Chewing Gum Art
Chewing Gum Art by Ben Wilson
I stumbled upon a mystic symbol on Archway Road, painted onto a pavement pockmarked with gum. [livejournal.com profile] ruudboy identified it as a piece of Ben Wilson's chewing gum art. I kept seeing patches of chewing gum that had been painted bright colours all over the pavements around Archway after that, everywhere I looked. Apparently, in 2004, Ben Wilson was intending to paint discarded chewing gum found in Barnet to the West End of London, so there must be a lot of painted gum out there. I'll keep staring at the pavements.

Photos on Flickr: Chewing Gum.
More photos on Flickr, by Rahid: Ben's chewing gum art, and one sculpture.
Alexandre Pollazzon, near to Goodge Street tube, just off Tottenham Court Road, is currently showing Andreas Dobler's Paintings from the Comfort Zone. The paintings are dreamy and have a sci-fi feel to them, although some are a little bit creepy, but for a few minutes before lectures started, I gazed at the 8 paintings of islands, bridges, tiny buildings and strange structures and imagined I was amongst them.

From the press release: "'Paintings from the Comfort Zone' presents surrealist settings that are hallucinatory utopian/dystopian visions and perhaps, cryptic prophecies about urbanism, originating in the painter's lust to occupy new territory. By indulging in these spaces and grounds, Dobler reflects on his own desire for comfort and security, and painting as an ideal way to reconcile reality and dream."
A talk at the ICA on the 29th of February: Fun and Games: The Gallery as Adult Play Centre

I've hung upside down on a climbing frame in an art gallery in Amsterdam and I know that many people played on the slides at the Tate Modern in London, so when I heard that the ICA's founding president, Hubert Read, described the ICA at its inception as an "adult play centre", I was inclined to agree that art galleries can be thought of that.

The talk at the ICA included various speakers, including curators from the Tate Modern, and a number of interesting points were discussed, but no conclusions really seemed to be reached. A video of Oh What a Lovely Whore was shown and then Sebastian Boyle spoke about it. Oh What a Lovely Whore was an exhibition, which looked more like a party really, that happened in 1965 and seemed to involve people getting drunk and smashing up pianos to turn them into new forms of instrument. Tino Sehgal's 2007 This Success/This Failure exhibition was also talked about, which simply involved a gallery full of actual children playing.

A few notes:
- "Play is crucial in sublimating aggression" - Read.
- "Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays" - Schiller.
- What happens when participation is forced?
- Being subversive by not playing.
- Invigilators at art galleries hinder play.
- You are not allowed to be delirious.
- Playing is not the same as gaming.

Fuzzy

Apr. 18th, 2007 11:51 pm
If I think about Fuzzy Felt, I imagine pale-coloured felt shapes arranged into musty farmyard scenes. I also think of jumble sales, cardboard boxes held together with sellotape, and felt that has been played with until it has been left soft and threadbare.

I recently noticed the Fuzzy Felt greeting cards in high street shops, found Fuzzy Felt patterned with Teletubbies available on eBay, and even glanced at the pictures of cute computer shaped felts used when understanding the programming patterns of domestic appliances. The ideas on Halfbakery are best though - fuzzy felt bell-bottoms, fuzzy felt wallpaper and even fuzzy felt sex.

I had rarely thought of those little bits of material for years, but a few weeks ago, in the Foundry, I joined the [livejournal.com profile] londongothsluts for a few drinks and found myself staring at Hot Fuzz: An Exhibition of Fuzzy Abstraction on the wall. Perhaps I should just stick to staring at carpets in future..

(Oh, the day after that, I did see Hot Fuzz at the cinema.)
Slap Bottom
In the forest, there are tiny islands, each made of only one tree. They appear to be floating through the rivers, but their roots twist and cling tightly to the riverbed. Leafless branches sway in time with the ripples in the water and my hair begins to swirl across my face as I try to peer at their reflections.

[livejournal.com profile] gevurah and I imagine ghost trains trundling along the dismantled railway that we begin to walk the route of near to Slap Bottom and towards Sway. I sip rhubarb wine and wonder where my destination would be, if I was on that train.
--

Sunday, [livejournal.com profile] ephoscus and I visit an exhibition that "explores what it means to be human in today’s world", at the Bargate Gallery. We tiptoe around encyclopædias covered in white dust and projected video speckles and then stare at photos of Bournemouth beach that look like an alien landscape,

At Mayflower Park, we dangle our feet towards the seaweed, while watching the water twinkle at us, as if glitter has been daubed across it. Southampton's elusive "beach" is also in view: the tiny metre of sand, where a fisherman stands, and even that seems somehow magical in the bright sunshine.
Tube Walk 32 Collage
Santa's Ghetto on Oxford Street was where Joe and I headed on Friday to gaze at the limb vending machine, graffiti, space invader mosaics, Banksy paintings and various other art scattered about the temporary gallery. We wore enough black to be able to drink in the new Intrepid Fox after that and then danced the night away at Sin City.

Saturday was Tube Walk 32 from Brent Cross to Golders Green. Camera battery uncharged, cheese melting in left luggage at King's Cross, and words, words are too slow to write while walking. Therefore, I collected bits of old carpet, Alien Autopsy, tags for dog clothes, abandoned cassette tapes and CDs, flowers, leaves, words written by other people, bark, a Wink-Ease sticker, packaging for planes, and tore down a sign that said, "find your way there."

Vancouver

Dec. 7th, 2006 09:44 am
View towards Lonsdale Quay
Skyscrapers compete with mountains.


Vancouver Art Gallery currently has an Emily Carr exhibition on, with beautiful paintings of vivid (and sometimes creepy) totem poles and swirling green forests where the undergrowth laps at the trees like waves. Emily Carr often visited and painted First Nations villages, sometimes with her sister and I quite liked this description: "Sister purchased a bird of melancholy mien, so resembling herself she had difficulty in restraining her emotions".

There was also a Paint exhibition on, so bright and neon and full of geometrical shapes and patterns, which seemed like such a contrast to the dark and brooding world Emily Carr sometimes painted, but it was still her trees that I found the dreamiest.

After visiting the gallery, we headed for Stanley Park, to see the Hollow Tree, which is mentioned in City of Glass: "Vancouver is perhaps the only city in the world where criminals might strap moose antlers to the hood of a stolen car and park it inside a 1,500-year-old hollow tree."

That was the day, I also ate a latke in Desert and then saw the play of Life After God.
The exhibition at Blow de la Barra, The Title As The Curator's Art Piece*, first appeared to be an empty room. At the end of the room was what looked like an office. After peeking around the corner a few times before stumbling in there, I found a sign on the wall listing the spoken word acts and a few people sitting at desks. A girl agreed to perform the Douglas Coupland spoken word act first. "It's the same for both sexes," she told us, smiling. She then performed the Momus spoken word act by whispering a sentence. Even after she repeated it, I was unable to figure out what she was saying, but I suppose that is kind of the point of Chinese whispers.

* Show title #347, by Stefan Brüggemann.

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