Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Obra Sonora, Carroll/Fletcher

until 01 Nov 14

So: dissonance, discord, cacophony: all words with the negative inbuilt inside them. Bad.

Arrays of moveable speakers as infographics. As sculptures. Beautiful on their own merit. They reveal their purpose immediately, actual, non-abstract, non-detached conceptual art. Conceptual art should always had been this.

Dissonance, discord, noise. Here, in front of us, the cacophony of national anthems is laid bare. I saw and heard the futility of nationalist ideals in these speakers, but maybe there is nothing to see, only to hear their assembly as is, this Pan-Anthem (2014).

Mirroring this same idea, Sphere Packing (2014) downstairs, engulfs you in a serene little solar system of exquisite planets, the music of the spheres incarnated in sounds emanating from each, audible only when you reluctantly put your ear next to them, touching them slightly with a feeling of mischief while their tiny vibrations tickle you back, in concert.

Both these sculptural and sound installations seem to stem directly from the tradition of the visually stunning statistical and information graphics introduced by scientists like William Farr and Florence Nightingale. It is this attribute that elevates Lozano-Hemmer’s work from his contemporaries’.

Voice Array (2011) plays with the idea of cacophony as well, but with different intentions. Here the visitors’ contributions help create an atmospheric output to which I felt I could immerse myself for days. I was ashamed by how reluctant I found myself in contributing my voice, maybe the actual installation is not even the encompassing light but exactly my inhibitions. Naughty man.

But aside of all these rooms of dissonance, is a small room where the noise and the playfulness are absent at first. In their place a small kinetic machine, full of morbid thoughts and more inhibitions. I felt very uncomfortable as if in a funeral, though possibly all is just thin air. Naughty man. The exhibition is indeed me as much as this machine. A joke, or a memento mori to revere? Last Breath (2012). I am so relieved this was long before ‘The Last Gasp’ of Inside No.9. I would had been devastated.

Obra Sonora. Lozano-Hemmer. Sound works. Sound Master.


more info:
http://www.carrollfletcher.com/usr/documents/exhibitions/press_release_url/32/rlh-obra-sonora-press-release.pdf
http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/
http://www.bl.uk/whatson/exhibitions/beautiful-science/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Gasp_(Inside_No._9)
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-09/20/rafael-lozano-hemmer

'20000 Days on Earth', dir. Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard (2014)

At a lecture on Music and Emotion yesterday, a researcher emphasized how our music tastes get fixed quite early into adulthood. No one really knows why, he proclaimed, but we all know why, don’t we?

Time passes and we evolve, we progress, we expand, we listen to genres that might once be anathema, like jazz, but he is right. We are stuck. I am stuck. To the music when I was young, when within the desert of all those mortals, oppressors, destroyers, or just boring adults, some semi-gods would speak to us, for us, their songs of our dark grace.

What they became, dead, fat, happy, sad, men, women is irrelevant. They are still intact in our memory because we are fixed in it. We do not want to see them as they are. It is for this that 20000 Days on Earth is as brave as it is accomplished. By resisting making a biopic, it shows the most intimate respect to one of those semi-gods, still living his life as art. And he, in turn, does not disappoint.

Constituted as a day’s journey, the film is flawless and beautiful. The playfulness and poetry that runs interminably through it, through both the images and the sounds, is a superb example of pure Structuralist Cinema as I perceive it: where the subject matter is fully reflected in the visuals, in the content and in the structure. With focus on the present and with the past present only as an abstraction and fragmented, this is the genius of this film. The cameos from various collaborators are exciting, spirited and thoroughly enjoyable; their short conversations succinctly colouring in tone what these relationships were and are. How much research and respect must lie behind this for the idea to succeed. For us old, stuck goths, the brief encounter with an ever transfixing Blixa Bargeld is the end to an unfinished conversation we were so long waiting for; Warren Ellis is shining as a character even larger than the protagonist himself; and all this, without any fake illusions of a great artistic existence, but only showing their constant effort for it, love for it, need for it and the banality of it.

It is no coincidence that out of all the propositions, Nick Cave accepted only this one. The same way he chose the present, not a glorious but near death past. He is the present, while we are the past.

You see, there is a trend among us, old, stuck goths, to label as sold out whoever from that past had a popular breakthrough; or did not die; Utterly unfair, this seems to me just a desperate attempt to cover our own guilt; for, less or more, we are the ones that didn’t keep the Life as Art promises; the ones stuck in a past that we chose not to make a future; the ones that compromised or changed minds because life can never be pure, because as we grow older we get hurt more, or we love more, inevitably hurting and loving someone outside our solipsistic selves.

Whether the new songs speak to us or for us is what is really irrelevant. Because he - he doesn’t need us. As no artist should. It is us who need him as a junkie, in distress, playing with death because we do not want to face ourselves becoming normal. So, I am glad he let us in, somehow, on his 20000th day; through an elegy to constant creating and not through a eulogy of times past.

So, here he is, in full glory, one of the semi-gods that made us in his image, walking the earth, just for a day, for us, to snap us out of our past delusions. And for this, I love him still and even more.


more info:
www.rottentomatoes.com/m/20000_days_on_earth/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/movies/in-20000-days-on-earth-nick-cave-is-on-the-move.html?_r=0
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/events/packed-lunch-podcast.aspx

Tennessee Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire: The Young Vic

until 19 Sep 14 (ticketed)

This is a play that though now a classic, in the 40s was deemed pornographic and shameful, proving exactly the point the play was trying to make.

It is a play of exposing pretences - the pretence of theatre itself, the pretence that domestic violence is a form of passionate love, the pretence of the fragile heroine to hold on to a never existent grandeur, the pretence of the alpha males of being strong, the pretence of a society that still often forces homosexuality to the shadows and honest men to deception. The pretences fall, and the broken heroine stands in the end destroyed but triumphant, she has the audience affection. The strong, on the contrary, stand despised.

It is such a thin line to write, direct and produce a play or a film where extreme violence towards women is not portrayed in a way that is actually voyeuristic or even misogynistic in effect. It is a very thin line, as well, to write or play the character of a broken alcoholic, delusional lost soul stumbling all over in their free fall, without presenting a caricature.

Maybe it needs a writer that writes out of care for someone they love, like Tennessee Williams did, having as it is said, never forgiven his family for his sister’s failed lobotomy.

Maybe it needs a ‘degenerate’, like himself, to write about the tragedy of other degenerates and their betrayals.

Someone that maybe has loved abusive men to write about abuse.

Someone alcoholic, to write about alcoholism stripped of moral judgement.

Maybe, in the end, it takes a writer that writes out of love for other souls, not out of pity, to write Blanche DuBois.

But it definitely also takes a most insightful casting decision and an outstanding, remarkable performance by Gillian Anderson to make Blanche breathe again, her sweet alcoholic breath of sadness and pain onto us, reaffirming her right to never be forgotten, her and all those other lost souls, standing and dancing, unrepentant, under a discobole while we only see a cheap, flat, kitchen light.


more info: http://www.youngvic.org/whats-on/a-streetcar-named-desire
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/a-streetcar-named-desire-young-vic-review-gillian-anderson-gives-shatteringly-powerful-performance-9634804.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Williams

RIFT: Macbeth: The Balfron Tower

until 16/08

By entering RIFT’s remarkable, immersive interpretation of Macbeth you have to be prepared to spend a night having left behind your phone, possessions, any contact with the outside world and your individualism. If you cling to these, like the characters, you will be left blind to all that is happening around you. Brutalism and gore, London and theatre at their best. For this night, you belong to the Tower.

Wonderful acting, playful improvisations complimenting the fully respected original, the set is reality and reality is the set, executed and choreographed exceptionally.

Thank you to RIFT and the Balfron Tower residents for their patience with the outsider, noisy, excited us.

Sleep no more, indeed; as, if you are lucky enough to be in a lovely group like I was, there will be no sleep. The apartment is now the set for you, stories and lives shared for this one night, how easily we now know each other for years, how obviously there cannot be any sleep when surrounded by these views, sets of their own accord.

Woken up tired, confused, hungover or still drunk, on a top bunk bed by the sweet hot light of a Summer Sunday I feel bliss. The dirt on the windows only helps to make the edge of the world blurred and even more dreamy. Breakfast with the new friends, goodbye, the Tower has been so kind.

You used to scare me, now I adore you. I wish these views and corridors and rifts and utopias of yours, even if sometimes soured, stay with you and your patient residents. Not sold shamelessly and shamefully to the affluent classes. I hope and will try to ensure that this summer hot light is reserved for you all, not for spreadsheets and flat whites.

You gave me shelter and a night to keep in memory forever, safe. How can you thank a building but in dreams?

Dreams that money can buy.

More info:

http://macbeth.in/
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/balfron-tower-art-fetishising-estates-157
http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jul/06/macbeth-review-rift-balfron-tower-london
novaramedia.com/2013/08/social-cleansing-in-tower-hamlets-interview-with-balfron-tower-evictee/

Leipzig, City of Angels: Wave-Gotik-Treffen Leipzig 2014

Body temperature: 40 C. Outside temperature: 27 C. Thursday.

Arrival. The taxi driver, overenthusiastic, shares possibly made up stories of the WGT festival from the 90s. Streets empty of both cars and people except for the creatures of the night. I feel increasingly excited. He leaves us, facing a 18th century facade, then facing the black eye of the landlord which somehow made perfect sense. This ancient house, half squat half palace, will become a house I’ll be thinking of so often in dark times and I will be safe there. Streets empty of cars and people, but we follow more the creatures than our maps and soon enter Moritzbastei. Like an intro scene to a film, a set, full of angels and daemons, enters Ariel. Beautiful friends, beautiful deities, daemons, all finally at rest. This place and these faces never seem to end. I am in awe.

Body temperature: 38 C. Outside temperature: 30 C. Friday.

Unable to speak due to the pain, the illness getting stronger, we head out. The city is shining in the hot morning, its beauty understated. East Germany, they say. A city respectful and quiet. The creatures are everywhere. A bizzaro-world, taken over, a post apocalyptic scenario where only goths have survived and inhabit the Earth. Ultimately exquisite, crinolines, parasols, men in high heels, men in plastic, men in skirts, top hats or top bras, women naked, women from Versailles, faces untouched, faces in masks, gas masks, makeup masks, pure, feathers of ravens and feathers of angels, La Madonna walks deservingly arrogantly holding a Saint by her side. I am so ill, under a tree, I stand still while a universe of wonders revolves around me in Agra and I watch this parade of souls. Is it an exhibitionist exercise in conformity was my first thought, how soon I would change opinion. And in line, the exquisite corpses parade under a sun that shows no mercy, unscathed. More friends, beautiful friends. 7JK giving an immaculate performance at the most beautiful Volkspalast. The people respectful, drink but are not drunk, drugless, immersed in music. Refreshing. Moritzbastei. More exquisite corpses. I am so ill. I cannot speak. Like trapped behind a soundproof glass wall I watch the conversations powerless. At the house. Thinking possibly of an emergency flight back to go to hospital. But I so want to stay with you all.

Body temperature: 37 C. Outside temperature: 32 C. Saturday.

The illness has miraculously broken. The pain is not excruciating and the fever is down. Hope. We head out. Random person stops us to take our photographs too. How funny, we are not even dressed up. Art nouveau, art deco, hidden passageways a whole morning walking and it’s not enough. Facades timeless, knowingly teasing us on our own ephemeral being and their permanence. Pharmacy. The assistant prescribes while I stare at his black fascinator stitched over his white medical coat. The city fully embraces the festival. All shop fronts all shop assistants, all waiters, all ages play along. This is not just because of the money brought in, as I thought before, but because of pride. The city is proud to have been chosen. Stasi Museum. Special exhibition, for free, and tour in english on the Stasi files and attitudes towards the local Goths during the last years of the GDR. Scary, upsetting and equally entertaining, the shaky nervous curator and researcher was just lovable. Between the laughs about the ridiculously inaccurate Stasi records on the subject, an unsettling sadness sets on us all, thinking of how often in so many places a simple choice in music and style is an unforgiveable act of transgression. And now, here we are, 20 thousand degenerates, laughing at you, evil banalités, bureaucrats and scared men. Here we are, laughing at you all, that at some point made the bitter comment, the outcasting, the strange look, or even persecution, for clothes, hair and radios at the wrong wavelength. Here we are, back, en mass, years later, triumphant. Theater Fabrik. The heat is unbearable. Lebanon Hanover give a great set despite the hellish temperatures. A break, and Kiss the Anus of a Black Cat take on the stage for a perfect show of blemishless performance, audience rapport, politeness and respect. At the exact time I thought I will be flying back in emergency, here I am, dancing with friends and strangers alike, receiving and offering smiles around in a collective and fully conscious happiness.

Body temperature: 37 C. Outside temperature: 33 C. Sunday.

The Pagan Village. Playful, mead, horns, serious or not, families of three parents, families of none, more monsters, knights, Lestats, fetishists, transvestites, aunts, dogs, babies in goth carts, monks, priests, ‘Satan’s baby inside’ on that woman’s pregnant belly, Mani the cutest puppy, then Volkspalast, as elegant as its temporary occupants and Soft Moon being adored while my friends dance happy. Moritzbastei for a last goodbye, I see the Saint from the other day, without his Madonna but in the company of other Saints, quiet, enjoying his last to one night before he is the freak again. Another Saint, tall and immaculate looks at me and smiles at me. Shy, I turn away my eyes, as if in shame, as if flirted when young, shy to receive this unsolicited, unsexualised gaze and pure smile from an asexual angel, expecting nothing in return.

Body temperature: 36.5 C. Outside temperature: 33 C. Monday.

The House decides on an excursion to the Monument to the Battle of the Nations. As otherworldly as confusing. Proto-fascist or art deco pure? I have never seen anything like this before and I am ecstatic. A structure that cannot be placed to any time or location. We are so hot, we walk, we could be in Peru or another planet or a film. Not prepared for the endless flight of stairs, the vertigo and claustrophobia that comes with them, it was worth it. But what is it? All my references are irrelevant. A monument like this to mourn thousands of deaths. Is it sincere? is it not? Why cannot I see it as it is, without prejudice? Without the knowledge it was built just before WWI? Why do I bathe everything in the muddy waters of incomplete historical knowledge and half baked assumptions? Maybe this is indeed the purest of art: the most grandiose, massive, epic, pharaonic monument, not to any win, success, God or Slaughterer but to mourn the war dead? Exhausted, sweaty and smelly we descent back to the hot earth, a bit different. We wave goodbye to the old wonderful friends, heading to an Absintherie, while we slowly leave the new friends, the angels, the exquisite corpses, the city in black, the crinolines and the masks, the parasols and the eyes made of alabaster.

At Liverpool Street, one in the morning, my heart slightly sinks. The world is again Technicolor. With Sound. Loud Sound. And a sad paste of vulgarity. The colours seem to drape everyone in a palette of boredom and conformity. Like a forgiving filter has been removed from my eyes, like when we were fifteen. Yes, the world cannot but look boring after all this. But in a most comforting coincidence, she, one of the angels of Leipzig, appears, comes towards us and we all kiss a final good bye with a smile.

No, the world is never going to be boring. Cause we are everywhere.

Photo by: SadMafioso [https://www.flickr.com/photos/sadmafioso/] More info:
http://www.wave-gotik-treffen.de/english/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moritzbastei
http://www.agra-veranstaltungsgelaende-leipzig.de/
http://7jkmusic.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/volkspalast
http://www.runde-ecke-leipzig.de/index.php?id=76&L=1
http://www.theater-fabrik-sachsen.de/
http://lebanonhanover.bandcamp.com/
http://www.discogs.com/artist/299459-Kiss-The-Anus-Of-A-Black-Cat
http://www.thesoftmoon.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Battle_of_the_Nations
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Absintherie-Sixtina/101020696620112

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: Double Visions/DILBAR, Anthony Reynolds Gallery

until 17 May 14

In the thin veil-like space between light and darkness, the twilight comes and goes, often unnoticed. The little tricks of light that were enough to create whole stories and fear in men, now pass by, invisible, in a blink. The spirits of folk tales and dreams, of sleepless nights, roam homeless, unnoticed, guideless, aimless. But once every so often, they find a small, safe home to rest.

This home is the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. In there, they can breathe again their weak, icy but comforting breaths to our ear; they are here, they mean no harm. They only want to be noticed again.

Behind a firmly closed door in the edges of Soho, one of these spirits walks and waits for us. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s installation of ‘Dilbar’ is a small enclosed port for both this restless soul and us. Eerie, as is most of his work, it demands our patience and observation. In the same way that our sight slowly adjusts to the darkness in the room to reveal the disembodied soul, our mind also slowly adjusts to what this might all be about. A wonderfully ghostly short film of the everyday, but its simplicity is deceitful. For this is a masterclass in Expanded Cinema.

The thin woven like screen on which the film is projected, does not only act as the thin layer between us and the spirit world but it is an actual physical thin layer that is ingeniously used together with lighting to break up the frame of the film into smaller ones. These smaller perfect frames, on the gallery walls and floor, focus on details that seem not important in the main frame. But on their own, these broken frames are whole new films, stories and histories on their own: a tree thumping to the sound of manual workers, a worker’s face becoming the portrait of a king. The main image of the everyday is broken down to faces, buildings, traffic, silence, a hundred new realities.

Which of them is the truth? All or none? Weerasethakul reminds us of the trickery of the Image as well as the beauty of noticing the detail, and he does this all at once and all so politely. He reminds us that what we see might not be the truth and what we fail to notice might be the whole world. Those first unnoticed, the manual worker, the tree, the building, are now the protagonists.

Briefly, like the restless souls Apichatpong Weerasethakul protects, the unnoticed start to exist.

more info: http://www.anthonyreynolds.com/current/documents/AWPressRelease2014.pdf
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/19476/1/apichatpong-weerasethakul-chai-siri-diblar
http://www.timeout.com/london/art/apichatpong-weerasethakul-double-visions

The urgency of taking the time to watch something like Jarman’s ‘Blue’

'Blue' at the Tate Modern, until 6 Apr 14

Since its first release in 1993, Derek Jarman’s ‘Blue’ has acquired the reputation of one of the most experimental or most pretentiously arty films. Though, to me, it is one of the most private, personal and cinematic experiences, I completely understand such criticisms based on ideology or taste; in the end the director himself would be the first to ask us to doubt everything revered. So, I was prepared to be met with anti-blueists at the film’s latest incarnation as a projection in a small room in the Tate Modern.

What I was not prepared for was the realisation of how urgent it has become nowadays to allow ourselves to dedicate a few minutes to something like ‘Blue’.

There was a constant stream of visitors of all ages and nations. Most would not stay for even a moment, to try see what this room is all about. Others would catapult themselves to catch one of the few seats and rest themselves from all the exploits of a tourist. All would spare no more than one second on the screen or sound, then reach for their phones or friends.

My patience already tried for twenty minutes, the newly arrived couple snogging on the sofa next to me was the last straw. Though completely certain that Jarman wouldn’t find anything more delightful than his work desecrated by an amorous couple, he would still find it in poor taste.

The experience of Tate Modern’s level 4 ‘Blue’ was unbearable. I left before the hour, angry and sad as I was, for days, looking forward to a public screening of one of my treasured films.

How did the Tate get it so wrong? My only answer is that someone thought this way they could bring something so experimental to the masses, to expose as many passers by to it as possible. But good intentions are often not only inadequate but also damaging. The setup only reinforces the preconception of ‘Blue’ and similar endeavours as out of touch with reality and any mass sensibility, and that is so erroneous. ‘Blue’ is treated here as a video art installation, but it is not. It is a film. 4 reels of it. The saturated blue gets scratched, revealing its nature, on a screen enclosing you in it. A small sofa and two benches in a tiny room are not welcoming for this, are not inviting you to meditate or mediate any thoughts of staying, concentrating or letting go as you are predisposed to assume that you are there on borrowed time. You are predisposed to the role of the passerby, as you have been, all day. Unlike in the Serpentine that got it just right a few years ago, this parade of visitors are lead to the room, then magnificently, left to roam blind. Our ever growing impatience and short span is met with uninspired ideas on curating.

While discussing this with JL, he rightfully compared our impatience with the impatience of a tech junky unable to dedicate a few minutes to a glowing big screen where seemingly nothing happens instead of our seductive glowing black mirrors. Only that the whole world happens, through the soundtrack and our own projections on this blue screen. It is a great thing, our black mirrors, permanently attached to us; do we though lose something cognitively more and more?

When ‘Blue’ was first broadcast on TV, Channel 4 and BBC Radio 3 collaborated on a simultaneous broadcast so that the audience could experience it in stereo. Apparently, people would also be sent blue cards to look at instead if they had no TV. When I first read this, my reaction was one of superiority, fake nostalgia and a self righteous smile about how - aww! - they had to do such a silly thing back then for effect. But my sardonic thoughts soon turned into a cold and dark veil of sadness and loss. For I got so jealous of all those, there, at the first broadcast; how, possibly, the prospective audience spent a good few minutes making sure the radio worked and was tuned in, that the tv worked, made themselves comfortable, poured a drink or made a cup of tea, waiting for the simultaneous event, knowing that all those people collaborated on this, possibly took the telephone off the plug, too, just to be sure.

How much of this have we lost? And what would that mean?

Our vision too fast, everything ready to be found, a world too impatient for ‘Blue’.

What will that mean?

Maybe we should slow down a bit, just to make sure. Maybe it is essential for institutions like the Tate to think harder next time, think of the necessity of facilitating patience, of offering a small place where we can still go back to the time before our black mirrors, where looking at an almost unchanging monochrome projection of real film, in real time, deteriorating with each projection like its creator’s eyesight, is an event, even without soundtrack. To a place and time where, like the dying Jarman in the flat above the Phoenix, we have full realisation of time well passed by experiencing and appreciating and observing; like looking outside a train window on a journey of an hour; where like him, without sight, without movement, without much breath and without any future we can still make a whole world just out of ourselves.

‘In the pandemonium of image, I present you with the universal Blue’.

Goodnight Derek,
Goodnight Maurice,
Goodnight.

more info:
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/derek-jarman-into-the-blue-he-is-not-living-with-aids-he-says-but-dying-with-it-but-he-works-on-his-new-film-and-his-very-presence-are-reminders-of-how-in-him-radical-challenge-and-disarming-delight-go-hand-in-hand-simon-garfield-reports-1461014.html
http://www.evanizer.com/articles/blue/index.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28j8D1nPoVc (with subtitles for those with hearing issues)