(no subject)
What a night! Thursday is the new weekend! If I hadn’t been floor-dippingly tired from not sleeping well, I’d have risked the suicidal Thursday latey but by then we’d had three nights of fun already for one night.
Me and scot went to lecture club / art school / the building where we are studying fine art/whatever hilarious title we’re giving it to see Roger Hiorns give a talk. The blurb for him was kind of vague but I’d sent he bench on fire at the contemporary and thought that was cool.
We sit at the side/back mainly because Scot gets there late and there are seats but there were some naughty kids there last night. My guess is they were doing some FE art course and went were told to go and decided it would be muck about central but left ten minutes in, which was a shame because it would probably have been interesting seeing how long they mucked about for.
Roger Hiorns looks about 25 and is really 35, was selected for the turner prize and this is what he’s done:
He has a bench on fire at the Contemporary that sometimes has a man-nudie sitting on the non-firey end.
He has jizzed on lightbulbs and displayed those
He has jizzed on lightbulbs and pointed them at the acropolis in Greece (more popular with younger Greeks than older ones apparently)
He’s put the brain of a calf into an engine and exhibited that
The calf had seen him and hence the brain had a memory of the artist before the calf ‘died’
Ground down a plane engine and displayed the dust in the Tate (10 minutes set-up, four and a half hours clean up)
Poured 750,000 litre of copper sulphate solution into a condemed flat so that it encrusted the walls/bath with blue crystals - and was nominated for the Turner prize for it.
Covered engines and model cathedrals in copper sulphate which slowly ate the engines. He sold one to the Tate who asked him how to
look after it when he explained the point was that it was destroying/eating itself. Probably not good from their investment point of view.
Has mixed brain matter with plastic to sculpt copulating homosexual figures (not for Franklin Mint to sell in the back of Sunday supplements alas)
Has worked with Heathcoat ‘Whale Nation’ Williams (which impressed me)
He was kind of nervous and kept playing with his nose but very friendly and warm with the audience and totally up for questions and interruptions. He talked about not wanting to become a ‘personality artist’ known for one thing (Being cow-brain in an engine guy is going to stop you being jizzy light-bulb guy). He said some interesting things about being interested in materials first and foremost and if I get it properly (it was pleasantly disjointed) interested in new materials in the sense of discovering material for the first time (any material) and using it for the first time with new or repurposed materials.
What was fascinating, in a world where concept of the project is so prominent, was that he wasn’t interested in interpretation, labelling etc of the project as a whole, as the material itself was interesting. Which spun your mind into ‘am I doing it right if I don’t try to find meaning in the resulting object outside itself?’, which is, of course, as rigid a definition/interpretation as saying it’s about ‘the sea engulfing the land’ or some such nonsense, so it was confusing in terms of what we were supposed to do with it but probably because it wasn’t the point, it was all in the behaviour of the materials and you got a sense not that he didn’t care how it was interpreted or that flakey ‘any way you want to’ line but it was actually none of his concern what happened to it once his work was finished (and the work of the piece carried on on it’s own).
There were some ideas in the materials, the cow had a sense of him (had seen him) before it died so there was a sense of him in the work, his films had him in it as had the photo that the nudie on the burny bench that the contemporary piece is based on and jizzing on the lightbulbs cast a sense of him in the light projected. He said that he didn’t think semen sexualised the object, which was the only real point that I didn’t believe as it is inescapable, given the choices of human element that he could have picked.
I kind of took all of the points on board and didn’t raise too much of an eyebrow (fine art is bullshit central so you can’t get too upset when you hear things that seem off-kilter) but it was a pretty even experience until we left.
The minute the doors closed two pennies dropped:
- He.Is.INSANE. Good insane but one day could be JOKER insane (‘My next project involves blue crystals growing ON YOUR LUNGS) *room fills with blue chemicals drowning everyone in the room.
- He blew my mind! This gathered momentum to the point that by the time we saw Theresa a few hours later, it was like we’d just seen Rocket from the Crypt. In fact this morning was a morning after the gig you weren’t sure you loved but you definitely DO.
He seems like a pretty exciting guy who had a realistic understanding of the world (referenced how funding can keep a studio working for x amount of time), was having fun while exploring, philosophically the nature of the fundamentals of material, had some cool funny shock-aspects that were ‘OK’ outrageous rather than feeling like he was bucking for shock value. The Jizz lights seemed interesting to him rather than HEY AUDIENCE, PRESS AND CONSERVATIVES I JIZZED ON A LIGHTBULB - CHECK ME OUT BIIIIIIIIITCHEEEEEES!
He said the word semen very quietly the first few times so that it only sunk in later and the giggles grew.
Then me and scot went for a Party’s on curry ath the Balti house which was tasty and cool as we shot the shit with the owner, who is a lovely guy, but later the amount of fat gave me weird stomach spasms because I’m not used to armaGheedon any more.
Then we went to the Chameleon for the Kogumaza show that the band had pulled all the stops/facebook favours out to get people to and it worked. Dusty Bible’s guitar sounded amazing and I always like the songs, Gareth Hardwick sent me off thinking about cool things and Kogumaza were AMAZING. I kind of remember what I thought about them at Spanky Van Dykes show earlier in the year but they seem so much more like three musicians totally locked into each other and making a single giant tribal noise. It’s as though they’ve all grown around/into each other as musicians which has transformed the overall sound and while parts of it can be riffy and even, there were changes and parts that were really exciting. I’ll never understand how you play songs that have more than about 32 bars in a piece (I need lyric cues to split the fours up) unless someone counts but maybe you need to be a perfectionist as a musician to work that out.
Me and Scot evangelised about our new favourite Jizz and brains artist, we ate well but badly and new ‘A’s torn by Chris Neil and Katie. I pity the weekend that has to follow that.
The weekend of Steve(n) Severin, Teddys at the Contemporary, Art lecture at the Broadway, TROLL 2 and Burly Nagasaki practice.
I pity the week that has to follow that.
A week with Jumpe…..( it never ends)