bluntie

lido, market, front seat of top deck of bus, another market, a very very empty turbine hall, circles of people watching other people pretending to be statues, covered in facepaint, cameras, large wheels, bens and bridges, palaces, parks, picnics. And, finally, the calmness of wolfgang tillman’s show at the serpentine gallery. so understated, large photos with smaller ones which were taped to the doors of fire cabinets, no fuss. really beautiful, i wish you could see it too. there is also an architectural pavilion masquerading as a cheap ‘pop-up’ coffee shop / american apparel corporate branding exercise. it is very red, but not much else.

my favourite photograph was this one, called Growth:

how could you possibly invade against the white chalkiness of these cliffs? this is what i think of england, must be from watching too much kiera knightly. the clouds are english, the weather is english, the surrounding pubs are very. shocking white cliffs, then tiny war-time bunkers, still there and rocky in the barren landscape.  must have been cold and damp in there, must have been aching.

The train departs in a sunny interval and slides between the upper levels of terraces and warehouses, their east faces lit up.
Then quickly expanding and wide, the overgrown stinky greenness of hackney’s marshes begins the pattern of outer London: the green, the remnants, the disused railway bridges, the rusted gas holders, the allotments, then warehouses. This is the Lea Valley. Industry melts into ditches of grease, geese, swans, a hundred dusty white vans.
On my left are the backs of  terraces, with their washing on the line and their lace curtains in the windows. To the right are so many trees, the saplings suffocating the old, undergrowth creeping into the canopy, weeds towering over ponds and stinky crevices. And then a power station. This valley will be one of the cradles of the post-apocalyptic world.
And then I am into the gently sloping pastures. If you have an empty heart, a positive side of this is that even small amounts of sunshine, a scrap of blue sky, a brief message, a short story, quick journey, glances, flickers, glimmers… all make it completely weightless.

Is this what it feels like to be Norwegian? So many things to make me smile in a single day:

^The memory of Victoria Plum, my saviour on that harrowing day 18th january 1987, when I was taken landscape painting in the 40degree Clare Valley heat, and when a fatty tiger snake crossed my dusty path.

^From nowhere, a heavy downpour for 5 minutes. Or maybe it was more prolonged but localised in this small patch of nowhere. Don’t be fooled by the sign, Cambridge City Centre is an hour ride away. Imagine me sheltering in the woods, building this quick shelter on Grug’s prototype. The sun came out instantly, just like the moral of this story.

^ Thatch is lovely, so thick and spongy. Again Grug’s hair.

^ And then, amongst all the thatch and winding roads, immediately after the rain and unpleasant wind, there it was: An Australian landscape. By some trick of the crop the land looked parched, and the sky was wide, opening up toward the A14.

And a cacophony of animal. Cows on the cycle path, cats in the lanes, ducklings in the river, bunnies in the golf course, two turtle doves, and a foil sealed baby frog for the journey home, gross. I savour the journey home, as the train goes through Ponders End which is my spiritual home and where I hope one day to settle.

this is a local topical blog by the youngest tasmanian hamilton in london, ricky. the daily entries are a study on the transrotational nature of the streets of east london; eternally shifting but never really changing.
chicken bones and their packaging are the product of a tide of inhabitation which sweeps twice daily and three times a night through east london’s streets, houses, pubs and buses. london fried chicken is the base unit of waste in the area, the lowest cost protein in the world and a great social leveller because everyone loves fried chicken, not least the communities of local cats.
also, in a head-spinning interconnectedness if you click on his links he gets cash from google.

visually related: bones, of the prolific and notorious 70k crew. which reminded me of the awestruck discovery early one morning in deserted melbourne (chicken bones yet to be swept from the gutter) of an empty office block whose windows had been filled with tags. beautiful and noble as the sun rose, and, as either public art or filigree sunshading (nouvel…) unrivalled in scale or value engineering.

it is embarrassing for me that i write and suddenly realise that i have created in my mind a vivid and direct connection between jean nouvel and chicken bones.

couldnt work out what these were for a while… how old? really old?  they are  just on the verge of being part of the natural landsdcape, part of the man-made. is just simple terracing on the slopes not mystical but necessary to keep the soil still and the lavender crop happy.

south of barcelona, in the heartland of the catalan industry of moving rocks, rubble, concrete, dust, ashes around in trucks.
calm and silent in a surrounding quarry, baking in the sun: a new cemetery of rocks, rubble, concrete, dust and ashes. like an undiscovered abney park, over decades the wild flowers and grasses covering the concrete, and the trees plunging it into shade.

the surreal house at the barbican didn’t give as it promised, although maybe getting a definitive impression from a surrealist show is a flimsy hope. architectural bits and pieces in amongst it though? a bit out of place imo. and, so many tiny tiny photographs… am i stupid?
i didnt want a blockbuster, but i do want the unexpected, like this nugget of metal machinery and its shadow.

surrealist declaration:
we have no intention of changing men’s habits, but we have hopes of proving to them how fragile their thoughts are, and on what unstable foundations, over what cellars they have erected their unsteady homes.

which is more evocative than the show. secretly, it also made me think of the local hackney mole man, recently deceased, who dug for 40 years under his house, hollowing our a web of tunnels spreading 20m in each direction. moles and rats underground, squirrels and badgers upstairs drinking tea.

and, the very long shadows of a de chirico painting is placed perfectly next to its soul-mate; the casa malaparte, showcased in  jean-luc goddard’s movie le mepris. long shadows, wide steps, heavy absence, the ominous, a wide sky, a cliff.

firstly, it’s just another northern town. highway severing, high street emptying. senselessness of place, a sense of placelessness. but the abandoned spode pottery works are full of treasure.

but not to forget the raw materials which created Stoke; a north-south ribbon of coal, clay and heavy woodland – the necessary components of the pottery industry. the six towns, six ‘potteries’, born were distinguished in skyline and texture by the functions of the industry; chimneys, kilns, hard labour, heat, and everywhere bricks. functions are volumes, vases, kilns, reduced to their essential machinery, and then becoming suddenly useless in the face of time.
but for all the heat and pain of the process, and the rawness of their forms, the end product is a delicate object, a refined product and branding, and a sophisticated organisation of trade, advertising and retail. moulds fix the design for a time, firing changes the tones and textures of glaze, and their use is about food and tables.
the Spode Works are now empty volumes, fused together over 200 years and then left suddenly without reason, like the town itself. on the same day as we walked into the huge dusty spaces and knotted courtyards of the site, Louise Bourgeois died. she had said of spiders and their webs that they do not leave when there is a hole, but repair it with patience.

and damon marshall was doing this at university and we laughed.

on sunday morning i strapped on my dalston sandals and walked to the east london line.

(on the way stopping at a car boot sale to buy a brooch in the shape of a golden mouse holding a golden cat one 20th its size among other delights)

the east london line is a revelation: moving at speed but quietly through the knotted part of london which is usually slow moving and loud. sudden moments of orientation up in the roof tops of buildings and streets which are so familiar at ground. the gherkin moving in an orbit detached from the foreground.

then another moment; the grey brown shadowy patchwork of dense grainy buildings is cut by the heavy colour of brick lane sunday, on axis, like some grand boulevard. which, given brick lane, is a thought to make one smile.

traveling the cross-section of east london is restorative, look, i can exist simultaneously in a village and a city, part of life and deeply anonymous. i can ride my bike through overgrown cemetery at the northern extent of my line, through the puddles of spilled meat-juice leaking onto the street from Ridley Road’s tripe and trotters market, through tree-lined streets, on cobbles, alongside canals. gardens move from behind houses to rooftops, from wide to narrow and wide again. is there any food i cannot taste? i wouldnt need anything more.

Whitechapel Road, where I “alight”! It’s another space entirely; uninhabitable by the shops on each side. their storefronts spilling only so far into the wide wide highway. what must this look like from the sky; the last straight road before the muddy river?

The Whitechapel Gallery is room into other room and at each point it feels as though the doors lead to somewhere private rather than to another gallery space. often i love the gallery bookshop more than the works and i feel that this is wrong. most relevant today in the gallery was the delicate drawing of Jim Hodge’s piece: Everything so Alive  Lively Living,without online representation, but approximated here:

and in the card shop; Christopher Wool’s Cats in Bag. always. i am sentimental about the very slightest of things and susceptible to the hit-over-head text. cats in bag, mouse catching cats, everything so alive, lively, living.