explain hoxton to an alien

anyway, i don't understand what the article means by its 'starting in '93'. how? cos some talentless self-publicists put on a show there? big deal.

I was never in Hoxton when it was still cool. I was, however, hanging out in Williamsburg quite a lot in about 1993, and I can extrapolate from that transformation what Hoxton might have been like at about the same time.

If you can't get the idea of a local wasteland with low rents being colonised first by artists, then overrun by trendy style gits, well... that's the story of the modern city, innit?

alas. but it's hardly montparnasse is it? i think they skipped an essential stage.

I think part of the alarmingness is the speed of the transformation!

I've never thought Hoxton was cool but I do think lots of that art's cool.

Hoxton has become a symbol or shorthand for a certain kind of trendiness, which I'm not even sure exists there any more!

but i have a lot of trouble with

a) notion of art as elite sphere, and uncritical identification of x artists with a nation/generation
b) suits vs cool kids. cool kids can be fuckin jerks.
c) matthew collings

And look, I know that cool kids can be freaking jerks. BUT! My experience of Hoxton Bars was that cool kids, usually being local, show a lot more respect and dignity because you don't piss in your own backyard. Suits just come in and treat the place like a party pen, throw up in your doorstep, and then just leave.

He's no Loius Theroux.

a) "Uncritical"? Really?
b) why invoke Paris/New Wave NYC/Punk then? Is Hoxton rubbish because it wasn't the zeitgeist or are zeitgeists rubbish?
c) YBA art is one of the least 'elite sphere'-ish art things that I can think of.

Also M. Collings is grebt, the best critic at taking that art at face value in its real medium (the TV and papers, not the art press) and taking the mickey right back.

As with any article written by Jess Cartner-Morley, it's kind of half-baked. Most of the artists wre driven out when a company called Glasshouse started trying to cave in on leases, or they doubled and trebled service charges (if you rent 'studio' space, you pay this quarterly) so that artists were billed £1000 a quarter for wet hallways and broken lightbulbs (I say 'billed'; most people refused to pay and went to court over it). Of course they fucking moved.

One thing she *did* get right is stuff written about my friend Joshua, who died in '95 in a bizarre drinking accident. The warehouse Josh, Gary Hume and countless others lived in is now the home of Prince Blowjob's architectural school. She missed off how much of the place has been designed by Waugh and Thisleton - architects who moved there in the late '80s as students, who designed the revamped Blue Note back in '94 (well, Andrew Waugh did, with Sarah Featherstone).

The BFI rented rather than bought the Lux cinema space, when buying would have been a steal. DUH.

If you want proper Shoreditch there's still the Foundry and the Vietnamese restaurants. I go for the occasional art openings but everyone except for White Cube has moved. Which is odd - the last night I saw Joshua alive was at the Basquiat opening at the Serpentine being blown off by Jay Jopling (asshole) over some artists' dinner later that night. The next time I saw Jay Jopling, he was one of Joshua's pallbearers.

b) why invoke Paris/New Wave NYC/Punk then? Is Hoxton rubbish because it wasn't the zeitgeist or are zeitgeists rubbish?
c) YBA art is one of the least 'elite sphere'-ish art things that I can think of.

b) because pop music and movies are popular arts -- anyway, i said pour cold water and fair enough.
c) i think pop and movies are less elitist; STW, the YBAs seem like a poisonous crowd from where i'm sitting, and imho the whole culture of openings etc, is a monstrous relic of the 19c bourgeois done up in fashionable garb. i'm overstating of course, but why not? crikey, etc.

Maybe the YBAs are 'poisonous': I've no idea. Maybe the people in pop and movies are poisonous too. I don't have any contact with them either. Openings are for the in-crowd and I imagine movie launches or LP launches are just as vile. I don't like the sound of any of the above.

Actually I think it would be a lot easier for me - an art-interested outsider - to get into openings than to get to music biz or film biz parties. And like it or not BritArt has made it into mass culture, hasn't it?

It's a very interesting counterpoint that the "new guard" i.e. Saatchi and company are trying to preserve the idea of modern art as aesthetics for the elite, the cult of the Collector, charging outrageous prices to get into his gallery, etc.

While the supposed "Art Establishment" old guard (the Tate for example) are doing their best to popularise art (even if it is with the shock tactics of the Turner prize designed at getting Daily Mail outrage (and therefore pop press coverage)) making the galleries free etc.

Don't get HSA going on his "Saatchi is evil, therefore yBa is fundamentally a Tory art movement" rant...

but the area is still strange in my view, it has gentrified yes, but in a strange way, it is a windswept and empty place, on certain days it reminds me of goole. to me, it doesnt seem to have followed the normal gentrification path.

tracer says that hoxton is more the equivalent of les than williamsburg, which would then follow that williamsburg is actually stoke newington. i think this theory holds a decent amount of water

camden has gentrified weirdly too, like only partially succesfully. but then you could hardly call camden empty, it has followed another path again, one of financial gentrification, but not of prettyification. i wonder if this is to do with the highly transient population there (isnt a key plank of gentrification an influx of permanent residents - at least after a certain point along the process?)

Basically, HSA's argument is thus: Saatchi is major Tory, his advertising agency was responsible for Thatcher Government, therefore any and all art that he promotes will be tainted with Thatcherism, because he is actually the artist curating and therefore specifying what the majority of yBa art will be. Also, situation of Saatchi Gallery within the former GLC Building is the ultimate F.U. because Thatcher (and therefore Saatchi) was responsible for the disbanding of the GLC.

I say, well, you may have a fair point about Saatchi being a Tory and therefore evil, but does the incredible evil political assocations of the Borgias and Medicis in Rome and Venice invalidate the art of the Italian Rennaisance, for example?

(Nigel Spivey and "Enduring Creation" to thread, obv.)

What's funny about this, is the reason we were on the South Bank in the first place was that weird art installation involving neon lights and the SPRINKLING OF RAIN AND DISPERSAL OF MIST which basically just made autumn England JUST A LITTLE BIT MORE ENGLISH. Sigh.

We did, however, decide that we liked the turbine and there should be more of them.

But I did see some footage of people in the film industry at Cannes and they appeared to be acting in an unacceptable manner.

(Kate I think I'm on your side wrt the YBA thing)
(BTW cost of getting into the Saatchi = more or less what I was skanked for when I went to see "Pirates of the Carribean" in Tottenham Court Road)

damn skippy!

early godard had stars: jean seberg, BB, oh god name escapes me, lemmy caution in 'alphaville' (who was a star in europe, also in 'the long good friday'), jack palance. he also made stars of jean-paul belmondo and anna karina.

but after 1965-68... things changed

although since then he has used jane fonda, yves montard, juliette binoche (a bit b4 she was a star), alain delon, blokey from 'alphaville' agane, isabelle huppert, jacques dutronc, etc.

but his work has indeed been difficile since the late sixties.

was to be called

Tarzan Vs. IBM

It's the Hayward Gallery Neon Tower, a kinetic sculpture designed by Philip Vaughan (structure) and Roger Dainton (kinetics).

godard's work surely somewhat assumes the viewer has seen as many pre-60s movies as godard has!

fair assumption though at the time --
'a bout de souffle' = 'scary movie 0'

Still haven't seen the sun thing in the Turbine Hall, unfortunately.

I'm not trying to come after you, Enrique, I'm just interested.

also right now he is not easy to see; probably only 5 of his films are currently on video.

but at the time his stuff was in cinemas; he was better known, i should think, than lars von trier or wong kar wai are today.

tracy's stuff is not that easy to find -- i live in oxford and she did a show here last year, and obv in london it's easy enough.

however, i don't find the content of her work very accessible. collings doesn't help me understand it, because i really don't see it. this sounds finger-in-ear, but there it is. whereas i enjoyed watching godard's films (my first were 'week-end', 'aplhaville', and 'a bout de souffle' immediately, without, at that point, really being a buff.

subjective factor.

-- N.

Well, duh.

The main point for me has always been a sense of a vague city community, of interest, not geography. If your interests lie in that direction, then you are quite likely to run into someone you know. The city is no longer big, no longer be there dragons. You can say the same in Camden (mass alternative), Notting Hill (west Lonon deep house, princesses and Jockey Slut boys) or the City (yuck, my prejudice) or pretty much any part of a city.

Jess Carter Morely's article, for me, is articulating a percieved break up of that community.This may sound like the bloody obvious, but I see the sense of 'this is where it is/ was for us' as the main point, rather than the whys and wherefores of YBAs, Satchi, rent issues and the rest. Look at the language most people in that piece use. Fuck off back to Notting Hill was a joke, because there was always some overlap ("you do the flyers, I'll DJ", "you build the website, I'll write the content"), now they've just moved on to an area of less (interest-based) overlap, fuck off back to the city, fuck off back to Clapham. Tribalsim.

(works both ways of course)

-- Citizen Kate

True (well, poeticly true), but I'm guessing people like Jess Carter Morley are probably not on the suity side of things. So then you get a slew of articles bemoaning City boys - 'oh, that's not cool any more, see, we moved the goal posts, I'M STILL COOLER THAN YOU YUPPIE BOY!'

It is often reported that the relatively high incidence of lunacy within the Royal Navy was due to the men continually knocking their heads on the low beams between decks especially when intoxicated. The ratio, according to Blane (an eminent naval surgeon),was one madman for every 1,000 seamen, an increase of sevenfold over the civilian population.

Perhaps rather more surprisingly we find that the Navy cared for its lunatics in its own mental hospital at Hoxton in London. In 1813, for example there were 140 inmates listed with a fair spread across the social spectrum. 1 Captain, 4 Lieutenants, 3 Lieutenants of Marines, 1 Surgeon and an assistant, 2 Carpenters, 1 Gunner, 1 Master's Mate and a Midshipman were incarcerated there, the rest being seamen. This would suggest that the level of insanity was greater among the officers than men although this cannot really be supported as the officers relatives may have had greater influence as to their treatment or that medical authorities were more inclined to perservere with them. Some men were discharged cured, or into the care of their relations and some died while in hospital. The great reformers of mental institutions had barely begun their work at this time and the majority were therefore discharged into the living hell of the Bethlehem Hospital or Bedlam as it was better known.