In the wastelands: two artist curators in conversation

Jamie Robinson and Peter Lewis

Mr C:

You start. It's about the difficulty or the process of the artist curator

Mr L:

I don't know if there is a real difference anymore, if the curator has internalised and incorporated the labour of the artist. That could be a depressing or pessimistic view, and although differentiation doesn't seem to be easily discerned, it might be that we have no alternative but accept a kind of total defeat, as artists - the defeat of subjectivity (maybe a good thing) at the cost of difference. It's an attack on the moralism of curating, on the curator as a provider of a utopian or philanthropic, therapeutic role for art as a social, state or institutional ideology that I'm advocating here.

Mr C:

I have never advocated morality, philanthropy or therapy, either as an artist or in this position of selection and direction. Maybe the artists are used willingly to satisfy my lusts, foibles, hangups, ideas, frustrations and deviancy. Leave moralism and hi-dealism to the corrupt politicians. I can revel in my own schizophrenia by working with a multiplicity of ideas and processes. So the artist curator is a happy schizoid, working with many personalities. There is a method in the madness and through the processes and the artists a sense of underlying thinking emerges, if this makes sense. ... I work from an instinctive intellectual base, but also quite simply there are certain things I am into that I want to explore, either in my own work or others'. Maybe I am just a slut who can't get enough, but I am a discerning one with certain standards.

Mr L:

Standards for artist curators? Is not the determination by one's own subjective position in the field the 'standard'? I am interested if its possible to short-circuit standardisations. The post-Fordist worker, all of us, whether artist curators or 'ordinary folk' can't escape from his or her PC, its a 24 hour standard, imposed. Telephonic GMT curating is what we do, and it's not rewarding, but by accepting as a kind of standard, 'doing it for myself'. A faulty connection in this discourse may produce a liberation accidentally, even if it's less 'dignified' in the public eye, making laughable mistakes, which may become the new 'standard' in the end. The maverick I guess is always disempowered by the pre-existing standards inflicted from within, which are the result of a personal disgust at the world, but it drives something against moralism, for sure, in the industry, which accommodates disgust, but not revolt; and in the forced situating of one's self in the general economic structure which accommodates 'art', where anti-art is the standard self-inflicted and therefore easily marketed, where is the revolt? Is the standard in fact the process of a revolt against it?

Mr C:

Probably. I'd like to think I was different, but I am probably just the same. Even the revolting is a marketing ploy. Dinos once smugly said to me a long time ago when I shared a studio with the Chapmans while they were making the fuck faces that "we make work of and for the lowest common denominator, but we make it of the highest quality." The first work they showed at Victoria Miro, Disasters of War, took them over 6 months to make on Dinos's kitchen table in Whitechapel, tiny figures moulded from toy soldiers. Even though they haven't looked back since then they should have. Hell may have been more ambitious but Disasters was the first and best of their work. Ever since then it has been very expensive posturing. By insulting their patrons, they became loved for it - to chastise those with power, slap their bottoms and humiliate them. They were winning the game, but their spunk isn't as potent anymore. They can't escape from Goya and have become trapped in bronze casting, endless repeats as their lives and habits become more expensive, the mortgage needs paying and the children need feeding. Now middle aged enfant-terribles repeat themselves with a twist ad nauseam. Happy as Larry like pigs in shit, the animals have taken over the zoo. Now painting is in, the brothers are making paintings and so is Hirst. The artists protest too much like ranting children looking for attention. Even Duchamp had a nice stipend from his banker father. The poor little rich kids of Notting Hill are now invading Spitalfields whilst weekending at their parents piles in the Home Counties. I may be a slut with standards, but they are whores without shame. Yes the curator wants to be loved by artists and audience, but like an estate agent is loathed by both. Actually I love the world. It's just a shame that we are fucking it up, but then its hard to be so fucking PC when your gallery is so right on and you own a couple of SUVs, like some project spaces who are Arts Council funded to the hilt whilst fornicating with the devil on the side and licking the reviewers arses in the insidious corporatising and branding of what is supposed to be an avant-garde artist-run project space. Some of these supposedly avant-garde spaces are really just run by lackeys for the flunkies.

Mr L:

Well that's pretty amazing. Seems that a lot of people are getting to sell stuff from an "independent space" in London. Everything has a dark side. Don't go there, to the dark side. It brings up projectile vomit, the issue of the end of the white cube as a bourgeois fetish with state support. Actually the state may be dropping its support in favour - as you note - of 'alternative' spaces ... is this not funny? It's the new boss really, no? Same as the old boss. But I think that Jake and Dinos are clever about bourgeois shock, in their inimitable way, with more than a nod to Paul McCarthy and to Bataillesque versions of erotic mis-en-abime kinds of surrealism as an 'insidious' practice but, to quote John O'Neill (the social theorist from the early 90's), when all this stuff started to move, the state and its rhetoric made new claims of institutional support for alternatives and struggles against marginalisation post-PC (which is a polite lie and, as you also have noted, corrupt) as we know, disguising the 'disgust' of major discourses for minor ones from a position of holding on desperately to barely concealed power. Postmodernism's nomenclature is split into camps of 'subversion' and 'conservation' - clumsily - either as neo-conservativism or as poststructuralism, as from the conservative position, of an anti-modernism they deplore, holding onto the modernist will to subjectivity, action, and history, where modernism is conservativism. Poststructuralists seem to believe that as O'Neill writes "the cart of history and politics can lurch along without any horse in front of it - they do not notice the masses pushing from behind". The same is true of the more flamboyant cultural antics of postmodernists (including Jake and Dinos) Their pretence to 'epater le bourgeoisie' merely staves off the "ignorant masses" while scarcely feeding the voracious appetite of the bourgeoisie for shock, outrage and violence. This protects by producing an a-historical violence in culture that colonises the domestic imagination as well as our 'extraterrestrial dreams' in the wasteland of capitalism and the lament for a lost spirituality. Actually curators, like the technologists of late capital, cannot in fact manufacture subjects and histories, just as 'professionals' and bureaucrats cannot reproduce communities, societies and their familial interrelations. So, yes, running a space from your home, with your wife and kid upstairs, says a lot about being gutsy in this climate, and making a few quid in the process.

Mr C:

I just wanted to add I just sold out the Mark Jones exhibition to one collector yesterday. He bought the lot, bang. He got a great deal, but now the artist is happy with me. But this collector has a lot of work especially by artists before they became prominent like Chantal Joffe and Keith Tyson - one painting in particular of a blonde looking out sitting on a bed. He said it was one of the strongest paintings he'd ever seen but it was so ugly, that he could never hang it up and look at it. This to me represents commitment, foresight and guts and there seems to be a lack of guts amongst artists and galleries these days. It's just an endless stream of art fairs and the nouveau riche

Mr L:

Yes, here at Redux we live and sleep in the space, which right now is showing 15 young artists, and we have gone broke - we made a three-year project and lost about 30,000 doing it. Fifty projects in two-and-a-bit years. Just heard that the landlords who've been ripping us off for the last three years are now putting the rent up by 70%, driving us out. Tesco's opened up below us on Commercial Street, and are torturing everyone with all night heavy industrial trucks smashing metal around, under the guise of 'delivery' to your door crap. Crates and massive trolleys in and out, with immigrant workers labouring hard through the night ... even Sandra at the Golden Heart shook her head, 'Yeah, its unspeakable Pete'. The police and the council don't seem bothered to apply any dignifying laws to protect us tenants. It's come to this, as Leonard Cohen once sang. ... Big question, money. Obrist writes in an interview that it's the only issue now in curating, raising funds. ... In a situation of excessive industrialisation, there's little hope. We are moving west again, as detached suburban houses are looking like a better option. Plenty of space, and maybe some subversion back in my life.

Mr C:

I'm still running at a deficit as the set up costs and running costs proved more than I anticipated and without a wealthy benefactor, money has to be made somewhere. I don't have a stipend from a college, or wealthy parents or an inheritance to rely on. Abstract thoughts cost money. So to be able to claw something back is good, but my cut is on the low side and most of the money goes deservedly to the artists. This isn't altruism, it's just good practise. I like the idea of the work having a life after the show, that it is recognized and has a value. The artist also gets funds to reinvest in their work. My wife's father used to run the communist party in the Kansai region of Japan. I like the way that the artist producer in this case makes 75% of the retail price and in most industries the producer is the lowest paid. My grandmother worked in a cotton mill in Manchester from the age of 12, scrabbling under the machines to pick up loose cotton. The working classes then had very little to show for a very long hard days work. The mills and the chimneys used to dominate the skyline of the industrial north, The producers made nothing. Now we in Britain seem to manufacture nothing, and the mills, shipbuilding, steel and coal are all-but vanished, yet our economy is one of the strongest in the world. Manchester has changed beyond all recognition, partly helped by the IRA, and they are putting the finishing touches to the highest residential building in Europe. What would a Lowry look like today? Steel and glass buildings, shopping malls, retail parks and car showrooms Only the rich say things like they don't worry about money. I don't know many artists who aren't constantly battling to pay their rents... That's why most give up or in reality can't afford it. As for the wife and kids upstairs, as I said I am a schizoid. The gallery and domestic life are separated, but like the schizoid, the two are interconnected and inseparable and sometimes uncomfortably placed. It's not a job and I am proud to be an amateur. Professionalism, the by-word in all these oversubscribed art colleges and art courses is a nasty word. For the professional is the businessman and the mercenary. The professional soldier, footballer, sex worker, they are all different sides of the same coin. I prefer a loving hug to a paid-for blowjob. The amateur works just as hard but is his own man. In my first show "Pencil - A Drawing Show", I asked 40 artists to bring me a drawing. My wife's mother was here for a month and she doesn't speak English. As I was out a lot when the artists delivered their work I would say to them just leave it with my mother-in-law. How unprofessional and uncool is that! Hah. I have noticed that Victoria Miro has built a space to live above her gallery next door to McDonalds just off the City Road, so the trend is catching. Joshua Compston used to have a hidden bed above his space over his desk at Factual Nonsense in Charlotte Road in Hoxton. He used to walk around in white suits with his blond hair like Jesus without a beard and put on Churchill's speeches on his record player, We kind of fell out a bit after "SS Excess" but I can't but miss him. The best die young - as did Philippe Bradshaw, found dead in the Seine last year. He was out there and his work was peaking. It's a fucking tragedy. There are too many professional careerists - fuck them all. You can spot them though, it's easy because you can see right through them. Maybe like footballers, pop stars and sportsmen we should have short, finite careers to do our best, reach our goals or not, and then move on or die. It would stop us from getting bloated, self satisfied, lazy and corrupt. Because corruption is inherent in us all. It's whatever works at the time and what's expedient. I'm not a commercial gallery, but now I have sold some work there is a contradiction. I say I am not a commercial gallery because sales are not the driving force or the raison d'etre, but now I've made a couple of sales - yes I have supped with the devil and the wine was great. But in all great tragedy, Macbeth, King Lear, the protagonists know they are doomed knowing they have to play out the scene, knowing that which ever way they turn the plot is mapped out and the end is their demise. There are no happy endings because in the end we die and that's the moist pointless thing in life.

Mr L:

We've known each other a while - since 1988? Royal Academy. I was teaching in secondary schools, crazy kids, girl gangs with knives, you know, I'd left college some years earlier and got very 1970s, the whole thing. Then the 80s rolled in with all the Thatcher/Reagan thing - before 'globalisation'! You were at the RA Schools doing great paintings. Dave Mollin was there too, and Crawforth and Siderfin. I think the social aspect was there then, also we used to meet up with John Russell and the St Martins crew at the Coach and Horses. Is it true it's closing down? But I remember joking a lot about the beginnings of a bohemian simulacrum then, when types were posing around the bar, looking like New York Baudelaires and Rimbauds, but standing among them Blakey clones from On the Buses here and there... That's why I can't take the Warhol scene seriously. It's hilariously funny and I'm influenced by Warhol's factory mentality freakish, I guess. The English version is always going to be unconvincing as an equivalent romance. Like the Warhol scene now we have the Kippenberger fetish, late as usual. I heard that Jessica Morgan at the Tate made a pig's ear out of his pig's ear art. Not clever. Bad curating. Hey, that's a good title! What happened? I always thought that I got sick around that time...confused about painting. That led to a desperate yet cold blooded act of giving it up, when Raab Gallery rejected my 'racist' paintings (made on the premise that if painting were essentially reactionary, conservative, etcetera, then why not mimetically go the whole way and produce a kind of non-parody of negro slave orientalism for middle class 'soft' radicals who would rather not see these things, as if they had 'gone away'). I don't think this was shock value on my part, but rather a subversive strategy that carried me into curating the work of others on a non-subjective 'cold' basis. With Matthew Arnatt and Dave Mollin and Runa Islam we made works that were 'mis-en-abime' - you couldn't tell who made what and works bled into each other, or they were disingenuously placed in the same spaces that had earlier carried Hirst and Landy, Friedman, Gillick forward. We hooked up with Simon Ford and Mark Harris and Julian Stallabrass to make a critical statement from these alternative strategies - as post-conceptual residues, we used what was at hand, pragmatically, to make something happen in potentia. That produced a lot of hostility from critics and YBAs and their mainstream trade / Tate Gallery / RCA / art fair affiliations (masonic if you like), since it went against the market so much. Actually some of these artists who made a trait of 'failure' succeeded in getting onto the trade route, but only recently. The Sharjah Biennial was a big rude version, and I was lucky to know Sheikha Hoor through Derek Ogbourne, she let me re-invent the Biennial, and I have seen a lot more of these artist led-events now, so its probably a sea-change, that's good, yes. Right now I'm going to work back in squatting situations with Wolfe Lenkiewicz, Paul Frier and others, on a project in a real law court called 'Judgement'. We'll take shit curators and bureaucrats to court like the French Revolution - should be funny.

Mr. C:

Yes, I think that's interesting. You curate what I consider authored shows, as an artist and curator, your ideas and thoughts about the world, your philosophy, are mediated through curation and interconnectivity and familiarity with those you work with. Sometimes it can appear as interference, dominating, but at others you get a sense of the thinking, of working through processes with artists you empathise with. This takes guts and continually questioning self-belief. That is why your curation of Sharjah Biennial 6 was so good, setting a standard that has been reproduced by other curators in Sharjah 7. But while Sharjah 7 had some memorable work it also lacked humour, playfulness and wit. I think you have a lot of wit.

Mr L:

London, fuckin' London, too expensive by half.... the saying ; "there goes the neighbourhood" used to be applied by the white working classes when an immigrant family moved in from the subcontinent in the 60's - epitomised by TV comedies like "Love Thy Neighbour". It's still said by those right wing ultra-conservatives and those leaning to the BNP persuasion, but in your case and mine, this term equates to corporate encroachment and franchise domination, the community's life stripped out by bruising capitalisation. Theme park East End here we come, and there goes the neighbourhood. The death knell began when the proper fruit and veg market closed down and what was it replaced with?? Organic fruit'n'veg stalls and smelly candle shops expensive hand-reared, massaged, sung-to cattle burgers, and shit furniture masquerading as expensive modern antiques. It's a sad fact as the chains move in and so-called regeneration really means a few tarted-up streets and rent and property price rises. We're on the front line there in Commercial Street. Once the front line of death and seediness, still the hookers lining the street much as they did a century ago, and their pimps and dope dealers hanging round the corners. Now its ciabbatta sandwich bars and posh offal restaurants and advertising companies. Don't move west! There is still enough to play for here in Shitsville. Maybe its a blessing in disguise. I could be less emotional about it all, and yes, actually, good things often happen. When things get worse, as the Dalai Lama once said about the Chinese treatment of Tibetans (I think he did anyway) "worst time, also best time" (mad laughter, crazy wisdom). We could all relocate to Japan

[Some time later]

Mr L:

I just laughed out loud in an internet cafe, reading the ranting Mr C's diatribe, or more so it turned from 'I'm so angry!' into uncontrolled laughter - as Barthes wrote in 'The Pleasure of the Text', it liberated a reader from passivity, representation and the intellectual corsetry of the precious or the Ideal. There's something right off the mark in these pseudo-Bataillesque gestures, these stains are not the shaky ones of Bonnard, or the smudges of a leaky biro, like Cy Twombly's 'left-handed' drawings, that retrieve beauty (convulsive, but now dying) as the more subversive (well, that's nice...the heart beats on, I am alive after all). Actually the Royal Academy retrospective of Bonnard (my father took me there) hit me hard between the eyes, as an uneducated moron, palpable, beautiful and pathetic. You don't see that very often as the ad says big and agile daring and practical. It had sentiment rather than sentimentality - as Scorsese reminds us about film - and moral conflict, it has a tension internal to its produced meanings. I find the Chapman's stuff sentimental in the extreme about shit. All that stuff, the McCarthy show, is sentimental about shit, and infantile of course. Mike Kelley's probably the best in the male obsessive artists/uncanny/Freudian post-Hitchcock sense. Can we go beyond the weak argument, (once strong in the Aristotelian sense) of the ameliorated therapeutic condition for art and the pathology of the artists? Who was that dreadful critic who 'analysed' Van Gogh's work on the basis of epilepsy? Donald Kuspit? Yeah, he wrote a piece of shit about Dieter Roth as well ... about how weak his work was and given too much credibility as modern art ... well Roth's shit is better, and its chocolate in fact. Like Godard's red is not blood, its red. These are important alerts within representation and linguistics/syntactics, all those kinds of rhetorical operations. Back to Bonnard. I tried to copy that shaky little tremor called 'style' in 1966, or '67, I can't remember, and it just looked too certain. Can blue men play the whites? Kumbaya my lord ... say daddio, lets shake some pots and pans, or get out of the kitchen. Cliff Richard and 'Summer Holiday' bohos ... not a far step from British art really. In Bonnard it's the uncertainty of the light and space and the sexual charge of the domestic that compels - can you believe I've been strolling around these heterotopic museo-curiosity shop spaces, academies, (where I later met you) since a kid - no wonder I'm half mentalist, half psychic, half bored shitless by it all. As a curator that is. Do curators really like what they do? I don't think so, unless you're an artist type like the pre-eminent Szeeman, making a display of his grandfather's things into art. ... I'm still obsessing on the beauty of the Merzbau, and if I curate it's as an artist with temperament. Can't stand what passes for so-called institutional curating these days as Mark Harris wrote recently, give me the cathedrals of erotic misery any day ... but I don't need the literal in yer face Brit Art shocko - Titian's Venus is far more what I'm thinking, as inscrutable and thereby full of endless fascination. No, in fact I'm very happy with who I am...don't you wish (as Paul Whitehouse says as Smashy or Nicey) you had a childhood as happy as mine, his smile souring slowly in the warm little boy's bedroom like bad milk...like a 'fat' cradle...on the edge of dementia?

Mr C:

Its funny ha-ha that it is the banal which is more shocking in a deeper and truer sense than the faux shock of intentional subject matter with the premise of getting a reaction, like how Charlie Dimmock's nipples protruding as she goes braless in the garden cause more of a storm. Wheel out Hitler - yawn - the Chapmans consume the artists they show who are happy to collude and sublimate their work in their sycophantic grouping. Look at their prodigies or the School of Chapman. Chris Offili was a nice boy until he took Jake's ideas on board. Nigel Cooke and others have all benefited in that they have major careers as a result of their proximity to J&DC and the power they exert. Actually we are friends, but all friends differ. Describing the show, to me it sounded like another J&DC expectability. Give the public what they want. Certain subjects, Christianity, Serano's Piss Christ, fucking children, Hitler, there is a list of incorrectness Tracy's bed, Diana bleeding, Stella Vine nonsense. This is what headlines are made of and yes that is what art is reduced to if you want to get the masses in galleries, you have to give them shit to look at. Stick Diana naked on Page 3 of The Sun, Marcus Harvey's bad taste Myra Hindley to horrify them art to the public is a fucking freak show and the Chapmans and Hirst are the ring masters and don't think they don't know it. I feel like a dissident who fears for his life but the tyranny is rife. Some have been corrupted, some unwittingly, and now they can't stop the putsch. Is that it - wheeling out Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot? Jeez its such fucking pubescent shit, like your next door neighbour's kid going goth just to get a reaction. A reaction for what?? I am so fucking tired of this sniping, ironic lowest common denominator tittering bullshit art. ... You know the biggest joke is on us and the collectors who not only tolerate this shit, but lap it up like they can't get enough of it. Jake and Dinos are getting richer on bad taste and all these collectors think they are in on something radical, challenging and cutting edge. They are the fools. Does art only work if you're a bad boy and outrageous and then have to constantly keep being that way?? Buy in to this puerility and you are a sucker. I'm bored of Jake & Dinos Chapman, give me Bonnard. He gives me more, not in a romantic artsy-fartsy-hippy-dippy-shit way, but actually in a revelatory way. Bonnard let's me see the world in a richer, more involved way and gives me an insight into ways of thinking and seeing. This isn't about catharticism, or even pleasure, but insight and intellect, process and observation, not gutter sniping. The Brothers Grim just stamp on your head and beat you into submission, they are fascistic in their art and now we can laugh with them at the joke. It's hard to step back, to be objective and actually swim in the other direction. Now they are the institution and we all live in an art dictatorship.

Mr L:

I just went to see the recent exhibit at Chapman Fine Arts, an 'anonymous' artist's of portraits of Adolf Hitler, many of them, some better drawn than others, as it were, showing the good looks of der Fuhrer (it's still news then, the second world war?), or the fine workmanship of the drawing, his steely resolve perfectly, or not so perfectly, captured by the artist's loving hand. Now I understand ... what you tried to say to them. There's a co-incidence, just talking about the reactionary essence of 'painting'. Actually it's odd how the man resembles everyone in a way, maybe by our familiarity breeding contempt, like an uncle who went mad, we all had one. The Chapmans are at their middle class best when they do these small shows, since I like the way no-one knows about them it goes back to the early hobbyist works, the banal suburbanism, and the sexual repression of the racist English and their time-honoured, honed and polished class system. All that precious stuff that Dave Beech eulogises about or dismisses as not worthy, in the kindred spirit of British social science and Raymond Williams, and the north-south divide (even in the bitterness of Burgin, which I really enjoy in his writing and his photographs and his rhetoric as does JJ Charlesworth, whom I bumped into there. "How are you?", he said as I descended the stairs. (Nice space, Chapman Fine Arts.) "Oh, I've still got vertigo." "Ja?", he replied, accidentally in German. "Don't you 'ja' me", I replied jokingly. Unfortunately, I gathered by the silence in response, not taken in good humour, or sounding 'profound' (Either my remark or his silence.) We parted with a "see-you" courtesy. Critics and pseudo-exhibitions, simulating the real amateurism and banality of evil can be evil in themselves. Didn't Heidegger or Kierkegard write about the necessity of a 'profound boredom'? That when time 'drags' then we begin to turn around in our sense, being aware of something happening I think the unthinkable ... a kind of slow death but a rebirth. Bush/Blair is defo the new AH, so how do these work? With a thousand murders a week in Baghdad this is mere bourgeois distraction and a deferral of thinking the unthinkable. Not good curating then, but palatable subversion for Art Monthly and the sycophantic crew of critics they employ. ... Scaredy cats, yellow gerards, red hemsworths, call them what you will, soft radicals, Baudrillard says ... Think film curators from the Tate, or Cubitt resident curators (10 grand a year? Great! Cash? Or is it going to be taxed?). No thanks, I'll get some welfare and rent paid, and do some high level curating in Europe where there's a market for it. There certainly is nothing here. Only hype and class-wipe communities of bourgeois academies posing as radicals. ... Give me a break. Coming back from the peaceful and beautiful Berlin of today, still traumatised by the war (that church with its bullet holes) they look 'old', these Adolfs, but I cant help think its the Chapman's work, and another guy, Barry someone, equally anonymous paintings, colourful versions of the anti-compositional 'cartoon' shit-but-great late works of Philip Guston. I like them and that's troubling. It'll rot your teeth says mother. Here's another strategy that was polemic or controversy at one time, when New York an' all was still hip and cool and all that jazz...that he "changed his style" drastically and upset everyone and everything. Who hasn't? - just that these days its de rigeur to change style, and also to accept the 'sell-by date' mentality of consumption. Does Guston and Hitler configure to shock us? Hardly. I'm more shocked by 'Team America' or the banality of the property programmes and the bargain in the attic crap of daytime TV. This is the truly shocking, n'est-ce pas? Yes, its speeding up, life, art, industry, war, sex, all gone to shit, as the prophets of our day keep saying, but its not easy this negation stuff, although I can't help liking it, the ol' end of world is nigh, Jesus is coming stuff. ... I'm sure Blair whacks off to it, while reading the stylish critique against him ...loves it ... someone reminded me of Celine's writing, which is half Nazi, half poetry, half insanity, actually mostly insanity. Look at Hauser and Wirth's Dieter Roth opening last night, packed out, and not with dumb-fuck wannabes, that's over, you cant compete in this climate, these guys are all in the same game, and the stakes are high on belonging: contemptuous, rapacious, inchoate, like Roth's abject trashed out leftovers from the 1950s, they're all on the road to postmodern nowhere, and its not a release from the desire for an 'authentic' experience. ... It was good to see Greg Muir from the Tate climbing all over the accumulated rubbish, in a panic to keep it all going, the projectors whirring, absurdly redundant, amid the demolition site of the 'artist's studio'. ... "What a dump", Liz Taylor cynically scowls, spitting out her disgust at Richard Burton in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?' Yeah this is academia, arcadia, arseholia, in the market for more and more and more. ... Someone once accused me, in a double bind, you know the usual, a complementary insult, or as intellectual toilet-training, a 'Lacanian' inversion like Jake's 'faecal' writing, or in the gesticulating, flatulent way of mouthing off intellectual politically 'correct' commentary - watch any Goldsmiths lecturer, propped against the podium, drooling over his own words, or hers for that matter, to get the picture. Either, as Lacan observes (through re-readings by Zizek) it's the dog shit in the cathedral [the cathedral of erotic misery] or the immaculate incarnation, the shining art commodity in a dirty space - scratching each other's backs, spinning around, stuttering like an old Elvis tune, predicated on a torturous inevitability. Is this 'turn' of the art dealer a return of the repressed, back to the glory days of the 50s, leading innovation and experiment in the avant garde, a sign of a lapse again to the homogeneity of 'the past'? If I curate a show, I'm not a dealer as such, and it's got to be situated. A friend just texted me, "I've always hated Dieter Roth, dead or alive..."

Mr C:

I like it when an intellectual gets drunk and the rhetoric flies, the wit and the invective comes fast and furious. Let's get drunk, take poppers and go fuck Jake's dog Kylie up the ass.