Blasted, A Moment of Silence

THE HOLY GRAIL is the holy grail of knights on a grail quest. The rest of us are just trying to get by. To those living in a world of perpetual gloom and despair the dream is often just to see tomorrow.

For some, it’s to not have to see another tomorrow, an altogether darker quest, yet whether it’s because there is no such thing as tomorrow, or due to fear, or to a very subtle kind of courage, the sun usually rises again. A kernel of optimism, of fantasy, a skewed logic involving statistics and karma keeps everybody going. We’re all on a grail quest. It’s just a matter of personal scale.

Millions Like Us: Nicky Coutts

Nicky Coutts ‘Film Still’ Courtesy of artist and Danielle Arnaud

Coutts’ previous works have investigated the relationship between found images and materials, experimenting with how they can be used to reshape memory and narrative.

In her second exhibition at the Danielle Arnaud Gallery she presents dream-like, off-key interpretations and re-enactments of feature-length films. ‘Eastern’ adapts a key scene from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. An actor is shot down in a Tokyo park by a toy gun as people walk by oblivious and regardless. Coutts amplifies the tension of the original film by cutting to characters played by locals chosen on location as they pace awkwardly, sizing each other up. 5 Nov – 19 Dec. Danielle Arnaud Gallery, 123 Kennington Park Road, Lambeth North, SE11 6SF

Throwing Shapes

Vanessa Jackson ‘Throwing Shapes’ Detail, 2010 Courtesy of the artist and Cafe Gallery

Curated by Rebecca Geldard, Throwing Shapes is a group exhibition presented by Coleman Project Space and Café Gallery Projects. The exchanged dialogue between the works of Vanessa Jackson, Clare Goodwin Alastair Duncan, Kilian Rüthemann and the two different project spaces are one of colourful abstract shapes, modernist notions and dance. Speaking in sharply defined symmetries formed by geometrical systems this exhibition explores and shatters language barriers. Until 7 Nov. Cafe Gallery Projects, 1 Park Approach, Canada Water, SE162UA www.cafegalleryprojects.com

SuperUnknown

Rosie Wiesner, Room. Courtesy of Edel Assanti Gallery

As societies in decline become a focal point in pop culture and cinema, SuperUnknown presents the work of 12 artists exploring the fringes of dystopia and apocalypse through image and sculpture. The tonal range of the varying investigations is impressive from Rob Sherwood’s pixelated explosions in ‘Nothing to Fear, Nothing to Doubt’ to Ed Payne’s bleak mathematical experiments. Rosalie Wiesner’s ‘Room’ is a light box depicting a glowing ethereal miniature interior within a woodland landscape. Whilst Gordon Cheung’s ‘Minotaur II’ portrays an exquisite candy-coloured bull frolicking across a polycarbonate landscape painted over stock listings. Until 13 Nov. Edel Assanti, 276 Vauxhall Bridge Road, Victoria, SW1V 1BB www.edelassanti.com

Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works

Untitled’ 2007 © Louise Bourgeois Trust Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Christopher Burke photo

Louis Bourgeois is known for her Freudian oeuvre, which is often accompanied by abject representations relating to women, maternal relationships and notions of femininity. This show features over 70 fabric drawings made between 2002 and 2008, as well as four large-scale sculptures. Made from clothes and other domestic effects accrued over decades, Bourgeois’s fabric drawings are abstract yet acutely personal works, retaining allusions to the materials’ past incarnations. The morphing geometries of her fabric patterns are supple and embracive: the stitches holding life’s threads together, protecting Bourgeois from her fear of abandonment. Until 18 Dec. Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, Oxford Circus, W1S 2ET www.hauserwirth.com

Exhibition of the month: Full Fat or Semi-Skinned?

Image Courtesy of the artist and Next Level

Andrea Hasler’s installation presents a radical intrusion into the audience’s space as the artist confronts her own feelings of attraction and repulsion through the abjection of the female body and breast milk.

Central to the installation stands a hospital trolley that appears to be the basis for an organic-based contraption. On the lower level of the machine lies a repulsive, lumpy and seemingly oozing organ from which the breasts of the machine seem to feed. Despite the initial repulsion that greets the audience near to floor level, the overt breast-based imagery draws the audience in through its unique and varied connotations from comfort and fertility, lust and attraction, to motherhood and fetishism.

Constantly challenging the viewer, Hasler’s seemingly fleshy representations of the breasts initially appear inviting and vulnerable but are conflictingly studded with diamonds. The extravagance and exclusivity are emphasised by the use of silicon implants; plastic surgery is usually a luxury indulged by those who can afford it. As possibilities of modelling and perfecting the body’s surface have become endless as well as financially affordable, the question arises: how exclusiveness, decadence, wealth or the desire for an individually controlled and designed physicality can be expressed.

Hasler’s sculpted body parts conflate usual appearances as inner parts are turned outside and outwards parts are turned inside as she exerts power over her sexuality, over anyone that would objectify and fetishise the female body. This exhibition is thought provoking, and compelling in its psychological complexity. Until 10 Nov. Next Level Projects, 58 Hanbury Street, Liverpool Street, E1 5JL www.nextlevelprojects.org 020 7655 4350

How do my wife and I tell our parents about our girlfriend?

I have a bit of a situation. I’m a 23-year-old heterosexual male, and I am married. My wife and I also happen to have a girlfriend now, making our arrangement a polyamorous triad. We all love each other very much, and we are getting to the point that we are thinking about how we are going to tell our parents about our relationship.

My parents have already been told. Their reactions were as expected: My mother was slightly bemused and amazed that I was able to pull it off, while my father gave me a high five. But my parents are divorced/remarried-to-other-people atheists, and by the time I was 12, my dad was teaching me how to eat pussy. So my situation is not exactly typical.

My wife’s family is super Southern Baptist, while our girlfriend’s mother is a big ol’ bag of crazy: She was a physically abusive nut job who beat her children with a Bible attached to a rope.

Our question is this: Should we even bother disclosing to either of their sets of Bible-beating parents? To give you an even better idea about who my mother-in-law is: I’m a recovering addict (two years sober), and after I told her that in confidence, she used it against me the first chance she got (called me a thieving junkie). She’s a hypocritical, judgmental bitch, but my wife feels like she needs her approval.
If we shouldn’t disclose, then how do we deal with things like family holidays and other group events? Is not disclosing a sign that either my wife or girlfriend is ashamed of the life we lead? Your help would be appreciated.

Not Telling The Whole Truth

Times claims 200,000 paid online users - but only if they include 100,000 print subscribers

Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing lays it out

First of all, 100,000 of the 200,000 paid subscribers are Times print subscribers who get the online edition for free (proving, I guess, that people like free stuff?). Of the remaining 100,000 “paid subscribers,” some unknown number are people who bought access to a single article or paid for a £1 trial subscription for a month, or bought the iPad or Android App. All of these categories are surely “paid customers,” but they’re not monthly subscribers paying full freight to access the site — we don’t even know how many people who paid for one day’s access ever paid for a second day’s access (or converted to a regular subscriber).

The Forest & The Trees

Another nice indie tune turned into some kind of mutant disco-pop classic by the towering production talents of DREAMTRAK.

The Forest & The Trees – Run (DREAMTRAK DIAMOND SOUND) by snipelondon

Two new music magazines to launch in London, Stunt and Fragment

The first is online ‘rock and roll’ mag Stunt, which seems to have a budget of some sort. Music journalist James McMahon is behind it.

His puffery:

Stunt exists because we think rock and roll is lifeblood; because we’re bored of people writing about guitar music (yes, guitar music, shoot us, we like guitars) as if they were compiling a shopping list of florid words; because we think that music is fun and exciting and thereby should be written with jokes in-between the serious bits and not as if we were writing an obituary for our own mothers.

Okay, then.

Above is their fake video from their fake launch party of someone falling off a roof in an attempt to go viral.

Next is new free quarterly mag Fragment, launching this Friday at the Horse in Groom in Shoreditch.

Here’s what they have to say about themselves:

Being strong believers in the future of the newspaper format we plan on creating an alternative to the current music and arts publications that are out there. Producing a product that people look forward to picking up from a visual and content perspective.

Okay, then.

Good luck, everyone.