, because I have an ongoing belief that artists need to be embedded across most public sectors in order to provide a different kind of relationship to art.

I also think it's important to include these kinds of organisations/projects in Art Fairs - not just for awareness, but from an investment point of view. It could be an interested area to pursue in art fairs, an investor information section that supports organisations like Mind, those embedding artists in schools and prisons, etc.

Large sculpture

Some of the projects for the art fair weren't quite as embedded as they could be - certainly not as much as I've seen in other art fairs. But there were still a few that I liked, including

The inflatable and mechanical flower by korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa, opening and closing/inflating and deflating at intervals - like something out of a nature time-lapse movie. It was so simple and so captivating, I regressed to a 5-year old and just enjoyed it. Imagine waking to that as your alarm clock in your palatial home? Hello, opening flower! OK, so it's nothing conceptually rigorous or challenging, but hey, sometimes art just needs to make me feel like waking up in the morning OK?

El anatsui is always a crowd pleaser and seeing a couple of his gorgeous, gorgeous works was like seeing your nan. A smile of nostalgia and comfort. I remember the first work of his I saw at the Venice Biennale about 5 years ago - massive wall-hanging that extended out across L'Arsenale floor. Damn.

Obelisk by Michaël Aerts

Made from custom road-cases, this sculpture is the imagined means by which a trad art piece might be transported around the world - complete with a pulley system and modular road-cases. As a form it was fun and also alluded to the globalised nature of art, the practicality to public art and gallery logistics. Also perhaps a reference to how a lot of art purchased for large collections ends up in storage in warehouse somewhere.

Overall, I quite enjoyed my time at the fair. I didn't feel like chucking it all in and becoming a human rights lawyer (which is my suicide bomber threat when it all gets too much), I felt like there was some new and interesting work to see, that there is still a market for good work for people to buy and that perhaps the commercial aspect to art isn't quite as disgusting as I have previously perceived.

Death: Mike Nelson and Susan Hiller

2013-02-26T23:49:00.001Z

I have the great fortune of living around the corner from Matt's Gallery.

This is especially fortunate when the day is wet and cold and the gallery's private view is so full that people are queuing down the street in the rain to get into a Mike Nelson installation.

Which is what it was like a few weeks' ago when I went.

The Mike Nelson and Susan Hiller shows are an excellent combination of contemporary British Art. I like both artists for different reasons, so it felt like a two-for-one deal - great bang for your buck.

Mike Nelson

The insane passage of human bodies that preceeded More things (To the memory of Honoré de Balzac) is mostly due to the fact that there is so much sculpture - fairly delicate sculpture - jammed into the gallery, requiring a 6-person limit. It also has the added bonus of generating a fair amount of hype and, if I'm generous, perhaps is the real Mike Nelson at work.

Especially because the work inside the gallery is kooky but not what I have come to know from his work.

Yes, there's his wild-west aesthetic that we all know and love, a few dramatic and poignant pieces - especially an intense assemblage work featuring an Israeli produce box, Arabic signage, American Op.Desertstorm badge and an 'enter at own risk' sign - but not the usual installation and spatial influence that thrills me.

The element of surprise or unexpectedness in his work is not obvious, apart from the casual 'oh, it's a skull' and a little more of 'oh, this isn't like his usual work' reaction, which isn't satsifactory. It probably means I didn't try hard enough.

Susan Hiller
On the day of intense queuing, Channels, the Susan Hiller room, was as much a physical respite from the crowds as an aesthetic balance for the Nelson work.

A largely-empty room, with the entire back wall filled with TV sets and screens of various sizes, colours and content. Mostly graphic (not uncomfortable, I mean, plain colours, lines, like graphic design), the screen sculpture conveyed the rhythm of conversations played out - a series of interviews on people's near-death experiences.

Green oscillators, static, black screens, blue screens and the occasional flicker give an appropriate 'backdrop' for listening to sound works: documentary and fractured, you can dip in and out of these stories in the way that radio functions at its best. Or you can sit and stare mesmerised as your eyes wander over the faint rhythm of slowly changing screens as you listen to the whole narrative of these people's deaths.

The place of light in the space is great, as the audience are bathed in this pale blue light, ghostly and slightly horrific (especially if you've ever watched either version of The Ring).

These two works together, opposed creates a beautiful and uncanny death theme running across the gallery, which I loved. The movement from this mortal coil from two different perspectives: hers from direct but calm curiosity in the active dying moments of people's lives, to his deserted, Death Valley, departed graveyard of symbols that allude to it.

The exhibitons are on until the 14th April, so head to Mile End and check it out and feel free to pop over for a cup of tea afterwards.

mothers are women too

2013-02-11T14:39:00.000Z

caveats: i've become an unashamed beyonce fan.
i don't have children so i don't understand.

Last week loads of peeps are talking about the superbowl half time extravaganza that Queen Bey staged on the weekend. there were a couple of official 'furore's about it, apparently. all of which have now been superceded by the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church® resigning.

But I still feel the need to chuck my two cents in.

There were two 'issues'. PETA are unhappy with her over the use of iguana skin, etc in her amazing costume.

Her being a massive 'role model' and all, she shouldn't fuck with animals. Which is true. I do wish she'd get with the program a little. But, as this excellent tweet (and the brilliant responses) highlighted, since when have men been required to be amazing role models.

And then a bunch of mumsy types are concerned about her short-skirt-put-in-on-ya-sexiness not being a good model for mommas... and that's what this post it about.

Apparently, now that Beyonce is a mum, she's got a whole new set of criteria which makes her accountable to the rest of us aspirationals.

So, let me get this straight, she was absolutely amazing, sexy, empowering, creative, business woman and owning all over the world up until last year. And now, because she's had a baby she's shifted into being a 'mother' that has to turn it down a little?

She can only be a beatific role model, saviour, light of the world, here to protect the whole of pop culture and your mum too? Fuck that.

Here's (an entirely subjective) list of awesome stuff that Beyonce did before she had Blue Ivy.

1. run the world performance at VMAs (jaw-dropping, powerful and i love the JT in-yo-face)

2. made the best video of all time. of all time.

and i'm still backing kanye over taylor swift. the final 2 seconds of panting? ouch!

2. crazy in love - the catchiest fucking pop tune this side of...

3. ...halo

4. turned up to dance with a stack of girls' dance class as part of the Let's Move group (which still makes me cry every time).

http://youtu.be/XoX9qXBP0Bs (sorry, embedding not allowed)

5. did an amazing version of tina turner's proud mary

6. took the piss out of her own husband with fine swagger

here's what she's done since then.

1. lip synced a national anthem (first person to do that, ever)

2. made a massive event at the superbowl and wore a short skirt.

And suddenly she's supposed to become some kind of angel?

I'm surely not the only one thinking that this kind of massive ethical demand on her work is a little unreasonable.

As it happens, this whole palaver illustrates one of the reasons I've chosen not to become a mother - or more specifically to have a child of my own. Because suddenly you become a 'mother' and that word, that identity is laced with all kinds of heavy and sometimes unnecessary shit.

This is where the community (especially in the US) and its role in assuring the survival of the human race can get warped. It seems that the view of ideal motherhood - that which best serves us as a society is getting more and more hypocritical. It's fine for a woman who doesn't want to have a child, or is incapable of emotionally doing so to be forced into it by the denial of abortion or contraception, but it's not OK for an amazingly successful and capable woman to continue doing what she does best because she has a child.

in the studio, yo.

2013-01-31T23:13:00.000Z

A couple of days ago, I had a little showing of new works in my temporary studio digs in New Cross. It was quite unlike anything I've ever done before, despite it being a pretty common thing to do in the art world: have a studio showing of new works.

I was slightly out of my comfort zone, because I was showing my #newsideproject works and portraits of listeners - paintings and drawings - after a long period of doing performance and installation works.

The show was a juxtaposition (sorry, but it's the best word, despite its art school connotations. - Ed.) of dialogue and gesture, humanity and technology, text and figure, monochrome and titian-inspired colour.

Slow
There's something quite different about the gestation of paintings and drawings, and the process of inviting people, pricing the works and hanging them that is well-known, but very drawn out. I realised that I quite like the instant gratification that happens with performance and installation works.
Either people get it or they don't.

By the same token, this was the enjoyable part about painting again - there is a slowness to the work and people observe the paintings in the same way that I observe the people in them: carefully, detached, objectively and with interest. Which is why they needed to be paintings, rather than photographs or videos or even a performance work.

Paint
As many of you know I have a funny relationship with painting, which is why this series of works has taken so long to appear.

I have been drawing, observing and photographing people in the act of listening (especially at experimental music gigs - an excellent control space) for ages - interested in what listening looks like from the outside.

And because they were going to be obviously figurative and portait-like, I guessed that the works would probably be paintings, but given my awkward history with painting, I procrastinated like you wouldn't believe. I tried to make them into photographs (inspired by Alfredo Jaar's portraits of revolutionaries), drawings, possibly videos.

Nope. Time and time again, they remained as paintings.

So, finally I relented, thanks to the hospitality of David Turley and Caitlin Yardly and their studio. I spent a month with oils and brush, really enjoying the process in the mean time.

And it became apparent that I was right about the choice to paint them. I like these portraits. They're exactly what I wanted them to be - gestures in slippy, slidy material, with frayed edges.

Yes, they're images of people listening, but they also look like people doing loads of other things. Listening is not a codified gesture. It's not something we're used to 'looking at'. We know what it feels like and makes assumptions based on context, but it's not a knowable action.

Dialogue
An antithesis to the human, painterly, coloured portraits are the Siri conversations I've been playing around with for a while - the #newsideproject works.

These are about the non-human listening - listening as algorithm. By saying well-known hip-hop lyrics to Siri (the Apple-acquired voice-activiated assistant on the iPhone 4S and above), I have ended up with these bizarre 'conversations' between art/poetry/pop-culture statements, and an approximation of a response.

There is no understanding, no meaning to the dialogue and they're amusing. Especially if you have an appreciation for hip-hop lyrics.

These works are drawings - hand-drawn text (white on black again) and paintstaking replication of the Siri background. And the action behind the drawings is so much fun. I end up in tears of laughter having these 'discussions' with the iphone app. I also have developed an even deeper love of hip-hop, having done them.

Hip-hop.
Hip-hop is poetry. It is so beautifully lyrical and narrative and filled to the brim with words and meaning and entendre. It's little wonder that Rap Genius became a site, as a way to really understand the messages behind the code and colloquialisms.

There is already quite a range of these works, but they're still going. I have a whole playlist of songs to do and am already taking 'requests' for the works (in art terms, this would be a commission, in case you're wondering).

They're fun and flippant and meaningful but not too bogged down in earnestness and steep history. Which is why for the studio show, they were the perfect partner to the paintings.

Selling things
It was also really nice to sell some of the works. Apart from my online sales, I haven't had prices on works in a long time and it was a new experience in going back to some old-fashioned ideas about art being in people's homes (or offices or whatever). The seeming antithesis to the experience, I have enjoyed making things that people would like to own - lengthening the experience to years' worth.

Rather than a 3-hour durational performance that people might pay £5 for (or not), or a small slice of a conceptual piece, these works are 25-year durational works that sit and brew in people's homes - they probably ignore them for days at a time and then finally notice them for a whole 6 minutes. Again and again and again.

I like that idea.

bank, dacs and sandback

2013-01-28T23:22:00.000Z

Ooh. See what i did with the title there?
There's a subeditor rolling in his grave over that.

The weekend before this last one, I took some time between workly appointments to trip down New Bond Street on a mini gallery mission.

I mostly wanted to see the BANK exhibition at MOT INTERNATIONAL (so many caps!), but it was nice to see a David Jablonowski show at Max Wigram and a Fred Sandback show at David Zwirner to take in along the way.

BANK at MOT

I had heard of BANK - perhaps in relation to Melbourne's own cheeky anonymous collective, DAMP and also as part of the YBA cheeky bastards era of UK art. And I have always been into MOT as a gallery, so it felt right that the two seemed to meet up.

The exhibition is a collection of images, ephemera and original FAX BAK words, as well as a sculpture, a painting and a beautiful light box. It does all seem to be flirting with the exact commerce of art that the collective jabbed at for so long, but I'm sick of artists not being allowed to bit the hands that feed them, so I'd prefer to embrace this particular quirk.

And, if i had a medium-sized pile of money sitting around that i could invest in art, I would promptly buy all the FAX BAK originals. Not only because they are brilliant, but because I thoroughly enjoyed laughing maniacally at their content.

I didn't enjoy having to stifle said laughter because nobody else was laughing, but goddamn the works are hilarious. Not just for straight-up wit, but for the sheer embarrassing close-to-home-ness of it all. All that artspeak that I have been super guilty of using in press releases and blurbs about my work, ripped to shreds.

I enjoyed looking through the table of ephemera, although it was slightly overwhelming, and the lightbox was quite a beautiful object, as was the large-format black'n'white photograph. I can honestly say that I really didn't like the sculpture of the BANK team - it was a little too Devo without being Devo enough. But to not like one thing in a whole gallery of works - that's pretty good.

David Jablonowski at Max Wigram Gallery

I was intrigued by this show, especially as I popped into the Patricia Piccini show at Haunch of Venison on the way there (which featured a lot of work I had already seen in this show, so read that instead) and there seemed to be a recurring amount of waxy gunky being poured in the scene - crude oil in this case, bio-viscera in Piccinini's case.

The Jablonowski installations featuring lots of synthetic display-type, media-influenced materials, lots of silver powder coating and plastic shapes, combined with moving image and/or light. I'm still not sure if it was to my taste, although I wasn't completely repulsed. I am a little bored with install-on-floor, and would have liked to see the work get up a little - but there was a bit of 80s Patrick Bateman feeling about the show, which was interesting to me.

To be honest, I actually preferred the Pavel Büchler series of acid and nicotine drawings in the back - something about the simplicity of form and oxidisation process had me. I enjoyed looking at the studies of hands and the survey of the ways in which people hold cigarettes. And I usually can't stand work that glorifies smoking, drugs or alcohol (I think we deserve better art than that).

Fred Sandback at David Zwirner

But the highlight of the afternoon was easily the Fred Sandback show.

His work is site-specific installations of wool/thread lines and geometric shapes that play with perspective, triangulation, linear planes and dimensions. He uses simple colours, often black, red and blue, to outline and alter the relationship between the viewer and the space.

I first saw his work in Vienna at MAQ years ago it was so great to see work like this installed in a commercial gallery; to play with the space through perspective and simple movement, to have my sense of vision and spatial assumptions messed with in such a delicate and concise way - voilà.

The spiral staircase was the perfect place to install a floor-to-ceiling work and the variety of works and spaces created in the gallery was perfect, and the gallery was packed. So deserved.

Postscript
this blog didn't have anything to do with DACS, but it made nice wordplay, so you'll just have to forgive me.

words

2013-01-19T23:22:00.001Z

I seem to continually pick up on accidental themes when checking out art. Recently I've seen a stack of work related to words and/or text - perhaps its the didactic nature of words i've been craving.

Whatever the reason, it's all about the letters.

John Latham and the APG at Raven Row.

I first saw works by John Latham at the Whitechapel library/reading room about 3 years ago. It was his series of works on books and i remember being relieved that art subverted books, whilst revering them and that writing and the written word still had a place in art.

i also discovered the Artist Placement Group - artists that believed in being embedded within 'society' - organisations, workplaces, schools, etc, etc, that the concept, process and open engagement of an artist's life was the crux of a practice worth investigating.*

Raven Row hosted a retrospective of the Group's work, which I only found out about on the day of a sound performance by David Toop. Phew!

I didn't get to see too much of the show, but I did get a chance to see some great posters and text by John Latham and his placement at the Scottish Office, some beautiful fifty (currency) prints by Barry Flanagan, the impressive steel sculptures/industrial interventions of Garth Evans and the great TV Interruptions installation/videos by David Hall, connected to his Scottish TV connection.

The David Toop performance itself was great. An improvisation piece - it quite an intense work that was like a freight train through my skull at some parts. I closed my eyes the whole time and it was just immense. It featured a variety of instruments, found objects, electronica and vocal distortions (which reminded me of Alice Hui-Sheng Cheng in Australia). Documentation from his placement at the London Zoo was shown in the exhibition.

Ian Hamilton Finlay at Tate Britain

I have always cringed at the term concrete poet. In the same way I have cringed at the term music concrète. And I cannot tell you why. There is something hard and horrible about the word concret that neither poetry nor music holds. But that's my thing and I need to get over it.

Especially because, as a concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay was quite a joy to discover. He makes words into things. He makes objects into words - plays with the relationship betweent the two and I like the sign/signifier relationship, even if it's passé to most other artists of my era.

A series of works/words in the main gallery hall, there were installations which played upon severity of The Message (as an idea in itself) his large hanging stone 'tablets' The World Has Been Empty Since The Romans is in equal part reassuring and ultra depressing. Crumbling and precarious, the Words are only just held, they're swaying, like some kind of odd bling around the old building's nave.

Then there were his monuments to plaques. These odd, flat columns/pedestals holding flat plaques - taken off the walls for which they were seemingly intended and bringing them into the gallery space, making them discreet objects and Art. Not just a salutory relationship between words and art, but more significant than that.

I also loved his display of worded tiles, prints and other text ephemera. Perhaps for the same reason I love John Latham - an artist embedded in the written word and beautifully designed things - tiles and nautical natures.

I hadn't heard of Finlay before this exhibition (I'm pleading foreigner, before you jump down my throat), so I'll have to do some more research on his work.

Lawrence Weiner at Tate and Lisson Gallery

I didn't manage to get to the Lisson Gallery show, but I put it there to show that Larry was big in london for about a month. Crossing East and West, yo.

When i saw them they were apt, as words. And I quite enjoyed that you see them only if you're walking up the stairs between floors. A series of nonsequiturs, but in big, bold and blue text. I'm not sure if that's quite in the spirit of the nonsequitur, but that's what the words themselves - the meaning of them - feel like.

Some of them hit a spot with the slightly vulnerable zombie I was impersonating when I saw them. Others are not in their finest form. I can say that I have seen Weiner's that have wowed me more, but I enjoy being slightly disappointed sometimes.

Whilst their presence in the Tate Modern is quite an afterthought, though. Which is possibly intentional. I suspect the Lisson Gallery is a whole lot more Front and Centre.

Mel Bochner at Whitechapel

I saw this show so many times - en route to the cafe, the auditorium, other shows and by the end I kind of liked it and kind of hated it.

If I'm honest, I didn't really like a lot of the text works - large letters, squished in and a little overdone.

However, I did really enjoy a work about measurement - numbers, rather than words - as significant elements. The series of coloured canvases that stretched across the gallery wall, all of various sizes, and their widths painted across the work. All the works, lined up to present a continuous linear measurement of the space, according to the individual measurements of the paintings. And as you walked through the space, it was like a Wes Anderson tracking shot, almost following you through the gallery.

Which is sort of how I felt about my relationship to these words works that I kept running into. Like text and words and clarity-of-meaning were following me, peering into my soul a little and nagging me to work out what it is that I really want to say.

*I still believe this and wish that I could continue doing this to the level they have. I have had a little success, here and there (with the AURA project and a workplace residency), but still a way to go.

template business

2013-01-14T13:50:00.000Z

apart from my mother, who has already lodged a complaint that the she sees red mobile template is ugly, is there anyone else who has an opinion here?

i've switched it back for the moment - read into that psychologically what you will - but for those who are regular readers on the mobile device, would it be very annoying to stick with the default site look?

go on, flame away in the comments.

ps. i made a new page on here for the stuff i sell. a little 'shop' page for my editions. for the prints, drawings, photos, etc.
most of you have them already, but keep an eye out anyway.
and if you don't have them, please buy them.

peer to peer music

2013-01-11T01:05:00.001Z

Happy New Year, y'all!

I hope the start of your year has been smooth and delicious.

I haven't seene too much in the way of visual arts in the first 10 days of the year, yet, but I did go to a music performance thing earlier in the week that managed to elicit a series of complex responses that I feel like querying.

On Monday night, I was invited to an open mic/jam session by a new friend. I usually hate those things because I get ridiculously self-conscious and I have no idea why. It's the same with public karaoke and quite a lot of busking. It's inexplicable and I just do my best to ride it out.

It turns out I was deeply affected by a few of the acts and my reactions were curious enough to keep me thinking more broadly about music and sharing culture.

The white english hippy guy playing the fake digeridoo
Curiously, I heard the sound of the didge before i even knew what I was hearing. I was like a dog that pricks up its ears at a car a mile away. I knew it was in the room before I was. Almost.

Anyway, the guy playing it was just barely playing it - lots of hi-hop hand punches, mostly rhythms and some basic inflection, but no story-telling, no animal calls, nothing about the land at all and certainly no traditional connection - not really playing it how it's intended. No true understanding. It was the sound version of doing a dot painting without any understanding of its symbols and meaning.

And, like a similar reaction to fake or appropriated aboriginal paintings, I found myself getting incredibly angry at this guy. I wanted to get up on my soapbox and shout about colonialism and the foreign whiteman's complete ignorance of the culture, in using sound for sounds' sake; about disrespect for the underlying purpose of the instrument, its traditional significance and how offensive he was being.

There were a couple of things that stopped me from taking this guy down:

1. My complicit position in that relationship
2. A desire to not embarass myself in front of my friend and 'make a scene'.

The second is hardly a mature reason and, for me, an unusually 'Australian' response - aw, c'mon just have a good night, ey - but I was there as a guest and the complexity of the issue made it a less obvious place for a takedown.

I did start a conversation with him, asking him about where he got the piece and, when he asked if I'd like to play it, I was incredibly restrained. I didn't ignore the issue - I let him know that it's an instrument that traditionally only men play- and he acknowledged that he was probably being offensive. I agreed. He proceeded to talk about his 'spiritual experiences' in India with it and i nodded politely, wishing that I knew the best thing to say.

The first point is the uncomfortable bit in this whole scenario:
Who am I to say?
I'm not aboriginal.
I know a little, but don't know enough about Australian indigenous culture and history to take a well-informed position. And, although I am passionate, supportive and aware of what's inaappropriate a lot of the time, as a white ghel from the burbs, I'm becoming aware that my yardstick of what is 'appropriate' is still way out of the park. Colonial habits die hard, it seems.
But if I say nothing, then i continue to perpetuate the problem, despite all of that.

And then there's the business of my relationship to african music that highlights that colonial habit of mine.

The moroccan band playing the hajhuj
These guys were legit. Playing together since they were kids, their music was based around this square stringed instrument, accompanied by a western drum kit, some toms and other percussion instruments - shaky bell things. It was quite a bass-driven sounds, deep and loose, almost like early banjo music. And the vocals were ulalational (did i just make up a word?) and atonal. It was furious in parts and reminded me of secret videos of whirling dirvishes.

Now, I ended up really enjoying these guys - they got the crowd really moving: dancing up a storm, participating in the call/answer situation (the type that I often cringe at, even when it's a completely justifiable 'heyyyy/hooooo'). I danced in a West-African style, a style that I have picked up over the years from dancing to African music and going to African cultural events.

And yet, again, I'm a white girl with no direct links to any African people. What gives ME the right to take those movements and use them for my own, to feel like I have the right to participate in these actions - likely poor substitutes for ones handed down through generations and culturally significant to a stack of people not my own.

Aren't I doing exactly the same as that hapless hippies with his plastic didge? Probably.

So what are the lines of sharing, then? And what are the lines of sacred?

Is music to be sequestered away to each small territory and solely for the bearers of its origin?
I really hope not (especially because I really love azonto and want to keep dancing to it). Musical style and form has been snipped and stolen, influenced and traded for centuries - and not just by white european overlords.

But it's also not a free-for-all, there for the rape and pillage by those who have the privilege of access.

Knowledge and respect are a huge part of it - understanding of the codes of culture linked to specific times/places and there to guide use. However, as a whitey, I feel like I don't actually know what those boundaries are and that perhaps what I have been raised to think of as 'respect' is often justification.

And above all of that, what is more important in a bar in Kingston on a Monday night? Abiding by culturally appropriate forms of musical culture, or just smiling and having a good time?

Postscript
There isn't time to make the link in this post, but I am seeing the correlation between cultural appropriation vs sharing influence of music (style) and proprietry vs peer-to-peer sharing of music (content) - something I would like to investigate further.

2012, you're dumped.

2012-12-23T00:48:00.000Z

2012 has been a year in which writing has actually held little solace for me. Which is weird, because until this point, you readers got everything I had.

Something was different this year. I just didn't have the oomph to bare my soul as much. And, for some reason, I found less consolation in art, theatre, dance or anything else than I have ever before. It has been almost too personal a year to really share with the world at large.

I'm sorry to those of you who read regularly - the main stayers that pop back every couple of days, hoping for a bit of vitriol, or sharp-witted art review and only found posts that were at least a few weeks' old and a little lacklustre.

But, having had the week I've just had, I've decided that I'm taking the rest of the year off (yeah, 9 days, big deal - Ed.) and will be back writing with a vengeance next year. I might even spruce the place up a little, make it a little more, well, somethin' somethin'.

Thanks to those of you who did stick around, who came back and read my stuff, maybe even went and saw a show or two, based on what I wrote, or even bought some of my works (thank you!) and I hope your year was amazing, spectacular, even just good - you totally deserved it.

All the best to you and your loved ones over these holidays.

If you're in the northern hemisphere, keep warm. If you're southside, enjoy the sunshine.

And 2012, we're through.
You were a nightmare. A beautiful one, but a nightmare nonetheless.

Fambai Zvakanaka

objects in mirror are closer than they appear

2012-12-12T15:40:00.002Z

I think the River Entrance Project Space at the Tate Modern is one of the most undervalued spaces in London. I still think about the delicious Nicholas Hlobo show I saw there 4 years ago and the rest of their shows are consistently great. It's a not-so-secret dream of mine to have a show there one day.

I popped in there recently, catching up with Mika Meskanen - he of the pop-up sauna at Electrofringe fame - and we checked out the show. I only got to catch a few works before we had to scoot.

I got another quick chance to see more a few days later, although i had to leave to deal with a few work emails, and i'll be going back again. I'm clearly experimenting with a piecemeal way of experiencing exhibitions at the moment. Living on the edge, yo.

Anyway, about Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear.

Curated by Contemporary Image Collective Cairo, the gallery is drenched in darkness and the exhibition has a great premise, reducing the privlege of the visual perception and reality, the catalogue opening with a quote from Jean-Luc Goddard's Le Gai Savoir, 1969.

"If you want to see the world, close your eyes"

Although mostly video works (which is quite the paradox), they're all interesting ways of dealing with the theme.

There's one work which is hilarious to watch people watching: A Middle Aged Woman by Ján Mančuška. It's a text piece - a slowly changing script of a narrative - that is presented on a screen and people sit down on the floor to watch it, like it's a TV show. The 'action' they're reading on the screen is enthralling and the reactions from the audience are fascinating - a cross between watching moving picture and reading a book. But together, in public.

Another text vs image work, Morrissey Foretelling the Death of Diana, is based on the ~~daft~~ conspiracy theory that the Miserable One predicted Diana's death through his lyrics. It's an amusing mash-up of Morissey lyrics, images and pop references connecting music-based poetry with the pastiche of the current Monarchy to create a history that isn't necessarily real..

A little about my two favourite works, Dissonant and Double:

Dissonant is a video installation by Manon de Boer that I came in half way through, so I didn't get the whole of the work, but I'm going to tell you about the work from my experience.

It began in darkness - you hear puffing and grunting, moving and squeaks of flesh. You get the sense that it's a woman, exerting herself and because it's in the dark and i'm a perve, it's get's pretty sexual, pretty quickly. I stick withit, wondering what it felt like to listen to someone else having sex and whether, because it's art, i'm not really prying.

I might be making this up, but I think I read that most woman are turned on by the aural sense - whispering, the sound of flesh on flesh, licking her ears, etc - much more than for men. And I reckon a radio porn site would be totally subscribed to by women.

But I digress. This huffing and puffing sound piece shifts half way through and the video comes (back) into view. It's not a couple having sex AT ALL, but a dancer rehearsing a contemporary dance work - squeaking and moving, huffing and puffing all over the studio, you perve.

But I found that 'big reveal' so thrilling! I loved that my first thoughts were sexual, that men left the room all uncomfortable, only to see miss seeing what the true picture was. And it also says something about contemporary dance: its sensuality and yet highly visual form.

Reading the catalogue afterwards, I can see that de Boer's work actually starts with the image of the dancer and her music, with the darkness being half way through. But I don't think it matters too much - the work is about the darkness, the black gaps that fix our memory of a film and perhaps the intense power of the auditory in a story.

Double is the retelling of a story about parallel universes, by Mančuška. Although in-jokes and meta narrative in art is getting tiresome, what with meme culture knotting us all sideways, I really enjoyed this work nonetheless. Probably because, above all else, I love the work of Franz Kafka and this could easily have been made by him.

On a screen, there is an image of a man standing in front of the image of a man on a screen. The second man is sitting, telling a story to someone off screen. It looks like he's in an institution somewhere, an interrogation room of sorts. The first man is standing, lit as though on stage, telling the same story to an audience off screen, although we only hear his voice narrating. The story itself is one of the first man coming home drunk one night to let himself into his appartment in Praha and faced with a stranger who attacks him. It turns out to not be his appartment, but an exact replica of it in Bratislava - same section of the city, same looking block, same layout and same key access. A parallel.

Layer upon layer, truth over art over truth, replication and storytelling are all elements to this work that I loved. And its simple form allowed for all those themes and ideas to come through.

Yet, honestly, I'm not sure i would have stood and observed the work for as long as I did, if i wasn't trying to get 3G reception near the door. It's the first work in the entrance and a little intimidating to stand right in front of the door to view this work. I watched loads of people (friends included) walk right past it. So if you're reading this before you've seen the show, keep that in mind and make sure you stop a while.

image credits:
Double film still, by Ján Mančuška from his site.
Dissonant film still, by Manon de Boer from the Galerie Jan Mot site.

World AIDS Day

2012-12-01T15:41:00.001Z

As you know I'm quite passionate about the ongoing fight against AIDS/HIV in Africa and have a little project on it sitting away in the background.

I'm grateful that my most recent HIV test (as part of a regular sexual-health check up in time for today's World AIDS Day) came back all-clear. There are millions of women for whom that isn't the case.

I haven't forgotten them.

black coffee blues

2012-11-28T16:15:00.000Z

ella fitzgerald. oh baby, you're so pretty when you're sad.

when i'm sad, i very rarely get right down into the grit of it. i usually love listening to something that scrapes me out of it - peps me. but i'm doing some more research into people's favourite songs and finding songs that are visceral, hurting and really allow people to wallow. i'm looking for the ones that really take people places.

so i'm listening to some heart-wrenching blues. and this song just, well, whoa.

go on, listen to it and tell me you don't feel something. just a little.

the two things it reminded me of were henry rollins and afro house. diametrically opposed for most people.

the henry rollins book, black coffee blues was the first book of his i read (thanks to my friend and fellow coffee lover, jem) and i subsequently inhaled all of them. the manic self-deprecation was intoxicating. i came to see how being consumed by creative passion looks in another. and i realised that i sort of wanted some of it. not all of it, mind - there's some intense self-hatred in those books that's nice to watch, but not so nice to actually feel.

black coffee is a great afro house DJ and whose video of a gig in the baltic states (people dancing on sand, goddammit!) makes me want to go to a place with sand and dance all night. it couldn't take me to a more opposite place of happiness and joy. this is the kind of music i usually listen to on a low - something deep, soulful, but rhythmic. something that supports dark skies and cold winds. i'm also a major sucker for a hot man in glasses.

but for now, it's back to a kenyan espresso, ella and her heart-wrench.

love is a seesaw.

2012-11-26T23:30:00.000Z

Balancing at the same level is a great challenge and fun for a while.
But its real function it is bound up in its momentum.
The joy comes when one of you is up in the air, and the other is down low to the ground.
One goes up the other comes down and you feel the wind rushing in your ears as you see your partner fly, framed against the sky.

I don't really know anything about love, but, as I sat with two other artists, looking out over St Paul's and the Thames, from the Tate, the analogy seemed to work. We're all in a slight existential crisis and were feeling very philosophical. I still think it fits.

home

2012-11-19T13:05:00.001Z

i have been living out of a suitcase since the middle of 2010. my residency in perth is the longest i've ever lived anywhere in that time and it has been an amazing, wild and exciting ride.

i've learned to not take things like 'home' for granted, i've realised how much society is based on the answer to the question 'where do you live?' and i've had some time to work out what the role of stability and consistency is in an arts practice. turns out it's kind of important.

anyway, i've finally moved into a place that i will be staying in for a good while. it's not my very own, but that's a while away. it has lovely books on the walls, a balcony with all kinds of plants, the view of canary wharf and i go to sleep at night with the sound of the limehouse lock doing it's thang.

i'm pretty bloody lucky. and it almost feels like home - even after one day.

thanks for everyone that came along for the ride. here's to more good times.

vaginabilia*

2012-11-17T00:15:00.000Z

*thanks to gregory povey for that wonderful term.

a few days ago, i had another accidentally-themed art day. this time it was pretty much all about vaginas.

firstly i went to see the judy chicago show at riflemaker, featuring early works of hers. i really liked the car hoods and especially the diagrams for them, but not much of the others.

then i went and saw the sarah lucas project space, situation, which wasn't all that vagina-heavy, but there was floor-to-ceiling meat genetalia wallpaper in your face as you walked in the door, including the image of two massive decorated vulva. it was quite spectacular.

actually, that show was a welcome relief, as i had popped into the ultra-white gallery downstairs and it was overwhelmingly austere. it was nice to walk into a space that, aside from the shock of a pair of massive cunts, was an interesting space: personal, less homogenous and almost revealed the works more, in their cluttered/more homely space.

there were works in the 'kitchen', on a sink, sitting on tables, hanging from the ceiling and projected onto the wall.

i actually sighed in relief when i walked in, because it was my kind of space. and, thankfully, collectors also respond well to works in a space like that. not every work has to be shrouded in whiteness in order to give it the right space to be.

later that evening i went to see judy chicago speak at whitechapel gallery and she was amazing. i'm not going to speak too much about the whole talk - but the fact is that she was inspiring.

really - she talked about the first 10 years of her practice being ignored, that she hates injustice, that she's a moral artist, that she just raised funds to do her work and that if you don't have the money to make the work, don't make it - she wasn't interested in selling her work - it was more important for the work to be seen. not to mention her continued desire to change art pedagogy and increase women's appearance in our museums. she's another one who has been more interested in longevity than a flash-in-the-pan fame and it was exactly the kind of thing i needed to hear.

there was a medium amount of focus on The Dinner Party, her most famous work, but nonetheless, anna somers cocks spoke beautifully about the actual plates - renditions of the vulva. which pretty much rounded off the evening of vaginabilia for me.

a match made in heaven

2012-11-13T01:03:00.003Z

leigh bowery and mike parr. at the kunsthalle wien.

could it get any more tailored to my tastes? only by adding patti smith and kanye west exhibitons in there...

leigh and mike are ongoing influences here at she sees red.

i'm bummed i didn't know about mike's artist talk and i am pretty sure i can't make next week's talk on extreme art and the body politic, but i'll be getting to vienna at some stage to see these shows.

you heard it here first.

mostly artefacts and artifice

2012-11-12T21:27:00.005Z

between settling into a life of sorts, i've been trying to make sure i get to see some art every day. and i somehow have gotten lazy about it. preferring to do dumb shit like watch scary movies with my friend age or sit and read thick novels about young women trying to escape the inevitibility of married life.

but i have, in fact, managed to see quite a bit of artefacty-type things and i'm totally loving the historical weight of london at the moment.

the money gallery
last week i went to the british museum because i had half an hour to spare and i hung out in the money section. it is a gallery that, actually, i would love to see properly expanded. the historical coinage/artefacts of trade are really interesting, including the chinese coins that didn't change in 2000 years (!) (that's good design for you). i think the modern era hasn't really been explored that well and could really help unpack the crux of currency and value and monetary history.

even the history of accounting was briefly covered (like a monument to pretty much the first auditor), but could have expanded right out. like - how did accounting evolve? how did we, as a society, come to agree on ways of managing money, and establishing methods of checks and balances? given that money and trade and currency underpin massive chunks of house societies function, i think it would give us a real insight into how we operate.

or maybe it's just me that finds that history fascinating.

on the road
i've also spent a bit of time in the british library lately (a great place to work), and checked out the original scroll manuscript of jack kerouac's on the road - it's actually a beautiful object that just oozes that manic style of the book. i couldn't really read the words on it - low lux protecting the manuscripts integrity made it a little difficult, but there were chunks of break-out text that reminded me of how great the book is. i might have to read it again.*

the jewellery gallery
as a compliment to the history of trade and artefacts at the british museum, i love going to the jewellery gallery at the victoria and albert museum. it's about craftsmanship and social identity through the history of personal ornamentation - of course it could be waaaaay bigger, but for a mostly-private collection, it's pretty amazing. it's also a reminder of the immense wealth and power that is conveyed through bespoke jewellery. i still maintain that even 'peasant' jewellery in the past is much more impressive than the peasant jewellery we have going now.

on the street
and even when i'm not dipping into museums, i still get to experience a sense of history about london through the blue plaques scheme.**

like, i walk past places where REAL SHIT HAPPENED. yesterday we were talking a walk in our local 'hood and came across the old residence of emmeline pankhurst. until now, emmeline pankhurst has just be a name in the history books, or a link on wikipedia. not a real person who did amazing things! yesterday I had a moment where the history of her life and the reality of mine suddenly connected. lineage.

in australia, i'm pretty removed from that. which is exactly why colonisation works - I'm completely divorced from the immense history of the land I was raised on because my ancestors killed pretty much everyone who could have possibly passed down that history. and, because i'm from english stock and so far from the sites of my family history, the concept of being connected to history is a little foreign to me. which is why i'm loving the cold, dark and grey city i'm in.

* i won't be seeing the film, even if the amazing sam riley is in it - he's too white to be sal paradiso and they're all not loose enough.

** brilliant idea, by the way, whoever came up with that.

please, sir. can we keep our moore?

2012-11-04T10:36:00.000Z

Change.org|Start an Online Petition

london fashion

2012-11-03T20:46:00.001Z

I've always engaged on some level with fashion design. you would have NO idea from the way i dress (or my wardrobe that fits within Ryanair luggage restrictions), but i regularly admire and covet high fashion.

You've probably seen random posts of mine about Hussein Chalayan, Ann Demeulemeester, McQueen, Vivienne Westwood, my work trying to integrate fashion and interactive art (which has been put waaaaay on the back burner) and perhaps wondered how I always end up at Dover Street Market.

The exciting thing about London is that I can properly engage with that aspect of my life (and practice) again. I don't have a fashion design background AT ALL. But I can still appreciate and learn on the fly. Actually, I plan to do that a whole lot more here, because I can

Even in the week I've been here, I've able to visit DSM (which is where I can get up close and personal with some of the designers I like), check out the Issey Miyake range, apply for work with Westwood, McQueen and Chalayan. I'll check out St Martin's soon and keep an eye out for local designers (like the amazing Tanique Coburn stall at Portobello Market - watch this space for this girl!).

Once I'm settled and financial again, I might even do something to properly upskill in this regard, but in the mean time, i'm going to learn from the public intellect - the V&A, libraries, working studios and fashion on the street.

Yay!

reach as high as you can

2012-10-30T18:55:00.003Z

i still love marc johns' blog. here's a gem from it.

justin mortimer

2012-10-27T00:30:00.000+01:00

I really like the Haunch of Venison's Eastcastle Gallery.

Each time I've been in there, there's a really great show on, and I can just enjoy the work. I've also always felt the staff to be friendly and open (not always a given in Central London galleries).

The show on there at the moment by Justin Mortimer is quite a beautiful show. Mortimer is a painter and, although I have a dysfunctional relationship with painting, this work (and other work of his I've seen recently) reminds me why the love exists in that love-hate relationship.

I also feel like Mortimer is addressing a new aesthetic in painting that I haven't really noticed until now. That aesthetic is something that was actually brought in by photography - something that I call the Vice Mag/Richardson aesthetic. It's one that, within the context of photography and media arts, I loathe. I cannot stand it and friends know not to mention Terry Richardson in my company if they don't have 10 minutes to listen to me rant violently.

However, the translation of that harsh, party-party-fuck-me-i'm young-and-sinister look - its framing, lighting and composition - translates really well into painting. Especially in the hands of Mortimer.

The slightly-detached position that painting affords a dark subject, using contemporary settings, naked youth, stark lighting allows these symbols and meaning of the work to filter through. The wasted youth aspect of the characters in Mortimers paintings are not People I Might Know as they are in Vice mag photo shoots (which is part of my problem with them). In these paintings, they become figures doing actions that i need to pay attention to. They aren't as directly accessible anymore, so provoke me as a viewer to pay attention.

And yet these scenarios are those that are very much occurring right now. The inbuilt-camera-flash type of lighting contrast (different to actual chiaroscuro), the RGB monitor skin-tones, the urban backgrounds and 'no pics it didn't happen' style of framing are all those I've seen online for the last 5 years.

This is not the 20th Century I'm looking at, here.

What I also like about these works is that they're not trying to portray a life I might aspire to, but are not sanctimonious or baroque in codemnation. They're gritty - possibly depraved - without taking themselves too seriously, and light without being glib (criticisms I have of other media using similar treatment). They're symbolic, but not so overloaded that they're confusing; realistic without being self-centered or mind-numbingly autobiographical.

And the great thing is that they don't look as good in the book. They're made to be paintings. They're intended to be experienced as a discreet object, not just an image or a shorthand version of them.

I have issues with paintings that become photographs far too easily - they lose the essence of why using goopy, messy, expensive materials matter. Mortimers works, although drawing from photomedia, are not photos. They're not even potential photos. They're solid pieces of shimmering oil that have depth and movement and firmness all at once.

I'm going to go back several times for this one.

image credit: Haunch of Venison's website

'No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.'

2012-10-26T12:13:00.000+01:00

Robert Frost is often quoted with that little gem.

I have a terrible habit of comparing myself to others. It's a nasty little tic that I would actually like to be rid of. Especially as I don't compare myself to those with whom i'm comparable. I compare myself to people who make vastly different work to me, or whose position I am apt to only see in favourable light. I have very little perspective when it comes to that.

I realised this a few days ago when I was heading off into a boring old inferiority zone and my (very smart and perceptive friend) suggested that the person I was lauding was actually fairly facile. That their work was pleasing to the eye, but had little substance.

She went on to suggest that it's like that for those who have an easy life - they want for little money, have confidence, don't really struggle, can produce accomplished and smooth works. But they also don't and can't create the depth, or the texture of those who have to bump into life, for those who have to wrestle with understanding.

That was slightly comforting.

According to this great article, Frost is also interested in the flipside of the process [of writing] too - not just just the agony, but the sheer joy and amazingness of it. That he has "a hell of a time" doing it too. Whilst it's important to embrace the gnarly depths, so too the peaks. So too the joy and fun and ease, actually, of living a life that is centred around conveying ideas and pretty pictures.

london. huzzah!

2012-10-24T13:14:00.001+01:00

this has been a weird year. thanks for trying to keep up, if you have. you may well have lost interest in the half-arse, confused musings of an artist who seems to be floating all over the place. you'd be forgiven, becuase i have.

however, this is the beginning of the good stuff again. i'm in london again, but for the long haul. i've got a nice chunky visa, the will to live and a stack of great art to see, do and hopefully help other people make.

i'll be going to a gallery a day again, so hopefully there's loads more writing about art on here. i'm also likely to get ranting again, which is going to be fun for you all. i have some posts up my sleeve.

i haven't had coffee yet today and i'm behind schedule, so this is just a little heads up for things to come.

thanks for sticking around, there are drinks and snacks on the table at the back.

hungry city and the existential crisis

2012-10-21T23:58:00.004+01:00

last week, on my way to the usual cafe sit-down time, i went to the hungry city exhibition at kunstraum kreuzberg/bethanien, a group show, focusing on agriculture in contemporary times.

it was a really worthwhile show. my criticism is that there wasn't a clear room sheet (which is why i have no names attached to the works i'm talking about and some of the actual displays were a little half-arsed and 'typical' execution.

mostly, it was an excellent group show with some great video about custom-tractor culture in eastern europe, fruit maps (that reminded me of nicola twilley's work) and a super-disgusting videos about pigs (which i had to walk out of immediately).

the biggest problem with seeing the show was, rather than get me all excited about art and/or changing the world's perspective about the role of capitalism on agriculture and the environment, i nosedived straight into an existential crisis.

art does the same old thing, over and over again - maps, videos, photos, words about issues that the world has.
and the issues are the same old issues over and over again - environment, capitalism, colonialism, disease, poverty, etc.

and nothing changes.

art does not change anything.

and i am an artist. i want to change things. this is a problem.

i actually spent the day very depressed.

i half-heartedly considered whether i really could be the human rights lawyer i keep threatening the world to be. or the al jazeera/economist journalist. i spewed my angst onto facebook and felt partly relieved, partly justified.

and then somehow it passed.

i've seen some beautiful work since then and have been getting distracted by films and theatre, etc. but not much. it's still a little below the surface.

but, back to the main exhibiiton. if you're in berlin over the next few days and are not an artist, you should go and see the show. it's meaty: full of interesting perspectives on the world.
and if you can't get there, subscribe to nicola twilley's blog. it will give you some of the flavour.