The Hepworth, names to take home.

I have just retured from The Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield. It’s a wonderful modernist building, a temple to perfectly crafted form, holding brilliant sculptures and the odd painting.

I’ve never considered myself a fan of sculpture, but it keeps creeping up on me. The things that tend to stand out in my memory of gallery trips definitely fall under that banner, from Joan Miró’s people, Alexander Calder’s mobiles, Antoni Tàpies’ cloud or Ólafur Eliasson’s frozen BMW —

Ólafur Eliasson, BMW H2R. Photograph © Adam Schwabe.

As I’m not a ‘fan’ of sculpture, getting by on a surface of knowledge and a likes-what-I-likes approach, I found the Hepworth to be an excellent journey. It is very good at contextualising the work, through showing initial sketches, maquettes, series, contemporaries. I think exhibitions are always best when they show the artist’s working out.

There were plenty of piece to enjoy, but these are the works that I made a personal note to record and follow up on:

• Bernard Meadows, Study for Black Crab / Black Crab
• Frank Auerbach, E.O.W. Nude
• Markus Schinwald, Roberte
• John Stezaker, Mask Series
• Des Lawrence, Fay Wray: Obituary Portrait
• Huma Bhabha, Untitled (2009) series

Maybe I will.

A year in pictures.

I’ve now pretty much left Instagram, bar for commenting/liking, and have moved my day-to-day photos towards Flickr.

For a while, I’ve had a feeling of wanting to take longer-lasting photographs, of better quality, that actually stand-up to time  — something which Matt well articulates. This post-Instagram, post-filter landscape has been accelerated by Instagram’s recent behaviour that has undermined its value to me and sullied the gentle social: the main reason I loved their service.

It is still a good record of the bits and pieces that I’ve experienced over the past year — including getting married, a handful of trips to Mitteleuropa and more Copenhagen — but next year I’d like to get better at photography, with a better camera.

So, 2012, through Instagram:

January.

February.

March.

April.

May.

June.

July.

August.

September.

October.

November.

December.

Jumping 23 miles and landing on your feet.

Today, we watched a man jump from the edge of space, 23 miles above the surface of the planet. He landed on his feet.

We watched it live on a social network video sharing site, via wifi and 3G, whilst sharing our collective anxieties with everyone in the world on our handheld super computers. Live.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the future isn’t what it was supposed to be.

The Desperate Hours.

This episode of Steptoe & Son (7-7, 03 April 1972) is a masterclass in situation comedy.

A one-room bottle episode with a sublime premise: the penniless rag & bone men are held up in their own home by escaped criminals looking for money, food, goods and a getaway car. The would-be stick-up-men find that there’s nothing worth having — a horse and cart, a slice of mouldy bread, leftover water-based porridge and some foreign coins — and leave with less that they came with.

The characters are richly drawn parallels of the Steptoes, with a brilliant performance by Leonard Rossiter for Corbett and Brambell to play off, exposing the tensions between the father and son: both captive dependents.

Steptoe & Son is the closest sitcoms have got to the absurd desperation of Beckett, barring maybe Bottom. Porridge is far too comfortable and owes much more to ‘Arold Pinter than despairing Samuel.

It’s brilliant, watch:

Breaching Experiments.

A new show opened at Site Gallery today by Finnish artist Pilvi Takala. It’s brilliantly observed work focusing on banal absurdism, mainly around rules, perceived rules and behaviour. It’s deeply funny and well worth popping into if you’re nearby.

Watch an excerpt of Takala’s The Real Snow White for an example of how she pokes things with a straight-faced stick.

 

 

 

Duck & Cover.

One of my long-standing hobbies is watching for discarded notes. Most notably over at Other People’s Shopping Lists, but I keep my eyes peeled for any kind of abandoned writing or photographs – fragments of people’s lives – mostly hoping for treasure maps or Dear John letters in amongst the lichen and chip papers.

Such as this torn beauty:

A document of a holiday fling that ended sourly, found on the street in Liverpool one summer many years ago.

Yesterday, I spotted a square of paper that looked like more than a lost to-do list or B&Q inventory. I kicked it down the road a bit before picking it up. This is what I found:

This is the kind of thing that you keep an eye on the discarded and the mundane for. Folding it out, there is a whole page of name ideas for the Nuclear Winter Menu, with a side section for Kruschev Cocktails:

Some decent pun work – including People In Blankets and Garlic Mushroom Cloud on the meal side, and Berlin Wallbanger and Sex On The Bunker cocktails – is let down by some pretty shit ones (Holocaust Halibut).

I can’t quite see that the anonymous, slightly racist, fantasy landlord will ever quite achieve their dreams of drinking a Sexed Up On The Beach at their less inspired franchise idea: The Baghdad Bistro.

In search of the Sublime.

This might be my second post about Instagram. About its worth to me, personally. It’s quick and superficial — looking at the “the continuous partial everywhere” of Cerveny and Juha, but maybe in terms of Coleridge and Wordsworth. I think I’m coming to find the opposite of Juha’s experience; a continuous partial nowhere.

The constant awareness of other people’s locations – thanks to foursquare, twitter, instagram – is causing a small sense of dislocation. I am not really a part of those locations. It’s wonderful, of course, precisely because of that. It’s cause for fantasy. Of escapism.

I’ve found the photographs I’ve actively liked on Instagram are pretty much a straight split between food/drink, brutal/urban, and pastoral/remote; the rest made up of moments and (what would once have been) noticings.

It’s pastoral/remote images like this:

This:

This:

and this:

I think I’m increasingly drawn to them because they’re over there. Not here, part of my daily routine. They’re a foreign bit, and they are very definitely somewhere. I find myself following people from Finland, Portland, Norway, adventurers and people near lands of tall pines, mountains, fjords. I follow them to escape briefly from the urban, suburban, bricks, mortar and railway tracks.

This is the nearest I have to a contemporary Romanticism; to reconnect with landscapes I haven’t known. Finding moments of the Sublime in amongst the bus rides in the city.

It’s the pastoral companion to Bridle’s Robot Flâneur. It’s post-industrial escapism delivered by the ultra-modern super-computer in my pocket.

(Images by Anne Holiday, Jez Burrows, Graeme Douglas & Jørn Knutsen, respectively)