At this years Greenbelt Festival I’m privileged to have been asked to be involved with a performance piece by Kaya Hanasaki, a performance artist who is a resident of Fukushima, Japan. She’s been over in the UK as a part of a respite programme by another artist, Kaori Homma. The idea is to get artists to spend some time away from Fukushima for so respite from both the stress and the very real physical danger.
It’s been a year and a half since the nuclear accident at Fukushima occurred, and now that the incident has to some extent faded from the media spotlight the people who live there have now somehow got to get on with their lives.
It turns out that the situation is not good at all, and that they’re still not sure what exactly to do with the power stations.
The group of artists based around Project Fukushima have started to hold a festival that “will let the entire world know about Fukushima as it is now, and as it will be in the future. We are determined to turn Fukushima into a positive word.” It’s well worth digging into their website and finding out about what’s going on over there, both within the festival and in Fukushima at large, as I suspect that the implications of Japan’s attempts to find a future that somehow deals with the implications of nuclear fuel and a strong desire to do without it are worked out, will have an influence upon all of us.
I’ve seen some video footage of Kaya’s performance, and it is at once very moving, emotional and loaded with imagery and symbolism. It’s certain to be a Greenbelt highlight, and I’m involved in trying to live stream the performance back to Japan. This could be tricky as the event is on Saturday at 2pm, so getting anything to stream smoothly when everyone is hammering the wifi will be a bit of a task, but we’ll see how we get on.
See you in the Hub on Saturday 25th August at 2pm.
Every so often I decide it’s time for me to do my bit to make our shabby estate more beautiful by attempting to plant some flowers in the planter on our balcony. (Don’t be fooled by the pictures in the link. Most of the estate does not look like that!)
Many of you who know me will be laughing at this point. I’m not at all green-fingered, and when I plant things and nurture them they tend to die.
In the times that I have attempted this before, the plants in question have been:
1) Choked to death by the most voracious weeds I’ve ever come across.
2) Massacred by some form of greenfly that clings to the stalks of any plant that’s planted there.
3) Dug out and shat upon by the cat from downstairs.
However, this time around I have attempted again and learnt a few things in the process…
I do want to be able to plant a few herbs to use for cooking. (Boring bit: I’d heard that begonias are good for diverting the greenfly away from things, plus they have a lovely colour that should look great when they grow. So I planted some parsley in the middle of the planter, and two begonias either side.)
Well, the voracious weeds are back. It’s astonishing – I always pull the little buggers out by the root, but they start growing out again, sometimes with little green leaves within the space of 12 hours.
And for some reason, the two begonias on the right are flourishing, but the two on the left are dying! Why?!? I treat them exactly the same!
At the risk of sounding like some rubbishy “Thought for the Day” monologue, this does feel like a bit of a metaphor for estate life and perhaps life in general.
To try and establish a bit of creativity and beauty, to push back the ugliness, is immensely hard, especially when outside forces are so intent on destroying it. Where did these weeds come from?!? There’s hardly any greenery round here! Is it from other people’s un-tended flower boxes (every flat has one)? Did it drift in on the wind? Who knows. All I know is that within about 3 days, if I don’t do weeding, it’s virtually unmanageable.
Also – to establish a critical mass of change in a place requires an effort from everyone. My one window box is not going to change the world, and certainly not going to reign in the daily anti-social behaviour that is a feature of our lives here. If all 13 flats made the effort, we might stand a chance of at least looking a bit nice. We might even get a bit of community spirit.
I’ve been thinking about the lad who was stabbed at Victoria station in rush hour 2 years ago. He’d fled into the ticket hall, as you should, thinking that being in a crowded space would somehow protect him. This is the advice that is generally given. But there was just too many of them. A big crowd of tooled up kids did what they did, and there was nothing anyone could do.
So here I am. Against the critical mass. Just me and my window box. Will there be an army of people come to establish something beautiful? Can my example of a beautiful window box make a difference? Will other people follow suit, in the face of rampant anti-social behaviour and a housing association that couldn’t care less, to try to make the place at least pleasant to look at? Or is the critical mass with those who like to smash things up? Or are too depressed to even try? Or can’t see what the point of trying is?
As you can see, I have given my site a bit of a facelift.
Alas, I can’t take all the credit for all of it. Huge props must go to Manish Gori at Themezen, for supplying me with this template, and putting up with my constant requests for suport via e-mail. He got me there in the end. Also, the wonderful Joel Baker designed some icons for me. You should check out his webspace.
All photographs are mine of course, as is the writing. The re-design puts the focus on the images of my work, whilst allowing me to work on other projects and display them here. On the home page, I can feature up to five of my strongest works with a little bit of writing about each of them. It also keeps my Tumblr, Blog and Shop centre-stage, whilst having some space for other dedicated areas for the side-projects I’m engaged in.
I hope you like the newness, and I shall endeavour to be more regular in my updates.
It’s always a difficult one re-designing a website. You know that when you push the button marked “change how everything looks”, it creates a whole lot of work for yourself that you don’t need. However, this needed doing. My previous blog template was an adapted template from the web, and although I’d put a lot of work into it, and was pleased with the results, I knew that it wasn’t right about a month after I’d done it. It just looked too amatuerish somehow. The new template, I’m sure you’ll agree, looks much better, allows a lot more scope for future updates, while also being something I’ll hopefully be able to live with for a lot longer.
So I’ve basically got myself a new phone. After years of being a dyed-in-the-wool Nokia supporter, I have changed to HTC.
I don’t consider myself to be a social media maven/guru/etc., but I do use social media, I base a lot of my work on that kind of thing, I do a lot of it with my phone, and I do feel that I have something to say about my choice. And I would be interested to see if people disagree with my reasons.
Like most people I know, when the Nokia N95 came out, I goggled, marvelled, and was envious. I’ve been using a Nokia N86 8MP for the past two years (the one in the photo at the top of this post), and when it came out it was the dog’s nuts. It came with Nokia’s Symbian operating system, and one of the features was that you could download any updates to the system direct to the phone via SIM card or Wifi – you didn’t need to log in to OVI, or any of that malarkey.
Well, reader in two years of owning that there phone, I got one upgrade and then they stopped making the phone. I felt that the build quality was appalling. It crashed repeatedly and moved at a snails pace. It shipped with a dodgy battery. I spent 2 years wistfully gazing out the window and typing #*0000* in the hope that more upgrades would come. In the 4 years since the N95, and especially since the advent of the iPhone, Nokia’s Symbian looks and feels clunky and clumsy. It’s a complete ball-ache to use, and I can not find any easy way to make this system to interact with my MacbookPro.
You see, I’m a simple user. I have shit to do. I do not have time to partition my Hard Drive in order to get my phone to do all the things it can do, when most other phones will just plug in and get on with it. It is shockingly criminal that Nokia have never worked smoothly with OSX.
And now I hear that the Android Operating System offered to work with Nokia, and they turned it down. Not only that, they’ve decided to jump ship and make Windows Phone 7 their new operating system. You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me.
If I were to go and get a Nokia N8, I would be going with Nokia’s Symbian, which they are abandoning. Based on my experience of updates and fixes with the N86, do you think they’re going to bother making sure my N8 works tickety boo? No, me neither.
It’s a shame. I’ve wildly supported Nokia over the years. And yep, that N8 has lots of good features. The aforementioned camera, an FM transmitter, DAB radio to name but three. But for the reasons I’ve outlined, as they say on Dragon’s Den: “I’m out.”
So why not the iPhone? Why not the iPhone? Get an iPhone. Ah, but you haven’t got an iPhone. The iPhone‘s better.
Or so several very annoying people say.
I am a complete Apple fanatic, and they do make exceedingly good laptops. But sorry. That camera? Still not great, despite what they’ve brought to it recently. And really there’s nothing on that phone that you would need and can’t get on any other phone just as smoothly.
And then there’s what a friend of mine refers to as the Jobs-ian Fist. If you want to listen to an MP3 YOU BOUGHT in iTunes on any other non-Apple device, you can’t. At least not without a lot of faffing around which is totally unnecessary. Back to the “life’s too short” issue you’ve got with things like partitioning hard drives for a Nokia.
Seriously guys, it’s like phones are stuck in the late 80s. We went through all this “getting one piece of equipment to talk to another” malarkey before with PCs and we dealt with it. Now can the rest of you catch up again please?
So I bought the HTC Incredible S. It’s got an 8 megapixel camera. Not 12, but still a good enough compromise.
And the operating system is Android. God, I can’t tell you what a relief that is.
All the Apps I need to do my Social Media shit.
It does have it’s disadvantages for sure. (What? It still all runs in the background? It kills your battery life and murders your family while you’re asleep? No, I made that last bit up. You can’t tell, can you.)
But really, it just. Does. What. I. Want. It. To. Do.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a life to return to.
Listen to this – I’m somewhere that I shouldn’t be….
Daniel Defoe, author of “Robinson Crusoe” also wrote a book called “Journal of the Plague Year” It’s a book about the experience of navigating your way through London at the time of plague.
In principle this sounds a very simple task, but in the days before the A-Z, and before streets had names, one would navigate one’s way via the known sights and landmarks of the area. When the plague struck, however, various streets and buildings would be quarantined and closed, making the usual paths un-navigable, and forcing oneself into unknown territories, rendering the capital city un-recognisable. And of course, just as quickly as new routes sprang up, they would be quarantined again, forcing yet more new passageways to open up.
The book documents these journeys, as well as the experiences and impact on the person as the city develops. Along with William Blake, these two seminal authors are now thought to be the earliest forms of what has now come to be known as psychogeography, a term coined and and formalised by Guy Debord and the Situationist movement.
I think it’s important both as a spiritual and emotional experience and a politically transgressive tool, as a means of resistance and re-gaining control of one’s environment, and becomes more vital as space is increasingly privatised and gentrified in contemporary society.
For years, psychogeography languished in obscurity, but more recently it has been revived as by many psychogeographical societies (google them, and you’ll find a whole host of organisations) and the authors Will Self, and Iain Sinclair, who is speaking at Greenbelt this year.
I was very pleased to find that Iain Sinclair is at Greenbelt this year, and hope to catch his talk.
If you miss it, you should be able to get the talk from the Greenbelt shop. Should be a good ‘un.
I’ve just got out of a talk by the artist Billy Childish, and frankly it’s the best talk I’ve ever been to. This things he said were so honest and refreshing, and I was especially pleased to hear him talk about a sense of play in art being missing in a lot of contemporary work, which is EXACTLY what I’ve been saying for some time now. YES! YES! YES!
I managed to stream some of it, but you should be able to buy his talk as a download from the Greenbelt website soon. Awesome stuff, embedded below. Sorry that the image goes a bit foggy after a while, but cameraphone goes a bit doolally on a low battery.
Every year, about this time, I go to a festival called Greenbelt. Tomorrow I shall be doing so once again. I’m nearly packed. Nearly.
For those of you who know little about it, it’s a music and arts festival that happens at the Cheltenham Racecourse. It is a Christian festival, which inevitably puts some people off, but don’t let that deter you. It’s very welcoming and accepting, and there’s something for everyone here.
Every year I go, I never know what to expect. It’s different every time. It’s inspiring, exciting, thought provoking, maddening, relaxing, stressful and exhilarating all at once. I’m kind of wishing I’d gone down there early today like a few others, but life stuff prevents.
From an artists point of view, there’s plenty to look at, and plenty of thought provoking material. I’m quite looking forward to see Billy Childish this year. Plus I get to see some wonderful people that I see sometimes just once every year.
I shall be going in my capacity as a social media person. You’ll be able to follow me on Qik, Twitter, Audioboo, possibly some youTube and Vimeo as well.
Last year I did a few videos, with the running theme of “Is it possible to do Greenbelt with a 3 year old and a 3 MONTH old?” Which you can see hereherehereherehere..
This year I’ll be working more with the others as a cohesive team, so I’m not sure what my role is yet. I may do interviews with other artists, and walk around some works talking about them like a sort of tour guide, or something like that. It might also be an excuse to indulge my new found love of psychogeography.
We’ll see. Hopefully I’ll be able to post some of it here.
I finished another work in the series of paintings I’ve been doing with Japanese endpapers today. Very pleased with it too.
The work is called “Via Dolorosa”, it’s acrylic paint and spray paint on board, and it’s 26cms x 34 cms x 5cms.
The figure is from a photo I took of one of the kids who play outside my window on the South London estate where I live. One day, one of their games took a particularly violent turn (more so than usual), and the lad in the photo fell badly on his wrist. I couldn’t tell if it was genuinely serious, or if he was playing it up to gain sympathy. Either way, he seemed to be ok after a while.
As an image though, I thought it was quite poignant, in that it could be about vulnerability, brutality, school memories, survival, and so on.
The image also works really well as a contrast with the leafy pattern, the soft focus – I don’t have much time for romanticised notions of either childhood or socio-economic dis-advantage, and art has a way of backing you into a corner and forcing you to think about such things. Especially when you’re making it yourself.
The flash from the camera has washed out some of the colour in the picture, so some of the detail is lost. If you come along to the show I’m exhibiting in next month, you’ll be able to see it a bit better in the flesh.
I went to see the new “Altermodern” show today on it’s first day of opening at TATE Britain in London, UK.
I went with some trepidation. I’d read a pre-amble in the TATE magazine, and I have to say that I find the movement back to modernism is one that I find alarming to say the least. However, there’s a big difference between an idea and a show, which in this case turned out to be just as well.
I went into the main hall at TATE Britain and was distinctly disappointed by what I saw. The work was OK, but not great. Subodh Gupta’s saucepan tower in the shape of a mushroom cloud was quite spectacular, and I always have a soft spot for Mike Nelson, but the rest of it left me pretty cold.
However, I’d missed that there was another, main part to it that you have to pay to get into. It’s not very well signposted, and there’s no little hand-held leaflet guide to tell you where you are, but with a wave of my TATE members card, I swished in for free.
I was straight away confronted by Franz Ackerman’s profusion of colour that was strangely calming despite it’s luridity. Piles of disused flags and an empty cage signaling the escape from shackles of nationhood into a bright new global modernism. Yes, I get it.
However, before long I came to see the idea of Altermodernism as a conceit of the curator – an idea to hang a show on. He’s coined a term, but will it catch on? I hope not, but in any case I found that once I’d manage to detach and forget about the idea of altermodernity from the actual works I was looking, at the show became much more enjoyable.
The first few works perversely helped me do this. Olivia Plender & Joachim Koester’s works felt more like plundering the past than a trajectory for the future. Firstly in “The Hashish Club” the hemp-heads unite to remember halcyon opium-filled days, and then the work on the Kibbo Kift Kindred completes the appropriations.
Thank goodness for some humour in the form of Charles Avery’s work (especially “Untitled (Head of an Aleph)” ” I really enjoyed his new world, almost inventing a past and describing a present that never actually happened but should have. I thought the drawings were perfectly executed, and the stellar maps drew me in too.
For the chillout enthusiasts, my old mucker Darren Almond exhibited his moonscapes, and I was quite happy to collapse on the scatter cushions in Gustav Metzger’s LCD projections – Liquid Crystals projected and altered by the heat, a bit like lava lamps. More than a nod and a wink to the abstract expressionists who, of course, we tend to associate with modernism. Very good works all.
Walead Beshty Fed-Exed a load of glass boxes around the world packed with little protection. The resulting damaged cubes are shown. Raised a smile and some thoughts about travel and handling. Very engaging – like little people with their own story to tell.
Shortly thereafter, I found myself standing in what only can be described as a room full of vibrators. Shaking the floor and humming inside my head. The possibilities for innuendo are endless, but you will not think about that at all when you stand in that room. Spine tingling – literally.
Those are the works that stood out with some brilliance for me. Like all good shows (and it IS a good show) its one that I will need to return to many times, and I may like completely different works for completely different reasons.
But I guess the biggest obstacle of the altermodern idea for me is that if you’re saying that you’ve learned from the postmodernist critique, then why would you exhibit the majority of artists from OECD countries? It’s not exactly a record of the marginalised and at worst smacks of imperialism. And I suspect the “creolisation” that Bourriaud talks of as a part of altermodernism leaves no room for the poor or marginalised.
But then, I never like feeling that I’ve been “steamrolled”.
I’m reading a compilation of his selected poems, and to be honest it’s been heavy going. I like the idea of reading something that is mutilayered, but in his case, it’s possible to have too many options.
As you may have surmised, I wasn’t looking forward to whiling away my journey in his company, but earlier today I read a poem that was so good, it made me feel bad for cussing him on Twitter this morning. I thought I’d share it with you:
hate blows a bubble of despair into
hugeness world system universe and bang
-fear buries a tomorrow under woe
and up comes yesterday most green and young
pleasure and pain are merely surfaces
(one itself showing,itself hiding one)
life’s only true value neither is
love makes the little thickness of the coin
comes here a man would have from madame death
neverless now and without winter spring?
she’ll spin that spirit her own fingers with
and give him nothing(if he should not sing)
how much more than enough for both of us
darling. And if i sing you are my voice,
That wasn’t what I called you back at school.
You had a different tag back then, with friends
and you and I were eight. You played the fool
at my expense in front of all the kids.
I want to hurt you
and now I have the chance. You’ve no idea
how often I returned to your assaults
that time. The sound, the looks, the memory’s clear
from frequent re-rehearsals ever since.
And now we’re older
I stop. Your face has sadness. Looking coolly
you don’t see me. I see your life is written
on your shoulders. A life of being a bully
with humour made you suffer more than I have.
A lot of people have commented to me how good the show looks, and how great the paintings look in their space. One of the great things about the SW1 Gallery where Beyond The Wilderness is showing is that it is properly kitted out with lighting track.
If you’re showing work, then lighting can make all the difference. There’s nothing worse than having a piece of work on the wall that’s stuck in a dingy corner. The piece doesn’t get seen, and the artist gets offended.
The joy of the lighting track is how versatile it is. In this case, the track is made by ERCO. If the piece of art on the wall is not directly under the light, you can slide the button round on the side at the top of the light fitting, pull it out of the track, and move it somewhere better.
Of course, the fitting itself pivots and tilts, so you can point it right at the work. It can be quite dramatic if you do that, but it does make the work look good.
At the SW1 Gallery, there are two types of light – spots and floods. The floodlighting (in this case the square ones) will light up the whole area that you are pointing it at. It diffuses the light over quite a wide area, so whilst the light is not intensely bright, you can give it a general flood of light that helps.
Spotlights concentrate the light in one particular place, which draws the eye to the work nicely.
If you look at the photo below, you can see how the spotlights light up the work nicely. For bigger works, you would probably want to put a few spotlights on different parts of the work, to make sure it is well lit-up, rather than just have one spot right on the middle.
The other thing about lighting track is that inside the track, there are 3 separate circuits. What this means is that you can basically have some lights on separately to others – and turn them on and off as you please. If you want to light up one side of the gallery one day and turn it off another day and light up the rest, then you can do so. Certain lights can be made to come on when you switch on Track 1, others on Track 2, and the rest on Track 3. You get the idea. To select the light to come on with a certain track, you have to twist the round button near the top which is mark “1”, “2” and “3”. Easy-peasy.
In practise, every time I come to do one of these (it doesn’t seem to matter what gallery I work in), the switches seem to bear little or no relation to what tracks light up with which light switches, so you end up experimenting until you work it out!
The only thing you need to be careful of is that you don’t put all the lights on one track, which will overload the circuit.
It took me just over half a day to get it all looking how I wanted – up and down a very tall ladder. Make sure you allow enough time at the end when you’re hanging. Get someone else to sweep the floor/write labels/touch up the wall while you’re doing it.
And so it begins. I started hanging the show today.
I forgot what this is like, as its been so long since I last hung a show.
I swear to God, I think sometimes people think the art just sprouts legs, runs to the gallery and leaps on the wall itself, all level and flush with ready-written labels next to each piece.
And they probably think that the works will shuffle themselves about into the right order so that everything can be seen, nothing gets hidden in a dingey corner of the gallery, and wherever you stand in the place, none of the works jar against each other, are too close together or make the other works look bad by comparison.
So, despite a nice start to the day, its been a day of people telling me they can help out, and then not doing so on the day.. People throwing extra work at me last minute, when we we’ve had months to sort it out.. Sorry Mike, I need that now, rather than sometime over the next 3 days like we already agreed… Sorry Mike, I’m not around tomorrow after all.
It would be nice to be able to get to a Private View with energy to spare, and able to talk to all the nice people ready to push the artists and the various events involved with a smile on my face, but HELLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL no.
I will be flush faced, sweaty, and un-able to string sentences together, whilst floating around opened bottles of wine, that I won’t be able to partake in because if I do, I will nose-dive after 2 sips. Even though alcohol will be exactly what I need by that point.
No wonder half the artists I know are on the Colombian Marching Powder.
I have made this part of the work by projecting a photo I took up onto the white canvas I was made earlier this week.
I had to work on the photo image a little bit first – I put it on the laptop, and worked on it with Photoshop to get it to three shades of grey. This gave it the strong graphic image, almost a bit like a screenprint. I then made up the different shades of paint using acrylic paint mixed with cigarette ash and soil.
The soil and ash have added to the tone of the paint, but have also made it really lumpy, making it impossible to paint a straight line, giving it a more organic feel, which is quite nice. You’ll have to see it in the flesh at the private view next week.
I tried to write a poem this afternoon whilst shopping in Knightsbridge for my relatives.
The result is pretty dreadful, but hey – It’s Christmas. Even poets can’t be bothered sometimes. Now I’m off for a mince pie.
Have a good one everyone, and thanks for reading.
I’m walking through the nicer part of town
away from home and all my normal cares.
The streets are not too full with handsome people
I take it in, and no-one minds my stares
For once I am happy
The shop assistant doesn’t want to work
on Christmas Eve (he drew the shortest straw)
But doesn’t mind me asking simple questions
A Happy Christmas smile is on his jaw
For once I am happy.
A simple present bought with little fuss
brings all my shopping to an end.
Returning home to make my wife her dinner.
Next year I do the whole shebang again.
For once I am happy.
I did actually put the LEDs on temporarily the last time I was in the studio, but I wanted to surprise you. I’ve taped them on a bit better now – with a lot more of it. Making a feature of the gaffer tape also adds to the feel of it, I think.
Apparently there’s something about twinkling lights that encourages people to spiritual visions. I’m sure that Richard Dawkins would suggest that its all part of the way the human brain has evolved, and that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about God, yadda yadda… But there you go. It is what it is, and I’m happy to go with it for the moment.
Since I was last in the studio, the black electrician’s tape has come away from the wood a little bit. I’m slightly concerned, as I don’t want this to keep happening every time. It might just be the damp air – my studio has a lot of moisture in the air, which has lead to all sorts of problems in the past – and its impossible to heat it up sufficiently to deal with the problem.
I like the idea that the icon could look like a piece of wood found on a building side – with boot-prints all over it, coffee mug stains, etc. There’s something about the urban-ness of it that suits moot‘s ethos. The burntness is part of that. I don’t know how to depict the table, wine-glass or bread in that vein, though.
With chewing gum, maybe.
More photos will be added as the piece changes and is worked on.
