This pretend book was made to be flipped through like time, as tangential as memory. An owner's manual for a brain that just won't stay on track, it began as something simple, and became quite the opposite...but its heart is in the right place...and "at the end of the day" ( a phrase I hate but which in this case seems apt) the point of communication is the attempt, surely, rather than the outcome? This is an attempt. I think I've done all that I can. It's success is down to you.*
*is this limbo loop my life?**
** If it is, it's in your hands
“Tell the story quickly and efficiently as if you are running out of time, which you are”
I realise I am in a story as I leave the film projection room. On my phone I make the note:
The Story...(dotdotdot) Nuclear Anxiety Black sun Varying degrees of abstraction Irradiated overexposed lounges That vanish leaving eye burn Archives and reconstructions Clement Greenberg's new york apartment apparent a parent
and return to the room to document what I can of the film, Paul Siet....'s1 Empire 2 a quiver with excitement.3 The images make me feel apocalyptic45 As I type this note on my phone, I remember a taunting kind of observation that someone had made once about me being unfocused6 and therefore unable to tell a simple story. I think – aha! Here's my chance! My 'IN'. I will tell a SIMPLE STORY of a DAY'S EVENTS. A simple day. Like this... I am standing in the Tate Liverpool. The date is Thursday 20th February 2020. I have 5 hours to kill and there are various factors7 and NOW I am writing this story. 1...may refer to a suspenseful pause or a lack of information. 2Empire has many 'arts' inside it, including replicas of Clement Greenberg's New York apartment and the Salon de Princesse in Hôtel de Soubise, Paris...a tour through a replica? of Louise Bourgeois's sculpture The Fairy Dressmaker, various abstractions and a fake grasshopper... 3Or possibly fever. 4Like the centrefold pages of the graphic novel When The Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs whose facing pages have been blasted pure white, blinding white....by the NUKE that hits London. 5All my love is apocalyptic. The end of the world is there eternally yawning with moist eyes in my heart. My heart is a nuke at the blasting point, I am a mushroom cloud around that tiny snap of energy. Which isn't to say I'm angry exactly. Just...excited. 6...or unable to abandon all the millions of tangents & digressions that I enjoy... 7 I didn't want to spend any money, it was windy and intermittently rainy with shiny spells and my so called snow boots had a hole and were already squelching and my son had an interview at LIPA with various activities all day and then we had to catch the train home at exactly the right time or we would never escape and Corona virus was gathering steam but no one was wearing masks except for the Chinese students but the taxi drivers still didn't want to pick them up which was why our apartment for the night on Myrtle Street had particularly freaked me out but that was all in the past now...
* Empire, revisited. (please click on pics)
From this point on I make notes exploring how I felt about the art etc.1 making my own connections as I wander back and forth between the rooms at will, UNACCOMPANIED for once. After the Empire notes, I write:
White writing Winds and grey waters Doubleframe2...you can't touch this! I'm imposing narrative. Watch me feel me
At which point I scroll back and insert a FOREWORD and a FLASHBACK3. 1I am in fact looking at a collection of Op Art, an exhibition titled Reconfiguring American Abstraction and a show called Constellations curated by Darren Pih. 2All transcriptions from the phone are [sic] 3And I continued to mess with the simple notes for many months after, so that hunting for the original text is like an archaeological groping in the dark, also known as Indiana Jones-ing.
The Artworks I Make Notes About Occur in This Order A silent 16mm film projected in a dark room1 A photomontage 'competition' between two men2 1Paul Sietsema – Empire – 2002 (I have looked his name up since the first page) 2I don't know who these are, I am trying to find out.* *I found out! Nigel Henderson, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi – Untitled (study for Parallel of Life and Art - 1952
A red drip painting, framed within a frame1 A statue of a naked lady mashed into massive pile of clothes2. On this, I write:
I don't know what to wear. But at least I can hide my shame, my shame? I mean my face. My tits but not my ass...
A blobby splurge of molten metal filling the right-angle where two walls collide, about the height of a man3 which doesn't quite fit flush against the walls it is leant against4 about which I write:
The crack The gap makes a mock of this leadspunked intoacorner
Two black and white photos of a kind of endurance performance with a long bit of wood in an artist's studio5 which inspire the words:
Wot a plank. But like a stoat-al plank, charles Ray is weaselly easelly wecognised 1Hermann Nitsch - Poured Painting - 1963 2Michaelangelo Pistoletto – Venus of the Rags - 1967 3Lynda Benglis – Quartered Meteor – 1969, cast 1975 4As it had been originally made for another, wonkier gallery. 5Charles Ray – Plank Pieces I-II - 1973
Some kinetic art on a small oval board on the wall in a room with Some pretty striped floor1
At sea on multicolored2 vinyl tape bobbing towards the soft fur of white nails seeing my own face like an arctic wolf mirrored back in the shadows3... But the multicoloured slick drags me back...jim lAmbie, 1999 kirstie ogg talked about him back in portsmouth...he vinylled the showroom But is it my eye mechanically Doing as it is told
A revolving toy on a Sony TV4 1Jim Lambie – Zobop – 2018? 2I cannot stress enough how [sic] the phone transcriptions are. 3Pol Bury – 3069 White Dots on an oval background - 1966 4 Mark Leckey –Felix gets Broadcasted - 2007. I actually thought it was Mickey Mouse broadcasting rather than Felix the Cat from the photographs later but I like to think my original instinct would have been correct.
A video about test card in a desert 1 At this point I write
Evil pixels 2 1Hito Steyerl – How not to be seen: a fucking didactic educational. MOV. file - 2013 2Which refers to a piece of art I didn't photograph, cubes, interactive?* *But which is almost like a cryptic crossword clue for the two previous art works
Feeling fizzy, I stumble into what seems to be the BODY area...
and write: Three men making mums in mauve1 The dead grey pink of ignoring flesh 1Rothko, Debuffet and Bellmer
Not like the snuffling piglets of louise borgois boobie Mamelles1.. 1Bourgeois
Are you a tit artist1? Or a leg artist?2 A guts on a plinth artist?3 1Bellmer, Bourgeois, Richier 2Dine, Ernst, Lucas, Richier. Not you Bellmer. 3Lucas
Do you like your art flayed1 in a heap2 or pulled taut on puppet strings3? 1Debuffet 2Lucas 3Dine, Ernst
Pretty little parceled up porcelain pasties farewell pudenda from Hannah1 to Claes... 1Wilke
Pandora's Amphora with a rod up her arse1... 1Richier
..the pink pillars outside at the dock.
The march of jim dine's “dream” mannequinned fetishing industrialising mundaning parade...
These blue notes refer to, A painting made of pink smears and ejaculation-airy trails1 A painting of a flattened but cheerful LADY2 An headless, limbless “doll”3 A row of LADY fun-bags I mistook for terracotta4 Some LADIES legs on canvas with high up clamps and spanners5 Some stuffed tights on a plinth6 A painting of a doctor with blobs and knob-shaped candles7 A painting of the moon and tubers below three pairs of LADIES legs8 open, gibbous, waning...waxed? Some little white pies laid out like maths9 A matronly jug on a painful 'stool'10 And Jim Dine's LADY limbs again... 1Or cautionary tales....Mark Rothko – Untitled - 1946-7 2Jean Debuffet – The Tree of Fluids 1950 3Hans Bellmer – The Doll – 1936 reconstructed 1965 4Louise Bourgeois - Mamelles 5Jim Dine – Waking Dream with Four Foot Clamp - 1965 6Sarah Lucas – NUD CYCLADIC 3 - 2010 7Francis Picabia – Portrait Of A Doctor - 1935-38 8Max Ernst – Men Shall Know Nothing of this - 1923 9Hannah Wilke -Elective Affinities – 1978. There were eighty-six pies to be precise. Though, to be precise, they weren't really pies. 10Germaine Richier – Water - 1953-4
Now I have made full circle. In the last room, which is also the first, I write:
Dreams chance flesh romance Look at me looking at Beuy's felt pants1 1Josef Beuys – Felt Suit - 1970
The condensation condescending box of breath1...ARTIST'S BREATH the ultimate self portrait!!!!!!!
Are we done? We're done. I look for a full stop. An end. A period. I find this... ●2 In a nutshell 1Haacke 2Fontana
The final arts are these A man's brown suit on an hanger A box of droplets1 The end of the world2 1Hans Haacke – Condensation Cube - 1963-5
2Lucio Fontana – Nature – 1959-60 This sculpture FEELS like the end of the world, but LOOKS a big black boulder with a mouth slashed in it. A crouching toady dense black presence, with a maw to swallow the last light left of life....on a plinth with please do not touch on it. Like the piece of concentrated evil (or burnt roast) left in the microwave at the end of Time Bandits
This is the point at which I decide the story ends, but I can't stop looking now, I can't stop noting and photographing as I hurry from the gallery to the meeting place. On the way, Chinese architectural tics feverishly JUXTAPOSE with English odds and sods.
Everything resonates strangely, vibrating with an anxiety first sparked by the taxi driver, back before the start...
FLASHBACK The cabbie is talking about Julia Lennon's unmarked grave and then he clocks the address. “Myrtle Street. Myrtle Street? Why do you wanna go there?” He cannot hide his disgust. Or is it fear? The threat of the Chinese students who populate this area. Flying in with You Know What. Often wearing masks. But what about gloves? No money's worth the handshake. That's what the Cabbie thinks.
He drops us at the door and accelerates away before a new customer can stop him. The rain shudders down, there is a 3 digit passcode – a sliding scale, ominously simple, 1 2 3 – and up some stairs to rooms that shake like paper cut-outs, flimsy, the furniture small and rickety, the apartment just a stage set to rent out on the internet. We stand about like awkward giants, afraid to sit down on chairs or beds that might break. “Sit on the floor!” I shriek, and then immediately retract it, actually scared that the lino might fall through like the thin skin on over-boiled milk. There's crack in the window. It grins, catching the light, raindrops drip like spittle....I snap it all SNAP! SNAP!
I am too early at the meeting point so I find the nearest pub to wait. The Cracke1 is aptly named... 1John Lennon's old haunt as an art student
...the fractures in reality are giving me eye ache.
A Lennon lookalike lounges in a corner, exquisitely aware of how he tickles my peripherals. I catch him in a 'selfie', the self of which is missing.
I check the time. Down my drink. Run to meet my target1. We leg it to the station. There are trains and trains are cancelled. There are storms and flooded fields. We get home early morning but the story keeps on telling, circling and circling...
After – WORD The liver bird, blue the Chinese dragon Coiling flames of red and gold The rumble of a bin Or a wardrum A whistle, low and leering, reeling in A call to battle? A war between Two aliens Me in the middle I Fall into Ye Crack And grin
The pull of that last bit of art was heavy, gravitational, warping everything around it like a planet or a black hole. Is a black hole an ex planet? I will find out. In the months that follow, the virus grows stronger and cities are locked down, the museums and galleries are closed while I still pace the rooms of Pih's Constellations1, mapping the Tate's patterns in the nuked sky of my mind. I redraw my photographs, in blue ink, in Biro. Retracing my steps. Re-seeing my sights. And now I am writing this, but there are still gaps which need stopping, pages that need penning in, black holes which need filling with new points of view... 1Also, Reconfiguring American Abstraction, Op Art in Focus and other curated selections.
Take Two: The Story the Photographs Tell (tracing paper, dip pen and ink, taken from Samsung Phone Screen)
Half a tired boy stands, dwarfing a toy-sized bed. On it a grey towel has been bullied into the shape of a swan.
The boy in profile, for scale, in another bedroom. A map of the world above another tiny bed. Two more towel-igami swans bow their twisted heads in defeat. They actually look more like pasties than swans.
A crack in the window. All this is proof of our (my) discomfort.
Boy with Beatles Monopoly.
Boy with Beatles Monopoly.
Beatles Pinball.
Boy with Beatles Pinball.
Boy crosses wet flagstones in front of two giant red periscopes.1
Multicoloured boulder stack outside Tate Liverpool. It is not apparently a big T for Tate, but a work called Liverpool Mountain.
Lovers' Padlocks on the chain link fence beside the River Mersey.
Close up of Padlocks – one has a sliding number combination similar to the dangerously simple code needed to gain access to the afore mentioned miniature apartment.
1As if The Beatles' Yellow Submarine was underneath the pavement.
Close up of Billy Fury's feet – one has a bunch of flowers shackled to it, one has only cheap ribbons that whip in the wind.
The same feet from a different angle.
Hanging canvas paintings. These sails do not billow. One has a red-faced creeping, beckoning Russian doll-like figure that I take to be the porter, guard, custodian, watchman, concierge, gatekeeper, OSTIARY or opener of the door into the Tate.1
More flat hanging paintings. A pot-bellied blue bird whose beak droops miserably. A grey shape like a snowman on a pedestal or a game piece from a dull version of chess.
A dual in collage form between two male artists, one representing life, the other art. Above is life, art is below. Life is football, many nets – goals and traps – and a squashed up motorbike, a squashed up man in hat. Is it about masculinity? Is it about death? As usual I am reflected vaguely in the glass along with the horrible tiles of fluorescent light in the ceiling. The art line is more abstract. Weak or do I mean fragile, subtle...scratches or raised scars in ceramic, smashed bits fly up, scattered like birds. Little itchy patterns, a flight of spit up seeds. A man leans all nonchalant in the shadowy hangar where his spaceships and blimps have limped home to be repaired.
Spidery diagrams of molecules, daisy-headed spikes sprout from the velvety brown bulk of a fallen lute, flattened like roadkill.2
The same lute and molecules in a second picture. This time I nestle my reflection's shoulder to the shoulder of the lute3, so that we make a new creature between us, a foetus with stars for brains.
1Or this state of mind. The inner sanctum. The world within a world. The layer between layers. The art sandwich, if you will. 2It is a screen print and - like Ben Shah's other works 'Age of Anxiety' and 'Helix and Crystal' - it reverberates with the unease he shares with me about THE NUKES 3Like two friends in a classroom, heads together, sharing nits
A film shown in a darkened room. First like a lozenge with its edges suck-softened...
Now the focus sharpens. Clement Greenberg's apartment in red and white or magenta and cyan or pale green ghosts 1 blobbing around a bloody chamber2. On the wall is a FAMOUS PAINTING – a target or smiley face or a swirling vortex of (un)questionable taste slurping at the edges of the angular sofas, drawing them towards the hot wet dangle of its uvula.
Rain pocked windows, the hard-working river.
One step back, the glass looks blue, the skies glow the nostalgic turquoise of a holiday postcard.
Red paint dripped, splashed, thrown and framed. Give it some space and frame it again and lo and behold, in a tidy box, the exuberance of the “gesture”.
A loose stacked pyramid of piled clothes with a naked Venus nose deep, sniffing out an outfit. She leans against a pillar which is short and mysterious and veiled in heavy drapery, hinting at her origin3. A rabbit's nose sacrum above the coy slant of her buttocks draws the eye to the nub of this thigh high phallus. Is it her companion? Her crutch? Her coffee table?
Her hair, too is more “dressed” than she is, with coiffured rolls and waves.
Echoing the shape of this wardrobe malfunction4 is a sculpture in the corner coloured gunmetal grey. It slumps down in folds like a thick robot smoothie, the effect slightly undermined by its unwillingness to fit. There is a gap, small but insistent, between the cast and the walls which suggests to me cheap trickery5.
1The name of an album by John Grant on the Bella Union label released 2013 2The name of a book by Angela Carter originally published by Gollancz in 1979 3A garden centre gnomic reference. 4Venus in Rags, Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1967, 1974 5I feel like Toto yapping at the flap of Oz's curtain
Planking about. A photo of a performance sculpture into which I am inserted, making of myself an integral, even overwhelming part. Without me the whole thing would collapse. The piece of two be four that Charles Ray has been pinned by is propped on my pelvis. I hold up the four lines of perspective with my eye. I wonder if this position hurts the backs of Charles Ray's knees. It doesn't hurt mine.
A Bigger Plank.1 Another photo. And the plank isn't bigger, but there is more of it showing so it is bigger in my eye. I have vanished from the reflection, instead Venus and her Material World have shuffled in to the left, while Charles Ray's dangling hands appear to reach unsuccessfully for a blackly shining block2.
My foot placed on a round plug socket so that the taped up rainbows seem to emanate from my magic toe.
My gaze weighs anchor...
...and sets sail for cooler climes.
Arctic wolf, soft as nails, a grey vibration, yellow snow.
An oval in polished wood with white-tipped filaments which twitch very slightly at the edge of my sight. Are there eyes on the end of those 3069 stalks?4 Do they blink when I blink? Do they cry when I cry? What if I woke up one morning blind and there were 3071 little eyes stuck on ply?
1It occurs to me that Charles Ray may have stolen David Hockney's diving board for these carpentry portraits. 2Felix the Cat twirls like a music box ballerina behind the glass of a big TV. 3This body of work has ripples that reach far back into my past, since this exhibition, like everything else in existence, is all about me. I first met ZOBOP (as the work likes to call itself) in 1999 at The Showroom where it was but a tot, and easily contained within the oddly angled floorspace of the the gallery's original site on Bonner Road, Bethnal Green. It is certainly a big boy now, and has sprawled and shimmered under feet in glamorous locations all over the world. 4Pol Bury has confirmed that this number is accurate and that this piece is one of his 'Erectile Punctuations'.
A blue white swoosh of light on a TV screen. I am reflected in the Space Odyssey 2001 style black monolith made by the SONY monitor1 and the wooden box it sits on2, shiny with its coat of car lacquer3. The whole thing is about my equal in height and has two absurd 'ears'4 either side of its 'head'5.
The screen brightens. A door is opened. Waist up, I disappear.6
A conjurors trick, Felix the Cat replaces my upper body. As a glamorous assistant I leave much to be desired, as my snow boots and winter coat will testify. Bless him, Felix does his best with his paws all “Ta dah!” and his nuclear explosion smile.7
The edges of the ceiling tiles catch the light8. A digital projection straight on to the wall. A neglected concrete surface with faded markings on it. Seven figures9, faces and bodies hidden under hijab-like green cloths, appear to be dancing10 in this man-made space, transforming what was a test site 11 into a desolate kind of arena. The figures are see-through, semi transparent, like green glass bottles out in the sun. A deep forked crack in the concrete foreground seems more substantial than anything else. It shines gold12 while the Californian desert and featureless blue sky shimmer on the brink of extinction, flutter like the painted curtain of a theatre backdrop.
The MOV. file continues. My photograph is blurred but bright, as if through a teary eye. A fresh Spectacle has been wheeled on by a jester in a jumpsuit. This rectangular screen shows the Three Degrees in belled white dresses singing the aforementioned song.13 The logo for Google Earth has been stamped on the image. Does Google own everything? The Earth? The Three Degrees?
Outside the MOV room, a couple stand angled, echoing each other15, to examine, close up, the same test card but human sized, designed to fit human eyes, rather than the cameras of jump jets, harriers and bombers.16
9 panels. Red frames. Shiny. Photographs of gestures. Some of sign language. I want to read “Children will be seen and not heard” and my brain keeps trying to make it so, but it is not so. Rather it is “We17 will18 no19 longer20 be21 seen22 and23 not24 heard25”.
4 identical copies of a photo portrait featuring what looks like a romantic sea captain gazing doe-eyed at something out of shot, high and to his left. The images are arranged with 2 above, 2 below like a passport photo taken by a machine. The top right – or first – image has a neon light forming a tick ✓ or 'check mark' over it, as if it has been chosen, or is more correct.26
As blurred as if made with a palette knife and a glut of beige toned paint, there are 5 figures flat on the wall and 5 figures stood on the floor. All 10 judder. All 10 slip and slide in the light.
1My top half, smaller, made more concise by the curve of the surface. 2Larger, blurred, bottom heavy. As in art, so in life. 3It took a two pack to achieve this level of flawless shine. 4Speakers. 5The chunky old skool monitor 6I look half-cut, bisected. I lose my petty little head. 7No one loves Felix like Mark Leckey loves Felix. It's an ongoing romance that spans time and space - or history, geography and the stuffness of things - as Felix grows from 'flat' cartoon to 3D papier mâché doll, to “an electronic entity that got broadcast into the ether” these transformations being breathlessly described by Leckey as “magical”. 8Like a Retro-futuristic 80's Synthwave Grid style background. 9Or one figure, cloned six times. How would you know? 10Since my information comes from a photo I took of a moving film, and all potential arms, legs and heads are draped and hidden, and I can't exactly remember the film, that they are dancing is a leap of imagination based on the formation they are standing in - or have been placed in - and by the memory of a song played towards the end of the film - “When Will I See You Again” by the Three Degrees. 11 ...to calibrate US Air Force surveillance cameras. 12 Kintsugi -golden joinery, Kintsukuroi – golden repair. The Japanese art of splicing broken pieces of pottery together with gold, making something new and more beautiful out of something thought to have been destroyed. 13“When Will I See You Again”. Originally released in 1974 on the Three Degrees' third album “The Three Degrees”. I thought I would mention it again. Their first and second albums were titled “The” and “The Three” respectively. It can take time for a band to really come into themselves and embrace their full entitlement. The Three Degrees are an American female vocal group, originally formed in circa 1963 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although 15 women have been members over the years, the group has always been a trio. “If both brush and handle have been replaced, is it still the same broom?” was suggested as a title for their fourth album, however, fearing controversy, they eventually went with “A Toast of Love” in 1976 instead. 15 Feet pointed at the left corner of the display, knees bent, chins and elbows cupped in hands, heads bowed reverently. 16Have I passed through the Looking Glass? Has a wrecking ball smashed through a FIFTH wall? Why are they posing like part of the picture? Is the art bubbling over, leaking into everything? 17An old man makes a small 'Eff Off” gesture near the cheek below his eye. The top of his head is missing, it is open like a jug to be filled by the milk of us all. There is no word = we 18One hand stands proudly atop the other. The vanquished other has the word overlaid on its back in black = will 19A little girl thumbs her nose in profile. The word is emblazoned across her forearm and upper chest in tabloid style white on red = no 20A man's jaw juts. He is cut off at the lip. His hand slices gently into his Adam's Apple. The background and his hand are yellow. There is no word = longer 21A young decapitated girl in a pale buttoned cardigan clasps her hands together at her jugular. The word is small beneath the church roof of her entreaty = be 22A young man with luxuriant eyebrows tugs down the skin of his upper cheek to reveal the lower white of his eye in a threatening or injured way. His lips are pursed and his mouth is downturned. The word has been quartered, a letter for each corner = seen 23A fully grown woman pouts, about to drink from her downturned thumb as from a defiant bottle. There is no word = and 24A segmented young person has rolled up their sleeves to expose their forearms which are crossed at the wrists in front of their belly. There might be three small gold buttons at the crotch. The background – a sliver either side of the hips and a tiny arrow pointing up between the thighs – is also gold. There is no word = not 25A male youth cups his small ear with his large hand. The word is somewhere between coral pink and mandarin and has been tipped across his fingers towards the keyhole of his concha = heard 26In fact this a customs officer who has been crudely reduced by Mr So Called Billy Apple to the function of his job – he has been 'ticked off' or 'checked' like the shipped goods he would oversee as part of his employment. It is likely that in this particular moment, the officer was turning a blind eye to contraband, as the photo was taken during a boat party in 1962 and was originally part of “Twist Drunk Drunk Twist, A Picture Story” by Keith Branscombe in the Royal College of Art magazine ARK33. The customs officer in that story was printed on tracing paper and had a hot pink lipstick kiss floating over his cheek bone, drifting into his ear and about to slip over his shoulder. Everyone wants a piece of this guy. His name is unavailable.
From blindness – a blink! - to people, plinths, columns, boxes, corners, wet-looking shadows on the polished wood floor. A photographer wrestles his long lens. Couples separate, come together. A pair stand. Women walk. Comfortable shoes. Jackets and coats. Squashable hats. Suddenly, horribly busy. And round the edge, past a girl's too long hair, the leer of the black ball that is Nature.
The gaze swings away. The picture is calmer. The pair still stand with their too long hair, their hat with its fish-lips, their meaningful distance, their obstinate silence – blocking my view of the 5 figures, focused. They are women or the same woman, in simple hospital smocks or home-made slips or paper vests, bare arms folded, heads replaced by the days of the conventional working week and where their legs would presumably be, are words beginning with M. The black ball remains, for now, in the background, mouth-breathing, maw ajar - still playing to the gallery through a gap in its Feng Shui.
A painting. The Grey pinks, browns and greens of suppurating internal organs. A small amount of bubble and froth. Smears and dabs. Abandoned veins, lying, disconnected. Perhaps, a little nipple.
The fish-head hat man half of the pair stands, again, in the way - this time of a painting. It is of a woman, if she was flattened out nicely. Pinned like a butterfly. A text book display. Her buttocks flap down, deflated, while her hands are small pressed flowers across the wasteland of her chest. My mistake, its not a woman. It's a “Tree of Fluids”. But the Tree has pretty little lips and cheery round red eyes.
The painting of innards and the painting of flayed skin step back to become bodyguards1 to a torso which now takes centre stage. Made of medical coloured2 balls in sockets, the torso balances its thigh nubs on a shiny bright gold plinth so that its undercarriage can be viewed3. In the glass of the display case, I am reflected in the space below its right tit. Above, ceiling arches echo the boob-age.
More mammaries, 16 this time.4 Sixteen tits in a jiggling line. They look like they are moulded from clay, the warm terracotta of adobe mud huts and there are even doorways and a Hobbit's round window to back up this idea....but in fact they are made of rubber, fibreglass and wood. You would only know this from squeezing the snout-like nipples, if it wasn't for the accompanying information card. The first image shows the sculpture foreshortened.
The second shows it lurched at and out of focus.
The third winces into detail.
The fourth is drunkenly viewed from below, on buckled knees with skew-whiff dizzy eyes. I have become an ever-thirsty, never sated Don Juan5, a wolf among piglets, a mouth among teats.
Legs! Still reeling from the liquid lunch, I crash too close to the slim parade of Jim Dine's pins. Half trampled underfoot, under svelte and pointed feet, I swivel...
1 made of bodyparts 2That pink grey of internal flesh 3If you can see through the huff of your breath, and are careful not to bump your head on the glass and if you are tall enough to get the angle right...but wait! There's little more to be gained after all, for the undercarriage is just as visible from above! The torso is cleverly reversible, it has a hairless split between the breasticles as well as down below. Such a wonder of beauty AND function 4Louise Bourgeois – Mamelles 5Never replete, never complete, Reet Petite, the finest girl you'll ever want to eat
And flinch, revolted, as the slender limbs convulse on themselves to form a sickly worm.1
A painting of a doctor2. His face has been covered or replaced by a symbol now used by Extinction Rebellion, a stylised hour glass with connotations of toxicity or trade waste. The kind of sticker you might find on a dumped cannister of evil. He points to a spot just before a skull on his table. A clustering of buboes fills the gap between the doctor's pointy finger and the skull's tiny teeth.3
4 There are many moons in the balance, but the one that dominates has not been painted. It is an electric light reflected in the glass whose slipped double exposure has a greenish tinge which makes the whole thing seasick. The sand peaks into proboscises5 which lift to sniff the heavily perfumed symbolism of the night. A crescent moon parachutes down three pairs of emergency legs which scissor and split above two humble nuns. The nuns' faces are blank of all but the love of Angles. They share between them one rather large hand and a small silver vessel which might be a bomb.
Porcelain Pasties laid out in 4's, 6's, 3's and 5's6 – a mathematical alchemy, a cold lunch of goodbye.
7A tar-black metal seated form with handles. Female.8
An overburdened real woman takes centre-stage. Real women carry bags. The Jug retreats into the distance and gazes past the window as if awaiting her next move. It seems to me quite filmic, as if we shared a moment. An over-dramatic moment, quite Bergman-esque10 in fact.
The window is soft with steam. Condensation withers the lowest panes. That is the yin half of the photo. The yang is shiny black. The Jug is ready for her close up.11
The Jug slides past demonically fast. Now there is just the polished curve of her back, a dark slice on the edge of a wide angled view. The window is filled with a line of pink pillars, a candy cane parade around the Royal Albert Dock.
1Nud Cycladic 3 - Sarah Lucas 2 bedecked in eight candle-shaped cocks and sprinkled with trios of black and blue pox - wears, like a night cap, two surgical socks 3 Grapes to be punctured, black wine to follow. 4 Men Shall Know Nothing Of This – Max Ernst 5 ...or willie noses, swollen trunks, feelers, suckers, wrinkled beaks, swallowers not spouters. 6. Elective Affinities - Hannah Wilke. These are – are these? - the parcelled up moments of a past relationship, apportioned blame, recriminations, bleached and crimped and glazed. Contained pudenda, no licky lips. Folded inwards, no sweet openings. Much like the origami swans – duck them! - the dull reminiscences of bloodless feminists. 7 L'Eau – Germain Richier 8 A big Jug with big jugs. Headless vase (say vase the American way – vayse – not varse like arse, not now anyway) She sits on a prong as long as her legs, bent. Making her a stool. The third leg where a stool would be, a length of dirty spine (thanks Viz). Can a female artist be a filthy misogynist? Or is it easier to ask, how can she NOT be? 9 In my mind she is a mother. Not mine, you understand. Everything's mother. A mother, the be all and end all. The birth the death the maybe. More than you and me. Less. The container. 10 Both Bergmans, BOTH of them! - Ingmar of The Seventh Seal, Casablanca's Ingrid. 11 “...we'll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life. There is nothing else. Just us, the cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark!” Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
The shock of her passing – an oil slick juggernaut - leaves me reeling, half concussed. The rest of the room swings into view and shimmers out of focus as if painted on some sleazy silk and blown at from behind. The silhouette of a weeping mother – Doreen Lawrence1 - with spurting tears and braided hair is at the centre of the picture. A huge postage stamp portrait balanced on two dung-ball 'feet'. A real woman has fitted her tiny crop-haired head inside the weeper's outline, a puny Russian doll version of a goddess. The real woman stands with one foot before the other as if stepping onto the tightrope wire barrier around Wilke's tray of hate-pasties. To the left, on the other side of a dividing column, the headless limbless Doll looks like a hairless baby mouse a cat has tossed into the air. Femininity in all its guises.2
Clickety clack, the legs are back. With a military scuttle or cockroach gait, the spike-heeled feet of Jim Dine's elite hurry along the wall towards the abandoned Jug who, from this distance, seems suddenly smaller, slightly hunched over, as a tall man stands to coolly appraise her, throwing a look down the gulp of her throat.
Stop. Me. Rendered sepia. Hands clasped at the crotch of Joseph Beuys' suit. His legs split mine. My eye is unbuttoned.
I move to the right and smear down his left thigh. A little bare Venus clings to his sleeve. A fluorescent runway of lights overhead.
My face. Obscenely close. Over my shoulder I am caught behind my back fitting snug in one leg of Beuys' fake brown trousers while between me and me a tiny, startled, real woman fears she is the focus of my fake self portrait.
Box of breath, the size of my head. Heated up it rises – Ha! Cooling down it falls – oh!3
Close up. Droplets. Are there figures? Minute faces in every wet curve? In every microcosmic sphere? Am I looking out multiplied, hungry, spit-glazed? A multi-cloned multitude of drool.
Step back. The room. Muted. Muffled. The people all gone. The space like a toy set of minimalist building blocks for the loneliest child in existence (god).4 The elements are as follows: columns, grey, two of them. Box, one low, flat. Box one tall, slim. Box, one see-through. One teetering table. One movable wall. One large black ball. Sticks on discs. Slim lines connecting dots. All the ingredients for sterile creation. All but the ball* are machine made and mark-less.
The ball* leers up at me. Pock-faced. Hang-lipped. Gross and hungry.5
Folk rush in to fill the space above the ball*. As if nothing has happened, they point at the paintings. They travel in twos or, like me, all alone, and lean into the labels to read the tiny words. “...the gash was a 'vital sign'...” “...'the atrocious unnerving silence' awaiting man in space and the need to leave a 'living sign' of the artist's presence.”6
1 Doreen Delceita Lawrence, Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, OBE, campaigner and reformist who founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust after her son Stephen was murdered in a racist attack in South East London in 1993. 2 Yes ALL. 3 KONDENSATIONWÜRFEL by HANS HAACKE. 1963. 305x305x305mm 4 Kai sits listlessly on the Snow Queen's frozen lake, moving jagged bits of ice around to try and make a word. If he gets it right, the Snow says she will release him, and has promised him a brand new pair of skates into the bargain. But what IS the word? His brain is numb with cold. He's been doing this forever. His heart is frosting over. A blizzard of her snow bees come to lick his freezing tears. *For 'Ball' read 'World' 5 The word is ETERNITY 6 These words are taken from the display caption for the work referred to here as 'The Ball' which is in fact called Nature and which was made by Lucio Fontana in 1959, first as “sphere of terracotta clay” into which a gash was cut, and then “subsequently cast in bronze.” These words were taken from my phone which was looking at the Tate website. I also took a picture of the actual display caption in the gallery, but the words were too blurred to be entirely trustworthy, as the photo was taken in a rush, to avoid suspicion.
I swing around the ball*1 to get the other view. A small girl is there with a unicorn and striped socks, standing far too near to it. Her hand blurs, reaching out to it . It gapes up at her like a untrained dog. The plinth says “please do not touch”.
I'm blown back. The lights dip. A dark expanse of floor. The ball* still central. The girl is distracted but her brother flaps towards it. Their dad holds his face together, or shields his eyes from it, he doesn't grip his son's hand, he doesn't pull him free.
Figures walk against the wind outside. The sun is bright. I watch through a window with opaque dots to confirm the solidity of the glass, a warning that one may not pass through it unharmed, except as sound or vision.2
I am outside. The columns are pink. The sky is blue. The water in the dock is blue, the water in the dock is black, the ups are blue, the downs are black, the rise is blue, the fall is black, they switch, of course, and then switch back.
The view widens. [LANDSCAPE] People in leggings. Hoodies. Trainers. Carrying coffees. Walking past signs.
The view lengthens. [PORTRAIT] The people gather. In holiday groups. In pairs, like brothers.
The Beatles made of Jelly Beans.3 George's lips are bloody bits. Paul's eyes are wide, unfocused.
John up close. The light flicks off his popcorn flavoured nose beans.
Closer still. Towards his teeth. Which glisten as he simpers.
1 I orbit it like a lesser moon. 2 What is the point, the end point of a gallery? What is the conclusion (forgone)? The Gift Shop. What sums it up? What makes sense of it, nicely? The gift shop, where your big ideas are brought (bought back and sold) to you, cellophaned, vacuum-packed, price tagged and paper-bagged, stamped TATE and....do they only let art in that can be commodified? Postcarded, T Shirted, toted – dare I say it? - Instagrammed? 3 This 6ft by 4ft picture of The Beatles in all their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band regalia was made using more than 15,000 jelly beans and can be found in the window of the Quay Confectionery shop at Liverpool's Albert Dock.
Other wares for sale. My hair reflected blown up sideways.1
Looking back. An explosion of light. The Tate is black in contrast.
2Rude Gentlemen's Club. Pink neon sign of a frog-legged pole dancer hangs high like a flag on a grand Georgian town House.
From high to low, the following items. A red Chinese sign3 with two golden dragons and a small green pagoda style porch very high. A large To Let placard.4 A boarded up building with tidy slats slanting and painted in one of four colours - forest green, mustard yellow, magenta or cyan. A bit of graffiti – neat, indecipherable – lands like an autograph, signing it off.5
From far to near, the Dragon arch marking the entrance to China Town. Closer, a road sign – Dingle, Toxteth, Waterfront, Anglican Cathedral. Nearest, the corner of a building called Neon though only the last two letters of its name are visible – ON or, upside down, NO.
The mid-piece of a lamp post. A tasty green – arsenic green? - with a red and gold dragon wound around it. Its tongue is especially long and three pronged.
My feet. The low edge of my coat. A flattened cigarette pack with a blind eye staring up.
The Hope Street suitcases from 5 foot 3 inches above.
Ye Cracke Pub. In black and white. With a red Bass triangle and a Boddington's keg.7
1 The other wares include Love Love Love candies, All You Need is Fudge and Let It Beans in cans. 2 Rude is its name and rude is also its game. 3 According to google translate, the sign reads Chinese China Big Liquor....and then it is undecided whether the last line means Wood Rice Girl or, more simply, Floor. 4 It is no longer to let. 5 L? O? U? K? T? 6 A Case History - John King -1998 7 This was John Lennon's boozer when he was an art student. He would come here with his other band 'The Dissenters' “who never played a note” as a plaque in the pub attests, and drink Black Velvet – a cocktail of Guinness and sparkling wine.
Inside Ye Cracke. A warm brass-topped bar with a soft warped reflection, the crooked frames of drawings and photographs of Lennon. A white envelope with a 'p' just in view. It shares the same font as the 'please do not touch' on the front and the back of the plinth in the Tate.
Welcome To Ye Cracke says a big hand-painted sign covering one wall. Bright as a barge or a Gipsy Caravan. Flowers and birds, hearts, dots and curlicues. Red with gold writing.
Look down. On the table a beer mat says something. A bright yellow taxi on black. The word Delta. The same cab that took us to Myrtle Street earlier.
My shoulder. Close. Some strands of my hair. The exaggerated perspective of the long mauve upholstery directing the gaze towards a man in the corner who is channelling the spirit of one of The Dissenters. He nurses a pint, another full one waits for him. A window of stained glass is echoed back three times – in the mirror, in the table and as colour on the ceiling, reflecting off the white. Diamonds of blue, turquoise, pink, peach and lemon. One of the lower panes has died and gone black.
Dusk. An open air train station. Electric lines overhead. A lamppost. Lit. A yellow 'keep your distance' line. A wet patch on the platform. A strip of textured paving that is Braille for the feet.
A train arrives. The doors are bright yellow. Orange trim on grey. Faded human outlines of monochrome giants have been painted on the carriages. A simplified map with symbols denoting places the train might go. A bus, a games console. A wonky sort of arrow. Under this, the workings are over-big and filthy. The brake frame, the battery, the drawbar, the bogie...
Half a tired boy stands, dwarfing a toy-sized bed. On it a grey towel has been bullied into the shape of a swan.
The boy in profile, for scale, in another bedroom. A map of the world above another tiny bed. Two more towel-igami swans bow their twisted heads in defeat. They actually look more like pasties than swans.
A crack in the window. All this is proof of our (my) discomfort.
Boy with Beatles Monopoly.
Boy with Beatles Monopoly.
Boy with Beatles Pinball.
Boy crosses wet flagstones in front of two giant red periscopes.1
1As if The Beatles' Yellow Submarine was underneath the pavement.
Multicoloured boulder stack outside Tate Liverpool. It is not apparently a big T for Tate, but a work called Liverpool Mountain.
Billy Fury pointing at a patch of blue sky.
Lovers' Padlocks on the chain link fence beside the River Mersey.
Close up of Padlocks – one has a sliding number combination similar to the dangerously simple code needed to gain access to the afore mentioned miniature apartment.
Close up of Billy Fury's feet – one has a bunch of flowers shackled to it, one has only cheap ribbons that whip in the wind.
The same feet from a different angle.
Hanging canvas paintings. These sails do not billow. One has a red-faced creeping, beckoning Russian doll-like figure that I take to be the porter, guard, custodian, watchman, concierge, gatekeeper, OSTIARY or opener of the door into the Tate.1
1Or this state of mind. The inner sanctum. The world within a world. The layer between layers. The art sandwich, if you will.
More flat hanging paintings. A pot-bellied blue bird whose beak droops miserably. A grey shape like a snowman on a pedestal or a game piece from a dull version of chess.
A dual in collage form between two male artists, one representing life ,the other art. Above is life, art is below. Life is football, many nets – goals and traps – and a squashed up motorbike, a squashed up man in hat. Is it about masculinity? Is it about death? As usual I am reflected vaguely in the glass along with the horrible tiles of fluorescent light in the ceiling. The art line is more abstract. Weak, or do I mean fragile, subtle...scratches or raised scars in ceramic, smashed bits fly up, scattered like birds. Little itchy patterns, a flight of spit up seeds. A man leans all nonchalant in the shadowy hangar where his spaceships and blimps have limped home to be repaired.
Spidery diagrams of molecules, daisy-headed spikes sprout from the velvety brown bulk of a fallen lute, flattened like roadkill.1
1It is a screen print and like Ben Shah's other works 'Age of Anxiety' and 'Helix and Crystal' reverberates with the unease he shares with me about THE NUKES
The same lute and molecules in a second picture. This time I nestle my reflection's shoulder to the shoulder of the lute1, so that we make a new creature between us, a foetus with stars for brains.
1Like two friends in a classroom, heads together, sharing nits
A film shown in a darkened room. First like a lozenge with its edges suck-softened...
Now the focus sharpens. Clement Greenberg's apartment in red and white or magenta and cyan or pale green ghosts 1 blobbing around a bloody chamber2. On the wall is a FAMOUS PAINTING – a target or smily face or a swirling vortex of ( un)questionable taste slurping at the edges of the angular sofas, drawing them towards the hot wet dangle of its uvula.
1The name of an album by John Grant on the Bella Union label released 2013 2The name of a book by Angela Carter originally published by Gollancz in 1979
Rain pocked windows, the hard-working river.
One step back, the glass looks blue, the skies glow the nostalgic turquoise of a holiday postcard.
Red paint dripped, splashed, thrown and framed. Give it some space and frame it again and lo and behold, in a tidy box, the exuberance of the “gesture”.
A loose stacked pyramid of piled clothes with a naked Venus nose deep, sniffing out an outfit. She leans against a pillar which is short and mysterious and veiled in heavy drapery, hinting at her origin1. A rabbit's nose sacrum above the coy slant of her buttocks draws the eye to the nub of this thigh high phallus. Is it her companion? Her crutch? Her coffee table?
Her hair, too is more “dressed” than she is, with coiffured rolls and waves.
Echoing the shape of this wardrobe malfunction1 is a sculpture in the corner coloured gunmetal grey. It slumps down in folds like a thick robot smoothie, the effect slightly undermined by its unwillingness to fit. There is a gap, small but insistent, between the cast and the walls which suggests to me cheap trickery 2
1Venus in Rags, Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1967, 1974 2I feel like Toto yapping at the flaps of Oz's curtain
Planking about. A photo of a performance sculpture into which I am inserted, making of myself an integral, even overwhelming part. Without me the whole thing would collapse. The piece of two be four that Charles Ray has been pinned by is propped on my pelvis. I hold up the four lines of perspective with my eye. I wonder if this position hurts the backs of Charles Ray's knees. It doesn't hurt mine.
A Bigger Plank.1 Another photo. And of course the it isn't any bigger, but there is more of the plank showing so it is bigger in my eye. And I have vanished from the reflection, instead Venus and her material world have shuffled in to the left, while Charles Ray's dangling hands appear to reach unsuccessfully for a blackly shining block2.
1It occurs to me that Charles Ray may have stolen David Hockney's diving board for these carpentry portraits. 2Felix the Cat twirls like a music box ballerina behind the glass of a big TV.
1This body of work has ripples that reach far back into my past, since this exhibition, like everything else in existence, is all about me. I first met ZOBOP (as the work likes to call itself) in 1999 at The Showroom where it was but a tot, and easily contained within the oddly angled floorspace of the the gallery's original site on Bonner Road, Bethnal Green. It is certainly a big boy now, and has sprawled and shimmered under feet in glamorous locations all over the world.
My foot placed on a round plug socket so that the taped up rainbows seem to emanate from my magic toe.
My gaze weighs anchor...
...and sets sail for cooler climes.
Arctic wolf, soft as nails, a grey vibration, yellow snow.
An oval in polished wood with white-tipped filaments which twitch very slightly at the edge of my sight. Are there eyes on the end of those 3069 stalks?1 Do they blink when I blink? Do they cry when I cry? What if I woke up one morning blind and there were 3071 little eyes stuck on ply?
1Pol Bury has confirmed that this number is accurate and that this piece is one of his 'Erectile Punctuations'.
A blue white swoosh of light on a TV screen. I am reflected in the Space Odyssey 2001 style black monolith made by the SONY monitor1 and the wooden box it sits on2, shiny with its coat of car lacquer3. The whole thing is about my equal in height and has two absurd 'ears'4 either side of its 'head'5.
1My top half, smaller, made more concise by the curve of the surface. 2Larger, blurred, bottom heavy. As in art, so in life. 3It took a two pack to achieve this level of flawless shine. 4Speakers. 5The chunky old skool monitor
The screen brightens. A door is opened. Waist up, I disappear.1
1I look half-cut, bisected. I lose my petty little head.
A conjurors trick, Felix the Cat replaces my upper body. As a glamorous assistant I leave much to be desired, as my snow boots and winter coat will testify. Bless him, Felix does his best with his paws all “Ta dah!” and his nuclear explosion smile.1
1No one loves Felix like Mark Leckey loves Felix. It's an ongoing romance that spans time and space - or history, geography and the stuffness of things - as Felix grows from 'flat' cartoon to 3D papier mâché doll, to “an electronic entity that got broadcast into the ether” these transformations being breathlessly described by Leckey as “magical”.
The edges of the ceiling tiles catch the light1. A digital projection straight on to the wall. A neglected concrete surface with faded markings on it. Seven figures2, faces and bodies hidden under hijab-like green cloths, appear to be dancing3 in this man-made space, transforming what was a test site 4 into a desolate kind of arena. The figures are see-through, semi transparent, like green glass bottles out in the sun. A deep forked crack in the concrete foreground seems more substantial than anything else. It shines gold5 while the Californian desert and featureless blue sky shimmer on the brink of extinction, flutter like the painted curtain of a theatre backdrop.
1Like a Retro-futuristic 80's Synthwave Grid style background. 2Or one figure, cloned six times. How would you know? 3Since my information comes from a photo I took of a moving film, and all potential arms, legs and heads are draped and hidden, and I can't exactly remember the film, that they are dancing is a leap of imagination based on the formation they are standing in - or have been placed in - and by the memory of a song played towards the end of the film - “When Will I See You Again” by the Three Degrees. 4 ...to calibrate US Air Force surveillance cameras. 5 Kintsugi -golden joinery, Kintsukuroi – golden repair. The Japanese art of splicing broken pieces of pottery together with gold, making something new and more beautiful out of something thought to have been destroyed.
The MOV. file continues. My photograph is blurred but bright, as if through a teary eye. A fresh Spectacle has been wheeled on by a jester in a jumpsuit. This rectangular screen shows the Three Degrees in belled white dresses singing the aforementioned song.1 The logo for Google Earth has been stamped on the image, does Google Earth own the Three Degrees?
1“When Will I See You Again”. Originally released in 1974 on the Three Degrees' third album “The Three Degrees”. I thought I would mention it again. Their first and second albums were titled “The” and “The Three” respectively. It can take time for a band to really come into themselves and embrace their full entitlement. The Three Degrees are an American female vocal group, originally formed in circa 1963 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although 15 women have been members over the years, the group has always been a trio. “If both brush and handle have been replaced, is it still the same broom?” was suggested as a title for their fourth album, however, fearing controversy, they eventually went with “A Toast of Love” in 1976 instead.
Outside the MOV room, a couple stand angled, echoing each other1, to examine, close up, the same test card but human sized, designed to fit human eyes, rather than the cameras of jump jets, harriers and bombers.2
1 Feet pointed at the left corner of the display, knees bent, chins and elbows cupped in hands, heads bowed reverently. 2Have I passed through the Looking Glass? Has a wrecking ball smashed through a FIFTH wall? Why are they posing like part of the picture? Is the art bubbling over, leaking into everything?
9 panels. Red frames. Shiny. Photographs of gestures. Some of sign language. I want to read “Children will be seen and not heard” and my brain keeps trying to make it so, but it is not so. Rather it is “We1 will2 no3 longer4 be5 seen6 and7 not8 heard9”.
1An old man makes a small 'Eff Off” gesture near the cheek below his eye. The top of his head is missing, it is open like a jug to be filled by the milk of us all. There is no word = we 2One hand stands proudly atop the other. The vanquished other has the word overlaid on its back in black = will 3A little girl thumbs her nose in profile. The word is emblazoned across her forearm and upper chest in tabloid style white on red = no 4A man's jaw juts. He is cut off at the lip. His hand slices gently into his Adam's Apple. The background and his hand are yellow. There is no word = longer 5A young decapitated girl in a pale buttoned cardigan clasps her hands together at her jugular. The word is small beneath the church roof of her entreaty = be 6A young man with luxuriant eyebrows tugs down the skin of his upper cheek to reveal the lower white of his eye in a threatening or injured way. His lips are pursed and his mouth is downturned. The word has been quartered, a letter for each corner = seen 7A fully grown woman pouts, about to drink from her downturned thumb as from a defiant bottle. There is no word = and 8A segmented young person has rolled up their sleeves to expose their forearms which are crossed at the wrists in front of their belly. There might be three small gold buttons at the crotch. The background – a sliver either side of the hips and a tiny arrow pointing up between the thighs – is also gold. There is no word = not 9A male youth cups his small ear with his large hand. The word is somewhere between coral pink and mandarin and has been tipped across his fingers towards the keyhole of his concha cavum = heard
4 identical copies of a photo portrait featuring what looks like a romantic sea captain gazing doe-eyed at something out of shot, high and to his left. The images are arranged with 2 above, 2 below like a passport photo taken by a machine. The top right – or first – image has a neon light forming a tick ✓ or 'check mark' over it, as if it has been chosen, or is more correct.1
1In fact this a customs officer who has been crudely reduced by Mr So Called Billy Apple to the function of his job – he has been 'ticked off' or 'checked' like the shipped goods he would oversee as part of his employment. It is likely that in this particular moment, the officer was turning a blind eye to contraband, as the photo was taken during a boat party in 1962 and was originally part of “Twist Drunk Drunk Twist, A Picture Story” by Keith Branscombe in the Royal College of Art magazine ARK33. The customs officer in that story was printed on tracing paper and had a hot pink lipstick kiss floating over his cheek bone, drifting into his ear and about to slip over his shoulder. Everyone wants a piece of this guy. His name is unavailable.
As blurred as if made with a palette knife and a glut of grubby paint, are 5 figures flat on the wall and 5 figures stood on the floor. All 10 judder. All 10 slip and slide in the light.
From blindness – a blink! - to people, plinths, columns, boxes, corners, wet-looking shadows on the polished wood floor. A photographer wrestles his long lens. Couples separate, come together. A pair stand. Women walk. Comfortable shoes. Jackets and coats. Squashable hats. Suddenly, horribly busy. And round the edge, past a girl's too long hair, the leer of the black ball that is Nature.
The gaze swings away. The picture is calmer. The pair still stand with their too long hair, their hat with its fish-lips, their meaningful distance, their obstinate silence – blocking my view of the 5 figures, focused. They are women or the same woman, in simple hospital smocks or home-made slips or paper vests, bare arms folded, heads replaced by the days of the conventional working week and where their legs would presumably be, are words beginning with M. The black ball remains, for now, in the background, the tip of a tongue poking through a gap in the gallery's teeth.
A painting. The grey-pinks, browns and greens of suppurating internal organs. A small amount of bubble and froth. Smears and dabs. Abandoned veins, lying, disconnected. Perhaps, a little nipple.
The fish-head hat man half of the pair stands, again, in the way - this time of a painting. It is of a woman, if she was flattened out nicely. Pinned like a butterfly. A text book display. Her buttocks flap down, deflated, while her hands are small pressed flowers across the wasteland of her chest. My mistake, its not a woman. It's a “Tree of Fluids”. But the Tree has pretty little lips and cheery round red eyes.
The painting of innards and the painting of flayed skin step back to become bodyguards1 to a torso which now takes centre stage. Made of medical coloured2 balls in sockets, the torso balances its thigh nubs on a shiny bright gold plinth so that its undercarriage can be viewed3. In the glass of the display case, I am reflected in the space below its right tit. Above, ceiling arches echo the boob-age.
1 of bodyparts 2That pink grey of internal flesh 3If you can see through the huff of your breath, and are careful not to bump your head on the glass and if you are tall enough to get the angle right...but wait! There's little more to be gained after all, for the undercarriage is just as visible from above! The torso is cleverly reversible, it has a hairless split between the breasticles as well as down below. Such a wonder of beauty AND function
More mammaries, 16 this time.1 Sixteen tits in a jiggling line. They look like they are moulded from clay, the warm terracotta of adobe mud huts and there are even doorways and a Hobbit's round window to back up this idea....but in fact they are made of rubber, fibreglass and wood. You would only know this from squeezing the snout-like nipples, if it wasn't for the accompanying information card. The first image shows the sculpture foreshortened.
The fourth is drunkenly viewed from below, on buckled knees with skew-whiff dizzy eyes. I have become an ever-thirsty, never sated Don Juan, a wolf among piglets, a mouth among teats.1
1Never replete, never complete, Reet Petite, the finest girl you'll ever want to eat
Legs! Still reeling from the liquid lunch, I crash too close to the slim parade of Jim Dine's pins. Half trampled underfoot, under svelte and pointed feet, I swivel...
And flinch, revolted, as the slender limbs convulse on themselves to form a sickly worm.1
A painting of a doctor1. His face has been covered or replaced by a symbol now used by Extinction Rebellion, a stylised hour glass with connotations of toxicity or trade waste. The kind of sticker you might find on a dumped cannister of evil. He points to a spot just before a skull on his table. A clustering of buboes fills the gap between the doctor's pointy finger and the skull's tiny teeth.2
1 Bedecked in eight candle-shaped, ball-bottomed cocks and sprinkled with trios of black and blue pox, he wears, like a night cap, two surgical socks 2 Grapes to be punctured, black wine to follow.
1 There are many moons in the balance, but the one that dominates has not been painted. It is an electric light reflected in the glass whose slipped double exposure has a greenish tinge which makes the whole thing seasick. The sand peaks into proboscises2 which lift to sniff the heavily perfumed symbolism of the night. A crescent moon parachutes down three pairs of emergency legs which scissor and split above two humble nuns. The nuns' faces are blank of all but the love of Angles. They share between them one rather large hand and a small silver vessel which might be a bomb.
1 Men Shall Know Nothing Of This – Max Ernst 2 ...or willy noses, swollen trunks, feelers, suckers, wrinkled beaks, spouts made to swallow, not spit.
Porcelain Pasties laid out in 4's, 6's, 3's and 5's1 – a mathematical alchemy, a cold lunch of goodbye.
1. Elective Affinities - Hannah Wilke. These are – are these? - the parceled up moments of a past relationship, apportioned blame, recriminations, bleached and crimped and glazed. Contained pudenda, no licky lips. Folded inwards, no sweet openings. Much like the origami swans – duck them! - the dull reminiscences of bloodless feminists.
1A tar-black metal seated form with handles. Female.2
1 L'Eau – Germain Richier 2 A big Jug with big jugs. Headless vase (say vase the American way – vayse – not varse like arse, not now anyway) She sits on a prong as long as her legs, bent. Making her a stool. The third leg where a stool would be, a length of dirty spine (thanks Viz). Can a female artist be a filthy misogynist? Or is it easier to ask, how can she NOT be?
1 In my mind she is a mother. Not mine, you understand. Everything's mother. The be all and end all. The birth, the death, the maybe. More than you and me. Less. The container.
An overburdened real woman takes centre-stage. Real women carry bags. The Jug retreats into the distance and gazes past the window as if awaiting her next move. It seems to me quite filmic, as if we shared a moment. An over-dramatic moment, quite Bergman-esque1 in fact.
1 The Bergmans, BOTH of them! - Ingmar of The Seventh Seal AND Casablanca's Ingrid.
The window is soft with steam. Condensation withers the lowest panes. That is the yin half of the photo. The yang is shiny black. The Jug is ready for her close up.1
1 “...we'll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life. There is nothing else. Just us, the cameras and those wonderful people out there in the dark!” Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
The Jug slides past demoniacally fast. Now there is just the polished curve of her back, a dark slice on the edge of a wide angled view. The window is filled with a line of pink pillars, a candy cane parade around the Royal Albert Dock.
The shock of her passing – an oil slick juggernaut - leaves me reeling, half concussed. The rest of the room swings into view and shimmers out of focus as if painted on some sleazy silk and blown at from behind. The silhouette of a weeping mother – Doreen Lawrence1 - with spurting tears and braided hair is at the centre of the picture. A huge postage stamp portrait balanced on two dung-ball 'feet'. A real woman has fitted her tiny crop-haired head inside the weeper's outline, a puny Russian doll version of a goddess. The real woman stands with one foot before the other as if stepping onto the tightrope wire barrier around Wilke's tray of hate-pasties. To the left, on the other side of a dividing column, the headless limbless Doll looks like a hairless baby mouse a cat has tossed into the air. Femininity in all its guises.2
1 Doreen Delceita Lawrence, Baroness Lawrence of Clarendon, OBE, campaigner and reformist who founded the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust after her son Stephen was murdered in a racist attack in South East London in 1993. 2 Yes ALL.
Clickety clack, the legs are back. With a military scuttle or cockroach gait, the spike-heeled feet of Jim Dine's elite hurry along the wall towards the abandoned Jug who, from this distance, seems suddenly smaller, slightly hunched over, as a tall man stands to coolly appraise her, throwing a look down the gulp of her throat.
Stop. Me. Rendered sepia. Hands clasped at the crotch of Joseph Beuys' suit. His legs split mine. My eye is unbuttoned.
I move to the right and smear down his left thigh. A little bare Venus clings to his sleeve. The lights make a runway from shoulder to spine.
My face. Obscenely close. Over my shoulder I am caught behind my back fitting snug in one leg of Beuys' fake brown trousers while between me and me a tiny, startled, real woman fears she is the focus of my fake self portrait.
Box of breath, the size of my head. Heated up it rises – Ha! Cooling down it falls – oh!1
1 KONDENSATIONWÜRFEL by HANS HAACKE. 1963. 305x305x305mm
Close up. Droplets. My eye in every one.
The ball* leers up at me. Pock-faced. Hang-lipped. Gross and hungry.1
Step back. The room. Muted. Muffled. The people all gone. The space like a toy set of minimalist building blocks for the loneliest child in existence (god).1 The elements are as follows: columns, grey, two of them. Box, one low, flat. Box one tall, slim. Box, one see-through. One teetering table. One movable wall. One large black ball. Sticks on discs. Slim lines connecting dots. All the ingredients for sterile creation. All but the ball* are machine made and immaculate.
1 Kai sits listlessly on the Snow Queen's frozen lake, moving jagged bits of ice around to try and make a word. If he gets it right, the Snow Queen says she will release him, and has promised him a brand new pair of skates into the bargain. But what IS the word? His brain is numb with cold. He's been doing this forever. His heart is freezing over. A blizzard of her snow bees come to lick his frosted tears. * For 'ball' read 'World'
Folk rush in to fill the space above the ball*. As if nothing has happened, they point at the paintings. They travel in twos or, like me, all alone, and lean into the labels to read the tiny words. “...the gash was a 'vital sign'...” “...'the atrocious unnerving silence' awaiting man in space and the need to leave a 'living sign' of the artist's presence.”1
1 These words are taken from the display caption for the work referred to here as 'The Ball' which is in fact called Nature and which was made by Lucio Fontana in 1959, first as “sphere of terracotta clay” into which a gash was cut, and then “subsequently cast in bronze.” They are taken from my phone which kindly showed me the Tate website. I took a picture of the actual display caption in the gallery, but it was too blurred to read as the photo was taken in a rush to avoid suspicion. People were looking at me strangely. As if I was stealing the words. Which I have, as you see here.
I swing around the ball*1 to get the other view. A small girl is there with a unicorn and striped socks, standing far too near to it. Her hand blurs, reaching out to it . It gapes up at her like a untrained dog. The plinth says “please do not touch”.
I'm blown back. The lights dip. A dark expanse of floor. The ball* still central. The girl is distracted but her brother flaps towards it. Their dad holds his face together, or shields his eyes from it, he doesn't grip his son's hand, he doesn't pull him free.
Figures walk against the wind outside. The sun is bright. I watch through a window with opaque dots to confirm the solidity of the glass, a warning that one may not pass through it unharmed, except as a vibration or disturbance of light.1
1 What is the point, the end point of a gallery? What is the conclusion (forgone)? The Gift Shop. What sums it up? What makes sense of it, nicely? The gift shop, where your big ideas are brought (bought back and sold) to you, cellophaned, vacuum-packed, price tagged and paper-bagged, stamped TATE and....do they only let art in that can be commodified? Postcarded, T Shirted, toted – dare I say it? - Instagrammed?
I am outside. The columns are pink. The sky is blue. The water in the dock is blue, the water in the dock is black, the ups are blue, the downs are black, the rise is blue, the fall is black, they switch, of course, and then switch back.
The view widens. [LANDSCAPE] People in leggings. Hoodies. Trainers. Carrying coffees. Walking past signs.
The view lengthens. [PORTRAIT] The people gather. In holiday groups. In pairs, like brothers.
The Beatles made of Jelly Beans.1 George's lips are bloody bits. Paul's eyes are wide, unfocused.
1 This 6ft by 4ft picture of The Beatles in all their Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band regalia was made using more than 15,000 jelly beans and can be found in the window of the Quay Confectionery shop at Liverpool's Albert Dock.
John up close. The light flicks off his popcorn flavoured nose beans.
Closer still. Towards his teeth. Which glisten as he simpers.
Other wares for sale. My hair reflected blown up sideways.1
1 The other wares include Love Love Love candies, All You Need is Fudge and Let It Beans in cans.
Looking back. An explosion of light. The Tate is black in contrast.
1Rude Gentlemen's Club. Pink neon sign of a frog-legged pole dancer hangs high like a flag on a grand Georgian Town House. 1 Rude is its name and rude is also its game.
From high to low, the following items. A red Chinese sign1 with two golden dragons and a small green pagoda style porch very high. A large To Let placard.2 A boarded up building with tidy slats slanting and painted in one of four colours - forest green, mustard yellow, magenta or cyan. A bit of graffiti – neat, indecipherable – lands like an autograph, signing it off.3
1 According to google translate, the sign reads Chinese China Big Liquor....and then it is undecided whether the last line means Wood Rice Girl or, more simply, Floor. 2 It is no longer to let. 3 L? O? U? K? T?
From far to near, the Dragon arch marking the entrance to China Town. Closer, a road sign – Dingle, Toxteth, Waterfront, Anglican Cathedral. Nearest, the corner of a building called Neon though only the last two letters of its name are visible – ON or, upside down, NO.
The mid-piece of a lamp post. A tasty green – arsenic green? - with a red and gold dragon wound around it. Its tongue is especially long and three pronged.
My feet. The low edge of my coat. A flattened cigarette pack with a blind eye staring up.
Ye Cracke Pub. In black and white. With a red Bass triangle and a Boddington's keg.1
1 This was John Lennon's boozer when he was an art student. He would come here with his other band 'The Dissenters' “who never played a note” as a plaque in the pub attests, and drink Black Velvet – a cocktail of Guinness and sparkling wine.
Inside Ye Cracke. A warm brass-topped bar with a soft warped reflection, the crooked frames of drawings and photographs of Lennon. A white envelope with a 'p' just in view. It shares the same font as the 'please do not touch' on the front and the back of the plinth in the Tate.
Welcome To Ye Cracke says a big hand-painted sign covering one wall. Bright as a barge or a Gipsy Caravan. Flowers and birds, hearts, dots and curlicues. Red with gold writing.
Look down. On the table a beer mat says something. A bright yellow taxi on black. The word Delta. The same cab that took us to Myrtle Street earlier.
My shoulder. Close. Some strands of my hair. The exaggerated perspective of the long mauve upholstery directing the gaze towards a man in the corner who is channeling the spirit of one of The Dissenters. He nurses a pint, another full one waits for him. A window of stained glass is echoed back three times – in the mirror, in the table and as colour on the ceiling, reflecting off the white. Diamonds of blue, turquoise, pink, peach and lemon. One of the lower panes has died and gone dark.
Dusk. An open air train station. Electric lines overhead. A lamppost. Lit. A yellow 'keep your distance' line. A wet patch on the platform. A strip of textured paving that is Braille for the feet.
A train arrives. The doors are bright yellow. Orange trim on grey. Grey skinned giants have been painted on the carriages. A simplified map with chunky yellow symbols. A bus, a games console. A wonky sort of arrow. Under this, the workings are over-big and filthy. The brake frame, the battery, the drawbar, the bogie...
Beer mat from Ye Cracke
Going back over... (Biro on A2 Rymans Sketchbook pages)
Square Edged Elaborations (Biro on Windsor & Newton Smooth Cartridge paper 100 lb 220 gsm)
Once more, with feeling...(this is where we came in) (Tesco ballpoint pen on Rymans Soft Cover A3 Sketchbook 110gsm)