sullivan street, six flights of stairs,each wall adorned with framed photos of african tribespeople.

6th of May

This lady in the Gap totally bossing my dad about and telling him to write the date with the month first on a travellers cheque, i said oh but in the uk we write bla and its always been ok here and shes like yes but youre in new york now. whats that the NATION of new york?

saw this other very well to do woman being handcuffed by some police because she totally tried to slap a cop for writing a parking ticket on her vehicle while she was in a restaurant. I mean you cant just try and slap a cop, it was all really over the top, she was parked illegally the cop was writing the ticket and she ran out and basically was verbally and physically abusive, the cop had her wrist to restrain her and was cuffing her and she was saying 'that's not very nice," she must have been in shock,if she can attempt to slap a cop she can surely muster a more gutsy retort than "that's not very nice" while someone handcuffs her.and a big crowd gathered and some construction guys were shouting "you guys are unbelievable, get the fuck outta here," and her daughter comes running out and so on and my dad joined the crowd and i was like hey come on its not the telly, stop staring at her, but then we both sort of kept it going for a while, it was totally all about symbolism she was a tiny snarly lady and the cop was huge, he had her arms behind her back though, cuffed.thats pretty hard core.

I have moved.
To an apartment above a restaurant where the likes of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens have dined, Delmonicos,a really fancy steakhouse. Chauffeurs sit in black cars outside it waiting to ferry some steak eater to his/her next destination.I am two minutes from the Hudson, and a helicopter pad which contaminates the sound of the city with blades dragging tourists up to the height of the skyline. The city to look back at and down on and across to and towards.

To get out of the way before the move, we stayed at a hotel in Little Korea, one block from the Empire State.It is the first time in my life I opened a curtain and saw a brick wall for a view, the wall was within touching distance. It was revolting .The hotel was twelve or so stories high and I was on the fifth floor so everyone on that side was facing a window full of bricks. You had to wait till the hotel lobby to see the weather or else you had to look at outside via the television.Monday was spent walking about waiting for the furniture in Sullivan street to be shifted downtown and for Dennis Elliot to get back to his office so I could pick up keys. It pissed with rain and originally we intended to browse the New York Public Library but it was shut so we loitered in that area, mainly in Grand Central Station where there is literally not one seat to sit on anywhere . You need a railroad ticket to be able to enter the waiting room.
That ‘s fucking hostile.
So we went and sat in this chi chi bar up on a mezzanine of the station so we could look down on the beautiful concourse and that was fun because suddenly all these dames arrive who are organising a charity auction event where they have sold tickets for thousands of dollars and its going to take place in that bar in a few hours and theyre waiting for the event stylist who is looking after the “aesthetic” side of things and eventually she shows up with two tailor’s dummies covered in gold stretch fabric which has been rumpled by the journey to the station.One of the prizes in the auction was one hundred dollars worth of make up and a free lesson in how to apply it given by a make up artiste!!!!!

The new apartment is HUGE. it’s the strangest area, interesting, I found a whole chunk of it yesterday behind ground zero that was exactly like the “What every woman wants” end of argyle street, I found a store called dee dees and bought shower curtain rings for only a dollar.

Yesterday I went up to Chelsea specifically to see two shows, Gordon Matta Clark at David Zwirner on west 19th, and Amy Cutler at Leslie Tonkonow on 22nd street.
The Matta Clark work was “Bingo” from 1974 where he crosses off sections from the side of a house, sawing them away one at a time leaving one central panel. Three of these sections were exhibited in the space. Relics, really,with slices of stair and window frame, interesting to look at, specifically in cross section. It’s almost alarming to see what constitutes the wall of a house , this one from Niagra Falls, upstate New York, I don’t know the names for some of the materials used to make the house but pretty much slivers of wood and plaster and panels of thin maybe pre-fabricated tiles on the outside, not ceramic tiles, wood seeming, anyway the sections were dismantled by power-saw so that gives you an idea.A stand alone generic house for that area. The sections were removed ,the house thus sliced and remained like that for two to three hours before a bulldozer came and demolished it. Matta Clark documented the whole process in stills and on super 8 film. The film was fantastic to see, specifically how he composed the shots in the documentary of the event, there was a total laugh out loud section when the forklift truck came. Like slapstick, the cut facade of the house fills the frame, the forklift appears theatrically, fork first, stage right and starts jabbing at the house like Godzilla. The house offers no resistance whatsoever, I watched that house come down in less than two minutes.

Since that mouse was in my kitchen up in the village, Ive definitely been more aware of ahouse in terms of the spaces between the walls, the areas which become sealed to the inhabitant but play host to other activity.I also remembered that piece by Henry the Eighth’s Wives in the CCA where they sent a camera along all the drain system of the gallery .

A great show on West 20th by Kerry James Marshall, from Chicago.I think he’s fantastic, his work is supreme, black and white ink and graphite drawings.The Black Power fist symbol moulded on the handle of an affro comb sticking in a fat dense afro on the head of a black man facing ablack woman with her back to him saying “everything is going to be alright…. I just know it will!” repeated several times in different variations, graphic novel style.
I was really excited to see Amy Cutler’s drawings after seeing her work at the Biennale.Yesterday I was blown away by an army of women in kahki army coats with snow shoes pushing melting snowmen along on sleds. That sounds kind of rubbish but it wasn’t, it was dreary, ominous,sad and amazing.There were a lot of drawings here, some had more energy than others,they are so intricate and intensive the drawings, an army of birds flying away with an army of women’s plucked eyes dangling from their beaks and even the tiny red veins of the small eyes are rendered .I felt tired looking at the labour of them and wondered if she ever gets fed up in the middle of a painting.

Interesting. Because im drawing here, not using a computer to make images, im more aware of manual work in images, i am always aware of that but more so now, also afraid of fucking something up half way through it becauseyou cant just erase the history, it's obvious to talk about working on computers like that, that mistakes can be undone, but the fear of wasting something is quite tangible.

14th of April
ham is in town, Tuesday we went up to the Whitney to hear Spencer Finch talk about his work. He works with colour and light in many different ways, the most interesting, for me, was his light measurement works. He has this very fine instrument from Phillips which measures and analyses light in different situations, he then takes these precise measurements and re-enacts the light from a specific place, elsewhere.Using very rudimentary materials, common lightbulbs, lighting gels, fluorescent tubes, until he arrives back at the exact measurement on his instrument.So for ParisTexas, an installation in SanAntonio, he used coloured stained glass to filter the Texan sun blazing outside the gallery into the exact light conditions of Paris at dusk in the winter.He also makes atomic particle models of pigment which exactly matches the colour of the sky in specific places, this piece from the biennale is the molecular structure of the pigment which matches the deep blue of the night sky in San Antonio. He also recreated the most beautiful desert sunset using fluorescent tubes covered with strips of coloured gels which looked like weird bands of digital noise in video.This work was problematic for him because of it’s gaudiness but he had learned to love it. Because of this piece,I asked him at the end if he was ever inspired by artificially lit environments and he said he’d been taking readings from Times Square at night and was interested in how unstatic that environment was according to his meter.It was interesting to hear him contextualise his work in traditional terms, referring to Turner and other landscape artists who were concerned with the colour of the sky.
Spencer’s work was deeply subtle, but he couldn’t explain why and sometimes that bothers me when artists talk, that they have made obvious core decisions towards abstraction or anti figuration or non vulgar work and I always really want to know how those positions, any positions, are reached. Someone actually asked him where he got his lightbulbs. Hahaha.
Wednesday I went back to see the werewolf heads in Central park, they are totally awesome.I read some critique of them somewhere saying that oh they were like some spielberg artefact , like some kids might be blazing on their bmx bikes through the park and find them, but I think that sort of diminishes their innate supernatural mystique. They are ant-cute,big decapitated rotten werewolf heads! In glass boxes in the park!The weather was totally hot and moist, the park had gotten more verdant in only a few weeks from when I was last there. Got on the bus down to 72nd street to find the Kusama work in the Kerbs boatingpond. Luckily, an electric storm broke minutes after I arrived and the work was transformed by torrential rain. The weight of the rain was mental, loads of childminders, black and hispanic women with white toddlers had to run pushing prams.

Iim working on a radio play for FACT.The Childrens Crusade.It's become interesting again that project,it lay dormant for a while.I fly back to the UK for ten days in July to rehearse and record it with the class of kids who worked with me last year

Tuesday 18th of May

Yesterday I spent most of the day at the United Nations. In International territory. Like the Vatican, they have their own stamps, I sent my dad a card with the UN emblem on it.

I knew it would bea really interestingvisit but in fact it has turned out to be a really important experience for me, the concrete environment, the ethos and the relics there have completely overwhelmed me.They have tea bowls on display from Hiroshima, which shattered then welded together at the impact of the atomic bomb. Prior to this visit I have been reading the only human account of what took place on the ground at Nagasaki moments before, during and after the atomic bomb was dropped there. I have initiated a correspondance with the UN to try and gain further access.

When I was a kid doing languages at school my dream job was to be a simultaneous translator at the UN. This image is taken from the public gallery(no longer in use for security implications) of the Economic and Social Council Chamber. There are five languages spoken at the UN, English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese. Ear sets are available in the arm rests of the chairs and the user can switch between language channels.

21st of May
Paul Chaat Smith is a friend I met at Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada in 1999. He is an American Indian,a writer, an academic and a curator, currently assistant curator at the new SmithsonianMuseum of the American Indian which will open in Washington in late September.I met him last night at the Museum of the American Indian in New York, beside Battery Park.He was in town for a talk by Shelley Niro,a Mohawk woman artist from Canada.
Shelley Niro is from the Six Nations Reserve and her work is completely identified and contextualised both by her community as it stands today,and the concurrent history of her people. It’s very local in it’s frame of reference but globalised by the sum of its parts because her dialogue, in articulating pockets of indigenous resistance both literally and metaphysically,is universally understood.She describes abstract behaviour and thinking as much as she illustrates, quite literally, what it means to be a Mohawk woman living in small town contemporary Canada.
She talked about her work in a deadpan way which really reminded me of the way Roseanne Barr spoke when she was Roseanne.It’s really compelling to hear a female artist talk so flatly about her work, to actually permit herself to express such a voice of world weariness.It’s Niro’s innate way, I think, but her curt pronouncements of what she did and why she did it form part of an engaging bleak comedy which is a core element and strategy of what she makes.When requested to talk specifically about work on show at the museum she simply said "It’s very straight-forward" or "it speaks for itself."
It might be wrong to describe her comedy as bleak but she certainly is coming from a somewhat desolate place.I can’t imagine anything more bleak than battling, ten years ago with the Quebequois people who wanted to turn the local Mohawk cemetery into a golf course.This was Oka, when there were violent protests and confrontations between the Indians and the landgrabbers.The confrontation made world news.In response to these depressing scenarios, Shelly invited her three sisters to come on a big day out, get all dressed up, do their hair and make up and live it up in downtown Brantford, being as noisy, rude and irreverant as they felt. The photographs she took from that day are part of a series called "Mohawks in Beehives". Hand tinted non archetypal images of native women.

I really liked a piece she made which wasn’t about anything beyond simply finding something significant and making a place for it. She had the radio on and the newscaster was saying get down to the river there’s ice floes going past and so the whole town it seemed to her had turned out to watch these, what? Mini icebergs? I don’t know what an ice floe is but she picked up a weird little rock that was on top of a piece of floating ice and took it home. Then she made a little mat for it out of beads in a traditional style. There was something terribly sad in the telling of the anecdote about a small town gathering to watch ice drift past, like an Atom Egoyan film.
Paul Chaat Smith revealed some of the curatorial strategy in the new Indian museum. Most of the funding has come from casinos on the reservations. In terms of what’s in there and how this living history will be interpreted, its incredibly complex, but part of the historical narrative will be illustrated by collections of guns and bibles, from contact to present day. The brutality implied by both objects in that context is so profound, also as objects in relation to each other, so toxic.
Today, me and Ham went to the Cloisters right up in Washington Heights, what an amazing part of the city, its up at something like 190h street in a big ramshackle park. A medieval style building that was specially designed around a horde of religeous relics and architectural slices that came from medieval Europe. It’s a wonderful place to go when its hot because its all shady stone and gardens and the works are really livid, religious-macabre and enthralling.Theres this whole series of unicorn tapestries which refer allegorically to jesus and the huntsmen are chasing the mythical beast and its cornered in one tapestry episode and stabs a hunting dog with its horn.Crazy, six tableaux like medieval manga.
I discovered a new lady from the bible also, a legendary woman called Lillith who was Adam’s first wife, I have NEVER heard of this woman before, anyway, she wanted to leave Paradise so God had to make Adam a new wife from his rib. Then Lillith came back as the serpent to tempt new wife,Eve, with the apple, and there was a fantastic wood carving there of Lillith snake woman and Eve, all tiny detail, remarkable.


The icing on the cake up there is the view of the Hudson, its suddenly not a city river anymore, its like how I imagine the Mississipi.
We came down on the bus to the Metropolitan because you get in free with your cloisters trip, we’re like oh its free we should go then,but it was all a bit crazy and busy, we went up on the fifth floor roof garden with an amazing view of the city and the park, Andy Goldsworthy had a piece up there, so a lot of people were milling around and there was a bar. We got a beer and sat down on this bit of a bench(seats were gold) next to some revolting European couple who spoke baby French to each other and kissed in a way that I could actually hear his tongue moving in her mouth, he was wearing rich man clothes, he even had a baby blue sweater knotted round his waist, and they acted rich,well they were obviously loaded and consumed by each other, then all these other people were practically on top of us trying to get photos of the view and a girl sat on the floor right in front of me and I could see right up her skirt, so my choice was to either look at her crotch or look at the rich people tongue kissing, or look at the Andy Goldsworthy.I went back for another look at the sculpture, I didn’t really enjoy it, I just couldn’t find a relationship between the piece and the environment that was worth contemplating further.

In an ideal world, Shelley Niro would be invited to make a rock piece up there with Beehive wearing Mohawks in attendance.

"Rebel"

Shelley Niro's Mother posing on a Rebel car