Becoming a Possibilian in 2010

The Jill Magid exhibition called Authority to Remove - which finishes today at Tate Modern - is a brilliant reflection on the possible relationships between art and secrets, between artistic freedom and institutional power. Tate describes the exhibition thus:

Authority to Remove marks the final chapter of American artist Jill Magid's long involvement with the Dutch secret service, the AIVD. In 2005, she was commissioned by the AIVD (De Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst) to create an artwork for their new headquarters. This unlikely-seeming invitation came about as the result of a stipulation under Dutch law that a portion of the budget for the new building be spent on an art commission.

In her notes, the artist recounts the process of becoming art thus:

We want you to think of the book as an object of art. We will redact it and put it inside the vitrine with your notebooks where it will remain, permanently.

You want me to put it under glass

so that it will no longer function

as a book but as a sculpture?

Yes. He blinks his eyes rapidly.

It becomes an object of art.

The Director follows this in a soft,

imploring voice.

Will you consider that, Jill?'

(from the Epilogue p. 187)

By displaying her novel as a sculpture on a plinth,

in compliance with the Dutch secret service's

request, Magid's book is transformed

from a narrative into an art object.

Displayed in this way, it can no longer be read,

its secrets secure. The body of the book ripped

from spine becomes a metaphor for the

artist's experience – she has surrendered her first

novel but how can she surrender her memory?

The exhibition got me thinking about the gaps, the missing bits

in our text of life, the things we don't understand, the photographic

negatives - the black silhouettes of experience, I guess we could say.

Hence the weather vane. (The word hence indicating a very

solipsistic logic...apologies. If we think differently, just enjoy

the weather vanes.)

When I first began to think about stories, and how we encounter narrative within a physical dimension, I was in Milan, and I was working in theatre. Nowadays the narrative I work with is not told or acted, but displayed andobjectified.

So when the story is an artwork that reflects on the missing bits - as in Magid's Becoming Tarden (subtitle The secret itself is much more beautiful than its revelation)... well, it is, like all the great epics, all great theatre, all great television plots, ultimately a reflection on death. The negative of our life is by definition - and since hundreds of years before Christian times - exemplified by the concept of death.

Death has been the most tremendously effective tool for narrative plots and myths across all cultures - and a scientifically proven fact for just as long.

Follow me once again down the path of BT-logic, if you will.

Scientists seem to reflect less on death than storytellers, artists and humanists. (I am sure this is a controversial statement, but I admit to not being enough of a scientist to know for sure - let's say this is my impression). But what scientists do just as well as artists, is reflect on possibilities. And hence my other inspiration for the New Year comes from David Eagleman's book Sum, forty tales from the afterlives,a neuroscientific exploration of 40 scenarios of the afterlife - all imaginative, all provocative, and funny.

I will, for 2010, define myself as a possibilian, following in Mr Eagleman's footsteps and attempting to see the afterlife and death as the other side of the coin of life, a way of enriching every living moment and offering us a lens through which to view our shared condition humaine.

Best wishes for the new decade.

Medieval and Renaissance Galleries, Victoria and Albert Museum

The ten new galleries in the east wing of the V&A – which reopened last week to a tune of 32 well spent millions – are very impressive. I could not make the official opening, but pottered around on Sunday with a friend. Designed by McInnes Usher McKnight Architects, the spaces are extraordinary – especially the bizarre and extremely fun new link areas which have created new surface areas and volumes that can happily accommodate entire frontages of houses. We have, of course, seen this before, as museums worldwide struggle to find space in which to make publicly accessible their hidden collections, and re-invent galleries inside their buildings in which to do this. It requires gutting out and re-imagining outside spaces as inside spaces, and making the new architecture work with what remains of the historic building.

Many similar interventions have been hugely successful - in primis Foster’s Great Court at the British Museum and I. M. Pei’s Deutsches Historische Museum in Berlin. On a smaller scale, but to refer to a project on which I worked, Terry Farrell Architects opening up of vertical circulation within the buildings of the Royal Institution in central London.

But at the V&A the visibility of these innards – spaces that are external to the buildings that make up what we know as the V&A, an architectural jigsaw behind the unifying Edwardian façade – is bright, exciting and plain fun. It is as if the architects have imagined spilling objects out into the in-between spaces, playing between negative volumes on display and entrail volumes of the building.

Natural light floods in from above, accenting all those stupendous other sunlit marble halls dotted around the building, and the negative volumes sing out against the new spaces. It feels like walking around the cutout silhouette of the main galleries – exactly like when making Christmas biscuits you are left with the non-shapes, where circle sat next to rectangle – and you are left with whatever that in between end shape is. Walking through and around, you find yourself connected to the other galleries. It is a joyous, exciting and uplifting experience.

Thinking about what I do

I have been reading a very interesting book called Friends of Interpretable Objects, by Miguel Tamen, Professor of Literary Theory at University of Lisbon.

It is a small book, brimming with Portuguese flair and a taste for aesthetics – hence it felt very warm and inviting and triggered many memories of red-wine-fuelled philosophical conversations while writing my dissertation.

Tamen’s most exciting claim is that:

something becomes interpretable, and describable in an intentional way, only in the context of a specific “society of friends".

I am in the middle of dealing with a Friends group at a museum I am helping redevelop, and thankfully the society of friends he refers to is more a spiritual community, united by language and meaning making, than the technical definition comprising these wonderful – and voluntary – supporters of museums all over the world who have such a huge part to play in the renaissance of our sector.

Reading this book has provoked a shift in my perceptions of what I do. I understand all visitors (and possibly even non visitors) as constituting the society of friends that I work with. As an interpretative planner my job is to reflect on the process of meaning making, on how and around what do museum friends come together? In what way do they share meaning making? In Tamen’s terms: how can I help to “characterise language, interpretation and intention-attributing activities” so that messages and experiences that inhabit our museums are shared?

Of course, my answer cannot find expression in a paragraph on this blog. (Not only do I not own the language, I don't actually have the answer yet!) It emerges every day in working creatively around the challenges of an interpretative project. Every project team reveals different understandings and approaches. Even language itself is a cultural barrier in meaning making, as I discovered – for the upteenth time – recently, in my dealings with the Italian Ministry of Culture. My discovery was one of increased self awareness – little to do with professional capability, and lots to do with the need to re-align myself to a different culture of meaning making.

So my thought for this day: each society of friends impacts most profoundly on the interpretative plan that their museum adopts. But... how can we avoid self referentiality? And how does an interpretative planner deal with that? Suggestions?

Meeting Michelangelo

My time in Volterra was all too short. But time in Italy is a relative concept, and I found myself slowing down a little. A whole day was taken up by lecturing on to postgraduate students studing Museology in the Scuola Normale di Pisa – a very select institution among Italian universities.

On the way out from the lecture theatre, I caught sight of a poster on a church door (Volterra has thirteen churches inside its city walls) which stated in quaint English:

You are welcome, deer tourist guest. Enjoy nature’s beauty and human achievements, and we pray you return home physically rested and spiritually strengthened.

Signed, the Bishop

Spiritually strengthened but physically exhausted, I stepped inside a small alabaster studio where Pupo mastro alabastriere works. A friend had suggested to me that I go and visit this endearing, ancient Volterrano gentleman who works in a studio the size of a large table. Everything here is covered in fine white dust – so fine, in fact, that you don’t really see it: it just seems that a patina of ‘pale’ covers everything, including Pupo – who is very appropriately wearing beige and grey. The dust is of such fine texture that it just seems to make everything a shade paler, rather like looking at a faded photograph or at a landscape through a misty lens.

Slightly selfconsciously, I started to chat to Pupo, whose strong Tuscan accent with its c aspirate is a joy to my ears – it’s a bit like hearing Dante speaking to you.

Pupo described starting work in the family business at age 7, having decided school was boring. He talked about his mother, whose pale picture hung on the side – a birthday picture, wishing her many happy returns for her 103^rd birthday (in 2003 if I remember rightly). He talked about working in Milan producing cast models from which castings would be taken, and about the dying art of alabaster. He talked about the figures he makes – many of animals, horse heads and dogs, of birds and turtles, some on commission.

I asked him about his art – what his favourite part of the process was. He looked at me with a twinkle in his eye and said “this” patting the large-ish boulder in front of him sitting atop a swivelling stand on his hand made work bench. Weighing in at about 70 kilos, the bulky shape looked like nothing much, but he explained that he was carving a family of elephants – the small one leading, the mother behind it and the father, the largest form, taking up the rear. He looked up at me, and said “I see them in there”. And so I remembered Michelangelo’s sonnet

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

Yes, he agreed, it is about taking away what is extra. And do you know the hardest thing? What I still haven’t learned to do? To stop myself before ruining the piece, to listen to my gut when it tells me it will not get any closer to what I have in my mind’s eye, that I should lay aside my tools, and call it a day.

I asked him whether he thought of himself as an artist or an artisan, and he replied that he is neither. “Io sono alabastriere”. Being an artist of alabaster is like nothing else, he said seriously – and paused, looking at me intently. It is a way of life, a way of thinking, a way of passing the time. It keeps me company, he said, and it’s good fun. With these new tools, I don’t have to make any effort at all – he points to a rudimentary drill head attached to a scalpel.

Momentarily, I was lost for words. Here was a man in his 80s, with basic literacy skills, who had single handedly expressed what I had spent 6 hours trying to get my students to understand. The concept that what we learn in life – and in museums – is far less about knowledge than it is about being human. At the heart of this, is the idea of proclaiming a life worth living that has nothing to do with our capacity for intellectual understanding. I had repeated to my students that GLO (generic learning outcomes) indicators used in British museums place knowledge on a par with skills acquisitions and sociality, that analytical capacity goes hand in hand with emotional sensitivity. And that a visit to a museum – or a day in one’s life – spent nurturing our emotional being is worth the time spent poring over a million books.

Volterra Etruscan heart of Italy

I returned yesterday from Volterra in Tuscany – for Etruscan specialists, this is the stoney medieval town Velathri founded by the Etruscans in the 8th c BC. For others among you (including some of my close friends – you know who you are) the location of Stephanie Meyers’ recent bestselling Twilight series.

The city is a vivacious, beautifully intricate medieval town - although 7 kms of the wall walk was laid out by the Etruscans - perched atop a hill, surrounded by the most beautiful rolling hills as far as the eye can see, right down to the sea. The ancient stone walls (la cinta muraria) that embrace the town – and apparently also define whether you are a posh Volterrano or not, ie whether you live entro le mura o fuori le mura – are a feat of stonemasonry and anti-instrusion planning tactics. (Very aptly they also house an imposing prison which still functions today.) They are also used by local kids to engage in sassaiole - or throwing stones onto your friends below the walls.

During one morning run I found it incredibly difficult to find a way back into the city, once I had passed a gate or arch in the ramparts – the walls and routes relentlessly chucked me outwards. This was frustrating at first, and then it made me smile. Any footsoldier in the service of Florentine powers led by Lorenzo il Magnifico who braved the scramble up the steep hill and the hot oil and the enemy snipers would, had he had the misfortune of breaking through without a map, have probably been churned out as soon as he had broken through. Result!

(Volterra did however eventually succumb to Lorenzo's armies in 1472.)

The art of language in Paris

I recently returned from an exploration of Paris. The heavily textual/literary character of the French nation is obvious for all to see. The French are proud of their language heritage and manifestly take pleasure in the French language in all its manifestations - the theatre posters in the metro, people reading, the obsession with Littérature moderne du monde francophone, the immense quantity of independent booksellers. Walking into one to browse one I couldn't help hearing the bookseller talking to a young lady whom I guess had asked him advice on reading matter.

Throughout the exchange, he walked calmly around the shop, woman in tow. A strong bright voice, pausing and pointing at the wares as if they were pictures of old friends. The monologue lasted for my entire stay in the shop - I was in there for about 25 minutes.

It went something like this:

...somebody you might like if you read Pennac, a beautifully written Native American narrative like the big epics of past times this is another French classic, and of course Michel Houellebecq if you like the radical. Let me see... Atiq Rahimi won the Goncourt last year we wait to see what he next produces - that was his first novel in French, the great story of an Afghani woman caring for her wounded husband in a repressive society,and another writer who explores the French language exceptionally well - of course, Yasmina Khadra you may know him - What the Day Owes the Night this powerful love story set in Algeria. Do you know Veronique Ovalde (mumble mumble in response) hers are stories to link things together and inseperable - and what about the bestseller Vincent Delecroix - one of my favourites La Chaussure each chapter focusing on a shoe - set in Gare du Nord...do you know the area? It's about loneliness poignant stories. Eric Reinhardt - great writing his is great writing the Cendrillon (Cinderella) novel a sweeping autobiography of four men - I know, I know. But it is autobiographical, and there are four characters...

No surprises, there, then. If all Parisian bookshops are like this one in Pernety, no wonder Parisians are all littéraire.

Museums Association 2009 conference - What I want you do to first is drink a glass of water

I caught up with a couple of interventions at this year's conference - both chosen because of relevance to the practice of using art interventions in museums - manifestly to "open up" collections, "encourage" visitor participation/exploration and/or radically change curatorial practice.

Two things of note.

Edinburgh's The Collective Gallery in 2007-2008 hosted an evaluative exercise on audience participation in interpretation, using works by Jason Nelson, Artur Zmijewski, and Freee (Dave Beech-Andy Hewitt-Mel Jordan) - picture above (http://freee.org.uk/works/how-to-be-hospitable). The gallery's attempt at harnessing multiple perspectives in the development of meaningful interpretations, while a laudable one, left me wondering whether most models of visitor/user generated meaning making are actually a self reflexive exercise that benefits gallery and museum practitioners in the sense that it involves a vocal, interested audience/curatorial panel, while leaving most visitors indifferent. In a postmodern sense, most of these panel based self-reflexive exercises seem to benefit those who take part in them, rather than the end user.

Does reflecting on the mechanics of meaning-making affect end users? Less than it could.

Is this practice legitimate? Even if you are not an artist?

The other excellent case study came from the session entitled "Artists and Museums: what's the limit?" during which Maria Bradshaw, Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, explored what happens when galleries embrace new steps in interpretative practice by involving artists as curators - in this case, the "grande dame of performance art", Marina Abramovic, during this year's Manchester International Festival. In this clip, Marina Abramovic presents the unnerving and unforgettable (see http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/video/2009/jul/06/marina-abramovic-manchester-festival-adrian-searle).

The Whitworth was cleared of all its collections; artists took part in intimate audience encounters for the duration of the international festival, each performing for an exhausting 4 hours each day; the public were taken through a drill - a sort of initiation ceremony - and finally explored the building freely, observing artists exploring their responses to the space, the (secreted) collections etc.

The lesson learnt was potentially a very strong one: live hauntings, the "renegade energy" of live art injects (can inject) traditional museum/gallery practice with new life, the collections seeming "new" even to their curators.

So why am I cynical?

There is a sense that this style of interpretative intervention - which takes inspiration from promenade theatre and site specific installation work, which turns visitors into private viewers who partake of a bespoke ritual rather than visit... are not our day to day audiences.

When Ms Bradshaw stated "we took this experience as a statement of what we intend to do all the time" - I sighed. It is precisely the "event" nature of the experience, the out-of-the-ordinary exclusiveness, the tailor-made character of becoming one with the gallery spaces and the artworks... that makes this type of experience intensely attractive and socially successful.

The issue is to find ways of maintaining the secretive nature of interesting interpretation - to encourage meaning making in visitors even when there is no special event. Is the solution actually to "open up" collections and "make them more accessible" - or is it, rather, to keep them secret and explorable? Should we encourage visitors to see more - or should we offer them the opportunity of discovering for themselves?

Is access a free exercise, or an initiation ritual of which we partake not as consumers but as co-celebrants? Has access rendered void an encounter with the unknown?

Richard Long’s Heaven and Earth

I celebrated a special day on Monday in the company of Richard Long and Coco Chanel – definitely two people I would invite to my dream “who would you have to a soiree” quiz. (Audrey Tautou as Coco in the recently released film Coco avant Chanel directed by Anne Fontaine, is extraordinary.)

Richard Long’s retrospective – of the last 18 years – is on at Tate Britain until September 6. I wondered whether having just come back from my long mountain trek I was especially well placed to appreciate the works on show. I was more than usually aware of the act of walking – and hence more responsive to his art. In his words:

 

To make art only by walking or leaving ephemeral traces here and there, is my freedom.

 

I was wearing heels, and the clacking on the Tate’s wooden floors was a rhythmic reminder of the exhausting and sometimes mind numbing but spiritually liberating step by step of mountain trekking. The galleries are quiet and clean and... meteorologically stable.

One of the galleries contains sculptural installations, including Alpine Circle from 1990. (see the Richard Long newsletter at http://www.therichardlongnewsletter.org/item.asp?no=62&m=current&i=1080) I knelt in between the textured surfaces – physical recreations of outdoor surfaces walked on, and I was reminded – coolly – of the harsh steep large grey eroding Dolomites, the cragginess of red lava the splintering of the rocks in Lagazuoi the dust of the underground mines.

The flatness of charcoalled wood like a lattice, the skulls of white rock, the pink of dolomia. These I recognise as Alpine stones.

It was slightly bizarre that in the Tate, of course, you cannot actually walk on the art. And indeed, recreating that outdoor landscape and detaching it from the act of walking strikes me as an interesting evolution of Long’s art.

 

My work is completely physical and personal. I’ve walked or climbed to the place of each sculpture. I’ve made it with my hands (or feet) and energy at that time. To walk across a country from coast to coast, for example, is both a measure of the land itself – its size and shape and terrain – and also of myself, how long it takes me and not somebody else.

 

An extraordinary way of turning an outer geography into an inner one.

 

 

Flattening time in the Dolomites

I have just come back from high mountain trekking in the Dolomites – the northeastern part of the Italian Alps which are half Alto Adige (South Tyrol and German speaking) and half Veneto (Italian speaking). Eight days of walking with no other pleasures but hot tea once the rifugio was reached and a hot shower – when lucky. Extenuating, exhausting, exhilarating – I highly recommend it.

One of the great surprises along our way – we were following our own version of the historical Alta Via numero 1, comprising about 80kms of rough terrain over stone gorges, mule tracks, military roads and high peaks, in amongst the cows and the marmots – was the Rifugio Lagazuoi, standing at 2752m.

The Lagazuoi peak was a highly contested area of one of the most surprising and least well known mine wars of the First World War. When I say mine wars, I mean that each side – Austrian and Italian, opposing each other – excavated miles and miles of tunnels in the rock in order to blow up the enemy’s defensive posts – from underneath! An absolutely incredible story.

The opening to this tunnel – which frankly re-awakened my tired senses and my tired legs and spurred me on to keep climbing – gives onto a dark cramped slippery corridor climbing 230m up and burrowing through the mountain for 1100m. Walking in these mountains is hard enough – with all the technical gear of today’s mountaineers… but mining in them? While being fired upon? Through the damp weather of autumn, the freezing fogs and snowstorms of winter – wearing only leather boots and furs? The mining operations resembled in my mind those of 19^th century Wales mining districts – all on top of mountains.

Shelters, mountain tracks, tunnels were constructed predominantly at night or on foggy days. Rusty barbed wire, the signs of craters in the mountainside, old boot soles, trap doors like balconies overlooking valleys, signalling and firing posts, hollows hewn into the rock face to hold ammunitions, gun chambers, sleeping quarters…

The frustration of this kind of warfare is evident in the archival sources – which I browsed through that evening, in the warmth of the bar at the Rifugio Lagazuoi, while sipping an amaretto. Records of the Austrian 96^th Infantry Brigade in October 1915 state:

On the ledge of Lagazuoi is a machine gun nest. A real torment… To oppose the machine gun, a patrol of grenade launchers must be detached from the Lagazuoi emplacements to strike the enemy from above with hand grenades.

A war fought from vantage points above and secret tunnels underneath – an all immersive war, which changed the landscape using 30,000kg of explosives at a time, dislodging hundreds of thousands of cubic rock at a time.

One of the Italian heroes – by the name of Maggiore Martini wrote in May 1917:

At 22.10 on the 21^st, a tremendous rumbling shook the whole mountain, completely sinking the trincea avanzata (the front trench) and splintering the Guglia (spire) while the Dente Filiponi, prodigiously intact in its immense size slipped onto the Trincerone (large trench) turning into a providential bulwark for our further defence.

Imagine – the Austrians have hauled up between 24,000 and 30,480 kgs of explosives into the far end of the tunnel they have excavated, then lit it, then escaped, hoping this would be the master stroke to expose the enemy. The mountain rumbles like a frighteningly huge earthquake, and the entire rock slides as one piece – providing extra shelter for the Italians.

Sheesh – time for a martini.

This must be the highest open air museum in Europe. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw the audioguide sign on the impressive graphic panels… who on earth would climb a whole day and then take out an audioguide as if they were walking down the Brompton Road in London’s museum district?

The faces of the soldiers staring out at you while you are struggling up the same mountains where they fought for months on end are a stark reminder that this is a place where history still breathes. The fact it is still a hard climb today achieves what I think is a great interpretative aim, applicable to many museums: it brings visitors up close and personal to the history. It flattens time, by making you share some of the physical struggle that was a day to day condition of these soldiers.

 

On the meaning of archaeology

As a museum professional, I have never had any doubt that museums are collective memories - that they have a public role, a responsibility to their community, and a duty to exist and communicate for future generations. As well as that, they represent some of our most precious treasures. They collect and present objects and stories that provide fuel for our wildest imagination and our most vivid scientific analysis. 

Nor have I ever had second thoughts about the public domain of archaeology - and the fact that finders are not keepers.

Last week I was chatting - as one does - with a bagnino (lifeguard) on the beach in Campania, southern Italy. And in speaking about ways of life we came onto the subject of underwater finds - archaeological remains that he has dug up over the last few years while fishing. He has held onto these, which are displayed in his home, and he told me of others who sell them on to interested foreigners for a small profit. 

I was shocked and appalled. Trafficking is of course illegal! Immoral, even! By holding on to something like a Roman amphora you are depriving somebody else from enjoying it, you are keeping part of our joint heritage to yourself! Surely surely he could see that! And selling it on... well, Italy along with Greece and Bulgaria are at the head of the illegal trafficking trade of archaeological heritage. 

But he spoke to me of his wonder in holding a terracotta fragment, in tracing the writing on it, in handling the jug as his ancestor would have done - and something was niggling at me.

Paolo - we shall call him Paolo - has probably never set foot inside his local museum. Nor has his local museum ever made any attempt to lure him in. Ne'er the twain shall meet - unfortunate, but true. And if he had never gone fishing, he wouldn't really care about his past, the archaeological heritage of Campania. He wouldn't - in the sense that he would probably be ignoring museums entirely. 

Even in a region so rich in heritage that it includes the stunningly well preserved remains of Poseidonia - today called Paestum - a city founded in the 7th century BC by colonists from Sybaris in mainland Greece. 

He would never know the touchingly beautiful tomb paintings found here - one of a diver in the act of flying through the air from a man made scaffold structure, into the deep blue sea of a summer's day in Campania. A sea that our bagnino knows so well. These most lovely pieces are presented in the most uninspiring way imaginable, behind a rope. It's as if the heritage that Italian museums protect for all to enjoy is all too much for those noble institutions to actually care for - care for in the way that Paolo cares for his amphora fragment. 

Ecosustainable tourism

This is where I have been spending the last week - not specifically on this tarmac road - in the deep south of Italy, in the region of the National Park of Cilento in Campania, on the Tyrrhenian Sea. A place of blue seas, dry heat, lizards and cicadas, olive groves, rosemary thickets,  fresh figs and the world's primary producer of mozzarella di bufala. 

The resort is very pleasant but it borders onto another, and this is the road that divides the two. 

On the one side, the macchia meditarranea - a natural vegetation of centennial olive trees, fichi d'India (in the name a clue - these are prickly pears), cacti, carob bean trees, pitosphorus, rosemary - sturdy thickets and bushes and plants that require next to little water. 

On the other, the following. 

Freshly mowed lawn - LAWN??? With a swimming pool. A swimming pool?? With the warm sea just a stone's throw away? 

Fresh water fountains spilling onto the grass. Irrigation systems providing tourists with the feeling they are in luscious vegetation... as green as a Wimbledon court. And...

...brick and glass structures - in this climate, the only way to keep your brain from frying in one of these is to have enough aircon to cool the entire regione of Campania. The traditional way, the sustainable way, the environmentally friendly way, of keeping cool in these climates is to slow down and ventilate using the land's own thermal currents. That, and sleeping in the heat of the afternoon - it will be 39 degrees Celsius tomorrow. The resort I am staying in ventilates its communal areas such as restaurants etc with the use of ancient things (called open windows) that create a breeze within the spaces. 

Olive trees all around provide a speckled but dense shade and the most wonderful smell. 

Happy holidays everyone. 

BP Summer Big Screens

Picnics in this country are an art form, no less. The Brits will contentedly bring along their picnics - sometimes improvised at the supermarket - and sit on (gradually dampening) grass, each on a tiny spot of about 50cm2 for the duration of an opera that lasts about 3 and a half hours.

 

Tuesday evening The Royal Opera’s live performance of Verdi’s La Traviata was played on big screens across the UK - I was watching, equipped with food, wine and friends from the park in Canary Wharf. The temptation to raise glasses at the chorus Libiamo libiamo ne’ lieti calici, which reminded me of my dad’s singing, was too much to resist. Let us drink, let us toast with these happy flutes.

 

The story of La Traviata (the fallen woman) is one of partying, decadence, love and prostitution, jealousy, parental control, money, sickness and death. A 19th century bestseller, page turner and musical triumph (although at its first performance in Venice in 1853 the public hated it). Thank you to one of my friends who actually shed some tears at the finale - opera still tugs at our heartstrings in the 21st century.

The Jeff Koons Craze

Yesterday evening I was invited to attend the opening of the Jeff Koons: 
Popeye Series exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park. The queues stretched around the block – which happens to be the entirety of one side of Kensington Gardens. And this was for the pulsed entry VIP visit, which I was luckily on time for. Inside the white gallery spaces, I could not believe the number of people – and these were not ordinary people! High flying artiste types, great American collectors (or so I was told) the fashionistas of the art world, lots of them young and beautiful. It struck me that for a world that presumes to commentate on the state of society, in some ways it is truly conventional.

Truth be told, I enjoyed myself - watching people people watch, drinking champagne, being obnoxious and over the top. It is a truism that you have to be part of that world to be part of it.

The art itself is quite surprising. Once you get over the thrill of the vibrant colours of the swimming pool inflatables and the Grosfillex chairs, the provocation of the vivid plastics (which are actually made of polychromed aluminium), the sexuality of the pin up airbrushed porn models, the superficial sense of banal fun – I found it deeply disturbing. In truly postmodern sense, the more garish it is, the more unsettling.

Take the 2D work Elvis - an oil on canvas depicting the same blonde female nude in two provocative poses. It resembles a diptych, with the famous lobster in the foreground between the two bodies. It is an attractive image, uneasily turning you into a voyeur, making you respond to the sexual come on (picture on http://www.jeffkoons.com search under Popeye and Elvis). And the more you look, the more you see. Very few words in the illustration-style grey and yellow background appear as you stare: Dance of Death.

I think this was the highlight of the evening – and the single thing that told me I needed to leave.