Baby, I'm yours

Saturday

Breakfast at the lovely Fleet River Bakery.


Followed by more coffee at Monmouth. What is everyone looking at, you wonder.



Ah ha! Protestors! Apparently Ahava is evil and no one should shop there. On a street with way too many interesting shops/cafes/smutty lingerie boutiques, I never really looked twice at Ahava anyway. 


Moi, une poseure? Jamais...


Spot of record shopping at the ever wonderful (����) Phonica.


Have I mentioned my crane obsession? No? Probably for good reason.



Checked out the Jitish Kallat and Chiharu Shiota shows at Haunch of Venison. Saw a couple of things I liked, but overall was a bit disappointed.









Post-art cinnamon rolls and (more) coffee at The Nordic Bakery. It should be obvious by now that much of my weekend revolves around eating and drinking good coffee. I stopped at Flat White earlier too (post-Phonica pick-me-up).


Darwin Deez gig in the Westminster Reference Library. First ever gig in a library. It was brilliant good fun. I wish more gigs were like this - more about having fun and playing good music and dancing - less about posturing and looking too cool to not have any fun.


How can you not love a band that does choreographed dance breaks to the Bangles in between songs?


Gig over. Bye bye.


I've been too busy/lazy to write proper posts lately, but doing picture days is really quite fun anyway. I've always been about the writing so it's nice to force myself to document life in a different medium.


Lastly, in celebration of this sunshiny day of wonderfulness (I saw some daffodils this morning!!), my cheery mates over at We Are Not A Rockband have come up with a tune (Breakbot's Baby I'm Yours) that makes me want to start a disco-dance commune in Hyde Park, kick off my shoes, and dance in the grass all summer long. Bring on the festival season.

<3 London

I haven't been able to get the thought of moving to NYC out of my head. I don't know where it came from, but all it takes is the tiniest flutter of a 'what if' to make me dream of stalking uptown streets in fantastic heels and going to lots of art openings and taking cool welding and drawing and drinking classes at 3rdward. The funniest thing is that this is basically what I do living in London, only just it's London and not NYC. I don't even know if I'd like living in Manhattan and I already know that I love living in London. I've lived around a bit and I've never had the kind of relationship with other cities that I have with London. Come to think of it, I've never put as much into a relationship with a man in the same way I do with this city. It takes lots of work to get the most out of living here and it's funny, if perhaps a bit strange, that I'm willing to put so much into London. I'm happy to compromise and to try new things, to be faithful to my old favourites and to spend time learning about what's beneath the surface. I can't quite put my finger on it, but something about NYC makes me think that I wouldn't have this same kind of relationship - maybe it's because it's so much smaller than London. Don't get me wrong, there's something about the NYC spirit that I wish were more prominent in London. Where are all the people making shit happen outside of the boring old established spaces, the people doing exciting things and running amazing events. I think Londoners tend to be a bit lazier, a bit more suspicious and cynical in general than their counterparts across the Atlantic. I shouldn't overly generalise as I met some super inspiring people during the SALON exhibition and also during the London Design Festival. It restores my faith in the people in this town to know that there are curious and dynamic people hiding out there, I just wish they'd transform from consumers of culture into producers of it.

On a semi-related note, and because people ask me all the time (I know...), here's a top 10 of my favourite places in London. These aren't token groovy places, but places I love and go to all the time - places that I can always count on for reassurance that London is the place for me.

In no particular order:

1) Brunch at The Ambassador in Exmouth Market
2) Donmar and Royal Court Theatres
3) Dana Centre
4) Champagne Bar at St Pancras Station
5) Library Bar at the Lanesborough Hotel
6) Haunch of Venison gallery
7) The reading room in the London Library
8) Three Kings Pub in Clerkenwell
9 Teasmith in Spitalfields, Monmouth in Covent Garden, and Flat White in Soho
10) London Review of Books bookshop

Failing that, just take a walk. Don't forget to look up for inspiration lurks in the most unlikely of places.

Teasmith

Royal Court Theatre

The Library Bar

The Three Kings

Event at the Dana Centre

Haunch of Venison III

Haunch of Venison makes me happy. Obviously, I love the way it sounds when you say, 'I'm off to Haunch of Venison', but mostly I love it because it's magnificently inspiring. HOV is doing what the Tate Modern should be doing had they more curatorial gumption: showcasing works by innovative and exciting contemporary artists. I'm pretty clued up when it comes to contemporary art, but every time I go to a new show at HOV, I'm always surprised by work from an artist I've never heard of before.

I went to the private view tonight for the new Thomas Heatherwick Extrusions exhibition which opens just in time for the London Design Festival. Rather appropriate, as (though I haven't quite made up my mind) I'm pretty sure these pieces are process over practice. Not that I'm in any position to gripe, because I'm absolutely fascinated by process, technique, form - all those behind the scenes elements tend only to heighten one's appreciation of the final product - I love a back story. But this only works if the process is merely a contributing factor to the finished product - anything that rests on the laurels of process must be, by its very nature, flawed. So the fact that you can't even sit on Heatherwick's benches means there's something not quite right about them, but does explain why they're in the HOV: these are not benches, they're art. To be fair, as art they're beautiful and immeasurably clever pieces of sculpture, but as benches, frankly they're terrible.

In any event, all was not lost as I stumbled upon something of much more interest on the ground floor: beautiful light sculptures from the early 1970s by the American artist Dan Flavin. This just goes to prove my point. Dan Flavin is one of those artists that you (meaning me, of course) probably should know, but don't. That's what I love about HOV. Everyone knows too much about Picasso, Duchamps, Dali, but even more than too much about Gilbert & George, Emin and Hirst. Most people who rock up to the Tate Modern on the weekend have never heard of Flavin or Coventry or Ghenie - all artists recently shown at HOV. I say this all the time, but it should be the role of an institution like the Tate Modern to expose people to under represented work by significant artists. If the Tate Modern went up in flames tomorrow, I wouldn't miss it for a second - as long as HOV continues programming consistently outstanding exhibitions, I'll look to it for inspirational and innovative thinking in contemporary art.

Coventry and Ghenie at Haunch of Venison

Paid a visit to Haunch of Venison's new show on Friday, featuring the work of Keith Coventry and Adrian Ghenie. I'm always slightly apprehensive before I walk in to a modern art gallery. I really, really want the work to be good, but experience has so often brought disappointment. I suspect the Tate Modern is largely to blame. Let me explain. Because the Tate is the biggest, most prominent, extensively funded space for the display of modern art in the entire country, one might expect it to - like one's parents before one is old enough to realise parents have affairs and neglect to use contraception - hold some degree of authority and expertise. Yet in the last two years, all but one of the Tate Modern's exhibitions have filled me with dread, apathy at the very least.

But since HOV has moved into its new home, I've arrived at each exhibition with a tingle of dread and departed with a satisfied sense of encountering artists of both great talent and great wit. Once upon a time a painter could get away with simply being a master of his craft. Michelangelo and Rembrandt didn't have to look far for their subjects. Though we like to think we have raised art as a profession above base comercialism (hahahahahahahahah!), from the Renaissance onwards, painting only made sense if there was someone to purchase the painting. So work did not tend to be created and then sold, for this was an inefficient waste of time, but rather only painted if there was a guaranteed buyer - hence commissions. Family or individual portraits, paid for by the sitter; or religious iconography, paid for by the church. So when we look at an old master painting, say Vermeer's Girl With a Pearl Earning, we tend to focus on the artist's wonderful technique, his use of tone, lighting, and brush strokes, and ignore his clever social commentary - if only because there isn't one. No matter. This isn't what portrait painting is about in the Renaissance.

Modern artists have a harder time of it in some ways, then, because they are expected to not only be excellent technicians, but also to be incredibly witty. Taken to the extreme with something like Duchamp's urinal, we have only the idea and no art. I think this is why you so regularly hear comments such as, 'my kid could have made that' or 'yes, but is it art?' And while we'll all draw our own lines as to what does or does not constitute 'art', these two painters, Keith Coventry and Adrian Ghenie, represent all the best possibilities of modern art: bringing together technique and wit in compelling and unique ways, creating beautiful works of art that restore ones faith in modern art.

Coventry typically works in series which is a lovely thing for an observer. It provides a sense of harmony and visual cohesion. Walking into the first room, a gorgeous sequence of paintings following the ROYGBV spectrum catches the eye. It's not until you walk up close that the thick, impasto strokes morph into the face of Jesus. In fact lots of faces of Jesus, as all the paintings in the spectrum of colours are of Jesus - paintings from a recent (2009) series called 'Repressionism'.

The other series I loved was 'Echoes of Albany', painted between 2004-2008. This series of more than 40 paintings is a collective interpretation of the infamous bachelor apartments, Albany, just next to Burlington Gardens. These little snippets of life at Albnany feel like clues to the mysteries surrounding the famous inhabitants of Albany and their equally salubrious lifestyles: paintings of Byron and Gladstone are interspersed with contemporary scenes of prostitution and drug-taking, all in Laura Ashley tones of pink and mauve.


While it was good to see the Coventry, Adrian Ghenie was a revelation. While the exhibition blurb talked about Ghenie's 'enduring fascination with European history, addressed through ideas relating to memory, trauma, and extremism', this almost seems to undermine the exquisite painterly quality and fantastical nature of the subject matter of the paintings.

Ghenie loves paint, that much is clear. Photographs simply do not do justice to Ghenie's skill as a painter, his exploration of technique and his perfection of a form that works perfectly with his incredibly visual and surrealist form of narrative painting. He drips and pours paint, then scrapes and removes the paint from the surface, building up layers in some areas, eroding in others. Again, the guide talks about Dadaism and Duchamp as being the primary inspirations for the work, but what is so wonderful about the paintings is that they are in no way prescriptive, but rather open to any number of interpretations. A spectacular painting entitled 'Duchamp's Funeral' looked to me like something out of Bram Stoker's Dracula. This fluidity in technique and subject is surprising, beautiful, and inspiring - this is work which must be experienced, not seen - reproductions simply do not do credit to Ghenie's work. Go and see it for yourself.

a haunch of venison

Though it was only founded in 2002, Haunch of Venison is already one of London's most important commercial art galleries. It probably helped that the place was founded by Harry Blain and Grahan Southern, two chaps who used to run the contemporary art department of Christie's in London. The gallery only really represents superstars in contemporary art - two of the four 2007 Turner Prize nominees are HoV artists.

In 2007, HoV was bought out by Christie's and the art world went absolutely cracking mad. Auction houses are only supposed to sell work that has been previously purchase in a gallery. It's like when Damien Hirst caused such an uproar in the art scene when he bypassed the dealers and sold straight to the auction houses. Things just aren't done this way in the protocol-obsessed art world. I'm not suggesting I agree with any of it, but it's interesting to know what riles people up in the high financial stakes world of art dealing. In any event, HoV is not allowed to bid for any works at Christie's auctions nor were they allowed to show at the Frieze Art Fair in 2007, but no one really wants to go on the record as saying they have an issue as the big boss of Christie's, Fran�ois Pinault, shells out an awful lot of money on contemporary art. You wouldn't want to piss off the man who keeps your gallery in business, would you.

Still. Some good has come out of the buy out. HoV clearly has a lot more cash to throw about and the first thing they did was abandon their old gallery space in Haunch of Venison Yard, just off Bond Street. The space was quaint, but cramped and impossible to find, so it's a relief that they've moved. The gallery's new home is in Burlington Gardens, where the old Museum of Mankind used to be, though I didn't even know there was a Museum of Mankind. Unfortunately, like a lot of grand buildings, there's a massive discrepancy between upstairs and downstairs spaces. The curators should be banned from showing any work in the downstairs section of the gallery: the resemblance leans more toward an unloved 80s hotel which has seen better days and can't be spruced up with a coat of white paint than a grand gallery space. It's unfair to the works to show them in such inappropriate spaces, and I still can't figure out whether I really didn't like any of the art on the ground floor, or whether the rooms just put me in that bad of a mood for considering art.

When I walked up the grand staircase onto the first floor however, prospects immediately looked up. The first room I went in was spacious and light - simply far more appropriate for the display of contemporary art. Why do curators think white walls, white boxes all the time? The piece in this room is a new installation by Jannis Kounellis which consists of rows of dark overcoats pinned to the floor by iridescent lead plugs and framed by a single row of worn shoes. The piece is untitled, which always irritates me, but I've seen enough holocaust films to get the visual message. However, when I read the blurb, it talks about the trio of materials forming a lexicon that conveys messages of warmth, protection, and the passage of people and time, carrying the imprint of nomadic individuals. Right...

I laughed out loud when I walked into the next room, where hanging from the ceiling were two "anatomically correct" skeletons of Tweety and Sylvester by Hyungkoo Lee. I love the idea of using contemporary art to poke fun of or engage seriously with the practices of something like the displays at the Natural History museum. It's such a fresh and light-hearted take on contemporary art's obnoxious fascination with skulls and images of death. There were at least four different artists at this exhibition who either showed skulls or skulls juxtaposed onto human or animal bodies. It isn't new anymore, there's no shock factor or controversy in doing this and frankly the association has become a bit tired.


I have a weird thing about taxidermy. I just like it. I don't think it's sick or disgusting, but very pretty and sort of delicate. A little macabre, maybe, but I still like it. These taxidermy dogs are by Jochem Hendricks and are funny, creepy, and gorgeous. I loved this room as well. I'm not certain if HoV isn't allowed to hang things directly onto the walls or if there are renovation works still in progress, but the upstairs rooms all had floating walls in front of the original walls on which the artworks were hung. It made for a slightly strange viewing environment, but I did like that they at least painted these walls interesting colours as in the below image, where the wall was painted a deep turquoise.


My favourite piece in the show was an installation by Ed and Nancy Kienholtz from 1994 called 76 J.C.s Led the Big Charade. There are 76 different representations of Christ mounted on wagon handle pulls with the hands and feet from different (what looks like) ceramic dolls. Ed Kienholz was a religious cynic and thought the iconographic representation of Christ was an abuse of spirituality by organised religions which only contributed to a disillusion of faith. It's an absolutely marvelous installation, very well thought out, and quite provocative. At least more so than many of the other installations.

And finally we come to Bill Viola, the primary reason why I went to see the show. Viola is one of HoV's bigger artists and I've seen his work exhibited there previously in 2006, when he created a piece around Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Viola makes video installations - some are marvelous, others less so. Like the Michalek Slow Dancing film I posted about a month ago, Viola films nearly everything in slow motion. His videos are surprisingly painterly and I think you can get the sense of what I mean from the second image below, an installation called Small Saints. They look exactly like Harry Potterified Renaissance icons and are transfixing in their loveliness. The other piece on show is called Incarnation, though I couldn't find any images of it (the photo below is from the Tristan and Isolde video from 2006). Lately many of Viola's pieces seem to feature a sort of screen of water which his actors walk through - it looks incredible in his rich, saturated colours and slow motion films. Viola has a tendency to be a bit fantastic, a bit romantic, and a bit obvious, but nevertheless, he makes you work for every second of meaning.


So while this may not be the most thought provoking, change-your-life provocative show of contemporary art happening, it certainly is entertaining, light-hearted and whimsical. And sometimes what you really need from art is just a few hours of fun.