Fortune's Pawn

Tonight took Pawn and X to the Schoenfeld theater for A Behanding In Spokane, the latest from playwright Martin McDonagh, marking his return to the theatre following his foray into film with In Bruges. I insisted that we book this show before coming to town, since I love Christopher Walken, who leads, and Martin McDonagh, and figure this would be a great show. Alas, I was wrong, sorely wrong.

Where to start… The script is weak, it is based upon a premise so fragile and absurd that it hamstrings the entire production. The performances, starting with Mr. Walken and continuing on to the rest of the cast – Sam Rockwell, Anthony Mackie and Zoe Kazan – seem smug and often hammy. The set, the set by Scott Pask, is the star of the show.

Admittedly, I fell for one of the curses currently afflicting both the London and New York stages – star productions. As was commented in a piece in the Times recently:

Other writers shared similar frustrations about mounting productions in New York nowadays. Israel Horovitz (“Line,” “The Indian Wants the Bronx”) said that two Tony Award-winning Broadway producers recently attended the Florida Stage production of his new play, “Sins of the Mother,” and told him that the only way to move it to New York would be to cast stars.

“The play had great reviews, from The Wall Street Journal and others, but these producers said we needed stars so the play could be critic-proof,” said Mr. Horovitz, 71, who has had 50 plays produced in New York (two on Broadway) by his count.

Such thinking is prevalent on Broadway right now. In another recent piece, the Times noted:

The new Broadway musical “The Addams Family” opened Thursday to the sort of scathing reviews that would bury most shows in the graveyard next to the Addamses’ forbidding mansion.

The result: The show sold $851,000 in tickets last weekend on top of a $15 million sales advance, huge figures for a new Broadway run, and all but guaranteeing that it will be hard to snag a pair of good orchestra seats until fall. After five months of well-publicized creative difficulties for the show, this seeming paradox amounts to a theater world version of the golden fleece: the critic-proof smash.

(emphasis mine)

What these articles attest to is the, some would say cynical, tendency of Broadway producers these days (and the West End, to a similar degree) to load the cast with popular stars from film and T.V. to help offset the weaknesses in their scripts, concepts or direction.

A sure sign of the impact of such cynicism was evident from the first at last night’s show. Upon the curtain, a tattered affair running right to left on an exposed traveler, whipping off stage to reveal Mr. Walken sitting on a disheveled bed in an even more disheveled hotel room, the audience roared with applause, as if they had just witnessed a show stopping performance on American Idol. I knew right then that I was going to have problems with this audience, if not the show.

Almost immediately, Walken was playing to the house, not his fellow actors. At times patently mugging, his hammy performance set the pace for the rest of the cast, especially Mr. Rockwell, whose cartoon-ish take on the hotel night auditor sets the low water mark for this piece. Making this all worse was Walken’s peripatetic accent which seemed to wander around the country the way his focus wandered around the theater.

I won’t spend too much time on the rest of this train wreck but to say that McDonagh should lose the awkward and outright distracting middle interval, in which the drape is closed and Rockwell performs a vaudevillian stand-up bit about his personal desire to have a monkey companion, and trim some of the other abundant fat in this 90 minute one-act, and he might end up with a 50 minute bon-mot to serve up on television. He could add a laugh track and judiciously placed commercials, and then no one would need to pay their good money to see four actors amuse themselves.

[X weighs in]

I pretty much agree with Nic’s overly generous review, but I think the thin broth of a ‘plot’ could be further reduced to a typical Walken skit on SNL or a scene or two in another dark comedy like “In Bruges”. I was really shocked by the audience. Several nearly inaudible ushers had stalked up and down the aisles before the show reciting a list of demands: power down cell phones, if you leave your seat you won’t get the same on back upon return, don’t jump to a better, empty seat, etc. I was perplexed by this, but when a phone rang minutes into the show I started to see some wisdom in it. Our friends, C and R, seated farther back had the back-of-the-seat kickers [justifiable homicide to me]; texters, talkers and general fidgeters around them. The tattered set was fantastic – the footlights were a rummage sale hodge podge of rusty gooseneck lamps, bathroom fixtures and other odd little lamps.

[X over and out]

Lest the reader think this night was a disaster, fear not. We started the evening with a lovely dinner with X’s old friends at Joe Allen’s on West 46^th. Following the show, a simple navigational error on the way to the subway turned into a fortuitous turn when, wandering past the International Center of Photography, I spied the trademarked large, sepia, dogeared photography of Miroslav Tichy, a Czech photographer with a solo show inside. I love his work, and will certainly venture back this way before this visit is over.

Abramović, Kentridge, Cartier-Bresson, Burton. Those four faces of artistic expression lay in waiting for us at MoMA as we polished off our street-corner gyro, X and I, and dodged slow moving taxi cabs and ducked into the portico.

Oddly enough, it was Tim Burton, the exhibition of his sketchbooks, models, props and ephemera, which triggered this particular foray into New York. I wanted to see the show, and it closes on the 26^th. The rest, Martina Abromovic, Henri Cartier-Bresson and William Kentridge, were icing on the cake, as it were. Or, in the case of Abramović, flesh upon the wall.

William Kentridge creates images and animations which are familiar to me, but I will confess a complete ignorance of his work, or the volume of it. Kentridge makes large drawings, typically charcoal and chalk on gauche and paper, sometimes segmented and articulated, and then films these pieces frame by frame to animate short films. Several of these films were exhibited here, in William Kentridge: Five Themes, which covers his entire career of 30 years. The show is expansive, but many of the films were hard for me to watch; the jittery nature of his animation, splayed across such large screens bothered my eyes, so I mostly focused on the drawings hung in the central galleries.

My favorite part of the exhibit was Kentridge’s animated theaters. These are complete theaters, typically about 6 feet wide and 4 or 5 feet tall, with carefully arranged and assembled tracks and guides and flats and frames and… very hard to explain here. Small automatonic figures enter and exit a stage defined by framing flats which are illuminated by projected set decoration. Again, too hard to describe with any grace here, but they were lovely.

Martina Abramović is a performance artist whose work tests the extremes of public acceptability. Over her long career she has produced many installations, pieces in which she creates a setting, sometimes grand, sometimes banal, in which she places herself or other “performers” and compels us to look on as some strange part of the human experience is put to the test within the little diorama she has wrought. “Martina Abramović: The Artist is Present,” is both a new piece and a retrospective of her career.

The titular piece is an installation in the Marron Atrium, a high ceilinged large open room on the museum’s second level. The artist is seated in a straight-back chair with a simple table in front of her. Across the table is a matching chair, in which visitors may sit, confronting the stoic, silent, artist. She sits thusly for the entire day (with careful proviso that she will not be present during late exhibit hours) from before the museum opens till after it closes. There are carefully arrayed hash marks on the wall which keep track of how many days she has been doing this (the show runs for about 10 weeks).

The sixth floor galleries bring us the retrospective of her work, covering her over 40 year career, with more than 50 pieces. Some are presented as films or videos, some as still photographs. The real import of the show, however, comes in the reënactments of many of her most important installation pieces, with a cast of performers taking on the roles that were always only filled by Abramović or her onetime partner, Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen). Here you may find a man and a woman, seated with their backs to each other, their hair braided together. Or facing each other, each pointing an accusatory finger at the other, for hours on end. A woman lays upon a plinth naked, a skeleton draped across her. Two women stand naked on either side of a doorway, challenging the visitor to pass between them.

It goes on and on, example after example of self indulgent, “let me offend you” work. The same theme seems to repeat in endless variations until the audience is numbed to it. The very in-you-face nature of the work seems in tension with the shear volume of it in this exhibition, which suffers the fate that so many retrospectives do at MoMA – over saturation. We just get bombarded with so much of these images that we become desensitized to them. One of Abramovićs works would have the desired effect upon most visitors (those who aren’t just offended and turn away) but 50 of them simply turn pale by repetition.

Okay, so I didn’t really like that show. What can I say. Time to move on to Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century. I am quite a fan of Cartier-Bresson, whose work is well featured in the current Street Scene at MAM. In this exhaustive, and exhausting, retrospective over 300 of his photographs, spanning the globe and many decades, covers his entire career. Three hundred photographs in a labyrinthine gallery packed with about 800 visitors at a time, many of them reeling from the Abramović experience as I was. Yeesh!

My complaint about curatorial under-selectiveness stands here as well. The trend at these shows seems to be that of quantity and completeness without any regard for how the visitor will appreciate the works and for the physical reality of getting through the show. The galleries sprawl, and while there are thematic groupings – Encounters; Beauty; Old Worlds, India; New Worlds, USA – these groupings themselves may be so large that one has a hard time discerning their start or end.

The work is fantastic, and where I would cut, I cannot say. Cartier-Bresson, as much as anyone, established the formal rules of editorial photo-journalism, and then routinely broke them. He practiced journalism but also portraiture. He had an eye for the moment, but also a mastery of composition.

The show is overwhelming, but worthwhile. A visit to MoMA just to see this one exhibit could take an entire afternoon, just to do it justice.

A respite in the sculpture garden was in order after the outright saturation of the past three exhibitions. We found a couple of chairs out of the sun, near the fountain, and just enjoyed the lovely weather. Ahh…

Okay, back to work! Tim Burton has had an interesting career spanning several decades. Popping onto the pop-culture scene with 1985′s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and 1988′s Beetle Juice and continuing to the recently released Alice in Wonderland. I love his twisted imagery and wild imagination, as reflected in such masterpiece films as Mars Attacks, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and The Nightmare Before Christmas. This exhibition brings together ephemera from his films – the angora sweater worn by Johnny Depp in Ed Wood, the cat suit worn by Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns, fifty or so Jack Skellington puppet heads from Nightmare – and his artwork, sketchbooks, student films, etc. going back to his childhood in Burbank, CA.

This is a popular exhibit, one requiring timed admissions with pre-purchased tickets (good luck getting one day of show) and it is thronged. The show itself was a lot of fun. It was quite entertaining to hear young people, teens or tweens, explain to their parents who some of the characters from the recent films were – Corpse Bride, for example – while then hearing a parent explain who Beetle Juice is a moment later.

This was well worth the visit, and it was wonderful to get a peek into the work and vision behind the stunning visuals which make up so much of Burton’s work.

All in all a great day at MoMA. In many ways I have only myself to blame for the excesses of today’s visit. To be fair to the artists and their work, today’s visit should really have been broken into two or three visits. But, for a traveler, time is of the essence! Move on, more to do, and too little time!

Thanks to Kate Coe for turning me on to this upcoming auction of the humongous collection of Michael Epstein & Scott Schwimer:

The Michael H. Epstein & Scott E. Schwimer collected works of glamour photography, fine art photography and contemporary art is one of the world’s most unique. The compilations convey impeccable style and beauty that will stand the test of time.

In addition to owning the world’s largest privately held glamour photography archive, Epstein and Schwimer are also the publishers of various George Hurrell editions, as well as those of Mel Roberts and Harry Langdon.

Epstein and Schwimer Glamour Photography Auction

There are over 1300 lots in this auction, ranging from print ad shots to studio promotional shots, memorabilia, original negatives, etc.  Quite the exhaustive auction catalog, online, for all to peruse.  Check it out!

Pawn recently withdrew from the social networking site Facebook following a year and a half involvement.  Friends, and “friends” will doubtless ask why (and indeed, some already have).  The answer is both simple and complex.

The simple answer is that I don’t like what the use of the site did to how I interact with people.  While “social” networking sites bring a lot of promise, they also present many pitfalls.  And these benefits and drawbacks have as much to do with you, the user, as with their own inherent dynamics.  This blog, and the mailing list which preceded it, going back five years now, is itself a sort of social network.  For while it is primarily a forum for me to express my thoughts, etc., it also permits a back and forth, a dialogue, and has even included direct, primary posts by others.  In addition to my personal rants or other writings, I have often featured links to articles and stories elsewhere which thought worthy of attention, posted photographs, music clips, etc.  In other words a lot of what one can do at Facebook, but without the large community surrounding it.

That community, however, can be a both a blessing and a curse.  Facebook, and sites like it (i.e. LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.) provide extensive tools to build community in ways we have never seen before.  This is a godsend for organizers from local grass roots up to presidential campaigns, but works equally well for fear mongers as prophets, for hate groups as for charities.  My very first girlfriend tracked me down via LinkedIn after nearly thirty years, to share memories and catch up on two lives now very separate.  So, too, former lovers have tracked me down whom I would rather not have so done.

Therein lies one of the problems with a media which is at once both public and private.  Anyone who has spent any time at all on social networking sites has seen a friend or friends mistakenly post in a public way what was intended to be a private message.  I actually made it somewhat of a personal mission to help educate people about how to use Facebook with security and privacy in mind.  Just as one can rekindle old connections, so one must cope with the ramifications of doing so, in both the public and private realms.  An old schoolmate wants to be your friend, and has become friends with many people with whom you actually have kept up with since those old days.  If you don’t become friends are you being rude?  What will your other former classmates think of your standoffishness?  It’s the old peer pressure writ large and on the Internet.

Then there is the odd dynamic of “meeting” new people, a friend of a friend or just someone with common cause, say another member of a local political group.  They share your view, or a common link, and in the anonymous and yet connected world of social networking it is perfectly natural to “friend” each other.  In a real world setting there is much more context for such a situation.  A mutual friend can offer either a direct introduction or a muted aside, encouraging or discouraging such a friendship, or in the context of a local political meeting or other event, one may infer more about the other from the goings on.

Not so in the cyber world.  I was friended by a couple of people following a comment I made on the fan page for a long-defunct local punk band.  in 1981 I had done several shows with this band, and had gotten to know some of them quite well.  Following my comment, a few recollections from that era, I received friend requests from these two, one male one female, who were fans of the band and the nightclub where I had managed back then.  Turns out they both used to come there as underage gate crashers whose youth was well hidden by the combination of fake IDs and the heavy makeup and hair dye prevalent in that crowd.  I kept them as “friends” more because they posted interesting links to artworks, but never really interacted with them.

Interaction on social networking sites is another area of potential problems.  The forum provided on such sites can often serve to magnify the tendencies already present when in a group.  Pawn, believe it or not, was a class clown in his youth.  One standout characteristic of a class clown is the tendency to speak first and consider later.  This is bad enough in real life, where the words one utters are heard by a room full of people.  Put it on the Internet, and the potential for regret or embarrassment multiplies.  This is further compounded where one cannot remove, un-say or delete ones utterances.  Just such a situation developed for me in the recent past.

In making what was intended to be a witty, sarcastic comment to an acquaintance’s post, instead I managed to offend them.  My bungled wit came across, even to my own eyes, as mean and rude — and ill considered.  There being no way to retract the comment, no way to unring that bell, it instead hung in the air.  There are examples galore of ill considered public utterances abounding on the Internet, from sites like Overheard in New York to Texts From Last Night, and new terms in the public lexicon, such as Drunk Dialing and TMI.  In the cyber world, when you screw up, it is never just a room full of people who know, or may know.

So, what happened in this situation?  The offended party “unfriended” me, a term which has no real world equivalent.  Perhaps that’s because in the real world when we no longer wish to associate with someone we simply stop doing so.  Now, true enough, anyone who has been stalked can tell you that it is not necessarily so simple (this I know), but by and large if we no longer wish to know what so-and-so is up to, we stop asking, calling, visiting, etc. and our spheres of experience will disengage.  Not so on-line, where we must actively sever the link.  What can be accomplished passively in-life requires active intervention in on-line.

In the world of Facebook, such an action is silent.  It is not like calling someone up and sayng “We’re not friends anymore!” but rather you click a button and that person silently and without their direct knowledge is no longer your friend.  They may never know that this has happened, until they try to reach out to you and find you no longer in their list.  Or they go to a, formerly, mutual friend’s page and see you appear not in the list of mutual friends, but in the list of all friends.  This quiet rebuff is all that is needed to lower the boom of disapproval.

That is how I found that I had been unfriended, and it brought home to me just how absurdly this new media (for that is what it is, ultimately, is media) has wound itself into our lives in ways that are as destructive as they are constructive.  I was temporarily crushed to see that I had lost a friend, yes, but then reflected on the fact that I have only ever met this person a few times, have no history with them, and only really knew them on-line.  The lingering feeling, however, is the shame I felt at my embarrassing comment.  Much like that I still feel for a bad joke told too loudly at a public event over twenty years ago.

But more, I had allowed my interactions with this new media become so central to how I interacted with people I truly do know, love and relate to in-life and not just on-line.  I recognize my peevishness when someone wouldn’t react on-line to things I had posted, or when they failed to keep up their on-line counterpoint to their in-life reality.  And I realized that it was just too easy to pretend that since I was present in my friends lives on-line that I was present in-life, when, in fact, I was absent there.

Thanksgiving is in two days time, and soon after I will begin to make and send my holiday greeting cards.  This, too, is an act of make-believe social interaction, this annual ritual of pretending that we are still connected to all of our aunts and uncles, old schoolmates and neighbors.  I long ago switched to printing out address labels rather than hand addressing, but I still take the time to scrawl a line or two into each card, lending an air of authenticity to this otherwise artificial intercourse.  I will make an effort, this year, to be more present in that process, to be more personal in those wishes, to be more thoughtful as I lick those stamps.

Will I ever return to Facebook?  For now I cannot say.  Every year I make my own Christmas cards, using images I compose or photograph or cull from family archives.  I post those on Facebook, as well.  I am not sure I’ll update it this year.  We’ll see.

Any visitor to Trafalgar Square cannot help but notice the four large plinth or platforms which mark the corners of the square.  Erected in the mid nineteenth century, these hold statuary of the lion and Generals type.  All but one, that is.  The plinth in the northwest corner, directly in front of the National Galleries stands empty, or has for most of its existence.

A couple of years ago a contest was staged which solicited ideas for what to put on the fourth plinth.  This is really rather difficult at this stage, as London have gotten quite used to it being empty.  Many responses to the challenge were received, and a select group of these have been getting their day, as it were, for the past year.  When Pawn visited Trafalgar this past May there was a sort of post-modern deconstructivist piece up there, involving metal and perspex and some lime green stuff.  Rather distasteful if you ask me.

Anthony Gormley has a different idea.  His piece, One & Other invites regular folk to mount the plinth, assisted by a cherry-picker, for an hour each, 24 hours a day, for 100 days.  These 2400 people were selected by lot, and within reason are allowed to do what they wish with their time on the plinth.

Jill Gatcum, above, made an eloquent gesture with a baloon release.  She had solicited 60 of her friends and family members to each make a donation to charity which they would not normally have done.  She then assembled 60 helium baloons, each bearing a card comemorating her friend’s donation and soliciting whomever eventually found the baloon to similarly make a donation they would not otherwise have made.  During her hour up on the plinth, cheered on by her friends and family below, Jill released one baloon every minute, and then came back down to earth.

The Independent Online have published a photo gallery celebrating the begining of this audacious project.  Check it out.

“Onion forced to cancel entire Michael Jackson parody issue!”

A trip to the Racine Art Museum last night provided insight into the monumental work required to exhibit monumental work.  In this case the program was the first 2009 installment of “Meet Me on the Patio,” a summer series of members and visitors events.  The subject of the program last night was Living Large – backstage at RAM, which focused, through the compelling tour discussion of David Zaleski, on the issues and labors involved with producing an exhibit like Bigger, Better More: The Art of Viola Frey, currently on display in RAM’s gallery 3.

Zaleski’s talk provided wonderful insight into the suffering of a curatorial assistant and great enlightenment as to the procedures, methods, and issues involved in dealing with any large exhibit, but especially in dealing with an exhibit of the large.  Some of Frey’s pieces are so large they may require 30 or 40 or more crates just to move.  Several semi-trailers were involved with this show, not to mention the flights back and forth for the specialists involved, the couriers, etc.

All in all a lovely evening at RAM|Art.  Programs like this are an invaluable part of the mission of any art museum, but especialy one which, like RAM, focuses on crafts and their more accessible nature.  It also engenders thoughtfulness on the part of the casual visitor when they know more of what goes on behind the scenes to get great art in front of them.

Hats off to RAM|Art and to David Zaleski for his great talk.

Having waited until most of the galleries are actually open, I’ve returned to Bethnel Green yet again to see some of the cutting edge works on display in the bevy of galleries there. First, however, I took a little trip back to Fitzrovia to check out Approach W1.

There are two Approach galleries, E2, in Bethnel Green (over the Approach Pub) and W1, in Fitzrovia, just above Oxford Circus (E2 and W1 are postal codes). I am more interested in the works of Chris Brodahl than I am in the works on display at E2.

It was a nice show, but not so much of the work really did it for me. I guess I may not be the audience for this stuff. I do like the pieces above, they are evocative of the work of Francis Bacon or some of his contemporaries. Oh well, off to stroll Oxford Street a little bit (it’s a “no traffic day” so that is made easier) and maybe shop a bit.

I end up shopping more than I want as the tube is suddenly shut for an “emergency” so I have to wait that out before finally getting into the station and on my way to the East End.

Once there I stroll up Cambridge Heath road to a few galleries Anne Redmond had clued me into. First on the list is “Look! No hands”at ¢ell Project Space, This is a group show featuring Athanasios Argianas, Kim Coleman & Jeny Horgarth and Simon Faithfull. The first piece we encounter in the darkened first storey location off the main road and back a mew is Simon Faithfull’s 1996 work, “Going Nowhere.” This is a video loop running about 9 minutes (I believe) in which the cameraman starts a video camera which is looking into the distance across the Oxfordshire landscape. It is winter and we see a snow covered field reaching to the horizon, a tree line in the distance, and an army of clouds on the march above. Once the camera starts rolling, the cameraman crosses from behind the camera and into the shot. He trudges off over the horizon over about two minutes, and leaves the camera, and us by proxy, behind.

This is the core of Simon’s work, and really this show. It is about what happens after the artist has taken their hands off of the work, hence “Look! No hands.” as the title of the show would have it. At first my reaction to Going Nowhere was, Okay, that’s enough of that… I waited, however, and started to think about the act of the artist, he has faith in his equipment and his setup and once he has got the machine started, the art machine, he just leaves it go for a while. This si either an act of hubris or one of exploration. I think it is in fact a mixture. In a way it made me think back to my days of exhibit development in a science museum. I would spend years making an exhibit, thinking it up, collaborating on design, watch it get built, etc. Then a day would come and it would go out on the museum floor. Then I could only watch to see how well it did its job as the public interacted with it.

About this time a shape appeared on the horizon and roused me from my reverie as Faithfull approached the camera again and shut it off. I guess he went nowhere, but I was left to think.

The other two rooms in the exhibit were less complex, in many ways, from the first. Kim Coleman & Jenny Hogarth provide four works, “Connect, (Venetian Blinds)”, “Connect, (hair dye)”, “Sugar Paper” and “Museum Light” all from 2008. Of these I most liked Sugar Paper which was shot from above looking down on a table covered with coloured construction paper (sugar paper) and a pair of hands move that paper about. It is projected from above onto a similar table, also strewn with sugar paper, which makes for an unnerving viewing experience as disembodied hands reach out and move the paper about, or so it appears until you look closely and realize that the real paper is stationary whilst the projected images are moving.

Venetian Blinds and Museum Light both are experiments in projecting an image of an object onto that same object (much like Sugar Paper). Venetian Blinds is the more effective of these (or else I am just too literal minded) as the projected blinds are opened and shut you almost do a double take to see if the real blinds just changed.

Lastly, Athanasios Argianas’s A demonstration of one thing as many as a demonstration of many things as one (I was swept off of my feet) is a masterfully effective piece of art. A pylon build of metal truss work rises out of a plinth in the centre of the room. Across this truss-work are three strips of white material (poster board or foam core) each about 3″ by 18″ wide and at different angles to you, one closer on the right, one on the left, the third about even. A projector fills each strip with imagry of three women, one on each strip, (one on the right, one the left, one the middle) as they start into singing rounds of a simple song. The interaction between these different planes, different strips, different coloured filters…It is quite beautiful, and I staye and watched it for more than a couple of cycles through the roughly 2 minute loop.

Okay Cell, on to monikabobinska gallery, just down the block. I needn’t have waited for them to open to see the installation piece by Sinta Tantra, for it is the paint job on the building itself. Interesting, but not really my cup of tea. Oh well. On to Vyner street and a whole bevy of galleries which dot the landscape. (Interesting sign seen on one building, “This is not a gallery!”)

Vyner Street is a few blocks of old factory and warehouse building backing on the eastern branch of the Regents Canal. There are small galleries all along the street. I stopped into all of them I could find, and as not all of them had handouts or cards, I am doubtless going to miss some.

First was Rene So at Kate MacGarry, a collection of bulbous busts which reminded me more of Pop-Art chess pieces than anything:

Again, not my style, but what the hell.

Then I crossed the street to Breaking New at Five Hundred Dollars an artist supported gallery conceived from the first to have a limited life of just a few months. This group showing consists of many artists. I will call attention to Aliki Braine for Forest (parts I – III):

And Tessa Farmer for A Prize Catch (series):

There is other stuff you may like, so check out the website.

VINEspace gallery feature Your face, your race, the way you talk…I kiss you, you’re beautiful I want you to talk modern photography by Neil Drabble, Sean Fader and Oskar Slowinski. Of these easily Sean Fader’s work has the most impact on me. Neil Drabble offers us Roy, a documentary study taking place over an 8 year period and focusing almost exclusively on his subject, Roy, coming of age. It is interesting, but doesn’t really inspire any thing stronger in me. Oskar Slowinski offers us some intriguing candid street shots, but again nothing too special to me. Sean Faber, on the other hand, offers us this:

Here he is digitally manipulating images to show us him in other forms (or skins) or him in the ultimate act of narcissism. Quite effective, I thought.

Don Joint Waldameer and Chuck Webster at FRED were nice, Joint certainly a masterful collage artist, but neither grabbed me.

The Götz Füsser Studios is showing paintings by Bryan J Robinson. His small watercolours got my attention, but his featured big works seemed like someone had gutted Keith Harring over a canvas and framed the results:

Nettie Horn gallery features The Hidden Land with Gwenaël Bélanger, Daniel Firman, Ori Gersht and Lori Hersberger. Upon entering the gallery you are instantly confronted by Le Faux Mouvement (2008) by Bélanger, and it is truly stunning both in scale and for its captured moment:

The other works are quite eye catching as well. Ori Gersht’s series Falling Bird is a stunning use of photography to mount an exploration behind a classic still life by Chardin. Originally a short film shot with high definition, high speed cameras, Gersht captures the plunge of a pheasant into a dark pool of fluid, next to some grapes arranged on a shelf above the water. It is quite a series.

I am going to speed through the rest of this because this post is already too long and I want to save some space for the highlight of my trip.

A quick mention is due Alex Echo Arts who opens up his working studio on Saturdays for inquisitive (and no doubt acquisitive) art fans. I liked his complex collage work as well as his experimentation with incorporating words into his works. Check his website (link above) to see what I mean.

Dialogue at Vyner Street offers up Remnants of our past by Gerard Mannix Flynn. This installation piece features hundreds of rifle stocks and thousands of rounds of spent ammunition to try to teach us a little bit about the emotional costs of entanglements, but more importantly of disentanglements. He is referring, specifically, to the disarmament process following the Good Friday agreements which brought “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland to an end. Again, check the website (link above) to see for yourself. The thousands of rounds of ammunition scattered about on the exhibit floor made this the most interesting tactile experience of the day.

Lastly some °art, host the Signature Photography Awards 2009 show. This annual awards series honours some of DegreeArt’s crop of graduating or recently graduated student artists. I am a big fan of young artists, and fully endorse Degree’s stated mission, “Invest in the artists of the future.” There is much for these young artists to be proud of. I will bring special note to A Dream from the Posted series by Natalie Tkachuk, from the 2007 class of University College, Falmouth. Here is that piece:

Natalie Tkachuk - A Dream

This features wartime letters from Frank to Maude, and in each in the series Natalie has carefully folded the letters within the envelopes so that particular lines from them are visible through the open slit of the envelope. In this the top one says, “…a long past. I was so disappointed as I woke up to find it was only a dream.” And the bottom one reads, “I suppose I will just have to wait.”

Another piece which really struck me was Hammered (no pun intended).

Catherine Dwyer Harvey - Hammered

This homage to the classic pin-up photograph effectively addresses the power imbalance implicit in those, while having a sense of humour about it. Contrast this to those dreadfully cold and violent images by Helmut Newton I wrote about the other day. The young Catherine Dwyer Harvey is a clear winner in that competition, and she won the Singled Out Portraiture Finalist in this competition, as well. Keep you eye out for her work.

Do yourself a favour and check out °art website (link above), you will not be disappointed at the huge range of works and artists they offer.

At last finished I took a stroll through part of Victoria Park and then back on the tube. I saw this upstairs from a shop on Montmarch Street and though it looked interesting.

Ta!

There are a lot of little things that I keep meaning to mention, so today I will try to catch up.

First off, however, I need to comment on Havana Rakatan, the dance programme presented by Sadler’s Wells tonight at the Peacock Theatre. Ooh La La!

I have learnt that Sadler’s Wells do not disappoint, and tonight was no exception. Last year I saw Insane in the Brain and Tango Por Dos, and both were exceptional. Now, when I see an advert for a Sadler’s Wells production I just add it to my list and don’t worry myself about whether it will be a worthy investment.

So, tonight’s performance, ending Saturday, features the top Cuban Son band Turquino, and a crew of about 20 dancers representing the cream of the crop in Cuban dance. Every style of Cuban dance is represented in this show: Salsa, Mambo, Rumba, Flamenco, classic folkloric, Bolero, Cha-Cha-Cha, etc.

A crowd favourite was when, following a bracing ensemble number, just the men are left on stage wearing an assortment of tops and tie-up trousers. They all face the audience and strip off their tops. The women in the audience went nuts and we all cheered. Then they started to loosen the ties on their trousers, the whole audience gasped, and many started a deafening cheer.

Just then a female Flamenco dancer started in from stage right, all taught angles, quivering curves, a costume as red as if a vat of lip gloss had been dumped on her (and as figure hugging, too) and a severe glint in her eye. As she moved across the stage in that staccato fashion unique to Flamenco, the men preened, then shrugged and then, resigned, simply picked up their kit and slunk off the stage.

The moment was precious, and the audience was but putty in their hands after that.

The show nearly broke my heart when the band started into Guantanamera, that most Cuban of all songs. I cannot help myself, whenever I hear this song I am transported to a little Mexican restaurant I visited many, many years ago with X and her mum N. N loved Cuba, and when the mariachi’s band came by X asked if they could play it. They launched into a serviceable rendition, an N started to cry for her love of Cuba. It was a touching, and to me eternally precious, moment, and now whenever I hear that song I start to tear up at my love for N and for her love of Cuba. Oh what a tangled web…

The show ended with the entire audience brought to their feet and trying to dance along with the crew on stage. My seat mate, Carolina, (a Polish immigrant, by way of Australia) a salsa dancer, put me to shame as I just did the white-guy-shuffle and tried to keep in time.

So, the other news… I have already reported twice on the little constitutional crisis brewing over here. Well, it would be one if the Brits really had a constitution like the US does. At the root of the current mess are two separate scandals, which are coming to fruition simultaneously. The first is the peerage “laws for pay” scandal. This actually dates back to my last visit here, in early spring of 2008. In this one, members of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of parliament (think Senate) were found to be dispensing favours for money – aka taking bribes. Two peers have been found guilty, finally, and have had their privileges suspended pending further action. This is remarkable in that it hasn’t happened in over 300 years, dating back to the era of Britain’s civil war (yes, they had one too).

The second is the continuing Exes scandal, in which members of the House of Commons (MPs) have been exposed as having exploited rules which allow them to recoup various expenses associated with maintaining multiple households so as to attend parliament. This has now claimed several members of all the major parties, including senior aides and ministers, and has lead to calls for wholesale reform of the entire electoral system. Yesterday it took its biggest toll, the resignation of the Speaker of the House of Commons. Though widely expected, and called for, this act, again for the first time in more than 300 years, has set the entire government, majority and opposition alike, on their arse and made them think about just how quickly they are racing towards the abyss of writing themselves out of governance and into history.

There is a lot of talking about cooler heads prevailing and the like, but coming down the tracks like a dual locomotive are the 4 June county and EU elections. The electorate are fuming and they are ready to elect anyone who is not currently in power. This could potentially send a bunch of fascistic “England for the English” folk, like the British National Party (we’ll pay you to just move back home and leave us alone) into Whitehall. No one bargained for this.

Meanwhile the Germans and French, in the person of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, have already issued warnings that if the Conservatives (Tories) or isolationists are elected they may need to restrict England from having a say on EU policy going forward.

This is, as my dad used to say, a right bloody mess.

On a lighter note. I noticed something in Mayfair the other day. You know those ridiculously gorgeous models in the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogues? If you go to the Mayfair outlet of A&F those very same models are there in person, wearing virtually nothing, and ready to greet you at the door and hand you a shopping basket. I kid you not.

Marks and Spenser, known affectionately around here as either M&S or Marks & Sparks, celebrate their 125^th anniversary this year, and so for three days, starting today, put 30 items on sale for a penny a piece, in recognition of their start as a penny shop (“Don’t ask the price, its a pence” was an early slogan). People started to line up at the flagship Oxford Street, Marble Arch location at 5 this morning and M&S handed out tea and coffee to those in line, along with cards listing the available products and little pencils so they could check up to five that they wanted.

Twiggy was there as Mistress of Ceremonies and has been all over the telly promoting it for the past week or so. At least we get to see a lot of Twiggy, whom fate and time have treated quite well indeed.

Bank Holiday, again! When Pawn first got here, nearly three weeks ago, England launched into a three day weekend, triggered by a bank holiday. In the US such a term evokes memories of the Great Depression, when “Bank Holiday” was a euphemism for a bank failure, wherein the government would shutter a bank for a few days while they sorted the books and then reopened the bank under national control. We have seen this happen with alarming regularity in the past year or so, but the FDIC, who handle such things, have gotten quite good at doing the whole thing over a weekend, so no one’s any the wiser.

Anyway, Bank Holiday weekends mean a few things. First off, sales, lots of sales. Two, everyone tries to leave London for the hinterlands, beaches of Brighton, etc. Third, half the underground goes under repair at once, and you cannot get anywhere you want. Fourth, the weather sucks. The forecasts are always rosy, but the actual weather always seems to suck. We’ll see if this time is any different.

The next item on today’s gazette, STRIKE! The RMT union have struck the Victoria line for a 24 hour stoppage from tonight at 9:00 pm. This is due to a little incident a couple of months ago wherein a train operator mistakenly opened the doors on the wrong side of the coaches of a Victoria Line train. The union pointed out that this line lacks the safety devices which prevent such a mistake on the other lines, but Transport for London (TfL) sacked the driver nonetheless. Thus the strike.

For me this means I may not get to see Cirxus up at Arcola Theatre’s new experimental Studio K space. Arcola are up in Dalston, in Hackney, and the only good way to get there from here is via the Victoria. I meant to go there tonight, but couldn’t risk being stranded with no way home. Thus my choice to attend Sadler’s Wells show. Tomorrow may work, but if the strike does continue for the full 24 hours it will be a no-go to get to Hackney. Bank Holiday means massive trains works, so that means the whole weekend is bullocks. >Sigh<

In other news of the day, I treked east to Bethnel Green again today, hoping to check out some more galleries there. Oops! Must learn to check the fine print more carefully. Most of these galleries are only open by appointment or on Friday and Saturday. Okay, add that to the list for the weekend.

Tomorrow L shows up from Wisconsin to visit her brother. We’ll hang out some, too. So look forward to more reports of someone getting annoyed at me for walking fast or refusing to hail cabs or other such indignities. I am hard to cope with, which just adds to your reading delight.

Two final notes: I pinched an office chair from a rubbish skip the other day, an office block across the street is under rehab and they had a half dozen chairs out to the curb.

My favourite Gay-Bollywood-After-School-Special, Nina’s Heavenly Delights is on BBC One right now. Ah, joy!

Ta!

As I strolled into Petticoat Lane Market today I was approached by a well dressed man wearing a cobalt blue turban and a dark brown suit.  He wore a full, thick, lush beard, and had penetrating brown eyes.  He bore them into mine, and said:

You are a very lucky man
Next month will be very good for you
You will become famous in your field
You are a mastermind
You have one story in your head
Write the book.

I thanked him and walked on, a little bewildered but feeling generally compliant.