Billy as Andy

Not entirely convinced by Billy Childish at the ICA. Recent paintings are on show and a selection of other artifacts (he's a full-on artist-poet-musician combo) for a bit of biographical fleshing out. I'm not sure how long it had been since I had visited the ICA, and as I waited outside for it to open was reminded of a friend's description of it as essentially a civil servant's club, an arty (why not arty?) backdrop for a liquid lunch. I had also heard the ICA ethos casually described as 'militant amateurism', which suits Mr Childish too it seems.

Childish as a painter, has some obvious influences: Van Gogh, Matisse; his Fauvist, expressionistic autobiographical paintings are thick swooshing smearing attacks on unprimed linen (using a perimeter of bare linen as a framing device). There are self-portraits, the odd still-life, other works from photographic sources, poems that have a nice line in black-humoured self-laceration; they have an oomph, accompanied by an apparently accidental delicacy. The oomph comes on as a tirade on modern life (and on modern art), on his own sense of self, his need to create. Intent on this confessional careering career, the artist is presented through a lot of the work as like someone picking themselves apart, and putting the parts back together again, at least the overtly visible parts. There is spelt out in his work, something saying "There are false prophets, but I am real, I am true, whose side are you on?". Not entirely convincing, but pathological?

One of my favourite lines from NYPD Blue describes Andy Sipowicz's struggle to cope with daily life: "It's like he's a watchmaker, takes himself apart and puts himself back together every day". Billy Childish has the disadvantage of being (at least partly) non-fictional but I think it's fair to say that even with a commitment to an admirably amateurist aesthetic (that does have space for self-deprecation) he is packing a lot more ego and pretension than Sipowicz.

There are interesting things here, some paintings have a lovely glooping life to them, some poems and text genuinely funny and moving, and Childish is an interesting and sincere fella no doubt, but the personality push that the whole show creates, well, I think my hard-wired cult resistance kicks in. I'm left thinking: wilful eccentric Billy barking away, dismissive of, but really just as self-celebratory as the cooler, more cynical YBAs of his generation.

Nash as Johnny, nice painter

Went to see the Paul Nash exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

A mid-century (20th) English painter known for war paintings (he was an official war artist in both World Wars), this exhibition 'The Elements' focusses on the theme of nature. The paintings on show (and to an extent the photographs selected to support the nature theme) reveal a dark symbollically oriented sensibility.

The symbolism and imagery mixes English visionary (think Blake) with English contemporary (contemporary that springs to mind being the Famous Five / Swallows & Amazons era) across English landscapes. So amidst rolling downs and woods; birds: hawks or owls; mirrors, felled German bombers, furrowed fields, generally seen at salmon-skyed sundowns or in moonlit nights.

Along with the visionary symbolism, perspective and scale are tipped and skewed; there is a modernist flattening. Some Cubist influence is evident and Cezanne-esque treatments of planes, perspectives and vistas. Arrangements of natural and man-made objects become still-life in landscape, objects could be monoliths or miniatures.

The paint itself is sometimes quite thickly, always deliberately applied. Nash's palette: autumnal greens and browns, cool blue, brick red, muted pinks, rather earnest greys. Straight lines dominate, accentuating conflict between nature and man - sea walls, ordered piles of logs, gates and promenades, frame-like structures incongruously standing atop of hills, perhaps no more incongruous than Neolithic interventions on the landscape like Stonehenge.

I have always tried to keep a distance from autobiographical interpretations of any artist's creative output, as that can exaggerate the linkages between a sensationalist interpretation of any artist's life and their art, fetishising Van Gogh's mental illness is the big example of that. So I don't know whether the unsettling/unsettled quality I see in Nash's work is over-reading. Being a painter myself and recently taking a pretty good look at my own mental health, I can see how intrinsic one's sense of mental well-being can be to one's creative side, though not always in ways that invite obvious interpretations.

As to Nash it is accepted that war, death and depression did inform the progression of his work. What I see in that charged unsettled quality brings to mind (rather flippantly I know) the landscape watercolourist Johhny Nice Painter played by Charlie Higson in 'The Fast Show' who would merrily lay out a gentle picture of unmarred rolling hills and woodland, before noticing something dark, seeing in those dark places the bleakness, the despair, the void behind and underneath, shadow taking over the canvas - "Black! Black!". Nash's work at the Dulwich seems to balance at that tipping point. It is as if the canvases are taken away just as Nash is reaching for that tin of black...

LiverpudliArt

Was up in Liverpool over Easter, hadn't been there for a while and wanted to check out some of the art galleries. As it turned out it was a bit of an exhibition change-over week oddly enough. You'd have thought that new shows opening over the Easter weekend would be crowd puller PR but apparently not a view shared by the galleries.

Went to the Liverpool Tate Gallery, where a Picasso show is due to open soon, but current shows have been hanging for a good long while. One long-term exhibition called "This is Sculpture" filled half the gallery space. Wandered about it with an old art-school mate; we kept having to point at pictures on the wall throughout the show and mention that "well, actually that is painting". Curators evidently desparate to prise recognisable 2-D Picassos etc into the show, (and fill up all that wall space). Plays into the hands of the old saying that sculpture is the stuff getting in the way when you're looking at the pictures on the wall. The Picasso sculpture on show seemed happily selected for comedic value to gift the gallery attendants the line "Please keep your hands off Picasso's Cock".

In the same show Jeff Koons' '3 Ball Total Equilibrium' was all wonky. Apparently visitors nudging it wonks the suspended basketballs up and down, so some of the meaning of the piece is subtly sabotaged with scally subversion; a bit of localised contextualising siting the piece perhaps.

One fun piece was a lightshow dancefloor for visitors to walk and dance on with headsets with disco playlists. Had a little holding-the-coats-waiting-at-the-bar kneehalfbouncesway to " Who's That Lady?".

The other major show whilst they're waiting for the Picassos (lost in an ash cloud somewhere off the Mersey shoreline perhaps) is Afro Modern which brings together an array of works with black culture in the 20th century (and 21st) as its theme. An impressive array of challenging works arranged chronologically (which is an understandable though unimaginative curatorial decision). The most arresting and moving thing that I saw was a video installation by Kara Walker, which has been exhibited fairly widely since 2005, 8 Possible Beginnings, or: the Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture. It depicts brutal and surreal images of black American experience, the central scenes are of slave exploitation on a Southern US plantation presented in a beguiling combination of techniques: cut-paper silhouettes, flickering vintage style film quality, work songs, Uncle Remus story-telling; full of symbols, flowers, phalluses, male pregnancy, and images of sexualised and grotesque violence.

Another interesting piece of video art was installed at FACT as part of an exhibition looking at life in conflict zones, MyWar. The piece called 'They shoot horses' (screengrab pic at the top) runs video of a danceathon by two trios of young Palestinians in separate rooms to cheesy upbeat disco pop. "I Believe in Miracles (Don't You?)". For 7 hours apparently! Falls into the category of an artwork with an "Oh right, now I get it" moment when you read the who-where-what explanation. Otherwise without the context it's just 6 people dancing, which is still good; their rug-cutting moves beat my bounce-sway big-time.

Thought I Saur You... (in the Rusty Hook)

Went to Crystal Palace Park to check out the Victorian dinosaurs. Drawings above somewhat improved by a 2-year-old nephew's penmanship.

Never seen them in the 'flesh' before. Like many before me I loved dinosaurs as a kid, read up on them and the Victorian fossil finds and these life-sized recreations (including the lovely Iguanadon nose-horn/thumb-spike inversion alluded to in Alex's directional marks on the second drawing).

Jurassic Park can go piss up a rope as far as I'm concerned (a mosquito-embalming amber rope). The proper jobs here are great: unDisneyfied thump-weighted real things. No carnivalist birds-of-paradise display colours, these are proper Britosaurs, grey-green winterlizards, made for fixing their deadeyed gaze through fog and drizzle. Gotta love 'em.

Mental health. Modernity. Media... and Murder, at the Movies

M directed by Fritz Lang (1931) was a recent treat enjoyed at the NFT/BFI Southbank.

A major highpoint in film is M. M for Murderer (or Monster) it is in essence a serial killer movie, and was shown as part of a month-long 'Psycho in Context' season. The season represents a filmic family tree for the Hitchcock movie; M has the family role perhaps of an elderly, stylishly disturbing great uncle.

The film is challenging but with a lightness of touch (apparent in the occasional use of ironic voice-over, much like a mockumentary) in how it tells its tale: a city's children prey to a pyschopath who whistles, buys balloons and sweets, as well as acting out far more depraved instincts.

One of the film's strong suits is the way it draws witty parallels between the city's police and its underworld. A council of leading criminal figures is amusingly compared with high-level police meetings, as are their respective organizational methods, and relative operational efficiency as the criminals form a shadow police force to track the killer.

It is full of memorable moments: the shots of a child's ball bouncing and a loosed balloon (leaving a child's abduction and murder off-screen); hands and voices appearing out of shot; the set-piece of a chase through the streets and ensuing man-hunt through an office block; the chalk 'M' marking out the killer on his overcoat; the show-trial beneath the city.

For a film about child-murder it also has some genuinely funny moments, with more laughs than you might expect. One of these comes from the incongruity of a gross-out, under-the-desk shot capturing the wonky bulk of the police detective leading the case from an eye-wateringly unflattering angle. Lang's movie maybe is making the point here that the police (and implicitly the city's other elements - the press, the shadow-police/underworld, local politicians, public health system, citizenry) should not be seen head-on as objective arbiters of social control and justice.

The killer himself, played unforgettably by Peter Lorre, is ultimately a sympathetic character (pitiful at least), identified as a victim of not just his own deviant compulsions (he is evidently schizophrenic), but by a society that doesn't understand how to treat his sickness, a society that is all too ready to succumb to urban paranoia, mob-rule and vigilante justice, whipped up by a hysterical press. Clearly still plenty of resonance with media witch-hunts that have occurred in the more recent past. Norman Bates was spared both the News of the World front-page and the death penalty.