Concert: BBC Proms - Gustav Mahler Symphony No.9

Having played Mahler's 1st myself - The Titan - on the clarinet in my late teenage days, I somewhat became obsessed with his symphonies. To my ears, there is nothing more deliciously complex and dramatic than his first, fiths, and only Schubert's Unfinished tops his ninth in terms of the opulent melodrama of romanticism. Oh well, music history...

Granted, the Royal Albert Hall is not the mecca of accustic fidelity - unlike the Cologne Philharmony, a purpose-built venue for classic concerts - but the charme to walk in after work for a fiver equipped with a blanket and a bottle of champagne urges you to re-position the evening on pleasure.

Hiding the booze like a teenager away from the patrolling staff on the gallery under the roof, it resembled the quest for a working class boy to mingle with his aristocratic lover at dawn without being detected by the entourage of the upper class girl guarding her viginity on the streets of Victorian Kensington.

Then you get the usual rituals of concert master and conductor coming in, receiving applaud, bowing, sitting down, the orchestra getting into pose, a few seconds of empty silence, and then the masterpiece emanates from the stage and illuminates the O2 of the 19th century.

Lying on the floor, closing your eyes, feeling your blood circulation and holding your better half in your arm, your thoughts float into the night and give space to concentrated listening while half asleep. You can just imagine yourself as a well-dressed gentlemenn with a broken heart in 1908 on the dawn of the Belle Epoque roaming the streets of Vienna.

Epic music meets monumental architecture. Can't wait to see the 10th - his unfinished one.

The Great Exhibition

Wanting to see Paul Chan's show in the Serpentine, I bumped into friends on the way and joined them to see "a graduate show in a tent" instead (I had seen Paul Chan in Boston already) It turned out to be a afternoon of exitement, arousal and inspiration. The RCA has coined this year's presentation of its students "The Great Exhibition" in hommage to the original in 1851 - and as far as I can say I have discovered some revolutionary and thought provoking concepts and ideas.

Let's start with The Race by Michael Burton, a series of interventions tackling the issue of antibiotics - human mankind cannot live without it yet bacteria are developing faster than R&D labs can spin out drugs. He suggests that "with the end of the antibiotic era we have no other choice but to symbiotically evolve to meet the pressures of hostile new diseases. The photo above is called bacteria harbourer, and another piece on display (as well as video) is a fist-size fabric cage that is woven into a women's hair in order to hosts a praying mantis. Yes, it may sound absurd, but when you see it it kind of makes sense, for future generations though.


My favourite is EXTREME GREEN GUERRILLA, a project by Michiko Nitta, that responds to global warming and other threats to contemporary civilisation. Among other radical solutions, he proposes an Animal Messaging Service, in which humans send digital messages from e.g. London to New York - not through the existing infrastructure of glassfibre cables but - by using biological transmitters: whales, birds, rats and other species. The 'interface' to carry the information is stored on RFID tags that are implanted into the animals, as demonstrated below with a Mackerel.

Surely, this isn't exactly the most efficient way to communicate, but that would miss the point. Screaming of with and humour on the one hand (species are clustered into fast and slow, or low and high risk; think predator and prey...the Mackerel belongs to the latter) this project also gives amazing impulses to think about carbon footprint and other hot topics.

To Andreas Molgaard, the most pressing issues is mankind's survival in the 21st century. Focussing on the big picture of global change, he comes up with 11 ways to survive, ranging from the funny, wouldn't it be nice, to extreme thoughts of erasing one continent completely or limiting life to 33 years (like Jesus). Like it or not, this is somebody with the vision (and guts - since this is pretty controvertial stuff) to list some of the options, viable or not, the history of the future will tell...

These days however, a big imminent problem in cities like London is social unrest, in form of gangs hanging out on the streets, women getting harressed, juveniles drinking on playgrounds and so on. Nothing new so far. But did you know that the police can declare an area - ranging from a phone box to the entire borough - a so-called "dispersal zone" legally prompting suspects to leave the declared zone and keep them at bay with a 3 months prison threat if violating this order? I didn't! And I am very glad that Tamsin Fulton is pointing this out in her project www.thedispersalzone.org.uk Using the API of Google Maps she publicises all DZs in London with Tags when it was declared for what duration and what the reason was. The fact that she uses readily available yet hardly known information (to the local residents) makes this project very Mark Lombardi-ish (he re-shaped newspaper clips into intricate graphic webs of state corruption across the world) More on her blog http://tamsdesigninteractions.blogspot.com


From the Mean Streets of London to the Great Oceans of our Planet: Daniel Sjoholm thinks that current abundance in Yacht design suffers a misguided focus on marble, gold and other Oligarch toys. He sees a need for an update in Yacht design, and promotes a new luxury in the form of glass bottom "speed lounges" that look like spaceships cruising lagoons and reefs. Can he also somehow reconcile his vision with the manifesto of the EXTREME GREEN GUERRILLA folks?

Other highlights of bionic design included Il Hoon's aluminum table, that could both be interieur of Sjoholm's yachts and vanguard of a new wave of organism-inspired architecture and furniture design. Bauhaus is dead. Long live Colani.

Emphasising round forms as well are Henny van Nistelrooy's old-magazines-turned-artworks. Starting from the outside, he works his way through these magazines carving out holes of different sizes and angles to create a paper-based sculpture. When you then flick through the pages, these meticulously crafted holes appear like wormholes trying to link the (often shallow and meaningless) world of fashion and advertising with your own imagination of how you might fill these voids with your personal stories. Having always admired paper cuts (Matisse, Felix Droese to name two) I felt inclined to get one for £20, which rounded-up this fantastic endeavour on a Sunday afternoon.

Until 28 June at Kensington Gardens

Art Show: Leonardo Da Vinci

To cut through the crap: this might be a once in a life-time chance to see some of the most famous and history making drawings as originals, so go - but close both eyes and shut down your connoisseur's minds amidst this disastrous kind of curation and presentation. £10 per time-slot ticket for a single smallish room cramped with dozens of works is a joke to say the least. The V&A museum is not exactly short of space, is it. However, to see the ink with your own eyes that documented one of history's most radical inventor and inventive artist puts you in a state of silent awe and (sensuous) goose bumps.

V&A, until 7 January, 2007

Art Show: Any Warhol at Hauser & Wirth

Think Andy Warhol was a one trick pony only making campbell soup and Marilyn portraits?

Sure, this guy was one of the founders of pop art and his iconoclastic canvas work hangs in all museums and collections of name and fame, but in my opinion his photographic work is not only extremely exiting, it also reveals more of the real drama behind this maniac. If you survive more than one hour of the eight hour Warhol TV footage, than you get an idea why he considered buying tons of socks in a department store a spiritual event and why he is the king of pop, eh soap.

Being a teenager in the 80s, this decade is my key to adoring fame, dismissing America’s political system as corrupt but idealising NYC as the world’s capital, hero-ing John McEnroe and Sylvester Stallone and worshipping Madonna (then young) and Joan Collins (then already sexy mature).

This show contains 250 black and white photographs of the above named, Keith Haring, J-M Basquiat, Jim Carre, Ozzy Ozbourne, a hell of a lot of NYC-invented here mullets, transvestites and that I-wish-I-was-there mingling of eccentric art scene-meets- new age underground crowd that made SoHo and the Lower East side so legendary in the 80s.

You can hear, smell and taste the then scene, which Warhol captured in real life situations, much better and deeper than the ah so many celebrity photographers at the time who in turn became stars themselves (think Newton and Ellen Mark). Warhol was an elder-statesman at the time of most of the presented portraits - kind of post-pop NYC new wave soap...:-)

And as far as curating is concerned, the fact that his (self?) portraits are kept in the vault down in the basement, give the entire show this fascinating notion that in reality this ueber-star was pretty shy and often lonely. I did get goose bums! (Hauser & Wirth Gallery is located in a former Palladium-style banking building and fortunately makes use of all facilities, sometimes even including the ancient elevator. The gallery is worth a visit alone.