If London felt charming, then Newcastle was like a nice bear hug from your grandfather. If your grandfather liked to drink to all night and yell loudly about football. Nestled on the Tyne River, the city is loaded with history (which to my surprise people seemed quite knowledgeable about) and tells another story of post-industrial hardships. I’ve been in England long enough to start noticing the differences in the accents; in Newcastle people sound more Scottish. For example, the word “do”. In London it sounds like “due”. In Newcastle it sounds like “dew”. I found it comforting for some reason; Geordies (as they are called) seem very rugged, hardworking and hard playing, and maybe just a little bit brash at times. I did inadvertently get mooned here after all.

(studying the mating rituals of the Geordies from my hotel window. apparently that involves dressing like superheros.)

In the art world circles run small and I found myself on a tour yesterday with the incredibly nice and lovely Paul, the brother of a friend of a friend. Michael, the brother, happens to be in Chicago, as a resident of InCUBATE, a space run by some friends of mine. I’d been e-mailing with Michael about my trip here and he kindly put me touch with his brother and off Paul and I went yesterday for the Newcastle art tour.

My favorite stop on the tour was on the outskirts of the city center, in an area known as Byker. The amazing gallery space Waygood (in the city center) is under massive reconstruction and while the new building is being redone, the studio spaces are located in a giant old furniture factory in Byker. The building itself is pretty isolated in a largely industrial area that is slowly being torn down (Paul informed me that a newly empty lot across the street was until recently, an emptied industrial building). It looked like Flint in a way and I immediately felt a warm cozy feeling. We toured through some of the studios, including Michaels, and went to the communal kitchen on the first floor for some tea. The first floor also has a space reserved for exhibitions, a way for the artists with the studios in the building to experiment with displaying their work or contextualizing it with other work – when the exhibitions are up a public reception is held. Truly brilliant.

During tea, James Johnson-Perkins joined us from a nap on the couch and we ventured to his studio to see his work. During the entire time I was cursing myself for the dead batteries in my camera; particularly when we went up the narrow staircase to Perkins’ studio. Standing floor to ceiling were huge lego-bots made out of plastic Tupperware-type containers in bright primary colors. Shelves lined the walls with hundreds of smaller, yet equally satisfying, lego-bots made out of actual legos. Some had guns, some wore skirts. Paul asked if one was wearing a chef hat. Perkins shrugged and said, sure. On the floor was his latest project, an in-progress dinosaur made out of Ken-dolls tie wrapped together in a big blob.

There seems to be this underlying theme of good silly humor in a lot of the art I saw made by the Northerners. At Vane Gallery there was work up by Jock Mooney, an Edinburgh-born artist. There were small black and white drawings lined on the wall, simple illustrations that were absurdist and induced many giggles in me, for example a dog with four very saggy breasts looks out to the viewer, and above it simply says “hello boys”. When I flipped through Mooney’s book of drawings and photographs of his sculptures I stopped at a drawing of a pasty in mid flight. Underneath in a hand-drawn font of mock-horror was written “The Pasty”. I bought a copy of the book…art about pasties?! If only I could curate an entire show with that theme…for now that page may have to be cut out of the book and framed on my wall. And I’m not going to go into Mooney’s sculptures, grotesquely awesome and made out of lightweight plastic. They need to be seen in person to be fully appreciated.

At the Laing Gallery I had a pleasant surprise of seeing an installation by Song Dong, based on his “Writing the Diary With Water” work. Song Dong is a prolific artist whose work beautifully and subtly addresses issues of the passage of time and the often futile nature of life. “Writing the Diary With Water” is part of a daily ritual that Song Dong does, where he literally writes a daily diary with water. At the Laing, Song Dong had set up a series of rocks across the gallery floor, about 2 feet by 3 feet. Next to the rocks were pillows and a container of water with a brush. Gallery visitors were encouraged to sit at a rock and write their own entries with water. A few children sat at rocks and wrote their names and then slowly the water evaporated. As with most of Song Dong’s work, its simple but extremely effective.

My first day in Newcastle was spent at the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art and was largely my reason for visiting Newcastle. The BALTIC, much like MASS MoCA, is housed in a converted factory. The Baltic was a flour and grain mill that closed in the early 80s. With a lot of help from the government (as is typical with the arts in England), almost the entire interior was ripped out (including well over 100 silos) and rebuilt into five floors of art space.

The BALTIC is impressive from the outside, the towering brick structure looking over the Tyne. But from the outside the Millennium Bridge (for pedestrians and bikes only, designed by Wilkinson Eyre and Partners) stole the show. It’s very sculptural and takes on different shapes and characters depending on which side you view it from. Looking at it from the Newcastle side, it has less of an anthropomorphic quality, looking more like something from a Miro painting. As I wandered up to the entrance of the bridge I noticed a sign, announcing “lift times” for that day. Lift? Hmm. The next one was about 5 minutes away so I walked down the river a bit and waited. Sure enough, a big horn sounded and a man came over a loud speaker, cheerily kicking everyone off the bridge – and then it started to lift. The bottom part, the actual part you walk on, began to rise up, the row of steel wires barely creaking with effort as it rose. It was breathtaking as the shape started to completely change as the bottom rose up, visually criss-crossing with the top part of the structure. No boats were around to make the passage underneath, so it paused briefly then began the descent. Impressive.

When I made my way into the BALTIC, I went first to the top floor (to my dismay the rooftop restaurant was closed for remodeling) to check out the viewing box. Another view of the bridge and of the city – I had a sneaking suspicion that for some, the draw of the BALTIC is the view up there.

The exhibitions at the BALTIC were hit and miss – a Yoshitoma Nara show that was fun, I’ll admit it. The stuff is cute. He worked with an architect to create three structures out of scraps of wood (one structure was sourced locally in Newcastle which had some amazing windows). Nara’s work filled the inside, creating a bizarre environment of ugly materials painted pastel colors and filled with images of Nara’s misplaced children and pets.

The group show, Double Agent, was on loan from the ICI London and had some interesting work – particularly photos by Phil Collins of art world people (curators, etc.) in the form of portraits taken in the style of a head shot. Collins had permission to slap the person as hard as he could before the photo was taken. He has had no trouble finding people to be in the photos, including the two curators of the Double Agent exhibition, looking startled with a big red mark along the side of their faces. How far will people go to be included? Pretty far.

The exhibition also had a video piece by the Polish artist, Artur Zmijewski. He brings together four groups of people in a big warehouse space: Polish nationalists, socialists, Christians and Jews. He gives them each a big sheet of paper mounted on stretcher bars. Each group wears the same color t-shirt according to their association. They are asked to paint symbols that are important to them, then they are asked to paint over each other’s work, over and over and over again. It gets pretty ridiculous and destructive but it’s also really poignant and entertaining. Sure he’s manipulating people’s emotions and their actions but that’s sort of the point, I think.

I liked the BALTIC, but beyond the factory converted building, it seems very very different than MASS MoCA. I won’t expound on that here, you’ll have to take me for a beer when I get back if you want to talk about it.

I’m now in Birmingham and preparing for my presentation…so far I’ve met some nice people here for the conference, bonding in our mass confusion of how to check into the dorm rooms…you never know at these things how you will end up befriending people.

(special thanks to Paul for showing me around! Here he is on the left with Dee and Pat of the wonderful Waygood Gallery)

London is charming. Granted I kept a pair of rose-colored tourist glasses on for much of my time there, happy to breathe in a city again. It also helped that for some reason my budget hotel offered me a cozy room with it’s own private garden, where I spent a few mornings basking in the sun over morning tea. I’m not a picky traveler, I don’t intend to spend a lot of time in my room anyway, but being surrounded by beautiful flowers in my backyard managed to melt my hardened traveler’s shell:

A lot of London cracked my shell actually:

St. Paul’s Cathedral:

Huge, old, beautiful. I sat through a half hour express lunch service like a good guilty Catholic, mostly staring at the light hitting the gilded gold on the statues. Then I trudged my way up the 530 or however many stairs to catch the view:

But a definite highlight of the Cathedral were two video works on display inside the chapel by Bill Viola. Which apparently is old news, St. Paul’s had his work on display way back in 2004 (along with Tracy Emin) in a show depicting contemporary images of Christ. Who knew the Brits were so progressive?

Another good way to see the city was the Tate to Tate boat ride, literally shuttling people between Tate Modern and Tate Britian. I had read that Damien Hirst actually designed the decoration of the boat and I was quite excited to see a polka-dot covered boat pull up to the dock. A bright pink “TATE” flag flew on the stern…yet for some reason (bad luck I guess) this boat was not doing the Tate to Tate tour that time. Thanks to Flickr, I found out later the only thing I really missed inside were more polka dots. Way to go Hirst!

But I digress, this is (as my Time Out London guidebook obediently told me) a fantastic way to see a lot of sights in a small amount of time. The Eye of London, Westminster Abbey, London Bridge, Big Ben…in about 30 minutes no less:

I actually took an almost break for a half a day and spent some time in Hyde Park, per the recommendation of a wise friend. I got off the tube at Notting Hill and found my way into the entrance to the park near Kensington Palace. The crowds kept me from paying the entrance fee to the Palace, instead I kept on track of having more of a day breathing in London than seeing the sights.

I sat in the shade for much of the late morning and afternoon, going from one tree to another around the park, mostly near the Princess Diana fountain. A police-escorted horse-drawn carriage passed by carrying Some Very Important Person but I continued to sit lazily under my tree. My one “art goal” for Hyde Park was Serpentine Gallery, co-directed by Hans Ulrich Obrist, an amazing curator and master of the artist interview. The show on display was Richard Prince, a sort of mini-retrospective of car hoods, joke paintings, nurse paintings, record covers, Marlborough men and a few sculptures thrown in for good measure. I like Prince’s work and see the validity in his use of media-soaked imagery…although I did have trouble grasping his newer work, aka the De Kooning series. Maybe I’m conditioned to seeing his work in a certain way and the fact that he’s doing something less immediately satisfying is actually my problem, not his. Most likely that is the case.

Outside of the gallery was a new architectural installation by Frank Ghery:

In honor of my day of lazying about, I took a few minutes to sit under the wood and glass canopy, and thankfully, for once, not thinking about the episode of the Simpsons that Ghery guest-starred on where he crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it on the ground, then picked it up and turned it into a design for a building. The piece at the Serpentine is all angles and no aluminum; lots of cast shadows and wide open steps. I could have gone without the frosting on the glass, but once again I’ll humbly defer to that being my problem, not his.

The bookstore at the Serpentine, by the way, is worth the trip alone. I practiced much self-restraint from blowing my meager savings on buying and shipping a giant box of art books back to the US.

One last art note, the ICA is programming an ambitious exhibition called “Nought to Sixty”, a presentation of sixty projects from emerging British and Irish artists happening over six months that started in May and lasts until November. For many of them this is their first major exhibition – I made it to a Nought to Sixty opening for The Hut Project, a group of three artists based in London. Their exhibition was half “retrospective” and half artist archive detailing pretty much every creative endeavor they’ve undertaken individually and collectively. From stacks of books on Duchamp and a massive installation of brown packing tape to rejection letters from galleries, The Hut Project definitely knows how to highlight the many absurdist sides of the art world.

Finally, I’d like to commend London on the amazingly clear and informative signs on the Tube. Chicago take note: see how easy it can be to show people a big map at each station, one on each side of the platform that shows clearly if they get on this train where it will take them! And electronic signs that give really accurate estimates as to the length of time until the next train arrives! No more staring down the dark hole down the tracks, anxiously craning your neck hoping to see the glimmer of train headlight knowing your wait is soon over! Think how much easier life could be for everyone involved in public transportation. Think how much happier people could be! It’s not that complicated, I swear!

Next stop: Newcastle.