the bart wells gang
I was smack bang
in the middle of a riot going down in the Barri Gotic in Barcelona. Breugel helped
paint the scene for me. It
was either fiesta time or Rivaldo had been sold to Real Madrid, having left with
the words, 'I've always wanted to play at a top club.' Screaming heads, sometimes
three a shoulder, were crammed in all the windows above me. Then a stone was dropped.
Everyone below
looked up and shook their fists and rained expletives to the dossers above. They
(we) retaliated with our own missiles. Something heavy was going down today. Unfortunately,
up there in the gods, they weren't so hot at throwing, yet I am, and I whipped
a stone side-arm up into somebody's eye hard. Vitreous humour, meet the air. Somehow
I got some respect Jamie Oliver style [1] and was allowed, or picked out, to be
brought inside the squat, to meet the gang. I was lead over numerous drunk and
drugged up bodies and into their art exhibition, noticing that some of the girls
might need saying hello to later, as I went. It was, apparently, a radical new
exhibition, something that wouldn't last long because the authorities were coming,
and something, which should change my life. There was a lot of jostling.
Everyone
who could stand wanted to show me around. I was lead into the room, but the art
was uneventful to say the least, like a school room, untidy, bits of work all
over the wall, floor and spread across tables, lots of trad figurative drawings
and mild abstractions. I immediately felt though, that in this room, at a previous
time, I had had the best years of my life, and I was going down a very pleasurable
memory lane. I woke up. It was Saturday morning. Tea, boiled egg + soldiers, paper,
Football Focus.
-
The directions
for The Bart Wells Gang exhibition said 'off' something or other lane. It was
cold, dark and wet and I tucked in my shirt. Under a lamp I saw a figure standing
outside a door. I strode down the lane, and finally saw the sign I was looking
for, 'THE BART WELLS GANG', painted sloppily in black on a now disintegrating
piece of cardboard. 'PLEASE PULL' was the other sign and after a ding or two we
were in. Straight away there's that strange buzz you get from seeing shows like
this. Like visiting a new crack dealer you've been told about, and being given
fresh oysters as a welcome, or something. It's a buzz that doesn't come with looking
at art from your organised, insured institution. It's a squat for a start (and,
for all I know right now, empty again, but there is hope for new shows). Shows
like this welcome you to a certain, more intimate, more cut off type of conversation,
which as Richer didn't exactly say, is what art is partly about. Too damp, too
rotting, and too cold for Gerhard though, but it's lit well enough and there's
a fire going. Plus you're allowed to smoke. [2]
The Bart Wells Gang rides again
The
ground floor was full of junk, but not art. Up a flight of stairs and it looked
like piles of separated junk, but this time, it was art. Mick Mee immediately
said hello. Strange objects d'irty art; a rickety market-stall window type thing
alone on the floor, with leaflets on the ledge, surrounded by so many things I
can't really remember right now. So what the Dickens is all this about? The participation
of Mick Mee symbolises this show (I keep typing Mick Mills)… somehow politicises
it. He's not an artist. In fact, he doesn't even know that all his things are
here. He's a 70 something 'eccentric' who lives the inventive, colourful and inspired
life, a world away from the contextualised celeb creativity that is the art mainstream.
A local man who has turned his home into a surreal and working jailhouse, a kind
of Boss Hogg meets that serial killer in 'Se7en'.
If
he comes across anyone misbehaving, he makes a citizen's arrest, and slings the
offender into his cell. No, it's true, he does. He's involved in charity work
with a local posse called The Bart Wells Gang, raising money for the local hospice,
and been voted Character of the Year in the local press. His possessions have
been borrowed for a few weeks, and this lack of knowledge of where they've been
taken to, or why, says much. Not just for spirit, or for fun, or for trust among
a community, these simple things, but possibly about how these valued sentiments
have been re-invented and sold back to us through pretence, inside the empty Thatcherite
repair job that is the rhetorical Blairite dream. A dream which is being nakedly
and transparently ladled out through a pseudo-philosophical cloud of bullshit,
where community spirit has been transformed from just that… spirit, to a buzz
word.
It's a good
time to go upstairs because a mock Turner prize is being fought out. The contenders
are; Harry Pye, Harry Pye, Harry Pye and the rank outsider, Harry Pye. Video,
paintings, sculpture and photography. There have been numerous attempts at 'protest'
against the Turner Prize by artists and students, but they've always either been
very lame or appallingly embarrassing [3]. The tabloids have always been better
at it, until now maybe. I'd glimpsed Harry Pye's rather abject video which mock-documents
him dumping a string of purposely chosen good looking women about 4/5 months ago,
during a panic sandwich making blitz in a kitchen of two friends who were stepping
up the aisle together in 2 hours time.
Harry Pye by Harry Pye
The
video somehow, didn't catch the mood. Also, it looked vain, with an air of Tracey
Emin, but even worse, a wannabe Tracey Emin. But for all of that, it looked worth
coming back to. Seeing it at Bart Wells again surprised me, not just cos it was
there, but that it looked good, plonked on a small stool. It looked good under
the mock Charles Ray life-size papier-mâché sculpture of Pye himself, his proud
belly between out-stretched arms soaking up the glory of a famous victory. It
looked good in-front of his Turner Prize thankyou list in mock Peter Davies, even
though I couldn't work out if it was sarcastic or not. Across from this, were
3 photos of Pye, looking as if he was either being interviewed for a job or interviewed
for JobSeekers, neither of which he was going to get. The whole ensemble gave
enough and left out a sufficient amount to inspire a spoonful of glee. Thing is,
I don't know who won. [4]
A Francis Uprichard mummy
Pye's
father-like figure created an interesting dialogue with two strange and creepy
mummies lying on the other side of the room by Francis Uprichard. Similar in size
to Ron Mueck's Dead Dad, but here preserving Henry's dead 4-year-old twins from
Eraserhead 2. Lying either side of a rubber snake, you could assume that these
disturbingly elongated and emaciated bodies had both been victims of a fatal bite,
but there's a chunk of time missing in the narrative and pneumonia came to mind
as being on Dr. Quincey's report. Hybrid, waxy Cronen/Spielberg-like objects lay
in hibernation on the window ledge nearby, further unsettling the scene into something
I didn't want to know about.
An eye for Gottelier
Luke
Gottelier started getting known for his broccoli for trees and plastic bread tray
things for tower blocks etc landscape photographs a while back, but is in front
of canvas full time now. Wondrously simple, but impossible to work out, Gottelier
has both an eye and an arse for painting. Hung awkwardly over a wall ravaged by
damp and green mold, these latest works were nicely compared to an exploded sugary
Guston in Time Out, but there's more late 20's Picabia and mid to late Picasso
at work here, a splash of Kippenberger, and a class 'A' olive dropped in to top
it off.
Sam Basu quietly kicks ass
Sam
Basu's two videos, one of which I did forgot to come back to I must say, pushed
the boundaries of production qualities to the end of the scale, and were wonderfully
stupid and silly for it. In the one I concentrated on, Basu assumes the role of
modern super-hero, a lo-fi 'Monkey'. In contrast say, to the two films on offer
by Isaac Julian at the Turner prize, with all the effort and production that were
obviously apparent there, Basu, with his simple, anarchic tom-foolery, inspired
a grin, and not the yawn and pat-on-back that Julian gave me. A show which quietly
kicked a little ass.
Notes:
[1]. If you don't know who Jamie is and want to get to know him, just go
to a bookshop, or Sainsburys, and pick out his book, 'The Return of the Naked
Chef' and turn to the double page spread at the back to page 286-7. I'm not going
into it here. But he's a f****** w***er.
[2] This was an unfinished 600-word
note, which I deleted. I'll come back to it another day.
[3] Why Rachel Whiteread,
the winner of the Turner in the mid 90's, didn't collect the extra £20,000 cheque
given out by the KLF for worst artist of the year I'll never know. She could have
walked down the steps of the Tate, 20 grand in one back pocket to collect yet
another 20, said thankyou, make a short acceptance speech, and sat back to watch
the KLF burn £1,000,000 in a stunt so childish and pathetically moronic as to
belie belief. Shit sandwich.
[4]. Also on show were Pye's magazines, which
if found, should be bought. http://www.frankmagazine.co.uk
