How could I fold with a three and four of clubs?
2006-04-09 ~ 12:02 a.m.
I shall try and write a drunken diaryland entry because nobody's on any instant message to commiserate about my shitty poker skillz. I was last-equal with Alan, who was drunk when he arrived. I was sober when I arrived. And not that drunk when I lost. I'm currently watching what appears to be a Stacked marathon on Paramount (Stacked is a Pamela Armstrong sitcom in which Pam is the second most attractive woman out of two. Which as Pam goes is not bad attractiveness. It does have Christopher Lloyd, though, who I'd less like to have sex with.)
How come nobody told me that Ian Hamilton Finlay died? The papers were full of Ivor Cutler, who whilst being endearingly eccentric was hardly at the forefront of artistic endeavour. I only know he died because I was at the Dean Gallery today and they had a little tribute to him. It's hard to explain why Ian Hamilton Finlay was so great, because he completely ignored or destroyed just about every conception of modern art or traditional art; people accused him of being a fascist, or of not doing any work (which is unlikely for fascists perhaps, but he worked almost entirely with collaborators; though most people like Hirst depend on collaborators to build their conceptual art things, and at least IHF credited his collaborators.) But Finlay was a gardener and a warrior and a classicist and a Scottish patriot. And at the same time he denied all those categories.
I think the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Dean Gallery, which is across the road from it, should have a big battle or fistfight or tug of war. It seems the SNG of Modern Art is in the thrall of conceptualism and installation art (currently showing some random nonsense and some Damien Hirst nonsense), while the Dean Gallery (founded to display Roland Penrose's collection of Dada and Surrealist art and the works of Leith's greatest artist Eduardo Paulozzi) is firmly on the side of painting and traditional sculpture in molten metal.
I went to the Dean Gallery today; they had a few small exhibitions on. They had a room of new acquisitions, paintings by Callum Innes, Alison Watt, Zebedee Jones, and others. I'm still not convinced by Jones, who doesn't seem terribly original, but Callum Innes is ineffably brilliant in the way top abstract painters are, and Alison Watt's pictures of folded fabric seem to be liked by everyone. But definitely The New Painting or whatever you want to call it. (Yes I know people have always used paint, but you might have missed it behind the felt and fat-laden sledges of the avant-garde.)
Also they had an exhibition in artists involved in camouflage in World War 2. Surrealist painter and collector Roland Penrose was recruited, and painted his half-naked girlfriend - photographer and model Lee Miller - in camouflage paint and showed photographs of her green body to soldiers. She was a little less conspicuous than she might be unpainted, but not entirely invisible. Other stuff was interesting, instructions on how to camouflage your guns, and the importance of sensitive parking. Plus some Ian Hamilton Finlay drawings on the subject (he liked naval vessels).
Without going into detail, I also saw their exhibition of 1945-1955 which pits the Scottish realist tradition (Joan Eardley and some even less exciting) against the full forces of modernism across the corridor (including Bacon, Freud, Paolozzi, Leger, and a wonderful Alan Davie - who's now by default Scotland's Greatest Artist - called something like Seascape Erotic; speaking of which I was surprised how quickly they amended the labels on all of Ian Hamilton Finlay's work to show his date of death). Plus at the gallery of Modern Art an exhibit to mark the banning of smoking, with lots of cute pictures of small children smoking cigarettes, some very elegant adverts, and more recent work by Peter Howson and Sarah Lucas.
After that, I came home and did some cleaning, which was all very nice except I managed to get bleach on the sleeve of my newish hoodie. And then the poker. Not great. But pub quiz tomorrow. Etc.
I finished Angela Carter's The Magic Toyshop last night, which must have had something going for it, because I stayed awake till 2 (in bed) reading the last 60 pages. It's very good in some ways, very lyrical and skilful with the symbolism. At the same time I didn't identify very much with it (the posh girl forced to live in humble surroundings with lots of red-haired people); too many secrets. As regards 1960s British female writers: Ann Quin's Berg which I read recently, I wasn't sure whether Quin was deliberately trying to recreate male experience because she considered that more literary (or more saleable) or if she was trying to bring female understanding to male experience. I guess Carter gets the feminism points, but she's not as astonishing or funny as Quin. Plus, ventriloquist's dummies are just scarier than marionettes.
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