I’m looking forward to two events next week, one in London and the other in Colchester.

Such Stuff : Everything must go !

Next Monday at the Minories Colchester is the last chance to view the static show and also to go home with a bargain at this closing down auction. We are proud to have Frinsley Baggage, A-list art opionista and autioneer, with us again. Everything must go, I hope you can come. Guide prices between £4.99 and £285. You will be welcomed with a drink, this will be another unique event and I hope to see you there.

Final viewing at 6.30pm - event starts at 7.00pm. Monday 5 December 2011. It will all be over by 8.00pm.

Venue : Colchester Minories art gallery Essex CO1 1UE.

Highgate Contemporary art : 12PM Twelve Printmakers

This is the second year we are showing here, this time with Alan Woods our new member. I’m showing some new box installations with intaglio embossed prints, as well as some of the early redundant media prints.

PV : 6 - 9.00pm Wednesday 7 December 2011. Show runs until 4 Jan 2012.

Venue : 26 Highgate High St. N6 5SJ. Open Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 6pm and Sunday and Monday by appointment.

I’ll be regularly tweeting through the week. If you would like to put in a tweet bid at the Everything must go auction please follow @signapse, or you can be a proper oligarch and phone in your bid. I have assistants standing by ready to receive your calls so email me and I’l give you the number to call.

Olympic posters ? Whassaappennin ? More posing than postering. YBA poser ?

It’s all very well being the grit in the bikini of the establishement, but that was a long, long time ago. Now we have Middle Aged British Artists, and we need a better word than MABA. My friend Steve came up with just the phrase to describe what happens when an enfant terrible gets properly settled at the armchair :

Les pantoufleurs terribles.

“Pantoufles are slippers. So someone who’s middle-aged and smugly comfortable & likes curling in in their slippers in front of the fire is a pantouflard. But the verb pantoufler has adopted two meanings: to laze around at home and also to transfer to the private sector. The latter meaning got attached to civil servants who use their privileged positions to secure hugely well-paid jobs in the private sector before they’ve given decent service to their country.”

Perfect. You heard it here first.

Some people have names that are perfect descriptors of their lives - William Whitelaw, Bob Diamond, Dan Quayle.

John Cage is the exact opposite. He opened the doors and the windows so the rest of us could hear properly. His work was properly, rigorously conceptual at a time when that word really meant something. The trouble is that the descriptions of conceptual work nearly always sound much sillier than the work itself. His 4′33″ sounded daft when I read about it, but was completely magical when I performed it for myself a couple of days ago.

I found a really beautiful interview he did in 1992 :

“When I hear what we call music it seems to me that someone is talking. Talking about his feelings, his ideas, his relationships. But when I hear this traffic here on 6th. Avenue I don’t have the feeling that someone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound.

… People expect listening to be more than listening … Sometimes they speak of the meaning of sounds. .. They think that for something to be just a sound is to be useless. Wheras I love sounds, just as they are. I have no need for them to be anything more. I don’t want them to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to pretend it’s a bucket, or that it’s president, or that it’s in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound.”

For me it’s important to make space for silences, especially after working so hard for a show. Thinking about John Cage also reminded me that paint is just paint and I love it for that, it doesn’t have to pretend to be a bucket or the president. Maybe it’s time to get the sticky stick out again.

I need your help developing a new test to identify machines and non-human entities.

Play “I wish” by Stevie Wonder. If you can stand completely still throughout, then you a non human unit.

I  need some help to develop this playlist, which will yield more accurate data. We can then  apply it to managers, helpline administrators, PR people and gallery front of house and others we encounter in our working lives. Then we can roll it out, as managers tend to say. Ooops.

Suggestions so far are :

1. “Reasons to be Cheerful” by Ian Dury and the Blockheads.
2. “Denis Denis” by Blondie/Debbie Harry
3. “Cool struttin” by Sonny Clark

Then we can think about having some fun designing the hardware, no better place to start than the Voight-Kampf Test. I can’t believe that the Blade Runner sketchbooks now fetch over £100 a pop secondhand, I remember them being full of beautiful drawing by Ridley Scott. It was clearly a fully imagined place for him before he went near a camera.

Douglas Coombes of Ipswich community radio asked me onto Lifelines, his weekly talk and music slot. I ended up being in the studio with Julia Devonshire, Ipswich art project officer. We talked about the joint show of Chinwe Chukwuogo-Roy and Gareth Bayliss in the old Ipswich art school building, her object exchange project and how that connected with Such Stuff at the Minories. Was a really interesting morning.

I love radio.

It’s my imaginary/imaginative friend in the studio. What also makes Lifelines really worth a listen is the playlists, Douglas gets the guests to choose them and I heard a really beautiful reading my Roger McGough. Here’s my playlist, which I got carried away with and we only had time to listen to four of them :

Miles Davis : “Nuit sur les Champs-Elysees (take 2)” from Ascenseur pour l’Echafaud.
Little Stevie Wonder : “I wish.”

Now that’s what I call poetry, and the best bass line ever :

Smokin cigarettes and writin somethin nasty on the wall

Teacher sends you to the principle office down the hall

You grow up and learn that kind of thing aint right

But while you were doin it, it sure felt outta sight

I wish those days, could, come back once more

Why did those days ev-er have to go

I wish those days, could, come back once more

Why did those days ev-er have to go, cause I loved em so…….

Antonio Vivaldi : Concerto no. 2 in G minor.

US3 : “Cantaloup (Flip Fantasia)” from Hand on the Torch

Annie Lennox : “Every time we say goodbye” from Red hot and blue.

Cannonball Adderley : “Autumn leaves” from Somethin else.

JS Bach, played by Glenn Gould : “Chromatic fantasy & fugue in D minor”

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi : “Stabat mater dolorosa”

Howlin Wolf : “Highway 49″ from the Howlin Wolf London sessions

Captain Beefheart : “Yellow brick Road: from Safe as Milk

There’s loads more on the list but we only had time for three. Lifelines on Ipswich community radio is definitely worth a listen. It’s on between 10 - 11.30am on Wednesdays.