Fleapit revisited:Tear the Roof Off - The Untold Story of Parliament Funkadelic

There have been so many members of Parliament/Funkadelic, so many offshoot bands, so many alter egos, so many egos even that to tell their story in its entirety you'd probably need to stretch it out over a couple of box sets. It's something to suggest to Netflix or HBO.

So props to Bobby J Brown for trying to condense it down to an hour's length. Ideal for that Friday night BBC4 music documentary slot but enjoying a brief cinema run as part of London's Doc'n'Roll film festival. Brown has worked more as an actor than a director in the past. He'd appeared in The Wire and also in John Water's Pecker. A great pedigree but other than the city of Baltimore it's hard to see much in common or much that would lead him to the funk.

Tear The Roof Off starts off as a fairly conventional documentary. Telling the story of how George Clinton and his childhood friends in Plainfield, New Jersey form a doo-wop group called The Parliaments. They travel to Detroit to get signed to Motown and then cheat on Motown by having a huge hit in 1967 with (I Wanna) Testify on Revilot Records. It's the first example of George Clinton taking over as bandleader and svengali.

After that the chronology goes a bit haywire. It's not adequately explained how these besuited smart young men mutate into the freak show that becomes the p-funk organisation. Nor how their doo-wop sound becomes more soulful and ever funkier before eventually morphing into the ultimate in funk rock experiences.

The music you hear throughout the film is, of course, absolutely excellent.The run of albums Funkadelic put out throughout the seventies stands shoulder to shoulder with anybody else. Not just in funk but in all music. From 1970's self titled debut, via Maggot Brain, America Eats Its Young, Cosmic Slop and on to 1978's One Nation Under A Groove they forged a sound, an image, and an ethos that was like nothing that had gone before. Or, indeed, since.

They went a step further by inventing their own mythology. Populated by characters like Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk, Rumpofsteelskin, and Starchild. The latter of these worked for Dr.Funkenstein, the intergalactic master of outer space Funk. Funk was spelt with a capital F as it's the source of all creative energy on Earth. Sir Nose, being too cool to dance, intended to place humanity into the Zone of Zero Funkativity but Starchild is on hand with his Bop Gun to achieve Funkentelechy for all humanity and everyone, even Sir Nose, starts dancing.

With all this going on, and words like supergroovalisticprosifunkstication, thumpasorus, and trombipulation being bandied about you won't be surprised to hear drugs were involved - and lots of them. Ludicrously large amounts. At one point Clinton, who by now was running the whole show, was paying band members in drugs. You may've wanted money but drugs were what you got.

It's here where the story, unsurprisingly, turns a darker corner. Addictions destroy, and even end, lives. The girls (and in many cases they are girls, not women) recruited for the band are treated abysmally, bordering on abuse in some cases and in one example crossing right over that border.

Clinton becomes a dictator. Pocketing royalties and keeping his bandmates hooked on drugs while living it up in his lakeside mansion in Michigan. While they were so high you couldn't get over it some of his behaviour was so low you couldn't get under it. How the fuck he managed to preside over such a huge rotating line up of musicians, many of them hopelessly addicted, while maintaining a gargantuan habit himself is a wonder of nature.

Perhaps due to Clinton not coming out of this well he's not there to represent himself. Bootsy Collins is another glaring omission. But the makers of the film have been able to secure interviews with vital musicians like trombonist Fred Wesley, drummer Jerome 'Bigfoot' Brailey, guitarist DeWayne 'Blackbyrd' McKnight and bassist Cordell 'Boogie' Mosson who died in 2013 giving us an idea how long this film's been in the can.

The talking heads interviews with these guys and the vintage live footage are easily the best parts of the films and luckily there's plenty of that. The seemingly endless anecdotes are in turns insightful and hilarious. Occasionally both. The historical reenactments fare less well. They look a bit daft and in a film where a man appears on stage wearing a nappy, another runs around the street wearing a fox mask, and George Clinton exits the mothership with his dick out behind bemused guest Sly Stone that's saying something.

For somebody who was new to the band, the mythology, and Afrofuturism as a whole the film may be a bit confusing, potentially alienating. For someone who's been an admirer of the band for decades like my cinema date Tony there's very little new for them. For someone like me, I own four or five albums and have been meaning to get a few more, it's pitched just about right.

If you're in the former two camps I can recommend the film to you. If you're with me in camp three then I'd say it's close to a must see. You could wait for it to show up on BBC4 but as another friend, Ian, said "you need to see the Mothership on the big screen" - and you do too.

Choose Your Own Adventure.

On a cold Monday night in November in a pub in Camden I stood up in a room full of people and read out a rape fantasy:-

Reaching her, he knotted his hands in front of her shift and the fabric like a veil. She could not move. For an instant, he stared at her, at her high, perfect breasts and her short slip, with grim triumph in his eyes, as though he had exposed some foul plot. Then he gripped her shoulder with his left hand and tore away her slip with his right, forcing her down to the sand as he uncovered her.

How she wanted to resist, but her limbs would not move; she was helpless with anguish. A moment later, he dropped the burden of his weight on her chest, and her loins were stabbed with a wild, white fire that broke her silence, made her scream. But even as she cried out she knew that it was too late for her. Something that her people thought of as a gift had been torn from her.

So what possessed me to do it? How come nobody complained let alone punched me? Well, it was because I was at a London Skeptics in the Pub event and the guest speaker Liz Lutgendorff was presenting "You are what you read? Thinking critically about sci-fi and fantasy novels". She was here to present the case that sexism and misogyny is prevalent throughout the sci-fi and, even more so, fantasy novel genre and I think it's fair to say she made a bloody good job of it.

She'd decided to use a bit of audience participation and had handed round excerpts illustrating her point to the assembled attendees. We'd been instructed not to open them until we were called and she also explained that one example was particularly nasty and should carry a trigger warning. Those of you who know me probably won't be at all surprised to find out that that was, indeed, the one I'd been assigned.

It comes from the 1977 book Lord Foul's Bane. Written by Stephen R.Donaldson as part of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant series. It's like Wagner's Ring Cycle in book form and features giants, griffins, subterranean 'cavewights', semi-corporeal 'demondims', and, as you've read above, a highly dubious grasp of what's an acceptable method of initiating sex.

Although I got to read out the worst line from one of the worst books it was hardly atypical. I'll give you more examples later but first some back story. Liz, as a fan of fantasy and sci-fi literature, had, a few years back, set herself a quest to read the one hundred greatest ever books in the genre as ranked by the US's National Public Radio's readers.

Sexist gaming scandals and online rape threats were in the ascendancy at the time and, reading these books, it occurred to Liz that, possibly, some of the disgusting behaviour and boorish attitudes being exhibited had been learned by people growing up with their heads in books where women are routinely referred to as bitches, whores, or sluts and mainly exist to have their breasts assessed, get raped, be killed, or, the unholy trinity, all three.

The more she worked her way through these books the more she noticed the same patterns repeating themselves - and not just that of terrible writing. In Terry Brook's Sword of Shannara (also written in 1977) no living female character appears until about three quarters of the way through. Shirl (for it is she) initially rescues one of the heroes but then for what's left of the rest of the epic (in size at least) book she simply hangs off his arm and follows his instructions accepting him as a master.

It wasn't just the seventies. Brandon Sanderson's a big deal right now. 2006's Final Empire is set in a medieval dystopian future in a world with the predictably daft name of Scadrial. It's a place where ash permanently rains from the sky and normal people have no rights yet nobles have superpowers. Because of their superiority they're entitled to "bed" any woman they wish. They just have "to kill her when she's done" to prevent half-breeds.
 

Anne McCaffrey is a rare example of a female writer working in this genre. Unfortunately the women in her 1968 Dragonflight fare no better than those imagined by her male counterparts. The lead male and female characters hate each other but the dragons they ride around on (fighting a space blight that's threatening to wipe out the planet, obvs) love each other and because the dragon's minds and their minds get intermingled in some ludicrous plot device they end up together. She's not really into the idea so he rapes her and then after that she accepts him as a 'gentle bedmate'. He's the hero remember. Not the baddie.

That's just four examples but there were plenty more and it was a fun, if slightly macabre, and enlightening hour we spent going through them. I wasn't ever a reader of this fantasy stuff (preferring the horror of Stephen King and James Herbert) when I was a teenager and I'm not going to start now. The hilarious artwork and poor prose is off-putting enough but I was hitherto unaware that these books were so horrid.

Liz cited exceptions. Carl Sagan's 1985 Contact about technologically advanced, extra terrestrial life forms. 2013's The Golem and the Djinni by Helene Wecker tells the story of two displaced magical creatures meeting by chance in 19c New York City. Just last year Silvia Moreno-Garcia's debut novel is about a Mexican woman who uses the music of Spanish indie band Duncan Dhu to help her cast spells. I'm quite tempted to read all three of these. They're well received, well reviewed books and nobody gets raped in them.

Of course nobody's saying you can't write about sexism, misogyny, and rape but should it really be written about so often, with so little regard to the consequences, and portrayed as some kind of heroic act? Clearly it shouldn't and, leaving aside the continued appeal of Brandon Sanderson, it's abating. though not quickly enough. What would speed things up is if people stopped reading this rot and chose their own adventures.

For that to happen we'll need people like Liz Lutgendorff to continue to shine a light and for events like London Skeptics in the Pub to give her the platform to do so. Another informative and interesting evening and one I'm glad I spent in the pub instead of reading any more of Lord Foul's Bane.

Fleapit revisited:Weiner

It's easy, and correct, to hate Donald Trump for the crass, xenophobic, misogynistic, bullying things he says. It's easy to hate the bad guys but what about when one of the good guys, one of our guys transgress? That's more problematic and that's what Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg's feature length documentary Weiner is about.

They don't mess about. In the first couple of minutes the tone is set as we see Congressman Anthony Weiner as man of the people, fighting the good fight against bureaucrats and party apparatchiks, before, almost immediately, we're introduced to his sexting habits. Compared to Trump's boasts of pussy grabbing and Bill Clinton's antics with cigars Weiner's schtick is pretty tame. He takes a photo of his bulging briefs and sends them to women. An ill advised move at any time but when running to be mayor of New York City, and handsomely leading in the polls, potentially suicidal.

What with his unfortunate name as well the press go apeshit. The headlines write themselves. When it's discovered he's used the pseudonym Carlos Danger it gets better still for them, and worse for both Weiner and his wife Huma Abedin, herself a high profile public figure. During the film's making Abedin was serving as deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton and now, for one more day at least, vice chairwoman of her presidential campaign. Hillary's so fond of Huma she's likened her to a second daughter.

On the surface Weiner and Abedin are the perfect example of the very best of multicultural New York. A Jewish boy from Brooklyn married to an Arabic speaking Muslim. Their son even has a Latino name. Bases have been covered and continue to be. We see Weiner supporting, and receiving support, from the black and Ecuadorean communities. We see him on a gay pride march. We see him DJ'ing. He loves the spotlight and the spotlight loves him.

But stories about his sexting continue to emerge and continue to dominate the discussion. He's torn between lying and brazening it out but at no point, at least in the film, does he consider quitting. We see his team as torn as he is and eventually, predictably, we see his poll ratings start to plummet.

The professional arc of the story, whilst fascinating to watch, won't particularly surprise you. But how does this affect Weiner and Abedin in their home life? At first they seem to have got through it but there's something about Huma's body language, the constant crossing of the arms, the forced smile, that seems to speak louder than her words.

What's her motivation? People more cynical than myself may suggest she's just looking out for herself and her boss Hillary. It's suggested she genuinely loves this guy and is struggling to come to terms with what he's done. A third theory is that Weiner, like many initially attractive and spellbinding figures, is simply a bully and a psychopath and she's been crushed by her time with him. I'd guess a bit of all three.

Certainly Weiner doesn't always help his own case. In public he demands questions about policies, not his private life, yet at home he watches his arguments with news anchors and journalists over and over again much to the dismay of those around him. Even when insulted in the street he gives as good back as he gets. He can't let it lie. Although contrite at times often he's fiery and unapologetic and, I've learnt, people like this are the most likely to repeat their mistakes.

You're torn between supporting him and grabbing him by the lapels and telling him to pull himself together. He comes across as both highly likeable and highly unlikeable. He does good things but he does bad things too. In that case he's not unlike any one of us but there's something of his self-regarding nature that comes through as the film progresses. It could be down to the editing but not once does he seem to consider the impact he's had on his team, his family, or, of course, the women who receive these often unwarranted messages.

On this final point the film fails. None of the women's cases are put forward until near the end when we meet Sydney Leathers who, cajoled by shock jock Howard Stern, uses the whole thing to try and generate publicity for herself and, more pertinently, Stern. She doesn't come across particularly well and I can't believe that all Weiner's victims/text recipients were of this nature. It's hinted many were just keen supporters of his political ideas.

Although it's a sad story it's a funny film. A documentary, that as my friend Ian said, looks in places more like a mockumentary. A cockumentary perhaps? You'll laugh. You'll sigh. You'll shake your head. So singular is the case it'll give you very little insight into the murky world of politics but the human drama played out at the heart of it doesn't, despite its peculiarities, look too different to many others being enacted in homes all across the world right now.

The mite has a thousand eyes.

I always feel quite nostalgic visiting the Natural History Museum. It reminds me of when I was a child as well as visits with nephews and the children of friends. When actually attending a specific event I can get distracted by the dinosaurs, blue whale, Chi-Chi the panda, and the giant sequoia.

I was there to see Colour and Vision:Through the Eyes of Nature and I wasn't totally sure what to expect. Was it to be a child friendly exhibition, something more scientific, educational, arty? It had elements of all these things and was pitched at just about the right level for someone, like myself, who was a firm believer in evolution but had never actually studied it. I'd never even given much thought to how the eye developed. I'm glad others have.

Matisse pretty much described colour as music to our eyes but there is function to this beauty too. Our ability to see colour helps us to identify danger, discover potential mates, and assess food.

The very first living things existed in a dark, shapeless world. Movement was limited. Before eyes evolved vision and colour were completely meaningless. From somewhere an 'eyespot' appeared and over half a million years, not that long really, that eyespot developed into an actual eye capable of seeing in detail.

Around about 565,000,000 years ago, near the end of the Precambrian Eon, these basic eyespots allowed some organisms to tell the difference between light and dark but they weren't advanced enough to identify potential predators or prey. But then as neither predator nor prey were able to see either presumably this wasn't a problem. Whatever. Brains certainly wouldn't have developed enough to realise it even if it was.

As image forming was impossible there was no benefit to being colourful. Like the cave salamander, below, any colour would have been a by-product of another function like the minute structures that create a pearly shine while strengthening shells.

Diversity of life exploded in the Cambrian age (between around 545 and 530 million years ago). The tree of life expanded from a handful of branches to about thirty-eight. Which is pretty much where it remains to this day. The evolution of the eye was one of the main forces that triggered this exponential increase in diversity. Trilobites, extinct marine arthropods, were one of the most prevalent creatures during this time and were also among the first to be found with fossilised eyes. The cluster below were found in present day Morocco. Pairs of eyes are visible on their heads and they're believed to have lived similar existences to modern horseshoe crabs. Which, presumably, is a whole load of fun.

Charles Darwin kept a pet octopus on board HMS Beagle. These guys were also at the forefront of the new fashion for having eyes. Their eyes are actually very similar to human eyes although they focus light on the retina in a different way.

Nobody seems sure when colour vision evolved. Cells and proteins that facilitate colour don't preserve so evidence can be elusive. However, the eyes in ancient fish have been found to contain the same rods and cones that exist in all modern vertebrate eyes with colour vision so we can deduce that it's been around for about 300 million years.

Once eyes had developed to this level it wasn't all pretty colours and getting it on. Now your predators could see you, you needed to evolve ways of preserving yourself. Sharp protective spikes seemed a winner. Soft bodied sedentary organisms were having less success. If you could protect yourself (or hide) you could pass these beneficial traits on to the next generation and give your species a better chance of avoiding extinction. Basic survival of the fittest stuff.

One massive advantage in this was having eyes, and being able to see, in the first place. Only six branches, of the approximately thirty-eight, on the tree of life have the gift of vision. That may not seem many but 96% of all species are found within those six branches proving the worth, primacy even, of sight.

Within these branches there is huge ocular diversity. Annelids (earthworms, leeches etc;) have ocelli which aren't far removed from the simple old fashioned eyespots. So they've got the blurred vision of a tipsy sailor on daybreak. Vertrebrates, like our good selves, have camera style eyes. An image is projected on to our retina using just three colours and then we use our brain, and memory, to decode this and transfer it into something that makes sense. Our eyesight is far from the most advanced but we compensate with our superior brains. Well, some of us.

You'd feel pretty inferior if you tried to compete with an arthropod in a game of visual one-upmanship (or one-uparthropodship). These show offs have got hundreds of, thousands of even, little eyes making up their two big eyes. The all seeing kings and queens of the arthropod world are the dragonflies. Dragonflies have almost 360 degree vision. Good luck in trying to catch one.

If you'd prefer to feel superior then how about taking on a cnidarian? Jellyfish and coral rarely have eyes and the few that are capable of detecting detail have such simple brains they're unable to process it. It makes them sound like a bunch of idiots but if they've survived until now obviously they're doing something right. Hey, jellyfish, what's the big secret?

Even those who can see don't always understand the colours we see. The key is light. All colour on land, sea, and air comes from it. As light waves bounce and scatter they paint the world. Grass, earth, flesh, your sofa, wherever light lands colour is born.

Clever old nature has found a way to exploit this decorative phenomenon. Different individuals in the same species may be different colours and some species, most obviously chameleons, can change colour in a matter of seconds. This is mostly as a result of the action of nerves and muscles on chromatophores, cells containing pigments and reflecting light.

One of the more well known pigments is melanin. The Gouldian finches, below, can have yellow, red, or black faces. Black is most common and yellow the rarest. Monet was furious when trying to paint a pheasant's crown because it kept changing colour with the angle of the light. This shimmering iridescence is caused by light being reflected by minute, repeating structures that are too small to see with the naked eye. A third way a bird can get, or change, its colour is through diet. Flamingos get their bright colours from eating shrimp

Animals can use colour to help maintain temperature. The dark colour of a marine iguana helps it absorb heat whilst on terra firma so that it can stay warm when diving in cold water. Some beetles are white to repel heat from sunlight in hot desert environments. Structural colour also brings with it strengthening qualities. The nacre in an abalone's shell and the melanin in a beetle's forewings make them incredibly strong. The colours here serve no actual purpose but are simply by-products.

In other instances we still don't know why colour has developed or even if there is a reason for it. The cowry has an intricately patterned shell that is rarely seen as it lives with its body wrapped around it. The curators have described it as having an expensive haircut but always wearing a hat. Another metaphor would be me buying a nice pair of pants.

Yet another facet of colour is to warn of danger or even herald disaster. Dramatic colours and vivid markings can warn potential predators to stay away from poisonous animals. The larvae of these cinnabar moth dudes eat ragwort leaves to make them, and the moths they become, poisonous. This ensures they don't get eaten. Unsurprisingly some wise ass critters have started to mimic them. Either way it gives you a better than average chance of survival. It's worth a try.

Of course if we don't breed we die out anyway. Humans choose clothes, pants even, in colours we look good in to increase our chances of passing our genes on. It's the same with the animals but instead of clothes (apart from the odd dog in a pair of pants and to be honest they were pretty threadbare and unlikely to impress anybody except the most desperate of bitches) they have to colour themselves. By looking at the difference in colours between sexes it's usually pretty easy to spot which of the pair has the responsibility of attracting a mate. Then again this male and female parrot both look pretty ostentatious to me.

The exhibition rounds up by telling us "as a species we are relatively plain. We have no stripes and no neon. We do not shimmer. We do not shine". The theory here is that's why we invent a relationship with colour by decorating our homes and our bodies. It's certainly true that we've developed, through art, design etc;, extraordinary ways of working with colour but I'm not sure I buy this bit of science. The rest, however, all sounds perfectly acceptable to me.

Despite being made to feel inferior to a dragonfly and told I neither shimmer nor shine (when I so clearly do both those things) it'd been both entertaining and educational and what more could I have asked for from a museum?

House with no door.

Last weekend my visit to Kensington Gardens resulted in a pretty, if underwhelming, show by Marc Camille Chaimowicz. I'm afraid to say Helen Marten's Drunk Brown House affected me in much the same way. As I left the gallery three swans were low in flight over the Long Water and it was, as I guess it should be, more profound than anything inside the Serpentine Sackler itself.

In some ways this made Chaimowicz and Marten apt bedfellows. Both claim to use the gallery space as an integral part of their work. Both employ all manner of mixed media. Both are fleetingly intriguing to look at. Both, sadly, feel a little empty. After each exhibition I'd questioned myself for attending. Am I stupid? Am I ignorant about art? Do I just not get it? Or is there, in fact, nothing to get?

Don't get me wrong. Art without meaning is fine. What meaning does an oil painting of a vase of flowers actually serve? Or a Mondrian? Perhaps it's the over-inflated language that underlines these shows. Apparently Marten's "installations employ visual and linguistic ambiguity in order to explore the potential for misinterpretation and misunderstanding". Does that just mean they don't make any sense? Again, fine in itself but why not just say that.

Helen Marten has been nominated for this year's Turner Prize and the inaugural Hepworth Sculpture Prize so she's clearly not without her admirers and good though it is to see a young female artist, from as unlikely a place as Macclesfield, making waves within the art world I'm afraid by the time the ripples reach figures as marginal as myself they barely register.

There's lots of talk about collapsing traditional forms, geometric memories, linguistic ambiguity, and vectors as a mechanism of delivery. All I see is piles of seemingly random assorted stuff piled up to look reasonably photogenic and then backed up with a stodgy, and not particularly, tasty word salad.

I'll try and get along to see the Turner Prize to see more of her work and I genuinely hope I can change my mind, see something that I hadn't been able to before. Quite often things I'd not initially liked have grown to be my favourites. I doubt it'll happen this time but I'll keep at it. For now, however, I'm baffled. This drunk brown house didn't seem to have any windows to me.

Brix & The Extricated:Our words return in patterns.

"All those whose mind entitles themselves and whose main entitle is themselves shall feel the wrath of my bombast".

Attending a gig by Brix Smith and other ex-members of The Fall playing Fall songs from the classic era certainly opens you up to the bombast of your more purist Fall fan. Playing a set of old songs somehow isn't part of The Fall ethos and it seems highly unlikely the cantankerous, and somewhat unlovely, Mark E Smith would approve of this venture. Even as it lightly tops up his coffers.

I had my doubts too but a quick glance at YouTube and the promise of a Friday night out with good company in the redoubtable Lexington convinced me it'd be worth going. So glad I did. I knew within the first few bars of US 80s/90s that I'd done the right thing. By the time the song was a minute old I'd already decided it was the best 'Fall' gig I'd been to in over a decade.

Brix, decked out in glittery boots and (hopefully fake) fur coat, is undoubtedly the band leader but the presence of Paul Hanley on drums and, specifically, his brother Steve provide a vital backbone. That rhythm section, those agricultural bass lines, they're something The Fall have been missing for some time now.

Leave The Capitol, 2x4, Dead Beat Descendant. Songs I'd not thought about for years kept flying at me. Reminding me of the pleasure I had when first discovering this band in the eighties and one, of late, I'd largely lost. LA, with its guitar oscillations like the blades of a helicopter's rotor, was immense and Hotel Bloedel an unexpected pleasure. Brix happily taking up MES's lecturing style and investing it with a brio that's long since been replaced by an alcoholic haze in her former husband. When they played C.R.E.E.P. a huge smile broke out across my face at the sheer joy of it all.

The set was liberally sprinkled with the band's own new material. Something I'd not expected and, in theory, would not have welcomed. They turned out to be another pleasant surprise. Veering from Adult Net style bubblegum infused punk to riot grrrl anthems, Brix positioning herself anywhere between Stevie Nicks and Kathleen Hanna, occasionally on Rickenbacker, occasionally on Gibson. Often leaving the guitar work to Steve Trafford and Jason Brown either side of her. When all three guitarists played at once it was some glorious racket.

She really seemed to be enjoying herself too. Bouncing around the stage and actually introducing the songs. It made a change to be able to hear the lyrics and to not have some irritable drinker fucking around with the amps and threatening people.

For an encore we were treated to Totally Wired before dropping into, suprisingly, Hip Priest which, finally, segued into Big New Prinz. Each band member leaving the stage in order until the two Hanley brothers finally got their moment in the spotlight churning out that song's grinding rhythm. They'd waited for, and earned, that moment. The guy in The Three Johns t-shirt certainly seemed to be enjoying it.

They were back on one more time for Lay Of The Land. A fantastic choice to end with though I think most of us could've argued for hours about what they'd missed. No Barmy. No Spoilt Victorian Child. No Oh! Brother. Oh well, plenty in the bank for next time.

Thanks to Gary Bhupsingh for persuading me to come, getting the tickets, and organising an all round super evening. After a fairly emotional week it was very much the tonic I needed.

The art of protestation.

On a rainy Friday afternoon I trudged down City Road to the Victoria Miro gallery. I'd been to some interesting solo shows here but I can't remember attending a group exhibition.

Protest, which finishes today, is an exhibition of historical and contemporary works by artists concerned with the socio-political issues of their day. They aim to question the status quo and power structures found within societies and explore the potency of the language of protestation. Victoria Miro have put it together with the help of Reprieve - an organisation dedicated to helping the world's most vulnerable people by fighting extreme abuses of human rights.

Spread over two floors there's no particular route you need to take around the show. You're free (appropriately enough) to just wander about taking in whatever attracts your attention. In the downstairs room that'll definitely be Elmgreen & Dragset's Prison Breaking/Powerless Structures Fig.33 which fills the bulk of the room. The Danish/Norwegian duo who once placed a rocking horse on Trafalgar Square's fourth plinth have gone for a mocked up, smashed up prison cell suggesting, hinting at both freedom and disaster at the same time.

Much like Yayoi Kusama's Prisoner's Door (1994) it's probably more impressive to look at it than it manages to address any particular deep theme of protest or human rights. Kusama is a very strong visual artist and I've enjoyed her mirrored rooms greatly in the past. Politically I'm yet to be totally convinced she's offering much. Doug Aitken's Free, made of high density foam, wood, and mirror, seems a bit too obvious on first viewing. The word FREE written on shattered mirrors as if to say 'but are we really?'. Where it works is when you walk around and the light plays on the mirrors' shifting perspective. I doubt it's as deep as it thinks it is but it's diverting enough.

Before you go upstairs there's a warning about the adult nature of some of the works. This clearly doesn't refer to Sarah Sze's series of heavily edited, completely blacked out in most part, newspapers. The message about censorship is clear enough. Blunt even.

Pennsylvanian Alice Neel's Nazis Murder Jews is the most powerful thing in the whole exhibition. Having been made in 1936 it would have been a brave work at the time and it still stands up now. Again, the message could be considered blunt, but the thirties, looking back at them, don't seem to be a time for sending mixed signals or being cryptic.

Not that that's always a bad thing. Vlassic Caniaris' 1959 Homage to the Walls of Athens 1941-19... has seen the artists paint the letter E on to a combination of burlap and wood. The E stands for Eleftheria (freedom), Ellas (Greece), and EAM (the National Liberation Front) who were the main movement of the Greek Resistance during the Axis occupation of World War II. As the work was made after the war Vlassis has been able to reflect rather than react. The juxtaposition of this with the nearby Neel canvas probably does the most to fulfil this exhibition's remit.

I'm not quite sure exactly how Richard Prince's vaguely pornographic untitled ink jet works fit in. Clearly the juxtaposition of heated demonstrations with erotica have a striking visual effect and the sheet of A4 paper you can pick up on entering the gallery claims "meaning itself is something to be stymied and subverted as a Dada-esque act of protest". Fair enough but it still felt a little weak after Neel and Caniaris.

Nobody could argue Wolfgang Tillmans' NICE HERE; but ever been to KYRGYSTAN? Free Gender-Expression WORLDWIDE from 2006 doesn't belong in an exhibition about protest. Tillmans sought to highlight disparity of freedoms enjoyed, or endured, in various countries. He's certainly succeeded in this but this print would probably work better if it was contrasted with some of Tillmans other work.

Another artist who's not brought her very best work to show is Kara Walker. Her series of pencil and collages, Tell Me Your Thoughts On Police Brutality Miss "Spank Me Harder", although impressively drawn and sketching a line between the American Civil War and Black Lives Matter, lacks the power of some of the other stuff of hers I've seen in the past.

A rare blast of colour is provided by the French-American Jules de Balincourt's Study for Idol Hands in which a throng of people hold aloft banners. Do they contain images of idols or are they the faces of disappeared people that you see in contemporary protest movements of Latin America?

There's an Isaac Julien film, WESTERN UNION:Small Boats (The Leopard), from 2007. You can watch it in a closed off area at the back. It's, in places, a little drawn out. But it is, at times, incredibly powerful. Using African music and scenes of boats crossing the Mediterranean to reflect on the current plight of migrants, refugees, or, the term I prefer, people. It's definitely worth sticking with it as the pay off is as affecting as it should be.

They've really squeezed the works in as there's a few in the office/bookshop area. It can feel a little awkward trying to take these in as staff are going about their work but as a conscientious blogger I needed to look in.

Wolfgang Tillmans' EU campaign posters make the case for a Remain vote in the recent referendum as strongly as many other things. As we all now know though lies and fear sadly won out. Perhaps that's why they're here? To reflect on how, sometimes, protest remains utterly impotent. Or even to show how some protests can be whipped up, say by UKIP and the right wing of the Tory party, to serve their own ends whilst kidding the protestors they're doing something to help themselves or even, for instance, the NHS.

I'd seen Wangechi Mutu's Panties in a Bunch at the Camden Arts Centre earlier this year so, on the surface, you'd find it hard to imagine her work has much in common with Tillmans' posters but this show is nothing if not a mixed bag. The Kenyan born artists' performance stills here pertain to the act of throwing things as protest. The works are a little too poorly lit to really get this but with the aid of my camera phone one of them did result in a rather pleasing tableau vivant affect.

As you leave the gallery Chris Ofili's Union Black, 2003, hangs outside the entrance. It's inspired by David Hammons' African-American Flag which based on the colours (red/black/green) Marcus Garvey had suggested for a pan-African flag. Those colours represent blood, skin, and natural resources.

The fact it hung rather limply should not be taken as a metaphor for a more hit than miss, free, exhibition which, if failing to provide a comprehensive overview of protest in art (which would be nigh on impossible anyway), certainly shone some light on a group of artists working away from the narcissistic confines of much contemporary work. For this alone they should be applauded.