Connections (Days 85 and 86)

Lucy in the Sky

Two days where relatively little done on the book and yet filled with surrounding stuff which feels of the same spirit, worthwhile and somehow connected.

Day 85 was just slow to start, had a run when the sun showed up mid-morning for a while and got caught up with other stuff – sorting out a trip to Ireland next week, writing to an old friend and exchanging emails with the excellent David McCandless of Information is Beautiful and the insightful Mark Stevenson of An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. Did a bit of polishing of Ginsberg chapter then had to do Enfants Terribles related stuff so by the time I dropped off ET No. 2 at a lesson in the afternoon I’d not that much done. But I repaired to the Adam & Eve on The Ridgeway in Mill Hill village with trusty Air at hand and, sitting by the fire, got up more of a head of steam. As I reached the section on Apple Corps, The Beatles’ corporation, Help came up on the pub’s sound system. Worked on and then just as I reached the section on Ginsberg’s involvement in early LSD testing, after The Who, Van and a bunch of other stuff had been playing, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds kicked in at exactly the moment the Find function landed me on that bit. When I left the pub and got into the car, switched on the engine, Radio London was still on from earlier and on it was, yes you guessed it, The Beatles, again playing  Help. So I take it I’m supposed to be writing that part at the moment.

I did some pro bono work in the evening for Anti-Slavery International regarding Film4’s 12 Years a Slave. Sorry to read Steve McQueen is going over to the BBC next as Film4 has really backed him to the hilt – my friend Jan Younghusband (formerly Commissioning Editor of Arts at C4) nurtured Hunger and navigated its way into Film4 (and Steve’s into feature film making), not an easy project to see home intact.

Day 86 began, after a quick burst of Ginsberg, with more pro bono – a fabulous & fun Culture24 project in need of a little guidance. Got the ol’ creative juices flowing alongside the cappuccinos at the marvellous Amici. Dashed from there to Middlesex University, where I’ve been doing a little consultancy work recently, to discuss doing a PhD next year. In many ways university was a bit wasted on me in my early 20s – I’m just about ready to do a proper job of the academic side of it now (as opposed to running film societies and doing the whole Art History tripos on the side when I was supposed to be doing Languages).

Final stop – the October Gallery in Bloomsbury, a place Allen Ginsberg often hung out in when in London, to meet up again with Kathelin Gray, a friend of Ginsberg and William Burroughs, a wide-ranging artist, performer, curator, teacher, activist and ball of energy who I interviewed before Christmas. She showed me around the beautiful gallery sited in an old schoolhouse and its library which was right up my street, custom-made book cases and a lovingly gathered collection.

So I’ll do some writing over the weekend to make up for it, the first weekend I will have worked since I started on 1st Sept. Working 9-5 Mon-Fri has been an important discipline and getting this far without breaking the pattern is quite good going, what’s a quick Friday for Sunday swop between friends?

Kathelin in the desert

Dreaming the Dream

The Dream Realised (courtesy of me)

Some great news just in at Channel 4 HQ – the Big 4 sculpture on the doorstep of the Richard Rogers designed home of C4 has been given an extension of 5 years by the planning department of Westminster City Council.

The public artwork – a 50-foot-high metal ‘4’ – was originally constructed in 2007 to celebrate both the Channel’s 25th anniversary year and the launch of the Big Art Project and was granted planning permission for one year, during which 4 artists were to decorate it. The installation is based on the Channel’s on-air identity, with metal bars forming the logo only when viewed from a particular angle and distance. It is basically a framework over which to date photographer Nick Knight, Turner Prize nominee Mark Titchner, Ghanaian sculptor El Anatsui and recent art graduate Stephanie Imbeau have added a skin.

Nick Knight, known for his work with Kate Moss and Bjork among many others in the realm of fashion & music, covered it with bare chest skin of various hues, adding the sound of a beating heart at its core. I recently did an Amazonimpulse and bought Knight’s new book, imaginatively entitled ‘Nick Knight’ – at £32.50 one of the most expensive tomes I’ve ever shelled out on. From an Allen Jones-like Suede album cover to exquisite nude shots of Kate Moss, it’s a lively spectacle.

Mark Titchner skinned the Big 4 with panels inspired by trade union banners and advertising, the slogans questioning the on-going role of television: Find Your World in Ours, Find Our World in Yours. He came in one lunch time to talk to C4folk about his work, shades of The Waterboys’ Mike Scott about him. My second encounter with him was a great rum cocktail-fueled chat with at the Tate Summer Party this year. Guardian photographer Vicki Couchman took a top class photo of me in front of Mark’s Big 4 for a Guardian piece on the inaugural Media Guardian Innovation Awards in 2007 (which Big Art Mob won).

El Anatsui paneled the 4 with metallic newspaper colour printing plates. What I remember most about when El (as he’s known to his friends) came in to chat about his career in The Drum, the basement space beneath the Big 4, was his generous championing of young, emerging artistic talent from Africa like Nnenne Okore.

Stephanie Imbeau won a competition to provide what was to have been the final iteration. Her Shelter saw the Big 4 fleshed out with umbrellas of a myriad colours. This is the version currently in place – it’s best viewed at night when it is illuminated from within [see below]. The umbrellas all come from London Transport Lost Property Office so no pissing away of public money there then.

The Big Art Project from which the Big 4 sprang started life as a regular, if very ambitious, TV documentary series. In the original visually rich proposal for the project from Carbon Media a space was left for the cross-platform treatment. Into that space went the Big Art Mob and a bunch of interactive ideas I put together inspired by the wonderful public art works that punctuated the proposal. The Big Art Mob was born of my messing about for 18 months with Moblog‘s mobile picture blogging software after an initial encounter with Alfie Dennen in the basement of Zero-One in Soho. I was on the look-out for the right project to which to apply Moblog and Paint Britain which evolved into the Big Art Project proved the one – the first use of moblogging by a broadcaster and one of the first uses of Creative Commons licensing by a UK broadcaster (the first use was PixNMix, a VJ project I commissioned in 2004).

Besides the TV, web and mobile stuff, at the core of the Big Art Project was the creation of six actual works of public art, seed funded by Channel 4 and the partners we gathered. One of these was Dream by renowned Catalan artist Jaume Plensa, located high up on the site of the old Sutton Manor colliery overlooking St Helens, a 20-metre-high north-western rival to Gormley’s Angel on the opposite side of the country. It is the head of a nine year old Catalan girl with her eyes closed (I found that out by asking Plensa directly at the capping off ceremony, he was very cagey about who she was and reluctant to reveal much in that particular respect). Dream was Plensa’s response to a brief developed through conversations with ex-miners and other members of the local community. Initially he came up with a huge miner’s lamp but the miners themselves pushed him out of his comfort zone or at least nearer his true self

Dream most deservedly has recently picked up a couple of major prizes. Last month it won the prestigious annual Marsh Award for Public Sculpture which is given to a work of permanent public sculpture erected in the UK or Ireland. The definition of public sculpture is loose, but the location must be openly visible to the public without having to enter a building or gain prior permission. The award was presented at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Plensa also picked up the British Creativity in Concrete Award for 2009 for Dream at a special ceremony at Southwark Cathedral. This award is presented each year to an architect, designer or artist in recognition of a particular achievement for the creative use of precast concrete. It’s difficult to convey the photograph-like subtlety of the face, no more than a pale reflection in photos like above.

The moment I walked round the corner of a forest path and first saw Dream in April was one of the high points of this year and indeed of my career at Channel 4, and made every second spent on the Big Art Project over the 5 year lead up worth it. It was a moment shared with my former colleague Jan Younghusband (ex-Commissioning Editor of Arts at C4, now Head of Music at BBC) who proved so open to the multiplatform dimension. It was indeed a dream come true.

Night Shelter (courtesy of Tom Powell)

More on Big Art:

The launch

The mobile dimension

Mark Titchner’s iteration