Discovering the Marvelous

To be honest, Blogs tend to proliferate, in my experience at least. You start one and the next one gets longer and longer –that’s always been a problem of mine, proliferation without adequate discipline. But now I’m reaching maturity I’m determined to keep a better hold on myself and shape up, editor or no editor.

To be honest, it’s been such a busy time that my freshest thoughts and reports from Fitzrovia and from London in general are already sinking into a slight mist of memory. Writing is an inspired thing, it’s all about moments, inspirations, and the right time to write. Anyway, I’ll do my best, and hope that for me, as for monsieur Proust, something about the passing of time will add extra colours and tones to the following descriptions.

London is a lovable place, the glossy new colourful surfaces slide by bus windows in night rain so that you feel you have been allowed to enter into someone else’s magnificent video game. At other times the biggest surprises lie around corners lined with shiny black railings or within a green Georgian door. With everything being so New! New! New! artists and aesthetes and the curious likes of me have found it very difficult to find and retain a position from which to judge anything. Many have of course resigned themselves to the idea that art and being an artist is no more special than anything or anyone else. I disagree I’m afraid, despite being more than democratic (alterocratic in fact) I increasingly see the crucial value of hanging onto that apple in your eye (if you’re lucky enough to have one), that special something that gives you an odd reason to exist, a strange role in the world (that has nothing to do with money or usefulness) and which you can spend your whole life (really, I mean it, your WHOLE life) seeking for a way to ‘apply’ or to ‘make sense of’.

In a way, THAT is my definition of art, and it’s certainly true that a way of just looking at things can be far more valuable a contribution than the richest and best known of so-called ‘artists’ who thoughtlessly fill white spaces with big dazzling objects in a kind of crude parody of a kind of artist that no-one really knows how to be any more. You can be an artist -I declare- with or without making things, and if you do make things, you should still be an artist when you are not making things of course. to be honest, for me, every damn thing is art, and by that, I mean every experience is fascinating, questionable, political, ripe for displacement and re-interpretation.

But let’s get back to the facts, to the street and to my own footsteps. Fitzrovia continues to fascinate, but sadly I recently had to confront and accept the unpleasant reality that on a huge site, bang in the middle of this otherwise gently evolving and quite strange area, a property consortium has recently smashed down the old Middlesex Hospital and is about to build one of the most hideous monstrous, out of character and certainly unnecessary developments (offices, shops, café’s, residential) that you could imagine. I ask you (I really ASK you) who NEEDS it? other than those remote capitalists who’ll make great profits at everyone else’s financial, environmental and cultural expense?

The old, dilapidated corner shop that operates as a Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Centre looks like something I haven’t seen in London since the 1970s. When I call, the door is closed to me while inside a visiting artist is conducting a tapestry workshop with a few mature Asian ladies) But on the window, along with lots of interesting community advice, there is a splendid image of all the famous writers (Virginia Woolf, G.B. Shaw, Olaudah Equiano, Rimbaud etc. and artists (Constable, August John, Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Camden School etc.) who have lived in or been associated with the area, and in a way bequeath it its peculiar and pervasive psychogeography. But these noble portraits surround (on a kind of poster) the hideous looking development itself that is, not only wholly out of place here but is also to be called ‘NOHO SQUARE’ thus completely ignoring, and as it were, writing-over, the Fitzrovia area with a new name, even suggesting that this is not Fitzrovia at all but ‘North Soho’ or something. Though the mysterious negativity of the ‘No’-ho, does have a certain philosophical attraction, I just wish it was being built in some ‘Nowhere’.

I’m sorry if this sounds conservative (I like to think of myself as only ‘radically conservative’ i.e. adopting outmoded and unfashionable positions as a risky strategy for maintaining vigilance over what might otherwise be blindly current, cutting, and cool) but I’m sure if you go and look at this situation (go and look) you will agree that it is pretty crude and appalling situation and against the grain of a much more empathetic kind of evolution that seems to be taking place in this, one of the few underexploited, relatively undisturbed and truly potential areas of truly central London. Surely there will be a fight, surely this is worth fighting for, but looking at the Fitzrovia News (a quarterly local tabloid) you get the sense that the battle is long lost and that the mighty, distant and ignorant have once more trampled over the rights of the local, caring and passionate.

Anyway, to art, and, as I gander about glugging from my trusty espresso flask I experience the wonders of the Wellcome Collection, a state-of-the-art museum of medicinal Mankind that contains –like many of London’s museums- far more surprising objects of contemplation than the contemporary art galleries. Here you can find the human genome project mapped in a stack of books that would take you 50 years to read as well as a very weird collection of oil paintings, sex aids, momento mori etc. all side by side.

The jewel in the crown of Fitzrovia, and perhaps of the whole London art world this year has to be Philippe Parreno’s wonderful Christmas Tree piece, of which eleven have been made, one for each month other than December. In gloriously Disney-esque cast aluminum form, each is accompanied by a commissioned piece of music, so that if you buy one (for 225,000 Euros) you get the rights to the music too (I think) -now that’s what I call Sculpture!

In a strange, metaphorical parallel that Philippe might have appreciated, the Wellcome Collection (I now recollect) shows a work which describes the H.I.V virus looking for all the world like a clear Xmas bauble with a clear Xmas tree-like structure snuck inside it.

David Altmejd has contributed some kind of grotesque, kitschy-mythic eclectic-eroticism -of a rather familiar kind- to Stuart Shave/Modern Art across the road from the Pilar Corrias (where Parreno is showing), but one of Altmejd’s pieces is quite original. In a clumsily contructivist perspex case, thin gold chains are supported by transparent mounts and formed into what look like 18th century balloonist’s spermatazoic ejaculations all composed with a grand symmetry evocative of an olde worlde plan for a future city.

Alison Jacques have an ambitious piece of ‘White Dada’ by Thomas Zipp. Here, yet another neo-Dadaism (oh no, not another!) is very carefully produced as a kind of neo-retro-event. White carpet was installed only so that it could be sacrificially inscribed with cigarette burns and red wine stains at the opening. The artists also wore white suits on that occasion for the same reason. A small auditorium has been constructed (all in a dour brown) so that the PV audience can gaze down like evicted Romans onto a scene of abject gladiatorialism in which drunken artists and inebriated invited guests play a drum kit and a fat electric organ through a guitar amplifier. Meanwhile a quick swish through some equally retro beaded curtains leads to a space in which poorly printed B&W photographs are self-consciously pinned to Hessian covered boards (reminiscent of a very interesting show I saw in 2007 called ‘So-Called Life’ at Camberwell College of Arts artspace -but I forget the artist’s name).

Up at ‘Mummery + Schnelle’ Louise Hopkins has obsessively attacked desire-inducing mail order catalogues, adding spindly hands to a page of engagement rings, or beheaded women to the page of D.I.Y saws. It’s a simple but very funny response to the Crapitalism (sic) we all know all too well. Here we have more a SURSurrealism (sic) creeping into the everyday with an alternative consciousness that refuses to swallow all the spectacular lies but, rather than rip it up, inserts another reality, that somehow we always knew was also there.

Ed Lipski is up at The Approach in Mortimer Street, an artist who greatly inspired me back in ohletmeseenow (sic) it must have been 1995-6 when he was with (now defunct) Entwhistle. He still has the mau mau mystique (big lumps of stuff that looks like owl pellets obscuring the heads of religious icons) but sometimes here I worried that he had absorbed some influence of excessive trashiness from unassailable Gary Webb and thereby lost his own sense of the quality object (again, it would have been better for one artist’s innate SURSurrealism (sic) to have triumphed over yet another neo-dadaist tendency -anyone who knows Lipski's early work will know what I mean here, in fact, in the search to imagine what a 21st century Surrealism might look like, those works could provide a welcome guide.

But of course, the best things to encounter are the unexpected ones, in unexpected places, not in big name galleries at all. On the way over from the Wellcome collection to Fitzrovia the sky suddenly changed, showered the streets with rain, then selectively illuminated everything with shafts of piercing sunlight, making the world somehow timeless or re-historicised, and opening my heart and mind to new possibilities so that the visual and sonic pollutions of Tottenham Court Road were washed away by the solvent experience of Fitzrovia's still idiosyncratic backstreets.

At Fitzroy Square a banner announced that Sofija Silvia -a recent graduate of St Martins MA course- was exhibiting her photos, juxtaposing London scenes and Croatian landscapes, in a small lecture room (recently turned gallery) of the Croatian embassy. the friendly curator there directed me to The Georgian Society in a preserved old house on the square (so graceful it is sometimes used for fashion and movie shoots) where there will soon be a series of talks on Palladian buildings (just the kind of unexpected event a radical conservative can recommend for opening your eyes to a diferent difference and to other margins). There I was told about the history of the Foot Hospital nearby -now being restored into residences (I seem to recall being told by a famous performance artist that a hospital building in Fitzroy Square had been communised and colonised by artists and radicals in the late 60s?).

I also saw an amazing empty gallery (that, in a way, looked like a work of conceptual or relational art in itself) just waiting for yet another entrepreneurial curator to move in, and then the converted factory space (reminding of why Fitzrovia is so interesting, so mixed-up with small factories, rag trade, classic residences and now galleries) that has become the Rebecca Hossack Gallery. I really wonder about how you describe this kind of gallery, this kind of art? –a real challenge I think to my alterocratic principles. My notebook says of this problem “…the exclusion (by cool) of, not ‘kitsch’ but an un-nameable form of ‘taste’ represented by middle-brow galleries…”. (turns out, reading the Fitzrovia news, that Ms Hossack is in fact the real Conservative representative for the area!)

I am always searching for what the cool excludes because that is the way to see how the necessarily unspoken code of cool is formed and defined, how to guess what the reasoning might be (iftheyonlyknew [sic] ) under that hard-nosed, hard-headedness you see in every successive wave of London's blindly ambitious and unnervingly fashionable, as they (unwittingly I'm sure) push more hesitant and more questionable beings aside, like a snowplough, with that necessary, blessed ignorance that gets you quickly to the top.

Walking down Great Titchfield Street I hear a young guy on his fag break boasting an obviously oft-told tale about a man who picked up a phone and said ‘buy gold’ after seeing the 2nd plane hit the World Trade Centre even though he knew his brother was in the tower ... dubious, and lager-y (sic) but this is the only unexpected tale direct from the lips of the street that I have for you on this occasion.

Perhaps the most important development for me this week was the consolidation of the idea that neo-dadaisms must no longer be allowed to carelessly proliferate as they did through the YBA phenomenon, and as can again be witnessed in a fashionable Sculpture catalogue like ‘Unmonumental’. It’s not just the American election that shows something changing in the world, something about the alliance of moral goodness with QUALITY. It seems to me we need an element of ‘radical conservatism', more like something seen in Surrealism than in DADA, a sense in which quality and the past are paradoxically most capable of disturbing the trashy present with unexpected possibilities. I thus call for an end to Neo-Dadaisms and an embrace of SUR- and UR-surrealisms. “Marvellous” –as Andre Breton would surely say!

Later in the week I’m far away on the other side of town looking at the Horniman museum’s amazingly curated Musical Instrument collection, and agog at films about how a euphonium is actually made -with the help of ICE! And for the 2nd time this week, my jaw drops and I say ‘Now that’s what I call Sculpture!' while the ghost of Andre Breton echoes sagely in my head, ‘Marvelous, Marvelous!'

END