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Dinner party person
Sep. 25th, 2007 01:25 pmI'm not really a dinner party person; Saturday night's supper with Holger Hiller was the first Hisae and I had offered anyone in a year of living at our current apartment. It happened because Holger rather unexpectedly said "Why don't I come to your house and you play me your stuff?" Once we'd established that it would happen in the evening, it made sense to combine it with eating. A Japanese friend was invited, a crackling electronic log fire lit, and it turned out really interesting. We ate stooped over low stools; we don't have a dining table. Holger gave me sweepingly methodical accounts of the postwar German psyche (I'd jump in with some new question and he'd say "Wait, I didn't get to the 70s yet!") or described how he'd taken out a £10,000 bank loan to buy his first sampler in the mid-80s, an Emulator 2.
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There was another cracking good supper party last night at the Mitte home of Joerg Koch, editor of 032c magazine. Seven of us were ranged around a simple kitchen table, eating pork chops and drinking a variety of exotic drinks (I was oozing with ouzo by the end of the evening). The artist Thomas Demand was undoubtedly the central figure, with Joerg (who looks like Donald Sutherland in Casanova) smiling and challenging from across the table. Five hours rushed by with never a dull moment. It reminded me just how good a dinner party can be. Exactly like a good magazine, in fact.
As with a magazine, there was a cast of characters one knew (Olafur, Rem, Miuccia, Hedi, Dash) but had never seen from quite that angle. There were technical insights into the process of creation (Demand was considering heading to his studio at 3am to take 800 photographs of one of his card installations, despite having a flight to Milan to see the new Prada collection the next day!), there were career retrospectives on influential designers (Dieter Rams, the famous industrial designer for Braun). Unlike a magazine, though, you could chime in with anecdotes of your own, or discuss whether artists feel just as overshadowed by their titanic 1960s ancestors as musicians do (Demand thinks yes).
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There were even product reviews; consumer tests assessing the merits of Documenta versus the Venice biennale, or exhaustive descriptions of the features of the Prada phone and how it shapes up to the Apple iPhone. And while there was no advertising, I did learn lots of fascinating stuff about what advertising means to magazines (life and death, really).
It made me think about what dinner parties are for (plugging people into networks, helping them recalibrate their value systems, even eating) and what gets discussed when artists and musicians and journalists all get together (like when Jeff Koons or Vito Acconci chatted with David Byrne in 1975, in the Jamie Dalglish videos above), and how the successful relate to "laboratory" people who are slightly more off the map. If a good dinner party mixes star performers with fascinated observers -- and last night's did -- then maybe I really am a dinner party person after all.
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There was another cracking good supper party last night at the Mitte home of Joerg Koch, editor of 032c magazine. Seven of us were ranged around a simple kitchen table, eating pork chops and drinking a variety of exotic drinks (I was oozing with ouzo by the end of the evening). The artist Thomas Demand was undoubtedly the central figure, with Joerg (who looks like Donald Sutherland in Casanova) smiling and challenging from across the table. Five hours rushed by with never a dull moment. It reminded me just how good a dinner party can be. Exactly like a good magazine, in fact.
As with a magazine, there was a cast of characters one knew (Olafur, Rem, Miuccia, Hedi, Dash) but had never seen from quite that angle. There were technical insights into the process of creation (Demand was considering heading to his studio at 3am to take 800 photographs of one of his card installations, despite having a flight to Milan to see the new Prada collection the next day!), there were career retrospectives on influential designers (Dieter Rams, the famous industrial designer for Braun). Unlike a magazine, though, you could chime in with anecdotes of your own, or discuss whether artists feel just as overshadowed by their titanic 1960s ancestors as musicians do (Demand thinks yes).
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There were even product reviews; consumer tests assessing the merits of Documenta versus the Venice biennale, or exhaustive descriptions of the features of the Prada phone and how it shapes up to the Apple iPhone. And while there was no advertising, I did learn lots of fascinating stuff about what advertising means to magazines (life and death, really).
It made me think about what dinner parties are for (plugging people into networks, helping them recalibrate their value systems, even eating) and what gets discussed when artists and musicians and journalists all get together (like when Jeff Koons or Vito Acconci chatted with David Byrne in 1975, in the Jamie Dalglish videos above), and how the successful relate to "laboratory" people who are slightly more off the map. If a good dinner party mixes star performers with fascinated observers -- and last night's did -- then maybe I really am a dinner party person after all.