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Notes from the galleries. (I am trying to go see art more regularly. Perhaps you'd like to join me?)
Plato's (and Jung's) cave
Gary Hume's Cave Paintings appear to be drawings inscribed in lead line into marble, but are in fact a mason's bricolage of different stones, with lead for mortar. They're very handsome, but blank emotionally.
The press release informs me that Hume pits "the sensibilities of an ornate Baroque decor against the aesthetic of the young city professional's start flat". That apartment is one of a stack of caves, and the young professional watches the flickering light on the wall from the flat-screen television, slipping into sleep and dreams of "reduced and suggestive" symbols - protective mothers, reaching children, of shadows moving on dark slate walls, of nurture and ritual, a slab of soft-veined green, birth of man, of doubt, death...
The marble tone determines whether they are seen as brutally flat, or illusionistic depth. Up close, everything is flattened by the surface texture. The black marble in The Pendulum (2006) is so smooth of surface and cut edge that it looks like poured resin. There's a similar black stone in The Adoration of the Magi (2006), though there the white marble is so split and cracked that the interstitial lead linework has become polyfilla, holding it together. Magi has a distinctly provisional quality: it's held together with a metal frame at the sides. Next to it, Milk Full (2006), a child/pizza figure is embedded in white marble that has split (look at the White Cube's official image: it looks as if it was delivered broken).
Mother Mortality (2006) turns up the dial on the archetypal motifs and adds art history to its palette. Mother looks like a Bacon pope, the background as if Adami has redrawn a staircase for descending nudes in lead foil.
Last chance to see: Gary Hume's Cave Paintings, at White Cube, 26 May - 1 July 2006 - a page painfully excavated from the useless White Cube gallery website.
Telegraph: Rebirth of the artist: "Hume is not very good at emotion: and he can't even get it out of a squalling infant. What he can do, when he cares to, is aesthetics. Mother Mortality, despite the nauseating name, is beautiful. Here all the obvious art-historical allusions of working in stone and jewel-like surfaces are brought into view"
Jonathan Jones was scathing in the Guardian: "An enthusiast might draw comparisons with the Italian baroque or Mussolini's Rome, but in art, allusions don't pay the rent and nor does an irony so dessicated and bitter it could be from some wafer-thin waspish 1920s novel. Whatever emotions are teased into play didn't nourish me beyond the walk back to the tube. As with many of his paintings, the feeling doesn't quite gel. It stays in a shallow part of you and is blown away with the dust of the street."
Vitreous edges
Down the road at The Agency, I have left the cave for the woods and rocky slopes that surround it. There is a tableau of black, oily/vitreous fired trees and shards of slate-like rock on a table that overfills the room. On the walls, there are some paintings are carefully identified to me as "for an event, not part of the exhibition", as if that caveat will excuse them. So I edge around the table, tracking a narrow path between the paintings and the table. Looking at these trees, I want to think Caspar David Friedrich (a Romantic/sublime flight of imagination to a Northern European heart of darkness), but actually am wondering if the trees will be shiny and hard like glass, or leave a mark on my hand. On leaving, I manage, inexplicably, to not go to Counter Gallery.
Alone in Engladesh
The sun drives me to a pit stop at Richmix, which is empty, the staff outnumbering me several to one; nonetheless a manager tells a staffer off for being six hours late to work in public. They have converted half of the atrium/cafe area into a big screen with astroturf seating - which although unoccupied now, has clearly been a success. "Same game, same fun" it says. There are group fixture tables chalked onto the steel collared around Hamish's two-storey concrete columns. The football target ranges seem to be styled in the favela manner. The scoreboard next to them reveals the hybrid loyalties of the local kids: several players name their affiliation as "Engladesh".
The Banglasdeshi artist Leepu Awlia is modding (or hot-rodding?) an old Ford Capri, but with a welding rather than with plastic body kits. It's cheerful, high-energy stuff, and reminiscent of those car ads in which people around the world resourcefully bash up and mash up their cars and fishing boats to make them look like a vernacular, cargo-cultish versions of a Peugeot 206.
The big screen is now projecting mobile phone and car insurance adverts to the empty cafe. I'm glad there's no-one to see it, because, without a Peugeot 206 ad, it doesn't seem to fit the ethos of rich mix. Shortly afterwards, the football fans start to drift in, and I drift out.
Richmix: Leepu Awlia's car blog.
Tomorrow
Michelle Grabner at Rocket, Danny Rolph at Hales, group show at Andrew Mummery, Intrusion at Bischoff/Weiss, Drawn In at Seventeen and Claire Harvey at Store Gallery.
Join me: I am trying to go see art more regularly. Perhaps you'd like to join me?
Posted at 12:39 AM in Art, architecture, books | Permalink | Comments (3)
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On the Mobbu blog we find some lessons for enterprise mobility in the experience of installing and using IM on a mobile device. In brief: Y Messenger has some useful design patterns; not all BlackBerrys are shipped equal - which might impact the cost of deployment; are "modern" wireless gateways like BES4+ sufficient for device access/deployment control? (IT/security might say yes, the business might not). Read more: IM on mobile devices: lessons for enterprise mobility.
Posted at 12:55 AM in Mobile, Work, teams, projects, systems | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I have already twittered about Schulze and Webb at the RCA, and was also impressed with George Grinsted's Chatsum. Also in the graduating show at the RCA, it's an elegant execution and has seen some coverage online.
One obvious next step (amongst many) for George is to incorporate and successfully develop it further for personal users, a market in which it might have competitors like Wakoo, Gabbly, CoComment, and perhaps others doing smart-chatting/commenting-about-websites.
However I'd be even more interested to see an enterprise version. For instance, Chatsum could be a way to apply a socially relevant and resilient lever to the ossified intranets and data stores that many companies run.
*
The RCA private view was horribly hot and busy, so we didn't see much. There's something socio-architectural called Greenwich Plan about rehabilitating prisoners that I need to find out about, and no doubt much more besides. I was very happy to see Niki Smart (this one, not that), who's a brilliant car designer and old friend who knows where the bodies are buried.
Posted at 11:32 PM in Work, teams, projects, systems | Permalink | Comments (0)
S&W are applying new design and manufacturing techniques to transformable, personalisable products, often in short-runs. There aren't many companies working on intimately weaving software into industrial/product design like this, and it looks to this (non-professional) observer as if they will achieve great things.
Metal phone (the dangerous hiptop)
Metal Phone is a mobile phone within limits. You’ll need strong pockets. The metal reduces the effectiveness of the aerial so you’ll need to be closer to the transmitter. If you leave your mobile on the dashboard of your car on a hot day, you’ll come back to find the components in a pool of liquid metal. It’s not advisable to hold the phone in your hands for too long—cadmium is present in a low concentration. [...]
It's made from an expensive alloy so you'd have to protect it like a valuable. It contains poisonous metal and has the heft of a weapon, so you'd need to protect others from it. And it's like a perishable foodstuff in the sun, so you'd need to protect it from the environment. These are qualities that your mobile operator wishes you perceived in your handset (but since your operator gave it to you free with your contract, you don't value it the same way do you?)
Could the Metal Phone be other things? Could its natural fluidity be sped up and used in the co-design of the object instead of being locked out of the production line? [...]
Metal Phone offers a new kind of permanence: it offers relief from sculpted plastic forms yet makes no attempt to accommodate interface by changing the surface shape. The shape is no longer defined by constraints such as manufacturing cost or the fashion in electronics. A consumer may upgrade the interior and the screen interface a dozen times, but keep the weight and form of the shell the same for a decade.
This last is a powerful idea: we often feel nostalgia for old phones, particularly those with rock-solid build quality and reliability - certain candybar-era Nokias and the 77xx BlackBerry immediately come to mind.
Availabot (is USB unheimlich?)
Availabot is a physical representation of presence in Instant Messenger applications. Availabot plugs into your computer by USB, stands to attention when your chat buddy comes online, and falls down when they go away. It’s a presence-aware, peripheral-vision USB toy... and because the puppets are made in small numbers on a rapid-prototyping machine, it can look just like you.
The only thing I'd add to that is that when your chat buddy goes offline, is seems to more than just fall over. It's collapse isn't limp, it seems to dive to the ground just as energetically as it springs up when they come online. There's something animated in this, as if it is more an embodiment of the buddy than a representation. I start to think that this Matt Jones on my desk might start to do his bidding. And what are its own intentions? So I want to open its mouth to see if there's a scroll in it. But in truth, its physicality, humour and usefulness far outweighs any risk of uncanny presence - I want one.
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