Ben Nicholson - DLWP, Bexhill-on-Sea

On a corridor wall in our new house hangs a print of a red Eiffel Tower by Robert Delaunay. The tower is mangled into fragments of red against a bright blue and white Parisian skyline. The tricolour shines through these contrasts of colour and the viewer is placed into a tangible metropolis. Into a dynamic modern city. Cubism generally has excited me for a long time. Encouraged to follow this style in my GCSE art classes, I developed my own juxtapositions of colour, line, shape and space, happily scumbling acryclics onto sugar paper. Taking the body as my main focus, its movements through the city, I attempted to create statuesque and masculine forms. The style developed into a form of colourful abstraction. Good on the eye if a little soulless. Unlike Delaunay, I did not have direct contact with a city for my inspiration. Weekend trips to London were frowned upon as a result of IRA activity in the 1990s. My home village (a sedate and very well-to-do place in the London commuter belt) was nowhere near to being a Bohemian quarter that aroused the creative juices. Neither did my immediate surroundings - a semi-detached red brick in a post-war working-class housing estate - find a way into my work. The only way to recreate a sense of the cosmopolitan was to trawl the image of sexualised city life depicted in my bibles of 90s living - FHM, Loaded and the slightly more urbane Sky magazines.

Ben Nicholson's exhibition at the De La Warr Pavilion proved to me, however, that you could develop a cubist style that reflected both England and the rural periphery. Leading cubists such as Braque, Picasso, Delaunay, Gris and Leger spoke to a different culture, in a different time and place. A life of cafés, clowns, music and furtive cultural exchange. In Nicholson, however, proximity to cosmopolitan life need not direct the subject. He shows that the patchwork of Cumberland countryside and Cornish coast can be reconciled into a Modernist framework without losing connection to the movement's political intent. In paintings like 1940 (St Ives, Version 2 or 1943-45 (St Ives, Cornwall) (pictured), the café culture seen throughout cubist still life is still there. Yet the cappucino is not the centrepiece. Nicholson looks beyond, to the fishing cottages, moored boats and distant hills from his studio window. Fragmented cups and saucers, a milk jug, coffee or tea pot are foregrounded. But the gaze searches out to life less immediated and movements in the distance, to the geometries inspired by the English coastline. Lighthouses (which were originally styled on the trunk of an English oak tree) and fully-rigged fishing boats heading out from the harbour for a day's catch provide comforting and familiar shapes whose colours leap from the rolling hills that surround.

Nicholson's lesson seems to be that an aesthetic can be directed by careful observation and commitment to technique. He suggests it is possible to find our own style and make it politically relevant in enclaves far away from the seductive speed of the modern city. For someone who has just moved to Bexhill this is an encouraging proposition.

It Starts From Here

In the same months the Royal Academy is showing its ‘Impressionists by the Sea’, a collection of works from the likes of Monet, Courbet and Boudin, which explore the early tides of coastal tourism, Bexhill leads with a(nother) reflexive exhibition designed to re-interpret the building. Both exhibitions address the concept of place-setting, the new cultural geography jargon that focuses on psychological and physical elements that draw tourists to an area. For the Normandy impressionists the reasons are clear. They depict the coast as a site for the French bourgeoisie to work and play; re-energised by the light, life and landscape of La Manche.

At the DLWP, the fruits de mer are a bit sour. To the disgust of the Bexhill blue-rinse brigade Alex Hartley has transformed the Pavilion into an American consumer paradise. Through montage, models and planning applications to Rother District Council, Hartley asks us to (re)consider the space variously as a fleamarket, a Costco, and a Tescos - with Hacienda-style adornments and plentiful parking. In equally dystopian mode, Nils Norman has utilised digital design to produce a series of work that incorporates elements from around the town with a political comment. His ‘Proposal for a mural’ stridently declares ‘Squandermania’ and features a road sign that incorporates as directions debates about investment in the Pavilion - ‘a wicked waste of money’, ‘rubbish’ and ‘another white elephant’.

Hartley and Norman are among twenty-one artists commissioned with a simple task; to re-imagine the Pavilion. They were given an assortment of materials relating to the Pavilion – its cultural history, geographic location, original plans and designs, and details of press coverage surrounding its regeneration and reopening. In execution and ambition the output was varied. But two artists hit the mark spot on. Robert Frith used the stylised and limited palette of the railway poster, in my favourite piece, to produce two aerial views of Bexhill. In the first, it was shown as it appears now, with the blues, greens and white of the front, juxtaposed next to the reddish built environment of the town. In the second, the Pavilion is camouflaged into absence, through a combination of green foliage and red-brick Victorian building design. This is a reference to the uses of the DLWP by German bombers during the Second World War, who used it as a marker to locate London from the South as they crossed the Channel. Ilana Halperin also focused on the history of the area. Through an exquisite line drawing she goes back to the ice age, picturing the DLWP in an ancient environment. The image shows the Pavilion as out of place, in a glacial and crystalline world absent of humans. It is located in context but is also a warning: a reminder that for all the talk of culture-led coastal regeneration initiatives, climate change is a real challenge that continually reshapes the relationship between Man and Nature. This dynamic, as Halperin suggests, requires us to build new relationships to the coast as our shoreline changes, but also to public buildings. As the floods in New Orleans and recently in the North of England showed, displaced populations seek havens from altered social and environmental existences. It’s a pity this message was not prominent in other work; the only people seeking a haven today were the windswept locals and visitors.

‘It starts from here’, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, 7 July

Biker Art + Culture

Hastings Art Forum hosted an excellent biker art show as part of the annual Hastings biker day on May bank holiday. Chris Watson provided a great mixture of biker illustrations (see right), some of which had been specially commissioned by biker groups. The opposite side of the gallery had a different side of the authentic as the imposing black and white photographs of Andrew Shaylor depicted the biker subculture in detail. Shaylor is the first photographer to be given access to the secret world of the Hells Angels. He spent four years travelling with the Angels to events that included a wedding, a funeral, world and national runs and numerous social gatherings. The four-foot portraits were spectacular, with gnarly, weather-beaten Angels staring out imposingly into the centre of the gallery, their faces etched with a lifetime on the road. All in all, an excellent and well-balanced exhibition.

David Lynch - Fondation Cartier - Paris

We went to Paris in the later week of the Easter holidays having both read some short travelogue essays from the Austrian writer Joseph Roth. His collection and depiction on the 'White Cities' gives Paris an illuminating presence, a radiance of beauty, refinement and sophistication undercut by a symbiotic secret life; strange people in dark spaces that lurk beneath its skin. Our trip sought experiences in both Paris' elegant surface world and its nether regions. We stayed in what can only be described as a 'liveable' (I joked that Mary and Joseph would have preferred the stable) hotel near the Gare de l'est. No boutique living for us. Just a simple bed, workable shower and small TV. The life around the Gare de l'est buzzes with foreign vistors, business people and waves of migrants each negotiating the boulevards. It's not a pretty area, but there is a buzz as people swarm from one place to another. The life around the Bastille down the road a bit is where white Parisian culture is to be experienced. A soho-lite as young urbanite Parisiens pose and party in the clubs and bars in the backstreets (thanks to Vincent for showing us).

Denfert Rocherot hides deeper secrets. A necropolis is situated under the streets, an infinite labyrinth of catacombs host to the eighteenth century dead of Paris, including Robespierre. In close proximity (and perhaps apt considering the content of the show) was an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier devoted to the visual fine art of the American film director David Lynch. David Lynch has a dark brain. He is fascinated with the work of Francis Bacon, Wasily Kandinsky and Picasso and has a love of the grotesque. His images convert pipes into body parts, the living to the dead. The exhibition had drawings and scribblings, some on tea stained toilet paper, others from yellowing torn out pages of his notebooks. Lynch is a better fine artist on larger canvases. These were impressive, depicting the range of his visual talent. The scribblings were less so, derivative of abstract expressionism, the work of Kandinsky and constructivists, some of which were poorly executed. The short films were a real success. 'Grandmother' was a distrubing look into the world of love and protection - although Sophie thought it was about child abuse and molestation. Other short films combined action sequences and animation resplendent of the work of Terry Gilliam. All the exibition was set an industrial pulse.

Hamburg - April 2007

Below the steel-shafted cranes that lurch and swing above the River Elbe lies a city that works. The red bricked warehouses, reminiscent of Manchester, indicate a proud trading and commercial heritage. Some have undergone conversion into living spaces for the nouveau riche, others continue to be used, as they were intended, as bases from which spices and rugs are received from the orient. The river bustles with goods arriving from ports around the world, making their way into lucrative European markets. Tugs ease their passage; their wash provides the thrills for tourists as they explore the labyrinthine maritime environment. The container ships tower over the quays, being loaded and unloaded in minutes of their rigid corrugated boxes.

Beyond the river lies an infamous and heady cultural mix. St Pauli and the Reeperbahn continue to entice those seeking luminous and bodily adventure. Tucked away in the adjoining streets are quarters which have a youthful buzz, a sense of anticipation, a cultural edge that marks them out as places to be. These are the new wombs of creative talent. In one street as we wandered around in the pink dusk was a building - clearly earmarked for demolition - adorned with graffiti declaring a defence of cultural autonomy against property developers. The hobos and crusties behind, warming themselves by their burning oil drum, know all too well that commercialism will destroy their idyll, replacing the down-at-heel minimarts and speciality Lebanese shops with designer fashions and cappucino culture. These streets are animated by bobos and the feral, children of the urban jungle.

Hamburg's watery expanse, a leviathan that grips and gropes around the bricks and concrete, will be home to a new area in the next decade - the harbour area - a modern yuppie paradise of bricked-paved bouldevards, municipal leisure and commercial maintream shopping. How anodyne, how safe. The heart of this harbourscape will beat the comforting rhythms the bourgeoisie expect, an enclave for limited aspiration. But it will be seedy Hamburg and its hipster, multicultural and working class streetscapes that will bring the creative highs, new wealth, treasures and enrichment from which the parasitic bourgeois water-rats will realise their property equity.

East Side Gallery - Berlin

Sandwiched between Oberbaumbrücke and the brand new Ostbahnhof, along the former borderline that ended at the River Spree and Mühlenstrasse, is the East Side Gallery. This is a unique expression of Germany's past and hopes for the future. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this section was transformed by hundreds of artists from around the world who daubed the wall with original pieces of artwork, some a commentary on Berlin's past, others more personal forms of expression. (This is me leaning against it, taken in August 2006).

The paintings document the cataclysmic changes in Germany and act as a record for future generations of the unyielding force of creativity that lurks beneath the totalitarian state. Unfortunately, the wall is in a poor state of repair, with some paintings flaking off the concrete whilst others have been chipped away by unscrupulous tourists and treasure hunters. International artists, led by Banksy, are now salivating at the prospects of transforming the Isreali 'security barrier', a longer and much higher edifice upon which to express the dreams of a new generation.

A Secret Service - De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea

This exhibition was about secrecy and fantasy. The two artists that stood out for me were Roberto Cuoghi and Henry Darger. Cuoghi, a Milanese artist, decided to become his father. He abandoned his life as a twentysomething and let his weight balloon to 20 stone, grew a beard and dyed his hair grey. He took on the deportment and lifestyle of an old man. So convincing was he that concerned neighbours would ask after his welfare and prepare meals for him. Naturally his father was disturbed when Roberto asked for his clothing, to make the transformation complete. Cuoghi wanted to disappear from society. The piece that is exhibited in the DLWP, an anaglyph, depicts him as a grotesque man, which wouldn’t appear out of place in Royston Vasey. The image is of a half-concealed side-profile of the artist, who is looking to the left and whose form is covered by an arrangement of childhood objects. Although his image is disrupted we still capture a glimpse of him, as we do of the elderly in our own society. We know mortality haunts and troubles our existence in Western society yet occasionally, fleetingly, as Cuoghi reminds us, we confront it. But it is only a glance. We see it as unreal - an illusion.

Darger’s work (see inserted picture) is equally in this vain. Several large panels of Darger’s illustrated novel appear at the DLWP. Entitled, in its full, “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in what is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion), this is a secret work that runs to 15,000 pages. Darger began this work aged 19 and never stopped. He died aged 82. It tells the adventure, as the exhibition guidebook states of “the Vivian Girls, seven sisters from the Roman Catholic land of Angelinnia, who, protected by magical, butterfly winged humanoid creatures, run about liberating child slaves from the evil, atheistic adult armies of Gladelinia. It is an epic tale in the style of a boy’s (but in this case girls’) own adventure, but filled with Hollywood blockbuster violence).” It should be made into a film by Jeunet and Caro. It is an extraordinary narrative, known only to its creator until the work was discovered by his landlord following his death. There is something Orwellian about the work. The social and political commentary invites us to see an adult world opposed by forces we take for granted. As in 1984, where the affective power of revolution was realised through the remembrance of nursery rhymes, so in Darger’s work, the world of man is shaken to its core by small girls, happily playing in the open, with ribbons in their hair, budding breasts and male genitalia.

These works are fascinating for they show that we can elide the surveillance state and dare to imagine and create our lives from other fabrics. For all the discussion of fixing our identities through bio-technology (ID Cards) and optical referencing systems, it is still possible – although the window is closing – to imagine our lives differently, live out our dream worlds, create personas and disappear. Concealment and creativity are twins – identities and products can be fashioned. If original, the artist gains a reputation and steps into the public sphere. More commonly the material product remains while its creator recedes into obscurity. However, our politics and society find it more troubling if we actively create our disappearance through changing our identity, living out different lives or simply disappearing. This is why the work of Cuoghi and Darger is so provocative.