I rather like those histories of everyday things – ‘Latitude’, the story of spice, the history of salt. Exhibitions of locks and keys from the middle ages, or the furniture exhibitions at the Geffrye Museum, fascinate me.

So an exhibition of desks is a must! As a writer I spend most of each day at one, and it isn’t beautiful.

When I daydream, I imagine myself sitting at a fine Louis XIV desk with curvy gilt legs, or a lovely Restoration bureau…

“8 Desks” is a bit more modern but equally stylish. Jean Prouvé and Jean Royère’s almost minimalist, strikingly modern desks represent the practical, functional side of the modern style. (We’ve already seen Jean Prouvé’s architecture in London recently – here’s another chance to catch up with this intriguing designer.) Mass production techniques enabled the French designers to create cheap, useful furniture while still achieving beauty, albeit a rather austere beauty. Metal and formica create slick, shiny surfaces and defined, geometrical shapes.

If you don’t go for modernist, though, you can have your desks more curvy, and if you don’t like formica, wood provides a warmer, less clinical feel. George Nakashima, for instance, seems to have been influenced by arts-and-crafts style or perhaps the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. This American designer creates a more sensual work, using the feel and look of natural wood. Charlotte Perriand, too, uses wood and traditional joinery techniques to make desks you want to caress rather than abuse.

Would you ever have believed a desk could be so interesting?

If your answer is ‘no’ and I haven’t managed to convince you, forget it.

But if you’re a design nerd, or a furniture nerd, or you’d just like to see something a bit unusual, go and take a look at these desks when the exhibition opens up in January.

When: 15 Janury – 14 March 2009, 10-6 Mon-Fri and 11-1 Saturdays

Where: Sebastian + Barquet London, 19 Bruton Place, W1

How much: free

Photo credit: Jean Prouvé,“Standard” Desk and Chair, 1943

Courtesy Sebastian + Barquet London

Post from: The London Traveler

This intriguing art sale features postcards which have been painted or decorated by numerous artists, some well known (Grayson Perry, Tracy Emin,  Paula Rego and Anish Kapoor feature this year) and some less so. Musicians and fashion designers have also created some of the cards. There are 2,700 works available this year.Britart, photography, printing, there’s a huge selection of different styles and media.

You pay £40 and you take your choice. But you don’t actually know who painted which card, so it’s a bit of a lucky dip (though with some element of skill involved).  So you might end up with a masterpiece worth several thousand, or you might end up with a postcard sized picture that you really like… hey, that’s not a bad result!

Proceeds go to the RCA’s bursary fund to help support impecunious students.

But you must register as a buyer on the RCA site by 19th November, so hurry up if you want to bid!

Where: Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore (South Kensington tube)

When: exhibition, 14 – 21 November, 11-6 (till 8 on the 20th): sale, Saturday 22 November, from 8 am

Post from: The London Traveler

I still remember the first time I saw a really great tapestry. It was the central panel of the Lady and the Unicorn series in the Musee de Cluny, in Paris, and I must have stood in front of it for half an hour, looking at the tiny flowers in the borders, each petal and leaf neatly delineated – an amazing profusion of detail.

But generally, my generation saw tapestry as something like needlepoint – something for little old ladies, something hanging in draughty old castles or at the back of ‘Ye Olde Tea Shoppe’. Tapestry was something from a world long past.

Well, now it’s  being brought up to date. Like knitting, tapestry is being reclaimed for street cred.

An exhibition  at The Dairy features tapestries designed by artists such as Gavin Turk, Grayson Perry and Gary Hulme, as well as leading Pop artist Peter Blake.

I was immediately attracted by Fred Tomaselli’s ‘After migrant fruit thugs’, a tapestry that takes the medieval tradition of foliage borders, and places two gaily coloured birds on a bough. It’s a modern spin on the old themes.

Also adapting the floral theme is ‘The bugs and the lovers’ by Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh. But this delicate tapestry, with its watercolour-like effects, diffused fields of colour, and pastel tones, has a very different effect from Tomaselli’s striking work. Bugs and butterflies are caught in almost textbook accuracy while the huge, undefined flowers remain inscrutable. It has a curious beauty.

Other tapestries are far more revolutionary. Kara Walker’s ‘A warm summer evening in 1863′ shows the black figure of a hanging woman – hanging from a noose, or perhaps from her pigtail; there’s a big black bow on the rope – in front of a crowd scene in grey and white. Everything is monochrome, and we’re not quite sure what we’re seeing. A suicide? A lynching? It’s a disturbing work, all the more disturbing because of its restrained colour palette, and the beauty of the craftwork.

Grayson Perry’s ‘Vote Alan Measles for God’ on the other hand  is a loud, exuberant work, like a twisted kilim – therather amorphous shape of teddy bear Alan Measles, dressed in suicide belt and brandishing a machine gun, shares the tapestry with tiny details- a mullah in a window, an explosion, crucifixes, oil derricks, a view of the Pentagon. Again, it picks up on that medieval tradition of filling in the borders of the tapestry, but it fills them up with terrorism and militarism, rather than flowers and birds.

But the tapestry that really impressed me was Gavin Turk’s Mappa del Mundo.  Turk collected litter from the street – Coke cans, crisp packets, tins of Fosters – and created out of it a huge map of the world. It’s colourful, but it’s difficult to work out whether we should be inspired by the recycling of rubbish into art, or depressed at the wastefulness allegorised here – a world that has become defined by its trash. And moving on from that, the litter-map isn’t the end product – it’s been copied in tapestry, so that we are at one remove from the original.

I don’t think I can afford this on my wall at home, unfortunately. But I would love it!

Exhibition: Demons, yarns and tales

where: The Dairy, 7 Wakefield Street WC1 (Russell Square tube)

when:  11am–6pm Mon–Fri, 12–6pm Weekends, till November 22

How much: free

Photo credit: courtesy Banners of Persuasion

Post from: The London Traveler

Half way along Whitehall stands the Banqueting House - the last remnant of Whitehall Palace.

The palace of Whitehall had grown up during the Middle Ages as a straggling, rather random collection of buildings. Into this Gothic and Tudor muddle, Inigo Jones placed a monument of classical reason – it must have come as a shock,  a building more Italian than English, clashing with everything around it.

Of course  later on, classical style became pretty common in London – Nash’s terraces, Lutyens’s neo-imperial, every other bank and insurance company using pediments and colonnades. But this was pretty much the first classical building of any prominence in the city.

James I commissioned it, and he must have been looking for a touch of ‘modern’ style.  He got a masterpiece.

Outside,  the building is a triumph of symmetry – none of the quirkiness of native Jacobean building. Jones uses alternating round and triangular pediments to set up a fine rhythm, and the whole facade feels light and elegant.

It’s the interior though that is the reason I’d put the Banqueting House on my London top ten list. It was Charles I, James’s son, who commissioned the ceiling,  showing his father’s apotheosis. And it was commissioned not from an English painter, but from the Flemish baroque painter, Peter Paul Rubens – probably the wealthiest and best known painter in the Europe of his day.

This was very different from anything that had been painted in England before. If you look for instance at the allegorical portraits of Elizabeth I, you can see they’re really just portraits with some extra scenery. This is completely different – it’s an entire panorama in which the figure of James is almost lost. (I think you can understand how Parliamentarians and Puritans, looking at this, would have been amazed and disturbed by this imperialist depiction of the divine nature, not just the divine right, of kings!)

If you’re interested,  you can make a little visit to the National Gallery afterwards, to see the preparatory sketch Rubens made for a similar ceiling in the Duke of Buckingham’s house.

Why ‘Banqueting House’? Well, the Stuart court was addicted to masques – small dramas  which were acted by members of the court, with songs and dances, and usually a final chorus praising the King or one of the royal family. Inigo Jones provided the scenery for many of these, working with his friend, the dramatist Ben Jonson. The Banqueting House was a place for staging masques and other court events – a sort of cross between a dining room and a theatre. It opened in 1622 with the Masque of Augurs.

The great irony of the Banqueting House is that it was built as a piece of propaganda for the Stuart dynasty. Yet it was from one of the windows of the upper storey that King Charles I stepped out on to the scaffold in 1649.

Where: Whitehall

When: 10-5 Mon-Sat 

How much:  £4.50 (£3.50 concessions and £2.25 children)

Photo credit: Matt Brown on flickr 

Post from: The London Traveler

The Islington branch is in that little bit of Essex Road that hasn’t been complete ly gentrified yet. You find lovely antiques, but you can also find a solid wood Victorian kitchen table like the one in my grandad’s kitchen for ten or fifteen quid  – if you’re lucky.

Auctions are on Mondays. That gives you Friday and the weekend to look at the lots. A viewing here is always fun – it’s like a fantastic junk shop, cluttered and higgledy-piggledy, with clocks, jewellery, trinkets on the top of the tables, dressers and sideboards, tables piled on tables and wardrobes forming narrow alleys of wood. You’ll find something – if you look hard enough –   indeed, it’s hard not to believe that if you look around long enough , you’ll find the manuscript copy of Hamlet, or perhaps the way into Narnia.

And the auctions seem to be crammed in among all the furniture. It’s a much more informal atmosphere than Sotheby’s – sometimes it seems slightly mad, if there’s a stuffed tiger glaring at the auctioneer or one of the assistants pulls the wrong lot out  by mistake.

Definitely the  place for a bit of weekend fun. And when you’re finished, there are plenty of good places nearby to get a cup of coffee or a spot of lunch.

Besides, you could  always combine your viewing with a little shopping in the Angel antiques market, if you’re down here on Saturday morning.

Where: 53 Essex Road, Islington (Angel tube)

Post from: The London Traveler

We’ve all seen the comic cuts where someone sneezes or scratches his nose and ends up buying a Van Gogh he can’t pay for as the auctioneer bangs his gavel…

Don’t worry.  It’s not going to happen to you. Not at Sotheby’s, anyway – you have to  register, and use a numbered paddle to bid. So you can watch the action in the auction room without wondering if you’re going to end up with a few million quid’s worth of Post-Impressionist and no money to pay for it.

So you can settle down, and watch what’s going on. You’ll see bidders raising their paddles – you’ll also see the auctioneer taking telephone bids, and sometimes written bids have also been registered. And just occasionally you’ll see the auctioneer take a  bid ‘off the wall’.  This is real brinkmanship – the work being sold hasn’t reached its reserve price and the auctioneer is just trying to nudge it up past the reserve.

It’s free theatre. At least, it is if all the buyers aren’t written bids. Then it can get a bit unreal.  None the less, if there’s a really expensive piece up for sale, you can feel the tension in the room – suddenly, it goes silent, and you could cut the air with a knife.

While Sotheby’s is best known for its sales of art, it handles all kinds of auctions – wine, classic cars, furniture, even jewellery and watches. And at some of these auctions, the average price is way below the multimillion pound Van Goghs and Monets – just a few thousand pounds could secure many of the items.

Look up auctions on the Sotheby’s website (above). Art fans may also be interested in going to see one of the viewings – it’s basically a free art gallery! But of course, you’ll need to be quick off the mark, because the viewings only take a few days – once the auction’s over, the brown paper and string will be coming out and off all the paintings go…

Photo credit: Bryan Gosline on flickr

behind the scenes

Where: 34 New Bond Street  (Green Park or Bond Street tube stations)

Post from: The London Traveler

Every summer sees a new pavilion built at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens. This summer sees a work by Frank Gehry, architect of the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.

The pavilion is made half of wood, half of timber. Though it rests on four giant steel supports, it’s the wood and glass you notice – the organic weight of the one, the transparency of the other.

Gehry apparently based the design on military catapults drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, and there’s something quite spiky about the way the wooden struts bristle down the back of the pavilion.

But there’s also something rather interestingly random about the way the elements are arranged, like a giant game of spillikins. It seems as if Gehy has just thrown the wooden beams up in the air – it’s a miracle they stay up at all. It’s all tilt and slide and twist and skew, a fantastic game being played with the architectural elements.

It should be fun.

When: July 20 to October 19

Where: Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens

Photo of the pavilion under construction by Peter Guthrie on flickr

Post from: The London Traveler

Believe it or not, London has one of the world’s best collections of Italian Futurist art. Like all the best museums and galleries, the Estorick Collection started as one man’s obsession – American writer Eric Estorick discovered Futurism during his honeymoon in Switzerland, and soon became a major collector.

The Futurists were a bunch of artists who were excited by the potential of modern machinery and technology. (To their discredit, some of them were also excited by the apparently modernist appeal of Fascism.)

Some of the earliest Futurist art is brash, energetic and powerful.   But my favourite works in the exhibition come from a later date, when  individual artists had developed their different styles. Marino Marini became obsessed with the figures of horses and riders (a bit like Elizabeth Frink, who also found the horse-and-rider combination inspiring). His bronze ‘quadriga’, four horses of immense energy but captured in a very frontal, almost formal way, takes the power of Futurism to its extreme – while forsaking the world of machinery for the natural world.

Saddest, perhaps, are the delicate paintings of Zoran Music, a Slovene Italian who was interned in Dachau during the Second World War. His landscapes too feature horses, but they are turned away from us, staring into the misty grey background.

Where: 39a Canonbury Square, N1 (nearest station: Highbury and Islington).

 When: weekdays (not Mon/Tues) 1000-1800 (1000-1700 on Sundays).

 How much: £3.50 (concessions £2.50; children and NUS cardholders free)

Photo  credit: Marshall Astor on flickr. Of course, this isnt’ the ‘real’ Futurists –  it’s the poster for a pub gig a few years back. But I thought it was fun.

Post from: The London Traveler

One of the London Festival of Architecture’s most interesting exhibitions is a show at Southwark gallery, charting the unvisited reaches of the Thames Estuary.

As you head out of London along the Thames, the glitzy office blocks and shiny residential developments disappear. Instead, there are sheds, warehouses, the strange concrete shapes of water towers, chimneys, power stations and cargo terminals. And mile upon mile of gloomy marshland.

It’s a landscape that looks its best with grey skies – moody and unloved. A landscape where history has come and gone, leaving only stumps of old forts in its wake.

This exhibitions puts photos by Frank Watson together with sounds by Dave Lawrence and spoken word pieces by Germander Speedwell, who has an ear for the strange and archaic names of the area -

Long Reach to Oaze Deep
Halfway Road to Middle Ground
Small Gains, Great Lines
The tide turns, the Lower Hope rises.

If you can’t get to the gallery, there’s a video of some of the work – very weird and slightly sinister. And a nice video piece in the Guardian, too, with a review of another exhibition I found fascinating, the one on flooded London that I blogged a while back.

Where: Novas Contemporary Urban Centre, 73-81 Southwark Bridge Road, SE1 (nearest tube – Borough or London Bridge)

When: Mon-Sat 10-6, till 20th July

Photograph courtesy of and copyright Frank Watson

Post from: The London Traveler

LT: When did you first encounter the Routemaster bus? How far back does your fascination with it go?

RO: I first saw the Routemaster on TV at my parents’ house in Staufen, on the edge of the Black Forest. I was 12 or 13 years old.

LT: How did the project for Last Stop get started?

RO: I’m a founding member of photodebut, which was set up in 2002 as a collective for emerging photographers. At photodebut I became friends with Maxine Beuret and jet. it was at one of our monthly photodebut get togethers (at the time at the agency in Charlotte Road, east London) Maxine informed us that the routemasters were going to be phased out by the end of 2005. Jet, Max and myself then realised that we shared a strong common interest for the routemaster, so we decided to create a tribute of this london icon. We split the project into three. Maxine concentrated on still life photography of the exterior and interior design elements of the routemaster, jet documented the drivers and conductors at the 19 and 38 depots (in Hackney and Battersea), and I photographed en route (passengers, drivers, conductors) and still life imagery of the interior and exterior design elements.

From the start I had the idea of a book in my mind. I had a pretty clear idea how i wanted the book to look and be. Then I researched some routemaster photography books that were to date available. I found out that there were quite few out there, however none in the form I felt I wanted to create.

Due to restricted time, Maxine unfortunately had to end her involvement as she was also shooting her own personal project ‘the departure of the slam door trains’. jet and I continued until the last day of the rm, 9th december 2005. jet was happy with the last stop website which we created together with emotional designers. in 2005 www.routemasters.co.uk was archived by the British Library in the interest of national heritage. With jet’s blessing i went the last mile alone and created the Last Stop book and exhibition (which is currently on show at London Transport Museum until 26th July). Once the project was completed i started to approach potential publishers, exhibition spaces (galleries & museums) and sponsors. London Transport Museum provided me with the home for Last Stop. The museum has been very supportive of the project. We worked well together on the marketing and PR, and the museum provided the exhibition space for free and also organised various routemaster related events (see www.ltmuseum.co.uk) to support the exhibition and book.

LT: I really liked the depot pictures. What sort of response did you get from drivers and conductors?

RO: The main body of work of drivers and conductors in the depot were photographed by jet. Again with jet’s blessing, i was happy that we also could show some of her depot pictures in the book.

The responses were great. We spent several days and weeks in the Hackney and Battersea depots. We created a relationship with the staff who I think were happy and proud to be part of Last Stop, which really was a labour of love project to us.

LT: Did you get a feel for how drivers, conductors and passengers viewed the change to the new buses?

RO: I felt the overall view was that most drivers and conductors really loved the routemasters and their job on them. There was a strong sense of social togetherness that I could feel amongst the drivers and conductors. Having spent 18 months on route I could witness the abuse and joy they were exposed to, especially the conductors. I obtained the sense that many of the passengers (especially the elderly, women and visitors) felt quite safe on the routemasters, because there was a conductor on board.

LT: What other London icons appeal to you?

RO: The people at the gutterslut parties, the architecture of the old East End, the people that run the last family businesses of the East End, the red phone boxes.

LT: Many thanks Ralf! I hope to see more of your photos – we both share a love of the old East End.

Photo credit: ‘Hopping off’ copyright Ralf Obergfell

Post from: The London Traveler