woobiquity

Actually, it's black

Nice try though.

Slight detour, Greenwich High Road, SE10, this afternoon.

Crafty little devils

“I’ve always been into arts and crafts.”

“Er, yes, more crafts than arts, I’d say.”

As you may already know (being so crafty and arty yourself), crafts are the new arts. I’m not talking about folk art, although any excuse to have another look at the extraordinary Gee’s Bend Quilts is a good one in my opinion. No, I refer to the ironic arts: trained artists dabbling in the needlework and jewelry-making of their grandmothers. Except with a lot more skulls and references to crack cocaine.

In Marfa, Texas, last summer I sat down at a coffeehouse beside two women, both of them artists. One artist said to the other: “I’m working mainly in crochet at the moment.”

It’s a trend, possibly even a movement. And so to Islington to look at Wild Styles – Hot Craft at Sesame Gallery. To my eye, much of this “work by women artists... working in craft media" only works if you imagine the stuff was made not by a MOMA or Tate caliber artist but by a granny who’s had it with roses and puppy dogs and other prettiness. Just HAD IT. And in that sense the impact might be stronger if the pieces were encountered unexpectedly at the winter church bazaar, at a stall next to Helen's pear preserves. Still, I'd have paid money to have a go at wearing that giant pearl necklace down the street.

The V&A has much more craft as art (or maybe art as craft) on the way, when its Out of the Ordinary Spectacular Craft exhibition opens on November 13.

Image: 'Skullfucked', by Boo Davis. One of her Evil Rock Quilts.

The art of surveillance

My fifth grade teacher had this idea that one day scientists would use machines and microphones to reclaim sounds from the ether. It was a Christian school, and this was as much a cautionary tale as a science lesson. Anything you say may be used against you. Now, be good. And enunciate!

I doubt whether even Mrs. Cook dreamed this payback could extend to video. The BBC has a feature tracing the final moments of Jean Charles de Menenzes, the innocent man who the Metropolitan Police shot dead on the Tube. Eerily, it includes enough video from covert and security cameras to make us all witnesses if not to the bloody finale then to the sequence that caused it.

It is a cautionary tale reclaimed by science. Look what happens when a police officer on stakeout takes a leak at the wrong moment, when the chase is its own momentum. Tomorrow: same bus, same tabloid paper, but the ordinary guy who got on at Upper Tulse Hill will be news, not near you. Who wouldn’t run for it, on the Tube so soon after 7/7, seeing eight nervous men nodding and winking at him? Seven shots, blood everywhere, and then they turn the guns on each other.

Of course, even the finest of cameras would have trouble catching the nods and winks, much less the thoughts behind them, in the secret place where all errors begin, where no surveillance reaches and reconstruction is always suspect. Maybe one day science will find a way to rewind our thoughts. But for now our best hope of getting at what really happened, what was meant and what it meant, is art, not science. It’s fiction.

Cat-people, cat, people, cat people

So it's confirmed:

Based on the structure of the chromosomes, the cat genome much more closely resembles that of humans than that of other nonprimate species. Unlike cats and humans, pieces of chromosomes in "the dog, mouse, rat, and others have been reshuffled like a poker deck," says O'Brien. This conservation suggests that the cat's genome has more in common with the ancient ancestor of cats, humans, and other mammals than, say, the dog's does.

Told of this exciting discovery, Guru and Sissie had only this response: