The God of Small Things

There’s an exhibition on right now in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto that I would love to see. Patti Smith, punk-poet/rock goddess started out as a visual artist, and Camera Solo features around 70 of her black-and-white gelatin silver prints created from photos taken over the years with a vintage Land Polaroid camera.

The photos are grainy and impressionistic and reminded me of nothing more than my post-adolescent photography phase, a year-long homage to Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire and the fashion photography of Deborah Turbeville. By which I mean, and not in a pejorative sense, elegiac atmosphere=good, technical skill=also good but really, not always necessary.

In using such an old camera Patti Smith accepts the accidental. In an interview with CBC News Sophie Hackett, Assistant Curator of Photography at the AGO, talks about a “Totally accidental double exposure” of Carlo Molino’s bedroom “Overlaid with the pattern of iridescent leopard wallpaper along with some butterfly specimens that he had done, so it emanates like a dream coming up from the bed”.

What emanates most clearly is her fandom. Her photos fetishise the most humble possessions of her idols so Rimbaud’s cutlery somehow becomes more fork and spoon than any fork and spoon since. Bolano’s chair resonates with…something. Mapplethorpe’s slippers are simply tragic. By focusing on the everyday, Smith’s photos give us pause. I’m not entirely sure if they give us any fresh insight into the lives of their owners, any more than a reliquary tells us anything about the life of a saint. It is the tenderness with which they are executed that is telling, and it is their meditation on the private and the quotidian that appeals to me.

My focus recently has undergone a radical shift. Having been stupidly (gratefully) busy for the last six months of 2012 I am now mostly at home seeing things I haven’t noticed in months. And in the contraction of my exterior world I feel an expansion within.

Morning light in my apartment

The Lidl €5 bouquet

Silk Bias Cut Lingerie I’ve made myself, as intellectual exercise and treat for the senses

Rhubarb that Paddy, the last tenant but one, planted outside the bedroom window

 

Photo 1 (of Patti Smith) from http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/story/2013/02/07/patti-smith-ago-exhibit.html#

Photos 2, 3 & 4 (by Patti Smith) from http://www.ago.net/patti-smith-camera-solo

December 1991 by David Hare

 

She drove me to Trouville in her black Volkswagen droptop
Leaving Paris early by the Peripherique and getting there by noon
There was frost even on the inside of the slanted back window
And the laughable so-called heater pretty soon

Gave out. The tyres rocked on the brittle brown concrete.
The car shook. The frozen air thickened like a knife,
Pellucid, and we left a trail of hot breath through Northern France.
As we travelled I thought “New life.”

New life. Deauville went by, with its curious timbered medieval
Travesty of a hotel. Thank God we’re not lunching there.
We prefer to head for white-tiled, cheap and cheerful,
A neon-lit, salty lunch at Les Vapeurs where

Our idea of what is good, pithy little peppered shrimp and oysters,
Dredged from the bed, sole, chips, beer, coincided. “Oh this is what she likes.”
The mud-brown beach stretching away beyond
And the silver sea motionless, trapped, unchanging, painted; estuaries, dykes

Small boats, dredgers, abandoned, the weather
Too raw for anyone, however calloused by experience, to pass red hands over rope.
This is the place, bracing then, where I find what it turns out I’ve been looking for,
By the sand, by the water, the what-you-don’t-even-know-you’re- missing: hope.

 

Happy New Year everybody!

Clodagh x

The Gate’s Ghosts

The Dublin Gate Theatre Studio was founded by Hilton Edwards and Mícheál Mac Liammoir in 1928 with a showing of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt at the Peacock Theatre and moved to its present home, part of the Georgian era Rotunda Hospital complex, opening with Goethe’s Faust in 1930.

A common thread (pun intended) in all the work I do is the disconnect between a final, polished product that the public sees, and the work that goes into creating that illusion and the places in which that work is done. ‘Behind the scenes’ can be a pretty ramshackle place.

The Gate is no exception: While the public areas are very elegant and the new extension is swoon inducingly lovely, other parts of the theatre are exhausted. But this is where the ghosts live and everyday treasures are created or unearthed.

I once found a small mirror in the back of a cupboard in a disused convent. It was rectangular, with a thin gold coloured frame and it still had a Woolworth’s price tag on the back. I can barely remember the film I was working on, but I remember wondering who had owned and hidden the mirror. Was she pretty? Did she miss that part of her life, a time when her vanity seemed natural, not a sin?

The Gate, like most theatres, has its ghosts. Apparently there’s one called The Grey Lady who is a benevolent presence, although I’d still rather not meet her.

Other ghosts take more tangible form in the corridor that leads from Wardrobe to a fire escape that overlooks one of the Rotunda Hospital car parks.

Many of these posters haven’t been archived. These are the originals and the only copies. To try to remove them would damage them, to leave them where they are is damaging them.  If you look closely you can see that they’ve been painted around or as below, have had electrical work superimposed.

There are plans to reproduce them however and hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later.

While the transience of live performance can seem terribly romantic the memory of these productions is worth preserving, however imperfectly.

Credits: Photo 1 from Scott Tallon Walker Architects

Photo 2 from DublinTown.ie

Photo 3 from Ian Grundy‘s Flickr Photostream. (Many thanks Ian)

All other photos by me.

The Grass is Greener

I start a new job tomorrow. It’s a six week project but may turn into a full-time actual job. This is tremendously exciting, so I wonder why am I day dreaming about this: An embroidered depiction of unemployment by Melissa Calderon.

 

 

Square is Blue

Or I thought I knew Bauhaus but I didn’t know Jack

Or Travels with my design connoisseur friend Kevin and a hangover.

The Bauhaus Archiv in Berlin is housed in a small building of unexpected charm. I’d anticipated something stern, but just look at this:

The museum was designed in the 1960’s by Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement, and posthumously constructed between 1976 and ’79 proving controversial even within the Bauhaus group, with Max Bill calling it “a screwed-up old man’s design”.

It is idiosyncratic. It’s a small museum, capable of displaying only a third of the archive at any time. Despite its modest scale however it seems pretty comprehensive, covering chairs and lighting, larger pieces of furniture, architectural models, ceramics and (having done no advance reading about Bauhaus before I visited I was also surprised to discover) a lot of carpets and tapestry.

In his 1919 Bauhaus Manifesto Gropius stated, “There is no essential difference between the artist and the artisan.” The tension between art, craft and the machine-made is evident in the Museum’s juxtaposition of tubular steel furniture and wicker (wicker!), horsehair or hand-woven textiles.

The official Bauhaus website (A collaboration between Berlin, Weimar and Dessau)  says “The outcome of Gropius’ approach was not established from the start but was to be discovered in the spirit of research and experimentation, which he called “fundamental research” applied to all the disciplines and their products, from the high-rise to the tea infuser.”  In other words the Bauhaus was as much an ongoing debate as an ideology.

I think this is why the museum is quite text-heavy, each section having what looked like a lengthy written introduction. To be honest I barely skimmed the writings although Wassily Kandinsky’s quote “Square is Red” did jump out. (Kevin and I stood in front of this for a few moments going “Uhhh…”)

In the visitors book on the way out we noticed someone had written “Personally, I always felt Square is Blue”

Kevin’s Model B3 chair – also known as the Wassily chair, after Wassily Kandinsky – designed by Marcel Breuer.

Photos 1,3 & 4 by Oliver Lins, Olex,where you’ll find lots of beautiful photography, and more about Bauhaus

Photo 2 from Bauhaus Archiv Berlin

Photos 5 &6  show two designs by Anni Albers from What I Do

Photo 7 shows Mies Van Der Rohe’s Cane Chair from here

and Photo 8 came from here

Cross Stitch & Digression

My new toy these days is Cross Stitch, which I’ve found to be as addictive as Angry Birds except instead of ending up with RSI you end up with RSI and a thing!

In these stitchin’ and bitchin’ days I find it odd how difficult it is to find a cross-stitched thing I’d actually want though. Possibly there is a community of cross stitchin’ punks out there, and please leave a comment if you know of any.

To date I’ve found these, which are great but for the fact that they don’t give you the right amount of thread in the kits – I’ve way too much green, nowhere near enough grey and they didn’t  put in any thread for the sky. Also in retrospect it might have been a tad ambitious to take this on as my first ever project given that the image isn’t printed on the fabric – you have to count each coloured stitch. Each stitch is about 1 millimetre across. So when I say they’re great…

Anyway. A bit about Battersea Power Station, now half-owned by the Irish people, via NAMA the National Assets Management Agency.

photo by Reuters

I lived in London briefly in the ‘90’s and would see the power station most days on my way into work. I was very fond of it. I vaguely remeber seeing the Pink Floyd album Animals at home, my sister was a fan, but I think I responded more to the aesthetic of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s great brick cathedral, described as “A Temple of Power”.

Funnily enough, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott also designed the iconic K2 red telephone box. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, To design one London landmark may be regarded as luck, to design two looks like talent.

Photo by Steven Dalton, from the 1996 Thames and Hudson book, London Minimum by Herbert Ypma.

Work started on Battersea Power Station in 1929, with Sir Giles Gilbert Scott brought in a little later to assuage public worries that the station, which occupies a 15 acre (61,000m sq) site, would be an eyesore. In fact it has had an enduring popularity.

In 1975 the A station was closed, following falling ouput and rising costs. (There are two connected stations; B was built shortly after the second world war)

Michael Heseltine declared it a heritage site in 1980 with a Grade 11 listing which denotes buildings that are of ‘special interest, warranting every effort to preserve them’.

In 2007 the listing was upgraded to Grade 11* a listing given to ‘particularly important buildings of more than special interest’.

As my cross stitching took shape (and it’s been a looong time coming) it started to remind me of Charles Sheeler. Sheeler was an American photographer and painter whose methods and subject matter hymned the Machine Age. His best known photographic work is his River Rouge Ford plant series.

Criss-Crossed Conveyors, River Rouge Plant, Ford Motor Company, 1927 Charles Sheeler

He achieved an equivalent photographic quality in his paintings and even his abstracts had a sort of machine-like precision.

Charles Sheeler, “On a Shaker Theme #2” (1956) From Hyper Allergic Labs Tumblr site

His subject matter should not be seen as one-dimensional however. Yes he depicted an urban and exurban world of work, often empty of people, but it is “Work” rather than ”Industry” that is glorified by Sheeler. In addition to his factories and foundries he painted and photographed Amish barns; between 1926 and 1934 he produced a series of interiors that depict his home in South Salem, New York filled with Shaker furniture and simple ceramics.

Here are some images of Sheeler’s to remind us all of a time when “The makers of things” as Barack Obama had it, and the places in which they worked were accorded a dignity forgotten for a while, but hopefully experiencing a renaissance.

Classic Landscape, Oil on Canvas, 1931

 

Side of White Barn, Bucks County, Gelatin Silver Print, 1915

 

American Interior, Oil on Canvas, 1934

 

 

Click here to see the work I do for my soul and not for “The Man” (man).

Classic Landscape, White Barn and American Interior from Area of Design

Valentine

Valentine

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

It promises light

like the careful undressing of love.

Here.

It will blind you with tears

like a lover.

It will make your reflection

a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,

possessive and faithful

as we are,

for as long as we are.

Take it.

Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring,

if you like.

Lethal.

Its scent will cling to your fingers,

cling to your knife.

Carol Ann Duffy

from Mean Time, pub 1993, Anvil Press Poetry.

Image by Justin Clayton