At The Bottom Of Everything

WB

2012-01-15T18:42:00.000Z

The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all the rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another.A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

South American Modernism

2012-01-10T01:24:00.000Z

"In the city’s San Francisco Valley, these slums, where nearly half of Caraqueños live, dramatically run up against a series of gargantuan buildings with punchy red, yellow, blue, and white facades cut out from the hillside—superbloques. Each of these housing projects is forty meters tall and over eighty meters long. Nearly swallowed by ranchos, they are vestiges of modernist urbanism long since colonized by the realities of twentieth-century Caracas."

- Joshua Bauchner, The City That Built Itself

In the kitchen

2011-11-25T19:42:00.001Z

When I'm not out at college in the studio one of my favourite places to spend time is in the kitchen of our house in Ealing. Over the summer we managed to grow a little of our own produce despite being away much of it, the cabbages in particular were delicious fried in olive oil and garlic. I've also been able to try my hand at pasta thanks to Dulcie buying me my own Imperia Pasta Maker for my birthday back in September, using Tipo 00 flour from the amazing Lina Stores on Brewer Street in Soho. Of course, Fred the cat is never far away, demanding his dinner or more often a little attention!

The Poetics of a Palm Tree

2011-11-20T16:57:00.001Z

I've long admired the work of Yto Barrada, so was pleased to hear that she is part of the new group show at Tate Modern's Level 2 Gallery, I Decided Not to Save The World. In an approach perhaps similar to that of Francis Alys, the artists in the show look at such topics as cultural identity, territory and globalisation by way of what could be considered gestures, small interventions that have larger implications. For me Barrada's work was the best contribution here, with a body of work that focuses on the palm tree as a symbol for modernisation in her native Tangier, its usage by thegovernment as a symbol to attract tourism. Barrada produced a fanzine that was first distributed at the Third Marrakech Biennial and here displayed in its entirety in poster form. Her film Beau Geste shows workers attempting to save the life of a palm tree on a vacant plot of the land that has been sabotaged in order that it might fall down - it is illegal to cut down a palm tree, and so in order to stop the owner of the land developing on it Barrada explains how these people have set about to save the tree and thus disrupt his plans. A simple gesture it may be, Barrada highlights the resistance that can occur in the face of a modernising and globalising economy.

Images from here.

An image of modernity

2011-09-09T22:56:00.000+01:00

Today I visited the ICA for the latest in their series of culture now talks, with this instalment being delivered by Hal Foster. His newly published book looks at ways in which contemporary art and architecture have informed each other, something he terms the art-architecture complex, and the implications of this. In his talk he discussed various threads of the book in relation to specific examples of architecture, from architects such as Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano who he described as being exponents of a 'global style' of design, to Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron, whose stylistic influences drawn from such historical artistic avant-gardes as Russian constructivism he was particularly sceptical of. He noted how these buildings are essentially images first and foremost - glittering beacons of modernity that have no grounding in site or locality (think the ostentatiousness of the Shard).

There was also a trajectory in his line of thought from the minimalism he has discussed at length before in his career and the spatial concerns of contemporary architecture today. Interesting was his disdain for how the buildings discussed aspired to create a sense of 'lightness of being', and how these buildings were aspiring to a sense of modernist 'transparency' - making the materials of the building visible - but in fact were creating an air of mystification and illusion. Rather than an experience being activated by the subject and their relation to the space - as with minimalism - the space itself creates the experience, and this is a negative, Foster posed.

Since it began to rise above its surroundings on the south bank of the Thames I've found the Shard incredibly disconcerting. As Hal Foster noted in his talk, it really does have no connection or awareness of its immediate surroundings in London Bridge and its sheer height really does make it difficult to come to terms with. I've always found its juxtaposition with the brutalist, modernist tower it sits next to a poignant happenstance - as Andrew Marr pointed out in his recent television series on megacities, here is London's glittering beacon of modernity, casting a shadow over the eyesore that once heralded another moment of modernity but that now is a drab, grey, monstrous lump of concrete. And yet it was this concrete and the aforementioned transparency of materials that formed the core of the modernist project, analogous to them with a transparency in all aspects of democratic life. What is so democratic about the Shard, rising high above all around it?

"We need to make a building that doesn't shut people out, one that responds to local as well as city-wide needs. A building of this scale, this ambition, cannot be just for private gain: it becomes a public project privately financed." - Renzo Piano on The Shard

Midcentury Days

2011-09-01T11:15:00.000+01:00

Polypropylene Chair

Royal Festival Hall Lounge Chair

Calyx print

Yesterday Dulcie and I visited the Robin and Lucienne Day exhibition at PM Gallery in Ealing. The Days, a husband and wife duo, could be regarded as the British Eames, with their furniture and fabric designs propelling Britain towards modernity in the 1950s and 60s. The exhibition displayed some truly exquisite design work, featuring famous example of Robin Day's chairs designed for the Royal Festival Hall and a vast range of fabric designs by Lucienne Day, including the famous Calyx print commissioned for the Festival of Britain in 1951 (pictured above). The whole midcentury modern thing is having a bit of a revival currently and with the recent recreation of the Festival of Britain on the Southbank, yet it was nice to see this understated exhibition focusing purely on the merits of the design, highlighting that, whilst it may be a nostalgic trend for some, this was not simply about riding the wave of popularity but showcasing timeless, quality design.

Ideational Arts

2011-08-27T17:34:00.004+01:00

If you have time please check out Ideational Arts, a new platform for discussion of visual art and culture. It has been set up by a course mate of mine and I am one of the contributors, and have just posted an article today. We hope to encourage dialogue and debate whilst discussing issues that relate to our own practice an other wider cultural concerns we may have.

Details from Butterworth Station, Penang

2011-08-12T18:24:00.004+01:00

Butterworth Station is in the north of Peninsular Malaysia and is situated next to the ferry terminal which provides access to Pilau Penang. We arrived here after an ovenight train from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur and a subsequent six hour train journey up the mainland, taking in much of rural Malaysia along the way.

My grandparents' home in Kuala Lumpur

2011-08-01T13:49:00.006+01:00

I've just got home from two weeks spent in Malaysia catching up with my grandparents and family in Kuala Lumpur, 'backpacking' to Singapore and relaxing by the sea in Penang. I wanted to document their house and the wonders it contains, with beautiful midcentury furniture in abundance and more tropical plants and succulents than you can count. Whilst we were there we celebrated by Ah Mah's (grandma) 88th birthday, a particularly lucky one due to the superstition in Chinese culture for the number eight. My Ah Kong (grandpa) turned 90 in January.

Grande Jorasses

2011-07-08T17:22:00.010+01:00

Last weekend my mum and my sister opened their brand new venture The Gallery William's Yard in Melbourne, Derbyshire to wonderful response, it was a really great opening weekend and everybody who popped by was really positive about how the gallery looked and the work on display. Perhaps it was the excitement of the weekend but after catching sight of the above painting during the hanging on the morning of the opening and then admiring it for the rest of the day, Dulcie and I felt unable to restrain ourselves and have thus acquired our very first piece of art. The painting is by sheffield artist Joe Mallia, whose work draws its inspiration from his other pursuit, mountaineering, and there was just something about the colours and Ruscha-esque imagery and also the particular choice of framing that drew us to it. The painting is of the north face of the Grande Jorasses mountain in the Western alps. He's got a number of works on show at the gallery and will also be running photography and art workshops alongside my mum. If you around the area pop by and check it out, it's definitely worth a visit!

Modern living

2011-06-14T13:38:00.007+01:00

All images from The 1960s Hom e by Paul Evans.

Collecting

2011-06-12T16:36:00.004+01:00

Broodthaers's deep attraction to the forms of the outmoded has been remarked upon by his various critics. His system of references focuses mainly on the nineteenth century, be they to the Ingres or Courbets in the first manifestation of his museum, or to the example of Baudelaire and Mallarmé for his books and exhibitions, or to the panorama and the winter garden as his models for social spaces. In fact, as Benjamin Buchloh has commented, this "altogether dated aura of nineteenth century bourgeois culture that many of his works seem to bring to mind might easily seduce the viewer into dismissing his work as being obviously obsolete and not at all concerned with the presuppositions of contemporary art."

But what Crimp is suggesting is that the power Walter Benjamin invested in the outmoded should be acknowledged in the Broodthaers's use of it - as in his assumption of the form of the "true" collector. This was a power Benjamin hoped his own prospecting in the historical grounds of the nineteenth century forms would be able to release. Writing of his own Paris Arcades project, he said: "We are here constructing an alarm clock that awakens the kitsch of the past century into 're-collection.'" That Benjamin's archaeology was retrospective was a function of the fact that he believed its view could open up only from the site of obsolescence. As he remarked: "Only in extinction is the [true] collector comprehended."

Rosalind Krauss - "A Voyage on the North Sea", p.42

Images of Marcel Broodthaers's Un jardin d'hiver, 1974. Top image from here, which is quite fun!

Walking the high line

2011-06-09T21:57:00.005+01:00

On the Guardian's homepage today was a story about the opening of the second phase of New York's High Line park. I'd read about this project a couple of months ago in Frieze magazine, in which the New York authorities have turned the disused High Line railway which runs down the west side of Manhattan into a public space, transforming the once overgrown rail tracks into a kind of faux-overgrown leisure space. It's quite interesting how they've created this artificial sense of nature reclaiming an urban space that had become long forgotten, essentially mimicking what the High Line had become - captured in a series of images by Joel Sternfield at the turn of the century - but with nice clean walkways to stroll down.

Tennis

2011-06-05T23:23:00.003+01:00

Yesterday, whilst taking a break from manning the stall at the book fair, I came across a book by Giasco Bertoli consisting of a series of photographs of abandoned tennis courts, a set of melancholic images reflecting on these disused, unloved spaces. These spaces of leisure were varied in their location, from inner-city to holiday resorts, all are united in their conspicuous absence of activity. After seeing these images and watching the French Open Final today I have to say I'm quite keen to get out on a court and have a knock around...

Quiche!

2011-06-04T22:12:00.005+01:00

Today we held a book fair at X Marks the Bokship in Bethnal Green, exhibiting the publications we've produced over the past four months in the AND Publishing workshop. I managed to sell a couple and Eleanor from the Bokship even asked to stock one of my books in the shop!

Reflection

2011-06-03T22:12:00.004+01:00

A little sneak peek at a series of photographs I've been working on, looking at plant life and flora within the urban environment. I've been attempting to create a sense of ambiguity with the framing of the shot, and it is a continuation of this idea of the in-between that I've been interested in for some time now. I've been starting to realise that my work needs a more systematic approach and a sense of a framework that would be given by undertaking a more specific project, and this is something I will be attempting to address over the coming months before my final year...

Book fair

2011-05-30T22:40:00.003+01:00

This Saturday I'll be joining my Unit 6 group in presenting our publications at X Marks the Bokship in Bethnal Green, an independent art book shop which does much to promote self publishing with various talks and events. They've ben kind enough to host our event so if your in the area pop by and check it out!

A return to form

2011-05-04T15:04:00.006+01:00

I first saw Walead Beshty's work at the Tate Trienniel a couple of years back, where curator Nicolas Bourriaud had selected a number of his photogram works alongside his glass Fed Ex boxes as part of the exhibition. The show, which attempted (whilst not quite succeding) to propose a new stage in the trajectory of postmodernism - Altermodern - essentially brought together a large number of artists loosely connected by their work's capacity to address the globalised world we inhabit today. Seen in this context it is easy to see why Beshty was chosen, his photograms alluding to the X-Ray machines encountered at Airport security checks - indeed, this is how they are made, with negatives being passed through the machines and then prints being made from the results - and the Fed Ex boxes an obvious symbol of trade and globalised travel, their transit to and from exhibitions leaving visible traces in the gradual cracking of the glass boxes.

Beyond this Beshty's works addresses the wider questions of medium, specifically in his case the medium of photography. His work, particularly the photograms and also his other camera-less work made in the darkroom, forms part of a dialogue with a number of artists whose practice involves photography who are dealing with the question of medium and form, a seemingly outdated concern associated with Clement Greenberg and modernist painting. Yet it would seem that these old arguments are coming to the fore with photography (consider Michael Fried's recent book on photography), a medium that is by nature ambiguous and is perhaps still having to assert itself amongst a portion of the art world - indeed, the title of Fried's book, Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before, almost parodies (unintentionally, of course) photography's contested status as an artistic medium.

It is this ambiguity of the nature of photography - what it actually is - that is perhaps leading to these formal explorations. Beshty states that photography is essentially a type of medium, "constituted by a dialectic of applied use and technological development" that is "in a state of constant revision". With the advent of digital technology posing fresh questions about the indexical nature of the photographic image and assigning analogue photography to a specific moment in history, categorised and reference-able, it would appear that these explorations of medium are only just beginning to be rethought.

A thought

2011-04-25T21:47:00.005+01:00

Wolfgang Tillmans' practice has always blurred distinctions between high art, commercial and documentary forms of photography. These photos are from a series of images taken in Haiti which appeared some time ago on the BBC website and are perhaps his closest to straight journalistic work. Although they appear here as part of a concise series there is nothing to stop these photos appearing in one of his installations in dialogue with other images from his archives, in fact it is not improbable that they won't. These photos raise questions that are also examined in the work of Allan Sekula, whose work I blogged about below, questions regarding the relationship between journalistic or documentary photography and fine art photography and the representation of labour in fine art photography. The topic of representation is particularly interesting, the ethical implications of 'straight' photographers like Tillmans and Sekula seemingly questioned by the 'near documentary' or staged realism of a practitioner such as Jeff Wall. Photography has long been a medium questioned by the high/fine art establishment of the West, Greenberg's assessment of it's 'transparency' as a medium still posing the main problem for those looking for the work of the artist's hand in the final output. I feel that it is increasingly methods of display that are redefining the nature of 'straight' photography in the world of art, from Tillmans' heterogeneous wall installations to people such as Sekula and Zoe Leonard employing conceptual traditions such as the series or the grid to frame their documentary influenced practice.

Post Script 26/04: Interesting news this evening: Jim Goldberg's documentary project Open See has won this year's Deutche Borse prize for photography, triumphing over amongst others Thomas Demand.

Still missing

2011-04-14T09:20:00.003+01:00

Ai Wei Wei has now been missing eleven days since being arrested at Beijing Airport by Chinese authorities. Today it was reported that the artist is 'confessing' to crimes of tax evasion, bigamy and spreading pornography on the internet. The Guggenheim have set up a petition calling for his release which you can sign here.

No Age presents

2011-04-03T22:29:00.008+01:00

This evening I finally got round to seeing No Age perform after two years of listening to them and multiple missed opportunities during their previous UK tours. This however was not an ordinary gig; held at the ICA, the event consisted of the band performing a live soundtrack to Jean-Jacques Annaud's 1988 film The Bear, which follows an orphaned bear cub who befriends an older, male grizzly bear who has been wounded by hunters, and charts their companionship and attempts to avoid the guns of the two hunters. It provided a more than suitable back drop to the sounds coming from below the screen, No Age's instrumental improvisation allowing you to to sit back and lose yourself in the narrative of the - at times quite poignant - film. Playing continuously for the length of the film it was akin to album tracks such as Impossible Bouquet or Escarpment, the guitars and electronics at time melodic and at others crashing down, with walls of distortion and drums used to heighten the tension at certain moments throughout the film. Managing to avoid both repetitiveness and overbearing the film, their understated playing style, doing a lot with not a lot, turned this marriage of music and film into a pretty successful one in my opinion. Perhaps more No Age film scores are needed?

Long distance

2011-04-02T10:02:00.001+01:00

To the sea

2011-03-31T18:56:00.006+01:00

Allan Sekula's Fish Story uses photography and text to document the enormous, globalised industry of trade. Divided into chapters, the work examines through photography and text the place of the sea as an in-between space of advanced capitalism, focusing on subjects such shipyard workers, post-industrial port communities and the ubiquitous shipping containers which are at once a sign of globalised trade, vital to its very being and pushed to the margins of visibility by a society, or system, that tends to attempt to make invisible the origins of its commodities.

As Benjamin H. D. Buchloh astutely observes in an essay written for the book form of the project, Sekula's work and wider practice seeks to engage through direct representation the labour which is removed from view, something he argues runs concurrently with modernist prohibition on representation, and specifically representation of labour - he uses here Bernd and Hilla Bechers' Typologies for an example of a labour that is represented conspicuously in its absence. As Buchcloh examines, Sekula's practice works in the discursive space between art photography and that 'lower' form of documentary photography. By engaging directly a photojournalistic means of photography Sekula is questioning the modernist hierarchy imposed on photography, an art form which has always sat uneasily at the art world table. Through his direct representation and use of photo-narrative he is consciously working in opposition to the modernist 'new objectivity' of the Bechers and of the de-skilled snapshot readymades of Ed Ruscha, as well as questioning the role of photojournalism, which has always been found in the world of high art only though appropriation and fragmentation. The body of work, then, can be seen as at once a critique of the role of photography as institutionalised by Western modernism, as well as, on a more simple level, a critique of the mechanisms of advanced capitalism, the lives of the people who are at once a part of its inner workings and who rely on it for survival, and perhaps more than anything a homage to the immensity of the sea.

There is an alternative

2011-03-26T21:11:00.010Z

As many will be aware today hundred of thousands of people took to the streets of London for the TUC organised 'March for the Alternative' anti cuts demonstration. In stark contrast to the student protests of last year this was a good natured march, in no large part thanks to the fact that those gathered were granted their right to march peacefully without being hindered by swathes of riot police, an act of political policing that the students were subjected to that clearly would not be considered appropriate here, given the cross section of society that was represented. Union members from all professions, both private and public sector, from the elderly to the young, students to teachers, all were out to voice their anger at the savage cuts being implemented by the government. As of this evening it seems that once again it seems the media is intent on highlighting an extremely small minority of violent protestors completely separate from the march, but then you would expect no less.

On the subject, these articles are definitely worth a read...

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/209

http://www.afterall.org/online/the-occupation-of-space

http://www.afterall.org/online/the-matter-at-middlesex

Modern life

2011-03-20T22:45:00.006Z

Today Dulcie and I visited the Midcentury.Modern Fair at Dulwich College and proceeded to spend most of our morning lusting after amazing furniture with price tags that were ever slightly out of our reach...

There was so much to take in, not least the setting itself, the aptly chosen midcentury modernist building one of the most beautiful examples of British Brutalism I've seen.

With so many amazing things to look at it was hard to walk away empty handed, and tempted as we were to splash we were content in the knowledge that our thrifty ways will see us seek out some equally exquisite pieces but for a tenth of the price...

On the road

2011-03-14T19:06:00.000Z

I came across this book the other day by Pablo Leon de la Barra, who writes this really good blog. It's a photographic travel diary of a trip to his native South America, an exploration of the cities he visited and a reflection of place and community. The book's title, 'Useless Landscape', perhaps gives us a clue as to the juxtapositions he is making, focusing often on empty places that have fallen into disrepair or in-between peripheral parts of the cities that have been inhabited by people. There is something quite melancholic but also optimistic about this collection of photographs, one that looks affectionately at an area of the world where extremes of lifestyles sit side by side, a place where the peeling paint of abandoned buildings is shadowed by the presence of towering concrete skyscrapers, where the locals set up their carts for trade along empty highways. More than anything it makes me want to travel...

Fresh is best

2011-03-13T17:36:00.004Z

I love a good coffee, so I was pretty happy when I came across Climpson & Sons' stall on Broadway Market yesterday (despite living in London for nearly three years now it was my first visit to the market, and now I'm desperate to make up for lost time!). Their coffee is roasted by hand 'a stone's throw away' as the guy on the stall dutifully informed me, and is then served and sold on their stall and also at their cafe on Broadway Market. I was recommended their Guatemala blend (best for 'plunger' cafetieres), which he ground and bagged for me there on the stall. Their website has some great tips for aspiring baristas, and they even offer a coffee subscription, with a different variety delivered to your door each month!

Glass

2011-03-11T23:05:00.007Z

I spent the day wandering around East London today to check out the Sheela Gowda exhibition at Rivington Place and also the John Stezaker show at the Whitechapel. Somewhere inbetween the two (Redchurch Street to be precise) I found this really great home ware shop called Labour and Wait. If you're in the area or are looking for something nice for your home it's definitely worth checking out, they have an array of products for all rooms of your house, and even a few breton shirts too! It's a really nicely laid out store with products that are all about functionality and classic design. I bought these two 'school' glasses for a mere £2.50 each, they're identical to the ones we used to drink milk from in nursery.

Free trade

2011-03-05T15:02:00.008Z

This is a pirated copy from Peru of Issue 109 of Granta magazine, which itself features an essay about book pirating in Peru. Note the lines of the edges of the pages visible from scanning and reproducing on a low quality laser printer. Book piracy is a major business in Peru, with vendors acting freely and openly and many writers considering being pirated the equivalent of making the bestsellers charts. An interesting thing to consider on the day the UK celebrates World Book Night by handing out hundreds of thousands of books for free...

The best mind of our generation?

2011-03-03T21:31:00.008Z

Last week saw the release of Howl, a film about the obscenity trial surrounding the release of Allen Ginsberg's poem of the same name in 1957, and the latest venture by actor and now general all round renaissance man James Franco. Dulcie and I went to see it at the Cornerhouse, and though I was apprehensive at first, we both really enjoyed the eclectic mix of animation and poetry recital recreations. It seems Franco has come a long way since portraying the son of Spiderman's arch nemesis; in the past year alone Franco has been Academy Award nominated for one of his numerous film roles, released a book of short stories, as well as entering the art world with gallery shows in Berlin and Beverly Hills, the latter a collaboration with Gus Vant Sant, who he worked with on the film Milk, at no less than the monolith that is Gagosian Gallery. In fact, his wikipedia entry labels him as 'actor, film director, screenwriter, film producer, author, painter and performance artist', as well as pointing out his current study for a Ph.D at Yale University. It seems there is nothing the man can't do.

In branching out into so many different areas of the creative industries Franco proves an interesting case. Many writers have dabbled in the film industry and actors and musicians are renowned for exchanging roles. The real question is whether they achieve any real success, and whether there acceptance is affected by their fame in a different field. Elvis Presley wasn't taking that seriously as an actor, nor Joaquin Phoenix as rapper. Today the crossover seems to be becoming a more popular phenomenon, with even Lady Gaga being heralded as a performance artist. Is Franco to be taken seriously as an artist, then, or does his rising to fame as a Hollywood actor negate any artistic offering he may wish to make as negligible, a mere vanity project? It is certainly an interesting question to consider in a world which claims to be post-canon, the boundaries of high and low long removed since the emergence of a so called postmodern age.

(James Franco, The Dangerous Book Four Boys, Peres Projects Berlin 2011)

Perhaps Franco is a Warhol for our times, refusing to be held down to one field or another but moving between roles with seemingly unending creative energy. Or perhaps he is simply making the most of a famous name, exhibiting at a gallery that is not shy to representing artists whose reputation often eclipses their art work - the late Dash Snow, Terence Koh, a some time Lady Gaga collaborator. Either way the fact is that he is doing these things, his book has been published, receiving not all that bad press along the way, and he is showing in the world's largest commercial art gallery. There will always be cynics, but who are we to judge? and is it ever possible to analyse art (or literature) objectively, unaffected by our knowledge of its author?

Northern soul

2011-02-28T20:09:00.004Z

Some photos from my weekend in Manchester...

AND...

2011-02-18T17:57:00.007Z

As I mentioned yesterday, today was the first day of a self publishing workshop I'm involved in as part of our practical unit at college. In the morning we discussed a little about what the artist book might be and the possible importance medium can have in disseminating an idea, followed by a practical session in the afternoon. In twos or threes we had to produce a publication with limited means - paper, long arm stapler, thread, photocopier - using what we could find from the library books surrounding us as source material. In my pair we settled on the idea of creating a kind of fictional encyclopaedia, with images selected from a variety of different books of art, theory, literature and history. Due to the seemingly arbitrary nature of the images and the titles we gave to each entry the encyclopaedia is not essentially intended to impart knowledge, but is more a reflection on the way in which knowledge and concepts of history and value are constructed.

Making a dummy...

The finished article...

Studio notes

2011-02-17T20:59:00.008Z

Just a little documentation of my current work in progress... To give a little background to the work, I am mainly concerned with the idea of the in-between space, and have been looking at these kinds of places that occur often on the periphery of urban spaces. I am having issues with display methods, it seems to be one of the major stumbling blocks right now in terms of my work's progression, other than that I'm feeling fairly positive about the direction it is taking, and the relations being produced between the images once they are in place on the wall.

Tomorrow is the first of a five day, bi-weekly self-publishing project which I am now really looking forward to starting, I feel more and more that the work could exist particularly well in book form. The idea of a book being placeless is a concept that particularly appeals to me in relation to this body of work, a potential for the work to be distributed and received simultaneously in various locations outside of the singular space of the studio.

Who knew?

2011-02-17T01:57:00.004Z

Today I discovered that one of the local schools back home in Norfolk was designed by Britain's leading Brutalist architects, Peter and Alison Smithson. The first project to bring them wider acclaim, Hunstanton School (now Smithdon High) is made almost entirely of glass and steel, and was highly influenced by the work of Mies van der Rohe. I've often driven past and thought it looked particularly interesting, but never quite realised its historical status!

Material pleasures

2011-02-13T21:59:00.004Z

Dulcie was very naughty and treated me with a rather lovely early Valentines present today, namely the above sweater from COS. It's a really nice speckled blue and will be great for the milder spring weather hopefully on its way soon. I was really impressed by the store, their clothes have a certain understated simplicity, offering a subtle twist on classic designs, and are very reasonably priced for such good quality. The suede Vans were another recent purchase, I saw them on sale at a cut price in the Vans store and couldn't resist adding them to my growing collection...

Good living

2011-02-06T16:46:00.002Z

Yesterday I picked up a copy of Apartamento magazine, which I'd been lusting after for a while. Describing itself as 'an everyday life interiors magazine', it features numerous interviews with designers, architects and others about their lives and their homes, with an ethos centred around good design and living solutions. Beautifully printed on various paper stock it is a really nice publication full of great photography and inspiring abodes. Issue 06 even contains activities for kids drawn up by LA artist Miranda July.

Zidane

2011-02-05T23:11:00.005Z

I finally got round to watching Douglas Gordon and Phillipe Parreno's Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait this evening. The film follows legendary footballer Zidane for the duration of a match against Villareal, with 17 cameras tracking his every move. Edited together with the varying footage and soundtracked beautifully by Mogwai, the film is first and foremost a treat to watch and at times moving. Michael Fried has discussed this film in relation to his interests in Diderot's notion of absorption, which argues that the most true form of portrait shows the subject completely absorbed in their actions, unaware of being observed. As he points out this film does that majestically, whilst also posing interesting questions due to Zidane's immediate surroundings: he is obviously aware of the magnitude of the people watching him (in the stadium but also around the world on television), yet his ability to remain absorbed completely in the task at hand never wavers. It is this aspect that I found most interesting, the way it allows us to reflect on the nature of the image today, its mass circulation and the spectacle of the sport itself, a truly global sport of which Zidane was a global icon (albeit a tragic one...)

Coleocephalocereus fluminensis

2011-02-05T12:10:00.005Z

The latest addition to my budding plant collection...

(Ignore the rather dead one in the corner, it didn't manage to survive the harsh winter alone in London...)

Currently reading

2011-02-05T11:13:00.005Z

Homi K. Bhabha - The Location of Culture

I've been finding Bhabha's classic of post-colonial cultural theory a really engaging read. Writing my essay around the subject of migratory form I have found this indispensable, his notions of 'in-Betweeness' and production of self-identity within the minority, marginalised individual that exist on the periphery of existing culture in a globalised, post-colonial world have been really useful in forming my own ideas of form in relation to my essay as well as my own practice.

Irit Rogoff - Terra Infirma

Rogoff here applies the language and signifying nature of geography and its associated connotations - space, luggage, travel, belonging - to contemporary art, reflecting on the problematics of geography in terms of its masking of issues of identity and relating these issues to visual culture and the image.

If you hear a piano fall...

2011-02-03T08:44:00.003Z

Considering how much of a big deal The White Stripes have been through my so called formative years I thought it would be wrong to not acknowledge their passing. Just one of their many hits, directed by Michel Gondry no less.

Mine

2011-01-25T14:45:00.001Z

I won this today on eBay...

Non-place

2011-01-20T17:53:00.003Z

I went to see the newly opened Gabriel Orozco exhibition at Tate Modern today, a newly opened show surveying the Mexican artist's two decades of work in sculpture, painting and photography. These two photos stuck with me in terms of their capturing of a space in between places, something of a major concern in my own work at the moment.

(Top: An Island Within an Island

Bottom: From One Roof to Another)

Gallery talk

2011-01-18T12:23:00.004Z

Some point soon I'm hoping to make a trip to Southend-on-Sea to visit the Focal Point Gallery. Founded in 2009 with support from the Art Council, it's one of numerous similarly funded galleries that are popping up around the country that is putting on relevant, exciting exhibitions, bringing contemporary art to an audience outside of London in a genuinely positive way. Their current show Anti-Photography features a number of big names, from Walead Beshty to Wolfgang Tillmans and Ed Ruscha, reflecting on the nature of the photographic image. Along with the likes of Nottingham Contemporary, who hosted the recent British Art Show 7 and an exhibition of David Hockney's work, and the forthcoming Hepworth gallery in Wakefield, a mix of good architecture and a programme of compelling exhibitions are coming together to prove that perhaps the arts can thrive in spite of the cuts.

Architectural forms

2011-01-17T00:53:00.004Z

The Atlas Group is a really interesting archival project worth checking out. Founded by Walid Raad, it is a fictional collective devoted to researching and documenting the contemporary history of Lebanon. These images form part of a series by the group to document buildings of architectural, political, technological or national significance in Beirut.

Art as book

2010-12-16T22:44:00.004Z

Today I learnt the next term I will be working on a project that centres around publication as a means of artistic production, run by these people at Byam Shaw, so thought I'd post a few examples from the master of the artist book, Ed Ruscha. Not sure how this fits in with my current work on the photograph as an object on the wall, but we shall see.

Absorption

2010-12-13T23:53:00.002Z

All photographs Jeff Wall, from top: Passerby; Untitled (Forest); Untitled (Night); The Burrow.

Le Mépris

2010-12-03T00:23:00.007Z

Le Mépris - Jean-Luc Godard (1963)

French playwright Paul Javal is hired by American producer Jack Prokosch to save his ailing production of Homer's Odyssey, where filming - directed by Fritz Lang as himself - has been halted at Cinecittà studios in Rome. Upon accepting the job Javal's life starts to mirror that of the film's hero, with the pressures of commercial constraints (embodied by Prokosch) leading to him becoming slowly estranged from his wife Camille (Brigit Bardot). As well as an examination of the collapsing marriage of the lead characters, the film can be described as being essentially about cinema, with Godard critiquing the Hollywood model and employing numerous instances of reference and self-reference - Fritz Lang being cast as himself, Godard playing the part of Lang's assistant, Bardot reading a book on Fritz Lang, and of course the obvious mirroring of Ulysses' estrangement with his wife with Javal's estrangement with Camille. The opening shot in particular draws our attention to this explicitly, in which the mechanisms of cinema are laid bare and we see Godard's camera crew filming a tracking shot of Prokosch's assistant, the camera moving ever closer to the screen before directing itself directly at the viewer, thus implicating us as viewer or spectator in the film.

Eames

2010-11-22T20:52:00.005Z

Inspired

2010-11-19T18:44:00.001Z

Feeling generous?

2010-11-18T19:33:00.003Z

If you are, these rather special, handmade in Italy Fracap mountain boots wouldn't go a miss. May have to go and lust after them in Oi Polloi seeing as I'm in Manchester for the weekend...

An old favourite

2010-11-18T02:26:00.004Z

The Waves

"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually." - Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Just a thought

2010-11-14T22:46:00.004Z

I personally think that Dulcie would have made the perfect New Wave heroine...

Studio notes

2010-11-14T22:16:00.004Z

It's been a busy few weeks, trying to further my work in the studio around trips home and late night shifts at Tesco. I've been shooting medium format on a regular basis, a format I had always been hesitant about but have found myself embracing, and I've found my work coming back to a relationship with cinema that I began to explore last year. As well as this I've been slowly working myself through Jean-Luc Godard's extensive back catalogue (I've got a long way to go), this weekend watching Une femme est une femme and Pierrot Le Fou. In the meantime I've also been reminding myself how good this album is:

Should also remind anyone that's interested about my website which is now over a month old, although still a work in progress... www.jianweilim.co.uk

GODard

2010-11-05T09:53:00.008Z

"Photography is truth. And cinema is truth 24 times a second"

Jean-Luc Godard - Le Petit Soldat (1963)

Currently reading

2010-10-23T18:11:00.014+01:00

A Post-Olympic Beijing Mini-Marathon is made up of a series of interviews with a number of Chinese artists, writers and thinkers conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist on New Years Eve, 2008. Taking the form of his now famous Serpentine Gallery Marathons, the event was an attempt to understand and evaluate the state of Beijing in the aftermath of the Olympic Games, to come to terms with the changes the city had seen and give a sense of what it is like to be living in the city at a time when it is rapidly evolving. An attempt to record history as it happened, the event focused not only on the impact of such a massive, worldwide spectacle as the Olympic Games but also issues such as the role of the Internet and the role of the artist in China today.

The book is published by JRP Ringier and beautifully produced by Vitamin Creative Space, who hosted the event at their space in Beijing.

(Photos of the Bird's Nest Stadium and CCTV Building by Dulcie Emerson)

A Week At The At The Airport

2010-10-23T13:30:00.005+01:00

I've just finished reading Alain De Botton's A Week At The Airport, an observation of Heathrow Airport's new Terminal that he made when approached to undertake a live-in residency at the airport, spending seven days exploring the terminal, meeting the people that operate it and the customers passing through it. I was attracted to the book at first by the quote on the back cover

"a single pace that captures all the themes running through the modern world - from our faith in technology to our destruction of nature, from our interconnectedness to our romanticising of travel - then you would almost certainly head to an airport"

which seemed to sum up the essence of various themes I have been interested in for a while now regarding my own practice, and felt this could be a nice break from all the theory I've been attempting to plough through. Essentially De Botton's book is focused on the people that inhabit the airport, suggesting less that it is some quasi-utopian place of technology and travel full of people moving from one place to the next without a thought for the others surrounding them (although, on the surface, that is what it is) but that it is full of thousands of individual stories and dramas, a collection of individuals brought together for a brief interval of their life between destinations, a strange non-place of coming and going.

De Botton is also keen to aknowledge our unwavering faith in technology, reminding us of the awe we should feel that something so enormous as an aeroplane can move, letalone fly. He claims that the new Terminal 5 is an attampt to create a vision of how we'd like to view ourselves, celebrating technology and progress, the shimmering glass structure "proposing a new idea of Britain ... that would no longer be in thrall to its past". The book for me is a poignant and timely vignette that captures the magic that is air travel in our times, how quickly a far off exotic land becomes a distant memory on arrival and how we will always long to be back aboard a Boeing 777 flying 30,000 feet in the sky to somewhere different once again.

Summer sun, where have you gone...

2010-10-14T21:46:00.004+01:00

This week I scanned the negatives from the roll of film that I put through my Olympus Pen in the summer, which had given me loads of great shots yet the majority of which were badly overexposed and had resulted in nothing more than a plain white/grey print. Amazingly when I scanned them in the overexposed frames came out perfectly and so I have even more hazy, sunny, summer memories now, like the one above. I was most happy to rescue some photos which I took at Barcelona Airport, which I've put up in a new album on my website. To see them just click here...

Atlanta sounds

2010-10-07T13:38:00.005+01:00

Book Fair Buys

2010-09-27T14:40:00.009+01:00

Wolfgng Tillmans - Freedom From The Known, published by Steidl on the occasion of his solo show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre New York. I've been meaning to purchase a Wolfgang Tillmans book for a while now, and this cloth bound hardback was too good an opportunity to miss at £14.50. The book contains mostly abstract works alongside black and white photocopied works, and a particularly insightful essay by Bob Nickas.

Words Without Pictures, published by Los Angeles County Museum of Art, part of the Aperture series. This book initially started out as an online project in which each month an academic/practitioner/thinker would contribute an essay on a certain aspect of photography and its place in the art world, leading to online discussion forums and panel debates, which has been carefully transcribed to exist in book form.

www.jianweilim.co.uk

Corduroy

2010-09-25T11:49:00.003+01:00

"This is the anglicised version of the French Corde du Roi, for the material was used on the jackets of the hunting livery of the servants of the King of France.

It is interesting to note that, like cul-de-sac (which always makes the French laugh as it is very rude), it is never used by the French, who call it velour côtelé which is exactly what it is, namely ribbed cotton velvet.

The Germans have an even more romantic name for it, namely 'Manchester'. Manchesterhosen to the German means corduroy slacks. It is in this latter form that it is mostly seen in our lives, and is of course very hardwearing.

On a jacket the cloth is almost too 'ungrateful' as the French would say, as it is too stiff to fall attractively or mould to the body. It is also extremely hot."

Nicely put in Hardy Amies' ABC of Men's Fashion.

http://www.jianweilim.co.uk

Website!

2010-09-24T22:49:00.002+01:00

Just a note to say that my WEBSITE is now live! At the moment it is a collection of albums of photography but will hopefully expand to include work I make in the near future.

http://www.jianweilim.co.uk

Absence

2010-09-24T21:35:00.004+01:00

Today I stopped by Rachel Whiteread's current show at Tate Britain, a collection of drawings and sketches and preparatory work dating back to the start of her career as an artist. Presented as the studies and supporting material behind the sculptures for which she is known for (included are plans for many of her most well known works, such as 1993's 'House' and her Fourth Plinth commission) they are allowed to stand alone here as pieces in their own right, her pared down studies in such everyday materials as pen, pencil and correction fluid showing many of the minimalist tendencies of the much more tangible, solid structures that are her sculptures. What is so haunting about her sculptures - particularly her Holocaust Memorial, a maquette for which is displayed in the exhibition - is the sense of quietness and absence produced by something so gigantic and present. In her drawings we are instead asked to reflect upon the textures and marks made by materials on paper, the objects and spaces rendered in two dimensions with subtlety and a certain weightlessness that hints at the empty space within that is repeatedly the focus 0f her practice. Through collage, over-drawn photographs and drawings on paper Whiteread displays an affinity for the flat image that more than compliments her sculptural work.

Francis Alÿs

2010-09-23T15:57:00.005+01:00

Really gutted I missed this exhibition at Tate Modern over the summer. If you have a few minutes spare and also didn't manage to catch the retrospective his website is worth checking out, with many of his videos and documentation of performances available to watch (and in some cases download) for free.

Let's try and revive this blog..

2010-09-21T12:59:00.013+01:00

I moved back to London on Sunday and it almost feels like I was never away, settling a little to easily back into old routines. Anyway, as an attempt to start blogging more regularly again, here are a few things I'm looking forward to in the coming weeks...

The London Art Book Fair, held this weekend at the Whitechapel Gallery. Will have to try pretty hard not to bankrupt myself on discount books...

Launching my website, whilst I finally get past my indecisiveness and manage to finish it.

Gauguin at Tate Modern.

New releases from No Age and Deerhunter, both of which sound pretty good from what I've heard on various streams on the internet...

Ever since watching Annie Hall the other night I've also started lusting after a corduroy blazer. Whilst this stunning example from Margeret Howell may be slightly unobtainable Uniqlo do an almost identical one for a snip of the price...

All I do these days is work

2010-08-21T23:04:00.004+01:00

Oh to be back in Spain...

Holiday snaps

2010-07-28T19:19:00.004+01:00

St Martins Degree Show Highlights

2010-06-28T23:37:00.006+01:00

A few of my personal picks from the Central Saint Martins BA Fine Art summer degree show. Unfortunately I don't have the names of the artists...

Somewhere soon

2010-06-20T15:16:00.004+01:00

Have just seen the trailer for Sofia Coppola's new film, 'Somewhere'. Set in LA's infamous Chateau Marmont hotel, the plot - a disillusioned actor coming to terms with his life in the surroundings of a hotel - sounds more than vaguely similar to her cult classic Lost In Translation. Hopefully, after the somewhat hit and miss Marie Antoinette, it will be something of a return to form. The trailer also hints at some typically credible names for the soundtrack, featuring a haunting demo of You Only Live Twice from The Strokes, as well as promising music from French band Phoenix. Not sure when it's out but most certainly looking forward to it.

Making progress

2010-06-19T16:35:00.003+01:00

This is just a note to say that Dulcie and I are really pushing forward with our poetry and photography fanzine Polly Put The Kettle On, we're planning to compile the first printed issue over the summer and are currently narrowing down submissions. Follow the blog here - http://pollyputthekettleonzine.blogspot.com/ - for regular online content and further news and information on submitting work. Oh, and spread the word!

Artefacts

2010-06-18T11:47:00.005+01:00

Before I cam home for the summer I saw a great exhibit in the Level 2 Gallery at Tate Modern by Cypriot artist Haris Epanimonda. Collating imagery from old copies of National Geographic with ancient artefacts and sculptures, she treats the space as an installation, with each element in the show creating a dialogue with the objects around it, playing with the conventions of the museum/gallery space and asking the viewer to dream up connections and connotations. The curation of a show is very much a focal point of her practice, the title of the show - Volume VI - a nod to the spatial element of the gallery space (this is number six in a series of similarly titled pieces).

Her method of juxtaposing found imagery is akin to John Stezaker, and recalls far off lands and ancient civilisations, creating the sense of being in a kind of disjointed museum where it is up to the viewer to dream up the origins and meanings of the seemingly unrelated ephemera.

How the elephant got its trunk

2010-06-09T01:18:00.006+01:00

Then the Elephant's Child sat back on his little haunches, and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and his nose began to stretch. And the Crocodile floundered into the water, making it all creamy with great sweeps of his tail, and he pulled, and pulled, and pulled.

And the Elephant's Child's nose kept on stretching; and the Elephant's Child spread all his little four legs and pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and his nose kept on stretching; and the Crocodile threshed his tail like an oar, and he pulled, and pulled, and pulled, and at each pull the Elephant's Child's nose grew longer and longer--and it hurt him hijjus!

Then the Elephant's Child felt his legs slipping, and he said through his nose, which was now nearly five feet long, 'This is too butch for be!'

Taken from 'The Elephant Child' from Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories.

Viva Las Vegas

2010-06-06T23:12:00.007+01:00

Just watched a programme on iplayer about Elvis' Vegas years, the final chapters of his life that, after initially providing him with a comeback no-one could have imagined, eventually led to his tragic downfall...

Pencil on paper

2010-06-05T17:56:00.007+01:00

('Don Bachardy; Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood' by David Hockney)

After finishing the year with our show at Trinity Buoy Wharf on Wednesday, I am now going to turn towards a summer of, amongst other things, rediscovering a love of painting and drawing. I made a few sketches today and it felt rather rewarding, and I vow to keep it up over the coming months.

Boho

2010-06-03T17:59:00.001+01:00

Message in a bottle

2010-05-25T22:15:00.009+01:00

This gargantuan painting by Peter Doig has just been unveiled at Tate Britain, palm trees must be in vogue! His painting is entitled Ascension and was originally shown at Westminster Cathedral last year, as a backdrop to a performance by pianist Stephen Hough. Today I constructed my own 8ft palm tree out of cardboard tubes and newsprint paper and ventured out into the streets of central London with it, will post the photos of the results soon...

I happened to be at Tate Britain this evening (although too late to see the painting, as the galleries were closed) for a debate on multiculturalism in art, centred around the latest piece of work to be unveiled on the fourth plinth, Yinka Shonibare's "Nelson's Ship in a Bottle". The debate ended up focusing on the way we articulate the notions of ethnic minorites and race relations, and particularly whether positive discrimination is a good thing, raised controversially by the author of this article and sparking heated discussion. I'm yet to see the rather impressive looking sculpture, but the critics seem unanimous in praise for its ambiguous subversion of and/or celebration of empire.

Hawaii

2010-05-21T22:31:00.002+01:00

A little tribute to what must have been the hottest day of the year so far. Am off to Manchester tomorrow to enjoy the sunshine with Dulcie, apparently it's even hotter up there!

Island life

2010-05-19T22:27:00.006+01:00

I came across these paintings by Paul Gauguin today in a second-hand book shop, and realised they hold some really relevant themes in relation to my current work. Portraying native Tahitian's in an almost prelapsarian state, they were the work of a man idealising and romanticising a past that had ceased to be, Tahiti long being a French colony by the time he made his visits. His fascination with their 'primitive' nature and an almost mythologised vision of semi-naked women offering forward fruit and reclining in the exotic landscapes are typical of an imperialistic West, and Gauguin was keen to build upon the myth, presenting these images as if they were treasures and truths of an undiscovered land. The curator of the forthcoming retrospective of his work at Tate Modern (the first in 50 years in Britain) has even gone as far as to say the relationship he had with his models was exploitative, forming sensationalist visions of Tahitian life to shock and play up to people's prejudices.

His intentions in leaving Europe for Tahiti were, reportedly to remove himself from European civilisation, with which he had grown increasingly frustrated, mainly due to his lack of recognition. He was in search of a tropical paradise, an escape from what the Western world considered civilised, and these paintings are a product of that very romanticisation.

Parc Central - Hong Kong

2010-05-18T23:03:00.005+01:00

This collection of films from cities across the globe provides further evidence of Gonzalez-Foerster's unmistakable sense of urban ambience and tropical melancholia. In a conversation between the artist and Jacques Ranciere published in Art Press, the philosopher, reflecting on the dialogue between East and West in her work, observes, "What is interesting is what they over there have done with what they borrowed from us here. You don't get that here, maybe because we have the idea that there are no more journeys left." That may be the case, but after seeing Gonzalez-Foerster's films I want to go places: Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Taipei, and of course Japan, though I'm not sure if her Japan really exists or whether it's a semiotic fantasy after Roland Barthes.

- Daniel Birnbaum, Artforum, 2006

A little inspiration... See the full series of films here.

This western feeling

2010-05-18T17:55:00.011+01:00

Photos from Penang, an island off Malaysia, that I took on holiday in 2006.

Barbican

2010-05-18T00:27:00.003+01:00

Short video I made at the Barbican the other day, just a kind of test for some ideas I've been having recently...

Independently speaking

2010-05-15T14:51:00.004+01:00

Last night I went to check out Tate Modern's 10th anniversary festival with a few friends. For the duration of the weekend Tate have invited 70 non for profit art organisations and collectives from around the world to set up shop in the famed Turbine Hall, creating a kind of mass market of stalls, displays and artwork for the public to navigate themselves through. Each participating organisation has been given a small square in which they are free to show what they like, and the displays range from artist's work to manifestos and propaganda to interactive installations. On top of this a programme of talks and film screenings has been put together, running throughout the weekend.

The main idea was to create an environment with no walls, allowing all these organisations to interact and engage with each other in a way that could not be possible anywhere else. Although it was rather manic and hard to really take in individual elements (it took a while to work out where one began and another ended at first) it is certainly an admirable idea for Tate to come up with, and it was really nice to see these tiny collectives and art spaces given a platform to reach out to such a wide audience. Whether or not it was entirely successful is another thing, but it was certainly an experience to wander through it all and see what is on show, and with art spaces from as far afield as Beijing, Morocco and New York it is certainly a great way to get a glimpse of what's happening on an international scale.

Nation and identity

2010-05-13T19:11:00.004+01:00

These stills are from Finnish artist Antti Laitinen's 'Voyage', a performance piece from 2008 in which he rowed a home-made island up the River Thames. In this piece, as well as other performances and video works, Laitinen raises questions of nation, identity and belonging, creating a one man state that he inhabits, and in this case rows through the city of London. I wrote about another of his works earlier this year after seeing it in a group show in Nettie Horn Gallery, and just happened to stumble across these images again the other day whilst considering my current work, to which this piece feels quite relevant.

Ironically he was stopped by the police as he reached the Houses of Parliament, which although put an end to the performance in some way allowed for further discussion of the issues he was raising in the first place...

In relation, I visited Peckham today to take more photos for my palm tree project that I'm currently working on, you can see a few pics here.

Seeking the unknown

2010-05-11T23:44:00.008+01:00

I've been thinking a lot recently about the 'romanticised other', the way we idealise places foreign to those we know, and the ways in which these places come to be a part of our own lives, be it subconsciously or in other more overt forms, such as the media, or through the imagery we are bombarded with daily. Often we yearn for these places for reasons we can't quite put a finger on, be it a desire for a taste of foreign cultures or an urge to discover the proverbial 'unknown'. These feelings can manifest themselves in different forms; take, for example, the palm tree, planted proudly in many suburban front gardens and around grey, urban environments, they symbolise the distant, the faraway land, injecting that little bit of tropical island paradise into the sometimes dreary reality of British life. The humble palm tree is a symbol of globalisation, of the post-colonial society that we live in, and moreover a symbol of the desire for the unknown, the other.

The palm tree is also a great symbol of that most infamous of American cities, Los Angeles. Like many of the inhabitants of the city the palm tree is not a native, and the first ones were brought to the city around the turn of the twentieth century.

The city holds one of those unexplainable interests over me, something about the legacy left by artists like Ed Ruscha and David Hockney and the way Hollywood filters through into our upbringing despite the fact we live half way around the world from it. Don't get me wrong, nothing about the artificiality and celebrity culture of the past decade interests me greatly, it is more an idealised, I guess you could say, fixation on a city that no longer exists, a distant, romanticised past when modernism was still new and California Girls was first being played on the radio.

To make artwork around the concept of the unknown, the desired other, is an interesting one that can throw up much discussion, and is something that has possessed artists for many centuries. For some, like Hockney, for example, the fixation reaches the point where fulfilment of the longing must take place, there is a need to experience the culture first hand. Alternatively what may be interesting is the very making of work about a culture that has not been experienced first hand, and is merely interpreted, experienced, through the images and media we receive in the comfort of our own home. In either case, we just might learn something about why we are so fixated on these places in the first place.

If you have a spare fifteen minutes, this is worth a watch.

(Photos screendumped from here)

Dulcette

2010-05-05T18:38:00.004+01:00

Processed some photos in the darkroom today, it never fails to amaze me...

Palm

2010-05-04T15:00:00.001+01:00

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older

2010-04-30T14:34:00.004+01:00

Can't stop listening to The Beach Boys, summer must be on the way...

Flora

2010-04-27T20:53:00.001+01:00

Plant life

2010-04-26T23:05:00.002+01:00

Tender is the night

2010-04-20T18:22:00.002+01:00

Some thoughts

2010-04-19T23:26:00.006+01:00

I went to the Tate today to see the Chris Ofili exhibition and was largely impressed, his paintings that chart the post-colonial black experience are bold, colourful, and often deliver powerful messages whilst still being concerned with the formal and material qualities of his mixed media approach (an early feature of his work was the use of elephant dung). Whilst meandering around before entering the exhibition I came across a room of paintings by an old favourite of mine, James Abbott McNeil Whistler, paintings which I had not realised had been on show. As well as inspiring a certain sense of awe of his beautiful use of paint, it got me thinking about one of his key concerns, that of 'art for art's sake'. It's true, art can have a message or a concept behind it, but at the end of the day is it not its sole purpose to be an object of aesthetic desire? Ofili's work, in my mind, addresses this dilemma, holding a mirror up to a certain part of society whilst still being beautifully and intricately crafted.

The Upper Room installation, a series of thirteen paintings installed in a purpse-built wooden 'chapel' is a perfect example of how Ofili's work is inherent in references and contexts - the thirteen paintings are based on a screen print by Andy Warhol of a monkey holding a chalice and their installation draws comparison wit the Rothko Chapel, placing them in a long line of painting tradition, yet also suggesting such religious connotations as the Last Supper and the Hindu god Hanuman - whilst at the same time being a shrine to the power of painting itself, reminding us that art needs not rely on the footnotes explaining every last shred of context in a desperate attempt for us to 'understand' it. For certain, these footnotes can exist, and it is important that a work of art is aware of and engages with the history it is a part of, but for it to stand alone in its own right is what makes it truly worthy.

Ode to spring

2010-04-17T22:07:00.005+01:00

Featured..

2010-04-10T14:59:00.006+01:00

This photo that I took a couple of months ago got featured on Platform, you can see the full feature here.

Art school

2010-04-04T19:34:00.004+01:00

Some photos from our show last month...

London

2010-04-04T00:37:00.002+01:00

Enfant terrible

2010-03-31T17:23:00.008+01:00

Ever since Dulcie informed me that Martin Amis was a professor at the Centre for Creative Writing in Manchester University (my home from home in term time) I've had a bit of a fascination for Martin Amis, regarded by many as one of our generation's more controversial writers. Recently, with the publication of his latest novel The Pregnant Widow, he's been cropping up in the press fairly frequently (one week last month he had a double page spread in the Evening Standard pretty much daily), and is never one to shy away from controversy, with accusations of misogyny and more recently Islamophobia never far away. His remarks about Katie Price are well documented and heavily vilified, yet he claims to be much more of a feminist than his critics make out (and to be honest, can we really point to Jordan and her self commodification as an example of the successes of feminism?), with The Pregnant Widow addressing the sexual revolution of the late sixties and early seventies, with Amis keen to point out its often overlooked pressure on women, something he claims his late sister was a victim of. After reading so much about him, his life and his novels, I've decided to see what all the fuss is about and actually read one of his novels, one which many cite as his masterpiece, London Fields. All I can say is so far so good for the so-called enfant terrible of English Literature.

Picture postcards

2010-03-26T22:54:00.006Z

A few photos from our holiday in Paris last summer..

Modernism had its moments

2010-03-25T17:18:00.003Z

Although here in England its reputation is often marred by and associated with that most detested form of architecture, the brutalist tower block, modernism really did come up with some stunning architecture during the course of the last century. Recently Tom Ford's A Single Man reminded us that modernism could be sleek, stylish and sexy, when he chose to use this house as the setting for much of the film.

The Schaffer house, designed by John Lautner for the mother of an employee, is situated in Glendale California, and like much modernist architecture uses glass as a prominent feature to create a spacious and light filled living space. Lautner studied under Frank Lloyd-Wright and was one of the leading modernist architects, designing other such icons of the West Coast as The Chemospere House in the Hollywood Hills:

and the Elrod Residence in Palm Springs, which apparently makes an appearance in the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever:

California, and in particular Los Angeles, is home to much celebrated modernist architecture, helped in a large part to become iconic by the photographer Julius Shulman, who devoted a career to photographing such modernist landmarks as Pierre Koenig's Case Study House No. 22 in Los Angeles:

As you can see the ethos of the designs was to be bold and daring, following the modernist intent to create something that completely shunned the past and tradition in favour of brash, uncompromising design. Many of the views afforded by these designs were rather incredible, where you would often be overlooking stunning vistas of the urban sprawl that is LA.

This is a house by Frank Neutra, again photographed by Shulman. Neutra was another of the leading figures of the Californian modernist movement. Like Lautner he worked for Frank Lloyd-Wright, and went on to design over three hundred houses in California, including this one, made famous in the film LA Confidential.

I'm always going to dream of the perfect Georgian townhouse or a seventeenth century country farmhouse, but as far as escapism goes these modernist utopias will always have a lasting legacy, there's just something quite special about their angular lines and minimalist chic, even if the reality of living in a glass box would be a little impractical...

Update

2010-03-23T21:49:00.006Z

I made a rather brash purchase today and bought myself a Nikon point and shoot camera. Although I am utterly devoted to film I just decided I wanted to be able to take snaps of what I've been getting up to and upload them the same day, rather than have to wait and pay loads of money for photographs that really didn't deserve one of the thirty-six precious frames a roll of film contains. This move was also largely motivated by my other blog/online diary that I started at the beginning of this year, in which I plan to catalogue my twenty-first year in photos. I've been uploading the odd photo every now and then but my new camera will actually allow me to post regular photos of the exciting things I get up to, such as Dulcie eating cauliflower cheese. If you want to follow it you can, it's here.

For Dulcie

2010-03-22T21:42:00.002Z

At long last

2010-03-18T15:14:00.001Z

I'm off to Manchester today!