Thursday’s debate du jour was served wrapped in the rind of yet another debate. I spent the day leading up to Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time watching the socio-political fallout. With great interest I followed the story as it proliferated itself across the Internet and news outlets, rattling the doors of parliament and rousing the executive suites of the BBC. Watching again as I ate my lunch, I was again moved by just how incendiary an issue this has been. And not just in terms of the wider populous. I truly flit between opinions as to the morality amidst this issue with all its gloomy complexity. I felt as though I needed my own debate about the issue before Griffin even reached the television studio. There are too many things to be said about this issue, too many views I myself want to express. But here is just one. It is a troublesome one, but one I would love to see given the kind of intellectual currency afforded to such platforms as the Intelligence Squared debates.

I put forward the proposition that the BNP, distasteful and undemocratic though it is, is in fact a powerful force for the re-democratisation of the UK. If you can put to one side for a moment the controversy and scaremongering (not to downplay the importance of the bias and racism inherent in the what the BNP stands for), it is plain to see that the drafting of this party onto a highbrow political platform and therefore into the upper echelons of the political arena, has exorcised the populous in a manner practically unheard of in contemporary party-politics. Not since the expenses scandals have ordinary, grass-roots voters been motivated to comment on the functioning of politics and I would suggest that contrary to its outward appearance to have roused political interest, the expenses issue served mainly to cement widespread dislike of the political classes and apathy in the process of democracy and its ability to offer real options and real change.

The BNP’s appearance on prime-time television, however, is one which leaves the moral compass spinning. If pushed I think I find myself most in agreement with the ex-editor of the Sun who commented that the BBC cannot be blamed for simply fulfilling the mandate for which we pay our license fee. I am not sure I am happy about Griffin appearing on Q.T. but it’s worth noting that it is the fundamental bases and building blocks of our society – law, rules, codes of conduct – that keep the BNP and its followers from exerting a greater influence than they do in this country, and therefore we must adhere to these markers of civilisation, and follow the rules and codes in deciding whether to give the BNP this platform. This taken as a given, it is plain that the BBC had only one choice given the BNP’s six percent share of the vote and two seats in the European Elections.

In which case it is not the BBC who is responsible for my discomfort in seeing such a figure ascend the tiers of debate in which I could find at least some semblance of respect for the participants until now. It is in fact the voting public, my fellow countrymen and women.

Quite simply, I do not remember the last time such a divisive political debate lead so readily back to the grass-roots electorate. In my disgust at some of the issues coagulated within this row, I cannot help but take enjoyment from the barbed blade planted firmly into the torso of political apathy.

Ed Williams

Worse, the release of this year’s ArtReview power list has seen him plummet from being Top Dog to being a tick-ridden no. 48 which is, I’m sure, the metaphorical equivalent to Mr Hirst of a royal crack to the knackers with a Doctor Marten boot — delivered while he’s already reeling on the ground. To the rest of us, it’s just a reminder that all glory is fleeting. A star is extinguished, not with a bang, but a very anguished whimper.

My point is that as some stars fall, other rise. That’s why I was tempted into going to the opening night of Lucas Price’s exhibition at the Black Rat Press, Rivington St, Shoreditch. I rolled my eyes when I saw the press release — another graffiti artist — but Price is proof that not every “urban” artist should be tarred with the same can of primer.

I’m going to use the B word. Sorry. But whenever graffiti is mentioned, his spectre looms larger than Banquo at Macbeth’s banquet. Banksy is the street art world’s Vettriano. Sure he does alright and he’s popular, but his work isn’t exactly challenging. Let’s face it, the only provocative statement that’s had Banksy’s name underneath it in at least a decade comes from the anonymous collective that wrecked his Stokes Croft mural by throwing red paint all over it.

I’m an old fashioned kind of guy. I like my art to say something. So it’s truly wonderful when you find art that not only says something, but says it from the heart. Lucas Price manages to do both.

He’s nervous. It’s his first big show and he’s worried about how people are going to react. But unlike a certain D Hirst, he’s not worried about his reputation in as much as it fattens his wallet. No, he’s got the same nervous need for acceptance that all recovering addicts do — a need that drives his entire body of work.

He needn’t be worried. Jesus Help Me find my Proper Place is a deeply personal collection that not only draws deep from Price’s years as a homeless drug addict, but also one that says volumes about his recovery. You feel as if he’s put his heart and his soul into his work and when an artist does that, something magical happens — art becomes more than mere technique and becomes imbued with meaning.

There’s a real sense of Price’s former disconnection and his struggle to reconnect with the world — in short, to find his place. A collage of photos of the Earth taken from the moon, shrouded in telling white space and bearing the legend ‘when you’re high it’s so warm… it’s like a blow job’ seemed to sum it up for me. As did his statement ‘I’ve decided to study real hard this year and become rich and famous.’ You get a real sense of an artist struggling to express himself in his work.

He’s definitely obsessed with death. Skulls abound, and there’s an open coffin placed in the centre of the room — the body in it is undoubtedly the corpse of his former self, the unlucky Lucas Price who never sobered up and discovered meaning. But it isn’t a morbid obsession. It’s a celebration of a deserved escape from the jaws of death.

Lucas Price’s work is warm and genuine. You might not think these are high accolades for pieces that can command up to 14k a throw. But they are. In fact, I can’t think of praise any higher.

For what it’s worth, I’d happily have one of Damien Hirst’s new paintings hanging on my wall. But that’s the point. Hirst’s new work is art-school stuff that ought to be hanging up in someone’s bedroom. You really get the feeling that the work of Lucas Price belongs in a gallery.

In short, I think he’s found his place.

Richard Allday

Lucas Price: Jesus help me find my proper place
Black Rat Press, Rivington St, Shoreditch
October 15th – November 13th 2009

Click here for details

I suppose the first colour in my wardrobe came when someone sent me a demo tape of some early Interpol recordings back in 2001, and I was just blown away that there might be more to life than two albums and a tragically short career.

Okay, so listening to Interpol wasn’t exactly opening my door to all the colours of the rainbow, but it was at least the adoption of some muted shades of contrast, a chiaroscuro landscape out of which I could finally begin to imagine life beyond the travails of a lonely teenager. Then of course it happened. I got into electronic music via way of Radiohead’s Kid A (2001) when someone said “yeah, they’re good, but they’re just copying Aphex Twin.”

I felt like a musical philistine. From that moment I set forth with one goal in mind — to become a musical elitist. I think I studied the music of Autechre harder than I studied for either of my two degrees. I still didn’t get it. There was a reason for that, as I would find out years later, doing an interview with them via email — they were just pretentious posers. Like me. Or like what I wanted to be.

I would sneer. Believe me, I would sneer. If you didn’t understand the cultural implications of the breakcore movement and hold it akin to revolutionary Marxism, based on a semiotic analysis comparing and contrasting it to the proto-punk movement, you were in trouble. Of course, you were sitting there rolling your eyes and wishing I would put some Pink Floyd on. Or some Eminem. Or whatever. Anything that wasn’t going to induce an aneurysm.

I’m not sure when exactly my fall from grace happened. I could tell you, for example, that Rachel Stevens 2005 hit ‘Some Girls’ was sampled from the Timelords (who were, of course, the KLF) 1988 ‘Doctorin the Tardis’ and that that track was itself based on a sample from Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock n Roll part II’ — but you wouldn’t catch me tapping my toe to it. Musically, I was still dressed in black, only now it was the skinny jeans and tight t-shirts of the self proclaimed artiste (naturally I dabbled in Logic Pro) rather than the gothic trenchcoats of my youth.

Don’t get me wrong. I still go mad for an experimental album. Scott Walker’s 2006 masterpiece, ‘The Drift,’ still rates, I think, as one of the finest albums of the last decade, perhaps forever. But it’s so avant-garde it’s practically art, not music at all, and certainly not pop. Something in me changed. Maybe it was reading Gary Mulholland’s This is Uncool in late 2005. It’s a beautiful book — acting as advocate for the 500 greatest pop songs you should’ve heard and never should. I think I downloaded them all. Naturally, thinking it would make me more cool.

And suddenly, there was colour. I could enjoy Slowdive, but now suddenly I could tap my feet to Hall and Oates’ ‘I can’t go for that,’ too. I suppose that opened up the door to a lot of other stuff. Have you heard Chromeo covering that song with Daryl Hall in his studio? Just beautiful. And come to think of it, have you heard any of Chromeo’s recent stuff? Pure pop perfection.

Skream seems to think so, too. That’s why he’s remixed Chromeo’s Night By Night. It’s his best track since his remix of La Roux’s ‘In for the kill’ earlier this year. And that’s about as pop as it gets. I almost found a way to stay po-faced about music forever. There’s always an insular music scene you can latch on to. I’m sure drum n bass is still going, and getting darker day by day. But I’m glad that dubstep seems to have found its sense of humour. Let’s just forget the remix of I kissed a girl ever happened… Sure, a lot of dubstep has gone pop. But there’s plenty of great serious artists out there at the moment. For the purists, there’s always Datsik,  I still don’t think Joker can put a foot wrong, and Borgore still brings a smile to my face.

The point is, I have been cured of my addiction to po-faced music. Sometimes I like it dark and dramatic. Other times, I want to blast out some heavy beats. But sometimes, just sometimes, you’ll catch me singing along to Robyn’s cover of Kelly Clarkson’s ‘Since you been gone’ while covering as much ground as I can in my car.

I suppose my musical journey has been very much like that of television. We thought black and white was awesome at first, but now I’ve discovered life’s so much better in colour.

Richard Allday

Babylon Revisited

I’m reminded of that old F Scott Fitzgerald short story about the man who lost his family while everyone else was losing their money in the Wall Street Crash.

“I heard that you lost a lot in the crash.” a wily bartender says.
“I did,” Charlie replies, “but I lost everything I wanted in the boom.”

I was very fortunate, in a way, to come of age in the boom. I had an easy ride, and there was always a soft landing. Credit was easy and money was so simple to make you couldn’t fall over yourself without landing on a tenner. I spent high and I lived hard. Life was good, or so I thought.

I turned twenty five soon after the credit crisis. I was too busy to notice. My life had fallen into disarray. I was involved with two women, I was drinking too much, for all the wrong reasons, I was no longer able to command a decent salary, and the novel I’d been working on for the past four years had been rejected by pretty much every publisher going. Too commercial. Not commercial enough. The characters are too mean. But nobody will believe the story if you make them nice.

Ultimately, I only cared about one thing. One of the girls I was involved with. The rest of the world, I said, could burn.

Burn

It did. While I was busy falling apart, so was the world. I lost the girl. I quit my job. I left town. I started again.

It’s easy to look back, in retrospect, and say yes, this was my quarter life crisis. It was certainly the moment when I realized the dreams I had as a child weren’t necessarily the life I was going to have as an adult.

I had to do a lot of growing up, very fast.

I had dreams of being a great novelist. Then I woke up. As it turns out, I’m a rather good creative director. We can’t all be F Scott Fitzgerald. I’ll settle for being Don Draper. At least Don Draper can pay his bills on time, and he isn’t trying to drink himself to death.

I think I’ve smiled more in the last six months than I’ve smiled in the last five years. I’ve come to terms with who I am, and what I really want in life. (Hint: it’s not to be a great writer. I just did that to get girls into bed. It worked.) It seems as if everybody has a crisis of confidence in their twenties, when they realize how hard it really is out there. Some go running for cover. They hide in perpetual childhood, living with their parents, hanging out with old school friends. Others, a lot of girls, go the other way. They run straight into the arms of older men, father figures who’ll protect them and pay for them. Until, of course, the men get tired of the girls and change them in for a younger model. Then you’re fucked.

Don’t be a child

My point is, I guess, that you can’t put off having a quarter life crisis forever. It’ll only make your mid-life worse. You have to face up to the responsibilities of the world and sometimes, you have to do it alone. I’m  happier being single than I ever was trying to juggle all those girls. Women are a headache. Even when they’re not trying to have you duffed up. I’m running a business, I’m earning a living, and I answer to nobody. Life is hard, but I never really enjoyed it when it was easy.

Having to work, having to struggle, having to beat the odds — that’s what life’s about. We had it handed to us on a silver platter when times were good. Now I see all the quarter lifers running for cover, trying to get those times back. They’re just delaying the inevitable. Those of us who lost everything and had to start again from scratch will be the real winners.

I finally got round to washing my car today. I bring this up because it’s been at least six months. Since I moved here. Since I began my life again.

Six months of dirt and grime. It felt like I was washing away a lot more. It felt like a purification, of sorts. Sweeping the trash away. Seeing the sparkling underneath.

I spend a lot of time in that car, commuting as I do through town and country. If there’s one thing I’ve learned as an adult, it’s that you’d better invest in a car you like. You’re going to be spending a lot of time in it.

Also: avoid mad women, don’t drink too much, put something by for a rainy day, no setback is ever permanent, no state of being lasts forever.

In fact, I’ve finally learned what my parents were trying to tell me all along.

Richard Allday

What we fail to realize is, this isn’t all we have to worry about. This is just the surface of a much deeper disaster. We’ve become a self-diagnosing, self-medicating, self-absorbed mess. To say it most simply: drama drama drama, we are so fucking drama obsessed.

Somehow, being fucked up has been glorified into ‘alluring tragicness’, and the worst of our generation has embraced this idea and made it a lifestyle. Drug addictions, eating disorders, self-harm, depression – the new problem does not simply lie in these actual things anymore; the issue is embodying and adopting them in order to define yourself as a person, and to attract and attach others who are the ’same’ – consequently creating social bonds which serve to amplify how driven we’ve become by drama.

The scariest factor is the thought of a generation so bored, lost, unimpressed and disillusioned that there is nothing else worth aspiring to, that there is no other worthwhile way to spend time, that self-esteem is so low the ability to form relationships with a healthy ‘normal’ foundation, has vanished.

But all this is a little too sympathetic. Because rather than popping pills for our latest mental ‘defect’, why don’t we call it a difference, call it a day, concluding “I’m just being too dramatic”? Why do we instead make such a fuss? The answer is, we WANT the drama! We crave it. We want, we need, to be fucked up. We feel special that way. We feel more interesting.

We could claim, somewhere in between too many pills and watching Twilight show us love is being saved from near death experiences, we have subconsciously learned to associate drama with happiness. We could say, I suppose you can’t really blame us when the people responsible for us were too preoccupied being their own version of fucked up.

Or
We could say, lets just stop being so fucking dramatic
and get over ourselves.

Rina B

A much deeper problem is that it’s hard to genuinely slate a piece of art without opening a can of worms. Are you really going to claim that you have the objective standard by which art can be judged? You can say you don’t like it, or that there are better examples, but would you really be prepared to say that any given piece was totally fucking meaningless? Well, my visit to the Turner Prize Exhibition left me inclined to give it a go… . Ok not really, but criticism seems to be in order.

Going to the Tate Britain at the weekend blessed me with the opportunity to observe plenty of visitors (screaming children expressed an understandable viewpoint), and as a result I was privy to much conversation. Not once did I hear anyone articulate anything that approached understanding, delight, emotional displacement or pleasure.

A notice board at the end of the exhibition which solicited the punters views confirmed a failure to engage with the works. People were mainly moved to draw cocks with the drawing pins or relate bawdy versions of nursery rhymes. You might think of that as creative reaction to the psychological whirlwind of the previous hour, but I think it’s more likely to be indicative of people bored out of their minds, with nothing about the exhibition to say.

If the works of the Turner Prize had emotion to impart, pearls of wisdom to espouse, or polemic to orate then they roundly failed to deliver their payload to the three-wheeled pram-pushing masses. But what of the experts, who are judge, jury and short-lister of the Turner Prize? Perhaps they are able to fathom some deep and complex meaning in these works, which eludes us mere mortals.

Certainly Goshka Macuga’s piece might lead us to believe we needed a higher expertise in art. Her work is about the relationship of the wives of artists Paul Nash and architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, famous in their field perhaps, but not names that come up around the dinner table. Not in my house anyway. Fortunately the blurb tells you what the installation is about, because if it didn’t it’s pretty clear we’d need a large team of forensic art experts to find it out. I didn’t hear anyone saying “Oh look, isn’t that Paul Nash’s wife? Do you know, I’ve always pondered her relationship with Ludwig Mies van der Roche’s other half.”

Anyway, it’s my strong suspicion is that whatever degree of prior knowledge you had her sculptures constructed form the steel and glass fittings normally used as banisters in public spaces never quite aspired to the sublime, or even the awful. They might perhaps teeter on the insipid.

Cathy Wilkes’ arrangement of female mannequins, supermarket checkouts and dirty bowls of baby food do come together to indicate some kind of meaning. I don’t think I deserve a prize for guessing that her thrust (although she probably doesn’t approve of the inherently male gesture of thrusting) may have something to do with feminity. For this reason this work stands out as the winner for me – not because it’s great, just because it has some kind of meaning that I was able to discern. And for that reason I’d like to exclude it from the criticism that follows.

All of the works, excepting the mannequins, fail a test that I thought up during the extreme boredom of being subjected to Mark Leckey’s video. The idea of this test came to me by way of the post-modernist essay generator. It’s a website that automatically generates essays by stringing together randomly ordered catch phrases and buzz words from post-modernist thought. The results are convincing in the sense that they are very hard to tell apart from some genuine academic papers. I think it’s fair to say that if an essay cannot be told apart from a randomly generated one it can only be of any value by coincidence, and a very unlikely coincidence at that.

So, the Turner Prize equivalent: as a thought experiment imagine having a computer spit out a random plot for video art – or a random selection of ‘found objects’ randomly arranged for a sculpture, and see if you can tell the difference between what you imagined work and the work being your evaluating. What I’m trying to get at is the idea that you might expect a piece of art to convey some more meaning than any random arrangement of matter. Or for it to be aesthetically pleasing, but that’s pretty much not a concern when it comes to the Turner Prize.

I think it’s fair to say that it would be hard to pick out a video of tuk-tuk drivers doing nothing (Runa Islam’s submission) from “coal miners learning French” or “oranges rolling down the stairs” (my random inventions). The tuk-tuk drivers may have significance and meaning, but even when I try really hard, I can’t see very much. Actually this piece may have been slightly less than random – think back to the 1997 Turner Prize winner “Frozen Policemen”. An hour long video of, you guessed it, policemen doing nothing.

Take another piece of Islam’s – a single continuous shot (I think) of somekind of workshop space. Whatever, frankly.

Perhaps a soporific and interminable video of man making inscrutable points about cartoon cats (Mark Leckey)? What about a black and white epic about the growth cycle of sorghum in China, with subtitles in binary (plot randomly generated by me)? Whatever.

What about a video of someone smashing porcelain cups? What about someone chasing a fictional greased weasel round a fetid bathroom? Can you guess which one is a real submission?

So I don’t quite want to say that these (putative) works are totally fucking meaningless. I want to say that they are about as meaningful as any other randomly chosen arrangement of matter.

Who cares? – well, it’s not the holocaust obviously – but when I think of the number of people who are excited to be challenged by difficult, avant-garde films, or have a passion for, frankly, inaccessible music, it does seem like a shame there is no equivalent to engage our questing minds on the visual art front. Or perhaps there is, but it certainly seems that the lime-light is hogged by bullshit.

Jimmy Tidey

But the Southbank is the city’s concession to holiday makers. It might be extruded in brutal concrete, but the skate boarders, buskers, and arts institutions and their enormous bars all open their arms to the tribe of the camera and baseball cap.

All this passed through my mind as I stood on the balcony of the National Theatre, watching Addictive TV project their creative output onto the side of the building. It’s an annual event, held every summer, and it works pretty well.

When you’re already in the landscape of the tourist, with all its artifice and showmanship, having a televisual experience on a screen the size of a house is somehow appropriate. I was half expecting the Millennium wheel to roll of down the Thames and blocks of flats to synchronise their lighting with the party’s pulse.

On at least two occasions the video exactly reflected what was actually taking place. While watching a group of people pass an oversized wrap of coke around with complete nonchalance a coke snorting scene from Pulp Fiction was chopped and cut in time with the music. We cheered on a guy who clambered on to a roof underneath the screen with his pants around his ankles, only to be confronted moments later with grainy footage of football streakers.

As the evening progressed the media types seemed to melt away, and to my surprise they were replaced with the kind of people who have three festival wrist bands as tokens of their summer achievements. Passing spliffs, trampling through the wheat that was incongruously planted on the roof and drinking cans of beer. I don’t know why I didn’t expect there to be a “party” contingent, its just that it’s a bit too, well, authentic, for this kind event.

The night did have the feel of a promotional event, which I suppose it was in a sense for Addictive TV, and certainly was for the films and equipment manufactures whose footage and names made their way into the show. At the same time there was a definite twist of anarchy and a festival mentality, we even asked for “one more” at the end. It had that subcultural edge that comes whenever there are long haired young people taking drugs.

Perhaps these kids were hooked on Addictive TV, as well as the Friday night coke-athon. Perhaps that’s the worst pun ever. Either way, I enjoyed myself.

You certainly won’t be paying for services on the web – email, search or storage – and we all know how cheap illegal downloading is. Even if you want to stay legal there are plenty of zero price options through the open source (free) software movement.

Musicians may be going hungry and the software industry reeling, but I’m concerned about what it means for me.

The price of sending an email is the reason that the global inbox is wedged full of spam. If an email cost even as much as a glass of water from the tap in your kitchen spam would cease to be viable, but because it costs close to nothing to send a million emails to find one potential penis extender spammers are able to do exactly that. I might add as a corollary an invitation to a thought experiment – how much less time would you spend writing and reading pointless emails if you had to spend a bit of money on each? If Benjamin Franklin’s time-money equivalence holds then might free email not be a false economy?

Email might be the most notorious abuse of zero cost communication, but there are plenty of others. Technorati (the blog search engine) indexes 112 million blogs, that’s one for every four English speakers. I’m not convinced that every one of the 1.6 million posts that it records every day is a valuable addition to the body of human knowledge. And Twitter – how can I say this more eloquently than its name does? – is hardly going to be running the Library of Alexandria close in terms of accrued intellectual achievement.

Copying content already available, writing for the sake of it and pointlessly echoing the opinion of others aren’t unfamiliar criticisms of the blogosphere. But even that content is a step above the one-off “welcome to my blog” posts which are probably the beginning and the end of thousands of blogs a day. All because starting a blog requires no monetary commitment.

There is a cost to hosting a webpage – it’s pretty low though, and this is another issue on the internet. When you are looking for information on the web how can you tell if a web page is genuine, legitimate and trustworthy or if it is maintained by a poorly-informed crackpot? If it’s an eCommerce site, how can you tell if it’s the real deal or a phishing skam run from a bedroom in Cambodia? It’s hard, because copying even the most elaborate webpage costs basically nothing.

Banks used to have impressive buildings to convince customers that they were there to stay and a safe vessel for your money. The tiny cost of building a webpage means that no such signalling is possible. This clearly makes the web an even more treacherous place for veracity.

Of course the idea of regulating the internet is as impractical is as it is repellent; I’d argue it’s least interesting to consider that having to pay for something has an upside.

Internet VCs, the Klondike prospectors of our day, have even coined a name for this phenomena. “The Penny Gap” – the massive increase in demand that occurs when something goes from costing even a single penny to free.

There is a simple reason for this. No matter how fantastic your product, most people don’t want it and they won’t pay anything for it. There’s no product that even comes close to be in demand by half the worlds population. However, if the product is free then a good many of people who don’t want this product will take it. Why? Because they can or because they’ve made a mistake, because it’s the quickest way to find out what the product actually is, or because other people have mentioned it. These are all types of people who have no demand for the product, and no want to satisfy.

Of course it’s not that simple, and advertising revenue throws something of a spanner in this analysis; none the less, the essential signalling mechanism of our society’s desires – price – has been neutered on the web.

“Spit” is the newest kind of unsolicited contact – Spam phone calls over VOIP (Skype and the like). It’s very hard to combat because, unlike email, there is not very much time to analyse whether an incoming call is “spit”, and being audio it’s much harder to filter. No doubt as the internet becomes more pervasive so will unsolicited contact.

It strikes me as a bizarre inversion of the problems of the command economy: on the internet we all have to wade through piles of spam just to get what we want, exactly as Russians queuing to bread (okay, I’d rather have spam than an empty stomach…). In Russia demand and supply didn’t equalise because the government would not allow prices to rise, on the internet we refuse to let prices rise because of our mindset — which is made possible because providing, for example, an email service costs very little. Instead of an inefficient allocation of limited bread, we end up with an inefficient allocation of limitless email.

What should be done? I think I’d probably be happier paying a tiny amount for my online services, just to make all the pointless chatter to go away, much less obvious is how such a system could be enforced, and I’m the last person to advocate regulating the internet…

Jimmy Tidey

Housed on Bentwaters cold-war era air force base, and as mentioned, associated with a classical music festival, it has dash of the unlikely from its beginnings. Faster Than Souns is a festival of noise/avant garde/installation art based festival which seems to attract glow stick wielding ravers and the more experimental end of the opera fan spectrum.

The first year I went the ex command-centre of the base, complete with blast walls, hosted various installation pieces and a few small scale musical performances. It may have looked familiar to some of the audience – that’s because it was used for that Channel 4 series where reality TV wannabes were fooled into believing they were going into space; bits of the set were still visible. Two other stages had more conventional dance music. The organisers were apparently still worried that it might be a bit mundane, so threw in an aircraft hanger (complete with signs explaining what to do with unexploded ordinance still visible inside) with a giant framework ball which could be rolled around, causing it to make weird noises from electronics attached to each vertex. (I’m afraid that I can’t write that last sentence in any other way to make it seem more plausible.)

This year’s events were unfortunately a little more conventional. Performances took place in a sound proofed hanger designed for testing aircraft engines (where else?), and proceedings were reproduced through an extremely crisp 8 channel surround sound system. Stand out performances came from Exile and Plaid.

I’m told Tim Exile was using his performance as part of an MA course, in which he took live vocal samples from two trained singers who stood on stage in front of him, and melded them into his trade mark mash of distorted rhythms and processed samples. His performance shifted from melodic and repetitive through to a few moments of straight-ahead jungle towards the end, and he took full advantage of the massive PA to hammer the audience with occasional walls of noise.

Plaid produced the only genuinely accessible performance of the night, playing more or less their normal fare. However, uniquely among the artists, they made impressive use of eight speaker stacks encircling the audience, sending sounds spiralling round us and bouncing all over the place.

Site specific theatre group Punchdrunk also performed in the hanger, simulating air raid sirens, playing “it” with the crowd and trying to evoke a general sense of a fear of flying. I enjoyed the performance, however my friends were a little more sanguine and pointed out that in such a dramatic setting a little more might have been achieved.

This point was forced home latter when the electric doors of the hanger unexpectedly closed accompanied by the sound of a wailing siren. The fire brigade (who were already there, presumably in case an aircraft hanger sufficiently fireproofed to test aircraft engines should spontaneously ignite through the presence of 150 opera fans) rushed in and eventually the doors were reopened. It certainly constituted a dramatic use of the space.

I have to come clean and admit that that I can’t appreciate all the performances I seem to see where a musician uses an effects pedal to mangle the sounds of an attack on an orchestral instrument. Sometimes I think I’m getting something; other times I’m definitely not. However, what made the first year’s FTS so good was that when I got bored of a man playing a cello with a spoon accompanied by time-lapse videos of plant growth there were plenty of other things to go and look at.

This year really only had one focus of attention, and, unfortunately, frequently no focus, since many of the acts took 15 minuets to set up.

Having said all this, the basic premise still functions. Where else do you get to see a miniature mechanical orchestra perform in the darkened recesses of the nation’s cold war infrastructure? Gentlemen, you can’t use a sampled Theremin in here! This is the war room!

Jimmy Tidey

I began to trace the figure-of-eight shaped infinity symbol that is the Kinetica logo back to its origins as an early piece of research for this article. It’s been suggested that the symbol, also known as the lemniscate, or ‘lazy eight’, is a representation of an hourglass on its side. Obviously, this action would cause the hourglass to take infinite time to empty thus presenting a tangible example of infinity.1

Kinetica is a museum dedicated to the display of kinetic, technological and electronic artwork, an area of creativity which is sometimes categorised under the more generic term of ‘Time-Based Art’. Since occupying a large commercial space in Spitalfields Market between 2006 and 2007, the museum now operates as a touring programme of exhibitions, events and workshops.

The Director of Kinetica, Dianne Harris, had suggested in her last email that we meet somewhere in the West End for this interview, so that we could head to Canada House in Trafalgar Square afterwards for the opening of Schematic; the first of a two-part exhibition of New Media Art from Canada, beginning with Montreal-based artist Eric Raymond. After devoting some serious thought to whereabouts would be the most appropriate interview territory, I had suggested The Café in the Crypt, below Saint Martin-in-the-Fields Church, a timeless setting with plenty of space.

When I get there, I see that the church is undergoing quite a makeover, but the café is open as usual. I’m early. I hover for a while, take two painkillers I just bought to hide my hangover and head downstairs. At the bottom I’m forced to walk on headstones. The cool, dusty smell of the old building adds to my dehydrated shakiness. I’m both excited and nervous about the interview. Cappuccino at the buffet. Pay, sit down. Frothy, hot, strong coffee. I get shakier as I play with my laptop, sifting through the carefully prepared questions which seem suddenly rather obvious and unoriginal. ‘She must get asked that all the time,’ I think to myself.

Then I spot her. Dianne Harris, Director of Kinetica, in the red hat that her email said she would probably be wearing. The first thing she tells me is that she has been meditating in The National Gallery, or at least trying to meditate amongst the end-of-the-day hordes. She tells me how she thought it might be a good place to find some peace and quiet. I respond with my own story about The National Gallery: It was my first visit to London, and I’d been staying with a friend who lived way out in zone six. I’d been out all night and needed sleep, but couldn’t get back to my friends place, so I went into The National Gallery in the morning, and had the great idea of sitting on one of the nice leather sofas and dozing off in front of Whistlejacket, a large painting of a horse by George Stubbs. Then, after vivid dreams of strangely serpentine horses doing looping figures in an ice arena, I woke up next to a tramp who’d had the same great idea. I’m not sure if our mutual unorthodox use of public gallery space is the best subject to start on, so to break the ice I offer her a drink.

Setting Up

Dianne begins by telling me how the Kinetica team first started conceiving of the museum:

‘There’d been a few [exhibitions of kinetic artwork] in the Sixties, but not so much recently.’ She goes on to describe seminal shows at venues like the ICA, such as Cybernetic Serendipity (in 1968), but that there had never been a permanent platform for that kind of work.

The curator of Cybernetic Serendipity was a woman named Jasia Reichardt who became an important influence on Dianne when they were introduced early on in her career. Dianne describes Reichardt as a ‘realist and mentor’ who helped her to focus on technological art as a valid creative medium; and ‘asked so many questions and re-evaluated everything’ for her.

When I ask Dianne how she and the Kinetica team funded such an ambitious project in such a huge commercial space as the one in Spitalfields Market, she explains how the Irish Construction company, Ballymore, owned and built the building and were looking for a cutting-edge arts organization to move in temporarily. Kinetica were then approached by Future City Arts, who brokered a deal between Ballymore and Kinetica, and the museum was up and running within 6 months. Kinetica was subsequently supported by the Arts Council, amongst other funding bodies, which covered expenses for a whole year, and the museum experienced huge volumes of visitors from the very beginning, following substantial press coverage of the first exhibition, Life Forms, including a feature on The Channel Four News.2

Open As Usual

I ask Dianne about the reasons for leaving such a unique exhibition space behind, and the decision to exhibit Kinetica’s artists as a touring museum instead. She explains what a wonderful launch-pad the building was, but that it was only a temporary space to house something that is perhaps better suited to transience anyway:

‘I feel like Kinetica could turn up anywhere, rather than necessarily being governed by one building. In this way, the museum has gone truly kinetic.’

She goes on to tell me that having permanent space has opened up so many more doors than she first expected and the museum finds itself spoilt for choice in terms of where to go next: Kinetica is currently in discussions about a collaboration with The Cambridge Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, where new commissions are to be developed with Kinetica’s artists, who are represented in a similar way to that of a commercial art gallery. The museum has developed an amazing online shop of small-scale Artist Multiples 3 and also an ever-expanding permanent collection.

Dianne tells me about the many artist-led workshops that Kinetica organises with schools and community groups, with projects exploring important contemporary issues such as recycling and alternative energy sources, where participants are shown how to build kinetic structures such as energy-generating wind sculptures.

The museum has also organised a series of forthcoming talks across various venues, including the Science Museum’s Dana Centre, The Bishopsgate Institute, and Sudely Castle. They’re also taking part in The Concrete and Glass Festival in Shoreditch in October this year, and, perhaps the museum’s most ambitious project of all, The Kinetica Art Fair, which is due to open in February 2009.

While Kinetica is committed to running events in the UK, it is also developing an increasingly global reputation, and receives proposals from all over the world:

‘People hear about the museum largely online, especially now that it no longer inhabits a permanent space, (it usually comes first in search listings of its related subjects), but also from surprisingly widespread sources.’ One example Dianne gives is that of a recent request to exhibit Soundwaves (a Kinetica show from May 2007), from a gallerist who read about it in a small, local Brazilian newspaper. This kind of international presence seems particularly impressive for such a young museum.

Having answered all of my obvious questions, and many more unobvious ones that I only thought of when she had answered them, we walk up the stairs of the Crypt and back out into the daylight. As we wander across Trafalgar square to Canada House, we pass The National Gallery, and the conversation turns to meditation again. Dianne explains that the method of meditation she has been using involves a particular type of internal visualisation, and how during this mediation, her mind’s eye began to trace the figure-of-eight shaped infinity symbol that is the Kinetica logo.

Endnotes:

1. Wikipedia: HYPERLINK “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_symbol”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinity_symbol

2. Channel 4 News HYPERLINK “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUPH-w_a0H4″ (05-10-2006) – Coverage of Kinetica’s inaugural exhibition Life Forms, featuring interviews with artists Elias Crespin, Daniel Chadwick and Chico MacMurtrie.

3. See http://www.kinetica-museum.org

Patrick Coyle is a London-based artist and writer.

Schematic: Eric Raymond continues until 6th June 2008 at Canada House, Trafalgar Square, London SW1Y 5BJ
Exhibition Opening Times: Monday – Friday 10am-6pm