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New City, Swiss Re, East End, Laban C, Deptford X

This weekend: New City Architecture, looking at the Gherkin, East End Academy, the Laban Centre, and Deptford X.

1. New City Architecture
Good models, interesting and mildly-interactive diorama, but not enough detail. Some confusing presentation: the models and maps aren't always oriented in the space similarly (for instance: with North aligned).

2. Foster's Gherkin
The Swiss Re building at St Mary Axe. The nearby NatWest tower is splintered and reflected in the triangles of the glass skin (ref to the Great Court's glassed roof at the British Museum, also by Foster?).

And opposite, the NatWest tower rises over a church and the gateway to the underworld (some license taken with this one). Lasciate ogni Speranza Voi ch'entrate...

3. East End Academy at the Whitechapel
- a show worth seeing. More here.

4. Herzog and De Meuron's The Laban Centre, Deptford
Outside is for looking and sitting: Architect Wolfram noted that the outside (for once) looks like a computer rendering in the flesh, and the curves and the ziggurat-style grass amphitheatrescape works well. (Our photos of Laban didn't come out, so look at these instead.) Inside is for looking and touching: the spiral stairs and balustrade in rough concrete ("it glitters as if hewn out of solid coal"), snaking wooden handrails, shiny glass curtain walls and blocks of colour. Michael Craig-Martin worked with H and de M on the colour schemes for the translucent polycarbonate cladding, and did a large mural inside in the standard C-M style. The site is next to Deptford creek, which is full of the customary rusting metalwork and boats in dereliction/restoration.

5. Deptford X
Some of the open studios in the Deptford X event. The highlight: Andrea Gregson's peephole sculptures in the Creekside open studios are brilliant and redolent of other art. You're a giant crouching down or stretching up on tiptoe to peer in (viz Duchamp, and you almost expect to see the bec auer) through dolls-house-sized windows and apertures at small - sometimes surreal (Svankmajer) - scenes. Some of which look like crime scenes awaiting analysis: who ran amok in the library of miniature books? And whose is the body dangling from a tree (Goya) at the end of the wild, primordial forest (Friedrich, David Thorpe)? Dioramas en valise. Excellent.

East End Academy at the Whitechapel

And other withered stumps of time
Were told upon the walls; staring forms
Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed. [Eliot, The Wasteland]

The East End Academy at the Whitechapel is like a mutant bio-explosion after the fallout: lots of remnants and dead ends but quite vigorous, so worth seeing. The reviews... Guardian: E is for Art, Observer: Go east, young man, and Waldemar Januszczak in The Times: it does have street cred:

The art of the East End has a particular feel to it. It favours the transformation of cheap materials, it pulses to the rhythms of a hedonistic urban life, it’s lippy, it’s jokey and it seems determined to whistle while the world burns. If art could run, this stuff would scarper at top speed from the doors of any academy. If I had to force some respectability onto it by calling it something, I’d call it London Dada.

Louise Brierley and David Harrison both go for an unheimlich, fall-of-society feel in their paintings. Januszczak again: "The imagery has a post-nuclear tristesse to it, as if this were what we humans had mutated into". Harrison's feathers-and-sellotape dove impaled on anti-pigeon spikes is the best of his sellotape-and-wire-and-drawing sculptures. More creatures-of-flight in trouble: Zatorski and Zatorski's The Last 3600 Seconds of Wasp is a simple emotional trick - a Philip Glass-soundtracked video of a wasp on its back, laid on an image of flowers (looking like dayglo skulls), twitching as its clock counts down. Its abdomen telescopes, and you can't help reading it as laboured breathing. The terminal hour, though we're with Waldemar - perhaps the terminal 10 minutes would have sufficed. Not subtle or complex, but sad.

Emer O'Brien's photos, Contemporary Amnesia (2004), use deserted lidos, the rusting baskets once used in their changing rooms, a blinkered donkey, an abandoned playground, and an obliterated dog's carcass as an obvious memento mori of our culture's need to move forward at speed, and forget our leavings. Other remains: Christoper Stewart's shadowy C-type of a ramshackle antenna as might be cobbled together by a community trying to retain arcane and poorly-understood technology.

Caroline McCarthy's Promise (2003) has tv-dinner packaging placed in flower pots under halogens. The plants on the packaging lids are cut out and stood up. It's neat, but you want to see more: Where are the plastic food trays themselves? Are the original meals in them, bloating as mould and bacteria take hold? If only the trays had been in situ, full of earth and compost, with a tiny irrigation system made from bendy Ribena drinking straws and cappuccino stirrers, running off a motor driven by loyalty card points...

Peter Peri's drawings are the pick of the show. He builds up shapes, images, blocks and structures with hair-thin and hair-like lines. The delicacy of the drawings is reminiscent of the precision work of process-artist Jonathan Callan and cartographer-artist Jason Wallis-Johnson, but Peri's works feel more tangibly thing-ful than representations of things, so instead of seeing pencil linework you experience delicate fibres, XXXSmall vesicles, ephemeral feelers and micro-scale threads.

The drawings here (Decoy, Sub and Supplement, all 2004) are about growth and accumulation, though - if memory serves - Carl Freedman had a Peri drawing at the Oct 2003 Frieze show which spoke of subtraction: a block worn down by time and the elements. This growth is simultaneously wildly organic and carefully artificial: Sub looks like a Superstudio proposal whose anti-graffiti paint has evolved out of control, spawning tendrils like a seaweedy aircraft carrier. But it also seems architected, the result of a painstaking accretion of filaments, like nest building. Growth/manufacture. Machines for generating interpretations with the property of distraction. Affordable. Beautifully terse-eloquent.

East End Academy pictures here and here.

The next show at the Whitechapel will be Paul Noble's Nobson Newtown drawings (and other work), in Sept-Nov 2004. His Unified Nobson Newtown map is rather good.

Books: streets of London, Joycyndication, biblioulipo, libraries, 007

Tonight, 25 June: Streets of London: "Over twelve hours (1000-2200) Greg Whelan and Gary Winters will attempt to read the entire London A-Z. Starting at opposite ends of the index they will meet in the middle on a street in London." And: London is a kunstwollen (Doctorow on Ackroyd's London: a Biography).

Joyce: Ulysses, page a day by RSS and Finnegans Wake, page a day by RSS. On this subject: search Joyce works and full text of Finnegans Wake (line numbering doesn't always agree with the search).

Ubu web anthology of conceptual writing includes Stein's Five words in a line and Rauschenberg's telegram: This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so. Related: a biblio-Oulipo, via tesugen.

Umberto Eco's home/hotel/library: "When the former hotel building in Milan where Umberto Eco lives was converted into flats, he preserved the winding corridors as a labyrinthine library, housing some 30,000 volumes." and:

Eco and his wife, Renate, and arts educator, have a huge summerhouse -- he describes as "Alcatraz" -- in the remote and craggy hills inland from Rimini. The seventeenth-century manor was used as a barracks for German soldiers in the Second World War, and more recently as a Jesuit-run summer camp for kids from the village. When Eco bought it 20 years ago, "every room had 40 beds!" Now the rooms contain the surplus from Eco's 30,000-volume library in his home base in Milan, and the chapel has become his workroom. Collecting books, he explains, "is a sport I practice."

Once found (now lost): a description of how Eco writes in that chapel: one room has a computer, another a typewriter, a third pens and paper, so he can pick the writing tool for the moment/subject.

The story of Bond [, James Bond]. Also: Eco's 'Narrative Structures in Fleming' in The Role of the Reader.

Art various: Pericoli, ateliers, 90 man-days

Pericoli padre e figlio:
City of Sound recently pointed at Matteo Pericoli's Manhattan images. More on Matteo: A 360-degree view of the N.Y. that was. Matteo's dad is caricaturist/illustrator/artist Tullio Pericoli, whose studio is here, and whose portrait of Calvino is here (half way down the page). More Tullio pictures here and here. [most of these via Metafilter]

Artist's Ateliers:
Franco Vaccari's Artist's Atelier, Real Time Exhibition no.22 ran from 1996 to 1997 and "consists of a collection of documents on "artists' atelier" (artists’ workplaces) sent via Internet"

Stella Vine's blog - sporadic, spasmodic, visceral. Related:

• Cathy Lomax's blog. Cathy runs Transition gallery, where Stella is showing currently (the small works don't look as strong as the others).
• Paul Murphy: showed at Transition a while back; has just lost a load of his Apu paintings.

90 man-days: this Demonstration for cutaway technical illustrations part 1 - Cruise Ship line art took 720 hours.

WPS1 art radio, with NY MOMA: Duchamp explains the readymade! - defines art! - as he speaks with Richard Hamilton and George Heard Hamilton. Originally broadcast by the BBC, October 20, 1962 (26:37).

More art:

• Leonardo warns against the unthinking use of (eg) the camera lucida etc.
• Barcode Art
• Attention to detail: Stephen Gill's photos of the quotidian
• Various: Yahoo directory, Ionarts, RobertJosiah, Indigo, Consumptive, ArtNotes (New Orleans), Franklin Einspruch's Artblog and Artsfeed (Miami).

Mottled, warped, streaked and pockmarked silent archival footage

The fifth fragment: notes on cities and things fragmented, ruined, re-used.

James Joyce on Ulysses:

I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book

(Ulysses, 15: Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger.)

Alfred Jarry, bike rider, world destroyer:

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

Re-using the ruins (precursor to adaptive design):

• Roman buildings into Anglo-Saxon churches
• Ships' timbers reused as roof and floor joists in houses throughout England
• Stone from Roman roads used for a villa (and when the Roman government stopped administering Britain, the economic structure fell apart, followed by the buildings)
• Canal routes repurposed for railways and Power stations into galleries

Dissolving, decaying dice: Ricky Jay's decaying dice became a book, Dice: Deception and Destruction, with photographer Rosamund Purcell.

• More Ricky Jay, more dice: a profile of Ricky Jay. And a taxonomy of dice.
• More Rosamund Purcell: Owl's Head, 2004; Two Rooms, 2003; Swift as a Shadow: Extinct and Endangered Animals, 2001; "Purcell's prints are actually 20" by 24" Polaroid shots, taken with one of four such cameras in existence capable of the shot", 1984.

Bill Thompson's Decasia: a film "composed entirely of decaying, nitrate-based archival footage", found film stock as memento mori. Reviewed by Charles Schoellenbach (And reminiscent of: Roszak's 1992 novel Flicker? The Footage. Rosebud. Marie Muchmore.)

Risky buildings:

The majority of these buildings are made from concrete. Crumbling and stained, they lack the romance of polished marble or rough-hewn stone. Desolate car parks and redundant shopping centres seldom attract the sympathy and support of the public, despite being of potentially great architectural importance. [via Chris]

How to photoshop modern ruins and The Decay of a City (uses some material from Laura Spinney's New Scientist article)

Previous fragments:

1. Fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of words
2. The worlds are dust: Kolmanskop and Elizabeth Bay
3. All the way was ruin: after London, Chernobyl, New York, civilisation
4. The ruined control tower; a concrete labyrinth
5. Eliot: I will show you fear in a handful of dust

RussCoff and Sir, Alfred

Russ Coffey and Jane went to CDG this week to meet Merhan Karimi Nasseri, aka "Sir, Alfred" (his adopted name - including that comma - is taken from the corrupted code of a form letter: a one-man cargo cult). Whilst we wait for the Russcoff writeup, here's his picture of Nasseri, looking every bit the king of the concourse.

More on Sir, Alfred: Terminal Zero: "Iranian exile Merhan Karimi Nasseri has been living in the interzone at Charles de Gaulle International Airport since 1988."

Update:
Sir, Alfred: a Groundhog day with neither immortality nor redemption:

Although locked in a fascinating Catch 22 situation for many years which has given him a status as an exciting real life urban myth, the truth is that he has problems with identity and more recently other mental problems that mean that he is reluctant to leave what he knows even though it is possible (especially now he is beginning to be a "somebody" through his predicament)

and Russ's comments on recent news coverage.

Russ Coffey on serial killers and scientologists

RussCoff, journalist and old friend, is posting some of his features:

Memoirs of a Serial Killer - the story of the autobiography of Dennis Nilsen:

In the last letter I received from Nilsen, dated Friday June 13, 2003, he says he is feeling his 58 years, and can no longer write late into the night. He jokes that he has asked to be put on Braille translation so he can tell David Blunkett what he thinks of him. His budgies have passed away, and he says, in a comparison many will find appalling: "The horror comes always from the stark realisation that no life is replaceable, whether it be that of a small bird or person."

Russ goes undercover in Scientology: It worked for Travolta. Would it work for me?:

Though I was feeling fine, I had a gut feeling that it was going to bring bad news. In fact, in a small booth in the shabby building I was "scientifically" diagnosed as depressed, unstable and nervous. Susan suggested that I stay to watch a film that might help my "problems". It was screened in a subterranean room with just two seats. While the projector was being set up the nervous young woman next to me bolted.

Russ interviews director Harmony Korine about David Blaine's glass box stunt:

This is a calmer and more philosophical Korine than the one who, for instance, started a project called Fight, a few years back, predicated on the notion that he would try to get beaten up by every demographic group in New York. [...] When asked why he did it, Korine replies with a smile "I wanted to make people laugh, so I thought I would have to bleed".

Bloomsday centenary

16 June 2004 is Bloomsday 100, the centenary of Leopold Bloom's one-day odyssey around Dublin in Joyce's Ulysses.

ReJoyce Dublin 2004: a 5 month festival April-August. Lots of events.

Bloomsday 100: the 19th International JJ Symposium is a massive Joycescholar conference, and will be publishing a cd rom of the proceedings.

The James Joyce Centre lists Dublin's Haveth Bloomsday Everywhere.

BBC: Ireland set for festival of Joyce
- "We are the first people to acknowledge that many people go out and buy the book, they get to page three, and they quit - and page three is the first page of text," (says the festival organiser, who isn't the only person never to have read it). (However: Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is a Joyce fan.)

Scotsman: Multiple Joyce - "In a city of blue plaques, there isn't one outside 60 Shelbourne Road, Dublin. Admittedly, there’s nothing much to see: two cars in a tiny front yard, a desolate wide street and a gasometer behind its flat terrace rooftop. But if you want to understand James Joyce, it’s as good a place as any to start."

Guardian: Sound of Bloomsday comes 100 years later. Two unabriadged audio versions of Joyce's Ulysses are being released by Naxos and RTE.

(Nora Barnacle never read Ulysses either: "But the very first copy no longer survives. Joyce inscribed it with a flourish to Nora Barnacle at a celebration dinner party. She never read it.")

Economist: An unforgettable odyssey: asks whether Bloomsday now outshines the book but concludes "A great book? Yes it is Yes."

Reuters: Joyce's Dublin Throws Party for 100th 'Bloomsday'

NYT: John Banville: Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday

Bloomsday New York - "One hundred years later, we asked four writers to employ the same technique, each on a real New Yorker - and to do it on deadline" [via Slate]

Boston.com: The people's Bloomsday - "If we no longer need "Ulysses," it's because we're all living in Bloom's paradise." [again via Slate]

Update:
Observer: Bangers and machinations - "the Disneyfication of Ireland's heritage continues apace. Now it's James Joyce's turn as the centenary of Bloomsday is marked by a mass fry-up in Dublin". Via John Naughton, who reminds us that Joyce could be direct: 'Get the poet's soul out of your mind', said Joyce, 'and see that you paint my cravat properly'".

Richard Hamilton's excellent Imaging Ulysses - book, prints.

More update:
Ulysses, a page a day (web and RSS) [via Webb]. And Ian Hays, friend and sometime tutor, gave his talk on 'Joyce and Duchamp' at the symposium.

Various art and books

Alfred Jarry, bike rider [via MeFi]

Gregory Dicum's Window Seat

decodes the sights to be seen on any flight across North America. Broken down by region, this handy little softcover book features 70 aerial photographs; a fold-out map of North America showing major flight paths; profiles of each region covering its landforms, waterways, and cities; tips on spotting major and not-so-major sights; and straightforward, friendly text on cloud shapes, weather patterns, the continent's history, and more. [via many]

Gilbert & George: true pioneers of East End art

Digital Photography Hacks looks interesting. Judge image sharpness from file size, etc. [via bb]

Catfunt is making art with Excel (See also David Byrne and Powerpoint)

T.S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, 1917

Museum of Depressionist Art [via Wendy] - quite funny

Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture [via everyone]

David Mitchell: Number9Dream - very good.

London Architecture week and Architecture Biennale

London's Architecture week is 18-27 June 2004. At the same time it's the London Architecture Biennale in Clerkenwell, 19-28 June. Kultureflash has a good overview of the highlights: the Future Smithfield charrette, the National Theatre tour and Will Alsop and Bruce MacLean in conversation on Visionary Living at Soane's Pitzhanger house all look good.

Also: RIBA's architecture news (no feed; can only get by email if you're a RIBA member).