Rupert Everett: The Happy Prince: Unapologetic love of life

Three girls are talking at the table next to mine, in this cinema bar, where they happened to be coincidentally, tables outside. They talk of how great of a deal she got on her new car. £7500. They are all dressed identically, fake-vintage denim skirts and they are 20.

The sun is exploding. The sun is still. England won the match. Groups of men, topless, pass by, chanting groups that seem one moment joyous, next moment aggressive.

‘ENGLAND!’ he shouts through the open window to the older woman in a parked car, also possibly English.

‘We moved the TV, that’s HD you know’.

The group of topless men kept walking, chanting, shouting, would that be the group of men that hunted down and bullied Oscar Wilde in France?

‘You look so nice, you are so tanned’, she exclaimed to her newly arrived friend.

All, seem trapped in a pre-defined role of gender macho-power, slutty-needy, playing it out on a stage for nobody.

A group of children passing by, one mockingly says ‘let’s go to the cinema, let’s watch a movie’.

PROM TIME. The sign on the florist’s across.

If there is a God, it is the God Oscar Wilde envisaged in his fairy tales. Powerless to the world we have made, but passionate. Fair. Later.

Most narratives of his life are sympathetic but always hold a hue of pity.

Poor Man.

So sad.

The beauty of the Happy Prince is that it is unapologetic.

The author is never presented as sad, pitied, no. He is completely, utterly, passionately in love with life. His addictions are choices. His troubles societal. His traitors small. His friends loyal. His lovers ecstatic. His wife a victim, like him. His crowds adoring, then mobs, then adoring. Different crowds. The high classes, all classes, the underclass, men trapped in class, men depressed, men oppressed, men with lust for life.

The film is sad. Yet at no point do you feel pity. This is the magnificence of it. Any sadness is an attack on the societal norms and a homage to the abysmal pain of unrequited love.

But Love.
Love.
LOVE.
Love of life.
Love of a man.
Love of men.
Love of joy.
Unapologetic love.

‘He is still going out clubbing! so sad, he is 43! at his age!’ a friend told me. A friend that spent all his 20s clubbing.

‘At his age’.

Partying, enjoying, pleasures have to have an expiry date.

After that, oh dear. Loser. Sad.

Not in this film.

And most of all, apart from its subject matter, the direction, to me, was superb. Flawless, with arthouse elements that accentuated the subject, playful tricks, visually and choreographically stunning.

Celebrating Decadence; Beautiful, exquisite Decadence. Feared by all. Because Decadence is a choice against continuation, against the species, against all that is supposed to be.

It is the yellow books; the numberless nights that are a blur; the tortoises painted gold.

And all this, not in contradiction, maybe that’s what life is about. Exactly, those tortoises painted gold. Statues that love so much they give away their emerald eyes to help others. Birds that love so much that choose to die.

That is a life worth living. Even if short. All the rest, a sensible, boring world.


‘When did you lose sight of Him?’ he was asked on his deathbed.

‘In Clapham Junction’



more info:
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/the-happy-prince-review-rupert-everett-delivers-moving-and-surprising-biopic-of-oscar-wilde-a8397086.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde

Modernity, Croydon and A Journey Through Brutalism, RISE Gallery

Saffron crocus is unknown to the wild.

An island city in between suburbia, built for cars, proud of its multi-storey car parks: Croydon, the space-age city prided itself in a Utopia that never happened.

Post war optimism got its golden child in Croydon. Lunar House, Apollo House, semi-brutalist structures, the sister to the Royal Festival Hall, the Future.

https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-the-new-croydon-1963-online

The National Trust backed tour ran by the RISE gallery is a love song to that intention but also to a different future that now might be waiting. It was refreshing to hear people knowledgable about and loving towards where they live.

A place snubbed by many, is now a place changing; old buildings are resurrected, office blocks are turned into housing showered with promises of affordable prices and no foreign investor interference.

The Saffron flowers are sterile. They reproduce only by human intervention.

As with all gentrification-suspect projects, you wonder if changing the built environment is a way to alienate some and make an area unaffordable to even more so there is more space for the wealthier to move in.

BoxPark. A temporary, precarious state of prosperity, while a woman sitting on its steps keeps screaming ‘save me’ in distress. Parallel lines, worlds that will never meet.

There seem to be a ripple effect stemming from, I believe,a genuine wish to improve the everyday life of residents by this entwined group of developers, councils, art patrons.

For instance, the public art endorsed and produced is impressive, intriguing and insightful.

Yet, I wonder if it somehow feels too conceptual and detached from the majority that views it. Like in a way a superficial paint, that doesn’t fix a wall, just makes it more appealing to outsiders.

Is it the middle class ‘Saviour Syndrome’ that is the driving force behind Croydon’s reformation process, even if there is good will? Are these efforts making any of the established population there happier or is the middle class making itself more comfortable thus inviting more middle class people to move in? The tour, we were homogenous. Some had SLR cameras hanging from their neck. Though with no exploitation agenda, still, Tourists.

Sometimes when reality is crushing, those affected are left with no energy. So why not that the ones that can afford it, offer their energy for a positive, as they believe, change. ‘Don’t be ashamed of your privilege. Just use it to help others’.

Croydon allegedly has got its name from the Crocus, the Saffron flower cultivated there. I love thinking of Croydon as the Saffron producing town of the past. And I love to think of it as the post-war optimistic project it was. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all I’d say to those that believe it is a project failed.

The more time I spend in East Croydon, the more I see it as London at its truest; the same embrace that also took me in as well as the immigrants, the destitute, the new middle class families, the kid with his hand inside his pants trying desperately to show off, the screaming woman, so many that try their best, all in pursue of a better life. Many visiting:

South London ICE,
Home Office
Lunar House, 1st Floor
40 Wellesley Road
Croydon
CR9 2BY

or

Electric House.
Home Office
UK Border Agency
3 Wellesley Road
Croydon
CR0 2AT


An electricity showroom of mid-war years, then an immigration office. With cells. An art deco facade, futurism turned into authoritarianism and, now, to desolation. The building might rot or might get a makeover. People passing by are surprised by our interest, given that its front is covered in garbage. It’s hard to see beyond this. Garbage is the reality now and maybe that should be the future of any Immigration Office.

In a London increasingly gentrified, beautified, streamlined, a Soho where LGBT people and sex workers are edged out by eateries, a Hackney/Shoreditch where artists, minorities and the working class are pushed out by fashion trends, where Elephant and Castle is to be torn down for luxury flats in the sounds of Nine Elms, maybe it is imperative that people like the RISE strive to strike a balance.

Naked of all above sub context, their tours and exhibitions are a unique, excellent opportunity to visit a place that is repeatedly saturated with Modernity. While there, be respectful. To the eye safe from harsh everyday struggle it is a place easy to dismiss or look down upon. And yet it is of the most truthful of realities London is.

Let’s celebrate it and breathe it as it is, before it is irreversibly gone.



Photos by Globbie Dcw.

more info:
https://www.rise-gallery.co.uk/exhibition/a-journey-through-brutalism/
http://jonathanmeades.co.uk/Artwork.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croydon
https://thecroydoncitizen.com/culture/event-review-launch-journey-brutalism-exhibition-rise-gallery/

Martina Amati: Under: Somewhere In Between, The Wellcome Collection

until 27 08 18


100m
Breathing is the soundtrack.

When I was seven
I asked my mother
To trip me to the bay
And put me on a ship
And lower me down
Lower me out of here
Because when I was seven
I wanted to live in a bathysphere

Beautiful in unmatched visuals, Under fills up the room as in a tank, immersing you in a limited but still a place with no horizon. I advise us all to sit down and breathe back, in turns.

This depthless space, where light seems emanating from instead of refracting into, is serene. It is timeless, it is where we go when we dream. Or maybe when we are afraid. There is no direction, no orientation, no azimuths, no nadirs. Just a white line, a blade cutting it deep, a place safe from gravity and fall; you can never fall. You can never hurt.

Between coral
Silent eel
Silver swordfish
I can't really feel or dream down here

A school of fish sweetly breaks this meditative state for a second.

Three figures, trapeze, ancient frescoes, animalistic, walk the white ropes in processional dance; they are the Rites of Demeter, the nymphs tempting the passerby, the Ballets Russes, the kids you want to follow, the mermaids that will never choose to dissolve into foam.

And if the water should cut my line
Set me free
And if the water should cut my line
Set me free, I don't mind
I'll be the lost sailor, my home is the sea

An upside down world that makes more sense than the one we know. With an exit route, a ring connecting you to the line guiding you out of it, the line we might choose not to follow. Even if for the duration of a breath.

A world where we are finally weightless again.

When I was seven
My father said to me
'But you can't swim'
And I've never dreamed of the sea again



Lyrics: Smog ‘Bathysphere’

more info:
https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/WhvoAykAACgAlDoo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Callahan_discography

The White Darkness: Spirit Possession in Haitian Vodou: Gabriel Toso, Treadwell's 22 Mar 18

Light hearted but at no sense any less serious or disrespectful, Gabriel Toso gave a captivating, enlightening and demystifying lecture on a subject and a religion so repeatedly misrepresented, misunderstood and marginalised in the popular mind.

Possession, the sense of self, notions further than the body and the soul, notions non euro-centric or western; like the ‘kick in the neck’ before the god or spirit possesses you.

Then, you let them in. Macho men embrace femininity, older people the vitality of youth, younger people the invincibility of the elder experience in a collective act resisting imposed religions; deities are now taking the form of acceptable catholic figures while the rawness of the act remains primeval and the drums reaffirm their dominion.

In an everyday where we get obsessed with presenting a self image, with anxiety on missing out, displacement of personal contact, focus on careers, and a society of the spectacle still reigns, maybe the notion of letting go, of letting a god take over for a bit to represent your opposite or your real self, to dance manically like the Maenads in a context where this is trivial, not exceptional, is the antidote: Accepting your insignificance in the magnificence of the shared act.

Like the speaker and myself, many having had an epileptic fit understand this to the core: the complete loss of self, loss of memory while in fits/ecstasy; the way the possessed get helped by the segregation reminded me of how I was helped then, too by a beautiful man. You come out humbled and thankful. There is no glamour in being chosen. The beauty comes later, in the realisation of the role of the collective in support and in invocation.

We go on daily, brushing off on each other’s tragedy, happiness, struggle. Emotional, physical, health worries, each one of us carries their own cross. Whatever we try, we feel we have no control. And there is where Treadwell’s, a constant for decades amidst the whirlwind of the world has its door wide open, with Christine and her team always welcoming, to slow us down, make us smell again, the candles, the night, the air, look again at stars, plants, ourselves, invite us to see ourselves as part of a whole not as singularities, and for a moment, doubt reality as we know it.

Somehow, while there, in that basement, in commune with the speaker's passion, the idea of a possession by a deity, temporarily, felt comforting and sweet. Like a familial embrace when you’re lost, a blanket pulled towards you by a lover, a song from the past you smile to.

A promise we are not alone, we are not abandoned. Even if we know we are.





more info:
https://www.treadwells-london.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Vodou

Altruism, the Postman's Park and Susan Hiller: Monument 1980-1, Tate Modern

The Postman's Park, near the Barbican, is always, patiently waiting for passers by in its quiet dignity.

On one of its sides there is a wall of tiles; it is commemorating impulsive acts of self-sacrifice that end up in self-demise.

These extraordinary acts, performed in circumstances of the everyday are far from trivial. And their succinct and poetic descriptions are emotive, draped in a sweet melancholy.

Susan Hiller’s installation at the Tate is a lovely tribute to the Postman’s Park. However it seems a weird omission that there is no mention of the park by name in any of the captions.

I did not listen to the audio part on the bench. By then, I admit I was already put off by this exact fact of no mention. My reasoning, I admit, possibly very unfair.

‘The Memorial to Heroic Self Sacrifice’ it is called.
‘Monument’ is how Susan Hiller called her installation.

The difference in naming seems telling of a difference in intention.

A monument, implies wishes of grandeur. Implies will to be immortal.

In the Postman’s Park, the dead do not want grandeur or immortality. They never looked for it. They only want dignity.

Heroic.

Apparently, the word heroism was introduced only in the 18th century.

Self-sacrifice.

It always implies intention. Self-Perishing is optional.

But would you, or me?

Recently, while attending a talk, a person collapsed. I was not the closest in proximity, there were a few others in-between but still I was there. Close. I am first-aid trained. I did nothing. Froze. Others stepped in and helped wonderfully. I felt scared and hopeless, numb and ashamed afterwards.

The people commemorated in the tiles did not freeze. They are the glue. The invisible ink writing human history.

So many squares, parks and streets are hosts to vulgar statues of heroes. Most of them butchers. Yet the heroes in the Postman’s Park don’t mind they are on no squares. They do not need or want recognition. They want to have left their last breath knowing their loss saved someone else. Most of the times, it didn’t.

Altruism, selflessness and self-sacrifice are often mentioned in dictionaries as interchangeable notions.

There are schools of thought (George Price, WD Hamilton etc.) that deny the existence of altruism. They believe that all acts of altruism are in reality evolutionary acts for the preservation of the species; that self-sacrifice is a misplaced belief together with the idea of preservation of the species in an individual, reproductive narrative.

The installation is a reminiscence of the park experience but far from it; the pictures of the tiles are pictures of the tiles. Someone else’s (art)work. There seems to be no real added value to the original. The concept/declaration that the listener on the bench is being part of the installation is naive as the identity of the audience is obvious.

The Park is a Cenotaph. The installation is placing this cenotaph to the personal in a way that, to me, is trivialising the subject, assuming an identity that cannot exist in in such concepts but in actions.

During the recent shooting in a Florida school, a man, Aaron Feis, a coach, put his body in-between the kids and the shooter, also a kid. He died of his wounds. His death will survive in the memory of those involved he saved, and his name maybe in some news pieces, but then he will embrace oblivion and his beloved’s laments will become a faint whistling at night, a hiss barely noticed.

Not in the Postman’s Park. His name will not be there but he is everyone and each tile is him. He is the one sitting on the bench watching the passers by. Content or regretful, either way immortal.

On a table opposite me, a man sits now with friends, sharing a wine and conversation and he is a man obviously dying, from his looks possibly cancer. He talks trivial everyday things as I overhear. He sips his sips, each sip a quiet, serene, deafening act of heroism.

And I am reminded that heroism is silent. Is instant. Or a daily occurrence; things that the rest of us take for granted.

Heroism is Love. It does not boast. It is not proud. Love never fails.



more info:
https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/green-spaces/city-gardens/visitor-information/Pages/Postman's-Park.aspx"
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/susan-hiller/susan-hiller-room-guide/susan-hiller-monument"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/8311816/Susan-Hiller-at-Tate-Britain-hidden-voices-lost-worlds.html"
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bmjanm/george-price-altruism"

Thanks to DP for additional editing.

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)

The Problem of Morton Bartlett: 'Alternative Guide to the Universe': Hayward Gallery

Until 26 Aug 13

This man is Morton Bartlett.

He was a private man, that is, he was a man with a private life, more than or equally intense as the rest of us. His private life now hangs in exhibitions worldwide.

According to all clues, Morton never hurt a fly. He would only, quietly, return from his daily routine to his apartment, to build an array of dolls of almost life size children, complete with hair, eyelashes, sexual parts and all. Painstakingly working for one year on each. Then he would make them clothes and backgrounds and whole worlds. Then he would photograph them, in moments of the everyday or in sexually suggestive poses. Crying or punished or in random situations. The dolls were only the vehicle, the photos were the end purpose. Talismans. or better, fetishes.

They have apparently been the inspiration for the Chapman Brothers.

But why are they here?

Morton kept his bizarre surrogate family a secret from the world. Allegedly, he used to carry some of the photos with him, and showed a few but that was all. Then art dealers, after his death, parade them all over and I suspect, though I hope I am wrong, making money on the way.

Morton was an orphan. He eventually did well for himself, had a stable foster home, business, apartment. He instructed in his will that all his estate goes to a Home. But since there was no special clause on his dolls and photos, those were considered exempt and the art dealers came into the picture. So, this is how this man’s private world is now viewable around the world.

All three times I saw the photos or the dolls exhibited I couldn’t resist feeling a sense of the absurd that they were there, thinking of how many people that are even suspected of fancying kids are witch hunted all over the world. Yet he is a curiosity, fancifully accepted during private views.

But mostly, I felt a sense of the unfair. Not fuelled by the fact that yes, maybe this is the last of the taboos. My concerns lie in the fact that while he was alive and there was a short lived exposure of his work, he withdrew this exposure. Maybe his doll-children, his doll-lovers, his doll-family were never to be exposed to the filth of the world. What right then does anyone have to bring them back out, to get infected? To expose them? To make us see this man that was hard working, hurt, with a shitty childhood reduced to this sick genius, half man half monster, but perfect over champagne talk? Who can give a blank permit like this in the name of (outsider) art?

Then should no outside artist be exposed if not explicitly consenting? No, not even for a second would I ever think that, Dagger’s children drawings should remain in obscurity. But their function seemed to be one of storytelling and delusion. In the end, Dagger might had accepted his world to be made public was he ever asked or revealed. And ‘outsider’ art is to me the most honest and fascinating art currently.

But Morton Bartlett, the scared internal child or the scary sick man or just the man absorbed by his fantasies or all the above, had a choice; and he said no. The filthy hands of the world started invading his perfectly fabricated memories and like any loving brother or lover he protected them.

I had these thoughts pounding in my mind since I first saw many of these photos in the Horse Hospital exhibition in March. I was intrigued, confused, unsettled and mildly obsessed with the whole affair and I was so happy as it is not often that an exhibition offers you this and for this I was very pleased with the curators.

This is why I was surprised with the Hayward Gallery’s view on Morton Bartlett. A room is dedicated to him as part of the otherwise fantastic ‘Alternative Guide to the Universe’ exhibition. I was surprised to feel that there was a definite censorship of Morton’s controversial side. Where were the naked, suggestive children? I think there was one photo and that was only nude, not suggestive. Is this positive censorship?

Morton Bartlett is, and has to be, all of his photos. Fabricating a different Morton Bartlett is sad and unacceptable. Creating him in our own image. Where Morton Bartlett is safe, he is no more the foundling, the abortion, the shame, the rejected, the one that found solace in his horrifying dolls. Where he is just the charming recluse that our philanthropy and intellectualism can care for. Worse sin than his inner world being paraded in full, despite his will, is his world being paraded selectively. Because when all his sides are exposed, whether we agree or not with the exposure, an unnerving thought process begins, and that is what life is all about.

But exhibiting him partially is exhibiting him clothed. Safe. A shame hidden like we do in life. ‘The inspiration for the Chapman Brothers’, that is all Morton is good for. We castrate him again, abandon him again and there aborted, he fits best.

Morton Bartlett, I think you creep me out. You were probably troubled and abysmally alone. Yet, you were Adam. You are pure. And that is why instead of propagating your obscurity I write this. Because it saddens me to think you are maybe slowly being moulded into our own doll, the way you moulded yours.

Designed, built and dressed to only fulfill our self-gratification.



more info:
http://www.thehorsehospital.com/now/morton-bartlett/
http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whatson/alternative-guide-to-the-universe-exhibition-73950
http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/guys_and_dolls/

Punchdrunk: 'The Drowned Man'

Paddington, until 06/07/14 LAST CHANCE

So, there was Theatre. And then there was Punchdrunk. No actors to enter from the left, no linearity, no more walls to be broken, nothing left unchallenged, including our reservations. The BAC’s Masque of the Red Death reaffirmed, reimagined and reinvented the theatrical and the art experience in its entirety, the same way the free event in Old Street later on reinvented advertising.

There is no doubt or discussion on how Punchdrunk are still the forefront of immersive experience, copied so badly by so many and so successfully by others like the Secret Cinema. Immersive, inclusive, they have come back to London to set up a wonderful game for all. ‘The Drowned Man’ might be pricey but be assured that this price is cheap for what’s on offer. Refresh your Woyzeck and Day of the Locust quickly and offer yourself to this faceless game of what’s a set and what’s not, on a spotless trip back to early Hollywood, fears, black magic and jealousy.

And at this point, I would ask the readers that are Punchdrunk novices to stop reading and just book their slots.

For the rest, fans and followers for years, it is here that the storyline turns a bit sourer. Because ‘The Drowned Man’ came and left without any extra heartbeat. Though the attention to detail was, again, fascinating and impressive, it felt cerebral. I realised very early that what I was feeling was amazement, the scale of it all fascinating and the imagery of the highest stage production and art installation taste. But all this, only in my head. For three hours I walked and roamed, trying to catch a glimpse of the soul I hoped for, but didn’t. Though I also was of the few blessed to actually have a small interactive experience, this was also lost in the vastness and the impersonality of it. The actors have been replaced by silent dancers. The improvised, private, intimate conversations replaced with dance routines. Masses of audience encouraged, like sheep, to run after dancers, missing whole worlds in between, and reaffirming their social importance as followers. The impersonal of the masked faces seemed to saturate everything.

There is an accounting concept called ‘economy of scale’: the point where a company decides if going big as an entity or as a product actually is beneficial or not to the organisation and its end goal.

There are no economies of scale here. ‘The Drowned Man’ by expanding, lost its uniqueness. Still utterly impressive, but soulless. While you used to wear a mask as a character and be everything, now you wear a mask to be nobody. You walk, you watch, you observe, feeling a bit clever getting a clue here and there but you are back to where you belong: the audience.

I am certain that the experiment Punchdrunk started at the dawn of the new century is not over, it’s not a cycle closing into itself. No. I feel this was another experiment on how big the game can grow, and not for any profit but to include as many as possible of everyone, to make it massive in scale and democratic in inclusion. But somehow it feels this new experiment has failed. Even though I still spent that night in dreams of things I saw in that evening of seeing things I have dreamed. But like Woyzeck, I felt lost. I felt directed by those in charge on what to do. I felt jealous of the beautiful overwhelming feeling I felt in the previous shows. Jealous of the time that I was special, I was the only one, when it was only me and them and all the other individuals. Jealous of the new people that came in and felt amazed and in love cause they don’t know what that love used to be. And this jealousy, I fear, is holding the knife that might kill my love.

UPDATE 10/02/14: Since writing the above article, revisiting the event and having conversations with a lot of Drowned Man Addicts, I am pleased to be able to reassess a few of the views and comments made. Though I still feel that its gigantic scale makes it impossible for someone to get inside the beauty and genius of it in just one visit, I think my review has been quite harsh. I am very pleased to hear that the group have been granted the council extension and I urge everyone that can afford it to definitely save up and go.

UPDATE 19/06/14: My 6th and last visit last night to 'The Drowned Man'. Amazing as always, still new things to see and experiences to be had. Thank you and goodbye. You have been ingenious and exquisite.


more info:
http://punchdrunk.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-23329899

Mark Cousins: 'What is this film called love?'

Kill your Idols, or take them for a walk. Man with a movie camera, Mark Cousins, takes a laminated picture of Eisenstein and us on a three-day derivé through Mexico City and memory that is light hearted but immersive, full of humanism and the God in the detail.

Either by necessity or as a statement, his embrace of DIY/no budget filmmaking perfectly complements his continuous efforts to democratise Film. Without a hint of condescension, he takes us through the streets and through the film and the thought processes behind each moment shot or contemplated.

Arrogance in Cinema becomes passé when you love both the medium and the audience. Denying the institutionalised and snobbish attitudes that often penetrate art house filmmaking, the ‘Man’ embraces solitude as space, not as loneliness, and celebrates the moment of godliness inherent in all of us. The exact moment of art.

‘What is this film called Love?’ will probably not end up in a pantheon in the history of film. It is not clear to me if some choices regarding the editing and the voiceover served their intentions. But even if the film does not rise to the magnitude and magnificence of ‘The First Movie’ or ‘The Story of Film’, its ideas, ideals and propagation of art as potential inherent in all elevates it to a highly important, essential and thoroughly political viewing.

Robinson, is finally unbound.

more info:

http://whatisthisfilmcalledlove.co.uk/

http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117947849/

The Perseverance of the colour red and the colour white as motifs of death.

"The hypnotism of patriotism"

Today stories of personal courage and sacrifice will be recited all over the land. Men severed of limbs, wives severed of husbands, women that fought like men, will recite their stories, pain and fearlessness to a proud nation.

But the story I would recite cannot be included though I would recite it with pride:

The story of a Deserter.

Led like lambs to the slaughter, my grandfather and his comrades were sent for years from place to place in lands they could hardly name, to fight a cause that the century that followed proved fake. In some unknown Balcan field, ill, very ill, he jumped on a train and left. Not out of fear but out of sanity. He was 21. He had been fighting since he was 18. He jumped on a train, and then on another, and then to a village, to herd cows, to marry, to bare children, to have my father, to have me. Died still young. But thirty years later. In an uncharacteristic manner, my father would tell us of his desertion with a laugh, never contempt. He felt proud. Because what pride could there be for him, in a national war, designed and directed by the red right hands of pre WWII politicians, that would probably have slaughtered an 18 year old uneducated boy, desist, he wouldn’t exist.

White Poppy, Red Poppy


Today, two wreath laying ceremonies will take place in the centre of the city.

Wreaths of red flowers (I think plastic) will be laid by all representatives of authority, of God and Country. It will take place in front of the Cenotaph, an empty tomb to those who fought and died. It is situated between Governmental and Royal Buildings.

Wreath and white flowers (I think plastic) will be laid by citizens, usually of an older age, representatives of utopianism, pacifism and non-violent resistance, of God and Man. It will take place in front of the Conscientious Objectors Memorial, a tombstone to those who chose not to fight, even though they died.

Both colours are the colours of death.

Red: blood: violence: violence: physical: screaming: loud: violence: the Shining: Cries and Whispers: American Psycho: red: violent: hell: active.

White: sterile: violence: violence: internalised: silence: quiet: violence: Cuckoo’s nest: Funny Games: Fargo: violent: heaven: irreversible: empty.

This colour coding seems to fit perfectly well the who, when and how of the two ceremonies. The rest of the people, in a mass exercise of conformity or in a mass expression of need for justification and answers, follow afoot.

But it is not a matter of choice, there should be no need for choice. But if I am to be true to myself, and in respect to my grandfather that made me, and as long as anomalies like the rise of fascism in the past and present do not make the pursuit of such ideals impossible, I will quietly only join the ceremony for those ‘who refuse to bow down to their fetish of bullets.’

And in a week, all these wreaths, red and white, will lay dirty, muddy, already decomposing, slowly, expectedly, until they become nothing but an annoyance. Garbage, irritating, cleaned eventually by a reluctant but relieved hand. Dirty, ugly and muddy, in their true colours. Plastic, decaying and fake in their true essence. And we see it. And we hate them.

more info:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adUYkPUI-KQ

http://www.nonresistance.org/docs_pdf/Tolstoy/Patriotism_and_Government.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day

http://www.ppu.org.uk/whitepoppy/index.html

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/