(Charles)
At the end of February after a visit to my local dentist, I travelled down to London for a couple of days of total cultural immersion. First to The Photographers Gallery for three related shows on American photographers: Andy Warhol (celebrity images and multiples, stitched together on a sewing machine), David Lynch (ruin porn in crumbling Polish factories) and William Burroughs (by far the most interesting - I bought the catalogue - working images in which he seems to be evolving his 'cut-up' style of writing). The following morning I attended the Broadcast Video Expo at Excel, to catch up with the latest technologies and sit in on a few technical seminars, then to Tate Modern for the Richard Hamilton show, which of course reminded me of the film we made with him back in 1985 as part of the 'Looking into Paintings' series for Channel 4, featuring his then new painting 'The citizen' featuring an IRA blanket protester.
After the fascinating Tate show (good to be reminded how widely and intelligently Hamilton's work and interests ranged) I moved on the the ICA in The Mall, to see two reconstructions of Hamilton's installations, Man, Machine and Motion, (1955) a hanging system of photographs, often amusing, depicting the Aquatic, Terrestrial, Aerial and Interplanetary. The second installation was an Exhibit, (1957), another hanging system, but this time using only coloured plexiglass panels and intended to give visitors an opportunity 'to generate their own compositions'.
The following morning I visited the National Portrait Gallery, first to see The Great War in Portraits (much praised by Brian Sewell) showing WWI in paintings and photographs - fascinating to see the different treatments for the generals and the Tommies. Then on to Bailey's Stardust a massive exhibition full of iconic images of our life and times. I worked with Bailey for an afternoon in New York back in 1971, when he asked me to swap a roll of my colour film for a roll of his black and white, which was all he had at the time, because Diana Vreeland, Editor of American Vogue, had asked him to photograph her apartment in colour, and very colourful it was, too.