OPINIONS

I am increasingly preoccupied with the absurdity of “opinions”. I can’t even have an opinion these days, even the one I have about Fry’s Turkish delight being underrated but also a totally embarrassing thing to be seen buying, without hearing a gleeful little song playing in my head: “Opinion! / Look! I’m having an opinion! / Opinions! / I’ve got ‘em, you’ve got em! / Der-der-der-der-der / *cymbal clash* / That’s opinions!” (I’m not musical enough to describe how the tune goes since I only like music that sounds like some drums clattering down a spiral staircase set to a disco beat, but suffice to say it sounds a bit like “Big Bottom” by Spinal Tap).

Having opinions is fine. Commendable, even. It’s the communicating of opinions that I am growing tired of, not the having them. While I have loads of opinions (if you wear heels higher than three inches on a night out you will have the most dreadful time and any perceived elegance will be undermined by your tragedy-mask face; a rights-based approach to international development is far better than a needs-based approach, but it will be undermined and rendered pointless if it doesn’t provide spaces for communities to solve their own needs; you should spend more time and money choosing your cleanser than your moisturiser; you can’t over-season a hard-boiled egg) I am also aware that they don’t really change anything. But telling people about your opinion – what are you trying to achieve? I am interested in facts, but the facts are not interested in YOU. Don’t “believe in calories” and prefer to just “eat natural stuff, yeah”? The calories don’t care, you’re still eating them. "Not convinced" about climate change? Unless your opinion is literally made of carbon it is irrelevant. It still snowed at Easter and there aren't any polar bears.

Twitter is dreadful (also: really good for pug pictures so I’m still on it) for this, because it basically packages up other people’s shitty useless opinions as “content” and encourages you to look at it. Maggie Thatcher died recently and it was an event notable (depressing) for how many people said something and how few people said anything I agreed with. You would think that with every possible permutation of opinions, some of it would have been good, but it had the strike rate of Keith Floyd trying to knock over a coconut shy with a balloon animal. It just makes me want to weep. It is so vulgar to tell anyone what you think, ever. Let's all just stop.

This is all I have to say about Luis Suarez biting someone:

MAKEUP

I like wearing makeup (although I also like not wearing makeup) because it is the nearest I can get to what I really want to do, which is to go to work in disguise, wearing an animal mask, or dressed as Fozzie Bear. I think it's a common misconception that it's related to attractiveness, and certainly it is a running joke among girls that men don't like makeup.

This doesn't stop every single well meaning boyfriend of the world telling us "but you don't need to wear makeup..." (implied subtext: I imagine all the other men of the world have told you that you do), "...I like you better without it" (implied subtext: I imagine this makes me unique and will make you think I am a good boyfriend).

Too cute, right? Saw-ry guys, it's adorable that every single one of you thinks that, but we know! We know you don't like it. We get it. While makeup is not unrelated to the complicated yet female-led matrix of self-esteem manipulation that pits girls against each other, it's more nuanced than that. Girls wear makeup for reasons including though by no means limited to: fun, fashion, boredom, because they feel fat, because they feel thin, to piss men off, to make their dress look more authentically 1940s, so they won't be tempted to kiss unsuitable men, because they were listening to David Bowie as they got ready, because they go into a little meditative lady-trance applying it, and to show other girls that they have more money and belongings than them. Makeup is one of the few things left in Girl World that actually runs on its own engine of girl-powered weirdnesses without really involving men.

Of course, if there was such a man who insisted that his lady wore make-up against her will because otherwise he might recoil in horror from her face, then, sure, he would be the biggest asshat of all. But this man is a straw man! I have never, nor have any of my friends, been out with a man who asked me to wear makeup, or more makeup. I have been out with a couple that professed not to like it, and many more who didn't notice or didn't think it was any of their business either way (this is correct). Do, however, note the unreliable narrator paradox. Many men think red lipstick plus nothing else equals "loads of makeup". I dunno either, maybe they think everything comes out of the factory the same colour and you can only achieve red-lipstick levels of pigment intensity by applying 47,000 layers? Don't sweat it, anyway. Just chuckle sagely to yourself, use it as an anecdote to bond with your female friends, and go back to your Plan A of doing whatever the heck you feel like. It's nothing to do with them and it's not their fault - it's not like you'd have a clue how to shave balls correctly, is it?

Still, if you need any further convincing as to how baffling and unwittingly sexist the "but you don't need to wear makeup, I like you better without it" argument sounds, 1) imagine if girls were all whining "but WHYYYYY do men even watch football, girls just don't find it attractive" and 2) have a go at reframing the sentence as "but you don't need to [continue doing this thing you profess to enjoy doing], I like you better [when you don't do it]" and see how it sits with you. Awkward!

YEARBOOK

When you're a teenager, everything seems important and everything seems like everyone else knows more about it than you do. This is good, because it means you really experience the world properly, smooshing your face into life's pie. This is particularly true with the way that teenagers and people in their early 20s experience music and fashion.

One weird skill I have that often confuses people is that I can remember what happened in each year. Most of my friends seem to experience life as a sequence of random events, occasionally saying things like "2007...was I at university then?" and I'll be like "no, you graduated in 2002" and they're all like "whatever, nerd" and I'm all like "seriously, how can you not know this stuff".

So I decided to put my mad skillz to use, and make a list of what I looked like and listened to each year from 1992 (before that I was wearing kid clothes and listening to kid music). I was going to go up to present day, but it got weirdly more embarrassing the closer to the present I got.

I think that every year when you're a teenager, you're just more-more-more-everything than you are now. Life is a race to learn about stuff and to embrace self-determination. So teenagers tend towards a defining look or outfit which usually goes with the music that you like. Each year you are a different person. And so it was with me. What I've learned is that you're never going to have a really special year when you just wear what's in the shops. Keep the experimental phases going, and your adult life will be more rewarding and exciting.

FYI: I had the most fun in 1997 and 2004. There is a correlation here I think: 2004 was a year where I worked a look and "a music policy". I made a lot of mix CDs this year. I was 23, and I suppose that was the last time I experienced the world like a teenager.

KYLIENESS

Here’s the thing: I think about Kylie Minogue four or five times a day.

Sometimes I think she might be my favourite living human, but I don’t talk about her to other people. It’s not because I don’t think they’ll enjoy listening to me talk about Kylie (although I don’t think they’ll enjoy listening to me talk about Kylie). It’s more because I have this thing where I don’t think I need to explain myself to other people, ever, and I just assume they’ll get what I’m thinking about through telepathy. I think it’s because I’m an only child. Anyway, I’m realising now that I do need to explain some things. So, for those with limited telepathic capabilities, this is what Kylie is.

Kylie is so much that my eyes well up thinking about her. She is more than one person. She is worth whole cities’ populations. She’s been everything, and everyone. She makes me think of the Highwaymen. It’s like she’s a figure that has lasted through all of time and space. In Egypt she was a pharaoh, WW2 a WREN; she stopped the Vietnam war and rode a white horse into Studio 54.

But I didn’t attend the exhibition of her clothes (seemed wrong to see the outfits lifeless and taxidermied- I like to imagine all the Kylies from the past are still out there wearing them). I didn’t buy the last record (it confused me because it seemed like an album produced by a human, and I thought if it was worth anything it will find me in the end. It hasn’t yet).

My favourite albums are Rhythm of Love (1990) and Fever (2001) but the peak of Kylie’s Kylieness is, for me, 1994-2000. Her 30th birthday is right in the middle of this, which I think is significant.

That was Did It Again, a 7/10 song from 1997 that is important not quite because of the video which spoofs/explains all the different Kylies we've seen in the last ten years (even though it gets SexKylie a bit wrong), but more because that video could have only happened at that point. She was a month or two off 30, and had reached that point where she was more than a pop star. Kylieness was a thing now, and she was a gesamtkunstwerk, a purer artist than Madonna or Bjork. She's kind of like Jeff Koons but more pleasant to have tea with.

Anyway, after that she made a record with Towa Tei about being a typeface:

Part of why I am suspicious of hippies and natural being best is because of Kylie; and I don’t mean that I don’t think she thinks organic carrots just taste better (they do) and that she buys all her groceries at Whole Foods (of course she does, so do I, whatever). It’s more that when I think of nature, and sacred femininity, and Persephone and her pomegranate seeds, what I see is Kylie. Neon lights, laser cut leather, that magnificent early 1990s take on the 1960s with matte skin, brown lips and strong eyebrows, gold hotpants, Alexander McQueen dresses, the beret from Finer Feelings...We are humans. These are our pinecones. These are our squirrels. We are on a planet! In space! And Kylie, more than anyone, understands.

TOP TRUMPS

CRUFTS

Units of alcohol I consumed in one afternoon 29.9
Food eaten No - I don't think they had any that didn't have Saluki hairs in it
What's the VIP room like The closest thing they had was in the pug section. Eight pugs languished on velveteen
Dogs petted 36
Artworks that were genuinely really good and that you wanted to talk to people about afterwards 0
Gwen Stefani No
Fundamentally ethically wrong? Yes


FRIEZE

Units of alcohol I consumed in one afternoon 12
Food eaten No - but you have, like, rillettes if you wanted to
What's the VIP room like The same as the non-VIP room, but there isn't any art and you have to buy your own drinks. They will give you a hot water bottle if you are cold. A hot water bottle!
Dogs petted 2
Artworks that were genuinely really good and that you wanted to talk to people about afterwards 6
Gwen Stefani Yes
Fundamentally ethically wrong? Sort of

But which one is best?

Frieze 8/10
Crufts 9.5/10

PICCADILLY COMMUNITY CENTRE

Piccadilly Community Centre

Until 30 July

Have you ever sat in a meeting where no one involved seemed to know why they were there? Perhaps some papers were passed round; a print out from MS Excel. A glossary of terms that all made sense individually but didn’t seem to relate to anything, least of all the Excel print out. As the meeting trundled on past its introductions and pleasantries, you began to realise with a fluttering heart and a sweaty palm that you didn’t have the slightest idea why you were there. Maybe, you suspected, neither did anyone else. But you were locked into a performance and you felt no more able than anyone else present to let the mask slip.

Perhaps you started to revel in your own dissociation, to soak up the fundamental weirdness of where you found yourself. The flipchart marker on the table becomes a creepy reminder of the equally pointless meeting that was there before you. You began to react to the abandoned boxes, everyday office ephemera and your own uncomfortable chair as though in an immersive installation.

This dissonance of normal life rings in your ears as you walk into 196a Piccadilly. The party line, that Hauser & Wirth gallery has been transformed by Christoph Büchel into a community centre, doesn’t begin to convey the scale of this. The plush old blue-chip, ex bank building of a gallery has been erased from history. In its place, we find worn linoleum, knackered bannisters, an entire new old floor, a cake stall, a working charity shop.

It’s the most balls-out fake thing I’ve ever seen – way beyond what would be required from a film set. Except it’s not fake. You can hire a room. You can come and take a yoga class. It just exists.

Normally, when – to borrow Allan Kaprow’s formulation - art blurs into everyday life, it’s one way traffic. Perhaps an art happening or performance is situated in an everyday situation or a location. It's novel, perhaps, but you probably don’t react to it so differently to any other art space; the everyday merely adds another dimension. The lines between art and life may be blurred, but they are generally still perceptible. Piccadilly Community Centre doesn’t work like that; it's not art happening in an everyday space. It's an everyday space recast as something queasy and troubling. Its closest parallel is the nausea and dissociation you actually feel in those rare moments of real life - those meetings, those grey office days - when you realise what you’re doing is really, really fucking weird.

Büchel, whose name doesn’t appear anywhere in the Centre or the website, doesn’t let his poker face slip. Even the staff are in character, as they mill around between the perpetually closed payday loan booths and the telly blaring horse racing.

Spend a little more time here and you notice the cracks: why is that Gulf War VHS resting against the TV? And, sure enough, as you roam the building, a more complex story begins to unfold. The Conservative Party displays and the abandoned shoe in the locker room suggest a story sadder than the butterfly cakes and enforced Big Society jollity. Push a few more doors, and you wonder what’s going on with the cupboard next to the DJ booth, who lives in the crawl space in the attic?

Spend an hour here, surveying the hyper-realistic tableau of raffle prizes, NOW That’s What I Call Music CDs, Korans, lost spoons and chicken bones, and something will come adrift in your brain permanently. You stagger out into Piccadilly and nothing quite seems real any more. You drift into the street, and find yourself absently stroking the railings: if that wasn’t real, is this?

A triumph of the Piccadilly Community Centre is that it manages to work perfectly as a community centre as well as art, without the joke ever once being on the hundreds of people who don’t know why it’s here, the people attending the yoga class or just nipping in to use the loo. It’s an incredibly class-conscious work, quietly angry, and all the more jarring, troubling and awkward for being entirely privately funded - with the odd awestruck art collector wandering round, outnumbered by the people here for the senior citizens IT class.

You have until 6pm Saturday 30 July to see this. Push every single door on every single floor, especially the ones marked private. Don’t forget the roof. If you don’t make it I don’t know what sort of shit you’re going to have to make up to tell your grandchildren.

http://www.piccadillycommunitycentre.org/

MATTHEW DAY JACKSON

Matthew Day Jackson

Hauser & Wirth 

Until 30 July 2011

Matthew Day Jackson’s “Everything Leads to Another” is a sprawling and expansive romp through post-war America, a longing for a time when all we were scared of was nuclear war and aliens.

Matthew Day Jackson, Axis Mundi
[photo: Peter Mallett / Hauser & Wirth]

Jackson is clearly so awed by the scale and wonder of the universe that he can’t keep still, cramming so much into his mouth at once he can barely speak. The enthusiasm is infectious, and at its most coherent, the show creates a rich and seductive universe where the corporeal bleeds into space and back again. Skulls are ordered according to the celestial rainbow, and arranged like a record collection. Bodies become one with nature – sentient rocks, faces in lightswitches, on the moon. Everything is everything, and there are ghosts in each machine.

In Study Collection VII, Jackson presents the collecting of ornaments as a way of making sense of the post war mindset, where the human body becomes at one with space and historical artefact – space, time, and the self all crashing into one. These themes are echoed and inverted in Axis Mundi, – situating the body and the home in space. The home becomes a framework for the paranoia as Life magazine is reconfigured in carpet, formica and needlepoint, comfortingly analogue. These works find joyous companionship in a duo of two documentaries entitled In Search Of…, half a beat away from note-perfect, but a perfect foil.

Matthew Day Jackson, April 10, 1964, #1 
[photo: Peter Mallett / Hauser & Wirth]

Here and there, though, you can see the seams. After the documentaries comes a wilfully brattish mock commercial for a Nuclear Testing Museum: a frat-boy burp after his sublime parodies. His Always anyone, anywhere, anything, anytime and for any reason is a full body homage to Bertelli’s Continuous Profile of Mussolini so literal it functions as little more than a hat tip, a hip reference. Although Jackson is at pains to point out in his work, “there is no past”, aesthetically the show is post-war Americana through and through; from the G-Plan sideboard to the fear of the bomb, it’s as mid-century as it gets. But the great unacknowledged presence of the internet looms large. He races giddily through Eidolon, 1970s horror films, “The Curse of Little Bastard”, rap music, ghosts, radiation – it’s an indubitably interesting list, but familiar to anyone who’s browsed Wikipedia for too long with a pot of coffee. If he’d had another room, you sense we’d have seen the Illuminati, eschaton, spontaneous human combustion, Avebury. It writes itself, because it has already been written. Fans of the meta will note that a film referencing himself as an artist (his own disappearance) looks crude in comparison to the deftness of Lindsay Seers’ Extramission, seen at the Tate Triennial in 2009.

This isn’t entirely Jackson’s fault. If there is no past and future in his work, that may be because that’s the world he finds himself in; every moment of time and space happening simultaneously. His work is caffeinated and over-stimulated because we all are. Jackson’s task now is to show us not just what we are, but what we could be.