Nick Cave/Will Self, 30 Sep 2009

This was my first trip out to an art event. Nick Cave has shiny hair and is dry (not dark), and Will Self is funny and is becoming the same man as that grumpy Jack Schulze. I like them. Nick read from his scary book, which Mummy said was good. Silly questions from the floor were indulged by the men, then despatched. Strangely no-one mentioned that Bunny sounds like a Keith Talent who'd suffered hard times - I haven't read Nick's book so I'm not sure. I got bored after a while and took Daddy outside for a cry. We missed something, then we went back in. Daddy thinks he saw some people called Adactio and Mrs Adactio some rows ahead, and he says you should go to the bookshop that organised the event. Nick sings songs, maybe he has some lullabys for me. It was good art.

Brighton Art Fair, 1-4 Oct 2009

This was another trip out, it was OK. Lots of people. It was too hot and bright - I cried a bit, but there were things to look at. The photos by Andre Lichtenberg were nice, as was a little bird clinging to the wall by Guy Holder. The most adventurous arts were some strange mummy bits by Sally Hewett. I tried to sleep through the not-good art. Many of the pictures were middle-age-crisis abstraction, which is a bad thing and makes us unhappy (see photo). Lots of women wanted to talk to me about being a baby but Daddy shot them down with his bloodshot eyes. Mummy and I bought for my room a little print of a bird, and a painting by Jude Hart.

• space: metal, ozone and gunpowder
• time: sickly
• books: classic musty
• Medieval England: smoke, herbs and roses
• contemporary England: gardens, sponge cake, campfires and cricket balls
• death: fatty and other acids, bad

We hate fingers, tools inside our heads - they're the locus of our private selves. A quietly nervous waiting room, as if a crime had been tacitly hushed. The dentist's reassuring patter. His optics glued to glasses lenses. Yellow safety glasses. Maps stapled to the ceiling to distract the patient. Teeth everywhere on the map - buildings, gardens, dental rectangles. The piers looking like decayed roots in the sea. Injections felt deep in the jaw, a tingling on the lip. Half the tongue numbed. Even so, the tongue going where it wants, involuntarily. The high-speed multi-fluted drill. A mist of air, water and matter. Tungsten-carbide dental bur. Grinding out decayed material. A foul taste at the back of the mouth. Gutta percha rubber obturating the root canals. Glue laid down onto the excavated tooth, a sudden smell of stag beetles. Resin and silica composite. Repeat in layers. A phenylpropanedion initiator and blue beeping light polymerise the resin, curing it to concrete. Tzank cheque.

[Émail aimé, laser-print on A3, edition of 10, 1996 (nonsense-French which means something like "loved enamel").]

Marcel Duchamp is the king of art's last hundred years, its trickster-saboteur. In 1993 Jennifer Gough-Cooper and Jacques Caumont's 'Ephemerides on and about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy 1887-1968' appeared in a Thames and Hudson monograph that's unfortunately quite hard to find now. The Ephemerides is a brilliant work of inframincean research: choice cuts of biography ordered by day, in which a note about chess from 12 July 1924 might sit next to a quote about the Large Glass from 12 July 1936. Reading it, you follow several stories in parallel.

Selections of those morceaux choisis - mostly quotes - are now going out on twitter at twitter.com/marcelduchamp.

Dada has also come back. Double-barrelled, second shot. It's a phenomenon peculiar to this century [interviewed by Hahn, 1.7.1966]

If I am to tell what my own point of departure has been, I should say it was the art of Odilon Redon [to Torrey, 2.7.1913]

Bravo! [watching the speedy progress of the masons on the fireplace in Cadaqués, 2.7.1962]

I admit that it's a new and immense pleasure to piss like everyone else, a pleasure that I have not known for 25 years [to Roché, 5.7.1954]

I who am doing nothing, I want you to work - Dada logic [to Gleizes, 6.7.1921]

For the glass, in principle I have no objection... the pieces are only held together by the lead wires and the colour! [to Roché 8.7.1951]

if she wants to discuss the price in order to please Arne, me and herself at the same time, my suggestion would be a price around $500 [of Belle Haleine to Hamilton, 12.7.1964]

Intimate relations with no one. That's one of the advantages of my situation [15.7.1920]

An exceptional rendezvous [15.7.1959]

we have very little contact with the Germans. They are chiefly occupied in finding and taking petrol for their cars [to Wood, 17.7.1940]

The main thing is to die without knowing it, which incidentally always happens that way; but to avoid the fears and physical suffering [to Roché, 17.7.1950]

Perhaps you know already that I have been here, for two months already, I am repairing my broken glass and the repairs are coming to an end [to Roullier, 21.7.1936]

The readymade is a consequence of the refusal which made me say: There are so many people who make pictures with their hands, that one should end up not using the hand [to Hahn, 23.7.1964]

Même does not refer to anything [...] neither denigration nor a joke, but a humour which amplifies. Somewhat the 'Ha ha' of Jarry. [to Hahn, 23.7.1964]

I am against the attitude which consists of reducing painting to a retinal emotion. Since Courbet, it is believed that painting is addressed to the retina: the retinal titillation. [to Hahn, 23.7.1964]

Introduce the martyr idea; suffering from not acquiring the needed, the desired. How much the martyr is unbearable [to Dreier, 27.7.1938]

• Norton Integrated Systems » Sherpa
  CCTV product which climbs lamp-posts etc and can be controlled remotely by eg mobile over gprs, wifi. (Can it broadcast cctv video feeds to devices too?) Via http://openeyecommunications.typepad.com/openeyechat/2009/04/not-about-twitt.html
  (tags: police cctv surveillance mobile)
• The Highways Agency takes the Sepura route again - Bapco Journal
  Sepura Tetra radios, running atop Airwave.
  (tags: airwave sepura transport)
• Bapco Journal: "Do you know what applications and functionality your hand-helds will offer?"
  33% say yes. The other polls are interesting too.
  (tags: police emergencyservices bapco)
• 37signals Product Blog: New in Basecamp: Export your account in easy-to-read HTML format
  Hmm, wonder if this might be a nice way to generate flat (installable) html documentation files...
  (tags: basecamp documentation)

• thirteen opens (tecznotes)
  thirteen "open"s - "When you hear the word open they may be thnking about any one of these 13 things while you're talking about 1 or more of them..."
  (tags: opensource migurski dev)

I tend to read too much online, surfing idly, reading industry publications, spawning legions of browser tabs, skimming things, saving things for later and never coming back to them. My ability to read long pieces gradually atrophies, and time that could have otherwise been used for creation is, well, consumed by consumption. In an effort to bring my habit to the surface and get on top of it, I decided to tally by hand every browser tab I closed until I had a page's worth.

Well, I read a fair few web pages between 12th February and 19th March, but as it turned out, half of those were spent in work's ticket-tracking website. But still, 1,700+ of them.

Did the manual tallying work? Initially, yes. But then I began to sense that I risked adding a new habit that would amplify the original one: it was starting to become a game of feed the tally-list, a delicious chore-ladder. It's like that thing of putting items on your todo list that you've already done, so you can have a tiny and immediate quantum of un-deferred GTD-pleasure of ticking them off. (I do that too sometimes.)

So I've stopped doing the tallying now, and am reading a bit less. And I have started writing a little bit more.

One technique for managing paperwork that's fairly common in productivity circles is the Noguchi filing system, in which files are always re-filed on the left of a shelf. This results in a gradient of freshness, with old or stale files naturally sorting themselves to the right, whence they can be discarded or permanently archived.

It's a nice system, but the archiving/discarding triage takes such effort doesn't it? Once those files have made their way to the back or the bottom of the filing cabinet, wouldn't it be nice if your filing system automatically and judiciously took care of that for you.

And kept you warm.

Tate Britain's Altermodern is a mixed bag. Some of it is great. Darren Almond's full-moon long-exposures in China are beautiful (he's always good), and Tacita Dean's photogravures of shipwrecks and war landscapes reportage are lovely novelistic storyboards.

Mike Nelson's The Projection Room (Triple Bluff Canyon) (2004) installation slowly draws you in by presenting an obsessive's study, every detail placed precisely. Gustav Metzger's Liquid Crystal Environment is a remake of a 1965 piece that uses liquid crystals and rotating polarising filters to create a mesmeric/brain-washing kaleidoscope. For a moment it looked like we'd lost Antimega to a chroma-coma.

The find of the show is an excellent draughtsman, Charles Avery - his drawings have the confident graphic line of comics, and his island world is an interesting story machine. He's like a cross between Paul Noble and Barry McGee. One to watch much more closely.

Some of it is very poor: Franz Ackermann, Spartacus Chetwynd, Marcus Coates, Rachel Harrison... tiresome. And some of it is in between: Simon Starling's second- to fourth-generation copies of a desk Francis Bacon made - ok, but as with antiques you get only so far with repro furniture. Nathaniel Mellors's excremental installation raises a chuckle. Subodh Gupta has a striking borderland mushroom cloud of stainless steel domestic implements.

The theoretical underpinning is confusing though. Here are three of Bourriaud's descriptions of "altermodern". On the show's website, behind a friendly EXPLAIN button, is a manifesto:

Second, altermodern as translation and trajectory:

Thirdly, as post-historicist era:

(Oh and there are some more here, critiqued.) So Bourriaud proclaims that the post-modern era has ended, and been replaced by a post- (or is it hyper-?)globalisation, anti-commercial, post-geographic, post-historic ("heterochronic"), rootless, nomadic altermodernism. And this is the bit that confuses me: if the theoretical positioning is an attempt to confidently stake out a new territory and era, wouldn't that gesture immediately undermine the claim that the altermodern sweeps aside specificities of space and history? But perhaps I don't understand it - my art-theory synapses are atrophied. Maybe I should read Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics or his new book Radicant (whose organising metaphor is surely a rhizomous echo of D&G?).

Most of the show doesn't look like a new new thing, which is the other thing complicating the claim to a different trajectory.

Afterwards, we nipped around the Drawing show. Some lovely stuff: Blake's Flea, a tiny Cozens landscape, this Tyson facing three Nobles in a room, a lovely Bill Jacklin.... great stuff.

An October 2008 revision to the tube map adds a few distance markers to the map. It's 250m between White City on the Central line and Wood lane on the Hammersmith & City. And to the right, 100m between Shepherd's Bush Central line and overland. There's a similar thing at Canary Wharf Jubilee line: it's 200m from Canary Wharf DLR and 150m from Heron Quays DLR. I particularly like the angle they're drawn at - like an elegant version of the walklines I was trying out a long time ago.

But this isn't quite so successful: there's 100m between West Hampstead overland and West Hampstead Jubilee line, and the latter also has a comment that West Hampstead Thameslink is 200m away from the tube. The tube map used to simply show the tube and overland stations as a single node on the map, which I think was better.

Previously: Tube Map with walklines showing when it's quicker to walk. See also Walk the Tube to get healthy, Walkers Tube Map and Adjacent stations.

We're hiring a developer to build mobile software products that help police forces and other government orgs communicate quicker/better. Messaging, photos, maps, presence, ajax, compliance, etc. Technically, it's generally BlackBerry J2ME mobile client and ASP.Net web/backend. More details on the role here.

We do scrum. We are nice people and have a shiny office in the middle of Brighton.

We're also looking for a good QA person in Brighton.

Ping us with your story at hello at mobbu dot com.

I read 50 books this year, fewer than in the years before. Notably these:

• Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, 2003 - a rather beautiful and moving novel on memory, anticipation and loss.
• Dave Hickey's Air Guitar, 1997 - Hickey is funny and provocative on music, art and aesthetics, lightly excavating truths that, once they're in front of your eyes, feel utterly self-evident.
• Ian Fleming's James Bond books, 1953-66 - as a body these comprise a great double-portrait of Fleming the self-exiled, nostalgic author and his self-loathing, consumption-addicted and often incapacitated character Bond.
• James Wood's How Fiction Works, 2008 - like Hickey, Wood is a great handler of words. As a critic he's sometimes accused of privileging psychological realism above all else, though the last sections of his book address this fairly directly.
• JM Coetzee's Disgrace, 1999 - extraordinary and pessimistic post-colonial novel of relationships tested, torn and abused, of the costs of wielding power, of cultural and gendered difference.

Going forward I plan to consume ever fewer books, and instead to create more writing, art, and other stuff.

(Elsewhere in 2008: Matt Webb's, many others', and books I wish I'd read.)

Keith Tyson's 2004 project History Paintings comprised fifteen paintings, each with 49 vertical strips of powder-coated aluminium in black, red and green - the colours of a roulette wheel (Tyson has always liked gambling). The three larger ones are reconfigured each time they're shown. The dozen smaller ones are tied to the months of the year. Michael Archer (of both Ruskin and Guardian) wrote: "In their bringing together of time, geography and randomness, the History Paintings address the question of how the individual relates to, participates in and attempts to make sense of historical events." I'm not quite feeling that, much preferring his scrappier drawing work from years previous, but they look ok.

(An aside: "history painting" generally presents man at the centre of the universe in order to yoke scenes of historic, religious or mythic narrative to an intellectual or moral message. Joshua Reynolds prescribed something "in the action, or in the object, in which men are universally concerned, and which powerfully strikes upon the publick sympathy [...] the painting of man". It was usually done in a grand, heroic, archetypal style. Félibien and the Académie française had identified it as the grand genre of painting among a list of others: history, portrait, genre (scenes of everyday life), landscapes, and, last, still-life. The hierarchy gets killed off with Impressionism in the 1860s. Anyway.)

A couple of days ago, Tyson did a spin-off (or spin of the wheel, we might say) project with The Guardian: a free edition of 5,000 pdf files, each delivered to the website visitor as a customised file. The arrangement of the coloured strips is partly determined by the location typed into Tyson's website: you can't tell if each is unique, or merely potentially-unique. Once experienced as the flat colour of a downloaded PDF file on your desktop - rather than as photographs of aluminium - the image hints at the bureaucratic ephemera of public transport and tube diagrams.

Another aside: they immediately recall Duchamp's imitated/rectified readymade Monte Carlo Bond of 1924: an unfinished collaboration between Duchamp, his alter ego Rrose Sélavy and Man Ray, an art-financial work that parodied company stock certificates and speculative get-rich-quick schemes. "The annual income is derived from a cumulative system which is experimentally based on one hundred thousand rolls of the ball; the system is the exclusive property of the Board of Directors" its verso proclaims. Of course, it never achieved his aim of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo. Later editions of the same work sometimes come up: here's one of the 1938 edition for $4,000.

What value has an art work that was free, is potentially unique, was distributed first-come-first-served, and in the form of a digital file with no physical instance? (on which topic, Danny Birchall reminds us that reproducability at zero marginal cost comes more naturally to the internet than does the concept of inherent value via the limited edition.) At the time of writing, some of them have gone onto Flickr (where they will hopefully be geotagged), and sellers on Ebay value them in the £10-£1,000 range, though none have bids yet. And there's a Facebook group that aims "to create a piece of crowd sourced internet art with the community of winners that we can gift back to Keith Tyson". (My own view is that if the resident artist doesn't like them, we might stick them in the office.)

Regardless of the dubious value of trying to dubiously value the art, one thing is immediately clear: in a reversal of casino logic, we value the rarity of the green stripe: 0, house wins.

See also: Danny Birchall's Unlimited.

Utzon, the architect responsible - with Arup - for one of the world's most recognisable buildings, was happy to draw anywhere:

From the same article:

See also: Calatrava, Niemeyer. More How we work.

Perhaps, after his somewhat unlucky end to the 2007-08 season, Mass has retired his Y-fronts:

See also: Jensen Button and Fernando Alonso. More How we work.

(Never apologise for weak puns when writing about Bond.)

It was very annoying to notice the Ken Adam discussion with Christopher Frayling at the V&A too late to attend, but it sounds like it was good. In Who Stole My Volcano? Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Dematerialisation of Supervillain Architecture, Matt Jones noted that Frayling (his book on Adam is very good) commented in passing that "the modern Bond villain (and he might have added, villains in pop culture in general) is placeless, ubiquitous, mobile".

Matt entertainingly explores the idea of the grand architectural gestures - under-volcano bunkers, sub-swallowing ships and other "gantries and Baroque" - de-materialising and dispersing into networks, mobile phones, briefcases, go-bags, spreadsheets, etc. And perhaps also into the sports franchises and art objects so loved of those who are as rich as supervillains. It's good stuff.

But a problem remains for the film-maker: how to show us multiplicity, power and scale (Mr White in Quantum of Solace: "we are everywhere") - and how to do it with Adamian grandeur and spectacle - in a world whose secret mountain redoubts and dark-side moon bases have been somewhat disappointingly replaced by the physical objects of ubiquitous computing and the ubiquitous metaphoric objects of power...

So satellite imagery abounds, and those terse-but-narratively-essential phone calls beloved of 24 get added to the mix. The villain becomes the panopti-cratic eye; you see much re-working of the conspiracy thrillers of the 70s - Enemy of the State, Bourne passim. And, picking up on Dan's work on wi-fi shapes in public spaces,  the use of menacing penumbral aurae would have been a more effective visualisation than the distracting touch-table that M16 toy with. But more is required. Plot also drives forward quickly, the edit is much faster - see Bourne, and the godfather of the edit, Murch the gun-slinger.)

One solution in the Quantum of Solace film isn't bad - the many members of the villainous organisation conduct a board meeting hidden in plain view in the audience of an opera, its set a monstrous eye staring at them. They mutter managerially about logistics and financing on earpieces, and Bond's immediate job is to reveal them against the camouflaging ground of hundreds of fellow evening-weared Euro-elites. It's the best sequence of a good film, though it's a little disappointing that both Bond and the villains are disciplined enough not to be distracted by the opera they're attending.

Though they're often sneered at these days, you could argue that the use of gadgets in previous Bond films represented an acknowledgement of this globalising, dispersing effect: Q is everywhere, Bond in some sense became his magnetised watches, exploding pens and performative quips. But the books didn't go in for gadgets much, and generally the Quantum of Solace film also turns away from these and back toward the architectural. Steve Rose notes that the recent films have seen Bond visit and destroy as much villain-architecture as ever ("The villains are the creators; Bond is the destroyer. He's basically an enemy of architecture"), and suggests this can be traced back to Fleming's difficulties with Modernist architects.

Previously:

• The name's Bourne, Jason, Bourne, Jason, Bond, James, Bourne
• Jones has previously mused excellently on the Bond villain of the long now

We are at Frieze, looking at an excess of art and spectators. We will see a couple of thousand works in the space of a two or three hours - this plenitude means that the works that are visually arresting are necessarily privileged as we scan the corridors. This is no bad thing though: having mulled on Phil Gyford's question about the opacity of art and artists, I'd have to say that the intentions and ideas of the artist and the wider context of the art work don't really matter unless there's an aesthetic response first. You have to like looking at it, or experiencing it.

Generally it felt as if there was a retreat to safer, more saleable work from name artists (though not much from the old school names of the 50s and so on). Fewer monstrous installations. Lots of paintings and easily installable work. Less video than in previous years. Tillmans, Shrigley, Ruff et al at multiple galleries.

Lots of photographs, but too many porny ones. Lots of painting, much of which has either strongly representational elements together with the abstract, or representation appearing to operate at large and small scales. But too much faux-naif painting. Quite a few works which comprised aggregations of smaller framed pieces, some of which were signed, faked celebrity photos. There's a resurgence of coloured pencil drawing, perhaps displacing monchromatic trend of the last few years (it's very foolish to attempt trends from a single show).

The media are (finally) in no doubt that the art market is in trouble. The Art Newspaper reported sales down and buyers haggling in its free daily at Frieze, and auctions since Damien Hirst's celebrated £95m Sotheby's sale in September have been getting low bids. Speculation in young artists is over. UBS head of art banking: "Every gallery and auction house is trying to leverage quality". Small dealers are feeling the pinch, large dealers are getting squeezed by auction houses. Interesting times. Despite the exodus to the private sector in the last couple of years, will there be a return to power for public museums, curators and critics?

My photos are here. These are the ones I liked the most:

The Approach's space was brilliant: Martin Westwood, John Stezaker et al. Westwood is new to me, and very strong: assemblages of drawing, collage, sculture, cut paper, iconography of 1980s corporate culture. I need to come back to Westwood, but in the meantime: at The Approach, Strange Flowers, Art Now at the Tate, Approach show 2007.

Sea Hyun Lee at Gagosian (well, it looks like Sea Hyun Lee but Gagosian annoyingly don't identify their artists). Paul Noble at Maureen Paley. Peter Peri (as ever) at Carl Freedman. Darren Almond at Matthew Marks - the thing about Almond is that his work is always solid.

Leslie Shows (painting and collage) and Ajit Chauhan (ink drawings) at Jack Hanley. Also, Ged Quinn at Wilkinson. Felix Gmelin at Vilma Gold had some beautiful atomic explosions in clay. Thomas Bayrle at Barbara Weiss anthropomorphises graphs and data. Dr Lakra at Kate MacGarry.

Previously: Year_07, Zoo 2007, Frieze 2006, Frieze 2005, and Sandpaper for the eye: Frieze 2004, London.

Henry VII passed a law against "maintenance", the keeping at hand of too many male "servants" - contracted men-at-arms, private armies financially retained by powerful noblemen in the power vacuum after the Wars of the Roses. (The word maintenance derives from the Latin manu tenere, to hold in the hand, ie: to keep in a condition of effective functional condition: keeping at hand functionally.)

The visual evidence of this surplus and illegal retainer was the overuse of a nobleman's livery (whereas the visual evidence these days of maintenance, seems to be a spanner - a tool rather than an emblem). In legal terms at least - "retaining", "livery" and "maintenance" seem to have had the same meaning. And the term livery derives from the French livrée, meaning delivered: typically the object or a servant/messenger bore the livery of the noble that owned, retained or had sent them.

Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance.

The Cabinet Office is providing £75m to get 25,000 mobile devices in the hands of police officers, the funding being managed by the National Policing Improvement Agency. It's quite hard to find consistent coverage of the story in the mainstream press, so we're tracking the story on the Mobbu blog as it unfolds:

• June: 27 Police forces will get £50m for 10,000 mobile devices
• July: Part of the £50m will be spent via NPIA's mobile data accelerator programme
• Sep: More background on the NPIA funding (and of Airwave's investment in Kelvin Connect, and BlackBerry having hit the 20,000 devices mark in UK policing).
• And any day now funding announcement is expected from NPIA for the unallocated £25m. And in the last week, 15 police authorities have revealed that they have money held by embattled or defunct Icelandic banks.

And Alex is starting to post some useful tips on device and application management with BlackBerry Enterprise Manager:

• Application updates not recognised on new BlackBerry devices? - on the benefit of keeping your device and vendor XML files up to date
• Always keep older versions of your Java apps on BES so that your BES can still perform remote management upon those devices that happen to update later then you expected.

And just like that, another year comes round and it's art fair week in London again. The big story is that it's getting tough for the satellite fairs - three haven't returned (Year09 being a particular shame), though there are now some free fairs filling the gaps. So here's a map of the art fairs in London in October 2008.

View Larger Map

Zoo
Now a well-established fair, Zoo looked better last year than Frieze's (so if you're short of time, this will be a good bet). Exhibitors list is here.
Fri 17-Mon 20 Oct, 12-8pm (12-5pm on Mon), £12.
At the Royal Academy, 6 Burlington Gardens, W1S 3EX (the entrance will be from the Burlington Gardens side).
Nearest tube: Piccadilly Circus, Green Park.

Frieze
This is a monster of a show (you could spend a day here) and it gets super-crowded at the weekend so try go on Thursday or Friday. The exhibitors list is here, and the talk/projects programme here. The bookshop always has good deals. Rodcorp at previous at Friezes: 2004, 2005, 2006.
Thurs 16-Sun 19 Oct, 11am-7pm (11am-6pm on Sun), £20.
In Regent's Park, entrance from Outer Circle.
Nearest tube: Great Portland St, Regent's Park, Baker St.

Free Art Fair
Jasper Joffe and friends return with the art fair "where all the work is given away at the end".
Mon 13 - Sun 19 Oct, 11-6pm, free.
5, 8, and 16 Seymour Place, Portman Village, W1H

And there are a bunch of others, though I doubt I'll make it to them:

Scope
This year (at last), Scope's website has some useful details. Galleries showing. It's across the park from Frieze.
Fri 17-Sun 19 Oct, 11am-8pm (12am-6pm on Sun), £15.
At Lord's Cricket Ground, St John's Wood Road, NW8
Nearest tube: Baker Street, St John's Wood, Warwick Avenue, Marylebone.

New!: Kounter Kulture
A new fair in Brick Lane. The artist roster looks like it leans toward that slick, decorative, often figurative, gothic/urban/folksy school "sprouting from and largely influenced by visual subcultures".
Wed 15 - Sun 19 Oct, 11-6pm, free.
Truman Brewery - T3 and T4, 146 Brick Lane, London, E1 (Wilkes St entrance)

New!: The Future Can Wait
Also on at the Truman Brewery.
Wed 15 - Sun 19 Oct, 11-6pm, free.
The Old Truman Brewery, 81 Brick Lane, E1 6QL

Red Dot London

"Concurrent with Frieze Art Fair and Zoo Art Fair", Red Dot is another of the satellite fairs, and can't make up its mind whether it's free or £5.
Thu 16-Sun 19 Oct, 11am-8pm (11am-7pm on Sun), Free or £5, maybe.
Radisson Edwardian Grafton London, 130 Tottenham Court Road, W1T 5AY
Nearest tube: Warren Street.

Affordable Art Fair
Will Ramsey's fair tends to show "relatively unknown artists" and all work is under £3,000.
Thu 23-Sun 26 Oct, 11am-6pm, £10.
Battersea Park Events Arena, London SW11 4NJ.
Nearest tube: Sloane Square, where there are free shuttle buses, or you're on the train to Battersea Park, or on the bus.

Art Sleuth suggests that there may also be some action on Vyner Street, if Wilkinson, Nettie Horn et al haven't all gone quiet whilst Frieze is on.

Gone but not forgotten...

Year 08
The Keith Talent Gallery-organised show has been a strong youthful upstart for the last couple of years, but has been cancelled. What a shame. Last year: Year 07.

Pulse hasn't returned to London in 2008, and Bridge claims it is skipping 2008 only.

.

See also: Alternative Art Fairs in London Art Week, All the fun of the art fairs, The beginning of the end for satellite fairs?,How to plan and run a successful art fair (by Matthew Slotover of Frieze), Art Fairs, Oct 2008, Last year.

The blank slate.

Most mobile companies show devices in use or an indicative user interface on the device. But O2 often present their devices as if they were blank but beautiful slates, ready to display anything or receive the impression of your literate texts. Here's the XDA Mantle, a device aimed at enterprise and field operations with "an in-built fingerprint scanner, so your data stays in safe hands". (Its name evokes safety and a sense of history: mantle-pieces and fireguards, organs that generate protective shell in molluscs, geological structure, orthodox garments...)

Ghosts (outside the machine).

Wheels, a Lego set in the Supplementary range. Sadly, the translucent blue ghosts on the packaging indicate building-potential - grander scenarios that the set might become a constituent part of - rather than the presence of a range of spectral figures, vehicles and structures suitable for restaging Pictish conflicts...

In both cases, blue as a colour indicating possibility.

Duchamp's final artwork, an internal chimney in an apartment in Cadaques, has been found:

The artist is believed to be responsible for a corner fireplace built within the residence in the resort of Cadaques in Catalonia where he spent the final months before his death in October 1968. [...]

"We knew about the chimney from references but it couldn't be found in the home Duchamp owned for the final seven years of his life," Mr Malla told The Daily Telegraph. "So I naturally thought it didn't exist until I met Richard Hamilton."

The British pop artist [...] directed him to a house that Duchamp had rented when he became too frail to climb the stairs of his own residence.

And at the top there we see Hamilton casually propping up the chimney.

A few precursors to the chimney are known: the assemblage Preliminary Studies and Tools for "Anaglyphic Chimney" (Cheminée anaglyphe), 1968 (video here, via Tout Fait), and the altogether sketchier Anaglyphic chimney, 1968 (ignore the menacing bee watermark hovering over it). Until now, there had merely been rumours of the physical existence of the chimney.

(There's much to write on chimneys, on smoke (married with the smell of a mouth or otherwise), on beautiful breath (Belle Haleine) and on the un-definable Duchampian un-concept of inframince. But let's leave these parenthetic breaths aside for now.)

The chimney stands at one end of a significant list of work that addressed, amongst other interests, spatial concerns:

• The Nude Descending a Staircase paintings of 1912: movement frozen and arrayed spatially
• A now-lost chimney ventilator, Pulled at Four Pins, 1915 - "Duchamp gave Pulled at Four Pins to his friend Louise Varese, who unfortunately misplaced it years later."
• a wall object placed on the floor (a coat-rack), or on a plinth (Fountain, 1917, the readymade versioned so many times it became a post-prefab)
• the Large Glass, 1915-23, the bachelors half particularly: think of the Glider sliding back and forth, and Steefel's description of it (erection tombe) popping out of the picture plan.
• the vertiginous spiralling space of Anemic Cinema, 1926
• Door Rue Larrey, 1927, a door (a joke, ajar) that's both open and closed simultaneously.
• the museums miniaturised into briefcases of 1935-41
• the space of a mile of string, 1942
• Etant Donnes (Given: 1. The Waterfall / 2.The Illuminating Gas), 1946-66, the erotic landscape placed inside a structure, secretly made after his avowed retirement from art in favour of chess, and hidden until after his death
• Eau et gaz a tous les etages...

And that list could no doubt grow - it makes me wonder whether a solid architectural view of Duchamp could be developed. There are clear secondary themes of optics and loss/vanished spaces to explore too.

See also:
Why Duchamp?: The Influence of Marcel Duchamp on Contemporary Architectural Theory and Practice; Duchamp & Architecture!!!???; Psycho Buildings at the Hayward Gallery; and bistre: "A colour made of chimney soot boiled, and then diluted with water, used by painters in washing their designs."

Cy Twombly is an American gone to the bad - a decadent exile who [...] is dirty-minded, and history-minded. Somehow, the two go together for this genius of rot.

Twombly looks like a man in a hurry: he violently pencils the canvas, claws through paint with his fingers, then wipes them on the canvases. There's a sense of hysteria: bodies, body parts, bodies in action, desire...

You'd go further than hurry and hysteria and think him barking mad, scrawling words as a babble. (He was conscripted into the Army in the 50s and trained as a cryptographer, and while on duty in the night would perform the automatic drawing of the Surrealists blindly. So imagine a Twombly who, during a top-secret cryptographic experiment, had inadvertently encrypted himself - his vision, brain, language - on a one-time pad, the drawings and paintings becoming desperate essays at auto-decryption or communication.) However, there's clear evidence against madness of the careful corrections in the underpainting.

He works in waves, cooler then hotter. The 70s drawings to a dead friend are beautiful and depthless, the Apollo drawings similarly cool and distanced. There's a preoccupation with repetition and the hand performing: many of the canvases have a clear right-handed italic bias - arcs of writing and drawing. The hotter ones are urgent, with frenzies barely repressed. The Hero and Leandro quartet combine the two: a wave of thick impasto and rich colour on the left makes way to a smoother, lighter treatment in the second canvas, minimal paleness by the third, and the smaller, supplementary coda of text.

"White paint is my marble", he said, but against the paintings the white sculptures unfortunately seem like weak filler. The later works, though - the pair of Four Seasons cycles and the muscular, exuberant Bacchus paintings - have meaty impact.

Great show.

.

See also:
Gordon Burns's excellent profile, which has this gem:

Twombly's practice in those years was to cover the whole of a large room with canvas and then start working close to the floor or up under the ceiling, wherever his eye took him. When many days had passed and all the walls were smeared with smudges of paint and fecal-looking stains and spidery unravellings of graffiti, he would hack off a section that looked as if it might have the makings of a painting and nail it to the wall without a stretcher.

Rindy Sam kisses Twombly's Phaedrus. Tate Etc: Lingering at the Threshold; Independent: 'Cycles and Seasons' spotlights an artist who hasn't put a foot wrong in a 60-year career; Observer: Top marks for handwriting; Guardian's sceptic: His scattered dreams and its cheerleader: The last American hurrah.

Ross Hansen, Roger Kelly, Adam Latham, Mariele Neudecker and Rosie Snell in a group show at Standpoint on humanity and natural world, "eulogising and destruction, aestheticising and control".

Ross Hansen's drawings and paintings have undeniable quality in their painstaking detail (see also Glenn Brown), but have variable impact: Memento Mori 2008, a large colour pencil image of a tufted owl, and Potter's Lamb 2007, a rich oil rendering of a chimera - a two-faced lamb, are strong.

Adam Latham's posters are fun. In the mixture of history, science and bawdiness there are obvious hints of Keith Tyson and Archimboldo, but visually they're indebted to Robert Crumb.

Mariele Neudecker's simulated tree trunks aren't quite as evocative of non-place as her work usually manages. What look like real twigs and pines cones are added to fibreglass trunks, the whole then sprayed with paint slightly clumsily. More a question of the convincing fiction than an evocation of the sublime; I prefer the cloudy vitrines from some years ago.

Rosie Snell's paintings of military objects, tanks and buildings camouflaged into their surroundings are great: silent monoliths cached in the landscape like lost - or certainly long-misinterpreted -archaeological cities. They're a bit like Peter Doig with flatter, simpler painting handling and colour. The one at the top - Stalker, 2005 - isn't in the show unfortunately.

The side room has the best work: Neudecker has a matt black cast of an airline black box that vibrates visually, a mute sigil (silence seems to be everywhere in this show) and crypt. Roger Kelly's drawings are extraordinary. Bomb-damaged houses, each with a title ("treasure house of stained glass") are rendered as flat scenes that only gradually reveal their source material. The linework is delicate, a consistent width and pressure (as if inked), giving them a quality of "alloverness" that collapses form and ground (something I'm obsessed with). Buildings with histories transformed, flattened down, teased out, re-storied into mostly abstract patterns. Fantastic.

This painting isn't in the show, but gives a sense of what he's doing. There's little on the internet about Kelly: a pair of blurry but representative drawings here, a 2007 drawing here, a 2001 painting that perhaps hints at his future directions. Kelly has compatriots in the excellent Peter Peri and Ernesto Caivano, who currently has a great show at White Cube.

Neudecker has always been one to watch, Rosie Snell and Roger Kelly get added to the list.

• Haruki Murakami: Nobody pounded the table anymore, nobody threw their cups | Sport | The Observer
  (tags: sport running harukimurakami books)
• Folkestone Triennial ~ Tales of Time and Space
  Rather good - recommended for you Down From Londoners.
  (tags: art folkestone folkestonetriennial)
• Whitstable Biennale 2008 - Welcome
  Missed it.
  (tags: art whitstable whitstablebiennale)
• Why artists love to be beside the sea :: Cathy Lomax
  (tags: art cathylomax folkestone folkestonetriennial whitstable)
• First Thursdays
  (tags: art london listings)
• Home >> comment
  (tags: art london listings)
• Art Rabbit - contemporary art - exhibitions listing and opinion
  (tags: art london listings)
• The Post-Materialist | Zines Run Amok - The Moment Blog - NYTimes.com
  Lo-fi photocopy-style mag and artist books.
  (tags: print magazines art scotland)
• State of art in London's East End :: Cathy Lomax
  (tags: art london cathylomax)
• The Long Now Blog » Blog Archive » Edward Burtynsky, “The 10,000-year Gallery”
  Interesting: "The gallery would consist of art in materials as durable as ...", but don't we have this already, everywhere: "curated slowly over the centuries to reflect changing interests in the rolling present and the accumulating past"
  (tags: art time history longnow edwardburtynsky print camera)
• A Memory of the Nineteen-Nineties by Teller
  (tags: story books memory time)
• An Economist Goes by the Numbers to Assess Artwork - NYTimes.com
  There is undoubted merit in quant approaches, but the top 10 simply doesn't feel quite right, nor the question ("greatest"?). Maybe needs to include books wider than 1990-2005 to avoid publishing trends? Cf Komar & Melamid.
  (tags: art duchamp picasso economics toread)
• Review: Trauma by Patrick McGrath | Books | The Observer
  A Hundred Years' War between literature and psychiatry: "the trump card that literature has always had in its dealings with psychiatry, the knowledge that explanations never satisfy", though analysis's defence is that it is never over and assimilates all.
  (tags: psychoanalysis books patrickmcgrath)
• The Urbanite Magazine - THE DRAWING BOARD
  Nice urban plan with shipping containers providing the measuring unit. "How can the structure of this place accommodate multiple systems that change over time—not just from shipping to housing, but also the fallow period in between?"
  (tags: architecture drawing infrastructure baltimore)
• npower renewables: Little Cheyne Court
  Wind farm east of Rye, near Camber. 26 turbines planned; they were installing the 12th last weekend.
  (tags: camber rye wind eco)
• Crookes radiometer - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Demonstrates light energy converted to mechanical energy, but the mechanism remains uncertain 130 years later...
  (tags: light physics)
• IBM Research - PeopleVision
  Will be used at 2008 Olympics.
  (tags: surveillance cctv security china olympics)

Zadie Smith on Kafka in the NYRB:

"It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time." [Begley, The Tremendous World I have in My Head]

The truth was that he wasted time! The writer's equivalent of the dater's revelation: He's just not that into you. "Having the Institute and the conditions at his parents' apartment to blame for the long fallow periods when he couldn't write gave Kafka cover: it enabled him to preserve some of his self-esteem." [...]

Obviously, Kafka put it more dramatically:

The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. One might add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing.... Thus what has resulted was a literature impossible in all respects, a gypsy literature which had stolen the German child out of its cradle and in great haste put it through some kind of training, for someone had to dance on the tightrope. (But it wasn't a German child, it was nothing; people merely said that somebody was dancing.) [Kafka, letter]

• BBC NEWS | The Reporters | Mark Easton's UK - Shocking crime figures
  Psychology and expectation. "When the national crime figures show that people's experience of wounding [...] is DOWN a significant 19% year on year, it is really time to stop this myth that we are in the midst of a knife epidemic"
  (tags: media london criminaljustice police psychology)
• Pixily: Put Your Paper Docs Online in 3 to 5 Days Max - ReadWriteWeb
  "lets small businesses and individuals send paper documents by mail in a Netflix style envelope, then scans, uploads to Amazon S3 and lets you search them in 3 to 5 days"
  (tags: paper archive sketchbook amazon via:bushwald)
• Little Springs Design: Mobile User Experience » greatness and danger in police car computers
  On the risks of eyes-busy modes in MDTs in policing (not much less so for mobile apps in the field too). So much to write about this, so little time.
  (tags: police mobile design mobbu)
• Silverback — guerrilla usability testing
  Recording/bookmarking/screencasting app aimed at commoditising usability lab work. Mac only. (Slightly confused whether the video demo was 100% Silverback or the product plus video edited in...)
  (tags: design dev usability testing)
• QA Deathmatch » “Hello World” - The SlickEdit Developer Blog
  As planning poker is to estimation, QA Deathmatch is to testing...
  (tags: dev testing games)