Roni Horn, a new... exploration

I should point out that if you click this link, you will see an article about an artist I have written about before. With her boobs out.

I suppose she felt like celebrating the latest incarnation of her retrospective.

I would say 'that is all' here, but as always with Roni Horn, that's not all.

Autumn day

Autumn day - mushrooms, originally uploaded by peripathetic.

The Guardian says today should really be a bank holiday, so it's good fortune that I decided before the weekend that today would be a day off.

So after reading the article and smiling at my freedom, I had a cup of hot coffee and headed out into the very autumnal local woodland for some photography, which you can see more of if you click the photo and explore the rest of the set.

Multicoloured Belfast City Hall

Multicoloured Belfast City Hall, originally uploaded by peripathetic.

Yes, I know this is blurry and horrible, but our City Hall has been given, from what I can tell, just a new electrical system, a café, and a lick of paint.

Anyway, the really striking thing about it is that they've taken to making it look like a rainbow at night. The colours shift and merge into one another. It's a striking effect and very welcome as we head into darker nights...

Keith Jarrett - Testament

Keith Jarrett - Testament, originally uploaded by peripathetic.

It is NOT natural to sit at a piano, bring no material, clear your mind completely of musical ideas, and play something that is of lasting value and brand new (not to mention that these are live concerts, and the audience's role was of utmost chemical importance: they could change the potential and shape of the music easier than the difference of pianos or hall sound). I then did a series of solo concerts in Japan in the spring of 2008 that seemed to hit a technical high-note in the history of my solo events. I wasn't sure what could possibly happen next after these concerts.

Then my wife left me (this was the third time in four years). I quickly scrambled to stay alive (music had been my life for 60 years) by setting up a Carnegie Hall Concert (a leaflet inserted into the program for my 25th Anniversary trio concert there in October 2008 advertised a solo concert in late January 2009), but before I did that concert, Steve Cloud managed to quickly come up with two solo concerts in Europe: Paris and London. I had not played solo in London for, I believe, 18 years. These were the first solo events since my wife had left. I was in an incredibly vulnerable emotional state, but I admit to wondering whether this might not be a "good" thing for the music. It truly didn't matter; I had to do them. - Keith Jarrett

When disasters have befallen me, I have not had the (difficult) good fortune of being able to set up a concert in Carnegie Hall to blow the blues away. And in the two concerts recorded on these three CDs, Keith Jarrett certainly does blow his blues away - or if not entirely away, there's a lot more here besides The Blues, or Gospel, or the lush, tearjerking tunes that nestle into the corners of your mind for months on end.

The first concert, on CD1, is from the Salle Pleyel, Paris, recorded on the day before Thanksgiving in 2008. The second concert, spanning CDs 2 and 3, is from the Royal Festival Hall, London, recorded on the following Monday. It's sometimes tempting to feel, when you remember what you were doing on the date a recording was made, that you have somehow influenced the music - in my case, that a warm Thanksgiving table, very special people, new experiences and a sense of quiet acceleration at the start of winter have leaked into these CDs as if by magic - but of course, that's wrong. We all influence music anew each time we listen to it, and if there is anything fresh and bracing about Jarrett's creations here, there is also plenty that is warm and slow and like a summer night. This is music that will last until next spring - and next century.

I won't spend time giving a 'proper review', except to say that these concerts aren't as raw and fragmented as the earlier album 'Radiance', nor are they quite as coherent and complete as the Carnegie Hall Concert. They do, however, keep Jarrett pecking at fresh material in short episodes, the results are always satisfying, there is always something old behind them, and those tearjerkers are there too. Obviously, you should really buy the CDs as soon as possible, but first, read Jarrett's liner-notes at Amazon, and have a preview listen there - but a better listen at the ECM Player.

Tower house

Christ Church Greyfriars , originally uploaded by EZTD.

If you fancy living in a church tower thanks to the Blitz, it'll only cost you four and a half million pounds. But it's well worth it - you get a prime location in central London and a garden in the shell of the bombed-out church. The photos look wonderful. I don't know how long they'll be up, mind you. Via Londonist.

Frozen

No - it's not cold here today. Just ever so slightly chilly first thing in the morning. So far, at least, Autumn here has been kind. 'Frozen' alludes to the title of this photo gallery from the New York Times. I know a lady in Belfast who keeps a house very much like this one...

Open spaces

Luigi Russolo - The Revolt (1911), originally uploaded by Marc Cox.

The painting above was finished not last year, but nearly 100 years ago. It's by an Italian artist called Russolo, and it's called The Revolt. Russolo was a Futurist, and the Futurists were fierce, angry artists who wanted to smash the prescriptive, ordered ways of thinking of the past and speed towards a modern future that was more fast, free and easy than the slow, bogged-down past.

During my recent holiday in London, I did a lot of walking. I did some photography, some of it while walking, other bits while sitting down or ambling aimlessly. While sitting down, I was usually also reading or thinking. And whereas earlier this year I was thinking about light and dark and surface and depth as things in themselves and what their properties might be, this time I'm thinking more about movement through dark and light, and movement across surfaces. And what the dark and the the light and the surface contain, and mean.

Moving across the earth, whether you walk down your road, or whether you take a tube-train in London and pop up above the ground again, or whether you fly, has lately become very... directed. We start our journeys from a particular patch of ground given some significance and a name. We move from that point to another point, and to do that, we usually walk along a road, or a path, or we follow a map, or we sit within a form of transport that will impose our route upon us. We are as directed in our movements as actors upon a stage or as plants upon a pergola.

Richard Long is an artist who is interested in those paths and roads and the surface of the earth and how we move across it. He is interested in prising greater freedom of movement from apparently regimented ways of moving. For example, one of his works comprises a higgledy-piggledy series of worm-like lines, moving freely across a white surface - the lines are actually an unmarked map of the paths and roads which 'allow' our movement over a particular area of the English countryside.

Another work, which looks much more limitational, is a straight line drawn across a map from one random point to another. There is no path - the idea is simply to treat the surfaces of the earth along the line - the random sequence of mud - stone - paved road - grass - pebbles - dry leaves - more grass - mud - heathland - outcrop - crag - as free land to be travelled upon and over without paths in mind, without routes to follow. The straight line ruled across the map suddenly opens out in the imagination and becomes the pathless way without rules of any kind. And his gallery installations - the ground on the wall in the form of mud, lines of mud splashes looking as delicate as the shoots of bamboo or reeds on a Japanese print - simply draw further attention to the freedom of the surface.

Which is why, wandering aimlessly around the gallery, I was surprised when a Tate gallery attendant told me I couldn't take a photo of a group of stones. And which is also why, wandering wide-eyed around Tate Modern's Futurism exhibition, I was surprised at how directed a future the free-thinking, museum-smashing, free-thinking, velocity-loving, car-driving Futurists seemed to be speeding so headlong and blindly towards.

It's not that their love of the machine is alien to me. I love aeroplanes and fast trains and slow, clunky underground ones, with their shadows and sounds and flashes of light and colour just as much as they did. But it's all so samey for fierce, free-thinking people, isn't it? And all those people in the painting above, rushing forwards as one, so fast that they seem to be breaking the sound-barrier... couldn't they see the threat to freedom lurking in a mechanised future?

Or was it that nobody could have seen that, and now that we're in the present day with its planes, trains, automobiles and timetables, it takes an artist like Richard Long to nudge us out of the airport, away from the coded motorways and across the open fields?

(And another couple of things. One: there's no way my camera could have captured all that - stop your silly snapshot policies, art galleries. Two: Roni Horn's art, which I blogged about before, suddenly seems more 'Free-Futurist' than ever.)