Resist.
Posted: July 13, 2018 Filed under: Catastrophes, Conspiracies, Corridors of Power, Events, London scandals | Tags: Brexit fiasco, Brexit the Game Show, Impeach Trump, Joke nation, peaceful protest, Trump blimp 4 Comments
Ah! What a beautiful day for having a cup of tea in your garden, watching the birds scatter in fear at the approach of a convoy of US military aircraft. Fran Isherwood, after the late Ken Dodd.
I’m not sure who is going to be reading this, as I have totally neglected The London Column this year. My lack of attentiveness is down to a combination of factors, but can be roughly summarised as: 70% personal crises; 20% working on a different version of this material; and 10% depression at the state of the subject under discussion.
However …
It is Friday 13th and Donald Trump is in town. This morning’s news headlines make for a bleach-in-the-eyes experience and one struggles to think of historical parallels. How about Suez ? That’s a humiliating episode of Britain’s history that isn’t part of the national myth (a bit of a downer between winning the war and the Beatles) and showed the extent to which we were constrained by American power; but at least Suez showed a U.S. president acting sensibly by reining in Anthony Eden’s anachronistic imperial folly.
No, the current mess has a toxic dynamic all its own. A fragile PM attempting to carry out a pitiful act of national self-harm (trying to limit the damage whilst maintaining the preposterous rhetoric to appease the loons in her own cabinet) is hosting a gleefully destructive, authoritarian president who openly despises her weakness.
Clearly, Trump despises lots of things – including the mayor of London and the multi-culturalism that the city represents. But, proving that a decent joke – or even a puerile one – can reach the parts that sober analysis cannot reach, a giant Trump baby blimp has taken to London’s skies this morning. The fact that people have been worried about how this inflatable cartoon will impact Caesar’s mood is a black joke in itself.
Anyway, there’s a real summer festival mood this weekend, what with the Wimbledon and World Cup finals, the continuing heatwave (due to end soon), The Latitude Festival in Suffolk (where a good friend is performing Brexit – the Game Show) and a host of anti-Trump protests to choose from up and down the country. So let’s enjoy the summer whilst we can; a joyous pleasure cruise to the edge of the abyss. DS.
Wild Camden.
Posted: January 6, 2017 Filed under: Amusements, Artistic London, Bohemian London, Events, Interiors, Public Announcements, Wildlife | Tags: Almuth Tebbenhof, Andrzej Maria Borkowski, Camden art, Christopher Reid, Danuta Sołowiej, Heather Barnett, Jens Schaumann, Julia Schrader, Katy Evans-Bush, London art galleries, Marzena Pogorzały, Natalia Zagórska-Thomas, Roisin Tierney, Studio Ex Purgamento 1 Comment
Natalia Zagórska-Thomas wearing Julia Schrader. Photo © Jens Schaumann.
DS: Well, we managed to negotiate our way out of 2016 only to find 2017 looming before us like a rogue ice shelf. Yet although the festive season was full of foreboding there were occasional moments of optimism amidst the gloom; one of the most enjoyable events in my pre-Christmas calendar was the private view of Call of the Wild at Studio Ex Purgamento in Camden.
Antlers © Julia Schrader.
Visitors to the gallery are often wrong-footed by the address; it is located in a second-floor extension in a private home, a flat that belongs to artist and conservator Natalia Zagórska-Thomas and her husband Simon. If there was ever an enterprise that demonstrated devotion to an ideal of what art can and should be, Studio Ex Purgamento is it.
Going into the Thing Seriously; or These Influences Have Been Exerted for Good. © Natalia Zagórska-Thomas (alternative titles provided for the artist by Diane Williams).
Profit, apart from a tiny percentage above a certain price to try to recover some costs, goes to artists directly. Some years we sell a lot; others, not at all. I want to show established names alongside lesser known artists whose work interests me, and to mix visual art forms with text, design, performance, architecture, design, music and science. I show many Polish artists to promote their profile and contribution to the culture of the city.
As to the current show, Natalia describes it thus: This is not a tidy show. This is not a tidy subject. What I wanted is what I think I always want: a contemporary version of the cabinet of curiosities, a camera obscura, an idiosyncratic collection of specimens picked up along the way. It feels like life: messy, chaotic, undisciplined, joyous, violent and confusing.
Pale Blue Hexapod © Danuta Sołowiej.
Somehow, Natalia has managed to fit work by 25 artists into her small gallery; these include sculptures by Almuth Tebbenhof, Danuta Sołowiej, and Andrzej Maria Borkowski, wearable art by Julia Schrader, photographs by Jens Schaumann, Marzena Pogorzały (whose images of massive Antarctic ice sheets are elegant visual tokens of the strangled metaphor I opened with) and your own correspondent. The show also features an extraordinary ‘biological’ installation by Heather Barnett, and poems by such luminaries (and friends of The London Column) as Roisin Tierney, Christopher Reid and Katy Evans Bush.
Ice 3. © Marzena Pogorzaly.
© Andrzej Maria Borkowski.
You hardly need me to tell you that the London art scene is full of bullshit, any more than you need me to tell you that 2017 could be a rough year. We will need all the optimism we can get our hands on; and any blows against philistinism or the dead weight of cultural conformity are as welcome as they are necessary. As Katy Evans-Bush writes in Call of the Wild‘s exhibition catalogue: ‘At the time of going to print no one knows what’s going to happen next. Old ways of being uncivilised are being exhumed and new ones invented. The one thing we do know is that we will need to call on all our most civilised impulses – as well as our deepest, wildest aardvark’. Or, to put it another way, if you think the world is going to end tomorrow, plant a tree today. (Who said that? Answers on a postcard to …)
Ruan Minor, Cornwall, 1978. © David Secombe.
Gallery photos by Natalia.
Call of the Wild runs at Studio Ex Purgamento until 15 January; open weekends from 11 am — 6 pm. To visit during the week, call for an appointment. (132D Camden Street, London NW1 0HY; 07799 495549; info@studioexpurgamento.com. http://www.studioexpurgamento.com.)
The March.
Posted: June 24, 2015 Filed under: Events | Tags: anti-austerity march, austerity, People's Assembly, people's right to protest, The Strand Comments Off on The March.
Katy Evans-Bush:
So, a few of us went for a walk the other day. The London Column was there, though we have not exactly been infused with alacrity in putting our pictures up. But we were a bit tired, the day after the march. It had all been rather emotional.
If this seems overblown, consider why we were marching, and who the marchers were. They were our fellow countrymen, women, and children. Many of them were elderly, walking with sticks, and many, many were in wheelchairs. They were marching for their lives, for our lives, for our NHS and schools, for our libraries and jobs.
In the time-honoured tradition, England became – if just for the day – a populace. The crowd filled both sides of the Strand, a street the London Column has always had a soft spot for, and took almost two hours to walk past, singing and blowing horns and chanting and laughing and dealing with their kids. That’s five miles of people.
And what people. They poured in from all over the country. They carried People’s Assembly signs, and banners from everywhere you can think of: Rotherham, Newcastle, Devon, Surrey, the Midlands; from the Trades Council of the Cities of London and Westminster. They came from Wales. The Rhyl Youth Group was there. They were Feminists Against Austerity. Deaf People Against the Cuts. Economists Against Austerity. Musicians, mothers, teachers, retired university professors, the Indian Workers’ Association. The Fire Brigades Union drove a fire engine blaring out eighties hits, and people were literally dancing in the street in front of it as it went past. No one who remembers the men weeping as they were forced out of Clerkenwell Fire Station for the last time could fail to find this joyfulness particularly moving.
in fact, the people, this populace, showed the qualities England is so noted for – all except perhaps shopkeeping, although in truth London was full of tourists and other consumers who were just out shopping; we don’t know what their problem is, but we support their right to it. The real business of the country that day was right here.
This populace was noisy, cheerful, vulgar. They were ribald and profane, they were angry, they were proud, they were together in solidarity. They were in solidarity with the political prisoners in Egypt, and with Greece (‘Give Greece a chance’). They showed scant respect for those who do not respect them (‘Cameron is a cock’). They were peaceful. They were well-informed, good-humoured, witty. And they were funny: slogans referenced Monty Python, Father Ted, Marx (“I warned you this would happen’). They were exuberant. Some had dressed up, some had dressed down, some had cross-dressed. They were beaten but not bowed, and definitely not defeated. And they knew the government wasn’t going to listen to them, and they came together and engaged in their democratic right to assemble in protest anyway.
The London Column fell in love with them all, every one.
All photos © Katy Evans-Bush, 2015
The lights are going out all over Europe …
Posted: August 4, 2014 Filed under: Architectural, Corridors of Power, Events, Interiors, London Labour, London Places, Vanishings, Wartime London | Tags: August 4th 1914, Britain's entry into World War One, lights going out all over Europe, Sir Edward Grey, start of World War One Comments Off on The lights are going out all over Europe …
Foreign and Commonwealth Office. © David Secombe 1993.
A friend came to see me on one of the evenings of the last week — he thinks it was on Monday, August 3rd. We were standing at a window of my room in the Foreign Office. It was getting dusk, and the lamps were being lit in the space below on which we were looking. My friend recalls that I remarked on this with the words: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time’.
From Twenty-Five Years 1892-1916 (New York, 1925) by Viscount Grey of Fallodon, formerly Sir Edward Grey. Sir Edward Grey was British Foreign Secretary in August 1914; Britain declared war on Germany on August 4th.
