Jannis Kounellis: various and Ugo Rondinone: Nude, Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens

until 30 and 19 Sep 12

The building that the museum occupies, by Ernst Ziller, is a reminder of the elegance and affluence of the Greek Belle Epoque Middle Class. I never managed to despise them, maybe because they seem more exquisite and less hypocritical than our contemporaries. The heat and traffic of central Athens vanished at its door.

The fragments of Kounellis are the first to greet you. Followed in the adjacent building by more broken selves. These are naked and disturbing. Made of wax, they were produced by casts of actual people, making the details almost breathe.

Like the inhabitants of the upper floors, the permanent collection of the bronze-age Cycladic figurines, they, too, seem to be representations of dead people. They all rest, reclined, anonymous, almost monochromatic, their bodies pure but exposed to the elements, our eyes and to pain. They rest but they are not relaxed. The ancient ones hold their torsos in discomfort, the modern nudes, with their different coloured limbs, some dislocated from their body, try in this way to support the tension of their fragmentation. They are also broken, like so many Kounellis pieces. They are more like Bellmer dolls than human. The models are dancers, but the perfection of their bodies (some unconventional) is more disturbing than arousing. They resemble the Monster as much as the Odelisk. They deflect any attempt we make to reflect on them our own selves.

While they are naked, coats, shoes, hats, stand and hang forever bodiless in the next building. They are waiting for the return of their masters, be them factory workers, coffee shop regulars, our grandfathers but definitely not the privileged.

The room where the coats hang, feels like a shrine. It filled me with what others might call reverence. The coats are tired, old, poor, similar but not identical, they are the people they belong to, possibly for life. The people are next door, upstairs, just left, this is the waiting room, the changing room, their room. A thousand narratives and one spring out of their inner linings. Time is bathing their room and drips down and all over from their worn out sleeves. Are we them, are we witnesses? Are we back?

As much as I loved it, I felt uncomfortable. An unidentifiable feeling of guilt was annoyingly persistent, like the pain from my new boots, constant, temporary and inevitable. We staged some playful photos and left.

Another piece, a collection of identical bottles wrapped in a coat wrapped in a sheet was possibly another of the pieces I had seen before in the Ambika P3 Kounellis exhibition. Its, then, industrially charged meaning now has silently turned into a melancholic biography. The choice of works exhibited, their sequence, the space they occupy can change so much the climate emanating from the pieces themselves. So democratic.

Unlike the entrance fee. Probably inevitable, but nevertheless excluding most people from this experience, especially in these times. How even more ironic that Kounellis especially is so related to Arte Povera that this happens. And so, iconoclastic pieces, the Kounellis clothes, the Cycladic death figurines, are standing now silent, surrounded only by the empty, intellectualized rhetoric of the exhibition leaflet, and the hollow clapping of the already converted.

7 euro, the price of its shame.

More info:
http://www.cycladic.gr/frontoffice/portal.asp?cpage=NODE&cnode=74&clang=1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jannis_Kounellis
http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/jannis-kounellis1/
http://www.artnet.com/artists/ugo-rondinone/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Ziller

Adam Dix / Tim Phillips: Programming Myth, Sumarria Lunn

until 30 Jun 12



In all the houses we knew when I was growing up a piece of furniture would always be present that nowadays would look peculiar. Like the one below.




Most would have this characteristic cushion and would be made out of wood. I hated the telephone tables. They always meant no privacy. They would be mathematically placed in the most accessible and open space in each house. Sometimes whole romances, secret calls in the middle of the night, whole dramas would be played out around them. The constant fear of being caught, the constant fear of a ring in public from a stalker or the torturing silence of a lover. Over time, my hatred for this wooden furniture turns into nostalgia.

Then there was the dentist’s. A waiting room wall covered top to bottom in an autumnal forest scene. Oppressive. Or there would be pictures of mountains. Closing down on you. Why were there always mountains?

And then, there were the visits to relatives or vague family acquaintances, formal, always on cold nights, dressed in Sunday best for people we couldn’t care less for. They would always have plastic flowers or foliage, inside crystal, next to the chocolates.

When I started descending into Sumarria Lunn, the long stairway, confined, with some extra steps, made me excitingly nervous. I would soon realise what a perfect intro the gallery stairway itself was for what I found inside. There they were, all of them: the telephone tables, the Alps, the plastic foliage. Interlocked into sectarian and alien funereal constructs with my childhood fears, TV sci-fi programmes, folkloric masks and rituals. As if suddenly stumbling into a Cult, or a forgotten civilisation, I realised these paintings and sculptures were so authentic that were it not for being in a gallery, I would, yes, be scared.

Ethno-rituals, Rudolf Steiner, Lost, The Freemasons, Quatermass, The Midwich Cuckoos, Maydays, Carnivals, childhood memories and childhood furniture, all sculpted into one document of an otherworldly time.

A compulsory visit for any sci-fi sensibility. Bizarre love triangles.


more info:
http://www.sumarrialunn.com/ http://www.ameliasmagazine.com/listings/e705/programming-myth-with-adam-dix-and-tim-phillips-at-sumarria-lunn-gallery#.T-h-YpH4LIg http://www.ameliasmagazine.com/listings/e705/programming-myth-with-adam-dix-and-tim-phillips-at-sumarria-lunn-gallery#.T-h-YpH4LIg

Gao Brothers, Nick Knight, Claire Morgan: Death, Show Studio Shop

until 31 Aug 2012



In Dublin once, there was an exhibition of three, only three, paintings by Dutch masters. I had thought, how bizarre, yet afterwards I realised that three is the exact perfect number of exhibits.

So, I was extremely pleased when now, years after, I entered the ShowStudio. Tucked away in a quiet laneway, hidden from the loud kitsch of Mayfair, a dead angel, a symmetrical cube and a firing squad are waiting in triptych.

Kate 2011, by Nick Knight, engulfed my heart immediately. I have always had a primeval fixation with wax statuettes. At 16, my friend had travelled with her parents to Bulgaria, she came back with the most beautiful gift, three vampyrettes, standing back to back in a column, dark, grey, waxy, I thought they'd be eternal. They melt ungracefully for 15 years.

Kate 2011 is their sister, an angel, woman, naked but not sexualised, dead. Her white waxy colour the most beautiful of whites. She is a Crucifix and she is hovering in a tiny tilt. How magnificent a little detail, I smiled.

Next to her, a perfect geometry of concentric cubes expands from a singularity. The imaginary lines of The Heart of Darkness, by Claire Morgan, are defined by spots, and those spots are dead flies. I would naturally tut at similar endeavours, but these flies are not just smirky material but they are a deadly, intelligent, exquisite and scary swarm.

The next room is occupied by a life-sized death squad and their prey: an almost stereotypical Jesus, dignified, inviting and wondering. You are welcomed to walk around them, and each angle makes this a different sculpture, making you observer from the sides or above, or both the victim and the executioner. The squad are all replicas of Mao. They are fat, overdressed, rigid and passé. They are old. They are the killers but they are the ones that are dead. Their Jesus is not the religious one. He is young, thin, and with a stature that is timeless and also contemporary, his hair is thick and untreated, not of an icon but of an eco warrior, a dissident, the one we will, probably, never dare be. They are all bronze, like all the statues of conquerors and butchers on horses. The squad are all alike. Bar one. One hesitates. Will we at least be him?
(Gao Brothers, The Execution of Christ)


more info:
http://showstudio.com/shop/exhibition/death
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gao_Brothers
http://nickknight.com/main.html
http://www.claire-morgan.co.uk/

Portal Painters: Heather Nevay, Whyn Lewis, Peter Thomson et al., Coningsby Gallery

until 23 Jun 12



Heather Nevay’s grotesque, ageless children, in boxes or with boxes stand still in transparent clothes on mythical landscapes. They also stand facing the exquisite elegance of Whyn Lewis’s harts and hounds that hover timelessly on monochromes. While Peter Thomson’s families - as nightmares - are forever self-absorbed, and noisy, in the next room.

This refreshing collection of new-surreal high-finish paintings has temporarily cast its net on a side street off Tottenham Court Road. Most of the busy lunchtime queuing and stressed of life passers by will continue their daily cycle undisturbed. The lucky few will fall gladly into this Venus Flytrap; this magical place that puts all work troubles into perspective, as these birds of paradise, though trapped, like us, stare back, for once, acknowledging us.

more info: http://www.portalpainters.co.uk/artists.aspx
http://www.coningsbygallery.com/
http://www.nevayburke.freeserve.co.uk/hnevay142.htm
http://whynlewis.com/whynlewis.com/Whyn_Lewis.html
http://www.peterthomsonart.com/

Bauhaus: Art as Life, Barbican

£10-£12
until 12 Aug 12



This is one of my very few negative posts, for which I apologise in advance. Since the exhibition though is a paid one, I thought that a balancing view might be of benefit to some.

So there it is..I was utterly dissapointed by the lack of narrative. The curation was tiringly safe and unchallenging, consciously avoiding the political and design context the Bauhaus challenged and the implications that this challenge caused. For a movement/school that had to close down and migrate by the then authorities, this exhibition seems like a desperate effort to institutionalise a thoroughly lowbreaking past.

more info: http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery/event-detail.asp?ID=12409
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/may/02/bauhaus-art-as-life-review

Laura Kuch, The Doppelgangers, Vincula, UCL Art Museum

until 08 Jun 12

The UCL Art Museum opens its doors patiently and punctually every weekday at 1pm. Like a curiosity shop, it doesn’t shout about its treasures to the passing trade but waits, quietly, occupying another unappreciated world.

Their recent collaboration with the Slade ends today. Most of Vincula’s pieces are uneventful but still, beautifully serene. Apart from two: the Doppelgangers by Laura Kuch look so natural in the room that, at first, I thought they were part of it. And they might as well be. They are two oil paintings from 1913 by two female Slade students, sitting next to each other while working on a life drawing of a female nude. Insignificant on their own, though not without talent, the paintings now also stand, next to each other, in stereoscopic devotion. The one is framed, the other is bare (it won 2nd prize after all). The model has her head and body turned away from us, she is as obscure and lost in 1913 as Dora Karrington and Fanny Fletcher, who painted her, are. The Doppelgangers stand a breath away from each other, quietly producing this ectoplasm of a 1913 Slade Studio Classroom: the subject, the students, the easels, the brushes, the slow wind from Gower St, all materialise in the small space between them. I was drunk with the view. Then, I played ‘spot the difference’ as the Doppelgangers look identical, but not quite so. And then a bundle of words and analyses started flooding my head, of art theories and gender theories and la la la which I silenced and expelled as they were doing the Doppelgangers no justice. For this is art in its purest form: an over-conscious eye, an opportunity, a simple idea, and one of the most complete, clever and honest pieces of found object art, that I have seen, was born. All out of a simple, single act: moving one object gently next to another.

After that, 1+1 can equal almost anything.

more info:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart

Smyrna: The destruction of a cosmopolitan city 1920-1922, Benaki Museum, Athens

until 18 Mar 2012

I was lazily looking outside the metro window at the city I only recognise so much, when I heard the familiar, slow, low, junkie voice. Through his over-dry mouth he was reciting his speech and the only thought I had was that all those years of books have paid off and I do not feel repulsed, only sad. I did not give him any change, neither did the two girls on my right, hair salon frequents. As soon as he left, and loud enough for everyone to hear, they huffed their relief: 'God, they don't even get it, do they! They come so close! Idiot!'.

I returned to my sightseeing. A few minutes later I was queuing at the Smyrna exhibition at the old Benaki Museum. The queue seemed to be a clone of the area itself: affluent, aged. The ticket was 5 euro. I was relieved as it was fine to me, but saddened I realised that now most of my friends there wouldn't be able to afford it. This queue obviously could.

For the next half hour I walked slowly between them looking at the blown up pictures of more clones, this time from the privileged classes of Smyrna pre 1922. Children dressed in immaculate navy clothes, the same costumes they'll be wearing later on, in the photos on the wall opposite, dirty, scared, climbing escape ships. Tragedy, as war always is, as any burnt city front is. The extremists and the dispossessed went amok, and the old city became the new, where my dear friend was later born.

"They are not unforgotten lands, they are unliberated" voiced a woman on late tv and I was nauseous.

What were they seeing?

"She was Mrs Theodoridou's grandmother" explained a lady in-between the shining of her old golden jewellery and her husband.

What do they see?

The curation is safe. A few captions, no commentary. No obvious juxtapositions, and a linear presentation of events apart from a few overlaps. The title of the exhibition is similarly ambiguous in its intentions. No dialectic. But also no hysteria. I was pleased. Is this a step forward for an extremely hurt, bled but also nationalistically indulgent state?

Sobriety.

But there is another Benaki museum in Athens. A few miles away, situated in the working class, deprived part of the city, home now to the new disposessed, those haunted by war, hate, poverty, criminals, killers, mothers, lost souls, workers, prostitutes and musicians in the gutter, from lands we cannot even name. You see them daily, collecting scrap metal from wherever inside stolen supermarket carts, walking them down the highways for miles and miles to sell them for who knows what.

What do they see?

Outside this other Benaki Museum, these people that will never make it inside, seem like clones too. Generalised, impersonal. Disgusting. Pests. Like the junkie in the metro. Like the guy that terrorised and mugged someone I love. Like the child in the navy clothes landing in Athens in 1922. Like them, landing every day in a port to annoy us.

What do they see?

Nothing.

The parasols are frozen in time. The teachers posing in late edwardian photo booths are just photograms. The straw hats keep reflecting the sweet Ionian light, they are never to see the knife on the throat. No. These houses that burn, the promenade in smoke, are there, safely away, frozen, still, in 1922.

"The documentary will start in 5 min" came the announcement. They all rushed not to miss the start.

They saw nothing.

The look of nostalgia in all their eyes and words as they walked out. "Where do you want to go back to!?" I wanted to ask her politely. "You do have enough and more". She would look back, her face old, wrinkled, tired, the face of a class that is dying. "Oh, my dear, back then. When we were all oblivious".

I would nod, and leave her in peace. I know what she means.

Because we all know, that when the pest shows up on our tv, car window, on the streets of the other Benaki,the sound of his scratching, scrap metal cart sings only one tune: your days of plenty could soon be over.




more info:
http://www.benaki.gr/index.asp?id=202010001&sid=1121&cat=0&lang=en

http://mediterraneanpalimpsest.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/smyrna-the-destruction-of-a-cosmopolitan-city-1900-1922/

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/inourtime/section1.html

Hannah Battershell: Lost Worlds, Framers Gallery

until 25 Feb 12

Used tin boxes of medicine, coffee, other utensils, always find their way to hosting something small or something special; things that have no other place (like pins) or things that have to be carefully preserved (like a time capsule or a memory). The tin box will usually be pretty or become pretty with time. It protects. Corrosion doesn't reach you as easily if you are inside a tin box.

Inside a saccharine tin box inside the humble Framers Gallery, protected from dust but not from eyes is a small moth. She is painted on a small button and it all reminds me of an Edwardian entomology box I once bought as a wedding present. There are other boxes, too, some wooden, with Edward Gorey figures on standby. All, a collector's children.

The wall Hannah Battershell occupies is full of beautiful, playful and comforting appropriations of contemporary miniature practises and a lovely reminder of the intriguing and timeless art of boxes, like the ones by the master, Joseph Cornell.

And maybe that is where their essence, and their differences, lie. Cornell was a forced loner, trapped in a house and world due to external circumstance. The stale air in his boxes is full of these smells of decay, loneliness, obsession and illness. And in being so, they enclose something horribly valuable: his whole internal world.

Hannah Battershell's boxes, for the time being, seem to still be letting a bit of air pass through.


more info:
http://www.hannahbattershell.com/
http://www.theframersgallery.co.uk/exhibitions.html
http://www.ubu.com/film/cornell.html
http://thisiscolossal.com/?s=miniature

Various Artists: Gesamtkunstwerk: New Art from Germany, Saatchi Gallery

until 30 Apr 12

repost:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/gesamtkunstwerk-new-art-from-germany-saatchi-gallery-london-6265755.html

Various artists: Infinitas Gracias - Mexican Miracle Paintings, Wellcome Collection

until 26 Feb 12

Last month, she died. I didn’t know her well, but the pain, stress and sadness of the people that loved her was contagious. I found myself burning incense sticks one after the other as I knew she used to sell them and that seemed appropriate. Unconsciously and irreligiously I started a mantra of my own. I was praying. What a cliché. ‘Stop this! They have suffered enough!’ I would demand from who? Dexter in the popular series prayed to a vending machine.

Then someone spoke of a miracle. A second liver. Ecstasy. Then, she was gone. For one day there was a miracle. But there are no miracles. £100 was stolen from the bereaved while in hospital. Then someone broke into the house to take the rest.

My heart sank with understanding as I went through each and every one of the Mexican Miracle Paintings, in reverence. Little tablets, perfect photographic instances of human pain. Figures disproportionate to the world and life, as we feel when in crisis. The divine is not the conceptual image of a god or saint but is represented as the saint’s tangible embodiment, that is, the statue. Miracle paintings, yet all so earthy. The materials, the images, pagan, human. The division in two areas of image and text reminded me of our hybrid early childhood notebooks. The image is naïve, theatrical, surreal, more beautiful than any contemporary art. Death-disease-illness-accidents-the railway-electricity-modernity-wage slavery-floods. The text descriptive, an account, a contract: date-place-names-event-intervention-resolution-gratitude. The Undersigned. Singing all of human sorrows. We know we are alone. But when that dark day comes, and our heart is ripped out, we’d give anything for that false promise. To become one of these paintings.

But we will not.


more info:

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/infinitas-gracias.aspx
http://artswrap.co.uk/event/reviews-tickets-infinitas-gracias-mexican-miracle-paintings-wellcome-collection-20112012
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Organ-donation/Pages/Introduction.aspx

Various artists: POSTMODERNISM Style and Subversion 1970-1990, Victoria and Albert Museum

until 15 Jan 12

If £11 is not a big price to pay to see outfits like this:

or this:

then the latest V+A exhibition will be a feast for the eyes of the gracefully aging 30-somethings and the studious younger generations.

Apart from this room that hosts the iconic costumes, blasted by sounds that complement them excitingly, the rest of the exhibition is a collection of 80s styles under a confident curator-proclaimed statement that to me is not convincing. The lack of humour throughout confirmed my suspicion that this is probably an exhibition that is trying to create an historical past and an art movement that was never there. Including the designs of the Bauhaus and New Order album covers showed me a confusion that I felt in all the rooms.

Sometimes some words are so beautiful and powerful that they take on a life of their own. Postmodernism is one of those beautiful words that we should probably leave alone, to lead their private lives, outside catalogues.

I hesitated to include this article here as I have made a conscious decision never to include negative reviews. However, I felt that this might give a balanced pre-taste to anyone wishing to purchase their entry to this quite hyped exhibition.

So, if like me, £11 is not a big price to pay to see this:

and this:

then tune your headphones to 1983, take the road to nowhere all the way to South Kensington, preferably at night. On the way out, indulge in the serenity and grandeur of the neo-gothic spectacularly lit inner yard, with Klaus Nomi’s tearful voice in your ears, his outfit in a glass box, and him, whatever any exhibition catalogue tries, forever and still, an escapologist.


more info:
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/postmodernism-about-the-exhibition/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/sep/20/postmodernism-at-the-v-and-a

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/heads-up-postmodernism-2348795.html

Felicity Powell: Charmed Life - the Solace of Objects, Wellcome Collection

until 26 Feb 12

It was a cold, misty but luminous 8 a.m. when in haste and impatience I threw it into the river, the ring that was so heavy in my hand. It was a thoughtful gift from Afghanistan, yet in the last couple of weeks I had assigned all my misfortune and troubles to it. The thought that this was to blame grew and grew into a monster from its conception, to my extreme disappointment as a person of reason. Even to our own disapproval, we cannot help but often attach attributes and an aura to objects as we try to regain some of the lost control.

Tiny gods made of cloth, bone, coral, skin. I felt a compelling desire to cry when I entered the exhibition. A room so small, yet containing centuries of human sadness, pain and desire. Miniscule objects, so much more powerful than any king’s structure. Some gruesome, some exquisite, equally captivating with their imagined stories. East London or Egypt. Now or yesterday. Edward Lovett’s bizarre collection is mirrored on the walls, on Felicity Powell’s own magical works. An eccentric collection inside eccentric artworks inside this temple of eccentricity that is the Wellcome Collection.

I proceeded to the projections in the other room. A rotating figure, the rotating scripture, the rotating black scrying mirrors and another visitor howling, expressing all this grief and worry in the only way her condition would allow. I thought her howling was so appropriate for what I was feeling, too. When she left, I missed her. I realised I had to go back to work. Reason suspended: 50 minutes.

But do me a favour, if you catch the glimpse of my Afghan ring under Waterloo Bridge, please, just in case, don’t pick it up.


more info:
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/exhibitions/charmed-life.aspx
http://www.ottawasun.com/2011/10/05/uk-museum-turns-on-charm-with-amulet-display

Various artists: Memory, Rosenfeld Porcini

[Roberto Almagno: Mar Arza: Andreas Blank: Leonardo Drew: Steve Goddard: Kaarina Kaikkonen: Nicola Samori: Spazio Visivo: Rossana Zaera]
until 3 Dec 11

Whenever I return to my family home, I am again and again impressed by how little it ever changes. Same furniture, same décor, same colours, same porcelain figurines. My mother would dust each of them religiously every Saturday and it would always be cold. Dust, the enemy.

The baroque shepherdess is now a Jesus head. White, made of threads, dead flowers, plaster is unashamedly inviting the dust to rest. On him. Cover the wounds. A figure, that would possibly be abstract to anyone outside judeo-christian obsessions.

I felt it; I get this certain kick on the right part of my head each time I encounter something interestingly different. Dolls, mannequins, sisters of Bellmer. Unisex shirts forming bone structures or ‘the Origin of the World’ without sensationalism but as comment. A memento mori set of clocks, possibly cheesy in description hypnotises me. Arte Povera vs. David.

And at the edge, a city, a favela of rooms and houses covered in tricks, fabrics, memories and sounds, homage maybe to Charles Matton. Playful and eerie it lends its song to the whole exhibition as soundtrack.

Poor little shepherdess: dead barometer.



more info:
http://www.rosenfeldporcini.com/
http://annavinegrad.com/category/rosenfeld-porcini/

Phyllida Barlow: Rig, Hauser and Wirth (Piccadilly)

until 22 Oct 11 [ENDED]

"Space contains compressed time". Two inappropriate times seem to have simultaneously uninvitedly burst into this former bank on Piccadilly. Its vaults and safes, dark and sinister, open into rooms now inhabited by concrete forests and disproportionate mazes, structures glimpsing out from dusty lofts, tactile and textile aliens.

Somehow these obstacles feel safer than the antique bank remains.

High-end galleries, still money merchants in another form. I didn't linger at the meaningless thought.

Instead, I savoured and sipped the calm of knowing that the thick bank wall is there, standing strong, protecting my surrealist forest and hiding it from the dry, cloudy, shopping and sightseeing morning lurking threateningly outside.


more info:
http://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/1048/phyllida-barlow-rig/view/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/audioslideshow/2011/sep/02/artist-phyllida-barlow-rig-exhibition

Apichatpong Weerasethakul: For Tomorrow For Tonight, IMMA (DUBLIN, IRELAND)

until 31 Oct 11

Welcomed by a bizarre portrait of a person, at night, luminous from blurry fairy lights, you are then directed to a succession of rooms showing three short films. Nightly, haunted, lonely, a vacuum of darkness seemed ready to pour inside from the dark barracks windows. The haunted and equally haunting figure of the woman occupies the rooms within the films and of the gallery itself. They are all filled with her resignation to her loss of control. Be it ghosts or playful neighbours. Resigned, but not desperate, weak but not pitied, she occupies these rooms with dignity. The soundtrack shared the occupation of the rooms equally.

The rooms of the IMMA and the rooms within the films become one and the same. Simply crafted but with dreamy results, the covering of the gallery windows in dark film traps us in a wonderfully eerie perpetual twilight. I was so pleased to see a curation that enhances the experience and respects the subject without any cerebral games and snobbery.

And with that little thought, I softly made myself comfortable at the corner of each of the three rooms. Part of them. Slowly, starting to feel the pain and discomfort of the medical nails on the side of my leg.





more info:
http://www.imma.ie/en/page_212402.htm
http://www.artbook.com/9781907020674.html

Artangel: Audio Obscura, St. Pancras International Station

until 23 Oct 11 [ENDED]

Headphones on, and the everyday commute, walk, staring outside a bus window turns into a parallel world, hidden in broad sight.

I cannot but shrivel in despair each time I hear of the way headphones and personal stereos 'destroy communities' and interpersonal warmth between strangers. Frankly, my dear, I couldn't give a damn. I prefer the thousands of impersonal souls I pass by everyday, actors in my tiny personal novel, play and dream especially in that moment that my music and their pace synchronise.

And then comes Audio Obscura. The headset, your Alice's Mirror. It didn't take longer than the first seconds of sounds and voices and music to make me jump through.

Surprisingly, it was not the sounds I noticed the most, but the building. St Pancras in its Sunday best. The people so beautiful and intriguing. The building cranes. Drunk. I walk, I stop, conscious still that I might be perceived as a weirdo or a thief, but not too much. 10 minutes more, still watching the Arrivals board. Beautiful. Someone right. Someone left. Real. Not real. Alice. 20 minutes pass so suddenly. I have to leave before the end. I am keeping the headphones on to the bitter end.

A couple were just getting theirs from the little secret booth of magic. They start walking together. Oh dears, let go, here you can never have the same experience yourself, or with any other. I wanted to hug the two Artangels while handing the headphones back. I left quickly as if to keep my pounding heart untainted by reality. On the way out, I saw a girl walking around wearing the same headphones. I thought of playing on her a trick...


more info:

http://www.artangel.org.uk/audioobscura
http://www.thethoughtfox.co.uk/?p=5054

‘Class Relations’, dir. Danièle Huillet, Jean-Marie Straub (1984)

As with so many of Kafka’s heroes, our young boy finds himself trapped from the start. Trapped by situations he can hardly control or understand, he drifts through a dark, inhospitable, German-speaking America. Though politics are not exactly explicit, the film title casts a specific light on all his situations: his demise, the rejection by his family, the accidental meet-ups and troubles, the accusations, all seem to stem from class conflicts, aspirations and needs.

As distant as the boy feels in these conditions and claustrophobic surroundings, so we also feel distant from all the characters, even those that we should feel warm towards. That the décor should not be describing the scene, it should be the scene, was what the directors believed, and even the characters seem part of it.

Automata, trapped in their class expectations, are we all, just part of the décor? Is there a way out?


other info:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087566/
http://www.straub-huillet.com/pages/film.php?id=Rapports_de_classes&cls=non

'Germany in Autumn' , dir. R. W. Fassbinder et. al. (1978)

Waving flags of multinational corporation logos, sinister in the background, replace both national flags and funerary ribbons; R. W. Fassbinder is having an argument with his mother on whether state violence is justified; real footage documents the Red Army Faction victims, the victims of state assassinations, the victims of political violence; And its supporters.

The pace of change in cinematic style follows the change of pace in context and form, creating a complex film to speak about the complex time that was the German Autumn. The RAF are both the starting point and the excuse for this conversation. All the questions are given equal space and no definite answers are posed. Layer over layer, the multiple directors offer a dialogue in Cinema as well as on Extremism. We are invited not to pick a side, but to realize there is no side to pick.

‘All political violence is fascist’ runs the quote, and Germany in Autumn would probably agree.


other info:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077427/
http://www.kinoeye.org/02/20/goldsmith20.php

Emma Goldman: 'Anarchy and Other Essays' - Dover Publications

Do not be deterred by the ‘anathema’ that has always been the word Anarchism. The issues Emma Goldman focuses on are, unfortunately, still as relevant as they were 100 years ago when these essays were written.

She has been accused of many things, but what no one could accuse her of is dishonesty. This honesty is reflected in the way her essays are constructed and her arguments formed. No alienating rhetoric, no pompous lingo so favoured by the Left. Talking from experience, not from theories, Emma Goldman’s call to arms is a call to Ethics, Justice and self-realisation. Putting equal weight on the social conditions, the authority structures but also the personal, human failure to act, her accussations are as close to home as ever. No stone remains unturned. Her essays try to uncover all hypocrisy, especially that of the liberals. She is the moral compass, the sleepless eye to reveal the dust on our self-proclaimed good deeds. The priestess that will forgive, as long as we finally look into that mirror.

‘Not for a hundred, not for five hundred years will the principles of anarchy triumph. But what has that to do with it?’

Essential reading for all.



Other info:
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Emma_Goldman__Anarchism_and_Other_Essays.html

http://www.archive.org/details/anarchism_otheressays_0908_librivox

'Of Gods and Men' dir. Xavier Beauvois (2010)

Like lambs to the slaughter; the monks choose to stay and not to flee. In a moral deadlock and entrapped in political violence they know that they are paying for their fathers’ sins. The stress of watching is unbearable. “There comes the moment when you have to say the big Yes or the big No”. The monks know that there shouldn’t even be a question.

Rejecting martyrdom for their faith they embrace death for the sake of their community work. “We are the birds and you are the branch” proclaims one of the village women and both the elders and the villagers know at that moment that Man has killed God.

Tchaikovsky sounds their requiem while they sip their last wine. And we weep for them, for we weep for Man.

Miserere.



other info:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588337/
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/of_gods_and_men/