Stewart Home's Blog, page 25

Why we need a weekly nudist night at Tate Modern in London!

Is it possible to enjoy modern art with your clothes on? Not if you are Mavis Artlover of the Art Lovers Network. According to promotional material you can find online: “This group is for everyone who likes to romp around naked with works of art. Sex with art is even better than masturbation!”

Mavis Artlover is a 25 year-old hotel chambermaid who moved from Totnes in Devon to Dollis Hill in London five years ago. She told me that she discovered she was sexually excited by art as a teenager when s

Ladbroke Grove in the 1960s with the accent very much on 24 Bassett Road…

As noted in an earlier post on this blog, at the end of 1961 my mother Julia Callan-Thompson moved to a two room top floor flat at 24 Bassett Road, London W10. The area around Bassett Road had been developed as a series of housing estates in the 1860s in conjunction with the extension of the Metropolitan train line on a viaduct constructed over the Portobello stream and marshes to Ladbroke Grove. The station at this latter location was originally called Notting Hill, which is why an area that mi

From Whitecross Street to Falmouth Harbour & Back Again!

Reader let me take you by the hand to Whitecross Street… are the words with which nineteenth-century writer George Gissing begins his first novel Workers of the Dawn. In Gissing’s time Whitecross Street was synonymous with poverty but now it boasts art galleries and a regular farmer’s market. Just down the road is the site that provided Gissing with the title of another novel New Grub Street. Today this road stops dead where it hits the Barbican complex and what is left of it is called Milton S

Holy Armageddon Batman! A Richard Grayson Opening at Matt’s Gallery in London!

I went to the Sunday afternoon opening of Richard Grayson’s The Golden Space City of God at Matt’s Gallery (42-44 Copperfield Road, London E3 4RR) on 10 May. Some drapes and stacked chairs, designed to make the gallery look like a community space, formed a minor part of an installation. The main item was a 45 minute film of a choir singing a libretto that had been assembled by Grayson from writings he’d found on the website of Christian fundamentalist cult The Family International (formerly The

The BFI Dwoskin season continues with even more cinematic sadism & absolutely the most disturbing movie you’ve ever seen about strippers….

You can forget Zombie Strippers (2008), nothing quite equals Dyn Amo (1972) as a burlesque horror show! I caught a screening of the movie on Thursday  7 May 2009 as part of the BFI’s Stephen Dwoskin season. The film is disturbing and quite a few audience members walked out before the end. I lost count of how many once the numbers reached double figures.

Although the Dwoskin movie is based on the play Dynamo by Chris Wilkinson, the original narrative is stripped away and the focus of the film is t

Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art On Video

There were two evenings of screenings and talks about Guatemalan live art at Iniva in Shoredtich on 5 & 6 May (2009). On both nights six videos lasting around 40 minutes in total were followed by a talk that went on a little longer. The panel on the first night consisted of London-based curator Joanne Bernstein and her Guatemala City counterpart Rosina Cazali. Among other things, they outlined the political background to contemporary cultural production in Guatemala. This might partly be summari

William Blanchard in Redchurch Street, or the death of art spells the murder of artists, the real anti-artists appear….

Although The Maurice Einhardt Neu Gallery (30A Redchurch Street, London E2 7DP) has set opening times, it doesn’t always stick to them. I was curious about their William Blanchard show (24 April -6 May 2009), but whenever I turned up to see it, the joint was closed. Fortunately, at 15,24 on 4 May 2009, I got the following text message: “William Blanchard show open now for 3 hours. Sexton.” The message was from Martin Sexton who runs the Artwars Project Space on the opposite side of the street, a

There is no beginning, there is no end, the counterculture goes on forever…

The London Zine Symposium 2009 took place at The Rag Factory (16-18 Heneage Street, London  E1 5LJ)  yesterday, Sunday 3 May. As an event, it occupies the ground between Publish & Be Damned (with its self-published art focus) and the Anarchist Book Fair (for those committed to full-on and weekend variety anarchist life-styles). There were a lot of familiar faces on the stalls at the Zine Symposium ranging from Mark Pawson (who can also be seen at Publish & Be Damned) to Active Distribution (who