Comfortable Disorientation

Watching, guiding, guarding or invading?

 

We braved the rain to go and see the Anthony Gormley exhibition at the Hayward this morning.  It's a brilliant adventure playground of a show. I'm not sure what was most fun the Blind Light fog or tailing kids and listening to what they made of it all:

"is it standing on it's corners, like going on tiptoes?"

"why did he only eat some of the bread?"

We really enjoyed it all, but agreed we liked the Event Horizon statues all over the South Bank best of all.  I'm not sure how many we clocked in total, I kept recounting the same ones. They're really affecting - quiet, dignified, vulnerable yet immensely dominant.

Stay gold, Ponyboy

Now the last time I posted about a project by Simon Pope I got into a debate about whether participatory experiential work qualifies as art worth funding.  I don't really want to go there again, I feel no more qualified to judge such things then I did that time round.

All I know is that Pope's projects seem to explore and connect things that are of interest to me. For example, Charade involves memory, cultural archiving, walking and identity.  I'm thinking of taking part:

Television's over. Networks are down. The radio is silent. All files erased. Imagine every book, film, play or song is about to be destroyed.
What would you save?

Each participant chooses a cultural work and sets out to become a living archive. Memorising the work and ultimately becoming it. In the process the group are going to meet up for walks around London.

The sensible thing to do would be to pick something short like a song, but I've never really been the sensible sort.  Both to keep true to what is most important to me and for the challenge, it has to be a book.

I've decided on The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton for a few reasons:

• I genuinely love it
• All those adolescent repeat readings/film viewings mean I already have chunks of it committed to memory
• I really believe it is a book worth saving
• It's celebrating it's 40th anniversary this year
• The narrative is first person (somehow I think this is going to help me commit it to memory)
• It's short enough that the task of learning it doesn't absolutely terrify me   

Not quite sure how I'm going to go about the task as yet - I'll let you know how I get on...

"Everything was once the latest, greatest innovation"

A fair bit later than planned...

One of the best things about the Museum of Brands, Packaging & Advertising was the way the exhibits prompted chat between different groups of visitors. Rather than speaking only to each other, we got chatting to lots of other people there. The content created conversation starters.

Robert Opie was a benevolent host: ensuring each of his guests enjoyed their stay; dazzling us with stories and trivia; asking us about ourselves and how we ended up there so he could ensure we were getting the most out of it. He was just charming, and so generous. I rather worry that we were hogging his time, so to honour it here's a record of some of the stuff I learnt from him.

Brands like those featured in the museum (mostly domestic consumer goods) get into our homes and become the fabric of our lives, so we have a natural intimacy with them - whether we're aware of it or not

Keeping the collection up to date in our innovation-focussed world is impossible. In the 1970's Kellogg's only launched one new cereal (Country Store), yet Robert was eating 3 bowls of cereal a day to keep up to date with the latest packaging. These days he doesn't stand a chance, so needs to pick his battlegrounds. Though increasingly, brand owners who’ve come to see his collection help out by passing stuff his way.

The Allsorts here are not as old as the tin (which I think was from the 1930's). Robert put them in here in the late 80's, intending to keep them fresh. They turned into a talking point, so he's kept the same ones there ever since.

Robert believes that should Prince William get married, we'd see a similar proliferation of commemorative goods from household brands as we did in the past for national events like Jubilees, Royal Weddings & National Festivals. I hope he's right, but I'm not so sure.

Robert is currently working on a special exhibition on sustainability. It sounds really good, he's going to look at the lessons that can be learnt from the past when we've previously been in a cycle of cutting back and making what we use go further. He's also going to look into the future. The exhibition will be on show in the museum some time in the summer.

"Slightly out of control, sprawling mass"

London, that is.  Today I finally got to the London: A Life in Maps exhibition at the British Library.  The prospect of looking at the city I love through lots of ephemera just sounded right up my street.

 

Maps of London; through time; showing the development of the city, from the first known depiction on a Roman medal, to Google Earth. Cool.

Equally fascinating was the behaviour of the people visiting the exhibition.  There's just something about maps that draws you right in. If a map depicts familiar territory, you're compelled to connect. To isolate somewhere you recognise and to pin it with an imaginary marker before navigating away or spanning out.  All around the exhibition, people had their noses up to the displays, often tracing with their fingers and muttering imagined journeys or locations to themselves. 

I swear the bigger scale maps sorted North Londoners from their Southern counterparts.  Northerners would stand on tiptoe and use their hands to shield their eyes from the ceiling lights, while Southerners like me could often be found crouched to the floor, looking to see if our patch had made it onto this map or not.

Video installations explored the undrawn London maps inside aspiring black cab-driver's heads - these are available online here.  There's also a film, My London, where six Londoners talk about their personal London geography.  The title of this post is a quote made by artist Gavin Turk in this film, though my favourite quote is made by Arthur Smith:

"The cranky underground tube. You can't help but be a little bit in love with the dirty old underground. Bastard."

I would have liked to see a time-line film, where all the different maps in the exhibition were digitally superimposed over each other. Letting you see the city building up, burning down, then rebuilding and growing over time.  I suppose it would have been very difficult and expensive to do - would have been cool though.

P.S.   More wonderful and creative cartography can be found at Strangemaps a blog dedicated to the lovely-sounding pursuit of 'collecting cartographic curiosa' (I think I originally found this blog via Zero Influence, but could be wrong).  Also I've only had a sneaky little peek at it so far but my colleague Lucy showed me her copy of The Atlas Of Experience and I'm desperate to pour over it some more (or perhaps even buy my own copy).  I need to know what roads lead to the Swamps of Boredom and ponder which lands surround the Sea of Possibilities.

Oh and beeker has also been feeling cartographically inclined, directing us to this archive of antique African maps. Looking at these reminded me of something that tickled me at the London exhibition -the way cartographers in the past often felt compelled to label their maps "new and accurate". That assertion of accuracy that somehow seeds an immediate sense of doubt.

Duckie: The Class Club

For the Spinach Christmas do, we went along to this 'dinner-tainment' at the Barbican last night.  Not knowing what to expect, we were pleased and relieved to discover it was a lot of fun.

The basic premise was you selected your class, then experienced  food, service and entertainment relevant to your status:

• For the lower classes: fun’n’festive Xmas carvery
• For the middle classes: contemporary ethically-sourced pan-fusion seasonal cuisine
• For the upper classes: a traditional Christmas dinner - bubbly & Mrs Beaton, game & figgy pudding

We went upper class, donning frocks, hats and cravats and had a riot pretending to be posh.  Not as much of a riot as the working class were having though - we had to complain to the staff about the frightful racket they were making!  Through the evening we were given glimpses of what is going on elsewhere and in the end the curtains came down so we could all experience opera-singing from the upper class waiters, contemporary dance from the middle class servers and the hidden hip hop talents of the disaffected working class waiter. 

Before we went I'd happend to see two reviews of the show:  one in the Metro (who went working class and gave it 3/5 stars); another in The Times (who went upper class and gave it 4/5).  Both mentioned how much fun the working and upper classes were having compared to the middle classes.   It's not really all that surprising, we were at the Barbican so it's a fairly safe bet that most of us were really middle class, choosing to move up or down for the night gave us the giddy thrill of fancy dress and play-acting.  The middle-classes were just being themselves and spectating.

Afternoon Tease

If I had access to a time-machine, I would go to a speakeasy during prohibition. It all started when I first saw Bugsy Malone, or maybe it was those apple adverts that used to be on when I was a kid. Whichever, the combination of glamour crossed with illicitness is too alluring to resist.

So I loved Afternoon Tease at Volupte Lounge. The poker girls (plus a couple of friends) decided to make this a Christmas outing.  Volupte is beautiful - I took photos, but none of them do it justice. Better to give you the description from the website and leave it to your imagination:

Volupte is a world of pleasure, exquisite delight, and sharing.  Of decadence, richness, indulgence and extremities. A world where you are cordially invited to spoil yourself, to preen yourself, to love and be loved.

We had the lot: champagne (in saucers), tea, sandwiches, scones, cake, burlesque, singing, a human Christmas tree that became gradually less decorated. Fabulous! 

Psychology as art

Some things that I like:

• Galleries: Both the spaces themselves and what they contain. I don't go to galleries as much as I should but nevertheless I really like them
• Psychology: It fascinates me. I wanted to be a psychologist at one point, instead I've settled for being an interested amateur
• Walking: It's the best way to get around if you want to understand where you are.  I find it a great activity for encouraging good thinking

So imagine my excitement when I discovered that an artist called Simon Pope and a psychologist called Vaughan Bell (who writes for the excellent Mind Hacks blog) are combining all three in an on-going project called Walking Here and There.  The first event is Gallery Space Recall which is on tomorrow in Cardiff (unfortunately there's not much chance of me going to see it).   

You don't often see experiential art being used as a way of exploring psychology but it makes perfect sense to me. I thoroughly approve!

Simon Pope sounds like an interesting guy. His book London Walking looks worth a look and although I don't understand Ice Cream For Everyone I know I like it.