documenta

To the galleries today for a few shows, and I took some photos.

To the Generator Members' Show, and here is some edited highlights/stuff that was made by my mates:


Rob Hunter and the pupils of Perth Academy, Morph- Love Heart


Alexander Hope, Girls World


Ross Fraser Maclean, Kenneth


Simon Reekie, Vagina Dentata



Bill Duncan, Seachurch Alterpiece


To the college's Lower Foyer Gallery, where the installation of Epiphany continues apace:

sexy

Now here's a link to tempt any vinyl fetishists, a database of picture discs featuring photos of (often near-enough) naked ladies. Most of these are for sale with prices as high as 200 quid for an especially rare nude photo printed on the grooves: LINK

coming attractions 4

By now you must surely be aware of my enthusiasm for the books of David Peace. There's a trailer been released for the forthcoming adaptation of his novel The Damned United:



Can't say I'm too impressed with the looks of it so far anyway.

Scott Murray writes a review on the Guardian's football site: LINK

"A nagging worry... this could be an underdog-versus-the-big-bad-world feelgood flick. Wasn't Peace's novel a tale of fags, inexpensive booze recklessly necked, and thundering depression?"

The big problem with sports films is always that reality contains all the drama:

femme fatale

Extract from Jean Baudrillard, Seduction:

Nico seemed so beautiful only because her femininity appeared so completely put on. She emanated something more than beauty, something more sublime, a different seduction. And there was deception: she was a false drag queen, a real woman, in fact, playing the queen. It is easier for a non-female/female than for a real woman, already legitimated by her sex, to move amongst the signs and take seduction to the limit. Only the non-female/female can exercise an untainted fascination, because s/he is more seductive than sexual. The fascination is lost when real sex shows through; to be sure, some other desire may find something here, but precisely no longer in that perfection that belongs to artifice alone.

Seduction is always more singular and sublime than sex, and it commands the higher price.

fly

There's a poster been produced for next week's NEON/EPIPHANY party:

The epiphany blog: http://our-epiphany.blogspot.com/

playing catch up

As discussed previously, my brother Nick is preparing to run the London Marathon in April. He has updated his blog with another post on his progress: LINK.

His footballing exploits continue to impress, with a dramatic last-minute equaliser being scored this week. Go on my son!

evidence 2

A few photos from Friday night's Generator Projects Members' Show opening:

Isidore Ducasse Memorial Plaque

inventory

While at a loose end earlier today I was having a gander round the links on my Delicious pages. Among them is this guide to acts who cropped up around the early 1980s post-industrial diaspora, a time when music had potential to be spontaneous and heterogenous and rather less inclined to go fishing for Brit awards.

"The bands... provide useful pointers both to those who had inspired the industrial scene, and to its future developments (e.g. extreme noise, electronic body music etc). It's also one of several breeding grounds that mushroomed into the underground cassette networks of the middle and late eighties. Many of these bands are forgotten now, some admittedly with justification. Others, however, are neglected gems."

readymades 3

Continuing a display of anonymous drawings found at random in the workplace:

6. Double Agent

Hate Week

Extract from David Peace, Ninteen Seventy Four:

Hate Week.
Dawn on Friday 20 December 1974.
Awake on the floor of Room 27, covered in the ripped-up snow of a hundred sheets of red-penned lists.
Lists, I'd been writing lists since I'd left Paula's.
A big fat red felt-tip pen in my left hand, circles in my head, scrawling illegible lists across the backs of sheets of wallpaper.
Lists of names.
Lists of dates.
Lists of places.
Lists of girls.
Lists of boys.
Lists of the corrupt, the corrupted, and the corruptible.
Lists of the police.
Lists of the witnesses.
Lists of the families.
Lists of the missing.
Lists of the accused.
Lists of the dead.
I was drowning in lists, drowning in information.
About to write a list of journalists, but tearing the whole fucking lot into confetti, cutting my left hand and numbing my right.
DON'T TELL ME I DON'T FUCKING CARE.
On my back, thinking of lists of the women I'd fucked.
Dawn on Friday 20 December 1974.
Hate Week.

more running!

As discussed previously, my brother Nick is preparing to run the London Marathon in April. He has updated his blog with a post on his progress: LINK.

Kudos due for scoring 5 goals in a comprehensive 11-1 football carpeting, while the miles and the funds continue to stack up nicely.

WB

Last year the renowned noise musician William Bennett very generously agreed to an interview with Yuck 'n Yum magazine. You can read the original article here if you're interested.

The man keeps a very eclectic and provocative blog, whose template I freely admit to copying for my own. This week there's a series of posts described as being "a long (rambling) multi-part treatise on art", and it all makes for a forcible argument:

SIGNAL TO NOISE
I Congo
II Ars Artis
III Frames
IV The Invisible Man
V Intents And Purposes
VI Apheresis
VII Signal To Noise

evidence

To the DCA last night for the Timecode opening. When I first saw the name of this exhibition and its cast-list of stellar players I thought, "do I really need to see this show? I know exactly what it will be like right down to the press release and the gallery hand-outs." Lo and behold indeed it was pretty much as I expected, although still enjoyable enough. There's a lesson in that there story: go in with low expectations and you're guaranteed to avoid disappointment.

I took a few photos, and there's some more on my Flickr page.

Isidore Ducasse Memorial Plaque (proof)

Proposal for installation at the entrance to next week's Generator Projects Members' Show

coming attractions 3

By now you'll be well aware of my interest in the Yorkshire Noir of David Peace's Red Riding novels. I'm still ploughing my way through the quartet, and now Channel 4 have released a trailer for the forthcoming TV series.

burned

Extract from David Peace, Nineteen Seventy Four:

Her mother was sleeping, her father was snoring, and I was on my knees on their toilet floor.
Kathryn opened the door and switched on the light and bought another piece of me.
It hurt and it burned as it all came up, but I didn't want it to ever stop. And, when it finally did, I stared a long time at the whisky and the ham, at the bits in the bog and the bits on the floor.
Kathryn put her hands on my shoulders.
I tried to place the voice in my head saying, you've actually got people feeling sorry for him, I never thought that was possible.
Kathryn moved her hands into my armpits.
I didn't want to ever stand again. And, when I finally did, I started to cry.
'Come on love,' she whispered.

I awoke three times in the night from the same dream.
Each time thinking, I'm safe now, I'm safe now, go back to sleep.
Each time the same dream: a woman on a terraced street, clutching a red cardigan tight around her, screaming ten years of noise into my face.
Each time a crow, or some such big black bird, came out of a sky a thousand shades of grey and clawed through her pretty blonde hair.
Each time chasing her down the street, after her eyes.
Each time frozen, waking cold, tears on the pillow.
Each time, Claire Kemplay smiling down from the dark ceiling.

readymades 2

The eyes betray not a hint of emotion, the mouth clamped tight shut silent. What to make of this hastily jotted schema of a man-monster, the Frankensteinian figure whose flesh is punctured by the thud of Biro bolts, temples throbbing with barely suppressed agonies? His haircut tells its own dismal story. Institutionalised, beaten, brutalised, shamed and scrapped as a failed exercise. Don't cry for him. He's already dead.

mid-week quality

As discussed previously, my brother Nick is preparing to run the London Marathon in April. He has updated his blog with a post on his progress: LINK. Can't say I approve of using the word 'chavs' to describe the lower orders, mind.

I have sent him some special running gloves and running socks(?) so by now he ought to be fully kitted out.

Free Jazz Day

Sun Ra

Thanks to my dad I grew up in a household suffused with free jazz. These days I'm usually preoccupied with tinny camp white robot music, but still have a lingering taste for the more discordant, abrasive dark side. The Free Jazz Day on Dennis Cooper's blog this week contains much fascinating material. I sent a link to my dad and was inspired to pick up Sun Ra's Lanquidity album too. Cosmic!

collection

Extract from Walter Benjamin, Unpacking My Library:

I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood - it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation - which these books arouse in a genuine collector. For such a man is speaking to you, and on closer scrutiny he proves to be speaking only about himself. Would it not be presumptuous of me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and down-to-earth, I enumerated for you the main sections or prize pieces of a library, if I presented you with their history or even their usefulness to a writer? I, for one, have in mind something less obscure, something more palpable than that; what I am really concerned with is giving you some insight into the relationship of a book collector to his possessions, into collecting rather than a collection. If I do this by elaborating on the various ways of acquiring books, this is something entirely arbitrary. This or any other procedure is merely a dam against the spring tide of memories which surges toward any collector as he contemplates his possessions. Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. More than that: the chance, the fate, that suffuse the past before my eyes are conspicuously present in the accustomed confusion of these books. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? You have all heard of people whom the loss of their books has turned into invalids, or of those who in order to acquire them became criminals. These are the very areas in which any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness. "The only exact knowledge there is," said Anatole France, "is the knowledge of the date of publication and the format of books." And indeed, if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalogue.

Maldoror

Salvador Dali, Les Chants de Maldoror: Aphrodite, 1934 edition

Maldoror is an incredible book. Since I first read it last year I've gone back to it a fair few times, and have posted numerous excerpts up on this 'ere blog:

http://0black0acrylic.blogspot.com/2008/10/fatality.html
http://0black0acrylic.blogspot.com/2008/11/taste.html
http://0black0acrylic.blogspot.com/2008/11/frond.html

Here's a few related links to the author and the work:
Brief Guardian article on the enigmatic Isidore Ducasse

Comte de Lautréamont Wikipedia page
Les Chants de Maldoror Wikipedia page
Maldoror at Google Books
Kenneth Anger's Maldoror project

So much about Ducasse is a mystery, and really the best way to approach the book is to just read the words.

nightlife/EPIPHANY

Eileen Towns, A Room Of One’s Own


On Friday 6th February NEON will DJ at the closing party for EPIPHANY. The exhibition is in the Lower Foyer gallery at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee: LINK. The closing party is scheduled for Drouthy's from 7pm.

EPIPHANY

Closing Event: 6 February, 5-7pm

Tara O'Leary
Eileen Towns
Aimee Henderson
Emma McGregor
Kari Arnot
Julie Reilly
Jamie Drew
Claudia de la Pena
Garance Warburton
24 January – 7 February
This collaborative exhibition shows the tentative steps ten students have taken in the ever-changing construction of their individual artistic self-identity in the early years of their art degree.

Most people can identify a moment when their sense of self was questioned or suddenly and abruptly changed. The group investigates the concept of Epiphany - moments of unexpected personal, social, cultural or creative revelation.

our-epiphany.blogspot.com

competition deadline extension!

The Yuck 'n Yum Christmas Competition deadline has been extended until Tues the 13th of January!! This means there is still time to get your hands on the amazing prize of a year's free subscription to MAP magazine plus a copy of the book 'On Ideology' by Lois Althusser, published by Verso!

All you have to do is download Luke Drozd's superb Christmas cut out, follow the instructions on the paper and then upload your efforts on the forum, easy. So come on get that sticky back plastic out and let your creativity run free!!!!!

heritage

Extract from Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life:

Whether these men are nicknamed exquisites, incroyables, beaux, lions or dandies, they all spring from the same womb; they all partake of the same characteristic quality of opposition and revolt; they are all representatives of what is finest in human pride, of that compelling need, alas only too rare today, of combating and destroying triviality. It is from this that the dandies obtain that haughty exclusiveness, provocative in its very coldness. Dandyism appears above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy is only just beginning to totter and fall. In the disorder of these times, certain men who are socially, politically and financially ill at ease, but are all rich in native energy, may conceive the idea of establishing a new kind of aristocracy, all the more difficult to shatter as it will be based on the most precious, the most enduring faculties, and on the divine gifts which work and money are unable to bestow. Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence; and the type of dandy discovered by our traveller in North America does nothing to invalidate this idea; for how can we be sure that those tribes which we call 'savage' may not in fact be the disjecta membra of great extinct civilisations? Dandyism is a sunset; like the declining daystar, it is glorious, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas, the rising tide of democracy, which invades and levels everything, is daily overwhelming these last representatives of human pride and pouring floods of oblivion upon the footprints of these stupendous warriors. Dandies are becoming rarer and rarer in our country, whereas amongst our neighbours in England the social system and the constitution (the true constitution, I mean: the constitution which expresses itself through behaviour) will for a long time yet allow a place for the descendants of Sheridan, Brummel and Byron, granted at least that men are born who are worthy of such a heritage.

nightlife

Please note that the forthcoming NEON event on the 23rd has been rescheduled to allow for the Generator Members Show after-party.

Further details will follow in due course!

getting started

As discussed previously, my brother Nick is preparing to run the London Marathon in April. He has just started his 16 week training plan and has updated his blog accordingly: LINK

coming attractions 2

Further to yesterday's post, March is set to be a bumper month for David Peace adaptations. The Damned United will hit the cinema screens, and I found this Look North feature to whet the appetite.

coming attractions

I've just the other day finished reading Nineteen Seventy Seven, another book in David Peace's much-acclaimed Red Riding series. The stories paint a harrowing portrait of the Ripper years in West Yorkshire, a time the newly gentrified Arcadia of Leeds city centre has almost managed to blot out of the collective memory. The glittering hyper-markets of Harvey Nichols and Vivienne Westwood have drawn a silver veil over events downtown in Millgarth and the Kirkgate market a generation ago. Channel 4 will show 3 film adaptations later in the year, and I'm intrigued to know what they will make of it.

Mark Fisher's k-punk blog has hosted a couple of good articles on these events recently, and you can find them here:

'Can the world be as sad as it seems?'

UNBURY OUR GHOSTS!

correspondence

From my Flickr page:


-jetske- says:

Hi,

For a project from school I collect photo’s from paintings from bragolin. I collect as many as can to look for a connection between the user and the product.

You would really help me by sending your picture of your bragolin and by answering the next questions:

What is your age?
How big is your household ( number of people)?
What is your job?
In which room is the painting hanging?
Where did you bought it and how much did it cost?
Why do you think the boy is crying?

You can send it to j-visser@hotmail.com Thanks a LOT!!!!! bye jetske

Hi jetske

Your project sounds very interesting, hope this is useful for you:

What is your age?
29

How big is your household ( number of people)?
2

What is your job?
Telephone banking, call centre.

In which room is the painting hanging?
In my downstairs study.

Where did you bought it and how much did it cost?
Bought on eBay, cost £5 but shipping from France was £15!

Why do you think the boy is crying?
Because he feels trapped.

You might find this page is useful for your project.

all the best
Ben x