Blog Posts

A Dada evening at Senate House

22/10/2016

I attended yesterday evening, with the artist Jill Rock, the ‘Salon Voltaire’ at London University’s Senate House.
Loosely inspired by the original Dada cabaret in Zürich, it was held in the Chancellor’s Hall, decorated in fairy lights, with LED lights of continually changing colours in upside-down exploded plastic bottles on each table – unlike the basic space I saw in the nineties, on a visit to the original site of the Cabaret Voltaire.
The evening really took off when finally a group appeared as if from nowhere (different from the stock academic introductions to the earlier presentations, with lists of prizes, positions held etc., rather un-Dada really). This group, the Vocal Constructivists, began to sing extraordinary music, responding to the acoustics of the hall to produce penetrating pitches, which emerged suddenly from the edges of complex and continually changing harmonic and contrapuntal textures.
As always with Dada-inspired events, what went wrong was most truly in the Dada spirit. For example, someone earlier had knelt down to fix a technical problem, revealing to the audience rather more than intended, courtesy of today’s fashionably low-slung jeans, and the directed stage lighting.

Jill Rock's recent show

4/10/2016

Here's a slideshow of some wonderful work from Jill Rock's recent show at her new Green Door Studio in St Leonard's on Sea, UK. Inspired by John Ruskin, Jill is currently Artist-in-Residence at John Ruskin's house, Brantwood, overlooking Coniston Water, in the Lake District. To play, just tap on the main photo. The artist encourages everyone to handle these sculptures, and experience their transformations. For more of Jill Rock's work: www.cargocollective.com/JillRock

Jonas Profil paintings in London

24/8/2016

https://twitter.com/ZeSmartestProJ/status/765847051280187392

https://www.facebook.com/ events/1054554027950404/
Check out the above for more information!

Awful news from Nice

15/7/2016

Terrible inhumanity - I feel it strongly, also due to my many happy childhood and later good memories of my time in Nice. Fanaticism is abhorrent.

Two visionary paintings by the Haïtian artist Jonas Profil

5/7/2016

This extraordinary painting by Jonas Profil immediately evokes analogical dreamscapes. This specific image brings to mind a number of questions. Who are these people, tightly bound by a circular barrier? Why do they all have long necks? Has this vast crowd been brought together of their own volition, or has some power put them in this restricted space?

The title of the painting helps: All in the Same Basket. This painting is an image of nothing less than the human condition – we’re all in it together, surrounded by the limiting barrier which brings us as one in our existence, and at the same time isolates us from everything else, including other forms of life. And the long necks suggest that we are capable of being self-aware, an awareness which extends beyond our bodies.

Painting vast crowds presents the artist with a considerable technical problem: how detailed does each person in the crowd need to be? How does one deal with representing people becoming progressively smaller as they extend so far into the distance, merging their continuously changing sizes, in the foreground, middle-ground and background figures, so that the depiction avoids visual incoherence?

The colourful Haïtian clothes help Jonas Profil solve this technical problem. His painterly and astonishingly fine detail and clever geometries achieve a virtuosic solution.

Migration.
In this painting we see another dreamlike vision, which on closer examination takes on the characteristics of a nightmare. A chaotic mass of people, a living human cargo, are carelessly thrown together in this gigantic, but fragile wheelbarrow. And then, scattered on the sea, there are even more precarious matchboxes, full of exiles. The dim pastel colours suggest an undefined future: a better life? Or a catastrophe?

Here families and friends are torn apart: relatives leave relatives, friends leave friends. Society becomes atomised in the misty hardly visible waters that provide the dangerous transitions to other lives in other countries. Some faces can be seen, but there are also the faceless, anonymous but sizeably powerful figures of those who profit from the misery of others, whose own migration is towards wealth, getting rich on the despair and hope of those who are desperate to leave. The traffickers don’t care about the loss of life involved in these migrations: there will always be others who will be paying them, as long as the living conditions of the majority remain appalling.

Jonas Profil is Makenol Profil’s uncle and teacher. I explored two of Makenol Profil’s paintings earlier, on the 16th April, 2016. These excellent Haïtian painters are represented by www.facebook.com/thesmartestproject

Contemporary art from Haiti: Gino Tintin - 21 Nations

29/5/2016

In this large, colourful and imposing painting by the Haitian artist Gino Tintin, the 21 Nations of its title refer to the ancient pre-colonial West African nations, for example the Ibo, Nago, Petro and Rada.
In religions everything is symbolic, everything refers to something else.
So the Ibo, Nago, Petro and Rada are each associated with a dance rhythm specific to that particular nation.
Here we see the loas, or spirits, from the 21 nations, each with their corresponding flags.
Each loa is represented in a different colour, in the same way that saints in the Christian religion are associated with specific colours.
The depiction of these loas recalls the thin-legged yet dynamic creatures in some of Salvador Dali’s paintings, for example his Temptation of St Anthony, as well as the shadows and distant landscapes often seen in this Spanish Christian painter’s work.
The loas also have shadows. At the centre is the empty chair of the dead, towards which Baron Samedi, the loa who is the Lord of the Graveyard, points his lowered black flag.
Part of the back of the chair merges with the distant mountains. It's also a ladder rising into the sky.
The vast landscape (look at the clouds) is full of the spirits of the dead, who reside there for a year. Then they are released into a new life.

Themersons show

12/5/2016

Excellent news!
The sales figures for Cinema and the Audiovisual Imagination are catching up on the success of Eisenstein on the Audiovisual! Musician Joe Lasqo quoted from Cinema and the Audiovisual Imagination (my text on Maya Deren) for the Electric Shadow Theater event in San Francisco - a big thank you to filmmaker sound artist Chris Lynn (https://framingsounds.com), for this info re this PianoFight music and film evening in the cool Tenderloin quarter.
Also, copies of Rabelaisdada are for sale at Foyle's in Charing Cross Road, the London Review of Books bookshop, the Hundred Years Gallery, and at the Camden Arts Centre, where there's a wonderful show about the Themersons.
A Polish artist and writer filmmaking couple, the Themersons provided a mini-avantgarde dynamism amidst the postwar London gloom. They set up Gaberbocchus Press and published Kurt Schwitters, Bertrand Russell (The Good Citizens' Alphabet & History of the World in epitome satire) and also Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi, all illustrated by Franciszka Themerson's satirical drawings.
In the exhibition there's a hilarious film of a Swedish production of Ubu Roi with puppets and cut-outs, a living cartoon. And on display there's a letter from the local librarian in Hampstead, explaining that their books are, in his view
'of such bizarre nature that they are likely to add little to the Library's resources' so he doesn't 'propose to add these volumes' to their stock.
Well, what a recommendation!
Last, but not least, here are the splendid costume designs created by Theatre Designer Judith van Praag for the Dutch production of The Kingdom:
http://www.redbubble.com/people/judithvanpraag/collections/304915-the-kingdom-costume-sketches

Makenol Profil

16/4/2016

One of the highlights of the recent DARK – Festival of the Unseen, organised by the artist Jill Rock at the Hundred Years Gallery, were the visionary paintings by Makenol Profil, from an amazing collection of contemporary Haitian art being promoted by gallerist Alexandre Latour.

Profil specialises in intricate scenes from daily life in rural Haiti, hovering prismatically between the dream state and the everyday. His paintings bring to mind the highly detailed visions of Breugel the Elder, and the oneiric and fertile imagination of Hieronymus Bosch, but in a specifically Haitian context.
Profil’s landscapes show human life and architecture as an integral part of nature, featuring surreal human and tree hybrids, with multiple perspectives, and a virtuosic use of colour, light and line.
Each painting by Profil works on different time levels, and they continue to reveal fascinating details, missed on first acquaintance.

www.thesmartestproject.co.uk

Festival at the Hundred Years Gallery

3/4/2016

Last Sunday Rabelaisdada was featured at Dark: Festival of the Unseen, organised by the artist Jill Rock, in association with the Hundred Years Gallery, at 13 Pearson Street, Hoxton, in London. Here’s the blackboard, which announced what was on offer, like a menu, appropriate as the Gallery also has a fine café.
The poet Grassy Noel, together with improvising musicians KMAT (Keisuke Matsui, Paul Shearsmith & Graham MacKeachan), Giles Leaman, and dancer Sofia Figueiredo, performed a memorable improvisation featuring James Joyce and his nighttime novel Finnegans Wake.

Another striking improvisation was performed solo by Cos Chapman with a plethora of his mini-synths, and sound modulators, which he manipulated virtuosically, transforming sounds from everyday objects, taken by volunteer members of the audience from a mysterious suitcase, into rich soundscapes.

The gallery was full of varied art and sculpture: from Anna Burel’s mysterious seated woman, to Jill Rock’s rhythmic assemblages of painted branches and bark, and some striking work with shards of mirrors and text. Montse Gallego’s sound work occupied Jill Rock’s icosidodecaheDRON’s inner infinitely mirrored space.

There were hallucinatory paintings by the Haitian artist Makenol Profil, featuring landscape scenes in which human figures were simultaneously trees, Neville Sattentau’s extraordinary visions in tempera, a wonderfully detailed and amusing horizontal landscape painting drawn in white on black by Phil Baird, and a large multi-layered painting by Mary Lemley, recently completed, but begun 28 years ago.

Nicky Heinen performed a haunting solo flute piece in the dark, which featured multiphonics of various kinds, including almost recognisable sung words. When the light returned, her painting, involving brightly coloured geometric shapes, was revealed, under a glazed coal-dark filter.

And other poets were there to perform their work – Steve Micalef, Steve Watts reading a translation of Adnan al-Sayegh’s poetry, which Adnan also read in Arabic, so we could appreciate its musicality. And finally on the last day, Jill Rock and I read from Rabelaisdada: the episode about the Island of The Stuffed Cats, followed by the incident involving The Long-Eared Birds, whose circular gossip was very effectively whispered by the audience. Altogether an incredibly varied four days and nights featuring over thirty artists, moving from darkness into light, from the unseen to the seen, and heard.

Full details of DARK: Festival of the Unseen:
http://www.hundredyearsgallery.com/exhibition-dark/

Massacre of the innocents

28/3/2016

Woke up today to the news of a terrible massacre in a park in Lahore: a man who deliberately blew himself up amidst children and women who had been enjoying themselves in the park's playground. Seventy killed, mostly children, hundreds severely injured. Unimaginable horror inflicted on the totally innocent, a depth of barbarity which is barely conceivable.

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