Why Constable is pants.

As mentioned before, I've just been round the Royal Albert Memorial Museum's current bunch of shows.

The Pond is a series of photographs illustrating the regeneration and adaptation of a pond on the outskirts of Exeter. This is a beautiful sequence of changes, finding the aesthetic in abandoned rusty farm machinery, old boats and the frozen surfaces in winter. The reclamation of the pond seemed to move in two stages: first it was cleaned up from an environmental point of view so that natural growth overtakes the manmade decay; then you notice that fencing and turf are appearing, with the suggest of nature being made to conform with health and safety. Overall a fascinating sequence of change - there was a moment where I had to go back and check that the trees which looked so startlingly new in the first Spring image were there in skeletal form in the winter images.

The Shell poster collection is another series, this time of the adverting images used by Shell in the 30s and 40s to promote the concept of tourism by car. The show itself is on tour, which adds a certain neat charm to the idea. It's hard not to notice the layers of nostalgia invoked here: the posters deliberately evoke a land with no cars, with very few people and often show ruins rather than complete buildings and the posters are themselves evocative of an age in which motoring must have actually been fun as opposed to the grinding tedium of the M25 today. I'm a bit of a sucker for 1930s graphic design anyway: there's a boldness to it, a lack of fear. You can't imagine advertising being this messily stylised now. Then again, the militant pedestrian in me mutters that it was the effectiveness of this which has led to the modern dependence on the car for transport.

Navigating Stevenson is an exhibition of digital art over which I am highly ambivalent. As usual, that means it's the room I spent the longest in. The works take photographs from Robert Louis Stevenson's effects and create huge digital treatments of them. The works are highly elusive. Seen obliquely, or from the far side of the space, the deep perfection of the colour treatment - each one being made up of tones of a single colour - is arresting. Yet up close the works lose cohesion and instead what catches the attention is the use of reflections and lines. One in particular reminds me of nothing more than some Duran Duran cover art from 1984. Amidst the artworks are pieces of bark cloth and other artifacts from the islands. Ultimately, this fails to raise any questions, beyond a mild curiosity about seeing the actual photographs on which it is based. I always distrust shows in which you have to reach for the catalogue to gain anything meaningful.

Finally, In Nature's Instant, or, why I think Constable is pants. Yes, finally. It's quite noticeable all the exhibitions connect together notions of nature, travel and/or locality. This final exhibition is of landscape painting. The one here, Cross at Chagford, is the only one in the entire room that I found even remotely interesting. It's not that I am anti-representational in my art preferences but if I'm going to look at paintings, then I want them to be of nature not of landscapes.

Monet, for all his Athena-print populism, paints a nature in which you can sense the heat rising from the haystacks or the flutter of the breeze over the lily pond (anyone who thinks the lily paintings are entirely naff should visit the chamber in L'Orangerie in Paris in which you are submerged by them - you can sense a power to them that they lack in their twee reproductions). Turner, well, I could stare at Turner's seascapes for hours. Back when the National Gallery had a room containing two giant Turner canvasses (here's one of them, and another) and two giant Constable canvasses, I used to visit regularly and sit with my back to Constable (like this one).

There's too much specificality to Constable and his ilk, an attempt to recreate an ordered view. This is the rural idyll controlled. There was a documentary a few years ago which demonstrated how he had rearranged elements of actual locations in order to better suit his requirements. It's unlikely to be a coincidence that Constable painted his cleaned up landscapes at the time the land itself was being regulated and brought under control by the Enclosures Acts. Constables most famous works are from the 1810s/1820s and the General Enclosure Act was passed in 1801*. It's also not a coincidence that the Romantics - who celebrated the sublime beauty of Nature as well as knocking up their sisters and throwing themselves into lakes - emerged as a movement in this same period. Constable, and all the followers of him with their hard-working peasants in empty mannered spaces where even the sheep seem to have a specific place, isn't reflecting nature-as-is but nature-as-ought-to-be. Not to mention the fact the brushwork is pedestrian, the use of colours decidedly limited and unimaginative and the subject matter sub-Claudean (and at least Claude could paint trees).

BTW, that National Gallery site is fantastic - I could get lost navigating its collections all night.

*this explains why I did history of art, design and film - you also got to learn political and social histories...

Perhaps I was hasty in dismissing Ilfracombe as "a small seaside town on the north coast of Devon more noted for some wickedly sharp rocks and a strange popularity with Liverpudlians" since Damien Hirst's bar has now opened there. There's going to be sushi*, allegedly, so I shall have to check it out.

I'm ambivilent about Hirst as an artist. I like some of his stuff, and find others a bit, well, obvious.

Back when I was at art college, and Thatcher was still in power (scary piece of contextualisation), one guy in our studio (Steve) did a lot of work involving bodily fluids and flesh. A couple of years later, an undergrad at Sheffield Hallam (where I was taking my degree) did an installation involving decaying flesh and or a turd on a bit of grass. I forget the precise details, merely remember that the idiot hadn't thought about what happens to flesh/shit under hot lights and the entire show was removed from exhibition. So the notion of cut up animal carcasses as art is not particularly shocking, and seems to assume that the viewer of the work is either squemish or not familiar with dead flesh. At the time I became veggie, one of my school-friends lived above their father's butcher shop**. To visit them for tea, one walked through the prep rooms and saw entire sides of cow carcasses hanging from hooks, or blood being washed from the floor. A work such as Mother and Child Divided is denuded of any shock value if you are familiar with, and blase about, the insides of a cow. At that point, you are free to look solely at the meaning of the work rather than discussing the attempt to shock. There's a nice play on 'divided' in it, obviously, with the mother and child divided from each other as well as literally cut in half. But what else is it asking of us? What other thoughts does it want to provoke, what other thoughts does it provoke? Well, not a lot. I suppose if you are not familiar with chopped up animals it provides a way of exploring the physically of its innards.

Yet his dots series, one of which was sent to Mars on Beagle 2, or the Pharmacy installation at Tate Modern, allow the mind to explore as well as the eye. The dots play with optical reality, and is very much in the Bridget Riley tradition of creating 2D work with 3D illusions. This ties in with my fascination for PKDick style SF, obviously. So my overriding suspicion about Hirst is that his most famous works are art college vacuous attention seekers but that he is not completely devoid of merit.

I went round the Royal Albert Memorial's current crop of exhibitions last week, so I really will get around to explaining why Constable - and all his bucolic rural idyll followers - is pants.

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*yes, vegetarians can have sushi. Instead of the fish you have avocado, or mushrooms, or corn, or peppers or... well, all sorts of things.
**this is not why I am vegetarian - I never found the prep rooms the least bit disturbing.

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Posted @ 9:30 am on Monday, May 24, 2004
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Some quiz results. I've actually just spent the day out in Totnes getting some clothing together for the ConVivial in Glasgow next weekend. As dressing like a Victorian/Edwardian is always a good idea in hot weather. The silks are going to be packed as back-up and I did pick up a lovely fan with Kuan-Yin on it in Portobello last weekend (and very nearly used it on the Tube on Tuesday).

Homer's heroes quiz:
[You are] Achilles. You're a good person to have around on the rare occasions you're ready to do some work, but you have volatility issues. Your willingness to enlist the help of your mum won't win you any friends, either.

You Are Ichabod Crane From "Sleepy Hollow." You're a deep thinker - most times logically. You're a bit of a neat freak and a wuss (hey, you do faint a lot!) but you do have the ability to overcome your fears and come out stronger in the end. And you never lose your head over things. (Gufaw gufaw!)

Take The Johnny Depp Quiz!

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Posted @ 8:51 pm on Saturday, May 22, 2004
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London belongs to me! Just back from five days in the south-east, working for the day job.

Amidst all the mis-delivered letters for the neighbour, bank statements and the like, there was issue 5 of The Girly Comic which contains my debut comic script, as mentioned back in Feb this year.

On the downside, I appear to have a mosquito bite on my leg, the first of the summer and the first ever in the UK. Not that global warming exists, according to Americans and Russians. I also got caught in my first ever barrier queue on the Tube, having foolishly decided to come back from Cheshunt via Liverpool Street (one change to circle line) instead of via Tottenham Hale (change to victoria line, change again at Kings X). London tube etiquette broke down utterly, with people talking to one another. Admittedly after one gentleman pushed through claiming the entire thing is the fault of a Labour government. Whilst Blair may be responsible for many dubious things, I'd suspect chronic under-investment by various governments over the last 20+ years is the real cause of the over-saturated public transport system...

The plus side of going via Liverpool Street is that I spotted an Accessorize and found a pair of the Chinese slippers I've been drooling over for weeks in my size. Also, had enough time to stop for conveyor belt sushi at Paddington station and got some vegetarian dumplings quickly fried for me - v. yummy.

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Posted @ 11:02 pm on Tuesday, May 18, 2004
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We're not in Devon any more, Moosifer.

Turns out that thunderstorm which kept me in the office on Monday was more entertaining than I realised, as a tornado formed on the outskirts of Dartmoor. This is Devon (WMN) report

Met Office spokesman Nigel Bolton said: 'Strong winds moved up from the south towards Tiverton, just as winds moved in from the north. A thunderstorm was already brewing and when the two winds met, they rose into the storm and caused a short-lived tornado across the northern fringes of Dartmoor.'

However, an older report remarks tornadoes are not that rare even in Devon and another site describes the waterspout in the Bristol Channel.

I have this terrible urge to start wearing gingham and plaits.

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Posted @ 9:38 am on Thursday, May 13, 2004
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Jennifer Aniston is not a pharmaceutical chemist.

WEN is a site dedicated to how women can influence environmental use/abuse. The grrls who came to last year's grrly meet will be delighted to see the swap meet idea is getting bigger.

I've still not put my diatribe about cosmetics online but those of you who have read it may be interested in WEN's subsite on cosmetics. Back when I wrote my bit, I got a friend who knows about these things to check something. Neutrilium, the special ingredient in, IIRC, a Laboratoire Garnier shampoo, doesn't exist. They haven't even bothered to patent an bunch of inactive chemicals under the name in case anyone checked. The 'science' they sell these products on is no different to the 'doctor's recommendations' used back in the 1950s. I really must get that article online.

And, I admit, they'll be prying a box of Schwarztkoff #43 from my cold dead hands...

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Posted @ 9:52 am on Tuesday, May 11, 2004
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Stupid weather. I am trapped in the office.

In, perhaps, a shining example of optimism - or more likely a grouchy not-awake-yet funk brought on by getting pissed off late last night leading to damp pillows etc etc - I wore summer shoes, no tights and no coat today. There's been a torrential downpour of rain and hail, possibly with thunder but the hail is so dense it might just be the rattle of the stones on the roof, for the last 35 minutes. Luckily, a customer rang at 5pm, thus delaying my leaving of the office, otherwise my slight concession to summer-dressing would be soaked through by now and I'd be planning hot baths and drinks to stave off the imminent pneumonia...

No, that really is thunder...I should disconnect the ...except that would leave me nothing to do but file paperwork...

I do have a back-up of the novel so far but I don't like working on the prose whilst at the office. Feels like cheating...

Definitely thunder...

and now lightening...

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Posted @ 5:26 pm on Monday, May 10, 2004
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Went to see Dylan Moran last Thursday. For reasons best known to his management, he was playing in Ilfracombe. This is a small seaside town on the north coast of Devon more noted for some wickedly sharp rocks and a strange popularity with Liverpudlians. Naturally, I expected a crumbling ruin of a Victorian music hall theatre somehow surviving on the crumbs of end-of-the-pier style shows. Not that Ilfracombe has a pier. Nowhere in Devon has a pier: we're sticking out into the Altantic. We're rugged and weather-beaten not like those sheltered south-eastern places like Brighton and Bournemouth. A pier wouldn't last a winter. The rest of the schedule for the theatre does indeed read like your worst vision of 'saucy' seaside Britain: Joe Longthorne, line-dancing, Chas & Dave, The Chuckle Brothers. So discovering that one of the main stars of the modern comedy circuit is playing a single night there is a surprise. So was the theatre.

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Hopefully someone somewhere will tell the comedy circuit management that Exeter has theatres as well. And isn't entirely full of old ladies and strange locals. The programme for the Barnstaple theatre has an evening with Germaine Greer, to which I may go if I can get a late train back.

On the drive back from Ilfracombe, Carrie and I discussed music. That came back to me when listening to Jonathan Ross this morning when he played I Started Something... by The Smiths. It does seem odd coming out of the radio now, tangled up with the latest by Belle & Sebastian, Keane and old songs by Aretha Franklin and Delroy Wilson. I really can't tell if the Smiths is still good - it's so heavily bound up to all-night sessions working to academic deadlines with only Meat is Murder or Radio Moscow (RAM of jingle) for company.

This is one reason why I listen to R2 now - the playlists are generally quite eclectic so you get a wonderful sense of the breadth of music. Except for the Steve Wright show which is just dreadful (and exactly the same schitck he was peddling on R1 back in the 80s). The only exception is in the mornings, where I must have the Today programme on R4. Dylan Moran did a perfect summation of R4's habit of alternating between mind-numbing political horror and small-scale whimsy. His impression of John Humphrey, "up since 2am warming up for a fight", was spot on. The weather forecast on Thursday morning was:

and now the weather. Remember how it's been for the last couple of days? Well, it'll be like that again.

How can you not love a programme that switches from that casualness to seriously interogating the Foreign Secretary?

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Posted @ 11:58 pm on Saturday, May 08, 2004
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photos from 25th Apr 2004 (click on thumbnail for full image):

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Posted @ 1:00 am on Friday, May 07, 2004
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Ow. I have learnt something new today. Giving blood does not hurt. Reaching for the dictionary to check "insensate" means what you think it means a couple of hours later does. This is, I suspect, due to the sticky plaster in the crook of my right elbow beneath which is the promise of a neat bruise. It has already meant I am drinking tea with my left arm (the one which only had a hb test done in its crook) and having to use my middle instead of my index finger when left-clicking on the mouse (due to the initial hb test). I knew in advance about the potential bruises and faintness, even remembering to have a good chunky pannini for lunch to reduce the shock. I knew about the tea and biccies. No one told me there might be dictionary reach pain.

And insensate does mean what I think it means: it means unfeeling.

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Posted @ 1:03 am on Thursday, May 06, 2004
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Her Dark Materials, or why I love Cornelia Parker's Cold Dark Matter.

I was sifting my postcard collection for wall objects, the things I cover the area behind my PC with whilst working, at the weekend. Amongst the various stuff, I found a postcard of Cornelia Parker's Cold Dark Matter. The installation is in a room apart and is the exploded remains of a junk-filled garden shed, rearranged on hundreds of wires as if the explosion has paused. Within it, a single naked bulb lights the exhibition space and casts shadows.

This is one of those pieces I can return to again and again, and have done. It has so many dichotomies caught up within it: the harshness and violence against the fragility. The way the blasted fragments hang in space, twirling and spinning on their wires. The suggestion that time has frozen, yet the awareness of those slight movements of the pieces. The exploded room within the solidity of the exhibition room. The mundanity of a garden shed of junk next to the concept of the universal Dark Matter no one can never actually find. Or a physical model of a Big Bang. At a base level, it appeals because of the shadow play, the chiaroscuro of it. There's something elusive to it, hence my frequent returns to view it again. I'd like to think it's because there is something fundemental to the questions and allusions it raises.

Next week: why I think Constable is pants.

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Posted @ 1:47 am on Wednesday, May 05, 2004
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Some of the questions in that quiz refer to American stuff. I was told off in the results (63.5) for not knowing the soundtrack to The Breakfast Club. And for a good reason, thank you very much: I don't like The Breakfast Club. Allison is, at the end, made over to conform and given the reward of a bloke. A lot of the people in the sub-goth subset at my school, circa 1985, adored The Breakfast Club but I always thought it sold out. The text is saying "we are all individuals" but the subtext is saying "conform to peer pressure". Of all the teen movies of the Brat Pack era this is the one I objected to the most, primarily because of the way in which it was held up to be the best film of the decade by my fellow anti-social black-wearing non-conformists. Look what they do to Ally Sheedy! It's wrong! Just wrong! Ahem.

At least I got a converse trainer for the image (although sadly not an all-star lo-top).

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Posted @ 6:59 pm on Monday, May 03, 2004
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I am feeling exceptionally grouchy today. Well, I do call it a grouch for a reason, even if I rarely do actually go into a bitter complaint. There are lots of things annoying me, several of which cannot be posted here, but some of the grouchiness is with myself. I have had a week in which I have achieved bugger all. Nothing annoys me more than the awareness that I've somehow mislaid a week's worth of time. It makes me bitter because, whilst I enjoying faffing about and avoiding work, I like to at least feel that I tried. Or at least that I have some control and choice in the matter.

The first two evenings were lost to the late night. Wednesday night was spent prepping for a work trip away. Thursday night was spent in Cumbria where I utterly failed in my plan to get some work done in the hotel due to being there with someone and thus having to go out for food etc. Friday evening was mostly spent in traffic jams around Birmingham and Bristol, thus confirming my belief that cars are evil and trains are civilised. I even revived my CNPS score which is still at a staggeringly low 16. Of course, since I only play when very bored on motorways, that might explain that. Getting back several hours after planned, I sat and ate pizza whilst watching the latter half of Buffy season 7, finally going to bed after Spike saved the world around dawn.

The worst thing about this partially self-induced grouchiness (I could have worked last night but I went for Spike Buffy instead, I could have gone home at 11pm not 4am on Monday etc etc) is that I have various social things planned for the weekend and am perceiving one of them to be an obligation which I can't blow off even though I want to. Grr.

On the plus side, despite the utter chaos the trip caused, Cumbria was very lovely in the Spring sunlight. I have taken a mov from which to grab stills later. The hotel in Penrith was a classic mid-Victorian job, probably an expansion of an old coaching inn, and we found a lovely Italian restaurant where I had some yummy bruschette and tagliatelle.

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Posted @ 4:55 pm on Saturday, May 01, 2004
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