Tom Phillips
Miami Dice (one of a pair), after Mallarmé. 12.5cm cube, 2003.
A quick trip from Princeton in November to see my friends and supporters for over thirty years, Ruth and Marvin Sackner. Boldly they moved (and well) as their fiftieth wedding anniversary approached, from Miami Beach to the penthouse of an apartment block in Miami itself. Great deflectors of attention, their celebration of both events is disguised as a party in my honour.
Miami and Party are synonymous for me since I've never visited the Sackners but that I was soon steered to some lavish gathering, the most opulent of which was to mark the blessing by a rabbi of a new jetty for the hosts' yacht. Was it at that themed evening (Welcome Aboard said the invitation which took the form of a T shirt) that a professional mermaid swam round and round a giant illuminated pool? and was it there that I watched the immolation of a million dollars in an endless firework display and was the sole witness, all other necks by then having returned to steaks like bibles and hat-high mounds of caviare, of its final showpiece, the sparkling portraits of host and hostess hovering expensively in the air with the coruscating, if enigmatic, inscription WE - WE - COME - YO - - ABOAR - ! and was it also there that a flotilla of imported gondolas ferried us beneath the stars across a small lagoon from entrée to dessert? Or was that the party we reached over many a bridge and small islet and sinister checkpoint to a gilded hall, loudly echoing with popping corks, where two executives stood with a tiny tape-recorder that eventually issued the message, "this is Baby Johnson saying Hi and welcome to my birthday party. I'm sorry I can't join you; I have a slight cold; but you all have a wonderful time now", after which the corks resumed their popping, a band struck up and all the guests started dancing glumly in their glittering gowns and evening dress - but I digress for the Sackners are victims rather than purveyors of social ostentation. Their soirée was warmly austere, though the gay caterer (much praised by all and his card taken by many) had arranged the excellently chaste food with artistic precision as if feng shui dictated the alignment of asparagus spears, or some severe aesthetic one might call bauhaus baroque governed the relative location, on a dish, of ghostly chanterelles and dark green cress
but I digress...
Suffice to say that all was perfect: but the moment arrives when I must make a speech, instructed by Ruth and Marvin not to talk about them but of myself. I have to ignore this injunction since what I say will contain my anniversary gift.
Somehow a work of mine would not have been right; their walls are already lined, their shelves heaving with them (as you can imagine if you check the Sackner Archive). I have instead devised a cocktail with the help of my friend, that prince of restaurateurs, Jeremy King who knows a thing or two about such matters and, moreover, knows that I know nothing.I shall explain...
[to be continued]
TP will feature on BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves on Wednesday 14th March at 9.45 to 10.30pm discussing the Unknown Monet exhibition opening at the Royal Academy.
Royal Academy link for more information on the exhibition.
Two things seen together on my kitchen table both recently acquired give me as much pleasure and provoke as much thought as anything I've ever owned. They are united in many ways being roughly the same size and designed for holding in the hand. Indeed their tactile aspects are equally satisfying: each gives an instant feel of inviting rightness and in each the thumb finds itself in an instinctive position of control.
Both are exemplars of the aesthetic principle of high modernism that perfection of function equals beauty of form. What separates them however is the distance between their moments of manufacture, a space of half a million years.
The iPod represents the future as imagined in my past, from the forties when I read of Dick Tracy's wrist radio and the fifties when I voyaged in space with Dan Dare.
The flint multi purpose tool (axe/knife/saw) from Tchad, whitened by millenia of wind and sand takes me on an opposite flight of the imagination to when it was held and used by a hairier hand than mine.
A third object on my table catches my eye and picking it up I find that my thumb reaches the controlling button at exactly the same point as the thumbgroove of the axe. Although the phone, patinated by a few years of studio use, is not so elegant as the axe, their length is, uncannily, exactly the same.
At the moment. artist engaged in meeting deadlines, some small like writing a review of hogarth exhibition for art in america and some large like finishing the designs for westminster abbey: a memorial to the fallen in recent follies of war... though don't mention the war is still the watchword since this is a conflict memorial, a project which since first embarked on many months ago has had its up and downs, delays and disputes, revisions and rerevisions during which time another few dozen poor sods have met their end in distant and desert places. Tacitus still has the last word on such ventures: when they have created a wasteland they call it peace.
The long and the short of it is
that even my visits to the barber
are trimmed according to demands of work.
One aesthetic battles with another
under the occam's razor of art.
And so to George's in the Peckham Road
which I first patronised in 1962
(a qualifier then for student rates)
there to be shorn by George (the son of George,
himself a son of that eponymous George
who served me long ago).
He now snips off
a pensioner's percentage from the bill.
Scissorwork done, the mirror is flashed
the gown whisked off.
Then George who knows the ritual
sweeps up my shearings lock by lock
and (to the surprise of other customers)
wraps them in yesterday’s Sun.
Clutching my red top reliquary
I hurry to the studio
where on a dedicated table
crowded with bowls and jars
a dark receptacle
(courtesy of Tesco’s microwave meals)
awaits replenishment;
material for morning toil to come.
So on this normal morning
my Gandhi hour begins the working day
a time for tweezers and rumination
sorting out one by one
the white hairs from the black.
I long ago discovered
that though my hair would be described as grey
there's no grey hair to sort.
Nature the pointillist
makes an optic mix
changing the proportion with the years
(I'm running 60/40 now:
black hair still in the lead).
I'd wear my hair short
if I had the choice
but art that shapes my ends
delays delilah-time.
And all this to what purpose?
Why tennis balls and skulls?
A postcard stapled to my studio wall
shows Titian's Allegory of Prudence
[so loosely painted with such enviable ease];
a man of middle years
flanked by a younger self and self grown old
plus emblematic animals and moral text.
Also in the studio
casts of skulls
variously covered in paint, mud,
orange peel, or fragments of a humument.
Humument Skull, 1986
Now three such skulls
entirely clad in my own hair
one black one white
and one in salt and pepper mix
will stand (when I have finished them)
for Titian's heads.
Instead of his symbolic beasts
I seek a metaphor
that might less gravely mark
the frittered past.
Macbeth is on my mind and Eliot
with coffee spoons and
all our yesterdays
and summers gone whose sunlit tournaments
(together with the Oval Test)
have measured out my life.
...., and all our wimbledons
have lighted fools the way to dusty death.
Enough of hair... but wait
I'll also have a hat before I'm through
If I can use my hoard for making felt
to fashion a fedora [beuys will be beuys]:
recycled life to adorn its place of birth.
This Thursday, 1st Februrary at 21.30 on BBC Radio 3 TP takes part in a programme in which Philip Dodd and guests explore Pablo Picasso's 1907 work Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which would become arguably the most important painting of the century. Picasso portrayed five prostitutes gazing out at the viewer, their faces bold and solicitous, apparently inspired by African and Oceanic carvings that he had seen in Parisian museums.
Drawing From Turner, a collaborative project and exhibition jointly organised by Tate Britain and the University of the Arts London, has extended its opening dates until May 20th 2007. TP is one of 30 contemporary artists who over the last two years were invited to draw directly from a Turner drawing in the Prints and Drawings Room at Tate Britain and these drawings are displayed with the original Turners from which the artists worked.
Drawing From Turner
6th November - 20th May 2007
Tate Britain, Open daily until 5pm
A Humument p.17 (click image to enlarge)
To celebrate 40 years of work on A Humument, which was started in December 1966, TP has created six new humument pages. Unusually the pages were made outside London, whilst TP was a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton during November 2006. One of the new pages features in the current issue of Art in America.
Tom Phillips will be taking part in the annual contemporary printmaking show Originals, at the Mall Galleries in February 2007. Originals sets out to celebrate the art of the printmaker with the most exciting work being produced today. The works are selected by a panel of experts in the field including artists, printmakers, collectors and academics. Last year's exhibition, Originals 06, was described by Peter Blake as "the best print show I've ever seen".
Originals 07 opens 14th February at the Mall Galleries, The Mall, London SW1 : the gallery is open daily between 10am and 5pm.
Telephone 0207 930 6844
michael c is more than welcome since he qualifies not only as icebreaker at this blog
[for blog it is and not {as it might have seemed} restricted to blood relatives]
but as first footer of 2007
albeit that he is not able to carry a piece of coal across its threshold
and may not even have dark [or any] hair
of hair there will
as my solstitial haircut approaches
be more anon
but meanwhile if michael c should get in touch via website
i can tell him of the gift that i must traditionally give
in exchange for the first footers conceptual coal