i can burn your face

'To burn a face' is a slang expression used among spies

for the threat to expose another agent's identity.

It's funny how spectators of art so often take 'truth' for granted. If someone whacks a shark in a box of formaldehyde and says it's art, we believe that not only is it a real shark in real formaldehyde, but also that it's real art, provided it's in a gallery setting of course. If an artist says that the ashes in a pile in the corner of the gallery resulted from a wind shelter they exploded with a hand grenade, we believe that as well. It wasn't until I went to check out Jill Magid's show at the Tate Modern that I realised how much we were willing to accept at face value.

Though Jill Magid's exhibition at the Tate Modern is in the little gallery on level 2 and hasn't been promoted well or reviewed much, it's the most interesting exhibition I've seen in the TM since Cy Twombly's exhibition in 2008. As a viewer, I'm very intrigued by the idea of Magid's work, her commission with the AIVD - the Dutch Intelligence and Security Agency, the country's secret service - and the restrictions placed on the artist about showing the work, but the very nature of the work itself made me surprisingly sceptical.

It's a very small show, but it took less than 5 minutes of wandering around before I begin to wonder whether I was being had. Was this exhibition a true reflection of the artist's actual experience or was it simply that a very clever individual had dreampt up a fantastic conceptual framework which resulted in some pretty words scrawled in neon light. I've since done a bit of research and it seems that Magid did have a commission with the AIVD and worked with them from 2005 to 2008. Under regulations - which similarly exist in parts of the UK - stipulating that new buildings must provide an element which engages with the arts, usually a public sculpture, she won the commission. It sounds like an initially forward thinking AIVD hired Magid to find the 'human face' of the organisation, only they got a bit more than they bargained for. She carried out her commission by meeting privately with a number of agents and collecting personal data about them and their experiences working as agents in the secret service.

In fact, Magid herself requested to be vetted by the agency and was eventually granted security clearance. Her exhibition speaks strongly of her own desire to be part of 'the secret' and to act as an agent herself. Though no matter how close she got and what kind of access she received, what happened next only demonstrates how clear the divide is between 'us' and 'them'. In 2008, Magid was set to show the results of her commission at a gallery in the Hague, though the day before its opening, a group of AIVD agents showed up (sounds more like a film than real life!) to vet the work. Magid also gave the agents a copy of the manuscript of her novel - which she wrote in lieu of a report about the experience - which they later returned in a heavily edited form.

AIVD edited page from Magid's novel

When Magid complained to the AIVD that the censored manuscript was no longer publishable, they brilliantly suggested that she show the manuscript in a one-time only exhibition, after which it would become the property of the Dutch government and not be published. What else do you expect when you undertake a commission for a secret service agency. Having said that, I think Magid, and the exhibition side-step the problematic issues surrounding permissions and secrecy beautifully and imaginatively. As Magid was obviously not allowed to reproduce photographic images of the agents, she had to think of another way to visually represent them. One of the ways she did so was to visualise language as a series of neon signs - these are words or phrases the agents said during their interviews - which are then written in neon in her own handwriting.

Exploring the negative imapact of a highly intrusive surveilance society is one of the most overused tropes in contemporary art - it's usually presented in a screechy, obvious, in-your-face manner. Magid's work makes the same statement but uses an entirely different pack of cards: the message is so subtle and refined - mixed with an unexpected longing to be on the other side - that it takes until long after you've departed the exhibition to figure out what the real message is all about.

PS While you're at the Tate, make sure to check out the Miroslaw Balka's work in the turbine hall. It's great fun!

Miroslaw Balka;s 'How It Is' at Tate Modern (image from London Smoke blog)

whose fault is it, really

Given that I’m a Classics PhD student, I spend an awful lot of time reading obscure texts, written in a language that no one even speaks by men most people have never heard of. Which is something of a shame as much of what these dead chaps wrote is rather splendid and though I’m loathe to say so, still relevant today.*

My thesis deals primarily with one text – Lucan’s Pharsalia – an epic poem written in the first century under Nero (you remember, he played the fiddle while Rome burned) which looks back on the last days of the Roman Republic. This ain’t Homer or Virgil – there’s no dawn and her rosy red fingers here. Lucan’s Erichtho makes Homer’s Polyphemus [the Cyclops] look like the BFG, and his grotesque descriptions of battle are entirely devoid of the traditional conventions of honour and glory normally found in epic. It’s a no-holds-barred gory, raging tantrum of a text, which positively bemoans the previously unimaginable fall of the Roman Republic.

One of the things I most love about Lucan’s epic is that, as expected, he rails against the leaders of the civil war – Caesar and Pompey – but his purest expressions of loathing are reserved for the Roman people.

When Caesar enters Rome for the first time, Lucan writes beautifully of how the people are so terrified of what Caesar might do that they are prepared to do whatever he wants:

“So he speaks and enters a Rome thunderstruck by terror, because they believe that he will sack the walls with black fires and scatter the gods, as if he had captured Rome. This was the extent of their fear: they equate his wishes with his power. No favourable greetings, no feigned cries of happy uproar do they pretend; hardly have they room for hatred. The Palatine halls of Phoebus [i.e. the Temple of Apollo] are filled by a crowd of Fathers brought out from their lairs, though no one has the right to summon the Senate; the sacred chairs were not resplendent with the consul, no praetor – by law the next in rank – is present, and the empty curule chairs are missing from their place. Caesar was everything: the Senate-House listened to one man’s voice. The Fathers sat, prepared to vote in favour if he asks for tyranny, for temples for himself, for the slaughter and the exile of the Senate. Thank the gods his sense of shame exceeded Rome’s self-degradation.”

This is what I mean about the contemporary relevance of the ancient texts. This passage reminds me all too well of the fear-mongering that goes on in my own terrified country: the war on terror, anthrax, communists – you name it – if the politicians and the media are able to whip up enough fear, people are all too willing to give up their civil rights.

Lucan delivers a stinging reprimand against the people for such cowardly behaviour and, as the ultimate dressing-down, suggests that ultimately the people of Rome are to blame for their own downfall. Something we’d all do well to remember, especially comparing, say the difference in cost v public anger over the MP expenses scandal with the banks bailout. MPs were paid just over £93 million in expenses in 2007-08 [the most recent total figures I could find] whereas the bank bailout was £28.7 billion – more than five times the cost of annual military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. But which do you think most twisted the britches of the general public? Not the bank bailout, which hardly merited so much as a sip of tea being spat out the nose, but the MP expenses ‘scandal’ which has hardly been out of the press since the story broke over the summer. Frankly, I don’t have a problem with MPs claiming for expenses (though I’m less happy about them claiming excessively, obviously) – in theory, these people are public servants (again, I might not be that enchanted by the behaviour of the current lot, but I agree with the position in principle) and it’s their job to look after the health of the country. £93 million over one year is not really that much money. £28.7 billion pounds is, however, A LOT of money. That taxpayer money went to bail out organisations with zero interest in the public welfare is absolutely mind-boggling. That the people of this country were ready to draw and quarter their MPs for a few thousand pounds worth of expenses and yet raised little more than an eyebrow when these same MPs gave shed-loads of taxpayer money to bail out the banking sector is just incomprehensible.

As Lucan says of the Romans, it’s not enough to blame the sender of the message when the recipient is equally culpable. Like Caesar and Pompey, some of our civil leaders may be dirty bastards, but who lets them get away with it?

*Loathe to say so as there exists a breed of classicist who feels the need to belittle our subject matter by constantly undermining it in ‘justifying the contemporary relevance of the ancient texts for the modern world’. We’re academics interested in knowledge, not in increasing profit margins, I don’t understand why there’s any need to forge bonds of contemporary relevance. That they exist is both happy coincidence and proof of the extraordinary nature of the quality of the writing and the subject matter of the texts.

take care of yourself

Am way behind the times here. This is no doubt due to the increasingly frequent nightmares where the board who sit on my viva line me up against a wall and shoot me instead of just failing my thesis. Hence writing thesis, not blog. Good times.

Having said that, I've still been out and about to see and do lots of interesting things in the last few weeks (yes, aside from work and nightmares): Ravel's L'Heure espagnole and Puccini's Gianni Schicchiat the ROH - amazing, hilarious, and beautifully performed - and who knew this ravishing aria was in the rather unassuming one act about a cheeky Italian farmer. Divine dinners at L'Atelier de Joel Robuchon (the third best dining experience I've had in London in the last year, after Landau at the Langham and the fine food and wine evening at the White Swan) and on the old Pullman Orient Express train. If I have the time, I'll write these up properly but I did want to single out one thing in particular: the Sophie Calle show on now at the Whitechapel Gallery until 3 January.

It's a sort of retrospective of Calle's work but the clear star of the show is Take Care of Yourself (as vile a phrase in French as in English: prenez soin de vous), a piece which won rave reviews at the Venice Bienalle in 2007. After receiving an email in which her then lover breaks up with her, Calle whizzed the email off to 107 various women and asked them to use their professional skills to interpret the missive. While the exhibition is simply unmissible and anything I say about it here would only get in the way of your own response to and enjoyment of what is a very, very clever piece of artistry and social engagement, there was one thing that really stood out for me and that was the email itself.

I don't know about you, but I've been broken up with by letter before (and it was handwritten, baby. One up on Madame Calle) and while his letter was as polite as the situation demanded, it wasn't anything like the email Calle's lover sent to her. I kept thinking over and over (you practically come to know the letter by heart - in French and English- if you stay in the exhibition long enough), god, why have I never gone out with a French bloke before! I don't want a boring 'I hope one day you may forgive me. It's nothing you did, nothing I can explain, blah, blah, blah' break-up letter, I want a mysterious, freakishly formal email about 'the others' and how he will always remember the 'unique and beautiful way I interpreted the world' - I still never did quite figure out what the hell he was referring to with 'the others'. Trust me, it's not as obvious as it sounds. But the disconnect between his letter, grounded in the rhetoric of courtly love, the fact that he sent it via email, and well, just that men actually exist who write letters like that sort of turned my world upside down. I think it's a sad day indeed when a gal starts looking at the men of another country differently (favourably, even) by the way the write break-up emails. Obviously, I'm not getting out of the library enough.

Hallowe'en

I love Halloween (especially Martha Stewart style). It's my favourite holiday. I think all Americans love Halloween. Not only does it kick off the holy trinity of Yankee holidays - Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas - but it also marks the single night of the year when nearly the entire country turns off the tv for the night and hightails it outside. Because Halloween has only really taken off in the UK over the last few years - primarily pushed via shops as a Hallmark holiday - people here just don't understand the spirit of Halloween.

Despite what people in the UK might think, Halloween is not primarily about dressing up. Moreover, it's not about dressing up like a slut or a zombie. I don't know where this came from (internal collective psychological trauma?) people in London seem to think that there are only two options for dressing up on Halloween: like a zombie or like a slut. On very rare occasions you'll get someone with some subtlety who goes for the slutty zombie look, but that's not very often. Given that the only difference between a normal Saturday night - because another thing people here don't get is that Halloween is on the 31st, not on the last Saturday of October - and Halloween is that girls might smear a little fake blood on their faces as well as glitter. I digress.

If you consider that most Americans live in suburban planned communities and drive everywhere, interaction with neighbours is very limited. Also, unless you're downtown or taking your dog for a walk or going to the park, you never walk anywhere. When I was growing up, the most exciting thing about Halloween was that we spent all night walking around the neighbourhood filling up pillowcases with candy by going door to door. Families set up chairs and sat outside, people got out bbqs and had big street parties - for one night, everyone was outside and everyone was friendly. Sure getting dressed up was a big part of the fun, especially because my aunt always made us amazing costumes, but it was more about being able to run around the neighbourhood with everyone else and just have fun.

Like Christmas or Easter, Halloween in America has its own set of traditions that haven't made their way across the Atlantic. When you disassociate these traditions, then you have Halloween a la UK: fake blood, slutty zombie costumes and lots of alcohol. There's no pumpkin carving, bobbing for apples, trick-or-treating, spending a month making an amazing princess costume, or any of the things that really make Halloween so fun and so different. Halloween isn't about zombies, it's about community.

christmas in, ummm, october?

image © ladybanana

Dear Shop Retailers, Evening Standard, and People Who Decide When To Put the Lights Up On Oxford Street,

Today is October 23rd. It is not even Halloween. November is a distant dream. December is a foreign country. Shop window displays should NOT be full of tinsel and ornaments. The Oxford Street Christmas lights should be gathering dust in a Croydon warehouse, not creeping us out (IN THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER!) with their ghostly hints of impending holiday doom.

While I realise that you would like us to spend the next two months in a Bacchanalian, Christmas-inspired retail frenzy as some sick means of propping up our tired economy, I would quite like you to fuck off and leave us in peace. Toys will not sell out by mid-December because buyers didn't order enough stock. Remember what they said about the millennium? Exactly.

Christmas is one day. ONE DAY. Please do not force us to spend 1/6th of the year thinking about a single day.

That is all.

Yours eternally,

Crystal

i am here

photo credit: Rowan Griffiths

i am here

13 September 2009 – Autumn 2011

Samuel House Estate, Dunston Road, E8 4HN

[a shorter version of this review appears in The Architectural Review, November 2009]

Boarded-up housing estates have become clichéd, yet increasingly prevalent, symbols of doom and gloom in the modern urban landscape. Thankfully there are those willing to push the boundaries of such clichés, as evidenced by new installation, i am here, by artist collaboration Fugitive Images (FI). Their installation replaces 67 bright orange boards – which have covered the windows of empty flats in Samuel House since April 2007 – with large-scale photographs of residents of the estate.

Though Samuel House was formally transferred to housing association London & Quadrant Housing Trust (L&Q) in October 2008, it is not scheduled for redevelopment until late 2011. In the meantime, there has been, ‘a gradual wearing down process’ as artist Lasse Johansson calls it, in order to get residents re-housed before development works begin. As long time residents of Samuel House, Johansson, along with FI colleagues Andrea Luka Zimmerman and Tristan Fennell, have lived through flats being bricked and boarded up.

The three have been documenting the drive toward the estate’s redevelopment over the past six years in a variety of media. In addition to the ‘i am here’ project, they are also collaborating on a book and a film, both aimed at catching this particular moment of imminent change in Hackney’s urban landscape.

Johansson is surprisingly candid and captures the crux of the underlying problem with urban estate housing, especially given last year’s furore over London’s Robin Hood Gardens estate and a failed campaign to obtain listed status for the building: ‘I’ve learned a lot, both from this project, but also just from living here. Initially, I had a very black and white view of redevelopment and I began to feel very nostalgic for what we would lose, but I also could see that residents who have lived here for 20 years deserved better facilities.’

photo credit: Rowan Griffiths

Speaking about their inspiration for the project, Zimmerman explains that it stemmed from a desire to confront this pessimism, from the estate’s residents as well as from outsiders. The charming top-floor flat Zimmerman and Johansson share faces the Regent’s Canal and both say they often struggled with comments made by passers-by. ‘People were always speculating about who lived here, whether anyone lived here’, Zimmerman says, ‘but also, there was the issue that the people who do live here were unable to project any kind of positive future for the estate. There was this idea that even in 10 years time everything would still be the same and we wanted to challenge these preconceptions.’

Zimmerman continues, ‘people saw a failed building and immediately equated it with failed inhabitants – we needed to challenge this one way dialogue and so we thought how can we make a work that addresses this idea and involves the individuals in the community.’

Armed with signatures from 98% of the estate’s residents, FI took advantage of a Community Growth Fund set up by L&Q for residents and presented their project proposal in February of this year where they were granted one-third of their budget, the rest of which was fundraised.

As to the project’s reception, Johansson says that it has definitely changed people’s perception of the estate, but he also points out that, because of city space and collective memory, the project has an infinite number of receptions: ‘it’s like Melanie Counsell’s installation at Matt’s Gallery [in 1995] when she lowered the ceiling - for those who were familiar with the gallery space, there was an immediate realisation of what had happened to the building, a different level of understanding for those in the know.’

Zimmerman chips in to clarify, ‘Of course, there are two different audiences for our project and for us they are very clearly defined: there are the people who live here and the outside world. Some of the people who didn’t live here will have remembered the orange boards and notice the difference immediately. People who have never seen the orange boards have a completely different reaction to the photos.’

Zimmerman crosses her legs before concluding, ‘A question that interests me, especially about social housing, is whether it is the building itself or the people who live in the buildings that makes it architecture? Perhaps the obvious answer is a bit of both and this project is about highlighting that.’

Samuel House before...

and after

people are strange

Plenty of culture to be had à Londres just now. It's art week mania with Zoo and Frieze and various spin off and satellite events. I'm off to Frieze this afternoon - with the AJ interns in tow - so will report back later. The London Film Festival also kicked off a few days ago and I went to see my first festival film yesterday. I should say films, rather, as I went to see the aptly titled 'People Are Strange' collection of short films.

First of all, let me make no secret of the fact that I love short films. Short films are to features what poetry is to literature. The best short films say more in 10 minutes than most features manage in two hours. In the same way that too many people say they don't like or don't get poetry, many film goers tend to say the same about short films.

Of the seven films I saw yesterday (4 from the UK, 1 from Australia, 1 from Iceland and 1 from Poland), all were very good, three were outstanding and only one felt mildly unoriginal. Most of the film-makers were present at the screening and a few things struck me as peculiar: two of the films were co-directed by brothers (have the Cohen's really had this much of an impact on an entire generation of film-makers?) and only one of the films was directed by a woman. As soon as I started to wonder why cinema - or at least this screening - was so male dominated, it also hit me that the film I thought was the least original - After Tomorrow - was also the only female directed film. Even though I wasn't very keen on the bizarrely titled, Spunkbubble, there's absolutely no way anyone could suggest the film was unoriginal.

Still from The Continuing and Lamentable Saga of the Suicide Brothers

It was a bit of a surprise to see Keira Knightley and Rupert Friend on screen in the short film, The Continuing and Lamentable Saga of the Suicide Brothers, though I've since discovered that Friend wrote the film alongside its third actor, Tom Mison. While the film is sinisterly beautiful to behold, there's something of a vanity project vibe about it. Though another benefit of short films is that you can forgive a 10-minute beautifully shot vanity project in a way that you simply can't forgive a 2.5 hour vanity project. Everyone wins with short films.

Still from Cicada

I think my favourite of the lot, though by no means the most creative or most original, was Amiel Courtin-Wilson's Cicada. In fact, it wasn't so much a short film as it was a mini documentary. It's just ten minutes of one man telling a story - in extreme close up - straight into the camera. Given that there are few cuts and that it's nothing other than this man's face, the ten minutes are absolutely gripping. I could only find a few stills, but what sadly doesn't come across in the stills photography is the quality of the cinematography. It's beautifully back lit so that the intense blue of the man's eyes are perfectly set off against the white glow of the background. My only complaint is that Courtin-Wilson mucks up the end a bit, by putting in some arty hand-held shots of the man walking through darkened streets - totally gratuitous and unnecessary given the power of the simplicity of the previous nine minutes. I suppose though, that this is the thing that distinguishes the truly great artists from the just plain good: knowing when to stop.