| Hello readers. As I wandered around the recent big, nice Monet exhibition, I was struck by a scary thought. We're all waiting for something. And I mean REALLY waiting. | |
| Not, like waiting for our exams to be over, or waiting for the next pay cheque, or waiting for the kids to leave home, or getting a new job, or even getting divorced or waiting for Grandma to die. We are waiting for something bigger, harder, scarier, more life threatening, more life affirming, something to really talk about. Something to make you want to say "I was there !" when it happened, something to really write home to the future about. And I realised I don't know what it is. And I don't think you know what it is either. And in the meantime we've all got to wait. And in the meantime we're all just going through the motions. | |
| Is it the Millenium ? Are we supposed to get all excited by that ? It's either that or the ostrich pose. Luckily some of us are just ignoring this lack of focus; what's been so brilliant about the 90's is that we could finally get down to recreating the 70's. Young guys with their Paul Weller/Richard Ashcroft hairdo's can walk around looking like their Dads did when they were born, and bring home CD's which their Dads "quite like", or even better, sound just like the stuff their dad's were listening to back then !!! Beautiful ! Clubbers can revisit the golden days of disco (I was there ! Dusseldorf 1979 !) and every newspaper and music magazine has exciting lists of "Albums of the 90's" (hey, the Milllenium even; why not ?) which end up featuring the good old Beatles, Stones and Radiohead. Or writing their fall and rise of Robbie Williams article. He's so brilliant Robbie. He's a survivor. Oh ! The 1970's, the 1970's, wasn't it kistch and funky and cool ? blah blah blah...what shall we bring back next from the 70's ? Sex discrimination ? Soccer Hooliganism ? Power Cuts ? |
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I mean, it's so crazy ! Why do we bother any more ? For how many of you who came to this show was the most significant |
| part actually telling someone else you came here ? I'm surprised ! I almost thought all we did was just cruise around these days, visiting things, taking pictures and telling people we're going places or have been somewhere and not actually really have a solid reason for knowing why we're going there ! At least I was worried that that was what I was doing !!! Or even just going to exhibitions because I had someone over for the day and thought it would be "cool to visit a gallery", when secretly it was an attempt to bridge the awkwardness, and let them reflect some flickering cultural light in between "going for a coffee" and "having lunch" ? | |
| Wierd ! Sometimes in galleries the people in the queue in front of me would be talking about where they were going afterwards as they were buying their tickets. Then they'd buy their tickets (but not until they'd had a go at the old "I get in free" routine" ! I once saw a director of a major London Gallery do that !!! Can you imagine it ?), nip in the old gallery for about 15 minutes and then slag it off and spend ages in the bookshop looking at witty feminist postcards !!! As a writer, I try not to think about things like that too much; you could almost worry about how many of you haven't even bothered to come here and are infact either not reading this at all or have found it somewhere else. Still, doesn't really matter I suppose. | |
| What's the point of art anymore anyway ? | |
| I asked myself this on the way back to my pad in Spitalditch, and I couldn't stop thinking about things, bad things... I mean how many galleries are run by people for whom lots of it is just a job ? Someone wants to sell it, someone wants to get on with their career in PR, someone else has got an agenda to show the works of their friends, loads of them get sucked into the esteem of being a curator and bypass being interested in the works they piss about with, many of them enjoy showing around the trustess telling them how clever they were to "create" the exhibition, and some of them are just plain stupid. |
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What's the point in all that ? |
| Only to canonise individuals in blockbuster shows, the equivalents of "best of" albums or chainstore versions of things ? Art now lifestyle, retail; go to Habitat and look at some "designerrr" furniture, and then nip off to look at Monet. And buy the three tenors record on the way home and have some pesto for dinner. Phew ! Horrid ! (Although I do love pesto !) | |
| Ahh, but of course, there's the cutting edge, yes ! V-i-d-e-o, installation, YES ! Yes, of course, that's more like it. It's so exciting to look through the NECA leaflet and find a silly title and a collection of wierdo things, even though they sometimes even sound better being talked about than seen ! MAD ! Little whimsical lists of "things" in different colours all over a canvas ! Really "rude" "scenes" (no, make that tableaux) painted, i mean get this, really badly ! Holy Maloney !!! Wonky little videos of people yapping on, maybe with a bit of Steven Hawking in there. Photographs. The Seventies. I had spaghetti once. Hmm, grainy black and white, maybe smoking a fag; my life is rough and tough ! I love those basement places in EC1. So...damp. | |
| And as a writer it makes such good copy !!! Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes, oh yes ohyesohyesohyesohnoohnohno oh no oh no ! oh ! no ! I mean other writers ! I don't like them though. I was bothered the other night when old fatty from The Sunday Times invaded our teevee and pompously "enlightened" us re: "The Truth About Art" ! (Still, your British television eh ? Cooking, detectives, sport, news and hospitals ! Mad !) And I got fed up for a bit of that other guy with the sidies who writes things like | |
| "He Started Out | |
| He started out on the television, and then he did the Goldsmiths MA, and ran off a lot of target paintings that looked sort of Johnsy, whilst writing lots of articles in a dismissive, throwaway style, which had a sort of ironic, defensive stamp to it. His style became very well known, because he could write really quite rude things about people, like | |
| "In the late 1990's... |
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| In the late 1990's he grew the most overblown sideburns which surely couldn't have survived without irony. Luckily for him he often wore a fur coat, which sort of looked like a ladies fur coat and therefore carried a disarming kind of "I'm a trendy geek" aura. He could often be seen turning up at galleries, telling people at the desk that he wrote for the one of the Blair broadsheets or something, and then going round the gallery looking at the work with a funny scowl, which looked half serious and half like he couldn't help it, just like on the cover of his book", and get away with it because it didn't seem serious enough to complain about. And anyway, if you'd have complained about it he would have written about that. The funny thing is is that if his writing had got a voice it would have been like two annoying girls who speak in their own silly language in front of other people, and certainly not like his own estuary English thing."". | |
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But then again, we're all in it together aren't we ? |
| And we're sort of here, and It's A World World World World Mad ! Any kind of fight is an emptied, vacant gesture or a never ending nervous wriggle ! Our uptight anxiousness finds vulgarity in the everyday, and yet our boredom looks to the everyday for vulgarity ! Our lives seem to ebb and flow until we don't know the danger of what we're doing or the violence that's come to surround us, and even if we do we just have to flow along anyway, treading water ! We try and make a home from all the right component parts and it still doesn't work quite right, because we don't even know what home is anymore ! We gag and bind things and put them in bondage, only to tear them back open in some attempt to speed things up. Oh Crazy ! I'm waiting, you're waiting. Can we wait any more...?!?!?!? Hans Friedrich Glansbasch c. 1998 HFG |
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