Remix: The Dialectic of Altered Books.

Brian Dettmar's intricate and skillful sculptures explore the meaning of knowledge and our relationship with it.  He insists on the obligation to challenge orthodoxy, and the right of the individual to do so.  This makes me very happy.

Dettmer:  Perpetuity to Rymer

(Thomas Rymer (1643-1713) English Historiographer Royal)

Dettmer's work is completely different to that of German sculptor Johannes Pfeiffer, which I wrote about recently (Weighing Words: Sculpture With Books).  Pfeiffer also articulates books as repositories of knowledge, and in his case the purpose is to critique censorship and rigidities of thinking. 

I liked the small exhibition that I saw in Turin. It conveyed, in a horribly static way, the deadness of thought control.  There is something deeply creepy about books entombed in concrete.

The Bible by Johannes Pfeiffer

Dettmer, by contrast, focuses on the other side of the intellectual coin: the dynamic potential of ideas; the opening up of thought; the importance of re-interpretation and re-integration; the development of knowledge through interaction with the material world; the evolution of meaning.

Take a look at this famous, lovely, brain-like creature:  or is it a magical helmet of knowledge? or a nifty mohican of dreams?  Anyway, it is made of a full set of encyclopedias (encycoplediae?).

The New World of Books
 All downloaded from Brian Dettmer's photostream on Flikr, under creative commons licence

How incredible is that?  Entrancing even?

Dettmer works by sealing the book or books with some kind of resin, and carefully cutting away one layer at a time, revealing images and text that are already there, putting them in new relationship to each other.  He never inserts, or moves the book's contents. What emerges is a new, or alternative, set of meanings, of knowledge.

Here is his Flickr slideshow, which is just astonishing.

And below is a video of Brian himself, setting out his ideas, and how he sees his work in relation to modern media.  He seems quite young to have achieved so much - each of his dozens (scores? hundreds?) of works must take ages to complete.

Perhaps he now has a studio of assistants, like the Dutch and Florentine humanists.

But he is a modern-day humanist.  As he says himself, his work is remix.

I will deffo be going to his New York exhibition 19 May-11 June 2011 at Kinz and Tillou, 525 W. 26th St.  It's in my calendar.  When will he next exhibit in London, I wonder?

Weighing Words: sculpture with books

Spotted on the tables and windows of Unicredit's Leadership Learning Centre in Turin this week, some interesting work by German sculpture Johannes Pfeiffer.

Not sure I really understand, but interesting nevertheless; I liked it.

Most of the books seemed to be about philosophy, the arts and religion, so perhaps that is where the meaning lies.......

These works were recently shown at Pfeiffer's exhibition "Pesare les Parole", at the Turin City Multimedia Library (Biblioteca Archimede Settimo Torinese).

Jim Jarmusch: Nothing is Original. Steal from Anywhere

The quotation below "speaks directly to my soul", and so I stole it, as suggested, from Not Just the Minutiae.

It is a remark by the wonderful, totally original and dramatically silver-haired film-maker, Jim Jarmusch

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. 

Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to”.” 

I hope you like it as much as I do.

And this related video is really very nice too.  

• Video Interview: Jim Jarmusch (gointothestory.com)

Image via Wikipedia

P.S.  

Way back in October I discovered the possibility for my interaction with the internets (I KNOW, but better late than never), and I naively wrote this little number - How Pumped Am I about 2.0!  

It was exactly the potential for all this thievery that I was excited about, but did not yet have the words to describe *smiles fondly at such childishness (not yet fully outgrown)*.


If you like this post, you may also like another little piece of theft:  The Gift

Orpheus: the Mythical. A Musical by Richard Stilgoe and the Orpheus Centre

I have never been to a musical by a mixed group of performers with and without disabilities, but I did last night: it was magic, and I'm totally bowled over.

Now, recently I have been engaging in some pathetic self-promotion lightly amusing self-deprecation by dropping a few celeb names here and there. In "It's True! I met Rihanna ..."  I said that my life-time total  number of brushes with celebrity is three.

Well, its actually four.

And this time I'm being serious.

I missed Richard Stilgoe from my list.  He wrote the lyrics of Starlight Express, and chunks of Phantom of the Opera, and has done lots of other stuff on stage and radio.  A very witty, very funny guy indeed, and totally brilliant musically.  I do know him a bit, socially.  I don't want to presume too much, but I do know him just a bit.  I can add him to my list.

He's also the father of the brilliant jazz musician, the super-cool Joe Stilgoe.  So I suppose in fact I have actually had five brushes with celebrity.

But enough of that.  What I want to say is not about me, and it's actually important.

In the overall scale of things, the Orpheus Centre is the kind of thing that really matters.

Richard founded The Orpheus Centre, in his former family home in Godstone, Surrey, and he spends a great deal of time with the people who live and work there.  It seems that its a really great place.

Named after Orpheus (the famous Greek musician), the Centre provides residential and domiciliary services and a fantastic learning programme for young adults with a range of disabilities.

It works with them to achieve personal progress through the performing arts.  It supports them to gain confidence and self esteem and learn essential skills that will help the transition into fully independent living.

The Company performs all over the place (including last year at the Royal Opera House), and with other outfits like the Graeae Theatre Company and StopGAP Dance Company, also fabulous.

And they have put together this really wonderful, hilarious and uplifting show, on the theme of Orpheus' and Euridice's adventures in Hades.

Richard wrote the words and the music, and Joe helped with the musical arrangement.  The Director is the very lovely spiky-haired Syd Ralph, and she's done an absolutely fabulous job.  Its a really well-paced show. Also involved are some young actors from the Guildford School of Acting, who were brilliant, and looked as if they were having a total ball, which I learned afterwards that they were.

Seeing as its about the Argonauts, and Orpheus travelled with Jason, Hercules and Theseus, etc. etc. and Apollo, Caliope, Persephone, Mercury and all that crowd could always be put in there in the background, wreaking their havoc, Richard was able to cram almost every known myth into the story.  There were lovely sheep, the three headed dog Cerberus, and a terrific dragon.  There was humour, pathos, and really good dancing and singing, including really lovely wheelchair choreography.

I loved the testosterone-engulfed argonaut sailors, pretty thick the lot of them but filling the theatre with energy, and also the Sirens, softly singing "danger! danger! danger!" while dancing with the greatest possible allure.

It was also crammed with lovely Stilgoe-esque puns: e.g. the Argos being built with parts bought from a huge catalogue, and steered by some-one beating a tom-tom.

(For the non-Brits among you, "Argos" is the name of a chain of stores in UK where nothing is on display: you order from an immense catalogue, and our main GPS navigation system is called "Tom-Tom").

And the Golden Fleece was a traffic warden's yellow fleece jacket, of course.

Not to mention, obviously, the title of the thing.

Matt Lucas introduced it, and did a lovely job.  He told us about his all-time worst heckle, and got the audience to do it en masse, to purge him of the horror, which was a lot of fun.  Others during the week will be Michael Aspel, Penelope Keith, Tim Pigott-Smith and Jane Asher.  And no less that HRH Prince Edward will be there for a Royal Gala one night.

The only, only (tiny) shortcoming is that there was no encore - we had one thumping good tune to end on, but we needed another one even more so to send us off like jet-fueled rockets into the warm summer evening:  I think they just didn't expect to hear the audience in very demanding mood at the end, and so we were frustrated, and left a little more quietly than we might have done, which was a pity.

Never mind.  I still loved it.

So if you are anywhere near Guildford this week, hie ye over to the Yvonne Arnaud theatre.  You won't be sorry you did.

Members of the Orpheus Centre

Performing at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera House

London 2009

By Jack Stilgoe Jackstil.  Downloaded from Flickr under creative commons license

Image via Wikipedia

Richard Stilgo

And here's a great picture of the whole troupe at Buck House a little while ago.

Five things I like about Newport Beach (but three things not so much)

So far, I have divided much of my life between UK and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Now for the first time I am spending time on the West Coast – Orange County to be precise. Its pretty much ground zero for affluent republicanism, but still, in many ways I’m feeling really lucky, in fact privileged, to be here.

  View over  Newport Harbor, Orange County, From Castaways Park  

See what I mean?

Been dealing with a bit of family bovva, from which we are all now recovering, and there are few better places for recovery than Orange County, CA, or, as we say over here, the OC.

For starters, there’s the weather. It’s almost perfect – around 21 C or, as we say over here, about 70 degrees. There is “June Gloom” at the moment, which means seasonal cloudiness, which is fine by me as it keeps the temperature down.

But mostly its like Nairobi – fine, cool-to-warm and sunny, with no humidity, and I find myself muttering each morning, with Isak Dinneson, “Oh no, not another f**king perfect day”. Except that I’m not bored, in the slightest.

Secondly there is the friendliness. People here find it much easier to talk to strangers, even easier than New Yorkers do. It’s very refreshing, and when in Rome I find myself able to do as they do. Surprising, and very nice.

Thirdly there’s the retail therapy. This place is built for shopping. Honestly, it feels like Stepford Wives on wheels, not to mention steroids. Socking great six lane roads, I mean highways, with additional left and right turning lanes, and women (mostly) in SUVs, loads of them, cruising along at the mandatory 40 mph, going to get their stuff (at least in my imagination). 

For me its not so much the retail therapy itself, I haven't been doing much of that, but how easy it is to get around.

Everywhere you want to go is easy to turn into, easy to park and easy to get out of, once you understand all the signage, of which there is much.  Its a completely different driving culture to UK - the lanes are not so much about speed as about exit - its all about being in the right lane for the next turn you want to make, and the one after that. 

It all makes moving around generally very easy (provided you have a car), which has its charms, after the congestion of UK (if I don't think of all the petrol, I mean gas, we are burning off, or the scandal, in this day and age, when we know what we know about carbon emissions, of the almost complete absence of public transport).

And there are acres and acres of car-parks, or as we say over here, parking lots. And they are all completely free.   

South Coast Mall, Costa Mesa, CA.  Orange County Archive

It's sad though.  Newport Beach is mainly built around a natural harbour, with all its islands and inlets  rationalised and now encrusted with mansions, slipways and yachts.

 Newport Harbor from the Air, by Kenjet

This used to be the estuary of the Santa Ana river, which in the early 1900s was diverted, sheathed in concrete and now debouches about half a mile to the north, as you can just see in the photo, while the former wetlands are given over to more productive uses - high-end services, dense  and mainly unattractive but nonetheless extremely costly housing and, as I say, acres of highway and parking lot.

That was quite a little land-grab from the collective commons!

Which brings me to my top favourite thing about Newport Beach: a little piece of land that was not stolen away.

In the midst of all this concrete and conspicuous consumption is an oasis called Castaways Park, which is a conservation area for native species.  It is on a bluff,  and has a striking view over yacht and mansion, highway and inlet.  This little sanctuary (25 tiny acres in all) is the object of my daily walk, and the fourth really good thing about Newport Beach, and the one I like best of all.  Check it out.

The park is adjacent to another small ecological preserve, this time the immediate margins of Back Bay which were saved from development by a huge struggle in the 60s and 70s, during which the land, already beleaguered by development, was wrested from the rapacious Irvine Company and assigned to public ownership   Thank goodness for that.  

Back Bay, Newport Beach, From Castaways Park

 Back Bay, Newport Beach

Back Bay, Newport Beach

And the fifth good thing is the ocean itself, which is totally lovely, especially the beaches. Swooping down the Pacific Coast Highway (or as we say over here, PCH ) listening to the great Ira Glass and “This American Life”,   on my way to a meeting in Laguna Beach, can’t be bad! Walking on the cliffs above Crystal Cove is also totally wonderful.

 Crystal Cove: sand, sea and millions of birds.  by Zelkova

Pacific Coast Highway, Near Crystal Cove

Laguna Beach 

On the downside, in addition to the gross over-development of the place, and directly related to it, in Newport Beach I feel distinctly odd doing my favourite thing – walking. Its been said before, but here the car is king, and the pedestrian a rare bird, unless you are poor or jogging, or moi.

Secondly,  on the downside, and deeply shocking considering the wealth around here, there is no re-cycling of rubbish, (or, as we say over here, trash), unless you make a call to the Office of Sanitation with a specific request. I kid you not: no re-cycling in this day and age! And when you think of all the shopping that’s going on …..  my mind is boggling.

And right now a third major downside is that it’s virtually Wimbledon-free (except for a few brief bursts of that most perfect American icon, John Isner) and that’s driving me totally nuts, especially in the second week.

But still, I'm feeling lucky to be here, and mostly that's down to the weather, and the  lovely, generous , welcoming people that I have met, and the tiny miracle of serenity, Castaways Park.

The view inland from Castaways Park

Cycling in Castaways Park

Castaways Park

I have to thank Nimisha Prasanth for all but two of the pictures in this posting.  She posts on Flickr as pookal (Flowers).  She is a wonderful photographer who has captured Castaways Park and its surroundings as I see them, and I love her for that.

Alexander McQueen: Why I'll Miss Him

Alexander McQueen. High Heeled Shoe 2009

By whatshewears

Flickr Creative Commons

The death of Alexander Lee McQueen so shocked and upset and touched me that I left my deadlines to spend an hour or so that evening setting up a post, just a few pix, to express my feelings.

Next morning I took it down.  "What am I thinking?" I thought.  What exactly are my feelings?

You see, my formative years were spent in the women’s liberation movement, which still has a beating heart.  We had then, and still have, concerns about the objectification of women.  And here I am, wanting to comment on the death of someone who made his living by objectifying womanhood, if not women themselves, sometimes in the most extreme ways.  I cannot let that go by me.  I have to interrogate myself on that one, I thought.

He was at the pinnacle of a profession about which one must ask questions, and he seemed to be asking them.  Nevertheless, he was hailed as a genius by even its silliest propagandists, sycophants and hangers-on, those one would most want to question, as well as by its serious and thoughtful adherents. Did they not see the questions, or where the questions not there?  Did they not see the anger? I am quite perplexed.

So today I have to spend another hour thinking about that, sorting it out and re-posting.

Now (full disclosure), I am not a fashionista, or even minimally fashionable, come to that. Those who know me might chortle at the thought.  I don’t read the magazines that peddle destructive fantasies to women, nor even flick through them in waiting rooms. All that stuff made me very unhappy once, and I totally reject the rampant consumerism that they promote.  Today I dress for comfort not for speed.

But fashion is not simply clothing (and perhaps on the catwalk its not even clothing), its also art and creativity,  and something about this guy's work got to me.  There is social commentary,  less widely noted than the brilliance and originality of his styling, but the fact that it reached me, about as far from the fashion world as it is possible to get, is evidence in itself of the power of the message, whatever it is.

His work is very, very edgy: teetering like his models at the boundaries of composure, terror, glamour, melancholia, sexuality, the macabre, the sweet and the terribly painful. This teetering is interesting in itself: he manages to convey so much contradiction and complexity, to use the extremes of his industry to criticize it, and to suggest, more than suggest, that things are not quite right, not as they aught to be. 

He was part of Claire Wilcox' hugely successful exhibition on “Radical Fashion” at the Victoria and Albert Museum for the Decorative Arts, way back in 2002.  His models were in glass cages, and thousands of moths were released   Moths?  *blinks rapidly*!  Talk about a many-layered metaphor!

And take a look at this little number, that is so sweet and lovely in concept, and yet so strangely armoured and tense in execution, so threatening.  There's a dissonance there: hard to define, but definitely there, I think. That is what he does - makes you feel uncertain.  And yet a beautiful dress, beautifully made.

And then there are those astonishing shoes of his.  So incredibly extreme and high and sexy, so odd, so puzzling, so outrageous and glamorous, but at the same time so downright ugly, and hinting at disablement: the club foot, the bound foot, limitations in mobility. And talk about teetering ….

 

 Dazed and Confused Magazine.  October 2009

Downloaded from Flickr

....  hints of stilts, the circus, the illusion, the freak show....

This video is fascinating.  I hope you have time to view it.  Its of his last  show, for Spring 2010.  Maybe you saw it streamed live, in itself an innovation.

In stark contrast to the lovely, feminine and familiar McQueen silhouettes, the parallel (literally) between the models and the cameras (or are they machine tools?), different kinds of automata, each on their respective runways, endlessly mirrored in the backdrop, is shocking, isn't it? And perfectly clear.  It's actually a terrifying image of  the self-absorbed, self-referential elements of the fashion industry, isn't it?

And what about the lightly reptilian fabric, and the distinctly reptilian hair-dos, and the stalking gait of the models, forced on them by the shoes? Combine this with the predatory silhouette of the cameras, like a couple of praying mantis: and we all know what praying mantis do with their own, with those they "love".

And what about this one?  The machine tools, this time spray guns, actually attack the model innocently pirouetting between them in her flouncy white dress.  It's very beautiful and original, and got thunderous applause, but it looks like a gang rape, or at least an absolutely devastating hissy fit.




I know nothing of the theory of fashion, nor much about McQueen or his life, so I should not, but I do, dare to comment: there is something about his attention to both the beauty and the horror of fashion that is important, as well as arresting.  He was angry, in fact I think he was deeply angry, and he was asking very big questions about his industry, from deep within it.

Not questions about the objectification of women, perhaps,  more about the cruelty and rapaciousness of the fashion/entertainment world, and perhaps also, by implication, the society of which it is the expression. This last is perhaps not impossible, although the focus was  clearly his love-hate relationship with the fashion world.

And now it is all in the past. And we are left with an enigma, and the awful tragedy of genius dying way too early.

And, sadly, yet another disturbing example of the fashion industry not looking after its own, even its greatest.

And I'll miss him: he had serious things to say.

Alexander McQueen 1969-2010

By Po Li

Flickr Creative Commons

History of the World in 100 Objects

Am I alone in thinking that the sub-text of the rather fabulous BBC/British Museum radio series / media extravaganza "History of the World in 100 Objects" is actually the text?

I haven’t seen a single comment on its lightly argued position that the loot in the BM should stay there, and I’m feeling pretty lonely.

It’s a terrific programme.  Fifteen minutes of un-missable delight every week-day, as one selected object from the past, and its historical implications, are described by the highly-regarded Director of the British Museum, the brilliant, unassuming and engaging, if hubristic, Dr. Neil MacGregor.

Go to the websites, both of them, (BBC and British Museum) see the objects, get the podcasts, upload your own historical object, be a part of emerging intellectual history.     You can listen to the story while looking at the object, brush-stoke close if you want to. New technologies are yielding new insights from old objects, and the latest multi-media communications bring it all alive. 

But there's a bit of a whiff in the air ....

For starters, under all this wonderfulness, its pretty weird, isn’t it,  that all the objects in a programme about world history are in one place:  London.

I mean, seriously, WTF??

And they’re not only in one place: they’re in one institution – the British Museum.

And we all know how all this stuff got there, some of it paid for, some of it not. That world historical process we call colonialism.  Which denied people their own history.

It's almost too obvious to mention, but on the other hand, should we be dazzled into overlooking it? That's the point.

So even while I’m hearing all this terrific stuff about how multi-faceted history is, and how connected we all are, I can’t help remembering that much of the evidence got there through that kind of connectedness we call exploitation.


And precisely because they are there, Dr. MacGregor feels that: "a world narrative can only be told in a museum like this".  Only? (emphasis mine)  If we want to have "world" history, it seems, we have to overlook the rather mixed provenance of the objects: the other history embedded in them.


Here's how the argument goes.  We can understand  world history more easily if, for example , we check out the Elgin Parthenon Marbles and then pop down the corridor and see the Persian sculptures, because Greece and Persia were at war at the time, and we can make a comparison.  

This is true, very true.  And its certainly a very nice thing to be able to do,  if you can, if you happen to be in London, and so much easier for the scholers than having to schlep around all over the place.  But its not the only way to get a handle on world history.  It's not necessary to an understanding of world history.


And how much better if we could look out from their beautiful new museum in Athens and see their original location in the Parthenon itself, and then stroll over and make a comparison with the footworn stones that were there when the marbles were first carved,  and sit on the warm stones in the agora and think about the kind of society that produced both the marbles and democracy, right there where you are sitting.  Feel the heat.  Hear the cicadas, that were also here when the marbles were.  Get a real sense of the place of these marbles in history.  

Through all the multi-media glitz of this glamorous tour de force, the deep message is that it’s OK for us to have hijacked their history because (only) we can tell it as world history, and tell it better.


Bejabers, that’s hubris, if ever I heard it !!

Me, I think its time for the formerly colonized peoples to have their own damn things back, if they want them, and tell their own history.

Then some-one could make a block-buster series about that, and how the objects  transformed knowledge generation in their own communities.  Now that would really be world knowledge.

That would be a great sequel.  

Love it.

Elgin Marbles by Chris Devers

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons.

Rosetta Stone

And in case we forget, it’s not only the objects from places like Greece and Egypt that matter, where their governments have made a high-profile effort to get them back.

My friend Leone Ross, the brilliant Jamiacan/British novelist and short story writer, has reminded me that there are plenty of people who bitterly wish they could take back their things when they go into museums, even if their governments havn't made a big show about it, and I can well understand the sentiment.

That makes this particular representation of “world” history seem pretty much a masquerade, doesn’t it?  Pretty darn hollow?

Here’s what I think should happen: there should be a world network of, say, 100 museums, big and small  (especially small), that are collectively, jointly, presenting a holistic view of world history, with the originals where they belong, and copies elsewhere.  We have the technology to make perfect copies now,  and all the networking bells and whistles to bring it alive.

That would be world history.  That would be context.  I think the public would be delighted, and everyone's bottom lines would benefit.  Terrific idea!

I'm hoping that someone more in the loop on these things than me can tell me its already in the works. 

That’s the way to go.  It would be hard to arrange, but would make a cosmic world-class multi-media blockbuster. 

Love it.

 

Mooretown Museum, Jamaica.  By Wayne Gunne

Dedicated to Nanny, a Maroon Heroin, who defended her people right here in this valley.

Downloaded from Flickr under Creative Commons License