(no subject)
Had a bit of a silly giggly day with Anna, who is ridiculously chatty. Reminds me a lot of the other night with Daniel, N, Rosy and her new boyfriend Giles were all prancing around at home and I for some reason was pretending to be a kitten and then we were all giggling like mad and then I farted and it was even funnier.
Those who know me know I am NOT the kind of person who can deal with publicly audible farting (much less my own) with aplomb. I must be becoming 'fun' or something kerazy like that.
Anyway, back to the pretentious shit. This evening I went to Camden Arts Centre for the David Silver/Kenneth Martin & Mary Martin opening.
David Silver was nice. Artist from Zimbabwe (extra points for Camden! Bet they were devastated that he's not black) doing stone carving - which is so unusual, modernist and uncool that it's refreshing, all over again. And this felt like honest work, not some I'm-so-uncool-I've-gone-up-my-arse-and-out-the-other-side Vilma Gold stuff. All about the room are about fifty plinths and stands, all of simple but varying designs and heights. I liked this - not attempting to be uber perfect museum stands, but also not being obtrusive and interrupting the sculptures themselves. These were all heads - or close enough. It seemed like and exercise in 'how little can I do to this piece of stone to stop it looking like a piece of stone and begin it looking like a human head'. It reminds me of that old joke: 'How do you make a carving of an elephant? Chip away all the bits that don't look like an elephant.' So the forms are midway through emerging out of the stone, some quite clear, others needing investigation to be found. There being so many of them, you got an idea (probably too much of an idea) of the process and thinking involved. Uncomplicated, not exactly exciting, but nice. Bit too many though. Anyone with a backpack on is in serious danger of knocking one off, in slapstick turning-with-a-ladder fashion.
Kenneth Martin and Mary Martin met at the Royal College, got married. He made derivative kinetic art and modernist abstraction that doesn't really bear the dusting down, she made forms and shapes that do. She's clearly the better artist, in the sense that you might easily see her work in a gallery today being made by a trendy young artist. Big applause for Camden and its anti-ageist, retrospective, reclaiming agenda, but christ, when are they going to stop doing these dry-as-a-duck's-throat historical shows? When was the last time they did a really exciting group show, or anything other than a super status solo presentation? It's such a gorgeous venue and it never does a bad show, but it badly needs more vision.
Marta (who has a studio at my workplace) was starting her residency there. Ahaha. Now they can deal with her insincere laugh and insipid pestering for a few weeks. Oh, that's bitchy. She's just gotten annoying lately. It's funny though. I used to really like her work, too, but she's started doing this pretty awful collage stuff. Anyway, she's done a wall painting in the corridor for them. It's not her best. It's a bunch of coloured dots. Supposed to be about snooker, and games as a metaphor for the organising principles of society. It looks like a child's bedroom.
Annalisa - the artist I've given a photography commission to - has shown us her work so far. It's wonderful. What's nice is, in amongst the kinds of things I've come to expect her to do, there are some real new steps for her. There are about three or four that are going to be really hard to choose between for the billboard image.
Her photos require having access to unusual, backstreet views, and often from a higher perspective, so it's quite difficult gaining access to the points of view she needed. She found a great view at the back of a local school, which we happen to have made education projects with, and Craig, the head teacher, agreed to stay till 10pm to let her in and get out on the school roof to take her pictures. This is srs bsns because she takes about 40 mins to get the picture right.
Craig is a bit of a special person. He's about 100ft tall, classically shaped, Canadian, very pale, and has white blond hair where he is not balding. He is one of those cool looking blokes who can totally carry baldness off. But what makes him amazing is this school he runs, Five Bridges, which has about twenty pupils in total and basically they're the ones who have been thrown out of everything else ever ever and who for one reason or another desperately need some stability. They're fucking horrors to work with and he has the funny calm deadpan and sensitive air of a sort of 21st century angel Gabriel.
Aside from that Craig comes to our openings, and has done a bizarre number of arcane favours for our visiting artists for one reason or another, so while they were up there Annalisa, on a whim, asked him to pose in a photo on his school roof. This is unusual as her pictures never, ever have people in.
The picture turned out amazing. He's quite a handsome bloke and Annalisa is phenomenally talented. (Not to mention that I am certain sure her work will be worth quite something very soon.) And she has made him a print, signed it, and Anna and I fished out one of the frames from the last exhibition, and it's the second last day of term for Five Bridges, and in a fit of excitement we called him up and said 'we've got a present for you! We're coming round with it!'
He's a funny bloke. I can't tell the hell when he's joking or not. He loved the picture. Really loved it. he'd had a shitty day and - I dunno, it's easy to romanticise about someone so charismatic doing something so unrewarding and selfless day in, day out, and it was nice to think that his term would end with a reward for his niceness. Oh, ok, I got a slight crush today. For once not in a rampantly pervy way. If you met him, you'd know what I mean.
Other than my non pervy crush on the angel Gabriel Craig, I thought I'd randomly write down
- N (obv). Insert ode to N and his hotness here. I know it bores the hell out of anyone but me, but god. I can't stop thinking about him and his *bleep* and the *bleep* and his beautiful *bleep*, etc.
- The kitchen boy at St John's restaurant the other night. I don't normally perve on strangers - oh who am I kidding, I do it all the time - but this boy belonged at the squeezy end of a tube of whipped cream.
- Richard the S.H.T. More because N finds it funny and because it's basically an artworld het female rite of passage.
- The Mauritian boy with the eyelashes who handed in a DVD of truly terrible artwork a couple of weeks ago. I'm not even a man and I thought of giving him a facial. (note to self: maybe should have sex change and become gay man).
Having an enormous feminist turn at the minute. I can't be fucked with temporising or 'being reasonable' or any of that shit. I've started just making crass generalisations about men. Fuck it. I got harassed by three separate men today, I think I'm entitled to generalise. Oh and those of you men reading this who are far too nice to ever do anything like that, mentally count yourselves out of my angry feminist moment. I only LJ fraternise with lovely nonsexist men anyway. Except Keef, he's quite sexist. :P
Those who know me know I am NOT the kind of person who can deal with publicly audible farting (much less my own) with aplomb. I must be becoming 'fun' or something kerazy like that.
Anyway, back to the pretentious shit. This evening I went to Camden Arts Centre for the David Silver/Kenneth Martin & Mary Martin opening.
David Silver was nice. Artist from Zimbabwe (extra points for Camden! Bet they were devastated that he's not black) doing stone carving - which is so unusual, modernist and uncool that it's refreshing, all over again. And this felt like honest work, not some I'm-so-uncool-I've-gone-up-my-arse-and-out-the-other-side Vilma Gold stuff. All about the room are about fifty plinths and stands, all of simple but varying designs and heights. I liked this - not attempting to be uber perfect museum stands, but also not being obtrusive and interrupting the sculptures themselves. These were all heads - or close enough. It seemed like and exercise in 'how little can I do to this piece of stone to stop it looking like a piece of stone and begin it looking like a human head'. It reminds me of that old joke: 'How do you make a carving of an elephant? Chip away all the bits that don't look like an elephant.' So the forms are midway through emerging out of the stone, some quite clear, others needing investigation to be found. There being so many of them, you got an idea (probably too much of an idea) of the process and thinking involved. Uncomplicated, not exactly exciting, but nice. Bit too many though. Anyone with a backpack on is in serious danger of knocking one off, in slapstick turning-with-a-ladder fashion.
Kenneth Martin and Mary Martin met at the Royal College, got married. He made derivative kinetic art and modernist abstraction that doesn't really bear the dusting down, she made forms and shapes that do. She's clearly the better artist, in the sense that you might easily see her work in a gallery today being made by a trendy young artist. Big applause for Camden and its anti-ageist, retrospective, reclaiming agenda, but christ, when are they going to stop doing these dry-as-a-duck's-throat historical shows? When was the last time they did a really exciting group show, or anything other than a super status solo presentation? It's such a gorgeous venue and it never does a bad show, but it badly needs more vision.
Marta (who has a studio at my workplace) was starting her residency there. Ahaha. Now they can deal with her insincere laugh and insipid pestering for a few weeks. Oh, that's bitchy. She's just gotten annoying lately. It's funny though. I used to really like her work, too, but she's started doing this pretty awful collage stuff. Anyway, she's done a wall painting in the corridor for them. It's not her best. It's a bunch of coloured dots. Supposed to be about snooker, and games as a metaphor for the organising principles of society. It looks like a child's bedroom.
Annalisa - the artist I've given a photography commission to - has shown us her work so far. It's wonderful. What's nice is, in amongst the kinds of things I've come to expect her to do, there are some real new steps for her. There are about three or four that are going to be really hard to choose between for the billboard image.
Her photos require having access to unusual, backstreet views, and often from a higher perspective, so it's quite difficult gaining access to the points of view she needed. She found a great view at the back of a local school, which we happen to have made education projects with, and Craig, the head teacher, agreed to stay till 10pm to let her in and get out on the school roof to take her pictures. This is srs bsns because she takes about 40 mins to get the picture right.
Craig is a bit of a special person. He's about 100ft tall, classically shaped, Canadian, very pale, and has white blond hair where he is not balding. He is one of those cool looking blokes who can totally carry baldness off. But what makes him amazing is this school he runs, Five Bridges, which has about twenty pupils in total and basically they're the ones who have been thrown out of everything else ever ever and who for one reason or another desperately need some stability. They're fucking horrors to work with and he has the funny calm deadpan and sensitive air of a sort of 21st century angel Gabriel.
Aside from that Craig comes to our openings, and has done a bizarre number of arcane favours for our visiting artists for one reason or another, so while they were up there Annalisa, on a whim, asked him to pose in a photo on his school roof. This is unusual as her pictures never, ever have people in.
The picture turned out amazing. He's quite a handsome bloke and Annalisa is phenomenally talented. (Not to mention that I am certain sure her work will be worth quite something very soon.) And she has made him a print, signed it, and Anna and I fished out one of the frames from the last exhibition, and it's the second last day of term for Five Bridges, and in a fit of excitement we called him up and said 'we've got a present for you! We're coming round with it!'
He's a funny bloke. I can't tell the hell when he's joking or not. He loved the picture. Really loved it. he'd had a shitty day and - I dunno, it's easy to romanticise about someone so charismatic doing something so unrewarding and selfless day in, day out, and it was nice to think that his term would end with a reward for his niceness. Oh, ok, I got a slight crush today. For once not in a rampantly pervy way. If you met him, you'd know what I mean.
Other than my non pervy crush on the angel Gabriel Craig, I thought I'd randomly write down
- N (obv). Insert ode to N and his hotness here. I know it bores the hell out of anyone but me, but god. I can't stop thinking about him and his *bleep* and the *bleep* and his beautiful *bleep*, etc.
- The kitchen boy at St John's restaurant the other night. I don't normally perve on strangers - oh who am I kidding, I do it all the time - but this boy belonged at the squeezy end of a tube of whipped cream.
- Richard the S.H.T. More because N finds it funny and because it's basically an artworld het female rite of passage.
- The Mauritian boy with the eyelashes who handed in a DVD of truly terrible artwork a couple of weeks ago. I'm not even a man and I thought of giving him a facial. (note to self: maybe should have sex change and become gay man).
Having an enormous feminist turn at the minute. I can't be fucked with temporising or 'being reasonable' or any of that shit. I've started just making crass generalisations about men. Fuck it. I got harassed by three separate men today, I think I'm entitled to generalise. Oh and those of you men reading this who are far too nice to ever do anything like that, mentally count yourselves out of my angry feminist moment. I only LJ fraternise with lovely nonsexist men anyway. Except Keef, he's quite sexist. :P