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:

repost: amazing photo of a gathering of starlings; Starling Wave by Danny Green. (won last year’s black and white category for the BBC wildlife photograph of the year. one of this year’s entries is this one of penguins; Back In Front Out by Esa Mälkönen. after pairing up, the birds take it in turns to incubate the eggs while the other walks to sea for food (white fronts have the eggs, black backs are returning from sea).

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.

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.

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.

posts outdated, waiting for photos from meg to evidence the abundance of switzerland; the sped-up and amplified explosion of green. you can almost see it growing.
that this abundance is a key contrast between switzerland and australia (on the one hand) and, more unforgivably given the climates, england, needs no questioning. it is just the way it is. plants will stay in pots here, green walls will stay in designs, any wildness in streets trimmed.
I never thought about Paul Klee until wandering around the thousand works in R.Piano’s Zentrum Paul Klee, the building’s shining structure emerging from the ground; in countryside next to a highway, and the shell already being grown-over by trees, grass, wild flowers. Klee was particularly obsessed by nature, and nature that had been brought under control. He encountered this at the Englischer Garten in Munich, where meg and I had spent the previous day, and this synchronicity does not go un-noticed.

English translated is far more beautiful than english pure. These are some of the titles of Klee’s drawings:
A Canoe Walking Across Country
Does Not Enjoy
Half-hearted Approach
With Beard
A Hen in the Evening
Rigid and Animated Things Wander Ghost-like
And, in the midst of these thousand beautiful delicate free drawings; a handful of ‘untitled’s.

either the altitude or the distance cause tearing/tearing
a seat by the wing is surely either safer/less safe from a dying point of view.

1. dawn in australia, skinny dry river snake
2. tiny buildings and tiny bridges in london
3. the Pyrenees on the occasion of my great-grandmother’s 97th birthday

4. and Gerhard Richter just because it’s beautiful and sad too

in primrose hill the pale low sun brightens white against dark knuckle trees and crispy winter sky.
the museum of everything is a cavernous sequence of rooms, up stairs and down low-ceilinged hall-ways; a big old house filled with strangeness. these are works by jailed mental patients, racists, homophobes and the common unsettled. nostalgia, sentimentality, darkness, and heavy-handed penmanship aside, there are beautiful tiny drawings: schizophrenic oswald tschirtner’s drawings of squids, intricate watercolours of russian guns. the stories were engrossing, not that i read many; it was the final week of exhibition and the big musty house was packed tightly with people who have blogs.

karol lasia / khomatech is the best cat photographer

are wonderful. at the Royal Academy with Anish Kapoor, and on this most crisp morning.