The art school disco
Mar. 7th, 2004 01:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusFrom the moment the bus I'm riding with hosts John and Debbie clears the hill and gives us a gorgeous view of Stockholm's sunny harbour, it's clearly going to be an idyllic Saturday. There's a liner, a viking longboat, and an island with museums on it. After some cursory snowballing on the walk up the hill, we reach the Design Forum Svensk Form and take in a show asking 'What is young? What is Swedish? What is design?' I'm struck by the odd yet nice mixture of nationalistic, folkloristic references with 80s retro or futurism.
The lexis of power and ambition is being genre-spliced with a vocabulary of solidarity, folk and fairy tale. A fashion model in an 80s puff skirt and padded shoulders is displayed in a pencilled sampler surrounded by folk motifs. Let's call it 'power folking'! There's also a groovy, gloopy flat-packable rocking chair which Ikea should adopt at once. In the bookstore I get very absorbed in a book about a Stockholm fashion design group called Mah Jong, who were at their peak in the early 70s. Shades of Ossie Clark and Nova magazine, if you can imagine them negotiating a leftist-collectivist compromise with the fripperish demands of fashion. The book's title translates as 'Uprising Is The Right Thing To Do'. John tells me his best friend when he was a kid was the son of one of the designers.
I really like the Stockholm Moderna Museet, set on a snowy hilltop amidst a mishmash of cutely pompous military buildings and big, colourful Nicky de Saint Phalle sculptures (apparently they used to be in the harbour but the good burghers of Stockholm demanded their removal). Recently refurbished, the gallery has a nice show of mid-century people photography (Lapps, Gypsies, Israelis...) by Anna Riwkin, some great single-channel Vito Acconci work, and an excellent architecture section with a show focusing on the five cute modernist cubes serried in Stockholm's centre like glass Mies sentries. Later we get a great view of them from the theatre bar. There's even time for a research trip to a Volvo showroom, where I pick up literature about the YCC prototype, the car by women for women. (I'm currently obsessed by the idea that 'the future is female' and that 'consumer society progresses towards the feminine' -- and the opposite idea, as expressed in, for instance, the Old Testament or the sermons of John Wesley: the idea that the feminisation of culture portends its decay and even destruction. Expect a new essay on the Momus website about this shortly.)
My show is at the Tekniska Hogskolan, a beautiful art school which fills up with even more beautiful people as the evening wears on. There are some delays with the soundcheck, but there's plenty of stuff to do: shoot pool, play table football, eat free food or pound out Carpenters covers on the grand piano in the music room. An interview for Bavarian Radio shows that I may have been invited on a misunderstanding. The first question is 'What does the word 'queer' mean to you?' and shortly after that comes: 'Your records are full of gay themes. Yet you got married in 1994. Why on earth did you do that?' It turns out that this is a gay event. I explain to the man from Bavarian Radio that my sexual orientation is towards women, but my cultural orientation is often homosexual, that I'm campaigning actively for gay values and see homo love as more disinterested (without reproduction pulling its strings) and therefore more pure than hetero love. Later I ramp up my set with all the gay material I can find.
The art college disco has a gimmick by which people can get in free to shows. Two weeks ago the gimmick was: 'Print out a naked photo of Momus and stick your own face over his and you get in free.' When I finally take the stage (after some anti-climactic pacing in full view of the audience: someone has stolen the microphone) I'm pretty self-conscious, feeling everyone's eyes on my groin as I jiggle and dance about. In fact one boy even reaches out and gives my dick a squeeze during 'The Penis Song'. Do people grab Nobukazu Takemura's knob when he plays here? This lecherous Saturday night crowd is way out-letching me.
Bad sound and lighting, leaking noise from other rooms, a big drunken sell-out crowd, only about 20% of whom know who I am, and a strong performance from Toronto's Hidden Cameras all make me feel that my set, far from my best, is a feeble little cry in the wind. I'm up against all the satyrs of a Stockholm Saturday night, and the satyrs win. It's reassuring that my next appearance in Stockholm (being set up for late July by my friends Hanna and Stefan) will be at a spoken word event, a kind of symposium featuring Vic Godard and Bid. Let's hope it takes place on a Tuesday afternoon, in pin-drop silence, amidst rapt attention, with scant regard to my member or its orientation.
The lexis of power and ambition is being genre-spliced with a vocabulary of solidarity, folk and fairy tale. A fashion model in an 80s puff skirt and padded shoulders is displayed in a pencilled sampler surrounded by folk motifs. Let's call it 'power folking'! There's also a groovy, gloopy flat-packable rocking chair which Ikea should adopt at once. In the bookstore I get very absorbed in a book about a Stockholm fashion design group called Mah Jong, who were at their peak in the early 70s. Shades of Ossie Clark and Nova magazine, if you can imagine them negotiating a leftist-collectivist compromise with the fripperish demands of fashion. The book's title translates as 'Uprising Is The Right Thing To Do'. John tells me his best friend when he was a kid was the son of one of the designers.
I really like the Stockholm Moderna Museet, set on a snowy hilltop amidst a mishmash of cutely pompous military buildings and big, colourful Nicky de Saint Phalle sculptures (apparently they used to be in the harbour but the good burghers of Stockholm demanded their removal). Recently refurbished, the gallery has a nice show of mid-century people photography (Lapps, Gypsies, Israelis...) by Anna Riwkin, some great single-channel Vito Acconci work, and an excellent architecture section with a show focusing on the five cute modernist cubes serried in Stockholm's centre like glass Mies sentries. Later we get a great view of them from the theatre bar. There's even time for a research trip to a Volvo showroom, where I pick up literature about the YCC prototype, the car by women for women. (I'm currently obsessed by the idea that 'the future is female' and that 'consumer society progresses towards the feminine' -- and the opposite idea, as expressed in, for instance, the Old Testament or the sermons of John Wesley: the idea that the feminisation of culture portends its decay and even destruction. Expect a new essay on the Momus website about this shortly.)
My show is at the Tekniska Hogskolan, a beautiful art school which fills up with even more beautiful people as the evening wears on. There are some delays with the soundcheck, but there's plenty of stuff to do: shoot pool, play table football, eat free food or pound out Carpenters covers on the grand piano in the music room. An interview for Bavarian Radio shows that I may have been invited on a misunderstanding. The first question is 'What does the word 'queer' mean to you?' and shortly after that comes: 'Your records are full of gay themes. Yet you got married in 1994. Why on earth did you do that?' It turns out that this is a gay event. I explain to the man from Bavarian Radio that my sexual orientation is towards women, but my cultural orientation is often homosexual, that I'm campaigning actively for gay values and see homo love as more disinterested (without reproduction pulling its strings) and therefore more pure than hetero love. Later I ramp up my set with all the gay material I can find.
The art college disco has a gimmick by which people can get in free to shows. Two weeks ago the gimmick was: 'Print out a naked photo of Momus and stick your own face over his and you get in free.' When I finally take the stage (after some anti-climactic pacing in full view of the audience: someone has stolen the microphone) I'm pretty self-conscious, feeling everyone's eyes on my groin as I jiggle and dance about. In fact one boy even reaches out and gives my dick a squeeze during 'The Penis Song'. Do people grab Nobukazu Takemura's knob when he plays here? This lecherous Saturday night crowd is way out-letching me.
Bad sound and lighting, leaking noise from other rooms, a big drunken sell-out crowd, only about 20% of whom know who I am, and a strong performance from Toronto's Hidden Cameras all make me feel that my set, far from my best, is a feeble little cry in the wind. I'm up against all the satyrs of a Stockholm Saturday night, and the satyrs win. It's reassuring that my next appearance in Stockholm (being set up for late July by my friends Hanna and Stefan) will be at a spoken word event, a kind of symposium featuring Vic Godard and Bid. Let's hope it takes place on a Tuesday afternoon, in pin-drop silence, amidst rapt attention, with scant regard to my member or its orientation.