| Nov 22 |
Copper Sulphate house
Roger Hiorns’ crystal house is probably the maddest of them all, a entire council flat flooded with copper sulphate solution, which is left to crystalise before being drained. It’s a very weird experience, a bit like entering Narnia through the wardrobe. First you wander down from Elephant and Castle, home to the most un-shopping centery shopping centre, along the New Kent Road, whose council blocks now appear to be little more than facades for this year’s incarnation of futuristic local authority bruto-chic, until you find the most boarded up two storey horseshoe shaped set of flats you can. You then stand there for an hour waiting for your turn to try on a set of some old geezer’s gumboots, before joining another queue to actually get into the flat. If you didn’t know better you’d think that there was some kind of secret stalinist indoctrination going on, an artistic linkage of the queuing process and the rotten environment you’re locked into.
It’s like a twisted Santa’s Grotto, all sparkley and gem-like and bloody cold too the day I went to see it. You stumble around in what could either be Blue Santa’s elves’ urine or more likely undrained copper sulphate runoff (hence the gumboots), while indiscriminate shapes of other visitors fade in and out of view. And you find yourself gazing into individual hunks of fist sized crystal mummuring ‘mmmm, my precious’ over an over like a demented Gollum. The overall effect is a bit like being entombed in one of Joseph Beuys’ huge felt installations, where all sound and sensation have been damped out of existance. Standing inside a Beuys installation was the nearest thing to being down a mine, said Arthur Scargill in possibly his only genuinely coherent moment. Standing here is even closer, because unlike a wall-full of felt, it actually looks like you could mine something here.
It’s the sort of thing that makes you wonder why there isn’t more of this stuff, or indeed, why they’re demolishing this at the end of the month. It’s the exact opposite of Whiteread’s internal spaces, which solidified the spaces inside a building, but prevented you from entering them. This concretises the surroundings (or more accurately, copper sulphatises them), allowing you to move around, but at the same time shows you a barren, poisonous, thoroughly alien landscape within that forces your mind to think about the nature of the space. Awesome. |
| Jul 08 |
My Wordle
This is a little word picture of the blog as ‘interpretated’ by Wordle. It’s a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. You can see more 1930s style word art at wordle.net |
Stumble it!