5.20.07: London

CS and I biked around town all day. Started off at the Tate Modern where there were some giant themed shows, which were not what we came to see. One of them was about minimalism — we gave that a pass — and the other was called States of Flux — a headline that seemed in this case to encompass just about everything in no particular order. It was the weirdest mish-mash of a show either of us had ever seen. One room was filled with lovely Matisse paintings, but then on one wall of the same room protruded 4 Maurizio Catalan manikin arms giving Hitler salutes. Huh? Maybe there was some intellectual or academic construct at work here, some thread tying this disparate work together, but it remained invisible to us.

I’d read that somewhere in the museum there was a show of contemporary art from Kinshasa, and that was what drew me there. That show was not listed anywhere on the walls or listings — but there it was, tucked in a room inside the States of Flux show. Huh again? Here’s one of the Kinshasa paintings:

The most well known of this group is the painter Cheri Samba, whose paintings are funny, political and inventive. Many of the paintings impart advice, or offer lessons or allegories of the crazy times we live in.

Next to this was a room devoted to the artist Dieter Roth, who lived part of the time in an extremely remote village in Iceland. He had some great images made from postcards which were then painted or silk-screened over. Here’s one based on a postcard of Piccadilly Circus:

And then (wall texts said these were all part of the same large States of Flux show) there was a room of spreads from a Russian magazine published in the 30s and designed by Rodchenko and other fairly radical artists of the time. The layouts were beautiful — obviously propaganda (printed in a few languages), and sometimes corny as hell, but gorgeous.

At the time, if one didn’t know other things, one might look at these beautiful and radically innovative layouts and think, “Wow, what a cool place, what a hip scene it must be and what an enlightened government they must have to produce such a cool magazine.” Here is a layout featuring images of a tractor factory that featured “illuminations” for the enjoyment and excitement of the workers. Google, the current hip place to work, has some catching up to do.

Other spreads were elaborate foldouts, duotones of smiling peasants next to Stalin and one incredible spread of a paratrooper in which the top of the page unfolded to become a duotone of the round parachute sail.

On to the Whitechapel gallery (in renovation), a delicious lunch on Brick Lane (very busy as it’s market day — but good for people-watching), St Paul’s cathedral (very spooky organ music playing — big ominous chords). The revolving entrance door had these words on it:

That’s quite a claim for a revolving door!

On to the ICA, which was closed for installation, then lastly a Paul Chan show at the Serpentine. Lovely animated projections onto the floor, mostly of semi-recognizable objects and people floating up or down, as if gravity had lost its grip and things had become unmoored. The one below featured a kind of pageant along the bottom, with mainly just the flags and banners visible.

That evening we had dinner with C’s former gallerist here, an American woman and her Italian husband, who both now have galleries across the river near the Imperial War Museum. Christine Amanpour, the CNN talking head, came in with some swanky-looking folks. The restaurant (Scott’s, a renovated traditional fish place) was a mish-mosh of styles, too: there were blobby sculptural objects holding beds of crustaceans, shiny mid-century lighting fixtures and dark woody walls on which hung contemporary art given in trade for meals. Down near the toilets was a Tracy Emin that said something like, “I WILL eat my fish sticks”. Mostly, though, the artwork disappeared, blending into the décor and the dark walls. It made me realize how ubiquitous the typical white walls have become for displaying art, as anything else swallows it whole. Contemporary art seems to be all the rage — every joint and everyone has got to have some, even if it gets a bit lost.

The next day CS hung her show while I went off to the Design Museum for a meeting — the director had visited my studio in NY, saw the chairs and drawings of chairs, and had offered a show. The museum, if fairly off the beaten track (there are no tube stations nearby) has done nice shows over the years, so I was pretty excited. I’d seen a Peter Saville show and a Helen Jongerus show and the former director even did one of the Queen’s flower arranger.

One of the current shows was of an Italian designer, Luigi Colani, who was mainly active in the 60s and 70s doing incredibly prescient blobby biomorphic streamlined objects, most of which were never built. The show, therefore, was mainly of his self-financed prototypes: futuristic flying machines that looked like sea creatures and aerodynamic cars.

CS and I have lunch with two youngish guys who run CS’s gallery here while the owners are otherwise disposed or are out of town. A thin German man who has moved here a few months ago and an Englishman transplanted from another local gallery. The gallery is in Mayfair, the zone of gilt-framed stodgy landscape paintings, antiques and antiquities, luxe designer boutiques and shops that seem peculiarly British — one is called the Cufflink Connoisseur, while another displays polo gear and riding crops in the windows.

The gallerists ask me what I’m up to. It’s always a little weird when people obviously think you haven’t done much since the hit records they remember from their childhood. The subject turns to live music we’ve seen lately and the German man says he’s only been to about 5 live shows in his entire life; he grew up on techno and electronic dance music and that’s pretty much all he listens to — DJs. I ask what time those “shows” begin and he says the name DJs usually don’t go on before 1. I feel a little old fashioned — I’m usually in bed by then.

The Englishman mentions that techno is a very German obsession, which gets a slightly puzzled and possibly annoyed look.

I think to myself how very different our concepts and uses of music are, how varied they can be. I assume that for him music is a sort of machine, a tool, that facilitates dancing and some kind of release. It’s simple, clear-cut, and it either does its job or it doesn’t. I imagine it’s pretty context-dependent, too — not too many offices have booming techno bouncing off the walls. Music, in this case, is pretty much something that is confined to certain spaces at certain times of day. Maybe there is some social interaction at the dance clubs as well, so the music helps that happen, too. Music, in this case, is definitely not about the words, that is obvious.

What then is music for in my case? Well, I like dancing to music, too, though I suspect I find that more syncopated rhythms — funk, Latin, hip-hop, etc. — get me moving more often than the repetitive thump of house or techno. But if it’s well done the genre doesn’t really seem to matter. More often I listen to music with singing, and I find the arc of a melody, combined with harmonies and a pulse, can be incredibly emotionally involving. Sometimes the words help, too. So that’s two “uses” I have for music. Lastly, I sometimes listen to soundtracks, contemporary classical and vaguely experimental music as a background, a mood enhancer or facilitator. We get doses of music this way in films and on TV all the time. I forgot to mention to the gallerist my recent collaboration with Paul Van Dyk, the techno master — I would have scored some points and cred if I had.

I mentioned that the waiter seemed to be wearing eyeliner and the subject turned to the local Abercrombie and Fitch store where I was told all the shop assistants must be models to be hired. This former bastion of wasp outdoor wear — which used to be about as unsexy as the boxy Brooks Brothers look — has remade itself as a kind of homoerotic fascist-chic outpost. Talk about a makeover! Is there a Tom of Finland lurking behind every buttoned-down square? Two male models stand at the entrance of the shop in hot pants and the walls inside are plastered with photos and paintings (paintings!) of shirtless male models. The ploy has paid off handsomely; youths of all types fill the place daily. It sounds like a wonderful kitsch theme park, like a Leni Riefenstahl film come to life. But what does it mean that gay kitsch sells to straight youth? Calvin Klein has been doing it for decades. Surely using this sales tool is intentional. Do the straight kids who shop there think, “Oh, they’re just cute guys”?

Later we have drinks with Verity M from the Roundhouse, a local venue that might be perfect for HLL, and Matthew Byam Shaw, the producer of the theater production Nixon/Frost, amongst others. We meet at a private club in Covent Garden called Hospital, apparently thrown up recently by Dave Stewart (Eurythmics). Almost all the patrons have their laptops out — they’re socializing, e-mailing (I guess) and drinking, all at the same time. There’s a laptop open on almost every table! Maybe they’re all trying to figure out what to do later in the evening? Or maybe interaction with live people just isn’t quite enough stimulus. The folks here love their private clubs, and they’ve only admitted women to some of them since the 80s, so I was told. It must be a legacy or spin-off from the class system, which lingers obstinately in many forms. One must separate oneself from the hoi polloi if possible — in speech, in dress and where one drinks. Even if you’re not upper class you need to wall yourself off from those slightly beneath you. Another remnant of class and caste is the notion that everyone has their place and station — to get involved in areas and jobs and even (or especially) ideas beyond your station is bad form, frowned upon — it is viewed as pretentious (if you’re going from low to high) and inauthentic (if you’re going from high to low). A film on the life of the late Joe Strummer brings out his diplomatic and vaguely upper-class upbringing, and how he did a perfect job of hiding it — or at least of keeping it quiet — as it would not have sat well with the image of the anarchic justice-seeking punk hero he was to become. I always found that pure rogue pose a little suspect regardless of anyone’s upbringing, but in later years Strummer and his collaborators ventured into other musical areas that didn’t require carrying the burden of that image of a working-class hero. What difference does it make anyway where you come from? Can’t you be judged by what you do, make and say and not by what caste you come from?

Anyway — the meeting is about Here Lies Love and I do a very short pitch and various ideas and opinions are tossed about, some of which are illuminating. Matthew confirms what Scott E. in NY said, that any video or film image of the historical person portrayed by the actress on stage would steal from the actress, which would be bad.

Matthew has to deal with a reluctant actor, so CS and I have dinner by ourselves at a hip restaurant where she is spotted by another former gallerist who later says he was dying to introduce her to Lucien Freud, who was also dining there. We are sitting next to a largish couple from Northern Ireland who, to be honest, don’t seem to belong in such a groovy temple. (Here I go applying my own class evaluation.) He’s an IT functionary in town for business meetings and she’s riding on the expense account tab, or so I would guess. They look like northerners on holiday in the big city, but they mention that they’re staying next door at the Ritz, which is more than an ordinary branch manager could afford. They explain some of the local dishes — Jersey Royals are a miniscule type of potato only available at select times of year. Either from a glass of wine or something medical the woman has turned bright red — all over, face, neck, arms — but they’re so unassuming and easygoing and lacking all pretense that her redness doesn’t register after a minute or two.

The restaurant has doormen, dressed in traditional English tails, as does our hotel. I love the juxtaposition here between the two opposing poles of dress and manner: the reserved, polite, perfect and solicitous staff contrasted with the world of theatrical shock and gross-out represented by Chapman bros., Damien Hirst, chavs and football hooligans. It all has to come out, I guess — the bigger the front the bigger the back. I’m reminded of the ads that plaster the phone booths offering spankings and humiliation. One assumes that, for a Lord, keeping it all in and maintaining that reserve can get to be a bit much sometimes so one needs to be put in one’s place to redress the balance. I’m jumping to national stereotypes, here.

The next day is gorgeous and sunny so we’re off on the bikes again. The Queen’s Gallery (the royal collection of renaissance Italian painting and drawing — Titian, Caravaggio, etc. — hung on bright crimson red walls!) and the Imperial War Museum (a great show of camouflage that includes two of the outfits used in True Stories!) Here’s a ship in full “dazzle” camouflage:

…as C said, “where would THAT be camouflage? In a circus?”

A visit to CS’s gallery chums on the South Bank, Sadie Cole’s and Simon Lee’s galleries in Mayfair, and we’re done in….almost…we quickly ride to the Tate Britain to check out the Chapman brothers show. Bronzed casts of imaginary Rube Goldberg-like torture machines. Frozen contraptions that drive nails into brains — dildos, hammers and gears. None of it functions, and it’s all bronzed so these pieces must weigh a ton. I mention that I’d seen a series of toy soldier dioramas they’d done at the former Saatchi collection on the South Bank a few years ago, large vitrines with meticulous scenes of imaginary prison and death camps, scenes of hellish horror and depravity but done with little boys’ toys. I liked those better — to me they said more about “playing” war and the roots of depravity.

We head back. The winding side streets are pleasant to ride on, especially in sunny weather. The city is fairly human scale and cottage-like, as C calls it. It has sprawled beyond reason, but the scale of each neighborhood and the architectural details tell a story about how people see themselves as a people and as a nation. “We might be sophisticated, upper class or creative titans, world-conquerors and explorers, but at bottom we are all country cottage folks.” Not a literal story — I’m not talking about inscriptions on the walls — but metaphorical. A story told in lintels and windowsills. The Queen with her dowdy clothes and the royals’ country hunting attire. The windows everywhere with lots of little panes, which are more enclosing, comforting.

The big thoroughfares like Regent Street and Piccadilly are pretty hairy to ride on with those giant red buses and no bike lanes, but overall we’ve been lucky with the weather and riding. It’s glorious when the sun shines.

We meet Michael Morris of Artangel at a gallery opening. There are security people at the door and maybe a guest list — Michael e-mailed me earlier that he’d “put us on the list”. For an art gallery opening? Well, lots of NY galleries now have hired guards so I guess guest lists and velvet ropes are next.

It is a pretty spectacular place, floor after floor of exhibition spaces in an industrial zone, topped by a large room with one glass wall leading to a balcony that looks out over the skyline. Girls with trays offer glasses of champagne. The show is of paintings by Alice Neel, the late portrait painter who worked in NY for many decades — there is now a documentary film out about her. Until almost the end of her life she was scorned as working in a dead old-fashioned style, and then, near the end of her life, she experienced a short burst of appreciation, and now there is a new appreciation. Maybe the work looks prescient?

I am introduced to Grayson Perry, the transvestite potter who won the Turner prize a few years ago. “It’s about time a transvestite potter got this prize!” he said when he won. I have one of his pots — he covers them with images and often with rude texts. Here’s one called “Boring Cool People”:

He was in full baby doll little girl drag tonight — like Alice In Wonderland when she got big. A blonde wig, a floral pinafore frock, bare legs ending in little pink socks with ruffles and white patent leather Mary Janes. (Where does he get this stuff in his size? Someone must make them by hand.)

He knew that I had one of his pieces and he was thrilled when he heard that news years ago. I was thrilled to meet him. He is married and has a daughter — I saved a family picture that was in the UK papers when he won the prize of him in his dress alongside his perfectly nice and ordinary wife, the daughter in front of them, beaming a huge smile, obviously happy that dad had won.

We chatted casually for a bit and then C suddenly unleashed a volley of what I thought to be pretty probing questions. “Do you do a bunch of different characters?” “When did you first start dressing up?” (A: He was 13 and he tried on his sister’s ballet outfit.)