The Bargain-Basement Baudelaire

By the way dear followers, on my urban perambulations I recently bumped into a slightly down-at-heel character going under the name of 'Bargain-Basement Baudelaire' -a very witty, pithy type of the kind who leaves in one's head the most memorable and quote-able opinions. I believe that he too 'Blogs' (as the contemporary expression has it) by means of a similar vehicle to my own irregular transcriptions at http://bbbaudelaire.blogspot.com/

Stumbling Out Of The Desert

Sorry I have been away so long, I lost my way near Holborn one night while concentrating a little to earnestly on the consumption of some fish and some chips and have been on some strange adventures amid the labyrinthine metropolis. There has, in effect, been a hiatus, an erasure, or cesura during which I am not exactly sure what has happened to me, though, now and then, brief episodes appear, looming up within my prevailing amnesia like islands of certainty, or at least, more fully formed images. I also misplaced my trusty espresso flask recently and this is another factor which means that I cannot claim to have been what I would call fully myself. But I am determined to keep you informed about the particular undercurrents and countercultural experiences to which I find myself witness and which I therefore feel responsible to impart or record for posterity, lest the commonly regarded surface of this city's existence be mistaken for its entirety -which I am sure, my more interesting friends and comrades will agree, is far from the case.

For now, I can only offer a brief greeting, like a man stumbling out of the desert into the environs of his home village, and assure you that I am alive, if not fully well and that I intend to continue offering you my observances and perspectives, albeit not fully formed or explicated. Suffice to say that I encountered, in Fitzrovia, an unexpected site of a Victorian church stuffed with scaffolding, causing the most delightful juxtapositions of design and technology spanning 150 years. On the same day I examined in some detail the work of the Irish sculptor Eva Rothschild who was showing, rather modestly, and not far from Fitz Mansions during the summer downtime for the Fitzrovia galleries. I was also thrust by a special duty out into the wild Western regions of Holland Park where I witnessed a middle aged woman carrying a transparent box of rocks, a homeless man singing a gibberish version of what sounded like a Japanese schoolgirl's song while clasping a beer can between grimy-sneakered feet and a woman clutching a mobile phone to her ear and exclaiming "God, is that the truth". Later, crossing grand Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens I saw numerous children writhing over the muddy bronze statue that there immortalises the fictional figure of Peter Pan, egged-on by mums who eagerly immortalised the idyllic holiday event using tiny digital cameras. I then saw various couples, sprawled here and there about the expansive grasslands, some of whom were unusually ugly English men gripping fast on to young Asian women as if some anti-gravitational force might at any moment whisk their angels back to heaven and leave them once again devoid of all charm and beauty.

Needless to say, much, much more have I seen and heard, but my present circumstances limit my abilities so that these brief images are all I can presently share with you. I hope they at least whet your appetite for more Roy-ish tales. Please do not neglect nor forget me as I soon hope to return to the full flow of my renowned literary force and regale you once once again by embellishing your own urban experience with the benefit of my own senses.

Roy In Ex-Holborn

To be honest, I walked towards Holborn in some trepidation, knowing it to be an area of Old London simply dripping with History and afraid it would overwhelm my knowledge and outstrip my vocabulary. But fortunately, as I turned off the Kingsway and found my way through some odd old alleys, I found that it wasn't there; i.e. that Holborn itself had disappeared; been eradicated from the London map.

As I stared East along what should have been Theobalds Road towards what should have been Grays Inn Road, all I could see was a kind of desert of neutral material, like a site from the computer-based pursuit once introduced to me as '2nd Life' where building was yet to begin, and that had come to inhabit this '1st Life' of my unjustly brief but nonetheless thankfully rich experience on earth. Just three structures rose up from that paucity; that dearth of detail. One very small object which turned out to be an isolated ATM or Cash Machine sprouting up from the grim grey void just to the height of my navel. Not far away, at about the distance of the width of Theobalds road -had it existed- there was a lively, illuminated and fully operational, traditional English Fish and Chip shop, complete with munching and queuing customers and Italian staff prodding, turning, sieving and shuffling the world famous fare as it spat, fried and bubbled in stainless steel vats. A little way off stood one admirable Georgian structure, a handsome 18th Century house in excellent repair, looming up alone in the barren landscape, its crisply set windows clear and dark, and with nothing beyond it but a featureless plain and an infinite horizon.

Needing, at this present moment, neither cash nor food of such a 'fast' variety; and patting my trusty Espresso flask to reassure myself that, should I require sustenance in this strange land a reliable dose of invigoration was close to hand, I walked in the direction of the house, which grew more impressive as I approached, until I was standing on its proud step and looking at a name written above a small metallic button which obviously operated some sort of doorbell. The name wasn't one I had ever come across before, and certainly didn't sound English. Neither was it a 'Mr', 'Mrs' or family name, but simply one ominous looking word, printed in a bold font, which led me to believe that this was some kind of business, perhaps even an art gallery? The name puzzled me, and so, hesitating to press the button and possibly thereby summon forth unprecedented or unmanageable events, I spoke the word aloud, as if accommodating its deep vowels and soft consonants on and around my tongue might make me feel a little more comfortable at this tense moment within such a disturbingly vacated neighbourhood.

" D O M O B A A L ", a little frozen cloud represented my breath in the cold January air as the word passed through my lips and into the world, but though the utterance seemed to subtly change the quality and meaning of the word it did nothing to interrupt the momentum of my impulsive index finger, which moved, like a helpless vessel inexorably destined to tumble over rapids, closer and closer to the button, until the whorled skin at the tip coincided with the button's smooth brushed aluminium, then pressed on, forcing the little disk to recede and thereby signal to whoever or whatever lay beyond the door that a visitor was seeking, either entry, or, at least some enlightenment as to what this singular establishment might be.

With a solid and satisfying 'click', equivalent in quality to an 18th century limousine door opening, the door released itself from its catch, apparently at the will of some remote electronic device, and enabled me to pass over the threshold into a stone vestibule. To my right stood a stack of boxes containing small bottles of one of my favourite drafts, Breton Cider of the kind I have often quaffed in magnanimous proportion during wasteful afternoons in The French House in Soho where that wonderful import is supplied in splendid quart bottles usually incongruous to these shores.

Using the bottle opener which lay to hand I availed myself of the effervescent and aromatic concoction as I began to mount some stairs which rose to my right, drawn by strange noises drifting down from above. At the the first floor landing I encountered another door and, gently pushing it open was pleased to find therein a party of aesthetes attentively listening to a strange kind of music performed by three rather studious looking men operating electronic equipment at a desk beneath the window. My entrance was barely acknowledged, the atmosphere being like that of a sceance or wake, as the audience concentrated -some with eyes closed- on the infinite subtleties and nuances of sounds rippling, bubbling, humming and gurgling from small speakers placed artfully about the room. I dutifully joined in the ritual and soon found my imagination both captivated and inspired by the exotic frequencies passing gently into my ears from the dimly lit room. Music is, of all the arts, notoriously the most difficult to describe in words or to enhance in any way with vocabulary, nevertheless, I can tell the reader that listening, and occasionally looking towards the source of the sounds, I found myself picturing great dams, power stations, and pylons by which these pure electronic emissions were fundamentally produced and transported here, so that, despite my rather compressed and crowded surroundings I was able to enjoy the sensation of mentally traversing enormous landscapes and encountering magnificent man-made phenomena, while each of theses images was adjusted or supplanted according to new frequencies.

When the sounds eventually arrived at a gentle conclusion (the musicians removing their hands from the equipment and glancing briefly at one another with barely discernible expressions of satisfaction) the audience applauded politely and broke into mumbling discussions, expressing their responses to the experience. Then, as the small gathering dispersed into other rooms about the house, I followed, and found myself confronted by a most unexpected sight.

Above me, stairs ascended to further floors on which I was destined to never know what occurred because a small rope or chain was deftly hung across them disallowing me entrance. But what startled me at this point was the realisation that, for some purpose the walls of the entire house appeared to have been recently painted a rather sombre shade of grey, producing an atmosphere quite un-conducive to the perpetuation of the daily family life for which the building was surely originally intended. Gazing curiously up those forbidden stairs the reason for this adjusted context became apparent when my eyes met a very peculiar, indeed frankly incongruous fixture whose permanence was uncertain. It appeared to consist of a model of a building, produced with an intimate degree of care and attention to detail surpassing those projections often compiled by architects and property developers, and made at what I speculated was something like a 1:100 scale or ratio of reduction.

The model was set high above me, so that it was difficult to see the whole, which was obscured, not only by the similar modelling of the building's foundations and most immediate surroundings (the corner of a paved street) but further, by perhaps the most surprising element of all, a great lump of earth projecting down beneath the model, seemingly representing (in similar scale) several meters of the earth's true substance immediately beneath the location of the miniaturised establishment, so that, in looking up, not only was one intrigued and a little frustrated by one's inability to thoroughly deduce the character of the model, but one also found oneself slightly awed by this rather mortifying reminder of our own eventual return to the soil carelessly trodden by our lively feet in our relatively thoughtless pursuit of everyday goals. Furthermore, this communication of gravitas served to suspend one's considerations (as must surely be the purpose of any artwork -for this was surely the nature of the object with which I found myself engaged) just as surely as had the erstwhile technicians suspended, with great skill and confidence, said object in such an unnerving and precipitous position, half way up the grey-painted wall of a 2nd floor Georgian staircase.

By now the effects of the fruitsome alcohol could be felt, and they made themselves apparent in the unusually carefree manner with which I struck up conversation with one of the complete strangers mingling nearby on the stairwell. Upon enquiring a little regarding the uncanny apparition floating above our heads (though not so far and so fast as to break its phenomenal spell over me as a result of a too-hasty acquisition of 'knowledge'-that arch foe of true intelligence) I learned that this was indeed an artwork and was attributable to one 'Steve Johnson' an English Sculptor who has -I learned from my new acquaintance- developed some renown for the design, manufacture and display of similar objects by way of several recent exhibitions on the continent (most notably in Germany).

Glancing up once more at the object as if to see it anew in light of this additional information, I found myself trying to ascertain the precise nature of the architectural example which had so inspired Mr Johnson's eye and imagination as to motivate him to take the by-no-means insignificant pains required to embark upon its miniaturised and very detailed replication. After some consideration I asserted that this was surely a model of the kind of establishment one might describe as 'seedy' or perhaps 'shady'; that is, the kind that necessarily shutters its windows both by day and by night and broadcasts a minimum of information on its exterior alluding to that which occurs in its interior; the kind of emporium -I should add- that anyone who regards himself as a gentlemen will always walk smartly by -and yet not without a feint sense of repressed and never-to-be-satisfied curiosity; with eyes seemingly, though never fully, averted.

At this point I began to sense some discomforting connection between the artworks and my earlier experience of Holborn itself, which had appeared reduced to a few similarly isolated islands of architectural eventuality, like moments torn from a highly subjective encounter with this teeming world; or remaining fragments of a mind rapidly losing its ability to recall huge swathes of once contiguous images which, combined, should constitute lasting evidence of one life lived on this earth.

Moving and mooching along with the crowd, who skilfully gave equal attention to eachother, to their drinks, and to the artworks, I entered another room, featuring the wonderful high ceiling characteristic of such houses and graced with windows which draped down to meet the floor, thereby giving the whole interior a sense of airy elegance conducive to the pursuit of delicate thoughts, posture, and manners. Here, the artist and his assistants had repeated and embellished the wizardry I had contemplated on the staircase at three sites about the room, all at a carefully designated height which made the upper parts of the sculptures almost obscured. Small worlds again floated eerily against the backdrop of the painted walls, but here the works emphasised a more lateral form, spreading out like brief horizons against the walls. One was artfully poised above the room's ornate fireplace -subtly evoking certain surrealist paintings I have seen, which transform the language of such household particulars into faintly disturbing dream scenarios .

Stretching my neck a little, along with the other curious visitors milling about me, I could make out various intriguing details. One of the Sculptures seemed to represent a German railway station platform, and the inclusion of a small figure who's back was turned towards the gallery wall immediately evoked that peculiar quality of time experienced by anyone who has ever endured the particularly modern experience of waiting alone for a train to come; a moment which, in my own experience, is likely to invoke a particular form of reverie -if that is, one is able to repress more base thoughts of impatience or resentment that one's transportation is not immediately to hand. The whole was again impressively detailed in its execution, even incorporating a clearly legible minature advertisement of the kind that usually occupies such sites and which, at such moments, competes with more cherished and personal thoughts for our attention.

All the Sculptures repeated the motif previously described wherein a large area of earth extended below each of the 'islands', as if to anchor the seemingly superficial, everyday events represented as indicative of the surface of worldly experience, to the hidden or un-representable density of time, and to the repressed, but no-less real, profundity of our all-too-hasty passage through this life.

Another Sculpture featured the kind of 'fast food' kiosk one might find offering its fare at a convenient stop on a long and busy road, but just as the previous Sculpture had featured a figure, with face averted, apparently enacting a part in a 'non-event', so here, the diminutive retailer appeared closed for business as the shutters of this kiosk had been made by Mr Johnson to appear firmly shut, perhaps for the entire season, or perhaps set to be opened imminently by its proprietor on another busy day of rather confined, overheated and highly aromatic commerce. As if to emphasise a pervading sense of what I have heard referred to as 'down time', a large and jolly sunshade had been crafted by the skillful sculptor, albeit firmly furled and tied as if to emphatically confirm the sense of closure, acting like a full-stop at the end of a sentence.

The Sculpture above the fireplace was inevitably influenced by being suspended above that highly symbolic hearth, on who's mantelpiece one could easily imagine a Georgian gent leaning, brandy swilling in one hand, to regale his guests, or while subtly interrogating his daughter's beau regarding assets and intentions. On this piece of long, modelled earth, a low building had been painstakingly concocted by Mr Johnson. Again its windows appeared shuttered, as if it were a holiday home, or some building brought into use for some other purpose only at certain times of the year. At one end of its long roof a German flag had been carved so as to hang limply, as if to signal that even the weather, on this particularly 'Johnsonian' day, had decided to do nothing; as if the elements themselves had here closed their blinds and put up their feet for a well-earned rest.

However, at the other end of the roof, seemingly symbolically opposed to the traditional sign of national territory, what I believe is referred to as a 'satellite dish' peeked out optimistically, encouraging me to consider the possibility that some activity did indeed persist within the seemingly abandoned building, and conjuring thoughts regarding the fact that, in an age of highly technologised, mass and transnational communications there is more to the world than the national borders and boundaries which proved such troubling obstacles to human understanding in recent centuries.

By now, Mr Johnson's sculptures and their thoughtful setting within this splendid house had quite sated my occasional appetite for art and other kinds of special experience; while the Breton cider had delivered a slight pang of hunger to my midriff along with its welcome injection of a sense of rosy well-being, and so, making slight valedictory nods to my fellows I made my way back down the stairs to the handsome door which soon clicked satisfyingly shut behind me so that I found myself once again in that strangely vacated land that I can only describe as 'Ex-Holborn' -the well-known quartier having apparently been all but removed from its historical location.

As I proceeded Eastward I could see the beloved city looming in the distance, beyond the barren plain still punctuated only by the mushroom-like stub of the ATM machine and the still-illuminated Fish and Chippery. There lay the Southern edges of Bloomsbury, and, beyond the Kingsway -on which the occasional vehicle passed- the Westward drag towards the intoxicants of Soho. I thought of Fitz mansions over in Fitzrovia, of its presently empty cupboards and my equally empty digestive system, and, having searched in vain among my pockets for an old folded fiver or thick gold coin, conceded to utilising the services of the ATM or 'Cash Machine' which I was, at that very moment, passing. Having obtained the necessary note I marched over to sample the fried food I had earlier witnessed freshly frying, then wandered in a North westerly direction, taking occasional swigs from my trusty flask, and reflecting -as one invariably does after eating- on my recent experience.

Mr Johnson's sculptures -I mused- were not unlike a record of a wholly subjective experience -what might be called a 'radical empiricism'- whereby only those events of true note and use to ourselves register significantly on our mental landscape as we make what is ultimately a solipsistic journey through this world; something which literature has often described very well but which Mr Johnson seemed to now be claiming as the potential domain of sculptors.

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

Introducing Fitzrovia - in the quiet rain before the storm of Frieze.

Well here we go, yes, this week I roved, I roved and I roved, first around Fitzrovia –that’s a cool new area of London opened up to galleries probably because it is close to the Frieze art fair and so it is easy to steer a car down there after the fair instead of finding a way to the cool East end. Yes! it was fresh because my eyes are fresh, having effectively boycotted contemporary art for a couple of years to think about something else. I guess the best thing in Fitzrovia –ifIdosaysomyself (sic)- was that guy Michael Muller (with an umlaut over the ‘u’) at the Mummary & Schnelle gallery. Yeah! he can really do it, a nice eclectic little show with some mystery, surprise, and multi-media. Hmmm, I had to sit down after that one and slurp some black coffee from my flask –it’s all that keeps me upright these days. Well, I whizzed around Fitzrovia where there’s a new Approach gallery, and a couple of very impressive spaces like Alison Jacques and Modern Art (showing big disturbed landscapes by Clare Woods), then cut down towards Soho and checked in at Anthony Reynolds (a quiet gallery I’ve always respected) where some of that nice ‘Un-monumental’-style sculpture had been installed by Nobuko Tsuchiya.

I then hoofed on over to more familiar territory like Hauser and Wirth, Sadie Coles, Haunch of Venison etc. At ‘Haunch’ (in a lovely old building with sweeping staircases, said to have once been the home of Admiral Nelson’s lover) I really enjoyed Anthony Goicoliea’s Cuban reminiscences as he used black and white photographs and their negative incarnations to attempt to trace in some way lost relatives in Havana and New York. At Timothy Taylor an ex Goldsmiths college man Ewan Gibbs had been meticulously drawing with pencil, copying tourist-y photos of NYC into 5mm gridded papers whooo! And at White Cube (Mason’s Yard) Robert Irwin was just a bit too big an artist for my liking, in a space that is also just a bit too ostentatious for my savoury taste-buds (is Jay Joplin the Mayor of Mayfair yet?). On the way, I bumped into an old friend and internationally renowned artist. He was really out to buy a cool scarf before Frieze begins and the cold spell kicks-in but I managed to swerve him into the new (everything’s new, new,) Frith Street gallery to see the calm old master Giuspeppe Penone’s cool works aaaaaH!

My friend deserted me after that (I know it’s hard to take a lot of me in one day) and so I went to Thomas Dane alone and saw the kind of works on paper that I like by Jorge Queiroz (a man after my own practice in fact). Aaah, truly speculative mark making, where the true alchemy resides! I finished up back towards Fitzrovia at a PV for the Architectural Association showing great planned buildings for London, that were either never completed (e.g. 2nd prize in the Tate Modern competition) or are still in the process of planning or being built (bigger, shapelier towers). To be honest, I couldn’t keep my concentration here, and I’d like to take more time one day to answer the question as to why an architecture show is sooooo different from an art show, even when you might think they could have similarities! Having rested for a day I ventured into the East End on a rainy Sunday morning, which was good, as I found the galleries empty of other less courageous critics, writers and would-be opinion-formers.

Vyner Street looked dour under grey skies but upstairs in the mighty Wilkinson monolith I encountered a really educational installation by Fia Backstrom that taught me all about the colour Orange as the new hue for revolution. While in Nettie Horn’s I must say I was gently knocked-out by the architectural sculpture of one Sinter Verner, wow! At Kate Macgarry’s space Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard have developed their ‘re-enactment’ and answer themes with a film of a young MC dissing her boyfriend into a door security camera. When I got to magnificent Matts Gallery (surely one of the most important and credible spaces in UK) after a longer than expected hike along the untimely Regents Canal you could see the enormous towers of Canary Wharf in the distance disappearing into gunmetal blue drags of cloud. Blade Runner had nothing on this real future I’m inhabiting, the corporate boys have really gone to another planet -have they not? leaving the likes of us kicking around here in the mud of an indecisive and divided society.

Roy Voss, at Matts, showed an impressive installation in which the human condition was rescued as something simultaneously Romantic (huge landscape backdrops) and kitsch (table lamps in the design of lighthouses or fishing boats -you know, you see them in flea markets). Hmmmm! suitably moved and reassured (and for some reason reminded of my grandfather) I marched over to Chisenhale –again slurping from my daily litre of espresso- and was again pleasantly relieved to see a very convincing layout by David Noonan. Here retro references ran riot as black and white images of black-clad dancers with way-outmoded white pan-stick makeup cavorted on wooden supports around a floor lined with 70s-style hessian carpeting –check this out, it’s a collision of History, photography, sculpture and dance that looks oh-so now! The monochromaticism was mellow music to my muddled eyes after the outside world had smothered them in iPhone-style multicolouration. More highlights of the East were Vilma Gold where Jennifer West had gotten her students to kiss many many metres of movie film with lipstick before she transferred it to digital and projected the resulting psychedelia in this (yet another cool, new) gallery. By the time I reached home I needed a long hot bath. My umbrella had done its best but my suit jacket was damp and my socks, having been let-down by a pair of aging shoes, moreso. Here I began to reflect on the nature and purpose of Contemporary Art; what it does and does for us in comparison with say, History, music or shopping.

To be honest I felt somewhat relieved that artists are continuing to explore and exploit these ever-renewed spaces and materials, all this history and all this possibility, whether it might be of value or not. And in this respect, art remains courageous, even if it is unfashionable in these sceptical and ironic times to say so. I have come to the conclusion in fact (‘ere I go) that Romanticism is alive and well in one guise or another, if only in the idea that to be or try to be an artist is necessarily unlikely, famously foolhardy, necessarily unnecessary, and unbelievable. We need new waves of candidates for whom the ambition of ‘artist’ is remote and unlikely, so as to sustain this speculation and Romanticsim in each new generation. Art only goes stale when monopolised by those who CAN do it, those who have the time, opportunity, education and confidence to do it, while what keeps art from sinking into mannerism is the constantly updated and renewed invitation to the most unlikely candidates to have a go and to simultaneously speak of unheard things.

This strange ambition thus remains (despite a recent sense of complicity) a complete alternative to the utilitarian thinking that has led us through years of intoxicated excess into world market crash. Fitzrovia is full of history, dudes like Paul Nash, Rimbaud, Augustus John, Virginia Woolf, Fuseli, Constable, Dylan Thomas and the spy Donald Mclean all have stories there, and this is what we need I think, a little history, like the opposite of sugar, too occasionally douse, dour and sour us, (‘the purpose of philosophy is to sadden’ I think Gilles Deleuze once said) into knowing just what a tough-call life really is, art really is, tough and absurd, and THEREFORE up for grabs by any subjectivity wild and brave enough to attempt an unfettered illustration of their experience. Art is still the place to go further, to think more strangely, to get out from under a suffocating carpet of objectivity and common sense. Fitzrovia used to be all ‘rag-trade’ wholesalers incongruously planted just behind Oxford Street, between Regent Street and Tottenham Court Road, but also featuring some lovely old squares and incorporating a bohemian period in its history. What we call the East –around Bethnal Green, Hackney Road, Mile End etc. is also crawling with history, disused industry (the canal itself was of course once all for industrial traffic) ripe for renovation by artists, whose economy seems to ride different waves, so that it can be up when the standard economy is down. Isn’t that where the big last wave of British art came from, the disused warehouses and closed shop-fronts at the end of the Thatcherite reign?

Maybe a time like that is coming around again, the world is now not only polarised but shattered into shards and fragments of difference. The cool cars will creep down from Frieze to Fitzrovia in a week or two, while along Vyner Street the car mechanics in greasy overalls will still be fixing London Taxis next door to cutting edge galleries. At the next global summit, world leaders will again be confronted by radicalised youth and protected by shining policemen, the U.S has gotten itself into a whole host of veritable Vietnams now, and amid all of this, the artists and the curators who rescue and provide a little space from the mega-rich metropolis or the murk of the down-at heel city, continue to proffer, like weird waiters at a l-o-n-g last supper, possibilities that might go otherwise un-noted and unconsidered in the great debate concerning what it is and how it is to be human.

END