2013. The year that really, really was.

Well 2013 has definitely been one for the books. As its final moments eek away I’m still grappling with everything that I saw, did, ate, accomplished, learnt, discovered and appreciated. I’m really not ready for 2014 to start and feel like I’m being dragged along, heels firmly entrenched, towards Getting On With Things when I’m still not ready to let go of London. So, really, New Years Eve is the perfect excuse for some indulgent looking back. And there’s a lot to twist the neck for….

Sunshine and saints alive

It’s stinky sweaty hot in London right now and its been this way for several weeks. Frankly, if it carries on any longer we might actually have to start calling it a summer. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Only in London could pubs and flower
baskets seem such natural companions

It’s been a strange, busy, exhausting couple of weeks – the heat not helped by the cold I seem to be coming down with – or the fact that Lovely Boy and I have finally called time on London, having made the humongous decision to go back to Sydney at the end of October. I sobbed telling work, absolutely well and truly lost my shit about it. There was not a single toy left in the pram because I love the people I work with and I love my job (case in point: they were amazing and supportive and inspired and wonderful.)

A little bit of lately

At the time of writing I’m en route to Kassel, Germany to see Documenta 13 – globetrotting art dilettante that I am – but even with a dedicated couple of hours to give here I’m slightly overwhelmed as to where to start on what is effectively a “Life Lately” catch up. Or really, a life lately, and life not so lately catch up.

The last nearly two months have been frantic. I do remember the last time I was this overwhelmed with exhaustion and adrenaline and it was pretty ugly then but that feels like a warm up compared to this recent marathon of sleep-deprived madness. 

Joy in Art (and people)

If the art world had art world-equivalent baseball cards I'd have collected Jeremy Deller this week, adding him to my haul of Mark Wallinger, Grayson Perry, Yayoi Kusama, Elmgreen & Dragset, Hew Locke, Ryan Gander and Tracey Emin.*

Signage for Deller's show at the Hayward

I spoke only briefly to Jeremy, in a quasi-dorky, carried a watermelon/really loved your exhibition kind of a way but before that I'd had the privilege to sit in on an hour-long Q&A he did with 30 young people at the Hayward Gallery as part of a cross-site visit organised by the young arts project.

We had the chance to take a look around his show beforehand and I really, really enjoyed it. I'd never known a great deal about Deller's work - my first major encounter with his practice was the work March 5, 2007, the wreckage of a car destroyed by a bomb in Iraq that killed 38 people on the date of its namesake. In 2010 the rusted, mangled heap was put on display in the grand hall of the Imperial War Museum in London amid a staggering arsenal of impressive military weapons - planes, grenades and rockets. It was the first and only artefact in the atrium to bear witness to the human impact of war and it's now in their permanent collection.

March 5, 2007 in the atrium at the Imperial War Museum.
Image: Anthony Devlin/PA. Courtesy the Guardian

In 2009 Deller took the car on a road trip across America in the company of an Iraqi citizen and a US soldier, hitching it to the back of a campervan, and the documentary about the experience, It Is What It Is (2009), which I hadn't seen before, is part of the Hayward exhibition, along with the car wreckage.

Jeremy Deller, It Is What It Is, 2009 (detail)

I want to call Deller a conceptual artist but there's a realist bent to his work with its explorations of cultural and social phenomena, communities, history and participation and the show brings together work from the past two decades, including a re-staging of the exhibition he held in his bedroom at his parents house in 1993 while they were away. There's a lot of humour to Deller's work and a subtle but compelling mix of compassion and pathos too. The exhibition includes a display of failed proposals including his controversial suggestion for the Fourth Plinth - a mannequin of Dr David Kelly, the biological warfare expert who committed suicide in 2003 after intense media scrutiny over his comments about government documents purporting to explain the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

Jeremy Deller - Fourth Plinth proposal. Copright: Jeremy Deller

And then there's his performance piece, I Heart Melancholy, where a lone performer reclines on a sofa set against an overwhelming wall reading, pondering, wallowing in melancholy.

These are just a handful of works on display - there's also a 3D film about bats and a relocated snack bar serving tea and coffee under a roof full of political banners - but the over-riding impression is of Deller's sincere curiosity about the dynamics of social encounter and collaboration and the nature of people. What's amusing is that despite this apparent 'Joy In People', Deller considers himself a pessimist and actually wanted to call the show 'Animal, Vegetable, Minerable, Pop Music'.

Jeremy Deller, I Heart Melancholy, 2011

His Q&A was lively and revealing and I was impressed actually with the questions put to him by the group. We filmed the whole event, which is good, because I spent a lot of the hour being distracted by the perils of live tweeting. I remain in two minds about the phenomena that is social media. Twitter to me feels like a rolling tsunami of information dressed up as white noise. It's exhausting. And apparently facebook now encourages socially aggressive narcissism so it just gets better and better.

Art has had quite a bit of attention the last couple of days actually (notwithstanding the fact that yes, I work in an art gallery so technically it has my attention every day...) but yesterday Lovely Boy and I went to the Affordable Art Fair in Battersea Park to buy ourselves a work of art. One of our wedding presents was money towards such a purchase and affordable being a key part of the remit, the fair seemed the ideal place to look for our modest masterpiece. LB was only mildly facetious, dragging out the best bits of his art vocabulary to declare a fancy for buying a piece of conceptual performance art - or else something in his most favourite medium, video.....

Jeremy Deller, Valerie's Snack Bar, 2009 

Strangely all out of video art, conceptual art and bad performance art, we were left instead with swathes of mediocre painting, the likes of which is typically found in bourgeois doctors surgeries and some interesting sculptures, including one of a bulldog wearing pearls.

Thankfully though we did come across several prints that we liked and in the end purchased two quirky screen prints by a British artist called Martin Grover that re-imagine London's public transport signage as sites for distracted, philosophical, humorous wonderings.

A sculptural version of the screenprint by Martin
Grover that we bought - out by the car park at the fair.

We have one at home on the wall already, the other is being framed and we'll have it in two weeks time. We're gathering quite the art collection now, with the delightful Daniel Lehan painting that the gallery gave us for a wedding present and the breath-taking Andre Derain lithograph from Lovely Boy's parents, another beautiful, brilliant gift.

Original watercolour by Daniel Lehan

From the Art Fair to the food fair, we grabbed lunch at Duke of York Square in Chelsea at the food market, proving unable to say no to blocks of cheese and jars of passionfruit curd along the way. And then a detour down a small side street in search of a pub so LB could indulge in a Guinness for St Patrick's Day before home and a late afternoon sleep.

Queens Head pub, Chelsea

Today I've cleaned the house, powered through three loads of washing and enjoyed the quiet delights of the house while Lovely Boy is out on a man-venture for the day.

This week I'm going to Gillian Wearing's private view at the Whitechapel Gallery and on Saturday it's Kusama madness at Tate.

If I wasn't a trained professional, I'd almost be artied out.



* In the interests of full disclosure I technically haven't exactly met all these artists but if I've emailed them, if I've written questions for them for an interview, if I've seen them at close range in some kind of non-accidental, non-everyday setting then I count them. My art world cards, my prerogative.

A pop-up invite and a very posh dinner.

It started with a pop-up invitation the likes of which I'll probably never receive again.

Actually, it started a couple of weeks before that, when we interviewed the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset for a film for the website. Thanks to a confluence of art world activities, all sponsored by the same luxury fashion brand (one of them: my job; another one of them: the Fourth Plinth Commission) I found myself in Trafalgar Square nearly a week ago exactly to witness the unveiling of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset's newest work for the square, Powerless Structures, Fig.101.

Frigid February

So it’s back to London and life as we knew it. It’s been a busy couple of weeks settling back in and I’d be lying if I didn’t say there were still some readjustments to be made. Not so much to married life, funnily enough it feels remarkably similar to engaged living-in-sin life, but to the absence that is – now was – a building, long-term anticipation for the megalith of home-summer-sydney-wedding-family.

I’m thanking my lucky stars (which may or may not resemble my mother and sister) that I didn’t turn into a crazy bridezilla during the 12 months leading up to the day (small incident with the cream vs. beige vs. off-white vs. white moment aside) but even still, there is a strange emptiness now that it’s all over and a funny wish to go back and experience it all again – but maybe as a guest this time just to see what it was like?... Or is that a bit latent bridezilla? Let it go Jo…. Let it go…

Some ish and some art

I've started August in earnest... Ish.

Tidied my room? Ish.

Started the arduous process that is researching my dissertation? Ish. With a dash of tick.

Returned fervently to my exercise regime of twice-weekly swims? Cough. Next?

Vowed to be a better writer, better ponderer, better Bondi girl when it comes to being 12,000 miles from home? Too early to say but I'm feeling optimistic.

The last time I wrote the parentals had just left and I was about to depart for Barcelona for The Meal of My Life at The Number One Restaurant In The Whole Wide World. That is a tale that very much needs to be told - a gastronomical, emotional, artistic(al) journey through 35 courses and some bloody fabulous wine. See previous point about being a better writer. To be honest, I don't yet have the words. But they're coming. Ish.


So to August for now and all things school and art and heavy intellectualisms. It's Dissertation Day Two and god bless Diet Coke - the ultimate fix all for hangovers, headaches and a curious affliction called Brain Fry. I popped my British Library cherry today and despite the curious fuzzy-headedness that resulted from six and a half hours churning through books on politics, monuments and the problematics of collective memory in artistic representation, I left feeling rather virtuous and too tired for tears.

As part of my Earnest August month - and because, you know, I'm doing a Masters degree in Contemporary Art - I have resolved to make more of an effort to see more art. It sounds silly I know, but in all my years as an art journalist, the more I wrote the less I actually had time to see. I am turning over a new leaf.

In truth it started last month, dubiously enough, with a visit to the Wapping Project in east London. A fabulous old building, the former Wapping Hydraulic Power Station in fact, it's been converted into a killer art space for exhibitions and performances but that also includes a chi chi restaurant and a cute-as little book store in the garden - inside a greenhouse.

What a total shame the exhibition we saw was utter shite. I hate feeling like art is taking the piss out of me, because I'm normally such a staunch defender of all things weird and ugly and challenging and silly. But this was, well, it was crap. An exhibition about the cultural history of eels, yes, eels, in Japan and the UK. There were some lovely sound installations, recordings of the daily kerfuffle at the Billingsgate Fish Markets, but otherwise, it was a room full of vitrines holding paraphernalia about eels - everything from fishing baskets to those naff patches your brother sewed on his football jumper. Yes. The Parramatta Eels got a mention...


So thank god for a wheatfield in the middle of Dalston.


Part of the Barbican's Radical Nature exhibition, the architectural collective EXYZT turned an abandoned railway line in east London into a functioning mill, with its own power-generating windmill. You could go and bake bread or simply lounge in a deck chair by the wheatfield and revel in the sheer delight of this little pocket of oddness.


As part of the off-site project, American land artist Agnes Denes was invited to re-create her famous 1982 work Wheatfield - A Confrontation. Twenty-seven years ago Denes planted two acres of wheat in Battery Park landfill in New York. Interrogating ideas about food, energy, economics and waste, it remains an iconic work:


Falling a little shy of two acres (by about 1.9 acres...) Denes' Dalston wheatfield is nevertheless a thought-provoking and in this instance, quite charming, interruption in an otherwise pretty drab industrial site. I liked it. No ish about it.

And then TODAY (earnest, earnest) I finally managed to get to Trafalgar Square to see Antony Gormley's take on the Fourth Plinth Project. Now I'm not sure what I think of Antony Gormley (shades of Artist-as-God complex perhaps?....) but his work for the Fourth Plinth was interesting, loath though I am to use that word because it says everything and nothing at the same time. The intellectual equivalent of a Milky Way bar.


But well, it was. The Fourth Plinth is, as the name suggests, the fourth plinth in iconic Trafalgar Square. The other three bear historically significant monuments dedicated to well, I'm not entirely sure who, but I'm sure they're important. Anyway - the fourth plinth, in the north west corner, was built in 1841 and intended for an equestrian statue that never eventuated. It was empty until 1998 when the Royal Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufactures and Commerce commissioned a series of temporary contemporary art works to sit on the plinth. Rachel Whiteread, Thomas Schutte and Mark Wallinger are just some of the big names to have plonked a big piece of sculpture on it.

And now it's Gormley's turn. For his 100 day work, One and Other, the artist invited members of the British public to sign up for a roster, an hour at a time, to sit on the plinth. Well, to sit, paint, sleep, dance, mime, protest - whatever the hell they wanted really. I'm not even sure it has to be legal. 2400 people - 24 hours a day for 100 days - are living the dream, immortalised as living, moving pieces of sculpture in one of the coolest locations in town. I imagine the view's not bad either.

I wasn't really sure what to expect, British Library Brain Fry and all. Maybe it was the hours of reading about monuments and democracy and the individual versus collective experience, but it turned out to be quite breath-taking seeing this tiny woman atop this huge plinth, just sitting and drawing. It was lovely too to just sit myself for a while and let my brain cells re-coagulate. While it wasn't terribly exciting up there on the plinth, there was still something quite impossibly cool about it, in the great tradition of anti-establishment gestures perhaps. And then the hour was up. And the crane came. And the lady with the sketch pad was replaced by a young girl with a banner that read "Happy 5th anniversary Sarah-Jane and Phil". It wasn't Shakespeare by any stretch of the imagination - but I think that's the point.


Speaking of Shakespeare though and funnily enough El Bulli comes to mind. Laughter, tears, confusion, strange nonsensical words and a period in the middle when we thought it would never end. Never mind being transported to a magical otherworldly place. And no, I don't mean the Costa Brava.

But that is a tale for another day. Soon. Ish.