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Friday, 25 January 2013
l'art est un moyen de survie | Art is a Way of Survival .(scribbled at 07:32 )

Yes, I know it’s a little so goddam corny but I really like this t-shirt that I bought in Birmingham last weekend.


T Shirt: Yoko Ono for Zara
Badges: dOCUMENTA (13), V&A Shop
Jeans (Seen below): Zara

Installing exhibitions all day can get a little grubby, so I have to wear clothes I don’t really care about for work. I stick to a uniform of jeans and a hoodie, which is why I don’t do outfit posts. No one wants to see that sort of thing on a blog, especially as I leave for work at half 7 so I rarely bother with makeup. And I can’t stress enough to you how rough I look sans maquillage. As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, my eyes are this vibrant shade of red at 7am.

So today’s OOTD ? A pair of staple boyfriend jeans and a t-shirt. How bloody exciting. I bought these jeans last week. They're so incredibly comfortable, if you're after a pair of Boyfriend fit jeans this season I seriously recommend you head on down to Zara. At least the studded pockets give some edge to today's outfit. Well, ish. I think I've already wrecked the t-shirt by accessorising with badges.

I’m off to see Les Misérables at FACT tomorrow afternoon. 158 minutes of Hugh Jackman never sounded so good. If you're in London at all over the weekend, I think you should take a trip over to the Wellcome Collection for their Death: A Self Portrait exhibition. It's only on for a few more days, and the Goya prints are so bloody amazing.




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Sunday, 6 January 2013
ça alors, c'est déjà Janvier! .(scribbled at 14:52 )


My 10 days away from work flew by far too fast; I can’t quite believe we’re a week into January already! I’ve noticed that most bloggers are writing about their New Year’s Resolutions, some of which talk about losing weight from their already emaciated figure. Believe me, I like the idea of being able to resist cake occasionally, but it just ain’t gonna happen. I got back from London on Wednesday night to find a belated Christmas gift of chocolate truffles and pannetone from Carluccio’s, and managed to scoff them all within a matter of minutes.

 I have no willpower, so I don’t usually bother with resolutions but I think this year I’m going to be a little more self-indulgent. Okay, that sounds ridiculous but I don’t mean it in the sense of the oh-my-god-everyone-look-at-this-weeks-Zara-haul kind of thing. That kind of post is great now and again, but after rent, £120 on my zone 1-2 Oyster and money for food each month (with a large amount being spent on the latter…), let’s just say that the Zara/Topshop/Asos/Urban Outiftters spending sprees (delete as appropriate) are a bit too expensive to be a realistic resolution. I’m thinking more along the lines of taking long walks, drawing more, choosing to spend my money on experiences rather than shoes, and actually getting round to reading the 4 shelves of artist monographs currently lurking in the corner of my room. It’s a pretty attainable resolution, and as I type this I’m actually booking Eurostar tickets to Amsterdam in another browser tab. I’ve asked my mother if she wants to come along with me, but I haven’t quite got round to telling her that I’m only going all that way to see The Night Watch by Rembrandt. Little does she know I’m planning to spend hours in the Rijksmuseum marvelling at Vermeer paintings. We may have to meander through the many chic bars and restaurants for her own sanity.

I’m back in London now (booo!) and so I’ve been fruitlessly trying to distract myself from longings for the north of England by a few gallery visits and an excessive amount of retail therapy. I went to the Serpentine Gallery on Friday for the Jonas Mekas exhibition, and I really am trying to resist raving about it for the rest of this blog entry. If you’re interested in self-documentation (I’m assuming you are, given that you’re reading a blog) then it’s a must visit. Based in New York, the poet and film maker’s retrospective is fundamentally felt like a large inspiring real-life-Tumblr. Well, it’s obviously a lot more than that, but it’s quite incredible to see how prolific an artist’s career can be, especially one that circulates around documentation in the form of diaristic film making and photography.

Yesterday, I joined a 3 hour queue to see the Rain Room at Barbican, but caved in 45 minutes later when my friend rang and said he was in London, asking if I wanted to go for a coffee and catch up instead. I tried out his pretty awesome new camera:


If any of you have been to the Rain Room you must simply tell me whether the 3 hours queue can be justified for a visit. I didn’t get round to re-joining the queue, but I saw Hannah Sawtell’s installation at Bloomberg Space instead:


Whilst walking back via Old Street, I popped into The Grocery on the bottom of the Kingsland Road to get a little something for my friend’s mom’s birthday. It’s the most brilliant shop for bizarre tea infusions and rich coffee, and I bought her a box of Earl Grey Teapigs. If you haven’t tried Teapigs before, you really ought to. When I was last at The Brink in Liverpool, I tried a mug of the Chocolate Flake Tea and bought an entire box of them immediately. Yes, they’re a little expensive but they’re not that widely stocked so they make quite a cute, well-packaged gift.




...And ignoring everything I said at the beginning of that second paragraph, I went on a huge Zara haul. Although I did most of it online I really recommend the Knightsbridge store. It’s right next door to Harrods but is far less crowded than all the ones on Oxford Street, and has a better pick of the sale items too. I managed to restrain myself from buying more than a bagful of things from Muji, but ended up blowing some money on a pair of Nike hi tops (whoops…). Happiest purchase was sans nul doute this tube of almond hand cream from The Body Shop. I wear gloves for work, which combined with the inevitable skin-nightmare of winter, has really dried out my hands recently. This is a really intensive moisturiser for a pretty damn good price (£5). It felt even better when I didn’t pay a thing for it too- my January issue of Glamour magazine came with a £15 gift card for The Body Shop, which I’ve used on various other shower gels, and on Satsuma-scented mini hand sanitizer (although a necessity, commuting on the tube is dirty business indeed).


After 18 months of intelligible scribbling, I’ve had to replace my Moleskine diary too. That excitement of getting a fresh new exercise book in school has never actually gone away, even years after leaving secondary school. I’ve opted for a 12 month diary this time, which I suppose could help with that ‘new year, new start’ feeling that I’ve yet to experience. I ended up meeting Ed Ruscha the day I bought my last diary and he very kindly signed it for me, so maybe this year’s resolution could be to get another artist signing this diary? 

I hope you all had a brilliant New Year! After the trauma of NYE 2011, where I stood waiting for the Westminster fireworks in a packed crowd for 6 hours desperately needing the loo, I decided to keep it lazy this time by spending some time at my friend’s house with a bottle of Pinot Noir and the Hootenanny. SO Wild.Ho

Jonas Mekas continues at The Serpentine Gallery until 27 January 2013.
Hannah Sawtell: Vendor continues at Bloomberg Space until 12 January 2013.

www.serpentinegallery.org
www.bloombergspace.com

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Sunday, 14 October 2012
The Unexpected Guest: LIVERPOOL BIENNIAL 2012 .(scribbled at 15:49 )

Photo Heavy Post!

As I fear I'm falling into an assuetude of having every blog post filled with ridiculously long ramblings, I'm trying to keep this post on the Biennial visual heavy and fairly generic. Which is fairly useful as my trip to the Biennial was ages ago and so a few memories of artworks are becoming a little hazy.

 My original Biennial master plan was to travel straight from dOCUMENTA to the Biennial, which in hindsight has been the wisest decision of 2012 yet. Just embarking on a flight back from Hannover is exhausting enough, so laying an additional 3 hour train journey onto that would have been somewhat hell-ish. I admit, I didn't want to throw away my launch party and private view invitations for the opening, but I guess no matter how I wanted to dash around the city with an air of Adrian Searle esque panache, it's pretty difficult to maintain an essence of the art critic lifestyle and not be living in a constant state of fatigue. Even now, as I'm typing this out I am very much still hungover from four too many glasses of Chablis I had with a gallerist I met at the last Private View I went to. Oh Networking, what a fickle friend you are.


 Anyway, so let's start with The Bluecoat, Britain's finest eighteenth century building. Undoubtedly it's my first place to pay a visit to on arrival to the city. I spent 12 months volunteering in their galleries and archives years ago so I might appear a little biased, but their work that's there as part of The Unexpected Guest is actually brilliant. Just in front of its grade I listed gates, (pictured above) the space is consumed by Dan Graham's large cylindrical installation. On stepping through one of the stainless steel entrances, you become a voyeur of those also in the courtyard and its immediate surroundings. I found myself immersed in his installation for longer than I anticipated, but let's move on before I exceed the 500 word limit I've allowed myself for this post...

 The Bluecoat is host to one of the city's regular vintage fairs, so before wandering the galleries, I picked up a couple of beautiful oversize jumpers that will get me through the long chilly nights ahead in gritty London. That said, I live in North London and work in South Kensington, so I'm not entirely sure what I define as 'gritty'. Anyway-



Above, are photographs of Sun Xun and Jakob Kolding's work, which both dominate the main gallery spaces. Xun's work is beautifully executed, making repeat references to eleventh century Eastern style. Large scale drawings take over the gallery/corridor that lies adjacent to The Bluecoat's garden, and through all its repetition in this space, each and every element is so intricately put together.

Likewise, Kolding's work is a fine example for intricacy. The image above is just one of the many mixed media collage that Kolding has created for The Unexpected Guest. It's quite easy to lose yourself in the three dimensional cut out images that have been assembled and then re-assembled again. Black and white images are set against the black backdrop of the gallery space, and I soon found myself sketching one of his assemblages illustrating a man talking to an ear. It sounds a bit absurd, but I really do like how bizarre all of it is. The placement of each image reminded me a little of Geoffrey Farmer's work for dOCUMENTA, but I'll discuss that in the following blog post.

Now, the only direct way to get to the Albert Dock from School Lane is via the vast amount of shops in Liverpool One, so before I'd even reached Tate Liverpool I found myself cradling a bag of clothes from Zara that I didn't need, I think I actually have no willpower whatsoever when I enter that shop. Directly outside Tate Liverpool is The Source by the multimedia artist Doug Aitken, which is part of the Sky Arts Ignition series. Inside this vast cinema space, Aitken explores the source of creativity, devised with a programme of films featuring Tilda Swinton, James Murphy amongst numerous other cultural figures. The interior is split across sections, each with its own unique film. Incredibly impressive still, is the pavilion the work is situated in which was conceived and designed by David Adjaye, the British architect who designed the Idea Store in Whitechapel (and Ewan McGregor's house!). At night, the films project outside the complex wooden structure out onto the perforated exterior walls.


The remainder of the Biennial works at Tate are a few floors up in its sculpture gallery. There's a wide variety of work here, but for the first time ever, I took an immediate liking to a few works by Gilbert and George (it usually takes a little perseverance...), but both 'England' (1980) and 'CuntScum' (1977) are really impressive. There should be a space in the title of that last work, but Blogger will resist my attempts to publish this post otherwise.

I've also became increasingly fond of Pak Sheung Chuen (b. 1977), his 'A travel without visual experience' installation was pretty amazing (see below), and a great paradigm for the theme of hospitality. The photograph won't justify the experience of it at all, there's an incredible backlog of a story to the work where Chuen recounts a tale of a trip to Malaysia he took in October 2008. Basically, during his 4 days there he explored the country either blindfolded, or with his eyes closed. Nonetheless, Chuen still documented his visit through photographs, and it was only on his arrival back home that he could finally look through the photographed foreign landscapes and reflect on a visit that essentially, he never saw. I'm not sure if that quite explains it well, but the photographs from his trip to Malaysia are then wallpapered into a single small gallery space. Before entering, there's a gallery assistant placed outside with a dozen small digital cameras. As the space where the photographs are in is pitch black, you can only navigate your way through with some form of external light, and this can only be in the form of a camera. I guess it's like a counter balance to Cheun's epic visit in a way. With only a handful of people allowed in the room at any one time (I imagine the risk assessment they conducted for letting people wander into a room with no light was pretty tough), you revisit Cheun's voyage through relying on the flash of your camera to guide you.
A Travel Without Visual Experience (2008)

 Also worth seeing if you have time, is the Kader Attia's film entitled 'Oil and Sugar #2' (2007), which is a short 4.5 minute looped video projection of a mound of perfectly formed sugar cubes. Oil is slowly trickled onto the sugar, and the sugar cubes only retain form momentarily before they collapse into a grainy rubble. Attia explores food and the notion of decaying quite frequently through recent works, I'm pretty sure there was another work of his at Tate which was a large sculpture of cous cous but I can't quite remember now.
Oil and Sugar #2 (2007)


With a limited budget (trains between London and Liverpool are extortionate), I wanted somewhere relatively inexpensive to scoff my face at that evening, so through a recommendation we ended up at Egg Café, which is just off Bold Street. I ate for less than a fiver, and the side dish of salad is not only tasty but also absolutely enormous! The vegetarian burgers were delish, and off the top of my head I think you may be able to take your own drinks in. Always an added bonus, which I guess is why they aim Egg at Liverpool's ever expanding student population.

I've just started laughing to myself at the hilarity if that last sentence were to be taken out of context. Oh dear.
If my laptop had photoshop I'd have edited that dead lightbulb out in an instant.


Walking back afterwards, we managed to slightly avoid the masses of the underdressed in Concert Square by taking a detour via the Anglican Cathedral, which is always a serene way to end an evening in Liverpool...


Travelling between Liverpool and London is a mission altogether, so my time in Livers was somewhat brief the following morning. I somehow managed to visit The Open Eye Gallery, FACT, The Cunard Building and still have a spare 20 minutes to grab something from American Pizza Slice before doing the usual dash to Lime Street.

At FACT, there's a huge interactive work, where the visitor is invited to partake in a number of games (pretty sure snakes and ladders was part of it...) in order to acquire one of many exhibition posters (seen on the walls below). The posters are really well designed, so next time I'm in Liverpool I am most definitely acquiring some before they run out of stock.

Oh, and not to forget Oded Hirsch's lift, plonked right behind Topshop smack bang into the middle of Liverpool One. Possibly the most well known piece in this year's Biennial, it really invites reaction from the unsuspecting public- I overheard a bunch of prepubescent boys talking about it for ages! 

I must have been listening to their conversation on what contemporary sculpture was for a while, because I ended up 5 minutes late for a tour I'd planned to go on at The Cunard Building, lead by Lorenzo Fusi, Liverpool Biennial curator. Having the Cunard building open to the public for this exhibition is a brilliant addition to the Biennial this year, as the chance of getting to wander through this dramatic building is pretty slim at other times. The interiors are amazing! Throughout Fusi's tour, he discussed why and how The Unexpected Guest came to be for the 2012 Biennial. Learning more about how Liverpool fits into this overall theme of hospitality was really interesting, and seeing how this ties in with so many works exhibited throughout the city really was fascinating. These tours occur every Sunday, alternating between the Cunard Building and The Open Eye Gallery and lead by a wide range of Biennial contributors. 
Trevor Paglen's 'Prototype for a Non-functional Satellite'
AMAZING.
(Detail of above)


Pamela Rosenkranz's 'Bow Human' sculpture series.

Mark Morrisroe's work in the Open Eye Gallery is brilliant as well, but I was on the verge of missing my train from Lime Street, so I didn't spend more than half an hour in there unfortunately. In retrospect, I had a particularly productive weekend, although I am about to splurge on another set of train tickets to head up to Liverpool again in the next few weeks, I've been waiting to see the John Moores painting prize for ages now so I'm deeply regretting not popping into the Walker Art Gallery. The Biennial guidebook this year is fairly succinct and useful too, but I did prefer the previous one that you had to pay a fiver for, as it contained a wealth of information about the Biennial's history and the artists involved, which is always handy I guess.

 Also, the dOCUMENTA entry is on its way, albeit rather slowly. Give me about a week and you'll soon be stalking my Germanic adventures! x

 Liverpool Biennial runs until November 25

www.eggcafe.co.uk
www.biennial.com

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Sunday, 12 February 2012
HEEBIE JEEBIES. .(scribbled at 21:01 )



Okay, so here’s to blog entry number 4 (if you can call last month's upload of muffins an "entry", hmmm.)
Anywho, for the first time in ages, I caught a train up to Liverpool to indulge in a long weekend of dancing in Heebie Jeebies, scouring Mello Mello and Leaf for its latest offer of exquisite green tea and checking out an art exhibition or two.

I'd been meaning to check out the Gina Czarnecki exhibition at The Bluecoat for a while too, and as it was in its final week at the time, I'd have rather saw it in Liverpool before her retrospective appears elsewhere (following its time in Liverpool, it will then go on to travel to the Imperial College, the Science Museum and then The Herbert Museum & Art Gallery)

I think my SLR is on its last legs.
Image accredited to The Bluecoat, Liverpool.




This is Palaces, my favourite piece from the exhibition. Part of her 2009-11 series entitled Wasted; here Czarnecki has created a beautifully delicate resin sculpture which is adorned by the milk teeth of children. It really does illuminate this ground floor gallery space, so much so that I begin to notice passers-by gawping through the window at the room in front of me: 

 I find this piece so fascinating, more so than any of the other works. I also sourced out where all these teeth had come from. Most had been donated by young children residing in Liverpool, but quite a significant proportion had been donated from overseas too. She really manages to evoke these thoughts to the viewer about just how accustomed we are to seeing human tissue within art. I suppose we never really think about the correlation between bodily tissue and museums and how essentially the body parts we view in these environments have been discarded by the donor, possibly even forgotten about. 


www.thebluecoat.org
www.ginaczarnecki.com

P.S... and after a very hard night drinking my weight in vodka, my BFF Hamish and I spent a chilly Sunday afternoon wandering through Sefton Park and its thousand Canadian Geese. 





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about
diaristic ramblings about architecture, design, art, baking and shoes.

...all posts penned by Vikki, a twenty-something girl based in London (but currently having itchy feet and wanting to move back to Neuilly).

all these poorly taken photographs are indeed my own.


Vermeer's Victoria Sponge.