AND I SAY TO MYSELF
Remain alert to the possibilities, eyes up instead of down, looking about instead of transfixed by a small screen, and daily life will furnish marvels, often in unexpected places. Exploring the streets and free institutions of a city like London is a journey through natural and man-made masterpieces, ingenuity everywhere apparent. To stand any chance of impressing in such a sweetshop official Contemporary Art needs to try a lot harder than it has so far.
Here are some sights that have captured my attention in only the last few days: the perfect functional simplicity of a clinker built signal box standing high over a complex railway junction; Lindsay Clark’s war memorial 404 Not Found
on Borough High Street – a crouching Tommy advancing through slutch and rotting flesh, death imminent; sublime choreography courtesy of Kevin de Bruyne; the chin-dropping magnificence that is Gene Kelly’s An American in Paris experienced on the big silver screen; Burnet and Tait’s ‘Egyptian’ Art Deco masterpiece, Adelaide House, on London Bridge, the tallest building in London in its day; an American F15 Eagle dogfighting an RAF Typhoon over the Wolds; pianist crooners Hoagy and Dooley in back-to-back Bogarts; Gwen John’s The Student in Manchester City Art Gallery, a delicate portrait of young Dorelia clutching dog-eared set texts; a double-act of canny jays in the ash outside my window, flashing sky blue and checkerboard; John Byrne’s brilliant display of characters at the Fine Art Society; The Black Friar; the chrome dream of a Harley shovelhead grunting at the New Oxford Street lights; ornate reliefs on a column drum in the BM from a temple perhaps touched by Alexander himself;
