which began, on the evening of Thursday 7th March, with a trip to the Barbican to experience The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns. Quite a mouthful. The exhibition focuses on Duchamp's interaction with and influence on four key American creators after he moved to New York in 1942. The main …
Author: Hilaire
I am a writer of poetry and prose. I was born and brought up in Melbourne but have lived in London most of my adult life.
what I didn’t do this weekend
I didn't go to the community roof garden. I didn't go to Publish and Be Damned at the ICA. Damn. I didn't see the Judy Chicago exhibition at the Ben Uri gallery. It's been on since mid November, closes next week. Typical. I didn't ring any of my family in Melbourne. 11 hour time difference …
Well Done Bryan!
To the British Library on Friday evening for B.S. Johnson: His Life and Legacy. The event, marking the 80th anniversary of B.S. Johnson's birth, also tied in with the publication of a new collection of his prose and drama, Well Done God!, edited by Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan. The evening began with …
cut and paste
What a revelation the current Tate show, Schwitters in Britain, is. Although the main focus is on late work by Schwitters, made after his arrival in Britain as a refugee in 1940, the exhibition does include work from earlier periods in Germany and then Norway, and highlights the breadth and inventiveness of his art throughout …
demolition blues
I'm feeling sad this morning. Just learnt that the Adventure Playground in Battersea Park was demolished yesterday, despite all the campaigning, protesting and petitioning by local people, huge support from the wider community, and the recent brave occupation to try to prevent the council's bulldozers going in. The sun is shining, but the playground's been …
a brolly good read
I recently finished reading Umbrella by Will Self. A novel without chapters and hardly any paragraph breaks; a novel of shifting consciousnesses, where the narrative viewpoint often jumps mid-sentence; a novel unfurling along many different spokes, spanning a century, hopping back and forth between different decades; centred in London, her accents and voices, her many-layered …
magic, danger, fear
magic, danger, fear: the first words I jotted down last night, sitting in the hushed gallery space of the Parasol Unit, listening with intense concentration to Ian MacFadyen talking about the Third Mind. We were there for On beat, an event billed as exploring 'some of Beat culture's most evocative moments and its ongoing legacy …
Occupy Battersea!
This weekend, the Occupy movement came to my back yard. And they are very welcome. My back yard, since I live in a block of flats and have no garden, is Battersea Park. And the bit of my back yard that's currently occupied is the Adventure Playground, closed by Wandsworth Council in September, and due for …
how’s my navel?
Two excuses to indulge in a little navel-gazing: another year drawing to a close, and this being my one hundredth blog post. My navel was quite well travelled this year, accompanying me to Melbourne in late February, the Dordogne in July, and Paris in autumn. We hosted a small antipodean invasion, and my navel and …
not quite hibernating
It's dark by four and we're in the middle of a sustained cold snap, but a hardy, not to say hardened, culture-vulture will still be tempted out by a private view or two. Last week, it was the opening of NULL OBJECT: Gustav Metzger thinks about nothing at WORK. The exhibition is the culmination of …
Hilaire 