Construction time again #6:Lina Ghotmeh and the Serpentine Pavilion.

I'd left it later than usual to make my annual trip to Kensington Gardens to see the Serpentine Pavilion (I've been going for years and have been writing about it every year since 2016 except for a Covid enforced interlude) and that meant that by the time I arrived it had been raining quite heavily and the pavilion was a little damp around its edges.

It looked pretty good though. A wooden affair with geometrical designs you may associate with the Arab world and some large tables inside where people can sit together and share food. Lina Ghotmeh's from Beirut in Lebanon so it seems likely she's been inspired by the architecture of her home city and country but she studied in France and, you can read on a small information board outside the pavilion, she's also inspired by that country's tradition of gathering over coffee and wine and having deep conversations about the issues of the day.

I visited on my own so was unable to do that (it's a lonesome life, that of a blogger) but I did have a good look at the pavilion and its climate friendly, low carbon, construction. Ghotmeh's called it 'a table' (yes!) and she's built it as if it to rhyme with the trees of Kensington Gardens as well as providing a skylight at the top that, on a sunnier day, would have let a bold shaft of light in.

The nearby Serpentine Gallery was, itself - before being converted into a gallery, a tea room so the pavilion being used to provide food and drink echoes that heritage too. There really isn't a lot to say about the pavilion except that it's a rather lovely building, I wish I'd visited with a friend, and that the yearly Serpentine Pavilion is a really great way of getting the public to take an interest in new architecture. Next time let's go as a group.

Master Of Puppets:More Jews From Nowhere.

Godwin's law is an Internet era adage that states that the longer an Internet online discussion, or argument, goes on the more inevitable it is that one party will compare another to Adolf Hitler or the Nazis. Reverse Godwin's law, however, states that if you delve deep enough into any given conspiracy theory you will find that behind it all, pulling the strings, are the Jews.

I'd not heard of reverse Godwin's law before last night's Skeptics in the Pub - Online (Jewish Space Lasers with Mike Rothschild - no relation, I'll come to that) but it was only one of many interesting things I learned last night in a talk, more a conversation between Mike Rothschild and host Michael Marshall (who is still responsible for my most viewed blog ever) than the usual lecture format, which was both superb and fascinating as well as depressingly timely.

Of course, I refer to the horrific situation in the Middle East at the moment. Something I've not really proffered any views on yet. Primarily because it's too confusing, and too awful, to get one's head around and also because what difference will the views of an unemployed blogger from thousands of miles away really make? About as much difference as the soundbites that come out of Rishi Sunak's and James Cleverly's mouths. None.

What I will say, before getting back on topic, is that it is clear that there has to, eventually, be a two state solution (it's either that or keep killing each other until there's nobody left to kill) but with Benjamin Netanyahu in power in Israel and Hamas in power in Gaza there's no chance of that as each seem to be utterly devoted to the complete destruction of the other. The first step towards peace, and even then it'd be a very slim chance, is to depose both Netanyahu and Hamas. Qatar and Turkey should put pressure on Hamas and the US should put pressure on Netanyahu to stand down. It probably won't happen. Not until several thousand more children have died.

The talk didn't really get into current affairs, I watched Question Time and Newsnight later so I could hear people argue about that, and it began with Mike Rothschild explaining what inspired him to write his most recent book Jewish Space Lasers:The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy. Mike Rothschild (I'm using his full name to avoid confusion) is a journalist and conspiracy theory expert so with that name it seemed it was only a matter of time until he turned his attention to the famous Rothschild family to which he is, I reiterate, unrelated.

Why is it always the Jews targeted in conspiracy theories and why is it, specifically, the Rothschild family rather than other famous, and rich, Jewish families like the Guggenheims and the Warburgs? As with most myths and conspiracy theories there is a grain of truth in there. A grain of truth that has been garnished over the centuries with lots and lots of lies.

Jews have been linked to money since the 11/12c when Catholic law made usury (lending money and expecting interest on it when it's returned) not just a crime but a crime that was considered equal to murder. That, of course, didn't stop people needing to borrow money. Kings and popes needed money to build castles, palaces, and armies and as Catholics couldn't lend them any they turned to the Jews who were not bound by Catholic law.

Soon enough, some came to thinking that the Jews had too much money, that they had too much power, and that the interest rates they were charging were far too high. We've probably all felt that about bankers and money lenders, be they Jewish or not.

What really deepened the belief that the Jews were not just greedy but running the world was the 1903 release of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion which posited an antisemitic conspiracy theory that the Jewish people were involved in a plot for global domination and were intending to use their wealth to ensure that that happened.

Very quickly, it was proven that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a hoax - but the theories remained - and remain to this day. The fact that Jews dressed differently, wore their hair differently, and had different dietary concerns aroused suspicion among Christian communities and, as we can see with migrants today in the UK, many Jews were accused of sexual crimes. Some were tortured. Some were killed.

 

The famous Rothschild family worked as merchants and low level money lenders in Frankfurt and lived in that city's Jewish ghetto. Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1744-1812) was the first of the Rothschilds to really excel in banking and he worked his way up to a position as the court Jew of the Mayor of Hesse and was tasked by the Elector of Hesse, along with his son - Amschel Rothschild, with hiding funds from Napoleon and his army who, in 1806, invaded Hesse.

A myth took hold that another of Mayer's sons, Nathan Rothschild, was actually present at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (where, if you know your Abba, Napoleon was defeated). The story had it that as it became clear Napoleon would lose, Nathan escaped Waterloo (in present day Belgium), crossed the channel in a horrendous storm, and made his way to the London stock exchange.

There he would buy up stock at depressed prices (depressed because in London it was still believed Napoleon would defeat Wellington) and then, as news reached London of Napoleon's loss, sell them again as the prices skyrocketed. None of this is true, and would rely on an awful lot of convenient coincidence, but the Rothschild family did make some money out of banking during the Napoleonic Wars as well as other wars in Europe - which there were a lot of back then. Once again a grain of truth had been garnished by a whole load of lies.

When a series of socialist revolutions swept across Europe in 1848, the sentiment was very anti-wealth and, therefore, very anti-Rothschild. Not, in most cases, because the Rothschilds were Jewish but because they were rich. Nevertheless, it still aided the construction of a conspiracy theory narrative.

James de Rothschild, another of Mayer's sons, had a plan to link Europe by train and was investing heavily in it (some of the lines he built still operate) but when there was a train crash north of Paris with around twenty casualties, a pamphlet was produced accusing James de Rothschild of intentionally building shoddy railroads to enrich himself. The idea of the Rothschilds as greedy and powerful grew.

Less than a decade earlier, the Damascus affair had been used even more egregiously for the same ends. When a Capuchin monk, Father Thomas, and his Muslim servant (seemingly not given the respect of a name) disappeared in Damascus the finger of blame pointed towards the Jewish community of the city and it was suggested that the Rothschilds had been involved in killing both the friar and his servant in some kind of blood libel (a conspiracy theory that has it that Jews kill Christian boys to use their blood in religious rituals and perhaps dates all the way back to the idea that the Jews killed Jesus - or even God. Deicide!

The Rothschilds didn't even have to be in a country to be pulling the strings there. Mayer Rothschild never moved to the USA (in a less astute move than usual, he thought there'd be no business opportunities in that country) but the myth of Jewish/Rothschild dominance took hold with the Jewish diaspora and people's suspicion of them.

During the American Civil War the Republicans claimed the Democrats were funded by the Rothschilds while others insisted the Rothschilds were funding the Confederacy. Either way they were manipulating US politics and potentially dragging America into yet another European/Jewish war. A belief that grew between World War I and World War II (Henry Ford promoted antisemitism almost religiously - think of that next time you're in a Ford Focus) and continues to this day with conspiracy theories like the Illuminati and the New World Order.

The Rothschilds were even accused of funding Hitler in World War II. Jews funding Hitler! Hitler, you may already be aware, had quite a dim view of Judaism (Kristallnacht, Auschwitz, the Final Solution). In reality, the Rothschilds, like all other Jewish families in Germany and across Europe, were on the run from the Nazi death squads. Some of the Rothschilds were killed by the Nazis.

I found it very interesting, though I'm trying not to read too much into it, that the Nazis had a lot of their antisemitic literature translated into Arabic because they were keen to turn the Muslims against the Jews. Mike Rothschild had it that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been translated into Arabic more than any other language and that on television in Syria there is a regular show that presents Jewish conspiracy theories quite simply as fact.

All of these myths and conspiracy theories moved, easily and quickly, on to the Internet when the world started to move online and that's, roughly, where we are now. Some of the tropes disseminated online may not mean to be antisemitic but are. In an echo of Jeremy Corbyn's support for the Freedom for Humanity mural in Tower Hamlets, the American conservative Christian media personality Pat Robertson (who died earlier this year) promoted a theory that the Rothschilds had plans to merge the worlds of the occult and high finance.

Which is, itself, pretty much a reboot for modern times of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Probably the biggest change in recent years regarding this centuries old conspiracy theory is that the Rothschilds are slowly being replaced by George Soros as string-puller number one. That's because Soros supports, and funds, many of the things that right wing America hates. He supports voting rights, prison reform, and the repeal of some drug laws.

It doesn't seem like these Jewish conspiracy theories are going away anytime soon but with people as bright and as curious as Mike Rothschild (and Michael Marshall) to guide us through the minefield, most of us should be able to stay well away from then. A fascinating Q&A took in 9/11, the Bilderberg Group, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Benjamin Netanyahu, aliens, galactic federations, the Russian Revolution, moonlanding denial, Ezra Pound, the Balfour Declaration, Benjamin Disraeli, QAnon (whom Mike Rothschild has written two books on), Ponzi schemes in Iraq, Covid (which some say the Rothschilds invented), freemasonry, and the former Coventry City goalkeeper and snooker commentator David Icke who obviously doesn't subscribe to Jewish conspiracy theories at all because when he talks about lizards controlling the world he definitely doesn't mean Jews.

Thanks to Mikes Rothschild and Marshall for an absorbing and engrossing evening in front of my computer screen and thanks to Skeptics in the Pub - Online for keeping these free events going and shedding some light on the darkness that seems to be engulfing the world today.

The Bottle Let Me Down:El Anatsui @ Tate Modern.

Impressive though the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui's Behind The Red Moon installation in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern is, I must admit I came away feeling slightly underwhelmed. Merle Haggard famously sang that the bottle let him down, for me El Anatsui's bottletops let me down.

 

But just like when the bottle lets you down, the journey was at least fun. Behind The Red Moon is, El Anatsui states, "an artwork in three acts" and all three of those acts are made of liquor bottle tops and metal fragments that have been crushed, crumbled, and connected together by hand by El Anatsui's team.

They're epic in scale, making good use of the Turbine Hall's vastness, and when you first look at them there seems to be no meaning whatsoever beyond a huge abstracted field of colour and texture. Which would be fair enough. But there's information on boards dotted around the Turbine Hall which tells you what El Anatsui's thinking behind the work is. I found it to be quite instructive - if a little cold.

The viewer is invited to embark on a journey and to interact with the hangings (although eager security guards were on hand to stop anyone touching them or going beyond the marked out lines that surrounded the floor based work) but we're also told that we should, if we look close enough, be able to see the moon, the sail (?), and the Earth.

I didn't see any of those things. But I did see how, much like Hew Locke's Procession at Tate Britain last year, El Anatsui's work made statements about colonialism and the overlapping histories of Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Split into three 'acts' (The Red Moon, The World, and The Wall) the installation is intended to evoke the ships that transported slaves (as well as gold, sugar, and spirits) across the Atlantic and the use of red bottle tops as a raw material is meant to evoke the 'blood moons' that sailors would use to navigate their way across the ocean.

It's likely, also, that El Anatsui wanted us to think of the thousands of gallons of innocent blood that was spilled on these voyages. A group of meshy figures suspended in the air seem to represent human figures. Perhaps they are alive but perhaps they were once alive. Perhaps they were consigned to a watery grave.

Perhaps they are embarking on a forced journey to a new, cruel, world. The inky black wall that stands at the end of the Turbine Hall is, I discovered, rooted in the ancient story of an earthen wall in Togo called Notsie that was built by King Agokoli to confine and oppress his subjects, the Ewe people. Despite their name the Ewe people were not sheep and a revolutionary uprising led to the wall's destruction and liberty for the Ewes.

It's good to learn about something I'd known nothing about before visiting this show but it would have been even better if I'd have learned that by looking at the art instead of reading about it. It's a problem I have with a lot of contemporary conceptual art. It's too obscure. It's fine to make the viewer do some work but sometimes the artworks seem to leave the viewer out completely.

I don't get the impression that that's what an artist like El Anatsui is aiming for. He's clearly trying to make connections (both physical and mental in his work) and by using everyday materials he's announcing he's an artist for everyday people and not just scholars and art bloggers. Sadly, for me, he hasn't completely succeeded in his aims (or what I assume to be his aims) but he's given it a good shot. Don't visit Tate Modern specially for this installation but if you are visiting, or just passing, pop in and have a look. You probably won't be quite as underwhelmed as I was. I'd been led to expect more.

Big Trouble In Little Lagos.

Nigeria is, by some margin, the most populous country in the entire continent of Africa. Lagos, Nigeria's former capital, is the most populous city in the whole of Nigeria (it's got more than three times the amount of people than call the second city, Kano, home - and the capital Abuja has a quarter the number of citizens). Only Kinshasa, the capital of the Democractic Republic of Congo, beats Lagos when it comes to population sizes in Africa.

Peckham doesn't have quite so many people but it is home to one of the largest Nigerian diaspora communities in the UK. To the extent that it is sometimes known as, though not by me - until earlier today, Little Lagos. The South London Gallery's LAGOS PECKHAM REPEAT:Pilgrimage To The Lakes is a free exhibition, spread across two venues, that brings together the work of Nigerian and British-Nigerian artists to look at issues of migration, pilgrimage, and identity and though some of the works are difficult to read or interpretate, they are - for the most part - both interesting and aesthetically pleasing.

Christopher Obuh - No City for Poor Man (2014-ongoing)

 

As you go in there's a little bit of history of Lagos. How it was given its name in the 18th century by the Portuguese (Lagos is Portuguese for 'lakes' and Lagos is surrounded by water), how it became a significant port for the transatlantic slave trade, and how Britain took possession of the city in 1861. Also how Nigeria gained independence from Britain in 1960 and how migration between the two countries has increased over the last six decades.

Nigerians first started arriving, in significant numbers, in Peckham in the 70s and 80s following an economic crisis in Nigeria and then more arrived in the 90s, escaping civil unrest. Today more than 12,000 people of Nigerian heritage call the London Borough of Southwark home.

One of whom is Yinka Shonibare. His Diary of a Victorian Dandy series, two of which are in this exhibition, shows the artist as a black dandy who has found himself moving in upper class, society circles. It's Shonibare's way of questioning our assumptions of who does and who doesn't belong in stately homes and polite society and, as the brochure rightly points out, it owes no little debt to William Hogarth's satirical social commentary.

Yinka Shonibare - Diary of a Victorian Dandy, 19:00hrs (1998)

Ndidi Dike - Deciphering Value:Economic Anomalies and Unequal Dependencies in Global Community Trade (2023)

Ndidi Dike's lengthily, and drily, titled piece is a bit harder to get your head around. There are images of Rye Lane (Peckham's market heavy - and phone repair heavy - high street) but also of Lagos markets like Balogun, Ladipo, Katangua, and Yaba and there are credit cards, computer keyboards, and paper money lying around. It seems to be all about commodity and capitalism and possibly also about global inequality but it's as tricky to work out as it is enjoyable to look at.

Emake Ogboh (who has provided a soundtrack to the exhibition which can be heard in each room - it consists of Lagos soundscapes, traffic, chanting, street vendors etc;) has made a work called No Food For Lazy Man which appears to be a pile of crates full of beer bottles.

It took the pamphlet to explain to me that the beer, Orbit, is brewed in south London and, apparently, celebrates migrant resilience (I suppose beer is quite often used during celebrations) as well as being made with a mix of English hop varieties and Nigerian alligator pear, calabash, nutmeg, and sugar cane. A true collaboration but what's with the title? Well, I learned that that is a popular Lagos saying that captures the hustle and bustle of the megacity.

Emeka Ogboh - No Food For Lazy Man (2023)

Temitayo Shonibare - I'd rather not go blind (2023)

Temitayo Shonibare's I'd rather not go blind is a twenty-six minute film of several commuters on the Overground travelling from Dalston Junction to Peckham Rye. It's a journey I have made many many times and, more often than not, I've been like the majority of commuters in this film. Either looking at my phone or reading. The chief protagonist of Shonibare's work (if you can call them that), however, simply spends the whole time stroking the huge mop of ginger hair that completely covers their face thus denying them the advantage of sight. Shonibare's thinking behind this work was that public transport, not least in large cities, involves an unspoken set of social rules and norms and she was trying to break those norms in an interesting way. Of course, it being London, it seems nobody gives her unusual creation a second look.

Viktor Ekikhamenor's Cathedral of the Mind looked interesting. Woven from mass produced rosary beads, Ekikhamenor's cathedral has a suitably imposing 'door' and when you look behind it there's a row of Ibeji ('twins' in Yoruba) statuettes. The Yoruba, it seems, see twins as divine and special people who bring prosperity to the household they are born into. I've got several friends who have twins. Maybe I should ask them if that's made them wealthy!

Viktor Ekikhamenor - Cathedral of the Mind (2023)

Viktor Ekikhamenor - Cathedral of the Mind (2023)

Christopher Obuh - No City for Poor Man (2014-ongoing)

Christopher Obuh's series of large photographs, No City for Poor Man, looks at the building of the planned city of Eko Atlantic in Lagos State. It's been dubbed the 'Dubai of Africa' and that's exactly the double edged sword you might imagine. Eko Atlantic has been built using forced eviction and the demolition of informal settlements. Poor people are being kicked out of their homes to make way for rich people. There is also a widely held belief that Eko Atlantic is terrible for the climate at a time when the climate is of greater concern than ever before.

Money, of course, wins out over life - as with nearly everywhere else in the world. Lagos Studio Archives' Archive of Becoming is a useful counterweight as it shows actual people from Lagos. Many of whom have now left their home city and moved to London.

Lagos Studio Archives - The Archive of Becoming (2015-ongoing)

Lagos Studio Archives - The Archive of Becoming (2015-ongoing)

Yinka Shonibare - Diary of a Victorian Dandy, 14:00hrs (1998)

Temitayo Ogunbiyi - You will find Lagos in London living (2023)

Temitayo Ogunbiyi's sculpture looks, at first, like one of those games where you have to prove a steady hand and avoid buzzing the wire (what are they called? they must have a name) and, indeed, the sculpture is described as interactive. Children are encouraged to play on it but I'm, sadly, no longer a child and I didn't have a handy child with me so I just looked at it somewhat bemused.

It looked nice though. But Abdulrazaq Awofeso's Avalanche of Calm was even better. In fact it was probably my favourite piece in the entire show. Awofeso made the work shortly after moving from Lagos to the UK and it appears to be an architectural model of a part of Lagos with some nice fluffy blue clouds hanging over it. I enjoy architectural models (most of the time - as long as I'm not ripped off paying to see them) and even though this one has a cemetery feel about it I still liked it.

Abdulrazaq Awofeso - Avalanche of Calm (2022)

Onyeka Igwe - No Archive Can Restore You (2020)

Which is not something I can say for Onyeka Igwe's rather dull film, No Archive Can Restore You. Rooms full of dust, cobwebs, and old film reels, there should be something 'hauntological' about it all but it's just too slow, too dry. There was a fairly big crowd in there watching it though so my disappointment with the work seems to put me in the minority.

Chiizii's installation contained a warning that some of the work referenced colonial times (which it did) and that there was nudity (some topless women) and it explores the Igbo diet in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial times. As, I assume, a way of exploring how colonialism affected not just the food eaten by the Igbo people but also the culture. Of course, you'd need to read a book to truly understand that but Chiizii's colourful and warm work at least pushes the viewer in that direction.

Chiizii - Research Room, Chapter 1. Nni Bu Ogwu (Food Is Medicine) (2023)

Chiizii - Research Room, Chapter 1. Nni Bu Ogwu (Food Is Medicine) (2023)

The final work I took in was rather good too and not just because I got to sit in a very comfy armchair as I took it in (more of this in art galleries please). Behind a coffee table loaded with soft drinks bottles and hot drinks cups, saucers, and teapots there was a screen showing Adeyemi Michael's mother riding a horse down Peckham's Rye Lane dressed in traditional Yoruba ceremonial attire.

It celebrates, as well as anything else in the show, the experience of Nigerians living in Peckham and as I watched it I thought to myself that if I was to see Adeyemi Michael's mother riding a horse down Rye Lane it'd barely warrant a second glance. Rye Lane is quite lively. I left the gallery, and walked home. As I walked down Rye Lane, past Khan's Bargains as seen in Michael's film, I didn't see a horse rider in traditional Yoruba ceremonial attire but I breathed in the vitality of Peckham (an area I have come to love deeply over the years) and thought to myself just how much the Nigerian community have given the place. There's no big trouble in Little Lagos but there's lots of big love. Pass me the jollof rice and a glass of palm wine.

Adeyemi Michael - Entitled (2018)

Adeyemi Michael - Entitled (2018)

 

 

 

 

Fleapit revisited:Watcher.

There's not a single country on the entire continent of Europe in which you are more likely to be murdered than the United States (you're six times more likely to be murdered in the USA than you are in the UK, France, Germany and twelve times more likely to be murdered in America than in Spain or Italy) yet when Americans in Hollywood films visit Europe they do so for only two reasons.

To fall in love (Four Weddings In A Funeral, Notting Hill) or to come into mortal danger. The Taken series of films were, perhaps, the most obvious signifiers of this trend in movie making but into the field, in 2022, came Chloe Okuno's Watcher. I watched Watcher last night on Netflix and though it was eminently watchable it was hardly a classic. I doubt I'd watch Watcher again.

American Julie (Maika Monroe) and her partner Francis (Karl Glusman) move into a plush (on the inside, at least) Bucharest apartment. He's had a promotion at work and as his mum is Romanian he can speak the language. She can't. Which she means she spends most of the day at home on her own. But instead of watching tv, reading books, or masturbating she seems to spend most of the time staring out of the window.

But .... somebody is always staring back at her from the flat across the road. She makes the foolish mistake of waving at him, he waves back, and soon he's showing up everywhere she goes. In the cinema for a Cary Grant matinee, on the metro, in the supermarket, and, yes - you've guessed it, in her dreams. That ghost train's never late.

She relates her concerns to Francis and though he doesn't dismiss them entirely he thinks she's reading too much into it. Nevertheless, he knocks round at the creepy neighbour's and even gets a policeman (Florian Ghimpu) involved. The cop brings the neighbour, Daniel Weber (Burn Gorman), round to Julie and Francis's apartment and they all agree, somewhat begrudgingly, that it's been a terrible mistake.

But Julie, and us - the audience - know it's not. When a serial killer named The Spider (who has been cutting throats and decapitating women in the Romanian capital) is finally apprehended it seems like Julie's fears may be lain to rest and Daniel will be able to get on with his slightly disturbing hobby of harmlessly staring out the window and following attractive young women around. Oh, and mopping up presumably sticky messes from the floor of the strip club in which he works as a cleaner.

But when Julie's new friend, neighbour, and stripper Irina (Madalina Anea) goes missing, it starts to look like The Spider may still be at large. When Julie finally learns enough Romanian to understand that inattentive Francis and his friends are making light of her fears she heads off into the dark Bucharest night in what seems highly likely to be a very poorly judged flit.

While Watcher plays on genuine, if very extreme, female anxieties and provides some bona fide jumpy moments, I found that none of the characters were fleshed out well enough to make me care about them (Glusman's Francis was little more than a cipher) and the plot was so rudimentary that I found myself imagining twists and turns in the storyline that simply didn't appear. I wanted to be wrong-footed but the only twist, for me, was that there wasn't one. Let's send some Romanians to St Louis next time and really shit them up.

Thanks to Michelle for watching this with me and having a cushion ready for me to hide behind if it all got too frightening.