There's no such thing as a harmless joke

Oct 23, 2007 14:00

Saturday was a day of culture: the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Tate Modern. OK, if we're strictly accurate, four of us went to see ( Jeffrey Lewis @ ICA )

gigs, art, london

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Comments 14

bateleur October 23 2007, 13:15:23 UTC
I don't see why this shouldn't extend to non-representational art.

Oh, but it does. The artist is absolutely not capable of stopping you seeing her work as a crack. In exactly the same way as artists are not capable of stopping critics from declaring their work to have deeper meanings than they themselves intended.

I do worry about what the sheep were up to in those landscapes you were looking at, though!

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venta October 23 2007, 13:26:19 UTC
I always worry about what sheep are up to. They're plotting, you know.

The artist is absolutely not capable of stopping you seeing her work as a crack.

No, but many people will mock you for interacting with it on such a naive level, and before you know where you are Brian Sewell has come round your house for a burst of personal sneering.

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j4 October 23 2007, 13:19:48 UTC
However, it isn't a shibboleth. It's a crack.

Isn't the shibboleth whether you see it as a crack or not? ;-)

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zotz October 23 2007, 13:24:09 UTC
And if you get it wrong they kill you?

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venta October 23 2007, 13:24:57 UTC
Aha! Maybe those people didn't just fall in...

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floralaetifica October 23 2007, 13:28:54 UTC
you can drop your toddler in it for a photo

This kind of thing is the best reason to have toddlers. That and spinning them round and round in an office chair, then setting them down to see them stumble away bewildered by their sudden lack of balance.

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bateleur October 23 2007, 15:00:45 UTC
Actually toddlers do things like that to themselves.

Once when Bea was not quite three she span herself round in a circle. "Be careful," I warned her, "You'll get dizzy." She laughed and laughed and carried on spinning round, then simply tipped over and crashed to the ground like a cartoon character. How she managed to be uninjured by this I have no idea!

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undyingking October 23 2007, 14:15:57 UTC
Does it go something like "Big A little A bouncing B / The system might have got you but it won't get me"? I have a very vague memory of seeing Crass doing something along those lines at a CND rally in maybe 1982 or thereabouts.

And the original Everett True is the annoyed chap in my usericon here. I found out about him a little while ago and did a post accordingly. "He's a walking id!" as sdn so rightly said.

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venta October 23 2007, 22:40:47 UTC
Does it go something like "Big A little A bouncing B / The system might have got you but it won't get me"

Pretty much exactly like that, actually, yes.

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undyingking October 24 2007, 09:05:13 UTC
Hmm, I guess that's vindication for the part of my brain that's been clinging on to that memory for the past quarter-century, but tbh I'd rather free it up for something marginally more useful...

Best Crass song I know of is the Falklands-related 'How Does It Feel (To Be the Mother of a Thousand Dead)?', is that on your compo? But I don't think I've heard any of the early stuff.

(To neatly unite your two themes, Crass drummer Penny Rimbaud's autobiography was called Shibboleth.)

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thegreenman October 23 2007, 16:26:17 UTC
A shibboleth always sounds like some vast alien creature to me. One thinks of Larry Nivens Bandersnatchii....

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venta October 23 2007, 22:41:14 UTC
Something more Lovecraftian, I'd say - Yog Shibboleth, eater of souls...

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