George Condo,

whose exhibition at the Hayward Gallery I'm seeing tomorrow (excited), calls the bug-eyed creations within his paintings 'Pod people', after the inhabitants of Aldous Huxley's book 'The Doors of Perception'. When Ossian Ward interviewed Condo in 2007, the resultant article on this website - http://www.timeout.com/london/art/features/2572/George_Condo-interview.html - contained the following extract.

"All of these ‘Pods’ – including the Queen – wear an expression that ‘goes between a scream and a smile,’ says Condo, ‘that reflects simultaneous emotions or conversations with the conflicting voices in your head.’ This ‘psychological cubism’, as he calls it, parallels our ability to channel-hop through increasingly fractured visual information and ‘exploits our own imperfections – the private, off-moments or unseen aspects of humanity – that often give way to some of painting’s most beautiful moments’."

Food for thought.

Another Month

without a peep from me. That's depressing. But to be fair to me it has been my first month of university, which I think, all things considered, couldn't really have gone any better. I missed the Tracey Emin exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. The moment I found that out was such an FML moment. But I want to go see the George Condo, which is up soon. George Condo paints stuff like this.

So you either totally get why I want to see it or you just stopped reading. So, I went to the Occupy London demo today in St. Paul's and managed to escape kettling by the skin of my teeth. According to the Beeb the Police are denying that they used kettling techniques but they can STFU. It was such a peaceful protest, the police massively overreacted. I was also there to take photos for the Uni Newspaper, QMessenger, so it's a shame I had to leave early and miss speeches by Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks. Due to potential copyright issues I don't want to post a huge number of photos from the protest here, but here's a few.