New York Torque: part 2

A lovely Autumn ’12 in New York had us walking down from our base in Harlem through Central Park in glorious weather – 3 weeks before a hurricane was to cause mayhem to the city.

We took a boat tour around the Statue of Liberty (it’s still there), we saw a show on Broadway (actually we ended up plumping for a broody Ibsen play instead of any sort of razzamatazz), and we got the lift up the Empire State Building – the view is worth joining the deceptively reasonable queue for (when you think you’re getting in, you’re just joining a new hidden giant snake of a queue).

Landmarks, good food, and a generous plentitude of art and artefacts were the order of our days. Here are some arty moments…

MOMA
  
All the way through the modern art story, with famous things like Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Rauschenberg’s Bed. Highlight for me was a special exhibition of the Quay Brothers‘ work, including very off-beat commercials, and their better known animated films like “Street of Crocodiles”.

American Museum of Natural History

Stuffed animal vistas, old fashioned but impressive. Some great quirky African masks and costumes. We took the “escalator to the Big Bang”. There were far too many dinosaurs.

Guggenheim
 
The best thing at the Guggenheim is the Guggenheim itself – the shape and the space, the gentle coiling slope like a perfectly peeled fruit skin. Photographs by Rineke Dijikstra, plus her film of Scouser school kids trying to get to the heart of Picasso’s Weeping Woman.  Lots of Picasso in the Black and White show, some great, some sketchy, some great and sketchy.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

This place is HUGE – we spent at least 5 and a half hours here, from medieval art through Tiffany glass, Egyptian artefacts, armour, Oceanic totems, African fetishes, buddhist garden, and yesteryear’s pop art.

Out and about

New York Torque

Last October before New York got battered by a hefty storm (we didn’t plan it that way, just lucky) my fiancee and I visited America for our very first time, spending a number of days in the big apple city itself. Although it was her birthday do, it was my choice of destination, partly because of all the galleries and museums bursting at the seams with great art, and partly because it’s the handiest bit of America to get to from old Blighty (Britain).

These days you can spend a whole trans-Atlantic flight fiddling with onscreen video games and films – prodding away at the back of someone else’s seat, so the time flies by. We flew over Canada and checked in at Nigel Kennedy airport. I jest, it was Nigel Havers airport.

Our base was the quirky old Harmony Hospitality House in Harlem – and very alliterative it was too. It was charmingly run by Cynthia Nibbelink and her husband, who described themselves as educators, artists and social activists, and were involved in a city garden project in their street. We ate our complementary muffins and listened to the loud chirpiness of ‘opinion’ radio, the nation being gripped by Presidential-debate fever. One commentator explained to another pundit “You’ve just flip-flopped!”

The room was small,  a bit rough and ready, comfy enough, quirky and on the back of the house, looking out on to many other backs with their famous NY fire ladders. If I’d had a string vest and a clarinet, I’d have gone out there for a stereotypical tootle. We often shopped at local uber deli “Best Yet” on Frederick Douglas Boulevard. They have a massive choice of everything – if you want something in 3 different flavours, they got 9! The fruit and veg was kept fresh by little shower jets. We bought some Puffin cereal and retired in a haze of jet lag.

Andrea Way @ the Pierogi

We met up with an artist called Andrea Way who was down from San Francisco arranging an exhibition at Brooklyn’s Pierogi Gallery. I know her through my art-blog Elbowroom, which she serendipitously discovered and liked. She’s a proper all-day-every-day artist, and she does great work. I had a document wallet bulging with doodles to show her (my work is very portable) and she tried to get Joe of the gallery interested: “He’s a musician, he does doodles on sort of crappy paper, the titles are really witty…” Actually he resisted because usually artist’s book well in advance to see him, and I resisted because I needed 10 cherry picked pieces and a more articulate background to weave around them – caught on the spot. Anyway, I was mainly there to see A and her work, which I’d only seen on the web. You can see how much I was absorbed by it in the pic!

The Pierogi is a very special gallery, and I can see why Andrea though it would suit my work. They keep a collection of works on paper called the Flat Files, which now contains portfolios representing over 700 artists. Painting, drawing, print and photography are all included, and you can pull a file out and peruse the artists’ work with white gloves – or indeed online without gloves. I was also drawn to the black and white ink drawings by the Mexican Hugo Crosthwaite on show at the same place. Here’s one of his enthralling Carnivorall series.

After this lesser known nook of artful interest, the rest of the trip was taken up with the more obvious tourist trek through MOMA, Central Park, Guggenheim, Metropolitan, lift up the Empire State Building, and boat around the Statue of Liberty. We HAD to do these things! I guess that’s more than enough to save for New York Torque part 2…

Bedecked Sharklet

A recent piece of doodle art. 95% of my art at present starts in a distracted moment in a work notebook, and gets a good finishing at home, hence the stray word like Bayboro which has nothing to do with the bedecked sharklet, except it does because it shares the same paper space.

I hope to catch up with things on Twisty Lanes. There’s New York, End of the Road, the Many Few, printmaking, and the usual thoughts about this that and everything. This IS a blog after all, although blogs are so 2006…

Advent 2012

It’s time for my annual search for cool, alternative or failing that, nicely traditional advent calendars. What’s around in 2012?

Electric December
First and foremost, I’m glad to see yet another year of the short film competition by Bristol-based Watershed – a curation of films and animations with offerings from schools, community groups and art organisations. It is coming soon. In the meanwhile you can dip into the last 13 years of inspired film-making.
Electric December

And…well, that’s it so far. I will add anything fabulous I chance upon.

Failing that, revisit some corkers from yesteryear
Hooting Yard & 2 - Frank Key’s arcane and abject approach – drainage ditches and lightning-struck cows to befit a bleak midwinter in the age of austerity.
Tate the cat - Penny Schenk’s delightful, warm-hearted stories featuring a French cheese-maker and his cat.
Hubble 2010 - Breath-taking photos of the cosmos.
Trinity Wall Street - Properly religious. Short films looking at inspirational lives of young Christians, plus beautifully pure devotional music.
And also the best of the rest
New York Carver - Medieval Christmas stories, legends and images from the Middle Ages.
Woodlands Junior School - Discover fascinating facts about how Christmas is celebrated in countries around the World.
Penelope Illustration - Each day’s bauble leads to a different illustrator’s contribution.
Liverpool Museums - Vintage pictures and info.

Jury’s out until advent
Busted Halo – With Sesame Street, Gollum, Maggie Thatcher, and a toilet intriguingly on the front of doors, this might be funny, or condescendingly topical – who knows.

I No Longer Live Here

This is a triple bill – a song, some pictures, and philosophical pondering – on a common theme. The photos are of our old flat (hardly missed at all).
        

The words of the song have a melancholic poetry with the odd humorous tendril growing in the spaces inbetween. They describe absence of a person in places and things, either because he’s moved on, maybe he’s even passed away. But when I was singing the chorus on my daily rounds, trying to fill in the rest of the song, I felt it was about being in places, knowing I won’t be there forever, and feeling that I already didn’t belong there. And then remembering all the layers of places that I have left but where my spirit still clings in some way.

In my spirit, I still live at the scene of my birth & childhood – semi-detached in a village in rural commuter belt Surrey. However humbly insignificant the house and garden, it is always my strong deep roots  - the very earth that the toddler-I-was grubbed around in. The same feeling but less powerfully associates with subsequent abodes I have bided in, or offices I have worked in, and this could spread to the slightest space I’ve spent any time in a knowing frame of mind – a pub, a street, a country walk.

Do I possibly feel a constant state of rootlessness, drifting? Wherever I am, I feel like I shouldn’t still be there, that I’m just passing through & I shouldn’t be clinging to my past, my childhood, my nostalgia, my unrealistic comfort & ease – and then this may colour my feeling about a locality. Singing this at any time, particularly in the home-of-the-moment, or in the workplace-for-the-time-being seems to be a sort of defiance to that nagging feeling that I don’t belong there, and I’ll shortly be moving on – is this internal or external pressure, or both. Not only is it defiance, but at the same time it must be rueful admittance that the place I am in can only be temporary, because I am not happy there – especially held up to my first ideal, the village house of childhood in the crucible of my first family.

These sung words are somewhat paltry and inadequate to come anywhere near conveying my state of mind, but hopefully they are still charged with emotional portent. As an ironic footnote, there was a corridor where the words “I no long live here” caused especial sympathetic vibrations in moments of snatched solitude at the music library I worked at in East Sussex. These were days when the songs was still in a state of incubation. The library sadly got closed, the cheap build quarters were knocked down, and that place is now a car park…Best thing about the old flat – cloud and sunset views!

Exquisite Shark, selling me the dark

Dear blog, and dear World,

I have been away far too long, time to press some words soon methinks. We have had warmed a house, attended the End of the Road in Dorset, today we nipped up to the Saatchi gallery to catch the soon-to-finish Korean Eye exhibition. Will I write about those, I don’t know.

But here for now is Exquisite Shark, latest track by The Many Few, what I is in. Definitely recommended!

Three artists at Islington

Grayson Perry: The Vanity of Small Differences
Having watched TV three-parter on English class and taste by Grayson Perry, we went to the Victoria Miro gallery in North London to see the resulting six large tapestries which he designed and had made from his time hanging out with plebs, middlers and nobs respectively. He had shown himself to be affable, sharply observant, humbly questioning and never patronising – also having fun into the bargain, either as himself or in his female guise.

Grayson Perry pot also at Victoria Miro…via Stichinscience

The tapestries are each loosely based on a famous classic painting, such as Masaccio’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, but the series echoes William Hogarth’s “A Rake’s Progress”, but charting social mobility and the strong influence of class on our aesthetic tastes. I am always charmed and impressed by Perry’s openness and directness, which makes his work something we can all own, complete with the thought processes behind it. He has a winning combination of imagination and incisiveness, which draws me in with eye-catchiness and detail, but keeps me interested with the breadth and connectedness of thought. As for these tapestries in particular, they are a garish riot of colour, some have greater impact, some have more delicious detail. I think they can’t fail to pique some interest and amused/embarrassed  recognition as they are all about us. The particulars of peoples’ cultural lives are seen against a background of economic decline, neurosis of desired security in unstable times, or the burden of inherited responsibility. The punchline seems to be the inevitability of death, as the nouveau riche comes a cropper in his sports car. The subject matter and the cartoonesque rendering also puts me in mind of Posy Simmonds, who has been mining this sort of thing for many years now, especially from the middle class point of view.

David Claerbout: The time that remains
Next door to the Victoria Miro gallery is the Parasol Unit, in fact you can easily go from one to the other without realising it. The woman at the Parasol Unit reception was being quizzed about the Grayson Perry and denied all knowledge of it. A series of minimal, subtle or subdued photo/video works by Belgian David Claerbout were on offer in a series of viewing areas. When I got over the “can I be bothered with this” stumbling block, I started warming to “The Quiet Shore”, simply a series of large projecting photographs of people at a Brittany beach, and a video loop of a girl looking curiously round every time a new gallery visitor triggered it off. I remained neutral through another couple of video pieces, but was finally properly transfixed by “The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment”. This was a projecting sequence of large photos, showing a group of young Algerians pausing during their game of soccer when a player feeds some seagulls. Set to very low key  music that may have been Arabic, the images show many aspects of the happy moment, the faces of the guys, shots of surrounding casbah, seagulls like a visitation of angels, close ups of the birds in flight. The combination of viewing and hypnotic music lulled me in to a state of acceptance and in the artist’s words “relaxed my suspicious gaze”. The art work, the light in the gallery space, the combination of tenderness and grittiness, the quiet due to having the place virtually to myself, and being on edge of seat due to a delayed decision to find lunch, all added up to a personally special moment. As a postlude to the perfect experience, I spoilt it/added to it by finding out in his book that a lot of the seagull shots were taken in Europe, so there was a level of falsity built in.

Sarah Sze: Conceptual constellations of everyday objects
Back to the first gallery to spend longer with some sprawling fragile constructions and collections of assorted stuff by Sarah Sze. They looked like a simultaneous but unscientific investigation into everything, somewhere between esoterically organised car boot sales, and daintily pointless accumulations of whim-made-sculpture using anything to hand. My first impression had been “messy indulgence”, then I got a sort of connection to various activities in my childhood – collecting junk/playing in a conceived personal space/building a world/having important but meaningless secrets – quite intangible but emotionally strong aspects of imaginative self. Whether any of this has really got anything to do with Sarah’s work, I enjoyed finding those resonances. Next to find out more about what she’s up to. There’s humour and beauty in the ludicrous flimsiness of long bent twigs, taut strings and stuck on paper. There’s enigma in the esoteric construction and purposeful selections of material. They are everything-sculptures, and because of the casual scattered nature of some pieces, I have a desire to add some more bits and bobs to the peripheries and carry them on like some sort of a relay artist. I like what they do, I don’t know what they mean. I don’t mind. Browse her world in her previous exhibitions on Sarahsze.com

Grayson postcript
*I’ve seen three curations by Grayson Perry: The Charms of Lincolnshire in 2006 (haunting and inspired), Unpopular Culture at De La Warr in 2008 (enjoyably reactionary but slightly undernourishing), and the recent Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman (alternately impressive and cute). Wish I’d written about them at the time, but it’s probably too late now.