Saturday 27 February 2010

Ion Barladeanu: Art From The Scrapheap


Ion Barladeanu and the art works he made whilst living as a homeless tramp on a dump in Bucharest are, in a very real sense, outsider art, which is one of the reasons why the Romanian artist’s story is so captivating. The other is a sense that in some way, the exposure recently given to his works equals a form of social justice. Barladeanu used his collages to create refusenik Dadaist cinematic visions in the hyperreal brights of mazagine cut-outs of the life under Ceaucescu that he had, as far as possible, opted out of. For more than 30 years he refused to participate as a citizen under Ceaucescu, and lived in the garbage room of a block of flats, scrapping together a living doing odd jobs. Untrained as an artist, he collected scraps of newspapers and magazines and assembled them into a collection of more than 800 collages: politicised, irreverent, savage, satirical. Whilst he was in Romania, his art was unseen because if attention had been drawn to it, its content would have put him at risk. He has described Ceaucescu as ‘my greatest fear.’
IN 2007 he showed his work to another artist, Dan Popescu, whom he had met by chance. Popescu is a gallery owner and within a few months, Barladeanu had been given a show, and found a flat. More shows followed, and recognition of his significance as a contemporary artist. With an exhibition opening at the Anne De Villepoint gallery in Paris this week, Barladeanu has literally gone from rags to the riches, and perhaps more vitally, from being hidden to finding exposure for his work.

Friday 26 February 2010

The Dickens Of A Good Play


Max Stafford-Clark has overcome a series of strokes that only seem to have intensified his work as a director, and his theatre company Out Of Joint – unmissable when they’re touring - consistently delivers theatre that excites and intrigues. Andersen’s English, written by Sebastian Barry and directed by Stafford-Clark, is the company’s newest production, and although apparently much more sedate than, for instance, their rambunctious version of The Convict’s Opera or their confrontational Macbeth, is gently, wonderfully, intriguing and disquieting.
It’s all the more brilliantly bizarre for being based on a true episode in the life of Charles Dickens, when the Danish writer Hans Christian Anderson, who penned the most existentially bleak fairy tales imaginable, paid a visit to the Dickens household at a time when the great writer was on the brink of his life’s most shocking and shameful episode: when he put aside his wife, Catherine, and denied her access to their many children.
Haunting and funny, Andersen’s English is a play about misunderstanding and the raw truths that hide behind manners and language. Danny Sapani’s immensely sympathetic Andersen, apparently gauche and kindly, is struggling with the English language as well as various physical discomforts. He seems to suffer from a version of Tourette’s, blurting out words and phrases that are accidentally distorted into monstrous social gaffes. Unable to read the Dickens family correctly because of his lack of language, he sees only the best in them, and his visit is seen through spectacles coloured by rose-tinted romanticism.
By contrast extraordinarily eloquent, Dickens (David Rintoul) is able to express the tortures of life within the bosom of his large Victorian family, but is so wrapped up in his own pain that he finds it impossible to see any viewpoint other than his own, or act in a way that is not destructive to his wife or the son he’s about to send to a soldier’s death in India. Niamh Cusack is heartbreaking as Catherine, apparently held together by her carapace of a mid-nineteenth-century costume but beneath it, a beaten, broken being damaged in mind and body by bearing child after child and unable to understand what she has done to deserve being banished from her husband’s heart and life.
Barry has done an astonishing job of turning the meeting of the two men into an odd, intriguing look at their lives that starts off as a strange collision between two worlds and expands into an intelligent, touching and troubling vision of lives in crisis. There are whole worlds of passion, pain and loss that may get lost in translation in Andersen’s English, but which are heartbreakingly apparently to the audience of this marvellous piece of theatre.

Friday 19 February 2010

Whole Lotta Bacon Goin' On


Elvis fan + local newspaper + pigs = reasons to be cheerful that it really can be grim up north

Thursday 11 February 2010

Hairy and Scary

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Friday 5 February 2010

Gogol A-Go-Go


Gogol Bordello are living out the title of their forthcoming Rick Rubin-produced album Transcontinental Hustle, taking their ragbag of gypsy music, punk attitude, global grooves and raggle-taggle rollicking on the road this spring, including four shows in the UK.
Live From Axis Mundi, last autumn’s live CD and DVD, encapsulates the marvellous mayhem of a Gogol performance: Gypsy Rose should know, as she’s shimmied herself into the giddiest of kippers on every UK tour since 2005’s Steve Albini-produced Gypsy Punks. Insane energy isn’t the half of it: not since The Pogues has there been such a gloriously raucous knees-up.
Eugene Hutz, the ringmaster for this motley crew based in NYC but hailing from the four corners of the globe, is up there with Iggy Pop, Lux Interior and Nick Cave when it comes to throwing himself into a performance. Gogol’s delirious sweat-soaked nights of intoxication are in the true spirit of Eastern European gypsy music: just when you think it’s as fiery and impassioned as it’s possible for music to be, the band turn up the heat. This is the kind of travelling circus you dream of running away with: check www.gogolbordello.com to see when the caravan parks up near you.

Thursday 4 February 2010

A fond farewell to The Foundry

Some years ago, I was one of a group of people who, as we worked next door and it was the nearest bar, used regularly to drop into – and fall out of – The Foundry, an alternative arts space near Old Street.
Last night Hackney council approved plans for The Foundry to be pulled down, and in its place, the site’s owners plan to build an 18-storey hotel.
The Foundry is a ramshackle dive of a place, with furniture that looks as if it came out of skips and a floor that sticks to feet. Every surface is covered in art: some good; much falling into either the graffiti or found object categories; some of it apparently constructed by trolls on strong hallucinogenics. It’s a hybrid space, somewhere between bar, art gallery and performance area – many of its clientele are art exhibits all by themselves, although The Foundry hosts all sorts of events. For all that it’s lacking in detergent, it is to be treasured: an authentic, eccentrically boho gin palace that celebrates all sorts of creativity and gives a platform to new and emerging artists. It is a place for oddballs and misfits: our lot felt right at home.
Places like The Foundry are more than just watering holes: they are breeding grounds for work by people whose conversations spark new developments and directions. Hot Chip formed in there, Pete Doherty read poetry and artists including Banksy and Gavin Turk have propped up its bar and scrawled on its walls. It looks like a mucky hole and maybe because of that, there’s more teeming life in it than in a thousand clean, efficient, modular, sanitised, corporate spaces.
I am glad of the time I lost in The Foundry – it was all too easy to loose time in there. I haven’t been for years, but its demolition will be a great loss, and a small tragedy. Hoxton lost its guts a long time ago, and a bit more of its soul will go when The Foundry does.

Monday 1 February 2010

Haunting tales


In ghost stories, a large, atmospheric home in some state of romantic dereliction sets the stage for creepy goings-on. In two of last autumn’s more beguiling books – Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry - the house in question was tantamount to a character in itself: in Waters’ case, the run-down home of a decaying family, and in Niffenegger’s the key ingredient in a plot that brought two identical American twins to live next door to Highgate cemetery.
In Jon McGregor’s wonderful new novel Even The Dogs, the ghosts that haunt its pages are of people for whom home is a troubled, temporary situation at best. They are the street people whose tales, in real life, are rarely told and barely heard.
McGregor’s first two novels have already proved that he excels in writing about the tiny, seemingly unremarkable details in the lives of apparently unmemorable characters. In Even The Dogs, he describes the life of a group of people who, having fallen though the cracks in life and seemed to disappear from mainstream existence, are ignored in real life. Even The Dogs is populated by a cast of drug users and homeless people who congregate in the home of Robert Radcliffe, a middle-aged alcoholic whose body is removed from his wrecked flat in the early pages of the book. In the wake of his death, the spooked, shadowy voices voices of his one-time companions keep a vigil, telling their own fragmented, layered derelict’s tales. Alive, they inhabit a parallel world where they’re invisible or at least unseen; in death it’s pretty much the same story.
Even The Dogs is set apart by the uncondescending compassion with which McGregor, without ever denying the squalid reality of his characters’ lives and the tunnelling despair of their addictions, transcends underclass clichés to evoke characters more often seen as symbols of social failure than as human beings who are broken. Their voices, and stories, are heartbreaking: this is a supernatural story that feels more real than a documentary report. McGregor’s ghosts may have been forgotten in their lifetimes but in their deaths, each one of them is insistently haunting.