today

back in the Netherlands after a 6 day absence in the UK. I visited Birmingham for a day to see a friend's exhibition at the international project space at the college for art and design. The image above is the only one I have of Birmingham, it's the view from the window of the bedroom where I stayed for one night. London was frustrating, hard, exhilarating and wonderful in equal measures. I spent so much time in trains, on train platforms and in train stations listening to a automated announcement personally apologising for the delay in one service or another ... and it seems that this is a point of genuine cultural difference between Australia and the UK ... How can a machine express regret? Perhaps it is an apology given in the same spirit as most other courtesies in England. Bland, automatic and meaningless. It has made me conscious of how painfully polite Australians are.

Despite my fixated and relentless interest in the quality and genuineness of customer service, I did manage to experience several good things -

One, an astoundingly good couple of beers and a meal in a 'gastro pub' somewhere near London Bridge Station - as part of the celebrations for my friend Kate's birthday;

Two, the pre-renaissance bits of the National Gallery's collection;

Three; tea in the Wallace Collection Cafe in Manchester Square with friends Nag and Sue;

Four, standing outside the Tate Modern in a freezing wind with an Australian friend who was wearing bright pink earmuffs as a few tiny, delicate snowflakes fell;

Five; seeing the Dan Flavin retrospective at the Hayward Gallery with my friend Lucy, who enabled me to appreciate work that I would have otherwise disregarded.



I guess what I found most interesting about the Dan Flavin's show was watching the people moving about in the space - and the way that the work activates the space as a kind of stage for human movement and interaction. It was also interesting to reflect on the idea that allot of artists only need one idea - for Dan Flavin, it was this thing with the fluorescent tubes, and how the tube is first used as a linear, two dimensional form, and then gradually becomes a barrier across a space. It made me think all kinds of things about light, and corners, and the relationship that these things have to the sacred or the sublime. And you can trace this back to the Constructivist trick of placing abstract works in the corner of the room, a place usually reserved for a religious icon, - or the constructivists generally replacing images or representations of the sacred with pure abstraction ... and the show makes this quite explicit, starting with some early 'icon' works and leading into the works dedicated to Tatlin.

the site for the show is ... here ... http://www.hayward.org.uk/flavin/retrospective.htm

Unfortunately, the strategy of having only one idea doesn't work to Rachel Whiteread's advantage ... the new work commissioned for the Turbine Hall, 'EMBANKMENT' is quite awfully hollow. And the pun is intended, awfully.

There is a link, or a lineage, between one thing and the other - between the works made by people like the Constuctivists who, I believe, or have been told, believed in something and the work made by Dan Flavin to "celebrate empty rooms" or by Rachel Whiteread to celebrate empty boxes. But that isn't really it, I don't have a problem with whatever it is that DF is celebrating - nothing, or something, or something that will remain wholly unkown to us - it is just that the idea of the work as a window to the sublime persists, and I (still) can't find anything in the work to replace it. And I'm afraid that, for me, the work is never just aout itself, it refers to something. So as much as I enjoy the work, its emptiness disturbs me.

What happens then, I feel, is that other agendas colonise the work. Famously, Abstract Expressionism became political during the Cold War as an expression of American "freedom". That's what I worried about as I watched people wandering about in RW's massive installation of (casts of the inside of) empty boxes. They were there for something (an experience of the sublime or the spectacular, perhaps) but after my days of wandering in amongst countless Londoners just struggling to survive, it really was a bread and circuses kind of affair ...