Last Rehersal & Art

It was our las rehersal today for Dancing in thier footsteps- and to be honest it went swimmingly well- we ran through twice with no problems at all- which is either really good (which it would seem) or really bad (in my negativity i imagine that because it went so well, people are not going to rehearse) also, i found out that it is bad luck to read the last line of a play in a performance. To be honest, that is quite rediculas, otherwise how would anyone ever be able to practise thier lines? I think Malcolm was relieved about the rehurseal today as Saturdays had gone a little belly up- one of the main characters couldn't make it and i had to stand in whilst doing the chairs at the same time. Its fine when Olivia is there- as a trained actress, she has the ability to read a script and not laugh after every line. Its a shambles when i do it.

After rehursal i went off to meet Joe for our second gallery trip of the week. We laughed about finally turning into real art students that actually enjoy going to gallerys in our spare time. We headed up to The White Cube in Masons Yard for a nice private view 'New order'- with promises of free Peroni. the exhibition was ok. I found a couple of pieces of work a little too overdone for the sensitive issues that they were talking about. For example, one artist had constructed sculptures out of furniature- to symbolise the 'silent witness' it is to what happens in war ridden or chaotic places. I liked the idea and the cupboards were aesthetically nice, but it did seem like they had only been constructed horizontally so they would fit in a space. I could be wrong, but the craftmanship, i feel, over-shadowed the point that the artist was trying to make. One piece i found interesting was Miroslaw Balka's 'Kategorie',  a large cold concerete tunnel, subtley lit, and as you trvelled through you had to avoid delicate threads hanging from the ceiling of the tunnel, slowley revolving. as you walked through you felt concerned that you would break the thread and as it reached the floor it gradually dissapeared to the floor. Each thread was a different colour- each one symbolising the different uniforms prisoners in the Polish concentration camps. It reminded me a lot of the cold schitzophrenic structure of the Berlin Jewish Museum which makes you feel physically sick through navigation of space, but in a way  this piece removed  you from the sickening realities of the holocaust and made you think more specifically about the individuals that would have been victimised. Most definately the highlight of the show.

The second trip we made this evening was up to Bethnal Green to the Vyner street galleries. Being 'First Thursday' night, it was absolutely packed in every space down Vyner Street- and the specific exhibition which we came to see (Structure) was bursting by the seams. Structure is an exhibition that is being held at the moment by a couple of 2nd year BA students from Havering college. It is quite impressive  of the students from the course to get a venue like this, just for an ordinary show(Not to sound patronising, but it is a lot easier for 2nd year students based in London to find a space in london, than those based in a college outside), and they managed to get a big following down as well.  I like to keep up to date with what the college are getting up to- the foundation i was on at Havering was great and the Tutors there are very keen for the BA to come up to the same standard, and baring in mind that it is only in its fourth year, i think it is certainly making its way in the art world.

The show itself was what i was expecting, to be honest, a lot of print and paintings and a couple of videos. The space itself was broken up quite nicely but as there were so many people i found it difficult to look at work in any detail. I think the best work in this show was a painting of a building, it was a high rise concerete block but the centre image was surrounded by gold leaf which gace the painting a really uplifting feel. Unfortunately i couldn't get close enough to see who had painted it or a title even- but this is the one that i found most interesting. There was also a video that was rather creepy with a child whispering on it. Sadley i think my attention was drawn to it because it reminded me of an episode of Dr Who where a child keeps whispering 'are you my mummy' whilst its head has been merged to a gas mask- but anyway, yes, this did keep my attention for a while.

Outside there was some performance art going on, not really my cup of tea. A friend described it as a performance that was supposed to be amusing, the performers covered in sheets and/or newspapers chanting and ringing bells. I personally thought it was more embaressing than funny and a bit boreing to watch, and as they walked towards a car that was trying to drive down the road the performers seemed to become very confrontational, inching the car back as they walked towards it. The driver obviously didn't know what was going on and was worried about running into them. The performers on the other hand i think wanted to make a statement for statements sake. The crowds were a little too much for me, maybe i'm getting old, but people are just becoming ruder and ruder, and no one has any spacial awareness. I think i'm starting to get more and more claustraphobic around people. I may need to sort myself out before i stop leaving the house!

Paris

I am ready to pass out. I managed to get back to the flat this morning at about 9am, surprisingly to my housemates who weren't expecting me back today- let alone so early. I had been travelling since 5am french time and sadly there was no chance to stop off for a croissant and coffee, because nothing was open. I also felt horrendously sick on the train, so even if there had been- I'm sure i wouldn't have been able to manage it.

We left for Paris on Saturday morning. We woke up at around 5.30am to Nick's phone ringing, it was the Taxi waiting to pick us up. After getting ready to leave in 5 minutes (Yes, just 5 minutes- impressive huh?) we rushed to the cab man who politely reminded us about 15 times that we were late. We laughed along as you do without realising he would stick £10 on the bill due to him having to wait that extra 5 minutes. A good start to an expensive weekend- although, to be fair i wasn't paying for anything, so the expense should not really be such a concern. During the day on Saturday we mainly explored the city. Nick wanted to avoid the touristy places and we took our time finding a very french restaurant for lunch. The waiters were the complete stereotype of what you would imagine a rude french waiter to be. Forcing you to sit with strangers and huffing because you have requested something unusual from the menu. Being a veggie, there wasn't much for me- however it did result in a total indulgence of cheeses so i didn't mind. The waiter wasn't pleased that i only had cheese. I think he thought i was wasting his time, either that or he was looking down on Nick for not feeding me properly. The restaurant- 'Chartier' was really fantastic inside- high ceilings and 20's train/ station design throughout. The tables each stood by a large brass over shelf for you to put your bags and coats and the lights were like a classier version of those from Cannon Street or Liverpool Street station. The waiter threw our meals down and hovered around us until we had nearly finished. I had to practically growl at him so he didn't prematurely take my cheese. The chips went though, as soon as nick placed his knife on the plate. Fantastic food though, and the waiter was worth the trip inside. We ploughed the streets a little more that day. Nick wanted to take some photos and got some amazing shots of odd Parisian moments and pigeons. I couldn't help but notice the amount of fancy dress shops everywhere.  wish i had more money- there were some amazing clown shoes with my name on them- 40 euros though. They can wait until the exchange rate drops i think.

The fancy dress shops were amazing- much better than the niche ones you find in Covent Garden. People were actually shopping in these, seriously considering what outfit to buy, as if it was a weekly routine such as going to the grocers. I must have counted about 5 or 6 massive shops on Saturday and a couple more on Sunday. my idea of Heaven.

We popped into one bar on Saturday night where we ended up staying most of the evening. It was actually a Beatles themed bar although that was only really the music. It was a Bar/ Tabac ran by one man and had a really relaxed atmosphere. They served Ricard in Ricard glasses, with Ricard water jugs. Which is pretty much what kept us there.

Sunday was a little more planned, although i didn't think that the shops would all be closed, I missed out big time on buying food for the next couple of weeks- I did manage to get Charlotte's 'I Love Paris' T shirt though, cheesy gift shops are always open wherever you are in the world. It was a shame though, i think living in London you loose a sense of what real life is and everything becomes '24 hours'.
We went over to the Pompadu centre to see what was showing Art wise. I didn't realise how big it was, and the views over Paris were astounding, i took lots of photos- not that you could recognise anything in them. I saw a large group gathering around a street performer and remembered a conversation i had with someone about whether or not making performative work in some contexts was just 'street performance' I decided from that conversation that i would love to be a street performer (and anyone who says 'street performer in a derogatory sense has no soul) - but actually that will always be a dream- my work isn't as entertaining and it takes a special type of person to be able to hold a crowd.

Going back to Art- The permanent collection was extensive and probably too big for me to comprehend in one day. To be honest i rushed through a lot of it just so i could 'look' at everything. I really need to go back to Paris again, just to spend a whole day with the permanents, if only it wasn't in a different country. European galleries have such a more interesting way of hanging work- it seems crisper and easier to look at, in Britain i feel curation always a little to overcrowded or sparse (one extreme to the other).

The real thing that  i enjoyed about the Pompadu though was the feminist exhibition which had just been installed. This shocked me. Usually i find feminism a little samey, but this collection again was extensive- from Annette Messenger to Pippilotti Rist to Lucy Gunning and the Guerrilla Girls, everything was so different together and all the works were addressing different issues about culture, race, identity, anything. I must say also, that the video room was amazing- so many classic video pieces that i have seen in other exhibitions but just escalated to a new platform being surrounded by each other. I ended up writing obsessive notes walking around- not something that i have done since A-level, and also taking photos of work to show other people specifically, to help their work. I really wish i had bought the catalogue for the show now because i know i will want to reference it in the future a lot, perhaps i can find it on Amazon...?

Our Sunday evening ended with Omlette and Chips. Fantastic french cuisine. Nick insisted that he wanted to order in French, but the fact that we ordered classic English, French food meant that the waiter only spoke in English. I was happy, as my French is terrible- I can't even prenounce Orangina correctly!

Pumphouse gallery fail

Stupidly i have left going to an exhibition to the last day it is open, and it is just my luck that it is closed due to snow. I am very disappointed, but i couldn't see myself being able to traipse across Battersea park in the snow. Also on the plus side, it is a travelling show, therefore, hopefully i may be able to see it somewhere else in the future...

The Magic Show

Winter Wonderland!

We took a house trip down to the Winter Wonderland in Hyde park today- originally the plan was to go and see The museum of everything, but when checking the website on the way there we noticed that it wasn't actually open. The quick change of plan involved going to see some Anish Kapoor by the Serpentine Gallery, however we thought we would walk through Hyde park to get there and by passing bumped into the Winder wonderland. It was very brightly coloured and wonderful as we expected, but unfortunately everything was far too expensive. We settled with buying some doughnuts and having some pictures taken with a pretend Santa. O well, onto the artwork.
The Anish Kapoor was ok, it was a little too predictable for me though, we may have just looked at  the photos in the Time Out mag we had instead of walking for half an hour to see the same sculpture doing the same thing in 3 different locations. Perhaps i just have a short attention span, but i did enjoy the winter wonderland more.

Liverpooool

We ventured up to Liverpool on Friday for a class trip. After leaving ridiculously early and being sick on one of those awful curving speed trains, we reached Lime Street and headed over to the Tate Liverpool to  drop my bag  off in a Hotel on the dock and meet the rest of our class (A little turmoil with this task as it seemed that when i checked in, the receptionist had given me a dud key card that wouldn't open the door- poor Laura took the initiative to go and ask for another while me and Joe were trying to force the thing open- Laura's method prevailed and the 5 minute stop turned into a 15 minute hastle and a quick stop in a Beatles souvenir shop). When we eventually got to the Tate, there wasn't much of a class there, in fact it was just myself, Joe and Laura who had turned up, Oh and Gill.

We stopped for a quick cup of tea in the Tate- i was horrified to share a pot of herbal tea with Laura, not that I'm not fond of it, just that i was shockingly tired and needed caffeine. I assumed Laura would need caffeine too?! Inside the gallery there was part of the Liverpool Biennial tour. I can't really say that i found any of the work breathtaking although i did enjoy finding various ways of sitting on a big blue sculpture in the middle of the room that you were allowed to interact with. My real joy came when browsing the permanent collection- Bruce Nauman's- Good Boy, Bad Boy. I have never seen the full installation before, only clips and photos. I was totally taken in by it and encouraged Joe to share the joy too. I think he was very pleased in the end with the forcing him to sit and watch it, unfortunately we couldn't watch it for the full hour.

 

We swiftly moved on from the Tate and we saw a couple more sights- the place where the 'This Morning' weatherman used to jump across his  floating map, the Mersey and the livabirds- we also learned about the Liverpudlian cultural heritage features (a la Gill) such as the immigration, slavery, trade and lambananas- and took a tour of a house that was dressed with 1940's ww2 decor- a very friendly man invited us in, he seemed very interested in our array of accents and i was convinced that he must have been friend of Gills- however we were reassured that Liverpudlians are just friendly and nosey, everyone speaks to each other like that.

The tour stopped for a brief buy in the Mersey Ferry gift shop where i bought my sister an 'I love Liverpool' T-shirt and had a conversation with the  shop assistant about Hanson and 90's music. We agreed that cheesy pop is the best music to play in a gift shop.

Gill moved us on again, this time for Lunch- unfortunately we had missed the ferry trip across the river and were told 'we may be able to go on the way back' - i think his was just one of those lies your mother tells you when you want to go in the sweet shop and she wants to go elsewhere (I do like a nice boat though, so i made sure i got a ride the next day). We got lunch in a very beautiful old pub- specifically chosen because it sold 'Scouse'- bowls of it. Again myself and Joe missed out as they weren't serving 'blind scouse' (The veggie alternative)- but what we lacked in eating we made up in drinking (I actually only had half a pint of beer and i was so drunk i insisted that we should visit a pound shop.)

Moving on from lunch and the pound shop we did a little more tourism- Joe had his picture taken outside of 'The cavern'  and we all went to the Vivian Westwood shop to dribble for a while, and then over to see a little bit of art. After all, I'm sure there was a reason for us to be there. We went inside a church building where there was a bed- a copy of the bed piece that John Lennon and Yoko Ono did all that time ago- apparently different artists were coming in to make an artwork on the bed over the course of about a month everyday. We had missed it that day though and the remnants wasn't really that illustrative of what had happened- we walked over to the back of the church where there was an old book store. Joe bought some old door knobs and i got a 70's penguin book of the Crusades. First Christmas present sorted.

The main exhibition that we had come to see in Liverpool was inside an old hardware shop- it had a piece of Work by the Freee collective on the front of the windows and had an extensive collection of every kind of artwork you could think of, from a room full of paintings, to the the roof which was full of pipes leading into the air vents out in the street (Rosa Baba) to some wacky brain numbing films in the basement that made absolutely no sense (Which was part of the fascination of the films-RyanTrecartin) This was probably my favourite space of the day, i enjoyed the challenging aspect of the space being completely different to spaces i had seen before and being so vast that i was ready to collapse when we left. The space also had a labyrinth type quality, and the mix of work meant that every turn was a surprise and unexpected.

Misty Liverpool and a UFO

I didn't wait long before i got cold and went back to the hotel, i grabbed a sneaky cab back up to the station about half an hour later- very interesting conversation with the taxi driver though, about how he likes the cockneys, but can't stand people from Essex- I told him i was a London girl to save embarrassment.

The weekend was a lot more relaxing than the whistle stop tour- we went on the Mersey cruise (where the Beatles song played over and over again) and visited various pubs in the city- the majority mentioning the Beatles somewhere in the pub for tourism purposes. We managed to find the old pub from the Friday again which was good, because i knew Nick would love it. We didn't go for any scouse though. It was very cold over the weekend too so we spent the weekend off and on looking at coats- the shopping is very extensive in Liverpool and it does seem as if a lot of the culture surrounds this at the weekend, the crowds were the varsity of those at Oxford street on a Saturday- which is probably why we stopped at the pub so many times. 

Nick taking photos of the Mersey (maybe to escape the Beatles song?)

We stopped off at the Britannia Adelphi Hotel (Adelphi Hotel) for a drink on Saturday, which was an odd experience, from the look of the building and the description of the Hotel you expect luxury- and we had specifically gone in to take a look around the building, but the bar had been turned into an American 'diner' style bar and the main pub area, although beautiful in its originality and architecture, seemed to have been hollowed out to fit in as many chairs and tables as possible, and hadn't been cleaned in a long time. However, to be fair, it was full. The pub culture in Liverpool obviously runs quite deeply into the city's history- the majority of the punters were men on their own with a paper and a pint, the odd family and a couple of Lady's scattered around. It wasn't a bad atmosphere, but it was a little odd. In contrast to this we walked into the main hallway of the hotel which was very large and lavish and immaculate. It is supposed to be a tea and coffee reception room but it was almost too daunting to sit down. We didn't stay for coffee, but we did head up the hill to see some of the architectural artworks that i hadn't managed to see on Friday. One in particular that i thought was very good was a building covered in flags- it was obvious to see the countries of each flag but at the same time there was an overlay  of a fire image, so the building looked like it had been burnt down (Will Kwon) I hadn't realised to start with

that it was a piece of work- but it was very effective.