I dream about you brother,
Where did you go?
In the dull grey mornings,
I can’t hear you anymore.
As quiet as the hour before dawn,
Lost to the stars…
You.
There is no wind to carry your voice here,
A song for our youth.
Tragic though, for you to be forever young,
While I fall apart with every breath.
Your smile perfect,
Now dust to dust.
They lied to us,
About life.
The sun keep rising every day,
Keeper of the walking dead.
Better to dream instead,
Of you brother.
‘Barman, a cup of dark chocolate and 60 marshmallows and don’t go easy on the hundreds of thousands,” said the man on New Year’s Eve.
He was an iconoclast.
“Are you sure you don’t want a pint of lager or a large glass of red wine or a double JD?” said the barman.
He was a thinking man, this barman, and was busy writing a thesis on whether all intelligent life forms create the same complex and redundant and unequal social structures like human beings.
“Sir, it is New Year’s Eve and we are on the precipice of another year of whatever and by gosh I want to celebrate the end of this year of whatever with a cup of dark chocolate and 74 marshmallows and be generous with the Jimmies.”
“Didn’t you say 64 marshmallows?”
“64 or 70 squire, it’s all relative.”
The barman smiled on the outside and laughed on the inside.
“Take a pew and i’ll be with you in five,” the barman said.
The iconoclast took off his hat and bowed flamboyantly.
“From one gentleman to another sir, you rock like a rock and roll sandwich.”
“Tu es a minha vida.”
He had learnt how to say it only now it had no audience.
Did he dream her up? He couldn’t tell, unsure was he of his own skin.
A new world was beginning to flower and he’d never speak it. His heart was mute.
He wondered about the poetry of another culture and whether he could love it all the same.
Will I ever understand literature in another land? Through different words, the world is not the same.
“Tu es a minha vida,” he said.
What was this foreign language he no longer understood?
Like broken dreams, alien words splintered his memory. He’d never know.
He danced in his bedroom.
Alone.
At the weekend.
Silly man.
Crazy man.
Lonely man?
The song was good. You can’t beat Gloria’s philosophy – the rhythm is gonna get you.
Can’t fight it.
And so, the rhythm got him, bit him like the girl he loved used to bite him, mid-coital, in a dream, on a lazy Sunday afternoon in a bed.
That hurt.
Her smile.
His smile.
Their smiles.
He danced and danced and danced.
And laughed.
Silly man.
Crazy man.
Lonely man.
He didn’t think about much, only that he wanted a beer.
So he hurried down the flight of stairs, into the kitchen and came to his fridge.
Still dancing.
There was beer.
He took a stubbie, flipped the top open, enjoyed the tsh sound and bopped back up the stairs.
The music was coming to an end.
He pressed repeat… and again and again.
And he danced.
Not thinking, just dancing.
How good it is not to think.
Just a song and the want to dance.
But how long can you dance for?
What then when the music stops, in the silent aftermath?
So he drank and he danced until…
Until…
If there were no controversy in any given art medium there would be banality, which would be sacrilegious to its very existence. Proper art, from the deep subconscious recesses of the soul, from heartbreak and political and social and existential discourse, is not meant to be dull, or, indeed, if it is actually intended to be vacuous, then there’s a deliberate provocation behind this outcome, the insipidness of it all a statement against everything we think we know.
Life is monotonous, not art.
Nothing is more divisive in the British art world than the Turner Prize, an event which has such hype and controversy entrenched in its being, is able to spill out from the insulated highbrow world of contemporary art and into everyday conversation between Tom, Dick and Harry, who, in general, don’t give a shit about art, but are, against all odds, forced to opine on what they see as the mediocrity of some of the artworks up for the award.
“Fucking messy bed? Come round mind on a Sunday morning and I’ll give you a messy bed,” says Tom.
“What’s this about a piece of work winning last year that doesn’t even exist. Mental mate,” adds Dick.
“I like those Chapman Brothers, but what I don’t get is why they made blow up dolls out of bronze?” concludes Harry, somewhat inconclusively.
TDC are not the only people to get riled. In 2002, the Turner Prize irked the then Culture Minister Kim Howells so much that he said: “If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost. It is cold mechanical, conceptual bullshit.”
Had he made the remark in 1998, his second sentence – the first doesn’t exactly hide his true feelings about the prize – would probably have come across as a glowing appraisal of Chris Ofili’s mixed media work, which literally used elephant dung. People don’t get it and maybe they’re not meant to. Conclude by saying it is a pile of shit and depending on your audience, that sentence has two diametrical meanings. Either way, you get a clap.
And so here we are, in 2011, in the midst of the usual conversation as is befitting such a discordant prize. From October, this year’s exhibition will be held at Baltic in Gateshead, which is something of a beautiful thing for region. As someone who has come from the northeast, who loves art in all its forms – and was once a raucous critic against conceptual artwork – I am proud that my literal place of origin is host to such a contentious thing. It’s seminal for two reasons: it is the first time that it has been held outside a Tate gallery and its the second time it has been held outside of London. C’est bon as the French would say positively, merde if they thought otherwise.
This year’s artistic provocateurs are Karla Black for her solo show at the Galerie Capitain Petzel, Berlin, Martin Boyce for his solo exhibition at the Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich, Hilary Lloyd for her solo show at Raven Row, London, and George Shaw for his solo exhibition at the Baltic, Gateshead.
You could dub Black and Shaw as the most orthodox of artists in that they embrace primarily the medium of paint, the former tending to go for a sort of woman scorned mix of materials that have included Vaseline, lipstick, eye shadow and crushed chalk to explore how the mind reacts to order and mess, whilst the latter’s photogenic landscape prints embrace the boyish Humbrol enamel paint –traditionally used by model makers – to cast quiet and unnerving landscape portraits of his childhood, his palate of colours limited by what is available.
Boyce meanwhile pays homage to, or at least references, modernist philosophy, his installations characteristic of the designs of the early 20th century. His sculptural installations are complex, through which he weaves a narrative about what they say about themselves in the moment, the future and the world in which they will never be realized. Consequently, the objects can only meditate on the ‘what if?’
Lastly, we have Lloyd, an artist whose preferred medium is moving image but not conventionally so. The source of the image – e.g. DVD player, video projectors – is awkwardly juxtaposed in a certain way so as to draw attention to them, becoming a distraction in some ways from the pictures that emanate from their jaws. Her subject is the silent mechanism of life and the silent motions of industry. In the same way that we “don’t see” the construction of a building, we “don’t see” waiters zipping around like a bluebottle.
In his forward to World Art: The Essential Illustrated History, Dr Mike Mahony commented on how in “our image saturated epoch, the eye, it seems, is rarely afforded the opportunity to linger”. We aren’t spoiled with images but blinded with their bland documentary of a generation who had too much. We “don’t see” these pictures, which we’re grateful for, because they’re shit, but, whatever you may think about artwork that is most associated with the Turner Prize, they at least possess the power to stop, however shit they may be.
And you can take that whatever way you want.
The Turner Prize 2o11 is at the Baltic from 21st October 2011 until 8th January 2012
Where once we were a confusion of language and culture, isolated by the sea, I woke up one day in your dream and fell in love with your poetry.
parabéns a você
The heart of The Wolfmen’s second album is the end result of a number of fruitful sessions done back in 2010 with the Dandy Warhols’s Courtney Taylor-Taylor.
There is nothing new here: it’s a rock standard rock and roll album. It’s anachronistic. It has that feel of being from the late eighties/early nineties, which given the make-up of the band – Marco Pirroni on guitars and Chris Constantinou on bass guitar and lead vocals – makes perfect sense.
It reminds me of America at that time. A bit cheesy, a time when clothes stopped looking good, when denim on denim on denim and then some was a good look. When leather trousers were seen as cool.
It is, aside from the ordinary, a well-produced album that is tight as fuck, a reflection of their capacity to compose and arrange and mix an album well because they’re been mastering music for decades now. But it’s, well, safe.
Not that we’re asking them to go so far leftfield just for the sake of artistic ingenuity, just, sometimes, you gotta throw some seeds into a desert plain and see what, if anything, emerges.
Standout track is I’m Not a Young Man Anymore. My feet tapped and I dreamed of a Budweiser and a bandana tied around my head like the Karate Kid.
In some places that’s a cool look, which is kind of how this album feels.
Welcome to what is a fairly ample guide to some of the fine exhibitions that are and will be gracing the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (Mima) from today onwards right up to Spring 2012. It’ll keep you entertained, occupied and stimulated throughout all colourful seasons.
Spring season
The Modern Jewel: In Time and the Mind of Others is a Mima’s largest ever presentation of jewellery to date. Over the last year Middlesbrough Museums and Galleries worked in close consultation with Ted Noten and Lin Cheung & Laura Potten, as well as to commissioning unique pieces of jewellery for the collection and the people of Middlesbrough.
Spanning over four large gallery spaces, the jewellery is being shown along with other works from contemporary makers. The project is part of prestigious national programme known as museumaker, which involves 16 museums across four regions.
The eponymous show from Carey Young, a multimedia artist whose mediums include photography, video, text and installation, examines the ideas of rhetoric, protest and performance in light of economic globalisation, which has, to put it simply, left the world on the precipice of uncertainty.
Unquestionably, this is another age of soul-searching, of Marx’s return and the consequent end of capitalism, but, if history truly tells us anything, it’s that we go round and round and round.
Memento Park (2010) is a video shot in the suburban locale of Budapest’s Soviet statue part, is a restrained deliberation on propaganda and contemporary leftist identity.
Summer Season
A personal insight into the world of Ben Nicholson is presented in the show The Intimate Surface of Modernism. This exhibition seeks to show a different side to one of the most important British artists to have emerged in the twentieth century by examining a collection of his work that is more personal and different to what we’re accustomed to. A sense of family and place is left open to interpretation.
A fantastic addition to summer is the huge show based around the art of the collage in paper, painting, sculpture and film. Transmitter/Receiver The Persistence of Collage is a touring exhibition from the arts council’s collection that traces the history of collage in British Art.
Exploring the first influences of the Parisian avant-garde upon Ben Nicholson’s modernist work and surrealists like Eileen Agar and Roland Penrose – is the appearance of persistence in the title a subconscious reference to Dali? – as well as contemporary artists like Steve Claydon, Idris Khan and David Noonan, the luminous show looks at our perceptions of culture and how we use it.
Fast & Slow is a captivating production of Richard Forster’s specially commissioned drawings, 52 in total, one for every week of the year.
Dealing with and reacting to the passage of time, the photo-like pencil images capture, so to speak, the briefest moments of time. Are they important? It’s like every time you see that girl you have fallen in love with who always passes you by on the bus or on the street and before a moment can be seized, like a rare cool breeze on a roasting day, she’s gone.
The central point of the exhibition is a series of 24 drawings of film stills – again, subtle, unknowing references to time and day – frozen at regular intervals. For your information, they illustrate the development of the 1926 Torten housing estate in Dessau. Accompanying and complementing the exhibition is a new short story from the award-winning author Colm Toibin.
This is the museum solo show from the northeast based artist.
Winter season
In collaboration with the Drawing Room, London, The Peripatetic School: Itinerant drawing from Latin America showcases Latin American art that deals with both rural and urban landscapes. Specifically, the myriad of work investigates what it means to travel and/or move through the world, especially by walking alone.
Many of the artists included in the show work through the medium of drawing, using innovative and diverse approaches that smudges the established boundaries of what an artistic medium actually is. Work done on paper transforms into sculptural objects and what appears to be an elementary line transcends into a video animation. Seeing is believing, or in this case, not quite so much.
And last, but by no means least, the final show, by its position in the calendar, we have Between Dimensions: The Representation of the Object. This is an exhibition done in collaboration with Towner and Tate looking at the exquisite force of still life. What more can we at Narc tell you? Not at lot! The organisers are still hush hush about the final details, after all, there’s a bit of fun to be had in teasing you, so that by March of 2012, when the remnants of wintering recede as the bloom of spring gradually appears, your growing anticipation will be met with a show that was worth the wait.
For dates and more information please visit mima.
Sometimes your read something and let out a pfff. Paperwork, bills, shit prose, words too hard to enunciate. Like ‘Pwr’… pfff.
Pwr lacks vowels. Try it. Pwr. It’s like a baby blowing meaningless sounds. Annoying. Not babies blowing words. That’s cute. Pwr, that’s what’s annoying. Pfff.
What to expect? First track Mountain Home kicks off with an arid buzz, a teaser followed by viscid synths and primordial drums tunefully arranged. It’s sumptuous; love at first sight.
So what they have a name I can’t pronounce, this is really good.
And then, much like faltering love, Baby Houses falls short of the endless possibility of the first song, so-so electronica leaving me relatively blasé. Melt offers hope, defined by a sweet hook, whereas National Parks’ dissension feels messy at time. Lakes is surprising, slowly revealing its beauty by taking us across the sky on electronic clouds. North Carolina is good, meant to be stirring, but not fantastic enough to achieve that. The languid Feel It seems deliberate as it is followed by the almost Indian Geodes, whose splashes of synths are like jets of water on a hot day –nourishing. Last is Your Life is Important – just a tad too cheerful to receive kudos.
Silly name. Pfff. Decent album… I smile.
A downright scrappy looking fella of 70, Seasick Steve is the kind of cool I like, namely the no-thrills I-am-what-I-am, and if that’s cool, then cool it is. He’s got an insouciant aesthetic that is dirt-hip, a fascinating life behind him as a hobo, a tramp and a bum, and a style of the blues that is all his own. This brilliant melange gives us an artist who is unconventional in everyway, and at a time in their lives where most artists are celebrating retrospectives of their careers – still making music but not as popular or critically lauded as before (i.e. not current) – Steve is experiencing a flourishing musical career.
You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks is another spectacular effort from the ole bluesman, his raspy voice in check, Deep South chords as mesmeric as ever, and his story telling way of broaching songs working smoother than a sharp Jack Daniels and coke, seesawing from straight talking to impassioned bouts of singing fluently. There’s range too, in his songs, from the surprisingly sombre Treasures – gorgeous bit of violin – to the veritably funky Don’t Know Why She Love Me But She Do, giving us an album that satisfies our fluctuating moods.
|
