Eliza's One a Week: The Cultural Exploration of E: 2011-11-27

Hello all and how are you this grey Monday? Don’t know why I’m asking actually as really don’t care – I’m in a shit mood and that’s all I really want to know about.
Yesterday after eating half of brick lane (AVOID the paella not only did it taste shit it made me sick) I stumbled down to the Whitechapel art gallery to see whatever show it was they had on there at present. As it turned out it was Willhell Sasnel aka the most boring painter practising today? Discuss. Rumour has it he ‘Chronicle[s] the complex experience of life today.’ Wow, must have missed that one as all I saw were some quasi-picturesque images of cats and beach front houses. Apparently his work ‘attests to the continuous spellbinding power of painting.’ Really?? Must have escaped me as for the most part I saw a room full of some of the most mundane and insipid pieces of postcard crap I have encountered in quite some time. If he is holding the baton for contemporary painting no wonder the medium is approaching death – this may just be the last nail in the coffin. They looked like something you would buy ready framed from IKEA. Try and try and try as hard as I could the picture of a cat asleep on some boxes did not comment on or chronicle the complex experiences of life today, it looked like a birthday card. I literally couldn’t think of a single interesting thing to say about this pile of boring nothingness – and I actually like painting!! I really can’t be bothered to waste any more breath on this instantly forgettable pile of nothing so instead here is a picture from this show entitled ‘Tsunami’. Deep huh!?

I am almost embarrassed for him. And there is a painting, taken directly from the photo that appeared in the paper, of a beautiful woman who was implicated in the Rwandan genocide of the 90s. That’s it really; the fact that she was beautiful yet implicated in genocide was the meaning behind this. And that it was a photo in the paper. Yes. Really. Talk about lightweight. Unfortunatly for you I can’t find an image of it. But here, as a final damning example (I hope) is a painting he has made from the Seurat bathers. He quite likes the original. That’s all.

After this high of interwoven insightful contemporary pondering (?) I was put in such a bad mood I had to go and sit in the café for an hour or so, to calm down, it was just such an overwhelming artistic experience I couldn’t take anymore (?). Luckily here something fab happened – I actually managed to get into a book!! It has been MONTHS since I read a new novel. According to my book list in fact (yes I have a book list and I have started dating it) the last book I read was on the 9th September!!!!!!!!????!?!? I reread a few much loved kids books in between then and now but basically I have had the most awful reading block this Autumn and I HATE not being able to read – but anyway, I started something and have finished it and will soon start the next. Tres happy.

Upstairs they had some more stuff that I really couldn’t be bothered to look at by Sasnel (the name Willhell Sasnel actually pisses me off now) but they did have a room which is being used to display the Government Art Collection in new and exciting sorts of ways which I thought was quite fun and important to see this stuff as it’s us who bloody pays for it. This show was curated by the artists Cornelia Parker. Don’t know much about her but no great surprise there. The title of the show was Richard of York Gave Battle In Vain. Because the images she chose were arranged in color theme. I thought this had some incredibly clever deep meaning to it, then I read the pamphlet:

“I made an initial selection, chosen exhaustively from over 13,500 works. Hoping for potential connections to present themselves, I found myself arranging the selected images on my computer by hue. The title of the infamous American book Primary Colours: A Novel of Politics popped into my head and I wondered what would happen if you applied a kind of colour theory to the selection. Could I curate a political spectrum using art plucked from the somewhat charged diplomatic arena?”

So, there we go, not much to say about that is there!!?

She chose some nice pictures actually. Liked the below:

Eva Weinmayr
Grayson Perry David Dawson Bedwyr Williams Jen Southam