Has Amie Siegel lost her marbles?

Has Amie Siegel lost her marbles? No. If anything she's worryingly sane. Her show, Strata, at the South London Gallery is tastefully put together, tastefully curated, tastefully filmed, and just a bit dull. I nearly fell asleep more than once watching the 34 minute video Quarry that fills the large main space of the gallery.

The Chicago born, New York based, artist's first solo show in London seeks to explore how items become imbued with meaning. 2015's Quarry tells the story of marble. From its excavation, in what's claimed to be the world's deepest underground quarry, to its use in the luxury apartments of Manhattan skyscrapers.

The camera lingers long, and lovingly, on these rich people's apartments. It's design porn and, like most porn, it's soulless. Not only are the apartments devoid of life they're devoid of even any sign of life. They look like show homes rather than actual spaces people carry out the messy business of living in. Slowly they're revealed to be glossy models rather than real homes but it doesn't seem to matter. The point's been made.

The portentous, even pompous, music that plays throughout the film adds another strata to the ennui. It's almost as if Siegel has sought to shine a light on the longueurs of the luxuries of life. That's not what she's aiming for but that's what she's got.

There's another film upstairs. Fetish (2016) shows two unnamed men in Sigmund Freud's' house, now a museum, in St.John's Wood meticulously cleaning his collection of archaeological artefacts and statuettes of Egyptian Gods. Silently they hoover down his couch before slowly replacing the blankets and cushions just-so. It's not exactly thrilling to watch but, by dint of only being ten minutes long, at least I was able to stay awake.

By filming (and exhibiting) this ritualistic process Siegel seeks to delve 'further into the stratified relationships between culture, value and material" but I'd be lying if I said I was anything other than massively nonplussed and a trifle baffled.

The third, and final, part of the show is some actual marble. I love marble. The crystalline surfaces and foliations look beautiful. It's a lovely sensation to run your hand along its smooth, cold surfaces. I didn't touch the marble in this room though. For two reasons. Being behind glass it wasn't possible and, because Dynasty (that's the name she's given the piece) was sourced from the lobby of New York City's Trump Tower, it felt somehow contaminated. To think that monster had maybe once run his little orange Wotsit fingers along the surface was enough to put me off. They'd probably put the glass in front of it to protect the visitors from the marble rather than vice versa.

Of course the inclusion of something (bought on eBay) from the Trump Tower can't help but have political overtones and they were surely the reason for its inclusion in this show. Whilst I appreciate that art feels a duty to be ambiguous, and I don't expect any neat answers, I was still disappointed that this work, this entire show, didn't at least ask some more complex questions.

I hadn't paid any money to enter but I still felt a little short-changed. Amie Siegel is still young and her art can either continue to plough a self-regarding furrow or open itself up to a dialogue with the world. I think if she chooses the latter route she can go on to do great things.

Talkin' bout a revolution.

I shouldn't have chosen a weekend to visit the V&A's You Say You Want A Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966-1970 exhibition. It'd been packed enough a couple of weeks back when I went to Opus Anglicanum and it was pretty clear that the 1960s counterculture was going to attract bigger crowds than 13c/14c English embroidery. You only have to look at the continuing fixation with all things Beatles, Pink Floyd, Rolling Stones, etc; to realise that there seems to be an insatiable appetite for revisiting the decade in which I was born.

Let's get a few gripes out of the way first. I find the continual fetishisation of this decade over all others a bit tiresome, a tad rote. I struggle to imagine what there is new to be learnt about flower power, swinging London, Carnaby Street etc; I also find it a little bit depressing to watch streams of people obediently pour past these artefacts as if they're in some way devotional or holy. Pay money and line up to worship at the altar of a sanitised past. See the dreams of your parents commodified in vitrine cases but, unlike the baby boomers, don't question it. Just obey, consume, marry, and reproduce.

More workaday concerns were the aforementioned large crowds which combined with some baffling curatorial decisions (tiny cramped rooms next to spacious airy ones and the labelling put in places nigh on impossible to read) made the exhibition a ballache to negotiate at times and the free headphones handed out as you enter, which play a selection of music (mine started with The Who's Magic Bus), jump randomly from song to song, change volume at will, and, even, occasionally, just cut out. I felt, at times, like I was in an episode of The Rock'n'Roll Years (but less comfy) and dispensed with mine before I was halfway through.

Moany McMoanface aside, though, the show was pretty good. It was too vast to ALL be good but there was more than enough there to make it worth an afternoon of anyone with even a passing interest in the era's time. In fact I'd probably prefer a series of smaller considerations looking at the various different angles. One for the politics, one for music, one for clothes etc; But then again I have the relative privilege of living in London and having lots of free leisure time.

Each wall is decked out in quotes from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin, William Blake etc; and you can catch excerpts from films like Dr Strangelove and Blow Up as you pass through an exhibition that kicks off with a brief overview of the Profumo affair. You can see THAT Arne Jacobsen chair but, alas, not with Christine Keeler astride it. Then there's a nod to LSD and a selection of paperbacks from the time:- The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, On The Road, The Doors Of Perception, Atlas Shrugged, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and Cathy Come Home. You can read a bit about the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco and the obscenity charges it faced after Allen Ginsberg's Howl shocked polite society.

There's a pair of John Lennon's glasses, handwritten Beatles lyrics, and a Twiggy coat hanger (!). We're clearly in the youthquake of swinging London now. Carnaby Street. King's Road. Granny Takes A Trip. Vidal Sassoon. Terence Donovan. David Bailey. Mick Jagger's Ossie Clark jumpsuit. There's a delightful example of Bridget Riley's op art and quite a few nods to Aubrey Beardsley and, less surprisingly, Andy Warhol. It's good to see the inclusion of, often overlooked, pop artist Pauline Boty. Less so The Krays. I'm not a fan of sadistic and violent gangsters no matter how snappy their attire.

These are all the kinds of things you'd expect to see. That didn't stop the crowds, or even me, enjoying them. But more interesting were nods to auto-destructive artist Gustav Metzger's Dialectics of Liberation and Marxist philosopher and theorist Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. We were witnessing how the cultural and the political fused at this time. Vietnam. Gay lib. Germaine Greer. Women's lib. The pill. Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The Black Panthers. Martin Luther King. Malcolm X. Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies. There's a white bicycle that would've been left for citizens of Amsterdam to cycle around that city for free. There's that poster of the pregnant man. Paris '68 is represented by Pierre Bernard's De Gaulle Hitler. Imagine considering a world leader to be a potential Hitler!

There's also a small area devoted to the Kent State shooting where four unarmed college students were shot dead by the Ohio National Guard while peacefully protesting the Cambodian Campaign in the Vietnam War. Far more relevant than it should still be bearing in mind former Michigan Republican politician Dan Adimi's response to the recent protests at Berkeley. Adimi had said "Time for another Kent State". Even in Trump's America calling for the murder of your own citizens for protesting against a fascistic paedophile sympathiser is jaw dropping.

Some of the more comfortably off had the luxury of being able to take a far more apolitical stance. To this end there's lots of Indian religious nonsense and hippy shit. George Harrison's sitar and other Beatles paraphernalia feature (too) heavily here. There's a poster of Frank Zappa on the bog, Paco Rabanne's Barbarella costume, and a PanAm hostess uniform. We find out that Time Out magazine started in 1968 and realise we've drifted into an era of advertising and consumerism like never before.

Expos. The space race. If you couldn't go into space you could go to Florida or Spain. Vacations were getting to be more regular and more exoctic. Malcolm Morley's Beach Scene (1969) depicted one such holiday. To pay for this, and your Souperdress if that's what you wanted to wear to your holiday disco, Barclaycard, the first credit card, was launched.

It wasn't just money this was costing us though. More enlightened thinkers became aware of the damage to our planet. Buckminster Fuller, architect of geodesic domes, warned in Spaceship Earth of the finite resources on our planet and how, once they'd run out, we'd be in trouble.

Pierre Cardin's view of the future seemed more preoccupied with couture. He said "'The clothes that I prefer are those I invent for a life that doesn't exist yet - the world of tomorrow." He wasn't the only one designing with the space age in mind. Eero Aarnio's globe chair seems just the right thing to sit in and watch the moon landings. You can watch them again here and even marvel at an actual piece of rock from the moon's surface.

Rock of a different kind was keeping the kids from complying. This was the age of the dawning of the music festival. There's a huge, and really rather splendid, Woodstock room with large screens blasting out various performances (The Who, Hendrix, best of all Sly & The Family Stone). It's full of outfits and instruments. Keith Moon's drum set adorned with pictures of Lily Langtry, Pete Townshend's smashed up guitar, and Mama Cass's kaftan. Robert Indiana's iconic Love (the header to this piece) is in the Woodstock room too.

Some didn't want the festival to ever end so they moved out in to communes on the West Coast of the USA. Joni Mitchell's Big Yellow Taxi became one of the many anthems of environmentalism and Richard Brautigan, Stewart Brand, and Steve Jobs became the chief ideas. Soon these entrepreneurial beatniks were building the future in their own image. It wasn't long before that hippy dream soured and turned to capitalism in its most unpleasant form. But in the early days of computing it must've seemed like the outsider tech-pioneers, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Honeywell (a ladies computer apparently, hmm), were ushering in a new, more open, more equal, and more idealistic society.

In 1969 the Cuyahoga river, in Ohio, became so polluted it caught fire. Not long before that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring became a seminal text on the ecology. More and more people were becoming aware of the damage we were doing to our planet. The sixties dream was dying. Marty Feldman calling a judge at the Oz obscenity trial a 'boring old fart' was the impotent yelp of a dying culture. Soon we moved into the decade of escalating wars in Vietnam and Watergate. The Beatles split up, the Baader-Meinhof Gang appeared and Milton Friedman led the Chicago School in a new aggressive form of capitalism which paved the way for the neoliberalism that would hold sway over the world for the next half-century.

The dream was over. The exhibition was over. In both cases there'd been some bloody terrible things but way more absolutely wonderful things and, in both, we came out wiser if a little more cynical.

The Bauer Brothers:A tale of two botanists.

The Natural History Museum is, quite simply, a fascinating place to just wander around. On most visits I find myself drawn to the highlights:- the dinosaurs, the enormous blue whale, the big tree, the stuffed panda. That kind of stuff. But on Monday I visited specifically to see a compact yet bijou exhibition of the botanical illustrators the Bauers. The relatively unknown, but highly influential, brothers who pioneered the use of microscopes to draw specimens and colour codes (sometimes incorporating 1,000 colours) to create the watercolours they used for doing so. The colour code below is one they used when in the employ of Nikolaus von Jacquin in Vienna in 1780.

Fantastically one of them was called Franz and the other was called Ferdinand. I shall resist the temptation to make jokes about indie bands and archdukes (ok, I couldn't think of any) and get straight to their story. Sons of the court painter of the Prince of Liechtenstein both Bauers spent their entire lives studying and drawing nature and even though the results of their work seem fairly indistinguishable to this layman's eye the arcs of their lives came to be very different.

Both were born in Feldsberg, Austria (now Valtice in the Czech Republic) where they were tutored by the wonderfully monikered Father Norbert Boccius to draw the local flora and fauna. Franz, who'd arrived in 1758 and was thus the eldest by two years, settled in Britain as the resident artist at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew but Ferdinand seemed to have the more exciting life. He explored the world from the Mediterranean to Australia filling his sketchbooks with as yet unidentified species.

Franz first came to Britain in 1788 as a guest of Sir Joseph Banks, a patron of the natural sciences who'd made his name on Captain Cook's first voyage, and was offered a position at Kew recording newly discovered plants brought back from all over the then vast British Empire. Work he diligently carried out over the next half a decade. He specialised in plants (particularly orchids) but occasionally branched out into animals and even people. The NHM vitrines contain examples of brown beard sugarbush, erica, tiger lilies, chrysanthemums, Japanese rose, Southern magnolia, ferns, corpseflower and red powder puff from Mexico (below) which was used both as livestock feed and shade for coffee and tea plants. He even illustrated brain tissue.

He combined scientific analysis with a keen aesthetic sense to provide pictures that not only helped scientists in their work but were easy on the eye as well. It seems standard procedure now but that's only because of the work of people like the Bauers. His illustrations considered diseases of wheat and corn and dissected slipper orchids. He occasionally branched out into copper engraving but it was the rather frilly, to our modern eyes, rendering of plants like the delicate lady's slipper (below) that made his name.

Whilst Franz laboured away in London Ferdinand got the plum, though potentially dangerous, job of sailing the seven seas as part of the crew of Matthew Flinders' HMS Investigator. The boat set sail in 1801 towards the Antipodes to complete the first circumnavigation of Australia. Working alongside the botanist Robert Brown, Ferdinand spent the next four years drawings the many plants and animals they encountered on their adventure and helping to advance scientific knowledge.

When he arrived in London in 1805 he set to work tirelessly converting his sketches into more precise watercolours though, unlike his brother, his work remained unnoticed outside elite scientific circles and very few were published during his lifetime. He returned to his native Austria in 1814 where he worked for another twelve years before predeceasing his brother (who is buried in St.Anne's church, Kew next to Thomas Gainsborough) by over a decade.

It's a pity because I preferred Ferdinand's flying fish, wombats, red-winged parrots, and bandicoots to his brothers stiller studies. Prior to joining the HMS Investigator, Ferdinand had travelled extensively around Greece and Asia Minor with John Sibthorp, Professor of Botany at Oxford University. There he'd completed a ten volume compilation of his sketches called Flora Graeca.

Other animals Ferdinand depicted included rainbow lorikeets, a platypus, koalas, wallabies, and the unfortunately named weedy sea dragon. Even Ferdinand's floral drawings have a slight edge over his more acclaimed brother. They're almost identical to look at but there's something in the fact that Ferdinand traversed thousands of miles to reach his subjects that makes them more impressive. The red flowered kurrajong from the North Island in Australia's Gulf of Carpenteria is believed to be the first of its kind in existence. The Queensland nutmeg, below the kurrajong, can also only be found in Australia, the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea.

So it was a rather dry exhibition and even though there was a couple of touch screens it was reminiscent of the old days of museums before interactivity ruled the roost. But it was no less informative or interesting for that. I'm not sure I'd want to spend four years on a boat in the early part of the nineteenth century but I'm glad somebody did.

Shirley Collins:Lodestar.

"There was blood in the kitchen, there was blood in the hall. There was blood in the parlour where the lady did fall." - Cruel Lincoln.

Shirley Collins may be 81 years old but when it comes to delivering a chilling missive from the cold blooded old times she could teach people a quarter of her age a trick or two. In fact her voice sounds even better with age. It befits a singer of folk songs to have an oaked delivery and Collins somehow manages to combine that with a sweetly spoken innocence that makes for an effortlessly winning formula.

It's not the only duality evidenced at the Barbican's Lodestar concert. I've long held a theory that any work of art that can have you crying one moment and laughing the next is a very powerful thing indeed. At times I wasn't far off doing both at the same time. Not least in Collins and her wonderful band's retelling of children thrown overboard on ships, lovers washed ashore, and heartless landlords.

Shirley Collins had not performed on stage for a long time until rather recently. Between 1981 and 2014 she didn't perform live at all. After a hugely acclaimed career with her sister Dolly she'd succumbed to dysphonia which had resulted in the loss of her singing voice. A performance with Current 93 at the Union Chapel saw her begin again a rise to prominence which culminated in last year's hugely lauded Lodestar album and this packed powerhouse of a gig.

The night had begun, for me, suitably enough. As I supped a pint of Jugged Hare pale ale in The Jugged Hare I noticed the Brighton Morris Men were in 'limbering up' with a few tankards. It wouldn't be the last I'd see of them. Then Mark Stewart (of The Pop Group) asked me directions to the toilet. I resisted the temptation to tell him it was beyond good and evil.

The concert, itself, was broken into two parts. The first, despite an impressive array of guests, was merely a starter. Dave Arthur and Pete Cooper (who'd later appear as part of Shirley's band) ran through a couple of banjo numbers, John Kirkpatrick (introduced as the sultan of squeeze) proved that he had a decent set of lungs to match his accordion prowess, Lisa Knapp's ethereal take on the folk tradition was eclipsed by both the ever wonderful Alasdair Roberts and Olivia Chaney's homage to Shirley's melding of the baroque and folk worlds. Graham Coxon suffered a few technical problems. The ridiculously low level of his impressive guitar playing exposed his weak, reedy, voice and, in the company of folk giants, he appeared a little out of his depth.

After the amuse-bouche a sumptuous feast. Pip Barnes acted as compere and joined in with a bit of the singing too. He's got a fine set of pipes on him and I appreciated both his and Shirley's introductions and histories to the songs. Where they came from and where they ended up. Normally how they got there remained a mystery but often there was some to-ing and fro-ing across the Atlantic.

This touched on the work Shirley did in her other job as musicologist and author. Her book America Across The Water chronicled the song collecting trips she took to the USA with the legendary Alan Lomax in the 50s. We were treated to songs she'd picked up in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia and a particularly humorous, bordering on ribald, anecdote about sharing a double seated toilet in an outhouse in the Ozarks.

There were songs from closer to home too of course. Maidstone, Billingshurst (in Shirley's home county of Sussex), and even a couple from around the Basingstoke area. Both Mapledurwell and Popham receiving surprising mentions. There was even a song, Sur Le Borde de L’Eau, sung in what sounded to me like impeccable French.

Every member of the band deserved the standing ovation they received but special mentions must go to Ossian Brown for his mournful sounding hurdy-gurdy work and Ian Kearey for his mandolin, his slide guitar, but most of all his relaxed stewardship of the nine piece ensemble. Glen Redman provided solo dances while also leading his Brighton Morris Men in some pretty impressive moves. Shirley seemed very touched by the youthful, and all female, Boss Morris too.

It was quite a gala, something of a celebration. It even felt a bit like an episode of This is Your Life at times. But what underpinned everything all night was Shirley Collins herself and that wonderful voice. She could have us beaming with glee on an 'upside-down' song like Old Johnny Buckle before tearing at our heartstrings with Pretty Polly's tale of star crossed lovers torn apart by cruel parents, and finally going for the full emotional jugular with the almost unbearably poignant Washed Ashore, a tragic tale of a young lady so heartbroken by the death of her lover that she lays down next to him saying "we shall lie here forever. The grave is our bed".

These songs, the old times they look back to, and the times we may soon be living in are dark but with voices like Shirley Collins shining a light on them we should be able to navigate our way through. After all, isn't that what lodestars are for?

Peter Liversidge:Civilization?

"Look around you. What do those faces tell you? Faces. Joy and pain. Faces, faces everywhere."

Not my words but those of early nineties dance-pop titans 2 Unlimited. However, they're certainly apt for Peter Liversidge's recent Civilization? show at the Kate MacGarry in Shoreditch.

After the disappointment of the Haris Epaminonda exhibition yesterday I needed something to restore my faith in trawling round galleries and although Liversidge's work could hardly make any great claims to high art it did put a smile on my face and that alone, sometimes, maybe all the time, is enough.

Maybe it's because it was a sunny day and I was in a good mood. Maybe it's because I like faces. Who can ever be sure exactly why we like something? Be it a piece of art or, indeed, a face? Why do we see some faces as prettier than others, some as more trustworthy, some as more sinister? These aren't necessarily the questions Liversidge sought to ask but it does illustrate how most of us have an innate human desire to make a connection.

Some take that even further and are said to 'suffer' with a condition called pareidolia where the mind finds patterns that aren't there. Examples include hidden messages in music, the man in the moon, and cloud animals. I think it's mainly the human brain, with its desire for clarity, trying to make sense of a nonsensical world.

Using a portable Olivetti typewriter (very hipster, very Shoreditch, point off) Liversidge began this project, like his others, with a series of written proposals that set out, precisely, the show's intentions. This adds a conceptual element to it that isn't really necessary in Civilization? but is vital in some of his other projects. He feels it's important that some of his work is realised whilst some remains in proposal form only.

In his 2008 exhibition at Tate Liverpool he proposed to drain the Albert Dock. He's also designed an album cover and stage set for the band Low, provided installations where visitors take a piece of his work away with them, and even suggested damming the Thames to flood the City of London. This was obviously doomed to failure but Liversidge celebrates failure as part of the work. As someone who's failed in a great many of endeavours it was a theme I warmed to.

But not as much as those faces. Think how easy it is to represent a face. Not a Mona Lisa or a Picasso but a basic face. A face a child would recognise as a face. Normally two vaguely circular marks and a straight line will do. As if to prove it the vast bulk of the gallery space is taken up with these crude but, occasionally, effecting fizzogs that Liversidge has either made or found. It's not clear. Some look happy. Some look scary. Some look surprised. Some look blank. What you read into them says more about you than either the creator or the lifeless piece of Polystrene, wood, or neon 'staring' back at you.

There's a small selection of quite large Carpet Faces that gawp out at you in something that could be considered amazement. These inanimate objects manage to be as expressive as an ancient tribal mask and simultaneously as blank as the neutral face emoji. Writing for Time Out Eddy Frankel posited that "Liversidge is laying bare the barren, detached, desensitisation of modern meh culture. All these faces watching you walk around the gallery feel worryingly modern, and depressingly human".

He's made a deeper, bleaker, reading of the show than I did but he's got a point. One wall consists solely of pictures with the basics of a 'face' plotted over the top. Birds, fish, walls, grass, beaches, islands, etc; Even people. People who already have their own faces.

Ok, the whole thing's silly. Really silly. But, in this, it's massively preferable to po-faced doctrines and self-regarding contemplations that don't connect at all. This connects. At a very childlike level. It was good to let the inner child out.

Haris Epaminonda and the .... not very much at all actually.

I've got a fairly high tolerance for pretentiousness but Haris Epaminonda's VOL XX at the Rodeo Gallery on Charing X Rd was, for fear of sounding like the fuddy-duddy I no doubt actually am, just taking the piss. I felt cheated. It didn't cost anything but it felt like a wasted journey. The highlight was certainly people watching in the February late afternoon sunshine in Soho Square afterwards.

It comes to something when the flight of unvarnished stairs leading up into the gallery is one of the most interesting things you see in your entire visit. Maybe I'm missing something so let me explain to you, in pretty much its entirety, what this show consisted of:-

Once you're up the stairs there's a room divided in two. Red carpeted, white walled. In one corner of the room there's an, admittedly pretty, stone table with a candle burning atop of it. That's the very best bit. After that there's a selection of wall hung black and white pictures of flowers with their Latin names. In the corner of the room (see last picture) there's another 'thing'. I wasn't sure if it was part of the exhibition or not so, on that basis alone, it became the most intriguing object in the room.

The two most intriguing things of all though were why this young Cypriot artist had been granted an exhibition at all and how it all fed into the rather grandiose press release which includes lines like this:-

"Taking disparate material from her hidden collection of poetry, books, historical objects from various geographies and civilizations, she conducts an invisible ritual, a long and quiet performance"

and this:-

"The decisive moment in time, this eternal pause is what the viewer experiences, as she could go on and on eternally"

and, most bafflingly of all, this:-

"The full moon rising from the sea of Cyprus becomes the shadow for the works on paper as well as the developed sculptures - the labyrinth - when connections become unclear and geographies merge. This group of collages is a recent series made from books of Roman and Egyptian art juxtaposed with a black and white series of ikebana arrangements; the Portuguese text is open for free associations and interpretations, as everything else"

Ok, so it's an ongoing series (Epaminonda started her Volumes in 2009) so perhaps some context would've helped. Or maybe I just don't get it? Maybe there's nothing to get and I'm just supposed to experience the space. In which case an empty room, or the aforementioned Soho Square, would have served better. I'd certainly love to hear a better explanation and appreciation of the work than the one given in the press release. A brief Guardian piece describes the work as 'poetic and contemplative'. I'm afraid the poetry appeared to me as doggerel and all that was contemplated was, from the artist's perspective, her navel, and from this viewer's perspective, what the fuck he was doing with his time, his life!? He's only got one life. He shouldn't be wasting it on shit like this.

I started to wonder if even the candle, the best thing remember, was part of the exhibition. This experience was so spiritually draining, such a waste of time, that I started to question the value of visiting art galleries in its entirety. Nevertheless I walked over to Eastcastle Street to try to see, as planned, an exhibition of Charles Avery's works at Pilar Corrias. It was closed.

Then a motorcycle courier nearly knocked me down. Even though I was on the pavement he decided it was my fault and launched into a volley of abuse. What a crap afternoon. Spirits were only lifted with a feta borek in Simit Sarayi.