Inputting

Sir Paul Smith's aphorism (must be original)

Sir Paul Smith's a wise old bird. I'm sure he wouldn't mind me describing him thus. He was speaking at HERE, an It's Nice That (http://www.itsnicethat.com) conference at The Royal Geographical Society yesterday. Here he is in action:

He presents like your favourite uncle: a bit whacky, stylish (but not pretentiously so), full of great ideas and observations (beach-hut = jumper; colours in a church = shirt; Russian building = scarf, etcetera), fresh, eccentric and ultimately down to earth. Well, he is from Nottingham. But you knew that.

Sir Paul's colours

After hearing him speak, I just wanted to rush out and buy his clothes. Not the ones off his back, obviously, but from women's wear, Floral Street - or better still, his known-by-only-those-in-the-know shop in Paris, curiously called 'Tourette' - a 1930s bistro on Rue Grenelle that he's kept as-was....

The conference had me realise how little input I have been receiving of late. Probably I have, as Sir Paul observed, just been missing what inspiration is around me. But I guess like most of us, I feel I am constantly outputting and this becomes hard, sterile, unproductive, when there's little or no input.
Yet HERE it was in spades.

The power of film, (Carol Morley's Dreams of A Life) art, design, social media, crowd sourcing (Tom Roope), photography and a tale of triumph through extreme adversity achieving all but a standing ovation (Giles Duley http://gilesduley.com/) (- I wept, actually), audience participation (the brilliant Job & Roel Wouters), animation (for studio aka, Grant Orchard's curiously kinky Yeah Just There for OneDotZero), even an audience-shared cocktail (- gin, industrial strength Guiness, ginger-beer and khat-infused vodka bitters) c/o those jelly mongers, Bompas & Parr (http://www.theavantgardediaries.com) - with on-stage nudity - to name but a few of the eye/mind/senses candies on offer, restored my faith in creative possibilities. Or rather, reminded me what can be achieved and is being, constantly, by those willing to just do it....  Les Artes Sans Frontiers, I guess......

http://vimeo.com/40442475

On Saturday Live this morning, studio guest Clarissa Dickson Right's triumph over alcoholism and the 'road to Damascus' tale of the amazing Linda Cruse (http://www.lindacruse.com/) seemed to echo the HERE theme of what human beings are capable when they just get out of their own way to do stuff, when people get fed up of drifting, being safe in their comfort zone of the security of the familiar. Joseph Beuys was right - to paraphrase, everyone is indeed creative. We are all pretty amazing.

Stirring stuff.

I attended HERE with an amazing woman, known to Twitterers as sitdowncomedian (https://twitter.com/sitdowncomedian). Together, we ventured into the Photobot photobooth (http://www.photobot.co/) at coffee break, (after Ms SitDown had caused us to gatecrash the speakers' genteel hospitality room where everything was free, instead of the punters' canteen where everything was hideously expensive after an equally hideously long queue....) where we were instructed by Photobot to be happy, then sad, then angry and, finally, surprised, in quick flash-gun succession. 

I feel it's fair to say that the result (retaken by phone camera - poor, but adds a certain je ne sais quois, I feel) illustrates fairly well the gamut of emotions we went through as the day progressed. Then again, HERE or not HERE, couldn't the same be true for all of us, every day?

To avoid any confusion, clockwise from top left: happy, angry, sad, surprised

'Til next time,

Bo

Back in the Saddle

So.

It's been soooo long since I blogged I can hardly remember how to do this. Should I be telling the world such things? Possibly not. I believe that's now the domain of Twittering. Or is that Tweeting?...

Who cares?

Birthday amuse bouche, Lauzerte

And now, I know what you are thinking. Have I started a cooking/foodie blog?

Perhaps.

Is this turning into a mish-mash of a travelogueartyfilmcritiquedocudramentary?

Perhaps.

Thing is, having turned 50 this summer, things have to change. The blog has to be bigger, better and at least more regular. Life moves on.

So first thing's first, I realise I must bring you, dear reader, up to speed. Well - ish. A lot's happened since Venice and the Edinburgh you never got to see, in 2011. 

As you'll notice, for one, I've been back to Venice. My return trip brought back to mind the work of Michael de Feo, the New York street artist you may remember I met last time, propping up the bar in Harry's. He was in my thoughts, as I'd not long since seen Banksy's 'Exit Through The Gift Shop' in which Michael's work makes an appearance.

And as you will also see, below right, things don't get cheaper in St Mark's Square.  Still, not bad value for coffee from silver pots, romantic music and the best place on earth for stirring the imagination.......

Venice 2012 was a day-trip from Udine, where I was staying as the guest of an artist I was interviewing. So in Venice, this time, I was with a painter, rather than seeing art. We did very little that day apart from swan around in the heat, swatting away all the other tourists - he looking suave, sophisticated and Italian/Albanian and totally cool (crisp white cotton shirt, low slung trousers with a sharp crease, barefoot in loafers) and casually and frequently smoking very slim, long elegant cigarettes. Whereas I, Mancunian/Londoner was overheated in black linen, sweating and flustered, trying to keep up with his Aperols via my spritzers and finally a vodka martini. I am always impressed that the Italians, no matter how seemingly macho, opt for downing wine and prosecco, rather than pints.

The artist, in case you are wondering, is Endri Kosturi, a young, passionate ball of energy who works hard and generates exhibitions, films, performance and backdrops to opera in Trieste. He also manages a restaurant while in London. His friend, film-maker Marco Tessarolo, works with him:

  http://vimeo.com/49375792

Anyway, back to the foodie thing.

A month before Venice/Udine/Trieste, I spent a few days - including the one on which I turned half-a-century - in the Dordogne as the guest of another artist I was interviewing. 

I am not at liberty to divulge the identity of the artist just yet but save to say, the experience made for a memorable celebration of my birthday. Not least for the food, (the plate on the above left was just the starters, the main deal was guinea fowl and the best chips (not pomme frites) I have ever tasted (- and I don't even like chips!) - the armagnac, and the pale, oatmeal- coloured cows, unique to the region. 

Oh, and the fields of sunflowers and walnut and plum-tree orchards surrounding the isolated farmhouse that forms the artist's home and studio.  The environs alone were enough to stir my artistic imagination, let alone the resident artist's, but as far as I can tell, their work betrays not even the most subliminal of traces of the location from where it originates, geographically speaking. Except, I guess, that it might not originate at all, were it not for the mental and emotional space that living in such a environment allows.

Back in Blighty,  I am working on compiling material gleaned from interviews with Rodney Dickson, an old friend of mine who is a painter now living and working in Brooklyn, New York where I also was back in January.

Having recently had a solo show in Chelsea at www.gassergrunert.net and taken part in a group show STILL at Frith St Gallery in London, he's poised for even greater things.

There will be more on Rodney later. The new format of the blog now that I have (almost) everything else out of my system will be more agile, more nifty, less talk (perhaps) and (even) more pics. It may be a bit haiku-ish even, a few one-liners and a few spoilers, a few nips and tucks and tips and hints. The key thing is, it will be more regular, more dependable, more consistent.

.....And I have to end this version, this current series (can I call it thus?) with an image that sums it all up for me, given I recently revisited the movie. If I was to say, "Name that film!" there'd be no prizes for shouting out the answer. However, it occurs to me that what's missing is an inventive caption expressing the mood, the sense of triumph, the curious high of achievement mixed with the dawning reality of uncertainty, expectation and unlimited possibility that just about encapsulates the feeling.

It's how I am right now, as it goes, having turned fifty and shades of going grey.....

Any ideas/thoughts re captions on an e-postcard please.....

'til the next one,

Bo

Into the Shipyard

So. Long time, no blog.

Well, I was waiting until one can finally wave goodbye to the Venice Biennale, finishing as it did last weekend, to complete the current train of thought on the matter as a fitting end to the episode. And how time and art have moved on in the interim.

We now have Bloomberg New Contemporaries featuring at the ICA. As the Biennale faded out, a day of 'Intercourse' (of the intellectual, rather than biblical variety) made the art news, including as it did an auction with Christopher Biggins (!) and a re-enactment of the Odessa steps scene from Eisensteins's 'Battleship Potemkin'  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v-kZzfec

The ICA version starred Norman Rosenthal, Tracey Emin, Mark Wallinger, Andrew Logan and Louisa Buck et al. The artworld's finest donned fancydress and plastic swords to trample over those members of the public daft enough to volunteer to pretend to die and drape themselves theatrically on the cold, stone steps at the bottom of Waterloo Place, just off The Mall.

Why, why, why?  You may well ask. But then, as Jane and Louise Wilson were directing, it makes sense. Still, more lark than art, methinks.

Anyway, one cannot close comment on the Biennale without a foray in to the Arsenale: the old ship building area of Venice. The Corderie at the Arsenale, the vast, industrial warehouse spaces that were the old rope factories, traditionally feature a curated mix of work by international artists in a more open, or 'aperto' exhibition. The lack of painting was compensated by only one of four works I can now remember. The key one surely being Christan Marclay's, The Clock (2010).

 

Not surprisingly, Marclay won the Golden Lion for the best artist at the Biennale's ILLUMInations exhibition for this. It's an utterly compelling piece of extraordinary research, editing and montage compilation. By now, you will probably know the premise: a film 24 hours in length, comprises film clips from contemporary and vintage footage, all featuring the time at which you are watching the film, whenever you happen to be watching it, in actual time. Yes, actually. I had thought that Douglas Gordon's 24 Hour Psycho (1993) had the monopoly on such a genre:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1jkoMfPa40 

However, Marclay's piece is such a tour de force, it's almost as impossible to fault as it was to get up off one of the large comfortable sofas provided and go back out into the Venetian sunshine.  

Ok, so before we leave Venice for a quick nip to Edinburgh (I did promise) I know you are dying to learn what the other three pieces were that caught my attention - no, dammit! - that were the only other artworks I can recall - as I said (memory's going).

Beyond Ukrainian artist Oksana Mas's extraordinary mosaics created out of hand-painted eggs (see above), Swiss artist Urs Fischer's essentially giant, burning wax candles made an impact. By the time I witnessed the work, I was confronted by a series of sad lumps, barely anthropomorphic. Once monumental copies of neo-classical sculptures, were dribbling and fizzling out in sad, solidifying pools of cloudy grey and cream on the floor. The most latterly magnificent of these was a full-scale cast of Giovanni Bologna’s 16th-century The Rape of the Sabine Women. 

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/15021/urs-fisher-at-venice-art-biennale-2011.html

The other piece was Chinese artists Song Dong's Para-Pavillion, evocative in spatial and olfactory terms:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMoyYKvJkUM  The maze of knitted-together wardrobe fascias, ending with what looked like a decaying skeleton of a chinese pavillion, gave rise to feelings similar to those experienced in the presence of the 'ghost' works by Rachel Whiteread. It's the sense of past lives, of clothes worn, loves expressed, rows and tears lost, imbuing the fabric of the installation that give the work its power....

A final thought from Venice that greets visitors to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection:

Next stop: Edinburgh

Ciao,

Bo

Just Off The Blocks

…. So, Venice: Amazing. Am getting a taste for wet vodka martinis. Best drunk by the Grand Canal in apricot sunshine, the colour of early evening here, facing the Iglesia de Maria de la Salute, across a gently lapping, surprisingly turquoise looking portion of the lagoon.

Except this martini is in Edinburgh – a couple of weeks later. Grey skies, intermittent sunshine, only water is occasional rain. Strange counterbalance: Venice vs Edinburgh. What holds them together in my regard is the art, of course. The former potently visual; the latter, mainly theatrical, largely comedic. Both stimulating, both inspiring. More of Edinburgh later….

So, for now: Venice (as I said), amazing. Following the evening at Harry’s, the next day was spent making best use of the day-ticket issued for the official Biennale in the Giardini and the Arsenale. For those of you who are not aficionados, the Arsenale is where the Venetians built their ships and the Giardini are the public gardens where the national pavilions are housed, each built according to their inimitable, national whims. 

Therefore, the USA’s pavilion mirrors the Thomas Jefferson era and the North Portico of the Whitehouse (just seen here as the background to Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla's extraordinary 'Track and Field').  Dullio Torres’ 1932 imposing façade of the Italian Pavilion (the biggest) exudes the extreme, linear plainness dictated by Mussolini’s facist rule. The British Pavilion is red-brick, looking ex-colonial and neo-classical, with grand stone steps up to the door. The German pavilion, the concrete floor of which was most memorably jackhammered-up in 1993 by Hans Haacke, is this year bursting at the seams with a show by the late Christoph Maria Schlingensief, an artistic provocateur, both revered and maligned for his radical commentaries on Germany’s past. The pavilion itself, the Ger of Germania being scrubbed out and replaced, in graffiti-like scrawl with EGO, won this year’s Golden Lion award. The building is suitably re-entitled because inside is a smorgasbord of sensual overload, got up to look like the inside of a church – altar, pews, incense, music, the works - blasphemously glorifying the personification and fictionalisation of a nation and focusing on inexplicable idiosyncracies.

Sharing a(nother) martini with Michael de Feo (www.mdefeo.com) later, I discovered that I had missed a key component of the show; the main event had sucked the stamina out of me and I hadn’t had the energy to explore the film tacked on to the side, showing smeared nudity. This made him laugh, which made other visitors show their disdain at his lack of respect for art. At this he laughed again.....

The French pavilion happened to be showing ‘Chance’, by an artist I’ve long admired, Christian Boltanski. When I was making art myself, portraits were one of my chosen subjects and Boltanski homes-in on the human face too. His signature grainy, black and white photos of heads of people long since dead (as a result of war and/or incarceration) are here again. This time, they are weighed against hundreds of images of new-borns, their photos on a seamless reel that ricochets around a scaffold filling the pavilion space. Or, on a screen nearby, their features can be mixed – at the whim of the visitor – with those of the features of the dead to create infinite possibilities of facial constructs. It’s a noisy, mesmerizing mess and strangely haunting too. The just alive and the long dead – all treated much the same.

Back to Blighty’s representation by Mike Nelson, who is currently also showing at Tate Britain with ‘Coral Reef’.  Here, in the British Pavilion he has created ‘I, Impostor’, a true to form, disorientating, claustrophobic labyrinth that differs from his other installations by virtue of a seemingly clearer sense of narrative and based on the interior spaces inspired by Istanbul. Hans Haacke may have hacked-up the floor in 1993, but now Nelson hacks through the hallowed pavilion roof to create skylights and open courtyards. Again, I find myself thinking back to being a critic and how awful seeing this work on one of the press days would have been. Crowds are no good for experiencing such a piece as this. Being, (at the beginning of my visit to the pavilion at least), a lone observer, I could savour the quality of the isolation, the eeriness, the disorientation, the cramped spaces and the fantasies that accompany being alone in such a creation - all heightened by the exciting but threatening noise of distant footsteps, the shadows and voices coming from somewhere else close by. 

Am kicking myself that for 10 euros, I did not buy the hardback published to accompany the installation, as I notice that it’s for sale now at Tate UK for £15. Curse easyjet for their ‘only one piece of hand luggage’ policy! I couldn't possibly have squeezed even the smallest olive, let alone another book, in to my bag. Then again, I’d be damned if I was going to struggle with and pay to have luggage in the hold, so I’ve only myself to blame....

Bo

Next instalment: Into the Shipyard

Musings of a later starter

Venice at first sight

I always was. Late to read, late to puberty (I’m still waiting for various bits), late to the joy of sex, late to technology, late to painting, late to blogging. Strange really, given that I am usually prompt – early even – for appointments. However, I am also relatively late to the 54th Venice Biennale.

My excuse for this is that as an ex-art critic, I am no longer due official press accreditation and therefore access to the biannual bun-fight known as the press previews.  Oh, I’ve been there, done that as a freelancer (– not quite a freeloader, but it's been a fine line at times). So now, as a general punter only, I am comparatively late to see the art, minus the feeding and drinking frenzies that accompany these temporary additions to the glories of Venice.

Harry's Bar

....So I find myself in Harry’s Bar (as you do) three hours after stepping off a plane. To be fair, not having been to Harry's before (late starter) I almost didn’t make it at all. I got to the end of Calle Vallaresso and even in front of the unprepossessing doors to the place but kept bottling it, wary as I was of the reviews. Images of pushing my way in only to be a victim of surly service and being thrown out on my ear for merely wanting one drink and not speaking Italian. Not only that, but when there’s no price list outside, you know you’re in for an expensive time and if I wasn’t spending a fortune in there, was I going to be welcome?

However, a good friend of mine had provided me with an envelope containing a message for the barman. I hadn’t a clue what this might say, (in Italian of course) but in deference to him and homage to Hemmingway, I felt it was my duty to enter. Before I dithered any longer, I saw my chance and quickly waded in behind a wealthy looking family, the tanned women sporting nude-coloured pashminas and patent platformed stilettos to match.

Lining up the Bellini's

Despite my trepidation, my, “Posso bere solo al bar?” was greeted by a friendly, “Of course”, (am I so blatantly English?) and a gesture towards a vacant stool, next but one to an old, portly, unsmiling guy at the end. It's a small bar so cosy, fairly sandwiched as I was pretty much between him and another guy to whom I hadn't yet paid attention.

Long story short, my friendly barman laughingly obeyed the instructions contained within the envelope I'd handed over to him, showering the bar with small silver hearts as he opened it. Turns out my friend had also supplied enough euros to set me up rather well for the evening. A bellini, vodka martini, and a bellini #1 (bellini + vodka) later, and I had made friends with a family from Chicago doing the European tour and spent the rest of the evening talking all things Biennale with that other guy, a street artist and curator from New York, who happened to be Michael De Feo.

Not a bad late start to the Biennale…..

Bo