Bring in the clouds

Have you ever noticed how certain cities don't fare very well in extreme weather conditions? As I sit at my computer in my bikini, refusing to stray more than a few feet away from a whirring fan, I'm thinking more specifically about London in the Summer heat.

If London were a person, it would be a city banker. A youngish man, still hungry for recognition but not yet sucked dry by the long days at a stressful job and the short boozy nights. Good looking in an angular, slightly rumpled way, London is both attractive and distant, as if it were withholding the best it has to offer. It needs a bit of a cloud cover to mask the edges and the dirt. Yet when it gets too sunny and hot, London becomes overbearing like an old sweaty uncle wearing a scratchy, ill-fitting polyester suit. It smells and it sticks to you with clammy paws. You want to get away from it but wherever you turn, there it is.

If you think you will have a picnic in the park and get a bit of fresh air, there it is in the form of loud, overweight half-naked sun bathers guzzling cider. Try and get out of London and just entering the urban inferno that is the tube during heat waves will send running to your overcrowded local lido for a dip in lukewarm water or any cinema showing a longish feature (I recommend the latest installment of the Batman franchise: two hours and a half of dark action. Not a minute of onscreen sunshine) for the air conditioning.

People can complain all they want that it's never warm or sunny enough, but I still think London is most agreeable in the Spring and the Autumn. At the moment, I'm secretly wishing for a nice Summer storm followed by a few gray days to cool everything down and get London back to its louche/aloof best.

Park life of luxury

Hyde Park, Summer Pavilion by Frank Gehry in construction, July 2008

If you call yourself a londoner and you don't live in the vicinity of Hyde Park, chances are you visit the place only on the odd sunny Sunday when you didn't have enough faith in BBC weather to plan a trip to the country or to the sea side. Once in a while, I take a walk through the park just to remind myself of the first impression I had of London when I got here over four years ago. It's orderly, pretty, clean. Nothing bad could ever really happen in Hyde Park, except when it comes to art... Indeed, no walk through the park is complete without a visit of the Serpentine gallery.

Each year, the Serpentine commissions an architect or an artist to design a temporary pavilion that will house the events of the season. The gallery itself being quite small, this serves the practical purpose of an enlarged capacity during the tourist laden Summer months. When the Autumn comes around, the small building (bigger than most two bedroom flats in London) is sold to a private collector who no doubt has a huge garden or an aircraft hanger to house it.

This year the pavilion was designed by American architect/occasional jewelry designer Frank Gehry who says of his construction: “The Pavilion is designed as a wooden timber structure that acts as an urban street running from the park to the existing Gallery. Inside the Pavilion, glass canopies are hung from the wooden structure to protect the interior from wind and rain and provide for shade during sunny days. The Pavilion is much like an amphitheatre, designed to serve as a place for live events, music, performance, discussion and debate.” As I walk by, builders are still working on it and the thing looks a lot like chaos: a mess of timber, steel and textured glass sticking out at odd angles. I don't quite see an urban street, I certainly fail to see an amphitheatre, but this is one rare building that is more or less exempt of the dictates of practicality. It is art, it is the talk of the town, it is vanity project. Actually, it is ornament. Like a shiny piece of jewelry that has no purpose other than to attract attention and admiration. It's doesn't really come as a surprise that Tiffany&Co. should sponsor it then.

There has been over the recent years a growing number of art projects funded by luxury labels. To see another example, I needed only to step inside the Serpentine where the Richard Prince show is sponsored by Louis Vuitton. Just like Takashi Murakami before him, Prince has appropriated the legendary Vuitton logo to produce very expensive bags. Is that art? I never quite know what is art and what isn't with Richard Prince. His tongue-in-cheek references to popular culture are easily accessible: car culture, pornography, romance novels, great American myths. Mostly based on found images, they are sometimes slightly tweaked, like the naughty nurses with their exposed lingerie and paint dribble eyes, or just made bigger than life such as the enlarged photographs of cowboys and actresses.

Richard Prince

Student Nurse, 2005

Acrylic and inkjet on canvas193 x 137.2 cm

© 2008 Richard Prince

Yet, the resulting works are so often (voluntarily) poorly executed that it's hard to take pleasure in their sheer superficiality. They are fun to look at but empty and redundant. We get that naked chicks and cars have a long standing partnership in the average pantheon of male fantasies but to plaster the naked chicks on the car is perhaps a bit literal and lazy no? A car plastered with vintage pornography makes for a funny sight in a highbrow gallery, but that's about it.

Richard Prince: Continuation

Serpentine Gallery, London (26 June - 7 September 2008)

Installation view© 2008 Richard PrincePhotograph: Jerry Hardman-Jones

The combination of the Tiffany pavilion and the Vuitton art left me thinking that art is perhaps more than ever perceived like a luxury good. I would be hard pressed to try and differentiate the handbag from the print: the price is similar, it is signed by the same artist, it's just as aesthetically pleasing. What's the difference? Oh, yes, the handbag has a purpose...

That's what intermissions are for

The view from the Riverside Terrace

It is now a commonly accepted proposition that our characters are formed of a combination of innate traits and acquired characteristics over which we have variable degrees of agency. Frozen, a Fresh Glory Production of Bryony Lavery's masterful play currently on at the Riverside Studios, asks what should be punished as pure evil and what should be treated as illness?

When a pedophile kidnaps and kills her daughter, Nancy's life comes to a standstill, revolving around the possibility that she might still be alive and then the need to confront her killer. All the while Agnetta looks at Ralph as the object that will verify a scientific hypothesis: some people are genetically predisposed to violence and can therefore not be held accountable. First performed in 1998 and then revisited at the National Theatre in 2002, the play deftly explores both the emotional impact of violence as well as the rational explanations, deconstructing dichotomies of good/evil, abused/abuser, rational/emotional.


This production uses spare set, lighting and sound to focus on the writing which seamlessly intersperses the gut wrenching testimonies of loss with the manic delusions of an addled mind and the scientific discourse. Quite a challenge for the actors who nonetheless deliver powerful performances. Jack James is especially potent as Ralph, the psychotic killer who oscillates from moments of pure mania to candid regressions on a troubled childhood.


A bit like a kick in the head that leaves you, once the shock has worn off, with enough material to really think, Frozen is a rare theatre experience. I suggest you visit the lovely Riverside terrace during the intermission just to drink in the sunset with a glass of wine and remind yourself that life is not all horrors... Now that's really what intermissions are for.

Looking up

Five days of rain and more to go, I miss seeing that lone little cloud from my window...

Where is God when you need him

If you have been experiencing difficulties getting through to God these days, it might be because he is trying his holy hand at hairdressing in Dalston. Who knew?

Questions I never thought I would ask myself (but did)

What does one wear to a dinner party if the other guests are magicians?
Can I still eat that cheese if I take off all the green fuzz?
Why don't people answer my emails while I'm online?
Why does the weather not care about my deadlines?

Things to do (that can't be planned for...)

Finding ducks in a swmming pool.

Falling asleep to the sound of the rain's pitter-patter on the roof above your head.

Getting lost.

Meeting a friendly fox on your way back home after a late night out.

Failing at something you should be good at.

Discovering that you can do something you never thought about (like putting your foot behind your head or solving riddles)

Forgetting your underwear in the morning and smiling secretly all day.