London 3: the installation

[imomus]

I fly today from London to New York, repeating my great escape from "Cool Britannia" back in March 2000. You can read what a relief that was in Nasty, British and Short, the essay I wrote shortly after settling into a tiny apartment in Chinatown. This time I'm staying on Manhattan Avenue, up near Columbia University. I'm curious whether New York will still feel as liberating and as welcoming.

In the meantime, I wanted to sketch a souvenir of my impressions of London this time around. I wanted to try and squeeze my basic feeling about London into a single image: an installation.

My installation consists of a door-shaped piece of MDF standing in a doorframe. It looks a bit cheap, but someone's put a posh handle on it, a knocker and a little fanlight, like the windows on the doors of the mid-century semis that form so much of London's suburbs. There's even coloured glass in the fanlight. The shabby MDF and posh accoutrements wage a little war between cheap and classy, brutal and retro-utopian. Neither wins, but a style you might call "Brutalist Edwardian" emerges. You half expect to see an ultraviolent Teddy Boy emerge from this door, an 88 year-old pill-popping, razor wielding spiv.

Above the door there's a plastic sign with the words "CITY CARS" in drop-shadow Profil. The bottom of the door stinks: it's been pissed on, and a slow stain spreads through the ply, tinged with a white liverish residue. Repelled by the odour, you walk around to the other side of the frame and see a mailbox overspilling with commercial bumph: a pizza menu, a leaflet with the word WIN! in drop-shadow stretched Univers on a red ground, a free tabloid with horrific details of a happyslap rape next to an article about a tennis star headlined "Why does she grunt like a pig?", another brochure with a picture of a sharky silver car and the words "0% interest!" and an estate agent's brochure. You look more closely and see that it's covered in little pictures of 1940s London semis all priced at £350,000 or more, but that the last picture is an incongruous photo of a stilted house in the hills of Northern Thailand listed at £8000. Surely some mistake?

You're about to go and look at the other installations in the room when you notice a little label saying that this piece has won the Turner Prize. There's a quote from an Adrian Searle review in The Guardian: "After ten years in which art students have referred to 90s Britart, if at all, in hushed, sneery tones (at Goldsmith's the students talk about "DH"), it seems YBA has returned, like mould to a cheese sandwich. City Cars, while not particularly new (it could be a Sarah Lucas piece from 1994), tackles our perennial British shoddy oddity - the way we'd probably screw brass knockers to bin bags if we could. It's a look into the void as unflinching as anything by the Chapman Brothers."

Comments

shiver

[xxdream.livejournal.com]

a free tabloid with horrific details of a happyslap rape next to an article about a tennis star headlined "Why does she grunt like a pig?"

[londonsound.livejournal.com]

this misses so much about london.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I did intend to map the city on a scale of 1:1, but I opted for art instead. It's easier, innit?

[londonsound.livejournal.com]

Haha!

[nickink.livejournal.com]

Hi - sorry to post an unconnected message, but I thought you might be interested in this album, especially in relation to your interest in childish music.

http://www.hofstrachronicle.com/media/paper222/news/2005/03/11/Entertainment/Cd.Review.Theodore.a.Summer.She.Has.Never.Been.A.Winter.She.Fears-892826.shtml

[(Anonymous)]

I'm just trying to figure out your imaginary installation. The door-shaped piece of MDF symbolizes how boring your whinging is getting, right?

[(Anonymous)]

No perhaps we're being had. This is all a brilliant satire about whinging indie hipsters
who lead incredible lives yet can't stop complaining about all those people who haven't
had the opportunities they've had...well done!

[(Anonymous)]

What about a failed thirty-something bass guitarist, now a bi-polar depressive in a Pop Will Eat Itself t-shirt, opening a can of Carling on the toilet, trapped in a seven foot amber egg? Which people are encouraged to roll around the gallery space.

[(Anonymous)]

Or maybe a 2ft high tin statue of Gary Wilmot, draped in lamb cutlets and perched on a podium made of Trevor MacDonald. The sound of machine guns and flame throwers issue from Gary's anus, representing the nefarious basis of Western society. Discarded in the corner of the room lies a small papier mache moustache, which is being advised on lifestyle matters by the "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy" team. Visitors are invited to mock the moustache. Outside, Momus is observed pathetically tapping at the window with a door-shaped piece of MDF under his arm.

No one lets him in.

[(Anonymous)]

Can anyone think of any ideas what to call an exhibition on Japanese Design?

[(Anonymous)]

Tie shoe, Untie shoe.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Don't touch that dial, Anonymous Detractors!

[(Anonymous)]

What about a giant butt plug rising from the Thames, with the face of Jeremy Clarkson?

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

This is visionary.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, and then the Thames drains away to reveal an enormous quivering arsehole on the riverbed just outside the Houses of Parliament, which farts an tremendous gust of apology which sets off Londoners on a week-long celebration now that their guilt has finally been dissolved. Overhead, a British-built zeppelin shaped like Gary Lineker's thigh drops pamphlets on Adorno and Derrida down the chimneys of the immigrant communities.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

I'm so disappointed. Are these people defending London truly British?? Surely not!

[(Anonymous)]

Whilst stalking you at the Elephant and Castle yesterday evening, I noticed how unhappy you looked. Was it the delapidation of the area?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Hello from New York Fucking City!

I was actually really happy at Elephant and Castle because there was an excellent Japanese Film Festival on and I saw 4 films, then ate at a rather nice noodle bar across the road. You probably caught me being anxious because I couldn't find my friends, or perhaps at the moment when I couldn't find the way into the College of Communication...

But on the whole I have to say Elephant and Castle has improved vastly since the bad old days.

[(Anonymous)]

I know you were there for the Film Season - the film about shitting was the best. The noodle place you speak of is OK - certainly it's cheap. Hope you enjoyed the noodles you took away.

[lites.livejournal.com]

1940s semis with coloured glass fanlights form much of london's suburbs? i'm finding it hard to visualise these. 1930s, certainly.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Last one to photoshop a pair of union jack boxer shorts onto a shot of Nick is a rotten egg!

[mylifeismundane.livejournal.com]

it's funny, because as an american that tends to be the way i feel about new york (although i actually find new york's filth appealing, maybe because i don't live in it), whereas coming to london feels incredibly liberating...i guess it's just difference of perspective, because you seem decidedly expat and london is definitely a manifestation of uk culture, society and politics. whereas i'm about to become expat (hopefully) and so for me that's a good thing because the uk compared to the states right now seems fantastic...

My first trip to England (Gilford with subway through London)

[meganfinley.livejournal.com]

I step off the plan with toddler daughter to get my tourist visa renewed (like someone in Holland is really going to notice, right?) and there welcoming me straight out of the tunnel from the plane is a big poster of a little girl holding a kitten- but it is tinted jaundice yellow, every bit of it, with the tag line "Hepatitis Kills Everyone!". That poster, the fact that you must take a car everywhere, lots of mud that sticks to your shoes unlike any mud in the known universe, and signs on everything telling you how much you will be fined and sentenced to jail for disturbing anything whatsoever. Besides reading Winnie the Pooh in a fake British accent to my daughter on a bus to Cambridge to annoy other passengers and have fun; I found everything extremely high priced, furnishings cold and formal, and stayed very drunk on soda and Remy cognaq most of the time I could manage it. Gee, maybe I should do a collage or a poem sometime on this come to think of it. Oh you're in New York now- MDF is called pressboard in the US. MDF sounds fancy and high falootin'. I do like BBC America though- but their European stuff has too many reruns.

[rwillmsen.livejournal.com]

"Lydon's evil cackle at the beginning of 'Holidays In The Sun' reveals him as an innocent who has decided to incarnate a malevolent view of human nature in the classic manner of the Dickensian pantomime villain. In The Sex Pistols, Lydon incarnates the British contempt for human nature. He becomes a parody of the malady, and is an immediate success in Britain. "

This is such a great insight, well worth repeating, especially for those of us who missed it the first time round. John Lydon and the British tabloids is indeed a marraige made in hell!