london belongs to me: October 2004 Archives

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October 10, 2004

two days (but it felt like more) in the capital

George Smiley on board the night train

Somehow the cup of coffee that they bring you at 5.30am when the train arrives in Paddington tastes like the best coffee ever. The whole experience is a relic of the past that no-one has yet noticed, rebranded and ruined, a genuine simple luxury in a world of bogus complex luxuries. Sent off to sleep by (or despite) the rhythmic vibrations of the rails, I dreamt that I was asleep in a house where an out-of-control washing machine was shuddering so violently that the walls began to crack and the ceiling to fall in. I woke repeatedly as the monotonous rhythm was altered by a change of speed or one of those inexplicable stops that trains make in the middle of nowhere.

Exiting Paddington onto Praed Street it's still dark, slumbering taxis wait patiently, the air is cool and tranquil in anticipation of another daily cycle.

On the way to Bayswater Rd we cross the Blairs' new manor Connaught Square, where the (ex?) prime minister and family will live cheek-by-jowl with Paul Oakenfold.

Cutting across the north-eastern corner of Hyde Park, the only other early morning walker, in the distance, is accompanied by a dog that sports a flashing light on its collar. It dashes frantically to and fro across the grass like a grounded UFO.

Mayfair in the Morning

Crossing Park Lane brings us into George Smiley country. Mayfair is one of those rare areas in London with an old-money air that puts it on a par with the cities of Old Europe. In London, to fight off constant transformation, demolition and renovation, the banal currents of shallow commerce, you either need unspeakable sums of money, or to not have been noticed yet. Both cases make for fascinating walking and photographing.

It even lives up to the impossibly expensive savour of its Monopoly namesake - that coveted, rich dark blue rectangle! To all outward appearances at least, the money that lives here is still is still infused with a dignified intransigence. Nothing needs to change, and nothing has changed. Unfeasibly expensive houses with carved stone facades dripping with verdant creepers and flowers. The galleries with their windows full of Sumerian relics and the offices of double-barrelled interior designers in the basement. A chandelier boutique, a flowerseller setting out his stall opposite the Spy Shop (now specializing in terrorist-attack-survival equipment). This early in the morning the Las Vegas Principle is in full play. For a d�riving commoner, it's all free to enjoy, to gawp wonder and laugh at.

London in the early morning is a different city to the sweaty, fervid, pullulating machine of London in the afternoon, early morning Londoners a completely different breed from the sluggish puffing suits. Laid-back laughing blokes in twos and threes in white transit vans swigging tea from polystyrene cups; butchers piling up hundreds of cuts into their meatwagon, all of which, come the night, will have been distributed, masticated over talk of futures options, and half-digested. The odd person emerges carrying something across a road, through a door, down some steps. A man flays the pavement with a powerful water jet. A chef, new apron virgin white, steps out for a fag.

Everyone moves with a certain ease: they are not being watched. Even if they're working, they can't be touched by the sleeping majority, they are a couple of hours in advance of the world for once. Everyone shares in the enchantment of temporarily owning the dreamy grey streets as they shimmer between night and day.

Caf� talk

Passing through the heart of Mayfair, we arrive at the Sandwich Bar in Brooks Mews. Hidden round the back of Gordon Ramsay's restaurant at Claridge's, this establishment offers something with an incalculably finer pedigree, and better value to boot. Thanks are due, as ever, to Classic Cafes for unearthing this treasure; the owner proudly displays his signed CC prints ('keep it classic!') on the wall, and he truly deserves the accolade. This is possibly the best caf� I've been to: for the friendly service, and for the perfect pitching of everything on the quality/griminess scale - d�cor and tea alike. But what really distinguishes this anonymous establishment is the clientele. Claridge's doormen with parkas over their uniforms having a quick bacon sarnie, and the overheard conversation of omniscient cabbies: "Yeah, ee got called back after the interview an they gave im the job. Driving a Bentley, 30 thousand a year...Bloke lives in Mayfair, got a place in Albermarle Street....I'll only be in the house for 10 minutes, he says, then we're going to Bournemouth. Fuckin' ell, Bournemouth. Well, 'ee's the deputy treasurer, in'ee?"

After a mug of proper tea, then, we follow Maddox St across Regent St into Soho (or "London's Soho" as it's called by members of the Proper Writing Guild) , noting the range of caf� cultures: Outside a coffee-chain a sandwich-board pathetically entreats media drones to treat it as an extension to their lives insofar as they are already systematic conflations of work, pleasure and consumption: 'Starbucks - Come in and be creative!'. Whilst the subscript on L'Escargot's menu reads: 'Strictly no pipes'.

Emerging onto Charing X Road we enter another CC recommendation for Full English and espresso; the clock on the back wall of the 101 caf� is a large plastic box of dunhill with a red digital display inset into it. A handful of tiny tables where bantering workers put off going to work for another five minutes, shouting to be heard above the gradually building roar of traffic. The breakfast is good, espresso perfecto.

Street Theatre

Bloomsbury. On a London morning. you see the sun hours before you feel it. Raking across the roofs of high buildings, it creates planes of light on the walls opposite, dazzling, golden, mockingly out of reach; whilst down below in the gulleys inbetween, your breath is still steaming and your fingers freezing. Like an impatient theatre audience, we wait in darkness for the museum to open, the unseen spotlight in its heavenly gantry sweeping serenely down the grand columns.

Impatient, we cross Russell Sq instead to admire the marvellous Brunswick Centre, concrete citadel of WC1. Across the street we discover the beautiful St George's Gardens, where we are sorry not to have anything to give to the unusually friendly squirrels that hop down from the trees by way of the leaning gravestones. Crossing the Bloomsbury-Clerkenwell border, there is the unfeasibly lovely Lambs Conduit St, of which I'm sure the locals say with smug relish, "It's just like living in a little village". Beautiful longhaired cats sleeping in the window of Matchless Prints.

Leaving Eleutheria to the delights of the museum, and with the rays finally angling into the depths of the street, I leave for a stimulating meeting with one of the most agreeable - and definitely the frenchest - philosopher I have ever met, and yet more espresso at the Russell Square caf�. It's strange to meet someone who speaks about Deleuze and Guattari as personal friends. I start to worry about what things offensive to them I may have written or said in the past...

Continuing to be dark

Back to Soho for a takeaway lunch from the superb Arigato, after which we visit Frith St Gallery to see some of Tacita Dean's videos. The first one I really enjoy (although perhaps enjoy is the wrong word), a film of aged Italian artist Mario Merz. His face disappears into shadow as he sits under a tree shaded by a leafy canopy; his voice is submerged in a swelling chorus of crickets. It's all rather unsettling, as your brain uncontrollably begins to fill the abscesses with dark suggestion. Dean even appears to be experimenting deliberately and sadistically with this mechanism as light and noise unexpectedly cut in and out. Merz becomes a creature of shadow, a sensory fact from which meaning is evacuated, a set of untotalisable signals flashing on and off. I've no idea whether all this is what's meant to happen (I know nothing about Merz, little about Dean, and speak no Italian), but I'm reminded of David Lynch's opinion on blackness:"Black has depth. It's like a little egress; you can go into it, and because it keeps on continuing to be dark, the mind kicks in, and a lot of things that are going on in there become manifest. And you start seeing what you're afraid of. You start seeing what you love, and it becomes like a dream".

Now east : back across Clerkenwell, onto old street, and to the inevitable, and absolutely unfailing Brick Lane Beigel Bake to get supplies to fuel another one and a half days.

Whitechapel gallery is showing work by Paul Noble, vast pencil and paper sketches in isometric projection; these megadoodles remind me of the selection of art brut we saw in Paris earlier this year: the same obsessive combinatorial drive. Unfortunately it also shares that material's weaknesses. Despite the immediate sublimity of its detail and magnitude, it doesn't really hold your interest - eventually your eyes skate over the surface, all the combinations seem to come to nothing, and you're reminded of the ways in which children and mad people aren't interesting.

Downstairs Tobias Rehberger has built a vast suspended yellow box, which you have to climb a ladder to enter. The dark, matt black cavity inside is lit only by a poorly-glued piece of Perspex redolent of Naum Gabo, around a bare lightbulb. Why do these perspex artists always make such a mess with the glue? You'd think they'd have developed a failsafe technique by now. The bulb is switched on and off automatically in electronically-transmitted sympathy with the bedroom light of a 15 yr old boy, also called Tobias Rehberger and located for the artist by a private detective. (I'm reminded of Tapehead's comments in the Guardian a few weeks ago where he thought up an elaborate conceptual art 'piece', concluding with something like "the only difference between a conceptual artist and me is that I realized it wasn't worth actually doing it because it'd be shit") We watch videos in which the two artists try to talk about what they do and why. Both fail miserably, but Paul Noble is more likeable. Rehberger, trying to justify his creation of several posters for products he likes but 'which usually have very boring advertising' concludes "It's not really about consuming the products...I think of it as political". One of the posters is for a fish and chip shop, and features poorly constructed digital 3d models of fishes and chips floating around. Having thus recovered in the gallery's 'reading room' for an hour or so, on the way out a member of staff asks me to do a survey ('Can you name any of our sponsors?' 'No.')

We head up to the Royal London Hospital, where Alex is lucky enough to be showing a photography exhibition in the front corridor (he's worried about what bodily substances he may have to clean off when the prints are returned). The opening is held in 'The Physician's and Surgeons' Sitting Room', which really is what it says, although they've vacated it for the evening. I chat to the people who run Vital Arts, the arts project of the London NHS Trust; maybe they could find somewhere to show my Steam and Scalpels project, display my simulacra of decay whilst the real building is erased. They sympathize with the project and confirm that demolition is scheduled and will begin soon. Panicked by this, I decide to return next morning for what may be my last chance to photograph the place.

We meet some people, drink some wine, eat some crisps, look at some photos. Then head out into the darkness. It seems like about a week since we disembarked from the train. The view from Liverpool street is at once familiar and gloriously futuristic, something out of science fiction. But infuriatingly, never both at once. The future, it seems, never comes quickly enough to deliver the promised shock.

By the time we've stagger back into Bloomsbury two hours later, we've capitulated in advance and rescinded our flaneur's vows - bus passes tomorrow. Nevertheless, having made sure to eat at least one of every item from the hotel breakfast buffet, and jumped on the no. 25, I foolishly insist that we get off at Liverpool St and wander into Spitalfields to see Alex's other (excellent) show at the Spitz restaurant. And then down Fournier St in the forlorn hope of seeing G&G out for a walk. But we do see someone carrying a whole, bisected halal-slaughtered beast on his back, legs stiffly flopping around as he walks.

Grey skies and drizzle have thankfully given way to clear sunshine, and I get to work wandering the half-deserted labyrinth of the hospital, climbing up fire escapes, into dark corners, all the time with an eye out for zealous security guards.

I manage to sneak into the abandoned nurses home. Down an empty corridor, each room retains its lovely solid wood built-in furniture, its mirrors, its electric bar fires and sinks. But the door to each room has a panel smashed in as if axed in the style of The Shining's "here's Johnny" scene. In the oppressive silence, the scene has an overall feel of the late-discovered aftermath of a Victorian sorority house massacre. Like the rest of the hospital, but to a more intense degree, it's distinguished by its contents having simply been left, with no bureaucratic-hygienic efforts made either to destroy or preserve them. It's somehow slid off the register, for the time being.

When I get home, and after re-viewing Lynch's The Elephant Man, I am thrilled to read the following in the book of interviews Lynch on Lynch, describing his search for inspiration for the film:

"I understood a certain English thing, you know, but for the film I was getting inspiration or ideas from books of London more than from London itself...

Then one day I was walking around a derelict hospital and suddenly a little wind-like thing came and entered me, and I was in that time - not only in that time in the room - but I knew that time. I knew what it was like then, and it came out of that hospital.

[Architecture is] a recording instrument. I'm sure that's right. And that's what was happening to me. It was just unraveling and I was picking it up."

Back onto the 25, we get off at Traf Sq for the ICA, world capital of scandinavian-style eyewear. The staff at the bookshop are discussing whether or not they will shortly need to open a new wing exclusively to house Zizek books. For a while we hang out in the bar drinking coffee, and water that has had a lime stored in it, because it's free.

A black-clad creative is making a pitch to a client at a nearby table. His Powerbook is open on the table; the first slide introduces the concept of The Agency as a rucksack (what's in it....and what isn't ). After he's boasted about his previous good works, he opens up Photoshop and it turns out he's pitching to design the posters for the Missing Persons Helpline ... how much design do you need for 'have you seen this person, then phone this number', I wonder. The client seems happy though (Imagine him saying "Picture of the missing person, and the phone number at the bottom. I like it."). He picks up his big leather bag and leaves the bar. The designer "kicks back" and lights up a Marlboro.

Eleutheria develops an obsessive streak about the art vending machine, luckily limited funds prevent us from amassing the uk's largest collection of pocket-sized conceptual art pieces.

John Bock's video work is shown in the corridor in a variety of DIY-style chipboard cupboards; you have to climb ladders, sit in baths, or lie down in tunnels and stick your head through a hole to watch them. Video artists usually disappoint because of their airy disregard for the artisanal procedures of videomaking and the resulting slackness of the results. Bock, however, understands that 90 percent of video is editing, and his work is accordingly taut, affecting, humourous and surprising: A lound, quick-cutting film of him driving a tractor in an empty field as if he's engaged in a desperate adrenalin-fuelled highspeed car chase is melancholy in its intensity. A sequence where objects in his apartment rearrange themselves and animistically co-operate in sinister, nonsensical ways brings to mind Jan Swankmajer and the simultaneous seriousness and hysterical humour of surrealist film.

The main exhibit is something else entirely. Bock invites us to climb, slide, shuffle and clamber through the chambers of his mind in a structure that seems to be an innovative architectural collaboration between Escher and B&Q; 4-dimensional Piranesi adventure playground made of chipboard, hay bales, tin foil, and mutant stuffed toys. Blurring the line between artist and curator, inside this framework he presents to us works that have influenced him (not only artists but Cure videos, and the superb film Theatre of Blood in its entirety). Recommend this unreservedly.

Cotton Buds and Deconstruction

In the bar we try to visit an interactive exhibit called 'Neuraesthetics' which is meant to be all about synaesthesia. A rather vague member of staff informs us that 'I've been told this exhibition isn't working'; a puzzled punter remarks after watching for five minutes that his synaesthetic film work has no sound; and when we ask whether we can have our brain waves measured, the staff member says that particular machine can't be used 'because we don't have any cotton buds'. It would be beyond the vocational remit of the ICA staff to take the initiative and go and buy some, presumably. We tell him we're going back to Cornwall tomorrow. "Oh well," he says, or something similarly sympathetic.

"Where were you when you heard..."

On friday night, we go to see Derrida - "the movie of the philosopher", uncognizant of the fact that he is perhaps on his way to the great bibliotheque in the sky at the very moment we are watching his simulacra. At least our last memory will be of a lively and cheerful soul: Derrida eats prawn crackers! Derrida gets his hair cut! Derrida chooses what jacket to wear! Derrida's wife calls him Jackie! It's essentially an excuse for unashamed reality-TV voyeurism with an intellectual sheen. Rhythmically, visually, it's neither a lovely nor an intelligent film. Everything interesting in it is entirely due to Derrida himself; often, it seems, in spite of the filmmakers who never seem to tire of asking faux-profound but basically self-regardingly poncy questions (the one exception is the soundman's - 'If you could have any philosopher as your mother who would it be?'). No doubt the film assumes the role of questioning how a thinker at the centre of an academic-media circus manages to remain a thinker. But it offers no answer, and, lacking courage, merely amplifies messy vulgarisations with gauche attempts at mobilizing reflexivity - you see, this film is itself a text, and Derrida himself may not be telling us everything, and, um, what is the truth anyway?! Er, look, that's why we're interviewing him....in front of a mirror! Paint a vulgar picture...

Minimally, what we do get is a portrait of a rather nice man who is a deadringer for Peter Falk's Columbo; and a nice family getting bothered by an irritating Californian film crew. Of course, on the day we arrive home, we learn that Derrida is no more, so this was a one and only missed opportunity. See infinite thought's caustic but entirely necessary pre-emptive strike against the inevitable posthumous cash-industry. But Moz said it best:

At the publishing company meeting/On their hands-a dead star
[...]
Re-issue! Re-package! Re-package!
Re-evaluate the concepts/Double-pack with a photograph...

Escaping from the cultural hothouse, and after an outing with Ray B to another longtime favourite, Sartaj, and discussions ranging from artistic genius to string theory, Castaneda and Laruelle, we get on a bus back to Paddington, board the 'Night Riviera' and midnight sees us luxuriating in our bunks to the sight of the sodium glow of the city sliding away outside the window.

Posted by robin at 11:18 PM | Comments (2)

October 02, 2004

Utopia in Humbrol

'I'm looking for evidence,' says Shaw. 'I'm not sure of what. Perhaps that I was here. '

Very sorry to have missed this documentary on one of Britain's finest living artists.

Having lived around Coventry for half a decade, and having grown up on an estate similarly remarkable for its drabness, when I saw this exhibition of Shaw's paintings last year I found them very beautiful. What a breath of fresh air, amidst the cloying, suffocating plethora of thoughtless, twee seascapes and new-age symbolism which is the cornish art scene, to see these meditative, intense images of midlands concrete. Unlike those unlovely products of glib 'self-expression' and sham-cosmicism, Shaw's apparently parochial, minutiae-focussed paintings are the result of slow, deliberate and reflective work: not (at least not only) in the fabrication, but in the preparation, in the preliminary examination and thought which goes into laying out in front of the artist the abstract material which he will proceed to transform. In fact, Shaw's whole life has been this preparation, his uneventful childhood the fixed point through which everything else is looped.

It's 4 'o' clock...I'm walking home from school...the sky is darkening...

Shaw's emotional involvement in the act of painting extends to his use of Humbrol enamel paint, a medium which he has made entirely his own, and which imparts to the paintings their simultaneous eery superrealism and tawdry glossiness, as well as their exquisite detail and rich colour palette.
The Humbrol brand is to Shaw a magical symbol, the sine qua non of his artistic practice, a tangible connection to the childhood whose haunted council estate scenes he returns to compulsively.

Shaw's skies are particularly magnificent, the enamel paint luminously capturing the muted chromaticism of the drab lid that is the typical midlands sky; infinite tints of gray. They are perhaps the best british skies since Turner (although Shaw's favoured painterly point of reference is Caspar David Friedrich); the visual equivalent of Morrissey's 'Every Day is Like Sunday'.

Places where you go to inexist.

Shaw has an appreciation of the profound mystery of the desultory persistence of the banal, the unglamourousness of the 'purely factual account'. But at his best he doesn't cleave to the latter-day angloromanticism of decline, or the aestheticising poetics of poverty. Shaw paints stasis, waiting, the empty spaces where the time of childhood is frittered away. The experience of place is reduced to an underlying electric hum of nondescript, unobserved facticity. The paintings exclude people, both in their content and in the viewer's engagement. They are places where the viewer is forgotten. You can't get into them unless you agree to disappear from the world.

"Past the leisure centre, left at the lights"

In terms of childhood memories, for those of us who have neither the self-confidence and automatic cosmopolitanism of the upper classes, nor the desperate aping of those qualities that characterises the middle classes, nor even the raw wit and furious will-to-dissipation of the disenfranchised but culturally-ascendent underclass, this mystery is the only thing we can really call our own. Our own utopia, the nowhere to which we belong but which has literally nothing to offer us except silent meditation on our own unimportance. We fall between the cracks of existence, we can't own what we are, the places proper to us are rarely mentioned in the 'real world' (rare exceptions - Shaw's paintings, a record like Pulp's His 'n' Hers). How remarkable, how valuable to us it is to see an artist not only understand but take the time to make a painting of a scene like 'The Path Behind The Shops'. It's not a 'validation', which would entail a sort of proprietorial pride over these banal origins, a longing for 'representation'; it's more a joyful wonder at Shaw's ability to capture so precisely and positively, that which one had always marked down as an absence, at most something to be overcome.

To Paint the Unutterable

Shaw is also a writer, and many of his stated influences (Beckett, Lawrence) are literary rather than visual; perhaps the intensity of his paintings stems from their being a negative artefact of his literary endeavour, the stubbornly inarticulable residue which it is impossible to force into prose.

"I paint bits of rubbish, but I don't hark back to things like old designs for Coke or Fanta cans."

The relationship between photography and painting in Shaw's work is fascinating, worthy of a monograph in itself. He works from his own photographs, and the informal, 'found' style of Shaw's paintings obviously owes much to the aesthetic of photography. But, as with Bacon, the manifest evidence of the photograph is thoroughly transformed in the act of painting so that this relation is complicated, the very nakedness of the photographic image brought into question. He is unapologetic about his own presence, or interference, in the process of image making:"I rarely draw anything without an emotional involvement with it," he says. Consequently Shaw's paintings, on anything more than the most cursory examination, are utterly resistant to being interpreted as an aleatory postmodern game. They're not a joke, not ironic. The work is not an attempt to transform the ridiculous into the sublime, the banal into the elevated, it's not a case of excavating the intense occult forces beneath the veneer of an apparently boring suburbia. But neither is it mere nostalgia, although it is, in the proper sense of the word, a disquisition on home and the unhomely; not a longing for home but a puzzling at the relation between the arbitrary materiality and its emotionally compelling certainty.

"The most successful paintings look out, not in: these are like me, as a kid, looking out at the world."

In the adult world, we submit the relationship of the shared, outside world with our intensive, inner landscapes to a severe disjunction, a deceptive decision that sunders the emotional from the factual. Much like Proust's delirious navigation through time and memory, the clarity of Shaw's reconfusion allows us to revive the world of the child, for whom round the back of the garages is a magical place as any (perhaps the psychogeography of a writer like Iain Sinclair also operates a similar reconfusion, piercing the membrane between subjective/aesthetic and objective/historic senses of place). We recover not exactly an innocence, but perhaps a certain autonomy anterior to the cleavage between 'real self' and 'real world', an ability to step out into a solitary, indeterminate imagination still teeming with possibility; unfocussed yet dazzling; unremarkable yet luminous; a gray area. Facts are never as banal as they look.

Interview with Shaw here, and C4's microsite links to other sites about him. Shaw's book This Was Life and the exhibition catalogue are available on amazon.