From his student paintings to grandiose cinematic panoramas, the Hayward Gallery’s retrospective celebrating 50 years of Ed Ruscha’s paintings, charts his experimentation with word and image, inspired by graphic design, Americana and the visual noise of the every day.

Ruscha’s early paintings use typography to encase noise in art. The bold uppercase statements on garish backgrounds, like Noise, make one word shout across a room while Scream represents the temporality of sound as, just like the noise soon disappears after it leaves the body, the word itself also disintegrates into the background.

Hurting the Word Radio also literalises how easy words can be manipulated on canvas; clamps tighten themselves around the curves of the letters, asking whether distorting the image of a word can maybe distort the meaning of the language itself?

Ruscha similarly disturbs meaning without words;  the generic American gas station of Standard Station, is carefully constructed between architectural ruled pencil lines however, in a matter of centimetres, the predictable and the recognisable is destroyed in the companion painting, Burning Gas Station, as the eye follows the identical line and soon discovers the same station now ablaze.

In the 1970s, Ruscha shows his experimentation isn’t just conceptual, deviating from oil painting to egg yolk in Sand in the Vaseline. The sign’s warnings: ‘These paintings have vulnerable surfaces’, seem to capture the essence of Ruscha’s aesthetic; if meaning can be so easily washed away, why should we concrete the everyday in oil-paint?

Ruscha’s paintings unpick the connection between image and word, forcing us to bring our own interpretation and emotion to the painting. It’s impossible to ignore the idyllic background image while reading the huge words in Not a Bad World Is It?, then in Hi Honey, we are literally lured over by a carrot on a stick to read a tiny, almost missable, printed message. One of the beautiful City Lights series, Wen Out For Cigrets, picks out and celebrates a simple overheard phrase from one of the hundreds of voices that reside in the ribbons of blurred street lights that lie behind the text.

Ruscha embraces these emotive connections of word and image in The End, where ominous gothic print is trapped between two frames, as if saying the end is coming…but not quite yet. Similarly, the mountain paintings juxtapose  awesome nature with the mundane phrases of life. We want our everyday to be connected with this breathtaking beauty but something just doesn’t fit. They belong to different worlds…or words.

But Ruscha forces such paradoxes onto the same canvas, all the while dangling any promise of definiton on that preverbial carrot on a stick.  If a picture could speak a thousand words, judging by this amazing look back through his work, Ruscha makes sure words can speak a thousand images, and just as loudly.

Ed Ruscha: Fifty Years of Painting is on until 10 January, 2010, at:

Hayward Gallery
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Road
Borough
Southwark
SE1 8XX

Tickets £10 (Concessions £6). Open daily 10am – 6pm, late nights Friday until 10pm.

Image: Standard Station, 1966. Courtesy Private Collection© Ed Ruscha 2009. Photography: Paul Ruscha

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Ed Ruscha: 50 Years of Painting

My story begins with an ill fated detour through Soho; a mistake that led my friend and I to find ourselves on Oxford Street. On a Saturday. After a moment of shared fear, we decided to man up and do some Christmas shopping – since we were there. Mistake number two.

Within approximately seven minutes, the palpitations began. I became aware of the hundreds of people and the fact that there appeared to be an unofficial one-way system in operation. And we were on the wrong side of the street.

Since this day, I vowed never to return and to find alternative methods of Christmas shopping. Preferably involving no people, novelty hats or public transport - this criteria mainly stems from a recent bus journey where I was violated by a roll of wrapping paper in a most unholy way. The novelty hats are included simply because I find them ridiculous. Walking home after said violation, I started thinking how I could subdue my resentment of Christmas shopping enough to actually do some. And then of course there’s the small issue of the sad state of affairs that is my bank balance after working unpaid in London for six months.

And then it happened.

Like the Christmas star over the manger, a flickering street light shone into an open skip on my street. I suddenly remembered a conversation I’d had with someone who said she found an amazing Art Deco mirror in a skip. Granted it was in Primrose Hill not Holloway, where you’re more likely to just find suspiciously stained furniture. But the idea of finding a hidden gem, buried under a mattress, mine for the taking, was just too tempting to pass up.

I slowed my pace to surreptitiously look inside. Maybe I’d find a nice art print.

Something moved in the darkness. It seemed someone else was doing some hunter-gathering;  except they fell into the rodent category as opposed to impoverished daughter who will be impaled, like a less-than-glamorous Christmas angel atop a tree, if I return home empty handed.  Suffice to say I soon conceded this was not a viable shopping option.

Yet, despite the likelihood of developing a death rattle worthy of Tiny Tim due to inhalation of potential asbestos, I still find myself glancing into skips, just in case. While I realise my brief foray into skip-shopping was mildly disturbing, I feel it demonstrated my commitment/desperation to finding the perfect (free) gift.  I assure you (or anyone expecting a present from me this year) I’ve never found anything worthwhile. But as C-Day gets closer, I can’t help but remember the old adage that one man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure…or Christmas present.

And to all skip owners out there, padlocks do not deter me - they just make me think you’ve got something in there that I want. Or perhaps my Grandma might want. Wrapped in a bow and put under the Christmas tree. Which I’m hoping will also be coming to a skip near me soon.

Image by Brockvicky courtesy of Flickr

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Christmas Shopping in Skips

Saturday. Regent Street. What you’d expect. But no. What’s this? A Marmite pop up shop?

Absolutely Juande Ramos, people of all ages brilliantly manipulated by this fabulous PR stunt. Genius. And my gosh was it working.
 
Yellow and black yeast extract everywhere. Simple but impressive, vibrant displays sending Christmas shoppers off on a tangent. A table set for two to have tea in the window. Very cute. Happy snappy shoppers ridden with curiosity peering through as tea was served. Up on a pedestal in the shop window is strangely romantic. Novel.
 
The menu:
 
Choice of tea; white or black.
Choice of toast; white or brown.
A jar of Marmite.
 
Uncomplicated, served on colourful, marmite-centric mugs and plates, all available to buy in store.
 
Love it or Hate it?
 
Looooooooooove it; a great idea, perfectly executed. The pop up shop is entirely in tune with its audience. It shouts youthfulness to all. And for those previously unacquainted with the big M, unsurprisingly the taste tickled more than it repulsed (the stickers upstairs illustrate that marvellously).
 
Before Saturday, I was impartial, undecided, on the fence if you will. Now I’ve bought the recipe book.
 
Marmite Pop Up Shop
82 Regent Street
Quadrant Arcade
W1

Monday to Saurday: 10-8pm
Sunday: 12-6pm
 
www.marmitepopup.co.uk

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Marmite Pop Up Shop

There’s something about the smell of pine needles that just gets me all festive; which is why I always buy a real Christmas tree.

But recently the eco warrior in me has been feeling a bit uncomfortable about buying this force-grown foliage, which I’ll eventually throw away three weeks later. And the Scrooge in me always feels annoyed that I paid a fortune for some scrawny tree that goes brown and loses all its needles by Christmas Eve.

Which is why I’m so pleased I discovered The Christmas Forest, a properly ethical, environmental and shopper-friendly company. They sell their trees from seven sites in London, including Putney, Islington, Kensal Green and Dulwich and provide great quality trees, while still looking after the environment.

The trees are sourced mainly in the UK (rather than imported from abroad) which reduces the ‘tree miles’; and all their trees are freshly cut, which means they haven’t been sitting in a warehouse for weeks, drying out. They also make an effort to ‘do good’, making a donation to TREE AID for every tree sold, who plant and care for a new tree in their Forests for Food project in Ethiopia. 

I popped along to the Islington site, by The Alwyne Castle pub on St Pauls Road. The staff were friendly and generous with their time, explaining clearly the difference between all the trees and why certain trees cost more than others. You can choose from the Nordmann Fir, Fraser Fir, Noble Fir, Norway Spruce and Blue Spruce. I went for a four foot Noble Fir, well priced at £23 and a gorgeous little tree with big fluffy branches and a really pleasant pine scent.

All the trees were in great condition, many came with their own stand and the sites also sell Christmas lights and wreaths, arrange delivery and provide you with a ‘care of your tree’ leaflet which not only gives you advice on looking after your tree, but also on where to recycle it, and other ways you can have an eco Christmas.

www.christmasforest.co.uk

Also this week…

Living Well loves…ethical gifts from Eco Chic Collection, a company making beautiful Christmas decorations and presents, all of which are ethical, sustainable and Fair Trade.

Image by Sociotard courtesy of Flickr

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Eco Christmas Trees

Adam Jacot de Boinod’s bestselling book The Meaning of Tingo boasts a bizarre collection of extraordinary foreign words from over 300 languages. For example: ‘bakku-shan’, Japanese for a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front. Or ‘Backpfeifengesicht’, German for a face that cries out for a fist in it.

Jacot de Boinod’s hunt for hilarious expressions began when he worked as a researcher for the BBC programme QI and trawled through hundreds of dictionaries from around the world, discovering an astonishing array of linguistic oddities.

In his latest offering, The Wonder of Whiffling, he turns his attention to interesting and unusual words from Old and Middle English and Tudor-Stuart, through the rural dialects collected by Victorian lexicographers, the argot of 19th century criminals, slang from two world wars, right up to our contemporary jargon.

His personal favourite word? ‘Nakhur, a Persian word meaning: a camel that won’t give milk until her nostrils are tickled.’

Where do you live in London and why?

‘I live in Notting Hill which has always been a very cosmopolitan area with the great plus that anyone in the world could come out of its tube station. It has lovely gardens, is near two parks and a good walk from the West End. It has many cinemas and restaurants and has houses and streets of varying shapes and sizes.’

From where do your quirky book ideas come from, and how did it all begin?

‘My interest in the quirkiness of foreign words was triggered when one day, working as a researcher for the BBC, I picked up a weighty Albanian dictionary to discover that they have no less than 27 words for eyebrow and the same number for different types of moustache, ranging from a ‘mustaqe madh’, or bushy, to a ‘mustaqe posht’, one which droops down at both ends. That’s how my book The Meaning of Tingo was born.’

What was the creative process of writing and researching The Wonder of Whiffling?

‘Having written two books called Tingo on all the words that English lacks, I wanted this book to be about the amazing and inventive range of vocabulary that does exist in English our marvellous language.

‘I was unable to go near a bookshop or library without sniffing out the often dusty shelf where the foreign language dictionaries were kept. I started to collect favourites. Many described strange or unbelievable things.’

Which areas of London do you find most inspiring?

‘The East End, Chelsea, Richmond Park and Docklands.’

Where in London would you recommend everyone visit at least once?

‘The Wallace Collection, the Cabinet War Rooms, Lord’s Cricket Ground and Borough Market.’

Do you have any tips for aspiring writers?

‘Only to bother if you are truly passionate about your subject – otherwise the odds are against it actually happening.’

www.thewonderofwhiffling.com

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Author Adam Jacot de Boinod

I’ve got two things against cookery courses: one, they’re too expensive and two, they’re too long.

With all the food porn I watch on TV, I should be an expert chef by now, but I’m not. I can watch Jamie Oliver cook a delicious citrus seared tuna with crispy noodles and then, having worked up an appetite, I’ll go and make a peanut butter sandwich.

Given this sad state of affairs, I was delighted to hear that the people at L’atelier des Chefs have designed the perfect cookery class for people like me. It’s called Cook Eat and Run. Basically, you learn to cook a gourmet meal in half and hour, then you sit down with your fellow classmates and eat it. I made guinea fowl stuffed with herby ricotta, served on a bed of polenta and rocket leaves. And it only cost £18. I’m sure I’d pay roughly that if I ordered it at a restaurant nearby. Except, now I know how to cook it myself, so that’s gotta be worth something.

I was initially doubtful about learning to cook a great meal in 30 minutes, but I managed to do it, plus I picked up some useful chopping techniques from our chef, John Fernandez.

There were about four people at each cooking station and, after John told us what to do, we divided the task among the group. The only thing we had to do ourselves was stuff the ricotta mix under the fowl’s skin. Then we handed our trays back to John to pop in the oven. While the birds cooked, we prepared the parmesan and sundried tomato polenta. The timing was spot-on.

We sat at a communal table and ate our lunch. It was clear that many of the people on the course were repeat customers. Some worked locally and were on a lunch-hour and one couple had their meal ‘to go’. I sat next to a drama teacher called Shaun who’d been given the course as a gift. He described it as ‘bringing back the sociable lunch hour’. We drank to that.

L’atelier des Chefs
19 Wigmore Street
Marylebone
W1U 1PH

Tel: 020 7499 6580

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Quick-Fire Cookery Course

The maxim of most estate agents is location, location, location. So given that the Portrait restaurant in the National Gallery looks out over the Millennium Eye, Big Ben and St Martin’s in the Field, it is situated in one sweet spot.

Placed on the third floor of the gallery, it fills up quite regularly on the Thursdays and Fridays when it opens up in the evening. If you are considering dining on these particular days, it would be advisable to book ahead as there was scarcely a free table in sight.

I started off with the cured salmon, which made for an excellent start to the meal. The salmon was juicy and full of flavour. My companion’s selection of the scallops proved another inspired choice as the meat retained a good consistency and texture.

My main course of guinea fowl with potato gratin was another well-balanced dish and with a great amount of thought put into its composition. Although I felt the potato gratin was a bit flat, this was a small distraction from the tender and succulent meat of the guinea. My companion’s main course of the pork belly was another winner although the addition of a red onion confit seemed to be too much of a leftfield choice. For wine, a 2005 Temparanillo was a perfect compliment to both dishes, its mixture of berries and oak giving an added resonance to the food.

For desert, I plumped for the bread and butter pudding. I am always weary when going for this particular dish as it is often done quite badly, which is confusing as it is such a simple dish. However, given the standard of the food thus far, I felt confident in selecting it. And my good intentions were rewarded with a very well-rounded pudding which held up very well.

My companion’s choice of liquorice parfait was something to behold. I normally have an aversion to liquorice in deserts as it can be terribly overwhelming in terms of flavour but this was exceptionally subtle and nuanced and rounded off what was an extremely impressive meal.

Portrait Restaurant
St Martin’s Place
Covent Garden
WC2H 0HE

Tel: 020 7312 2490

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The Portrait Restaurant

‘Lost within the abyss of urban debris, a plethora of discovery awaits, as you, the earthworm, crawls into the Pandora’s box of Urban Faerie real.’

The Wantona Collective summons Londoners to the East End on the seventh evening of December, to explore the faerie’s realm: ‘a place somewhere between the urban jungle and another’.

That jungle rests near Brick Lane, where the Bacon Street Project’s warehouse basement will be transformed into an enchanted space: part city, part woodland, for one night only at the Urban Faerie pop-up exhibition.

Featuring printed illustrations from eight contemporary artists, each a visual interpretation of an ‘urban faerie’ and her environment, the evening promises an atmospheric display of performance art and surreal spectacle, from a collective that includes talents in photography, performance, design, graphics, illustration and filmmaking.

Creative Director and head Wantona, Emma Winter, whose ceaseless enthusiasm has helped steer the project from conception to near completion, initially envisaged producing the exhibit solely, but found she ‘wasn’t getting anywhere’. It wasn’t until the cooperative took shape that her dream was realised through their meeting of inspired minds.

‘With a collective all of our creative imaginations pulled ether, it’s like a collective energy. We have a diverse team, and that’s essentially what the Wantona Collective is.

‘The evening will be very kooky. Wantona’s got so many different creative outlets and we’ll be utilising some of these on the night. There’s a short film which we produced which we’ll be showing on the night. It’s a bit of fun and we want to create a different experience.’

Limited edition illustrations are available to purchase on the night with guaranteed delivery before Christmas.

Featured artists will include:

Cereinyn Ord
Natasha Chambers
Peter Edwards
Craig Mooney
Jack Clayton
Jon Boustead
Dan Desaleux
Emma Winter

Photography: Cereinyn Ord

The Urban Faerie pop-up exhibition is showing on Monday 7 December, 5- 9pm at:

The Bacon Street Project
14 Bacon Street
Tower Hamlets
E1 6LF

Tel: 020 7729 9800

Image: ‘Inside Outside’ by Natasha Chambers

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East End Faeries

And so it begins.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but like the bi-annual dental check-up, or the end of the car insurance policy, Christmas has crept up on us again.

It’s time to start honing the Yuletide gag reflex to perfection for the inevitable force-feeding of festive cheer down our throats.

Some thoughtful types, however, have already got in on the act early. If, like many Londoners, you happen to have taken a wander down Oxford Street at any point since November, you can’t have failed to notice the abysmal excuse for their Christmas lights this year.

It almost feels like cheating to call them Christmas lights, because they’re actually just a load of LED-laden advertising boards for Disney’s new movie, A Christmas Carol.

I’m usually a bit of a Scrooge at Christmas anyway (oh, the irony), but this seems to be having some kind of reverse-Scrooge effect on me. Where are the snowmen? Where did the glittery trees go? I imagine them to be locked away in a damp basement somewhere, an unlit neon Santa crying a single mildew tear, while his dull reindeer pals scratch away the number of days until Christmas 2010 on the exposed brickwork with a sharpened candy cane.

We already live in a city where adverts are impossible to get away from, so why besmirch a glorious tradition with hideous promotional crap?

To make matters worse, they went on display on November 3. I was still munching away at the kiddies Halloween sweets on November 3, not thinking about Christmas.

Who in their right mind could think that displaying a sickening illuminated marketing campaign for a Disney movie for one whole sixth of the year could be a good idea? Wait. I think I know this one. Probably the man who’s rolling around in the vast majority of Disney’s marketing budget.

Who did they get to switch on this November spectacle? None other than Jim Carrey. A family favourite, if your family happen to be stuck in the ’90s, and haven’t tired of predictable rubber-faced humour.

Did he do it for the good of London? Or because he’s just like a moth and loves lights? No. It’s because he plays the lead in Disney’s A Christmas Carol, which, by some odd coincidence, was premiering that very evening in Leicester Square. How very convenient.

Quick. Deck the halls with office-loads of marketing gurus, because apparently ‘tis the season to have corporate bullshit shoved in our faces.

Image by Mark Hillary courtesy of Flickr

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Bah Humbug!

Culture can be divisive and whereas I enjoyed the musical retelling of the mysterious and tragic case of Leo Frank in Parade, my boyfriend claimed to feel: ‘disgusted, appalled and like throwing up on the director’s face.’

The first thing to note about Parade is that it has been put on by sedos, a 104-year-old charity set up by the Stock Exchange  to harness dramatic talent inside the square mile. Membership has diversified during the passing century to include performers outside of the City but off-duty lawyers still make up a satisfying portion of the cast.

Parade, based on a book by Alfred Uhry, is set between 1913 and 1915 in Georgia and tells the story of events leading up to and from the discovery of 12-year-old Mary Phagan’s body in a factory run by Jewish businessman, Leo Frank.

The timeline is religiously accurate and not only crams in all the events of what turns into a massive legal and social battle with a side of romance, but also takes the time, at the beginning of the play, to set the climate of the epoch and the significance of the characters. Although this is commendable from a historian’s point of view, after the fifth twist, my addled brain was dreaming of neat little narrative arcs.

Irrespective, the content was sufficiently intriguing to prompt me to spend hours researching the real life events later on that night.

The reason why this case transcended a nightly news level of fame to become something that gets a long Wikipedia page is that it epitomised the social and anti-Semitic forces of the time. To this day there are no concrete facts that point to Leo’s guilt or innocence yet the prejudice he met is clear.

The source of my boyfriend’s ire was that now should be a time in which – rather than resurrecting stories that fuel a victim complex amongst the Jewish people – we attempt to disarm paranoia and build bridges in the Middle East.

My take is less political: if art can fill in a piece of the sprawling jigsaw that makes up our global history then I’m for it. And Parade, with its stonking band and all-singing, all-dancing cast of lawyers and stockbrokers did that with energy, talent, and scrupulous attention to detail.

Parade runs until Saturday 5 December at:

Bridewell Theatre
14 Bride Lane
Blackfriars
EC4Y 8EQ

Box office: 020 7353 3331

This post is from The London Word and should not be republished elsewhere without prior permission. Please check out our site for more great stories and features.

Parade at Bridewell Theatre