Sledge Blog

The Hayward at 40

Took a trip to the Southbank on Wednesday evening to hear a talk celebrating 40 years of the Hayward Gallery. On the panel were one of the building’s original architects, Dennis Crompton, artist Anthony Gormley and critic Alison Rawsthorn.

The Hayward Gallery image courtesy of Marc Cox

The Hayward isn’t London’s best loved building and is burdened with the label of being of the ‘brutalist’ school of architecture. But the more you learn about the building’s genesis and what the architects set out to achieve, the more interesting it becomes. It started as a 1950s urban planning challenge; everyday thousands of people arrived into Waterloo Station and had to make their way to the other side of the river. In between Waterloo Station and Waterloo Bridge was an area of old factories and the remnants of the Festival of Britain site - including the wonderfully named 'Dome of Discovery'. The brief to the architects was to create a building that acted as a concourse at the same height as the platforms at Waterloo Station to help carry people to the bridge and beyond.

The Mappin Terraces image courtesy of Malcolm Edwards

They were inspired by the Mappin Terraces at London Zoo and created this multilayered structure that people could access and travel through at different levels. This was the thinking behind the whole South Bank area - that it should be alive with people but for the first thirty years of the Hayward’s existence it was bereft of people and events and consequently didn’t work as a public space.

The area is now alive with stuff, currently there is a boating lake on the building’s roof as part of the Psycho Buildings  exhibition, an amazing United Visual Artists light installation twinkles nearby and Nokia's Skate Almighty  is in situ. The Hayward was designed not to be a passive art gallery but as a space to host events both inside and outside; the more that is going on around it the better it works as a building.

The Power of Disorientation

I was lucky enough to get a ticket for Punchdrunk's The Masque of the Red Death at the Battersea Arts Centre on Saturday night. I'm not normally a big fan of theatre, I find it hard to suspend my disbelief and buy into the conceit of actors on a stage (this says more about my shortcomings than those of theatre in general). The Masque of the Red Death was a very different evening, it is audience involvement theatre. You plot your own path, explore a myriad of rooms and come across different scenes as you move through the space. Whenever you feel like it you can even pop into a David Lynch like cabaret show and have a drink before exploring further.  No two people have the same evening because of this you end up spending a lot of time afterwards comparing notes and trying to combine knowledge to understand the story.

The success of the evening was in large part down to something that it is really important to think about when designing brand experiences - the power of disorientation. On arrival the venue looks shut, you are directed down a side street and enter via the fourth fire exit on the right. Everyone is given an identical masque to wear and told not to talk. You walk through five or six small dark antechambers, separated by big black curtains and from then on in you have no problem suspending your disbelief. Complete immersion in an amazing experience.

Henry Moore sculptures in the dark at Kew

Julian Opie Dublin

I had always wanted to see Julian Opie's  walking sculptures so it was brilliant to find four of them along Dublin's O'Connell Street this weekend. To get the full effect and to appreciate the craft check out some of the videos that people have posted here.

Ganton Street Decorations

Magical Margate

Wonderful posters in Margate's museum.

And a very rare collection of paraplegic dolls!

Lost in Space

What an ideal experience in the midst of this gloomy, overcast London “summer”: Antony Gormley’s ‘Blind Light’ exhibition at Hayward Gallery. I went this past weekend and found myself lost and disoriented in the midst of dense mist, foggy glass walls, steel mass, reinforced concrete and aluminum tubes. The artist has created a series of interactive experiences, exploring ways in which we orient ourselves within the urban, built environment - and, more importantly, how we react when we are disoriented and lose our certainty in space.

‘Blind Light’, a luminous glass room filled with a thick cloud of mist, had a queue of visitor’s circling the room, waiting in suspense to enter.  Inside, people would disappear, enveloped by vapor and eventually appearing again as confused silhouettes coming closer to the glass to locate themselves. As a labyrinth without walls, you would lose yourself in light and mist with no visibility of what and who was in front of you.

My favorite part of this exhibition was the 31 life-sized (and naked) sculptural casts of the artist’s body spread across the city centre, on bridges, rooftops and pavements, all of them visible from the gallery balcony. In the drizzly and misty grayscale of sky, concrete buildings and London streets, these figures appeared eerie and uncanny, as they were peering across the city’s horizon.

The exhibition ended Sunday, but I believe the figures are still standing. If you are in the South Bank area keep an eye out for them!

77 Million Paintings

Selfridges isn't somewhere I'd normally associate with deep relaxation, but it is currently hosting Luminous, an installation of Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings.

It uses multiple monitors to display a constantly evolving painting, generated from handmade images, randomly combined by computers, creating an ever-changing ‘painting’ consisting of hand-made elements that evolve into almost countless variations. The result is that the pictures only exists for a few seconds and you never see them again.

You slip out of the shop floor and into a dark space with comfy seats, within five minutes you are hypnotised by the continually evolving images and the wistful sound scape. Whilst you focus on one screen, trying to unpick how the image is changing, all the others evolve into something completely different.

It might sound a bit lava lampy but the experience draws you in and leaves you feeling strangely uplifted.

iPhone

The iPhone cometh... need I say more...?

Lomowall

Rather beautiful installation of lomo photography and poetry on the South Bank in London.