Coming Soon - The Freeconomy Feastival 28th November

The Freeconomy Feastival

28th November

Hamilton House (2nd Floor), 80 Stokes Croft, Bristol on 28th Nov, Buy Nothing Day.

The entire day is FREE for EVERYONE and begins at 11am.

Mark Boyle, the founder of the freeconomy community has rallied forces in and around Bristol to bring you all the Freeconomy Feastival this weekend on the 28th of November, at Hamilton House.

The Feastival offers twelve hours of talks, workshops, bookswaps, clotheswaps, dance and music all for the princely sum of ZERO English pounds, all in aid of celebrating Buy Nothing Day a fantastic global holiday from consumerism, that has been running for ten years.

In the current economic climate, the concept of spending less and reducing our involvement as consumers is becoming more and more appealing. And there are a plethora of ways of doing so:

1. Freecycle - an international network and grassroots movement that sees community members offer and receive items that are no longer desired. I have personally gained 3 double beds, a television and a bookshelf and have given away mobile phones, a bike and darkroom developing equipment. My gran even gave away her grand piano on Freecycle!

2. Freeconomy - a gorgeous community website that has the aim help reconnect people in their local communities through the simple act of sharing. A wonderful feature of the site is that you are only allowed to message members a maximum of three times a month to encourage meeting and skill sharing. I have gained ukulele tuition and returned the favour with fixing a sewing machine, and gained many like-minded friends and skipping buddies through it.

3. Which leads me neatly to freeganism - dumpster diving, skipping, call it what you will, this simple act of rifling through supermarket bins can provide you with a meal every day of the week. You learn to be imaginative with your menus, and as stealthy as a panther. Two great charities - FareShare and Foodworks are also making the most of the ludicrous levels of food waste in the UK.

4. Ask yourself these simple questions before buying anything:

- Do I need it?
- How many do I already have?
- How much will I use it?
- How long will it last?
- Could I borrow it from a friend or family member?
- Am I able to clean and/or maintain it myself?
- Will I be able to repair it?
- Am I willing to?
- Have I researched it to get the best quality for the best price?
- How will I dispose of it when I'm done using it?
- Are the resources that went into it renewable or nonrenewable?
- Is it made from recycled materials, and is it recyclable?

5. Get an allotment. Simple.

I think ultimately, the thing that I appreciate the most about all of these ways of reducing one's impact is that it has sharply come to focus that community is key. I think it is fantastic that collectives like Coexist in Hamilton House are thriving, without any support from the Council, growing organically and responding to the needs of the community.

So if you happen to be in Bristol on Saturday, come to the Freeconomy Feastival and immerse yourself in the thriving creative community, dance, sing, listen, and SPEND NOTHING!

The Food for Free Feast:
We aim to cook a delicious three course meal for 300+ people on the day, and there will be free drinks / snacks / bike smoothies constantly throughout the day. It will be on a first come / first serve basis. Even if you can't come in the evening, or are too late to get the feast, you can still come to any of the following throughout the day:

Talks (from 11am onwards):
- Mark Boyle (founder of Freeconomy) - 'My year without Money'
- Fergus Drennan (The BBC's world famous forager) - 'How to make use of Wild Food'
- Claire Milne (Transition Towns UK food policy advisor) - 'Nutritious food - an opportunity for profit or a basic human right?'
- Ciaran Mundy (Transition Bristol's alternative economics advisor) - 'Evil Roots'
- Alf Montagu (Famous Freegan!) - 'Freegan Living'
- Sarah Cameron (Environmental Consultant) - 'Happy Earth Living'
- Megan Orpwood-Russell (Environmental campaigner) - 'Climate Chaos - Campaigning for Change'
- Caraline Collett - 'No money, more love'

Music and performance (from 4pm onwards - run off a pedal-powered sound system!)
- The Undercover Hippy
- Tom Bellamy
- Denise Rowe (from Baka Beyond) with Alex Michelsen and others
- Eirlys
- Siddy Bennett
- The Green People

Cinema (from 11am onwards)
- Money as Debt
- Earthlings
- The Transition Movie
- Age of Stupid
- The History of Oil (stand-up comedy)
- The Story of Stuff
- Wake up Freak Out
- Local film-makers

Holistic Therapies (from 11am onwards)
- Acupuncture
- Massage
- Energy Healing

Bookswap
Bring the books you don't read anymore (not just the naff ones!) and swap them for ones you've never read!

Clothes Swap
Bored of your old clothes? Then bring them along and swap them for clothes you fancy! Or if they need mending, take them along to the 'Junk to Funk' clothes mending workshop in our 'Creative Corner'

Freeshop
Bring along useful things you don't need anymore, or just take stuff that you could use. You can even steal stuff, we couldn't care less!

WE DON'T ACCEPT BARCLAYCARD, VISA OR EVEN CASH!

If you want to join the Freeconomy, you can join at www.justfortheloveofit.org
If you have any questions - or even get involved - feel free to email mark@justfortheloveofit.org or on 0775 886 1783

Kids are more than welcome!

So come along from 11am onwards and enjoy a day where you can eat, drink, learn and be entertained completely for FREE!

On Now - Harun Faroki 'Against What? Against Whom?'

In 1966 Harun Farocki was a student at the Deutsche Film und Fernsehakademie in Berlin. Alongside him was the filmmaker Holger Meins. Farocki went on to make protest films like 'Inextinguishable Fire' and 'Videogramme of a Revolution', whilst Meins made 'How to make a Molotov Cocktail'. Faroki is one of the most prolific and respected filmmakers of his generation, the subject a major retrospective at the Tate this month. Meins joined the Red Army Faction and died whilst on hunger strike in prison. The link, and the divergence between these two filmmakers. The theorist and the terrorist, it where the fascination with Farocki's work comes from. The fine line that he treads so effectively in his work, and which is often so hard to negotiate as a politically engaged writer or artist.

I am fascinated by Farocki's work. I discovered him last year when I was studying video art for my masters, and I was blown away. His video essays, created in a similar vein to those of Godard or Marker, spoke to me in ways that I'd never been spoken to before; they used new modes of expression, new forms of montage, new lines - and curves - and folds - of argument. Anyway, it looks like everyone else has been reading the same books as me. He's big news at the moment, what with the retrospective at the Tate, and the opening of 'Against What? Against whom?' at Raven Row. What is it that we all love about Farocki?

In some ways, I think that its got to do with the war (yes, we are at war), and to do with our desire to be simultaneously involved, and absolved. Farocki deconstructs the images of war, and at the same time he deconstructs his own deconstructions of the images of war. It's all jolly clever, and it might be seen as a bit of a cop out, if his films weren't so darn effective. Watching them makes me want to do stuff. To act (well, at least to video). And I suppose that's the catch, and part of the question that his art makes us ask: what does it mean to watch this stuff. When so much of warfare has become virtual, when - as in 2009's 'Immersion'- treatment for post-traumatic stress takes the form of a virtual-reality video game, are Farocki's video essays acts of aggression in themselves?

An element that might useful to think about is the close relationship between image and body, art and activism in his films. Even though his career has been dedicated to the creation of screen works: films and works of art that have no real presence in the bodily world, Farocki's activism is not just a metaphysical concept. This is due to the literal presence of the body in many of his films. The primary example of this occurs in 'Inextinguishable Fire' Faroki's 1969 film about napalm. In the film, Farocki stubbs out a lit cigarette on his arm whilst talking about the effects of napalm. The body of the filmmaker, the manipulator of images, is physically scarred by the events he is talking about. By this insignificant action he is inserting himself - his physical body - into the ecomomy of warfare. The cigarette acts as a cipher for two things. Firstly, it represents a tiny fraction of the heat at which napalm burns. Secondly, it demonstrates the language of association and metaphor in which activists are forced to talk in order to confront people with the realities of chemical warfare.

Anyway, rather than listening to me rhapsodising forever about video art (I can you know...) why don't you jog off to the exhibitions and have a go at inserting yourselves in the economy of warfare. The screenings at Tate are ongoing every weekend until the 6th December, and the Raven Row show is open near Liverpool Street until the beginning of next February. For more information click here or go to www.ravenrow.org

Review: Nation at The National Theatre

Perhaps you wouldn’t think so to look at me (I hope so, anyway) but in my youth I was a huge Terry Pratchett fan. To the un-initiated, this might seem a bit weird. Pratchett’s Discworld books are marketed at the geekier end of the fiction-consuming spectrum. Pratchett fans are typically the kind of people you find wandering in single-sex groups around the Birmingham NEC. They go to conventions, they have sweaty palms, and often their most fulfilling relationships are with people they’ve met over the internet playing War Hammer (can you even play War Hammer online…?).

Now, I don’t count myself amongst these people. The only time I went to the Birmingham NEC was on a school trip to The Clothes Show Live (I’m aware that this is nothing to be proud of…) and I don’t even know how to play Risk, never mind War Hammer. (I can tell you that it’s Rimmer from Red Dwarf’s favourite board game though, so guess I do fit in somewhere…). I am, however, unashamedly into the Discworld. Admittedly, I’ve not read many of the more recent ones, in which poor Pratchett’s Alzheimer’s is definitely getting the better of him, but early Pratchett. Oh yes! Going home to my parent’s house and cracking open a dog eared Discworld book is one of my favourite Christmas traditions. It’s a bit like getting all wrapped up in warm blanket, discovering that the furthest corner has become permanently soaked in whisky, and having a good suck. Yum.

Imagine my delight, then, when my mother called me up and asked if I wanted to see the new Mark Ravenhill adaptation of ‘Nation’, Pratchett’s latest, in the Olivier theatre at the National. I love Pratchett. I love the Olivier theatre. I even quite like Mark Ravenhill. (At least, I got a big thrill out of Shopping and Fucking in 1997. Looking back that might be because I was twelve years old at the time…). I’ve not seen anything he’s done recently though, and, now I’ve seen Nation, I’m not going to see anything he does in the future. Nation, dear readers, is AWFUL. Execrable. Mind numbingly dull. Crushingly heavy handed. Moronically moralistic. BORING. It made me so angry!

Here’s how it goes:

Small girl with amusingly overblown 19th century name: Look! Black man! Your country’s economy may be shot to shit, and half your people are dead because granddaddy used them as slaves, but 5,000 years ago your ancestors discovered astrology!

Young tribal leader: Why don’t I have any trousers on? Why can’t I do basic maths? I hate myself.

Small girl: Look at these ancient astrological devices that I’ve found! Don’t you feel better now that I’ve shown you how similar to my people you once were? Well done! Now do a funny dance in one of those silly masks, and we can all have a laugh and feel better. Hooray!

Tribal warriors: Ooga Wooga!

British people: Jolly what ho!


I jest not. It is borderline offensive in its inanity. And it is BORING. The plot meanders around, going nowhere, pulled along by the most trite and trying of plot conventions. One of the most infuriating things are the pseudo-intellectual ‘insights’ that appear to be the driving force behind the action. In one plotline, in which they seemed to be saying something about the ethics of the Victorian class structure, the butler, whose life has been devoted to serving the heroine, Daphne, turns cannibal, and tries to eat his ex-mistress. The ‘cannibalised’ servant classes turns literally cannibal. But, oh! Which is worse? Wronged mistress, or wronged servant? Who knows. To be honest, who cares!?

Nation is being marketed at the National’s big blockbuster Christmas spectacle. The people in marketing are mentioning it in the same breath as Coram Boy, War Horse, and Northern Lights. Let me tell you, it’s nothing like those plays. I mean, yes, it shares a theatre with them, and like them, the designers had access to the greatest set and prop making facilities that money can buy. Where those plays differ from Nation, however, at the very basic level of plot: they had one. This doesn’t. There are some nice things about Nation. The set is great. The acting is very good and the lead character is FIT. There’s a very effective shipwreck scene, and some cool underwater moments. It’s not enough to make up for the lack of story though. Rather than anything resembling a narrative arc, all we get is a three hour meandering around various ‘issues’. The good things almost make it more painful – it’s such as waste of resources! Why isn’t Nation good?! How can they have got it so wrong? All questions for Mr Ravenhill to address in his next Guardian column I suppose. Although I’ll never know, because from now on I won’t be reading it. Ugh.

For more information and tickets go to www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Review - Bright Star

This might be the most eagerly awaited (and dreaded) film in the literary calendar this year. I have a friend doing a PhD on Keats who is so emotionally invested that she can’t actually bear to watch it.

Keats, for some reason I’ve never been quite able to fathom, has often been idealised as some sort of asexual aesthetite - as anyone who’s actually read Keats’s poetry should be able to tell, the man was overwhelmingly sensual, even sexual, and was pretty ambivalent on the beauty of art vs. sexuality of life debate - witness his lines on the lovers frozen forever in art in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’:

Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Is this the triumph of the immortality of art, or a torment akin to the most horrific in Hades? This film will hopefully offer a corrective to this misconception in that it is necessarily focussed on Keats as a man – a man with sexual desires and emotions that were instrumental in the shaping of his poetry.

Freud famously summed up the reasons to write as ‘money, fame and the love of women’. Keats desperately, perhaps more than anyone before or after, wanted all of these three things – his tragedy is that he achieved one of them, fame, too late, and the other he managed, love, was blighted by his lack of success in the last, money, and by his early death. But there is another tragedy in this story - Fanny’s, who, without Keats would have been a nobody in history: even with Keats she has still been a bit-part in his story, long ignored, misunderstood, and even vilified. In life, she was rejected as a bad influence by most of his friends; in death, she was lambasted for keeping Keats’s letters and the bequeathing them to her children for publication. And it is this tragedy that Jane Campion concerns herself with: when Keats departs for Italy, so too does he depart from the film – we stay with Fanny in Hampstead. This is a very good move – if Keats’s reputation has ossified him in the public mind, Fanny is an enigma, the perfect subject for story making. Whilst Keat’s love-letters to her are now considered among the greatest achievements of English literature, hers were burned: her story has remained mostly untold.

The film however, stays remarkably true to what of Keats and Fanny’s relationship can be objectively verified as fact from letters and biographic sources. Even bits which seem like modern overlays – Keats calls Fanny ‘minxtress’, are based upon reality – Keats admits in his letters to finding Fanny so forward that he did, in fact, calh her a ‘minx’. In fact, this is a film immersed in Keats – in his letters, his poems, his numerous biographies. Lines from his letters crop up constantly, adding an authenticity to the story without seeming imposed – iconic Keastian lines – such as his heart-wrenching words on first coughing blood: ‘I know the colour of that blood; - it is arterial blood; - I cannot be deceived in that colour; - that drop of blood is my death-warrant; - I must die’ are left out – this line would be too much of a set piece for such a subtle film. Its Keastianess goes beyond the level of narrative into the very mood of the film – the cinematography indolently lingers on beautiful images – of landscapes, of the lovers and moves with the lush, cloyed, sensuous, slowness, almost paralysis, of a Keatsian sonnet. These words are usually pejoratives – Keats has the power to turn pejoratives into positives. This film is an artwork in its own right. One beautifully arresting image – Fanny sitting among a field of bluebells wearing a matching dress, is the most gorgeous still I’ve seen from any film recently. I also love the idea that Fanny, with her flair for fashion, has dressed herself (and her sister) to match the landscape – evidently Campion shares her love for clothing.

One of the things I dislike intensely about films about poets is that they go around quoting their own poetry constantly – as if their egos are so enormous that they think that their own poetry is the most apt thing to say about everything. In real life, you’d have to be the most fantastic poet in the world before you could get away with spouting your own poetry on the slightest provocation. Even then you’d still be an egomaniac. Just an eloquent one. I understand that this is generally to introduce some of the poetry to those who have never read it, or, worse still, to induce that smug feeling of self-satisfaction among those that have when they recognise a line. This film used the poetry more sparingly than most – and more interestingly – it actually used the poetry rather than just shoving it in there as a padding around the narrative. There is a brilliant moment when Keats, reciting his ‘When I Have Fears that I Shall Cease to Be’, falters, and claims to have forgotten his last lines – but one suspects that this moment follows on so quickly from his brother’s death that these lines are simply too painful to be said aloud. This did a great thing – credited the audience with some insight and left it there – no need to spell it out. I was really hoping that when Keats’s friend Brown tried to catch Fanny out by asking her if she did not find Milton’s rhymes in Paradise Lost too ‘pouncey’, to which she demurely replied in the negative, that it would be left there. Unfortunately, the next scene had him roaring about blank verse – but perhaps I was expecting something a little too rarefied or even snobbish – and it was still evidence of a great wry and intellectual sense of humour which permeates this tragic film.

Actually, something astonishing happened to me during this film. Keats’s friend was reciting lines from Endymion to precede his defence of it to Fanny, and these lines hit me with such force of emotion and freshness that I involuntarily welled up (I know – you’re not meant to cry till the end of the film, and even then I appear to have been doing rather too much of it lately) Firstly, poetry hasn’t done this to me enough lately. Secondly, I’ve never really liked Endymion. Like Fanny, I think the opening something rather perfect, but like Keats’s friend (I know I should know the name), I think it great in some parts and immature in others. Like Fanny’s sister, I prefer my poems short, and most unfortunately, like the reviewer from Blackwood’s magazine, I am sometimes too intellectually lazy to sieve through the good for the sublime. This was sublime. I spent the rest of the film in a rather strange heightened emotional state – although, the film being so beautiful, it was a particularly Keatsian experience of a strange pleasure/pain nexus. I sort of floated home afterwards feeling strangely out of my own body and disconnected from the rainy, dark streets of Bristol, connecting with reality only to drop into a bookshop to buy Keats’s poems (I had decided the selected was no longer enough), letters, and Andrew Motion’s biography on which the film is based, and then settled down on my sofa to read. I can give no higher praise than this.

Unfortunately for me, Bright Star seems to have done this to everyone – I have now been searching for Motion’s biography for twenty-four hours and have just found out that even the publishers have sold out of copies. A run on Keats – if only he had lived to see the day.

On at cinemas nationwide. Go to http://www.brightstar-movie.com/ for more information.

On Now - Front Room 2009: Totterdown Art Trail, Bristol

If you fancy a poke around in artists' studios (and let's face it - it's brilliantly appealing to the slightly horrendous nosy side of all of us), totter down to Totterdown this weekend (sorry - I've never being able to say anything about Totterdown without invoking wordplay so feeble that it barely qualifies as pun).


It's always inspiring meeting the artists and seeing the spaces where they work when seeing the art - and sometimes they even give you homemade cake too!


There's over 200 artists taking part in over 60 venues around Totterdown, from D. Brooke's paintings and installations at The Oxford Pub, Oxford Street (the turf bike looks fab), through Linda Gates's ceramics of everyday objects - inspired by pop-art but with a quirky DIY-twist - at 13, Hawthorne Street to Rachel Heaton's stunning seascapes at Totterdown Baptist Church, Wells Road.


Join in a communal knitting project at 19, Summer Hill; there's music and poetry going on at the Shakespeare; and if it all gets a bit too cultural, Sean Busby and Richard Jones from The Totterdown Press will be making cider outside number 31 Balmain Street.


Front Room art trail takes place Friday 20th Nov, 6-9pm; Saturday and Sunday 21st & 22nd, 12-6pm. Go to http://www.frontroom.org.uk/ for more information.

Review - Welsh National Opera, Madam Butterfly, Bristol Hippodrome

This evening I was going with the boy, which meant that not only had I got plush seats near the front, but we also went out for a meal first. In hindsight, this turned out to be a mistake. Having left the cafe, which was two minutes walk from the theatre, ten minutes, according to the cafe clock, before the production started, we somehow contrived to arrive after the performance had started. Apparently, this was my fault, as I work in the cafe, and therefore should have realised that the clock was slow. My defence, that the clock being slow is the only thing that prevents me from being late to work every day and was therefore something that I’d never experienced before as a problem, didn’t go down well. A bad start.

Anyway, all of this meant that we didn’t get to our plush seats until the interval, but had to stand at the back. Thos proves that a) you should never trust clocks and b) as there were about 60 people doing the same thing as us, performances should never start promptly. This meant that we couldn’t see the subtitles, so, without their guidance, this is what appeared to be happening in the first act:

Something colonial was happening in Japan which involved some kind of manly colonial chat, and then said men smoked cigars whilst watching Japanese women dance. Main man falls in love with main woman. Everyone seems happy. There is a party and possibly a wedding. There appears to be a song about sake, but that could have been my imagination. The arrival of an angry fat bald man in an enormous white robe is heralded by a small boy flailing his arms and the clashing of cymbals. Evidently this has something to do with main woman shouldn’t have fallen in love with main man, as angry man hits at her a bit with a very soft looking whip. It doesn’t look like it can hurt very much but she falls to the ground anyway. Presumably it’s a pride thing. Party crowd tuts at one of them, but I can’t tell which, and then leaves. Man and woman left alone. They sing, presumably about the fact that they’re in love and about the apparent difficulties that I haven’t fully understood. She prances around, her body language and tone of music suggesting that she’s oscillating between hope and fear. It sounds lovely but goes on for a long time. The boy is clutching at his face in pain. I want it to be the interval. Eventually it is the interval.

I push my way in the opposite direction to everyone else. My way is blocked by old men congregating around the ice cream stand and braying in fantastically posh voices about their wives. One’s wife is here, one’s isn’t. They both look over the moon about their respective state of affairs, which I presume speaks volumes about their respective marriages. I am not in a good mood.

I find our seats. They are in the front row. A violinist plays practically in my face and the woman next to me fusses over whether or not I missed the first act. The boy gives me some wine and jelly babies. This all makes me feel better. I can now see the subtitles. Opera really needs subtitles. As we’re watching Butterfly decline in her hilltop house waiting for her husband to come back (turns out he’s a bit of a cad, which I would have known if I’d understood the first half), it struck me that the plots of both operas I’d seen in the last two days followed an incredibly similar trajectory, not just in the tragic fate of the heroine, but also in the fact that once these women have abandoned their old lives for love, they lose their financial independence. Clearly you can’t have both a man and money in opera universe. Unfortunately, this woman doesn’t get either. It also made me wonder about that stock figure of literature, the wronged woman dying for love. Why is literature, and apparently, opera, fascinated with her? Is it for slightly misogynistic aesthetic reasons – Edgar Allan Poe one called the death of a beautiful woman ‘the most poetical topic in the world’, or is there a genuine sympathy, even solidarity, between these artists and women? The ivory tower can easily be mistaken for Rapunzel’s, after all. As I decided I was probably watching the thing for a mixture of the two reasons, and wondering if my enjoyment thus made me slightly hypocritical, I decided to stop thinking and enjoy it.

Again, the interminable fates of opera worked their force on the protagonist. As Butterfly and her maid entombed themselves in their petal strewn house, their silhouettes through the wall looked so ghostly that her actual suicide seemed more like a formality than a choice. Again, the set was beautiful – cherry trees straight from a Japanese-inspired Christmas card framed a house with semi-transparent sliding doors. Although these doors kept being elaborately opened and closed, their fragility and transparency seemed to be inviting the audience to question ideas of the public and private, and Butterfly’s ability to shut out her suitors whilst remaining open for her husband. As Butterfly ceremoniously changed back into her wedding clothes and attempted to transform herself back into the bride she had been, the loose hair and dress had once looked flowing and feminine now looked wild and threatening, as if they could strangle her at any moment. Again, the inevitability of the ending only served to make it feel more poignant, although this time my sadness was tinged with anger at the fact that this man wasn’t even worth moping over. As with La Traviata, if you enjoy bawling your eyes out, brilliant fun.

Best things about the opera:
- You’ll definitely see everyone you know over the age of 60 in the interval.
- Subtitles.

Go to http://www.wno.org.uk/ for details on both operas.
The Welsh National Opera will be at Bristol Hippodrome until the 21st November and will move to The Mayflower, Southampton, on the 25th. Go to bristolhippodrome.org.uk, or http://www.mayflower.org.uk/.

Review - Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler at the British Museum

Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler is the last in the British Museum’s series of history’s great rulers, which started with Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, and his sell-out Terracotta Army in 2008, and having travelled Westward round the globe and 1700 years in time, ends in 1520, with the Spanish conquest of Moctezuma’s empire. Although the short-lived Aztec nation was born and extinguished during the period of the European Renaissance, Western historiography has tended to portray it was the last ‘ancient’ civilization – a tendency that the exhibition makes apparent, began almost immediately after the Spanish conquest, with imperial portraits portraying Moctezuma in the role of ‘noble savage’, simultaneously Europeanised and aesthetically exoticised into a symbol of a lost world that would appeal to European eyes.

If the positioning of Moctezuma as the last in a line of Ancient world emperors, a problem that a finite four-part series dealing with such an infinite topic as empire was bound to face, does little to question this, one of the most fascinating and valuable facets of this exhibition is that it seeks to interrogate this Westernised viewpoint by juxtaposing Aztec and Spanish artifacts and historical documents. This suggests alternatives to the famous story that we think we know – for example, whilst the official story of Moctezuma’s death has him fatally injured when stoned by his own people, indigenous Mexican sources contain a picture of him with a recognizably Spanish-looking sword sticking out of his back. Thankfully, the British Museum’s curators are too good historians to simply replace one narrative with another, but let both sit uneasily alongside one another, inviting and encouraging the visitor to question the motives behind why each wanted to portray Moctezuma in a certain way.

This is one of the difficulties and points of interest of the exhibition: it may be arranged around the figure of Moctezuma, but it is practically impossible to access the man himself except through highly biased and politicized representations from one side or the other. In certain details, the fact that he chose the symbol of kingship as his own personal symbol, rather akin to Julius Caesar taking on the name of Caesar as his own, and in his naive acceptance of Cortes, a personality convinced of his own right and righteousness seems to shine through, and as such, he appears an unlikable yet tragic figure, so obviously, to our Western eyes, sowing the seeds of his own destruction. But that is as far as we can go with Moctezuma as a man – he is too shrouded in myth and too culturally remote to be comprehensible. As for portraits, which so often give us a feeling (even if false) of intimacy: the Spanish portraits are so blatantly fictionalised (in some, Moctezuma is indistinguishable from his Spanish conquerors) and the Mexica (which is, despite the exhibitions title, apparently what we should be calling them, Aztec being a misnomer – albeit a misnomer probably now too ingrained to dispel) don’t seem to be particularly interested in individual personalities, their art being more focused on the symbolic. Moctezema’s face is indistinguishable; he is identified only by his symbol, the symbol of Kingship. He is a King, not a man.

And as a king, in relation to his kingdom, he is fascinating, and it is as a king that he provides structure to the exhibition – his reign provides the perfect focus and narrative to explore Aztec civilization and its extinction. And as a civilisation, it is profoundly disturbing. As Laura Cumming has put it so brilliantly in her Observer review

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/sep/20/moctezuma-aztec-ruler-review): ‘this is a culture of blood and rock’. The blood pours from enormous stone monuments - their pictorial depiction of their temples has a stream of blood running from each door – The BM has been accused of underplaying the bloodthirstiness of the empire, although gore on this scale probably speaks for itself. It is a culture of war and death: their earth god is imagined as an enormous pair of jaws stretched open around the surface of the earth, demanding human nourishment. Most of their gods seem to relate to war, all are fanged, and the walkway entrance to the sacred square in the middle of their city was lined with skulls. Even in small details - a pair of goblets depicts skulls with purple blotches, which the explanative caption informs us represent the remnants of the victim’s flayed skin - these artifacts are permeated with violence. Aztec human sacrifice is often anaesthetised, kept from being questioned by the sense that we, with our Western ethical and societal codes, could never understand such an alien culture. This is true, and this sense of disconnectedness shines through this exhibition, but, faced with the violent relics of a violent empire, one cannot help but think that the Mexica nobility, savage imperialists as they were, differed only from their Spanish conquerors in martial equipment and guile. Morally, they were their equals.

For bookings and information, see http://www.britishmuseum.org/.

Coming Soon - Statues Die Too

17th November- 28th November 2009 12-6PM

They inhabit islands, museums, what were once public squares for the proletariat. Here there exist these fine specimens of muscular perfection, preserved representations of the human image, people of the past. They appear within the desolate landscape of monumental ruins, silent relics set in stone, not disturbing the animals that graze at their feet…

Statues Die Too is a group show presenting new works by Gabriele Beveridge, Rose O’Gallivan, Niamh Riordan, Poppy Jones and Lise Hovesen. Using traditional and contemporary printmaking processes, photomontage, film, restoration and sculptural installations, the exhibition draws on the concerns about the relation between history, culture and obsolescence explored by Chris Marker and Alan Resnais in their 1953 film Les Statues Meurent Aussi.

Taking place in a glass roofed car park in South Kensington. Statues Die Too sees five artists seeking to interrogate the relationship between their own practice and the basic human inclination to preserve, restore and reproduce. By addressing these issues in a range of media – from tradition printmaking to mobile phone technology – the artists deconstruct the relationship between memorabilia and memory, art and archive.

The conjunction of different media with different concepts of history allows new and fruitful associations to take place. Lise Hovesen’s descision to exhibit a restored Victorian carriage alongside a film made recently in the Zone at Chernobyl leads the viewer to challenging conclusions about destruction and restoration. Niamh Riordan’s idiosyncratic projection devices question the course of cinematic history itself, creating alternative modes of projection that emphasise the role of illusion in all cinematic practice.

The exhibition also shows the artists utilizing traditional and time consuming craft-based processes. Rose O’Gallivan’s delicate etchings take structural designs and reproduce them as etched motifs. By displaying her work along the folded gallery walls O’Gallivan aligns these archaic designs with the contemporary architecture of the space.

Gabriele Beveridge’s work in photography and assemblage interrogates the role of the gaze in constructing history. By combining images and other remnants in seductive groupings Beveridge reveals how images and memories become imbued with meaning in order to tell coherent narratives. Similarly, Poppy Jones uses traditional printmaking processes to reproduce video footage and images taken on mobile phones. In doing so she imagines a culture that has forgotten how to assemble representation back into a meaning and history, leaving us with mysterious printed artefacts whose provenance we are unable to determine.

On Now! - Javier Rodriguez’s Chromatic Aberrations and David Stearn: Works, at The HIVE / T1+2 Gallery

If the on-again-off-again November rain is getting to you, and you’re longing for a bit of proper weather, then head down to Greatorex Street in Whitechapel for the relaunch of T1+2 Gallery as The HIVE.

The two-part show features Venezuelan artist Javier Rodriguez’s ‘Chromatic Aberrations’ and young Brit David Stearn’s ‘Works’. The centrepiece of Stearn’s offering is a snow machine, which fills the gallery with a (slightly toxic) snowstorm and piles up in satisfying drifts on the gallery floor. Stearn’s work, which has previously included sculptures made of balloons, uses industrial materials to interrogate the relation between ‘built’ and ‘sculpted’. In this case the only built things in the exhibition are the stands which the snow machine rests on, so Stearn’s designation of himself as a sculptor is somewhat reliant on the exhibition invigilator’s facility with an on/off switch.

Rodriguez’s Chromatic Aberrations are a series of maculaturas, overprint sheets that display the cumulative blottings of an industrial printing press. Rodriquez is interested in the overproliferation of the mass-media and his works use solid and near-illegible masses of stained paper to question the veracity and opacity of the popular press.

The exhibition also features a film made at the nearby Aldgate Press, which is projected in the corridor outside the exhibition. The film neatly encapsulates the ideas that the two shows share about machinery and process. Walking down the darkened corridor towards the projection screen you feel rather as it you’re travelling along a gigantic industrial production line. Once you arrive at the gallery door, right in the glare of the projector, the line spits you out into the blinding whiteness of the exhibition, and straight into Stearn’s snowstorm.

Javier Rodriguez’s Chromatic Aberrations and David Stearn: Works, at The HIVE / T1+2 Gallery, Greatorex Street, Whitechapel. Tue-Sunday 12-6 until 6^th December.

Review - The Museum of Lost Things - BAC

Grandiose titles seem to be all the rage in art-land at the moment. First, there was the wonderful The Museum of Everything, an outsider-art exhibition that opened on Primrose Hill during Frieze (and is still open, go if you get the chance). Then The Age of the Marvellous opened in Marylebone, followed closely by the Embassy show (in the former Sierra Leonean embassy, no less) and Laurence Owen’s Gold at 20 Hoxton Square. BIGGER, these exhibitions seem to be saying, is better. (“And if you don’t believe us, we’ll drop a gold ingot on your head”).

Down in south London, titles have been a little less bombastic, but no less expansive. During November the BAC picked up the baton with a two day showing of the wonderful installation, The Museum of Lost Things, part of its Not for me, not for you, but for us season of workshops and talks. The Museum of Lost Things was much less high-gloss than the rest of these offerings (in fact it was a bit like being in the counselling room at a Steiner school). For simplicity, lack of pretention and sheer all-out beauty, it was one of the best things I’ve seen all year. And there was free cake.

Those of you who went to Latitude this year are probably already familiar with the Museum’s predecessor, The Tree of Lost Things. The Museum, the version which appeared at NFMNFYBFY (phew!) on the 1^st-2^nd November, was very similar to the original, but in the place of an actual tree, the artists had threaded string across the space. Coupled with the BAC’s cosy chairs and ‘cup-of-tea-in-a- cup-and-saucer’ aesthetic, it looked rather like bunting at a village fete.

The idea of The Tree of Lost Things is simple. First, you have to think hard about all of the things (people, objects, morals....) that you’ve lost in your life. Then, once you’ve selected your most poignant, immediate or amusing loss (depending on your level of denial, I guess), you write your loss onto a luggage label. Finally you release your loss into the public domain, by tying it onto the tree (or, at BAC, string).

Once the label is tied, you have to log your loss into the Ledger of Lost Things. Type of loss; date of loss and, most interestingly, weight of loss (there’s a scale helpfully provided. I think virginity weighed in at about 8oz...), all get inscribed, alongside a list of the people involved in the event. It’s a fascinating read and I’m sure some of the dreamier geeks amongst us could turn the data into some really spiffing graphs.

Allegra, one of the artists who devised the tree, told me that the losses tend to be split into age groups. For children, it’s objects that make up the bulk of their losses. For older people: friends, lovers and relations. Twentysomethings, the largest group represented, tend to chose less tangible, more ephemeral things: morals or emotions - dignity features highly. When I read it, the most recent entry in the ledger was the rather troubling ‘my freedom’, a loss which was attributed, in matter of fact penstrokes to: ‘my son’.

Browsing amongst the dangling labels, or through the pages of the ledger, you’re faced with the difference between just losing things, and leaving them behind. Some of the labels seemed to see the loss as part of an ongoing process, following their declarations with the coda: ‘…but then I found my boyfriend/new house/self respect…’. It made me wonder about the power of collective action; if taking part in the installation can help with the process of leaving things behind.

Certainly the artists feel as though they’ve been left with something precious. They talked earnestly to me about the sheer weight of the losses they’ve been left with, and the responsibility that they felt towards them. They wondered about devising some kind of filing system in which to store the luggage labels, and talked earnestly about systems for cross-referencing. For now, though, the labels are being stored in a series of battered suitcases. If you’re an archiving genius, and can think of a way to file ‘Dignity’ so it takes in both ‘in death’ and ‘when wearing no knickers’, then I’m sure the artists would love to hear from you.

The Museum of Lost Things, part of ‘Not for me, not for you, but for us’ at Battersea Arts Centre. 1st-2nd November www.bac.org.uk

Coming up - Naum Gabo and Florian Roithmeyer at The Russian Club Gallery, Opening Wednesday 18th November 6.30-9pm.

The Directors of The Russian Club Gallery seem to be very much of the ‘cats in a sack’ school of curating. I.e., they take two artists (or ‘cats’) put them together in a space (or, ‘sack’) and then step back see what happens. The artists, working together, either create new works or modify old ones, to develop a joint show. There are two possible outcomes (and yes, I am going to continue my ‘cat’ analogy to express them): a whirring mass of blood and fur, or kittens.

Neither outcome is particularly conventional, but they are both, in their own ways, pretty exciting.

Naum Gabo and Florian Roithmeyer promises to be even more interesting than usual, however, as in this case one of the main collaborators is dead, and the work which is being shown in the exhibition is in no way representative of the rest of his oeuvre. Roithmeyer, an adorable softly spoken German, is ‘responding’ to a drawing by the famous … Gabo, who is best known for …. The outcome looks set to take the form of a zig-zagging fold out book, which will cut delicately across the gallery space. As a big fan of both Gabo, and the ‘pop-up’ school of literature (why aren’t there more pop-up books for grown ups?), I’m excited to see what this entails….

Naum Gabo and Florian Roithmeyer at The Russian Club Gallery, Opening Wednesday 18^th November 6.30-9pm. www.therussianclubgallery.com

Review - Bristol Hippodrome, Welsh National Opera’s 2009/2010 season - La Traviata

La Traviata is based around the wonderful fallacy that a woman can hold a powerful soprano performance whilst simultaneously dying of tuberculosis. Being skint, I bought the cheapie tickets that cost less than the interval drink, which meant I was so far back that Violetta’s main visual identifiers were a gaudy dress and a magnificent bosom. When she changed into less revealing outfits I would become momentarily lost until she opened her mouth. At anything less melodramatic than opera, the inability to discern actors’ faces could have been an impairment to the experience. Here, I found, it didn’t really matter too much. Opera doesn’t appear to be subtle.

From the moment you realised that the floor was inscribed with Violetta’s tombstone writ large so that, right from the beginning she was, quite literally, dancing on her own grave, the plot drove towards her love affair, betrayal and death with such grim determination that the only real surprise was the means by which she would get there. When Alfredo’s father announced the presence of a hitherto-unmentioned daughter, whose marriage was threatened by her brother’s association with Violetta, I rather shared in her scandalised exclamation, ‘two children!’ (obviously, this is the subtitled version – I don’t understand spoken Italian, let alone sung), the sense of frustration that such a clunky plot device had been wheeled in to prevent her happiness. Nonetheless, the opening party scenes instilled enough of a desire to drink in me that I had to shoot off to the bar to by a miniature plastic bottle of red wine at the first sniff of an interval. My friend actually attempted to get one at something which turned out not to be an interval after all, but merely a prolonged scene change. Unfortunately, as Violetta’s hard-drinking life had caught up with her, the wine became increasingly hard to swallow.

It’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll cry at any production in which lovers are separated, the only thing being more certain is that I will watch any scary movie from behind the sofa whilst resolutely staring at a space of wall half a foot away from the television screen whilst trying to pretend I’m somewhere else. At this, I cried three times, which is quite a hit rate. My friend cried so much she had to go to the toilet and restock on tissue and came out looking rather like an Impressionist painting of herself. A resounding success, if one were to measure success in bucket loads of tears.

The opulent Rococo scenery was great, helped by the luxuriousness of the Hippodrome, which was clearly designed with lavish productions in mind. For Brecht or Pinter or any kind of stinging social realism, the realisation that you were sitting in something that resembled a red Baroque wedding cake might have felt a bit clanging. As the Hippodrome specialises in Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals and Strictly Come Dancing, this is hardly a problem. Costumes were fab:, lots of velvet, flounces and cleavage. The singing was good too, as far as I could judge. Shortest 2 ¾ hours I’ve ever spent in a theatre

Go to http://www.wno.org.uk/ for details on both operas.
The Welsh National Opera will be at Bristol Hippodrome until the 21st November and will move to The Mayflower, Southampton, on the 25th. Go to bristolhippodrome.org.uk, or http://www.mayflower.org.uk/.

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