Walthamstow Garden Party 2018:It's Alright.

"It's alright. It's alright. It's alright. It's really alright" - It's Alright, East 17.

Sadly, or perhaps luckily, Walthamstow's most famous sons had not been scheduled to put in a performance at the Barbican's really rather lovely, and fantastically free, two day Walthamstow Garden Party in E17's Lloyd Park round the back of the William Morris Gallery. If they had would the queues to get in have been even longer?

It's a moot point but the combination of the UK's longest heatwave in decades, a wonderful line up of African and Latin American bands, and the thought of an afternoon spent, or wasted, in a sun drenched park all combined to bring crowds from near and far to Walthamstow. On Saturday the line led out of the park, along Forest Road, down Winns Terrace, along Winns Avenue, and, finally, into Carr Road. It was tempting to get a can for the queue (having already wetted our whistles with a pint of Solstice summer ale in The Bell beer garden) but we resisted.

Luckily, because despite being a long queue it moved pretty fast. Pam and I were joined by Gary and Shaun and we were all in the park within less than half an hour. Even in the queue we were treated to a blast of drumming (not for the last time over the weekend) and a DJ blaring out John Holt's Police in Helicopter from turntables fashioned from upturned wheelie bins.

In time honoured fashioned we worked our way promptly to the bar. £5.50 a pint's not too bad for a festival (not least one where the music is free) and they had a decent selection of ales and lagers. Prosecco, Caribbean and cocktail bars were scattered around the surprisingly pretty site but I took a pint of Joker and we found a patch of scorched grass and sat ourselves down for some sunshine and some music. The atmosphere was most convivial. Kids running around, people sunbathing, and the smell of various international cuisines wafting over in the wind. Shaun proposed we all have dinner together at 5pm which seemed a bit too organised but turned out to be something of a masterstroke.

Once we'd watched, and listened to, the best part of one hundred drummers, the Colombian DJ Cero39's bubbly dance beats, and a gospel choir run through some nice versions of songs from Paul Simon's Gracelands album it was time to tour the food stalls. Alongside the vegan curry bowls there was cuisine from Vietnam, Greece, Spain, Italy, and elsewhere. The toughest decision would be choosing what to go for. Each aroma coaxed me in like a superannuated Bisto kid.

In the end I took a Cypriot halloumi wrap, Pam went for some kind of Senegalese stew, and Shaun opted for Venezuelan arepa with cassava fries (he let me try one, delicious). Gary had a sausage roll. He wasn't feeling hot food on a hot day.

We may've eaten our dinner in the shade but we were soon back out in the sun for some reggae c/o Adrian Sherwood and Creation Rebel. At this point we met with our friends Mark, Natalie, and Neill and it felt like the festival had turned from a lazy afternoon in the park into, well, a festival.

As Sherwood at the controls bobbed his head to the righteous rhythms we indulged in some age appropriate skanking to the bass heavy sounds of Creation Rebel. I must admit that despite professing myself a huge reggae fan I wasn't overly familiar with the work of Creation Rebel. I've missed out. They were ace and, judging by the enthusiasm with which Mark, Neill, and Pam received their dub version of Jacob Miller's Baby I Love You So, I was far from alone in that opinion.

Alas, Afro-Cuban All Stars didn't quite live up the billing. While it was undoubtedly quite a coup for the Barbican to book such a big name for the event there was something missing. Neill suggested that for him it was that he didn't really like Cuban music (at least in relation to Jamaican music) and Pam felt they were too quiet.

I'm more inclined to side with the latter viewpoint. While they were undoubtedly proficient, enthusiastic, and incredibly tight they left me just a little bit cold. It was a shame. Other friends (Mike, Mark, and Eugenie) arrived and we drifted over towards the bar and the dance tent before the first day of the festival reached closure.

We headed into Walthamstow's Mirth, Marvel and Maud for more beers and to watch enthusiastically refreshed punters cut a rug to Tina Moore's Never Gonna Let You Go, DJ Luck & MC Neat's Little Bit of Luck, and Madonna's Vogue. It was nearly 2am by the time I got home. It was one of those nights. There'd only been one really great live band but the day itself had been absolutely delightful.

Sunday would be less about friends (because none of them came, preferring to watch the World Cup or prepare for holidays in Whitstable - I ask you) and more about music. Just as well the music would be great then.

I jumped off the Victoria line at Blackhorse Road for a change (and for the first time ever) and followed the sun baked A503 past some sort of Hindu temple, the birthplace of William Morris, and a vandalised Mercedes-Benz. The queues were slightly less long than the day before and it was even warmer than it had been then too. I had a look around Fellowship Island with its craft stalls and little bars, I watched some kids play in the skate park, and I, once again, let the waft of grilled food fill me with joy.

47Soul were already on stage when I arrived. A group of Palestinians based in London they play a type of music called shamstep which is a warm and generous mix of dance styles du jour and Palestinian folk. They told impassioned stories about government injustice, the Grenfell tower, and the Balfour declaration. They sounded great but they were no match for the absolute star of the festival.

Dona Onete, the 'Queen of Carimbo', from Para state in the Amazonian region of Brazil, may not have put her first record out until she was 73 years old (she's eighty now) but by the time her set had finished she was as much the Queen of Walthamstow as she was of either Para or Carimbo. I wasn't the only one beaming from ear to ear at the joyous sounds that Dona and her band were doling out. That's why she's the header photo in this report.

What a joy it is that elder women, so long marginalised, are now having their voices heard in the world of music. You can add Dona Onete to Calypso Rose, Toto la Momposina, and Shirley Collins on the list of women born in 1940 or before who are finally getting their due. No Meio do Pitiu lightly handles a call and response vocal over a lilting, but urgent, Caribbean rhythm as Dona intones passionately over the top and Jamburana makes a hearty, but not gutbusting, casserole of samba, salsa, and cumbia with even a sprinkling of klezmer on top. It's a winning mix.

Lengthy introductions were given to the songs but as they were in Portuguese I was unable to understand them. They weren't completely in vain however as there were plenty of others there singing along to every word of Dona's. It seems that she'd brought the Brazilians to the yard, alright. As her saxophonist danced around the stage and generally fulfilled the role of hype man, Dona shook her shoulders and grinned the satisfied smile of somebody whose eight decades of life and hard work have finally paid off and then, in a coda to melt the steeliest of hearts, she rose from the chair she'd been perched on all set, did a little shimmy, bowed to the audience and walked off safe in  the knowledge that she'd probably got a few thousand more admirers than she'd had half an hour ago. Bravo jovhem senhora.

It seemed like a good time to go for a little stroll around the park and to check the World Cup football scores (France were 1-1 with Croatia in a high scoring final they'd go on to win 4-2, I'd backed Croatia but hey, it seems like, cliche alert, football was the winner after all) before getting some more food. 

I'd eyed Shaun's Venezuelan arepa with envy the day before, and had also enjoyed that particular snack in Cartagena during a Colombian sojourn back in 2015, so I headed over to the Venezuelan food stand and got myself a veggie version. Roasted peppers, pico gallo, Llanero cheese, and loads of black beans made for a messy meal but a bloody tasty one. I washed it down with a slightly hoppier Pillars lager from one of the many remarkably fast serving bars.

It filled me up alright and I must confess to feeling slightly bloated during the adorable Fatoumata Diawara's set. Decked out in blue and white the Malian born Ivorian dashed through a greatest hits set of sorts but also included her own tribute to the Afrobeat sound of Fela Kuti and a cover of Stevie Wonder's HIgher Ground which brought some of the more 'experienced' festival goers briefly to their feet. Hey, it was hot! Have I mentioned that?

The light guitar lines of Sowa drifted across the zephyr and I laid back and let them wash over me. When I was younger the idea of putting music on to fall asleep to would've been anathema but no longer, this is the stuff that (sweet) dreams are made of. Later I saw Fatoumata eagerly shaking hands and posing for selfies with young fans. I think I fell ever so slightly in love. Not for the first time that day. 

Once I'd soaked up some more rays and enjoyed a little dessert of churros'n'chocolate it was time for the last act of the weekend. Seun Kuti was a coup to rival the Afro-Cuban All Stars and, luckily for me, a less disappointing one. The snake-hipped, Yoruba jumpsuit clad, elastic man's voice was in as good nick as his body as he spat out verse after verse of anti-corruption, anti-imperialism infused Afrobeat. A chip off the old block, you can't help thinking his ol' fella Fela would've been mightily proud.

Amazing dance routines from the two female backing vocalists, horn stabs, flickering guitar lines, all added up to a wonderful headline appearance and if Seun lacks some of Fela's originility (or, indeed, song running length) that's no major criticism. In Afrobeat Fela, and Tony Allen, invented one of the most powerful, compelling, and enjoyable genres of music I've yet to discover.

Bad Man Lighter took from the 70s/80s blueprint and pared it down to something more accessible to today's shorter attention spans, though it still weighs in at seven minutes plus, and Struggle Sounds was a lithe funk banger decorated with trilling keyboard flourishes and an old school brass blowout. In a festival that had featured music from Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Palestine, and Colombia it was left to the Africans to finish it all off. Seun Anikulapo Kuti was the fire to Fatoumata's ice and African Dreams spread out over an easy nine minutes as if to soundtrack our exalted egress from E17. It may've told a story of African youths losing their souls and sense of self chasing the American dream but it felt more like a comforting hand on the shoulder than a finger wagged in the face.

I went home suntanned, sober, and sated. Fantastic food, marvellous music, and fabulous friends. I can't wait to do it all over again next weekend closer to home in Camberwell and Brixton.

Break my Body:Bumped Bodies at the Whitechapel.

"Pregnancy is one of the most extreme states of the human condition, according to art theorist Amelia Jones, as it reveals the ‘tension between self as subject and self as object’."

So begins a rather ambitious press release for the Whitechapel Gallery's current Bumped Bodies exhibition before going on to claim that by "placing figures in states of metamorphoses, artists rupture our sense of physical cohesion to reveal new possibilities that lie beyond selfhood".

It's an intriguing premise for sure. Who hasn't, at times, felt a disconnect between their body and their self, their sense of how they feel they look and how others perceive how they look? Of course, body horror is a fascinating area and one definitely worth exploring but despite bringing together over twenty artists from across six decades and three continents very few of the works on show really hit the mark.

It was a pity because it was a well intentioned, and free, show in a really rather lovely gallery space  (that has a good bookshop and does a decent coffee). Perhaps if the curators hadn't pitched in with such lofty ideals I'd have enjoyed it more, in a simple 'here's some interesting pieces of art' way.

When I'd seen works by Huma Bhabha before (in Mayfair's Stephen Friedman Gallery back in January last year) I'd come to much the same conclusion writing, at the time, that "Bhabha's works weren't disgusting or even particularly grotesque. Sure some of the body parts appeared mutated, dismembered even, but if she's trying to shock that's not going to work at all. My reaction was more one of 'oh, that's quite nice'".

Bhabha was, without doubt, one of the most interesting artists showing at Bumped Bodies. Her Untitled from 2013 had some of the fierce energy of the abstract expressionists whilst keeping a figurative edge. The blood red of it, too, gave it a raw, maybe even menstrual, feel. 

Huma Bhabha - Untitled (2013)

Cathy Wilkes - Untitled (2015)

Huma Bhabha - It's Me (2013)

In the middle of the room, there's only one medium sized room in the show, there was a plinth with a scattering of sculptural works on it including another Bhabha, It's Me, that looked totemic if inscrutable. Curious enough as was Belfast's Cathy Wilkes spindly legged lady that seemed to peer out at us visitors in an unsure way.

But Cologne's Alexandra Bircken's Simone was remarkable only in its sheer ordinariness and Tony Cragg's Big Head Green, though initially acting as a neat little visual trick, was nowhere near as impressive as some of the quite wonderful stuff I'd seen the Liverpool man showing before.

Alexandra Bircken - Simone (2013)

Tony Cragg - Big Head Green (2009)

Nicola Tyson - Song (2010)

Nicola Tyson was one of the few artists in the room to really use colour and because of that alone her twisted, contorted, and somewhat illegible forms caught the eye. Her work owed a debt to Francis Bacon but also reminded me a little of the recent Glenn Brown show I attended and wrote about. 

Unsurprisingly twists and contortions proved to be a very popular theme throughout the exhibition. Prague's Maria Bartuszova's Untitled work from the mid-sixties may, to the untrained eye, initially look not unlike a plaster cast of freshly curled off turd but apparently it's inspired by her awareness, at a time when Czechoslovakia was relatively cut off from the Western art world, "of the work of abstract forms of Constantin Brancusi, Lucio Fontana, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Isamu Noguchi" so you can pop those ideas in your dog poop bag and put them in the nearest available receptacle. How puerile of you!

Maria Bartuszova - Untitled (c.1966)

Paloma Varga Weisz - Bumped Body (2007)

Paloma Varga Weisz's Bumped Body is the work that gives the show its name and it's a curious mix of bling, solitude, Brancusiesque sculpture, and an unsteady mix of female empowerment and female enslavement. It made me think of The Handmaid's Tale for some reason. 

It certainly proved to be far more thought provoking than the uninspiring Sun Leak by Ancona's Enrico David or, indeed, Daniel Silver's equally dry Untitled. These are works you forget almost as soon as you see them. Maybe I'm missing something, I do go to a lot of galleries. Perhaps I've become art-blind and can no longer see the wood for the trees.

Sometimes there are just too many works that look too similar displayed together and it all becomes a much of a muchness. I think that was part of the problem with this show. Sarah Lucas has been showing cigarette sculptures, bucket fannies, and fried egg tits for a couple of decades or so now and they've long lost any of the shock value, or humour, they once held. But in this show, situated amongst so many dry academic pieces of work, her Oral Gratification took on a new life. An office chair, a rugby ball, and some fags and still far more interesting than more than half the other work here.

Enrico David - Sun Leak (2014)

Sarah Lucas - Oral Gratification (2000)

Daniel Silver - Untitled (2008)

Wael Shawky - Cabaret Crusades II:The Path to Cairo (2011-12)

Wael Shawky was another one who stood out. I'd seen his work, and written about it, obvs, back in 2016 in Soho's Marian Goodman Gallery's Animality show. It was part of the same Cabaret Crusades series and if it only just about fitted into a show about animals and our relationships with them it was even harder to fathom how it fitted into a show about 'extreme states of the human condition'. Unless the idea of taking a walk through the desert to Cairo may be a fairly extreme human experience. That's probably it. Can't think of anything else. Looked nice though.

The same could be said for both Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist's Iris Ruggel Kinked and Belgrade's Bojan Sarcevic's Presence at Night. Rist inserts little video screens in unlikely places like bits of a tree (and, er, museum toilets) with the idea that you'll have to contort your body to look at them (not that you can make out much when you've done so) and Sarcevic has laced the branches of a tree, protruding from the wall, with some human hair with the aim, it's claimed, of unsettling. It didn't. People just said it looked 'interesting' and even then not so interesting they bothered contemplating it for more than a few seconds. So, yeah, looked nice but so do lots of things and that wasn't really the premise of this exhibition.  

Pipilotti Rist - Iris Ruggel Geknickt (Iris Log Kinked) (2014)

Bojan Sarcevic - Presence at Night (2010)

Mark Manders - Vertical Bed (2007-2012)

One of the best things in the exhbition for me was Dutch artist Mark Mander's Vertical Bed. It had something of the Rauschenberg about it. He creates 'conceptual self-portraits' and is known to claim that all his work should be viewed together as a 'self-portrait as a building'. It sounds quite pretentious, as does his claim that he's referencing ancient Greek sculpture, but it actually works pretty well. Who'd have thought some old socks would be one of the best things in an art gallery?

The Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere's Quan certainly did have something of the classical world about. A classical work distorted. It fitted the remit for the exhibition and was actually pretty powerful. I read that she'd taken influence from 'European Old Masters and Christian iconography' and I certainly see that in Quan. The fact she uses hair, wax, and skin in her work too neatly ties up with the idea of the body playing a dual role as both subject and object. Are our fluids part of our body or not? Certainly they serve a role while they're in us but once I've urinated, defecated, or ejaculated I've never felt a desire to hang on to the urine, shit, or spunk dispensed.

Berlinde De Bruyckere - Quan (2010)

Ruth Claxton - Postcard (Mary I) (2006)

Mary I has got something come out of her eyes and bearing in mind how I finished the last paragraph I'll try not to speculate just what that is. Ipswich's Ruth Claxton has modified a series of postcards showing Mary, Elizabeth, and other royals I could barely care less about and it proves to be mildly diverting. Much the same could be said for the Hungarian artist Kati Horna's Prestado which sees a hand stretched so that it almost resembles an antler, a shroud, a mask, and some ruffled bed linen. Maybe in 1962 it looked in some way 'classic' but to me it looked a bit tired, the sort of postcard an unbearable, and self-consciously 'creative', person would have Blu-tacked to their wall to impress you with how deep they are.

Kati Horna - Prestado (1962)

John Stezaker - Untitled (5 Nudes) (c.1980)

And John Stezaker (who has something of the Warhol about him) has gone for straight out titillation, or as near as this show gets to it. That's okay really. Perhaps with the idea of 'extreme states of the human condition' they could have gone for hardcore pornography or even torture. I'd have been uncomfortable looking at it but then that says a lot more about the human body and our sometimes uneasy relationship with both our own and other people's than a plaster cast or a piece of tree with a little screen on it. It seems to me that our human physicality, sexuality, and our ambiguous relationship with our own living, breathing, eating, drinking, fucking, shitting, pissing, sweating, vomiting bodies is so complicated that art's yet to catch up.

It was a nice try and a few artists, notably Bhabha, Stezaker, De Bruyckere, and Varga Weisz, came close to making a good fist of it. But for now stick with the music of The Pixies and the films of David Cronenberg for the best cultural expression of the ‘tension between self as subject and self as object’.