Today's theme is old and new. Or perhaps smart and tatty. Here's some old/tatty – looking across to Tabernacle Street:
Good name, Tabernacle Street – and Worship Street just to the south. I never know what to call this slightly run-down area, between City Road to the west, Old Street/Great Eastern Street to the north, Bishopsgate/Shoreditch High Street to the east, and Broadgate/Liverpool Street to the south. Shoreditch is more to the east, Hoxton to the north, the City to the south and west….
Nearby:
The smart outposts of the City are just to the south. The new Broadgate Tower:
But over to the east of Bishopsgate, towards Brick Lane, we say a definite goodbye to the smart:
Except – ooh look – isn't that the gherkin? – through the gates there? Indeed it is.
And so, down to the newly-expanded Whitechapel Gallery. I wasn't aware that a new exhibition had just opened: Elizabeth Peyton. I was wondering why such a minor talent deserved so much space, but there is a certain quirky vision there which I ended up quite enjoying. Still, Waldemar Januszczak, in today's Sunday Times, has to do the art critic stuff and chew over it at length. Is she shallow or is she profound? Oh dear, what to make of it all? He manages to fill a column somehow though, and that's the main thing.
Elsewhere, some local East End artists:
Lisa Bradley's practice incorporates sculpture, time-based media, and live art. Her work is informed by social and cultural hybridity, language, spectatorship, and the boundaries between performativity and performance art.
Which is a remarkable coincidence, because my work – this blog – is also informed by social and cultural hybridity. (The boundaries between performativity and performance art, not so much). In fact for quite a while now I've been meaning to update that "Politics and Culture" tag under the blog title. It's doesn't sing, really, does it? I thought of "surfing the zeitgeist", but that's so Nineties. And now here we are, the phrase I've been searching for: "exploring social and cultural hybridity".
And a visit to the art gallery wouldn't be complete without the short video, would it? A Cheap and Ill-Fitting Gorilla Suit, by Angus Fairhurst, did the trick for me. Five minutes long, this bloke dressed up in the eponymous gorilla suit (not a phrase I've used often before, that); after a minute or so of standing there, gorilla-like, inscrutable, and just when you think this is going to be one of those videos, he starts jumping around energetically, up and down, up and down. Bits of newspaper that've been stuffed inside the suit to bulk it up start spilling out of the front; then the suit itself starts to disintegrate. An arm comes off, then the other arm; the head. The bloke's still leaping around, like a manic down-market King-Kong. Eventually it all comes off, and he's standing there naked. At which point he stops jumping up and down (thank goodness) and he walks off.
Well, it made me laugh. No one else, mind. No one laughs in an art gallery. I'm lucky I wasn't escorted off the premises.
Mick Hartley 
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