Vivienne Westwood show

There's a show that opens today in Sheffield, at the Millennium Gallery, dedicated to the work of Dame Vivienne Westwood: it's a retrospective of her clothes, a monument to her status as grand dame of British fashion.

Typical of most of the Vivienne references I found while researching the chapter on her in In Search of the English Eccentric is this: "She is one of the most original voices in 20th century fashion," says Claire Wilcox. "She never swam with the tide. In 100 years' time I still think her work will be strong and will speak for itself."

I agree. Although it's a shame that the show doesn't seem to focus on Vivienne herself, and what she stands for. For more, see her manifesto.

Bankesy

Here's an interesting piece from the Jerusalem Post all about the ruins of Qasr al-Abd, west of Amman, capital of Jordan, brought to the attention of the world by 'an eccentric English aristocrat', William Bankes. Orientalist, Egyptologist, collector and mate of Lord Byron, Bankes recognised these ruins as being those of Tyros, described by the 1st century AD Jewish historian Josephus, when he came across them along with two British naval officers midway through a grand tour of the world.

Although he was mostly responsible for redesigning Kingston Lacy and leaving it in the shape it is in today, Bankes barely got to live in or enjoy his creation. He was forced to flee the country and live more or less in exile after he was caught in flagrante with a guard in Green Park. Sodomy, at the time, remained a capital offence.

Throughout his life he sent back to Kingston Lacy numerous artefacts or curiosities that he picked up on his travels, and is said to have returned home in secret to glimpse this collection just before he died.

Without doubt England's most eccentric sporting fixture

I have no idea why, but this makes me extremely happy. Yesterday the legendary cheese-chasing event took place at Cooper's Hill in Gloucestershire. I wish I'd been there. Instead, here's a video of it, something I could watch (and have watched) again and again...

birth

At last I've got my hands on one. It's just as exciting as it looks on films or when you read about it. Although the book feels different to how I imagined it - the paper's better and it smells unlike my last book. In a good way.

I once met someone who could tell what country a book had been printed in just by smelling it.

As of late last week these little bundles of joy have begun to make their way around the country and parts of Europe in order to be stacked up in large warehouses or hidden under other books on literary editors desks.

I've decided that the month of June is going to be a month of dead eccentrics on this here blog. It needs a bit of structure I think. I'll post 15. One every other day, with each as a slightly fuller biog of a dead English eccentric.

Ruskin

Over the last few days - in Paris, interviewing the last of the Saudi artists - I’ve been re-reading bits of This is Civilisation by Matthew Collings, the tie-in for his recent tv series. I like it more and more. I like the way he writes, the sweep of the book, and the change of pace that happens every time he switches from his light-coloured look-at-me-Mum-I’m-blogging chatty font to the slightly fatter one for Meaty Serious Stuff.

The best parts, though, are when he writes about John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, visionary and eccentric, someone Collings clearly likes. He's the one on the left in this picture. I guess part of the reason I like these passages is they flesh out one of the main themes of In Search of… - that of how Victorian writers and readers began to pine after their recent, vanished past and would by turns idolise or laugh at its apparent bawdiness and closeness to nature. Without them doing this, it’s unlikely that we’d be able to talk today with such familiarity about an ‘English eccentric’. This figure is part of the national furniture only because of the extent to which Victorians wanted to read about him.

In Collings’ book Ruskin becomes the guide to art in the second half of the 19th century. He explains Ruskin’s love of organic-looking Gothic design over the more regimented and classically pleasing symmetry of the Renaissance because you could see the hand of individual craftsmen in the former. For him, irregularity and inconsistency stood for humility, individuality, participation within the natural world; and this belief in the purity of Nature and the importance of being connected to it in some way was symptomatic of his age – a time of mass-urbanisation and mass-industrialisation. It’s also exactly what fuelled the Victorian fascination with English eccentrics.

As well as embodying something of why eccentrics were so popular during the Victorian era, Ruskin was an eccentric himself, both as someone who had visions and as a visionary. I didn't really take this in first time I read the book.

Collings: ‘He resisted the soul-destroying effects of industrialism with cranky concepts like free schools, free libraries, town planning, smokeless zones and green belts, all of which we now take for granted.’

Towards the end of his life he became ‘what we would nowadays call bipolar. He saw devils and had hallucinations and had to be constantly nursed, and finally spent the last twelve years of his life in silence, utterly withdrawn from public life, spending his days nodding and smiling in his house in the Lake District.'

Here he is nodding mode:

gnomes

an excellent gnome montage from the Chelsea Flower Show. Ann Atkin would be proud.

Robert Lenkiewicz

A few days ago in The Independent there was a profile of Robert Lenkiewicz, painter, showman, artistic musketeer, lothario (see above), and eccentric, who died six years ago leaving a mountain of unsettled debts. There were 240 claimants to his estate. Most of these claims have been met by selling off his paintings and his collection of rare books, but it's the record prices for his paintings that sparked the article.

They're newsworthy because he was not, and is not, seen as a cutting-edge contemporary artist. Instead his work was shunned by what you could call 'the contemporary art world' yet embraced by 'the public', in the way that Jack Vettriano's work is. Though their work is quite different - even if Tom Lubbock more or less lumps the two together at the end of this piece (along with Beryl Cook). More on this further down.

Robert Lenkiewicz is someone I was planning to write about in the chapter on eccentric artists (towards the end of In Search of the English Eccentric). I went for Sebastian Horsley instead, and then wrote in a general sense about how the modern artist has been perceived over the last 500 years. All of a sudden I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do.

Lenkiewicz would have been fun to write about, mainly because he falls outside the accepted caricature of the aristocratic, anachronistic eccentric toff who lives in cheery isolation somewhere in the English countryside, also because there are some great stories associated with him. But, if I'm entirely honest, and after starting a sentence like that I kind of have to be, I didn't want to write about him because I used to work for his son at his gallery. He's called Wolfe. I know one of his daughters too, and I guess the idea of writing about their father with any kind of authority felt unnatural. I couldn't see a way of describing him that would allow both of them to recognise him. But that's an aside. Again. At times this entire blog feels like an aside. Much more interesting is Wolfe talking about what it was to be a teenager growing up around his dad.

He told me once about a tramp called Andy Lynch who had been taken in by his father. One night Andy drank a titanic quantity of meths, climbed to the top of the building where they lived and began to piss onto the street below. Mid-piss he set fire to the stream of urine issuing forth before jumping, ablaze, to his death. Wolfe was about 16 at the time. His father wanted him to know death, to understand something of its smell and what it looked like so he took him and his brother Ruben to the morgue. There they found Andy's corpse. He told his sons to sit with it for fifteen minutes. Wolfe went to feel the texture of the charred flesh but pushed too hard and broke the blackened surface. From the way Wolfe described it, it had the consistency of a crème brûlé pudding. On the way out, with a rare kind of forcefulness, Robert insisted that they look into the other cubicles in the morgue. He wanted to show them more bodies and more death. So they did, like negatives exposed to the non-light that was, here, death.

Wolfe's an artist now. Here's a low-lit image of one of the three big pieces from his last exhibition, at Dickinson's on Jermyn Street.








There's one more thing to say about the way Robert Lenkiewicz was described in this article, and it's to do with how we configure art and artists.

Although he is lumped together with artists who produce kitsch and unchallenging work, Lenkiewicz's output is different to that of Jack Vettriano or Beryl Cook. Because of its inconsistency. That and its ambition. There are occasions when he achieves the clarity and quality of mark, intent, visual impact and the kind of compositional harmony that he undoubtedly aspired to. Yet there are thousands of times when he does not - the works he did in a hurry, to pay a bill, get out of there, pass the time, or just feed the part of him that needed to be prolific. Towards the end of his life he rarely struggled to push each painting as far as it could possibly go, more often leaving the paint thin and light.

When talking about art, a lot of the time you end up talking about movements or artists - though more often it's artists. When talking about artists you end up referring to the work they have produced. Their character, eccentric or not, with time becomes less important than the works that have survived them. And it's at this point, for the sake of concision, when describing an artistic oeuvre in your mind you flatten the images that you can associate easily with the artist, until they form a single generic image. Your response to that image controls your reaction to that artist. The artist becomes a discrete productive entity: a kind of machine there to produce 'arts'. It makes it easier to say yes or no to, say, Klee art, Kippenberger art, Kosuth art. So when Lubbock sets out a mini-hierarchy of figurative painters (a bit like a school sports day with coloured rosettes, trophies and plaques) he's cementing that.

I suppose the thing that interests me here is that (as with someone like Giorgione) the artist-machine is rarely judged according to how many 'arts' it produces. Our minds can't easily concertina a thousand images into one.

But don't bother telling this to a freakishly prolific artist. The drive to create on this scale doesn't stem from a reasoned intellectual decision; it comes from somewhere lower down.

ECCENTRICITY, the band

There's a band called ECCENTRICITY. They're Indian. I'm not sure if they've broken into the Indian pop mainstream, yet, but they've got a good look: as far as I can make out it involves cricket whites set off by denim jackets. The cricket whites might just be school uniform, it's hard to tell. And their sound? I'm not sure how to describe it, it's heartfelt, or heartbroken, with quite an 80s ballad feel to it. Here's a video of one of their first concerts on youtube.

If anyone knows of other eccentric bands, or bands called eccentric, please please let me know. I want to stockpile as much trivia to do with the word eccentric as possible, particularly things to do with the way the word is used today.

satin worship

Here's me and Ayman, the Palestinian living in Jeddah who prints film posters onto tissue boxes - the first guy I described as an eccentric Saudi artist. We're in his studio, with the air conditioning monster towards the top right of the shot.

The day before leaving Saudi Arabia Stephen - brilliant exhibition curator and all round good guy - and I went to see Ayman's new exhibition. It was about touch. Some of the canvases squeaked when you pushed them. Others felt scummy, or adipose in the way they were a little damp. Over towards the far corner of the gallery was a series of hellish, black paintings covered by a shiny vinyl texture that he'd arranged in swirling patterns. Each looked like an inferno of crude oil. In between two of them was a sheet of white paper with one word in large printed letters:

s a t a n

Hands on chins, Stephen and I agreed with each other that this was pretty bold for Saudi Arabian contemporary art. In fact, it was about the most shocking thing we'd seen since getting here. By some distance. Hamza, who was with us, was stunned as well. After another minute of staring at it and telling each other in a spiral of admiration, fear and by the end of it, bewilderment, that Ayman had gone too far, Hamza gave him a call. Stephen and I watched as an inaudible Ayman explained the piece to Hamza's right ear. It registered little. He hung up.

'It's a typo,' said Hamza, putting his phone away. 'It's meant to say 'satin'.'

The gallery phone rang. About twenty seconds later the guy looking after the exhibition went up to the offending piece of paper, pulled it down, folded it, and took it over to the main desk where he hid it amongst some old files.

more saudi artists

some pictures from the last few days:
























Above, Sameer Al Daham, one of pillars of Saudi art, who works now at the Ministry of Culture and Information.

And Mehdi Al Jeraibi, from Mecca. He collects pilgrims' hair when it gets shaved off at the end of haj (because he's got a friend who works in one of the barber shops that specialises in this). He sets these clumps of hair in resin, and suspends that around a wooden frame. They become giant negatives, as well as emblems of the rebirth that follows the end of haj when most men get their hair shaved off.

He also makes work using the inside of Meccan schooldesks that he's collected over the years. Each one is a rich, mucky palimpsest of graffiti, either scribbled or scratched - names, football teams, crushes, hearts, names in hearts, birds, and more names. here's a slightly fuzzy image of one:

and lastly here's m. ali farea.

the policeman and the doctor - two of the youngest artists in the show - to follow soon..

found one!

Ayman Yossri is my favourite artist from yesterday. And the day before. Though originally Palestinian (with a Jordanian passport), he's lived in Jeddah most of his life - Jeddah being cosmopolitan compared to other Saudi Arabian cities. Ever since pilgrims began to gravitate towards nearby Mecca there's been a greater racial, cultural and ethnic mix in Jeddah and thereabouts, which is some kind of a backdrop to Ayman's life and status as someone, in his words, who lacks identity.

Ayman is pronounced 'A-man'.

His studio was a concrete-walled sauna. Jammed into a rough-hewn hole above his bed was an air conditioning unit the size of an oven, and about as useful when it came to cooling us down. I went to visit him towards the end of the day - he usually sleeps till four or five in the afternoon and spends most of his waking hours watching old films and crying; sometimes he prints miniature versions of the posters from these films onto tissue boxes. He also collects IKEA gnomes and arranges them on boards.

More than any other artist I've met in Saudi he has a following. At times it feels cultish. Young film-makers and artists look up to him and see him as a mystic, genius, man-child, joker, or just inspired baby with extraordinary ideas and a balding pate. He has has a more situationist take on making art than other Saudi artists in the sense that he doesn't believe so much in the creation of finished artistic products that can last beyond him and be photographed, packaged and sent to London for an exhibition. He'll do all that. I guess. If you force him. But it's unlikely he'll send exactly what you've agreed. At the beginning of our evening he announced that he would recreate his studio in the London gallery and man it throughout the show, shopkeeping an 'Identity Shop'. He wants to buy identities, you see, and offer some of his in exchange. By the end of the evening he had decided to send 3-metre wide blow-ups of film stills with subtitles in Arabic frozen onto the screen. Dialogue or voice-over which when translated would read as: 'I know who did it'; or 'Then there was silence'; 'Later he died', and others.

Is he an eccentric artist?

Am I not allowed into Mecca.

That doesn't quite work, sorry.

Yes is the answer.

Here's a slightly less eccentric Saudi artist I also met yesterday:

The Kingdom

If England is famous for its eccentrics, Saudi Arabia ain't. That's where I am right now by the way. In Jeddah, high in a hotel that looks out to sea. From my window you can see oil tankers planing north towards Aqaba and Eilat, or Suez; and one heading south, high in the water, empty. Could there be a less eccentric country? By that I mean a land where eccentricity is encouraged or in some sense championed less. I don't know.

Above is a picture of me and Al Braithwaite in the Saudi Gazette from the last time I was here in 2003.

This time I'm in the birthplace of Islam to meet and write about fourteen different Saudi artists. Their work will appear in an exhibition taking place in London, this autumn, and I've been asked to provide the text for the book accompanying the show. Up until about eight minutes ago there were eight Saudi artists I had to meet and write about, but the other person writing the profiles has just got in touch to say that she will have to drop out.

Still, I'm excited. I want to find out whether any of these artists think of themselves as typically marginal, eccentric outsiders by virtue of being artists, calling themselves artists, or having other people call them that. Do fellow Saudis imagine that you need to see the world differently in order to be an artist? Or, as I found when I was here last - five years ago, disguised in a Pakistani dish-dasher, sleeping rough in the desert or on a stony beach with the invasion of Iraq rumbling towards its inception, in the company of Al not Stephen - is the artist imagined to be a pillar of zen-like calm, cleanliness and craft?

The first meetings are later today.

We have a driver.

Women still can't drive in Saudi Arabia.

Aisha, wife of the Prophet Muhammad, oversaw a battle from the vantage-point of a camel. The battle was even called The Battle of the Camel because of this. Camel-riding in the 7th century feels equivalent to car-driving in the 21st.

In the words of Sebastian Horsley, 'that's an aside.'

Below is a piece by Abdulnasser Gharem, a Saudi policeman. It's from his recent 'Path' series (2006) and shows the words Al Siraat - meaning the path, the way, the course you take in life, the decisions you make - spraypainted repeatedly onto an abandoned road that falls away into a ravine.