Counter Investigations: Forensic Architecture at the ICA

Legal cases usually allow both legal teams - prosecution and defence, in criminal cases - to examine and make use of the relevant evidence. But while governments have their own evidence-gathering experts and the money and knowledge to commission additional external expertise if needed, the people and organisations that might find themselves having to defend themselves against or challenge the state generally don't have access to these kinds of resources.

That's where Forensic Architecture comes in. It's an "independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London", according to London's Institute of Contemporary Arts, which is showing an exhibition of the agency's work.

The ICA's website says: "Forensic Architecture is not only the name of the agency but a form of investigative practice that traverses architectural, journalistic, legal and political fields, and moves from theoretical examination to practical application."

Actually, if the exhibition is a reliable guide, then the agency practices very little architecture as most people would think of it, and really carries out research encompassing interviewing, forensic examination, reconstruction and - the area where architecture is most at play - digital and physical modelling.

They've been commissioned by non-governmental organisations and families to examine evidence relating to potential human rights abuses, crimes and state violence, including police killings, state airstrikes, and the EU's handling of the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.

It's a fascinating subject for an exhibition, and the ICA devotes a lot of space to it, including multiple videos and charts and a recreation of the floor-plan of an internet cafe where a murder took place.

Eddy Frankel was fairly scathing in his review of the exhibition in Timeout, and he has a point when he says:

"All along the opening walls of this show are long, involved, mega-academic essays on the ‘forensics of aesthetics’ and shit like that. Is it a concession to the usual blah-blah waffle of the art world? Or is it simply an inability to condense down all the inward-looking, shoe-gazing academic theory at the heart of Forensic Architecture into something that can really connect with people? Probably a bit of both."

The section of the exhibition he highlights is interesting in flagging that aesthetics plays a part in courtroom presentations of forensic evidence even though evidence itself is supposedly straightforwardly factual, but it's a point that has minimal relevance to the case studies presented. There are also far more accessible ways of saying that the human body records evidence of the impacts of some of the things it experiences.

Furthermore, it's not always clear what, if anything, resulted from the agency's work. In some cases this is because the work is ongoing, but in others - such as the reconstruction of an airstrike - it seems to have been left out.

Likewise I had doubts about some of the findings. An increase in deaths in the Mediterranean is attributed to a specific cause, whereas it looked to me like it could have been due simply to the seasonal increase in attempted migrant crossings during the summer. A video is asserted to show a soldier pretending to discharge a shell from a rifle, when actually something that looks very much like a shell clearly ejects from the chamber.

But Forensic Architecture is, as I said, a fascinating agency that seems to help provide a counterpoint, in situations of a massive power imbalance, to the ability of governments to control the generation of evidence and expert analysis. And this exhibition provides a substantial, if at times somewhat confusing and frustrating, insight into how it does that.

It's well worth dropping by.

Review: Andreas Gursky at the Hayward Gallery

People at the exhibition

Art is at least as much about what's left out as what's included. A sketch of someone can be all the more moving for excluding their surroundings; a photograph can highlight neglected details by zooming in on parts of a whole.

This also mirrors how the human eye and mind work. Our eyes can focus on only one small area at once, while our brain generally limits our attention to what matters most at any given moment, filtering out the rest.

But this is not how the world really is, and that's part of the point of the Andreas Gursky works currently on display at London's Hayward Gallery.

Many of Gursky's works are very large, and depict monumental scenes of people interacting with their environment on an epic scale.

More than that, he uses post-production techniques to splice together multiple images of the same scene, so that he can capture and reproduce more of it - and all with the same sharpness of focus, rather than with any blurring, curving or fading away at the edges.

This is not how we perceive the world, and yet it represents the world as it really is. Objects we aren't focusing on at any given time don't really become blurry, just as background noise doesn't really reduce in volume as we eavesdrop on a particular conversation - it only seems that way to us. In reality these things carry on as before, just as big or small, just as important or unimportant, regardless of who's looking.

Similarly, the things that seem monumental to us are actually hardly any more or less so than the things that seem inconsequential. The different threads in a carpet, as depicted abstractly in one Gursky photograph, are barely any different in size to the glacier and mountains depicted in another if considered on the scale of subatomic particles or the distances between galaxies.

Even when Gursky takes more egregious artistic liberties, such as when he manipulates the capture of two Formula 1 pit crews to make the team members more multitudinous and their exertions seem simultaneous with each other, he gets closer to the real truth by doing so. A single snapshot of a pit stop wouldn't convey the frantic speed of the action or the competitive importance of it as brilliantly as the hyperreal, toyed-with version.

Gursky

In collapsing several moments and perspectives into a single work, like David Hockney did with his Polaroid collages, Gursky gets closer to the reality of multidimensional spacetime.

Hockney

Not that Gursky always wants to portray everything as it really exists in the world. His depiction of the Bahrain grand prix circuit chops the track up into multiple kaleidoscopic pieces that lead to nowhere, while the one of the pit crews intensely isolates the cars and people in a sea of black space like a computer game emphasising a highlighted character or object selection from an array of options.

But even here one could argue that Gursky is getting closer to the truth. Even if, in the real world, photons fall from the sun onto surfaces at the same rate regardless of what those surfaces are made of or how they got there, likewise raindrops and wind, and even if all materials are ultimately made up of the same subatomic stuff, the deeper truth is that some things are different by virtue of their origin or emotional resonances. A Formula 1 car is different to a mountain because of the thousands of hours of human effort and ingenuity that have gone into its design and manufacture, while a tarmac loop in the desert deserves attention for the sheer absurdity of its having been forced into being.

Gursky somehow captures that. One of the many things he does with his pieces - as well as documenting the interplay and mutual impacts of people and the environment - is make us think differently about the world and our place in it. And that, again, is what art - some great art, if not all - is about.

Rachel Howard; Study (2005)

Rachel Howard's painting Study, currently on display in London's Newport Street Gallery, is a rendition of the infamous photograph of Ali Shallal al-Quisi being tortured by US military personnel in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

It's being exhibited alongside 14 other paintings, each of which was created by pouring paint and varnish down the canvas, to produce an effect similar to that used to reproduce al-Qaisi's robe in Study.

Those paintings are all mostly abstract, and might not have brought much to my mind. But because Study is figurative, and perhaps because I'd been prompted by TimeOut's review of the exhibition - opening sentence: "Humanity is capable of abominable acts of violence and degradation" - I found myself thinking of the runs of paint as representing humanity literally draining out of the world in response to the horror of the situation; colour and richness drawing away in abhorrence or despondence.

From that point of departure, the other paintings, despite their abstraction, can be seen as extensions of the first, if you choose to view them that way - as showing life in flight.

Probably that's not what Howard had in mind, but that was my take.

Suffering for your art

"The power to resist makes the hero journey affective. And for the audience to undergo the hero journey, it's essential that the writer undergo the journey. That's why writing never gets any easier [...] you can't sing the blues if you haven't had the blues."
David Mamet, Three Uses of the Kife

"Each time a painter realised that he was dissatisfied with the limited role of painting as a celebration of material property and of the status that accompanied it, he inevitably found himself struggling with the very language of his own art [...] Every exceptional work was the result of a prolonged successful struggle."
John Berger, Ways of Seeing

Alien sculptures

There's an otherworldliness to the Ron Nagle sculptures currently being exhibited in the Amended Testimony show at the Modern Art gallery near Old Street in London.

Each of the twenty or so small works on display comprises at least one pocked, sedimentary, blocky chunk suggesting a segment of rock or slab of construction, and most also have an amorphous, smooth, shiny blob dribbling or oozing somewhere on or near the crusty part.

Eight-Track Mind, the piece that most captured my attention, also has a shaft a bit like a tree trunk, of a similar or the same texture as the block - blocks, actually, since there are two in this work:

Ron Nagle, 'Eight-Track Mind', 2016. ‘Amended Testimony’, our first solo show with Ron Nagle opens Thursday 1 June. #ronnagle

A post shared by Modern Art (@stuartshavemodernart) on May 30, 2017 at 6:12am PDT

All of the pieces are otherworldly, but Eight-Track Mind is the apotheosis of otherworldliness, like something seen through a tear in the fabric of the universe.

The ceramic blob, which swells pregnantly and precipitously on the edge of the uppermost epoxy resin block, seems somehow sentient, as though malevolently purposeful.

Meanwhile the shaft, which has a hint of having been amputated, damaged but not destroyed, seems - perhaps because of its grey-black colour and the way it's lit in the exhibition from above and behind - strangely incorporeal, like a projection or digital image. It's an other-dimensional presence in this otherworldly tableau, which is monumental despite its small size.

These two parts of the piece seem to be interacting, or about to interact: the blob radiating a kind of cold menace; the shaft like the embodiment of some mystical force with no say over its own use or abuse.

I've never felt so transported by a sculpture, or been so transfixed - although not actually fixed, since the piece encourages you to move around and view it from every possible angle, to better appreciate the suggestive bulging tension of the blob, the weird, eye-fooling texture of the shaft, and the changing relation between the two as your vantage alters.

I didn't want to leave the exhibition, and after I'd left I wanted to return. It's like Eight-Track Mind really is an alien artifact, able to lodge itself in your consciousness. It's invaded mine.

Quotes #9: Art

"A painting has to be the experience, instead of pointing to it. I want to have and to give access to feeling. That is the riskiest and only important way to connect art to the world - to make it alive."
David Salle in a letter to Janet Malcolm in her article and book Forty-One False Starts

"I can remember, for instance, waiting for a performance by Toscanini of the Eroica, say, and not being able to stop trembling while waiting for it, I mean trembling with nervous excitement, with pleasure, with what I think can only be described as a kind of sexual pleasure, though it's not directly that. And if you're interested in having experiences which will last you for a lifetime in the arts, you've got to do your damnedest to find your way to that kind of experience. How you do it I do not know."
Marvin Mudrick, Mudrick Transcribed, as quoted in James Wolcott's Critical Mass

What do people do all day? #2

 “Rather than make friends, then go off down to the soda fountain or go to where the kids would hang out, I would just go home and write my scripts and cut my films. I was pretty much isolated, but I had a hobby that I was obsessed by. I would come home from school and I would not go to friends’ houses to play. I would go to my bedroom and I would sit with my little editing machine.”

Steven Spielberg as interviewed by Tom Shone for the Guardian

Quotes #6: Life

"One day, toward the end of a conversation I was having with the painter David Salle in his studio, on White Street, he looked at me and said, "Has this ever happened to you? Have you ever thought that your real life hasn't begun yet?"
"I think I know what you mean."
"You know - soon. Soon you'll start your real life."
Forty-One False Starts, Janet Malcolm

"Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans."
Cartoonist Allen Saunders

"This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time."
Fight Club

Book review: Fucked Up Reader, 2017, Bryan Ray Turcotte

Forty years after the punk phenomenon, people still ask exactly what punk was and whether it died. They should stop, cos it really isn't all that complicated, the Fucked Up Reader shows.

The book contains some 300-or-so reminiscences from people who were right there at the heart of the scene - mostly in the US; a few in the UK.

So what was punk? It was a reaction to the bland, overblown, inaccessible music of the 70s, driven by kids with independence of thought and jumped on by kids who liked the aggression, adrenaline and escape. At its best it was DIY, exploratory, and challenging. At its worst it was derivative and dumb.

Is it dead? In itself, yes. But as an ideology, no. Punk was merely the latest new thing to challenge rigid old forms - it's just that it wore that challenge more explicitly than any new trend before or since. Pretty quickly punk itself became formulaic and got co-opted by the mainstream, but the punk ideology - which predated punk music - got taken up in diluted form by post-punk, hip-hop, grunge, garage, dubstep, grime, and whatever comes next.

For as long as there's something new and different left to be created, and someone out there fed up enough and bored enough and brave enough to explore it, punk survives.

Punk is dead. Long live punk.

Book Review: Pour Me, AA Gill, 2015

Pour Me is short as memoirs go: just 241 pages. In part that's because, as Gill says early on in it, the alcoholism from which he suffered in his twenties meant that "there was no film in the camera" for those years, and that earlier memories were also dissolved: "childhood, school, holidays, friends ... all seemed to be faded and incomplete".

Incomplete, but not erased entirely: Pour Me does cover some of Gill's childhood, as well as the time between when he managed to stop drinking, aged 30, and when he wrote the book, 30 years later.

Stopping drinking saved Gill's life, and after "thousands of hours of learning the wrong thing" - art, cooking, gardening, bartending - he finally "failed into journalism", becoming one of the best-known food and TV critics in the country.

So I'll borrow a description of journalism that Gill says he liked - "journalism is what will be grasped at once" - and come to the point: Gill was a fantastic and endearing writer, and he had an interesting life. What more can you ask from a memoir?

He could be brilliant, as perhaps best demonstrated by the section on the speech he gave to a room full of dyslexic schoolchildren (he himself was dyslexic), telling them that the English language was theirs to manipulate no matter what their school might tell them about their abilities. This echoed two transformative elements in his own life: the moment when he came upon his English teacher literally tearing apart books to show them who was boss, and a crucifixion painting that particularly moved him with its depiction of human suffering, which was made in the period of the Lutheran reformation.

He was also enviably insightful - something he attributed to his artistic training ("It made me look, as opposed to merely see"). Consider for example this, from page 2: "I wonder what the rest of nature makes of a lawn? Arrogant, snobbish, entitled, needy, effortfully polite, sober." Or this, on famine (he wasn't just a critic), a subject that sadly is timely again: "It isn't staring into the face of starvation that thuds like a blow to your heart, it is having starvation stare back at you".

His turns of phrase were up there with the best of them, and he was funny, and he was empathetic, having experienced loneliness and sickness and desperation by the gallon.

I'm using the past tense, because Gill died in December 2016, a year or two after Pour Me was published. Could that be another reason why the book is so short? I'm not sure: it wasn't clear to me whether he'd received his diagnosis of terminal cancer before the book was finished.

I suspect not, because I suspect he'd have carried on writing it until the end if he'd known it was coming, just as he did with his articles, the last of which was about his experience of dying on the NHS. But then the book is so dense with insight and tales told only in snatches that it could easily have been four times the size, and the final paragraphs are filled with finality: "I misused a life for 30 years and I had 30 more of a second chance that I used better, though not as well as I might."

Perhaps those tales are told only in snatches here because they have already been told elsewhere - in Gill's journalism, a compendium of which is due to be published this year. I'll certainly be buying that too, so maybe I'll let you know.

On experience

"“You want to make something real, you have to experience something, not just something you’ve read or you’ve listened to… something that is you.”"

Musician Pan Daijing as interviewed by Aurora Mitchell for The Quietus.

"It is no longer rare to meet adults who have never swum except in a swimming pool, never slept except in a building, never run a mile or climbed a mountain, never been stung by a bee or a wasp, never broken a bone or needed stitches. Without a visceral knowledge of what it is to be hurt and healed, exhausted and resolute, freezing and ecstatic, we lose our reference points. We are separated from the world by a layer of glass. Climate change, distant wars, the erosion of democracy, resurgent fascism – in our temperature-controlled enclosures, all can be reduced to abstractions."

George Monbiot in the Guardian

Born into debt

Millennials are coming to expect to be less well off than their parents. What hasn't yet received much attention is that millennials are probably also the first generation to have a black mark against their name from the moment they're born.

To be alive is to consume. In today's world, that means that to be alive is to have a carbon footprint, and a waste footprint.

Just by being born, we're guaranteed to have a negative impact on the world.

That's been true since the industrial revolution, but millennials are the first generation to have been born and raised since it became almost universally accepted and the consequences so readily and devastatingly apparent.

To be alive is to contribute to the loss of the ice caps, the accumulation of landfill, and the degradation of habitats.

Millennials are the first generation to have a genuine original sin: their very existence.

The implications of this for environmental policy are one thing; more interesting from a cultural perspective are the implications for the generation's collective psychology.

Will millennials' art bear the cringe of innate guilt, or the striving of a need to atone?

Will their actions?

Film review: Blackhat, Michael Mann (2015)

There's an artist in the UK called Jim'll Paint It who uses Microsoft Paint to create affectionately absurd and frequently nightmarish renderings of scenes suggested by his fans, like "Zippy from Rainbow as John Hurt in Alien being held down as a human hand bursts through his stomach":

Zippy from Rainbow as John Hurt in Alien being held down as a human hand bursts through his stomach - ealadubhsidhe pic.twitter.com/wCuwLOzDII

— Jim'll Paint It (@Jimllpaintit) September 13, 2016

I mention this not only because it's utterly brilliant but also because, with a little help from this retrospective on Miami Vice by Stephen Hyden, I've realised that it provides a good way of illustrating how best to enjoy Blackhat, the 2015 hacker thriller from director Michael Mann.

Hyden says of Miami Vice that "the plot [...] matters less than how it looks and feels", and although I think Miami Vice is still a pretty terrible film, I also think Hyden's observation works perfectly for Blackhat.

Blackhat is about a hacker who gets let loose from jail so that he can help the US and Chinese governments track down a nastier hacker who caused a nuclear power station to go into meltdown. The good(ish) hacker is played by Chris Hemsworth, the same actor who plays Thor in those superhero films. Yes, really.

And despite his character's primary skills being by nature best deployed at a distance and distinctly non-physical, Hemsworth is soon gallivanting off to China and Malaysia, throwing tables at people and using screwdrivers for things other than upgrading his motherboard.

There's also a love interest, who's supposed to be a network engineer. This mostly involves caressing Hemsworth's forearms.

But none of this matters. What matters is that, as in two of Mann's masterpieces, Heat and Collateral, Mann has a reason for pointing his lens at things and making them beautiful. In this case those things include the interior of a Korean restaurant, the skeleton of a half-built skyscraper, bullet-riddled shipping containers and the control room of a decaying nuclear reactor.

Mann shoots cities, and people interacting with cities, better than anybody else around. Way better.

And so it doesn't matter how improbable it is that Thor-as-freed-from-prison-kickass-hacker would be sent into a still-hot reactor core to physically wrench out a hard drive while the walls crumble around him. What matters is that it gives Mann an excuse to shoot Hemsworth in a lime-green radiation suit smashing the place up with an axe (see one minute forty for a brief flash):

Just like Jim'll Paint It cramming Zippy, Kermit and Sooty into a reimagining of the Alien chestbuster scene, Blackhat takes a mountain of improbables and uses them as the anything-goes basis for creating something almost unbearably gorgeous. It's a work of art.

Book review: Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari (2014)

Sapiens is the book to end all books. Literally. Well, almost.

It tells you everything you need to know about the history of human culture and thought, and then asks where we might be going as a species.

In the process it undermines consumerism, nationalism, the pursuit of individual happiness and the idea that mankind is shaping the planet in a positive way. Having done so, it leaves us with one question for our future: what do we want to want?

It's a question that we might well try to answer by writing books, and once we've settled on some answers we might well try to track our progress towards those answers by writing more books. Hence that "almost" earlier on. But most books have just been rendered pointless. Along with most of everything else.

I've spent my adult life looking for the answers to life's questions in books. How did we get here? Why are things the way they are? Is that how they ought to be? What kind of life should I lead? How can I do that better? Thanks to Sapiens, I now feel like I know most of the answers.

The past 500 years of unprecedented human productivity have given us Shakespeare's sonnets, Mozart's requiems, Leonardo's portraits, Manolo's Blahniks and Gangnam Style. Are we any happier or more satisfied as a result? Nope. Should I bother with them? Eh.

Only two things seem important now: community and the future of human activity. I've long struggled to foment ambitions, and now I think it's because I haven't been focusing on those two issues.

Am I focused enough to do so from now on? I guess I'll find out.

Gaika live at the Roundhouse

SECURITY @gaikasees #theroundhouse #gaika #warped #security

A photo posted by Gabby cooke (@gabrielle_cooke) on Aug 11, 2016 at 3:23pm PDT

Gaika delivered a confident and powerful performance of his 2016 album Security at the Roundhouse on 11 August, overcoming but not quite compensating for the over-hyping of a sparse bill.

The Brixton-raised self-defined Afrofuturist, whose music combines R&B, rap, grime and dancehall, was one of several musicians invited over different nights to make use of Ron Arad's Curtain Call installation at the Roundhouse - a "floor-to-ceiling artwork made of 5,600 silicon rods suspended from an 18-metre diameter ring [that] provides a canvas for films, live performance and audience interaction".

The Roundhouse billed Curtain Call as "incredible" and "epic", but on the basis of Gaika's show, a visual display encircling the audience is a backwards step from the more typical audience-facing live music array, which through multi-sourcing and layering offers far more opportunities to dazzle.

Gaika's show itself was billed by the Roundhouse as an "imaginary club experience" inspired by Security and its "dancehall-tinged songs for the city" but that too proved to be hype: four dancers on podiums were positioned around the Curtained space, and early on in the evening the "club" was guarded by "bouncers", but that was the sum total of the "immersion".

Doors opened at 21.00 and the venue closed at 23.00, already making for a painfully short facsimile of an actual club night, and to add insult to injury the first hour of the evening proved to be nothing but the chance to mill around the performance space while minimal use was made of Curtain Call to some vague musical accompaniment from the VIP bar area. There was no support, and nothing to see. It was a scandalous waste of people's time and ears.

Thankfully Gaika's performance itself, when it finally came, rose magnificently above the inauspicious start to proceedings. Either Curtain Call, the shape of the Roundhouse or Gaika's own proclivities meant that he delivered his performance from a small circular stage in the centre of the space, allowing the crowd of "clubbers" to push up close and move around freely.

It was an inspired choice that made the show much more intimate than most at the Roundhouse, which is a monumental building but, with a maximum capacity of 1,700, not a place where most of the crowd can normally get near the performers.

Gaika kicked things off by exhorting the crowd to rotate around him, which they briefly did before settling down again and remaining mostly static for the rest of the night, bar some self-conscious shuffling. It was possibly an acknowledgement on Gaika's part that he knew he was going to have to single-handedly deliver the 'epic immersion' people had been led to expect.

If so, he delivered. Security is strange beast of an album, claustrophobic and threatening but also heartfelt and at times uplifting and energising, and Gaika managed to translate all of that into the live show with an intense and physical performance. The crowd was an uncommon mix of achingly trendy arty types, tracksuited youths, bespectacled nerds and rather bewildered-looking middle-aged culture vultures, with most of the dancing taking place among those belonging to the first two categories, but those who looked like they'd actually known what to expect, rather than being enticed in by the Roundhouse's hype, appeared to greatly enjoy themselves.

I was one of those, and it was just a shame that the "club" of the billing was indeed imaginary: had Gaika's performance been the centrepiece of a real club night, or even of a properly organised gig schedule, the evening would have been a resounding success. As it was, only Gaika emerged with credibility intact.

Quotes #2: Jacques Herzog. Leonardo da Vinci's disgust and disbelief

For some reason I'm very struck by this comment from the architect Jacques Herzog in Rowan Moore's Guardian article about Herzog and his architectural partner, Pierre de Meuron. Here's the full paragraph for context:

Artists, says Herzog, are much better at uncertainty and instability than architects. He unexpectedly cites Leonardo da Vinci and the way he painted an angel’s wings: “You can see he was not a believer. When he paints the joint where the wings meet, when he has to work out how you attach a wing, you get a sense of his disgust and disbelief.” Great names of architecture, by contrast, seem to have no such doubt. “They were almost religious about their work, a bit absurd. Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier: how can they be such heroes?”

That paragraph, or Herzog's point, doesn't make much sense to me. The part about architects being religious about their work or absurd is fine, but if artists are "better" at uncertainty, why can Herzog apparently discern da Vinci's disgust? Shouldn't it be undetectable?

So it's not that I think Herzog makes a good point: it's the assertion he makes that strikes me.

To say that da Vinci, possibly the most revered artist of all, was so unbelieving as to be unable to keep disgust out of his depictions of angels' wings! Mein Gott! 

Book review: Fear of Music, David Stubbs, Zero Books, 2009

Best read with Spotify or similar to hand.

Despite being subtitled "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen", Fear of Music doesn't actually address the question of "why modern [read: avant garde] art is embraced and understood while modern [as above] music is ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated and listened to by the inexplicably crazed", as the blurb puts it, until its conclusion - a mere 26 pages out of 137. Rather, the first 111 pages set out the parallel histories of the two beasts.

The answers eventually proffered are: because the megabucks associated with modern art have familiarised the public with it; because modern music can feel like an infliction; because music more powerfully depicts the future, and the future is bleak; because humans are inherently more tolerant of visual than auditory chaos; and, a more general repetition of the first, because people aren't used to modern music.

Of these, I give most credence to the infliction and tolerance suggestions. To take the latter first, modern music much more commonly causes physical pain through sheer extent (in its case, volume) than modern art when experienced live, and auditory chaos also much more readily causes headaches (even at reasonable volume).

The infliction point is related. Although modern art often aims to challenge, it doesn't generally aim to cause as much unpleasantness to its audience as possible, whereas this does seem to be the aim of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Napalm Death and Sunn O))). A more appropriate comparison to these more extreme avant garde bands than the sublime (in an artistic sense) works of Rothko would be images of violence such as those force-fed to Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

The very premise of the book is on shaky ground in this respect. In setting out the history of avant garde music, Stubbs includes such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Brian Eno and Radiohead - hardly musicians that lacked a popular following. Furthermore, he states that millions of people already do embrace avant garde music (albeit calling this "a tiny fragment of the overall demographic"). Most damagingly, he even says "it's hard to conceive that Duke Ellington's music was once considered 'dissonant' or to recapture just what a fissure the joyful peal of Louis Armstrong's trumpet represented" - i.e., that in these cases at least the avant garde has been wholly accepted by and subsumed into the mainstream.

Likewise, although Rothko is indeed extremely popular, the same cannot be said of all avant garde art. The Tate Modern may receive millions of visitors per year, but this is due more  to its cannily having been established as a symbol of trendy London and to the monumentalism of the building itself than to its housing works by the likes of Giacometti, which are barely glanced at by the incessantly shuffling crowds, despite a Giacometti having sold for $141m this year. The public much prefers shows of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo or impressionists like Monet to the Futurists or conceptualists.

Having said all that, I like the premise of the book even if it's a false one, simply because it gives Stubbs the chance to provide his parallel histories of these two fascinating movements. And I like the book itself: Stubbs writes well and with a keen eye for what to cover from what must have been a wealth of material, and includes just enough of himself to add an extra dimension without being intrusive. I read it in one day, fighting to keep going through straining eyes (see the glasses in the photo above).

The book is also a fantastic way of discovering new music, and I recommend having access to Spotify or similar when reading it so that you can appreciate what's being discussed as you go along.

I also like the ethos of Zero Books, which claims to have the lofty aim of fighting the contemporary elimination of the public and the intellectual.

However, while both the publisher and the author seek to stand up for the avant garde, I do wish they hadn't taken such a free-thinking approach to grammar and spelling in the edition of FoM I read: practices such as printing words in a meaningful order, including every word in a sentence but only as many times as is required, subject-verb agreement, apostrophe placement, knowledge of what commas are for and reserving paragraph returns for the ends of paragraphs do help to convey a message more easily, boringly conservative though they may be.

Juxtapositions #1: Tiepolo and Mondrian

Tiepolo's The Building of the Trojan Horse, about 1760, National Gallery, London

Mondrian's Composition With Red, Yellow and Blue, 1942

Just the essentials

Like most Londoners, I move flats a lot. I've lived in 9 different places in 8 years, which I think is pretty average for this city. Because I move so often, I try not to acquire too much stuff; nevertheless, the last time I moved - 3 weeks ago - I spent about 4 days packing in fits and spurts, no more than 5 minutes in the removal van, and then about 6 hours unpacking at my new place.

This is roughly the amount of stuff I have (the furniture isn't mine):

My stuff

Conversely, most of the people in Kiki Streitberger's Travelling Light photographic project, one of several such projects being exhibited until 29 August at the University of Westminster's 2015 Documentary Photography and Photojournalism MA course graduation show, took only about half a dozen things with them the last time they moved homes.

That's because Kiki's project focuses on Syrian refugees who have made their way to the UK by boat, for the most part taking not even only what they could carry but only what they could stuff into their pockets, as traffickers want to use all available space on their boats for more people.

For the project Kiki photographed not the refugees themselves, but the clothes and objects that survived their perilous journey. The photos are accompanied by descriptions of the items in the refugees' own words.

One of the people featured in Kiki's project is Alaa (his is the second entry on her own website's link to this project), a 14-year-old student who chose to share the T-shirt he wore on the trip, his asthma inhaler, his glasses, a book on Arab history, a notebook and a report card.

I don't have permission to reproduce the photograph or the full text, but Alaa's thoughts on masculinity, based on his history book, are surprisingly insightful given his age - although perhaps less surprisingly so given his own history.

I'll just quote the final few sentences of his entry, which read as follows:

"The school report is my last one from home. I brought it with me because I want to show people that I'm not stupid. When I come and ask for asylum, this doesn't mean I'm an idiot and I want people to know that."

Serendipity and creativity

Wandering around Dublin on Friday night, freed from the conference that took me to that city, I stumbled across the graduation party for the National College of Art and Design's Visual Communication degree. There was live jazz, beer and chorizo hotdogs, plus a crowd of joyful arty types and their families - and the chance to see all of the graduates' final-year projects in the College building adjacent. I polished off a 'dog and a pint of Hooker while enjoying the music and general gaity, and then checked out the work...

It was inspired and inspiring stuff. NCAD says its Visual Communication degree teaches students to use "a variety of media to creatively communicate ideas and concepts that can inform, challenge, educate and potentially transform lives", which sounds like it could be PR-esque guff, but actually the show bore it out.

Some of my highlights were:

Ben Hickey's use of illustration to break up and enliven selected pieces of journalism as a way of making them more accessible.

Ellius Grace's photographic and interview-based portraits of people and the things that make them feel alive (not on his website, but his other photos are in a similar vein).

And Laura Dunne's "experimental cutlery", such as knives and forks made of pig skin, to "disrupt the eating process" and encourage people to be more aware of what they are eating.

There were other unconventional ideas too, like Stephen Kerr's alternative design for musical notation, and Manus De Brun's idea for a way of encouraging contemplation through a particularly innovative way of watering a plant - neither of which seem to have been put online, so I'll say no more about them.

The students' inventiveness and implementation were fantastic, and it was amazing to see so much creativity and passion in one room.

There's a video of the graduates' work over on The Irish Times. Be inspired.