My objects of yesterday have now been removed as evidence of how I live in three suitcases, one shoulder bag and a plastic carton. It is shocking how much one touches and uses in the course of the day, particularly if one includes dirty washing from New York, but also how the whole of one’s life and all the archaeological evidence of how one lives can be packed away in a few suitcases. I was interviewed about my day. There were a number of things I had failed to document, including a satsuma and tea bag (PG Tips). The logs and the log basket were included, together with the box of matches and poker.
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Wilton’s Music Hall
We went last night to a performance of L’Ospedale at Wilton’s Music Hall. It was the first time we had been back to it since its renovation by Tim Ronalds, funded by the HLF. We were worried, because nothing is harder to restore than crumbling magnificence (see what happened to Christ Church, Spitalfields). But, miracle of miracles, it is the same, only better, just as rundown and shabby, with a bar next door to the theatre and a mass of old wood and peeling paint, but now a lift (we were its first users). There was a performance of L’Ospedale, a hitherto unknown mid-seventeenth-century opera by an unknown composer on the problems of seventeenth-century medicine, performed as if it was the NHS: a brilliant production by a young and newly formed musical collective called Solomon’s Knot:-
Every Thing We Touch (1)
I’ve been asked to document and record every single thing I touch, including what I eat, during the course of today, for the launch of a book on the subject of objects and their use in everyday life by Paula Zuccotti. I am not finding it that easy. Some things are straightforward, starting with the British Airways eyemask which was the first thing I touched when I woke from a brief and unsatisfactory sleep on the overnight flight. But I’m not sure I can hand over my mobile phone for a couple of days in order for it to be photographed. And do I include the table cloth ? And what about the log basket ? It certainly sensitises one to the mass of objects by which one is surrounded, the multiplicity of object types, and how many things one uses without thinking during the course of a day.
Sean Scully RA
I never did make it to the new Whitney. Instead, we had a cup of tea with Sean Scully nearby in a large studio with its original wooden roof and a series of large paintings from the 1980s which he has bought back at auction and will show next year in an exhibition in China. He and the PRA discussed different ways of achieving a shiny surface in paint (it was more technical than this implies).
This is the studio:-
IAC Building
The party on Thursday was in the IAC Building, down on 18th. Street and designed by Frank Gehry. I didn’t have a chance to appreciate its strange, curvilinear, milky façade in the rain and the dark, but yesterday it was billowing in all its glory:-
David Zwirner Gallery
I had read that David Zwirner’s gallery had been designed by Annabelle Selldorf, so was surprised that the gallery on 19th. Street, where there was a beautiful Bridget Riley exhibition, was so unexpectedly low-key. It turned out that the Selldorf building was one block north, an exercise in very minimal, sculptural shuttered concrete, entirely appropriate for showing the work of Donald Judd:-
The Big Apple (2)
I am in New York for the annual gala of Royal Academy America. It was quite a wonderful event (in the American sense of ‘quite’): champagne supplied by Moet & Chandon; honorees including Cornelia Parker and Jeff Koons; and a speech by Agnes Gund, the President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art, in honour of Jeff Koons which was as thoughtful and profound a statement of one generation in support of the next as I have ever heard. I tried to take a picture of Agnes Gund as she gave her speech but failed because it was very unrhetorical:-
I did better with Jeff Koons:-
The Big Apple (1)
I was late for my 3 o’clock meeting in New York, but at least got a brief glimpse of Manhattan from the 45th. floor. More Alvin Langdon Coburn (but slightly marred by reflections on the glass):-
Bejwelled Treasures
This evening I attended the private view and opening dinner at the V&A for Bejewelled Treasures, an astonishing exhibition of highlights from the collection of Sheikh Hamad Al-Thani, alongside a small number of loans from the Royal Collection. It was an event of appropriate magnificence: an ice sculpture in the entrance hall, a full orchestra, the waiters in white tie and decorations looking grander than the guests (actually, that’s not quite true as there were several representatives of the Qatari ruling family, as well as a few Maharinis, not to mention the Prince of Wales).
This was the ice sculpture:-
The exhibition opened with the Turban aigrette of the Maharaja of Nawanagar, dating from the 1930s:-
Marcus Stone RA
I was gently rebuked last night for having described Marcus Stone RA as obscure. Of course, he would not have been obscure in 1900 when he was living in pomp in Melbury Road next door to Frederic Watts surrounded by all the attributes of late Victorian artists’ prosperity, painting rather saccharine narrative paintings which were bought for large sums of money at the RA’s annual Summer Exhibition. But nowadays ? I am not so convinced that he has enjoyed the revival of interest in Victorian art and note that as a book illustrator he is described as ‘wholly undistinguished’ and that in discussing his work as an illustrator of Dickens, Nicolas Bentley wrote: ‘the defence of youth as an excuse for Stone’s inadequacy as an illustrator would be easier to sustain – he was twenty four when he illustrated Our Mutual Friend – were it not that the talents of Millais, Holman Hunt, Richard Doyle, Keene and others were considerably more precocious than his own. The fact is that whatever other talents he may have developed – later in life he achieved some degree of fame as a painter of maudlin pot-boilers with a Regency flavour – as an illustrator he was no better than a hack’.
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