da...da.... daft.

I had been thinking all weekend how signage had been getting better recently. Where we live, you have to know where you're going before you can use the road signs to get there... by which time you don't need the road signs. I have to draw elaborate maps for anyone coming to our house, for if they religiously followed signs, they'd end up in Saragoza, not Azeitão. In the past few months, though, a few extra signs have been popping up, and it has been geting a little easier to find one's way around without the use of psychic powers.

So, I was full of confidence on Sunday, when I saw the signs that clearly said "Fundação de Serralves" that we might actually get there. We followed, we followed, we followed.... we lost the sign. We could see no entrance, no big blue P for Parque, nothing. We turned around, looked for the sign, followed, followed, followed.... got lost again.... Took a different road, found another sign, pointing towards Wales if you ask me.... got lost.
Asked someone.... followed their directions and finally got there. I am convinced that there is someone in the "Ministry for Road Signs" who sits on one of those giant maps they used in WWII to plan how very lost he can get people by placing enigmatically wrong road signs.

So, by the time we arrived inside the gate of Serralves, Madge's small people were desperate for the loo (for the ninety-eighth time that day) and I was in no mood for much other than a long hot bath and a dry martini. I was also still rather peeved about not getting there in time for the Paula Rego show which finished three weeks ago; every time we had planned to go, something or other prevented us.

So, here's today's question: do you think I or the more magnanimous Madge were in the mood for the "conceptual" art on display at the moment?

Of course the answer is a resounding NO! (sing that "no!" out like a large Wagnerian behorned fat lady opera singer if you will)

amongst other stuff ...an audio recording of some bloke cut to repeat in varying length and word order "no one can teach you touch" as you walked down a narrow corridor with the words painted on the wall.... and a darkened room with a puppet theatre, surrounded by a load of coloured light bulbs chucked on the floor, with a looped video of a shoe, it was a man's brogue, talking in an irish brogue (oh, god, was that the joke?) about something biblical, with a few chairs infront for the audience to sit at - the only audience entertained by that were Madge's three and five-year-old who thought it hysterically funny.... ... ... a 55 minute film showing some fog while a japanese man voiced over a story about a fox in japanese... I didn't stay to watch the end... ... and some hideous, godawful sculpture made so badly, with so little meaning, appeal, aesthetic or otherwise that I can't believe they had them ship them here from wherever they did and call the sculptor "one of the great sculptors of our time"...

I once did a tiny stint teaching A level (baccalaureat level) art students, for a month. The fact that most of them were doing it just to pass the time didn't help, and that I'm a terrible teacher, no, a REALLY terrible teacher, all contributed toward the month being a total unmitigated waste of time. But there was one highlight.... a trip to London to see the finalists in that year's Turner Prize. It was a year of a plaster cast house's insides by Rachael Whiteread, some stripey paintings and a load of rice with lazers shining in lines above it. I can't remember the other. I took some of the students around and instead of the stuff I should have said, I just proclaimed my utter disdain for such twaddle. I wasn't asked back.

But I actually rather like Rachael Whiteread's houses filled with plaster, and stripey paintings abound in my house and my non-shed is full of things half finished that will go tinkly tinkle in the garden when they're finished that I shall call sculpture. ...

And I know that different things get to different people and that I'm a visual person who can be thrilled by a visual and there are some that are audio who will be enthralled by an audio...

And I could write a doctoral thesis about what I think about art and its position in society and the greater scheme of things and that I think it is the most important thing there is and the most trivial thing there is, and that we only find great art while filing the mountains of drivel....

But I do get horribly irritable when vast sums of money go into the installation of STUFF, like the huge quantities of false walls in Serralves at the moment, built to contain each installation, which may actually just consist of a video projector and a white wall.... when things that really don't deserve exaltation are exalted.

So, I thought I'd do you a graphical representation of an audio visual installation I thought I'd create in my garage... to describe my feelings about MOST conceptual art these days..... follow the lines carefully and you will see......




:) heheheh