I’ve talked about the Hayward Gallery a lot in this blog – whether you love or hate it, it always makes for a good talking point. I’ve seen exhibitions here that have brought me almost to tears with their beauty (Rebecca Horn, for instance), and others that have surprised me with their banality. Many artists have taken up the challenge of filling its unique walls, bringing…
I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn’t use this site to shamelessly plug my new photography blog, photogr.aphyx. I’ve been developing it for some time now – I tried a number of different photoblog CMSs before returning to the familiarity of WordPress with an excellent theme, Grace Photoblog, designed by 7879 Designs here in the UK. I’ve done a full re-skin on it, and tinkered with the…
The first thing that I should get out of the way is this – I love my iPhone. It may have many faults, and I find myself cursing Apple frequently for their lack of trust in their own users, but fundamentally the iPhone is a cool piece of kit. What is not cool, though, is the camera. When the 3GS was launched the camera was lauded as “revolutionary”…
Conceptual art intrigues me; it always has- of all the art sub-genres, conceptual art is probably the most controversial and comes in for the most criticism by far. No other art form inspires such incredulous public outrage, and the many newspaper headlines about public bodies purchasing conceptual pieces could make for a very interesting collection of work in themselves. Duchamp, the father of conceptual art,…
Jim Goldberg’s Open See, the latest exhibition at the Photographer’s Gallery, comes as a great surprise. After a couple of decidedly average exhibitions, I wasn’t sure what to expect of Goldberg’s work, although the Magnum connection got me interested. I’ve been a fan of their group of photographers for many years and the draw of the name was enough to get me over to Soho for a visit and…
Alcohol and art – a perfect match. On Friday we found ourselves at the Tate Britain for Late, a long-running monthly evening of drinking, entertainment and art. This month’s theme was “The Story of London” – represented through movies, cabaret, and archival material from the Tate collection. What got us really excited, though, apart from some very tasty free Courvoisiers, was the Richard Long exhibit, which has…
The Hayward Gallery has featured in these posts many times recently, and with good reason – with consistently solid shows and some great curation, they’re giving the Tate Modern reason to be worried. On the bottom level is Annette Messager – The Messengers, a show that I caught a couple of years ago at the Pompidou and has finally made it to this side of the channel.…
29.03.09 – Overnight in Algeciras 11:45 pm A brutally early start to the day was followed by an excellent journey from Marrakech to Tangier, with a stop in Casablanca. The first-class compartment was extremely cosy, and I dozed my way through the Moroccan countryside to Tangier. Not so impressive was our Straits crossing, which left half an hour late and ran an hour and a half late, leaving us…
28.03.09 – Marrakech 10:00 pm A day in the Medina – cries of “bonjour”, “hello” and “saluté”, people and smells, light streams through the roof slats, perilous corridors, souq mosques behind curtains, leather and metal, fabric and silver. Food, hastily cooked on rusty grills, smoke drifts across the souq, wood turned in tiny workshops, thé de menthe brewed on tiny stoves, shared between friends. People,…
28.03.09 Arrival in Marrakech With sadness, we left the Riad de la Mer behind in beautiful, calm Essaouira. The Supratours bus crashed along the dusty, half-built roads to Marrakech, making the journey in three hours. The pollution of Marrakech hit us like a brick, and we quickly sought respite in our riad, Jnane Mogador, a bargain place to stay right in the middle of the Medina. We’ve certainly…
26.03.09 – Essaouira 11:30 am Essaouira is a strange meeting point – a place where European influence meets Moroccan tradition, where Western politics meets Arabic sensibilities, where French and Portuguese architecture meets Berber house building. One thing all can agree on, though, is that nothing has to happen in a hurry. Essaouira is the same haven of tranquillity as 12 years ago, and even the souq traders, so…
25.03.09 – Arrival in Marrakech and the journey to Essaouira There have been a few firsts on this journey – my first trip outside Europe since 2003, my first time in Africa since 1997, and my first time asleep on a sleeper train ever. Although we were naively expecting old-world colonial opulence in our first-class couchettes, the garish orange functional compartment turned out to be the most…