An allegory for artmaking

Nomura Toshiro in Haiku edited by David Cobb, Overlook Press, 2013

Studio work is coming on in productive bursts of activity, many try-outs and spontaneous decisions, many beginnings.  It's been a case of doing first and then trying to understand afterwards.  This is a familiar pattern to me and a useful one when away in unfamiliar environments.  I’m beginning to realise that the really strange detours in the making process are few and far between, and one should trust the instincts that arise.  Alex calls it following his nose, and he’s right.

Last week on a flying visit to Newcastle I picked up a book of Haiku and was distractedly flicking through when I found this.  In the last few days this 'modern' haiku has come to mind several times as I walked the 4 mile round trip to and from the studio.  Both in its activity and its introspection it comes close to the sense of making things before you know. You throw, then you walk.

alone in the spring -
hurling a javelin, and then
walking after it

Bird Walking

1

Once a year the park opens up early for the 'Dawn Chorus' bird walk, a sun-up meander through the grounds guided by an expert from the RSPB.  After a dash to make it for the 7am start, I just about arrived in time for the chiff-chaff song, though I hadn't yet attuned my straining ears to be able to disentangle the many voices.  Everything at the beginning seemed drowned out by the honking geese.

But then, bit by bit, you begin to pick up on things, you hear faint or high-pitched variations, different rhythms and complexities, and you realise how distinctive these songs are.  Park Warden Dominic was there with his binoculars and kindly explained a few things to me, pointing out invisible things in trees and generally impressing with his knowledge of the natural world.  I meanwhile was struggling for the language to even ask the questions...

The emphasis here was on listening; being silent, being still.   This is a lesson in its own right.  As you walk the birds fall quiet, but after a few moments of standing the crescendo begins to swell around you, after 4 or 5 minutes the birds are in full and confident voice - forgetting all about you.

The variety is astonishing, in three hours we must have heard at least 20 species.  As with the trees, insects and mushrooms - I am beginning to understand that this park is teeming with life, including anomalous and unusual varieties whose presence surprises even the experts.

If we started with a chiff chaff then we ended with a yellowhammer, or, "a little bit of bread but no cheese", as its song goes.  Our RSPB man told us that some birds have 'regional accents', and a Yorkshire finch, for example, will have a subtly different song to another from a different area...
I added this to the growing list of things that must verify/find out more about. Citation needed.

1  Male Yellowhammer - Emberzia citranella, courtesy RSPB.org.uk

Yorkshire Sculpture Park

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2

The first few mornings after my arrival at Yorkshire Sculpture Park were shrouded in heavy mist, which lent the place an eerie feeling, hearing sounds but not being able to identify where they came from.  The lambs are all out, running from one hill to the next, racing eachother on the unnatural tarmac driveway with spray-painted numbers on their sides.  

Seeing sculpture in the fog is a pleasure, the edges dissolving, the forms slowly emerging as you approach, a perfect diffused grey backdrop from every perspective. It’s perhaps a better condition for viewing sculpture than sunshine, rarer in any case. It made the park feel infinitely large.

Over in Leeds, The Henry Moore Institute’s current exhibition ‘Photographing Sculpture: How the Image Moves the Object’ was a pertinent follow-on. Archive prints showing sculpture in various stages of undress; artist’s snaps in the studio, images taken of tarpaulin and rope-bound work in transit, un-worked back-sides and underneaths that were never supposed to see the light of day.  I remembered that somebody’s argument against this kind of corner-cutting was that though nobody could see it, “the Gods would know”.  Indeed.

1  Henry Moore, 'Reclining Figure: Arch Leg', 1969-70 at Yorkshire Scuplture Park. Courtesy Henry Moore Foundation.
2  Arthur Fleischmann, 'Miranda', 1951, Image of the artist in the studio with the work and model.
    Vintage print, Courtesy Leeds Museums and Galleries. Courtesy Henry Moore Institute Archive.

Zinc, Zinck, Zinco

Still from 'Matchbox Cars' (1965) © British Pathe

Hardly emblematic of the warmth and generosity of the book as a whole, I have meanly cut a paragraph from Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table to suit my ends. Amongst the other elements, he writes a bittersweet chapter on ‘zinc’, from which the following dismissive-sounding excerpt comes:

“It is not an element which says much to the imagination, it is grey and it salts are colourless, it is not toxic, nor does it produce striking chromatic reactions; in short, it is a boring metal.  It has been known to humanity for two or three centuries, so it is not a veteran covered in glory like copper, nor even one of those newly minted elements which are still surrounded by the glamour of their discovery.” (1)

Oh, but the things you can do with it!  Countless thousands of ingots of this boring metal slowly made their way up the Lea River on barges, from Dead Man’s Wharf on the Thames to Lee Conservancy Road in Hackney, to be transformed in to the little Matchbox Toys that would delight countless thousands of children all over the world.

Last week I interviewed Andrew Smith, son of Matchbox co-founder Leslie Smith.  Zinc was fundamental, and it flowed through every part of the conversation as it once flowed through every part of the factory; if you weren’t melting it, you were moving it, pouring it, pressing it, fettling it, rumbling it, painting it or boxing it.

“Yeah, the pallet would come in with a hundred ingots, just like you see in the vaults of the bank of England, exactly that same shape, not heavy, not particularly heavy, you'd pick one up in your hand and move it around without any problems.  Silvery colour, dark silvery colour.  Melts down and away you go.  Pure zinc is 98% zinc, it’s got a little bit of nickel or bronze in there as well, but it's just to help stabilize it, that was all you put in, there was no need to add anything else, you could just spray on top.  They used to be known as white metal, when they come straight out the press, they are shiny - shiny silver colour - then within hours really they start to dull, a bit like galvanised fencing, a bit of oxidisation happens and it starts to dull, and you spray that one way or another, and off it goes.”(2)

(1) From Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, 1985, p27
(2) Excerpt from my interview with Andrew Smith, August 27th 2013

Adventurous Manifesto

*

Slim pickings of late, but the spring is coming.

Over the last weeks, a growing sense of place here in Hackney as I dig into local history, discovering brilliant things, people and organisations - brilliant in that they really shine.

-

Resembling an early 2000s mobile phone, black and small-screened, I bought an understated voice recorder which can sit on a table almost unnoticed.  It was chosen because it seems unintimidating for the quasi-interviews that are lined up over the next few weeks with Matchbox factory workers and management. It's not been noticed so far in my 'test recordings' anyhow, my hi-def family and friends completely unaware that their lunchtime chat and incidental scraping and clinking are being analysed for echos, interference and vocal range.  That sounds creepier than it is.

-

Embodying the spirit of recent web-trawls, a little gem from The Building Exploratory based in East London.  In The Adventurous Manifesto, through excellent leafy animated portraits kids give some equally excellent springtime advice like:

"Make your own tools."
"Experiment and debate the use and meaning of things."
"Make harmless mischief."
"Be daring, playful, thoughtful"

*Still from The Adventurous Manifesto by The Building Exploratory, 2010.

Relative Sizes II

1.

A film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero?

The Eames’ film “The Powers of Ten” (1977) might seem a jump, but I can’t help but think of these images whenever I see an aerial photograph. Two happy picnickers somewhere in Chicago form the mid-point of a journey to the extremes of our understanding - from the very close to the very far, stepping up (or down) by a power of ten every ten seconds by adding (or removing) another zero.

I evokes the feel of the planetarium: the barely grasped information, the wonder,  the pure pleasure of the images rolling over you.  Here the information is delivered at such a rate that it takes several watches to even hear the audio.   This lonely scene, galaxies like dust, the flickers and flares of the 16mm film itself making new galaxies at 5 minutes, and additional quarks and electrons at 8 minutes...

As we approach Christmas time a nice line:

"Notice the alternation between great activity and relative inactivity", our narrator informs us...

Can't wait.

1. Powers of Ten, made by the offices of Charles and Ray Eames for IBM, (1977)

Relative Sizes I

The studio where I will be based for the next eighteen months is triangular in shape. It’s on the ground-floor, with a dog-leg corridor.  It has windows all along one side.

Looking out to the right, you can see the end of Lea Conservancy Road, with Mabley Green and the football pitches beyond.  To the left a bollarded terrace with immortal up-lit plants, the canal and a line of trees concealing the Hackney marshes.

The leaves that are being shaken from the trees are swept up in piles and taken away.  The windows get cleaned weekly by abseiling men on ropes. Inside it’s also squeaky and shiny. It still smells of paint and floor adhesive.

Perhaps most interestingly, all this sits on the site of the former Lesney ‘Matchbox’ factory – world famous for their miniature toy cars, but locally more significant as employers of nearly six thousand Hackney workers during their heyday in the mid 1960s. The factory’s closure in 1989 and demolition in 2010 rubbed out a hugely influential part of Hackney’s social infrastructure, making way for this glossy high-rise development.

After the building’s official opening, one of the developers gave me a stack of folders and photographs he had accumulated over the years: planning applications, documents and drawings, reports and  surveys.  His pictures do more than just analytically record the internal layout of the building, they detail the last empty days of the factory, a handful of workers scattered in the too-large spaces, stalled machinery, empty storerooms.  Amongst the pile was a large, square-format aerial shot of the area, taken I suppose sometime in the 90s.  I drew an orange fence around the factory.  Orange is the colour of optimism I once heard...

Patrick Keiller I

Still from Patrick Keiller's 'London', 1994

To Tate Britain between the downpours for the 'Robinson Institute' with Dave S.  I had expected to spend an hour in the dark on a comfortable chair viewing the third film in Patrick Keiller's Robinson series - Robinson in Ruins, 2010, so the daunting miscellany of the film not screened -  but rather unpacked and spread out - collided with artworks from the Tate's collection, came as a bit of a shock.  It looks exhausting, I shamefully thought to myself...

The results are startling: grouped works arranged on shiny aluminium scaffolds already imply certain relationships, but there's an additional bounce that follows you around as well, the whole show building a rhythm that you never quite get hold of but admire nonetheless.  A modest paint-on-paper Pollock draws invisible parallels with the graphic infrastructural maps of Britain's oil supply lines, chunks of scorched meteorite sit like icons in temperature-controlled boxes, and I overhear open conversations of people bringing their own experience and interpretations to these things.

As a foyer or hallway might, The Duveen galleries take on a democratic, communal feel leading up from the river-side entrance.  There's not nearly so much of the gallery hush you might normally expect. As part of an 'open archive', the hallowed Tate works stand disarmed here, thoroughly levelled amongst the exhibited photographs, maps and books.  The geological time-frames and political undercurrents of Keiller's installation locate each and every work as a product of its time and circumstance, a perspective that encourages them to be scrutinised as curious artefacts, little footnotes washed up in the political ebb and flow.

In the flimsy shop I bought the double-bill DVD of London with Robinson in Space.  Quite mesmerising viewing in the hour or two after I arrived home.  At 57 minutes my ears pricked up: Keiller's unnamed narrator (voiced by Paul Scofield) quotes from Alexander Herzen's Memoirs written in the late 1850s:

“There is no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London; the manner of life, the distances, the climate, the very multitude of the population in which personality vanishes, all this together with the absence of continental diversions conduces to the same effect.  One who knows how to live alone has nothing to fear from the tedium of London. The life here, like the air here, is bad for the weak for the frail, for one who seeks a prop outside himself, for one who seeks welcome, sympathy, attention. The moral lungs here must be as strong as the physical lungs, whose task it is to separate oxygen from the smoky fog…nervous and romantic temperaments, fond of living among people, fond of intellectual sloth and of idly luxuriating in emotion are bored to death here and fall in to despair.” *

Of course, the details do not any longer hold up to scrutiny, but the message rings clear. On low days this is precisely how it feels.

*  Alexander Herzen's Memoirs written in the late 1850s, and published as My Past and Thoughts (1982), University of California Press.

The First Sculpture

Opening boxes of old things makes me completely sentimental.  I tend to just reorganise the piles a little more economically than they were before without throwing anything away.  In amongst the wreckage I found this little totem - courtesy of Mr McMillan's fierce woodworking class at Central Middle School, 1992.  It was the first time I'd picked up a chisel, and though perhaps it looks quite imaginative for a 9 year old, we were all making essentially the same thing, with only the 'features' and colour-scheme self-determined choices. 

I remember it quite clearly - being frustrating and fiddly, annoyed at the roughness of the gouges and the certainty of it breaking apart. It ranked low on the satisfaction scale. My relationship with the chisel has evidently not changed a lot in the intervening years...

Heavily influenced by my mini-craftsman neighbour who was fashioning what he considered to be a direct representation of Zig, of Big Breakfast fame, out of his miserable scrap of pine, mine leant a little towards Zag - or so I had thought, but looking at pictures again now of that particular TV phenomenon, there's not a lot in it...

Noses

Noses and Beaks.

Every three months, give or take a few days, I begin a new notebook.  They are always of the same kind:  A5, green-card covered, spiral-bound, lined pages with perforations.  They're differentiated only by the Letraset word I press on the front each time with great satisfaction.  Mostly I choose good common words, sometimes I just have to use up the letters that are left.  "BEAK" was, it seemed, the only passable word to be scrabbled from amongst the X's and Z's last time around - random and unconnected I had thought...but then I began finding Noses!
The first, a sea-washed red clay shard on the scrubby sand underneath the Belem Tower in Lisbon. I picked up another equally sea-washed black peel of rubber, with two nostril holes, and crazed from the salt and sun at Dungeness a couple of weeks later.  The beginnings of a collection?  The beginnings of a complex?

Then today, Lu said I could borrow two of her own recent prize-finds: Masahiro Chatani's Paper Magic (1987), and Michael Grater's Paper Faces (1967).  The latter has an excellent collection of bird masks (top), making me wish I'd seen it three years ago when I made the 'Toucan' costume for a friend's birthday party. (above) I'm not going to pretend that it wasn't good to wear it again though, balancing the camera on a chair, on a box...

I put a beak-like yellow filter on them.  

Anthony McCall

Stepping into the dark and cool Anthony McCall exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof was a relief on a sticky Berlin lunchtime.  Black walls, dense black carpet, the enormous old train station fog-filled with gently buzzing 'haze machines'.  Then the projections: beamed pure white lines from high above describing slowly shifting shapes on the floor, the coned light paths marbling in the moving air.
The photograph above is dreadful, but I decided in the end that was appropriate;  there's no way to evoke the atmosphere of this work through a photograph.  Even in a stubborn, anti-theatrical mindset this work is impressive.  Such simple means, condensed and deepened over half a lifetime yields such rich and complex results, but only in that they stand so effectively as drawing, sculpture and film all at the same time, and wow you and your body whilst you make up your mind. Knowing that the earliest of the 'solid light' works, from 1973, were made 'physical' only with the dust and cigarette smoke that filled the room might lead a sceptical mind to viewing the newer work and environments as stage-y and simulated.  Of course, it is, but the pleasure and satisfaction of walking through takes the mind instantly elsewhere, to emerge again afterwards full, like you've watched a beautiful movie alone and want to tell somebody about it.

Fado

*

Oh already two weeks since my return to London, and amongst a backlog of half-baked ideas for intended posts only  one impression raised itself.   Fado made a big impact on my short stay. Visiting Porto for a week in 2007 was the first time I had seen this Portuguese tradition in the flesh, but these last weeks in Lisbon cemented it in my mind as something very special.

The room at Bela's was tight and dense with smoke; we stood long enough outside the locked glass door for Pedro to run off down the road to buy us a little 'imperial' of Super Bock for the wait, and for him to bump into many familiar faces on the Alfama cobbles. Once inside it was all flaming sausages and sardines in vinegar, bottles of house red decanted explicity by the landlady's son from massive plastic bags into bottles of ex-spirits.  Apparently one doesn't come here to get the flavour of 'authentic' south Portugal Fado; this is a place to bend the rules and be promiscuous with the rigidity of the famous tradition: Women sing, there are additional contributions to the two guitars, duos, singalongs, breaks for drinks, laughter, tears.  Even recognising only one word in fifty the sentiment rings clear.  On my second visit, Nuno quietly and self-consciously translated line after line. "Lips of smoke and promises" might sound trite on the cold white page, but belted out by Vanessa at touching distance (tall, dark-eyed, playing pac-man on her phone and chain-smoking Ventil before, and burning away in a battered white Mercedes 190E afterwards), something pretty magical happened.

The red kept coming.  At 7 Euros a bottle it was pricy by local standards, despite the music coming for free.  I would have gladly paid more.

With coat on and ready to leave, birds singing outside on a sharp and very early Monday morning, we had yet one more performance.  She was on my right shoulder, squeezing past my awkward chair, and looking down at me in towering heels and exquisite make-up to say, "don't be frightened".  (Thanks Nuno).

What a way to pass the hours.




Thanks: *http://truckstopmodels.com

The Kiln Gods

Kilns, like other ovens, have little tricks and pitfalls that only their regular users can grasp.  I took my inexpert pottery, wrapped in t-shirts and plastic sheeting, across the magnificent 25 de Abril bridge to AR.CO  where I'd arranged to rent a kiln for firing the first of the new work.  Loading them carefully onto the constructed platforms, Marianne (the expert potter) explained how the heat moved in spirals, how certain parts would be affected, why some of the work need propping up and supporting as it baked, and dispelled my anxiety with a string of smart and enthusiastic solutions.  I had good reason to be anxious too; the clay was still wet, was combined unnaturally with steel mesh, was a mixture of high and low temperature varieties, and was already brutally cracking.  But then the kiln door closed, the temperature and timer set, and we drove home.

This was on Monday.

Today we went back to see the results. Amazing transformations in colour and weight, eye-wateringly fragile things that I didn't realise I liked so much.  The steel has almost disintegrated structurally, though it fools you by still looking like mesh...Every bump on the way back to the studio made me wince.  And just when I thought I was home and dry (you know where this one's going), I knocked one over.  I just watched it fall, with all the typical feelings of stupidity and amazement that happens when you take too much care over something that has no structural integrity. Atleast I didn't lunge after it and risk the others meeting a similar fate...maybe my adjustment to the Portuguese pace of life...

So there were six, and now there are five.

There will be more next week...

The Irritable Chess Players

Concorde's Floor, no, not that one...

Primo Levi's wonderful Other People's Trades (1985) has been accompanying me on this Portuguese odyssey, and what a companion it's proving to be. On every yellowing page is some unassuming few lines that shift your perceptions of the world with such seeming simplicity to leave you wondering how on earth he manages it.  His short essay on the relationships between poetry-writing and chess-playing is worth a further mention, and it extends well to all those other professions that lack a blamable intermediary between themselves and their work:

"A game of chess, even played by dilettantes, is an austere metaphor of life and a struggle for life, and the chess player's virtues - reason, memory and invention - are the virtues of every thinking man.  The stern rule of chess, according to which a piece that was touched must be moved, and it is not permissible to re-do a move of which one repents, reproduces the inexorability of the choices of the living.  When your king, as a result of your inexperience, lack of attention, imprudence, or the opponent's superiority, is ever more closely threatened (but the threat must be enunciated in a clear voice, it is never insidious), cornered and finally transfixed, you cannot fail to perceive a symbolic shadow beyond the chess board.  You are living a death; it is your death, and at the same time it is a death for which you are guilty."*

(*Primo Levi, from The Irritable Chess Players, in Other People's Trades, Abacus, 1985, pp131)

Larry Bird

Michael E. Smith, Larry Bird, (2010), KOW Gallery Berlin

Yesterday a visit to Culturgest, an expansive, museum-like gallery in the basement of a monstrous, post-modern hulk of a building in the business city centre.  Ten of us from Atelier Concorde had been invited to take a tour with curator Miguel Wandschneider around the two current exhibitions; Katinka Bock, and Michael E. Smith. Though both impressive in their own ways, it was hard not to be more strongly affected by Smith's dangerously sparse arrangements,  suggesting accident-damaged body parts and hung heads.  They are oily rags of works, and they leave a smear in the imagination.
The tour was thorough - 6 hours later we emerged into the afternoon heat feeling mostly like having a drink.  The image pictured was billowing on the side of the building, though not present in the show.  I find it very violent.  A goose, emptied out, yanked into shape, cut with shears, titled after a basketballer(?)

Arrival in Lisbon

I blinked and a week has already almost elapsed.  In an unexpectedly anti-touristic move, I didn't even see  any of the sights - the city proper - until Thursday, having spent the first few days in the 'district of the colonies' - Graca, which is my temporary home and workplace for the next few weeks.  The city, baked in sunshine, is completely reflective: slippery foot-polished mosaic pavements, cobbled roads and tiled facades have had me walking around with a squint, giving the public squares and courtyards a sharpness that comes as a shock to unaccustomed eyes.

Pictured, just one of many brilliant painted shopfronts on the Rua Boa Vista; I bought some wire mesh from a place directly opposite that seemed to specialise in car-radiator parts and unusually shaped connectors to join unknown parts to one-another.  I carried the roll of mesh under my arm back across town.  It got heavier as I got hotter. A month here in total, with an exhibition pencilled in at the end, brings some urgency to make work alongside a strong desire to explore and enjoy.  It always has to be a balance, of course, bananas and monkey nuts have been keeping us going late in the studio.

Meanwhile, Pedro has been introducing me to everyone: taking me to openings, dinners, concerts and bars where they read aloud drunken poetry.  It's been a year and a half since I last saw him in London and there's been lots of catching up to do.  We begin talking about mutual friends - their new relationships, obsessions, achievements, marriages, babies.  Compressed like this, into snippets of conversations, you realise quite how quickly all this changes...

Time, as you might tell, is keenly on my mind, though in the studio (as ever) it flows in mysterious and unpredictable ways. I am finding concentration, and the rhythm that moves one thing to the next with a kind of easy confidence normally suggests i'm on the right track.  Though this I might well regret saying...

Mr Munari

Bruno Munari: Seeking comfort in an uncomfortable armchair (c.1950)

Bruno Munari's excellent photo-series has been circling my mind just out of reach for the last few days, before I suddenly remembered the title.  I'm pretty sure it was something in Conran's invisible leg that brought it on.  If Munari was riffing on the cold chrome constructions his contemporaries were churning out, I wonder what he would have made of Terence and his homespun chic.

Conran at 80

We might be a teeny bit biased, after his emotional address at the Albert Hall, but Catherine and I were impressed by the Conran exhibition at the Design Museum last weekend.  We'd been feeling under pressure and in serious need of distraction, and left feeling thrilled.

With their skinny welded-rod legs and tiled tops, I wanted to go home with a couple of the 1960s coffee tables tucked under my arm.  The aztec-like fabrics launched me back to my childhood, to friends' sofas and curtains, and the chairs, well, he's got a knack for making chairs...
The image above, late 1950s, was so good we bought a postcard.  It's up on our wall at home.
 I wish i'd bought two so I had the pleasure of sending it to somebody.

Takis the Greek

I didn't even know his full name, just calling him 'Takis the Greek' on the rare occasions it came up. Normally this was brought about by some passing mention of La Défense, or the Île de France (that my poor apprehension of spoken French had compressed together).

And so it happened that I finally managed to see the Signaux Lumineux (1987) on a bright and breezy New Year's Day.  It was, to me, long overdue, having carried around a little stapled booklet of poor, high-school-photocopied depictions for all of the intervening years. Though I didn't browse through very often, I knew the handful of images so well, transferring it with the certainty of treasure from one folder to another at each house- or city-move.

We walked at New Year, a little dazed from the night before, and wearing too few clothes for the wind tunnel Champs Élysées, from the far, West side back towards town.  I took one photograph of the work, framed against the shiny blue bank-buildings, but it doesn't come close to the stolen, too-dark, folded photocopies.

The Nunnery (above and below)

Berkel-Enschot village outside Tilburg,  a good hours’ drive through the heavy lorry traffic to Eindhoven, was our temporary residence for Dutch Design Week. This recently vacated Trappist Nunnery, set back from the road behind ivy-covered gates became too large a building for the dwindling superfluity*, and simultaneously crowded in by the encroaching town.  

In a quarter of the ground floor, sixteen theatre producers and playwrites have made home, walking the distance between the living rooms, bathroom and kitchen over cold, inlaid marble floors.

There were many remarkable things about this place, but that which set me shuddering was the expertly recounted story of the nun who spent the last two years of her life in solitary confinement.  “Up there, behind the darkened window…”

This space is only accessible by climbing to the top of the building, then up another laddered stairway to the eaves of the chapel.  Ducking under the beams along the narrow wooden walkway brings you to a trapdoor, which leads in turn to this tiny chamber.

If the story lent gravitas to the architecture, then this room pressed upon your superstitions until you squeeked; a dirty mat, a hand-painted cross, a fogged and distorted view through the glass to the chapel below, and cold like outside.

* Apparently ‘Superfluity’ is the correct collective noun for Nuns, but that unfortunately here suggests an excess, when the opposite is actually the case…hmm…But isn’t it good to learn a new (use for a) word?!

Fruit Pastels

Ok, so it's a stretched 'kid in a sweet shop' analogy - but there's something that appeals to the child in me about art materials; about sequences and sets of alike things, boxes full of possibility.  Invariably they look better in the box before you actually do anything with them...but this time, this time, I say to myself, will be different...

Chris has passed on four small boxes of Unis*n pastels to me, as well as this much coveted big box of 72's, having had them lay dormant 'for ten years'.  These are the best pastels money can buy, if you can tame their fat, crumbling, awkward nature.  The pigments seem implausibly intense, and much pleasure can come from simply crushing their chubby faces into a piece of paper and looking at the results...

But that was before, and now I am going to do marvellous things with them...

Fungi to be with

A couple of weeks ago - the tail end of our October heatwave, was perhaps not the ideal time to go foraging for mushrooms in Epping Forest, but we managed without difficulty to fill up two boxes brim-full.  To one who is most used to the perfect white caps of shop-bought varieties, and who is (still) impressed by the fact that a little mushroom is easily capable of killing a man, we seemed to have gathered a right armfull of skull-and-crossbone varieties.  But, arriving late back to meet our man - aka Andy "fungi to be with" Overall (I kid you not)- we managed a hasty identification process with his car engine already running.  Those few we took home looked dreadful in the kitchen strip-light, and I chickened out after slicing up a little fella that had a colony of bugs inside.  Still a bit squeemish, it seems.

Tempelhof

Staying as we were in the district of Neukölln to the South-East of the city, accommodating many of those affected by the ten year squeeze on Kreuzberg, it’s impossible not to be struck by the expanse of the former city airport Tempelhof that spreads itself out and buffers up on the edges of that quarter. A vital source of food and equipment during the Berlin blockade years of 1948 and 1949, when Soviet forces cut off all channels of supplies to West Berlin, the site has been closed to air traffic since 2008. Now designated parkland, the runways have been taken on by roller-skaters, kite-boarders, dog walkers and cyclists; community gardens have sprung up, and the terminal building itself has been partially utilised as a venue for music, art and fashion.  We walked the runway on the night we arrived, against the ten-metre painted arrows and under relentless rain, feeling mischievous and very, very small.  The vast building, and foregrounding it, the vast airfield makes it plainly apparent how minute a body seems when measured on an industrial scale.  After half an hour we seemingly hadn’t got any closer.  It was one of the biggest bulit structures of the 20^th Century, nearly a mile long, and with space to land a plane (Hitler’s plane) on its roof.  Apparently its ‘lower five levels’, (the mind boggles) have been flooded because they were laid with booby-traps, and even today three remain underwater.

It’s 6 years and a few weeks since I last saw Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the dense grey field of more than 3000 undulating concrete columns close to the Brandenburg Gate in the historical heart of Berlin.  At that time, I was writing a dissertation about the problems of Monument building - specifically in post-war Germany - where the debates were raging on the painful 60^th anniversaries of so many dark days. I had been impressed then by its silent impact; spacious and oppressive simultaneously, cool, even in mid-summer, as you're slowly submerged within its volume.

This time, like the last, it was with equal measures of delight and uncertainty that I witnessed people sitting and standing on, leaping between, or playing hide and seek around the concrete blocks; direct proof that once turned over to its rightful recipients – and irrespective of the steps taken to minimise the ‘wrong’ kinds of interaction – people would do as they pleased.

Diamonds on the floor of the 243

As the bus became more crowded I got slowly pushed into the boxy bit by the middle doors, next to the rusty revolving posts that act as the hinges, accompanied by a beep.  It’s maybe the worst bit of the bus, it looks and feels the grubbiest.

But lo,

I saw a diamond!  It was pretty sizeable (maybe 5 Carats), half buried in the crack left by the retractable wheelchair ramp.  I tried not to look at my find too intently, for fear I might attract attention, I just (casually) slid my foot forward to cover it up.  Looked out the window, thought what to do with my new-found fortune.

Afterwards, at Dalston Kingsland, mothers with buggies entered the equation, and I had to move again, leaving the diamond behind.

Friday morning at the Royal Albert Hall for Catherine’s Convocation ceremony was a grand occasion.  The golden Albert Memorial on the fringe of the park opposite so reflective in the sun to be near impossible to look at, and then once inside, a kind of vibrating hazy colour - no reflected light at all.  20^th Century organ compositions, three trumpeters, a slow procession of gowns and hoods and staffs and caps trimmed with gold preceded the thousand names and handshakes.  Catherine somewhere near the middle.  After the ceremony proper, an emotional address from an elderly looking Sir Terence Conran, (stepping down this year as Provost of the RCA) read like a call to arms for the irreplaceability of the arts.  He broke down several times, each time greeted by a standing ovation, which was strangely fitting.  ‘I love this college’, he almost whispered before sitting down, unable to continue.  Nobody quite knew what to say after that.

The Fall, and some near misses

Kate and I headed out one early Sunday morning to take aerial pictures of the mini roundabouts around East London in search for the flyer image for the Event Gallery exhibition next month.  The initial curiosity of these forms is that they occupy a strange mid-point between an object - a thing, and an image.  They are sometimes obeyed as objects, and driven around, but mostly people fly joyfully straight over them, showing little respect for the fact that they are still, technically, roundabouts.  It also turned out we weren't nearly early enough to avoid the traffic, and the makeshift ladder and cantilevered wooden arm with gaffer taped tripod had to be hastily dismantled every few shots to allow buses, scrap collecting vans, lastnight's drunkards, and endless cars through.
From above they are transformed, revealing more clearly the hand-painted spiral, and the traces of their use (and abuse).  All the while I had Mark E Smith in my head, singing "I hate roundabouts, just cant find my way...around!"

Image: 'Aggregate!', © David Murphy/Kate Owens 2011

Good Catch

Billingsgate market at 5am on a Friday is a hectic blur of activity; thousands of boxes of frozen, prepared or still active sea-beasts being bargained over, shifted around, kept fresh with tonnes of ice.  I walked around, still asleep, after driving to Canary Wharf in a total dream state. 

Shouting, wet slanting floors, stacks of cash being counted.

My eel man was doing just that, sleazily turning the corners of crumpled twenties with a licked finger, belly out. 

I had gone with the intention of buying an eel, to photograph, but my feeble imagination had gone only as far as imagining a dead or prepared one, not drawer after drawer of very alive looking specimens.  “Don’t come any fresher than alive”,  he said.  I took a ‘small one’ with a slightly dodgy eye.  Slapped into the scales.  “9 quid”.

He squirmed on the passenger seat beside me all the way home, trying to find the way out of a knotted blue carrier bag. As a distraction I put on the radio - awful early morning Radio 1 jingles.

This was all becoming quite distressing (for both parties), and after the pictures I faced up to what was necessary.  Two hours and a sharp boning-knife purchase later, he was scrubbed and gutted and chopped and sitting in a green marinade in the fridge.  I was shaking slightly.

Campeggio! Vista! Panoramica!

Five nights under a concrete canopy, the tent battened down with an assortment of mismatched screws in the place of pegs. Some might consider 20 Euros a night for such a spot a bit on the steep side, but this was the week of the furniture fair in Milan, and a collective sense of reality was temporarily suspended.  Not a room was to be had across the city, especially to latecomers like me who only began to consider booking after the Christmas holidays…

The vibrations from the road (think M1) rattled the tent with a continuity that became actually quite soothing, and my sleep deprivation came from the hard surface rather than the noise.  This, though, is no sob-story. The traditional* rain that accompanies the fair was nowhere to be seen.  Instead, warm sunny days, dusty pavements, a diet of carbohydrates and caffeine.  One can’t see that much design on an empty stomach.

The maps we got our hands on, replete with yellow numbered dots, were suitably secretive to make it all a bit of a treasure hunt, a hunt nevertheless extended over ten square miles, 400 venues, and with expectedly varying rewards.

On the last day the heels fell off my boots from all the walking, but by then I was so exhausted not to mind at all, just clipped along the street with the little nails sticking out.  

The boots gave up before I did. (small victory)

(*if five years running counts as a tradition.  Last year was a volcanic ash cloud AND rain, which surely makes up for any sense of exaggeration.)

In the cave (mostly)

Lastnight something of a personal milestone – my first 3D film.  Though secretly I’d hoped to see some explosive blockbuster, we went down to the Renoir at Russell Square to see the late showing of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. 

The Chauvet Cave, discovered in 1994, is home to the earliest paintings known anywhere on earth.  Beautifully drawn Rhinos and Elephants and Horses thirty thousand years old, interspersed with bear scratches, and the drip drip of cliff-water that slowly encases everything in a calcite coating.

The small crew, four including Herzog himself, were reverential to the point of shaking; the cave will never be open to visitors, and there was a strong sense that this was perhaps the only chance a film crew would be allowed access.   We feel vicariously the weight of expectation upon them.  

It is an experience that’s physical in the looming walls and thrown shadows, the images bulge, as wide-eyed and crane-necked as we are.  

Over the course of the day aspects of the film have drifted in and out of my imagination. It is almost a sequence of defining images, but somehow none were as affecting as this one: At the back of the cave, where carbon dioxide levels are so high to only allow a few minutes of access, Herzog’s guide points out a rock column that hangs from the ceiling, rendered with the only representation of human form found on this site – a woman depicted from the waist down being consumed by a bison, becoming the bison. Nowhere is the thrill and limitation of this film so clearly defined.  From the narrow walkway on which the crew must remain only half of this image is visible, the other behind in darkness - tantalisingly close - but nevertheless impossible to (ever) see.  The film presses desperately at these barriers, tries to stretch them, but returns each time unfulfilled.  We are reminded momentarily that we are not in the cave.

The film ends with an unusual postscript that spins the whole thing further from the straight documentary format, (closer in fact to other of Herzog's works)   Belching chimneys fill the screen as we are told that a few miles away from the cave is France’s biggest nuclear power station, the steam it produces used to heat a tropical biosphere where crocodiles thrive.  A line is drawn between the cave and the biosphere; its inhabitants – including pink-eyed albinos – and us.  A curious, ominous closing.

(Picture courtesy Plancas67 www.flickr.com/photos/43212985@N08)

Eelvis has left the building!

Being the actual headline of the article I was sent last week.  All my talk of eels had reminded Mark at Water Weights in Great Yarmouth that last year they had helped relocate a five year old male from the Macduff Marine Aquarium in Banffshire, North East Scotland, back to the North Sea using one of their bags (a borrowed crane, and a great deal of patience).  The aquarium  had named him Eelvis - after the flurry of excitement that established a concrete link between the 18th Century Pressleys of Lonmay, Aberdeenshire, and the Presleys of Tupelo six generations later.

Eelvis as a young man

(image from www.macduff-aquarium.org.uk)