We spent yesterday looking round some of the fancier galleries of west/central London; we’re talking buzzers, automatic doors, the lot! First on the list was Simon Lee which has two shows on at the moment, one which is David Hammons and Mike Kelley and another that’s Bas Jan Ader. We were able to see Mike Kelley’s amazing football drawing and felt genuinely fearful of one of Hammons’ pieces which was a museum style cabinet but protruding from the bottom were a set of tiny feet – a truly dark piece, as always. Next stop was Ibid which had a group show on titled ‘Holiday’. Included in the show were big names like Ai Weiwei and David Hockney. A fairly bland show but we did see something that we’d never seen before; a hammock made by Alexander Calder. We’re definitely now interested in the idea of making/designing our own hammocks.
After we’d finished there we went to Luxembourg and Dayan to see ‘Melodrama, Act 1’. A really well curated show with one of Maurizio Cattelan’s famous horses on one side of a massive room and Pino Pascali’s sculpture leaving nothing other than a tail on the other with both pieces suggesting this extension of the gallery walls. There was another beautiful room with a work by Fischli and Weiss, a rubber heart, and on the walls photographs of a soup terrine. Both containers of various things being put together; due to the materials, they’re now even more connected as objects.
The show at Victoria Miro was works by Yayoi Kasuma. It felt kind of sad to us, like people with money just put a canvas in front of a mentally unstable woman and she just bashes out these paintings a couple of times a day. Especially in the environment that we were in, it was just expensive wallpaper.
Wondering past the RA we were able to see Ron Arad’s new kinetic sculpture, ‘Spyre’. It comes in the form of a colossal rotating arm, spinning round at each of its 4 axes, with a camera on the end of final section capturing the audience from a variety of angles. From that description it might sound clumsy and even gimmicky but it’s far from either of those, if anything quite the opposite.
Zabludowicz was having a brief curator tour of ‘Emotional Supply Chain’ so we thought we’d drop down to see if we could learn anything new. It was good to hear more detail about Ed Fornieles’ Facebook piece; it comes in a variety of forms and all the individuals within the locked group were building a scripted environment – all controlled by him. He spoke about Fornieles using Facebook like a material or performance space, which continued to put it in perspective. Another work we enjoyed hearing more about was Pierre Huyghe’s ‘One Million Kingdoms’ where he and Philippe Parreno acquired an anime character and made such a character available for others to use. It’s drawing strange boarders with regards to fiction and reality with the added complication of authorship.
We also did our first interview the other day titled ‘A chat with Sid and Jim’ seen >here<. The opening of The Great Unanswered II’ went really well! Got some great feedback on the piece and should be on the site soon!
