London

Finally - the last part of the journey was a 2 week stay in London.
All the major galleries were about to install significant works highlighting major artists for the Frieze Art Fair - so I missed a Baldessari retrospective at the Tate Modern, a Kiefer show at the both White Cube's Mason's Yard and Hoxton St venues, and several others by about a week. Mason's Yard did have a great show of Zhang Huan, complet with 2 pigs installed in the gallery. There was however Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy and good shows at The Haunch of Venison and an American abstract painting exhibition at Saatchi Gallery. Serpentine Gallery had major collection of works from German-born artist Gustav Metzger http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2008/06/gustav_metzger29_september_8_n.html parts of which were not unlike the current show at Detached by Brooke Andrew. I was the first viewer after the opening the night before to cut up an old newspaper and pin it on the wall under specific headings.

Then it was off to Birminham to meet with Heather and Ivan Morsion http://www.morison.info/ who will be coming to Tasmania early next year to undertake a project with CAST. While there Ivan introduced me to Gavin Wade, from Eastside Projects http://www.eastsideprojects.org/index.php?/more-about-eastside-projects/ which is an artist-run space given generous assistance by the local council to invigorate the local industrial community. Wade, who is a curator and artist, is doing some interesting work within an old warehouse space, where each of the exhibitions intertwines with the next.

Heather and Ivan Morsion.
Conversion of a former work I Love Pleasure Island, their work for the 2007 Venice Biennale, which is now converted into Eastside's office and meeting room.

Following on from I Love Pleasure Island, Heather & Ivan Morison present I Hate Her, I Hate Her, a dark dystopic sci-fi puppet show with a nod to Punch & Judy (below). The puppet show continues the story telling in relation to Pleasure Island, Eastside Projects unique crystalline red wood office (above), working with hand made clay, bone and fabric hand puppets performed by professional puppeteers.

Heather and Ivan Morison

Gustav Metzger

The exhibition draws together the themes and methodologies that have informed the London-based artist’s practice from 1959 until the present day. The broad cross-section of works on view include Metzger’s auto-destructive and auto-creative works of the 1960s, such as his pioneering liquid crystal projections; the ongoing Historic Photographs series, which responds to major events and catastrophes; and later works exploring ecological issues, globalisation and commercialisation. Film footage of seminal performances and actions are exhibited, as well as a new, participative installation using the archive of newspapers Metzger has been collecting since 1995

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Crisp London Los Angeles is a tiny gallery - much like an ARI, that has three floors connected only by a tall spiral staircase

They were showing Charlotte Becket, a USA -based artist. The work looks like Colin Langridge's work, except it is made of black plastic and Gaffa tape. A small motor inside makes it seem like it's breathing. She had several wall-mounted works which were better - they moved very slowly breathing in and out, with the plastic making an odd cracking sound.
http://www.crisplondonlosangeles.com/2009/charlotte-becket-2/

This exhibition by Jill Magid was worth the visit to Tate Modern http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jillmagid/
even though most of the building was in 'install' mode

Authority to Remove marks the final chapter of American artist Jill Magid's long involvement with the Dutch secret service, the AIVD. In 2005, she was commissioned by the AIVD (De Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst) to create an artwork for their new headquarters. ...The brief from the AIVD was 'find the human face of the organisation'. Instructed to work only with agents who had volunteered to participate, the artist set about recruiting her subjects with an alluring infomercial broadcast on the agency's intranet. Arranging meetings via a third party fixer, Magid met with her subjects in impersonal locations – restaurants, bars, airport meeting points – and began gathering information from a selection of agents. As part of the commission, she proposed to write a report based on these encounters, to be made publicly available, combining personal details of the individual agents she met into a collective persona of the AIVD. Forbidden from using recording equipment during her encounters, she kept handwritten notes from which she created a series of artworks including neons, sculptures, prints and drawings. By collecting the agents' personal information and their accounts of the mechanisms of the agency, Magid hoped to discover the 'face of power' at the centre of what she began to refer to as 'The Organization

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