News has reached me of a new exhibition entitled Chasing Mirrors at the National Portrait Gallery. A short interview [PDF] with the artist Faisal Abdu’allah ends with the following exchange:
If you were to create a portrait of the city of London, would it be an
amalgamation of the collected memories of all of the cities that you have
known?
London could be best described in two ways: coleslaw or salad bowl!
Coleslaw is blended with pepper and mayonnaise to create what I perceive
as a generic pulp. Salad bowl is very different where each ingredient
maintains their identity and the difference is appreciated. To amalgamate
London would lose that ‘bendy bus’ moment of serenity and escapism.
Now that the days of the bendy bus are numbered, will the London artist still find inspiration on the replacement cattle trucks?
Tags: 5 Comments
5 responses so far ↓
“London could be best described in two ways: coleslaw or salad bowl!”
Uh-oh.
“Coleslaw is blended with pepper and mayonnaise to create what I perceive as a generic pulp. Salad bowl is very different where each ingredient maintains their identity and the difference is appreciated.”
Scraping the salad bowl of uninspired gibberish, astride the dark pepperpots of despair, London, which I perceived as a large banana….
Is there a doctor in the house?
“To amalgamate London would lose that ‘bendy bus’ moment of serenity and escapism.”
Oh no Boris! Don’t scrap the bendy! We don’t want to lose that special bendy bus moment of serenity??? WTF?
Is Faisal Abdu’allah the pen name of Bertie Bassett?
This crap will certainly take some beating.
“News has reached me….”
Does that mean you read it in Time Out?
Time Out? No, I had an email from the Arab-British Centre, Brother Appealing Of Ealing.
“Time Out? No, I had an email from the Arab-British Centre, Brother Appealing Of Ealing.”
LOL. Thank you Sister! It just read like one one of your flunkies had delivered it on horseback to your castle: “wondrous tidings of Faisal Your Majesty!”
…don’t take it personally. The humour’s free.
Escapism and serenity is right.
The fact is that decent, ordinary people regularly fall asleep on them. They feel that secure and at ease.
That never used to happen on double deckers, except to drunks upstairs on a bed of kebab meat.