tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-48475386471128446932024-02-07T16:39:37.751+00:00the rightness of wayward sentimentPhoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.comBlogger295125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-9513264738494729162012-12-19T11:27:00.001+00:002012-12-19T11:55:37.746+00:00Writing for the theatre: The Traverse Fifty<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">A few months ago the <a href="http://www.traverse.co.uk/writing/the-traverse-fifty/" target="_blank">Traverse Theatre</a> in Edinburgh launched a writing competition as part of its plans for celebrating 50 long years of producing bad-ass plays in that fair city. I have a long-standing love of theatre, and, coupled with one of my other long-held loves - writing - you probably wouldn't be too surprised to learn that I've got a dozen or so finished or nearly finished pieces of writing for the theatre kicking about in the darker regions of my filing cabinet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I have always, always wanted to write something for the theatre (lots of somethings, really) and have come pretty close on a couple of occasions. But then, the timings never worked out or all the funding fell through at the last minute and so those scripts sit around while other projects take precedence.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">When I saw the Traverse Fifty announcement, I thought it would be a great opportunity, should I wind up amongst the selected fifty, to not only produce a piece of writing for the theatre, but to learn as much as I could about theatrical writing over the course of the year-long attachment. The Traverse have concocted one of the most generous and genuinely exciting anniversary projects I've ever come across: 50 winning writers selected from among competition entries will all be attached to the theatre for the entire year, with a small number of writers from this larger pool given the opportunity to create full-length pieces for production the following year. In January, each of the 50 chosen writers will have their winning entries performed as read-throughs at the Traverse. Brilliant, right? The other thing that I enjoyed about the submission process was that each play could be no more than 500 words. A play in 500 words? What fun! </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So I wrote a little something, tenuously related to the theme of "a play for Edinburgh", and sent it off to the wizards at the Traverse. I got an email last night (incidentally, while I working my first service in the kitchen of House of Wolf for Blanch & Shock) from the Traverse saying that, while I made it to the later stages of the selection and "demonstrated real craft and a compelling theatrical voice", I didn't make the cut. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Of course, I'm bummed to have missed out on such a wonderful opportunity and a chance to <i>finally </i>do some writing for the stage, but I was so busy during service last night that I literally didn't have the chance to feel even a twinge of disappointment. Also, the Traverse ran the competition so professionally that it's impossible to feel let down or cheesed off. For all people running competitions out there, a bit of courtesy, punctuality and kindness really does go a long way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I don't usually put any kind of creative writing out in the public sphere because, well, I don't know why, really, but I thought I'd post my 500 word play about Edinburgh for the Traverse here because if I ever want to get a piece of writing for the theatre produced, I suppose it'll help if people know I want to do it...</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Anyway, here's my 500 word play for Edinburgh. There are numbers at each line instead of character names as each of the 50 lines is intended to be read by a different actor.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">London --> Edinburgh</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">1. I don't have to get out of bed to see the sky in the morning. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">2. Lying back, my head on the pillows, I can see London’s umbrella.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">3. It’s usually grey. But not today.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">4. Today, it’s just beautiful. So blue.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">5. An unreal blue; a blue only seen in cities.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">6. Or maybe, a blue like people who live in cities can only dream of.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">7. There're lots of things that people who live in cities can only dream of. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">8. Last week, I went to a talk about cities at the London School of Economics.<br />9. By 2050, the professor said, of 9 billion people on the planet,<br />10. The majority will live in cities. I can't get my head around this.<br />11. The thing no one ever tells you about cities<br />12. Is that nothing much happens when you live in one.<br />13. It only looks like things happen in cities, but<br />14. Most days I wake up, look at the sky,<br />15. Go to work, go to the shop, make dinner, go to bed.<br />16. “Metro-boulot-dodo”, as the French say.<br />17. Some days I'll watch a cooking programme on TV,<br />18. Or catch an art exhibition in town.<br />19. When you’ve lived in a city like London for a while,<br />20. You become part of this weird hive mind.<br />21. Things start to drive you crazy that never did before.<br />22. Like, tourists walking too slowly on the tube.<br />23. I kick the back of their shoes to get them moving.<br />24. Why does it make me so angry?<br />25. On the flip side, when people are screaming at each other<br />26. Outside my windows - shouting like they're gonna kill each other<br />27. I don't do anything other than press my face to the glass<br />28. And look and listen and shake my head and go back to the TV.<br />29. Because that's what cities are like. The people who do nice things,<br />30. They're not locals. They don't understand the code of anonymity that brings us here.<br />31. They say people come to cities for opportunities, but where else would we go?<br />32. The internet means we're all born in cities now.<br />33. What would my parents say if, after all that, I told them<br />34. I want to go live in a little house outside of Edinburgh.<br />35. To get away from these people, with their crazy ambitions,<br />36. Their desires to be famous no matter what cost.<br />37. These days, people don't even care what they're famous for.<br />38. Used to be they wanted to write literary masterpieces,<br />39. Symphonies so glorious people wept in dimmed auditoriums. <br />40. Now, people just want to be on telly.<br />41. Talking about other people on telly.<br />42. That's why I'll leave London for Scotland.<br />43. Today, from my window, I watched two men smash up<br />44. A perfectly serviceable brick wall and put it together again.<br />45. Why did they chip away at the old brick?<br />46. Only to make new cement and pile up new bricks?<br />47. I'm still trying to figure out the answers to my questions.<br />48. This is what happens when you live in a city like London.<br />49. There are always questions.<br />50. And never any answers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></span>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-64362505948582797902012-12-14T11:29:00.000+00:002012-12-14T11:30:05.205+00:00香港<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Ah, Hong Kong. What a strange and mysterious place. Like the city of the future 50 years ago that's already lived through the future and is now a bit saggy and patchy. There's clearly money everywhere, but wandering around the shopping haven that is Central I kept wondering about who actually buys this stuff? Who lives here? Who, indeed, can afford to live here?</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I ate wonton soup, Michelin-starred restaurant lunches, street-food buns filled with red bean paste and cream, Hong-Kong style comfort food (which, incidentally, is absolutely delicious). I had cocktails in bars with incredible views of the famous, and deservedly so, skyline. I walked everywhere, got lost a lot. Discovered the only remaining shop in the city dedicated to Chinese scroll painting and bought ink sticks and brushes to practice my calligraphy. I went to the outskirts of the city to check out Hackney-Wick style (though commercial) art galleries, and then had a meeting with the director and curator of soon-to-be the biggest museum of visual culture in the region: M+. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In some ways, there's not really a lot going on in Hong Kong apart from the usual métro-boulot-dodo, which seems strange since the soft-power of cultural consumption is what's so often sold as the psychological carrot for urban dwellers. If there aren't theatres and cinemas and art museums, no one will live happily in the squashed conditions necessitated by urban density, but I suppose in Hong Kong, that's what the high-end shopping and eating establishements are for. Who cares about Turandot when you've got Otto e Mezzo? Personally, I need both, which is why I'm in London and not Hong Kong, but the city certainly makes for a fascinating visit and I'm looking forward to going back to see how M+ develops.</span></span><br />
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<br />Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-48279746764299633942012-11-09T12:50:00.002+00:002012-11-09T12:51:43.731+00:00Video fun times!<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I was cleaning a load of old photos and documents off my phone the other day, when I came across a few videos I'd obviously taken on my phone and completely forgotten about.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In chronological order:</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">1. The light parade which launched last year's <a href="http://www.lumiere-festival.com/" target="_blank">Lumiere Festival</a> in Durham, which was AWESOME!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dymCXY4qL-hunl7Bri9ONYVEiGOOhf9A4ySYsrtcNzIyzZmp926QBOIXb-nIMqnGOYI6AWiWdTzuwHuA1gvSA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">2. Some wicked tunes by an insanely crazy bone people orchestra thing in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeppsholmskyrkan" target="_blank">most brilliant Swedish building</a> that's a sort of rip off of Rome's Pantheon, during the Stockholm Furniture Fair.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dw0r9TldSDfV5GAdiXJTYyUsVr2f5PoG-VdLjj4jGPSfDp0IEZIv8rq1nvgOpWh-p9GixrGvK0mzetmQ6R-TA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">3. Josh from <a href="http://www.blanchandshock.com/" target="_blank">Blanch & Shock</a> swearing profusely while trying to flip out a bacon mousé from a teddy-bear shaped mould, during a photoshoot for the Pilot Issue of <a href="http://pagesofmagazine.com/" target="_blank">Pages Of Magazine</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></span>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-28150853392534692002012-11-01T16:00:00.005+00:002012-11-01T16:00:52.491+00:00You're Not From Around Here<a href="http://s205.beta.photobucket.com/user/cbennes/library/Wayward%20Sentiment" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="515" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/mikesmith4.jpg" width="640" /></a>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I've only been to Tennessee once and it hardly counts as a visit since it was little more than a look out the window of Memphis airport on a layover between a Phoenix to London flight. I don't remember anything about the view other than that the landscape was flat as a pancake. The only other thing I have to go on when it comes to Tennessee was a pre-teen best friend who was obsessed with the movie <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108327/" target="_blank">The Thing Called Love</a>. "Look out Music City," the heroine shouts off the top of a building when she finally arrives in Nashville, "cause here I am and I ain't never leaving." Needless to say, the two of us never made it to Tennessee and our dreams of country-music stardom came to naught. <span style="font-size: small;">B</span>ut that's probably for the best. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: small;">D</span>uring a San Diegan visit to my </span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span class="st">paterfamilias</span> in 2006,<span style="font-size: small;"> one afternoon I </span></span></span><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">dropped by the amusingly-named <a href="http://www.mopa.org/" target="_blank">Museum of Photographic Arts</a><span style="font-size: small;"> where</span> an exhibition of photographs by <a href="http://www.mikesmithphotographs.com/" target="_blank">Mike Smith</a> were on display.<span style="font-size: small;"> I don't know what suddenly brought Smith's photos back to mind, but I loved the images the<span style="font-size: small;">n and I still love them now.</span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Here<span style="font-size: small;">, the</span> classic visual trope of an outsider looking in, framing the oddness of an odd place with the surprising sensitivity <span style="font-size: small;">of a very good storyteller</span>. Smith moved to Tennessee via New Haven and Boston in 1981 to take up a professorship at East Tennessee University and spent his time travelling around the region, documenting the strange transformation of rural Tennessee as suburban tendencies took root.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The book - You're Not From Around Here - was published in 2004 and then toured various locations as the exhibition I saw in San Diego. I stupidly didn't buy <span style="font-size: small;">it</span> at the time and now wish, of course, that I did. Luckily, it's my birthday in a few weeks and <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/registry/wishlist/3J52IWLQ4S1GK/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_ws_7qPKqb0EZ58X6" target="_blank">if no one buys the book for me</a>, well then I'll just have to get it for myself<span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></span><br />
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<a href="http://s205.beta.photobucket.com/user/cbennes/library/Wayward%20Sentiment" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="524" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/mikesmith5.jpg" width="640" /></a>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-40183926817721712542012-10-30T16:23:00.000+00:002012-10-30T16:23:38.810+00:00Poetry Hour<a href="http://s205.beta.photobucket.com/user/cbennes/library/Wayward%20Sentiment" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20121026-00161.jpg" width="640" /></a>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I'm not entirely certain how it happened that I came to miss the news of Josephine Hart's death last year. I suppose this is what happens when you only read the FT and the IHT. Where else are such deaths reported but in the obit pages of the broadsheets<span style="font-size: small;">?</span> What a<span style="font-size: small;"> strange<span style="font-size: small;">, </span>long-lasting</span> tradition<span style="font-size: small;">;</span> the obit pages. I wish the British Library would have posted a notice on their events page - where I regularly go to find out when the next Poetry Hour will take place and always come away wondering<span style="font-size: small;"> </span>why the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour never appears anymore. <span style="font-size: small;">Almost certainly, s</span>omeone, somewhere<span style="font-size: small;"> </span>would <span style="font-size: small;">l<span style="font-size: small;">ambast</span></span> such a notice as callous and disrespectful, but for my part, I still find it difficult to understand why our culture deals with death - even difficult deaths - as a quiet thing to be hidden away. Or as a thing to be boxed off in the pages of broadsheets no one reads anymore.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I miss the Poetry Hour. For my money, it was consistently one of the finest cultural events in London. There is such power in beautiful, insightful poetry read aloud, particularly when it is read by highly-skilled actors. I'm a huge supporter of the next generation of poets and poetry publishers<span style="font-size: small;"> </span>and I certainly think Britain has a rich and vibrant contemporary poetry scene it can be proud of. Many of these younger poets are as skillful performers as they are writers, though the scene's interest in supporting the new and the next (no bad thing in a discipline still understood by most of the rest of the population as Shakespeare's sonnets), means that there are very few opportunities (outside of academia, at least) to re-examine the beauty and skill of previous generations of poets<span style="font-size: small;"> in a public setting<span style="font-size: small;">.</span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The format for PH was simple<span style="font-size: small;"> </span>but effective: Hart always introduced the poet-subject with brief contextual background - in her wonderful<span style="font-size: small;">y</span> thick voice - before the actors took turns reading various poems from the chosen poet's oeuvre. I can't remember all of the evenings I attended, but the two that stand out were Damian Lewis and his wife Helen McCrory reading Auden, and Charles Dance and Dominic West reading Larkin. I also heard on Radio 4, before I ever went to PH, Robert Hardy and Greg Wise reading Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, which still stands out as one of the best things I've ever listened to on BBC Radio.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I've written elsewhere about the <a href="http://waywardsentiment.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/but-larkin-will-never-go-out-of-fashion.html" target="_blank">Larkin</a> and the <a href="http://waywardsentiment.blogspot.co.uk/2009/05/september-1-1939.html" target="_blank">Auden</a> <a href="http://waywardsentiment.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/tastes-like-bitter-lemons-and-judgement.html" target="_blank">evenings</a>, about how both events made me entirely re-evaluate my views on both poets and their respective works. I can't fully express how wonderful, in particular the Larkin, evenings were - the pleasure <span style="font-size: small;">of being</span> made to realise and reflect <span style="font-size: small;">upon</span> how poems are song and how song is so intimately bound up with human culture and human expression. That these are words which are meant to be read, meant to be listened to and how wonderful, almost essential, it is to listen to them together with other people. And because Hart so often selected experienced stage actors, people whose professional success depends upon their ability to make words meaningful, the old poems came alive in ways in which they so rarely do on the page.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So now that I <span style="font-size: small;">finally know why the Josephine Hart Poetry Hour never appears on the British Library events page, I wonder whether the time might not be ripe for an adaption and extension of the theme<span style="font-size: small;">? Perhaps a n<span style="font-size: small;">ew poetry hour<span style="font-size: small;"> that teams the next-generation of <span style="font-size: small;">future-classic poets with their soon-to-be-supersta<span style="font-size: small;">r<span style="font-size: small;">-</span>stage<span style="font-size: small;">-</span>actor counterparts? Tempting.<span style="font-size: small;"></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-14413417496670584902012-10-23T14:58:00.000+01:002012-10-23T16:14:01.876+01:00A weekend with Newton in Lincolnshire<a href="http://s205.beta.photobucket.com/user/cbennes/library/Wayward%20Sentiment" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20121021-00158_zpsd5af1e43.jpg" width="640" /></a>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">We've been spending most of our weekends outside of London in the last few months, which has been rather lovely, particularly since many of these weekends have involved trips to various parts of England which I've never visited before. While I do love travelling to strange and distant lands, there's something very pleasant about hopping on the train on Friday evening and arriving somewhere a few hours later - and with such little fuss! - only to wake the next morning surrounded by great natural beauty. It's all too easy to forget, especially living in London, that England is full of so many beautiful and fascinating places.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">This past weekend we headed up to Lincolnshire to investigate Compass, new contemporary art commissions at Woolsthorpe Manor, Grimsthorpe Castle and Ayscoughfee Hall produced by arts-organisation <a href="http://beaconartproject.org/" target="_blank">Beacon</a>. Beacon had organised a bus to take us, and a large group of other art enthusiasts, from Lincoln around to each of the various sites and works. We had a grand old time and covered a lot of Lincolnshire ground to boot. We spent a wonderful evening with the directors of Beacon - John and Nicola - who left London 13 years ago to buy up and convert an old Methodist church in a little village outside of Lincoln and some of their friends, who also left London (some five years ago) to buy up and convert an old Methodist church in a different little village outside of Lincoln. Apparently there are a lot of unloved Methodist churches to be had in Lincolnshire.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Even though I'd seen pictures of Newton's house many times before, I somehow didn't quite make the connection in my head between hearing the name <a href="http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/woolsthorpe-manor/" target="_blank">Woolsthorpe Manor</a> and Newton's home until we were walking into the grounds of the house. It seems silly to be so excited simply by virtue of being in the same house where Newton was born and then came back to work during the plague years of 1666-7, but the history of a place like that makes me feel absolutely electric. We even ate an apple off a tree in the garden, though why they have one particular apple tree fenced off, as if it were irrefutably the apple tree from which Newton's apple of gravity fell, I have no idea. History as tourist attraction. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">We went also to visit the John Vanbrugh-designed <a href="http://www.grimsthorpe.co.uk/index.php?ID=1" target="_blank">Grimsthorpe Castle</a>, (Vanbrugh was commissioned in 1715, though there has been a house on the site since 1516) though we we unable to go inside, the exterior of the house and its gardens were lovely enough to keep our eyes entertained for the 30 minutes or so we were there. Finally, our tour took us to Spalding and the utterly bizarre <a href="http://www.ayscoughfee.org/" target="_blank">Ayscoughfee Hall</a>. The original building dates to 1451 and, in terms of the building's central structure, remains much unchanged. In terms of decoration, the building has changed superficially as much as one might expect in a building more than 560 years old. There's a Gothic-looking Victorian front facade and, excepting the dark, Victorian library, most of the interior rooms resemble a series of enormous Georgain fondant fancies. Heritage Lottery funded a three-year "sympathetic restoration" project which completed in 2006, but I haven't been able to find out much about what the building looked like pre-restoration on the internet. A conservator's report, which indicates that the restoration was carried out under the aim of bringing the building back to how it might have looked when the Johnson family lived in it at the end of the seventeenth century, reminded me of <a href="http://waywardsentiment.blogspot.co.uk/2008/12/transitional-states-robert-polidori-at.html" target="_blank">Robert Pollidori's photographs of Versailles</a>. History by its nature is not fixed, but restoration demands history stand still at a precise point of reference - it's like putting a blue plaque on a building and denying the memory of all others who lived there. How would one go about restoring a house or a building so that each of it's previous histories, previous lives, live together in harmony? I have not the slightest idea how one would begin or even what the end result might look like, but I do know that it wouldn't look like Ayscoughfee Hall.</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://s205.beta.photobucket.com/user/cbennes/library/Wayward%20Sentiment" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/P1040293_zpscd311821.jpg" width="640" /></a>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-55178330130193149542012-10-18T16:03:00.000+01:002012-10-18T16:03:12.098+01:00The Lighthouse Keepers<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=thelighthouse.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/thelighthouse.jpg" /></a>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I used to date a guy who had the most ridiculously esoteric interests. And I mean genuinely out there, not just crackers as a matter of impressing unimpressible London-types. It wasn't the best of relationships, but I have to give him some credit as he introduced me to a few truly awesome places in northern Wales and, as per the terms and conditions of our split, left me with Emma, a dear and delightful friend. He was into comedy, which was how we met - I previously dated another member of his Cantabrigian improv comedy troupe who I met one year during the Edinburgh Fringe (a long story. who cares!). Anyway, just before we started going out he'd formed a new sketch comedy group - <a href="http://www.thethreeenglishmen.co.uk/" target="_blank">The Three Englishmen</a> - and perhaps during one barn-storming brainstorming session, or so I imagine, the ex whipped out a juicy little story he'd been saving about three lighthouse keepers who went missing from their lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides in 1900. Like sherry from my refrigerator, the three vanished without so much as a by-your-leave, never to be seen or heard from again. The Englishmen couldn't quite work the lighthouse keepers into a sketch of comedic genius and so instead hit upon the rather wonderful idea of turning the story into a torchlit play. <br /><br />I remember the first time I went to see this little cracker way back in 2008. In fact, my memory of that first outing is so strong that, when I went to look back over old blog entries to find out the exact date, I realised that I'd forgotten that they'd performed the play again in a completely different venue a year later. Clearly a case of selective memory, as the second venue was far too small for the play's silly physicality and the whole thing just didn't quite work as well as it did the first time.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />If you've ever been in a relationship with a "creative", you'll be well aware of that sinking feeling that comes from having to attend their opening or listen to their poems or their songs or whatever, and, on the frequent occasions when the work is terrible, feign enthusiasm if you still want to keep having sex with said person. I remember walking into the Cockpit Theatre for the first outing of The Lighthouse Keepers worrying about exactly this thing and, at the play's end, feeling not only relief but genuine respect and admiration for this utterly bonkers little work of theatre that they'd created. It still stands out in my mind, not exactly as a work of genius, but as a refreshingly unique and entertaining approach to making theatre.<br /><br />Because of this back story, it came as something of a surprise when I found out that the ROH was putting on a chamber opera about the very same lighthouse keepers! As I learned from the catalogue last weekend when I went to see <a href="http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/the-lighthouse-by-ted-huffman" target="_blank">The Lighthouse</a> in the ROH's petite Linbury Studio, it's not a new work, but a piece written by Peter Maxwell Davies in 1979. It's a fine little opera and though, despite the fine singing and excellent playing by the small orchestra, it's modern music that somehow isn't quite modern enough and not really the sort of operatic music I prefer.<br /><br />As for the plot, as Delacroix says of architecture, so can be said of theatrical plots: <span style="background-color: white;">"A
finished building encloses the imagination within a circle and prevents
it from straying beyond its limits. Perhaps the only reason why the
sketch for a work gives so much pleasure is that each beholder can
finish it as he chooses..."</span><br /><br />Though I can't quite remember the details of the plot of The Three Englishmen's version, it felt more meaningful because - unlike Davies' version - it never tried to answer the question of the mystery of what actually happened to the lighthouse keepers. As Delacroix figured out, the magic of these kinds of stories is that there are no true answers and so it's left to our imaginations to fill in the blanks. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />Even more mysteriously, just after I bought my ticket to the ROH's The Lighthouse, I found out that The Three Englishmen are reviving their torch-lit production of The Lighthouse Keepers on <a href="http://leicestersquaretheatre.ticketsolve.com/shows/873483871/events?TSLVq=ee28e27c-f923-43ed-93e0-e214b273d8d2&TSLVp=26f93ec9-9a9c-4b2c-a979-3997539a568e&TSLVts=1350570435&TSLVc=ticketsolve&TSLVe=leicestersquare&TSLVh=5a5d015c04cf7cf04ffdca945875bf2c" target="_blank">29 October</a> as part of the Leicester Square 13th Hour Horror Festival at the Leicester Square Theatre. Spooky!</span></span>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-62685749956058871552012-10-17T15:47:00.000+01:002012-10-17T15:47:26.686+01:00Footloose and fancy Frieze<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/?action=view&current=Screenshot2012-10-17at152101.png" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="421" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Screenshot2012-10-17at152101.png" width="640" /></a>
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">As a blogger, I get invited to a lot of things - art parties, bar openings, trips to Iceland - and ad companies are always getting in touch to sell stuff on my site or to write guest posts on all manner of un-related topics. I never accept because I'm not trying to make any money off the blog and because I get to go to parties and trips and plenty of fun things anyway, regardless of the blog. I've always seen this blog as the one place where I can just make it up as I go along. I'm not being paid to write this stuff, so </span></span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">my thoughts don't always have to be perfectly expressed or even fully worked out</span></span>. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />So, a couple of weeks ago when I got an email from <a href="http://www.lemeridienpiccadilly.co.uk/" target="_blank">Le Méridien Piccadilly</a> asking if I wanted to come hang out with other bloggers on a Frieze-week extravaganza, I started to reply with my usual "thanks, but no thanks" spiel. But I looked through the itinerary again and thought that if I was ever going to go on a blogger event, it should probably be this one.<br /> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">And you know what, the whole thing was brilliant fun. I think my style as a blogger is about as far removed from the lifestyle "isn't TK hotel AMAZEBALLS" vibe you can get, but it was certainly an interesting three days and I had some particularly intelligent conversations about the contemporary art world with people in industries I don't often interact with on a professional level.<br /><br />Among other things, being with the Le Méridien group - who sponsor the <a href="http://www.outsetfriezetate.org/" target="_blank">Outset/Frieze Art Fair Fund</a> for Tate (which uses the monies raised through their sponsorship partnership with the hotel, and elsewhere) to acquire works from Frieze for the Tate Collection - meant we had easy access to quite a few events that I probably wouldn't have otherwise bothered attending, alongside other amusing field trips with private tours of the Serpentine Gallery and the two Tates. <br /><br />
<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/?action=view&current=Screenshot2012-10-17at152239.png" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="424" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Screenshot2012-10-17at152239.png" width="640" /></a> On the morning of our first day together, we attended an Outset/Méridien <a href="http://www.artinfo.com/galleryguide/831797/831796/event/831801" target="_blank">panel discussion on growth in the contemporary art world</a>. Because it was an invited audience of art-world VIPs, the panelists were far more honest and relaxed about their positions and ambitions than I'd ever encountered them in more public forums, and as a result, the discussion actually ended up being very informative and interesting, if entirely one sided. As JPJ so succinctly put it: "the aim is to win territory without sacrificing quality." The four certainly made a robust case for the side of growth, but it would have been interesting to have at least one person taking the opposite case. Indeed, as Georgina Adam argued in a <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/07b44ccc-1389-11e2-9ac6-00144feabdc0.html#axzz29YHFF6Pw" target="_blank">recent round-up of Frieze week for the FT</a>, what with the White Cube showing Anselm Kiefer in Hong Kong, and both Gagosian and Ropac launching new spaces in Paris also with Kiefer, it seems that unchecked growth may lead, at the very least, to many artists overstretching their creative capacities.<br /><br />
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We also went to the Outset 10th anniversary dinner at the RCA which was organised and prepared entirely by students. There was such a scrum when we walked in that I lost all of the bloggers and ended up sandwiched between three former RCA students (two of whom had had work purchased by Outset for Tate's collection) and a professor of business strategy at LCC who also teaches at Sotheby's, helping former investment bankers open art galleries! Never mind that Jérôme Sans and Candida Gertler didn't talk to us! I went classic Crystal-kamikaze on the people at my table and introduced everyone to everyone, so much so that by the time pudding was served out entire table was getting properly stuck in to an argument about the current state of arts education in the UK. Awesome.<br /><br />
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Equally, I normally find traipsing around <a href="http://friezelondon.com/" target="_blank">Frieze</a> makes me spit fire, but I was in such good humour that I actually had a jolly time wandering through the fair. I ran into loads of people, which is always fun and helps keeps one's spirits up, but I think it was partly because the work was all a bit straight this year - lots of smallish sculptural pieces, paintings and other 2D work - there wasn't anything hugely grotesque or abominably idiotic to bring my blood up to boiling point. In any event the difference between being jolly, in high spirits and critical, as opposed to angry, mildly depressed and critical was so great as to be hugely liberating. I went through something of a rough patch this summer what with cynicism winning the daily battle far more often than optimism, so it was rather refreshing to find myself back in good spirits. Even at Frieze...</span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-size: x-small;">[lots of nice things I saw at Frieze in bad BB pics, ignoring the 98% that was rubbish…]</span><br /><br />
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The principle reason behind the Le Méridien blogger event was to spread the word about the hotel group's partnership with various artists and designers, but particularly their support of the Outset Fund. I must admit that I found the four works purchased this year by the fund to be absolutely dreadful (pictured below, from top to bottom: Hideko Fukushima, Nicholas Hlobo, Caragh Thuring, Jack Whitten), but I think the partnership is an interesting one. As we've all seen from the <a href="http://www.redbullstratos.com/" target="_blank">Red Bull Stratos insanity</a>, brands feel they have to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and while Red Bull has chosen risky stunts, Le Méridien has opted for art and design. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In some respects, this isn't anything new: hotel aesthetics have always been a major part in what draws customers in. I often pass the best part of an afternoon reading in the foyer bar at Claridge's, it's such a lovely, relaxing space. But Le Méridien have really pushed these art-design partnerships to the forefront of their branding. They have a cultural curator who oversees and commissions artists and designers (in a <a href="http://www.starwoodhotels.com/lemeridien/lm100/index.html" target="_blank">Courvoisier Future 500-style network</a> of 100 people involved in creative commissions for the hotel) to work across all of the hotels in the group, and each hotel has a partnership with a major cultural institution in the host city, so, for example, in London your key card (which has, of course, been designed by an artist) will get you free admission to the Tate's paid exhibitions. Definitely better than an afternoon raid of the mini-bar...</span></span><br />
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<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=oft2.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/oft2.jpg" /></a>
<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=oft3.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/oft3.jpg" /></a>
<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=oft4.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/oft4.jpg" /></a>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-42376746678933791362012-10-08T12:52:00.003+01:002012-10-08T13:15:14.960+01:00Paname: the city that wants to go to sleep<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=P1040251.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/P1040251.jpg" width="640" /></a> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I've been going to <a href="http://nuitblanche.paris.fr/" target="_blank">Nuit Blanche</a> almost as long as I've been going to Paris. I've seen the all-night arts extravaganza evolve from something resembling more of a weekend music festival to its most recent incarnation as a Paris open house meets artist film fest. In 2008, I saw <a href="http://waywardsentiment.blogspot.co.uk/2008/10/sleepless-nights.html" target="_blank">Ryoji Ikeda's spectra [paris]</a>, still one of the most immensely engaging installations I've ever experienced. <a href="http://waywardsentiment.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/sleepless-night.html" target="_blank">2010 stands out as the best Nuit Blanche ever, ever, ever</a>: from 7am to 7pm, we wandered around the city in a daze of wonder (possibly exhaustion) from one dream-like piece to the next. In the courtyard of the Hôtel d'Albret, some friendly volunteers even served coffee and croissants to us hardy souls who were still awake at 7am after Fayçal Baghriche's 300 alarm clocks all went off, marking the close of that year's festivities.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Last year, though, things to a marked turn for the worse. Who knows what happened exactly, maybe the money just ran out or perhaps Paris lost interest, but the 2011 Nuit Blanche was the worst I'd ever been to. If you're putting on an all-night arts fest in a city whose inhabitants don't start glassing people at 3am after, you need to consider the rhythm of the thing. The hardest bit is the 3-5am mark when enthusiasm wanes and bed beckons. Part of what made 2010 so great was that the balance was just right: there were plenty of show-stoppers; lots and lots of smaller pieces hidden across the city; and plenty of interesting films in the lecture halls of the city's many universities which meant that when you were flagging at 4am, you could sit somewhere warm and dry for 40 minutes zoning out to an interesting film. Last year, everything was outside and it was as if the organisers had made a rule disallowing any visitors to sit anywhere. Inside a school gym, watching a film, people were bared from lying on the empty floor. What's the point in having a festival run all night if you don't engender the conditions to make such a thing possible. Ridiculous.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So it was with some trepidation that we went back this year. So much so, that we rented a flat for the weekend instead of doing what we usually do and get the Eurostar to Paris on Saturday, arriving around 6pm and then back again the following morning around 10am. Knowing that we had a flat to go back to meant that we certainly didn't make as much of an effort to get around everything this year, instead choosing to check out the clever-clever Calderpiller at Les Halles before a leisurely dinner with friends at <a href="http://www.maceorestaurant.com/maceo_paris_welcome.html" target="_blank">Macéo</a> (which incidentally was very good), before heading East to the BnF and making out way back to the middle of town before heading home around 4am.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">While things were certainly better than last year, there weren't any standout pieces as with 2008 or 2010. Instead, this year was more focused on the opening up vistas of the city not often available to the public with a series of belvédères across town. We began over at the BnF in Bercy, which was nice as I did quite a bit of research for my PhD in this library but hadn't visited again since. Also, the area of Perrault's library typically open to the public is underground - the four towers house the book stacks and administrative offices, so it was rather exciting to be allowed up to the 18th floor of one of the towers. The lookout offered little by way of a beautiful panorama of Paris, but it was fascinating to be able to see the layout of the library building from that vantage - it makes more sense from height than from at human scale. You could also make out quite clearly the utterly peculiar shapes of Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy and the cruise-chip-like Cemex building nearby.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">From the library, we strolled along the Seine until we reached Les Docks de Paris: an old depot for goods brought to Paris via the Seine built in concrete at the turn of the last century. In 2009 the docks were redeveloped by Jakob+MacFarlane who elected to keep the original structure, which now houses a school of fashion and design. It's covered with two, long neon green tubes hiding walkways and staircases (ver, very ugly in person) and though I'd seen it from the train many times, I'd never actually visited until last weekend. On the terrace was showing a dreadful film by Katerina Jebb (though the premise of the film was interesting enough), and though there was a bar and it seemed like a cool-enough place to hang out, we didn't stay for long as there wasn't actually that much going on (an architect's boring pavilion is not a good installation).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We then spent a half hour queueing to get into the Natural History Museum (there's a lot of queueing at Nuit Blanche), and though the museum itself was AWESOME, the three pieces by Kate MccGwire were not.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Likewise, La Ceinture de Feu, at the Institut de Physique, which was literally what it says on the tin: a belt of neon wrapped round the Institute by Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain. Inside, a film on the history of neon lights by philosopher Luis de Miranda was showing, which may have been interesting, but at that point my feet were throbbing and my mind was starting to turn to mush and I was finding it difficult to concentrate on the finer points of complex French.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">In search of something lighter, we headed off to Édourad Albert's notorious Jessieu Campus only to find ourselves in the middle of a quite wonderful sound installation/performance by Décor Sonore. Half a dozen or so performers, dressed in white and black jumpsuits with matching makeup, stalked through the site making live, improvised music using the buildings and bits of rubble lying around as percussive instruments. Combined with an underlying soundtrack of sustained tones, the whole thing was surprisingly captivating.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jussieu_Campus" target="_blank">history of the campus</a> itself is interesting and the buildings are actually quite beautiful so it's a shame many seemed to be unused and that the place looks like a stalled building site, though the tower at the heart of the campus was renovated, having all its asbestos removed in 2007, and is now lit up like a stack of jolly ranchers.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">All in all, not a disaster of a night, but not enough to convince me to come back for more next year. Better a weekend spent at Versailles and the Palais Garnier than traipsing round town to queue for hours for the pleasure of crumpling in front of lacklustre art installations. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Special mention must go to the cakes. If you're ever in Paris, two of the best are <a href="http://www.lapatisseriedesreves.com/" target="_blank">la pâtisserie des rêves</a>, where we gobbled up a Kyoto-Brest which had date and saffron cream squirreled away amongst the crème patissière, sandwiched between pastry and dusted with matcha. And at <a href="http://www.patisseriepaindesucre.com/" target="_blank">Pain de Sucre</a>, we had another divine pastry with rosemary and almond and pistachio and rubharb. Yummy!</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG-20121006-00056.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/P1040232.jpg" width="640" /> <img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20121006-00056.jpg" width="640" /></a></span>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-22007685772101503942012-09-06T11:43:00.000+01:002012-09-06T11:43:56.053+01:00Natascha Sadr Haghighian at Carroll/Fletcher<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/?action=view&current=RafaelVargas2011.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="378" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/RafaelVargas2011.jpg" width="640" /></a>
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<span style="font-size: small;">I had a few hours to kill in between a lovely lunch date and a radio recording at the BBC yesterday, so I thought I'd amble around inspecting exhibitions in Fitzrovia. Just my luck that most of the area's galleries were in change-over mode, getting ready to open new shows tonight, so I mostly just wandered around looking in windows at exhibitions not-yet-open. There's actually something quite pleasant about window-shopping exhibitions while they're still being set up: </span><span class="content clearafter main_caption">Alessandro Raho at</span><span style="font-size: small;"> Alison Jaques and Hot Tools at Libby Sellers didn't look that inviting; Clare Woods at Stuart Shave, maybe; I can't even remember what was going on at Haunch of Venison…<br /><br />I walked past one glass-fronted space on Eastcastle Street and did a double take. An open gallery! Nice. But, oh no, oh god: it's <a href="http://www.carrollfletcher.com/" target="_blank">Carroll / Fletcher</a>. What to do? What to do? Go in and leave depressed, like last time, or give it a go and see what happens. I opted for the latter, because, well, because I'm like that; I took a deep breath and plunged into the icy chill of an air-conditioned concrete box.<br /><br />And you know what? It was fan-flipping-tastic. I'm not even joking. I've adopted a new practice of not reading press releases until I'm on my way out of the gallery, which increases the possibility of my not being pissed off with a show by the incomprehensible twaddle written therein before I've so much as looked at a single work. It seems to help.<br /><br />Anyway, so this show. Natascha Sadr Haghighian (who borrows her bios from <a href="http://bioswop.net/">bioswop.net</a> as a rejection of CVs, bios, institutionalised regimes of knowledge, etc.!), hasn't made any new works for C/F, but installed a selection of pieces made over the last fifteen years. I find myself more and more approving of such a practice, as it means you get to see the best thoughts from, in this case, a clearly thoughtful mind, spread out for your enjoyment, rather than one amazing thought and lots of other not-so-good thoughts jammed together in a space because they all purport to tow the same thematic line. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br />In the first room, a suitcase crushes a bottle of water, the sound of which is amplified throughout the space. The sounds are nice, if the work is perhaps a bit too obvious in its attempt to say something new about the ridiculousness of airport security measures, but I found myself willing to forgive after walking into the "appendix" room next door. I've rarely seen work by artists which makes use of freedom of information requests, but it's a hugely effective and surprisingly powerful visual tool, particularly when accompanied by documentary-style photographs. The piece moves on from the farce of airport security, but sticks to water, with its investigation of Buxton's natural spring and the local council's decision to sell the rights to Nestle, thus jeopardising its townspeoples right to the spring. Like an exquisitely-crafted poem, a few simple pieces tell a striking story of one town's potential folly in selling its natural resources to a mega-corporate in exchange for what seems to be, as outlined by the FOI request, a pitifully small amount of cash.<br /><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The other piece which stuck with me was a microscope with its eyepiece replaced by a speaker. I walked up to the microscope, on its shiny silver cart, and dutifully wedged my eye up to the eyepiece only to realise I could see nothing but black. What's going on here, I snorted. Why can't I see anything. Just then, a strange - almost hyper auto-tuned voice - started singing "every breath you take…" from the microscope. Where in the hell is that coming from? Oh, that's clever. Ridiculous, but clever. I turned my head and put my ear against the eyepiece, which wasn't an eyepiece at all, but the squishy, soft bit from a pair of old-fashioned headphones. <br /><br />But the best bit about the microscope piece was a little grey booklet sitting beside it. Inside the booklet, an interview with Haghighian asking questions of Evelyn Fox-Keller, professor of History and Philosophy of Science at MIT (who commissioned the piece in 2006). Fox-Keller is author of numerous books, <i>The Biological Gaze</i> among them, in which she examines how the concept of looking helps to determine what the scientist sees when he looks into the microscope. The conversation between the two is absolutely fascinating, particularly in that Fox-Keller's research takes questions of socially constructed meaning into account when considering the already sticky situation of perception and reality presented by physics (some of which I was trying to get at in my last exhibition, <a href="http://www.flatclondon.co.uk/current-exhibitio/" target="_blank"><i>Pink Does Not Exist</i></a>). Or as it's framed in the discussion: how we construct our realities as a hybrid of what one sees with the mind's eye (as something potentially influenced by meanings of looking) rather than the body's eye (the problem of perception as reality).<br /><br />Like any good critic, I'm ignoring the works that I didn't really care for: <i>schnitte (cuts)</i>, <a href="http://www.julienmaire.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Julien Maire</a> does this sort of thing with far more skill and spectacle; <i>vice/virtue</i>, which felt intellectually insignificant compared to the more thoughtful works in the show. On the whole, though, Haghighian's works are an eloquent pean to the power of research in artistic practice. </span><br />
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Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-71594946246523031932012-07-26T11:28:00.001+01:002012-07-26T15:52:40.603+01:00Margate: 2008 to 2012<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG-20120725-00436.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20120725-00436.jpg" width="640" /></a>
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After my first visit to Margate, a little over five years ago, I developed something of a low-level obsession with the place and, in 2008, often found myself on the train from Victoria to the seaside. I'm not entirely sure what it was about the place that captivated me so, but I loved the big-time, small-town contemporary art gallery <a href="http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTfGO46IDcgpENbNzcWN1UKxiSIFIRgfahBpIcWEhyOtMJ5vAC0dS4kyZijNg" target="_blank">in a huge, ex-Marks and Spencer shop</a> on the High Street; the burgeoning network of perky artists trying to make something of the vast swathes of empty shops and spaces in the Old Town and on the High Street; and the glorious, mostly empty expanse of beautifully sandy beach only two hours from London.</div>
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At least they were mostly empty beaches back in 2008, but my, how things have changed! I went on a day trip yesterday for the first time in just over four years and the beach was absolutely heaving with people. The Old Town is virtually unrecognisable, filled up as it is with ludicrously overpriced Brighton-esque vintage tat and retro clothing shops. And of course, the addition of David Chipperfield's new building for <a href="http://www.turnercontemporary.org/" target="_blank">Turner Contemporary</a> (the very same gallery that used to operate out of the high street M&S) has given Margate's Harbour Arm an "iconic" landmark where previously there was only a glorious view of the sea.</div>
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What with so many eyes turned towards Margate, undoubtedly due to the arrival of this new Turner Gallery, it's hardly surprising that the gentrification has begun in spluttering stages, but I must admit that I was surprised by how quickly things had changed. Margate used to feel like an undiscovered secret, like a weird and wonderful little world that those who knew about were able to have all to themselves (selfish, I know). Given the amount of media attention the place has received over the past year, it was only a matter of time before people began paying attention to Margate's peculiar charms.</div>
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Despite the cutesy shops and cupcake cafes of the Old Town, Margate's High Street - just a few feet away - is still blighted by swathes of empty shops. Stragely, the Turner's crumbs of gentrification have failed to reach quite that far. Which, of course, is where Mary Portas enters the equation.</div>
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I didn't realise, though I probably should have, that Margate was to be *sarcasm alert* one of the lucky recipients of Mary "Queen of Shops" Portas' benevolence with a Grant-Schapps approved government regen/kickstarter grant of £100,000. Unsurprisingly, Portas has been pissing a lot of people off in Margate as of late, swanning around town filming footage for her reality TV show documenting the "rehabilitation" of grant-recipient towns. During a town meeting last month, when objections were raised to TV cameras being in the room, Portas apparently suggested that if the cameras weren't allowed in, then she wouldn't be staying; and if she wouldn't be staying in Margate, neither would the government's money. Regardless of such behaviour, there is something rather revolting about Portas essentially using government money to bankroll a television programme about a tokenistic regeneration programme (£100k is chump change in this context) for personal and professional gain.</div>
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Elsewhere in Margate, speculators are beginning to move in given that property is incredibly cheap and relatively plentiful. You can buy a five-bed house in Cliftonville for less than the cost of a studio flat in Bethnal Green. Redevelopment is on the cards for the amazing, though utterly derelict, <a href="http://www.desertionphotography.co.uk/apps/blog/show/5038618-the-lido-margate-kent-" target="_blank">Cliftonville Lido</a> which was ruined in the 1978 storm which also destroyed Margate Pier. The Lido was never rebuilt, though has been subject to numerous redevelopment plans in the past few years, the latest of which fell by the wayside after its developers went bust thanks to the Icelandic banking crisis. The latest proposals to incorporate the Lido, by Margate-based Lido Views and Kent and Sussex Property Development, look set to turn a beautiful stretch of Margate's beach into - what a surprise! - blocks of high-rise flats and a luxury hotel, <a href="http://www.thisiskent.co.uk/Plans-20m-Lido-development-Cliftonville/story-16568737-detail/story.html" target="_blank">something totally out of keeping with the area</a>.</div>
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One rather splendid Margate institution which is all-but unknown to most tourists is the Walpole Bay tidal swimming pool, dating to around 1900. It's not pretty, and the lovely art-deco funicular that used to transport swimmers from the town above has been closed down, but it is enormous and brilliant fun. </div>
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For all its problems, Margate is still an extremely charming place. Now that outsiders are paying attention again, here's hoping the town can maintain its identity in the face of those who would transform utterly it for financial gain.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">(I didn't have my camera with me yesterday, so these are old photos from previous visits - the harbour beach is rarely so empty now!) </span></div>
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<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG_3573.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG_3573.jpg" width="640" /></a>
<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG_3592.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG_3592.jpg" width="640" /></a>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-84884264104757855672012-07-24T16:28:00.000+01:002012-07-26T15:54:15.416+01:00Bread and Circuses<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=totes.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/totes.jpg" width="640" /></a><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Tote bags from <a href="http://maiden.bigcartel.com/product/they-re-all-on-steroids-bag" target="_blank">Maiden </a></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">Some men are hurled headlong by over-great power and
the envy to which it exposes them; they are wrecked by the long and
illustrious roll of their
honours: down come their statues, obedient to the rope; the axe hews in
pieces their chariot wheels and the legs of the unoffending horses. And
now the flames are hissing, and amid the roar of furnace and of bellows
the head of the mighty Sejanus, the
darling of the mob, is burning and crackling, and from that face, which
was but lately second in the entire world, are being fashioned
pipkins, pitchers, frying-pans and slop-pails! Up with the
laurel-wreaths over your doors! Lead forth a grand chalked bull to the
Capitol! Sejanus is being dragged along by a hook, as a show and joy to
all! "What a lip the fellow had! What a face!"----"Believe me, I never
liked the man!"----"But on what charge was
he condemned? Who informed against him? What was the evidence, who the
witnesses, who made good the case?"-----"Nothing of the sort; a great
and wordy letter came from Capri."----"Good; I ask no more."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">And what does the mob of Remus say? It follows
fortune, as it always does, and rails against the condemned. That same
rabble, if Nortia had smiled upon the Etruscan, if the aged Emperor had been struck down unawares, would in that very
hour have conferred upon Sejanus the title of Augustus. <span style="background-color: yellow;">Now that no one
buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; the people
that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions and all else, now
meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things: Bread and Circuses!</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/juvenal_satires_10.htm" target="_blank">Satire 10</a></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="pub-title">Juvenal</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="pub-title">~ </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="pub-title"> </span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators,
strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for
ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty,
the instruments of tyranny. <span style="background-color: yellow;">By these practices and enticements the
ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke,
that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain
pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively,
but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at
bright picture books.</span> Roman tyrants invented a further refinement. They
often provided the city wards with feasts to cajole the rabble, always
more readily tempted by the pleasure of eating than by anything else.
The most intelligent and understanding amongst them would not have quit
his soup bowl to recover the liberty of the Republic of Plato. Tyrants
would distribute largess, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a
sesterce: and then everybody would shamelessly cry, 'Long live the
King!' <span style="background-color: white;">The fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a
portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given
them what they were receiving without having first taken it from them.</span><i><br /></i><i></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="field-item odd"><br /></span></span> </div>
</div>
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<div class="field-item odd">
<span style="font-size: small;"><a href="http://www.constitution.org/la_boetie/serv_vol.htm" target="_blank">Discourse on Voluntary Servitude</a></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: small;"><span class="field-item odd">Etienne de La Boétie, </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">1548 </span></div>
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</div>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-79983327191597142062012-07-20T12:25:00.002+01:002012-07-26T15:53:42.492+01:00A Midsummer Night's Dream of Amsterdam<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG-20120719-00423.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="640" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20120719-00423.jpg" width="640" /></a>
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I can still remember the first time I came to Europe on my own, with my
then boyfriend, the summer after my first year at University. After a
few weeks of travelling, the cities began to melt into each other:
cathedrals, central squares, cobbled streets, magnificent art in bland
museums. For a variety of reasons Amsterdam was the one European city I
always avoided. Dutch art never did much for me; my personality means I
don't enjoy the slow-down, spaced-out highs of weed, negating the
obvious attractions; and if Amsterdam was the "Venice of the
north", well, I preferred to reserve my affections for the real thing. Even
after living in Europe for nearly ten years, yesterday was the first
time I'd ever been to Amsterdam.<br />
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And so what of it? Well, Amsterdam is certainly a picturesque city, but it's not for me. Of course, it's probably unfair to make such a judgement after a single day's visit, and I can hardly fault Amsterdam's for being full of touristing Americans. I hear more foreign languages spoken in Hackney than I did yesterday in the centre of Amsterdam. Though the buildings are gorgeous (and I can definitely get behind a place where playgrounds are on boats!) and the canals are charming, it's all just so polite, so mannered, so neutered and nice. Venice it ain't.<br />
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Last weekend we went to a dress rehearsal of Purcell's The Fairy Queen at <a href="http://glyndebourne.com/production/fairy-queen" target="_blank">Glyndebourne</a>. This is in no way connected with yesterday's trip to Amsterdam, but no matter. I mention it only because, unlike Amsterdam, it was so wonderfully outrageous and over-the-top ridiculous that it definitely warrants a visit. Rather shamefully in this year of chest-thumpingly nationalistic celebrations, there are no performances of Purcell at the Proms, so if you want to get your fix, Glyndebourne is the place to go.<br />
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This is a revival of Jonathan Kent's 2009 production of Purcell's seventeenth-century curiosity. The odd mish-mash of Shakespearean dialogue with the most heavenly baroque music (played superbly by the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment) takes some getting used to, and, on more than one occasion, I wished I could skip over some of the theatrical scenes to more singing. The staging is stupendously crackers, in the best possible way -- a twenty-first century take on splendid baroque set pieces. At one point it's like the sumptuous, seventeenth-century portrait of a young Louis XIV as Apollo has come to life as an operatic set piece. Kent's production even makes up for an admittedly lacklustre end with a magical surprise for the audience after curtain call. <br />
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Glyndeboure are streaming the opera live on Sunday evening (22 July) <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jul/17/opera-classicalmusicandopera" target="_blank">on the Guardian's website</a>, where it will then be available until 17 August. <br />
<br /></div>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-28939426870351579342012-07-18T10:44:00.002+01:002012-07-18T10:44:58.282+01:00Florence Trust Summer Exhibition 2012<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG-20120712-00393.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20120712-00393.jpg" width="640" /></a>
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<br />
I am wedded and honeymooned; returned from honeymoon and back in London, a city which I am more and more convinced is one of the best there is for living in. It's sometimes difficult to get a handle on just how great London actually is when you're living in it, when you're too close to it. It's like trying to make out the scale of the Shard from standing right underneath it. All you can see of the city is what's right in front of you at that particular instant: tourists stopping to crane their necks at every unusual cornice; perfectly manicured, semi-suburban neighbourhoods in Highbury; the utter lack of an El Salvadorian restaurant. <br />
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A common refrain has started to develop among a lot of my friends, which is something along the lines of how much they want to move out of the city and set up a commune-type thing anywhere that isn't London. When I've just come back from Berlin or had a rubbish day or am just in a certain kind of mood, I think that this sounds like an inspired sort of idea. They get broadband in the country, right? I could have horses again and space and peace and quiet and lots of other nice things. But after honeymooning in Bali, which is a little like living in the countryside for two weeks, I honestly just don't think I could hack it. A man who ran one of the resorts we stayed in said he moved to Bali when he realised that he only liked the thought of having city amenities at his fingertips, not the reality, for the reality was that he never took advantage of London living. In spite of all of the things about living in London that really irk me, I'm just not ready to go anywhere. I'm happy to be here, for here is where things are happening my friend. Unless, that is, you are a connoisseur of self-help workshops and rice-based cuisine, and if that's the case I suggest you hurry yourself to Bali.<br />
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To make up for my two weeks in the desert that is a honeymoon, I went on a massive art binge Thursday last, stopping by a good eight galleries (before capping off the day with some <a href="http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/london/event/spoonfed-live-presents-comedy-on-a-roof/at/the-print-house/" target="_blank">comedy on a roof</a> at Dalston Roof Gardens, courtesy of Spoonfed). Of the lot (Limoncello, Florence Trust, Victoria Miro, Parasol Unit, WW Gallery, Fold, 50 Redchurch St and Studio 1.1), the <a href="http://www.florencetrust.org/" target="_blank">Florence Trust</a> was by some distance the most interesting show. Not least because the space is amazing (St Saviour's church in Highbury), but also because it was by far the most diverse group of artists and so provided much in the way of mental and aesthetic stimulation. <br />
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During the course of the year, the church is sliced up into ten studio spaces for a year-long residency programme which is capped off with an open exhibition. I don't think I'd really heard of the Florence Trust before I knew <a href="http://www.woodeson.co.uk/" target="_blank">Ben Woodeson </a>(who is an FT resident this year, and recently strung up an electric fence in the hallway for my most recent show at <a href="http://www.flatclondon.co.uk/" target="_blank">Flat C</a> - Pink Does Not Exist), whose work primarily triggered my visit to the show. It was interesting to see more ambitious versions of Ben's work previously exhibited elsewhere this year, namely <i>Health & Safety Violation #41</i> -- some 4,000 matches and a random timer spelling out the phrase "keep in a dry place and away from children". At the discretion of the random timer, the work literally bursts into flames, leaving an almighty burn mark on the wall after the main event. There was also a much larger version of the marble-filled, exploding-balloon sculpture which hung from my bathroom ceiling in the Flat C show. Given that the version in my bathroom hung rather terrifyingly above one's head there was something a little bit neutered about seeing the balloons tacked to a board at eye level, but, with each of them in a various state of destruction and marbles scattered all over the floor of the church, it was still a satisfying piece of work.<br />
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<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG-20120712-00391.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20120712-00391.jpg" width="640" /></a><a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG-20120712-00383.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20120712-00383.jpg" width="640" /></a>
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Wandering around trying to find Ben's work, at the west end of the church I walked head first into <a href="http://www.corinnefelgate.com/" target="_blank">Corinne Felgate's</a> absolutely massive sculpture, <i>Bigger Than the Both of Us</i> -- an overwhelming number of geometric patterns painted on board swathed in an unholy amount of glitter. Scratching my head, wondering what in the hell was this all about, I looked down to read the plan of works in my hand. When I saw that the subtitle of the work was "Piet Mondrian's complete oeuvre of geometric compositions replicated in glitter" I couldn't help but laugh aloud. I have to say that while the work itself does little for me, I do like a good chuckle. It doesn't happen often enough in art exhibitions.<br />
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<a href="http://www.nicholasjohnson.ca/" target="_blank">Nicholas Johnson's</a> acrylic paintings on paper were like looking at crystals under a microscope, but were unfortunately (or maybe not!) more captivating when reproduced in the catalogue than in real life; reading about her works in the catalogue, I felt I could fall in love with the works of <a href="http://www.hanaeutamura.com/" target="_blank">Hanae Utamura</a>, but I was disappointed by the confused installation -- an HD video loop of someone running up and down a garret tower in front of a floor strewn with plaster. The catalogue described an artist who attempted to cast the waves of the ocean by pouring wet plaster into the sea. I couldn't see the link between the artist who made such clever, elegiac works with the uninspired video in front of me.<br />
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The work of <a href="http://jlmurtaugh.com/" target="_blank">JL Murtaugh</a> was an unexpected treat. A self-described agent provocateur is an artist I nearly always expect to be dreadful, but perhaps it helped that I saw the work before I read the blurb. Though if I'm honest, I'm still not entirely sure what the works actually were. Entitled <i>Psalm for the Solvent Estates (after Booth and Charlemagne)</i>, described as a colour-coded economic classification and reconfigured hymn applied to Aberdeen Park and Europe, there were apparently twenty-two parts to the classification/hymn of which five were painted onto various walls around the space. Like a partially-eaten pie chart painted at various points around the room, each was accompanied by a verse from the "reconfigured hymn", e.g. Some almighty power sevenfold rich in energy shal sanctify our song. Looking at the works, I felt like I'd stumbled upon an artist who is just treading the line between potential genius and utter chancer.<br />
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I'd tell you to go and see it, but it closed last Sunday. <br />
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<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG-20120712-00385.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20120712-00385.jpg" width="640" /></a><a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=IMG-20120712-00386.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="480" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/IMG-20120712-00386.jpg" width="640" /></a>
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<br /></div>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-90305793066836285632012-05-21T09:14:00.000+01:002012-05-21T09:14:20.350+01:00Introducing: LeandaKateLouise<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=bg600.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/bg600.jpg" /></a>
<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Everyone is just so damn busy all of the time, which is why it took an absolute bloody age before me and the three lovely ladies of <a href="http://www.leandakatelouise.com/projects.html" target="_blank">LeandaKateLouise</a> were able to find the time to meet up for a chat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I first heard about the work of LKL, aka <a href="http://www.clairedorsett.co.uk/" target="_blank">Claire Dorsett</a>, <a href="http://www.sarahkatewilson.com/" target="_blank">Sarah Kate Wilson</a> and <a href="http://www.rosedavey.co.uk/" target="_blank">Rose Davey</a>, via my wonderful soon-to-be husband Tom Jeffreys of Spoonfed fame. He suspected that their free-wheeling inventiveness would be right up my street and forwarded me a link to the first exhibition.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Though it wasn’t so much your standard exhibition as it was a series of postcards, mailed to a select group of “attendees” once a week for ten weeks. “We started talking about getting some projects off the ground after the degree show,” explains Wilson. “We didn’t really have any budget or a space, so we thought about what else we could do and came up with the idea of using the post as a gallery.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Armed with little more than a mailing list, ten willing artists and some money for the post man, the three staged an imaginative and witty exhibition which made the most of what they had to hand, rather than get sidetracked by what was then out of reach. The first week saw a simple cardboard box posted out, and every subsequent week for ten weeks, the recipient was sent a different post-card sized work, the idea being that each postcard was a one-week solo show that began when it entered the postbox and ended when it reached the cardboard box.</span><br />
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<img alt="Show 3, Edition of 400<br/>
Oliver Rafferty, <em>SLIDE</em>, 2010" height="461" id="fancybox-img" src="http://www.leandakatelouise.com/images/show1-10/03ollie_web.jpg" width="640" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<img alt="Show 10, Edition of 400<br/>
Sarah Kate Wilson, <em>Mermaid Zoo</em>, 2010" height="456" id="fancybox-img" src="http://www.leandakatelouise.com/images/show1-10/10sarah_web.jpg" width="640" /><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Their second exhibition about one year later, 26, was yet another exercise in making the most of what was to hand, only this time on a larger scale. "We did the postcards as that what we could conceivably do at the time, but for the next show we wanted to do something more static. We thought, ‘well, what have we got to hand?’ and the obvious answer was our houses,” says Wilson. A one-day only exhibition in a house in Islington, 26 saw works above the mantelpiece in the living room and in kitchen shelves, installations in bedrooms and a large sculptural piece in the back garden. “It was fantastic,” says Dorsett. “We only had it open for one day, but all day, partly because everyone tends to come to the private view and then never come back and it’s hard for people to actually see the work during the private view because there’s too many people. It was a gorgeous day and people were hanging in the garden next to Ian’s huge sculpture.”</span><br />
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<img height="426" id="fancybox-img" src="http://www.leandakatelouise.com/images/26_website_images/dorsett_1.JPG" width="640" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<img height="426" id="fancybox-img" src="http://www.leandakatelouise.com/images/26_website_images/dorsett_whitehead_davey.jpg" width="640" /><br />
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<img height="426" id="fancybox-img" src="http://www.leandakatelouise.com/images/26_website_images/mapes.jpg" width="640" /><br />
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<img height="415" id="fancybox-img" src="http://www.leandakatelouise.com/images/26_website_images/rose_davey.jpg" width="640" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It was hearing about this exhibition that made me want to write about the trio. If I thought that the postcard show was a splendid idea, when I found out that they staged an exhibition in their house I knew I'd found kindred spirits. Though the exhibition I'd planned to host in my Hackney Wick flat last year didn't go exactly to plan (a rather spectacular falling out with my flatmates meant that I ended up hosting the show in an Islington town house), I'd always wanted to stage a show in a domestic space (I should say that while there are quite a few "domestic space" galleries in London - e.g. the old WW Gallery space, Danielle Arnaud, Kabin - these are primarily or entirely cleared of other furniture and possessions in order to display the art) and to see LKL do it with such panache was exciting and inspiring. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">So, when I received an email from them in advance of their most recent show, A Wall is a Surface, at LondonNewcastle Project Space about a month ago, I replied asking whether they had some time to meet up and chat.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Until I met them, I had no idea that all three were also practising artists. They often exhibit their own work in the shows, part of the reason why they decided to start organising exhibitions in the first place. "We all did painting at The Slade,” Davey says. “It was a great community, quite open and really free and we didn’t ant to lose that. These projects were a way of making things happen once we left.” Wilson chips in, “Also, it’s a way of creating opportunities for ourselves, our friends and other artists whose work we admire.” These aims carry through to the Wall show, their most ambitious exhibition to date. Featuring the work of 12 artists, the exhibition venue was secured thanks to a well-conceived application for the gratis use of Londonewcastle's project space on Redchurch Street. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The project space is enormous and, instead of fighting the size of the space by breaking it up into more manageable pieces, the three decided to make the most of the space and invite their selected artists to create a new piece of art on the interior walls. The artists decamped from their own studios into the exhibition space ten days before the opening to create the new works in situ. While I initially thoughts that it might have been interesting to open up the gallery to allow visitors to witness this process of making the works, Wilson disagrees: “We’re always trying to offer interesting opportunities to people and part of this project was about giving the artists an opportunity to use the space as their studio for ten days.” Dorsett agrees, “I don’t think it would have been fair to the artists, really. It would have made it more like a performance piece.”</span><br />
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<img height="421" id="il_fi" src="http://londonewcastle.com/workspace/assets/images/blog/entries/a-wall-is-a-surface.jpg" style="padding-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="640" /><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<img alt="Tessa Whitehead-Cowboys and Nails" class="article-image" height="397" src="http://londonewcastle.com/image/1/600/0/assets/images/blog/entries/tessa-whitehead-cowboys-n-n.jpg" width="640" /><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The Wall show was excellent - some pieces were certainly less successful than others, but that's perhaps to be expected given that 12 artists each created a brand new work in the space ten days before the opening. Painter Tessa Whitehead (whose work I’ve exhibited twice before), had a sensational work on an enormous wall in the back room: a huge paper cut-out of a cowboy on a horse next to a square of hundreds of nails. Davey’s soothing painting running along the longest wall in the space was a simple, clean and lovely piece of colour work.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It’s rare to find a group of artist-curators who are able to dream up inventive curatorial concepts and then execute them with equally strong exhibitions. Given the rarity of such occurrences, it would be nice to see LKL average more than one show a year, but I’m always happy to wait for quality.</span>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-89186916339709949522012-04-04T10:53:00.000+01:002012-04-04T10:53:09.691+01:00A walk in the Royal Docks<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/9536824@N08/6898332296/" title="DSC_0652 by crystalbennes, on Flickr"><img alt="DSC_0652" height="425" src="http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5312/6898332296_b14a415e79_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Sunday was such a lovely day we decided to go for on a little adventure way out in east London. I'd always wanted to have a snoop around the Millennium Mills building since I'd seen photos of the interiors on a few <a href="http://www.urbexforums.co.uk/showthread.php/5102-Millennium-Mills-Silvertown-E16-%E2%80%93-Aug-%E2%80%9809">urban explorer sites</a> - it looks absolutely incredible, if rather like a death trap, inside. I'd also recently seen an image of a fantastic viewing platform that used to stand in the Royal Victoria Gardens in the late 70s, and I'd never been to the gardens so I was curious to see what they were like so with mills and gardens in mind we headed out.</div><br />
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/9536824@N08/6898366786/" title="royal vic gardens viewing platform_1976 by crystalbennes, on Flickr"><img alt="royal vic gardens viewing platform_1976" height="502" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7192/6898366786_6305f88589_z.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">We walked from the far end of the docks past City Airport, through the Gardens, along the Thames as far as we could get before being spat back out to industrial wasteland. Past industrial carnage we were surprised to find an awesome Chinese cash and carry, though unsurprised to find brand new, grotesquely yuppie Barratt Homes blocks of thoughtless "investment" flats, sold on the back of being so near Pontoon Docks DLR and overlooking the Thames Barrier Park. We made it to the Millennium Mills at precisely the same time as a police car and so didn't get much further than the perimeter fence, sadly. More walking before a quick hop on the DLR to Blackwall for dinner, followed by a leisurely stroll into Canary Wharf.</div><br />
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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/9536824@N08/6898347050/" title="DSC_0766 by crystalbennes, on Flickr"><img alt="DSC_0766" height="980" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7268/6898347050_63684c73bb_b.jpg" width="640" /></a>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-29185212614349923502012-03-29T11:11:00.002+01:002012-03-29T15:16:43.410+01:00Agora: Block336, Coldharbour, South London Gallery<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=VideostillfromInsideEdwardThomasson2012Imagecourtesytheartist.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="360" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/VideostillfromInsideEdwardThomasson2012Imagecourtesytheartist.jpg" width="640" /></a><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">"Institutions collapse from lack of funding, they do not die from lack of meaning. We die from lack of meaning." ~ G.B. Shaw via Dave Hickey</span><br />
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This Brixton trip was brought on by a tweet from Justin Hammond (@artcasual) about a new artist-run space opening up at 336 Brixton Road. <a href="http://www.block336.com/index.php?/exhibitions/coming-soon/" target="_blank">Block336</a> is in the basement of an enormous Lambeth Council office building, set for rejuggification at some point in the near-distant future. It's a super cool space, despite a total lack of natural light, and a nice chat with co-founder Lucie Pardue gave me great hope that future programming will be interesting and varied. Their first show is called 1, which appeals to the no-nonsense-art-speak campaigner in me, though I don't think there are plans to title every subsequent exhibition sequentially. Since it's such an enormous space, they've been able to hang nearly sixty works without crowding. There's a room full of sculptural works by Andrew Hewish that I rather liked, and some lovely little paintings by Alex Virji that would have been more lovely had they not been on stupid canvas shapes.<br />
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Back on Brixton Road. Sun. Sun! Glorious sun. More wandering, dithering, trying to decide whether to eat something at Brixton Village, but nothing appeals after a walk around, so carry on walking up Coldharbour Lane. Something about the sunshine makes everyone chatty. Or maybe it's just Brixton. One guy wants me to go back to his place; someone wants to give me directions; an old lady wants to know why I'm taking pictures of the hideous Fabrik apartment building on Coldharbour Lane; and a car pulls up next to me outside of Loughborough Junction station: a teenage girl wants to know where I bought my boots. In Italy. She looks unimpressed and drives off. I know how she feels. I've just been from <a href="http://www.coldharbourlondon.com/exhibitions.php" target="_blank">Coldharbour London Gallery</a>. Boring, boring, boring. Cowardly. The exhibition press text lettered onto the gallery wall is full of rubbish art speak which puts me in a foul mood and makes me less generous than I otherwise might have been. Why did the curator put the works of Keke and Kate together? Why did she give the exhibition such a stupid title: "The Inception of Line". What line? A Platonic Line? No, that's ridiculous. What does "The work of art exists within a trajectory or line, marking a point of communication between viewer and work that refuses to repeat itself." mean? I wish the curator would have at least had the courage to go with just one artist - Kate Terry - and fill the entire space with neon-coloured string. A sort of happy Chiharu Shiota. That would have been nice.<br />
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Thence to <a href="http://www.southlondongallery.org/page/edwardthomasson" target="_blank">South London Gallery</a>, which I'd especially been looking forward to given that I hadn't eaten any lunch and was ravenous. It was 4pm and the cafe wasn't serving any food until 6pm. What is this tyranny with prescribed meal times? It's like being on the continent. I'd come all the way there, so I thought I'd better at least have a look at the exhibitions before fainting of hunger. Alice Channer in the main gallery. No, no, no, no, no. Artists, please learn when to stop, when to say no, that's enough, this show doesn't need any more crap. The enormous drapery, printed with stretched images of classical statues, dripping like candle wax from the ceiling was quite appealing. Intriguing, even. But the mirrored stainless steel and marble pieces scattered all over the floor looked like something someone might buy in the housewares department of TK Maxx. I know the "dangers" of beauty in art, but I love it and long for it anyway. Not beauty exclusively, but political and cultural criticisms can still be delivered via a beautiful vehicle. I want more than anaesthesia offered by "the therapeutic institution". More than "mirrored stainless steel".<br />
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Luckily, I had a look in the first floor galleries before stumbling out to find food. It was a video piece called <i>Inside</i>. I heard song. Great. I hate video pieces, especially ones with contrived soundtracks. I sat down. I watched the video. I waited to feel the bile of dislike rise up, but it didn't. My mind whirred with all the delicious sensations of a struggle to decipher the stimulus. This is nuts, I thought. It looks fantastic, the narrative is mental, and I LOVE THE SONG! Edward Thomasson, you bloody brilliant person. Your video is awesome.<br />
</span></div>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-11828159713266783682012-03-28T09:45:00.000+01:002012-03-28T09:45:43.723+01:00Dieppe, 21 September 1854<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>The world was not made for man. </i>Man is the master of nature and is mastered by it. He is the only living creature who not only resists, but overcomes the laws of nature and extends his authority by energy and force of will. But to say that the universe was made for man is a very different matter. All man's constructions are as transitory as himself; time overthrows his buildings and blocks his canals, it reduces his knowledge to nothing and obliterates the very names of his nations. Where is Carthage now? Where is Nineveh? <span style="background-color: yellow;">They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection.</span> But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other. I have no need to point out how harmful to morality, and even to health, many of his so-called improvements have been. Some, by removing or reducing the need for exertion and hard work, have diminished our patience to endure evils, and the energy that was given to us to overcome them. Others again, by increasing luxury and an appearance of wellbeing, have fatally affected the health of generations to come and have brought about a general decline in morals. We borrow from nature such poisons as tobacco and opium and make them the instruments of our gross pleasures, and we are punished by loss of energy and the degradation of our minds. Entire nations have been reduced to a form of slavery by immoderate use of stimulants and strong drink. <span style="background-color: yellow;">No sooner do nations reach a certain stage of civilization than they find themselves growing weaker, especially in their standards of courage and morality.</span> This general loss of energy, which is probably a result of the increase in pleasure and easy living, brings them to swift degeneration and to the neglect of the tradition that was their safeguard - their standard of national honour. In such circumstances it is hard for a nation to resist conquest. There will always be peoples ready to enrich their selves at the expense of degenerate nations, either because they are essentially barbarous, or because they still retain their courage and spirit of adventure. This easily foreseeable catastrophe sometimes turns out to be a source of new life to the conquered peoples. It purifies the air like a storm of a hurricane and brings fresh seed to an exhausted land. Sometimes a new civilization rises from the ruins, but centuries must pass before the arts of peace can flourish again. <span style="background-color: yellow;">Those arts which in their turn are destined to lead to softer ways of living and the corruption of moral standards bring about once more the eternal succession of greatness and misery, proof of man's weakness, but also of the astounding power of his genius.</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: small;">~ I have developed quite the soft spot for Eugene Delacroix since reading his <i><a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Journal-Eugene-Delacroix-Arts-Letters/dp/0714833592/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1308052132&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Journal</a> </i>last year. I love this entry, where he borrows the Tacitean/Juvenalian argument <i></i>that luxuries lead to civic corruption and remixes it with the Polybian view of the cyclical nature of governmental forms, all the while struggling between despair and admiration toward the capabilities of his fellow humanity. Wonderful.</span></span></div>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-66368110465688942022012-03-27T11:09:00.002+01:002012-03-27T11:18:02.596+01:00So Far, the Future<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=SFTF_Main.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/SFTF_Main.jpg" /></a><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Though <a href="http://www.so-far-the-future.co.uk/" target="_blank">So Far, the Future</a> is probably the same size as a broom cupboard in the new Bermondsey White Cube, its aims are sizable indeed: to showcase the process and materials of design. It's always been something of a mystery to me that, given the size of London's design industry, there are so few dedicated design galleries in town. The best London-based design curators - <a href="http://www.libbysellers.com/" target="_blank">Libby Sellers</a>, <a href="http://designmarketo.com/" target="_blank">DesignMarketo</a>, and <a href="http://www.studiotoogood.com/" target="_blank">Faye Toogood</a> - have always tended to exhibit in pop-up installations often coinciding with the London Design Festival. Before Sellers opened her new gallery space on Berners Street last year, I don't think it really occurred to anyone that collectors could be persuaded to buy design pieces as one-off or limited multiple editions from design galleries that weren't studios or showrooms. The LDF exhibitions were primarily directed towards press and manufacturers, just another part of the trade-show hoopla.<br />
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Perhaps the success of Sellers & co has inspired other young and would-be design curators to concoct more public-facing galleries. Or perhaps it's only now that a new generation of curators, who have been educated in a more interdisciplinary fashion, are realising that there may in fact be a market for design-technology-material hybrid gallery spaces after all. So Far, The Future, for example, was set up by Rebecca and Andreas Pohancenik: Andreas is creative director at <a href="http://www.practiceandtheory.co.uk/" target="_blank">Practice + Theory</a>, which explains the gallery's apparent obsession with typography, and Rebecca has degrees in biology, philosophy of science as well as an MA from Kingston in curating contemporary design. The gallery's exhibition programme reflects the diversity of their backgrounds and feels largely driven by their educational and practical experiences. The exhibition I saw, <a href="http://www.so-far-the-future.co.uk/exhibitions/plastic-alchemy" target="_blank">Plastic Alchemy</a>, didn't strike me as a complete success, but the ambition is certainly there and I look forward to seeing how the So Far, the Future programme develops. It's very exciting to see a dedicated design space set up by inquisitive and intelligent young curators who actually care about the process of design and in communicating that process to an audience wider than top-doller buyers.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Top photo copyright </span><a href="http://www.blipfoto.com/entry/1691426" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;" target="_blank">Duncan</a><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">, bottom photo copyright So Far, the Future</span></span>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-28388018261648658332012-03-26T09:58:00.000+01:002012-03-26T09:58:59.759+01:00Phoebe English<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=Phoebe_English_Autumn_Winter_2011_Collection_phoebeenglishcom_001.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="640" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/Phoebe_English_Autumn_Winter_2011_Collection_phoebeenglishcom_001.jpg" width="426" /></a><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Last February in a tent in the courtyard of Somerset House, perched behind Daphne Guinness' bouffant, I tried to sustain interest as one hideously ugly confection after another marched out on model after model while the 'curated soundtrack' blasted out from corner speakers. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Suddenly, a swishy, twitchy black pony tail of a dress flicked past and my interest was piqued. I couldn't help but fixate on these Amazons strutting past in their man-killing, frenetically-fluid goddess dresses. I wanted a faux-hair and black rubber number of my own! I flicked through the 21 pages of student details in the Central St Martins MA fashion show catalogue to discover the person responsible for the apparitions before me: <a href="http://phoebeenglish.com/" target="_blank">Phoebe English</a>. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I tried getting in touch to see if I could buy one of her creations to wear as my wedding dress. Alas, she never replied. Probably for the best.</span><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">By that September, after winning an award at the February show, you could already see the giant paws of commercialism working their way into English's designs. No bad thing, everyone has to make a living, but the shift from materials to fabric didn't entirely seem to suit her. The hunter Amazons turned into gatherer Betty Rubbles drowning in smocked linen. Not sexy. Or wearable to anyone under 6ft5.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: small;">So it was a welcome relief to see less smocking and more body spring back in her A/W12 collection, even if some of the layers were almost Costa-esque in their simplicity. And the design mind that closes a show of all black with a pop of beautiful bubble-gum pink separates certainly warrants bookmarking. If you want to investigate for yourself, English is now stocked in <a href="http://www.doverstreetmarket.com/dsmpaper/phoebe_english_ss12.html" target="_blank">Dover Street Market</a>. Pretty impressive after only one season.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">All photos © Phoebe English</span><b><br />
</b>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-72082147382149475492012-03-21T12:27:00.000+00:002012-03-21T12:27:06.724+00:00Lately I have been...taking a lot of pictures<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">of Elephant and Castle</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;">of Hackney Marshes</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">of Hackney Wick</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">of Newcastle</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">of Sunderland </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">of art! </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">of Walthamstow</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">of the City</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Good times.</span></div><br />
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<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=DSC_0413_2.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="640" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/DSC_0413_2.jpg" width="425" /></a>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-17654131764339986302012-03-12T17:14:00.000+00:002012-03-12T17:14:33.207+00:00Campaign for the Rehabilitation of No-Nonsense Plain Speaking in Art Gallery Press Releases<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Few things make me happier than the launch of a new art gallery in London. If the gallery happens to be run by go-getting young artists or curators, all the better. I want them to do well; I'm rooting for them, I really am. But Jesus Christ on a Bicycle, do yourselves a favour and take a three day break between the writing of and the emailing of your breathy press releases.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I wouldn't normally pull on the razor-blade nail edges for a newbie gallery run by youngsters, but Peter Templeton ain't a newbie and really ought to know better than to send out a press release about his newest endeavour, the Red House Yonder, that somehow manages to take a lot of things I believe in - artistic excellence, art for everyone, the integration of social activities into gallery spaces, collectivity and community - and comes out sounding like a trumped-up convolution desperate for attention from the art-world's big hitters. I mean, come on! When the first sentence of your PR shtick is "<span id="yui_3_2_0_1_1331565861104606">Like Charles Saatchi they feel a lot of today's art has moved away from its true essence, from being something emotive and instead is often appreciated simply for the status it carries</span><span id="yui_3_2_0_1_1331565861104606">" something is so really very wrong. What! Charles Saatchi? Feels today's art has moved away from its true essence? Really?</span></span><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span id="yui_3_2_0_1_1331565861104606">The press release says that Red House Yonder fervently believes in the notion of art for everyone before Templeton effectively follows that up by saying that the <i>real</i> art will be made as one offs for the actual collectors, while some crappy digital prints will comprise the affordable offerings for the "art lover on a more limited budget."</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span id="yui_3_2_0_1_1331565861104606"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Templeton also reminisces about his prior artistic "public outreach" project, the Salon des Arts, held at "the prestigious Palace Gate address in Kensington". Templeton feels it's important that the Red House "challenges the prevailing obsession with celebrity and sensationalism" by replicating the "interesting, provocative, and fun" events held at the Salon which included the likes of artists John Hoyland, Patrick Caulfield, architect Willy Allsop [sic], critics Mel Gooding. Aaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhh! Even if Templeton really does believe in some of the things he spouts off about in the press release, the whole thing is so totally contradictory that it's impossible to tell whether Templeton is genuine or totally full of shit. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Anyway, decide for yourself. Read it in full below.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">And to all you gallerists out there, please think twice before sending out your press release. Get a friend to read it, hell, get your mother to read it. If she doesn't understand it, there's no hope for the rest of us.</span></div><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">A new art collective has just launched in London, called Red House Yonder. Founded by a group of international artists including St Ives artist and RA member Liz Hough, Spaniard Gabriel Granados, emerging young artist Samuel Bassett, deceased Tony Smith and London artist and collective founder Peter Templeton.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Like Charles Saatchi they feel a lot of today's art has moved away from its true essence, from being something emotive and instead is often appreciated simply for the status it carries. They are keen to create art that "talks to the senses not sensationalism", art that tells the artists' story and is loved for what it is not just because it is a status symbol or brand.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“It’s time to move on from the notion of the art gallery and the collectors having this elite status. Yeah, we should be doing work for the collectors, because we also need to be represented in the art world and as a strong voice But it is about the larger world. We live in a very uncertain but exciting time. A phoenix, it is the time for a new kind of order to arise. This is a microcosm of that. It is about sharing, not about being anal and possessive about your own commodity in this case art. But wanting to work together to do things that are considered worthwhile. To me it is an enduring kind of art.” Said founder Peter Templeton</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Peter explains that “The name came from an old blues song: I love the lyric “there’s a red house over yonder, that’s where my baby lies”. For me it was like going into a wood when you are little; you are a bit nervous or scared, but you know there is a house there or a place with lights and you want to go and find out what it is. That for me is the red house yonder. It’s a destiny, something you are drawn towards. To me there was the red house and the yonder. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The Red House Yonder project is an extension of the Salon des Artes, a creative space set up in the 90s by Peter Templeton with co-founder Danielle Dodd. Located at the prestigious Palace Gate address in Kensington, the Salon hosted social evenings, events, and exhibitions which included the likes of artists John Hoyland, Patrick Caulfied, architect Willy Allsop, critics Mel Gooding and thinkers like Charles Handy.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Peter explains: “The Salon was about generating social events which were interesting, provocative, fun and a place to chill out. People loved coming. It became a part of their weekly life and I have always fancied the idea of resurrecting the Salon but as part of a wider movement reflecting the digital age we now live in. One which, gives us the opportunity of producing original art at affordable prices. The Red House should also challenge the prevailing obsession with celebrity and sensationalism. Striving instead to create enduring Art which has something meaningful to say.”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“I have always been a believer in the collective and in community rather than just art as a sole pursuit so I wanted to do something which involved other artists. Working individually can be very isolated. I like the idea of sharing and working with other people; the excitement of invention, exploring the unknown, taking on challenges, having fun. A playful adventure in fact!”</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Affordability of art is also central to the Red House thinking. The Red House will produce one-off pieces for their serious collectors, original customised digital prints and affordable print editions for the art lover on a more limited budget</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Peter Templeton: “Affordable art can be achieved by looking at how things are done in the other creative domains like music, publishing or fashion. For example in the fashion world, there are different levels, from designer haute couture to High Street. All thoughtful and creative in their own right. Although haute couture, like the one off original piece of art, can be exclusive and expensive, a level also exists that is accessible to everyone which is still special, valid and a symbol of the artists and the originality of their work."</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Moving into the present world has seen the creation of the Red House Yonder as a virtual collaboration, online and via a blog in which artists can share and engage, producing digital work and prints (The website will go live on 8th March 2012)</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">What better way to celebrate their launch than a party? It is happening on 25th April at 20th Century Theatre in Notting Hill from 6.30 - 9pm and they'd love for you to come. </span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">“We see it less as an exhibition and more as event, as the art will be displayed in a more organic way than you might find in a traditional gallery. Our aim is to make art more accessible, fun and engaging and we believe this begins with how it is viewed in public. There is general perception that Galleries are intimidating and unwelcoming places to enter. Where you are expected to tip toe around in reverential silence. We have asked the question why is this case and isn’t there a more user friendly way of viewing and appreciating Art? Art is not appreciated in this way at home, so why does it have to be in the public sphere?” Peter Templeton commented. “It will be an evening of creativity, not just static art. A journey which we invite you all to join. We have a lot of surprises planned.”</span></div>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-10407535130402131682012-03-09T10:50:00.000+00:002012-03-09T10:50:26.499+00:00Bodies Electric: NDT2 at Sadler's Wells<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/SOA5jtGigi4" width="560"></iframe><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Great expectations are a curse. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I seem to somehow unthinkingly operate under the assumption that everything will be fantastic; that everyone is a genius; that <i>this is going to be amazing.</i> It hardly needs said that this isn't a unique quality - I'm sure everyone has their own peculiar set of assumptions - so I don't understand how it always feels like news to me when these assumptions are regularly shattered. Yet, instead of learning from shattered assumptions, I always manage to twist round like a falling cat to land back on my own status quo of high expectations. I'm pretty sure a GP would diagnose psychosis. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"> </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Apart from the mental gymnastics of the roller-coaster of high hopes and disappointment, I suspect I find an enormous amount of pleasure in the surprise of something actually being incredible. It doesn't matter if my default state is to assume incredibleness; if the thing turns out to actually be incredible, the delight of the incredible translates into a wonderful surprise, usually accompanied by a deliciously physical response.</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">I went to see one of my most favourite dance companies last night at Sadler's Wells, the junior company of the Nederlands Dans Theatre. They're the kind of company that validates having high expectations. I know they are going to be amazing, and so they are. The only problem is that I simply don't have the vocabulary to describe what it is that they do. How to describe something beyond description? I'm definitely at risk of being hyperbolic, but I don't care. I see so much opera, theatre, ballet, art, stuff, stuff, stuff and it's probably only once a year that I see something or experience something that makes me feel electric. There's something about watching these dancers that makes you realise what it means to have a body, what it means to move. Not to move gracefully or in ways that push the body to its limits of endurance or flexibility, but to know what movement is to the body and to know how - in an almost primal way - to move in space. When you watch them move, it often happens that it stops looking like dancing and looks only like bodies releasing in space. It looks like making the body free. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">It's also nice to see NDT move on a bit beyond Jiri Kylián, whose Gods and Dogs piece came out, surprisingly, as the weak link in a perfectly pitched programme. Young Swedish choreographer Alexander Ekman's Cacti piece was hilarious, poking fun at contemporary choreography's tendency to ooze significance and meaning through oblique staging and bizarre movements - in parts, it reminded me of the brilliant <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDi3wgQFBmQ" target="_blank">Bongo Bongo Nageela-section</a> of William Forsythe's Impressing the Czar. Ekman's genius is that he's been able to do what do many artists try and fail to accomplish: a synthesis of all that's come before into something new and fresh yet still intelligible, no matter how strange. It's not often that you see a string quartet and cacti share the stage with 16 dancers, let alone that it works so wonderfully well. <br />
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Also, how amazing does Philip Glass' String Quartet No. 5 sound in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX01FLu9LLc" target="_blank">this piece</a>? </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
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<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=6382783201_93bd7a9a30_b.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" height="426" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/6382783201_93bd7a9a30_b.jpg" width="640" /></a>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-84463470137322139832012-02-14T10:50:00.000+00:002012-02-14T10:50:30.526+00:00A City Divided<a href="http://s205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/?action=view&current=CD.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="Photobucket" border="0" src="http://i205.photobucket.com/albums/bb162/cbennes/Wayward%20Sentiment/CD.jpg" /></a><br />
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<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I'm crap at vices. I don't smoke, rarely drink to excess, not a sex addict. My addictions are far more esoteric, often laughable: Ladurée macaroons, opera, magazines and horses. Magazines are the worst. I could go for weeks without macaroons, but hardly a day passes when I haven't made a stealth trip to one of my favourite shops to surreptitiously stock up on freshly-printed pages. I don't know why I keep buying magazines, since most of them depress me with their samey blandness or samey edginess. You'd think that so much sameyness would be enough to drive anyone away from magazines. You'd be wrong. I keep coming back for more.</span><br />
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</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Christmas often brings gifts of bad magazine subscriptions - I don't want one issue of Cosmo, let alone twelve - but not this year. This past Christmas, my very clever soon-to-be husband, realised that the best he could do to rein in my magazine habit was to feed it with quality in the hope that at least the quantities piling up in our house would subside. That didn't happen, of course, but I've been absolutely delighted with my <a href="http://www.stackmagazines.com/" target="_blank">Stack Magazines gift subscription</a>.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Every month Stack sends me a parcel of treats, usually a new issue of an independent magazine along with a little pamphlet or newspaper. I was a bit worried initially that, because I was familiar with so many of the mags on the site, there wouldn't be anything new to me but I was totally wrong about that and it's been one revelation after another. Since it's only February I've only had two Stack packages, but both were awesome: <a href="http://www.boat-mag.com/" target="_blank">Boat</a> came in the first package (Boat are a design agency who up sticks every six months to a new city where they write a cool magazine entirely themed around that place, so far: Sarajevo, Detroit and now London - I'm writing a piece about London's markets for this issue!) and <a href="http://www.decatorevista.ro/english-dor/" target="_blank">DOR</a></span> (an English-language version of a journal of Romanian nonfiction) in the second. </div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But the best thing I've been sent by Stack thus far has to be <a href="http://www.markdearman.com/cairodivided/" target="_blank">Cairo Divided</a>. I don't know that many consumers who complain about the demise of long-form journalism, but I certainly know a lot of journalists who do. One of the things I love about newspapers and magazines is that, at their platonic best, they provide a far better format for longer, more in-depth pieces than the no-attention-span web typically allows for, without being forced to succumb to the objective, academic demands of nonfiction books.</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The beauty of Cairo Divided - a two-year collaborative project between photographer <a href="http://www.jasonlarkin.co.uk/index.php?/projects/cairo-divided/" target="_blank">Jason Larkin</a> and writer <a href="http://www.jackshenker.net/" target="_blank">Jack Shenker</a> - is that, being a newspaper of only one story, the piece has space to breathe. Instead of finding itself wrapped in endless 500-word news blurbs and photoshopped snaps of B-list celebrities, this fascinating story of Cairo's sprawl into new and improved 'satellite cities' is allowed to be important, by virtue of being the only thing in the mag to read. This text-heavy image-heavy approach certainly wouldn't work for every subject, but it's an excellent fit for the story of Cairo's changing approach to urban planning against the backdrop of national revolution. The perfect story, perfectly written and documented in the perfect format - this is magazine making at its best.</span><br />
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</span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">You can get your hands on a free copy of Cairo Divided <a href="http://www.markdearman.com/cairodivided/" target="_blank">here</a> - just pay the cost of postage.</span><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Except top image, all images copyright Jason Larkin.</i></span></span></b></div>Phoeneciahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08358887663281708976noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4847538647112844693.post-6546507457567142922012-02-01T10:55:00.000+00:002012-02-01T10:55:09.293+00:00a week in pictures<div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Playing catch up with pictures. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Reminds me that I really ought to fix my camera and stop taking snaps on my phone.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">Captions.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">1. Mag shopping spree at the ICA</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">2. I'd have left it on the train too</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">3. Tacita Dean installation in Tate Modern Turbine Hall</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">4. South London art adventures</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">5. The amazing (not all to my taste, but the guy is dedicated to his art) <a href="http://www.kabin.org.uk/gallery/collection">Kabin collection</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">6. Nee naw!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">7. A Room for London</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">8. Casiokids!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">9. ecoLogicStudio's H.O.R.T.U.S at the Architectural Association</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">10. Christina Mackie at <a href="http://www.chisenhale.org.uk/">Chisenhale</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">11. <a href="http://mikeandollie.co.uk/">Mike+Ollie</a> at Brockley Market</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">12. <a href="http://federationcoffee.com/">Federation Coffee</a> in Brixton Village Market</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">13. Croydon riots fire burn down building bye bye</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">14. Don't feed the pigeons!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">15. <a href="http://www.croydonminster.org/">Croydon Minster</a>, resting place of six Archbishops of Canterbury</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">16. Kingston's Ancient Market Hall</span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">17. Swans in the Thames at Kingston</span></span></div><div style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"></div><br />
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