Party Girl
by Olivia Cole21 June 2010
Spas Roussev and Olivia Cole
While my esteemed colleague Mr Foulkes and friends kept their private jet taxi-ing on the tarmac, I flew in via Vienna. After the doors broke on our plane, in fact, I very nearly didn’t fly in at all. Much to my distress, I’ve since been airlifted out of Sofia where I saw Zeng Fanzhi’s show staged by Spas Roussev. Back home, I texted an art dealer friend of mine as part of my Fanzhi research. Back came the response via another friend of the artist’s:‘You should be in Sofia this weekend for the Zeng Fanzhi exhibition at the museum this w/e, it was an an amazing evening…’ TGIF, was, and it was. You can read more here. Never let it be said that TGIF is just a party girl…. though that said, I can’t wait for my next 24 hours in Sofia.
Museums with a twist were still on my mind on Monday when I sat in a tree house at the V&A. The exhibition, Architects Build Small Spaces, has been artfully arranged so that if you climb up on to the roof of another ‘small space’ (this time a casting of a house in Mumbai) you can sit and talk to Michaelangelo’s David. It reminds me of my friend Michael Donaghy’s poem, commissioned by the museum and inspired I reckon by the way in which you always want to touch everything in a museum even though you shouldn’t… You can read it here. Even on a good day, you are fully grown, being able to climb on museum exhibits is in general a good thing. (If only they had thought of that last week at the Royal Academy’s summer show where an orangutang made of coat hangers was the closest thing to any kind of art you’d want to play with, climb, or talk to. Though who could resist the leaning wall of canapes that turned out to be food not an installation?)
Spas Roussev, Olivia Cole and Dylan Jones
Though anyone who comes within any proximity of my i-phone is starting to weary of my reggae obsession on Tuesday I was, of course, at the first night of The Harder They Come. Having missed it in the West End, I caught the Wimbledon leg of the tour. Originally a Stratford East production, I ran into Michael White who took it into the West End. A Jamaican party continued complete with patties and coconut milk and vodka and the whole night was given an extra kick by news that there are plans for the show to end up in Kingston, Jamaica. Via, er, Bungalow 8 on Thursday night where fashionable creatures were dolled up in Preen, I’ll sign off with a recommendation for artist Henry Hudson’s show at 20 Hoxton Square Projects. Taking the idea of art that you can play with to a whole new level, his scenes depicting Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress are made entirely from plasticene. The whole series could take so long that he will be kept off the party circuit and out of rakish trouble indefinitely. What a shame!
If you enjoyed reading this, we recommend:Tags: Henry Hudson, Michael Donaghy, Michael White, Michaelangelo, Zeng Fanzhi
