Archive for October, 2009
Friday, October 30th, 2009
1. Flying around the world, attending art biennials and eating expensive meals puts us in touch with the wretched of the earth – by underlining exactly what it is that peasants and workers are missing out on.
2. Like the lumpen-proletariat, the left-bourgeoisie is a distinct class fraction and cannot be conflated with its bourgeois and lumpen enemies. Since the proletariat has failed to act as a class for itself, we have no choice but to lead it to taste and discernment via our elevated aesthetic principles (viz, if you liked Damien Hirst, you’ll love Takashi Murakami – and don’t forget that the current Tate show featuring both of them takes its name from the 1991 album Pop Life by Bananarama!).
3. Since Art Review currently ranks Hans Ulrich Obrist as the single most powerful person in the art world, we look to him as our ‘man of steel’. He’s faster than a speeding bullet and susceptible to nothing but an unfortunate tendency to be distracted in the middle of a conversation by his BlackBerry! Obviously Obrist isn’t really the most powerful man in the world – but with the art market collapsing, Art Review couldn’t place a collector or dealer in pole position, or hand this accolade to Nick Serota (who having massively expanded the Tate franchise is now merely adding an extension to Tate Modern). That said, the left-bourgeoisie prefers illusion to reality, and so we are more than willing to risk our all on a rather arbitrary Art Review ranking!
4. Because long manifestos are so last-century, and we are on our way to another networking opportunity disguised as an expensive meal, we’ll restrict our ‘international manifesto of the left-bourgeoisie’ to four points: but if we can think of any more we won’t hesitate to add them later. For us, knowing lots of famous people is way more important than being theoretically coherent.
5. Art is like an over-masticated piece of chewing gum and the more tasteless it becomes the more we like it! The future of world culture will emerge from the dialectical synthesis of this and point one (above). With a little help from Mike Stanley of course!
6. Did we ever tell you what Hou Hanru said to us in Venice? If not ask about it next time we see you…
7. It is impossible to beat our enemies at their own game. Likewise, to participate in a system that is inherently corrupt gives credence to the Labour Party and trade unions (we always knew they were our enemies). Art, on the other hand – what we discretely refrain from calling elite high culture – is a necessary evil that must be used in the self-defence of the left-bourgeoisie and progressive proletariat! All power to the curators’ and collectors’ councils! Forward with Vasif Kortun!
Paul McCartney, Charles Tompson and Pi Li on behalf of The Left-Bourgeois Club of Great Britain (formerly The National Satanist Movement of Europe, the Americas, Australia, North Africa, the Middle East, the Northern Fringes of the Indian Subcontinent and related dependencies including New Zealand and the Solomon Islands).
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Art Review, Bananarama, BlackBerry, Charles Tompson, Damien Hirst, Greek Pete, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hou Hanru, Left-Bourgeois Club of Great Britain, left-bourgeoisie, Michael Stanley, Modern Art Oxford, National Satanist Movement, Nicholas Serota, Paul McCartney, Pi Li, Pop Life, Takashi Murakami, Tate Modern, Vasif Kortun, Venice
Posted in art criticism, humour | 20 Comments »
Wednesday, October 28th, 2009
Last night I went to the celebration of the life and work of Tamara Krikorian and Tony Sinden at Tate Modern’s Starr Auditorium. The event was a tribute to two pioneering UK based video artists who died earlier this year; among other things, Krikorian also played a major role in setting up London Video Arts. Unfortunately, I find Krikorian’s work boring, and neither the talks about her nor the screening of her 1977 video Vanitas did much for me. In Vanitas, Krikorian stands in front of a mirror with a TV and many other objects reflected in it, the audio cuts between the artist talking about art and TV news reports. It is an understatement to say this failed to rivet me.
Tony Sinden wasn’t afraid to experiment, and I find his work hit and miss, but went it hits it nails me to the floor. The first screening last night was This Surface (1973) by David Hall and Tony Sinden. The 12 minute short kicks off with a pub scene: a right tasty geezer with a not quite full pint of beer balanced on his head dances, while guys and gals in groovy flares and sporting fabulous seventies hairdos look on in disbelief. As the dance goes on the reveller tilts his head further and further to one side in order to keep the beer balanced on top. The soundtrack is Mouldy Old Dough by Lieutenant Pigeon. After this, the film cuts to a tracking shot looking out to sea and moving from the east towards the Palace Pier on Brighton Beach. The words ‘this surface’ is written in marker pen on either the camera lens or some plate glass in front of it. The camera movement creates the impression the viewer is on one of the mini-railways that were a common feature of British seaside resorts in the 1960s and 1970s.
This Surface runs through various fragments of text relating to filming, cameras and cine-projection; both ‘interrupting’ the filmed ‘scenery’, and as ‘subtitles’. Having not quite reached the Palace Pier, the camera jump cuts to a reverse shot, and facing inland we trundle past the various boat houses and sheds located immediately beneath Marine Parade as we head back east. Next comes another jump cut to what looks like Western Road, and the camera tracks west to east along the shops immediately north of what is now Churchill Square. The next cut apparently takes us back to the seafront, and a static shot shows a Pit and The Pendulum type scenario, with a blade swinging over the body of a human dummy (displayed in the window of one of the many seaside attractions). Finally the action cuts back to the man dancing with a glass of beer on his head (still to Lieutenant Pigeon), but shot from a different angle to the scene that kicks off This Surface.
One of the things I find curious about Sinden’s work is the chance serendipities that can sometimes really enhance its effects. In the case of this particular collaboration with Hall, the setting is for me an example of this. Although I’ve never lived in Brighton, I know the town well, and as a child in the sixties and early seventies I’d be taken on day trips to Brighton Beach in the summer. Thus This Surface is jolting for me, because once the text is stripped away from it, it could almost be my own memories. Likewise, Mouldy Old Dough was a huge hit when I was a nipper, and takes me right back 1972. Sitting immediately behind me was currently London based but north American raised artist S. E Barnet. She told me afterwards she’d never heard the tune before, so although she found it striking, it had no associations for her; and I assume she doesn’t have childhood memories of Brighton in the early seventies which render This Surface even more strangely familiar to me. S. E. was obviously as grooved by the short as I was, but given it carried for her few of the associations it held for me, was she watching the same movie?
The other highlight of the night was David Cunningham (a former member of seventies one-hit wonder band/collective Flying Lizards), Rob Gawthop, and Alan Baker, performing a 1977 sound piece from Sinden’s Functional Action series. They each rubbed a couple of pots together and the resulting music was a groove sensation! The Functional Action series is where my fascination with Sinden began. I was vaguely aware of his video installations when in mid-eighties London I was doing something or other with a gallery (possibly Chisenhale in Bow) and I came across a pile of his album Functional Action Parts 2 & 3: Swing Guitars/Drift Guitars (Piano, 1980). Asking why the albums were leaning against a wall with rubbish piled up beside them, I was told the gallery were throwing them out and if I wanted the record I was welcome to take one. When I got the vinyl home and played it, I thought one side was fabulous and the other dreadful. After that I paid attention whenever I came across Sinden’s name.
Last night the Tate Modern was filled with Sinden and Krikorian’s friends and colleagues, who were paying tribute to them. It would be nice to see parts of Sinden’s Functional Action series and 16mm collaborations with David Hall reaching a new and younger audience. I trust that will happened in due course, with the best of his film and music reissued in appropriate formats. Despite an at times understandably sombre tone, the Tate tribute nonetheless provided a very useful overview of Sinden’s creative endeavours. Minimalism and conceptualism can rock, you just have to do it right!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1960s, 1970s, Alan Baker, Brighton, Brighton Beach, Churchill Square, conceptual art, David Cunningham, David Hall, Drift Guitars, Flying Lizards, Functional Action, Functional Action Parts 2 & 3, Lieutenant Pigeon, London, London Video Arts, Marine Parade, minimalism, Mouldy Old Dough, Palace Pier, Piano Records, Pit and The Pendulum, Rob Gawthop, S. E. Barnet, Starr Auditorium, Swing Guitars, Tamara Krikorian, Tate Modern, This Surface, Tony Sinden, Vanitas, Western Road
Posted in film, music, talks | 18 Comments »
Monday, October 26th, 2009
When I first heard about Children of the Sun, I assumed the title was taken from the classic sixties psyche single of the same name by The Misunderstood, but anyone who reads the book can see that it actually invokes Savitri Devi, a particularly bonkers and unpleasant exponent of post-war Nazi occultism, and one of the founding members of the World Union of National Socialists. That said, the focus of this ‘novel’ is very much on English neo-Nazi scum of the Thatcher era; although Devi does appear in extended fictional form, partly on account of the fact that she died in England on the same day that the moronic bonehead band Skrewdriver played their comeback gig in London.
The book intercuts two narratives, which are joined at the end. One is about a lumpen south London secretly gay Nazi skinhead called Tony; and the other concerns the middle-class liberal James, whose family is financially supporting his research into the far-Right, so that he can write a TV script about British Movement activist and amateur porn star Nicky Crane. Schaefer uses the first narrative to undermine reader expectations, his main character Tony is complete low-life, and in every fight sequence I was rooting for him to be annihilated; so it was a major disappointment that this piece of trash survives right the way through to the end of the book.
Although Tony is a member of the British Movement, his depiction often led me to think of a Strasserite plonker on the ‘far left’ of a 1980s photo of Ian Anderson ‘manning the deliberately provocative National Front stall in the Asian area of Brick Lane, East London’, which is available from photographersdirect.com (search for “Ian Anderson Brick Lane”). In the ‘Tony’ parts of Schaefer’s book we encounter fictional depictions of figures such as Nicky Crane, Ian Stuart (of Skrewdriver), Savitri Devi and even Nick Griffin (now the BNP’s leading Nazi twat, but back then in his national ‘revolutionary’ phase an associate of a motley crew of Italian fascists with a string of criminal convictions implicating them in more than one mass murder, as well as a huge fan of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi).
Children of the Sun not only takes the reader through a very lightly fictionalised version of key incidents in the development of British neo-Nazism, it is peppered with genuine historical documents relating to these events. What will most immediately grab many people’s attention is documentation relating to Nick Griffin’s unbelievably unsavoury past. However, of more interest to me was the resurfacing of two press clippings I’d appraised some time ago – an October 1986 news item from Searchlight linking Tony Wakeford’s National Front band Above The Ruins (the name was subsequently changed to Sol Invictus) to Nazi bonehead Nicky Crane as well as Michael Walker of The Scorpion, plus a 1986 review from the fascist zine English Rose that suggests top Nazi prick Patrick Harrington was a member of Wakeford’s group during its early days. Above The Ruins are mentioned more than once in the ‘fictional’ sections of the text, and these invocations prove extremely suggestive. For example:
“I was reading the Scorpion, this would-be intellectual journal put out by Michael Walker, who used to run a tour company with Nick Griffin and Roberto Fiore. So in summer ’93, just before Nicky died, Walker published an article by Stephen Cox, who ran something called the Jarls of Baelder, which as far as I can tell was a sort of occult, quasi-nazi homoerotic naturist group. Baelder had, or has, a secret inner order called the Fraternitas Loki, devoted to ‘covert aeonic action’: aeonics is a key Nine Angles term, and in Norse mythology Loki was the father of Fenrir, the wolf, right? The Above The Ruins album was Songs of the Wolf, and Fenrir was the in-house journal of the ONA… Anyway, Cox’s piece is this barking analysis of European history that says we need to reappraise the Third Reich and seek our destiny among the stars. And it’s illustrated with diagrams that say, at the bottom: copyright Order of Nine Angles. So this is explicit Nine Angles material appearing in the major British journal of the new right. They’re all over each other…” (pages 252-253).
There are, of course, other ways of linking Wakeford to David Myatt and the Order of Nine Angles, and Children of the Sun provides more than enough information to encourage readers to do just that and much else besides. Therefore, I’m not sure I’d describe this book a novel, it seems to me to be closer to what the Wu Ming collective call an ‘unidentified narrative object’; in fact, it reads a lot like recent work by Iain Sinclair crossed with gay porn for Nazi fetishists. The tome is incredibly well researched, and is guaranteed to stir up a lot of debate about links between the music scene and neo-Nazi politics (especially as, yet again, it blows away the threadbare argument a number of fascist musicians and their apologists have used for years in order to attain a fig-leaf of respectability; viz, they couldn’t possibly be Nazis because either they or some of their associates are gay). Likewise, although this is by no means the last word on why some extremely sad non-fascist gay men are turned on by Nazi uniforms and related trash (like Nicky Crane), it explores the area much more effectively than say Bruce La Bruce’s ill-conceived film Skin Gang/Skin Flick (1999).
Children of the Sun is at times an extremely unpleasant read, but it will nonetheless prove an eye-opener to those who run the literary world (anti-fascist activists will already be familiar with much of this material). I’m very much looking forward to some of the debates this book is likely to spark when it is published early next year. A couple of the ‘fictional’ Nazi scum turn out to be copper’s narks, and this might well lead to heated arguments about whether or not they are based on certain real-life characters. Schaefer has written an arresting debut that makes me extremely curious not only about what he will be doing next, but also what will happen to the huge amount of as yet unused research he’s done into the Nazi music scene and its fellow travellers.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 1980s, Above The Ruins, Brick Lane, British Movement, British National Party, Bruce La Bruce, Children of the Sun, Colonel Gaddafi), David Myatt, English Rose, Fraternitas Loki, Iain Sinclair, Ian Anderson, Ian Stuart, Jarls of Baelder, Libya, London, Max Schaefer, Michael Walker, National Front, Nick Griffin, Nicky Crane, ONA, Order Of Nine Angles, Patrick Harrington, Photographers Direct, Roberto Fiore, Savitri Devi., Searchlight, Skin Flick., Skin Gang, Skrewdriver, Songs of the Wolf, Stephen Cox, The Misunderstood, The Scorpion, Third Reich, tony Wakeford, World Union of National Socialists, Wu Ming
Posted in books, music, politics | Comments Off
Saturday, October 24th, 2009
Two weeks ago I received an email informing me that an attempt to sell titles in my Semina series at the New York Art Book Fare had descended into farce because the books had been impounded by US customs. Book Works told me they’d flown from Europe to America to sell the novels, but ended up manning an empty table. The publications have now disappeared and may have been destroyed; from New York any unsold copies should have gone on to a distributor in Los Angeles, but there is still no sign of them on either the east or west coast. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago, when the following message from Bubble Entendre author Mark Waugh turned up in my inbox:
“Hi, could you expand on the rumour that Bubble Entendre has been impounded by US customs? In a week when the Tate flirted with showing Spiritual America, and then withdrew the work, I am curious about a conspiracy to regulate the flow of subversive literature into the homes of bourgeois America? Best wishes, Mark.”
Word on the grapevine is that the Semina books were impounded because a US customs official took a look at Bubble Entendre and decided it was a blue-print for a terrorist attack on the 2012 Olympic Games. The novel does contain a narrative about an entirely fictional kidnap incident during this event; but I’d like to stress that I only accepted the text for publication because it was, in my opinion, critical of terrorism.
For the benefit of customs officials and cultural cops around the world, I’d like to clarify that I am 100% opposed to all forms of terrorism – regardless of whether it is committed by the US and British governments (as is currently happening in the Middle East and Afghanistan); or by religious fundamentalists (Christian, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu or any other variety). It should go without saying that terrorism is always vanguardist and can never be justified.
To reiterate, I do not write, edit or endorse books that in any way condone terrorism. I’d also like to know what happened to the missing Semina books – Index by Bridget Penney, One Break, A Thousand Blows by Maxi Kim, Bubble Entendre by Mark Waugh and Rape New York by Jana Leo. I trust that the several hundred missing copies of these works have not been mindlessly destroyed by US customs, and that they will be delivered to Book Work’s LA distributor in the very near future.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 2012, 2012 Oympic Games, Afghanistan, Bridget Penney, Bubble Entendre, Europe, Index, Jana Leo, Los Angeles, Mark Waugh, Maxi Kim, Middle East, New York, New York Art Book Fare, Olympic Games, One Break A Thousand Blows, Rape New York, Richard Prince, Semina, Spiritual America, Tate Modern, US customs, USA
Posted in books, politics | 28 Comments »
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Hadewijch is the latest film from Bruno Dumont, a former philosophy lecturer whose movies are often compared to the work of Robert Bresson. Dumont doesn’t so much take inspiration from Bresson, as allow the older man’s films to possess his own, so that he might correct their faults. If someone had told me before I went to see Hadewijch that it was ‘The Trial of Joan of Arc meets Mouchette in the age of post-modern simulation’, then I could have imagined the flick in its entirety before I viewed it. That said, the process of attending the screening was nonetheless worthwhile, albeit rather irritating.
It was difficult to get into the Vue in Leicester Square due to a simultaneous premier for a very boring British film set in Twickenham in the early sixties. The crowds and the cops were out in force, and I had to get past some ridiculously heavy security before being allowed anywhere near the multi-screen Vue. Thus after much hassle and finally seated, I realised I hadn’t seen a Dumont flick since his big screen debut, The Life Of Jesus, came out a decade or more before.
Hadewijch is inspired by the writings of a 13 century Flemish mystic of this name, a rich but nonetheless hip chick who liked to eroticise her relationship with ‘God’ and ‘Christ’ by foaming at the mouth until the resulting insanity poured forth from her pen. Hadewijch’s religious pornography took the forms of poetry, letters and written records of visions; and these mystical freak-outs might be likened to free spirit heresies. But while this provided Dumont with his initial inspiration, he sets his film in contemporary France.
The plot of Hadewijch isn’t of much consequence. Celine (Julie Sokolowski) is booted out of a nunnery for being too zealous. She returns to her parent’s opulent apartment. The 20 year-old Jesus freak then hangs out in and around her Parisian home; she meets Yassine (Yassine Salihine), an unemployed teenager from the suburbs who wants to get it one with her, but they never do anything more intimate than embrace. However, in Yassine’s brother Nassir (Karl Sarafidis) she recognises a kindred spirit, a fellow religious nut. Nassir tells Celine about Islam and then takes her to Lebanon; when they return to Paris they ‘matyr’ themselves by performing a two person suicide bombing on a metro train. If this were a realist film, then the explosion would be the end of the movie, but Dumont’s speciality is a Baudrillardian simulation of realism, and there is a lose thread to tie-up in the form of a character called David (David Dewaele).
At the beginning of the film, David is a prisoner doing restoration work on the nunnery from which Celine is expelled. He is also framed at various times to look rather like the image of Christ in various Dutch old masters. A succession of scenes indicate that he is a conflation of both Christ and the thieves on the crosses beside the Toad Of Nazareth at the time of ‘The Crucifiction’. I assume Dumont is inviting viewers to recall Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, and even if he isn’t, this is what the depiction of David brought to my mind; in other words, religion is an alienated projection of human attributes into a bogus realm of ‘the sacred’.
After the explosion (i.e. after Celine and Nassir’s implied but not explicitly depicted deaths), Celine and David appear back at the nunnery, but rather than it being winter – as was the case when we first saw them there – it is now spring. Celine attempts to drown herself in a pond but is saved by David. The series of events that take place after the explosion clearly confused much of the audience and became a focus for questions to the director during his Q & A session. I wasn’t feeling engaged enough to point out that the failed drowning rather too self-consciously invokes the climax of Bresson’s Mouchette. My unwillingness to join the discussion stemmed in part from Dumont’s answers exuding the rotten-egg smell of what is sometimes labelled ‘the anxiety of influence’, and this made what he did say so boring that I left before he finished.
Nonetheless, a director like Dumont becomes significant when you see how many of the people attending his screenings don’t understand that film as a medium need not be restricted to utterly flat realist narratives; and is, in any case, better understood as ‘poetic’ images. Quite a few people walked out during the festival screening of Hadewijch I attended. I like the effect Dumont has on audiences considerably more than his movies – which are still too tastefully made to shake up the film world as much as I’d like.
After seeing Hadewijch, I found myself imagining an alternative version in which Celine was a white rasta rather than a catholic, who is loosely modelled on Gale Benson (the daughter of a British Tory politician murdered at Michael X’s black power commune in Trinidad); this would also allow for a heavy dub soundtrack rather than the shit classical music Dumont favoured. Such a venture is not something I can imagine Dumont carrying off successfully – and so, instead, I look forward to him making a Deulezian cross between my two favourite Bresson movies A Man Escaped and Pickpocket. Dumont remains the Jean-Philippe Toussaint of contemporary French language film. Good as far as he goes, but cinema will leave him behind when we force it to go much further….
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: A Man Escaped, Bruno Dumont, David Dewaele, Flanders, France, Gale Benson, Hadewijch, Jean-PhilippeToussaint, Julie Sokolowski, Karl Sarafidis, Leicester Square, London, London Film Festival, Ludwig Feuerbach, Michael X, Mouchette, Paris, Robert Bresson, The Essence of Christianity, The Life Of Jesus, The Trial of Joan of Arc, Trinidad, Twickenham, Vue, Yassine Salihine
Posted in film | 16 Comments »
Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
With plenty of galleries and art fairs closed for good by the vagaries of the current recession, some might see it as a surprise that Soraya Rodriguez’s Zoo has survived at all. No longer billed as an art fair, Zoo 2009 (16-19 October 2009) was restructured to include more curated projects and a section given over to multiples. Becoming more ‘educational’ is, of course, one way of securing sponsorship when the commercial sector has become both less willing and less able to support shebangs of this type. The location for Zoo had also changed, although this had nothing to do with the recession; the event is now taking place in a dirty former industrial space at the southern end of Shoredtich High Street, on the edge of both the city and east London.
Of the curated exhibitions, the outstanding show was organised by The Lux in collaboration with students from Goldsmiths College. The main work on show in Film As A Subversive Art was changed each day, with residues of previous displays left in the space. I went on Monday 19 October when the featured work was Francisco Valdes Reagan (2003); this takes a possession scene from Hollywood horror blockbuster The Exorcist (1973) and replaces the filmed content with a series of animated drawings (the sound appeared to be identical to the original). On another level of the same building, Nicholas Burne and Anthea Hamilton’s Calypsos used a series of four TV screens to good effect in the space allotted to it, but wasn’t to my taste; this show was curated by Studio Voltaire.
Rob Tufnell’s attempt at an alternative take on psychedelia, Altogether Elsewhere, didn’t really work in its dirty environment and disappointed me in the choice of works – despite Jennifer West’s film projections being fun. As for The Filmic Conventions ‘curated’ by FormContent, this was an unmitigated disaster. There were two projections but most of the works were displayed on single monitors with a single set of headphones. This resulted in it being difficult to take in the works because there were too many people visiting the space to be comfortably accommodated with such a restrictive number of headphones; having two headphones connected to each monitor and more seating would have done much to resolve the problem. The films themselves were uniformly dire. The only merit I could see in the FormContent fiasco was that it prepared me for the room of editions being sold by 176, Camden Arts Centre, Chisenhale Gallery, Dundee Contemporary Arts, ICA, Other Criteria, Paul Stolper, Peer, Serpentine Gallery, Studio Voltaire, The Multiple Store, White Cube and Whitechapel Gallery. To describe these displays as ‘depressing’ would be an exercise in understatement.
The prize exhibitions by Scoli Acosta and Clunie Reid were better than much of what was on the trade stands; the latter were almost as flatulent as the room of editions and multiples. Zoo is often seen as an opportunity for younger gallerists to flex their muscles and strut their sense of visual flair, but this year it was an old hand who had the only decent stand. Documentary material based around veteran live artist Stuart Brisley formed the core of England & Co’s display; but there was also work by the younger artists Chris Kenny, Georgia Russell, Harald Smykla and Jason Wallis–Johnson. Jane England looked to me to be far and away the oldest person manning a stand, but her eye is clearly far sharper than those of the younger gallerists.
“Former’ art fairs like Zoo aren’t the best way of taking in visual culture: there is too much too see, and since 99% of art is shit, the sheer volume of bad work makes it hard to appreciate the little that is good. Still, judged on Zoo, if the world economy has double-pneumonia, then the art world has the black death! All of which goes to prove once again that the current fiscal crisis is a groove sensation!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: 176, Altogether Elsewhere, Anthea Hamilton, Calypsos, Camden Arts Centre, Chisenhale Gallery, Chris Kenny, City of London, Clunie Reid, Dundee Contemporary Arts, east London, England & Co, Film As A Subversive Art, FormContent, Francisco Valdes, Georgia Russell, Goldsmiths College, Harald Smykla, ICA, Jason Wallis--Johnson, Jennifer West, London, Nicholas Burne, Other Criteria, Paul Stolper, Peer, Reagan, Rob Tufnell, Scoli Acosta, Serpentine Gallery, Shoredtich High Street, Soraya Rodriguez, Stuart Brisley, Studio Voltaire, The Exorcist, The Filmic Conventions, The Lux, The Multiple Store, White Cube, Whitechapel Gallery, Zoo, Zoo 2009
Posted in exhibitions | 18 Comments »
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
Yesterday night I was at the ICA doing an event with Wu Ming 1 and Wu Ming 4, who were presenting their latest book Manituana. After a very brief intro from me, Wu Ming 1 opened things up with a short explanation of the collective writing activities he’s been embroiled in for many years as one part of the Wu Ming collective (and before that the Luther Blissett Project). Then there was an introduction to the new Wu Ming novel, after which I read a passage from the book that required a strong London accent. Having read live many times, yesterday I decided to record the passage in question, and it was played back while I lip-synced very badly. This was something new for me – and to make it even more pointless I’d waited until just a couple of hours before the event to make this recording – I enjoyed the absurdity of it so much that I may well repeat the trick! After my intervention, Wu Ming 4 gave an in-depth account of the genesis of Manituana. Wu Ming 1 spoke in English, Wu Ming 4 spoke in Italian with Shaun Whiteside translating.
For the last hour of the presentation, the Wu Mings took questions from the audience; and these quickly progressed from queries about how the four members of the Wu Ming group (originally five) wrote collectively, to their thoughts on left-communists such as Jacques Camatte and Amadeo Bordiga. I was impressed with both the depth and breadth of the answers, as well as with how relaxed the Wu Mings were on stage. Although I’ve been in contact with the Wu Mings for about 15 years now, I’d not seen them do a public presentation before, and it was quite a revelation! So if they’re ever somewhere near you – and I understand McKenzie Wark is hosting a Wu Ming event in New York in November – make sure you catch them! There’s no point in me summarising what the Wu Mings said yesterday here, you should check their website, and if possible catch them live!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Amadeo Bordiga, ICA, Jacques Camatte, London, Luther Blissett, Luther Blissett Project, Manituana, McKenzie Wark, New York, Shaun Whiteside, Stewart Home, Wu Ming, Wu Ming 1, Wu Ming 4
Posted in books, counterculture, talks | 18 Comments »
Friday, October 16th, 2009
I read Running Away about two weeks ago and ever since I’ve been thinking about blogging it, but there’s something in me that revolts against writing about this book. It’s short and light and Matthew B. Smith’s translation reads really well… but the narrator is repulsive, a middle-class idiot savant who has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. He goes to Shanghai to deliver money to a guy called Zhang Xiangzhi, and then indulges in all the usual orientalist fantasies; including misreading menace into acts of friendship in a culture he doesn’t understand. This culminates in him concluding that Xiangzhi is a heroin wholesaler. After returning to Paris, the narrator heads out to Italy where he fails to connect with his girlfriend.
The plot doesn’t really matter, this book is like Jean Baudrillard turned into very finely wrought fiction, a study in alienation by an unreliable narrator who doesn’t understand that everyone in a capitalist society is alienated (in an economic rather than a psychological sense). I read and enjoyed this very well-crafted book as a damning critique of capitalism and the middle-classes; my fear is that some of those who are delusionally attracted to literature as a mark of their own ‘distinction’, will identify with Jean-Philippe Toussaint’s obnoxious narrator. I guess that’s the risk of writing this type of fiction… Running Away is published in English by Dalkey Archive Press early next year. Since it’s hard not to love a book named after a Sly & The Family Stone tune, let’s hope its reception in English isn’t marred by too many nerds announcing their love of the ridiculous narrator.
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org/blog – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Dalkey Archive Presss, Italy, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-PhilippeToussaint, Matthew B. Smith, Running Away, Shanghai, Sly & The Family Stone
Posted in books, literature | 19 Comments »
Wednesday, October 14th, 2009
The Cupar Arts Festival went head to head with The Frieze Art Fair once again this year, and for me there was no contest in terms of prioritising one over the other. I headed out of London and away from Frieze to Cupar in Fife (Scotland). The main attraction was The Attic Archive on at The Y (Marathon House, Bonnygate, Cupar, Fife KY15 4LG). The Attic is a private space on Dundee’s Union Street that has been an international centre for marginal art collaborations since the early 1970s; the Cupar Arts Festival exhibition provides a rare chance for the general public to get a sense of what’s been going on there all that time.
On display is a slew of works by malcontents ranging from international mail artists like David Zack and Carlo Pittore, via oppositional Scottish painters/sculptors such as Karen Strang and Andy Stenhouse to erm, people from London like Stefan Szczelkun and me! A lot of the material is in the medium of print and short run cassettes/CDrs (indeed some are one-offs), but there are also remnants from performances (including a hat set on fire by legendary American Neoist John Berndt, who was wearing it at the time it burnt, and clothes worn by Pete Horobin during his 10 year Data Project).
Causing intense excitement are a series of washing powder boxes (Lux, Ariel and Drive) that had housed the soap Pete Horobin used to clean his clothes during the 1980s. They bring back memories of old commodity packaging, and are a hot topic of conversation among visitors. The soap boxes are displayed on the top of various sets of industrial shelving, while beneath are hundreds of publications that can be picked up and read; and there is an armchair sprayed gold and painted with the name ‘Monty Cantsin’ in which visitors can settle and peruse some very obscure magazines and catalogues.
Peter Haining is on hand to talk about all this material, and will play any of the hand assembled CDrs or cassettes on display, if requested to do so. He also made me a pot of tea when I demanded one about two minutes after walking in – and it came in a Lotte Glob teapot. This environment and the work it houses clearly emerge from fluxus and conceptual art, and might more correctly by labelled as neoist, but some visitors will also see in it a reflection of post-slacker aesthetics. That said, the room was freshly painted, carpeted and well heated (all in all very comfortable)… even if the packaging used to transport everything is on display too! Make sure you don’t miss this show (on until 25 October, closed Mondays) because it is a rare opportunity to dig into the international anti-art underground of the 1970s, 1980s and beyond; and it will take you in even deeper than the recent and current London retrospectives of Ray Johnson and Gustav Metzger!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Andy Stenhouse, Ariel, Attic Archive, Bonnygate, Carlo Pittore, conceptual art, Cupar, Cupar Arts Festival, Data Attic, Data Project, David Zack, Drive, Dundee, Fife, Fluxus, Frieze Art Fair, Gustav Metzger, John Berndt, Karen Strang, London, Lotte Glob, Lux, Marathon House, Monty Cantsin, neoism, neoist, Pete Horobin, Peter Haining, post-slacker aesthetics, Ray Johnson, Scotland, Stefan Szczelkun, Stewart Home, underground, Union Street
Posted in exhibitions, neoism | 16 Comments »
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Yes, those crazy non-erotic soft porn DVDs are invading UK pound shops once again, which led Justin to comment on my Jenna Jameson blog of a few days ago: “Have you noticed that Poundland actually sell porn DVDs?” Well, I blogged about the porno on offer in pound shops back in the days when I was posting on MySpace. Poundland still seem to be concentrating on the more ‘tasteful’ Penthouse and Electric Blue type stuff. Pound shops stuffed with trash DVDs, let alone euro or dollar shops selling anything at all, are in short supply in inner London; but the same shirt turns up at the same prices on market stalls in Whitecross Street and elsewhere (okay, I lied, a lot of these DVDs go for 50p when they turn up down Whitecross Street – never trust a Londoner!). Two years ago, I was more impressed with what was on offer in Poundgate in Glasgow than Poundland. However, when I gave a talk at the Streetlevel Gallery a few weeks ago, very close to where Poundgate used to be, I noticed the shop had gone. Anyway, here’s what I had to say about their porno DVDs a couple of years back:
“Poundgate was doing titles like Lust In The Grass (although personally I’d prefer Lust In The Dust as the ‘hard’ sell end of a tiresome video of a Czech chick getting ‘filthy’ – double entendre – in her garden), Bondage Party (you can see a picture of that here) and Best of Sammy Marshall (image of that here). I’d never heard of Sammy Marshall but a web search led me directly to her site (this was nearly two years ago, the site is no longer up): ‘Sammy Marshall. A model for around 20 years now, I’ve been published in all the top shelf magazines, page 3, calendars etc, and have also been in various movies. I also do lap dancing and strip shows all over the country…’ The Internet Movie Data Base provides the following filmography for Ms Marshall: Women That Wank: Volume 1 (2004), British Bitches in Leather (2001), Best of Single Sensations 1 (2001), Girls in Uniform 1 (2001), Dodger DVD 2 (2001), Dodger DVD 25 (2001), Golden Shower Girls 1 (2001), The Bitch: Best of Sammy Marshall (2000), Lesbian Amateur (1998), Mistress Leather (1997), Fetish Special 4 (1996).”
Having checked, I see that no new titles have been added to her IMDB filmography, so I guess Sammy Marshall’s glamour career ain’t going so well. You now need to add at least a year to the estimated age I gave Sammy in what I went on to say, but it looks like I judged things about right.
“At 34 Sammy Marshall has obviously reached a career peak as far as her work as a glamour model goes, but you can still book her: ‘My rates start from £40 per hour. I tailor every job to your specific requirements and my rates change accordingly. Please contact me to discuss your needs and we can agree a price. Minimum booking time is 2 hours, unless petrol money paid on top. If you want me for more than two hours then we can come to a special discount arrangement on price. All day bookings are £250. If you require a model release, then that’s an extra £25 on top. I will work all over the country but may ask for petrol money if it’s a long way. i.e. Newcastle. I will not do any anal, water-sports, animals or anything illegal. If you would like any more information on my work please contact me. Email sammy@sammymarshall.co.uk… Facing the future and the glamour age barrier that she’s already hit, Ms Marshall is now acting as an agent for other dancers and models. Check her r18models site…”
The r18models site is still up, albeit with slightly fewer models than last time I looked. And for me it makes the world of glamour modelling look distinctly unattractive. In fact, neither it nor one pound porno DVDs are at all tempting… I still prefer horror and crime as movie genres to bored housewives getting it on with candle sticks and water hoses in their suburban homes and gardens…. And if you want to book Sammy Marshall for a stag night or whatever, she now appears to be managed by the Stand and Deliver Booking Agency, who specialise in supplying comedians! You gotta laugh!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Tags: Best of Sammy Marshall, Best of Single Sensations 1, Bondage Party, British Bitches in Leather, Dodger DVD 2, Dodger DVD 25, Electric Blue, Girls in Uniform 1, Glasgow, Golden Shower Girls 1, Jenna Jameson, Lesbian Amateur, London, Lust In The Dust, Lust In The Grass, Mistress Leather, MySpace, Penthouse, Poundgate, Poundland, Sammy Marshall, Streetlevel Gallery, The Bitch: Best of Sammy Marshal, Whitecross Street, Women That Wank: Volume 1
Posted in exhibitionism, porn | 15 Comments »