Pancakes and post-post modernism

I saw this great t-shirt the other day. It read "I can stop procrastinating. Just you wait and see."

Rather sums up my life at the moment. There's been lots of procrastinating and lots of waiting. Most recently for pancakes in honour of Pancake Day but also some serious waiting for everything from emails to dawn to summer to inspiration to an end to a seriously upsetting situation with a seriously suicidal flatmate. Say what you will but I've never been one to cope terribly well with not knowing what the hell is going to happen next.


Next week marks six months since I arrived in London and it's really only been in the last two or three weeks that I've stopped fighting being here and stopped trying to force myself to find every minute fabulous. I feel like my life here is finally starting to grow roots as my friendships develop and school becomes part of a bigger picture of events and meetings and outings and adventures.

I feel fairly certain though that however comfortable I get shoving people out of the way getting off the tube I will never stop appreciating the "pinch me I LIVE in LONDON" moments. I had one several weeks ago, walking through Trafalgar Square on my way back from the National Film Theatre because, well, cutting through Trafalgar Square just happened to be the fastest route and then yesterday, schlepping most unglamorously into school on the bus, I happened to look out the window only to find myself gazing at St Paul's Cathedral. It's all just so incidental and I think that's what makes it so fucking cool.



Lots of all else has been happening here of late. Some high brow some definately not so but it's been variably dizzying, exhausting, exciting and excruciating. And amidst it all there have been endless discussions about endless post-modernist dilemmas - is the Deleuzian theory of the rhiazome the most appropriate model for understanding the increasingly nomadic tendencies of contemporary art-making practice? Should you date the lovely guy or the guy with the cool record collection? That sort of thing.


Earlier this week we went to the Tate Triennial, titled appropriately enough, Altermodern - the curator Nicholas Bourriaud's hot new term for life and art post-post-modernism. I'm not sure if I think it's a crock of shit or not but the exhibition was by turns compelling and utter crap. I am a sucker though for a blockbuster entrance and Subodh Gupta's Line of Control was pretty spectacular - a mushroom cloud made entirely of silver pots and pans and other assorted kitchen accoutrements.

Someone made the comment the other day that often, the writing about art ultimately proves more important than the art itself. It's a provocative suggestion but the more I think about it and the more I read and the more art I see the more I think there's something to it. So I should probably stop using terms like 'crock of shit' when discussing important international exhibitions.