Smashing, smiting, screaming, throwing, crashing and making poetry

Backwards, backwards, more and more backwards! At least this is the last post about the weekend before the last one. That is a lot of "last/least" to be written, I know, but please be patient, you would understand my state of mind if you were reading the book I am through right now.

Having planned a totally relaxing weekend, as you have read in the most recent posts, my lovely all-sweet partner added to it a two nights gig by her most beloved band, the Einsturzende Neubauten!

If you find the name sounding a bit harsh - strikingly enough being German a generally considered very smooth language, of course - I can assure you that it gives just a pale representation of their music. As it is easy to guess, I am not an industrial music enthusiast, even though I have to admit last year Nine Inch Nails' gig was one of the funniest and most dangerous I have been to in years - I know, NIN are not really industrial, according to purist like my beloved girlfriend, but still... - so I was quite sceptical about the possibility of enjoyment of the nights. I was badly wrong.

 

 

The band was amazing to listen to in a live performance, entertaining at any level - great performers, strong stage presence, unexpected sense of humour - and their instruments were real works of art.

Truly inspirational. The ability of creating such an appealing contrast between the painful noises of astounding percussion instruments, the harshness of the language driven to its extremes at times and the poetry of the lyrics is a non-common quality. I love contrasts, being able to manage them gives the opportunity of creating something with a soul, not just a nice/cute/vacuum looking whatever-it-is-I-erase-it-from-my-brains-the-moment-I-cast-my-eyes-anywhere-else.

So I believe I have to sincerely thank my lady for my newly gained hearing impairment and this glimpse over a previously unknown world of creativity.

The galleries' idea of Arts

It would look great in my living room

Being one week late is not that bad - unless you are a girl and had unsafe sex recently - it is like I am talking about something not exactly new, on the spot, but not completely faded away yet. In some way a reminder of an happening that needed to be understood more deeply, not just judged and discarded.

Unluckily enough though, my present subject, the Frieze Art Fair, was by many means something to store away in a dusty corner of one's mind and move on.

I know I sound too extreme and I am not an expert in any way, but certain aspects of the Fair were pretty disappointing. Obviously there were a lot of great works all over the place, it was difficult not to find at least an interesting one in each gallery, but the overall quality of them was incomprehensible. Unless one is an art dealer, of course. This is really the only valuable point of view on contemporary art, sadly. If a gallery manager decides to show an artist's piece, no matter what junk it is, job done, the guy has probably made is fortune. Otherwise whatever amazing, breathtaking, Stendhal syndrome causing object one can produce, it is just worthless rubbish if no gallery wants to sell it. Visual Arts nowadays are hostages of wannabe-posh people who can not go out without their bloody iPads! At least Londoners and New Yorkers, all the other ones will follow soon on their path.

Did I sound too harsh? I can do better than this, just try to bring me to a crowded, warm, dry-to-the-point-of-eye-burning place stuffed with multicoloured eclectic things and listen to me right there...

Kind of a living hell, I have to admit, until I turned a corner, got inside Paul Kasmin Gallery area and had a true epiphany...

 

Mark Ryden - Awakening the Moon

End of the epiphany...

Creepy, even creepier at times

One of funniest activity I resumed once I started uni again is visiting art exhibitions. Not that I did not do it at all during my resting period out of the World, but certainly now I am in a much better attitude towards it.

Talking about exhibitions, more or less a year ago I have been to a pretty peculiar one. Seriously, "marvellous" was just the appropriate adjective for it, so I went there twice, just because I could not manage to go there more often. Perhaps on the tenth time I would get slightly bored, I have to admit, but just because there were no armchairs around where I could read a book or have a sandwich.

Unfortunately indeed, soon the exhibition ended too and I decided it would have been too humiliating to keep going in front of the place, bringing maybe my picnic basket with me and settling down there for the whole day reminding myself what amazing pieces of art were there once upon a time.

And then each one of you, dear readers, can figure what a breathtaking emotion I felt when I found out that organization was in the making of a new one! What can I say about it? They did not disappoint me, for sure. Now, I do not want to sound too fond of them, I just want to say it really was a bunch of good artworks, maybe they were not all brilliant or the final stage of originality, but I liked it, that is all. Ah, one characteristic of the AVA organization is the ability to choose and adapt the location to their needs: this time they used a classic Victorian house, a former Embassy, so richly furnished in the past as decadent now, and it worked perfectly.

Apparently it is all over already and it is a shame because none of you can go anymore and I will probably have to wait for another whole year to see something else by them, and this means I will need those pills to calm me down again. Damn!

I told you it was creepy

And: yes, this is a tyre

I know it seems just a big mess, but look close enough...

And this is what I meant for creepier at times

What I mean for a nice walk around

Time is running faster and faster, I can clearly see it, they were absolutely right! Otherwise I have got no explanation for my hair getting more white everyday and me being constantly late in writing these posts.

Taking it as an agreed statement, I can now move on talking about last Friday's "out & about" session, which was pretty enjoyable, it has to be said. First of all, the Old Street/Shoreditch area is so filled with studios, agencies, galleries, clubs and whatever else, having a walk there is always interesting. For instance, it has been proven that a design agency can rightly have a pool table, even though it was a small one with an arguable orange playing surface.

Secondly, the places we have visited did not lack potentials of inspiration.

What an astonishingly long piece of work...

Typography, I just love it!

The Kemistry Gallery is incredibly tiny, but the exhibition itself was great, a good amount of posters and material, but the walls did not end up neither crowded nor messy. The White Cube Gallery is wide enough to display many artworks pleasantly, no matter whether they actually deserve to be showed or not.

The YCN (hopefully the name is right...) and the bookshop close to it were undoubtedly two huge sources of material every designer would strongly desire to have in his own studio/living room/bedroom/hallway and everywhere else, if he could just afford it.
And, as you can see in the second link above, lunch at last!
 

 

Collages, a lot of them!

Two posts in a row without pictures, how bad can that be? This time anyway I have them, I swear!
In the previous post I gave myself a list of subjects, I am confident I can stick on it and give some coherence to my words. Thus comes last week's workshop.
Did I ever mention how much I love collages? I am pretty sure I did not, as I would have no reasons to lie so blatantly. It is something dated back to my childhood, I suppose: even though I really, deeply like works of artists such as Rodchenko, to say the most obvious ever - while I sincerely disapprove his philosophy as crude elitism - and I admire many others directly inspired by him, I equally dislike making collages myself most of the times.

Is it necessary to describe my feelings about the assignment of a hundred small collages to submit to the tutors by early December then? Yes, it is! I like it. Really, I do. I will hate every single minute I will have to spend cutting and pasting and cutting and pasting and on and on, but it will all make sense at the end. Focusing! Trusting in myself! Not giving up! These are my new aims for the one and half month to come.
 

Glue! It looks useful and good, but it can be your worst enemy!

I was forgetting about it: great piece of theory!
And a very bad picture too!

This is just the beginning...

"Could be worse: it could rain..."

 

Loads of material and a strong headache

Oi! Here we are again, eventually. I can not believe it is almost a whole week since I wrote my last post, especially because it just means I have so many things to talk about now, I do not even know where to start from. Great...

Should I mention the new improved look of the blog itself maybe? I have already done it at this point, so too late to go back. As you, dear readers, can easily notice, I finally put my head on the issue trying my best to make a real mess and I firmly believe I achieved such a satisfactory result.

Next on this page and out of my aching head: last week's workshop, "out and about",  an exhibition, an art fair, a double gig and some words about an astonishing contemporary painter!

Domino break

Time by time a distraction is inevitable. Even Chess Masters can not play all the time, unless they do not mind getting serious brain damages, and here is where several other relaxing activities kick in. Domino for instance, a remarkable way to lose temper and friends, but still enjoying oneself. For the unlucky ones who do not know the actual game, it is just like what happens to a person who, having a good amount of spare time, innocently goes checking some interesting video on Youtube and inevitably ends up watching tens of them in a random sequence for hours, until his brain is so overloaded by information, he needs to ask for help to get out of such a vicious circle and has absolutely forgotten where he started from. Which is, unexpectedly enough, exactly what happened to me just today. So I have been dragged into this compulsive watching, being the subject so amazing. I would love to share with you all, readers (three people so far, if I am not wrong and Catherine kept an eye on it too), any single one of those videos, but wishing to save myself from another brain-washing session, I might rather not look for all the links again. I just hope you will get as curious as me and have some friend around to bring you back to life after a while.
Not that I consider all people being of my same kind - meaning that idle one who would have not made it if natural selection were still working on human beings - but I can tell you these happenings lead me constantly to very late dinners and a sleeping path that would turn lovely Mrs Threadgoode into an adorable Pepa Marcos in just a fortnight...
Ah, by the way, I can not wait for next Friday "Out and About" lesson at the Kemistry Gallery!

3. Nf3 d5

"It's alive!"

Honestly, I hate contradictions and incoherence. So, having anticipated I was going to talk about one of my favourite artists on my third (ever) post, I decided to leave that for later and move on.
What else is at stake then? Last Friday Narrative Workshop, of course. ...Too many capitals for one sentence, indeed...
"Back in business" - just like old mate Gekko recently has been heard saying, it seems - after a long, pleasant, battery recharging period out of the real world made of responsibilities/duties/expectations, as everyone knows it. Playful time, smooth approach, I would say, to the toughest tasks in communication: creating a narrative that actually makes sense to the designer's audience, either a generic or targeted one.
First step: it is all fun. Keeping to know each other, facing quietly David's language and methods, starting to make our hands dirty on paper and glue, as we will do countless times during the next two years. Meaningful. Someone comes across a completely new thing, someone else shows understanding, few more ones start showing off their raw potential. Maybe a bit too much showing off...? No, perhaps just right, I would not expect anything less from this kind of environment, though.

"I like work: it fascinates me.
I can sit and look at it for hours."
Jerome K. Jerome

Frieze Art Fair 2010

Perhaps this is suitable for Plato's purposes

Wondering quite randomly on the Internet, looking for one of my favourite artist's website - who will be the subject of my next post then, I suppose - I accidentally came across news about the Frieze Art Fair 2010 in Regent's Park! What is surprising in this discovery is not the event itself, which it is suppose to be generally well known, but obviously the embarrassing level of my lack of knowledge of whatever is going on in London at any given time.

So a question arises in my mind: is it really alright to live in my own isolated world as far as my fridge is full and the chessboard is on the desk? And it is giving to me a slightly upsetting feeling of missing something somehow important, exactly the same as whenever I look out of my room's windows and I see that huge bunch of houses and buildings of various nature and shapes that utterly interrupts the otherwise astonishing view of the British countryside, which my housemates mysteriously refer to as "Central London"...
 

"Central... what? Damn it, it is just all over the place!"

1. e4 c5

64 black and white little squares to make a bigger one

According to some minor philosophers (myself, to say just the first one at hand) life is like a chess game. More likely a chess tournament, actually. Then each new chapter is a single game and one is supposed to go on developing skills like tactics, strategy and self-control... If I were right, opening slightly sideways would make sense after all! There you go, keep watchful and get time to study the next move, it will pay back on the long term.

So, as uni starts, my reaction is pretty neutral, shy and quintessentially Sicilian: pawn in c5, we will see what comes next.
 

Empty drawers: I do not know what anyone else would think of it,
but I find so exciting to have them in a studio at the beginning of a new year...