What you’re saying is, ‘Commit more fraud because that’s the GDP of Britain: bank fraud… We’re going to impose a fine on you Barclays so go out there and commit fraud more rapidly so that the GDP of the country goes up.’
November 15, 2012 § Leave a comment
It began, an idea without a name, in the quiet of Rachel Whiteread’s studio in East London. And it ended several years later, a sculpture called House, demolished in the full glare of the world’s media. House always had the potential to be a contentious work of art. But in my first conversations with Rachel Whiteread in the summer of 1991, it was impossible to imagine that it would be quite as exposed, quite as contentious as things turned out; and that its transition from private projection to public phenomenon would be so dramatic and so quick.
House could have been made elsewhere, in a different place, at a different time; perhaps with another cast list and chorus. Indeed, Whiteread and I had looked at several other terraced houses in North and East London through 1992 without success. At one stage, a condemned house in Islington seemed possible, but the right permissions failed to materialize. Another in Hackney was knocked down before we could make a proposal to the owner. Finally, after months of private persuasion and occasional public meetings, the councillors of Bow Neighbourhood voted by a small majority to give a temporary lease on 193 Grove Road, one of the few remaining houses in what had once been a Victorian terrace. After several months’ more waiting, Whiteread took possession and the physical making of the work began in August 1993. From that moment, House was of a specific place and a particular time. And it was this configuration of time and place, with its attendant contingencies of local and national politics and the added spice of the 1993 Turner Prize which, as much as the physical appearance of the sculpture, created the meaning of House and determined the course of its short life.
House was completed on October 25 1993. There had deliberately been almost no press until one day before. Slowly at first and then more quickly, interest and comment began to grow in the locality and beyond; in the pages of the national press and on television news. Newspaper leaders and letters, columns and cartoons appeared and multiplied. Visitors grew day by day. On November 23 two decisions were made simultaneously in different parts of London. A group of jurors at the Tate Gallery decided that Whiteread had won the 1993 Turner Prize, and a gathering of Bow Neighbourhood Councillors voted that House should be demolished with immediate effect. It was an incendiary combination. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Brittany Markert
You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Joan Crawford is dead. Good
November 9, 2012 § Leave a comment
If you were born in rural England in 1837 and never travelled more than a few miles from your home, you would have been surprisingly likely to see a hippopotamus before you died.
The reign of Queen Victoria saw a surge in the construction of all manner of places where exotic animals could be viewed.
And as well as formal, educational settings – private and public zoos, natural history museums – the period brought animals for entertainment to the masses. Travelling menageries would tour towns and cities, featuring performers and their animals.
Or, if you were sufficiently interested (and wealthy), you could simply buy your own tiger or boa constrictor in a shop.
Most exotic pet shops were in London – by 1895 there were 118 wild animal dealers in London alone – but there were also shops in Liverpool, Bath and Bristol.
People could walk into a shop and purchase anything, from an elephant to a bear to a kangaroo.
And the greater politics of the British Empire drove this burgeoning industry into the rest of Europe.
Before the Suez Canal was built, for example, almost every ship coming from Asia or Africa touched land first in England. After it was built, Germany steadily overtook the UK in “the scramble for elephants”. read more
ART: Michaël Borremans
This is the shining grudge of numbers
November 6, 2012 § Leave a comment
This is an era of CGI end-times porn, but London’s destructions, dreamed-up and real, started a long time ago. It’s been drowned, ruined by war, overgrown, burned up, split in two, filled with hungry dead. Endlessly emptied.
In the Regency lines of Pimlico is Victorian apocalypse. Where a great prison once was, Tate Britain shows vast, awesome vulgarities, the infernoward-tumbling cities of John Martin, hybrid visionary and spiv. But tucked amid his kitsch 19th Century brilliance are stranger imaginings. His older brother Jonathan’s dissident visions were unmediated by John’s showmanship or formal expertise. In 1829, obeying the Godly edict he could hear clearly, Jonathan set York Minster alight and watched it burn. From Bedlam – he did not hang – he saw out his life drawing work after astonishing work of warning and catastrophe…
‘London’s Overthrow’. Scrappy, chaotic, inexpert, astounding. Pen-and-ink scrawl of the city shattered under a fusillade from Heaven, rampaged through by armies, mobs, strange vengeance. Watching, looming in the burning sky, a lion. It is traumatized and hurt.
The lion is an emblem too
that England stands upon one foot.
With the urgency of the touched, Martin explains his own metaphors.
and that has lost one Toe
Therefore long it cannot stand
The lion looks out from its apocalypse at the scrag-end of 2011. London, buffeted by economic catastrophe, vastly reconfigured by a sporting jamboree of militarised corporate banality, jostling with social unrest, still reeling from riots. Apocalypse is less a cliché than a truism. This place is pre-something. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Miguel Soll
You have read me, I am sure. Am I black enough, think you, dressed up in a lasting suit of ink?
October 23, 2012 § Leave a comment
If Robinson in Space traffics with the aesthetics of the Sublime by encompassing heavy industrial sites, sweeping moorland, surging sea and the shock of economic restructuring, Robinson in Ruins, with its focus on fields, wildflowers, historic sites and the ache of decline traffics with the Picturesque. From a nearby car park Robinson surveys ‘the centre of the island on which he was shipwrecked: “the location”, he wrote, “of a Great Malady that I shall dispel in the manner of Turner by making picturesque views on journeys to sites of scientific and historic interest”’. The prospect evokes the series of elevated views of Oxford made famous by Turner. The distinctive skyline of college domes and towers in the distance is still as recognisable as it was in the nineteenth century, even though the fields in the foreground have been fully built over with houses and the middle distance screened with trees. Closer inspection, however, reveals that the city’s dreaming spires are now flanked by two massive cranes, one towering high over the city.
The documenting of current developments in an old, venerable landscape along with successive waves of change in the place’s history is indeed in the manner of Turner. It is particularly characteristic of Turner’s series Picturesque Views of England and Wales made between 1825 and 1838, which reformed the idea of picturesque landscape to document the dramatic changes of that period, including times of economic and political crisis. As with Turner’s picturesque views, the countryside is researched and envisaged in terms of wider and longer material and imaginative geographies, including its connection to urban, industrial and international interests.
The ‘great malady’ Robinson seeks to dispel in the manner of Turner recalls the words of another cultural wanderer, Charles Baudelaire. In his journal Baudelaire spoke of ‘the great malady, horror of one’s home’, a leitmotif of modernist mobility, particularly for exploratory English writers. The maxim is the epigraph of London where it denotes horror of ‘home-made’ English pathologies, including racism, militarism, bad food, sexual repression, hatred of intellectuals and indolence. Another pathology has been added by the time of Robinson in Ruins, neo-liberalism. read more
PHOTOGRAPH: Jillian Xenia
my nerves are bad to-night 