Month: November 2011

on paul noble, font of … etc. – more on nobson at gagosian to dec 17

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more…

Returning for a longer look at Paul Noble’s current exhibition, I realise that Nobson is more prominent in the show than I’d understood. Also, that my sense that deserts had bloomed is probably more revealing of my baseline bounce into every morning as a blind optimist than the actuality! That is; yes there are trees, plants and they emerge from the desert but that doesn’t quite conjugate the verb ‘to bloom’. Plus, my eyes lied to me in identifying clusters of rocks -which I know peculiarly well, given their relationship to images in In Ramallah, Running– as bushes, trees, verdancy! Continue reading “on paul noble, font of … etc. – more on nobson at gagosian to dec 17” →

on paul noble, font of wonderment at gagosian britannia street nov 10 – dec 17

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Font by Paul Noble [close up] [Ph. Guy Mannes-Abbott]

I want to flag up Paul Noble’s new show at Gagosian Gallery which opened last night, Thursday, and is on until December 17th. I approached it with an unusual degree of pleasurable anticipation to see both artist and art works which in Paul come together in very particular ways. The show was buzzing, the work a triumph. I’ll write something more exact in time, but for now I urge you to go. There is an ‘old’ PN from the ’90s I think but many of these new drawings -ranging from big to absolutely huge, not least Welcome to Nobson itself which is 4 or 5 metres square- have a transformative verdancy to them. Bleak and funny dystopian cityscapes and stone strewn deserts are made to bloom here alongside monumental pink marble poops! No-one can or does do what Paul achieves to such mesmerising effect.

on watching charles fourier dance, time to sit down and read?

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Pauline Boty – butterflying?!

Reading Adam Curtis’ blog on Occupy London Stock Exchange and the broader protest, with its clips and pics of Pauline and gang dancing in the mid-Sixties, made the thought of coming across images of Charles Fourier and gang [or just Charles!] dancing at any time peculiarly enticing! Continue reading “on watching charles fourier dance, time to sit down and read?” →

on my review of mourid barghouti’s i was born there… in today’s Independent

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Screenshot 2018-03-12 10.30.56

MB by Rex Features The Independent
Horror, and happiness: Mourid Barghouti ( Rex Features )

I Was Born There, I Was Born Here,

By Mourid Barghouti, trans. Humphrey Davies

GUY MANNES-ABBOTT | FRIDAY 04 NOVEMBER 2011

 

Mourid Barghouti’s first volume of memoir, I Saw Ramallah, is a classic of the genre and a uniquely clear-eyed account of returning home after 30 years of serial expulsion. Barghouti is also the poet of displacement in general as well as its specific Palestinian form. In between the first and this second volume of memoir came Midnight & Other Poems – a first selection from many volumes of his poetry.

I Saw Ramallah wove a life of enforced absences into a moment of return to that city and the author’s home village of Deir Ghassanah in 1996, with prose of poetic concision. It ended with Barghouti recrossing an indelibly memorialised bridge over the Jordan river to collect a permit for his son Tamim, so they could return together. “He will see it. He will see me in it, and we shall ask all the questions after that.”

I Was Born… is that collection of “questions” Continue reading “on my review of mourid barghouti’s i was born there… in today’s Independent” →

response to masterplan pt one; did somebody say trees? evidently, we did…

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CAVAT Southwark piloted CAVAT in 2008, but massively undervalued the Forest at £700,000 [and held to that figure in to Summer 2011, post Phase 1 demolition and destruction of trees] a figure which only emerged after long campaigning for it and the completion of a People’s CAVAT through winter 2010-11. The latter was directly inspired by a proto Forest School talk by Jim Smith of the Forestry Commission at Balfour Street in October 2010. The People’s CAVAT valued the entire Forest at 18 million, the part valued in the document above [‘the Heygate’] at about £15 million. Urbanforesters do not make cheap points!
Download LL’s CAVAT here;
http://www.elephantandcastle.org.uk/pages/consultation_dialogue/90/elephant_c…
Download Masterplan imagery/boards [caution most of the green around the park is private, two-storey podia; so look hard at and for detail!] here;
http://www.elephantandcastle.org.uk/pages/consultation_dialogue/88/elephant_c…

NB: reposted from original ECUF site [now defunct, content archived] 3 November 2011 with permission of its author. Continue reading “response to masterplan pt one; did somebody say trees? evidently, we did…” →