Alex Pearl
25th February 2009
I'm on a trip to London with Hayley and Simon. Simon described himself last night as an overweight doodler which I think is dissembling a little too much. He is an illustrator, who, like Hayley works constantly and puts my sporadic activities to shame. They often plot things together and Hayley is currently making him a bright blue Yeti suit to wear on the glaciers in Iceland. Hayley is always moving, she drives and drives and drives. Tomorrow she will head up to Liverpool to do a talk about her work at the Royal Standard, she plans to point some sort of toy epidiascope at each collage and talk about beautiful boys, counts and Mrs Palm and her five sisters. I'm often trailing around after them as they chatter from place to place. Another friend and artist, Annabel, accompanies us by text throughout the day.
Our trip has not started well, it is a college visit to London and we have just discovered that one of our students, James, has died of a brain hemorrhage. Hayley is tough, she spent the morning gathering his close friends and breaking the news, while the rest of us shuffled round doing the mundane things and being tearful. James was very tall and very quiet and more than a bit bumbling. He had a few very good friends and they were knocked back by the news. One girl was crying on the concrete steps another, a boy, was sick. I remember the coach drivers asking where the toilets were.
At the moment a few of us, the tutors, are gathered in the Clarence just off Trafalga square having a quick drink before heading back to the coaches which promised, rather vaguely, to pick us up on Embankment. There is a red ceiling and leather chairs, well actually one leather chair which I got to first. I fancy I look like a gentleman in his club but everyone says I look very small. I notice our bowls of wizened chips, a group of bouncy revelers viewed through an internal window and a flat screen tv in an ornate golden frame.
It has been a good day. We, Simon, Hayley and I, have wandered round looking at sale signs and laughing at pigeons. We have been to Rokeby to see a show by four artists. Three of them have collaborated to make a gesamtkunstwerk installation upstairs while the fourth, Doug Fishbone, is on his own in the cellar.
the owners
To get into the show we had to enter a rather blank atrium with three people eating their lunch. It felt a bit like that Abramovic piece where you had to squeeze between a naked man and woman to get into the show. Well it wasn't quite as painful as that but luckily I was in company so I managed an embarrassed hello and I shuffled past, their sandwiches looked nice.
the collaborators
The first room taking up the whole of the ground floor of the gallery was a spectacular experience by Laura Buckley, Haroon Mirza and David McLean whose work I'd come across, and enjoyed, before. As I stood there mesmerized by the twisting coloured light sound and sculptural installation I wondered, a bit cheekily and probably wrongly I think, that this was somehow more interesting than their individual pieces. That is I suppose the definition of the gestalt and the failure of the individual contributors to live up to the greater whole is kind of an act of delicious built-in disappointment. I am obviously in a germanic mood but instead of Wagnerian pomp, the show had a feeling about it that made me think of the joys of little pleasures. Small actions, understated sounds and objects combined to create a room of childlike wonder not at all grown up.
the man in the cellar
Down the stairs we found two facing screens that made up Doug Fishbone's piece. As usual we had all failed to read the blurb on our way through the gallery so we spent a fun ten minutes trying to work out what the hell was going on. What were the people doing? Could they see/hear the stream of internet images and monologue projected on the facing screen? "no they can't, oh yes they can, why did that woman cheer? Who is barking? he's just licking his lips, oh I'm missing the pictures". We found out later that the audience were hypnotised to produce set responses to the images in the presentation, in a way so were we.
The three of us left the gallery (squeezing past the naked sandwich eaters) smiling and chatting about being from the country and re-crossed London to buy Hayley's projector.
So here we are having a drink to James' memory, which wasn't very good. The revelers turn out to be a group of our students on the other side of the bar. There is a newspaper on the table, apparently teenage pregnancies are on the rise.
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