meish dot org: life, unfolding

I can’t be the only one who’s noticed the similarities between the promo poster for Inception and the “horizonless projection of Manhattan” map made by BERG (here’s a post by Jack Schulze about the design influences for the project):

I’ve got the Here And There (HAT) map prints, and they absolutely deserve further scrutiny because they’re so detailed, plus it’s a really interesting, mind-bending (sorry) way to think about space, and the world.

Hot on the heels of the fortieth birthday of the information superhighway, it’s time for another birthday: an actual highway, this time: the M1, which today celebrates 50 years since opening by, presumably, having some sort of jam session, or maybe wearing one of those traffic cones on its head.

Motorway, by Darius Kay. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution/Noncommercial license

I can’t say I feel quite the same levels of personal enthusiasm and excitement about the potential of the motorway as I do about the internet….

(Incidentally, I’d link to the interesting BBC Four series about the cultural and engineering history of motorways, except of course you can’t watch it now. Ah well. Here’s a review instead)

Just spotted this little fella in the office emergency staircase:

He appears to be related to this little fella:

Who was spotted a few years ago on the staircase of the old derelict Midland Grand hotel over St Pancras station, just down the road.

I wonder if he survived the multi-million-pound facelift the hotel/station/area is undergoing at the moment?

BTW, there’s a whole load of Flickr groups dedicated to spotting faces in everyday things, including hello little fella, found faces and pareidolia (from the group description: “Pareidolia is when a vague or random image is perceived as recognizable. This group is for those pictures that look just like real life objects, but it’s all in your head.”)

[or: Haven't We Seen This Somewhere Before?]

I’ve been noticing recently a number of ad campaigns which seem to have “taken inspiration from” (which is a polite way of saying “copied wholesale from”) works of art.

In recent years there’s been controversy over the origin of Sony Bravia’s Bunnies ad (was it ripped off from LA based art due kozyndan?), the Honda Cog ad (did it borrow extensively from a 1987 art film?) and (while the original doesn’t really count as art, perhaps), even the Bravia’s Bouncing Balls commercial (was it all Letterman’s idea?)

While there’s always been a liberal approach to homage in ad agency’s bulging toolkits, I’ve been especially interested to see that some of the more recent examples seem to be directly inspired by art projects and works which have been heavily viral - the sort of links which people regularly send to each other on facebook, blog about and which rise to the top of digg and del.icio.us rankings.

It seems possible that creative ad agencies are turning to web trends/organically viral stuff to inform or inspire at least some of their creative vision - indeed, it’s hard to imagine how they might be able to get away without doing so, at least subconsciously, in an increasingly broad and social-infoflow-driven world. They may not be stealing ideas, but the influence of things which have also been popular on the web is clear in a many cases

I also wonder if the same circumstances of perma-connectivity and social object exchange by consumers means that concept appropriation is getting easier to spot because the circulation of information and sources is getting broader and more rapid?

Here are just a few examples….
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In the great, grim, glorious days of the GLC in eighties london, the South Bank frequently played host to great works of public art, towering over the murky thames, often contrasting starkly with the grey paved and concrete-clad terraces which surround the National Theatre, SBC and Royal Festival Hall.

When conceived the terraces were supposed to be public spaces - for meeting and mingling, seeing and being seen, much like the great piazzas of Italy, and grand moorish plazas of Southern Spain. Unfortunately, London on a wet Saturday afternoon could not be further from these distant, sunny ideals, and the terraces seemed grey and cold, unforgiving and uncomfortable. In the seventies, people chose not to linger.

But soon, some bright spark realised that the terraces provided a perfect location for displaying big artworks - contrasting with the grey paving slabs, river and sky, large against the South Bank skyline.

Have you ever seen that thing attached to the Hayward Gallery that looks like illuminated scaffolding? It’s the Hayward Gallery Neon Tower, a kinetic sculpture designed by Philip Vaughan (structure) and Roger Dainton (kinetics), and it’s still standing after thirty years (Update, August 2008: It’s been taken down).

We arrived in London from Nigeria a few years after it was completed, at the beginning of the decade that taste forgot, but it’s always loomed large in my memories of the South Bank, colorfully twitching in the night sky.

The colours change and shift according to wind speed and direction. When the wind’s in the north, it’s mostly magenta. When it’s in the west, it blows yellow. North is red. South is green. The colours dance with change in winter, flashing through the colour combinations. On hazy summer days, the progressions and shapes thrown are more leisurely and languid altogether.

In 1980, a man called Maurice Agis created a pneumatic sculpture on the lower terrace of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, and my mum dutifully ferried us down to the riverside to see it. Well, not so much to see as to experience. Colourspace was an inflatable structure pumped with slowly moving air. It consisted of dozens of differently-coloured chambers made of fairly thin plastic, though which natural light fell, casting livid hues within the structure itself. Visitors were limited, and were given a coloured cloak to wear over their clothes as they wandered through the colourspace, accompanied by dreamlike music, specially composed for the installation. Walking through the chambers, the cloaks took on the colours of the space. People would move from colour to colour, stepping through interlinked chambers. Others would sit for hours in the space, watching, experiencing. Moving, brightly-coloured people became part of the sculpture.

It was quite unique, quite amazing, and I never forgot it. We went back at least three times during that run, and every time it came to London after that, we were there. I’m annoyed because I’ve just discovered that his latest work, Dreamspace, was at Mardi Gras in Finsbury Park last year (along with me and a few thousand others) but I somehow managed to miss it. That’s such a shame - I’ve been waiting for it to come back to London, because I want to know if it was as magical and amazing as I thought when I was six. Few things are.

In 1983, there was a festival of Sculpture in London: Fifty Sculptors at the Serpentine and the South Bank, which in conjunction with the GLC, funded huge public artworks on the South Bank. My most vivid memory of the event is a giant bullet-shaped pink-tiled structure on an upper terrace, set around with handbasins and soap dispensers. People could stand and wash their hands, overlooking the Thames, and from within the structure the sound of running water, caused by the running and draining of the water in the sinks, made delicate haunting music. I had possibly the cleanest hands of any nine year old in London that summer.

Also that year, David Mach built a nuclear submarine entirely out of old tyres on the terrace behind the Hayward Gallery for his contraversial work Polaris. It was enormous, and ripe for climbing. We weren’t allowed to clamber on it, but we were very, very tempted, despite stern notices to the contrary. Later, it was torched by an angry critic who, having set light to the structure, coud not escape, and died in the flames he had lit. There were mumblings about irony, and we weren’t keen to walk around the back of the gallery for years.

More recently, in the late nineties, I huddled in winter clothes to watch video installations projected onto the river-facing wall of the Lyttleton Theatre, including Mark Wallinger as a blind man, swinging his cane and pacing the last few feet of a moving escalator at Angel, reciting from the opening verse of St John’s gospel, over and over. Soon, it became clear that the video was being played in reverse - in the background, people walked backwards down stairs and litter flew into their hands - and that his speech had been recorded backwards, phonetically, which accounted for his strange pronounciation - “Een thab igginning wusTHA wurrd…”

In the last few months alone, I’ve visited the Angel of The North and the newish Blue Pavement at the Laing Gallery (it’s not very blue, until you look down), and have been impressed and encouraged to see that art is gradually making its way out of the galleries, and into the everyday - not just in the form of statues and memorials, but as installations, interactive art, too.

It’s not always popular, but it’s getting increasingly public.

With a day off and London on the doorstop, one of my goals was to head over to see Antony Gormley’s Field for the British Isles at the British Museum.

I managed to haul myself out of bed early and get down there for the gallery opening to miss the crowds, but before I go any further describing it, let me just make a tangential point.

I find it sad that I no longer feel that I can mention my future plans in specific detail, without worrying that this lays me open to potentially threatening situations or interactions with strangers - people who may think that they know me well enough to show up where I’m planning to be and say hello, or pick a fight, or worse.

A few years ago, I was happy (/naïve) to say “tonight we’re going to be in such-and-such a pub” or “I work in this street” or whatever. These days, I’m afraid that too much has happened, on and offline to allow that sort of casual conversation to feel safe any more. It seems that for every hundred genuinely nice people who understand and respect the concept of privacy, even in a public space, and the generally-held notion that what little they see online does not make an individual’s entire life fair game or public, there’s at least one person who unfortunately doesn’t, and who furthermore fails to accept that such behaviour makes them seem like a stalker, or bully, or threatening, or worse. They seem to think that if one little bit of you is in the public domain - a handful of words, published daily online - the rest of you ought to be as well.

That makes me sad.

But back to the exhibition.

I saw Field in the Tate in Liverpool in 1993, and was moved by it. All those little figures. All that clay, brought to life and sensitised by human touch, standing expectantly, staring. The way that Field is always laid out means that you can’s see the whole thing from one position - it’s necessary to change position to see the peripheries, and even then you’re unlikely to see the far front edges.

Field is presented in a room, 40,000 clay figures staring forwards and upwards, huddled to the very edge of the doorway, meaning that visitors can only peer in through the narrow gap. It’s impressive, partly through scale, and partly because the figures seem to resonate on a deeper level with people.

Like others, when I first saw the installation in Liverpool, I sat on a bench in the doorway, and looked out over the figures for an hour or so. Small, squat, roughly shaped by hands ranging from 7 to 70 at a community project in St Helens on Merseyside, all shades of brown and red, clustered together by hue, the figures gave the impression of standing in a …well, in a field, staring up, waiting.

So that’s how it must feel to be on stage at Glastonbury.

This time the experience was different, but equally compelling. It definitely paid off heading to the gallery for opening time on the first day of the exhibition, because I was the only person there for a long time.

Well, I say “only person”, but what I mean is “only person, if you don’t include the three bawdy security guards watching the doorway overlooking the installation.”

When I arrived, they were looking out over the figures, hands on hips, joking about them.

“It’s sort of like egyptian, innit?” said one.

“Nah,” chimed in another, “If that was made by the egyptians, the civilisation wouldn’t have lasted three weeks, let alone three thousand years”

The others laughed. This work of art seems to have been lost on the security guards paid to watch over it.

What I had really wanted to do was take some digital pictures of the installation, but a sign on the doorway pointed out sternly that photography was forbidden. A shame. So I did the next best thing. I sat in the doorway, pulled out my PDA and wrote to capture it - eighty thousand staring hollow eyes, the slight smell of dusty earth, the feeling of warmth and clouds passing caused by the different groups of shades, clustered together.

I wonder if there is an order to the 40,000 pieces; a grand plan to which they must be laid out every time. Have they been laid out from the back forwards, or in clumps? How are they stored? Individually, indexed by colour? Who oversees the setting out - the artist? And if not, what does that do to the artwork, given that he conceptualised (but not created or arranged) the piece?

As I’m thinking about this, one of the guards compares the colour of the figures to spit-roasted tandoori chicken, his dinner last night. The others laugh. Somehow this lacks the solemnity that the figures seem to demand. Standing. Waiting. Watching. Expecting.

I’d strongly recommend a visit if you have the opportunity and the inclination.

If you do go, make sure to pop over to exhibitions of Antony Gormley’s drawings, also at the British Museum. I found myself particularly stuck by one in particular, entitled Space. I’m trying to find an image of it online…watch this space.

Once a year, London flings open the doors to hundreds of privately-owned buildings and closed institutions across the boroughs.

P and I headed out early to make the most of the good weather and the lack of queues, and visited the Midland Grand Hotel (St Pancras Chambers) and Marble Arch - both of which I’ve wanted to get inside for years.

The Midland Grand is disused and dusty - though not quite derelict - and on the edge of a major refit, to bring it in line with the new Eurostar terminal which the station it sits on top of will be receiving. The hotel was in use from the 1880s until 1933, then being used as offices for the following fifty years or so. And then it was the location for the Spice Girls’ debut Wannabe video.

This year, the building was also being used to display some rather odd art/light installations, which sort of detracted from the faded gothic grandeur of the hotel architecture, and the impessive recent renovations of the original paintwork and decor. Ah well.

Marble Arch stands at the entrance to Hyde Park, overlooking Speaker’s Corner. Originally planned for the gate to Buckingham Palace, the arch was moved to Hyde Park where it now rests. And you can go inside! The room at the top of the arch, which can only be reached by ascending a set of very steep and narrow stairs - complete with peeling victorian paint - was originally used as a police interregation room.

Anyway, a fascinating annual event, well worth taking advantage of (next year, could they open up Aldwych, please?), especially for a nosy Londoner like me…

Went to see an exhibition of work by Shirin Neshat last year at the Serpentine gallery. A combination of striking (if sometimes a little trite) b/w photographs and powerful film installations.

The most memorable were Fervour, Rapture and Turbulent - high contrast, high impact pieces about men/women public/privacy personal/anonymity, as well as exploring her experience of being an outsider in her own country after years in exile, as well as a woman in islamic culture. Really fascinating stuff, the more you know about it…

After watching the South Bank Show on Sunday night (well, last night - the lovely Niki taped it for me) I was reminded how ethereal, primal and gut-wrenching the music in Turbulent was - mentally, elementally stimulating - and was pleased to discover that the composer/performer, Sussan Deyhim has recorded a CD, which I’m going to try and get hold of. And speaking of artist/composer collaborations, I was interested to hear that Neshat is currently working with Philip Glass. Should be very interesting.

[Oh, small aside - I went to last summer's Serpentine exhibition with Mat, who, if I remember rightly, fell asleep in one of the video installations....incorrigible :o)]

Must go to the Serpentine more often. They have some cracking stuff there. Of course, they also have some absolute piffle…

Update: Found Sussan Deyhim’s CD Madman of God at Amazon, and have sneakily added it to my wishlist.