NewsArt

The press today has been filled with recriminations as it reviews World Cup action so far. In England keeper Robert Green has been ridiculed for the goal he allowed against America and in Australia the press have attacked the Socceroos’ 4-0 demolition from Germany.

The British and Australian public are disappointed. I thought about whether they will forgive their teams. Thinking the word ‘forgive’ made me think about ‘forgiveness’, much more so then the other words in the sentence did, and I decided to explore this issue.

I realised that to receive forgiveness, as these footballers seek to do, you must first learn to forgive others. I decided to constuct an artwork of the place most associated with forgiveness to look into this.

I set up a flower shop in Liverpool St Station. I would deduce with each customer if they were purchasing the flowers with the aim of receiving forgiveness from someone (I could tell by their gait) and with these customers I would not give them the flowers until they had first forgiven me for something.

They didn’t realise it but I was cleansing their soul to make their forgiveness more attainable.

Many were confused and walked away when I held back the flowers and asked them to forgive me for a lie I had told or a homeless person I had ignored or a fake personality I had assumed for benefit fraud. But sometimes they understood entirely and interacted with the art, such as in the following exchange:

Customer: Hi can I have the geraniums please?
Me: Forgive me, I don’t know which are the geraniums.
Customer: They’re those ones near your foot.
Me: Are you saying you forgive me for not knowing?
Customer: Uhhh… sure.
Me: Then take the Geraniums my friend, they are yours.
Customer: No these are daisies.

In conclusion, I learnt that if Robert Green were to answer my email asking him to forgive me for not bothering to walk my diet coke can up to the recycling bin then he would probably find the press a little lighter on the jokes about his ball dropping issue (which made me think about the issue of when boys reach puberty).

The Queen celebrated her official birthday yesterday with the Trooping the Colour parade. Her real birthday is in April.

I wanted to use the opportunity of the Queen’s birthday to look at where the monarchy is in today’s world. Unfortunately I was busy in April on her birthday. Luckily for me, it turns out the Queen not only has been born into immense privilege and fortune, she also gets to celebrate this fact twice a year! On a fake birthday! And we pay for the party! And she doesn’t even help clean up in the morning!

There have been sad suggestions in recent years that support for the monarchy is waning. This is a terrible state of affairs and to convince people of why the Royals should retain our support I have sculpted this metaphorical cemetery. I have decorated it with gravestones that name the ideals we would lose forever if the monarchy were to disappear from our lives.

The ideals that the monarchy represents and you can see on these gravestones are;
-Reserve,
-Dignity,
-British pride,
-The class system,
-Manners,
-A country that has a deep history/old person smell,
-Good breeding,
-Good inbreeding,
-Unexplained corgi fettish,
-Increased tabloids sales,
-Making prison service sound classier by calling it ‘on her majesty’s pleasure’,
-Making people astonished when someone who lives a lavish lifestyle funded by taxpayer dollars was ‘down to earth and friendly’ in a two minute conversation,
-Stamps.

I hope that the grim setting will work to shock people into realising how important these ideals are to our daily life.

The cemetery’s unveiling was a huge success and gathered quite a crowd. I asked the second cousin of the Queen to come and cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony and I was really impressed with how down to earth he was!! He even asked me what I do and nodded when I replied!! Twice! (for an extra 50 quid)

This is a wonderful moment in not just South Africa’s history but also Africa’s. It is time for them to make the world forget the stereotypes and generalisations of this beautiful and diverse continent.

When this tournament is over we will all know so much more about this land and its people and no longer pigeonhole it with the two dimensional imagery of safaris, deserts and lions that we have always lazily called upon.

I felt I was well positioned to help portray the modern Africa, due to my ability to immediately see to the heart of an issue and discard all media-informed assumptions. I wanted to pay tribute to this great and courageous risk they are taking in order to present the new Africa to the world because ‘sometimes you have to be like a giraffe and stick your neck out to get what you want’. These wise words came to me as I once again remembered the wisdom of Mufasa , the Lion King, a great leader and a great man. So I have sculpted Mufasa here as inspiration for the great continent as they strive to make us see the real Africa.

I then thought about how South Africa must battle the many doubters who have questioned their preparedness. I wanted to tell South Africa to keep their confidence, because ‘If you doubt yourself, others will doubt you too’. This advice was originally said, I believe, by Mufasa the Lion King, who I have sculpted below to remind South Africa to stand strong.

But in the end, I know South Africa will be fine, even without my art. They are going to give us not only a wonderful and enjoyable World Cup but a completely unique one.The world is about to be blown away by the many sides to this great continent we never imagined existed and it will never again be merely a place of legend and half remembered childhood stories to us.

This is going to be a World Cup unlike any other and they are going to do it their own way because, as someone once said, ‘No lion ever became great by being a copycat’. I forget who it was but I have sculpted a lion here as a reminder of these words. Obviously I realise there is more to Africa then lions but I figured just one couldn’t hurt.

SPOILER ALERT!!!! If you have not seen Sex and the City 2 do not look at the below ART-icle

I apologise if you ignored my warning and now know the entire plot after seeing and correctly interpreting the artwork/review

At my old house the drain pipe outside my window developed an incredibly loud, annoying and constant drip. Each night as its incessant noise began I would contemplate stabbing my ears with a pair of compasses to end the torture.  I thought I would never be able to fall asleep within earshot of it but after what felt like hours and hours of pain I would finally drift off into a disturbed and exhausted sleep.

Despite days of tired ranting and weeping I could not convey to my friends the levels of pain, boredom, frustration and insanity that the drain was causing. It could only be expressed through art and that is why I have made this film, Sex And The City 2, to recreate every emotion that drain caused.

This is a photo, not of the artwork, which is the film, but of the old, rotting and broken drain which inspired it.

NB: The drainpipe’s dripping also had an unnecessary and annoying voice over, was filled with offensive opulence and sweeping generalisations of Middle Eastern culture and would sing amazingly cringeworthy renditions of ‘I Am Woman’ as its attempt to empower women. It also tried to prepare against the guaranteed criticisms of its lazy, lazy script by announcing that anyone who criticised it was just ‘scared of women with a voice’… The drainpipe did this. In retrospect it was quite a unique drainpipe.

President Barack Obama spoke on Tuesday of an initiatve to cut government agency budgets  while Britain, Germany, Spain and France have also spoken of austerity plans. The new British Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor George Osborne warned yesterday of tough spending cuts and the need for big sacrifices from the public.

This is about everyone having to make sacrifices. As something to inspire us I tried to think of who in society makes the greatest sacrifices in life and I immediately thought of mothers. There is no one who is more filled with love and more willing to give everything for someone or some thing than a mother for their child.

I then thought about my friend who is a recently new mother – well I say friend, more aquaintance… and I say ‘recently’, it was AGES ago now – and I thought, imagine if you asked this mother to not talk about her kid for just 10 minutes.Or even imagine if you just asked her not to link a discussion about, say, sanctions against Iran’s nuclear power programme, back to the dull fact that her toddler Megan shouted ‘no no no’ in a very cute, angry voice this morning.

For her to agree to this would require one of the greatest sacrifices known to man and it is this kind of selflessness we are all going to need to aim for in the upcoming financial squeeze.

I then saw the CLEAR link of this girl’s pain at sacrificing talking about her child briefly to how the UK Chancellor George Osborne would feel if he were asked to stop talking about his precious budget that he keeps banging on about for just one evening. I imagine his ‘friends’ are in for a lot of conversations such as this…

Friend: ‘George! How’s it going? Haven’t seen you in months! I’ve not been too good myself, lost my job, ended up homeless. Had nowhere to-‘
George: ‘Ha ha, oh that reminds me how my budget was looking a bit fat today and then I realised how I could move a lot more rehousing responsibility onto local charities. They’re so cute when they cry out for funding’.
Friend: ‘Oh I heard you’re just Mr One Topic lately. Maybe we’ll catch up in July’.

So I have sculpted this image of a mother and child/my friend and her very aggressive toddler/the general population and cuts in public sector spending/George Osborne and his budget to represent Sacrifice.

Apple’s Steve Jobs released the new iPhone4 last night. He said the 100 millionth of the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad devices would be sold this month. Despite some criticisms of the recently released iPad, Apple also passed Microsoft at the end of last month in market value.

The constant excitement around recent Apple announcements such as this one made me think about technology and the intense emotions it can bring out in humans, sometimes even sending them into an almost frenzy. I have always felt this was best expressed in the groundbreaking film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have always felt this, rather than known this for sure, because despite three attempts to watch it I have never remained awake past the opening scene.

In the opening scene some apes/early man, are confronted by a giant monolith which represents technology and monoliths. It makes them go crazy (or ‘ape shit’ as explorers later discovered it was called) and they all decide they really want to own the monolith or the latest monolith upgrade. Then another ape realises that bones can be used as tools for killing and this soon leads to a computer trying to kill a man called Dave, as usual!

I built this monolith outside Liverpool Street Station in London’s banking/wanking district, a hive of gadget adoration. As the commuters gazed in awe at the monolith and felt confusing desires stirring within them (some of them technology related) I approached them and offered them Apple’s ‘latest gadget’. It was a piece of animal bone and called ‘the iBone’. The iBone had no camera function or wireless internet but it did have a function allowing you to bash it against rocks (if they were Apple compatible rocks). All they had to do to own the product for a low £25 a month was to beat to death any of the Microsoft employees dressed in unconvincing ape suits whom I had paid to crouch around the monolith.

Pick up on the product was slow but just as word of mouth was beginning to spread I was warned of potential law suits from Apple, along with a rival product being planned by Google so I had to cancel the artwork.

I learnt from this artwork that man is not so different from the apes/men-in-unconvincing-ape-suits that we are descended from. We are still blinded by the beauty of technology without considering its consequences in terms of killer computers or legal action from any company mentioned in this piece. And every human who embraces such technology must accept that they are, at heart, a simple ape playing with their new toy, confused by its meaning or how to get the latest plugin to work on their new blog.

Sent from my iPhone.

Jessica Watson, the 17 year old who three weeks ago unofficially became the youngest person to sail non stop around the world unassisted, has returned to her home port in Queensland to a welcome from thousands of supporters.

Jessica Watson was indeed an inspirational girl. She stood strong against many doubters, before and during her journey, who had claimed she was too young and too inexperienced to achieve the circumnavigation of the globe.

I, like all those who heard this story, and unlike those who didn’t so knew nothing about it, was impressed by her managing to achieve such an amazing list of accomplishments (sailing, docking and being young) all before the age of 17. But a part of me questioned if the extraordinary amount of scrutiny on this girl was a depressing sign of our society’s obsession with youth.

This sculpture of an ancient-looking pensioner is called Jessica Watson and asks the question, would the thousands of supporters have turned out to welcome her home if she had been this old man?

I was glad the sculpture asked the question and I tried to answer it. I decided that , no, the supporters would have stayed at home and not welcomed her because;

a) they would have viewed his claim to be a 16 year old girl as a clear lie

b) they would have been put off by his nudity, particularly with some of the awkward crouching and reaching that has to be done while someone operates a boat.

c) they might have had personal admin or odd-jobs to catch up on at home that day.

I thought about the obvious  and increasing neglect of our ageing population who are suffering from loneliness, poor health and fuel poverty and these thoughts left me feeling cold. Thankfully I realised this was because there was a draft coming in from an open window and I simply needed to turn the heating up.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has defended Israel’s blockade on Gaza saying it was vital for security.

I wanted to spread a message of peace, love and caring. I wanted to tell the world we should never raise a fist against our fellow man and that harming others physically, judging them unfairly or damaging their possessions and property are horrendous crimes.
I decided to use a quote from the bible to do this. I wrote ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ on some beautiful, smooth, white stones. I had collected these stones one at a time from a beach, every time I received a smile or kind word from a stranger.
I then had to come up with the fastest and most democratic way to get this message out to as many people as possible, as it was probably the most urgent message mankind needs to hear. Or at least in the top five. I built a cannon to spread the message of love. I called it The Love Gun and fired the stones into the streets of London.

Unfortunately there were some initial problems with misjudged trajectories. Too high and the paper weights gained too much height and became dangerous if they landed on anyone, too low and they shot into the walls and windows of many nearby buildings and cars. I decided this was the lesser of two evils and so went for the low trajectory.

‘The current round of the British Airways cabin crew strike heads into its final day today with little sign of progress after the most recent set of talks broke down late on Tuesday. Both sides are waiting for further talks to be arranged by ACAS, the conciliation service, in the run-up to the final five-day walkout, which starts on Saturday.’ – Sarah Arnold, The Independent.

British Airways CEO Willie Walsh and the Unite Union (representing the BA cabin crew) are locked in an archetypal battle for dominance that has been running for months now. I’ve made a sculpture of their dispute by representing the two sides as these Greek demigod type figures.

They are naked here because the battle has laid bare all their agendas, fears and genitalia. Each man/organisation hopes to be the man holding the knife, about to deal the killer blow. The knife, currently in the hand of Tony Woodley of the Unite Union, is the threat of customers moving to other airlines.

Willie Walsh looks up from the ground as if to say “I’d rather you didn’t attack me with that knife” or even possibly, “oh look up in the sky behind you, one of our planes flying past, how ironic!”, we will never truly know.

I’m not sure what the obvious homoeroticism represents but it makes it suddenly clear that BA and Unite may actually be closer to reaching a compromise than we realised, something that would have never been apparent without this art.

I have submitted the sculpture to talks between the two groups and ACAS in the hope that it will help them reach an agreement on employee travel concessions (represented by the fact that their ability to wrestle nude implies they must be on holiday in a warmer country).

‘Attorney General Eric Holder said last night that the federal government was launching criminal and civil investigations into whether BP broke any laws in its handling of the Gulf oil disaster… In the meantime, oil will continue to spew into the Gulf until the completion of the relief wells – which BP says will not be finished until August. ‘ Channel 4 News.

This is a pretty self explanatory piece. Clearly this sculpture I have created represents man and his pride that blinds him and BP from the damage we/it/he   is/are/will be doing.

The man, who represents Man but is actually called Garry in this piece, stands in a vain pose, showing off his abdominal muscles and small penis while he tries to wash off the oil covering his body with a small soapy rag. He seems oblivious to the fact that the soap is doing nothing and his entire body is coated in oil, much like BP talk about cleaning up the oil slick but I imagine their board members are actually just having showers at their gym and showing off their abs.