The big Frieze

It is overwhelming, often overblown, sometimes infuriating, but it is still London’s great annual art event, and always worth the effort of struggling through the crowds. There were many things I loved at this year’s Frieze, but for the purposes of this post, I will concentrate on works that referenced notions of the book.  

To begin in the main fair. I’ve seen the work of Hans-Peter Feldman before, and admired his playful take on collecting and grouping – sometimes to the point of obsession, perhaps in an effort to achieve completion, or at least to impose order in chaos. The Barbara Wien gallery presented his piece ‘Françoise Sagan, “Bonjour Tristesse”’, a series of colour photos pinned casually to one wall of the display, depicting the disembodied hand of a ‘reader’ holding up Sagan’s book. The reader is outdoors – there is a bush behind him (it looks like a man’s hand) and sunlight catching the green leaves. Each photograph shows a double-page spread, and with the time and inclination, a viewer could read the entire book, although perhaps Feldman’s goal is to invite us to consider the simple pleasure of reading a book (a sad book at that, about the blossoming and disappointment of a teenage girl) en plein air. Perhaps too, Feldman is interested in the book itself – its materiality, the presentation of text and language, the paper (presenting one paper medium through another paper medium).

The Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck is interested in art as stage set. In addition to his installation work, he makes sculpture and film that pitch the viewer into fantastic worlds, often quite dark. But his installation for the Marianne Boesky Gallery, ‘The Silent Library’, is pure white; once you step inside you are surrounded by clean, empty, clinical spaces. There are shelves, furniture, amazing tableaux on the console tables of birds surrounded by fruit and plants (still lives of still lives) – all white. Even a white ashtray with white cigarette butts. The spines of all the books are white, and so any notions of meaning or language are rendered impossible. It recalls grand libraries in stately homes where the leather-bound volumes were not so much there to be read, but to provide a kind of insulation from the outside world. But I was also reminded of the pure white rooms of Kubrick’s ‎2001: A Space Odyssey, and the notion that there is something alien, slightly threatening about such whiteness. Joan Mitchell, who hated white, said: ‘It’s death. It’s hospitals. It’s my terrible nurses. You can add in Melville, ‘Moby Dick’ a chapter on white. White is absolute horror. It is just the worst.’

At Travesía Cuatro’s stand, Spanish artist Elena del Rivero’s delicate set of pencil drawings on handmade paper presented a series of ‘letters’, incorporating borrowed texts from writers. Her interpretation of Emily Dickinson renders her words as spidery handwriting, forming a circle – words that bend over on themselves, like voices speaking at the same time. A circle is also a continuum, a wreath, a ring, an opened mouth. By calling these drawings ‘letters’, del Rivero is addressing her chosen authors as well, giving their words back to them in another guise. The lightness of the mark on the paper is like a whisper – and so the drawings are like diary entries, very intimate, very personal.

Over at Frieze Masters, there were works by Ed Ruscha – Gagosian created an entire wall of his books and text pieces, winks and nods towards plainspeaking America. At Timothy Taylor there were destroyed books by John Latham – beautiful, like the ruins of some great library (in the wake of the wholesale destruction of ancient monuments, I see his work in a new light).

But a new discovery this year was the American artist Michelle Stuart, connected to the Land art movement of the 60s and 70s. Parafin presented her ‘ledgers’, sculptural ‘book’ works that contain objects from specific locations. Her ‘Bat Palace Book’ seals earth and feathers from Tikal, the Mayan ruins preserved in the Guatemalan rainforest. The book itself feels like an ancient object recovered from the site, its weathered pages like wrinkled skin. I found her books very moving. Even closed and behind glass, it felt like their pages held great secrets waiting to be revealed.

Doing the Lambeth Walk with William Blake

On the final Saturday in September, as the last rays of summer sun shone on London, a group of poets, artists and designers spent the day on the trail of William Blake, in the company of our brilliant guides, Sophie Herxheimer (http://sophieherxheimer.com/) and Chris McCabe (http://chris-mccabe.blogspot.co.uk/).

This is familiar territory, explored here before http://invectiveagainstswans.tumblr.com/post/24683335676/number-13-hercules-buildings-lambeth . I walk past the site of Blake’s house in Hercules Road at least once a week, and I have even named my little press after that address. Indeed, I’ve been resident in Blake’s patch, first across the park in Southwark, then in Lambeth itself, for 17 years. There is something about the cosmic pull of south – as Chris pointed out during our walk, it was (and in some ways still is) a place of non-conformity, raising a fist towards Parliament across the river. It was the location of circuses and pleasure gardens, music halls and ale houses, ‘seedy pleasures’, as Stanley Gardner has described them.

We started, of course, where Blake’s house at Number 13 Hercules Buildings once stood – and Sophie told us something I didn’t know (no matter how long I live in London, there is always something new to know). She mentioned a strong man in Philip Astley’s circus named Hercules (Astley’s mansion, Hercules Hall, was down the road from Blake’s house). Doing a bit of Googling, I found the site of Astley’s Ampitheatre on Westminster Bridge Road https://londonstreetviews.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/astleys-royal-amphitheatre/. The site also tells us that the ‘strong man’ in question was Andrew Ducrow, originally from Belgium, who was able to lift a table with four or five children on it with his teeth. His nickname was ‘The Flemish Hercules’. Ducrow is a familiar name to me, as his grave is one of the most spectacular in Kensal Green Cemetery, more circus ring than mausoleum.

Chris McCabe will be hitting Kensal Green in his long-term project to find the lost poets buried in the ‘magnificent seven’ Victorian cemeteries of London. This is a link to his first instalment, the product of his exploration of West Norwood http://www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk/index.php/2014/05/in-the-catacombs-a-summer-among-the-dead-poets-of-west-norwood-cemetery/

But back to Lambeth. We crossed Hercules Road, past the horrible new Crown Plaza hotel that has risen like one of Blake’s terrible serpents and now dominates the block opposite. It was this (and a drawing by Alison Gill, a constructivist composition of cranes and scaffolding) that prompted my poem, recently featured in Tom Bland’s online journal Blue of Noon

http://blueofnoonpoetry.tumblr.com/post/147744704015/the-lambeth-prophecy

We proceeded down Centaur Street and then Virgil Street – a grimy, dirty conflation of streets running off Hercules Road under the railway line, dotted with pigeon excrement and graffiti. But also, for those who take the trouble to seek them out, some stunning mosaics based on Blake’s illustrations.

http://www.southbankmosaics.com/blakes-lambeth/

We walked up to Lambeth Palace, and along the river to Westminster Bridge, then back to Vauxhall, finally ending up in the Blake room in the Tate. During the day, Sophie asked us to find the ‘textures’ of London, rough and smooth. Chris asked us to find our ‘own William Blake’ in the landscape. And suddenly, everywhere, there were poems in trees and signs and pavements.

For me, one of Blake’s most moving statements about London is his poem of the same name, which was written while he was resident in Hercules Road. During our session, we discussed Blake’s use of the word “chartered”, a term from banking and business, which still feels modern in the age of property deals (I know exactly what Blake would think of the hotel taking over the end of his road …). It begs the questions ‘Who owns the streets’? ‘What rights do we have as city dwellers?’ Blake’s insistence on ‘every’ in the second stanza shows that in his London, everyone is a stakeholder, from man to child, but the stanza resolves itself by having them all in chains. The churches are blackened, from the chimneys of new factories belching out smoke, and the palaces have blood running down their walls, from the deaths of soldiers called to fight in the French Wars. And the human drama continues: the harlot’s ‘curse’ is passed to her child, and to her client, who takes it into his marriage bed, or ‘marriage hearse’, suggesting that what they all face is an early death. The Harlot represents innocence ‘blackened’, like the chimney sweep in the previous stanza. It’s a microcosm of his London, which puts me in mind of Hogarth, who, although a very different kind of artist, shared Blake’s concern for the London poor.

While on our walk, the news flashed over our phones that Jeremy Corbyn has secured the Labour leadership. I wonder what Blake would have said …

London

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infants cry of fear,

In every voice: in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear 

How the Chimney-sweepers cry

Every blackning Church appalls,

And the hapless Soldiers sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls 

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlots curse

Blasts the new-born Infants tear

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

The world from the Isle of Grain

I’ve long been obsessed by the Isle of Grain – the name, the idea of it – although I’d never been there. I even wrote a poem about it, informed by a painting by David Harker. David had never been there either (he’d based the painting on a photograph he’d been given) so together we entered into an imaginative speculation about this magical weird spot, a misnomer (the name is derived from the Old English greon meaning gravel), the end of the world.

Because sometimes art is better for not having had the experience, just imagining what it might be like. Why get hung up on truth?

But this Monday I finally, physically, arrived in Grain – by bus, in the company of Steve Perfect (http://www.steveperfect.com/) and other artists (including Mike Nelson and Adam Chodzko) / keen psychogeographers. I can report that it truly does feel like the end of the world; although it’s now linked to the land, it has the aloof air of somewhere cut-off, on the edge.

We began our walk at the footpath at the end of the tarmacked road, which follows the sea barrier along the coast. Across the water at Sheerness, Garrison Point Fort was to our right, and, just over the ridge, Grain Power Station to our left. The power station was decommissioned in 2012 and is in the process of being torn down; its chimney remains (the second-tallest power station chimney in the UK). One of our group said the locals had protested against its demolition. You could argue it’s a strange structure to love, a reminder of our grim nuclear history, not worth preserving. But if you had grown up in its shadow, and it had represented work and prosperity, you might begin to understand its symbolism. And besides, it’s rather beautiful, with its gently tapered base, imposing in a stark landscape where there are few defining features. Like Grain’s answer to the Shard.

As we walked, we could begin to see our destination looming in the distance, forlorn and imposing: the Grain Tower Battery. There are many Martellos, mysterious squat structures that dot the east coast of England, mostly along the curved shore of Kent and Sussex. They were constructed to keep Napoleon at bay, over two hundred years ago. But the tower at Grain is unique; its Martello-style base was built slightly later, in 1855, to protect the nearby Sheerness and Chatham dockyards from possible attack by France. It was added to during both the First and Second World Wars, so what remains is an odd, slightly thrown-together construction, like something a kid might make if he’d gone mad with Lego. It has the best address in the world – Number One Thames, and sits in prime position, at the point where the Thames and the Medway meet. It is bunker and fairy castle combined, its brick and concrete daubed in graffiti, but undeniably beautiful, in a sort of butch, brutalist way.

As soon as we saw it, we had to get out there. The tower is accessed along a stone causeway that joins it to the foreshore, only passable at low tide. We started across, wading through the thick mud that sucked at our boots, making slow but steady progress.

What makes these strange, set-alone places so alluring? Often, it’s simply the challenge of reaching them (our journey to the tower at the easier level of achievement). Once there, it’s the promise of solitude, in this case, an opportunity to feel as if we’d stepped into the sea, with all the secrecy of codes and campaigns that the tower suggests.

The urban explorer Bradley Garrett made a point of getting stranded at Grain Tower at high tide: http://www.bradleygarrett.com/our-own-private-island/. Even more extreme was artist Stephen Turner’s thirty-six days in isolation at Shivering Sands, one of the incredible sea forts in the Thames Estuary: http://www.seafort.org/theproject.html. It was enough for us to touch the heavy bomb-proof walls, to climb the makeshift ladder into the upper levels of the lookout, and stare across the estuary to the sea.

Perhaps we also crave a notion of safety. We live in frightening times, and these coastal defenses were built to last, built to deter intruders, still standing to purpose two hundred years on. We find them romantic, windswept and lonely, looking out to sea, but they were symbols of defiance and fear, born from our panic that the channel wasn’t wide enough to repel the French.

And now we make them into desirable homes. Even as the power station is demolished, Grain Tower Battery is being repurposed. It has just been sold for £500,000, and may be turned into an exclusive residence, or maybe a hotel or nightclub. And so another reason for our desire is to see these places before they are modernised beyond recognition, always more beautiful as ruin than when made whole again.

In praise of Joan Mitchell

I’m a guest today on Anthony Wilson’s excellent blog.

http://anthonywilsonpoetry.com/2016/02/28/guest-blog-post-in-praise-of-joan-mitchell-by-tamar-yoseloff/

We can be heroes

On Monday night, I stood in a crowd outside the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. The marquee above us read:

It seemed inconceivable that Bowie was really gone, although he’d always been like an alien who’d just dropped in for a while to see what was happening on earth before tripping off to other galaxies (I am thinking especially of his role as Thomas Jerome Newton in The Man Who Fell to Earth, a part that Bowie didn’t play as much as inhabit). He appeared to be immortal, perhaps because of his many reincarnations, from Ziggy Stardust, to Aladdin Sane, to the Thin White Duke. No one expected that he might actually die one day, and even on Monday morning, when the news was first announced quietly on his official Twitter site, no one believed it; people were still claiming it was a hoax until Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, confirmed it, posting a photograph of Bowie as a young dad, hoisting little Zowie / Duncan on his shoulders. Since then social media has been overloaded with Bowie tributes and photos … but it still doesn’t seem real, just as he didn’t seem real.

For me the damascene moment was quite late, 1979 to be exact. Perhaps because suburban New Jersey was a backwater compared to sexy London, and American radio was blaring good old fashioned guitar rock like the Eagles and ZZ Top. I was navigating the first wave of British pop, always at least ten years out of date, first through the Beatles, then through the Yardbirds, Cream, the Zombies, the Moody Blues, early Pink Floyd. I was of course aware of Bowie. ‘Fame’ had been a big hit in the American charts. But it was his arrival on Saturday Night Live on December 15^th 1979, when he played ‘Boys Keep Swinging’ with Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias as backing singers, all of them wearing tight pencil skirts, which coincided for me with the swirling epicenter of puberty. I was fourteen at the time, and very aware of boys, but not ones in skirts, and Bowie was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen. It was confusing, but also exciting, and that performance opened up the possibility that there were men who didn’t wear flannel shirts and swig Bud out of the bottle (and that they were probably all in London). I was a particularly awkward and gangly fourteen-year-old, still trying to overcome the tyranny of braces and glasses, and it would be a few more years until I embraced glitter eyeshadow and vintage tuxedo jackets, but seeing Bowie that night was a revelation. I felt like a misfit growing up in New Jersey – never accepted by the horsey set or the cheerleaders – but for the first time I could see how you might be proud of your difference, how you could construct a character out of your strangeness.

I covered the walls of my room in Bowie posters. He was a different man in each one, a chameleon lover. I bought all his albums. I still have them in a box somewhere, although I don’t have a turntable to play them on (I have him on iTunes now). I know they would scratch and skip, because I played them to death. He was the soundtrack to my later teenage years, and because of him I started to be who I am now. ‘Heroes’ was my anthem, my ultimate desert island disc, and it still is – the greatest cold war love song of all time.

In Brixton on Monday we stood in vigil. A guy in turned up in Windrush Square with a sound system in the back of his van, and we danced in the street. People had painted Aladdin Sane lightening bolts across their faces. Even the police were dancing. It was spontaneous, happy. But it still doesn’t seem real, and I am waiting for him to pop up any minute and tell us it was all a joke. But I’m listening to Blackstar as I’m writing this, and he’s singing Something happened on the day he died / Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside and it’s clearly his way of saying farewell. For me, the star will always remain lit.