Art, Wine, Company
LONDON - Started my sleep-truncated day with the Ed Ruscha restropective at the South Bank's Hayward Gallery. Ruscha specializes in monumental juxtapositions of landscape and typography. Sometimes the words are austere objects of interest only for their value as objects in imaginary space. At other times their meanings imply an obscure but poetic connection to the vistas they dominate. Ruscha started working in a Pollock-dominated American artscape and continues to this day as an icon of post-modernism. His work combines austere formalism with a touch of pop art, in which irony is preserved but tongue-in-cheek elements largely drained from the proceedings. My favorite piece was a recent diptych, Azteca /Atzeca In Decline. The first monumental image is of a mural seen by the artist in Mexico, containing lines and forms congruent with his own work. The second shows the mural in a state of physically impossible deterioration, with the mural elements having slid off the gray background into a gluey heap. The second canvas appears to be scored and warped; on close inspection all of the apparent damage is conjured through astoundingly simple rendering techniques, entirely in 2D.
With a short period to spare before dinner plans, I whizzed through the nearby Dali Universe, a private museum permanently devoted to the Spanish surrealist, mere steps from the London Eye. (Essay assignment: London Eye as Esoterrorist installation. Go!) Dali Universe is a rubbishy tourist trap and appalling travesty of a museum. It is thus a far more poignant encapsulation of its maddeningly paradoxical protagonist than any proper exhibition could ever be. There isn't an original painting in sight-it's all prints, mostly torn from the pages of limited edition art books. Kitschy authorized sculptures, based on his much older paintings and approved by Dali in his dotage, abound. Also present are various costumes from a Dali-inspired fashion show staged years after his death. Random bits of classical music, including Vivaldi's Four Seasons, are piped in for the punter's listening enjoyment. As Dali served as both savior and Judas to the surrealist movement and was a proud prostitutor of his own legacy, this louche treatment is entirely on point. There's even a Dali penny roller, a make-your-own T-shirt offer, and a (regrettably roped-off) children's museum celebrating the “power of art.” This last item is especially fabulous, given the wild sexual explicitness of many of the prints on display. I have no idea whether the connected print gallery allows you to purchase genuine fake Dalis produced under dodgy circumstances in his final years, but certainly hope that it does. Only that would truly convey the man and his contradictions.
After that I met for pre-dinner toast, then dinner, then post-dinner drinks with longtime pal James Wallis, new friend the prodigiously productive Gareth Hanrahan and Gareth's fiancee Edel. Subsequently we repaired to Chez Rogers for more vino & badinage with an expanded crew, including new arrivee Brennan Taylor of IPR fame and his lovely wife Christa, whose name I am, statistics tell me, probably spelling wrong.
During the evening, we mooted such new products as The Book Of Mild Disappointments and a magazine called James.
The former would be a follow-on to The Book Of Unremitting Horror, featuring creatures less interested in curdling your soul than in betraying your already lowered expectations. So you'd get the beast that wasn't quite as scary as the one you were hoping for, or the one who breaks into your house, eats your food and washes your dishes-but does a poor job, leaving food specks requiring you to redo all of its inadequate washing-up.
James would be to James Wallis what Oprah magazine is to Oprah Winfrey. It would consist entirely of complaints about printing errors and delays arising from the previous issue. Able to achieve full poignance only in hardcopy, this would not only single-handedly save the magazine industry but would be the best periodical of all time.
Did I mention that the later-mentioned portions of the evening featured a certain amount of wine consumption?