Culture fatigue

If I appear listless or lacking in humour I apologise at the outset - it's entirely possible my capacity for wit and clever insight was left at the roadstop in Oxford last night on the way home from Liverpool. What a loooo-o-ooong last few days it has been. Amazing in so many ways but I am now so tired I don't even have the energy to watch America's Next Top Model - surely the one true and effective antidote to a serious case of Culture Fatigue.

I got home late last night from our three day trip to the North of England - Sudeley Castle (which is in the Cotswolds if anyone is interested...), Birmingham to see the Martin Creed exhibition at Ikon Gallery and then two days in Liverpool for the Biennial. 2008 European Capital of Culture maybe but sometimes a dump is just a dump, you know? Certainly a hectic few days - but in many ways also the ultimate magical mystery tour (sorry - couldn't help myself) of all things art and crazy.

Sudeley Castle was on the list because every year it holds an outdoor sculpture event called Reconstruction. Contemporary art meets gothic ruins - that sort of thing. A fabulous idea really and a fabulous exhibition too - despite the rain - thank goodness for sculpted hedges to hide under. These were just two of my favourite works - taken between bouts of thunderous downpour. This here being a work by Henry Krokatsis (the name of which escapes me....)


And this one, by Kevin Francis Gray, which was particularly evocative - especially when you looked up at her face through the beads...



Just insane. Won't go all art theory on you but suffice to say there's been a lot to think about and it's been fascinating. Not like Birmingham - rife with idling police oficers thanks to the Conservative Party Conference that was also on that day. Ikon Gallery though was great and an interesting exhibition of Martin Creed's work, despite the videos of vomiting and anal sex. For those of you that don't know, Creed won the Turner Prize a couple of years ago for his installation featuring a room with a light that went on and off. And then on and off again. And then...

We also saw an amazing project by an Italian artist called Claudia Losi that was all about whales.

Uh huh.

Anyway - Birmingham was a flying visit and we got to Liverpool (after leaving London at 7.30am) at 7.30pm. The whole experience was rather like school camp - long bus trips, communal lolly eating etc etc - except at this camp you got to stay at the Holiday Inn Express. Thankfully we didn't spend much time there (a hotel whose chief appeal is its proximity to the Beatles Museum doesn't hold much sway with a bunch of girls from London it has to be said...)

The Biennial had a lot on offer - sadly most of it was seen in the rain on the first day - not the most conducive of conditions for viewing outdoor sculpture - especially when you add icy winds and an ambient 8 degrees.

As with any biennial of this scale there was a lot of dross but enough sparkling moments of genuine ingenuity, beauty, perplexity, humour and intelligence to make it overwhelmingly worthwhile. Highlights would include Ai Wei Wei's Web of Light...


Richard Wilson's Turning the Place Over...

Steve Mcqueen's Queen and Country (no pictures sadly but the most beautiful, brilliant work about the Iraq War and all the British soldiers who have died in the conflict) and Yayoi Kasuma's totally immersive and utterly hypnotic Gleaming Lights of the Souls...


This was one of the very last works we saw before beginning the shlep back to London. She's a Japanese artist who lives voluntarily in a mental asylum (though she comes out for openings apparently...) Her work is exquisite and totally trippy - you certainly get a sense, among other things, of what it would be like to suffer, as Yayoi does, from a vision constantly obscured by hallucinogenic-like dots. In this work you enter a darkened enclosed space with mirrored walls and roof and a floor of water surrounding the small standing platform. The room is dark but for a series of suspended light bulbs that change colour intermittently - creating an otherworldly, ad infinitum experience. It was fairly magical. And quite mysterious.

There were other highlights of course, one of which was getting to know more of the girls on the course. We didn't sit around singing camp songs or braiding each others hair but we drank a bit and gossiped and bitched - talked art and shoes and boys. And we were all of us thrilled to get back to London last night. Nothing like a six hour bus trip for a bit of communal bonding.

No plans for the weekend - though half of Saturday has already been squandered because I refuse to get out of bed it's so fucking cold - but looking forward to next week - Rothko at the Tate Modern, some great lectures, return of the first assignments... And then Berlin. I mean "Reading Week"...