ni.chol.as

Since I bought a new lens in Japan, I’ve been thinking of the need for a new bag. The new lens is a bit massive and has finally forced me to outgrow my little Crumpler thing I’ve used since I started out on this crazy gig. One of the chaps at work has a nice bag made by Lowepro which you wear over one shoulder and comes with a cunning little quick access zip so you can easily whip out your camera at a moment’s notice. He bought it in today so I could see if my stuff fits inside. It does! I tried to wear it over my shoulder and suddenly came to the horrible, bigoted truth. Lowe hate southpaws! You see, the bag is offset, so it’s asymmetric. You can only wear it over your left shoulder which, as I explained to LowePro in an email just now, is like trying to wipe your arse with the wrong hand. It feels totally wrong and it’s going to lead to a terrible mess. I really want this bag, but unless they make a leftie version or I can get some kind of hemispherical motor neurone reassignment surgery I think I’m done for. Are all sling bags made by bilateral hand-fascists?

Last weekend, I went to see Antony Gormley’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. I wasn’t sure what to expect given that the media surrounding the thing was intent on making it revolve around the gimmicky sounding box of fog that they’d installed. I was pleasantly surprised by the whole thing. The atmosphere in this godawful Brutalist monument to aesthetic fuckheadedness that is the South Bank Centre is unexpectedly wonderful – cold, concrete walls with sharp edges, colourless and futuristic-feeling in spite of being (ironically) an anachronism in an age of glass and steel. Putting Gormley’s cold concrete and metal artworks into this space is almost a no-brainer. One piece, a giant metal sculpture that barely fits in the space it’s been put, looks like Salvador Dali met the Borg and squirted out Gormley’s brain as their sole output of feverish steely copulation. To imagine the piece, it’s not a million miles from a katamari made out of giant metal plates with square holes somehow bored into them. The whole thing was glorious but was, however, dimly lit and guarded by a wary eyed security man who looked like he would wring my neck if I so much as thought about getting out my camera.

One of the more time consuming pieces to make, I imagine, is “Allotment”. The nut of it seems to be that Gormley (or assistants) measured 300 people’s heights, widths, girths. All sorts. These measurements were then converted into boxlike concrete forms that were the exact height and width and depth of the 300 individuals. To make people “ew” a bit, the boxes also have areas cut out of them to represent the area of their mouths, ears and, er, anuses. The room is fun to walk around, the concrete statues were cast inside wooden boxes and have natural defects that give character to some of them. The lighting in this room seemed to miss a trick, we commented at the time. It was harsh, directed from above and a bit warm in colour compared to the rest of the gallery. In the corner, by the stairs, another (doubtless) photography-hating gallery employee was stood next to a chair. So close, in fact, you’d imagine she was about to sit on it. She wasn’t though, it was a piece of artwork she was skilfully hiding from the visiting public. A chair with two balls (“maybe testicles”, the exhibition pamphlet helpfully suggests) sat on it.

I’ll skip over the bread-based wall-hanging and the frankly awesome steel-wire sculptures which defy logistics as well as my primitive arty brain. How did they get them into that room without breaking them? The advertised highlight of the show is “Blind Light” itself, a glass box maybe 10 metres square and a couple high. Inside the room was fog so thick you can’t see more than a few inches. The artistic merit of this is somewhat dubious until you see people stumbling around inside, inches from the glass wall and fading into the smokey beyond. Walking into the box yourself is a very rapid exercise in suppressing panic and trying to work out a survival strategy. Ok, I’m in a room and I can’t see my legs. If I extend my arms, I look like a thalidomide victim. A bowl of skimmed milk is less opaque than this, for crying out loud. I can hear voices clearly, though. Voices of Rob and Sarah and Jon who went in a few seconds before me, immediately lost in the mess. The fog in here is so thick you can taste it. If you inhale too quickly, through your mouth, you’re liable to cough. You breathe gently, through your nose, in here. I make a beeline for the friendly voices and Rob looms out at me, growing from dark splodge to full features in half a footstep. We’re at the back corner of the glass box and they tell me they just found a couple kissing, secretly, in the middle of the room. I wonder how far you could get before someone stumbled over you, called the guards and the whole thing was emergency-evacuated of smoke in a heartbeat leaving you in mid-grind with your girlfriend de-pantsed on floor and the entire gallery looking in at you, O-mouthed and disbelieving. Hmm.

We edged our way around the room. Someone walked into me and fled before I had time to retaliate. Some giggling and annoying child was running around inside, ruining my attempt to pretend I was in a horror movie by crouching down and then standing up just as someone came near. The child’s levity was cruelly crushed as it ran headlong into a wall with a satisfying clunk. There were no tears or cries, so I can only assume it knocked itself unconscious and was found half an hour later with heat-sensing equipment. I didn’t hang around to find out, my schadenfreude satisfied for the day, I left and hung around outside for Rob and company who, somehow, had got lost inside an empty box with one door. Duh!