The C Word, (Because Craft is Art's C Word).

Emmanuel Cooper, 1938-2012

2012-01-26T23:32:00.000Z

Emmanuel Cooper, potter, writer, historian, teacher, friendand mentor, died on the 21^st of January, 2012. He was, and will remain, one of thecentral figures in British twentieth century ceramics. He was the alchemist whotransformed studio pottery from its marginal position with of a handful poshEnglish blokes making wholemeal brown stoneware and a sprinkling of preciouspottery ladies pursuing a wholesome hobby in the garden shed, to the fullyfledged, vibrant, professional craft that it now is, thriving in the art worldand imposing itself on the reluctant consciousnesses of the literati andmedia-ristocracy.

In 1970, with Eileen Lewenstein, he founded Ceramic Review,which evolved into one of the most respected art magazines on the market withan international readership and profile. As a historian and glaze technician hewas second to none. Go into the studio of any working potter and you will findat least one of his books, if not the dictionary of glaze recipes, then one ofthe histories. He did not restrict his research and writing to ceramics. Hispublications include: ‘Fully Exposed: Male Nude in Photography,’ (1995), ‘People’sArt: Working Class Art from 1750 to the Present Day,’ (1991), and, ‘The SexualPerspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West,’(1994). He brought this extensiveknowledge to his writing and teaching. Under his influence ceramics became adiscipline able to flourish in a contemporary art context. Without EmmanuelCooper, we probably would not have either Grayson Perry or Edmund de Waal, atleast not as we know them. Both, doubtless would be successful artists and deWaal, in particular, would still be a potter and writer but their work wouldhave so much less meaning and resonance. Perry would not have his adversarialopposite which would deny his work much of it’s ‘charge,’ (his word), and deWaal, too would lack an opposing context – his would be a much lonelier body ofwork.

Cooper was born in 1938 and during his early years, duringthe post-war era, studio pottery, under the auspices of Bernard Leach, grewsteadily. It become fashionable in the1960s when the quasi-rustic, back tonature aesthetic was part of an anti-establishment life-style. Numerous pottersassociations sprung up, sharing information and resources, each with its ownnewsletter, annual conference and exhibition. There was a corresponding growthin availability and quality of materials as the industry reached out to theburgeoning market of hobbyists. Classes mushroomed and potters acquired anincreasingly professional training. In the midst of this maelstrom of activity,was Emmanuel Cooper who had that rare and extraordinary gift of being able toconnect across the full range of makers and designers that emerged during thisperiod. From the most conservative makers of garden and tableware, toiling inbarns in the rural shires, to the most outré and rarefied of post modernacademicians, producing dusty ‘installations,’ and museum ‘interventions,’ heinspired equal respect and affection in us all.

Cooper the potter was tenaciously 'urban.' He developed a range of glazes tailored to the needs of urban surroundings, in particular the use of a compact electric kiln. Not for him the roar, smoke and melodramatics of the wood-fired beasts beloved by rural potters. I will always think of Emmanuel Cooper pots as either bowls or jugs, but primarily as shapes which could show off his latest glaze like some kind of grand new apparel, a volcanic swathe of blistering, bubbling colour - usually a monochrome but rarely the same thing twice. Delicate and elegant, they were and are instantly recognisable as his.

Emmanuel Cooper was true democrat, a unifier among thecliques and factions which so often proliferate in marginal subcultures. Hediversified the discipline in all senses of the word, bringing together industry andstudio, academics and makers, and above all, consistent with his egalitarianactivist politics, he brought in people from all backgroundsensuring that it could grow beyond the effete circle of posh blokes in shedswhich characterised the early years, and become the highly respected art form itnow is, one in which we can all be proud to participate. In a word, he is irreplaceable. In his case, the cliches are right: it is the end of an era and we probably will not see his like again, but that does not need to be a reason to mourn. Rather we can celebrate his colossal legacy and build on it. There could be no better way to honour his extraordinary life and work.

The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman: Grayson Perry at the British Museum

2011-12-20T22:24:00.000Z

'Ooooh how I love those stout German stoneware jugs,' I crooned, leaning into the display case to admire every twirl of oak leaf and branch on the rough brown surface. Then other decorative motifs swam into my vision: bloody Alan Measles again. I'd been had. It wasn't a 'genuine' stout German pot, it was a genuine Grayson Perry, pretending to be one. Round the display case I went and found the ribbon's of text, stamped into the clay surface using old printing letters, setting out a ludicrous rhyme which I no longer recall, but it made me laugh out loud. The best thing about this show is that you often can't tell at a glance, which works are 'proper museum objects' and which are Grayson Perry's museum objects, and the other best thing about this show, if that's possible, is that it will make you laugh out loud many times, and it's not often you can say that about contemporary art, let's face it. Alan Measles, that ubiquitous teddy bear, cavorts with angels and devils, with soldiers and horses. He is a knight astride his mount, standard and shield at the ready, he is a votive object in a shrine, with erect penis with a flower in it, holding hands with Claire, dressed, as she so often is, in headscarf and A-line skirt. Both of these works are cast in metal but the shrine has a ceramic tile at the back, painted with the image of a female black smith. Perry uses iron for most of the metal work in this show- it is the material of the forge, of industry and of craft for industry, a concept Perry expresses well, not least in the first exhibit, one of his motorbikes, which is outside the gallery with a shrine on the back with another teddy bear in it.

The selection of the Museum's votive and spiritual objects is magnificent and Perry's works respond to these objects effortlessly and work their way in among them, threading his own mad story of the life of his god-bear and his attempt to establish himself as a contemporary deity. He encounters everything from religious tourism to celebrity, 24 hour news and social networking and scowls at all of it. The pots are as gorgeous and as funny as they always are, mixing that lucid graphic hand with layer upon layer of collaged imagery, dense and dark at times. The final piece of the show, the boat with the casts of crafted objects and the bottles of sweat, blood and tears lashed to its mast, is a fabulous object, (in all senses of the word,) cast in Iron, lyrical and mythical, utterly convincing and deeply eccentric all at once.

I had thought that Grayson Perry's best show to date was The Charms of Lincolnshire, where he created a collection of works responding to a rural, agricultural and domestic museum collection. The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman continues and develops this theme but with a much greater emphasis on the talisman, the votive and the ritual object. It probably tops the earlier show. It's wonderful, moving and funny. Go and see it!

Origin - in Turbulent Times

2011-09-24T23:05:00.001+01:00

The Autumn Equinox has brought with it an atmospheric change. An economic year of bumbling along, sort of hoping things might improve has suddenly blown up into a maelstrom of recrimination, anxiety, market chaos and talk of recession round two. Origin, now in the beating heart of trendy art-world East London, oozed confidence by contrast. It hummed with activity which, I hope, was an indicator of people deciding to spend money on well made, long lasting objects they would love.

Origin is vast, overwhelming in some respects. You can't look at everything unless you have all day and a substantial reserve of energy. I go there for the ceramics and, to some extent I notice the metalwork and furniture too. Jewellery, textiles and sundry other weird-looking accessories interest me not one jot and, these days, with limited time, I simply edit out of my vision all that does not immediately engage. This year, I looked only at the ceramics and, for the first time, bought things. It's my new project - kick-starting the economy.

Sophie Woodrow's porcelain dream-world beasts made an enticing reception committee. With hollow eyes and strangely clad in unlikely costumes, they stood on their hind legs, those that had them, and stared and I stared back. An owl with antlers, covered in miniature toad-stools, a bull with a lowered head and large bow, hedgehog-like creatures and rabbity things - all called out mournfully for attention. It was astonishingly affecting and surprising too - a relief not to encounter more of the vicious bunnies intended to subvert or shock but, instead, something quietly and genuinely moving.

Aneta Regel-Deleu had a gorgeous collection of new work - weird bone-like structures, half live, human, and growing but also surreal and anything but human, in their skins of ferocious-coloured glaze - matt powdery pink, bright orange gloss and vicious yellow.

Then came the tableware, which is where I got out my debit card. First stop, Sun Kim, her sleek, oatmeal coloured stoneware has evolved into a fine collection of supremely elegant tableware. I sulked when I found no mugs with handles. 'A disastrous firing,' she explains, and promises me mugs at her forthcoming open studio. I make a mental note to reserve enough money for one of her teapots too. On to Linda Bloomfield's stall where a lovely new lemon yellow glaze attracts me and I buy a mug, tall and straight. She's also developed a new mushroom coloured glaze. 'Men didn't buy my work until I made the 'grey,' she explains.' She's talking to a woman from London Potters Association who's taking copious notes and questioning every potter closely, particularly about sales. Origin, according to Linda, delivers the goods. Hooray! So I'm not the only one determined to kick our sluggish economy up the ass then.

Finally, it's Chis Keenan. Lately he's been making delicious Temmoku glazed work with sky blue insides and sure enough - he has mugs. Mugs! Proper mugs with handles - he's one for the Japanese aesthetic which is all very fine if you're Japanese but I'm English, very English, and I like a good stout mug for tea, brown tea - and I've always had my doubts about blue with brown. However, to my surprise, I find myself selecting a mug with a handle and buying it. Someone had asked him to put a handle on a tea-bowl apparently - and damn sound advice it was too. I don't hold with this tea-bowl nonsense. The colour is gorgeous. Ok, so the Temmoku is a wee bit marmitey and the handle's a bit fussy - Keenan's a tad over-crafted for my tastes but this is proper mug-shaped mug and I wasn't going to pass up on the opportunity - I do love that black/ blue mix. I needn't have worried about the blue / brown tea look. It works perfectly. The tea just reaches up near the rim where the black of the Temmoku is bleeding into the blue and it's just exactly right. Looks like a turbulent Autumn day in fact. Slurrrp. That's better - and silky smooth too, enough to calm the most jittery nerves, even those of the markets.

Johara Dance Company present: Hoochie Coochi Girls

2011-08-17T23:08:00.005+01:00

Hoochi Coochi Girls, the latest production from Johara Dance Company, is a complex, evocative, and technically brilliant extravaganza, showcasing contemporary Middle Eastern dance at its best. Forget those uncomfortable, attenuated bellydancing performances you’ve seen in restaurants and nightclubs or even the polished displays of a handful of moves in music videos; Hoochi Coochi Girls mines a rich seam of dance history and treads a vast and ambitious cross-cultural terrain, challenging comprehensively the limitations imposed by the notion of an ‘authentic’ Middle Eastern dance. The show encompasses classical Egyptian, Oriental and folkloric dances in part one, through contemporary urban Hiphop, to interludes of early twentieth century cinema and music hall, to some magical nightclub fusions in the closing scenes.

Sailors and Sequins

The show is in four parts with the opening scene set in a port in Alexandria. It is a bright, cheerful good natured, dance banter - a theatrical portrait of dockside life. Awash with glitter and colour, a series of set pieces and solos tell a story of life at the social margins. We encounter women with baskets of wares to sell, women with bodies to sell, women with airs and graces to disapprove of everyone else, and a group of disreputable sailors who provide comic interludes and lewd commentary. Stunning group dances with full ‘corps-de-bellydance’ ensemble, faultlessly choreographed and performed, set the standard: a sharp and punchy Malaya Lef contrasts with the liquid elegance of the veil dances while a music-hall style hornpipe by the sailors adds variety and theatricality which shapes the entire evening.

Loss and Longing

The second part, Gypsy Life and Immigrant Love, sees a dramatic change of mood and a complete departure from the norms of bellydance. A darker, heavier atmosphere produces a series of dances that are variously spiky, angry, bored, steeped in sorrow and, finally, fist-clenchingly optimistic – that desperate hope of the brutally oppressed. The defining scene is The Factory in which a line of dancers produce and reproduce each other’s moves in sequence, imitating the monotony, relentlessness and sheer bone-shattering exhaustion of the sweatshop. Startlingly original, it choreographs boredom and resentment, an emotional territory largely untouched by dance productions and studiously avoided by bellydancers. On either side of The Factory, are two dances exploring loss, yearning, grief and confusion. Bellydance meets Flamenco Jondo in Josephine Wise’s gorgeously intense performance of ‘I long for Jerusalem,’ a passionate expression of longing traditionally sung by Spanish Jews, and, rural America meets central Baghdad in Two Kids, which portrays the lives of two Muslim children, both shut indoors away from life-threatening hostility. Performed with extraordinary tenderness and grace and by Mayelle Roger and Trish Rapley-Giles, this deceptively simple dance was both deeply touching and immensely evocative. The section ends with a ebullient Bollywood Hiphop fusion choreographed by Nuxya Nereisidos, and performed with razor-sharp precision.

Hollywood Spectacle

Part three, The Golden Age of the Movies, (see video of Arras performance at 1.20) is a return to classical oriental dance and costumes but now the entire performance is imbued with a golden haze of soft-focus, cinematic fantasy. It opens, in spectacular contrast to the preceding section, with a romantic, dewy-eyed performance by the whole cast, in glistening white, fairy-princess style costumes and enormous smiles. Margaret Krause’s choreography, which defines this section, captures the enchanted, dreamworld innocence of the period to perfection.

Masques and Swords

The fourth and last part, Masked Ball, performed in electric blue and pink with black masks, retrieved the accented spikiness of some of the earlier dances. The centre piece of this section was a breathtaking sequence of pure theatre which silenced the audience as ‘Kali’s Militia,’ (video at 1.47) choreographed by Gwen Booth, completely reinvented the traditional sword dance, introducing mystery, magic and fury as the dancers lined up and the swords took on the look of a terrifying, mythic beast. More fluid though no less terrifying was the moment the group circled menacingly, each dancer raising her curved sword above her head such that the blades themselves appeared to dance, rising and falling in sequence like wave, driven by their own fierce beauty. It was one of those unforgettable theatrical moments that will live in my memory forever.

What sets Hoochi Coochi Girls apart from all other bellydance shows I’ve seen, and places it in a class of its own, was the originality and scope of the choreography, the immense visual contrasts, the ambitious emotional range, and the flawless conviction with which all the dances, solos, duets and set pieces were performed. The grand finale, a mass of colour, light and splendour, drew extensively on the techniques of Sorcha Ra, Johara’s resident fire dance and poi expert and a recent addition to the company. A mix of veils, vast flaming fans, and flags, or ‘poi,’ swirled through the air, closing a truly audacious and unforgettable performance.

Two Fingers and High Five: The Harrow Ceramics degree show, 2011

2011-06-22T22:29:00.002+01:00

Image from installation by Cami Cabra and Sally Szczech

If your University and your government decide to close down your art course – what do you do? Well you mount the most impressive degree show ever, obviously.

17 ceramicists conspired to put a massive two fingers up to the head of school (absent) and the vice chancellor, (absent) and the entire demolition government to show them exactly what would be missing. Their work ranged from handsome, thrown bowls, (Jo Beckett), to a ‘shit machine,’ (Lawrence Epps), which oozed strands of clay in the most scatological way imaginable - not so hard with terracotta clay perhaps, but it provided much amusement to attendant children, to say nothing of the adults. It turned out that the extruder had been carefully adjusted to produce strands which, when cut in cross section, had a human profile. The massed human profiles were then arranged in an office, a London tube, and in various other groups, busying themselves on shelves and so on. Brilliant!

Hats off to Colin Wainwright for a witty installation and for corresponding economy in his artists statement: ‘An exploration of the inappropriate.’ It was too, - I especially loved the skeletal wine glasses. I also enjoyed the quiet two fingers to mighty dynasties of craft ceramics. Jane Cairn’s gorgeously proud celebration of industry, of how things work, of process and mechanics, occupied the space magnificently. It dominated the entrance to this giant, underground car-park of a 'gallery' and mixed effortlessly with the masses swarming round the drinks table at the private view.

Downstairs, clearly enjoying the acres of space available, the rest of the artists spread their work to full advantage. Naomi Wayne’s ceramic chairs, with the words of an Arab protest poem printed on to their seats, were placed in disarray in front of a slide show of photographic images from Palestine – a potent mix of fury and something more elegiac but still everyday. Contemporary art is littered with clichés on the subject of the Arab –Israeli conflict and most often, unfortunately, by artists whose ignorance is outweighed only by their dullness. Wayne’s finely tuned mix of hard edged, unyielding anger with humour and poetic vision is a very welcome redress.

The notion of craft and memory, deployed by Sally Szczech in ‘Heirlooms,’ is also a well trodden path but she succeeded in bringing a fresh visual and tactile element to her work, particularly with chest of drawers filled with sewing materials, including printed ceramic cotton reels. It was immensely appealing and really brought out the nosey, inquisitive side of the audience. Everyone seemed to be fiercely resisting the desire to have good rummage around. Not all succeeded.

I have focused on five of the artists in the show but all of them, produced highly original and professional work – there really wasn’t a dud one among them and there are plenty more I could have singled out. So, hereis the link to their collective website with all their names, images and briefest of artist’s statements. Look out for any one of them. You will be richly rewarded.

Lamentations 2010 Rachel Kneebone at White Cube

2011-01-24T23:59:00.009Z

Pictured above is an earlier work from an exhibition at The Barbican in 2010 - it gives a good idea of the way she works around the plinth.

Lamentations: Rachel Kneebone at White Cube

An exhibition of glistening white porcelain works, mounted on giant, monumental plinths, theatrically lit in a darkened room with painted black walls and called, ‘Lamentations,’ states unequivocally that you must take it seriously. You should approach with due solemnity and appropriate hush, and regard – probably for quite some time.

The title alone sounds literary. Add the theatrical staging and it suggests a Greek Tragedy. Actually being in the gallery, surrounded by the six Lamentations, felt more like being in a church awaiting Benediction or the Stations of the Cross, such was the depth of reverence in the atmosphere.

Even now, it is hard to say if these works lived up to their onerous atmospheric conditions. They are magnificently made and produced by an artist who knows her material intimately and who casts aside all anxieties about self-conscious knowingness and the need to make satirical references and, instead, takes the risks required to stride, apparently without fear, into an unlikely world of large-scale porcelain statuary.

I say ‘statuary’ because the six Lamentations seem to imitate statues. The porcelain in these works is playing the part of marble. They resemble the marble figures on graves and tombstones. They are each made up of a mass of writhing porcelain figures, doll-sized and mounted on porcelain plinths and glazed. Though the individual works are small, table-top sculptures, they read as large-scale because of the way they have been displayed. The porcelain pieces, including their plinths, are placed on another white plinth, which is itself placed on a black plinth, adding to the overall stagey effect. They imitate the tumbledown-ness of Victorian cemeteries. The porcelain plinths are cracking open and threatening to fall apart any minute. There’s a hint of eighteenth century gothic in the atmosphere.

‘As grave as the imagined as frivolous as the eternal,’ is the title of the first piece. It might be a pun, I assume it is, but the atmosphere was dictating due seriousness, so perhaps not. They all have long literary titles. A distorted figure with extended legs and weird oozing toes is draped over the knee of another distorted, faintly girlish figure. The pair is instantly reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Pieta and sits atop a wriggling mound of dismembered bodies and twisted, porcelain spaghetti-like strands. None of the figures have heads, or, if they have something in place of head, they have a vagina or a penis.

The plinths are an essential part of the narrative. Some are overtly tomb-like, cracking open and releasing the vile spirits, while others are barely discernible amidst the swathes, festoons and yet more ecstatic distorted figures. All the figures have either enlarged vaginas or vagina or penis heads. Some have small breasts with agonising torsos which resemble enlarged ribs or hands gripping and squeezing the body. There is an innocence in the girlish legs and arms, in the bottoms and feet and something tortuous in these finger-rib torsos.

Inevitably the vagina and penis heads are a reminder of the Chapman brothers’ rubbery confections and of the cartoon grotesques of Breughel. Kneebone’s references derive from three sources: ceramics, sculpture and painting. The Meissen shepherdesses are present, and the Sevres swathes and flowery festoons, as are the tortured souls of Italian Renaissance sculpture. What is interesting though is that she does not seem intimidated by any of them; there is no sense of genuflection. She certainly isn’t subverting them she seems to be saying, ‘yes, this looks like a Chapman figure and that looks like the foot of a Meissen shepherdess, the ankle of a Renaissance religious figure, the twirl of a Sevres swathe, but never mind all that, just follow these wounded souls into their torment or sorrow.’

I wasn’t entirely convinced but I’m still open to persuasion. I’d like to see them ‘out in the field,’ in a Renaissance or even Medieval church or ruined abbey. They don’t need those dutiful titles and I’m not sure they need all that theatre. They need to breathe air. For all the death and the sorrow and the lament, they are, very much about life. They teeter on the edge of ridiculous but that might be a strength. It’s just too easy to dismiss work like this, with the titles and the grandiose display, as absurd, pompous, overblown and, yes, ridiculous. The catalogue essays, though blisteringly professional and academically proper, don’t help. Partly because neither writer sounds entirely convinced either.

That said, David Elliott’s essay is very convincing in places. He discusses in particular Kneebone’s interest in realising female sexuality in art – wresting it from the persistent image of ‘lack’ and ‘absence.’ It is a detailed, involved, and sometimes passionate essay - so perhaps he is convinced – but here too, it is possible to over-write just as much as it is to over-display.

Kneebone is producing highly original, risky, substantial works. She uses porcelain in visceral, exciting and unorthodox way – mixing moments of studio pottery, (spaghetti strands and roses), moments of industrial production, (bottoms and feet), and moments of immensely Proper Sculpture. Putting aside the inflation and the derivation, they deserve and they reward serious contemplation.

Edmund de Waal: The Hare With Amber Eyes

2010-10-21T00:29:00.001+01:00

I had no idea what to expect when I opened this book. I deliberately didn’t read any of the reviews. The only thing I had really absorbed was the image of the hare with its amber eyes which is on Edmund de Waal’s website. I still think it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

You can really lose yourself in the journey which forms back bone of this story and in the histories, the politics, the atmosphere and, above all, the objects, artefacts and interiors. It has been described as a memoir but it reads more like a cross between a thriller and a family saga with a hint of political journalistic travelogue thrown in. The chase is about objects, art objects, art history, collectors and collections. You’re panting your way across Europe from art dealer to salon to soiree to dressing room and at one stage, in the middle and, arguably, the heart of the book, we’re being lead through the cavernous rooms and corridors of a Viennese banker’s Palace, opulent to the point of vulgarity and crammed full of the, ‘accumulation of stuff from four decades of affluent shopping,’ (he’s scathing about their taste). All this is for the purpose of finding the netsuke, the hoard of 264 tiny carved creatures, human, animal and plant life. They are variously sexy, mysterious, malevolent, and much more, and we are introduced to them as the story proceeds. He holds back from really exploring the objects themselves until close to the end, which is perhaps why it feels so much like a thriller. The dénouement involves a brindled wolf, a hare with amber eyes, a tiger – who’s the star apparently, a monk with a begging bowl, a woman in a bath, a great many rats, some persimmon seeds and so it goes on.

It starts, if you read the preface, in Japan with de Waal’s great uncle Iggie who, when we first meet them, is the owner of the netsuke. Here too we learn that de Waal will be their next owner. The netsuke themselves also start in Japan, this is where they were made but several centuries earlier.

Part One, Chapter One starts with the writer as researcher in Paris, standing about on street corners looking at buildings and blagging his way into them seeking hard evidence about the Charles Ephrussi, his great, great uncle, who was a Nineteenth Century connoisseur, collector, art historian and aesthete and the son of Leon Ephrussi, the mighty grain merchant of Odessa. Leon was himself the son of the immensely ambitious Charles Joachim who changed his name to Ephrussi from something altogether more peasant-like and who developed the then modest agrarian business into a prodigious, global Empire. Leon continued the success and sent his sons to Vienna, the heart of Europe, the very pulse of Hapsburg Empire, to start a bank, be a magnificent and out do the Rothschilds. Then they set about conquering Paris. There’s fantastic story in the first few pages and I wanted to know so much more about creaking grain carts and the shtetl in the Ukraine the thick black earth and all the rest of it. But we had to go in search of the caved beasts with their multi-coloured eyes, so that was it. We return to Charles who was the first member of the dynasty to own the netsuke.

In Paris, we get to know Charles, his milieu, his way of thinking about things and, especially, about collection and display. Simultaneously, we are becoming acquainted with the relentless, meticulous nature of the research process. This first part, as well as being a portrait of Charles and his astonishing art collection, which includes a procession of famous paintings now hanging in places like the Louvre and the National Gallery, is also an intimate portrait of research itself. It doesn’t happen on screen with search engines. The search engine in this case is de Waal himself ferreting through dusty boxes, lurking in doorways, nipping upstairs when no one’s looking and weedling his way into people’s lives to excavate, endlessly.

I have talked about one part of this epic journey. The rest is consistent. Although written in five parts, the story feels like it has three main stages, which are defined by the owners of the netsuke, Charles, Emmy and Iggie. The Emmy part is divided in two – the first half is the happy, social, glamorous time of parties, love, sex and shopping. These are the last heady days of the Hapsburg Empire before Nazification and war. The second half is the violence, dispersal, menace, and loss defined by the Nazi occupation and the holocaust and the extraordinary loyalty of Ana, Emmy’s maid, and the hiding and rescue of the netsuke.

This is a family of Russian Jews who become European Jews and then, in his words, 'had to encounter the Twentieth Century.' De Waal is dealing with very big stuff on a very intimate scale. At no point does he yield to nostalgia, nor is he afraid of this massive and complicated heritage. He does not romanticise this family or its story which would be extremely easy to do. He is critical of their behaviour where he feels they deserve it which allows him to write with real warmth about the people he loves – including the ones he could never have met. He winces palpably in the writing when Charles under pays one of his artist friends for their work but is full of praise for the way he cares about art. He doesn’t quite call the Vienna family a bunch of jumped up nouveau-riche plebs, but he does sort of suggest it – this is where he compares the ‘carefully calibrated,’ thoroughly well informed collection of Charles in Paris with the ‘accumulation of stuff from four decades of affluent shopping,’ in Vienna. At the same time, though, he loves Emmy and her love of clothes.

Weaving in and out of these minutiae of the family saga and the journey of the netsuke is a detailed discussion of anti-Semitism, what it is and how it works. He discusses the history from the ‘stinking hovel’ that defined the impoverished Eastern European Jews in the shtetl through the period of gaining citizenship and civil rights in Europe to the point where they were, realistically, able to own things and earn money. He then paints a graphic picture of the newly acquired wealth of some of the Viennese Jews as compared to the ‘proper Jews,’ the grindingly poor ones, who were grudgingly tolerated because at least they had the decency to be authentically poor. What comes across with ringing clarity is the sense that wealth in Vienna was welcomed as long as it wasn’t Jewish wealth. Forget culture, writing, music, theatre, art, knowledge, anything that the Jewish population of Vienna at the time might have contributed, ‘they,’ the Jews, had got ‘above themselves,’ they were, ‘taking over.’ He traces the itinerary of anti-Semitism from a casual ‘given,’ where it was not just tolerated but normalised, showing how that created a fertile ground for the growth of the monstrous, politicised, paranoid, obsessive activism it became, culminating in the Third Reich and the Holocaust.

The view from the pages of this book is panoramic and global. From Europe descending into a state of savagery and eclipse we emerge slowly into lighter times, moving from the United States, to English suburbia with trim hedges and, finally, back to Japan. The last part of the book, the, ‘Coda,’ comes back to London with the writer and includes a visit to Odessa and, once again, I longed to visit Berdichev in the Ukraine, the shtetl where it all started but no, we stayed in Odessa on the promenade and imagined the black earth on the Eastern Ukraine border with Poland.

It’s a wonderful book. Just read it.

In Your Name: The Inconvenient Politics Of Palestinian Handicrafts

2010-09-19T22:50:00.027+01:00

On the face of it, the ‘Justice for Palestine’ flag laid out on a stall selling plants and handicrafts seemed out of place at the fourth annual Tottenham Flower and Produce Show, an urban ‘village’ show with big white tents, vegetable competitions for allotment holders, a home crafts section, a dog show and various ‘side shows.’ The plants were local but the handicrafts on this stall were made by Palestinian women from a town called Azaria, divided in two by the accursed Israeli wall. Embroidered, stitched and crocheted objects jostled for position with olive oil, fragrant seeds and herbs and hand made soap. They were being sold by Haringey Justice for Palestinians, (HJP), a small local charity which does income generating projects with the people of Azaria which is now twinned with Haringey. The purpose of the stall was both to raise consciousness and therefore more support in the area and also to raise money - desperately needed income for families living ‘behind the wall,’ cut off from their work and even from family members, under siege in effect, by the Israeli occupation.

So, what was it about this stall that was still producing a sense of doubt and discomfort chewing at the edges of the otherwise pleasant experience of looking at the pretty, embroidered objects set out before me?

In the current political context, groups supporting the Palestinians, including this one, must deal with an additional, increasingly difficult and demanding problem. Put very simply, much of the Palestinian struggle is ‘supported’ by Lebanese Hezbollah, and by Hamas, both of whom are in hock to the current Iranian ruling regime. Like it or not, all of these campaigns supporting the Palestinians, including eminently sensible, practical ones like HJP, have the territorial scent markings of Iran sprayed all over them. They are inextricably linked. The violent oppression of dissidents in Iran, the mass rapes of Iranian women and men in prisons, the torture, the executions and the shootings and beatings on the streets, are all done, in the name of the Islam and, in particular, in the name of the Qods and of Palestine. The Palestinian women stitching those small bags and crocheting the flowers didn’t ask for Iran's support and certainly not for their slaughter, but they’ve got it and now their supporters must deal with it.

The problem for the Palestinians is twofold. The first and, for them, the most urgent, is that the Iranian regime needs dead Palestinians, as many as possible, especially women and children, to prop up its ailing government. The only support it has left in Iran is the hard core of Iranian Hezbollah who will continue to support them as long as Palestinians are dying at the hands of Israeli soldiers. Hence the necessity to ensure that they do go on dying. Bluntly, a dead Palestinian is worth far more to the Iranian regime than a living one. A prosperous, cheerful, independent Palestinian is no help at all and a prosperous, independent Palestine would spell the end of the Islamic Republic in Iran.

Tehran 2009: Police attacking protesters after the 2009 election

The second problem is that much of the support structure, in Britain and elsewhere in the West, is cheerfully burying its collective head in the sand and ignoring what Iran is actually doing in Palestine and, even more, what the same regime is doing in Iran itself – namely murdering Iranians at a rate and with a degree of impunity which would make any Israeli government green with envy.

HJP is affiliated to Palestine Solidarity Campaign, both of which have laudable aims. While both organisations carefully state their affiliations, their links, their patrons and their sources of support and what they aim for and what they do not support, (the latter includes ‘all forms of racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia’), there is a howling silence on Iran.

Iranian Street Protester: Tehran 2009

They must now declare their independence and condemn, unequivocally, the atrocities meted out to Iranian dissidents by the ruling regime. This must be clearly stated on their websites and, wherever possible, on their publicity material. They can no longer ignore what is happening in Iran. No longer can they state that it may not really be so, that it is just an invention of the Western press, (or ‘Zionist’ as some prefer), they cannot afford to risk colluding with a hard-core proto-fascist regime which celebrates the deaths of Palestinians as much as it celebrates the rape and death of its own dissidents.

Tehran 2009: Police attacking protesters

It is time for all of these groups to adopt another ‘not in my name’ badge, a second one. This one might have an electric baton, an image of the Iranian basiji beating the life out of one of the women protesters or a crane with a dead Iranian protester hanging by the neck. They need to do this as a matter of urgency, because it is being done in their name.

The thought and care put into projects such as those of HJP is fatally undermined by this cavernous silence. Maintaining silence, in effect sacrificing one set of lives, (Iranian lives) in order protect Palestinian lives is manifestly absurd. And who wants to buy a lovingly embroidered oyster card-holder drenched in the blood of Iranian street protesters?

Ceramic Review: A conversation with the editor

2010-06-08T23:04:00.001+01:00

Things are on the move at Ceramic Review. The much esteemed and now, 'former' editor, Emmanuel Cooper, is departing and has been replaced by Dr. Bonnie Kemske. For those of you, and you are many, who have been feeling that CR is, 'stuck stuck stuck,' relief is on the way. It will be slow. You will not detect changes immediately. The first issue in which Kemske has had any input at all is the next one, the July / August issue. She wrote the editorial but has had little, perhaps no other input.

We're in the office in Carnaby street and she's growling impatiently at the paper proofs, 'what's the point? Who still has paper proofs?' or words to that effect. Further indignation at the full-page, black and white image of a bearded Mick Casson on the back cover and some shamefully conventional photographs of Paul Scott's work on the front. 'Well, that's enough of Mick Casson for the next seven years at least,' she announces with a bold sweep a the hand, 'and these photographs!' She snorts her disapproval at Scott's blue and white subversions, barely visible in the format chosen. It's not the work that's the problem here, it's the picturing of it.

It's all music to my ears. I almost dared to feel cheerful. Perhaps I might actually enjoy working for this magazine again instead of dreading every assignment. I couldn't quite believe that here was someone, the editor of CR no less, ranting about how truly appalling the standard approach to photographing ceramics is. Goodness, it's only, what, seven years that I've been cheerfully holding forth to a brick wall on this subject. Every review I've ever written and almost every feature has included a critique of the way the work is photographed and almost every time I've explained why it really doesn't work. Not that I actually expect anyone to take the slightest bit of notice but it is deeply depressing to find ghastly, pompous, didactic demands in everything from grant application guidelines to articles in potters' newsletters to calls for contributions for books to guideline for exhibition submissions telling people exactly how their work should be pictured and, without exception, the photographer / artist must exclude, 'clutter', for which read, 'life.' I'm then expected to believe that ceramics is oh so accessible and close to human life and so tactile and embodied. And where is the human dimension? Eradicated, cleansed, sanitised, GONE. Just a pot, or something else ceramic, in a vacuum. Dead.

Over time, expect the imagery - the nature of the imagery - in CR to change. This is the moment to rethink your own photographs. Start breaking the cast iron rules. It's only when artists rebel that the establishment eventually catches up, lumbering breathlessly into line - by which time you'll be twenty steps ahead again, but never mind. And here's an interesting thing - expect the adverts to change. Kemske wants the entire look of the magazine to be different. How much of this can happen this year I dont know. I do know that the layout will stay the same for at least a year but the intention is to change that as soon as finances allow. Finances, since we're on the subject, are dire and they have to change offices which in itself will take up time, energy and scarce resources.

I would like to have asked what the five and ten year plan would be. I know it's going to include practicalities such as raising the number of subscriptions, retrieving the student and adult education market, and making sure CR appears in the academic search engines. It will also include introducing at least one longer, chewier, more analytical article per issue as soon as possible. I know that articles which chat amiably about the potter's studio, what the weather was like that morning, how many times the kiln was checked, and whether of not the maker has a cat, will be discouraged - removed in fact. The really big question that remains unanswered is: 'what about marketing and audience research?' Marketing, I learnt, has not been a part of anyone's job description since the day the magazine began. Shocking but true and wholly unsurprising. Kemske knows that has to change. but how it can change has still to be worked out. I say this is the big question because, without it, the other changes become almost irrelevant because the magazine would struggle to survive long term.

We will have a magazine more conversant with the blogosphere, the internet, with e-books and online publishing of all kinds. We will also find out who the contributors are - something which has always been lacking. In short, CR is about to become a good deal more professional. I have been worried for a couple of years now that, in a harsher economic climate, such as the one we now have, CR could not survive. I'm happy to say that I'm a good deal less worried now.

Quilts at the V&A

2010-04-20T10:55:00.001+01:00

Quilts 1700 - 2010 is a mesmerising collection of stitched, appliqued and variously decorated bedware all gathered together in several rooms at the V&A with explanatory texts, very little lighting, (such is the problem with displaying textiles), and freezing cold jets of air. That latter may be because the dimmed lights and dormitory of beds upon which the said stitchery is displayed, is enough to reduce even the most hardened exhibition goer to a stupor and induces a desire to just kick off your shoes and climb in. Just as you're about to submit, out rushes the cold air-shower and you remember where you are.
It's much more fun to listen to the frighteningly well-informed audience than it is to read the explanatory notes. I never know what to say about quilts. They're gorgeous, all of them - well apart from a couple of horrible contemporary deconstructed 'interrogating the quilt' type offerings - god I wish they'd just go home and watch the telly. This authoritarian desire among contemporary craft makers to interrogate things and people and expose their weaknesses is repellant.

Contemporary Quilts
Apart from the one or two of those, the contemporary work enlivens the show considerably. Two memorable paper quilts, one made entirely of old and new Chinese bank notes, the other from news print - thousands of tiny squares - roughly equal in number to lives lost among Iraqi civilans. In among them, a few tiny painted portraits of dead British soldiers. Works well - something about the background, 'wallpaper' feel of quilting itself, repetitive, detailed, boring in some senses, certainly in terms of the work involved, combined with the extreme intiimacy of the object itself, that vivifies the statement being made such that it goes well beyond vacuuous rhetorical statement. You sense the maker cares. That is one of the great strengths of domestic craft. The bank notes one is more conversant with the 'show off,' display aspects of quilting, which has always been a part of it's identity - 'darling- we must get the x's over and show them the new conservatory,' is just the updated version of 'darling we must get the x's over and show them our new quilts.'

Fantastic quilt done by prisoners at Wandsworth, (men's) prison. Really excellent, this one, and the film that goes with it with the voices of the makers and what they think about it. Grayson Perry's Right to Life quilt is there - excellent idea and works very well indeed, especially in this context - come to think of it, it works better here than I've seen it anywhere before.

Censorship again...
Tracy Emin did a lovely quilted, appliqued bed in 2003, it seems - and it is gorgeous. She's sewn some writing on the to bottom sheet which we're not allowed to see. I stood on tip-toe, put on my long range glasses and gazed into the deliberately obscured gloom, 'I'm not weird it's the hole fucking thing that's weird...' then it gets hidden under the bed clothes. I haven't remembered this correctly unfortunately, but it's something about 'wierd sex' and it's not her at fault. Feels like a protest and I didn't take kindly to not being unable to see it. It is work that we should be able to walk round, but we got only one view. Inexcusable. I know I'm rather sensitive about these things these days, but I suspect the censorious hand of the public sector again, and I'm getting mightily pissed off about it. It's what gets censored as much as that it is censored that is really starting to make me angry. Ok for Primark and Accessorize to proclaim the joys of sexual attraction for seven year old girls, but not ok for adults to protest about sexual abuse... something doesn't make sense here. If we stick to gallery / museum art, fine for Grayson Perry to do whatever he wants but not for Tracey Emin apparently...

Quilts and meaning is very old hat for most craft makers, especially feminist ones, but I'm delighted that it hasn't become worn out and deconstructed to oblivion, (except in one or two cases). Artists are still using quilts to great effect and not only about matters of intimacy and sex. Very good indeed to see to prisons and the people in them, war, and the people touched by them, and international finance entering the quilting frame too.

Possibilities And Losses: Transitions In Clay

2010-04-19T18:04:00.010+01:00

Possibilities And Losses: Transitions In Clay is the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name held at Middlesboro Institute of Modern Art, (MIMA), in Summer 2009. Published by the Crafts Council in partnership with MIMA, it follows a conventional exhibition-catalogue form: it’s a big, more or less A4 size, book of shiny photographs with two essays. I did not see the exhibition itself and, of the four works represented in this book, I know only one, so I write about it here only as a literary representation of ceramics. I’m not commenting on the work itself. It does not claim to be a new approach to publishing, nor does it claim to break new ground as a model of discussing craft. The two essays, one by Glenn Adamson, the other by Jorunn Veiteberg, discuss and, on balance, promote the work. If one was feeling both churlish and excessively disinclined to scrutinise, one could just dismiss it as more / (mere), Crafts Council (self) promotional literature.

However, what makes this catalogue production different and worthy of comment is that, firstly, it follows the standard format with considerable flare and, secondly, and here perhaps it does do something new if not revolutionary, both of the essays are critical - in the sense that they discuss and critique contemporary ceramic work and current trends and developments in a way that allows the reader to think, scrutinise the work, even if only in picture form, and then form his/ her own opinion. The nature of the writing opens up discussion, rather than closing it down. This does mark a tangible progressive development: catalogue essays usually take the form of an introductory essay by the curator or other representative of the host institution, followed by an essay which discusses only the work in the show, usually with little other context, and which is invariably a positive appraisal rather than a serious discursive essay. The result amounts to an exercise in marketing and propaganda rather than an intelligent introduction to new work.

Publishing Ceramics

How ceramics is discussed, either in the pages of a book, in journals, in lectures and presentations, and now, increasingly in the blogosphere and on social networking sites, is a subject close to my heart. The lack of a proper publishing infrastructure for this discipline is something I’ve referred to many times – most recently in my review of Confrontational Ceramics, (Ceramic Review, 235:26). Increasingly, academics and researchers are turning to catalogue essays, as the major source of literature on ceramics, rather than to books which consistently lack substance and concern themselves only with visual representation. There is some freedom of movement in the catalogue form which is not dependent on the commercial demands of a publishing corporation or the weighty history of an esteemed publishing house. Moreover, small institutions, and relatively speaking the Crafts Council and MIMA are minute, could, in principle, take more radical decisions about what constitutes excellence in the field of literary representation of ceramics. They could mobilise digital technology to improve the visual representation, all being well that will materialise with the advent of e-books. Poss and Loss is still stuck with magnificently perfect still photographs, taken from a single angle without much human context. There are many photos so the angles are taken care of – sort of – but, even so, they remain detached from human intervention. There is so much more that could be done.

A Tale Of Two Essays

Glen Adamson’s essay discusses the work in the show, one artist at a time, Jorunn Veiteberg’s discusses the show as a whole in the context of related developments in contemporary ceramic practice. The exhibition was curated by Clare Twomey, who also edited the book and her choice of writers is faultless. Both are immersed in craft, but one, Adamson, is a slight outsider to ceramic work, just enough that he is able to keep a distance and interrogate the work of the four artists, and the other, Veiteberg is very much immersed in ceramic practice but, in the UK at any rate, she is not beholden to any institution or strand of thinking or developments in practice that are grounded in this country. There is just enough detachment in both of them to escape that vexatious sense of cosiness that persists in writing on ceramics.

Outsider Artists

Adamson characterises the four artists firstly as, ‘outsiders’ to the studio pottery model of ceramic practice, while acknowledging that two, Twomey and Keith Harrison are thoroughly grounded in that practice through their art college training and Brownsord, who initially trained in the industry, also migrated to studio practice via the Royal College of Art. Secondly he ascribes ‘typologies,’ to each of them: Brownsord is the historian, Harrison the alien, Sormin the immigrant and Twomey the curator. He then introduces the work as operating in a context imbued with pathos. Referring to the collapse of the ceramics industry in Britain accompanied by the slow eradication of discrete ceramics courses, he sets up a theme of exponential degradation, ‘the ‘medium feels more fragile than usual… news is bad… slow motion collapse… abandoned…downgraded… mounting wreckage…’ etc etc. That sets the scene for the phoenix from the ashes or rather the ‘punk concert in a tea room.’ He then builds the bad-boy metaphor into a mildly rapacious declaration of war against MIMA’s ‘chaste galleries,’ and, by implication, against studio pottery, which the exhibition, ‘takes by storm, possibly by the throat.’ Don’t get me wrong, I’m delighted I’m not the only one who refers to the highly problematic notion of ceramics a ‘virtuous female,’ it’s just I’d rather constitute the achievements of this show as emancipatory rather than as violation. After all, all four have training in ceramics, three in a very orthodox sense and, for all I know, Sormin’s training may also have been very orthodox. They themselves chose to disrupt the virtue of the discipline, they didn’t come under attack.

That said, it’s a fine essay and immensely helpful to the many of us who did not see the show. As a general comment, I’d say he sounds assured about Brownsword and Twomey - he has a clear sense that he knows who they are and what they’re up to. He sounds uncertain and, possibly, unconvinced about Sormin’s work and is amused and also entranced by Harrison who he perceives primarily as a performance artist using the tropes of ceramics and Marxism in his performance rather than having any real attachment to either of them.

Continuity or Collapse: Ceramics in a post industrial era

Jorunn Veiterberg is an altogether more sober writer and more immersed in contemporary ceramic practice – certainly in contemporary studio practice. She takes as her starting point, almost as a given, the understanding that the industry has migrated to the studio and that studio potters are now deeply immersed in industrial as well as 20th century studio practices. Her essay is a survey of contemporary practice related to the industry and to collaborative, or community, non-individualistic practices. Thus the essay ranges from the work of groups like We Work In A Fragile Material and Temp, both Scandinavian groups who work collectively with what ceramics means as well as with what it does, to Marek Cecula, based in the USA and very much the individual studio artist practitioner, but one who designs for industry as well. The latter is not a new model. Cecula’s is the traditional model. Studio practice alone is very unusual indeed and probably took off only when the growth in arts schools meant that artists could teach. Otherwise artists of all kinds have always worked for public institutions, be it frescoes for churches or portraits for monarchs and their courtiers.

Veiteberg discusses the rise and rise of the readymade as a material in individual studio ceramic practices and ends with Christin Johanssen’s ‘Feminoir,’ the urinal for women which operates, according the artist, ‘in the borderland between industrial design and fine arts.’ Johanssen makes work in the studio that imitates industrial design. She sees this area of practice as a way to ‘question and discuss function and design,’ which Veiteberg seems to agree with. I hope that ceramics, as it reinvents itself in what Veiteberg calls, the ‘post-industial’ age, won’t be quite so po-faced that artists feel obliged to be ‘questioning and discussing function and design,’ all the time. I’m slightly concerned that this is going to be virtue reinvented. It’s a bit clean and worthy sounding – which is funny, when you consider how witty and un-worthy ‘feminoir’ is.

Veiterberg’s writing produces ceramic practice as an immensely self-conscious process - this is in some contrast to Adamson, who has a brief love affair with something he perceives as mad and dangerous, in the positive sense of those words, but then extricates himself. The book is a good read about current practice and is illuminating and hard working – by which I mean that a relatively small amount of writing about one exhibition with a finite number of images does an enormous amount to inform and gives the reader a clear sense of an expanding practice at an exciting point of departure.

Ceramic Art London, 2010

2010-03-02T13:22:00.001Z

Here is the 6th Ceramic Art London at the Royal College of Art. It looked tired. Only six years old and tired already. It’s not so much that the work itself looks tired, it’s the overall curation of the event that is the problem. I would suggest parking restrictions. I mean a simple rule – you can park your pots here for two consecutive years, but no more, and no return within two years. That would help to refresh the show a bit but it needs more than that. I don’t know who is on the selection panel or on what basis they select, but it is clear they are not keeping the look of the whole in mind. If they need a wider variety of makers to apply for selection then they need to say so. At the moment it looks like they’re short of applications. There are far too many people who have been showing year after year. There were very few new faces. The inclusion of two makers of table ware in bone china, (Lowri Davies and Maria Lintott) was very welcome indeed and another, slightly over complicated, but nonetheless appealing collection of work by Solomia Zoumaras, (there for her second year), was also a welcome change.

CAL is not a survey of contemporary ceramic practice, no single show or art fair could achieve that and certainly not in that format – it is the standard approach to art fairs with a single small, kiosk type space for each maker. Susan O’ Byrne took over two spaces to show her troupe of dancing vermin, (one muntjac, ( a small deer), a pack of galavanting foxes and a gathering of crows,) but apart from that, it was one space each and set out your pots as tastefully as you can. Apart from O’Byrne, and the three named above, there was really nothing fresh, experimental, progressive, or thought provoking, - not the right space for contemplative or thought-provoking work anyway – but only these four made me stop and look again and want to see and know more. For a show this size, and this established, it isn’t enough.

Looking over the CAL catalogues for the last six years, the buzz and excitement of the launch in 2005 is barely recognisable as being part of the same event. It is difficult to discern if this is a gradual fade or a sudden collapse. The 2005 catalogue includes a collection of commentary from Grayson Perry, contributions from Edmund de Waal, Louise Taylor, (then head of the Crafts Council), as well as something from a collector, Michael Evans and from Jack Doherty, chair of the CPA which, with Ceramic Review, hosts the event. Variety breathed life into the show. Perry is, of course, a bona fide celebrity and can’t fail or, at that time, couldn’t fail to bring a sprinkling of stardust to almost any occasion. Edmund de Waal is the kind of star whose writing means something. In this otherwise unassuming catalogue, he writes a response to Stephen Bayley’s article published a year earlier in The Independent on Sunday, (Feb.15th 2004). The title of the article was: Pottery: The Evil in Our Society. While, according to de Waal, Bayley berates potters who, ‘did not know their place any more,’ de Waal himself responds by making the simple observation that they never had: ‘As to making installations, they were the currency of European Modernism,’ he remarks, after a brief discourse on the less functional aspects of Bauhaus.

The point is that there was lively debate, a sense of boundaries being broken, a sense, in short of a kind of renaissance in craft and, in particular, in ceramics. If commentators like Bayley and also Germaine Greer could get sufficiently steamed up about it to write articles in broadsheet papers, then we were certainly doing something right.

Now we are in a different phase. Ceramic work in mainstream and blue chip art galleries is becoming commonplace. It maybe tokenistic or only a brief flirtation, a kind of cultural tourism – let’s give this a try while we’re in recession. It doesn’t much matter, the danger for ceramics now is complacency. Where are the new voices, the new stars? Well they certainly weren’t at CAL. I’m not talking only about the work in the show, I’m almost more concerned about the ‘Discovery’ section – these are lectures and demonstrations. Whereas in earlier years we have had Clare Twomey (2009) talking about installation and Jeremy Theophilus talking about the forthcoming Biennial, both with a strong sense of mission and future developments, it seems we have now returned to a round up of fairly standard makers doing picture shows and demonstrating making techniques - tried and trusted, or maybe just tired and musty. Closer examination of the six catalogues I now have reveals that the seed of this is there right at that start. De Waal is recycled three times, the makers who give their presentations and demonstrations are the ones we’ve seen a thousand times before. Where is ‘the Discovery’ exactly? Is it not usual for London shows to curate new work rather than established work? How on earth can a public develop any sense of discernment, any experience of looking and deciding, if they are never presented with new work to consider and respond to?

In his 2005 essay, de Waal issues the following warning concerning the ways we might respond to Bayley’s attack: ‘There are other options, of course: bunkering down is an option, preaching to the converted is an option, talking to ourself is an option.’ This year’s CAL is disappointing because it has not heeded that warning. In responding only to the desires of the known and established ‘collectors,’ bringing in only the ‘tried and tested,’ it is, above all, talking to itself and people who talk to themselves quickly become boring. CAL cannot afford to look this dull again. The visitors and buyers will depart and with them will go much of the good will and enthusiasm that has been built up over the past six years.

For a different angle, please take a good look at the coverage of this event at Sliponline. You will find vast numbers of excellent pictures and probably some lively commentary - it says 'from Tuesday,' I guess this means Tuesday, March 9th or 16th.

Reflections and Spectulations: The last 3 months and the next 3 days in Iran

2010-02-09T23:01:00.013Z

These days I spend far too much time on facebook. I’ve come to rely on the constant flow of news from Iran, accompanied by comment and spontaneous calls for action in response to the most recent outrage. Last week the Iranian Green Movement and its supporters and friends were in action on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, (x2) and Sunday. Thursday saw some action at the Centre for Promotion of Persian Language and Literature, which hosted a dinner party for Iranian government officials, entitled, according to my source, ‘Standing Up To World Arrogance.’ Not a trace of irony was detected unless you count the presence of Yvonne Ridley, who always seems to be some kind of site-specific ironic self-parody. Friday was the 40th day after the deaths of the 8 people shot in the Ashura protests on December 28th. Saturday is the day people usually gather for an hour or so in Trafalgar Square in solidarity with the mothers of the murdered protesters. There were also people outside the Chinese Embassy protesting the continued support that the Chinese government gives to the regime. Sunday was a quiet gathering in front of the embassy, something which is now happening weekly again.

Countdown

One of my facebook contributors has been counting down to Thursday 11the February, with mounting excitement, as though expecting a sudden bang which will indicate, unmistakably, the sound the departing regime leaders and their stooges. Everyone expects that the end is nigh, but I’m still not clear what comes next. ‘Go on, what’s your best guess?’ asks an English friend but I’m useless in response. I mutter darkly with another Iranian friend at the Sunday demo – he like me has fears, ‘It’s just so dangerous at the moment.’ I do fear that Thursday 11th will result a blood bath. I do fear Tiananmen Square all over again. I don’t want any more ‘martyrs’ and I don’t want the gathering of mothers in mourning that takes place in Tehran and other Iranian cities weekly to grow any bigger. I don’t want any more mass graves, Iran has enough of them already, many dating from the early 1980s.

Anyone doubting the organisational capacity of the Green Movement, should probably think again. Here is the film they have sent out to the Iranian armed forces. It’s bilingual. So they want you to know they’ve done it.

A Message from the Green Movement to the Armed Forces of Iran:

The embedded video caught a nasty virus. Will upload again when the coast's clear. Apologies for irritating ommission. Claudia

Riding Authority
The tone and register of both the organisation of the protests and the reports on them by the Green Movement has changed markedly over the moths, which I’m going to look at in the next post and show various video footage I’ve been collecting. I think it’s getting more positive by degrees now. Time was when it seemed to be about working out how best to protest. As the opposition built, partly in response to the sheer brutality of the crackdown, the show trials, the reports of deaths, torture and, especially of the first hand accounts of rape, the people began to ‘ride’ authority, ‘piggy-backing’ on government approved demonstrations such as ‘Qods Day,’ ‘13 Aban,’ (the anniversary of the occupation of the US embassy by Iranian students in 1979; ‘Students Day,’ (anniversary of the shooting of 6 students on Tehran University campus by the Shah’s police force); and culminating in Ashura Day, 28th December 2009, when the gloves come off the current regime and they shot another 8 protesters including the nephew of Mir Hossein Mousavi. This was followed by the execution of two political prisoners, one arrested before the elections for campaigning for Mousavi and one arrested during the post-election protests - the latter was 19 years old. A further 9 have now been condemned. There is a great deal more to say about these but the government has now issued 3 entirely conflicting statements about the two who were executed. Initially, it announced, they were involved in the Ashura demonstrations, but both were in prison at the time, then it changed to a ‘monarchist group,’ until it was pointed out that no such group existed either in Iran or anywhere else, now they are part of the Mujahideen e Khalk, (who exist only outside Iran). We’ve had the ‘foreign powers’ story trotted out a couple of times as well. No doubt they’ll be Israeli agents next.

Constructing History In Advance

For the first time since the disputed elections of the 12the June 2009, the opposition leaders are actively encouraging the protesters to go out and confront the regime. The regime has demonstrated its willingness to shoot to kill whenever it pleases and shows no compunction. It has established that it is capable of conducting a ‘reign of terror,’ and, with the show-trials, the executions and now the announcement of the next 9 due to be executed, we could say that it has already begun. The Green Movement has also gathered considerable force and has the support of the much of the Iranian diaspora, but is not armed, unless the armed forces respond to that video. As far as I can tell, that’s pretty much it. I have no ‘best guess,’ and I’m not about to hazard one now. For now, I will just leave you with some of the calls to action and some of the imagery emerging in the last few days and weeks.

Movie trailer style, schmultzy accents:

Stirring stuff and Human Rights :

The last word in optimism:

The End:

Tableware Migrates And A Call For Action

2010-02-05T12:43:00.072Z

Crockery shop in Green Lanes Haringay, everything is imported from Germany.

Introduction

The wobbly brown pot, once much prized by aficionados of domestic studio tableware, has more or less departed. It has yielded to the prevalence of the wobbly white pot. If this is starting to sound like an investigation of the dominance of the grey squirrel over the red, well it’s not dissimilar. Time was when wobbly domestic pots were brown, stoneware and made in rural studios and industrial pots were white, straight, and made in urban factories. Now they’re all playing musical chairs and it’s a struggle to keep up, taxonomically speaking, with who’s doing what, where and why.

Still Alive

The condition of the British Ceramics Industry looks terminal and needs a revolution in design, in working practices and, above all, in the attitude of management and marketing to survive. There are numerous graduates of ceramics and / or design courses, many of whom are skilled in the kind of craft and design needed for industrial production or collaboration, but many, I suspect will end up working in either Germany or Scandinavia. Both Origin and the British Ceramics Biennial, (BCB), indicate that, although the making of tableware is not the dominant discourse in ceramic practice anymore, it is alive and well and there are many who work steadily producing ware that has that distinctively hand-made, uniquely studio look which is still immensely appealing to many of us – to me anyway.

Feral Parrots: Urban and Rural
To wit: Stoke on Trent, once the beating heart of the industry, has become small-town and quasi-rural – it’s certainly poor enough to count as rural and it’s the only place I’ve ever found where the ATMs dispense the money in fivers. Moreover, if the BCB, which it hosted at the end of 2009, is anything to go by, then it’s rapidly becoming more ‘studio’ (rural), and less ‘industrial,’ (urban). To confuse matters further, urban sophisticates now like to buy hand-made ware from urban studios, classed, by ‘The C Word; as ‘Terraced Industry.’ The latter now replaces the old ‘cottage industry,’ and those distant rural lands, once the home of the original, ‘cottage’ industries, have instead become home to an interesting clutch of quite exotic, almost colourful, stoneware makers, urban migrants to rural settlements who, like feral parrots, produce what Debbie Joy calls, ‘urban rustic.’ Step forward: Claudia Lis, James and Tilla Waters, Nick Membery, and Debbie Joy herself.

Claudia Lis with her work at Origin 2009

Parrots in Flight

Almost colourful – Lis’ work is very very sleek, almost-shiny-but-not-quite stoneware in a huge variety of luminous greys – ah yes, but not ‘Camberwell greys,’ forget Alison Britton, Lis makes grey into a highly complex colour. Think Corot and his 20 tones and you’ll be nearer the mark. J and T Waters also produce sleek stoneware for domestic use, also in colours, - a tad prim perhaps – but then urban stuff always is – that, after all, is what ‘urban’ means, now I come to think of it. Membery’s stoneware is a good tough colour and unbelievably well thrown. It’s what happened when stoneware, in the 60s and 70s sense of the word, went contemporary. He sells in kitchen shops – swanky ones, and you can buy on line too. It’s sort of butch but with added colour, definitely not prim, and it’s for POSH urban kitchens whose inhabitants want to look like they spend their summers in rural France and changed the colour scheme to blue, to remind them of the blue blue sky and the Med. When I say posh though, it’s not at all expensive. It’s brilliant value and looks fabulous. Debbie Joy makes a stoneware and porcelain mix, much chunkier than the work of the other four, but she dips it in glazes which look exactly like Italian ice-cream – there’s green, pink, blue and yellow - and then puts little bugs on in transfers. The overall effect is edible, child-friendly, and gorgeous.

James and Tilla Waters: Origin 2009
It’s interesting to note that none of these five makers are living or working in England now. Three are in Wales and one in Scotland. Studio rents are considerably cheaper and both Scotland and Wales take an enlightened view of supporting ‘rural ‘industries.’ (sic)

A Tale of Three Cities
Back in England, meanwhile, Chester and Bristol - which is almost Liverpool and Bristol - each have a domestic tableware potter: Rachel Holian and Hanne Rysgaard. Liverpool, Bristol and London were the three cities which hosted the development of blue and white ‘delftware’ pottery, particularly tea sets, in response to the expansion in commodities, - tea, coffee, chocolate and sugar – in the 18th Century. These two ‘heritage’ cities probably support more than one tableware maker each but these are the two whose work I’ve encountered. Both might be considered, ‘rustic urban,’ urban in essence but with a rustic tilt, rather than, as with Joy’s work, rustic in essence but with concession to urban desires. They reference industrial ware – it’s white and uses transfers and has much added colour, but the work is hand-made, complete with the all-important wobble. It seems apt that these cities, inheritors of innovation in tableware, should now be supporting the same.

Left: Hanne Rysgaard's milk carton and bottle jugs and wincyette teapots

Holian says she has difficulty selling in Chester itself. It’s very much a tourist town and a county town for horsey types who, in my experience, want either an ‘authentic’ wobbly brown rural pot for their chunky, stripped pine, kitchen table, or a proper Spode or Wedgwood dinner service for the mahogany dining table. The sort of bisexual, transnational, bi-lingual smart-ass stuff that Holian makes demands a slightly more, dare I say it, aesthetically heightened consciousness. She sells in Liverpool instead. The same is true of Hanne Rysgaard’s work. Rysgaard’s forms much more obviously reference industrial production – the carton jug is a fine example, but similar reference can be found throughout, from lustre rims on the ‘china-ware’ through to the teapot that looks like a reshaped winceyette nightie.

Terraced Industry: The Theory
So, if the ‘uban-ware’ is made in the Scottish and Welsh mountains and the ‘trans-ware’ in middle England, what’s happening in London? The clue is in the first paragraph. While the uban potters have migrated to the countryside, the rural potters are thriving in the heart of the metropolis. Akiko Hirai, Kaori Tatebayashi, Sophie MacCarthy, Linda Bloomfield, Chris Keenan, Louisa Taylor, all form a part of the complex of Terraced industries which can be found in all manner of side streets and olde cobbled courtyards across London. Two more – John Butler and Yo Thom have scuppered this neat little theory by escaping the city and settling in rural areas – although, to be fair – both are users of wood kilns so, arguably, need the extra space and appropriate planning laws which will accommodate such equipment. John Butler is a lesser-spotted maker of proper, warm toasty brown, wobbly wood fired pots. Yo Thom’s work is tawny in essence, but she has indigo tendencies, and her tableware, though splendidly wonky, has a little chic urban touch to it.

Terraced Industry: Who’s Who
In the urban terraced, classic studio model, The Chocolate Factory N16, which really was a chocolate factory and now has a courtyard, geraniums and studio cat, you can find the great-crested Sophie MacCarthy who makes elegant patterned table ware, stupendously well thrown and turned, (the latter is a rare thing these days) and Akiko Hirai – a gas kiln user, who dwells in a twilight cave of a studio and makes magnificently glazed stoneware which the cat treads on from time to time, adding new and unexpected wobbles to the plates. Linda Bloomfield works in shed at the bottom of the garden in Chiswick, and makes ‘rural pottery’ in every sense, except that it’s all pink underwear and satin petticoats. Her tableware is certainly more milkmaid than noble peasant but, happily, this is a milk-maid of extremely dubious moral virtue. Kaori Tatebayashi works in Wandsworth making what one of her galleries describes as ‘artfully wonky’ tableware – whose aesthetic is an oddly successful mix of Habitat and William Morris reproduction with Japanese ‘authenticity.’

Linda Bloomfield: Origin 2009

Chris Keenan produces ‘genuine’ habitat – his work is all thrown tableware and celadon glazes – more proper than this it doesn’t get. He designed a set for Habitat and makes very perfect ware, no wonkiness here – but he can get away with it because he is a rare user of the notorious Tenmoko glaze – the shiney black one, which is one of the original, authentic-wobbly-brown-pot-glazes. Most people’s work looked like big shiney turds, but Keenan makes his look like it wasn’t just a ghastly accident. It has an earnest frown to it, but at least you can take it into the kitchen without calling the environmental health.

Do You Stack Or Are You Gentry?
From Camberwell to Deptford and to the studio of Louisa Taylor, winner of the BCB batch award and a maker of impressively eccentric looking lego tableware. Taylor is concerned with stacking. Everything, even the Teapot, is stackable, which must make storage considerably easier and adds an interesting twist to the matter of display – which, let’s face it – is all part of the hand-made tableware aesthetic – how it looks after you’ve washed it up or even before. Taylor’s work is clearly rooted in rural, hand thrown studio tableware but, like Holian and Rysgaard, references industrial concerns. She too has taken the white option and her concern for functionality, such as the stacking, reveals a holistic interest in design for living. Taylor’s work is somewhat ‘straighter’ than the potters of Chester and Bristol though.

Crockery shop, Green Lanes, showing tea sets,samovars and assorted domestic china

Back To The City: Tableware Migrates

Talking of design for living, I’d like to return to North London, to Grand Parade, Green Lanes, Haringay. Here is a kitchenware shop – not the swanky King’s Rd type where you’ll find Nick Membery’s work, nor indeed the ‘aga saga’ kitchen shop of the Shires, this is a down at heel, semi-suburban, dinner sets, tea sets, saucepan sets and samovars outlet. Run by a Turkish family, with the various Turkish speaking communities of the area in mind, this shop thrives on the sales of matching dinner services, tea glasses in multiples and all things food-related which extend hospitality and help define an identity in terms of ethnicity, class and family values. ‘I have arrived, I have made my way in the world, I have a ‘normal sized’ family; a very big family when you put us all together; and a vast community of friends,’ it says. This is what is used when family or important visitors come to visit. This is middle class immigrant Wedgwood, except that it isn’t Wedgwood. Every last piece of china in this shop and numerous others like it has been imported from Germany. The ‘original’ English tea set, (or European tea set) did not include tea glasses with matching double-story teapots of the sort required for Turkish, Balkan, Eastern European, (sometimes), and Middle Eastern tea.

Turkish tea glasses, made in Germany, selling in London 2010

Meeting Migration
Edmund de Waal commented on Wedgwood’s long history, ‘not only of creating markets but also of incredible social commentary,’ in Crafts Magazine (217: 17). The five contributors to this article suggest that a combination of weak marketing and a failure to recognise the changes in the shape and behaviour of the ‘British family’ are two reasons, among others, why the company failed. The argument was that these changes meant that the multiple-piece dinner service was no longer relevant. This does not appear to be the case, it’s just that the giant family dinner service for special occasions has ‘changed hands.’ It is intensely frustrating that a company, like Wedgwood, with socially progressive origins was so unwilling to recognise and respond to the enormous changes in demographics that have occurred in this country over the last thirty years. The people who migrated here in the 50s, 60s and 70s have settled, prospered and developed their own brand of ‘British middle class,’ These cultures are still family - orientated. The family does come round to dinner and matching dinner-ware is expected and produced. Moreover people who migrate understand both price and value. They are not going to pay ludicrous prices for domestic china for family dinner. As the example of the Turkish shop above so amply illustrates, German industries seem to have cottoned on to this and produced the required goods at the right price in the right locations.

Engish tea things, made in Bristol by Hanne Rysgaard, selling in London 2009

What Happens Next And a Call To action

Of necessity, studio potters are responding to their markets. I am anticipating that the hand-made, ‘local potters’ will mainly be concentrated in urban centres, with the large centres such as London and Birmingham being able to support numbers of them, working out of sheds, as Bloomfield does, and supplying their locales. I would imagine most of these will be mature adults pursuing this craft as a second career. As long as the work is made and the desire for such ware is met, it doesn’t matter much who makes it. It does matter, however, that they tap into all their potential markets. We need ‘china,’ either factory or hand made, for Chinese New Year, Pesach, Ramazan, Rosh Hashana, Eid, Diwali, Now Ruz, the list goes on and on, to say nothing of accoutrements for shisha pipes, handsome receptacles for vodka and other delightful dalliances. Both the industry and the craft sector need to bring in new designs and develop new markets accordingly and they need to do this by noticing who lives here and what we use. In the case of the industry, I just hope it does so while there is still and industry left to respond.

Until February 13th 2010, Contemporary Applied Arts is showing, Domestic Contemporaries, 'focusing on the functional aspects of tableware within Ceramics.'

Links to websites of featured artists or sites with images and contact details:
Claudia Lis Debbie Joy James and Tilla Waters, Nick Membery John Butler, Yo Thom Akiko Hirai Kaori Tatebayashi Hanne Rysgaard Rachel Holian Louisa Taylor Sophie MacCarthy Linda Bloomfield Chris Keenan

Many Iranian Diplomats Seek Political Asylum

2010-01-15T19:53:00.003Z

Many Iranian Diplomats Seek Political Asylum
Probably the shortest post I've ever written, but do click on the link and read the article - it's short, succinct and revealing. I was prompted to follow it up myself after news emerged that the Iranian diplomatic representative in Norway resigned his post and petitioned for asylum there.
The Persian 2 English site is an excellent way of getting additional information about the situation in Iran in English.

Comparatively Speaking: Reviewing The Reviews

2010-01-12T10:24:00.004Z

Introduction
There’s something insanely decadent about eating eggs on toast and drinking really classy champagne for supper – I guess breakfast would be more decadent but then I’d just fall over on the ice. Anyway, perhaps this just tells you what a simple soul I really am underneath all the artspeak.

So, it’s January and my sciatic nerve’s still complaining but with nothing like the ferocity of previous months. I write / type standing up – sitting down is still an endurance test – but if it was good enough for Virginia Woolf, it’s good enough for me.

East End / West End

I was asked to write a review of Charlotte Hodes work at Marlborogh Fine Art. First the White Rabbit asks me to write about those four artists – Rebecca Warren, (Maureen Paley), Rachel Kneebone, (White Cube), Renee So, (Kate MacGarry), and Klara Kristalova, (Alison Jacques) – who feature this month’s Ceramic Review; then he asks me to review Hodes’ work, at a gallery in Cork St; now I’m to write about Judy Fox, another artist working in clay who is represented by PPOW gallery in New York – doesn’t look especially blue chip but seems to be a fairly standard fine art gallery – also represents the highly esteemed, (by The C Word anyway), Carolee Schneemann, who hales from the 1970s feminist art movement and did some extraordinary performances cleaning floors with her hair among many others.

So, The White Rabbit’s got very interested in artists who work in clay and show in swanky or moderately swanky art galleries – which is fine by me because it means I get a troll around London finding out about all this stuff, at least 50% of which I probably wouldn’t get to otherwise and I find that I’m still fascinated by what’s going on, or not going on, in these old West End joints.

The Great Divide

They appear to have frozen in time. I get the impression that the brash, oh so nouveau riche, (perish the thought), YBA, Saatchi / J. Jopling cohort burst into action in, say, 1989, eclipsing Cork street and it’s cohorts forever. They, Cork Street, responded by carrying on just as they always had. They still are. Some are, shall we say, renewing the stock; in other words they’re adding to their collection of artists. Marlborough certainly seems to have a number of dead artists on its lists. It represents highly established and still living artists like Paula Rego, Magdalena Abakanowicz, Frank Auerbach and Maggie Hambling as well as ‘the estate of RB Kitaj,’ Uglow, Pasmore et al. In addition they have an artist by name of Catherine Goodman, with whom I was a student at Camberwell. Imagine my surprise to find that she was still producing EXACTLY the same work she did at Camberwell on the painting degree course 25 years ago.

So they are still representing, ‘nice painting.’ Nowt wrong with that, you may say, but no point pretending it’s groundbreaking, exciting work with something new or different or especially incisive to say about the world. If Goodman’s work is representative of what they show, then it’s safe to say that they stock, well, ‘safe’ work: sellable, domestic, well-made, - the precise, painting equivalent of Alison Bitton. Sound - Camberwell Grey - 2nd eleven - inoffensive; a nice, moderately flattering mirror in which the bourgeoisie can view themselves. Well, why not? If there’s a market – flog it. Silence, you in the back row, no one mentioned dead horses!

Charlotte Hodes

So where does Hodes fit in? And how? Well she’s more up to date, I’ll give her that. Faultlessly crafted. No problem there either. Intellectually rigorous –can’t ague with the stuff, it’s absolutely rock solid. Thank goodness you don’t have to like it – but whatever you do, don’t go and see this stuff with a hangover. Or if you must, take a bucket or a lot of alka seltzer, because it IS nauseating. The morning-after-the-night-before colours really don’t help – it’s even got lumps floating about it. Grotesque. And, I’m sorry, but it really is vastly over-crafted. I could find no justification for it. It was, in Love Jonssen’s words, ‘a manifestation of wasted time.’ A harsh judgement, perhaps, but there seemed to be no discernible story, or not one that I really cared about- the faint-hearted feminist narrative is one we’ve seen a thousand times before – and is insipid at best anyway and beyond that – what? There’s no particular beauty either. It’s just ever so well crafted. I did try to convince myself it was some kind of spoof on Donatella Versace and might look well alongside some kind of high fashion home-ware collection, but I didn’t succeed.

Psiche Hughes

This is all in immensely sharp contrast to Psiche Hughes work that I bloggged about some time ago. Hughes shows at Francis Kyle gallery down the road, same neighbourhood. No claims can be made here about virtuoso exercises in ceramic materials. It isn’t ‘well crafted,’ but it is exactly as well crafted as it needs to be to say what she wants to say, and it’s not without skill – she certainly understands the difference between colour, local colour and tone – these are old fashioned craft-painting concerns – you see? I’m a wee bit conservative myself as well as being a simple soul. Hughes’ work is not made up of ‘museum pieces,’ forget that, but it is well observed and funny. If I had to choose, yes, I’d take Hughes imitation still-life, ‘bananas in a bowl,’ home with me long before I gave house room to one of Hodes confections.

East End

And what of the others, the four who graced the blue-chip East End galleries? I’d love one of Rebecca Warren’s terrifying women in my front room, by the window – that’d give upstairs something to think about. Kistalova’s work I just love, I’d take it with me anywhere and everywhere. The other two I can leave alone. So’s work I found just slightly too pedestrian – predictable somehow and Kneebone’s was just vastly over heated – almost too desperate – ‘look, I am a proper artist, I know all about the Renaissance and Roccocco and I wouldn’t dream of working in anything other than porcelain.’ It protests it authenticity too much – but it’s very early days in her case, she may yet become much more fluent and less self-conscious.

Conclusion

What was interesting to me about this little crop of artists who showed in 2009, is that it seems that the concerns and, in particular, the problems of artists working in clay seem to be broadly similar to those of potters working with clay –not when they make pots so much, but when they depart form making pots and start to produce work which suggests they might become part of the wider art world. They have exactly the same struggles with authenticity – but this time it’s ‘art’ authenticity that’s at stake; predictable ways of thinking about something, resulting in a too predictable narrative; and an over-concern with being authentically ceramic and designed, in the case of Hodes. The three who, I felt, had very much found their own voices, namely Kristalova, Warren and, although far less developed, Hughes, were able to identify a way they needed to work with the clay and, in turn, make it work for them. Certainly Kristalova and Warren are absolutely fluent in the ceramic dialect of their choice and it serves them fully, whereas Kneebone, Hodes and So are still, to some extent dominated by it. Kneebone, in particular, is too close to the grammar book and dictionary, but give her another five years, and I hope we’ll see something much more expressive – unless, of course, she becomes increasingly pedantic. Hughes is working with clay in her retirement, so is an entirely different matter. Still, I can’t help feeling that her very extensive understanding of language and of the particular demands of the art of translation give her a very astute and fully understood aesthetic sensibility.

Love Jonsson, ‘Conquered Time,’ 2009, in Skill, (Think Tank 05, 2009): 34.

Some Reflections On The British Ceramic Biennial

2009-12-14T21:56:00.005Z

BCB: Some Reflections On Fresh And Award Winners

I was invited to talk about this blog at a forum organised by the National Association for Higher Education in Ceramics, (NACHE). The intention, as far as I could discern, was to discuss the future of Ceramic education and NACHE’s relationship to it. The only thing I can tell you is that it looks likes it will now have some student representation and that it may well broaden out to include secondary school education. While I was there, however, I was able to have a good look at the Award Winners show and a quick look at Fresh.

The dominant theme of the AWs was undoubtedly pathos, or rather PATHOS – almost overwhelmingly so at times. It was appropriate but bizarrely inconsistent. While half of the work said, ‘I’m in mourning,’ the other half said, ‘Well I couldn’t give a monkey’s. I’m just continuing to reproduce the same stuff I’ve made for the last 30 years,’ – pots about pots and pots about material. Nothing wrong in that you might think and, indeed, there isn’t, it just looked like the selectors couldn’t decide what to do – have a show with a narrative, one which they’d forgotten to mention in advance, or choose what they fancied, mix it up and keep their fingers crossed. They probably would have got away with it if they’d had a couple more rooms to work with but, as it was, all the work was crammed into a too small space, which gave it that singularly unfortunate junk shop feel – which just added to the pathos.

The supreme winner was Neil Brownsword and deservedly so, thankfully – it always makes life easier when you find yourself agreeing with the selectors – and somewhat rare in my case – although, of course, I have no idea who else submitted images of their work, I might well have disputed the initial filter.

Brownsword chose to materialise, or rematerialise, a collection of detritus from Stoke Factories. Beautiful shreds of glazed weird bits of gubbins strewn around a plinth -the plinth was a bit unfortunate- but, as a whole, it was genuinely moving. The was a slow slide show which you couldn’t see because there was too much light, but the bits I did see had their moments- It wasn’t a slide show – it was what happens when you put the camera on a tripod and let it record whatever’s going on in front of it for a while – a series of those shot one day a week over a month or so. Some bits were shot through a wire fence which was particularly affecting.

Paul Scott also went for the pathos narrative using damaged and altered transfers on his industrially produced plates. A simple enough idea and one which communicated well.
The material-culture irony came from Connor Wilson, the ‘satire’ came from Steve Dixon who, unfortunately, decided to wrap himself in a copy of the Daily Mail, and - yes, that’s right, it’s almost too crassly embarrassing to have to write it, but he really did produce a series of pig’s heads with rosettes and little labels so we could identify exactly which politicians they were intended to represent. Moreover, he appears to have cast them from a real pig’s head which, from a distance, makes them look far too interesting to work as satire at all. Never mind. Then there was Philip Eglin – football as religion – no shit – now there’s an original idea.

We had the raku and general crustiness from David- gone- can’t remember his name, -or any of the others come to that. Ken Eastman showed that nice line in bone china, and a factory of some sort produced some SENSATIONAL paperweights, which included the campest looking owl I’ve ever seen. Fab.

Roberts – that’s his name: David Roberts. Raided his shed and brought out a couple of raku numbers he made earlier and we had those lobbed on a plinth. Oh well. Someone had to I s’pose.

Natasha Daintry produced hundreds of little – um- things- like over-sized thimbles in different colours and set them out in colour order and disorder. Looked like quite an interesting game for a particularly introspective, overly fastidious child. I quite liked it. Jacob van de Beugel was next to her with a series of thoroughly unpleasant bottles. I mean just because you’re a thrower of things unglazed doesn’t mean everything has to be brutally ugly. I think he trained with Julian Stair at one stage though. Looks like he’s absorbed all the brutalism and then turned it into multiples.

I didn’t, alas, get much sense of the architectural presentations. Sliponline have covered those and everything else in some detail with endless pictures, so best thing is to tune into them and watch the show. Then you can ignore everything I’ve said and decide for yourself.

Fresh was brilliant. Feezing cold but brilliant. It was in a disused factory workshop. I guess it’s almost inevitable that new grad shows are going to be more enjoyable than a show made up of largely very established makers because it’s not freighted with all sorts of expectations or irritations that have already been developed. Fresh, overall, had a strong sense of materiality and of the ‘place’ of ceramics in society and material culture, mainly the former though. Again, Sliponline have the pictures so that’s going to be the best place to have a good look if you didn’t get to see the show.

I’ve just remembered I missed out Halima Cassell and Clare Twomey. This is because they were easily missed. Their works were hidden, like a treasure hunt one had to stumble across them by accident. Cassell’s were perched on a ledge high above the main show and Towmey’s was hidden in gallery above the main gallery, glassed in as though it had an infectious disease – it was her jasper-ware dust again so it probably did. It’s one the best things I’ve seen her do in ages and ages. Quite creepy and theatrical. Miss Haversham may have got dressed and departed from the V&A but now we know she came to Stoke and created some kind of mayhem over the dining room table. Very literary and 18th Century – cinematic as well as theatrical.

Looking down on Cassell’s work from on high worked quite well, you really got a sense of their intricacy and also of their architectural ancestry. Her work is derived from the geometric patterns in Islamic architecture and was originally executed in brick clay – much of it, I think, still is.

Brownsword showed a film at the forum which was a sort of eulogy to an abandoned clay pit – well not quite. It was side-splitting and, from the point of the view of the film maker was clearly meant to be. Brownsword, who ‘played a starring role,’ gamely went along with it – pointing out that it was filmed like a western – but I’d say, very obviously a spoof on a western. It had that daft, hard bitten, macho pioneering-movie quality to it, the ones filmed in period costumes with endless shots of brave suffering people squelching through inhospitable landscapes in unsuitable carriages with exhausted horses, with lots of soupy music and tragic but brave moments.

My hunch is that the other two, two immensely earnest Scandinavian artists, may not have thought of what they were doing as quite so hilariously funny. They and NB were in this pit making it into a giant work of landscape art. Just watching the woman ramming her knees and jarring her spine into the not very yielding cold wet clay made me almost cry with the back pain that was coursing through me at the time. I hope I never have to watch anyone being such a bloody idiot again. Why, oh god why, do so many potters / makers think they have to act macho? I just don’t get it. As if the wholly unacknowledged derivation of Asger Jorn and Noguchi weren’t irritating enough – and let’s face it, Jorn was irritating enough to begin with.

There was much much more to see in Stoke and the first BCB was a fine tribute to that city’s achievements. I’ve said more than enough now but there is plenty more to be said. I have merely scratched the surface. I hope much more will be said and that much will be learnt to take forward to the next Biennale. There was some talk of the British Ceramics Biennale moving to other cities – perhaps – but I’d be happy for it to stay in Stoke for a while yet. It’s a weird place, but it kind of works.

Some Notes From A Prolonged Absence - Getting Ready To Continue

2009-12-11T12:54:00.003Z

This has been a pronged absence. I’ve been showing Shattered and nursing the most severe, vicious and unforgiving episode of sciatica I’ve ever had. It is this that has prevented me from writing. I couldn’t sit down long enough to write anything, still less concentrate on anything I might want to write.

So – how do I now squeeze everything into one small post in preparation for continuing? Well, firstly by providing two excellent links.

The first, Potkin Azarmehr’s blog, For a Democratic Secular Iran. For Peace and Prosperity in the Middle East has to be the best coverage in English of events in Iran at the moment, - so for readers interested in catching up on that check it out.

The Second is Sliponline; produced by
Eleanor Snare and Alexander Archer-Todde who are writing lucidly, comprehensively and robustly about ceramics and, in particular, have some excellent coverage of the first British Ceramics Biennale, (BCB), in Stoke on Trent.

I was going to write a post about Grayson Perry’s show at Victoria Miro, ‘The Walthamstow Tapestry,’ but pain prevented that and so too did the show itself. It just wasn’t up to his usual standard. It really lacked energy. Now this may just be a projection of mine. It was a huge effort to get there, and I’d hoped for something that’d make be glad to be alive, which his work usually does, but he seemed bored. Even the tapestry was predictable. A great idea, but the idea was better than the result, which looked like he was just going through the motions. True it’s not handmade so cant rely on the weird irregularities that occur when things are so produced, but that wasn’t the main problem – it was just too simple, nothing to surprise I suppose. Maybe this is the cost of fame – we get to know someone’s work and their way of working almost too well, so they couldn’t surprise even if they wanted to. I suspect another reason though. I think the pots were quite old and rejected in the past, just brought in for the show. I suspect that the tapestry is just a way of living up to the demands of the Perry Market. I have a hunch that the real Perry work occurred elsewhere, around the same time, at a fashion show he did at - I think it was St. Martin’s college, part of University of the Arts, London. I’d love to know what that was like because I think that’s where his spirit went. Hope so anyway. Otherwise I really will get depressed.

November 4th / 13th Aban

2009-11-08T16:24:00.007Z

‘Huh,’ snorts Masoud, ‘I’m not staying here for a load of Rafsanjani’s goats,’ and stomps off into the gloom of the early November night.
The Green Movement of London, ‘Sabz e Landan,’ formed with such verve and tenacity in response to the electoral fraud in Summer 2009, has, shall we say, hit a deciduous patch. Bits of it a tumbling off, bits being peeled back, branches we didn’t even know existed laid bare, exposed to the merciless winds of autumn, festering wounds oozing all over the place and so it goes on.

All those differences I talked about – with so much optimism- back in August, well, they’ve all risen to the surface and bubbled and spat and spouted and burst into chaotic, recriminatory rankling argument. Superficially, it’s about reformists vs. revolutionaries, but, the reformists are fighting each other as much as or more than the revolutionaries. My feeling is that this is standard issue, grass-roots-movement, jostling for power, position, visibility, clout and attention. There’s that unmistakable autumnal sound of the clunking of antlers - male antlers in this case.

I’m advised: ‘we are learning about democracy;’ ‘we have grown up in a dictatorship;’ ‘Iran has never had a democracy,’ etc. Problem is, I’ve witnessed exactly the same processes in UK grass-roots movements for as long as I can remember, and we’ve had democracy or near enough, for several centuries. Nah – these are just competitive displays of posturing, parading and intermittent punch-ups – and this is just round one. There’ll be several more bouts yet.

Meanwhile, everyone put on a brave face and behaved themselves for an evening and gathered outside the embassy on November 4th, (13th Aban – Iranian month), and got stuck into their favourite slogans and lit candles and sang and chanted and shouted some more slogans, and disapproved of each other, but it worked. For a moment I caught a glimpse of what an Iranian democracy might look like. Mottled and no mistake. The Communists were there – looking like something straight out of the British Museum, - really classy though, and they’re always so amiable and good-natured and thoroughly well behaved. The Sabz – Mousavi were out in force, which was weird because they are the ones that turn up least often. The Sabz – general-purpose-liberal-democracy-go-with-the-flow, we-don’t-really-want-an-Islamic-Republic-but-we-don’t-want-to-upset-anyone – these are the majority who come to almost all the demonstrations and who I know well, they were all there but a bit drowned out by the more pious ‘allahu akabar’ lot. And then a bunch of lefty ex-revolutionaries brought up the rear –generally in good spirits- and they too are demo regulars.

Things were very different in Iran however. The official parading of 13th Aban commemorates the storming of the American Embassy by Iranian students, so, true to recently established form, (see Qods day demonstrations, 19th September), the Iranian green protestors took to the streets in their tens of thousands in numerous cities across Iran, and called for the death of the dictator and the freeing of the political prisoners. They were beaten ferociously by Basiji for their pains but even so, the subverting of an officially sanctioned, government parade provides them with a bit more cover than they had during the days after the electoral coup d’etat. There are many more days such as these to come. I’ll try to keep posting.

My thanks as always to Iman Nabavi who takes the pictures and makes them available to all. Thanks to all who turned out to demonstrate and, above all, thanks and immense respect to the brave women and men, young and old, able-bodied and disabled who fill the streets of their cities in Iran and continue the fight for democracy against colossal and brutal odds.

Miss Haversham Gets Dressed: The New Ceramics Galleries At The V&A

2009-10-12T16:30:00.011+01:00

Edmund de Waal once commented that, ‘ceramics have not been well served by museums.’ They haven’t. Museums have tended to view ceramics as historic objects. The meaning and purpose of contemporary ceramic work, which is sometimes exhibited alongside, is at best uncertain and at worst the whole lot is confined to the top floor of the museum, like the mad woman in the attic, disconnected from the rest of the museum’s displays, with few visitors and offering no meaningful dialogue with today’s audiences.

So, the ‘mad woman in the attic,’ the jilted or abandoned bride,- namely the V&A’s ceramic collections - has had a make-over. Someone has bravely attempted to sort out and make sense of the most colossal symptom of inflated imperial over-production imaginable. The V&A seems to have examples of everything ceramic that has ever been made or collected.

I am one of those few visitors that used to climb to the top of the museum, with flask and sandwiches and compass in case of bad weather, and spend hours gazing at rose-painted Chinese enamelware, and decorous Sevres porcelain. I’d stop, about half way up to adore the stoves, which had somehow escaped. I seem to remember them being on the next floor down, but I’m probably wrong.

The main thing is that it’s all still there – acres of it in new cabinets. Yes, it’s still all in cabinets. They haven’t gone that radical. Much of it is still crowded like Kings Cross on a rainy Friday. But you can still warm yourself on the stoves and gaze with love at the Andrea della Robbia leaning nonchalantly against a wall somewhere.

Pots At Work: Teaching Ceramics
The really BIG change is the teaching gallery. It has a real live studio where you can watch real live potters making things, like going to the zoo, only I don’t suppose mating in public is encouraged. There’s a reconstruction of a Lucie Rie studio – now this is interesting because the ‘studio potter’ is presented as an historical exhibit – so this must be the stuffed extinct animals section of the museum. The middle bit of this gallery, like a spine running down the centre, is a display of clays and glazes and all manner of ‘how to do it’ explanations and instructions. It’s brilliant. The best bit of the whole show is in this section. It’s called ‘under the sea’ (something like that). It’s a case full crockery that has been salvaged from wrecked ships that were carrying tea and the like from ‘The East’ and also carried chests full of crockery. It’s got bits of coral and you can almost smell the salt water and see the fish. It’s wonderful.

Contemporary Collection: The Ready-Mades
Finally – the other big change – is the attempt to exhibit the contemporary collection and connect it to the historic collections. Where they’ve mixed it up with the historic collections, it really works well. The teaching section has a several cases of contemporary work –mostly from Norway with a couple of particularly successful pieces by Paul Scott, (UK). These are examples of works where the artists are using ‘ready-mades,’ and they undoubtedly fare best in the V&A context. The overwhelming majority of the collections are made industrially - that’s just what people like to collect. So inevitably the work that is connected with the ceramics industry is in the right context. At last! These makers have not, in the main, been served that well by craft galleries.

Contemporary Collection: The Clay Pots
There ‘s also a collection of industrial based work in a cabinet in the ‘Contemporary Ceramics’ section and, again, you immediately sense it’s in the right place. The rest of the work still struggles for some reason. Ten years ago, someone asked me to go and look at the V&A contemporary ceramics collection and tell them what I thought of it. I said I thought it was an absolute disgrace. I remember being really horrified. It was an apology for a collection. Not only was it shockingly narrow, restricted to the worst kind of stoneware ‘Camberwell-Grey’ studio ‘vessels,’ it didn’t even have the best examples of those. It resembled the reject section of Oxfam – the stuff they put in boxes on the pavement and sell for a quid. It’s not quite as bad now. Modernist stoneware has expanded to the next phase of modernism, but it’s all still strangely soulless. From dirty modernism we’ve progressed to clean shiney modernism. They are now buying better examples of people’s work and certainly the industrial collaborations and readymade users are looking good – these kind of artists just make much more sense of the obsession with being clean, shiny and meticulous.

Signs and Wonders: Edmund De Waal, 2009 - He started this post so I’ll let him end it

Structure
The new, improved contemporary collection is displayed in a dark and solemn room like a tomb. It’s not a room as such, it is a wooden gallery - In the middle is a square opening. You can peer over the balustrade down into the entrance hall. The big lumpen mounds of fired clay which represent the truth-to-materials section of the contemporary work is arranged on a semi circular raised runway which embraces the gallery. The semi circle of the ‘stage’ – for such it is – the pots are spot lit in a brave effort to make them look more dramatic - connects it to the dome above. The bright white of the dome is circled at its base by a glistening red steel bracket. If you were to take a cross section of the bracket it would look like one of those square brackets: ] - like that. On the lower lip of the bracket are perched the white pots you probably associate with Edmund de Waal. The overall effect is slightly more elegant-interior-design-ish than I was expecting. I had imagined something that would look immensely precarious and a bit dangerous, with the pots stacked up to some height. It’s actually much more controlled than that, more arranged. The colour is magnificent. It really lifts the drowsy darkness lurking below – there is a lightness about the work, both in the sense that it is well lit and in the weightlessness sense, that provides a sharp and very welcome contrast to the layer beneath – where one half expects some of the crustier pots to start hatching.

What It Feels Like
The best bit is remembering to check from the entrance hall downstairs on your way out. You really can see it from the ground floor. From there it resembles the gums of some frightful hag bearing her chipped teeth at you. When you get closer, the chipped teeth turn out to be pots. They contain elements of various part of the collection so it is like a celestial meditation on the mighty imperial collection of collections.

Congress
One of the aims of Signs and Wonders was to connect the historic and contemporary collections and to embed it all in the architecture of the building. This it does very successfully, especially since it also connects the two, apparently disparate halves of the contemporary collection – the ready-mades and the carefully made, finely produced porcelain appear to have no connection whatever with the big beasts in the darkened cave. If you were to view it Marxist terms, it would be like trying to connect the lumpen proletariat – noble peasants toiling in the cave, with the petty, ever-so-refined bourgeoisie nestling in cabinets with tight lips. De Waal’s pots occupy the space which is exactly in between and which is somewhat under occupied at the moment. He still makes pots. They’re clay pots. They’re not obsessively clean and finicky and tidied up to within an inch of their lives – at least thy don’t look like they are – and porcelain seems to attract the most anally retentive of potters who just cant resist imitating the precision of industrial ware. De Waal relishes the wonky aspects of the material, its ‘mind of its own’ness, he certainly doesn’t do precious – well a bit sometimes, but not so it makes you worry, but not does he pretend he’s toiling in the mud. De Waal’s ‘collection’ is more like a conference of pots and they do succeed in unifying the two halves which is quite a feat.

Origin, The London Craft Fair, 2009

2009-10-07T23:11:00.009+01:00

I didn’t expect to be assailed by the scent of lavender when I got to Origin, but I was – well it is a craft show after all - and a nice lady called Maxine Sutton has very obligingly, understood what craft is really about and made lavender bags and tea cosies, handsomely printed and sewn up like children’s sewing kits. They really are the business and the best bit is that the lavender bags have biologically in/accurate hearts printed on them. The heart design is the sort that shows valves and arteries but the shapes are traced in leaves in flowers. Brilliant!!

So Origin begins with a hint of the village flower show while being, unmistakably, a glitzy urban trade fair – a bit kitsch, a bit snazzy, a bit – well very naff at times – but proud. This is what works so well with this year’s selection, it seems much more certain of its own identity, much more confident than it has in the past. Industry is present but not dominant, it’s part of the process in conversation with the handmade or individually designed. This year’s ‘interventions’ use the ancient uber-craft discipline of basket weaving, - but this is post-modern basket-weaving, forget physiotherapy. I’ll write more about them next week, once they’ve had time to develop. Gone are the dark recesses containing ‘art’ as though it was something mildly unpleasant deposited under a lamp post. Origin, in short, has ‘come out.’

Jewellery, textiles of various sorts and ceramics dominate. There is a strong flavour of pink, lacy, girly feminine, - it’s a bit in yer face at times, splendidly tasteless, but a VERY welcome relief from the tedious thudding masculinity of ‘pure’ studio craft. Origin is altogether more promiscuous than it was: round the corner from the lavender you know there’ll be a bit of expensive cheap perfume. Someone made jewellery that looked like chocolates and presented then in pink sponge like fairy cakes. Ludicrous but very very effective.

Consistent with the extravagant cavorting of ceramics the other side of London, (in the Temple of the Applied Arts,) Sevres porcelain was a strong flavour in this year’s ceramics selection. Excessive, absurd, I’m not sure I really want to see it again, but it was fab just this once. See Kate McBride, Timea Sido,(second picture from top), and Jo Davies, for instance. At the extreme end of this is Jasmine Rowlandson – the Donatella Versace of UK ceramics. It looked tailor made for the Dubai market to me, but should do well here is she can reach the various diasporas to whom it will undoubtedly appeal.

This is not to say that ‘old fashioned’ studio ceramics has turned tail and fled. All of the above is ‘old fashioned studio ceramics.’ But somehow there’s more ceramic and less studio – its less noble peasant and bit more whorish – halleluja. A nice bit of anagama firing or similar would have provided a good contrast, but that kind of approach to making was conspicuous by its absence. It’s a relief not to see grizzly stoneware, but the swathes of pink gold and frills will pall very soon if its not balanced out with something a wee bit calmer. You cant live on marshmallows alone.

Chris Keenan, The Guardian Angel of Celadon Coated Tableware was there, representing ‘proper pottery,’ and also proving that celadon can still be tableware, it doesn’t have to be deconstructed to be desirable. Sue Nemeth’s Middle-European, folk-pottery inspired mould-cast porcelain, (picture top), brought all the strands together - very proper pottery, while also very pretty, feminine without being fetishistic, graceful, and very much her own vision.

Week one was seething with visitors within the first few hours of opening. That morning, Deborah Carre of Carreducker had received a Selvedge award. Now the presence of these shoemakers is something of a triumph. It’s a been a long time coming, The crafts Council, for decades, would have nothing to do with them. Not ‘pure’ enough apparently. But they, the CC, have now embraced design and collaborations with industry, so, with a bit persuasion from various people no doubt, shoemakers are at last allowed in. Carre’s stall looked magnificent. She had a case showing the tools of the trade as well as collections of beautiful hand made shoes. It was the proof positive of the confident, trade fair approach, a convincing exposition of craft as an industry in itself.

Belly Dance Congress, September 2009

2009-10-07T11:11:00.002+01:00

Middle Eastern dance, popularly known as ‘bellydancing’ suffers from all manner of image problems in the West. Firstly, ‘Middle Eastern dance,’ as such, doesn’t exist. There are hundreds of different kinds of dance and, although you will hear people speak of ‘Turkish’ dance, ‘Egyptian’ dance and so forth, it should be understood that these various ways of dancing are really more associated with regions than national borders and even more strongly associated with culture - culture shaped by communities – by their language, religions, occupation, history and relative mobility.

Dance Migration
The extent to which various population groups have migrated, and also the extent to which they themselves have acquired new populations and influences, has had as great an impact on dance as it has had on language, religion, cooking and all other forms of social and political discourse. Thus the traditional, folkloric dance of the Egyptian Camel herders of the Nile region, ‘Saidi,’ for example, will be categorically different from the ‘Mwahashat,’ an Arab/Andalucian court dance. Technically though, they’re both Middle Eastern dances or ‘bellydancing.’ To add to the confusion, they may share some characteristics depending upon exactly which Arab population it was which colonised the Andalucian region of Spain and when.

Restaurants and Cabaret
Bellydancing, in the West, is often considered to be an embarrassing episode in dodgy restaurant at best and, at worst, a form of strip tease. It certainly counts as ‘cavorting in an unseemly manner in public,’ whichever way you look at it and it’s almost always considered to be amateur. So professional dancers in this discipline have their work cut out. Not only do they have to dance better than anyone else if they’re going to have a ghost of chance of being taken seriously and getting paid for what they do, they also have to ward off the prurient interest, entice those with a genuine interest in dance and then, after all that, create opportunities to perform. That bellydance has never, to my knowledge, received any public funding, also speaks volumes, especially when compared with other kinds contemporary dance.

Orientalism and Authenticity
Further complications are added by those who consider the whole business to be an exercise in post imperial Orientalism of the most insidious kind. True this would have to come from someone largely ignorant of the history and culture of the dance and somewhat naïve politically but it shows what serious exponents of this dance are dealing with. If it's 'authenticity' you're looking for, you may need to look elsewhere - if not, take a look at the last video on this post featuring Fifi Abdo dancing at a wedding surrounded by christmas decorations in Egypt. If that doesn't disrupt every last vestige of concern with the 'A' word, nothing will.

From Hollywood to Hip Hop
In the 20th Century, Cinema, especially Hollywood had a huge influence on the Urban dancers of Cairo and Cairo duly returned the favour to Hollywood and particularly to 1970s American pop. Ballet seems to creep in all over the place and I have no doubt that Hip Hop is mixing it up a storm with Saidi and a tinge of Flamenco somewhere – London probably – or Surrey – that beating pulse of the Bellydance Universe - Oh yes! For it was in deepest, darkest Surry that we convened in sequinned apparel to shimmy, camel and undulate our way through three glorious days of sunshine and dancing.

What Happens at a Belly Dance Congress
Bellydance Congress sets aside all these anxieties, raises the calibre to the heavens, and summons the assembled deities of the dance to come and show us the real thing in all its variety and complexity. Congress brings in the megastars from all over the world and devoted fans and students who came from as far afield as the USA and Russia to attend master classes, workshops, and take a once in a lifetime opportunity to see some of these people perform.

Classes and Stars: Leyla Jouvana
I attended two three-hour classes with Leyla Jouvana, one on layering of techniques and moves and the other on dancing with two or more veils to a mixed ability class. I did a technique class, also three hours, with Caroline Affifi, a tabla solos class – that’s dancing to a solo drum - with Kay Taylor and I had the exceptionally good fortune to be facilitating a class with Randa Kamel. In principle I was facilitating one of Leyla Jouvana’s classes as well, but she did not teach in a way that required it so I was able to do the class in full. Jouvana (Germany) and Kamel (Egypt), are major stars and rarely in this country so the opportunity to do their classes is a rare, extraordinary and invaluable privilege. Jouvana’s rigour and attention to detail accompanied by careful, precise explanations make her an exceptional teacher. She is accompanied by her husband, Roland, on the drum, so the music is always exactly as she needs it.

Randa Kamel
Kamel’s class, the one that I facilitated, was for dancers in grades 3 and 4 and I know from experience that these grades at international level are much higher than is appropriate for my experience. ‘Facilitating’ in this instance means that I had to ensure that the rows of dancers in her class were rotated regularly so that everyone had a chance to be at the front. Even now, remembering being at the front of her class, so close to her that I could see clearly every move that she made and exactly how she did it, brings tears to my eyes, it’s a chance I don’t really expect to be repeated and I shall not forget it soon. Hers was not an easy class to follow and many of the students clearly struggled in spite of my best endeavours to ensure they could all see, but the truth is, many were just not up to the level she expected of them.

The Mighty Fifi Abdo
This year’s Bellydance Congress was dominated by the legendry presence of her Imperial Highness, (massive drum roll), her Royal Magnificence, the Astounding FIFI ABDOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gasp. Now I get it. Now I understand why everyone talks of this woman. I talked at length in this post about the problems that Bellydance faces in the West. One of the results of this is that we now have a collection of dancers, excellent dancers, who produce highly polished performances, virtuoso displays of technical perfection. And, yes, they make you gasp, but after a while of seeing one after another after another of these displays, one can start to lose the will to live. The intense focus on technique really can be a bit soulless and where you have a dance whose exponents often rely on cabaret to build up experience, it seems we lack a demanding dramatic repetoire that might serve as a training ground for evolving performance dancers.

The Horse, The Hurricane and a Touch of the Divine
Fifi Abdou whirls through all this like a hurricane. Her dance has a kind of roughness and raw edge to it which is wholly unexpected. She struts about on stage like she owns not only the stage but the audience too. She tosses her mane like some demented dervish horse and twirls and shimmies simultaneously punctuated by deep bowing twirly things – we call them ‘breaks.’ No one dances like this without close attention to detail and careful learning in the early years, but technique, practice and training alone will not bring it either. She’s an immensely expressive, intimate dancer, bold and brash in her gestures, there’s almost a touch of aggression, but combined with her own unique equine grace it all results in an electrifying stage presence and performance.

East & West: Cross-Cultural Encounters - The Conference

2009-10-07T11:04:00.002+01:00

View of ST. Andrew's looking out over the harbour

I’ve always been a bit suspicious of Art History. When I was still at school and also when I went to Art School and the early 1980s, Art History was about the lives of painters and about ‘brush strokes.’ ‘The Renaissance,’ meaning the one that took place in Western Europe, was deemed to be centred in Italy, specifically Florence; this Renaissance was the back-bone of the subject. All other parts of the History of Art were somehow attached to or related to this time, place and collection of work. I still love Florence and I love what I learned of that time, but I’m very happy indeed that History of Art has become something else entirely, as East &West: Cross-Cultural Encounters eloquently demonstrated.

Orientalist Painting In Poland
The papers in this conference took me into corners of the history of the art that I didn’t know existed. I had no idea, for example, that Polish artists in the 19th Century were producing Orientalism in paintings every bit as rhetorical and absurd as anywhere in France or Britain. However, the underlying narrative, according to Ana Chruscinska, was predicated on Poland’s political situation, particularly its loss of independence, which prompted artists at that time to deploy the Orientalist imagery as a metaphor to describe Poland’s own subjugation.

Ana Chruscinska: Myths about the inhabitants of the Arab World as depticted in 19th Century Polish Oriental paintings

Hungarian Ottoman Woodcuts And Mock Battles
Also examining a nuanced relationship to imperialism and its imagery, AnnMarie Perl discussed the relationship between Hungarian and Ottoman artists during the Ottoman period when Hungary formed part of that vast empire. Far from being divided along cultural and ethnic lines, she argued that there was a well developed cross-cultural transfer which substantially unsettled the idea of an ‘authentic’ Ottoman aesthetic and genre. All this was discussed through book illustrations – wood cuts - and mock battles – yes Mock Battles –the Reenactment Society is not, after all, one of the more outré and eccentric inventions of Middle England, but was a major source of entertainment in the Ottoman Empire and documented in woodcut illustrations. Marvellous!

This, I discovered, was what I loved about Art History. It’s the weird little details which seep through and which tell you so much about the period. I was envisaging Hungarian and Turkish or Armenian or Greek artists dining together in each others houses and swapping tabards and swords before gadding off the local tea house to get uproariously drunk and party it up a storm in the street staging a mock battles till dawn when they’d be rounded up by the district gendarme for being drunk and disorderly and sent home to sober up.

Dr. Seung Jung Kim: The Beginnings of the East-West Dialogue: An Examination of Dionysiac Representations in Gahdhara and Kushan-Mathuran Art

Original Copies
Authenticity, as you might expect, was a dominant theme of the conference and it waltzed into view with Princess Akiko’s paper on the gentle art of reproduction. Her focus was on the repros of Japanese artefacts in the British Museum. Konstanze Knittler talked about ‘Famille Noire’ - a very weird-looking kind of porcelain that I’d never heard of – with a very intriguing story attached. It seems that hundreds of wealthy collectors have collected thousands of pieces of black porcelain believing them to belong to a much appreciated part of Chinese porcelain history – the Kanxi period, (1622-1722), and that this ‘famille’ turns out to be the bastard progeny of another period entirely – late 19th Century – Perish the thought!! This, along with Princess Akiko’s paper, neatly encapsulates much of what the conference discussed, namely, who’s to say what’s authentic and what if the reproduction is really more interesting than the ‘original’ ?

Dr. Claudia Clare: The Artist and the Coup D'Etat: A User's Guide to Exhibiting Ceramics in Politically Unstable Situations

Seen Through The Lens
The lens – the fiendish camera – popped up every so often. It began the conference and ended it – in a way – and it appeared in the middle cleverly disguised as paintings by Jackson Pollock. This was about a group of Japanese artists - the Gutai group, based in Osaka in the 1950s. They are widely thought to be influenced - almost formed really – by Jackson Pollock and that their work sprang out of and responded to his as an homage. However Natalie Roncone’s paper showed that what they were responding to was not Pollock’s painting or his writing but to a collection of photographs by Hans Namuth of Pollock ‘in action,’ published in a 1951 issue of ‘Art News.’ In other words their ‘homage’ was predicated on someone else’s interpretation and mediation of Pollock’s work.

Dr. Luke Gartlan: Portraying China's 'Character': Baron von Stillfried's Portfolio of Shanghai Photographs

Confusing The Image
This first appearance of the camera was in the Keynote speech by Dr. Luke Gartlan, about a collection of 19th Century photographs of ‘life’ in China which failed to attract buyers and was quickly abandoned. Gartlan argued that the main reason for this was that this album of, let us say, ‘images of China’ did not meet or in any way match the image of that country that the Western consumer expected. He compared it to similar albums made by the same photographer, Baron von Stills, of Japan which sold in their thousands. They look remarkably similar. And that’s the rub. They weren’t supposed to. China was considered an, ‘unpaved, dirty, stinking,’ place, quite different from the elegant, stylish exotic Japan. The Western Consumer duly turned up its western nose and refused the offering.

Shirley Bahar: A War Within: The Westernized Performance of Israeli Artists

Had We But World Enough And Time…
This is such a tiny bite of what was really a feast of careful, passionate research and lovingly honed knowledge. There were papers on consumers of Manga, on queer masculinity and nationalism, (possibly), in Japanese / (American?) photography, on masculine self reflexivity in Israeli film, on 18th Century Chinese court paintings, on Graeco-Roman representations in Kushan Buddhist art, on contemporary Chinese calligraphy, on Orientalist bookcovers in contemporary Western publishing, and on a kiln maker and designer of production methods in the Leach pottery, by name of Matsubayashi Tsurunosuke, who’s immense contribution to that pottery and, by implication, to British studio pottery, has been largely written out of the history. All of this was served up with delicious food, sunshine and a fabulous beach in one of the most beautiful towns I’ve seen in years. My thanks to the organisers, to my fellow participants, and to Ana Chruscinska and, (again), the conference organisers, who made the final lens-based contributions by providing all of the photographs on this post.

Dr. Shinya Maezaki: A Legacy of Matsubayashi Tsurunosuke in St. Ives: Introduction of the Art of Japanese Ceramic Making to British Studio Pottery

East & West: Cross-Cultural Encounters, Introduction

2009-10-07T10:57:00.002+01:00

School of Art History, St. Andrews University, 11th and 12th September, 2009.

The Railway Station In A Field
On the East cost of Scotland, sort of southernish by Scottish standards, there’s platform in the middle of a field with a metal bridge slung a bit carelessly over the top of it. That’s how you get from the train, which just about remembers to stop for a minute or two by the platform, to the road. Otherwise you’d just tumble straight into the field. This windswept, lonesome, soulful looking place, something between Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth, is Leuchars. It’s where you get off to go to St. Andrews.

St. Andrews - The Town
St. Andrews, just five miles or so down the road couldn’t be more different. Home to one of the oldest universities in the world, - founded in 1413 – it is busy, thriving, wealthy beyond its modest size, and astounding beautiful. The town is the university and the university is the town. Shops, restaurants and hotels rely on the busy-ness of academia and on the achingly beautiful coastal landscape for their incomes - its other industry is tourism, especially tourism related to golf.

Chance Encounter
So, imagine my surprise, when stepping carefully off the train in Leuchars, and looking around at my fellow travellers, I spot a woman who, I decide, must also be coming to the conference, and accordingly invite her to share a taxi. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Forough’ she says. ‘Crikey,’ I’m thinking, ‘what are the chances of that?’ I spend all summer in London in the company of Iranians, I come to a very very small town in the east coast of Scotland, whose railway station is 10 miles away in the middle of a field, and the first person I meet is Iranian.

Dont Forget To Switch Off The Lights
Later that same day, I venture into town to the beating heart of the university, and find the New Arts Building where I plan to register for the conference. Almost every name on the conference list is Iranian. ‘What the hell’s going on? Is there anyone left in Iran?’ Then I read the title to the conference programme, ‘Historiography and Iran in Comparative Perspective.’ Ok, so I’m about to gate crash someone else’s conference. But seriously, is there anyone left in Iran? – they all seem to be in Scotland.

Filed Under History
But you see, it’s not so surprising. St. Andrews and its quaint medieval Scottish streets is also home to the Institute for Iranian Studies. It’s cunningly hidden in the History department, not, as I thought, in The School of International Relations – although there you will find the intriguing Centre for Syrian Studies. I have to say, a bit of Syria and a bit of Iran, a chunk of unusually interesting Art History mixed up with bits of Armenia, Georgia, The Caucasus – all based in Scotland, near Edinburgh, but in St. Andrews, sounds like my idea of Heaven. Surely I could squeeze myself in somewhere…

The Street Protests Continue

2009-10-03T22:03:00.004+01:00

September the 18th, Qods Day, September 28th, Back to Uni and Any Other Day, the protests continue. Below are three film clips. Two are from Qods Day, the first shows two separate marches in two main roads in Tehran, on the left is the green movement rally, on the right is the government rally, the latter is sparsely attended compared to the the former. The second is a short clip of a qods day march in slow motion which is easier to look at than some of the more frenetic phone-filmed clips in the post below.

The third film shows an argument in the Tehran Tube. The young women in the foreground and some of the others on the tube are shouting slogans that compare the behaviour of the Basij, the pro -government militia group who are always dressed black and ride motorbikes, to that of Israeli soldiers in Palestine. The man shouting 'death to Israel / marg ba Israel' is becoming increasingly isolated. He appears to be only one calling this government approved slogan by the end of the clip.

Qods Day, September 18th 2009, UN meeting New York, September 24th 2009 and Back to Uni, 27th September 2009.

2009-09-29T13:33:00.016+01:00

It seems important to provide some update on the Qods day protests in Iran and, if I can find pictures, on the protests here and especially in the US on the 24th September, when Ahmadinejaad addressed the United Nations in New York.

The press coverage here in the UK of events across Iran on Qods day was truly deplorable. Not because it was misrepresented as such, but because it was studiously ignored – another kind of misrepresentation.

Facetious remarks aside – what the hell is Qods Day?
Qods day is also called, ‘Jerusalem Day.’ Originally, it was intended as a day of support for Palestinians and for autonomy, liberation and self-determination for the people of that profoundly oppressed, beleaguered and abused nation. Long ago, however, that was forgotten. In Iran, since the dawn of the Islamic Republic, it has been used for the self-aggrandisement of the ruling theocratic regime which relies on the brutalisation of Palestine by Israel to justify its own existence.

Where Were The Press?
The wholesale debunking of Qods day by the people of Iran, from all classes, all age groups and all over the country is a matter of immense, incalculable significance. Why the BBC ignored it and, as far as I’m aware, all other British news channels and organisations, both print and broadcast too, is beyond comprehension. It is true we have no journalists there. It is also true that once ‘the moment’ has passed, news deadlines and the ‘sexiness’ of a story is deemed to have evaporated. Jim Muir in Lebanon said he hadn’t heard anything much, ‘certainly nothing like the mass demonstrations we saw earlier in the Summer.’ Ok, so he’s an Arabic speaker not a Farsi speaker and I’m not persuaded that he was ever really very interested in Iran even when he was there. John Lyne, the current correspondent, always sounded bored rigid and baffled by every aspect of Iran, until it all got a bit exciting which awakened his interest but, because he appears to have so little background knowledge and so little real interest, it is hard to sustain. It seems to me that the absence of any real analysis of this event, - which was absolutely momentous – was, for most part, owing to incompetence – an unedifying mix of ignorance, clumsiness and lack of interest.

What Happened?
Qods day in Tehran, Shiraaz and Esfahan saw the people of Iran turn out in their thousands, except in Tehran, where they numbered somewhere around two million – yes you did read that right – 2 million. As a strategic move, it was a stroke of genius. The opposition movement, the ‘green’ movement, used the Qods day marches as a cover for demonstrations all over Iran. Qods day in a national holiday and it is expected that all good Muslims, aka all good Iranians will march. For years it has been ignored by many with numbers dwindling. Not so this year. The people en masse took the streets and chanted ‘Death to the dictator,’ ‘Not Gaza, not Lebanon, for Iran I sacrifice my life,’ and much more.
Below is a selection of videos filmed in Tehran and Shiraaz, (Shiraazi vids coming when I've found them again,) just to give you an idea of what the demonstrations looked like. There are over 60 videos uploaded to You Tube that you can look at and doubtless many more will come. The first is filmed in Haft e Tir Underground station in Tehran, so great booming sounds!! The second is in Tehran from Haft e Tir to Valiasr - a distance of about 8 kms, then there's a view of the demo from the northern half of Valiasr - the whole road is about 20km long north to south, - so you're beginning to get an idea of size of this demonstration and the scale of the upheaval - hardly 'a couple of thousand at most.'

September 23rd, 2009 UN Building New York
The meeting of the United Nations in New York was well covered by press all over the world, not least the mass exodus of delegates from almost everywhere while Ahmadinejaad strutted his stuff. Magnificent demonstrations in New York and rather more modest ones here were well attended and covered by BBC Persian Service, various US channels, a Dutch channel but, of course, the UK new news outlets were conspicuous by their absence!

Below is a 14 minute video of the NY demos outside the UN building. It's well worth taking the time to see it in full. The voices are saying: ‘Ahmadinejaad is not my president / Ahmadinejaad raais jomhuri man nist’ and ‘marg ba dictator’ or ‘death to the dictator.' Note, about 9 minutes in, from 9-10mins 30sec approx, images of the murdered protestors, Sohraab, Taraaneh, and Nedaa, followed by very interesting commentary on Qods day demonstrations. (BBC Shame on you Shame on you!) The demonstrators in NY are wearing white and images and sound from inside Iran are being projected on to the assembled crowd.

Back To Uni, Back To Iran
Meanwhile, it’s the start of the new academic year in Iran’s universities. Still chanting, ‘marg ba dictator,’ and 'doulaat e coup d'etat estefa' estefa' / government of the coup d'etat, resign resign,' the students are on the march again – footage here.

Today, 28th September, I’m told that the authorities have already closed Tehran University – ‘swine flu’ is the reason given!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Mini Post: About Qods Day - More Protests Planned In Iran

2009-09-17T17:56:00.013+01:00

The images above are exceptionally well known and justifiably so since they depict so graphically and unequivocally the violence of the plain clothed police and the basij against the protesters.
This is a link to Global Voices Online saying more about planned protests in Iran on Qods Day, the 18th September.

The demonstration planned for 23rd September, to protest the visit of Not-President A'jad to the United Nations in New York, will be in front of the Iranian Embassy in Knightsbridge, London, 6-9pm
If you're in London, or if you're in New York, or nearby, or feel motivated to travel, United4Iran are highly organised. If you go to the website and follow the links they've got all sorts of stuff about transport from all over the USA, where to stay and so on - there's even a facebook site with an rsvp bit you can fill in.
If we ever get as organised as that - I'll let you know... till then, I'll just keep posting.
Payande Iran!

'Key to the Door... Now you can vote,' Protests Continued: Friday 18th and Wednesday 23rd September, 6-9pm Opposite The Iranian Embassy, London

2009-09-16T23:03:00.016+01:00

The images above are all from the 5th September which was a procession in Parliament Square and Westminster Bridge in support of the mothers of the murdered, the tortured, the raped, the detained and the disappeared.

Coming Soon...
The next few days are your last opportunities to gather outside the Islamic Centre in Maida Vale - see right hand column for details. The days are: Thursday 17th and Sunday 20th September. If you've not been there yet, go this week and relish the splendour of the converted bingo hall that is the only shi'e mosque in London - oh yes! From gaming to god in one easy step. Just attach a few pretty tiles over the 'two fat ladies' and job's a good'un: Bingo Palace to Palace of Piety.

Not only can you marvel at the ready made satire in the building, you can reflect on upon sheer poetry and pathos of the bingo numbering system: as if it were planned in ancient bingo-gaming times, the call for 18 - the next big date I'm coming to - is, 'Key to the door,' 'Now you can vote.' Shame no one mentioned that the vote doesn't count.

So, Friday 18th September is, 'World Qods Day,' when the more vicious elements of the Islamic Rebublic and the hardest-core among Islamists everywhere, take to the streets and celebrate their savagery and well 'ard core.
Jonbesh Sabz will, accordingly, be gathering outside the Embassy in Knightsbridge, London, to show our disapproval and celebrate something more positive. This is planned from 6 - 9.00pm.

Wednesday 23rd September, 'A Duck and a Flea, 23' is the day Not-President Ahmadinejad will address the United Nations in New York. Demonstrations are planned in that city on the 23rd and 24th, and also here, in London, on the 23rd.

Part 2: Parting Company, The Image And The Life

2009-08-29T21:19:00.017+01:00

Pictures Continued
This post continues to look at the way images are used to build the story of Iran’s resistance to its current tyrannical regime. In the post below, I introduced the story, such as it is, of Taraaneh Mousavi, whose image has become so closely associated with the campaign to expose and indict the perpetrators of rape as a method of torture, of social control and, in some instances, of death, in prisons and police stations across Iran.

The Story And The Life
The post below attracted two comments, one of which states that, ‘a healthy dose of scepticism’ is required when reading the stories of Taraaneh for which the writer provides some links, which, I have to say, leave me none the wiser. I am aware of the highly contested nature of this story and I do want to emphasise again, that in this series of posts, I am not so much concerned to set out the facts of the lives of the three individuals named below, there are others far better placed to do this, but rather to set out the story. I am differentiating here between ‘truthful’ reportage or ‘documentary truth,’ and an examination of how a story grows, why it grows, what its meaning is and how this is built through imagery and the use of those images. Whatever the evidence of the life and death of Taraaneh Mousavi ultimately reveals, and my strong feeling is most of us will never know for sure what happened, what is beyond question is the strength and nature of the feeling the story has aroused and what meanings have become attached to it. Like it or not, it is now and probably forever, the single image that most frequently appears associated with rape-to-kill and rape as torture. The collection of images above are all from one jonbesh e sabz demonstration in London, outside the Iranian Embassy, on Sunday 23rd August 2009, (photo credits Iman Nabavi).

A Sign
In the case of all three individuals introduced in post below - Neda Agha Soltani, Taraaneh Mousavi and Sohrab Araabi, the image has already started to part company with the life of the woman or man represented. This is more obviously the case with Neda and Taraaneh, as I think is clear from the story of ‘Neda the Christian martyr’ which can be seen in the proliferation of blogs which emphasise her crucifix, and in Taraaneh, whose highly formalised, almost impersonal image, lends itself so well to the notion that ‘this might happen to any of us.’ I think, and I hope it is not too harsh to suggest it, that she is almost more of a signifier of a ‘victim of the worst excesses of the Islamic Republic’ rather than a real woman from whom we might then differentiate rather than identify ourselves. Sohrab Araabi is usually pictured as 'the protester hero,' the beautiful young man cut down in his prime. My guess is this is how he'll stay. I assume he was many other things too, not just a protester but, as far as his image is concerned, he has now become, 'any (male) protester.'

What Counts As Rape
I should also add that, in spite of my searches of the life of Taraneh Mousvi, I am still not clear what part of her story is seriously contested. There doesn’t seem to be any doubt that she was raped or that she is dead, or that the two are in some way connected. There are endless questions concerning who when where and why which could be the source of the doubt. A possible interpretation of this may be connected with how rape is constituted legally, socially and morally – in other words: what counts as rape. English readers will be very familiar indeed with this since it regularly arises here in the form of ghastly, legalistic expressions such as, ‘she was guilty of contributory negligence,’ which means she was out on her own late at night, or was wearing a short skirt or was drunk or some such thing. The equally offensive offering is, ‘she was asking for it,’ or ‘she was a prostitute,’ which apparently means she can’t be raped because prostitute women ‘don’t count.’ In short, the entire discourse of rape in Iran has many parallels to the discourse here in England. The whole notion of rape is subject to disbelief and blame. This of course makes it even more likely that this image will be forever attached to the Iranian rape-in-prison, rape-to-kill reports, precisely because, as always, it is contested. The story can reasonably be said to be typical - it is ‘any woman’ and, in this case, ‘any man.’

Building The Story In Pictures, Part 1: Neda Agha Soltani, Taraneh Mousavi, Sohrab Arabi

2009-08-26T14:05:00.017+01:00

Neda Agha Soltani: About A Picture
‘Oh, that’s the girl that was shot isn’t it?’ Asks the policeman.
Earlier the same day my sister had asked the same question when she saw my banner peeping out of my bag with the unmistakeable face of Neda Agha Soltani, her head tilted slightly to one side, loose hair and a bright, unaffected smile.
‘Why Neda? I mean why her in particular?’ Asks my niece.
‘She’s very pretty,’ comments my sister, suggesting this might be why her death was singled out among so many. She is, but I can say with confidence that this is not the reason.

The death of Neda was intensely shocking because it happened in public, in daylight, at short range and was witnessed live in real time by hundreds and, having been captured on camera, by millions.

A Picture Outside Its Context
There are other qualities and details about the picture above, however, which suggest that her face will forever be associated with the Iranian resistance as it emerged in response to the coup d’etat (‘election’) on June 12th 2009. If you google, ‘Neda Agha Soltani’ and press the ‘images’ key, you will find hundreds, perhaps thousands of blogs which include this image. Studying these began to raise questions in my mind about the delicate balance of mourning, of expressing overwhelming sorrow and how easily that can tilt just too far and become a kind of exploitation or fetishisation. It’s hard to imagine how this might feel to her family and friends. It may be uncomfortable or of no consequence at all to them. It is, ultimately, a photograph. It is not Neda.

On many of these blogs, this image has a red circle on it. If you look closely at the image, you will see, not quite concealed under the shirt, she is wearing a crucifix. It is this that is circled.

I don’t know if Neda was a Christian of not, and don’t consider it a matter of importance. That she wears a crucifix does not automatically indicate Christian faith or practice. However, this picture has been adopted by numerous Christian minority communities all over the Middle East, the Arab and North African regions and in the Far East. If the blogs are anything to go by, it is a matter of immense importance to them.

The second significant point is that in this photograph, Neda in not wearing hejab. At a single stroke, this renders this image more understandable and more sympathetic to non Muslims. Put simply, she could be the girl next door, your sister, your friend. There is a kind of simplicity about her appearance in this image, she becomes ‘any woman.’

Taraneh Mousavi
Taraneh Mousavi is also pictured above, wearing hejab. This black and white image of Taraaneh is, as far as I know, the only one we have which is available for download and therefore is the only one to appear on placards and banners. Her image too has become strongly associated with brutal treatment of protestors after the elections. Taraaneh Mousavi was gang-raped unto death. She died as result of the multiple rapes and was subsequently burnt. Her image has become widely used in conjunction with ‘stop rape-to-kill’ placards and the emerging campaign to indict the perpetrators. Very little is known about Taraneh. It is thought that her family have been severely threatened. As a result they do not talk.

Sohrab Arabi
Sohraab Arabi is the third image which is becoming well known. Again, this is partly because we have a number of images of him as a living protestor and as a young man preparing to go to university. So our encounter with his sudden and brutal death is all the more shocking. We also have several images of his mother angry and in deep distress. She has given an interview as has the mother of Neda. The alive-ness of both Sohrab and of Neda is in sharp contrast to Taraneh around whose death and memory is a dense silence.

Three Stories, Three Pictures
Neda’s death is unequivocal and uncontested. We know exactly what happened, when and where. About Sohrab, there are many unanswered questions. Days elapsed between his disappearance and the identification of his dead body. We don’t know if he was tortured to death in Evin prison, or shot dead in the street or if he died of his wounds or what. The first is widely suspected. About the death of Taraneh, we have even more questions.

The three images provide a parallel to the three dominant stories of the disappeared. The first is the story of the protestor of bystander shot dead in the street: a crime committed in public with absolute impunity. The second is the protestor shot or arrested, detained in prison and tortured to death, but about whom there are still questions needing to be answered. The third is the story of the disappeared, found dead, obviously raped. This story is also the one that has come to stand for the use of ‘rape to kill’ and ‘rape as torture.’ It was ever thus. Rape has been used by police against young women and girls in police stations as a tool of social control since the dawn of Islamic Republic. It was used against all the female prisoners in Evin during the 1980s and 90s. Only now, however, is it being widely and openly discussed. That it is now being talked about among the political classes is entirely new.

Short Story Of Two Pictures And Some Rain
I have two banners, one of Neda Soltani and one of Taraneh Mousavi. On the tube, returning from one of the most rain-soaked demonstrations I have ever known, I began to wipe the excess rain-water still clinging to their surfaces. With 30 years experience of demonstrations in this country, I knew how to prepare. Everything was covered in plastic. I had only to wipe them clean with a cotton cloth. As I began the task, the other passengers looked on, fascinated. The man opposite opened his bag, got out new packet of tissues, and offered them to me, in what was a simple but obvious and extraordinarily touching gesture of solidarity. He was also showing, as were other passengers in other ways, that he knew who they were, what I was doing, and why I cared enough to do it. This small collection of gestures and glances, gathered together on a train journey, left me with no doubt as to the power and potential of a simple image. Though I worry sometimes about an over reliance on images of the dead and the disappeared, I certainly can’t doubt their power to inform and affect, in a way that images of defiance, much as I love them, do not, or not in the same way.

About Jonbesh e Sabz, or Iranian Green Movement in London

2009-08-12T23:12:00.005+01:00

(For this post, and on this blog, I’m going to refer to the ‘jonbesh e sabz,’ or ‘green movement’ in London as the just ‘sabz’ to avoid any confusion with ‘The Green Party.’)

The ‘jonbesh e sabz’ is, or was, allied to that constituency that voted for Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi - although I think the green was associated originally with the Mousavi campaign (?) However, it has now broadened considerably. Here in London, it is more of a big green umbrella, appropriately enough for this summer. The Sabz includes people who voted for Mousavi or Karoubi; many of the ‘old left,’ the campaigners from the original, 1979 revolution, before it was Islamised; it includes people who didn’t vote at all and wouldn’t dream of so doing because they don’t believe in or want an Islamic Republic anyway; and various other odds and sods, like me, who join because we believe in solidarity, used to live in Iran and / or because we have much loved friends or relatives in Iran.

So the Sabz in London is diffuse, slightly confused, a bit disorganised, is eager to be inclusive, is working on being bilingual - meetings and social relations are conducted entirely in Farsi, but the facebook site, is a mix of Farsi and English - the news of demos, meetings etc are in English, the discussion groups vary. Sabz is also allied to United 4 Iran, which is international, in intention anyway, and is primarily focused on Human Rights. So some people in the group are more focused on the welfare of their protesting friends and family at home, in Iran, others on campaigning for Human Rights in Iran, others on developing practical campaigns in the UK that can be supportive to the protesters in Iran, such as the Boycott Nokia campaign. These are, we could say, all part of the colouration of the group. They are not differences as such.

We are highly resistant to being rearranged into some kind of organised, command and control, ‘party in exile.’ I think the Sabz are somewhat resistant to the idea of leaders at all, although of course, there are dominant characters. They let me in, so they must be pretty flexible. I think I’m right in saying that they/ we are wholly committed to non-violent means. Any notion of military action is absolutely out of the picture. It is also for this reason that, as it says, somewhere on the facebook site, we are not concerned with ‘regime change.’ The expression is redolent of war, bombs, guns and misery, to say nothing of the absence of democracy.

Most of the people I’ve talked to so far and certainly all of my personal friends would prefer a secular government. However, they are working with what is actually there at the moment, which is an Islamic Republic which, as I said in the previous post, is the source from which Mousavi springs. So, you can say that there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of this – hooray- I like contradictions. I guess I like them because it gives you something to work with. It’s when you try to form something that is perfect from the outset, that you know it’s doomed to failure.

So, if you’re interested, do come along. Have a look at that link again. Scroll down a bit to find the current information on the demonstrations. At the time of writing and for the foreseeable future, we are opposite the Iranian Embassy, Princes Gate, London, (Knightsbridge is the nearest tube), from 6.00-9.00pm Thursdays and from 4.00-7.00pm Sundays. It’s a good idea to wear something green and something black, especially if you’re obviously not Iranian, because then people know that you’re there to be with them. Slogans are in English and Farsi, so don’t worry if you don’t know any Farsi, you’ll get to shout too, and placards, flags etc are provided. Bring an umbrella. Next post, I’ll provide examples of slogans and songs, with some stuff about what it all means. Shall also try to find out more about this Nokia campaign.

Is Mousavi the real deal?

2009-08-10T22:04:00.033+01:00

(About the relationship between Mr. Mousavi and Green Movement, and what it all might mean.)
The five images above were taken in Tehran in the first couple of days after the election. The top image is our protest in Hangar Lane, London, outside the offices of Press TV - see the last paragraph of this post for comments on that.

'Is Mousavi the real deal?'

This question, which my niece asked me a couple of days ago, has been bobbing about in the back of my mind for some time now. It is, of all the questions, the one which most often surfaces, not least among Iranians.

The first thing I want to say is that there is no ‘real deal’ for Iran. There is no ‘saviour.’ Iran cannot be 'saved' by one leader or another, either from within the country or from outside. It is in process – a long process, I suspect, and probably a messy one. This work–in–process, I believe, is as much social as it is political: it has as much to do with the way social lives are conducted as it does with the actions of government.

Mir Hossein Mousavi is wholly of the Islamic republic. He conforms to the model of the ‘mainstream, traditional, small-c-conservative, Muslim,’ as does Karoubi and, for that matter, Khaatemi. He, and others like him, are a necessary part of the equation which needs to be worked out. This process can’t happen without Mousavi and his ilk being involved, of that I am certain. I just can’t imagine what they can do with the unholy Trinity of the Basij, the Revolutionary guard and the Supreme Leader – I have a feeling Ahmedinejaad is almost irrelevant in this set up – he could be exchanged for anyone.

‘Mousavi has killed a lot of people,’ says one of my Iranian friends, herself a refugee. She is referring to the 1980s, when Mousavi was Prime Minister and many people were indeed executed and killed in prison. ‘Has he really changed?’she asks. This question is repeated by many.

I have no idea. I do know that people sometimes change their strategies though, particularly when the context changes. And the Iranian context has, unquestionably, changed: its social context has changed beyond recognition from the time when M. was prime minister, as has the economy, as has have the surrounding international relations, and on top of all of that, mass communications have extended the reach of all of those changes.

I hope that Mousavi does not attempt to be too much of a ‘real deal,’ – the martyr / hero talk worries me, but martyr / hero talk always does. If he ever does become President, then I hope he rolls up his sleeves and is a bit boring and serviceable. Iran doesn’t need any more drama queens and the most inspiring sort of leader would be someone who wasn’t too inspiring, just very practical and good at building things - socially and poltically, I mean, they've got more than enough fancy mosques and noxious government buildings.

It’s just come to my notice that His Royal Loathsomeness, George The Glistening Turd of Galloway, has a programme on PressTV, (shame on you), called ‘The Real Deal,’ in which, presumably, he broadcasts his ignorance to the Nation with his customary, matchless pomposity. If this is the real deal then I sincerely hope Mr. Mousavi isn’t.

Payande Iran! (Viva / Long Live Iran): Iranian Protests in London in support of the protestors in Iran.

2009-08-07T16:39:00.012+01:00

(An account of a demonstration outside the Iranian Embassy In London, August 6th, 2009 in very heavy rain, with comments on the Iranian Election of 2009 and introducing the green movement / Sabz here in London.)

I remembered, last night, why it was that God created the Victoria Line. It is there not to punish commuters on exceptionally hot days, of which, let’s face it, there are relatively few in London, rather it is there to dry out soaking wet demonstrators. We could consider it London Transport’s contribution to participatory democracy. Or we could just consider it a giant mobile drying machine – one which was particularly welcome at 9.30 pm on Thursday August 6th, the first day of the second phase of demonstrations, actions and, which is most important, movement-building for ‘jonbesh e sabz e Landan’ or London’s Green Movement supporting the protestors in Iran.

We arrived outside the Iranian Embassy, Princes Gate, London, at 6.00pm. A hot airless day produced a sudden stream of cool air and small spitting raindrops. By 6.20 it gushed and verily it continued to gush, torrentially and relentlessly, yeay unto the very last minute of our demonstrating and lo the mighty torrent rushing in the road did swell and roar and threaten to carry off our flags and banners – to say nothing of the long-suffering police sent to keep an eye on us. It takes a good deal more than that, however, to silence the voices of distraught and angry Iranians. Undaunted by somewhat inhospitable English weather, they gathered, as they have done, day in, day out, since June 13th, the day after the fraudulent elections, and howled their disapproval and fury at the Embassy.

I have not witnessed all of them, although I well remember the arrival of all the images of Neda Agha Soltani at the demo on Sunday the 21st of June, the day after she had been shot dead by the Basiji in Tehran. The daily gatherings of thousands of Iranians outside the Embassy continued until, at the request of the police, it was reduced to twice weekly, Thursdays and Sundays. We added different venues on different days. We went and hurled invective at Press TV, one of George Galloway’s little hang outs, on Mondays, and we’re still trying to get at the Russian Embassy, only they’re probably all too busy having punch-ups with grizzly bears to notice us. This week we gathered Monday and Wednesday to protest the inauguration and reinstating of Ahmedinejad as president. This evening, Friday, they will gather outside the Islamic Centre in Kilburn to mourn the murdered and to demand the justice for the detained and disappeared. We shall be doing the same on Sunday and Thursdays and Sundays hereafter outside the Embassy, until the police ask us to move on or until the cracks in the regime finally split.

Ahmedinajad is not the elected the president of Iran. The election was a grotesque travesty of democratic process, an obscene charade, as are the carnival of show trials now in process. It can rain all it likes. The Victoria Line will still be there to dry us out and we shall continue to get soaked.

Ceramics Degree Show, Camberwell College of Arts and New Desingers, 2009

2009-07-12T09:51:00.013+01:00

If you want to get completely lost in a Degree Show, this is the place to do it. Camberwell always was a warren and it hasn’t changed. Once you’re in, it’s near impossible to find any way out.

But here I am and none the worse for it. Camberwell ceramics degree show was an optimistic affair. The only dedicated ceramics undergraduate course left in London, it marches on regardless. This was the final year for that spirited group known as Buff, (see labels on the right for commentary of the Buff Extravaganza Spring 2008). Their degree show, though individual now rather than a group endeavour as before, very much fulfilled the promise suggested by Buff.

Mud Larks, Party Frocks and Headless Chickens and Well'ard Angles.
Julia Kubik had become a mud lark and collected Thames detritus in the form of clay-pipe stems, washed up on the pebbly shores of the mighty London river. (Btw, these are tabacco pipe-stems for that archaic act of smoking.) These she had threaded singly so they all hung from the ceiling in a carefully graded, bristling mass, from charcoal grey to almost white, like a cloud, recalling the smoke from the pipes and the mist over the Thames. Philip Li had moved on from curling eyelashes and white cups with water-melon pink liquid to well-‘ard, block rocking, angular lumps of fired clay arranged on steel shelving in a cavernous recess all set about with dials and instruments of industrial might. A photograph called Statue shows him on a plinth with fired clay shoulder addition, surrounded by lights. This looked like the lab or den in which he, the statue, was constructed, slightly frankensteinish and fiendish.

Rebecca Fairman’s journey through the less charming side of family life continued and developed. The bed appeared again, but is context made it appear completely different, more benign, more innocent perhaps. At the end of the bed hung a slinky gown constructed of hundreds of tiny ceramic pieces – the top made of mottled glazed ceramic orange peelings, shrivelling at the edges, and the skirt of very smoothly glazed, blistering red peppers. The acidic, bitter, burning apparel in orange and red suggested a glamorous but distant, maybe slightly vicious character, less innocent-looking than the bed anyway.

Some inverted chickens with gold legs and their heads in layers of foam / fibreglass or similar, sprinkled beneath with blue dropping was both funny and slightly horrifying. And there was much much more. Degree shows are a moment of concentrated anarchy and a moment when the students get a chance to show their work as they want it seen, before the curators and institutions get hold of them and start of mould them in a career-shaped candidate.

Which leads me neatly on to New Designers.

The first impression of New Designers is one of an overdose of very nice clean stuff. I looked only at the ceramics and that was nice and clean too. This, I think, is my highly inexpert, defining word for Design – with a capital D - Clean, and Tidy. The exhibition spaces are, as someone put it, ‘like little shop fronts.’ It suits some stuff, but really doesn’t suit the stuff which isn’t design – or that’s manky or just needs a dirty space. Fairman’s bed is a perfect example of this, incidentally. I’ve seen it in three contexts now and it definitely isn’t a product – it’s a story, or rather it’s many stories, and quite literary ones at that. It thrives in an entirely different context. ND is for products. Nothing else really works. The Westminster and Camberwell shows did not, this year, specialise in products and, in most cases, the work suffered in this somewhat stifling environment. Much of it could hold its own, but I’d seen it look so much better elsewhere. See labels in right hand column, ‘Rebecca Fairman’ and ‘Buff’ and you’ll see what I mean. Perhaps it’s time for the New Designers stranglehold on craft disciplines to be broken.

Socially very fully engaged practice.
I’m not overly interested product design, not even product design that’s been reinvented as art, Lamp-Kebab notwithstanding, so I’ll select the one work that really grabbed me. Step forward Laura Masson, www.lmceramics.co.uk . Laura works directly in consultation with children in the development of her work. Her entire degree, show included, was a collaborative project with various children’s groups and organisations. The results and the thinking that is part of it are stunning. Firstly, not only are children allowed to play with porcelain, PORCELAIN, - don’t you just love it? – they’re actively encouraged to take part in the design and development of these things. Then they play with them to their hearts’ content, while contributing to further design developments. Risk is encouraged, breakage not a cause for anxiety, and their own care and manual dexterity is developed along the way. Having spent much of an afternoon involving myself with the social aspects of craft at the Jerwood do, here was an object lesson in how to do just that, as well being the only example I’ve ever seen of porcelain as a voice for one of the world’s most marginalised social groups– now how subversive is that?!

Jerwood Contemporary Makers, 2009

2009-07-11T18:41:00.006+01:00

JCM, version 2.0

Enter: Lamp Kebab, Phat Knitting, Furry Flock Floor tiles, climbing up the wall like a strange virus culminating a in a pattern vaguely resembling a map of the London Underground, a spikey light hanging from the ceiling, a sort of woven maze, and some bits and pieces dredged up from the bottom of the sea with carefully made ceramic bits added.

This year’s Jerwood show was satisfyingly different from last year’s. Next year will be the last in the run of this version of the Jerwood prize for the applied arts and, by then, an overview of sorts will have been achieved. Last year the theme of ‘touch’ was explored by the selected makers, which was a ghastly idea but produced some tremendous work (and some not) and, arguably, deployed one of craft’s more potentially problematic fixations, namely that of the skilfully hand-made. This year it’s gone social, plural, industrial-in-conversation-with-studio, collaborative – possibly. and altogether less fetishistically hand-made. It is certainly more socio-politcally positioned / aware / questioning, in terms of the actual approach to making and for that reason alone, makes for a healthy addition, building on last year’s selection.

I recall last year that I announced, rashly, that I’d lost interest in textiles, or something similar. I certainly recall that I found last year’s textile work a crashing bore. This year’s fared much better, perhaps being more responsive to the pluralistic, social approach. The giant woven textile maze – which wasn’t a maze, that ‘s just how I experienced it – was impressive, if inexplicably so. I didn’t like the feeling of being trapped, suffocated in this giant, very tightly woven wall with things scrawled on it, so I got out and didn’t go back. Linda Florence’s flock tiles were appealing initially as her work always is, (click on Linda Florence label in right hand column for a review of her work at the V&A), and the idea was beautiful but somehow didn’t quite work in that annoying way that beautiful complex ideas often don’t. Her written statement works better. That’s just the way these things go sometimes. The social knitting was, I thought, and absolute triumph and prompted me to remember that I have a particular love for knitting – fond memories of a crafts council show in the 80s about the knitting of Gansey jumpers – a sort of social history of fishing in wool. Anyway, this kitting escapade was by Rachel Matthews and involved people sending her bits of unfinished kitting which she rescued and remade or completed, or rearranged. Each had its own story. There was some heroic look-what-I-can-do-with-wool type knitting which was excessively fanciful in a WI, village flower show sort of way, which I enjoyed very much and cheered the Jerwood Space up no end – eg floral knitted spectacles frame, and an exemplary jumper that was like a woolly wall with roses growing up it.

And there was the Lamp Kebab: a pink lampshade supported by various household objects, including a pink boxing glove that might have been an oven glove, threaded up the pole like a kebab. Then all the other rejected objects were arranged on a table next to it. This was by ‘Committee.’ I wont say their names, because anonymity in an industrial mass-production sense is presumably part of the point. Here, is a selection of four of the works. One of the dominant impressions of this year’s show was of things that were appealing, public spirited and good natured. The spikey lamp especially so, all very very environmentally well thought out. It wasn’t the kind of art that moves you especially, (although there were some very sweet and moving moments in the knitting stories and in Florence’s written commentary), nor was it the kind of Craft that makes you gasp at its virtuosity, but it did make me laugh – even when it didn’t quite work. Full marks for that. A girl needs a laugh in these days of voluminous atrocity. Will someone make me a Lamp Kebab please?

Horses Make A Degree Show Look More Beautiful: Harrow Ceramics Degree Show 2009

2009-06-19T10:11:00.008+01:00

Plagued, first by fire, then by threats of closure and, finally, by tube strikes, Harrow Ceramics marches on undaunted. This was certainly one of the most varied of their degree shows that I’ve seen and easily the most colourful. They’re normally pale shades of grey, all very finely tuned and produced, but ‘clay colours’ nonetheless. Not so this one. Now then, a monumental hats off to Chris Sutherland for a rare example of astounding virtuosity that also managed to be interesting – I know, you wouldn’t think it possible, but it is. As per the previous post, I am normally bored to death by virtuoso displays, but this was actually enticing. Weird great big dead baby birds, the size of three year old children, (and that’s the point), were draped over plinths and slumped in corners. I didn’t exactly feel for them, partly because I was distracted by the glazes, but most people, presumably, wouldn’t be. They’re funny looking cartoon characters, exactly the sort of thing you’d expect find in computer game graphics, or vinyl LP-cover artwork, only these were 3-d and ceramic. Weird, as I said.

There were two or three installationy-type displays, some more interactive than others and an assortment of standard ceramics degree show fare- but all of it several notches above the ‘standard,’ I’d say. Geraldine Williams produced wonderful ‘whore’s handbag,’ Victorian-looking peep show comprising a big, red, fake-crushed-velvet-covered box with peep hole and when you were sitting peeping through said hole, the whiff of the velvet was almost nauseating. I’ve never been in such a booth, but I have to say, I’ve got a good idea of just how grotesque it might be now. It also did very very weird things to my sense of gender-assignment – which is a fancy way of saying I felt like a bloke. I’d just been reading an account, in ‘Whores and Other Feminists,’ by a woman who was a peep-show performer. The book is a bizarrely and ferociously American, obsessive wail about Feminism and the sex industry, but fascinating even so. Anyway, Geraldine’s work tuned right in and for a moment, I was the teenage boy jerking off over something that looked like a twirling Christmas decoration / pretty ceramic figurine in magic box. Brilliantly fetishistic and provocative but in a not too serious way – which was a relief and which makes it a big improvement on the book. There were some laughs in the red box– as there were in the rest of her work.

And from whores to horses, Hiromi Nakajima’s smoke fired animals also belong to a standard category in degree show production, but these were anything but standard. ‘Working with animals makes me happy,’ she says in what must be one of the most straight forward artists statements I’ve ever read. Her glorious beasts writhed and giggled and stretched and snuffled and the smiling horses – oh the smiling horses – sniffing clover – she’d made them a paddock with real grass and clover and they screwed up their eyes and, somehow you just know, that when the lights are out, they start galloping about.

There’s lots more and it’s all good, and excellent pictures can be seen here.

Francis Kyle Gallery: Psiché Hughes Ceramics

2009-06-07T21:22:00.016+01:00

Had these works been made with any greater hand-work skill, craftsmanship, or ceramic technical knowledge, they would simply have been unspeakable. They would have resembled the worst kind of meretricious ceramic ‘kitsch’ associated with the craft shoppe, and from which the oh so tasteful craft connoisseur recoils, nay cringes, with embarrassment, appalled at the unholy image of craft that mocks him from the mirror frame. Psiché Hughes’ work confronts us – (the ceramics audience at any rate), with questions concerning the social construction of taste accompanied by a question of what constitutes skill – dare I say it – a question of epistemology. What counts as skill in ceramics is far from a given, although you could certainly be forgiven for thinking otherwise given the extent to which the word is used wholly uncritically and without interrogation in most of the writing, talking and teaching related to Ceramics.

Family Tree
We acquire skill with which to manipulate clay, this slippery, muddy stuff, at once pliable and compliant in some ways but, as Grayson Perry once observed, remarkably intolerant of amateurs. So the work gets shiny and accomplished, a little too accomplished perhaps, its absurdity becoming just too evident, embarrassing, so we rush to theorise and call on irony, for how else can we escape the worst excesses of our own bourgeois associations? It’s a bit like having embarrassing relatives – we think our own practices to be sound and appropriately knowing/ tasteful (or ironic – delete as applicable), / (in)authentic/ (post) modern – you can take your pick, but what about those others? Those others that aren’t us? Those makers of wobbly brown pots, or wobbly white pots or makers of uber-designed not/pots or makers of (my own particular pet hate and designated ‘other,’) the makers of ‘the female form’ - bleeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaagh!!!

East End Boys and West End Girls
Then, every so often, along comes an artist like Psiché Hughes and blows the whole ghastly edifice apart – almost certainly without meaning to which is, of course, the only way it can be done IF – and this is important - you’re going to do this way, that is without irony. And it gets worse. She’s done it in public in, wait for it, a Cork street gallery - actually it’s not, it’s Maddox St, but same difference – and since this bit is all about context, let’s take a couple of lines to examine that. Now I didn’t know these places still existed. I sort of did, but I freely admit I took absolutely no notice of them. I have no idea if anyone else does, but I was under the impression that the East End ruled, that the whole Cork St. thing had been blown clean out of the water 15 years ago by the Three Graces and that the West End was finished. I thought that Cork St was old money, Fine Art of the fiiiiinest variety and, bluntly, redundant. Old. And for all I know that may be right. Waddingtons is still there though. And it’s all looking pretty much the same as it did 25 years ago. What I don’t know is whether that is its strength or its weakness. Now that the East End is unquestionably the Establishment – (see Saatchi Gallery – gone West End) – will we turn round and regard the West End with some lingering respect? I honestly don’t know.

New Becomes Old Becomes New
I do know it will have to reinvent or at least refresh itself – it needs to be demonstrably alive but the interesting thing, potentially, is that these were the dealers of ‘fine art’, in other words craft, as in Camberwell School of Art and Craft. They were the dealers of paining, printmaking and drawing on paper. Old fashioned crafts by anyone’s estimation. So will they invigorate themselves by dealing in art that contains contemporary craft practices? Countless thousands of artist paint, draw, reproduce things on paper, and in clay and use lens-based media to make highly crafted films and photographs. So, let us hope that these dealers engage themselves with these practices. If they do, then we are in for an exciting time –but they should be warned that this space is not just vacant – Jay Jopling’s White Cube is doing exactly that and has been doing for some months now.

Study Collection
So let’s get back to the artist and translator who generated all this: Psiché Hughes. A small collection of her work, distributed among the pigeon holes of a white display case resembles the results of the curious empirical enquiry of a botanist or natural historian of another age materialised in clay. It even more closely resembles a study of ceramic types, like a series of approximations which seek to imitate or even ‘perform’ ceramics – like someone who attempts to perform gender, doesn’t do it very well so tries it in numerous different ways until finally ‘coming out’ as transgendered – and proud.

Performing Ceramics
At first glance, the collection of objects presented in their white pigeon holes, look like someone’s collection of pottery but instead of buying the original object, they decided to make copies. Thus we have: the Lucie Rie, the Gabby Koch, the imitation souvenir from Morocco, the shell and the faux fruit and veg – the sort you get from a semi-posh kitchen ware shop to put in the fruit bowl in the absence of real fruit. The ‘Moroccan Souvenir’ should be symmetrical with flat lid, but it’s wonky, it flops a bit to one side. It would be cleanly, faultlessly re/produced by a Properly Trained Designer, but it would also be ‘knowing’ and ‘ironic’ in some way, a ‘comment’ on the souvenir industry. Hughes, however, does not concern herself with such predictable nonsense. Why should she? As a translator of Spanish American literature she has more understanding of satire in her little finger than the average clunky designer can amass in a lifetime of attempted ironic comment - comment which is rarely, if ever, backed up with any understanding at all of what satire actually is, what it’s for, or how it works. No, this is a carefully but imprecisely made study. It’s not a ‘quotation,’ it is a performance. The wonky lines on the Rie pot and its all-round wonkyiness, the pretend ‘designer’ fruit all deliver the same message. They’re a careful, loving study, tender and wholly unselfconscious.

Translation
I wonder, for a while, if this is a ‘knowing’ execution, even though there is clearly no attempt at irony. Then I see the oranges in the fruit bowl and the penny drops. They are not oranges in fruit bowl exactly, they are a ceramic rendering of a painting of oranges in a fruit bowl. They are arranged to the point of seeming to be almost flat. They are certainly not trompe l’oeil but they are oddly convincing because they can be comfortably believed as a version of a painting of an arranged still-life which itself signifies an ordered version of real-life. The orange and lemon skins are not rendered in glaze – why bother - all that kerfuffle and for what - just to prove that the maker can make orange peel glaze? Not only is the image clearly articulated by acrylic paint, it also clarifies the intention. These are not meant to be ‘proper’ ceramics. She is – well – translating – as she has always done.

Painting
Hughes makes clay objects with the eye of a painter. What painters constitute as important, valuable, and as skill is categorically different from the way potters assess these things. Painters see, collect and show and make ceramics completely differently from potters and, in the UK at least, the differences between these ways of seeing and comprehending is enhanced by the difference in the original training. The vast majority of artists working in clay in the UK have trained as potters and what they constitute as skill, as proper making, is largely concerned with material finesse. The joins must join, the glaze mustn’t have bubbles – you can’t concern yourself with how the bubbles look, if they look right – it’s just not – well – pottery – by definition they DON’T look right. You can’t let things break and then glue them back together again, unless its done in a proper way – raku or something. That’s permitted breakage. Potters have rules of engagement – a sort of haram and halal approach to things. And painters do too, and this is what potters don’t get. Take colour, for example. Tone, saturation, local colour, distribution of weight, the visual equivalent of sentence stress – it all matters, but not to potters who tend to just jumble it all up in a firework display of dreadful virtuous glaze technique. Oooooooooooh – look how clever she is! Look at those crystals! Will you just LOOK at those finely controlled drips! That RED! And so on.
Painter: ooooooOOooo. That’s intesting, Fine tonal variation, there, sort of cloudy looking.
Potter: It’s CRAWLED. Snort. That’s against the rules. We don’t concern ourselves with the way things LOOK. Only if they’re properly done or not.
But then again you see, that’s not quite true either. The problem is that the seeing of the potter, the potter’s gaze if you like, is so obsessively trained that all they see IS the crawl, not the colour variation.

Avoiding Conclusion
So, who’s right? Darned if I know. I’ve become too much of a hybrid myself over the years. Well not quite, not yet. I’ll always despise virtuosity even if I can be persuaded it’s there for a reason. I do know that I greatly enjoyed Hughes adventure through planet ceramics and her lovingly made ceramic fruit and veg and, perhaps most of all, I loved the imitation paintings, with very lovingly ‘painted’ banana skins and fennelly looking fennel. It’s not just the passion and love and tenderness and curiosity, all of which can be admired, it is that she is developing her own material visual vocabulary which works. It resembles the rendering of a language that you know but the speaker is laying the emphases – the sentence stresses - in unfamiliar places. For this reason, you find it difficult to understand. Slowly you realise you do know all these words and that the construction of them is also correct, but you just didn’t recognise it as first because of the unfamiliar rhythm.

A Note On Think Tank
I’ll just add here that Think Tank has produced a collection of papers on the subject of Skill. It’s not bad at all, in fact it’s a good start, but it is only a start. It comes across as a collection writing from people – albeit intelligent, thinking people, who have only just woken up to the fact that skill isn’t either uncontested or uncontestable. This may be because the only maker among them is unfortunately absent from this collection of papers, or it maybe they really haven’t been thinking about it for long. I’ve read almost all of it, and when I’ve finished, I might attempt to review it…

House of Words: Part 1 - musings on dictionaries

2009-06-07T12:25:00.008+01:00

I collect dictionaries. It’s a vice I speak of rarely. I didn’t mean to and I’d like to say that it just happened but of course it wasn’t like that. It all started when I decided to learn Farsi – or Persian if you prefer. The problem is – and maybe collecting is always started by a problem of some sort – the problem is that Persian English / English Persian dictionaries are dreadful. At least they are for the English student. They’re not so bad for the Iranian student of English but they’re still pretty ropey. The source of that problem, as I see it, is that they are all written either by Iranian lexicographers with no input from any native English speakers, or by an English lexicographer, with no input from any native Farsi speakers. The result is some pretty weird translations one way or another. For the English student of Farsi, it’s a nightmare. There’s no indication of pronunciation. The phonetics support the Iranian learner, there are none to help the English learner.

Backwards and Forwards
Example – Judge ‘(juj)’ it says, helpfully, like I don’t know.
Then comes the Farsi, but nothing in Latin script to indicate how I should pronounce the word – and you’d think that the English pronunciation for the Iranian student ‘juj’ should ideally be in Farsi script anyway. The only dictionary that does provide this kind of support for the English student was published in 1953. It’s got some great words in it, but not much you’d hear on the average Tehran street now.

Usage
Then comes the usage problem. Few dictionaries provide examples of how the word is used. Only very rarely can you change an English word into a Persian word directly. They don’t translate like that. You have to rethink the entire sentence. So when faced with seven different possibilities for ‘through,’ I have no idea which to use because there is no example of a sentence using the word. Then comes Dr. Aryanpour. He produces a fine beast of dictionary, so heavy it sits on my living room table and is never moved. I had to get a shopping trolley just to transport the thing home from the shop in Golders Green to my flat in Tottenham. It’s my pride and joy. But I have noticed that the beast in question is directed towards Iranian students who are translating English, not for English students writing in Farsi.

Mis/Translations
‘Fence,’ for example, deploys many column inches explaining in dense Farsi to the unsuspecting Iranian student, all the different ways those pesky English speakers might be using this word and what it is. You don’t really have fences in Iran as such - not in Tehran – they don’t do terraced housing with gardens and fences - and Aryanpour is Tehrani and Tehrani, like Londoners, are loath to leave the capital and in the rural areas – oh, look, you get the problem. Anyway, this splendidly dense section is rounded off as follows:
‘The teacher fences awkward questions.’
I wonder what with and how? The English mind boggles and god help the Iranian student. ‘Fencing,’ the verb meaning sword fighting, is said: ‘shamshi baazi’ meaning sword play. It’s one of my favourite words. Just thought I’d add that for good measure.

Confession
Thus I grew to love dictionaries. To my fevered, nerdy mind, they are a source of endless entertainment. Now I have shelves full of them. Mostly they are Persian English / English Persian but I also have Hungarian English / English Hungarian, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, French, Modern Greek, and that’s all I’m willing to confess to for now.

House of Words: Part 2 - a highly personal review with some extra bits

2009-06-07T12:20:00.006+01:00

Shall we start again?

House of Words

This is an exhibition of contemporary art which is on show now until August 29th 2009 in Dr. Johnson’s House, in Gough Square, just North of Fleet St. in Central London. It’s a good idea to abandon public transport somewhere around High Holborn so you have time to get involved in the tangle of streets on the north side of Gough Square and transport yourself back to 18th Century London. At least that’s what I did. And then I did it again four days later. Upon reflection, I’m not so sure that it is a good idea because I kept wondering what all these weird bits of ‘modern art’ were doing hanging around. And this is the problem that both the curators and artists have to deal with.

Oh England
What defines England? Well if you were to list five of the most important things, surely the English language would appear somewhere on almost anyone’s list – wouldn’t it? And who has defined the English language? Well, again, many things and many people, but Dr. Johnson’s dictionary must be among the most significant. So producers of contemporary art are either working with or competing against 300 years of the history of the English identity. Foolhardy you might think.

Getting to Grips with 'Modern Art.'
It was an uncomfortable, slightly fractured experience at first. I kept on finding that I was ignoring the art and absorbing myself in the stuff of the house. The second time I went, things fared a little better. I got much more absorbed in the work of the two of the artists, namely Jane Prophet and Caroline Broadhead.

Unspeakable
The brilliantly named Prophet did unspeakable things to unsuspecting dictionaries, which I loved. British literary culture is deeply suspicious of people who do stuff to books. We are nauseatingly precious about the damn things. Ludicrous when you think how many are pulped each year, how much we over-publish, - a very good thing from a literary point of view because it means we have a fighting chance of actually producing and READING some quite good stuff – and how much dross there is in print - also when you think how many books rest politely on people’s shelves unread. So the Prophetess took her laser thingy whatever it is and these dictionaries were lacerated and their pages made to produce shapes of butterflies and umbrellas and trees that turned out to be flames and so on. One included a woman’s profile being sick or breathing fire or with trees coming out of her month. She picked pages with related words which made you realise how many words meaning something similar are constructed from or grow out of the same etymological root and how many words in the English language refer to sex, sexuality or bodily function or are just plain rude. It sounds a bit obvious, but it worked and it was delicate and beautiful and followed an approximately sequential narrative which pleases nerdy people like me. And there was a gorgeous one hanging in a cupboard – reminiscent of the paper artist’s work in ‘Spectacular Craft’ at the V&A.

Repetition
The other work I grew to love was Caroline Broadhead’s chair which was actually the repeated ghostly apparition of Johnson’s chair, or so it was claimed. The chair was a strange shaped thing with a very long seat with a ridge at the edge, so it looked really uncomfortable. It’s reputed to be his chair at the pub, and someone has suggested that it may be that you’re supposed to sit on it backwards, leaning forwards against the back, one leg each side of the chair, which makes sense of its narrowness I suppose. Anyway, this apparition reappeared in several different places, at one time on top of a door in miniature and made of bronze, again behind a wooden window shutter, imprinted into paper and again as a 3-d ‘drawing,’ here it’s constructed out of what looked like piano wires, in many very straight parallel lines – as though it had been ‘drawn’ with a ruler.
I’m advised by the curator’s notes that this alludes to the repeated uses of language and the way it mutates with use. I liked the repetition because I like it aesthetically. I wasn’t overwhelmed by too much stuff. If there is a fault with the exhibition it is perhaps that - too much stuff. I’m not sure it matters though, and I’m damn sure Johnson wouldn’t have minded.

Afterthought:
Come to think of it, houses of that sort like clutter. They respond well to it. It’s contemporary art spaces that don’t. So on second thoughts- bring on the clutter. I might have found those annoying little books and the ‘found text’ stuff irritating, but it doesn’t mean you will.

Afterword:
Pourism: a mixture of English and Iranian words. This is one of the words suggested by a visitor for a new dictionary of English being compiled as an ‘interactive’ exhibit. It had turned up when I went the second time. You write down your word and its meaning on paper and, for no apparent reason, it might appear on a screen built into a cupboard. As a piece of art it’s cumbersome – putting it mildly. As an idea it’s quite cute. If more words like these turn up then the idea will have proved itself even if its articulation as artefact really isn’t convincing. The word, I guess, is a reference to the vagaries of ‘Farlish,’ which means the same kind of thing. I would imagine Pourism is gag at pour old Aryanpour’s expense. Farlish is used by both Iranians and English speakers who use each other’s languages and fiddle about with them but particularly when you try writing Farsi using English / Latin script or English using Farsi script.

5.00am Sunday May 31st 2009 at Mum's and her garden later the same day

2009-06-07T11:35:00.005+01:00

Job Centre Honey-Plus

2009-06-06T12:35:00.004+01:00

OUT OF ORDER announced the job-hunting machine, folding its arms and refusing to budge. OUT OF ORDER added the photocopier, idly staring out of the window. Wood Green Job Centre Plus commands a magnificent view across one of Haringey’s many fine public gardens. This garden boasts a 25 metre pergola draped in abundant pink roses and twirling with Wysteria, glistening lawns and perfectly cropped hedges. The centre was milling with the recently unemployed - all trying their best to look positive - in sharp contrast to the uncooperative equipment that had decided to take Friday off.

I eventually found reception and was told go upstairs to another reception where a nice lady told me I’d come to the wrong place entirely – I should have been at White Heart Lane apparently – but she’d try and persuade ‘an advisor’ to see me. ‘Hmm,’ she muttered, ‘you’re the second doctor I’ve seen this week.’

I waited and filled out a form and waited some more and looked out of the window and did some reading and had a stretch and then another nice lady passed by and offered me strawberries which I refused but felt inspired to do a few shimmies instead. Various rather smart people were congregating on the sofas by now, all eagerly filling out forms and waiting and chatting bravely to each other like one of those mad self-improvement seminars convened by some organisation desperately trying to justify its funding. I was then assigned an advisor.

The divinely pretty woman with glistening white teeth looked out from under her dark fringe, smiled beatifically, puckered her darling, perfectly sculpted, little eyebrows and cooed, very softly, ‘what are you dooo-ing here???’

I warbled on about this and that and being in the studio and so on and so forth and she glazed over with the sheer tedium of it all and then asked if I liked going to ‘foreign places.’ Yes I said, about to launch into a blow by blow account of my adventures in and not in Iran but, before I’d completed the first sentence, she smiled again, ‘that’s good. You could go somewhere else and do your arty-farty stuff.’

Time passed pleasantly enough, we signed this and that and I wrote down a few things and our lady of the strawberries passed by again, this time followed by an angel of biscuits, and then my own advisor-princess, by way of closure, gazes at me closely, then, tilting her head to one side - oh so prettily - and smiling even more, she asks: ‘why are you single?’

Wood Green marriage bureau can be found at 1 Western Rd, London, N22. It has curved walls like a ship and beautiful views. I doubt that Tottenham High Rd, where I now have to sign-on, can compete – but who knows?

Back To The Shop: More Adventures In Philip Lane

2009-05-21T08:35:00.005+01:00

Things are hotting up considerably at the corner shop these days. The marching songs still embellish the police sirens in Philip Lane and the price-war continues, happily for the customers. I’ve more or less abandoned Yasir Halim now, in favour of Euro Stores and Mr. Ocean. I interrupted a tumultuous row the other day, arguments being bellowed from one side of the Ocean to the other, ricocheting off the fennel and back to the beer, then up an aisle to the carefully arranged sheep heads and back to the pasta and round again, taking in the grape-seed molasses on the way. Bewildered, I announced that I agreed with HIM and waved towards the tallest, in gold chain, who grinned from ear to ear. Ah-ha, muttered the lad at the counter, checking the change, so you ARE a communist.

They’d been arguing in Kurdish so I hadn’t understood a word. I clearly wasn’t going to be served unless I demanded attention and that seemed the best way to do it. Gold Chain was clearly delighted at my declaration of partisanship. ‘We just need to bring back communism and everything will be ok,’ he announced, beaming beatifically. I wondered when it was that Philip Lane, or Tottenham, or perhaps it was the whole of Haringey, had been a communist enclave. Had I missed something? Counter lad explained that Gold Chain was ‘going back to the mountains to fight.’ He seemed confident that I was now a fully paid up, card carrying member of Gold Chain Communists Inc and that I would repair at once to my cave and make ready to join the march.

I can barely carry a Kalshnikov, let alone fire one, but I will admit to having once had a go. I shot a collection of beer bottles in the mountains outside Dogubayzit, on the Turkish Iranian border. Mr. Siam Shahin, who runs Murat Camping, a tourist camp-site close to Ishakpasha Palace, had taken me there to show me his eleven, glistening smuggling horses. He was a kind of Kurdish God-Father figure, who smuggled alcohol into Iran on horseback, and brought back electrical goods and people- at vast cost presumably. He told me he ran schools for Kurdish children in the mountains. He’d been proudly displaying his gun collection to me and others staying at the camp-site. I admired the Kalashnikov and foolishly remarked that I’d always wanted to fire one. ‘I’ll teach you,’ he offers. You don’t refuse a man with four guns, so I went into the mountains for my first, (and last), fire-arms lesson. It weighed about 25 kilos and jolted back into my shoulder every time I fired it. I did hit a couple of bottles, but not the ones I was intending to hit. Satisfied I’d be a hopeless freedom fighter of the armed variety, I retired to nurse my bruised shoulder.

I just want to make it absolutely clear this was not a ‘training camp’ of any sort. Shehir enjoys very cordial relations indeed with the Iranian Consulate in Erzerum and I had gone there to see if he could extract a visa for me. To say that he was, and presumably still is, an extremely unsavoury character would be an understatement - the more so, somehow, for being so thoroughly personable. It took me about four days fully to realise and then accept exactly how unsavoury he was. The Kalashnikov story sounds like one those cheerful little travellers tales. On the face of it is, but it involves some of most toxic characters I’ve ever met in my life. The people he was bringing over the border, I subsequently found out, were women that he sold to the hotels in the area to provide sex to Russian traders. I hope Gold Chain’s just shooting his mouth off. If not he’ll find himself involved in one the main trades that funds the PKK. I’d rather he just tried to ‘bring back’ his communist enclave in Philip Lane any day.

We Built This City

2009-05-15T11:12:00.011+01:00

E Voila – here we have a group of crafts people, we could call them makers, working together - collaborating - on a project in Kensington, London’s fanciful West End: land of tallish stately houses, painted white, land of locked shared gardens in fashionable squares that aren’t square, land of the Temple of the Applied Arts and The Royal Dinosaur Paddock, Land of the most excellent Polish restaurant, Daquise, descended from Polish inward migration round one, (circa 1945). Here, in a swanky, if ever so slightly frumpy, naff part of the metropolis, was, (trumpet blast):
We Work in a Fragile Material!!
A charming group of Swedes with green fingernails had come to build us a new city. Quite unlike those pesky Danes that preceded them a few centuries ago, they built, wove, constructed, plaited and stuck things on and painted them.
Well, imagine my surprise to find, here in Kensington - KENSINGTON of all places - a Greenham bender!! Sisters – we’ve arrived! We are in Kensington. A Bender in SW1!! No, seriously, it gets better – this bender is ‘supported’ by South Kensington Estates. We’re part of a cool urban regeneration project. Whooood a’ thought it? They even had a spider web !!!!!!
Now, for those youngsters who have absolutely no idea what a Greenham bender is, check this out. Those nice people at the Guardian have made us our very own website – here.
So, ‘We Built this City’ was a faultless exercise in marginal refuge/ee migratory construction, combining basket weaving, papier mache, other kinds of weaving, and the careful tearing up of the Metro, London’s esteemed free newspaper.
It resembled a cow’s stomach, it had four chambers, all of which looked like they were chewing cud. The ‘skeleton’ of the structure was - oh, you know, basket weaving material, and there was chicken wire and papier mache stuck on the chicken wire and painted in parts and, I loved this bit, decorated here and there with pistachio nut shells – the makers having first eaten the said nuts presumably. This was a real Greenham touch.
Inside things got really dinky. There was, as I said, a spider’s web woven out of string, cute little papie mache cups and a tea pot and some ‘clay pots’ made of papier mache and light bulbs on long wires – now we didn’t have them at Greenham – and candles – we had tonnes of them.
‘It’s supercraft’ said one of the team. ‘We also make non-material things but we bring our craft minds to it.’
And ‘supercraft’ it was. It was also funny and delightful and cooperative and un-precious. I wrote this the same weekend I saw it. It was the latest offering of the 6pm project space, curated by Marie Torbensdatter Hermann and hosted by her and co-curator Edmund de Waal. For no particular reason, other than having got distracted by something else, I am posting it now, almost three weeks later and, coincidentally, the Crafts Council’s flagship enterprise, Collect, opened last night at the Saatchi Gallery. This is the Craft Council’s annual fit of decorative craft debauchery, an absurd fetishisation of binge-consumption, belching quietly in time to the theme tune of late consumer capitalism. You can almost see those posters, cant you? Labour isn’t working – brilliantly crafted politics at the time, courtesy of the watchmaker’s son, even it did consume itself into oblivion. Shudder. Ah well, I shall repair to a supercraft tent – now, where did I put those bolt cutters?

Dinner With Svetlana

2009-04-20T21:09:00.010+01:00

This is the second version of Dinner With Svetlana. The first I did in 2006 and it's featured on my website where you can also find the text in full. Svetlana is also another version of me. She is the Russian trafficked or prostituted woman I am often thought to be, especially when I stay in hotels on my own in Tehran or Shiraz. I couldn't escape this alternative identity so I just accepted her and began to find out who Svetlana was and is. My 'Svetlana' self doesn't exist only in Iran, she was also with me throughout Eastern Europe and in London. This is the version I made for the Esfahan show. I had to change a couple of the words which were not considered 'decent,' although no one seems to mind too much about the trafficking.

A Tale of Two Ministries

2009-04-19T21:03:00.014+01:00

For the foreign visitor, arriving in Esfahan in Spring does make you wonder if you died suddenly and got catapulted into Heaven. However, Esfahan is also a large industrial city. It sprawls and belches gross sulphuric yellow pollution, which hangs in a thick cloud at the periphery, a cloud so dense that even on an otherwise clear day, the city is not visible as you enter it from the South side. It is entirely concealed under the suffocating blanket of smog. This is Esfahan’s ‘other side’. There’s plenty more to add to add to that, but not in this post.

So, what of the exhibition?
Well, it hasn’t been cancelled, exactly, nor postponed, exactly. It has suffered from a bout of bureaucratic incompetence, conniving and malevolent malfunctioning that makes its pollution seem almost harmless. Having laboured day and night for five months on no pay, and produced a body of work that I like to think might hold its own in a gallery, having organised the transport and written the catalogue and done everything I should have done, I was refused a visa. So, just to clarify this: a government institution, namely the Museum of Contemporary Art, Esfahan, invites me to do the show and asks me to sign a contract and the very same government refuses to allow either me or the exhibition to enter the country.

Arcane dealings
The Foreign Ministry, part of central government, doles out the visas. The Museum is under the jurisdiction of provincial government of Esfahan. The process was as follows:
FM to Museum, ‘Send us a copy of the official letter confirming the exhibition.’
Museum to FM. ‘No – bugger off!’
FM to Museum, ‘Send us a copy of the email you sent her inviting her to exhibit.’
Museum to FM. ‘No – I said NO, now bugger off!’
Museum to me, (snarling): ‘The FM is trying to trick us into being your host but we are forbidden to be the host to any foreign artist - VERY VERY forbidden’
Bureaucratic language note: ‘host’ means someone who ‘takes responsibility for you all the time that you are in Iran.’ Meaning: if you do anything ‘wrong’ it becomes the fault of the ‘host’. Tough on an individual, but something you might think an institution could tolerate.
Technically, as far as I can tell and as far as anyone can tell, the museum is indeed the host, but they’re having none of it.
My interpretation: Museum has got very cold feet, possibly because ‘foreign artist,’ in this case, is ‘British artist' and, since A’jad (Ahmedinejad) is preparing to get in the bed with Ooooooooo ba mast, (Obama) a new ‘great satan’ must be found as a matter of urgency and the old ‘great satan’ ie Britain, will do just fine. Bum. That ‘s all I’ve got to say – in this post anyway. Actually I’ve said quite a bit more but it’s all off blog, hence my prolonged silence in this space. Oooooo baa maast, btw, is how Obama's name reads when it's written in Farsi. In effect it divides into three words, which just happen to mean 'he's with us' - ok, strictly it's ooo baa maa, 'he with us,' but what's a 'st' between friends? Back in November 2008, last time I was in Iran, this was considered a thigh slappingly funny joke at the news stands in Tehran. It was pretty funny the first few times.

So what now?
So, in principle, it could all just wait till the election’s over and the dust and pollution settles and ‘they,’ whoever ‘they’ are, get a bit less paranoid about foreigners, especially foreigners who have something called a BBC in their country that does unspeakable things like report on what goes on in Iran - occasionally. And what of the planned triste between Ooooob and A’jad? Will they or won't they? Will Oooooob get Mr. Mousavi instead? What about that poor women (Roxana Saberi) they’ve just stuffed in gaol for god knows how long as a bargaining chip?
October 2003, Tehran, lobby of Naderi hotel, Hassan to me: ‘This really is the most lawless bloody place I’ve every encountered.’ (‘Hassan’ teaches Middle Eastern politics and law at a well-known British University)
October 2004, London, Afsane’s kitchen, watching the rice, Felora to me: ‘Iran would be a great place, Claudia, but the problem is there’s no law.’
The tale of two ministries suggested that even Iranian officials are utterly confused by their own legal bureaucracy, but the Tale of Roxana says that in April 2009, they’ve just declared war on their own legal system. Many would say they did that decades ago, but it hasn’t been quite so fully-paid-up, so shamelessly public for some years has it? Or am I just deluded?

To more important matters
Atefeh comes to mind, but they didn’t expect anyone outside Iran, outside Neka even, to notice– we did and we’re still angry by the way. Come to think of it, this year, August 15th, (?) is the fifth anniversary of her murder…
This is the Wikipeida entry for Atefeh Rajabi Sahaaleh, it’s not bad as these things go. Here is a link to a blog about Atefeh with the youtube links to an American version of a documentary about her. There is also a BBC documentary, 'Execution of a Teenage Girl' available on youtube in five parts. Click here and type 'execution of a teenage girl' into 'search' to find the five pieces. Here’s one in French which is all in one, not in parts.

Klara Kristalova: Where The Owls Spend Their Days

2009-03-06T19:30:00.007Z

It’s not often I walk into a ceramics show and feel a burst of joy followed by a sigh of satisfaction. In fact it’s extremely rare, but it happened last week. Things have happened since then which have left me feeling oppressed, bruised and sorely in need of something to lift the spirits. So I sneaked into Alison Jacques Gallery again today, to see if Klara Kristalova’s show was really as I’d remembered: fabulous – in all senses of the word. I sidled nervously past the first figure who stands alone elevated on a plinth in the entrance, surveying the audience with sunken face and long dark cloak, Dickensian and a bit threatening. In the main gallery a vast, dark cupboard looms out of a dimly lit space baring its contents, a collection of strange, yet instantly recognisable creatures. They’re magical and other-worldly, like toys but also like dreams or nightmares, visions or fantasies.

That sense of excitement and wonder was still there and it does offer relief to the spirit, in spite of the hint of anxiety lurking among the creatures in the cupboard.

Lets start with the top shelf of this over-sized toy cupboard. There are four joined heads, called ‘Family;’ a pansy; a woman with a very white face, black hair and the vestige of a lacy veil (?) across her eyes; and then another sunken face. All these are ceramic ‘figures’, white, black and colour, all saturated – it’s a bright white, a deep, inky black and a sweet, pansy-like purple, if it’s there at all. I might have added that with my own memory of the flowers. The imagination gets to work in a show like this. The way it’s been displayed invites it as does the work itself which seeps into the threads of your own memory. There’s a donkey on the next shelf down, sitting upright on the shelf, human-sitting pose, its (back) legs dangling over the edge of the shelf – front legs are ‘arms.’ Just looked at the picture, it is a human with a donkey head. Then there’s a girl with an owl head and shoulders– a Stoke on Trent type owl. There are lots more things. Go and see it. There’s ‘Dog-Friend’ on the bottom shelf and ‘Gluttony’ – a small girl devouring enormous grapes bigger than her, very very greeeeen grapes.

Room three has heads covered in moths on plinths. The moths are huge and congest the sight and nose and mouth of the head, you can sort of feel them in your own mouth – it’s all a bit unpleasant and furry. The moths’ wings are beautiful in a slightly clumsy ceramicy sort of way, thick wings, lines drawn a bit shakily – thick puddling glaze making bubbles and big crackle marks: gorgeous if worrying – the creatures not the crackles.

The show, entitled ‘Where the Owls Spend Their Days,’ is fables and fairy tales, not menacing exactly but provoking just enough anxiety to meet your own and feel like you’re among friends. I guess that’s where the sense of relief comes from. It also deliciously made, heavy-ish, visceral, painterly, almost sumptuous. I can’t think of anyone else working in this material who turns black and white into colour as successfully as she does. It is immensely impressive.

Kristalova joins a proud group of makers working with the figure / figurine and storytelling. I don’t want to list them here because I want to leave this post to her, but I will say that I think this strand in ceramic thinking and practice is probably the strongest at the moment. This show is certainly a joy to behold, and, curators, please go and see it – make it a priority, and see ceramic work displayed brilliantly. Thank you.

The ski slopes of Broadwater Farm

2009-02-03T18:03:00.009Z

So, we all took a day off.

Philip Lane: A Tale of Treachery, Protection, Cucumbers and Marching Songs.

2009-01-26T22:12:00.002Z

Cemal calls round last week. I haven’t seen him for ages. He’s been keeping a low profile in a charming northern city somewhere, railing against the lack of proper Turkish supermarkets, giving up smoking, complaining, nay mewling, about those other Kurds, those ‘Iranian’ ones, who turned out to be Iraqi, but also enjoying a good moan, breathing cleaner air, and getting very attached to his local, premier league, football team.

So we stroll out in the morning frost to investigate Philip Lane which, I realise, has completely changed since his departure last year. Now, he used to work at Aksu, little Aksu, the veg shop on the corner of Kitchener rd, that’s where I met him. Then the bigger shop by the bus stop, big Aksu, committed an act of unspeakable treachery. It started to stock vegetables too, not as well kept as those on the Kitchener rd corner, but veg nonetheless. The upshot was that little Aksu went 24 hours, then closed and was sold, unable to compete with its treacherous neighbour which now sold alcohol and veg. Little Aksu didn’t have room for alcohol and anyway Hussein’s wife was observant and didn’t really approve, so Hussein went and got drunk at the Turkish tea shop at the back of Botany Bay pub opposite and gambled away the shop’s meagre profit.

So, the ever stoical Cemal migrated over the road to work at Ocean Stores, another Turkish supermarket. We had only two so naturally a third was necessary. Mr. Ocean must have been a bit loaded so he bought up little Aksu as well and turned it into a butcher. That lasted less that a year, and was bought by Mr, Tea-shop-at-the-back-of-Botany-Bay-pub, affectionately known as ‘the Trafficker,’ on account of the alarmingly high turn over of Lithuanian women who worked at the bar in the tea-shop. So the Trafficker buys out the butcher’s shop and turns it into – yes that’s right – another of his lovely tea shops, because we’ve got only fifteen of them in Philip Lane / West Green road so, clearly, we need another.

Well then Mr. Ocean buys up the Turkish hostel at the back of Ocean Stores where my friends Cafar, Bilgen and their children used to live (in one room with the children in a bunk bed under the stairs in a corridor - happily they now live in a nice big flat at the back of Tescos opposite Seven Sisters), and where Cemal used to live, ‘bunking up’ with his mate, Rifat, and he, Mr. Ocean, extends Ocean Stores to include the butcher again. It’s now a pretty substantial supermarket. He even thoughtfully drops the price of soya milk from £1.29 to £1.19, having noticed at long last the Big Aksu has been selling theirs for £1.19 ever since they committed the cucumber coup.

Then what? Well, Botany Bay Pub was closed down and sold off around Christmas last year. Lately there’s been much activity and buying in of shop fittings and I ask the nice young woman at Ocean Stores what’s happening. Ocean Stores by now has doubled up as the local recruiting agency for the PKK. If you go there at the right time of day, there’s now a very chatty lad who plays, ‘communist marching song’s’ according to him. ‘I’m not supposed to,’ he confides and then starts trying to interest the hairy English anarchist man behind me, sporting ginger beard and desert fatigues, in joining up. He looks at me and boldly asserts, ‘there are almost as many women in the PKK as there are men, you know.’

I’m interested in more mundane matters though and, as the nice young woman counts my change, she informs me that Botany Bay is to be another supermarket – a really big one. ‘What sort of supermarket, which supermarket?’ I demand, dreading the onset of Tescos or similar. ‘Another Turkish family,’ she growls, and flares her nostrils for added emphasis.

Thing is, I cant see either Big Aksu or Mr Ocean going down without a fight and, given Ocean’s affiliations and Aksu’s protection racket which, according to Cemal, he started around the time of cucumber coup, I’m not sure if the sheer size of Botany Bay will be enough. The C Word’s prediction for 2009 is local skirmishes breaking out on the borders of N17 and N15, (BB is N15, Aksu and Ocean N17 – Philip Lane is the border,) resulting in possible all out war later in the year.

Maureen at the Laundrette on the corner of Philip Lane and Clonmell rd offers the best vantage point for anyone interested in observing from her splendid, full-size, picture windows. It was ideal for observing the fights at the pub and I’ve no doubt she’ll offer front row seats, tea so strong you could tar the road wit it, and a plentiful supply of her own unique Irish wisdom for all patrons in need. She also does a very fine line in second hand books. I wonder if there’s one about the battles of Broadwater Farm. Ah, now there’s another story. Thelma at the flower shop over the road can tell you all about that.

Work in Progress

2009-01-19T23:00:00.007Z

Happy New Year! January 19th and I've only just started my first post for this year. Ok, so I have to admit it - I'm wholly immersed in making new work for the show in Esfahan and in writing a journal article, Tanslating Virginity. The result is that I cant easily get to shows because of time pressure and because there's no more room inside my head to fit other people's work in and I'm not reading because I want to concentrate on writing. That last bit isn't quite true because I am reading Fataneh Farahani's glorious PhD thesis - yes they can be glorious sometimes - it's called, 'Diasporic Narratives of Sexuality: Identity formation among Iranian - Swedish Women.' Swedish Universities publish their theses properly so anyone can read them. This one is from Stockholm University and I warmly recommend it.
So, the pot above is for 'How to Eat a Pomegranate', that's the title of the show. When I'm in Iran, countless numbers of people ask me, 'What do you think of Iran?' The show is my response to this question. The pot pictured above is one of two pots called, 'Forming the Perfect.' Yes, it is a pun on language. I got it from one of my grammar books. I like it because of the reference to the struggle with language and also because it indicates that perfection is formed, rather than being natural. The show's getting increasingly involved with the deep concern that Iranians have with perfection, especially perfect beauty, and the ways they construct it. Fataneh, she of the thesis, took this picture in my studio. I really like it because it shows the scale of the pot well and its relationship to me. I have a very troubled relationship with perfection. So none of my pots will be perfect. This one, for example, is going to have breathe in if it's going to get in the kiln ok. I'll let you know what happens.

Lotf'allah mosque, Esfahan, Iran

2008-12-28T11:01:00.005Z

No one with an interest in ceramics should allow themselves to die without first seeing Esfhahan.

Viva Viva

2008-12-19T20:47:00.004Z

I'm shocked to find it's more than a month since I wrote for this blog. Much has happened. I've been in Iran, discussing a planned solo show in Esfahan in 2009, in the Iranian month of Ordibehesht, which runs from April 21st - May 21st. There will be much more on this soon, and more about plans for The C Word's second year, which, coincidentally starts at about the same time as Iranian New Year, mid - March.
Meanwhile, I want to tell you about a remarkable, ambitious, and to the best of my knowledge, unique exhibition I saw on Sunday 14th December, the last day of it's two-week run.

Viva Viva

In a giant concrete bunker under the Marylebone campus of the University of Westminster, opposite Baker st. Tube Station and Madame Tussaude’s, lies P3. It’s one of London’s newest art spaces, and certainly one of its biggest. If Tate modern resembles an airport, (which it does), this is the aircraft hanger. It’s brutal though, the sort of place that General Pinochet would have singled out for particularly ghastly torture sessions.

Undaunted, however, the turbo-charged visionary that is Zemirah Moffat, spun into action and delivered an astonishing exhibition of flickering, glittering screens, colour bars, soundscapes, language trails and lovingly bound, printed volumes, all in the service of the practice-based PhDs in Audio-visual media.
The idea itself was eccentric to the point of insanity – it would certainly have seemed so to the average, art-world curator.
‘I’m going to curate a show of practice-based PhDs in audio-visual media from the last 20 years. It’s a show about knowledge. The centre piece will be a library with all the doctoral theses bound in orange on the shelves so that the audience can read them.'
YAAH RIGHT, drawls the west-end curator, adjusting her velvet hair band, and hastily doing up the top button of her Harvey Nich’s silk blouse. A doctoral thesis sounded mildly threatening–she wasn’t going to take any risks.
YEAH RIGHT, sneers the cool cat curator, tossing his thinning mane, grease landing in a fine spray on a nearby wall – consults his blackberry, ‘we’ll just close the gallery for the two weeks it’s on shall we?’ Collapses with laughter at his own side-splitting wit.

I wont pretend it wasn’t overwhelming, intimidating almost as you descend the concrete bunker and encounter the numerous screens, but bit by bit, they separate out and become individual pieces of work. The vast space is generous, you could arrange yourself comfortably and settle into each work, absorbing the particular nature of the ‘cinema’ venue, or the tv screens, the still photographs suspended from the ceiling, or the computer screen tucked up next to a pillar, or the several screens forming a whole installation. Ear phones allowed me to sink into John Wynne’s ‘Hearing Voices’, work on click languages from the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, which attended to all my personal obsessions, and for which I would cheerfully have settled in for the night.

Screen work rarely does well in a conventional gallery space, so perhaps this most emphatically not white, not cube, demonstrates that very different kinds of spaces are needed for such work to thrive. The most significant thing though was the constant humming presence of the research, the building of knowledge through experiment and writing, the integrated relationship between the written thesis and the art work, which, probably for the first time, were allowed to appear in the same venue at the same time, so the viewer/ reader/ audience could encounter the whole, rather than the fragmented, disassociated parts. This was an extraordinary adventure which demanded much from its audience and delivered more. I’d love to see something like it in the Hayward. The public are quite capable of coping with a bit of hard-core thinking, if only we’re given the chance.

Rebecca Fairman, 2008: Cold Comfort

2008-11-17T21:20:00.006Z

Cold comfort is a very simple work, a collection of small, square, imprinted and slightly cushioned hollow tiles, arranged together on a child-sized iron bedstead to resemble a patchwork quilt. The bed is placed in a dimly-lit, cell-like room, with a curved ceiling like a tunnel and with one entrance and no windows. It’s a forlorn sight.

There is a palpable sense of sorrow hanging in the dimly lit rain-soaked air. It’s impossible not to think of Jane Eyre or the Princes in the tower. It has a theatrical, film location quality to it which gives it a contemporary feel but simultaneously recalls images of Dickens’ characters and Victorian London, in the ‘produced’ sense.

Fairman has very successfully introduced devices of melodrama to the work through her use of lighting and of the damp, dark cell. She has kept the visual qualities simple and in so doing, has allowed the ceramic quilt on its bed to communicate what Jorunn Veiteberg has called, ‘craft’s affective side,’ The patchwork quilt, both as an image and as a thing, and here it’s used as both, is steeped in cultural memory. It is an archetype of craft and a recognisable object which can speak to a wide and culturally diverse audience. Fairman uses it to generate very personal, intimate meaning, but one to which audiences can and did respond.

Fairman has used craft practice as the central agent of narrative in this work with considerable agility. The cold hardness of the ceramic ‘quilt’ is the tactile surprise which works, not least because you can pick up each piece, turn it over in your hands, and know how hard it is. In so doing you encounter the imprints of fine lace, embroidery, bits of doilies and so forth which are the pieces of female biography, the domestic memorabilia from which quilts are made. Quilts, traditionally, are made from ‘leftovers’. There is a class aspect to their story: the very wealthy didn’t need to bother too much with patchwork quilts. There are ‘posh’ quilts, made from new fabric, but overwhelmingly they’re ‘backyard’. Cold Comfort deploys a down-home, domestic, useful and traditional craft form, to generate a new, contemporary narrative, which suggests that the genealogy of this work is closer to feminist art from the 1970s and 80s, than to modernist craft pottery.

Fairman took this piece to some local woodland and was surprised at how much the public, especially children, took to it and wanted to get involved in some way. ‘One child was clearing all the leaves away because she didn’t want this beautiful thing to get dirty.’ Left on it’s own in that kind of environment, it might quickly look like a murder scene and would be too visceral, for me anyway. Cold Comfort is at its strongest when it is interactive. Fairman was wise to avoid a white cube, gallery environment which would have made it very stagey. The brickwork of shunt and of basement room in her house allowed the ‘affective’ side to do its work.

Cold Comfort was exhibited at Shunt, November 2008 and previewed at the artist’s house in Bermondsey.
Fairman is also part of the Buff group, featured earlier this year on The C Word.

The Parlous State of Publishing for Writing about Ceramics.

2008-11-09T22:42:00.004Z

This post will appear in three parts. it is about the vexed question of how to write and talk about pots, about ceramics, about craft and about art. It's also about where and how publish what we do write. Part one is below. Parts two and three will appear later this week. They're in the pipeline - I'm working on them. There may be another section discussing examples of art-speak, pot-speak, Ceramics' emancipatory inheritance and Ceramics' mythic imaginary - these last two are a bit connected but not entirely. Ready?

Part 1: A moderately short story about writing a book review

Alice was eating toast and marmalade and feeling rather pleased with herself. She’d been sent a big fat glossy, expensive-looking book to review, at least that’s what she thought she had to do. Confrontational Ceramics was the title. She settled down for a quiet morning’s reading – the sort of reading you do with a pencil, note book and those mini post-it notes in different colours for marking special pages. Just for a moment, she felt really quite important. Gradually, as the morning passed, storm clouds gathered, as the sordid truth slowly dawned. The beautiful fat glossy book was dreadful. Dreadful in every way. The text was ghastly - it was only an introduction and then some mini-introductions but, even so, they were enough to put you off the whole thing - and the rest of the book was made up entirely of pictures with something called, ‘artist’s statements’. These apparently were where the artists were allowed to try and bully you into thinking what they thought. Well Alice jolly well wasn’t going to be bullied. She threw the beastly book across the room, and went and consulted the Cheshire Cat. She was, after all, expected to write about the thing. What was she to do?

Well, she wrote the review and let’s just say that, in the process, she learned that it was almost impossible to write a negative review which wasn’t inherently depressing and as unreadable as the book she objected to. She sent it off and it was politely returned. She tried again. It went back and forth for weeks.

‘Try writing about the ‘work’ instead of the text,’ growled the white rabbit, fishing out his gold pocket watch and snarling about academia, while Alice, almost in tears by now, meekly agreed but also snarled. She berated the parlous state of publishing and wondered how to review ‘work’ she hadn’t actually seen.

Then a neighbour publication, ‘Sopra Nova Glittery Handwork’ published its review of the bestial book, and Alice noted that it was written by a Patrician White Patriarch with a very Proper Pottery Pedigree. She also noted that he’d made exactly the same complaints as she had. The White Rabbit emailed: he too had noticed that Alice’s objections, (yer honour) had been upheld by the senior Prefect with the Perfect Pedigree. Alice tried not to feel too smug, and suppressed the ‘I told you so’ that threatened to jump out of her mouth. She wrote the new review, but the bestial book didn’t get any better.

Alice still doesn’t know if the Parish Council Pottery Newsletter will publish the new version or the old version or an amalgamation of the two, or nothing. She still isn’t sure if the senior prefect’s review has somehow made her’s more palatable or not. The White Rabbit seems somewhat mollified, but you can never be sure with rabbits. They take fright easily.

It had been a funny morning. Alice felt strangely satisfied and yet something was still bothering her. The Cheshire Cat still hadn’t uttered. So she thought she’d go and see the Red Queen just to see if she had anything to say on the matter.

Ending International Feminist Futures? (??????)

2008-11-02T15:33:00.004Z

Say, what? ---

I was puzzled by the title too but, undaunted, high-tailed it off to Aberdeen, gorgeous, graceful, granite-grey city, glistening sea-side, stately trees and rushing, shining river, bright winter sun and magnificent (eat yer heart out Cambridge and Oxford), magnificent university campus, and had a whale of a time at the conference above named.

What's in the Name?
First things first, why Ending? It’s all in the question mark, of course. It seems that some feminist academics are engaged in one of those quasi-apocalyptic moments, a bit like the art world gets into about every ten years or so, when a bunch of people produce manifestos or articles or similar saying ‘the end of art?’(craft/global capitalism/ celebrity/ religion/ life/ the universe – delete as applicable), and organise endless conferences, seminars, happenings, etc to discuss the matter and generally create much carbon emission.

'Hell No!'
So, I added my carbon footprint to everyone else’s and went and said, ‘hell no,’ along with all the other speakers and everyone there who said, ‘hell no’ too. This was in fact the last of four conferences, which, I now suspect, were convened chiefly to say a monumental collective, ‘hell no’ very loudly. And we did. There certainly wasn’t any sign of feminism ending, quite the contrary; there were a great many new beginnings, much growing of small, feminist bean sprouts. Oh and some splendid making of cheese cakes.

'So then what happened?'
The genesis of the four workshops/conferences was something to do with International Relations, although this conference was hosted by Marysia Zalewski and the University of Aberdeen’s Centre for Gender Studies and School of Social Science. There was an IR tinge to most of the papers, but not all. It was admirably varied, quite a bit of cultural studies, some media studies, a very cool genomics meets eco feminism via science fiction joint paper, a study of how women were pictured by Communist Poland and then by the Solidarity movement ‘women tractor drivers to Solidarity women’, I talked about Shattered. Actually, I talked about Traffic, which is one the pots in Shattered, (see website), and there were several papers which were either about trafficking or touched on it somewhere. A Dutch woman talked about feminist Egyptian (documentary) Cinema, (that one was really fascinating,) a Turkish woman, talked about the construction of Turkish masculinity through compulsory military service, also fascinating. Cynthia Enloe talked about post-war Iraq and post-wars going back to the First World War and how feminists need to intervene in these situations and in how the stories are told. She produced the quote of the conference in my estimation: ‘Widows make people very nervous.’ Too bloody right they do, you should see what they’re doing in Iran.

'And What Else?'
Some papers were very esoteric, exploring much chewy, involved, quite abstract theory, others were more like discussions of a much bigger research project. It provided an immensely diverse overview of feminism at work in the academy and of feminists, in every imaginable discipline, bringing their feminism to scrutinise and - in the case of IR in particular – almost reinvent it. One of the most imaginative and highly successful strands to this event was the part played by artists and some students from Gray’s School of Art, who curated a show of their work. An artist called Merlyn Riggs was doing participatory work. We all had to bring something which was indicative of us and she photographed the things for 'The Museum of Me'. She introduced the work saying, 'My work is about 'Me, Meals, and Menopause,' -(she was responsible for the cheescake recipes). She's also been working with women in a drop in centre and with women in the Sottish Parliament. Alex Brew, another of the artists, has been working with images of men,'Why don't women objectify men?' she asked. She's written an excellent piece for The F Word which is linked to her website, here.

Mixing It Up
It would be truly revolutionary to see planets art, craft and, especially, ceramics, following suit. Unfortunately ‘interdisciplinary’ on planet craft just means including different media, for example textile art mixing with digital media, which you might think was part of how textile/fibre art was developing in digital times anyway, but apparently this counts as interdisciplinary. Not in my book it doesn’t. That’s just visual art behaving as it should. The Crafts Council is consulting on good practice in the crafts, fostering ambition, that sort of thing. I’d suggest this was an excellent example of good practice I’d like to see imported into craft practices.

'Now What?'
Conferences are an extraordinary opportunity to listen to things we don’t normally listen to and meet people we wouldn’t normally meet, this one particularly so because of its interdisciplinary element. Academic departments are often entirely separate from one another, even within a single university, which limits the spread of knowledge because people can’t easily learn from each other. A truly interdisciplinary event such as this can capitalise on the broad dissemination of research which results from the mix and make a real contribution to the building and sustaining of knowledge in that it brings new ways of understanding the issues that arise within our own disciplines. I want to encourage the visual arts and craft institutions that I’m involved with to be much more interdisciplinary in their approach particularly to the dissemination of our work and research. Neither academia nor the art/craft world are particularly well disposed to this kind of interdisciplinary high-jinks, and this conference was an object lesson in how to do it.

Connecting Cultures: Relaunching the collections at Cartwright Hall, Bradford

2008-10-30T09:49:00.004Z

Cartwright Hall is one of those stately, Victorian monuments to wool, civic pride, ambition, wealth and paternalistic duty which graces many a small, middling-sized and large town in Northern England. It was purpose built in 1904 to house the art collection of one Mr. Lister, local wool magnate, and continues to function as a magnificent museum and art gallery. It was recently refurbished and the collections were re-curated and displayed thematically, which has allowed the historic collection to meet and mingle with the contemporary collection in a way that brings new meaning to both and probably new audiences too.

About the Collection
Cartwright Hall’s contemporary collection has never been ‘medium-specific,’ the collection was not either acquired or organised according the material from which the work was made, such as metal work, ceramics, textiles or photography, but rather according to narrative and meaning. At one time there was a ‘transcultural collection’ which focused of arts from the Indian sub-continent and on contemporary South Asian and diaspora art. It then expanded and the collecting policy became an early exemplar of ‘diversity’ in art acquisitions. The result is probably one of the most interesting public collections in Britain. Ok, I’m biased, I have work in it, but mine’s a very early work, don’t get too excited. It’s the mix and now the arrangement of the works that is so successful. Some wonderful, classic Orientalist works sit alongside contemporary work exploring migration narratives where they can quietly or noisily comment on each other without much need for interference from clunky curatorial text telling the audience what to think.

Connect, the current exhibition
The relaunch of the collections and of the current exhibition, ‘Connect,’ was followed by a short symposium on contemporary museum display in which seven of us, with work in the collection, opined as eloquently as we could on the matter of public collections. ‘Opportunity or risk?’ was the question posed and which we were asked to address in our three-minute presentations. All of us emphasised the opportunity, I think only two of us discussed the risks. I’d welcome the chance to be in more collections of this sort, the risks of having your work sanitised and intellectually vandalised by the sort of craft curators who really want to discuss only your provenance, authenticity, medals and firing temperatures are fewer I think. That said, I wouldn’t mind the chance of risking that either, but since most ceramic collections are, alas, absolutely material-specific and concentrated on the modernist, truth-to-materials drone, I don’t think I’ve got too much to worry about - unfortunately.

Good Practice
Thinking about good practice, Cartwright must also be held up as an example with their young ambassadors project. This is an outrageously audacious attempt at commandeering disaffected, callow youth, locating their art-lover within and then, as if that wasn’t enough, asking them to set about developing their teenage and early 20-something pals into sophisticated, eloquent and articulate gallery-goers too. The astonishing thing is that it’s working brilliantly. These kids are going to be holding forth about neo-modernist, quasi-de-Waalian, late 20th century handle-less pale-ware, before you can say ‘cylinder’. Can I cope?

Origin, The London Craft Fair, 2008, part 2

2008-10-27T19:16:00.002Z

Quote of the week, or possibly of the moth:

“My star customer at Origin was someone who owns Edmund de Waal's wall of pots
but feeds her children off my tableware.”

This from Linda Bloomfield, she of the delicate pink interiors.

So Origin 2 was, well, altogether more upbeat than week 1. If we consider the Crafts Council’s stated aims, one of which is to create a viable economic infrastructure for the craft sector, then this was an unqualified success, as far as I could see. It would be a truly ground breaking achievement if countable numbers of makers could generate a sustainable living wage from making and selling their work, assuming that’s what they want, without needing to be from a class or family background which is able to provide a trust fund, or help with the mortgage, or similar, to keep things afloat. The acid test of this is if a critical mass of women from non-moneyed backgrounds can achieve that even if they are single, or have no obvious access to money. Then you know you’ve got an infrastructure not just a sprinkling of exceptions, or a group of people who’ve netted higher income partners. If they can achieve that, I’ll be cheering them to the rafters, however ‘naff’ ore over perfect the craft is.

Some Pictures of Pots in Origin

2008-10-09T11:44:00.013+01:00

Decided to show the pictures separately, not sure why, but the lengthy review of Origin is the post below. So, from the top, we have, Helen Beard's Meadow. Helen is one of very few who illustrate pots, in fact she may be the only one. The point is she deploys pictorial space a sort of pot perspective. The Meadow needs to be seen as a vast group to be the meadow she envisages. Origin isn't the right space for it, but here's hoping she finds somewhere.
Next is Katrin Moye. Some of her pots have rich brown insides, like those seaside souvenirs.
Next is the weird knitted cups. Imagine drinking out them. These are made by Annette Bugansky. She had some quite pervy zip up ones as well.
Alinah Azadeh's 'crafted space' is next. Such a relief to the eyes and to the psyche to find something BIG, light and airy.
And finally... Sun Kim's mugs. Gorgeous. She doesn't seem to have a website. If I find one, I'll add it.
This is a tiny sample of over 100 exhibitors. I did take more photographs but they're a bit fuzzy. Battery running low I think. Off to the sunshine to recharge my own batteries.

Origin, The London Craft Fair, 2008

2008-10-08T21:28:00.005+01:00

Ladies and Gentlemen,
The C Word has important news to announce:
Sun Kim makes proper mugs with HANDLES! Yes, it’s true. Maker of very fine porcelain tableware, she did her stint in atelier de Waal, and emerged unscathed. None of that dimpled beaker business, so popular among makers of whitish ware. You can lift one of her mugs to your lips, and slurp your tea without fear of burning your hands, dropping the mug or waiting so long to touch the damn thing that the tea’s now tepid and undrinkable with a milk slick on the top. Yeucccchhhhhhhh.

To business then…
There is no doubt that under the auspices of Rosy Greenlees, the Crafts Council has become vastly more professional. Whereas the old Politburo spawned the Chelsea Craft Fair, which was a King’s Rd version of the annual church bazaar, so the New and Improved version has produced Origin which is altogether more Knightsbridge. It kicks off in a big white glistening tent in the Somerset House courtyard, next to Waterloo Bridge, in London, with fat carpets underfoot and every ‘stall’ a polished white or grey sort of cabin with plinths or whatever is required. You can plug in your laptop and play on line backgammon all day if you want.

As to the craft, well I didn’t see Chelsea after about 1985, and yesterday was the first time I’ve seen Origin, but ‘a source’ told me that they’d brought many new, younger makers this year. Gone, apparently, are most of the ‘old guard’. I’ve no idea who the OG were, but they’ve gone anyway, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. For better or worse, Origin now represents the newyoungupandcoming glitzy professional designer-makers. Origin is a shiny, glittering shopping mall and it meant business. It is unequivocally the commercial, commoditised end of craft, Greenlees’s ‘sector’ at work.

Strategy
So, like pushing an elephant up a long flight of stairs, you push craft up market and, all being well, the makers can, at last, earn a decent living. So everything is polished and ‘well made’ to the point of self-parody. It has to be, this is the ‘gold standard’. I have no idea if the strategy can work. It depends on the buyers understanding that they must pay much higher prices than they would for something which may well look quite similar, from Habitat or Cargo, but is in fact mass produced. Anecdotally at least, it can work. Chris Keenan designed some work for Habitat, and someone came to his stall at Origin and said, ‘Oh, I’ve got the one from Habitat, now I want one of the real thing.’ So, if this version of craft can project an idea of ‘authenticity,’ the ‘Original’ in fact, then the strategy could be a winner.

Class again..
The risk, and it could be a big risk, is that pushing it up market will just make it look, well, upwardly mobile, 'pretentious,' as someone, (Grayson Perry) once said. You see, you cant ever get away from talking about class when it comes to craft. If it goes posh, and people can actually earn a living without starving in the winter, it's called 'pretentious', in other words it's 'jumped up', 'got idea's above it's station.' The makers are s'posed to be peasants for godsake. Not earning a good wage. God's bread, whatever next, muttered the colonel, snorting into his port. My hunch, especially in the light of the global banking crisis, is that the top end will work, but I’m not sure about the knitted socks. By top end, I mean hand made, very high quality silver tableware, for example, well-crafted, contemporary design. I’d buy it. Portable wealth d'you see. Ceramics sits right in the middle. I’m not even going to try and guess.

Too much craft for the content
What i'd really like to see, is a move away from the insistence on 'well made' or rather, dare I say it, a more sophisticated understanding of what constitutes 'well made.' At the moment it's still stuck, as it ever was, in the 'too much craft of the content' rut. Most of the objects I encountered were just too ordinary to tolerate being blisteringly well made. Their material perfection just couldn't be justified by the banality of the object. So, what I'm really saying, is I want to see more substance and less craft. But this is not what Origin is about. I am in the wrong place.

Crafting Space
So much for the stalls, there are other things at Origin too. You could say it’s trying to be all things to all people. Hidden in dark nooks and crannies in the liminal spaces between the stalls, there are pieces of art. You can tell, because they’re on their own in dark spaces with carefully, self consciously written, curatorial flannel accompanying them. For all I know, these might be fabulous, immensely interesting works. If only one could see them. I wanted to like then and be happy they were there, god knows, for these I am certainly the designated audience. But they felt more like craft's dirty secret than convincing art moments. And as all good C Worders know, Craft is in fact Art's dirty secret. There is also an ‘interactive’ space. At first I thought this was a highly imaginative piece of audience research and was well impressed. I was wrong, it was an interactive textile work – which could still work as audience research but I don’t think that was the primary purpose. There was a big wire cage with ribbons woven into it on which were written the answers to questions such as: ‘what did you buy and why does it interest you?’ ‘Who are you giving the object to and what do they mean to you?’ and ‘Describe a gift you’ve received and how its changed your relationship with the giver.’ Find out more here.
The interactive project worked better than the art nooks. It was much more central and open and also inviting because you could sit down. They should have provided tea though. It was based on the old Persian poetry sharing thing, so tea should definitely have been there – or wine perhaps.

The Jury's still out...
For those of us who love craft because we relish its lowly status, its down-homeness, its folksyness, and we use that to explore a host of related ideas and tell all manner of low down tales, then Origin is a Big Yawn. It is mesmerising, busy with people and objects, and, once I’d got round it all, stupefying. But it isn’t meant for me. It’s meant for the people who go to Dorothy Perkins on Saturday, or Harvey Nichs on Sunday. For Craft readers who know London, but haven’t been to Origin, it’s like a turbo-charged CAA (Contemporary Applied Arts,) but more Bond St. than Oxford St, more Harvey Nichs than Dotty P, but both, I assume, are the intended market. The thing that I did feel sad about was that I couldn’t think of a single thing, that I really wanted. I was left with no feeling of desire or covetousness. I reflected on that for about half a day, and then remembered Sun Kim’s mugs with their silky satiny matt glazes, and their proper, properly placed, handles. So, just one thing then.

Crunching Credit, Ceramics in the City, Confrontational Ceramics, and the Collapse of global Capitalism.

2008-09-28T21:41:00.007+01:00

Jackpot!!! A veritable treasure chest of C words to add to the ever-expanding list. Ceramics in the City is now affectionately known at C in the C and Confrontational Ceramics, a vast glossy tome, was sent to me by Ceramic Review, with a request to review the book in 1000 words. With this request I have gladly complied, and I can let you know, in advance of publication, that my review is almost 900 words longer than the text of the book. Ok, slight exaggeration, but suffice to say, it’s yet another of those unspeakable survey books, packed to eaves with hideously glossy pictures and littered with ‘artists’ statements,’ each more turgid than the Journal of Psychiatry.

American Acronyms
So, lets get back to the Credit Crunch. Now it seems that this phenomenon has not yet hit Hackney. Almost everywhere else in the world in now affected: 11 banks in the USA have gone bust, 2 in the UK, President Bush will henceforth be known as the Supreme Leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist States of America, and Maggie May and Donald Duck are building a straw-bale barn somewhere near you where they will swim in the local WAMU and lay AIGs. I’m sure I shouldn’t be so flippant but what else can one do?

Ceramics in the City
Getting back to Hackney, this is where the Geffrye Museum is located, in Kingsland rd, and where the eighth outing of Ceramics in the City bustled with buyers who did, by all accounts, buy. I didn’t get there this year, but I have this information on good authority. All the makers I’ve asked so far have told me it was very well attended and business was brisk. Although results varied for each maker, all have said it was better than most other years. This event took place on the 19th, 20th and 21st of September, the weekend after the announcement of the take over of HBOS by Lloydstsb, which will result in the loss of at least 140,000 jobs and an almost complete collapse of the stock market. Add to that the nationalisation of Northern Rock, near collapse of Bradford and Bingley, rescued by nationalisation, the loss of thousands of jobs when Lehman’s went under and you wonder how it is we’re still selling anything at all. So, encouraging though C in the C’s results obviously are, I am wondering if we shouldn’t all be diversifying – into what I haven’t quite decided, but all imaginative suggestions will be considered.
Just checked google for the spelling of Lehman’s, and found a site, also called Lehman’s in Ohio, which sells butter lamps (ok, oil lamps, but they can easily be converted) and wood burning stoves. I think we might be on to something here.

Lasting vs Disposable
So why are people cheerfully buying handmade pottery at this time, when most of us are facing a winter without heating because we can’t afford the bills, a great may people will be losing their jobs, still more are paying higher interest on their mortgages, others paying higher rents because of competition in the private rented sector because, if you’re on a modest income, you haven’t got a hope in hell of getting a mortgage, and so on? Perhaps longevity is suddenly appealing. Hand made tableware is the very embodiment of the polar opposite of both disposable and conspicuous consumerism. I emphasise handmade tableware because this is what C in the C showcases, arguably, better than any other event I can think of. It also showcases the domestic side of craft, immensely elegantly. The Geffrye is the Museum of the domestic interior, so domestic pottery sits particularly well here.

Terraced Industries
C in the C is a nest of urban potters, many of whom are Londoners. They are experts in ‘old fashioned’ skills such as throwing, (colloquial pottery expression: it means making pots using a potters wheel) and this in itself is unusual these days. Many work full time as potters. They are running what used to be called ‘cottage industries.’ These have now migrated to the city and become ‘terraced industries.’ I suspect such industry could not survive economically in rural areas. Caveat here – Nick Membery is bucking this trend. He has a sophisticated internet selling mechanism, which none of the terraced industry potters do, as far as I know. So I guess his is really, ‘small industry.’ So, in our upside down world of Socialist America with its nationalised banks we can add smart terraced industry migrating to the country, to rural Wales in fact, and peasant industries thriving in Stoke Newington. Now all we need is Serbia to become the world leader in Islamic banking and England to win the world cup. Then I’ll have to go out and buy a new brain, the old one isn’t going to cope.

And Finally...
So, just to acknowledge the last C in the title of this post, are we witnessing the Collapse of global Capitalism? It’s got to be a change in the old world order, surely. I have a feeling it’s not going to be a very comfortable one. I’ve got used to my creature comforts. I’m getting the shed tarted up this week. Just in case a proliferation of C words is the only jackpot I’m going to win.

Tottenham Flower Show, 2008

2008-09-15T19:24:00.011+01:00

After all my proclaiming that a Tottenham Flower and Produce Show would be a very fine thing, if only someone would organise it, I find I’m behind the times. Someone has organised it. It started last year. Imagine my excitement. No more that 30 metres from my very own front door, September 13th, 2008, was the very flower show I yearned for, complete with tents, band, (wonderful Irish dance music), and tea tent.
The exhibition tent was THE BUSINESS. Packed to the eaves with enthusiastic citizens anxiously awaiting the announcement of the first prizes, the trestle tables fairly groaned under the weight of sponge cakes, loaves of bread, fruit pies, chutneys, jams, honey, knitted and crocheted items of many kinds, quilts, bunches of herbs. Eat yer hearts out sour-faced estate agents, police, taxi drivers and all you other miserable sods who always run Tottenham down at any opportunity! Come and see what we can make! There were donkey rides, a dog show and the paddling pool was clean and glistening for Tottenham’s youngsters. The tea tent was a bit small and understaffed, but the teas and cakes were the best I’ve had in years. Sorry Wootton, you were outclassed I’m afraid. We even had a broderie-anglaise table cloth for the communal trestle table. So there!

Urban or Rural?
If Wootton is really a suburb, what does this make Tottenham? Is it an urban village, is it also a suburb? I don’t think either description fits. To me, Tottenham feels like a small town which has somehow got itself muddled up with London. The show is in its infancy and has a few ‘teething problems’ – such as the too small tea tent - where are the WI when you need them? I have high hopes however. I suspect it will be a much bigger do twenty years from now. I’d like to see much more participation from some of Tottenham’s newer populations, such as the Kurdish ladies I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, who do the magnificent sewing. There is something about this kind of occasion that provides exactly the right context for craft, in the sense that it becomes ‘home craft’ again and, in an instant, all that craft agonising is removed.
So, in keeping with that spirit, the C Word is awarding ‘best in show’ again and, on this occasion, it goes to the woman who made the knitted shopping bag out of those beastly blue carrier bags that every corner shop uses – she’d knitted the bags together. BRILLIANT!!! I loved it. Pictures above. So that’s it for this summer. The C Word is back from holiday and open for business from now on.
See you very soon with a short comparative review of two shows which opened on September 11th, Richard Slee at Barratt Marsden, and Elspeth Owen at the Hart Gallery.

Cabbages and Quilts: The Wootton Flower and Produce Show, 2008.

2008-09-05T20:13:00.015+01:00

Cabbages and Quilts: The Wootton Flower and Produce Show, 2008.

Ra tatataaaaaa, drum rolllllll, ratatat, dum diddle dum diddle dum dum dum. Intermittent strains of brass band music twirl around tents and idling teenagers, village elders and passing visitors, all of whom milled about the glistening green lawns and drifted in and out of immaculate white tents at this year’s village flower show. If ever there was an act of faith, a testament to optimism it was this. A rain drenched, wind swept, dripping cold August had put aside one fine day, Saturday 30th, for Wootton’s annual extravaganza of cabbages and cakes. Apples and preserves, cable knitted cardies, quilts and roses, all expertly assembled, jostled for position on their tables, and were justly, or unjustly, rewarded. An incident over the gladioli was duly calmed, the wasps sought refuge in the prize-winning cake, and everyone delighted in the glorious sunshine which bathed the tents and lawns and gardens all day.

So here it is, an authentic village flower show, which, as far as I can see, is still pretty much as it was 40 years ago, when I won first prize for a painting, aged 6. No one’s gone out of their way to insist in its unchanging state. It just hasn’t changed. Of course the people have. I’ve drifted off to London and the village has been almost entirely repopulated but the flower show still has runners and beets and marrows and carrots and ‘garden on a plate’. My niece made a mangrove swamp one year. She’s still feeling misunderstood because she didn’t win a prize. She’s 21 now. The ‘home craft’ is still astounding. It doesn’t seem even slightly naff to me, not in this context. It’s quite at home here. The exquisite smocking is for someone’s new baby, the tea cosies are for teapots, the quilts for someone’s bed, the knitted cardies will be worn, the wooden toys played with. I know, it all sounds too idyllic, but it is true. I don’t quite know how it is that people have the time, but the work is here to prove it. They’re not trying to make a living from it, which helps, but it’s all made for a purpose.

This should not be mistaken for ‘rural’ craft. Certainly Wootton is a village and is in ‘the country’. It is, however, a suburb in character, but one that is detached. It is one of the wealthiest areas in England now and its economy is entirely urban. No one goes to work in the village. Everyone who lives there works in neighbouring cities. The place is deserted during the day, apart from the school – ah ha, so there are teachers who work in Wootton, and as very small number of people who come to clean houses and maintain gardens. So Wootton flower and produce show is a product of urban – not always wealth, but stable income - combined with a mixture of creative domestic activity, good gardeners, - and these are the ones cared for by the owners, not paid gardeners, - and an industrious spirit – oh and a touch of neighbourly competitiveness. Tottenham flower and prod show would be very similar. There are enough people with a stable income to fund the creative domestic activity, a wealth of domestic skill, and we even have the ‘country’ house, - Bruce Castle – which can compete with any in the land – and we have the 400 year old oak trees. It would just be a more multi-cultural that’s all.

As to craft, village craft vs. gallery craft, well – craft it seems becomes a problem requiring scrutiny, only when it departs from the flower show and from that use/comfort/decoration mix to something that either questions itself and what it’s doing in an industrialised society or when it is used as a medium to explore ideas which are part of its habitus, probably, but not part of it usual or original social role.

This seems like a good place to leave this post which serves, I think, as a good introduction to the next series of posts which will talk about Ceramics in the City, Origin and so forth, as well as a fond farewell to the summer holiday – such as it was.

The sequined insurgents

2008-08-21T09:37:00.003+01:00

And CAmel two three - and to the LEFT - and HIP circle, bottom OUT, half circle and SHImmy - and DUM diddy DUM diddy DUM diddy DUM, and CHEST, imagine you’re cleaning the windows with your bosoms - and other way - reverse tumble dryer - lovely - and chest-snap, snAp, snAp, and on-the-spot camel – reverse camel - fanny-over-the-fence and ShImmy. How was that? Any questions?

‘No,’ we mutter meekly, barely able to keep the pace never mind clean the windows with our bosoms. These, it may surprise you to learn, are all the highly technical terms for belly-dance moves bellowed out by the doyenne of Arabic dancing in Britain, the formidable Josephine Wise. This is just a taste of her class, which includes a ‘shit in the woods’ and ‘throwing up camel,’ among other choice examples of dance instructions. Weekly classes ended in June and, just as we were all getting fidgety, August came and we packed up our jangly hip scarves and high-tailed it off to Tring Park to a once-stately mansion, deep in the heart of suburbia, where the JWAAD annual summer school shimmies into action.

JWAAD, according to Wise, its director, is the biggest and most respected school of Arabic Dance (aka belly-dancing) in the UK. The summer school attracts eager students from all over the country and beyond for a week-long extravaganza of extremely high-octane, sequined suburban camp, with intensive classes, starting at 9.00am, and culminating in a string of performances and a fancy dress party with more performances. Oh and there are some more performances on other nights, because no one can quite resist strutting their stuff on stage or showing off their sequins. Btw, 'suburban' is often used a pejorative term, not in this case, it's a simple fact of demographics and probably economics.

Among the many fine qualities of belly-dancers, is the capacity to work extremely hard at their art, which they take very seriously indeed, while somehow managing not to take themselves too seriously. Performances included a sensational pastiche of a Nirvana- style, hard-rock, leather-clad, metal-spikes-round-the-neck, guitar-smashing, pelvic-thrusting-rock-hard-guitar-band, using plastic double-headed axes as guitars and complete with gormless rock chicks with dead pan faces who rounded off the performances by emasculating the front men with their plastic axes. Other outstanding performances included ‘Chav-Saidi’ –including seven-months pregnant ‘bride to be’ in lipstick-covered tee-shirt. This was a professional group, most of whose members teach as well as perfom. The saidi dance is originally a folk dance for camel herders and is performed with sticks, style and much jumping about. There were numerous beautiful graceful classic belly dances too, step forward and curtsey- Krystl from Belgium - and a particularly gorgeous one which seemed to be hybridising with some bharatanatyam moves (?) not sure, but imaginative mix of perfect moves, grace and humour. I have absolutely no expertise in this by the way, so I’ve remembered the slightly or very unusual ones. Next year I hope to able to comment a bit more lucidly on the ‘beautiful, graceful, classic belly dances.’

You may by now have gathered that I am a very fully paid-up member of the shimmying club. I don’t have the sequins yet, all in good time, for now I’m concentrating on improving my camels, arms-and-hands, and breathing, to say nothing of my hip-drops, chonks, figures of 8s - you do these with your hips, horizontally and vertically, Hagalla or Egyptian walk – that’s ‘Frankenstein’s Monster’ in Wise-speak, and all the other things I have to work on.

Shared, very manky, boarding school ‘dorms’ were transformed into glittering palaces of camp, eye liner, and sequined festivity by a combination of will-power and sheer good nature. Even ‘school dinners,’ for such they were, were wolfed down gratefully in school dining room on wooden benches before the next gruelling techno-belly-dance-fusion of leaping about and snake-arms session. Yes I did perform. Pictures will be supplied if I can get hold of any.

I didn’t quite master the double combination of cleaning the windows with my bosoms – that’s upper body going round vertically in one direction – moving separately but at the same time as hip circle going round horizontally in the other direction. But I’m working on that too. These gloriously descriptive phrases are now being rationalised or made uniform so that, as belly dancing moves inexorably into the cultural main stream, classes up and down the country will use the same instructions. So, sadly, I suspect we’re going to lose ‘fanny over the fence’ and ‘reverse tumble dryer,’ both of which I find very helpful, in favour of something less descriptive but probably a bit more technical. Ah well, I guess we all know what a reverse undulation is really. At least I think we do.