Fires Were Started

Saw Beautiful Losers just now at HotDocs - a lovely inspiring thing, with all the ramshackle artists of New York’s Lower East Side giving testament of how wonderful things can be when you do what’s most special to you. It’s not the most focussed film, but they all truly made the prettiest things they could, and that includes Harmony Korine before he ate himself - there was a remarkable clip from one of his earliest raw shorts, plus a glimpse of Gummo, reminding me why I spent my university days paying homage to a mental shrine of him hour after cinema hour.

But it also makes you feel proud of all the outsider artists there have been and always will be, and for once, we’re just as strong in the UK I reckon with our equivalent East Endy wandering wibbling minds making pretty little things and making me thrill. So I’m thinking Rob Ryan, king of the delicate and poetic, Mark Pawson, whose show just gone at the Horse Hospital was a party of little creatures, slogans, badges and cabinets of silly and profound curios, and of course the lady (and girlfriend)-laden shop where they’ve shown (and Rob R is at the moment), Tatty Devine, which pirouettes at the art-commerce end of things which Beautiful Losers slightly-melancholilylyly concludes on.

And that don’t cover it all. There’s the party party party ace Bob and Roberta Smith , of whom you might want to ignore that wikipedia record if you don’t want your art heroes crushed into an easy-to-understand box (which lifeless people write these thing?) and everything going on at the Sartorial Contemporary, which is very closed indeed in spirit to the B.Losers Alleged Gallery, albeit without the skating and (I think) more balding.

Sorry for a list. I just think it’s all really lovely.

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