What a strange exhibition. I love strange exhibitions. They are the perfect antidote against the banal prevailing miasma. I also like the South London Gallery, with its android Japanese waitress that hasn’t left and its wabi-sabi garden.
Although I couldn’t have a tea because they don’t have bebushka chairs and I can’t let her loose. She has just started to walk. It is not on for her to stir others chats and eat the zen the moment I look away. When I am in global urban artist mode and intellectuality emanates out of my pores, I don’t want babies (other people’s, of course) to come and take me out of my bohemian pomp either.
So we left the bar and went back to the room with whispering pigments, the small bobins with cosmic farting and the hummock of salt in the sewer. I didn’t hear upstairs much. And it is not a bad joke because it was about silence. But in the middle of London a room about silence turns into a yearning. Oosterlynck made ten trips around Europe looking for silence. But here traffic didn’t let me hear his drawings.
And I thought I was strange in my search for silence. That is why I got so happy when I read in a book about noise that my aunt gave me (they know me in my family) that many campaigns against noise pollution had been started by artists and intellectuals. Dickens, amongst others. Schopenhauer even said that if one is insensitive to noise one is also insensitive to ideas, to argumentation, to art and to culture. Have that. It is that without silence it is impossible to create, nor think. And my little neurons need exercise.
Illustration from the Feminist Gooseneck Barnacles Series.
“Bream face”