Weekend

by Alex Hetherington, 4 Feb 2008

We sent the launch edition of the Village Voice to the printer, a proof should be back in this week, we report to the group tomorrow and should have all the pages to show them. I’m looking forward to reactions to the Jim Colquhoun text and responses for our call to action. I’m looking forward to what this might mean for us, for them. It’s like waiting for the sky, slow motion. Meanwhile I went to see the Camilla Løw show, Straight Lines, at the DCA. Its such an achingly self-conscious show, fragments of seriality, it is so narrow, I couldn’t breathe, the sculptures looked like they had been manufactured by a machine, given instructions to play out all the possibilities of a limited palette of colors, materials, shapes and angles. Yet its brittle desolate sensibility reveals a kind of wanting, best embodied by a crumpled metal white form leaning against the long wall in the gallery. This motion was its only revealing human moment among all the mobiles, stacks, neon colors, empty, in-between spaces. I kinda thought of Richard Prince’s car hoods in this piece, it might be a reference to her time living in San Francisco, living in America. Two colourful prints are shown in a small annex, I checked the ‘for-sale’ print bins and these seemed to be by Martin Boyce, is this true? Or have they be wrongly attributed to another Modernist economist?

Anyway Straight Lines articulates another set of experiences with the built environment, that might find a voice with our encounter with these High Rise buildings. It might be time to investigate their materials.

This week if I get paid then I am ordering a pair of too short black polyester Comme des Garçons trousers for the performance of House/Lights. It should cheer me up because…

I just finished reading The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, which had me awe-struck and open-mouthed for large chunks of its meaty yet serene text. Its fluid, comprehensive, coherent tone is in dramatic contrast to its killer accusations, its full and reasoned arguments spilling venom over the disaster capitalism complex that is embodied by the Chicago School Capitalist clean-slate, wealth accumulations in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, the Falklands, China, the Asian Tigers, Russia, etc. I was particularly interested by her discussions on gated communities, Red Zones and Green Zones, the emergence of districts of wealth and private security, the hollowed out government passing all of its responsibilities into private hands.

Back at the High Rises and the House tomorrow; I like what Janie is doing with gold. I will return to Olga’s House of Shame tomorrow and all the found sound, the noise.