The crumbling core of Britain’s pout.

Jericho, Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy Courtyard, 2007

 Some artworks stay with me indelibly. Experiencing Anselm Kiefer’s Annenberg courtyard commission “Jericho” (above) is one of the most prominent memories of my few years in London, yet one I have rethought and re-understood time and time again.

Now, as I am contemplating my future in our nation’s capital, it strikes me as a disturbingly appropriate commentary on the things about London I find most problematic, both within the “art world” and as a place to call home.

(NB: I hate the words art and world put together like that).

Kiefer’s works have puzzled and enthralled me for years now, and I often feel somehow ill-prepared for the full weight they exert, both in meaning and in materiality. Nowhere was this truer than when I was standing in the royal academy courtyard before these two monoliths. My reaction to the work at the time understood some sort of apt and historical linkage between the empirical prowess and pomp of the RA and the rotten, shanty-builds of Kiefer’s towers, unashamedly delivering a treatise on social divides, class divides; non-sequential historical narratives crossing borders and centuries. The towers appeared a public meditation on their immediate vicinity, whilst also leaving shadows as far as the British Empire once stretched. They appeared like totemic exemplars of 3^rd world living conditions, but also of the crumbling core of Britain’s pout. A smile swept off.

The image above is crowned with a sorry St. George’s cross more appropriate than any metaphor could muster.

Now, however, all of these thoughts ring somehow hollow, or at least superficial. London has taken on a particular shape for me, in my conscious. It lies somewhere between the metropolis of my childhood excitement, sidling up alongside New York, Paris, Chicago… (the battlefields of my dreamt desires)… and the twisted archaic monstrosity as presented beligerently by J. G. Ballard in his 1997 essay Airports.

London itself seems hopelessly antiquated. Its hundreds of miles of gentrified stucco are an aching hangover from the nineteenth century that should have been bulldozed decades ago. London may well be the only world capital – with the possible exception of Moscow – that has gone from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first without experiencing all the possibilities and excitements of the twentieth in any meaningful way. Visiting London, I always have the sense of a city devised as an instrument of political control, like the class system that preserves England from revolution. The labyrinth of districts and boroughs, the endless columned porticos that once guarded the modest terraced cottages of Victorian clerks, together make clear that London is a place where everyone knows his place.   

I’ve come to know my place, and London’s place. After three years, its enchantment alongside New York, Paris, Chicago is on the wain… it is failing to hold sway even next to the (sent to) Coventry of my childhood. The municipal pride is lacking that any great city should harbor in abundance, even in my friends born here and bred here or hereabouts. It is a sham of a capital dressed up as a frivolous parlour game. In the setting of the royal academy, Jericho shames London into submission if only for a second, condemning everything corrupt and moribund about this flailing home of elitism.

The snootiness of such institutions as Christies resembles a club I’ll never be allowed in… I would only want to be in a club that would have me as a member… and it is that club mentality which I constantly fit out of here… I don’t sit well amongst “gentrified stucco”, and the contorted concrete and twisted steel of Jericho appears closer to the Coventry of my childhood, my comfort zone and my understanding. Coventry is both the fragmented sorrow and the toneless concrete personified. London is the colonial oppressor. Coventry is my retarded younger brother.

Coventry Cathedral after the Blitz, 1940.

Coventry’s Mercia House

I was recently thinking about what I consider to be London’s poor musical lineage in comparison to places like LA and New York, only to come across Paul de Noyer’s new book In the City: A Celebration of London Music. It got me thinking about what London might sound like, and the disquieting, threatening rumble of dub-step and grime seems more apt to the London I’ve experienced than any cheeky chappy mod or ska group. I don’t want to descend into Ballardian crises, but this city isn’t all waterloo sunset. It is strikingly akin to what I have found looking back at Jericho.

All this interpretation is for us to find… Kiefer offers us little, and resists interpretation. He only offers us up the ability to process our own thoughts.

Listen to Erik Satie

A month or so back, whilst killing my brain cells in a data entry temp job, I wrote in my moleskin,

 “Thought of the week: they didn’t have data entry in the 1900s when things were good and pure. Listen to erik satie.”

 I am now working again for the same company before, and so decided to ramble along with this thought as a starting point.

 **

 When I call myself a Modernist (with all the appropriate levels of irony and facetiousness) I am never quite sure if my interest should be manifest as a desire to have lived in the early twentieth century, to recreate the values and hopes of that era (be it in writing or in method), or simply an appreciation of /SLASH/ kinship with a purer time. Probably somewhere in the middle of all of these. Recently, I have experienced a notable slowing down in my life – some might call it growing up – and my current way of thinking is underpinned by the aforementioned appreciation of, and kinship with, a purer time. That is, a slower, less hectic, less demanding, less box-ticking-orientated approach to life. i want out.

 There is something about modernism which seemed to grasp and celebrated the death knell of simplicity, reveling both in the new excitement of a globalizING, technologizING world, and an inseperable appreciation of reality through eyes opened by the new order. Before a success- and commerce-driven experience of the every day kicked into gear, Picasso’s analytical still lives and Kandinsky’s exuberant portrayals of the Russian landscape briefly saw the world as it could have been.

 Something tried to destroy that in the 1940s.

 These works remain for me mementos of a non-day-glo, no-instant-gratification, non-merchandised and, most of all, artisanal rather than theoretical approach to art (let’s just stick with the arts for now, or this subject will get out of hand!). Even the most existential, searing portrayal of life such a Soutine’s poultry, or Giacometti’s Orange on a sideboard are rooted in representation… without wanting to sound old fashioned, I like that. The end of representation seems to me parallel to the end of reality as a lived experience.. Theory’s dominance came in tandem with the rolling out of vicarious living: tv, computer games, internet etc.

 I want out.

 But when I consider the purity of day-to-day life back then, before the internet, pandemic advertising and 24-hour customer service, I feel pangs of jealousy and longing. Currently caught up in the trappings of customer service, a 21^st century buzz-word for Joe-Job aimed at the temporarily unemployed, I continue to ponder the original question. If they didn’t have data entry in the 1900s, what did the multitudes do… well for a start, the world population was significantly smaller, and social stratification was clearer (I won’t touch the ramifications of current population levels here…too big and way out of my point of reference). Now, we are encouraged to pursue our dreams only to find at too late a stage we have gone too far without thinking about the openings available to us. Here I am, a postgraduate from the Courtauld Institute of Art, working in a call centre.

Erik Satie’s piano works remove me from 2009. They place me squarely in the Lapin Agile, or some other such Parisian drinking den crowded with delirium tremens of the highest order. Even Tom Wait’s piano ballads of the 70s feel soothing, sitting me squarely amongst imaginary boho savants and drunken revelers in the Troubadour, LA, CA. Debauchery in both of these cases as a removal from life. What I seem to be desiring is pure removal: pure escapism. This is certainly better than this electric-lit, chalk infused, pinboard- partitioned, break-prohibited cell, alone with my thoughts and my telesale prompts.

 I WANT OUT.

 More recently, a few wonderful bands have sprung up from American backwaters, desperate to escape all of these trappings. Bon iver and Bowerbirds are only the most notable, existing for themselves self-sufficiently as life once was. We’re probably going back further than Modernism now. My point remains intact. I was born at the wrong end of the 20^th century.  

Two works that I have seen in the last few years stand out for me as exemplifications of artistic purity. Monet’s Les Nymphéas at Paris’ Orangerie, and James Turrell’s Deer Shelter at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park… the latter proves that all is not lost, and that conceptual works can still stand up to scrutiny and resemble a real human experience: one’s looks through a skylight towards the clouds… that’s it. Abstracted reality. Pure form. Pure experience.

 This is how Erik Satie’s music makes me feel, as do such bands/ composers as Susuma Yokota, Christian Fennesz, and the unimpeachable Stars of the Lid. These pure feelings having nothing to do with data entry. They also probably having nothing to do with Modernism… I just want out.

Cezanne Picasso, Aix-en-Provence, June 2009

Since childhood, Cezanne’s provencal landscapes have held a special significance for me. Never the early experiments in form and colour that textbooks might have had me believe, they were only ever – and remain to be – the most appropriate rendition of this harsh, scorched mediterranean lanscape as first viewed by an eight month old toddler – myself.

Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne’s birthplace and hometown for the majority of his life, has also been the home to my auntie and uncle for thirty seven years. Last week was my first visit for 9 years to the town I spent every summer in for the first decade of my life. In this gap, my understanding of art has developed and matured hundred fold and some, and ye the Aix I found last week was one of retrieved memories, not pictorial recreation. The heat, the searing smell of pine, lavender and European sewage, the constant chatter of crickets, they all returned me to a place in my formative years. In the gardens of the Pavilion Vendome, only the red roundabout rang true, not the 17th century chateau.

Yet my return comes as a result of the goings on of the last ten years of my life. It has been a coming together of my stages of evolution, with the presentation of “Picasso Cezanne” at the Musee Granet in this town my childhood, two years after the meteorically successful Cezanne retrospective there. The basic premise of the exhibition is to consider Picasso’s devotion to, referencing of, and development via the lessons of Cezanne, the master of Aix, whose work laid the path for modernism, and Picasso’s rendition of the world through newly found eyes.

It’s results are extraordinary.

Rather than writing a review of the exhibition, however, of which many exist, I have decided to briefly dabble with the ideas which came to be during my time in the exhibition, and in the following four days I spent in Aix and Marseille, in which time I visited Vauvernargues, Picasso’s home from 1959 and 1961 and his final resting place, opened only for the duration of the exhibition, l’Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, Le Corbusier’s great modernist housing block, the Fondation Vasarely in Aix, a purpose built home for the Polish Op-Artists works long since cared for with anything like an appropriate level of funding or maintenance, and of course this area inhabited by my artistic heroes.

The first real success which stood out for me came as a result of one of my auntie’s first comments after picking me up at Marignane airport, driving through the Provencal hills south of Aix. My flight landed at the – unusually for a budget flight – respectful hour of two in the afternoon. My auntie happily commented upon the reversal of shadows on the hills she had come to known so well driving back and forth to the airport for friends and family over the years. This movement of shadows immediately stood out for me as a simply put comment within the Bergsonian framework of time’s flow, and the integration of experience, memory and the present. Here was a non-static landscape constantly interrupting it’s own, and our memories; shadows able to tell different stories to a watchful and respectful audience; the passage of time exemplified by shifting shadows and light.

Appropriately then, the first stop we made once in Aix was a garden opened only a few years ago, a few hundred metres further up the avenue Paul Cezanne than his atelier, from where Cezanne painted some of his most famous views of the Mont Sainte Victoire. Standing here, one can see exactly the colours and shapes of Cezanne’s work, and one can imagine how the shifting shadows and colours over an afternoon, not to mention the shifting visibility resulting from the mistral’s intent, might lead to a confusion of colour and perspectival intent might be found more in artistic oratory of a view rather than any Bergsonian theory… or somewhere inbetween.

And so images by Picasso in the exhibition such as those painted in Gosol in 1905-06, in which shadows systematically disagreed with one another in orientation, then became for me rather a Cezannian lesson in the passage of time, and a romanticised view of the movement of light. Morning afternoon evening. Both of their landscapes have dramatically shifted in my cognition.

Visiting the Vasarely museum two days later, I was still thinking about this question when I encountered these optical art pieces; harsh abstraction for the sake of pure colour and form, yet in images similar to the one below, I found something of the above which I have yet to reconcile in my thought process.

It certainly seems to me there is something to be found in the space between these two works, or maybe more particularly in other examples. I have always found abstraction a hard conundrum to crack, but also saw these works in Aix as a child, and have always been intrigued by the games therein. Similarly, I like to see Picasso’s application of his own vision a game of sorts. Perspective becomes a word malleable in it’s ambiguity, as one’s perspective need not chime with the purest one identified and sought out by the past master’s. In modernism, perspective becomes a defiantly isolated view down a valley.

One other brief consideration I came upon was to do with why Picasso never seemed to usurp Cezanne in the way he did happily any number of greats in his career, even the Spanish greats. Though he did famously state upon buying Vauvenargues ”j’acheté le mont-Sainte-Victoire de Cézanne” as a result of it’s views over the mountain (not to mention the fact that the surround 10000 hectares included one side of the mountain), he never painted it but, arguably, for in one nude of 1959.

Yet in Braque’s early pilgrimage to l’Estaque where he first painted with the cubist style (if one is to accept THIS starting point), we find the most direct encounter between cubism and modernism at an early point. And in a later portrait of a man with a pipe by Picasso, possibly of Braque, we find a relation to similar such images of Cezanne, and Braque’s mystique appears more closely tied into the fable. Picasso never approached Cezanne so clearly in a career that lasted another seventy years!

Finally, in visiting the Unite d’Habitation a few hours before my flight: just another housing block in south marseille, the message became clear, as the art which emerged from the south of france throughout the modernist period so frequently found its place in the landscape and in it’s contemporaneous origins…

and on also discovering that Blaise Cendrars lived for a short period in Aix, my entire perspective of this town and this countryside had finally been overcome by my education… until the next time those smells and sounds hit me.

Le Corbusier vs. Ken Kesey

Having interned at the Barbican Art Gallery towards the current Le Corbusier retrospective late last year, I have spent a lot of time thinking about his approach and method, successes and failures. These, the first thoughts I have penned, result from a talk I went to last week by Marc Treib from UCB speaking about Le Corbusier’s involvement with the 1958 Philips Pavilion from the Brussels world fair, and my own thoughts on the subject, which have taken a twist following my recent literary adventures in the world of the Merry Pranksters.

Though Corbusier’s involvement with the architectural schema of the Philips Pavilion was shown by Treib quite conclusively to be in doubt, it having actually been fully realised and designed by Iannis Xenakis, it is the Pavilion’s insides that interest me. Built in response to the Philips companies desires for a totemic temple to the power of electricity: their electrictity, as well as the potential technological advances thought possible through their progression, Le Corbusier’s écran for the insides of the pavilion was a considered thesis on the potential of technology.

Here, the grand master of modernist design stepped his methods up a notch, working with the Philips Company to create a “synthesis of the arts”, where images, animation, light, colour, overwhelming sound from 300 odd speakers (in the shape of Edgar Varèse’s composition which worked within and against the space given to it) and design integrated towards an EXPERIENCE. The effect must have been destabilising. a multi-sensory attack of the modern, the new, the possible.

Though Varèse’s soundtrack, now thought a modern masterpiece, was attacked by none other than Fritz Philips as “everything rallied against by the free world” (though Treib amusingly pointed out Stalin may well not have liked it either), the piece as a whole was thought a celebration of technological prowes…

…and yet the reality is that in Corbu’s imagery, starting off at Dinosaur’s, the virgin mother, “primitive sculpture” and buddha, before moving on through auschwitz and machinery, science fiction and planes, to missiles, nukes and mushroom clouds, before settling on babies, love and the universe (according to my notes), the message presented appears both an anti-technological, anti-evolutionary, anti-MODERN diatribe on technologies failings. (Though as Treib commented, Corbu also positioned his own buildings in the latter part of the filmic trajectory…the love and babies bit! contrived to say the least). But the message reads as though Corbu was rallying against the free-world just as Varèse was said to be, or rather pointing out its pitfalls and its indiscipline.

Indeed, the abstract glitchiness of the soundtrack came on at times like a Warp records noise box… squarepusher at his laziest, making the twisty squelchy noises with none of the DnB and gabba furiosity… a maniacal accomplishment in the 50s and a musical ode to abstraction which itself was the protégé of modernist pictorial ennui.

When a member of the audience asked about the surrealist overtones of the piece, however, Treib defiantly stated that they weren’t there to be found except maybe in a footnote… the reality seemed to me quite the opposite. Many of the images were directly lifted from Georges Bataille’s Documents journal, and fell perfectly within the surrealist programme of misappropriation and confusion which sought to reimagine the world as unexplainable, curious, impregnable and, ultimately, failed… ish.

AND SO, it was here that my mind ticked over. Having just finished Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, the success of Corbu’s film seemed, rather than a reverential meditation on technological and economic prowess, a sort of nihilistic renunciation of the accepted order, and a call to arms VIA the new technology… a multi-sensory evocation of NEW as a method of CHANGE… MODERNISM’S CENTRAL TENET.

Just as Ken Kesey’s acid tests were, in essence, a reimagining of space, of thought, or human approaches to understanding and our abilities to comprehend and explain the world around us unilaterally, so might Corbu’s work with Philips have been a way to promote hope through discombobulation.

As the merry prankster’s trials with LSD and with multi-sensory befuddlement were a dada-esque manifesto on new approaches to SEEING, so, perhaps, was the philip pavilion’s true story one of progression through insurrection.

The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test left me thirsty for reimagining my approach to thought, both responding to Kesey’s desire for advancement away from reality, or away from the expected line, and responding to Wolfe’s literary style which in it’s quasi-concrete form attempted to approach Kesey’s direction with sensitivity and understanding…

As e e cummings’ poetry has long been for me a way into thinking about semiotics and the possibilities of words and images, so do both of these projects appear somehow utopian in their desire to confuse… a reality much more appreciative of life as we live it…

john hughes is my god

I was just about to sit down and watch a vhs (yeah, a vhs) I recently purchased entitled bad medicine, starring the illustrious steve guttenberg, and thought it worthwhile to explain my love of 80s movies.

While I can’t vouch for the film in question, concerning as it does, according to wikipedia, “ethnic stereotypes”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Medicine_(film)

i certainly can vouch for 80s movies generally with exactly that carpet statement. The eighties come in for a lot of flack, as do its movies, and indeed my movies, the ones I love, the ones I own on vhs proudly. and continue to buy on VHS. The eighties are oftentimes considered worthwhile only in ironic terms, or especially in ironic terms.

The thing for me is that 80s movies represent the era I was born into. I grew up with my parent’s telling me the reader’s digest version of thatcher, of conservatism, of economics, of war with the first gulf, and I remember the early films I watched and my first visits to the cinema being filled with joy and excitement and removal from reality. I remember seeing back to the future III at the old theatre one in Coventry, now gone, where popcorn piled high on the floor, tickets were cheap, and so were the customers. It sits in a still inhospitable corner of the city centre, and has held various short lived estalishments since theatre one closed.

I remember going to the movies and having to complain that the picture/sound quality was awful. Even more so, I remember this with videos. The video shop, only open on rainy days or so my brother one thought, represented a world of options, some for older people, some just for you. All of them contained an hour and a half’s escapism in grainy and imperfect form.

The problem with films today, for me, isn’t the film itself, but the perfection of its delivery. Digitisation had made all of our expectations too high. Perfection is the least of our expectations. Faultless delivery, on time, still hot etc.

Videos represent the chance that things might not work out okay, either for yourself or the protaganist. Okay, the geeky girl will always get the cool guy, but hey, that’s what escapism is for. and that’s just it, the loser wins. Time and again, the films I watched when I was younger helped me believe in myself. Teen Wolf represented to a gangly boy who wished he was better at basketball the chance that it might just happen, one full moon, with a killer soundtrack.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30sYk9B4OqU

and John Hughes: the ultimate movie maker for Generation X. In Hughes’ world, anything was possible, it was okay to be below average, and you weren’t stuck in what you were born with.

As another recession kicks in, I can only hope a return to hopefulness and imperfection enters the world of movies, and by extension, our understanding of ourselves.

endemol = EndEmAll

I recently read the following article in the guardian about the repugnant production company Endemol’s latest televisual stroke of voyeuristic and sickening public nuisance, “Someone’s Gotta Go.”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/09/endemol-us-reality-tv-unemployment

That’s right, you can now get sacked AND made to feel worthless AND be humiliated in front of a live studio audience, or thereabouts. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about reality TV and its impact on society versus its relation to society, and I can’t get passed the idea that we are beginning to live vicarously through our TV screens. This isn’t a Ballardian metaphor…

Watching the slow decline of Jade Goody, I constantly considered her dalliance with the dailies a masterstroke of PR (I hate Max Clifford too, but bear with me). For a woman who grew up, matured and lived her adult life in the spotlight, now blighted by the most terrible of diseases, what else could she do but rinse our public grieving for all she could. Her career in real terms can be counted in newspaper pages, sentences, photos, appearances. Her income was based on voyeurism. Ultimately, her pension and her last will and testament was bled into the redtops over the course of a month or two, leaving her kids with more photos to add to the scrapbook and many more pounds in the bank. She grew up in an unreal world, and played its game.

That was her choice.

But the idea of being publicly humiliated and losing one’s job is a step further. This sense of public invasion is worrying, but it’s the logical conclusion of the public fascination with a televisual community. Where people used to gossip about their neighbours over the garden fence, now they gossip over internet comment boards, and down “vote off your least favourite” phonelines. They play these people’s lives like the newest add on to the computer game Sims. We all play our part.

The digitisation of reality and the need to understand electronically (wikipedia versus the britanica etc) culminates in the expectation of perfection and immediate gratification in watching someone getting sacked and eating popcorn, rather than hearing about it from Betty at no. 24 and realising that this thing is REAL!

A recent conversation with a stupid rich girl, daughter of a banker, who justified banker’s bonuses in relation to their “miniscle wages” made me realise that young, naive working class women like Jade Goody don’t represent anything more than a cartoon to most people, and the divisions in society remain, and remain deep. To do well and line one’s pockets with the public’s gullibility is the perfect inversion of the usual trend towards entrenchment of stereotypes. And yet I can’t help but feel that anyone sacked on “Someone’s Gotta Go” will soon find work in a similar line of empty fame, and riches beyond the walls of their previous position of employment. Perhaps the goal for all of us should be to reach the promised land beyond our own, in front of an Ant and Dec hosted celebration of uniform mundanity. We love it. Britain’s Got Talent has just restarted celebrating that our great isle loves crapness, and rewards it many times over. Meanwhile, thousands with real skills and abilities remain unemployed.

It is not the people perpetuating and wrapped up in this unreal televisual world of fake money who I detest, but those who choose blindly to subscribe to the world which created it, the world which forced its hand. The bankers who waved money out of the bank’s of England and Scotland at protestors during the G20, missing entirely the position this country is in, and their position in it.. They may only be pawns in the game, but they are far more stuck in their roles than any social movers from the world of documentia, and far more deserving of an almight public argument than Jade Goody. She might have died without dignity, but at least her lack of diginity didn’t sap our society into a massive recession.

May “Someone’s Gotta Go” come to our shores and remove some of those foul toffy nosed pompous bankers who fail to partake in the reality of society (their aren’t many garden fences in the limehouse penthouses and shoreditch lofts so forgive them) , keeping only those willing to show some compassion for their fellow humans. Reality TV has a funny way of filing the dregs of society into the world of unreality anyway. Put them their. No, let’s make a larger, more programme-atic removal of the bankers and the toffes and the TV executives who roll in the money created by other’s misfortune, gather them up and give them and all-mighty gunging on national TV, hosted by Dave Benson Philips, then spend weeks argueing over whether watching the slow decline of their Gucci suits is our final social indignity.

the exhibition that changed my life

The guardian is running a competition in conjunction with Bob and Roberta Smith to write a 25 word review of the exhibition that changed you life.

I just wrote a long preface to the 25 words themselves (printed below) about the summer’s day in 1999 when my father, my brother and I visited the Jackson Pollock retrospective at Tate. WordPress decided to delete it before I could publish it, but I am half thankful. In the discipline of writing just 25 words, I tried to consider what was most important, and writing much more somehow dampens what I chose to write, which is the absolute crux of why that show changed me…. so here we go.

“My father’s an art teacher, he taught me a lot. But at age 15, 1999, Jackson Pollock taught us concurrently for the very first time.”

my own failures

In the current Gerhard Richter show at the National Portrait Gallery in London, a mirror is exhibited as the final work in the show; an extension and culmination of Richter’s career-long excavation of the process of seeing. Painting and photography intertwined and equally unable to convey reality: opposition to – and appreciation of – abstraction…

I love the exhibition. I love Richter’s denunciation of realism, and his exploration of seeing through layers of technological insight. The sfumato of his early works, or the disintegration in later series such as the S. mit kind works appear emblematic of our learning through images. Photoshop accounts for our idea of beauty. I frequently perplex my girlfriend by trying to justify what and who i find beautiful. I can’t put into words or a totalised picture the result of what’s been fed to me via magazines, european cinema, victorian painting, porn, friends from both an upbringing in the poorer parts of coventry and the more affluent bubbles of postgraduate art history, and most vividly my own tastes which underlie all these things..somewhere.. hopefully.

But I was probably more interested at the NPG to find this mirror positioned at the end of a corridor of sorts. It acts as both a unifier of the exhibitions rooms, and an expected culmination of the exhibition’s point. It proposes that Richter’s interest is society’s reflection on themselves…

But it also, almost, finds itself in the league of major works such as Velazquez’ Las Meninas, Holbein’s Ambassadors, Matisse’s Snail, etc (at the Prado, National Gallery and Tate respectively) which are most often found at the ends of corridors to aggrandise their importance. They muscle themselves into every room preceeding them, and muscle out their competitors for sightseers looking only for the most famous works. They stand defiantly, exclaiming their own importance.

So does the mirror. It infiltrates the entire exhibition from the first time you see it at the end of the second room. The next three rooms are interjected by one’s own self-consideration. For me, the entire exhibition was superceded by my own shyness, and desire to not be looked at and considered by my fellow gallery visitors… I didn’t want to be the art…

But these power games appear everywhere in life.

Since I moved to London two and a half years ago, I have been consistently impressed by 30 St. Mary Axe, “the Gherkin”, not only for it’s beauty, but more particularly for its location. Walking down Whitechapel high st, the Roman Road and/or Kingsland Road, as I frequently did, it looms large. It ingrains itself in your conscious and on the london sky line. Yet in recent months I have noticed that the almost completed 100 Bishopsgate has been muscling in on the Gherkin’s territory. It has overtaken the Gherkin’s place at the end of East London’s major roads.

I love 100 Bishopsgate, not just for the aforementioned pompousity, but also for its shifting form, from the block skyscraper visible from parliament hill, to the gentile wedge seen from the end of the Bethnal Green Road, and I think it somehow mirrors Richter’s mirror. They both seem to reflect upon one’s own place in society. They both help me consider myself in relation to them.

Perhaps i’m being kind to 100 Bishopsgate, which might equally stand for the cocksuredness of the banking sector before the financial decline… I like to ignore that.

Instead, with both it and Richter’s Mirror, I am encouraged to attempt to make my own mark, however large or small. I consider my own importance, and believe I am capable of such an impact. I put myself up against everything surrounding me as both an equal and someone capable of, one day, conquering vistas and bookending corridors…

art history as individualised recapitulation

 

If all poetry is rebranding as the poet Luke Wright recently suggested, then perhaps all art history is individualised recapitulation, a misplaced narcissism of sorts: Art history as the internalised exemplification of one’s own history. This seems true of criticism at the very least… I’m going to roll with it. 

As with music, what moves one and makes one’s neck hairs stand on end retains a personal significance to be reckoned with later in words and reasoning. When Jo Wiley said in the BBC commentary for the 2007 Glastonbury festival that Brian Wilson’s performance was the first time she had actually felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, however, I was troubled. I experience this on a daily basis, and oftentimes with regards to something much less culturally significant than Brian Wilson’s presentation of his opus to a crowd of thousands. My enjoyment and appreciation of “the arts”, therefore, demands an overtly individualised response, frequently backed up by and similarly improved by the patterns of my own biography. 

And so it was that the exhibition of Sir Basil Spence’s architecture, currently on show at the recently re-jigged and re-opened Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry, tickled my nape. As a Coventrian born and bred and a Sussex graduate, my platonic ideals of English modernist architecture are informed largely by the buildings which form the backbone of his career, Coventry Cathedral and the University of Sussex campus, at the summit of which lies the root of my enthusiasm, one might be tempted to hyperbolise. Moreover, in these buildings referred to regularly as the ‘most personal’ of his achievements remains some of the most personal of my experiences of architecture; independently sanctuary like, and home manifest. 

Yet the exhibition was and is so much more than that in my reading of it. Firstly, a wonderful achievement for the city of Coventry which has found itself all but lacking in the cultural expression it deserves and needs for decades, and secondly a reminder of both the metaphoric and the actualised possibilities for reconstruction and rebranding that Coventry possesses. 

“Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town,                                                                       We danced and sang and music played inna de boomtown”

sang the Specials in the eighties. Now, slowly, Coventry is rekindling its former glory. Similarly,  I am attempting to refigure my trajectory having found my designs interjected by misfortune. And as Coventry Cathedral’s construction was plagued by arguments during its design between the need for it to express the city’s loss and subsequent reconstruction as well as the country’s at large, so must I meet the demands of my own expectations and a wider world. 

Spence’s early promise and natural talent is apparent in the works which form the beginning of this exhibition: the early days. A skilled craftsman as well as artist, the curator’s propose his birth in India and all of the cultural lessons that presented to a young man as key in his development. More important from the work they display, however, appears the moment of modernism into which he was born, be it in his early designs for the Southern Motors Garage in Edinburgh imbued with all of the excitement of modern engineering which informed his contemporaries, his designs for the Festival of Britain in 1951 contained within promotion of the contemporary, and even in his brush work in which must be found an enthusiastic rendering of life through the eyes the modernist masters.

 

It is here that his work must be placed, with all of the importance of artists who captured separately the energy, the fears, the speed, the size and the possibilities of twentieth century life. In Coventry Cathedral’s entrance screen by John Hutton, bridging the gap between the new and the old,