Art about People and the Things They Do and Stuff
What a great weekend. Even most of the crap bits were sort of great. It started on a beautiful sunny Friday evening as killalla, kauket, Adam and myself went punting from Magdalen Bridge. So terribly Oxford: calm green water, weeping trees, spires hazy in the distance, people studying on the riverbanks. It all had that too-idyllic-to-be-real feeling I had in winter when I started cycling around town, like we were in a period drama. Kat had brought cupcakes. We didn't talk that much. In between fending off banks and other boats with the paddle, I touched the water with it to make intersecting patterns of ripples. Once Jo made a sort of "ahhh" noise which was exactly what I'd just been thinking.
Then to Templars for barbecue and games.
I slept in on Saturday, into the afternoon. That was the plan: it was going to be a very late night. Then I set off to get a top-up of London to keep me going. On my way down on the Oxford Tube, the sun was shining on yellow fields and hawks were hovering. When London came up around me it didn't feel draining, like it sometimes had before. It buzzed, and I was fresh enough to catch the buzz and run with it. The music I chose got faster the closer I got to the centre.
As soon as I got on the tube I saw three people in completely ridiculous outfits the like of which I'd never seen before: brocade tracksuits with short legs, flat caps and beaver hats made of patchwork and gingham. Fancy dress? The new style among Shoreditch Twats, or is it Whitechapel Twats now? Yeah, London.
Across Trafalgar Square - Nelson's Column is covered in scaffolding with scary ads about climate change, shots of landmarks under water - and down the Mall, getting tree pollen in my eyes, and I arrived at the ICA to see the Beck's Futures exhibition the day before it closed.
The title of the post is one of a list of jokey exhibition titles by Stefan Bruggemann, which covered three walls of one room. It was amusing, though more like something you'd read on a website than something you'd expect to see at an exhibition. I was excited to see Sue Tompkins's stuff because I'd recently read about it in a story by sibyline. Her characters were at an exhibition in New York. One of them got it, the other didn't. It's fragile pieces of newsprint paper stuck to the wall, with semi-random creases and often mistyped words scattered across them. ("I am disconnected from life! Sing it!") It's the kind of word-based thing I usually like, but it didn't move me. I was seeing it through a screen of expectations from the story and I couldn't decide if I liked it or not. More fun was the pebbledash pillar, shaped a bit like the BT tower. If you look closely you realise, with a jolt of perspective shift, that every pebble has a face. Silly, but I like the jolt, the surprise.
But the thing I've spent most time thinking about since, even though most commenters didn't seem to like it, was Simon Popper's stacks of alphabetised copies of Ulysses. You could flip through them. They each started with pages of As and ended with pages of full stops, as if the book were saying "The story's over. No, really, it is. Move along, please, ladies and gentlemen. What are you doing still hanging around? Go home!" There was a whole page of yes and maybe three of Street, all looking naked without their proper noun to make them special. Then there were the words which only happened once: things like myriadislanded and STORMBIRDS. I tried to work out why it made me uncomfortable to see a book rearranged like this. Imagine having to reassemble it! That would be a hopeless task for a fairytale heroine, like spinning gold from straw. The more I thought about it the more twitchy I felt. I suppose it's another example of something you can't understand better by breaking it down into its component parts. You just end up killing it.
I sat and watched Matt Stokes's video of a soul dance event in a church, mesmerised by the girl spinning in a white circle skirt who looked like a jive dervish, until they threw me out. Walking past a wall where projected silhouettes marched back and forth, I got some burnt-tasting coffee and sat in the café reading the programme.
I like modern art because it's so vague, not in spite of that. My brain struggles to explain it and sometimes comes up with very cool stuff, while for more traditional art there only seems to be one obvious story. But it's funny how I often get the wrong end of the stick. "His works suggest the pleasures of luxury," the booklet said, of a tortelloni-obsessed artist whose work had actually made me feel claustrophobic and stifled. But is there even a wrong end of the stick to get? Perhaps my end of the stick is just as valid as Tortelloni Man's. Maybe there is no stick. I dunno. As I was pondering I looked up at the wall of silhouettes and - whoa! - there I was, walking along with my bag on one shoulder and my coat over the other arm. The shadows were being filmed on the spot, all of people walking by.
An electronic folk singer called Katy Carr was playing. She sounded great, kind of Four Tet-ish, but that sort of music needs space within it, silences between the notes and the electronic clicks and squelches, and in the ICA bar all the silences were filled with people shouting in each other's ears. I want to hear her on CD, in an otherwise quiet room.
So after some coveting of the entire bookshop and some texting to find out the plan, I headed down to Borough for the next bit. And what a next bit it was.
Let me know if there's loads of space between paragraphs. LJ doesn't seem to want to put in line breaks, so I've put them in as html. It was like this the last time I posted too. Hmm.
Then to Templars for barbecue and games.
I slept in on Saturday, into the afternoon. That was the plan: it was going to be a very late night. Then I set off to get a top-up of London to keep me going. On my way down on the Oxford Tube, the sun was shining on yellow fields and hawks were hovering. When London came up around me it didn't feel draining, like it sometimes had before. It buzzed, and I was fresh enough to catch the buzz and run with it. The music I chose got faster the closer I got to the centre.
As soon as I got on the tube I saw three people in completely ridiculous outfits the like of which I'd never seen before: brocade tracksuits with short legs, flat caps and beaver hats made of patchwork and gingham. Fancy dress? The new style among Shoreditch Twats, or is it Whitechapel Twats now? Yeah, London.
Across Trafalgar Square - Nelson's Column is covered in scaffolding with scary ads about climate change, shots of landmarks under water - and down the Mall, getting tree pollen in my eyes, and I arrived at the ICA to see the Beck's Futures exhibition the day before it closed.
The title of the post is one of a list of jokey exhibition titles by Stefan Bruggemann, which covered three walls of one room. It was amusing, though more like something you'd read on a website than something you'd expect to see at an exhibition. I was excited to see Sue Tompkins's stuff because I'd recently read about it in a story by sibyline. Her characters were at an exhibition in New York. One of them got it, the other didn't. It's fragile pieces of newsprint paper stuck to the wall, with semi-random creases and often mistyped words scattered across them. ("I am disconnected from life! Sing it!") It's the kind of word-based thing I usually like, but it didn't move me. I was seeing it through a screen of expectations from the story and I couldn't decide if I liked it or not. More fun was the pebbledash pillar, shaped a bit like the BT tower. If you look closely you realise, with a jolt of perspective shift, that every pebble has a face. Silly, but I like the jolt, the surprise.
But the thing I've spent most time thinking about since, even though most commenters didn't seem to like it, was Simon Popper's stacks of alphabetised copies of Ulysses. You could flip through them. They each started with pages of As and ended with pages of full stops, as if the book were saying "The story's over. No, really, it is. Move along, please, ladies and gentlemen. What are you doing still hanging around? Go home!" There was a whole page of yes and maybe three of Street, all looking naked without their proper noun to make them special. Then there were the words which only happened once: things like myriadislanded and STORMBIRDS. I tried to work out why it made me uncomfortable to see a book rearranged like this. Imagine having to reassemble it! That would be a hopeless task for a fairytale heroine, like spinning gold from straw. The more I thought about it the more twitchy I felt. I suppose it's another example of something you can't understand better by breaking it down into its component parts. You just end up killing it.
I sat and watched Matt Stokes's video of a soul dance event in a church, mesmerised by the girl spinning in a white circle skirt who looked like a jive dervish, until they threw me out. Walking past a wall where projected silhouettes marched back and forth, I got some burnt-tasting coffee and sat in the café reading the programme.
I like modern art because it's so vague, not in spite of that. My brain struggles to explain it and sometimes comes up with very cool stuff, while for more traditional art there only seems to be one obvious story. But it's funny how I often get the wrong end of the stick. "His works suggest the pleasures of luxury," the booklet said, of a tortelloni-obsessed artist whose work had actually made me feel claustrophobic and stifled. But is there even a wrong end of the stick to get? Perhaps my end of the stick is just as valid as Tortelloni Man's. Maybe there is no stick. I dunno. As I was pondering I looked up at the wall of silhouettes and - whoa! - there I was, walking along with my bag on one shoulder and my coat over the other arm. The shadows were being filmed on the spot, all of people walking by.
An electronic folk singer called Katy Carr was playing. She sounded great, kind of Four Tet-ish, but that sort of music needs space within it, silences between the notes and the electronic clicks and squelches, and in the ICA bar all the silences were filled with people shouting in each other's ears. I want to hear her on CD, in an otherwise quiet room.
So after some coveting of the entire bookshop and some texting to find out the plan, I headed down to Borough for the next bit. And what a next bit it was.
Let me know if there's loads of space between paragraphs. LJ doesn't seem to want to put in line breaks, so I've put them in as html. It was like this the last time I posted too. Hmm.