From the East End to Dresden
15 October 2009
“I’m going to be in Dresden.” A frequent refrain in my life: so frequent in fact that it is a cause of concern for some…particularly my friend Spas Roussev.
As a patron of the contemporary art scene, Spas is around and about the capital of Empire during London’s Frieze week. He was even kind enough to attend our pre-Frieze dinner at Nick Jones’s new pizzeria in the fashionable East End of London.
The East End has moved on since the days of Limehouse opium dens and Lascars and it might surprise you to know that I once considered moving there about twenty years ago to perfect a style of life that owed much to the film Performance – basically I wanted to shut myself off in an 18th century house in the Tredegar Square area – but anyway back to Dresden, or rather the night prior to my departure to Dresden, when I was at the FQR Pre-Frieze Pizza Party.
Spas mentioned that he was hosting a dinner for Mr Brainwash, a noted contemporary artist from the West Coast of the former British colonial outpost now known as the United States of the Americas. Apparently our former subjects are making a fairly decent fist of things and Mr Brainwash is an artist of the magnitude of that great early 20th century British master Brangwyn. Mr B was introduced to Spas by that great panjandarum of the contemporary art world and scion of a leading Netherlandish gin dynasty Fabien Fryns and if it is good enough for Fabien it is more than good enough for you and me.
Any way Spas invited me to dinner the following evening to allow Mr Brainwash to be introduced to the world of FQR and its appointed representative on earth…ie me.
“I’m going to be in Dresden” I carolled.
“Dresden…that has been haunting me all my life” said Spas.
Over the years my presence in Dresden has meant that I have been absent from the capital of Empire causing me to miss the odd social gathering, including one or two of Spas’s gala evenings and ambassadorial soirees. It is really in order to alleviate some of Mr Brainwash’s disappointment at not meeting me that I am ‘posting’ (as I believe the young people say) this blog from Dresden, or to be more accurate Meissen, another culturally rich town in Saxony.
Normally my Dresden visits are horologically oriented, I am a fan of Saxon watchmaking and I think it safe to say that I am far and away the most frequent English visitor to the watch factory of Lange & Soehne, in fact I am there so often that I think they are going to name a street after me, but this time I am enlarging my knowledge of porcelain production.
Earlier this year I was asked by an utterly charming young woman called Inge to write the history of Meissen porcelain and, ever eager for an excuse to broaden and deepen my knowledge of all things Saxon, I accepted with alacrity.
So, while Spas was arranging the place à table for his banquet in honour of Mr Brainwash, I was down a kaolin mine. Yes, that is right I was several metres underground watching two miners tear down the pit props in a disused section of their mine…spellbound by the drama of this moment I even made a small film of it, which I will ask Tristram to ‘embed’ (as youthful people with ipod telephones might say) into the virtual warp and electronic weft of the FQR website. I am afraid my cinematic skills are not up the standard of the ultimate mining film ‘Gold’ starring Roger Moore, so don’t get too excited.
In the meantime I am having a photograph of me and my two subterranean friends ‘uploaded’ (as I believe the younger members of the ‘online’ community might put it) to give an impression of what life is like, or to be rather more accurate underneath, the former, and oh-so-wittily named, German Democratic Republic.
Top Image: Nick Foulkes, Saffron Aldridge at FQR’s Pre-Frieze dinner at Pizza East. Taken by Richard Young.
