Igor’s thoughts

Or just a top-hatted dude with a stripey shirt, lying on his back pretending to be a dog having his tummy tickled? Or just apparently collapsed while doing a drunken zombie/ghoul/sneaky-monster walk? Not that either of those wouldn't be quite good in its own right, but I don't know, maybe I read too much into these things. Maybe I just try to connect things up too much. Anyway, nice picture. So it goes.

One of the things that annoys me about the fact that in all probability I won't live for ever is that it means I won't get to see all the crazy shit those space-age futuristas will come up with. Mostly the time machines. Example: only yesterday, a moment of genuine sadness overcame me when, while warming up some nice thick pea and ham soup, I glanced at my cooker and felt a real pang of regret that I might never be able to pop back to a carefully-tended Palæolithic fireside, wrest a caveman's attention from the dancing shadows cast by its oh-so-hard-won flames, zap him back to my futuristic lair and show him a god-damned GAS HOB. I mean, imagine the look on his face while I'm just standing there, switching it on, and off, and on, and off. Maybe casually scorching some paper, a candle, a sabre-tooth steak; you know, just making the point. On, again; once more, off. And hey! Look! I switched it on again! Yeah! How'd you like them apples, Cavey? He'd go batshit, I'm telling you.

I remember having, as a young child, a red t-shirt with the Coca-cola logo emblazoned upon it in Arabic. I don’t know where I got this t-shirt; maybe an equally small visiting friend left it at our house and I “inherited” it, as there’s no way my Dad would have sanctioned its purchase, unless he really didn’t clock what it was. At any rate it feels like his very lack of realisation was part of the shirt’s attraction to me, making it somehow more mine than all the other oh-so-explicable stuff surrounding us. I loved it, anyway. It’s quite an early memory: I remember wearing it on a warm day in the main hall at my infants’ school, and we moved our house (and hence my school) in December 1978, so at the latest it would have been towards the end of the summer in that year, making me six years old. Thirty years ago. It feels like it could have been earlier, but of course recollections of childhood can be deceptive. I reckon it must be close to every time I’ve seen a tin of Coke with its writing in a language other than English since then that I’ve thought of that t-shirt, or at least my memories associated with it. It's a well-worn mental path for me now, meaning sights like this can evoke easily the excited sensations provoked in an inquisitive child by the possibility of some arcane knowledge to which he and he alone might be privy.

Having rarely seen much of it in the flesh before yesterday, I’ve never really been sure what I think about Rothko’s work. I suppose I’d always thought there was a kind of grim humour to it, with these huge window-like figures hung high in windowless gallery rooms; and I was aware not only of a Warhol-like fascination with repetition, cycle, and (im)mutability, but also of a somewhat Klein-esque experimentation with colour, texture and profundity — even if my perception of it was mediated and inevitably emasculated through the Habitat-isation of (e.g.) “Orange and Yellow”. The Tate Modern’s current gathering of his late works reveals quite how much a real-world viewing illuminates and clarifies Rothko’s art, and hence how much sense it makes that he should have been so concerned in his lifetime with the compositional aspect of the works’ presentation — not least because the presentation in question, even though perhaps at odds with aspects of Rothko’s reported views on it, is itself so intelligent and sensitive to the work.

On first seeing abstract pieces, I often can’t help myself from wondering, Middle England-like, how much artistic ‘skill’ or ‘talent’ is required to daub paint in a seemingly random or at best simplistic manner on a canvas. After enough viewings, investigations and conversations, however, the knee-jerk “I could have done that” has at least come to be followed usually equally automatically in my mind by “Well, you didn’t; this artist did”, on which cue I settle into some kind of analytical appreciation of the work, taking authorial intention as a first principle and working outwards, as though mapping atoms of causation, into its effect on the viewer. (OK, I know, that’s mental, but come on, give me a break — I’m a computer geek, a decomposer and a re-builder of things. I can’t help it. It’s the way I’m made.) Though I started out on this exhibition in the same analytical mode, fussing over which room was which so that I could make sure I was reading the right bit of the guide, feeling slightly short-changed by small mural studies in gouache on paper looking much to my impatient brain like children’s washes of colour, by the time I left, I’d undeniably felt something quite different, brought about by these paintings; something quite inexplicable and quite powerful.

The guidebook returned more than once to what it called Rothko’s “preoccupation” with the display of his work; in the first room, a small cardboard model was shown of the space proposed to him for display of his mural at the Tate; later, photographs of some of the pieces under ultraviolet light showed details of the brushwork. Strangely, for one as construction-oriented as I am, under some circumstances I find an exhibition’s dwelling too much on the craft, the historicity, the detail of the manufacture to be a distraction, sometimes even an annoyance — surely, I ask myself (perhaps through some desire to escape, by the offices of overpowering sensation, from that very orientation) the work leaves something to be desired in terms of immediacy and appeal, if such examination is required in order to appreciate it? In this case, however, it was exactly that examination which opened up the desired sensation to me.

The respectfully muted lighting in which Rothko himself had been so insistent that his work should be presented is maintained in the main Seagram room, contrasting directly with the conservators’ inspections in the next room, the stark change of atmosphere from the practically ritual to the scientific adding weight to the feeling of getting under the ‘skin’ of the paintings. The nigh-pornographic revelation of the layers of multiple paint media under the UV lights combine with the glass-backed presentation of one painting’s underwear to instil a feeling of paradox, an unease brought about by the juxtaposition of the large murals’ seemingly uncomplicated gloomy luminescence with the sudden realisation of the actual complexity of the work undertaken to impart that appearance of simplicity. Layer upon layer, stroke upon stroke, coatings, glaze, obfuscation, redirection, misdirection … Should we be seeing this? Should we be laying bare this depth of care, rather than simply appreciating the final result, particularly in the case of an artist so intentionally proscriptive about the manner in which it might best be appreciated?

I found this dichotomy particularly striking, because it was exactly the realisation of the care taken which opened my eyes to these big, bold, engaging, contemplative canvases. Not just the care taken in and of itself, but the demonstration of what was under the surface made me consider these pieces in a new, naturalistic way. From the more or less subtle re-covering and smothering of the landscaped “Red on Maroon — Mural, Sections 5 and 74” in the Seagram room, to the intense, concentrated paper studies and the increasingly open, even loose textures of “Black on Gray”, I became aware of a kind of tangibility to the paintings, not the thickly-applied oils of a Van Gogh but something altogether delicate, as though the ethereality of the intention behind the works had somehow been infused into the physical materials, bonding with its form and somehow lightening the weight of that material even as it impresses its reality upon the viewer.

The “Black-Form Paintings” seemed to me the summation of this experience. As the guide says, “prolonged contemplation reveals the slow build-up of the surface through multiple layers and the close attention Rothko paid to gradations in tone and texture”; in the course of such contemplation, the paintings really do seem somehow to reveal something of themselves. The familiarisation of my eyes to the light, the surroundings and the composition of the space allowed the Black Forms to shimmer before me, pulling in and out of my conceptual focus, and I found something enormously compelling about these implied monoliths. Something mysterious, something suggested, something long-known and yet long-forgotten; a kind of magnetism, an unspoken yet powerful compulsion towards something just the other side of comprehensibility. It felt in that moment as though there really might exist, in the world, such a thing as human meaning, be it devoid or otherwise of objective implication, and as though such meaning might be conveyed across time and space, even through inscrutable, formless form.

I’m still not sure what I think about Rothko’s work, but at least now I know that I feel something about it. Thankyou, Mark Rothko, for your enduring obsession with communicating your wordless meaning, and thankyou, Tate Modern, for granting it this prism.

It's a bright, crisp day on the autumn cusp of summer, and I’m in Portland, Maine; wandering, solitary, drinking in the surroundings and stealing snaps away with me.

As I straighten from my crouch, a young woman approaches me, an equally young man in tow. The boy, uncertain, sports a shock of orange hair; the girl wields a Sony DSLR and a resolute expression. We stand face to face, exchanging an expectant stare as though each would read the other’s intention through the eye – and, almost defiantly, she raises the camera and steals in turn a snap from me.

She lowers her device, holds my gaze for a moment, and walks calmly away. The boy follows. Not a word is spoken.

I stand for a moment, let it pass without question, and feel free.

I’ve been meaning to write this down for a while now. I think it was in early October 1989 that I was sent on an errand which involved picking up a box of now–forgotten materials from a printer’s premises somewhere around this area; Tabernacle Street rings a distant bell. Memories fade, memory confounds, and close on twenty years have passed since that atom of happenstance flickered in and out, but I know I have an image of this place, forged by the place it then was, on that sunny autumn day.

I remember the old Tube station — I feel like it was Moorgate — as having an agèd wooden bridge over the tracks, and I remember looking, as I wandered through this maze of biblically–inspired street names, down into still–forsaken gaps in the buildings, gouged presumably by the intrusion of V2s decades earlier.

I remember that pinch in the air, that welcome snip of coolness slicing through the tail of an Indian summer’s breath. I remember the shimmering, thinning quality of the light, borne of our angle to the sun at that autumnal point; and as I remember, the years gone by conspire to spin webs of tangled connections in my mind between that glistening, concrete day in which I lived, and others, similar, but merely conjured from the minds of writers I read as a child. I remember popping in to The Castle Sandwich Bar on my way back to the station to buy a toasted sandwich: ham, cheese and pepperoni, a recent concoction, and by far my favourite at the time.

I remember so clearly how good it was; not just the butter and grease oozing out of the edges of the burnished floury white bread to soak into the bitty texture of the coarse white paper bag as I walked excitedly yet somehow deflatedly back down Paul Street to find my way home and back to the grind of the familiar, but the whole sphere of presence and determination, of an expanding vista of thus far elusive but soon–to–be graspable possibilities opening themselves to me — the thrill of the new, the budding comprehension of the enormity of it all. It felt good; it was good.

I remember the friendly faces in the Castle and the easy, matter–of–fact bonhomie of the people who worked in this oasis, alongside its even–then ageing décor; and I remember, fondly, one of my first solitary tastes of a hitherto completely unknown city.

What with Friday night’s revelry causing me to spend most of Saturday in bed, I missed my recently-instituted weekly trip to Dalston market, and so decided today to stretch my legs and grab some essential supplies by strolling down to the supermarket in Whitechapel, walking back the long way, up towards Aldgate and back up Brick Lane. I snuck out of the side gate to cut the corner round onto Whitechapel Road, and couldn’t help but notice immediately an unusually heavy police presence. Walking further along the road I encountered more and more, stopping to snap some shots, wondering whether this could really be a normal population for a Sunday – surely the Met aren’t so uptight about Whitechapel that a few street-stalls and a fancy-dress procession would inspire such blanket coverage?

A quick consultation with an enthusiastic photographer whose view I’d inadvertently blocked in the execution of further investigations bore Olympian fruit; the Torch was to be borne along Whitechapel Road as part of its journey to Beijing, via the Millennium Dome. My gaze followed hers up to the police helicopters hovering above, back down to the sea of fluorescent jackets, and, realising that the route would coincide with mine, I continued along my way, shopping bags in one hand and camera-phone in the other.

Soon the density of detectives grew dramatically; on foot, on motorbikes, in vans and even on pedal-bikes they came, and sure enough, the first bus of the Torch Team came past the bottom of Brick Lane, aswarm with yellow coats and flashing blue lights, with more vans hot on their heels. In spite of a policewoman’s estimate of an hour, a five-deep guard of shouting, sweating, screaming officers heralded the arrival of the torch-bearer within moments of the bus, and instantaneously the atmosphere of the scene transformed from pregnant anticipation to an unmistakeable, almost tangible atavistic thrill. A battle of shouts was merely the sonic manifestation of a battle of wills between the phalanx of police, and the demonstrators whose attentions they wished to ward off, the latter shouting not only various admonitions to the boys in blue but also, amongst other things, “Free Tibet!”, “Go home!”, “You’re not welcome” – that last, I thought, particularly personal and powerful in its clarity, simplicity and directness.

Here was the representative, the conceptual; here was the pinnacle of a clash of human forces, the apex of antipathy between a set of interlinked and interwoven binary oppositions. Imperialism and freedom; China and Tibet; Western and Eastern policy, power and perception; order and anarchy; the Olympian spirit inevitably set deliberately and manipulatively in stark contrast to political machination, human frailty in the face of the temptations of power, and human cruelty in the face of that power’s actual attainability.

Yet also here was the real. The spine-tinglingly immanent reality of tribalism; of simple aggression and antagonism dressed up in self-righteousness; of the thoughtless exercise of duty. An ultimate reality, yes, the street level of this internecine struggle pointing inescapably to the reality of the powerlessness of the masses, their lives laid out before them by the soaring sweep of History and its implementation through the desires of ideologues the world over, whose causes and intentions they champion at the front line of conflict; but also the palpable, material reality of the crowd, the hormonal and adrenal dynamics of the constituents of those masses, the sudden and powerful meaninglessness of the ultimate at the very moment of its infusion into the corpus. It was that which grabbed hold of me, the excitement of the moment, the presence of the world and its power and I turned to follow the runner, first with my eyes and then with my feet, overcome not only with a sense of immediacy and connection to my surroundings but also by a heady cloud of comprehension of everything swimming around me; the grunts and Marine-like shouts of the police, the angry baying and shouting of the protestors, the apparent calm of the torch-bearer in the face of what suddenly seemed to be mayhem, organisation barely maintaining dominion over chaos.

Here, now, was a primal happening; a chink in the fabric of daily existence through which one might conceivably slip, a believable possibility of the collapse of order; people running madly down the street, pavements and roads becoming one, cyclists, pedestrians, police, protestors, passers-by like myself intermingling in a frenzy of excitement, my shopping bags swinging beside me, my camera clicking away, my mind exalted and my senses ablaze, an explicit distinction on political grounds mirroring the sociological and psychological chasms separating these groups of people so close to each other that they could reach out and touch, grab, caress, punch — and within it all, almost subsumed by the emotional seismology, the still, small voice of calm, of integrity and endeavour, its figurative presence rendering trivial the manner of its physical representation: the Olympian intention.

A young lady sitting at a junction chatted idly with her passenger, and, when ready, thrust a tonne of moulded metal across my two-wheeled path as I sailed into a green-light gauntlet, throwing the common perception of rectitude conferred on me by that beacon into stark relief against its ultimate meaninglessness.

Time lolled lazily ahead of me, affording a nonchalant Destiny the opportunity to dangle in my sights the possibility of action against its intended trajectory; daring me to deny its dominion, challenging my challenge of its apparent authority.

Contemplation of the uselessness of an in any case absent bell done and dusted, the startling abundance of exhalation sprung like a well from my lungs was still not sufficiently strong to penetrate the toughened glass shield, and this first fist shaken furiously at the hand of Fortune fell again, futile.

Shaken suddenly from a now seemingly lifelong sensory indolence, abruptly acutely aware of the surrounding world’s almost visceral and certainly soon-to-be tangible physical indifference to my plight, my mind elevated by excitement and adrenaline to that mythical state of presence to the moment of existence, I grasped fully in that very moment the eternally infinite complexity of Now; that vortex of happenstance, that abundance of potential pathways continually strewn palm-like before us and summarily trodden beneath the grinding steps of our narcoleptic trudge through the luminous intervals we call our lives.

Seized by my own capacity, I squeezed on my brake and the back wheel – apprising me, even in my access of apprehension, of the paradox of choice and mechanism – started to skid on the dry tarmac, ceasing immediately on my grip’s relaxation; one course closed, I opened immediately another, my mind and body tightened, together, to a sneer at such dualistic distinctions, and tilted my frame away from true, leaning into a leftward swerve which though inadequate to avert entirely the expected collision, would surely diminish its force, and leave me free to proceed with my reflections?

The instant of impact took me momentarily outside of myself; in the pitching, yawing rolls of hand-wound gramophone cycles, the bike was knocked from under me and I slid to the dirt, my ear presumably, as evidenced by its subsequent revelation to a hospital nurse of chipped black metallic paint, grazing the nearside wing of the car fractions of a second before the ground treated my elbow in the same manner. The cosmos scrabbling around me in a crazed dash to regain its familiar orientation, my panorama returned to its customary aspect and I lifted my head towards the rapidly-approaching anxious onlookers, then back to the car, puzzled as to why its passenger, the door now open, was towering above me at such an unusual angle.

I stood, dazed but unbroken, and was assisted kindly to the roadside where I sat for a moment bemused, befuddled, and bewildered, distracted from my meditations by the ministrations of an emergency-ambulance motorcyclist. Where was I hurt, could I see, could I feel?

To those questions I could provide answers, but to another, more fundamental: had I averted my fate, or merely co-operated in its implementation? – I had, and have, none.

Suddenly, it seems, the hirsute crest of flourishing youth announces its
Intention to pass the way of the rest of all flesh.
Cruel is the irony of existence, played out through the path of

Testosterone: in early hours it runs a relaxed
Riot, coursing freely, unworn by care, unfettered by
Anxiety; beholden only to the satisfaction of physical
Necessity, revelling in the magnetic pull of a crown quite so full - but
Soon, the daily grind inevitably
Impinges, inescapably, upon
The hitherto heedless viscerality of

Glowing adolescence,
Leading the newly over-active adrenals to attend
Openly to their accelerated
Recession of the erstwhile pilous perimeter and its
Ignominious retreat to entirely unexpected
Areas.

Many are the compensations to be gleaned from a life increasingly
Unencumbered by juvenile confusions and agitations; yet
None can deny how cruel indeed a
Deception is wrought upon us: to grant so transcendent a glimpse of
Immortality through the briefly burgeoning bloom of experience - so swiftly and so softly whisked, wholly, away.

We wonder how this might have come about. Of course the reason might easily have been as simple as that the TV star was hungry, angry with the homeless man (damn those homeless men), or merely criminally insane; one can’t help but wonder, however, whether there might not have been a deeper and altogether more fascinating scenario at the root of this regrettable occurrence (assuming, of course, that it was regretted and not vaunted). Perhaps the TV star had also become homeless and stumbled into a biting episode arising from a territorial dispute over begging rights with another member of the homeless fraternity (or indeed sorority)? Or maybe, just maybe, there exists a secret society whose members are all TV stars happily paying to attend staged fights between homeless men in (temperature-controlled) empty swimming pools in the basements of Barratt mansions secreted deep in Epping forest? Perhaps the TV star was so incensed at the loss of one such fight by the homeless man he or she had sponsored with a significant display of fiscal confidence that the bite was simply one of frustration? Or maybe - just maybe - the TV star, once a keen participant in such light-hearted leisure activities, might have fallen from grace, losing a coveted spot on “Celebrity Bastard Squad” following a mysterious incident with a turkey and a Cumbrian rapist, collapsing via a glut of explosively lurid coverage ultimately into a desolate morass of anonymous obscurity, eventually ending up, in a staggering and of course entirely unexpected dénouement, fighting for coins in the cellar of his replacement’s crypto-Wimpey pile?

We may never know.