I’ve been to few exhibitions where Rachael Whiteread’s work was on show, and I’ve always felt she stands out from the run of the mill YBAs. She expresses an intellectual rigour that is missing from the showmen of the group.
Her work seems not to be about the object, but about the spaces inbetween.
Coming up from the beach this morning, I noticed the plant in the picture. The sun was so bright, I didn’t notice the plant itself at first, but the structure and the shapes inbetween. It looks quite like a scientist’s model of a carbon based nano structure.
I felt that all the spaces between the spines would happily accept a pingpong ball.
It’s a kind if convergence with science and art – the mega and the nano exploring the same thing. And so it should be. Art and science should work together. All the greatest scientific insights have come from artistic moments.
I’ve just been going through the 2000 or so channels available on European satelite tv.
So much available and so little to watch. Every few stations appear to be earnest folk calling on us all to repent and turn to whatever branch of religion they are selling.
They split into two types. The lean and hungry, with swivelling, guilty eyes. They must have done something terrible in their own eyes at sometime and now feel qualified to demand we all join them and help them atone for their pasts.
The other sort look fat and prosperous. These are the religious businessmen who are in it for the career prospects and the self-glorification of being on tv.
The one thing that unites these two types is that they are voices in the wilderness of dubbed baywatch repeats, shopping channels and recycled pop videos.
Sweet! Yes, that’s me – about six years old with very cold knees. I started boarding at the age of 5! This is Eddie Rosser-Rees who ran Drayton’s School in Warminster – His wife was the headmistress.
I distinctly remember that the “back to school” signs didn’t go up in the shops until about two weeks before the end of the holidays when I was young. When the signs went up, my heart would sink and the remainder of the holidays would be tainted with the oncoming threat of school and the end of freedom.
This may have been heightened by my attending boarding school which, in the grand scheme of things, wasn’t too bad when it wasn’t my turn to take the crap.
We didn’t go on holiday. Going home was special enough. Summer holidays were endless days of making and building and cycling and grubbing around in hedgerows, studying wildlife and generally hanging out and remembering what family life should be about.
Then the signs went up in shops and the countdown would begin.
So why do W H Smiths now put their “back to school” signs up the moment the summer holidays have begun – before most people have even left for Spain or the damp caravan in Porthcawl? Don’t they know the torture they are inflicting on the children of the nation, or do children who live at home not feel the same way as I did then?
My holidays were never the same as the local kids. I’d always have a few days when I’d be hanging around on my own while the rest of the world seemed to have gone back to a school routine. It could sometimes feel like I was special, allowed out when others weren’t, but then I’d see the “back to school” signs in the shops and I’d shrink into myself, wondering if some truancy officer might catch me and not believe my story and lock me up in some awful place for children that don’t go back to school when they’re told to.
