London Loves.....Akerman

        'See Perspective at the Elephant' by Jeremy Akerman 

"You should really pop in and see Jeremy's work, it's mind blowing" says Amalie Russell, owner and director of the Hardy Tree Gallery, in her endearing Canadian dialect. Her words did the trick because suddenly here I am, again, in this petite but enticing arts space cowering beside the hustle bustle of central London traffic and grime.

Russell (an artist herself) has managed, in a short space of time, to exhibit a diverse range of artists here, from local photographers, to audio-visualists accompanied by techno DJ sets, to Goldsmiths-trained bastions of that golden 1990s era of British art. Jeremy Akerman falls into the latter category, his skills honed at that grand old Deptford institution, he was in the year below the much celebrated Gary Hume. Having established himself as a curator as well as an artist in his own right he has returned from a residency in South Korea and produced a series of fantastic... photographs? ...paintings? I'm stuttering...."I call them mosaics". Yes, mosaics. Exactly.

Influenced by cubism, I at first assume these images, created with a cutting knife from huge photographs, to be the creation of a mathematical brain. They are, essentially, landscapes but the scenes depicted (parkland, churches and urban buildings photographed and enhanced to a smooth, colour-heightened "postcard like texture") have been painstakingly chopped into circular shapes and fragments and carefully rearranged across the artwork distorting the viewer's perception. Blowing your mind? Actually I rather felt them to be quite lulling. These are familiar images to me. A leafy Hampstead Heath, a concrete Aylesbury Estate in Elephant & Castle basking in the sun. Yet the contiginous circles, juxtaposed with a kind of precise anarchy in relation to one another "so that a piece of the top left of the scene can be seen right the way down in the bottom right", I found to be a transporter. Moving me from familiarity to a distant newly discovered place. 

             'Pleasurable Forest' by Jeremy Akerman

Good art should blend humour and seriousness, I have always thought, in order to bring real pleasure. The bruised gore of Francis Bacon for example has never been pleasing on my eye. Akerman here gives me what I want to see. Comedy and obfuscation amidst a quite serious point - that perception is everything and can be messed with. "The world is all around us and we are in it. It surrounds us and sometimes we effect it and sometimes it effects us". I ask whether he means this in a phenomenological sense and he half agrees. "Sometimes there are days when you trip over something and bump your head and coincidences happen. Somethings things just aren't quite physically right. Social study says things are 'all ok' [ordered and rational] and we start off from that perspective so as to make sense of them. But if you start off from a position of 'everything is not ok', like the Cubist movement did, then you reveal other things."

It's at this point that I make the enquiry as to whether Akerman is a former mathematician to which he laughs and says the pieces don't follow a geometric law. "It's more about perception than maths. I got a C at 'O' Level." This humours me intensely as I also got a C (at GCSE). I blame this on my flagrant truantism and Akerman and I briefly compete over who bunked off school more than the other. Kids these days can't bunk off we agree, everything's locked down. It turns out Ackerman's brother beat us both in bunking off. "One day our mother found him in the shed at the bottom of the garden. Turned out he'd been there most of the school year." I turn to Russell to assess her absentiesm credentials but she, charmingly though somewhat embarrassed, reveals she was something of a swot at school (a NERD in Canadian). Akerman's girlfriend Anne Odling-Smee, here to accompany him on a drive down to Brighton, was also a straight A student. When I mention my mother's recent move to the south coast, Bexhill-on-sea it turns out she worked as a designer on the refurbishment of the grand art deco De La Warr Pavilion on Bexhill promenade. (Small world, and something I should revisit in future blogs.)

             'perspective4' by Jeremy Akerman

Having touched on his early family life, Akerman reveals the shed his brother bunked off in was in the garden of their vicarage home. He is in fact the son of a vicar. While his brother rejected faith and eyes it with suspicion ("he felt let down and you don't want to hear the words 'God will never let you down' when he already has let you down") Akerman is much more exploratory around the subject. "The church is the base of almost every bit of art history we know of" he says. He finds churches fascinating, but in several of his pieces, including the one above, the central round 'eyes' appear. "People's eyes generate a kind of chaos theory. Not chaos theory but a distortion of order. This notion of the eyes focusing in the centre is me trying to eliminate myself, if you emptied yourself out and tried to see yourself you might end up looking like that", he says pointing at the image.

His father, the vicar, was buried in a church later burnt down and its ruins had to be supported by scaffolding erected around the church to stop it collapsing in on itself. Clearly prime fodder for a cut up, heavily dissected colourful mosaic. One which means a lot to Akerman clearly, but one that - as art should - laces the seriousness of morbidity, love and death with a comic touch.

He wastes no opportunity to reference Simone Weil as his chief theological influence - observations that go somewhat over my ill educated head - but his serious approach to "pushing perspective to an absurdity" is reflected mostly in his discussions of the meanings around God, belief and art. Looking at the church pieces he describes, perhaps sarcastically a "highway to the heavens" and that the relationship to space in a church always comes back to this visual idea. When I ask if he believes in God he tells me "it's not about belief, it's just there. I grew up in my father's vicarage so it's just there. As a believer and a liberal you're more promiscuous than athiests. You get to explore so much more without shutting yourself off". Somehow I believe him. 

Rowan Williams, somebody he also respects as a theologian lifted Weil's idea of abandoment for his own writing. "The notion that when that God has abandoned his creation you move into another space. God's tactical withdrawal sucks people towards him into the vacuum created. Heidegger said what attracts us is that which calls to us. It calls and we go towards it. It's like creating art in the studio, something calls you and you go to it and bask in it for a while."

He says this while we look at his rendition of the Aylesbury Estate teetering on the brink of visual collapse while the wasteland foreground glistens like sand on a French beach. Then he says I should come and see his studio in Brockley some time.

And by God, I just might!



Jeremy Akerman's 'The Stream Will Soon Renew Its Smoothness' exhibtion is on at the Hardy Tree Gallery, Pancras Road until 25th November

London Loves.....St Pancras

               © Hisano Luttman

The Hardy Tree Gallery, a tiny, boundary pushing arts space on Pancras Road is currently showing a wonderful exhibition of black and white photos by local artist Hisano Luttman. Born in Japan, Luttman moved to Kings Cross over twenty years ago. She has lived there ever since, a resident of what is sometimes referred to as Somers Town. Between 1988-1990 she documented the area in a personalised photographic portrait of the streets and architecture. Today, in 2012 the pictures appear to come from a completely different world. A bygone era of London rapidly disappearing underneath ceaseless modernisation. The gallery, itself situated in the heart of St Pancras is overlooked by the shiny new behemoth of the Eurostar terminal. The beautiful gasometers in Luttman's pictures have all been ripped out and the skies are instead littered with the sight of cranes lifting and moving building materials. New buildings have emerged, creeping skywards. New, expensive looking roads have replaced the dark, dingy streets once stalked by prostitutes and drug dealers. The British Library and The Guardian are neighbours in the area. The UK Centre for Medical Research is currently building its new £500 million home on a vacant plot, from where the future of cancer treatments will be mapped out. The beautiful St Pancras Renaissance Hotel has reopened after lying dormant for decades. The area has seen significant change since Luttman's photos were taken. In an interview with London Loves she told me what the pictures and this area of London mean to her.

London Loves: What does the Kings Cross, St Pancras and Somers Town area mean to you personally?

Hisano Luttman: This is the place I’ve lived since 1988, sure I have lived somewhere before, but this is the place I call home. As I learnt about the place, the history, I found an attachment, also I became close friends of an old lady (by using the local launderette where she was the service wash girl), a sweet lady, she was in her 80s, born and lived all of her life here, she introduced me to her friends, they became my friends. To them, I was never Hisano, I was Tina, it felt strange, but also natural. I met her family, and she met mine. This was where the sense of belonging really came from. I remember she told me about the Chalton Street of her youth, a busy marketplace 7 days a week, this pokey little street sandwiched between Euston and St Pancras. Sainsbury’s, all this street, both sides was stalls, a Jewish furniture shop, a silk stocking place… that’s how the area came alive to me.

                    © Hisano Luttman

London Loves: What's the biggest change you've seen or felt in the 20+ years you've lived in the area?

Hisano Luttman: The people. When I arrived there some of the older people felt to me like the characters of those old films, the Ealing or the Gainsboroughs, remainders of another age. Those people had an inherent sense of Britishness. I knew the people who had lived all their lives in this area, who had spent their lives for example working in the local industries, on the railways, they were a part of the local fabric. But now they’ve gone. Those that remain, they may be the same people – people who’ve spent their lives around here, but their experience are different, they weren’t shaped in the same way.

London Loves: Talk us through your favourite photo from the exhibition and what you like about it/what it says about the area...

Hisano Luttman: The shot of the kings cross parcel yard (main pic), it contains everything I loved about the area; the brickwork, the cobbles, the gasometers, the railway lodging house…. People have said to me it looks Victorian, but I did nothing, just snapped it, that was how it was and that was how I caught it.

London Loves: Are you positive about the future for Kings Cross?

Hisano Luttman: I am not sure … the change was needed, it had to happen, but what I see now is a community sidelined, nothing really for the locals. It’s like, to the east of the Pancras Road, everything is new and modern, you cross over into Brill place and you’re in Somers Town, nothing has changed. All this wealth and yet for the people who have lived here all their lives, the old people, the day centre – the lunch club, shut down last year, not because there are no old people, but because of cuts to services. So where, I ask, are the benefits to the community from all this money? 

     © Hisano Luttman

London Loves: You must have seen a lot happen in these streets or from your balcony... tell us the good and bad things you've seen in the area.

Hisano Luttman: Somers Town is actually a warm place, a small place. And once you are inside it, the community itself is quite close. We look after each other and know each other. It doesn’t mean you nod an hello to everybody, it’s more that even if you don’t know the gang of kids hanging out on the corner, once they’ve seen you a few times, they know you are local, so they’ll leave you alone. It’s an inclusive community.

On the downside, when they cleaned up the worst parts of the Cross (Argyle Square), they didn’t solve the problem of the hardcore drug addicts and prostitution, they just displaced them. We caught the fall out and for a few months, it was not a nice place to be. Of course we have our own problems, every place does, but we saw them triple or quadruple overnight. We got over the worst – largely thanks to a dedicated ward councillor continually pestering the Council and Police, but again they – the addicts and prostitutes were just moved on, it just make’s me wonder where they went.

London Loves: Does anywhere in London feel even remotely like Japan?

Hisano Luttman: Department stores – English departments stores before were really old fashioned. You had departments (fashion, haberdashery, kitchen appliances etc), but now the department stores like Selfridges, the layout is like Japanese stores, so you’ll walk form a section selling one brand, into another selling a rival brand, into another, all within a single department … that’s very Japanese. But the service, no, English assistants don’t have it. Also in the sense of the shopper – especially young people, before they would look for individuality, visit markets, look for the little shop that was special, but now it all seems to be Brand driven and that to me is a very Japanese thing. And it’s inherently sad that I think you’ve lost that, because with it you lose the individuality, the flair…. It’s a funny thing, because back in the 80’s that’s something we Japanese studied of the English – that individuality, the music, the fashion, it was so London driven … and yet now its almost - in a way - the opposite.

London Loves: There are so many people in London from every part of the world, I always wonder do they feel at home here. Do you?

Hisano Luttman: I can only speak for myself, and as someone who came here – not born here. If someone asks me where is my home, Nagoya or London, I would always say Nagoya, because I always feel – even after all of this time and all of my positive experiences – I still feel like I am a bit of an ‘alien’. But, whenever I go back to Japan, then I miss London, I want to come back, because when I am there I feel in some unexplainable way estranged from Japanese society – not like I don’t fit or have my place, but like I have seen or lived too much to feel totally comfortable with it – questioning my actions and responses so to speak.

London Loves: What other photographic projects, particularly in London, would you like to do.

Hisano Luttman: As you know, the photos in this exhibition were all taken between 1988 and 1990, around this time I took lots of photos they were never expressly intended for exhibition, they were just me capturing images through my lens. I want to revisit the images I took then, and maybe also revisit some of the places and compare the changes.

 St Pancras - A Photographic Diary 1988-1990 is on at the Hardy Tree Gallery, 119 Pancras Road, NW1 1UN until the 2nd September