Dung Sisyphus. Deubner – London Art Fair

The London Art Fair. The selling of old rope. Maybe Charlie Smith Ltd had some verve. Xavier Ellis had a a delicate little Goya looking thing.

Saw Birgit – appeared out of a crowd at the London Art Fair – responsible for some fine pieces of art these days. amongst all its vulgarity was Birgit D, got into a book of young artists to watch. Her dung rolling performance is supreme – A German artist from way back/way forwards. Bounding up to me always looking 70% to the left or right. Some say dangerous Birgit. She’s moving back to Liverpool.

The London Art Fair – Observe the feckless marketeers neurotically biting themselves, trying that reverse alchemy of turning the spiritual into the financial – and the odd thing that seems to do to their souls, to everyone’s souls – artists, buyers, and dealers alike.  There was something (gratingly) endearing,  about the way the gallery directors looked like fish that had constructed their own aquariums – all strip lit, artwork like aquarium ornaments, the little castles and anchors amongst the coral grit.

Sitting in Blackwell’s on the Charring Cross road, found a chair and a copy of Erich Fromm’s – “The Sane Society” – And it starts with a quote from Aristotle about the marketplace of ideas. It states that if ideas are commodities like anything else in the market place then it is beholden on the purveyors of those ideas to hold double responsibility for their practices.

I did have a sweet conversation with one JC, he handles artists estates – Ivon Hitchens, Roger Hilton, Kenneth Armitage, Eduardo Paolozzi, Bryan Wynter, Ceri Richards, Adrian Heath, John Wells. A repository of the dead. Perhaps that’s what gave him the charm of a slightly mischievous undertaker.

Birgit Deubner Dungbeetle and Sisyphus, 2008

B.Deubner Dung Beetle performance. flickr photos. Its good to see.

It belatedly occurs to me the extent of plagarism. B. Deubner made a load of bird boxes – did she, am I imagining this. I knew they felt slightly familiar. But the story goes back further. I once had a crow shot for her. She was doing these very Germanic drawings of black birds, thats birds that are black. And she wanted to get one and have it stuffed. I was working for Splinter at the time and there were these young interns who lived out in the country who went shooting, so I commissioned the kill of a crow and they brought it into the office in a shoe box and I gave it to her in some cafe somewhere.