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 Love/Hates Tower Blocks

I've always been obsessed with tower blocks and council estates. Some say it's an unhealthy obsession. I disagree. Others will see this piece as middle class snobbery wading through working class life like an American tourist on a cultural exchange visit to Baghdad. Again, I disagree.

If anything, middle class snobbery was imposed upon estates at the point of conception. Evidenced by ridiculous sights such as the name John Keats House affixed to the most unpoetic building you've ever seen in your life.

These are nothing short of in-jokes invented by architects to amuse themselves (Fatima Whitbread Mansions etc...) The Arden Estate in Hoxton is the best example of titular misattribution. A Shakespearean theme emerges as you explore its ugly hinterland. Lo, my liege here lies Macbeth House, and what is this good knave, but Juliet House? Not content with desecrating these characters you soon discover Oberon, Falstaff, Bianca, Miranda and lastly Caliban all assigned to truly hideous buildings. And yet the latter, Caliban Tower, is oddly appropriate. If any building were to sum up the shipwrecked, deformed, deranged half man/half beast character from The Tempest this monstrosity is surely it.

High rises are often so outlandish in the mediocrity of their design they become beautiful oddities capturing the eye and imagination. And sometimes they are so disgusting they provoke projectile vomiting.

But the people living in them are wonderfully warm and remarkably positive. Estates and their impoverished communities guarantee you a far friendlier welcome than the opulence of Sloane Square.

As a child I was hypnotised by the sight of tower blocks at night. All those lights on in each little bedroom. All those people living literally on top of each other, surrounded on all fours sides. The bundle of tightly packed human life seemed so cosy and protected. Strength in numbers. Little did I know of the piss stenched hallways and broken down lifts .

At age 5 in a park one sunny day in the mid 1980s i watched the demolition of two tower blocks in Hackney. The event has always stuck with me. The loud bang. The hundreds of pigeons flying into the air. The delay between the detonation of the explosives and the collapse of the block. The delighted cheering and smiling from the assembled local community. The space in the air where moments before two symbols of Thatcherite oppression had stood blocking the sky.

The sound of laughter, dogs barking, sound systems pumping, scooters revving, TV soaps playing through an opened window, kids playing on the swings, old people nattering away in corridors. The everday sights and sounds of the estate. But, every estate has a finite lifespan. And for some the end is imminent.

The Heygate Estate, Elephant & Castle

Human sounds are largely absent on the Heygate estate. Soon this silently sprawling world of ghosts will be no more. Row after row of former homes are boarded up with metal panels sealing doors and windows. Even the most hardcore squatters have been deterred by eviction notices warning of the imminent demolition.

I first noticed this estate in the heart of Walworth whilst standing outside the Corsica Studios under the arches of the railway station one summer night. Opposite me stood a huge, dominating rectangular sea of phosphorescent lights and concrete. It felt like a vision of a Warsaw suburb from the communist Soviet Bloc era. I was awestruck by the dualism of its shimmering majesty and cold hearted oppression. Returning home I googled it to find it described as an estate with "a reputation for crime, poverty and dilapidation."

Walking around it five years later on a cold but sunny afternoon in February feels like that opening scene from 28 Days Later. Yet even more desolate. A surreal detritus of discarded toys, broken glass and deflated footballs litter the untended gardens and trees. Oceans of satellite dishes point in unison toward the sky waiting in vain for a signal that will never come to transmit pictures that will never be seen.

And yet, astonishingly, amidst the desolation, signs of life still exist. As you wander through echoing walkways, across doomed footbridges, through puddles of collected muddy water, past infinite grey sheet metal, all of a sudden you find yourself looking through a window into a perfectly normal kitchen scene with dishes on the draining board and cereal boxes on the table. You have found survivors. Survivors like Riikka, (below) from a remote village of 3,000 people in the east of Finland and her flatmate Cindy from Sydney, Australia.

Smiling and bemused as she opens the door, Riikka, aged 20, explains how they moved in to the crumbling flat last December and expect to be moved out by June at the latest. "I'm going to stay 'til they demolish the place" she says, defiantly, "we like it because we can do what we want. We probably wouldn't have moved in if the community had still been here".

When I ask if they throw parties, Cindy, 23, who earns a living selling theatre tickets offers a sheepish grin and a semi-guilty confession. I suspect the parties are more frequent and wild than they are willing to let on. The fact they have just got out of bed at 3pm and the sight of every available wall in the flat covered in home-made murals ranging from beautifully abstract paintings to childish surreal graffitti (ejaculating penises, talking clouds, He-Man etc.) gives an apt indicator of the lifestyle of this apartment. I ask if they ever get scared being so isolated and alone. "It feels a lot safer with nobody around. Police patrol regularly now. It's not as scary as the [occupied] flats near the station." I ask if they are artists and they laugh "no, not at all" as they set about creating another artwork. Their home made art, like the rest of the Heygate, will soon vanish into thin air. I leave them to their painting.

On Rodney Street I encounter another survivor. Born in 1938 and having lived in Elephant & Castle all her life, Yvonne Castelle (below) has survived a lot more than council bureaucracy and botched town planning. World War II for example.

She remembers the days before the Heygate estate when streets of picturesque 'two up two down' Victorian terraced houses characterised Walworth. Looking up at her bedroom window one night she felt certain the world was on fire. "Daddy the sky's all red". And it was. The neighbourhood had been set ablaze by German V1 rockets. Her dad hurried Yvonne, her three sisters and pregnant mother down into the Anderson bomb shelter. The following night she witnessed another strange skyscape; barrage balloons as far as the eye can see. The simple, yet ineffective method of deterring low flying bombers. She was eventually evacuated but soon returned.

Later, her career in dancing, cabaret, variety performances and acting took off (she shows me the book of photos she keeps in her bag), yet she remained living at home with her parents. Then in 1969 disaster struck when, on the set of a film called Moon Zero II, she fell and was paralysed in an accident. Pushed, she claims, by a jealous co-star. "Six foot seven she was! And what's worse, she was German. I still haven't seen the film to this day!" Yvonne remained bedridden for 10 years, and when she finally emerged, wheelchair bound, the streets she once knew were no more. The behemoth Heygate estate had been erected.

So, after 36 years of living with it, what does she think of Southwark council's plans to pull it down? "I think it's disgraceful. There are thousands of people without homes in this country. It turns out the government only meant for these flats to last 30 years. They say the new flats will be cheap but you can tell it'll be for the rich; gated communities." She attends all the local housing meetings and feels aggrieved at the lack of care shown by local authorities and central government. "People should have right of tenure, not the council selling the land from under their feet. Thatcher started this whole thing in the 80s. And I voted for her. I'd like to blow her up and dance on her grave when she dies". She certainly knows her stuff, Ms Castelle.

So where have all the people gone? "Some of them have been put on the Aylesbury Estate over there" she points into the distance, "which is ludicrous because that's being pulled down soon too. Others have gone to Dulwich. That's alright, it's a better area."

Heading on I bump into two Community Police officers who have patrolled here for the past two years. "It's quite sad really" says Ross, "some people have lived here 30 years, they don't want to leave". Gemma, his beat partner explains how they'd got to know people here and were friends with them. She doesn't know where they are now.



On the towering menace of the Claydon block, an Eritrean woman with four children chats to an elderly family neighbour. She doesn't wish to be named or photographed, suspicious of my introduction as a journalist. Her family are the only people left on the 4th floor. That's about 35 empty flats surrounding her. It's the same on the floor above, and below. Despite the presence of the police she doesn't feel very safe. "It's very dark, here and the heating goes off all the time. I don't have heating right now." Why have you not moved yet, I ask? "I'm waiting for them to offer me something better." Despite her trepidation about the future she is still smiling and laughing as she closes the door to feed the kids. Brave, spirited and determined.

As I return to my car, heartened and proud of what I have seen I pass the Latin American Multicultural group and its colourful display of carnival costumes. I pass the defunct doctor's surgery and the Angelus Temple Foursquare Gospel Church where a small group of black teenagers are having lunch, taking a break from singing and playing instruments. I pass the Institute of Traditional Karate and Performing Arts which, it occurs to me, is rather a strange combination of physical activities. All of these things will soon be gone. The sounds of human beings are largely absent on the Heygate estate. But those that remain have stories to tell.