Stan's Cafe

The cab driver was Romanian and some kind of slowburn Gnostic. He learnt we were setting up an art show and pronounced that there was not enough art in the world. To make art you must have soul and today people are without soul. Having just stepped from the World Financial Centre it wasn't a perspective Amanda, in the front seat, felt moved to contradict. Rocketing up FDR Drive the subject turned to a Future Global Dictatorship, a conspiracy theory he had heard that day and relayed sardonically, as if testing or teasing us.

After slow progress on Monday, the show took shape rapidly on Tuesday and opened yesterday well developed. Ironically the piece looks much better around the highly polished sunlit balcony than in the actual gallery space, which is slightly gloomy with a scruffy concrete floor.

Jack is the poster boy for this incarnation of the show. It’s Graeme’s picture of him tending rice piles in Bocham that has been picked up by the venue and graces banners and brochures and screens. Five vitrines placed around the public concourses have caused a stir so audience numbers should build from a promising start. The vitrine placed at the entrance to the American Express HQ caused such a stir that some agent of the corporation leapt to phone and check who “authorized” the use of 65,800 grains of rice to represent their global workforce alongside all the teachers, police officers and taxi drivers in New York City. They also wanted to know where the number had come from. It all got smoothed out easily enough, but such twitchiness makes you want to bundle certain people into a big yellow cab and give them a dose of the slowburn.

James
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