Last week I decided to venture forth from my natural habitat and go gallery hopping in Mayfair. There were two exhibitions I was desperate to see - Rob and Nick Carter's Chinese Whispers at The Fine Art Society and Joseph Kosuth's Amnesia: Various, Luminous, Fixed at Sprüth Magers.
I loved the concept behind Chinese Whispers. It's like a visual version of that childhood game, where a message is whispered around a group, passed through each person, until by the end it's just nonsense, like 'purple monkey dishwasher' or 'Ben likes Katie' or something. The Carters commissioned a Chinese artist to reproduce various Warhol images. The reproductions were then passed onto another studio and who then copied them and sent their versions to another studio. This was repeated twenty-eight more times. The Carters then arranged the images from first to the thirtieth picture. Each artist made little mistakes or alterations that eventually eroded the original image until the final reproduction looks nothing like the first or very much like anything really, just a lot of lines and dark patches.
This was done for all sorts of Andy Warhol greats - the soup can, the Coca-Cola logo, even Da Vinci's Last Supper.
According to the blurb, the exhibition is all about truth and authenticity. This is a big sticking point in fashion. The majority of people don't have access to a wardrobe of one-of-a-kind pieces. We buy off the rack. Granted, an item can look completely different depending on who's wearing it and how but there's always a risk of bumping into someone wearing the same thing. (Oh, the horror!) The High-Street takes a lot from high-fashion designers, who in turn find inspiration from all sorts of sources, from muses to trends past to cinema. By the time it's got to you, it can be hard to disentangle your individual style thumbprint (what I see as authenticity) from the web of fashion.
So after this, I went to look at some lights.
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| Looking in at Sprüth Magers from the rainy street outside. |
People are going to start saying I have an obsession with neon lights. Well, maybe I do. But these are a million miles away from The God's Own Junkyard exhibition I went to a few weeks ago. There's no sex, no rock'n'roll, no Soho.
The first thing I noticed was the noise. It sounded like a beehive. A beautiful, glowing beehive.
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| Well, if you don't even know, Kosuth... |
Language is central to Kosuth's work. Statements like 'Language must speak for itself.' and '"I see (hear, feel, etc.) X"' were translated into neon. The room downstairs featured a sort of timetable version of Joyce's 'Ulysses' - the lights said 'Sirens 4p.m.' and 'Cyclops 5 p.m.'. Fab
While going around looking around galleries, I wore some clothes:
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| {Headband, H&M. Jumper, Topshop. Trousers, Topshop. Shoes, Topshop.) |
A marvellous song if ever there was one and the sort of music video that makes you question everything: R.E.M's Imitation of Life.
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