I know Rob indirectly and hope to be able to meet up with him when I’m in London over Christmas. Ancient and Modern is still going, by the way, it will be interesting to get Rob’s take on how things have gone since they opened and what he sees for the future of independent galleries.

Rob Tufnell and his business partner, Bruce Haines, are taking the ultimate risk. Tomorrow they will open a new gallery near Old Street, called Ancient and Modern. For the present, the world economy is healthy, art sales buoyed up by swaths of new collectors enriched by hedge-fund bonuses. But can a new gallery like this survive?

The gallery’s first show, with work by artists including Simon Periton and Francis Upritchard, is based on the idea of the memento mori. Tufnell says: “We are opening with a sort of funeral; we’re aware it might all go wrong … But I can’t see an art market crash happening. After 9/11, everyone assumed the market was over in New York, but it wasn’t; it’s too big.” He and Haines have scraped together money by saving their salaries and remortgaging; Haines still works part-time as a curator at Camden Arts Centre in north London, whereas Tufnell threw in his job as a curator at Turner Contemporary in Margate. Nor does he have any plans to return to subsidised galleries: the commercial sector offers more freedom, he thinks, to work closely and creatively with artists.

“At the end of three years we’ll either be ready to get a bigger space or I’ll get a job at Costa Coffee,” he says. “In the public sector, in the end you just exclude challenging practice. In my mind, the publicly funded arts are supposed to support what the market cannot, but apparently they cannot support an avant garde. You are competing with shopping centres, which is what [subsidised] art galleries increasingly resemble. None of this is why I went into art.

“I’m probably being very naive with the idea that if you put on interesting exhibitions you will end up self-funding. But for us this is, in the end, about independence, not about making money.”*

* http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2006/oct/07/arts.artsnews1

St Richards Church of England Ham

Suburbia, for me a quasi-magical set of places. There are obviously many suburbias, I grew up in one of them, and I’ve lived in a few others, and I know there are many more out there somewhere. But I would never want to visit them on purpose. They are places you have to be, only if you have to be there – you would never just visit them on their own account, perhaps? Very often they are not even places you pass through, they’re spurs off the main roads, usually not shortcuts to anywhere else, they occupy tracts of land between the major areas, the areas with a meaning, filling in gaps. They are ringed by mini-roundabouts, protected by sleeping policemen, cul-de-sacs.

The cul-de-sac! Unless you lived in one they were off-limits. You wouldn’t enter a cul-de-sac without a definite intent, and destination (or were lost?). There was one just around the corner from the house where I grew up, I walked past it every day I went to primary and then junior school, but I have never been into it. I didn’t fantasize about it, but it remains to this day a blank place.

And what of wanderings about suburbia, the endless roads, the sameness punctuated by sudden change, the places where I was lost for a while, but then unexpectedly—and with so much relief—found the connecting path through to a known area. How terribly nostalgic it all is. It feels so dangerous, this reverie, so thoughtless. What does it mean to dwell on and in these places?

Model of “The Opus” Building, Dubai, UEA (under construction)

Installation view of Hadid’s furniture and lighting

Two of Keiller’s films are being shown that afternoon, “London” at 1pm and “Robinson in Space” at 3pm. I have both these on DVD so I won’t bother going to see them, but I would heartily recommend them to everyone.

The DVD cover

Then at 6pm the man himself is presenting a lecture about his work.

Patrick was one of my tutors while I was doing Fine Art BA at Middlesex University in 1993 – he was always very patient and helpful although I can’t have been the easiest student to tutor.

I’ve always read his films as being ruminations on the state of being of a traveller in a city as expressed through the disjointed imagery. “London” especially brings out the relations between these places and the experience of them physically or mentally, through the traveller’s day-to-day, hour-to-hour existence walking, or being propelled through them. The films also have an eye to their own structure, they make you somewhat aware of the breaks, the editing process and it’s creation of a sequence of images which are interpreted as a narrative space (or otherwise?).

Wonderful, funny and poignant films. I’m looking forward to seeing Patrick again after all this time, and to hear what his future works will be.

* These events are in parallel with the “Global Cities” exhibition currently on display in the Turbine Hall, which in itself is an interesting presentation of factoids about and proposals for world cities, intelligently combined with artworks in many cases providing the focused view of the city which is lacking from the charts and statistics plastered across the installation.

Firstly, and most importantly from a personal point of view, I’ll be seeing Shi, my fiancée again after a five-week gap. I’ll also be meeting her family for the first time.

Secondly, I’ll be being a tourist, seeing all those things which a tourist mustn’t miss when in China (or at least as many as we can reach comfortably from Beijing in the time available). That includes all the usual suspects, the Forbidden City, Tian’anmen Square, the Great Wall, the terracotta soldiers, etc.

And finally, I’ll be getting a feel for the art scene in China. This is something that I’ve only recently been introduced to, mainly through Shi, and the whole situation really interests me, both formally and theoretically.

When I look at Chinese art, I keep having to remind myself that these artists come from what may be a completely ‘other’ environment to mine – their work is based on an alternative set of assumptions. This leaves me at a loss as to how to respond to the works, much less how to read them, indeed it leads me to begin to reassess the knowledge (and the value of that knowledge) that I rely on unconsciously when I encounter “Western” art.

One could also ask whether applying Western theory and historical knowledge to this culture add anything to an engagement with their art? I already feel a dangerous(?) tendency to dismiss some of what I’m seeing of Chinese art as naïve, in that its approach seems so old-fashioned when looked at from a Western viewpoint. If I was to see a Western artist make similar work, I would read it as ironic or meaningless, perhaps, but in this context I have to almost scour away my own knowledge and try and approach this art from a completely new direction, one for which I am still lacking the necessary background.

I also worry that this may be me exoticising the situation somewhat, looking at my ‘unknown’ and reading my fantasies into it. Without spending more time with the artists and works I will not be able to know the answer to that question. Here’s to a great trip!