Fall of the Rebel Angels photograph in Olympic Park, London

A few of weeks ago the artists taking part in 'The Fall of the Rebel Angels' took part in a photo shoot in Olympic Park. The shoot was arranged by Rebecca Feiner, one of the artists, and the photographer was Ansell Cizic.

Here are the results. A fun day out.

The Fall of the Rebel Angels, Venice

Early this month saw the opening of 'The Fall of the Rebel Angels', the group show in Venice curated by Vanya Balogh that runs concurrently with the 56th Biennale.

I'm taking part in the show. It's been huge fun. Vanya has done a terrific job curating it and organizing it. Big sense of camaraderie among the artists too. A large number of those taking part have gone over to Venice and I wish I could be out there - alas this hasn't proved possible. Good luck to everyone. I shall share the experience vicariously, sipping a Campari in the garden.

RCA Secret Dubai

Nice shots of the RCA Secret Show in its Dubai location

RCA Secret

Once again I am taking part in RCA Secret, and I would urge you to visit the show at RCA's Dyson Gallery and to consider buying one or more postcards becuse the cause really is worthwhile.

Since its launch in 1994, RCA Secret has raised over £1.5 million - all of which has been used to support RCA students.

In the face of funding cuts, increased student debt, and continued uncertainty in the economy, your support is more important than ever. At the moment over 25 per cent of UK students and 75 per cent of international students have to turn down their places at the RCA for financial reasons.

This year RCA Secret will be bigger than ever,and an international edition of Secret is to be launched in partnership with Art Dubai. RCA Secret Dubai will take plalce at the same time as the exhibition in London, and all proceeds will go to supporting students in need at the RCA.

The show at the Dyson Gallery will run from March 12th and the postcards will go on sale, to support student bursaries, on March 21st. RCA Secret Dubai will take place alongside Art Dubai from March 18th to March 21st.

For further details please see the RCA Secret website www.rca.ac.uk/secret

Sunday in the park with Ed

Tomorrow night is the private view of a show I'm in - 'Sunday in the Park with Ed'.

'Ed' is Edouard Manet, and the 90 artists taking part in the show were asked by curators Cedric Christie and Pascal Rousson to question whether the radicalism present in Manet's work is alive and flourishing today.

We were asked to produce a single work addressing the idea of the transgressive in art. How does it come about? How much of it is willed, and how much just happens in the course of a developing practice? Is it sometimes the case that a work of art is seen to be grooundbreaking only in retrospect?

The show, which is at Display Gallery in Holborn (www.displaygallery.co.uk), runs from March 6th to March 28th. It's a great gallery, and the lineup of artist is from all over Europe. In addition to the work on display, a curated programme of picnics, hosted by selected guests, will take place in the gallery throughout the show. So do pay us a visit. And let us hear your throughts on the transgressive in art.

The New Eros

 

An image of 'The New Eros', a piece I showed recently in a group show in London.

The show, 'We Could Not Agree', was in the Q-Park multi storey car park beneath Cavendish Square in London.

The piece was inspired by my having re-read two of J G Ballard's novels, The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash.

Ballard was obsessed with multi storeys. For him they were fetishised places. In The Atrocity Exhibition he writes of 'the mysterious eroticism of the multi storey'. In Crash the anti hero Vaughan is in a multi storey 'his eyes following the canted floors, as if trying to recognise everything that had passed between himself and the dark haired girl'.  In both Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition multi storeys and sex are inextricably linked.

My piece suggested itself within moments of my visiting the Q-Park. Opposite my studio is a tyre warehouse. Piles of tyres on the forecourt are each marked in chalk with the tyre's size and specification. I showed these tyres with, instead of the specifications, the chalked in names and phone numbers of hookers advertising their services. Fictitious names of course!

Writing about Ballard, the novelist Zadie Smith observes 'In Crash the distinction between humans and things has become too small to be meaningful', and these fetishised tyres, worn out, discarded, seemed to me an appropriate metaphor for the joyless car park sex that Ballard describes. 

'The New Eros' is a paragraph heading in The Atrocity Exhibition. In the novel multi storeys are mentioned on average every five pages.

Dylan Thomas centenary neon on Kardomah Cafe in Swansea

I've been so busy of late I haven't had time to write about my Dylan Thomas neon installation which went up on the Kardomah Cafe in Park Street, Swansea on October 19th, a week before the centenary of Dylan's birth.

The installation, which is Locws International's final commission for 2014 as part of the Dylan Thomas centenary, is an upper-case neon text, in white, which reads: 'Michelangelo, ping-pong, ambition, Sibelius, and girls...'

As many will know, the line is taken from Dylan's radio broadcast Return Journey. In the broadcast Dylan returns to Swansea in search of his former self growing up in the town. We find him at one stage in the Kardomah Cafe with his friends, putting the world to rights. They talk about 'music and poetry and painting and politics'. They talk about 'communism, symbolism, Bradman, Braque'. And they talk about 'Michelangelo, ping-pong, ambition, Sibelius, and girls...'.

This last line is the best. It is Dylan at his most exuberant,and I thought it would be a nice touch to run it along the Park Street facade of the Kardomah. Thus, in Dylan's centenary year, Return Journey returns to one of the places that inspired it. I knew the site of the Kardomah had chanaged since Dylan's day, but the important things surely was that the name remained - Kardomah, my 'Home Sweet Homah' as Dylan put it in a letter to his friend Charles Fisher.

As I mentioned in a previous blog about another of my neon installations, you need a lot of support and expertise on a job like this, and it was amply forthcoming in Swansea. To Gordon Dalton at Locws lnternational, to Marcus and Juliet Luporini who own the Kardomah, to Nick Malyon of NeonNeon who made the text, to John Ski who installed it, to Kevin and Tony of KC Electrical (Wales) Ltd who prepared the electrics, and to Jeff Towns of Dylan's Bookstore who provided general advice, a very big thanks indeed.