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deviWhat a great weekend. Even most of the crap bits were sort of great. It started on a beautiful sunny Friday evening as ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
killalla, kauket, Adam and myself went punting from Magdalen Bridge. So terribly Oxford: calm green water, weeping trees, spires hazy in the distance, people studying on the riverbanks. It all had that too-idyllic-to-be-real feeling I had in winter when I started cycling around town, like we were in a period drama. Kat had brought cupcakes. We didn't talk that much. In between fending off banks and other boats with the paddle, I touched the water with it to make intersecting patterns of ripples. Once Jo made a sort of "ahhh" noise which was exactly what I'd just been thinking.
Then to Templars for barbecue and games.
I slept in on Saturday, into the afternoon. That was the plan: it was going to be a very late night. Then I set off to get a top-up of London to keep me going. On my way down on the Oxford Tube, the sun was shining on yellow fields and hawks were hovering. When London came up around me it didn't feel draining, like it sometimes had before. It buzzed, and I was fresh enough to catch the buzz and run with it. The music I chose got faster the closer I got to the centre.
As soon as I got on the tube I saw three people in completely ridiculous outfits the like of which I'd never seen before: brocade tracksuits with short legs, flat caps and beaver hats made of patchwork and gingham. Fancy dress? The new style among Shoreditch Twats, or is it Whitechapel Twats now? Yeah, London.
Across Trafalgar Square – Nelson's Column is covered in scaffolding with scary ads about climate change, shots of landmarks under water – and down the Mall, getting tree pollen in my eyes, and I arrived at the ICA to see the Beck's Futures exhibition the day before it closed.
The title of the post is one of a list of jokey exhibition titles by Stefan Bruggemann, which covered three walls of one room. It was amusing, though more like something you'd read on a website than something you'd expect to see at an exhibition. I was excited to see Sue Tompkins's stuff because I'd recently read about it in a story bysibyline. Her characters were at an exhibition in New York. One of them got it, the other didn't. It's fragile pieces of newsprint paper stuck to the wall, with semi-random creases and often mistyped words scattered across them. ("I am disconnected from life! Sing it!") It's the kind of word-based thing I usually like, but it didn't move me. I was seeing it through a screen of expectations from the story and I couldn't decide if I liked it or not. More fun was the pebbledash pillar, shaped a bit like the BT tower. If you look closely you realise, with a jolt of perspective shift, that every pebble has a face. Silly, but I like the jolt, the surprise.
But the thing I've spent most time thinking about since, even though most commenters didn't seem to like it, was Simon Popper's stacks of alphabetised copies of Ulysses. You could flip through them. They each started with pages of As and ended with pages of full stops, as if the book were saying "The story's over. No, really, it is. Move along, please, ladies and gentlemen. What are you doing still hanging around? Go home!" There was a whole page of yes and maybe three of Street, all looking naked without their proper noun to make them special. Then there were the words which only happened once: things like myriadislanded and STORMBIRDS. I tried to work out why it made me uncomfortable to see a book rearranged like this. Imagine having to reassemble it! That would be a hopeless task for a fairytale heroine, like spinning gold from straw. The more I thought about it the more twitchy I felt. I suppose it's another example of something you can't understand better by breaking it down into its component parts. You just end up killing it.
I sat and watched Matt Stokes's video of a soul dance event in a church, mesmerised by the girl spinning in a white circle skirt who looked like a jive dervish, until they threw me out. Walking past a wall where projected silhouettes marched back and forth, I got some burnt-tasting coffee and sat in the café reading the programme.
I like modern art because it's so vague, not in spite of that. My brain struggles to explain it and sometimes comes up with very cool stuff, while for more traditional art there only seems to be one obvious story. But it's funny how I often get the wrong end of the stick. "His works suggest the pleasures of luxury," the booklet said, of a tortelloni-obsessed artist whose work had actually made me feel claustrophobic and stifled. But is there even a wrong end of the stick to get? Perhaps my end of the stick is just as valid as Tortelloni Man's. Maybe there is no stick. I dunno. As I was pondering I looked up at the wall of silhouettes and – whoa! – there I was, walking along with my bag on one shoulder and my coat over the other arm. The shadows were being filmed on the spot, all of people walking by.
An electronic folk singer called Katy Carr was playing. She sounded great, kind of Four Tet-ish, but that sort of music needs space within it, silences between the notes and the electronic clicks and squelches, and in the ICA bar all the silences were filled with people shouting in each other's ears. I want to hear her on CD, in an otherwise quiet room.
So after some coveting of the entire bookshop and some texting to find out the plan, I headed down to Borough for the next bit. And what a next bit it was.
Let me know if there's loads of space between paragraphs. LJ doesn't seem to want to put in line breaks, so I've put them in as html. It was like this the last time I posted too. Hmm.
killalla, kauket, Adam and myself went punting from Magdalen Bridge. So terribly Oxford: calm green water, weeping trees, spires hazy in the distance, people studying on the riverbanks. It all had that too-idyllic-to-be-real feeling I had in winter when I started cycling around town, like we were in a period drama. Kat had brought cupcakes. We didn't talk that much. In between fending off banks and other boats with the paddle, I touched the water with it to make intersecting patterns of ripples. Once Jo made a sort of "ahhh" noise which was exactly what I'd just been thinking.
Then to Templars for barbecue and games.
I slept in on Saturday, into the afternoon. That was the plan: it was going to be a very late night. Then I set off to get a top-up of London to keep me going. On my way down on the Oxford Tube, the sun was shining on yellow fields and hawks were hovering. When London came up around me it didn't feel draining, like it sometimes had before. It buzzed, and I was fresh enough to catch the buzz and run with it. The music I chose got faster the closer I got to the centre.
As soon as I got on the tube I saw three people in completely ridiculous outfits the like of which I'd never seen before: brocade tracksuits with short legs, flat caps and beaver hats made of patchwork and gingham. Fancy dress? The new style among Shoreditch Twats, or is it Whitechapel Twats now? Yeah, London.
Across Trafalgar Square – Nelson's Column is covered in scaffolding with scary ads about climate change, shots of landmarks under water – and down the Mall, getting tree pollen in my eyes, and I arrived at the ICA to see the Beck's Futures exhibition the day before it closed.
The title of the post is one of a list of jokey exhibition titles by Stefan Bruggemann, which covered three walls of one room. It was amusing, though more like something you'd read on a website than something you'd expect to see at an exhibition. I was excited to see Sue Tompkins's stuff because I'd recently read about it in a story by
sibyline. Her characters were at an exhibition in New York. One of them got it, the other didn't. It's fragile pieces of newsprint paper stuck to the wall, with semi-random creases and often mistyped words scattered across them. ("I am disconnected from life! Sing it!") It's the kind of word-based thing I usually like, but it didn't move me. I was seeing it through a screen of expectations from the story and I couldn't decide if I liked it or not. More fun was the pebbledash pillar, shaped a bit like the BT tower. If you look closely you realise, with a jolt of perspective shift, that every pebble has a face. Silly, but I like the jolt, the surprise.
But the thing I've spent most time thinking about since, even though most commenters didn't seem to like it, was Simon Popper's stacks of alphabetised copies of Ulysses. You could flip through them. They each started with pages of As and ended with pages of full stops, as if the book were saying "The story's over. No, really, it is. Move along, please, ladies and gentlemen. What are you doing still hanging around? Go home!" There was a whole page of yes and maybe three of Street, all looking naked without their proper noun to make them special. Then there were the words which only happened once: things like myriadislanded and STORMBIRDS. I tried to work out why it made me uncomfortable to see a book rearranged like this. Imagine having to reassemble it! That would be a hopeless task for a fairytale heroine, like spinning gold from straw. The more I thought about it the more twitchy I felt. I suppose it's another example of something you can't understand better by breaking it down into its component parts. You just end up killing it.
I sat and watched Matt Stokes's video of a soul dance event in a church, mesmerised by the girl spinning in a white circle skirt who looked like a jive dervish, until they threw me out. Walking past a wall where projected silhouettes marched back and forth, I got some burnt-tasting coffee and sat in the café reading the programme.
I like modern art because it's so vague, not in spite of that. My brain struggles to explain it and sometimes comes up with very cool stuff, while for more traditional art there only seems to be one obvious story. But it's funny how I often get the wrong end of the stick. "His works suggest the pleasures of luxury," the booklet said, of a tortelloni-obsessed artist whose work had actually made me feel claustrophobic and stifled. But is there even a wrong end of the stick to get? Perhaps my end of the stick is just as valid as Tortelloni Man's. Maybe there is no stick. I dunno. As I was pondering I looked up at the wall of silhouettes and – whoa! – there I was, walking along with my bag on one shoulder and my coat over the other arm. The shadows were being filmed on the spot, all of people walking by.
An electronic folk singer called Katy Carr was playing. She sounded great, kind of Four Tet-ish, but that sort of music needs space within it, silences between the notes and the electronic clicks and squelches, and in the ICA bar all the silences were filled with people shouting in each other's ears. I want to hear her on CD, in an otherwise quiet room.
So after some coveting of the entire bookshop and some texting to find out the plan, I headed down to Borough for the next bit. And what a next bit it was.
Let me know if there's loads of space between paragraphs. LJ doesn't seem to want to put in line breaks, so I've put them in as html. It was like this the last time I posted too. Hmm.
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no subject
Date: 2006-05-16 11:42 am (UTC)Reminds me of the memorial in Washington to American soldiers who died in the Vietnam war. The assumption had been that the names of the soldiers would go on in alphabetical order, for how else would families be able to find the names of the men they’d lost? But how horrible it would have been for the Smith family to find their dad’s name lost in a sea of other Smiths.
The designer chose instead to order the names chronologically by date of death. Soldiers who died together are listed together.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-16 02:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-05-16 11:55 am (UTC)I was totally intimidated by the Ulysses, though, both because it was ULYSSES and because I didnt' know what to do with it. One of the people I was with flicked though a copy that was laying open on the windowsill, and I wandered off hurriedly with a flash of 'oooh, no, we'll get in trouble!' going through my brain.
no subject
Date: 2006-05-16 12:00 pm (UTC)I felt slightly naughty looking through the book too, even though that was what it was there for. Touching the exhibits! Bad! An alarm will go off and lights will start to flash...
I think the bus stop was the only thing I liked in the other upstairs room.
brain struggles to explain it and sometimes comes up with
Date: 2006-05-16 01:49 pm (UTC)(Paragraphs look fine to me.)
Re: brain struggles to explain it and sometimes comes up with
Date: 2006-05-17 01:52 pm (UTC)Yeah - I can, and I do, but it's a totally different sensation and form of entertainment. I have trouble considering conceptual and traditional art as part of the same thing at all.
They're vivisecting our books!!!
Date: 2006-05-16 01:56 pm (UTC)It reminds me of a story I heard last week. Apparently you can now go on corporate racetrack outings where you sit in the bar, drinking, betting and watching the race on a TV monitor as usual... except that the race isn't real. It's a tape of some random past event, on which you can still place your bets because, let's face it, who's going to recognise the horses?
No good can come of this. It's just the sort of thing which ends up with giant invisible battleships materialising in mid air and dispatching their sailor servitor units to drag museum exhibits off to a more conceptual space...
Re: They're vivisecting our books!!!
Date: 2006-05-17 11:55 am (UTC)And I was just writing a bit in the travel book about Japanese arcades where you can train and race horses in the Metaverse and hold race meetings with teams from other arcades...
I don't think the invisible battleships are going to kidnap things back to idea-space, I think idea-space is colonising us.
Re: They're vivisecting our books!!!
Date: 2006-05-17 12:43 pm (UTC)Dear God. Have these people never even heard of Sapphire and Steel?
I don't think the invisible battleships are going to kidnap things back to idea-space, I think idea-space is colonising us.
I think I have the Fear now. Excuse me while I go and hide under the covers where the Colourless Green Ideas can't get me...
Re: They're vivisecting our books!!!
Date: 2006-05-17 01:48 pm (UTC)Re: They're vivisecting our books!!!
Date: 2006-05-17 04:01 pm (UTC)Tonight, I shall drown them all. I only hope they don't know how to swim...
no subject
Date: 2006-05-16 08:39 pm (UTC)The thing I found particularly interesting this weekend is that they've demolished Rachel Whiteread's "Embankment", which is currently lying in shredded form in about fifty large white sacks. However, those sacks are arranged in a square on the Level 2 balcony, next to a notice about the work, which leads me to suspect Whiteread is pulling a sneaky flanker at getting a second artwork out of it...
no subject
Date: 2006-05-17 12:25 pm (UTC)The Rachel Whiteread thing reminds me - at the ICA I did the whole cliche thing of staring at a newspaper rack on the wall and wondering if it was part of the artwork or not. (It was.)
no subject
Date: 2006-05-19 07:51 pm (UTC)And one day I'll make it to Dennis Severs House, which looks weirdly wonderful.
then there's Kettle's Yard - if only it was open at times when I can actually get to it...
no subject
Date: 2006-05-18 12:49 pm (UTC)