Mister Trippy

On Thursday night I took in the opening of the Hoppy (John Hopkins) exhibition Against Tyranny: Talking about a Revolutionary at Idea Generator on Chance Street in Shoreditch. The displayed photos date from the early and mid-sixties. Mostly they seemed to be straightforward examples of photojournalism and celebrity portraiture. There were also some freak graphics by people other than Hoppy, but connected to him via his involvement with the underground newspaper International Times. So what Idea Generator presents us with is very much an official history of one phase of the London counterculture. That said, it looked a little odd in east London, when so much of what was on display depicted west London more than 40 years ago.

The opening was too packed to be able to see the images properly, but what most interested me was coverage of ‘ban-the-bomb’ demonstrations. I didn’t clock Hoppy’s Doctor Steve Abrams portraits which I’ve roundly criticised elsewhere (do a word search to get to Abrams and Hoppy on this page) for:  “mimicking the depiction of male doctors and female hysterics in nineteenth-century medical paintings. Since some viewers were inevitably going to make a connection between these publicity japes and the earlier imagery upon which they so strikingly draw, Abrams left himself wide open to criticism for generating negative perceptions of both women and recreational drug users.” If these problematic images were on display, they were hidden in one of the nooks it was impossible for me to enter because of the crowds already there.

I couldn’t see enough of the show to make any real judgement of it; and beyond Joe Boyd and Hoppy himself, I spotted very few familiar faces from the sixties. I did manage to grab hold of Malcolm Dickson from Street Level Gallery in Glasgow, and as we needed to catch up, we ducked out for refreshments elsewhere. So I guess I’ll go back and see the show properly later, it is on until 19 July. The place was just too mobbed, with endless flashbulbs going off and professional film-makers getting in my way, to be pleasant.

Moving on, I hadn’t posted anything on YouTube for more than six months until yesterday because I was fed up with being censored on that site. As I’ve said elsewhere: “YouTube actually removed a parody of a Fluxus film for violating their rules. This was a countdown from 10 to 1, no images in it at all, just numerals. Presumably the problem was the joke title 10 Erotic Movies – it had more than twenty thousand hits before being taken down by the authoritarians who run that platform. If YouTube won’t allow a film like this, then Web 2.0 is a joke and we need to move on to Web 2.1, where we control the sites we’re posting on!”

But right now there is a new video of mine up on YouTube entitled Does Modern Art Give You A Headache? Check it out, and see how it emerged from an earlier blog on this site: Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art On Video.

And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org - you know it makes (no) sense!