Nostalgia

Things half-knitted (with the needles sticking out), jam, hot water bottles, blown out umberellas, September-October traffic jams, tram tracks, videos, Rock Lobster.

All these things inspire snapshots of memory, nothing longer. Those memories are like a place left behind or something seen long ago from far away. They are dulled by vivid.

That was the week that was...

Well it has been a fair while between posts and worryingly this is because I have been busy. Doing things. I've been meaning to write but every time I sit down in front of my keyboard I don't. Worrying to me, because I want to write about the great time I had last week, the exhibitions I saw and the simple pleasure of being elsewhere, walking around and even being on a train. Now I start to write it flows out, I just listed why I had a great time, I could go on discussing the wonderful feeling of seeing someone again after a long while or the excitement of my up and coming move to London. However it did not dawn on me to do that because we don't analyse why we are happy we just enjoy it.

We find lots to write about in our misery and our boredom. We notice details and take the time to take them in. Our starved eyes and minds look for something else in our lacking lives. When we are happy we enjoy those things. Jean Rhys commented that she only wrote in periods of unhappiness. Wide Sargasso Sea was published after a thirty year stop-gap. Many thought she was dead, she was just happy.

The title of my blog itself speaks of this culture of misery, or less harsh, irony. But too often are these blogs used as a place to vent our woes and boredom. Honestly this blog was set up in the same vane, yet over these two months although I haven't travelled the world, worked for a big corporation or interned at a magazine (all things I desired) I have been happy. I hope this blog shows that in some way. Hopefully its title will evoke its provenance; Jarvis and his Grecian sculpture-student running through the supermarket. This is not to say I'm a misfit in an unknown 'common' world but look past the ordinary and appreciate the everyday... just a little.

Ok so this will do nothing for my disillusioned-young-adult persona, my usual irony and sarcasm have been dropped by the wayside for a little cheesey, optimism. Its hard to write about happiness but easier to write about, writing about it.

All you really need is love

Volunteering at the Grundy is proving an invaluable experience. During discussions with the curator Stuart Tulloch and artist and assistant curator Tom Ireland I have learnt so much. Whether it is processes which define Stuart's career or indeed Tom. They come from quite different professional backgrounds yet both work in the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool in 2010. For me they (and the two other permanent members of staff) are incredibly lucky; it is a dynamic space, small but beautiful. Like any other gallery they struggle under issues of funding, visitor numbers and audience diversity but they are also incredibly lucky in their setting- Blackpool.

Ok, so skip back a few posts and read my moaning about returning to this cultural backwater. If I could I would eat those digital words, now forever ingrained. I have more contemporary arts practice here than in York. Forget etchings, oil paintings and Richter-style paint laden canvases think mesmerizing objects of accumulations, Dr. Adolf Steg who posts his art (through a letter-box rather than online) and an aluminum foil bolder. Crushed and fragmented this shiny and fragile object is a collation of the discarded skin of too many consumed sandwiches. The last object, created by Tom, has been shown in the Grundy within an exhibition of his own Gallery project 'Supercollider'. The Grundy's Art fair included the work 'Supercollider Embassy' which cordoned off an area of the gallery to create a replica space filled with works from Supercollider's past and future exhibitions.

'Supercollider Embassy' really struck me. It's elegance and simplicity is combined with a complex refiguring of gallery space and expo. Of contemporary art spaces merging, of remits colliding and exhibitions morphing together. Its frenzied. Its exciting.

Blackpool is like any other place, it can have exciting and interesting propositions. There maybe money, press and larger audiences in London, Newcastle and Manchester but there is also competition and competitive spirit. In Blackpool these institutions are working together, interacting and supporting each other. They are not disallowing the cultural heritage of the town but working with it. In a town hit hard by the recession, with empty shops and lower incomes the arts provides something beyond consumption, it creeps up in the crevasses.

Art shouldn't be selective on location. Welcome to Blackpool.

www.grundyartgallery.com

www.supercolliderhq.org.uk

(First image 'An Agenda of Type' Samantha Donnelly, Second image 'Beneath the stride of Giants', Brian Griffiths)

When we don't know what to say

Sometimes, most of the time, people do not say what they really think or feel because it is too difficult, too aware of shame, embarrassment, refusal, hurt. Whether it is for selfish reasons or to save someone else pain. Sometimes people say those things; in a whisper, a letter, a text, an email. Sometimes I regret not saying things. Its no easier in the end.

In this world of supposed free, mass communication our interaction is more bound up with etiquette than ever. Our social situations no less complex than Versailles. The lines are drawn and very few cross them.

For those very reasons I have just written those lines above.

Sometimes things are better in the rain

I love the reflection in this picture. Caused by the poor drainage on the promenade and drizzling rain. The ground looks glazed. That red shines angrily yet it can only interfere with the calmer sand and sea through the reflected striations of the stone wall.

It reminds me of the floors in indoor play grounds- those bouncy, shiny floors. I think thats what makes it awkward and interesting. It contrasts with the beach, the natural playground. It reminds of fun and the seaside but the lack of population make this only a memory.

So much for the Summer sun in Blackpool.

Pistol and Fur | Reviews | Interface | a-n

Pistol and Fur | Reviews | Interface | a-n

'Fan Club'

So I've clocked up two weeks worth of research for 'Fan Club' an exhibition being put on at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool. Its going to be a mix of art and ephemera around the subject of celebrity but particularly fan worship. This makes the exhibition seem a little precocious and patronising; 'Hark at all these people who mindlessly worship the idols of popular culture'. This is not its aim. Work included will be by artists about fans, by artists who are fans and by fans themselves. I think it will be more about legacies.

'Fan Club' is mean to accompany a touring exhibition from the Victoria and Albert museum, 'My Generation' a series of photographs by Harry Goodwin taken on Top of the Pops from 1964-1973. The icons of the rock n roll generation will adorn the walls, cheekily posing, moodily staring and even playing their stratocasters with their teeth. The black and white images engrave their subjects into icons. Framed on a gallery wall, in an exhibition named 'My Generation' they make material the essence of youth which spurned the spirit of rebellion in the 1960s and 70s. At once they historicise, this is the past- but a past you were/are a part of. Were, you lived it. Are, you listen to the records, brought up on the music, the politics, the images. You remember those depicted in the photographs.

So 'Fan Club' makes for an eloquent partner-exhibition. Exploring this remembering, through fan clubs, fanatactists and impersonators. But its not just remembering or legacies, thats all a bit past tense. Its about how these icons are made and how they thrive. Not just single artists but entire music movements. Think Mods, Rockers, Punk, Goth, Gangster what are the codes, the vocabularies that define each movement, which allow it to permeate. What is it that gives identity to these music movements? Dress code? Place?

The exhibition will explore these fan clubs, these networks of communication complementing Goodwin's photographs but also (I hope) destroying some of that iconicity in favour of highlighting the buzz which creates it.