Desperately Seeking Sportswear

The costume for Exercise Magic!! didn’t just require custom made wii straps it also needed some good old fashioned aerobics gear.  Here is a still from “Real Results with Coronation Street’s Beverley Callard” which shows you the inspiration behind the look.

The video is from the mid 90s and my first thought was to try second hand and vintage clothing shops to find something to recreate the look.  Unfortunately it was only after an epic two days of searching  that it occured to me that lycra degrades fairly quickly (especially if its been worn frequently to the gym) which is why you don’t see any second hand.  So it was back to the shops to see if I could find anything new with a retro feel.  In the end I choose Nike Dri-fit stretch shorts in black with a blue stripe detail combined with a white vest top from Marks & Spenser (kindly lent by Michael (apparently only cost 10p in a sale 5 years ago)).

You can see the finished outfit at Cryptic Nights: SuckerBallz! at the CCA in Glasgow tonight at 8pm. Or check back here later to see photos and video of the finished piece.

Yeah Yeah Yeah I’m Luminescent

Last month I went to see the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at the O2 Academy in Glasgow.  The gig was fantastic and you can read my review on the Skinny website or check it out in the magazine which is out now.

Apart from the music the Karen O’s fashion was as inspiring as usual in a leopard print leotard accessorised with a selection of mono screen print capes and scarfs (for want of a better word) in simple tribal designs.  Half way through the set she added a flourescent pink face mask decorated with a swirl of electro luminescent wire which began at the nose.  Unfortunately my mobile phone completely failed to capture the moment and google has let me down in the search for someone who did.

What impressed me the most about her look was how easy almost every element would be to recreate at home whilst still looking effortlessly cool.  You could get the leotard from American Apparel (the new Zig Zag design is a close match), print the fabrics yourself on white cotton (even old sheets would do) even the face mask would be fairly simple.  Ever since then I have tried to pick up some EL wire but haven’t managed to find a supplier outside the US but fingers crossed I’ll be able to wear a bright pink mask out on the town some time soon!

Scandalous Abstraction

Is it me or is there an aesthetic beauty to the blacked out MP’s expense claims which are all over the papers this morning.  The news is scandalous but there is something visually appealing about flicking through the papers seeing lots of blacked out squares and rectangles. 

Taken from page 107 of Paddy Tipping's Incidental Expenses

I love the thrill of the random placing of the blacked out sections creating a tension with the formal beauty of the monochrome pallete, pasted accross the rigid beaurocracy of a humble telephone bill.  A blatant attempt to rip off the taxpayer  – definitely, but perhaps also abstract art.

What do you do when art is too popular?

You know the feeling, you’re on your way to a gallery and you feel very very hip. You’re an insider, one of the in crowd. No one is as cool and as cultured as you are. Until, that is, you get to the gallery and discover that it’s packed to the rafters like an art historical meat market.

The question is, what do you do when art becomes too popular? This has been a problem for sometime. When I went to see Turner Whistler Monet at the Tate Britian in 2005 visitors were being hearded in by a man with a megaphone. Around the paintings people were ten deep. It was an example of shameless overselling. Now, I do believe that as many people as possible have the right to see art, especially when it is a national instituion. But selling a room to capacity just doesn’t work, this doesn’t create new converts it just puts people off.

Three years later it seems like nothing has changed. When I went to see the Rothko exhibition a few weeks ago at the Tate Modern it was just the same, as this sneaky iphone picture shows.

To be honest this picture doesn’t do it justice, there were far too many people. Basically you know something has gone wrong when you have to queue up to read vinyl wall text. It is especially problematic when viewing art which should create an intimate and sacred experience.

This doesn’t just happen at large institutions, at the Fruitmarket Gallery’s summer exhibition of the work of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller the queues were so long that even after three visits I didn’t manage to see the whole exhibition.

I’m not blaming the galleries, at least I don’t think it is always intentional, although in the case of the Tate I do sometimes wonder if this is the result of barefaced capitalism. But how can this problem be solved? This is a dificult question without any easy answers, beyond longer opening hours and longer runs there isn’t much else that can be done. A painting isn’t a film, it can’t be shown on two screens at the same time.

Perhaps galleries and museums need to be brave enough to limit numbers going into the gallery, to hold people back until a room is cleared, to say come back later rather than selling to capacity and hoping for the best. Otherwise this is the high water mark and soon no one will come back and art will definitely lose its cool.

Loris Greaud – Cellar Door, Palais De Tokyo

Whilst Eija-Liisa Athila was quietly impressing me with her subtle and thoughtful videos on the other side of town, at the Palais de Tokyo, something altogether more bizarre was on display. In the rotting concrete grandeur of one of contemporary arts most infamous spaces Loris Gréaud had put together a show which was radiant with ambitious failure.

Cellar Door is hyper conceptual: from video works which only play when no one is in the room, to a net cage ‘sculpture’ in which bored paintballers shoot at each other every half hour, to the ubiquitous low base rumble of bad sound art, this show had everything and not in a good way. The work was fractured and made little sense either as stand alone pieces or as a body of work.

The work was controlled by a man sitting in a booth his computer screens directed away from the visitors so you couldn’t tell if he was working or playing solitair and updating his facebook page.

And with this came text, text and more text. Text on the walls, text in a paper hand out, text on Electroluminescent music stands which flashed to frustrate the reader. And all of it so pretentious and obscure reading it felt like wading through treacle. For example:

“The common version of the artist’s studio, the dream factory, isn’t on display; rather, the studio is featured as a dreaming factory, a delirious object endowed with thought and speech that constantly reinvents itself.“

So much these days seems to be based on the idea that the audience has to unravel something, to work out a mystery set for them by the creator, from TV shows like Lost to films like Donnie Dark. Cellar Door embraces this idea but it seems as though there is no substance behind it, there is no big mystery the artist is as confused as we are! I read a great article in the Guardian about this phenomena in film by John Patterson with Cellar Door this trend has moved over to contemporary art.

From reading this post you would think that I didn’t like Cellar Door and you would be right – the trouble is I can’t seem to stop talking about it. Despite it all it was wonderful. It was great to see something which was so unhampered by any kind of restraint. This exhibition failed totally, but it failed on its own terms and that failure was glorious.

All pictures taken by The Amazing Rolo