By Jonathan Holt, a London-based writer and editor.
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It's at Maison Bertaux. Where else?
I mean, where else would the properly-vowelled proprietress who took your morning order burst through the tearoom door with a sloshing cup, use the spoon from the saucer to hold back the foam (which has already spilled down all sides of the cup) and say, "You did say 'white coffee', didn't you dahling? See if it's alright. I usually take it black."
(Photo: Cup half empty, Maison Bertaux, London, Monday.)
On the campus of Goldsmiths College, London, this afternoon
The filmmaker Peter Greenaway gave a talk last night at the ICA. At least, it was billed as a talk. It ended up being more of a MacBook Pro video demonstration. But before all that, Greenaway, who is very articulate indeed, laid out an argument that words are no longer the bedrock of our culture. He quoted the philosopher Derrida: 'The image always has the last word'. Adding his own twist: 'The written word is also an image'.
The talk was entitled 'The New Visual Literacy', so hearing language get a licking came as no big surprise.
What was surprising, at least to me, was how far the director of feature-length provocations like 'The Pillow Book' and 'The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover' has taken these ideas into his own work. He's given up making feature films. It's all about New Media now. It's about freeing the image from the prison of the cinema screen and the script. We saw video clips of museum installations, of an opera with avatars, of looped film fragments used for 'VJ-ing' in arenas with DJs who have only one name ('Wonderboy').
If some of what he showed us looked to the untrained eye like high-tech versions of those kitsch, back-lit photographs of 'moving' waterfalls (so common in American restaurants of a certain class), this may have been our imaginative failure rather than his. This animation, for example, probably had an altogether different resonance when projected onto The Last Supper itself. Only a few Italian dignitaries will ever know for sure.
By the end of it all, my head hurt. 'Madam,' Gore Vidal said once on a different London stage, 'I've told you things here tonight that you have never heard before in your life.' And maybe this was the thing. Too much, too fast of stuff I've never heard -- I mean, seen -- in my life. But as I fled before the Q&A could start, my head brimming over with split screens and classical statuary madness, I wanted soooo much to close my eyes and just listen to simple voices on the radio for a while.
What does any of this have to do with the above (ahem) image of Barack Obama? Everything.
Think about this. The postmodern era is over, the global financial crisis was the final nail in its coffin. In its place: art that begs, borrows and steals, with no particular aesthetic or geographic home front, art that moves about and never arrives anywhere because it's not about the destination, it's about the journey, it's about embracing the placelessness of the global and the great multicultural melting pot. So, that's the premise (more or less) of Altermodern, the Tate triennial, which opened at Tate Britain this week.
I went yesterday and wasn't disappointed. With the art, that is. The premise may be a matter for connoisseurs. What is/was postmodernism exactly anyway? And whatever it is, would it be so lacking in irony as to have a conventional beginning, middle and end? Why is it always necessary to describe something by what it is not?
Still, there is something important here, I think, and it is hinted at by the reference to the current global crisis. Here we are at what feels like a turning point in human history. Global warming, terrorism, financial meltdown. The worthlessness of recycling materials, the defense of torture, protectionism spreading the globe. The world seems particularly strange right now, and so right now we need art more than usual. Art, not entertainment. Because what art does best is show us the strangeness in what we had thought was ordinary, and the ordinary in what seems strange.
Go see the exhibition if you can. Look out especially for the brilliant paintings and sculpture of Charles Avery (slideshow here), whose work revolves around the idea of a world, a mythical island, made exceptionally strange through the artist's imagingings. Strange as in whimsical, recognizable, full of meaning and spare, surprising beauty.
Altermodern is at Tate Britain until April 26, 2009. Charles Avery's solo show at the Scottish National Gallery ends on February 15.
(Photo: Strange trees, Pimlico, London (near Tate Britain), Saturday.)
Not quite Wildlife Photographer of the Year material (I lack the necessary equipment), but a nice thing to see out the window first thing on a snowy London Monday. The title is misleading, but also true, since under snowclouds dawn stretches right through to dusk.
(Lots more London snow photos here.)
The Global Village (Tell Tales vol 4)
With my short story, 'The Experiment of Life'
Common Ground: Around Britain in Thirty Writers
With my chapter on creativity in the City
