dad (1): one of the dragons is gay

(Extract from a phone conversation with my dad last night):

Dad: - So what have you been up to?

Me: - Well, been busy as ever.

- Good, good. That's good.

- Work mainly. A bit endless. Um, can't think. Oh, at the weekend I went to London to a kind of gathering of artists and intellectuals in Hyde Park. All sorts of people there. It was great.

- What sort of gathering?

- Well, a bunch of artists and others were presenting kind of manifestos, you know, they were talking about the state of things, what art could be or should be, that sort of thing. It was in the park near the gallery.

- Oh. What sort of artists? Any painters? Would I have heard of any of them?

- Well, no, no painters as such. But some other quite famous ones you'd probably know. Contemporary artists really. Gilbert and George were there.

- Oh were they. They're a bit odd aren't they.

- Um, well, they're certainly eccentric. But they're hilarious. Maybe they run the risk of turning into parodies of themselves, you know, a bit like Kenneth Williams turned into a parody of himself. But they're very funny ... Um, who else? Yoko Ono.

- Oh yes. There's a new biography of John Lennon that's just come out.

- Is there?

- I never much liked John Lennon.

- Really? Why not? He was way the most interesting of the Beatles.

- I didn't say he wasn't interesting. I just never fancied him much.

- Well, I didn't fancy him either, dad. But he was great. One of my heroes when I was a kid. But I guess a dope-smoking anarchist hippy's never quite going to float your boat, is he?

- I don't know why, was it because he didn't go to his father's funeral or something?

- I don't know, but I think he had an unhappy family life as a kid.

- Yes, probably ... so what was Yoko Ono doing?

- Well, she showed some videos, and talked a bit, and then we danced with her.

- Oh. What, you danced with her?

- Well, we all did. There were loads of people there. She invited us to dance and so we did.

- Oh. I see.

- I love her stuff. She's fantastic. She looks amazing, really great for her age.

- Yes, although she looks a bit freeze-dried and leathery.

- Dyou think so? I don't think she's had any surgery. She's just in really good nick. She must be all of 70.

- Is she.

- Sadly in Britain it seems she's most famous for being the 'weird' wife of John Lennon, and the supposed cause of the break-up of the Beatles. I blame the Daily Mail.

- Oh. Do you.

- But she's a super interesting artist, and she's really well known in her own right - she's done some brilliant things. She's a bit conceptual, a bit zen. Very witty. Does all sorts of different kinds of art.

- Oh. I don't think I understand conceptual art. All those instructions ... She does things with ladders, doesn't she?

- Does she? I don't know. What do you mean?

- Well I read something about her and ladders.

- Really? Mmm, I'm not sure. She's certainly used ladders in her work in the past, although I don't know that they're central. What was that thing where she met John Lennon in a gallery?

- I don't know.

- Didn't she have a ladder in the gallery, and you climbed up it with a magnifying glass, and there was a tiny 'YES' written on the ceiling ... Or was it that one with nails and hair, you climbed a ladder with a nail with a piece of hair wrapped round it and hit it into a frame on the ceiling, and the painting was finished once you could only see hair.

- Oh god.

- Something like that. Maybe the hair thing didn't have a ladder ...

- Oh well.

- Okay, who else was there? Mmm. Maybe you've heard of Marina Abramovic? She's really well known, you know, the performance artist. I think she's from what was Yugoslavia.

- I'm not sure. Rings a bell.

- Oh I know who you'd know: Eric Hobsbawn, the historian. Amazing old bloke. He's in his nineties and sharp as a button. A bit frail physically, but not intellectually. He was brilliant.

- He's a communist.

- Well, yes, he is, you're right; but that's alright isn't it, no reason to write him off surely.

- Like John Berger.

- I thought you'd like that book. And Berger's hardly some hard-line Stalinist. He's got a huge heart.

- I didn't understand that book. Something about a pocket.

- Oh well. Okay, okay. Um, who else was there? Partly I went to support some friends who were doing something.

- What, that lot you work with? The Lonely Twins?

- Lone Twin. No no, it was a different lot, a couple of friends in a group called SpRoUt.

- Sprout?

- Oh I know, there was that guy Owen or Evan, the economist who's on the telly. You know, the gay guy on the news, he's the economics reporter. You know who I mean - he's on 'Dragon's Den'.

- What, one of the dragons is gay? Which one is he?

- No no, he's the presenter, he's the one who interviews the people who pitch things to the dragons.

- Oh. No, I don't know.

- Well, he was there in the audience. Doesn't matter ... I tell you what, dad, London's dead weird after Devon, you bump into all sorts of people. It's quite surreal. I met Ian Wright in a shop.

- What, Ian Wright? Wrighty?

- Yes.

- Oh he's a nice bloke. He got into trouble recently for saying something or other about diving in the box.

- Did he?

- Yes, he was on telly. Something about Drogba. He said, well you'd do the same in his shoes, and he got into trouble for it.

- Oh, I didn't hear about that. Yes, he seemed nice ... I said hello.

- Good. Good. So ... any news on the job front?

the body is a scar of the mind

The lord chisels still,
so don't leave your bench for long
(Gilbert & George, 'The Laws of the Sculptors', no. 4, 1969).



I spent the weekend in London at a 2-day Manifesto Marathon event at the Serpentine Gallery. Over 50 presentations, curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, were given in Frank Gehry's agora-like pavilion outside the gallery in Hyde Park. Despite the cold in this glass-roofed wind tunnel, which by late on Sunday had turned the event into a muffled scarf'n'gloves durational epic, there were some very stimulating contributions and interventions.

Highlights for me, in no particular order, included: Nicolas Bourriaud, talking about the polyglot 'time-specific flightlines' of an 'alter-modernity'; Gilbert & George ('The Laws of Sculptors: Ten Commandments for Ourselves'), G&G giving the perfect economical performance of G&G; Marina Abramovic ('An Artist's Life'), conducted by Abramovic as a kind of reiterative chorale for a large group; Agnès Varda, in full costume as a dancing potato; a hilariously provocative Adam Pendleton, with an Amire Baraka inflected prowl called 'Black Dada' that included the phrases: 'aah, the white people; we ate you'; and the curiously impressive sneer, 'shalalalalala, man: fuck you, motherfuckers'.

My friends in SpRoUt, with an elegantly formal choreography of placards and beautifully crafted texts about multiplicity, with occasional banjo accompaniment; Charles Jencks & Tino Sehgal, both of whom separately interrogated the very notion of the manifesto in the 21st century - Jencks in particular with great wit in terms of its impossibility today without irony, and the need for a 'critical modernism' within which anger, laughter and serenity are conjoined; Jimmie Durham ('for the first time in history, we now have the chance & responsibility to meet each other' - the stillness of his gaze over his shoulder as a trio of birds chirruped past); Jonas Mekas, showing exquisite slides of strips of film, the projector's carousel miked up as hypnotic minimalist soundtrack.

The architect Claude Parent, playfully/seriously proposing a new architecture for Paris and London after their disappearance beneath the flood waters; Ben Vautier, staging a large number of Fluxus-related scores; a collaborator of Rem Koolhaas whose name I missed, calling for a renaissance of functionality and simplicity, 'a new type of modernism' in the face of the 'icon-excess' of cities such as Dubai, its skyline a copy-filled 'representation of cultural greed'.

The ever present Gustav Metzger, apparently immune to 'auto-destruction' himself, contextualising this current event through slides of earlier manifestos from the 20th-century avant garde, as part of what Obrist characterised as 'an urgent resistance to forgetting'; Vivienne Westwood, who looked fantastic in haughty Elisabeth Ist mode, although she rather drifted on a bit in her looong text proposing a notion of a trans-historical 'objective' self; Mark Wallinger, with an extremely funny and astute text, somewhat compromised by its being filtered through his deeply uneasy monotonal reading; as well as Richard Wentworth ('Da Do Ron Ron'), Karl Homqvist (You Blew Up My House'), Mark Titchner, Jean-Jacques-Lebel, and the extraordinarily intellectually energised 91-year-old historian Eric Hobsbawn.

Yoko Ono was a large part of my reason for being there - she's one of the great heroes - and in the end she stole the show. It would be all too easy to dismiss her intervention as naively idealistic - and to parody it cynically - but as always her proposition was deceptive in its apparent simplicity. It generated challenging thoughts in terms of the nature of resistances to the event of encounter; in particular here her invitational pedagogy of the imagination hovered around economies of the social/relational. I take her play-fulness seriously, for she creates 'restless spaces' (to borrow Jane Rendell's words), spaces that ask questions of our relations with each other and with the world, and gesture at possible futures. In this context in London, her 'onochord' involved us learning a simple morse-like call & response of torches flashing the words 'I love you', the 'onochord' video, a brief video of details within a photograph of her with John Lennon, then an invitation to a free-for-all dance with Yoko, immediately met by 50 or so running jumping people (including me). Music suddenly pumping, with a tiny buoyant Yoko, huge grin on her face, going for it in the middle of the crowd. A frenzy of camera flashes and bobbing bodies. In a matter of minutes, she transformed the formal separations inscribed in the chilly thorougfare of Gehry's structure into a little vortex of energy, fleeting encounters and exchanges. Her beautiful groove with Jonas Mekas. She took people's hands and danced with them. Some people hugged her in the melee. At one point she took my hand and looked me square in the eye. I couldn't stop grinning. Everyone was grinning. And that was it; she was off into the night, in her top-hat and white scarf, shades still perched on the end of her nose, leaving us with the words: 'The body is a scar of the mind'. Blimey. Now that's enough of a manifesto for me to be going on with ...

*****

On the way back to the train station on Sunday, I popped in to a Shell garage shop on the Bayswater Road, looking for some short-term sugary fuel for my flagging scar of the mind - and bumped into Ian Wright, classy ex-football player and impassioned, one-eyed TV pundit. You know, Wrighty: Sean's dad. In worryingly oafish fashion, and for reasons that remain mysterious and probably not worth disinterring, I said with a little too much enthusiasm: 'Ian Wright! You're a legend, man!' (I very nearly said 'leg end', like I used to say to my brother as a kid in mock football commentaries when we knocked a ball around; but at least I managed to edit that one). Ian laughed and waved cheerily as he headed out the door to his glimmering silver BMW at a jog, patting his pockets for his keys. All you need on a Sunday, jesus, a nutter down the garage. What was I thinking? I blame it on the combination of declarative manifesto overload, cold bones, Mars bar and surprise. And maybe a slightly misplaced re-emergence of Yoko's universal love, and of her suggestion that we 'keep sending the message / to the end of the year / and beyond':

from ships
from the top of the mountains
from buildings
using whole buildings
in town squares
from the sky
to the sky
(Yoko Ono, 'onochord', 20o8).

As he drove off, Wrighty paused for moment in the forecourt to flash his headlights in the familiar rhythm. I - love - you, he signalled. Then he was gone in a silvery blur.

*****

Photographs (from top): Gilbert and George; the original book version of Vivienne Westwood's manifesto; bouncers outside the Gehry pavilion, Mark Titchner in the background; Marina Abramovic and collaborators; one of the SpRoUts (Hannah); Adam Pendleton, with Jean-Jacques Lebel seated in the background; Ben Vautier; Mark Titchner; part of the glass roof in the Gehry pavilion; Yoko Ono x 3; one of the Sams from SpRoUt; Tracey Emin in the original book version of Vivienne Westwood's manifesto. All photos © David Williams