Tuesday
We went for lunch with my "Edwardian" family on sunday, which was a rare treat,,, well,, I say lunch,, it was more like tea and cake... after that we went for an ethiopian meal,, which the punk has wanted to do for a while.. i didn't tell you about the bin i bought did i? i got this designer bin for our very un-designer flat,, i'm totally into it.... so now we need to get a fridge,,,, but i don't think its going to go down the way i'd like,,, i'm after a black or red fridge,,,, but those things are way out of my league,, so i'll have to wait until,,, until i'm not quite sure what as it goes... anyway, today i was at white cube so i had a quick look at the eberhard havekost show.... i remember when white cube did that show with havekost, thomas scheibitz and frank nietzch,, i much preferred that, when it was a bit more mixed up...... havekost on his own is a bit like a whole plate of riveta biscuits,,, kind of dry...
when i was leaving work today, there was this big letter for me from a secretarial company i've been using,, i thought it was a bill or something,, but then i opened it, it was some chocolate bunnies for easter,,, it was really good quality chocolate as well,, nice touch i thought,,, then again, at 18 pounds an hour i guess they can afford to send out flash chocolates..
Wednesday
Slash fiction at gasworks. even before arriving at this exhibition, the show was onto a winner, firstly, the title, slash fiction, which refers to a genre of literature written by fans, where they write parodies of favourite tv shows or books, and usually infect the narrative with some sexual occurrence between previously familiar characters. Some of my favourites include the A-Team story which shows Hannibal and the boys back in Nam and ends up in some sweety, salty stolen moments between Faceman and Murdock... the other thing this show had going for it was the weird immigration card that fell out of the envelope when i received my invite. when i arrived at the opening,, there was a mob of people crowed around a desk and some kind of bewildered gallery assistant demanding visitors show their gallery visas. somehow i managed to slip past the mob and into the gallery, but unfortunately the artist was on hand and immediately called me back. "no entrance without visa" he said... "ER,,, i filled it in earlier and posted it to the gallery," i lied, very unconvincingly....
Slash Fiction invitation
Easter Sunday
Last night i went to this redball beat battle at the hackney empire... I got an invite through this old school graffiti dude I was interviewing... you've got to call it "b-boying",,, not "break dancing" is the first thing to get straight,,, so, this was a b-boying competition,,, a hip-hop dance off...they had some pretty top notch people in the house,,, I have to say... a few legends... kool dj Marley Marl was up on the tunes,, crazy legs giving it on the mc... and then there were the b-boys and b-girls spinning their little hearts out.... In the end team germany walked away with the top ranking,, though I have to say japan and south korea were robbed blind... then after the b-boying was out of the way,, hip hop legends EPMD did a live set,,, they might not have been at their primest--you'd have had to have been around harlem queens circa 1989 for that,,, but still... legends is legends.. and he who don't believe can get the bozak....
Wednesday
i'm slightly whacked out this morning after a late night out with the museum 52 posse... they had an opening of valerie hegarty,, who'd made various trashed paintings and a big cupboard which had been severely distressed... then we went of to st. johns (very good pea and ham soup,, very good shoulder of venison,, also they do really good beer in that place,, i had this english lager from greenwich,, i think it was called meantime,, which would make sense..) then i was just off home when i got caught up in a conversation about tailoring with this socialite dude,,, so then they twisted my arm and we went to the groucho,,, that place has changed... you have to buy your own drinks now,, before only members could buy drinks... we ended up playing "virgina rules" snooker-- don't ask.... then another thing.. the groucho actually closed,, i thought that place never closed,,, so we dragged our sorry asses to some sleazy dive of tottenham court road,, where i ended up getting my ear bent by an ex-tabloid journalist from the sun and news of the world who told me a very convoluted story as to how he'd been sacked for refusing to "out" some dodgy vicar... a "reverse ferrite" he called it... john the ex-journalist's name was,, and he was exactly as you imagine a sun/news of the world journalist would be.
Valerie Hegarty, 'Niagara Falls'
Sunday
We went to see The Lives of Others today,, it's fantastic,,, a must see movie... all about the stasi in berlin in the 80s,, it's kind of also about loss of faith,, it's a good story.... they did make east germany under communism look extremely stylish though,,, saskia said the main stasi guy looked like an artist from hoxton square,, in their weird eastern european style clothes.. anyway,, wifesawp is on,,, and it's a classic,, they swooped a muslim wife from birmingham and a liberal wife from liverpool, whose daughter is a carpet muncher.. i'll tell you,, channel 4,, they're doing the government's job for them... talk about culture clash.. now they've done the rule change bit,, so wife no.1 from liverpool has brought a bottle of wine into the house and is sending the daughters to a gig,, the dad is not happy... now's she got them cleaning the house... and wife no.2 has been crying because of the daughter's sexual tastes and has taken the daughter shopping to buy her "more suitable" clothes.
Friday
i have hay fever. yesterday i went to a workshop on conflict management and negotiating skills,,,, it was in the east end so afterwards i popped to see some shows,,, first i went to the whitechapel,, which was pretty much closed apart from a dodgy video piece by someone called david maljkovic,, you know my rule with video,, i tend to give them about a minute,, and if it doesn't grab me by that point i walk on,,, life, like your dear narrator, is just too short, and such was the case with maljkovic's work... then i went to herald street who had cary kwok... i really like these drawings and if i could afford it, i'd buy one...there just super kitsch gay porn images where all the men constantly have gallons of sperm flowing out of them,,, very knowingly referencing tom of finland...
Cary Kwok
after that i popped round the corner to wolfgang tilmans' space, between bridges,,, which i hadn't been to before,,, it's a tiny little hallway but they've been doing some interesting things so i was glad to find it... the show they had on, charlotte posenenske, was, as it happens of little interest to me,, i can see that if you were concerned with the current (perhaps fading), debate on trashy d.i.y minimalism,, this could be for you... then i went to interim,, who had a show of photographs by james welling... downstairs wasn't so interesting,, but the more pretty flower images upstairs i could quite easily imagine going very well in my luxury apartment, if i had a luxury apartment.... the prints were actually quite intriguing,, in terms of how they were made,, i guess the artist has been playing around in the dark room in order to produce the images,, which are silhouettes of flowers,, with images of flowers inside,, like i say,, pretty, in a good way...
Torsten Slama, 'Vision 3: The Wilhelm Reich Cryogenic Institute', 2007
Pencil, coloured pencil and chinese ink on paper
then i wandered down a sunny cambridge heath road to hotel who were showing torsten slama,,, who had made a series of black and white drawings,, which kind of looked like lazy paul noble drawings,, just as if paul had started one of his drawings and then said fuck it,, i'm stopping early... they were kind of quirky and trendy as you'd expect from hotel,, and they occasionally had weird details,, horses or gorillas.... after that i was going to walk down to keith talent and then jonathan viner,, but on my way there I bumped into simon and andrew from keith talent who told me the gallery was closed but there was something equally as interesting in the pub on the corner.... about three hours later i stumbled out and over the road to vyner street for luke gottilier's opening at kate macgarry's new space... i wasn't quite sure about the work,, he mainly had these black canvases with the occasional sparse dab on them.. the main feature of the canvas being that the edges were completely fenced in with darts.. I think the darts were a good start,, but I would have liked to have seen more on the canvases... as someone,, probably the punk, said,, it looked like a lot of effort had gone in to looking effortless... there was also an opening at ibid of work by guillermo caivano,, which i didn't mind either way,, the punk seemed to take a massive disliking to them though... they were a bit like larger versions of chris orr I guess..
after that we went to bistroteque,,, I had cray-fish soup to start,, which was pretty good.. then i had lamb chops which were ok,, a bit rare for me,,, and it came on top of a kind of oriental carrot salad which wasn't a very good combination... the punk and neil had rump steak and they both said it was extremely chewy... lisa had the same main as me then rubarb fool for desert,, which i tried and liked a lot.. thomas had the classic steak tartare,, which he said was great... over all, we're well off bistroteque for food as what you get and what you pay for seem to sit on opposite sides of the room.
Saturday
i went to matt's gallery after work last night to see john russell's show.... i hadn't been to matt's for a while,, a good while.... i think that's what john liked about the place,, that everyone's kind of forgotten about it,, so there's a weird quirkyness going there. the show followed on in the same vein,,, i.e more weird quirkyness,,, actually, i'll tell you something about john's show,, everyone's talking about it and it's a rare thing these days in london for a show to have a buzz around it,, where people are saying you have to see this... so that kind of word of mouth marketing made me think i need to see this show, now,, so i left work early and went over there...and once you were inside the gallery,, well it was a bit disappointing in some ways... but there's something ok about disappointment,, it's like,, what the fuck?,,is that it?,, this wasn't the complete case with john's show,, because the intallation of the work is quite impressive,, it's four large scale photo prints on canvas which are back lit,, like huge light boxes,, and there's a great sence of the light humming when you walk in the room... but the underwelment comes with the images,, which if you know john's work are acually quite sparse by his usual standards.. but the images themselves are these highly computer-made and manipulated vistas of hidious looking people seemingly in various states of ecstacy.. the thing about john too,, is i think he wants to put forward the most debased anti-aesthetic image possible,, so it's hard to judge them in normal terms,, you have to judge them in terms of how awful they are... i think the level of ambition,, scale etc is good though..
John Russell
did you see gilbert and george on the jonathan ross ??? it was pretty funny,, there was one classic line where "wossy" asked them what they think about david cameron's urge for everyone to "hug a hoodie" and george said, "oh, we've been doing that for years"....
Cedar Lewisohn
Cedar Lewisohn is an artist and curator. He is also currently an Inspire Fellow at Tate Modern in London.
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