February 16th, 2010 Audrey Gillan
Tower Hamlets council has been accused of trying to force through a controversial sculpture against the wishes of locals
It is synonymous with curry and trendy bars, nightclubs and art venues. Now a plan to mark the entry points to London's cosmopolitan Brick Lane with giant arches in the shape of headscarves or hijabs has been condemned as offensive to Muslim women and a waste of £1.85m of public funds.
The proposed arches, part of a "cultural trail" through the street – immortalised in Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane – have been criticised as "misconceived" and "excluding". Locals have said they risk ghettoising a community that considers itself tolerant and diverse. Tracey Emin, who lives just off Brick Lane, is one of a number of residents in the east London area who claim that Tower Hamlets council risks inflaming racial tension by trying to force the "hijab gates" – as they have become known – through without proper consultation. After an outcry, the council has extended the deadline for complaints to 22 February.
One local Muslim woman has told the council that the stainless-steel, illuminated arches "create a stereotypical image of Islam, and endorse the practice of the veil that not all of us are happy with. It is a divisive image and one that in the present climate is highly inappropriate. Tower Hamlets should be seeking to bring communities together at this moment." Another, a hijab wearer, said that to call the gates anything other than a hijab was "just semantics". She said: "It is a huge waste of money. There has been enough conflict and tension since Brick Lane started developing after the yuppies moved in. This looks to me like a tool of aggravation and is taking a step backwards."
The Spitalfields Trust, which helped to save many of the historic Huguenot silk weavers' houses that abut Brick Lane, has urged the council to abandon its "misconceived" idea.
The cultural trail through the area is aimed at celebrating the various migrant communities – including Huguenots, Jews and now Bangladeshis – that have settled there across hundreds of years.
Using planning-gain funds paid to the council following the development of Bishops Square and Spitalfields market, the trail is intended to bring more tourism into the area and smarten it up. But locals complain that the focus has been too much on the Bangladeshi community, which makes up a third of the Tower Hamlets population.
At the centre of the trail is a 29 metre high minaret that has been attached to the Brick Lane mosque, a grade II listed building originally built in 1742 as a Huguenot church, then converted into a synagogue and now the Brick Lane jamme masjid [mosque]. Tower Hamlets council says the structure "is not a minaret" but a "large steel art sculpture".
Brick Lane and its side streets are also home to artists such as Emin, Gilbert and George, Jake Chapman, the actor Samantha Morton, as well as architects, designers, planners, poets, musicians and others. Many were shocked to learn only recently that the council planned to erect the veil-like structures. Some say that given the high concentration of artists in the area, the design should have been open to competition.
In a letter to the council, Emin wrote: "I sincerely object to these proposals … the proposed material has no relevance to the heritage of the area or its future. I understand that the Jewish East End Celebration Society does not approve the concept overall and neither do the Spitalfields Trust nor the Spitalfields Society, as stated in the review of the consultation. I am shocked to learn that the scheme is budgeted at £2m and I strongly feel that rubbish collections, vermin control, education and improved policing are more important to resolve."
Broadcaster John Nicolson, who lives off Brick Lane, said: "Throughout history numerous groups have passed through here and made it home. That's what makes Spitalfields so special. It belongs to all of us – atheists, Muslims and Christian, homosexuals and heterosexuals, men and women. The council's latest wheeze – metal arches in the shape of headscarves – is exclusive and excluding. They'd never dream of crucifix-inspired gates – nor should they – so why an arch that is both Islamic and representing a specifically conservative form of Islam?"
A spokeswoman for the council said the concept behind the arch was "loosely based on the sculptural form of a headscarf, reflecting the many cultural backgrounds that have occupied and sought refuge in and around Brick Lane over the centuries".
She said headscarves were worn for a variety of purposes, "such as for warmth, for sanitation, for fashion or social distinction; with religious significance, to hide baldness, out of modesty, or other forms of social convention", and not only by Muslims.
"Observant married Orthodox Jewish women, for example, are required to cover their hair, often employing scarves for the purpose, and Jewish men will use a kippah or yarmulke to cover their heads for religious purposes." She went on: "Many men and women currently wear headscarves or bandannas as a fashion statement, and with Brick Lane being a cultural melting pot both historically and now at the start of the 21st century, this design reference seems appropriate and fitting."
But Will Palin, secretary of Save Britain's Heritage, and a local resident, said: "The headscarf motif is undoubtedly faith-specific to Islam and therefore does not represent the breadth and richness of the borough's history."
At the Beigel Bake, a few metres from the site of one of the proposed arches, Sammy Minzly had been unaware of the proposals.
He said: "I have been here 50 years, and they haven't even told me about it. This used to be a Jewish area, and all my life I have been here. It is disgusting that they have not shown us the respect to ask us what we think."
Posted in Art, Art and design, Communities, Culture, Heritage, London, Monica Ali, News, Sculpture, Social history, The Guardian, Tracey Emin | Comments Off
February 16th, 2010 Audrey Gillan
Tower Hamlets council has been accused of trying to force through a controversial sculpture against the wishes of locals
It is synonymous with curry and trendy bars, nightclubs and art venues. Now a plan to mark the entry points to London's cosmopolitan Brick Lane with giant arches in the shape of headscarves or hijabs has been condemned as offensive to Muslim women and a waste of £1.85m of public funds.
The proposed arches, part of a "cultural trail" through the street – immortalised in Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane – have been criticised as "misconceived" and "excluding". Locals have said they risk ghettoising a community that considers itself tolerant and diverse. Tracey Emin, who lives just off Brick Lane, is one of a number of residents in the east London area who claim that Tower Hamlets council risks inflaming racial tension by trying to force the "hijab gates" – as they have become known – through without proper consultation. After an outcry, the council has extended the deadline for complaints to 22 February.
One local Muslim woman has told the council that the stainless-steel, illuminated arches "create a stereotypical image of Islam, and endorse the practice of the veil that not all of us are happy with. It is a divisive image and one that in the present climate is highly inappropriate. Tower Hamlets should be seeking to bring communities together at this moment." Another, a hijab wearer, said that to call the gates anything other than a hijab was "just semantics". She said: "It is a huge waste of money. There has been enough conflict and tension since Brick Lane started developing after the yuppies moved in. This looks to me like a tool of aggravation and is taking a step backwards."
The Spitalfields Trust, which helped to save many of the historic Huguenot silk weavers' houses that abut Brick Lane, has urged the council to abandon its "misconceived" idea.
The cultural trail through the area is aimed at celebrating the various migrant communities – including Huguenots, Jews and now Bangladeshis – that have settled there across hundreds of years.
Using planning-gain funds paid to the council following the development of Bishops Square and Spitalfields market, the trail is intended to bring more tourism into the area and smarten it up. But locals complain that the focus has been too much on the Bangladeshi community, which makes up a third of the Tower Hamlets population.
At the centre of the trail is a 29 metre high minaret that has been attached to the Brick Lane mosque, a grade II listed building originally built in 1742 as a Huguenot church, then converted into a synagogue and now the Brick Lane jamme masjid [mosque]. Tower Hamlets council says the structure "is not a minaret" but a "large steel art sculpture".
Brick Lane and its side streets are also home to artists such as Emin, Gilbert and George, Jake Chapman, the actor Samantha Morton, as well as architects, designers, planners, poets, musicians and others. Many were shocked to learn only recently that the council planned to erect the veil-like structures. Some say that given the high concentration of artists in the area, the design should have been open to competition.
In a letter to the council, Emin wrote: "I sincerely object to these proposals … the proposed material has no relevance to the heritage of the area or its future. I understand that the Jewish East End Celebration Society does not approve the concept overall and neither do the Spitalfields Trust nor the Spitalfields Society, as stated in the review of the consultation. I am shocked to learn that the scheme is budgeted at £2m and I strongly feel that rubbish collections, vermin control, education and improved policing are more important to resolve."
Broadcaster John Nicolson, who lives off Brick Lane, said: "Throughout history numerous groups have passed through here and made it home. That's what makes Spitalfields so special. It belongs to all of us – atheists, Muslims and Christian, homosexuals and heterosexuals, men and women. The council's latest wheeze – metal arches in the shape of headscarves – is exclusive and excluding. They'd never dream of crucifix-inspired gates – nor should they – so why an arch that is both Islamic and representing a specifically conservative form of Islam?"
A spokeswoman for the council said the concept behind the arch was "loosely based on the sculptural form of a headscarf, reflecting the many cultural backgrounds that have occupied and sought refuge in and around Brick Lane over the centuries".
She said headscarves were worn for a variety of purposes, "such as for warmth, for sanitation, for fashion or social distinction; with religious significance, to hide baldness, out of modesty, or other forms of social convention", and not only by Muslims.
"Observant married Orthodox Jewish women, for example, are required to cover their hair, often employing scarves for the purpose, and Jewish men will use a kippah or yarmulke to cover their heads for religious purposes." She went on: "Many men and women currently wear headscarves or bandannas as a fashion statement, and with Brick Lane being a cultural melting pot both historically and now at the start of the 21st century, this design reference seems appropriate and fitting."
But Will Palin, secretary of Save Britain's Heritage, and a local resident, said: "The headscarf motif is undoubtedly faith-specific to Islam and therefore does not represent the breadth and richness of the borough's history."
At the Beigel Bake, a few metres from the site of one of the proposed arches, Sammy Minzly had been unaware of the proposals.
He said: "I have been here 50 years, and they haven't even told me about it. This used to be a Jewish area, and all my life I have been here. It is disgusting that they have not shown us the respect to ask us what we think."
Posted in Art, Art and design, Communities, Culture, Heritage, London, Monica Ali, News, Sculpture, Social history, The Guardian, Tracey Emin | Comments Off
February 1st, 2010 Tim Adams
The Foundling Museum, London WC1, until 9 May
The three artists chosen to collaborate at the Foundling Museum on the site of the original Foundling Hospital on London's Coram's Fields are, appropriately enough, a dysfunctional kind of family. Mat Collishaw and Tracey Emin and Paula Rego have history. Rego taught Emin for a while and was certainly an inspirational midwife to the violent angst of her art; Emin and Collishaw, meanwhile, were stormy lovers in the heyday of the YBAs, a six-year union that ended with Emin childless at 40.
The ghosts of some of this past seem to haunt the rooms in which they have displayed work, which responds in different ways to the already heavy history of this place. In the basement, Emin shows sketches she made during her pregnancy of 1991 that ended in a botched abortion: unknown hands clutching at her foetus, nightmares of labour and suckling, half-formed scribbles of a half-formed child who never was. This theme is picked up in her other contributions – the row of infant clothes she has collected and neatly hung on a rail but never used, the soft, woollen baby clothes her grandmother made for her, in the hope the maternal line might continue.
Outside are Emin's orphan mittens and socks, cast in bronze and left on railings, or on stone steps, in the forlorn hope of finding their twins. The inspiration might be Hemingway's suggestion for the shortest novel ever written – "Baby's shoes for sale. Never worn" – but the sentiment, mawkish, and self-absorbed, is all Emin's own.
Collishaw is more hard-headed in his response to the charitable foundation, which from its inception in the 1740s took in abandoned children, or those born out of marriage, or those who were the issue of rape, and gave them a rigorous upbringing and education. He shows a series of exquisite prints of Indian street children set against 18th-century backdrops – one young boy is framed by Ingres's bather, flesh on flesh – making the point that this museum is not all about oil-painted history: in some geographies, its concerns are very much of the moment.
Elsewhere, Collishaw muses on the mythic desperations of parenting, updating the Romulus and Remus legend in a large, backlit print that shows two naked cherub babies in the care of a pair of vast wild dogs on a knackered and bloodstained sofa.
There is little room for sentiment either in Rego's tableau Oratorio, which takes its tone from the scabrous moralising of Hogarth, one of the original hospital's champions (Gin Lane is included in the permanent collection). Her large-scale installation is a kind of altarpiece to the horror of rape and abuse of children; her sketches for it are full of witchy obstetricians and newborns with dislocated, doll-like limbs being weighed by the pound.
It's something of a relief after this to return to the section of museum that details the ways in which generations of discarded children were saved from the accidents of their birth, with the help of copperplate ledgers and worsted uniforms.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Features, Paula Rego, Reviews, The Observer, Tracey Emin | Comments Off
January 28th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
Numerous British artists of the 1990s haven't quite lived up to the hype. But we shouldn't worry: art carries on regardless
So another modern British artist bites ... well, not the dust exactly. But in comparison with the hopes once held for him, the reception of Chris Ofili's new show at London's Tate Britain is flat. Hey, these new works are interesting ... or are they ... hmm, they could be garbage, but we still like him.
I personally find Ofili's new direction intriguing, but I come from a different starting point: I do not think much of his Upper Room cycle or other early works. I did once, but I had a terrible moment of alienation after writing a big raving feature about him then seeing ... well, not much at all in the exhibition I had helped to puff. Ofili is a good and interesting artist, but the fame he won in the late 1990s was overblown and now there is bound to be a correction.
And that puts him in good – or perhaps we need to say so-so – company. The truth is that almost no talent of the British 1990s has endured. All were given a soft ride – and all are landing, with varying degrees of softness, back into the realm of reality. Gary Hume's latest works will be seen not at a snazzy London venue, but the New Art Centre, Salisbury. Damien Hirst ... but I promised to keep silent about him, Rachel Whiteread, Gillian Wearing, that guy who did the Tube map ... so many have fallen. Gently.
Nor does this mean art is in trouble. Actually things look quite good. I am optimistic that 2010 will see another excellent Turner prize shortlist. There are plenty of good and worthwhile artists to choose from, of all ages. But it is not what we were promised. It is not what seemed possible. It is, actually, business as usual. The dust has settled, and art in Britain in 2010 is much like art in Britain in 1987, or 1977. Interesting, varied, often surprising.
Undoubtedly, we are a nation with something to offer the art world - we always were. But when it comes to the really high stakes the Freuds and Auerbachs have nothing to fear from my generation, and they never did.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Chris Ofili, Culture, Damien Hirst, guardian.co.uk, Painting, Tracey Emin | Comments Off