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Password Shibboleth

When I told my artist mother that I had been to the Tate Modern to see the crack, she gave out a short laugh; this gasp was her way of saying, why on earth do you want to go and see that load of rubbish?

I found the experience exciting, as I always do when visiting these works designed specifically for this huge space. It is as much the responses to the work - as much as the work itself - which seem interesting. The probing, tracing, straddling public examining every little detail of this feature.  (As someone pointed out, this was a looking down experience and actually not about engaging with the great space of the Turbine Hall.) But what if the viewer simply looked at the piece in isolation - as if stumbling on it without hype or explanation?

Conceptual art in my mind easily spills into the space occupied by branding and advertising. Here, Doris Salcedo wants to communicate the idea of fractured society, but her canvas is not exclusively the concrete floor of the Tate Modern. The communication requires a strategy which includes press releases, photographs and editorial. It propagates through TV and radio, around the internet, through consumer generated content (like this piece).  By the time I arrive at the exhibition I am already warmed up to its gathering fame. The notes to accompany the piece give me plenty of context so, in some way, the work becomes more like the cover of an exciting book or the title sequence of a movie thriller; the real interest is actually behind the intriguing artwork or within the programme. In due course I go on to read more about Salcedo and so the experience is complete.

It is for this reason that I think conceptual art has a hard time with people like my mother. She sees the whole thing as clouded by its association with marketing and advertising - which, as we all know, is evil to the core. From within advertising, most creatives like to think of their work as art; they will do everything they can to pump up the cultural value of work for the likes of Sony or Guinness.

To give some more flesh to the piece, Shibboleth is after the Hebrew word that was used to separate the 'inferior' Ephramaites from the 'superior' Gileadites after he Old Testament's bloodiest massacre. The few remaining refugees attempted to cross the river Jordan but were unable to pronounce the 'sh' of the password and so were slain. The act of differentiation between products and the propagation of ideas that set up divisions between 'superior' and 'inferior' is at the heart of marketing, interestingly.

All this raises the age old question of what is art and why can't we all be artists? Are there Ephramaites and Gileadites in the art world? I suppose we'll know only when we look back and see a body of work settled in the historical flow.

 

Sam's dramatic rescue

There are things we are able to do on ITV Local Yorkshire which show how accessible the media can be - even if you are far away on an adventure.

We are following the progress of the Hull and Humber Clipper in the Round the World Yacht Race. From the clipper, the crew is able to upload video directly to our website. Sam Willis, who's seventeen and a crew member, was evacuated on Friday evening to a Brazilian naval vessel with a suspected grumbling appendix. Footage shows the transfer.

Half Term

This is the first holiday I've had since starting work and it's a good week.  I realise that the summer is over rated in some respects - the sunshine and the autumn colours are just fantastic. We went to Swinsty Reservoir yesterday which is the most wonderful walk. An added bonus was a cream tea in one of the old parochial halls in nearby Fewston. more photos

Light Night

Leeds late at night can be a bit of a worry, but there was a festive atmosphere on Friday with the annual Light Night. A very nice installation in one of the churches which re-created a thunderstorm inside. Projections of rain on the ceiling and water projections around the alter, together with the sound made it quite relaxing - as if sheltering from a storm. And some wayside shrines which reminded me of those at Greenbelt. Here's a little sample.

Light Night from markwaddington on Vimeo.

Literary Feast

Ilkley Literature Festival is half way through and with quite a parade of erudite celebrities at the bottom of our road.

Alastair Campbell was entertaining to a point but failed to do much more than puff up his former boss. There was nothing revealing in his talk. The main points - MPs are poor quality because all the decent brains are working for Newsnight, the press can only do one story at a time (in spite of the number or outlets) and the public needs to get off its collective backside when it comes to social and political action. He was amusing in an immature kind of way way.

James May came across a tad more intelligently - he's one of the presenters of Top Gear who collects his toenail clippings; I liked him. He was quite open about his lack of academic achievement at school but seemed to have a genuine and infectious enthusiasm for the world around him. He, like me, was awestruck by the first moon walks. I remember watching the very first one all night and the tension it created.  He says that technology and invention today has been made far too easy by the computer - in his childhood, ideas and inventions were born in a shed not on a PC screen. We need sheds.

Phillip Beadle's talk took the form of a lesson in English grammar in which he demonstrated his teaching style - he was secondary school teacher of the year, 2005. He says there's no such thing as a stupid child, just poor teachers. I now have much more confidence in the correct use of prepositions.

Alan Bennett was amazing. I wish younger people would take more of an interest in his work. It was an older audience as you might expect, but only he could get a laugh out of pensioners with the carefully planted word fuck (among other similar). He talked about Uncommon Reader in which he pokes fun at the Queen imagining she becomes a customer of a mobile library.

It's surprising that he himself did very little spontaneous reading until he was twenty eight, and didn't settle down to writing in an organised way until he was forty.