Mapplethorpe through the eye of Teller.

As soon as you enter the Alison Jacques Gallery on Berners Street you're presented with a very large photograph of a naked man (model Marty Gibson) paddling in the shallows. It would be fair to say he's quite 'excited'. It's far from the most explicit thing in this exhibition to mark what would have been Robert Mapplethorpe's 70th birthday. An exhibition that's been curated by UK based, German photographer Juergen Teller.

Teller, is along with Mapplethorpe, one of a select band of artists who've been able to operate within the worlds of both art and commercial fashion photography so it's apparent why he's an admirer. Alison Jacques themselves have said that it's Teller's 'provocative and subversive' style that made him the right man for the exhibition and that his eye would be a new reading to Mapplethorpe's work.

He's had a good go but I'm not quite sure he's pulled it off (if you'll pardon the expression). Mapplethorpe's work is so iconic, and in places, frank that it's hard (there I go again) to change our inbuilt preconceptions so easily. I guess he does present a side of Mapplethorpe I was less aware of. That of the still life. 1979's Bread is beautifully shot and is unlikely to date in the same way as the styles sported by 1983's Lisa Lyons, above.

1978's The Sluggard, above, is clearly a more classicist piece than we're accustomed to. 1973's Self Portrait demonstrates, playfully, the cheekiness of the then mid-20s snapper.

Again, as with the recent Laura Owens show at Sadie Coles HQ it's the juxtaposition of differing works that really brings out the talent. Mapplethorpe's 1982 gelatin print of actress Madeline Stowe looks innocent on its own but being framed next to 1985's Coconuts gives it a bit of slapstick, bawdy seaside humour that seems, to me at least, more the work of Teller than Mapplethorpe. Teller's intention was to show the 'essential mission' of Mapplethorpe's work. His life long quest for 'perfection of form' whatever the subject matter should be. The human body, cutlery, or a muffin.

Carol Overby (1979), Clothespinned Mouth (1978), and the aforementioned Muffin (1981) sit in a side room. They tell less of a story but still show the range of Mapplethorpe's work. In the main room, opposite Marty Gibson's schlong, stand Pods (1985), Eva Amurri (1988), and Frogs (1984). It'd be a understatement to say they're overshadowed by Gibson but, whatever you think of that, you may want to prepare yourself for possibly the most eye-watering photo of the exhibit. Those of a faint hearted nature may want to scroll over Fist Fuck/Double from 1978.

It certainly opens up a lot of questions about art and pornography. I didn't really want to look at it long enough to answer them so I soon moved on to 1988's Italian Devil. It was like having a cool glass of water the morning after a heavy night on the booze.

1983s Kitten, above, is intriguing and certainly doesn't appear to include any felines. Amongst all the willies and bums there are a few more, actually quite delightful, still lifes and even as close as you'll get to a landscape in this show. Chest ('83), Corn ('85), and Apartment Windows ('77) are all excellent photographs. The smutty stuff is too but how you feel about that may depend on various factors quite irrelevant to Mapplethorpe's undoubted skill with the camera.

Laura Owens:Snails, emojis, gloves, and no geometry.

The recent Laura Owens exhibition at Sadie Coles HQ on Kingly Street was the first time I've ever been asked to don a pair of gloves to inspect an artist's work. It was to leaf through a rather large selection of Laura's books they had and, pleasant though they were, the gloves seemed rather unnecessary.

Laura was born in 1970 in Euclid, Ohio. Not far from the much larger Cleveland. Euclid was named for the Greek mathematician and father of geometry though there's little mathematical or geometrical about Laura's work. In fact she seems to allow herself a very free hand indeed. She doesn't seem to be restrained by one style, changing from work to work, and, often, within a single piece.

The works hanging in the Sadie Coles are given numbers instead of names (maybe that's the only nod to Euclid himself!) and there's very little info about them either so it's simply a case of wandering around and taking as much of it in as possible. Traditional oil paint mixes with screen printed images digitally photoshopped.

Some work better than others. I really like the greens used in the below work. They hint at a warm rural idyll. Sometimes it's the juxtaposition of works with each other that catches the eye and I've included a few of them for your perusal below.

In the same room as the books (and the gloves) there's both a film of a snail which is, probably aptly, very slow moving and these little Ping-Pong balls/emojis with silly faces drawn on them. They're a bit pointless really and it's not like the room is in any further need of decoration.

One thing I enjoyed was her riff on Robert Rauschenberg's combines. Paintings with sculptural elements attached. Best of all being a wheel attached to this typically colourful large wall mounted piece. I was less keen on the appearance of Garfield the cat as he's never done a lot for me.

But what did it all mean? To be honest I've absolutely no idea but it was a pleasant lunchtime art blip and I very much enjoyed walking around taking it all in. I'd go see her work again and, next time, some explanation would be nice. Or maybe that would ruin the experience?

After you left:The ruins and memories of Alex Hartley.

One of the main draws for me of Alex Hartley's recent After You Left at the Victoria Miro's charming Wharf Road location was the promise of 'a major architectural intervention in the gallery's waterside garden'. I'm a sucker for architecture - and I'm a sucker for art posing as architecture or, indeed, architecture posing as art. It's all entwined as far as I'm concerned.

I wasn't to be disappointed. Either with the waterside garden nor with the major architectural invention. Luckily the rest of the art on show was really good too. I'm not quite sure what Arrangements in the Beyond, below, was all about but the juxtaposition of its brutal concrete base with the metal frames containing monochrome images of springtime forest walkways was highly pleasing to the eye. I'd had a fairly rotten morning but being in the quiet gallery space surrounded by things of beauty relaxed me greatly.

Hartley was born in 1963 and lives and works in Devon. Garcia, 2016 (everything here was made in 2016), however, hinted at a wider worldview. It reminded me of one of Hokusai's Japanese woodcuts from over 200 years ago. Although it was actually part of a series of monochromes that combined photographic and hand-painted elements describing and embellishing the verdant West Coast landscape of the USA. The semi-transparent Perspex layer renders the works slightly unknowable, ever so untouchable. It adds a layer of mystery to the seemingly mundane.

These two tricks make up the bulk of the exhibition. It may've been repetitive but it's ok to be a one trick (or two trick) pony if your trick's a good 'un. I felt Hartley's was. City of the Sun, above, and Miller, below, pulling off the concrete/forest mutual compliment scenario and hazy LA modernist architecture set within lush plantation move again with some aplomb.

These took me through to the garden and A Gentle Collapsing II. Victoria Miro's garden, with it's little pond, is a calming prospect at the best of times. If the gallery is an oasis from the hustle and bustle of life on City Road then the garden is an oasis within an oasis. I'd seen artists use it before but never as well as Hartley.

The International Style (think Philip Johnson, Richard Neutra) domestic building apparently abandoned to the elements aims, and succeeds, in representing a scene of poetic dereliction and decay. The clean lines of Bauhaus subsumed by the water and impinged upon by trees and leaves. Nature will have her revenge.

The staircase leads to a watery end. The bricks have been chipped away. There's no glass left in the windows. Hartley's imagining a future when the buildings of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier have been ravaged to the extent of Corfe Castle or Kirkstall Abbey.

It's strange how a ruin, even a mocked up one, can be a thing of rare beauty. Books of Detroit ruin porn fly off the shelves these days and even Nazi architect Albert Speer understood the concept. Rumour has it he constructed the major edifices of National Socialism so that they'd look good when reduced to rubble. Though not nearly as good as the whole concept of rabid nationalism, so rampantly on the rise again, will look if, and hopefully when, that's destroyed.

Putting on my pseud's hat for a bit I'd wager that this is possibly what Hartley is aiming for. We seem to be collapsing inwards as a society, torn so far apart by the extremes that the middle can't hold. The decay this leaves can look exciting, beautiful even, but we shouldn't be blinded by it. I think we're better off having decay in art than in society. Something to gawp at rather than something to experience. Our bodies will turn on us soon enough. Let's at least not turn on each other.

I had a good think in the waterside garden but I came to no real conclusions. But as I visited the upstairs galleries for more of the same (Present Order, above, Yew South (East Elevation) and Inadomi, below) I felt calmer than I had earlier in the day. Art had performed a transformative role on me. In a very small and gentle way. But yet it had happened. I felt better.

Perhaps it wasn't so much the art as the enforced peace, quiet, and contemplation. I'd been working in a gallery as an invigilator for the last week and I'd found the long hours spent in solitude to be extraordinarily beneficial. Most of the time we don't have the luxury to sit around reading and doing nothing. Some people like to call this mindfulness. I think that's a bit of a wanky word for it but I do feel we'd all feel a little better if we forced ourselves to step back and ponder for a while. It may not've been Alex Hartley's intention to provide that space for me but I thank him for the fact that he did.

Maria Nepomuceno and the Carioca positivity.

I've spent one day in Brazil so I have very little knowledge of that vast country. Therefore I'm highly susceptible to clichés of sun, sand, and samba. Obviously the true picture is far more complicated than that but I hope, and expect, that there is still some room for these things. They're all so positive.

Maria Nepomuceno was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1976 and her organic and curious artworks certainly make use of the generous colour I'd imagine from the country. There's a display of them on at the Victoria Miro's Mayfair branch at the moment. It's titled Sim. The Portuguese word for Yes. More positivity

Her mostly untitled works lovingly created from ropes, beads, ceramics, and braided straw aren't representative of anything specific yet they don't appear to be entirely abstract. It's as if they're alluding to something, provoking an emotion, or signifying some kind of inner feeling that'd be difficult to express in words.

These could almost be animals, mythical beasts conjured up in the depths of our imagination. They're curvy too and exuding a sexuality that can either be comforting or frightening. The wood piercing the ceramic spiral is one of her more blatant metaphors rendering the act of sex raw and exposed. The fibreglass and resin balls surely represent a softer side.

It's said she 'pushes ancient traditions and complex craft techniques into a wholly contemporary engagement with space and structure, form, and concept'. That's got a whiff of the press release about it and for one very good reason - it's from the press release. For once though I think there's something in it and I could happily spend more time with these intimate and delightful pieces. I don't think they'd ever give up their mystery and I'd be quite happy with that. If William Blake can see the world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower then I can at least marvel at the infinite possibilities Nepomuceno has presented to us.

Nepomuceno is interested in failure as a source of fruitful opportunity. As someone who's just failed in quite an important life goal I'm interested in, and feeling that, too. Creating art from junk. Turning the base metals of one's life into solid gold. Shovelling through a stable full of shit to find the pony.

She creates intentional cracks and fissures in her work to represent her positive feelings on this. Though it'd be hard to deny there isn't something highly sexually charged about them too. In a gently erotic, rather than crude, way.

There's another room in this worthwhile, and free, exhibition and the second contains the works that don't quite fit into the whole vibe of the first. To this end there's a Christmas tree that manages to be both romantic and modern situated amongst figurative paintings of gauchos, campsites, and skylines. They're rendered in vibrant and arresting hues and they, too, are a joy to behold.

Did I enjoy it?

Do I still want to visit Brazil?

Sim. Sim.

The psychic caravan rolls into Greenwich.

Ash Pryce was at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub presenting his How to be a Psychic Conman show. It was not intended as a training course though I suppose it could work as one.

Despite vaguely reminding me of an awful old acquaintance (which he couldn't help) Ash is an interesting, and funny, speaker. He's a magician and he dresses like one too (whilst carrying the air of the circus ringmaster). But he's one who lets you in on his tricks. At least some of them.

A considerably more well known stage magician and skeptic is the retired North American James Randi. Randi is something of an iconic figure in what passes as the Skeptic community. He's often referred to as a 'debunker' though personally prefers the term 'investigator'. Whatever. He had a long and succesful career exposing frauds and showing up 'woo-woo' for what it really is.

The James Randi Educational Foundation created something called the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge in which Randi and his foundation offered to pay $1,000,000 to anyone who could prove their paranormal or supernatural powers under agreed upon scientific testing criteria. Between 1964 and 2015 over a thousand people took this challenge and how many do you think succeeded? Yes, you've guessed it. None.

Randi's, predictably, run into trouble with many who make claims of these powers. Not least the highly litigious spoon bender Uri Geller. I was at a football match in Reading's Elm Park where Geller, who was supporting Reading then before switching his allegiance to Exeter City, attempted to use his powers to affect the result of a rather dismal half-time experiment that involved the seated spectators, I was in the terraces so played no part, holding up various coloured cards. It failed as miserably as Uri's attempts to help England win the World Cup and to bring peace to the middle east!

Not all his tricks fail though. If you want your spoons bent he can still do that. Although as his technique is simply using his hands to bend a spoon you may as well just do it yourself. Anyway, who even wants a bent spoon? They're useless. You'll end up with soup stains all over your shirt.

Geller claims he receives his special powers from aliens and has in the past, though he's since recanted, said he was sent to Earth from extraterrestrials on a spaceship 53 million light years away. There's also the boast that he once teleported a dog through the walls of his house. It sounds quite a feat but, alas, no independent observer was there at the time to witness this. Ash spoke of a guy high up in the US military who believed that he, himself, could run through walls using his special powers. He'd never done it but he 'knew' he could.

Randi has also bent a spoon or two in his time and he's quite clear that it's a trick. He's said that if Geller is using psychic powers 'he's doing it the hard way'. Ash demonstrated the trick, with the aid of an audience member, as he did many others.

Even though Geller's work is both fraudulent and a bit crap he's nothing compared to James Hydrick. Hydrick is currently locked up in California's maximum security Coalinga State Hospital for the violent sexual predatory molestation of several small boys.

So his shit attempts at being a psychic are far from the worst thing he's done. His big claim was that he had telekinetic powers and could make pencils spin and pages of books turn using them. You'll note that pencils and pages of books are both quite light and this same effect could be brought about by simply blowing on them. Which was what he was doing.

It seems incredible that anybody fell for it in the first place but around the late 70s/early 80s he became an occasional fixture on US tv claiming he'd learnt telekinesis from a Chinese master.

Randi and others exposed him fairly easily. Randi's trick was to place small polystyrene pieces around the book and ask Hydrick to turn the book's pages but not move the polystyrene. He failed and blamed the stage lights. Later Hydrick admitted it was a fraud and that he'd not learnt the 'trick' from a Chinese master but during an earlier spell in prison.

Hydrick's later crimes were about as heinous as they get though his fraudulent, and rubbish, telekinesis con was, essentially, harmless. Less so is the career of 'Charismatic Christianity' televangelist Peter Popoff.

He rose to fame in the 80s with a tv show, aired nationwide in the US, in which he miraculously cured audience members. People would throw away bottles of medicine and rise out of their wheelchairs and walk after being told by Popoff to 'break free of the devil', 'rise and break free'.

Impressive huh? Not really. Investigations showed that the wheelchair bound recipients of these 'miracles' had been fully ambulatory all along. But not all the audience were stooges so how was Popoff able to use the 'divine' gift of identifying ailments in those not on his payroll?

His wife Elizabeth asked attendees to fill in a prayer request on entering one of Popoff's 'revival meetings' and, using a wireless radio transmitter, relayed them to her husband while he was on stage. Just to juice things up she made jokes about sexual abuse, referred to members of the congregation as niggers, and made disparaging remarks about the physical appearances of cancer sufferers.

Randi exposed Popoff in 1986 and a year later Popoff declared bankruptcy leaving 790 unpaid creditors.

In the late 90s he returned rebranding himself, in a cruel irony bearing in mind his wife's racial slurs, for the African-American market. Not much else had changed though. He was still using the same tricks to con the vulnerable and make himself rich. Even another exposure in 2007 failed to stop him. Popoff's shameful, immoral, and disgusting scams continue to this day.

As does the similar, if even more Old Testamenty, psychic surgery. These bastards really will boil your piss. Possibly literally.

These quacks (and they barely deserve that term) operate in Brazil and the Philippines. If you're terminally ill and accepted medicine can't save you it's understandable that you may be desperate enough to pay anything from £70 to thousands of pounds (plus air fare) to fly out and undergo this 'pyschic surgery'.

The claim is that with no surgical instruments, no pain, and no scarring (but lots of blood, looks cool I guess) these people can reach into your stomachs, pull out your tumours, and save your life. They can't. All they're doing is redirecting the money you may have wished to leave to your children into their own pockets.

With the aid of his own very willing stooge Ash gave a demonstration. The patient pulls their shirt up and the 'surgeon' ruffles around on their chest before popping open a polythene bag full of pre-prepared blood and some gooey fake internal organ thing. The patient is supposed to believe this has come out of their body and, maybe, when at that low ebb we're more inclined to fall for these things.

Similar scams operate in India and skeptics there have worked to have these charlatans closed down. In a depressing coda to this story the bogus medics have employed murderous tactics and skeptics and debunkers have actually been killed in India.

In our 'post-truth' age of Brexit and Trump and with Michael Gove's self-serving dismissal of experts we shouldn't think we're totally above this sort of thing but at least skeptics, rationalists, and others are still free to speak out. Which Ash did impressively, amusingly, and passionately. Another win.