The WIP #3: The pebble in the shoe
The Week in Photos (13-19 January 2024)
“It isn't the mountains that wear you out, it's the pebble in your shoe,” Muhammad Ali.
This week has been a struggle. My calves are incredibly tight so I haven’t been doing any exercise and, on Sunday, I came down with a cold. I feel better now but it has been life on a steep gradient.
On Saturday, I returned to see Simon Murphy’s Govanhill at Streetlevel Photoworks, which closes in 8 days. It was moving, full of the sadness of everyday life.
There was another show in The Project Room I had wanted to see but the artists had closed the gallery to protest outside the City Chambers in support of the Palestinians. I went along to take in the speeches, which were buoyed by the intervention of South Africa at the International Court of Justice.
I have, of late, been reading about Robert Capa, the guy who basically invented modern war photography. Of course, it is impossible to do the kind of work he did when the conflict consists of dropping 2,000-pound bombs on a city, and the main images we see are of bleeding toddlers.
That evening, I went to the Glasgow Artists’ Moving Image Studios, which is hosting a series of Powell & Pressburger films alongside works by contemporary artists. This week they showed a masterpiece, The Red Shoes, which is a vivid melodrama about the tension between art and life. The film was contextualised by a film about Kate Bush fandom by Harry Maberly who then spoke with the performance artist, Peter McMaster.
Alas, the venue is still a work in progress and lacks heating, which may have contributed to my illness.
I thought about doing a series of photos of a room, challenging myself to create something out of the domestic setting, but this is about as good as it got.
I emerged, briefly, for my second festival of the year, the brand new Partick Film Festival, which featured a wry conversation between the journalist Paul English and Ian Pattison, creator of original Glasgow street philosopher, Rab C Nesbitt. When asked what Rab would be doing now, Pattison replied “He’d be dead. They’re all dead. All those guys in the pubs who drank heavily. They’re dead.”
I also made it to the cinema to see Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s idiosyncratic, psychosexual farce about a woman whose mind is a blank slate. Emma Stone gives it her all, Mark Ruffalo is a cartoonish cad, and Willem Dafoe is typically brilliant. It has a similar affectless magical realism as Michel Gondry and Wes Anderson but is definitely worth a watch.
You have to try and get out of the house, even if you’re ill. I went as far as the Argyle Street TK Maxx, which sells ornaments like this to folk. Why bother going to exhibitions when high art is available on the high street?