webcowgirl

The bike ride to Hyde Park was really great. Walking around in the leaves in the park was also great, and I noticed that, because the foliage is a lot thinner, you can see the views of the park better. There were a lot of people out and it was ... I don't know, I felt like I could feel the pages of history passing by me, if that makes any sense, even though with the girls picnicking out of their plastic Sainsbury's bags and the Muslim woman walking by talking on her cellphone it was all very here and now. We got a snackie snack at the pavillion next to the Serpentine and ate it while watching people puttering around on boats on the lake.

Matthew Barney at the Serpentine gallery: God, that man is always good for a laugh. Anyone that has to explain their art that hard is just trying to be deliberately obtuse. I found the video of him bouncing off of a trampoline so he could make little marks on a wall just a big fat ball of comedy. He does make me wish for my beloved Clyfford Still with his belief that people who will understand his art will and that he didn't need to sit around and explain everything. Matthew Barney desperately needs a little more mystery in his work and a little less, "Hey, this is the digestive system! Get it? The digestive system! I'm consuming and excreting!" Somehow it all comes off a little Bart Simpson, though I quail to think of what he would do with industrial quantities of Vaseline.

We made it home in good time (conclusion: I won't be biking to work, it's too far for me to go with a time deadline) and raced to the grocery stores (they close at 5!) to get the ingredients for tonight's dinner. I'm apparently a shopping whiz now as I made it in and out in thirty minutes. Now we're folding laundry and watching the internet go up and down and waiting for the roast to finish up. I'm serving it with a side of slightly Italian not-exactly turnip greens, which will be made with a bit of hot pepper; I think it will be very good.

What will we be doing this time next year? Got only knows. I am amused that today is the birthday of both trishpiglet and motomotoyama, who perhaps have far more in common than I might have ever expected of two people born on the same day. Oh, those Scorpios!

Right, sleeping in was achieved by all, and no one made it into the living room until 11:30. That is what I call getting the weekend off to a good start (after a Friday that included a trip to the Bricklayer's Arms, duck salad with orange dressing, and wechsler whupping me and J at Cartagena). I put in laundry (to have an appropriate shirt for today's nice weather), made breakfast, took a shower, then hit the reset button and took a nap.

Now it's time to go see art - the Keith Arnatt exhibit at the Photographers' Gallery and the prison art exhibit at the ICA. We've altered our plans and will be going to booklectic's for games tonight rather than going to robot_mel's housewarming (apologies, but I thought skipping crowds was my better bet), then tomorrow is Cornwall (which reminds me of the Corn Palace in South Dakota but probably shouldn't)!

Saturday morning we set out at 11:30 to see the exhibit in Notting Hill I'd read about in the paper a few weeks ago, but were quickly turned back by a call from the curator letting us know we'd missed our entry slot and would not be allowed in (drat). So we made a quick u-turn and headed to the train station and the quick shot to Waterloo and the Hayward, where there's an exhibit up by Antony Gormley. You know the one: the ads have this sort of foggy room pictured on them, and the bizarre statues that are on top of the buildings nearby are a part of it.

Well. The good bit: the foggy room was really cool. Two steps in and you can't see the door anymore; inside the walls, the space seems infinite. You can tell other people are there by their voices, but you can't see them (much less your feet) until they are within a foot of you. Basically you see a dark area, and then it has color, and then it resolves into someone saying, "Excuse me" as they've almost run into you.

shadowdaddy and I had a great time in this part of the exhibit. Two steps back and he'd disappear, then I'd tiptoe away, giggling, and see if I could sneak up on him. On my own, I tried to see if I was managing to go in the direction I thought I was (is this the south wall? the north wall?). At one point, we were playing Marco Polo, which was making me laugh and laugh. We had lots of fun.

The rest of the exhibit was ... let's start by saying odd. There were all of these casts of his body, some of them sort of stapled to walls, other hanging from the ceiling upside down by iron cables. Then there were sort of these negative casts of his body, but set up so they were cages with an open space where the body would have been, like African fetishes, or a reverse iron maiden. To be honest, they all looked a little pervy somehow, like giant bondage toys - suspension bondage mummy cases and giant mesh prisons in which a body could only find one way to contort itself.

But the more I looked at these things, the more I thought they were some of the most pretentious, egotistical twaddle I have seen in twenty five years of looking at modern art. Gormley's exhibit, at its heart, is about ME me ME me ME ME ME, my body, my nose, my butt, me in a ball, me standing up, me stapled to the wall, me standing outside, ME ME ME. It really got aggravating when I realized that it was simply impossible to see it as being a generalized human form as there was not a single female figure represented in the entire exhibit. No, really, I might as well have been looking at casts of Antony's penis, because his self-obsession was so utterly and puerilely focused on his own magic self. I would have found it so much more honest if it had really been a bunch of SM toys and not such an altar to his own vanity.

But wait! There were other people represented in the exhibit, in the work called "Allotment II." The exhibition pamphlet said of it, "The individual units that congregate to form Allotment are derived from the vital statistics of real people aged between 18 months and 80 years. Besides the height and widgh of their bodies, thirteen other precise measurements were taken from each of the 300 volunteers." And what did he get out of these? Little cement blocks. Yep, that's right, Antony Gormley is represented by anatomically correct body casts; the rest of us, in his art, are little faceless rectangular blocks of cement, with holes for our eyes and mouth. It was really pathetic.

I left in a hurry to escape from the pretension and return to the world of people and light, where the sun was shining and people from a hundred different cities were walking down the banks of the river and beer and friendship and laughter were waiting for me. We went to the Borough Market, bought venison sandwiches and a delicious slab of cheese (and nice cider), had a sit down at The Rake, then trotted off to Walthamstowe and the lovely company of countess_sophia. We napped, we ate, we drank, we enjoyed a walk in the forest and sunset in the garden, we played Cartagena (I've apparently lost a pirate), we laughed a lot, we pondered the great mystery of Relationships then had more wine. It was great, one hundred percent Live Life Now, and a wonderful antidote to the art exhibit as well as the rest of the week. Rah!

I'm a bit tired - couldn't sleep last night and resorted to melatonin at around midnight. I'm planning on leaving work early three days in a row - wish 5:15 didn't seem like early, dammit!

I made a little progress on the cleaning last night - got the winter clothes stuffed under the bed in a bag, emptied the clean laundry bin that's been waiting for over a month. At this rate you might be able to see the floor in the bedroom by Saturday evening, which will still seem like a miracle.

The trip to see art was a bit of a bust, at least at the Great Eastern hotel, where the exhibit had closed on Friday! (The Metro got it wrong, which almost made keeping the article pointless.) I was re-reading about the "stories written on blankets one page at a time" and getting sad about what we'd missed. We did see what was left, but it was just drips and drops. Alas.

On the other hand, the sound art exhibit at Kinetica was AWESOME. All of the art was interactive ("Put on a wristband, then touch someone else who's wearing a wristband") and I got to play a theramin! They're having a talk on Wednesday with Martyn Ware (described on the site as "80s pop icon as co-founder of Heaven 17 and The Human League") introducing the artists. shadowdaddy is going to that if anyone wants to go with him, but I have to go to a tech talk that night. We never even got to the upstairs gallery; we must go back!

Home and we had a wechsler over for dinner, which was an Italian feast of prosciutto and melon/bread salad/tagliatelli with butter and parmesan/some vegetables. This was followed by more wine and a game of Euchre. All in all, it was a good day and a great evening.

I want to talk about my really great evening and the fine (and cheap) place we went for dinner (Shalimar in Brick Lane, great meal for two for 11 pounds) ... but what I really want to talk about is photography. So. An essay, like I used to write back when I wrote.

There's an exhibit up right now at the Barbican, In the Face of History, that I think every photographer should see. It hit for me on a few of those ongoing questions about photography: what makes photography great? What makes an individual photographer's work notable? How is photography quintessentially different from other art forms? - and gave me some ideas about answers to those questions, and, most importantly, inspiration to Make Art.

Photography has had problems since its inception with whether it is an art at all, because, in truth, photography was created to document, faithfully, the reality that our eyes perceive. In the late 1800s the Photo-Secessionists decided that they would try to make photography "art" by manipulating the image, or, if you prefer, making it worse than a clean, focused mirror of what the eye sees. They put vaseline on the lens, they shot out of focus, they printed on heavily textured paper that just couldn't get all of the detail that the negative was utterly capable of faithfully reproducing. (I once heard Bill Jay say they were later dismissed as the "Fuzzy Wuzzy School of Photography," and, even though it's a very cruel moniker, it's not entirely undeserved. In fact, it's totally deserved, but I love their pictures anyway.)

This dichotomy between "is it or ain't it art" has continued today, getting, I think, worse in the age of the digital camera. I keep seeing what I see as two different approaches to photography that mirror the original split: is it about making art or is it about making a faithful image? The faithful image school tends to be a more "masculine" arena, more Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, focused on the perfect shot, and the perfect set of equipment (and production techniques) needed to get that image. I feel, however, that this (to my mind) obsessive focus on tech and technique skips the vital element of the content of the photos and the ultimate making of (what I can't help but see as) art. I see piles and piles of people out there cranking out photos and fussing over their lenses and color balancing and yammer yammer blah blah blah (lots of magazines out there for these folks), but they are NOT talking about art to me.

I start from the presumption of art, and then I looked (tonight) at a group of photographers and thought about their practice and what made each of them artists. For photographers, it seems that the oeuvre is the thing, and to understand how an individual saw the world, you want to see many of their photos. One person shows images from a studio he does not dare to leave; another, portraits of people whose inner lives he cannot understand; a third, nearly microscopic images taken while he was a soldier. Each of them left me with insights into the artist, but, more importantly, things for me to think about caused by the generally pleasant assault of so many pictures.

But which of these images are compelling? Compositionally, many of them are doing interesting thing; but I was faced with the tyranny of the label! Art, I like to think, does not need a "label" to make it enjoyable or understandable; in fact, I often prefer to avoid reading the information next to displays in a gallery in order to have a purer appreciation of the work. But ... photography is utterly contaminated by being pictures of things at a certain place in history! It can barely get away from the labels! Sure, Westie's green peppers and Stieglitz's nudes break free of time and place, but when you are looking at the work of Henryk Ross, how can you not go, "Ooh, secretly made photos of Jews in the Polish ghetto that were stuffed in a can and left behind when he finally ran for it!" I hated that I was being (as I felt) emotionally manipulated by these declaration of time and subject. Couldn't I just enjoy the images as they were?

Well, heck, you know, I think I just have to accept that this is part of the medium, that it is affected by its ability to document transience and historicity. Some images go beyond this; but some images are, in fact, far more moving because they grip on to their point in time and refuse to let go. And thus we have the dark and gorgeous shots of Brassai's Paris, with its prostitutes and lesbian couples and transvestite sailors; Anders Petersen's pictures of the poor habitues of a sleazy bar in Hamburg; and, again, the shots of the Polish ghetto. If we accept that this ability to be stuck in time is a part of the power of photography, then art may in fact be created by loving and obsessive documentation of what it means to be here, now, in a time that will not be forever. Christer Strömholm, I believe, is the artist who said, "Photograph what matters to you," and I think that this passion very clearly comes through in these photographs. So I, in order to create art, should photograph the things that are happening at this moment, the people and the life that matters to me; and somehow, in the struggles of composition and balancing light and dark and pattern, I think that this will create art, an oeuvre worth remembering, far more than 5000 perfectly lit pictures of quaint New Mexican towns or spiral staircases or seashells could ever hope to do.

At any rate: see this exhibit. And go, people, go make art, and don't beat yourself up because you don't have the best lens out there or the spiffiest camera. You can make objects of lasting beauty with what you have right now. I went to the museum tonight, and I know that what I say is true. (And the narrator in Remembrance of Things Past got a stiffie tonight - how could I not share that, too?)