Book Review: Boxer, Beetle by Ned Beauman

A mystery thriller mixing pugalism, etomology, Nazi memorabilia and sex might not be your first choice of reading material, but if you can get over your inhibitions this ambitious debut is well worth it.

Switching between the present day and 1930s London, Beauman eases us into the narrative by way of introduction to an affable young collector who confounds our pre-conceptions and quickly finds himself at the centre of a murder mystery so unlikely that his 'fishy' nickname is probably part of the joke. The hidden history that he discovers, linking an East End Jewish boxer and an upper class fascist entomologist, is equally bonkers, yet Beauman's description of pre-war London, with it's protection rackets, dive bars, gentleman's clubs and their denizens, is so compelling that you're pulled right through. On the way there's some surprising sex, a few more murders and an (un)healthy dose of Ayran conspiracy theory.

The only time I really felt let down was the last third of the book in which everything culminates far too neatly. My disbelief grounded as soon as the mystery dissolved. I suspect this is intentional though. Conspiracy theories are all a bit too neat aren't they? It's as if Beauman's suggesting that if you can buy into this, you're as susceptible as the mad Ayran eugenicists of the early 20th century. A great tongue in-cheek read and well executed idea. Look forward to the next one.

Like: Not much that I've read before
Read: At speed on trains, August 2012
Time on bookshelf before reading: 10 months

Book Review: The News Where You Are by Catherine O'Flynn

Don't be misled by the 'comic' label. This is an accomplished novel that ties together themes of aging, ambition, social cohesion, media, celebrity and urban regeneration, whilst keeping it personal and acutely poignant. There are undoubtedly lots of comic moments and characters, but they seem almost to reflect rather than exaggerate real life. I picked this up for a light read but ended up quite affected. Touching.

Book Review: Perdido Street Station

In this other-worldly, steam-punk fantasy, China Miéville introduces us to the fetid streets of New Crobuzon, a city rife with corruption, teeming with strange races, humming with thaumuturgy (magic) and clamouring with the din of steam-powered constructs.

Bas-Lag is not the tired old fantasy realm of elves, dwarves and orcs, though, but a refreshingly original land of water-dwelling vodyanoi, cactae men, beetle-headed kephri and the remade, pitiful mash-ups of flesh and machine.

Through this mélange of cultures, Mieville explores notions of race and identity set against bigger themes of poltics and the polis, whilst propelling us through the book with a thrilling tale of horror, intrigue and pursuit. Like a ramshackle Victorian London, the city itself is beautifully described, not so much a backdrop as part of the action. The characters, despite their alien appearance, remain endearingly human in action, emotion and capacity for thought. As with most fantasies, this is a book about humanity after all.

Perdido Street Station is a dauntingly fat volume, yet I don't think I've ever got through 800+ pages so quickly.

Like: Clive Barker takes on a steampunk Discworld with a dash of HP Lovecraft
Read: Summer 2011, everywhere I could grab 5 mins

Eliane Radigue: Spiritual Resonance

St Stephen Walbrook

I’ve been spending a surprising amount of time lately sitting in churches, in a praying position. Not the result of a sudden calling to mend my agnostic ways, but for a series of concerts dedicated to the music of the little-known pioneering French composer Eliane Radigue.

Aged 80 this year, Eliane is enjoying her first major retrospective in the UK thanks to the does-what-it-says-on-the-tin organisation Sound and Music. It began last week with an evening of instrumental works at Christ Church Spitalfields, the second of which was last night, and continues through her on-going electronic compositions at St Stephens Walbrook. Having been to three of the six concerts to date, I now feel like I have enough of a grasp of her music to write about it.

First though, some background. After working as an assistant to the pioneers of musique concrète Eliane began composing music with tape loops and feedback during the 1960s. She was later introduced to synthesisers, to which she took and initial dislike, before discovering an affinity with ‘a tiny field of sound’ that interested her on an ARP500. As she explains in her recent Guardian interview “I just dug under its skin” and continued to do so, for many years.

Eliane Radigue

I attended one of the playbacks of these classic works at St Stephen Walbrook last week. Eliane’s music, extremely minimal and delicate, displays all the signs of someone that’s been playing with tape loops.  It repeats notes in gentle oscillations with slight and gradual shifts in tone and the occasional bright harmonic, often accompanied by feedback, hum or crackle. It’s hypnotic in its ebb and flow and you soon find yourself absorbed, eyes closed and head down. The position of Henry Moore’s magnificent circular altar of travertine marble under the centre of the dome lends to sitting in the round, so when you open your eyes in the spaces left by softer sounds, you realise that you’re sitting in a room full of others also entranced, reflecting, absorbed. As if praying. You leave with a heighten sense of the world outside.

In recent years Eliane has stepped away from the synth to focus on un-scored collaborations with a select group of instrumentalists, and it’s these that have been showcased at Christ Church as part of Spitalfields Summer Music Festival. Last week I saw the Lappetites perform Elemental II and the world premiere of Occam I, a piece for solo harp played by Rhodri Davies. The former was very close to her synth work, although perhaps with more texture.  In the latter, Davis uses the sawing motion of a bow to create buzzing pulses offset by occasional and increasing harmonic plucks. Sadly I missed the translation of Elemental II for bass guitar that followed, which I’m told resonated through the bodies of those present.

It’s in last night’s Naldjorlak trilogy that Eliane’s instrumental work seems best described though. Pt.I played by cellist Charles Curtis has similarities with the bowing of Occam I – a slow, oscillating sawing, like a chair being scrapped around your head, although altogether more brooding. Offset by harmonics and the scraping of the bow, it’s almost like feedback on an electric guitar. The work rises in pitch, imperceptibly at first, and by the end Curtis is playing the hyper taught string-not-to-be-played below the bridge, creating a sound not unlike the echo of braking and screeching traffic or electric trains, at once both gentle and piercing. It blends with the traffic noise of engines and sirens on Commercial Road outside and by its end you feel a weight lift.

Eliane Radigue, Bruno Martinez, Charles Curtis, Carol Robinson

Pt. II sees a tone we’ve not yet heard, that of Carol Robinson and Bruno Martinez’s basset horns. Edging gently into our perception like all of Eliane’s work the notes come through with increasing force.  Sitting opposite each other, the push and pull of their alternate circular breathing begins reminiscent of a didgeridoo, but morphs into pulses of a spaceship force field or slow motion lightsabre. Towards the latter half it tails off to the sound of fingers on the rims of glass or the warm evening sun spilling through lead lined windows into the whitewash ceiling of Christ Church. I’m reminded of yoga sound bath meditation, before the piece tails off into a quiet aesthetic that seems to prefigure early 90s ambient goa music. While the meditative influence of Eliane’s Buddhist faith is apparent throughout her music, this is one of the few places it seems to reflect any existing traditions.

Pt. III combines its preceding parts to great effect in a way that I’ll leave to your imagination rather than fail to describe. A long meditative silence followed the last note before the eventual rapturous applause. I’m told that Naldjorlak is due to be recorded in Paris soon, but if you want to catch Eliane’s electronic works in London they’re at St Stephen’s Walbrook until Saturday 26 June. I also recommend visiting her installation works played through Sonic Beds designed by Lappetite Kaffe Matthews in Waterman’s, Brentford and the Rich Mix, Shoreditch. They’re like an aural sonic body massage.

For tickets and info visit: www.soundandmusic.com

Central St Martin’s – MA Fine Art Interim Show 2011

Matt, Tom and I went down to the Central St Martin’s interim show at Coin Street in the OXO Tower last week, on the invite of my friend Mike Marcus. As with most student shows, especially mid-terms, the work was mixed and patchy, but brilliant in parts.

Vasilis Avramifis

In the first room I was particularly fond of a large clay wheel, set on rollers on an easel and Vasilis Avramifis’ dreamlike landscape-come-still-lives reminiscent at of both 14th century religious paintings, Max Ernst and Glen Brown.

Over in the main building, an empty warehouse, an enterprising artist was selling conceptual art for 50p a sheet. Typed out each slip of paper was a short, cliched, abstract statement. She was raking it in.

Upstairs Tom and I spent some time discussing linguistics (his specialty, not mine) in front of Kate Barsby‘s word art. We were also mesmerised by her video of unfulfilled urges, like the hands that never sharpen the pencil they’re holding with the sharpener that they keep toying with.

Josephine Declerck’s candid documentary shots of young Eastern European male squatters around London  were well complimented by a series of the buildings they've lived in. On the film front there was a very well shot religious ceremony in Pakistan, but it was too dark to see who made it.

Mike Marcus

We finally found Mike on the top floor, with a work that was quite book related – he’s composted a bible, a Torah and a Koran in glass vitrines to the point at which they’re no longer distinguishable. He’s not yet had any death threats.

London Art Fair 2011

London Art Fair in Islington marks its territory in the crowded London calendar with a focus on paintings, print and sculpture.

Andrew Curtis - New Empire (Josiah Warren)

Matt and I were gifted tickets by Hoxton gallery Payne Shurvell. Matt’s particularily fond of Andrew Curtis‘ ‘Wild England series’ – grainy black and white photo prints of Suburban gardens, over which non-native trees are blacked out by ‘Whity Jet’ paint the pigment of which comes from fossilised monkey puzzle trees. Curtis is a print maker for high profile artists such as Hirst, so when he’s making his own work with his wife they like to be a bit more rough and ready.

We also had a good conversation with Jealous Editions, whose enterprising business model involves working with tutors at the various art schools to identify emergent MA fine art students. One Jealous Graduate Prize winner from each school has screenprints made of their work to be sold in affordable editions. The system appears to be very effective, with an interesting selection of work on display alongside more established artists.

Sarah Tse

One of the Graduate winners is Sarah Tse whose drawings have also been noticed by Woking-based collector Chris Ingram. Chris’ contemporary collection already includes Suki Chan and Haroon Mirza, who last week one the Northern Art Prize, so I’d keep and eye on her!

Tom Leighton @ Cynthia Corbett

Other highlights for me included the Danielle Arnaud gallery and Tom Leighton’s digital photomontages of sprawling imaginary urbanscapes at Cynthia Corbett. In the project space, Hamni Gallery from South Korea had some rather mesmerizing iRobot-style kinetic buddhas by Ziwon Wang. Hanmi are about to open their first gallery in London on Maple St, near the CG offices, and figures remind me that The Kinteica Art Fair is coming up next week.

If there was one thing I could take home (other than a Ziwon Wang robot) it would be one of the Eduardo Paolozzi prints from FAS Contemporary, complete with Wittgenstein quotes. Paolozzi is my favourite of the Modern British Artists, who were visible everywhere at the fair thanks to the current RA show. For me Paolozzi’s circuit-board like designs and pop cultural assimilation anticipate the electronic information age in which we now live. His brilliant mosaics light up my journey every time I catch the tube from Tottenham Court Road.

'Where Three Dreams Cross' at the Whitechapel Gallery

To survey 150 years of photography from across three countries is an impressive feat. When these countries are as vast, diverse and complex as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, it seems like a mind-boggling task for the curatorial team of When Three Dreams Cross - directed by Indian-born photographer, writer and curator Sunil Gupta.

The result is over 400 images from 82 photographers who have been born, lived or worked in these countries – displayed across three rooms of The Whitechapel Gallery. Between them, they cover a huge diversity of photographic styles and myriad perspectives of life in the subcontinent.

Subjects range from the iconic – Ragu Rai’s portraits of Mother Theresa and Tanveer Shazad’s press photos of the Supreme Court Crisis in Pakistan are instantly recognisable – to the everyday. The marginalised are represented, such as in Munem Wasif and Ayesha Vellani’s brilliant series documenting the lives of rural workers, but they also represent themselves – in amatuer pictures taken by the children of Sonagachi (sex workers) in the slums.

As the titles suggests, the three dreams are crossed. Rather than segregate photographers by nationality, the works are grouped into five themes: The Portrait, The Performance, The Family, The Body Politic and The Streets. Chronology is also eschewed, with works by individual photographers from different eras and countries grouped alongside each other.

The intention seems to be to deflect a linear historical reading of the images and instead focus our attention on the connections between them. The initial effect, however, is to render you slightly bewildered upon entering the exhibition. This feeling is enhanced by a scarcity of contextual information about the artists and works on display, as well as, in my case, an inadequate cultural syntax for religious symbolism, caste and Bollywood history.

As you progress through the rooms though, you begin to see for yourself the emergence of a South Asian photographic tradition, apparent through the imagery and pre-occupations of the photographers. One of the most enjoyable aspects of the show is seeing how contemporary artists are acknowledging, adapting and subverting their own photographic or cultural heritage. Prashant Panja's 1990s series King, Commoner and Citizen is displayed alongside 19th century photographs of Maharajas dressed in all the finery of their traditional ceremonial clothing.

The most curious object I found was the Hijras – an album of eunuchs photographed in their saris and moustaches during the 1880s. It’s displayed near Asim Hafeez’s magazine style snapshots of contemporary ladyboys in Karachi, which claims back self-representation of the ‘third sex’ – an unfamiliar concept to our diametric western understanding of gender.

Despite its challenges, if you’re at all interested in photography or the history, culture and people of the Indian subcontinent, then this is a rewarding exhibition with plenty to get your teeth into. Coming between Indian Highway at the Serpentine last year, and Saatchi’s upcoming mega-show The Empire Strikes Back, I suspect it will retrospectively be seen as an important step in the establishment of a South Asian photographic canon.

Where Three Dreams Cross is at the Whitechapel Gallery until 11th April 2010.

Reviewed for Spoonfed.