After dropping off my exhibits for the Angels of the North show at Greenbelt 2011 and having a great chat with Carla Moss and Andrew Shelton about ghosts in the curtains, the practicalities of hanging and whether anyone including ourselves actually takes more than a passing glance of notice at exhibits I headed off to Leeds City Markets to get a new battery for my watch which had begun to fail me.
I’d forgotten how exciting the place was; so much to see and do. We had 15 minutes to wait for the battery to be replaced so took a wander around the stalls and pathways. The smells coming from the cafes and food shops, the flashing lights of the mobile phone accessories stall, people learning to cook in a healthy eating centre, children making pictures in another activity centre, the lovely lady at the fabric stall selling bright red shiny material with printed black skulls (in honour of the Hirst exhibition at the City Gallery we supposed) the Chinese grocery store where we perused the packed shelves and I awed the roasted seaweed formed into sheets with the markings I’d seen on handmade paper in Scotland.
We collected the refurbished watches and headed into the city, through Victoria Quarter, across Briggate and through the arcade towards Park Row where we stopped to eat lunch propped on the sill of the new NatWest building. The need for refreshment brought us to the Henry Moore Institute where an impressive display of books vied for our attention. The little room was shut today. Mario Merz was holding fort with a show called ‘What can be done?’ I found it a little underwhelming but I did like the piece that gave its name to the exhibition which was a stainless steel trough about an arms length in width filled with what looked like fat but was much more likely to be some type of resin because inside it was set a neon sign with the words meaning what can be done.
I was much more taken in by the work of Darrell Viner who made computer drawings, repetitive and obsessive and utterly dark like some kind of sci-fi, matrix of non-compliance. There was also a machine with three slabs of marble that rotated and took small amounts of the marble away in the process. It reminded me on Janine Antoni’s work where she grinds the two huge stones by pushing a lever around in a circle for many days.
Downstairs I was confronted with the brilliance of highly refined roman influenced marble busts of the Gott family and others which some terracotta figures of such fine beauty I could barely believe they existed. Then through to A Selection of Objects carefully Arranged where I found images of Stuart Brisley’s 26 hours in Vienna and lost of waxed figures place in ornate frames. A little weird and sickly those wax creatures like the heads in the Wizard of Oz film. The ones in the cabinets belonged to the queen that whilst detached from the body where still animated when woken by a careless and frightened Dorothy.
By the time I got to the Damien Hirst Show in the front room of the gallery I was visually exhausted. Still I took a look at what had been created. I was tired and I’d seen it before so I spent no more than 5 minutes in the room before wandering off to the installation Pharmacy. It smelt of liquorice and it intrigued me. I glanced at the restaurant that had been installed and the silver wall paper that would be scraped off the wall at the end of the show much to the amusement of the invigilator who disclosed the price one could pay for a single roll. I asked him about the liquorice. I think he thought I was a little mad and conferred his colleague. It turned out he was chewing Airwaves.
