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.)

The art of Peckham

After all the gallivanting of late I was pretty excited to have a weekend kicking about in London – especially now that summer has announced itself with ferocious good will.

This last weekend has been about two things mostly: Peckham. And Art. And not just because I had to work on Saturday afternoon…

Bold Tendencies, 2013

As all weekends do, this one kicked off on Friday evening. I’d managed to guilt Lovely Boy into joining me for post-work drinks in Peckham. His “but it’s just so…. far….” line didn’t really garner much sympathy. 

Me: “Oh you mean that journey that I make twice a day five days a week? That one? Too far? Really?”

Him: "...I'll meet you there." 

Casual tourism...

...Otherwise known as Life on the Monopoly Board.

Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery by night

So much about London drives me absolutely insane and a large part of that is the gall to be so completely insanity inducing one minute, and just so insanely in-your-face impressive the next.

Take today.

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. 

Jumping on Jeremy

This is a cheat post. One of those posts where you stick up a bunch of images in lieu of substantive or witty writing to tell yourself you updated the blog. Tick.

I am writing. Just elsewhere. A book. I'm nearly done. I promise.

In the meantime, distract yourself with pictures of our visit to Burgess Park, Peckham two weekends ago to jump on Jeremy Deller, or rather, Jeremy Deller's brilliant, bouncing Stonehenge spectacle, Sacrilege. The title says it all really.

Things I Want To Do When...

Am busy. Stupidly busy. Swigging diet coke at 3am busy. It's awful. I look awful. But soon - soon - it will be finished and normal transmission will resume.

Then I Will...

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.

Revolving doors

crazy sky over Hammersmith last week

Lovely Boy and I are contemplating the installation of a revolving front door. Or perhaps a listing on tripadvisor. At the very least a guest book. Our little house feels tired - scruffy round the edges and lightly bathed in dust - so god knows what we ourselves look like after what can only be described as a very busy month of house guests. We had LB's sister, her husband, their baby and all the accessories that come with an 11 month old for 10 days, then a friend from New Zealand for a night, then a 24 hour flying visit from Mum and Max. And this morning we bade goodbye to my little sister's boyfriends little sister whose been with us these last two nights between post-school Europe adventures and still-post-school Canadian ones. It's been wonderful to have had so many visitors from home this year but we do live in a one bedroom flat. Waiting to Exhale is not just a bad Whitney Houston movie.

My Seven Links

Some weeks ago my Lovely Friend (also known as Tori of eat-tori fame) tagged me as part of a blog project called My Seven Links organised by website Tripbase.

It's my kind of project - an opportunity to trawl back through the endless reams of my navel gazing to find seven posts I think fit the following categories....


My most popular post
This was a tie between two posts but for obvious sentimental reasons I've decided to nominate this one. A trip to Turkey and the small matter of a proposal...

Turkish Delights

A post whose success surprises me
I have no idea why this post has been as popular as it has. It's a fairly standard post, I mean scintillating, but just regular scintillating with some art pondering, some east London eating and the usual work wobbles and thoughts of home.

Pinch me moments and friends from home

My most beautiful post
This one is very personal to me. Not written for any other reason than to articulate my grief about the death of my grandmother. I didn't write it to be read so much as write it to make tangible and articulate a knot of overwhelming feelings. I still feel her absence and I miss her and love her always.

84 and a day and 31 tomorrow            

My most controversial post
This frankly is as controversial as it is nasty. Thanks to a rambling introduction that ranged from Chanel lipstick to caffeine-supported exhaustion and the need to kick my own arse this post came up - repeatedly - when someone typed into Google Arabic - repeatedly - "lipstick on girls arses". Coco would be horrified.

Redbull and lipstick

My most helpful post
This one, like my 'most beautiful' post is a testament to the cathartic powers of word vomit. This post is the written equivalent of forcing my fingers down my throat.

The post too big for a title

A post you feel didn't get the attention it deserved
This one is kind of tricky as I've never really thought of my blog as a means for attracting attention but something about this post has always appealed for some reason. I think I think I'm especially witty or something...

Fit and you know it

The post you are most proud of
I'm going to take liberties here and post three links. I'm not sure why these particular posts appeal to me or why I'm most proud of them but I think they are the kinds of posts I imagined my blog to be when I moved to London to travel, immerse myself in art and write and reflect on everything I learned along the way - about myself as much as the world at large.

A trip down memory lane with my 18 year old self... Brighton Rock(s)!

A trip to Berlin, my most favourite European city... I (heart) Berlin

A trip to the British Library and a little bit of art... Some ish and some art

A recent launch and an imminent departure

I'm going to try and get in one last naval gaze before an inevitable phone call this weekend about my resilient in mind if not in body grandmother. Wanting someone's misery to end and not wanting them to die are two difficult emotions to reconcile and grief frankly scares the shit out of me it's so huge. But that's another naval gaze.

Mat Collishaw, Ryan Gander.

Pinch me moments and friends from home.

I worked out today it's 32 weeks until LB and I fly home to Sydney and the thought rather depressed me as it feels like SO FAR AWAY. Probably, well, because it is. I also calculated it's 10 days until we leave for Greece so I really should try and keep things in perspective but it's Mother's Day in Australia today and I've been thinking about home, and mothers, grandmothers and family generally, A LOT. So thank god for a phone plan that gives me 800 international minutes a month. You know who you are and you know how much I love you.

Sentiment mine but signage courtesy of Southbank

I sound flat, I'm really not, just philosophical as I think about work, career, marriage, living overseas and that thing called a life plan and feel, for the first time in a really long time, reasonably calm that It Will All Work Out. One way or another.

I've struggled to enjoy work this last week. A lack of confidence hasn't helped, nor have external politics and the pressure of a ridiculously stressful deadline but on Friday I was the only one in the office and I managed to get quite a lot done so I'm hoping this week will be constructive and exciting. No pressure.

More bunting love...

One of the highlights of work last week though was a meeting at Tate Britain. Not so much the meeting itself but the walk I took from my exercise class in Covent Garden to the gallery. I walked through Trafalgar Square and then down Whitehall, with a quick detour to cop a look at all the flags still decorating the Mall, past Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Silly me, being early, thought I might swing past and stick my head in the door of the Abbey so I could gape at all the beautiful trees and flowers still in situ from The Wedding. Not a chance in hell of making my meeting with a line that looked like this:

On Thursday I had Another 'pinch me' moment after Another meeting, this time on Southbank. My love of bunting has been discussed elsewhere but I so love all the signage around the Royal Festival Hall for the Festival of Britain. I also fell a little bit in love with this work by Gitta Gschwendtner, called The Lion and Unicorn, after the Lion and Unicorn Pavilion from the 1951 Festival. Fifty years ago the Pavilion was designed to show who the British people were, largely to the British people themselves and part of that pavilion was a flight of ceramic birds designed to symbolise migration and freedom of speech.

Gitta Sschwendtner, The Lion and Unicorn, Southbank, 2011

Gschwendtner's work is an ephemeral homage to this work and the result of a collaboration with a number of young people from refugee groups across London. She asked them to write poems that explored ideas of strength and imagination and then re-cast their written poems not as birds but paper aeroplanes. While some thoughts were thus 'set free', the others fluttered in the wind as part of a sculptural installation, where you could go up and read the poems or listen as pre-recorded readings were played. It was just so beautiful, both in its fragility and its power and I felt so heartened by the encounter, the more so because it was so accidental. The metaphorical potential for this work, visually, politically and poetically is just breathtaking.

And from one lovely encounter I headed for another as at home waiting for me was LB and a dear friend from home, Bec, making her debut on British soil. Bec and her sister had arrived on Wednesday and being a working girl these days I had barely had a chance to see her. Thankfully she came to stay and we've had three lovely nights of catching up, talking friends from home, talking weddings, travel and all about London.  

On Friday night we decided that a quintessential London night was needed and so we went east, for a drink at the so-cool-if-it-wasn't-in-Shoreditch-it-would-be-in-Melbourne Commercial Tavern, with its fabulous wallpapers, light fittings and not so fabulous loud music. From here we went to Brick Lane for some Indian and introduced Bec to the cultural delight that is getting seduced or harassed, depending on your temperament, by the smooth talkers touting every restaurant along the strip. One even had hologram business cards. 

Interiors upstairs at the Commercial Tavern.

Brick Lane... Yes there really are bricks.

After too much naan bread and just enough wine to make us sleepy we headed home with a plan to tackle Borough the next day. Which we did, via a button shop on Marylebone Lane so I could replace the admittedly ugly buttons on the trench LB calls my flasher coat. I take such comments as a reassuring sign of his heterosexuality and frankly of all the fashion crimes I could be committing, there are worse out there. Much Worse. (And n.b. I'm not the only one who thinks so. The very clever Amy Sly came up with this handy chart for the Huffpost and I feel it's my social responsibility to share it here:)

By Amy Sly and first seen here

But back to Borough. Being a sort-of-sunny Saturday and frankly, simply Saturday, the market was rammed but we nonetheless successfully navigated our way past every cheese stall with a tasting plate and over a lunch of burgers (mine halloumi, LBB's duck and Bec's lamb) we came up with a menu for dinner that night. Slow cooked leg of lamb and roasted beets, asparagus and vine tomatoes. With Portuguese tarts for dessert. A large part of the recipe's appeal was the three hours it would take to cook, which gave us three hours for Pimms at the pub while the house filled with the intoxicating smell of lamb, mint and garlic. It was seriously delicious. 

Sitting under Southwark Cathedral.
Food already consumed by this point.

The fruits of our shopping labour.

Today we've done zero. Bec left for the non-London parts of the UK to visit her mum and LB and I have dossed about the house, cleaning, TV watching, Thailand googling (honeymoon anyone?) and generally trying not to think about the five day week ahead. It's been awhile since we've had one of those. Spring it may be but holidays it isn't. At least not until next week.

Welcome back woollens

It's cold. The clocks don't change for another two weeks, winter doesn't officially start until November 1 but today was the first day I felt it in my toes. That numbing, achy cold that says, "Hello, I think I need socks. And probably some sensible leather shoes in the form of smart boots." I was anticipating this day. Last week I pulled out all my woollens - the chunky knits, the cute cardies, the accessory scarves, the functional scarves, the v-necks, the roll necks and my three pairs of knitted bed socks. And still I left the house today in fabulous but totally inappropriate slip ons...

The grey is steadily making itself known, mopping up the last occasional blue days and sunshine with a moody sort of melancholy that will eventually see it settle in until March. Which feels like forever away and too soon at the same time. Not too soon for sunshine mind, more too soon for a new year with an old broken plan. But one thing at a time.

LB and I had a lovely weekend, armed with little more than a plan to do "Something" that involved leaving the house. Something turned out to be a stroll through Portobello Road Markets, the purchasing of an exquisite, totally insane necklace (for me, not LB) and a visit to Hyde Park to see the new Anish Kapoor sculpture exhibition. It's been a while since I dragged LB somewhere in the name of Art but we had a great time and I am now earnestly in love with Kapoor's work. His Sky Mirror appeared to me like an alchemic dish of lost souls and moments, with the stainless steel disc angled skywards and thus reflecting the shifting grey clouds and silent thoughts of the world above. It was just exquisite.

 

To write about it or not write about it however remains the question. Pithy, self-indulgent observation is one thing, sitting down to extol my MAsterful opinion on contemporary art is quite another. I still haven't written anything for myself since the knee-capping of my confidence and honestly, it feels just like that summer in 2006 when that stupid big wave at South Bondi landed on me after a moment of hesitation (FYI dive, don't think) and I came away with a mouthful of sand and an inability to go beyond knee deep for the rest of the summer without having a serious anxiety attack.

I'd like to imagine that my triumphant career version of the conquering of my oceanic panic by successfully swimming the Bondi to Bronte 12 months later was somewhere in the non-wave near pipeline but I'm not holding my breath. Basically, my convoluted point is that I think I have to learn to swim again, artistically speaking. And without the help of that patient Bronte lifeguard. 

I'm trying not to over-think overthinking it but giving up on my career - momentarily, temporarily or forever, whatever it is I'm doing right now - is basically me on the beach, refusing to get my feet wet. Or unable to. I don't know. Whatever the case, Anish Kapoor on a cold, grey day in Hyde Park made something inside me want to get back in the water. 

I guess I just have to trust that whenever I'm ready, I won't sink, despite the conditions. Though speaking of conditions, I probably shouldn't be waiting for a warm day either.  

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.