Image And Insurrection:Jannis Kounellis @ Tate Modern

"I have seen the sacred in the common object. I have believed in weight as the right measure ... I want the return of poetry by all means available: through practice, observation, solitude; through language, image and insurrection" - Jannis Kounellis, 1987

 Untitled (Hanging Knife) (1991)

Knives, bells, toy trains, coal, steel, chickpeas, kidney beans, lentils, old beds, bricks, chairs, rope, sewing machines, and dead (stuffed) birds. If you're looking for a definition of mixed media then Jannis Kounellis (whose work is currently showing, for free, at Tate Modern) is just the man to give it to you.

It's easy to see what he made his work from and it's easy enough to understand why but the reasons he chose to make THIS art with THOSE materials is a little bit more confusing. In some ways his art means absolutely nothing at all. In other ways, and if you're pretentious enough - and sometimes I am, you can read multiple interpretations into his work. I'm happy for it to mean nothing - and lots of things. At the same time.

Untitled (Sack with Z) (2001)

Kounellis (1936-2017) was born in the Greek port city of Piraeus but lived and worked in Rome from 1956 where he found himself, eventually, becoming part of the Arte Povera ("poor art") movement along with Alberto Burri, Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luciano Fabro, and - my favourite - Alighiero Boetti.

The Arte Povera group used ordinary, everyday, materials to create their art in the hope of bringing the art closer to most people's normal lives. As Italian society was undergoing a rapid transition and people were torn between industrial and agrarian lifestyles there were clashes - both in society and its reflection in the art of the Arte Povera.

Kounellis reflected this by making art works that combined steel (industrial) and wood (agrarian) but he also made works that considered other juxtapositions and pondered other ways of trying to resolve, or even intentionally leave unresolved, dichotomies that were springing up in both the art world and in society at large. Even though he considered himself a painter (despite there not being a lot of painting here) he expanded his artistic vision to include sculpture but also smell and sound. Hence the coffee beans and the church bells.

There are hints and illusions in his work (the sack with a Z on it does not refer, twenty plus years in advance, to the Russian army's use of that letter during their ongoing invasion of Ukraine but the sack of coal is believed to be a reference to the trade and commerce of the port of Piraeus) but they're not always clear. Sometimes quite the opposite.

Untitled (1960-98)

Untitled (1960)

Before he'd fully got involved with, and inspired by, other Atre Povera artists, Kounellis was attracted to numbers, words, and graphics found in street signs which he'd reduce to ever more basic symbols and arrange them, seemingly on a whim, against a plain background. It's mathematics by way of abstract expressionism (Kounellis admired both Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline - the latter's work not being massively dissimilar to this) but though I looked for meaning and tried to decipher some kind of code I was unable to. 

Which was a little frustrating. But is there even a code there? Is it just a pattern that appealed to Kounellis sense of aesthetics? I don't know. Sometimes he would "expand" these paintings into "performances" by reading them out loud. It doesn't sound like one of the most thrilling of events to have attended.

Preferable, to this visitor at least, is the steel bedframe that Kounellis has hung from a meat hook and hung in front of a painted yellow square (a cheeky reference, it is suggested, to Kasimir Malevich's iconic Black Square of 1915). Meat hooks and beds? Is Kounellis trying to say something about sex as a commodity, something you buy and sell, something you trade in, bodies as meat? Or is he just teasing us. I was quite surprised that the artist himself, because of the use of yellow, claimed the work to be inspired by Van Gogh's sunflower paintings.

Untitled (1993)

Untitled (2005)

Untitled (1969)

And what of the work that consists of seven sad looking burlap sacks (sad sacks, quite literally) left on the floor, as if waiting taking in following a delivery, and containing coffee beans, lentils, peas, maize, and kidney beans. These are, one would imagine, similar to products that a young Kounellis would have seen arriving, or leaving, Piraeus as a boy and it's quite possible that the burlap sacks would have been used to.

Again, it seems to be an exercise in reflection on times gone by and a nod to the work done by the lower classes of Greek society. Like it or not, and I rather did, it is very much an Arte Povera piece. The same could be said of 1971's bricked up doorway but that also shows a more playful, pranksterish, side to Kounellis - which is always good in the often po-faced world of art.

Untitled (1969)

Every time the work is displayed it is always, on Kounellis' instructions, installed in a doorway where it performs a physical art of 'blockage', blockage of the 'threshold' if you will. Kounellis also insisted that the curators, or whoever is responsible for replicating this piece, use stones that are sourced locally to the venue of installation. Which is nice.

Another more fun work, also called Untitled - you're getting the hang of it I suspect, shows a chair and an abstract expressionist adjacent green canvas with feint music notation depicted on it. In 1971, when this work was first exhibited, a cellist would sit on the chair and repeatedly play from that notation. Which is an excerpt of Bach's oratorio St John Passion (composed in 1723-4). If I'd attended on a Saturday, rather than a Friday, and been lucky with my timing I could have heard a presumably different cellist getting to grips with Bach. It is suggested, by the curators, that I could imagine the music by simply looking at the notes but I don't know who they think their average visitor is. All I could hear, as ever, was the internal, and infernal, monologue inside my head.

Untitled (1971)

Bells (1993)

Bach, or church bells, would have been preferable. I'm not religious but churches look great and church bells, unless it's too early on a Sunday morning - in which case there ought to be a law against them, sound great. Kounellis thought so too. He was particularly interested in the presence, omnipresence even, of church bells in the Southern European communities he grew up and lived in.

When 1993's Bells (a work not called Untitled - wonders will never cease!) was first exhibited in Pistoia in Tuscany, that city's impressive cathedral was visible through the gallery windows creating a visual, if sadly not aural, echo. Kounellis believed that bells represented "language, a magnified human voice - and the enthusiastic roar of liberation". He really ought to let us visitors have a ding on them.

Untitled (Sewing Machine ) (2004)

Coal Sculpture with Wall of Coloured Glass (1999)

Untitled (Scissors) (2004)

Untitled (Hair) (2004)

Untitled (Coffee) (1989-91)

Other works, some of which - disappointingly - have my gormless fizzog gurning back at me in their reflection, reminded me a little bit of a pared down Joseph Cornell. There's a sewing machine and a crumpled blue coat (sadly not a famous blue raincoat) which is said to be a comment on industrial manufacture and, because of the anchor on the buttons of the coat, naval life.

There's a pile of coal (that and iron, according to Kounellis, are the two materials, that best reflect the industrial revolution), a paraffin lamp (like one that would have been used for mining), and a doorway of glass lumps that look very pretty even if I'm not sure what they are meant to represent. Let's just say that as a juxtaposition, and as an aesthetic piece, it works very well. Which sometimes seems the main point of Kounellis' work.

Then there are three cabinets containing, variously, scissors, hair, and coffee beans. All things you may encounter in a hairdressing salon I suppose. Though I doubt that's the intention. Scissors, like the hanging knife that heads up this review/blog/total waste of time, can be used for violence as surely as they can for tonsorial purposes.

Hair is something most of us like. It looks nice on people's heads. But when it's removed from their head it can look a bit weird - especially if placed in a steel and glass box and put in a gallery for people to look at. Hair cutting, we're informed, is not always a good thing (though when I had my hair - and David Bellamy style beard - shorn recently it was definitely for the best) and can sometimes be used as a punishment or signify trauma or even illness.

Coffee smells good (I actually prefer its smell to its taste) and, for Kounellis, "the smell of coffee ... is painting - because it's a reality". Which brings us right back to the point I was making earlier about pretension. But I prefer pretension to the use of dead animals for art purposes so 1979's stuffed birds (a jackdaw and a hooded crow) is an unhappy view for me.

It's not clear if Kounellis had the birds killed or just stuffed already dead ones and I'd like to know as it would help inform my view of him as a person if not as an artist (not that he cares, he's dead). As an artwork, I will admit it's one of his most powerful. Some abstract prints and an industrial looking townscape where there is, and you can see, an influence of Giorgio de Chirico in his metaphysical pomp.

It speaks of transformation, decline, regeneration, and disappearance and, like much of Kounellis' work it is frustratingly difficult to get a grip on. There's something there but you can't quite work out what it is. After attending this show one suspects that's exactly how Jannis Kounellis used to like it.

Untitled (1979)

Half A Century Of Fakers?

I've never bought, or even read, the Fortean Times. I use the (completely unaffiliated) London Fortean Society to get my fix of Forteana. But having attended last night's LFS talk, 50 Years of the Fortean Times, with that periodical's news editor Ian Simmons at The Bell in Whitechapel, I'm starting to think that maybe I should. I'm missing out on stuff.

Good stuff too. Talking partridges in Uganda, Bigfoot piloting a UFO, Spring-heeled Jack, Edinburgh fairy coffins, women who vomit up frogs and lizards, feral bishops, and Zimbabwean poltergeists that remove people's trousers when they're asleep. Of course, some of these may not actually exist but it is the Fortean way to neither be too gullible nor too sceptical. With a smile, a Fortean simply examines the evidence and comes to their own, sometimes speculative, sometimes cheeky, conclusions.

It is, ultimately, supposed to be fun. Even if the Forteans these day take things a bit more seriously than Charles Fort (the man who began the 'movement') did. Beginning, with a theatrical flourish, Simmons told the story of the Fortean Times (which turned fifty in November 2023) from the very beginning. From before the beginning in fact.

Charles Fort (1874-1932), as a young man, was an adventurer, a short story writer, and a journalist and he was a man who refused to adhere to dogma. His 1909 novel The Outcast Manufacturers was not a success - by any metric - but when he started to take an interest in the likes of UFOs and seamonsters he found a richer seam to mine.

1919's The Book Of The Damned saw Fort attempting to classify anomalistic phenomena and it was followed by other (slightly) more successful books like New Lands (1923), Lo! (1931), and Wild Talents (1932). Perhaps I should try and read them one day. But, apparently, they make for tough reading by today's standards.

At the time, however, Fort's writing was admired by the likes of H. L. Mencken and Fort's friend (and drinking buddy) Theodore Dreiser. It was Dreiser who formed the first Fortean society, in 1931, and early members included Dorothy Parker, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Buckminster Fuller. He of the geodesic dome fame.

While neither Fort nor Dreiser were cranks, just curious, the editor of the first Fortean publication, Tiffany Thayer - that's a male Tiffany by the way, was. The magazine, Doubt, did include some of what we may now recognise as Forteana but it was also used as an excuse for Thayer to air his 'eccentric' political views and to suggest nuclear bombs didn't exist and were a government hoax. 

Thayer also wrote romantic fiction which seems to have been universally panned. Dorothy Parker once saying of his writing that "his power lies in his ability to make sex so thoroughly, graphically, and aggressively unattractive that one is fairly shaken to ponder how little one has been missing".

She wasn't the only one who wasn't a fan. Thayer himself easily made enemies and once expelled the entire San Francisco chapter of the Forteans. Doubt carried on until 1959 when it died with Thayer and then fourteen years later Bob Rickard (who showed up at the talk - late, he'd got lost on the way - and later posed for photos, answered some questions, and received a huge round of applause) started what would soon become today's Fortean Times. 

In 1961 Paul and Ronald Willis rebooted the International Fortean Organistion and they put out a magazine called INFO and about the same time Rickard, then at Birmingham School of Art, himself launched a sci-fi journal called Speculation which included features on Michael Moorcock and lots of other people I haven't heard of.

In 1969, Rickard saw an ad for INFO in the countercultural magazine Oz and that inspired him to get in touch with Paul and Ronald Willis. In 1973, they launched the first ever issue of The News (essentially the first ever Fortean Times, the initial title was inspired by William Morris's News From Nowhere). The first copy featured toads falling from the sky, feral children, mass hysteria, kestrel attacks, and somebody who somehow managed to swallow a fork.

Everything was pretty much in place from the start and Simmons gave us a run through the magazine's history which took in quite a colourful bunch of characters:- William Burroughs, Bill Drummond, David Icke, Uri Geller, Paul Giamatti, Alan Moore, Derek Jarman, Colin Wilson, Jerry Hall, Jamie Hewlett, Play Away's Brian Cant, Ken Campbell, John Michell, Stewart Home, the author John Higgs, and the comedian Andrew O'Neill.

The Fortean Times was, and still is, "the point where science and surrealism meet" and it was with the sixteenth issue that it changed its name from The News to the more descriptive Fortean Times. In the early nineties, John Brown Publishing, flush from the extraordinary success of launching the hilariously vulgar Geordie comic Viz nationally, bought up several titles and Fortean Times was one of them.

In 2001, John Brown sold Fortean Times to I Feel Good which was run by the former Loaded editor James Brown and the magazine started expanding into features about film, gaming, television, and music. When I Feel Gold folded the FT went to Dennis Publishing (where my mate Gareth used to work, he might still do actually - not spoke to him for a while) and then on to Diamond Publishing where it remains now.

Still priding itself on finding the world's weirdest news and still priding itself on being a print magazine. Simmons ended by saying he sees no reason why the Fortean Times should not last another fifty years. It's not as if weird stories ever stop coming through. If anything, there seems more weird shit out there than ever.

I've titled this blog, with tongue in cheek - and a nod to Belle and Sebastian, Half A Century Of Fakers, but these people aren't fakers. They're very serious about this stuff but that doesn't mean they believe in UFOs, aliens or bigfoot. They're having fun (while also trying not to belittle those who do believe) and they're providing fun for many others.

I certainly had fun last night and for that I'd like to thank Ian Simmons, Bob Rickard, and the Fortean Times as well as David V. Barrett for hosting, and Jade, Paula, Tim, and Michael for keeping me company. Disappointingly though, I had to take the Overground home as Bigfoot failed to pick me up in his UFO.

Get Outta My Car, Get Into My Nightmares:The Responder S2.

"The same fucking mistakes over and over again. Just when I think I'm moving in the right direction" - Chris Carson

Police officer Chris Carson (Martin Freeman) is still working nights, he's still on 'response', he's still got serious anger management issues, and he's still bedevilled by his demons - though he is trying to be a better person. He's even attending a male mental health group. Though the chair of that group is the unlikely named Father Liam Neeson (Matthew Cottle) and he's got his own problems. He likes the booze so much he'd make a great character in a Graham Greene novel.

Series two of The Responder (BBC1/iPlayer, created by Tony Schumacher and directed. variously, by Mounia Akl, Jeannette Nordahl, and Charlotte Regan sees him separated from his wife Kate (MyAnna Buring) and struggling to fit his nightshifts in with visits to his daughter Tilly (Romi Hyland-Rylands). Kate's paired up with Chris's nemesis, fellow copper Ray Mullen (Warren Brown) and she's on the verge of accepting a job in London which would mean relocating from Liverpool and putting two hundred miles between Chris and Tilly.

Something Chris is none too happy about. He's looking to move to day work and he's applied for a job but he's tipped off that he won't get it because everyone thinks he's a "knobhead". Instead, he manages to get caught up in a war between two of Merseyside's leading drug dealers. The always excellent Adam Nagaitis plays Franny Sutton and when Chris searches Franny's garage and finds something disturbing, Franny (who hides his criminal enterprise under the front of a plastering business) uses that to compromise Chris and his colleague Rachel (Adelayo Adebayo).

Rachel starts the series partnered with the irritating Eric (Ian Puleston-Davies), who waffles on endlessly about The Pirates Of Penzance, and regularly considers burning herself with an iron (preferable, she suggests, than working in response) but, inevitably, she ends up embroiled in Chris's mess.

She even brings a fresh mess of her own to proceedings when she takes it up on herself to try and warn her abusive ex-partner Steve's (Philip Barantini) new girlfriend Lorna (Izuka Hoyle) about his behaviour. Something she doesn't handle particularly well.

Following husband Carl's death in the first series, his widow Jodie (Faye McKeever) is getting their drug empire up and running again with help from 'baghead' Casey (Emily Fairn) and hapless Marco (Josh Finan). Jodie works at an ice cream parlour (and sells drugs from there), and Casey and Marco work the nightclubs. Marco briefly holds down a day job at Krunchy Fried Chicken and is looking after his young baby after the mother, Moire (Debbie Brannen), is sent to prison for assaulting someone she believed was, but wasn't, a paedophile.

He's not a natural when it comes to fatherhood. The goonish henchmen Barry (Mark Womack) and Ian (Philip S McGuinness) are back to create further trouble and Chris and Rachel's colleague DCI Debs Barnes (Amaka Okafor) has clearly got herself into something way over head which will further test Chris's patience. On top of that he's dealing with a very uneasy reconciliation with his estranged father Tom (played by Bernard Hill in his last ever role, Hill - most famous for playing Yosser Hughes in Boys From The Blackstuff - having died earlier this month).

Tom had been a mostly absent father - spending most of his time in the pub - and there is, at first, little love lost between Tom and Chris. With his mum now dead, Chris tells Tom, in no uncertain terms, that he considers him to be a "fucking cunt". If you don't like f-bombs and c-bombs, don't watch The Responder, they go off as regularly as air-to-ground munitions in Gaza.

All of these strands can get a little confusing at times and it takes a while for the second series to get going but when it does we see Chris, Rachel, and everyone else thrown into a world of guns, blackmail, death threats, double crossing, assaults with torches, unappetising looking meals, social workers, antiquated mobile phones, CAPITAL LETTER TEXT MESSAGES, and, rather oddly, dancing to The Magnetic Fields.

There are nearly as many very bad people in The Responder as there are cups of tea consumed. There are odd people too. People with too many cats, people with too many dogs, eccentric pissheads, and people who throw actual shit at coppers. There's a cameo from Kevin Eldon as a man with no memory who doesn't understand that it gets dark after sunset and there's also appearances from two Brookside legends in Sue Johnston and Sue Jenkins. They were both in Coronation Street too - but it's their roles in Brookside (as Sheila Grant and Jackie Corkhill) that matter to me.

But I digress. As for this series of The Responder? It's bleaker than the first series - nihilistic in places even - but it's not quite as good. I didn't find it as gripping. But it's still an enjoyable watch. Even if you are never in doubt that to live the life of any one of the characters in The Responder would be far from enjoyable. Watch it. Don't live it.

A Butterfly Bewildered By A Universe Of Flowers:Rob And Rylan's Grand Tour.

 "I fell into a delightful delirium that none but souls like us experience, and unable to check my rapture flew madly from bust to bust and cabinet to cabinet like a butterfly bewildered in a universe of flowers" - William Thomas Beckford

The novelist, art critic, and politician William Thomas Beckford (1760-1844) was one of many who took the infamous Grand Tour of Europe as a rite of passage between the 17th and 19th centuries. Many others did too. Edward Gibbon, Mark Twain, Inigo Jones. But for Rob and Rylan's Grand Tour (BBC2/iPlayer) the focus is Lord Byron (on the 200th anniversary of his death). and specifically the time he spent in the three Italian cities of Venice, Florence, and Rome.

All of which Rob (Judge) Rinder and Rylan Clark visit during this enjoyable three part series. We learn a bit about Byron, we learn even more about Venice, Florence, and Rome, and perhaps we learn, more than anything, about Rob and Rylan who are an odd couple of pals but have a very sweet friendship. They seem to have bonded recently after both going through painful divorces and this trip seems to bring out the best of them. Even if I can't help thinking what lucky bastards celebrities are getting to do this kind of thing. Somebody send me on a tour of Italy. I'll tell you some good stories.

Tintoretto - Il Paradiso (c.1592)

Canaletto - Venice:Entrance To The Cannaregio (1742)

 Artemisia Gentileschi - The Allegory Of Inclination (1616)

The trip begins in Venice. Canals, gondolas, Piazza San Marco, the Bridge of Sighs (as well as the Bridge of Tits - yes, really), Casanova, Canaletto, Tintoretto, a history of prostitution and sexual wantonness, masked balls, Vivaldi, and glass blowing on the island of Murano. Rob conducts an orchestra, both of them go on dates, and they both get dolled up as drag queens. Rylan looks like Conchita Wurst. Less happily, Rob looks more like Pauline Fowler as Rylan points out.

Later on he gives a shout out to Letitia Dean suggesting he's a proud Eastenders fan. Well, he is from Stepney Green. Which must feel a long way from Florence. Florence is, of course, Brunelleschi's dome atop the Duomo (still the largest brick dome ever built), Michelangelo's David, Donatello's David, and countless other nude sculptures, the Uffizi, the Bargello, the stories of Artemisia Gentileschi and the horrific torture she suffered, and a bloody game of calcio storico. A sport that appears to be a mix of rugby and a fight in a pub car park.

Botticelli - The Birth Of Venus (1485)

Caravaggio - Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598-9)

 Caravaggio - Death Of The Virgin (1606)

Both Rylan and Rob pose semi-naked for their own portraits. Perhaps surprisingly it is Rylan who is more self-conscious about his body. Of course the trip ends in the eternal city - Rome. The Trevi fountain, the Parthenon, the Spanish Steps, and the Colosseum ("a noble wreck in ruinous perfection" - Byron). There are scooters, churches - not least the Vatican, and trips to see the Castel Sant Angelo and the tomb of Cecilia Metella.

There are stories of popes, fashion (how British nobs returned home dressed as "macaroni" - even if they don't go into the links with eighties British casual culture and Italian designer labels), and the castrati. Perhaps the most celebrated of whom, Farinelli - the "blazing star", is described as like "Harry Styles on steroids" and there's a beginner's guide to baroque art and architecture as well as coffee in Caffe Greco, a place once haunted by the likes of Shelley, Keats, and, of course, Byron.

En route, we learn about Byron's pet monkeys, his narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, his reusable sheep gut condom, his penile mercury injection, and how Lady Caroline Lamb once sent him an envelope containing her snipped off pubic hair.

Rob and Rylan are pretty tame in comparison. Rob Rinder is clever, cultured, and a fan of high art and opera - he loves classical music so much he even gets to conduct an orchestra playing some Vivaldi. He's concerned with authenticity and excited by ceiling frescoes but he's also, by his own admission, "buttoned-up" and is called by his friends "the gay that style forgot".

Rylan's not, at least at the start, so into art and culture. But for a guy not into art he has some very perceptive readings of it. He's a proud working class lad and celebrates working class culture (see those Eastenders mentions and multiply them by an amusing musing on The Only Way Is Essex) but he's far from stupid. As with Rob Rinder, you can't help warming to him the more time you spend in his company.

It's a fun three hours watching the two of them sip Aperol Spritz or drink Birra Moretti on beautiful Italian balconies and in glorious sun dappled plazas. It's funny when Rylan learns to say in Italian "I like your big dick" and when he refuses to eat a cow's arsehole and it's funnier still when Rob tells Rylan off for calling a gondolier Giuseppe. Rob points out you can't just call Italian men Giuseppe but Rylan tells him he met the guy earlier and his name IS Giuseppe!

But perhaps the most moving moment of the whole show, and particularly pertinent to me considering my own recent mental health struggles, is when Rylan talks about spiralling into depression following his divorce and how bad he felt about causing his much loved mum so much worry. It reduces Rob Rinder to tears. I'm not far off. If a programme can make you laugh AND cry then it's a pretty good programme I reckon. Right, who's buying me a ticket so I can make a similar programme. They haven't covered Milan, Bologna, or Naples yet.