The best summer house?

Yauatcha

Amazing lighting in the basement dining room at Yauatcha. Restaurant lighting can be hit and miss, and is very difficult when subterranean, but Christian Liairge has done an brilliant job. It is simply like sitting under a leafy tree in the midday sun...all dappled, dreamy and beautiful. (And the food is incredible too.)

Conrad Shawcross - Ropemakers

Conrad Shawcross - Ropermakers.......Where deep philosophical content meets coloured craft, all brought together via the most brilliant wooden constructions. Oh Yes.

Beam Drop

I must have mentioned this before, probably loads, but hey, I don't care... I could never tire of Chris Burdens Cold-blooded Brute of a sculpture, 'Beam Drop'.

UbuWeb

UbuWeb is a total triumph.......get involved!

UbuWeb is a completely independent resource dedicated to all strains of the avant-garde, ethnopoetics, and outsider arts. 

All materials on UbuWeb are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights belong to the author(s). 

UbuWeb is completely free.

It's amazing to me that UbuWeb, after fifteen years, is still going. Run with no money, Ubu has succeeded by breaking all the rules, by going about things the wrong way. UbuWeb can be construed as the Robin Hood of the avant-garde, but instead of taking from one and giving to the other, we feel that in the end, we're giving to all. UbuWeb is as much about the legal and social ramifications of its self-created distribution and archiving system as it is about the content hosted on the site. In a sense, the content takes care of itself; but keeping it up there has proved to be a trickier proposition. The socio-political maintenance of keeping free server space with unlimited bandwidth is a complicated dance, often interfered with by darts thrown at us by individuals calling foul-play on copyright infringement. Undeterred, we keep on: after fifteen years, we're still going strong. We're lab rats under a microscope: in exchange for the big-ticket bandwidth, we've consented to be objects of university research in the ideology and practice of radical distribution. 

But by the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Cobbled together, operating on no money and an all-volunteer staff, UbuWeb has become the unlikely definitive source for all things avant-garde on the internet. Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our ISP pulls the plug, our university support dries up, or we simply grow tired of it. Acquisition by a larger entity is impossible: nothing is for sale. We don't touch money. In fact, what we host has never made money. Instead, the site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists—the music of Jean Dubuffet, the poetry of Dan Graham,Julian Schnabel’s country music, the punk rock of Martin Kippenberger, the diaries of John Lennon, the rants of Karen Finley, and pop songs by Joseph Beuys—all of which was originally put out in tiny editions and vanished quickly. 

However the web provides the perfect place to restage these works. With video, sound, and text remaining more faithful to the original experience than, say, painting or sculpture, Ubu proposes a different sort of revisionist art history, one based on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on the perceived, or market-based, center. Few people, for example, know that Richard Serra makes videos. Whilst visiting his recent retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, there was no sign of TELEVISION DELIVERS PEOPLE (1973) or BOOMERANG (1974), both being well-visited resources on UbuWeb. Similarly, Salvador Dalí’s obscure video,IMPRESSIONS DE LA HAUTE MONGOLIE—HOMMAGE Á RAYMOND ROUSSEL from the mid-70s can be viewed. Outside of UN CHIEN ANDALOU (1929), it’s the only other film he completed in his lifetime. While you won’t find reproductions of Dalí’s paintings on UbuWeb, you will find a 1967 recording of an advertisement he made for a bank.

(Image is a clip from 'Equation: X + X = O  (1936)')

Jardin de Cactus

Daphna Laurens

There is something quite engaging about this image from Daphna Laurens at Salone de Mobile, Milano. It does not look quite real, almost like a Thomas Demand reconstruction, or a dolls house.

McCullin

I have just seen the most amazing documentary about the photographer Don McCullin. It is hard to describe the intensity of the film which charts McCullins' career capturing war, famine and ultimately humanity in every conceivable form. It's incredibly moving and distressing but it is also so very important, all brilliantly knitted together with newsreel and moving image film.
McCullin is a marvellous photographer, and he became obsessed by conflict (and the adrenalin it produced), putting himself in situations which were frankly suicidal.  But he did this in order to tell the truth, to tell real stories from the front line, to render the pain and suffering in all its gore and desperation.
Implicitly trusted and published by (Sir) Harold Evans, then editor of The Times and bank rolled by a fiercely independent owner, the photographs would form the basis of accounts from Cyprus, Vietnam, Lebanon, Cambodia and Biafra . These images left people reeling back home, trying to digest their breakfast on a quiet sunday morning.
McCullin struggled with the situations, and is obviously mentally scarred, but he is a true artist in my view. He seems to have had no control over impulse to shoot these images, he just had to do it.
I was slightly concerned by Argo, the recent Oscar winner, and its depiction of conflict, now I just think it is downright awful and actually dangerous.
The world needs more people like Don McCullin, and more people with the integrity and foresight to fund and produce stuff that is truly important.
Remarkable, (and not to be missed).

Pae White

More short Video,  but a gem this time, as Pae White talks about her current installation at the South London Gallery. I think whats interesting here is the honesty. The fine arts (and particularly the discussion & critique) can sometimes be perceived as over complicated and superflous. But White is adroit, has a real clarity of thought, and is also happy to talk about anxiety in the process. Oh... the work is quite brilliant to boot!

PM Gallery

Basic but informatory little video piece about the Walk On exhibition at the PM Gallery.

Aurelie Rimbert

Very concise series of 'trunks' by Aurelie Rimbert. There is a lovely openness to these pieces, both in a physical sense, with some of the series being perforated, but also emotionally. Is there anything painted on the canvas?, does the graph paper continue inside?and is there a line anywhere? They implore you to interact. All of these trunks could become in series in their own right, but I would like to think they won't, as the contrasting dimensions hint at more occasional, specific furniture. (Which is a very good thing in a one size fits all world.)