Goshka Macuga, artist
Today I visited Goshka Macuga at her studio in the Rochelle School overlooking Arnold Circus. I was early and as I stood waiting on the iron fire escape in the snow, I spotted Goshka, who hails from Poland originally, walking towards me taking bold strides through the snowy drifts of the Boundary Estate in a long sheepskin coat and gloves, and sporting a multicoloured Peruvian hat. She gave me a cheery wave, grabbed her mail from the box and sprinted up the stairs to greet me. Once we were inside the former schoolroom, that is now her workplace, we had a cup of tea to warm up while Goshka entertained me with dramatic tales of her Christmas adventures on the island of Stromboli, where she went to peer into the active crater of the volcano at the fountains of molten lava. It sounded pretty exciting to me.
I have known Goshka for years but I am always mesmerised by her intense grey eyes and long auburn hair. With feline grace, she tilts and twists her hands to illustrate her spontaneous thoughts, gesturing with slender fingers to indicate the innumerable ideas and artistic possibilities that are constantly at her fingertips. Goshka draws you in to her world. When she laughs, Goshka’s eyes sparkle and she can give a very convincing self-parodic impression of a Polish witch. Talking of her work, she dazzles you with her notions, projecting them into the air with powerful conviction, and yet you know that behind the curtain of that low-cut fringe there is also a quiet rigorous self-questioning intelligence.
Born in 1915, Goshka’s father was an art supplies dealer in Poland who struggled his whole life to retain self-possession and integrity in the face of the institutionalised humiliations that defined life under Communism. No stranger to questions of politics and art, Goshka came to London in 1989 to do her Foundation Course in Fine Art at the Sir John Cass University opposite the Whitechapel Gallery where her current exhibition “The Nature of the Beast” (including the tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica) runs until 18th April.
Perversely, Goshka says she can be described as an artist or as a curator, and that she refuses to commit to any single medium in her work. So you might ask, what does she do? The answer is that she does plenty. In the case of the Whitechapel project, she originated the idea, borrowed the tapestry, designed the table, edited the film shown in the gallery and arranged the space. Goshka realised that she wanted to create an event that would feed into the ongoing history of the gallery. Knowing that the painting of Guernica was shown there as a political gesture at the time of the Spanish Civil War, Goshka displayed the tapestry of Guernica from the UN Building in New York (covered when Colin Powell made his speech claiming Iraq had chemical weapons as the justification for war), as a means to bridge the gap between these different wars. Equally, installing the round table and providing the space to any groups that chose to use it for debate (as hundreds have), was a means to open up the gallery itself as a democratic forum for public discourse.
The day I visited her studio, Goshka was painting portraits in tea of participants in the recent tea party protests in America against Obama, as preparatory work for a show in Boston where the so-called Tea Party that sparked the War of Independence happened. “I am interested in tea drinking as an act of social protest,” she announced and I was just thinking flippantly that this was the style of protest I could ascribe to, when she reminded me sagely that the history of the relationship between Europe and Asia can also be told through tea. Goshka makes inspiring company because her mind is constantly making lateral connections and you never know what direction the conversation will take next.
In the twenty years it took Goshka to cross the Whitechapel Rd from her first art school to her current exhibition, she studied at Goldsmiths and at St Martins School of Art and worked tenaciously to establish an identity for her own particular vein of work, eventually winning recognition on the art scene that resulted in her nomination for the Turner Prize in 2008. It was a long creative journey to travel a short geographical distance. And it is something of a personal triumph for Goshka that she has been able to communicate her elusive approach, succeeding in an ongoing sequence of high-profile commissions.
Finally, I asked about this old enamel sign in Polish above her desk and she told me it translates as “workplace.” Every factory in Poland had them at one time and she rescued this specimen from an abandoned factory post-Communism and brought it here to Arnold Circus – and though she did not say it, I think it serves as a reminder of the journey. This workplace is Goshka’s present tense where she combines things from the past in new ways to imagine possible futures and I admire Goshka’s extraordinary vitality of mind and passionate curiosity about all the things that humanity creates which, through their stories, tell us who we are.
Mike Myers, The Spitalfields Crooner
From the moment Warren Dent at the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Social Club mentioned Mike Myers, the Spitalfields crooner, I knew I had to meet him and this morning I enjoyed the pleasure of dropping round for a cup of tea with Mike in the warm brightly-lit kitchen of his flat – a cosy eyrie high up in the Spitalfields Market building on Lamb St, where he has lived since 1974.
“I’ve been singing for a few years now…” he told me,“I went in for a contest and I won first prize because I’ve got a good voice.” Word of Mike’s remarkable singing ability has travelled since he won the talent show at “Up the Creek” in Greenwich and now he performs regularly at functions and weddings, becoming the star attraction on New Year’s Eve at the Working Men’s Club over the past seven years. Mike Myers is a class act, taking his inspiration as a performer from singers like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby and his preferred repertoire of songwriters is Cole Porter, Rodgers & Hart and Irving Berlin, with “That Old Black Magic”,” Night and Day”, “Just One of Those Things” and “Where or When?” as special favourites. “It all goes down well”, he confirms, adding, “I’m hoping to getting an agent now, so I can perform more.”
Mike Myers, the Spitalfields crooner, was the story I was going to bring you today but Mike is a man of many facets and when I told him about “Spitalfields Life”, he produced a stack of filing boxes with copies of “Spitalfields News”, the lively monthly newspaper that he edited for two years in the nineteen eighties. If you examine the photograph above, you can get an idea of the social campaigning stories that he championed and I recognised a kindred spirit in Mike as we spent half an hour poring over the treasured copies on his kitchen table, studying old neighbourhood stories. “You used to work to a deadline,” he recalled affectionately, placing a hand upon the plastic table top,” I remember sitting up all night pasting it together.” Then we tried to find the interview Mike did in the early eighties with Sandra and Dennis Esquilant at The Golden Heart (so I could reprint it for you), and though we searched in vain this morning, if Mike can trace a copy you will read it here.
When Mike moved into his beautiful old flat, unexpectedly quiet and secluded under the eaves of the market, the fruit and vegetable market was still in operation, so he has witnessed a transformation in his immediate surroundings over the intervening years. “A lot of the new buildings are horrible, just functional,” he declares, in pity for the office-workers in their synthetic cubicle workspaces that have replaced the sociable atmosphere enjoyed by the market porters. Time has granted Mike a certain perspective on things and through all his years working as a newspaper editor, driving a cab (until a year ago) and performing as a crooner, he knows our city and its inhabitants better than most.
Today, Mike continues to live confidently at home here in Spitalfields at the centre of his own personal universe. “It still has a village atmosphere – you meet up with people you know in The Golden Heart. It’s a friendly neighbourhood too, which is very important considering where it is right in the middle of the city,” he says. Indeed, Mike is a popular figure among the regulars at The Golden Heart where his portrait hangs in a frame on the wall. “The place where everybody wants to live and where, once upon a time, nobody wanted to live,” he muses wryly, contemplating the absurd changing nature of Spitalfields. Let me admit, I have not yet had the pleasure of hearing Mike Myers sing but I already know he has got soul.
Amy Cooper's handiwork
One afternoon at the end of last week, I walked down the Mile End Rd to the Bancroft Library, where the Local History collection is housed, to see a newly donated collection of Spitalfields silk and lace. The archivist produced a small cardboard chocolate box from the nineteen sixties with a Raeburn portrait of a child on the top. He kindly placed a table beside the window in the dying light and covered it with a piece of grey paper. The he opened the box and unwrapped the precious packages inside wrapped in white tissue paper, arranging them on the table, so that in the last light of day I could photograph them for you.
The first item to catch my eye was this little silk purse with the phrase SPITALFIELDS SCHOOL OF DESIGN 1848 elegantly picked out in gold thread. Not only is the stitching neat and regular, the balance and spacing of the typography is perfect – James Brown and Richard Ardagh would be impressed. This curious item has no wear, it cannot have had any function beyond displaying the accomplishment of its own creation. It fits neatly into the palm of the hand and is exquisite in every detail, the string of golden glass beads looped around the edges, the delicate string handle, the jet button and the oyster blue silk lining.
Next I examined the needlebook below, with embroidery of flowers on both covers, and taking the utmost care I unfastened the ribbons that held it closed. Opening it up, I found a scrap of paper folded in between the pages of needles which tells us the maker. This needlebook was made by Miss Amy Cooper: she was born in 1794 & died in 1891. The script itself had a delicacy and restraint, similar to the handwriting of “No more twist!” pinned on the Lord Mayor’s unfinished waistcoat in The Tailor of Gloucester.
I love the aesthetic, using pale silk and embroidering subtly coloured flowers in natural colours, as fresh as the day they were stitched. The use of different toned threads in the recognisable heather and rose flowers suggests she worked from nature. Every individual stitch is a decision made with the same care you might bring to the selection of vocabulary and arrangement of words in a poem. Fine details, like the sky blue lining, the grey glass beads sewn at intervals around the edge of covers and the use of bordered ribbon upon the spine, draw the eye in to observe the nuances of this lovely artefact. When someone invests as much time and consideration as Amy did here, it deserves our closest examination and rewards us in turn by delighting the eye.
Amy Cooper lived to be ninety-seven, born five years after the French Revolution, she died in the year that automobiles began manufacture. The three sisters who donated the collection, which belonged to their mother Mrs Ann Maitland MacEwen, know nothing of its origins – so we cannot say if Amy made them all or establish what is the connection to the Spitalfields School of Design, which was an early government project to promote design in industry, founded at 37 Crispin St in 1842. Amy would have been fifty-four in 1848, when the purse was made, and I would like to think she made it as an example to show her pupils at the school.
The other two items that complete this modest collection are two girls’ lace caps. The workmanship of these pieces is inconceivably intricate and bears testimony to long hours of patient labour and awe-inspiring skill. I am a keen stitcher myself, I have sewn shirts by hand, I mend my own clothes and you have seen the quilt I made, but I could never begin to approach this level of expertise. I particularly like the smaller one with its beautifully regular ruching, gathered at the crown and the drawstrings at front and back.
Now I have seen my first examples of Spitalfields lace and silk, it has made me curious to find more. This place is famous for the silk thread, cloth and clothing that was made here, and much of the story of Spitalfields can be told through the textile industry. Somewhere in archives there must be wonderful examples, and I have decided that I am going to seek some more of our predecessors’ work to show to you.
So long, Piers Wardle
This drawing by Piers Wardle has been on the wall of my office for more than ten years now. I love the irrepressibly joyful smile of this happy dumpster and it serves as a healthy reminder to me never to take myself too seriously. Significantly, the drawing is made upon a rare piece of lumpy handmade paper made of sheep shit in North Devon. This accounts for the pleasant beige tone of the paper which even has a watermark of a sheep running through it. It is highly characteristic of this clever artist that the dopey cartoon drawing is entirely in contrast with the hidden poetry of this charismatic work.
Piers Wardle, who died unexpectedly over Christmas, was a popular figure in Spitalfields – a participant in the art scene here for the past twenty years, at first as part of Joshua Compston’s Factual Nonsense in Charlotte Rd, including the “Fete Worse Than Death” in Hoxton Sq, and more recently as part of Decima Gallery. Tall and naturally authoritative, with old-fashioned deferential good manners and a disarmingly unsentimental sense of humour, yet equally blessed with a generous kindly spirit, Piers Wardle was an intriguing and attractive man. He cultivated an attitude of amused bewilderment at the absurdity of life and I think of him always primed with some droll unique observation to lighten any moment.
It was in early December, on the day I interviewed John Constable at the Crossbones Cemetery in the Borough, that I last saw him. After the interview, I walked down to visit Piers in his flat in Southwark to borrow a tripod to take the photo of the children outside Leila’s Shop before Christmas. Typically of Piers, he insisted on giving me the tripod as a gift, and instead of just dropping by, I found myself going off to have lunch with him at the local Spanish restaurant. Once we realised we had no money to buy lunch, this became an excuse for a tour around the architectural wonders of the neighbourhood as we searched for a cash machine.
That day he showed me his last artwork. A transparent plastic pin wheel that sat upon the screen of an overhead projector and turned in the heat rising from the light, projecting a revolving image of a star upon the wall. It was elegant in its simplicity, funny and magical too. Although he did not know it, it was a beautiful image to conclude his work as an artist and I am grateful to have last seen Piers then, on an inconsequentially happy day.
We had a nice lunch and, as it was getting dark, we said our goodbyes and I walked back towards Spitalfields, only to discover part of the tripod was missing. It was cold and miserable but in spite of my urge to go straight home, I called Piers and retraced my steps. He buzzed me into the building, I walked up the stairs, he passed me the missing piece of the tripod and with a brief amicable greeting we parted. We were sublimely unaware that after all the years we knew each other, this was the moment when we would never see each other again in this life. In retrospect, the moment is startling for its insignificance and I am glad of it. There is no good way to say goodbye to a friend forever, but there are plenty worse than my farewell to Piers.
Aged 49, Piers died unexpectedly of a brain haemorrhage on 22rd December at his mother’s home at Clyst Hydon in Devon. He will be greatly missed by everyone who knew him, including me.
I took this picture of Piers on my phone in the private bar at The Golden Heart, one summer’s evening in 2008 after a Decima Gallery cowboy event.
Columbia Road Market 18
Last Sunday, I woke early and walked up the road from Spitalfields through the frost to arrive at the market at the usual time, but there was hardly anyone there. Wisely, most of the stallholders had stayed at home and the hardy souls who had arrived were still unpacking. It was cold and it was grim, so I simply returned home and went back to bed. This week, I returned an hour later and the picture was much the same but I resisted walking away because I felt a hunger for some new plant life. So I began searching through the trolleys of plants, stacked up in trays and when I tore away the plastic wrap, I found a tray of these Snake’s Head Lilies or Fritillaria meleagris at the bottom of a trolley. They were four pots for a fiver, so I handed over my cash and bagged the lilies.
I have always been fascinated by these wonderfully strange plants with their spindly stems and exotic chequer board flowers in purple or white. They seem too exotic for England and yet there are places where they grow wild. I was once in Magdalen Meadow for a picnic, the island between tributaries of the river in Oxford that belongs to Magdalen College, and the entire meadow was full of Snake’s Head Lilies in flower. Having struggled to grow them in the past from bulbs, I was relieved to read Christopher Lloyd writing about the difficulties of cultivating them in “A Year at Great Dixter”. However, buying them in pots and then transplanting them is an effective subterfuge, and that is what I shall do with these – once I have enjoyed them indoors in this Honiton Pottery bowl of my grandmother’s and when the thaw has come.
On the way home, I passed Gilbert & George in the Bethnal Green Rd, on their way to E.Pellicci for breakfast. They were all wrapped up against the cold in magnificently tailored full-length tweed coats and mufflers. George wore a flat cap and Gilbert had a pair of ear muffs. With my first discovery at Columbia Rd and my first sighting of G&G, I feel that the New Year has now begun in Spitalfields.
The vermin of Spitalfields
If you remember the squirrel and the rat that I wrote about last year, you will recognise the style of these paintings by the Belgian street artist Roa that I came across last weekend. With the building of the East London Line, Pedley St has become a forgotten cul-de-sac and I realised it was months since I had climbed over the iron footbridge from Cheshire St, walked under the smelly railway arch to turn left and make my way along the fragmented cobbled street – where on Sunday I was surprised by these enormous birds, startling in their scale and vitality. If you know where to look, you can even see them from Buxton St, a quarter of a mile away across the railway line on the other side of Allen Gardens.
At first, I thought they might be emus but, on closer examination, the body shape is like a goose or a diving bird. My opinion, bearing in mind their scrawny necks and febrile scavenging nature, is that that they are cormorants. Whatever birds Roa thinks they are, they seem particularly at home in this neglected area of Spitalfields, where nature has taken over and where the neighbourhood foxes have their lair. So I recommend you take a stroll along there yourself, because this is a work that deserves to be visited in its chosen location and seen with your own eyes.
In my enthusiastic haste to write to you about the squirrel and the rat last year, I quickly realised that I had neglected to notice several other paintings that Roa did at the same time. I am making up for it now by showing you this fierce bird in Spital St at the back of the Truman Brewery, this miserable lazy pig dozing on the pavement outside a tattoo parlour quietly ignored by a preoccupied smoker in Bacon St, this fine crow on a pair of doors also in Bacon St and this other little crow, round the corner on the shutter of the Brick Lane Boutique.
Roa is unique among street artists for his unsentimental images of animals that, in spite of their exaggerated features, reveal an understanding of the anatomy, movement and personality of the species in question. He has a real feeling for the living world, his creatures are always quick with life and I consider him to be an unlikely wildlife artist. In each example, the presence of Roa’s charismatic vermin in this extreme urban environment raises a question about our relationship with nature, that can tenaciously adapt, survive and thrive – supporting a variety of animal life here even in such apparently unsympathetic circumstances. There is an unease about their presence, a tension that provokes us to see the reality of the cityscape we have created. His creatures may be at odds with the city but they are not defeated by it, they are clinging onto life, tooth and claw. They demand our respect.
You can watch a timelapse film of Roa at work by night in Chance St on a painting of two pigs sleeping here. The short film successfully captures Roa’s natural draftsmanship in action and the immediacy of his spontaneous way of working through building up the image with feathery strokes, resulting in such lively paintings placed strategically in unloved corners of our neighbourhood.
For those completists among you, there is a Flickr site here with all of Roa’s works, including a rabbit in Curtain Rd that I missed. These are the vermin I like.
Shakespearian actors in Shoreditch
Nowadays, the neighbourhood is full of actors like moths batting around a flame. Some live here, others drop by. I only have to walk out of my front door and I am tripping over Toby Stephens in Hanbury St, Damian Lewis in Redchurch St, Reese Witherspoon shopping in the Spitalfields Market, Gael Garcia Bernal and Eva Green lunching at St John Bread & Wine, Sienna Miller wolfing curry in Brick Lane, Ralph Fiennes reading Dostoevsky in Leila’s Cafe, Julie Christie in Bethnal Green Tesco, Maggie Gyllenhaal in Ryantown, Gywneth Paltrow dining at Les Trois Garcons or Jennifer Aniston stepping into Shoreditch House. The list is endless.
In this respect, not much has changed since the sixteenth century when, before the West End and before the South Bank, this was London’s theatre district and most of the actors were residents. The very first playhouse, “The Theatre” opened in New Inn Broadway in 1576 and then “The Curtain” nearby in Curtain Rd in 1577. I have no doubt there were plenty who felt the neighbourhood was going downhill when these new entertainment venues opened up within a year of each other.
If you read my post about Shakespeare in Spitalfields you will know that many of his plays were first performed here at the Curtain Theatre and you may recall that I came upon the tombstone of Shakespeare’s younger brother Edmond in Southwark Cathedral last year – he was an actor at the Curtain and his young son was buried in the churchyard of St Leonard’s, Shoreditch.
It surprised me, after all these years, to come upon the collecting box (that you can see above) with the phrase “The Actors’ Church” when I visited the atmospheric unrenovated St Leonard’s Church recently. In the sixteenth century, it was simply the parish church for local actors but it has been entirely rebuilt since then and nowadays St Paul’s, Covent Garden is known as “The Actors’ Church” – I have attended it when friends of mine in the theatre have had ceremonies there. However, since I discovered who exactly is buried at St Leonard’s, I understand why they might wish to brag about it.
If you enter the main door of St Leonard’s (built by George Dance the elder in 1740) and turn right inside the body of the church, you can go through a pair of double doors to ascend a wide staircase which leads to a space at the top of the stairwell where you will find the monument to all the Shakespearian actors who were once residents of our neighbourhood and are interred here. It is an impressive roll call, taller than a man and graven in marble by the Shakespeare League in 1913, who I suspect were also responsible for the phrase on the collecting box.
Top of the list is James Burbage, who trained as joiner then became an impresario, building “The Theatre”, believed to be the first purpose-built playhouse, and whose sons became distinguished actors. I like to imagine James Burbage was like Tyrone Walker-Hebborn who runs the Genesis Cinema in Whitechapel today. Tyrone was a roofer who took on the cinema because he fancied running one, was not challenged by the holes in the roof and has now become a film producer. Similarly, James was not troubled with explaining the requirements of a theatre to a carpenter because that was his own trade, also he had an instinct for show business and became a theatrical producer in his own building. In the future, we will need to keep an eye on Tyrone’s children – if he has any – because the most exciting name on the list of Shakespearean actors is James’ son Richard Burbage who was the first to play Hamlet.
When I met Ben Whishaw – the most exciting Hamlet of our own generation – buying his Christmas tree at the Columbia Rd Market recently, I wish I had suggested he walk over to the churchyard of St Leonard’s, and maybe take a holly wreath, to admire the wintry flowers growing there nourished by the remains of our very first Hamlet, Richard Burbage, who was buried there in 1619. Certainly, I shall never be able to walk down Shoreditch High St and take the shortcut through the churchyard again without thinking that this is where Hamlet lies.
If, like “Orlando”, I could have lived through all these centuries, I might have written four hundred years ago that the neighbourhood was full of theatrical types, like moths batting around a flame – I could not walk out of my front door without tripping over William Shakespeare stepping out of the ale house with Ben Jonson, Edmond Shakespeare mourning his son at St Leonard’s church, Richard Burbage supping with his father James and brother Cuthbert at The Boars Head, Richard Tarlton shopping at the market, Gabriel Spencer in Bishoppes gate St, William Somers in the Spittal Fields, William Sly at the bawdy house and Christopher Marlowe getting arrested in Norton Folgate. The list is endless.
